My first ever story for 10,000 Birds was about the wonderful city reserve of Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, here in Wellington, a city that has been my home for 9 years this week. To celebrate this I thought Id talk about an urban reserve on the other side of the world, because my introductions are nothing if not tenuous. Actually, there are connections, like Karori (or Zealandia as we must now call it) this reserve is a reclamation of a defunct reservoir to be repurposed as a popular nature reserve for city flock. The connection is personal too; its location, in Barnes in south-western London, was my home for many years. I left the area before the old reservoir was converted to a reserve, but I used to walk my dog in another of the neighbourhoods reservoirs (which is also now a small reserve) and so I have long been keen to go back to my old stomping grounds and see the WWT London Wetland Centre.

The opportunity finally presented itself on New Years Eve last year, where after stumbling blinking and not a little bit hung-over from my friends house after a long-overdue catch-up I made my way there to see what was what. It was sunny and warm, as pretty much every day was last December in Britain (one frost in the whole month  terrifying), so I decided to walk from Hammersmith so I could also check out my old neighbourhood. It was pretty much like I had left it, nearly twenty years ago, only the great pub on the corner was a nursery. A nursery! At least the Italian place was still there, I always thought it was the best place to eat south of the Thames (and it seems it is still a fine place to go according to Trip Advisor). Sadly it was shut, so I should probably get back to the birds.

Hammersmith Bridge today

Hammersmith Bridge as it was (thanks Dad)

The London Wetlands Centre was converted and is managed by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, founded by the famous duck and swan enthusiast Peter Scott. They manage a number of reserves around the UK to protect waterfowl, the most famous being Slimbridge (another iconic place I havent made it to yet). Ive also previously recounted a visit to see the swans at Martin Mere in Lancashire. The London centre was the result of a long-running desire to create an urban reserve, to bring nature the centre of London. As improvements in Londons water infrastructure were brought in in the 19080s and 1990s the Barn Elms reservoirs became redundant, and the water authority, trust and a private company were able to convert them into a reserve. The reservoirs themselves were drained and the concrete broken up and used of the centre, and then the land was sculpted to create several large and small bodies of water as well as extensive reedbeds and some damp grasslands.

I didnt have long to stay at the reserve so I did a quick walk through the ornamental pools near the entrance  as in many WWT reserves these are given over to the breeding collections of exotic species (although these are smaller in London than elsewhere. I wanted to get to the action, and near the entrance is the large lake, were almost the first bird I saw was my second to last year bird of last year  a Gadwall. Also in evidence were a lot of the usual suspects, Common Moorhens, Eurasian Coots, Tufted Ducks, Mute Swans, Canadian Geese and Mallards. Another nice bird is the Common Shelduck, a bird I more usually associate with the coast and estuaries. Also obvious were several large Grey Herons standing sentry on several of the islands. I was told that a few minutes ago a Peregrine Falcon had been seen on one of the islands, but I couldnt find it.

Common Moorhen

I swung left to a huge hide that overlooked most of the reserve, and in particular had a great view over an area not unlike a large flooded field. From here Eurasian Wigeon, Northern Shovellers, Common Teal and Greylag Geese could be seen. There were a number of volunteers in the hide that could help with identifications and even had scopes up on the more interesting species, and they found me some Common Snipe. They were also able to talk about what rarities might be about, like the Eurasian Bittern hiding in reeds on the other side.

There wasnt much chance Id see the bittern as they take time to wait out, but it was a longshot I considered worthwhile. I walked around the reserve to the other side, passing some feeding Egyptian Geese; this was the first time Ive seen this African colonist in England. The species has taken over Germany so I imagine it is only a matter of time before it is ubiquitous in England too. I didnt manage to find the bittern, but I did add Little Grebe and Common Pochard to my day.

On the way out I reflected on a number of things, namely how glad I was that they had done such a great job in the attempt to bring a bit of the wild into London, but also how much I missed the area. Im happy in New Zealand, but I do miss London too, and now it seems London is better than when I left. But London had one last treat for me before I left, another introduced species, but one that is uniquely a London speciality.

Ringed Parakeet, my last year bird of 2015 and the ultimate London bird

***

Getting to the WWT London Wetland Centre is pretty simple, Hammersmith is served by the Hammersmith and City Line, District Line and Piccadilly Line (making it important for most basic Mornington Crescent gambits). From there the 283 bus is direct, and a number of other buses go near it. As Hammersmith is on a direct line from Heathrow on the Piccadilly Line, it may be possible to visit on a layover.
  

  

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ELKO -- After hearing from more than a dozen residents, most of whom favored lifting the ban on medical marijuana establishments in Elko, the City Council voted 4-1 Tuesday to establish an additional two-year moratorium on those licenses.

Councilmen stated reasons for continuing the ban, saying marijuana was still illegal at the federal level, and that allowing medical establishments would help "legitimize recreational marijuana" and be detrimental to law enforcement.

Councilman John Patrick Rice cast the dissenting vote, noting that 60 percent of Elko County residents voted to allow medical marijuana use in Nevada. He believed banning those businesses would deprive the City of an opportunity for revenue, and deny residents a needed service.

"There will be a great sucking sound of our money going somewhere else than our county if we don't take advantage of this," Rice said.

He believed the City could allow establishments "safely and prudently" in order to help the lives of many.

Many of those who spoke to Council either personally required medical marijuana, knew someone who did, or anticipated a need in the future.

Ron Abbott, founder-president of the Elko County Medical Marijuana Patients' Association Inc., said those patients are a minority and are being put in a position they don't want to be in.

"We are disappointed as medical marijuana patients, and we feel they're not following their mission statement and vision," Abbott told the Free Press following the Council's decision.

The City's vision statement says the City is to provide excellent service to the public through dialogue.

"The voice of the people will be heard, and it will be heard on a big level," Abbott said.

See the full story here.
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ELKO  While some attend political rallies to support their candidate, several of Elkos elected officials attended Jeb Bushs rally in Elko to learn more about the former governor of Florida.

Regent Kevin Melcher said he hasnt chosen a candidate yet, but he tries to attend the rallies that come to Elko.

This is the first one Ive made, he said. I was out of town for the other ones.

Elko County Republican Party Chairman Lee Hoffman said he will attend the political rally of any national candidate that comes to Elko.

It makes the point that Elko matters; Nevada matters, Hoffman said.

He attended the rallies for the other Republican presidential candidates who have come to Elko  Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Ben Carson.

When asked if he would go to a Democrats rally he said yes.

I would probably show up out of interest and curiosity.

City Councilman John Patrick Rice, who is a registered Democrat, said he attended the rally because he was accepting an invitation.

It is a great opportunity anytime candidates come to town, Rice said.

He encouraged all voters to attend rallies.

It helps you make an informed decision no matter what that decision may be, he said. I told my public speaking class today, you have a responsibility as a speaker and as a listener. We all have a civic responsibility.

County Commissioner Glen Guttry said he attended the rally to see what Bush had to say.

I think hes a great guy and his hearts in the right place, Guttry said.
Rep. Gary Glenn, R-Midland, and Sen. Jim Stamas, R-Midland, appeared Tuesday before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure with Aaron D. Ulloms parents, Kevin and Debi Ullom, and his brother, Sean Bartley, to support Senate Bill 513.

The legislation designates the U.S. 10 bridge over Eastman Avenue in Midland as the Corpsman Aaron D. Ullom Memorial Bridge.

This bridge will forever memorialize Aaron, a son of Midland, for his service to our country and his heroic action to aid a fellow soldier while under enemy fire, said Glenn, a member of the House Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. Sen. Stamas and I both served our country in uniform, and we know the people of Midland will join us in honoring the sacrifice made by Corpsman Ullom and his family.

Ullom, a 2009 Midland High School graduate, was a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy when on July 12, 2011 he was killed by enemy gunfire while on patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, after leaving his small ditch to apply a tourniquet to a wounded Marine. For his actions, Corpsman Ullom was awarded the Purple Heart.

America is strong today because of patriots like Aaron, Stamas said. The people of Midland and the entire state are proud to call Aaron one of our own, and this memorial bridge would stand as a permanent reminder of the life of a native son who never returned home.

The Michigan Memorial Highway Act of 2001 allows for naming bridges and highways within the state to memorialize people or events of significance. The act requires that the cost of constructing, erecting and maintaining the sign and other costs associated with the designation be borne by the individuals or organization requesting the designation.

The House committee unanimously approved SB 513, with bipartisan support, for consideration by the full House.
LANSING (AP)  Local officials filed a lawsuit Tuesday against a new Michigan law they say unconstitutionally restricts their free-speech rights, urging a judge to immediately block it so they can distribute ballot measure information to voters ahead of the March elections.

The complaint, brought against the state by 17 school and local government officials and one private citizen, alleges that the gag order law violates the First and 14th Amendments by prohibiting the free flow of objectively neutral, core political speech.

Gov. Rick Snyder signed the Republican-backed measure on Jan. 6, after it was quickly approved the final night of the 2015 legislative session with no substantive debate despite the addition of the divisive provision. The law prohibits public money or resources from being used to disseminate factual information about local ballot measures through TV and radio ads, mass mailings or robocalls in the 60 days before an election. It already was illegal to use public funds or resources to advocate for or against ballot questions, with exceptions for officials with policymaking responsibilities.

I would hope that the law would go through some revisions to make it easier for local entities to communicate with citizens in an unbiased way, said Midland City Manager Jon Lynch.

Snyder asked lawmakers to quickly pass legislation clarifying that the expression of personal view by public officials is not affected by the new law, nor is the use of government facilities for debates or town halls on ballot issues.

But groups representing school districts, municipalities and other government entities said the fix pending in the House Elections Committee is inadequate and would only let them communicate the election date and a 100-word ballot summary of the proposal to voters.

Dearborn Mayor Jack OReilly, president of the Michigan Municipal League, said the secretary of state found only five valid complaints in three years of a local entity improperly advocating for a ballot measure.

There is no indication there was any great calamity to be solved by this law, he said. This was a political thing that never should have happened.

The case, which names Secretary of State Ruth Johnson as a defendant, was assigned to U.S. District Judge John Corbett OMeara in Ann Arbor.
1 p.m.

Michigan officials say that water samples in Flint are "trending better," but that it's too soon to give the go-ahead to residents to resume drinking unfiltered water.

Residents have been using bottled water and filters because the improperly treated supply was tainted with lead from pipes leading to old homes.

State Department of Environmental Quality Interim Director Keith Creagh stressed Wednesday that the test results are not statistically valid because there's no guarantee homeowner-provided samples are coming from homes at higher risk. Further testing continues.

Creagh says officials are studying whether the city's pipes are being recoated with enough of a lining of phosphates to keep the lead from leaching.

The state is working to identify newer neighborhoods with no lead pipes, so those residents can potentially get the all-clear on their water sooner.

___

12:05 p.m.

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver says she has hired a Virginia Tech professor whose extensive testing helped bring the city's lead-tainted water problems to light.

Weaver said at a news conference Wednesday that Marc Edwards will oversee all water testing done by the state and federal governments. She added he will be "fully independent," report to her and get paid through private donations. She also touched on the issue of Flint residents' water bills. Supplemental funding approved by the state House last week included $3 million to help residents pay their bills.

Gov. Rick Snyder says Edwards and Weaver are part of a 17-member group of medical experts selected to determine long-term solutions to fix Flint's water system and help residents who have been exposed to lead.

Snyder also announced that the state would have an increased administrative presence in Flint and called it the beginning of a long-term effort.

___

9:20 a.m.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Flint Mayor Karen Weaver have scheduled a news conference to address the actions the Michigan city has taken and the next steps it will take to deal with a public health emergency caused by lead-tainted water.

The state's website says the news conference will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Others expected at the news conference are Michigan State Police Capt. Chris Kelenske, Department of Environmental Quality Interim Director Keith Creagh and Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon.

___

9 a.m.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has named a group of medical and field experts to a committee that will determine long-term solutions to fix Flint's water system and help residents who have been exposed to lead.

In a news release issued Wednesday, the governor says the 17-member committee will make recommendations regarding the health of people exposed to lead, study Flint's water infrastructure and determine potential upgrades, and establish ways to improve communication between local and state government.

The committee includes Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, who has extensively studied the issue in Flint and elsewhere, and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is credited with bringing the problem to the public's attention after state agencies initially dismissed her concerns.

Members will serve three-year terms expiring Dec. 31, 2018.

___

8 a.m.

A new lawsuit asks a federal judge to force Michigan and the city of Flint to replace all lead pipes in Flint's water system to ensure residents have a safe drinking supply.

The complaint, filed Wednesday, says service lines from water mains into homes should be replaced at no cost to customers. The suit seeks an order requiring city and state officials to remedy alleged violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

It's at least the fourth lawsuit filed over Flint's lead-tainted water. The others seek financial damages and class-action status.

The plaintiffs are the Natural Resources Defense Council, American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, Concerned Pastors for Social Action and resident Melissa Mays.

This item has been corrected to reflect the proper name of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
MidMichigan Health is moving to a single electronic medical record (EMR) system that will connect all of its hospitals, doctors offices and outpatient care facilities.

The new system will enable each patient to have one comprehensive medical record shared across all of the MidMichigan Health-employed providers and facilities who deliver their care. The project will also bring all MidMichigan Health-owned facilities onto the same platform for registration, scheduling and billing.

MidMichigan has signed a contract with Epic Systems Corp., a privately owned healthcare software company based in Verona, Wis., to provide the clinical, administrative and billing software.

The new system will result in faster, more accurate communication and streamlined processes for safer, higher-quality patient care. The system will also be more cost-effective than the current system. MidMichigan is making a $55 million investment in the project and expects to recoup those costs within six years through efficiencies gained.

Our current state of multiple vendor systems requires us to maintain a large number of custom interfaces, said Dan Waltz, chief information officer. This has simply become unsustainable, both in terms of the cost to maintain those systems and the potential risk and confusion that it introduces.

MidMichigan Health leaders said this is not just a software project, but rather a complete transformation in the way patient care is delivered.

As part of the process, we will be evaluating all of our workflows, comparing them to industry best practices and making improvements, said Pankaj Jandwani, M.D., chief medical information officer. Its an opportunity for us to think differently about how we work and to design our tools and our processes around what patients and their families need. At the same time well be improving our internal productivity and satisfaction. Many of our current tasks and roles will be dramatically transformed by this effort.

The new system will enable patients to do many more things electronically, such as scheduling appointments online, self-check-in from home or at on-site kiosks, virtual care options such as telemedicine and e-visits, and the ability to view and pay all of MidMichigan Health bills from one account.

Project team members have already begun traveling to Wisconsin for Epic training and will begin configuring the system in early 2016. MidMichigan officials anticipate that the system will be fully operational in April 2017. At that time, patients will transition to using Epic for their MyMidMichigan accounts, which they use to communicate electronically with their providers, view their medical records and manage appointments and prescriptions. A second phase of the project in late 2017 will connect MidMichigan Home Care and other newly owned subsidiaries to the rest of the health system.

The IT framework for this system will be hosted internally at MidMichigan Health. The University of Michigan Health System also uses Epic, and will be a resource for sharing best practices.
To the editor:

When Jesus was being questioned prior to his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in Jerusalem, uttered a famous question, What is truth? Jesus himself declared toward the end of his life that We would know the truth and the truth will make us free. There have been lots of concerns across the centuries about how to discover the truth. Historically it has often been a serious enterprise.

However, we have apparently fallen into a situation where truth is a disposable quality. We are in the early stages of a presidential campaign, and already we have groups of people checking the validity of facts recited by speech-giving politicians. The scores from these groups dont look very reassuring no matter what candidate were talking about. Then, of course, we have the ubiquitous Internet which makes information available world-wide instantly. We are easily led to believing whatever we discover when we do things like a Google search of the internet. The reality is I could put material on the Internet claiming to be a retired biology researcher who has discovered a cure for a horrible disease. It would probably take quite a while before my opinion was thoroughly debunked. Pilates ancient question takes on new urgency in the present time. Peoples willingness to play fast and loose with ideas being promoted as truth is hurting innocent folks.

Currently there is a lot of anger and fear being expressed about the fact that our citizenry includes people who follow the religion of Islam. There are actually close to 8 million Americans who identify with the Muslim community. Our own state has one of the largest concentrations in the country of Muslim folk. Way too many people are too quick to suppose that Muslims cannot be trusted and that they are either overt or covert terrorists. With the possible effect such prejudice may have on the next presidential election and with the nasty effects that discrimination has on both minority groups and the society as a whole, it is high time we stopped ourselves from yielding to knee jerk reactions in response to frightened people who want to convince us that well all be better off as soon as we institutionalize the blaming of the minorities in our midst. Some are even urging that we deport a particular category of folks.

Part of this confusion about whom to trust could easily be related to our unwillingness to learn difficult truths in any depth. Recently a friend of mine did some genealogy research for me. I learned from this material that one of my great-great-ever-so-great ancestors came to this country on the Mayflower! Who knew? That means I come from immigrant stock. If we start exporting immigrants, maybe Ill volunteer  which would mean sending me to England. I recently was teasing a physician friend about a coffee mug I had seen which said please dont equate your Google search with my medical degree. The physician told me, as we chuckled over that mug, that lots of patients come into the office with elaborate computer print-outs of their Internet research, perhaps trying to tell their physician that they wanted to be treated according to unsystematic, unvalidated theories!

We are going to have an opportunity to get real about our understanding of the Muslims in our midst. The United Church of Christ, at 4100 Chestnut Hill Drive, is hosting a meeting on Sunday, Jan. 31, from 4 to 6 p.m., where members of the local Islamic community will discuss the major tenets of Islam. Special attention will be paid at this meeting to developing connections between Islamic and Christian youth. I urge you to come join in the dialog, learn some new truth and help freedom ring in Midland.

REV. DR. CARL R. GILLETT

Midland
To the editor:

I have just read the Rev. Jeff Liebmanns diatribe (sorry, but I can think of no better word to describe it) in Sundays Midland Daily News. He is very upset with a lot of things, and has harsh words to say about just about everybody. In particular, he is upset by the heartless manner in which America is failing to respond to the immigrant crisis caused by the conflicts in the Middle East.

I have a suggestion for the good Reverend: Take it upon himself to do what an unknown gentleman in New York of Hungarian background, and very likely Jewish, did for my wifes family when they were driven out of Hungary after World War II. That is, Rev. Liebmann could volunteer to personally guarantee for some Syrian family two things: that they would never require public assistance and that they would have employment when they arrived in the United States.

Rev. Liebmann seems to have a lot of suggestions of things for other people to do. Here is an opportunity for him to have a real personal impact.

RICHARD HEINY

Midland
A 24-year-old Coleman man has been charged with drunken driving causing death in connection with an October crash at South Meridian Road and M-20.

Brandon Duane-Raymond McMullen has been arraigned in Midland County District Court. Judge Michael D. Carpenter set bond at $10,000, 10 percent, which McMullen posted.

He is being monitored by an alcohol tether, and Carpenter sent bond conditions of no drugs or alcohol, subject to drug and alcohol screening and McMullen is not allowed to enter bars.

The crash, which claimed the life of 53-year-old Vickie Shauger of Sanford, occurred at 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 3 in Homer Township. Shaugers 2014 Nissan Sentra was stopped at a red light at the intersection when it was struck from behind by McMullens 2005 Dodge Neon. The force of the collision pushed the Sentra into three vehicles that were stopped ahead of it.

An affidavit filed in court states McMullen smelled of alcohol and admitted to drinking beer. He told deputies he did not see any brake lights or the red stop light at M-20.

He suffered a broken ankle in the crash, thus he could not perform sobriety tests. Testing of blood drawn at the hospital showed a blood alcohol level of 0.29 percent; results from tests conducted by the Michigan State Police lab were 0.193 percent, and the affidavit notes the blood was drawn for that test three hours after the blood was drawn for the first test. The state limit is 0.08 percent.

McMullen waived a circuit court arraignment in the case, which is set for a presentence investigation and recommendation in preparation for a Cobbs plea hearing. During a Cobbs hearing, which is not open to the public, the judge uses the information at hand to inform the defendant of the likely sentence in a case, and the defendant can then use that information in deciding whether to enter a plea. The defendant can withdraw the plea if the judge does not deliver the expected sentence.

McMullen is being represented by attorney Marcus Garske of Bay City.

Drunken driving causing death is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The following list includes reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department.

Monday, Jan. 25

2:32 a.m.  Police were called to a domestic assault at a Sturgeon Avenue address.

2:58 a.m.  A motorist was arrested at Jerome and Larkin streets for driving on a suspended license.

9:46 a.m.  A detective received a referral from the Department of Human Services regarding a 2-year-old girl who was acting out of character and complaining of pain during diaper changes.

9:48 a.m.  A Homer Township woman, 34, reported $583.90 worth of fraudulent charges were made to her debit card. The purchases were made in the Detroit area.

11:31 a.m.  A Warren Township man, 48, was arrested on a Gratiot County felony drug warrant after he went to the Law Enforcement Center to obtain a firearm purchase permit. The warrant was discovered during a background check.

11:41 a.m.  A Mount Haley Township woman, 46, reported her debit card was used to make purchases of $301.49 without her permission at a Toys-R-Us in Ohio.

11:55 a.m.  A Lee Township man, 80, reported his neighbors mailbox was struck by a vehicle.

12:47 p.m.  A $20 glass pipe and $7 bag of tobacco were stolen from Tobacco Alley in Jerome Township. Deputies are investigating.

12:50 p.m.  A Midland woman, 38, reported finding fraudulent charges of $376.61 on her debit card. The suspects used the card number at a business in Ohio.

2:08 p.m.  A Mount Haley Township home reported someone broke into his RV while he was out of the state for a month. Presidential gold coins, titles for his motorcycles and a vehicle title were stolen. The total value of the stolen items is set at $500. There was no damage and there are no suspects.

5:02 p.m.  A deputy was called to the emergency room to speak with a 33-year-old woman who had been assaulted in Lee Township the day before. A report is being sent to the prosecutor.

8:31 p.m.  A deputy responded to Jasper Township for a report of people shining deer and possible poaching. The deputy checked the area and found nothing suspicious.

Sunday, Jan. 24

1:36 a.m.  A Saginaw woman, 40, was arrested in Lee Township for driving on a suspended license.

2:13 a.m.  A motorist was arrested in the 500 block of Linwood Drive for drunken driving.

3:07 a.m.  A motorist was arrested at West Main and Jerome streets for driving on a suspended license and on a warrant.

11:02 a.m.  Police responded to a report of domestic violence at a West Allen Street address.

5:44 p.m.  A motorist was arrested in the 4000 block of Wellness Drive for driving on a suspended license.

7:45 p.m.  Police investigated a case of retail fraud in the 900 block of Joe Mann Boulevard.

7:58 p.m.  A deputy checked the well being of a 2-year-old child in Edenville Township.

9:46 p.m.  A deputy responded to a report of a domestic assault, involving a 47-year-old woman and 46-year-old man, in Lee Township. Neither party wished to press charges. A report was sent to the prosecutor for review.

Saturday, Jan. 23

1:06 a.m.  Deputies were sent to an Edenville Township home for a report of ongoing problems between neighbors that have escalated into a 47-year-old man setting up a graphic and threatening display on his property. A report is being sent to the prosecutor for review.

3:03 a.m.  Deputies, Jerome Township firefighters and EMS were sent to the Village of Sanford for a single vehicle rollover accident and found the driver had left the scene. She was found later and cited for violation of the basic speed law. A report is being sent to the prosecutor for leaving the scene of an accident.

3:35 a.m.  Deputies assisted Midland Police by checking an Edenville Township home in an attempt to locate a 14-year-old runaway. The teen was not found.

6:46 a.m.  Deputies responded to a 911 hang-up call in Lee Township and found a 48-year-old woman who needed help up off the floor and into her wheelchair. Deputies assisted the woman.

Friday, Jan. 22

12:10 p.m.  A deputy was sent to a Lee Township school for a report of threats made by a fourth grade boy toward another student. The boy was sent home for the day and both sets of parents were notified by the school.

3:29 p.m.  Property in Ingersoll Township was damaged.

11:43 p.m.  Two Detroit men, ages 18 and 19, were arrested for drug possession after they were stopped for speeding in Lee Township.
New U.K. Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt has reversed most of an economic package announced by the government just weeks ago, including a planned cut in income taxes. Hunt said Monday he was scrapping almost all the tax cuts announced last month by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Liz Truss, and also signaled that public spending cuts are on the way. It was a bid to soothe turbulent financial markets spooked by fears of excessive government borrowing. The move raises questions about how long the beleaguered prime minister can stay in office, though Truss insisted she has no plans to quit. She vowed to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, but many in the party want her gone.
BLOOMINGTON  On the day that the Illinois Farm Bureau celebrated its 100th anniversary, IFB President Richard Guebert Jr. met separately with its past presidents and members of the Future Leaders program.

I just couldnt help but think in those meetings about what the founders what have thought about our organization at 100 years old, he said. I think they would say Wow, this isnt what we imagined, but we are very proud.

Guebert oversaw a special ceremony Tuesday afternoon to commemorate 100 years of the Illinois Farm Bureau. The ceremony was held at the headquarters in Bloomington.

One of the things Guebert will remember most about the day, he said, was meeting with the past presidents.

Their leadership in years past set the stage and propelled us to get to this point today, he said. They made a lot of tough decisions and a lot of the issues they faced are similar to the ones we still face today. And in meeting with the future leaders, I can feel very good about our future because I know it is in good hands.

The IFB was founded in 1916 by a group of farmers who met at the University of Illinois to discuss the need for agriculture education, better information for farmers, and more effective farming practices.

Thirteen 13 local farm bureaus came together to form a statewide organization. Initial concerns centered around issues such as control of insect pests, protection of livestock from disease, and the construction of better rural roads.

We are talking about an anniversary today but, really, it feels more like a family reunion, said Matt McLelland, director of operations for Prairie Farms Dairy, an affiliate of the IFB. We are, in fact, one big family, and always there to support each other.

Employees from the IAA Credit Union, Prairie Farms Dairy, Growmark and Country Financial  all affiliates of the IFB - celebrated the anniversary with cake and ice cream. Representatives from the U.S. Postal Service hand-canceled commemorative postcards celebrating the anniversary.

A new historical exhibit, A Voice for Agriculture: the Centennial History of Illinois Farm Bureau, also was unveiled. The display showcases artifacts, photos and memorabilia that highlight IFBs first 100 years.
Sanders not that kind of socialist

Editor:

In his letter regarding Sen. Sanders, Duane Hoem provided two definitions of the economic/political term socialist, stating that it was unlikely that Americans want a socialist president.

I agree. Americans DONT want a socialist president. However, Bernie Sanders isnt a socialist, hes a democratic socialist, and there is a significant difference in the terms.

According to Bloomberg News and political scientist John Ahlquist, an associate professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego, social democrats believe in the responsibility of an elected government to ensure that the functioning of a market economy adequately provides for the basic needs of everybody. In other words, no government takeover of industry, no public or collective ownership of production, none of the scary scenarios being used by the right to smear Sen. Sanders and distort his beliefs.

What he does believe in is strong collective bargaining and significantly higher corporate taxes and regulation, with the benefits of same dumped back into the social safety net to ensure universal access to reasonable health care, education, etc.

For insight into how a functioning social democracy works, look to Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and other (largely) European countries that function under this system. Closer to home, the Canadian health care system is very much a social democratic institution.

Personally, I dont think Sanders has a chance of being elected, and even if he did hed never get his ideas through Congress. Unfortunately, the guy I support, John Kasich, will never make it out of the GOP primary, and well all be left choosing between whichever lunatics the parties put forth.

It isnt going to be pretty. But if youre going to malign a guy, at least be accurate about it. Bernie Sanders isnt a socialist, and the media do a disservice to the debate by falsely portraying his ideas to the nation.

Sue Kennedy

Lamoille
Of all the jobs available today  traditional and cutting-edge  there's one that makes all the rest possible.

Teaching.

Yet, fewer and fewer people are choosing teaching as a profession and that decision could have disastrous consequences down the road.

A recent survey by Illinois' regional school superintendents showed 60 percent of Illinois school districts reported trouble filling teaching positions, particularly for secondary schools.

At Illinois State University, which has one of the state's leading teacher education programs, an assistant dean said the reason is multi-fold: people still are recovering from the economic downtown of 2008; students are concerned how the state's pension issues will affect their future retirement; they hear negative comments about teaching; and graduates can make more money in other fields.

All, unfortunately, are understandable. All, fortunately, can be addressed.

As reported by Julia Evelsizer and Lenore Sobota, the survey said 16 percent of schools had to cancel programs due to teacher shortages in specific subjects. Local districts said the most difficult positions to fill are specialty programs, such as foreign language, speech pathology and physics.

In some areas, it's hard even to find substitute teachers. "Subbing," and student teaching, both provide an entrance to the profession, or to become familiar with students at another grade level.

More worrisome is that teacher-education programs, like at ISU, have seen a sizable decline in teacher education majors. The university is looking at other ways to get students interested in teacher education, including a Troops to Teachers program that targets community colleges located near military bases.

That's the kind of creative thinking that will help. But teacher programs  and our communities and local school districts  also need to encourage young people to consider a career in education. Displaced workers or workers looking to change careers also should consider teaching. But to make it attractive, communities and districts need to make sure the environment, technology and pay are equal to the job at hand.

That may mean some hard looks at district and state money and where it's spent. Classrooms are the most important part of a school and that's where the money, time and attention should be focused.

After all, we're asking teachers to guide young people into adulthood. We shouldn't expect them to do the job otherwise.
Political correctness continues with many absurdities. Last November, a guest at a campus hotel at Northern Illinois University complained about a Bible in her room. The offended guest was co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. To her, the presence of a Bible sent a message of endorsement and was an agent of proselytizing. She notified the university. It cowered in an instant, saying, "We're very conscious of the separation of church and state." The Bible was quickly removed.

The university, a supposed citadel of openness and diversity, has a mistaken view (like many) of the separation of church and state. The constitutional guarantee of this principle does not mean an iron-clad separation of religious influence from everyday life.

The establishment clause means there is to be no state church, of which each citizen is to be a member. A twin to this principle is the free exercise of religion where citizens are free to believe whatever they wish.

Anyone has a right to express their beliefs. A guest at a hotel has a right to ignore or read that Bible. There is no mandate that they must read the Bible and/or embrace its message.

The university, and most liberals, have a misconstrued understanding of the separation of church and state. The Constitution guarantees free exercise of religion. The presence of a closed Bible on state property is a far cry from the official establishment of a state church.

Perry Klopfenstein

Gridley
This is me, Giovanni Hitler. Samuel Sanchez (EL PAIS)

For a short time a few years ago in a small town in Ecuador, Hitler, Lenin, and Bolivar lived under the same roof. Im Hitler, Lenin is my younger brother, and Bolivar was my father.

Ecuador is different: among the 4,000 inhabitants of my town of Huigra, there was another kid called Hitler

My father abandoned us when I was aged around two (as if he hadnt done enough by baptizing us), meaning I never had the chance to ask him why he gave us those names. I can only suppose that as he called my brother Lenin (second name Helen) it wasnt for ideological reasons. Perhaps he liked the idea of sitting in on the domestic disputes between these two giants, as though this would allow him to rewrite the history of the 20th century.

I paid no mind to my name when I was a kid, but in Spain, Hitler is pretty unusual, to say the least: the countrys National Statistics Institute lists some 87 Lenins, along with 65 Bolivars, but type in Hitler and you get a message saying it has no record of any. But Ecuador is different: among the 4,000 inhabitants of my town of Huigra, there was another kid called Hitler.

Hitlers Spanish identity card.

I cant imagine what the Germans must think of my hometown, but I can describe the surprise on the face of the police officers at the passport check in Bonn when I visited my mother-in-law, who lives there. They brought in a translator to ask about my name, and he told them that it wasnt my fault I was called Hitler. They also asked me if I understood what my name meant!

Im well aware of it. I remember being at school when we were taught about his crimes. But, as Shakespeare said: Whats in a name? I certainly dont identify with Hitler: anybody who knows me will testify to that. Mind you, when I think about it, my brother, Lenin, who lives in Spain as well, campaigned on behalf of Podemos

I worked for the same construction company for 14 years, and my workmates used to say Heil! each morning

By now Ive gotten used to peoples efforts to hide their surprise when Im introduced to them. The other day, I went to buy a monthly transport pass, handed over my identity card and once again noted how the person on the other side of the counter could hardly contain themselves from jumping up and telling their workmates. But overall, my name hasnt really created any problems for me at work, for example.

I worked for the same construction company for 14 years (Im currently unemployed), where my workmates used to tease me by saying Heil! each morning, but it didnt bother me. Anyway, Ive managed to get my own back by naming my two boys Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong-un. Only joking! Theyre really called Adrian Giovani (hes aged 24) and Bryan Andres (aged 15). I chose these names because my wife and I liked them, like most parents do, except, it seems, in Huigra.

But now Id like to say something serious. Soon after moving to Madrid around two decades ago, I was working opposite a big, impressive building.

About Verne In past times, explorers, adventurers and writers scoured the Earth seeking out the wonders of the world. Today, we have the internet. VERNE: a thousand marvels a minute. Click here for more Verne stories in English, and here for the Spanish page.

What is that place? I asked a workmate.

A school, he replied.

I hope I can send my kids there one day, I said.

Haha, thatll be the day, he laughed.

But several years later, my kids ended up going to that school. We had to fight hard, because when we came to Spain there werent many Ecuadorians and things have been difficult.

In fact, I still remember that New Years Eve when a taxi driver ordered me and my family out of his vehicle, calling us South American shits. Perhaps if he knew my name he would have given us a free ride and opened the door for me. I tell this story to show that my status as an immigrant has had a much bigger impact on my life than having the name of one of historys most notorious villains.

A lot of people I meet say they would change their name in my position. It would be a bit bothersome, but no big deal. But the simple truth is that I dont really have a problem with my name. At the age of 43, people know by now who I am and what I believe in, and that my second name is of no importance. Who I am has nothing to do with my name, but in how I live my life.

Giovanni Hitler Cando Ruizs story was told to Alvaro Llorca.
A day after emerging party Ciudadanos offered to mediate between Spains two main groups to break the stalemate and get a government up and running, fresh scandals affecting the Popular Party (PP) are making potential deals increasingly difficult. On Tuesday alone, the PP conservatives were dealt several new blows: 24 people were arrested in the Valencia region in connection with a bribes-for-contracts investigation; former government official Rodrigo Rato became embroiled in a new probe, and former minister Miguel Arias Canete, now an EU commissioner, is under scrutiny over a corruption scandal at a state agency called Acuamed.

An investigator takes away a box from Popular Party offices in Valencia on Tuesday. EFE

And last Friday, both the PP as a whole and its treasurer were named official targets in an ongoing investigation into possible illegal party financing called the Barcenas case.

With the conservatives making headlines again, other parties rushed to condemn the corruption.

The PP is rotten to the core with corruption, said Oscar Lopez of the Socialist Party (PSOE), which came in second at the inconclusive December 20 general election. If anyone thinks they can pressure the PSOE into supporting Spains most corrupt party, either actively or passively, so it can govern again, they are wrong.

Any talks between Ciudadanos and the PP will include a raft of anti-corruption measures that the latter will have to accept

Inigo Errejon, the number two official at Podemos, said the Valencia arrests affected ongoing talks to form a government in Spain, either through a coalition or a minority administration.

Nobody who talks about regeneration should allow the PP to have another term in La Moncloa [prime ministerial palace], he said, alluding to the Socialists but particularly to Ciudadanos, which secured 40 seats in parliament on a program of democratic reform of Spains institutions.

While the PP originally described Ciudadanos as a marketing product and a high-risk vote, it has recently been courting its leader Albert Rivera, whose can-do attitude is now being described as constructive.

But the latter is warning that a deal between both parties will be difficult, particularly with Mariano Rajoy still at the helm of the PP.

Its going to be complicated for Rajoy  who has been heading the PP all these years, who is involved in the Barcenas case, and whose party is sitting in the dock over its management  to be able to handle this kind of fight against corruption, and above all, its going to be very hard for him to have the authority for it, noted Rivera on Tuesday in an interview on ES Radio.

So far Rajoy is showing no signs of wanting to step aside and make room for a different candidate for prime minister

Any talks with the PP will include a raft of anti-corruption measures that the latter will have to accept; these will possibly include eliminating government pardons for convicted politicians and holding parties accountable for their own members crimes.

Spain is no longer afraid of the notion that if Rajoy is not in charge, the ship will sink, added Rivera.

But so far Rajoy is showing no signs of wanting to step aside and make room for a different candidate for prime minister. Despite winning the most seats at the election  123  Rajoy lacks enough support to get himself reinstated at the upcoming investiture session. Aware of this, on Friday he told King Felipe VI that he would not stand for the position at that session.

Meanwhile, Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez, whose party has 90 seats, is attempting to create an alternative alliance with Podemos and regional groups, but talks with the anti-austerity party have been stalling.

If no candidate manages enough congressional support to form a government, Spain will be forced to hold fresh elections later this year.

English version by Susana Urra.
News about the royal couple Kate Middleton and Prince William having a third child has been spreading around the Internet saying that the latter can't wait for a new baby, but the former does not agree with that idea.

Although there were stories about the Duchess of Cambridge being excited to have a new baby and there are even news about her being pregnant already, no confirmation has come out yet from the couple or the royal courts about it being true.

In a report posted by the Latin Post, the Prince had a conversation with his wife telling her how he feels about having a new child, but unfortunately, it is not something that Middleton was happy about, which is contrary to what is spreading around the web.

The publication's inside source said that the two are currently going through some marital drama and it is because of their issue with their different opinion about having another child. They even said that the couple's problem these days is getting more intense due to this subject.

Based on the post of Movie News Guide, Middleton has a good reason why she thinks it is not a good time to have a third child. There are different sources saying that she is contented with having two kids and is no longer willing to have another baby as of the moment.

The Inquisitr said that there is a possibility of the reports being true since her last two pregnancies made the press quite crazy as they want to get all the details of what she was going through. This, however, made the Duchess uncomfortable.

Although the press has not yet verified all these pregnancy rumors, the media still keeps pounding Kate's door for more information. It came to a point that the couple even had to make a statement demanding to give their family the privacy that they need.
Toxic Home Syndrome is affecting 15.3 million homes in the U.K., according to the report. Mail Online describes this as a condition wherein an individual's health is failing because of the polluted air in the house. This may increase the risk of acquiring a heart disease, asthma and lung cancer.

The syndrome is characterized by air that is circulating in the house with more than 900 potentially harmful chemicals. Other symptoms associated with the said syndrome are respiratory problems, coughing, headaches, fever or chills, nose bleeds, eye irritation, lung disease, rashes, wheezing, dizziness, muscle pains, hearing loss and sneezing.

The experts are calling the attention of households to safeguard their homes with proper ventilation. "Toxic Home Syndrome occurs when individuals and families are exposed to a potent mix of airborne pollutants within the home arising from poor ventilation, causing respiratory and skin diseases to occur more frequently," Professor Peter Howarth, an expert in respiratory medicine and allergy at Southampton University, explained.

The World Health Organization asserts that everyone has a right to have a healthy home. Besides mounting your homes with effective and proper ventilation, each family member, especially the mothers, must observe ways on how to make their homes healthy and clean.

Likewise, Woman's Day shares the following housekeeping tips that would spring clean your home -- free from airborne pollutants:

1. Dust Off Potentially Harmful Particles

Pet hair, dust mites, dirt and other harmful particles can trigger asthma attacks and allergies. The best way to get rid of them is to completely clean your house. This includes cleaning the carpets, curtains, mattress, pillows and furniture such as sofas and other things where harmful particles could live.

Mattresses and pillows must be covered and washed weekly or often times. You may wash them with soap and water and then pour hot water on them to terminate the dust mites and other insects living inside the mattresses and pillows.

It is recommendable that you vacuum an area depending on the number of people that regularly use the area. For a single bedroom, vacuum the room every week. And for two roomies, vacuum the room twice a week. A living area must be vacuumed weekly.

2. Sanitize the Kitchen Sink

Kitchen sink has lots of bacteria. Disinfect it with soap and water and then spray it with vinegar followed by a mist of hydrogen peroxide. Then let it dry.

3. Clean the Dishwasher Thoroughly

Dishwasher must be cleaned every week. Pour baking soda on a wet sponge and wipe it around the edges of the machine. Remove the food or stains that are stuck on it. Pour a Dishwasher Magic inside of the dishwasher to terminate the bacteria such as E.coli.

"During cold and flu season, add a quarter-cup of bleach to the regular dish cycle to kill the bacteria," Laura Dellutri said.

4. Get Rid of Bad Odors

To disinfect the disposal, remove the bad odors by pouring a drop of lemon, salt and ice cubes into it. The lemon freshens and the salt and ice remove the residues.

5. Use Microfiber Cloths

Wet microfiber cloths can clean counters, glass, tiles and floors to disinfect them instead of using paper towels.

6. Decontaminate the Sponges

Every night clean the sponges after using. Squeeze and microwave it for a minute.

7. Always Clean the Toilet

Use a drop of Tang Drin Mix at the toilet bowl. Its citric acid serves as a scrubber. Let it remain for few minutes then flush. To free the drains from clogs and hair, use a Liquid-Plumr or Drano then pour hot water once a week.

Shower curtains might have mildew and mold. Let it wash together with few towels. This will scrub the shower curtains clean and let it dry. The bathroom door must be cleaned, too. For glass shower door, rub it with teaspoon lemon oil or use the Rain-X Original Glass Treatment at least twice a year.

8. Sweep Daily

Choose a sweep with finer bristles that can pick up smaller dirt for indoors. Hence, use a stiffer bristles to clean the porous surfaces of your outdoors. It is advisable to sweep your entire house and patio daily.

Do all these regularly to get rid of the syndrome; however, Parent Herald also urged moms and dads to keep an eye on your usual household cleaning products as these can be harmful, too.
Most people nowadays are shameless and full-pledged coffeeholics! With several coffee shops, coffee brands and coffee variants mushrooming here and there, it is undeniable that coffee has already been a part our lives.

While coffee addiction is said to be detrimental to one's health, NBC News shared that a recent study suggested drinking coffee is not bad at all. It was found out that coffee, tea and chocolate consumption do not really cause palpitations.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, assessed the caffeine intake of 1,388 respondents from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for one year. With an average age of 72, the participants were instructed to wear a heartbeat monitoring device for 24 hours to measure instances of premature atrial and ventricular contractions.

After months of assessment, researchers found no difference on respondents' heart activities regardless of the amount of their caffeine intake. In other words, drinking coffee, tea and chocolate does not affect and exhibit palpitations.

Written in the Journal of the American Heart Association, Dr. Gregory Marcus claimed that caffeine intake, regardless of the amount, does not cause premature cardiac contractions. "Therefore, we are only able to conclude that in general, consuming caffeinated products every day is not associated with having increased ectopy or arrhythmia but cannot specify a particular amount per day," the cardiologist said.

The results of the study supports previous claims that coffee is not dangerous to health. As a matter of fact, Parent Herald previously reported that it contains magnesium, niacin, potassium and other nutrients needed by the body.

One study even claimed that coffee decreases the risk of Diabetes Mellitus Type II since it is found to reduce inflammation and insulin resistance with the bioactive compounds found in it. Moreover, Independence also claimed that it lowers the risk of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, liver cancer and more. However, it should be noted that only three to five cups a day is recommended by experts.

Do you think coffee is healthy? Share to us your thoughts in the comment section below.
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Craft beer is about so much more than special releases, rare beers and hard-to-find treasures, and while beer is better when youre not just checking boxes off a list of things to try, there is a certain special satisfaction provided by finally sitting down to a glass of beer that youve long imagined drinking. Its the thrill of the hunt, when long hours browsing trade forums or promising favors to friends in return for bottles from far-flung locals culminate in the satisfaction of, at long last, hearing that seductive hiss of the cap being unsealed.

Each beer lover has their own special list of beers to seek out on their journey, and once all the obvious and easy-to-acquire beers are crossed off, its time to tackle the white whales. The beers that you can stalk for years before sampling. The mythical brews that every man or woman with a deep appreciation for all things fermented should strive to try.

Here are 10 rare beers, mostly from American craft brewers, that are unmistakably special. They may be divisive, they probably arent your 10 favorite beers, but they all deserve your attention and your respect.



Photo via Russian River/Facebook

Lets start with one of the most notorious bucket list brews in the craft beer world: the potent and pungent triple IPA from Californias wine country. Pliny the Younger is brewed once a year for release on the first Friday of February and is available at Russian Rivers Santa Rosa brewpub for just two weeks and a small number of kegs are sent out to Russian Rivers best accounts. PtY inspires long lines, big crowds, and even the occasional parking lot brawl. The subjective merits of the hop-driven elixir can be argued (though it does enjoy 100 point ratings at both BeerAdvocate and RateBeer), but what cant be debated is The Youngers impact on craft beer culture. Wherever there is talk of The Younger, there are arguments about if its overrated or worth the trouble to score a glass, but a true beer lover knows that the experience is often worth more than the liquid in the glass. Getting a taste of Pliny the Younger probably wont be life changing, but enjoying the hunt and sharing the experience with the like-minded beer-lovers surrounding you is certainly life-affirming.

Wanna start an argument with a group of beer geeks? Ask them if Heady (Topper) or Pliny (The Elder) is the better double IPA. For the record theres no right answer, but Heady is the east coast answer to Russian Rivers DIPA, and the Vermont brew enjoys a fiercely loyal fanbase who will drive long miles to fill their trunk with cases of the tall silver cans. Fresh Heady Topper is, well heady; just cracking open a can will fill the room with the spicy, pungent odor of hops. Then you take that first swig from the can, and the hop essence blossoms into your sinuses before the bitterness slams down on your palate. It isnt long before youre hitting that can for another long pull, then another, with each sip revealing more depth and complexity to the hop character. Heady Topper is so densely hoppy that you can actually sense the hops in the beers mouthfeel; its a beer that will show you that theres more to hops that bitterness and pungency.

Im going with the double IPA Abner here, but really any Hill Farmstead brew that ticks your preferred style box is an acceptable choice for a bucket list beer. There are few other American craft breweries that demonstrate the mystique, character, and quality that this Vermont producer does, and the beer geek pilgrimage to the remote farm to sample beers from the source is an honored tradition. Exemplary craftsmanship and a focus on raw materials (including some really great well water) combine to create a long list of triple-A craft brews, and each has a compelling story that evokes a strong sense of family and heritage. Its rare that ultra-hyped beers will meet expectations, but the few Hill Farmstead beers that Ive been lucky enough to try have lived up to their stellar reputations. You get points for scoring a bottle or a festival pour (as I have), but the real joy comes from making that trip to the source for a little one-on-one time with Abner, Edward, Arthur or Susan (this feat is still on my personal bucket list).

Westy 12 as it is known colloquially is oft considered one of the finest beers in the world. Brewed by the Trappist monks of the Abbey of Saint Sixtus in Belgium, this dark strong ale is notoriously difficult to acquire. It usually requires a by-appointment visit to the Abbey, where intrepid beer-geek errants can purchase a single wooden crate of 24 yellow-capped bottles. First brewed in 1940, the beer itself is wondrously balanced and bold. Tremendously complex with layer after layer of malt flavor and yeasty essence, Westy 12 is the superlative Belgian Quadrupel. Even after a few thousand six packs were imported to the U.S. by the Shelton Brothers in 2011, bottles fetch high returns on the trade market, but its a beer that any worldly beer lover should seek out. (One inside tip: if you want to get a sense of what Westvleterens XII is like but dont want to track a bottle down, pick up the eminently more available ABT 12 from St. Bernardus brewery. This closely-related brewery shares the recipe, the techniques, and most importantly the yeast strain with Westvleteren, but they make a whole lot more beer that the monks, so you can find it without much trouble.)

Big, inky imperial stouts are some of the most hyped and sought-after styles of craft beer, and perhaps none is more desired than the wax-dipped and lavishly illustrated bottles of Dark Lord from Munster, Indianas 3 Floyds Brewing. Each spring the brewery hosts Dark Lord Day  a beer festival and the only time to purchase bottles of the brew made with coffee, vanilla and molasses  and the event has evolved into the most anticipated date on the craft beer calendar. Like nearly every other beer on this list, Dark Lord will spur contentious arguments among craft aficionados, with one cap extolling the depth of flavor and sheer brutality of the metal-influenced brew and the other camp loudly proclaiming it a soy-sauce flavored mess. Theres only one way to find out which team youre on: youll need to break that wax seal for yourself. Even if you dont love Dark Lord, trying a vertical tasting of several vintages of the stout is eye-opening.

First, the bad news: production on this notorious English barleywine ceased back in 2008, so finding a bottle can be a challenge. The good news is Thomas Hardy Ale is best when left in the cellar for years (or even decades), and there are plenty of fans, pubs and shops whove socked away bottles for the long-haul. First brewed in 1968 by Eldridge Pope & Co, and later by a couple of other British breweries, the thick and boozy barleywine is inspired by the namesake English novelists The Trumpet Major, and the brew was bottled with live yeast to ensure a continued development for many years. The esters of English ale yeast meld with rich treacle sweetness and cutting high alcohols for a truly unique, and unmistakably British tipple. If you manage to track down a bottle, be sure to have a hefty wedge of Stilton blue cheese on hand to complete the experience.

Yeah, youve probably had a bottle of the quintessential Belgian pale ale, but a stateside glass of Orval is only half of the story of this beer. Orval is unique even among the tiny group of Trappist ales brewed in Belgium, and the beer features techniques and processes more often considered part of the American beer renaissance than the purview of stodgy monks. Orval is both dry-hopped and bottle conditioned with brettanomyces  the favorite wild yeast of American craft brewers. Brett yeast goes to work on sugars that normal ale yeast doesnt touch, and this provides a lightened body, drier finish, and distinctly complex phenolic aroma. While the influence of brett on the bottles sitting in your local shops cooler is wonderful, that dry-hopped character is largely lost before bottles of Orval ever touch American soil. To get the full experience youre going to need to order a glass of the pale ale in a Belgian beer cafe. Only then will you fully understand why Orval is widely considered to be one of the worlds greatest beers. Or so Im told; this is another item on my personal bucket list that remains unchecked.

I feel like I have a humorous story about Black Tuesday, but I cant actually remember it. Such is reality when youre tangoing with nearly 20%ABV bourbon barrel aged imperial stouts that seem to coat your very soul with the essence of malt and char and alcohol. When a bottle (or heaven help you a vertical of a few years worth of bottles) get popped at a bottle share, you can count on things getting weird (in the best way). A Southern California favorite, The Bruery bucks the trends and doesnt participate in the hop-driven IBU arms race. Theyre plenty content to win the race for the biggest, boldest, most tart and most inventive beers. Black Tuesday, released once a year on the eponymous day in October, holds the first two of those prizes and is basically the craft beer equivalent to the fictional Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster cocktail made famous in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. To paraphrase author Douglas Adams, the effect of Black Tuesday is like having your brains smashed in by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick: simultaneously unforgettable and unrememberable.

Firestone Walker Brewery does everything well. We recently called them the Bo Jackson of the beer world, and besides incredible core brands, a vibrant wild beer program, and excellent use of the cutting edge of hop varieties, one aspect of Firestone Walkers game that is most impressive is their spirit barrel aging program. Besides world-class barrel aged gems like the bourbon barrel stout Parabola and their take on the American barleywine Sucaba, the brewery ages a handful of other beers, many of which never see release outside of the brewery. Instead, these hundreds of beer-filled bourbon barrels are combined to create the annual Anniversary Ale release. Brewmaster Matt Brynildson enlists the help of his friends from wineries around Californias central coast to blend the components into a unique cuvee, and every year teams of winemakers compete to craft a winning blend and earn the cardboard crowns and adulation of their peers. Each years release is unique, but they all showcase the breadth of character that oak barrels can impart to the various constituent brews. The 19th Anniversary Ale was released in November, 2015, and the brewers and blenders will surely have something special planned for the 20th Anniversary in 2016. Youre going to want a bottle.

While American wild ales are finding traction in modern beer culture, few offerings have yet risen to the level of bucket list. One particularly notable example that is worth the challenge of hunting down is the irreverent Duck Duck Gooze. This brew from San Diegos Lost Abbey is made even more challenging to procure as it is released only once every three years, and when that day rolls around, it sells out in the blink of an eye. If youre lucky enough to score a bottle, the temptation to flip it to a far-flung trade partner will be great as a bottle Duck Duck Gooze can net you some of the biggest ISOs on your list, but dont trade it away too hastily. This is one hyped up beer that manages to live up to the fervor. Its tart, complex, funky, and refined. It tastes like the old world sour beers that inspired it, and a diminutive pour during a festival or bottle share will not do justice to this brew  you need to really get into a glass to learn all the secrets of the beer. The last release was in 2013, so if youre extra lucky perhaps youll get a taste of the 2016 vintage.
One young girl is tackling the lack of diversity in childrens literature head on.

Marley Dias, an 11-year-old girl from New Jersey, has started a campaign to collect 1,000 childrens books that feature black girl protagonists. The idea came to Dias after she realized that not a single one of the books assigned to her school class featured girls of color.

In my fifth grade class, we were only reading books about white boys and their dogs, Dais told Good Day Philadelphia. And I understood why my teacher wanted us to read those books, because those are the books he could connect with. But I didnt necessarily connect with them.

After broaching the issue at home, Dias mother, Dr. Janice Johnson Dias, asked her daughter what she wanted to do about the issue. The young girls response was to start a book drive. The #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign aims to collect the books featuring black girl characters and then on Feb. 13, Dias and her non-profit partner GrassROOTS Community Foundation will play host to a book festival at Retreat Primary School in St. Mary, Jamaica.

In an interview with the Philly Voice, Dias shared that 400 books had already been collected, putting her nearly halfway at her goal. She hopes to collect all 1,000 books by Feb.1.

Dias efforts not only illustrate a good deed, but highlight the publishing industrys glaring diversity issue. In a 2014 study by The University of Wisconsin-Madisons Cooperative Childrens Book Center, annual statistics for books by and about people of color raised serious red flags. Of the 3,000 to 3,500 sample used by the center, only 179 books were about Africans/African Americans, 36 books were about American Indians, 112 books were about Asian Pacifics/Asian Pacific Americans, and 66 books were about Latinos.

The overall number of books by and about people of color constituted only 14% of the books, which was reportedly up from 2013s 10%. Childrens book publisher Lee and Low also presented their own data from their 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey, which pointed out that the diversity in publishing issue is far larger than just the characters in the books.

Where is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results: https://t.co/EI4ar1UeE8pic.twitter.com/5zahSrHqeR  Lee & Low Books (@LEEandLOW) January 26, 2016

Dias effort joins the ranks of several other ongoing campaigns, including the We Need More Diverse Books initiative, in trying to tackle the publishing industrys representation issue.
Sicily may be part of Italy, but so much of its history, culture, and cuisine are entirely unique from the rest of the country. Treat yourself with a visit to Sicily and your taste buds will be thanking you for the Mediterranean-Adriatic flavor combination found nowhere else in the world.



Translating literally to little orange, arancine are a culinary win all around. Theyre none too complicated, simply rice balls coated in breadcrumbs and fried, sometimes with a little butter or bolognese thrown into the mix. Heat one of these babies up and bada bing bada boom, youve got yourself a delicious snack that will have you keep coming back for more.



Its no surprise that arancine, one of Sicilys most famous dishes, essentially pays homage to the delectable sweet fruit found all over the island. Naturally-growing oranges arent hard to come by in places of similar latitude, but theres something special about these almost-royal treats. The farming of oranges, along with lemons, helped earn the area around Palermo the nickname Conca dOro (golden seashell) because of high levels of citrus export. Head to the source for the freshest and best.



Of course Sicily has its own type of olivethis is Italy, after all. However, these meaty, delicious green olives are rich in both flavor and history, having hailed from the island since before the Greeks arrived in the 8th century B.C.E. Lore has it that these ancient Greeks even preferred the Sicilian olives over their own, likely due to the fertile, volcanic soil in which they continue to be grown.



This dish is the Sicilian answer to ratatouille, with possible Spanish origins. Its a slow-cooked mixture of eggplants, tomatoes, olives, onions, pine nuts, and extra-virgin olive oil. Though it once stood alone as an entree, its more commonly eaten as a side dish these days, and at cold or room temperature to boot. It accompanies fish dishes extremely well, and bold chefs even add octopus or shrimp directly into the mix.



Sicily is an island, so its almost impossible not to run into top-notch seafood dishes. This Sicilian specialty takes the basics out of this world. Finely chopped anchovies and sardines may not seem like your thing, but when theyre done well by the people most equipped to bring out the best in them, youll be changing your tune. At the very least you can enjoy the addition of wild fennel, which grows naturally all over the island.



This dish includes some bias from the author, who is marrying a man whose family hails specifically from Siracusa, but even without a personal connection this dish brings back all the nostalgia of the old country. This classic spaghetti recipe includes garlic-sauteed anchovies from the nearby sea without overwhelming the food with a fishy flavor. Toasted bread crumbs give it texture, and the eater gives it a thumbs up.



Gelato is a must-have everywhere in Italy, but in Sicily its extra special. Fruit syrups infused with the unmelted snow from Mt. Etna, Sicilys ever-active volcano, formed the basis of sorbet. Once cream was added, it became the gelato we all know and love. Even in the ancient city of Ortigia, gelato is not hard to come by.



Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. The character Peter Clemenza in The Godfather speaks like a true Sicilian, and for good reason. These fried pastry tubes stuffed with ricotta, candied orange peel, then decorated with pistachio and chocolate sprinkles are a legacy. Decadent and filling, they are the dessert version of pasta, and are always the most delicious when cooked like only Nona knows how.



Continuing on with the dessert options, sfingi is fun to both say and eat. Essentially a light donut hole, this Sicilian favorite is typically enjoyed during the Carnevale festivities as well as on the Day of San Giuseppe (St. Josephs), which is March 19th. Eating these fried beauties is enough reason to celebrate, in our opinion.



Its pretty obvious that Sicilians have a sweet tooth. Add granita to the list of must-try desserts, because it is another Sicilian legend. Its a semi-frozen dessert similar to sorbet, but is icier in texture because its not churned. Typically its infused with refreshing citrus or mint flavors. Like most everything in Italy, it can be served with coffee.
A Mercadona supermaket in Barcelona. Massimiliano Minocri

Mercadona, Spains largest supermarket chain, has come out against online accusations that it is switching Spanish-produced goods for foreign-made, lower-quality products.

You may have read on the internet or received information through social media indicating that Mercadona is eliminating Spanish products in favor of foreign products, or that Spanish products are being taken off the shelves at Mercadona. This information is completely FALSE, reads the company release, available on its website.

The online message exhorts consumers to change supermarkets and let them know that you dont play around with jobs and food!

The company then goes on to detail exactly who makes the goods that it sells under its own brands, which include Hacendado (food) and Bosque Verde (household cleaning products).

Mercadona issued an extensive note to counter the hoax accusing it of buying as many as 1,800 products from foreign suppliers.

It is no secret that the Valencia-based, family-owned company partners with firms that work almost exclusively for Mercadona. Every year, CEO Juan Roig thanks them for their work and lists them in the companys annual report.

Mercadona says it has 120 suppliers with 220 factories and also has long-term agreements with 12,000 fishermen, 6,000 farmers and 4,000 livestock breeders across Spain for its fresh products.

The anonymous online message claims that Mercadona has traded in 1,800 Spanish products for foreign ones of low quality. It specifies that the olive oil comes from Morocco, the oranges from Argentina, the sunflower seeds from China, the pumpkins from Panama and the potatoes from Israel.

An image of the online accusation provided by Mercadona, which stamped "This is false" on it.

The online message exhorts consumers to change supermarkets and let them know that you dont play around with jobs and food!

But the Mercadona release explains that its olive oil is bottled by a provider in Seville and is 100% Spanish as indicated on the label and accredited by the independent agency Det Norske Veritas (DNV-GL). In order to make our Hacendado oil, Mercadona works with over 150 cooperatives and oil presses from differents parts of Andalusia, Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha, the Valencian region, Catalonia, Madrid and Murcia.

As for oranges, the company notes that 90% are Spanish, with Argentinean ones imported only between August and November, when they are no longer grown in Spain or else the ones available are not of sufficient quality.

Similarly, the potatoes on sale in Mercadona are Spanish except between November and April, when homegrown potatoes do not meet Mercadonas standards and are imported from different climes.

In 2014, the company bought 14.9 billion worth of products in Spain, said the company.

Founded in 1977 as a butchers shop in a Valencia village, Mercadona has remained in the Roig family and expanded nationally to reach over 1,100 supermarkets and 70,000 employees. The company has received plaudits for its early embrace of innovative techniques and fair employment practices. During the economic crisis, Mercadona expanded and hired thousands of new workers.

English version by Susana Urra.
After a strong start, this weeks episode of Agent Carter falls a little flat. What few plot twists were offered are unraveled too quickly, and the emotional stakes of last week seem to have cooled down quiet a bit. Theres even the annoying use of a deus ex machina or two. Still, even when Agent Carter falls short, were still in for a good time, so lets break this episode down to see if we can find the good among the, er, not so good.

We begin at Wilkes homeRIP Wilkeswhere Peggy and the gang are doing their investigative best to find any clues that may offer a new lead. Unfortunately the only ones they find indicate that Wilkes is a Russian spy. Peggy cuts this idea off pretty quickly, and while Im sure the writers wanted to use the false accusations of spying to make a statement, it really just falls flat. It adds little to the plot except to show off Peggys awesome loyalty and commitment to truth, which we already knew about. So where else could this have gone? Well, imagine for a minute that the set-up isnt so obvious. Imagine that Peggy, even if only for a few scenes, has to question how well she actually knows the man she met two days ago. It certainly would add some tension to tonights plot, of which this episode was desperately in need.

We also get our first look at Howard Stark tonight, and somehow finding out he took some time to actually live his Howard Hughes-esque persona by becoming a movie director is pretty endearing. Theres some nice meta-commentary about the ridiculousness of comic book movies, but where this scene really works is in the details. We finally learn what the lapel pins signify (acceptance into an ultra exclusive club), and we learn Howard Starks rather narcissistic way of remembering women. Dont worry ladies; Jarvis is well aware that remembering you based on the jacket hes wearing places Howard into the category of very rude.

In fact, most of the highlights of tonights episode center around the Jarvis/Howard relationship, and just like a good addition to the Marvel Universe should, were offered a lot of insight into how they work as a team. Seeing Howards childlike excitement when things begin to mysteriously float around Peggy, and Jarvis willingly take on the role of number one student, adds a new layer to this relationship. Jarvis also has a way of pointing out and undercutting some of Howards oh, how do I say this more creep-like tendencies. I mean seriously dude, roll back the objectification just a little bit. I keep hoping Maria will eventually show up in this series just to get Howard to straighten up. Plus, dont we all just really want to meet Tonys mom? Yeah, I know you do.

Theres even a pretty emotionally revealing moment between the two men, where Howard implies that Jarvis is free to go off adventuring with Peggy if thats what he really wants to do. Of course Jarvis would never do such a thing, but if he does, dont worry; Howard will always have Velveeta to keep him company. Overall, Howards return is nice. Not particularly dramatic, but nice. We get to see his Tony side as he runs around hopped up on caffeine doing SCIENCE! He even gets an arc reactor halo in one shot. So, yes definite points tonight for comedic relief Howard. The comedic relief alcoholism though, not so much.

While there are certainly a few more clever lines, pretty much every other plot point fails. Will Peggy be murdered due to the mechanizations of Whitney Frost? Nope, not really. Will she be caught infiltrating the Arena Club? Um, please, shes a super spy. Will Thompson stand by his agents, trust them at their word and stand up to the powerful forces he already knows to be corrupt? Look, Im not even entirely sure why Jack Thompson hangs out for as long as he does tonight, though part of me suspects that he may have his own superpower. Like the power to sense when his OTP is in trouble, because Carter/Sousaoh yeah, he is more than prepared to go down with that ship.

We do get a nice little application of comic book science when Howard discovers how to make Wilkes reappear. Because, Wilkes is alive (taking back the RIP), and definitely not a communist. Once again, a problem is solved almost before we even knew there was a problem to address.

Last nights Agent Carter was ridiculously focused on giving us answers. I honestly cant think of a plot question they dont address. Well, except for maybe what the hell happened between Sousa and Peggy before he moved to L.A. But with all these answers in one episode, the show can quickly lose its dramatic tension.

Whats the fix to this? Maybe throwing a few more questions into the mix. Stretching out doubt and uncertainty amongst the main cast in a way that effects their actual actions. Maybe throw in a bit more Mrs. Jarvis, who was upsettingly lacking. Theres no exact, right answer. There never is, but feeling like this adventure show is lacking adventure probably isnt what the production team is going for.

Oh, and one last thing. Trying to pull emotional strings with Jarvis not intending to spend eternity as a disembodied voice is a low blow, Marvel. Dont worry Jarvis. That wont happen to you. Well just get a different actor.



Katherine Siegel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and director and a regular contributor to Paste. You can find out more by checking out her website, or follow her on Twitter.
Talking about The Cruise without talking about Brooklyn Nine-Nines fondness for referential and self-contained franchisement is impossible. First, we had Halloween III, where Santiago brought the series-long All Hallows Eve prank war fought by Holt and Jake to a decisive end; then we had Yippie Kayak, where Boyle became subsumed into Jakes Die Hard fantasy, and took on the role of John McClane just shy of a year after Windbreaker City. Now The Cruise brings back the Pontiac Bandit himself in a plot that riffs so hard on Speed 2 that the script cant help but name-drop that ill-fated film into its dialogue. So it goes. All trilogies must come to a conclusion, after all.

Except that if you think this is the last well hear of Doug Judy, youre nuts. Craig Robinson is great on his own merits, but hes the kind of actor who forces everyone around him to up their charm and timing just to keep pace with him; hes effortlessly funny, and thats as true in The Cruise as it is in Robinsons other work. The best part about his return to Brooklyn Nine-Nine, of course, is the chemistry he enjoys first with Andy Samberg, and also with Melissa Fumero, who replaces Stephanie Beatriz in this installment of the Pontiac Bandit saga (though Amy will never replace Rosa in Dougs heart). Rather than convene at the precinct, they get together on a cruise ship. Jake and Amy have a free pair of tickets for a Carnival-style vessel, so they set out on a much-deserved vacation. But it turns out that Doug has paid for their passage, in hopes that theyll protect him from a would-be assassin aboard the boat.

The A-plot sounds like a great time at first blush, and unsurprisingly, it is. It hardly matters that Dougs presence gives away the episodes ending, and if thats too much of a spoiler for some, well, theyve forgotten how The Pontiac Bandit and The Pontiac Bandit Returns both played out. Doug Judy is a conman. Hes a scammer. Its what he does. So the moment Jake and Amy spot him on stage in the ships lounge, crooning about smooshing, we know exactly how things are going to play out: Jake will struggle to avoid falling for Dougs cool charisma, Jake will fail to avoid falling for Dougs cool charisma, and Doug will eventually get the better of Jake and leave him sputtering promises of revenge. But so what? The Cruise and episodes like it tend to come down to how much amusement they mine out of well-tread territory. Originality is a secondary cause. (Hey, they cant all be Halloween III.)

But the best part of The Cruise, as so often happens in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is Holt. Having Kevin sail off to Paris and leave Holt behind in New York City didnt make a ton of sense to begin with; that development looked more or less like an excuse to force rare Boyle/Holt shenanigans, among other things, rather than develop Holt as a character. But last weeks 9 Days, and now The Cruise, are treating Kevins sabbatical as a bummer for poor, lonesome Holt. Holt, in point of fact, is the last sort of person who should be left alone. He is a rock, and thus incapable of processing his ennui without being nudged. The Cruise provides a hell of a nudge in the form of Niecy Nash, showing up as Holts sister, Debbie (though sadly, her appearance here seems only to be a one-off guest spot).

Debbie is everything Holt isnt: shes talkative and fun, for one thing, and she is unbridled in her self-expression. Holt has no idea how to deal with her. To paraphrase him, he cannot [dramatic pause] even. Its an odd couple pairing, for certain, but Debbies arrival at the office gives us a chance to see a little bit more of Raymond Holt as a human being, and gives him the chance to open up about Kevins departure. In between the two, there is pure hilarity; The Cruise might contain the highest total volume of GIF-able reaction shots from Holt, Jake, Doug, Terry, and Rosa, who is off on the sidelines competing with Boyle for dibs on the apartment of a dead old woman. But all of that humor is layered upon a foundation of sweetness: Holt and Debbie having a heart-to-heart in Holts desk-fort (it makes sense once you watch the episode for yourself), plus the credits tag where Jake finally tells Amy he loves her.

Maybe this is why the sameness of the plot threads is irrelevant. Brooklyn Nine-Nine knows how to take tired material and liven it up with authenticity, whether emotional or comical. If you dont chuckle at Holts shadowy seltzer habits, or feel your heart melt in his climactic moment with Debbie, youre more of a robot than he is.

Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing online about film since 2009, and has contributed to Paste Magazine since 2013. He also writes for Screen Rant, Movie Mezzanine, and Birth. Movies. Death. You can follow him on Twitter. He is composed of roughly 65% craft beer.
Pascal Laugiers 2008 Martyrs is often considered one of the most brutal films ever made. A thoroughly upsetting, immeasurably graphic depiction of human suffering wrought in real timewith something like a half an hour of near-dialogue-less tortureLaugiers film seems designed to interrogate the audience, to push viewers so far as to wonder aloud what the actual purpose is of witnessing such visceral depravity, simulated or not. Are there any true benefits to obscenity?, it asks, threatening over and over to tip from the grotesque into the pornographic. That in the end the film is left ambiguous is almost an indictment on Laugiers part, resembling formal experiments like Michael Hanekes Funny Games: You sat passively through all of that, he chastises. You refused to quit. And for what?

While the American remake of Martyrs shares much of the same plot as its predecessor, gone is the ambiguity and the accusationand much of the brutality, to be honest. Instead, directed by brothers Kevin and Michael Goetz, the new Martyrs compromises on every level, ultimately coming off as pretty much just a feminine take on The Passion of the Christ. Yes: It is that stupid, that ugly and that pointless.

Troian Bellisarioof Pretty Little Liars fame, in which she is inarguably the best actor on set (better, believe it or not, than even Chad Lowe)plays Lucy, a woman who as a child escaped an ill-defined traumatic situation to befriend Anna (Bailey Noble as an adult) and learn to operate as a functional human being. When we catch up with the friends 10 years after Lucy escapes, were confronted with a picture-perfect middle class family who, upon answering the door one picture-perfect morning, is murdered by Lucy, all grown up and out for revenge. Putting down the shotgun, and done with deliriously crying for a bit, Lucy calls her still-best-friend Anna to confess that she finally found her torturers, and she needs help burying the bodies. Anna arrives, horrified (duh), but still not convinced Lucy found the right family. That is, until she discovers an underground facility and a gang of thugs show up to continue what they began with Lucy 10 years earlier.

What follows would generally fall into the category of harrowing, though the American remake neuters much of 2008s most shocking bits. (And since we cant really talk about Martyrs without spoiling it, then heed this warning: Spoilers followthough there will be nothing in this review to recommend anyone actually watch this thing.) From death via mallet to the aforementioned extended torture sequence, the 2008 Martyrs unflinchingly subverted all audience expectations regarding typical slasher fare, taking tropes and beating them into smithereens. Laugiers idea, it seemed, was to literally strip away (care of some gruesome scenes of flaying) the idea that the victim has her punishment coming, even if the morality behind that idea, as in most slasher films, is suspect (i.e., because she engaged in premarital sex, is a hussy, etc.). In Martyrs, victims are ostensibly good, innocent people who deserve nothing in the way of such extreme painchaos definitely reigns.

To their credit, the Goetz brothers direct this Martyrs remake without any desire in inflicting undue suffering on the audience, framing some scenes, in fact, with what could be construed in any other movie as a modicum of taste, generally leaving the depravity outside the screen, relegated to distant screams and guttural howls rooms away from the cameras focus. So then, whats the point? All blame falls to screenwriter Mark L. Smith who, among a few forgettable flicks, co-wrote The Revenant with Alejandro G. Inarritu. Yupsomehow the man who worked closely with an Oscar winning director wrote this abhorrent abyss of ideas, demonstrating no actual conception or understanding of what Laugier was maybe trying to accomplish with his original film. Granted, this remake has been in development for a few years, and so maybe this was written long before Smith had more experience under his belt, but the story so widely misses the markwhile succeeding in offering no character development, spatial logic, or spiritual flavor whatsoeverthat not even a decade of development would have done much of anything to rectify this literal bloody mess.

Quick note of contextualization: While in the original Martyrs, the leader of the torture cult, Mademoiselle (Catherine Begin), explains to Anna (Morjana Alaoui) that all of their actions are intended to help a chosen girl transcend her physical trappings to glimpse, in her martyrdom (natch), what lies beyond death, their plans are thwarted when Anna, who does survive the torture and essentially does transcend, whispers something to Mademoiselle which drives her to suicide, leaving the rest of the cult members without a leader or an answer to the question that justified so much of their godless actions. In the remake, Lucy survives to become the chosen one, and Anna survives as well, though in Lucys final moments Anna escapes her torturers, kills many of them, kills the American Madame (Kate Burton, tragically underused) before she can learn what Lucys seen, and then joins Lucy on the sacrificial altar as together they (I guess?) transcend to a higher plane of existence, spurred to enlightenment by their terrible circumstances. In other words, while the original Martyrs questions whether such cinematic cruelty is anything but obscene, the American Martyrs, though much more obliquely violent, insists that all of the cruelty was worth it. Because both characters do exactly what their torturers want them to do, which is to transcend their corporeal vessels in some sort of grand spiritual manner, the American remake affords its audience the revenge fantasy they want while ensuring observers thatlike in The Passion of the Christall of that brutality wasnt for naught.

The Goetz brothers and Smith have, in attempting to provide Americans a way into a cult French classic, created its polar opposite, crafting something as dumb as an Eli Roth film with only a quarter of the chutzpah. Martyrs is a film that wants you to believe it doesnt revel in its own depravity, but theres little evidence it has anything else on its mind. If this is punishment, now we just need to figure out for what. Probably for nominating The Revenant for so many Oscars.

Directors: Kevin and Michael Goetz

Writer: Mark L. Smith

Starring: Troian Bellisario, Bailey Noble, Kate Burton

Release Date: January 22, 2016

Dom Sinacola is Assistant Movies Editor at Paste and a Portland-based writer. Since he grew up in the Detroit area, it is required by law that his favorite movie is Robocop. You can follow him on Twitter.
If films greatest triumph is to help us see the world from a different perspective, then Virtual Reality might just be the next big leap forward in the world of movies. That at least seems to be the position of Sundance on the new technology. You couldnt walk down Park Citys Main Street this week without the lure of virtual worlds calling out from every side.

The New Frontiers portion of the festival was heavy with VR film this yearsome 30 projects were available to festival-goers, ranging from an encounter with Star Wars droids C-3P0 and BB-8 to a scientific laboratory inside a flying whale to a police shooting filmed from four different points of view. Perspective Ch. 2: The Misdemeanor is a follow-up to a popular VR short shown at Sundance last year. The four short films tell the same story of a suspected shoplifting that turns into tragedyone from the perspective of the kid whos shot, one from the perspective of his brother and two from the perspectives of the officers involved. Its poignant, chaotic and puts you right in the middle of the unfolding events.

I dont think theres anything thats more immersive than virtual reality, says Morris May, CEO of Specular Theory, the company behind Perspective. You can watch someone shot on television and youre like, Ah, whatever. But if youre in this piece with Sean and you see your brother get shot, thats a very powerful and impactful thing.

Plenty of the VR projects on display in Park City were mostly about the experience, such as the video-game like Irrational Exhuberence presented by WEVR and Seed&Spark, where you used controllers like hammers to manipulate floating meteors sending mesmerizing showers of pebbles around your environment. But Perspective, The Visitor and a 12-minute horror VR film Eye For An Eye showed what new technology could do for live-action narrative films.

Its moving past the demo stage where you have these short films that are really about the technology and what the camera can do and the wonder of the 360 experience, says Perspective co-creator Rose Troche. That has to move narratively forward to where its really about the content. Its nice to have things that are experiential. Its fun to be in the ocean and swimI love that one. But story is a big thing.

Ben Dickinson, who directed a trippy musical experience with Reggie Watts said that the structure of traditional film has already been set. He wasnt sure that VR was going to be the thing allowed the medium to grow in new directionseven after filming Waves with Wattsuntil coming to Sundance and seeing all the different ways that people were experimenting with technology. The first great VR auteur is probably 15 right now, he said. Theyre going to see what were doing and come up with something completely new.

Waves is part live-actionwith Reggie Watts appearing as host, as every member of his air-instrument band, and as a malevolent space-god who shoots a giant laser beam out of his mouthand part psychedelic animation. Virtual reality is the perfect medium for his unique sense of surreality and humor.

Another VR film which mixes live-action with animation is Lynette Wallworths Collision, a documentary about an aboriginal man whose first encounter with modern culture outside his remote village was a nuclear test in the 1950s. Jaunts Patrick Meegan traveled with Wallworth into the outback to film Nyarris story and saw how the new technology could translate across cultures.

When we arrived and showed Nyarri and some of the other folks in the community the VR headset and the cameras, it immediately made sense to them, says Meegan. Even Nyarri, this 85-year-old guy, is explaining to the kids, The camera has 16 eyes and four ears; thats why it can see everything.

While Collisions was premiering at Sundance, Wallworth was in Davos, Switzerland, for the 2016 Wolrd Economic Forum, sharing Nyarris experience with world leaders. Virtual reality had given voice to a man who thought an atomic blast was a gift from the gods, killing kangaroos for his villageuntil those who ate the irradiated meat became sick.

At Sundance, virtual reality took me to the surface of Mars in a companion experience to the film The Martian via Oculus. It took me underwater in Jake Rowells theBlu: Encounter. But nothing quite blew my mind like Real Virtuality: Immersive Experience, a full motion-capture set-up where I joined an actor/filmmaker from the Ivory Coast on a spaceship with a teleporter. Wearing sensors on our hands and feet, along with headsets and backpacks, our minds were quickly convinced we were in a completely different place. This was the Holodeck come to life.

We could see each others virtual selves and so could work as a team and hand objects to each other, like the crystals we had to locate on the ship (wooden batons in the real world). We simultaneously inserted them into a virtual/physical device to teleport to a futuristic city, which we toured by boat. Having the boundaries of the boat meant that there was no danger of walking into a wall or the watching crowd. We just wandered around our vessel, taking in the wonder of the architecture and lights all around us. The time to teleport away came too soon.

Our final stop was a cave system that would have thrilled Indiana Jones. Walking over an ancient bridge, ducking through small openings and nearly falling over as I tried to balance on floating steps, my surroundings were unimaginably real. Or at least more real than I could have imagined before first trying on a VR headset at Sundance.

While some of the static experiences left me a little motion sick, the immersive technology left me exhilarated. I want movies that not only put me in the center of the action, but that allow me to explore that action. The 360-experience is very cool and the ways filmmakers are using it to tell stories is fascinating. But the motion-capture experiences, where your avatar matches your actions, are truly game-changing.

In my final VR experience, The Leviathan Project, I created a Huxley, a sort of flying jellyfish, by moving objects and manipulating levers. And then I flew around the lab from the perspective of my new creation by moving my hands in different directions. It was more video game than film, but the lines blur when it comes VR. The possibilities of what this technology can do are just starting to be tested. And somewhere, that 15-year-old is getting ready to blow all our minds.

You can watch the official Sundance VR selections via Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard.

Josh Jackson is co-founder/editor-in-chief of Paste Magazine.
Last Friday Wall Street's Projections were laid out as noted in our cover graphic. They projected 76 million iPhones would be sold and in reality, Apple reported that they sold 74.8 million iPhones. Wall Street projected 18 million iPads would be sold and Apple delivered 16.1 million units. Six million Macs were projected and Apple delivered 5.31 million units. Wall Street projected $76.7 billion in sales with $18.2 billion in profit and Apple actually delivered $76.9 billion in sales and $18.4 in profits. Yet to really understand Apple's great quarter, check out our follow-up report here to read about Apple's explanation of how difficult the quarter really was due to the crashing currencies around the world. It's the hidden reality behind Apple's financials that most should appreciate, as the quarter could have resulted in much higher revenue under normal global conditions.



Apple's official press release stated that they posted record quarterly revenue of $75.9 billion and record quarterly net income of $18.4 billion, or $3.28 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $74.6 billion and net income of $18 billion, or $3.06 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.1 percent compared to 39.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 66 percent of the quarter's revenue.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook, stated in their press release that "Our team delivered Apple's biggest quarter ever, thanks to the world's most innovative products and all-time record sales of iPhone, Apple Watch and Apple TV. The growth of our Services business accelerated during the quarter to produce record results, and our installed base recently crossed a major milestone of one billion active devices."

Apple's CFO Luca Maestri, stated that "Our record sales and strong margins drove all-time records for net income and EPS in spite of a very difficult macroeconomic environment. We generated operating cash flow of $27.5 billion during the quarter, and returned over $9 billion to investors through share repurchases and dividends. We have now completed $153 billion of our $200 billion capital return program."

Apple is providing the following guidance for its fiscal 2016 second quarter:

 revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion

 gross margin between 39 percent and 39.5 percent

 operating expenses between $6 billion and $6.1 billion

 other income/(expense) of $325 million

 tax rate of 25.5 percent

Apple's board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $.52 per share of the Company's common stock. The dividend is payable on February 11, 2016, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 8, 2016.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple said iPhone sales grew at the slowest pace since its introduction in 2007 and forecast that revenue in the current quarter will decline at the steepest rate in 15 years, signaling an end to its recent period of hyper-growth.

BloombergBusiness quoted Abhey Lamba, an analyst at Mizuho Securities USA who stated that "They have other products, and have the potential to launch other products, but the hole left from an iPhone slowdown is too big to fill. Its future is whatever is happening in the smartphone space."

Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer added that the company is feeling the effects of a "very different" economic environment around the world. Apple is beginning to see "softness" in China, particularly in Hong Kong, he said. "You need to take into account the business opportunities that we have, but also the realities of an economic environment that is not ideal right now," he said.

Canada, Brazil and Russia also are showing signs of slowing down. "There are a lot of economies around the world that are in recession," he said.

After hours AAPL is close to unchanged. Obviously the market has been lowering the price all month to soften any disappointment. We'll have to wait until the morning to see if there's more reaction to today's financial news.

Apple's Q1 2016 Unaudited Summary Data





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A new report published this afternoon reveals that the European Union will propose on Thursday a new set of rules and common standards aimed at amending corporate tax legislation across the bloc's 28 countries in an effort to thwart avoidance schemes and ensure wealthy multinationals like Apple pay their fair share.

The Wall Street Journal's report notes that "The commission's push marks a new attempt by the EU to stop large-scale corporate tax avoidance in Europe, where governments are struggling to close budget gaps in the wake of the financial crisis and assure citizens that large companies are being held accountable for paying their share of taxes. The bloc also is reeling from disclosures that multinational companies struck alleged sweetheart deals in countries such as Luxembourg that allowed them to pay very little tax in the EU.

In response to a public outcry, the EU has launched a series of investigations into special tax deals with multinationals, based on its powers to bar governments from providing aid that favors some companies over others."

The EU has struggled for years to close tax loopholes because all EU countries must agree unanimously on tax matters. But over the past two years, regulators in Brussels have found another way around that blockadeby using their powers to enforce the bloc's state-aid rules that prohibit governments from providing aid to some companies and not others.

Those powers have allowed Brussels to open a series of high-profile investigations into alleged sweetheart tax deals for multinational companies including Apple in Ireland and Amazon.com in Luxembourg.

The move is likely to raise concerns among U.S. companies that they are being targeted in Europe. A statement from American Innovation Mattersa group that includes U.S. companies Cisco Systems Inc., Boeing Co., Apple Inc., Intel Corp. , and Facebook Inc.described the EU proposal as "the latest example of the aggressive moves being made abroad in an effort to tax even more American earnings, and use them to pad the coffers of foreign governments."

Last Thursday we reported that "Apple's CEO Met with the EU's Antitrust Chief over the Looming Tax Judgement that's due this Spring." The tax avoidance issue has also gone beyond Europe as we reported yesterday with Australia now auditing Apple's tax position for 2012.

The Financial Times reported today that "Apple could be liable for several billion dollars in back taxes, analysts estimates suggest, if a Brussels investigation over its European tax arrangements goes against it.

Luca Maestri, Apples chief financial officer, told the FT: "This is a case between the European Commission and Ireland and frankly there is no way to estimate the impact right now, we need to see what the final decision is going to be."

Maestri added that "My estimate is zero. I mean, if there is a fair outcome of the investigation, it should be zero." Good luck with that one, Luca, but I'm glad to see that you're an optimist to the extreme on all things Apple.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Comments are reviewed daily from 4am to 6pm PST and sporadically over the weekend.
Smartphone part suppliers are ramping up competition to develop better next-generation technologies that will support wide-angle and 3D photography, iris recognition other features as the industry trend for 2016 will be for cameras that go far beyond the mere promotion of higher pixel counts. The new dual camera trend is being promoted heavily by Korea's major camera module developers such as MCNEX and Namuga. LG Innotec already has such a unit on the market today. It's now being report that Samsung Electro-Mechanics is preparing to enter mass-production for dual-cameras later this year. These developers are developing dual-cameras because many smartphone manufacturers are designing their next-gen higher end models to offer dual cameras in 2016.

Out of South Korean Smartphones, LG Electronics' V10 was the first offer a smartphone with a dual-camera in Q4 2015 using the LG Innotec camera system. LG Electronics' next flagship Smartphone called the G5, which will debut in March, will also have a backside dual-camera.

We first covered Intel's RealSense technology before it was branded as such back in January 2014. More recently we covered Intel's CEO Krzanich revealing that a RealSense 3D camera would be coming to a smartphone this fall back in April during IDF China.

According to Intel's CEO Krzanich, "The RealSense Camera harnesses the power of human sight on a computing device. It not only creates a great image, but it measures the depth and relative position of all the objects in its field of view. Google is looking to promote this feature with Android OEMs in 2016. It's part of their Project Tango Project that got derailed in 2014 because Apple acquired Israeli firm PrimeSense that was to supply the Android OEM ecosystem with the needed dual camera systems.

If Apple has the technology for a high-end dual camera system, will that mean that Apple will be introducing this feature in 2016? While we were hoping to see this feature on Apple's latest 6s line-up last year based on a first round of rumors, there's a new rumor out today that pegs this feature for Apple's iPhone 7 Plus.

Apple's dual camera system is likely to carefully merge the best technologies from both PrimeSense and their other acquired Israeli company LinX.

We reported last April that "LinX cameras are significantly smaller than any camera on the market today, leading the way to DSLR performance in slim handsets. The LinX cameras not only capture 2D images but also acquire very accurate depth information of the complete scene." LinX further noted that their cameras "allow Apps to freely use the 3D information captured by our camera to achieve amazing new features such as the ability to refocus an image after it has been captured, measurement of the true dimensions of objects, 3D object modeling and real time background replacement for video calls." As noted below, LinX had created duo, trio and 4x camera systems and it's unknown which Apple may consider for the iPhone 7 model or beyond.

Other points from the Korean report worth noting are that dual camera system features will be able to reduce the time needed to focus on an image along with introducing next generation security and authentication systems. In fact HP is now offering Intel's RealSense camera that's in sync with the Windows 10 Windows Hello feature on their next-gen all-in-one desktop model today. It's an authentication system using facial recognition software instead of biometrics like Apple's Touch ID. So it's not just for mobile devices.

So will this finally be the year for dual camera systems on smartphones and desktops? Yes  and the iPhone 7 Plus just might be the first device in Apple's product line to introduce it later this year.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Comments are reviewed daily from 4am to 6pm PST and sporadically over the weekend.
I have a lot of respect for Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN who runs a popular blog about childbirth, abortion, and reproductive health. But something she wrote in a recent post struck me as off, and I feel the need to address it.

Access to child care doesnt reduce abortion. Really, how little do you think of women to say such drivel? Ben Carson tried to say the same thing. Its insulting to women. Feminists dont insult women. Im 22 weeks but just cant bear the burden of finding affordable child care so Im going to have an abortion, said no woman ever.

Some years ago a woman commented on this blog explaining that she had had an unexpected pregnancy while in graduate school, and that her pregnancy had coincided with her breakup, leaving her a prospective single parent. She said shed initially assumed she would have to have an abortion, because she couldnt afford to have a child on her own while in graduate school, but that shed looked into what support she might get from the state just to evaluate all of her options. When she found out that the state would pay for both medical care and childcare, she decided to keep it.

So yes, in fact, affordable daycare can (and sometimes does) prevent abortions.

Wanting to better understand the context of her statement, I read the post Gunter linked to above. Much to my surprise, I found that Gunter appears to brush off the idea that women have abortions for financial reasons altogether.

Poverty does play a role, but not in the way Carson thinks. While 42% of women who have abortions have incomes below 100% of the federal poverty level and 27% have incomes between 100-199% of the federal poverty level, women at or below 199% of the federal poverty level also have the highest rate of unplanned births. The abortion rate for low-income women is 52 per 1,000 and the rate of unplanned births is 70 per 1,000. Poverty doesnt cause abortion it causes unplanned pregnancies which are more likely to end in abortion. However, if Carson had read anything on the subject hed know that compared with higher-income women, poor and low-income women are less likely to end an unintended pregnancy by abortion, which is why low-income women have an unintended birth rate nearly six times as high as that of higher-income women.

To summarize, Gunter argues that the reason higher percentages of poor women have abortions is not that they cant afford children but rather that poor women have higher numbers of unplanned pregnancies, and unplanned pregnancies are more likely to lead to abortions in any demographic. She further states that poor women are actually less likely to terminate an unintended pregnancy than other women, thus supporting her apparent contention that things like daycare costs dont play a role in womens decisions to abort.

If I am misreading Gunter, please let me know. I respect Gunters work a lot, and have truly appreciated much of her previous work on this topic (see this post on last summers Planned Parenthood videos and this post on Gosnells clinic of horrors and this post on some of the most recent anti-abortion legislation). However, I have looked through her blog archives on abortion and havent been able to find anything to suggest that I am misreading her here.

I found Gunters comments surprising because we have data that makes it clear that an inability to afford a baby is one of the primary reasons women seek abortions. A study conducted in 2004 found that 73% of women who have abortions cite their inability to afford a baby as a reason for doing so. This same study found that 28% of women who have abortions cite an inability to afford childcare. Similarly, 21% state that they cant get time off from their job to care for a child and 19% state that they would have to find a new place to live if they had a baby. Further, and perhaps most importantly, a full 23% cited their inability to afford a baby as their primary reason for having an abortion.

Gunter is wrong if she thinks financial issues dont play a role in womens decision to abort. They do. There are all sorts of reasons poor women might be less likely to abort unintended pregnancies than non-poor womenpoor communities may be more culturally accepting of unintended pregnancies and unwed motherhood, for instance, while non-poor communities may emphasize family planning and stigmatize having children out of wedlock. Oh, and what about inequities in access? For a large number of reasons, poor women have more limited access to abortion than do non-poor women. The idea that poor women being less likely to abort unintended pregnancies than non-poor women means that financial considerations like childcare costs dont play a very real role in many womens decisions is steeped in privilege.

I found Gunters comments surprising, too, because they stand in marked contrast to my own personal experience on the issue. Several years ago, I spent some time doing volunteer counseling work with women having abortions. I spoke with dozens of women over the course of nearly a year, but what struck me most were the women who told me they didnt want to have an abortionwomen who cried and who spoke sadly of their child but who simply couldnt see any way to make it work financially. We did what we could to provide these women with information about what services they might qualify for, but in many cases it wasnt enough.

I will always remember these women, and their sorrow. This experience cemented for me the importance of a stronger social safety net and a wider framework of reproductive justice. The women I spoke with made a choice, yes, but for too many of them it was the only choice they felt they had. And before anyone suggests otherwise, denying these women abortions would not have made their lives better. These women needed more options, not fewer. Being denied abortions would have left them homeless, unable to keep their jobs, and/or vulnerable to exploitation by abusive partners. What these women needed was expanded access to subsidized daycare, higher-paying jobs, and better maternity policies.

I watched women abort unplanned but wanted pregnancies because they wouldnt have paid maternity leave and couldnt afford to take six weeks off without pay. I watched women abort unplanned but wanted pregnancies because their parents would kick them out if they were pregnant, and they were still in school or didnt make enough to afford their own place. I watched women abort unplanned but wanted pregnancies because they were already raising multiple children on minimum wage. I did what I could for these women, and my heart grieved for them.

Not every woman who has an abortion for financial reasons struggles with this decision. I saw women who were very matter-of-fact about their situationsthey would like to have a child (or another child) someday, but they just couldnt afford it right now. It was just how life was. And overall, most of the women I spoke with approached their decision with certainty and a sense of peace. I saw plenty of women have abortions without any qualm or question about their decisionbut I also saw women who were utterly heartbroken over their decisions.

Can we (or should we) boil down all of womens decisions surrounding abortion to financial considerations? Absolutely not! Providing paid maternity leave, state-funded daycare, and subsidies for child rearing would help ensure that every woman could afford to keep her pregnancy if she wanted to, but it wouldnt eliminate the need for abortion. There are plenty of women who have abortions because they dont want to parent (either at the time or ever) or because they are having problems in their relationship with their current partner and dont want to bring a child into that. There are also women who abort for health-related reasons, or because of stigma surrounding unwed motherhood, and on and on. Women choose to abort for all sorts of reasonsincluding but not limited to financial reasons.

While Im uncomfortable with Gunters dismissal of financial reasons for abortion, I am also not comfortable with Carsons statement that the solution needs to be in the private sectoras though affordable childcare is something the private sector will fix (it wont). Similarly, while I appreciate Carsons emphasis on promoted education for poor women, Gunters point that Carson seems to assume that a large number of those who have abortions are under 18 (ts actually 6.4%) is worth repeating. Still, in terms of understanding the reasons poor women have abortions, and the constraints they face, I actually came away feeling that Carson was more empathetic than Gunter.

I wonder if the problem is that some feminist have played up financial reasons for abortion to the extent that others have felt nervous, as though providing more funds for childcare, maternity leave, and other child-related expenses might be used to justify the curtailing of abortion rights. I understand this concern. However, this concern does not justify a dismissal of the role financial concerns do play in many womens decisions regarding abortion. I wonder, too, if some are so concerned about countering the myth that all women are conflicted about their abortions that they overlook the reality that some women truly are conflicted. Denying these realities doesnt help us in our efforts to promote access to abortion, and it certainly doesnt help us in our promotion of choice.

There are many memories from the months I spent counseling that I will never forget. I came to have an appreciation of the huge variety of womens experiences, but also an understanding of the many factors that can push women to have abortions whether or not they truly want them. Ill never forget the woman who aborted a very wanted (though unplanned) pregnancy so that her exs lawyer couldnt slut-shame her in custody proceedings over her small daughter. She told me she felt she had to choose between her two children, and that she had chosen the child she already knew. My heart broke for her, and for every other woman in her situation.

The Right would like to talk about women coerced into abortions by selfish, immature boyfriends. I never saw that, and it was something we were trained to look for. I did see women have abortions they would rather not have had because they didnt have access to paid maternity leave, because they feared being fired when their employers learned they were pregnant, because they were already raising a sizable family on a minimum wage job, because their religious parents would kick them out of the house when they learned of their pregnancy, and because they were concerned slut shaming might cost them the custody of their child. Let the Right take note.

But let the Left take note, too. Being pro-choice has got to include improving womens access to affordable childcare, paid maternity leave, and jobs that pay a living wage. We need to remember that the choice to abort is not the only choice women can losethat they can also lose the choice not to abort. We need to pay attention to African American activists who are uncomfortable with white feminists laser-like focus on abortion access and prefer to speak of reproductive justice instead. We need to listen to abortion stories from women of all walks of life. Are we listening?
The tension over what to emphasize in dharma practice, just sitting or waking up (aka, meditation or wisdom), goes way back, probably to the time of the historical Buddha. And because we are in an emergency situation  born and soon to die  discovering the most skillful approach for resolving the great matter of birth and death  and throwing ourselves into it  is an urgent matter.

If we make the wrong choice, well, lost time wont be found again.

In China, an atypical tension between those with just-sitting and waking-up predilections erupted into an intense conflict during the 12th Century, especially between two monks, Zhenxie Qingliao (Japanese, Choryo Seiryo, 1089-1151), a successor in the Caodong/Soto lineage that passed through Eihei Dogen to Japan, and Dahui Zonggao (Japanese, Dai-e Soko, 1089-1163), a successor in the Yogi branch of the Linchi/Rinzai lineage that was transmitted to Japan by Enni Bennen and others, also in the 13th Century.

The Chinese Chan lineages eventually worked things out by accepting the wisdom/Dahui position and returned to the harmonious and near non-distinctness of different lineages that was characteristic before the fight between Silent Illumination and koan introspection. Unfortunately, the conflict was still smoldering when Bennen went to China just shortly after Dogen returned from China. Dogen had found a way to integrate the just sitting and koan introspection aspects of the path, although his successors seem generally to have bypassed his brilliance and returned to the just-sitting position, thus the conflict continued in Japan and is part of whats been transmitted to the West.

So its important to take a look at it, because like one-term Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura said, Learn from history or youre doomed to repeat it (note: thats a real quote from the internet and that one-term Jesse apparently heeded his own advice).

Qingliao and Dahui: Soto meets Rinzai

In the 1130s, Qingliao was a prominent teacher in the Caodong/Soto tradition, and the abbot of Xuefeng monastery with almost seventeen hundred monastics. He sure was no slouch. Qingliao taught a practice that emphasized many hours of still sitting, called the Silent Illumination approach to practice:

Without taking a step you should constantly sit in your room and just forget about the teachings. Be like dry wood, or a stone, or a wall, or a piece of tile, or a pebble. Cut off knowing and understanding and be naturally vacuous and completely bright. You should not make the least bit of conscious effort.

Die completely, he advises, in your effortless zazen (just sitting), forget the teachings (like the turn-around words of the Buddhas and ancestors) and brightness (wisdom) will be there without contrivance.

Qingliao may not have emphasized effortful enlightenment, but he is reported to have had an enlightenment experience. One day when he was studying with Danxia, Danxia asked, What is the self before the empty eon?

Qingliao started to speak but Danxia interrupted him and said, Too noisy. Go away for awhile.

Later, Qingliao was wandering in the mountains and he was suddenly awakened.

Most enlightenment experiences recorded in Zen literature occur while two people are in dialogue. Those that occur while the practitioner is sitting zazen are rare, although there are few when the adept is away and in nature, often having the catalytic turn-around comment of their teacher cooking away beneath the surface, like in Qingliaos case.

However, theres something vague and quietistic about Qingliaos experience. We just know that he was wandering in the mountains and not the specifics. Other wandering-in-nature stories have monks stubbing their toe, or kicking a rock that struck bamboo, or suddenly really seeing the peach blossoms. Not so with Qingliao.

Qingliaos teaching seems to have reflected his enlightenment  a naturally occurring phenomena without a notable precursor other than wandering in the mountains. So enlightenment is not something to strain and stress about.

Dahui, on the other hand, was a strong proponent of wisdom and stressed breaking through the veil of illusion and tasting real reality. He invented the head-word or turn-around method of koan introspection, first using it with a nun who had been a student of Qingliao, Miao-tao, and because of the effectiveness of the method, championed the focus on the little word mu (or wu in Chinese and no in English) that has haunted many a Zen student since his day. Dahuis turn-around innovation swept through the Zen world faster than scholars can track it  like the proverbial arrow flying past Korea.

Miao-tao, the one person for whom we have recorded teachings translated into English (as far as I know) that studied with both Qingliao and Dahui, said that she learned from Qingliao that enlightenment was not an event. She learned from Dahui that, indeed, it was. This distinction is still present in the just-sitting and koan introspection circles today.

An important aspect of Dahuis innovation was that it didnt require a practitioner to sit silently in their room for years waiting for illumination. How many lay people could do that? The turn-around word koan method could be done anytime, anywhere. The practice was powerfully portable and immediately connected with lay practitioners. This may well have been a primary reason for it spreading across east Asia so rapidly.

In about 1134, Dahui was invited to give a talk at Qingliaos monastery. Dahui began the talk by calling Qingliao a clear-eyed teacher. But then he got personal and stepped way beyond the expected decorum for a guest, especially in Confucian culture. Dahui took up the phrase that played a key role in Qingliaos enlightenment, the self before the empty eon, and suggested it was merely a dangerous contrivance that could encourage practitioners to sit immovable in the ghostly cave under the black mountain until they get calluses on bones and buttocks, and saliva is dripping from their mouths.

He went on to present a koan from the Linchi lu #30, the heart of which goes like this:

An elderly monk came for an interview with the master. Before he had finished the customary greetings, he asked, Would it be right to make a formal bow? Or would it be right to do without the bow?

Linchi shouted.

The elder monk made a formal bow.

Linchi said, Quite some thief-in-the-grass!

The elder monk said, Thief! Thief! and left the room.

Linchi said, Better not think that that ends the matter!

Here we have a vigorous and playful interaction between Linchi and an old monk. Nobody in this koan is sitting until they have saliva dripping from their mouths. Dahui went on to claim that he understood the koan but Qingliao did not. Major etiquette violation!

One way to see this interaction between Dahui and Qingliao is that Dahui lacked basic social skills, violating decorum as he did. Later, even Dahuis head monk would confront Dahui, asking something like (translations vary), Why you gotta be such a dick?

Another way to see it is that Dahui was so devoted to awakening that he was willing to ruffle some robes.

And finally, another way to see it is that Dahui was testing Qingliao. It looks to me like Dahui was playfully enacting the very koan he presented. Dahui had entered a masters room, Qingliaos monastery, raised a question about decorum, right practice, and, in his way, called Qingliao a thief.

Throughout Dahuis presentation, it is recorded that Qingliao maintained his calm composure, but as far as we know, didnt meet the challenge directly like Linchi, didnt engage the play, didnt expose his heart and meet Dahui. Qingliao didnt shout and he didnt bow. He just sat in dead-like calm. It isnt recorded whether he had saliva dripping from his mouth or not.

The encounter had numerous outflows

Soon afterwards, Dahui was sent into exile for fifteen years. Some scholars speculate that it may have been due, in part, to his rude attacks on Qingliao and Silent Illumination. Qingliao must have had friends in high places, perhaps even close to the emperor, to receive appointments to prominent monasteries and so it is possible that these supporters rallied to his defense and got Dahui his comeuppance. Support for this theory comes from the courts choice for abbot to succeed Dahui at his somewhat more prominent monastery after he was sent into exile  Qingliao.

Exile, however, would not deter Dahui from denouncing Silent Illumination and advocating for the turn-around method of koan introspection which he did throughout his career before, during, and after exile. He had seen the methods powerful effects in the number of dramatic awakenings the method had precipitated, and there was no going back.

After his unhappy meeting with Dahui, Qingliao wrote a commentary on a poem by the third Zen ancestor in China, Sengcan, Trusting in Mind. Qingliao criticized some of the practices that Dahui advocated, for example, taking the turn-around words from koans and resting them in the lower abdomen, a technique advocated in koan introspection circles to this day, including by yours truly.

And theres more.

Four generations and well over one-hundred years later, Wuwai, one of Dogens dharma brothers who had also received transmission from Rujing, and edited Dogens Recorded Sayings, wrote a preface to the 13th Century edition to Qingliaos commentary on Trusting in Mind, noting that this was Qingliaos rebuttal to Dahuis slanderous attacks on Silent Illumination.

The great 18th Century reviver of the Rinzai tradition in Japan, Hakuin, borrowed much from Dahui when he leveled similar attacks on the Soto successors of Qingliao, as did the 20th Century provocateur, Yasutani Roshi. It isnt clear, however, that there were Soto monks calling what they did Silent Illumination either in Hakuin or Yasutanis time, as the attacks on this phrase by Dahui and others seems to have relegated it to the silence before the empty eon. Just sitting, though, has a way of slumping into a samadhi practice, where Dogens earnest, vivid sitting, becomes lulling in quietude.

Shortly after the conflict, Caodong teachers stopped using the words Silent Illumination, although it seems to be having a bit of a revival in the West. Dogen, for example, in none of his many recorded words, used the term a single time. Rujing himself, the dharma great grandson of Qingliao, seems to have been impacted by the conflict and appears to have been working toward integration of Silent Illumination and turn-around koan introspection, borrowing aspects and language from both approaches.

For example, teaching his monks about practice and enlightenment, Rujing said,

When the divided mind flies away, how will you deal with it? Zhaozhou little dog buddhanature mu. This single word mu  an iron broom. Where you sweep, confusion swirls around, swirling around confusion where you sweep. More turning, sweeping, turning. In the place you cannot sweep, do your utmost to sweep. Day and night, backbone straight, continuously without stopping. Bold and powerful, do not let up. Suddenly, sweeping breaks open the great empty sky. Ten thousand distinctions, a thousand differences exhausted  completely opening.

Here we have Rujing, lineage holder in the Caodong/Soto school which had previously championed Silent Illumination, using mu to to sweep the mind clear, much in the spirit of his Silent Illumination predecessors, but now silencing the mind with vigorous and effortful mu, the most significant turn-around word of all time. Rujing also uses mu in order to have the Dahui effect  a sudden enlightenment experience, breaking open the great void. There is no trace in Rujings words of the conflation of practice and enlightenment.

However, it wouldnt be until Rujings student, Dogen, that the issue of meditation or wisdom, just sitting or waking up, would be fully exhausted. It seems to me that the whole of Dogens voluminous recorded teaching was about this one point. And the work has continued through the years and now we know that just one breakthrough, although an important step on the path, requires ongoing just sitting (when its earnest, vivid sitting) and koan introspection, and that fully understood and actualized, both can be essential to bringing forth the great truth of the triple treasure.

Dosho Port began practicing Zen in 1977 and now co-teaches with his wife, Tetsugan Zummach Sensei, with the Vine of Obstacles: Online Support for Zen Training, an internet-based Zen community. Dosho received dharma transmission from Dainin Katagiri Roshi and inka shomei from James Myoun Ford Roshi in the Harada-Yasutani lineage. Doshos translation and commentary on The Record of Empty Hall: One Hundred Classic Koans, is now available (Shambhala). He is also the author of Keep Me In Your Heart a While: The Haunting Zen of Dainin Katagiri. Click here to support the teaching practice of Tetsugan Sensei and Dosho Roshi.
The shrine created for Alicia, the 17-month-old who was hurled out a window. L. Rico

A 17-month-old child who was hurled out of an apartment window in the Basque capital of Vitoria on Sunday night has died in hospital, authorities reported.

Young Alicia sustained serious head injuries after falling five meters down on to the sidewalk from a first-floor home.

I gave my daughter this stuffed toy when she was five months old. She now has two children of her own. Today we are giving it to Alicia, God rest her soul

A 30-year-old Seville man was arrested and charged with attempted murder after allegedly sending the child crashing through the window.

A saxophone teacher at the local conservatory, the suspect had previously had a loud argument with the mother, an 18-year-old from Brazil who has also been hospitalized. The attacker had allegedly tried to throw her out the window as well, and faces a second count of attempted murder. Following the childs death, the first charge will be reviewed.

If the little girl were to die, the penalties will increase and we will have to see whether the new permanent prison penalty is applicable, because it was recently introduced, the Basque Countrys chief prosecutor, Juan Calparsoro, had said before news of the childs death was released.

The mother told Basque police that she met the suspect on Sunday night and took him home. At around 3.30am, she woke up and realized that neither the man nor her child were in the room. She then said that she went into a different room and found the man sexually molesting the child. A fight erupted, which the neighbors have testified to.

Police officers collecting evidence at the scene of the crime. L. Rico

It was the neighbors who called the Ertzaintza Basque regional police after hearing the screams and blows coming out of the apartment, located on Libertad street. When a patrol car arrived at the scene, officers found the child lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood.

On Monday thousands of people marched in Vitoria to show support for the mother, who has been offered assistance by provincial social services. As news of the death emerged, people began creating a makeshift shrine outside the victims door, leaving stuffed animals and messages for little Alicia.

I gave my daughter this stuffed toy when she was five months old, said one of the building residents, holding back tears. She now has two children of her own. Today we are giving it to Alicia, God rest her soul.

The suspect remains under observation at the psychiatric unit of Santiago Hospital.

English version by Susana Urra.
Patna: Bihar Governor Ram Nath Kovind at Patna's Gandhi Maidan on Tuesday, unfurled the Indian Tricolor to mark the 66th Republic Day of the nation in the presence of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Janata Dal  U President Sharad Yadav, and Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav and other cabinet ministers and senior government officials.

In his speech, the Governor denied there was a law and order problem in Bihar, an accusation frequently made by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led opposition in the wake of recent sharp surge in murder, kidnapping, and extortion cases.

{gallery}newsimages2016/jan/012616{/gallery}"The rule of law, coupled by communal harmony, has turned Bihar into the fastest growing state in the nation with its registered growth of 17 percent," the Governor said after taking the salute from the Indian Armed Forces including the Central Reserve Protection Force (CRPF), Bihar Military Police (BMP), Special Task Force (STF), Home Guard, District Armed Police (DAP), and the three divisions of the National Cadet Core (NCC).

Kovind also hailed the Lalu-Nitish-Congress government for adopting a zero-tolerance policy towards corruption within the government.

The function also included dozens of colorful floats representing a number of state departments to showcase the changing face of Bihar.

Earlier, the Chief Minister also hoisted the national flag at his residence on 7 Circular Road where he welcomed school girls, and shared sweets with them.

After the Gandhi Maidan parade, Kumar visited Samanchak Mahadalit Tola in Punpun where he took part in the unfurling of the flag by Chandrika Mochi, an old man from the area.
Podcast

About 75% of military recruits arrive at a training base with no bank account and have to be bussed to a local bank to open one, says Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond. The bank's team is building a platform that will help service members save and build credit.
Pope Urges Iran to Promote Political Solution in Middle East

01/27/16

Source: VOA

Pope Francis has urged Iran to use its important role to promote peace in the Middle East and help halt the spread of terrorism and weapons trafficking. The pope made the appeal during a 40-minute closed-door meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the Vatican Tuesday.



Iran's President Hassan Rouhani (R) with Pope Francis at the Vatican, Jan. 26, 2016.



A Holy See statement after the meeting pointed to the "relevant role Iran is called on to play" to find political solutions to the problems the Middle East is facing, specifically terrorism and arms trafficking.

Since elected, about three years ago, Pope Francis has emphasized mediation and dialogue as the best way to solve conflicts.

Rouhani's visit to the Vatican marked the first meeting between a pope and an Iranian president since 1999. His trip to Italy is also the first state visit by an Iranian president to Europe in nearly two decades.

European visit

Rouhani's four-day visit to Italy and France is seen as part of Irans effort to reach out to its old partners following the implementation of the nuclear deal with six nations, including the United States. Rouhani has shown great interest for foreign investment since the lifting of international sanctions that followed the deal.





Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (l) meets Italian President Sergio Mattarella, upon his arrival at the Quirinale Presidential palace, in Rome, Jan. 25, 2016.

(source:

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (l) meets Italian President Sergio Mattarella, upon his arrival at the Quirinale Presidential palace, in Rome, Jan. 25, 2016.(source: Islamic Republic News Agency



Before going to the Vatican, Rouhani told a forum of business leaders in Rome that "Iran is the safest and most stable country of the entire region.''

Rouhani has described the talks leading to the nuclear deal as a potential blueprint to resolve Middle East conflicts, including Syria's civil war.

Iran also wants to end decades of diplomatic distance with the United States and other Western counties.
US-Iran Prisoner Swap Raises Hopes for Iranian-Canadian Prisoners of Conscience in Iran

01/27/16

Source: International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

The release of Iranian-Americans in the recent prisoner exchange between Iran and the United States has given hope to the family of prisoner of conscience Saeed Malekpour that he too might also be freed.





Saeed Malekpour





When I heard the news about the release of four Iranian-Americans it made me very happy. I think theres room for a lot of hope these days... I hope my brother will be freed, too. Saeed has been in prison for seven-and-a-half years without leaving on furlough even for a single day, Maryam Malekpour told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

Saeed Malekpour, 39, is a permanent resident of Canada who worked there as a computer web developer. He was arrested in 2008 during a visit to Iran and charged with insulting the sacred for allegedly creating a pornographic website. He was sentenced to death, a sentence that was later reduced to life in prison.

Last month Maryam Malekpour and Parastoo Azizi, the daughter of Iranian-born Canadian resident writer and filmmaker Mostafa Azizi, who is serving an eight-and-a-half year sentence in Evin Prison, wrote a letter to Canadas new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, calling on him to do what he can to secure the freedom of their loved ones.

I wrote the letter to Mr. Trudeau to ask him not to forget that there are two Iranian-Canadian political prisoners in Iran, Maryam Malekpour told the Campaign.

Mr. Trudeau always says that he considers human rights a priority so in my letter I asked him to prove it. If he wants to reestablish relations with Iran, he should pursue my brothers case. Saeed is innocent and theres no proof that he committed anything he has been accused of, she added.

In the previous Canadian administration, John Baird, the former foreign minister in the Stephen Harper administration, twice issued statements calling for Saeeds release, and referred to him in his statements as a Canadian citizen, even though he was not technically a citizen but a permanent resident; he applied for citizenship just before going to Iran, Maryam noted.

She added: Saeed and I talk on the phone sometimes. He always says hes fine but I dont really know if hes telling the truth or not. My mother is in an advanced age and its hard for her to visit Saeed every week.

Saeed Malekpour made a televised confession after being tortured during the first months in detention.

The Islamic Republics practice of eliciting false confessions under the threat of torture or actual torture, and then broadcasting these confessions on the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), in order to publicly defame those it is persecuting, has been well documented by human rights groups.

A large portion of my confession was extracted under pressure, physical and psychological torture, threats to myself and my family, and false promises of immediate release upon giving a false confession to whatever the interrogators dictated, Malekpour said in a letter from prison in March 2010.
Iranian government stresses opposition arrests beyond its powers

01/27/16

Source: Radio Zamaneh

The Rohani administration says it has made every effort to secure the release of MirHosein Mousavi, Zahra Rahnavard and Mehdi Karroubi from house arrest; however, it has not been successful because the administration is not the final decision-maker in this regard.



Iranian students demanding end to house arrests of opposition leaders





As the fifth anniversary of their house arrest approaches, Iranian media report that the spokesman for the administration, Mohammad Bagher Nobakht, responded on Tuesday January 26 to a question about their situation.

"We made all the efforts we could and in some cases even went beyond our jurisdiction," Nobakht said, emphasizing that the executive branch does not have the final word on the situation.

Fatemeh Karroubi, the wife of Mehdi Karroubi, has criticized the Rohani government for its failure to take effective steps to end the house arrests.









Since February 2011, Mir Hossein Musavi and Mehdi Karroubi (candidates in June 2009 Presidentail Elections), as well as Musavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, have been under house arrest, completely cut off from the outside world.



Since February 2011, Mir Hossein Musavi and Mehdi Karroubi (candidates in June 2009 Presidentail Elections), as well as Musavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, have been under house arrest, completely cut off from the outside world.

Since the opposition figures were put under house arrest for making allegations of fraud in the 2009 elections and triggering widespread protests, there have been conflicting statements as to which entity is responsible for making decisions about their fate. The three were put under house arrest without any formal charges being laid against them.

It has been said that the final word for their release can only come from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been quoted as saying implicitly that the regime has in effect treated Mousavi and Karroubi with leniency.
The fifth anniversary of the Egyptian Uprising

01/27/16

By Farhang Jahanpour (first published by TFF Associates & Themes Blog)



Celebration of President Mohamed Morsi ouster by the military at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, July 2013.

Morsi was the first democratically elected President after Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office.

(Photo by Mehr News Agency)





Since achieving their independence from Western colonialism, most Arab countries have never experienced events such as they have seen during the past few years. The demonstrators in Tunisia got rid of their autocratic ruler in a remarkably short time.

And the events in Egypt starting exactly five years ago today (25 January, 2015) spelled the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime. The fire of revolutions and uprisings spread to other Arab countries, and are still continuing.

Although those revolutions have not yet led to any lasting democracy or improvements in the lives of their citizens, nevertheless, what has happened during the past five years cannot be reversed, no matter how hard the autocratic rulers try to set the clock back.

For better or worse, the Arab world is undergoing profound changes, which will affect both the lives of Arab citizens and the relations between those countries and the rest of the world for a long time to come.

Let us remember that the Prague Spring began on 5 January 1968, but it took more than another two decades for East European countries to achieve their independence and a greater degree of democracy. The Prague Spring was short-lived, as was the Arab Spring, but the spark that it ignited never died.

The spark of the revolution in Tunisia was an altercation on 17 December 2010 between a young fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi and a policewoman called Faida Hamdy. Soon, demonstrations erupted in a number of cities and in less than a month, on 14 January 2011, they had succeeded in toppling President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, one of the most autocratic rulers in North Africa, after 23 years in office.

Massive demonstrations in Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo marked the start of the revolution in Egypt and in less than three weeks' time Hosni Mubarak who had ruled Egypt for 30 years with Western backing had been toppled.

The true message of Arab revolutions is that the long-suffering Arab people were at last fed up with their unelected, dictatorial and corrupt rulers, and had decided to do something about it.

The most famous lines of a Tunisian poem, "when the people decide to live, destiny will obey and chains will be broken", became the anthem of young protestors in Tunisia and Egypt. That sentiment was echoed in the chant of the Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square: "The Egyptian nation has decided to topple the regime." The term that was used most often by the demonstrators was karama, or dignity. They wished to regain their dignity as free and independent individuals and not as oppressed masses.

It is interesting to note that on 25 January 1952, the Egyptian police in Ismailia fought against the British forces by refusing British demands to evacuate the Suez Canal Zone. That event marked the beginning of the Young Officers' Uprising. That day was traditionally celebrated in Egypt as the "Police Day".

Fifty-nine years later, 25 January became engraved in the memory of the Egyptian nation as the "Day of Rage", when tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets demanding political and economic rights, and thousands of policemen were dispatched by the regime to disperse the protesters and keep the situation under control.

Although the demonstrations were declared in advance, the authorities were caught by surprise. Believing that 1,000 protesters at most would take to the streets, according to security officials 100,000 demonstrators took part in the demonstrations. That number was surpassed by a surge of masses not only in Cairo, but also in Alexandria, Suez and many other cities.

A notice by the 6 April Movement on Facebook urged the Egyptians "to continue what we started on 25 January. We will take to the streets to demand the right to life, liberty and dignity and we call on everyone to take to the streets... and to keep going until the demands of the Egyptian people have been met." (1)

Those demonstrations were followed by the "million-man" protests demanding that President Hosni Mubarak should leave office. By some accounts, more than 300 people were killed in the disturbances, over 1,000 were wounded and an untold number were arrested.

Yet all that brutality did not prevent the crowds from returning in larger numbers and renewing their call for the end of the Mubarak regime.

US reaction to the Egyptian revolution was a carbon copy of their failed policies at the time of the Iranian revolution 32 years earlier in the month of February 1979. At first, US officials called on the Shah to resort to massive force to crush the protests, something that to his credit he refused to do although there was some violence.

Once millions of people poured into the streets, it became clear that repression was not the answer. Following the failure of the use of force, the Shah was advised to initiate some reforms and promise greater change and democratization in the future.

In a famous broadcast to the nation, the Shah said that he had heard the nation's message and was determined to change his ways, but even that broadcast did not stem the tide of the revolution. So, the Americans tried to rely on the armed forces.

Prior to the Shah's departure, without informing him, the Pentagon sent General Robert Huyser, the deputy commander of NATO, to Iran to arrange for the Shah's removal from power while keeping the armed forces intact. In his memoirs, the Shah has written that the first time that Huyser went to see him, his only question was: "When are you going to leave the country?"

Lt. General Abbas Qarabaghi, the last chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the Shah, has written a valuable book about what really happened. General Huyser who had close relations with Iran's top generals, most of whom had studied in the United States, summoned them to a meeting.

Qarabaghi writes that in that meeting Huyser told the assembled generals that the Shah's time was up and that they had to stop supporting him.

Instead, they had to keep the army intact so that if needs be they could carry out a coup against the regime that would come to power, if things went wrong. (2)

There were a number of wrong assumptions in that advice. First of all, it infuriated some of the generals who stayed loyal to the Shah right to the end. General Rabi'i, the head of the Shah's Air Force, during his trial prior to his execution, accused Huyser of taking the Shah by the tail like a rat and throwing him out of the country, thus being partly responsible for the success of the revolution.

The second mistake was that it ignored the fact that just winning the support of the top generals would not necessarily mean winning the support of the rank and file of the armed forces who were drilled to be loyal to their king and country.

The third false assumption was that even if the generals and officers had issued orders to the soldiers to open fire on their fellow-citizens conscript soldiers would have been ready to kill their own kith and kin on the basis of orders issued by their superiors, especially when their commander-in-chief had been forced to flee.

The fourth misjudgment was that it ignored the fact that with the euphoria of the revolution and the victory of the revolutionaries there would be no chain of command for the generals to issue orders and for the soldiers to obey those orders.

The fifth and perhaps the most serious mistake was that it is not possible to resist genuine revolutions by force and to put down a determined nation with bullets and guns. On the contrary, revolutions thrive on conflict and military confrontations strengthen them.

It seems that after first supporting Mubarak and then deciding that he could not remain in power, the Americans decided to keep the army intact to stage a coup at the right time. This scenario has superficially worked better in the case of Egypt than it did in the case of the Shah, but many people believe that its success is temporary and when the fury of the masses returns, it will be more ugly than was the case with the Iranian revolution.

At the beginning of the Egyptian demonstrations, the then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly stated that she had no doubt in the stability of the Egyptian government. Then she and President Obama called for an orderly and peaceful transfer of power from President Mubarak to a new government at the end of his term. Then they urged him to start the process immediately. Finally, they openly called on him to relinquish power as soon as possible. Meanwhile, they put their faith in a military junta.

Already, some voices have been raised in the United States accusing President Obama of having lost Egypt, in the same way that President Jimmy Carter allegedly lost Iran. However, the person who should be really held responsible for all that is happening in most of the Middle East is not President Obama, but President George W. Bush with his illegal wars, destruction of various Islamic countries, and his blind support for the most extreme Israeli policies and the suppression and humiliation of the Arabs. Huge demonstrations rocked the Arab world shortly before and after the invasion of Iraq.

What we see now is the culmination of those feelings of anger and frustration that have been unleashed in those anti-regime, anti-American and anti-Israeli uprisings.

One major problem with nearly all Arab uprisings has been that the people knew what they did not want, but had not given much thought to what they wanted.

The aim of most revolutionaries was simply to topple their rulers, but they had not planned a proper transition. As a result, instead of a progression towards democracy and the rule of law, the vacuum led to chaos, creating fertile ground for the extremists and the terrorists.

The key to the success of these revolutions would be if saner heads can prevail, if terrorism and anarchy can be brought under control, and true governments of national unity, with the participation of all political parties and ethnic and religious groups can be formed paving the way for fair and free elections.

The second key to the success of these revolutions is to prevent them from being hijacked by Islamist groups, and if they can create truly secular, democratic and free societies with equal rights for all the citizens, and ensuring gender equality. Now that people have seen the ugly outcome of religious extremism and sectarianism they are in a better position to chart a different way and move towards pluralism, tolerance and the rule of law.

The immediate prospects are grim and the road ahead will be difficult and uphill, but it would be unwise to lose hope in the eventual success of these revolutions.

We need to have a historical perspective to realise that all great movements in history have taken a long time to evolve, mature and come to fruition.

Let us remember the words of a popular Tunisian poet Abul-Qasim al-Shabi in his poem "To the Tyrants of the World", which teaches a lesson not only to the present regimes and their Western backers, but also to any violent and radical government that might emerge out of the chaos:

"Wait, don't let the spring, the clearness of the sky and the shine of the morning light fool you ...

Because the darkness, the thunder's rumble and the blowing of the wind

are coming toward you from the horizon

Beware, because there is a fire underneath the ash" (3)

One may also recall the words of a short poem by Emily Dickinson, who teaches us that words cannot be destroyed by guns and have a way of continuing their life:

A word is dead

When it is said,

Some Say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.



Footnotes



1- See "Time for Action", al-Ahram, 27 January-2 February 2011

2- See Mohammad Reza Afkhami, The Life and Times of the Shah (University of California Press, 2009), pp. 500-504.

3- Quoted in Lamis Adoni, "To the Tyrants of the Arab World...", Aljazeera, 16 January 2011.

About the author:

Farhang Jahanpour, a TFF Associate and Board member and Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society, is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Isfahan and a former Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University. He is a tutor in the Department of Continuing Education and a member of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.




Iran's President Rohani Says Better Ties Hinge On U.S.

01/27/16

Source: RFE/RL

Iranian President Hassan Rohani has said his country could have better relations with the United States, but it was up to Washington to change its "hostile" stance towards Tehran. "It's possible that Iran and the United states might have friendly relations. But the key to that is in Washington's hands, not Tehran's," Rohani said at a news conference in Rome on January 27.

"I would like to see the Americans set aside their hostility and chose another way, but inside the U.S. there are some problems, there is no unified voice," he said, noting that "the Zionist lobby" was "very influential."

Rohani, on the first state visit by an Iranian president to Europe in nearly two decades, is seeking foreign investment after the lifting of international sanctions against Iran on January 16 under its nuclear accord with world powers.





Iranian's President Rohani waves during a visit to the Colosseum in Rome on January 27, 2016.





Rohani is due to travel on to Paris later on January 27, with talks with French President Francois Hollande scheduled the next day.

Rohani's visit to Paris is expected to result in the signing of important business contracts, after sealing multibillion dollar deals in Italy.

A major order for 114 Airbus planes to modernize Iran Air's ageing fleet is expected to be confirmed in France, along with tie-ups with carmakers Peugeot and Renault.

Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters



Copyright (c) 2016 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org
The Pamplona brothel where the incident took place in 2012. Luis Azanza

A Civil Guard sergeant has been suspended for five days over a 2012 incident in which he forced his way into a Pamplona brothel without paying the cover charge, then attempted to spend the whole night drinking for free and partying with his friends.

The military section of the Supreme Court, which dealt with the case given that the Civil Guard is a militarized police force, was divided in its ruling, with four justices arguing that the case should be sent to military prosecutors.

Sergeant Jose Alberto Nava Cano had previously forged a reputation thanks to his one-man fight against corruption and abuses of power inside the Civil Guard, a mission that had earned him the nickname Lieutenant Segura, after an army lieutenant who wrote a book revealing widespread wrongdoing in Spains armed forces.

Were going to show these people. Were going to spend the whole night drinking for free and partying - Sergeant Nava

His reputation for being a corruption buster was such that he was enlisted by the emerging party Ciudadanos to run in 2015 local elections in the Navarrese capital. The party ejected him after learning about the brothel incident.

On January 27, 2012, at 10.30pm, Sergeant Nava showed up at a brothel named Supermodels, located outside Pamplona, with three Civil Guard colleagues, a local police officer and an agent who works for the National Intelligence Center, according to court papers. They were all off duty and out of uniform.

When Nava and several other members of the group attempted to get in for free, the bouncer said there was a cover charge. The Civil Guard officer, showing evident signs of being under the influence, then produced his badge, claimed that he was there on a police operation, and threatened the employee. I know where you live, and if I want to I can put you behind bars this very night, he said.

More information Inside Spains Civil Guard

The establishment owner then came to the door and asked the officers in for a drink. Inside, Nava shouted out: Were going to show these people! Were going to spend the whole night drinking for free and partying!

The owner decided to phone the Civil Guard, which sent out two patrol cars. A report was filed with officials on the force, but not with the local courthouse or the attorney's office as is normal procedure.

Four out of the eight justices on the panel believe that a five-day suspension for conduct seriously contrary to the dignity of the Civil Guard is not enough, that Nava may have incurred in a crime of coercion, and that the case should be sent to military prosecutors.

English version by Susana Urra.
The core task for every antivirus utility is to exterminate any malware infestations that took root before its installation and then maintain vigilance to prevent any further attacks. Some products stick to those essential activities, while others, like ESET NOD32 Antivirus, go quite a bit beyond them. Among other bonus features, NOD32 includes a Host Intrusion Prevention System, a scanner for your PC's firmware, and an elaborate device control system. It scores well in most tests, both lab tests and our hands-on tests, but it did turn in a few poor scores. In addition, some of its advanced features may be too complex for the average user.

How Much Does NOD32 Cost?

A NOD32 subscription costs $39.99 per year. Each additional license adds $10 per year. Kaspersky, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, Webroot, and quite a few others come in at or near that $39.99 price for one license. McAfee costs $59.99 per year, but that lets you install McAfee protection on every device in your household, including devices running Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS.

It's not immediately obvious, but your NOD32 subscription offers its own kind of cross-platform security. You can use your licenses to activate an installation of ESET Cyber Security for Mac, if you wish.

Getting Started With NOD32

Just about every antivirus program includes the ability to detect and remove potentially unwanted applications (PUAs)programs that, while not actively malicious, cause problems that outweigh any virtues they may have. Some default to removing these PUAs, while others leave them alone by default. NOD32 makes you actively choose whether to remove PUAs during installation. I enabled PUA detection, and I advise you to do the same.

After installation, NOD32 launches a scan, but for testing purposes I halted this initial scan, saving a full scan for later when I could time it.

It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online

The main window includes plenty of whitespace, along with a picture of ESET's blue-eyed cyborg mascot. To launch a scan or an update, you can use either the left-side menu or a pair of large blue panels near the bottom of the window. If there's a configuration problem, the green security banner changes color. If NOD32 needs your attentionto show the results of a completed scan, for exampleyou see the number of notifications next to the corresponding menu item.

Like Norton AntiVirus Plus, NOD32 gives you a ton of settings for tweaking its configuration. As with Norton, you don't have to page through all those options to find the one you wantyou can just start typing in the search box. This may not become an issue, though, as the software's default configuration is tuned for optimal security.

Mostly Good Lab Results

Three of the four independent testing labs I follow include NOD32 in their testing, and its scores are mostly excellent. Tests by London-based MRG-Effitas(Opens in a new window) are especially grueling. Out of a dozen products tested, only ESET, Bitdefender, and Norton pass both this labs tests in the latest round.

Experts at AV-Test Institute(Opens in a new window) examine antivirus products for three important criteria. Protection is important, naturally, but so is a low impact on performance. Wrongly flagging valid programs as malicious is detrimental to a programs usability. Antivirus tools can earn up to six points each for Protection, Performance, and Usability, for a maximum score of 18. Any antivirus that earns at least 17.5 points is named a Top Product. More than half the products in this labs latest test earn a perfect 18 points. Another quarter of the products, ESET among them, take 17.5 points.

At AV-Comparatives(Opens in a new window), testers don't assign numeric scores. A product that passes any test receives Standard certification, while those that go beyond the minimum passing score can take Advanced or Advanced+ certification. In the three tests from this lab that I follow, NOD32 takes one Standard, one Advanced, and one Advanced+ rating. Bitdefender is the only product with Advanced+ in all three.

For each product that receives scores from at least two labs, my scoring algorithm maps all the results onto a 10-point scale and generates an aggregate lab score. ESET's 9.3 aggregate score is decent, though not up to the 9.9 score it held when last reviewed. Among products tested by all four labs, Kaspersky Anti-Virus is the big winner, with an aggregate score of 9.9.

Unusual Scan Choices

I timed a full scan of my standard clean test system and found that NOD32 finished in just under half an hour. That's quite a bit better than the current average of 66 minutes. During that initial scan, NOD32 also optimizes for subsequent scanning, marking known good programs that don't require another look. A second scan finished in just four minutes.

NOD32 doesn't offer the quick scan option found in many antivirus products, but it gives you several custom scanning choices. You can drop suspect files or folders on the scan page for a quick checkup. It offers to scan each removable drive you mount. From the custom scan menu you can scan memory, boot sectors, or any local or network drive.

The boot sector scan I mentioned also triggers NOD32's UEFI scanner. UEFI (which stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is what modern computers use instead of the antique BIOS. The UEFI scanner also runs in the background, making sure no malware has subverted your firmware. I have to assume it works, but I have no way to trigger its protection for testing purposes. Firmware protection is important. Any malware that weaseled into the firmware would have total control over your computer. One aim of the stringent security requirements for running Windows 11 is to protect the firmware and the entire boot process.

NOD32 can actively scan the WMI database. WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is best known to programmers as a source of system information. For example, my boot-time performance test for security suites queries WMI to get the start time of the boot process. The WMI scan looks for references to infected files within the database and for malware embedded as data. Likewise, the Registry scan checks for such references and embedded malware throughout the Registry. As with the UEFI scan, we have to take these activities on faith, as theres no easy way to test them.

Mixed Malware Protection Scores

Im always happy to have results reported by the independent labs, but not every product makes it into those reports. Even when results are available, I still run hands-on malware protection testing, to see the product's defenses in action.

When I opened the folder containing my current collection of malware samples, NOD32's real-time protection gave them the once-over. However, it only eliminated 32% of them at this point. Thats uncommonly lowmost products score in the 80s or better. Adaware Antivirus Free impressively eliminated 90% of this same sample collection on sight, though it came up short in other areas.

Notably, NOD32 recognized less than half of the ransomware samples on sight. Of a dozen other products whose real-time protection wipes out known threats on sight, eight eliminated all the ransomware samples on sight and four eliminated all but one.

Continuing the test, I launched the remaining samples. Clearly the antivirus applies a tougher standard to programs that are about to launch. It prevented quite a few samples from launching at all. That included all the remaining ransomware samples, most of which it identified by name. It did flag some samples as PUAs, and I chose to delete all of those. In other cases, it caught a malware component during the installation process.

NOD32 detected 89% of the samples one way or another. However, the fact that it let several samples install executable files brought its overall score down to a dismal 7.9 points, even worse than the 8.3 points it scored in my previous review. Tested with this same sample set, Malwarebytes managed 100% detection and a perfect 10 points. McAfee came close, with 100% detection and 9.9 points. And Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus detected 99% and scored 9.8.

NOD32s score in this test is the lowest of any product tested with the current sample set. That result doesnt line up at all with its many excellent lab test scores. When my results dont jibe with the labs, I give the labs more weight.

It takes me quite a while to collect and analyze a new set of malware samples, so those necessarily stay the same for months. To check a product's protection against the latest in-the-wild threats, I start with a feed of malware-hosting URLs detected in the last few days by researchers at MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL in turn and note whether the antivirus prevents access to the URL, eliminates the malware payload, or utterly fails to detect any threat.

While some antivirus tools rely on browser extensions to filter out dangerous websites, NOD32 functions below the browser level. That means it can extend its protection to any internet-capable app. In testing, NOD32 blocked the browsers access to 86% of the malware-hosting URLs. For most of these, it displayed a red warning page. In a few cases it displayed a yellow warning of potentially dangerous contentI counted these as successful detections, too. The antivirus eliminated another 10% of the threats during the download process.

NOD32s total score of 96% protection is good, but 10 products scored even better in their latest malicious URL test. Bitdefender, McAfee, and Norton top this list, all with a perfect 100% protection score.

Decent Phishing Protection

Writing code to hide from antivirus tools and steal people's passwords is hard, bitter work. Bamboozling people into just handing over those passwords can be much easier. Phishing websites imitate secure sites of all kinds, from online banking systems to gaming sites. The netizen who logs in to one of these frauds has just given away access to the real account. It's possible to spot phishing scams if you're alert, but having help from your antivirus means you're protected even when your eyelids are drooping.

To start the phishing test, I collect reported frauds from websites that track such things, making sure to include some that are so new they haven't yet been analyzed and blacklisted. Phishing sites are ephemeral, and the very newest ones are typically both the most effective and the hardest to detect. I launch each suspected URL in a browser protected by the product under test and simultaneously in instances of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge protected only by the browser's built-in phishing detection.

If a URL doesn't load properly in any of the four test systems, I toss it. If it doesn't fit the profile for a phishing sitemeaning it's trying to steal login credentialsI toss it. Analyzing those that remain gives me a clear idea of the product's phishing protection skills.

When last tested, NOD32 detected 93% of the verified frauds. This time it scored 92%, hardly different. It did beat all three browsersEdge, in particular, had a really bad daybut others have scored much better. Ten products currently score 96% or higher, including F-Secure, McAfee AntiVirus Plus, and Norton, all three of which flagged 100% of the phishing URLs.

I tested ESET Cyber Security for Mac with the same set of samples and found its behavior didn't track with that of the Windows-based product at all. In fact, on macOS ESET caught just 10% of the phishing frauds. When I asked about the same problem during my previous review, my company contact explained that we have an issue with some scanning related to some https links, and that the team is working on a fix. Clearly they're still working on it.

Its clear from the Windows versions score that ESET has the technology to do a good job detecting phishing frauds. I hope that technology will make its way into the Mac edition.

ESET Home

Modern security offerings go beyond simply protecting one device. Even the simple antivirus reviewed here can protect multiple Windows or macOS devices. A central hub to manage all your installations is more important than ever. Thats where ESET Home (formerly My ESET) comes into play.

Youll find an ESET Home button in the title bar of the main application. You can also simply navigate to home.eset.com(Opens in a new window) from any browser. Once you log in, you can view all your licenses and protected devices. For each license, it shows the total number of devices, the number in use, and the number still available. Right from this dashboard you can open a license and add protection to the current device or send an email link.

Shifting to the devices view, you can quickly see if any of your devices have security issues. You can get details on any problems, but to do anything about those issues you must go to the affected computer. Theres no remote configuration control such as you get with Sophos, Webroot, and a few others.

This page offers another opportunity to add protection to more devices. There is one odd limitationat present, protected macOS devices dont show up in ESET Home.

The online dashboard is also the spot to manage the parental control, password management, and anti-theft components. However, those components arent part of this standalone antivirus.

See How We Test Security Software

HIPS Blocks Exploits

ESET's suite products add full-blown firewall and network protection, but even the standalone antivirus offers a Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS). To see this component in action, I hit the test system with 30 exploits generated by the CORE Impact(Opens in a new window) penetration tool. The HIPS detected and blocked many of these attempts to exploit security vulnerabilities.

None of the exploits penetrated security since the test system is fully patched. NOD32 detected and blocked 35% of the attacks, identifying most of them using the official exploit number. HIPS and exploit protection are among the areas flagged as being improved in this latest version, but that score is down from 52% last time I ran this test on ESET. Kaspersky and Bitdefender detected 84% and 74% respectively in their latest exploit tests.

Ransomware Protection

According to ESET, NOD32s ransomware protection has been beefed up in this latest edition. It falls under HIPS in settings, meaning I could test it by turning off ordinary real-time protection and leaving HIPS turned on. I did just that and then tested a dozen real-world ransomware samples. The results werent pretty.

One of the samples didnt try any chicanery; without ransomware behavior, the ransomware detector naturally didnt react. Four file encrypting samples proceeded to do their dirty deeds without a peep from NOD32, as did one whole disk encrypting sample. Four more got caught after launch by NOD32s scan for active malware in memory.

That leaves exactly two detected by ransomware protection. This detection took the form of a warning about a program trying to modify files in a suspicious way. It didnt mention ransomware. Denying the activity saved the day in one case. The other managed to encrypt over 4,000 files before NOD32 took it down.

As with ransomware protection layers in other antivirus products, NOD32s isnt intended as the first line of defense, or even the second. With all cylinders firing, NOD32 eliminated almost half the samples on sight and wiped out the rest when they tried to launch. But this test suggests the ransomware-specific protection layer could use another round of enhancements.

Comprehensive Device Control

NOD32's Device Control is a feature more suited to business settings than to consumer use. Out of the box, this feature is disabled. To enable it you must reboot the system. With Device Control active, you can prevent the use of a wide variety of device types, while making exceptions for trusted devices. Among other things, Device Control can prevent anyone from stealing data by copying to unauthorized external drives and head off infestation by USB-based malware.

ESET isn't the only security company offering such a feature. Device Protection in Avira Antivirus Pro lets you whitelist or blacklist specific devices, and you can password-protect settings so nobody can mess with the lists. However, even when password protection is active, any user can whitelist a new, unknown drive. G Data Total Security offers more advanced device control, and it can prevent others from adding exceptions. Note, though, that this is G Datas top-tier mega-suite. ESET puts device control in its basic antivirus. It's an excellent bonus feature for an entry-level product.

The Device Control system in NOD32 is the most elaborate of any I've seen. You can create rules for a wide variety of devices, including card readers, imaging devices, and Bluetooth devices, as well as more traditional external drives. Each rule sets an action for a device type, an individual device, or a group of devices. Available actions include blocking use of the device, opening it in read-only mode, or allowing full read/write privileges. You can also configure a rule to simply warn that policy limits access to the device, and that accessing it despite the warning will be logged.

As with G Data and others, using this system is a game of rules and exceptions. For example, you could start by forcing read-only use of CD/DVD drives, so nobody can burn secrets to disk. On top of that, you might create an exception allowing you, but nobody else, to burn disks. Or you could ban removable drives but permit specific authorized ones.

In a super-techie household, you might set different access levels for different user accounts, with full access for you but limited access for others. Note, though, that NOD32 relies on the awkward Select Users or Groups dialog to pick user accounts rather than providing a more user-friendly account list.

Yes, even less technical consumers can probably manage to configure NOD32 so the kids can't corrupt the system with infected thumb drives, but it's not easy. Most users should leave this feature turned off.

Device Control isn't the only feature that takes NOD32 beyond the realm of simple antivirus. There's a whole page of tools to enhance your security experience. Some are useful to all; others require a technical mindset.

Several of the tools give you views of what NOD32 has been doing for you. The Security Report displays statistics on how many applications, web pages, and other objects NOD32 has scanned, along with a world map showing the current malware situation. You can peruse logs of malware detections, HIPS events, and more.

Bringing up the Running Processes list shows you every process running, with a lot more information than you'd get just by looking at Task Manager. Drawing from ESET's LiveGrid analysis system, it reports the reputation, number of users, and time of discovery for each process. This chart, like the chart of file system activity, may be more useful to a tech support agent who's examining your system remotely. The same is true of the live file system activity graph.

Soon after installation, you should download ESETs SysRescueLive tool. This tool runs from a bootable DVD or USB, meaning Windows-based malware is powerless to resist it. If a NOD32 scan detected and removed malware but you still feel like you've got malware on the system, run a scan from this tool. Malware that requires this aggressive tool can be seriously persistent, and can interfere with regular antivirus, which is why you want to download it before you run into any such trouble.

Quite a few competing products offer a similar bootable rescue disk to handle the most persistent malware. Bitdefender one-ups the bunch, though. Its Rescue Mode lets you boot to an alternate operating system without the need to create a disk.

Many security suites offer a system cleaner that wipes out junk files and erases traces of your computer and web-surfing history. With NOD32, System Cleaner has a different meaning. Like Webroot's similar feature, it aims to correct and restore system settings malware may have modified. For example, some ransomware replaces your desktop wallpaper with a ransom note, even before attempting encryption behaviors that might trigger an antivirus reaction.

Everybody should run the SysInspector tool right after installing NOD32. This scanner logs a ton of details about your PCs configuration, including what services are active, the status of critical system files, and the values of essential Registry entries. The report alone might be valuable to a tech support agent, but the key is SysInspector's ability to compare two reports and tell you what changed. If you run into any kind of system problem, comparing the current status with a no-problem baseline should give you a clue as to the cause.

Even if you always get someone else to help you out of computer jams, you should still run a baseline SysInspector report. Your tech-savvy niece or remote-control tech support agent will find it extremely helpful.

Good for Techies

Independent lab test scores for ESET NOD32 Antivirus are mostly excellent, with a few that are merely good. Its scores in our own hands-on tests range from poor for basic malware protection to very good for phishing protection and malicious download blocking. It offers numerous features beyond the basics of deleting malware and preventing new attacks. If you're tech-savvy enough to use it, the Device Control system is the most comprehensive we've seen. In that case, you should consider ESET NOD32: It's a worthy contender.

If that doesn't sound like you, consider our Editors' Choice antivirus tools, which pack plenty of more typical security features along with award-winning protection. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus consistently earn top scores from the independent testing labs. McAfee AntiVirus Plus doesn't score as high, but it protects every device in your household. Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus scores high in our hands-on testing, and it's the tiniest antivirus around.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4.0 (Opens in a new window) Check Price (Opens in a new window) Pros Some excellent scores from independent labs

Some good scores in our hands-on tests

HIPS component blocks exploits

Comprehensive device control View More Cons Poor score in our hands-on malware blocking test

Device control too complex for most users

Ransomware protection not effective in testing The Bottom Line In lab tests and our own hands-on tests, ESET NOD32 Antivirus earns some impressive scores. It also packs extras that go far beyond the antivirus basics, such as exploit protection and device control.
The Google Docs suite just got a lot more mobile-friendly.

Google on Wednesday launched real-time mobile commenting for Sheets and Slides on Android and iOS, rounding out mobile editing for the Docs suite. The company also updated Docs commenting, making it easier to share your thoughts and add another person to the conversation.

"If you're like most of our Google Apps customers, there's a good chance you're working from different locations throughout the day," Google Docs Product Manager Ryan Weber wrote in a blog post. "Whether you're on a tablet at the breakfast table, a phone on the train, or a laptop at the office, it's important to have a suite of apps that allow you to be productive from wherever you are."

So, beginning today, you can use the same iOS and Android-friendly mobile commenting experience already available in Docs in Sheets and Slides as well. You can also now quickly add someone else to your back-and-forth by typing their name in a comment.

"We know that mobility is critical for today's professionals," Weber wrote. "That's why we continue to invest in features that make being productive on the go simple."

Meanwhile, Google also today rolled out a new commenting experience for those times you're using Docs at your desk. You can now instantly insert a comment using the bubble that appears on the right side of a doc.

Check out the video below for a peek at the new mobile commenting feature in Slides. The video also features a delicious-looking chocolate cake recipe from an actual Google engineer and his wife, in honor of National Chocolate Cake Day, which happens to be today.
The home Internet market in the U.S. is broken, and nobody's laying the cables to fix it. Wireless carriers, for their part, have said they don't have the capacity to fulfill Americans' multi-gigabyte home needs. From the folks who brought you Aereo, here comes Starry, which announced today that it's bringing high-speed Internet to Boston in March.

Starry's founder, Chet Kanojia, is really good at transmitting a reality distortion field. And just like he did with failed TV-watching startup Aereo, he's hitting out at some companies that Americans hate: the cable firms, who are also the major ISPs.

According to Starry, ideally, you'll get an antenna to stick out your window and a router to put into your home. Turn 'em on, and you'll have gigabit Internet with no caps, limits, or worries.

The router and service will be sold separately. The $349 Starry Station router(Opens in a new window), available Feb. 5, will attach to any Internet connection. It has a touch-screen display on the face that shows you the condition of your Internet service, the speeds you're getting, and lets you manage parental controls. A "Starry Wing" extender will help it reach odd corners.

But $350 is a heck of a lot for a router, even one that helps you diagnose Internet service problems. The really hot deal here is Starry Internet, a new ISP that's initially launching in Boston. Starry hasn't announced pricing for the ISP, other than to say it will be "simple" and "consumer focused." The ISP uses very high-frequency, short-range wireless technology to broadcast Internet throughout a city, a lot like wireless carriers do, but with more capacity and a bit of an easier time distributing Internet. It's only connecting to large, window-based stationary antennas rather than tiny antennas that might be at the bottom of your purse.

That makes Starry a wireless ISP, or a "WISP." You may never have heard of such a thing, but it isn't new.

A WISP of a Hope

Kanojia is trying to make it sound like he has radically new technology. But WISPs have existed for decades, especially in rural areas where it's too expensive to lay cable to very broadly spread-out customers.

In cities, you're more likely to find a WISP strategy being used by business ISPs and cell-phone companies, which use them to tie small base stations to a central Internet connection. Towerstream, which operates in 12 cities, has been WISPing its way into businesses since 1999.

Starry intends to distribute very fast, high-density Internet to homes using "millimeter waves" in the unlicensed 38GHz band. At frequencies like that, you get great speeds but very little range. The range gets even shorter when the air is wet. There are a few smaller ISPs working up there; Monkeybrains, which covers a few neighborhoods in San Francisco, is running at 60GHz(Opens in a new window).

Those waves have trouble penetrating walls, but that isn't the problem here. Starry will have rooftop base stations (which it calls MetroNodes, or Starry Beams, above at left) that link to receivers you put outside your window (above at right), which in turn will link to that station in your home, which will translate the signal into more conventional 2.4GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi.

The challenge is that Starry is going to need to place a lot of those rooftop base stations. They'll probably need to place one every quarter-mile to half-mile, in dense cities. Every one of those base stations will need permission from a property owner, they'll need an Internet connection, and they'll need to be maintained and serviced.

(A relevant tangent: New York University has been exploring using 28GHz and 38GHz for handheld devices, and it got about a 600-foot range(Opens in a new window) from its base stations in tests in New York City. Starry should get better range because of its large, fixed-location window antennas.)

Starry has a much easier task than starting a new wired ISP, which requires digging up streets. And it's an easier task than starting a new wireless carrier, which requires buying expensive, licensed spectrum at auctions that only happen every few years. But it's still a long slog of negotiating base station locations and setting up infrastructure, as opposed to with Aereo, which only required one major location per city.

The big start-ups of the past few years have generally been apps or platforms that use someone else's infrastructure. Uber uses drivers' cars and public roads, and Airbnb doesn't own any rooms. But Starry is going to need to build real infrastructure, a physical network of base stations to support its dreams. Google has been able to do that with Google Fiber. The question I don't know the answer to is, does Starry have the deep pockets to actually build its dreams?
SoftBank is giving its Pepper robot a new job with some big responsibilities.

The Japanese telecom giant is planning to open a cell phone store in Tokyo this spring staffed primarily by Pepper robots, according to a report from The Japan Times(Opens in a new window). About five to six Pepper robots will run the store from March 28 through April 3, and be responsible for helping customers and making sales.

"I don't know how this will turn out, but it should be a quite interesting experiment," SoftBank CEO Ken Miyauchi told the newspaper.

The robots will be able to answer questions about different cell phone options, and when someone's ready to buy, they'll even attempt to complete the sale. SoftBank does plan to have humans at the ready to handle tasks Pepper can't yet do  like checking customer IDs when drawing up a new contract.

More than 500 companies are already using Pepper, including 37 different financial institutions and Nissan, according to the report. The robot can interact with customers, detect emotions via built-in cameras and sensors, and react appropriately. SoftBank is also partnering with more than 200 firms to develop new business apps for the robot.

Unveiled in June 2014, Pepper comes with a 10.1-inch touch display to monitor emotions via changing colors and movements, as well as voice-recognition technology  enabling human-to-humanoid communication. It also makes gestures like an arm wave or head nod.

SoftBank at CES earlier this month announced plans to soon offer an IBM Watson-powered version of Pepper for enterprises that can make sense of hidden meanings in data that traditional computers can't understand. For instance, Pepper may in the future be able to gain insights about people from sources like what they share on social media, to better assist them in a customer service capacity. With the help of Watson, Pepper might move beyond customer service, to take on teaching assistant or nursing aide roles.
Microsofts Garage internal incubator has come out with a news feed on the iPhone targetting users business information needs.

News Pro is a new app that allows users to connect their LinkedIn or Facebook accounts and get a feed of the top stories relevant to their interests and work experience. Depending on how much time people have spent elaborating what theyre into on one of those networks, the initial recommendations might not be all that helpful, but users can specify more about their interests inside the app itself.

The News Pro interface is fairly bare bones: it shows a list of articles that users can scroll through, comment on, and like, similar to other news apps. Users can either read them as they would appear on the web, or in a streamlined Speedy mode that strips away everything but basic text.

People who are expecting the app to be a full-featured consumer experience will be disappointed, but thats to be expected from the first release of a Garage project. Apps from Microsofts internal ideas incubator are aimed at proving out a particular concept, or testing a hypothesis, and usually arent as polished as the companys flagship applications.

It seems like everyone has a news app on the iPhone these days. Facebook has its Notify app for sending quick snippets of news, Google has two news apps, Twitter is trying to be a news app with its Moments feature, and Apple has its own News app thats built into the phone. Microsoft is no stranger to that ecosystem either, since it has an MSN News app, plus Bing and Cortana apps that include their own recommended news stories.

And then theres LinkedIn, which has its own Pulse news reader thats aimed at providing a similar experience to News Pro.

What will be interesting to see from the launch of this application is what Microsoft plans to do with the results of its experiments with the app. Successful experiments can go on to be key features for Microsofts products, like the Garage app for monitoring air quality in China that turned into one of Cortanas key features in that market.
SACRAMENTO (AP)  Gov. Jerry Brown is announcing a ballot initiative Wednesday that would change how long felons serve in prison and how many juveniles are tried as adults, according to people familiar with his plans.

Brown scheduled an announcement Wednesday afternoon with law enforcement and faith leaders to make what his office termed a major announcement on public safety reform.

It would give prison officials broad authority to grant sentence credits for inmates who complete rehabilitation programs, according to those briefed on the fourth-term Democratic governors plan.

It would also allow non-violent felons to seek parole after they have completed their base sentences, without enhancements for things like gang involvement or firearms possession that can add years to a prison term.

It also would require judges, instead of prosecutors, to decide if juveniles should be tried in adult court.

The initiative that Brown is proposing would further reduce the states prison population, which is under a cap ordered by a panel of three federal judges with backing from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The state is currently under the headcount limit thanks in part to voter-approved ballot measures that reduced penalties for career criminals and those convicted of certain drug and property crimes. But that population is expected to grow again, and the state is making do now by sending inmates to out-of-state prisons and keeping them in rundown facilities within California.

Brown, who is termed out of office in 2018, has about $24 million in his campaign account that he can spend on initiative or candidate campaigns. Wednesdays announcement is expected to be the first time he has said how he intends to use it.

The governor helped create the states determinate sentencing system when he was governor in the 1970s and 1980s, but has previously said he now has regrets that it has led to less discretion. His initiative would change that system by allowing for nonviolent inmates to be paroled earlier, after they complete their base sentences without the numerous enhancements that have been added over the years.

Some of the proposals expected in Wednesdays announcement are similar to changes ordered by the federal judges to reduce the inmate population.
A suspect in an interrupted home burglary remained at large Wednesday afternoon, Jan., 27, in Moreno Valley.

The burglary was reported as it was in progress about 9:40 a.m. in the 25300 block of Renoir Avenue, said Riverside County Sheriffs Department spokesman deputy Michael Vasquez. No property was stolen in the incident.

When police arrived, two people took off on foot from the home. One of the suspects  a juvenile  was apprehended. The other remained at large at 1 p.m.

Anyone with information regarding the burglary is asked to contact Moreno Valley deputies at 951-486-6700.
Long freeway closures like the one planned for Corona next month are increasingly becoming the choice for addressing thorny construction challenges despite the headaches they cause, transportation officials and experts say.

The strategy was successfully deployed during the Carmageddon closure of I-405 in Los Angeles about five years ago, a more recent closure of I-805 in San Diego and a shutdown of I-5 in Sacramento in 2008.

And officials plan to deploy the strategy again in Los Angeles over Super Bowl weekend, Feb. 5-7.

UPDATE: 6-mile, 55-hour 91 closure is a go

The Corona closure  affecting both directions of travel  would last more than 50 hours the weekend of Feb. 19-22.

Expect more such closures in the future, said Brian Taylor, professor of urban planning and director of UCLAs Institute of Transportation Studies, in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Theres sort of an emerging school of thought that says, Lets just take the Band-Aid off quickly. Lets just shut everything down, Taylor said.

He said the total and extended closure to accelerate completion of a critical project component goes against a long-standing philosophy of highway operation.

The thought for a long time was, you need to keep transportation flowing, you need to keep it moving, Taylor said.

But now, instead of worrying about potentially crippling closures, he said, public officials find themselves fielding complaints about irritating projects that seem to drag on forever.

SHORT-TERM PAIN

Then theres the realization that some construction-related tasks  like tearing down a bridge  are difficult to accomplish in piecemeal fashion. And when agencies opt to take them down all at once, with an advertising blitz to persuade drivers to make other plans, they minimize disruption, Taylor said.

A case in point, he said, was the 405 closure that set the stage for removing the Mulholland Drive bridge.

There was shockingly little delay over the whole network as a result of that, he said.

The success of the L.A. demolition and other projects has spurred a change in approach statewide.

More and more, whenever we have a large-scale project, we always consider a closure option, said Mark Dinger, a spokesman for Caltrans in Sacramento. Its on a case-by-case basis. Its not a viable option for every project.

But Dinger said the strategy has proven effective where it makes sense.

People can endure a short-term pain better than a long-term one, Dinger said.

NOT A DISASTER

There appears to be support for the plan to close the 91 next month  albeit mixed with fears and concern, according to comments on social media and an online Press-Enterprise poll.

Don Fuller, who has lived in Corona 15 years, is a supporter.

It is far and away the best solution to a massive construction project issue, Fuller said in an email. Any alternative would be far worse.

Fuller said some people have likened the 91 expansion to a disaster.

It is nothing of the sort, he wrote. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. What happened in San Bernardino in December was a  tragedy.  The 91 freeway project is a minor and temporary inconvenience.

Still, some Corona residents who work in Orange County on weekends expressed concern on social media that they will have a rough time reaching their jobs.

The Riverside County Transportation Commission, which is financing the 91 makeover in Corona, intends to shut both sides of the freeway between I-15 and the 71  from late Friday, Feb. 19, until 4 a.m. Monday, Feb. 22.

John Standiford, commission deputy executive director, said the closure will clear the way for workers to erect a wood-and-steel structure, so a new Maple Street bridge can be built above a wider freeway footprint.

The commission intends to blitz the region with a steer clear of the 91 message.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9699 or ddowney@pressenterprise.com
As the Year of the Sheep wanders out, the Year of the Red Fire Monkey swings in.

This years Lunar New Year has Inland-area Asian cultures celebrating with festivities, cultural exhibits and savory food leading up to the Feb. 8 holiday. Traditions varying from lion dances, drumming, fireworks and childrens activities will be featured at events in Riverside, Temecula and Ontario.

A daylong celebration

In downtown Riverside, the 6th installment of the Lunar New Year Festival kicks off with a daylong celebration on Saturday, Jan. 30 that will include a parade, family friendly activities, tea pavilions and dance exhibitions.

Beautiful red lanterns are already strung and dangling over parts of downtown adding a hint of whats to come.

This event allows people to get a whole different view of what other cultures are like, said May Lynn Davis, president of the Asian Pacific Cultural Association and chair member of the event. When people get immersed in the various cultures, it changes their perspective and helps them understand the beauty of other cultures.

Attendees will have plenty of options to explore traditions from countries including Japan, China, Vietnam, India, the Philippines, Taiwan and the Polynesian Islands.

Karen Cheng, chairwoman of the Inland Chinese Association said the Lunar New Year signifies new beginnings and a fresh start with families coming together to share food and happiness, including the joy of little ones.

A childrens village will give kids a hands-on experience in arts and crafts that many Asian children participate in such as origami, calligraphy and games. There will also be interactive educational tables and a petting zoo.

Of course, food is an important part of the holiday and Cheng says many items hold specific meaning in Chinese culture.

Dumplings signify wealth, fish signifies surplus and abundance and peanuts represent longevity, Cheng said. Its so exciting to share our culture and happiness with everybody.

Museum offers music, parade, more

The Ontario Museum of History & Art is hosting a Lunar New Year family day featuring live performances by Chinese folk dancers, music and arts and crafts.

Guests will have the opportunity to observe calligraphy artist Tom Chow and then try their hand at writing characters, according to a City of Ontario news release.

The free event will also feature Japanese drumming, traditional Chinese orchestra music performed by A Little Dynasty Chinese School with the day topped off with a parade.

Lion dancers, firecrackers and food

The Lunar New Year will ring in at Pechanga Resort & Casino with a firecracker presentation and a special performance by the colorful Lucky Lion dancers on Saturday Jan. 6. The casino will also be decked out all month long in the holidays traditional decorations including cherry blossom trees, red lanterns and tall trees donning red envelopes.

Khiet Dang, head chef at the Asian restaurant Bamboo hails from Vietnam and is overjoyed to share aspects of his culture with casino guests and diners.

Although it is a little different here in America, it is still so nice to see everyone celebrating, Dang said. Its important to keep the traditions alive for the kids born here or those who have moved here from Asian countries.

And for Dang, the best way he knows how to represent the New Year is through food.

He said in Vietnam a popular item to share during the Lunar New Year is Banh Tet, which resembles a beautiful green package. Traditionally, the filling is pork belly and mung beans surrounded by sticky rice and then wrapped in banana leaves before being steamed. Dang said these can also be served vegetarian-style.

The casinos Blazing Noodles and Bamboo restaurants are offering two family-style dining specials to celebrate the holiday. First is lobster dish ($56) and a whole stripped sea bass ($48). The specials are available at Blazing Noodles throughout February and at Bamboo on Feb. 8 and 9.

For those who want to try cooking something traditional at home, Dang offers his striped sea bass recipe and notes it is important that the fish be served whole as it is considered lucky to have it unbroken.

Chef Khiet Dangs Striped Sea Bass

1 striped sea bass weighing 1 to 2 pounds. This fish is readily available at most Asian markets that sell seafood and meat.

For the sauce:

1/8 cup sesame oil

1/4 cup chicken broth

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/8 cup vinegar

1/3 cup white sugar

1/4 cup stripped bamboo shoots

1/4 cup chopped Shiitake mushrooms (more can be used based on preference)

1/4 cup julienned green bell pepper

1/4 cup julienned red bell pepper

1/3 cup peeled and julienned carrots.

Optional garnish:

5 or 6 sprigs of cilantro for flavor and color.

Hot chili paste to taste.

Procedure:

1. Mix together broth, soy sauce, vinegar and sugar. Set aside.

2. Heat oil in a small skillet. Add bamboo shoots, mushrooms, carrots and peppers. Sautee about two minutes or until slightly tender. Add broth mixture and thoroughly coat vegetables.

For deep fried fish:

3. Place fish in a deep fryer or dutch oven. Pour in vegetable oil until fish is nearly submerged. Remove fish.

4. Heat oil on medium-high and place fish back into the oil. Fry for 3 minutes on each side. Splash guard for the oil is highly advisable.

For steamed fish:

3. Use a fish steamer or a large vegetable steamer. Place steamer on bottom of large saucepan and fill bottom of saucepan with water.

4. Bring water to a simmer and place fish on the steamer. Steam inside saucepan for 4 to 5 minutes on each side.

5. Whether fried or steamed, you then top the fish with the vegetable mixture and garnish with cilantro and chili paste if desired.

Fish is intended to be eaten family-style.

Contact the writer: sschulte@pressenterprise.com, 951-368-9457
Rio health workers on Tuesday fumigate the Sambodromo, where Carnival celebrations will be held.

More information Brasil desplegara 220.000 militares para luchar contra el zika

Brazil has announced that it will mobilize some 220,000 troops in a bid to eradicate the Zika virus, which is spreading fast through countries in the Americas.

The virus, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, can cause serious birth defects in unborn infants, according to health officials.

The US Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has asked pregnant women to reconsider traveling to 21 nations and territories where the mosquito-borne virus has been reported.

Brazils offensive comes just weeks before Rio de Janeiro will host its world-famous Carnival celebrations.

Brazil is losing the battle against the mosquito, Health Minister Marcelo Castro said last week

Officials said they will begin distributing mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive government aid.

Brazil is losing the battle against the mosquito, Health Minister Marcelo Castro said last week. He had warned of the epidemic last October when the first cases were detected.

Unlike dengue and chikungunya, which produces high fevers and body aches and is also transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, Zika virus symptoms are not as severe.

But doctors believe that unborn infants are most at risk after they discovered a rise in microcephaly  a rare birth defect that can cause babies to be born with unusually small heads and continues to cause developmental problems in later life.

Brazilian health authorities reported they have detected 3,893 cases of microcephaly since October.

It is not clear what role the military will play in its eradication efforts. Some cities, such as Rio, have begun fumigating certain neighborhoods as it gears up to welcome millions to Carnival celebrations.

Brazilian health authorities reported they have detected 3,893 cases of microcephaly since October

The government estimates that 80% of mosquito breeding grounds are located inside homes, where water tends to gather in plant pots, abandoned tires, open bottles and other standing containers.

According to the Brazilian Health Ministry, the soldiers will provide support and replace fumigation teams as well as handing out information to the public about the mosquito and its consequences.

There are no official figures as to how many Brazilians are infected with the Ziki virus. One government study estimates that there could be between 497,000 and 1.4 million infected throughout the country.

But there are concerns that the numbers could rise between the February and May rainy season, which would help the mosquito population proliferate.

Government officials are also worried about the Olympic Games, which will be held in Rio in August. Brazil will welcome visitors from all over the world who may be more susceptible because they have never been in contact with any mosquito-borne viruses.

English version by Martin Delfin.
A 23-year-old Hemet man faces a preliminary hearing Feb. 3 in San Bernardino County Superior Court in a felony insurance fraud case where he is accused of failing to report income while receiving disability benefits, according to a San Bernardino County District Attorneys Office news release.

Raymond Chastain pleaded not guilty to the charge in his initial court appearance Thursday, Jan. 21, according to court records.

Chastain filed a workers compensation claim Oct. 26, 2012 alleging he sustained injuries while working for TPG Staffing. While he was receiving temporary disability benefits, he failed to report additional earned income, Rodney Tamparong, senior district attorney investigator, said in the news release.

Chastain was arrested in November and is free on his promise to appear in court. The district attorneys workers compensation insurance fraud unit investigates and prosecutes insurance fraud cases.
BURNS, Ore. (AP)  The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests  including Bundy.

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution.

Those arrested were Ammon Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, all during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said. Another man who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported ( http://bit.ly/1nOammV ) that Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum was the person killed, citing the mans daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her fathers death to the paper, saying he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.

Ammon Bundys group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement. The leaders of this group are now in custody and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Deschutes County Major Incident Team and the Harney County District Attorneys Office.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West.



Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.
Murrieta Councilman Alan Long pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor driving under the influence with injury in connection with a October 2014 crash that injured four high school cheerleaders.

Long entered his plea during a hearing on Friday, Jan. 22. He was sentenced the same day to 180 days in custody  which can be done with electronic monitoring  and three years of probation, according to John Hall, spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorneys Office.

He also must participate in the states program for first-time DUI offenders, attend a Mothers Against Drunk Driving victim impact panel and pay more than $2,000 in booking fees, fines and penalty assessments, court records state.

Murrieta police have said Long, who was serving as the citys mayor at the time of the crash, was driving south on Jefferson Avenue about 8:15 p.m. Oct. 16 when his full-size pickup truck smashed into the back of a Chrysler 300 waiting to make a left turn at Lilly Avenue.

The four girls in the car, ages 14 to 17 at the time, suffered moderate to major injuries. One girl had fractures to two vertebrae in her neck.

Long, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, stepped down from the council following his arrest but remained on the ballot in that years election. He was re-elected to a fresh four-year term.

The deal wraps up the criminal proceedings against the councilman but he still faces a civil lawsuit.

Riverside-based attorney Jean-Simon Serrano, who is representing the families of the girls, said the resolution of the criminal matter could spur some sort of settlement of the civil case in the near future.

It will help in the sense we can finally take his statement, he said Tuesday. Up until this point he had refused to make a statement and said he was going to plead the fifth. He wont have that protection any more.

Long, a battalion chief for the Anaheim Fire Department, was elected to his first four-year term in 2010.

Police officials rejected a public records request for the reports in the case, but the girls attorney provided a copy of the crash report. Long told police he had consumed about half a glass of wine with dinner an hour before the crash, the report said.

Long said he was traveling about 25 mph when Chloe Rogers, the 17-year-old driver of the car, slammed on the brakes for no reason, the report said.

But Rogers said she had been stopped, with her turn signal on, waiting for oncoming traffic to pass for about 20 seconds before Longs pickup slammed into her car, the report said.

Toxicology tests showed Longs blood-alcohol level was 0.08 percent. He was arrested on suspicion of DUI that night.

Staff Writers Sarah Burge and Alex Groves contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9698 or aclaverie@pressenterprise.com
Prosecutors are declining to criminally charge eight Los Angeles police officers who injured two innocent women after mistakenly riddling their pickup truck with more than 100 bullets during a manhunt for cop-turned-killer Christopher Dorner, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office said there was insufficient evidence to prove the officers acted unreasonably when they shot up the truck on Feb. 7, 2013, according to the report, dated Friday.

The two women, a mother and daughter, were delivering newspapers in a Torrance neighborhood where police were protecting a Dorner targets home.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck previously found the 2013 shooting violated department policy. But, he said the officers involved would be allowed to return to the field after additional training because he had confidence in them.

The mistaken shooting unfolded after Dorner, a fired Los Angeles police officer, claimed he was unfairly dismissed and vowed revenge against law enforcement officers in a rambling online manifesto.

He killed the daughter of a former LAPD police official, along with her fiance, and two law enforcement officers over 10 days before being cornered and killing himself in a burning mountain cabin in San Bernardino County.

The shooting involving the two women happened in the middle of the chaotic manhunt for Dorner.

When one of the women threw a newspaper onto the pavement in the early-morning hours, an officer believing the sound was a gunshot opened fire. Officers unable to see clearly into the truck sprayed it with 103 rounds, and hit seven nearby homes and nine other vehicles with gunshots and shotgun pellets.

Margie Carranza, then 47, suffered minor injuries from broken glass. Her then-71-year-old mother, Emma Hernandez, was shot in the back but survived.

The women won a $4.2 million settlement from the city.

In declining to press charges, prosecutors said they werent endorsing the officers conduct that day, but that theyre guided by legal principles.

Attorney Glen Jonas, who represented the two women, criticized the district attorneys office for the heavily redacted report, which has the majority of statements from the officers involved completely blacked out.

I cant tell from that report whether the charging decision is correct, Jonas said. I dont have faith in the decision  Either release it unredacted or dont bother.

The biggest question still in his mind, Jonas said, was which officer fired the first shot and why.

Thats a key question if youre going to convince the public that you cant prove beyond a reasonable doubt, he said. We need it to know what happened with that first shot  who took it and why they took it to determine if it was reasonable or unreasonable.

Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the district attorneys office, said the statements from the officers are considered compelled and that prosecutors are barred from releasing them because theyre part of their personnel records.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Andrew Orton was recently awarded the Naval and Marine Corps Achievement Award and Medal for meritorious achievement and service as a Fire Controlman CIWS (Closed in Weapon System) operator while assigned to the Naval Destroyer USS Arleigh Burke.

Orton is the son of Joseph Orton of Highland and James and Pamela Clarke of San Bernardino. He graduated in 2005 from San Bernardino High School and earned an associates degree in 2008 from San Bernardino Valley College. Orton enlisted in the Navy and graduated from Recruit Training Command in Illinois in 2012. He continued A school combat systems training at Great Lakes and later was transferred to San Diego Naval Station for further education for CIWS training.

Orton was deployed to the Arabian Gulf for eight months in 2014, also earning an achievement as an expert marksman. He served aboard the USS Arleigh Burke during the Syrian conflict of September 2014 in which his ship fired the Tomahawk Missiles into Syria.

Orton has been stationed at Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia since 2013 and continues to serve aboard the Destroyer USS Arleigh Burke.

Have your own military accomplishment to share?

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Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine who racially integrated into an Arkansas high school in 1957, told a theater full of people at Mt. San Jacinto College on Tuesday, Jan. 26, that its up to each of them to evoke change.

You have a responsibility to learn what on earth is going on, he said.

He also had a challenge.

When is the last time you did something for the first time? Roberts said is closing the 90-minute program at the San Jacinto campus.

Roberts spoke for about 45 minutes then took questions from a crowd of 325, most of whom were students.

He talked about his experiences being one of nine black students who attended Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., starting in September 1957, after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools.

Roberts shared about being confronted by hostile crowds and what it was like attending the school for a year with his classmates.

I cant explain it to you because it was so horrible, he said. Anything they could do to a person, they did.

But, Roberts said, the group took a vow of nonviolence and except in small cases, didnt fight back physically.

Your goal is not to give in, your goal is to be successful in what youre doing, he said when asked how he was able to avoid fighting.

He said 150 black students signed up to attend the white high school, but only nine did.

We came from families that were very supportive, he said. We were collectively tired of this craziness.

Roberts moved to Los Angeles before his senior year and graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1959.

Roberts said there are still troubled race relations in America and there is a need for serious discussion on the issue.

It seems that the forces that want to maintain that wall of separation are much louder, he said. Theres a lot of denial that there is a problem. Its not over and thats unfortunate.

He said hes not surprised about the racial rhetoric that has come up in the presidential campaign.

Theres a sense that we have a hierarchy we should respect, a hierarchy of whiteness, Roberts said.

He also said its time to stop defining people by race.

We have to recognize that we are all unique individuals, Roberts said.

Malcolm Johnson, a 21-year-old freshman from Hemet, said the message he took from the talk was not specific to race.

We need to develop critical thinking skills as a society as a whole and it will help us move forward, he said.

Organizers said they attempt to have prominent speakers come to campus each semester and Roberts had spoken there previously in 2001.

Student coordinators said having Roberts speak is relevant to current events.

With everything going on in our country, it was important to have him here, said Tammy Russell, another of the coordinators.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9086 or cshultz@pressenterprise.com
On the eve of National School Choice Week, a news site operated by the National Education Association, published a snarky article claiming that school choice is merely a smokescreen.

What its really about, according to the article, is the transfer of public money to the private sector without accountability or transparency.

The school choice movement is bankrolled by a faction of incredibly wealthy conservative donors and political groups, the article continued. That includes the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

And the aim of that vast right-wing conspiracy, according to the NEA, is to dismantle public education throughout the fair land.

Well, thats just so much disinformation from the 3.2 million-member teachers union, with which the 325,000-member California Teachers Association is affiliated.

Almost none of those taking part in the more than 1,500 events throughout the Golden State marking National School Choice Week have been bankrolled by either the brothers Koch or ALEC.

That includes the mayors of such Inland Southern California cities as Hesperia, Indio, Moreno Valley, Temecula and Upland, all of whom issued proclamations recognizing School Choice Week.

We dont think those mayors are out to dismantle the public school systems in their respective cities. We think they simply recognize  as do most parents  that some schools are better than others.

Indeed, there is no greater gap between the regions affluent and less-advantaged families than the quality of education their children receive. The affluent usually live in neighborhoods boasting high-performing public schools; the disadvantaged in neighborhoods with lower-performing schools.

Both the NEA and CTA profess empathy for school children mired in failing public schools  including four such schools in Riverside County and seven in San Bernardino County that rank among the states lowest-achieving 5 percent, according to the California Department of Education.

The unions suggestion to the parents of those unfortunate children is not to give up on their low-achieving public schools their offspring attend, and that those failing schools eventually will improve.

Well, maybe Inland Southern Californias lowest-achieving public schools will somehow transmogrify into average- or even high-achieving schools. But it almost certainly wont happen in a school year (or five or 10 school years). In the meantime, the children attending those low-achieving public schools will be irreparably under-educated.

Thats why there is much public support for school choice, according to a December 2015 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed favored charter schools, while a similar ratio would allow parents to select any public school in their district.

School vouchers  allowing parents to enroll their children in private schools at public expense  did not elicit the same level of support, with roughly one-third favoring such a program.

But it very well may have if such vouchers were limited to lower-income parents of children attending low-achieving public schools, who havent the financial wherewithal to enroll their children in better-performing private schools.

We think it absurd for the NEA to suggest that school choice is but a smokescreen intended to destroy public education. Thats not the aim of those attending School Choice Week events in Inland Southern California. Its to bring this region closer to the day when the quality of education schoolchildren receive is not determined by their ZIP code.
Speaker to highlight Colorado River voyage

REDLANDS  Adventurer Bryan Brown will present a program, 100 Days on the Mighty Colorado River: a 2,400 Mile Solo Kayak Odyssey, at the Tuesday, Feb. 2 meeting of the San Gorgonio Chapter of the Sierra Club. Brown made the voyage from September to November of 2013.

The 7:30 p.m. meeting, open to the public, is at the San Bernardino County Museum, 2024 Orange Tree Lane. Parking and admission are free but donations are accepted for room rental.

Information: 951-686-4141, ralph.salisbury@sangorgonio.sierraclub.org or sangorgonio.sierraclub.org.

 Staff report

REGION  John Hine Temecula Subaru is the new major sponsor for Bark in the Park, an annual fundraising event benefiting the Live Oak Dog Park in Fallbrook. Proceeds pay for the maintenance of the off-leash area.

Bark in the Park will take place 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. March 19 at Live Oak Park, 2746 Reche Road.

 Staff report

REDLANDS  The San Bernardino County Museum will hold an opening reception for a new exhibit, Community Chronicles: Photographs by Henry Hooks, 3 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 31. Photographer Henry Hooks will be in attendance and the San Bernardino County Association of African American Employees choir will perform.

The exhibit records daily lives, social events and notable visitors in the San Bernardino area during the mid to late 20th century, according to a news release. The exhibit opens Feb. 2 and continues through Feb. 28.

The museum is at 2024 Orange Tree Lane.

Information: sbcountymuseum.org.

 Staff report

WILDOMAR  Sycamore Academy of Science and Cultural Arts will showcase student history projects to commemorate National School Choice Week at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28. A news release says students, parents, staff and faculty will be available to talk with visitors about the charter school.

The school address is 23151 Palomar St.

 Staff report

TEMECULA  Crossroads Church is inviting girls to a one-day conference designed to help them handle issues and challenges they may encounter. The conference, based on the book Miror Mirror by Diane Wilson, is 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30. There will be music, sessions, creativity centers, food and prizes.

The church is at 26090 Ynez Road, Suite A.

Information: 951-695-1123.

Students to compete in underwater robotics competition

RIVERSIDE  Navy JROTC cadets at Martin Luther King High School will host the inaugural Southern California SeaPerch Challenge on Saturday, Jan. 30. A news release says events include an obstacle course and a new orb challenge, which requires submersibles to capture balls of various sizes and relocate them to holding pens.

In addition, Navy recruiters will exhibit STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) displays and interactive exhibits. The news release says this is an opportunity for middle and high school students to learn what STEM fields are available to them.

The event begins at 8 a.m. at the swimming pool. The school is located at 9301 Wood Road.

 Staff report

Send items for possible inclusion in Community Notes to community@pressenterprise.com.
A months-long investigation into a human trafficking ring involving at least one minor girl led to the arrest of a man and woman from Twentynine Palms on Jan. 17.

Kevin Akins, 26, and Aubrei Wilson, 22, turned themselves in after being identified as suspects in the human trafficking ring, according to a San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department news release. They were both booked into jail on suspicion of trafficking of a minor.

The investigation began June 2015, when deputies responded to reports of a female juvenile who had been abandoned in the desert in Twentynine Palms.

During the investigation, deputies recognized the signs of human trafficking, the news release said. Deputies took immediate action and the juvenile was placed in a safe location.

The San Bernardino County Human Trafficking Task Force  a partnership between the Sheriffs Department and the District Attorneys Office  took over the investigation, and identified key people involved in the human trafficking ring.

Deputies identified several other victims and three adults were rescued from the trafficking ring, the news release said. Thats when Wilson and Akins were identified as the suspected traffickers.

The trafficking pair lured young females from areas as far as Ohio and Texas promising romantic relationships, the news release said. Once they arrived they were conditioned and made to work as prostitutes.

The task force, along with Homeland Security investigators served search warrants at six locations Sept. 29 in relation to the investigation. Those places in Twentynine Palms and Palm Desert were determined to be residences for the suspects, hotels and a brothel in a residential area.

Wilson and Akins avoided arrest at that time.

Police believe there may be additional victims of the human trafficking ring, and ask that anyone with information helpful to the case call investigators at 909-890-4840. Information can be relayed anonymously at 800-78-CRIME (27463) or at www.wetip.com.
Poor Miranda Devine. Can everybody, like, just take one fucking second to feel sorry for her?

I mean, FIRST Google has the audacity to acknowledge the First Australians on a day many mourn as Invasion Day, which is just reminding Miranda to her face that shes the product of two centuries of privilege.

And THEN, the leftist social engineers at the Australia Day Council bloody award Australian of the Year to former Army chief David Morrison.

This travesty of a selection has been rewarded for exposing our military to the warped ideas of  the left-feminist clique, when it SHOULD have gone to someone who hasnt spent years fighting for equality for Australias female soldiers.

Its like council are just trying to goad her, like theyre staring down the barrel of the camera and mouthing fuck you, Miranda right into her living room.





Its a disgrace, is what it is.

The aggrieved Miranda  whos just about had bloody enough of this  took to her Daily Telegraph column this morning to drop a few ~truth bombs~ about the award. She writes:





The Australian of the Year award has officially become a politically correct joke with the selection of former chief of Army David Morrison, the diminutive gender equity maven who believes military force achieves nothing. The award, which ought to reflect and unite this great nation, has evolved into a mere plaything of social engineers and reflects all of the unhealthy pre-occupations of the Left.



I weep.

The lucky recipients announced on Australia Day then spend a year lecturing the rest of us about how backward and awful we all are compared to their enlightened selves. From Adam Goodes to Rosie Batty and now Morrison, you would think we are an irredeemably racist, sexist nation in which every man is an incipient wife basher.

FFS guys. Why couldnt you have picked someone who took a look around Australia as it is right now, and gone looking good, looking pr-e-e-e-tty good. Its not like were ALL racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic and/or transphobic. Some of us benefit daily from the bountiful privileges of being white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, and cisgendered and just want to enjoy those privileges in peace, thanks all the fucking same.

Actually, why couldnt you have picked Miranda Devine as Australian of the Year? She is the real victim here.

Source: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH / SATANS SWEAT TOWEL.

Photo: As above.
SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

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The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces

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STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments

Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan

Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement

With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building

OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh

USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens

ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression
Hey, remember that time Tony Abbott said that thing about the Labor Party? That one about their internal division, and what unmitigated disasters their leadership changes were? How Australia couldnt possibly trust a party that wouldnt trust its own leaders?

Remember how he won an election on the back of those fears?

If former Minister For Defence Kevin Andrews latest jaunt to the U.S is anything to draw from, the stage is well and truly set for Tones & Co. to mount an irony-destroying coup of their own. Which is just swell.

Fairfax reports Andrews, who was banished to the Liberals backbench following the Turnbulls successful challenge, has taken notes from his compatriot Abbott and is jetting off to the States to deliver a chat to one of their right-wing thinktanks about Australias Global Security And Defence Challenges, which includes our continual role in the Middle East. Remember: hes no longer actually the Defence minister, and hes skipping out on the first session of Parliament to boot.

His speech to the Heritage Foundation, like Abbotts decision to give a talk on the sanctity of the traditional marriage, is notable for how much of a middle-finger it could send to the current Liberal leadership. The Foundation, for the record, are aaaaall about increased military involvement in the Middle East.Andrews is red-hot on it too, but the current head honchos have nixed sending more forces into Iraq and Syria.

ICYMI, The Project caught up with Turnbull last night to get his admittedly diplomatic take on all of these goings-on, saying Abbott is entitled to speak to such audiences as he wishes.

Of course, Ministers are allowed to talk with whoever they please, and having this sort of international show-and-tell of ideas between peak political bodies isnt inherently a bad thing. Still, after Andrews even set up a literal tea party with Abbott after his ousting, even Malcolms gotta recognise that somethings up.

The speech will be held in Washington D.C sometime this week. Somewhere else, Julia Gillard is ascending to peak schadenfreude.



Source: Fairfax.

Photo: Stefan Postles / Getty.
Grab that fluorescent jersey outta your cupboard, slip into your cleanliest jock-strap and drink a cup of concrete, because the HSBC Sydney 7s series is on its way to Straya, mates. PEDESTRIAN.TV is partnering with the Australian Rugby Union to give your inner Rugby-nut a sneaky look at the boys summer training regime ahead of the clashes. Sydneys Allianz Stadium will host the 45 matches played over the 6th and 7th of February; head to the HSBC Sydney 7s website HERE to book your tickets.

There arent many sports robuster than Rugby Sevens.

With only seven players per side (as opposed to the 15-player set up of traditional rugby), seven minutes per half, and two minute breaks in between Its a fast as feck game that demands its players be in their #cleanest and #meanest form.

We had a yarn with the Sydney 7s team captain and straight-up massive unit, Ed Jenkins, as well as the teams Sports Dietician, Peta Carige, about how the boys are #shreddingforsydney7s, and how we can adopt a few of these techniques to help banish our public holiday blowout bods.

 because lets face it, you probably over-indulged on food/booze this Straya day just gone.

As depressing as the follow information may be to your FreakShake-loving ears, take a deep breath in, and remember whats important here: trying to get a rig an eighth-as-fucking-impressive as these boys:

Leg day is nay skipped in Sydney 7s land.

We start by posing a hypothetical question to Peta.

Lets say a friend of a friend binged their dick off over the holiday break; the classic drank a million coldies and smoked more durries than heroic national icon Ciggy Butt Brain himself.

Whats the first thing they should do to get back on track?

1. Drink more water.

The best thing to do, and I know it sound boring (no one actually does it), is to make sure youre getting your eight glasses of water a day, at a minimum, to wash out all the bad stuff, Peta tells us.

And, as we know, water is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty.

Ed says he drinks at least three litres while training on field. On a training days, [the boys] can lose up to 2kg a session, through perspiration. Some of the guys lose 3  4kgs.

H20 = important.

2. Get some vegetables up ya.





The typical day-on-a-plate for a Sydney 7s player sounds a little like this:

A big arse breakfast, including eggs, toast and avocado. Some of the guys make big breakfast smoothies, with oats, fruits, milk and yogurt, Peta says. If theyre training early, theyll cop a snack afterwards, like tuna or a banana.

Lunch, you ask? Always lots of veggies, brown rice and a meat,. If the boys grab their own lunch, theyll get a big chicken and salad sanger.

They aim for a serving of three cups of veggies per night, with a lean meat. When asked what his fav vegetables are, Ed say hes probably the worst person to ask. Us too. If he had to pick a favourite it would be broccoli, though.





For all you non-athletes out there, adopting the three cups of veggies a night technique is a great way to banish your #constantcraving.





If youre eating that, you wont be able to fill up on anything bad at night time. The veggies have all the vitamins and fibres you need to detox. The bigger variety the better. I recommend a minimum of three different colours, for different vitamins and minerals. And always at least one green vegetable, says Peta.





~ KD Lang straight preaching the story of our lives ~

3. Cop it on the chin, old mate, and start training again.





This point works on the assumption that you were actually training before the Christmas break So lets just pretend this is 100% truth and continue.





You might be surprised to hear that it isnt just us non-muscular mortals that have trouble getting up in the morning to train. When we asked Ed if he ever has trouble finding motivation, he tells me of course.

That first Monday morning back, he says, we knew the schedule was quite brutal for that week so I can guarantee you I wasnt looking forward to getting out of bed that day.

Petas top tips for getting back into it?

Train in the morning. That way, you have no excuses to get out of it in the afternoon. (Peta is obviously not privy to our immaculate excuse techniques a la dog ate my alarm clock oops I slept in.)

(Peta is obviously not privy to our immaculate excuse techniques a la dog ate my alarm clock oops I slept in.) Do it with a friend. Peta says elite athletes are lucky, because theyre all in it together. They get back into things as a team, so theyve always got someone to lift them up if someone is having a bit of a bad day. If youre really struggling [which we will be] join in on some group exercise.

Strength, sweat and hip-swings in numbers, folks.

4. Lay off the turps, you filthy animals.





We know you probably like drankin. Whatever your chosen poison, it has probably been the biggest factor in preventing you from achieving your #riggoals. The Sydney 7s arent meant to drink during the season, so please, take a moment to commiserate our brothers in abstinence.

The biggest cause of weight gain over the Christmas period is from alcohol, Peta tells us. *Tugs collar feverishly*.

She recommends trying to reduce to having at least three alcohol free days per week, or cutting out altogether until you feel like youre back on track with nutrition and training.

Buuuuut, if you simply must get on the turps, but want to stay as clean as possible, choose wisely. Spirits, like vodka, lime soda, or scotch and soda: theyre consistent with the amount of alcohol in each drink, as opposed to beer and wine Its easier to keep track.

This point was the clincher though:

For every one shot of alcohol, youre looking at three-hundred kilojoules, which is the equivalent to one slice of bread. AND If you mix drinks, like vodka with coke Its like eating a slice of bread with butter on it.

^ You every Friday night, pretty much.

Try, try, try again.

Photo: Supplied.
Portrait of Turkish-American Genocide denialist

By Harut Sassounian Publisher, The California Courier www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com While Armenian-Americans closely follow the sinister efforts of Turkey and its lobbying firms, they rarely pay attention to a handful of Turkish-Americans who are either on the payroll of the Turkish government or blindly carry out propagandistic activities out of a misguided sense of patriotism! One such Turkish-American is Oya Bain who was described in a recent interview by the Turkish denialist website HistoryofTruth.com as one of the most active names in the Turkish American Diaspora. She is a Board Member of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), a coalition of 60 Turkic associations in the United States. Bain claims that after many years of ATAAs efforts in organizing lectures, conferences, programs about the false Armenian claims throughout the U.S., in 2015 [Armenian Genocide Centennial], the frequency and the intensity of such programs reached the highest number. She adds that there has been a significant increase in the number of serious scholars and academicians studying the Ottoman period during WWI objectively and publishing their findings without the Armenian threats and intimidation of the previous years. Curiously, Bain uses the wording, we have serious scholars, when naming denialist writers Ed Erickson, Michael Gunter, Guenter Lewy, Tal Buenos, Jeremy Salt, Norman Stone, Christopher Gunn, Maxime Gauin, and Pat Walsh. What exactly does Bain mean by saying, we have them? This phraseology is surely a kiss of death for any self-respecting scholar! Responding to a question regarding relations between Armenians and Turks in Washington, DC, Bain takes advantage of the opportunity to attack the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA): Yes, we have friends in the Armenian community. Turkish Armenians are warm, friendly and like us. Then, we face entities like ANCA, a relentlessly hostile and negative organization, prejudice, exaggerations and outright lies in the media, political circles, academia. She is also not too fond of my weekly columns: Just recently, an October 20, 2015 article by extremist writer Harut Sassounian was headlined as To Ban Genocide Denial, [European] Court Incites Armenians to Commit Violence. Closing her eyes to the millions of dollars spent every year by the Turkish government to manipulate politicians, journalists, authors, and so-called scholars, Bain exaggerates the measly budgets of ANCA and Armenian Assembly, falsely describing them as well-funded, have plush offices and large staff. It is definitely an industry. Bain proudly reports that the Turkish Caucus in the House of Representatives has grown from 62 in 2005 to 151 members. Acknowledging that money buys votes, as in the case of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, she asserts: We dont have as many votes as the Armenian and Greek communities, but we can provide financial and volunteer support. Bain lashes out at Senator Menendez and House members Pallone and Pelosi by describing them as die hard members [of Congress] who are very rigid and very antagonistic to Turks. As a seasoned propagandist, Bain states that her organization tries to win over - I would say fool - members of Congress by presenting to them a message of reconciliation with Armenia. As an example, she cites ATAAs support for the 2009 Armenian Turkish Protocols, especially the formation of an independent committee of objective historians to study the Armenian-Ottoman conflict. She conveniently forgets to mention that Turkey has persistently refused to ratify the Protocols! Acknowledging that ATAA was established in 1979 by Sukru Elekdag, then Turkish Ambassador to the United States, Bain inadvertently discloses ATAAs extensive political activities which violate the organizations non-profit status! She unwisely urges ATAA groups to get out of the harmful mindset that as 501-c-3 [non-profit] organizations they cannot be active politically. This attitude has seriously hampered our efforts to challenge the regional Armenian allegations. Complaints should be filed with the IRS to restrict or terminate ATAAs lobbying activities. ATAA may also be in violation of other US laws. Qualifying as excellent the relationship between ATAA and the Turkish Embassy in Washington DC, Bain acknowledges that successive Turkish Ambassadors in Washington have provided much support to ATAA, such as sponsoring many fabulous fund-raising events at the Embassy. She does not seem to realize that her self-aggrandizing revelations could land ATAA in legal trouble, requiring registration with the U.S. Department of Justice as a foreign agent. In her concluding remarks, Bain accuses the American media of bias, suppression of any good news of Turkey, subtle discrimination. She then adds: The media bias became much worse during April 24, 2015, the centenary of the Armenian claims. It will probably take another 100 years to reverse and correct the misconceptions. Bain vainly hopes that in the next 100 years the Armenian lies and propaganda will be purged and a balanced view of the Turkish Armenian tragedy will emerge, respecting the suffering and death of both peoples during 1915. I think the Armenian tragedy is now so debased by vulgar propaganda that it cannot get lower. One wishes that the Internet may eventually be cleansed of the garbage of wrong information about the Armenian claims. I am hopeful about the next 100 years. The tide is turning around. It is imperative that Armenians counter the lobbying campaigns of not only the Turkish government but also Lone Wolves like Oya Bain, without overstepping the bounds of civility and legality!
Why did Armenia fail to thwart the second resolution at PACE? (video)

Advocates of caviar diplomacy back Azerbaijans views, a senior Republican lawmaker said on January 27 speaking about yesterdays vote on two anti-Armenian resolutions at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). On January 27, the Strasbourg-based body voted 70 to 66 to reject the resolution Rise in Violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and Other Occupied Territories of Azerbaijanby British parliamentarian Robert Walter. At the same time, PACE passed the other controversial document drafted by Bosnia and Herzegovina representative Milica Markovic. The resolution entitled Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water, received 98 votes in favor and 71 votes against at the Assemblys plenary session on Tuesday. We managed to stop PACE from passing one of the most dangerous resolutions [for Armenia], Gagik Minasyan told media representatives today. In reply to A1+s question why the Armenian delegates failed to thwart the other resolution, the head of the Standing Committee on Financial-Credit and Budgetary Affairs of the Armenian National Assembly, said, We worked equally on both resolutions. The second resolution was more humanitarian and focused on social issues. It said that people living in the neighbourhood of Sarsang Reservoir had been deprived of water for many decades, and naturally, our chances of success were small.
Karabakh MFA: Use of Sarsang Reservoir is sovereign right of Karabakh people

According to all norms of international law, the use of the Sarsang Reservoir, which is located in the territory of Karabakh, was and will be the sovereign right of the Karabakh people, which cannot be violated by any resolution, Deputy FM of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) Armine Aleksanyan told News.am. She positively assessed the fact that the PACE deputies didnt adopt the report by the British MP Robert Walter entitled Escalation of Violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and Other Occupied Territories of Azerbaijan. This is indicative of the fact that PACE has supporters of common sense, who understand the responsibility and seriousness of the moment, Aleksanyan said. The Deputy FM also stressed: PACE actually acknowledged that the issues on the settlement of the conflict are outside its jurisdiction. The issue should be considered only in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group. At the same time, Aleksanyan expressed concern over the fact that the PACE deputies didnt manifest the same political maturity during the voting on the resolution regarding Sarsang Reservoir.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've got our next Blac Chyna bombshell: she's expecting a baby with Rob Kardashian.

For the uninitiated, Chyna's pregnancy  which she revealed just two weeks after posing alongside her proclaimed "lil sis" Kylie Jenner on Snapchat  might seem like no big deal.

If that was the case and you didn't bat an eye at the news that the Kardashians allegedly were the ones to leak the news, then you probably need a refresher on the Chyna/Kardashian/Jenner drama, which imploded back in January when Rob, 29, and Chyna, 27, went public with their relationship.

Let's start at the beginning, though, and get to the bottom of why exactly everyone is talking about a woman named Blac Chyna  whose real name, in case you wondering, is Angela White. Here's a recap of her long and tumultuous history with the Kardashian-Jenner women, which begins with a rapper named Tyga, 26.

It all started when Chyna starred in Tyga's "Rack City" music video in 2011. They began dating in November of that year, posed for the cover of Urban Ink magazine a few months later, and welcomed their son, King Cairo Stevenson, in October 2012. They were engaged shortly afterward but broke it off by August 2014.

At the time, Tyga  who had been hanging out with Kylie  claimed it wasn't because of Kylie, tweeting: "DONT BELIEVE THE RUMORS, BEEN FRIENDS WITH THE FAMILY FOREVER. WERE ALL JUST FRIENDS."

Indeed, he was good friends with the Kardashian-Jenner crew and even attended Kim Kardashian's May 2014 wedding to Kanye West with Chyna, who also happened to be close pals with Kim herself.

Rumors about Tyga and Kylie, however, continued to swirl as the two spent more and more time together in the months that followed. (This was also around the time Kim and Chyna's friendship started to fizzle.)

At this point, Chyna's BFF Amber Rose  who, by the way, also happens to be Kanye's ex  decided to get involved, going on Power 105.1's The Breakfast Club in February 2015 and slamming Tyga and Kylie for their (at the time) rumored relationship.

"Kylie's a baby," Rose said. "She needs to go to bed at 7 o'clock and relax. It's ridiculous. Tyga should be ashamed of himself. That's how I feel, for sure. He has a beautiful woman and a baby that he left for a 16-year-old who just turned 17."

Then Kylie's sister Khloe Kardashian got involved, sparking what would become a massive Twitter feud.

" 'I was a stripper since I was 15 years old,' Amber Rose told Foxx," Khloe tweeted, quoting an old Rose interview in which she divulged her past job. "Please don't worry about my sister who has a career and her s--- together at ONLY 17. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," she continued, adding: "Please stop talking about us in interviews mama. None of us talk about you."

"[There are] 3 sides to EVERY story. His, hers and the truth. I'm not passing judgment but I wish others would do the same until they have FACTS," she concluded.

In response to Khloe's barrage of tweets, Rose simply tweeted back with the hashtag "#DontPanic," which is the title of a song by Khloe's boyfriend at the time, French Montana, for which Khloe starred in the music video.

(Rose eventually went on to apologize for the spat, but by the way, that wasn't the first time she feuded with the famous family  in 2012, she alleged to Star magazine: "Kim is one of the main reasons me and Kanye are not together. She's a homewrecker! They were both cheating on me and Reggie [Bush] with each other.")

Just a few days after Rose gave her interview, Tyga went on the same radio show and said he and Kylie weren't dating and didn't leave his family to be with Kylie. Three short days later, Kanye also went on The Breakfast Club and essentially blew Tyga's cover by saying Tyga was "smart" to get with Kylie.

Finally, a month later (we're in March 2015 now) Tyga seemed to confirm he was dating Kylie by posting an Instagram of her with the caption: "Certain things catch your eye, but only few capture the heart." (Oh, and he also got a "Kylie" tattoo at some point.)

In the months since  and particularly after Kylie turned 18 in August  the duo became much more open about their relationship, regularly stepping out together, making out on Snapchat and even starring in two of Tyga's music videos together.

Meanwhile, there was no love lost between Tyga and Chyna: the rapper lashed out at his ex in a since-deleted post on Instagram in September for allegedly spreading rumors that he couldn't afford the Ferrari he bought Kylie for her 18th birthday.

That just about catches us up to this January: Though Tyga and Kylie went through a rough patch in late 2015 (spending lots of time apart after the rapper was hit with cheating allegations in January), the two are very much still going strong.

This brings us to the Rob Kardashian connection, and why Kylie and the rest of her famous family were less than pleased when they found out Rob and Chyna were dating. ("Kylie is livid," a source told PEOPLE when news of the relationship broke. "She feels super betrayed and can't understand why someone in her own family would stab her in the back like that.")

Of course, then Rob and Chyna went ahead and got engaged, and not a single Kardashian-Jenner publicly acknowledged the news for nearly a month  up until two weeks ago, when Kylie and Chyna decided to throw everyone into a legitimate frenzy by oh-so-casually hanging out on Snapchat.

"When we've been best friends the whole time" Kylie captioned the mirror selfie.

Oh, and they also face swapped, because, you know, it's Snapchat. Welcome to the family, Chyna.
New urgent care, family practice opens in Petoskey

Bay Street Urgent Care and Family Practice opened in Petoskey in early September and has seen high demand for services ever since.
Freedom House: Armenia is under Russias negative influence

Armenia is in a very difficult region in terms of human rights protection, Arch Puddington, senior vice president for research at Freedom House, told the VoA Armenian Service. Presenting the findings of the Freedom in the World 2016, a flagship annual report by the independent watchdog organization, he said, Armenia is surrounded by countries, such as Azerbaijan and Russia that have a very rigid authoritarian system. It is very difficult for democrats to function in such surroundings. In 2015, Armenia was recognized a partly free country, with not free media but free Internet. Speaking about Armenias unchanging partly free status in recent years, Arch Puddington accounted it for the pressure and negative influence of Russia as a result of which Armenia preferred the Eurasian Economic Union to the European Union. Armenias leadership feels that they cannot challenge Russia because the latter will treat Armenia the same way as it treated Ukraine and will make the country ungovernable and organize a coup, the Freedom House official said. Mr Puddington noted that ever since its independence in 1991, Armenia has actually been a semi-democratic country where different forces participated in elections but the winning political force always curbed civil society and prevented its development and restricted freedoms. Though the pressure by the ruling political force in Armenia was not as extreme as in Azerbaijan, it is enough to obstruct the emergence of a strong opposition and oversee the countrys politics, he added. Armenia, Georgia and Turkey were recognized as partly free countries while the other countries in the region were recognized not free.
Petrobras gas unit stake sale to Mitsui is blocked by Brazil court





Japan-based Mitsu agreement with Petrobras for partial acquisition of shares in the latter's natural gas distribution unit Petrobras Gas (Gaspetro) was blocked by court.

RIO DE JANEIRO

Petroleumworld.com 01 27 2016

A Brazilian court blocked the 1.9-billion-real ($469 million) sale of a 40 percent stake in a natural gas unit of Petroleo Brasileiro SA to Japan's Mitsui & Co, throwing up a roadblock to the state-led oil company's efforts to cut debt by selling assets.

Judge Paulo Piropo de Abreu of the Federal Regional Tribunal in Bahia said in a ruling on Monday he issued the injunction out of concern the sale was not conducted with the transparency required by the country's public tender laws.

This could hide corrupt practices damaging to Petrobras, as the company is known, and harm public finances, he said. Piropo de Abreu said Petrobras' involvement in a corruption scandal and its move to sell $15.1 billion of assets by the end of the year required him to prevent any final sale of the Gaspetro stake until it faces a full, independent and public review.

"The time has arrived for the Judiciary to define if Petrobras is following the same practices in its sale of assets (as it has in the past)," the judge wrote. "These being: sales without public tenders, secret negotiations, suspicion of price-fixing, (and) with strong suspicion of illegality."

Petrobras has said it plans to speed up efforts to sell oilfields, fertilizer, refining and other units to raise cash to pay down $130 billion of debt, the largest of any oil company.

Rio de Janeiro-based Petrobras has released little information about the assets it is selling. Gaspetro, whose sale was agreed last year, was the only major deal done so far and raised less than 4 percent of the total asset-sale goal.

The judge's ruling also blocks Mitsui from executing control over gas distribution activities related to the sale and orders Petrobras and Mitsui to turn over all sale-related documents within five days.

Mitsui declined to comment. Petrobras said it had not been informed of the decision and will take necessary legal action when it is. It said the sale was entirely legal.

The injunction against the sale is the second in two months. On Dec. 3, Brazil's state of Bahia won an injunction against the sale on concern that it may reduce its control of Bahiagas, a state-controlled natural gas utility.

Bahia withdrew its case just before Christmas after Petrobras and Mitsui assured the state of its continued control of Bahiagas. Gaspetro and Mitsui are both partners in Bahiagas.

($1 = 4.05 Brazilian reais)






The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has issued final recommendations endorsing National Health Service use of new therapies for ovarian cancer, multiple myeloma and prostate cancer, but rejecting one for gastric cancer.

AstraZenecas Lynparza (olaparib) has won backing as a maintenance treatment for patients with relapsed platinum-sensitive ovarian, fallopian tube and peritoneal cancer.

The drug targets cancers in adults testing positive for the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, and whose disease has responded to platinum-based chemotherapy.

NICE has stipulated that Lynparza should be available for people only if they have had three or more courses of platinum-based chemotherapy, and that its cost for those who remain on treatment after 15 months is met by the company.

Meanwhile, the Institute also recommended Bayers Xofigo (radium 223 dichloride) as an option for treating adults with hormone relapsed prostate cancer, but only in those who: have previously received docetaxel treatment; are experiencing symptoms from the disease spreading to their bones; and have no signs of cancer in any other organ.

The drug is a radiopharmaceutical agent that delivers alpha-radiation to cancer that has spread to the bone without affecting the patients healthy bone marrow. Its recommendation is also dependent on the patient access scheme discount (PAS) agreed as part of the appraisal.

Bayer previously noted that, if the therapy is removed from Englands Cancer Drugs Fund, Scotland will remain the only country in which NHS patients can access Xofigo before they have been treated with chemotherapy.

Sticking with prostate cancer, Astellas Xtandi (enzalutamide) was also green-lighted for NHS use to treat metastatic hormone-relapsed forms of the disease in patients who have no or mild symptoms after androgen deprivation treatment has stopped working, and before chemotherapy is needed.

NICE described the drug as a well-tolerated treatment that delays chemotherapy (which it recognised as being valuable to patients) and improves survival, found to be cost-effective when provided through the agreed PAS.

Elsewhere, Novartis Farydak (panobinostat) can be routinely prescribed as a possible treatment for people with multiple myeloma, if they have had at least two prior therapies (including bortezomib and an immunomodulatory agent).

The decision, which marks a u-turn from an original rejection that was overturned after the consultation process, is conditional on the continued provision of the agreed PAS.

Farydak is the first cancer medicine to target enzymes known as histone deacetylases, offering a novel mechanism of action different from other MM treatments on the market, and was shown in trials to boost progression-free survival by around 7.8 months versus treatment with Velcade/dexamethasone alone.

On the downside, the cost watchdog issued a final no for Lillys Cyramza (ramucirumab) as a treatment for patients with metastatic stomach cancer or this with cancer that develops at the point where the food pipe joins to the stomach.

The independent appraisal committee concluded that the drug does not provide enough benefit to patients to justify its high cost and did not qualify for end of life considerations.

The most plausible incremental cost effectiveness ratio for Cyramza compared with best standard care was calculated to be 188,100 per QALY gained, so far above normal value for money benchmarks.
Cost regulators have approved the routine use of Boehringer Ingelheims Ofev as a treatment for some patients with the lung-scarring disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis on the NHS in England and Wales.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has issued final guidelines allowing the drug to be considered for IPF patients with a forced vital capacity between 50% and 80% of predicted, but only if it is provided with the discount agreed in the patient access scheme.

The Institute has also stipulated that treatment should be stopped if the disease progresses in any 12 month period.

IPF is thought to be diagnosed in around 5,000 UK patients every year. The potentially fatal disease causes damage and scarring to the tissue surrounding the small airways in the lungs, leading to symptoms such as breathlessness and cough, which, without treatment, steadily worsen over time.

Ofev (nintedanib) was approved for IPF in Europe back in January, on the back of Phase III data showing that it slowed disease progression through a 50% reduction in lung function decline over a year across.

The drug is also marketed for the treatment of lung cancer, under the brand name Vargatef.
Epress.am: Human Rights Watch Concerned by Armenias Human Rights Situation

Armenias human rights record remained uneven in 2015, with serious concerns related to the governments interference in freedom of assembly. Other concerns include media freedom, poor prison conditions, including overcrowding and ill-treatment, and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today in its 26th annual World Report 2016. Firstly, the report mentions the ruling Republican party-initiated referendum on constitutional amendments held in Armenia in December, 2015, envisaging the country's transition from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary system. Some critics said the amendments are intended to allow the party to remain in power, although the Council of Europes Venice Commission said that the draft constitution was 'in line with international standards.' Following the referendum, some domestic and international observers reported allegations of large-scale vote-buying, ballot box stuffing, and intimidation and violence against observers, the authors write. Below is HRW's review of the human rights situation in Armenia in 2015: Freedom of Assembly Authorities in several cases interfered with freedom of assembly in 2015, including by force. Some protestors faced violence. In September, Smbat Hakobian, of the Alliance of Freedom Fighters, an independent group critical of the government, was savagely beaten by several men he did not know, after a protest march. On June 19, hundreds gathered in central Yerevan to protest a proposed 17 percent hike in electricity tariffs in round-the-clock demonstrations dubbed Electric Yerevan. On June 22, demonstrators marched toward the presidential palace and, after police blocked them, occupied a central avenue until early June 23, when police issued warnings and then used water cannons to disperse the protest. Police officials told media that at least 25 people, including 11 police officers, were injured. Several protesters sought medical assistance. Activists and media reported that police attacked and detained numerous reporters, in some cases, smashing or confiscating cameras and deleting photos and videos of the events. Police detained more than 200 demonstrators and held them for most of the day before releasing them without charge. In at least two cases, police refused access to lawyers. By evening, thousands gathered on the avenue to protest police actions. Police did not interfere. Many stayed until the police cleared them without incident on July 6. After an internal inquiry into the July 23 incidents, one officer was demoted and eight received reprimands for failure to demonstrate restraint. A criminal investigation into police conduct was ongoing, and no one had been charged at time of writing. Authorities eventually dropped a criminal investigation into hooliganism regarding the protests. Police forcibly dispersed another peaceful protest against the rate increase on September 11, temporarily detaining approximately 50 protesters. On April 7, Yerevan police arrested five members of the opposition movement Founding Parliament, including Chairman Garegin Chukaszyan, and Jirair Sefilyan, Varuzhan Avestisyan, Pavel Manukyan, and Gevorg Safaryan. The group had received permission to hold a rally in Yerevan on April 24, the 100-year anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Authorities charged the men with planning a mass disturbance, after searching their homes and office and seizing wooden bats, kitchen knives, a stun gun, and a publicly available pamphlet, as well as their laptops and flags. On April 10, a Yerevan court remanded all five to pretrial custody, but on May 4, the prosecutor general released them pending the investigation. In 2015, appeals courts upheld the verdicts against controversial opposition leader Shant Harutyunyan and 13 of his supporters, who were arrested in 2013 after clashes with police during an attempted march on the presidential administration in Yerevan. [...] On September 15, a Yerevan court sentenced Hayk Kyureghyan to nine years in prison for shooting air pistols to protest the 2014 trial of Harutyunyan and his supporters. Many local activists consider the sentence disproportionate, and retaliation for Kyureghyans political views." Freedom of Expression Authorities continue to curtail media pluralism, and impunity for attacks on journalists, including by the police, remains the rule. The Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression reported that if the law on television and radio remains unchanged, provisions will take effect in January 2016 limiting each region to one television station, and at least 10 stations will have to close. The committee documented 19 cases of violence against journalists in 2015, including 13 during the June Electric Yerevan protests, and, aside from the reprimands noted above, reported that no one was held responsible for any of the attacks." Torture and Ill-Treatment in Custody Despite new guidelines issued to law enforcement officers, human rights groups reported that torture and ill-treatment in custody remain serious problems in pretrial and post-conviction facilities, especially to coerce confessions. Some victims do not file complaints, fearing investigations will not be effective. Impunity for torture remains a key concern. The Armenian Helsinki Association reported that, in April and August, appeals courts in Yerevan upheld Aik Agamalyans 10-year prison sentence for murder. Authorities refused to investigate claims that investigators tortured and ill-treated Agamalyan, 16 at the time of his arrest in 2013, and his relatives to coerce a confession. According to the Helsinki Citizens Assembly Vanadzor, a human rights monitoring group, in May, a woman in Yerevan rebuffed a police officer who whistled at her. Four officers handcuffed her and took her to the station, where they insulted and ill-treated her for three hours. A forensic exam revealed bruises and psychological distress. Her appeal of the Special Investigation Services decision to dismiss her complaint was under court review at time of writing. She was charged with insulting an officer. Authorities opened an investigation into allegations that some witnesses were pressured to testify against Karen Kurngurtsev, whose murder trial was ongoing at time of writing, but refused to investigate Kurngurtsevs allegations that police ill-treated him after his arrest in 2013." Military Service Although Armenia has taken significant steps to correct long-standing problems with military service, including by providing for alternative service for conscientious objectors, Armenian rights groups reported that violence among conscripts and a high number of non-combat deaths remain concerns." Palliative Care Armenia continues to discuss reforming its complicated and time-consuming prescription and procurement procedures for opioid medications. A national action plan on palliative care remained pending for more than a year at time of writing. Current regulations obstruct the delivery of adequate palliative care, condemning most terminally ill patients to unnecessary suffering. Tight police controls on injectable opioids and restrictive policies on procurement, prescription, and disbursement are inconsistent with many of the World Health Organizations recommendations on palliative care." Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Activists reported that LGBT people continue to face discrimination, harassment, and physical violence. The government has not addressed hate speech or discrimination against LGBT people. Gender identity and sexual orientation are not included in anti-discrmination or hate speech laws, limiting legal recourse for many crimes against LGBT people. On October 17-18, the LGBT rights group PINK Armenia held the first Armenian forum to discuss problems faced by LGBT people. An article about the event and a photograph of participants posted on PINK Armenias website and re-posted by various media outlets, received a slew of homophobic comments and threats in social media, including calls to burn and kill the forum participants. PINK Armenia filed a complaint with the Prosecutors Office to investigate the threats. PINK Armenia reported that five men attacked two transgender sex workers in a Yerevan park in August, causing serious injuries, including brain trauma. The victims attempted to seek assistance from security officers, who refused to help them. In April, an appeals court rejected the appeal by 16 plaintiffs whose lawsuits against the Iravunq newspaper were dismissed by a court in October 2014. Iravunq had published several online articles calling for LGBT people and activists to be excluded from public life and for their families to shun them. One article included a blacklist of 60 such people, with links to their social media sites. The newspaper refused to publish a retraction." Womens Rights Following her April visit, Anne Brasseur, president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, called for immediate action to combat violence against women and domestic violence, echoing the March report by the councils human rights commissioner. Despite evidence that violence against women remains common, Armenia has no law criminalizing domestic violence and has not become a party to the Council of Europes Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence."
There is no military solution to the NK issue: Serzh Sargsyan receives EU official

On January 27, Serzh Sargsyan received Herbert Salber, EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia. The President welcomed the guest and congratulated on the extension of his mandate. Serzh Sargsyan expressed hope that Mr. Salber will do his best in the framework of his mandate - to establish trust between the warring parties in the region, which will be conducive for the efforts aimed at the peaceful resolution of the conflict. Serzh Sargsyan stressed the importance of maintaining by the EU of its balanced position and implementation of the commitment to create an atmosphere which would be favorable for the comprehensive resolution of the issue. The EU Special Representative assured that the European Union is interested in a speedy and peaceful resolution and is eager, within the scope of its abilities, to promote the resolution of the issue, supporting efforts of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group which is dealing with the issue. Mr. Salber noted that it is the only agreed upon and acceptable format. The parties spoke also about the recent developments in the NK peace negotiations conducted in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group, current situation and possibilities of registering progress. The President of Armenia introduced the position of the Armenian side. Serzh Sargsyan and Herbert Salber exchanged views on the avenues that the EU can use to assist the peaceful resolution of the conflict. The parties stressed once again that there is no military solution to the NK issue and said it can solved based on the compromise which would meet the interests of the conflicting parties and will be acceptable for them.
The advocacy group CeaseFirePA called Monday for supporters to thank Comcast Corp. for "standing up to the gun lobby" after the cable giant demanded that the National Rifle Association edit one of its ads for the Pennsylvania outdoors show in Harrisburg in February.

But an NRA spokesman said the gun-lobbying group conceded only to a minor edit of a 30-second TV advertisement after Comcast retreated from its initial demand that it remove all images of guns, handguns, and shooting ranges from two TV ads.

"We made a concession once Comcast backed down," NRA spokesman Jeremy Greene said Monday.

The edit involved removing a segment of children at a shooting range, the NRA and Comcast said.

A Comcast Spotlight spokeswoman said the depiction of children with guns violates its advertising guidelines, which reflect industry standards.

The NRA runs the Great American Outdoor Show, scheduled for Feb. 6 to 14 at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex, one of the largest hunting, fishing and camping shows in the nation.

The NRA has budgeted $85,000 in TV ads in central Pennsylvania to promote the show, he said.

CeaseFirePA, which seeks to reduce gun violence, asked supporters in a tweet Monday to sign letters that will be presented to Comcast. The group also sent emails to supporters.

"There are not a lot of times that people can thank their cable company," Shira Goodman, executive director of the Philadelphia nonprofit, said Monday.

bfernandez@phillynews.com

215-854-5897

@bobfernandez1
Activists to Police: Why are you elbowing and pushing citizens? /updated/ (video)

Police officers gathered at Liberty Square are not allowing the New Armenia opposition group to put up a large umbrella at the square though the activists have shown them the Municipalitys permission to conduct an awareness campaign there. Do not talk to me with your hands, I know the laws (in Armenia), a policeman told the group. We are not erecting a tent, we are putting up an umbrella, the activists said in reply. The police are showing arbitrariness. We have the impression that the police are afraid of the campaign, said Gagik Yeghiazaryan, a member of the Founding Parliament movement. The activists continually urged the police to act within the realm of their powers while the police said there had been precedents of unlawful actions. Why are you elbowing the citizens? If we speak about precedents, then police officers were to be shot dead long ago, the activists said. I officially announce that [the chief of the Armenian Police] Vladimir Gasparyan is a liar. He says they have reformed the police system but it is not so. Why do you prevent us from holding a campaign sanctioned by the Municipality? the group said. Negotiations are continuing between the activists and the police. After long negotiations, the activists finally put up an umbrella at the square.
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HOME // Episode 2: East Side Adventure with Bryn Atkinson and Jill Kintner

Episode 2:

Series Description:

Jill and Bryn pack up the Sprinter for a weekend adventure to Washington's east side. The destination is Angels Staircase, a 23-mile trail that loops through the Methow Valley and climbs more than 5,000 vertical feet. Topping out at just over 8,000 feet, it's the highest singletrack in the state and has the extraordinary views to prove it. This being a "" weekend and all, the two opt for a smaller loop around Eagle Lakes before returning to the van for some much-deserved tacos and camp vibes. is a term that has a very solid meaning, yet the concept itself has a very loose structure. Home is a place. Home is people. Home is a trail. Bryn Atkinson and Jill Kintner recently moved to Bellingham, Washington, where all of these aspects converge into a community that matches their own passion for riding. Some things about their new locale might take some getting used to -- but its all these elements together that make it what it is: home.Continue the story in Freehub Magazine Issue 6.4 . Pinkbike readers save 40% on subscriptions.: Sam Saimo @Bryn-Atkinson / @jk33




INSIDE



ROSE BIKES





WORDS AND PHOTOS: MATT WRAGG



At the heart of any business like this are logistics - everything that Rose sells comes in and out of this building. That means it all has to be processed on arrival, warehoused, then sent back out again when the time is right. That may sound like common sense, but when you throw the thousands of bikes that Rose sell every year, plus their online bike shop, you start to understand the scale of the task at hand.

Rose use something called chaotic warehousing - the items stored are kept in no particular order, but are meticulously tagged for their computer system to remember where each part is kept. When it comes times to fulfill an order the computer then plots the most efficient route to collect the parts on the order. Yet fittingly for Rose, it is a system that relies on people, rather than processes and machines.

The warehouse is split in two - one side is for the online shop, the other is for the components that will go on to form their complete bikes. Unlike any other bike company, Rose do not have stock builds, the customer can specify the spec they want on their bike. That means they keep some seriously niche parts in stock - there aren't many bike companies who offer builds from the factory with Tune's ultra-rare and expensive hubs, for instance.

Busy as it may be, the assembly area in Rose doesn't feel like a factory, more like a giant-scale version of the workshop in your local bike shop.

When it comes time to start assembling a bike the first step is quality control. As the frame is pulled from the inventory it is meticulously checked by a technician. This is a theme that will follow the bike throughout its assembly - at each stage there are people involved, checking and rechecking.

At the first assembly station the cable outers and hoses are run through the frame and the hardware like headset cups, shocks, and seat post clamps are mounted.

The one part of production that does feel like a factory is the wheel building section. All of Rose's custom wheels are built here in house - they are very proud of the tolerances, claiming their wheels are true to a tolerance of just 0.2mm. The one part of production that does feel like a factory is the wheel building section. All of Rose's custom wheels are built here in house - they are very proud of the tolerances, claiming their wheels are true to a tolerance of just 0.2mm.

The wheels and the frame are joined at the next stage - along with the majority of the components and it begins to truly take shape as a bicycle rather than a collection of parts.

Final assembly is done by a highly trained team. To be allowed to finish a bike unsupervised you need to pass a formal qualification to become a master mechanic, which takes two years of study to attain. While mechanics are studying for the qualification they are allowed to work assembling the bikes, but all of their work is then checked by one of the qualified master mechanics. This is also where customers bikes come when they are sent back for service and repairs. This is where the bike shop DNA is most apparent, with the personalized workstations, the lack of a structured production line and meticulous attention to detail at every stage, it does not feel like mass-production. For the people working here, the experience is clearly very different too - it is about people who understand bikes assembling them for their customer, rather than a series of processes which is what you find in most large scale bike manufacturers. Final assembly is done by a highly trained team. To be allowed to finish a bike unsupervised you need to pass a formal qualification to become a master mechanic, which takes two years of study to attain. While mechanics are studying for the qualification they are allowed to work assembling the bikes, but all of their work is then checked by one of the qualified master mechanics. This is also where customers bikes come when they are sent back for service and repairs. This is where the bike shop DNA is most apparent, with the personalized workstations, the lack of a structured production line and meticulous attention to detail at every stage, it does not feel like mass-production. For the people working here, the experience is clearly very different too - it is about people who understand bikes assembling them for their customer, rather than a series of processes which is what you find in most large scale bike manufacturers.

Once it is assembled there is one final check before the bike is sent out, a final quality control - every aspect of the bike is inspected, then signed off and sent to the customer.
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San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has requested a federal investigation of the police shooting of a young black man, along with a broader look into the department, reports the Associated Press.

Lee asked for the probe of the Mario Woods shooting in a letter to U.S. Attorney Gen. Loretta Lynch that was made public Monday.

The letter said Lee is "inviting transparency and accountability" in the department.

"We seek answers, not just to the facts of Mr. Woods's case," Lee said, "but also answers about how as a Police Department and a City we can build deeper, stronger trust between law enforcement and the communities they're sworn to protect."

Many, including Woods' family, had urged the mayor to ask for the probe, and Lee was joined in the request by city supervisors London Breed and Malia Cohen.
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Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders met with President Obama at the White House and afterwards debunked the media speculation that Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton in a recent interview.

According to The Hill:



There was some discussion the other day about a Politico interview where he was tipping the scales towards Secretary Clinton. I dont believe that at all, the Vermont senator told reporters after a 45-minute Oval Office meeting.

The senator noted that Obama campaigned for him during his race for Senate in 2006.

In 2008, I did my best to see that he would be elected president, campaigned hard for him, as I did in 2012, he said.

Sanders said he did not ask for Obamas endorsement during the meeting.

I think he and the vice president have tried to be fair and even-handed in the process and I expect they will continue to be that way, he said.

Sen. Sanders was correct. The Obama endorsement of former Sec. of State Clinton was a media creation. The President qualified his remarks about each Democratic candidate by saying that he knew Hillary Clinton better because she had served in his administration.

Obama reminded Democrats that the real contrast isnt between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. According to the President, the most important contrast is between the Democratic candidates and what candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are campaigning on.

During the Politico interview, the President said, So, to me, the relevant contrast is not between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but relevant contrast is between Bernie and Hillary and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and the vision that theyre portraying for the country and where they want to take us and how they think about everything from tax policy to immigration to foreign policy, and that gap is as wide as Ive ever seen. You know, you think about it.

The media doesnt bother to pay attention to what the President actually said. They are busy creating these false narratives about an Obama Democratic primary endorsement that doesnt exist. President Obama and Vice President Biden have been very even handed.

The biggest priority of the current occupant of the Oval Office is to get a Democrat elected in 2016. He doesnt care which Democrat. What is important is that the country is not run by Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders has once again busted the corporate press for making things up.
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Republicans are just starting to admit the danger their party is in, but they havent hit on the proper reasons yet.

In an effort to avoid looking inward, Republicans are blaming Sarah Palin for Donald Trump.

Nicolle Wallace, a former senior adviser to McCain/Palin in their 2008 campaign, wrote a scathing piece at the New York Times  Sarah Palin, Rage Whisperer, in which she blames Palin for Trump, Mr. Trump has now usurped and vastly expanded upon Ms. Palins constituency, but the connection between the two movements is undeniable.

This tortured piece holds Palin responsible for wrapping herself in the rage of the voters, Her legacy lies in her innate ability to wrap herself in the anger that those voters felt. The gist of it is that Palin stoked rage and turned the Tea Party against the establishment and now they have Trump.

So lets start off here. Sarah Palin isnt new to the Republican Party and they picked her for a reason. To deny this seems disingenuous but perhaps it speaks more to the desperate levels of denial that intellectual Republicans will go to in order to avoid facing what has become of their party.

Republicans picked Palin because she spoke to the base and because she was allegedly what they call pro-life. She was a great image  fierce and beautiful while leading the great state of Alaska (she was actually the most socialist governor of all the states but Im talking about her image not reality), and the party needed an image.

All politicians need an image to really resonate, but when youre coming off of the partys denial of their weapons of mass destruction lies that led to an invasion of a sovereign country that then contributed in large part to the power vacuum that gave rise to ISIL, well, its best to wrap yourself in the flag and lofty talk of freedom whilst ducking away from serious discussions that would require an ounce of intellectual honesty.

In the 2008 campaign, the GOP was hit with their denial of the financial crisis, which came to a head days after McCain promised everyone all was well, culminating in the Bush Great Recession. People lost their life savings and then were asked to bail out the rich. Who was pushing the Wall Street bailout? That was the Republican Party, when Bush was still in office. Bailing out too big to fail banks should have been a clue that the party was no longer the party of real capitalism. The Republican Party allowed itself to be trapped between its subservience to corporate money and the growing extremism of the far right. The tent was shrinking.

If it wasnt small enough due to their mismanagement of the economy or Iraq, there was always the Republican ideology on display in the clustermuck that was the administrations failed response to Katrina, remnants of which can be seen currently in Michigan under Republican Governor Rick Snyders response to the Flint water crisis.

I could go on, but Republicans know all of this already. They have just chosen to ignore it.

They were and are in the position of selling hate to cover for their denial of climate change and trickle down promises in subservience to corporations. Republicans must sell hate to people who dont know they are being manipulated, or no one but the 2% will vote for them.

This is why they picked Sarah Palin. So to blame Sarah Palin, whose hatred they used and let harm innocent people, is the height of hypocrisy. Sarah Palin was but a symptom that something was very wrong with the Republican Party. Ive been saying this since 2009, when I first started covering politics.

Liberals get annoyed by coverage of Sarah Palin, not understanding that she represents what the Republican Party has become. She is an excellent branding mechanism for what ails the GOP.

Ms. Wallace romanced the moment when Senator John McCain corrected a woman in his crowd who called now President Obama an Arab, saying, This interaction will go down as one of the finest moments from one of the countrys finest men. Really? President Obama says things like this on a weekly basis at the very least. Why is it that when a Republican manages to work up an ounce of political courage to stand up for reality members of the party swoon and cling?

Perhaps its because Republicans so rarely have a moment to celebrate integrity these days. But no, that was not the one of the finest moments of our country. It was a hideous shame that this correction was only made once, while high profile Republicans stoked the race fever at every turn.

Ms. Wallace has deluded herself into the conservative line of thought that Republican voters are angry for real reasons such as Republican failure to do enough to stop Obama. This is almost laughable from the outside, where its obvious that conservative anger keeps leap frogging from one issue to another, no matter if the issue is fabricated or not. These people are angry about Benghazi because the conservative media told them to be. When each fake scandal fizzles out, they move on, adding that failure to their pile of growing resentments. They are angry because that is who votes Republican these days. The resentful of change, the people who want to blame brown people and women for their own failures  the Archie Bunkers of this country. Republicans know this, as well. Theyve been using the Southern Strategy for decades. So to pretend they arent responsible for the resentment in their base is laughable.

Theyre just angry that after all of these years, it gave birth to Donald Trump, who unlike Sarah Palin, cant be put down so easily. Trump cant be used and tossed aside as the party did with Palin. Trump has too much money and access. Trump was a celebrity before he was a Republican, instead of the way Palin did it. He owes Republicans nothing.

Wallace wrote of Trump:

That he would refine and recalibrate his proclamations in a general election or as president is a widely held assumption among the Republican establishment. Its possible that this is the kind of false comfort that people on a sinking ship murmur to one another about how death by drowning really isnt a bad way to go.

If Republicans have honed one specific skill in the last 30 years, it is the skill of burying their head in the sand and hoping math and logic arent real. Donald Trump is not going to suddenly change into a new person who values loyalty. See his wives.

Republicans could have stopped the hate when McCain and Palin lost in 2008, but they didnt. Republicans used Sarah Palins hatred to try to kill Obamacare. Republicans didnt condemn her violence-inciting rhetoric or her call to pull over the Obama bumper sticker car and confront them or her gun sites she posted over Democratic districts.

Republicans were silent then because Palin was doing their dirty work.

When Blood Libel outed Palin as an incredibly self-centered person with a persecution complex, the public began to hold their nose and Republicans began their slow walk away from Palin.

Did Republicans walk away from what Palin represented? No. Did they address the fundamental problem that they have never taken responsibility for Iraq, the financial crisis, or Katrina? No.

These are all things they need to do in order to win the White House without someone like Donald Trump.

Because everyone else is too smart to vote for a party of drunken frat boys who refuse to step up with an ounce of accountability and be a grown up. The only people the Republican Party can attract with its current platform of climate denial, hatred for immigrants, liberty-stomping for women, and troops in every country are people they can manipulate with rage.

There were a lot of hate mongers in-between Palin and Trump, but Republicans are conveniently ignoring this fact in order to place the blame for their partys demise on Sarah Palins shoulders.

I am no Palin fan, but she is not responsible for Donald Trump. Where was the integrity to speak out against her when she was operating in service of the partys agenda to kill healthcare reform?

The party cant refuse to take responsibility for hatred they use and aim with deliberation and egg on when it suits them.

A platform so full of denial the only people who can fall for it are those whom it directly benefits and those who can be conned by rage or faith to vote on emotion.

Enter stage right, Donald Trump.
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he FBI on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for the past three weeks, conducting a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

The Oregonian newspaper reported several hundred people had gathered at the John Day Senior Center on Tuesday evening and were told the "guest speakers" would not be appearing.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made six arrests: Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said another person, Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, was arrested in Burns.

One of those arrested suffered non-life-threatening wounds after shots were fired and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said. Another individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased," they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

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Ammon Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings Tuesday night.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The FBI said the people arrested Tuesday face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats. No indictments or federal charging documents had been made public.

Federal law enforcement officers converged on the wildlife refuge after the arrests and were expected to remain at the site throughout the night. It was unclear how many members of the armed group, if any, were at the refuge when the law enforcement officers arrived.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West.
Fox News has released a statement accusing Donald Trumps campaign manager of threatening Megyn Kelly. According to Fox, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski stated in a call to a Fox News executive that Kelly had a rough couple of days after that last debate and he would hate to have her go through that again.

The threat, though only to initiate another war of words, was inappropriate. It reminds me of Team Obamas approach to journalists, as described in testimony before Congress by former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. She expressed concern about the serious, long-term damage to a supposedly free press by the Obama administration, which bullies and threatens access of journalists who do their jobs, news organizations that publish stories they dont like, and whistleblowers who dare to tell the truth.

If Fox News claim is accurate, this is quite similar to what Team Trump just did.

Attkisson continued:

The message has already been received: if you cross the administration with perfectly accurate reporting that they dont like, you will be attacked and punished. You and your sources may be subjected to the kind of surveillance devised for enemies of the state.

Team Trump hasnt gone this far yet. But who can say with any confidence that a President Trump wouldnt conduct himself similarly?

Fox News isnt blameless in the current dust-up with Fox News (although Kelly herself is, in my view). Its snarky, juvenile statement about Trump conducting a Twitter poll on whether to meet with Putin and the Iranian Ayatollah was inappropriate conduct from a news outlet that purports to be neutral.

Trump expressed his disgust by refusing to appear in the Fox News debate. This certainly was his prerogative. Attempting to intimidate Fox News by threatening to make life hellish for Megyn Kelly was not.

For her part, Kelly seemed, if anything, to be enjoying life even more than usual during her program last night. Good for her.
Last summer, my friend David Lebedoff published a thriller titled Buzz, in which a terrorist group found a way to weaponize mosquitoes. (Buzz is available on Amazon, including a Kindle edition for a mere $4.99.) Now, tragically, the nightmare fantasy envisioned in Buzz has been surpassed by reality. The Zika virus is ravaging South America and spreading rapidly.

Probably you have heard about it: the virus is spread by mosquito bites. It causes terrible birth defects, most notably abnormally small and damaged heads and brains. Already there are around 4,000 such cases in Brazil alone. So far, the Zika virus apparently is carried by just one species of mosquito. As it inexorably makes its way northward, what are our authorities doing about it? Not enough, argues Betsy McCaughey:

Already, nearly 4,000 Brazilian newborns have been affected. Brazil, Jamaica, Colombia and El Salvador are urging women to delay getting pregnant for up to two years, and countries are being encouraged to lift their abortion bans. Zika is also linked to GuillainBarre syndrome, which causes paralysis and nerve damage in men and women. For now anyway, Americans have only a small worry  contracting Zika from a mosquito bite while traveling to the Caribbean or Latin America. But the World Health Organization warned on Sunday that mosquito-borne Zika will soon spread to all countries in the western hemisphere except Canada and Chile.

Im not so sure about Canada: they have plenty of mosquitoes.

Unbelievably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it has no intention of helping communities in the United States eradicate mosquitoes, even though its immersed in the same fight against mosquito-borne disease in other countries across the globe. Florida, Texas and southern California have mosquitoes that can spread Zika year-round, according to the medical journal Lancet. The Midwest and East Coast, including New York City, are at risk in the spring and summer, says the report. These areas are now considered conducive to seasonal Zika virus transmission. 

The CDCs Lyle Petersen, director of the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, predicts Zika will hit the United States, but says we dont expect very large outbreaks.

Well, thats reassuring. There is no cure for the Zika virus other than exterminating the mosquitoes that carry it. So far, that is just one species out of thousands, but how can we be sure that other, more common species will not become carriers of the virus?

We really need to up our game, says Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who concedes vaccines and treatments could take years to develop. Meanwhile, the federal governments approach  travel warnings and advising pregnant women to wear long sleeves and pants  falls way short. The CDC should be helping local health departments prepare aggressive campaigns to eradicate mosquitoes. But the agency flatly refuses, stating the CDC is not involved in state or local level mosquito control programs. So why does it spend millions of dollars in foreign countries to fight mosquito-borne illnesses?

Here in Minnesota, mosquito control is a big business. If the only (partial) solution to the Zika virus is to kill lots of mosquitoes, why shouldnt CDC be involved in leading that effort? Killing mosquitoes in Africa has saved millions of people who otherwise would have died from malaria. What is so different about the U.S.?

It helps that [New Yorks] City Hall has had a mosquito-control program since 1999 to combat West Nile virus, though spraying is done judiciously to placate opponents of pesticides. In a typical year, several New Yorkers die of West Nile.  Scientists are trying to stop Zika by destroying the main type of mosquito that carries it. Theyve genetically engineered a male mosquito whose offspring automatically die. But environmentalists are whining about eradicating a species. Good grief! There will still be more than 3,000 mosquito species left. Given a choice between bugs and human babies, the priority is obvious.

Not to environmentalists, apparently. But here is a prediction: as soon as Zikas appalling birth defects start showing up in the U.S., it will be all-out war. Lets hope that the relevant agencies are preparing and not dithering.
Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, on Tuesday in Lagos asked the Federal Government to pay compensation to artists who lost their works and had their creative space destroyed during last Saturdays demolition of the Artists Village at the National Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos.

The Artist Village was demolished on the orders of the management of the National Theatre.

Artists, who were in the village when the demolition started at around 5 am, claimed that the General Manager of the National Theatre, Kabir Yusuf, guarded by a team of armed policemen, ordered the place to be pulled down without prior notice to the artists.

The artists said they lost properties and creative works worth several millions of naira as Mr Kabir only gave them 15 minutes to move their belongings.

They said they could only salvage a fraction of their work before the grace period elapsed and the demolition commenced

One of the artists was shot by the rampaging policemen in the scuffle that ensued during the demolition.

Speaking during a press conference he called at the Freedom Park in Lagos, Mr Soyinka described the manner at which the place was demolished as reminiscent of the inhumane manner of doing things synonymous with the days of military rule.

This is a very sad day. It is a very sad beginning to what we thought was to be change. There is too much of military mentality. Democracy means a humane approach to resolving issues. We must relate with other people like human beings not like disease or dirt, he said.

Mr Soyinka said the purpose of the press conference was not to apportion blame but to get to the bottom of the matter by finding out who gave the order to demolish the Artists village.

The Nobel Laureate said the artists must seek to be compensated for the destruction of their works and other belongings and should be prepared to head to court if none was forthcoming from the government.

We must talk about issues of compensation and if that is not forthcoming the artists must go to court to request for compensation for the destruction of their artistic work. It is about time we stopped the mentality of arbitrary destruction of peoples livelihood however parlous their history may be. That should become unacceptable.

He said the controversy surrounding the National Theatre and the event of Saturday must be discussed in the open so that all interested parties would have a say in the matter.

Popular Poet, Odia Ofeimun, who ran a dance company at the village said the place had become a kind refuge for up and coming artists.

He said artists basically built the village themselves and that many of the artists who used the village could not afford the steep rental cost of commercial venues.

It was a place where poor artists could start from, Mr. Ofeimun said. In this city we need a place like that. Im happy that Soyinka is here to save that place because the place needs to be saved.

Mufu Onifade, who owned a studio at the Artists Village said Mr Kabir demolished the village on the pretext of demolishing shanties and illegal structures around the National Theatre.

According to him, although the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, confirmed that he gave the directive for the shanties in the National Theatre to be demolished, he did not order the demolition of the Artists Village.

He said Mr Mohammed has promised to pay compensation for the works demolished, and that the artists are already taking inventory of what was lost to the demolition.

The Coordinator of the Artists Village and an official of the National Council for Arts and Culture, Aremo Babayemi, said Mr Kabir was settling old scores by ordering the demolition of the village.

He explained that the demolition was Mr Kabirs way of paying back the artists for standing against the concession of the National Theatre.

He therefore asked the government to take the following steps in addressing the issue:

1. That the Honourable Minister of Information and Culture make good on his promise regarding injuries to affected residents and damages to property.

2. That temporary accommodation be provided for artists whose structures were demolished pending compensation and rebuilding of such structures. The offices of the National Film Corporation (NFC) and the Centre for Black Arts and Africa Civilization (CBAAC) at the National Theatre are vacant. We implore the Honourable Minister to use his good offices to relocate the displaced Artists and their materials and works to these offices.

3. That the Honourable Minister takes active steps to stop Kabiru Yusuf Yar Adua from further preventing the National Council for Arts and Culture from carrying out her statutory obligations to Artists and the Arts Community.

4. That the Honourable Minister should as a matter of urgency, remove Kabiru Yusuf Yar Adua from office as he has become an embarrassment to the current Administration. The Nigerian culture sector is already in deep crisis as a result of a lack of leadership and direction from the public sector. Kabiru must be prevented from further demonstrating vestiges of misrule which characterized the last administration.
As the organised private sector mulls how to overcome the challenges imposed on businesses by the Nigerias economic environment, John Holt Plc has been handed a damning report questioning its capacity and those of its subsidiary companies to continue in business.

John Holt Plc is one of Nigerias legacy companies transformed from trading in primary commodities during the colonial era into a manufacturing and trading conglomerate.

But, a report of an audit of its business operations by BDO Professional Services, a firm of Chartered Accountants, on Friday raised serious doubts about the capacity of the Group to remain in business.

The report, which followed a comprehensive audit of John Holt Plc consolidated and separate financial statements for the year ended on September 30, 2015, said that the basis of their opinion followed the huge losses incurred by the company and the group.

The auditors noted in the report that their fears were predicated on the massive erosion of the companys shareholders fund and the fact that John Holts current liabilities far outstrip current assets.

The auditors however noted that while the groups current liabilities exceeded current assets, the shareholders fund remained very strong.

Specifically, the auditor stated that John Holt Plc audited annual account signed off by Ebenezer Olabisi, with FRC/2012/ICAN/00000000104 registration number, and dated December 30, 2015, made the revelations under Emphasis of Matter.

A close review of the financial statement revealed that the company incurred a loss before taxation of N311 million.

Overall, the Group lost a total of N171milion as at September 30, 2015, compared with a profit of N266 million and N427 million earned by the company and group respectively in 2014.

In the period under review, the companys current liabilities exceeded the assets by N4.2 million, with N3.6 billion as shareholders funds.

In the same period, the groups current liabilities exceeded current assets by N1.2 billion, while the group also had positive shareholders funds of N3.2 billion.

In spite of the groups positive shareholders funds, the auditors said that the financial conditions in the group were worrisome.

These conditions indicated the existence of a material uncertainty, which may cast significant doubt about the companys ability to continue as a going concern, the auditors stated in the report.
Twenty-four hours after completing his tenure, immediate past chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, Sam Amadi, spoke with PREMIUM TIMES about his challenges, achievements in office as well as his ambition. In a two parts interview with Business/Economy Editor, BASSEY UDO, Mr. Amadi said he left behind a credible NERC leadership, electricity market.

Excerpts:

PREMIUM TIMES: Your tenure as chairman of NERC ended yesterday. You have come to the point where Nigerians and posterity would pass their verdict. What would you say that would be?

AMADI: I want to write a book. The tentative title of the book is Mission (Un) Accomplished. That means mission either accomplished or unaccomplished, depending on what people choose to see my tenure in office.

I see myself as lucky to have managed the countrys electricity sector when all these reforms were happening. This is a mission accomplished, because I set out to create a credible leadership in NERC and the electricity market; to make NERC an effective regulator capable of accomplishing its regulatory mandate.

Before we came, the Nigerian electricity market was totally without credibility. Former commissioners were hounded out of office on allegation of corruption. Even the Multi-Year Tariffs Order (MYTO) was not being implemented properly.

Clearly, we needed to make a clean break from a NERC that was conflict-ridden, dysfunctional, and lacking in standard procedures and credible processes. That was why NERC was the first to sign on to the Freedom of Information Law.

NERC has remained the only agency to publicly declare the codes of conduct for the commissioners to commit to good conduct, namely zero tolerance for corruption, and good conduct.

We have created a transparent process where resolutions and decisions of the commission are warehoused. So, we achieved the first pillar of creating a clear and transparent regulatory market.

We have also created a regulatory framework for the industry and a step by step process for tariff review. Everybody knows what the rules are, and the ones NERC would follow.

We have succeeded in establishing a credible electricity market. Today, the World Bank and US EXIM Bank say the Nigerian electricity market is the most transparent and credible in Africa, because it is bankable and reliable.

Today, we have licensed over 144 independent power producers capable of generating 32,000 megawatts, MW.

The tariff order, methodology and pricing framework, interconnectivity agreements, grid codes, standard codes and the various embedded generations are now creating more investments in the industry. We have created a local content regulation to promote local participation in service delivery.

We may not achieve reliability, but we have established the framework. We have now de-risked the value chain. Now, we know what to do with gas supply. We have a commercially viable gas price at $2.50 and 80 cents for transport. The regulatory problem of gas pricing has been cured.

Before privatization, the Nigerian DISCOs were bankrupt and unable to pay for the power collected. There was no bulk trader as an off-taker, because the DISCOs were not credit-worthy to buy power. All licenses could not achieve financial closure.

In 2012 the Nigerian Bulk Trader Company was created as a government capitalized owned off-taker to guarantee DISCOs and GENCOs for power supplied.

Today, some of these licensed companies have signed power purchase agreements and built market support instruments  credible tariffs, solid regulatory frameworks, codes standards and footprints of consistency.

There is massive confidence that investors can trust the countrys electricity market and micro-economic fundamental change to re-index.

Again, its mission unaccomplished for me, because we are yet to produce the level of electricity we want, and Nigerians are yet to enjoy a minimum of 20 hours of electricity supply daily.

But in the next three or four years, if the country produces 10,000 MW, I hope somebody would remember that happened because we built a strong foundation for the industry.

PT: Which of these missions posed the most challenge to realize?

AMADI: I would say building an effective and credible NERC; and perhaps, achieving regulatory mandate towards adequacy and reliability.

Three months ago, we set up a task force to improve the electricity market. We wanted to understand the bottlenecks and clear the system. We thought the problem was with gas supply. But when we had gas, generation reached about 5,000MW.

However, there was another problem of load rejection. Because the DISCOs network was frail, available power could not be taken, and the generators could not ramp up power.

The generators had to tell gas suppliers that they could not take all the gas supplied to avoid incurring more liabilities.

Today, the country has lost about 1,000 metric tons of gas when about 4,800 MW was generated few months ago.

For the generators to rapidly improve those networks, they need massive investment of capital. Without financial viability and strong network, sustainable electricity system cannot be guaranteed.

The operators require huge financing, either through funding from financiers or revenue recovery by increased tariffs collection.

PT: But, that would mean extra burden on the consumers?

AMADI: Extra burden? Yes, increased tariff is more pay. But the consumer is paying more to get more value. If we have proper tariff that allows for investment and incentive for efficiency, it will ultimately work for improved services by creating commercial viability.

The first and second years, the tariff by consumers will not pay fully for the investment DISCOs make for service delivery.

But, in the third and fourth year, they will be able to have full recovery of that cost, as the tariff and costs become fully aligned. NERC has benchmarked the tariff within a certain threshold, so that the increase by the DISCOs is reasonable and fair.

The tariff framework imposes obligations on the DISCOs, namely on metering to the customers; no over-estimation. This means that the customer has to pay the last bill, and in case of a dispute, use it as a benchmark till he is fully satisfied with the resolution of the dispute with the operator. That is unlike in the past where the customer was expected to pay his bill or disconnected.

Under the new framework, NERC had said that if after six months the DISCO does not meter the customer, no matter how much improvement on power supply, the consumption would be capped at a charged not beyond a certain amount.

As a regulator, NERC has always argued that fixed charge should not be removed arbitrarily, but through a regulatory process. But, it has discovered that everybody can be on the same page.

Customers have to pay their bills, while DISCOs will not be guaranteed revenue without service. Under the new framework, the revenue of the DISCOs is now tied to 100 per cent availability of electricity supply.

If for its negligence a DISCO allows its transmission line to collapse, it would lose revenue per kilowatt hour for the period that line remains unfixed. This is one of the biggest things NERC has done. It is a big game changer in the electricity market.

In the next two to three years, this will make the DISCOs more efficient; the customers much more comfortable to pay bills, while creating a better relationship between consumers and the operators. This will help the regulator and government introduce much more critical and drastic measures required to move the market to a more efficient level.

PT: Would you say in all sincerity that you have left the industry now better than you met it?

AMADI: NERC has really done excellently well. The indicators are clear. The success of a regulator is measured by its credibility. Nobody in this industry, even if an unfair minded enemy of Sam Amadi, can accuse NERC of corruption. The regulator must not only have integrity, it must live above board.

In the last five years, there is no single evidence of misappropriation, corruption or allegation of abuses. NERC has made big ticket decisions running into billions, particularly in licensing. Nobody can accuse NERC under my leadership of a single whiff of corruption.

PT: What about the multi-billion severance package you and members of the Commission were recently alleged to have approved for yourselves?

AMADI: That allegation and questions about how much one earns are that because there is nothing else to use to tarnish our image. This is what is called tenure battles to achieve hostile takeover, where parties interested in taking over office create unfounded reputation issues to make the shareholders look at the company in certain way, to force management to accept a buy-out.

This is rough tackle tactics. All those hoopla about N2.7 billion, N2.5 billion or N2 billion is because, basically, there was nothing to bring up. The best way for them was to say these guys are fat cats that must be wrestled down by all means.

PT: But, why was it so difficult for you to disclose your pay, if there was nothing to hide?

AMADI: Because we wanted to make a choice between responsible leadership and populism. I am a civil rights activist. When I go on the other side I can do that.

PT: Now that you have crossed over to this other side, can you talk about it now?

AMADI: Yes, if I am on that side fully. But, I cant talk about what people earn. I sympathize with those making that call. It is lazy and unreasonable. In this country, we suffer from three things  lack of rigour and role occupant ethic as well as excessive populism.

If one is a clergyman, there are certain ethical behaviours that go with clergymen. If one is a rock star, there is also a role.

A regulators role is that of reasonability, responsibility and rationality. Why would anybody disclose his salary when it is already in the public domain? In NERCs reports, two copies are sent to the National Assembly, including all those details. In all fairness, asking for such disclosures is being silly and comical. I am not for drama.

NERC is bound by the Freedom of Information, FOI, law. We said if a request is made through FOI, well give to them. Thats the procedure. If anybody wants to know the salary of any public official, the person can go the website of the appropriate government agency and download it.

PT: Are you saying that Nigerians who keep asking to know the pay package of National Assembly members are also playing to the gallery?

AMADI: The issue is the process. If one really wants the information, one should write to the Clerk of the National Assembly requesting that. If the lawmaker is in a public hearing over an issue, he would most likely dismiss the request to disclose what he earns.
Crude oil price slipped further closer to a 17-year low on Thursday as members of the National Assembly prepared to open debate on the 2016 federal budget, amid reports the document was missing.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries data on Thursday showed that basket of 13 crudes dropped to $25.69 per barrel on Wednesday, from about $25.76 the previous day.

At the close of trading on Wednesday, WTI light crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) for February delivery traded at $30.80, from about $31.12 per barrels the previous day.

Equally, Brent crude contract on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) traded on the same day at about $30.57 per barrel, from $30.93 per barrel on Tuesday.

The current price level was last attained in 1999 when crude oil sold at about $25 per barrel after the group intervened to boost the price from a historical slump below $20 in late 1990s.

At the rate of the current price slide, analysts are already speculating that reaching that 1990s level would be in no time.

The rapid drop in crude oil price has already made nonsense of Nigerias 2016 budget proposal, which the federal government pegged on an oil revenue benchmark of $38 per barrel and a production estimate of about 2.2 million barrels per day.

The Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, IMF, Christine Lagarde, told the leadership of National Assembly during her recent visit to Nigeria that commodity prices would remain lower for a longer time beyond 2016.

Over the medium term, (crude) oil prices are likely to remain much lower than the 2010-13 average of more than $100 a barrel, Mrs. Lagarde said.

Apart from huge over-supply in global oil markets, the IMF boss drew attention to the impact of United States shale oil boom and prospects of Iraq and Iran coming back to the international crude oil market.

Before departing Abuja at the end of the visit, Mrs. Lagarde had indicated that an economic team from IMF would be coming to Nigeria to meet with Economic Team on some issues concerning some proposals in the budget.

Indications are that the first area of concern to both government and the National Assembly members would be a drastic review of the crude oil benchmark to reflect the current reality in the crude oil market.

When crude oil price tumbled out of control in the late 1990s, OPEC members got together on March 28, 2000 to adopt a price band of $22-$28 for their basket of crudes, while real oil prices only exceeded $30 per barrel in response to the Middle East conflict.

However, with OPEC showing reluctance to reach a consensus on production cuts to stabilise the market and halt the price decline, concerns are mounting around the world, particularly among developing economies, like Nigeria, dependent almost entirely on oil revenues to survive.

When crude oil price dropped to about $50 per barrel in December 2015, from a high level above $100 per barrel the previous year, analysts thought the 168th meeting of OPEC in Vienna would provide the best opportunity for a resolution to cut production.

But, at the end of the meeting members merely reviewed the oil market outlook for 2015 and the projections for 2016, and agreed to sustain the negotiation with other oil-producing countries to avoid action that would destabilise the market.

Prior to the meeting, Saudi Arabia, one of the most influential OPEC members, had made it clear that it had no plan on its agenda to reduce for any reason its production of over 9.51 million barrels per day as at May 2015.

The country is leading a section of the group, including other Gulf State oil exporters like Venezuela, that have declared that OPEC would not intervene in the crisis, by cutting production quotas, even if global crude oil price crashes below $20 per barrel.

Worried by the alarming slide in prices, the immediate past OPEC President and Nigerias Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, during the Gulf Intelligence UAE Energy Forum at Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday, gave hints of pressure by other members to convene an emergency meeting in March to attempt to dialogue on the way forward.

Mr. Kachikwu drew attention to a resolution during the last OPEC meeting that an extraordinary meeting of the group would become expedient to look at crude oil price if it drops to $35 per barrel level mark.

The agenda of the meeting, the minister explained, would be for members to review the current crisis in oil markets and proffer a resolution on the way forward, particularly relating to efforts to secure the cooperation of non-OPEC member countries to reduce oil exports to stabilise price.

Although most members of the group are in support of the need to intervene to curb further price decline, Mr. Kachikwu said there was yet the view that such a decision would not yield much, since OPEC accounts for only 30 to 35 per cent of global crude oil production.

He argued that since about 65 per cent of total global production was from non-OPEC countries, the impact of the decision to intervene would be insignificant without securing their support and cooperation on the issue.


A new report by Action Aid Nigeria has revealed how Nigeria lost $3.3 billion (about N650.1 billion) in seven years to what appeared questionable tax exemption granted the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited.

The report titled: Leaking Revenue: How a big tax break to European gas companies has cost Nigeria billion highlighted the loss by the Nigerian government through the contentious pioneer status regime granted the company.

The Nigeria LNG is a joint venture project by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell (25.6 per cent), Total (15 percent), and ENI (10.4 per cent).

The consortium was established in 1989 to help Nigeria harness and exploit her huge reserves of natural gas resources for exports.

In a bid to encourage the company realise its objective, the federal government had granted a pioneer status to the project, an incentive granted legally to fresh investors that venture into difficult economic terrains to do businesses that positively impact the countrys economy.

Under the pioneer status arrangement, benefiting companies are entitled to exemption from all corporate income tax payment for the first three or five years of operation in its chosen area.

A company with pioneer status is always entitled to deduct the costs of interest payments and investments in physical capital, capital allowances from its pre-tax profits, making it easier for it to borrow to invest in capital equipment.

However, under the provisions of the NLNG Act approved by the Nigerian government in 1990, the company was not only granted the legal five years exemption, but also an extension for another seven years.

During the period of the extraordinary tax holiday, the NLNG was not only exempted from paying 30 per cent corporate tax on its profits for five years between 1999 and 2004, but also for an extended seven years period till 2012 valued at about $3.2 billion (about N630.4 billion).

The exemption also covered a range of other taxes, including two per cent of its profits in education tax earmarked by the government for the advancement of education in Nigeria.

This exemption cost the country a total of $141 million (about N27.8 billion).

The third component of the controversial exemptions, for which the report said was difficult to come by accurate data, covered capital allowances the partners got from government each time they bought equipment, which were allowed to roll over to periods not covered by the pioneer status regime.

Details of the loss through the dubious tax arrangement showed that the Nigerian government lost a minimum of $1,668 million (about N328.6 billion) in revenues through the share of tax the Shell BV should have paid for the period.

Another $977 million (about N 192.5 billion) was lost through Total, in addition to $677 million about (N133.4 billion) through ENI, based on calculations from the NLNG annual accounts.

The NNPC share was however not covered by the losses conveyed in the report.

The report said findings from its investigations showed that during the tax exemption period, the NLNG had calculated what its tax benefits from interest costs and capital allowances would have been if it had paid CIT.

However, these deductible costs items were forwarded in NLNGs balance sheet, by deducting its reservoir of deferred tax assets from its CIT payments.

The report noted that although the tax holiday granted under the NLNG Act ended in 2009, the NLNG did not start paying CIT until 2012.

During the period of the holiday, the report said NLNG had accumulated a total of $2,157 billion in tax assets, which explained why the company paid no CIT in 2009, 2010, 2011 and part of 2012.

The $1.148 billion that would have been due for payment in 2012 after the reservoir of deferred tax assets, the report pointed out, was however delayed following the report of further unrelieved tax obligations not reported during the year as deferred tax liability.

Although the report said under normal accounting practices, such deferred payments would eventually be paid, it however expressed doubts regarding when the NLNG would do so.

Citing the example of the situation in 2013, the report said although $1.402 billion was booked under current deferred liabilities in the companys balance sheet, no CIT was paid by NLNG.

This massive tax break was a triple whammy, the report noted. First, came a five tax holiday granted to most international energy investors in Nigeria; second, an extension for a further five years exceptionally allowed for this deal, and third, tax allowances would have been used during the tax holiday were rolled over and exempted the companies from tax for further two years.

The report criticised the tax arrangement, arguing that even with a normal five-year tax holiday, the NLNG would still have been profitable.

A review of the companys accounts showed that it earned a profit every year since 2004 if its tax holiday had ended that year.

The difference in the Consortiums actual profit (with the 10-year tax holiday) and the estimated profit it would have earned with a five-year tax holiday is less than 20% on average over the years 2004-2013, the report said.

The NLNG is yet to comment on the report. So also is the Nigerian government.
The Supreme Court has upheld the election of Nyesom Wike of the Peoples Democratic Party as governor of the oil-rich Rivers State.

The court gave the ruling validating the April 11 governorship election on Wednesday but did not provide reasons for its judgment.

It said detailed reasons for the verdict would be provided on February 12.

The Court of Appeal had on December 16 affirmed the judgment of the Rivers Governorship Election Tribunal.

The appeal court had ruled that Mr. Wike was not validly elected.

The Rivers Tribunal had earlier on October 24 nullified Mr. Wikes election.

The tribunal, which delivered its ruling in Abuja, also ordered that a fresh governorship election be conducted in the state.

After the tribunals ruling, the governor headed to the Court of Appeal, saying the judgment was untenable.

The petition challenging the election of Mr. Wike as Rivers State Governor was filed by Dakuku Peterside, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the election.

The Rivers governorship election, which was criticised by local and international observers, witnessed the largest amount of violence both in its build-up and after the election.
The Kaduna State University has suspended one of its senior lecturers for posting a Facebook comment deemed as hate speech.

In December, John Danfulani stirred controversy by lashing at supporters of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, northern leaders, and President Muhammadu Buhari. He also mocked the large number of out-of-school children in the north.

Part of his Facebook post post said, To them, APC is a religious party. Northern leaders under the party are demigods and crusaders of their ways of life. These people living in dusty villages of Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Kano, Jigawa are quick in calling you Arne or Kafiri (Meaning Pagan) once you express your view on anything their God PMB and his brigade of small Angels are doing. Attack the attacker, and lets the skies fall.

Mr. Danfulani confirmed to PREMIUM TIMES that he authored the post, which was widely circulated among Kaduna residents.

He subsequently deleted his Facebook page. Mr. Danfulani is believed to be currently out of the country.

After criticisms poured in, the university queried Mr. Danfulani, calling his post divisive, injurious and tantamount to hate speech.

In a query dated January 6, signed by the school registrar, Talatu A Kuri, the university said the lecturer should explain why disciplinary action should not be taken against him for a comment he posted on the social media.

The content of the publication you authored is divisive, injurious to the University and tantamount to hate speech capable of inciting particular group of students against staff and other students. This behaviour is unbecoming of a lecturer who is supposed to mould students character and impart learning, the letter said.

In his response, Mr. John said he was not furnished with details of his offence.

It is a large world of dozens of platforms, most of which are yet to be in full practice in Nigeria. I have pages that upload my opinions on multifaceted local and international issues when my conscience and spirit direct me to do so, he wrote.

Because of this, I do not know on which of the platforms the piece that generated this query was hoisted because your query did not contain such details.

He added: My wall, updates and writings in the social media are all in my private capacity and not in my official capacity as a Lecturer with the University.

Not satisfied with his response, the school authority suspended him from the university.

The registrar of the university, Talatu A. Kuri, last week, informed Mr. Danfulani of the decision.

The letter reads: We refer to our letter of query dated 5th January, 2016, requesting you to explain within 48 hours why disciplinary action will not be taken against you for gross misconduct and confirm that you failed to respond.

In line with S15 (1) 4 of KASU staff Conditions of Service, the Vice Chancellor has suspended you from duty forthwith and will report the matter to Council.

A student leader of the university who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES said the post could have caused a major crisis save for the prompt response by the authorities.

On Saturday, the Kaduna State Security Council announced that it would henceforth prosecute any group of persons or individuals inciting ethno-religious crisis in the state.

Rising from its weekly security meeting, the council said the warning was necessary following reports of comments made by individuals capable of creating social unrest in the state.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has written the National Assembly accusing the lawmakers of corruption, impunity, greed and of repeatedly breaking the nations laws.

In a letter dated January 13 and addressed to the President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, the former president specifically accused the lawmakers of fixing and earning salaries and allowances far above what the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission approved for them.

He also alleged that most of the 109 senators and 369 members of the House of Representatives were receiving constituency allowances without maintaining constituency offices as the laws required of them.

Mr. Obasanjo was president between 1999 and 2007.

In the letter, exclusively obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, the former president said on a few occasion, both in and out of office as president, he had agonised over the massive corruption and lawlessness at the National Assembly and other arms and tiers of government.

He said he had reflected and expressed, outspokenly at times, his views on the practice in the National Assembly which detracts from distinguishness and honourability because it is shrouded in opaqueness and absolute lack of transparency and could not be regarded as normal, good and decent practice in a democracy that is supposed to be exemplary.

While referring to the issue of budgets and finances of the federal legislature, Mr. Obasanjo said the present economic situation that the country has found itself in is the climax of the steady erosion of good financial and economic management which grew from bad to worse in the last six years or so.

According to him, the executive and the legislative arms of government must accept and share responsibility in this regard and that if there will be a redress of the situation as early as possible, the two arms must also bear the responsibility proportionally.

The two arms ran the affairs of the country unmindful of the rainy day, he said. The rainy day is now here. It would not work that the two arms should stand side by side with one arm pulling and without the support of the other one for good and efficient management of the economy.

The former president argued that the purpose of election into the Legislative Assembly particularly at the national level was to give service to the nation and not for the personal service and interest of members at the expense of the nation which seemed to have been the mentality, psychology, mindset and practice within the National Assembly since the beginning of this present democratic dispensation.

He asked pointedly, Where is patriotism? Where is commitment? Where is service?

He stated further, The beginning of good governance which is the responsibility of all arms and all the tiers of government is openness and transparency.

It does not matter what else we try to do, as long as one arm of government shrouds its financial administration and management in opaqueness and practices rife with corruption, only very little, if anything at all, can be achieved in putting Nigeria on the path of sustainable and enduring democratic system, development and progress. Governance without transparency will be a mockery of democracy.

Going more specific, Mr. Obasanjo noted that a situation where our national budget was predicated on $38 per barrel of oil with estimated two million barrels per day and before the budget was presented, the price of oil had gone down to $34 per barrel and now hovering around $30 and the country has no assurance of producing two million barrels and if it could, it would have no assurance of finding market for it, definitely calls for caution.

He added that if production and price projected in the budget stand, the country would have to borrow almost one third of the N6 trillion budget.

He stressed, Now beginning with the reality of the budget, there is need for sober reflection and sacrifice with innovation at the level of executive and legislative arms of government. The soberness, the sacrifice and seriousness must be patient and apparent.

It must not be seen and said that those who, as leaders, call for sacrifice from the citizenry are living in obscene opulence. It will not only be insensitive but callously so. It would seem that it is becoming a culture that election into the legislative arm of government at the national level in particular is a licence for financial misconduct and that should not be.

The National Assembly now has a unique opportunity of presenting a new image of itself. It will help to strengthen, deepen, widen and sustain our democracy.

Mr. Obasanjo said going by the provisions of the 1999 Constitution, RMAFC is charged with the responsibility of fixing emoluments of the three arms of government: executive, legislature and judiciary.

He said the Commission did its job but that by different disingenuous ways and devices, the legislature had overturned the recommendation of the Commission and hiked up for themselves that which they are unwilling to spell out in detail, though they would want to defend it by force of arm if necessary. What is that?

The former president added, Mr. President of the Senate and Hon. Speaker of the House, you know that your emolument which the Commission had recommended for you takes care of all your legitimate requirements: basic salary, car, housing, staff, constituency allowance.

Although the constituency allowance is paid to all members of the National Assembly, many of them have no constituency offices which the allowance is partly meant to cater for. And yet other allowances and payments have been added by the National Assembly for the National Assembly members emoluments. Surely, strictly speaking, it is unconstitutional.

There is no valid argument for this except to see it for what it is  law-breaking and impunity by lawmakers. The lawmakers can return to the path of honour, distinguishness, sensitivity and responsibility.

The National Assembly should have the courage to publish its recurrent budgets for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. That is what transparency demands.

With the number of legislators not changing, comparison can be made. Comparisons in emoluments can also be made with countries like Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and even Malaysia and Indonesia who are richer and more developed than we are.

Mr. Obasanjo recounted that while in office as president, he was threatened with impeachment by the members of the National Assembly for not releasing some money they had appropriated for themselves which were odious and for which there were no incomes to support.

On the plan by the legislature to buy new cars for its committees, the former president said it is unnecessary.

According to him, The recent issue of cars for legislators would fall into the same category. Whatever name it is disguised as, it is unnecessary and insensitive.

A pool of a few cars for each Chamber will suffice for any Committee Chairman or members for any specific duty. The waste that has gone into cars, furniture, housing renovation in the past was mind-boggling and these were veritable sources of waste and corruption. That was why they were abolished. Bringing them back is inimical to the interest of Nigeria and Nigerians.

Mr. Obasanjo expressed hope that the National Assembly would reconsider its plan and do what is right not only in making its own budget transparent but in all matters of financial administration and management including audit of its accounts by external outside auditor from 1999 to date.

This, if it is done, will bring a new dawn to democracy in Nigeria and a new and better image for the National Assembly and it will surely avoid the Presidency and the National Assembly going into face-off all the time on budgets and financial matters, he said.

Below is Mr. Obasanjos letter:

January 13, 2016 Distinguished Senator Bukola Saraki,

President of the Senate,

Federal Republic of Nigeria,

Senate Chambers,

Abuja. Honourable Yakubu Dogara,

Speaker, House of Representatives,

National Assembly Complex,

Abuja. It is appropriate to begin this letter, which I am sending to all members of the Senate and the House of Representatives through both of you at this auspicious and critical time, with wishes of Happy New Year to you all. On a few occasions in the past, both in and out of office as the President of Nigeria, I have agonised on certain issues within the arms of government at the national level and among the tiers of government as well. Not least, I have reflected and expressed, outspokenly at times, my views on the practice in the National Assembly which detracts from distinguishness and honourability because it is shrouded in opaqueness and absolute lack of transparency and could not be regarded as normal, good and decent practice in a democracy that is supposed to be exemplary. I am, of course, referring to the issue of budgets and finances of the National Assembly. The present economic situation that the country has found itself in is the climax of the steady erosion of good financial and economic management which grew from bad to worse in the last six years or so. The executive and the legislative arms of government must accept and share responsibility in this regard. And if there will be a redress of the situation as early as possible, the two arms must also bear the responsibility proportionally. The two arms ran the affairs of the country unmindful of the rainy day. The rainy day is now here. It would not work that the two arms should stand side by side with one arm pulling and without the support of the other one for good and efficient management of the economy. The purpose of election into the Legislative Assembly particularly at the national level is to give service to the nation and not for the personal service and interest of members at the expense of the nation which seemed to have been the mentality, psychology, mindset and practice within the National Assembly since the beginning of this present democratic dispensation. Where is patriotism? Where is commitment? Where is service? The beginning of good governance which is the responsibility of all arms and all the tiers of government is openness and transparency. It does not matter what else we try to do, as long as one arm of government shrouds its financial administration and management in opaqueness and practices rife with corruption, only very little, if anything at all, can be achieved in putting Nigeria on the path of sustainable and enduring democratic system, development and progress. Governance without transparency will be a mockery of democracy. Let us be more direct and specific so that action can be taken where it is urgently necessary. A situation where our national budget was predicated on $38 per barrel of oil with estimated 2 million barrels per day and before the budget was presented, the price of oil had gone down to $34 per barrel and now hovering around $30 and we have no assurance of producing 2 million barrels and if we can, we have no assurance of finding market for it, definitely calls for caution. If production and price projected in the budget stand, we would have to borrow almost one third of the 6 trillion naira budget. Now beginning with the reality of the budget, there is need for sober reflection and sacrifice with innovation at the level of executive and legislative arms of government. The soberness, the sacrifice and seriousness must be patient and apparent. It must not be seen and said that those who, as leaders, call for sacrifice from the citizenry are living in obscene opulence. It will not only be insensitive but callously so. It would seem that it is becoming a culture that election into the legislative arm of government at the national level in particular is a licence for financial misconduct and that should not be. The National Assembly now has a unique opportunity of presenting a new image of itself. It will help to strengthen, deepen, widen and sustain our democracy. By our Constitution, the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission is charged with the responsibility of fixing emoluments of the three arms of government: executive, legislature and judiciary. The Commission did its job but by different disingenuous ways and devices, the legislature had overturned the recommendation of the Commission and hiked up for themselves that which they are unwilling to spell out in detail, though they would want to defend it by force of arm if necessary. What is that? Mr. President of the Senate and Hon. Speaker of the House, you know that your emolument which the Commission had recommended for you takes care of all your legitimate requirements: basic salary, car, housing, staff, constituency allowance. Although the constituency allowance is paid to all members of the National Assembly, many of them have no constituency offices which the allowance is partly meant to cater for. And yet other allowances and payments have been added by the National Assembly for the National Assembly members emoluments. Surely, strictly speaking, it is unconstitutional. There is no valid argument for this except to see it for what it is  law-breaking and impunity by lawmakers. The lawmakers can return to the path of honour, distinguishness, sensitivity and responsibility. The National Assembly should have the courage to publish its recurrent budgets for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. That is what transparency demands. With the number of legislators not changing, comparison can be made. Comparisons in emoluments can also be made with countries like Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and even Malaysia and Indonesia who are richer and more developed than we are. The budget is a proposal and only an estimate of income and expenditure. Where income is inadequate, expenditure will not be made. While in government, I was threatened with impeachment by the members of the National Assembly for not releasing some money they had appropriated for themselves which were odious and for which there were no incomes to support. The recent issue of cars for legislators would fall into the same category. Whatever name it is disguised as, it is unnecessary and insensitive. A pool of a few cars for each Chamber will suffice for any Committee Chairman or members for any specific duty. The waste that has gone into cars, furniture, housing renovation in the past was mind-boggling and these were veritable sources of waste and corruption. That was why they were abolished. Bringing them back is inimical to the interest of Nigeria and Nigerians. The way of proposing budget should be for the executive to discuss every detail of the budget, in preparation, with different Committees and sub-Committees of the National Assembly and the National Assembly to discuss its budget with the Ministry of Finance. Then, the budget should be brought together as consolidated budget and formally presented to the National Assembly, to be deliberated and debated upon and passed into law. It would then be implemented as revenues are available. Where budget proposals are extremely ambitious like the current budget and revenue sources are so uncertain, more borrowing may have to be embarked upon, almost up to 50% of the budget or the budget may be grossly unimplementable and unimplemented. Neither is a choice as both are bad. Management of the economy is one of the key responsibilities of the President as prescribed in the Constitution. He cannot do so if he does not have his hands on the budget. Management of the economy is shared responsibility where the Presidency has the lion share of the responsibility. But if the National Assembly becomes a cog in the wheel, the executive efforts will not yield much reward or progress. The two have to work synchronisingly together to provide the impetus and the conducive environment for the private sector to play its active vanguard role. Management of the budget is the first step to manage the economy. It will be interesting if the National Assembly will be honourable enough and begin the process of transparency, responsibility and realism by publishing its recurrent budgets for 2016 as it should normally be done. Hopefully, the National Assembly will take a step back and do what is right not only in making its own budget transparent but in all matters of financial administration and management including audit of its accounts by external outside auditor from 1999 to date. This, if it is done, will bring a new dawn to democracy in Nigeria and a new and better image for the National Assembly and it will surely avoid the Presidency and the National Assembly going into face-off all the time on budgets and financial matters. While I thank you for your patience and understanding, please accept, Dear Senate President and Honourable Speaker of the House, the assurances of my highest consideration. OLUSEGUN OBASANJO
Kogi State on Wednesday made another unusual history as its fourth democratically elected governor, Yahaya Bello, was sworn in without a deputy.

The man nominated by the All Progressives Congress to be Mr. Bellos deputy, James Faleke, made real his threat not to present himself for swearing in with the governor.

He was conspicuously absent at Wednesdays ceremony, and no replacement was announced at the event.

The legal implication of that arrangement remained unclear Wednesday.

It is the first time in Nigerias political history that an elected governor would be inaugurated without a deputy.

The North-Central state had made another history late last year when a leading governorship candidate, Abubakar Audu, died before its governorship election is concluded, throwing the state into what appeared a constitutional logjam.

On Wednesday, Mr. Bello was inaugurated amid pomp and ceremony by the Chief Judge of the state, Nasir Ajana, who administered the oath of office and that of allegiance on him.

Mr. Bello was picked by the All Progressives Congress to replace its late candidate, Mr. Audu.

Mr. Faleke objected to the partys decision and approached the election tribunal in the state asking it to declare him governor-elect.

He contended that the election had been won and lost before Mr. Audu died and that he (Faleke) should have been pronounced governor-elect.

Mr. Faleke has repeatedly claimed that he was not consulted or taken into confidence by anyone regarding the choice of Mr. Bello as Mr. Audus replacement.

He was also quoted in various reports as expressing suspicion that the party was planning to announce his replacement on the grounds that he absconded from Wednesdays inauguration.

Those attending Wednesdays inauguration include the National Chairman of the APC, John Odigie-Oyegun as well as the governor of Nasarawa state and the Minister of Communication Technology, Adebayo Shittu.

The President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, was represented by Kabir Gaya, a senator and former governor of Kano.

The Senator representing Kogi East, Dino Melaye, who gave the welcome address, said Wednesdays inauguration was historic because a minority is now the governor of Kogi state.

He pledged that Mr. Bello would not disappoint the people of the state and called on all aggrieved people to unite and cooperate with the new governor for the sake of Kogi state.
A former political adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan, Ali Gulak, has stormed the headquarters of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to take over as chairman.

Mr. Gulak arrived the partys office Wednesday afternoon.

He relied on a ruling by Justice Husseini Baba-Yusuf of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, who, on December 16, ordered the acting chairman of the party, Uche Secondus, to vacate office and allow Mr. Gulak or anyone from the north east region of the country take over.

Mr. Gulak, who addressed journalists briefly at the National Working Committee hall at Wadata Plaza headquarters of the party, said he was assuming office after another court on Wednesday ruled against Mr. Secondus suit seeking to stop the execution of the December 16 ruling.

Mr. Gulak said the PDP must not be left headless following Wednesdays ruling.

He said his immediate task as acting chairman is to take the party back to the people. He said members of the party would be taken along in the administration of the PDP.

Meanwhile, Mr. Secondus has stated that he would also address the press at the Legacy House presidential campaign office of the party in Maitama Abuja later on Wednesday.
Operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on Tuesday evening questioned Jide Omokore, an ally of former president, Goodluck Jonathan, and Chairman of Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts Nigeria Limited.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered the arrest was in connection with a series of multi-billion dollar petrol import and crude export deals.

Multiple security sources told PREMIUM TIMES that Mr Omokore, who was later released on Wednesday evening, made revealing statements.

Operatives said he was expected to return with some required documents.

Atlantic Energy Limited was one of the companies that allegedly received multibillion dollar worth of public assets without due process by the Jonathan administration in 2011.

The company, which was created less than a year earlier and had not produced a droplet of oil, was awarded controlling stakes in two lucrative oil blocks  OML 30 and 34  for just over $50 million each.

The deal, which was signed by the immediate past minister of petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke, gave Atlantic Energy Limited a controlling 55 percent stake in the oil block.

Curiously, Shell, which owned the remaining 45 per cent stake, fetched $1.3 billion for a single field after an open and competitive bidding process.

The company was also accused of lifting crude oil, but only remitting a fraction of its worth to the government.

In 2012, Atlantic Energy paid $168m into the governments account, but lifted about three million barrels  valued at over $350 million.

In 2013, it also lifted about 2 million barrels of crude valued at about $240million, but paid only $68million.

Similarly, in 2014, Atlantic Energy paid zero cash-call, but lifted about 500,000 barrels of crude oil, valued at $54 million.

SPOG, another of Mr. Omokores companies, is also being investigated for an alleged N400 million petrol import fraud.

SPOG allegedly imported 3,000 metric tonnes of PMS but filed claims for subsidy payment of 13,000 metric tonnes with the Petroleum Product Regulatory Agency (PPRA), therefore allegedly pocketing N400 million more than it should have been paid.

The EFCC recently raided the business premises of Mr. Omokore, making away with documents and computers.

A source also said Mr. Omokore has been instructed by the presidency to reconcile his accounts with NPDC, and immediately pay up the several billions he is owing the Nigerian government for allegedly lifting crude without remitting the proceeds.
The Lagos State Government on Tuesday said it would no longer allow social functions and parties in public schools just as owners of private schools across the state have been warned to comply with rules and regulations guiding their operations.

The Deputy Governor of the State, Idiat Adebule, who disclosed this while briefing the media on the strategic focus of Governor Akinwunmi Ambodes administration on education for 2016, said the governor had directed that schools should no longer be used for social functions.

Mrs. Adebule said, The Governor has directed that schools will no longer be used for social activities any longer. We want to implore members of the public to report any school that violates this directive and we would ensure that defaulting schools are sanctioned accordingly.

Mrs. Adebule, who also oversees the Ministry of Education, said the state government was putting a searchlight on the standard of education in the private schools, saying it would no longer be business as usual for such schools that undermine best practices.

She said as a first step, the government will engage with private school owners and proprietors to intimate them on the action plan of the present administration towards improving the standard of education, saying although government is willing to partner with private schools, they must also be willing to adhere strictly to the acceptable standard.

Much as private schools are partners in the sector, we would not fold our hands and watch the standard flopped. Some schools even operate without registering with the government. We want to urge such schools to do the right thing or government will have no choice but to do what it has to do, she said.

Earlier, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Education, Obafela Bank-Olemoh, while giving a detailed presentation on the policy thrust of Governor Ambodes administration for the education sector, said the state government intends to construct the biggest digital library.

He said the government was already at the planning stage of the library, while the actual establishment of the project would commence in the next quarter of the year.

He said the state government will build 10 new model schools with state of the art facilities, while two new technical colleges will be built in the course of the year in areas where such facilities are urgently needed.

On the Ibile Tablets, Mr. Bank-Olemoh said 324,000 tablets would be distributed to Senior Secondary School students, adding that plans have been concluded to register all students in both public and private schools in the state under the Lagos State Student Personal Administration Number (LASPIN) project to aid proper planning.

On the free meal in schools project, he said the state government was currently perfecting its framework for the eventual take-off, saying the project was expected to on the one hand, enhance the learning capacity of the pupils and on the other, boost the economy of the state.
Some Nigerians based in the United Kingdom, under the aegis of 2015 Group, have asked President Muhammadu Buhari to immediately initiate reforms in Nigerias judicial sector in order to successfully tackle corruption in the country.

It also urged the Itse Sagay-led Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-Corruption to expedite actions in producing its awaited report on the frame work for fighting corruption in Nigeria.

The group stated this in a communique after its meeting in London, United Kingdom.

The communique was signed by its spokesperson, Kingsley Ogbonda and lead campaigner, Tunde Doherty.

While declaring support for the anti-corruption crusade of the Nigerian government, the group regretted that some of the nations judges and lawyers had been bending justice, which it argued could hamper the efforts of the government.

It said, We recall that the rule of law implies the inalienable condition that the judiciary must be fit for purpose; therefore with the zeal the majority of Nigerian judges, aided by disreputable lawyers, have been bending justice, leads us now, to call for the immediate and fundamental reform of the Nigerian judiciary.

We are disturbed that judges, who granted frivolous injunctions, allowed unmeritorious appeals and simply gave official thieves mere slap on their wrists are allowed to keep their share of the loot orchestrated by thieving politicians. And worst, they are still presiding over cases of improprieties.

It is our solemn belief that unless the Nigerian judiciary is reformed the fight against corruption would be hard to be successfully prosecuted. We hope that the Prof Sagays committee will incorporate this concern in its final report.

The group said it does not believe Mr. Buhari is unmindful of the respect for the rule of law, which is one of the fundamental principles of democracy.

It argued that a quiet display of irritation caused by his enduring sense of patriotism and abiding sense of national duty should not by any stretch of imagination be elevated to an abuse of the rule of law.

It said Mr. Buhari had clearly demonstrated his belief in the rule of law by challenging his previous election defeats in courts and accepting the verdicts regardless of some reservations of those judgements by observers.

We remind some elements in the public space that the rule of law is not a mere slogan that should be mouthed glibly without regard to its intrinsic value, the communique said.

The group pledged to reach out to international anti-corruption individuals and bodies for support for Nigerias effort to fight corruption.

It called on the media to join the president in the fight against corruption and also meet his request to do more investigative work to expose official corruption.

The group enjoined Nigerian journalists to borrow a leaf from the work of Anas Aremeyaw Anas in Ghana, whose investigative work has led to the public humiliation of no less than twenty Ghanaian judges caught in corruption scandal.
The immediate past governor of Kogi state, Idris Wada of the Peoples Democratic Party, was absent at the inauguration of his successor, Yahaya Bello of the All Progressives Congress, on Wednesday.

He was not available to perform handover formalities or make a speech at the inauguration ceremony.

Mr. Wadas whereabouts remained unknown but those close to him said he might have travelled out of Nigeria.

Another source at the Kogi Government House told PREMIUM TIMES the former governor travelled out Tuesday.

The former governors spokesperson, Jacob Edi, confirmed that his boss was not at the handover ceremony.

He said attendance at the inauguration ceremony by an outgoing governor is optional and discretionally.

Attending the ceremony is not mandatory, Mr. Edi said. But every other instrument of power was handed over, and every holistic cooperation was given for a smooth transition.

He added that Mr. Wada handed over to the APC transition committee raised by Mr. Bello at about 8 p.m. on Tuesday, after the new governor failed to personally show up at Government House to receive necessary briefings and document.

He (Mr. Bello) promised to be personally there, but he did not, Mr. Edi said. So the chairman of our own transition committee had to handover to their own team. Governor Wada was personally there.

Mr. Wada is challenging Mr. Bellos election at the Kogi governorship election petition tribunal.
The acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu on Monday met with elder statesman, Yusuf Maitama Sule, in Abuja.

The meeting which lasted nearly one hour, according to a source in attaendance, saw the former minister lavishing praises on the EFCC boss for revving up the anti-corruption campaign in the country.

Mr. Sule was quoted as saying he was fully in support of the activities of the Commission and urged Mr. Magu not to be distracted by the antics of critics.

You are doing very well. Please remain focused and I am confident that you will go far, the former minister was quoted as saying.

Mr. Sule was Nigerias former representative to the United Nations, and later Minister of National Guidance, a portfolio designed to assist then President Shehu Shagari in tackling corruption.

He was the pioneer Federal Commissioner of the Public Complaints Commission, and is well regarded for his oratory and wisdom.
The Governor of Osun, Rauf Aregbesola, on Tuesday advised the Governor of Ekiti, Ayodele Fayose to face the reality of the death of Peoples Democratic Party as a political party.



Mr. Aregbesola said while he was not asking the governor to abandon the opposition PDP against his wish, he would only advise him to join hands with a political party that would give hope to the people of Nigeria.

He also charged the Ekiti State governor to direct his energy towards bringing human and physical development to Nigerias western region and the country as a whole.

The governor made the remark when his Ekiti counterpart visited him at the Government House in Osogbo.

Governor Fayose, during the visit, had said he was in Osun not for any political reason and that he was not ready to abandon the PDP for the All Progressives Congress.

Mr. Fayose however said his belief in the Yoruba race and its development and unity remained unshaken.

Mr. Aregbesola described Mr. Fayoses visit to Osun as a demonstration of maturity, saying it takes a very matured human being to know that at the end of every public office, he would be left with humanity.

He said, Osoko has said that he is not going to leave his party, but the reality today is that PDP has served its term in Nigeria. When a horse is dead, it is either you abandon it or you bury it.

I want my good friend and brother to know that PDP has exhausted its stay in Nigeria, it can no longer be revived. Let us look at a political party that will give hope to our people. Opposition must be for a purpose, I stand by you on the unity of Yoruba land and that our leaders should not put down in the country.

The war is over, we are in a season of mobilising our people to agriculture and produce such that we will economically have the strength to give leadership to the nation and Africa. Our energy must be directed at bringing human and physical development, we have enough in this region to give leadership, Mr. Aregbesola said.

He assured Mr. Fayose that he would stand by him in his effort to galvanise the people of the South-west for accelerated development.

The governor, who lamented the present economic situation of the country, noted that there was an invasion on the economy of Nigeria to the extent that the country was loosing 75 percent of her income due to oil glut.

The country is facing a very serious crises with the rate at which the crude oil price is falling. There is an invasion on the economy to the level that we are loosing 75 percent of our income which is not good.

At this point, wise people must have an alternative to oil which part of it is your visit. We must use our culture and affinity to form a bond that can make our people live a normal life, it is a duty that we owe our people, States and Nigeria as a whole.

Speaking earlier, Governor Fayose stated that against all speculations that he was coming to Osogbo to ask Mr. Aregbesola help him beg President Muhammadu Buhari, he was in Osun for the unity of the Yoruba race.

He added that the Yoruba race was greater than any political office hence his belief in the development of the race.

The governor averred that the visit of the Ooni of Ife to the 45th coronation anniversary of the Alaafin of Oyo was instructive hence the need for every Yoruba sons and daughters to see to the unity and progress of the race.

He said, This is my first official visit to any APC state in Nigeria. I am not in Osogbo to ask Aregbesola to help me beg as being speculated in some quarters. We are all Yoruba, politics is like water, it can flow anywhere.

I believe in the Yoruba race, the race comes first before the office of the governor. The race is eternal while that of governor is momentary. We must watch today to be guided by tomorrow. I am here for the unity of Yoruba as it affect the Oodua, the progenitor, Mr. Fayose said.
A Federal High Court has adjusted the conditions for bail granted the spokesperson for the Peoples Democratic Party, Olisa Metuh.

Mr. Metuh, who is being prosecuted for allegedly receiving N400 million arms money, has been in detention since his arrest over three weeks ago.

A court granted him bail on a N400 million bond, and N200 million each from two sureties.

The court also said the two sureties must have properties within the Maitama area of Abuja.

On Wednesday, Justice Okon Abang, who gave the initial order, said assets from other parts of Abuja would also be accepted.

He advised Mr. Metuh to appeal if he was not satisfied with the conditions.
A pregnant business woman, Tosin Taiwo, detained at Surulere Police Station in Lagos collapsed in the cell after for four days before she was forcefully granted bail.

Sources told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the woman, who was eight weeks pregnant, was arrested at Meran area and detained at Surulere over an allegation that she borrowed money.

Meran is in Agbado/Oke-Odo Local Council Development Area.

The sources said that her husband, Taiwo, came to the police station for her bail, but was refused bail by the Investigating Police Officer (IPO), one Louisa Njoku.

The IPO said she will not grant her bail due to instruction from above.

I believe the complainant gave the instruction. That is why he brought the case to Surulere Police Station where he knows officers.

One of the officers, who arrested her at Meran, simply identified as Jide, boasted that the woman would rot in jail, a source told NAN.

The husband told NAN that his wife was not well when she was arrested, stressing that at the police station in Surulere, they were informed of her condition.

Taiwo said the wife borrowed some money from her friend to do business but unfortunately, she was duped and could not make up the payment as scheduled.

He said a payment plan was made known to the complainant, noting that the complainant had wanted a full payment rather than in installments.

He brought police to arrest her on Saturday and detained her at Surulere Police Station.

All efforts to secure her bail proved abortive as the IPO was tossing us up and down, saying there was instruction from above not to grant her bail.

We followed it up on Sunday and Monday; the IPO was not cooperating.

It was then we went to meet the Area `C Commander, ACP Tajudeen Bakare, who advised the complainant to accept our terms of payment, her husband told NAN.

The complainant still insisted in collecting his money in full or else, the case should be charged to court.

The area commander again, advised him against it as it may last longer than necessary.

The area commander then ordered the IPO to release the woman on bail or charge her to court. Due to `instruction from above, she was not released.

The IPO told us that she would be charged to court on Tuesday morning. We were at the station early in the morning waiting for the police before my wife fainted.

In the company of the IPO, we rushed her to Randle General Hospital where she was revived about two hours later. The police almost killed my wife.

I am sure the complainant gave them money to detain my wife indefinitely.

While she was still in the hospital bed, the police called me to come and sign for her bail.

When NAN visited the casualty unit of the hospital at about 12.30 p.m. on Tuesday, only the woman was seen sleeping without police presence.

All efforts to get close to her bed were rejected by the hospital staff, who said that she was brought by the police; therefore, no stranger should go close to her.

One of the matrons at the casualty unit, who spoke to NAN anonymously, noted that Tosin was in a stable condition, adding that they had yet to determine why she fainted.

NAN reports that at about 2.30 p.m. when the hospital certified her to be strong enough to go home, they insisted that police must come before she would be discharged.

The woman later told NAN on telephone that the hospital discharged her at about 5 p.m. after obtaining permission from the IPO to let her go.

She said she bled while in the cell, stressing that she was seeking medical attention to ascertain if the pregnancy was still intact.

When contacted, the police spokesperson, Oladapo Badmos, told NAN that she would confirm the incident later. (NAN)
President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday requested the National Assembly to consider and approve Money Laundering Prevention and Prohibition Bill 2016 and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Bill 2016.

The bills are believed to parts of efforts to improve Nigerias legal framework to combat corruption.

The president of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, read the letters covering the bills at plenary on Wednesday.

Quoting the presidents letter, Mr. Saraki said the bill on money laundering sought to repeal the Money Laundering Prohibition Act 2011, and re-enact a more comprehensive legislation.

This bill seeks to make comprehensive provisions to prohibit the laundering of the criminal activities, expand the scope of money laundering offences, Mr. Saraki said.

It seeks to provide protection for employees of various institutions, bodies and professions who may discover money laundering, enhance customer due diligence.

It provides appropriate penalties and expands the scope of supervisory bodies.

It also recognizes the role of certain self-regulatory organisations to address the challenges faced in implementation of comprehensive anti-money regime, the letter, quoted by Mr. Saraki, read.

The second bill, Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Bill 2016, seeks to get relevant international assistance in cases of money laundering.

The Bill is expected to provide framework for other countries to assist in provision of and obtaining of evidence, making of arrangements for persons to give evidence.

The biIl also hopes to elicit international assistance in criminal investigations, recovery, forfeiture or confiscation of property in respect of offences.

The restraining of dealings in property or the freezing of assets that may be recovered, forfeited or confiscated in respect of offences.

The execution of request for search and seizure, the location and identification of witnesses and suspects, the service of documents and other matters connected herewith, it read.
A senior lawyer, Femi Falana, has lashed back at former finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, saying Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala has a habit of attacking critics of her appalling records.

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Falana said the ex-minister resorted to scurrilous attacks on him for requesting the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity committed by past public officers.

Mr. Falana had petitioned the ICC, last week, urging the court to investigate serving and retired military officers and their civilian accomplices involved in arms procurement for the war against insurgency.

Her baseless attack is not unusual as she is always quick to deflect criticisms by accusing anyone seeking to hold her to account for her appalling records in government of ulterior political motives, said Mr. Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.

When Professor Chukwuma Soludo alleged that about N30 trillion could not be accounted for under her watch he was described as an embittered loser in the Nigerian political space.

When Comrade Adams Oshiomhole questioned the illegal withdrawal of $2 billion from the Excess Crude Account, he was accused of having animus towards her because she had blocked Edo State from obtaining a loan.

Therefore, instead of exchanging vulgar abuse with the former minister, I shall respond to the diversionary allegations which lacerated her response and the attempt to extricate herself from the mass looting of the commonwealth under her watch, he said.



Read the full statement below:

FEMI FALANAS REJOINDER TO DR. NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALAS REPONSE TO ICC PETITION

In my application to the Special Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) last week, I requested for investigation into the allegations of crimes against humanity committed by serving and retired military officers and their civilian accomplices. Having diverted over $8 billion earmarked for the procurement of arms and armament for counter insurgency operations I argued that the suspects who aided and abetted the dreaded Boko Haram sect in the barbaric killing of over 25 soldiers and civilians including children and the displacement of 2 million people ought to be prosecuted at the ICC. However, for having the temerity to request the ICC to investigate the crimes against humanity committed by some former public officers who bear full responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated by the terrorist group Dr. Okonjo-Iweala resorted to the scurrilous attack of my person.

Her baseless attack is not unusual as she is always quick to deflect criticisms by accusing anyone seeking to hold her to account for her appalling records in government of ulterior political motives. When Professor Chukwuma Soludo alleged that about N30 trillion could not be accounted for under her watch he was described as an embittered loser in the Nigerian political space. When Comrade Adams Oshiomole questioned the illegal withdrawal of $2 billion from the Excess Crude Account, he was accused of having animus towards her because she had blocked Edo State from obtaining a loan. Therefore, instead of exchanging vulgar abuse with the former Minister I shall respond to the diversionary allegations which lacerated her response and the attempt to extricate herself from the mass looting of the commonwealth under her watch.

The claim that I am unfamiliar with the mandate of the ICC shows that Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala has not been following the practice of the court and its active and robust approach to its mandates, in particular with regard to the investigation of crimes in Darfur, the warrant of arrest for Joseph Kony (Uganda), and the warrant of arrest for Ahmad Harun, (Sudan). In many decided cases, the ICC has expanded its mandate to humanitarian issues, aimed at forestalling and impeding the perpetration of crimes which cause gross human rights abuse. There is absolutely nothing in the Rome Statute of the ICC to suggest that the court cannot address impunity for enormous financial crimes (and its crippling impact) which took place while Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala was the Finance Minister and the Coordinating Minister of the economy.

Dr. Okonjo-Iwealas claim that I own the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) is far-fetched and laughable. A simple google search would have shown her that while I am one of the legal advisers of the organization, there are other very distinguished lawyers and academics of international repute on SERAPs board. Her claim that SERAP is discredit is the exact opposite of reckless characterization because it is an organization that has won national and international recognitions  including nomination for the UN civil society award; the Ford Foundation Jubilee Transparency Award; and the Wole Soyinka Anti-Corruption Defender Award.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala also claimed that my petition against her to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) were lacking in credibility, without any substantiation of what this means or specific rebuttal of the allegations contained in that petition. She has however not denied the accuracy of the claims in my petition. Whereas the former Finance Minister had insisted that only $500 million was recovered from the Abacha loot my petition detailed the recovery of $4 billion. As she could not challenge my claim Dr. Okonjo-Iweala now says that the $500 million was the amount recovered while she was the Minister of Finance under President Obasanjo. In making that claim she did not take cognizance of her recent statement that while she gave out $322 million to Col. Dasuki the sum of $700 million had been set aside for development. From her own account, over $1 billion was recovered from the loot under the Jonathan regime when she was coordinating the economy.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala should have also provided further explanations as to why a substantial part of the Abacha loot was criminally diverted under her watch, especially in light of her confessional statement that she transferred $322m from the Abacha loot to former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, to prosecute the war on terror. Apart from the said $322m, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala also released 5.5m to Dasuki. Even on this ground alone, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala cannot plausibly claim not to have anything to do with the arms procurement scandal. Dr. Okonjo-Iwealas excuse that the said $322m was released due to the urgency of the crisis in the North-East region is untenable having regard to the fact that former President Jonathan had sought the approval of the National Assembly to take a loan of $1bn to equip the armed forces to fight insurgency. Therefore, her self-induced urgency is not a justification for spending public funds without appropriation.

In the course of my defending several military officers and soldiers who were charged before court-martial for demanding weapons to fight the terrorists I confirmed that the $1 billion loan for arms procurement. I was compelled to request Dr. Okonjo-Iweala for an inventory of the military equipment purchased with the $1 billion loan. The requested inventory was made available to me as the weapons were not purchased.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala has continued to give the erroneous impression that she rendered selfless service to the nation. But while her colleagues who served as ministers under President Olusegun Obasanjo were paid their salaries and allowances in the local currency she received hers in dollars despite a judgment of the Court of Appeal which had declared the payment illegal and unconstitutional in the case of Fawehinmi v The President (2007) 14 NWLR (Pt 1054) 275. In order to weep up sentiments Dr. Okonjo-Iweala referred to the unfortunate kidnap of her 84-year mother, two years ago. But it is public knowledge that the lumpen elements involved in the kidnap were arrested by the Lagos State Police Command. From the report of police investigation the kidnappers were palace guards who were inspired by sheer avarice. In fact, they were arrested by the Police following the disagreement over the sharing of the N12 million ransom paid to them for the criminal enterprise.

The most ludicrous of Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala sweeping and jejune allegation is that some corrupt elements are using me as a tool. Although the allegation is without factual support it is illogical, to say the least. My request that the disbursement of the Abacha loot be investigated is further buttressed by the fact that the $500m Dr. Okonjo-Iweala claimed was spent on development projects was also not appropriated by the National Assembly, contrary to constitutional provisions. However, I have asked the EFCC to discountenance the 700-page report of the World Bank which has listed some phantom projects executed with the $500 million.

In the Appropriation Act of 2011, the sum of N245 billion was budgeted for fuel subsidy. But at the end of the year, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala had authorized the illegal payment of about N2.5 trillion to a cabal of fuel importers. As usual, she washed off her hands like Pontius Pilate. In order to unearth the monumental fraud I petitioned the EFCC and gave oral testimony before the House of Representatives Committee which separately investigated it. In the same vein, I have just asked the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation under the Freedom of Information Act to provide information on the failure of the NNPC to pay into the Federation Account the sum of $9.7 billion out of the $11.8 billion dividends paid by NLNG from 2004-2014. I have equally demanded information from the NEITI over its claim that the NNPC and some oil companies are indebted to the Federal Government to the tune of $19.1 billion.

Finally, let me make it abundantly clear that my petitions to the anti-graft agencies and the Special Prosecutor of the ICC were anchored on law and facts as there is nothing personal in the ongoing battle to end impunity and retrieve the looted wealth of the nation from corrupt elements and institutions. It is my belief that the recovered loot should be channelled towards job creation and infrastructural development. Therefore, all hands should be on deck to ensure that the recovered loot is not criminally diverted by another set of looters.
President Muhammadu Buhari is to address a special session of the European Union parliament and European Commission next Wednesday in Strasbourg, France.

The Head of the European Union Delegation to Nigeria, Michel Arrion, told reporters in Abuja on Wednesday that President Buhari is scheduled to address the 751-member EU Parliament in a special session to be attended by members of the executive and legislative arms of the 28-member states of the EU.

Mr. Arrion said the one-day session would afford the Nigerian leader the opportunity to canvass the support of his European counterparts for his administrations cardinal agenda of fight against insecurity in Nigeria.

The last African leader to address a similar special session of the EU was Thabo Mbeki of South Africa in 2004.

The president is expected to hold bilateral discussions with the presidents of the UK Parliament and European Commission about corruption, economy and the challenges of migration and mobility in Africa.

Mr. Arrion said the EU would use the occasion of Mr. Buharis visit to re-open discussions on the controversial Economic partnership agreement (EPA) on trade with the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, which Nigeria has refused to sign.

He said the EU would continue to support Nigeria in the fight against corruption through a range of programmes aimed at strengthening the capacities of the anti-corruption agencies and the criminal justice administration system.

We welcome any form of cooperation in the judicial and the police that Nigeria wants to have with EU member-states, he said. The EU will be ready to support government agencies fighting corruption in public procurement and administration, starting with investigation and judiciarys handling of corruption cases.

Apart from the support for the fight against corruption through a 35 million Euros project implemented nationwide by the UN Office on Drug and Crime, the EU envoy said the delegation would support the judicial reform in Nigeria with the currently United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC, initiative in six states.

The projects, targeted at various anti-corruption cases, seek to evolve a coordinated mechanism for the implementation of anti-corruption strategies in the country.

He said the EU was committed to work with Nigeria in formulating the appropriate policies and strategies, by combining military, intelligence, information, humanitarian, political and development responses to the problem at federal and state levels.

During the visit, we (EU) will hold bilateral discussions on the humanitarian responses, in terms of building the capacity of Nigeria to respond to the social infrastructure needs for schools, hospitals and electricity in the North East region of the country.

The focus of the discussions will be how the international community can help Nigeria address the threat of Boko Haram insurgents; fight corruption in public and private sectors of the countrys economy, and help recover and return stolen assets to Nigeria, he explained.

He advised the government not to focus on corruption in the public sector alone, noting that the level of corruption in the private sector, especially in the business sector, was not only high, but also seriously impacting on the economy and management of economic infrastructure.

Mr. Arrion said the problem with the Nigerian economy was its over-dependence on oil revenue.

There should be a complete review of taxation policy in Nigeria, particularly on company and individual income taxes as well as value added tax, VAT. Nigeria has the lowest rate of VAT in Africa. The issue is not the rate of VAT, but the coverage. You cannot raise VAT if half of the economy is not covered and the businesses and transactions are informal, he said.

On migration, Mr, Arion said a high level mission is expected to visit Nigeria soon to discuss on the challenges of migration and mobility in Africa, to follow up on discussions held last November in Malta on EU-Africa summit to form a common agenda on migration.
Governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, have kicked against moves by a former presidential aide, Ahmed Gulak, to assume office as the partys acting national chairman.

Rising from a meeting in Abuja on Wednesday, the governors said the invasion of the party headquarters by Mr. Gulak on Wednesday was regrettable and condemnable.

The position of the governors, which was contained in a communique issued at the end of the meeting, the PDP governors forum took cognizance of the judgment by a court in Abuja which ordered the current acting chairman, Uche Secondus, to vacate office for any other person from the North-East zone of Nigeria.

Our party constitution has enough provisions for that and the necessary process has been put in motion, they said.

Justice Yusuf Baba of a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory had on December 16 directed Mr. Secondus to vacate office and revert to his position as deputy national chairman of the party.

The court also said Mr. Secondus should handover the leadership of the party to either Mr. Gulak, who was the plaintiff to the suit, or any other qualified person from the north eastern part of the country.

The office of national chairman of the PDP became vacant after former chairman, Ahmadu Muazu, resigned his position last year.

PDP governors on Wednesday said the appropriate organs of the party will meet soon to elect a national chairman of the party from the appropriate zone.

The governors also congratulated two of their colleagues, Nyesom Wike, and Dave Umahi over their victory at the Supreme Court, which affirmed their elections as governors of Rivers and Ebonyi States respectively.
The Deputy Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on the Army, Funke Adedoyin, has described the Jebba-Mokwa Road as a national disaster.

Ms. Adedoyin said the road needed urgent reconstruction.

Ms. Adedoyin said this in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, on Wednesday (last week) when she led a delegation of the Committee on the Army on a courtesy call on the Kwara State Governor, Abdulfatah Ahmed, at the Government House.

The federal lawmaker said the deplorable state of the road had caused loss of lives and properties as it is a major link road between the Northern and Southern parts of the country.

Ms. Adedoyin promised to liaise with the House of Representatives Committee on Works on how to ensure that the road receives urgent Federal Government attention to halt carnage on it.

The lawmaker commended the state government for what she called the excellent relationship between it and the Army and other security forces.

She said the 22 Armoured Brigade Cantonment at Sobi in Ilorin occupies a strategic position in its operations, which covers Kwara State and parts of the neighbouring state of Niger.

Responding, Governor Ahmed said he had made several presentations at the National Economic Council and other fora on the need for reconstruction of the Jebba-Mokwa Road.

Mr. Ahmed promised greater partnership with the Nigerian Army and other security agencies on security in the state.

He said the nation must tackle its security challenges in parts of the country.

The governor commended the members of the House of Representatives on the Army for their active disposition to the promotion of the welfare of the Nigerian Army.


The Adamawa State government has commenced public enlightenment on how to identify a suicide bomber, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

The campaign, sponsored by the Adamawa State Security Council, includes jingles on radio and television stations as well as distribution of English and Hausa language posters on how to recognise a suicide bomber.

One of the posters being distributed by a team from the state Ministry of Information led the commissioner, Ahmad Sajoh, now on advocacy visit to traditional rulers in local government areas, contain 16 points on security awareness and how to identify a bomber.

According to the poster, a suicide bomber could, among others, be identified based on appearance and behaviours as he moves towards his target.

(He or she) wears loose clothing giving the impression that the body is disproportionally larger than the head or feet.

(He or she) appears to be focused and vigilant and may be fervently praying to him/herself- giving the appearance of whispering to someone.

(He or she) Displays no response to authoritative voice or direct salutation.

(He or she) Demonstrates forceful action (to reach a desired target by pushing their way through a crowd or restricted area), the poster read in part.

It also provided security hotlines for people to call in case of any emergency.

The special lines include: 08021366660 and 09038800688.

(NAN)
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chairman in Rivers State, Felix Obuah, has dedicated the victory of Governor Nyesom Wike at the Supreme Court to God.

Mr. Obuah made the statement on Wednesday in Port Harcourt while reacting to the Supreme Court judgment which upheld Wikes election.

A statement by Jerry Needam, Mr. Obuahs Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, urged Rivers people, irrespective of party affiliations to join hands with the governor to move the state forward.

It congratulated the people of the state for their prayers and commitment in the face of provocations.

The statement also quoted Mr. Obuah as commending ministers of God from all denominations across the country for their prayers and support for the governor.

It said that Mr. Wikes administration was built on the foundation of God.

It said that the PDP state chairman thanked the Supreme Court for protecting the mandate Rivers people gave Mr. Wike.

(NAN)
An octogenarian farmer in Ikere Ekiti, Ekiti State, Gabriel Oloro, has been kidnapped by unknown gunmen, who are demanding the payment of N40million as ransom.

The father of the former Chairman of Ojodu Local Council Development Area of Lagos State, Julius Oloro, was abducted on January 20 while returning home from his farm and had since been held in an unknown location.

A family source told journalists in Ado Ekiti on Tuesday that Pa Oloro was with his wife and two children when he was seized by the armed men.

Baba was driving home in his Toyota Camry with his wife and two children around 9.30 p.m when the kidnappers barricaded the road. They dropped the two children and took him away with his wife, the source said.

The kidnappers later dropped the wife and returned the vehicle around 2am to the house.

They later contacted the family and demanded N40m ransom. The ransom has been reduced to N10m.

The Ekiti Police Public Relations Officer, Alberto Adeyemi, confirmed the incident, saying the police had commenced a search for the kidnappers.

He assured that no effort would be spared to secure the victims release soon.
Polish and foreign top officials, including Poland's and Croatia's presidents Andrzej Duda and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, Israeli and Russian ambassadors to Poland and former Auschwitz inmates on Wednesday marked the 71st anniversary of Auschwitz liberation.

"Auschwitz is not just a museum. Auschwitz is not just a huge grave, because the ashes of those murdered here are everywhere and you can say that this site is one huge grave. It is not just about commemoration", President Duda said.

"It is a great sign and a warning against what can happen when those in power get confused and ensnare society ... what can happen when social, public, political life becomes dominated by hatred; what can happen if international law is violated and the international community fails to respond in time; what can happen if countries are aggressive towards other countries, if they annexe their territories, if they spread war and hatred", the Polish head of state continued. May be of interest to you Address at the commemoration ceremony of the 71st anniversary of the liberation of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau

Everything needs to be done to make sure that awful events such as those which took place at Auschwitz and other similar sites never happen again, Duda also said, adding that this was not just a matter of "abiding by international law" but also educating young people all over the world and reminding everyone that these had been German Nazi concentration camps.

The ceremony included joint prayers by Christians and Jews, after which the former prisoners, President Duda and Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic placed candles at the monument to the camp's victims.



January 27 was also declared the International Day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust in a United Nations 2005 resolution.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was built by Nazi Germany in 1940 to imprison Poles. Two years later Auschwitz II-Birkenau was constructed and it became the place of extermination of Jews. Nazi Germany exterminated at least 1.1 million people there, mainly Jews but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners and people of other nationalities. (PAP, own information)
It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discover the
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All eyes are on the Awards Night of the 12th edition of the PrintWeek Awards to be held at the Grand Hyatt (Santacruz East, Mumbai) on 2 Nov...
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.




TORONTO, January 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Incorporates ESG issues into portfolio management and investment processes

AGF Investments Inc. (AGF) today announced it has become a signatory to the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in recognition of the increasing relevance of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues within the investment process.

The PRI Initiative is a global network of investors working together to put the six principles for responsible investment into practice. Its goal is to understand the implications of sustainability for investors and support signatories to incorporate these issues into both their investment decision-making and ownership practices. In implementing the principles, signatories contribute to the development of a more sustainable global financial system.

"As one of the pioneers in the development of sustainable investing, we are pleased to join this international network and integrate ESG issues into our investment analysis and stewardship practices across the firm," said Kevin McCreadie, President and Chief Investment Officer, AGF Investments Inc. "This reinforces our commitment to responsible investing and offers our clients a more sustainable approach."

When applying the PRI's six principles of responsible investment, all the AGF strategies consider ESG factors in their portfolio management and investment decision-making processes to inform asset allocation, stock selection, portfolio construction, shareholder engagement and voting.

"We are delighted to welcome AGF as a signatory to the PRI," said Fiona Reynolds, PRI managing director. "Their long-standing commitment to responsible investing, combined with a wealth of experience in looking at sustainability issues, will benefit our other members across North America."

To learn more about Responsible Investment at AGF, visit: AGF.com/ResponsibleInvestment

About AGF Management Limited

AGF Management Limited is one of Canada's premier independent investment management firms with offices across Canada and subsidiaries around the world. AGF's products include a diversified family of mutual funds, mutual fund wrap programs and pooled funds. AGF also manages assets on behalf of institutional investors including pension plans, foundations and endowments as well as for private clients. With approximately $33 billion in total assets under management, AGF serves more than one million investors. AGF trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol AGF.B.

Media Contact: Pamela Marchant, Vice-President, Marketing & Communications, +1-416-815-6205, pamela.marchant@agf.com

SOURCE AGF
31% of employers in Western Europe say it's difficult to measure the ROI of engagement on the wider business, and 30% say boardroom decision-makers cannot easily understand its impact

68% of employers in Western Europe still rely on traditional annual staff surveys to measure engagement

LONDON, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle has today released findings from the second phase of its Western European study focused on understanding employee engagement, which reveals that there is an opportunity for HR teams to take ownership of engagement in the boardroom, and demonstrate the value of a more engaged workforce to decision-makers.

The employer viewpoint results of the Oracle Simply Talent 2: A Western European Perspective study, which set out to understand the drivers and benefits of employee engagement in Europe, polled 250 HR decision makers working for large Western European businesses.

Findings from the survey reveal 93% of employers acknowledge employee engagement is strategically important to their company. A majority say it positively impacts collaboration between teams 65%), helps boost business performance (61%), and contributes to improved customer service (60%).

However, the survey results also reveal current processes are not optimised to drive engagement. Sixty-eight per cent (68%) of businesses still rely on standard staff surveys to gauge engagement levels, with only 37% using advanced analytics to measure engagement.

Consequently, 31% of employers say they find it difficult to measure the direct impact of engagement on the wider business and nearly the same proportion (30%) admit this makes it difficult to quantify the above benefits for company decision-makers.

Despite their crucial role in gauging and analyzing employee engagement, HR teams are not currently seen as a major driver of engagement for businesses. When asked who in the business has the greatest impact on employee engagement, only 10% of employers said HR, compared with 34% who said line managers and 28% who said the senior leadership team.

This also echoes the comparatively low profile HR has with employees, which was brought to light by the first phase of Oracle's Simply Talent: A Western European Perspective study, which surveyed 1,500 employees working for large Western European businesses. Of those employees polled, only 3% said HR has the most positive impact on engagement

Loic Le Guisquet, President for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific regions commented: "Employees are the front line, the public face, the tangible personification of what a business represents. Therefore being able to understand, and more importantly improve employee engagement becomes an absolute priority for any of today's successful leaders.

"A more rigorous engagement strategy has become indispensable, and HR has a vital role to play in helping organizations make the transition. Modern HR teams have access to data-based tools allowing them to effectively measure employee engagement, and just as crucially to quantify its impact on the business for the decision-makers in the boardroom. In this way HR will find itself at the centre of the business, driving engagement strategies that best serve the organization's growth ambitions."

Combining Oracle's latest findings with those from the employee viewpoint phase the research reveals that despite employers saying line management has the greatest role in driving engagement, employees still say poor communication from managers is the most frequent reason for them feeling less engaged at work.

An overwhelming 90% percent of employers agree strong leadership is effective in boosting employee productivity, with 34% saying line management has the greatest role in driving employee engagement, more than any other department in the business.

This appreciation for line management excellence is echoed by employees. Nearly one-third single out good line management as making them feel more engaged at work, and 41% say poor communication from managers is the single most frequent reason for them feeling less engaged. Despite this, only 13% of employers consider a focus on line management excellence is most important to making employees feel engaged at work.

Encouragingly, there are multiple areas where employer priorities do align with those of employees.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of employers agree recognising the excellence of individual employees has a strong positive impact on engagement, a belief shared by 53% of employees

Fifty-two percent (52%) of employers believe embracing teamwork and collaboration positively impacts engagement, as do 53% of employees

54% of employers say a good work/life balance makes workers feel more engaged, and 50% of employees agree

Le Guisquet said: "These findings suggest that while everyone agrees that line managers are responsible for creating high levels of employee engagement, and that good communication is an essential element of this, businesses have not developed their management functions accordingly. Given the changing world of work and the increasing demands of millennials it is essential that HR helps create a culture of engagement within the organization, centered on line managers as the key agents of change."

When it comes to the latest digital and mobile technologies, HR tools, and social media platforms, Oracle's findings indicate only a minority of employers view these as direct contributors to improved engagement.

Employers certainly place stock in the practices that these technologies enable. For example, 48% of employers say a healthy, safe and comfortable working environment improves employee performance, 45% credit flexible working hours, and 48% chalk this up to offering training and development to employees  all areas that can be enhanced with mobile and social tools.

And yet, only 15% of employers say using the latest digital and mobile technology is most important to driving employee engagement, while only 3% say enabling employees to use social platforms at work is most important.

Additional Resources

Additional Information

For this research Oracle partnered with Opinium Research to survey 1,511 individuals from large enterprises based around Western Europe, with respondents coming from countries including the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

About Oracle

Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit oracle.com.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Related Links

http://www.oracle.com



SOURCE Oracle
DUBLIN, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/w6ptn7/offshore_support) has announced the addition of the "Offshore Support Vessel Market - Global Forecast to 2020" report to their offering.

The offshore support vessel market is expected to reach $38.53 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 5.8% from 2015 to 2020.

The increase in global oil & gas production from North America and the Middle East has been accompanied by maturing onshore oilfields, which has shifted the focus of operators towards offshore markets.

Due to slide in crude oil price, offshore support vessel companies would see weaker revenues for the next few years. This downfall is a result of spending cuts and decrease in vessel utilization, day rates, and an overall offshore capital expenditure.

The offshore support vessel market has also been categorized on the basis of depth into shallow water and deepwater-based operations. More than half of the offshore support vessel market is covered by the shallow water application; however, with the advent of advanced technology, operators are entering into deepwater and ultra-deepwater zones. This has led to rising demand for offshore support vessels capable of operating in deepwater environments.

Moreover, due to decreasing production in shallow water basins and large potential of untapped subsea hydrocarbons reserves, there has been an increased focus in deepwater exploration & production activities. There has also been increasing deepwater oil discoveries in Asia-Pacific, Africa, North America, and Europe.

Oil discoveries in the African region especially in Ghana, Congo, Mozambique, and Angola are creating lucrative business opportunities, where offshore support vessel market players are trying to focus to enhance their revenue.

Companies Mentioned:

Bourbon Sa

Edison Chouest Offshore

Farstad Shipping Asa

Gulfmark Offshore Inc.

Harvey Gulf International Marine, Llc

Havila Shipping Asa

Hornbeck Offshore

Island Offshore Management as

Rem Maritime as

Seacor Marine Llc.

Siem Offshore Inc.

Solstad Offshore Asa

Swire Group Ltd.

The Maersk Group

Tidewater, Inc.

Vroon Group

Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Premium Insights

5 Market Overview

6 Offshore Support Vessel Market, By Type

7 Offshore Support Vessel Market, By Depth

8 Offshore Support Vessel Market, By Region

9 Competitive Landscape

10 Company Profiles

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/w6ptn7/offshore_support

Media Contact:

Laura Wood, +353-1-481-1716, press@researchandmarkets.net

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com



SOURCE Research and Markets
TAMPA, Florida, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WilsonHCG, a global talent solutions leader, today announced it experienced its largest annual growth in its 13-year history. The growth is a result of increased current client adoption and new client acquisition.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110823/FL55876LOGO

For more information about WilsonHCG and its services, visit wilsonhcg.com.

Also contributing to the growth in 2015 was the completion of two acquisitions: Head2Head, a talent solutions firm based in Toronto, Canada; and Sumner Grace, a US-based HR consulting firm. These expanded WilsonHCG's suite of services and global capacity.

"Our clients and the overall market want quality, innovation and scale, not just cost savings," said CEO John Wilson. "2015 represents our ability to execute a long-term strategy of providing solutions that positively impact our clients. We expect more of the same in 2016, as organizations look for efficiencies and scale. Talent will remain critical even with economic instability."

In 2015, the company significantly grew overall headcount globally with a specific focus on Toronto due to favorable foreign exchange and availability of high-quality talent. As part of the focus on Toronto, WilsonHCG was pleased to host Toronto Mayor John Tory at the annual CONNECT Forum in the fall to help promote his Partnership to Advance Youth Employment (PAYE) program.

WilsonHCG's current client list includes some of the world's most admired and best-known companies. In the first quarter of 2016, WilsonHCG will open a service center in Krakow, Poland. The company will also continue with expansion plans in Latin America and Asia.

ABOUT WILSONHCG

WilsonHCG is a global talent solutions leader that operates on the principle of providing true partnership to its clients. Delivering business-impacting talent solutions  including recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), talent consulting, contingent workforce solutions and executive search  WilsonHCG is transforming its clients' businesses through their talent. Founded in 2002, the company's global headquarters is located in Tampa, Florida. While optimizing clients' talent strategies is essential, WilsonHCG recognizes the relationships it develops lead to the results its clients realize.

Better People, Better Business.

Media Contact:

Jessica Lang

+1 (813) 280-7746

jessica.lang@wilsonhcg.com

Related Links

http://www.wilsonhcg.com



SOURCE WilsonHCG
LONDON and MUNICH, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

How robots will revolutionize factories of the future

In the age of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" industrial and service robots are repeatedly breaking new sales records. According to the latest IFR forecasts, global sales of robots will enjoy double-digit growth to 2018.

Experts from the world's largest robotics + automation fair AUTOMATICA, the London School of Economics (LSE) and the German Engineering Association VDMA will present their vision of how robotics + automation are reshaping industry at a press conference on Monday, 8th February 2016 (11:00 am - 1:00 pm). The conference will be held at the Institute of Directors (IoD, 116 Pall Mall ) in London by AUTOMATICA. The Speakers

Dr. Martin Lechner , N ew T e c hnologies expert , AUTOMATICA , Messe Muenchen

Prof. Guy Michaels , London School of Economics

Patrick Schwarzkopf , Robot ics + Automation Unit, German Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA)

Dr. Malcom Roberts , Founder of Guidance Automation Ltd., UK

are looking forward to welcoming you to the ensuing discussion.

Some of the themes covered will be:

Outlook of the most 'futuristic' robotics technology - e.g. human-robot collaboration

The automation of smart factories and the future of work

How the UK industry will be changed by robots and new automation strategies

For your free registration please contact Carsten Heer:

E-Mail: newsroom@econ-news.com Phone: +49-(0)-40-82244-284

Press conference AUTOMATICA: "How robots revolutionize future factories"

08th February 2016 (11:00 am - 1:00 pm)

Institute of Directors ,116 Pall Mall, SW1Y 5ED, London

Contact

econNEWSnetwork

Carsten Heer

Rothenbaumchaussee 31

20148 Hamburg, Germany

Tel.: +49-(0)40-8-22-44-284

Mob. + 49-(0)-15-737-511-823

Carsten.Heer@econ-news.de

http://www.econ-news.de



SOURCE German Engineering Association VDMA
NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Treato, a leading consumer healthcare website, revealed their first annual list of top statins. This ranking is part of a new series of drug rankings from the company. Statins are one of the most commonly used medications to treat high cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. Statins work by blocking cholesterol's production in the liver. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recently announced their recommendation that adults as young as 40 without a previous heart attack should consider starting a low dose statin. Merck formulations took the top two spots with Vytorin, at the top of the brand list and lovastatin, the generic for Merck's Mevacor, at the top of the generics list. Despite generics for statins being on the market for many years, consumers are still favoring brand name statins as many brand names scored higher in overall satisfaction than generics. Among popular statins, Bristol Myers Squibb's Pravachol is the statin with the highest rate of posts discussing concerns, while lovastatin has the lowest rate.

Treato's Statins Ranking

Treato's Top List Of Statins:

(5 being the highest and 1 the lowest score)

Brand:

Drug Manufacture Price* Satisfaction (Overall)

Score Helpfulness Score Concern Score 1. Vytorin** Merck $233.53 (20mg) 2.4 5 3.9 2. Zocor Merck $216.57 (20mg) 2.1 3.3 4 3. Crestor AstraZeneca $236.14 (10mg) 1.8 2.7 3.6 4. Pravachol Bristol-Myers Squibb $170.51 (40mg) 1.7 1.7 4.5 5. Lipitor Pfizer $310.84 (20mg) 1.6 1.3 3.6

Generic:

Drug Price* Satisfaction

(Overall)

Score Helpful

Score Concern

Score 1. lovastatin $4.69 (20mg) 2.3 2.9 3.3 2. pravastatin $8.34 (40mg) 2.2 3.7 4.1 3. simvastatin $2.81 (20mg) 1.6 1 4.1 4. atorvastatin $8.99 (20mg) 1.4 1.3 4

* The prices listed refer to a 30-day supply of the most common dosage before any insurance co-pays or drug discounts. The prices listed for prescription medications are provided by OneRx before any insurance co-pays or drug discounts.

** Vytorin is a combo pill of Zetia (ezetimibe) and Zocor (simvastatin)

"By ranking consumers' experiences of their satisfaction with statins, we hope to empower individuals with information based on the experiences of other patients. We want patients to be more confident in their discussions with their doctor when picking a statin to meet their needs," says Ido Hadari, CEO of Treato. "We anticipate that a year from now the rankings of treatments for high cholesterol will look very different with the recent FDA approvals of first-in-class PCSK9 inhibitors Praluent and Repatha, both of which are anticipated to be blockbusters."

Treato's Top List of Statin's was created with data from OneRx, the authority on consumer drug pricing information. OneRx is a free prescription management app that helps insured and uninsured Americans save on medications. Additionally, the OneRx National Drug Index is the only prescription drug price index in the U.S. that measures the average price of prescription drugs, driven by the most commonly prescribed medications. OneRx is part of Truveris, the leading health IT company with a suite of solutions servicing the pharmacy value chain.

Find more information here about Treato's statins drug ratings

Treato's Methodology:

TreatoVoice is a unique data asset that continuously collects and analyzes more than two billion patient and caregiver conversations happening across the Internet to understand what patients are saying about their experiences with their conditions and treatments. Within TreatoVoice, we have the capability to algorithmically identify and rank patients' experiences with medications within their Web posts based on the following methodologies:

Treato Satisfaction scores are overall drug scores that are calculated based on a ratio of positive to negative reviews about a medication with weight given to the volume and recency of conversations happening online.

Treato Helpful scores are condition-specific scores that rank the medication among other medications used to treat the same condition. The score is calculated based on the percentage of online conversations in which patients reported the brand being helpful with relation to that condition out of all the online conversations about that brand and that condition.

Treato Concern scores are calculated based on the percentage of patient online conversations that raise a concern or discuss a side effect in the conversation compared to all of the conversations about the brand happening online.

To find out more about Treato's drug scores please visit: https://treato.com/treato-drug-scores

About Treato:

Treato, the leading source of real health insights from millions of real health consumers, uses patented analytics and big data technology to turn billions of disparate online conversations into meaningful social intelligence. With more than two billion posts analyzed and continuously expanding, Treato has partnered with 9 out of the world's top 10 pharmaceutical companies as well as numerous other multi-national pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations. Treato.com, its consumer website, helps millions of visitors each month.

Treato is privately held with offices in Israel, New York and Princeton, NJ. Investors include Reed Elsevier Ventures, OrbiMed Partners and New Leaf Venture Partners, among others. For more information please visit https://treato.com/

Allyson Noonan

Media Relations Manager

+1(858)245-7256

[email protected]

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SOURCE Treato

Related Links

http://www.treato.com


WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) previously, Breathe opened their new California State licensed Residential Treatment Center on Monday, January 18, 2016 adjacent to their main Laurel Canyon Campus.

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"We've been working towards the inclusion of the restricting client since we opened more than two years ago," says Brad Lamm, Breathe's founder. "Those in the grips of an eating disorder, be it anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder, deserve trauma-informed care and a dedicated outcome-focused clinical team." Breathe's client-centered philosophy and trauma-informed model is embedded in all facets of programming.

The extensive sensorimotor psychotherapy training of founding Clinical Director Kathleen Murphy, MA, LPC drives Breathe's clinical approach. "I see eating disorders so often in clients as an expression of a traumatized nervous system seeking to regulate itself in any way possible," says Murphy. "Sometimes that trauma expresses itself as anorexia, or binge eating, or substance abuse. We cultivate healthy relationships and redesign patterns of life-affirming behavior."

"The impact of an eating disorder can be devastating on an individual and their family," says Dr. Carol Kiriakos, Breathe Life Healing Center's Medical Director. "Our commitment to treating the whole family system encourages the village to change in many ways together, not just the individual." With more than 20 million Americans battling eating disorders, time in treatment is critical to improve outcomes. "Each client arrives at Breathe and settles in to begin establishing change. We consider time as a tool, and ver time they become a healthier person," says Cara Timko, MFTI, Primary ED Therapist. The average eating disorder client stays in Breathe's continuum of care 120 days.

About Breathe Life Healing Centers: Breathe is a trauma informed clinical program treating Substance Use Disorder, Eating Disorders and Co-Occurring Disorders, utilizing an integrative approach to treatment. Our stabilization treatment is deeply informed by interpersonal neurobiology and utilizes evidenced based approaches which include DBT, mindfulness-based CBT, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR, Internal family systems as well as transpersonal modalities. Breathe offers Family Class for each extended family system and offers superior accommodations and meals.

CLINICAL CONTACT: Lilit Arvahi, LMFT || Clinical Outreach Coordinator || [email protected], 800-929-5904

MEDIA CONTACT: The Narrative Group, Sarah Stevens || [email protected], 323-843-4294

Visit Breathe Life online at BreatheLifeHealingCenters.com

SOURCE Breathe Life Healing Center

Related Links

http://www.BreatheLifeHealingCenters.com


MILWAUKEE, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at X Games Aspen, Harley-Davidson unveiled the Low Rider S and the Harley-Davidson Custom Vehicle Operations (CVO) Pro Street Breakout motorcycles  two additions to its 2016 model-year lineup, which is the most powerful collection of cruisers in the brand's 113-year history.

The new 2016 Harley-Davidson Low Rider S combines Screamin' Eagle performance and Dark Custom style in a powerful new cruiser.

Raw, dark and trimmed to the essentials, the new Low Rider S motorcycle is the most powerful non-CVO Dyna cruiser ever offered by Harley-Davidson. The Screamin' Eagle Twin Cam 110 engine, Screamin' Eagle Heavy Breather performance intake and Fat Bob-style 2-into-2 exhaust deliver 115 foot pounds of peak torque at 3500 rpm. Premium suspension and brakes complete the performance package. The new limited-edition bike joins the Fat Boy S and Softail Slim S models as the third in the new line of S series cruisers for the 2016 Harley-Davidson lineup.

The new CVO Pro Street Breakout motorcycle rewrites the factory-custom book with obsessive attention to styling detail. This limited-edition motorcycle has a new, darker look and utilizes cutting-edge finishes and textures. Menacing, muscular and steeped in drag racing attitude, the CVO Pro Street Breakout motorcycle matches the high-intensity performance of the Screamin' Eagle Twin Cam 110 engine with a look that is pure American street machine.

"X Games Aspen is the ideal global stage to unveil our newest motorcycles that take cruiser performance, attitude and design to a whole new level," said Shelley Paxton, Vice President of Marketing and Brand, Harley-Davidson Motor Company.

2016 Model Lineup Highlights

The new Iron 883 and Forty-Eight  models join the Harley-Davidson Street  motorcycle to assert Harley-Davidson's leadership with its Dark Custom  motorcycle line-up inspired by the rebellious spirit of the past updated with modern design and performance.

and models join the motorcycle to assert Harley-Davidson's leadership with its Dark Custom motorcycle line-up inspired by the rebellious spirit of the past updated with modern design and performance. High Output Twin Cam 103 engines upgrade the power for all Softail  and Dyna  models (except Street Bob  ) in the United States , Canada and Mexico .

engines upgrade the power for all and models (except Street Bob ) in , and . The convenience of electronic cruise control is available on all Harley-Davidson Softail models. Enabled by new electronic throttle control, cruise control is standard equipment on 2016 Heritage Softail  Classic, Softail Deluxe, Fat Boy S and Softail Slim S models and available as an accessory for all other 2016 Softail models.

is available on all Harley-Davidson Softail models. Enabled by new electronic throttle control, cruise control is standard equipment on 2016 and models and available as an accessory for all other 2016 Softail models. All 2016 Sportster  models tame rough roads with all-new front and rear suspension and improved seats working together to enhance rider comfort and control.

 models tame rough roads with and improved seats working together to enhance rider comfort and control. Harley-Davidson's touring segment leadership grows with the addition of the Road Glide Ultra motorcycle to the Project RUSHMORE lineup and the refresh of the iconic Heritage Softail Classic model.

Visit H-D.com to see all the 2016 Harley-Davidson models and to find a local authorized Harley-Davidson dealer.

About Harley-Davidson Motor Company

Since 1903, Harley-Davidson Motor Company has fulfilled dreams of personal freedom with cruiser, touring and custom motorcycles, riding experiences and events, and a complete line of Harley-Davidson motorcycle parts, accessories, general merchandise, riding gear and apparel. For more information, visit www.h-d.com.

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SOURCE Harley-Davidson Motor Company

Related Links

http://www.h-d.com


MIAMI, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Glaucoma patients treated in a prospective clinical trial with the InnFocus MicroShunt Drainage System and followed for over three years experienced significant reduction in both Intraocular Pressure (IOP) and use of glaucoma medication. The results of the study were recently published in the peer reviewed Journal of Glaucoma*

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The patients studied had an average pre-surgical fully medicated intraocular pressure of 23.8 mm Hg. Three years after being treated with the InnFocus MicroShunt System the average IOP was reduced 55% to 10.7 mm Hg. Over 80% of the 22 patients achieved an IOP under 14 mm Hg. Sixty-four percent of patients did not require any glaucoma medication at the third year of the study.

"These results show not only the potential effectiveness but the possibility for sustainability of low IOP with the InnFocus procedure," said Juan F. Batlle, MD the principal surgeon and lead author of the article.

The company will be seeking FDA approval for the InnFocus MicroShunt System, as the first minimally invasive stand-alone procedure for mild, moderate, and severe stage open angle glaucoma, which lowers and sustains IOP under 15 mm Hg, with the potential to eliminate eye drop medications in most patients. Unlike many MIGS (micro-invasive glaucoma surgery) technologies, the InnFocus MicroShunt does not require simultaneous removal of the cataract.

The prospective study of the InnFocus MicroShunt System, used intraoperatively with mitomycin C, implanted both alone or in combination with phacoemulsification, was conducted by Dr. Batlle's team at Centro Laser in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The study results indicate that the InnFocus procedure achieved IOP control up to 3 years of follow-up with only mild transient adverse events (e.g, 2 cases of IOP < 6 mm Hg after day 1 and 2 cases of choroidal effusion), all resolving without surgical intervention within 3 months of surgery. Importantly, there were no leaks, infections, migrations, erosions, persistent corneal edema, chronic hypotony or serious long-term adverse events.

Over 250 patients have now been treated in clinical trials with the InnFocus MicroShunt in Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic and the US.

The final phase of the FDA randomized clinical study comparing the InnFocus MicroShunt System to trabeculectomy is underway.

The InnFocus MicroShunt drainage device is made from SIBS, an innovative, highly biocompatible biomaterial that has been implanted in the body for over 15 years. The InnFocus MicroShunt system was developed in collaboration with the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. It provides a quick, minimally invasive procedure for shunting aqueous humor from the anterior chamber to the same "gold standard" drainage path that has been used in trabeculectomy for approximately 50 years.

For more information visit www.innfocusinc.com

*Batlle, Juan F. MD; Fantes, Francisco MD; Riss, Isabelle MD, et al. Three-Year Follow-up of a Novel Aqueous Humor MicroShunt. Journal of Glaucoma: Published on line January 13, 2016, doi: 10.1097/IJG.0000000000000368

CAUTION: INVESTIGATIONAL DEVICE. LIMITED TO INVESTIGATIONAL USE IN THE UNITED STATES.

Media Contact:

Ed Coghlan

Email: Email

Phone: 818-489-4774

SOURCE InnFocus, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.innfocusinc.com


COUPEVILLE, Wash., Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Island County has chosen Verity Voting by Hart InterCivic to upgrade their election system before the May presidential primary. The choice was based on two core values, said County Auditor Sheilah Crider: "Trust and transparency."

"We have been a Hart customer for more than 10 years and are very comfortable with the quality of the Hart system, the integrity of its programs and their high level of customer service," she said. "Hart's people as well as equipment make the company a valuable partner in the election process. We can entrust our county elections to Verity."

"Island County is among the growing number of counties in Washington to upgrade to Verity, and we appreciate their confidence in a smooth, efficient transition," said Phillip Braithwaite, President and CEO of Hart InterCivic. "We will exceed the County's expectations."

Transparency, accuracy and efficiency are bywords in Island County, where the public is invited to observe the Hart system at work any time ballots are being processed.

"We take every step to assure our voters and the general public that our election process is transparent, credible and accurate. That is our highest mandate," Crider said. With Verity, that includes a streamlined and time-saving scanning process, part of a state-of-the-art ballot tally solution.

Verity is the only second generation digital solution to pass rigorous state and national certification standards. Hart designed Verity from the ground up based on decades of election experience and with direct input from Washington users.

Crider looks forward to faster data processing in a system that is easy to learn and operate  a system backed by Hart's excellent service and support. "We have never had issues with Hart equipment. This is my ninth November in this position, and we have had no equipment issues. If we have questions, we always have access to someone at Hart who can help."

"As a relatively small county with high voter turnout, we enjoy the efficiency of using Hart to create and process our ballots. This efficiency and accuracy is a vital part of serving our county," she added. Island County has about 51,000 registered voters, a number Crider expects to grow this year.

Training and installation of the Verity system are scheduled for two weeks in March, and the system will be ready for the May balloting, or even an April special election if necessary.

"Verity will be easy for us to adapt to. We may not need the entire two weeks of training," said Crider. "But, if needed, we know we can always get a quick response from Hart  by phone, email or in person."

For more information on the Verity Voting system, please visit www.hartintercivic.com/verityoverview.

About Hart InterCivic, Inc.

Austin-based Hart InterCivic is a full service election solutions innovator, partnering with state and local governments to deliver secure, accurate and reliable elections. Working side-by-side with election professionals for more than 100 years, Hart is committed to helping advance democracy one election at a time. The Hart mission fuels passionate customer focus and a continuous drive for technological innovation. The new Verity Voting system makes voting more straightforward, more equitable and more accessibleand ensures that managing elections is more transparent, more efficient and easier.

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SOURCE Hart InterCivic

Related Links

http://www.hartintercivic.com


WASHINGTON and NEW YORK and LONDON, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MarketResearch.com asked fifteen thought leaders to share their market research predictions for 2016. These quotes were compiled into a blog post to highlight a variety of possible trends for the coming year.

To learn more, visit our blog: http://hubs.ly/H01X72n0

Many respondents emphasized the role of mobile devices, which could become a game changer, allowing market research analysts to capture more timely and location-specific information from consumers. Big data was also cited as a major trend that will gain momentum as marketers seek to better understand consumer motivation and behavior.

The use of online tools and social analytics was another recurring theme. As more people spend time consuming digital content, market research techniques will continue to evolve as well. According to Cade Hildreth, President/CEO of Bioinformant.com, "Social analytics are becoming critical to assess, in addition to traditional analytics, because nearly the entire population is now engaging with online tools such as social media and online search."

Other topics included neuromarketing research, the growth of automation, and the importance of ROI, among others. To learn about the trends expected for 2016, visit the blog: http://hubs.ly/H01X72n0

Interested in learning more about how market research can help your business? Check out our free eBook, How to Succeed Using Market Research: http://bit.ly/1ZSQhNh

About MarketResearch.com

MarketResearch.com is the leading provider of global market intelligence products and services. With research reports from more than 720 top consulting and advisory firms, MarketResearch.com offers instant online access to the world's most extensive database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends. Moreover, MarketResearch.com's Research Specialists have in-depth knowledge of the publishers and the various types of reports in their respective industries and are ready to provide research assistance.

Follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketresearch

Like us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/marketresearchdotcom

Follow us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/marketresearch_

Press Contact:

Caitlin Stewart

240.747.3086

[email protected]

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SOURCE MarketResearch.com

Related Links

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TEMPE, Ariz., Jan. 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Zion & Zion, one of the Southwest's top ranked full-service advertising and marketing agencies, continues to expand by adding four new clients to its agency roster. Billing Solutions, GECO, Inc., Modesto Dairy Supply and Southwest Title will kick off 2016 with Zion & Zion as their marketing firm.

"Kicking off 2016 with these four new clients is particularly exciting for us, especially because it allows us to branch into new categories including agriculture and healthcare billing," said Zion & Zion CEO Aric Zion.

GECO, Inc. is a leading designer and manufacturer of embedded systems for critical environments for the military and aerospace industries. GECO, Inc.'s subsidiary, AllKiosk provides customer payment solutions for utility companies across the U.S. Its largest client is Arizona-based SRP (Salt River Project), which is one of the most progressive utility companies in the country. To position AllKiosk for an aggressive national expansion, Zion & Zion is responsible for the overall positioning and branding of the company. Specifically, Zion & Zion will develop branding strategies for the company as well as logo design, messaging and positioning, corporate identity, sales materials, brand standards, and a new website.

Also new in 2016, Billing Solutions is a national company that specializes in billing and claims management for practices and facilities that deal with substance abuse. With substantial growth and profitability during the past few years, the company has hired Zion & Zion to redevelop its brand identity and marketing to position it for further growth. This will include not only overhauling the identity and communications of the company, but also working to develop ongoing marketing strategies to target the company's key potential customers.

California-based Modesto Dairy Supply signed with Zion & Zion at the very end of 2015. The company provides equipment, electrical contracting, facility design and equipment servicing for dairy farms in multiple states including California and Arizona. Zion & Zion will work on comprehensive branding initiatives for Modesto including logo development, corporate identity and a dynamic new website.

Rounding out a great start to the New Year, Southwest Title has named Zion & Zion as its agency of record. With numerous brick and mortar locations, plus a robust online business, Southwest Title is a major regional player in the market for auto title loans. The company has hired Zion & Zion to focus on marketing and branding initiatives to support the business as it expands nationally. The agency is responsible not only for the company's significant paid search campaigns, but also for a comprehensive branding campaign including integration with the company's CRM and loan management systems.

About Zion & Zion

Based in Tempe, Ariz., Zion & Zion is a full service marketing firm specializing in marketing strategy, advertising, public relations, social media and interactive services. The work of the Zion & Zion team includes local, national and international brands, including ARS/Rescue Rooter, Bank 34, Barro's Pizza, Casino Del Sol Resort, Childhelp USA, DMB Associates, Fox Restaurant Concepts, Global Organics, and Goodwill. Learn more at www.zionandzion.com, follow @ZIONandZION on Twitter and Instagram, and Like ZIONandZIONAgency on Facebook.

SOURCE Zion & Zion

Related Links

http://www.zionandzion.com


Abstract:

In Stone v. Ritter, 911 A.2d 362 (Del. 2006), two important strands of Delaware corporate law converged; namely, the concept of good faith and the duty of directors to monitor the corporation's employees for law compliance. As to the former, Stone puts to rest any remaining question as to whether acting in bad faith is an independent basis of liability under Delaware corporate law, stating that although good faith may be described colloquially as part of a 'triad' of fiduciary duties that includes the duties of care and loyalty, the obligation to act in good faith does not establish an independent fiduciary duty that stands on the same footing as the duties of care and loyalty. Only the latter two duties, where violated, may directly result in liability, whereas a failure to act in good faith may do so, but indirectly. 911 A.2d at 370. Nevertheless, this holding may not matter much, because the Stone court makes clear that acts taken in bad faith breach the duty of loyalty. As a result, instead of being split out as a separate fiduciary duty, good faith has been subsumed by loyalty. In this sense, Stone looks like a compromise between those scholars and jurists who wanted to elevate good faith to being part of a triad of fiduciary duties and those who did not, with the former losing as a matter of form, and the latter losing as a matter of substance.



As to the duty of oversight, Stone confirmed former Chancellor William Allen's dicta in Caremark Int'l Inc. Deriv. Litig., 698 A.2d 959 (Del. Ch. 1996), that the fiduciary duty of care of corporate directors includes an obligation for directors to take some affirmative law compliance measures. In Stone, the Delaware Supreme Court confirmed that Caremark articulates the necessary conditions for assessing director oversight liability. Stone, 911 A.2d at 365.



This article argues that the convergence of good faith and oversight is one of those unfortunate marriages that leaves both sides worse off. New and unnecessary doctrinal uncertainties have been created. This article identifies those uncertainties and suggests how they should be resolved.

corporation, corporate governance, board of directors, good faith, oversight, Caremark, Delaware corporate law
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As more and more people look to invest in student property, where are the best places for buyers to spend

Over the last few years, the market for student property has grown at an incredible pace, with investors piling money into a sector that has grown from a small niche into one of the most lucrative and attractive of all asset classes, both within and outside of property.

Both 2013 and 2014 saw student property investment in the UK top 3 billion, but 2015 was the year where it really came into its own, with 6 billion being put into properties in this sector.

Unite Group reports that 85 per cent of second year undergraduates are now looking for quality, purpose-built student homes that fulfill all their needs, and with the CBRE statistics showing that student accommodation generally has occupancy rates of some 99 per cent, it's easy to see why people put their money into this area of the market.

With this strength of demand  and student numbers expected to continue to grow year on year  the sector is likely to see even more investment in the years ahead, potentially making even 2015 pale into insignificance in the long run.

But where should investors look to spend? UK property specialist Experience Invest takes a look at a few of the very best markets in the country for investment in student property in 2016.

Manchester

Manchester is one of the easiest choices when it comes to investment in student accommodation. Over the last few years, the city has undergone something of a transformation, with the moving north of many media companies in particular, having seen it become something of a revelation in residential lettings. But even as more people come to live in the city for work, it remains a hotbed of student activity.

Manchester has more students than any other city in Europe, 85,000 across four universities, which gives investors the peace of mind that it's one of the liveliest areas of demand in the entire country.

The still relatively low entry prices and high yields in the city also mean that 2016 could be the very best time to put money into Manchester's thriving student property sector.

Liverpool

Few cities have seen regeneration in their city centres quite like Liverpool in the last few years, and with many of the new build student properties being centrally located, it's time to put money into an area that will be ready to take off in the last years of this decade.

The nightlife in the city centre is more plentiful and impressive than it's ever been  which is likely to bring in an influx of residents  and with the number of students in the city now topping 50,000, it's becoming one of the most important cities for universities in the entire nation.

Birmingham

The UK's second city has two main factors that make it a great place for student property investors; quality of life and the sheer volume of people studying there.

The bohemian nature of Birmingham has made it increasingly popular with students from London over the last few years, especially with the likes of Aston University's consistently strong performance going hand in hand with this.

And with as many as 65,000 students living in Birmingham, there will scarcely be a shortage of people to rent good quality, modern accommodation that really enhances the trendier areas of the city centre and its attraction for students.

Brighton

A surprising entrant for 2016, Brighton is becoming more and more popular as the years roll by, especially as the number of people enrolling in its two universities  University of Brighton and University of Sussex.

Much like Birmingham, it has become very popular in the last couple of years with London-based students who are not only seeking out a strong education, but also the more peaceful way of life that can be found on the south coast.

Unlike most of the other areas, Brighton is also a great place to invest in more traditional properties. Beach side accommodation may not be the sort of trendy flats seen in most cities, but it's popular with those looking for something a little different from their student digs, and Brighton can be a way to buy away from the more popular areas for the more savvy investor.
Patients can expect treatment of the highest standard in state-of-the-art surgical facilities, but at a more affordable price than in the United States.

Tijuana Bariatrics, one of the worlds top destinations both for medical tourism and weight loss surgery, has announced that it is now offering plastic surgery and nutritional counseling. The practice has added two plastic surgeons and one nutritionist, all three of whom bring extensive training, skill, and experience to the Tijuana Bariatrics team.

Plastic surgery through Tijuana Bariatrics is available in both Tijuana and Monterrey, Mexico, at hospitals held to the same high standards as U.S. hospitals. Both cities are popular tourist destinations, with Tijuana conveniently located within mere miles of San Diego, California, and Monterrey being one of Mexicos most affluent and picturesque locales. Patients will have access to a comprehensive range of both surgical and non-surgical procedures at both locations, including breast augmentation, breast lift, face lift, post-bariatric body contouring, abdominoplasty, liposuction, and BOTOX Cosmetic injections. Further, hair transplantation and laser procedures will be available at the Monterrey location.

Patients from the United States can arrange to have their surgeries performed at one of the two locations by reaching out to Tijuana Bariatrics care coordinator. The coordinator provides patients with instructions on how to take and provide the practice with photos of areas of their bodies with which they are concerned, answers any questions they might have about surgery, and assists them with scheduling issues.

One of the greatest advantages of having plastic surgery performed through Tijuana Bariatrics is that patients can expect treatment of the highest standard in state-of-the-art surgical facilities, but at a more affordable price than in the United States.

In terms of its core practice area, bariatric surgery, Tijuana Bariatrics has also broadened its scope of services by adding nutritional counseling. The nutritionist establishes a rapport with bariatric patients even before their surgery, chatting with them and gathering their contact information. She visits them in the hospital immediately after their surgery, and always meets with them after their discharge from the hospital when they are back at the hotel, whether individually or in groups.

Nutritional counseling can play a vital role in ensuring the long-term success of bariatric surgery, which requires that patients commit to healthy eating and lifestyle habits for the rest of their lives after their operations. The Tijuana Bariatrics nutritionist specializes in bariatric surgery patients and is able to provide them with individually tailored post-operative plans based on their unique needs and goals. She will monitor them closely during their healing phase, devoting an hour or so a week to communicating with them via live online chat. After their recovery, patients are encouraged to contact her through Facebook, chat, or email whenever they have questions or require guidance as they adapt to their new eating behaviors.

Further information about Tijuana Bariatrics and its plastic surgery and nutritional counseling services can be obtained by visiting http://www.tijuanabariatrics.com or by contacting the practice at:

San Diego Office

(800) 308-3607

info(at)tijuanabariatrics.com

Originally posted by Dr. Fernando Garcia.
Tom Gildred Emerald Textiles CEO "It is important to me to support the work of the American Heart Association with the goal of doing away with cardiovascular disease and stroke..."

Emerald Textiles is pleased to announce that its CEO, Tom Gildred, was named chair of the 2016 American Heart Associations (AHA) San Diego Heart and Stroke Walk. In 2015, the American Heart Associations San Diego Heart and Stroke Walk had over 10,000 participants and raised over $1.4 million to help in the fight against cardiovascular disease and stroke, two of the leading causes of death in the country. The Heart & Stroke Walk is one of the primary fund raisers for the AHA, and this year the goal is $1.4 million in San Diego alone. Last year, the American Heart Association contributed over $9 million in funding to San Diego research facilities; saving lives, creating memories, and giving hope. For more information about the American Heart Association, view their website here.

I am delighted to be selected as the Chair of the 2016 Heart Walk," said Gildred. "It is important to me to support the work of the American Heart Association with the goal of doing away with cardiovascular disease and stroke. Emerald Textiles has been a supporter and fundraiser for five years now, and we are proud to continue that tradition.

Emerald Textiles is Southern Californias leading healthcare linen rental and laundry services provider. Through Gildreds leadership, the company built a facility that has won awards from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the local utility for their extreme energy savings and recently received recognition and rebates from the water authority for its conservation of water in the region. In just over five years of operations, Emerald captured significant market share throughout Southern California, currently providing service to the majority of the hospital beds in San Diego and has recently expanded to Los Angeles and Riverside Counties

Mr. Gildred brings significant background in business and the community to the position of Chair of the 2016 American Heart Associations (AHA) San Diego Heart and Stroke Walk. He is the winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award locally and has twice been a national finalist. He serves on numerous boards of directors benefitting both local companies and non-profits, including past president of the board of The San Diego Museum of Art and the San Diego State University, College of Business Administration Board of Directors. Mr. Gildred founded and is Chairman of the Board of FMT Consultants, a Microsoft Gold Certified business software firm which has received the Microsoft Partner of the Year Award and was named one of San Diegos Best Places to Work in 2011 and 2012. He is also on the Board of Directors for The Gildred Companies. Gildred is the Treasurer for the Plaza de Panama Board of Directors led by Irwin Jacobs who is the Director and Chairman of the committee.

Gildred is a founding member of Vistage Group 3080 and served on the Vistage Member Advisory Committee. He is a founding member of the Downtown San Diego Breakfast Rotary Club, a past member of the Board of Directors of the Mission Valley YMCA and a past member of the San Diego Software Industry Council. He recently won the Millennium Award from the Friends of Balboa Park and was named Most Admired CEO by the San Diego Business Journal.

About the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association

The American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association are devoted to saving people from heart disease and stroke  the two leading causes of death in the world. We team with millions of volunteers to fund innovative research, fight for stronger public health policies, and provide lifesaving tools and information to prevent and treat these diseases. The American Heart Association is the nations oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke. The American Stroke Association is a division of the American Heart Association. To learn more or to get involved, call 1-800-AHA-USA1, visit heart.org or call any of our offices around the country.

About Emerald Textiles

Emerald Textiles provides the most environmentally responsible, high quality, linen rental and management solution for the Southern California healthcare industry. Emeralds two facilities are located in the greater Los Angeles and San Diego areas and serve hospitals throughout Southern California and across the eastern corridor to Palm Desert. Emerald utilizes the most advanced technology and provides a higher standard of cleanliness, industry compliance and customer satisfaction.

For more information about Emerald Textiles and its services, please visit EmeraldUS.com
Neil L. Spector, M.D., author of "Gone in a Heartbeat: A Physician's Search for True Healing." The wealth of knowledge he brings as a scientist, along with his insights as a patient who nearly lost his life from Lyme, will be invaluable to GLA.

Global Lyme Alliance (GLA), the nations leading nonprofit funder of Lyme and tick-borne disease research and education, is pleased to announce the appointment of Neil L. Spector, M.D., Duke University cancer physician-scientist and Lyme survivor, to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

One of the nations top oncologists, Dr. Spector is Associate Professor of Medicine and of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke in Durham, North Carolina. He also is the Director of the Developmental Therapeutics program for the Duke Cancer Institute. His personal experience with the near-death consequences of undiagnosed and untreated Lyme disease is the subject of his 2015 memoir Gone in a Heartbeat: A Physicians Search for True Healing.

In his book, Dr. Spector recounts how he began to experience debilitating health problems, including overwhelming fatigue, cardiac arrhythmias and joint pain. After several tests proved inconclusive, his doctor told him he was suffering from stress. Years later, his doctors discovered his heart was barely functioning. It had nearly been destroyed by Lyme disease that had been totally overlooked. He learned that unless he received an immediate heart transplant, he had only 72 hours to live.

Today, almost seven years after his successful struggle, Dr. Spector says much work needs to be done to improve the lives of individuals suffering from Lyme and other tick-borne infections.

I am honored to join GLAs Scientific Advisory Board because this is an organization that is passionate about changing the lives of those suffering with Lyme disease and co-infections through their relentless efforts to seek out and support innovative research and increase public awareness to the ravages of this horrendous disease, he said. Better diagnostics and more effective therapies are desperately needed, which will require a commitment to support cutting-edge research.

Prior to joining Duke University, Dr. Spector served as Director of GlaxoSmithKline's Exploratory Medical Sciences in Oncology, where he successfully developed two important cancer drugsone for pediatric leukemia and the other a targeted therapy for breast cancerand guided them through Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. Internationally recognized for his research achievements, in 1991 he received the Claudia Adams Barr Investigator in Cancer Research from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and in 1994 the Stanley Glaser Research Foundation Award for Excellence in Cancer Research.

Dr. Spector received his medical degree from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, then completed his internal medicine internship and residency at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center. He completed his hematology/medical oncology training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School.

GLAs Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Harriet Kotsoris, said: We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Spector to our Scientific Advisory Board. The wealth of experience and knowledge he brings with him as a scientist, along with his insights as a patient who nearly lost his life from Lyme, will be invaluable as we seek to accelerate research into the development of better diagnostics and treatments for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.

Global Lyme Alliance's SAB provides advice on overall research strategy to direct GLAs grant funds into programs judged to have exceptional prospects of delivering measurable advances. Last month, GLA announced it had awarded a record total of over $1 million in 2015-2016 grants to eight exceptional researchers advancing the science of post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, or chronic Lyme.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT GLOBAL LYME ALLIANCE

Global Lyme Alliance is the nations leading tick-borne disease organization dedicated to supporting Lyme and tick-borne disease research and education. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit is headquartered in Greenwich, CT. The organization will hold its annual Time for Lyme fundraising Gala at the Hyatt Regency in Old Greenwich, CT on Saturday, April 2, 2016. Contact Shelley Terry at sterry(at)GlobalLymeAlliance (dot) org for tickets, tables or sponsorship opportunities or call 203- 969-1333.
Thanks to Star Wars VII, Irelands ancient Eastern part will be the key marketing theme of upcoming promotions

Tourism Ireland is forecasting a record number of tourist arrivals in 2016 with an estimated 8.2 million visitors. This Star Wars effect will bring an economic benefit of Euro 4 billion, according to the report. Thanks to Star Wars VII, Irelands ancient Eastern part will be the key marketing theme of upcoming promotions.

Britain is Irelands largest tourist market with a share of 40% of total visitors and a YoY increase of 11% in 2015, which signifies the popularity of the Emerald Isle among UK tourists. Working on their successful foundation, the island is planning an ambitious campaign to increase the number of tourists to over 8 million in 2016. With the UK being the largest tourist market for Ireland, Thomas Exchange Global is offering the most competitive travel money package for the Euro to meet the demand of UK travellers to Ireland.

Ireland is a very popular destination among British tourists. Its very close to home, has a similar culture and the almost negligible air fare make Ireland a special place for Londoners, especially when choosing a short break or a weekend escape, stated Trevor Samuel, Senior Manager for Thomas Exchange Global. Dublin being twice voted as the friendliest city in Europe, a visit to Ireland will be staying at home away from home.

Thomas Exchange Global, with 11 branches in London and a next day delivery service, offers the most competitive exchange rates for the Euro. In addition, they hold the widest range of foreign currencies in London as 120 types of bank notes can be bought or sold at their stores and most of these currencies are instantly available without any waiting time.

Ireland is a place for greenery, nature and history. Keep sufficient Euro with you as ATMs may not be available in the best of locations, which is mostly remote, concluded Trevor.

About Thomas Exchange Global

As dedicated foreign exchange specialists, Thomas Exchange Global has the professional expertise, in depth market knowledge, technological infrastructure and commitment to provide an unprecedented level of service that sets the standard in the foreign exchange industry. They are specialists in all areas of foreign exchange. They provide commission free currency as well as travellers cheques.

Thomas Exchange Global also offers International Money Transfer Service where funds can be remitted to overseas bank accounts within one to two days. With commission free service for transfers over 10,000 backed by competitive exchange rates, customers are assured of a better deal and a substantial saving compared to banks and money brokers. Thomas Exchange Global branches are located at Strand, Embankment, Victoria Place (Victoria Rail Station) Victoria Street, Liverpool Street, High Street Kensington, Hammersmith, Canary Wharf, Cannon Street, Wormwood Street and Richmond.
We understand the role of a webmaster better than anybody else, and we built our affiliate network based on that understanding.

If youre a webmaster, and make a living out of it, then your chief concern is to find the most suitable affiliate network. Unfortunately, finding that network is not an easy task, as there are a lot of pitfalls on the way that cause unnecessary loss of time and money.

The perfect affiliate network is the one that is built on a simple understanding: webmaster is the key to e-commerce, as the success of a whole enterprise depends on him. Hence the conditions of this enterprise must be as attractive for the webmaster as possible, to provide long term relationship.

We at PixelAds Media understand the role of a webmaster better than anybody else, and we built our affiliate network based on that understanding. As a result, weve managed to achieve fascinating results in a relatively short period of time. Within a few months of work, we collaborated with more than 1000 webmasters, and as we continue to improve our work environment and service, we do it using feedback from webmasters we work with.

As our capacities grow, we are now happy to present our new affiliate program and we invite even more publishers to do business with us. Our main goal is to build a long-term profitable relationship with every publisher, so if youre on the same page  welcome aboard!
The International Bullying Prevention Association (IBPA) strives to make schooling systems a safer place for children by creating a safe learning environment that is free from all bullying behaviors. The organization does this through research based bullying prevention training, practices, and support. http://www.ibpaworld.org.

Dr. Agatston has had many years of experience in bullying prevention. She is a licensed trainer for the International Institute for Restorative Practices and certified trainer and technical assistance consultant for the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. She has presented nationally and internationally on bullying, cyber bullying, and digital citizenship.

Dr. Agatston has also co-authored several books, including Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age, Expert Perspectives in Cyberbullying, the Cyber Bullying Curriculum for Grades 6  12, and the Cyber Bullying Prevention Curriculum for Grades 3  5.

She has been quoted in articles on cyber bullying in several different publications including The Washington Post and Time magazine. She has appeared on CNN as well as other local and national radio and television programs to discuss cyber bullying and other youth online risky behavior. She was a participant in the CDCs Expert Panel on Electronic Media and Youth Violence, and the CDCs Expert Panel on Youth Involvement in Bullying and Suicide-Related Behaviors.

Dr. Agatston has served on the IBPA Board of Directors for the past six years in various roles including conference co-chair for the annual meeting that is held each year in November.

Contact: Lynn Lonsway, 800-929-0397, info(at)ibpaworld(dot)org

The mission of the International Bullying Prevention Association is Advancing bullying prevention best practices by:

Convening research-based forums

Advocating best practices

Promoting positive school climate

Collaborating across disciplines/sectors/fields

IBPA

PO Box 99217

Troy, MI 48099

800-929-0397

http://www.ibpaworld.org
The Legendary Stories of Don Hansen I actually hitchhiked from South Dakota to California to surf.

Peak to Peak is the story of legendary outdoorsman and Hansen Surfboards founder, Don Hansen. Follow along as this epic story of the original king of cool is told. From his humble beginnings in South Dakota to finding his way on the famed North Shore, Don has done and seen it all. Hansens is honored to share the vision, passion, and amazing journey of one of surfings most iconic craftsmen.

Don Hansen was born in a small, dusty plain town in rural South Dakota. After spending 18 years in the cold, barren state, Don decided to hitchhike his way to California to surf and embrace the beach lifestyle. Hansen would eventually learn how to craft surfboards and would go on to work with iconic legends, such as Jack ONeill and Hobie Alter. Dons passion for surfing would lead him to the famed North Shore of Oahu, where he would make the decision to launch his own label, Hansen Surfboards.

After finding worldwide success as a surfboard manufacturer, Don Hansen opened Hansen Surfboards, North County San Diegos premier retail surf shop. The family-run surf shop still thrives today. Peak to Peak is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to follow along as the legendary surfer, outdoor enthusiast and family man shares the story of his journey to icon status.

Watch Peak to Peak Part 1: Humble Beginnings here.

Hansen Surfboards

Hansen Surfboards is located in Encinitas, California, and has over 20,000 square feet of retail space. Hansens is still the largest surf shop in San Diego County and remains family owned and operated. With independent and family based values still at the center of the Hansens brand, the ongoing passion for providing an unparalleled retail experience hasnt changed.
Creative agencies rave about Function Point Function Point let us take on more clients and be more agile, do more tasks for the clients, and we didnt have to preplan everything.

Function Point Productivity Software has been helping creative agencies streamline their businesses for 19 years, and has published a Testimonial eBook to illustrate the ways in which it helped creative agencies to become more profitable. The eBook is divided into six sections, which feature fp. clients testimonial stories on how the cloud-based, project management software helped to improve workflow, and the bottom line. The sections include topics of scalability, features, QuickBooks integration, consultation, support, and profitability and productivity.

Function Point specializes in providing solutions tailored to creative agencies, design studios and internal marketing departments. Our clients love that were experts in this niche industry, because we understand the day-to-day operations and time management issues, as well as their big picture challenges, such as financial reporting, said Chris Wilson, Founder and President of Function Point. The eBook gives a quick glimpse into how weve solved some of these problems for creative agencies, such as finding efficiencies through synchronizing workflow, simplifying reporting and making financial planning more effective.

One of the many issues creative agencies struggle with is scalability, and the eBook outlines how Function Point has addressed this challenge for clients by helping them stay organized through periods of growth. We thought once we got to a certain number of clients, it would get really burdensome, because we would have so many tasks, time management would be impossible, said Adriel Michaud, Partner & Director of SEO at Top Draw. But Function Point let us take on more clients and be more agile, do more tasks for the clients, and we didnt have to preplan everything.

Since Function Point is specifically designed and built for creative agencies, the softwares features reflect the industrys needs, and include: a Business Intelligence dashboard for real-time business data; time-saving project management; easy-to-use time sheets; flexible invoicing; full-service CRM; real-time financial reports; client portals; and integrated accounting options. Andrea Gibson, Operations Manager at The Met Agency said, Function Point has more functionality than we could have dreamed of. It's taken away our need to create reports manually in spreadsheets and has enabled us to better plan our projects. Every day we are discovering new features and info it can provide us.

The project management software seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks Online, which assists clients in being able to achieve financial visibility and profitability on projects, and their business as a whole. The eBook demonstrates how clients appreciate the integration of Function Point with a long-established accounting package. Jamie Farmen, Media Director at Narrative Inc. noted, Finding Function Point, an industry-specific project management solution, gave us the specific information we needed with the capability of integrating with a widely-used accounting package that was the right size for our small business.

In the Consultation and Support sections, creative agencies discuss how Function Points commitment to customer service has enabled them to use the project management software to their businesses maximum benefit. Ultimately, the returns are seen in a more productive workflow, and an increase in profits. The real value of this software is the customer service, said Claire Strande, Account Executive at Judson Design. Any small issue that arises, I can pick up the phone and its fixed. Since the implementation of new software can be daunting for any business, Function Point provides a variety of training options including one-on-one sessions, webinars, YouTube videos and more. George Waite, Program Manager at Chute Gerdeman, said, The trainer was fabulous at training our group. She took time to understand our needs and then was able to direct us in the best direction. She was able to provide an answer for all the curve balls we threw at her.

Accountability and exceptional customer service are pillars of Function Points company values reflected in the eBooks client comments. Wilson remarked, Its another reason why our clients love working with usour culture is built on a foundation of focus, respect, growth and balance. Focus, in particular, means that we embrace the needs of our customer and are accountable for results.

Function Point software has had a significant impact on growing the productivity and profitability of creative agencies, through simplifying collaboration, centralizing information, and delivering real-time business data. The Productivity and Profitability section of the eBook demonstrates how clients were able to streamline company processes by using Function Points integrated software. For instance, Shezad Manjee, Founder and CCO at Dallas HD Films said, Having easy access to the analytics available in Function Point, we have re-engineered our workflow to be more efficient with our resources, more responsive to our clients and as a result, more profitable.

For more information on how Function Point helps agencies in six different ways, and the benefits of using an all-in-one, creative agency project management software system, the Testimonial eBook is available free for download.

About Function Point Productivity Software Inc.

Function Point Productivity Software is the leading all-in-one project management solution specially designed for ad agencies, design studios and internal marketing departments who are looking to streamline their business. Our integrated software combines project management, time tracking, CRM, financial, and business reporting tools in one convenient cloud based system. Easy, effective, and efficient  do more with Function Point.

For more information about the company and the services Function Point offers, please visit http://www.functionpoint.com
The National FFA Agriscience Fair is just one of the FFA programs made possible thanks to John Deere's partnership with the National FFA Organization. The announcement of John Deere's continued commitment with this multi-year gift speaks volumes to their dedication to the future of agriculture and FFA.

For more than 72 years, the National FFA Organization and John Deere have worked hand in hand to ensure the future of agriculture and agricultural education. Through their generous donations, John Deere has worked with FFA to provide FFA members the opportunity to grow into leaders, build their communities and strengthen agriculture.

2016 will be no exception. John Deere has pledged to donate one million dollars annually over the next five years to help FFA continue its strides in creating future leaders.

Education is one of John Deere Corporate Citizenships primary focus areas. This effort to inspire youth to achieve their greatest potential aligns well with the FFA mission of making a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth, and career success through agricultural education.

"John Deere has been a deeply loyal and generous partner of FFA for many years," said Molly Ball, National FFA Foundation President. "The announcement of this continued commitment with this multi-year gift speaks volumes to their dedication to the future of agriculture and FFA. Through gifts like this, we are able to continue to pursue our mission and strengthen the future leaders of agriculture and agricultural education."

At the local, state and national level, FFA brings their mission to life for student members. Members gain experience in the areas of agricultural literacy and advocacy, agricultural knowledge, career exploration, leadership development, food security, and service engagement.

Deere's support through the years has allowed FFA to deliver its mission to millions of members. Their gifts have supported the National FFA Organization's Career Development events, Proficiency Awards, National Chapter Awards, Agriscience Fair, and leadership conferences for state officers. Deere is also a key supporter of the National Association of Agricultural Educators, as well as the FFA scholarship program, in conjunction with John Deere dealers.

In addition to monetary support, Deere employees have an active FFA Alumni Chapter. Since 1947, five John Deere representatives have served in the role of the National FFA Foundation Sponsors' Board Chair, including Cory Reed, senior vice president, Intelligent Solutions Group, who headed the group last year.

John Deere is privileged to partner with such an esteemed and valuable organization as FFA, said Amy Allen, Manager, National Corporate Contributions. We look forward to continuing our partnership and shared commitment to tomorrows Ag leaders.

The National FFA Organization provides leadership, personal growth and career success training through agricultural education to 629,367 student members who belong to one of 7,757 local FFA chapters throughout the U.S., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

# # #

About National FFA Organization

The National FFA Organization is a national youth organization of 629,367 student members as part of 7,757 local FFA chapters in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The FFA mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education. The National FFA Organization operates under a federal charter granted by the 81st United States Congress and it is an integral part of public instruction in agriculture. The U.S. Department of Education provides leadership and helps set direction for FFA as a service to state and local agricultural education programs. For more, visit the National FFA Organization online at FFA.org, on Facebook, Twitter and the official National FFA Organization blog.

About National FFA Foundation

The National FFA Foundation builds partnerships with industry, education, government, other foundations and individuals to secure financial resources that recognize FFA member achievements, develop student leaders and support the future of agricultural education. Governed by a 19-member board of trustees comprised of educators, business leaders, individual donors and FFA alumni, the foundation is a separately-registered nonprofit organization. About 82 percent of every dollar received by the foundation supports FFA members and agricultural education opportunities. For more, visit FFA.org/Give.

Deere & Company (http://www.JohnDeere.com) is a world leader in providing advanced products and services and is committed to the success of customers whose work is linked to the land  those who cultivate, harvest, transform, enrich and build upon the land to meet the world's dramatically increasing need for food, fuel, shelter and infrastructure.
Portner & Shure Attorneys

Portner & Shure has been conferred the Litigator Award by the Trial Lawyers Board of Regents for 2015 based on the firms million and multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements attained. This is the nations highest award in trial law that honors a firms extraordinary achievement in the area of personal injury. The Litigator Award only recognizes the best trial attorneys in America and measure what matters most: performance.

Award recipients are chosen after an extensive selection process. A firms experience, skill, and ability within specific areas of expertise are evaluated in order to select the top 1% of trial lawyers. When prospective clients are looking for an attorney to help them with their auto accident case, they can now make a more informed decision. Clients know that a law firm that has been a recipient of a Litigator Award has been through a highly competitive and extensive selection process. This process relies solely on actual verdict and settlement dollar outcome data. In order to even be considered, nominees must have at least one verified verdict or settlement of at least $1 million within the last five years. Unlike client testimonials and peer reviews, which can easily be inflated, verdict and settlement numbers cannot.

Portner & Shure is proud to be honored with the Litigator Award for its outstanding performance in 2015. While awards like these are very humbling, Portner & Shure still continues to put its clients at the forefront of everything. The attorneys and paralegals of Portner & Shure do everything in their power to assure that clients are completely satisfied with their result and the service we provided them.
EBI's Long Beach Office Grand Opening We have greatly enjoyed working with our partners and clients in Southern California for almost 25 years, and we are all thrilled to have a physical office location.

EBI Consulting, an industry leader in environmental, engineering, and health & safety consulting services, announced today the opening of its newest regional office in the Bixby Knolls neighborhood of Long Beach, CA. The companys expanded presence in the area will allow EBI Consulting to better serve the needs of its clients in Southern California and the greater West Coast region.

EBI Consultings employees, clients and business partners are excited by this opportunity to reinforce and expand the breadth of the companys exceptional environmental and engineering consulting and due diligence services for which they are known. EBI has relocated several employees to help launch the L.A. County office, bringing the southern California full time employee headcount to almost forty, with many job openings available.

We have greatly enjoyed working with our partners and clients in Southern California for almost 25 years, and we are all thrilled to have a physical office location. This will enable us to offer all of our services on the west coast, including remediation, civil engineering and construction management, and more mechanical and structural engineering. As a closely held private company, every team member is like family to us, and were excited to provide a new home for our people and to be a larger part of the community that we serve.  Jeffrey Previte, President, Telecom & Retail Services

This new office will allow EBI Consulting to enhance relationships with current clients in the area, while being able to attend to the requests of future clients seeking to mitigate environmental and engineering risk in their businesses. The Long Beach, CA location marks the companys 14th office to date, with existing offices in:



Atlanta, GA

Baltimore, MD

Burlington, MA  headquarters

Chicago, IL

Dallas, TX

Denver, CO

Houston, TX

New York, NY

Phoenix, AZ

Portland, OR

Richmond, VA  opening soon

San Francisco, CA

Seattle, WA

York, PA

About EBI Consulting

EnviroBusiness, Inc. (doing business as EBI Consulting) has since 1989 provided industry leading environmental risk and compliance management, due diligence, energy efficiency, and engineering services to organizations seeking to improve operations, lower costs, manage risk and exceed stakeholder expectations. Combining broad technical expertise with deep industry knowledge and a business perspective, EBI solves challenging problems with a focus on creating business value.

EBI Consulting has grown to more than 450 employees and was recognized as one of the nations top 50 fastest growing environmental firms by the Zweig Letter. The company is a top national provider of environmental, civil and structural engineering services to the real estate, financial services and wireless telecommunications industries, including many Fortune 500 clients. In addition, we serve a diverse and growing base of life sciences, healthcare, academic/laboratory, manufacturing, and other industrial and institutional clients. EBI Consulting is known for the quality of our work, the business and technical expertise of our consultants, our professionalism and responsiveness, and the personalized nature of our services.
We are honored to be a trusted veneer source for this burgeoning industry. So many skateboarders are looking to make their own custom longboards, cruisers, or street decks from scratch," said Jim Martin, President of Marwood Veneer.

Indianas premier skateboard wood veneer source, Marwood, Inc., has begun working with woodworkers, students, and others interested in making their own skateboard through private classes. The company will host a skateboard build class on Saturday, March 19, and Sunday, March 20th, at the Indiana State Museum (ISM) in Indianapolis from 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM each day. This class was, in part, inspired by interest from the Rad Science: Skatepark Physics Exhibition at the ISM, which concluded on Jan. 3, 2016.

Teaching the class will be Master Skateboard Builder Brian La Vallee, who is also a technology and art teacher at Lake Placid Middle/High School in New York. He will demonstrate a hot knife method for making foam molds that he has used for years in his skateboard building classes at the high school. Assisting will be Veteran Store Manager Al Huls of Woodcraft in Indianapolis, and Jim Martin, president of Marwood, Inc. in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Each participant will build a skateboard deck, that they have designed and constructed in the class.

The cost of the class varies depending upon the type of board that is chosen: $135 for a Mini-Cruiser; $150 for a Skateboard; or $170 for a Longboard. If you are under the age of 18, your parent must attend, but at no additional cost. All supplies, including trucks and bearings, are included in the fee. Please call Cece at Marwood to register at: (812) 288-8344, or email her at cece(at)marwoodveneer(dot)com. The class is also sponsored by: Woodcraft and TALK (The Technology Association of Louisville Kentucky).

Marwood has discovered a growth market in the US for offering skateboard wood to all ages for the creation of handmade skateboards, penny boards, and longboards. We are honored to be a trusted veneer source for this burgeoning industry. So many skateboarders are looking to make their own custom longboards, cruisers, or street decks from scratch. Skateboarders know to come to our ecommerce online store for 10-deck packs, or visit their local Woodcraft store to buy a one-deck pack of maple veneer, said Jim Martin, President of Marwood. Visit http://www.marwoodveneer.com to purchase veneer kits, books, and related supplies for skateboarding design and build projects.

Skateboarding is classified as a sport which involves riding and performing tricks using a skateboard, and the X Games have grown in popularity at the national level, covered by ESPN. It has been noted as pure recreation, an art form, and a career, not to mention a form of transportation. Statista.com reports there are approximately 6.35 million active skateboarders in the world. This represents approximately a $4.9 billion dollar market worldwide, according to the International Association of Skateboard Companies.

About Marwood Veneer

Marwood is a leading provider of domestic, imported, and FSC-certified hardwood veneers for both the U.S. and overseas markets, serving a variety of industries. Marwood has a wide variety of veneers available, including exotics and domestics. From quartered and highly figured to flat cut and no figure, the companys wood veneers have the texture, color, thickness, and shape you need to finish any of your project needs. http://www.marwoodveneer.com
Im proud that Express is now working to make this program a reality in more communities across the country. Its good for our associates and good for the businesses we work with.

It took the promise of a new life to make Teddie Fason realize that he was tired of bouncing around between jobs and ready to set an example for his young son. But he soon learned that employers were not as forgiving when it came to his work history.

Luckily for him, Ronnie Morris was willing to give Fason a second chance.

Morris is the owner of Express Employment Professionals in Jackson, Tennessee, and he created the Second Chance Program as a way to give job seekers another chance at finding work, despite their past mistakes.

A second chance meant everything for program participant Kenneth Burgen of Jackson, Tennessee. He admits he messed up in the past, but says that the Second Chance program gave him a new beginning.

I want to be an example of what to do after you get a second chance, said Burgen, who is now succeeding and receiving positive reviews from his job placement.

Job seekers qualify for the Second Chance Program if they are former Express associates who have been inactivated for failing to appear for an assignment. An associate might also have been inactivated, or removed from consideration for job openings, if a business reported dissatisfaction with a worker.

Express recognizes that some mistakes are outside of an associates control, Morris said. Difficult life circumstances may arise or, in other cases, associates come to regret their mistakes. With additional support from our office, they demonstrate a renewed commitment to the job placement process. We believe this makes them worthy of a second chance.

As part of the Second Chance Program, the Jackson Express office develops a list of inactive Express associates who, based on their skills and desire for work, would be good potential matches for job assignments. They are invited to a learning session, where Morris personally discusses with them the key elements to being successful in a job placement. Values such as dependability, attitude, flexibility, appearance and initiative are covered in the session.

If the Second Chance candidate makes a commitment to the program following the learning session, he or she will be signed up for another interview with Express before being reactivated, making them eligible to be placed with a business, Morris said.

Were excited about the results weve seen. Weve had very positive feedback from our clients and associates alike. Were able to help people who deserve it. Its actually made our office more efficient and effective, and theres been so much interest in the program that were considering two Second Chance classes a week, instead of just one.

The Second Chance Program has been running as a pilot program at the Jackson Express office, but now the Express International Headquarters in Oklahoma City is now offering an opportunity for Express offices nationwide to adopt the Second Chance program in their markets. Within a month of announcing this opportunity, 150 offices have requested information to move forward with implementing the program.

With many areas of the country experiencing tighter labor markets, the Second Chance Program has the added benefit of expanding the talent pool for businesses that are finding it increasingly hard to match skilled workers with open positions.

Under Ronnies leadership, the Second Chance pilot program has achieved resultsfor workers seeking jobs and for jobs seeking workers, said Bob Funk, CEO of Express, and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Im proud that Express is now working to make this program a reality in more communities across the country. Its good for our associates and good for the businesses we work with.

Morris said he ends every class stressing the importance of "adding value." He tells the class, "In the end, it's all about adding value, and the way you do that is by making the place where you work better when you're there."

The Second Chance Program will help Express Employment Professionals reach its long-term goal of putting one million people to work annually.

If you would like to arrange for an interview with Bob Funk to discuss this topic or arrange to attend a Second Chance session, please contact Sherry Kast at (405) 717-5966.

About Robert A. Funk

Robert A. Bob Funk is chairman and chief executive officer of Express Employment Professionals. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, the international staffing company has more than 750 franchises in the U.S., Canada and South Africa. Under his leadership, Express has put more than six million people to work worldwide. Funk served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and was also the Chairman of the Conference of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve.

About Express Employment Professionals

Express Employment Professionals puts people to work. It generated $3.02 billion in sales and employed a record 500,002 people in 2015. Its long-term goal is to put a million people to work annually.
USCG Aux Members set to Greet Movie Patrons in Pompano Beach, Florida The USCG Auxiliary is a nationwide volunteer organization with 30,000 members serving our nation and our communities in 1,000 local units called Flotillas.

Jim Lamb, USCG Auxiliary's Public Affairs Officer for Pompano Beach, issued a statement today advising that members of the USCG Auxiliary's District 7, Division 3 in South Florida will be greeting members of the Pompano Beach community this weekend each night from 5pm to 9pm at the premier of the Coast Guard-themed movie "The Finest Hours" at the Muvico Broward 18 theater located at 2315 N Federal Hwy, Pompano Beach, FL 33062.

According to Lamb, it has been more than 60 years since BM1 Bernard Webber and his all-volunteer crew of three ventured out over the Chatham, Massachusetts bar in a 36-foot wooden motorized lifeboat in 60-foot seas and 70-knot wind and rescued 32 crewmen from the stricken tank vessel Pendleton.

"This is a story of unparalleled heroism by a Coast Guard small boat crew who should be honored and remembered," Lamb said.

"The USCG Auxiliary is a nationwide volunteer organization with 30,000 members serving our nation and our communities in 1,000 local units called Flotillas," Lamb said. "We're proud to mingle with Coast Guard enthusiasts and help members of the community appreciate the mission of the US Coast Guard and US Coast Guard Auxiliary," Lamb added.

Lamb said USCG Auxiliary members will be on hand this weekend at the theater to help facilitate the recruitment of membership in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, Active Duty, and Reserves. Members intend to distribute literature and information on the Coast Guard's voluntary vessel safety checks, public education classes, and other Auxiliary programs.

ABOUT USCG AUX & FLOTILLAS 34/37

The United States Coast Guard Auxiliary is the volunteer, civilian arm of the United Stated Coast Guard. Our mission is to assist the United Stated Coast Guard by focusing on recreational boating safety. In essence we are your volunteer lifesavers. The four cornerstones of the Auxiliary are Member Services, Recreational Boating Safety, Operations and Marine Safety, and Fellowship.

See: https://www.uscg.mil/auxiliary/administration/aux-history.asp

Flotilla 34 is currently lead by Mr. Jack Doyle, Flotilla Commander and Mr. Bob Uleski, Vice Commander. Flotilla 37 is lead by Mr. Carlos M Arenas, Flotilla Commander and Mr. George Kozel, Vice Commander. Our flotillas perform many functions within the realm of boating safety, including, but not limited to: boating safety courses, complimentary vessel safety examinations, regular visits to marine dealers to promote boating safety, boating safety patrols and many community events to further educate the recreational boating public about safe boating. As a volunteer organization, we are not all work and no play. One of the cornerstones of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary is fellowship. Our flotillas have a quarterly dining out event held at a different local restaurant where we have the opportunity to socialize and bring our guests to meet the members we serve with. In addition, we hold picnics and other social outings as well. If you would like to join the USCG Aux, please contact one of our public affairs officers.

Flotilla 34: http://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=070-03-04

Flotilla 37: http://aux37.org/

ABOUT USCG AUX PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Public Affairs Directorate Mission Statement

The Public Affairs Directorate engages and communicates with the public and stakeholder groups. It encompasses creative services, public affairs, publications, training and Web services. The Directorate serves the auxiliary and active duty Coast Guard by developing and distributing stories, photos and video to members, the public, and promotes a positive image of the United States Coast Guard. It reaches the right audience, with the right message, using the right communication tools, at the right time. It builds awareness, understanding, credibility, trust, and mutually beneficial relationships with external publics with whom the Auxiliarys success depends.

See: http://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=a-dept
Updater, the leading provider of relocation software to ease the moving process, today announced a key addition to its multifamily team. Jon Wyant, a seasoned sales and business development professional, has been appointed Updaters Vice President of Multifamily Sales.

An industry veteran, Wyant joins Updater with over 17 years of experience working for top multifamily technology companies including Entrata, RealPage, Rainmaker Group, and AMSI. At Updater, Wyant will focus on delivering Updaters technology solutions to top property management companies. He will also leverage his expansive network in the multifamily industry to secure technology integrations with core property management software tools.

Jon brings an impeccable reputation for building and motivating high-performance sales teams, says Ash Bell, Executive Director of Multifamily at Updater. He will provide expert oversight of our multifamily sales strategy and execution, as well as our vision for growth as we continue to expand our Multifamily team.

Previously, Wyant served as the Vice President of Sales at Entrata, where he managed a results-driven sales team and implemented client acquisition programs, growing his teams annual revenue from $4.3MM to $8MM in just two years. In addition, Wyant established measurable KPIs, allowing him to create and build the companys first sales dashboard for measuring sales performance.

Wyant has received numerous accolades for his innovative sales and business development leadership strategies. At RealPage, Wyant was recognized as the Top Velocity Sales Producer in 2008 and the Top OneSite Sales Producer in 2009. In addition, he was recognized as the Top Revenue Producer at RealPage for two consecutive years, 2008 and 2009.

About Updater

Updater makes moving easier for the 17 million households that relocate every year in the US. With Updater, users seamlessly transfer utilities, update accounts and records, forward mail, and much more. Hundreds of the most prominent real estate companies in the US (from real estate brokerages to multifamily and relocation companies) rely on Updaters real estate products to save clients hours with a branded and personalized Updater moving experience.

Headquartered in New York City, Updater has raised over $30 million from leading investors, including SoftBank Capital, IA Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Second Century Ventures (the strategic investment arm of the National Association of Realtors), and more. For more information, please visit http://www.updater.com.
Edward Tick, Director & Co-Founder of Soldier's Heart Forty years have passed since Pacifica Graduate Institute was birthed in Isla Vista, as a small counseling center serving those in need, including veterans returning from Vietnam.

Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association(PGIAA) announces its second-annual Coming Home celebration, Vocation and Service, A Journey of the Soul. PGIAA and Pacifica Graduate Institute offer a special welcome and will honor our military service members, both active duty and veterans. Coming Home 2016 will be held at Pacifica Graduate Institute, located at 801 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108 from Thursday, January 28 through Sunday, January 31, 2016.

The Coming Home 2016 welcoming event and tribute to veterans across the United States is free and open to our community. We are proud to host this years tribute and welcome you to our campuses, said Dianne Travis-Teague, Director of Alumni Relations. Highlights include Friday mornings keynote speaker and honored guest, Dr. Edward Tick, Director and Co-Founder of Soldiers Heart, Inc., a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization, plus special presentations by Pacifica alumni, Eduard Uzumeckis, PhD (2011 Mythological Studies Program) and Michael B. Bogar, MA (2012 Mythological Studies Program).

In addition, the premier screening of Ground Operations: Battlefields to Farm Fields will be presented on Saturday, January 30th. This groundbreaking documentary film is part of a social action campaign that champions the growing network of military veterans who are transitioning into careers as sustainable farmers, ranchers, and artisan food producers. Dulanie Ellis, the filmmaker, will host a panel discussion following the screening.

2016 marks the beginning of Pacifica Graduate Institutes 40TH Anniversary Celebration, said Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, founding President and Chancellor. We are honored to launch our celebrations during the Alumni Associations Coming Home weekend. Forty years have passed since Pacifica Graduate Institute was birthed in Isla Vista, as a small counseling center serving those in need, including veterans returning from Vietnam."

The Board of Trustees is proud of our many alumni/ae, noted Dr. Thyonne Gordon, Board Chair. They are demonstrating involvement in the global arena, influencing personal, cultural and planetary concerns, while advancing Pacificas commitment and motto: For the Sake of Tending Soul in and of the World.

Other special events of the Coming Home weekend will celebrate Vocation and the Pacifica Journey. These include the Chancellors Reception, highlighted by presentation of the Wendy Davee Award for Service and the Chancellors Award for Excellence; the 2016 Faculty/Alumnae Lecture series featuring Elizabeth Nelson, Jennifer Selig, Glen Slater and Dennis Patrick Slattery along with alumnae, Elizabeth Robinson, PhD (2011 Mythological Studies Program); and, our second-annual Alumni Authors Spotlight and book signing co-sponsored by the Pacifica Bookstore. Spotlight is a spectacular showcase of publications by Pacifica Alumni/ae. Each author will share a brief synopsis of their work and sign copies of their books.

For more information and to attend the free, open to the public Coming Home 2016 events, please contact the Office of Alumni Relations at Pacifica Graduate Institute, alumnirelations(at)pacifica(dot)edu.

About PGIAA

Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association (PGIAA) was formed on April 17, 2013 as a California 501(c) Nonprofit Corporation for the purposes of developing an operational and charitable membership association that supports both the alumni of Pacifica Graduate Institute and the wider community in pursuit of developing their intellectual, spiritual, altruistic, and professional capabilities.

PGIAA Board of Directors Charles Caldwell, President Tom Lyon, Vice President Beth Boardman, Secretary Kay Todd, Treasurer

Members: Joseph Fontana, Dori Koehler, William James Jones, John Michal ONeal, Patricia Taylor, Jo Todd

For additional information, please contact: Office of Alumni Relations

Pacifica Graduate Institute

801 Ladera Lane

Santa Barbara, CA 93108

Tele: 805-679-6179

E-mail: alumnirelations(at)pacifica(dot)edu

***************

Pacifica Graduate Institute, with two campuses in Santa Barbara, California, is a WASC-accredited graduate school offering masters and doctoral degree programs in depth psychology, mythological studies, and the humanities. The Institute has established an educational environment that nourishes respect for cultural diversity and individual differences, and a rigorous academic community with a spirit of free and open inquiry. Students have access to an impressive array of resources including the OPUS Archives and Research Center.

The mission of Pacifica Graduate Institute is to foster creative learning and research in the fields of psychology, the humanities, and mythological studies, framed in the traditions of depth psychology. Consistent with and supporting this vision, Pacifica Graduate Institute is employee-owned, and practices shared stewardship.

Pacifica Graduate Institute

Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association

Opus Archives and Research Center

Pacifica Bookstore
The Pittcon sponsors, Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh (SSP) and Society of Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (SACP), are pleased to announce the call for nominations for four prestigious annual awards that will be presented at Pittcon 2017 in Chicago, Illinois.

For complete requirements, guidelines and submission instructions for all the awards, please visit pittcon.org.

SSP Call for Nominations

The Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award is in recognition of an individuals outstanding contributions in the field of applied spectroscopy.

Nomination Deadline: April 30, 2016

The Ralph N. Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry recognizes noteworthy contributions to the field of bioanalytical chemistry, broadly defined. The recipient will have introduced a significant technique, theory, instrument or application important to the life sciences and provided an exceptional environment to educate bioanalytical chemists.

Nomination deadline: May 1, 2016.

SACP Call for Nominations

Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award honors an individuals impact to the field of analytical chemistry including the introduction of a substantial technique, theory or instrument or providing exceptional training or a fertile environment for progress in analytical chemistry.

Nomination deadline is April 30, 2016.

Pittsburgh Conference Achievement Award is a tribute to an individual for outstanding achievements in the fields of analytical chemistry and/or applied spectroscopy within 10 years after completion of his/her Ph.D. work. To be eligible for the 2017 award, nominees must have completed their Ph. D. no earlier than March 1, 2006.

Nomination deadline is April 22, 2016.

About Pittcon

Pittcon is a registered trademark of The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, a Pennsylvania non-profit organization. Co-sponsored by the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh and the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh, Pittcon is the premier annual conference and exposition on laboratory science. Proceeds from Pittcon fund science education and outreach at all levels, kindergarten through adult. Pittcon donates more than a million dollars a year to provide financial and administrative support for various science outreach activities includingscience equipment grants, research grants, scholarships and internships for students, awards to teachers and professors, and grants to public science centers, libraries and museums. Visit http://www.pittcon.org for more information.
GrooveCar, the nations leading online automotive buying resource for credit unions, announces five new partners have joined the program: Telco Plus of Longview, TX; Picatinny FCU of Dover, NJ; Port Washington FCU of Port Washington, NY; Lehigh Valley FCU of Allentown, PA; and Longview Consolidated CU of Longview, TX.

Our program provides credit unions with the ability to grow from within, while providing members with the best data, research and value in the auto buying market. Additionally, we provide the relevance credit unions so desperately need in order to communicate effectively to their membership, while increasing their loan growth and product-per-member ratios, explains Robert OHara, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, GrooveCar.

The U.S. auto industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, surpassing original sales estimates for 2015. All market indicators predict another record-breaking year for 2016. This is the best time for credit unions to look towards meeting members auto buying needs. In a recent GrooveCar survey, credit unions from across the U.S. were asked; what areas of growth were a priority for them? Over 50 percent responded they would be concentrating on their auto loan growth, ahead of mortgages, credit cards and home equity loans. GrooveCar researches the automotive and finance industry, along with conducting countless surveys and studies to consumers, credit unions and dealers focused on the areas which will help make our auto buying resource valuable and useful to all served. GrooveCar provides a host of resources members can access during the car buying process designed to streamline the procedure.

Our program aims to make the manner of completing all the essential tasks of researching and locating a vehicle, timely for the member, states OHara. Some of the features members will enjoy include a search tool displaying vehicle choices from all angles, a payment calculator that populates searches with a monthly payment commitment the user is comfortable with, current vehicle articles and videos, and the very popular loan application tool. All of these features on the website are designed to match the credit unions branding while offering a clean, crisp look accompanied by easy navigation.

The GrooveCar program provides information relating to auto-buying and leasing that is appealing to the member and gives the member a reason to investigate a credit unions auto offerings in greater detail.

The success of the GrooveCar program is not predicated on what size the credit union is or where they are located or what type of charter they have. As long as the credit union wants to close more auto loans with their existing members or enhance their dealer relationships, this program will drive results, adds OHara.

About GrooveCar:

Founded in 1999, GrooveCar provides automotive loan growth solutions to credit unions nationwide while providing their members, as well as the general public, with the most informative and user friendly auto search engine. With its expansive dealership network surpassing five million vehicles, GrooveCar facilitates the entire car buying process, including shopping, researching, buying, leasing, and financing. Through the national auto leasing program CU Xpress Lease, credit unions can take advantage of leasing opportunities in the new vehicle market. CU Xpress is the leading credit union lease program in the nation. Additional information on GrooveCar or CU Xpress Lease may be found at http://www.groovecarinc.com.

About GrooveCar Direct:

GrooveCar Direct was created expressly to enable credit unions to develop a revenue generating stream and enhance their ability to secure auto loans. The custom program assists credit unions in realizing quality auto loans through direct and indirect avenues while strengthening member relationships and boosting financial stability. Additional information may be found at http://www.groovecarinc.com/GrooveCar-Direct
"There is more than $150 billion of financial aid funding available," said Dr. April Osborn. "Every student should be taking advantage of that. The FAFSA is the critical first step."

The Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education announces its 20th Annual Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) workshops. FAFSA completion workshops are hosted at more than 45 locations statewide. College and Community sites will host the February 13 and 14 events, while more than 25 high schools have signed on to host one or more workshops as a result of the positive turnout at several high school locations in 2015. The FASFA workshops are designed to give college-bound students and their families free, on-site assistance in completing the FAFSA, and provide information about available financial aid opportunities. A FAFSA is required to apply for all federal and state financial aid programs as well as many private-donor scholarships and work study programs.

The mission of College Goal FAF$A is to increase the number of first-generation and under-served students entering postsecondary education. The goal is to provide awareness of the financial aid process, increase access to accurate and timely information regarding financial aid, as well as offer in-person events where students and families can get help to complete the FASFA. The Commission reports that 92% of students surveyed stated that the help received at a 2015 College Goal FAF$A event was worth the effort of attending and 89% of students surveyed stated that their participation in College Goal FAF$A 2015 increased the likelihood that they would enroll in college or vocational school in the next academic year.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 90 percent of students who complete the FAFSA application receive some form of federal aid to attending a postsecondary institution. In addition, a data analysis study performed by NerdWallet showed that in the state of Arizona 34 percent of the graduating class of 2013 did not complete the FAFSA, and left more than $75 million dollars of free federal grant money on the table. That works out to $3,478 per student  enough to cover a full year of classes at a local community college with money left over for books.

Completing the FAFSA early is the key to removing one of the most common barriers students face in going to college, said Dr. April Osborn, Executive Director for the Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education. There is more than $150 billion of financial aid funding available and every student should be taking advantage of that. The FAFSA is the critical first step in applying for any type of assistance.

Financial aid professionals and community volunteers will help students and families complete the FAFSA during the February 13 and 14 event. These workshops will be held from 2 - 4 p.m. at a variety of locations spanning the state including sites in: Phoenix, Glendale, Tempe, Tucson, Prescott, Nogales, Yuma and more. High school workshops will also be held statewide, at various times and dates throughout January, February and March. A full list of locations, dates, times and information of what attending families will need to bring  identification, financial information, etc.  can be found at: https://collegegoal.az.gov/college-goal-fafsa.

About Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education

The Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Educations mission is to expand access to and to increase success in postsecondary education. The Commission offers the Arizona Family College Savings Program, administers student financial aid programs, hosts College Goal FAF$A and College Application Campaign, as well as numerous other postsecondary education initiatives. For more information on the Commission visit http://www.highered.az.gov.

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Media Contact: Alec Robertson | BIG YAM | arobertson(at)bigyam(dot)com | 480-704-3259
SeniorAdvisor.com today announced the winners of their second annual scholarship program for American students enrolled in an accredited two-year college or four-year university program. Of the nearly 600 students who applied from 250 different schools nationwide, only three students were selected to receive the scholarship award.

SeniorAdvisor.com is North Americas largest ratings and reviews site for assisted living and home care services in the United States and Canada. The organization launched its annual scholarship program in 2014 as part of an initiative to bring awareness to younger generations of the unique benefits and challenges senior care presents, while helping to defray the costs of higher education for the recipients, such as books and tuition expenses.

Winners were chosen based on their essay response to the question, How can your major of study improve the lives of seniors in assisted living facilities or receiving in-home care in your town? Two students were selected to receive the $2,000 Assisted Living Scholarship award, and one student was selected to receive the $1,500 Home Care Scholarship award.

The winners of the SeniorAdvisor.com 2015 Future of Assisted Living Scholarship were Matthew Brooks and Nicole Campbell. Mr. Brooks is a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park. He detailed the many ways his major of study, Geospatial Information Sciences, can assist local cities in planning locations of new assisted living facilities based on demographics, safety, and proximity to community features like transportation. Ms. Campbell is an aspiring speech language pathologist at Utah State University. She explained how speech language pathologists use group song, individual therapy sessions, and other techniques to help seniors improve their communication skills and feel a deeper connection to their environment.

The winner of the SeniorAdvisor.com 2015 Future of Home Care Scholarship was Maria Patino, an University of Texas at Arlington student majoring in interior design. Ms. Patino discussed how interior designers use lighting, color, and accessibility to plan spaces that are functional, aesthetically pleasing, and safe for seniors to reside in, enabling them to continue aging-in-place.

To learn more about the scholarship recipients and read the winning submissions, please visit the SeniorAdvisor.com blog. Eligible students are encouraged to apply for the 2016 scholarship program here.

About SeniorAdvisor.com LLC

SeniorAdvisor.com is the premier consumer ratings and reviews site for senior living communities and home care providers across the U.S. and Canada. The innovative website provides easy access to the information families need when making a senior care decision, and features over 100,000 trusted reviews and advice from local residents and their loved ones. For more information, please visit https://www.SeniorAdvisor.com or call (866) 592-8119.
Orchard Place Spelling Bee This years Spelling Bee will be held Thursday, March 3, 2015 at Woolys, 504 E. Locust Street in Des Moines

Orchard Place, mental health experts for Iowas children, is proud to announce that the 13th annual Spelling Bee will be held Thursday March 3rd. Nationwide Insurance has been named as the Presenting Sponsor of the event.

The Orchard Place Spelling Bee is a one of a kind event where participants either spell a word correctly or bribe judges to proceed to the next round. Last years champions, a Nationwide team named O BEE Wan Kono BEE, took the title of this zany contest by correctly spelling the winning wordepexegesis, a noun meaning the addition of words to clarify meaning.

Proceeds from the past 12 years have totaled more than $895,000. Funds go directly to support more than 10,000 Iowa children and their families with mental health issues served by Orchard Place.

Orchard Place is extremely grateful for the continued community support, said Nancy Bobo Vice President of Development at Orchard Place. Each years event has not only been fun, but has provided funding to help 75,000 children during its history.

This years Spelling Bee will be held Thursday, March 3, 2015 at Woolys, 504 E. Locust Street in Des Moines from 5:30 to 8:30 pm.

Prizes are awarded to teams that have the most creative team name, best team costumes, best team cheering section, and most bribe money raised. Competition is fierce and typically hilarious.

Registration for the event is now open. As an extremely competitive event, teams generally register early. Its hard to describe how much fun everyone has both onstage and off, added Bobo. Whether you come as part of a team to spell or as an individual to watch, she advises people to come ready to have fun for a good cause.

Registration and event information is available online at: http://www.orchardplace.org/events. To register a team, contact Brandi Broadhead at bbroadhead(at)orchardplace(dot)org.

About Orchard Place:

Orchard Place is Des Moines oldest charity providing mental health treatment and expertise serving Iowas kids. Our inpatient, outpatient and community programs annually serve more than 10,000 children each year from birth to age 22. Four operating divisions are included in the Orchard Place umbrella of services: Child Guidance Center, Orchard Place Campus, PACE Juvenile Center and the Integrated Health Program. More information can be found at http://www.orchardplace.org.
Bar Louie (http://www.barlouie.com ) has opened at University Village Maxwell Street (http://www.uvmaxwellstreet.com), the mix of dining, retail and service offerings on the south end of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Its the 14th Illinois location for the fast-casual urban bar and restaurant.

Located at 1325 S. Halsted St., on the site of the former Morgans on Maxwell, Bar Louie University Village (312-773-1411) is open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily serving 30 beers on tap, handcrafted cocktails and a 90 percent made-from-scratch menu. Specials include $8 lunch specials on weekdays, $5 burgers from 5 p.m. to close on Tuesdays, $6 buckets of beer from 4 to 7 p.m. on Wednesdays, and half-priced bottles of wine on Thursdays.

Owners Windy City Restaurant Management LLC also operate several Chicago-area Subway sandwich shops and Dunkin Donuts locations, including two Subways on the UIC campus.

Were excited to be opening University Villages first Bar Louie, and cant wait to introduce the neighborhood to this new, fresh venue where locals can gather and socialize, said Murad Fazal, one of four Windy City Restaurant Management principals.

Bar Louie University Village joins dozens of restaurants, taverns, retail outlets, and service shops in the family-friendly destination that is convenient to UIC, the South Loop, Bridgeport, Chinatown and surrounding neighborhoods. Garage parking is available seven days a week and there is easy access to public transportation and major expressways.

For information about leasing opportunities at University Village Maxwell Street, contact Yolanda Valle at CBRE, 312-456-7107.

About University Village Maxwell Street

Located on the south campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago  and on the former site of the historic and renowned Maxwell Street open air market  University Village Maxwell Street (http://www.uvmaxwellstreet.com) is a unique and family-friendly shopping area composed of businesses, restaurants, taverns, retail outlets, and service shops. Everything is conveniently dispersed along Halsted and Maxwell Streets, Roosevelt Road, and Union Avenue.
Lori Blaker, President/CEO of TTi Global Human trafficking is one of the most profitable criminal activities on the planet. It is a $150 billion annual industry. Its profits are right up there with the illegal arms and the drug trade. The cost of human suffering is staggering  Lori Blaker

On January 20th, Oakland University hosted a two hour forum on the topic of human trafficking. Amy S. Allen, Victim Specialist from DHS-ICE and Lori Blaker both delivered a comprehensive presentation on this important issue to a group of students.

Amy S. Allen shared her field experience with working with the victims of human trafficking. Allen emphasized the reality of human trafficking in the State of Michigan and discussed specific cases that she had worked on including a domestic servitude case in Farmington Hills. Allen emphasized the need for victim advocacy and greater awareness training for first responders and law-enforcement agents.

Lori Blaker presented a comprehensive overview of how the United Nations is approaching the global crime of human trafficking and how several interlocking agencies are working together to combat it's growth. 'Human trafficking is one of the most profitable criminal activities on the planet,' stated Blaker. '' It is a $150 billion annual industry. Its profits are right up there with the illegal arms and the drug trade. The cost of human suffering is staggering." Blaker went on to discuss the many challenges involved in tracking and reporting on this global criminal activity. She referenced a recent article from Reuter's that discussed how even official government reports can be influenced by political agendas. Blaker emphasized the need to stay aware and informed on this growing problem.

Both presentations were followed by a round table discussion. Participants in the round table discussion included the following Oakland University faculty members; Diana Orces, Ph.D, Political Science, Amanda Burguess-Proctor, Ph.D, Criminal Justice, and Elizabeth Shesko, Ph.D., History. The event was moderated by Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, Ph.D., Spanish. The audience was comprised primarily of student studying criminal justice and language arts.

About Lori Blaker and TTi Global

Lori Blaker is the President and CEO of TTi Global, a leader in providing staffing, learning, research and consulting solutions to industries across various sectors with automotive as a core focus. TTi Global oversees operations on five continents with offices spanning the globe, which include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, Venezuela, UK and most recently Afghanistan.

TTi Global has ranked consistently among the "Top 25 Woman-Run Businesses in the USA" as recognized by the Womens Presidents Organization. Blaker heads of one of the fastest growing women-led organizations in North America. Her leadership skills continue to be recognized by the business community. In 2012 President/CEO Lori Blaker received the Leader of Leaders Award from Leadership Oakland.

About the Metro Detroit Chapter of the US National Committee of UN Women

The Metro Detroit Chapter of the US National Committee of UN Women supports the efforts of The US National Committee through advocacy, education and fundraising. The US National Committee (USNC) for UN Women is an independent non-profit, 501c3 organization that supports the mission of UN Women and social, political, and economic equality for women and girls around the world.

The group hosts various events throughout the year and advocates for global womens issues and UN Women in communities around the country. The group also works to support legislation on global womens issues, especially on leadership, economic participation and ending violence against women.

Members and supporters are men, women, and children in cities around the country who give their time and resources to support a world where women of all ages have access to education and employment opportunities, and sustainable livelihoods that enable them to live free of gender-based violence.

For info contact: Nancy Thompson uptownpro(at)hotmail.com or 248-496-4965
For the businesses we serve to remain competitive for talent in 2016, the leadership changes weve put in will help us fully support those efforts."

Nelson, one of the largest independent staffing companies in the United States, has announced changes in its leadership team to address the unique hiring challenges faced by California organizations, including Fortune 500 companies. Joining the ranks of Nelson executives are Joe Prusko as Chief Financial Officer, Crissy Russo as Vice President of Marketing and Rachel MacNeill as Vice President of Business Solutions.

All predictions point to a true candidate-driven market in 2016, said Craig Nelson, Chairman of the Nelson Board of Directors. It will be even more crucial for the businesses we serve to remain competitive for talent; the leadership changes weve put in place will help us fully support those efforts.

Joe Prusko, Chief Financial Officer, brings more than 35 years of financial management experiencein both public and private companies, such as Goldrush Stores, Accountants International (now Randstad Finance & Accounting), and Management Solutions, Inc. An analytical thinker with a passion for finding solutions for complicated problems, Joes unrelenting customer focus and provision of timely and useful financial information will drive profitability and help Nelson expand its impact.

Crissy Russo, Vice President of Marketing, is a results-oriented leader with a wealth of experience in consumer, product and enterprise marketing, and strategic initiatives. Crissy was most recently with RiseSmart (recently acquired by Randstad), where she was a pivotal player in the successful brand growth through creative client and participant-driven programs. Driven by the possibility of a future where the latest tech advancements connect people to not just a job but to a career, Crissy will build upon Nelsons market presence and focus on creating marketing programs that grow the foundation for ongoing customer, sales and partnership success in these markets.

Rachel MacNeill, promoted from within the Nelson organization to Vice President of Business Solutions, will utilize her proven organizational skills and big-picture approach in leading the technology team to create innovative solutions that solve employment and job search challenges.

Ever since my father founded this company 46 years ago, one thing has driven us: unparalleled service excellence, explained Craig Nelson. These new leaders will build upon their significant industry experience and Nelsons history of innovation to help us bring Nelsons unique service offerings to a new generation.

With Millennials surpassing Baby Boomers in 2015 as the nation's largest living generation and Gen Z workers already entering the workforce, the workplace landscape is rapidly changing. Companies will experience different recruiting and retention challenges and require new recruiting methodology. By bringing on proven and successful leaders from within the staffing and recruiting industry, Nelson solidifies its commitment to both hiring organizations and to job seekers in navigatingand thriving inthe evolving world of work.

About Nelson

Founded in 1970 and recently named #1 Staffing Firm by the San Francisco Business Times, Nelson ranks among the largest independent staffing companies in the United States. Nelson offers a wide variety of workforce support services, including staffing and recruiting, and domestic and international independent contractor compliance, risk mitigation and payrolling. Matching more than 10,000 people with California companies each year, Nelsons recruiting specialties include: administration, human resources, wine and beverage, manufacturing, technology, engineering, digital media, legal, and accounting and finance. To learn more about Nelson, visit http://www.nelsonjobs.com
P-TECH can essentially cut a students college costs in half, while preparing him or her for a range of high-demand jobs in the medical field, said Nick Dawkins, principal of Manual High School.

Manual High School is the first Denver Public School to be accepted into Colorados P-TECH program, signed into law in 2015 and designed to create public-private partnerships to prepare thousands of Colorado students for high-skilled jobs. The P-TECH program will complement and extend The Med School at Manual program by giving students the opportunity to graduate with high school and associate degrees, as well as educational experiences such as job shadowing, internships, and mentoring relationships.

P-TECH can essentially cut a students college costs in half, while preparing him or her for a range of high-demand jobs in the medical field, said Nick Dawkins, principal of Manual High School. P-TECH is a natural complement to The Med School at Manual program, which we initiated this school year to offer our students four distinct medical career pathways. These programs make Manual High School a must-consider option for students interested in pursuing medical-related careers.

The Med School at Manual has career pathways in healing medicine, wellness medicine, investigative medicine, and veterinary science. The school is one of four Denver Public Schools receiving funding from a $650,000 grant awarded by Kaiser Permanente in 2015. Benefits of the program include:

1) Engaging coursework: Hands-on, project-based, industry-focused coursework in grades 9 through 12 that often allow students to earn valuable industry credentials and college credit while in high school.

2) Experiential learning outside of the classroom: Industry exploration events, mentoring and internships in grades 9 through 11.

3) Strong college and career connections:



Advanced industry apprenticeships: A two-year program starting in grade 12 in which students spend 50% of their time earning and learning. Students gain valuable work experience while earning an associates degree at no tuition cost that could be transferrable to a four-year degree.

Preferential admissions: Students are expected to receive preferential admissions into top Colorado colleges and universities. According to Dawkins, these college partnerships are currently being developed.

It is wonderful to see education evolving to simultaneously serve the education needs of students and Colorado employers, said Cheri Wright, associate principal and Career Connect director for Manual High School. Med School at Manual, combined with P-TECH, gives students the advantages of hands-on experiences to learn skills such as drawing blood or testing DNA with the ability to earn an associates degree with no tuition cost. Plus, students get valuable on-the-job training with a local hospital or business that could provide future employment.

For more information about The Med School at Manual program, click here. Those interested in enrolling are encouraged to call 720 423 6350 or email cheri_wright@dpsk12.org for further details.

About Manual High School

Located in the heart of Denvers Whittier neighborhood, Manual High Schools highly trained teachers are committed to challenging, nurturing, and supporting all students. The schools achievement-focused culture cultivates goal setting, resiliency, and critical thinking.

Manual High School was one of the first schools in Denver to educate women and African Americans. Noteworthy graduates include Mayor Michael Hancock, Mayor Wellington Webb, and activist and poet Rodolfo Corky Gonzales.

Today, Manual is at the forefront of career and technical education with the launch of MedConnect, one of the districts first biomedical pathways for high school students. As one of the first schools in the district to be granted Innovation Status, Manuals classrooms are equipped with modern tools and technology. Just as importantly, each Manual student has the use of a dedicated tablet during the school day to ensure the development of the technology skills needed for todays workplace.

To find out more about enrolling at Manual High School, visit http://www.manualhs.org or http://schoolchoice.dpsk12.org/.
Teen Inventor Alexis Lewis Narrates The Paradigm Challenge Lesson Plan Alexis teaches youth that they have the ability to solve serious problems now, while they are kids.

The biggest youth innovation competition in the country has announced it will award at least $70,000 in grants to persons and organizations who help inform educators and students about the competition and $30,000 in grants to educators who are associated with the top 100 teams.

The Paradigm Challenge invites youth aged 7 to 18 to use STEM skills plus kindness, creativity, and collaboration to generate new ideas to prevent injuries and fatalities from home fires. Student prizes total $250,000. The top 100 teams will win cash prizes ranging from $500 to $100,000 and their inspiring teachers will win cash grants from $250 to $5,000. The deadline to enter is May 1, 2016, and there is no cost to participate.

Over 35,000 students already have registered for the competition, but Project Paradigms founder and CEO, Jeff Richardson, wants to engage even more students. Students are empowered when they are told they can help solve real-life problems. Students can come up with public service announcements, community events, inventions, and new ways to think about this problem, explained Richardson.

Project Paradigm chose Alexis Lexis, a teenage inventor, to narrate the lesson plan video on The Paradigm Challenges website. Lewis already has invented two life-saving devices--one patented and one pending. Alexis story inspires students to realize that problem-solving, and even inventing, is not reserved for adults, said Richardson. Alexis teaches youth that they have the ability to solve serious problems now, while they are kids.

The lesson plan video is accompanied by supporting materials to help teachers and parents inspire their students to use kindness and creativity to make a difference in the world. To learn more about the lesson plan and the educator grants, visit http://lessonplan.projectparadigm.org. Youth can sign up for The Paradigm Challenge at http://www.projectparadigm.org.

About the Paradigm Challenge:

The Paradigm Challenge is a new annual competition created by Project Paradigm in collaboration with the American Red Cross and supported by a coalition of partners including Youth Changing the World and the National Youth Leadership Council. The theme of the competition will change annually. The 2016 theme is home fires. Coalition partners for the 2016 Paradigm Challenge include The Phoenix Society, The National Fire Protection Association, and Childrens Burn Foundation.

About Project Paradigm:

Project Paradigm, a national private foundation headquartered in Los Angeles, California, aims to identify, support, and collaborate with passionate individuals and organizations to inspire, lead, and facilitate paradigm shifts in the approaches to global challenges. Learn more at projectparadigm.org/founder.
Packed with key discussions on phenol and acetone demand/supply, downstream market dynamics and trade flows between regions, the summit, organised by Centre for Management Technology, gathers major players from Asia and worldwide.

Li Yimin, Senior Analyst, Macro Team, SWS Research leads the sessions with the Global Economic Outlook focusing on the volatile China economy. A joint session on Changing Dynamics of Phenol/Acetone Market in China is presented by Tao Haixing, Vice Chief Economist and Zhangxin, Senior Product Manager at East-China Company of Sinopec Chemical Commercial Holding Company. They elaborate on Chinas phenol/acetone supply and demand projections, downstream derivatives demand, their plans to overcome excess capacities and an overview of the new export destinations. A third China focus session will be presented by Cepsa.

The Shift in Global Phenol/Acetone Trade Flow & Trends is presented by Kitiya Hongsirikarn, Senior Analyst, Nexant Asia. Phenol/acetone market in India is discussed in two sessions  Indias Phenol/Acetone Markets & Derivatives to Drive the Future by K. Shankar, Vice President  Commercial & Marketing, Deepak Phenolics and Phenol/Acetone Trade in India by Leo Zhou, Regional Manager, Basic Chemical Division, Mitsui & Co.

The summit also includes key discussions on:



Development in Polycarbonate Market  Jens Kaatze, Senior Vice President Global Product Management, Polycarbonate Business Unit, Covestro (Shanghai) Management Company

Global Propylene Market Overview & Trade Flow  Wonsoo Byun, Managing Consultant, Nexant Asia

Cumene Market Trends Worldwide  Jennifer Marchi, International Product Manager, Cedar Petrochemicals

Crude Oil Market Outlook & Trends - Gordon Kwan, Head of Regional Oil/Gas Research, Nomura

Polycarbonate Technology Update  Michael Streng, Director of polymer technologies & Member of Management Board, EPC Engineering Consulting

Caprolactam Market Outlook  Huang Wei, Raw material synthetic fiber Dept., Sinopec Chemical Sales Company

View website for more details or contact Ms. Grace at +65 6346 9147.
Tri Cities business people, educators, students, local MLA Linda Reimer, and Amrik Virk, Minister of Technology, Innovation and Citizens Services joined TriCelerate to launch the Pitch Your Idea contest today at Heritage Woods Secondary School in Port Moody, BC, Canada.

The PitchYourIdea.ca competition is in line with our vision to continue to develop a strong ecosystem of startup entrepreneurs in the TriCities, states Jason Leo Carvalho, Co-Founder of TriCelerate.ca. PitchYourIdea.ca is open to all British Columbians including students grade 10 and up. Our mission is to impact the economic development of the TriCities by accelerating the growth of entrepreneurs through leveraging the community's' resources. PitchYourIDea.ca brings together entrepreneurs, students, and researchers in the TriCities community and outside to act on their talent, ideas and energy to launch tomorrow's leading firms.

The launch featured a demonstration of how typical business pitches work. Four groups of students from School District 43s Innovation Hub Secondary School presented their ideas to a group of judges comprised of Minister of Technology, Innovation and Citizens Services Amrik Virk, COO of Captherm, Philipp Fuhrmann, Vice President of Finger Food Studios, Michael Smith, General Manager of Torq Systems, a division of Traction On Demand, Aaron Zuccolin, Business Development Manager of Futurepreneur, Mina Haghighi, Founder of Life Three Sixty Financial Group, Desiree Dupuis and Program Manager of Spring.is, Chin Hing Chang.

Said Minister of Technology, Innovation and Citizens Services Amrik Virk,  Pitch Your Idea events provide the skills and experience students need to develop their ideas into marketable products. Experience is a crucial aspect of preparing students for the future  B.C.s Tech Strategy recognizes this with investments in coding, updated curriculum and work experience initiatives that will prepare students for the marketplace.

Patricia Gartland, Superintendent of Schools who was instrumental in networking TriCelerate with the Secondary said, This "Pitch Your Idea" event provides the motivation, inspiration and support that will allow our young inventors to transform their dreams into realities.I wish to congratulate and thank Tricelerate and the Ministry of Advanced Education for promoting youth entrepreneurship in School District 43 and its communities."

MLA Linda Reimer who was Guest MC to the event stated, I commend TriCelerate for working with local businesses and the Coquitlam School District to support youth in thinking creatively and engaging in entrepreneurship. By pitching their innovative ideas, it makes for a business-oriented and fun environment.

Video Applications are being accepted starting Jan 25 till Feb 25, 2016. Within 30 days the finalists will be named and will be asked to pitch to 100+ individuals in front of a panel of experts. Winners will receive cash prizes and in kind services to help them take their ideas from pitch-to-reality.

For more information about Tricelerate, or the Pitch Your Idea competition please go to http://www.pitchyouridea.ca
Blueshift, the leading provider of Segment-of-One marketing automation solutions for consumer marketers, today announced that it has been selected as a Finalist in the Most Innovative Integrated Marketing Suite category in the upcoming Direct Marketing News 2016 Marketing & Technology Innovation Awards. Other finalists in the same category include Salesforce, Experian, Oracle and Act-On Software. Through a combination of big data and machine learning, Blueshift is applying the latest innovations in artificial intelligence to make digital marketing smarter, better and more relevant: Rocket Science as a Service (RSaaS).

Blueshift's Segment-of-One marketing automation solutions are powered by an Interaction Graph that stores each user's stream of interactions with products or content. The Graph is continually enhanced with additional attributes including affinity scores, email & push notification engagement data and more. Leading B2C marketers are using Blueshift to boost response through a variety of merchandising techniques including collaborative filtering, affinity based content, retargeting, trending content, content updates and user and event attributes.With the multi-channel capabilities of Blueshift, customers can scale to multiple messaging channels, including email, mobile push notifications, SMS & display--including Facebook retargeting and Facebook custom audiences--easily synchronizing messaging across all these channels.

"Youre known by the company you keep and we couldnt be more thrilled to be named a finalist among such an outstanding field of innovative companies in the marketing technology space," said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. "Our focus on serving consumer marketers continues to pay off with customer wins and we are honored to be receiving industry recognition, especially from such a prestigious set of industry experts judging this competition."

About Blueshift

San Francisco based Blueshift is the leader in Segment-of-One marketing automation for B2C companies. Using the power of real-time segmentation and dynamic-content personalization, Blueshift enables marketers to automate individualized messages across multiple channels including email, push notifications, Facebook & SMS. Blueshift was founded by serial entrepreneurs with backgrounds at successful companies such as Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs) and Mertado (now Groupon Goods). The company is funded by prominent venture capital and angel investors, including Storm Venture Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.
Hillside Sedona

Hillside Sedona Shopping Center, located at 671 State Route 179, Sedona, AZ, is excited to welcome their newest restaurant, The Hudson.

The Shugrues describe the restaurant as industrial chic with a hip, urban and sophisticated, fun vibe. The restaurant is offering chef-driven food for both lunch and dinner, along with cocktails and wine. Most of all, the restaurant is taking full advantage of the breathtaking views that Hillside Sedona offers their guests. The restaurants deck is perched at the highest point in the plaza offering panoramic views of Sedonas majestic red rocks.

Executive Chef Jeff Storczs menu is American grill with appetizers that include barbecued shrimp, calamari that is flown in fresh and bruschetta. Entrees include a selection of salads, burgers and sandwiches, along with prime steaks and flown in fresh seafood. Chef Storcz has also designed a menu of unique and tantalizing desserts. Local vendors are used to supply the fresh herbs and greens with seafood being flown in from Foley Farms on the east coast.

Hillside Sedona is proud to call the Shugrues latest creation a resident within their plaza. This is the second restaurant for the Shugrues at Hillside Sedona, with the Javelina Cantina located just below The Hudson. With their more than 30 years of experience in the restaurant industry we know that anything they open will represent nothing but quality and class, says Karen Reynolds of Hillside Sedona. Bringing on Chef Jeff Storcz, with his incredible resume of culinary achievements, along with the views we provide this restaurant is sure to be a go-to destination for a night out on the town in Sedona.

For more information on Hillside Sedona and The Hudson log onto http://www.hillsidesedona.net/ or http://www.thehudsonsedona.com/.

Hillside Sedona:

In 1986, Shirley Caris developed Hillside Sedona, bringing to it the spirit of nature, artistic qualities and the essence of the town she now called home. An upscale retail shopping center, Hillside Sedona is home to fine art galleries, unique boutiques, a variety of restaurants, locally owned shops and the event venue, The Bridge at Hillside. The popular Northern Arizona destination is filled with sites and attractions that are sources of inspiration to many. In a setting with a view of the Red Rocks that surround the property, Hillside Sedona also is a perfect destination location for photography. http://www.HillsideSedona.net

Media contact:

Jose Miguel Santiago

Phoenix Marketing Associates

602-282-0202
This version includes tons of new features that were built directly from customer feedback and should go a long way towards making programming quicker and easier.

BobCAD-CAMs latest CNC software release will be on full display at the upcoming SOLIDWORKS World 2016 and attendees will be among some of the first to see the new BobCAM for SOLIDWORKS Gold Product CAM plug-in.

The new BobCAM V5 CNC programming software, which launched in December 2015, includes more features and overall system improvements than ever before. It also marked the release of two completely new add-on modules: Mill Turn, a CAM programming product for multitask machining, and BobART, an artistic application.

The new modules and V5 software will be shown at BobCAD-CAMs booth in the Partner Pavilion section of the SOLIDWORKS World show, which is scheduled for January 31  February 3 in Dallas, TX.

Theres a lot of new CAM functionality and programming power packed into the new BobCAM product, explains Sean Owen, COO of BobCAD-CAM. This version includes tons of new features that were built directly from customer feedback and should go a long way towards making programming quicker and easier. Were also excited to finally offer our popular BobART product for BobCAM so that SOLIDWORKS users can access the full array of powerful artistic tools. Its an incredibly versatile product that really magnifies the creative power designers have at their fingertips.

Beyond the booth, BobCAD-CAM will also be one of the featured presenters at the Certified Partner Theater. Attendees will be able to watch a full presentation on the new BobCAM software at 7:15 pm EST / 6:15 pm CST Monday, February 1st in Exhibit Hall C of the Convention Center.

At the booth, members from the Development & Technical teams will be on hand to provide one-on-one demos and answer programming questions throughout the show. The demos will be available daily at the BobCAD-CAM booth #629.

Teachers, school administrators, and students can also meet with BobCAD-CAMs Director of Education, Dane Pendleton, at the show to talk about the companys Manufacturers of the Future program. Dane will be on hand to discuss the programs new online educational training resources, new Work Ready career oriented student program, and many other ways Manufacturers of the Future program is aligning the goals of schools, students, and manufacturing businesses.

Show Special Pricing

SOLIDWORKS World attendees will have access to show exclusive software specials  only available to attendees through the end of the show.

BobCAM for SOLIDWORKS V5

BobCAM V5 software and new Mill Turn & BobART demos are available for download at the companys website BobCAD.com.

About BobCAD-CAM, Inc.

Clearwater, FL | http://www.BobCAD.com

For 30 years, BobCAD-CAM has been dedicated to designing powerful, user-friendly and affordable CAD-CAM software. BobCAD-CAM products are used in CNC machine shops and schools all over the world - helping to automate the programming process for mill, mill turn, lathe, router, plasma, laser, waterjet, and wire EDM CNC machines. They provide solutions for CAD, artistic CAD, nesting, solid machine simulation, custom g-code post processors, comprehensive training, and support packages.
Karen Bremer, Ga. Restaurant Association

Karen Bremer, CEO of the Georgia Restaurant Association(GRA), was named as one of Georgia Trend Magazines 100 Most Influential Georgians. The list contains Georgias business, education and government leaders. Each year, Georgia Trend is tasked with selecting those that make a significant impact on people in the state of Georgia.

With over 35 years in the hospitality industry, Bremer is a founding member of the GRA and the past president of the GRA Board. In 2015, she was inducted into the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau (ACVB) Hospitality Hall of Fame and she serves on the board of directors for the Council of State Restaurant Associations, the National Restaurant Association, the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau and the DeKalb Convention & Visitors Bureau. She also sits on the Industry Advisory Board of Georgia State University's Cecil B. Day School of Hospitality Administration and is a trustee of the Arbys Foundation. Furthermore, she has been inducted to Les Dames d'Escoffier International and the International Women's Forum. Bremer was also the former owner of Daileys and City Grill restaurants.

Bremer has garnered numerous awards including the ACVB Member of the Year Award in 2002 for her role in founding Downtown Atlanta Restaurant Week. In 2009, Bremer received the Lifetime Achievement GRACE (Georgia Restaurant Association Crystal of Excellence) Award for her outstanding contributions to Georgia's restaurant industry. Bremer has also been listed as a notable Georgian by Georgia Trend Magazine in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Georgia Trend Magazine hosted a luncheon and ceremony honoring the 100 Most Influential Georgians on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at the Ritz-Carlton in Downtown Atlanta.

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About the Georgia Restaurant Association

The GRAs mission is to serve as the voice for Georgias restaurants in advocacy, education and awareness. The GRA is sanctioned by the National Restaurant Association to operate Georgias only not-for-profit representing the states foodservice industry. The GRA serves as the unified voice for over 17,000 foodservice and drinking places in the state of Georgia with total sales in excess of $17.1 billion which provides more than 421,800 jobs. From large chains to start-ups, the GRA helps make Georgia a better place for restaurants to do business and helps make restaurants better for Georgia.
Jennifer Johnsen, Newly Appointed Vice President of Brand Development for RSIR

Executives of Realogics Sothebys International Realty (RSIR) are pleased to announce the appointment of Jennifer Johnsen as Vice President of Brand Development within the expanding global brokerage network. Johnsen will lead continued growth for RSIR through talent acquisition, broker and team development as well as company mergers and strategic affiliations.

We are elated to welcome Jennifer to our passionate pursuit of real estate excellence, said Dean Jones, President and CEO of RSIR. Having admired her industry contributions for several years across several brand platforms and both coasts theres one common denominator  success. We look forward to her positive influence at RSIR. Jennifer is an industry innovator and fosters the kind of progressive culture that attracts and cultivates change agents in our market.

With more than 20 years of real estate experience, Johnsen is respected by her peers of real estate professionals, mortgage lenders and top management. Her appointment at RSIR follows her role as a strategic executive for several respected real estate companies in New York City where she launched and grew innovative new brands with tremendous results.

Like many in our industry, Ive admired RSIR for their extraordinary marketing, brand stewardship and broker-centric business model, so this opportunity is both serendipitous and exciting, said Johnsen. We share the belief that its the agents who are at the core of a successful brokerage and by celebrating each broker with award-winning marketing and micro-branding, we can achieve our corporate goals. I join a new generation of real estate professionals backed by a world-class brand and a passionate executive team  this is a pivotal time in our industry on many levels.

Having worked in New York City, Johnsen gained valuable experience competing in a first tier city and she recognizes the importance of both interstate and international networks.

I know what brokers and their clients are looking for and what it takes to deliver on those expectations, adds Johnsen. RSIR is uniquely positioned to help brokers and their clients reach their goals and Im thrilled to lead the growth of this fine organization.

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About Realogics Sothebys International Realty (http://www.RSIR.com) - Artfully uniting extraordinary homes with extraordinary lives, Realogics Sothebys International Realty is a leading global sales and marketing brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest. Recognized by the Puget Sound Business Journal amongst the fastest-growing private companies in Washington State for 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 the boutique real estate firm of 140+ brokers consistently ranks among the top producing firms within the markets that it serves with branches in downtown Seattle, Bainbridge Island, Kirkland and Issaquah.

EDITORS NOTES: For high-resolution photography contact Andrea Savage at 206.448.5752 or email Andrea(dot)Savage(at)RSIR(dot)com.
Replace your datacenter with StoneFly USS next generation product redefines simplicity by delivering virtualization, compute and storage in an agile, scalable, easy to manage hyper-converged infrastructure solution

StoneFly, Inc., a wholly owned business unit of Dynamic Network Factory and a VMware technology partner is rolling out the third generation of its Unified Storage and Server (USS) series of appliances which allows users to consolidate all data center needs into one redundant and highly available appliance. This next generation product redefines simplicity by delivering virtualization, compute and storage in an agile, scalable, easy to manage hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

Available as a single easy-to-manage appliance, the hyper-converged infrastructure greatly accelerates time to market by enabling customers to go from power-on to virtual machine conception within a few minutes. By using a virtualized framework, users can completely utilize their entire hardware and thus be rewarded with reduction in power and cooling costs.

StoneFly USS is an all-in-one appliance which can easily integrate and be fully managed by VMware vCenter or Microsoft Hyper-V within a customers virtual environment, said Mo Tahmasebi, president and CEO for StoneFly. It offers peace of mind to users with a strong roadmap for performance, scalability and enterprise compatibility.

StoneFly hyper-converged USS appliances employ StoneFlys proprietary SCVM Virtual SAN Storage appliance software which is driven by its patented StoneFusion network storage operating system. SCVM allows users to provision their storage as block-level storage (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, Infiniband), object-based storage, or as file-based storage (Scale out NAS) to virtual machines hosted on the appliance as well as to physical or virtual host servers on the network.

SCVM also provides data services like snapshot, encryption, thin provisioning with space reclamation, tiered storage architecture, synchronous replication (campus mirroring), asynchronous replication, and support for public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud or private cloud connectors. StoneFly's data deduplication capability allows users to fit 5x to 137x more data within the same storage footprint without reducing overall performance.

The StoneFly USS also can be used as gateway to convert existing NetApp, EMC, Dell and other legacy storage into unified advanced iSCSI, Fibre Channel SAN or NAS storage. Once the storage volumes have been provisioned by the USS appliance, they can enjoy StoneFlys numerous advanced data storage management features.

Since StoneFly USS appliances incorporate an industry standard embedded hypervisor (VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V), users have the ability to create additional virtual storage or servers as needed and migrate their existing physical or virtual Windows and Linux servers to run directly on the USS appliance.

USS flexibility replaces the fixed hardware model approach of the past with on-demand resource allocation (such as CPU, memory, storage etc.) based on the users application needs. This helps in bringing uniformity and simplicity into data center environments while maximizing hardware utilization and reducing the footprint to run many more applications.

The StoneFly USS supports Infiniband, up to 16Gb Fibre Channel, and up to 10Gb Ethernet network connections with up to 8 ports per node.

StoneFly hyper-converged Unified Storage & Server appliances not only help in consolidating and modernizing customers data centers, but can also be used to perform testing and development, modernize backup, and implement disaster recovery.

With StoneFly USS, users can spin up a virtual machine at a mirror or remote site, restore a deleted, corrupted or infected file, recover from up to 2520 points-in-time, restore an entire appliance, perform bare metal recovery of the primary appliance from a mirror or remote appliance, and spin up replica VMs at a mirror or remote appliance for DR testing and compliance.

For even greater high availability, StoneFly USS-HA and Voyager WX SAN + NAS appliances are designed with clustered storage controllers and active-active RAID controllers. This architecture allows extreme scalability from 6 up to 4320 drives per appliance providing the flexibility to start small and scale up to 4 Petabytes of tiered (SAS and SSD) storage.

StoneFly brings in next generation data center infrastructure that delivers cloud-like economics and agility, but with the credibility of security and reliability of on-premise solutions.

About StoneFly, Inc.

StoneFly, Inc., headquartered in California, was founded to deliver upon the vision of simple and affordable storage optimization and disaster recovery protection through IP SAN solutions. StoneFly is a business division of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), a leading maker of high-performance network attached storage, storage area networks, RAID and iSCSI systems. For more information on StoneFly, please visit http://www.stonefly.com and http://www.iscsi.com
Logo

FastFingerprints is opening a new livescan electronic fingerprinting location in Pickerington, Ohio on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016. The store is located at 155 E. Columbus Street, Pickerington, Ohio 43147 (inside Arrow Security). The FastFingerprints Pickerington location will provide livescan electronic fingerprinting for Ohio BCI and FBI background checks, and fingerprint capture for FBI Channeling. Also, professionals planning to work in Florida can complete their Florida Level 2 Livescan background check (with photo capture capability) at this location. FastFingerprints Pickerington will be open Monday-Friday 9:00am5:00pm. Appointments can be scheduled online or applicants can walk-in during normal business hours.

FastFingerprints offices in Ohio now total 20. FastFingerprints prides itself on making the fingerprinting background check process fast, easy and accurate. All of the locations throughout Ohio accept walk-ins, and mobile services are available throughout the state for groups of 25 or more. FastFingerprints also provides indefinite fingerprint storage for professionals who need to be fingerprinted regularly. When an applicant stores his or her fingerprints indefinitely, they will never have to be fingerprinted again. Upon needing a new background check, applicants call in for a registration form, fill it out, and email or fax it back to the FastFingerprints corporate office. Stored fingerprints are sent directly to the BCI for processing.

FastFingerprints parent company, National Background Check, Inc. (NBCI), is an approved FBI Channeler. As an FBI Channeling Agency, NBCI can obtain expedited FBI background checks, complete with the FBIs seal and section chiefs signature. FBI Channeling can be completed for the following reasons: Foreign residency or travel, work visa or student visa, to review or challenge information on your record, to adopt a child and personal reasons.

To learn more, visit us online at http://www.fastfingerprints.com, or contact us at 614.457.8900. Find us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

About FastFingerprints

FastFingerprints, a division of National Background Check, Inc. (NBCI), has been a leader in the services, technology and equipment required to process state and FBI background checks via electronic fingerprinting for over 17 years. In addition to 20 locations in Ohio, 20 in Florida, 3 in Arizona, and 1 in Washington, D.C., FastFingerprints parent company NBCI, is one of few companies in the country to be recognized by the FBI as an approved FBI Channeling agency. In that capacity, NBCI processes FBI requests for federally legislated purposes. Additional information on acquiring an FBI criminal history check for federal reasons can be found at http://www.nationalbackgroundcheck.com under the FBI Channeling tab.
Stratoscale, the software company sitting at the crossroad of hyperconverged and cloud, today announced it was recognized in the TechTarget Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards for the best IT products and companies of 2016. Stratoscale Symphony received Honorable Mention in the Software-Defined Infrastructure category, as voted on by over 800 readers, noted as Easing the Path to Private Cloud.

The TechTarget Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards recognize the top cloud and data center products and technologies making a difference for IT shops. (These awards are) where readers, industry experts and editors weighed in on the products and technologies that will have the biggest impact on IT operations in the coming year. The award-winning tools will be those helping to run enterprise businesses with efficiency and insight -- whether they're used inside the data center or out.

In its category, Stratoscale Symphony earned honorable mention, second to only the winner. As Modern Infrastructure writes in its article about the January awards, Are you building a private cloud, but dont have the budget for VMware, dont have the stomach for OpenStack, and dont want get locked in to a proprietary hyper-converged architecture? Modern Infrastructure readers ... recommended Stratoscale as a software-only software-defined storage stack that offers most of the functionality of commercial offerings, extensive scalability, and less of an up-front integration effort than running on open-source OpenStack.

Also published in the January write up was comment from Stratoscale customer, Arik Sudman, department manager for systems and storage of Bezeq, an Israeli telecommunications provider that recently began offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to its business customers based on Stratoscale and commodity hardware. Sudman said, We like to do things on our own, in a way that will cost the least money.

We are thrilled to be recognized by over 800 of Modern Infrastructure readers and writers in the software-defined infrastructure category, said Stratoscale founder and CEO Ariel Maislos. Stratoscale Symphony is the industrys first integrated software stack converging compute, storage and networking. Modern Infrastructure says we are easing the path to private cloud, and we love that description.

Stratoscale Symphony is the first integrated software-defined data center (SDDC) solution that transforms the data center into a cloud, leveraging a hyperconverged architecture. The software is hardware agnostic, supporting all x86 based hardware and allows organizations to build an SDDC in minutes, without investing in new hardware. Scaling from three to hundreds of nodes, Stratoscale Symphony leverages a single software stack across the entire cloud. The solution is designed to allow IT to focus on developing and running business applications while scaling out easily with never-before-seen simplicity.

Stratoscale Symphony is available on subscription basis with no upfront costs. Stratoscales sales model is 100% indirect with a growing global partner network positioned to extend their reach into their customer's infrastructure with next-generation enterprise IT. Interested users can download a free trial through the Test Drive program at http://www.stratoscale.com/Testdrive

About Stratoscale:

Stratoscale is revolutionizing the data center with a zero-to-cloud in minutes solution. With Stratoscales hardware-agnostic, software-only hyperconverged platform to store everything, run anything and scale everywhere, IT is empowered to take control of their data centers. Led by an experienced management team that brings a proven track record in the field of startups, Stratoscale was named a Cool Vendor in Servers and Virtualization by Gartner. Stratoscale is funded at $42 million, backed by leading investors including: Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco, Intel and SanDisk. For more information, visit http://www.stratoscale.com/

About TechTarget:

TechTarget is the online intersection of serious technology buyers, targeted technical content and technology providers worldwide. Our extensive network of online and social media, powered by TechTargets Activity Intelligence platform, redefines how technology marketers view and engage technology buyers based on their active projects, specific technical priorities and business needs. With more than 100 technology-specific websites and a wide selection of custom advertising, branding, and lead generation solutions, TechTarget delivers unparalleled reach and innovative opportunities to drive technology marketing success around the world. To learn how you can engage with serious technology buyers worldwide, visit techtarget.com and follow us @TechTarget.
Optimity Advisors (Optimity) today announced that Dennis Horrigan, former President and CEO of Catholic Medical Partners (CMP), has joined the rapidly-growing firm as a Healthcare Senior Advisor. Horrigan will provide strategic guidance and hands-on support to Optimitys healthcare clients as they create new, high-performing delivery models to improve patient outcomes and control costs. Optimity is a strategy, operations and technology advisory firm that helps clients in complex industries navigate rapid market and technological change.

During Horrigans ten-year leadership at CMP, he grew the organization from 700 to almost 1,000 physicians and achieved shared savings as the third best performing accountable care organization (ACO) in the country. Horrigan and the leadership team reduced healthcare expenditures for its attributed patient population by eleven percent, saving more than $27 million, while also demonstrating high levels of quality in areas including patient safety, care coordination, preventive health and at-risk populations.

Designing clinical integration strategies in todays evolving healthcare ecosystem is challenging, but achieving real-world results that include a healthier population and shared savings is the pinnacle of success organizations strive for as they create new models of care, said Doris Stein, Partner and Global Healthcare Practice Lead at Optimity. We are excited that Dennis expanded his long-term relationship with Optimity to become a Senior Advisor. His expertise, experience and enthusiasm to help other healthcare organizations achieve the same level of success and improved patient care makes him the perfect asset to our team.

About Optimity Advisors

Optimity Advisors is a specialized management advisory firm that combines deep industry expertise and integrated solutions to help companies enhance stakeholder value, improve operations, and address performance and risk related challenges. Optimity Advisors is comprised of professional advisors with deep domain expertise related to strategy, operational transformation, business intelligence, technology and regulatory compliance. Visit us at http://www.OptimityAdvisors.com.
We are very honored and excited to receive this grant that we intend to use to promote our cavitation technology to the international market for hop extraction in beer and for biodiesel transesterification in renewable energy. Past News Releases RSS Cabarrus Brewing Company Purchases...

Witchs Hat Brewing Company...

Anchor Brewing Purchases ShockWave...

Hydro Dynamics, Inc. (HDI) is a recipient of a $5,000 grant and a semi-finalist in the inaugural Atlanta Metro Export Challenge, a grant competition powered by Chase which boosts support for small and medium-sized businesses looking to begin exporting or to increase their export programs.

Thirty-five companies from metro Atlanta were selected as semi-finalists and will each receive a reimbursement grant of up to $5,000 to apply toward expenses related to building export capacity and activities.

We are very honored and excited to receive this grant that we intend to use to promote our cavitation technology to the international market for hop extraction in beer and for biodiesel transesterification in renewable energy, said Doug Mancosky, Vice President of HDI.

Nearly 70 companies, ranging in size from pre-revenue startups to small and established medium-sized businesses, applied for the 35 available grants. The semi-finalists represent a wide array of industries, including traditional and advanced manufacturing, professional services, food and beverage, apparel and technology companies. Women-owned and minority-owned businesses are among the semi-finalists. Also, grant awardees represent 12 different counties, eight of which are within the metro Atlanta 29-county region.

To see the full list of grant awardees, click here.

HDI will have a chance to win additional prize money later this summer. Each of the 35 semi-finalists must utilize the grant funds during the first half of 2016 and show export success to be invited back for the second round of competition this summer at Pitch Day  a Shark Tank-style pitch session before a panel of judges. The semi-finalists must share their export success and future plans for export development for a chance to win additional prize money. At Pitch Day, companies will present their exportable product or service, their export success with the initial grant, and a business plan detailing how they will use additional grant funds to increase exports. The top three companies will receive $20,000 (1st Place), $10,000 (2nd Place), and $5,000 (3rd Place).

The Atlanta Metro Export Challenge will distribute a total of $210,000 over the course of the competition. This competition is one of the key components of the Atlanta Metro Export Plan (MEP), an initiative launched in June 2015 to stimulate economic growth in the region and create quality jobs through exports. The grants competition aims to encourage area companies to export and drive business growth by increasing international sales of local products and services.

The program was created through a grant from JPMorgan Chase as part of the firms ongoing work to promote global competitiveness in metros around the country.

The more we support small businesses efforts to broaden their opportunity, the stronger our economy becomes, and exports are key to meaningful, sustainable growth, said David Balos, market leader for JPMorgan Chase in Georgia.

Promoting participation from small businesses will help boost Metro Atlantas exportsright now, the region ranks 64th among the nations largest metros in export intensity, despite being the 14th largest exporter in the U.S. Exports are shown to add jobs to regional economies. The International Trade Administration reports that for every $1 billion generated in exports, an additional 5,800 new jobs are created.

Exports are shown to add jobs to regional economies. The International Trade Administration reports that for every $1 billion generated in exports, an additional 5,800 new jobs are created. With 95 percent of the worlds consumers located outside the U.S., the potential for growing exports is tremendous.

The Atlanta MEP is being implemented by multiple organizations, including the Metro Atlanta Chamber, the Georgia Department of Economic Development and the City of Atlanta working in partnership with several other regional and local economic development agencies, public and private organizations. The MEP is the first phase of Atlantas participation in the Global Cities Initiative (GCI), a joint project of the Brookings Institution and JPMorgan Chase that aims to help leaders in U.S. metropolitan areas reorient their economics toward greater engagement in world markets.

About Hydro Dynamics

Hydro Dynamics, Inc. is located in Rome, Georgia and is the developer and manufacturer of the cavitation based ShockWave Power Reactor (SPR). The SPR equipment uses the physical phenomenon of cavitation, normally known as destructive force, and harnesses it to solve critical industrial mixing, extraction and heating problems. The technology The SPR can now be found on four continents in applications ranging from biodiesel production to hops extraction for beer. Learn more at: http://www.hydrodynamics.com.
Global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP is pleased to announce the addition of Kimberly A. Cole to the firms Labor & Employment Practice. Joining the firm as an of counsel in the Los Angeles office, Cole brings nearly two decades of experience with labor and employment litigation, primarily focusing her practice on recent trends in California employment legislation.

Coles labor and employment practice encompasses employment-related claims including PAGA, wage and hour class actions, wrongful termination, harassment, and discrimination. She also handles matters pertaining to defamation, breach of contract, and whistleblower claims. Additionally, she counsels clients on classifications, development of policies, training, investigations, severance, and discipline.

Cole joins the firms robust California Labor & Employment Practice, and will work closely with Los Angeles shareholder and national co-chair of the Labor & Employment Practice's Class and Collective Action Group, Mark D. Kemple, who focuses his practice on bet-the-company employment class and individual litigation, consumer class litigation, false advertising, and unfair competition. In addition to Kemple, the California Labor and Employment Practice is comprised of attorneys throughout the five offices in the state, including shareholders Chuck S. Birenbaum in San Francisco, Koray J. Bulut and Magan P. Ray in Silicon Valley, and Kurt A. Kappes and James M. Nelson in Sacramento. The California Labor and Employment Practice also includes six associates: Ryan C. Bykerk, Ashley M. Farrell Pickett, and Adil M. Khan in Los Angeles, Roger Scott in Orange County, Shea B. Brack in Sacramento, and Jamie R. Adams and Lindsay E. Hutner in San Francisco.

About Greenberg Traurigs Labor & Employment Practice

Greenberg Traurigs Global Labor & Employment Practice serves clients from offices throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Members of the practice have had numerous trial wins and are frequently called upon to handle complex, bet-the-company, and large high-stake cases, including class and collective actions. On the labor side, a leading group of lawyers regularly represents management with labor-relations matters. Labor & Employment team members assist clients with complex employment issues, and design practical, proactive strategies that can be readily implemented by todays human resources professionals. The practice has been recognized by Law360 as Practice Group of the Year for Labor & Employment (2011 and 2013), and has received a regional award from American Lawyer affiliate, Daily Report, for Litigation Department of the Year in Georgia (Labor & Employment 2015). In addition, the practice is recognized by The Legal 500 United States in the areas of Labor and Employment Litigation, Workplace & Employment Counseling, Labor-Management Relations and Trade Secrets Litigation. Visit Greenberg Traurigs Labor & Employment Blog for insights and analysis of the latest labor and employment developments, including legislation, regulations, cases, policies and trends.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, multi-practice law firm with approximately 1,900 attorneys serving clients from 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm is No. 1 on the 2015 Law360 Most Charitable Firms list, third largest in the U.S. on the 2015 Law360 400, Top 20 on the 2015 Am Law Global 100, and among the 2015 BTI Brand Elite. More information at: http://www.gtlaw.com.
Semantria for Mac If its on your Mac desktop, youll be able to easily integrate with text analytics, enabling the critical addition of context to your analysis that would otherwise be missing

Lexalytics, the leader in cloud and on-prem text analytics solutions, announced today that its Semantria software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform is now available as a desktop application for Mac users. With Semantria for Mac, analytics professionals in customer experience management and social media marketing can quickly and easily analyze the sentiment and meaning of text documents stored locally on a Mac via the Semantria platform, without the additional coding associated with other commercially available text analytics solutions and APIs.

In this new application, Semantria for Mac eliminates the back-end work typically required with text processing. By separating out the text processing from the ins and outs of the system, users can easily and quickly roll out direct integrations with popular business intelligence, visualization and statistical analysis applications. Lexalytics plans integrations that will provide completely new abilities in interactive unstructured and structured data analysis.

This is different than providing an API and will open the door to simple integration and use with a wide range of different applications. If its on your Mac desktop, youll be able to easily integrate with text analytics, enabling the critical addition of context to your analysis that would otherwise be missing,  said Jeff Catlin, CEO, Lexalytics.

Currently, Semantria for Mac pulls in Excel format files, including files exported from applications like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms, as well as handling directories populated with text files. Outputs include Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, compatible with visualization tools like Tableau, Qlik, Microstrategy, as well as JSON format output -- suitable for ingestion in Elastic Search and other tools.

Semantria for Mac is available now at https://www.lexalytics.com/semantria/mac included free as part of any Semantria subscription.

About Lexalytics

Processing billions of unstructured documents every day globally, Lexalytics is the industry leader in translating text into profitable decisions. Lexalytics deploys state-of-the-art cloud and on-premise text and sentiment analytics technologies that transform customers thoughts and conversations into actionable insights. The on-premise Salience and SaaS Semantria platforms are implemented in a variety of industries for social media monitoring, reputation management and voice of the customer programs. Based in Boston, MA, Lexalytics has offices in the US and Canada. For more information, please visit http://www.lexalytics.com, email sales(at)lexalytics(dot)com or call 1-617-249-1049. Follow Lexalytics on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
SeaBear Ready-to-Eat Wild Salmon "Were very pleased to be working with The Non-GMO Project in our efforts to meet customer demands for transparency on this issue."

SeaBear Company, a leading processor of premium smoked salmon in the United States, is proud to announce its Gerard & Dominique line of wild salmon lox and its SeaBear brand Ready-to-Eat Wild Salmon are both are now verified by the Non-GMO Project.

The Non-GMO Project is a non-profit organization that believes in offering consumers an informed choice about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and is committed to building the non-GMO food supply, educating consumers, and providing verified non-GMO options.

Gerard & Dominique branded items which will carry the Non-GMO Projects seal are: Smoked Wild Sockeye Lox (regular and sugar free recipes); Smoked Wild Coho Lox; and Wild Coho Gravlax. For the SeaBear brand, items now Non-GMO Project Verified are the Ready-to-Eat Wild Salmon line (Sockeye, Smoked Sockeye, Smoked Pink and Smoked King varieties). And, the company is already working with the Non-GMO Project to verify additional items.

Were very pleased to be working with The Non-GMO Project in our efforts to meet customer demands for transparency on this issue, and are thrilled to be among the first major brands in the smoked salmon category to do so. said Karen Calvin Woodard, Vice President of SeaBear Company. We received fantastic response to our new Non-GMO Project Verified certifications at the San Francisco Fancy Food Show, and will now begin shipping to customers immediately through both our wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels.

About SeaBear Company

SeaBear Wild Salmon is a small, growing, privately owned company in Anacortes, Washington, which started producing Northwest style smoked salmon in 1957. The SeaBear brand serves customers in all 50 states via their website at SeaBear.com. The companys Gerard & Dominique brand of smoked salmon is served in fine restaurants and hotels, and available at select high end retail grocery stores.

For more information, samples, or to arrange an interview, contact Rustan Robertson:

Email: rustanr(at)seabear(dot)com

Phone: 1-800-645-3474, ext. 3046
Rail Europe, the largest distributor of European rail products in North America, will move into its new US Operations Center in the OHare Submarket at the beginning of 2017. Rail Europes objective was to develop an environment that would enhance the effectiveness and engagement of its workforce, and contemplate expansion for future growth on the same floor plate.

Savills Studley represented Rail Europe in its lease negotiation to relocate into 23,543 square feet of new office space at 1350 E. Touhy Ave in Des Plaines, IL. Rail Europe, the largest distributor of European rail products in North America, will move into its new US Operations Center in the OHare Submarket from Columbia Center II (9450 West Bryn Mawr) in Rosemont at the beginning of 2017.

Executive Vice President and Co-Head of Savills Studleys Chicago Office Robert Sevim and Corporate Managing Director Jon Azulay represented the tenant; Fred Ishler from Transwestern represented the landlord.

Rail Europes objective was to develop an environment that would enhance the effectiveness and engagement of its workforce, and contemplate expansion for future growth on the same floor plate, said Sevim. Relocating to 1350 E. Touhy provided the most economically viable opportunity for Rail Europe to successfully meet these requirements.

Azulay added, The building has invested in interior and exterior improvements, provides an amenity rich environment and is situated within the OHare marketplace  all attractive features to Rail Europes employees.

Rail Europe has a long history of doing business in North America. Since opening shop in New York City in the 1930s, the company has become the leading authority of European rail in North America, representing more than 50 European train companies. The company is well known for having introduced the Eurail pass to North America, and currently helps more than one million visitors each year discover the rich heritage and scenic landscapes of Europe by train.

About Savills Studley

Savills Studley is the leading commercial real estate services firm specializing in tenant representation. Founded in 1954, the firm pioneered the conflict-free business model of representing only tenants in their commercial real estate transactions. Today, supported by high quality market research and in-depth analysis, Savills Studley provides strategic real estate solutions to organizations across all industries. The firms comprehensive commercial real estate platform includes brokerage, project management, capital markets, consulting and corporate services. With 27 offices in the U.S. and Canada, and a heritage of innovation, Savills Studley is well known for tenacious client advocacy and exceptional service.

The firm is part of London-headquartered Savills plc, the premier global real estate service provider with over 30,000 professionals and over 600 locations around the world. Savills plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (SVS.L).

For more information, please visit http://www.savills-studley.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @SavillsStudley.

About Rail Europe, Inc.

Rail Europe represents more than 50 European train companies and is a one-stop shop for European rail travel planning and booking. Rail Europe, Inc., is the largest distributor of European rail products in North America, offering a wide range of passes and train tickets to North American travelers. An essential part of the vacation planning process, the companys Web site offers a user-friendly booking engine, knowledgeable experts, online rail pass finder, virtual tours, interactive maps and much more. Rail Europe provides a worry-free, cost and time-effective and seamless travel experience by enabling customers to purchase tickets and plan travel details in advance.

For more information or to book a trip with Rail Europe, visit http://www.raileurope.com. Trips can also be reserved by consulting with a travel agent or calling 1-800-438-7245 (U.S.), 1-800-361-7245 (Canada) or 1-888-337-8687 (Mexico). To book rail for groups of 10 or more, please contact the Group Department at http://www.raileurope.com/group-travel/group-travel.html.

For the latest Rail Europe news, downloadable videos and high-resolution photos of European trains, media can visit the newsroom at http://www.raileurope.com/about-us/for-journalists.html.

Connect with Rail Europe on:

Facebook

Twitter (@RailEurope)

Instagram

Youtube

Google+

Pinterest

Blog

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Becker's Hospital Review is pleased to release the 2016 edition of its list of "100 Hospital and Health System CIOs to Know," featuring some of the most prominent health IT leaders in the industry from across the country. The executives are leading their organizations through healthcare's technology revolution, overseeing EHR installations, new patient portals and telemedicine advancements while working to keep data secure from breaches, among countless other priorities.

Becker's Hospital Review has published a version of this list every year since 2013. Leaders were selected for this list based on editorial research and discretion. Nominations were also considered when making selections for this list.

The full list features individual profiles of all 100 CIOs.

The full list can be read here: http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/lists/100-hospital-and-health-system-cios-to-know-2016.html

Note: This list is not an endorsement of included hospitals, health systems or associated healthcare providers, and leaders cannot pay for inclusion on this list. Executives are presented in alphabetical order.

About Beckers Hospital Review:

Becker's Hospital Review is a monthly publication offering up-to-date business and legal news and analysis relating to hospitals and health systems. Content is geared toward high-level hospital leaders, and we work to provide valuable content, including hospital and health system news, best practices and legal guidance specifically for these decision-makers. Each issue of Becker's Hospital Review reaches more than 18,000 people, primarily acute care hospital CEOs, CFOs and CIOs.
Ja-Nae Duane, an award-winning innovator and Clark Universitys Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and Steven Fisher, an award-winning designer and innovation strategist, believe that Do-It-Yourself businesses are poised to change our world. Publishing giant McGraw-Hill agrees.

On February 12th, the publishing house will release The Startup Equation: A Visual Guidebook to Building Your Startup. The book, currently available to pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, is the first-ever, visually-based, choose your own adventure guide to the ins and outs of turning ones passion into a profitable and responsible business.

More than just a book, The Startup Equation is a movement. By 2020 it is projected that 1 in 6 people globally will be an entrepreneur at some level. From micropreneurs who innovate on the side, to visionaries building the next global Fortune 500, more than 1 billion people will launch their own business. The Startup Equation strives to help people build confidence through understanding and satisfaction through liberation.

Within The Startup Equation, Ja-Nae and her co-author and husband, Steven Fisher, provide a holistic and comprehensive approach to the unique challenges facing aspiring entrepreneurs. The book includes the only startup table of elements and the first-ever entrepreneurial equation developed by the authors to give entrepreneurs the tools to calculate the kind of startup they should launch.

Of the book, Mrs. Duane says, The Startup Equation is for those kindred spirits with the drive to make the world a better place through launching and growing responsible businesses. It will inspire and those impassioned to create change and give them the tools they need to do it.

Together, Ja-Nae and Steven have over 40 years experience in entrepreneurship and innovation that includes teaching the entrepreneurs of tomorrow at some of the country's most innovative universities and innovating on behalf of leading technology companies and startups around the globe, as well as creating several organizations and ventures.

The duo is excited that the release of their book will reflect their experience as well as the innovation renaissance in Boston, their home states capital. Ja-Nae and I are excited to share the many unique lessons weve learned throughout our entrepreneurial journeys. While weve worked extensively across the world, Boston remains one of the best examples of what can happen when a city harnesses the creative spirit and disciplined business acumen of its entrepreneurs, said Mr. Fisher.

About The Startup Equation

When it comes to starting and growing a business there isnt one size that fits all, which is why The Startup Equation is designed to be flexible enough to fit the diverse needs of entrepreneurs around the world. The Startup Equation is not a math problem to be solved, rather, a framework upon which to select elements that focus your efforts and allow you to turn your passions into a business.

About Ja-Nae Duane

For over 20 years, Ja-Nae Duane has been focused on one mission: to make life better for as many people as possible. With that goal in mind shes founded or co-founded five different organizations, including Wild Women Entrepreneurs, The Leaders, the National Artistic Effort, and the Massachusetts Artist Leaders Coalition. This award-winning innovator currently leads the Revolution Institute while also teaching at Emerson College and Northeastern University and is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Clark University. The Startup Equation is Mrs. Duanes third book on entrepreneurship and the first official collaboration with husband, Steven Fisher. Shes also the author of How to Start Your Business with $100 and How to Create a Revolution: A Step-By-Step Guide from History's Social Influencers.

About Steven Fisher

For the last 20 years, Steven Fisher has been an award-winning designer and strategist helping companies, governments and startups innovate. His slogan, Unleash Your Innovation Rebel, serves as the foundation for his work around the world. In addition to his entrepreneurial experience, Steven serves as the Global Head of User and Product Experience for a technology company in Boston. Steven is also a Lead Futurist with The Revolution Institute, an advisor and angel investor in a number of startups including Singularity University. The Startup Equation is the first of many books that Steven hopes to write with his wife, Ja-Nae Duane.
We Develop What No One Has Done Before! We are encouraged by the progress the company is making with its RAPID process in completing projects on time and within budget

Syprosoft Engineering announced today success with their Risk Averse Product Innovation & Development (RAPID) process. This agile development process is the culmination of efforts to reduce product development risk while accelerating the pace of development.

Syprosoft Engineering will be exhibiting their capabilities at the 2016 Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West exposition in Anaheim, California on February 9-11. Please visit them in booth 1775.

Syprosoft Engineering continues to offer its clients a broad range of services. Recently, they completed several major projects including:  Retinal imaging engineering unit,  Drug delivery device compliance to IEC 62304,  Knee brace manufacturability,  Catheter balloon removal tool design,  Spinal brace functional and durability test,  Optical coherence tomography GUI design,  Smoke detector mechanical design, and  SPECT liver image processing and PACS software.

We are encouraged by the progress the company is making with its RAPID process in completing projects on time and within budget said Dipu Ghosh, Chief Engineer & President of Syprosoft Engineering. We believe this expertise will provide real value to our clients and help us grow our market share.

About Syprosoft Engineering

Syprosoft Engineering provides R&D services, including software, electrical, mechanical, optics, biomedical and systems engineering. We design and build prototypes, perform verification and validation, provide regulatory and quality assurance services, and support production launch.

Founded in 2002, Syprosoft Engineering is located in Irvine, California. The company has experience with medical devices, biotechnology, industrial equipment and consumer products. Medical device expertise includes surgical, cardiovascular, radiology, oncology, ophthalmology, dental, diagnostics, therapeutics and drug delivery.

As an extension of a clients engineering department, Syprosoft Engineering provides the critical skills and expertise at the right time to achieve product development goals. For more information please visit http://www.syprosoft.com.
Canto positioned for further growth in 2016.

Canto, a leading provider of digital asset management (DAM) solutions, today reported it exceeded growth expectations in 2015 with the acquisition of more than 200 new business customers worldwide across a broad range of vertical marketsspanning small, midsize and enterprise-level organizations.

The privately held company announced that Flight, its SaaS DAM product, gained market share with a host of new customers including Boston University, Childrens Hospital of Chicago, AFP, Axel Springer and Sears. Cantos flagship enterprise DAM platform, Cumulus, welcomed many new customers as well, with CarMax, BlueCross BlueShield of Texas, Bell Helicopter, Overstock.com, Texas Childrens Hospital and other organizations onboarded in 2015.

Cantos market-leading position was also reinforced in 2015 as the company was once again named the top DAM vendor out of a ranking of more than 200 companies provided by Capterra, a Gartner company.

Being named number one in DAM is a great honor for Canto, reflecting the significant gains weve made across the board in 2015, from technology development, to industry alliances and customer growth, said Jack McGannon, CEO of Canto. In 2016, we will continue to invest in the innovations and technology advancements that our customers need to drive higher levels of productivity and growth in their own organizations. When they succeed, so do we.

Additionally, Canto has opened a new East Coast office to better serve its customer base in the greater New York area.

Continued Focus on Platform Integrations and Technology Advancements.

With technology integrations being a key focus for Canto, the company plans to continue to forge new industry alliances to benefit its customer base. A recently announced Adobe InDesign integration for Cumulus, featuring two-way data exchange, was one of the Canto development teams most significant DAM integrations to date. In 2015, Canto also achieved a new milestone with the Cumulus X release, which included a new client-branded Portals application and all-new iOS mobile app.

Flight had four major releases in 2015, resulting in a rapidly expanded feature set. The most recent additions include integration with Dropbox for more streamlined workflows, the ability to quickly add keywords and other descriptive information during data asset uploads for easier management, and new options for collaborating more effectively with groups.

Two Canto DAM Summits Planned for 2016.

Following the success of its first Canto DAM Summit (held in Fall 2015), with more than 95 percent of attendees stating they would recommend attendance at a Canto conference, Canto has announced a New York City DAM Summit, scheduled for May 9-10, 2016. The company is also planning a September 26-27, 2016 DAM Summit in Berlin to support its growing European customer base.

For our New York City Summit, we are pleased to announce keynote speaker John Horodyski, Partner at Optimity Advisors, a well-known DAM expert and frequent presenter at DAM events worldwide, said Leslie Weller, Director of Marketing, Canto. The jam-packed, high-impact agenda will also include client presentations from simplehuman, Newsday, ISC Motorsports and more yet to be announced.

Past Canto Summit attendees have included Honeywell, ProSiebenSat.1, Rittal, Hugo Boss and other leading organizations. For more information on the New York City DAM Summit, visit https://www.canto.com/event/canto-dam-summit-americas-2016/.

About Canto

Canto is committed to innovation, with a focus on delivering digital asset management (DAM) software and services that solve customers ongoing brand asset challenges and help to promote brand awareness. Founded in 1990, Canto is an industry pioneer and leader with more than 2,400 customers worldwide. Cantos offerings include its flagship enterprise DAM technology, Cumulus, which allows customers to efficiently secure, repurpose and distribute brand assets, and its SaaS solution Flight to facilitate basic digital asset management and collaboration for teams. Supported by a global partner network, Canto is based in San Francisco (USA), Berlin and Giessen (Germany). For more information, visit Canto.com.
Skyline Eco-Adventures, Hawaiis award-winning zipline tour company and operator of the first zipline course in the United States, launched an all new Lava n Zip tour at their Skyline Akaka Falls location on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The all new Lava n Zip tour combines the thrill of ziplining with a tour to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The full day adventure begins with driving through the scenic Hamakua Coast before arriving at Skyline Akaka Falls where guests experience 7 incredible ziplines that pass above jaw-dropping scenery, along unrivaled spans, including the only zipline in Hawaii that soars over a 250 waterfall! A picnic-style lunch and swim is enjoyed at privately owned Kawainui Falls before guests explore the wonders of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, including steam vents, the Jaggar Museum, and the Halemaumau and Kilauea Iki crater lookouts.

The tour includes a walk along a bridge that gives guests a literal look inside Hawaii as they follow it to the eerie Thurston Lava Tube. At the end of the tour guests experience a high note enjoying a sit down dinner while viewing of the spectacular lava glow at Halemaumau Crater. The Lava n Zip tour is hosted by professional guides who share the knowledge of the history, cultures, and geology of the island while ensuring the guests comfort and safety on the tour.

For additional information about the tour and to book online guests can visit Skyline Eco-Adventures website at http://www.zipline.com/lava-n-zip

Skyline Eco-Adventures was recently named among Hawaii Business magazines 2015 Best Places to Work in Hawaii for the seventh consecutive year. Skyline was also selected among more than 100,000 picks in HAWAII Magazines third-annual Readers Choice Awards, earning top 2015 honors in three categories: No. 1 Zipline Company; No. 1 Zipline Course, Kaanapali, Maui; and No. 1 Land Activity/Adventure Tour Company.

About Skyline Eco-Adventures - Skyline Eco-Adventures is a leading commercial zipline company that thrills more than 90,000 guests annually with knock-your-socks-off experiences. As the first zipline operator in the United States, Skyline operates two Maui zipline tours at Kaanapali and Haleakala, in addition to the Akaka Falls Skyline Adventure on Hawaii Island, and the Poipu Skyline Adventure on Kauai. Call (888) TO-GO-ZIP or visit http://www.zipline.com.

About Wasabi Tours, Hawaii - Wasabi Tours Hawaii is a locally owned and operated company that has been providing small group guided tours on the Big Island of Hawaii since 2006. Wasabi tours offer a personal, exciting, and unique experience that exceeds the expectations of their guests. Visit http://www.wasabitourshawaii.com/about-us/ for more information.
Ian Schafer, Founder & CEO, Deep Focus This years attendees will learn how savvy marketers are connecting the art of paid advertising to the science of engagement marketing to reach the individual level of communication with customers.

AAF Cincinnati today announced the speaker line-up for its 8th annual D Digital Dialogue, to be held March 29-30 at Cincinnatis Hyatt Regency downtown. This years attendees will learn how savvy marketers are connecting the art of paid advertising to the science of engagement marketing to reach the individual level of communication with customers.

Headlining this years conference:



Ian Schafer, Founder and CEO of Deep Focus, will share insights into the platformification of media and a new era of digitally-led creativity.

Louis Slotkin, Leo Burnett Chicagos lead on the Fifth Third Bank account, will present Crash My Party - How to Market in a World Where Participation is Open to Everyone.

Damon Ragusa of ThinkVine will address best practices, using real examples to help marketing teams maximize digital media budgets.

Steve Caldwell, co-founder/CEO of Strap and a leader in human data analytics, will speak on leveraging data captured by smartphones, wearables and activity tracking platforms to reach the level of marketing personalization todays consumers demand.

Dan Barczak, Creative Director/Partner and Sherwood MacVeigh, Director of Strategy at HyperQuake, will invite attendees to Stop counting impressions and make one instead. They will explain how to turn data into knowledge that helps marketers better relate, share an authentic point of view, build trust and create a lasting relationship.

Other speakers and panelists will discuss trends such as:

Building engaging creative

Maximizing your digital media budget

Using human data analytics

Improving mobile location-based marketing with beacons

Tracking results by device

Avoiding digital silos on your marketing team

Turning customer insights into useful actions for customers

Taking advantage of changes in how consumers use digital media and technology

How content and automation go hand in hand

The growing roles of search, mobile, social, display and video

While Digital Dialogue has, for the past few years, focused heavily on consumer packaged goods, this years event will turn additional attention to digital marketing in travel, energy, healthcare, banking and other sectors.

The still-growing list of outstanding Digital Dialogue sponsors includes Silver sponsor Enquirer Media, Bronze sponsors Xavier University, Big Media, LEAP and the Goodway Group, Contributing sponsor CoStrategix, and Supporting sponsors, 84.51, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, and REDI Cincinnati.

This year, for the first time, the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber has stepped up to co-produce the annual event. As a result, members of the Chamber can receive a $100 discount off their online registration by entering the code Chamber at checkout. Members of any American Advertising Federation (AAF) chapter from across the country will receive the member discount with the code District5.

The conference will take place at the Hyatt Regency, 151 W. Fifth Street. To learn more and register, visit http://d2cincinnati.com.

To register for D Digital Dialogue, or for more information on still-available sponsor packages, visit http://d2cincinnati.com. For the latest news, follow D on Twitter @d2Cincinnati #d2Cincy.

About AAF Cincinnati:

A staple in the local business community for 112 years, AAF Cincinnati is an incorporated nonprofit organization, an affiliate of (and one of the original 1905 founding members of) the American Advertising Federation (AAF). Headquartered in Washington, D.C., AAF is the "Unifying Voice for Advertising"the oldest national advertising trade association, representing more than 40,000 professionals in the advertising industry.
CSTMR (pronounced customer), a digital customer acquisition marketing company for fintech and financial services, today is joining leading US and Chinese credit and lending companies at the 2016 Continuum Credit Conference. CSTMR is a Gold Sponsor of the event and will host a booth there as well.

Additionally, Rory Holland, CEO of CSTMR, will discuss marketing in the US as part of a keynote panel, speaking before lending executives from the US and China, along with investors, technology leaders and San Francisco government officials, including mayor Edwin Lee.

The Continuum Credit Conference is designed to promote cooperation and business opportunities between Chinese and US companies that are part of or service the credit and lending space. The conference is being held January 26-27 at Pier 27 in San Francisco, CA.

We are very excited about the opportunity to meet with Chinese business leaders and entrepreneurs at the event and discuss US digital marketing and customer acquisition, said Holland. China has such a vibrant and growing financial services space, but the marketing and advertising environment in the US differs from China in many ways. We hope our participation can provide a good framework for these companies to use in their expansion planning.

CSTMR also hosted a select group of visiting conference attendees at its San Francisco offices the day before the event, for a private presentation on key digital marketing issues in the US as well as a cocktail reception.

For more details about CSTMR and its marketing services for fintech and financial services, visit http://www.cstmr.com or call 415.968.1805. For information about the Continuum Credit Conference, please visit http://www.credit-conference.org.

About Cstmr

CSTMR is a digital marketing firm that helps financial services and fintech companies attract and convert more customers. Founded in 2014 by industry veterans, we help move financial services buyers into, through, and out the other side of the sales funnel as enthusiastic customers, and we do it again and again and again. With proven acquisition programs that marry strategy, execution and a focus on performance metrics, we engage B2B and B2C customers from first touch to conversion with marketing experiences that promote action and create value. For more information about CSTMR, visit http://www.cstmr.com
Bruce Lewitas and Gregory B. Simon have joined the Chicago office of global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP as shareholders in the Securities Litigation Practice. Both join the firm from Morgan Stanley.

Lewitas, who was an executive director and unit-head of Morgan Stanleys Midwest Client Litigation Department, represents major broker-dealers, their officers and employees in FINRA arbitrations, state and federal litigation matters, and regulatory proceedings pursued by the SEC, FINRA, and various states. He is a former senior attorney in the SEC Division of Enforcement.

Simon, who was a vice president at Morgan Stanley, focuses his practice on a variety of financial services industry litigation and regulatory matters.

Both Lewitas and Simon have substantial experience representing clients in sales practice and employment-related litigation and arbitration proceedings involving a variety of claims, such as breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, defamation, wrongful termination, breach of contract, and violation of various federal and state laws and industry regulations. In addition, they have handled numerous complex investigations and disciplinary proceedings initiated by the SEC, FINRA, and various state regulators.

I have known Bruce and Greg for a number of years and am delighted that they have joined us, said Bradford D. Kaufman, co-chair of Greenberg Traurigs Securities Litigation Group. We look forward to combining their top-notch skills with those of the attorneys in our national Securities Litigation Practice.

We are thrilled to welcome Bruce and Greg to our Chicago office, said John F. Gibbons, co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurigs Chicago office. Their experience will be an asset to our top-flight Securities Litigation Group, our firm, and the Chicago office.

Lewitas earned his J.D. from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, his MBA from the University of Chicago, and his B.A. from Michigan State University.

Simon earned his J.D. from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, and his B.A. from The University of Illinois.

Greenberg Traurig has one of the broadest and deepest securities litigation practices in the country. The firm has been lead defense counsel in hundreds of securities class actions, derivative lawsuits, and SEC investigations and enforcement actions. These include some of the largest and most complex regulatory actions ever filed and one of the most highly publicized securities fraud cases in recent times. The firm has one of the most experienced and largest teams in the United States representing both market leading broker-dealers and Directors & Officers to final award or judgment in thousands of securities arbitrations and trials throughout the country. The team has tried some of the largest arbitration cases to verdict, including numerous matters involving more than $100 million. The attorneys regularly handle matters before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Dispute Resolution, Securities and Exchange Commission, American Arbitration Association, National Futures Association, and state and federal courts across the country.

Since February 2015, the Securities Litigation Practice at Greenberg Traurig has had 17 attorneys join in offices firmwide. In addition to Lewitas and Simon, joining the firm recently were shareholders Robert S. Frenchman and Terri A. Mazur in New York; Pete S. Michaels, Daniel M. Rabinovitz, and David L. Ward in Boston; and Jeffry M. Henderson, Harris L. Kay, and Peter G. Rush in Chicago; Donald S. Davidson in San Francisco; David Lisi in Silicon Valley; and Daniel J Tyukody in Los Angeles. Joining as of counsel were John K. Wells in Boston and in Chicago, Douglas E. Arend, Robert B. Christie, and Todd E. Pentecost.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, multi-practice law firm with approximately 1,900 attorneys serving clients from 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm is No. 1 on the 2015 Law360 Most Charitable Firms list, third largest in the U.S. on the 2015 Law360 400, Top 20 on the 2015 Am Law Global 100, and among the 2015 BTI Brand Elite. More information at: http://www.gtlaw.com.
Matrox Mura IPX Series 4K capture and IP encoder & decoder cards will be featured in video wall and multi-operator workstation control room collaboration systems at DistribuTECH 2016.

At DistribuTECH 2016 (Orlando, Florida, Feb.911, booth 2266) Matrox Graphics Inc. will present a live interactive demonstration illustrating how utility control room operators can safely share and record data and collaborate in real time for grid management and transmission & distribution.

Two four-monitor operator workstations based on Matrox C680 multi-monitor graphics cards will share their entire desktops with each other onto four additional monitors sitting atop the four-monitor operator desk. Regions of interest from both operator stations will also be shared onto a 2x2 video wall that will also be showing live feeds from an Axis camera and content from other IP sources. All capturing, encoding, streaming, and decoding will be done using Matrox Mura IPX 4K capture and IP encoder & decoder cards.

Systems integrators serving the utility industry have long benefited from the innovation, premium technical assistance, long product life cycles and reliability that Matrox is known for, said Samuel Recine, director of sales - Americas and Asia Pacific, Matrox Graphics Inc. Recent additions to our AV-over-IP product line will bring even more advanced capabilities such as safely incorporating AV elements into SCADA environments, recording full quad-monitor desktops to networked attached storage and decoding them for display in SCADA workstations, and live streaming for realtime collaboration by sharing all or part of an operator station to other operator/supervisor desks or to the entire control room via a video wall.

About Matrox Graphics Inc.

Matrox Graphics is a global manufacturer of reliable, high-quality ASICs, boards, appliances, and software. Backed by in-house design expertise and dedicated customer support, Matrox products deliver stellar capture, extension, distribution, and display. Engineering high-quality products since 1976, Matrox technology is trusted by professionals and partners worldwide. Matrox is a privately held company headquartered in Montreal, Canada. For more information, visit http://www.matrox.com/graphics.

Media Contact:

Janet Matey

Media Relations Manager

Tel: +1 (514) 822-6037

E-mail: pr(at)matrox.com
Rajdeep Randhawa of Innovative Dentistry has been practicing dentistry since 1988 and is a graduate of New York University College of Dentistry. He strives to introduce new and innovative techniques and technology in the office by availing new opportunities in continuing education. His motivation is to provide patients with the highest standard of care that they deserve. Dr. Randhawa practices comprehensive dentistry where he customizes treatment plans and options to your personal needs and priorities. His goal is to give you the best smile you have ever had. After achieving your dream smile patients are motivated and encouraged to maintain and protect their new smile line by patient education and regular dental maintenance visits. Patient comfort is our highest priority. Dr. Randhawa brings dentistry to you in a simplified and unique way, with a lot of understanding and patience.

Dr. Randhawa is a member of the Academy of General Dentistry as well as the Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. He continuously takes continuing education courses to learn new techniques and procedures so that he can offer his patients multiple, individualized, customized options to take care of their dental needs and wants including smile makeovers.

Dr. Randhawa strongly believes in patient education that helps informed and educated patients make the best possible decisions about their dental care after knowing how dental neglect can affect their mental, physical and social well-being! In addition to having an informative website, http://www.innovativedds.com , there are regular postings on his google plus pages that can be accessed through the website.

Innovative Dentistry is also actively involved in raising the awareness of local residents of Colts Neck and Rahway and all the patients that visit them about Oral Cancer. They do oral cancer screening as part of their regular dental exam. Approximately 48,250 eople in the U.S. will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer this year. One hundred and thirty-to new people in the U.S. every day will be newly diagnosed with an oral cancer, i.e., one person every hour of the day will die from it!

In the month of April as a part of oral cancer awareness month they coordinate with oral cancer foundation and offer oral cancer screenings, early detection saves lives!

From routine dentistry to complicated smile makeover with invisalign, chairside veneers, and da Vinci Veneers, Innovative Dentistry is equipped to handle all of their patients dental needs.

Below is a list of some of the services that the practice offers:

Bonding

Cosmetic Reshaping and Contouring

Crowns and Bridges

Specialty Full and Partial Dentures-metal free with natural looking teeth

Cosmetic Fillings

Implants

Veneers

Whitening

Perio Protect 

NTI-TSS System 

Snap-On Smiles 

Sealants

Root Canal Therapy

Extractions

Scaling and Root Planing

Dentures

Cosmetic Dentistry

Invisalign 

Lumineers 

ViziLite  Plus

IMTEC Mini-Implants

Periodontal Treatment

Chairside Dental Veneers

In Office Teeth Whitening

Customized Bite Plates and Mouthguards

Bruxism and Sleep Apnea Dental Devices

Porcelain Crowns, Inlays and Onlays

Gold Crowns, Inlays and Onlays

Dr. Randhawa strives to provide the latest and greatest innovations in dentistry. He specializes in his patients concerns for their smile and creates a customized treatment plan just for them. The bottom line is that your dental care is his priority, where he uses high quality dental techniques and materials to give his valued patients a smile they deserve. They also help you maintain your smile and excellent oral hygiene by customizing their patients periodontal treatment with a dental hygienist on staff with over 12 years in experience. Having gentle and regular periodontal visits increases longevity of teeth and helps prevent major dental problems.

Dr. Randhawa has two conveniently located in Rahway and Colts Neck, New Jersey. To learn more about Dr. Randhawa, please follow the link below to his online profile: http://www.njtopdocs.com/drrandhawa .

415 Route 34, Suite #102

Colts Neck, NJ 07722

546 St. Georges Avenue, Suite #3

Rahway, NJ 07065

About Us

NJ Top Dentists is a comprehensive information resource of Top Doctors, Dentists and Hospitals. We are profiling over 900 Healthcare Providers and have made it convenient for you to find them.

NJ Top Dentists allows patients to meet these providers online before making their appointment.

For more information, visit http://www.NJTopDocs.com.

You can also follow us on Facebook  Twitter  YouTube
This tightly focused seminar is aimed at start-ups that dont have time to waste and who are in need of bringing revenue in immediately.

The New York BizLab, a business lab focused on technology, is hosting Sandler Training on Feb. 8 for a two-hour specially focused seminar for start-ups that is being powered by AT&T.

Jump Start Your Start-Up: Scaling Your Business Through Sales, powered by AT&T, will be presented by Sandlers Lorraine Ferguson and Lauren Valentine from 9-11 a.m. at the New York BizLab at 251 State St. in Schenectady. Cost is $11.54 and seating is limited.

To register, visit: http://tinyurl.com/BizLabJumpstart

"Start-ups are juggling many things all at one time: They may be incorporating, building a team, creating a product, hiring. And on top of that, they need to land that first sale, and then the next sale, and gain credibility in their industry, said Antonio Civitella, founder and president of the New York BizLab and CEO of Transfinder. This tightly focused seminar is aimed at start-ups that dont have time to waste and who are in need of bringing revenue in immediately.

Ferguson, president of Direct Impact Associates LLC, the Albany, New Yorks Sandler training office, said these types of issues were kept in mind when she crafted the laser-focused talk on what start-ups want  and need  to hear.

Start-ups are in a unique situation when it comes to sales, she said. There is no shortage of passion and desire to get their idea, concept, or product to market. There is usually a big shortage of time. At the end of the day, the successful entrepreneurs recognize that not everyone is a prospective client, and have a process for figuring it out early.

Topics Ferguson and Valentine will discuss include:



What to consider when scaling a sales organization from an Owner/Seller model

Why what works for YOU (as seller) does not work for others (or Why dont they just do what I do - its so easy!)

Why is it so hard to find good salespeople (and what you can do about it)

Best practices for on-boarding, motivating, and holding sales people accountable

The BizLab is pleased to announce that AT&T has partnered with the accelerator to power this unique event for regional startups.

AT&T is proud to power the New York BizLabs Jump Start Your Start-Up event because it will provide a unique forum for local entrepreneurs and innovators to gain knowledge on essential and complicated business issues associated with launching a successful start-up company from leading industry experts, said Marissa Shorenstein, New York president, AT&T. Our support for this event grows out of our commitment to foster local innovation by providing opportunities to assist entrepreneurs in their efforts to create new ventures that could strengthen the Capital Regions innovation and start-up economy.

About New York BizLab

The New York BizLab, http://www.nybizlab.net, is a business accelerator located in Schenectady, New York. It is focused on helping tech companies grow smart and grow fast. The BizLab has state-of-the-art space, 1Gig Internet access and more than 30 CEOs and entrepreneurs in its stable of advisers. The BizLab, which is a Start-Up NY-approved site, was founded by Antonio Civitella, the president and CEO of Transfinder, a 27-year-old software company that has landed on Inc. magazines fastest-growing companies list for the past nine years.
Join Civicom Marketing Research Services at the Quirks Event to connect, share knowledge and engage in cutting edge consumer insights learning with industry peers and clients.

Civicom Marketing Research Services will be an exhibitor at the Quirks Event, a marketing research industry expo and conference to be held in New York at the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge on February 23 and 24, 2016.

Quirks Media established the event in 2015, where it brought together almost a thousand attendees and 80+ exhibitors. Designed with a practical and effective experience in mind, the expo brings together every type of participant in the industry  MR suppliers, corporate researchers, and clients  allowing for an inclusive and collaborative network to showcase products and services as well as to interact and experience diverse learning from various perspectives.

This years event will feature almost a hundred exhibitors and 70+ workshops, with industry verticals in B2B research, mobile and online qualitative text analytics, big data, ethnographic research, data security, social media, and a lot more.

As a leading global marketing solutions provider, Civicom Marketing Research Services will be participating as an exhibitor, offering its mobile quantitative and web-based solutions to clients and the rest of the industry. As a service provider that continuously develops tools and solutions, Civicom continues to engage with industry peers and stay well-informed on the latest trends, techniques, and topics in the marketing research field.

About Quirks Media

Quirks Media has evolved to become a means for marketing research providers to promote their products and services as well as a forum for industry ideas. The company has been in business for nearly three decades. Its main focus remains Quirks Marketing Research Review, an industry publication covering the full realm of marketing research interests. Also published by Quirks is the Quirks Researcher SourceBook, a specialty directory of research providers, which lists over 7,100 companies worldwide.

About Civicom Marketing Research Services

Civicom Marketing Research Services is a global innovator in qualitative research tools using the latest technology solutions for marketing research. The company works hand in hand with market research firms, facilitating projects that enable clients to achieve extensive, global reach.

Civicoms proprietary global audio and recording platforms, plus web-enabled tools, operate in virtually every country in the world. Civicom operates 24/7 every day of the year with a dedicated and trained service team of CiviTechs, assuring clients that no matter where their project is located, Civicom will be able to facilitate it. Civicom operates in over 96 countries and offers extensive translation services for marketing researchers. All services are available in Spanish, as well as English.

Civicom is the global leader in facilitating telephone and web-enabled IDIs and Focus Groups using Civicom CyberFacility. Civicom also offers Civicom Chatterbox, an online research platform that operates globally and is available for individual or multi-country studies, plus Civicom InSitu Mobile Research, a qualitative tool for audio diaries and patient journeys.

Additional services include Civicom FrontRow Mobile Ethnography, transcription services through TranscriptionWing, and respondent recruiting through CiviSelect. The companys latest tool is See Me Navigate for assessing mobile usability, enabling researchers to view a respondents mobile device remotely through online technology to conduct mobile app and mobile web usability research while the respondent engages with their mobile device.

Civicom is known among its clients for dedication to service quality and for the companys motto Your Project Success Is Our Number One Priority.

Civicom Marketing Research Services chooses to be as dynamic as it is innovative; always listening to and acting on clients ideas and requests as they see fit. This kind of relationship has paved the way for the development and rollout of new services.

To learn more, email Civicom at inquire(at)civi(dot)com or call +1-203-413-2423.
Clearview International Virtual Desktops clearly represent the next evolution of the desktop. It offers so many advantages for our customers: centralized administration, complete control of user access, and savings on capital investments. TJ Karkins, Clearview CEO

Clearview International, LLC, a premier Hybrid Cloud Colocation Provider, is pleased to announce its partnership with Dizzion, Inc., a full-service, Cloud Delivered Desktop provider. With this agreement, Clearview is now able to offer a new advanced cloud solution to help the mid-sized enterprise. Clearview and Dizzion will host a 30-minute introductory webcast of this new service for customers and the general public on February 17, 2016 at 11:30 am CST.

Headquartered in Dallas, TX, Clearview integrates cloud services, colocation, and IT consulting, offering its customers fully-compliant data centers and a comprehensive, customizable suite of cloud solutions. Clearviews cloud offerings span private, public, multi-tenant, and multi-site solutions and are all delivered as a monthly service. In order to meet the growing need for centralized, more secure desktop management among its customer base, Clearview surveyed the market for a scalable, economical DaaS solution it could offer by the seat.

Clearviews commitment to Cloud Delivered Desktops is exemplified in their capital investment in an on-premise Dizzion POD, a purpose-built, fully managed Dizzion technology platform that sits inside the Clearview Dallas data center. A POD is designed to efficiently operate Virtual Desktop workloads at large scale. With an on-premise POD, Clearview eliminates storage CAPEX and traditional IO bottlenecks to provide its customers with the fastest possible virtual desktop. A POD also delivers a scale-out system architecture where platform performance increases as load increases.

DaaS clearly represents the next evolution of the desktop, said TJ Karklins, CEO of Clearview. It offers so many advantages for our customers: centralized administration, complete control of user access, and savings on capital investments. With Dizzion as a partner and a POD in our data center, our customers receive an additional benefit: performance so good that their virtual desktops will run as fast - or faster than their traditional desktops.

Dizzion recently received $3.9 million Series A funding to expand its presence in the fast growing end user computing market, which includes Virtual Desktops and Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Part of that strategy involves building on their already solid channel partner program with companies like Global Communications Group, Inc.

Were extremely pleased to be working in partnership with Clearview, an outstanding global colocation provider, said Phil Brekke, Dizzion Channel Development Manager. Clearviews ongoing commitment to delivering secure, reliable cloud services aligns in every way with Dizzions mission of Redefining the way that the world works.

To demonstrate the efficiency and benefits of Cloud Delivered Desktops, Clearview and Dizzion will co-host a free, 30-minute webcast for customers and the public. Attendees will experience what the desktop looks like, learn about the control and customization options and ask their specific questions regarding features, cost and deployment. To register for this webcast, visit: http://www.dizzion.com/webcasts/hosted-VDI.

About Clearview International, LLC

Clearview International, LLC is a premier Hybrid Cloud Colocation Provider serving global firms from multiple data center platforms. Clearview combines Cloud, Colocation, and Consulting services to solve complex enterprise IT challenges such as: multi-site data center deployment, private cloud execution, data center migration, high scale storage, disaster recovery, enterprise application hosting, complex web hosting, and virtual desktop execution.

For more information about Clearview, visit our website at http://www.cvglobal.com, email us at info(at)cvglobal(dot)com or call 888-907-7085 to speak with us.

About Dizzion, Inc.

Established in 2011, Dizzion [rhymes with vision] brings the power of cloud computing to the desktop by enabling employees to securely access their applications and data from any device, anytime, anywhere. Dizzions proprietary managed desktop service is built on enterprise technology that includes infrastructure, software licensing, management, support and security for a monthly fee. Dizzion is a privately-held company based in Denver, Colorado. For more information, visit http://www.dizzion.com.
A disabled American veteran participates in the Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing program. In memory of Dr. Katz, we hope this memorial gift might cause others to realize the importance of this activity and decide to support it as well.

In an effort to promote awareness of the needs of disabled veterans and create a meaningful memorial to the late Dr. Jeff Katz, Allied Anesthesia recently presented a monetary donation to Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing (PHWFF). Dr. Katz and his wife Carole Katz were significantly involved in the project, which aims to empower and heal disabled American veterans both mentally and physically through the art of fly fishing.

Allied Anesthesia President Dr. Kaveh Matin said, "Dr. Jeff Katz was a highly respected member of the Allied Anesthesia Medical Group for many years. He provided leadership and assisted the physician affiliates of AAMGI with incorporation as a true medical group in 1993 after many years of collegial but informal clinical collaboration. The physicians of Allied Anesthesia deeply mourn Jeffs passing and wanted to provide a meaningful memorial to him.

Carole Katz was the 2008 Womens National Dry Fly Casting Champion and president of the Long Beach Casting Club in 2006 and 2007. She said people often ask her why she got involved in the project. I was just ending my term as president of Long Beach Casting Club and happened to read about the original Healing Waters program. I was instantly moved to start a project here, because our club is right down the street from the VA Long Beach, and weve always had a strong teaching focus, Katz said.

But the foundational inspiration was my father-in-law Charlie. He was held as a prisoner of war in Cabanatuan and suffered severe post-traumatic stress the rest of his life. After wed been involved in the project for a while, I remember my husband saying how he wished there was something like Healing Waters for Charlie when he returned from the war. In big part, Im doing this for Charlie.

Matin said when he approached Katz about Allieds desire to honor her husband, she offered several options, one of which was Project Healing Waters. The project is dedicated to supporting the recovery of disabled veterans through the simple Zen and joy of fly fishing, Matin said. Jeff and Carole dedicated considerable time, energy and compassion to a group of men and women who, in the defense of their country, sacrificed their wholenessphysically, mentally and spiritually. Regrettably, these men and women can become largely invisible to most of us as we go about the relative good fortune of our lives. This project seeks to change that.

We support the work Jeff and Carole have been doing and hope, in memory of Dr. Katz, that this gift might cause others to realize the importance of this activity and decide to support it as well."

PHWFF Aims to Heal Heart & Mind

The project shows that fly fishing has unexpected power to heal. A fisherman has to really focus on the task at hand when hes building a rod, tying a fly, or casting, because one slip up can mean a big, tangled mess or, even worse, a lost catch. When the fisherman is concentrating on his work, he can keep stressful thoughts at bay, which is what vets suffering from PTSD needa mental break that opens the window to healing, Katz said. And our veterans with physical disabilities gain improved eye-hand coordination, balance, fine motor skills and exercise toleranceskills that transfer into everyday life. The best part of the program, though, is the camaraderie that grows among the participants and volunteers. Thats possibly the greatest source of healing.

PHWFF began in 2005 as an outreach to disabled American veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Today it has a global reach, serving veterans in Warrior Transition Units, Department of Defense hospitals and Veterans Affairs clinics and medical centers nationwide.

Participating veterans range from beginners to seasoned fly fishers, and all the necessary equipment, supplies and costs for the one- and multi-day fishing trips are provided free of charge.

To stay vital, the project depends on the cooperation of the Federation of Fly Fishers, Trout Unlimited, independent fly fishing clubs, volunteer staff and generous donations like that presented by Allied Anesthesia. Those interested in supporting PHWFF can do so via this link.

About Allied Anesthesia: With over 100 highly qualified physician anesthesiologists on staff, Allied Anesthesia provides adult and pediatric anesthesia services to St. Joseph Hospital of Orange, CHOC Childrens Hospital, St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland, St. Marys Hospital in Apple Valley and many other Southern California health care facilities. In 2014, Allied Anesthesia joined with Fullerton Anesthesia Associates and Upland Anesthesia Medical Group to consolidate best practices in more than six hospitals and more than a dozen ambulatory surgery centers. The expanded medical practice is dedicated to offering the highest comprehensive quality of care and the most cost-effective procedures in all facilities they serve. All Allied physician anesthesiologists are board certified in Anesthesiology and they staff and manage the most efficient operating rooms in Southern California. Allied is a member of the California Society of Anesthesiologists, the American Society of Anesthesiologists, and the Anesthesia Quality Institute.

For more information, visit: http://www.alliedanesthesia.com
Certificate of Good Standing is just one of the many ways showing commitment to building long lasting relationships with our valued customers.

The Secretary of the State of Illinois, Jesse White, has signed the Certificate of Good Standing for Tao Trading, the domestic parent corporation of BestMassage.com. A Certificate of Good Standing is issued to confirm incorporation and legal authorization of transacting business in the state. This Certificate of Good Standing also affirms that Tao Trading is up-to-date on state fee payments, annual report filing and franchise taxes.

According to Peter Wang, Marketing Director for BestMassage.com, Obtaining a Certificate of Good Standing from Illinois is just one of the many ways we are committed to building long lasting relationships with our valued customers. Since the majority of our massage and wellness business is conducted online, the Certificate of Good Standing is proof for inquiring consumers to know that we are a reputable existing company that has met state requirements and is officially authorized to sell their favorite massage products and supplies.

From banks and lenders to potential investors and state governments, many organizations request a Certificate of Good Standing to affirm not only the existence and authorization of an entity to conduct business but as evidence that the corporation has met with all statutory requirements. Whether youre purchasing a massage table or massage lotion, you can rest assure that when you are doing business with BestMassage.com, you are doing business with a corporation in good standing with the state of Illinois.

To learn more about the Certificate of Good Standing, please visit http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com.

About BestMassage.com

BestMassage.com is proud to be a BBB (Better Business Bureau) accredited organization with a BBB Rating of A+. Having over 14 years of experience and knowledge behind us, we are committed to offering massage therapists and those who care about health and well-being a complete line of high-quality massage tables and supplies at the best prices possible with exceptional, friendly service, and fast shipment. Detailed information on the company can be obtained by visiting http://www.bestmassage.com/
With a ton of hard work and building our brand through word of mouth, grass roots marketing and long lasting relationships is what allowed us this incredible opportunity to launch our products in Target. Past News Releases RSS Curly Hair Solutions Attends...

Curly Hair Solutions Exhibits...

Curly Hair Solutions Reveals...

Curly Hair Solutions is thrilled to venture into a new world of mass retail at Target with its new line of curly hair styling products under the Curl Keeper brand. The Curl Keeper Styling Collection has every curl type covered with eight unique problem-solving formulas that address the main issues with textured hair such as frizz control and shine. The concept behind the brand is to Freestyle Your Lifestyle and it is all about helping curlies create a style that is their own. The top five selling products include award-winning Curl Keeper Original, Gel, Styling Cream, Leave-In Conditioner and Slip, and are now available in select Target locations.

Weve taken everything our fans know and love about the original Curl Keeper formula and expanded the brand to house many different solutions for curl control, said Jonathan Torch, Founder of Curly Hair Solutions. Were delighted to now be able to have that same superior curl control for every different curl type.

Steven Torch, the CEO of Curly Hair Solutions says, We came into the market 15 years ago as a small Canadian brand selling through online websites and small hair salons. With a ton of hard work and building our brand through word of mouth, grass roots marketing and long lasting relationships is what allowed us this incredible opportunity to launch our products in Target.

The New Curl Keeper Collection consists of:

Curl Keeper Original  This award-winning styling product offers total control for frizzy hair and enables all curlies to become masters of those gorgeous frizz-free curls.

$9.99 for 3.4 oz, $17.50 for 8oz, $19.99 for 12oz (exclusive at Target), $46.00 for 1L.

Curl Keeper Gel  This water-based gel offers ultimate holding power while controlling frizz and fighting humidity without flakiness or crispiness. It leaves no product buildup and holds any curly hairstyle for several days. $9.99 for 3.4 oz, $17.50 for 8oz and $14.99 at Target, $46.00 for 1L.

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Our customers expect more from glass doors and windows these days

Express Glass & Board Up, South Florida's five-star rated glass repair and replacement service, has released an updated informational page on glass replacement options for West Palm Beach residents. Sliding glass door replacement requires various types of glass available at a moments notice. Residential and commercial businesses can access the best type of glass to replace a broken sliding glass door.

Our customers expect more from glass doors and windows these days, commented Yaniet Santos, General Manager of Express Glass. They want sliding glass doors to help protect their property against hurricane and sun damage as well as vandalism. Our newly update page offers all the ways customers can help secure their homes and businesses with the type of glass that works best for them.

To review the updated informational page about different types of window and sliding door glass replacement, go to: http://www.expressglassfl.com/home-window-repair/glass-repair-replacement/. Details about 24 emergency service for sliding glass door replacement and repair are also available to West Palm Beach residents.

West Palm Beach: Sliding Glass Door Replacement Just Got Personal

Sliding glass door repair for a home or business can become an individual experience. In Florida, the best choice for sliding glass door and window replacement depends upon specific customer needs. Store owners may require sturdy door glass to lessen the impact of high winds and intense sunlight. The goal of a homeowner may want enjoyable backyard views from large patio windows that also conserve indoor energy. In West Palm Beach, choosing the right glass for a specific sliding glass door replacement is vital. Understanding the best choice in glass replacement during a crisis can save time and money.

The update to the informational page about different types of window and door glass helps both business and home customers in West Palm Beach investigate their options, online, before reaching out to a sales or installation representative. The informational page details options such as: high-impact glass, tempered glass and insulated glass. Information about every option in sliding glass door replacement is available to West Palm Beach locals. 24 hour emergency glass repair service, and knowledge of the right professional to call, make sliding glass door replacement easy and affordable for individual Florida residents.

About Express Glass and Board Up

Express Glass and Board Up Service Inc. is a family owned and operated glass repair business with more than 20 years of experience. Their professional technicians and the large variety of inventory make Express Glass the top glass repair service. If customers are looking for sliding glass door replacement in West Palm Beach, Miami glass repair or Ft. Lauderdale glass repair, please reach out to the company for a free estimate. If customers need a 24/7 emergency sliding glass door replacement service along the Florida coastline, technicians are standing by. The company specializes in sliding glass door repair and replacement as well as window glass repair; technicians will handle any glass replacement situation efficiently. Home or business glass repair is the company's main priority.

Express Glass Repair and Board up http://www.expressglassfl.com
Continuing its strategic growth in Texas, the global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP has added a team of three prominent attorneys in the Texas legal market. Karen M. Kennard joined the firm as a shareholder in the Government Law & Policy Group in Austin, while Barry W. Cowan and Labry Welty will anchor the Tax Practice in the Dallas office.

Two of the founding fathers of Greenberg Traurigs Austin office, Thomas J. Bond and Demetrius G. McDaniel, are leaders in our highly-regarded Government Law & Policy Practice, said Darrell R. Windham, managing shareholder of the firms Austin office. Karen's distinguished career includes deep experience in representing municipalities, which will expand our capabilities and strengthen our offerings to our governmental affairs clients.

We are so pleased to welcome this talented duo of lawyers to our team, said Joseph F. Coniglio, managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurigs Dallas office. Our firm is committed to continued growth in Texas for the purpose of expanding the breadth and depth of quality legal services to our clients in this region and we know our clients will benefit from the addition of Barry and Labry.

Cowan focuses his practice on employee benefits, ERISA, and compensation matters. He represents clients in a broad spectrum of sophisticated employee benefit issues. Cowan is experienced representing clients before the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Labor, and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation on voluntary compliance, plan reporting, plan termination, and government investigation matters. Cowan also represents clients in complex ERISA litigation matters, including fiduciary breach issues. He works on a variety of employee benefits matters pertaining to mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcy, executive compensation, health and welfare, and all aspects of qualified and nonqualified plan design matters for both publicly traded and privately held companies. Cowan received his J.D. from the South Texas College of Law and his B.A. from Texas Tech University.

Kennard focuses her practice on government law, policy, and regulatory matters with an emphasis on municipal local government issues. Her experience spans more than two decades and includes positions as City Attorney for a large city and General Counsel for the largest municipal league in the country. Prior to joining the firm, Kennard served as City Attorney for the City of Austin, Texas, where she was instrumental in leading several high-profile initiatives, including four large municipal bond elections, the transition from at-large council district election system to single member district elections, settlement of two U.S. Department of Justice pattern and practice investigations, negotiation and drafting of major Chapter 380 economic development agreements, and the sale and transfer of large tracts of publicly owned property for redevelopment purposes. Kennard received her J.D. from the Texas Tech University School of Law and her B.A. from Southern Methodist University.

Welty focuses his practice on federal, multistate, and local tax planning and implementation for entrepreneurs and their businesses. He has worked on numerous highly complex transactions affecting a wide variety of business interests, including the real estate industry, the hospitality industry, the restaurant industry, the healthcare industry, services, retail, manufacturing, and private equity. Welty possesses wide-ranging experience and knowledge of multistate and local tax issues. He has advised clients with regard to income, franchise, sales and use, ad valorem taxes, and tax and business incentives throughout the country. Welty received his J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and his B.B.A. from West Texas A&M University.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP  Texas

Greenberg Traurig has more than 100 attorneys in Texas, serving clients from offices in Austin, Dallas and Houston.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, multi-practice law firm with approximately 1,900 attorneys serving clients from 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm is No. 1 on the 2015 Law360 Most Charitable Firms list, third largest in the U.S. on the 2015 Law360 400, on the 2015 Am Law Global 100, and among the 2015 BTI Brand Elite. More information at: http://www.gtlaw.com.
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Im the say yes guy, the inspiration guy, said Kwame Alexander, Newbery Medalist for The Crossover (HMH), on the third and final day of WI 11 in Denver, at a breakfast keynote he called The Idea Business: A Life Spent Writing and Selling Books. He described how he went from signing 100 books over the course of a weekend to signing 600 books in two-and-a-half hours at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla., to encourage booksellers to become say yes people, too.

Alexander said he got creative when he published his first book, a collection of poetry, back in 1995. He had to. Two months after his initial printing of 1,000 copies, he still had 900 left. After reading in Publishers Weekly that Stephen King had just finished a 20-city book tour, Alexander decided to go on a tour, too, to 30 cities. He called bookstores, which didnt want to talk with a self-published poet. So he had his friends call. He ended up visiting 55 stores.

When Alexander got to the end of the tour in Los Angeles, he gave money to his friends to buy books at his final bookstore stop in Westwood. The bookstore was overwhelmed by the sales. Really, a poet? We want you to come back for your next book, they told him.

But Alexander still had 100 books left, which he needed to sell to return home to Virginia. He spoke at a church after services. What I didnt tell you, Alexander added, is that the poems are love poems, and some are questionable. The church ladies bought every copy.

Although Alexander regards that tour as his entree into bookselling, his father was a book distributor and Alexander grew up reading trade publications like PW. It was only at age 12, when his father insisted that Alexander come to work with him, that he began to loathe the business. That first job entailed taking the subway to the Bookazine warehouse, pulling books for an hour and a half, and then taking them to sell in a parking lot in Brooklyn.

Two years later, Alexanders father took him to a London book fair. No, not that fair  the International Book Fair of Radical Black & Third World Books. His father bought them first-class plane tickets, but they had to carry the 10 boxes of books they brought with them to the book fair. While his dad was busy inside the fair, Alexander knew that he had to sell the books. He did not want to lug 10 boxes back to Heathrow Airport. Alexander gave a book to a beautiful girl, who came back the next day with her boyfriend. He bought $100 worth of books, and Alexander ended up selling eight boxes of books. His father deducted the free book from his commission.

When Alexander started his own publishing company, he tried to use the lessons that he had learned working for his father and selling his own poetry. Alexander printed 5,000 copies of the first book and booked the author at Louies Bookstore Cafe in Baltimore. He called African-American sororities and fraternities in the city and sent letters to local community groups. A few days before the event, he realized that the author didnt have the kind of engaging personality needed for a reading. So Alexander rewrote the first chapter of the book and turned it into a play. He hired two actors to perform it. Every book sold.

Sometimes we have to say yes to creativity, Alexander said, adding, theres more than one way to sell a book. When Tupac Shakur died in 1996, Alexander got friends to contribute to a collection of essays that he put together about the hip-hop artist, Tough Love. He printed 500 copies two month after Tupacs death. PW ran a brief review, and Koen Book Distributors sent Alexander a purchase order for 6,000 copies. That was the first purchase order I saw, Alexander said. Soon he got a second, from a distributor on the book on the west coast.

Alexanders career in childrens books also began by him saying yes. He was invited to be on a panel at the Florida Council of Teachers of English. Afterwards the teachers asked him if hed like to read from his work. He recited a love poem, and once again sold out of books. At the event Alexander was approached by someone who asked him if he had ever thought about writing for children, and put him in touch with Sleeping Bear Press.

Alexander submitted a few love poems and a poem inspired by his 15-year-old daughter wanting to go on a date, 10 Reasons Why Fathers Cry at Night. Sleeping Bear liked his poetry, but didnt think these were books. Thinking back to lulling his daughter to sleep with Ella Fitzgerald when she was a baby, he decided to write a book about jazz music for kids, Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band, which Sleeping Bear published in 2011.

About that time Alexander lost his job, and his wife gave him three months to find a way to sell more books or get a new job. She suggested that he try the farmers market in Reston, Va. After two and a half hours, Alexander sold $1,000 worth of books. He spent the next year and a half going to farmers markets three days a week, up and down the East Coast. One of the booths had a woman who sold frogs, which is where he got the idea for his new picture book, Surfs Up (NorthSouth, Feb.) about frog friends Bro and Dude. The idea, Alexander said, was to tell a story about the joy of reading.

I believe literature can empower young people, Alexander continued. Childrens book authors, like teachers, have a responsibility to imagine a better and brighter world. Its important for each of us to say yes to ideas and thinking out of the box. You all are the way we can continue this legacy of creating beautiful people.

He ended his talk, for which he received a standing ovation, by telling booksellers: Reading is an opportunity for all of us. Its up to you.
Frederick Warne & Co., an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, will publish a new Beatrix Potter tale concurrently in the U.S. and U.K. this September. The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots was re-discovered by PRH Childrens U.K. publisher Jo Hanks, via a reference to the unedited story in an out-of-print Potter biography. Hanks made a trip to the archives at Londons Victoria and Albert Museum, and found three manuscripts and some sketches.

Kitty-in-Boots is the best of Beatrix Potter, Hanks said in a release. It has double identities, colorful villains and a number of favorite characters from other tales (including Mr. Tod, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Ribby and Tabitha Twitchit). And, most excitingly, our treasured, mischievous Peter Rabbit makes an appearance  albeit older, slower and portlier!

The book was found handwritten in childrens school notebooks, with one rough color sketch of Kitty-in-Boots and a dummy book with some pencil sketches. Letters from Potter, also in the archive, revealed that interruptions, namely WWI, marriage, and illness, had kept her from completing the project.

The new book will be illustrated by Hans Christian Andersen Medalist and former British Childrens Laureate Quentin Blake. While the book was re-discovered two years ago, Hanks waited until 2016 to publish it, to coincide with what would have been Potters 150th birthday. The book will officially release on September 16.
Most people know the late Phyllis Tickle as the author of nearly 40 nonfiction books, the founding religion editor of Publishers Weekly, and as a religion expert and media commentator. Fewer know that four decades ago Tickle thought of herself first and foremost as a poet, says Jon Sweeney, who is writing a biography of her due out in 2017.

It was her first career, and she was passionately involved, he says. She really wanted to be a poet.

During that time, in the 1970s and 80s, Tickle also taught poetry to children in the Memphis area, where she lived. Then, at the urging of her husband, Sam, Tickle moved on to more serious writing and the other kinds of work that would come to define her life.

But in the spring of 2015, facing death from inoperable lung cancer, Phyllis Tickle circled back to poetry and moved to make it central to her legacy. With her long-time collaborators and friends at Paraclete Press, she established the annual Phyllis A. Tickle Award in Poetry; beginning in 2016, the winners first book of poetry will be published by Paraclete. The first winner will be announced in March.

Now Paraclete has published a volume of Tickles own poetry, Hungry Spring & Ordinary Song: Collected Poems (an autobiography of sorts). Of the 82 poems in the collection, most were written in the 1970s and 80s; a few are from the early 2000s. Many are about the quotidian joys and sorrows of raising a family (children smuggling kittens into their rooms; multiple miscarriages and the death of her infant son, Phillip Wade, in 1971). Some are about the time and place in which she lived and worked, touching on the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War; others are ruminations on the milestones of life, on love, loss, and faith.

In the last months of her life, after making her illness public, Phyllis didnt want to be maudlin, Sweeney says. That was counter to how she wanted to die. She turned to poems instead. While editing Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings (2015), a volume in Orbiss Modern Spiritual Masters series, Sweeney added some of her poems, and She was delighted they were being brought back, he says.

Promoting a book without the help of its author is always difficult, but perhaps especially so with poetry, which benefits most from readings by the poet. Pam Jordan, director of marketing for books at Paraclete, says Sweeney will do radio interviews, and Paraclete has sent review copies to key journals and bloggers, where most contacts knew Phyllis personally and well. We also are selling directly to all the churches where Phyllis was invited to speak, as well as through liturgical (Episcopal and Catholic) retail stores. Says Jordan, Weve been more focused initially on the religion market and are now moving into poetry markets as well.
Michele Buzon, a Purdue University associate professor of anthropology, is excavating pyramid tombs in Tombos, Sudan to study Egyptian and Nubian cultures from thousands of years ago in the Nile River Valley. (Purdue University photo/Charles Jischke)

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  A Purdue University archaeologist is returning to Tombos, Sudan to excavate tombs in the Nile River Valley and research the Egyptian and Nubian cultures from thousands of years ago.

Michele Buzon, an associate professor of anthropology, is excavating Nubian burial sites dated 1500-1050 BCE to better understand the relationship between the Nubians and Egyptians during the New Kingdom Empire. Egyptians colonized the area in 1500 BCE to gain access to trade routes on the Nile River.

"This season at Tombos we are working on continuing in a tomb we started last season," said Buzon, a bioarchaeologist. "This site dates to the Ramesside period of the New Kingdom and appears to have three large chambers off the shaft. In addition, we are exploring the foundations of other pyramid tombs to figure out the construction sequence and how the structures related to each other in terms of chronology."

Michele Buzon, a Purdue University associate professor of anthropology, is excavating Nubian burial sites in Tombos, Sudan. She is standing near a doorway to a pyramid tomb's chamber. (Photo provided)

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Buzon and her team, which includes graduate students Katie Whitmore and Kaitlyn Sanders, who are already on site, also are excavating at Abu Fatima, a nearby Kerma cemetery, where many of the graves have been destroyed. Also working at the site are Purdue alumna Sarah Schrader and Buzon's collaborator, Stuart Tyson Smith, anthropology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This is Buzon's sixth excavation in the Nubian Desert, which is in the far north of Sudan. She will be on site through March 3.

The National Science Foundation funds the research. A member of the Sudan Department of Antiquities also will be on the research site during the dig.

Writer: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu

Source: Michele Buzon can be reached via email, mbuzon@purdue.edu, during the excavation.

Related websites:
Jim Whitehurst

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A leading authority on open-source innovation and author of the book, "The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance," will deliver a Discovery Lecture next week to be followed by a book signing in Discovery Park.

Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc., will give the talk, The Power of Openness, at 12:30 p.m. Feb. 4 in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. A book signing will follow at 1:30 p.m. in the nearby Venture Cafe. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is a part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series.

"We believe better innovation comes from a lot of people working together to solve a problem," Whitehurst said. "Constant collaboration with an ecosystem of information technology leaders, corporations and partners is the future of IT."

Red Hat, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is the world's leading provider of open-source enterprise IT products and services. The term "open source" refers to software code that can be modified because its design is publicly accessible.

"Following the principles of open-source software, Jim Whitehurst's book demonstrates how transparency, authenticity, success and openness can be applied to the world beyond software," said Purdue technology and innovation professor Sabine Brunswicker, who directs the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation in Discovery Park. "He also demonstrates how these principles are changing the nature of working and managing in the 21st century."

In May, Red Hat announced plans to partner with Purdue and sponsor a $100,000 gift to fund a two-year doctoral research position for the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation. Albert Armisen was selected as the first Red Hat Doctoral Research Fellow in Open Innovation Communities.

Whitehurst began his career in 1989 at The Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and held several corporate development leadership roles at the firm. On Sept. 11, 2001, Delta Air Lines asked Whitehurst to serve as its acting treasurer. That same week, he led the airline's secured debt offering, winning the Thomson-IVR Deal of the Year for helping reopen the capital markets. In 2002, he joined Delta full time as senior vice president of finance, treasury and business development, becoming chief operating officer in 2005.

Since joining Red Hat as president and CEO in 2008, Whitehurst has grown revenue from over $500 million at the end of February 2008 to over $1.5 billion for the first nine months of the company's 2016 fiscal year.

Under his leadership, Red Hat was named to Forbes' list of "The World's Most Innovative Companies" in 2012, 2014 and 2015. The company also was added to Standard and Poor's 500 stock index in 2009 and named one of the best places to work by Glassdoor in 2014.

Through a $1 million gift to Discovery Park from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment, Purdue launched the Discovery Lecture Series in 2006 to bring prominent speakers to campus.

Sponsors for this Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series event include Lilly Endowment, Cyber Center, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, Research Center for Open Digital Innovation, Center for Predictive Materials and Devices, Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation, Department of Computer Science and the Burton D. Morgan Center.

Writers: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Anna Schultz, 812-447-5229 schult70@purdue.edu

Source: Sabine Brunswicker, sbrunswi@purdue.edu
ROCK ISLAND  A simple calendar vote sparked a larger discussion at the Rock Island-Milan School Board meeting, which may lead to a review of the district's modified calendar schedule.

School board members on Tuesday voted 6-1 to approve the recommended 2016-17 calendar as presented by the administration, with board member Kevin Nolan casting the lone no vote. The calendar slates the first day of school as Aug. 3, and the school year concludes on June 2. It includes a fall intersession, from Oct. 11 to Oct. 21, and spring intersession, March 13 to 24. Any make up emergency days, for days canceled because of snow or other reasons, will be scheduled during the spring intersession.

Prior to casting their votes, board members heard from Milan resident Marji Boeye, who asked the board to vote against the recommended calendar in favor of one that emphasizes education needs over vacation preferences. She said a district survey gathered information focused on the vacation preferences of families and students. Ms. Boeye said it was her wish to see the district make data-based decisions on what is best for learning, and she particularly did not believe much learning would occur during the June school days. She said those days are often filled with a lot of record-keeping and movie showings.

As stewards of our money, I ask you to not pay our teachers to babysit, she said.

Ms. Boeye added that when the district moved to the modified year-round schedule, the decision was based on educational philosophies and the opportunity for schools to provide special learning opportunities to students during that time. She said she believes the Center for Math and Science continues to offer some extra classes during the breaks, but she does not believe many other schools offer the same.

Mr. Nolan said he believed when the district moved to the year-round schedule, the idea was academic performance would increase because students would retain more information with the shorter school breaks. He said this may be an opportunity to look more broadly at what calendar would best serve the district based on factual data.

Board president Linda Dothard said research shows a modified schedule such as Rock Island's may lead to some initial academic gains, but in the end a traditional or modified calendar will come out about even because both calendars will have the same amount of days.

If we want to concentrate on something, to give us the biggest bang for our buck, it has to be classroom management, Ms. Dothard said.

Board member Dave Rockwell recommended the board members approve the presented calendar, stating he had no problem with the proposed calendar. He said he believed historically June 2 was pretty early for the district calendar to conclude. He said in the future he would be open to looking at the calendar issue on a broader scale, but at this late of a date the district must move forward with a decision for next year.

In other business, board members:

 Took no action following a closed session to discuss employee matters.

 Approved the resignation of Frances Willard principal Meredith Johnson, who has served two years with the district, and the retirement of Rock Island Center for Math and Science principal Ruth Ann Tobey-Brown, who has served 11 years with the district. Both principals will end their service at the end of the current school year.

 Heard from Ms. Linda Dothard that a student's comment about continuing to feel isolated after living here eight years after immigrating was very striking and she said the district should be concerned.

 Heard a teacher-led report on a unique math class at Rock Island High School aimed helping students who have fallen off track to regain credits and better engage in lessons.
BURNS, Oregon (AP)  A member of an armed anti-government group who was killed in a traffic stop in Oregon vowed a few weeks ago that he would die before spending his life behind bars.

LaVoy Finicum, a 55-year-old rancher from Cane Beds, Arizona, died Tuesday after law enforcement officers initiated the stop near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Finicum was a leader of the armed group that took over the southeast Oregon refuge Jan. 2 to protest federal land restrictions and object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

He and other occupiers were heading to a community meeting in the town of John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns.

It's unclear what happened in the moments before his death. Authorities said shots were fired but have declined to say how many, or if Finicum or any of the other activists exchanged gunfire with officers.

Eight occupiers were arrested, including group leader Ammon Bundy. On Wednesday, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said the traffic stop initiated on a stretch of road away from populated areas was a tactical decision that officials hoped would bring a peaceful end to the standoff.

Finicum was a prominent presence at the refuge and frequently talked with reporters. His affable but passionate demeanor made him a popular subject for on-camera interviews.

Finicum seemed to have made up his mind about how his role in the occupation was likely to end  with his death.

Just a few days into the occupation, he came barreling to the refuge entrance in a federal truck.

Rifle in hand, Finicum sat in the middle of the driveway, telling the reporters gathered around him that he learned there was a warrant for his arrest and he wanted to make it easy for federal agents to find him.

At the time, he said he didn't know what the warrant charged him with, but he believed agents would try to arrest him soon.

"I don't think it really matters. There's enough things they could make a warrant for us, I believe," he said.

Finicum said he had neither threatened nor harmed anyone during the occupation.

"I have grown up loving the fresh air. I love the elements. And this is where I'm going to breathe my last breath," he said. "... I'm not going to spend my last days in a cell. This world is too beautiful to spend it in a cell."

He then gave a message to his family: "And kids, if I don't come, you know I love you and I'm proud of every damn one of you."

The rancher was media-savvy and tried to popularize and monetize his political beliefs on his website, www.onecowboystandforfreedom.com. He used the site to sell his book, a 252-page paperback titled "Only by Blood and Suffering," as well as T-shirts, bumper stickers and posters emblazoned with slogans like "Let Freedom Ring" and "Defend the Constitution Original Intent."

He described himself as a longtime friend of Ammon Bundy's father, Cliven Bundy, and he participated in the standoff with federal authorities over grazing fees at the elder Bundy's Nevada ranch in 2014.

Finicum and his wife, Jeanette, raised dozens of foster children, though social workers removed the kids from the couple's home a few days after the occupation began.

Finicum said the foster kids were the family's main source of income.

Catholic Charities paid the family more than $115,000 in 2009 to foster children, according to tax filings. Foster parents are generally paid a small per-child amount by the government. It's intended to reimburse them for the costs incurred in fostering. The money sometimes is disbursed through nonprofit partners.
WASHINGTON  An obscure mosquito-borne virus that has already prompted warnings in Central America to avoid getting pregnant and is thought responsible for thousands of birth defects in Brazil has now reached the United States, according to health officials.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said U.S. doctors should test newborns who show signs of the Zika virus, especially in states such as Florida, where mosquitoes are a daily nuisance. The advisory came the same day that Arkansas officials confirmed that they had diagnosed someone there with the virus and warned it was possible that the virus had infected the local mosquito population.

The dual announcements mark the latest twist in a burgeoning public health crisis that evokes memories of the 2014 Ebola crisis, when a slow international response to an unusually virulent outbreak of disease ended up costing the lives of thousands.

The threat from the Zika virus, which causes fever, rash and joint pain, is not so much to those who contract it, however, but to their unborn children, who often suffer from microcephaly, a birth defect characterized by an unusually small head and developmental problems. As many as 4,000 infants in Brazil are thought to have suffered the condition because their mothers had been infected with Zika.

Zika has already been found in 21 countries and territories in the Western Hemisphere. It has spread so quickly that world health officials had warned that it was only a matter of time before it reached the United States.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, on Tuesday called Zika an emerging threat and urged more research into its treatment and prevention. He said a recent study found that more than 60 percent of the U.S. population  about 200 million Americans  live in areas where the virus could spread.

In addition, another 22.7 million people live in humid, subtropical parts of the country that might support the spread of Zika virus all year-round, including southern Texas and Florida, Collins wrote in a blog post. Already, there are reports of local spread of the virus within Puerto Rico and of travelers returning to the U.S. with the Zika infection.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito carrying Zika is the same one that transmits dengue and chikungunya viruses, which have caused outbreaks in Florida and other parts of the United States.

The warnings should be a wake-up call for Florida and other Southern states, which are more vulnerable because of their large mosquito populations, said Walter Tabashnick, former director of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory. He pointed to how dengue fever struck Key West in 2009, infecting 27 people, and then again in 2011, infecting 66 people.

All that is needed for the virus to spread is for some Florida mosquitoes to bite an infected person who has traveled to the United States, Tabashnick said. The mosquitoes can then transmit the virus to others.

There should be a public outcry, said Tabashnick, who is a professor at the University of Florida at Vero Beach.

Are we waiting for the first babies? By then its too late.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Since Brazil reported its first case last May, Zika has affected as many as 1.3 million Brazilians, and more than 220,000 soldiers have been mobilized to spray for mosquitoes. More than 13,000 people have been infected in Colombia and roughly 500 in El Salvador, where health officials have taken the dramatic step of advising women to delay getting pregnant until 2018.

Authorities in Ecuador and Colombia have also recommended that couples avoid pregnancy but for shorter periods.

Zika virus has become a priority for the president himself and for the minister of health, said Juan Carlos Pinzon, Colombias ambassador in Washington. He added that his government has launched a campaign to educate the population on how to reduce the spread of the virus.

Colombia, with one of the stronger local economies, may be better suited to respond to the health crisis than more cash-strapped countries such as El Salvador, where health services are extremely precarious.

There is not a very clear sense of how to deal with this, said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue research center in Washington. It means already limited resources will have to be devoted to dealing with this problem. Theyre already stretched.

Despite having one of the regions largest economies, Brazil may also struggle. Shifter notes that Zika cases were found in one of the poorest regions of northeast Brazil, where the health systems are most fragile.

The CDC and Pan American Health Organization are working with countries to help them with laboratory testing to detect Zika. But the health organization does not advise delaying pregnancy in countries where access to birth control and information about its use are scarce.

How are women supposed to follow a recommendation to delay pregnancy if they lack information and access to contraception? Dr. Suzanne Serruya, director of the organizations Latin American Center for Perinatology, Women and Reproductive Health, said in an e-mail. And if contraception fails, what are they supposed to do if they become pregnant?

In the new interim guidelines, the CDC told heath care providers in the United States to work closely with mothers to track down babies possibly suffering from the rapidly spreading virus.

Doctors and nurses were advised to test infants born to women with positive or inconclusive tests for the Zika virus as well as infants with microcephaly or those showing signs of brain calcification caused by the tropical disease.

Last week, CDC officials said pregnant women should consider postponing trips to 14 destinations, including Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala. On Tuesday, they added the U.S. Virgin Islands and Dominican Republic to the list.

Arkansas health officials confirmed Tuesday that a resident had tested positive for a mild case of the Zika virus after returning from a trip out of the country. It warned pregnant women in particular to consider postponing travel to Central and South America.

Arkansas authorities also issued guidelines that they hoped would prevent the spread of the disease, urging people traveling back to the state from countries with Zika outbreaks to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes for 10 days after their return. Mosquitoes here in Arkansas can become infected with the virus if they bite someone who has Zika, the Arkansas Department of Health warned.

Travelers to areas where Zika is present should also go to their doctor if they experience any of the symptoms associated with Zika within three to seven days after they return, Dr. Nate Smith, the health departments director, said in a statement.

The health department advised returning travelers to use insect repellant with Deet, wear long-sleeved shirts and clear standing water from containers such as flowerpots as ways to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes.
CINCINNATI (AP)  Officials in North Korea and the U.S. released little information Friday about a university student from Ohio who was detained for what the authoritarian nation called a "hostile act."

Otto Warmbier is the second person from southwest Ohio to be detained in North Korea in less than two years. A Dayton-area man, Jeffrey Fowle, was held for nearly six months in 2014.

North Korea's state media said the University of Virginia student entered the country under the guise of a tourist and plotted against North Korean unity with "the tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its manipulation." The date of his arrest was unclear, as were any details of what he did.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, campaigning in New Hampshire as a Republican presidential candidate, called the arrest "inexcusable." His Columbus office released a letter he sent to President Barack Obama, urging his Democratic administration to "make every effort to secure Mr. Warmbier's immediate release and keep (his) family constantly apprised." Kasich said North Korea should either provide evidence of the alleged anti-state activities or release Warmbier.

The U.S. Department of State said it was "aware of media reports that a U.S. citizen was detained in North Korea."

A China-based tour company specializing in travel to North Korea, Young Pioneer Tours, confirmed that one of its customers, identified only as Otto, had been detained in Pyongyang, the North's capital, but provided no other details.

Social media accounts for Warmbier show interests in finance, travel and rap music. Warmbier is majoring in economics with a minor in global sustainability and was on the dean's list.

A professor at the university's school of commerce, Jeremy Marcel, called Warmbier "a very intelligent, wonderful young man." A Theta Chi fraternity brother, Miles Kirwin, added, "He's an incredible guy."

An attorney who represented Fowle in 2014 advised caution for those involved with the student. Attorney Timothy Tepe, of Lebanon, said North Korean authorities monitor reports and comments about detainees.

Fowle said on Friday he was "surprised and disheartened" to learn of Warmbier's detainment. He said he was considering reaching out to Warmbier's relatives. He said he'd want them to know he was treated "reasonably well" while detained, was kept in decent quarters and had three meals a day.

"So physically, it should be all right," Fowle said. "It's just emotional and mental stress that everybody's going through is the big thing to worry about."

Fowle, of Miamisburg, said in 2014 he had left a Bible in a North Korean nightclub in hopes it would reach underground Christians. Back home, the married father of three said he's doing well now.

North Korea's announcement Friday comes amid a diplomatic push by Washington, Seoul and their allies to slap Pyongyang with tough sanctions for a recent nuclear test. North Korea has occasionally announced the arrests of foreign detainees in times of tension with the outside world in an apparent attempt to wrest concessions or diplomatic maneuvering room.

North Korea also regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the U.S.-backed South Korean government to control the Korean Peninsula. Some foreigners previously arrested have read statements of guilt they later said were coerced.

A few thousand Westerners visit North Korea each year, and Pyongyang is pushing for more tourists as a way to help its dismal economy. The U.S. Department of State has warned against travel to the North, however, and visitors, especially those from America, who break the country's sometimes murky rules risk detention, arrest and possible jail sentences.

North Korea has previously released or deported U.S. detainees after high-profile Americans visited the country. Critics say such trips have provided diplomatic credibility to the North.

The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea.
If you believe access to health care is a human right, it follows that access to safe and affordable prescription drugs is also mandatory. You cant really have one without the other.

In the U.S., asthma is a very common disease; 40 million people suffer from this condition. In most cases, it can be controlled with prescription drugs, but you need excellent insurance or plenty of money.

Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, is quite effective and we pay $180-$223 in the Quad-Cities. In England, its $20 and is dispensed free to asthma patients. Rhinocort, a drug to treat allergies in children, sells for $55-$128 in the Quad-Cities. In Europe, it sells for $7 without a prescription. Advair, a steroid inhaler used for COPD, costs us $342-$368 in the Quad-Cities while in Europe and Australia it costs only $47-$72. (Just 6 years ago, the price of Advair in the U.S. was $200.) Of course, as Americans, its illegal for us to buy those cheaper drugs from other countries.

Suggestions?

1. Keep large pharmaceutical companies from PAYING other drug companies to keep their brand or generic brand off the market.

2. Allow Americans to buy drugs from Canada and the U.K.

3. Encourage competition between drug companies, after all, that is what capitalism is all about, isnt it? It is NOT about holding Americans hostage to Big Pharmas greed!

Diane Trix,

Moline
Meng Brings NASA Astronaut To Queens On October 17, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens) brought NASA astronaut Dr. Jonny Kim to Queens where he met and spoke with students at Francis...

Celebrating Columbus The Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Queens (FIAO) held their annual Columbus Day parade in Astoria, on Saturday, October 8, during Italian Heritage Month. The...

Russo-Elling Mourned More than 300 first responders lined up on Thursday night to honor FDNY EMT Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, as her body was placed into a waiting...
Hot 100

We have a new #1 this week as Snakehips ft. Tinashe & Chance The Rappers All My Friends leads the charts up six spots from last weeks #7 spot, pushing last weeks #1 Duke Dumonts Ocean Drive to #4.

Justin Biebers Love Yourself remains at #2 for another consecutive week while DJ Snake ft. Bipolar Sunshines Middle joins the Top 3 party at #3 up two spots from last weeks #5.

Shawn Mendes track Stitches moves to #6 from #8 this week while Zara Larsson brings another single into the Top 10 with Lush Life coming in at #8 up from last weeks #16. Sitting below is Larssons other hit Never Forget You featuring MNEK at #7 down from #4.

Taylor Swift is slowly moving to the top with Out of The Woods at #9 up one spot from last weeks #10 while we welcome back to the Top 10 Sigalas Sweet Lovin coming in at #10 from last weeks #12.

ARIA Singles

Not a lot of movement in the Aria Singles chart this week as we see the Top 3 all holding onto last weeks position for another week with Justin Biebers Love Yourself remaining at #1, followed by Jonas Blues Fast Car at #2 and Snakehips ft. Tinashe & Chance The Rappers All My Friends staying at #3.

Zara Larsson and her single Lush Life is up four spots sitting at #4 from last weeks #8, while Elle Kings Exs & Ohs sits next to her at #5 up from #7, Adeles Hello remaining at #6 for another week.

We see a new entry this week from none other than Flume ft. Kai and their hit Never Be Like You debuting at #10, meanwhile Charlie Puths One Call Away sits at #11 jumping a massive 12 spots from last weeks #23.

Other big movers include Selena Gomezs Hands To Myself at #30 up from #41 and L D R U featuring Paige IV and their hit Keeping Score at #32 from last weeks #45.

ARIA Albums

Adele return to her #1 spot this week with her incredible album 25 from last weeks #2, pushing David Bowies Blackstar to #2 from last weeks #1.

We welcome Panic! At The Disco to the ARIA Album Chart this week with their fifth studio album Death Of A Bachelor debuting at #3, while Justin Biebers Purpose remains at #4 for another week.

David Bowie has quite the presence in the charts this week with Nothing Has Changed (The Best Of David Bowie) sitting at #5 down from last weeks #3 and Best Of Bowie at #6 up from last weeks #9.

We have a new addition from Brothers3 with their album Brothers Never Part debuting at #11; meanwhile we see a re-entry from The Eagles with The Complete Greatest Hits coming in at #14.

Other re-entries include Adeles 2008 album 19 sitting at #34 and N.W.As Straight Outta Compton at #39.

Singles to radio:

AlunaGeorge / Im In Control / UMA

Sean Bradford / Hello / EMI

Ronan Keating / Let Me Love You / UMA

Major Lazer / Light It Up / MAD/WMA

Bob Moses / Before I Fall / EMI

Most Added:

Flume ft. Kai / Never Be Like You / EMI

The 1975 / The Sound / SME

Charlie Puth / One Call Away / WMA

Kiiara / Gold / IND

Ellie Goulding / Something In The Way / UMA
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) on Jan. 27, 2016 released its first State of the Industry Report focusing on the key challenges, accomplishments and innovations within the freight railroad industry. This initial, five-chapter edition details the industrys investments in new technology and innovation that are enhancing safety across the nations rail network.

The reports are designed to inform lawmakers, the business community and the public about the freight railroad industrys top priorities. This edition features the input of experts such as John Tunna, Director of the Federal Railroad Administrations (FRA) Office of Research & Development and Tony Sultana, a Principal Investigator at the Transportation Technology Center Inc. (TTCI).

Our industry maintains its leadership position through innovations designed to improve the performance of our employees, our equipment and even the rail itself, said AAR President and CEO, Edward R. Hamberger. This new report outlines how the railroad industry provides innovative, on-the-ground technologies and community programs that safeguard our customers cargo, the communities we serve and our employees.

The report focuses on items such as safety investment, the role of big data in diagnosing and solving problems, the continued commitment by the rail industry to implement Positive Train Control (PTC) technology as quickly and effectively as possible, emerging technologies such as drones and community-based training and outreach.

Through input from experts like Tunna and Sultana, as well as The Security and Emergency Response Center (SERTC), Railinc and AskRail, AAR shows how the industry is continuing to address safety in an industry where the train accident rate has fallen 45% since 2000 and 80% since 1980.

The exciting thing right now is that technology is moving into the transportation field at a rapid rate, Tunna said in the report.

The report showcases new safety advancements that the industry is taking. For instance, technologists are developing a sophisticated ultrasonic detection system that allows a better view into steel rail to locate track defects before they can cause problems. The industry is also investigating the use of unmanned aerial vehiclesor drones for inspection of track, bridge and other freight rail infrastructure, as well as monitoring air quality.

Hamberger says the ultimate takeaway from AARs first State of the Industry Report is clear: an increased emphasis on rail network investments $25 billion annually over the last five years on averagecollaboration with customers and government and the development of new technologies combine to improve safety.

The sweeping reduction in freight rail accidents and injuries over the last several decades is the result of stepped-up employee training as well as a dedicated team of safety experts who conduct rigorous research, examine problems in new ways, apply technological advances and novel changes to processes that ultimately make a safe system of transportation even safer, said Hamberger. We are proud of the industrys efforts, including those highlighted in this report, and look forward to promoting more developments in the future.

The AAR will issue multiple such reports each year, including two more in 2016, with each individual report focusing on a particular theme.
MTA approves final contract for East Side Access project Written by Carolina Worrell , Senior Editor









The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Board on Jan. 27, 2016 approved the final major contract for the East Side Access project, which will build and finish four platforms and eight tracks for the new Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) terminal some 100 feet below Grand Central Terminal.

Under another contract awarded last month, a tunnel approach will be built and a bridge rebuilt in Sunnyside, Queens. The total value of both contracts is nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars.

These are a significant milestones for East Side Access and will turn raw underground caverns into the modern station that LIRR customers will use when they head directly to and from the East Side of Manhattan, said MTA Chairman and CEO Thomas F. Prendergast. And the Sunnyside contract will make it possible for trains to reach Grand Central Terminal. East Side Access will save Long Island and Queens customers up to 40 minutes a day in travel time, demonstrating why transit expansion is a key element of our 2015-19 Capital Program.

The Manhattan contract will transform two enormous 1,143-foot-long caverns carved out of solid rock into a terminal station, with more than 12 miles of track work from Queens to Manhattan, including eight tracks and four platforms in the station; elevators, escalators and staircases to carry customers to and from the underground station; and all architectural finishes through the caverns.

With the award of these contracts, the eventual completion of East Side Access is starting to come into view, said Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, President of MTA Capital Construction, which is building the project. This is the next chapter in the long history of Grand Central Terminal and the growth and development of New York City.

The MTA selected the Tutor Perini Corporation for the three-and-a-half-year caverns project at a contract value of $663 million. During the yearlong procurement process, 34 firms requested the RFP documents and seven submitted separate technical and cost proposals. The selection committee unanimously selected low cost proposer Tutor Perini from among three firms that submitted best and final offers.

The contract award was approved on Jan. 25 by the Long Island and Finance Committees of the MTA Board and by the full MTA Board on Jan. 27.

The contract to make upgrades to railroad infrastructure in Sunnyside, Queens, was also awarded to Tutor Perini Corp., in December, and is valued at up to $79 million. The upgrades will enable LIRR trains to access Grand Central Terminal.

The work the contractors will perform in Sunnyside includes excavation and construction of an approach structure that will allow the LIRRs existing tracks to connect to one of the four rail tunnels that have been built below Sunnyside Yard. This will complete the physical connection that will run from the tunnels under Grand Central all the way to daylight in Sunnyside, Queens. Approaches to the other tunnels will be built separately through other contracts.

Workers will also replace of one of the five bridges that carry tracks over 48th Street. Additional work that will be performed under this contract includes switch installation; retaining wall construction; installation of electrical utilities; demolition of an electrical substation; and installation of overhead wire support structures.

The contract is structured to take 19 months and is valued at $53.3 million. If the MTA deems that the work is going well, the contract allows the authority to exercise options valued at approximately $26.5 million that would expand the scope of work to be undertaken and extend the duration of the contract to a total of 30 months. Construction activities for this contract are planned to be underway in late February.

The award of these contracts closely follows the completion of two other major contracts, one for a subsurface ventilation structure at 55th Street in Manhattan and one for major civil infrastructure work in Harold Interlocking in Queens. This past November, the project made its first leap forward into the public realm when the contract to fit-out the future LIRR concourse broke through to the Lower Level Dining Concourse in Grand Central Terminal, where escalators and a stairway will be installed to connect to the new concourse.

The East Side Access project will increase the LIRRs capacity into Manhattan, and dramatically shorten travel time for Long Island and eastern Queens commuters traveling to the east side of Manhattan. It is projected to reduce crowding at Penn Station and nearby subway stations and provide easier access from East Midtown to JFK International Airport via the AirTrain at LIRRs Jamaica station.

The completion of the East Side Access project will also free up LIRR tracks in Penn Station, allowing trains from the MTA Metro-North Railroads New Haven Line access to Penn Station through Queens. The Penn Station Access project will construct four new stations in the East Bronx, significantly cutting travel times to and from Manhattan.

Some public benefits of the East Side Access project already have been realized. Sixteen months ago, the MTA opened 50th Street Commons, a comfortable pocket park between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan. A year before, the MTA opened a new entrance to Grand Central inside 245 Park Avenue that faces 47th Street between Park and Lexington avenues. The entrance is now the most direct way to access Grand Centrals platforms from points east of Lexington Avenue and north of 47th Street.

East Side Access is scheduled to be completed in December 2022.
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Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Bogota (ETB), the public telco of Colombia's capital Bogota may be put up for sale, with Millicom's Tigo first in line to buy it.





The new mayor and local government of the country's capital intend to sell ETB as they see it as a non-profitable company.ETB has in fact been receiving important investments since 2012 to extend its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network, through which it offers fixed services like Internet and IPTV. But both services, especially pay-TV, have had difficulty taking off , having gathered less than 200,000 subs, of which under 60,000 pay for TV.While political parties discuss whether to finally privatise the company or not, there are some interested parties already. According to Colombia's Portafolio , Tigo believes ETB would complement its Colombian business.In 2013, Tigo merged with UNE-EPM to become the second largest telco in the country behind Telefonica's Movistar.If the opportunity appeared, Tigo-UNE would be interested in participating, said Mauricio Ramos, Millicom's CEO, speaking to Portafolio.
UAE telco du is planning to commence broadcasting 4K content to subscribers in March, following a similar announcement from IPTV competitor Etisalat last month.



We have already obtained rights from certain studios for delivering their 4K content. To start with we will be offering a bunch of TV series and movies in 4K, dus vice president of consumer, new business and innovation, Samer Geissah, told Emirates 24/7.In December Etisalat announced that it would offer UAE subscribers the first Ultra HD 4K IPTV service in the Middle East and Africa in the first quarter 2016, in partnership with Huawei.Netflix, which launched its online streaming service in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area earlier in 2016, already offers premium subscribers 4K titles, with a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels, about four times greater than full HD.
Scripps Networks Interactive has announced its first pan-regional original commission for Latin America with Destino Con Sabor.





Hosted by Venezuelan chef Grace Ramirez, Destino Con Sabor will explore the food, cultural traditions and heritage across Latin America. Destino Con Sabor, 16x30, is due to premiere on Food Network across the region in spring 2016.We are focused on growing our slate of original productions in Latin America, creating local content that resonates with the regional audience, said Adriana Alcantara, VP of marketing and production, Latin America, Scripps . Destino Con Sabor fulfils this strategy  celebrating the culture and authentic cuisine of Latin America, while also providing new cooking techniques and original recipes.Ramirez will meet with local chefs, farmers and residents in the region. She will taste family recipes passed down by generations, try the best of the artisanal pop-ups as well as sample the latest modern gastronomy trends.
Khodorkovskys arrest in absentia upheld

MOSCOW, January 27 (RAPSI)  The Moscow City Court on Wednesday upheld a lower courts ruling to arrest in absentia Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russian tycoon turned political opposition figure, who stands charged with organizing the murder of Nefteyugansk mayor Vladimir Petukhov in 1998, RAPSI reported from the courtroom.

On December 23, the Basmanny District Court of Moscow issued an arrest warrant for Khodorkovsky and put him on the international wanted list.

Khodorkovsky who is currently abroad earlier said that he would not participate in another criminal trial of him in Russia.

According to investigators, a criminal group killed several people between 1998 and 2002, including Petukhov, on orders from former Yukos shareholder Leonid Nevzlin. In 2009, Nevzlin, who moved to Israel in 2003, was sentenced in absentia to life in prison. Alexei Pichugin, YUKOS's former security chief, was found guilty of murdering Petukhov and received a life sentence in 2008.

The murder of Petukhov provoked a public outcry 17 years ago, when several media outlets speculated that he was directly involved in the re-division of Russias oil assets. Investigation into Petukhovs murder was suspended.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order releasing Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in prison for fraud and embezzlement, on December 20, 2013. The same day Khodorkovsky went to Berlin on a chartered flight.
Antiwar.com, January 26, 2016

By Jason Ditz

While presenting it as a shift in President Obamas mindset, Pentagon officials are talking up the idea that the US occupation of Afghanistan, which began in late 2001, is not just extended for a couple of additional years but will continue for several more decades, and for all intents and purposes may as well be permanent.

What weve learned is that you cant really leave, one Pentagon official was quoted in the Washington Post as insisting, while other officials openly talked about a generational approach, in which the US stays for generations more to create an entire new Afghanistan.

Despite making some statements of aversion to endless war, President Obama has never really appeared all that eager to end the Afghanistan occupation, and the end dates were always speculative dates set by NATO to give the impression the war was winding down.

Yet all along, these end dates were based on the assumption of a nigh-miraculous improvement in the Afghan military that hasnt happened yet, and it was always more or less assumed the date would just keep getting punted down the road until victory just sort of happens.

The change isnt that the US is staying, but that the Pentagon is doing away with the pretense of leaving in any measurable timeframe. From the Afghan militarys widespread corruption to the growth of ISIS in the nations southeast, all the military talking points are now that the Afghans arent ready, but that these Afghans likely never will be.

Instead, the shift toward generational war means measuring success a few decades down the road, to see if the Pentagon can successfully rear the Afghan children being born today into the sort of pro-US warrior state that theyd feel comfortable turning back over to its population. If not, we just roll the dice on the next generation, and so on.
PAN, January 27, 2016

In the Transparency Internationals annual Corruption Perceptions Index for 2015, Afghanistan has been listed the third most corrupt country in the world.

Millions of dollars that should have been spent on Afghanistans reconstruction have been wasted or stolen, seriously undermining efforts to restore peace, the organisation said on Wednesday.

In its report, the influential global watchdog alleged hat child labour remained a sad reality in an environment where citizens were trapped in poverty while corrupt officials were paid off.

Human trafficking, child mortality, poor education standards, environmental destruction and terrorism were identified as other causes of the devastation fuelled by corruption.

The 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index clearly shows that corruption remains a blight around the world. But 2015 was also a year when people again took to the streets to protest corruption, said Transparency International chairperson.

Jose Ugaz remarked: Corruption can be beaten if we work together. To stamp out the abuse of power, bribery and shed light on secret deals, citizens must together tell their governments they have had enough.

Overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries on the 2015 index scored below 50, on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived to be very clean).

In 2015, Afghanistan did better than North Korea and Somalia -- the worst performers. Denmark took the top spot for the second year running. The big decliners in the past 4 years include Libya, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Turkey.
"There's never been a line of commercial insurance that has more data at its fingertips than cyber insurers do today," says Methven. "But it's how they find that needle in the haystack."
The better-known "Radetzky March" is a musical march, Op. 228, composed by Jonah Strauss Sr. and played commonly at New Year's concerts. Less famous, perhaps, is the book written by Joseph Roth that goes by the same name. Roth's "The Radetzky March" is a score written to the rhythm of the glorious Austrian Empire's decline.

The narration of three generations of the Trotta family -- professional Austro-Hungarian soldiers and career bureaucrats of Slovenian origin -- spotlights not only the constancy of the notion of the "love of one's own" at a time when the nation-state was still young, but also shows how even despite the best intentions, actions in personal and political life may lead to failure.

The political novel, written in 1932, teaches life lessons of universal value. Read today, while widely applicable to the challenges of governance in general, the book brings to mind the challenges to European cohesion and governance.

It is obvious that global governance as we knew it until 2008 has been restructured. We never quite had a definition for it before then, but we were hopeful that globalization would equal harmony and shared prosperity. However, the Orange revolution in 2004 -- the moment the so-called Russian Bear awoke -- and the Russian-Georgian war in 2008, alongside the beginning of the global financial and economic crisis, have dramatically changed the way we perceive the world today.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War had formally ended. However, it continued informally along the Russian buffer zone. The struggle was most visible in places like Ukraine that the mainstream Western media has focused on ever since the early 2000s. Moldova's struggle was far less visible. The politics of Chisinau are of interest for Russia, which wants to keep the country in its buffer zone, but also for NATO member states as Romania, which favors a pro-Western Moldova, and Turkey, which needs to keep an eye on all Russian interests near the Black Sea.

Moldova has managed to balance between the West and the East -- but while doing so, the country's political elite has become entangled with its business elite, developing a clan-like ruling class. In time, as the country's economics have worsened, the management style has given way to a zero-sum game pulling in business interests and the pursuit of power. The well-intended actions of the elite, looking to maintain Moldova's neutrality while balancing between the West and the East -- and also pulling the levers of power to build their own fortunes -- have apparently led to the systemic failure of the country. At least it has if we are to consider the last year's political instability, coupled with the near-bankruptcy of the state. Thousands have taken to the streets to protest. While it is true that the pro-Russian factions want to climb through the window of opportunity and regain control of government, the black-and-white image painted by the media, of the pro-Europeans fighting against the pro-Russians, is only part of the story.

This East-West balance has been weighted on the interests of business -- political philosophy has not been a priority. Socialism and liberalism, left-wing and right-wing, tend to have very broad definitions in Moldova, adjusted only by profit rates. While the pursuit of neutrality may be well-intended toward keeping the balance, corrupt practices stemming from business interests that operate as clans are breaking it up. That other balance -- based on "who gives more money" in the short term -- breaks the balance of neutrality and has brought the country's politics to general loss. Russia has had the winning hand during times of economic stability at home, and while as there were different levels of corrupt practices involved in each process, it was easier to get and spend Russian funds than European funds. But as Russia's economy weakened, corruption gained visibility. In the end, the balancing tactics, and the fraud by corruption, used by the governing elite have weakened the state.

Within the blacks and whites of a broader geopolitical struggle, the grays of nuance are provided by the population that is in fact protesting against the corrupt political elite and the poor state of the country's administration. The example of nearby Romania, where the ongoing fight against corruption has shaken off the political elite, has reached the Moldovan public. The influence of the stories of those working abroad -- and who report better conditions in the European Union and even in Russia -- has also grown. All of them want to see order and responsibility from the governing elite.

The protests, and the clash of popular influence against the interests of the elite, seem to create an unstable if not chaotic environment. High political risk no longer characterizes Moldova - uncertainty has replaced it. No calculation is able to issue probabilities and results for short- and medium-term governance. A guess seems just as good. And that is worrying.

All indications are that Moldova is at a turning point -- not only a geopolitical one, but a fundamental one, based on civic choices. The state's institutions seem paralyzed. The protesters, no matter who brought them to the streets of Chisinau, are all calling for the death of old, corrupt Moldovan practices of competing for personal short-term gain while pretending to fight for the country's neutrality. Russia has been most supportive of the formation of a system where politics are transformed into a system that supports a clan-type elite. The West has not been perfect, but has also supported the institutional administrative system where the rule of law matters most. The former system entertains corruption, while the latter fights it. Considering the protesters' constant call against corruption in Chisinau, it seems the civic voice has made its choice between the East and the West.

The march of Chisinau is not an easy one. Governance has to represent the people's choices, and Moldovans want reform. Geography has made of Moldova a strategic country, which means that the veins of external influence are and will always be present. This means reforms are not easy to achieve -- but when politics are turning to the street, for the civic calls of a new shared dream, a new and hopefully better fate becomes possible. It is only possible, however, if the courageous ones take the window of opportunity for transforming the long, enduring march of Moldova into an optimistic -- if not joyful -- march.
As European leaders prepare for a mid-February summit -- just the latest such gathering to seek a solution to the Continent's refugee crisis -- the politics surrounding that crisis are intensifying. Under the aegis of Dutch leadership, the 28 heads of state must somehow compromise in order to save one of the fundaments of the EU: free movement across borders. Failing such a compromise, there is no Plan B.

Europe's attention is fixed for now on Amsterdam, as the Dutch government holds the rotating presidency from January until July 1. Within these six months, the European Union needs to find solutions to several daunting challenges at once. The refugee crisis is at present the number one problem faced by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, EU president Donald Tusk, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Rutte caused a bit of a ruckus in EU leadership circles when he said that the union should resort to what he called a Plan B if the leaders of the member states fail to unite on a compromise. Such a compromise would lead to tightened controls along Europe's southern borders, and an allocation of refugees already in Europe among member states. Rutte said that the European Union has six to eight weeks to agree on a compromise.

To Eastern European member states Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia, any forced allocation of refugees from the Middle East is unacceptable. They refuse to offer shelter to any refugees, and they will not accept orders from Brussels on the matter.

Rutte declined to expand on what a Plan B might entail, but last November Dutch finance minister (and Eurogroup chairman) Jeroen Dijsselbloem hinted at forming a mini-Schengen consisting of The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, and Austria. This would abolish the current 26-state Schengen free movement area, whose 26 members include most of the EU states. (The United Kingdom, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania are not members.)

The treaty that arranges free movement of people within the area is named after the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, where the treaty was signed.

The establishment of a mini-Schengen would mean that these nations would reinstate dormant borders between them and the other EU states, severely limiting the free movement of refugees to the new Schengen countries. It would also effectively mean the end of free movement among a high number of EU nations, removing one of the fundaments of the European Union. Imagine the states of New England uniting to erect fences and border controls to separate them from states outside New England, and you have the idea.

If this is what Rutte meant when he mentioned a Plan B, well, that is not a real plan. Thus far it appears to be a way to exert pressure on those countries that are now opposing a compromise on the refugee issue -- most of them nations that rely on open borders for trade with some of the economically most powerful countries in the EU, among them Germany and the Netherlands. Re-establishing tight border controls would severely hamper trade routes for the economies of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

Thus far the governments of these countries seem unfazed by the Dutch threats.

(AP photo)
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Investors of Nolan Hall and Harbourside Development Corporation demand refund because the condominium project has been stalled for more than 7 years. The condo is expected to be turned over already, yet to date no development is seen on its site.

Canadian Real Estate Magazine reports Carol-Ann Garland, one of the investors of the condominium project of Nolan Hall and Harbourside Development Corporation, came out to express her sentiments. She thought that her decision to invest in 2012 on the said real estate development would make her prudent. Her goal of investing almost $60,000 on 2 units is to have extra income. In her mind, once the condo would be finished, she could have the 2 units rented out, then have a monthly income for her daughter's college tuition.

Report says the condo project began its advertising in 2009. But then the construction has not begun. It is noted that "Kevin Nolan and Robert Hall, who run Nolan Hall and Harbourside Development Corporation, once boasted that these properties were 'a solid investment' and one which would offer security and projected great returns."

CBC News Canada says investors of the condo are already enraged and wanted their deposits back. Based on report, the developer of St. John Condominium refuses to refund the money that the investors had deposited when the company began selling units in 2009.

According to Garland, it didn't make sense that after signing the contract, the company would not honor the agreement, since it's stipulated clearly in the agreement that money should be refunded. "We signed a contract that promised our money back if we wanted out, we want out. Therefore, the money should be forthcoming," Garland said.

Garland had presented several requests to the run Nolan Hall and Harbourside Development Corporation, but then the company has not returned the money she deposited for the 2 units. Since the company remains mum, Garland together with other investors "has started a Facebook page called "Nightmare on Temperance Street" to put pressure on Nolan and Hall."

Aside from the Facebook page, those who participated also threaten the company a legal action. In fact, report says that Kenneth Harvey, one of the investors, "has already launched a lawsuit, naming Kevin Nolan, Robert Hall and their companies as defendants."

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2016 seems to be another bright year for the real estate market in Canada.

According to a previous report in Vancouver Sun, more people are expected to rent or buy properties in the suburban areas. Second, more investors are also expected to come from Asia, Europe and the United States as they take advantage of the lower Canadian Loonie. No one was said to have a decrease in property prices. And according to Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver is still considered "a bright shining star on many levels when it comes to real estate."

In addition, despite the negative effects that the declining oil prices have on Canadian regions dependent on oil production, Vancouver remains a good spot when it comes to real estate. Later this month another group of experts take another look at the things that can be expected to come in 2016.

As Vancouver Sun has also stated about more investments to come huge sales numbers and high prices can still be expected not only from foreign investors but also local, according to Money Sense. Moreover, it was reported that the markets in general can expect to see a slight mortgage rate increase, because of the U.S. Fed rate hike and the low Loonie but it was stated that it would not really be a big burden to the average buyer.

In addition, down payment changes and a few possible rate changes are expected and the market could cool off a bit but influx of sales is still expected to come in March and April, which historically, have been the busiest months when it comes to house buying, thus prices could increase to as much as 10 percent from December's sales prices.

Over all, according to Money Sense, one's personal financial health should first be checked before either buying or selling property.
A city that that will pay you to live there? How does that sound to you? But yes, it's true. There are actually cities in the United States that will pay you just for living there, according to Smart Asset. These cities include Detroit, Michigan, Alaska, Chattanooga, TN, Niagara Falls, NY and Kansas City. But why would they do that, you may ask?

Detroit, Michigan

The City of Detroit wants to encourage new job seekers and businessmen to move in the state. The chosen applicants will be paid to move in. They will work with businesses there while making contacts with the community. This is also to encourage new residents to bring back the life in the city.

Alaska

The whole state in Alaska will pay new residents to live there. The state believes that this is for them investing in the next generation in a hope that they will stay in Alaska for long. To be qualified, one must be a resident of the city for at least a year and has not been convicted of any crime.

Niagara, New York

Niagara hopes to attract younger generation to move in the city. They are offering student loan repayment for new graduates of over $7,000 through its program Live NF. The city aims to advance its downtown area to make it more alluring to the younger population.

Kansas City

In an article by Farrah Gray, Kansas City aims to attract professionals to relocate there. Kansas Department of Commerce Program reported that baby boomers are shrinking. The state offers to pay off student loans as incentive for just moving. They also have tax breaks and more jobs available for new residents. Kansas delights in the fact that their city is a safe place for those residents who are looking for a safe place to raise their families.
More than $33 million properties were sold in an auction in last Sunday.

According to Domain, it was Australia's biggest residential auction. "The Event," held in the Bundall's Gold Coast Turf Club on Sunday by Ray White Surfers Paradise Group's, saw a total of 45 out of 105 properties getting sold on the same day and 18 before the auction, fetching the clearance rate of 60 percent. It was the group's 23rd consecutive mega-auction that was attended by 300 registered bidders and about 2000 spectators.

The sale of an 875sqm redevelopment site at 544 Marine Parade, Biggera Waters was the biggest at $1.2 million followed by a three-story hilltop home at 38 Albany Avenue, Currumbin that got sold for for $1.1 million.

According to Domain, Ray White Surfers Paradise Group chief executive officer Andrew Bell said, "It's the biggest crowd we've had. This year we have 150 more chairs than ever before and there's still lots of people standing at the back." He also said "The Events" reputation helped rake in a record breaking number of bidders and general attendance and it has put the spotlight on Gold Coast's real estate.

"It's the Magic Million's equivalent in real estate," Mr. White said feeling positive about the future of Gold Coast's real estate. He added, "It lifts the profile of the properties and really puts the spotlight on them.

"Stacked up against Sydney and Melbourne, the Gold Coast is very affordable and because we're still coming off a fairly low base there is more room for capital growth."

One of the Melbourne-based couple, Paul and Marie Foster, are very happy that they have won the Chevron Renaissance apartment in Surfers Paradise. Paul believes that they got it at the right price as wife Marie said, "In the last minutes it looked like we weren't going to get it because people kept on bidding."
Foreign investors have pulled away from the U.K. commercial real estate market, the prevalence of low oil prices and unstable stock markets keep investors alarmed, as per a study of property agents.

The demand for U.K. commercial real estate from overseas investors went into a slump in the previous three months of 2015 for two consecutive quarters, as indicated by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. The decline comes as general buyer interest for U.K. estate markets reached its slowest pace in over two years.

Prices of U.K. business properties, like workplaces, shops and warehouse centers-are comprehensively anticipated that would continue ascending because of high demand for only a few number of assets, according to RICS.

Solid demand for commercial properties has pushed up costs in urban areas in a global scale. After the 2008 financial crisis, investors and investment firms consequently considered real estate property to be a gray area for financial stability, while returns looked better compared to bonds and other assets. Investors begin to become more cautious with their real estate property investments.

London, which has pulled in major foreign investors from Asia and the Middle East, has been the center of focus. A year ago, $40.5 billion of commercial real estate were made in London, over 50% of the U.K. total of $72.7 billion, presented by Real Capital Analytics.

RICS chief economist Simon Rubinsohn says, "For the time being, the real estate sector seems largely insulated from the turmoil affecting financial markets."

Despite the decreased number of foreign buyers, strong investor demand, limited supply, and a developing economy will keep on underpinning commercial property values.

The low loan cost environment gives comfort to those areas of the property market where values look stretched and ostensibly more powerless against a material shift in monetary policy.

Markets expect the Bank of England to keep its base rate at 0.5% until no less later 2017.
Greg Barnette/Record Searchlight Workers put finishing touches on the outside of the new Walmart on Tuesday in Red Bluff.

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By David Benda of the Redding Record Searchlight

First conceived more than 10 years ago, the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Red Bluff will open this spring, and the retailer announced Tuesday that it will hire 150 full- and part-time employees.

"We are ready to expand our team with some great individuals that will complement the wonderful work of our existing associates," store manager Robin Collins said in a news release.

Applications are being accepted online at www.walmart.com/careers. Applicants need to select store number 1608.

Wal-Mart will offer a job to any eligible U.S. veteran honorably discharged from active duty as part of its Veterans Welcome Home Commitment, a program it launched Memorial Day 2013. More than 100,000 veterans have been hired at Wal-Mart stores across the country since the program started. Veterans interested can find out more at www.walmartcareerswithamission.com.

Wal-Mart first proposed building the Supercenter in 2003, the same year big-box retailer The Home Depot took out an application to build a store in Red Bluff.

While The Home Depot celebrated its 10th anniversary in Red Bluff in 2015, the proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter was mired in litigation, which led developers to modify original plans from 218,000 square feet to 201,000 square feet.

The Supercenter cleared its last legal hurdle in October 2012 when a court ruling moved construction closer for the Luther Road store. Tehama County Superior Court issued final judgment in favor of the city, lifting the stay on construction.

The City Council first approved the project 3-1 in November 2006.

Four months later, Davis attorney William Kopper sued the city and Wal-Mart on behalf of Citizens for a Healthy Community, contending the project did not meet California Environmental Quality Act standards.

Wal-Mart also operates a Supercenter in Anderson (173,000 square feet) on Rhonda Road and in Redding (220,581 square feet) on Dana Drive. The former opened in 2006, the latter in 2009.

The Supercenter in Red Bluff is near the existing Wal-Mart on Main Street.

Wal-Mart in the news release did not give an opening date for the Red Bluff Supercenter.
This October 26, 2015 photo shows rye rag pasta with sausage, mushrooms and fennel in Concord, N.H. "We cut pasta sheets into elongated haphazard shapes that resemble a small pile of rags when cooked," Travis Lett writes in his cookbook, "Gjelina." (AP Photo/Matthew Mead)

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By CHRISTINE ARMARIO, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP)  Even Travis Lett's beloved BLT wasn't immune to the chef's unwavering support of local and seasonal foods. If the tomatoes had to come from far away, the sandwich had to go away.

And so it is at Gjelina, Lett's Venice, California, hotspot restaurant where even much-loved menu items are sacrificed if even a single ingredient passes out of season. "If I have to bring in a tomato from Chile or something like that, I think I'm better off not using those," said Lett, pausing briefly while baking at the restaurant on a recent morning. "We wait till they're available."

The good news is diners increasingly appreciate he message as well as his method. During the past eight years, the New Jersey native has watched appetites and appreciation for seasonal produce grow. The child of parents who followed a strict vegan, macrobiotic diet said he's encouraged by the demand for organic products. Still, he laments that people will spend $300 on jeans, but balk at spending $5 on a well-made, sustainably produced scone.

"I like jeans, too," Lett said. "I'm not saying you shouldn't buy those. I just find it strange we put this really intense scrutiny on the price of food you're putting in your body, but we'll willingly spend money in other ways."

He recently spoke with AP about his new cookbook, "Gjelina," the farm-to-table movement, and that road trip from Colorado to California he took in a roofless Jeep after finishing art school. (Edited for length and clarity.)

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AP: Where does the name Gjelina come from?

Lett: My partner is from Detroit, although his family is Albanian. Gjelina is his mom's name. That "Gj" spelling is really common in Albania. Naming restaurants is annoyingly arbitrary, like naming a band or anything else. And at the time I remember there was a lot of animal nomenclature, like The Spotted Pig (April Bloomfield's New York City gastropub). There were naming trends at the time and we didn't want to get into any of those. I remember seeing his mom's name on some paperwork. I remember thinking, 'That's beautiful.' It has this ethnic ambiguity to it. It sort of sounds Italian when you say it, but the way it's spelled, it's clearly not. It had this feminine elegance.

AP: You grew up in New Jersey. What drew you to Venice?

Lett: I went to school in Colorado, so that was kind of halfway here. I studied fine art, and I started cooking just as a means of paying for school. There wasn't really an, "I want to be a chef, aha!" moment. By the time I was finished with school I had three or four years of professional culinary experience under my belt and it just made sense for me to keep cooking. I knew I needed to go to a bigger city. I thought, 'Why not take a trip to "LA?" It was my 22nd birthday. I had an old Jeep Wrangler that I drove to LA  without the roof on it, which is actually a terrible idea. Don't ever drive 1,000 miles in a topless jeep. It's miserable. Just for the fun of it, I threw my resume around a little bit, and I actually ended up landing a job. Venice was just instantly the place I gravitated toward.

AP: What did you pick up from cooking three years in a Japanese restaurant?

Lett: There's a clarity to Japanese cooking that was really eye opening to me. There's a singularity to how they treat ingredients. A little less is more. I try and bring that sensibility. This isn't an Asian fusion restaurant, but some of that sensitivity, that clarity I'm looking for.

AP: How do you develop your dishes?

Lett: When I was at the W, I had established a network of farmers I already worked with. At Gjelina, we wanted to push that a little bit more. Instead of just getting peaches and tomatoes and things like that when they were in season, I said, "Well, I'm close to the farmers markets, I don't have these corporate restraints around me, I don't have to buy from any other company at any certain level, let's buy everything there." Everything down to the parsley we finish dishes with. We really are just going off what's available. Building the dishes ground up that way. A lot of the time I'll start with a pile of fennel and say, "Wouldn't that be nice with roasted fish on it?"

AP: Is there anything you cannot get locally?

Lett: No. If I can't get it locally, I just don't use it. In the beginning, we had a BLT on the menu. Fall came around and we took the BLT off the menu. You'd be amazed how hard it was for people to grasp that they couldn't have that sandwich. Well, tomatoes are out of season, and people were like, "Dude, that's my favorite thing on the menu. Can't you get them from somewhere else?" So again, the conversation has changed a lot over the last seven or eight years.

AP: When people think farm-to-table, they often still think something that's more high-end.

Lett: And often it is. The movement's been marred in a way by this. "Oh, it's a luxury for the rich." You go to Whole Foods and drive a Prius and got your yoga mat rolled up. I think that's sort of the archetype the organic movement is moving against. Broadly, it's seen as a luxury for the rich. It's not seen as a necessity for humans, which I believe it to be. So how do you shift that conversation? How do you shift that perception? I certainly can't do it by myself with a restaurant. But it's part of what we're doing.

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RYE RAGS WITH SAUSAGE, MUSHROOM AND FENNEL

"We cut pasta sheets into elongated haphazard shapes that resemble a small pile of rags when cooked," Travis Lett writes in his cookbook, "Gjelina." ''The larger, rye-flavored sheets of dough hold up beautifully to the substantial ragout of mushrooms cooked with sausage and fennel."

Start to finish: 1 hour 15 minutes

Servings: 4

For the rye rags (pasta):

1 cup light or finely ground rye flour

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 eggs, room temperature

Fine sea salt

2 tablespoons water, room temperature

Semolina flour, for dusting

For the sauce:

1 large slice rye bread

1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus 4 tablespoons (or as needed)

1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds

1 clove garlic

8 ounces fennel pork sausage or sweet Italian sausage, removed from the casings

1/2 fennel bulb, finely chopped, plus 2 tablespoons chopped fennel fronds

6 ounces shiitake mushrooms

1/4 cup tomato confit or oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes

Kosher salt

1/2 cup white wine

1 1/2 cups low-sodium, chicken stock

Pinch red pepper flakes

Grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

To make the rye rags, in a medium bowl, sift together the rye flour and bread flour. In a small bowl, gently whisk the eggs, then drizzle them into the flours. With your fingers, mix to form a rough dough. Sprinkle in some salt and continue to mix until you have a shaggy dough. Add the water, 2 teaspoons at a time, adding just until the dough comes together. The flour will absorb the water as you knead, so add as little water as you can and still gather it into a shaggy dough.

On a lightly floured work surface, knead the dough until silky and smooth, about 3 minutes. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for 20 minutes.

Lightly flour the work surface again if it needs it. You need some friction with the work surface, so don't use too much flour, but sprinkle a light dusting if the dough starts to stick. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough about 1/16 inch thick. It's good to roll the dough around the rolling pin and flip it over from time to time so that you roll both sides of the dough from the center out to the edge.

With a knife, cut the dough into irregular-shaped rectangles 3 to 5 inches long. The more random they are, the more beautiful they look in the bowl. Dust the pasta rags with semolina flour, place on a baking sheet, then cover with a kitchen towel while you make the sauce.

To prepare the sauce, heat the oven to 350 F.

Brush the bread with 1 teaspoon of olive oil, then toast in the oven until completely dried, 15 to 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a small, dry skillet over medium, toast the caraway seeds until fragrant, about 3 minutes.

Rub the toasted bread with the garlic clove, then break the bread into pieces with your hands. Transfer to a food processor along with the toasted caraway seeds. Pulse to make small bread crumbs, stopping before they turn to dust. Or smash the bread and caraway seeds with a mortar and pestle. If the crumbs seem very dry, moisten with a bit more oil and set aside.

In a large skillet over medium-high, warm 2 tablespoons of olive oil until hot but not smoking. Add the sausage, breaking it apart with a wooden spoon, and cook until well browned, about 2 minutes. Transfer to a plate, leaving as much of the rendered fat as possible in the pan. Add the fennel bulb and mushrooms, then cook until beginning to brown, 2 to 3 minutes. Add up to another 2 tablespoons of oil to the pan if it begins to look dry.

Add the tomato confit and cook until lightly browned and fragrant, about another minute. Adjust the heat so you are searing and not steaming your ingredients. Season with kosher salt. Add the wine and stock to the pan and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan, until the sauce begins to thicken, about 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the rye rags and cook just until tender, 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the thickness of the pasta and how long they sat before cooking. With a slotted spoon, tongs or a wire-mesh strainer, transfer the pasta to the pan with the sausage and mushrooms. Cook over high heat just until the pasta is well coated with the sauce, 2 to 3 minutes.

If the sauce is too thick, loosen it with a few spoonsful of the pasta cooking water. Toss in the fennel fronds and red pepper flakes. Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the seasoned bread crumbs. Serve immediately, offering the Parmesan at the table.

Nutrition information per serving: 610 calories; 250 calories from fat (41 percent of total calories); 28 g fat (9 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 155 mg cholesterol; 870 mg sodium; 60 g carbohydrate; 7 g fiber; 5 g sugar; 22 g protein.

(Recipe adapted from Travis Lett's "Gjelina," Chronicle, 2015)

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Follow Christine Armario on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cearmario
Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight John Wayne Noonkester, right, is shown Tuesday in Tehama County Superior Court with Redding defense attorney Joe Gazzigli moments after Noonkesters preliminary hearing ended.

SHARE Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight John Wayne Noonkester was closely watched Tuesday at his preliminary hearing in Tehama County Superior Court.

By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

Seven months after their deaths, a Cottonwood man was ordered on Tuesday to stand trial for murder in a July 3 shooting rampage that left his ex-wife and her father dead.

Tehama County Superior Court Judge C. Todd Bottke ordered John Wayne Noonkester, 32, to stand trial for the deaths of his ex-wife, Kimberlee Thomas, 29, and her father, Keith Thomas, 53.

He also was ordered to stand trial on a related attempted murder count, as well as enhancements.

Noonkester is accused of gunning down his ex-wife and her father outside the Little Country Store in Lake California with what was called a "battle rifle."

He remained emotionless as two sheriff's detectives described a grisly crime scene.

Questioned by Tehama County Deputy District Attorney James Waugh and Redding defense attorney Joe Gazzigli, Tehama County sheriff's detectives Charles Chad Dada and Eric Patterson chronicled the moments of the deadly shootings.

Patterson said Noonkester fired at least 10 rounds. Kimberlee Thomas was shot twice, once while she was lying on the ground.

Her father  Noonkester's first victim  was also shot as he was lying on the ground, Dada testified, including one shot to the head.

Sheriff's deputies have said the shooting erupted outside the store after Kimberlee Thomas, who would have turned 30 last week, called 911 to report that her ex-husband and the father of their two young children had punched her father.

Dada, citing eyewitness David Lewis, testified that Noonkester had spat into Keith Thomas' face and had shoved him before shooting him.

Sheriff's officials have said that the 911 call from Kimberlee Thomas was abruptly dropped and that calls came in moments later regarding gunshots.

Citing Lewis, Dada said Kimberlee Thomas called out "dad, dad, dad" after she reportedly saw her mortally wounded father.

Kimberlee Lewis was standing next to Lewis in the store's doorway when she was shot, Dada testified.

In his testimony, Patterson said Noonkester made spontaneous statements to law enforcement after his arrest expressing remorse and disbelief about the shootings.

"I'm not proud of what I did," Patterson quoted Noonkester as saying. "I can't believe I did it. I'm a piece of s---."

Although a possible motive behind the shooting was not raised at the preliminary hearing, electronic court records show that Noonkester had been involved in a dispute with his ex-wife over the custody of their two children after she had filed for divorce earlier that year.

Deputies have said they found Noonkester sitting at a stop sign after the shootings and holding his hands behind his head.

Gazzigli did not call any defense witnesses to the stand.

In addition to murder, Noonkester is charged with attempted murder in the wounding of bystander Anthony Maitias Baugher, then 25, of Cottonwood.

Noonkester potentially faces the death penalty, but Waugh said after Tuesday's hearing that his office has yet to discuss whether it will seek capital punishment.

Noonkester, being held in Tehama County Jail without bail, is due back in court on Feb. 22 for the possible setting of a trial date.

Although it's not known whether Noonkester will actually stand trial or possibly take a plea bargain, Bottke told Gazzigli the court has streamlined its procedures to limit the number of pretrial conferences to three to avoid trial delays.
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By Joe Szydlowski of the Redding Record Searchlight

Tehama County will move forward with plans to rezone many parts of the county, its board of supervisors decided at its meeting Tuesday.

That was one of several items on a packed agenda at the supervisors daylong meeting, which included establishing a 40-bed transitional housing facility and a report on groundwater levels in the county.

The board did not hold a vote but told county staff to move forward with zoning changes for a series of areas county staff said needed to be updated to fit with the countys 6-year-old general plan.

Planning lives or dies by that document, the departments director, Sean Moore, said of the plan.

The updates are required by state law and for some projects to proceed, he said.

While most of the rezoning should go through easily, there are about 80 parcels that may be subject to a state-mandated review of possible environmental impacts, said Arthur Wylene, county counsel.

The supervisors sent the rezoning back to the Planning Commission for final approval.

Wylene said rezoning could increase property values, though it shouldnt have any immediate impact on property taxes.

Changes include rezoning one parcel along Highway 99 so the part that fronts the highway is commercial while the rest remains residential, Supervisor Burt Bundy said. Currently the entire area is zoned for homes.

Supervisors also approved a lease with the Sportsmans Lodge, a motel on Antelope Boulevard, to establish a 40-bed transitional housing facility for recovering addicts and the mentally ill.

The county will pay $40,000 quarterly according to the agenda documents. The money will come from closing the countys two current six-bed facilities.

The facility would take in both men and women, said Richard Muench, director of the countys Probation Department. The exact rules are still being hammered out, but residents would be able to stay for about four months, he said.

But he would be flexible on that, he said. Im a believer of the gray, not the black and white, he said.

Some residents will take care of maintenance and cleaning, preparing them for jobs inhotel service, Muench said.

Residents will be selected by a committee and wont be charged rent, Muench said.

The idea of the transition was to help them with clean, sober living, (and for them to) get a job and move on, he said.

The facility should be open by March, Muench said. It needs little more than a paint job and some security features, such as sensors on the doors.

This really isnt institutional bedding. This is transitional, he said.

Thanks for the work on that, Bundy said.

The lease takes effect Feb. 1.

Supervisors also heard a report on the countys slowly dwindling supply of groundwater from Michelle Dooley, a representative of the Department of Water Resources.

But El Nino is helping.

Weve had rain and rain and some sun and some partly cloudy days, she said. Weve got more rain coming.

Precipitation in the Sacramento Basin since last Oct. 1 is about 110 percent of the average of the previous century.

But groundwater levels in the fall were the lowest since measurements began, she said. The average level of groundwater wells has fallen 40 feet since 2004, she said.

Southern Tehama County has been worst hit, especially near Corning.

The decrease in Glenn County is sort of bleeding out into Tehama County, she said.

She said the drought and an increase in pumping as surface water was increasingly rationed likely drove those drops.

That, and drops in other areas, led the state to establish groundwater sustainability plans and agencies to craft those plans, she said.

The Tehama County Flood Control District has applied to be that agency for its area, Bundy said.

State officials plan to hold at least three meetings across the state on the new regulations, which should be out in February.
Downtown parking rates going up? An update on vacation rental rules

Public Works Director Chuck Aukland said the new rates should go into effect by the first of the year.
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When household budgets are tight, people tend to put off expensive maintenance projects. So a leaky roof gets patched instead of replaced, or paint is left to peel for a season or two or three longer than a homeowner (not to mention the neighbors) would like.

Government agencies do the same thing. And now, after years of putting off less-crucial repairs because of insufficient funding, the National Park Service has an $11.5 billion backlog of deferred maintenance projects _ about four times the departments annual operating budget (and part of a $159 billion overall federal backlog). About half of the parks backlog involves roads and bridges, and the rest covers wastewater treatment plants, buildings, water systems, campgrounds and other facilities.

Thats an astounding amount of work, and while its not as popular with park users as habitat restoration, its crucial for ensuring public safety and the quality of the parks themselves. Fortunately, Congresss recent budget nearly doubles the money _ to $116.3 million _ for projects deemed by the Park Service to be critical for the well-being of visitors and workers, or for environmental restoration.

The new five-year highway transportation bill also includes $1.4 billion for roads and bridges in national parks. While the increased spending is good news for the parks and those who visit them, its far less than whats required to address the need.

Later this year, the National Park Service will celebrate its centennial, which marks more of a bureaucratic benchmark than a true birthday, since Yosemite was designated the worlds first national park in 1872. By early 1916, the nation had 14 national parks, 21 national monuments and two protected reservations at Hot Springs, Ark., as well as the Casa Grande ruins in Arizona. But the parks had no central administration, which led to inconsistent policies; in August of that year, the National Park Service was founded.

Hoping to capitalize on the centennial spotlight, the Obama administration has asked Congress to allocate $900 million more over three years to reduce the parks deferred maintenance backlog, and another $300 million over three years for restoration projects, making energy and water use more efficient and improving outdoor recreation facilities in parks as well as on land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service and other agencies. Neither of those proposals have gained traction with Republicans because they dont include cuts to offset the new spending.

The Park Service also wants Congress to create a new National Park Centennial Challenge Fund which would match private donations for park projects with federal money, including but not limited to deferred maintenance. The concept of a public-private partnership has bipartisan support but, not surprisingly, theres a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon on funding. The administration proposes as much as $100 million over each of three years in matching funds. A Republican counter-proposal would bump the price of a lifetime senior pass from $10 to $80, the same price as a regular annual parks pass, with the new revenue going to the matching fund. Republicans also want to raise money for a new National Park Endowment with a 5 percent lodging fee on park guests. They estimate both fees would bring in as much as $37 million a year, which they argue should be the limit of the governments contribution.

Thats quite a divide. But to leave these maintenance issues unresolved just sets the stage for more expensive fixes down the road. The backlog includes more than $500 million at Yosemite alone, some $100 million of which is considered critical (Californias national parks account for a total of $1.7 billion in deferred maintenance). While nonprofit conservancy groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on restoration, preservation, wildlife management and similar projects in national parks, they generally dont address infrastructure issues.

We hope we arent misplacing our trust in the ability of Republicans and Democrats to compromise on this issue. Even in Washington, the city of eternal discord, there ought to be room for shared vision, and shared commitment, for a national park system that author Wallace Stegner once described as the best idea we ever had.

Los Angeles Times (TNS)
"Aladdin" opened at New York's New Amsterdam Theatre in 2014, scored five Tony Award nominations and continues to play very profitably. It's based on the 1992 animated movie of the same name, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by the late Howard Ashman and Tim Rice. (The late Robin Williams played the Genie.) Casey Nicholaw, who helmed "The Book of Mormon," is the director and choreographer of the musical.
The Pune-based two- and three-wheeler maker will roll out the 150-cc bike, christened 'V', on February 1

Indian naval ship (INS) Vikrant, the first aircraft carrier, which played a pivotal role in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, has made its way into a commuter bike to be launched by Bajaj next month.

The Pune-based, Indias most valued two and three wheeler maker, will launch a 150cc motorcycle on February 1 christened V which is built from metal used in the countrys most celebrated aircraft carrier.

This will be the eight product by Bajaj Auto this financial year and the first in 2016. V is a new brand by the company complementing five of its predecessors in production.

This new bike, which has a slight retro look as seen in the sneak preview aired on Tuesday by Bajaj, is expected to be positioned between the Pulsar and Discover. However, further details including its price would be known at the time of its launch.

The bike will sport a special logo to commemorate the aircraft carrier.

Eric Vas, president (Motorcycle Business), Bajaj Auto said For decades, the INS Vikrant has been celebrated as the pride of our country and is synonymous with Indian military capabilities and power projection. We are proud that Bajaj Auto is playing a role in keeping the legacy of Indias first aircraft carrier alive.

INS Vikrant was commissioned as the first aircraft carrier of Indian Navy in 1961. After years of distinguished service, she was decommissioned in January 1997 and served as a museum till 2012. In late 2014, Vikrant was dismantled and sold as scrap metal.

Bajaj Auto purchased the Vikrant metal and processed it to be a part of its new brand. The new bike will therefore preserve a significant piece of Indian military history, added a Bajaj Auto statement.

For the warship, the name Vikrant was taken from the Sanskrit word Vikr?nta meaning "stepping beyond", i.e. "courageous" or "bold". These qualities also form the essence of our new brand. We are confident that the bike will carry the spirit and legacy of INS Vikrant forward and become one of the most path-breaking motorcycles that customers will witness this year, added Vas.

In 1957 Indian purchased HMS Hercules, an incomplete aircraft carrier from the British Royal Navy and commissioned it in 1961. The carrier saw two wars with Pakistan, 1965 and 1971 where it played a crucial role in isolating Pakistan Naval Ships during the war of independence of Bangladesh.

Vikrant is also the name of Indias first indigenous aircraft carrier being built at the Cochin Shipyard for the Indian Navy at the cost of nearly Rs 20,000 crore (Rs 200 billion).

Image: Workers dismantle parts of the decommissioned Indian Navy Ship INS Vikrant at a ship-breaking yard in Mumbai. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
The INSEAD tops the FT Global MBA Rankings 2016.

Read on to find out which other business schools feature in the list this year.

Leading economic daily Financial Times has released its Global MBA rankings 2016.

The annual ranking features the best full-time MBA programmes in the world.

For the survey, 157 international business schools were considered.

Nearly 9800 alumni from the listed schools were interviewed three years after their graduation.

Among the criteria considered for rankings were weighted salary (20); Salary increase (20); Value for money (3); Career progress (3); Aims achieved (3); Placement success (2); Employed at three months (2); Alumni recommend (2); Female faculty (2); Female students (2); Women on board (1); International faculty (4); International students (4); International board (2); International mobility (6); International course experience (3); Languages (1); Faculty with doctorates (5); PhD graduates (5) and FT research rank (10).

This year, INSEAD, which has branches in France and Singapore, topped the rankings.

It's the first time a one-year MBA has led the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.

This year, the United States of India tops the rankings -- 47 American schools feature in the list. Seventeen schools from the UK and seven from China are part of the top international schools.

The three Indian management schools that have made it to the list have made significant progress since last year.

The IIM Ahmedabad has moved two spots up to the 24th place; Indian School of Business has climbed four steps to be ranked 29th and the IIM Bangalore, has jumped from 82nd last year to 62nd this year.

France's INSEAD has been ranked best for its one-year programme. For a course that has half the tenure, its fees are lower than those of the top three US schools.

INSEAD joins Harvard Business School, London Business School, the Wharton School, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, in the elite club of schools that have reached the number-one spot.

The other four schools occupy the remaining spots in the top five, for their respective two-year programmes.



The year's rankings prove that the one-year MBA is popular worldwide, including among some US business schools.



Created just a decade ago, the one-year, full-time residential PGPX programme from IIM, Ahmedabad, is ranked number one for the career progress of its alumni this year.



Widely regarded as the top business school in India, and ranked 15th in the world in FT's 2015 Masters in Management rankings, IIM-A is also famous for its 100-acre campus and its teaching space designed by American architect Louis Kahn.



The 2016 ranking includes nine new schools, two of which appear for the first time. Renmin University of China School of Business is the best-ranked new entrant, at 43rd. The remaining seven schools had appeared previously but did not make it to the ranking in 2015.



The proportion of women studying at ranked schools is rising.

In 2015, 35 per cent of MBA students were women, compared with 30 per cent in 2005.

Last year, the proportion of female students had topped 40 per cent in 27 schools, a leap from just four a decade ago.

Chinese schools lead the way in this respect, with women accounting for 44 per cent of students overall and 59 per cent at Renmin University of China School of Business.



However, the proportion of female business school faculty remains low overall, at about 27 per cent. Merage School of Business at University of California Irvine is the most gender-balanced, with women accounting for 46 per cent of the faculty.



The average-pay gap between men and women increases from 14 per cent before their MBA to 19 per cent three years after graduation, the FT ranking shows.

Take a look at the top business schools this year:

Click here for the Global MBA rankings 2016 and scores (external link)

Lead image: INSEAD, France
'People ask me when I will do a film that will see me as a serious actress. But to me, this is as serious as doing something else.'

Serious talk with Sunny Leone.

Sunny Leone loves being in a harness and is craving to work in an action film!

But for now, she's busy with her favourite genre: comedy.

The girl of the moment, especially after her controversial interview on The Hot Seat, Sunny isn't worried about what people might say or think about her new film Mastizaade. She claims the film is a walk in the park, compared to Hollywood films like American Pie and Meet The Millers.

Sunny chats with Jahnavi Patel/Rediff.com.

Image: Sunny Leone in Mastizaade

How has your Mastizaade experience been?

It is one of the most fun movies I've ever shot because it's a comedy. When you're doing comedy, there are no serious days. It's all about having fun and joking all day long.

Why did you take up this project?

When Rangita (Nandy, producer) and Milap (Zaveri, director) met my husband Daniel, they gave him a few scenes and narrated the story a bit. Daniel called me and said I *had* to hear the story. It was the first time that Daniel was so excited about a story!

Milap told me the first half of the movie and I thought it was so funny. When I do such movies, I don't think log kya sochenge (what people will think?). These things do not even cross my mind because I have grown up watching movies like American Pie and Meet The Millers. This movie is a walk in the park compared to those.

After Ragini MMS 2, I thought it would be nice to be in a comedy.

Is the second half of the film just as interesting as the first?

The second half is more for the women than the guys.

When you see Meet The Fockers or Wedding Crashers, they have the family games -- the mother is crazy, the father is crazy, the brother and sister are crazy and that's what makes it fun to watch. So I, as somebody who is watching the movie, liked all the characters they had created.

The first half is so funny, it's outrageous! The situations that the boys go through are hilarious.

But in the second half, you meet the family and it's even crazier but in a different way.

Image: Sunny Leone in Mastizaade

You have a double role in the film. Which character do you like moreL Lily or Laila?

Lily. She's closer to my personality than Laila is.

Laila has been created for the world and that's how people see me.

When Milap was telling me the story, I liked Lily more than Laila and that's when he came up with the idea of a double role.

It worked for me because now, people would get to see what they want to see and they would also get to see this other person, who is sort of me. Both the characters are opposite to each other, and it will be interesting to see which character the audience would like more.

How difficult was it transforming from Lily to Laila?

Lily is goofy, crazy and funny. She makes faces and she is completely the opposite of her sister Laila, who is always sexy and provocative.

I found it more difficult to become Laila.

Rangita and Milap would tell me all the time, 'Okay, Sunny, now you are Laila. Remember sexy.'

I always had this switch in my head.

Your craziest moment in the film?

I can tell you my favourite scene because everybody has seen the 'crazy' in the trailer and songs.

My favorite moment is when Laila has this nightmare and when she wakes up, she tells her sister, 'Ab mujhe woh karna hoga jo maine kabhi kiya nahi'.

The next morning you see her covered from head to toe in sari, performing a puja. And they have remade Baby Doll with Main Laila hoon. It's the same tune but with different words.

It's one of my favourite scenes and you don't see it in the trailer or any of the songs. I am dying for people to see that.

Image: Sunny Leone in Mastizaade

Milap said that shooting the climax scene was most difficult. Was it difficult for you too?

The scene has two Sunnys, so we had to shoot it, and then freeze. Everybody had to wait because I had to go and change into the other character. And that took a lot of time.

That happened during the songs too. For instance, in the Rom rom romantic song, I had to walk out of the pool while doing the steps, and then everyone had to wait while I changed into the other character.

So every time the scene had two Sunnys, the whole set would stop moving and the camera would stay still. I would go, change and come back again. Also, the outfits were very elaborate.

Because of Rangita and Milap, changing from one character to the other wasn't taxing on me. I love the idea of becoming something totally different. The fun part about making movies is that I can somebody else; I can be a fictional character who comes to life. Milap and the entire team made sure that if I was Laila in the morning, we would finish the Laila scenes then, and later do the Lily scenes.

So I did not have to go back and forth too much.

Would you like to be a part of any biopic?

I haven't been offered, you know, to be somebody. These stories of girls who come in the industry and what happens to them, that's not interesting to me at all; but I get such scripts all the time.

You come from nothing, then you become an actress, then you become larger-than-life and then you fall and then you commit suicide. It's the same story over and over again.

Photograph: Sunny Leone/Instagram

Do you fear being typecast?

If I'm going to be typecast, there's nothing I can do about it. So I'm okay with that. It doesn't bother me.

My job is to do the movies that I like.

My next two films are not in the same zone as this one. People ask me when I will do a film that will see me as a serious actress.

But to me, this is as serious as doing something else.

Would you like to do an action or a thriller movie?

Of course, I love action!

Anybody who has worked with me knows I love being in a harness. I love jumping around. I get hurt; I am very clumsy, but as long as something is not broken, I keep moving. So yes, if I get a chance to do an action or a thriller, I'd love to do it.

I love movies in general. I like lots of kinds of movies but my favourite genre is comedy.

Will we see you direct a movie in the future?

I don't think so. I think to be a good director, you have to do so many things.

I would rather be a producer than a director.

Photograph: Sunny Leone/Instagram

There were reports that you would like to play a mother in a film.

Sure, why not? I'm actually playing a mother in one of the movies that I am making.

I love children but I don't think I'll be getting pregnant anytime soon. There's so much going on now, it would be wise not to get pregnant.

What is happening with your films, Tina and Lolo and One Night Stand?

I am not sure about Tina and Lolo because Karishma (Tanna) is really busy and so am I.

One Night Stand will probably release next.
'If the Congress allows Arunachal Pradesh to slip out of its control, then it sends negative signals to its leaders and allies across the country,' says Rajeev Sharma.

IMAGE: Then chief minister Nabam Tuki's supporters block the highway at Papu Nallah in Naharlagun, Itanagar. Photograph: PTI

Finally, President's rule has been imposed on Arunachal Pradesh, a sensitive state which borders China. It is a decision which impacts three stakeholders: President Pranab Mukherjee, the Modi government and the Congress party.

First of all, there is the President himself and Pranab Mukherjee is an important stakeholder in the entire drama.

Last, but not the least, there is the main Opposition party, the Congress, which is the most affected party as it had been ruling Arunachal Pradesh before the current conundrum started.

1. President Pranab Mukherjee

The President had done his bit when he asked Home Minister Rajnath Singh to explain the reasons for imposing President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh. He must be acutely aware that the matter is before the Constitution Bench in the apex court which is going to hear the case in the next few days and may well quash the Cabinet decision of imposing President's rule in the state.

Yet, President Mukherjee has played ball with the Modi government and cooperated. It may well be a subtle political tactic!

It will have to be seen how the Supreme Court decides the issue. If the apex court upturns the Cabinet's decision the President's initial doubts would have been redressed.

After all, it is rare that the President questions the government and whenever he does there is fair reason for doing so. The President speaks in measured tones within the parameters delineated by the Constitution.

2. Modi government's stakes

Clearly, the Modi government is not unmindful of all the controversies and the legal and Constitutional stakes. It is also not unaware of the fact that its executive decisions may well be reversed by the Supreme Court. And yet it has taken this call!

Obviously, the BJP's gamble is a political one. The erstwhile Arunachal chief minister Nabam Tuki of the Congress initiated the political drama by his sheer incompetence as he allowed dissension within his party and the government to reach such a stage that the BJP saw a major political opportunity of forming its government in the state.

The Congress rebels and the number of BJP legislators in the assembly were found to be just enough to upstage the Congress government and form a BJP government in India's Land of the Rising Sun.

The Congress party has been projecting the Arunachal Pradesh goings on as yet another act of intolerance by the BJP-RSS, charging the duo of upstaging all non-BJP governments in the North-East.

This is big fish versus small fish kind of politics! After all, it is only the fittest who can survive!

3. The Congress party

The Congress, the principal Opposition party without an official tag, has cried itself hoarse over the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

It has challenged the Modi government's decision of imposing President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh in the Supreme Court and mobilized like-minded non-BJP parties for support.

Clearly, it is a high stakes gamble for the 130-year-old party. If it allows Arunachal Pradesh to slip out of its control, then it sends negative signals to its leaders and allies across the country. This is something it can ill afford. That is why it has taken the Arunachal battle to all possible theatres and left no stone unturned.

The only hope for the Congress party is the Supreme Court and how the apex court deliberates on the issue. If it wins its case in the Supreme Court, it will be a vital face saver for the party.

But if it were to lose its case in the apex court, the Modi-led BJP would be emboldened.

In either case, the Supreme Court's verdict on the matter will be of huge national importance.

Rajeev Sharma is an independent journalist who tweets @Kishkindha
Mudslinging and verbal attacks will definitely surge once the poll dates are announced, but as with any state, there are some crucial issues which will play a significant role in influencing voters in Assam too, says Devanik Saha.

With two successive defeats in Delhi and Bihar, Assam is an extremely crucial election for the Bharatiya Janata Party, as this is the only election in 2016 where it stands a good chance of winning.

Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a rally at Kokrajhar at which he attacked the Congress for not fulfilling their promises for Assam. He said, None of the promises made to the people of Assam for 12-13 years have been fulfilled. It has become a fashion not to give account of your own work but blame others.

Mudslinging and verbal attacks will definitely surge once the poll dates are announced, but as with any state, there are some crucial issues which will play a significant role in influencing voters in Assam too.

Here are five key factors which hold the most potential to swing the elections either way:

Scheduled Tribe status: There is a proposal by the Centre to grant ST status to six communities in Assam, which is expected to boost their support in the state. The six communities are -- Moran, Muttock, Tai Ahom, Koch Rajbongshi, Sootea and Tea tribes. Interestingly, this move is a demand which has been supported by the United Liberation Front of Assam but has been opposed by tribal bodies across the state, according to reports by local newspapers. Given the BJPs desperation to win the elections, it is certain that it will go ahead with the proposal, but it will definitely dominate the election agenda in the coming months.

September 7 Refugees Notification: On September 7, 2015, the central government issued a notification under the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, and Foreigners Act, 1946, which stated that all Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who entered India on or before December 31, 2014, and who do not have proper documents or expired visas, can stay in India. The notification triggered huge protests from student and ethnic Assamese groups. As one may be aware, illegal immigration is the biggest challenge Assam has faced in the past few decades, and has led to political mayhem and chaos. This notification actually contradicts Modis promise of stopping illegal immigration and solving the issue.

Implementation of Assam Accord: The Assam Accord, which was signed between the Rajiv Gandhi government and the All Assam Students Union post the six-year old Assam agitation in 1985, is a crucial factor. More than 30 years have passed but the accords clauses have not been implemented. During Modis recent visit to Assam, the All Assam Students Union voiced their demand for the implementation of the clauses such as an effective border mechanism, stopping infiltration of illegal immigrants, due maintenance of birth and death registers, among others.

Pre-poll alliances: Given the spectacular success of the Mahagathbandhan alliance in Bihar, every party seems to be inspired. The BJP has announced that it will fight the elections in alliance with the Bodoland People Front and Asom Gana Parishad. However, if the All India United Democratic Front, which has a significant command over the Muslim votes, more so over the years due to the increase in Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, decides to support the Congress, the equation will be more favourable to the Congress-AIUDF coalition.

So far Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has maintained that the party will go it alone, but there is still some time left and he may well reconsider things.

BJPs chief ministerial candidate: The Congress has announced that Tarun Gogoi will remain its CM candidate. The BJPs strategy of over-reliance on Modi and not choosing a chief ministerial candidate backfired in the last two elections, therefore, it is expected that it will not commit the same mistake in Assam.

Currently, there are two probables: Sarbhananda Sonowal, a former AGP leader who joined the BJP in 2011 and won the 2014 Lok Sabha from Lakhimpur. Recently, he was made the Assam BJP Chief and given responsibilities to handle the campaign; then there is Himanta Biswa Sarma, Gogoi's key aide in the Congress who switched over to the BJP last year. It is definite that he will stake his claim to the CM's post as he is a known face and has a strong understanding of Assam politics.

Given the two strong contenders, choosing one over the another before the elections is bound to create dissent in the opposite camp. BJP president Amit Shah has to handle this carefully and ensure that this doesnt lead to infighting and dissent in the state unit.

Much then depends on the BJPs chief ministerial candidate as that will ensure whether Tarun Gogoi has a major challenge on his hands or not.

Image: BJP supporters in Assam celebrate their's party's good showing in a municipal poll. Photograph: PTI Photo.
'If chutzpah nationalists brought the Babri Masjid down, chutzpah secularists did precious little to stop it from being torn down.'

'If chutzpah nationalists ensured carnage in Gujarat, chutzpah secularists allowed Muzaffarnagar to become their next hunting ground.'

'Chutzpah secularists readily banned SIMI, but dragged their feet when it came to banning the Bajrang Dal.'

The Indian Muslim is caught between the chutzpah nationalists and the chutzpah secularists, says Shehzad Poonawalla.

IMAGE: Muslim girls stage a protest against ISIS in Mumbra, outside Mumbai, on January 25, 2016. Photograph: PTI Photo.

Vishal Bharadwaj's award-winning Haider, that was set in insurgency-hit Kashmir of 1995, saw actor Shahid Kapoor produce his best performance to date, as the protagonist who returns to the Valley at the peak of conflict in the militancy-ravaged state, to seek answers about his father Dr Hilal Meer's disappearance.

Haider, a visibly deranged poet played by Kapoor, in a most poignant and satirical four-minute solo dramatisation of the atrocities perpetrated on Kashmiris, elaborates in a riveting scene the meaning of 'chutzpah' -- a Hebrew word that in his opinion, best described the brazen effrontery and audacity with which the Indian State and armed forces treated the people of Kashmir.

Haider gives an example in that scene to explain just what 'chutzpah' meant -- of a bank robber with a gun holding up a cashier to steal all the money in the bank and then, without an ounce of remorse, guilt, regret or sense of personal responsibility, walking across to the next counter and asking another bank official for an account opening form, pretending or, worse yet, actually believing he had a legitimate right to open a bank account after committing a daylight robbery at that very same bank!

While impotently sympathising as much as I can with the plight of the Kashmiris as portrayed in Haider, I certainly cannot claim to have any credible independent commentary on their plight, given the lack of any first-hand experience and the over-reliance I have on my second-hand knowledge about the Valley and its issues.

But when it comes to the multi-faceted discrimination faced by Indian Muslims in general, being an active observer of it, an unfortunate recipient of its intended and unintended consequences, and a tireless, legal crusader against its manifestations, I certainly say this with all the authority at my command, that just like the average Kashmiri often feels trapped between India and Pakistan, the average Indian Muslim, as the protagonist of this piece, Haider from Uttar Pradesh, also feels caught between 'chutzpah nationalism' and 'chutzpah secularism', much like the proverbial sailor whose nautical misery landed him between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Here is how Haider from UP would explain what he means by the terms he has coined.

Chutzpah nationalism -- the devil

Haider from UP lives in fear of the Hindutva brigade -- the chutzpah nationalists. His relatives in Gujarat have been consigned by them to the saffron flames of a communal fire that burnt huge holes into the secular fabric of India. Justice, promised on paper, remained on paper. Injustice was done and seen to be done.

Puppy dogs accidentally run over by the wheels of a fast-moving 'rath' had a greater claim to an apology, but not those who were raped, murdered and butchered in Gandhi's own land.

The chutzpah nationalists never fought as freedom fighters to liberate this country from the British. There was evidence that they served British interests instead. They refused to recognise the tricolour for decades and they advocated the two-nation theory.

Yet, post-1947 they transformed themselves into the sole custodians of nationalism -- a religious, xenophobic and parochial kind of nationalism and not some broader idea of civic nationalism that truly elevates and transforms majoritarian chauvinism into a meaningful democracy.

With a history so depleted and bankrupt, these chutzpah nationalists co-opt as their own, heroes of the past -- Sardar Patel, Netaji Bose and Dr Ambedkar -- the very figures they once abused and faced stiff opposition from. They often attempt to rewrite history, very often at the peril of ignoring the lessons of the past.

Haider is acutely conscious of the loyalty test these chutzpah nationalists force him to take each day. He knows the first two verses of Vande Mataram though he fails to understand why singing Jana Gana Mana is not enough.

Co-opting the cow, they have turned him into a sacrificial lamb who can be slaughtered with the sharp knives of 'beef politics.'

He wonders why claiming to build the Ram Mandir is patriotic even as the Ayodhya dispute is sub judice, but expressing disgust about the illegal demolition of the Babri Masjid is anti-national.

Having revenge drool down one's lips each time a Yakub is hanged is civilised, but questioning why not a single perpetrator of the 1992-1993 Bombay riots has been convicted reveals one's perverted mindset.

Haider over-compensates for his Muslim identity by his expressive hatred for all things Pakistan, but frankly all he wants is peace between the two nations.

He plays the perfect, defensive, apologist for his religion each time criminals, sometimes disguised as ISIS and at other times as Al Qaeda, choose to carry out mindless terror attacks in its name, though he doesn't really get the logic of why the majority 99.99% non-violent, peaceful practitioners of the world's second largest faith don't have the legitimacy and claim over Islam that its misguided minority has, putting the guilt-ridden onus and spotlight on billions for denouncing the actions of a handful 0.01% as 'UnIslamic.'

He doesn't understand how terrorism becomes Islamic/Islamist if imperialism and the Holocaust weren't Christian.

He is frustrated at the claims of his heart being in Pakistan even though his forefathers chose to keep their mind, body and soul in India in 1947. He remains at the bottom of every socio-economic and socio-political index, but he bears the brunt of being the most appeased.

He is told to be apologetic for the invasion and alleged atrocities of the 'Mughal rulers', notwithstanding the antiquity and authenticity of the claims of victimisation, yet when he demands an apology for the atrocities of 2002 or 2013, he is asked to not play victim but to 'move on.'

Chutzpah secularism -- the deep blue sea

Haider remains at the mercy of the chutzpah secularists. They have given him rights under a secular Constitution, but they have taken away the means to enforce those rights.

They have never really questioned his right to live in India, but are probably guilty of doing everything that makes it unliveable for him in India.

They have issued him blank cheques of safety, prosperity and security, but each time he has tried to encash those cheques from the vaults of our democracy, they have been returned marked 'inadequate funds.'

Over six decades of being a democratic Republic committed to equal opportunity, the chutzpah secularists happily accepted his votes, but not his leadership.

Haider from UP could elect the prime minister of India, but never dream to be one. His community's 14% vote share must be invested into the secular cause, but the payout could never translate into 14% of electoral representation for him, whether in the Lok Sabha or the state assemblies.

The chutzpah secularists haven't felt it important, even for the mere sake of keeping alive this sorry charade of secularism, that not a state other than the Muslim majority one of Jammu Kashmir has a Muslim chief minister since 1982.

A mere 2.5% share in the civil services, a paltry 3% share in a million strong army and a dismal 4.3% share in the higher judiciary of India for Haider's community that finds itself over-represented in only one category -- as prisoners in Indian jails where their share is a healthy 26.4%!

Low employment in the organised sector, lower odds than Dalits in getting a job, highest school dropout levels, lowest presence of schools and hospitals in Muslim concentrated areas that anyway lack civic infrastructure coupled with one of the lowest per capita incomes and consumption levels make Haider and his co-religionists perfect candidates for affirmative action and reservation, but the chutzpah secularists are so weary of the chutzpah nationalists' propaganda, that they actually buy into this 'appeasement of Muslims argument' and pay mere lip service to a legitimate demand.

If the police force under chutzpah nationalists organised fake encounters, under the chutzpah secularists they arrested innocent folks on terror charges, kept them incarcerated for years or killed them in police custody.

In both cases, Haider from UP suffered.

If chutzpah nationalists brought the Babri Masjid down, chutzpah secularists did precious little to stop it from being torn down.

If chutzpah nationalists ensured carnage in Gujarat, chutzpah secularists allowed Muzaffarnagar to become their next hunting ground.

Chutzpah secularists readily banned SIMI, but dragged their feet when it came to banning the Bajrang Dal.

Just like chutzpah nationalism is not real nationalism, but brazen audacity of appearing to be nationalistic, chutzpah secularism is far from Constitutional secularism that was promised to Haider.

It is only the illusion of secularism. It is the half-hearted implementation of the promises made to Haider's forefathers by Gandhi and Nehru in 1947.

Today, between the false choices of two undesirable situations -- situations Haider from UP can neither change nor avoid -- he remains a helpless prisoner of circumstance. On the one hand is the devil and on the other, the deep blue sea.

The only option to break free from the cycle of victimisation by chutzpah nationalists and exploitation by chutzpah secularists lies in genuine empowerment -- political, educational, economic and social, in that order. Organised political power can be the only panacea for millions of Muslims across India.

The time has come for Haider from UP to call out the chutzpah of his own bank robbers.

Shehzad Poonawalla is a lawyer-activist and founder-member of the governing body of the think-tank PolicySamvad.
'India is a major target for ISIS and Al Qaeda because it has a very large Muslim Diaspora, regular conflicts with a Muslim country and experiences violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims on a regular basis.'

'This provides for a very stable breeding ground for jihadist radicalisation and recruitment.'

IMAGE: A screen grab from an ISIS recruitment video.

In early 2015, New Zealand -- located thousands of miles and two oceans away from the Syria-Iraq battlegrounds, with a negligible Muslim population of less than 1 percent -- had 6 fighters enlisted with Islamic State or Da'esh, which had till mid-2015 recruited 25,000 people from over 100 countries.

In spite of ISIS's ferocious social media presence, partly responsible for successful enlistments -- its affiliates posted 129,600 tweets in 2014 alone, before some 500 accounts were deactivated -- till late 2015, ISIS had lured and converted only some 17 Indians to its cause, according to United Nations and the US National Counterterrorism Centre statistics.

Experts have suggested that young Indians have been immune to a certain type of radicalisation that makes the ISIS cause attractive because they do not cope with the feelings of alienation that young Muslims elsewhere face.

Daniel Koehler, director, German Institute of Radicalisation and De-radicalisation Studies, Berlin, has devoted his career to understanding terrorism, radicalisation, and de-radicalisation.

In the wake of last week's arrests of ISIS synmpathisers all over India, Koehler discussed ISIS-inspired radicalisation with Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com

What is the Indian situation vis-a-vis ISIS?

India is one major target for ISIS and Al Qaeda because the country has a very large Muslim Diaspora, regular conflicts with a Muslim country (Pakistan) and experiences violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims on a regular basis.

This provides for a very stable breeding ground for jihadist radicalisation and recruitment.

Does India figure in any ISIS plan in a larger and more sinister manner?Is there something the Indian national security establishment needs to be worried about?



Right now, I would say that the biggest problem for India, with regard to ISIS, is the threat of recruitment to join the jihad in Syria and Iraq and the returnees.

The bigger threat currently could come from Al Qaeda, which has proclaimed the 'caliphate' in Myanmar, Bangladesh and parts of India. The competition between the two groups forces Al Qaeda to be more aggressive and commit terrorist acts.

On the other hand, ISIS has shown a great deal of attraction for the Taliban in Pakistan and other violent networks already present.

India lies right at the centre of two jihadist terrorist groups fighting each other for power.

What are the best strategies available to fight the threat of ISIS in a calm, non-kneejerk, manner?

A comprehensive strategy of early prevention, targeted repression and intervention (deradicalisation), which involves government and non-governmental actors.

It is important to counter the jihadist ideology and not support it indirectly through standalone security crackdowns etc.

India so far has no sophisticated deradicalisation programme, which is essential in this regard. Working with families is another tool to detect early radicalization and prevent it from going further.

There have been some cases of young Muslims getting radicalised in India, but at the moment it does not seem a large-scale threat. How can one prevent it from becoming a threat?

There needs to be a prevention network trained and designed to spot radicalisation and to develop individually tailored counselling strategies. This needs time, resources and specialised expert training.

In the long run, India will face more threats and should start building something now before it is too late.

IMAGE: A Muslim boy at a rally organised by a Muslim charitable trust in Mumbai. Photograph: Shailesh Andrade/Reuters

Are there important reasons why young Europeans get radicalised that may not be the case for young Muslims in India?

No, I do not think that there are essential differences. The reasons why ISIS is appealing are basically the same in India as elsewhere.



In India the incidents of terrorism sponsored by Islamic radicals has lead to another kind of radicalisation -- that of some Hindus getting 'radicalised' to fight Islamic radicals-sponsored terrorism.

Would you be aware of that? Could that kind of radicalisation also grow in India?

We have seen this kind of reciprocal radicalisation in Western countries as well. It is almost a natural reaction against the perceived threat from jihadists, but only plays in their hands really.

That would be another threat for India which will most likely grow.

IMAGE: Pro-Islamic State Twitter account handler Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who was arrested in Bengaluru in December 2014.

What factors account for the threat of radicalisation in a society?

Radicalisation has many different reasons and causes. There is no single profile of (the) list of risk factors that would explain every case of radicalisation.

It is important to know that it always takes two types of factors for every individual: Positive and negative aspects.

Negative are any kind of frustration, like bullying in school, fights in the family, racism, no job etc.

Positive are, for example, quest for justice, honour, freedom, significance, to live up to your ideals.

Both are bound together through radical ideology. The individual mixture is always different. There are no general societal aspects which favour radicalisation. It can happen with anyone.

Are there parallels of this phenomenon in other times?

Is going to Syria to fight sort of as attractive and daring as Woodstock, rock and roll and drugs was to '60s youngsters or the rise of Communism in Russia in 1917 or the Prague Spring or the Arab Spring?

Or is it a phenomenon worse or far stranger than young angst being acted out?

In terms of numbers -- how many foreign fighters have gone to Syria -- it is worse than any civil war conflict we have seen so far.

The issue of mobilisation around a political or religious cause is, of course, nothing new at all, like terrorism as such is not.

It goes back to ancient times, for example, with the Sicarii in Rome-occupied Palestine or the sect of the Assassins.

Any larger youth counterculture displays similar elements, but the turn to violence can only be understood through the specifics of the respective ideology.



To me, it seems that the physical isolation of youngsters caused by the Internet-social media age has something to do with it?

Could that be so? And hence the more unique 2012-2015 concept of radicalisation?

No, I do not think so.

The Internet is not isolating youngsters at all. It liberates them. I have done research on the role of the Internet on radicalisation and think that the virtual community feels as real and important to these kids as the offline world.

Think about it: They play games together, chat, Skype, talk about everything, watch movies together etc.

In this way a kid in some small village with no radical group can become an active member of a global movement.



There is a case of a young woman, from a well to do family, who was radicalized in a city near Mumbai.

The authorities, her family and her religious community is working on de-radicalising her. What are the best strategies for de-radicalising a youngster? And the best strategies for her parents?

There are, of course, different strategies and I would need more information.

But it generally is about identifying the causes and motivations for her radicalisation and addressing all of them in a non-coercive way with intervention providers that are most trustworthy.

Common mistakes are usually to apply force through police etc, which enforces the radicalisation process. Parents need specialised counsellors who are trained to understand the role of the family.

IMAGE: Foreign ISIS fighters in Syria in 2014. Photograph: Reuters

Why did no one initially believe that young Western, white, youngsters from Christian backgrounds could not be radicalised in this manner?

I think they knew it could happen potentially, but they underestimated the sophistication of groups like ISIS. They are simply better in recruiting and producing propaganda than any other terrorist organisation in history.



In the European/Western context, does family background have a role to play, with ISIS recruits coming from disjointed/dysfunctional family setups?

No. I have worked with almost 200 families in the last five years and they were all extremely different and came from all possible backgrounds.

Radicalisation can potentially happen with any background.

Given that the family as a unit is still holding up in India and Asia, perhaps those societies are better placed to face the risk of radicalisation.

That would mean only that family counselling can be more effective in India and Asia, not that they are immune against radicalisation.

It is dangerous to think that simply because a family sticks together they can successfully fight off radicalisation.

Parents are usually completely unprepared against a sophisticated organisation like ISIS.
Image: A visitor looks at a picture of Subhas Chandra Bose at a museum in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

'The non-violent movement would not have brought freedom to the country, that had to be an armed struggle.'

Chandra Kumar Bose is Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grand nephew.

After the Narendra Modi government declassified 100 files on Netaji, C K Bose joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, raising eyebrows why a descendant of Netaji, who was once a president of the Indian National Congress, would join a party that is opposed to the Congress.

C K Bose (seen, below left, with BJP President Amit Shah) spoke to Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com about why he had joined the BJP and the controversies swirling around the declassification of the Netaji files.

Why did you join the BJP?

Subhas Chandra Bose was one of the first nationalists of India. I can say the BJP is a nationalist party. Joining a party obviously cannot be for one or two reasons, it has to be for multiple reasons.

They (the BJP) believe in nationalism and they are the first transparent government in Independent India.

January 23, when they declassified Netaji's files, was a historic day. It was Netaji's 119th birth anniversary. The NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government started the process of declassification of the files.

Previous governments, mainly of the Congress, for almost 60 years never bothered to release the true story of the INA (Indian National Army and Netaji.

In fact, they worked tirelessly to suppress the true history of India's freedom movement. For the first time the NDA government has reversed the trend.

Earlier governments were governments of suppression and of defeat. The Congress government successfully distorted the entire history of the Indian freedom movement, which started from the 1857 sepoy uprising.

You will not find any mention of Bhagat Singh, Khudiram Bose, Mangal Pandey and even Bal Gangadhar Tilak. All contributions made by these national icons have been obliterated by the Congress party.

But we read about these freedom fighters in our history textbooks.

Just a mention, their contribution has not been properly presented in history textbooks. If you read carefully, the INA and Netaji's representation in history textbooks is only half a page.

Everybody contributed towards the freedom movement, but the final nail in the coffin was because of the INA and Netaji and the subsequent INA trial which was held at the Red Fort in 1946, which completely destroyed the loyalty and allegiance of the British (Indian) armed forces.

This is exactly why the British had to relinquish India, and these are not my words, but that of Lord Clement Atlee who was the prime minister of Great Britain during that time.

In 1956, Lord Atlee had come to Calcutta and he was residing with Dr P B Chakravarty, who was also chief justice of the Calcutta high court. Justice Chakravarty asked Lord Atlee why they (the British) left India after winning the Second World War.

Atlee said the British had to leave because (there were doubts about) the loyalty and allegiance of British Indian forces, that there may be a revolt within the British Indian Army. So they had to vacate India.

This truth is nowhere mentioned in any of the textbooks of the Government of India or the National Book Trust. Nothing is there.

So you don't think Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru got us freedom from the British, that the INA got us freedom.

Well, that is what Atlee said and this was corroborated by (the last British viceroy) Lord (Louis) Mountbatten when my father met him in 1976 in England. He said exactly the same thing. I am not trying to run down or play down anybody.

Definitely Mahatma Gandhi had a role. His role was (organising) a mass awareness programme. The people of the nation were not even aware we need freedom.

Gandhiji made people aware that we need to be free, but the non-violent movement under no circumstances would have brought freedom to the country, that had to be an armed struggle.

In the history textbooks it is written violent struggle. That is wrong. What do you mean by violent struggle? It is an armed struggle. That is the word.

Armed struggle was the final nail in the coffin and that was the final onslaught which drove the British out of India.

What has the country achieved since the secret files on Netaji were declassified? Do we know how Netaji died?

The issue is not about his death. The issue is about his life and dying after August 18, 1945. That is what we want to unravel.

About 100 files have come out from the 1,000 files which were classified. We have to wait and watch. But there are crucial links that have come out of these files.

One is the 1962 letter written by Nehru to Suresh Chandra Bose, Netaji's elder brother, who was a member of the Shahnawaz Committee (investigating Netaji's death).

Here, Nehru clearly states that, 'Yes, there is no conclusive evidence to establish Netaji's death in a plane crash. There is only circumstantial evidence.'

So even Nehru never believed in the air crash (theory) although in Parliament he stated that Bose died in an air crash.

There seems to be lot of inconsistencies in the plane crash theory. In fact, there is more evidence to debunk it.

Do you think Nehru was insecure because he felt had Netaji returned to India he may have become prime minister?

His action indicates that. I don't want to make a statement on that. His action indicates that he was nervous because he kept surveillance on Netaji's entire family.

Family members of Netaji were not in public life and they were no threat to Nehru and his government. He was obviously trying to track Bose.

He knew he (Bose) was alive, but did not know his exact location. He was under the impression that Bose would get in touch with his family if he wanted to come back to India.

If Netaji was alive, why was he in hiding?

How do you know he was in hiding? The theories that are doing the rounds have not established conclusively that any of the theories are correct. That is why declassification. That is why the entire movement for declassification. Let us now wait and watch.

The NDA government is trying to get to the bottom of this mystery. The earlier governments were trying to suppress and mislead the people.

How will you make a difference to the BJP's prospects in West Bengal?

I have joined public life to make my contribution. It would be unfair if hailing from Netaji's family I don't contribute something to the nation.

I thought the BJP is the right party to join. It is a nationalist party. It is trying to bring out the truth of what happened to Bose. It is an inclusive party.

The ideals of the BJP are based on Swami Vivekananda, Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee. This is the best party to join.

Coming to power in West Bengal, it is an election procedure. You see, we have to highlight what we can offer the people of West Bengal and that process is on.

People have seen 34 years of misrule of the Left Front, they have seen the last five years of the Mamata Banerjee government. It is time they give the BJP a chance.

You spoke of the BJP being inclusive, but people talk about growing intolerance under the Narendra Modi regime. What do you have to say about it?

A national party like the BJP has all kinds of people. The central issue is to take everybody forward and be inclusive, maintain communal harmony, tolerance, which was primary to Bose's ideology.

Now the BJP has accepted Netaji's ideology as part of its ideology. I am sure tolerance and harmony would be the top priority on the BJP's agenda now.
Inderjit Singh Reyat, the lone person convicted for the 1985 Air India Kanishka bombing that killed all 329 people on board, has been released from prison in Canada after serving two decades behind bars.

Reyat was convicted of perjury in 2010 for lying to the court in 2003 during the trial of Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, who were acquitted in the terrorist attack.

The flight was operating on the Montreal, CanadaLondon, UKDelhi, India route.

A spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada confirmed Reyat's statutory release after serving two-thirds of a nine-year sentence for his involvement in one of the deadliest airline attacks in history.

A mechanic migrated from Punjab, Reyat bought the dynamite, detonators and batteries that took the lives of 329 passengers on Air India's Flight 182, which exploded over the coast of Ireland on its way to Heathrow Airport in London.

The second exploded at Japan's Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers as they transferred cargo.

In 1991, Reyat was convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of two baggage handlers. He served 10 years for that crime. He also got five years for another manslaughter charge in the Air India bombing.

Reyat got nine years for perjury, the longest such sentence ever given in Canada, although he was given credit for time served awaiting trial. His sentence began on January 7, 2011.

Patrick Storey, Pacific regional manager of the Parole Board of Canada, said Reyat has reached his statutory release date.

"A statutory release is not a discretionary release. It's an automatic release mandated by law," The Globe and Mail quoted Storey as saying.

"So his statutory release date is Janaury 27, 2016, and he reaches the end of his sentence on August 6, 2018....[Wednesday] is the two-thirds mark in his sentence."

Storey said the parole board had no option but to allow the release and a hearing was not held.

Reyat has been ordered to abide by several conditions set by the parole board, including having no contact with victims' families or alleged former co-conspirators, and no political activities.

Storey said the board imposed eight conditions, including one that is seldom used, restricting where Reyat can live.

"He's required to reside at a community correctional centre or a community residential facility, or other residential facility approved by the Correctional Service of Canada," he said.

"So in other words he cant go home, he has to go to a halfway house."

Reyat also cannot associate with anyone involved in criminal activity, or who has extremist or political views.

Storey said the conditions will apply until the end of Reyat's sentence in 2018.
Four bomb threat calls received in quick succession at Delhi and Bengaluru airports forced the aviation authorities to ground three flights, including two international, sending a panic wave among fliers.

While Air India and Jet Airways flights to Kathmandu were grounded at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, no-frills airline AirAsias Goa flight from Bengaluru also failed to take off on scheduled time due to similar reasons.

The Kathmandu-bound flights of Air India and Jet Airways, which were scheduled to take off at 1.15 pm and 1.25 pm, were halted and sent to the isolation bay just before they were readying for departure after the airport police received a bomb threat call.

Around 1 pm, the airport police received an anonymous call saying that there were bombs inside two laptop bags, kept in the planes of Air India and Jet Airways, Deputy Commissioner of Police (IGIA) D K Gupta said.

Immediately, the authorities decided to ground both the flights, which were to carry 121 and 122 passengers respectively and take the two aircraft to the isolation bay for an extensive search of the baggage, cargo and aircraft, sources said.

Jet Airways flight 9W 260, scheduled to depart from Delhi for Kathmandu at 1.25 pm, has been delayed due to a security alert. All 122 guests and 7 crew have been taken to the departures waiting area at the airport, Jet Airways said in a statement.

The Air India flight finally took off at 7.50 pm after receiving clearance from the security agencies.

#AI215 DEL-KTM, which was delayed due to bomb threat, took off at 1950 hrs with a change in aircraft after security clearances, Air India tweeted.

Before this, the flight was delayed for the second time just when security agencies were carrying out the search.

#AI 215 DEL-KTM has been further delayed due to a fresh threat call & will take off only after security clearances, the airline had tweeted.

Earlier on Wednesday, Flight AI 215 was evacuated and all 121 passengers were taken to the terminal as aircraft was at the bay area for security check up, Air India spokesperson G P Rao said in a statement later.

At the same time, budget carrier AirAsia Indias flight to Goa from Bengaluru, which was to fly 141 passengers and four infants, was also delayed following a similar bomb scare on its incoming flight from Jaipur.

According to AirAsia India, its incoming Flight I5-1721 to Jaipur from Bengaluru received a specific bomb threat on arrival at Bengaluru after all 164 passengers on board with 1 infant deplaned.

The flight was scheduled to depart for Goa at 12.30 pm.

In-flight cabin crew spotted the bomb threat in the aircraft after landing, it said, adding the aircraft was taken to isolation bay, checked thoroughly by Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad.

But nothing was found. Aircraft was then cleared and released for normal operations. The aircraft was airborne at 4.32 pm after all security clearance with 141 passengers and four infants, AirAsia India said in a statement.

Safety and security of our guests, employees and overall operations are paramount in AirAsia India and at no stage would compromise in its core commitment of service ensuring safety and security, airlines Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Mittu Chandilya said in the statement.
The Romans have censored themselves to make visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani feel more comfortable during his historic stop in Italy.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi came under fire after ancient nude statues in Romes Capitoline museum were covered up to avoid any possible offense to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who is visiting the country.

Rouhani -- the first Iranian leader to visit Europe in almost 20 years -- met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Tuesday, but another stop on his agenda was the famed CapitolineMuseum, where classic Italian nude sculptures were covered with plain white boards to avoid offending the Muslim president.

Italian news agency ANSA said the nudes were covered out of respect for Rouhani.

However, the move wasnt going over well with many lambasting it as absurd, and embarrassing, servile behaviour.

Federico Mollicone of Silvio Berlusconis Forza Italia party said: It dishonours centuries of our history. An embarrassment that affirms the inferiority of the west versus Islam.

Barbara Saltamartini, of the Northern League party, said: Whoever comes in our country, and this goes for an Iranian president as well, must accept our values and identity which must be defended not hidden.

The 41-year-old Renzi met with similar criticism last year when he covered up nude pictures in the renaissance town hall of Florence, the city where he used to be mayor, on the occasion of a visit by the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates.

It is standard practice, both in Europe and the United States, for hosting governments to keep alcohol off the menu when Muslim dignitaries visit, as Islam forbids its consumption.

Image: A gilded bronze Greek statue of Hercules dated 300 BC, and equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, dating to the Roman emperors reign, appear in the new hall at the Capitoline museum in Rome. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters
Six of the seven students of the Hyderabad Central University, on hunger strike to protest the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, have been shifted to a health centre even as the agitators today took out a march to the residence of the interim head of the institution.

The students, who had given a nationwide university strike call, marched to the residence of the interim head of the institution and then went outside the campus and burnt the effigy of the Vice-chancellor, whose ouster they have been seeking.

"Six (students) were shifted (to the health centre) on Tuesday", Ravindra Kumar, chief medical officer said. One student is continuing with the hunger strike, which resumed three days back after the first batch of his colleagues who went on fast were moved to the health centre.

The students first marched to the residence of the officiating Vice-Chancellor Vipin Srivastava in the staff quarters.

Srivastava was given the charge of the institution after VC Aappa Rao went on leave amid escalation of protests last week. But selection of Srivastava as interim head of the institution was stiffly objected to by the students and SC/ST staff forums alleging he headed the Executive Council sub-committee whose decisions were "responsible for the death of Rohith" and was one of the accused in the death of another dalit student in 2008.

Srivastava had on Tuesday made a fresh appeal to students to help restore normalcy on the campus. Rohith was found hanging in a hostel room on the HCU campus on January 17, sparking strong reactions on the campus and across the country.

Rohith and four other students, all from the dalit community, were suspended last year by the varsity for allegedly attacking an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad leader.

The suspension of the four students were revoked last week after the issue snowballed into a major political row with the agitation drawing support from parties other than the Bharatiya Janata Party.
'Minakshi Jafa Bodden is the first person to have ever taken Bikram Choudhury to trial and we greatly admire her courage.'

Ritu Jha/Rediff.com reports from California.

IMAGE: Bikram Choudhury has attracted thousands of followers with his unique style of yoga. Photograph: Bikram Yoga/Facebook

In a significant blow to his career, Bikram Yoga founder Bikram Choudhury has been ordered by a Los Angeles jury to pay $924,554 (Rs 6.28 crore/Rs 62.8 million) as compensation to Minakshi Jafa Bodden, his former legal advisor, for wrongful termination.

Choudhury is the founder and president of Bikram Choudhury Yoga Inc and Chairman and CEO of the Bikram Yoga College of India in California.



A Los Angles Superior Court spokesperson said the jury awarded the damages to Bodden based on: Past lost earnings - $237,054 (Rs 1.6 crore/Rs 16 million); future lost earnings - $187,500 (Rs 1.27 crore/Rs 12.7 million); past economic loss including mental suffering and emotional distress - $50,000 (Rs 34 lakh/Rs 3.4 million); future non-economic loss including mental suffering and emotional distress - $450,000 (Rs 3.05 crore/Rs 30.5 million).

"Mr Choudhury will appeal the verdict," his attorney Robert Manuel Nacionales Tafoya told Rediff.com

"Our client is deeply appreciative of the verdict," Bodden's attorney Carla V Minnard said.

"We are most appreciative for the opportunity to bring to light in a public forum all of the conduct that Bikram Choudhury and Rajashree Choudhury (the company's vice-president and Choudhury's wife) have worked so hard to keep hidden and under wraps for many years," Minnard said.

"Ms Bodden is the first person to have ever taken Choudhury to trial and we greatly admire her courage," Minnard added.



"We think the verdict is a tremendous vindication of all of Ms Bodden's efforts to stop the abusive and harassing conduct not just towards herself," Minnard said, "but to numerous other women who have attempted to stand up to Bikram Choudhury."



"She stood up for what was right at great personal risk to herself and her daughter, both of whom were threatened by Bikram Choudhury with being deported and killed," Minnard alleged.



"We look forward to the punitive damages phase of the trial, and to the award of attorney's fees in this matter which will be awarded by Judge Mark Mooney," she said.

Bodden filed the case on June 11, 2013, in which she alleged discrimination, retaliation and harassment by Choudhury.

According to the court document, Choudhury failed to pay Bidden the salary promised her.

Choudhury, Bodden complained, repeatedly used obscene language, repeatedly made offensive and vulgar sexual gestures, and made disparaging remarks against single mothers, including herself.

Choudhury, the court document alleged, created a hyper-sexualised, offensive and degrading environment for women. Lady staffers were required to give him massages, and Bodden had to conduct business meetings while he was receiving a massage.

Bodden and other lady staffers were summoned to Choudhury's hotel room at night for meetings, the complaint stated. Not only Choudhury, the complaint alleged, but Choudhury's friends from overseas would treat women as if they were chattel, meant for sexual pleasure.



Bodden tried many times to investigate the mistreatment of lady students, but was asked by Choudhury to stay away. She alleged that Rajshree Choudhury, who is also founder of the USA Yoga Federation, was aware of her husband's behaviour, but did nothing to prevent or curtail it.



Instead, Rajshree Choudhury, Bodden alleged, defended her husband and told Bodden that 'Bikram was saying you are having an affair' with an attorney she had retained.



Choudhury, the court document stated, threatened to put Bodden in jail on several occasions.

On March 2013, Bodden was forced to resign, evicted from her home, her car repossessed and the process to secure a Green Card revoked.
In a fresh setback to the Mumbai attack trial, a Pakistani court has dismissed the government's petition seeking voices samples of 26/11 mastermind Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects in the case.

The prosecution had filed an application in the Islamabad high court seeking voice samples of the suspects to compare it with the communication intercepted by Indian intelligence and then present it before the anti-terrorism court as evidence against the seven suspects in the Mumbai attack case.

The Islamabad high court on Monday dismissed the petition.

In 2011 and 2015, the issue of obtaining voice samples of Lakhvi had been dismissed by the trial court on the grounds that "no such law exists that allows obtaining of voice sample of an accused".

The prosecution's petition said the Indian intelligence agencies had intercepted communication between the suspects and the terrorists in connection with the Mumbai attack in 2008.

In the recorded intercepts, the suspects are alleged to be instructing the terrorists.

The prosecution lawyers had argued that the samples were essential for concluding the investigation of this high profile case.

The trial court had also rejected another petition of the prosecution requesting the court to declare Ajmal Kasab and Faheem Ansari absconders in order to meet legal formalities.

The prosecution had told the court that unless it declared the two men absconders, the trial against them would remain "inconclusive" as both have been cited as accused in the Mumbai attack case by Indian authorities and that they were also wanted by the Federal Investigation Agency that was probing the 26/11 case.

Pakistani authorities arrested seven Lashkar-e-Tayiba members involved in the planning of the attacks including the terrorist group's operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the mastermind of the Mumbai attack.

Six accused -- Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum -- have been in Adiala Jail for more than six years in connection with planning and executing the Mumbai attack in November, 2008, that left 166 people killed.

Lakhvi, 56, secured bail in December, 2014, and was subsequently released from Adiala Jail on April 10, 2015, after the Lahore high court set aside the government's order to detain him under a public security act.

A trial is underway against them at the ATC since 2009.
Alleging "delay in justice" to Hyderabad University research scholar Rohith Vemula, 150 protesting students from universities across Delhi who were detained earlier on Wednesday decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike at Parliament Street police station in New Delhi.

According to police, due to security concerns, around 150 students were detained from outside Shastri Bhawan and taken to Parliament Street police station.

"Every time we try to go to the Ministry and raise our demands with HRD Minister Smriti Irani, we are held back and detained by police. Protesting is a basic right. We can't be denied that at a time when the government is trying to cover up an 'institutional murder'," JNU Students Union vice president Shehla Rashid Shora said.

Members of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan and Left-backed All India Students Association were among the protesters.

Sucheta De, national president, AISA said, "We will not budge from the premises of the Parliament Street police station now and sit on an indefinite hunger strike here till our demands are met."

"We are protesting the delay in justice to the student who had to end his life due to the harassment by the institution," she said and asked "who will be held accountable for similar such suicides in varsities across country which go unreported?

The protests over the issue have been rocking the national capital since last week with three JNU students sitting on an indefinite hunger strike since Sunday.

Twenty six-year-old Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar, was found hanging at Hyderabad Central University's hostel room on January 17.

He was among the five research scholars who were suspended by Hyderabad Central University in August last year and also one of the accused in the case of assault on an ABVP student leader. They were also kept out of the hostel. The suspension was revoked later.

Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya and Hyderabad University vice chancellor were named in an FIR over the death of the scholar, which triggered massive protests and demands for their removal from their posts.

The issue also took a political turn with allegations that the extreme action was a result of discrimination against Dalit students after Dattatreya had written a letter to Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani seeking action against their "anti-national acts".

In a bid to defuse the raging controversy, the Centre had last week decided to set up a judicial commission to go into the suicide, and announced an ex-gratia payment of Rs 8 lakh to his family but protests continued.

Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his silence and expressed grief over the death of Vemula, students are demanding the removal of Irani and Dattatreya and the vice chancellor.

Images: Student shout slogans demanding resignation of HRD Minister Smriti Irani as they are detained during a protest against the death of Hyderabads student Rohith Vemula in New Delhi on Wednesday. Photographs: PTI Photo
The bench allows petitioners to amend their plea after attorney general's objection that the notification on promulgation of Presidents rule has not been challenged in the fresh plea.

The imposition of Presidents rule in crisis-hit Arunachal Pradesh on came under the scanner of the Supreme Court which sought the report of Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa recommending central rule in the state, saying it is too serious a matter.

The remark by a five-judge bench headed by Justice J S Khehar came when Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi raised a preliminary objection contending that the notification on promulgation of Presidents rule has not been challenged in the fresh plea.

The bench asked the attorney general not to raise technical objections when he persisted with his plea arguing that rules are rules and they apply equally to all.

It posted the matter for February 1, asking the governor and the ministry of home affairs to file responses by Friday, January 29, on petitions filed by Congress leaders including the plea of Rajesh Tacho, chief whip of Congress Legislature party in the state assembly which is now kept under suspended animation.

The bench allowed the petitioners to amend their plea by Friday.

When Additional Solicitor General Satpal Jain, appearing for the governor, sought to maintain secrecy of the report and the recommendation for the Presidents rule, the bench said, He will only mention the date of report recommending Presidents rule to opposite parties during the course of the day.

However, the bench for its own perusal sought in a sealed cover the report and recommendation on imposition of the Presidents rule.

Unless we get the grounds for recommending the President's rule, we cannot proceed. If grounds are not same in the proclamation then it is totally a different ball game, the bench, also comprising justices Dipak Misra, M B Lokur, P C Ghose and N V Ramana, said during the hearing.

The bench was also of the view that no interim order can be obtained unless the parties see the grounds for proclamation for Presidents rule.

A battery of senior lawyers including Fali S Nariman, Kapil Sibal, Rajeev Dhawan and Vivek Tankha opposed the plea of governor, seeking to maintain secrecy of his report and recommendations, saying that larger bench of more than five judges have already laid down the proposition on this aspect.

However, Jain, who was asked at the beginning of the hearing to bring to court within 15 minutes the governors report, claimed that the confidentiality of the document was required to be maintained.

He said there are photographs to suggest that the governor was under threat as slaughtering of animals, burning of tyres and posters took place outside the Raj Bhawan.

The fact that the notification of Presidents rule was not challenged in the fresh plea was raised in a big way by the attorney general who said that they should be asked to file another petition.

When Rohatgi said there were reports on which the President has acted, the bench drew his attention to Tuesdays notification in which there was reference to only one report.

You (A-G) have been saying there have been series of recommendations. Look at the Presidents proclamation. It only speaks about one report and information, it said.

At the outset, Nariman explained the sequence of events and said that it was a fit case for an interim relief and the court has to prima facie arrive at a view that a case is made out or not.

He said as the report of the governor was not in hand, it was not known as to what were the grounds taken for recommendation of central rule.

His submission was objected to by senior advocates Ashok Desai and Vikas Singh, appearing for opposite side, saying that no interim order can be passed without hearing them.

We will not pass any order without hearing all the parties. It is a sensitive issue, the bench said.

Desai said that reasons for proclamation may be different from what has been given by the governor.

Yes, that is why we want to see the report and that is why we want to hear the attorney general, the bench said.

Explaining the urgency and importance of the matter, Sibal said that the issue of proclamation of Presidents rule will come before the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha in the coming session for affirmation and they may lose it in the Upper House as the National Democratic Alliance does not have a majority there.

Further, he said even if there is no affirmation, the court has to look into the legality of the actions taken by the Centre and even if there is new chief minister, he will have to prove his majority before February 23.

While the bench was taking note of the possibilities, Sibal said that if no government is formed then there is no option but to dissolve the house and go for fresh elections.

He urged the bench not to declare as infructuous the present petition even if the Opposition forms a new government.

Earlier during the day, the court agreed to hear at 2 pm the plea challenging the Union Cabinets recommendation to impose President's Rule when Nariman and Sibal mentioned it for urgent hearing.

The fresh plea assumes significance as the five-judge bench is examining constitutional provisions on the scope of discretionary powers of the governor, amid continuing a month-long impasse over Nabam Tuki-led Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh.

In an earlier plea filed by Nabam Rebia, who was allegedly removed from the post of speaker by rebel Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs in an assembly session held at a community hall in Itanagar on December 16, has listed out legal questions, including the governors power to convene the assembly session without the aid and advice of the government for adjudication by the apex court.

It was also alleged that the governor had advanced the assembly sitting from January 14 to December 16 without the aid and advice of the chief minister and his council of ministers.

Congress, which has 47 MLAs seats in the 60-member assembly, suffered a jolt when 21 of them rebelled. Eleven BJP MLAs backed the rebels in the bid to upstage the Nabam Tuki government. Later, 14 rebel Congress MLAs were disqualified.

The governor then called assembly session on December 16 in which deputy speaker revoked disqualification of 14 rebel Congress MLAs and removed Rebia from the post of speaker. This sitting was held in a community hall in Itanagar.
The women's outfit spearheading the campaign against a centuries-old ban on female devotees entering the sacred platform at Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra on Wednesday brought their fight to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for lifting of the restrictions.

A day after police foiled the attempt by 400 women activists to barge into the famous temple in Ahmednagar district as part of their high-voltage stir, Bhoomata Brigade leader Trupti Desai met Fadnavis here and presented a memorandum of demands seeking his support to end gender bias and unrestricted entry to women at the temple and all other sacred places in the state.

The meeting with Fadnavis took place on the sidelines of a function in Pune even as the gram sabha at the village where the shrine is located passed a resolution condemning Desai and her volunteers for attempts to storm the chauthara (sacred platform).

The plan was foiled when police stopped the marchers at Supa village, 70 km away from the shrine. The activists were released after being detained for a few hours.

At a meeting of the gram sabha of Shingnapur village, a resolution condemning Desai and her brigade was passed.

Fadnavis, who on Tuesday favoured a dialogue on the issue in the wake of a tense showdown, did not make any comment on the set of demands before leaving the venue.

Desai, however, told reporters that Fadnavis favourably responded to the demand as he accepted the memorandum with a positive assurance. She also suggested he visit the temple along with his wife to strengthen the women's cause.

Over 400 women, mainly hailing from Pune, led by Desai had launched a protest against the tradition of not allowing women at the inner platform (chauthara) of the temple where only men are permitted to make offerings to the deity (Lord Shani).

Fadnavis on Tuesday favoured a dialogue between the temple authorities and the activists to find a way out over the ban on entry of women into the inner sanctum of the shrine, maintaining that women have a right to pray.

Indian culture and Hindu religion gives women have the right to pray. A change in yesterdays traditions is our culture. Discrimination in praying is not in our culture. The temple authorities should resolve the issue through a dialogue, Fadnavis, who also holds the Home portfolio, had said.

Congress backed the campaign, saying that it is the pious duty of whole society to support such a move.

"This is also the responsibility of the government so that reason prevails over those people who are creating hurdles and problems in this direction," party general secretary Janardan Dwivedi said in New Delhi.

"I commend the move of one of the women's organisations of Maharashtra asserting their right of worship at Shani Shingnapur. Women have got equal rights in the field of religion and philosophy in our country for centuries. Doors of knowledge and religion should be open to everyone without any discrimination," he said.

Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam said he supports women's agitation for equal rights at the Shani temple.

"I am of the belief that women should be allowed equal rights at all temples," he said, adding, "Respecting women is our core value. They must be allowed in Shani Shingnapur temple."

The shrine is dedicated to Lord Shani, who personifies the planet Saturn in Hindu belief.

Women devotees are not permitted on the chauthara as per the tradition followed at the shrine.

The shrine has no walls or a roof. A five-foot black stone stands on a platform and is worshipped as Lord Shani.

A bid by the womens organisation to enter the prohibited area of the temple was foiled on December 20 last year by security guards of the Shani Shingnapur Trust.

The charity commissioners office had imposed restrictions on the proposed campaign fearing damage to property.
A group of Indian-Americans has formed a committee to campaign for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, describing him the best hope for the country.

'Indian-Americans for Trump 2016' -- which was registered as a political action committee on January 21 with the federal election commission -- aims at garnering support of Indian-Americans to have Donald J Trump become the next president of the United States.

In a media release, the PAC said A D Amar, a business professor with Seton Hall University in New Jersey has been elected as its president; while New York-based attorney Anand Ahuja as its vice president.

Eminent Indian-American and Padma Shree awardee Sudhir Parikh of New Jersey has been appointed the chair of fundraising and advisory Committee of Indian-Americans for Trump 2016.

Devendra 'Dave' Makkar, a business owner and community activist of New Jersey has been elected as its treasurer.

The Trump Campaign, which so far has been vocal against PAC culture in the country and has said that he is self-funding the election, did not comment immediately on the formation of the 'Indian American for Donald Trump 2016'.

"This is only the first step. We are on the side of Trump for this election," Amar told PTI in an interview, soon after the announcement was made.

"We believe that Trump would be the nominee of the Republican party and he would be the president on the United States," he said.

Amar, who supported New Jersey Governor Chris Christies, who is also a Republican presidential candidate earlier during his State-level run, said at this moment Trump is the best for the United States and Indian-Americans.

He cited Trump's policies on illegal immigration and economy in particular as the main reasons for the Indian Americans to support him.

"Indian Americans would benefit the most from his policies," Amar said.

"On realising that the agenda of Donald J Trump for President 2016 is focused on reviving the American economy, rightly bringing America on the world stage, defeating terrorism and establishing peace through strength; many Indian-Americans believe that he is the best hope for America and the right candidate to be the next president of the United States," the political action committee said in a statement.

"The officers of the Indian-Americans for Trump 2016 urge all Americans to join in the effort and support Donald Trump in his endeavour to make America great again by electing him the next President of the USA," said Indian-Americans for Trump.
The Zika virus, an alarming and disturbing infection that may be linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains, is spreading through the Americas.

Some areas have declared a state of emergency, doctors have described it as a pandemic in progress and some are even advising women in affected countries to delay getting pregnant.

But what is the virus, how is it spread and how can people minimise the chances of catching it?

Image: A health ministry worker fumigates a house to kill mosquitoes during a campaign against dengue and chikungunya and to prevent the entry of Zika virus in Managua, Nicaragua. Photograph: Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters

What is the Zika virus?

Zika virus is spread by the aedes species of mosquito, including the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which usually bites during daylight hours.

This is the same mosquito that transmits dengue fever and chikungunya.

The illness is similar to dengue fever and is generally mild and self-limiting, lasting four to seven days. About 1 in 5 people infected with Zika virus will develop symptoms, which include fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis.

Why is it so serious?

Zika is commanding worldwide attention because of an alarming connection between the virus and microcephaly, a neurological disorder that results in babies being born with abnormally small heads. This causes severe developmental issues and sometimes death.

Since November, Brazil has seen nearly 4,000 cases of microcephaly in babies born to women who were infected with Zika during their pregnancies. To put that in perspective, there were only 146 cases in 2014. So far, 46 babies have died.

Other Latin American countries are now seeing cases in newborns as well, while in the United States one Hawaiian baby was born with microcephaly after his mother returned from Brazil. In Illinois, two pregnant women who travelled to Latin America have tested positive for the virus; health officials are monitoring their pregnancies.

How does the Zika virus spread?

The virus is transmitted when an Aedes mosquito bites a person with an active infection and then spreads the virus by biting others. Those people then become carriers during the time they have symptoms.

In most people, symptoms of the virus are mild, including fever, headache, rash and possible pink eye. In fact, 80 per cent of those infected never know they have the disease. Thats especially concerning for pregnant women, as this virus has now been shown to pass through amniotic fluid to the growing baby.

Which are the countries affected by the Zika virus?

The Zika virus is currently being locally transmitted in Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Saint Martin, Suriname, Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and Venezuela.

How can I protect myself from the virus?

There is no vaccine for Zika. Do everything you can to protect yourself from mosquito bites.

Wear mosquito repellent that provide long lasting protection and long-sleeved clothing when you can. Aedes aegypti bites mostly during the day.

Aedes aegypti breed in small pools of water, often those in front yards and backyards of homes: flower pots, tires, even tiny pockets of water in childrens toys. Remove as many of these containers as you can from the area around your home.

Will India be affected by the virus?

Experts believe its only a matter of time before India becomes its next target. Zika virus has never been isolated in India. The only time any trace of the virus was recorded in India was in 1952-53.
Captain Manpreet Singh led his band of 130 men on Rajpath, perched on a ladder 10 feet high, rising precariously from the handle-bar of his motorcycle.

He tells Archana Masih/Rediff.com what it is to be a Bullet-riding Dare Devil, a member of the Indian Army's award winning acrobatic team.

IMAGE: Captain Manpreet Singh led his contingent of Dare Devil bike riders in the Republic Day parade. The 131 men practiced for one-and-a-half years and put up a fabulous show.

Some of the loudest cheers at the Republic Day parade were reserved for Captain Manpreet Singh, his men and their fleet of Bullet motorcycles.

Captain Singh led his band of 130 men on Rajpath, perched on a ladder 10 feet high, rising precariously from the handle of his motorcycle. He gave his Supreme Commander a smart salute and elegantly maneuvered the Bullet from atop the ladder.

In the splendour of the Republic Day on Tuesday, the acrobatic motorcycle display by the Dare Devils was the piece de resistance for the Indian and foreign dignitaries and spectators.

"Keeping the speed to 20 kilometres per hour is most important," says Captain Singh, who is from the Corps of Signals with four-and-a-half years service in the Indian Army.

"It can't go below 15 kilometres," he adds.

"The ladder we used for the Republic Day parade was shorter. Otherwise the height of the ladder is 15 feet and 4 inches."

The riders and acrobats from the 1 Signal Training Centre in Jabalpur had been training 2 to 3 hours every day for the past one-and-a-half years. The men and machines arrived in Delhi in December.

They had reported for the parade at 6.30 in the morning, but their turn did not come up till 11.15 am. The parade organisers were saving the best for the last and sure enough it was a gobsmacking display.

It took the Dare Devils an hour-and-a-half to check their bikes and go over the routine for that morning. The bikes have to be maintained excellently to avoid any mechanical error.

"Your mind can be controlled, but a mechanical error cannot," points out Captain Singh.

Thirty members of the group had participated in previous Republic Day parades, one of them being a veteran of 8 parades!

"I think we did well. You need presence of mind, discipline and concentration, especially because there is a lot of cheering, clapping, which is not so during our practice," says Captain Singh, the son of a farmer from Haryana and the first in his family to join the army.

It was the first time for him at the Republic Day parade, but the Dare Devils team travels almost six months in a year performing at events and jubilees at different army units.

It is not easy to find a place in the motorcycle display team, explains the officer. Those who volunteer are put through a tough selection process.

After their basic riding is gauged, personnel undergo a three month probation where they are trained in motorbike acrobatic skills. The riding fit finally make it into the team.

Some veterans in the team have 28 to 30 acrobatic biking experiences behind them.

"In our routine, it is difficult to give a motorcycle to a new chap because a rider has to balance a lot more people on his bike. It needs tremendous control and skill," adds Captain Singh, whose favourite mean-machine is the Bullet.

"To be part of the Dare Devils you need courage," says the captain, "If you don't have that, I am afraid, you can't ride our Bullets."

Photographs: PIB/Twitter.
A former US air force lieutenant, Robin Chaurasiya moved to India to fight a battle of another kind.

What she has done has put her in the reckoning for a $1 million award. (She has been named among the top 10 finalists)



Archana Masih/Rediff.com met her and the girls whose lives she is changing -- one day at a time.

IMAGE: Amreen is deaf and mute. She started going to school only a few months ago. Photographs: Rajesh Karkera/Rediff.com

Amreen walks up and down the room several times carrying empty plastic bottles in a blue basket and returns after filling them with water. Each time our eyes meet, she smiles.

She is deaf and mute. The bright red walls of the room fade under her dazzling smile.

The teenager had never been to school till a few months ago. Nobody ever taught her the sign language used by the hearing and speech impaired. A tutor recently recommended a school suitable for her and soon she will join a boarding school for deaf and mute children in Indore.

"Every weekend there is sign language class so that the rest of us can learn how to communicate with her," says Robin Chaurasiya, a remarkable young woman who moved from America five years ago to work with marginalised girls in Mumbai.

Along with three other women -- Bani Das, Trina Talukdar and Maya Jhaveri -- Robin co-founded Kranti, a home-cum-education-cum-creativity centre where the daughters of sex workers could live, learn and make a go of their lives.

She certainly has done something right because some of the girls have gone on to do interesting courses in the United States and programmes in India. It has also fetched Robin a nomination for the $1 million Global Teacher's Prize.

The award will be announced in Dubai on March 12. She has been invited for the ceremony and is keeping her fingers crossed.

IMAGE: A former communications officer in the US Air Force, Robin, an Indian American, started an NGO for the daughters of sex workers in Mumbai.

"I grew up with a lot of domestic violence in Seattle and nobody talked about in our home," she says, sitting on the floor of the rented house she shares with the girls.

"My mother was schizophrenic -- and I realised I was a lesbian as a teenager. I did not know where to go with the issues I was dealing with when I was growing up, so I can understand what these girls feel," she says.

The house has a quirky funness to it. Shelves stacked with books hang from the ceiling. The walls have been painted with creative messages by the girls.

In the kitchen, one of them, entrusted with cooking lunch for that day, is almost done. Another bunch is putting an untidy cupboard to order, helped by Melissa, former US military personnel and Robin's friend who is spending a few months with the group.

Among them is Shweta Katti, who won a $30,000 scholarship to study at Bard College, New York. Beside her are Shraddha and Kavita, who recently returned from a 6-month English speaking course in San Francisco and a study programme on a ship, 'Semester at Sea', that started in California and ended in London.

The girls chat and giggle as they share their stories.

IMAGE: Shweta Katti received a scholarship to Bard University, New York. The experience opened her mind, she says.

Shweta, a confident, well-spoken, young girl, has decided to take some time off and re-apply to another university because it was hard to adjust to academic and campus life in New York.

"I never went to a proper school as a child and I didn't speak good English, though the professors were very kind and I made some very good friends," she says, her voice speckled with traces of an American accent.

"I have learnt so much -- the experience has opened my mind."

Her mother, born into a family of devdasis in Karnataka, has left the past behind and now assists in the day-to-day running of the house. Shweta herself has been helping Robin with Kranti since her return.

Shraddha, meanwhile, is back from San Francisco where she attended an English speaking course, volunteered with an NGO and did street theatre.

She found out about Kranti and contacted Shweta on Facebook. After convincing her mother, she made the journey from Kerala to Mumbai and wants to pursue street theatre as therapy for those suffering from psychological trauma.

The girls recently returned after a field trip to Nepal where they volunteered at a Buddhist monastery and are preparing to travel in India with Lal Batti Express, a play based on the lives of Kamathipura's sex workers.

Last year, they took the play to America.

IMAGE: Asmeeta shows us around the house. All the walls have been painted by the girls.

"Learning here is focussed on the 5-Cs," says Robin, "Communication, Community leadership, Critical analysis, Creative thinking and Compassion."

"The girls came from different languages, different skills, different levels of education -- so we created a school system that includes four hours of formal school, one hour of yoga, meditation along with world news, geography, journal writing, logical puzzles and a physical sport."

The girls also attend a two-hour English speaking class and go for field trips once a week.

"The idea is to bring the world of a classroom to you," explains Robin.

When she first came to Mumbai six years ago, she worked with a shelter for sex workers. "It was the 'inki zindagi barbad ho gayi hai' mentality and they were taught how to make achar and do silai. What if one of them wanted to become an astronaut?" says the former US military lieutenant who joined the US Air Force to avail a scholarship to fund a university education.

"I was expelled after two-and-a-half years for violating the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy in place at that time. For being openly lesbian ('telling') while on active duty," says Robin who had married her partner.

A 'Genderbread man' stands next to a hand-painted Buddha.

A few months later, the law was repealed. The couple, however, separated later and Robin says she is committed to being single all her life.

"I never enjoyed my years in the military. I was a woman of colour, lesbian and vegetarian. The only other Indians I saw were two doctors. Being a vegetarian was most difficult. I remember at one boot camp my physical scores did not improve because I was not having proteins while others around me had beef, chicken, eggs. I hope that's changing now."

She moved to India and has no immediate family left behind in the US. Her father passed away, her sister moved to London and her mother now lives with relatives in Madhya Pradesh.

"Something about America is so sterile. India, on the other hand, does not hide from its reality. There is something systematically better in India like close relationships... laughter..." she says, just as a group of girls return from a yoga class in the neighbourhood.

IMAGE: The girls with Robin and Melissa, below, sit on the narrow staircase that joins their three rooms.

They sit on the floor around Robin and tell her about their day. Melissa is about to go for a meeting and discusses the stay of some American students who will arrive shortly for volunteer work in India.

One of the girls sings a song. Her voice fills the room, wrapping the audience in its husky cadence.

The 18 girls in the home come from families broken by the vagaries of sex work. Some of them have been abused, raped and suffered acute emotional damage. Even a 5-minute encounter with sexual abuse can cause life-long emotional destruction.

"It is nice to see them move to better place psychologically. I tell them instead of thinking of your life as a weakness, think of it as a strength and build your lives," says Robin who dreams of starting a school where children study by topics and are grouped by interest rather than age. A curriculum that prepares children to sit for any Class 10 board -- CBSE, ICSE, IB or Open School. She would like to open such a school in Kamathipura one day.

Till then she has her hands full, managing 18 teenagers and 18 cats, inside a house with bright walls that has become a healing sanctuary for its girls.
'Mrinalini Sarabhai was gracious, well-read, liberal, very secular, and very well informed,' recalls film historian S Theodore Baskaran of the celebrated dancer who passed into the ages last week.

It was when S Theodore Baskaran, the well known film historian and wildlife conservationist, was the postmaster general in Ahmedabad from 1993 to 1996 that he and his wife Thilaka became quite close to Mrinalini Sarabhai.

In this exclusive interview, Baskaran, image, left, speaks to Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com about the many lunches, dinners and art and culture meetings he had at the Sarabhai home.

I had just come to Ahmedabad as the postmaster general and we were planning a philately exhibition there. I thought it would be fitting to invite Mrinalini Sarabhai to inaugurate the exhibition. I was not keen on inviting any politician, and the obvious choice was she.

I went to her house to invite her and in the first meeting itself, I felt she was a very positive, cheerful and a sparkling personality. She must have been in her early seventies then, but looked so energetic and full of life.

It was like age forgot to catch up with her. If you remember, the three generations of Sarabhais -- Mrinalini, Mallika and her daughter -- had danced together during that time.

She was curious to know more about me and my interests when we met first and we started talking about films. Though she was interested in films, she knew only about Hindi films and I was more knowledgeable about Tamil films, so we spoke a lot about Malayalam and Tamil films.

Later I came to know that she was a good friend of (Hollywood actor, The King And I, The Magnificent Seven) Yul Brynner. I didn't know much about classical arts, but I was very much interested in folk deities and we talked a lot about that too.

It was her mother Ammu Swaminadhan who had started the first film society in India in Madras in 1952, and when I mentioned that, she said she knew about it, but she was very happy that I was aware of it.

Another common interest we had was conservation and though she was not into wildlife conservation, she was basically a conservationist. As I was a wildlife conservationist, she told me about the nearby Thol lake in Ahmedabad where many rare birds used to come.

After that, in the three years I was there, whenever I had time, Thol lake became a favourite destination for me and my wife Thilaka. We used to drive to the lake, watch birds on weekends.

She inaugurated the exhibition and then spoke about stamps. I have to say she was a very gracious guest.

After my wife joined me, she started inviting us for lunch and dinner quite regularly. I still remember the first time she invited me for dinner, I went in a veshti and they were so excited and they started exclaiming happily, 'mundu, mundu'! I considered it an honour to be at her place when she had special guests.

When my children came, she invited all the four of us for dinner and when Thilaka's brother and family came, she invited us for dinner. She used to invite us whenever she invited visiting dignitaries. Food was always an excuse for people to meet and talk at her home.

There was only vegetarian food at Mrinalini's house and it was very delicious. There would be Gujarati, south Indian, north Indian, in fact, all kinds of vegetarian delicacies would be there. The lunch and dinner meetings had lively sessions where people spoke about art, culture, dance, music, books, etc. Of course, political and social issues also dominated the dinner table, but nothing about god, religion or spirituality came in our discussions.

I think I used to visit her at least two times a month in those three years. I like to believe that she liked us and our company. We also invited her and Mallika to our home for dinner and she always admired Thilaka's cooking. She used to love the aappam and vegetable stew made by her. We were Bhaskaran and Thilaka to her while she was Amma to all of us.

I got to know Mallika as her house was next to her mother's. I still remember our first meeting with her. My wife and I were invited for dinner at Mrinalini's home and it was Mallika who opened the door. She said, 'Welcome home. I am Mallika, the daughter of the house.' We could sense the great bonding the mother and daughter had.

They had Darpana theatre in their house complex, and the auditorium was on the banks of the river Sabarmati and we used to go there for all their programmes. The auditorium was built in such a way that we were actually sitting on the banks of the river and watching all the programmes. It was an amazing setting.

Gandhi Samarak Nidhi meetings also happened at her home and I used to go for the dinner. It was at one such dinner that I met Rajmohan Gandhi (both Mahatma Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari's grandson). I also met a young Australian who had left his job and country to become a Gandhian after watching the film, Gandhi!

Sometimes, Mrinalini would invite me for lunch at very short notice. When Mulk Raj Anand visited her for a few hours, she arranged a lunch, and invited me. She called me in the morning on a working day and asked, "Can you come for lunch today? Mulk Raj Anand will be here." I had been an admirer of his and one reason was he had written a book on the Indian post office.

So when I went for lunch, I carried the book covered in a brown paper to get it autographed. Interestingly, though it was covered, Mulk Raj Anand immediately recognised his book and said, 'I see you have my book'!

He signed the book and told me the story behind writing the book -- that it was Nehru who asked him to write a book on the Indian post office. I remember we had a very interesting conversation about the Indian postal service.

After we left Ahmedabad, we used to write friendly letters to each other and I cherish those letters from her. We left Madras in 2005 and moved to Bangalore and we were not really in touch after that.

The last time I met her was in 2004 when she was passing through Chennai from Ahmedabad to Palghat. She was at her ancestral home at Nungambakkom and called us from there. We went and met her, and that was the last time I met her in person.

Most of the conversation we had that day was about what was happening in Ahmedabad then as she was very concerned about the communal riots that had rocked the state.

She was a person from the Nehruvian era -- gracious, well-read, liberal, very secular, and very well informed on traditional arts. One adjective I would like to use for Mrinalini Sarabhai is she was very cerebral.

IMAGE: Thilaka Baskaran, left, with Mrinalini and Mallika Sarabhai and a guest at the Baskarans' hoMe. Photograph: Kind courtesy Theodore Basakaran

Theodore Basakaran's photograph: Anton
Amid military confrontation in Darfur, 'limited' progress on resolving conflict  UN peacekeeping chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 25 January 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Amid military confrontation in Darfur, 'limited' progress on resolving conflict  UN peacekeeping chief, 25 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a877cf40b.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

25 January 2016 - Against the backdrop of renewed military confrontation, the political process to resolve the conflict in Darfur through dialogue remains fragmented with limited progress, the United Nations peacekeeping chief today informed the UN Security Council.

"Major armed movements and opposition parties continue to boycott the current national dialogue framework," the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Herve Ladsous, told the 15-member body during a briefing on the situation in Sudan's strife-torn region.

Since the last report submitted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in December, fighting has resumed in the Jebel Marra area, with clashes in the west and north of Darfur marking the end of a brief lull in the civil war, which the UN estimates has killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of Darfuris and displaced nearly two million since 2003.

In the north, where villages were recently attacked by Arab militias, troops from the African Union-UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) were shot at twice - once by the Sudan Liberation Movement/Abdul Wahid faction while trying to recover a stolen UN World Food Programme (WFP) truck, and a second time by Arab militias while protecting a top UN official during a trip to Anka.

"The security situation limited an inter-agency relief mission to Anka, and humanitarian assistance had to be delivered by airdrops," Mr. Ladsous said.

Meanwhile, to the south of El Geneina, 5,000 people have reportedly been displaced due to deadly violence, but neither the UN nor humanitarian partners has been able to confirm this figure due to Sudanese authorities blocking their access to the area.

"Despite the extension of the unilateral cease-fire by President [Omar al] Bashir in the region of Jebel Marra, incidents occurred, aerial bombardments resumed, and clashes between governmental forces and the Sudan Liberation Movement/Abdul Wahid intensified in January," the UN peacekeeping chief underscored.

He added that a dozen bombs were reported in North and Central Darfur and that fighting between Government forces and Abdul Wahid rebels resulted in victims, but the number could not be verified, again due to lack of access. Mr. Ladsous did however report that 7,900 civilians, mainly women and children, have sought refuge around the UNAMID camp at Sortoni in North Darfur.

With respect to the Darfur peace process, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army/Minni Minawi faction held a meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister of Qatar on 11 January in Paris. They pledged to develop a joint position paper on their concerns with respect to the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD), which forms the basis for a permanent ceasefire and comprehensive peace agreement to end the fighting.

An informal meeting between the Government and the two groups started in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia, on 23 January, but the parties reportedly remain divided on the role of the DDPD and an African Union implementation panel.

"It is regrettable that Abdul Wahid has been absent from these talks and we call upon him to participate constructively in the efforts to find a resolution to the conflict," Mr. Ladsous stressed.

He also voiced his regret that the visa situation remains precarious, "with no major improvement in its overall status." Since the last report to the Security Council, the Government rejected another seven visa requests, including four involving substantive civilian functions and one for the post of Senior Joint Operations Officer.

"The resultant loss of capacities in those sections directly related to the strategic priorities of UNAMID, such as the Protection of Civilians, is particularly concerning, in light of the evolving situations in the Jebel Marra and other areas," he explained.

Concluding his remarks, he reiterated his concern about the impact of the renewed upsurge in fighting on civilians, and expressed his hope that the cessation of hostilities negotiations will come to a "positive conclusion" and bring to an end the suffering of people caught in the fighting.
Delayed intra-Syrian talks, brokered by UN, to begin on Friday in 'uphill' bid for ceasefire

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 25 January 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Delayed intra-Syrian talks, brokered by UN, to begin on Friday in 'uphill' bid for ceasefire, 25 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a87e2340c.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

25 January 2016 - Intra-Syrian talks that were scheduled to begin in Geneva today under United Nations sponsorship will now start on Friday, with the first priority being a broad ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and halting the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

But in announcing the new date, for which invitations will be sent out tomorrow, Special UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said he is under no illusions about the difficulties in ending a war that has killed over 250,000 people, sent over 4 million fleeing the country, displaced 6.5 million internally, and put 13.5 million people inside the country in urgent need of humanitarian aid.

"In terms of vision, things may get faster, things may get slower, I can tell you in advance, don't be surprised," he told a news conference in Geneva. "There will be a lot of posturing, we know that, a lot of walk-outs and walk-ins because a bomb has fallen or because someone has done an attack, and you will see that happening," he said.

"We should not be impressed, neither depressed, but it's likely to happen. The important thing is that we keep the momentum," he stressed.

The meetings will start with proximity talks and are expected to last for six months, with Government and opposition delegations sitting in separate rooms and UN officials shuttling between them. Any ceasefire would not cover ISIL of the Al-Nusra Front.

The talks stem from an agreement reached in Vienna in November by the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), comprising the Arab League, the European Union, the United Nations, and 17 countries including the United States and Russia, as part of an effort to end the five-year-long war with an agreement on new governance, a new constitution and new elections.

The first phase could last two to three weeks before preparations are made for further phases and there will be no opening ceremony, Mr. de Mistura said, stressing that there will be a substantial presence of civil society and women, who represent 51 per cent of the total population.

"There are political risks," he added. "But those political risks, and tensions and positioning and prepositioning should be also taking into account that our line is, and the Security Council has been clear, no pre-conditions at least to start it off and while the talks start.

"The rest is open is going to be uphill. They are not in an agreement yet, but we are all feeling that the time has come to at least try hard to produce an outcome," he noted.

He said he expected there to be "a lot of shuttling because there is not only different delegations but there are also civil society, women and others who deserve to be heard," with UN facilitators attending a lot of simultaneous meetings.

Meanwhile, UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown has warned that 2.5 million children could be displaced as refugees from Syria by the end of 2016, adding that the only way to ensure they remain in the region is to provide stability through a new plan for double-shift education.

Under that system, local children would be schooled in the mornings and early afternoons, and refugee boys and girls would use the same classrooms in late afternoon and early evening. The plan will cost an initial $750 million, but $500 million has already been raised through offers of grants or loans from countries and businesses.
With Mali at turning point, commitment to lasting peace and development a 'must'  senior UN relief official

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 25 January 2016 Cite as UN News Service, With Mali at turning point, commitment to lasting peace and development a 'must'  senior UN relief official, 25 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a87eeb40c.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

25 January 2016 - Wrapping up visit to Mal, the United Nations Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel, Toby Lanzer, said that he had seen both progress and challenges on security and access to basic services for crisis-affected communities, while underscoring the importance of full commitment - from national authorities and the international community - to move the country forward.

"Mali is at a turning point in its history and the authorities must remain fully committed to seizing this opportunity. At the same time, the international community must maintain and scale up its support to enable people to realize their expectation for peace, justice and development," said Mr. Lanzer in a press statement from the capital, Bamako, at the end of his 18-22 January visit to the country.

"Important progress has been made; schools have reopened and access to safe water and essential healthcare has improved," he continued, adding that sustained "redeployment of State authorities is essential if we are to consolidate existing gains and strengthen the much needed recovery and resilience work with the support of humanitarian and development partners."

In the North of the country and in Bamako, Mr. Lanzer met with members of the Government, local authorities, civil society organizations and humanitarian partners. He also visited Gao and Kidal to meet people affected by the crisis and visit aid projects.

"The youth, women and community leaders I met all have a vision for the future of their society; and they want to be part of its shaping," stressed Mr. Lanzer.

While noting that progress was less significant in areas of persisting insecurity, which yielded hampered aid, vulnerability and precarious conditions, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator saw significant improvement resulting from relief work and the return of some administration personnel.

Mr. Lanzer's mission took place just after the Humanitarian Coordinator for Mali, Ms. Mbaranga Gasarabwe, assessed the needs and challenges on the ground in northern Mali - encompassing Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal - including within the context that the humanitarian actors were operating.

"The signature of the Peace Agreement and its implementation by all parties should allow for broader humanitarian access to meet people's urgent needs, as well as working with authorities to strengthen communities' self-reliance and autonomy," said Ms. Gasarabwe.

Through concerted efforts, humanitarian actors in the country assisted more than a million-and-a-half people last year. Water distribution and electricity systems in the main urban centres were rehabilitated with the support of partners from the stabilization sector.

"During the coming months, expected improvements in the security situation will be essential to ensure populations' access to basic services," she added.

However, significant needs remained, such as access to water in rural areas and Kidal; maintenance of public health and livestock conditions; and support for the next planting season, to safeguard household food security.

The humanitarian response plan for Mali, which involves partnering UN and non-governmental agencies, called for $354 million this year and included a crucial component to build community resilience.

The country's Government, with the support of UN agencies and programmes as well as the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), has been seeking to restore stability and rebuild following a series of setbacks since early 2012, including a military coup d'etat, and renewed fighting between Government forces and Tuareg rebels.
Confronting bitter winter, UN agency steps up food aid in conflict-affected eastern Ukraine

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 25 January 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Confronting bitter winter, UN agency steps up food aid in conflict-affected eastern Ukraine, 25 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a87f05412.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

25 January 2016 - With food security expected to worsen in conflict-affected areas of eastern Ukraine during the cold winter months, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced today that it would extend its emergency operation to help feed more than 260,000 people until the end of June.

"The ongoing conflict has affected tens of thousands of people who are in desperate need of help," the WFP Head of Office in Ukraine, Giancarlo Stopponi, said, stressing that the agency urgently needs $35 million to continue to provide aid through June.

"They are either trapped by the conflict or have fled their homes, thinking they would return in a few months and are now living in difficult conditions, especially in winter when temperatures are extremely low.

"WFP is overcoming enormous operational challenges to deliver food assistance to the most vulnerable people - especially in harsh weather conditions," he added, noting that the aid will target both non-Government-controlled and Government-controlled areas.

It is estimated that more than 1.5 million people have been displaced in Ukraine since the beginning of the crisis in 2014.

WFP will give priority to the most vulnerable and food insecure among internally displaced persons (IDPs), returnees and conflict-affected residents as well as female-headed households.

It will provide food to those who are particularly vulnerable such as the elderly, the disabled and those unable to leave the conflict-affected areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, mostly in non-Government controlled areas and across the 'contact line.'

It will also continue to assist people with cash or vouchers, in relatively secure IDP-hosting communities in Government-controlled areas where the food supply is adequate and markets are functioning well.

WFP also provides assistance to people living in hospitals or social institutions facing a dire financial situation, many of which are hosting IDPs.

The agency has stepped up its activities in recent months. In November it increased aid to non-Government-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine, delivering food to areas of Luhansk for the first time in four months ago.
7 questions for Hassan Rouhani if you run into him

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 26 January 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, 7 questions for Hassan Rouhani if you run into him, 26 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a87f6140b.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrives tomorrow in Paris for an official visit and will give a news conference on 28 January. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) suggests a few questions that could be put to him.

1/ You promised a change "in favour of free speech and media freedom" and you undertook to "free all political prisoners." Why is Iran still one of the world's five biggest prisons for journalists?

A total of 20 professional journalists and as many non-professional journalists are currently detained in Iran in connection with their reporting. Since Rouhani's election as president on 14 June 2013, at least 50 journalists have been arrested, mostly by the Revolutionary Guards, and some have received long jail terms. Eleven newspapers have been closed.

2/ You are guarantor of the Iranian constitution, which says that "publications and newspapers are free to express all opinions except those that perturb the bases of Islam and public decency." Why don't you enforce it?

Article 24 of Iran's constitution guarantees media freedom. Iran is nonetheless ranked 173rd out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. As official guarantor of the constitution's implementation, Rouhani could end this unacceptable state of affairs. No fewer than nine official entities in Iran are tasked with carrying out censorship that is clearly unconstitutional.

3/ How is it that the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has never given a news conference and never given any interviews?

Aside from a few words as he left hospital in September 2014, Ali Khamenei has never answered questions from journalists. The Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader since June 1989 demonizes the traditional media and new media. More than 300 media outlets have been closed for supposedly being "foreign enemies within the country," thousands of websites have been censored and more than 500 journalists and Internet activists have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured and given long jail sentences. Khamenei describes Iran as the world's freest country, but he has never agreed to an interview, not even for his own website.

4/ The United States may obviously have a hand in destabilization operations in Iran but why do you systematically regard all critical journalists as western spies and traitors?

Journalists who are arrested and jailed in Iran are usually charged with "spying," "collaborating with foreign states," participating in "enemy infiltration plans," "actions against national security" or "contacts with foreign journalists." The threat of such paranoid accusations, which allow the authorities to carry out "preventive arrests," are also used to silence Iranian journalists and intellectuals.

5/ When will you ask parliament to amend the media law, which obliges journalists to act as government propagandists?

The 1986 media law (which was amended in 2000 and 2009 to take account of online publications) allows the authorities to verify that journalists do not "threaten the Islamic Republic," "insult the Supreme Leader" or "disseminate false information." This law clearly violates article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

6/ Tehran's Evin prison is a place where human rights and civil rights are not respected. When do you plan to end this state of affairs?

Evin prison is one of the world's worst detention centres, comparable to the Santiago de Chile stadium in 1973 and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Two special security wings in Evin - Section 209 and Section 240 - are controlled respectively by the intelligence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards. In violation of Iran's law, the names of those held in these special wings, who include several journalists, do not appear in the official prison registers. The prison's director is not even allowed to visit these wings.

7/ You have replaced the "Halal Internet" by "intelligent filtering" but in practice the situation has not changed and the Internet continues to be controlled. When will restrictions be lifted on Internet access?

The relaxation in Internet surveillance and control since the end of the Ahmadinejad era is just a facade. The creation of a "Halal Internet" has simply been replaced by "intelligent filtering", which provides only selective and controlled access to the Internet and above all to social networks. Censorship, which is officially supposed to protect the public from immoral content, has been extended to political content, information about religion, and websites covering human rights and women's rights.
Mounting dangers for journalists in Yemen

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 25 January 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Mounting dangers for journalists in Yemen, 25 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a87f7a40b.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the growing dangers for media personnel in Yemen, where a second journalist has been killed in the space of a week as a result of the Saudi-led coalition's air-strikes and an Al Jazeera reporter has been abducted together with his crew.

Hashem Mohamed Homrane, a reporter for the pro-Houthi TV station Al Masira, died on 22 January from the injuries he received in an air strike the day before in Dhahiane, a town in northern province of Saada. He was only 17.

Local news media said he was injured while preparing a report on the damage caused by early airstrikes in the town. His death came just five days after a freelance reporter was killed in similar circumstances in the southern outskirts of the capital, Sanaa.

"The situation for journalists is becoming extremely worrying in an increasingly hostile environment for freedom of information," said Alexandra El Khazen, the head of RSF's Middle East desk.

"We remind all parties to the conflict that they are responsible for the safety of journalists and that crimes of violence against them must not go unpunished. RSF also calls for the release of all journalists and media workers held by armed groups."

Al Jazeera said it lost contact with its correspondent in Taiz, Hamdi Al Bokari, on 18 January while he was covering the fighting between rebel and pro-government forces. The TV channel said it feared that Bokari was kidnapped along with Abdelaziz al-Sabri, a reporter for the newspaper Al Masdar, and their driver, Mounir al-Soubaie.

Security conditions in Yemen deteriorated dramatically in 2015 as a result of the fighting between government forces (backed by the Saudi-led coalition) and the Houthi rebels, who are allied with the supporters of former Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh.

According to RSF's tally, 17 journalists and media workers are currently held hostage by armed groups - either Houthi rebels or Al-Qaeda members.

Yemen is ranked 168th out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.
Cameroon: Authorities must drop "non-denunciation" charges against three journalists

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 25 January 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Cameroon: Authorities must drop "non-denunciation" charges against three journalists, 25 January 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a87fc740d.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Cameroonian authorities must immediately and unconditionally drop all charges against three journalists accused of failing to disclose information and sources, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders said on the eve of their trial before a military court.

Journalists Baba Wame, Rodrigue Ndeutchoua Tongue, and Felix Cyriaque Ebole Bola are due to appear before a military court in Yaounde tomorrow. They are the first journalists charged for the crime of 'non-denunciation' in a military court.

The journalists had been investigating a story about allegations of collusion between elements of the security forces and a leader of an armed group from Central African Republic that had been accused of previously attacked a town in the east of Cameroon. They were charged with failing to share information that could harm national security.

"Charging journalists for abiding by the ethical standards of their profession is a violation of the right to freedom of expression, and a worrying development in Cameroon," said Stephen Cockburn Amnesty International West and Central Africa deputy regional director.

If convicted, the three journalists could be sentenced to jail terms between one and five years and/or a fine between 50,000 to 5 million CFA (approximately US$832 - US$8,325).

Having received documents about the alleged affair, the journalists had written to the police to get more information. Receiving no reply they abandoned the investigation and did not publish the story.

They were originally charged in October 2014 under Article 107 of Cameroon's Criminal Code, and placed under judicial control, registering with the police each week and prevented from publishing in the media. The journalists deny they uncovered any information that could undermine security, and say they wish to protect their sources.

"Cameroon's Criminal Code should be reformed in conformity with international standards to protect freedom of expression and the confidentiality of sources. The public have a right to information and national security must not be used as a pretext to stop journalists from doing their job," said Clea Kahn-Sriber, Reporters Without Borders Africa Desk manager.

Cameroon has ratified both the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which provide protections for journalists and their sources.
Afghan Human Rights Workers Under Threat

Publisher Institute for War and Peace Reporting Author Mina Habib Publication Date 21 January 2016 Citation / Document Symbol ARR Issue 533 Cite as Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Afghan Human Rights Workers Under Threat, 21 January 2016, ARR Issue 533, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a891514.html [accessed 20 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Human rights work in Afghanistan faces a greater threat from elements within the government than from the armed insurgents, according to experts.

They warn that government forces are often unwilling or unable to ensure the rule of law, leading to an increase in violations. Activists also told IWPR that new legislation may further imperil basic rights.

"Our staff members have been threatened even by high-ranking government authorities," Lal Gul, chairman of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation, told IWPR.

He said that influential powerbrokers posed more of a problem than threats from armed insurgents. Assaults on his staff had gone unpunished he added, noting a grenade attack on their head office eight months ago.

Despite his staff cooperating fully with the security forces and petitioning the president's office, there had been no progress into the search for the culprits, Lal continued.

"If fifth columnists and powerful people were not involved in this attack, why is it being covered up?" he asked.

Political analyst Atiqullah Amarkhail was also convinced that some threats against human rights workers emanated from high-ranking figures within the government.

"As long as there are criminal individuals within the body of the government, the law will not be implemented nor human rights ensured," he said.

Sima Samar, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) told IWPR that weak governance and patchy implementation of the law had led to higher rates of violations.

"Unfortunately, there is no suitable political commitment from the government to bringing about justice and ensuring human rights, which is our biggest problem. Some individuals currently in power are accused of the violation of human rights."

The AIHRC came into conflict with the previous government of Hamid Karzai over this issue.

In December 2011, the commission was due to present a major report on three decades of human rights abuses in Afghanistan, which was said to include the names of former warlords who are currently high-ranking government officials.

The report was never published, and at the time Samar said, "When I asked the president to guarantee the safety of commission members once the report was published, Hamed Karzai gave me a negative response".

GRAVE CONCERNS OVER ABUSES

Experts in the field marked last year's international human rights day on December 12 by issuing dire warnings of an increase in violations across the country.

Douglas Keh, United Nations Development Program Afghanistan country director, told a ceremony at Kabul university that he had grave concerns about the situation.

"There are few countries that face such intense conflicts as Afghanistan. Under these circumstances people cannot receive their fundamental rights and have no access to justice," he said.

Abdul Basir Anwar, minister of justice of Afghanistan, acknowledged that there was a problem.

"The cause for the continuing violation of human rights is the lack of rule of law; I call on all institutions to bring human rights violators to justice and punish them in accordance with the law," he said.

However, AIHRC spokesman Rafiullah Baidar said that a major problem was corruption across the entire system, particularly in the judiciary.Criminals who are well-connected or in positions of power themselves felt free to act with impunity, he said, adding that legal action was rarely taken against such offenders.

Baidar complained that this unequal implementation of the law meant that justice was impossible.

"Unfortunately, due to the fact that those who violate human rights have powerful friends in government, we have mostly been unable to achieve our aims [as an organisation]." he said.

AIHRC regional head Shamsul Haq Ahmadzai highlighted some specific examples of what he said was corruption in the legal system.

Ahmadzai said there were hundreds of prisoners still in detention Bagram prison, a former US facility now back under sole Afghan control, despite having been cleared by court decisions.

"There is one prisoner who has already served his 20-year period of his imprisonment, but because some of powerful individuals in the government are against his release, he is still in prison despite spending 24 years there," he said.

Baidar warned of recent legislative moves that he said completely contradicted human rights principles.

He gave an example of an annex to the Afghan penal code created in September 2015.

"This extension means that the security institutions can put someone accused of a crime under surveillance for an undefined period of time and without any documentation. The intelligence service can also keep an individual in prison after their term has ended if [they deem it] necessary."

Despite repeated requests, the spokespeople of the attorney general's office and the ministry of interior affairs declined to be interviewed.

Zafar Hashimi, deputy spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, said that the government cooperated fully with human rights advocacy groups.

He said that the president was committed to bringing war criminals and human rights violators to justice and would not tolerate corruption.

"The duty of the government is to implement the constitution and in the constitution, there is no room for those who betray people and make illegal deals," Hashimi said, adding that if human rights groups encountered problems they should lodge official complaints.

Some experts said that the only way the situation could improve was through outside intervention.

"The Afghan government should observe the human rights conventions that Afghanistan is party to," said Gul, of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation. "The international community and the United Nations should put pressure on the Afghan government to respect human rights and to ensure the security of the employees of these organisations."

Political scientist Amarkhail was also convinced that the situation could only be changed through outside pressure.

"Right now the only way forward is for these human rights bodies to get in touch with international advocacy organisations so that they pressurise the government of Afghanistan to cooperate with the groups working here to ensure human rights,' he said. "Otherwise, human rights violators will remain within the government, and will always create problems and prevent justice being done."

Copyright notice:  Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Fighting flu starts with a shot, and it's time for Texans to get one
Girl Scout Cookies just got more addicting

Girl Scout cookies are addicting enough already, but now there is even more reason to buy an extra few boxes.

Cookie sales kicked off recently and run through Feb. 28. And, just in time, Taste of Home magazine is showcasing several tempting desserts made with Thin Mints, Do-si-dos, Caramel deLites and other favorites. The magazine sponsored the first 2015 National Girl Scout Cookie Recipe Contest, and the finalists are in the February/March issue available on newsstands and online.

The magazine staff gleaned through submissions, tested recipes and selected 16 finalists, four each in four categories: cakes, pies cupcakes; cookies, brownies, bars; pudding, ice cream, gelatin desserts; and candies, according to a contest news release.

The public then voted for their favorites on the magazine's website.

Shortbread Fudge Tiramisu, created by Leilani Smith of Clyde, won the pudding, ice cream, gelatin desserts category using Girl Scout Thanks-a-Lot cookies. Thin shortbread cookies with a fudge bottom are soaked in coffee and interspersed between layers of a custard that includes creamy mascarpone.

"It's plate-licking good," said D Grant Smith, Smith's husband.

Smith was inspired by an Italian friend's family recipe for tiramisu.

"She uses Maria cookies instead of lady fingers," Smith said. "Her recipe is perfect to begin with. I just swapped out the cookies."

Smith split the $250 prize money with her friend.

"You could use the regular shortbread cookies but I think the chocolate ones give it a nice taste," Smith said.

The final recipe printed in the magazine was adjusted by the Taste of Home staff to replace the uncooked eggs in Smith's original entry, she said. The contest rules stipulated that the recipes could be modified by the staff.

"But the original recipe is on my blog," Smith said.

Since 2010 she has been chronicling online about the challenges and joys of remodeling her 100-year-old house in Clyde. She also loves cooking, so her recipes with accompanying step-by-step photos started making their way into the blog, keepingupwithmrssmith.com.

In 2012 Smith entered a Taste of Home holiday seasons contest and won the Halloween category. Shorty after, the magazine invited her to be a field editor, which involves annually submitting six original recipes and testing six recipes on the magazine's website. Field editors also receive early notice of upcoming contests, Smith said.

"I first thought about doing Thin Mint ice cream but then I thought, no, everyone is going to do Thin Mint ice cream," Smith said.

Her cooking inspiration comes from childhood memories and travels.

"Basically my cravings help me create recipes," Smith said. "If I find something I really like, I try to reinvent it."

The Taste of Home cookie dessert contest was new on the national level, but Girl Scout area councils have been promoting the use of cookies in desserts for a while, said Gay Ganske, product sales/retail coordinator for Abilene for the Girl Scouts of Texas Oklahoma Plains Council.

"A lot of people use Shortbread cookies crumbed for a pie crust," Ganske said.

She also has tasted at the Fort Worth corporate offices a cheesecake with a crust of Cranberry Citrus Crisps cookies.

Ganske has even made cupcakes with Thin Mints and a boxed mix of Devil's Food cake. The cupcake batter is made according to package directions. A layer of batter goes on the bottom of the cupcake liner, then a Thin Mint, then more cake batter. For added richness, Ganske said she uses packaged chocolate mint frosting.

"Then to make it look pretty, you put some chopped Thin Mints on top," Ganske said. "It looks like you worked really hard on it."

Another dessert option is cake balls, Ganske said. In a food processor, combine a box of the Lemonades or Thin Mints cookies with about four ounces of cream cheese. Shape the mixture into small balls, chill in the refrigerator and then dip in melted chocolate, she said.

Despite all the new tempting ways to enjoy Girl Scout cookies, even cooking aficionado Smith admits the old way is still the best way.

"I'm a purist. I just eat them out of the sleeve," Smith said with a laugh.

Following are other dessert recipes using Girl Scout cookies, include Smith's Shortbread Fudge Tiramisu, from girlscouts.org, the official website of Girl Scouts.

GIRL SCOUT COOKIES SALE

What: Girl Scout cookies can be bought by individual girls or at cookie sales outside area businesses.

When: Sales run through Feb. 28.

Where: To find a cookie sale location, visit gs-top.org, click on the "Cookies" tab and follow the links.

Cost: $4 a box.

SHORTBREAD FUDGE TIRAMISU

Prep Time: 25 minutes plus chilling.

Ingredients

2 egg yolks

1/4 cup sugar

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 carton (8 ounces) mascarpone cheese

2/3 cup heavy whipping cream

27 Girl Scout Thanks-a-Lot cookies

1 cup brewed espresso or strong coffee

2 tablespoons baking cocoa

Directions

1 In top of a double boiler or metal bowl over simmering water, combine egg yolks and sugar; whisk constantly until mixture is thick, holds a ribbon and a thermometer reads 160 degrees. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Cool completely.

2 Gently stir mascarpone cheese into egg yolk mixture. In a small bowl, beat cream until soft peaks form; fold into cheese mixture.

3 Quickly dip 9 Thanks-a-Lot cookies into coffee (about 5 seconds), allowing excess to drip off. Arrange in a single layer in an 8-inch square dish. Spread with 3/4 cup cheese mixture; sprinkle with baking cocoa. Repeat layers twice. Refrigerate, covered, at least 8 hours or overnight. Yields 9 servings.

Recipe courtesy Leilani Smith of Clyde, girlscouts.org.

PEANUT BUTTER TRAIL MIX FUDGE

Prep Time: 10 minutes plus chilling

Ingredients

1 pound white candy coating, chopped

1 cup creamy peanut butter

1 package (6-1/2 ounces) Girl Scout Peanut Butter Patties/Tagalongs cookies, coarsely chopped, divided

1 cup coarsely chopped salted peanuts, divided

1/2 cup chopped dried cherries, divided

Directions

1 Line a 9-inch square pan with foil, letting ends extend up sides. In a large microwave-safe bowl, melt candy coating with peanut butter; stir until smooth.

2 Stir in 1 cup chopped Peanut Butter Patties/Tagalongs cookies, 1/2 cup peanuts and 1/4 cup cherries. Spread into prepared pan. Sprinkle with remaining chopped Peanut Butter Patties/Tagalongs cookies, peanuts and cherries. Refrigerate until firm.

3 Using foil, lift fudge out of pan. Remove foil; cut fudge into 1-inch squares. Store between layers of waxed paper in an airtight container. Yields 2 pounds.

Recipe courtesy Kim Varner, girlscouts.org.

LEMON SHORTBREAD CHEESE CAKE

Prep Time: 30 minutes plus freezing

Ingredients

1 package (9 ounces) Girl Scout Shortbread/Trefoils cookies

1/4 cup butter, melted

Filling

2 packages (8 1/2 ounces each) Girl Scout Lemonades cookies

1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream

Lemon Curd

3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup butter, cubed

Directions

1 Place Shortbreads/Trefoils cookies in a food processor; pulse until fine crumbs form. Add butter; pulse just until blended. Press onto bottom of a greased 9-inch springform pan. Freeze 10 minutes.

2 Place Lemonades cookies in a clean food processor; pulse until fine crumbs form. In a large bowl, beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla until smooth. Gradually beat in Lemonades cookie crumbs. In another bowl, beat cream until soft peaks form; fold into cream cheese mixture. Spread over crust. Freeze, covered, for 1 hour.

3 Meanwhile, in a small heavy saucepan, whisk eggs, sugar and lemon juice until blended. Add butter; cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until mixture is just thick enough to coat a metal spoon and a thermometer reads at least 170 degrees. Do not allow to boil. Remove from heat immediately. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a small bowl; cool. Press plastic wrap onto surface of lemon curd. Refrigerate until cold.

4 Spoon 1 cup lemon curd over cheesecake. Freeze 1 hour longer. Remove rim from pan. Serve with remaining lemon curd. Yields 12 servings.

Recipe courtesy Rosalia Roger, girlscouts.org.
Incident reports released by the Abilene Police Department:

Credit card abuse, 800 block of Waters Drive, Monday

A woman told police someone charged $6,857 to her credit card.

Theft, 2000 block of North First Street, Monday

A man told police someone stole a $10,000 travel trailer from his workplace after cutting a chain and padlock off a gate.

Robbery, 3400 block of Ambler Avenue, Tuesday

Police said a man reportedly brandished a weapon at a store clerk and stole an unknown amount of money.

Forgery, 3700 block of West Lake Road, Monday

Police said a woman used a counterfeit $100 bill at a convenience store to pay for cigarettes and got change back.

Burglary, 3600 block of Grape Street, Monday

A woman told police someone stole $950 in property from her residence after entering through her unlocked back door.

Criminal mischief, 800 block of Elmwood Drive, Monday

Someone shot two front windows of a man's residence with a BB/pellet gun, causing $300 in damage.

Criminal mischief, 3600 block of Cedar Run Road, Monday

Police said someone keyed a vehicle, causing about $1,200 in damage.

Criminal mischief, 600 block of Shelton Street, Monday

A woman told police someone broke the rear window of her vehicle, causing at least $100 in damage.
The Snyder Police Department identified the two men killed in the alleged home invasion incident Sunday in the 2000 block of Avenue Z, as well as the weapons used, according to a media release Tuesday.

Snyder police and the Texas Rangers are investigating the death of 25-year-old Joshua David Hoover of Snyder and 29-year-old Benjamyn Leslee Bruns of Victoria, after already arresting 24-year-old Juan Barron of Arizona and 28-year-old Nicole Dabney of Snyder and charging both with tampering with evidence in connection with the incident.

Authorities recovered one handgun and three knives at the scene of the incident and they believe no one else is involved.

According to the news release on Monday, at 8:55 a.m. Sunday, police were dispatched to the 2000 block of Avenue Z to investigate a report of a suspicious vehicle parked on the side of the road. Officers at the scene found a parked vehicle with its engine running.

A few minutes later, at 9:13 a.m., a man and woman went into the Law Enforcement Center and reported that at 4 a.m. two people broke into their house in the 2100 block of Avenue Z, the release stated. The woman told police 'an assault had taken place at that location and two male subjects had been killed.'

Officers sent to the scene found the two deceased men. The bodies were scheduled for autopsies Tuesday in Lubbock.
Officially kicking off his campaign to serve Place 3 on the Abilene Independent School District's board of trustees, Sammy Garcia laid out four points as his main motivations for seeking office.

The former trustee, who served from 2008-2012, said the biggest challenge facing the district is the change that's already occurred and the change that's coming in the future.

From construction changing some schools and closing others to personnel and board upheaval, and a coming legislative session in 2017 that could affect the future of education in the state, Garcia said he feels someone with experience should be at the table to keep the board strong and moving in the right direction.

'We need a strong board to be ready for anything the state will throw our way,' he said. 'I've had experience facing these types of situations in the past and look forward to facing any challenges that arise.'

He also lamented the turmoil AISD has gone through in the past roughly 14 months, with two teacher-student sex scandals, a superintendent resignation and arrest and several others investigated for possible criminal activity, he said the district needs to heal and his work across economic, social and demographic communities gives him a strong voice at the table.

Garcia wants to make sure the students receive the best education they can, which would allow them choice after graduation.

He owns a State Farm Insurance Agency on North Willis Street and has served on numerous councils and committees beyond Abilene ISD since moving to Abilene in 2000.

Place 3 on the school board has been occupied by Barry Hoefer, but Hoefer said he is not running. Other spots on the board up for election are places 1, 2 and 7. Jeffrey Arrington submitted his paperwork to seek Place 1 seat, currently held by Robert Laird who said he has no plans to seek re-election, while Randy Piersall, the current Place 2 trustee, is seeking re-election.

In Place 7, Abilene Education Foundation President Angie Wiley has filed for election after Kelvin Kelley resigned in December.

Interested individuals have until Feb. 19 to file for a place on the school board, with the election set for May 7.

Twitter: @TimothyChippARN
Taylor County Judge Downing Bolls estimated it would take 10 days before someone filed a complaint against the county for banning firearms inside the courthouse, he said Tuesday in his office.

It took almost a month.

Terry Holcomb, executive director of gun rights advocacy group Texas Carry sent a letter of complaint to Bolls regarding what Holcomb says are "unlawfully posted" signs prohibiting guns in the Taylor County Courthouse. Bolls received the letter Monday.

The county is working to respond to Holcomb's letter, Bolls said. It has three days to reply or remove the signs.

"We're notifying governmental entities that are violating the law on behalf of our members all over the state," Holcomb said. "We try to work with the local governments to try to get them to understand the law instead of intentionally misinterpreting it because that is absolutely what is happening."

Those who believe they see violations of the law must first file a complaint with the governmental agency posting the signs, according to the Attorney General's website. If the agency does not remove the signs within three days, a complaint may be filed with the Attorney General's Office, which will investigate the matter.

Texas Carry has thousands of members across the state, Holcomb said. They reach out to him when they see what they believe to be violations of the open carry law, and he files the complaints, which sometimes end up in the Attorney General's office.

Holcomb said he has distributed more than 50 notifications to local governments and has not "lost one yet." Either the political subdivision removes the signs, or Holcomb files a complaint with the Attorney General, who orders them to remove the signs.

Bolls said the county has no intention of removing the signs from the courthouse, which has a sign on the front door citing the law that allows courts to ban firearms.

"I'm not surprised," Bolls said. "This is really to be expected. We think we're in compliance with the law. Our judges have declared what they believe to be essential areas in the courthouse. They're allowed to do that."

As of Jan. 1, licensed Texans can openly carry holstered handguns in many public places and private businesses that permit it. Firearms are still prohibited in schools, election sites, racetracks, courtrooms, correctional facilities and rooms where government officials, like city councils and county commissioners, meet.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion last month stating that buildings that house offices in addition to courts should permit the open carry of guns. The ruling was in response to a request from Allison Palmer, district attorney for the 51st Judicial District that includes Tom Green County.

The law prohibits guns in areas essential to the court's operation, and it is up to judges to designate those areas, Bolls said.

"If a district judge makes a ruling that tells you this is an essential area, then you do it," the county judge said. "If somebody sues you, you go from there. There are some things the Legislature didn't answer for us, and it's going to take lawsuits and things like that for us to go through to finally have these things decided."

While Holcomb has not had to file a complaint with the Attorney General about a courthouse, he believes Paxton's ruling is "crystal clear."

"If it's a multipurpose building, you can't exclude CHL holders," he said. "That really is unacceptable behavior. We're all expected to be law-abiding citizens, and we shouldn't have to force our own local governments to comply with the law."

Holcomb said he would give Taylor County more than three days to respond. It's possible he will file a follow-up complaint with the Attorney General.

Twitter: BrookeCrum_ARN
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In open defiance of authorities, over a thousand Tibetans in western Chinas Sichuan province gathered this week in public at a Buddhist monastery to pray for the long life of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who is receiving medical treatment in the U.S.



Participants in the gathering had assembled two weeks before at Chokri monastery in Kardze (in Chinese, Ganzi) county in the Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture for an already scheduled traditional ceremony, a Tibetan source in India told RFAs Tibetan Service.



This is an annual prayer gathering which usually begins on Jan. 13 and ends on Jan. 25, RFAs source, named Lodroe, said.



But following a notice sent out on Jan. 20 by the [India-based] Central Tibetan Administration requesting prayers for His Holiness the Dalai Lama while he undergoes a health check at the Mayo Clinic in the U.S., the Tibetans extended their praying for two extra days, Lodroe said.



They dedicated the gatherings final two days, Jan. 25 and 26, to those specific prayers, he said.



Video and photos circulating on social media sites and obtained by RFA show hundreds of Tibetan men, women, and children seated before a large shrine at the monastery and praying before a large image of the Dalai Lama, whose photos are banned by Chinese authorities in Tibetan areas.



No crackdown on event



The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet into exile in India in 1959, is reviled by Chinese leaders as a dangerous separatist who seeks to split the formerly self-governing region from Beijings rule.



In what he calls a Middle Way Approach, though, the Dalai Lama himself says that he seeks only a meaningful autonomy for Tibet as a part of China, with protections for the regions language, religion, and culture.



No word has been received of a possible suppression by Chinese authorities of this weeks gathering in Kardze, a second source living in India with connections in the region told RFA on Tuesday.



So far there has been no word of a crackdown because of the prayer gatherings, Chokri Phuntsok Tsering said, adding,The situation is said to be tense, though.



Speaking on Wednesday at a prayer service held in Dharamsala, India, Tibets exile political leader, or Sikyong, Lobsang Sangay said that the Dalai Lama, 80, is expected to make a full recovery after treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and that there are now no major concerns for his health.



This has been confirmed by His Holiness himself as well as the doctors who are looking after [him], Sangay said in a statement released by the exile Central Tibetan Administration.



Reported by Sonam Wangdue for RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney.
A series of classes promoting the study of the Tibetan language and taught by university-affiliated instructors has gone ahead with apparent state approval in a Tibetan-populated county in western Chinas Sichuan province, sources say.



The classes were held over the winter school vacation and pulled in around 200 students in Tawu (in Chinese, Daofu) county in the Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Geshe Yarma Tsering, a monk in South Indias Drepung monastery with contacts in Tawu, told RFAs Tibetan Service.



Based on the students language proficiency, the classes were divided into four levelsadvanced, dialectical, intermediate, and beginners, Tsering said.



The local Tibetan students in Tawu warmly embraced this crash course and were very attentive during the teachings, Tsering said, adding that the series of intensive classes was also well received by students parents.



Classes were taught by Tawu Gyaltse, a student at the Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou, capital of neighboring Gansu province, and by two university friends, possibly accounting for local authorities approval of the initiative, sources said.



At the conclusion of the 20-day winter course in Tawu, a closing ceremony was held, presided over by Tawu Nyatso monastery schoolmaster Geshe Paljor, Tsering said.



Prizes were awarded for top-performing students.



Bilingual education is a necessity for living in a modern society, course instructor Tawu Gyaltsen said, addressing students and others at the event.



Teaching of the Tibetan language should be promoted and strengthened through systematic planning, Gyaltsen said.



Language rights have become a particular focus for Tibetan efforts to reassert national identity in recent years, with Chinese authorities frequently closing language classes taught outside the state-controlled education system.



Informally organized language courses are typically deemed illegal associations, with tightened security measures in Qinghai provinces Pema (Banma) county recently leading area residents to take classes in secret due to fear of arrest, sources said.



Reported by Sonam Wangdue. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney.
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung (R) retakes his seat after casting his ballot as Vietnam Communist Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong (L) sits on the podium during the election of the new Central Committee in Hanoi, Jan. 26, 2016.

Vietnams ruling Communist Party re-elected party chief Nguyen Phu Trong to a second term as general secretary, likely putting an end to any attempt to reform the one-party states human rights abuses, observers tell the RFAs Vietnamese service.

Vietnams 12th party congress named Trong to its 19-member Politburo -- the all-powerful body that handles the day-to-day affairs of the government and the party. He was then immediately chosen as the general-secretary and the countrys de-facto leader. The announcement was made on the official Vietnam News Agency's website.

By selecting Trong and a slate of hard-liners, the ruling Politburo is signaling an unwillingness for the Communist Party to make any immediate shift toward a more representative and less repressive government, Jennifer Dunham, research director at the independent watchdog organization Freedom House, told RFAs Vietnamese Service .

The election maintains the same level of repression of the media, of civil society activism and restrictions on the Internet, she said. With the appointment of the new secretary general, any kind of hoped-for reform probably wont happen because hes one of the old guard and will likely continue the policies of his predecessors.

Catholic priest Phan Van Loi described the elections as a sham saying the moves are only for show.

We see that as an abuse of power -- a violation of the peoples rights because those three posts are for governing the country, he told RFA. They have to reflect the wish of all people. That is why civil society groups have to protest the party in the selections of the three most important posts, but of course the communist government still continues their repression.

A priest in the diocese of Hue in central Vietnam, Van Loi said the entire slate is problematic from a human rights perspective.

Public Security Minister Tran Dai Quang is expected to become Vietnams new president. The general secretary, prime minister, president, and the chair of National Assembly, are the four key members in the collective leadership represented by the Politburo, while the 180-member Central Committee, which handles policy.

We are concerned to hear that Tran Dai Quang would become the president, he told RFA. When he was the police minister, he was very adamant in his crackdowns. Now that he is the president, he will have more power to do more.

The China Card

While little broad change is expected, Trong will still have his work cut out for him as he attempts to steer the country through a rocky time with an ascendant China on one hand and a desire for economic reform on the other.

The 71-year-old Trong is seen as being receptive to Beijings economic and political overtures even as the two countries are at odds over Beijings ambitions in the South China Sea.

China has built a series of islands in the seaway with airstrips that can handle military aircraft and has moved an oil platform into the area. Both China and Vietnam have conflicting claims in the area that is transited by one-third of the worlds sea traffic and is rich in mineral wealth.

Even though Trong has closer ties to China, he is unlikely to capitulate to Beijings wishes. Trong will want to avoid going soft on China as most Vietnamese object to Chinas island-building projects in disputed waters, and they resent Chinas economic influence as they feel it smacks of Chinese imperial conquests.

Political machinations in the spotlight

The vote also puts Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dungs political career on hold as Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc is now expected to become the prime minister.

Trongs selection marks the end of a round of unprecedented political maneuvering as Dung was attempting to hold onto his spot. Dungs tenure was marked with unprecedented economic reforms as he looked to the West and particularly the United States for foreign that helped triple per capita GDP in 10 years. Dung was also viewed as standing up to China over the territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Dung won praise for his economic plan and his stance toward China, but he was also accused of ignoring government corruption by allowing unhealthy doses of patronage and maintaining a lack of transparency.

While Dung may be eclipsed, its unlikely his policies will wane entirely as the economic reforms he started have the backing of the party elites of which Trong is one. Dung is also seen as brokering a compromise that would see Trong step aside before the end of his full five-year term.

Reported by Gia Minh for RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Brooks Boliek.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has condemned an attack against a journalist that was carried out earlier this week by police in Belarus.

The OSCE's representative on freedom of the media, Dunja Mijatovic, issued a statement on January 27 calling on the authorities in Minsk to ensure Paval Dabravolski's safety.

Dabravolski, a journalist with the Tut.by news website, was beaten by police while covering the detention of two protesters in a court building in Minsk on January 25.

Dabravolski's face was bruised in the attack. He was then detained and fined by the same court on charges of hooliganism and disobeying the police.

Dabravolski says the police also erased data from his mobile phone.

Mijatovic called the situation "unacceptable," and said police "should facilitate the work of journalists, not obstruct their activities and intimidate them."
Last year saw a greater decline in global freedom than any other in the past decade, according to a leading rights monitor.

The U.S.-based organization Freedom House says freedom ebbed in 72 countries around the world in 2015, while just 43 countries witnessed an increase.

A key finding of the report was that "fear of social unrest" led Russia, China, and "other authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent."

Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan also received special attention for joining a group of 10 other countries the authors regard as the "Worst of the Worst" as far as political rights and civil liberties are concerned.

It was the 10th straight year that Freedom House has reported an overall decline in global freedom.

"This [year's] decline was the result of several factors, including the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as other areas which are not only intensifying the humanitarian crises in these countries but also generated unprecedented numbers of refugees and fostered terrorist groups that inspired or organized attacks," Jennifer Dunham, the director of research for the report, told RFE/RL.

In its report, Freedom In The World 2016, released on January 27, Freedom House said wars and other violent conflicts "fueled xenophobic sentiment in democratic countries."

Balkan Concerns

Among other important findings in the report was that Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia were deemed to have "suffered from crippling government dysfunction in 2015" that prevented democratic progress and assured those Balkan countries that joining the European Union remains "a distant prospect."

The report warns that Bosnia-Herzegovina could see even worse government paralysis if a planned referendum takes place in Republika Srpska, the majority-Serb entity within that country, on the legitimacy of Bosnia's national courts.

Dunham said there were "concerning declines in governance" in the Balkans in 2015.

She cited Macedonia's ruling party being implicated in electoral fraud and a wire-tapping scandal and nonstop battles with the opposition that required EU intervention; the fragile and still-pending approval of a "normalization" agreement between Serbia and Kosovo; a "factionalized" Bosnian government that is hampered by the Republika Srpska leadership's moves for greater autonomy; and the administration of Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic's "continued harassment" of the independent media.

Freedom House also cited Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula -- which was forcibly annexed by Russia in 2014 -- as experiencing "dramatic setbacks" in freedom.

Dunham said Russian authorities in Crimea continued in 2015 to suppress dissent, including shutting down independent media and civil-society groups, particularly those representing the Tatar community.

She added that many opponents of the Russian seizure of Crimea have been arrested or driven into exile.

Ukraine Stymied

Dunham said that, although Ukraine "retained the democratic gains" achieved after the 2014 ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, further progress was stymied in 2015 by fighting in the Donbas region between Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed separatists, controversy over decentralization reforms, and rivalry among the country's leading political figures and oligarchs.

Dunham said Russia's involvement in the conflict in Syria seemed to "deflect attention from what it was doing in Ukraine" but that its actions in eastern Ukraine are still a big concern for Freedom House and a major reason for its low designation for Russia.

She said the Russian government in 2015 also expanded the role of propaganda within state-controlled media and ratcheted up its domestic control by declaring some NGOs foreign agents, part of "increased [government] repression on independent activism, the media, and civil society."

Turning to Central Asia, Dunham said that, along with Uzbekistan coming in just ahead of North Korea at the bottom of the world rankings and Turkmenistan only two places ahead of its neighbor on the list of the world's least-free countries, Tajikistan had a "watershed year for getting worse."

She pointed to the Tajik government's banning of the last remaining opposition party, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, which Dunham said was a violation of the accord that ended the Tajik civil war in 1997.

Tajikistan also clamped down further on independent media sources and any type of public criticism of the government in 2015, Dunham said.



She added that Tajikistan is "really moving toward the category of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan," which she called "very disturbing."

Iran Executions

In Iran, Dunham said there was unfortunately a spike in executions and the shutting down of several civil-society groups as well as the arrest of journalists as government hard-liners seemed to be trying to "tamp down public expectations that there would be [democratic] openings" following the landmark nuclear deal Tehran inked with global powers that cleared the way for increased mutual trade and diplomacy.

The Freedom House report noted that Afghanistan was unable to hold scheduled parliamentary elections in 2015, but Dunham added that there was "a slight improvement" in the area of government intervention in the media under President Ashraf Ghani compared to his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.

The Freedom House report said the situation in Pakistan remained largely unchanged in 2015 but cited a government clampdown on NGOs. Dunham added that there is still "some pressure from the government" on Pakistan's media.

Bad Year For Baku

In the Caucasus, Dunham said "Azerbaijan had a pretty bad year" that included parliamentary elections that "foreign observer groups didn't even bother" attending because "it was pretty clear who was going to win."

She said Azerbaijani elections were followed by "another intense round of repression" of civil society that included the detention of journalists and the barring of foreign journalists from covering the European Games, which Azerbaijan hosted in 2015.

Belarus is "improving in the eyes of the international community," Dunham said, adding that she doesn't think "anything is actually improving" inside the country. The presidential election "was more of the same" and was neither free nor fair, she said.

"Moldova suffered a pretty big decline [in its rating] this year," said Dunham, pointing to the corruption scandal involving the disappearance of more than $1 billion from several banks and the resulting mass demonstrations against the pro-European government.

Among countries in RFE/RL's broadcast regions, classifications were as follows:

Not Free

Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan

Partly Free

Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Pakistan, and Ukraine.

Free

Croatia and Serbia

Among disputed territories, Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia and Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh were rated by Freedom House as Partly Free. Crimea, Kashmir, Moldova's Transdniester, and Georgia's South Ossetia were deemed in the report to be Not Free.

Despite the global setback in freedom in 2015, Freedom House reports that 74 percent of the 195 countries analyzed are still considered to be Free (86 countries) or Partly Free (59 countries).

The remaining 50 countries were determined to be Not Free.

Overall, the report concluded that, in the past 10 years, 105 countries have seen a net decline in their freedom ratings while only 61 have experienced an improvement.
Growing state and public fear in an age of terrorism, conflicts, and mass migration is producing an increasingly bleak human rights picture in many parts of the world, international watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned.

"Fear of terrorist attacks and mass refugee flows are driving many Western governments to roll back human rights protections," HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth writes in the introduction to the international NGO's annual rights roundup, World Report 2016.

The 650-page report issued on January 27 surveys human rights practices and trends in 90 countries worldwide.

"If we are looking back at 2015, the key trend that we are seeing is what we call 'the politics of fear,'" says HRW European Media Director Andrew Stroehlein. "Fear that drives refugees out of war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and also oppressive countries like Eritrea, and drives people away into places where others fear them and politicians make use of those fears throughout Europe."

Moreover, many authoritarian governments are using the guise of combating terrorism and extremism to crack down on peaceful dissent at home in what HRW calls "the most intense crackdown on independent groups in recent times."

Increased Surveillance

The report argues that the spread of high-profile terrorist attacks by militant group Islamic State (IS) and the refugee crisis have resulted in growing Islamophobia, racist manifestations, and general fear-mongering that most governments have failed to respond to adequately.

In addition, it says, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France have all made moves to increase state mass surveillance. The report says evidence indicates that improving law enforcement's "capacity to pursue targeted leads" does more to bolster security than measures that "undermine privacy rights."

On the other hand, the report criticizes countries like Russia, Turkey, and China for cracking down on civil society and independent media out of fear of popular movements spearheaded by civic organizations such as the Arab Spring movements, the "umbrella protests" in Hong Kong, and Ukraine's Euromaidan.

"We've seen a real acceleration in the trampling of rights in places like Russia, in places like Turkey," Stroehlein says. "We've seen a kind of retrenchment of authoritarianism and the use of fear, the political use of fear, to justify all sorts of rights abuses."

Russia's crackdown, now in its fourth year, "took a more sinister turn in 2015," the report states. Key laws aimed at isolating civil society from foreign contacts came into effect. Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in February. Russia also bucked the global trend toward stronger rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people as LGBT events were disrupted and activists harassed.

Internationally, Russia is criticized for "positioning itself as a global leader in defending 'traditional values' and state sovereignty." In the United Nations, Moscow voted against "all country-specific resolutions" on rights, including measures criticizing Syria, North Korea, Belarus, and Iran.

Baku Brutality

Azerbaijan comes under harsh criticism from HRW for an "unrelenting crackdown [that has] decimated independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and media." Lawyers, activists, and journalists have been "prosecuted, convicted," and imprisoned, it says.

The group notes that the Baku bureau of RFE/RL's Azerbaijan Service was shut down and RFE/RL contributor and investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison on charges widely seen as retribution for her reporting on official corruption. Police torture and mistreatment "continue with impunity," HRW says.

Turning to Iran, the HRW report notes that Tehran executed at least 830 people in 2015, many for nonviolent offenses or following "flawed trials." At least four of those executed last year were likely under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan were criticized for giving broad power to security agencies in the face of the deteriorating security situations. Although Afghan President Ashraf Ghani approved an action plan against torture in January 2015, HRW says, it was slow to be implemented and cases of torture by security officials actually increased in 2015 compared to 2014.

In Pakistan, the military gained significant constitutional powers in 2015 and stepped up the "muzzling of dissenting and critical voices in nongovernmental organizations and media," the report says. There were disturbing reports of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, and arbitrary detention.

In addition, at least 19 people are awaiting execution after being convicted under Pakistan's harsh blasphemy laws, while hundreds of others await trial. Many of those targeted for prosecution under such laws are from persecuted religious minorities. Such cases often stem from unrelated personal disputes and many of the trials are characterized by "inadequate evidence or lack of legal counsel," HRW says.

HRW Executive Director Roth, writing in the report's introduction, warns against setting up a false dichotomy between rights and security.

"The wisdom enshrined in international human rights law provides indispensable guidance to governments that seek to keep their nations safe and serve their people most effectively," Roth writes. "We abandon it at our peril."

Stroehlein agrees.

"You do not have long-term security without respect for basic rights and fundamental freedoms," he says. "It is the trampling of those rights that causes security problems."


Iranian President Hassan Rohani has arrived in France for an official visit in which he is expected to finalize a series of commercial deals -- including the purchase of 114 passenger planes from Airbus and a partnership with French carmaker Peugeot.

French officials have said the partnership between Peugeot and Iran's Khodro would result in the production of 200,000 Peugeot vehicles in Iran beginning in 2017.

The French oil firm Total is also said to be interested in buying Iranian crude oil.

Rohani will also be meeting with French President Francois Hollande in Paris.

Meanwhile, exiled Iranian opposition leaders and activists have planned a human rights demonstration in Paris to coincide with Rohani's visit.

WATCH: Iranian emigres in Paris turned out to protest against the visit of Iran's President Hassan Rohani. They assembled near the French parliament, and accused Rohani of being a dictator. (Reuters)

Earlier on January 27 in Rome, at the end of the first leg of his first European visit since sanctions against Iran were lifted under a nuclear deal with world powers, Rohani said Tehran could have better relations with the United States.

But he said it was up to Washington to change what he called a "hostile" stance toward Iran.

"It's possible that Iran and the United states might have friendly relations. But the key to that is in Washington's hands, not Tehran's," Rohani said at a news conference in Rome on January 27.

"I would like to see the Americans set aside their hostility and chose another way, but inside the U.S. there are some problems, there is no unified voice," he said, noting that "the Zionist lobby" was "very influential."

Rohani, on the first state visit by an Iranian president to Europe in nearly two decades, is seeking foreign investment after the lifting of international sanctions against Iran on January 16 under its nuclear accord with world powers.

Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters
Iranian media say that the country's navy has warned a U.S. warship to leave an area in the Gulf of Oman where Iran has been conducting a naval drill.

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency quoted Iranian Navy chief Admiral Habibollah Sayyari as saying that the U.S. warship received two warnings before leaving the area.

Iran on January 27 began a naval drill near the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world's oil supply passes.

The warning was the first such incident since 10 U.S. sailors were briefly captured by Iran on January 13 after drifting into Iranian territorial waters.

There was no immediate reaction from Washington, which this month joined other world powers in lifting sanctions on Iran after the implementation of an international deal to curtain Tehran's nuclear program.

Based on reporting by AP and Reuters
Memes are making the rounds mocking Italy's decision to cover up nude statues at Rome's Capitoline Museum with big white boxes for a visit by Iranian President Hassan Rohani.

The decision has caused anger in Italy, where it has been condemned by critics as "incomprehensible," "ridiculous," and "submission" to principles that are against Western culture.

Speaking on January 27 in Rome, Rohani said that Tehran had not contacted Italian officials to ask for the statues to be covered up.

"This issue is something journalists and the press like to discuss," Rohani said.

He added that he didn't have "any talks" with Italian authorities on the issue.

"I know that the Italians are very hospitable, a people who seek to make their guests' visits as pleasant as possible and I thank them for that," Rohani added.

After wrapping up his visit to Italy, Rohani arrived in France where he is expected to preside over the signing of major business contracts.

A photoshopped picture of the Mona Lisa wrapped in the Islamic hijab that is compulsory for women in Iran was being shared on social media ahead of the trip, which follows the lifting of sanctions against the Islamic republic under a landmark deal restricting its nuclear program.

"Preparations by Louvre Museum for Rohani's visit," reads the tweet.

Some Iranians have likened Italy's decision to cover up nude statues to Iran's state censorship, including tough Internet censorship that targets tens of thousands of websites.

"Smart filtering of statues during #Rohani's trip to #Italy," reads the tweet that includes a photo of the nude statues covered in the page that Iranians see when they try to access banned websites.

A photoshopped photo of Rohani posing with Pope Francis under a nude painting was widely circulated.

Here is the original photo.

Meanwhile, some suggested that there were perhaps more creative ways of covering up nude statues than hiding them behind wooden panels.

In 2013, a relief carving of a naked man at the UN's headquarters in Geneva was covered up by a large white screen apparently in an effort not to offend Iranian diplomats who were due to take part in talks over Iran's nuclear activities.
BISHKEK -- Former Kyrgyz President Askar Akaev will not be attending his brother's burial in Kyrgyzstan.

An associate of Akaev, Bekbolot Talgarbekov, told RFE/RL on January 27 that Akaev had been informed that his brother Asankul Akaev had died on January 26 in the capital, Bishkek. He was 76.

Talgarbekov also said that Akaev, currently on a business trip in France, had been advised not to travel to Kyrgyzstan to avoid possible arrest.

Akaev, a 71-year-old scientist-turned-politician, has lived in Moscow since he was forced from public office in the wake of antigovernment protests in March 2005.

He is wanted by the current Kyrgyz authorities for alleged corruption.

In 2014, Akaev skipped the burial of his other brother, Bolot Akaev, who died at the age of 81.
Germany has cautioned Russia not to politically exploit a claim of rape by a 13-year-old girl from a Russian immigrant family in Berlin.

Speaking on January 27, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he was "surprised" by remarks his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, made about the case the previous day.

"There is no reason or justification for using the case of this 13-year-old girl -- which is still being investigated -- as political propaganda in order to influence and inflame an internal German debate which is difficult enough, the debate on migration," Steinmeier said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said earlier on January 27 that it was "inappropriate for this case to be politically exploited" by Russia.

German legal authorities "should be able to complete their investigation without disturbances from abroad," Seibert said.

The girl, who disappeared on January 11 before reappearing the next day, is at the center of a media storm after she initially told police she was kidnapped and raped by what her family said were Middle Eastern migrants.

At a high-profile annual press conference on January 26, Lavrov said that "the girl certainly did not voluntarily disappear for 30 hours" and called for "truth and justice."

Lavrov said he hoped the German authorities don't "attempt to cover up the reality for some domestic, politically correct reason."

Berlin police say they have found no evidence of rape or abduction.

But the spokesman for Berlin's prosecutor's office, Martin Steltner, told RFE/RL two men were under investigation for possible past sexual contact with the girl, which under German law can be prosecuted as child abuse since she is under 14.

Steltner said neither man is a recent migrant; one is a German citizen and the other, a long-term resident, has a Turkish passport.

The case has prompted public rallies organized by Russian immigrant communities in Berlin and other German cities.

The Berlin incident occurred weeks after authorities in another German city, Cologne, were criticized for what was widely seen as a slow response to a spate of sexual assaults and robberies of women allegedly carried out by Middle Eastern and North African men on New Year's Eve.

With reporting by Pete Baumgartner, dpa, Interfax, Berliner Zeitung, AFP, and Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin has introduced martial law in four of Ukraine's regions, parts of which are under the control of Russian troops, as Ukrainian forces continue liberating occupied territories in the country's east despite another barrage of air attacks across the country.

Putin said at an online session of the Security Council on October 19 that he signed a decree declaring martial law in Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya -- all of which Russia illegally annexed last month.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, Russian protests, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

He didnt immediately describe the steps that would be taken under martial law but said his order was effective starting at midnight on October 20. His decree gives law enforcement agencies three days to submit specific proposals.

The package of moves, which come nearly eight months into the war launched by the Kremlin in late February, marked the latest escalation by Putin to counter a series of defeats to Ukrainian forces since the start of September.

By extending the decree to regions beyond Ukraine, the move ensures that more Russians, already angered by a military mobilization announced last month, will more deeply feel the consequences of the war in their own lives.

Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office's head, called Putin's move "a pseudo-legalization of looting of Ukrainians' property."

"This does not change anything for Ukraine: We continue the liberation and deoccupation of our territories," Podolyak tweeted shortly after Putin announced martial law in the four Ukrainian regions.

U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking at the White House, said Putin is trying to get Ukraine to give up.

"I think that Vladimir Putin finds himself in an incredible difficult position and what it reflects to me is it seems his only tool available to him is to brutalize the individual citizens in Ukraineto try to intimidate them into capitulating. They are not going to do that," Biden said.

U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said earlier the declaration of martial law was a desperate tactic and any claim by Russia over the regions was "illegitimate."

Putin's move came as the Russia-installed leader of Ukraine's southern Kherson region said the evacuation has started of tens of thousands of civilians and Moscow-appointed officials in the face of a Ukrainian military advance.

Vladimir Saldo said 50,000-60,000 civilians would leave four towns on the west bank of the Dnieper River in an "organized, gradual displacement" over the next five or six days.

All of the Moscow-installed administration in the city of Kherson would evacuate, too, Saldo said.

Russian television showed footage of a number of people queuing for boats on the Dnieper River bank although it was not immediately clear how many were leaving. The forced transfer or deportation of the civilian population by an occupying power from the territory under its control is considered a war crime.

Saldo's statements came after General Sergei Surovikin, the new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, said the situation in the southern city of Kherson is "difficult" and residents facing Ukrainian bombardment are to be evacuated.

WATCH: Ukrainian forces first got their hands on FH70 155-millimeter howitzers courtesy of Italy in May and received training in Estonia. RFE/RL journalists met with a frontline FH70 crew and watched them in action against Russian forces.

"The Russian Army will above all ensure the safe evacuation of the population" of Kherson, Surovikin said.

But Kyiv on October 19 accused Russia of staging a propaganda show in an attempt to "scare" the Kherson residents.

"Russians are trying to scare the people of Kherson with fake messages about the shelling of the city by our army and are also staging a propaganda show with evacuation," the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, wrote on Telegram.

Kherson was the first big city to fall to the Russian forces in February after the start of Moscow's unprovoked invasion, but Ukrainian forces have been steadily retaking nearby territory in recent weeks.

They have pushed as far as 30 kilometers south along the Dnieper River, threatening to trap Russian troops.

Meanwhile, fresh explosions were heard in Kyiv and other areas on October 19, with a missile strike hitting a major thermal power station in the city of Burshtyn in western Ukraine.

The coal-fired Burshtyn plant in the region of Ivano-Frankivsk, which supplies electricity to three western regions and to five million consumers, was hit and on fire, according to Svytlana Onysshchuk, the regional governor. There were no casualties in the strike at the plant, which was hit by four missiles nine days earlier as well.

Serhiy Borzov, governor of the Vinnytsya region in western Ukraine, said Russia had also carried out attacks on energy facilities in his region. Russian bombardment also cut power and water in some parts of Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhya region on October 19, said Dmytro Orlov, the mayor of the southern city located near the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant that's been a flashpoint of the nearly eight-month conflict.

A power plant in Kryviy Rih, a city in south-central Ukraine, was also seriously damaged by Russian shelling, leaving villages, towns, and a city district without electricity, the regional governor reported.

Russian forces also targeted Ukraine's southern Mykolayiv region again with kamikaze drones early on October 19.



The Ukrainian military's southern command said in a statement on October 19 that its forces shot down 12 drones overnight.

More than a week of air attacks has destroyed almost one-third of Ukraine's power stations and cut electricity in more than 1,000 settlements.

With Ukraine gaining momentum in the war that is now nearly eight months old, European lawmakers on October 19 recognized the country's "brave" citizens by awarding them the 2022 Sakharov Prize.

"This award is for those Ukrainians fighting on the ground. For those who have been forced to flee. For those who have lost relatives and friends. For all those who stand up and fight for what they believe in. I know that the brave people of Ukraine will not give up and neither will we," European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said in the statement.

The annual prize is named after the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov and was established in 1988 by the European parliament to honor individuals and organizations defending human rights and fundamental freedoms.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP
Moldova's new Prime Minister Pavel Filip called for calm from protesters demanding his resignation and said he will not step down but will fight to restore public confidence.



"The political class now has its last chance to restore Moldovans' and our international partners' trust," Filip told reporters in Bucharest on January 26.



On a visit to neighboring Romania, Filip said the elite was responsible for a political crisis that has spurred mass protests in recent weeks.



Some 40,000 people took to the streets last weekend to demand early elections just days after a new government was sworn in -- the third such administration to take office within a year.



Filip said he had no intention of resigning, telling the BBC that Moldova desperately needs stable government to avoid a "deep economic and social crisis."



He added that action would be taken against protesters who "cross a red line and become violent."



Moldova has been mired in crisis since April when the exposure of a $1-billion corruption scandal triggered huge protests and the arrest of former premier Vlad Filat.



The country is torn between those who want it to join neighboring Romania in the European Union and those who want closer relations with Soviet-era ally Moscow.

Based on reporting by dpa, Interfax, and BBC
Finland and Russia have agreed to step up cooperation along their shared border, through which a growing number of migrants are entering the European Union.

Finish Interior Minister Petteri Orpo made the announcement on January 27.

The 1,340-kilometer border between Finland and Russia is also a frontier of the EU's free-travel Schengen area, but Orpo said issues would be handled bilaterally between Finland and its giant neighbor. He did not specify what measures might be taken.

"Although Finland's eastern border is also the outer border of the Schengen area, both Finland and Russia want to solve the issue primarily on bilateral basis," Orpo said in a statement after meeting his Russian counterpart Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

Last week, the government criticized Moscow for allowing increasing numbers of asylum seekers across their Arctic border. It also stressed that a common European solution must be found to the refugee crisis.

According to the Finnish border guard, about 400 asylum seekers have come from Russia to Finland this month, compared with about 700 in the whole of 2015.

Based on reporting by Reuters
The Power Vertical is a blog written especially for Russia wonks and obsessive Kremlin watchers by Brian Whitmore. It offers Brian's personal take on emerging and developing trends in Russian politics, shining a spotlight on the high-stakes power struggles, machinations, and clashing interests that shape Kremlin policy today. Check out The Power Vertical Facebook page or Follow @PowerVertical
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has appointed his daughter as his chief of staff, the latest in a series of moves that appear aimed at consolidating power in his family for years to come.



Ozoda Rahmon's appointment as head of the presidential administration was announced on January 27.



One of the long-ruling Rahmons seven daughters, 38-year-old Ozoda Rahmon has served as first deputy foreign minister since May 2014.



She graduated from Tajikistans National University before studying in the United States in 2004-06.

Her father has been the Central Asian countrys head of state since 1992, the year after it gained independence in the Soviet breakup.



In late December, Rahmon signed a law that gave him the title Leader of the Nation and granted him and his family lifelong immunity from prosecution. If a separate legislative change is approved by referendum, it will also allow him to run for reelection an unlimited number of times.



But Rahmon, 63, may have other plans for keeping power in the family in future. Last week, lawmakers approved a constitutional amendment that would lower the minimum age for presidents from 35 to 30.

That proposal is widely seen as designed to enable the elder of Rahmon's two sons, 28-year-old Rustam Emomali, to run in the next election in 2020. It is also subject to approval in a referendum whose outcome is all but assured in the tightly controlled country, but no date has been set.



Rustam Emomali was appointed as head of the state anticorruption agency last year, after running Tajikistans Customs Service since 2013.

Elections in Tajikistan have been marred by widespread allegations of fraud.



Many of Rahmon's relatives hold important official positions or control lucrative businesses in the country, one of the poorest in the former Soviet Union.



Ozoda Rahmon's husband, Jamollidin Nuralizoda, is deputy head of Tajikistan's National Bank, the central bank.



The president's brother-in-law, Hasan Asadullozoda, runs the country's largest commercial bank, Oriyonbank, and reportedly controls sales of aluminum, a key export commodity.



A collective farm manager in the Soviet era, Rahmon is one of several Central Asian presidents who have been in power for many years, tolerate little dissent, and are accused of rights abuses by international advocacy groups and critics at home.
Traffic police in Kyiv have fined Terezia Yatsenyuk, the wife of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, for talking on a mobile phone while driving.

Media reports in Ukraine say police fined the prime minister's wife in downtown Kyiv on January 27. She reportedly paid 425 hryvnyas ($17).

The police officer who fined Yatsenyuk refused to speak to journalists about the case.

The case is attracting media attention because police across most former Soviet republics avoid stopping cars or issuing fines to cars driven by relatives of senior government officials.

In Ukraine, the police forces have been undergoing reforms since the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.

Eka Zguladze, a former deputy interior minister of Georgia who oversaw police reforms in her country from 2006 to 2012, is currently Ukraine's deputy interior minister.

She has been leading police reforms in Ukraine as well.

Based on reporting by Ukraine.shafaqna.com and Ua.racurs.ua
A separatist leader in eastern Ukraine has admitted to burning down a village at the height of fighting more than a year ago, while praising a proposal for restoring the place.

Aleksandr Zakharchenko's remarks came as his pro-Russian separatist group, which calls itself the Donetsk People's Republic, held a Youth Socio-Political Forum that was billed as a platform for local students to present a range of project proposals.

Students from the so-called Donbas National Academy of Construction and Architecture presented their concept for the tiny village of Kozhevnya, once home to around 69 residents, according to Census data.

The area was the site of some of the fiercest battles between Ukrainian national forces and separatists in the summer of 2014.



The Russia-backed separatists held the village until July 23, 2014, when troops loyal to Kyiv forced them to retreat. At the time, a separatist representative told Interfax news agency that the populated areas had been abandoned and that no separatists had been killed in action.

It was not until his January 25 admission that Zakharchenko explained how they pulled it off: by burning everything to the ground.

"This village was a milestone for me. ... It was our first offensive. Unfortunately, in the course of fighting we practically destroyed this village," he said. "By burning down houses, we saved our lives and the lives of our people":

Fighting in eastern Ukraine broke out in April 2014, and more than 9,100 people have been killed in the conflict. More than 1.4 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, while more than 600,000 others have fled to neighboring countries.

Russia-backed separatists continue to control swaths of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and a shaky, internationally brokered cease-fire is largely holding, but a long-term solution remains elusive nearly two years after the onset of the separatism-fueled violence.



New Republican Values



In his eight-minute speech, Zakharchenko spoke not only about physical rebuilding but also about the return of what he called "cultural values."

"In the Soviet Union, which the majority of you don't remember...the ideology of that state was good. Of course, there were some exaggerations, a lot of shortcomings, but the things that were done were done for the people," he said.

Zakharchenko went on to suggest that children were raised on "true" values back then -- those of "family, loyalty, brotherhood, and love for the motherland."



Millions of Ukrainians died during Stalin's orchestrated famine known as the Holodomor in 1932-33, when the Soviet leadership aimed to collectivize land and labor and at the same time eliminate its perceived opponents.



But according to Zakharchenko's reading of history, the West imposed its own values on the Ukrainian people after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.



"Now we understand that we are raised on Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse, blue jeans, and so on, on Playboy, on a democracy that implies that the family could have two dads or two moms," he said. "This is absolutely unacceptable."



The latest Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on the situation in eastern Ukraine accuses the separatists who control parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of killings, torture, ill-treatment, illegal detention, and forced labor.



A former commander of separatists in Donetsk, Russian Igor Girkin, recently said that he executed four people in the city of Slovyansk in 2014 -- killings he said were carried out in accordance with Stalin-era laws.



Zakharchenko, a university dropout with a technical-school education, tried to end his speech on an inspiring note. He said that creating the so-called "republic" -- which is not recognized as an independent state by any country -- should be a source of pride.

"You are proud of us for doing it and we will be proud of you for having done it," he said.
The United Nations has launched an appeal to raise $393 million in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan to reach millions of vulnerable people this year.

The UN's humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, Mark Bowden, and the country's chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, launched the appeal on January 27 in a live national TV broadcast.

According to Abdullah, the 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan for Afghanistan targets millions of people in need of food and other essentials, including shelter, health care, nutrition, safe water and other necessities.

Abdullah expressed hope that donor countries would match their commitments of previous years to assist and support the country's vulnerable people.

Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, and regularly suffers natural disasters, such as earthquakes and storms that displace people from their homes and contribute to widespread hunger.

The country is also plagued by violence, with Taliban attacks frequent.

Based on reporting by AP


The Obama administration has chosen Lieutenant General John Nicholson, Jr., a veteran of several war deployments to Afghanistan, as the next top U.S. commander in Kabul.

If Nicholson is confirmed in a vote by the U.S. Senate, he would succeed General John Campbell, who is expected to retire.

Nicholson is a 1982 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a career infantry officer.

He currently heads NATO's Allied Land Command, headquartered at Izmir, Turkey.

He was first deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 when he was deputy chief of staff of operations for the international military command there.

In 2010, he was the deputy chief of staff for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

He also spent 14 months as the director of the Pentagon's Afghanistan-Pakistan coordination cell.

The outgoing Campbell has been the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan since August 2014 and was due to be replaced.

Campbell is expected to complete his tour around the beginning of March.

Based on reporting by AP and Reuters
An international monitoring group says people around the world demonstrated to governments in 2015 that they must become more transparent and tackle the large-scale corruption that continues to plague so many countries and hinder their development.

In its 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released on January 27, Transparency International ranked 168 countries based on perceived levels of public-sector corruption, with Denmark edging out Finland to win the title as the least corrupt country in the world and Somalia and North Korea being declared the most corrupt.

The high levels of corruption in Afghanistan -- which was ranked 166th -- Iraq (161st), Turkmenistan (156th), and Uzbekistan (153rd) placed them all near the bottom of the index.

Central Asian countries as a whole did poorly, with Tajikistan tying with Nigeria for 136th place and Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan seen as equally corrupt and listed 123rd on the index.

"All five countries of Central Asia areat the bottom of the CPI table," said Svetlana Savitskaya, Transparency Internationals regional coordinator for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Europe and Central Asia, told RFE/RL.

"[The low score] is a signal that corruption is endemic, it is deeply ingrained, and it has a systemic nature [in Central Asia]," she said.

Savitskaya said there have been no big changes or improvement in corruption levels in any of the Central Asian countries since 2012, saying the situation is one of "stagnation all over the region."

She said the situation is similar in several other former Soviet republics such as Russia (119th), Ukraine (130th), Moldova (103rd), Armenia (95th), and Azerbaijan (119th).

"If you analyze what is going on as far as anticorruption reforms [in Ukraine], not so much is going on," Savitskaya said. "The political will is pretty weak -- the government doesnt demonstrate that it is so committed to perform well on [taking] anticorruption [actions]."

Savitskaya said Transparency International (TI) has not seen any positive changes in Russia in recent years, even though the government has declared that it is trying to fight corruption.

"[Russian authorities] continue to limit space for civil society; they continue to press nongovernmental organizations  including [Transparency International  Russia]; to exert pressure on investigative journalists, on independent media," she said.

Savitskaya said Transparency International "has not registered any tangible changes [in Russia regarding corruption]  when you speak to ordinary citizens they dont sense any positive change yet."

She said Belarus (107th) recently adopted a new anticorruption law which envisages regulations on conflicts of interest, public officials making income and asset declarations, and the participation of civil society in anticorruption efforts.

"It will be interesting to see how this will materialize in real life because this country doesnt have any freedoms like political or civic liberties; it doesnt have independent mediaand these things are very important for qualitative anticorruption work," Savitskaya said.

Corruption is currently one of the leading topics in Moldova, which is embroiled in a political crisis due to the disappearance of more than $1 billion from state banks and numerous reports of corruption among the countrys political leaders and oligarchs.

TIs office in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, said in a statement that "as never before, the link between corruption and state capture has become visible."

It added that there has been a delay in the approval of several laws addressing "the system of integrity and the failure in taking a prompt action against those responsible for overseeing the security of the banking sector."

Corruption Perceptions Index (Click On Each Country To See Its Score) Source: Transparency International)

Turning to the Caucasus, Savitskaya said "Georgia (ranked 48th on the CPI) as usual is the champion, it is the best performer of all in the whole region."

She added that there has been no change in Azerbaijans score and that Armenia had actually gone down from 2014 to 2015.

Savitskaya pointed out that "in most of the countries of the former Soviet Union  Belarus, Moldova, and [those in] Central Asia  there exists this nexus, this link between political parties and businesses is so strong [and] which causes huge political corruption."

The Transparency International report says that "a failure to tackle corruption is feeding ongoing vicious conflicts" in Afghanistan (186th) and Pakistan (117th).

It points out that the setting up of anticorruption commissions in these countries and others in the region is a good first step, but such efforts are often undermined by political interference and inadequate resources.

Iran is in a stagnant position (130th) and Iraq checks in as one of the 10 worst countries on the Corruption Perception Index (161st).

Mass public demonstrations in several Iraqi cities in 2015 resulted in pledges by Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi to reduce government largesse and to implement several other reforms, but the actions thus far seem to have not satisfied the people or some important religious leaders.

A minimum of three opinion polls among residents of a country on their perception of public corruption is needed for Transparency International to secure a "score" for a country on the Corruption Perception Index.

As the report points out, no country came close to achieving a perfect score, and it lists a string of corruption scandals that occurred in Denmark -- considered the worlds least corrupt country -- and fellow upstanding countries Finland, Sweden, and Norway.

The report says the way to fight corruption is to attack graft within politics and to reform a country's financial sector.

But it points out that these things are impossible unless a country's civil society and the media are "genuinely free" -- preconditions that are unfortunately missing in many of the countries in RFE/RL's broadcasting regions.
Joe Kinego will be speaking about his time flying the Cold War-era SR-71 spy plane and his years as commander of the Air Forces SR-71 squadron today at noon as part of the the Science Museum of Virginias Lunch Break Science series.
In 2012, Stewart Bryan sold this newspaper to Warren Buffett to save it. The Times-Dispatchs parent, Media General, was struggling with groaning debt and a crummy economy. Buffett offered a lifeline: attractive financing and a soft landing for many of the companys newspapers, of which the Richmond Times-Dispatch was the flagship. Bryan ended his familys ownership of the newspaper after 162 years. His fascination with the news, particularly out of the state Capitol, continued until his death  on deadline, in the middle of a two-day snowstorm  this past Saturday.

When you own the only daily newspaper in town and that town is the seat of state government, you command peoples attention: candidates, elective officials, lobbyists, government employees and contractors. Bryan  like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him  was low-key about it, as one would expect from a Virginia aristocrat. In an Old Richmond lilt that allowed occasional barnyard epithets to pass smoothly into the ear, Bryan delighted in the newspapers coverage of political intrigues and the often-pungent views advanced by an editorial page whose conservatism usually reflected his own.

Bryan, who often said he might have been a politics columnist, led The Times-Dispatch with a light hand, deferring to editors and respecting the chain of command. But he could be firm. Bryan stoutly defended reporters whose work irritated governors, legislators and power brokers. He went to the U.S. Supreme Court  and won  a press freedom case in 1980 that further opened the courts to the public. In 2009, he renounced the newspapers editorial advocacy in the late 1950s of massive resistance to court-ordered desegregation of public schools.

As the only son of a dynastic family, Bryan was born to be the publisher. His path included stints in circulation, as an advertising salesman and as a reporter, working in Vermont, Florida and Virginia. Under the tutelage of Jim Latimer, The Times-Dispatchs legendary chief political reporter, Bryan covered the Virginia Senate. There, in the late 1960s, he met the imperious Hunter Andrews. It was a relationship that occasionally could be contentious but endured because it was always cordial. Bryans peerless manners could lower the temperature when things got hot.

Andrews, descended from an ancient Tidewater family, was always partial to people like himself  people who had last names for first names. Though he was John Stewart Bryan III on the Times-Dispatch masthead, he went by Stewart, the name of his great-grandmothers family.

In the late 1980s, Andrews  then menacingly powerful as Senate Democratic majority leader and Finance Committee chairman  ran afoul of the open-meetings law when Mike Hardy of The Times-Dispatch reported that Andrews had held a secret session of the Finance Committee at a hunting cabin outside Richmond owned by another influential senator. The meetings implicit agenda included ways the Senate might rein in Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, with whom Andrews bitterly tangled.

The disclosure was a stinging embarrassment for Andrews, who had once declared that, as far as he was concerned, the open-meetings law was responsible for a retarded form of government. Andrews detractors were thrilled by the story, believing that hed been shamed into conducting the publics business in plain view. Others werent so sure and urged The Times-Dispatch to consider legal action against Andrews. That wasnt an expense Bryan was ready to incur.

Instead, he went to see Andrews at his office in the General Assembly Building, walking the six short blocks on Grace Street that separate the newspapers offices from the state Capitol. That the former is, figuratively, spitting distance from the latter speaks to the intimate but fractious relationship between two institutions that have shaped Richmond for centuries.

In recounting the meeting with Andrews, Bryan described the senator, who died in 2005, as absolutely crestfallen, frustrated by the press pile-on that followed the Times-Dispatch report of the unannounced gathering of senators with the biggest say in how to spend billions in taxpayer dollars. Maybe it was motivation by humiliation, but Andrews  knowing that Bryan bought more ink than most Virginia publishers  became a little bit more tolerant of government in the sunshine.

God knows what Bryan would have told Tommy Norment, the Senate Republican majority leader who booted the press from the Senate floor earlier this month. It probably wouldnt have been pretty.

And then there was Joe Gatins, a Times-Dispatch reporter who tormented governors for a more than a decade with microscopic coverage that included a regular precis of the household accounts of the Executive Mansion. Bryan was as amused by Gatins aggressive reportage as he was by Gatins odd fashion sense. Like Bryan, Gatins favored tweedy, three-button sports coats, though Gatins  unlike Bryans  looked lived in. Gatins also was partial to psychedelic-patterned neckties and a dark-blue beret, and always was veiled in cigarette smoke.

David McCloud, chief of staff to Gov. Charles S. Robb, complained mightily about Gatins snooping, at one point saying that the reporter was interested only in counting butter patties. The grousing was an inducement to Gatins to push harder, ask more questions and keep writing page one stories. Bryan considered McClouds bill of particulars, but the publishers message was not what he wanted to hear: You take care of your end of Grace Street; well take care of ours.

As a publisher, Bryan was above the Establishment, running an enterprise that made money discomforting the comfortable. But he also was of the Establishment.

Bryan didnt consider it at all unusual that in 1970 it was at his father Tennants house  the elder Bryan was then publisher  that then-U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr., a favorite of the Richmond newspapers editorial pages, hid out, plotting his historic break from the Democratic Party to successfully stand for re-election as an independent. The press was kept in the dark about Byrds whereabouts, apparently never considering that a press baron was in on one of the eras biggest political stories.

Another time, in the late 1980s, Bryan received a letter from a prominent Republican activist peeved by the newspapers coverage of an effort to recruit young professionals  yuppies  into the Virginia GOP, then suffering through a long electoral drought. Because Bryan and the correspondent were personally acquainted, moving in some of the same social circles, Bryans reply had a friendly tone  until the closing paragraph. Having been informed that the activist had not returned repeated calls from the reporter covering the story (full disclosure: me), Bryan told him  in that temperature-lowering, gentlemanly way  that he had little reason to complain.
SunTrust plans to build a 21-story tower along Haxall Canal that will offer panoramic views of the James. The banks of the river that explains Richmond will gain another landmark.

Atlanta-based SunTrust will consolidate its Richmond operations in the high-rise. John Stallings, head of the banks Virginia division, says the project reflects the corporations confidence in Richmond, particularly the citys downtown. The building will complement the Gateway Plaza, which opened last year and will include not only corporate offices but also luxury residential units on its upper floors. Richmond welcomes the news as evidence of urban revival. It also understands that a thriving city will require affordable housing as wll as pricey perches.
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There is an extreme amount of work going on to expand the Things Hoped For store.

Things have already been put into trailers for storage so that when moving day comes, it is all ready to go. There has been such a large amount of donations to the store that it has run out of room for anything else.

Thankfully there is an empty space next door to Things Hoped For that used to be a motorcyclist shop that has moved to Peters Creek Road. Things Hoped For is located at 3014 Christian Ave. in Roanoke near El Rodeo.

The move of the store started Jan. 19, with the hope that it is completed by March, said Diane DiPalma, manager of Things Hoped For.

The store is beneficial to International Christian Centers for the Deaf.

Thank you especially to Sonny Spickard for letting us rent out this space, said Tom Turner, general director of ICCD.

ICCD reaches out to the deaf in the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico and many other places around the world. Some of the individuals are children who live in poverty-stricken homes. Some of these children know sign language, but many of their parents do not know it, and it is very hard for these children to communicate with those whom they love. All of the money that is given to the store goes to support these children and the deaf communities.

After the store has moved into the new area, it will have about tripled in size.

The new store is going to be a bit more shopper friendly, said DiPalma.

Clothing and childrens items are going to be in the new space, and furniture and household items will remain in the old store space.

Submitted by Trista Voekler
Faith Christian School students who are part of the Little Hearts, Big Hands club spent an afternoon recently creating fleece blankets for the residents of Pheasant Ridge assisted living facility.

Younger students were aided in the cutting and knotting process by older students or parent volunteers.

The blankets will be distributed when the club travels to Pheasant Ridge to help the residents celebrate Valentine's Day.

For photos of Faith Christian School's Little Hands, Big Hearts project, see the photo gallery, or for a different view, click here.
Roanoke County Fire & Rescue Department held a Promotion Ceremony on Wednesday, Jan. 20, to promote eight personnel to officer ranks.

Members of the Roanoke County Administration, Chief Stephen Simon, department personnel and family members were in attendance to witness and participate in the official pinning of one deputy chief, three battalion chiefs, two captains and two lieutenants. The officers then recited the departments officer oath.

Deputy Chief Travis Griffith was hired by Roanoke County Fire & Rescue Department in 2002 as a firefighter/EMT. He was promoted through the ranks becoming a lieutenant in 2005, captain in 2008 and battalion chief in 2012. Griffith holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia. He is also a graduate of the National Fire Academy's prestigious Executive Fire Officer Program. Griffith lives in western Roanoke County with his wife Ellen, and two daughters, Carly and Claire.

Battalion Chief Darryl Burks was hired by the department in 1990 as a firefighter. Darryl previously volunteered with the Cave Spring Volunteer Fire Department from 1987 to 1990. In 1998, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and then promoted to captain in 2002. During his 25 years, Darryl has been assigned to the North County, Cave Spring, Catawba, Hollins, Clearbrook, Bent Mountain, Masons Cove and Back Creek stations. Darryl holds certificates from VWCC in Fire Science and Industrial Supervision and is a graduate of the 2003 Human Resources Management Development Program. He has assisted with the departments hiring process for the past 12 years, maintains the Thermal Imaging Program and has served on the Fire Truck Specification Committee. Darryl lives in Bedford County with his wife, Lynn.

Battalion Chief Craig Robertson was hired by Roanoke County Fire & Rescue Department in 1990 as a paramedic/firefighter. He previously served briefly as a volunteer with Cave Spring Fire Department and Cave Spring Rescue Squad. Craig was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 2000 and captain in 2008. During his 25 years, he has been assigned to the North County, Cave Spring, Hollins, Mount Pleasant, Clearbrook, Bent Mountain, Fort Lewis, and Masons Cove stations. Craig serves on the Wildland Engine Specification Committee, Ambulance Specification Committee, and Officer Requirements Committee. He lives in Craig County with his wife, Kimberly, and two sons, Cody who is 18-years old and Jake who is 14-years old.

Battalion Chief Randy Spence was hired by the department in 1985 as a firefighter. Randy was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the early 1990s, deputy fire marshal in 2002 and captain in 2009. During his service, he has been assigned to the Cave Spring, Hollins, Clearbrook, Bent Mountain, and Masons Cove stations along with an assignment in the Fire Marshals Office. Randy holds certifications as a fire inspector and fire investigator and has graduated from the Virginia Fire Marshal Academy and Cardinal Criminal Justice Academy. Randy lives in western Roanoke County with his family.

Captain Jeffrey Johnston was hired by Roanoke County Fire & Rescue Department in 2003 as a paramedic/firefighter. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 2010. During his career, Jeff has been assigned to the Clearbrook, Mount Pleasant and Back Creek stations, as well as the Roanoke Valley Regional Fire & EMS Training Center. Jeff is a graduate of the Virginia Fire Office Academy and is an EMS instructor for PHTLS, ACLS, BLS and PEEP classes. He lives in Franklin County with his wife, Mary Jo and son, Haden.

Captain Chad Wheeler was hired by the department in 2001 as a paramedic/firefighter. Chad was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 2012. He has been assigned to the Cave Spring, Hollins, and Fort Lewis stations, as well as being stationed at the Roanoke Valley Regional Fire & EMS Training Center for a period of time. Chad is a Nationally Registered Paramedic, a graduate of the Virginia Fire Officers Academy and holds a number of certifications through the U.S. Fire Administration National Fire Academy. He lives in Montgomery County with his wife, Rachael and two sons, Tyler and Matthew.

Lieutenant Michael Haubner was hired by Roanoke County Fire & Rescue Department in 2003 as a firefighter/EMT. Michael became a National Registered EMT-Paramedic in 2008 and in 2010, he was upgraded to a field training officer. He has been assigned to the Hollins, Mount Pleasant, Clearbrook, and Fort Lewis stations. Michael earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Kentucky Christian University. Additionally, he holds certifications for Fire Officer 3 and ALS Coordinator and is an instructor for ACLS, PHTLS, AMLS, PEPP, PALS, BLS and CPR courses. He has served on the following committees: EMS Education, Wildland Team, and HTR Division 6 Response Team. Michael lives in Montgomery County with his wife, Debbie and two daughters, Andrea and Katie.

Lieutenant Christopher Shaun Lacy was hired by the department in 2003 as a paramedic/firefighter. He upgraded to a National Registered EMT-Intermediate in 2005 and Paramedic in 2008. Shaun has been assigned to the Vinton, Cave Spring, Fort Lewis and Back Creek stations. He has served on the Image Trend Implementation, Ambulance Specification, and unmanned Aerial Vehicle committees. Shaun lives in Christiansburg with his wife Dana and two daughters.

Submitted by Jennifer Conley Sexton
RICHMOND  Bills seeking to strengthen oversight of interstate natural gas pipelines are going to be making their way through the General Assembly.

Del. Greg Habeeb, R-Salem, is carrying a bill that directs the State Corporation Commission to seek federal authorization to conduct its own pipeline safety inspections.

The SCC already inspects intrastate pipelines, Habeeb said, and has been deputized by federal authorities to monitor interstate oil lines.

His proposal, which would have to be accepted by federal regulators, would expand that to include interstate natural gas pipelines.

One of the concerns a lot of our constituents have is, if and when these pipelines come in, the feds wont devote the resources needed to try to prevent a problem, Habeeb said. This is the first step in letting Virginia play a role.

Federal regulations allow officials to delegate inspection duties to state agencies, though decisions about penalties and other enforcement action remain firmly under federal purview.

The inspection authority doesnt empower the state to approve or deny proposals for new pipelines.

Its not a pro-pipeline bill. Its not an anti-pipeline bill, Habeeb said of the measure, House Bill 1261.

Its a bill that says, if interstate natural gas pipelines run through Virginia, then Virginia would like to have a role in protecting our citizens.

Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, introduced a separate measure that would require companies seeking to build new pipelines to submit a local erosion and sediment control plan.

The proposal, Senate Bill 726, would apply to natural gas and other utility projects that disturb more than 50 acres of land.

While not specified in the original draft, Edwards said he hopes to amend the bill to require that the plan be filed with local governments along the project route.

Erosion and sediment control plans detail how builders plan to minimize erosion and protect local waterways and other surrounding areas from damage.

It gives the localities some control over water quality protection, said Edwards, adding he envisions that localities will be able to require changes and improvements in the plans as needed.

Edwards and Habeeb both filed their bills last week. They are awaiting committee hearings.
RICHMOND  A bill that would allow more inmates to serve their jail sentences during the weekends passed the Senate on Wednesday.

Under current law, a judge can grant weekend service for misdemeanor offenders who need it in order to hold onto their jobs.

Senate Bill 4, sponsored by Sen. Bill Stanley, would expand that to include nonviolent felonies and would replace the employment standard with a broader good cause threshold.

The bill specifies that weekend or other nonconsecutive sentence structures could only be offered if an inmate has 120 days or less left on an active sentence.

This is the third year that Stanley, a Republican from Franklin County, has carried a version of this proposal. Its passed the Senate before, but faced opposition in the House of Delegates, where lawmakers wanted to add a provision requiring that the prosecution had to agree to the modified sentence structure.

In a compromise, this years bill specifies that weekend jail time couldnt be offered for felonies if the prosecution raised objections.

Stanley said he expects the bill will now clear the House. He described the measure as an important step that will allow nonviolent offenders to serve their time, not lose their job and be able to take care of their families, so they dont go on welfare or they dont become recidivists and commit more crimes in order to survive.

 Alicia Petska

Bill on franchise owners clears on party-line vote

RICHMOND  A bill pushing back against a landmark National Labor Relations Board ruling passed the House of Delegates on a straight party-line vote Wednesday.

House Bill 18, sponsored by Del. Chris Head, asserts that employees of an individual franchise wont be considered employees of the larger franchising corporation for any purpose.

The proposal is a response to a federal labor ruling handed down last summer that significantly expanded the definition of joint employer and may make it easier for workers at fast food chains and other franchisers to organize.

Head, R-Botetourt County, said his bill merely reaffirms already existing practice in Virginia and allows franchisees to maintain their independent status. It had the backing of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.

Del. Mark Sickles, D-Fairfax County, said hes concerned the state may end up creating blanket immunity for any company that calls itself a franchiser.

Disputes about whether a franchiser qualifies as an employer or not are best handled by the courts, he said, which can examine the specifics of a business arrangement to make a decision.

Head said his proposal doesnt change the definition of franchiser or eliminate the ability of the courts to settle disputes.

The bill now heads to the Senate.
Ironically, Christian minister, Saheed Abedini, was freed by Iran Jan. 16, Religious Freedom Day, the day in 1786 the Virginia General Assembly passed Thomas Jeffersons Statute of Religious Freedom, ending state-established Church of England. It said: (1) individuals would be free from punishment for not conforming to state-established religious mandates, and (2) one's religion would no longer affect the civil privileges he could enjoy.

State religions illustrate why the First Amendment is freedom of religion, speech, and assembly, adopted by our founders from Virginias statute. Iran established a state religion and prohibits the free exercise thereof of other religions. Today and the past, states control the conscience of citizens and suppress inalienable, God-given rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Bill of Rights' sole purpose is to protect citizens from government.

Dont think it cant happen here. Individuals/businesses have been sued for refusing to bake a cake. Federal courts begin eroding the Bill of Rights in the 60s with misinterpretation and modification to appease special-interest groups.

The Constitution does not prohibit prayer in public or private, by officials or citizens. In the full context of his letter response to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson underscored they no longer had to worry about government interference in religion, as was the case with the British. In context, a wall of separation between church and state means the government has no authority over religious issues.

In 1797, Congress approved use of the Capitol building for church services for several denominations of up to 2000 people each Sunday. As President Jefferson sang and prayed, the Marine Corps band playing hymns, he understood separation and knew government had not established a religion and was certain it wasnt prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

What happens in Iran and other countries today will happen in the U.S. unless we protect the intent of the Bill of Rights. If we dont, the consequences of state control are not far behind.

WILLIAM FIZER

ROANOKE
The current debate over gun control policy in Washington has Congress and the Obama administration at odds over which branch has more power  and the Supreme Court has stayed on the sidelines.

President Barack Obama, expressing frustration with Congress not passing gun control measures, announced in January he would act on his own to require more background checks on gun sales.

But two weeks later, Attorney General Loretta Lynch went to Capitol Hill and confirmed what many legal observers noted: The actions seem to restate the current laws. Lynch told Republican lawmakers that the actions dont overstep the presidents authority because they dont make new laws.
Valley Metro Rail's major north-south rail connection could be in service as soon as 2023 as Phoenix takes its first official steps to implement Transportation 2050 (T2050), a 35-year, multi-modal transportation plan approved by Phoenix voters in August 2015.

The Phoenix City Council approved accelerating segments of the future high-capacity/light-rail transit system to advance into the Regional Transportation Plan. These changes will be forwarded to the Valley Metro Board of Directors and the Maricopa Association of Governments Regional Council for additional discussion and final adoption into the plan this summer.

Because Phoenix voters made a historic investment in public transit, were able to accelerate high-capacity transit projects to meet more immediate community and mobility needs, said Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton. The adjustments to the transportation plan are critically important to further the citys economic development, sustainability and accessibility goals.

High-capacity transit program updates include: South Central Light Rail Extension to accelerate by 11 years, opening in 2023; currently scheduled for 2034. In addition, the council recommended that the project be prepared for a federal grant submittal for inclusion in the FY18 Presidents budget; Northwest Phase II Light Rail Extension to accelerate by three years, opening in 2023; currently scheduled for 2026 and Capitol I-10 West Light Rail Extension to be phased with Phase I to the State Capitol opening in 2023; Phase II to 79th Avenue and I-10 opening in 2030.

The Council vote follows recommendations by the City of Phoenix Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee and the Citizens Transportation Commission (CTC). The CTC was created to ensure accountability and oversight of the plan.

Funding for T2050 comes from a 7/10ths of a cent city sales tax that started January 1, 2016. Over the life of the plan, the funds are estimated to generate about $16.7 billion, or more than half of the plans overall cost. There will be an additional $14.8 billion in federal and county funds, passenger fares and other sources.
Microblogging website Twitter Inc. (TWTR) on Tuesday announced the appointment of former American Express executive Leslie Berland as its Chief Marketing Officer.

Fittingly, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the new hiring through a tweet: "Welcoming @leslieberland to Twitter! She will join as our CMO to help tell the stories of our iconic product!"

Berland added her own tweet, thanking her new boss and expressing excitment for her new position: "Thanks @Jack! Excited to join you and the amazing teams to bring to life the power, uniqueness and magic of Twitter!"

Berland will be responsible for Twitter's global consumer, product and sales marketing, according to reports. She will take over the job from CFO Anthony Noto, who had also been serving as interim CMO.

Berland had joined AmEx in 2005, media reports said. Her most recent job there was as executive vice president of global advertising, marketing and digital partnerships at American Express.

Twitter is in the middle of an executive shake up. On Monday, Dorsey announced that four top executives are leaving the company, including engineering chief Alex Roetter, product head Kevin Weil, human-resources vice president Skip Schipper and media head Katie Stanton.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Technology News
Indian shares gave up initial gains on Wednesday as Shanghai stocks struggled after falling sharply the previous day.

China's Shanghai Composite was down nearly 3 percent, extending Tuesday's 6.4 percent loss on concerns about the slowing , rising capital outflows and spikes in onshore short-term borrowing costs.

Markets elsewhere across Asia were mostly higher, although gains remained capped ahead of the Federal Reserve's policy statement due later in the day.

U.S. crude oil futures fell more than 3 percent in Asian deals after climbing 3.7 percent in New York trading overnight on talk of OPEC and Russia considering production cuts.

Closer home, the benchmark BSE Sensex was little changed at 24,490 after climbing around 160 points in early trade.

The broader Nifty index was down 6 points or 0.10 percent at 7,429, with Adani Ports, Cairn India, GAIL, Kotak Bank and Bank of Baroda all losing more than 1 percent each.

Adani Power rose 1.4 percent after winning the latest auction for solar energy projects in Uttar Pradesh.

Oil marketing companies BPCL, HPCL and IOC traded mixed on reports they plan to invest Rs 1.5 lakh crore for setting up India's biggest refinery in Maharashtra.

Reliance Power edged up marginally on news it is seeking to exit the stalled 4,000 megawatt (MW) Krishnapatnam power project.

HDFC held flat and Power Grid Corporation of India rallied 2.1 percent ahead of their quarterly results due out today.

HCL Technologies held little changed after bagging an IT infrastructure deal from Alstom.

NBCC climbed 2.8 percent on bagging work order from ITPO for re-development of Pragati Maidan in New Delhi.

The Sensex and Nifty indexes closed off their day's highs on Monday as an oil price rally fizzled out and global credit rating agency Moody's Investors Service said India's economic exposure to external risks has gone up during the past seven months. The were closed on Tuesday for Republic Day.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis
In its symbolic look at the likelihood of Armageddon, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has announced the 2016 time of the world's so-called Doomsday Clock, setting it at three minutes to midnight.

A metaphor for the end of the world as we know it, the Doomsday Clock has been set at 11:57PM since January 2015, when it was moved down from five minutes to destruction. It's the closest the clock has been to midnight since the Cold War in the 1980s.

The Bulletin scientists said the clock is staying right where it is because recent progress in the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord "constitute only small bright spots in a darker world situation full of potential for catastrophe."

A statement accompanying the Doomsday Clock decision Tuesday opens with the following words: "Three minutes (to midnight) is too close. Far too close. We, the members of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,want to be clear about our decision not to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock in 2016: That decision is not good news, but an expression of dismay that world leaders continue to fail to focus their efforts and the world's attention on reducing the extreme danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change. When we call these dangers existential, that is exactly what we mean: They threaten the very existence of civilization and therefore should be the first order of for leaders who care about their constituents and their countries."

The decision about the time reflected on the Doomsday Clock is made by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board in conjunction with the Board of Sponsors, which includes 16 Nobel Laureates. The hands of the Doomsday Clock were moved to three minutes before midnight on January 22, 2015, marking the direst setting of the Clock since 1983, at the height of the Cold War.

In addition to a news event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, the Doomsday Clock also was unveiled by a panel at Stanford University in California featuring Governor Jerry Brown; former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz; Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford distinguished fellow, Hoover Institution; and William J. Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense.

While recognizing the important progress represented by the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, the Bulletin cautions that these positive steps have been offset in large part by foreboding developments.



The statement also reflects concerns about "the nuclear power vacuum" around the globe.

Rachel Bronson, the publisher of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: "Last year, the Bulletin's Science and Security Board moved the Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes to midnight, noting: 'The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.' That probability has not been reduced. The Clock ticks. Global danger looms. Wise leaders should act  immediately."

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Fears are growing that Alzheimer's may be passed from person to person after researchers reported a second case suggesting the disease could be transmitted by 'medical accidents'.

Swiss doctors found signs of Alzheimer's in the brains of people who died of the rare, brain-wasting CreutzfeldtJakob disease (CJD). Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater, the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord, from human bodies. These grafts were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD. In addition to the damage caused by the prions, five of the brains displayed some of the pathological signs that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Plaques formed from amyloid-beta protein were discovered in the grey matter and blood vessels. The individuals, aged between 28 and 63, were unusually young to have developed such plaques.

Researchers writing in Swiss Medical Weekly suggest the transplanted dura mater was contaminated with small 'seeds' of amyloid-beta protein which some scientists think could be a trigger for Alzheimer's. The researchers from Austria and Switzerland said the find was highly unusual and suggests a causal relationship to the dural grafts. They added further studies would be needed and called for a critical re-evaluation of how surgical instruments were cleaned.

In September, Professor John Collinge, director of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit at University College London, first discovered evidence the amyloid beta proteins could potentially be transferred from one person to another during some medical procedures. Speaking of the latest study, he told Nature that "we need to rethink our view of Alzheimer's and evaluate the risk of it being transmitted inadvertently to patients. Our results are all consistent. The fact that the new study shows the same pathology emerging after a completely different procedure increases our concern." But Britain's top doctor, Prof Dame Sally Davies, was quick to reassure the public after the controversial findings were published in medical journal Nature.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Political News
In a shocking move less than a week before the Iowa caucuses, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump announced he will not participate in the next Fox News debate scheduled for Thursday night.

A statement from the Trump campaign claimed Fox News is making tens of millions of dollars on the debates due largely to the real estate tycoon's presence on the stage.

"As someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one," the campaign said.

The statement added, "Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away."

The Trump campaign said the billionaire will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors.

Trump's decision to skip the debate is largely seen as extension of his feud with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who is scheduled to co-moderate the debate.

In a post on Twitter, Trump said he refuses to call Kelly a "bimbo" and instead criticized her as a "lightweight reporter."

Trump has been feuding with Kelly since the first Republican debate, when he attacked her for asking what he believed to be unfair questions.

However, Fox News has stood by its anchor and issued a statement accusing Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of threatening Kelly.

"Capitulating to politicians' ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly," the network said.

Fox News went on to say it "can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees" but noted, "Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly."

In response to the news, rival presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., challenged Trump to a one-on-one debate anytime before the Iowa caucuses next Monday.

"We'll do 90 minutes, Lincoln-Douglas, mano-a-mano, Donald and me," Cruz said at a campaign event. "He can lay out his vision for this country, and I can lay out my vision for this country in front of the men and women of Iowa."

Cruz suggested Trump is afraid of Megyn Kelly and called on his supporters to tell the businessman to accept his one-on-one debate invitation.

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday showed Trump and Cruz in a statistical tie in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa.

If Trump follows through on his threat to skip the debate, the primetime debate would feature Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ken.

(Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore)

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Political News
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Rawlins Cross sails into the Sunrise on new album, tour around the East Coast

Rawlins Cross has been on hiatus before, once for nearly a decade after a successful run during the 1990s as one of Atlantic Canadas most popular modern Celtic bands, but never one that was imposed by an outside force of nature. In the spring of ...
A first-of-its-kind journey along India and Pakistan border

What binds the two most talked about nations - India and Pakistan together? What makes the
Ukraine could resume exports of electricity to Belarus and Moldova from April 2016, Deputy Energy and Coal Industry Minister of Ukraine Oleksandr Svetelik told reporters in Kyiv on Tuesday.

"Now we're holding talks. From the second quarter we will be able to foresee as largest exports as possible [to these countries] in the balance of power," he said.

He added that when temperatures rise and the emergency measures in the energy sector are revoked, the burden on reactors of Ukrainian nuclear power plants (NPPs) could considerably fall.

As reported, at present Ukrainian exports electricity only from the Burshtyn Energy Island.
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Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk predicts difficult macroeconomic situation in the country in 2016 and urges largest banks to jointly look for tools for long-term cheap crediting in the national currency.

"I looked at the macroeconomic forecasts for 2016: we have too many challenges in 2016 and the general macroeconomic situation requires unusual decisions. Without crediting the Ukrainian economy at low rtes and with the long length of crediting in the national currency of Ukraine the economic growth would be under big question," the premier said, opening a meeting with representatives of the banking sector held on January 26.

According to a report published by the People's Front party, where Yatseniuk is the leader of the party, the meeting was held at the Cabinet of ministers without representatives of the National Bank of Ukraine. The finance minister, economic development and trade minister, infrastructure minister, regional development, construction, housing and utilities economy minister and agricultural policy and food minister took part in the meeting long with a dozen of heads of the largest banks.

Yatseniuk said that when he was head of the National Bank of Ukraine in 2044 the long refinancing program was launched.

"The money were sent directly to industry, engineering  everything to develop the economy," he said.

He asked representatives of the banking sector to share their thoughts who to implement the broad crediting program in 2016 both for business and the public first for self-employment, creation of jobs and entrepreneurship.
Ex-officer was a churchgoer & family man. Police say he may be a serial rapist.

The Allen family lived on the northwest side of Hutchinson, less than two miles from Rice Park, where several women said they were accosted.
Parliament passes bill on government guarantees to buy gas worth $700 mln in EU

The Ukrainian parliament has passed bill No. 3388 on the stabilization (reserve) energy fund.

A total of 228 parliamentarians backed the decision on Tuesday.

"The bill proposes that the provision of the Budget Code are expanded with a requirement which would allow providing government guarantees to form the stabilization (reserve) energy fund," the explanatory note to the document reads.

The adoption of the bill would allow attracting $700 million from the World Bank to buy gas in the European Union (EU).
National energy company Ukrenergo has signed a contract with the ALSTOM/ChESM consortium (Germany/Ukraine) for the rehabilitation of the 330 kV Kirovska substation and the 330 kV Dnipro-Donbas substation, the press service of the company reported on Wednesday.

The press service said that the cost of the contract is EUR 18.1 million and the completion period is three years and a half. The substations will be rehabilitated as part of the Power Transmission Efficiency Project (rehabilitation of substations) financed by the German government and German Development Bank KfW.

The contract signed is a first contract as part of cooperation of Ukrenergo with KfW and the German government in rehabilitation of facilities of the Ukrainian power grid.

As reported, Ukraine and Germany on December 30, 2011 signed a credit agreement worth EUR 65.5 million for the rehabilitation of substations of Ukrenergo (Power Transmission Efficiency Project).

The total cost of the project is EUR 80.4 million, and the German government will finance EUR 40.5 million, KfW  EUR 25 million and Ukraine will provide the rest of the money.
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Singapore -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/26/2016 -- Many of the people residing in Singapore, whether true-blue locals, expatriates, or tourists will agree - Singapore is the best place to live in the world. And that's not simply based on opinion. According to recent studies, there are reasons why Singapore residents all tend to lean towards that direction.



A recent survey conducted in 450 places around the globe evaluated a number of factors to assess the quality of living expatriates had in these specific locations. Some of the factors were climate, health services, and housing. Osaka and Nagoya, both Japanese cities, garnered the second and third spots in the ranking. Singapore, however, outshone everyone else and topped the list.



According to specialists and experts, the reason why Singapore is highly regarded by thousands of expatriates is because of its intelligent infrastructure, good air quality, availability of dental and medical facilities, low crime rate, and few health risks. What's more, all the positive reviews the city-state has obtained from hundreds of trusted entities, both foreign and local, have attracted international investors to take a slice of the benefits. This is why Singapore has also been dubbed the Gateway to Asia, as it is the country of choice for many foreign investors.



Many other locations that were previously seen as ideal places for expatriates have lost their luster and have begun to fade in comparison to Singapore. Malaysia, for example, was ranked 62nd on the United Nations' list of best countries to live in the world, however paled in comparison to Singapore, which ranked 11th.



Individuals don't have to look into the numbers to find out that Singapore is an ideal place to live. Locals and expats who walk the streets can feel the ease, the light breeze, and the convenience that trickles down from the herculean efforts of the people at the top of the ranks. The mornings are usually laid back  an ideal time for residents to hit the trendiest shopping malls and retail centres scattered throughout the city. There are also numerous attractions such as a gigantic ferris wheel, a cable car ride overlooking the entire city, and a near-by Universal Studios amusement park where individuals can enjoy the warm weather.



The night life is also something to behold. When the sun goes down and the horizon pushes away the last remnants of light, this urban city-state becomes a light of its own. Hot clubs, bars, pubs, and party spots all start to shine their brightness on residents. The energetic night life has residents hooked, and is also an ideal venue to rub elbows with many of the workers, employees, and business men and women that make city life as lively as it is.



When it comes to quality of living, numeric measures are all well and good, but the true feeling of having a good life can only be found on the streets. If people who walk the sidewalks can say that life is good, then it really must be an ideal place to live.



About Morris Edwards

Morris Edwards is a content writer at A1 Business. A1 Business Pte Ltd is a company in Singapore dedicated to providing support for corporate matters ranging from Singapore company registration, compilation of unaudited financial statements to corporate tax.



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Hudson, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/27/2016 -- AIRTEK, a disaster recovery and heavy appliance cleaning service in Massachusetts, has launched a new website making it easier to find and learn about the company



HUDSON, MA  AIRTEK, Inc., one of Massachusetts' premier cleaning services for disaster recovery, mold removal and HVAC ductwork cleaning, has launched a new website, AirtekMA.com.



"We felt it was time to update things. We needed a website that was more mobile friendly and more accurately told the public about our services," said company owner Neil Maloney. "The Internet is the place to get your name out. You also have to have a user-friendly site so people can find what they need."



The new website offers easy navigation and clear page links within the site. Mr. Maloney said that was a very important part of setting up AirtekMA.com.



The home page slowly cycles through the main services the company offers. Each page gives a viewer plenty of time to read the content.



A link bar near the top of the page allows viewers to find more information about AIRTEK and the services offered. The Services popup menu clearly shows everything the company does.



"We want you to know what we do. We want you to understand what we do," he said. "Once you get that information if you have any questions, every page has a contact form and our phone number. If you have questions, we want to answer them."



The new website also features a blog where customers can find valuable information about duct cleaning, water damage, mold remediation and more.



"We're going to offer quality information for our customers and everyone else to use. It's not going to be a giant advertisement for AIRTEK. You can read the blog and get maintenance tips you can do at home. You can learn about how to prepare for and recover from water damage," Mr. Maloney said. "We'll tell you about the problems mold can cause and how mold can spread."



AIRTEK chose SoaringAway.com to build and maintain the new website.



"They have a great reputation and the price was within my budget. The site is professional, easy to navigate and the maintenance costs are reasonable," Mr. Maloney said.



For more information or to see the new website, visit http://www.AirtekMA.com.



About AIRTEK Inc.

AIRTEK Inc. is a family owned and operated cleaning and Restoration Company in Hudson, MA that started off cleaning duct systems 30 years ago. We have since expanded and we are proud to have added many other services including dehumidification, hood cleaning, insulation removal and more. All of our technicians are certified and fully trained. We use powerful vacuum trucks and offer our customers the very best carpet cleaning services using truck mounted equipment. We are the only call you need to make in the event that you need emergency water damage response including structural drying and mold issues.



Media Contact:

AIRTEK Inc

282 Central St

Ste 5

Hudson, MA 01749

Contact Number: 978-567-1072

Email: nmaloney@airtekma.com

Url: http://www.airtekma.com
The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has decided to additionally capitalize two state-owned banks  Ukreximbank by almost UAH 10 billion and Oschadbank by almost UAH 5 billion, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk said at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

"The government additionally sends almost UAH 10 billion to the charter capital of Ukreximbank and almost UAH 5 billion to the charter capital of Oschadbank," he said.

The prime minister said that this would support stability of the two key state-owned banks, provide for crediting and development of the Ukrainian economy.

As reported, banks are to be additionally capitalized after stress tests conducted in 2015. According to a draft memorandum as of late November 2015 after conducting stress tests of 18 out of 20 largest banks the total need in their additional capitalization was UAH 156 billion.
Deerfield Beach, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/27/2016 -- 2015 Global Cufflinks Industry Report is a professional and in-depth research report on the world's major regional market conditions of the Cufflinks industry, focusing on the main regions (North America, Europe and Asia) and the main countries (United States, Germany, Japan and China).



The report firstly introduced the Cufflinks basics: definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain overview; industry policies and plans; product specifications; manufacturing processes; cost structures and so on. Then it analyzed the world's main region market conditions, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, capacity utilization, supply, demand and industry growth rate etc. In the end, the report introduced new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.



Request for report sample of Cufflinks Market: http://www.9dresearchgroup.com/report/47392/request-sample



The report includes six parts, dealing with: 1.) basic information; 2.) the Asia Cufflinks industry; 3.) the North American Cufflinks industry; 4.) the European Cufflinks industry; 5.) market entry and investment feasibility; and 6.) the report conclusion.



Table of Content



Part I Cufflinks Industry Overview



Chapter One Cufflinks Industry Overview

1.1 Cufflinks Definition

1.2 Cufflinks Classification Analysis

1.2.1 Cufflinks Main Classification Analysis

1.2.2 Cufflinks Main Classification Share Analysis

1.3 Cufflinks Application Analysis

1.3.1 Cufflinks Main Application Analysis

1.3.2 Cufflinks Main Application Share Analysis

1.4 Cufflinks Industry Chain Structure Analysis

1.5 Cufflinks Industry Development Overview

1.5.1 Cufflinks Product History Development Overview

1.5.1 Cufflinks Product Market Development Overview

1.6 Cufflinks Global Market Comparison Analysis

1.6.1 Cufflinks Global Import Market Analysis

1.6.2 Cufflinks Global Export Market Analysis

1.6.3 Cufflinks Global Main Region Market Analysis

1.6.4 Cufflinks Global Market Comparison Analysis

1.6.5 Cufflinks Global Market Development Trend Analysis



Chapter Two Cufflinks Up and Down Stream Industry Analysis

2.1 Thin-film Batterytream Raw Materials Analysis

2.1.1 Thin-film Batterytream Raw Materials Price Analysis

2.1.2 Thin-film Batterytream Raw Materials Market Analysis

2.1.3 Thin-film Batterytream Raw Materials Market Trend

2.2 Down Stream Market Analysis

2.1.1 Down Stream Market Analysis

2.2.2 Down Stream Demand Analysis

2.2.3 Down Stream Market Trend Analysis



Enquiry for Buying of Cufflinks Market: http://www.9dresearchgroup.com/report/47392/inquiry-for-buying



Part II Asia Cufflinks Industry (The Report Company Including the Below Listed But Not All)



Chapter Three Asia Cufflinks Market Analysis

3.1 Asia Cufflinks Product Development History

3.2 Asia Cufflinks Process Development History

3.3 Asia Cufflinks Industry Policy and Plan Analysis

3.4 Asia Cufflinks Competitive Landscape Analysis

3.5 Asia Cufflinks Market Development Trend



Browse the full (Index) Table of Content of Cufflinks Market: http://www.9dresearchgroup.com/report/47392#table-of-content



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Wayne, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/27/2016 -- Folks who are in charge of planning a large function quickly realize how stressful it is, justifying the need for professional help. More and more people who find themselves in a situation as such are reaching out to Kaleidoscope Solutions, the premier event planner in Greater Philadelphia.



After years of experience in event planning, they have zeroed in on the industry and broken their business down into four categories, focusing on special events, wedding consultation, corporate functions and fundraising. Wherever these events are being held, Kaleidoscope Solutions is fit to assist, whether they are taking place at a banquet hall, restaurant, home or elsewhere.



For those who are planning weddings for the upcoming 2016 summer season, Kaleidoscope Solutions further breaks their services down into several subcategories. They offer full or partial wedding planning, and day-of coordination. These tiers allow for clients with a variety of needs to all be able to work with Kaleidoscope Solutions and personalize services in a detailed manner.



As far as corporate events go, the event planning company is just as able to adapt their services to the specific needs of their clients. Whether businesses are hosting small lunches for ten clients and coworkers, or large galas with one hundred guests, there is not a job too small or large for Kaleidoscope solutions.



When it comes to events that most hosts would not consider hiring a planner for, Kaleidoscope Solutions challenges them to go the extra mile to provide their guests with an event that goes above and beyond what they could have imagined. Kaleidoscope Solutions suggests doing so for events like retirement parties, graduation parties, baby and bridal showers, funerals or Super Bowl parties. Those who are seeking party planners in Philadelphia can visit Kaleidoscope Solution's webpage, or call 610-964-9600 for more information.



About Kaleidoscope Solutions

Kaleidoscope Solutions first started in June of 2009 with special event planning services. As their demand began to grow, they expanded to specialize in four distinct areas such as special events, wedding consultation, corporate functions and fundraising. The company has over ten years of combined experience with various vendors and food and beverage industries in the Philadelphia, Delaware, and New Jersey areas. The professionals have conducted events for numerous clients, planning details of all aspects under budgets within time frames.



To learn more, visit http://www.kscopesolutions.com/
Singapore -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/26/2016 -- Within the Southeast Asian nations, there are a lot of great cities. But the roaring front liner that is Singapore has left many of its competitors in the dust. The race to becoming the greatest city in the world has begun, and Singapore is aptly representing its Southeast Asian roots.



This island city-state only became independent in 1965, and things didn't look so great for this then infantile country. Its small land area and poor infrastructure was very unattractive. What's more, there was a lack of motivation to become anything more as the people who populated the tiny island were immigrants who had just recently entered the land. Lee Kuan Yew, the country's first prime minister, changed all that with his revolutionary ideas and intelligent innovations. But what exactly did the man do to turn this sad excuse for a city into the thriving, urban metropolis that it is today?



Singapore might not have had much to begin with, but this city-state had one thing going for it before it developed anything else  its strategic location. Singapore is located at the heart of the Southeast Asian nations, making it an ideal place for many investors seeking to dominate the area. Located at the mouth of the Malacca Strait, Singapore is passed by 40% of the world's maritime trade making it an excellent destination.



Another thing that Lee Kuan Yew did to assist this then derelict city-state to become the thriving metropolis it is today is to foster foreign trade and investment. Lee invited multinationals into the country, and encouraged expansion and development with client-centred ideals and principles. The government is relatively small, making it efficient in many of its functions. This makes it easier to oversee operations and maintain business at the highest level of efficiency.



These days, Singapore has become an ideal location for many foreign investors to set-up camp and establish their headquarters. This is because current political entities have maintained Lee Kuan Yew's original principles. This city-state offers a large pool of talents and workers ideal to strengthen the workforce of any company, big or small. These employees are also frequently multilingual, making it easy for foreigners to get ideas across without messages getting mixed up along the way. By keeping taxes low, fostering the growth of foreign investors, and giving international brands and businesses the same benefits as local companies, Singapore has topped the ranks as the best place for all kinds of enterprises to call home.



Life on the streets of Singapore is also reflective of the many advancements and innovations that occur at higher offices. Here, residents can enjoy a laid back daytime atmosphere and an energetic nightlife guaranteed to keep every waking hour an event in its own right. While cost of living might not be all that affordable, Singapore makes up for it by offering countless benefits to its loyal residents, such as easily accessibly medical services, low crime rate, and few health risks.



About Morris Edwards

Morris Edwards is a content writer at SingaporeCompanyRegistration.com.sg, a blogsite by A1 Business Pte Ltd. A1 Business is a company in Singapore dedicated to providing support for corporate matters ranging from Singapore company incorporation, business setup, corporate tax to logo and web design.



Contact:

A1 Business Pte Ltd

Telephone: +65 6100 6673

Address: 10 Anson Road International Plaza #27-15, Singapore 079903

E-mail: info@asg.sg

http://www.a1corp.com.sg
Developing countries can take a short cut to improving the impact of their research by simply increasing national science budgets, a study finds.



A model developed by a team of researchers, which looked at publications in ecology, shows that the amount spent on research in developing countries directly correlates to the number of publications from these countries in top journals.



In rich nations, research output in such journals strongly relates to economic output as measured by GDP (gross domestic product), the research team says.

The main ideology among policymakers is based around GDP, so to say that investment in research is the key is extremely positive  Shalene Jha

Shalene Jha, a biologist involved in the study, says this could give poorer nations an edge over their richer competitors, as raising research spending is relatively easy, while stimulating GDP growth is complex and slow.



The main ideology among policymakers is based around GDP, so to say that investment in research is the key is extremely positive for developing countries, she says.



The study, published in BioScience last week (13 January), analysed the output of more than 130 top ecology journals to determine the nationality of researchers who publish in these journals or sit on their editorial boards.



Developing world scientists authored just three per cent of papers in the journals and made up two per cent of academic review boards, showing that developed countries continue to dominate the field.



What challenged the conventional wisdom in the study is the importance of research spending for boosting scientific output in developing nations. It could be because low-income countries have less developed science systems, so they are much more adaptable and can choose to which fields funding goes much more readily than rich countries, the study says.



As developing countries are on the front line of some of the worlds greatest ecological challenges  climate change, food security and biodiversity loss for instance  the researchers hope their study will translate into more funding for ecology research and conservation, and more publications.



Although the paper focuses on ecology, increasing research investment for any scientific discipline should offer a similar publication boost, says Jha.



But Milena Holmgren, an ecologist from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, believes that presenting investment as a research panacea oversimplifies the issue. Her experiences throughout Latin America suggest that some countries focus less on publication. As a result, budding scientists are less likely to value such pursuits, she says.

Jha and her colleagues acknowledge that investment alone is not enough to boost publication rates. Instead, established Western research leaders could do more to reference and include authors from developing countries in their work, or share their results in open access and non-English language journals, they propose.Increasing the number of international students and engaging in long-term collaboration will also help both developed and developing countries build a more equal research landscape, the study says.
Death rates from leukemia among people of all ages in Europe are falling, according to the latest predictions for European cancer deaths in 2016, published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology today (Wednesday).

The study shows that falls in leukemia death rates will be greatest among children and young adults of both sexes. Between 2009 and 2016 death rates from leukemia among children aged 0-14 will fall by 38% in boys and 20% in girls, and by 26% and 22% in young men and women respectively, aged between 15-44. Among men and women aged 45-69 the death rates will fall by 19%.

The authors of the study say that improvements in management, multi-drug chemotherapy, immunotherapies, stem cell transplants, radiotherapy and treatments that have less toxic side-effects have all contributed to the improvement in survival from leukemia. However, some leukemias remain hard to treat successfully, particularly those that are more common in adults and the elderly.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is most frequent in children, adolescents and young adults, and it has a five-year survival rate of over 90%. Stem cell transplants and new chemotherapy treatments have improved survival in acute myelogenous leukemia, which is relatively common in adults and the elderly. However, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which is more common in the elderly, is difficult to cure, although long-term survival has been achieved in chronic myeloid leukemia due to the introduction of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (drugs that block signals promoting cancer cell growth).

Carlo La Vecchia (MD), Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan (Italy), one of the study authors, said: "Predictions of death rates from leukemia are complicated by the fact that leukemias are a varied collection of blood cancers, with some being more treatable than others. However, the important falls in overall death rates from this group of diseases are very encouraging and are a testament to the hard work of researchers and clinicians in developing and implementing better diagnosis and treatments. We do not understand much about the causes of leukemias, and so more research is needed in this area."

The study by researchers in Italy, Switzerland and the USA looked at cancer death rates in the EU 28 member states as a whole and also in the six largest countries -- France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK -- for all cancers, and, individually, for stomach, intestines, pancreas, lung, prostate, breast, uterus (including cervix) and leukemias for men and women. This is the sixth consecutive year the researchers have published these predictions and there are encouraging downward trends in deaths from most cancers.

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Since 2011 there has been a fall in total cancer death rates in the EU of 8% in men and 3% in women. In 2016 the predicted age standardized rate of deaths* in men will be 133.5 per 100,000 of the population and 85.2 per 100,000 in women. As the number of elderly people in Europe is increasing, the actual number of deaths will rise from 734,259 in 2011 to 753,600 in men in 2016, and from 580,528 to 605,900 in women, making a total of nearly 1,359,500 deaths predicted for 2016. However, Professor La Vecchia said: "The absolute numbers of cancer deaths are likely to level off in the future."

He continued: "Although we are seeing declining death rates, the number of new cases of cancer are increasing, placing a growing burden on national health services, and so governments should be aware of this and plan for it."

In men, death rates from lung, colorectal and prostate cancer are predicted to fall by 11%, 5% and 8% respectively since 2011. In women, death rates from breast and colorectal cancer will fall by 8% and 7% respectively, but lung and pancreatic cancer rates will rise by 5% and 4%; in 2016 the death rates from lung cancer in Europe will be 14.4 per 100,000 women (compared to 13.51 in 2011) and 5.6 per 100,000 for pancreatic cancer (compared to 5.39 in 2011).

However, the picture varies from country to country. For instance, among the six largest countries, although the actual numbers of female deaths from lung cancer will still be the highest in the UK in 2016 than in the other large countries (at 16,400), the rate per 100,000 women has started to fall (from 20.15 per 100,000 in 2013 to 19.37 predicted in 2016), while death rates are still rising in the other countries.

Professor La Vecchia said: "There is a moderate fall in deaths rates in female lung cancer in the UK, although UK rates are still higher than in other EU countries, except Denmark, as British women started to smoke earlier. Rates of deaths for all ages are still comparatively high, but they are leveling off, while rates for the young generation of UK women are lower than in most other large EU countries."

Co-author, Fabio Levi (MD), Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, (Switzerland), said: "We need effective tobacco control in European women in order for overall rates to level off at around 15 to 17 per 100,000, and so that subsequently we can start seeing a fall in female lung cancer rates in Europe."

*Age-standardized rates per 100,000 of the population reflect the annual probability of dying.
Roughly twenty years before the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease appear, inflammatory changes in the brain can be seen, according to a new study from Swedens Karolinska Institutet published in the medical scientific journal Brain. The findings of the researchers, who monitored several pathological changes in the brain, suggest that activation of astrocytes at an early stage can greatly influence the development of the disease.

Alzheimer's disease is characterised by the atrophy of brain neurons, especially those involved in memory, and is our most common dementia disease. Exactly what causes the cells to die is not known, but many years before the first symptoms present themselves, pathological changes occur, such as the deposition of the protein amyloid in the form of amyloid plaques, the accumulation of tau proteins and inflammatory changes that eventually degrade the points of contact between neurons. Exactly when the changes take place along this chain of events remains, however, an unanswered question.

By studying families of people with known Alzheimer's mutations and who therefore run a much higher risk of developing the disease, the researchers were able to examine changes that appear at a very early stage of the disease. The study included members of families with four different known Alzheimer's mutations and a group of patients with non-inherited, 'sporadic' Alzheimer's disease. All participants underwent memory tests and scans using PET (positron emission tomography), whereby radioactive tracer molecules with a short half-life are introduced into the brain via injection into the blood. For this study, the team used the tracer molecules PIB, Deprenyl and FDG to study the amount of amyloid plaques, inflammatory changes in the form of astrocyte activation, astrocytes being the most common type of glial (supporting) cell in the brain. They also studied neuronal function in the brain by measuring glucose metabolism (FDG). In order to monitor the changes over time, the PET scans were repeated after three years for half of the just over fifty participants.

The mutation carriers were found to have amyloid plaque and inflammatory changes almost twenty years before the estimated debut of memory problems. The number of astrocytes reached a peak when the amyloid plaque started to accumulate in the brain, and neuronal function, as gauged by glucose metabolism, began to decline roughly seven years before the expected disease symptoms. The individuals from families with inherited Alzheimer's who did not carry any mutation showed no abnormal changes in their brain.

"Inflammatory changes in the form of higher levels of brain astrocytes are thought to be a very early indicator of disease onset," explains principal investigator Professor Agneta Nordberg at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Center for Alzheimer Research at Karolinska Institutet. "Astrocyte activation peaks roughly twenty years before the expected symptoms and then goes into decline, in contrast to the accumulation of amyloid plaques, which increases constantly over time until clinical symptoms show. The accumulation of amyloid plaque and the increase in number of astrocytes therefore display opposing patterns along the timeline."

These studies demonstrate that the pathological processes that lead ultimately to Alzheimer's disease commence many years before symptoms start to show, and that it should be possible to provide early prophylactic or disease modifying treatment. According to the researchers behind the study, the findings indicate that astrocytes can be a possible target for new drugs.

First author of the study is Elena Rodriguez-Vieitez, PhD, senior scientist at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society. The study was financed by grants from, among others, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SFF), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Stockholm County Council/KI ALF fund, Swedish Brain Power, the Swedish Brain Fund, and a GE Healthcare unrestricted research grant.
More large storms in the future, such as Storm Desmond, will increase the loss of valuable soil and nutrients from agricultural fields, according to new research published by a Lancaster University-led team. In the wake of Storm Desmond, and the wettest November and December since rainfall records began, farmers in the North West of England are once again struggling with waterlogged soil, livestock and crop loss.

Alongside the devastation caused by flooded homes and businesses, farmers also face the loss of an asset essential to their livelihood -- the soil itself.

In a new paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment, researchers investigating nutrient runoff from agricultural land warn that losses of soil and nutrients could increase by an average of 9 per cent by 2050, with some years washing off greater than 20 per cent more soil than the average year.

Professor Phil Haygarth of the Lancaster Environment Centre is leading the three-year, Natural Environment Research Council-funded study.

He said: "There always has been, and always will be, large variability in the weather between years, but there is undoubtedly a trend towards warmer, wetter winters which could result in increased water pollution from agricultural land."

Nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen are essential to plant and animal growth, but too many nutrients cause excessive plant growth and algal blooms in rivers and lakes. These suffocate fish and other organisms and require costly remediation by water supply companies.

Fertilisers and manures washed off in storms are a major source of nutrients, with more than 60 per cent of the nitrogen and 25 per cent of the phosphorus in our rivers coming from agriculture.

Dr Mary Ockenden, Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University and lead author of the publication, said: "The research in this project highlights the importance of the largest and most intense rain events, which contribute more than 90 per cent of the soil loss and 80 per cent of the phosphorus loss in 10 per cent of the time. But longer periods of low rain fall during hotter, drier summers will also result in increases in nutrient concentrations and increased ecological risk."

The research in the paper combined analysis of high-frequency data from the Eden Demonstration Test Catchment programme, (a related collaborative project involving Lancaster University and partners) with site-specific rainfall projections for the future (UK Climate Projections 2009), to make estimates of phosphorus losses in the future.

The predictions incorporated both the uncertainty in the data and the natural inter-annual variability in climate.
Planet Earth's oceans and lands will be buried by increasing layers of plastic waste by the mid-century due to human activity, according to research led by the University of Leicester.

A new study, which has been published in the journal Anthropocene, examines the evidence that we now live in the Anthropocene, an epoch where humans dominate the Earth's surface geology, and suggests that the surface of the planet is being noticeably altered by the production of long-lasting human-made materials, resulting in us entering an 'Age of Plastic'.

Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology from the University of Leicester's Department of Geology explained: "Plastics were more or less unknown to our grandparents, when they were children. But now, they are indispensible to our lives. They're everywhere -- wrapping our food, being containers for our water and milk, providing cartons for eggs and yoghourt and chocolate, keeping our medicines sterile. They now make up most of the clothes that we wear, too.

"Plastics are also pretty well everywhere on Earth, from mountain tops to the deep ocean floor -- and can be fossilized into the far future. We now make almost a billion tons of the stuff every three years. If all the plastic made in the last few decades was clingfilm, there would be enough to put a layer around the whole Earth. With current trends of production, there will be the equivalent of several more such layers by mid-century."

The study suggests that plastics have such a long-lasting impact on the planet's geology because they are inert and hard to degrade. As a result, when plastics litter the landscape they become a part of the soil, often ending up in the sea and being consumed by and killing plankton, fish and seabirds.

Plastics can travel thousands of miles, caught up in the 'great oceanic garbage patches', or eventually being washed up on distant beaches. Plastics can eventually sink to the sea floor, to become a part of the strata of the future.

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The rise of plastics since the mid-20th century, both as a material element of modern life and as a growing environmental pollutant, has been widely described. Their distribution in both the terrestrial and marine realms suggests that they are a key geological indicator of the Anthropocene, as a distinctive stratal component.

Professor Zalasiewicz added: "Plastics will continue to be input into the sedimentary cycle over coming millennia as temporary stores -- landfill sites -- are eroded. Plastics already enable fine time resolution within Anthropocene deposits via the development of their different types and via the artefacts, known as 'technofossils', they are moulded into, and many of these may have long-term preservation potential when buried in strata.

"Once buried, being so hard-wearing, plastics have a good chance to be fossilized -- and leave a signal of the ultimate convenience material for many million years into the future. The age of plastic may really last for ages."

The study was carried out by an international team of scientists including the University of Leicester's Professors Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams and PhD student Yasmin Yonan from the Department of Geology and field archaeologist Dr Matt Edgeworth who is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History.

Dr Edgeworth said: "It may seem odd to think of plastics as archaeological and geological materials because they are so new, but we increasingly find them as inclusions in recent strata. Plastics make excellent stratigraphic markers."

In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group led by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz will gather more evidence on the Anthropocene, which will help inform recommendations on whether this new time unit should be formalized and, if so, how it might be defined and characterized.

Colin Waters from the British Geological Survey, a co-author in the study, added: "We have become accustomed to living amongst plastic refuse, but it is the 'unseen' contribution of plastic microbeads from cosmetics and toothpaste or the artificial fibres washed from our clothes that are increasingly accumulating on sea and lake beds and perhaps have the greatest potential for leaving a lasting legacy in the geological record."
The world's "Doomsday Clock" isn't likely to budge. Scientists have kept the clock's hand at three minutes to "midnight," which was the same time it was set at since January 2015.

Last year, the clock was set at 11:57 due to fears over climate change and a nuclear arms race. Now, it's staying right where it is-which shows that conditions haven't improved.

What is the Doomsday Clock? It's actually a symbolic look at the likelihood of Armageddon. Members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists look at various factors when it comes to setting the time of the clock to see how close we are to "midnight," which represents the end of the world as we know it.

There are a number of reasons why the clock is staying right where it is.

"In keeping the hands of the Doomsday Clock at three minutes to midnight, the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board mean to make a clear statement: The world situation remains highly threatening to humanity, and decisive action to reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change is urgently required," wrote the board members.

The hands are currently the closest they've been to catastrophe since the early days of above-ground hydrogen bomb testing. This is largely due to concern about heightened tensions between the United States and Russia, continued conflict in Ukraine and Syria, and tensions over the South China Sea.

The clock represents an introspective look at what is occurring in the world during this time. More specifically, it shows how countries need to consider the types of actions they are taking on a larger and grander scale.

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While some previous research has suggested that the caffeine from tea or coffee may increase the risk of heart palpatations or irregular beating, a new report challenges the belief that caffeine affects our heart at all.

Researchers at the University of California San Francisco examined over 1,000 people (average age 72)-60 percent of whom said they drank caffeinated products every day. After measuring instances of premature ventricular contractions and premature atrial contractions, the study showed that there were no differences in heart distrubances no matter how much coffee, tea or chocolate the individuals consumed.

"Clinical recommendations advising against the regular consumption of caffeinated products to prevent disturbances of the heart's cardiac rhythm should be reconsidered, as we may unnecessarily be discouraging consumption of items like chocolate, coffee and tea that might actually have cardiovascular benefits," said lead study author Dr. Gregory Marcus who is a cardiologist at the University of California San Francisco, in a statement. "Given our recent work demonstrating that extra heartbeats can be dangerous, this finding is especially relevant."

While researchers cautioned that they did not ask participants if they drank coffee and they cut back on consumption from heart issues, coffee still remains the most commonly consumed beverage in the United States. Furthermore, it's consumption has been known to lower the risk of a number of health problems.

The study is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

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For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has created a delegation to participate in the negotiations with Poland regarding the signing of the agreement between the two countries on cooperation in defense sector.

According to the presidential decree issued on January 27, a delegation will be lead by Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister for European integration Ihor Dolhov.

Poroshenko also approved guidelines for the Ukrainian delegation, which will participate in the talks with Poland concerning the signing of the agreement.
TIMMONSVILLE, S.C.  South Carolina State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman said Tuesday evening that Florence School District Four has made progress in clearing up accreditation deficiencies. There are still a couple of areas that have not been completed, and the district will have until Monday to do so.

Spearman said she has met with FSD4 Superintendent Andre Boyd.

We will have to make a decision at the February state board meeting," Spearman said. "We will be taking a recommendation to the state board whether to release you from denial, to say everything is OK or leave you on probation, or we could determine to recommend to the state board that your accreditation be removed and you will no longer, beyond this year, be able to give South Carolina high school diplomas.

The district was advised of its accreditation deficiencies years ago.

In 2013, we advised your district that you had numerous deficiencies on accreditation, Spearman said. Many of those were dealing with teacher certification.

Spearman said in 2014, the same deficiencies were present, with the possibility of additional ones.

Year three, which is where we were in August 2015, those deficiencies were still there, Spearman said. So the department went before the state board. And the state board of education at that time put you on probation.

In addition to other superintendents who are facing similar situations , Boyd was sent a letter stating that the deficiencies needed to be fixed, Spearman said. If they arent fixed, the district can be denied accreditation.

What happens if you lose accreditation? Its very, very serious, Spearman said.

The FSD4 accreditation status for 2014-2015 is as follows:

>> Board of Trustees: Advised

>> District Operations: Probation

>> Brockington Elementary: Warned

>> Johnson Middle: Probation

>> Timmonsville High: Probation

Spearman said the district is the state departments top priority. But her three areas of concern are accreditation, academics and financial risk.

In 2014, each school in FSD4 received a letter grade of F. A score of 28 is considered a financial high risk. The district received a score of 41, meaning it has a very high financial risk.

Three teachers working in the district aren't certified.

The state department of education has sent staff in to assist the district in recovering from its hardships.

Spearman said it will take everyone in the community to turn the district around. The status of the FSD4 accreditation should be known by March.

If accreditation deficiencies continue for a fourth year, the district will not be able to issue state high school diplomas in 2017, and schools will not be eligible for state funding in 2017 until an acceptable plan to eliminate deficiencies is submitted and approved by the State Board of Education, according to Spearman.
Fiscal Service to pay off all debts on VAT refunds in 2016

The State Fiscal Service of Ukraine plans in 2016 to repay all the debts on VAT refunds and compensate for all the sums of VAT claimed by companies, service head Roman Nasirov has told reporters at a press conference.

"In 2016 we will reimburse for VAT on time under the Tax Code and we won't have overdue amounts for compensation," he said.

According to Nasirov, on January 1, 2016 the debt on VAT refunds amounted to UAH 12 billion, whereas at the beginning of last year it was UAH 22 billion.

The official noted that in 2015 the Fiscal Service compensated for UAH 10 billion over the target, i.e. in general it repaid UAH 68.4 billion.

"In 2016 we plan to reimburse for UAH 100 billion," he said.
Ukraine's need for gas imports stands at 11-13 bcm in 2016

Ukraine's need for natural gas imports in 2016 is 11-13 billion cubic meters (bcm), it could be covered by reverse deliveries from Europe, Minister of Energy and Coal Industry Volodymyr Demchyshyn has said after a cabinet meeting.

"We have a sufficient capacity to pump this volume," he added.

According to Demchyshyn, currently Ukraine receives 40 million cubic meters of gas per day through reverse, another 90 million cubic meters are taken from underground gas storage facilities.
Restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and bringing Crimea back are two things for which the whole world bears responsibility, Ukrainian president's envoy for humanitarian issues in the group Iryna Heraschenko said.

"Ukraine aspired to more actively use all international platforms for the sake of Crimean issue. This is a duty of the whole world: to search an answer to the question about restoration of sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, transfer of Crimea under Ukrainian jurisdiction," she wrote on Facebook on Tuesday evening.

Heraschenko said she had asked Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjorn Jagland about the role of the Council of Europe and PACE over the issue of bringing back Crimea, restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, in human rights defense. "Jagland's reply was blurred from the diplomatic point of view: he said the mission works now, outcomes of its work will be a basis for further actions. He has stressed that a stance of the Council of Europe and PACE over Crimea remains the same as it was declared in the previous resolutions about illegal annexation," Heraschenko said.

According to her, Jagland in his speech in PACE reminded that a special mission of the Council of Europe on the monitoring of the situation with human rights violations in Crimea has been working in the annexed Crimea for two days long.

As reported, the Council of Europe reported on its website that it sent its delegation to Crimea on Monday to assess the human right situation on the peninsula.

Swiss diplomat Gerarg Stoudmann will head the delegation, in which he will be assisted by three members of the Council of Europe secretariat.

"More than 2.5 million people live in Crimea, they are all covered by the European Convention on Human Rights and should be able to benefit from it," the Council of Europe's press service quoted the secretary general of the organization, Thorbjorn Jagland, as saying.

However, for more than a year, no delegation from an international organization has been able to go there, he explained.

"The mission will be conducted with full independence and will not deal with any issue related to the territorial status of Crimea," Jagland stressed.

The mission's mandate covers all major human rights issues including freedom of expression and media freedom; freedom of association and of assembly; minority rights; local and self-government; fight against corruption and prison conditions.

The mission will conclude with a report and recommendations submitted to the Secretary General in late February or March, the report reads.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk and Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Roivas in Kyiv on Tuesday discussed the implementation of the Ukrainian-EU free trade agreement and prospects for Ukrainian citizens' visa-free travels to EU countries.

"Ukraine has taken all important steps necessary for visa-free travels. We expect the European Commission to make a relevant decision as soon as possible," Yatseniuk said, adding that he hoped that Ukrainian citizens would receive the right to travel to the EU visa-free as early as in 2016.

The Estonian prime minister expressed solidarity and firm support of Ukraine, its territorial integrity and security, noting that support and assistance for Ukraine should remain a priority for the EU. "I am convinced that everyone in the EU understands this," the Ukrainian government press service quoted Roivas as saying.

He agreed that there should be no obstacles to visa-free travels between Ukraine and the EU.

The two prime ministers also discussed regional interaction.

They shared the opinion that projects that could be detrimental to the EU's and Ukraine's energy security, particularly the Nord Stream 2 project pursued by Moscow, should be blocked.

The parties also discussed the implementation of the Ukrainian-EU free trade agreement, which has taken effect since January 1. Ukraine expects the EU to support its economy in light of Russia's trade pressure and embargo, Yatseniuk said.
All four working subgroups on Ukraine begin working

The working subgroups from the trilateral contact group on the settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine are meeting in Minsk, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry has reported.

"All four working groups on various aspects of the [conflict] settlement in eastern Ukraine are meeting in Minsk,' the ministry reported.

According to earlier reports, the subgroup on security is in Minsk discussing issues related to Donbas mine clearance.
The ruling opens the door to damage claims against the captain and the insurer, The London Steamship Owners Mutual Insurance Association, with one prosecutor calling for more than EUR4bn.

More than 13 years after oil spill, Mangouras, now 81, was on 26 January convicted of recklessness resulting in catastrophic environmental damage, according to a statement by the court, overturning a previous sentence which cleared him of criminal responsibility.

The Supreme Court ruling confirmed the acquittal of the Prestige chief engineer and of Jose Luis Lopez Sors, Spains former director-general of the Merchant Marine, but it slapped the tanker's owner Mare Shipping, and the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds (IOPC) with direct civil liability.

The sinking of the 1976-built 81,000dwt Greek tanker, which was sailing to Gibraltar, released an estimated 63,000 tonnes of oil along the Galicia coast and forced the closure of the countrys richest fishing grounds.

The Galician regional court had previously concluded it was impossible to establish criminal responsibility and the spill was partly due to the 26-year-old tankers poor state of repair.

After a storm damaged one of its fuel tanks, the ship had spent days drifting at sea having been refused permission to dock by Spanish, Portuguese and French authorities. It eventually split into two and sank about 250 miles off the coast, spurting oil into the water from the sea bed.

Mangouras was accused of guiding the tanker in treacherous conditions with full knowledge of its weakened structure while the ship was overloaded by at least 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil.

The Supreme Court ruling overturned a 2013 decision of a lower court that acquitted him of most charges but sentenced him to nine months for disobeying authorities.

It is not known if Captain Mangouras, who spent 83

days in a Spanish jail after the incident will now actually serve jail time.

He lost a case against Spain in 2009 at the European Court of Human Rights when a Strasbourg court ruled his EUR3m bail and 83 days in jail did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

In the US the Spanish state sued the ABS, the Prestige's classification society. This ended in 2014 with a New York appeal court ruling the classification society could not be held liable for the casualty.
While there was a tempered level of optimism from Braemar ACM Shipbroking research head Henry Curra, senior tanker owner executives remained bullish. Curra presented both bullish and bearish cases for tanker prospects in 2016 but concluded that the market has legs, despite arguing that 2015s surge in oil demand, including stimuli such as increased OECD refinery utilisation and increased use of commercial storage were unrepeatable.

Euronav ceo Paddy Rodgers gave a resolutely positive evaluation. You dont have to apologise for being bearish in this market, he said. We had a really bad opening to the year on the capital market, but oil has never been about the capital side, its always been about the operating economy.

Predictions for 2016 demand growth have ranged between a International Energy Agency (IEA) predictions of 1.2%, and more optimistic proposition of 1.9%. However, Rodgers declared: Ill be quite happy with 1% demand growth," and argued that the IEA has "once again undercooked demand."

Commenting on the risk of oversupply, he continued: Price determines buying behaviour. At 1.9% (demand growth) were going to have easily enough demand to absorb the extra tonnage.

Coming from Russia, people were probably expecting me to be one of the bears, joked Nikolai Kolesnikov, evp and ceo of Sovcomflot. But were really quite bullish. I dont think things will start changing dramatically over the next 2-3 years.

Were witnessing a certain crisis of many international institutions, OPEC being one of them, but I dont see them cutting production. It is vital that they continue pumping oil in many countries, and that oil has to be transported.

Ridgebury Tankers ceo Robert Burke described the current oil market a War of attrition.

Everyone has invested in energy and nobody is going to give up on the price war, said Burke. Its going to last longer than anyone thinks. Countries in price war have long term view  the Americans, the Russians, the Saudis. People do not start a price war with a time horizon of 12 months. The

possibility of supply cut is unlikely.

People just have to stop being such willing buyers of bad news, maintained Rodgers, referring to the dire predictions based on the first weeks of 2016. Its not a trend, its not an indicator of the market  stop looking at the tea leaves and get back to work.
The investor, a Chinese businessman, is identified as Xu Caizhong by the local media. Xu, who was present at the groundbreaking ceremony, said Weihai Samjin will aim to deliver six ships this year, and to gradually improve and expand the yard facilities.

Xu said there are two main reasons for savingf Weihai Samjin, with the first being favourable policy support given by Weihai city authorities. He added: Secondly, Weihai Samjin is a Korean-invested yard, and such a Korean-invested business model is rare in China. We believe Weihai Samjin already has the much-needed technological edge against its competitors.

The investor has signed up for ten 11,000 dwt oil tankers with the yard for work to commence in end-March.

Bankrupt Weihai Samjin had earlier gained approval from a local court to start a restructuring to revive operations after Xu agreed to pump in RMB300m ($46m) into the yard.

Established in November 2000, Weihai Samjin was hit hard by the 2008 global financial crisis and was declared bankrupt in September 2014.
Ukrainian military register 66 attacks on their positions in Donbas in past 24 hours

Ukrainian military positions in Donbas came under fire 66 times in the past 24 hours, the press center for the anti-terrorist operation reported on Facebook on Wednesday morning.

Specifically, the enemy opened fire on Ukrainian military positions in the Mariyinka area from grenade launchers, large-caliber guns and surface-to-air missile systems. The positions near Krasnohorivka came under fire from grenade launchers and mortars. The enemy opened fire on the strongholds near Novhorodske, using combat infantry vehicles, automatic grenade launchers and guns, the report says.

Ukrainian military positions in Troitske and Zaitseve came under mortar fire, the press center reported.

"The situation is traditionally tense in the area of the temporarily occupied Donetsk. The enemy opened fire on our strongholds in Opytne, Piski, Adviyivka and the Butovka mine using grenade launchers and large-caliber guns,' the report says.
Russian security officers Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Alexander Alexandrov, who are being tried in Ukraine, may be transferred to Russia to serve their sentences at home, Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General and Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios said.

"In line with international legal treaties ratified by many countries, including Russia, citizens of other countries may serve their sentences in their own countries through an extradition exchange. That is, the state whose citizens have committed a crime in Ukrainian territory may accept their citizens, and must ensure that they serve their sentence in keeping with the conviction handed down to them by Ukraine," Matios said on the Hromadske.TV television channel.

A decision on Alexandrov's and Yerofeyev's possible extradition might be made if Russia makes a relevant request, he said.

Military prosecutors are not directly related to a negotiating process regarding the swap of captives, he said.

The officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, were captured near the town of Schastia, Luhansk region of Ukraine, in an attempt to seize a strategic bridge. Both were injured and later underwent surgeries at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's main clinical hospital in Kyiv.

On May 19, Ukrainian detectives told the Russians that they were suspected of terrorism. The Kyiv Shevchenkivsky District Court ordered their arrest on May 22.

The Board of the High Specialized Court of Ukraine decided on October 15 that Kyiv Holosiyivskiy District Court would hear the case of the Russians. The court began to hear the case merits on November 10.

The Russian Defense Ministry has insisted that Alexandrov and Yerofeyev were not on military duty at the moment of their detention in Ukraine.
Press Release

January 27, 2016 Duterte-Cayetano says Philippines on the brink of becoming

a narco state, commits to end "drug chaos" for the people The tandem of presidential bet Davao City Mayor Rodrigo "Rody" Duterte and Senator Alan Peter Cayetano today warned that if the disorder brought by illegal drugs will not end, the country will become a narco state. In a statement, Duterte said the country is showing alarming signs of becoming a narco state. "In the national capital region (NCR) where the country's capital is situated, the government admitted that 92 percent of barangays are already infiltrated by illegal drugs. If Manila, the country's seat of power, is helpless to address this, what more the other parts of the country where government presence is weak?" The tough-talking mayor said. Duterte also noted the presence of international drug syndicates in the country, such as the Sinaloa drug cartel, a Mexican-based group considered the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the west. "This is a clear national security threat. This is an invasion of a new kind. Drug lords, domestic and foreign, have declared a war against our families and children, and the government is helpless about it," Duterte said. The duo said if elected, they will implement a combination of national, regional and international strategies to combat drug trafficking. "On the national level, we will strengthen and capacitate our security forces. We will cleanse the ranks of the police and military of the corrupt, provide better salaries and incentives and modernize their anti-narcotics infrastructure," Cayetano explained. "We will also strengthen the five pillars of our criminal justice system. Drug trafficking thrives best in countries where there is grave insecurity and injustice," Cayetano added. Meanwhile, on the regional level, Cayetano said they will push to develop the regions, especially those heavily infiltrated by illegal drugs, to provide the people alternative livelihood. The vice presidential bet also said that internationally, he and Duterte will enforce stricter immigation laws to prevent international drug syndicates from entering the country. "We will not allow the disorder to continue and our country to become a narco state. We will build a strong developmental state to provide bold solutions and swift actions to bring about real change. Under the Duterte-Cayetano watch, everyone will be afraid of the law, but everyone will be protected by the law," Cayetano ended.
Press Release

January 27, 2016 HISTORIC PH-INDONESIA MARITIME TREATY

SUBMITTED FOR SENATE APPROVAL A historic maritime treaty between the Philippines and Indonesia that draws maritime boundary between the two countries may soon take effect after more than two decades of negotiations. This after the Senate Foreign Relations sub-committee on the Philippines-Indonesia Delimitation of the Exclusive Economic Zone Boundary, chaired by Sen. Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos, Jr. today agreed to endorse for concurrence of the entire chamber the historic maritime pact between the two countries. Signed on May 23, 2014 after 20 years of negotiations, the treaty draws the boundary between the overlapping EEZ of the two countries, specifically in Mindanao Sea and Celebes Sea. To be valid and effective it requires concurrence of at least 2/3 vote of all members of the Senate. "This is a very important agreement with our neighbor, Indonesia. We will sponsor this for concurrence of the Senate as soon as possible," said Marcos after a hearing of the sub-committee on the maritime treaty. An EEZ is a sea zone defined under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) over which a state has special rights on exploration and use of marine resources. It stretches from the baseline out to 200 nautical miles. It was Marcos who authored the UNCLOS-compliant Philippine Baselines Law (R.A. 9522) during his term as representative of the 2nd District of Ilocos Norte in the House of Representatives. Marcos noted that a clear demarcation of the EEZ boundaries between the two countries would not only prevent conflict between Filipino and Indonesian fishermen but would also pave the way for closer cooperation in protection of marine environment, increased trade, and enhanced maritime security. "The valuable experience we had in conducting years of negotiation with Indonesia provides us with a roadmap on how to resolve our maritime territorial dispute with other countries, particularly the one with China in the West Philippine Sea" Marcos added. Marcos has been urging the government to exhaust all diplomatic efforts to resolve the row with Beijing, including bilateral and multi-lateral talks, back-door channels, as well as cultural and educational exchanges to ease the relations between the two countries strained by the maritime territorial row. Representatives from concerned departments of the government, such as Foreign Affairs, Defense, Energy, Environment and Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Transportation and Communications posed no objection to the PH-Indonesia maritime agreement.
Press Release

January 27, 2016 SEN. GRACE POE OPENING STATEMENT RE-OPENING

OF THE MAMASAPANO INQUIRY Magandang Umaga sa inyong lahat. As Chairperson of Senate Committee on Public Order and Dangerous Drugs, jointly called with the Senate Committees on Peace, Unification and Reconciliation and Finance, this public hearing on the Re-opening of the Mamasapano Incident is called to order. Bago po natin simulan ang pagdinig, nais ko po sanang magbigay ng ilang pananalita. Bilang pagbabalik-tanaw at malaman natin kung saan tayo nanggaling at kung nasaan na tayo ngayon sa usapin ng Mamasapano. Mahigit isang taon na ang lumipas, bago sumapit ang hatinggabi ng ika-25 ng Enero 2015, halos apat na daang (400) miyembro ng Special Action Force (SAF) ang may misyon para dakpin ang dalawa sa pinakamapanganib na terorista sa buong mundo. Bago mag-bukang liwayway, patay na ang dalawang kriminal. Pero bago magtakip-silim, apatnapu't apat (44) na PNP-SAF ang wala nang buhay. May dalawamput-tatlong (23) Moro fighters at limang (5) sibilyan rin ang namatay, at marami pang nasugatan. In the Senate, eight resolutions were filed and a privilege speech delivered, all expressing the nation's pain and the outrage over the death of the SAF fallen heroes. This loss was as massive as the tribute to their valor was moving. The Committees conducted five public hearings, spanning a total of 23 hours and 39 minutes. The transcripts of these hearings alone total 1,098 pages. We also met five times in executive session, spending 15 hours and 9 minutes, grilling witnesses behind closed doors. A total of 37 persons were summoned to testify. From both camps of the conflict, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and the Office of the President to barangay officials. The Philippine National Police (PNP), the Special Action Force (SAF), the Philippine Army, high-ranking national government officials, local government officials, peace panels of the Government and the MILF, and heads and members of ceasefire committees appeared before us. On March 18, 2015, your Committees submitted a 129-page Committee Report (CR No. 120) on the various resolutions with regard to the Mamasapano massacre. The Committee Report was signed by 21 senators, some with separate annotations and was submitted to plenary for its consideration. Tatlumpu't pitong (37) araw mula nang buksan natin ang unang pagdinig ng Senado, kulang dalawang buwan mula nang maganap ang trahedya sa Mamasapano, isinumite po ng Committee ang aming report. The records would show that the probe was thorough, our questioning relentless, the review of events methodical, and our request for information uncompromising. Committee Report No. 120. among others, contains the following conclusions, findings and main observations: 1) What happened in Mamasapano on 25 January 2015 was a Massacre, Not a "Mis-encounter"; 2) The PNP's Inadequate Intelligence, Poor Planning and Lack of Coordination with the AFP were Fatal Mistakes; 3) MILF and BIFF fighters and members of other Private Armed Groups (PAGs) committed murder and robbery and was not in self-defense; 4) The MILF leadership does not have absolute control over their ground troops which, therefore, raises doubts as to the capacity and sincerity of the MILF as our "partner" in the peace process and it has implications upon the safety of government troops who must conduct law enforcement operations within MILF controlled territory; 5) While prior coordination by the PNP with the AHJAG is not necessary, the Ceasefire mechanism between the GPH and MILF proved unable to effectively end the firefight and save the members of the 55thSAC; 6) The Chain of Command within the PNP was violated and both Purisima and Napenas committed acts constituting administrative and criminal offenses; 7) The President failed to prevent then suspended PDG Purisima from violating Article 177 of the Revised Penal Code (Usurpation of authority or official functions) and, as Commander in Chief, makes him ultimately responsible for the incident. 8) The Americans, who were present during the entire operation, were more than mere observers especially given the facts that they directly trained, equipped and supplied information to the SAF troops involved in the operation. The report covered all bases and covered up nothing. Tinukoy natin ang mga nagkamali at pagkakamali, pero pinuri natin ang mga nararapat at kilos na marapat sa isang patas na pagtatasa ng partisipasyon ng bawat isa. We were able to do these because first, we believe that truth can never be compartmentalized; and that second, the nation, even in grief, has the wisdom and courage to handle the truth, no matter how painful. However, if there are supervening events or new evidence that come to fore after all of these, I will also be the first to say that we should unearth these information and that we should be open to receiving and hearing additional facts in our continuing search for the truth. Almost seven (7) months after the filing of our committee report, Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile took the floor on 7 October 2015 with a motion to reopen the Committee Hearings on the Mamasapano Incident. After inquiries and clarifications, the Senate, as a whole, during plenary session, unanimously and finally decided on 18 January 2016 to grant Senator Enrile's motion, taking in good faith his assertions on new information regarding the issue. The reopening of the hearing was allowed with the specific note that the filed Committee Report remains valid and subsisting. Ginawa natin ang ating trabaho dati. Ngayong may lumilitaw na posibleng bagong impormasyon, hindi tayo maaaring magbubulag-bulagan o magkunwari na wala nang maaaring gawin pa ang Senado. Ang katotohanang walang kabuuan ay hindi ganap at hindi matatawag na katotohanan. Kailangang ipagpatuloy ang masalimuot na pagbubuo ng mga datos para makita nating lahat ang buong katotohanang naganap sa Mamasapano. Ang tunay na parangal na pwede nating maibigay sa SAF 44 ay ang buong katotohanan. Dahil doon nakasalalay ang tunay na katarungan. It is for this reason that we are convened here today to hear new matters and receive new evidence or information that may be submitted; facts that will, hopefully, add to our enlightenment and not subtract from what we already know. Let me emphasize it succinctly: the purpose of this inquiry is not only to find fault but more importantly, to know the absolute and complete truth. For the orderly conduct of today's discussion, we shall observe the following guidelines: 1. Given that he is the main proponent of the hearing on the Mamasapano reopening, Senate Minority Leader Ponce Enrile, will be accorded the first one hour to ask questions to Resource Persons invited. (For the information of everybody, all Resource Speakers today are mainly from the recommendations of Senator Enrile.) 2. Thereafter, the other Senators shall be given 10 minutes each for their questions on a "first in time first in right" basis 3. Finally, given the relatively high emotions involved in this issue, may I remind our fellow Senators, also those in the audience, as well as our resource speakers to observe proper decorum as well as our rules on inquiries in aid of legislation.
One Ukrainian military serviceman has been injured in the Kyiv government's military operation zone in eastern Ukraine in the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian presidential administration's spokesman Andriy Lysenko told reporters on Wednesday.

After sunset, militants shelled Ukrainian military positions "practically nonstop," using grenade launchers and large-caliber machineguns, Lysenko said.

"As a result of one such shell attack, one Ukrainian soldier was injured; there were no other casualties," he said.

The situation in Donbas is escalating, Lysenko said. "The enemy occasionally used mortar launchers, there was also a tank shell attack," he said, adding that the Ukrainian armed forces only fired "in response to most daring provocations."

On the Donetsk track, provocations took place along the entire frontline, the presidential administration official said. Near the village of Zaitseve, Ukrainian military positions were shelled with 82-milimeter mortars twice; militants also used mortar launchers near the village of Troitske, having launched 20 mortars there.

The hottest spot on this track was the area around Donetsk Airport where snipers also stepped up their work, with seven sniper attacks registered so far on Wednesday, the official said. Tank shells were fired near Pisky.

On the Mariupol track, the situation was unsettled near Maryinka and Krasnohorivka, Lysenko said. On the Luhansk track, there was no ceasefire breach.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate has said the situation in the central government's military operation zone in Donbas has become more difficult, with militants amassing weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreements.

"Representatives of the Special Monitoring Mission of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] provided information about the presence, in the districts of Leninsky, Donetsk, and Zhovten, of weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreements: tanks, cannons, mortar launchers and 122-millimeter Grad rocket launchers," the Directorate said on its website on Wednesday.

Militants have stepped up their shelling, having fired small arms, grenades, mortars and tank shells against Ukrainian positions 66 times on Wednesday, the military intelligence directorate said.
A 30-year-old Ventura woman is believed to have drowned after parachuting off of the iconic Bixby Bridge in the Big Sur area last week, and video of the incident shows a Finnish man probably died when he jumped into the ocean to rescue her, authorities said.

It took days for officials to learn the two went missing while BASE jumping, and investigators were only able to put together the chain of events after watching a dramatic video of the incident from the helmet camera of the missing man.

The video shows Mary Katherine Connell accompanied by a man at the Highway 1 bridge on what appeared to be last Wednesday morning, said Monterey County Sheriff Cmdr. John Thornburg.

Connell, who went by Katie, heads to the side of the bridge, jumps, and successfully deploys her parachute, aiming for a small beach about 300 feet below.

Unfortunately for her, she landed in the surf, Thornburg said. As she landed, she was overtaken by a wave.

Two more waves quickly came in secession, and she disappeared from view. Thats when the man, whose identity has not been released, parachutes off the bridge and successfully lands on the beach.

As he lands, he takes his parachute off and puts down his helmet camera, Thornburg said.

We believe he went into the ocean to try to rescue her and subsequently drowned, he said.

The pair parked their car on a road about 30 to 50 yards from the bridge, and the car was tagged for removal by the California Highway Patrol a day after the jump, Thornburg said.

But a search didnt start until Saturday, when the mans parachute was discovered and his helmet camera revealed they were likely lost at sea. Investigators recovered the mans Finland passport, and were working with the Los Angeles-based Finland consulate to contact his family, Thornburg said.

The bodies of the jumpers have not been recovered after extensive helicopter and diving searches. Monterey County Sheriffs Office has no intentions of releasing the video, Thornburg said.

BASE jumping, a sport where athletes jump from fixed structures and cliffs, happens occasionally at the bridge, Thornburg said. There were no known reports of any prior deaths from such jumps.

The sport is illegal in many cities and can become dangerous when there is parachute trouble, Thornburg said.

If something goes wrong, it really goes wrong, he said.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
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Produce shoppers were examining bulbs of onions and bunches of kale Sunday at the Clement Street Farmer's Market in San Francisco when an object suddenly fell from the sky, barely missing a customer.

It was a drone with a wingspan wider than the biggest cauliflower for sale.

"A drone fell in the middle of Clement Street and nearly landed on someone's head," a woman identified only as Jaime told the Richmond District Blog. "Would have been bad because it was a large drone."

Incoming objects are rare at the Richmond District farmer's market, so naturally customers were nonplussed. But, Jaime said, within a minute, a man ran up, grabbed the drone and, without saying a word, briskly walked away.

Jaime pulled out her camera, caught up to the operator and his companion, and began snapping.

The drone couple, obviously unhappy to be on the other side of the camera, shouted for her to stop.

"They said, what did I think I was doing taking their picture as they tried to cover their faces? I replied don't you see the irony here? You guys just did the EXACT same thing to me and everyone else at the farmers market," Jaime told the Richmond District Blog.

While it was not known if mechanical failure or pilot error brought the drone down, it's clear that this guy should not have been flying it over a busy public place.

At least until he becomes more adept at controlling it.
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The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a day of remembrance Tuesday for Mario Woods, the stabbing suspect shot to death last month by several police officers, in a vote that ratcheted up tensions between the supervisors and the police union.

Several supervisors railed against what they described as bullying behavior by the Police Officers Association, and said they would not be intimidated. The union called the resolution completely inappropriate.

The resolution said that while several supervisors and the chief of police have privately expressed their condolences, the city and county of San Francisco has not publicly apologized to Gwen Woods, Mario Woods mother.

It declares his birthday, July 22, to be Mario Woods Remembrance Day in San Francisco. It also offers Gwen Woods sincere condolences for the loss of her son and apologies for the way in which she has been treated since her sons death.

No say for Lee

As a resolution, the boards action does not go before Mayor Ed Lee for his signature or veto. Lee has said that there are ways to express your sadness, but I dont think it necessary to sign a resolution.

Police say Woods, 26, was a suspect in a Bayview stabbing and was carrying a knife when he was confronted by several officers Dec. 2 at a Muni bus stop. Police say they fired four nonlethal beanbag rounds at him and tried using pepper spray, but that Woods would not surrender.

Video taken of the confrontation showed Woods starting to walk away from police when five officers opened fire with at least 15 rounds. Critics of how police handled the incident say theres no indication on the videos that Woods was lunging at or otherwise threatening the officers.

Union angry

The district attorneys office, police and Office of Citizen Complaints are investigating whether the officers either committed a crime or violated department policy. On Monday, Lee asked the federal Justice Department to look into the Woods killing and other police actions.

Also on Monday, the Police Officers Association sent the supervisors a strongly worded letter deriding the Woods Day resolution. It cited several police officers and firefighters who were killed on the job, and said the city hadnt designated a day in their honor.

It will be a hurtful day to their families if this citys elected officials decide to recognize and honor an individual that preyed upon our most vulnerable citizens, wrote union President Martin Halloran.

Several supervisors said the union was using strong-arm tactics.

This is a victory

Supervisor David Campos, who authored the Woods Day resolution with Supervisor John Avalos, told his board colleagues, By standing up to the bullying and intimidation we have seen, you are not only standing up for yourself, for your family, but you are standing up for an entire city.

We wont be intimidated by the POA, board President London Breed said. This is a victory, but we have so much more work to do.

Breed and some of the boards more moderate members were running the risk of longer-term political damage by defying the police union. The union seldom funds progressive candidates, but it has thrown its money and weight behind moderates, including Breed during her 2012 campaign. She is up for re-election in November.

Although Tuesdays vote was unanimous, it was not without backroom drama. Breed and Supervisor Malia Cohen, who represents the Bayview where the shooting happened, were initially angry that Campos and Avalos introduced the resolution without approaching them.

Campos and Breed hug

There was no sign of that acrimony Tuesday. Breed, Campos and others took pictures with Woods mother in the board chambers after the resolution passed. Campos and Breed, who arent on speaking terms, even hugged.

Today we call out Mario Woods, but Mario Woods is a symbol for those that dont have a place in history  that may have died tragically and nameless, Cohen said.

The police union has previously criticized Cohen for questioning the officers actions in the Woods shooting, saying she was making dangerous and inflammatory statements based on little more than an eight-second video clip.

Politicizes a tragedy

The police union vice president, Tony Montoya, said after Tuesdays vote, Unfortunately, todays resolution only politicizes a tragedy and does not engage us in a meaningful dialogue, but instead assuages blame and lack of understanding of what men and women of this department do every day to keep our city safe.

Lee sidestepped a question about his reaction, noting that he had asked the Justice Department to investigate and saying, I think I have done my part. ... We will take whatever they investigate and will work with those consequences.

Emily Green is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: egreen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @emilytgreen
A lawsuit claiming the bail system in San Francisco and elsewhere is unconstitutional, because it keeps poor people in jail while wealthier people charged with the same crimes can go free, hit a wall in federal court Tuesday.

The problem, said U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of Oakland, is that decisions on bail are ultimately made by Superior Court judges, who under the law are state officials. And the U.S. Constitution says the state generally cant be sued without the state consenting, which California hasnt granted in this case.

State law requires judges to determine bail, and you cant sue them, Gonzalez Rogers told lawyers for the plaintiffs, two low-income women who were held in San Francisco County Jail before being released without charges. The Superior Court is a constitutional branch of the California government.

She declined to dismiss the suit, but gave the plaintiffs 30 days to think of a legal avenue to reach their goal of striking down the bail system. I dont know if it exists, Gonzalez Rogers said.

Lawyers for Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit that has filed similar suits in six other states, said they would continue to argue that the cash bail system was constitutionally invalid, no matter who oversees it.

A county cannot violate the federal Constitution even if ordered by a state judge, attorney Phil Telfeyan told reporters. During the hearing, Telfeyan argued that a federal court could strike down clearly unconstitutional bail orders  for example, one that set higher bail for Muslims than for Catholics  and said San Francisco is ultimately responsible for the bails its judges impose.

Gonzalez Rogers seemed unpersuaded. You want me to issue an order to all of the judges in San Francisco telling them that their orders are unconstitutional? she asked.

According to the lawsuit, filed in October, plaintiff Riana Buffin, 19, had been arrested that month on suspicion of grand theft. Unable to raise bail of $30,000, she sat in jail for two days until prosecutors dropped the case, and wound up losing her job at the Oakland airport that she counted on to support her family.

The second plaintiff, Crystal Patterson, 29, was arrested in October on suspicion of assault and was held on $150,000 bail, the amount set by San Franciscos bail schedule. Bail bond companies normally require inmates to put up a nonrefundable 10 percent of the bail to go free, but Patterson couldnt raise that amount, the suit said. Instead, she was given a special arrangement that allowed her to put up $1,500 and pay off the rest later, with interest. She did so and was freed after 31 hours, but will spend years paying off her debt, even though prosecutors never charged her, the suit said.

Wealthier defendants could simply have put up the entire bail amount and get it back when they show up in court. That system, the womens lawyers argued, is wealth-based discrimination unrelated to public safety and violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law.

California law requires counties to set monetary bail for different crimes but leaves them free to determine the amounts. Lawyers for San Francisco and bail bond companies, which are seeking to join the suit, argue that the system promotes public safety by giving defendants an incentive to come to court.

The plaintiffs say the same goals could be accomplished evenhandedly by monitoring defendants, electronically and otherwise, and taking other steps to bring them to court. They say those measures, used in some counties elsewhere and in most other nations, result in higher show-up rates than cash bail.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
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The San Jose City Council has unanimously approved Apples plans to develop up to 4.15 million square feet of office space over 15 years in North San Jose, fueling hope that one day Apple will move its headquarters there.

Cupertino would be upset, but I tell you what  I hope it happens, said Councilman Raul Peralez.

City officials say Apple has already invested roughly one third of a billion dollars to expand its offices in the region. It expects to bring several thousand jobs into the city and pour significant revenue into San Jose coffers. The councils actions allow Apple to add 43 acres it acquired last year for $138 million to a development agreement approved by the city years ago. The space sits on Orchard Parkway on both sides of Atmel Way and east of Orchard Parkway on both sides of Component Drive.

Apples senior director of real estate and development, Kristina Raspe, said at Tuesdays meeting that the company plans to start moving employees to San Jose by July. City Council members estimate that the move would involve more than 1,000 workers. The company employs roughly 110,000 people worldwide, with more than 25,000 in the Santa Clara Valley.

Over time, Apples San Jose project will bring about $15 million in annual property tax revenue to the successor of the citys redevelopment agency, and once those obligations are met after about 20 years, the citys general fund will get up to $2 million in property tax revenue annually from the Apple development, officials said. In addition, the city will get $300,000 in annual business and utility tax revenue.

Apple hasnt revealed its plans for the property or the total number of employees that will work there, but city officials say the jobs will be related to research and development.

Such efforts are seen as vital to Apples growth, because the company has faced criticism from analysts for its reliance on the iPhone, which made up 66 percent of its overall revenue in its last fiscal year.

In a bid to diversify, it has rolled out other products such as its first wearable, the Apple Watch, and an ecosystem for apps related to Internet-connected homes and health. It has also invested in areas that could spur growth, such as augmented reality.

Auto plans?

Some speculate that Apple is building an automobile. The effort, code-named Titan, already had 600 employees in September, according to the Wall Street Journal. But the project may have hit a roadblock recently because Steve Zadesky, a manager leading the project, plans to leave the company, the Journal said. Apple declined to comment on whether Zadesky is departing and has never publicly said it is building a car.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, said he believes Apple is trying to build an electric car, calling it an open secret on the BBC this month. Its pretty hard to hide something if you hire 1,000 engineers to do it, Musk told the network.

Industry observers figure Apples hiring spree means that San Jose will be the spillover office for employees who dont fit into existing spaces.

The flying saucer isnt done yet, so they have to put these people someplace, said Rob Enderle with advisory services firm Enderle Group, referring to Apples spaceship campus in Cupertino.

Were still studying the site to determine what is the best use for us, Raspe said.

Apples San Jose property is in a designated industrial park, which could be used for research and development, manufacturing, assembly testing, and offices, according to city documents.

Some skeptical

But according to analysts, its unlikely that Apple will manufacture cars in San Jose. It would make more sense to do that in a place with cheaper land and more opportunities for financial incentives, they said.

I dont think 4 million square feet is enough for auto production; that wouldnt make sense, said Jessica Caldwell, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com. She said Tesla has a 16 million-square-foot site in Fremont, mostly using an area of 5.5 million square feet for manufacturing.

It could be a place where employees work on prototyping an electric car, given that the car would probably be compatible with the iPhone, Caldwell said. Apples San Jose land and its Cupertino headquarters are only about 10 miles apart.

Regardless, the moves will have a huge impact on San Jose, where half the citys residents commute outside the city for work, to places like Mountain View and Palo Alto. Councilman Johnny Khamis said he hopes Apple will help keep more San Jose residents employed in the city. About 25 percent of Apples Silicon Valley employees live in San Jose.

We do have a large job imbalance here, and we hope that they bring more balance to our city, Khamis said.

If Apple were to develop all 4.15 million square feet, it would own San Joses second-largest share of corporate office space behind Cisco Systems 6.1 million square feet.

While some council members hope Apple will relocate to San Jose, the company has recently expressed its commitment to Cupertino.

Apples been in Cupertino for nearly 40 years, and were incredibly proud to call this home. Weve invested heavily, given back, and created a huge number of jobs in the area, Apple said.

Cupertino offices

Apple owns or leases 67 percent of the office space in Cupertino, according to CoStar Realty Information Inc. Some have pointed out that it could make the city vulnerable if Apple moves or faces financial adversity.

But in the early 1980s, co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs envisioned Apples headquarters in San Jose. At the time, Apple was leasing space in Cupertino and Jobs took a helicopter ride over San Joses Coyote Valley, acreage that Apple purchased but later sold. Today the land remains undeveloped.

When he stepped off the helicopter, Jobs envisioned building a futuristic campus with a tram going up the hillside.

Steve was committed to that property the minute he landed on it, said Robert Feld, a real estate consultant at a firm helping Apple look at its long-term facility needs. Feld is now a senior managing director at Newmark, Cornish & Carey.

But the dream of an Apple Coyote Valley campus never materialized. Jobs vision for a futuristic campus morphed into the spaceship-like structure now under construction in Cupertino.

Still, that slice of history suggests to some that the companys investment in North San Jose is a sign that it is returning home. Brian Darby, who helped build the Apple IIe in 1981, said hes happy that Apple is opening an office in San Jose, where he currently resides. The 55-year-old teacher expressed his support at Tuesdays council meeting, calling Apple a really innovative company.

I think it will add prestige to the area, Darby told The Chronicle.

Wendy Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: wlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee
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America needs a price on carbon to halt global warming, and oil companies should stop fighting the idea, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said.

Paris has got to tell people the handwriting is on the wall, Moniz said, referring to last months climate accord in Paris. And the question is, Whats the best way of getting there, and the way that gives companies and everybody else the most certainty?
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Comerica Banks Texas Economic Activity Index dropped in November as losses in exports, rig counts and hotel occupancy dragged down gains in employment, housing starts and sales tax revenue.

The index decreased 0.6 percentage points to 94.1, which was still 21 points above the indexs cyclical low, reached in 2007.
Mike Nichols arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from Nazi Germany with the ability to speak only two sentences in English: I dont speak English and Please dont kiss me.

Most Americans who knew Nichols as Elaine Mays improv partner or the director of films such as Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate and Silkwood may not have even realized that English was his second language. He not only spoke the language like a native, but understood the American character, its core and conflicts, as only a great artist could.

Nichols, who died after suffering a heart attack at 83 in November 2014, is the subject of an American Masters documentary directed by May and premiering on Friday, Jan. 29, to kick off the PBS series 30th anniversary.

Mike Nichols isnt an acme of filmmaking  most of it features Nichols talking to film, TV and theatrical producer Julian Schlossberg, with a stingy selection of archival clips, and a handful of former colleagues talking about how brilliant, funny and smart he was. And yet, every time May cuts away from Mike Nichols talking, youre impatient for her to get back to him. That only underscores why you entirely believe people like Bob Balaban, Meryl Streep, Stanley Donen, Neil Simon and Matthew Broderick when they proclaim him a singular genius.

Nichols arrived in the United States as Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in 1939. He wasnt an especially good student but ended up going to the University of Chicago. College was mostly a chance to chase girls and have fun. His life changed when he saw A Streetcar Named Desire onstage with Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Kim Hunter.

His newfound interest in theater led him to the Compass Players and Second City, where he describes himself as having been painfully inept at improv for weeks.

And then he wasnt. He found his talent and he found May. The two formed an improv team whose success eventually led them to An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May on Broadway in 1960, as well as TV appearances.

Fame proved their undoing as collaborators, though. Being famous and doing eight shows a week was especially hard on May, Nichols says. Other comedy teams had broken up before  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis lasted a decade, from 1946 to 1956  but they were best known for their film work. Nichols and May were known for TV appearances and their Broadway show. Nonetheless, their split was heartbreaking for a new generation of fans who valued a more intellectual brand of comedy befitting the dawn of the 60s.

Nichols had trouble adjusting to not being, as he puts it, half of something anymore. He directed a version of Jules Feiffers Passionella in New Jersey (which later became part of the Bock-Harnick triptych Broadway musical The Apple Tree, directed by Nichols), but didnt realize he was meant to be a director until the producer Saint Subber drafted him to oversee a new play by Neil Simon called Barefoot in the Park, with a young Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley. Nichols won the first of many Tony Awards as a director for the play.

Walter McBride/WireImage

Nichols struck gold his first time out on Broadway and did the same with his first film, Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal. It was a great film, but his next was to be an indelible distillation of American cultural deterioration in the late 20th century: Although some critics wrongly labeled The Graduate as a comedy about the generation gap, in fact, it was a film about materialism and hollow values. With its screenplay by Buck Henry, The Graduate is a probing descent into the American psyche, mirrored in Benjamin Braddocks descent into his own psyche, as represented by the opening scenes of an airliner landing in Los Angeles.

His next film was less successful. Nichols couldnt do with the adaptation of Joseph Hellers best-selling novel Catch-22 what Robert Altman did with MASH the same year. With more aircraft than the Italian air force, Catch-22 was a leviathan of a movie, and its size simply snuffed the sardonic tone of Hellers book. Looking back, Nichols kept thinking somethings wrong. This wasnt my kind of picture.

Mays film doesnt try to be either a comprehensive catalog of Nichols achievements or a thorough biography of his marriages and children. It doesnt have to: Its far more interesting to consider what Nichols has to say about high and low points in his career. It becomes even easier for us to understand why Streep and Broderick, among others, are so lavish in their praise for his style as a director when Nichols displays unusual insight about himself. We believe him when he says that having a flop was important to him as a film director. Expectations were so high about what he could do that they presented an obvious burden for him. Having a flop meant you could get past it and get back to your real life.

Mays film is one of two documentaries on Nichols scheduled for TV this year. The other, Becoming Mike Nichols, will air on HBO next month, but premiered at Sundance in January. It doesnt matter who got there first, though: Theres more than enough material in the singular life and career of this most American artist for a dozen documentaries

David Wiegand is the TV critic and an assistant managing editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV

Mike Nichols, American Masters: 10 p.m. Friday, Jan. 29, on KQED.
Eva Longoria has teamed up with a French photographer to show that love is love with a series of photos where straight celebrities pose as gay couples in an effort to promote its normalcy.

Longoria took a couple photos with singer Lara Fabian, showing the two celebs caressing each other and nearly locking lips in a sensual display of affection.
SCHENECTADY -- A city man faces multiple felony charges for a hammer attack that injured a city resident, police said Wednesday.

Mahadeo Beharry, 41, of Schenectady, repeatedly struck a man in the head with a claw hammer following a verbal dispute on the second floor of a Grove Street apartment around 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, police said.

Beharry fled to Mohawk Ambulance on State Street, smashed into the building with a hammer and destroyed property there, police said. When police arrived, Beharry hurled the hammer at the patrol car and menaced officers with a large knife. He dropped the knife and, after a brief struggle, was arrested.

He is charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon, menacing a police officer, burglary and criminal mischief, all felonies, as well as misdemeanor resisting arrest and criminal mischief, Lt. Mark McCracken said.

Beharry was arraigned Wednesday and bail was set at $50,000. He has another court appearance scheduled for Monday.

The victim, whose identity was not released, is in stable condition at Ellis Hospital, McCracken said.
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A Tuesday evening shooting at Seattles most notorious homeless camp left two men dead and three people seriously wounded as police searched for those responsible.

Gunfire erupted at the Beacon Hill homeless camp known as The Jungle shortly after 7:30 p.m. By the time shooting subsided, one person was dead, another was mortally wounded and at least two shooters had fled.

It wasnt immediately clear what prompted the shooting. The camp, in woods next to Interstate 5, has seen violence in the past, and police say the victims likely knew their assailants.

The shooting comes as city of Seattle leaders attempt to grapple with a homelessness crisis. Recent efforts have seen police make sweeps through areas popular with homeless campers, and attention has recently fallen on car-dwellers whove drawn complaints in several North Seattle neighborhoods.

Statements from police and medical officials indicate that five people were shot shortly after 7:20 p.m. in an area of The Jungle, near the 1500 block of Airport Way South.

Police report two people had died. One died at the camp and another at Harborview Medical Center.

Harborview spokeswoman Susan Gregg said the three surviving shooting victims were rushed into surgery. Those three -- a man and two women -- were in serious condition in intensive care Wednesday morning. Two had been upgraded from critical.

Gregg said the patients ranged in age from 25 to 45, and had suffered gunshot wounds to their torsos.

Addressing a Seattle City Council committee Wednesday morning, Seattle Police Chief Kathleen OToole said the victims appear to have been shot by people known to them.

We have no evidence at this point that they were targeted because they were homeless, OToole said. We believe this is likely an incident that occurred between people who were known to each other.

Homicide detectives are interviewing witnesses as officers continue to pay close attention to the citys homeless residents in the wake of the shooting, OToole continued.

Assistant Police Chief Bob Merner said Tuesday night that police have identified two persons of interest in the shooting.

Tactically oriented police units  the department SWAT team and anti-crime teams  swept the area following the shooting. It does not appear any arrests were made.

The shooting comes two months after Seattle Mayor Ed Murray declared a homelessness emergency in the city. In that November announcement, Murray noted what was already apparent to most city residents  tents were popping up everywhere, and the residents werent heading anywhere.

"You can't help but wonder -- I can't help but wonder -- did I act too late? That's my reaction. Maybe I should have issued the state of emergency months earlier. We have tried to do the best we can given the circumstances we have, but obviously I'm going to question, was I good enough at my job? It's on me at the end," Murray said.

The city has yet to find resources matching the scale of the homelessness problem in Seattle.

A week ago, Murray opened up 50 parking spaces split between parking lots in Ballard and West Seattle in an effort to create a better space for people living in their cars. The best estimate available puts the number of Seattle car-dwellers above 700.

A new village of tiny houses recently opened on Capitol Hill. The 14 homes were welcomed by advocates and residents, but, like the parking lots, they come up short for a city with several thousand people living on the street.

Murray has proposed adding three new tent cities around the city, each serving about 100 people. Hes also argued that the city cold weather shelters should grow as well. Seattle currently provides 1,700 shelter beds, each used by an average of six persons each year.

On Tuesday, Murray announced that he will be asking voters to double the Seattle Housing Levy, which currently draws $145 million in property taxes. About $50 million of the increase, Murray said, would go to serve our homeless neighbors.

Tuesday night that duty fell to Seattle police officers and detectives canvasing The Jungle and, presumably, other homeless encampments. Police are asking anyone with any information about the case to call SPDs Violent Crimes tip line at 206-233-5000.

Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.
A Newcastle man accused of accidentally shooting a woman at a Seattle-area theater claimed his defective pistol fired when someone grabbed his crotch, prosecutors now say.

King County prosecutors contend Dane Gallion shot a woman in the shoulder when his gun discharged last Thursday night during a showing of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Gallion, 29, was charged Tuesday with third-degree assault, a felony.

Writing the court, Deputy Prosecutor Margo Martin said Gallion cocked his pistol while taking in the Michael Bay-directed action movie. Investigators claim Gallion said he was cradling his 9 mm pistol because he was afraid of mass violence.

He could not provide any explanation for why he had put a round in the chamber of his gun, Martin told the court.

Gallion, a concealed-pistol permit holder, apparently had armed himself with a pistol that didnt have a safety. Almost all firearms are equipped with safety devices that make it extremely difficult to discharge them accidentally.

The shooting occurred just after 8:10 p.m. at a Regal Cinemas multiplex in Renton.

Writing the court, a Renton detective said Gallion was sitting behind the woman when he bumped his Smith & Wesson pistol and accidentally shot her in the shoulder. The woman was rushed from the Renton Landing theater to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle with a life-threatening gunshot wound.

A theater manager told arriving officers that a man who appeared to be impaired had stumbled into the theater shortly before the shooting, a Renton detective said in court papers. Immediately after the gunshot sounded, he stumbled back out of the theater, dropped a handgun magazine in a trashcan and walked out of the multiplex.

Police recovered a 9 mm shell casing and an unfired round from the theater, as well as a Smith & Wesson magazine from the trashcan.

About 90 minutes after the shooting, Gallions father called 911 to report that he believed his son was the gunman, the detective said in court papers. Gallion appeared to be the same man shown on surveillance video obtained from the movie theater.

Gallion was arrested that night and interviewed by police.

According to charging papers, Gallion told police he was watching the movie when another patron, for reasons unclear, reached for his crotch. Gallion is alleged to have told police the semiautomatic pistol then fired.

Having admitted to drinking prior to the shooting, Gallion said he left the theater because he worried hed be mistaken for a mass shooter, the Renton detective told the court.

The detective said Gallion admitted he chambered a round in his pistol after sitting down in the theater. Gallion, the detective continued, said he kept the gun unholstered in his waistband because he was worried about mass shootings.

Gallions wife told police he returned from the theater distraught and crying, repeating Im f---ed, Im f---ed, according to charging papers. The woman told police Gallion armed himself because he was afraid of gun violence.

He had the gun because he feared these recent public shootings and wanted to protect himself, the detective told the court, recounting the statement given by Gallions wife. Dane told her he had the gun out and was holding it in his hands based on fear when an unknown subject grabbed his crotch, causing the gun to fire.

Gallion, who was convicted of drunk driving four years ago, was released after posting bail. A judge on Tuesday increased his bail amount, though he remains free. He is scheduled to be arraigned Feb. 4.

Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.
British film censor is not always the glamorous job it's cracked up to be.

Sure, you get to watch movies every day, but let's face it, most of those flicks aren't Oscars quality. Some, in fact, can be hard to sit through.

Especially one movie by filmmaker Charlie Lyne.

Lyne, an opponent of censorship by the British Board of Film Classification, raised 5,963 ($8,486) via Kickstarter to fund 10 hours and seven minutes of paint drying footage. The BBFC charges 8.51 per minute, so it can cost roughly 1,000 to certify a film as suitable for British sensibilities. Lyne argues that many independent filmmakers can't afford the upfront cost.

"PAINT DRYING is a film showing paint drying on a wall." https://t.co/uwoY3M4ZZn  Charlie Lyne (@charlielyne) January 26, 2016

However, British censors are required to screen every minute of each film, which is why he crowd-sourced "Paint Drying" in crisp 4K digital video. (Spoiler alert: The entire movie consists of a single, unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall.)

In a statement Tuesday to Mashable, the BBFC aid:

"With regards to the motives behind making the film (as a protest against censorship and fees for classification), the BBFC was set up in 1912 by the film industry itself, as an independent body to bring a degree of uniformity to the classification of film nationally.

"The BBFC is a non-profit organisation that works to protect children, from content which might raise harm risks and to empower the public, especially parents, to make informed viewing choices. It implements Classification Guidelines that reflect changing social attitudes towards media content through proactive public consultation and research."

Lyne actually shot 14 hours of "Paint Drying," but the Kickstarter only covered just over 10 hours.

So perhaps we can look forward to the longer "director's cut" of "Paint Drying" sometime in the future.
The Finest Hours  an odd title in that it evokes Winston Churchill and the London blitz  concerns a lesser-known historical incident that took place in 1952, a sea rescue by the Coast Guard. That might not sound all that spectacular, but it was quite a rescue, accomplished against long odds, in the face of great hazards and lethal weather.

Of course, the rescue was successful. We know that going in. Watching, we might not know for sure if all the participants will survive until the end of the movie, but we can be sure that the vast majority of them have to, which means the appeal of Finest Hours cant be its suspense, but must be its execution. What happens is important, but more important is how it happens and whom it happens to.

Along this line, The Finest Hours presents a Coast Guard culture and a Coast Guard world as it existed in Chatham, Mass., in the postwar years. As with a fishing culture, everyone knows people who make their livelihood on boats. Everyone has one eye on the weather, and everyone knows someone who was lost at sea.

At the center of the story is the one indispensable man, Bernie Webber, a young coxswain and a by-the-book seaman. Hes an arresting character  shy and diffident, and yet with a rare decisiveness and certainty in his own judgment. Over the course of the film, the audience cant help circling back to Bernie and pondering him, wondering if the thing that allowed him to be heroic was simplicity  a sort of This is whats right, so this is what Im doing  or moral profundity. Both possibilities are in play in Chris Pines performance.

Pine is the films big surprise. To date, he has been cast as blithe, confident and superficial, or as the young Captain Kirk, who is at least two of those things. Here he digs into a character role, a regular guy with a thick Boston accent and a weird tendency to be nervous around his girlfriend and assertive in the face of mortal danger.

With a small boat and crew, Webber has to go out on what could easily be a suicide mission. His goal is to find survivors of the Pendleton, an oil tanker that split in half. This brings us to the big nights second-most-indispensable man, the Pendletons chief engineer, Sybert. Sybert finds himself in the following situation: His ship  that is, half a ship  is slowly sinking. But the storm makes it impossible to launch the lifeboats, and theres no way to make it back to land. What would you do?

Casey Affleck plays Sybert as an odd, reflective guy, very internal, not a glad-hander, not a natural leader of men, but rather as someone who just knows what to do. He radiates competence and intelligence, such that we believe that others would recognize these qualities and listen to him.

Most of Finest Hours takes place on the night of the wreck and the rescue, and the screenwriters (Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson) tell the story by following three centers of action. We see the men on the ship, the men on the rescue boat and the people on land, particularly Bernies fiancee, Miriam (Holliday Grainger), presented as a young woman as outgoing as Bernie is reticent. The cutting from one center of action to another feeds an atmosphere of mounting tension.

In filming scenes of the rescue boat, director Craig Gillespie keeps the camera fairly tight on the men to show how theyre reacting to the elements, the cold, the wind and the wetness, as well as to the sheer terror. But occasionally he pulls back to show the boat against the ocean, practically submerged at times, at other times just falling through space. Its an extraordinary sight, and if the actual night was anything like this, its remarkable that any of them were still breathing by sunrise.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicles movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

The Finest Hours

Action drama. Starring Chris Pine and Casey Affleck. Directed by Craig Gillespie. (R. 117 minutes.)
50 Shades of Black: Should have known that a Wayans (in this case Marlon) would be involved in this spoof of E.L. James erotica Grey series.

The Finest Hours: Based on a true story of a Coast Guard rescue mission in New England. Stars Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster and Eric Bana.

Jane Got a Gun: The Western film stars Natalie Portman, who asks her ex to help find her outlaw husband. Joel Edgerton and Ewan McGregor also star.

Lazer Team: Science fiction has had its share of comedies (think The Worlds End, Galaxy Quest and Space Balls). Heres the latest entry in that genre.

The Golden Dream: This movie, directed by Diego Quemada-Diez, is about a group of teens who take a harsh journey from Guatemala in hopes of finding the American dream. The ensemble cast won the 2013 Cannes Film Festival A Certain Talent Award.

Kung-Fu Panda 3: Jack Black voices our intrepid hero, who continues his legendary adventures of awesomeness.

45 Years: Charlotte Rampling was nominated for a best actress Oscar in this searing portrait of a couple who make discoveries about themselves on the eve of their 45th anniversary. Tom Courtenay also stands out as the husband.

Oscar Shorts: Among this years collection of animated, live action and documentaries nominations are Pixars Sanjays Super Team and the documentary Last Day of Freedom by Bay Area filmmakers Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman.

 Leba Hertz
The sterling British violinist Daniel Hope was 6 months old when he arrived in Europe in 1973 from his native South Africa, where his father, novelist and antiapartheid activist Christopher Hope, had been granted a visa to leave with the proviso that he never return, to quote his sons biography.

The family moved to Paris, then to London, where Hopes mother, Eleanor, by chance met Yehudi Menuhin, the great San Francisco-reared violinist, conductor and humanitarian who was knighted and later given the title of lord. She became his secretary and eventually his manager. Hopes earliest memories of Menuhin, who inspired and mentored him, are of hearing him play in the church in Gstaad, the Swiss resort town where Menuhin invited his new secretarys family for the summer. Its where Menuhin founded a music festival and academy in the 50s.

Wed come penniless to Europe, and here we were transported to this fairy tale world in the Swiss Alps, says Hope, who was 11 when he first performed publicly with Menuhin. We were treated so generously, and I was surrounded by Yehudi and all the other musicians associated with him. The greatest musicians kept showing up on a regular basis  it could be Ravi Shankar or Stephane Grappelli  so for the first five or six years of my life, I made absolutely no distinction between musical styles. It was all just beautiful music. That was the most amazing privilege to me.

Hope is now celebrating his mentors centennial with performances and a new recording of works beloved by and written for Menuhin. He arrives in the Bay Area next month to play his Menuhin tribute as guest concertmaster and soloist with the New Century Chamber Orchestra. Concerts will be Feb. 4 at First Congregational Church in Berkeley, Feb. 5 at First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto, Feb. 6 at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco and Feb. 7 at Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael. Menuhin was 7 years old when he made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony. He died in 1999 at 82.

The repertoire for Hopes concerts includes the Bach and Mendelssohn concertos in D minor for two violins and strings, which Hope played many times with Menuhin, Philip Glass Echorus for two violins and strings, Toru Takemitsus Nostalgia for solo violin and strings and Bartoks Six Romanian Folk Dances.

My goal was to try to illustrate the broadness and diversity of the music that Menuhin loved, that he commissioned and that composers wrote for him, the 42-year-old musician said on the phone from Cologne, where he records a weekly radio show on which plays and talks about music he loves. When he walked into a room, it lit up. It was the same when he played a phrase on the fiddle. It spoke to you. He communicated so powerfully. It was beyond putting a bow to a string and making a beautiful sound, it did something that change people. They felt his performances.

Hope, who lives in Berlin and was recently named music director for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, is also a writer and musical activist who co-produced a documentary about composers killed by the Nazis. He is working on another film about the ones who escaped, made it to Los Angeles and wrote music for the movies (the subject of Hopes 2014 recording Escape to Paradise).

For details on the concerts, go to www.ncco.org.

Cypress Quartet says so long

After 20 productive years, San Franciscos noted Cypress String Quartet is disbanding, playing its farewell concert June 26 in the Green Room of the War Memorial Building.

The globe-trotting foursome, whose accomplishments include its innovative Call & Response program  they commissioned and premiered works by contemporary composers responding to familiar chamber pieces  decided to call it quits after a great deal of reflection and discussion, according to its announcement. The quartet agrees that it is the right time for them to move on and explore new artistic territories as individuals.

The group, which consists of violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone, viola player Ethan Filner and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel, caps its career with the release of its final recording, the complete Beethoven quartets, on Avie Records in May. And to thank the supportive hometown crowd, it plans to play all 16 of those quartets during a monthlong series of performances at venues across San Francisco.

For more information, go to www.cypressquartet.com.

Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area journalist and former San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa  Donald Trump declared Tuesday he would boycott the last Republican debate before the Iowa caucuses, leading Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to challenge him to a one-on-one debate.

The developments created a new ripple of uncertainty six days before voting in the presidential race begins.

Trump raised the prospect of skipping the debate as he blasted Fox News Channel for playing games and including anchor Megyn Kelly as a debate moderator. Trumps campaign later said he definitely will not participate.

I said bye-bye, OK? Trump said.

Trump said he would hold his own event in Iowa during the debate to raise money for wounded veterans. He dismissed Kelly as a third-rate reporter who is bad at her job and had been toying with him  reprising a squabble that erupted after a debate Kelly co-hosted last year.

Kelly shot back on her nightly show, arguing that Trump is used to getting his way but cant control the media. She said her network and CEO Roger Ailes had made it clear to Trump for months that they wouldnt change their moderator lineup.

Ill be there, Kelly said. The debate will go on with or without Mr. Trump.

Trumps pullout came after Fox News Channel tweaked the GOP front-runner for asking his Twitter followers whether he should debate. The network, in a sarcastically worded statement, said it had learned from a secret back channel that the leaders of Iran and Russia planned to treat Trump unfairly if elected.

A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings, read the statement from a Fox News Channel representative.

Trumps declaration was an unexpected, if not unpredictable, twist in the final days of the Iowa campaign. The real estate mogul had threatened repeatedly to boycott debates before, only to ultimately acquiesce.

By picking a fight publicly, Trump assured that even if he goes through with his plan not to show up Thursday, his absence will be the center of attention.

Cruz, appearing at an evening rally, offered to face Trump mano a mano anytime. He said Trump was scared of Kelly, telling supporters that skipping the debate was like refusing a job interview.

If someone did that, didnt show up at the interview, you know what youd say? Youre fired, Cruz said, riffing on Trumps famous rejoinder from the The Apprentice.
FLINT, Mich.  Flint residents coping with lead contamination will be cleared to drink unfiltered water again only when outside experts determine it is safe, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said Wednesday, acknowledging their mistrust of government officials while saying a full replacement of the citys pipes is not imminent.

A lawsuit filed earlier in the day by environmental and civil rights groups asked a federal judge to order the prompt replacement of all lead pipes in Flints water system at no cost to customers. Snyder did not rule out the eventual replacement of the lead service lines leading from water mains, but said it is a longer-term consideration.

In the meantime, Flint hired a Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the lead problem despite initial skepticism from state regulators to now oversee water testing. Professor Marc Edwards also was appointed by Snyder to a committee that will set in place long-term solutions.

There absolutely is a trust issue, Snyder said during a news conference with state and local officials who announced more plans to address the citys crisis. The Legislature is expected to direct $28 million in additional funding toward Flint on Thursday.

Mayor Karen Weaver said residents should not have to pay for the water they did not and are not using. Emergency budget legislation approved Wednesday by a Senate committee includes $3 million to help Flint with unpaid water bills.

I was glad that the governor said these are just first steps because Im asking for a staircase, she said.

Flint residents are currently unable to drink unfiltered tap water, and tests have shown high lead levels in some childrens blood. While under state financial management, the city switched its water source to the Flint River but without controlling corrosion. That caused lead to leech into the water for a year and a half and contributed to the spike in child lead exposure before state and officials fully acknowledged the problem in early October.

It remains unclear how badly the lead service lines were damaged by the river water. While Snyders administration has estimated it could cost up to $55 million to repair some 15,000 pipes, he cautioned that more study is needed.

A lot of work is being done to even understand where the lead services lines fully are, Snyder said. The short-term issue is about recoating the pipes (with chemicals), and that will be based on third-party experts saying the water is safe. ... Its a lot of work to take out pipes, to redo all the infrastructure.

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Interim Director Keith Creagh said water samples show things are trending better, but he stressed the results are not statistically valid.
BEIJING, Jan. 27 -- The profits of China's major industrial firms in 2015 fell year on year for the first time in over a decade, official data showed on Wednesday, fuelling concern for the world's second-largest economy.

Industrial companies with annual revenues of more than 20 million yuan (about 3.1 million U.S. dollars) recorded total profits of 816.7 billion yuan last month, down 4.7 percent from December 2014 and accelerating from November's 1.4-percent drop, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

The firms' profits in the whole of 2015 fell 2.3 percent from 2014 to around 6.4 trillion yuan.

He Ping, an official with the NBS Department of Industry, attributed the annual drop to weak demand both at home and abroad, falling prices of industrial products and rising production costs.

Revenues from the firms' primary business inched up 0.8 percent last year, compared with a 7-percent rise posted in 2014.

The profits decline was most alarming in mining and raw material industries like oil and natural gas exploitation. Coal miners' profits tumbled 65 percent from a year earlier while that of oil and natural gas exploration firms slumped 74.5 percent on an annual basis.

Although the overall situation is grim, He said there were favorable signs from industrial restructuring. The high-tech industry, equipment manufacturing enterprises and consumer goods producers posted profit gains of 8.9 percent, 4 percent and 7 percent, respectively.

Facing lingering downward pressures, China's policy makers are striving to ensure short-term growth while steering the economy away from an export-driven and credit-fueled growth model to one based on stronger consumer spending, innovation and the service sector.

GDP growth slowed to 6.9 percent in 2015, the lowest level in 25 years.
BURNS, Ore.  A day after eight members of an armed antigovernment group were arrested, three more were arrested and their jailed leader on Wednesday urged a handful of remaining militants to abandon the Oregon wildlife refuge they have occupied for more than three weeks and where they are now surrounded by federal agents.

The FBI and Oregon State Police said they arrested 45-year-old Duane Leo Ehmer of Irrigon, Ore., and 34-year-old Dylan Wade Anderson of Provo, Utah, around 3:30 p.m. A few hours later, 43-year-old Jason S. Patrick of Bonaire, Ga., was arrested.

The FBI says the men turned themselves in to agents at a checkpoint on a road near the refuge.

As with the eight others, officials say these men will face one federal felony count of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.

FBI officials say they are working around the clock to empty the refuge of armed occupiers in the safest way possible.

After militant leader Ammon Bundy made his first court appearance in Portland on Wednesday, his attorney, Mike Arnold, read this statement from his client: Please stand down. Go home and hug your families. This fight is now in the courts.

It was unclear whether the remnant of Bundys followers still holed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns was ready to heed his advice.

Meanwhile, details began to emerge about the confrontation Tuesday on a remote highway that resulted in the arrest of Bundy and other leading figures in the group of occupiers, and in the death of militant Robert Finicum.

Bundy followers gave conflicting accounts of how Finicum died. One said Finicum charged at FBI agents, who then shot him. A member of the Bundy family said Finicum did nothing to provoke the agents.

An Oregon man who says he witnessed the shootout says he heard about a half-dozen shots but didnt see anyone get hit, and that the shooting happened quickly  over maybe 12 or 15 seconds. Raymond Doherty told KOIN-TV that he was about 100 feet back and couldnt see who specifically was shooting.

There was no immediate way to confirm the accounts. Authorities refused to release any details about the encounter or even to verify that it was Finicum who was killed.

Also on Wednesday, a federal judge in Portland unsealed a criminal complaint that said the armed group had explosives and night-vision goggles and that they were prepared to fight at the refuge or in the nearby town of Burns.

Someone told authorities about the equipment on Jan. 2, when the group took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, according to the document.

Bundy and the seven others are charged with felony counts of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.

The criminal complaint stresses that point. It states that the 16 employees at the wildlife refuge have been prevented from reporting to work because of threats of violence posed by the defendants and others occupying the property.
The FBI and Oregon State Police on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks, conducting a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

The Oregonian newspaper reported several hundred people who had gathered at the John Day Senior Center on Tuesday evening were told the guest speakers would not be appearing.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests: Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. No indictments or federal charging documents had been made public.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting, though neither agency released details about what started it. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said. Another man who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

Ammon Bundys group, which has included people from as far away as Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. Law enforcement officers converged on the wildlife refuge after the arrests and were expected to remain at the site throughout the night; it was unclear how many people, if any, remained in the buildings.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a written statement. The leaders of this group are now in custody, and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender so this community can begin to heal the deep wounds that this illegal activity has created over the last month.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.
Bounnhang Vorachit, the newly-elected general secretary of the Central Committee of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) (R) meets with Xi Jinping's special envoy Song Tao (L) in Vientiane, Laos, Jan. 26, 2016.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Xi Jinping has expressed his willingness to advance the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership with Laos, a Chinese envoy said on Tuesday.

Bounnhang Vorachit, the newly-elected general secretary of the Central Committee of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) met with Xi's special envoy Song Tao.

Song, who is also the head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, conveyed a message for Xi to Bounnhang.

Xi, in the message, congratulated Bounnhang once again on his election of the LPRP party chief.

China is willing to work with Laos to strengthen strategic communication, boost political mutual trust and deepen pragmatic cooperation so as to push forward their comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, Xi said in his message.

Bounnhang said the Lao party, government and people have appreciated the support and help from China over the past years.

The Lao side is ready to join hands with China to further develop the relations between the two parties and two countries, he added.

Song said the Chinese side is willing to jointly implement the consensus reached between the two party chiefs with Laos, and boost cooperation in high-level exchanges between the CPC and LPRP, as well as in governance and personnel training.
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SANTA ANA  One of three inmates who escaped from an Orange County jail was ordered deported to Vietnam in 1998 but remained in the country and racked up a lengthy rap sheet, immigration officials said Tuesday.

Bac Duong, 43, came to the United States legally in 1991 but was ordered removed seven years later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. ICE did not say why.

Duong checked in with federal immigration officials as required until August 2014, ICE said.

U.S. officials cant detain immigrants indefinitely while they await deportation and must release most after six months. Under a 2008 agreement, Vietnam will provide travel documents to help repatriate immigrants but only those who entered the U.S. after July 1995.

Duong and two other inmates escaped from an Orange County jail Friday by sawing through a quarter-inch thick grill on a dormitory wall and climbing through plumbing tunnels to reach an unguarded area of the roof, where they moved aside razor wire and rappelled to the ground using a bed linen.

Duong and Jonathan Tieu, 20, and Hossein Nayeri, 37, are considered dangerous, and all were awaiting trial for separate violent felonies. They have now each been charged with the escape.

Sheriffs officials are focusing the search on neighborhoods where the men could be hiding, especially among Orange Countys sizable Vietnamese American population, which is among the largest in the U.S.

Two of the men have ties to local Vietnamese gangs, sheriffs Lt. Dave Sawyer said.

Tieu had been held at the jail since 2013, accused of murder and attempted murder. Duong faced attempted murder and assault charges in the shooting of a man in November.

Nayeri was arrested in 2014 on charges including kidnapping and torture. Authorities said he abducted a marijuana dealer, burned him with a blowtorch and cut off his penis because Nayeri thought the man had buried money in the desert.

The men were gone for as long as 16 hours before officials noticed they were missing from the common dorm they share with more than 60 other inmates at Orange County Central Jail. An attack on a guard delayed a Friday night head count by hours.

The sheriffs department has been slow to add more rooftop security cameras at the jail despite a grand jurys recommendations for eight years straight, according to a report in the Orange County Register. The department has said since 2008 that budget constraints prevented upgrades to the camera systems at the five county jails.

The escape was eerily similar to one last year in New York, where two inmates cut through a portion of a wall hidden under a bunk bed and used piping and tunnels inside the facility to get out.
Mosquitos associated with the Zika virus have been detected in the Bay Area, but none has been found to carry the disease linked to birth defects in newborns in South America.

That may not be the case for long if steps are not taken to control their population growth, say health and vector control experts.
File photo: South China Sea

China on Tuesday rejected U.S. criticism of China's reef construction in the South China Sea and urged the U.S. side to stop "groundless" accusations.

"China will never take such unreasonable criticism," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said when responding to a question at a regular news briefing.

She said China had repeatedly made clear the public service nature and legitimacy of reef construction and test flights at a newly built airport in the South China Sea.

Hua also urged the U.S. side to play a constructive role in promoting peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region, instead of sowing discord.

A U.S. official was quoted as telling the press that ASEAN hoped to unite to protect maritime rights and avoid conflict in the region.

Hua said she would not comment the official's remarks, as "the U.S. official is not the spokesperson of ASEAN."

"Maintaining peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region is in the interest of all nations in the region," Hua said.
SACRAMENTO  Gov. Jerry Brown is putting his weight and likely his campaign war chest behind a November ballot initiative that would allow inmates to get out of prison earlier and require judges, not prosecutors, to decide whether to charge juveniles as adults.

The Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 initiative would roll back parts of Proposition 21, the ballot measure voters approved in 2000 that gave prosecutors the right to try minors as adults. It also would give inmates with nonviolent offenses the chance to seek parole after serving time on their primary, most serious offense.

That would mean that inmates whose sentences were lengthened because of secondary offenses or enhancements  tougher penalties due to drug, gang or weapons violations  might not have to serve the extra time.

Its pretty dramatic, said Joan Petersilia, a Stanford law professor who has studied the states prison system for decades. With enhancements, a base term of 4 years can quickly turn into 20 years. In one fell swoop (Brown) is eliminating that.

Brown said that only well-behaved inmates would be considered for early parole. The initiative would let inmates strive for a reduced sentence through a revised credit system for good behavior, education and rehabilitation.

Inmates earn credits

This says before the add-ons are served, there will be a possibility a person can be considered for parole if their behavior has been exemplary, Brown said in a conference call with media. It allows credits to be earned and it allows for parole consideration to be given. Those two experiences depend on the inmate making definite steps to change what got them in prison in the first place.

The proposed initiative needs necessary signatures to qualify for the November ballot.

The reason for the changes, Brown said, is to give inmates an incentive to rehabilitate.

In its essence, its to provide an incentive, both reward and punishment, because those who misbehave can lose credits they attain, Brown said.

$24 million war chest

Browns support of the measure is the first indication of what he will do with $24 million in campaign funds hes been sitting on. Brown would not say whether he would use his campaign funds because that would be using government time to discuss campaign spending. He did, however, say he would do whatever it takes to get this done.

Petersilia said some sort of sentencing reform was anticipated as the state looks for long-term solutions to dealing with prison overcrowding, as required by a three-judge federal court panel.

Brown said the ballot measure would allow prisoners to take control over their lives by giving them the ability to show they are ready to return to society. He called it a partial return to indeterminate sentences, in which prisoners were given broad sentences  such as five years to life  and had to show a parole board they were rehabilitated and had a plan for their release.

The governor was joined by faith leaders and law enforcement in his announcement.

L.A. chiefs view

We have a very finite resource in which to deal with crime in California and that is our prison system and our jail system, and we have to effectively use those systems and we do not when we keep the wrong people incarcerated for the wrong length of time, thereby not freeing up space for people who deserve to be there, said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, who did not take an official position on the measure.

Brown has called for criminal sentencing reform for more than a decade after becoming a critic of the states determinate sentencing practices, fixed prison terms which he helped create. Determinate sentences give prisoners a set release date, which itself was considered a reform 40 years ago.

During Browns first stint as governor in 1975, the states prisons used indeterminate sentencing, which had been a staple of the system for nearly 60 years.

Arbitrary and racist

That system wasnt without its critics, who argued that the parole boards decisions were arbitrary and racist, and that sentences without a release date led to prisoners acting out violently while incarcerated.

One of the things that created the movement for determinate sentences was there was a distrust that was created by the decisions made at the parole review hearings, said Patrick McGrath, the district attorney in Yuba County and president of the California District Attorneys Association. In many peoples minds there was a wide disparity between who was getting out and when and what prison officials were considering.

Only nonviolent offenders

The Legislature stepped in and passed a bill to create determinate sentences, which Brown signed into law in 1977.

McGrath said returning to indeterminate sentencing could be problematic, even if it applies only to nonviolent offenders.

The emphasis has been on this not affecting violent offenders, but I think most members of the public would be surprised at what qualifies as a nonviolent offense under the penal code, McGrath said. Domestic violence, driving under the influence that causes death, residential burglary  these would be eligible for early release.

Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber (Tehama County), said the measure would weaken the criminal justice system and increase the victimization of California citizens.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Some people turn in their college coursework and never think about it again, content to pull off a passing grade on the themes in Moby Dick, or guess at the economic causes of the Civil War or randomly fill in answers on a multiple-choice biology quiz.

Related: 5 Surprising Things I Learned From Interviewing 100 'Shark Tank' Entrepreneurs

Then there are Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta, who turned a single architecture assignment into a $2 million-plus business that has turned out to be not only profitable but a crucial assist to victims of disaster during their darkest moments.

Stork and Sreshta are the inventors of LuminAID, a solar-powered inflatable lantern that can light up 10 square feet for 16 hours, recharge on just a few hours of sunlight and fit into a pocket. Hundreds of thousands of the 3-ounce, 8.5-by-12.5-inch lanterns have been deployed in hurricanes, floods and other disasters.

But theyre also popular enough with campers, hunters and homeowners that LuminAID snagged a $200,000 investment from Mark Cuban after pitching their company in February 2015 during season six of Shark Tank.

In fact, LuminAID was such a hit that Stork and Sreshta found themselves in the rare position of fielding offers from each and every shark that night.

We decided to go with an offer from Mark Cuban, of $200,000 for 15 percent of the company, Sreshta said this week. Then he put an additional clause into the deal that if we raised money again he would put in an additional $300,000.

Since then, sales have gone from $1 million in 2014 to $2 million for the first nine months of 2015, Sreshta said. In addition, LuminAIDs Give Light, Get Light initiative, where customers buy one light for themselves and donate another to an aid organization, has distributed more than 13,000 lights, including 3,000 distributed last year through non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, as part of the Nepal earthquake relief efforts.

Between the taping and the time the segment aired, Cuban and his team helped prepare LuminAID for the big bump in sales that normally follows an appearance on Shark Tank.

Related: 5 Important Startup Lessons From 'Shark Tank'

When you have a $20-to-$25 product, people just start ordering to your website, Sreshta said. We were just coming out of that, and at the end of April, unfortunately, the earthquake happened; so all of our NGO customers were really busy.

Not all deals initiated by the investors on Shark Tank see success; theres a period of due diligence when the sharks whose offers have been accepted dig through a companys background to make sure no problems come to light following the taped segment. Stork and Sreshta had come looking for a deal and were ready to go, allowing LuminAID to start benefiting from Cubans involvement right away.

Mark has a whole team that supports his Shark Tank companies, Sreshta said, listing business-development experts and operational support, including bookkeeping. That is a big help. It was just one giant aspect of the business that we dont have to worry about anymore.

Stork and Sreshta were in the midst of a three-year masters program in architecture at Columbia University in 2010 when they got a studio-design assignment to create an idea that solved one of the problems resulting from the earthquake in Haiti.

The two women already had an interest in solar power which, they discovered, offered a sustainable, lightweight solution. Then, to make sure their light was big enough to illuminate a wide area but also compact enough to save space in ongoing aid shipments, they made their product from a lightweight inflatable polyurethane that packs flat.

When inflated, the LuminAID projects a wide, diffused light, and is so waterproof that it also floats.

The women continued to develop a prototype, and were on a school trip to Tokyo when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami hit. They saw that city suffer through rolling blackouts to conserve energy after nuclear reactors were wiped out on the coast. That was one more sign to us that lighting in a disaster is a universal need, Sreshta said.

Before appearing on Shark Tank, LuminAID had promoted its business by supplying aid organizations and some specialty outdoor retailers. But since the show, the company has opened up more retail opportunities through outlets such as Zulily.com, the Container Store and Brookstone.

Marks team has thrown a lot of new opportunities our way, Sreshta said. "We have a growing emphasis on retail, and [the team is] so experienced, having helped how many other dozens of Shark Tank companies grow their strategy. We always did the camping thing, but a lot of people kept our lights for snowstorms and preparedness, in their cars and for emergencies.

LuminAID is introducing two new products, including a light that changes colors for consumers to use in backyards and on patios, as well as versions that produce higher-powered light and use the LuminAIDs solar capacity to charge phones. The company also has gone from a two-person operation staffed solely by the partners to a full-time team of four, plus two interns and a raft of subcontractors.

While LuminAID has been expanding its retail offerings, it's been no stranger to Shark Tank. Sreshta said that she enjoyed using the company's January 2016 update appearance on the show to highlight its disaster-relief efforts -- by running footage of the companys aid effort distributing lanterns in flood-ravaged Malawi.

And that holds a lesson for other would-be entrepreneurs, Sreshta said. Its not a coincidence, she said: If youre solving bigger problems, youre not far from someone just paying for your product.

Related: 5 Important Startup Lessons From 'Shark Tank'

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(File photo)

A Swedish citizen who is suspected of funding criminal activities that endanger China's national security was deported from China on Jan. 25 after he confessed, said a China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson at a press conference Tuesday.

In accordance with the Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China, Beijing State Security Bureau placed Swedish citizen Peter Dahlin under compulsory measures of residential surveillance at designated residence, said Hua Chunying, a spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry.

Prior to that, following the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, China informed the Swedish side about the relevant situation and arranged for the Swedish side to visit him, Hua added.

Hua mentioned that information from relevant departments shows that Peter Dahlin is suspected of supporting criminal activities that endanger China's state security in the name of defending human rights.

Dahlin's group carried out activities in China in the name of providing aid for those in need of help while defending rights, without registering and reporting to the Chinese government. In this way, they tried to avoid governmental supervision of their activities and their use of funds, according to a report on China Daily.

Xinhua News Agency said Dahlin's group has been receiving financial support from seven overseas organizations.

>>>Related:

Group endangering China's national security busted

State security organs and public security departments have busted an illegal group which attempted to endanger China's national security in the name of defending human rights. Several suspects including a man from Sweden were detained, Xinhua News Agency reported on Jan.19, 2016.
The richest place in China is in Guangdong, the poorest place is also in Guangdong. This issue is a heated topic at the ongoing annual session of Guangdong Provincial People's Congress and Political Consultative Conference in the southern province. Guangdong pledges to fight to reduce the gap between rich and poor, helping 1,790,000 people shake off poverty.

In 2015, the GDP of Guangdong was 7.28 trillion yuan, ranking the top of all the provinces in China. Such a high figure for GDP means the gulf between the richest and poorest is much more serious than in other provinces as well. From 2011 to 2015, Guangdong raised 2.492 million people out of poverty. Based on the standard disposable income of 4,000 yuan per year for each rural family, there are still 467,000 families, or some 1.79 million people, will be living in poverty from 2016 to 2018.

To deal with the issue of poverty, Guangdong government plans to start a poverty alleviation project. In addition to traditional economic development, new and diversified ways of business should be applied. For some poor, mountainous areas, green ecological agriculture and leisure agriculture industrial zones can be explored. Rural E-commerce is another popular way of enriching small villages. Whats more, committee members suggested at the NPC and CPPCC that education should never be neglected during the process of overcoming poverty. Some members also proposed to make good use of the active good will from Hong Kong and Macau citizens.
Thousands of red-throated bee-eaters were spotted gathering in throngs in a South Luangwa National Park in South Africas Zambia in October, 2015. The bright-colored birds would flock by the Luangwa River every year for reproduction.

The red-throated bee-eater (Merops bullocki) is a species of bird in the Meropidae family.
SAN DIEGO, Jan. 26 -- No evidence or signs of casualties were found after sweeps of a building at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego where an active gunshot was reported Tuesday morning, said a Navy commanding officer.

"A DoD (Department of Defense) employee reported the gun shot... the initial report was not through phone call, it was made in person," Capt. Curt Jones, commanding officer of Naval Base San Diego, said at a press conference in the afternoon.

"We are now clearing the building for couple of times... moving people out of the building, and we (have) not found anything which substantiates the earlier report," Jones said.

An active shooter was reported around 8 a.m. local time on Tuesday morning in the southern California border city of San Diego. Local police officer confirmed a single witness reporting three gunshots fired in the basement of Building 26 of the center.

"An active shooter has just been been reported in building #26 at Naval Medical Center San Diego. All occupants are advised to run, hide or fight," the Center posted on its Facebookpage.

"We don't take any of these calls as a joke, we take them very seriously," San Diego Police Department Chief Shelley Zimmerman told Xinhua.

"If somebody thinks they saw something that could potentially be very dangerous, be it an active shooter or something else, if they hear something, if they know something, we want everybody to say something," she said.

The medical center has more than 6,500 staff, including military, civilians, contractors and volunteers, according to its website. It spans 1.2 million square feet in the city's Balboa Park. On an average day there are thousands of patients visiting for medical or dental treatment.

San Diego is a border city with Mexico, and the Naval Medical Center in San Diego is the largest and most comprehensive military healthcare system in western United States. It has eight clinics for active duty personnel and nine primary care sites for their family members.
Illustration: Shen Lan/GT

Every time North Korea tests a nuke, it does not only shock the peace and stability of Northeast Asia, but also tests the resilience of cooperation between all stakeholders in the region. Different voices have emerged in the discussions about what to do in the aftermath of Pyongyang's recent and fourth nuclear test.

China, as a major stakeholder, sticks to the principle that the Six-Party Talks should be resumed as soon as possible, while South Korea, as President Park Geun-hye stated in a recent speech, doubts the feasibility of the long-halted mechanism, proposing to establish a five-party talks program barring North Korea.

It is normal that states tend to diverse policies on the same matter for different national interests, but the enormity of the North Korea nuclear issue makes it a difficult one, especially between China and South Korea, whose affinity has been endorsed by both leaderships on many occasions. Their discord on such a fundamental issue can easily catch attention, in particular when the US is willing to back Park's idea, the disagreement might evolve into geopolitical tensions.

Under such circumstances, stakeholders should regain composure and look at the origins of the nuclear crisis. They should try to explore reasonable and feasible solutions.

Haunted by the remnants of the Cold War, and upset by its declining strength, North Korea feels enormously insecure. This is the root cause that drives Pyongyang to pursue nuclear capability. But the North Korean regime's choices also matter a lot. It could have grown stronger by opening up its gates and conducting domestic reform instead of flexing nuclear muscles to keep itself safe.

Given these two major causes, the North Korean nuclear issue should be addressed from two perspectives at the same time. Fundamentally, the remnants of the Cold War should be swept away. The technically-at-war status that has lingered for decades between the North and the South after the Korean War should be ended as soon as possible with peace treaties signed rather than just ceasefires. Reconciliation and rapprochement should prevail on the peninsula.

In the immediate future, decisive and firm actions must be taken to deter North Korea from owning nuclear weapons, especially when it conducts nuclear tests. Strong and clear signals should be sent to Pyongyang, bringing it to an awareness that possession of nuclear weapons will only cost it.

China talks about the fundamental issues while the US and South Korea are focused on the immediate problem. However, a real solution requires both approaches to be employed. Sanctions, without a full consideration of their real effect to resolve the core issue, will only aggravate the tensions and even backfire. Stern but myopic penalties will only end up with North Korea feeling less secured and holding nuclear weapons more tightly.

It doesn't mean concrete measures such as sanctions should be overlooked. Sanctions could serve as a clear signal and push North Korea to a negotiating table, where discussions should be focused on how to end the fundamental problem.

The gravity of the nuclear talks should be on how participants focus their energies on a solution that combines the two perspectives, instead of argument about who should be invited and who shouldn't. It is almost impossible to pressure North Korea to give up nukes by means of sanctions, and it is also unrealistic for the US and South Korea to sign a peace treaty with North Korea before the latter compromises first. The Six-Party Talks have sketched the big picture of denuclearization, but the facts have shown that the progressive way of discussion is time-consuming and vulnerable, and easily disrupted by accidents, considering there is little mutual trust between the North and the South.

We should call for a new negotiating mechanism, which is founded on the basis of the achievements of the Six-Party Talks, and can generate real meaningful progress. No matter what the new program should be, China needs to play a constructive role. If the US and South Korea keep siding with dogged sanctions, China won't chime in with them. Under that scenario, denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is no more than a daydream.
Chinese President Xi Jinping talks with workers during his visit to Guoyuan Port in Southwest China's Chongqing municipality, Jan 4, 2016. Xi made an inspection tour in Chongqing from Jan 4 to 6.[Photo/Xinhua]

No more large development projects will be launched along the Yangtze River, President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday at a top-level meeting to finalize guidelines for the economic belt along China's longest river.

All economic activity along the Yangtze must not result in harm or risk to the environment, Xi told the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs.

With major exploitation no longer allowed, all government departments have been told to comprehensively protect environmental quality in the Yangtze Valley.

The environmental quality of the Yangtze "can only allowed to become better, and can never be allowed to deteriorate", Xi said in his first public statement about the river's environmental challenges after his inspection tour of the riverside city of Chongqing earlier this month.

The president's comments set the tone for the government's policy on using and protecting the 6,300-kilometer-long waterway, according to many Chinese online commentators.

In 1988, China built a 47-meter-high dam on the Yangtze for the Gezhouba hydropower project, and built the 185-meter-high Three Gorges Dam in 2006 for a large hydropower project. Both dams are on the middle reaches of the river.

But last year, another hydropower project, named Xiao Nan Hai, was abandoned by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

In 2015, the central government first raised the idea of connecting all the riverside provinces, cities and development zones into a more integrated Yangtze River Economic Belt to share resources and facilities.

The Yangtze is the third-longest river in the world, but the longest to flow entirely within one country.

It runs from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau across China before reaching the sea at Shanghai, covering an area representing 40 percent of the nation's population and GDP.

At Tuesday's meeting, top-level decisions were also made on promoting forestry development and on implementing the strategy of supply-side reform to phase out uncompetitive industries.
Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang addresses the Business 20 (B20) China Kick-off meeting in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 26, 2016. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

BEIJING, Jan. 26 -- Vice Premier Wang Yang on Tuesday called on business leaders to offer suggestions for the 2016 G20 summit, which will be held in China this September.

In his address to the launching ceremony of the Business 20 (B20), which groups business leaders of G20 members, Wang said the theme of the Hangzhou summit "building an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy" reflects the key issues of the world economy and appeals of different countries.

He encouraged business leaders to focus on the construction of the G20 trade investment mechanism to boost global trade and investment cooperation.

He called on business leaders to focus on infrastructure construction and explore new approaches that that could balance the interests of all parties.

The vice premier also spoke about coordination of macroeconomic policy and financial regulation cooperation as well as inclusive growth, as the public can benefit from world economic growth.

China will host the G20 summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou from Sept. 4 to 5. The country formally took over the G20 presidency on Dec. 1, 2015.

B20 is a forum through which the private sector produces policy recommendations for the annual meeting of the G20 leaders. It brings together business leaders from across G20 member countries to reflect upon the role of the private sector as the main driver of economic growth.

Some 500 business leaders and representatives from G20 countries and international organizations attended the launch ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in downtown Beijing by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT).
Former Hainan vice governor on trial for corruption

GUANGZHOU, Jan. 27 -- A former vice governor of south China's Hainan Province stood trial on Wednesday accused of accepting about 86 million yuan (13.1 million U.S. dollars) in bribes.

Tan Li's case was heard by the Intermediate People's Court of Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province.

Prosecutors accused Tan of accepting the bribes from 10 companies while in a number of different posts between 2001 and 2014. Before becoming vice governor of Hainan, his posts in this period included publicity head of Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, and Communist Party of China chief in the Sichuan cities Guang'an and Mianyang.

In return for the money, Tan helped the companies in project bids and arbitrations, according to the prosecutors.

Tan, who was removed from his post as vice governor in July 2014, pleaded guilty in court.

The verdict will be given on another day.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani meet reporters after a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. FENG YONGBIN/CHINA DAILY

China has agreed to strengthen anti-terrorism work with Afghanistan, a war-torn country whose stability is linked to that of western China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi made the announcement at a news conference with his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani on Tuesday.

The development comes shortly after the second meeting of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group on Afghan Peace and Reconciliation was held in Kabul on Jan 18. The group comprises China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States.

China and Afghanistan have also agreed to discuss and expand the China, US and Afghanistan trilateral cooperation.

US Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Tuesday.

Wang said China and Afghanistan have agreed to strengthen bilateral and multilateral cooperation on anti-terrorism efforts to maintain the security and stability of both countries and the region.

"China supports all initiatives and measures that help reconciliation and the resumption of peace talks, as they are totally in line with China's security interest," Wang said.

The Afghan government and various political factions should work for an attractive and reasonable reconciliation plan, and China hopes the Taliban will respond positively, he said.

Fu Xiaoqiang, a security and arms control researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said there is the possibility of talks on the Afghan issue being held at foreign minister level between China, Afghanistan and the US.

They have a common interest in "preventing Afghanistan from becoming a source of terrorism," he said.

Fu said Afghanistan is a "very important" factor for the security of Xinjiang.

Rabbani said a third round of the quadrilateral talks will open on Feb 6 to finalize the road map for peace and reconciliation. He added that the Afghan government has called for "all members of Taliban groups" to come to negotiate.
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Liking the rock band Nickelback is a pretty heinous accusation by most standards, but it takes on a new flavor when hurled at a presidential candidate.

Especially if that candidate is Ted Cruz.

RELATED: Video: Young Ted Cruz cries out for "world domination"

A young male protester has continuously showed up to Cruz events during January in Iowa holding a sign declaring, "Ted Cruz Likes Nickelback."

Sometimes, the protester shows up with just the sign in hand.

But, on Saturday, he donned a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform, planted small Canadian flags and a photo of Cruz's face over a maple leaf in the ground outside of a rally hosted by the freshman senator's super PAC, The Washington Post reported.

RELATED: Rick Perry backs Ted Cruz for president

The protester, who has refused to identify himself to the press or name his affiliations, also handed out copies of Cruz's birth certificate, according to the newspaper.

"I just don't want, really, a Canadian in office," the protester told The Washington Post. "It seems like he's got a lot of controversy behind him whether he's a U.S.-born citizen or not and I'm just out here making a statement."

Cruz has endured questioning by Republican primary rival Donald Trump regarding whether Cruz's birthplace of Calgary disqualifies him from residing in the Oval Office.

Cruz's mother, however, was a U.S. citizen at the time, making Cruz a citizen as well under U.S. law.

RELATED: Harry Potter' author J.K. Rowling bashes Donald Trump spokeswoman, a Texan, for 'pure breeds' tweet

Tying Cruz to the Canadian band Nickelback  whose members grew up in Alberta, the same Canadian province where the Texas senator was born  has the double, but obscure, whammy of reminding primary voters of the questions raised by Trump while also implying that Cruz has terrible musical taste.

However, the band took the protester's jabs in stride in a Jan. 11 tweet, "NICKELBACK Employee of the Month. January 2016. #Election2016 #Nickelback4President"

But, when asked about his favorite Nickelback song, the protester told the Post, "I don't like Nickelback."

jfechter@mySA.com

Twitter: @JFreports
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) shakes hands with visiting United States Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing Jan 27, 2016.[Photo by Feng Yongbin/chinadaily.com.cn]

Foreign Minister Wang Yi started talks with visiting United States Secretary of State John Kerry this morning, and voiced hope that the ongoing visit will "strengthen our strategic mutual trust" and "eliminate strategic doubts".

Kerry's two-day visit to China began Tuesday. The two sides will exchange ideas on bilateral relations and other issues of common concern, according to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

Wang noted the great public attention to Kerry's ongoing China visit and the huge interest on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and the South China Sea issue.

"We are ready to exchange views with the US on all the issues of common concern to boost our mutual understanding," Wang said.

Wang added that a deepened discussion is expected to further implement the important outcomes reached during President Xi Jinping's US visit last September.

"I hope during this visit, we can strengthen our strategic mutual trust, eliminate strategic doubts and deepen our strategic cooperation in various fields in order to give a good start to China-US ties this year," Wang said.

Wang noted the tight schedule for Kerry's ongoing Asia trip. He said Beijing is glad to see Kerry is visiting Laos and Cambodia and that US ties with the two countries are further improved and developed.

"In Asia, there are not only your allies, but also many important countries. So visiting those countries will help you perceive the situation in Asia on a more comprehensive basis and learn from the opinions of various parties in a more objective manner," Wang said.

Kerry said China and the US have been able to find a level of new cooperation with respect to a number of issues, including the Iran nuclear issue, counterterrorism, climate change and Ebola. "So we found important common grounds," he said.
BEIJING, Jan. 27 -- China has urged the United Statesto uphold the one China policy and carefully handle the Taiwan issue, a mainland spokesman said on Wednesday.

During a press conference, Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesperson for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office (SCTAO), reiterated the points made by SCTAO head Zhang Zhijun during a meeting with visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Jan. 21.

Zhang told Blinken that cross-Strait peace and stability is facing challenges and uncertainties due to the current changes on the island, according to Ma.

The U.S. should stick to the one China policy and the principles laid out in the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques, respect the major concerns of China and properly handle issues relating to Taiwan, Ma quoted Zhang as saying.

Zhang also told Blinken that the mainland's Taiwan policy has been consistent and clear and will not be changed by the result of the election on the island.

Tsai Ing-wen, chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was elected the island's leader on Jan. 16.

Zhang said peaceful development of cross-Strait relations, that the two sides have achieved by adhering to the 1992 Consensus and opposition to Taiwan independence over the years, should be cherished.

"We will continue to stick to 1992 Consensus, oppose Taiwan independence activities in any form and firmly safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Ma also stressed that supporters of Taiwan independence will find no room across the world.

It is not realistic for Taiwan to sever economic cooperation with the mainland to expand its so-called "international cooperation space" and "such a thinking goes against the international community observing one China policy," said Ma.
On Jan. 14, the National Park Service announced that Yosemites iconic Ahwahnee Hotel will become the Majestic Yosemite Hotel on March 1. A news release explained that because of a trademark dispute with outgoing concessionaire Delaware North of Buffalo, N.Y., the Wawona Hotel will become Big Trees Lodge and Curry Village will become Half Dome Village. People readily saw a case of corporate greed. At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum posted a blog with a photo of company executives and the heading: Meet the corporate suits who claim to own the trademark to Yosemite National Park.

The next day, Drum conceded his initial take was probably wrong. The story is less of an outrage than a fairly pedestrian contract dispute. It turns out Delaware North does have rights to its concessions intellectual property  including names  because the company had to buy those intangible assets from the previous operator. The National Park Service acknowledges this fact and values these assets at $3.5 million. Delaware North wants $51 million. The matter will be settled in federal court.
A special one-night only performance at the ODC Theater on Sunday, Jan. 31, celebrates the 20th anniversary of the always engaging Mark Foehringer Dance Project|SF.

The Brazilian-trained Foehringer has been making work in the Bay Area since the early 90s, and his ballet-based modern company has come to be known for quirky, well-crafted, often theatrical pieces. Hes also known for showcasing a terrific coterie of dancers like Brian Fisher and Tanya Bello, who will dance Foehringers Brevis in Longo, as well as Jamielyn Duggan and Raphael Boumaila, who perform his evocative Sunken Cathedral.
Highway 1 undulates past an array of seaside spots along the San Mateo County coast that include Montara State Beach. Here, next to craggy sandstone cliffs topped with ice plants, stairs lead to swaths of golden sand, waves crash dramatically against the rocks, and the shoreline stretches for nearly a mile.

Across the Pacific Coast Highway and a bit north, a small entrance leads to the trailhead of the McNee Ranch State Park, a 625-acre outdoor haven popular with hikers, bicyclists and equestrians. Containing three main trails  the Gray Whale Cove Trail, the Pedro Mountain Road and the North Peak Access Road  it offers hikes ranging from easy to extremely strenuous. Trekkers go from sea level to an elevation of almost 1,900 feet at Montara Mountain, depending on which path they choose, meeting native plants such as seaside daisy, yerba santa and manzanita along the way as well as California quail, fox and deer.
With 16 nuclear power units in operation and a total installed capacity of 17.09 million kilowatts, China General Nuclear Power Corporation(CGN) becomes the world's fifth-largest nuclear power company after those in France, Russia, America and South Korea, CGN announced Tuesday at a press conference.

At the same time, CGN continues to maintain its position as the largest builder of nuclear power in the world, with 12 nuclear units making up a total installed capacity of 14.65 million kilowatts still in construction, which account for one fifth of the global nuclear power currently under construction.

Yuan Changhong, spokesman of CGN said that adding the new energy generating capacity, the Group's total installed electricity capacity in operation has reached 31.23 million kilowatts, an increase of 33.8 percent on last year. CGN is also becoming an important solar and wind power company in China.

As the largest builder of nuclear power plants in the world, CGN set a target of constructing five nuclear power units in a year in China. Guo Zonglin, deputy general manager of Nuclear Engineering Division, said that multiple nuclear power units currently under construction use third generation technology, which brings the construction up to the international advanced level.

China's nuclear power industry has also made a major breakthrough in terms of internationalization in 2015. Yuan Changhong said that taking CGN as an example, the company signed an investment agreement for a new nuclear power project in the U.K. with Frances EDF in October. The Bradwell project will adopt the domestic-developed third generation technology from nuclear power brand Hualong No.1 (HPR 1000), which demonstrates how China's nuclear power technology has been recognized by European countries.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan  Ten police officers in the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan were poisoned by a rogue officer and shot in the head by Taliban fighters the officer was working with, the second insider attack on the police in the province in less than two weeks, officials said Tuesday.

The recent insider attacks have added to the woes of an Afghan security force that suffered record casualties in the past year, as the Taliban mounted strong offensives across the country, stretching the governments fighters thin. Officials say the situation in several districts of Oruzgan is fragile, as it is in neighboring Helmand province, with government operations unable to break the Taliban momentum.
RIO DE JANEIRO  Brazils health minister says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects  but he also says the war is already being lost.

Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazils Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the countrys Carnival celebrations. Agency spokesman Nivaldo Coelho said Tuesday details of the deployment are still being worked out.

Castro also said the government would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

But the minister also said the country has failed in efforts against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito, the ministers told reporters as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.

A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations, public health experts have said. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as the virus symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didnt become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.

Worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond. U.S. health officials are advising pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.
REYNOSA, Mexico  The young Salvadoran woman was robbed and forced to dodge kidnappers working for a drug cartel during her four-month odyssey to this border city of belching factories and swirling dust across the Rio Grande from Texas.

She hoped to be on the other side long before Pope Francis visits the region next month and delivers what promises to be a highly symbolic homily addressing immigration. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will flock to the border to hear him speak, and Americas political class will likely be listening as well. Francis Feb. 17 Mass in Ciudad Juarez comes just eight days after the New Hampshire primaries, and three before contests in South Carolina and Nevada.

Immigration has been a hot-button campaign issue particularly among Republican hopefuls such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who have taken an increasingly hard line with Trump vowing to deport the more than 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally and Cruz aiming to end birthright citizenship for their U.S.-born children. It is also an issue close to Francis heart, and while analysts doubt he will wade too blatantly into the political thicket, his very presence along the border speaking on the issue will turn heads.

Migration is a complicated situation, and hes not going to ignore the demands of national sovereignty ... (but) hes calling for a more open and generous approach, said Tom Quigley, former Latin America policy adviser for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. You cant assume that hes going to say You all come, but he will clearly be urging the United States government, implicitly at least, to find ways of addressing the reasons why people are leaving El Salvador and Honduras and other countries.

For the Salvadoran woman, who gave only her last name, Miranda, all the talk makes little difference to her plans. She said she was not even aware the pope was coming, and nothing Trump or the other candidates say can dissuade her from seeking a better life.

Back home in El Salvador  which last year recorded a homicide rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, believed to be the highest of any country not in open war  she faced death threats from hyper-violent gangs that rule entire neighborhoods largely unchallenged.

It does not make you want to go less, Miranda said of the rhetoric, because you know that immigration is never going to stop.

Violence is also rampant in neighboring Guatemala and Honduras, the latter of which had been the worlds reigning murder capital in recent years. Gangs in all three countries kill with impunity, extort broad swaths of the population and recruit young people so aggressively that some stop attending school or even leaving home.

Living in many parts of those countries is like living in a dark, dangerous, dead-end alley, and migration is a dark, dangerous tunnel  but its a tunnel, said Kay Andrade Eekhoff, who works for Catholic Relief Services in El Salvador overseeing programs for at-risk Central American youth.
ROME  In Italy, family is considered so sacred that marriage is lauded in the Constitution. But what kind of family?

That has become a bitterly divisive question in a nation where the Vatican packs considerable political weight and where gays have grown impatient as other traditionally Catholic European countries have either allowed same-sex couples to marry or legally recognized their civil unions.

On Thursday, Italys Senate will plunge into a debate on proposed legislation to grant legal recognition to civil unions, including those of same-sex couples, without equating the partnerships to marriage.

The coalition government of Premier Matteo Renzi is pushing for the legislation, which includes the right of inheritance, to receive the pension of his or her deceased partner, or to make medical decisions about a partner in hospital. But one provision of the bill, to permit same-sex couples to adopt the biological children of their partner, has generated animosity even within Renzis coalition.

Opponents fear the so-called stepchild adoption will encourage male couples to turn to surrogate mothers abroad. Surrogacy is banned in Italy, as well as in many other European countries. Headlines warning of a surge in rented uteruses have abounded lately in Italian Catholic publications, as well as in more conservative lay newspapers.

Intentionally or not, Pope Francis has waded into the debate. Last week, in an annual address to the Vatican tribunal that grants marriage annulments, the pontiff declared: There cant be any confusion between the family intended by God and every other kind of union.

And the head of the politically influential Italian Bishops Conference defended Catholics having their say in the debate. Laity must inscribe divine law into earthly life, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said.

According to Vatican teaching, homosexual relations are sinful and marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

Pro-Vatican elements among Renzis Democrats are among those insisting the adoption provision be jettisoned, and the premier has told lawmakers to vote according to your conscience.

While politicians squabble over what rights same-sex couples should have, Italian courts increasingly have been approving the adoption by gays of their partners biological children on a case-by-case basis.

Besides the faith factor, the proposed bill has prompted a rethink of what constitutes family in a country where people rely on relatives or spouses when the state falls short. Grandparents care for children because public day care spots are scarce; hospital staff often assume Italians will bring hot meals to their relatives bedside.
KABUL  The Taliban have sabotaged a major power line in the northern province of Baghlan, officials said Wednesday, cutting a supply of electricity from Uzbekistan to Kabul, the Afghan capital, and exposing a vulnerability in the nations rickety infrastructure at a time when the insurgency has government forces thinly stretched.

Wahidullah Tawhidi, a spokesman for the national power company, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat, said insurgents destroyed one electricity transmission tower and damaged two others late Tuesday in the area of Dand-e-Shahabuddin, near the highway that links Baghlan and Kunduz provinces. Utility workers reached the area not long afterward, he said, but could not begin repairs until Afghan security forces had dismantled mines left by the insurgents and secured the area. He predicted that service would be restored later Wednesday.
Movies, Jan. 20: Grizzly

Film Date Significant

Reviewing The Revenant, Alex De Vore describes the movie well but errs badly in claiming it is set post-Civil War. Hugh Glass died in 1833. This is important, considering how young America was. There is a poignancy to an immature nation trying to find its way that is echoed in the themes of the movie: the opening of the West, the coming disintegration of the Indian way of life, and the visual cues of primordial water below ... and the countering sky shots.

Like the Glass character, America was caught between ... the quintessential American hero and the bigger question of who has the right to kill, man or god/nature.

Stating the wrong time frame for the movie is like saying the themes of a World War II film are the same as one about the Vietnam War.

Mike Baker

Santa Fe



Rest. Guide, Oct. 20: Restaurant of the Year

No Dazzle

My partner and I invited friends, part-time Santa Fe residents, to this restaurant which was honored as SFR's 2016 Restaurant of the Year. Previously, having had the pleasure of experiencing lovely appetizers in Georgia's bar, I felt confident that our guests would be equally thrilled.

Our dining experience was suboptimal. The evening's special, manicotti, was a muddy, cheesy presentation that defied any appearance and flavor of a respectable pasta dish. The shrimp and grits was a slop of cornmeal with a few shrimp, devoid of any "wow" factor. My salmon fish and chips was chunks of soggy salmon, accompanied by a pile of pommes frites two inches in length. The dinner salad was limpid and the flat bread unremarkable.

No one at the table finished their meals ... Simply put, Georgia failed to dazzle as a destination dining experience.

Luci Osaki

Santa Fe

7 Days, Jan. 6: Metroglyphs

Compromise Wins

Please don't replace This Modern World with MetroGlyphs.

W Hayes

Santa Fe



Editor's note: Thanks to all the readers who repeated this request, we're bringing the syndicated cartoon back this week. It appears on page 8, below our new local cartoon by Russ Thornton.



SFR will correct factual errors online and in print. Please let us know if we make a mistake, editor@sfreporter.com or 988-7530.



Mail letters to PO Box 2306, Santa Fe, NM 87504, deliver to 132 E Marcy St., or email them to editor@sfreporter.com. Letters (no more than 200 words) should refer to specic articles in the Reporter. Letters will be edited for space and clarity.

Santa Fe Reporter
Joy Godfrey (Joy Godfrey)

Terra

Andrew Cooper, the chief chef at Terra Restaurant at Four Seasons Rancho Encantado, has managed to turn melted cheese into a delicacy that's to be shared with everyone at your table. It's his twist on queso fundido ($14, it's not on the menu, you have to ask), a Mexican dish associated with pico de gallo and chorizo. But leave it up to Cooper, who's known for his green chile cheeseburger, to turn it into a whopper by adding onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, avocados and local chile. You forget that the chorizo, the main ingredient, is even there, making it, in his words, "a New Mexican-style cheese dip." It's one of the more filling appetizers on the menu, whose very unorthodox dishes pleasingly range from blue corn crusted trout ($22) to sweet crab chile relleno ($17). The trout is a healthier version of fish and chips. The batter is blue corn, soaked in buttermilk, and the trout is coated with blue corn meal before it's fried. There is a chipotle dipping sauce. As for the sweet crab chile relleno, it's as sweet as the relleno is amply stuffed, making it one of the best around.

-Thomas Ragan

198 State Road 592, 946-5800

Lunch and dinner daily; brunch on Sunday

fourseasons.com/santafe

#SFRfoodies

If you find some tasty food out in the wild, give it its "15 minutes." Share it on Instagram using #SFRfoodies for a chance to be featured in our upcoming Restaurant Guide.

@simplysantafenm @iconikcoffeeroasters @santafeculinaryacademy @theranchhousesantafe





Santa Fe Reporter
Like a fabled cat with nine lives, former New Mexico state Senator Phil Griego keeps landing on his feet. Less than a year after he resigned from the Legislature amid an ethics scandal, Griego is once again under investigation. This time, the State Land Office wants to know why he allowed sandstone boulders to be stolen from state grazing land that Griego and his family have leased in San Miguel County for decades and why the unfenced property has become an illegal dumping site.

And once again, Griego is claiming ignorance rather than purposeful misconduct.

Griego admits he allowed two men to excavate 8.8 cubic yards of rocks worth an estimated $5,000 from the state trust land last October to slow ditch erosion on private property in nearby Pecos, in exchange for using some of the rocks to block access to the dump ground, which archeologists consider to be a culturally rich area because of its connection to the historic Santa Fe Trail.



The state Land Office says these sandstone boulders were illegally excavated. Courtesy of State Land Office

While he never applied for a state permit or sought prior approval to allow the men to remove the rocks, Griego insists that he never intended to sell them.

"There was no exchange of money," he tells SFR during a telephone interview. "If I had known I had to ask permission, then I would have done that."

But Griego's story contradicts information uncovered by SFR in an agency report marked "private and confidential," provided to the newspaper through a public records request.

Emily Strickler, the State Land Office's assistant commissioner for communications, says field division employees at the agency, including Compliance Officer Kenny Baca, who prepared the "San Jose Rock Theft/Illegal Dumping" investigative report, believe the rocks were being moved off the lease "in order to sell them."

"They were never sold because the state police and the SLO became involved and halted it," says Strickler.

Baca's report reveals that Griego, who first identified himself as "Senator Griego" when they contacted him months after he resigned, claimed he "never intended to violate the terms of his lease." But Griego, who eventually clarified to Baca that he is a retired senator, asked the investigator what the potential repercussions could be from the removal of the rocks.

Ultimately, Griego and the men could face civil penalties or criminal charges. SFR has confirmed state police referred the matter to the 4th Judicial District Attorney's office, but Chief Deputy Prosecutor Thomas Clayton says the incident is still under review and no charges have been filed.

State law prohibits individuals from soliciting, employing or counseling others to excavate, injure or destroy cultural property on state land without a permit.

Since violations could be deemed to be misdemeanor offenses punishable with up to a six-month jail sentence and a $500 fine, the State Land Office advises lessees like Griego to "always exercise due caution to ensure that cultural properties are not inadvertently" damaged by others.

Griego, who claims he hasn't read the terms of the lease in years, and the other men could also face depredation charges for destroying or injuring trees on the property.

The entire incident has some San Jose residents upset. One woman, who did not want to be identified because she says she fears retaliation, tells SFR, "Griego does whatever he wants and then tries to talk his way out of these things when he gets caught." She's also worried about flooding and mudslides now that the rocks are no longer shoring up the base of a hill that holds the community's water tower.

The person who anonymously tipped off authorities last fall told field division inspectors and New Mexico State Police officers that allowing the removal of the rocks "wasn't right."

Griego's perpetual lease, which is set to be reopened in 2018, could be in jeopardy. Before it's yanked, he and his attorney Robert Stranahan, who was employed as general counsel for the land office during Pat Lyons' administration, have the opportunity to discuss the matter with agency staff this week.

After meeting with Griego earlier in November, Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn told him he wants him to pay restitution for the rocks, which haven't all been accounted for, fence the property and clean up the dump site, where investigators found abandoned vehicles, a school bus and an open septic tank. Griego contends the land is community property, but land office staff say maps show it is on state trust land.

For now, David Eck, a state archaeologist, has recommended Griego be instructed to contract an archaeological damage assessment survey to determine the level of damage to the site. Griego has requested and posted "No Trespassing" signs from the State Land Office.

Meanwhile, Griego tells SFR that he has no plans to campaign for his old Senate seat this year.

He voluntarily gave up the post in March 2015 as his colleagues in the Legislature reportedly prepared to vote on kicking him out over his role in the real estate sale of a historic state building to business associates in Santa Fe and in pushing through the resolution that allowed the building to be put up for sale in the first place.

Greigo avoided an expulsion vote by resigning, and he is collecting a pension because he wasn't charged or convicted in the matter.

That affair might not be over yet. A spokesman for New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas says staff attorneys are still reviewing potential violations of the Open Meetings Act in connection with Griego's 2014 real estate deal and potential perjury charges, after Griego failed to disclose his representation of Santa Fe hoteliers Ira and Sharif Seret with the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department on his 2015 financial disclosure form.

"We will inform the public of the disposition of this referral once that determination has been made. All complaints received by the Office of the Attorney General are fully reviewed, and appropriate action is taken," spokesman James Hallinan wrote. Editor's note: In an earlier version we misspelled the last names of Griego's attorney and the assistant commissioner for communications.

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Santa Fe Reporter
Hemp: Its been as popular as it is pragmatic for quite a while, as far back as the mid-1700s, when rope and yarn and even paper were made out of it. Then, in the 1990s, it started making a comeback, in clothes, in hoodies, in shoes, in backpacks.

Like a wildfire set among its drought-resistant stalks, its popularity spread. It was trendy. It was sustainable. It was, in short, cool.

But there was a problem: The crop could legally only be grown in countries like Canada and China, frustrating in light of its economic power. It accounted for nearly $581 million in US sales in 2013, the most recent trend, extracting a compound known as CBD for pain-relieving oils and lotions.

So this Friday, Jan. 29, outside the Roundhouse, legislators and activists and farmers take their turn to rally in what has become a perennial push to legalize hemp agriculture in New Mexicooutlawed since the late 1930s strictly out of guilt by association for being a cousin to the marijuana plant.

The non-psychoactive member of the family contains minimum traces of THC, and for decades now, farmers have not been allowed to cultivate the stalks, although you would not get high even if you smoked a field of them. But with every Legislative session, hope springs eternal, even though Gov. Susana Martinez, a crime- and-punishment Republican, vetoed similar legislation last year.

"I think the governor is sufficiently studied up on the matter now, and we're optimistic that she's going to call it this year," says Doug Fine, 45, a New York native who's written books on the subject and lives on a 42-acre goat farm outside Silver City; Fine claims he wouldn't mind growing his own crop someday.

"If this bill is signed, our farmers are off to the races," Fine says, referring to Democratic state Sen. Cisco McSorley's Senate Bill 3, which seeks to establish a research and development fund that would operate under the auspices of New Mexico State University and be licensed and monitored by the state Agriculture Department.

It's pretty much identical legislation to a bill he floated last year, SB 94. And there's no indication either way from the governor's office if she's changed her mind on the idea.

Last session, Martinez said she had a problem with the bill because state and federal laws were at odds with each other.

"Given the similarities between growing hemp and marijuana, this legislation could also create serious challenges for law enforcement in investigating drug crimes," she wrote.

"Additionally, I am concerned by the inconsistent language used throughout this bill to describe the purposes for which industrial hemp may be cultivated. Some descriptions appear limited to research and development whereas others broadly include commercial production. Any permission to cultivate hemp for commercial purposes under this legislation would, of course, also be contrary to federal law."

But this year, McSorley and Fine and other activists have ammunition: It's good for the economy, and nearly half the country, from Oregon to Colorado to Kentucky to Vermont, has gotten onboard and legalized it under a special provision in the federal 2014 Farm Bill, which removes the stigma of the crop as a Schedule 1 controlled substance and, in effect, gives the states the opportunity to grow it under university-run programs.

Since then, Fine says the production of hemp in the US has increased from 350 to 6,000 acres across the country.

The way Truchas activist Jerry Fuentes sees it, legalizing hemp could only lead to more jobs, more dollars and a local product that could serve to undercut the price of imports and drive prices down, from textiles to car parts and beyond.

It also sounds like something Martinez would like, Fuentes notes, given her State of the State Address and the emphasis on bringing more industry to the state.

"And there's no better industry than the agricultural industry," Fuentes says.

Last fall, Fine said as much, in a letter he penned to Martinez in response to her veto earlier in the year, in which he explained the particulars of the 2014 Farm Bill and its special provision. Martinez received it, not coincidentally, with a basket full of hemp products, including a red chile rub, all courtesy of Seebinger Hemp in ABQ.

"The reason is simple: we want to join the billion-dollar North American hemp industry, which is growing 24% annually," he wrote. "It means profits in the ground with low water demand for those hundreds of New Mexico small farmers, right from the first harvest."

And if that doesn't convince Martinez, maybe a recent letter from a Colorado company will.

Ed Lehrburger is president of PureVision Technology Inc., which has been processing industrial hemp since in 2014 in Fort Lupton. Last week, he joined the growing ranks of supporters for New Mexico hemp agriculture, telling the governor he's ready to buy the crop.

At Santa Fe Hemp, in business since 1997 on Water Street, owner Kathleen Savage says she looks forward to the day when hemp is legal and it doesn't have to be imported at a higher cost to the US and then sold to retailers such as herself.

"I'd rather see it grown in the US," says Savage, 60, whose business, ever since the 2008 recession, has taken a hard hit, forcing her to shift to organic cotton, too.

Conventional cotton, she says, "is terrible environmentally. It's the third largest polluter on the planet. It uses so much pesticides, it's poisoning water tables. Hemp is a weed, it doesn't require pesticides, and it's a great rotation crop. Plus, if we're talking about paper, it's only one season to grow a hemp crop versus 25 years for a tree to grow. ... It's a wonderful source for paper."

Which brings us to the dissemination of fact and fiction with regard to the plant. Contrary to what you learned behind the bleachers, the US Constitution was not written on it, but it's been said that some working drafts might have been.

If the tree-based paper reaches Martinez, all she has to do is sign her name.



Santa Fe Reporter
An e-commerce supplier in China plans to recruit international students to be couriers so as to ensure efficient express delivery services during Spring Festival, China Business News reports.

Online shopping sites are short-handed due to an exodus of workers for weeks before and after China's Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb 8 this year. But in a competitive market, companies such as JD.com, Cainiao and Alibaba have promised to keep business normal, at least in major cities, during the festive season.

Suning Tesco suggested its customers should not feel surprised when opening the door and seeing a foreign guy saying, "Here's your delivery!" as the company is inviting foreign students to be couriers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing and Chengdu.

Foreign couriers are trained with courier skills, etiquette and Chinese culture and custom during Spring Festival and start working from Feb. 1.

Besides the shortage of employees, the express delivery industry was hit hard by the cold front that swept most parts of China.

Facing a slew of delays, the speed of parcel deliveries has slowed by 20 percent from Jan. 20 to Jan. 24, largely due to the bad weather, according to statistics from Cainiao and Alibaba.

Couriers are also facing other barriers, such as traffic congestion and frozen fuel tanks.
From the moment he picked his way through the crowd and took the stage at Collected Works this fall, it was clear that Peter Nabokov was prepared to face public criticism.

Typically, at these events at the go-to local bookstore in a town full of eager writers, the author takes the stage, reads for a few minutes, answers a few softball questions, signs books, shakes hands and says good night. But the air in the store that evening was heavy with tension. Nabokov, a tenured professor in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, had prepared two books about Acoma Pueblo with the publishing behemoth Penguinand members of Acoma, who made up roughly half the crowd, were not happy about it.



Margaret Molloy (Margaret Molloy)

How the World Moves, a sprawling hardcover, is a biography of Edward Proctor Hunt, an Acoma man who collaborated closely with some of the founding members of the field of anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. The Origin Myth of Acoma Pueblo, packaged as a paperback "Penguin Classic," is a re-edited version of the Acoma origin myth that Hunt had shared with researchers in the late 1920s and which Nabokov had dug up from a government archive.

That morning, the Santa Fe New Mexican had published a letter by the governor of Acoma that criticized Nabokov for writing about Acoma without having consulted the tribe firstand the daily newspaper for having given him free publicity by reviewing his books. Then-Governor Fred S Vallo explained that Hunt "never had the permission of the pueblo to impart any Acoma sacred information to anyone, much less to the Bureau of Ethnology for publication. The pueblo has always considered this publication ... to be a fundamental breach of trust by the United States."

Current and former members of Acoma's tribal government spoke eloquently and at length about what they felt was a violation by Nabokov, comparing his work to that of grave robbers who sell Native artifacts illegally. "This story belongs to us. It is our intellectual property," said Brian Vallo, a former director of historic preservation for Acoma (and Governor Vallo's son). He turned to face the audience. "I would ask you all to not buy this book."



Lucas Iberico Lozada (Former Acoma governor, Fred S Vallo, says he wants to preserve the uniqueness of the Acoma people.)

In the weeks and months that followed, I set out to understand the root of the conflict between Nabokov and Acoma. How had a well-respected scholar of Native American history and anthropology ended up on the receiving end of such harsh criticism from the very people he had set out to honor?

Acoma (a Spanish bastardization of Haak'u) occupies some 430,000 acres of land in Cibola County in western New Mexico. South of today's Interstate 40 and some 60 miles west of Albuquerque, the old Pueblo sits atop a sandstone mesa that rises 367 feet above the valley floor. Its height affords sweeping views of Mt. Taylor to the north and the Malpais "badlands" to the west. Today, most enrolled members of Acoma live in satellite villages that surround the base of the mesa.

I visited Acoma on an uncharacteristically wet Sunday. Jay, my tour guide for the afternoon, delivered his spiel inside the San Estevan del Rey Mission Church, the enormous adobe structure on the southern end of the mesa that is both a proud landmark of Acoma's longevity and a stark reminder of Spanish brutalityit was built with forced labor after a skirmish in which the Spanish massacred some 800 Acoma and enslaved many more in 1599. The Spanish were briefly supplanted by the Mexicans, who were in turn ousted by the Americans in the 1840s.

In 1861, an Acoma boy named Gaire (or "Day Break") was born on the mesa. At the time, US federal policy was geared towards complete cultural assimilation of young Native men; at 19, Gaire left the Pueblo in order to begin his "civilized" schooling in Albuquerque. Nabokov describes in How the World Moves the radical makeover this entailed for the young Acoma man and his peers:

"Day Break's headband, homemade cotton pants, baggy tunic, deerhide moccasins, and Navajo blanket were incinerated. His pageboy-style hair was scissored to the head. Buckets of cold water doused his body, and he was scrubbed with chunks of laundry soap. He was measured for a uniform, then heavy leather shoes and a Union soldier-like cap."

He also received a new name: Edward Proctor Hunt. As Nabokov tells it, Gaire's return to Acoma as Hunt three years later was uneasy. The things he had learned in Albuquerque put him at odds with the secretive religious societies that govern social and political life on the mesa.

Acoma, like the other Puebloan tribes traditionally devoted to farming and husbandry, has a clan-based social and religious structure. Membership is passed down the mother's side and determined at birth. Each Acoma boy and girl is expected to learn the rituals and tales unique to their clan over the course of their lives. Additionally, they are often initiated into special religious societies distinct from the clans.

I met with Brian Vallo, the director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research, to learn more about the unique set of stories that explain how each clan came to be part of Acoma. "Those stories are life guides: They are very sacred. Different clan groups and societies have their own version, so the stories differ as a result. So, you know ... you don't share that information with anyone else. Even internally some things are secret until you reach a certain age."

After completing his schooling in Albuquerque, Hunt returned to Acoma's religious and social society, became a shopkeeper and married the daughter of an important political family. But what Nabokov describes as growing "commitments to Christianity, capitalism and individual liberty" meant that Hunt refused to allow his children to participate in the Pueblo's religious ceremoniesa decision that led to a break with Acoma in 1918. After a failed attempt to start over in a different Pueblo, the Hunts left New Mexico and joined a traveling circus as "show Indians."



Acoma Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, is one of the oldest continually inhabited communities on North America. (Anson Stevens-Bollen)

Offered the chance to return to Acoma in the early 1930s, Hunt refused, and he died in Albuquerque in 1948.

But Hunt had an additional life besides that of a wandering minstrel. It would be another 60 years before his watershed contribution to the anthropology of the Southwest would be recognized.

The federal Bureau of American Ethnology was founded in 1879 as an outgrowth of the US military's exploratory campaigns. Its mission to catalog the cultural artifacts of Native peoples often ran in uncomfortable parallel with the federal government's official policy toward those culturesvacillating between annihilation and assimilation. As one contemporary researcher I spoke to explained, the first generation of anthropologists stood in opposition to the government's idea of assimilation. Instead, they scoured the Southwest in hopes of preserving the "ancient" cultures that lined the tracks of the newly built Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad.

As Nabokov writes in How the World Moves, these "professional anthropologists ... did not come to make friends and refused to take no for an answer. Their fervor for esoteric information would often become an intellectual combat between aggressive scientists and increasingly withholding Indians."

For anthropologists eager to make their mark in a new field, a source as well-informed and skeptical of tribal secrecy as Hunt was a godsend. As Hunt would later explain to the anthropologists interested in his stories, his induction into the Koshare society meant that he was exposed to the ur-rituals that undergird Acoma culturemaking him the perfect informant on a people that keep their stories secret even from one another.

Nabokov, who nurtured a childhood fascination with Native Americans into a successful career as an anthropologist and historian, marveled at the obscurityand great powerof the BAE's Bulletin 135, "Origin Myth of Acoma and Other Records." "Printed on cheap paper ... with a drab gray cover and a thirty-five-hundred-copy press run" in 1942, Nabokov writes in the Penguin version of the Origin Myth, it contained the "most complete examples from Native America of the most important narrative that any society can tell itself about itself," the story of its founding.



The San Estevan del Rey Mission Church is both a proud landmark of Acomas longevity and a stark reminder of Spanish brutality. (Anson Stevens-Bollen)

The document listed no Acoma authors on its title page; indeed, the "Origin Myth's" sole author is Matthew W Stirling, an archaeologist who was at the time the lead researcher at the BAE. But the preface to the text alludes to a group of "Pueblo Indians from Acoma and Santa Ana" who met with Stirling and his staff in Washington in September and October of 1928. Nabokov was curious about these anonymous Puebloans who had willingly divulged so many details to outsiders, and, enlisting the help of an archivist at the Smithsonian, was able to establish the Hunt family as the source. Then he tracked down Wilbert "Blue Sky Eagle" Hunt, the last surviving member of the family who had been on the fateful trip to Europe and Washington.

Nabokov conducted a series of interviews with Wilbert Hunt beginning in 1993 that only stopped upon Wilbert's death in 2007. Nabokov, as he notes in the acknowledgements section of How the World Moves, his biography of Hunt, is deeply indebted to Edward's son, "who entrusted me with this story, and to whom I pledged I would make it into a book."

On numerous occasions, Nabokov has written that he had two goals in re-editing and republishing the "Origin Myth." The first was to give an Indian man erased from the historical record his due recognition for an enormous contribution to anthropology. The second was to place the story into the upper echelons of religious texts read the world over, believing it equivalent to "the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Upanishads, or the Koran."

But unlike the ancient Israelites, Akkadians, or Hindus and Muslims, Acoma has no written language, much less a single canonical text revered by its people. As Vallo and others explained, since Acoma still exclusively maintains its traditions orally, its religious societies and its lifetime tribal councilors are, essentially, the curators of the traditions that are transferred to younger generations of Acoma people carefully, in metered doses and at the right time.

Theresa Pasqual became the director of Acoma's Historic Preservation Office in early 2007around the time the Pueblo learned that Nabokov was planning to republish the "Origin Myth." That June, she and her team met with attorneys from the Chestnut Law Offices, the Pueblo's general counsel. In a strongly worded letter to Nabokov, Ann Berkley Rodgers, an attorney at Chestnut, wrote: "The fact that one member of the Pueblo at one time may have transmitted this story to persons calling themselves anthropologists without the consent of the whole Pueblo does not matter. His violation does not sanitize your action."



In a reply, Nabokov apologized and agreed to meet with Acoma's tribal council, "comply with Acoma law," and submit a manuscript of his work to the tribe by the end of that year.

As Pasqual explained to me, the Pueblo feared a loss of control over its social-religious apparatus. "The Pueblo has its own internal mechanisms for when and with whom information gets passed down from generation to generation," she said. "Once that information becomes publicly available, the Pueblo loses that ability. The traditional religious leadership has always expressed that this information gives us the basis for who we are."

Indeed, what for Nabokov was an act of overdue recognition for an overlooked Native man is, for the tribe, a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which the community preserves and maintains knowledge. In February 2008, Nabokov wrote Rodgers to say that work on his project had been delayed; in April, he sent another letter that he was now aiming for September of that year. And then, nothing.

Vallo, Pasqual and others often refer to these stories as the tribe's intellectual propertya formulation which would suggest the tribe as a whole legally owns the stories, and that therefore any unsanctioned publication of the stories would be tantamount to theft.

In November, I drove to Albuquerque to meet with Rodgers and Aaron Sims, an enrolled Acoma member who joined Chestnut in 2014. They explained that since the original "Origin Myth" was a government publication, it lies firmly within the public domainmaking any threat of a lawsuit on intellectual property grounds toothless. Nabokov reiterated this point when defending his publication at the contentious Q-and-A at Collected Works.

Shortly after meeting with Rodgers and Sims, I called Eileen Maxwell, public affairs director at the Smithsonian's National Museum for the American Indian. Maxwell told me that if the papers were held in her archivesrather than in the Smithsonian's Anthropological Archivesthey would "never" have been shared with Nabokov without first consulting the tribe. On Jan. 14, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, backed Acoma in their fight to protect the "Origin Myth," asking that the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution "manage these archives with respect for their sensitive nature and in consultation with affected tribes."



Ritual knowledge, according to tribal officials, is released on a need-to-know basis. Day Break (Edward Proctor Hunt) did not have authority to disclose secrets to the Smithsonian, some Acoma tribal leaders claim, and neither did Peter Nabokov. (Anson Stevens-Bollen)

But the attorneys aren't out of options.

When someone from the tribe saw the book available for pre-order on Amazon.com last March, the Pueblo immediately reached out to Sims, who fired off a letter demanding that Nabokov respect the agreement made in 2007.

"This painstaking restoration," Nabokov explained in a lengthy response, "has sought to enhance the narrative, eliminate some sensitive material, and delete specialized linguistic clarifications so as to make a publication that would at last stand alongside the world' [sic] great volumes of religious literature."

"It was like arguing, 'Even though these people have done wrong by you, I'm going to do it as well,'" Sims said.

Nabokov did eventually send the Pueblo a copy of the manuscript in May 2015, just a few months before publication. The tribal council held a meeting to review the manuscript two weeks before the book was released, by which time it was too late to halt publication. It was then that they planned a public condemnation of Nabokov, filling seats at his Albuquerque and Santa Fe readings, using the Q-and-A section of the night to make their case, and held a press conference in Santa Fe to further explain their position.

A day after the Santa Fe book event, Nabokov did appear before the tribal council, alongside his lawyer, James Kawahara. According to a handful of people who were present, he made a plea for the tribe to "go easy" on the descendants of the Hunt family who remain on the Pueblo.

When I reached out to ask for an interview, Nabokov politely declined, writing in an email that "out of respect for the privacy of those on-going conversations ... I have been advised not to comment further at this time." I tried reaching Eddie Hunt, Wilbert's nephew, but multiple calls and messages to his caretaker went unanswered.

Sims and Rodgers explained that while they believe they have strong grounds on which to sue Nabokovbreach of contract, based on the 2007 and 2008 lettershis fate, ultimately, lies with the tribal council. "Part of me would like to bring a lawsuit," Rodgers said, "but you're talking about years of litigation, and I don't know that that's best for the Pueblo." Many Pueblo leaders, she added, "would love for this to molder in the corner and die."

In How the World Moves, Nabokov draws on Hunt's past as a shopkeeper and trader to argue that he served as a conduit between Hispano settlers, Anglo lawmakers and his own people, and frames his collaboration with anthropologists as the exchange of ideas crucial to cross-cultural understanding.

But Acoma Pueblo's leaders don't see Hunt as a maverick interested in preserving his people's dying traditions. Instead, many see him as a sellout, a traitor who turned his back on his people in exchange for money and the respect of outsiders, and take umbrage that Nabokov glamorized the act.

Brian Vallo, who oversaw an expansion of the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak'u Museum in the early 2000s, enumerated the complications attached to maintaining Acoma's unique cultural traditions in the age of the smartphone. "We have language loss, there is separation of community members from their communities, we have intermarriage, [all of which] impact the sustainability of culture and traditionswe have had to ask ourselves some difficult questions. So when a book like Nabokov's comes out, it's like, 'Damn it.'" He laughs. "It's just another thing that we have to deal with."

I asked Jay, my tour guide on the mesa, how he and the rest of the guides decide what they're allowed to tell outsiders about Acoma. His reply surprised me in its simplicity: "I can give a tour and teach people about anything I've read about in books because it's already out there." He said he hadn't heard of Nabokov or his books, and didn't seem particularly concerned about the possibility that an outsider was broadcasting tribal secrets into the world for anyone to see.

I found the resignation implicit in his answer perplexing. It seemed to crystallize the fear expressed by Vallo, Pasqual and others that the ready availability of The Origin Myth of Acoma Pueblo would transform a powerful religious and cultural tool into one story among many, prepackaged for outsiders with a desire to learn about the continent's original inhabitants.

In fairness to Nabokov, this is largely already the case, thanks to the digitization of government archives. And as he points out, the original publication includes color illustrations of ritual vestmentsas sacred, if not more so, than the stories: Eliminating these illustrations from his updated version was a no-brainer for the academic.



But his decision to publish without consulting the Puebloeven after promising he would do soraises the question of an ethical or professional failure on his part. It's unusual to find a work written about Native history or anthropology by an outsider these days that doesn't explicitly confront the obligation that academics owe to their subjects.

The world we live in is a literal one. This is as true for young Acoma people as for their non-Native counterparts, former Acoma Governor Fred S Vallo, a kindly retired civil servant, conceded to me when we met in late November. "It's so tough to protect our cultural patrimony now. Everything's out there on social media, the Internet. We're slowly realizing this as we hold on dearly to what's left," he said quietly. "Once we lose our ability to maintain our customs, our uniqueness as Acoma people goes too."



Santa Fe Reporter
MLK Commission Investigated

Rick Nathanson reports the NM State Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission is being investigated by the attorney generals office. The groups

on Tuesday a month after its executive director and board came under scrutiny for approving a no-bid contract.

State Land Office Questions Griego

Less than a year after he resigned from the Legislature, former state Senator

is under investigation by the State Land Office for allowing two men to illegally remove sandstone boulders off grazing land he leases from the agency.

Solitary Confinement Ban Proposed

Milan Simonich reports lawmakers want to prohibit New Mexico jails and prisons from placing inmates 18 and younger in solitary confinement and

with a serious mental illness in isolation.

Plea Deal Reviewed

Steve Terrell has

about an accused cop killer who got a plea deal from prosecutors while the governor was a district attorney.

Slow Job Growth

For the second consecutive month, New Mexico has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at

. And Sal Christ reports

may have hit New Mexico operations harder than originally thought.

Best-Paying Jobs

Doctors, surgeons, dentists and nuclear engineers in New Mexico, who are still employed,

, according to US News & World Report.

Mental Health Priorities

A new behavioral health business plan aimed at helping providers serve mentally ill residents suggests crisis response teams and intensive case management services be the

in Bernalillo County.

Big Pharma and Medical Pot

"Big Pharma must be getting seriously worried by the results of a

conducted by the Centre for Addictions Research of BC." 420 Magazine reports that medpot patients reduce their use of opioids and other prescription drugs.

Pot-Growing Nuns

A group of nuns who grow marijuana to make salves in Merced, Calif., are

to try and block a city ordinance that would ban their business.

Hemp Farming

SFRs Thomas Ragan takes a look a legislation that proposes legalizing hemp farming in New Mexico, which has been

.

Sen. Cisco McSorleys Senate Bill 3 ... seeks to establish a research and development fund that would operate under the auspices of New Mexico State University and be licensed and monitored by the state Agriculture Department.

Its pretty much identical legislation to a bill he floated last year, SB 94. And theres no indication either way from the governors office if shes changed her mind on the idea.

Forest Restoration

The Associated Press reports, More than 140 square miles of overgrown, fire-prone areas around New Mexico have been thinned over the last several years, but



Santa Fe Reporter
Only 285 days to go until Election Day now! *collapses*[Content Note: Racism] Yesterday I mentioned's ahistorical and troubling comments on Reconstruction during the last Democratic town hall (and explained further in comments why they were so problematic).Last night, Clinton's Senior Advisor and Senior Spokesperson, Karen Finney, issued a clarifying statement : "Her point was that we might have gotten to a better place under Lincoln's leadership. What we needed after the Civil War was equality, justice, and reconciliation. Instead we saw the federal government abandon Reconstruction before real change took hold, which ultimately led to a disgraceful era of Jim Crow. And as she talks about frequently, too many injustices remain today. Attempts to suppress voting rights go back to racist efforts against Reconstruction, and in fighting for voting rights and equality today we are continuing a long struggle that still has to be fought and won in our own generation."Noting "racist efforts against Reconstruction" was wise, as it at least signals that Clinton understands Reconstruction itself wasn't racist. But acknowledging the pernicious narrative about Reconstruction into which her comment played would have been appreciated. In other Clinton news : "At a campaign event in Deocorah, Iowa on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton lit up when a voter asked her if she would consider appointing the president to the Supreme Court should she win the White House. 'Wow, what a great idea. No one has ever suggested that to me, I love that, wow,' the Democratic presidential candidate responded. 'He may have a few other things to do but I tell you that's a great idea. ...I mean he's brilliant, and he can set forth an argument, and he was a law professor, so he's got all the credentials.'" I LOVE THIS IDEA SO MUCH! But only if President Obama is interested, of course! But if he is, LET'S MAKE IT HAPPEN!Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle,says he won't participate in this week's Republican debate (awww) because Fox News is mean to him. And his official statement about it is, naturally, fucking amazing.WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWWWWWWWWW WOW WOW WOW In other debate news : "After MSNBC and theannounced on Tuesday that they would hold an unsanctioned Democratic presidential debate ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Sen.(I-VT) said he would not attend a debate not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, told thethat Sanders won't participate in an unsanctioned debate for fear that he would be barred from future official debates. A spokeswoman for Clinton, told thethat the former secretary of state would be 'happy to participate in a debate in New Hampshire if the other candidates agree, which would allow the DNC to sanction the debate.' The DNC said in a Tuesday statement that the party will not sanction the Feb. 4 debate planned by MSNBC and the Union-Leader." Okay.The rest of the dipshits +running for president are still running for president.Talk about these things! Or don't. Whatever makes you happy. Life is short.
Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed and other leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation were arrested Tuesday after the FBI and state police stopped vehicles about 20 miles north of Burns.



Authorities did not release the name of the person who died at the highway stop, but Finicum's daughter confirmed it was Finicum, 55, of Cane Beds, Arizona, one of the cowboy-hat wearing faces of the takeover.



...Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound in the confrontation about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395. He was treated and released from a local hospital and was in FBI custody, authorities said.



Also arrested during the stop were his brother, Ammon Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho, Ryan W. Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont., Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada, and Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah. They were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony.



...[Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore], a vocal supporter of the Bundy family, said that Ammon Bundy told his wife that Finicum was cooperating with police when he was shot.



But sources told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Finicum and Ryan Bundy disobeyed orders to surrender and resisted arrest. No other details were available.

In the meantime, Operation Mutual Defense, a network of militias and patriot sympathizers, issued a call on its website for help at the refuge. The post was written by Gary Hunt, a board member from California who has expressed support for Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City and had ties to the patriot movement.



"You have an obligation to proceed to the Harney County Resource Center (the wildlife refuge) immediately," Hunt wrote. "If you fail to arrive, you will demonstrate by your own actions that your previous statements to defend life, liberty, and property were false."

[Content Note: Guns; death; insurrection.]Last night, law enforcement and some members of the insurrectionists holed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge got into a violent confrontation about 20 miles away from Malheur, and one militia member was killed, one was injured, and a bunch were taken into custody.One might imagine that means their insurrection is over, but one would be wrong: "At the refuge Tuesday evening, occupier Jason Patrick reported no unusual activity. 'It's pretty quiet here,' Patrick said. He said no one was leaving as of 6 p.m. Hours later, Patrick said the refuge remained quiet but 'we're all standing here ready to defend our peaceful resolution.' He wouldn't elaborate."And outside the refuge, Finicum is now a martyr to the cause, and other extremist groups are rallying around the government action taken against the insurrectionists.Which means that things could potentially get a lot worse before this things, unless the feds move to end it swiftly. But they haven't shown much inclination to do that, frankly.My condolences to Finicum's family, who I'm sure loved him very much.
New Zealand has fallen down the league table of the least corrupt nations, with access to official information and discussion about environmental policy both issues according to the chair of Transparency International New Zealand.

With a score of 88 out of 100 for 2015, New Zealand dropped to fourth least corrupt nation globally, behind Denmark, Finland and Sweden in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.

Having topped the index for two consecutive years with the least corrupt public sector, New Zealand was toppled last year by Denmark. Australia's score fell from 80 to 79, and its ranking dropped to 13 from 11 in 2014.

Chair Suzanne Snively said there were steps that could be taken immediately to re-establish New Zealand's exemplary reputation for a trusted public sector.

Snively told BusinessDesk that there was a current issue with access to official information, where New Zealand has historically been strong.

"We were leading in terms of the Ombudsman Act years ago, but we haven't resourced it," she said. "We don't prioritise the importance of having access to information in the way that has been done in the past."

The Official Information Act has come under scrutiny recently with media organisations reporting government departments are increasingly invoicing for requests made for information. In outgoing Ombudsman Beverley Wakem's report on practices adopted by government agencies in dealing with OIA requests, she said there was no reason to exclude media from being charged for information requests.

In her report, Wakem also said it was clear the office of the Ombudsman had struggled to keep up with complaints made, and she had advised parliament the office had failed to meet all of its timeliness performance targets in the 2014/15 reporting year.

Discussion of the balance between environmental and economic importance was another issue, Snively said.

"We've been slow to address water quality issues," she said. "We've been behind when it comes to talking about the compromises that are necessary when talking about your future economy. The idea behind taking this stuff seriously is not that we want to become perfect overnight, but we need to be having discussions and debates about the trade-offs."

The Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 ranks 168 countries on a scale of zero to 100. Somalia and North Korea are bottom of the list, both scoring just eight out of 100.

Snively said the fall in score and rank was a wake-up call for the government and public sector, with New Zealand needing to make corruption prevention routine and comprehensive to reclaim the number one spot.

"A clean reputation makes us attractive to do business with and secures qualified migrants and confident tourists," she said. "We're subject to the winds of global markets, and a strong reputation is a very important asset, but you need to work at it."

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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New Zealand imports rose to a record high last year as a decline in the value of the currency pushed up values.

The country's imports increased 2.5 percent to $52.53 billion compared with the year earlier, according to data from Statistics New Zealand. Annual exports slid 2.2 percent to $49 billion. The annual trade deficit widened to $3.55 billion from $1.18 billion in 2014, and the widest for a calendar year since 2008, the agency said.

The New Zealand dollar slipped about 12 percent against the US dollar last year as falling commodity prices, particularly for dairy products, weakened the country's growth prospects, while a pick up in the US economy bolstered the greenback. That increased the cost of importing goods into the country.

"The depreciating New Zealand dollar has an upward effect on import and export prices, Statistics NZ international statistics senior manager Jason Attewell said. Imports rose $1.3 billion, but exports fell $1.1 billion as the impact of falls in world prices, such as for dairy products, was greater than the upward exchange rate effect.

The rise in imports was broad-based and was led by consumption goods such as clothing, toys and games, which increased 13 percent to $13.48 billion. Imports of capital goods rose 4.6 percent, led by a 5.8 percent increase in machinery and plant imports.

Offsetting the increases, the value of annual crude oil imports slid by about a third on the back of lower prices.

Meanwhile, the drop in export values was led by dairy products, which slid 21 percent to $11.53 billion, with China accounting for two-thirds of the fall. The decline was led by a 31 percent drop in milk powder values.

Still, the quantity of dairy exports rose 2.9 percent to a record high of 2.9 million tonnes, the agency said. China was the largest market, accounting for 21 percent of the total, down from 28 percent in 2014.

For the December month, exports rose 0.6 percent to $4.43 billion from a year earlier, led by logs and wine. December imports slid 2.6 percent to $4.48 billion, led by a drop in crude oil and transport equipment. Excluding the volatility of large capital items, goods imports rose 2.6 percent, the agency said.

The December trade deficit was $53 million, compared with expectations for a monthly deficit of $131 million in a Reuters poll of economists.

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Prime Minister John Key has confirmed the government's plans to help bring forward spending on Auckland's transport infrastructure including the $2.5 billion city rail link and the $1 billion East/West Connections road project.

The government will work with Auckland Council to bring forward the business plan and formalise Crown funding from 2020, Key told the Auckland Chamber of Commerce in his first major speech of the year. Key had been tipped to bring forward the government's own funding, and these commitments are expected to help the local body negotiate contracts and provide investors certainty for other major central business district projects. A business plan is expected to be delivered later this year.

"The government still has to work through a number of important and quite complex issues with the council," Key said. "These include how project costs will be shared and how the rail link will be owned and managed."

In 2013, the government agreed to jointly fund the rail link with Auckland Council but to not provide its share until 2020, but would consider an earlier business case and construction start date if it became clear that Aucklands CBD employment and rail patronage hit thresholds faster than current growth rates suggested.

The two thresholds were rail patronage hitting 20 million trips a year before 2020 and a 25 percent increase in Auckland CBD employment over the 2013 level  half the increase predicted in Auckland Transports City Centre Future Access Study. Neither threshold has been met at this stage although rail trips are forecast to hit the 20 million mark by the end of this year. Patronage increased 22 percent in 2015 to just over 15 million trips a year.

The rail link will connect Britomart Station in downtown Auckland with the existing western line at Mt Eden station, allowing trains to run both ways through Britomart, and preliminary work began in December with council's long-term plan passed last year based on construction beginning in 2018.

Auckland Mayor Len Brown welcomed the commitment, saying it will help the city cater to annual population growth of 3 percent. The next step for council to work with government will be in addressing traffic congestion and make public transport more desirable across the whole city, he said.

Key also announced plans to fast-track the East/West Connection to improve traffic between Onehunga and Mt Wellington which is heavily used by industry to allow consent to be made within nine months of application.

The government plans to fund the connection through the Land Transport Fund to allow construction to start as early as 2018, he said.

Key detailed up to $115 million of funding for four road projects, two in Taranaki, one in Gisborne and one near Blenheim.

He also touched on housing affordability, which he said has no quick fix, with reforms to the resource management act a priority for the government.

"I want to make the government's expectations absolutely clear - we must continue lifting supply of new houses in Auckland to meet the demands of this growing city," Key said.

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The high price of the airline-style meals served on plastic trays on China's high-speed trains has stirred heated discussion on the Internet as the 2016 Spring Festival travel rush kicked off.

Since the first day of 2015, China Railway Corporation has implemented "quality standards of railway transport passenger service", of which, Article 9.1.7 says: 2 yuan pre-packaged drinking water and 15 yuan plastic tray meals are served throughout. How about the actual situation?

(Photo/File)

On Jan. 22, when a reporter from Jiangsu TV went to the dining carriage to buy meals just ten minutes after boarding the G7145 from Nanjing to Shanghai, he was told by a crew member: Today's 15 yuan lunch are all sold out.

Reporter: The 15 yuan tray meals are said to be served along the whole journey, is this not the case? We're looking for a simple meal.

Conductor: Youll need to wait until we've arrived in Shanghai when theyll be replenished.

Reporter: Im getting off at Shanghai. So what are the options for tray meals then?

Conductor: We only do replenishment at major stations such as Shanghai and Nanjing. On our way to Nanjing, there are several [15 yuan meals] but we do not have enough time for the replenishment in Nanjing. Would you like to have some snacks or a can of instant porridge instead?

(Photo/Xinhua)

The train was just leaving Nanjing, all 15 yuan plastic tray meals were said to be sold out. Was it true that the crew did not prepare well or they didn't plan to sell this kind of meal from the outset?

When the reporter tried to buy a bottle of water, the conductor first gave him a bottle priced six. Then the reporter asked if there were cheaper ones. The conductor gave him a bottle of two yuan water and explained that six yuan is for a bigger bottle of water....

The 12306 Hotline responded to the reporters complaint, saying there was no provision that the 15 yuan plastic tray meals should be continuously served by the Shanghai Railway nor across the whole country.

This begs the question: Should we believe the official document of China Railway Corporation or the reply from its 12306 Hotline?

(Photo/File)

In fact, most Chinese passengers prefer to bring their own food with instant noodles, a popular choice, as boiling water is readily available. However, China Railway Corporation has removed instant noodles from its menus during the Spring Festival travel period this year, which falls between Jan. 24 and March 3.

"The smell of instant noodles is strong. Thus, it's not good for the air quality inside the trains. And some people may not feel comfortable with that smell," said a crew member. But crew members cannot stop passengers having their own food on board.
A middle school in northwestern Chinas Shaanxi province forbids male and female students to eat together by dividing the dining area into two parts in an effort to prevent puppy love.

According to local newspaper Huashang, the measure has been implemented for several months and officials said it is effective.

Qiao Zhenyi, principal of Shenmu High School, explained that the school adopted the measure because some students had shown inappropriate behaviors at the canteen, which had bad influence to other students.

The school he worked at before had the same requirement, he said, adding that the parents support the practice as it not only eliminated inappropriate behaviors but prevented early romances among students.

However, the majority of students think the new measure makes them uncomfortable and is completely unnecessary.

A boy and a girl sitting together does not necessarily mean they are in a relationship. They could be just talking or discussing school work, a student of the school said.

Contact with the opposite sex is a normal phenomenon for high school students, Wang Guirong, a psychologist of the Yulin Number Two Hospital noted, further pointing out that the practice may work temporarily, but in the long run, it could have a negative impact on students mental health, which will even affect their academic performances.




File photo: Chinese vessel patrolling Diaoyu Islands

Four China Coast Guard vessels sailed within a 12-nautical-mile range of the Diaoyu Islands and patrolled there for about 2 hours in the morning of January 27, 2016, reported the Janpanese news agency Jiji Press. This is the third time that Chinas official ship patrolled the Diaoyu Islands within 12 nautical miles since 2016.

According to Japan 11th Regional Coast Guard, they issued warnings, asking the Chinese vessels to sail off immediately, but China Coast Guard refuted the warning, saying that we do not accept the standpoint of Japan.

Chinas State Oceanic Administration has confirmed on its website that China Coast Guard Vessel 2337, 2151, 2506, and 31239 were patrolling the Chinese territorial waters near Diaoyu Islands on Wednesday.
Bengaluru: As investors around the world are gripped with pessimism and anxiety owing to the continual freefall of global markets, the world's most prominent business leaders and public figures kicked off the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland to 'improve the state of the world'.

Amidst the plunging stock market values and the rupee trotting towards its lowest-ever level, Raghuram Rajan, the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India sought to allay fears. Speaking at the first official session of the World Economic Forums five-day annual meet, which started on Wednesday, Rajan stated with optimism, things will stabilize. With his innate calm demeanor apparent, he assured listeners that the market turmoil is temporary and equities will soon find their base with foreign investors coming back to emerging markets.

Heres the definitive list of key takeaways from what Raghuram Govind Rajan said at World Economic Forum

Monetary Policies do not change the World by themselves

Asserting that monetary policies alone cannot change the world, the RBI Governor said that there are various other tools to carry forward reforms and boost growth.

"The good news across the world is that we have realized that monetary policies wont change the world and the reforms bear much more. Not just enabling but also creating the underlying framework for growth will take us a long way," said Rajan, before adding that monetary stimulus has largely run its course.

Read Also: Rupee Drops 15 Paise against Dollar in Early Trade

E-Filings of Income-Tax Returns up 27pct During April-December
New Delhi: In the fight against black money stashed abroad, India on Wednesday signed a protocol with Armenia, to make changes to the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention (DTAC) between the two countries.

"The protocol will enable the two countries to exchange information related to financial and banking transactions under the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention, and thereby facilitate them in addressing tax evasion," the union finance ministry said in a release here.

"It is also expected to further strengthen the efforts of the government of India in curbing generation of black money," it said.

The protocol amends the article on exchange of information for tax purposes in the bilateral DTAC of 2004, to bring it in line with the updations in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) model, the statement added.

The confidentiality, or secrecy, clause in such treaties forbids sharing of details obtained under these with other law enforcement and investigation agencies.

India has double-tax avoidance treaties with over 95 countries and plans also to sign with others. The major countries with which it has signed these agreements are the U.S. Britain, the UAE, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand and Mauritius.

Also Read: 6 Things to Look Forward to This Republic Day

Life or Death: How to Stay Informed as a Citizen of the WorldNew Delhi: In the fight against black money stashed abroad, India on Wednesday signed a protocol with Armenia, to make changes to the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention (DTAC) between the two countries.

"The protocol will enable the two countries to exchange information related to financial and banking transactions under the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention, and thereby facilitate them in addressing tax evasion," the union finance ministry said in a release here.

"It is also expected to further strengthen the efforts of the government of India in curbing generation of black money," it said.

The protocol amends the article on exchange of information for tax purposes in the bilateral DTAC of 2004, to bring it in line with the updations in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) model, the statement added.

The confidentiality, or secrecy, clause in such treaties forbids sharing of details obtained under these with other law enforcement and investigation agencies.

India has double-tax avoidance treaties with over 95 countries and plans also to sign with others. The major countries with which it has signed these agreements are the U.S. Britain, the UAE, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand and Mauritius.

Also Read: 6 Things to Look Forward to This Republic Day

Life or Death: How to Stay Informed as a Citizen of the World
NEW DELHI: India's military prowess and multi-hued images of the country's rich cultural diversity and achievements in various fields were on display at the majestic Rajpath today during 67th Republic Day parade which was graced by French President Francois Hollande as the chief guest.

Thousands of people on both sides of the imposing Rajpath, India's ceremonial boulevard facing the seat of power Raisina Hills, braved the winter chill and cheered loudly as the marching contingents and tableux went past them.

The national capital, particularly the Central and New Delhi areas, were brought under unprecedented security blanket as thousands of personnel kept a hawk-eye vigil to thwart any untoward incident. There were intelligence inputs that terror groups may target some important installations in the city.

Hollande was seated between President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi who wore a marigold coloured 'safa'(turban). Modi was seen explaining things to Hollande on several occasions during the one-and-a-half-hour-long event.

This year the duration of the parade has been curtailed from more than two hours to 90 minutes. A French military contingent also marched down the Rajpath, a first by any foreign armed force. In 2009, an Indian contingent had also participated in France's annual Bastille Day parade.

Apart from India's missile firing capability T-90 'Bhishma' tank, Infantry Combat Vehicle BMP II (Sarath), Mobile Autonomous Launcher of the BrahMos Missile System, Akash Weapon System, Smerch Launcher Vehicles, the highlights of the parade also included a canine squad.

The synchronised military and police contingents led by General Officer Commanding (Delhi), Lt General Rajan Ravindran marched proudly to the lilting tunes of the bands through Rajpath where Mukherjee, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, took the salute from a specially erected dais.

Earlier, Hollande, who is on a three-day state visit, arrived with Mukherjee and was received by Modi who introduced him to the three services chief -- Army, Air Force and Navy. Alongside Hollande, the fifth French President to attend the celebrations, the parade was watched by Vice-President Hamid Ansari, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP president Amit Shah and the country's top political and military brass, besides the diplomatic community.

Minutes before the parade began, Modi, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and the three service chiefs laid wreaths at 'Amar Jawan Jyoti', the war memorial at the India Gate where an eternal flame burns in memory of those who laid down their lives defending the frontiers of the nation.

Before the start of the ceremonial parade, Mukherjee presented the Ashok Chakra (Posthumous), highest peacetime gallentry award, to Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami of 9 Para (Special Force) for his bravery in fighting with terrorists on the intervening night of September 2/3 last year in Haphruda forest at Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir. The award was received by his wife Bhavna Goswami.

Also Read:

US-Based Photographer to Hold Exhibitions to Support Indian

67th Republic Day: BSF Camel Contingent March on Google Doodle
BENGALURU: India improves its ranking in Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2015, moving from 85 to 76th position, as revealed by Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2015, reports TOI.

The change of government that happened in Delhi and the Centre is mostly due to the public outrage against corruption that India witnessed in the last two years. The ranking of CPI now brings that the corruption in public sector is still due. Indias score continues as 38 in CPI, for two consecutive years. The scoring system is based on a scale of 0-100.

CPI takes in account of the levels of corruption in public sector for nations across the globe.

India tops in ranking among its neighboring countries except Bhutan (27), which is far ahead than India. China ranks 83, Bangladesh 139 while Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal continue to fall back in the list.

The CPI report extends focus on corruption in the Asia Pacific region, calls Indian and Sri Lankan governments as pioneers in not standing up to their promises. On the other hand, governments in Bangladesh and Cambodia are inflaming the corruption by subduing on civil society. The report states Afghanistan and Pakistan as countries failing to curb corruption and Chinas prosecutorial approach as a failure.

Director for Asia Pacific, Transparency International, Srirak Plipat writes to TOI, India has been flooded with anti-corruption promises especially in the last few yearsfrom the general election in May 2014 to the recent Delhi election in February 2015. The CPI scores, staying firm well below 50 at 38 out of 100 for both 2014 and 2015, show that there has been no improvement. The rhetoric has yet to become action. This year's CPI sends a message to people of India, as much as to the government. It invites people of India to question their governments and hold them to account to their election promises. If leadership is about delivery in an imperfect environment, this leadership is questionableto say the least. The Modi government has set a new trend in Asia Pacific: fast and big in anti-corruption promises, while slow and small in delivery.

In the world platform, Denmark tops as least corrupted country for the second consecutive year, with the score of 91 points; followed by Finland (90 points) and Sweden (89 points) in second and third position, respectively.

Top features of the corruption free nations includes public access to budget related information and freedom of pressThe countries also show high rates of unity among people and less discrimination among rich and poor, reports an International press release.

The same press release adds that North Korea and Somalia occupies the last two positions of the list with 8 points. Brazil made a vast decline since last year with a drop of 5 points and fall of 7 positions. Petrobras scandal in Brazil is main reason for this downfall.

Other big leaps have been made by Netherlands in CPI ranking, which is now among the top five clean countries in the world. Switzerland fell to seventh position, from fifth in 2014. The report mentions that 68 percent of these worldwide countries have serious corruption issues and half of them are G20 nations.

Greece, Senegal, and UK made to the improvers list while Libya, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and Turkey are among the decliners.

READ ALSO: Soldier martyred in J&K to Get Ashok Chakra Posthumously

Kashmiris Will Benefit from India-Pakistan Peace: Vohra
NEW DELHI: Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has signed agreement with its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan, an official statement said here.

The agreements related to cyber security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and the respective country, the cabinet statement said.

The CERT-In and its Malaysian counterpart signed an agreement on November 23, 2015, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Malaysia.

The agreement between CERT-In and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team, Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, was signed on November 24, 2015.

The agreement between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center was signed on December 7 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed agreements between the two parties completed by December 22, 2015.

Read More: U.S. State to Open Tourism Office in India

India Projected To Be World's Fastest Growing Economy: Singapore
WASHINGTON: Researchers led by an Indian- origin scientist have successfully identified 10 new genes associated with lupus - a debilitating chronic autoimmune disease where the body's immune system becomes unbalanced and attacks its own tissues.

They analysed more than 17,000 human DNA samples collected from blood gathered from volunteers in four countries - South Korea, China, Malaysia and Japan. Of those samples, nearly 4,500 had confirmed cases of lupus, while the rest served as healthy controls for the research.

From the analysis, researchers identified 10 distinct DNA sequence variants linked to lupus. It can result in damage to many different body systems, including the joints, skin, kidneys, heart and lungs. "We know lupus has a strong genetic basis, but in order to better treat the disease we have to identify those genes," said Swapan Nath from Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) in US, who led the study.

One gene in particular, known as GTF2I, showed a high likelihood of being involved in the development of lupus, researchers said. "Its genetic effect appears to be higher than previously known lupus genes discovered from Asians, and we surmise that it now may be the predominant gene involved in lupus," said Nath. "These findings mark a significant advance in our knowledge base for lupus genes," said Judith James from OMRF.

"For every gene we identify, it brings us closer to uncovering the trigger for this puzzling disease," James said. Understanding where and how the defects arise will allow scientists to develop more effective therapies specifically targeting those genes, researchers said.

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Goibibo is the No. 1 in Hotel Booking Volumes in India
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On Tuesday January 19, 2016 the Executive Committee established to steer the execution of the Franco-Dutch treaty met at the Immigration and Border Protection Services (IBP) building on A.T. Illidge Road to discuss the progress of the cooperation between the French side and Dutch side immigration officers at the airports on the island. This was the second meeting of the Committee that took place.





The French side committee members are Commander Jean-Luc-Deras and Captain Aveline Fernandes of the Police Aux Frontiere (PAF), the French immigration agency. The committee members from the Dutch side are Chief Prosecutor Ton Maan, director of IBP Udo Aron and policy adviser Johishi Romney.





The committee exchanged views on how the combined efforts of the French and Dutch side immigration officers could yield greater results. The Immigration and Border Patrol Services (IBP) will be implementing a more sophisticated border control system at Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) in the very near future and in cooperation with the PAF, the use of this system will increase the effectiveness of the joint passenger controls that are conducted. Currently, PAF officers are present at PJIA twice a week for flights coming to Sint Maarten which are considered to be risk flights. A presence of Dutch immigration officers at L'Esperance Airport, popularly known as Grand Case Airport, is expected later this year.





In view of the different visa policies that French and Dutch Sint Maarten apply, the Committee also focused on ways information could be better shared between the two. For example, travelers that are allowed to travel to a Schengen country such as France without a visa are not automatically granted admission to Saint Martin. Schengen countries are European countries that have eliminated border controls with other Schengen member states and have signed vise exemptions for selected countries. Travelers visiting Saint Martin instead must be in possession of a visa for the territory as Saint Martin is not considered a Schengen country. Joint operations and training on visa policies and trainings on forged travel documents were also discussed in the meeting.





The Committee meets at least once a year according to article 14 (2) of the Treaty. The next Franco-Dutch Treaty meeting will take place in the second half of the year on the French side of the island.




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Perry raised concerns about rhetoric from Russia about the use of nuclear weapons and said the threat of nuclear disaster was greater today than during the Cold War. Shultz said the U.S. needs to engage Russia and China. Brown warned about "tipping points" in the fight against climate change. "And around a tipping point, we may not be able to come back to a stable planet," he said.
San Mateo, CA (94402)

Today

Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 74F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 52F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
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ANZ Banking Group has reshuffled its senior management, moving its Australian head, Mark Whelan, to group executive of the institutional bank and promoting Fred Ohlsson from a senior role in New Zealand to run Australian retail and commercial banking operations.

In its statement to the ASX, ANZ also said Gilles Plante, the deputy CEO of institutional and international banking will leave the bank. His departure follows the head of that division, Andrew Geczy, on Friday.

The bank plans to reduce risky assets after its push into Asia, with more job cuts to come. Credit:Glenn Hunt

ANZ is still looking for a chief financial officer and has not yet appointed someone into a new role of group executive of digital banking. Both appointments will be made "in the coming months", it said, with the digital role to be filled by an external candidate.

Farhan Faruqui has been elevated to the new position of group executive, international, reporting to Mr Whelan. Mr Faruqui, who has been chief executive of international banking, will now have responsibility for ANZ's institutional operations in Asia, Europe and America.
London: British Prime Minister David Cameron has been condemned over his response to the refugee crisis in Europe after describing people in a camp in Calais as a "bunch of migrants".

The British Refugee Council said Mr Cameron's comments were "disappointing" and called on him to show political leadership in response to the "desperate" situation.

British Prime Minister David Cameron addressing the House of Commons. Credit:AP

Opposition MPs also lined up to criticise the Prime Minister, who made the inflammatory comments during a House of Commons clash with Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn as part of his response to Mr Corbyn's criticism of the British Government's deal with Google over its 130 million ($262 million) backdated tax bill.

He was reacting to the opposition's call for Britain to do more to help refugees in the French town of Calais.
Anu Singh has broken her silence as a film chronicling her 1997 murder trial edges closer to release.

The former Australian National University law student has criticised the makers of a film documenting her case. The rare interview comes nearly two decades after she sedated her boyfriend Joe Cinque, injected him with a massive dose of heroin and watched him die.

Joe Cinque with Anu Singh, who was found guilty of his manslaughter.

Singh was acquitted of murder on the basis of diminished responsibility, and found guilty of manslaughter instead.

The film is in post-production and is expected to be completed in April for release later in the year but Singh said she had not been contacted by the filmmakers to share her side of the story.
Hundreds of drivers scored free fuel, but many missed out when a Fyshwick petrol station gave away free e10 and diesel for two hours on Wednesday to coincide with the launch of a new petrol discount app.

Fears of traffic chaos failed to eventuate during the promotion from noon to 2pm at Metro Petroleum, but hundreds of drivers who queued for up to two hours in an attempt to score petrol for $1 off a litre were left disappointed.

Disappointed: Melissa Harcan missed out on the cheap petrol after waiting for almost two hours. Credit:Rohan Thomson

At 2.05pm Paul Ontong was the last person to drive away happy, after initially fearing he had missed out.

"I was in the driveway [when the offer ended]," he said.
Police could issue criminal infringement notices for a series of new offences and low level drink-driving as part of a proposal included in a new ACT government discussion paper.

Attorney-General Simon Corbell said level two drink-driving, consisting of between 0.05 and 0.079 blood alcohol content for first time offenders, and other crimes including trespass, minor theft and property damage are among seven new offences that could be added to the scheme.

ACT Health Minister Simon Corbell has announced $5.3 million for an expansion of the Canberra Hospital's trauma service. Credit:Rohan Thomson

Criminal infringement notices were established in the ACT in 2009 to help deal with low level public order offences and low level criminal activity. The scheme was designed to allow police to focus resources on proactive law enforcement activities, including targeting and investigating more serious offences.

More than 20 offences are already included, including urinating in a public place, supply of liquor to intoxicated people, failure to leave premises when directed, possession of prohibited items and failure to permit a police search.
Police say officers who swarmed a Belconnen street on Wednesday morning were engaged in a routine operation, despite witnesses describing tense scenes between a man and a police negotiator.

Part of Chandler Street was sectioned off between about 10am and 11am while the operation took place, a police spokeswoman said.

A police operation took place in Chandler Street in Belconnen on Wednesday morning.

Police were tight-lipped about the nature of the incident, however witnesses reported it involved a man and a woman inside an apartment building.

One man watched the SWAT team surround the property while a negotiator reached out to a man inside via a loud speaker.
Air New Zealand is poised to begin its first-ever night flights in and out of Queenstown Airport in July, in time for the ski season at the popular South Island destination.

The night flights, at present are only planned between Auckland and Queenstown with A320 aircraft, remain subject to regulatory approval. Air NZ has decided against trans-Tasman night flights for the time being given the Queenstown flights connect to international flights from its main hub in Auckland.

Air New Zealand will begin night flights to Queenstown in July, pending regulatory approval. Credit:Destination Queensland

Overall, the night flights will help grow Air NZ's capacity between Auckland and Queenstown by 15 per cent in the financial year beginning July 1.

Queenstown Airport is spending $NZ17 million ($15.7 million) to widen its runway and install new lighting to allow for the new flights after New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority in 2014 approved the safety case for the flights provided the airport infrastructure was properly upgraded.
Australian infant formula makers are poised to gain a greater share of the lucrative market in China after Beijing authorities introduced tougher food safety laws.

Under the changes, which are expected to be implemented soon, manufacturers will be limited to selling only three brands in China in an effort to tighten supply chains and improve food safety.

Up to 80 per cent of the "thousands of baby formula brands" sold in China could disappear. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The new laws appear to be a crackdown on Chinese manufacturers and opportunistic companies, rather than tightening the supply of foreign products, considering international producers rarely export more than three brands of formula to China.

Synlait Milk founder, Ben Dingle  who now heads the goat milk-based infant formula business Nuchev in Melbourne  viewed the changes as "very positive".
Shares have ended higher, defying falls in regional markets as investors snapped up resources stocks and ANZ.

The ASX gained 0.6 per cent to 4976.2, while the broader All Ords added 0.55 per cent to 5028.1.

The local market started on a cautious note after Wall Street plunged in late trade, disappointed by a Fed statement that wasn't quite as dovish as many had hoped for.

But a turnaround in S&P500 futures sparked a local recovery that lasted even when regional markets ran out of puff.

"Volumes were noticeably beefy this afternoon as investors returned with confidence and wallets," said Vital Addition head opf sales Betty Lam.

ANZ provided the most support to the benchmark index, rising 1.5 per cent, followed by Telstra, up 1.1 per cent, and CSL, which gained 1.2 per cent.

Asciano rallied 4 per cent after Qube lobbed a rival bid for the ports operator.

Slater & Gordon was a major loser, falling 14.3 per cent after the embattled law firm told suffering shareholders they must wait a bit longer for information on its cashflow.
A multimillion-dollar Gold Coast mansion, one of the jewels in the crown of Clive Palmer's family property interests, could be in the sights of administrators chasing debts from the wealthy politician's failed nickel business.

Sources close to Queensland Nickel said voluntary administrators were looking at assets linked to Mr Palmer's nephew and close business confidante, Clive Mensink.

A company controlled by Clive Palmer's nephew, Clive Mensink, owns this luxury mansion on Sovereign Island on the Gold Coast. Credit:Island Realty

The 48-year-old Mr Mensink is the sole director of Queensland Nickel and its parent companies, QNI Resources and QNI Metals.

Although QNI Resources and QNI Metals were not placed in administration they could be pursued for debts incurred by Queensland Nickel if the company is placed into liquidation. Mr Mensink could be held liable if it is found Queensland Nickel was operating while insolvent.
The sustained decline in the nickel price has forced three more West Australian operations into suspension at the cost of more than 100 jobs, as the toll of the price crash mounts.

On Wednesday, Panoramic Resources said the weak and uncertain nickel price had forced it to gradually suspend operations at its Savannah mine in Western Australia's Kimberley region ahead of last shipments and a full care and maintenance position during April.

Queensland Nickel's refinery in Townsville. Credit:Glenn Hunt

It came as Mincor Resources confirmed it would cease mining at its Mariner and Miitel mines, both in the historic Kambalda nickel district, at the end of the month "for a period of suspension until the nickel price recovers".

Together the closures have resulted in 90 job losses, with tens more expected as the operations are wound down.
Apple has taken advantage of accounting rules in its local business that could allow it to pay virtually no tax in Australia on its profits in 2016.

Apple's local financial accounts, first reported in Fairfax Media, show $200 million in "deferred tax assets". This can be used to offset against future profits  if the company makes profits  helping it lower its tax bill.

That amount tallies almost exactly with the before-tax profit of $208 million that the US technology giant reported for 2015 (down from $251.9 million in 2014).
Cruz's comments are just the latest attempt to try to scare Americans into believing that Australians are all cowering under the bed, defenceless and in fear, or living in some kind of dictatorship. His claim also fits in with an attempt by the gun lobby to exploit growing awareness about sexual assault and position itself as a pro-woman solution. In 2015, as the country grappled with reports of widespread sexual assault on university campuses, some Republicans took the opportunity to push for more guns on campus, or campus carry laws, with one politician telling The New York Times "If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them." While the idea of women shooting their would-be rapists may be an emotionally powerful one, as popularised by films such as Thelma and Louise, the reality is far more complex. As opponents of these laws point out, sexual assaults on campus (and elsewhere in life) are most likely to be perpetrated by someone known to the victim rather than a lurking stranger, and may start in a situation that switches from consensual to non-consensual, making locating and using a gun impractical and unlikely.

Instead, having guns more freely available in a society makes women less safe, not more so. Women experiencing domestic violence are more likely to be killed in homes where there is a gun. "For women in America, guns are not used to save lives, but to take them," the Violence Policy Centre said it its latest report. A forthcoming study from Boston University also shows a "strong correlation", according to Slate, between rates of gun ownership in a state and the rate of women being killed by someone they know. "Our study confirms that a greater availability of firearms does not appear to protect women from homicides committed by strangers," author Michael Siegel told Slate. "But it does appear to increase the risk for firearm homicides committed by non-strangers." Previous studies have shown that owning a gun does not make a person, man or women, more likely to survive an assault in general. In fact, one oft-cited paper found people in possession of a gun were actually more than four times more likely to die in an assault that those who did not own a gun.
"Everyone knows my view is very strongly that a marriage between a man and a woman is the foundational institution for socialising the next generation," Abetz told The Guardian on Wednesday in a flurry of meaningless verbiage. "It would be up to each member to decide whether the plebiscite accurately reflects the views of the Australian people, whether it reflects the views of their electorates and whether it is good or bad public policy in their view. There will be people in the Parliament who could not support the outcome of a plebiscite whichever way it went." So, in other words: it's a complete waste of time and an estimated $157 million. Fellow power-free attention-fan Senator Cory Bernardi also declared that "there's no way I'm ever going to cast a vote in favour of changing marriage" - the opposite of what he said a mere six months ago when he claimed he'd "respect the will" of the people on the subject. Bless. A baffled Entsch spoke for the entire nation when he responded: "It makes you wonder why we would spend millions of dollars on a plebiscite if you're not going to respect the result. I find it rather bizarre." And, as we mentioned yesterday, by pure coincidence Abetz and Bernadi's little cage-rattling comes as their leader-in-exile Abbott jets off to the US to speak at an event for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a strongly anti-gay/anti-abortion/anti-women's-rights group, just in case his position on such matters hadn't been adequately clear.

This sort of divisive rhetoric makes the Coalition look less like a united government leading Australia and more like a cauldron of angry vipers provoking one another, and so you might think that the PM might use his position as leader of the party to demand that Abetz and Abbott maybe pull their heads in since there's an election coming before too long. So how did Malc lay down the law? Law, laid "There are people in the Parliament, there are colleagues, there are, you know, fellow members of the Coalition, who have different views," he said on The Project, "and they are entitled to express them, and I respect their right to do so, just as they would respect my right to disagree with them." And that's just super-nice and all, but the issue isn't "may people say things if they want?" so much as "why are high-profile party members actively defying your position as leader?"

And the answer would appear to be nothing - heck, even Kevin Andrews is skipping Parliament to speak to a right-wing US thintank The Heritage Foundation about "Australia's Global Security and Defense Challenges", which is obviously more important than doing his actual job - since, as he clearly keeps forgetting, he has been dumped as defence minister. Still, the Coalition always did its best work in opposition. It's just weird seeing it opposing itself. Palming off Speaking of leaders facing self-created problems, it looks like Clive Palmer's going to be uncharacteristically busy during the final days of his political career. You'd likely be aware that 237 workers were laid off from Palmer's company Queensland Nickel just under a fortnight ago, with Palmer immediately demanding that the Queensland government guarantee him a loan to keep the business afloat.

The reason that this looked a mite suspicious was that the supposedly-broke company had still managed to donate around $21 million to Palmer United (including $209,000 on December 31, days before handing out the pink slips) which seems an awful lot for a company supposedly going through rough financial times. Queensland Nickel is currently under voluntary administration, leading to speculation about whether Palmer would be bankrupted and therefore have to leave Parliament. And the answer is no, for two reasons. One is that Palmer could be leaving Parliament whether he likes it or not: a Galaxy poll of his electorate of Fairfax found that he enjoys a whopping 2 per cent primary support. Just as a reminder, he initially roared to victory over Liberal challenger Ted O'Brien in 2013 by a total of 56 votes. Secondly, given the way that he's structured his companies, he's probably not going to lose anything of value himself. Insulate them assets!
And yet, he is anything but the objective, serious historian. He has his clear favourites among the Tsars: he gleefully follows the frenzied and regularly alarming activities of Peter the Great and the lust for life (and love) of Catherine the Great, while only just managing to stifle his boredom with the order-obsessed Nicholas I and Nicholas II. Each successive ruler is shown in detail, but the writing sparkles when its author feels challenged by the personality and sheer life-force of his subject. There's something of the literary critic Harold Bloom about Montefiore, with the former's hunger for "more life into a time without boundaries" (from 2001's How to Read and Why) a central part of the latter's sensibility. The descriptions of Peter the Great drinking his way through Europe (while learning to build ships), Alexander I's infatuation with Napoleon Bonaparte (majestically discarded after the French invasion of Russia) and Alexander III's gruff persona (bending pokers and tearing up decks of playing cards) are highly commended. Likewise is the book's empathetic understanding of the courtiers, ministers and frequent charlatans at the heart of power. Each such personality is probed and presented with considerable freshness. Nonetheless, The Romanovs has two serious flaws and some minor weaknesses. Given its author's love for anecdotal history, it is surprising that the early chapters are relatively thin on detail. We learn much less about the first tsars (Michael I, Alexei and Fyodor III) than we do about the last (Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II). Montefiore presents the familiar story of Nicholas II's myopic self-dependency, downfall and brutal execution with considerable interest, much aided by the wealth of available sources on this episode in Russian history. And yet, there is nothing shockingly new in what he recounts here. Instead, it would have lifted his work up a considerable notch had he given us as much to think about for the earliest tsars.

Also, The Romanovs isn't really a book about Russia. Not, that is, the Russia experienced beyond the tiny ruling elite who directed foreign policy and crushed internal dissent. This is not a story of small towns and village life, of rolling steppes and vast empty spaces, of the grimy St Petersburg in which Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov murdered to prove himself a superman, of Astapovo train station in which Leo Tolstoy breathed his last, of broken bread floating in water to make kvass, of illiteracy and superstition, of Christian sects living in near isolation, of saints and sinners, the extraordinary and the mundane. Of course, Montefiore is forgiven for not managing to capture Russia in one volume (even one of more than 700 pages), but still, it is strange to find him so unwilling to look beyond the Kremlin to the long-suffering country beyond. He appears to have the right temperament and sensibility to think through the "wide, too wide" Russian soul (as Dostoevsky put it), but he has not done so. It might seem odd to note that a work covering more than 300 years, hundreds of major and minor Romanovs and their lovers, courtiers and ministers simply has too little in it  but so it proves to be. As for the minor weaknesses, the most evident is the book's at first interesting, but then rather tiring interest in the Romanovs' sexual relations. On the one hand, it is a good thing to know that these were men and women of flesh and blood. It is undeniably important to know that such an ogre as Nicholas I was nonetheless highly active, and apparently successful, romantically. Peter the Great's hyperactivity didn't end with shipbuilding, but carried on behind closed doors and with mistresses and casual pick-ups too many to name. On the other hand, to read the erotic correspondence of Alexander II and his mistress (and ultimately second wife) Catherine Dolgorukova at first proves a point (that the great reformer's empathy went beyond social relations to matters of the heart), but finally does that ruler an injustice. It feels slightly degrading to read of him speaking of his private parts and strong desire more than a handful of times, especially since the repetition doesn't show anything new.

Of course, we're talking about people long dead and buried, but sometimes less is more, one feels. To draw a contemporary parallel: one can admire Prince Charles and his second wife Camilla for their sense of duty and life of service, without necessarily wanting to know more about their indiscreet conversations from the time they were lovers. In the end, though, The Romanovs deserves the best praise any book can get: it never bores. Montefiore, for all his suave and erudite persona, is actually rather gossipy. He's somewhat reminiscent of Anna Pavlova Scherer, the well-spoken, incredibly well-connected and incorrigibly curious hostess whose elegant reception opens Tolstoy's War and Peace. Montefiore has as much to say about political machinations as he does about personal friendships and love, which lifts his work far above drily academic history. His personal friendships  his manuscript was read by Slavic experts such as Dominic Lieven, Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service, and partly informed by conversations with the Duke of Edinburgh about the latter's family history  also must have been strongly beneficial. The worst that can be said about The Romanovs is that it's not nearly enough of a story of Russia  though it's hard to see how any single volume could ever be. Simon Sebag Montefiore will speak at these events in Sydney:
Sandilands, no stranger to controversy himself, passed on advice to Greig about her return and dealing with the legacy of the prank call.

She made a positive start to her comeback on the four-hour Hot Breakfast program alongside Travis Winks, fielding several high-profile calls including one from Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson from KIIS 1065.

Three years after her highly publicised fall from grace in the wake of the "royal prank" phone call, radio presenter Mel Greig has returned to the airwaves, co-hosting the breakfast show on Wollongong local station 96.5 Wave FM.

"From time to time you make some mistakes and you can either ride the wave out and keep doing what you do or you can bury your head in the sand like what Mel did and disappear for years and come back a stronger person," offered Sandilands.

She's back ... Greig with breakfast co-host Travis Winks. Credit:96.5 Wave FM

Greig agreed the road back had been far from easy but that she wanted to start her new job without being "aligned" to the 2012 prank call.

"It's been so tough," she said. "People just won't give me that chance. The biggest problem is we didn't want to be aligned with that prank call. You know, if you start somewhere we're going to get that bad reputation, we're going to get people talking about it and rehashing it [but] it hasn't happened with this. The press has been incredibly supportive and positive."

Earlier, actor Sophie Monk, who starred with Greig in Celebrity Apprentice called in to lend her support, describing her friend as "organised, loyal and awesome".
Fox has found a new lead actor to fill the big shoes of 24's hero, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland for nine seasons.

Corey Hawkins, who has appeared in Straight Outta Compton and The Walking Dead, has been cast in the lead role of Eric Carter in 24: Legacy, the latest revival of the action-thriller franchise.

Kiefer Sutherland attends the 2015 Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall. Credit:Kevin Mazur

So far, the project amounts to just a pilot episode for a potential series that would air next season with an all-new cast.
A national vote on whether to legalise same-sex marriage after the next election, is expected to cost about $160 million. Government sources confirmed the "mechanics" of the plebiscite, including its timing, and the question to be put, could go to Cabinet as early as February or March. Mr Entsch also dismissed fears on the party's right, that the pro-change advocates were hijacking the process, arguing any formula would be taken to the party room first. Warren Entsch says Peta Credlin has a nasty streak and her attack on Malcolm Turnbull smacked of sour grapes. Credit:Andrew Meares Mr Turnbull told Parliament last year that "the consequence of a 'yes' vote in the plebiscite will be that same-sex marriage will be legal in Australia". "When the Australian people make their decision, that decision will stick," he said in October. "It will be decisive. It will be respected by this government and by this Parliament and this nation." But Senator Bernardi told Fairfax Media on Wednesday: "Even if the public voted for [same-sex marriage], I wouldn't vote for it.

"It goes against what I believe in. This is a substantial issue and, in the annals of public policy, you want to be on the record about your views." Senator Bernardi said he still expected Parliament would "respect the views of the Australian people" because not all parliamentarians were as passionate about the issue as he and they would be guided by the plebiscite result. Senator Abetz, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, earlier said he would reserve his judgment following the plebiscite result. When asked about Senator Abetz's comments, Mr Entsch told Fairfax Media: "Given he was part of the decision-making process [on a plebiscite], I find it rather extraordinary. "It makes you wonder why we would spend millions of dollars on a plebiscite if you're not going to respect the result. I find it rather bizarre.

"If people make a decision either way we should respect that. "It will be a very brave individual - either in the House of Representatives or the Senate - who seeks to challenge the views of the Australian people." Senator Abetz's comments come as Mr Abbott prepares to address US anti-gay marriage group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, in New York. Mr Turnbull has defended his right to speak at the event, saying there were "fellow members of the Coalition who have different views, and they are . . . entitled to express them". Mr Entsch has been working on the wording for a plebiscite question with Attorney-General George Brandis to be presented to the Coalition party room early this year.

Coalition frontbencher Steve Ciobo said it would be "passing strange" for politicians to defy the will of the Australian people. "I think any politician, any member of Parliament, would have to think twice about snubbing their nose at the views of Australians," he told Sky News on Wednesday. Another conservative Liberal MP said he would expect many Coalition MPs, including himself, who oppose same-sex marriage to abstain from a vote if a plebiscite proved successful. This would respect the public's verdict while not forcing MPs to vote against their conscience, he said. The MP, who asked not to be named, said he was concerned about the process leading up to a plebiscite. "I hope this isn't just something being cooked up by Warren Entsch and George Brandis," he said. "There needs to be broad consultation."

Mr Entsch said "many colleagues" may have voted "no" last year but agreed to the compromise put forward by Mr Abbott. He said Mr Turnbull was doing no more or less than honouring that commitment. Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said: "Eric Abetz has let the cat out of the bag, admitting the Liberals are not planning to take any notice of the expressed will of the Australian people. This absurd notion makes a complete joke of our democratic process and renders a $160 million national plebiscite totally pointless." Other opponents of same-sex marriage have previously vowed to vote according to the plebiscite. "Certainly I, as somebody who has advocated for all Australians to have a say, clearly I'll be bound by what all Australians have to say," Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells said last year. "I don't believe that the majority view will support [change], but if that's not the case then, of course, I would support that."
As dusk fell over Damascus in the spring of 2008, I met two Syrian girls with big hair and brightly painted lips. They were poured into tourniquet tight jeans  stonewashed denim for one, classic indigo for the other  and teetered on preposterous heels. It was my first night in town and I asked them for the directions to al-Nofara, a traditional cafe that came highly recommended. They agreed to take me and off they walked, clacking over the cobbles of one of the world's oldest inhabited cities.

When we arrived at al-Nofara, said to have first opened 500 years ago, the girls did the ordering: tea and a hookah to share. We sat in a wood-panelled room as a man with a crimson fez and a salt-and-pepper moustache read aloud from One Thousand and One Nights, twirling a slender baton for dramatic effect. Most of the customers were Syrian. Like my companions, the girls were dolled up and the guys seemed to be channelling the young Bruce Springsteen.

Students gather in a Damascus teahouse. Credit:Alamy

My companions had dates that night, which they'd stalled with a few terse calls on their phones, but after an hour it was time to go. For an impromptu group, our farewells were surprisingly heartfelt. There'd been a kind of mutual allure at work.

I wanted at that very moment to be nowhere else in the world; they wanted to be elsewhere. I was enchanted by the minarets and domes, by the street along which St Paul had walked, and the frescoed third-century synagogue. The past! They just wanted a future. In the street outside the cafe they scrawled names, email addresses and phone numbers on paper serviettes. Then they asked if I could help get them out of Syria.
Being driven to distraction may be sucking dry your ability to focus and succeed.

Just take a look at how many tabs on your browser you have open right now. I have 12 open.

Going deep: We need to focus to achieve elite performance. Credit:Getty Images

If you find yourself flicking between Facebook, the news and your emails, while completing a project, while eating breakfast at your desk and pausing to send a text message, you are fairly typical of the way modern workers operate.

It also means you have "attention residue" and it is likely to be affecting you far more than you realise.
Every day in Australia an unofficial network of Chinese shoppers known as "daigou" buy up tonnes of supplies for friends and family back home.

While baby formula remains their most common purchase, daigou have told Fairfax Media that there is a growing demand for fresh food and, with it, a potential bonanza for farm-gate producers.

Daigou roughly translates as "buying on behalf of" and these shoppers have become notorious for clearing supermarket shelves of baby formula.
University chiefs are publicly condemning the ATAR university admissions system, after a Fairfax Media investigation revealed that a policy of admitting sub-standard students was rampant throughout the sector.

Both the ANU and UC have criticised the ATAR as an "imperfect" measure of student ability, while University of NSW chancellor Professor Ian Jacobs said NSW should move away from the ATAR as quickly as possible.

"We need a set of criteria that identifies the most talented students from all backgrounds, not ATAR alone," Professor Jacobs said.

On Tuesday, an analysis of confidential data from NSW universities, including the University of Sydney, Macquarie, Western Sydney University and UNSW showed that universities were disregarding ATAR cut-offs and admitting students with ATARs as low as 30 into degrees in fields such as business, teaching and engineering.
The federal government is under pressure to reform taxes following a report card on public hospitals that shows the most urgent patients are waiting longer at the emergency departments, bed ratios are deteriorating and elective surgery waiting times are static.

The Australian Medical Association is using its annual report on the performance of public hospitals to call for an overhaul of health funding, which faces slower growth from July next year when new funding arrangements come into effect.

AMA president Brian Owler says public hospitals are facing a budgetary "black hole". Credit:Andrew Meares

AMA president Brian Owler said hospitals would be insufficiently funded to meet the rising demand from 2017, when the states and territories were facing a "black hole".

A Treasury analysis found $57 billion would be removed from the health system over 10 years.
Australian cancer patients are currently testing a promising new drug targeting advanced forms of leukaemia, one of the most common of blood cancers.

Early clinical trials of the drug Venetoclax on 116 patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukaemia in Melbourne and the United States has seen the cancer reduced by at least half in nearly 80 per cent of cases.

In a small number of patients the cancer can no longer be detected at all and researchers are hopeful this drug in combination with other treatments could eventually pave the way for a cure.

The results of the trials conducted over four years at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, in conjunction with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, will today be published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Rodney Jacobs, a 63-year-old record shop owner from Melbourne, was referred to the trial in 2012 after traditional therapies including chemotherapy proved ineffective in his fight against leukaemia.
Since arriving in Australia 16 months ago, Syrian refugee Youssef Darwish has learned English and is studying for a qualification in furniture removal and warehousing.

He is among 70 per cent of refugees who are either working or studying to gain English language or other employment skills. He is also among the majority of new migrants who have found Australia a friendly place to live.

Youssef Darwish, a Syrian refugee, has been living in Sydney for more than a year. Credit:Janie Barrett

Just 5 per cent complain of having experienced racial discrimination here.

But three-quarters of recently arrived migrants on humanitarian visas have struggled to find secure housing, according to a landmark national study to be released on Thursday.
Lawyers for the family of Lindt Cafe siege victim Katrina Dawson have expressed concern they may be "cut out" of examining sensitive documents about the police response to the siege during the inquest into the tragedy.

The Commonwealth and the NSW Police Commissioner have sought to block the release of some documents revealing the police response and tactics, including so-called "Emergency Action Order" and "Direct Action Order" plans, the inquest heard on Wednesday.

Police outside the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place during the siege in December 2014. Credit:Daniel Munoz

They have made claims for public interest immunity  which would prevent the material being aired as part of the inquest  over hundreds of documents.

Counsel for the NSW Police, Robin Bhalla, proposed that in some cases the documents could be taken into account by NSW coroner Michael Barnes and counsel assisting the inquest but would not be released publicly.
Tension had been simmering on Noakes Parade for some time before Michael Kimmorley was hit by a four-wheel-drive and nearly killed.

Friends and family say he walked over to a neighbouring house at Lalor Park in Sydney's west just after 7pm on Australia Day to defend a couple of teenagers who had been caught up in a dispute.

A few words were exchanged, an engine was revved and, seconds later, Mr Kimmorley, 42, was hit and catapulted into a blue, parked car.

Fairfax Media has viewed a video of the moment Mr Kimmorley was hit.
Australia has become "complacent" about corruption and the failure of successive federal governments to stamp out foreign bribery has resulted in the country plummeting in a global corruption index, a former judge who presided over NSW corruption inquiries has warned.

Anti-corruption organisation Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index on Wednesday, which showed Australia had slid in the rankings for the third consecutive year.

Transparency International Australia chairman Anthony Whealy wants bribes to foreign officials to be classed as a crime. Credit:Peter Rae

It now sits at number 13 in the index of 168 countries, behind New Zealand in fourth place and the United Kingdom in 10th spot, but ahead of the United States (16) and Japan (18).

"It's not a good look for Australia," said Anthony Whealy, QC, the new chairman of Transparency International Australia and a former Supreme Court judge.
He said he had written "numerous letters and emails" about these subjects and in some cases had not even received a reply. Mr Pyne spoke with Ms Palaszczuk on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesperson for Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the conversation was positive. "The government is definitely now looking into these issues," a spokesman said. Mr Pyne said Queenslanders did not understand the big variations across a decentralised Queensland.

"I have the unemployment figures here in front of me and you are looking at Cairns with over 10 per cent unemployment, with 20 per cent youth unemployment," he said. "And obviously some of your MPs in the Brisbane area are experiencing unemployment of four per cent." Cairns has 10,000 indigenous residents. "So the issues are different. And this is unique to Queensland. Quite often, people in other state's don't get it, but we are a decentralised state." "And if you want to be a state, well that involves investing in your regions.

"I just think we are struggling in a two-speed economy and we don't want to be left behind in getting the same sort of services that many other Queenslanders take for granted." Mr Pyne disagreed with the approach of seeking one big project to kickstart the region. "People believe that a big project will kick-off and that will fix everything," he said. Mr Pyne said it was clear parts of the Cairns region's labour force needed retraining. "Well there are people in Cairns, particularly in West Cairns, who are just not jobs-ready.

"So what I want to see is an investment in West Cairns in community training." Mr Pyne said he is unable to learn if the government plans to continue funding for the Manoora Community Centre in Cairns. The money ends in March 2016. "I think we should be making sure that the Manoora Community Centre is funded," he said. "And not just a community centre with a door open, but somewhere where we have a community officer doing outreach in the West Cairns community." Mr Pyne acknowledged many of his concerns were basic grassroots concerns, but he has heard nothing from the respective portfolios.

"What the principal of Cairns State High School wants is an undercover assembly area where all the students can assemble at the one assembly," he said. "I've sent numerous letters and emails and one poor old principal said to me, 'I'm going to be blasted in the media again because some student can't attended Anzac Day." Mr Pyne did not immediately support Townsville-based Mundingburra MP, Coralee O'Rourke, who is Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk's Minister for North Queensland. He said Cairns people questioned Townsville and Palm Island as the NDIS trial site in Queensland. "I'm a first-term MP and Coralee is a first-term minister," Mr Pyne said.

"And I would like to see actual things happening in Cairns, rather than just roundtables," he said. "But I am encouraged that the ministry seem to be listening to us." Rob Katter on Wednesday said a North Queensland independent voting bloc was emerging. Mr Pyne said he would not join Katter's Australian Party. "I see a lot of what Robbie does and it is quite noble and I agree with a lot of his policies," Mr Pyne said.
A spate of attacks on Northern NSW beaches late last year, not to mention dramatic footage of pro surfer Mick Fanning punching a shark in the nose in South Africa, has sparked much debate over the best means of deterring attacks.

While state governments are forking out millions on beach-wide strategies, individuals now have reassurance about what they are buying when it comes to personal deterrents, thanks to an independent study by Choice.

Out of several products it surveyed, the consumer advocacy group said a device called Shark Shield, which uses electrical pulses to overwhelm sensory receptors in a shark's nostrils, is the only one "independently shown to be effective at deterring sharks from biting".
uFlix customer Richard Boulton said he hoped uFlix would be able to keep one step ahead of Netflix. Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones brings complexity and darkness to the female superhero trope. Credit:Netflix Another popular unblocking service, Getflix, said it too had found a way around the geo-block. In a tweet, the company said it had made system updates which ensured its "most popular Netflix regions" were not affected by recent changes to Netflix's service. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Credit:David Paul Morris

The workarounds couldn't have come sooner for the many Netflix customers who threatened to cancel their subscriptions in the wake of the company's crackdown on so-called "geo-dodging". "When I heard the news I was unsure if you [Getflix] could still provide access [to the Netflix US library]," Chris Cumberland posted on Getflix's Facebook page. uNoGS lets you browse Netflix everywhere. Credit:David Paul Morris "But now I know I'll be continuing my subscription." Another Getflix user, Brayden Hulett, said he was "thrilled to know that Getflix have been so proactive about this".

According to website Netflixable, which tracks new titles as they are released to Netflix in each region, Netflix's US catalogue is almost three times as large as Australia's, at about 6900 titles compared to about 2500. While Netflix owns global licensing rights to most of its original series, such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, many other titles are constrained by content licensing arrangements which differ from region to region. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings has said in the past that Netflix is working to break down these archaic business models. He also said the company's decision to step up enforcement of geo-blocking was at the behest of the film and television studios which own the rights to its streaming content. How to watch anything you want on Netflix Well, not quite anything  but anything Netflix has the rights to stream in at least one country.

Now that you know how to get around the geo-blocking offensive, you'll want to know how to make the most of Netflix's global catalogue. Each country's Netflix catalogue differs, which means that even though the US Netflix is bigger than Australia's, you might find a title here or there in the Australian catalogue  or some other country  that is missing from the US catalogue. Introducing "uNoGS"  or the unofficial Netflix online Global Search  a new website that lets you search Netflix's catalogue across all countries where it's active. (Which is now almost everywhere.) You can search by the country available, title, genre, length and release date; and you can filter by ratings from IMDb and from Netflix itself. It's simply a matter of finding out which country has the title you're after, and changing your (not blocked) internet proxy or VPN settings so that Netflix thinks you're in that country. You'll then be browsing that country's Netflix library within the Netflix app, and can locate the title from there.
A driver of a black Mercedes who allegedly spat in the face of a young McDonald's drive-through worker has contacted police.

The teenage worker had the man's saliva on her face and in her mouth following the argument at the Essendon McDonald's outlet on Keilor Road, police said.

Police have released a photo of a man they wanted to speak to regarding a spitting incident at a fast food outlet.

The man became impatient and refused to wait to pay for his order of two frozen Cokes at the first drive-through window about 5pm on January 13.

He was left waiting at the window for between 20 and 30 seconds, while the drive-through operator took another order, police said.
A Perth fly-in, fly-out worker says she will no longer park her car at Perth Airport's long-term car-park after thieves stole more than $3000 worth of spotlights from her Nissan Navara in January.

The woman claims her vehicle wasn't the only car targeted by thieves in the secure parking area, with spot lights and aerials missing from six other cars she noticed in D Block near her vehicle.

A FIFO worker claims Perth Airport thieves stole her Nissan Navara's spotlights, valued at $3000. Credit:Facebook / Gem Ramsay

Local police also confirmed motorcycles had been reported stolen from the long-term car-park in recent months, but denied there was a spike in crime around the airport.
Swedish asylum worker Alexandra Mezher stabbed to death at refugee centre

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But it resurfaced in the news following the disappearance of multiple people, including medical doctor Rica Tri Handayani and her son, many of whom were found living on a remote farming settlement in West Kalimantan.

Gafatar, also known as the Fajar Nusantara Movement, was disbanded in August 2015, after the government, suspicious that it mixed beliefs from several faiths, refused to register it as an organisation.

Jakarta: The former leader of a group labelled a "deviant sect" in Indonesia claims its sole priority was to create food security to help Indonesia survive a global food crisis.

In an interview with Fairfax Media, ex-Gafatar leader Mahful Tumanurung said no one had been forced to move to Mempawah regency in West Kalimantan.

The charred remains of the Gafatar settlement burned down by a local mob. Credit:Amilia Rosa

"After we disbanded we committed to one thing: we will continue to work for this country to provide food security," Mr Mahful said. "There was no instruction for an exodus, everybody decided on their own to go.

"As we foresee it, a food crisis will happen all over the world, including Indonesia. Indonesia has the potential to survive it, with its vast oceans and rich natural resources. But if no one cares about the food problems, who will work on it?"

The Gafatar settlement in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo was torched by a rampaging mob last week and its members are now being transferred to their home towns, where they will be "re-educated" by religious leaders.
Maiduguri, Nigeria: At least 12 people were killed on Wednesday when two female suicide bombers blew themselves up in a market in the northern Nigerian town of Chibok where Boko Haram Islamists abducted more than 200 girls almost two years ago, police and residents said.

Boko Haram has been waging a six-year armed campaign in Nigeria's remote north to build an Islamic state. Thousands have been killed and more than two million people displaced by the campaign.

Smoke rises after a bomb blast at a bus terminal in Jos, Nigeria on May 20, 2014. Boko Haram is again being blamed for the latest bombing attack in Chibok. Credit:AP

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the attack bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has been using suicide bombers since the army expelled the group from much of the northern territory it had captured previously.

"Two veiled girls suspected to be suicide bombers entered Chibok market at about 12.54 pm today," a police official said, asking not to be named.
"Now that the matter has been comprehensively put to rest, it is time to unite move on," he said. Malaysian PM Najib Razak in Kuala Lumpur in January. Credit:AP However opposition politicians are demanding to know what happened to US$61 million that, according to Mr Apandi, was not sent back to the Saudi Royal family from Mr Najib's account. They also want to know who specifically donated the money, why it was donated and why it took more than six months for the government to say where the money came from. Saudi Arabia's King Salman in Riyadh last year. Credit:AP

The Wall Street Journal has reported the money flowed to Mr Najib's account through an anonymous British Virgin Islands company and a Swiss private bank account wholly owned by an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund that is intertwined with Malaysia's heavily indebted sovereign fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad, which Mr Najib established in 2009 and still oversees through chairmanship of an advisory committee. The closest Mr Najib has come to explaining the money came in a statement issued hours after Mr Apandi's announcement. We have to do some serious soul searching if we care for this country and its future. "I appreciate that political funding is a topic of concern to many people," Mr Najib said, adding that opposition MPs had blocked party funding reform proposals he had initiated in 2010. "I have instructed them to be put forward again for discussion," he said.

Authorities in the United States and several other countries are continuing to investigate the money transfers and links to the 1Malaysia fund that is struggling to pay US$11 billion in debts and is selling off assets. Mr Apandi's announcement, which was greeted with widespread scepticism and derision, has intensified pressure on Mr Najib to resign, including from within the ranks of his long-ruling United Malays National Organisation. Leading opposition MP Rafizi Ramli said the announcement had only made the situation "more ridiculous" and described the prime minister as a "clown". "This can only happen in fairytales," he said. National Human Rights Society president Ambiga Sreenevasan said Malaysians were entitled to know the reasons why Mr Apandi has shut down the investigation.

"So far as I can see, the explanation given is not enough because at the end any explanation must make sense and this doesn't make sense," she said. Veteran newspaper editor and commentator A Kadir Jasin said Mr Najib may be safe from prosecution now "but despite the Attorney-General closing the case, the court of public opinion will continue to try him." "As for all of us, we have to do some serious soul searching if we care for this country and its future," he said. As well asserting that Mr Najib had received the money from the Saudi family, Mr Apandi said there was "no evidence" that the prime minister "had any knowledge" of about US$10 million that was transferred into his accounts from a company owned by the Finance Ministry known as SRC, which handles the savings of Malaysian government employees. Mr Najib was "of the belief" that any of the money he spent had come from the Saudi royal family, Mr Apandi said.
Dane Gallion was so worried about public shootings that police say he committed one.

Last Thursday, Gallion popped a Xanax, ate a pizza and downed a 22-ounce (650 millilitre) beer. Then the 29-year-old headed to an evening showing of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi in the Seattle suburb of Renton, Washington.

But not without his handgun.

Despite a Regal Cinema prohibition against firearms, Gallion sneaked his piece into the cinema. He was, he later told police, "concerned about recent mass shootings in public places". So concerned, in fact, that he kept his gun unholstered and tucked into his waistband, according to the Seattle Times.
Colombo: A group of saffron-robed monks chanted as officials crushed more than 300 elephant tusks in a seaside ceremony in a Colombo park on Tuesday, as Sri Lanka's new government tried to send Asia a powerful message of intolerance for elephant poaching.

Sri Lanka is the first south Asian nation to publicly destroy ivory obtained through elephant poaching and the 16th country in the world to destroy confiscated elephant tusks so they cannot be traded in the black market.

The previous Sri Lankan government had planned to distribute the tusks to Buddhist temples around the island, including the Sacred Temple of the Tooth, the country's most revered. That spurred an outcry from Sri Lankan environmentalists and international wildlife agencies, who argued that the ivory would later be traded.

The crushed ivory weighed 1.4 tonnes, far less than some caches that have been destroyed. But the action was significant because Sri Lanka is a transit hub for trading in illegal ivory, which is popular in Asia as a symbol of prosperity and for use in Buddhist religious ceremonies. More than 100 tonnes of poached ivory have been destroyed since 1989, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Washington: When the school bus lurched forward, Susan Jordan followed her instincts.

They were the same instincts that had guided her for 22 years as the principal of Indianapolis's Amy Beverland Elementary.

The same ones that helped the school receive a Four Star, "A" rating from the Indiana Department of Education. The ones that compelled her students and staff to describe her as the "definition of wonderful" - along with virtually every positive adjective in the dictionary - in a tribute video last year.

Everyone who knew Jordan knew that she put children first. And so she did on Tuesday afternoon (Wednesday AEDT), after a stationary school bus inexplicably accelerated, jumping a kerb towards a group of students.
PHILIPSBURG:---The Central Committee will meet on January 28th.

The Central Committee meeting is set for Thursday at 10.00am in the General Assembly Chamber of the House at Wilhelmina Straat #1 in Philipsburg.

The agenda point is a discussion with Julio Romney on the draft National Election Ordinance amending legislation to correspond with the Constitutional requirement of the proportional representation in Article 47 section 1 of the Constitution.

Members of the public are invited to the House of Parliament to attend parliamentary deliberations.

The House of Parliament is located across from the Court House in Philipsburg.

The parliamentary session will be carried live on St. Maarten Cable TV Channel 120, via Pearl Radio FM 98.1, the audio via the Internet www.pearlfmradio.com and via www.sxmparliament.org.
PHILIPSBURG:--- The Zika virus situation on St. Maarten needs to be managed much better by the minister responsible for public health. It worries me that our population and visitors are being exposed to the unnecessary risk and according to the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) St. Maarten, whether French or Dutch, has been put on the list and pregnant women are being advised not to travel to our destination.

I would have expected a more proactive and hands on approach from the Minister of Public Health. What he needs to do is follow exactly what I did with the Chickungunya situation and improve or tweak where necessary or just give me a call because I would be more than happy to assist in the interest of St. Maarten and exclude politics from this situation. He should be taking the initiative to meet with his French counterparts, coordinate fogging with them and go into the neighborhoods to inspect and inform households by identifying breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Leadership from the minister of public health leaves much to be desired.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) / World Health Organization (WHO) recommends its Member States establish and maintain the capacity for Zika virus infection detection, clinical management and an effective public communication strategy to reduce the presence of the mosquito that transmits this disease, particularly in areas where the vector is present. This virus will not stop at the border - we must protect our population and especially the pregnant women. In addition, the minister needs to work with all ministries, especially the Minister of Tourism, to communicate with our stakeholders like the cruise industry and the SHTA/CHTA.

There is something called an ovitrap which consists of a black cylinder with a piece of cardboard submerged into the water in a cup. Ovitraps mimic the preferred breeding site for container breeding mosquitoes and was initially designed for monitoring Aedes populations. Researchers found that if they provided artificial breeding sites, they could easily collect and study the eggs found in the container. Since the original ovitrap was invented, lethal ovitraps have been developed, which kill the larvae and/or the adult mosquitoes that enter.

Ovitraps used for monitoring can detect Aedes mosquito populations thus acting as an early warning signal to preempt any impending dengue outbreaks Analysis can be done on the ovitrap breeding data collected weekly to identify mosquito breeding hotspots and risk areas when there is a danger of high Aedes infestation. This analysis is used to plan vector surveillance and control operations. Let us all roll up our sleeves and go into the field to fight the Zika virus together, MP de Weever concluded.
PHILIPSBURG:--- On Tuesday January 19, 2016 the Executive Committee established to steer the execution of the Franco-Dutch treaty met at the Immigration and Border Protection Services (IBP) building on A.T. Illidge Road to discuss the progress of the cooperation between the French side and Dutch side immigration officers at the airports on the island. This was the second meeting of the Committee that took place.

The French side committee members are Commander Jean-Luc-Deras and Captain Aveline Fernandes of the Police Aux Frontiere (PAF), the French immigration agency. The committee members from the Dutch side are Chief Prosecutor Ton Maan, director of IBP Udo Aron and policy adviser Johishi Romney.

The committee exchanged views on how the combined efforts of the French and Dutch side immigration officers could yield greater results. The Immigration and Border Patrol Services (IBP) will be implementing a more sophisticated border control system at Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) in the very near future and in cooperation with the PAF, the use of this system will increase the effectiveness of the joint passenger controls that are conducted. Currently, PAF officers are present at PJIA twice a week for flights coming to Sint Maarten which are considered to be risk flights. A presence of Dutch immigration officers at L'Esperance Airport, popularly known as Grand Case Airport, is expected later this year.

In view of the different visa policies that French and Dutch Sint Maarten apply, the Committee also focused on ways information could be better shared between the two. For example, travelers that are allowed to travel to a Schengen country such as France without a visa are not automatically granted admission to Saint Martin. Schengen countries are European countries that have eliminated border controls with other Schengen member states and have signed vise exemptions for selected countries. Travelers visiting Saint Martin instead must be in possession of a visa for the territory as Saint Martin is not considered a Schengen country. Joint operations and training on visa policies and trainings on forged travel documents were also discussed in the meeting.

The Committee meets at least once a year according to article 14 (2) of the Treaty. The next Franco-Dutch Treaty meeting will take place in the second half of the year on the French side of the island.
Votacalls Hosted VoIP and Skype for Business Integration Application Receives the 2016 CUSTOMER Magazine Product of the Year Award

BOSTON, MA  (Marketwired)  01/26/16  announced today that , a global, integrated media company, has named Votacalls Skype for Business Integration Application as a 2016 Product of the Year Award winner.

Votacall Skype Connect is a powerful facilitator of unified communications allowing for the integration of Microsoft Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync) with the Votacall Business-class Solution. This integration allows for telephony presence through the Skype desktop client. In addition, Votacall Skype Connect provides a seamless bridge between the Votacall Cloud Phone System and the Skype for Business desktop client. This deep integration has made Votacall Hosted VoIP call control functionally accessible from the user friendly Skype for Business Client. Thus meshing the power of Votacall Cloud voice with the productivity of Skype for business.

Votacall Skype Connect has taken business productivity and Unified Communications to new heights, said Andy DeAngelis, Chief Operating Officer, Votacall. The seamless integration of Votacalls robust Hosted VoIP platform with Skype for Business has created a truly powerful Cloud-based Unified Communications productivity tool. The meshing of Votacall Hosted VoIP and Skype creates the most efficient Anywhere communications environment in the industry and therefore delivers a major business advantage for organizations looking to utilize deep Cloud-based UC functionality.

The 2016 CUSTOMER Product of the Year Award recognizes vendors that are advancing the call center, CRM and teleservices industries one solution at a time. The award highlights products which enable their clients to meet and exceed the expectations of their customers.

On behalf of both TMC and CUSTOMER magazine, it is my pleasure to honor Votacall with a 2016 Product of the Year Award, said , CEO, TMC. Its Skype Connect solution has proven deserving of this elite status and I look forward to continued innovation from Votacall in 2016 and beyond.

The 18th Annual Product of the Year Award winners will be published in the 2016 January/February issue of magazine.

is a leading provider of Cloud-based voice solutions and business communication systems with an expertise in VoIP, Unified Communications (UC) and Call Center design and deployment. Votacall is committed to delivering the latest best in class offerings to our end users through constant market and product research. Our approach allows our customer base to stay ahead of the technological curve at the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in the industry. The Votacall tag line states that you must INNOVATE to effectively COMMUNICATE. We base our organization and its daily operations on those two words. The world is changing, technology is changing, organizations are changing, it is of the utmost significance that you partner with a company that respects and embraces change.

For more information, please visit our website at

Or check out our Blog at

Global buyers rely on TMCs content-driven marketplaces to make purchase decisions and navigate markets. This presents branding, thought leadership and lead generation opportunities for vendors/sellers.

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For more information about TMC and to learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals, please visit .

Andy DeAngelis

Chief Operating Officer

Votacall

Rebecca Conyngham

Marketing Manager

203-852-6800, ext. 287
EFT Canada Announces Proposed Going Private Transaction

TORONTO, ONTARIO  (Marketwired)  01/26/16  EFT Canada Inc. (EFT Canada or the Company) (TSX VENTURE: EFT), today announced that it has entered into an arrangement agreement with 1422748 Ontario Inc. (the Purchaser) whereby the Company will effect a going private transaction through a statutory plan of arrangement (the Arrangement ). The Purchaser is a private Ontario company owned by Jonathan Pasternak, a director and the Chief Executive Officer of the Company.

If the Arrangement is approved, all of the Companys issued and outstanding common shares (the Common Shares) will be purchased by the Purchaser, at a price of $0.105 per share, other than shares owned by the Purchaser. Following completion of the Arrangement, EFT Canada will apply to have its Common Shares delisted from the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) and it will also apply to the applicable Canadian securities regulatory authorities to cease to be a reporting issuer in each province in which it is currently a reporting issuer.

The $0.105 price per Common Share represents a premium of 15.6% over the 90 trading-day volume-weighted average price per Share of $0.0908 and 15.9% over the six-month volume-weighted average price per Share of $0.0906, in each case on the TSXV prior to the announcement of the transaction. It also represents a premium of approximately 31.3% over the closing price of the Shares on November 24, 2015, the trading day prior to the receipt of a proposal letter by the Company from the Purchaser in respect of the Arrangement, and 31.3% over the closing price of the Shares on January 25, 2016, the last trading day prior to the public announcement of the transaction.

We believe that the Arrangement offers a premium over fair value for EFT Canada shareholders and serves the best interest of its employees, customers and business and we look forward to working towards its successful completion said Jonathan Pasternak, CEO and President of EFT Canada.

Holders of approximately 5,562,124 common shares, representing approximately 40.7% of the issued and outstanding common shares, have entered into irrevocable support agreements committing them to vote in favour of the Arrangement. Moreover, holders of approximately 7,787,069 common shares or 57% of the issued and outstanding common shares, have stated they will not support any transaction but the Arrangement.

The Arrangement was considered by an independent special committee of the board of directors (the Special Committee), comprised of Ray Martins (Chair), John Cerenzia, and Lin Fellerman. The Special Committee was advised by independent counsel and engaged Evans & Evans, Inc. (Evans), an independent valuator, to prepare a comprehensive valuation report and fairness opinion with respect to the Arrangement (the Valuation Report). Subject to the qualifications, restrictions and assumptions set forth in the Valuation Report, in the opinion of Evans, as at December 18, 2015, the terms of the Arrangement are fair, from a financial point of view, to the minority shareholders of the Company (the Minority Shareholders). The Valuation Report arrived at a valuation range, as at November 30, 2015, for the shares ($0.065 to $0.087) which is below the $0.105 price that the Purchaser will pay under the Arrangement.

After consideration of all of the circumstances including the Valuation Report, the Special Committee concluded that the Arrangement is in the best interests of the Company and fair to the Minority Shareholders. Accordingly, the Special Committee recommended that the Board approve the Arrangement and seek all required court, shareholder and regulatory approvals. The Arrangement must be approved by the affirmative vote of at least two-thirds of the votes cast by all shareholders and, in accordance with Multilateral Instrument 61-101, at least a simple majority of the votes cast on the Arrangement Resolution by the Shareholders (other than the Purchaser and Jonathan Pasternak), in each case present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting.

The Company has scheduled a special shareholders meeting for March 9, 2016 at which shareholders of record on February 8, 2016 will be asked to approve the Arrangement. The Company has applied to the Supreme Court of Ontario and has received an interim order permitting the holding of the meeting and certain other matters in connection with the Arrangement.

EFT CANADA INC.

EFT Canada, founded in 2003, is a financial processing company that offers a complete solution to the collection and payment processing needs of small and medium sized business merchants, banks, credit unions, and other financial firms in Canada and the United States. The Company develops, maintains and delivers innovative electronic transaction processing technologies, such as customized electronic payment and collection processing solutions and gift and loyalty card services, by drawing on its operational and applications expertise. For more information, please visit .

This press release contains forward-looking statements which reflect the Companys current expectations regarding future events. The forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ significantly from those projected herein. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts:

EFT Canada Inc.

Jonathan Pasternak

President

(416) 781-0666
Alphinat Announces a Profit for Quarter Ended November 30, 2015

MONTREAL, QUEBEC  (Marketwired)  01/26/16  Alphinat Inc. (TSX VENTURE: NPA) announces a profit for the quarter ended November 30, 2015.

For the 3-month period ended November 30, 2015, the Company recorded total revenue of $380,850 compared to $257,107 (restated) for the same period in 2014. For the 3-month period ended November 30, operating expenses amounted to $305,978 in 2015 compared to $415,608 in 2014. The earnings for the period ended November 30, 2105 amounted to $30,983 or $0.001 per outstanding common share compared to net loss (restated) of $(202,543) or $(0.004) per outstanding common share for the 3-month period ended November 30, 2014.

Alphinats financial statements and Managements Discussion and Analysis for the quarter ending November 30, 2015 can be found on SEDAR, at .

About Alphinat

Alphinat is the creator of SmartGuide, a next generation application development and deployment productivity toolset providing agility to leverage existing IT assets and lower costs for a one-stop delivery tool of Web and mobile enterprise applications from any back-end system.

Alphinat has been appointed by technology company peers to associate member at the Smart Cities Council ().

Alphinat technology is also used in the healthcare, banking, insurance, telecommunications and other sectors, in modernising, automating and rendering cost-effective a number of business processes at a fraction of the cost associated with conventional customized solutions. For more details about Alphinat or its software suite, please visit .

Forward-looking statements

Certain statements in this document, including those which express managements expectations or estimations with regard to the Companys future performance, constitute forward-looking statements as understood by applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are, of necessity, based on a certain number of estimates and hypotheses; while management considers these to be accurate at the time they are expressed, they are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and risks on the commercial, economic and competitive levels. We advise readers that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other known and unknown factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements. A number of factors could cause significant differences between actual results and those described in forward-looking statements. These include, but are not limited to, the Companys capacity to increase acceptance of its products on the market, and to penetrate new markets; the potential existence of defects or undetected problems in the Companys products; the Companys ability to manage its growth; the Companys ability to compete with others; potential commitments; maintaining the Companys intellectual property rights and defending against litigation putting those rights in question; the Companys reliance on the knowledge of its key personnel; and the Companys access to sufficient capital to finance its future needs. This is a partial and non-exhaustive list of factors that could bear on any of our forward-looking statements. Investors are advised to not rely unduly on the forward-looking statements. This advisory applies to all forward-looking statements, whether expressed orally or in writing, attributed to Alphinat or to any individual expressing them in the name of the Company. The Company is under no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements, whether to reflect new information, future events, or other circumstances. Risks and uncertainties that bear on the Company are described in greater detail in the Companys Annual Report.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts:

Mr. Philippe Lecoq

Chief Executive Officer Alphinat Inc.

Alphinat Inc.

(514) 398-9799 ext 222
Eco-Shift Launches 2016 OEM/ODM Product Lines and Catalogs; Sees Record Financial Results Ahead for FY-2016

CAMBRIDGE, ON  (Marketwired)  01/27/16  (OTC PINK: ECOP), a leading global producer of advanced lighting products, today announced the launch of its 2016 lineup of OEM products and new product catalogs.

The new, 2016 product lines reflect the Companys fundamental shift over the past year from a capital and labor-intensive model of designing, manufacturing, marketing and installing retrofit lighting products  to one that capitalizes on Eco-Shifts extraordinary manufacturing capability. This enables the Company to focus on producing state-of-the-art LED and other lighting products white-labeled for major, global lighting distributors and their industrial, corporate and retailer clients.

Eco-Shifts change in business model has been underway since new management was recruited eleven months ago to lead a turnaround that enables the Company to capture significant global market share  profitably  of an industry that analysts project growing at 30 percent annually. Accordingly, the Company expects to report record financial results for the full year 2016.

This an exciting time at Eco-Shift Power, said its Chief Executive Officer, Alistair Haughton. Publicly, 2015 was a quiet year for our company. Behind the scenes, it was all about transforming our business model to leverage our strengths and reduce risks. Today, that year of hard work, investment and relationship building is paying off handsomely. Preliminary feedback on our 2016 product catalogs from our growing customer base is extremely positive. We are actively working with our industry leading distributors on initial order workups in anticipation of follow-on orders for big-brand end-users, at healthy gross margins, for 2016 and beyond.

Eco-Shift is distinguished competitively by its deep, worldwide relationships with many of the top OEMs and distributors, and its commitment to providing unrivaled levels of service that includes a drop-ship model and ability to white label products to serve established in-market product lines.

Eco-Shifts competitive advantages include the lighting industrys highest quality products and components, practically unlimited manufacturing capacity, with the industrys best warranty programs to meet growing market demand worldwide. Its new, 2016 product catalogs are available at: . The Company is currently upgrading its website that is expected to be ready next month; it will include a robust Distribution Channel Partners, and Investors, section.

The Company serves product market segments including:

Filament line (traditional and old world styles) hotels, residential, food industry

Commercial/Industrial (high bay, linear tube, flat panel, PAR, etc.) hotels, automotive retail, outdoor spaces, office space, large venues  stadiums/arenas, schools, etc.

Specialized (vapour tights, greenhouses/horticulture, task lighting, inspection lighting, medical, military, etc.) mining, automotive manufacturing, paint booth, agriculture, livestock, etc.

With many tens of millions of dollars invested in lighting industry R&D and engineering by its major players, the state of LED and other advanced lighting technology has reached a level of design maturity and efficiency ideally suited to be combined with Eco-Shifts exceptional contract manufacturing expertise. Compatible with the most technologically advanced and cloud-based software, our full product lines offer compelling energy savings for a high customer ROI and short investment payback.

All of the components used in Eco-Shifts products are manufactured and underwritten by industry leaders, bringing comfort to all stakeholders while allowing the Company to offer the industrys leading products without the R&D expense. The Company is not restrained by brand, and is able to acquire and match the best of breed from each sub component manufacturer and combine them to deliver a superior product.

Eco-Shift has built distribution partnerships that provide deep connectivity into the industrys four key market segments:

Walk in retail (big box store, independents) and high volume sales

Online sales

Facility Management Companies with a global footprint and includes hotels, offices, industrial spaces, etc.

Commercial sales including contractor sales, specialized electrical distributors.

According to industry research firm Transparency Market Research, The global industrial and commercial market was worth US$12.9 billion in 2012 and is expected to reach US$86 billion by 2019, growing at a CAGR of 30.8% from 2013 to 2019.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Ontario, with affiliate and distributor offices strategically located in key markets California, Florida, Auckland NZ, and Scotland, Eco-Shift Power Corp. is a contract manufacturer of advanced, high-efficiency lighting products and components designed for state-of-the-art energy management systems and cloud-based software platforms. It has strong relationships with a growing worldwide customer base composed primarily of major OEM/ODM lighting designers and distributors. Please visit us at and .

This news release contains forward-looking statements. Such statements may be preceded by the words intends, may, will, plans, expects, anticipates, projects, predicts, estimates, aims, believes, hopes, potential or similar words. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, are based on certain assumptions and are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Eco-Shifts control, and cannot be predicted or quantified and consequently, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, risks and uncertainties associated with (i) the highly competitive nature of lighting industry sales and distribution, (ii) development and protection of our key OEM/ODM and distribution partnerships, (iii) unexpected industry technological development. More detailed information about Eco-Shift and the risk factors that may affect the realization of forward looking statements is set forth in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Investors are urged to read these documents free of charge on the SECs web site at . Eco-Shift assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise its forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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JANUARY 27, 2016

Arizonans face 36th highest state-local tax burden in U.S.

8.8 percent of income in Arizona goes to state and local taxes

WASHINGTON  8.8 percent of all income in Arizona went toward state and local taxes (in FY 2012), according to the annual State-Local Tax Burden Rankings released this morning by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The report highlights the state-local tax burden on taxpayers in each of the 50 states, details how much residents pay to their state and other states, and illustrates tax burden trends over time and within each state.



Here is a breakdown of Arizonas state-local tax burden:

 State-Local Tax Burden rank: 36th

 Percent of income in Arizona that goes to state and local taxes: 8.80%

 Amount of taxes paid to Arizona per capita: $2,283

 Amount of taxes paid to other states per capita: $992



Its important to remember that a significant amount of taxation occurs across state lines, and that this shifting is not uniform. For instance, one might pay sales taxes at their local corner store, but also pay sales taxes when on vacation in another state. This shifting should not be ignored when attempting to understand the burden faced by taxpayers within a state.



Theres an ongoing debate over how much is enough when it comes to taxes, but it isnt always informed by accurate data, said Tax Foundation Economist Nicole Kaeding. Our study gives taxpayers a comprehensive look at where tax burdens are felt across the states, so that they can have an informed discussion on the size and reach of state and local taxes.



The studys key findings include:

 During the 2012 fiscal year, state-local tax burdens as a share of state incomes decreased on average across the U.S. Average income increased at a faster rate than tax collections, driving down state-local tax burdens on average.

 New Yorkers faced the highest burden, with 12.7% of income in the state going to state and local taxes. Connecticut (12.6%) and New Jersey (12.2%) followed closely behind. On the other end of the spectrum, Alaska (6.5%), South Dakota (7.1%) and Wyoming (7.1%) had the lowest burdens.

 On average, taxpayers pay the most taxes to their own state and local governments. In 2012, 78 percent of taxes collected were paid within the state of residence, up from 73 percent in 2011.

 State-local tax burdens are very close to one another and slight changes in taxes or income can translate to seemingly dramatic shifts in rank. For example, Delaware (16th) and Colorado (35th) only differ in burden by just over one percentage point. However, while burdens are clustered in the center of the distribution, states at the top and bottom can have substantially different burden percentagese.g. New York (12.6%) and Alaska (6.5%).



Full Report: State-Local Tax Burden Rankings, FY 2012.


January 27, 2016

The First Annual Arizona Miniature Horse March Festival March 24  27, 2016



The first annual Arizona Miniature Horse March Festival, the largest Miniature Horse event ever to be held in Arizona, will take place March 24 through 27, 2016, at WestWorld of Scottsdale. This upcoming 2016 March Festival of Miniature Horse shows which is sponsored by the Miniature Horse Association of Arizona (MHAA) will include a one-day Kick Off Arizona (R) Miniature Horse Show on March 24, a one-day 3rd Annual Kick Off Arizona (A) Miniature Horse Show on March 25 in Arena 3, and the 29th Annual Arizona Touch of Class Miniature Horse Show on March 26 and 27, Saturday and Sunday, with over 150 AMHA approved classes including halter, driving, obstacle, liberty, costume, jumping, and roadster categories for adults and youth entries.





The R show is for those horses that are registered in the American Miniature Horse Registry and measure between 34 to 38 inches from end of mane to the ground, while the A shows have the horses measuring 34 inches and under and registered in the American Miniature Horse Association. The R show will have two judges and the A shows will have three judges from around the U.S. to determine the top winners in conformation, behavior, performance and showmanship of the Miniatures.



Miniature horses from Arizona and nearby states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas will be competing for awards and points to earn their eligibility for the AMHR National Show and the AMHA World Show in the fall. The Touch of Class show, in its 29th year, will be held in the climate-controlled Equidome (the Tony Nelssen Equestrian Center) at WestWorld. Rain or shine the show will go on. Exhibitors can contact the show manager, Ruby Priore, (918) 576-1452 for show premiums, entry forms, and show information.





For the spectators, there will be free admission and parking. Visitors are welcome to come out and enjoy the family-friendly activities at this one-of-a kind festival event. WestWorld is located at 16601 North Pima Road, Scottsdale, AZ. The shows start at 8:00 am and run till 7:00 pm. Food and refreshments, barn tours to see and pet the minis up close, and various vendors specializing in arts and crafts, horse products, apparel, and jewelry will be set up in the Equidome. A raffle for gold jewelry valued at $1500 and a silent auction will add to the festivities at the Touch of Class Show. The MHAA invites the public to come out to watch the fanciful little equine and judge for themselves to appreciate the beauty and pleasure these little horses display and bring to the horse world.



The nationally renowned Arizona Mini Mystique, a precision driving Miniature Horse team, will have a special presentation of their precision driving on March 27, Sunday, during the afternoon intermission.



The ten expertly trained mini horses with small carts will work in patterns of circles, rows, figure 8s, crisscrossing and more, which is sure to leave spectators awe-struck at their spectacular performance.



Come see the biggest Miniature Horse Festival in Arizona. For show info: (623) 465-5034 . Website: www.AZminis-MHAA.com


Dia de los Muertos in South Bend: Here's how you can celebrat

Unlike the city's Day of the Dead events in the past, this one has broader community involvement.
Suburban schools grow slightly, or lose less than state average

Numbers from the state Department of Public Instruction show that in suburban Milwaukee, about 27 school districts grew last year, or lost fewer students than average.
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Karl's association with Space.com goes back to 2000, when he was hired to produce interactive Flash graphics. From 2010 to 2016, Karl worked as an infographics specialist across all editorial properties of Purch (formerly known as TechMediaNetwork). Before joining Space.com, Karl spent 11 years at the New York headquarters of The Associated Press, creating news graphics for use around the world in newspapers and on the web. He has a degree in graphic design from Louisiana State University and now works as a freelance graphic designer in New York City.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger's STS-51L mission, which ended in tragedy shortly after launch on Jan. 28, 1986. From left to right, the astronauts are Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Michael Smith and Ellison Onizuka.

NASA will honor the memories of its fallen astronauts during a series of special ceremonies Thursday (Jan. 28), the 30th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy.

The agency will pay tribute to Challenger's seven-member crew, as well as the three astronauts lost in 1967's Apollo 1 fire and the seven space flyers who died when the shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003. Ceremonies will occur during NASA's annual Day of Remembrance, on Thursday.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Deputy Administrator Dava Newman and other senior officials will participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery Thursday at 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT). Another wreath-laying ceremony will occur at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Visitor Complex in Florida; you can watch this latter ceremony live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV. [Fallen Heroes of Space Exploration: A Memorial (Gallery)]

Other NASA centers, including Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Johnson Space Center in Houston and Glenn Research Center in Ohio, will host their own events to mark the somber occasion.

The three NASA tragedies occurred just a few days apart on the calendar, over the span of 36 years. The Apollo 1 fire broke out in the command module of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on Jan. 27, 1967, while the three astronauts were participating in a launch pad test at Cape Kennedy (now known as Cape Canaveral) Air Force Station in Florida. All three men were killed.

Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launching from KSC on Jan. 28, 1986, killing mission commander Francis "Dick" Scobee; pilot Mike Smith; mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ron McNair and Ellison Onizuka; and payload specialists Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe (who had been chosen to fly via NASA's "Teacher in Space" program).

An investigation later determined that Challenger was doomed by a failure in an "O-ring" seal on the shuttle's right-hand solid rocket booster. Cold weather played a role in the failure, by hardening the usually flexible O-ring.

Columbia was lost toward the very end of its mission, breaking apart upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. A piece of insulating foam had broken off Columbia's huge external fuel tank during the shuttle's launch two weeks earlier, and investigators later determined that the chunk damaged the orbiter's left wing, allowing hot atmospheric gases to enter the wing's interior.

All seven astronauts on board  mission commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; payload commander Michael Anderson; mission specialists David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark; and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, from the Israel Space Agency  were killed.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
"That's no moon, it's a space station..." Actually Obi Wan, that IS a moon, it's Saturns moon Mimas. It simply resembles the "Death Star" from Star Wars. (Or that's what the Sith Lord would have us believe.)

A long, long time ago (a little over 40 years ago), the world was introduced to Jedi knights, lightsabers, droids, Wookies and the Force. "Star Wars" exploded into movie theaters in 1977 and became an instant hit, eventually spawning a pop-culture empire, including sequels, prequels, books, comics, video games, television series and radio shows.

And before long, elements of the space fantasy began influencing the development of real-life space technology.

Here's a brief overview of the franchise and its effect on space technology.

Franchise overview

The "Star Wars" franchise is divided into three sets of films  the originals, the prequels and the sequels  as well as myriad off-canon television series, video games, radio shows and other forms of media.

The tale, from "a galaxy far, far away," concerns the adventures of young Luke Skywalker, the nephew of a moisture farmer who lives on a desert planet called Tatooine. Luke learns that he is adept at harnessing the Force, described as an "energy field  that binds the galaxy together."

Related: 'Star Wars'! 40 Surprising facts from a galaxy far, far away

He eventually joins the rebellion against the Galactic Empire, along with his newfound allies  two robots ("droids"), C-3PO and R2-D2; Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi knight in seclusion; a smuggler, Han Solo, and his Wookie co-pilot, a large sentient beast named Chewbacca; and a princess and rebel leader, Leia Organa. Luke also encounters Darth Vader, a Jedi knight who has fallen to the dark side, and (spoiler alert!) turns out to be Luke's father.

With the help of his allies and others in the rebellion, Luke destroys the Death Star, a planet-killing satellite, as well as its bigger, more powerful replacement. In a final showdown, Luke confronts the Emperor and battles Darth Vader, who redeems himself by turning against the Emperor and aiding his son.

After discussing his future plans with his Uncle Owen, Luke Skywalker leaves the Lars Homestead and heads towards the vista to watch the twin suns of Tatooine set while he reflects upon his destiny. (Image credit:  Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.)

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The original trilogy  later subtitled "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi"  was released into theaters between 1977 and 1983. Director George Lucas expressed frustration with the technology of the 1970s and 1980s, and when digital technology came along in the 1990s, he chose to re-edit the originals and in some cases, alter or add scenes. (The most infamous scene came in the first movie. The original version of "A New Hope" has Han Solo shooting the bounty hunter Greedo, while the re-mastered version has Greedo firing first.)

Lucas also released three prequels between 1999 and 2005  "The Phantom Menace," "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith"  to chart the path of Darth Vader's rise and fall, and the birth of Luke and (another spoiler alert!) his twin sister, Leia.

Related: Stuck at home? Take a tour through Disney's (empty) Star Wars, Pandora and space-age parks

In 2012, Disney announced that it would take over the franchise's production and subsequently released a set of sequel films between 2015 and 2019: "The Force Awakens," "The Last Jedi" and "The Rise of Skywalker." The films follow the story of a scavenger named Rey, as she trains to use the Force under the guidance of an aged and reluctant Luke Skywalker, then defeats Emperor Palpatine, helping the Resistance to end the evil reign of the First Order.

In 2020, Disney released ""Star Wars: The Mandalorian," the first live-action "Star Wars" television series for their Disney+ streaming service. The show follows a Mandalorian bounty hunter as he rescues a child of the same species as Yoda. The company also has plans to release another series called "Star Wars: Obi-Wan."

Related: The best Disney Plus movies and shows for space fans: Star Wars, sci-fi and more

Space fantasy meets space fact

As popular culture became entrenched in "Star Wars" references, words, phrases and ideas from the franchise entered the vernacular of science and technology.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would use ground- and space-based lasers, particle beams, missiles and other weapons to help protect the United States from attack by nuclear missiles. Critics derisively referred to it as "Star Wars."

The defense system would have some parts of it based in space. One idea, according to Encyclopedia Britannica , was a laser system that could shoot down missiles before they reached their target. The proposal also called for surface-to-air missiles placed beside strategically important locations (such as intercontinental ballistic missile silos). The program led to the development of items such as the Extended Range Interceptor, which successfully caught a missile in-flight in testing in 1987. The U.S. Army also had a successful hit-to-kill on a target on the fourth try with a Minuteman missile, in 1984.

The program was eventually abandoned. There were concerns that the program violated the anti-ballistic missile treaty that was part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Then there were budget cuts before any real progress was made. After $30 billion spent, no laser and mirror system was ever used.

In 2007, shuttle Discovery launched Luke Skywalker's lightsaber into space to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the franchise. The ceremonies on the ground surrounding its handover to NASA included appearances by Chewbacca and Imperial stormtroopers.

The first-generation Robonaut looks more than a little bit like the bounty hunter Boba Fett from "Star Wars." (Image credit: NASA; Disney/Lucasfilm)

Look-alikes

Close-up images of Saturn's moon Mimas revealed it looks similar to the Death Star , which had a distinctive circle on one side of its sphere shape. In real life, the moons that have these large circles are actually showing off the remnants of a large asteroid that smacked into the surface and left behind an enormous crater.

NASA has also referenced "Star Wars" when talking about Iapetus , another one of Saturn's moons. "The moon Iapetus, like the 'force' in Star Wars, has both a light side and a dark side," the agency wrote in 2015.

Related: The force of 'Star Wars': The staying power of a sci-fi icon explained

"Star Wars" is also referenced frequently when speaking about planets with two suns, similar to Luke's home planet, Tatooine. Most of the planets that orbit two stars are huge gas giants , but a handful of planets similar to Earth have been found as well, such as Kepler 16b, Kepler-34b, Kepler 35b. In 2015, a study from the University of Utah suggested these sorts of planets might be more common than was once thought. Simulations showed it was possible that planetesimals  the precursors to planets  could safely orbit in an oval around two stars without necessarily crashing into each other.

A TIE fighter from "Star Wars." (Image credit: Disney/Lucasfilm)

Droids and robots

Today, there is a real-life R2-D2  at least the 21stt-century equivalent of it  on the International Space Station (ISS). NASA's humanoid Robonaut 2 is sometimes called R2. It is still in testing, but R2 is intended to flip switches and do other simple science experiments and free up time for the astronauts to do more complicated things. In the future, NASA hopes to outfit a version of the robot to do work outside the space station, rather than sending astronauts out on risky spacewalks.

C-3PO's role was to serve as a translator for his human companions. While robots aren't quite at that stage yet, in 2013 a Japanese child-like robot called Kirobo (created by university researchers in association with Toyota) had a chat with ISS commander Koichi Wakata about their journey into space. Kirobo is intended to be an interactive robot for lonely people, whether they are astronauts in space far from home, or isolated seniors who are unable to get out of the house very easily.

Related: In photos: Robonaut 2, NASA's robot butler for astronauts

In 2006, NASA launched a set of droids to the space station to test synchronized flying in space, and the technology was used by several ISS crews. The droids are intended to be aware of each other and to synchronize their flying so as not to crash into each other, which is technology that could be useful for satellites. In "Star Wars," robots like these were used for lightsaber training.

There are other, less obvious uses of technology from "Star Wars" being used in space:

For example, the Empire's TIE fighter spacecraft appear to have solar panels on their outer hulls, which is a technology that NASA uses for many of its Mars probes (including the Opportunity rover on the surface) as well as the ISS. Solar panels are most useful on spacecraft that are closer to the sun. This means that a mission such as Rosetta  which chased a comet beyond Mars' orbit  had to have extremely large solar panels to catch the sunlight required. Spacecraft operating farther away require nuclear power.

And while lasers are used for combat in "Star Wars," NASA is testing out lasers for high-speed communications between space and the ground. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe, for example, tested out a laser system from the moon and received a picture of the Mona Lisa sent from Earth. NASA is discussing doing laser tests from the ISS to increase the flow of communications from the orbiting complex. This would be particularly useful for experiments, which send out quite a large amount of data for investigators back home.

Additional resources:

Read about 8 sci-fi inventions in "Star Wars" and their real-life counterparts, from Live Science (opens in new tab) .

. Learn more about the Strategic Defense Initiative and its parallels to "Star Wars", from the Cold War Museum (opens in new tab) .

. Here are even more connections between NASA and Star Wars (opens in new tab) .

This article was updated on May 3, 2020 by Space.com Reference Editor Kimberly Hickok.
A view of the massive globular cluster NGC 1783 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, near Earth's own Milky Way, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The cluster is 160,000 light-years from Earth and as massive as 170,000 suns.

Clusters of stars can harvest enough gas from their galaxies to give birth to a new generation of stars of their own, new research shows.

This finding could help shed light on how the building blocks of galaxies evolve, scientists added.

Globular clusters are densely packed, spherical collections of up to millions of stars orbiting the outskirts of galaxies. These clusters are up to 13 billion years old, making them among the oldest structures in the universe. [Star Quiz: Test Your Stellar Smarts]

"Star clusters are building blocks of galaxies  almost all stars formed in star clusters," said study lead author Chengyuan Li, an astronomer at Peking University in Beijing.

Stars in globular clusters are thought to all form at the same time in a single burst from a common cloud of gas. After that point, star formation ends in those clusters.

"In a star cluster, the first stellar generation usually contains very massive stars, and those very massive stars will contribute very high-energy photons  that is, X-ray photons  into their environment," Li told Space.com. "A cluster is initially gas-rich, but after that first batch of massive stars pours their energetic photons out, most of the gas will get accelerated and escape from the cluster. About 3 million to 10 million years later, the star cluster will be gas-free, hence quenching the star-forming process."

However, about a decade ago, astronomers discovered signs that old globular clusters, ones more than 10 billion years old, often possess younger stars. Now, Li and his colleagues said they have strong evidence that the reason globular clusters may have younger stars is that they experienced more than one star-forming event, or "starburst."

The researchers analyzed data from the Hubble Space Telescope regarding three globular clusters located in two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Two of the clusters, NGC 1783 and NGC 1696, are located about 160,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the third, NGC 411, is located about 190,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud. NGC 1783 is about 180,000 times the mass of the sun, while NGC 1696 is about 50,000 solar masses and NGC 411 is about 32,000 solar masses.

The astronomers found that these globular clusters, which are each about 1.5 billion years old, are home to groups of stars a few hundred million years younger than other stars in the clusters. These younger stars make up about 0.2 to 2 percent the masses of those clusters.

Specifically, NGC 1783 is mostly about 1.4 billion years old, but some groups of its stars are 450 million and 890 million years old; NGC 1696 is mostly about 1.5 billion years old, but some of its stars are 500 million years old. And in 1.4-billion-year-old NGC 411, some stars are 320 million years old.

One potential explanation for these apparent differences in ages is that these stars only look relatively young, but are in fact "blue stragglers." Such stars look younger due to an infusion of extra fuel they get after they either siphon gas from their neighbors or swallow other stars whole. However, the colors and locations of these younger stars are not what one would expect of blue stragglers from previous work, the researchers said.

Instead, Li and his colleagues calculated that as the orbits of these globular clusters took them through the gaseous disks of their galaxies, the clusters could have collected or accreted enough stray gas and dust to trigger new waves of star formation.

"Traditionally, scientists did not expect that a young star cluster can form additional stars after its initial formation," Li said. "Our finding indicates that the evolution of a star cluster is much more complicated than what we thought  there must be frequent interactions between star clusters and their environment."

Future research will aim to extend the findings to other globular clusters in the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way, the researchers said.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Nature (opens in new tab).
The prime crew of the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations (NASA) first manned Apollo Space Flight, named on March 21, 1966, are pictured during training in Florida. Left to right are astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee.

This article was originally published in 2013.

In NASA's early years, the agency learned by doing; developing tests and procedures as programs wore on. One test developed and used in the Mercury program was the "plugs-out test," a prelaunch test of the spacecrafts systems through a simulated countdown on launch. It was never considered a dangerous test, but on Jan. 27, 1967, Apollo 1's plugs-out test claimed the lives of the crew.

Typical for the first flight of a new program, the plan for Apollo 1 was a simple shakedown cruise. The crew  Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, Gemini veteran Ed White, and rookie Roger Chaffee  would take just the Command and Service Module (CSM) into Earth orbit.

PHOTOS: 'Lost' NASA Photos Catch Apollo Teams in Training

The plugs-out test started out routinely with the flight-ready spacecraft mounted on its unfueled Saturn IB rocket. The umbilical power cords that supplied power were removed  the plugs were out  putting the spacecraft on its internal batteries and the crew cabin was pressurized with 16.7 pounds per square inch of pure oxygen. As the crew entered the spacecraft around 1pm that afternoon, a full launch-day staff of engineers in mission control took their positions for the test. There was also a staff of men in the White Room; the room that gave the astronauts passage to the spacecraft remained attached to the vehicle.

For the first five hours, minor things interrupted the test. Grissom complained of a foul odor like sour buttermilk in his oxygen unit and at one point a high oxygen flow rate in the astronauts suits tripped an alarm. But these were minor problems compared to the persistent communications problems. Static made conversations between the crew and mission control nearly impossible. Grissom, frustration rising, remarked that they'd never get to the moon if they couldn't talk between two or three buildings.

Just after 6:31pm that evening, technicians monitoring the spacecraft from Mission Control noticed a sudden increase in oxygen flow and pressure inside the cabin. This irregularity in telemetry was accompanied by a garbled transmission: "Fire," someone said, then "they're fighting a bad fire  let's get out. Open 'er up" or "we've got a bad fire  let's get out. We're burning up." Because of the static, it wasn't even clear who was speaking.

ANALYSIS: Book Shows Rare Snapshots from NASA's Early Days

Monitors showing a live video feed of the white room told the story: flames visible through in spacecraft's small window. Crews in the White Room tried to open the hatch, but no one could move the inward opening design against the pressure inside the spacecraft. Three seconds after the crew's first mention of a fire, the CSM's pressure reached a critical point. The hull ruptured, flames poured into the White Room. Telemetry and voice communication from Apollo 1 went silent.

It was a half hour before firemen and recovery personnel were able to remove the astronauts' bodies; Ed White was found turned around on his couch reaching for the hatch.

The accident investigation lasted a year. It took two months for technicians to disassemble the spacecraft; it was taken apart piece by piece with everything removed checked against another full Apollo CSM. The accident review board finally determined that a wire over the piping from the urine collection system had arced. In the pure oxygen environment, and with everything inside soaked in pure oxygen, that spark turned into a full fire easily. The pattern of damage suggested that the fire started below the crew's feet, a point out of their line of sight. The best estimates said it took about ten seconds for spacecraft to fill with flames. But it wasn't the fire that killed the crew. Autopsies showed they asphyxiated after their oxygen hoses were severed. They were gone less than a minute after reporting the fire.

The accident investigation focused on NASA's controversial decision to run a test with a spacecraft under high pressure with pure oxygen. The Apollo CMS' manufacturer, North American Aviation, had recommended NASA not test the spacecraft under pressure, warning of risks of fire, but NASA pressed on and ran the test as it had before all six Mercury flight and all ten Gemini missions. In retrospect, head astronaut Deke Slayton said, it was sheer luck that plugs-out tests in the McDonnell built Mercury and Gemini spacecraft hadn't ended in tragedy. It was an unfortunate oversight that the plugs-out test had never been classified as hazardous. That designation was reserved for tests involving fueled vehicles, hypergolic propellants, cryogenic systems, high pressure tanks, live pyrotechnics or altitude chamber tests.

PHOTOS: Out of This World Space Memorials

The accident led to two significant changes in the Apollo spacecraft. The inward-opening hatch was replaced with a quick-operating, outward opening, lightweight design made of aluminum and fiberglass that could be opened in less that 10 seconds. NASA also changed the spacecraft's cabin atmosphere for pre-launch testing. The 100 percent oxygen was replaced with a mixture of 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen, a mixture that was far less supportive of combustion though the astronauts' suits still fed them pure oxygen. After launch, the oxygen/nitrogen mix was gradually replaced with pure oxygen for the duration of the mission.

No crew ever flew on Apollo 1. The mission was redesignated Apollo 204 and manned missions continued with Apollo 7 in October of 1968. The plugs-out test was never reclassified as hazardous, but Apollo 7's plugs out test was run with the hatch open.

Originally published on Discovery News.
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Most of the problems suffered by crofters under the new Common Agricultural Policy seem to stem from the Scottish Government ignoring crofters views in favour of the industrial agriculture lobby, said Vice-chair of the Scottish Crofting Federation, Yvonne White.

The debacle over having three payment regions, something which the SCF opposed but which was foisted upon us at the last minute by the SNP government, with no public consultation, is causing inestimable problems. But it goes further; indeed, the entire thrust of CAP reform to a fairer and sustainable system has been thwarted by this big farmer lobby. For example, a fundamental opportunity to move to an area-based system has been delayed for five years when we could have instigated the change straight away, as other countries have, Ms White continued. Even the cabinet secretary for agriculture, Mr Lochhead, has cited industry lobbying as one of the reasons payments have been delayed. Scotland has had to create an ever more convoluted payment system to continue defending the indefensible.

The immediate consequences are catastrophic Ms White added. Credit from banks and feed merchants is drying up, sheep stock clubs and common grazings cannot pay share-holders, and the ewe-hogg scheme is a damp squib. It's a wonder that there are any sheep and cattle left on the region 3 hill.

Of course the emergency at the moment is the lack of payments, Ms White continued, but the root of the problem goes much deeper. As we have indicated to the Scottish Government, the absence of any meaningful reference to crofting in the Future of Scottish Agriculture consultation document, says it all.
The highest placed R-SQP, covering livestock, companion animal and equine health, was Hannah Rose, a researcher in veterinary science at the University of Bristol, who also runs her own consultancy (Rose Research) advising farmers and horse owners on parasite control. Tessa Hill was named best E-SQP, specialising in equine health. Tessa works for family business, Carolines Pets of Hulme near Stoke-on-Trent and also took the relatively new avian module. Kathryn Dymott, Assistant Manager at the Pets At Home store in Wokingham was top prize winner in the C-SQP, or companion animal, category. Kathryn Dymott was also awarded the prestigious AHDA Cup for Overall Highest Achieving SQP from an AHDA member, sponsored by Elanco.

I have a degree in zoology and a PhD in parasitology at the University of Bristol, says Hannah Rose. Now, as an R-SQP, I am qualified to put scientific knowledge into practice, assisting farmers implement guidelines from organisations such as SCOPS (Sustinable Control of Parasites in Sheep) and choosing the most appropriate treatment for their livestock. SQPs also understand how disease risk varies by season and with the weather. I studied hard for the SQP qualification so Im delighted to have done so well! Hannah Rose concludes.

Fellow prize winner, E-SQP Tessa Hill, was equally pleased with her exam results. I qualified as a research chemist and later taught chemistry, so becoming an SQP has been a career change for me. Good communication skills and the ability to listen are key to doing a good job as an SQP, believes Tessa Hill.
STAMFORD-A Chinese restaurant delivery driver was held up by gunman on the South End Tuesday afternoon, but because of his bosss fears of retaliation police werent notified of the armed robbery until just after midnight.

Sgt. Sean McGowan said police were called to a Chinese restaurant on Selleck Street early in the morning Wednesday on the report of a robbery.

Officers were told by a food delivery man and his boss that he had been robbed at 4 p.m. by a while male with a gun on Manor Street. The restaurant manager explained to police that at first he did not want his driver to report the robbery because he was worried that the gunman would retaliate, McGowan said. Later the two talked it over and figured out that it would be best to call and report the incident.

The driver told police that he was making a delivery to a home on Manor Street near Dyke Lane, but could not find anyone home, even though he knocked on the front and rear doors.

The driver said he saw a skinny white male dressed in all black walk to the home he was to make the delivery to from Dyke Lane. The man walked right up to him and pulled a gun out of his jacket and pointed at the driver.

Then the gunman said, I dont want to do this, just give me your money, McGowan said. The driver handed over several hundred dollars from the deliveries he had been making over the past few hours. The gunman also took the food, McGowan said.

The gunman then walked away and disappeared. McGowan said the gunman was in his early 20s, about five-feet, ten inches tall, and had a short beard. The driver was not injured during the robbery and police calls to the number requesting the delivery were blocked, McGowan said.
Education site, Niche, has released its 2016 rankings of the best private high schools in the country and four Connecticut schools landed in the top 100 nationally.



The site gave each school a grade for academics and student culture and diversity. They also used data from "various government and public data sets, Niche's own proprietary data, and 123,218 opinion-based survey responses across a variety of topics from 16,688 current students, recent alumni, and parents."



Click through to see the top 10 private high schools in Connecticut. Read more.
I ts make-up-your-mind time for the board of EDF, the French utility which a couple of years ago seemed to promise Chancellor George Osborne it would build Britains first new nuclear power station for more than 30 years, at Hinkley Point in Somerset.

Many suspect the commitment was a moment of madness the French board now regrets and wants to get out of. Certainly it is under pressure to change its mind. News came this week that Frances CFE-CGC energy trade union, which is represented on the board, has grave doubts about whether EDF can afford the contract.

The companys employee shareholders also attacked the plan just before Christmas on much the same lines of cost and risk to the health of the business. This group speaks for only 1.7% of the equity but, given that the French state still owns 84.5%, you could say the employees account for more than 10% of the independent share float. Not that it matters much. French boards do not have a great tradition of listening to shareholders.

Perhaps this time the board should. Union and shareholders say EDF cannot afford to take on what is a hugely risky project, and doing so could put the future of the company at risk. How this might be the outcome, given that EDF is still effectively a nationalised business, is not altogether clear but that should not detract from the merit of their case. They are right to be scared by the numbers.

As things stand, EDF has said it will pay the 18 billion cost of the project, which is rather more than it had planned but it was lumbered when other partners pulled out. Help should be at hand because CGN of China wants to be involved and is supposed to have pledged 6 billion for a one-third stake in the hope this will open the door to it being allowed to build another plant here itself.

Unfortunately, however, EDF has not yet seen the colour of CGNs money and, given the growing worries about the health of the Chinese economy, there are some who doubt whether it is still good for the full amount.

Others clearly have reservations about the viability of the project, if not the Chinese. Infrastructure UK, now under the wing of the Treasury, has given the project a credit rating of BB plus, which is below investment grade. That almost suggests it believes the project wont happen  or at least that it will not be completed on time or on budget. There are reasons to be sceptical. EDF has said it will have the plant completed and running by 2025, which gives it just nine years to build the twin reactors.

But its two previous attempts to build this kind of reactor have been troubled. One in Normandy was budgeted to cost 3 billion (2.8 billion) and be ready by 2012 but it will now not be finished until 2018 and the cost has more than tripled to 10.5 billion. The other in Finland is 10 years behind schedule and at least 5 billion over budget.

"If the French pull out, the outlook for our power generation capacity really would be serious."

EDF has other problems. It already has 37 billion of debt on its balance sheet. It has to find an estimated 55 billion over the next couple of decades to extend the life of Frances existing fleet of nuclear electricity generators and is likely to incur further costs after recently taking over Areva, the French reactor builder that has its own troubles.

Unfortunately, EDFs problems could very easily become our problems. It is ironic that the 18 billion cost of Hinkley might be too much for EDF because most people think it is also already too much for the British consumer  given the hugely generous guaranteed prices the Government had to offer the company to tempt it in.

But the bigger issue is what happens if the French pull out, which they certainly could after the EDF board meeting today. The idea is that the new plant will provide 7% of Britains electricity when it is open in 10 years. Our power generation capacity already looks uncomfortably tight for the coming decade. Without Hinkleys capacity, the outlook really would be serious.

Bailey gets cream with watchdog role

Andrew Bailey must feel he is the most secure person in the world as he contemplates his new role as chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Given the struggle the board has had to find anyone to replace Martin Wheatley, ousted by the Chancellor last summer, no one would dare fire him and have to go through the whole embarrassing process again.

It is alarming that the reputation of the FCA has fallen so low, and the prospect of political interference is seen as so great that they could not find anyone else to do the job. While Bailey is respected, he does have the Co-op Bank debacle on his CV but, more to the point, he already had a proper regulatory job as head of the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA).

Having watched from the sidelines as the FCA job was touted from here to Australia, what must he have thought when they finally came knocking at his door? What was the offer? Sir Andrew perhaps? Or the promise of the inside track for Governor of the Bank of England when Mark Carney goes back to Canada? Let us hope he has no cause to regret any encounter with politicians bearing gifts.

Nor should we underestimate the challenge he faces. Bailey is a good operator and he knows banking  he even used to sign the nations paper money in his time as chief cashier at the Bank of England. But he has had limited exposure to the world of independent financial advisers, asset managers, consumer credit agencies and the Wongas that make up much of the FCAs world.

That is one challenge. The other is finding someone to take on his vacated job at the PRA. What is really needed there is someone who understands insurance, given that sector is where the next problems are most likely to erupt as a result of the excessive amount of naive capital that has flooded in at a time when the claims experience has been unusually benign.

It is hard to see it ending well but unfortunately regulators who understand insurance are even more scarce than regulators who want to head the FCA.
I have just come back from the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. What was striking was the small number of women in attendance  less than one in five  and how diversity quickly became one of the biggest topics of the event.

While we should be proud that British firms have achieved Lord Davies 25% target for board positions, progress has been glacial.

The number of female chief executives has barely moved and there are just nine more female executive directors on FTSE 350 boards than there were in 2010.

For me, the real issue is not about simply getting more women on boards, but about more women as leaders.

Thats not to say non-executive directors dont play an important role as guardians of values, challenging decisions and managing risk. But they are part-time and arent running organisations on a daily basis.

This is the job of executives  the sleeves-rolled-up leaders in our society. The truth is we just dont have enough women who are executive leaders  the chief executives, chief financial officers, heads of operating divisions, managing directors and partners.

"We have talked a lot about glass ceilings over the years: we now need to address sticky floors."

There are two issues that need disentangling  why some companies struggle to attract women, and why some women choose to quit their careers.

Its clear some companies, particularly in engineering firms, are struggling to attract women at the start but not sectors such as retailing, banking and professional services.

Meanwhile, more chief executives are telling me that their best women are choosing to leave just as they get into very senior positions.

We have talked a lot about glass ceilings over the years: we now need to address sticky floors.

There are factors to do with being a mother that are immutable, and there is no right and wrong in terms of personal choices. But some of the reasons why women to choose to leave need addressing, including availability and cost of childcare, flexible working arrangements and support in caring for elderly parents.

Then there is the working environment itself. Taking leadership roles in our society is risky and exposed. The personal toll can be high. Women need friends, support systems, connections and a sense of belonging.

Too much of British business is still geared up for men, in terms of its social habits, its small talk, its clubbiness. Women can look at this world and think this isnt for me.

So we need the chief executives of today to lead and champion the progress of women into top jobs and we should draw on the success of the Davies Review in changing business behaviours.

Thats why tomorrow, the CBI will call for a new voluntary, business led-25% target for women in executive management roles.

Of course, diversity isnt just about women, but it is a good place so start. Lets make sure that many more women reach the top  running our organisations day-to-day, calling the shots, managing change, hiring the next set of stars, and leading Britain into a bright and prosperous future.

Carolyn Fairbairn is the director-general of the CBI
C itadel founder Ken Griffin doesnt fancy Sainsburys much  hes shorting the stock  but the hedge-fund billionaire is a Katy Perry fan.

He splashed out a reported $500,000 (350,000) for the starlet to appear at the companys 25th birthday bash in Chicago.

Lets hope they didnt talk politics; Perry played at Democrat presidential hopeful Hillary Clintons rally but Griffin is a staunch Republican.

Home truth on Zeus Purplebricks prose

Broker Zeus Capital is very keen on online estate agent Purplebricks.

Their impressive growth in market share of new instructions and clear financial model enable us to consider 140p as fair value on a range of metrics, gushes its analyst.

Thats nearly double todays share price of 79p, which in turn is, ahem, rather less than the 100p they were brought to market for a month ago by a certain... Zeus Capital.

Sugar hits a bum note with product plug

Lord Sugar is doubtless a shrewd businessman, but dating guru he is not.

The entrepreneur, an investor in organic skincare company Tropic, took to Twitter to advertise one of the products: The perfect Valentines gift for her.

The goody in question? A cream that counts one of its attributes as helping to combat cellulite.

Not the most romantic marketing, Alan. Youre fired!

At sea: Mover and shaker for charity

Removals firm Anthony Ward Thomas is best-known for burly blokes shifting the contents of the homes of west Londons poshest postcodes  as well as working for celebrities including Cate Blanchett and Lily Allen and for Sothebys auctions.

But the companys 58-year-old eponymous founder  who started the business with one 15-year-old truck with no power steering  is putting himself a long way away from demanding Kensington households by crossing the Atlantic on a pedalo.

No ones done it before  its expected to take at least 45 days of pedalling 24 hours a day in two-hour rotations with a crewmate, to cross from the Canaries to Antigua, with Ward Thomas aiming to raise 100,000 for childrens hospice Naomi House.

Donate at pedaltheocean.co.uk.

Peston promotion

Is Robert Peston getting used to life at a commercial broadcaster?

Lauding the signing of its new top political boffin and ex-BBC economics editor, ITV popped up on Spys Facebook feed to encourage us to like his page for exclusive news and analysis in a sponsored post.

Peston had better get used to his new employers  theyll be selling sponsorship of his infamous haircut next.

Marston's memory problem

Spy was interested to hear Marstons lauding newly acquired beer brands Wainwright and Lancaster Bomber amid a stonking Christmas.

The landlord and brewer mustve been so busy pulling pints it forgot to list its new top pairing on its website. Hic!
Y ou could almost hear George Osborne growling in Ross McEwans ear this morning: Spring any nasty surprises after I flog RBS back to the public and youre toast, pal.

Todays figures from the bank look ghastly: billions injected into the pension fund, billions more set aside for mis-selling and a warning of losses.

But, although this is all real money, it is cash that would have left the bank in future years anyway, after the Government had begun selling its stake to investors.

McEwan is emptying the septic tank before selling the house.

Hes right to do this, of course. It would be scandalous to leave a hidden vat of effluent for new investors.

Its just a shame the poor old taxpayer picks up the tab again.

Uber in driving seat

Sitting on my delayed Eurostar yesterday, I pondered who would be on strike when we emerged from Le Tunnel this time.

As I picked my way through the beggars outside Gare du Nord in search of a cabbie to get me to my lunch meeting on time, I soon found out. Taxi drivers. Pourquoi? Uber, of course.

If you thought it was only the London black cabs trade which is bolshy about this company, think again.

French taxi monopolies are raging. And, being French, they were blockading the streets and setting fire to stuff to make their point.

The crosstown jog that this necessitated gave me time to consider their plight. For generations, theyve made a decent living charging high prices ferrying tourists and wealthy locals around the place, safe in the knowledge that a finite number of taxi licences means supply will always be limited versus demand.

Taxi drivers go on strike in Paris

Then, along comes the internet to totally disrupt that. Customers now have a choice of suppliers offering different services: space wagons, multiple child seats and the beck-and-call willing of David Hasselhoffs motor in Knight Rider, to name a few. Unfairly, they also dont face the high licence costs traditional cabbies pay.

At the moment, politicians are interfering to protect the monopoly. Boris Johnson has proposed absurd restrictions on Uber drivers which do little but inconvenience the public. France has passed anti-Uber rules too.

But its hard to see the worlds mayors holding back the inevitable progress of the internet for long.

Public demand for Uber is too great, their fondness for traditional cabs too small to be a vote winner for the lawmakers.

The market, in other words, will win. Going on strike is not the answer.

As my Parisian lunch companion shrugged when I arrived, late and puffing: Mon ami, why didnt you call an Uber?
R oyal Bank of Scotland, the taxpayer owned bank, will announce another loss for 2015 when it reports next month after it announced billions of pounds more of write-offs and charges.

This will be the eighth full-year loss in a row for the taxpayer-owned bank since the financial crisis blew up in 2008.

But the 6.7 billion of extra charges announced on Wednesday should make the Chancellors task of selling off the remaining 72.9% stake in RBS easier acording to analysts.

Chief executive Ross McEwan said: We are now clearly in phase two of cleaning up the bank and we will move into the third phase as a much fairer bank which provides decent returns to our shareholders. But the timing of share sells is in the hands of the Chancellor and his advisers at UK Financial Investments.

The Treasury sold a 5.4% stake in RBS last August at a loss. It sold shares at 330p against an average cost to the taxpayer of 500p. Today, the shares were down 10.7p at a three-year low of 250.2p.

"I am determined to put the issues of the past behind us and make sure RBS is a safer stronger bank."

McEwan said: I am determined to put the issues of the past behind us and make sure RBS is a safer stronger bank. We will continue to move further and faster in 2016 to clean up the bank and improve our core business.

The fresh charges include an extra $2.2 billion (1.5 billion) for mis-selling mortgage-backed securities to investors in the US.

This number is based on recent settlements by rival banks with the Federal Housing Finance Agency and takes the total set aside to 3.8 billion. It does not include any provision for leagl action against RBS by the Department of Justice or US Attorney General.

Another 500 million is being added the payment-protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling pot taking the total for that to 4.3 billion. McEwan said this was based on the recent moves by the Financial Conduct Authority to set a deadline for claims in 2018 and publicise the need for consumers to make claims before then.

Ross McEwan (Picture: Getty Images) / Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

RBS is also writing down 498 million of the value of its private banking business, which finance director Ewen Stevenson said had been under-managed and not profitable enough because of insufficient concentration on its core UK franchise.

On top of this the bank has agreed with the trustees of its pension fund, which is one of the biggest in the UK with 220,000 members, to accelerate extra payments to the fund through to 2023 into one lump sum of 4.2 billion this quarter.

McEwan said: Together these decisions provide greater clarity for shareholders and also show that we now have the financial strength to deal with these issues.

RBSs extra 500 million charge for PPI mis-selling was matched by Santander UK. The Spanish owned bank announced a 450 million increase in its provisions, which helped to push pre-tax profits 4% lower in 2015 to 1.34 billion.

UK banks could announce extra provisions for PPI totalling around 5 billion over the coming month taking the total bill for the scandal to some 32 billion.
R oyal Dutch Shells $47 billion (33 billion) takeover of BG was set for approval from its shareholders despite concerns from investors over the deal.

The deal - one of the sectors biggest ever - was poised to win approval at a specially-convened meeting in the Hague, even though some shareholders want the cash-and-share deal to be renegotiated to reflect the sharp decline in the oil price since it was struck.

Chief executive Ben van Beurden told the meeting that the deal would be a springboard to simplify Shell and that the merger would add to Shells cash flow at any price.

The tie-up would create the worlds biggest liquefield natural gas trader and give Shell much greater access to Brazils deepwater oil reserves.

Todays vote is seen as the last potential obstacle to a deal since the BG shareholder vote tomorrow is widely regarded as a shoo-in.

There will be a number of Shell shareholders against but I think it will probably go through, said Cavendish Asset Management senior investment manager Paul Mumford.

And on the BG side it looks a shoo-in. It looked a fair valuation at the time and it looks an even better valuation now. So theyll be saying thank you very much chum, well vote in favour of it, he added. Cavendish owns shares in both companies. In his Shell proxy vote Mumford moved to block the deal while as a BG investor he has backed it.

The oil price has tumbled from about $55 a barrel when the deal was agreed last April to $31 today.

Shell in April offered 0.4454 of its shares and 383p for each BG share, valuing the transaction at $70 billion and offering a 50% premium.

Downward pressure: Oil prices have tumbled to their lowest levels for more than a decade (Picture: Reuters) / Beawiharta/Reuters

As Shells shares have dropped with the price of oil the deals value has declined to $51 billion. But Shell says it is better off with BG rather than alone in a downturn, while in the longer term the acquisition puts it in a much stronger position.

The firm also sees opportunities to cut costs through the deal. In December it said it would cut 2,800 jobs from the combined group, if the deal goes ahead  on top of the 7,500 redundancies announced last July.
S hareholders in Shell have backed its $49 billion (34 billion) takeover of BG.

At a meeting in The Hague, 83% of the oil company's investors who voted did so in favour of the merger, which boss Ben van Beurden had earlier described as a "springboard to simplify Shell".

Commenting on the vote he said: "I am delighted with the positive shareholder vote and the confidence that shareholders have shown in the strategic logic of the combination of Shell and BG."

The result was widely expected despite concerns among some backers, including nineteenth largest shareholder Standard Life, which thought the deal would not work at current oil prices.

The oil price has tumbled from about $55 a barrel when the deal was agreed last April to $31 today.

Shell in April offered 0.4454 of its shares and 383p for each BG share, valuing the transaction at $70 billion and offering a 50% premium.

As Shells shares have dropped with the price of oil the deals value has declined to $51 billion. But Shell says it is better off with BG rather than alone in a downturn, while in the longer term the acquisition puts it in a much stronger position.

The firm also sees opportunities to cut costs through the deal. In December it said it would cut 2,800 jobs from the combined group, if the deal goes ahead  on top of the 7,500 redundancies announced last July

BG shareholders will vote on the deal on Thursday.
Y ou and I know how these things go. George Osborne was helping himself to a miniature pain aux raisins in a conference room in Davos when he noticed some of those cool Google guys chatting in the corner. Well, here goes nothing, he thought, sidling across. Who the beep are you? said the first dude, peering down at his nametag. Will 130 million magic beans make you go away? said the second, barely suppressing a snigger. Whereupon Osborne yelped and ran away to share the good news with the nation.

At least, thats how I imagine these things play out at the World Economic Forum. Who really knows? What is certain is that Osborne couldnt believe his good fortune. Weve got Google to pay tax and I think that is a huge step forward, he announced after securing 130 million from the internet giant to cover 10 years of back taxes.

For the millions of British taxpayers currently trying to remember their passcodes for the HMRC website, heres another chance to marvel at the contrast between our affairs and those of multinational companies. We get faceless bureaucracy. Firms such as Google  which made around 4 billion in the UK last year  get to dream up special discounts directly with HMRC.

Even Osbornes colleagues were unimpressed with the lack of transparency on this one. Boris Johnson called the payment derisory, while David Cameron declined to endorse the deal. The tax expert Richard Murphy calculates the real bill to be closer to 200 million each year and warns that this sets a low bar for future negotiations.

Its easy to point the finger at Google. Here is a company that proclaims how progressive it is but so often comes across as devious, calculated and unethical  to use Margaret Hodges memorable description. However, for it to behave otherwise would require an improbable moral epiphany among its executives. Googles only sacred duty, according to the laws of capitalism, is to provide a return for its shareholders.

Its easy to blame Osborne too  but we should be careful where we aim. Its not as if the Chancellor wants Google and friends to stitch him up; clearly, he wants as much revenue as possible. His Treasury colleague, David Gauke, reminds us the rules governing corporation tax date back to the Twenties so theres only so much they can do too.

But these meek protests only point to a wider failure of governance. The current logic at the World Economic Forum seems to be that markets produce better outcomes than states ever can, so the main role of politicians is to ensure that markets function efficiently. In theory, theyd like to intervene in the economy as little as possible. In practice, they intervene often (bailing out banks, tendering out contracts for public services, issuing fines) since markets are annoyingly prone to malfunction.

For this contract with the private interests to work , however, politicians need to have no illusions about who theyre dealing with. They must treat the Googles of this world with suspicion. They must regulate and overrule where necessary. And they need the courage and ingenuity to create new frameworks to hold them to account. Economist Mariana Mazzucato  who helpfully points out that Googles algorithm was funded by a US government grant, by the way  calls this the entrepreneurial state.

As it is, we have ministers driven by a sort of congenital naivety that almost welcomes private interests running rings around them. Its a logic that can only ever be self-defeating.

The Creme Egg cafe is an affront to taste and childhood memories

A suppurating sore has opened up on Greek Street. Yes, I refer to the Creme Egg cafe, a hideous orange and purple pop-up selling Creme Egg Toasties to credulous cutesters. The secondary purpose of the building will be clear to anyone who has kept half an eye on the fortunes of Cadbury since its hostile takeover by Kraft back in 2010. The American multinational immediately axed 400 jobs and has set about abominating the well-loved British company  and the nations childhood memories  ever since.

Last January the firm prompted outrage after altering the Creme Egg recipe, the latest in a series of disastrous revamps of its products. Cadbury recently posted its eighth consecutive decline in revenue.

So youd hope wed all be wise to the desperate PR exercise that this is  the final nail in Sohos coffin? Cracking! said Time Out. Egg-cellent news! said The Sun. Tickets sold out in hours.

Dont hate Kristen for wanting to act on Oscars prejudice

Kristen Stewart is the latest actor to feel the wrath of social media. In a video posted by Variety, she appeared to dismiss the Oscars diversity row as boring. Instead of sitting around and complaining about that, do something, go write something, she said. However, the editors at Variety appear to have missed the fact that she was talking about sexism, not racism, and hurried out the story without checking. Stewart was subject to the customary Two Minutes Hate before the mistake emerged.

There was an unhelpful assumption in some of the tweets that I read  an idea that everyone is racist, you just need to wait for them to drop their guard, and thats the issue rather than, say, the way film is financed. But when news outlets appear so eager to fan the flames, what hope nuance?

Such a vacant lot at City Hall

The Mayors office has produced an eye-catching interactive map to demonstrate how much public land is underexploited in London. The London Land Commission Register features some 40,000 sites that Boris Johnson reckons can be turned into 130,000 new homes. [For] far too long, land owned by public bodies has lain dormant or [been] sold off with no benefit to the capital, he says. [We] must build on the work done at City Hall in releasing land for development.

Curious, I clicked on three dormant sites in my area. One appears to be the extremely well-used Kurdish Community Centre. Another is Railway Fields, a scrubby triangle of land that local volunteers have turned into a childrens conservation area. And another appears to be South Harringay Infants school  or at least part of it.

Still, at least the Mayor is doing his bit. City Hall itself is included in the register, along with some useful supplementary information: Existing use  TBC.
W omen Ins views are misguided [Letters, January 25]. The group claims that our membership of the EU helps create jobs, but if this is the case why has the EU failed to create jobs in France, Portugal, Spain and Greece?

We have European nationals working here because the UK is the economic lifeboat for the EU  not because the EU creates jobs.

To answer Karren Brady, benefits such as paid maternity leave and rules on equal pay are issues that are not beyond the wit of our Government to bring in.

If we decide to leave, the world will not end. Trains will run, schools will stay open, there will be food and French wine in supermarkets and petrol in the garages.

The necessary administrative changes will go unnoticed and allow EU nationals to continue to work here and Britons to live on the Continent. But the overwhelming benefit of leaving the EU is not having to listen to Jean-Claude Juncker or David Cameron drone on about a Brexit any more. One can only imagine how good that will feel.

Angus Henderson

It was disappointing if unsurprising to see Women IN echoing so many superficial and worn-out arguments for the EU.

The EUs control over international trade policy prevents us from making our own deals with global partners. Countries outside the EU  from Norway to South Korea  trade with the single market freely and there is no reason to believe we would not do the same after a Brexit.

The social benefits the EU likes to take credit for, such as maternity leave, often come from global bodies such as the International Labour Organisation, and without Brussels curtailing our efforts we could engage with these more fully. As a businesswoman and mother, Im excited by the opportunities a Brexit would bring.

Liz Bilney, CEO, Leave.EU

While I think we should renegotiate the terms of our EU membership, especially the amount we pay to be a part of it, the main issues in the UK such as the housing crisis and public cuts have been caused directly by our Government, not the EU. Do we really think things are going to be that much different if we leave?

M Hannan

People should not be fooled by the claims that we are stronger in Europe as proclaimed by the chair of the Women IN campaign.

This group represents an elite who dont experience the issues this country faces while being run by Brussels  the hospital waiting lists, local schools being over-subscribed and lack of affordable housing. None of these things are applicable to this group of wealthy business people.

They are right, however, to say we cannot take risks with the future of our country, which is exactly why we should vote out.

Vanessa

Boris is failing us on the night Tube

Londoners will be deeply disappointed by this latest delay to the night Tube [Night Tube launch could be delayed until May, January 25], but they are unlikely to be surprised. Boris Johnsons attempt at a slapdash job has created setbacks from start to finish.

Businesses attempting to plan for the future, and the increased footfall the night Tube is likely to bring, have been left flailing in limbo. Tube staff, who have fought Boriss attempt to impose weekend working and antisocial hours with little consultation, remain unsure about their pay and hours. Meanwhile, ordinary people continue to await a service they were promised many moons ago.

To make matters worse, this latest delay comes in the same week we learned that TfL expects the night Tube to bring increases in crime, antisocial behaviour, noise complaints and illegal taxi touting.

The Mayors eagerness to rush out press releases on the night Tube hasnt been matched with an impetus to iron out the details that matter and to deliver on his promises.

Val Shawcross AM, Labours London Assembly Transport spokesperson

Visa plea just a call for cheap labour

The tech firms who are urging the Government to increase visas for overseas workers are being disingenuous [January 25]. This is clearly an attempt to mirror the situation in the US, where established employees have been asked to train their cheaper replacements before being sacked.

Also, there is a substantial pool of experienced but older workers who are not interviewed for Silicon Roundabout jobs because they lack the necessary strange haircuts and techno-babble. They may not be seen as dynamic or passionate but they are competent.

Dont be fooled  this debate is about maximising shareholder value and a lack of willingness to reskill, not a lack of workers.

Hugh Barnard

Poetry is a lifeline for troubled youths

Sam Leiths view that it is to sell poetry dreadfully short to treat it as a therapeutic tool is hurtful to those whom poetry has saved [Comment, January 18].

We see the positive effects poetry has on the young people we work with. Defencelessness is replaced with sparkling eyes as words are read and written without judgment or fear and forbidden subjects are discussed.

Furthermore, can you really say its a bloomer when a traumatised young person finds peace with themselves? Words such as these hinder our chances of solving the mental-health crisis.

Eleanor Carter, director, The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation

Bill spells the end of social housing

The Housing Bill will destroy social housing as we know it in the UK. The housing crisis already means thousands are stuck paying exorbitant rents for private rented housing and soon enough people in social housing will also face this. It also means tenants will pay more and have less security. Should elderly and disabled people be forced to re-apply and potentially risk losing their home every two to five years? The introduction of the Bill will only make the crisis worse, affecting the most vulnerable in society.

Jenny March
If there is any truth to the idea that a fashion collection reflects the state of mind of its designer, it seems John Galliano has found a happy place.

Unveiling his latest Artisanal collection for Maison Margiela in Paris this morning, Galliano brought joy on a damp January day with a showcase that celebrated the beauty that can be found in everyday things.

The result was bonkers but brilliantly so, with everything from bankers shirts to lipstick print riding boots to Ziggy stardust wigs added to the mix.

Taking this idea of turning humble gestures into works of art through the processes of haute couture and really running with it, the London reared designer unveiled a jacquard coat dress, worn with a Fair Isle knitted veil, and a navy satin bomber jacket, made special through entertwined pieces of luxurious panels of lame.

Francois Durand/Getty

The collection was heavy on references; disco boots worn with denim and lace cigarette pants and a flowing silk cape evoked memories of Bowie in the Seventies while the opening sequence of all-ivory ensembles which combined plisse silk and panels crafted from Korean paper suggested the designer had been exploring the idea of construction and 3D techniques.

Highlights came via a black calfskin coat, masterfully laser cut to give the impression of scales. A pionnering appraoch to tailoring which saw ordinary wardrobe staples slashed in half to create conceptual shapes also inspired.

While the notion of turning the mundane into the extraordinary is nothing new for the Margiela house which has long considered the practice as part of its DNA, it is new ground for Galliano whose heyday at Christian Dior is defined by otherworldly opulence.

Francois Durand/Getty

Gallianos decision to celebrate the codes and practices of the house which brought him back to the fashion fold following his breakdown and subsequent sacking from Dior, points to a change in tact.

Instead of being known for his ego, the man who once strutted his way down the catwalk at the close of his shows was hidden away backstage today. And undoubtedly, is flourishing at the Paris-based Belgian house which prefers its designers to have anoymity in order to let the clothes do the talking.

Following a week in Paris during which a change towards a more collective approach to luxury fashion design has become something of a talking point - notably with the entire Dior team taking a bow at the end of its catwalk show on Monday - Maison Margielas model has emerged as being ahead of its time.

Will the other big houses follow suit and allow their star designers to spend more time in the shadows?

Undoubtedly, when you see the wonders it has worked on John Galliano, it is a brave new dawn that's difficult to disregard.
A boat that carried people fleeing Syria to the Greek island of Lesvos will form the focal point of a fundraising concert supporting refugee charities.

The dinghy, which was made for 15 people but took 62 refugees from Turkey to Greece, is suspended in the nave of St Jamess Church in Piccadilly.

War artist Arabella Dorman created the installation, Flight, after she visited Lesvos last year to work with refugees, and salvaged the ruined boat and some lifejackets used on one crossing.

Afghan and Syrian musicians and artists, among others, will perform and give readings at the concert. Proceeds will go to Doctors of the World UK and The Starfish Foundation.

Associate Rector The Reverend Lindsay Meader said that Doctors of the World UK offered medical assistance to refugees in Calais. She added that Dorman had seen the work of the Starfish Foundation on Lesvos and felt that as a small charity they were particularly effective.

Flight: Songs Of Exile And Homecoming is at St Jamess Church, 197 Piccadilly, on Tuesday at 7.30pm. Tickets, for 20, are available on the door or at arabelladorman.com

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E ating mealworms and crocodile meat inside a 35-foot-high treehouse is not your average London staycation.

For one week the South Bank is hosting a safari-style hut  with an opportunity to win a one-night stay in it.

The Standard spent a night in the designer treehouse, which has a bedroom and lounge-diner and comes with a personal chef and waiter.

It has been built by Virgin Holidays to promote its Wonderlist breaks, which include the Lion Sands Game Reserve treehouses in South Africa.

Wild idea: Sophia Sleigh in the treehouse hut / Jeremy Selwyn

I arrived with thick pyjamas, woolly hat and blanket. The hut is perched on four trees at Observation Point, overhanging the river. But inside it was warm and beautifully decorated with a flatscreen TV and four-poster bed.

London-based South African designer Hubert Zandberg has introduced handcrafted furniture, tribal prints and natural materials. The bed has a mosquito net. Instead of the wild plains of Africa  the nearest big cats are in The Lion King across the river  guests enjoy views of the Thames and St Pauls.

Wild dining: chef Petrus Madutlela serves Standard reporter Sophia Sleigh her meal, which included worms Nigel Howard / Nigel Howard

The six-course menu can resemble a bushtucker trial, featuring ostrich biltong, goat fillet, braised terrine of crocodile and a soup with pickled mealworms. The mealworms tasted like walnuts, the crocodile a cross between ham hock and fish. It was delicious.

The menu is by ex-MasterChef contestant Petrus Madutlela, co-owner of The Poet restaurant in Tunbridge Wells. He said: A piece of Africa just moved here. South Africa has some of the worlds greatest ingredients.

Home comforts: the bedroom at the tree house Nigel Howard / Nigel Howard

Like the savannah, the South Bank has noises at night, in this case drunks and boats. The structure wobbled with the wind, but sleep came with the distant roar of traffic.

The treehouse will be dismantled on Friday and is open to visit between 11am and 6pm. To win an overnight stay visit virginholidays.co.uk/dreambigger

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R emember the TNT in Looney Tunes, that yellow flame crawling up the fuse, spelling the (temporary) end for Wile E Coyote? Oh, happy days of unthinking violence. Now transpose that memory to a cocktail bar in Brixton, where youre anxiously watching an all-too-real flame sprint up a piece of string to a highly flammable glass of ethanol-laced juice. Way to ruin your childhood. Flaming, theatrical cocktails are having a moment in London, and its a moment that youre not going to forget in a hurry.

The first time I tried the Mission Impossible at the Shrub and Shutter (336 Coldharbour Lane, SW9, theshrubandshutter.com) I ended up on fire. Not properly on fire  but theres a significant patch of arm hair which looks to be gone for good.

Yeah, Dave has a tendency to do that, says Chris Edwards, co-founder of the Brixton cocktail bar with fellow pyromaniac Dave Treganza. The pair decided when they opened the Shrub at the wrong end of Coldharbour Lane that we needed something to draw people down here because its a bit off the beaten track. Perhaps they should advertise their complimentary hair-removal service? Especially as the Mission Impossible isnt their only flaming cocktail. Chris ensures at least a third of the menu has a bit of play to it, so its not just a basic drink.

Hence the Goonies (a bucketload of rum topped with an eternal flame, thanks to a slug of 80 proof vodka in a hollowed-out fig) and the Sazerac to the Future, in which (don your fireproof suit) two lines of fire snake up the table before exploding over your whisky-absinthe-armagnac cocktail  in a deeply Instagram-friendly way.

Just add cake: Nightjars rum cocktail

Because of course, like a towering triple bacon doughnut burger, over-the-top drinks make for great social media. After all, whos going to retweet a picture of a boring old Martini, however perfectly made? But that might just be the problem with all these weird and wonderful pyrotechnics  the gunpowder and fireworks could be a smokescreen for poor-quality ingredients and shoddily made, over-sweetened drinks.

But even traditionalists would accept flames licking from one place: the Zombie. In case youve never been introduced to this monster (or you dont remember), its basically rum, plus rum, plus rum, plus juice, set on fire. God help us.

Mexican-themed bar Barrio (various locations, welovebarrio.com) has long been firing up the blowtorch for its five-rum version in a Mexican wrestling mask mug. Its uncompromisingly designed for the laughs and lash rather than taste or pleasant experience (so dont expect to get anywhere near the bar at happy hour). In an attempt to redeem what is essentially a get smashed drink, Shoreditch speakeasy Nightjar (129 City Road, EC1, barnightjar.com) adds a rather cute twist by lighting a piece of rum-soaked cake on top (like thats going to save your hangover).

Gabriele Manfredi, formerly of Artesian and Nightjar, now playing with fire at new Smithfield site Oriole, reckons flame is a great advertising tool. Many of our customers will see a cocktail on fire on the table next to them and then order that drink without even reading the ingredients, he says.

A touch of subtley: the Big Smoke at Bo Drake

For a touch more subtlety in your drink, go for the smoke without the fire. Smoking infuses the booze in a flash: in the Big Smoke at Bo Drake (6 Greek Street, W1, bodrake.co.uk), Sou Hakushu whisky, vermouth and bamboo syrup are mixed in a glass bottle, filled with hickory smoke then sealed to infuse for three minutes before being poured over ice. Cue a big puff of barbecue-flavoured smoke. Yes, its the sort of gimmick that will have purists screaming for a manhattan, but as head barman Darren says, you cant deny the theatre that it brings to the table.

Something a little more understated is at play over at 69 Colebrooke Row (69 Colebrooke Row, N1, 69colebrookrow.com) where award-winning molecular mixologist Tony Conigliaro is respectfully wary of messing with the classics: I like to keep it to a minimum; we might have one speciality cocktail, maximum.

So whip out your ouija board: that one speciality cocktail is the Santeria: Rooibos tea-infused rum and Lapsang syrup, all served in a voodoo incense smoked glass. Yep. voodoo. The drink, says Conigliaro, pulls on the emotive power of scent. Whether or not it sparks Proustian-type flashbacks, the smell (boozy bonfire night) and taste (vanilla, tobacco, RUM) is dangerously good enough to ensure you wont end up with many memories the next morning. Which is just as well if that Daves burnt your arm off.

@franklymccoy

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T he former Dragons' Den star accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl today told the Old Bailey about his secret addiction to dominance and submission sex play.

Douglas Richard, 57, said he had joined the Seeking Arrangements website four years ago to find women interested in sexual role playing and fantasies.

Since then he engaged in chats almost every day and met up with such women up to twice a month to see if they wanted to take it further.

Its secret, its infidelity, cheating on my wife, its keeping it secret, said the father-of-three, who was also an advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron.

Yes, it bothers me but I was quite addicted to it so I continued on.

Richard told the jury he wanted to meet the alleged victim "to do what we wanted to which was our 50 Shades of Grey role play between us."

Richard, of Islington, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of sexual activity with a child, and further charges of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and paying a child under 18 for sexual services.

He denies that he failed to take reasonable steps to ensure that the alleged victim, who cannot be named because of her age, was at least 16 years old.

Richard told the jury he felt terrible about having had sex with a child and is seeking medical help for his sex addiction.

I feel terrible for her and for myself and in particular for my wife and children knowing. I would never have had anything to do with her [the alleged victim] if I had known that she was under 16, he said.

I would never have had sex with a child, I would never knowingly have sex with somebody under age.

He added: I have been to see a psychiatrist and undergone therapy to deal with my addiction.

The impact of his arrest has also wrecked his business loans initiative called School For Startups, he said.

In the last year, since I was arrested, the company is near bankrupcy. I have laid off 99 per cent of the staff - basically nobody will deal with us. My reputation has been shattered and with it StartUps, he said.

The court previously heard that the girl and Richard had met on the online site and that he paid for her and her friend to come to London from Norwich to meet him.

He paid 149 for an apartment in Bishopsgate where he spanked her and had sex in January last year, the jury has been told.

Richard said that the site drew women who were at least 18 and mostly in their 20s.

In chats, the alleged victim had told him she was a 17-year-old college student who was 5ft 4ins tall and weighed seven stone.

But the court heard she was only just over five foot tall and weighed less than six stone.

The case continues
A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of murder after 21-year-old David Darko was stabbed to death in a south London park.

Scotland Yard said a 19-year-old man was arrested by detectives on Tuesday and remains in police custody.

On Saturday, officers were called to South Norwood Recreational Ground where the victim was reported unresponsive.

He was found suffering from a stab wound and was pronounced dead an hour after police arrived.

Mr Darko had just recently celebrated his 21st birthday and was described by his aunt as a wonderful boy.

She said: He had lots of friends and was much loved. We are all too sad to speak much at the moment.

Detectives from the homicide and major crime command led by Detective Inspector David Reid are investigating.

Anyone with information should contact police on 020 8721 4054 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
A pervert who used his phone to film women in the toilets at the Winter Wonderland attraction in Hyde Park has been spared jail.

Dutchman Tim Bastiaans, 26, hid in a cubicle for at least 20 minutes while working at the Christmas attraction, Westminster Magistrates' Court heard.

He had already recorded one woman, who was oblivious to the hidden camera, by the time a second victim caught him in the act on November 28.

She spotted the phone near a gap on the floor, knocked on the door and discovered Bastiaans, who tried to flee but was caught by her friend.

They seized his Dutch identity card and took photographs of him before alerting the police.

The woman, who said she was distressed and embarrassed by the filming, had originally thought it was her friend messing around only to find a man in the cubicle next door.

Prosecutor Zahid Hussain told the court: "It seems he was there for at least 20 minutes waiting for unsuspecting females in the cubicles, waiting so that he could film them on his smartphone."

She said a search of his web browsing history showed that "on one day alone he had viewed over 100 pornographic sites" that were related to voyeurism.

Bastiaans, who admitted voyeurism and attempted voyeurism, was sentenced to 12 weeks jail for each offence to run concurrently. The sentence was suspended for two years.
D avid Cameron came under fire today for describing people in The Jungle camp in Calais as a bunch of migrants.

The Refugee Council said Mr Camerons comments were disappointing while Labour called them disgraceful.

Critics said his words were particularly inappropriate on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Several MPs believed the Tory leader was deliberately controversial in his choice of words to draw attention to Jeremy Corbyns offer to give homes in the UK to 3,000 people at the camp in France.

The row erupted after Mr Cameron mocked Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Ministers Questions, accusing him of caving in to the unions over strike laws and to Argentina over the Falklands. He went on: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain.

Mr Corbyn, who visited The Jungle last weekend, did not respond, but later a senior Labour source said: The people we saw at Calais and Dunkirk over the weekend were families, kids, babies... to consider those people we saw as a bunch of migrants demonstrates an attitude that is entirely unacceptable to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep.

Desperate: migrants at the Calais camp which is known as the jungle / Getty

Lisa Doyle, the Refugee Councils head of advocacy said: When we are facing the greatest refugee crisis of our time, it is disappointing the Prime Minister is using flippant remarks to score political points.

We have all seen the pictures of the desperate conditions people are living in across Europe, including just miles from the UKs border. The Prime Minister should be showing political leadership and work with other European countries to ensure that people can live in safety and dignity.

MPs were queuing up to condemn the bunch of migrants remark.

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: On Holocaust Memorial Day, the Prime Minister chose to refer to desperate refugees fleeing from war as a bunch of migrants, a statement which diminishes his office and our country.

Whether Mr Cameron planned to use this phrase in advance or whether it was an off the cuff throw away remark it shows his true attitude towards those most in need.

Comedian David Baddiel also expressed concern, writing: Not the right day #HolocaustMemorialDay for the bunch of migrants thing.

Former shadow cabinet minister Chuka Umunna said the comment was shameful and criticised the language as inflammatory and unbecoming of his office.

Yvette Cooper, who is leading Labours refugee task force, suggested the PM should use much more statesmanship-like language on such a complex and sensitive issue.

Business minister Anna Soubry said she would not necessarily have used the term bunch of migrants, and she was sure the PM meant to say group.

I think what everybody forgets is that in the heat of things one says things that you might say in a conversation, by way of example, but you wouldnt necessarily say when it was analysed and picked apart, she told BBC Radio 4s World At One.

On the one hand people say, Oh God, all politicians they sound the same, they sound like theyve been schooled and they are trotting out the lines.

But actually when they dont, and actually use the language of ordinary people they get slammed and criticised.

I will not criticise the PM on this one because I know that when youre standing at the despatch box ... and you have all the noise and the row around you it is very easy to use a word which on reflection may not be the best way.

I am sure he meant to say a group, but we all use slang.

She added: I would be amazed if that was a scripted line. I dont believe that for one moment. If anybody says that they are being silly and playing cheap politics.

Asked whether Mr Cameron thought his choice of words was acceptable, a senior Downing Street source said: The Prime Minister thinks that the key thing here is to get the policies right, and I think thats what the people of Britain are concerned about.

The policy we are proceeding with is to give nearly 1.2 billion to support people who have been forced from their homes by the Syrian conflict with shelter and food, and also to take refugees from the region rather than providing an incentive for people to make that dangerous journey.
F ormer pupils who were against Damian Lewis opening the anniversary celebrations of a north London comprehensive school had missed the point, he said at the event.

The Homeland and Wolf Hall actor instead heaped praise on the "creativity" and "diversity" of Acland Burghley School in Tufnell Park, which hosted a 50th anniversary celebration on Wednesday.

About 100 people had signed a petition against the Eton-educated actors role as guest of honour, saying he represented "privilege and inequality" and was not appropriate given the school's "long and proud tradition in comprehensive education".

The campaigners felt someone who attended the school over the past five decades  former pupils include musicians Eddy Grant and Ms Dynamite  should have been chosen instead.

Standing next to headteacher Nicholas John and Lucy Amis, the daughter of the school's architect Stanley Amis, Lewis joked that he was the "best available" and apologised to those hoping to see the notable former students, who also include Madness saxophonist Lee Thompson.

He said: "For those people out there who suggested by kindly writing into the newspapers this morning that perhaps I shouldn't be here at all because I wasn't at the school, what I would say to them is I think they are missing the point slightly because it seems to me that this evening is about more than that.

"It seems to me that this evening is about a celebration of our community here in Tufnell Park and he role the school has played here in Tufnell Park in the last 50 years."

Lewis, whose wife Helen McCrory stood in the audience as he addressed a crowd of approximately 450 before starting a countdown to a laser show, said he had lived in the area for 10 years.

He said: "It strikes me every time I walk down the street that there is more creativity, independence and support in this neighbourhood than any other neighbourhood I have lived in in London.

The actor flicked the switch for a laser light display PA / PA

"That is of course exactly the qualities they teach the students here at Acland Burghley.

"It's central to its ethos, and why it has been such a success and why it has been recognised as special status in performing arts and creative studies."

He added that he was lucky to benefit from a "thriving creative community" at Eton and that schools were more successful if they excelled in the arts.

Speaking from notes he concluded: "I share with you the hope that Acland Burghley can continue to grow and be a beacon of curiosity, independence, creativity and diversity right here in the heart of Tufnell Park."

While many parents and students celebrated his appearance as an "inspiration" - including 13-year-old Louie Cooper who jumped into a picture with the actor, some disagreed.

Rachel Cohen, 44, attended the school between 1982 and 1989 and started the petition which had garnered 100 signatures before the event.

She said: "It's really just about how do you celebrate the anniversary of a really good comprehensive school that has always taken a very radical and socially progressive attitude towards education and been very committed to inclusive education within the community and arts being very central to that."

But she insisted it was not a personal protest against Lewis and she hoped he would become more involved in the school in the future.

Headeacher Mr John, who joined the school in September, is hoping the start of the celebrations will help him to raise money to improve some of the half-century old buildings.

He said he wanted to the school to focus on improving its academic standards and continue excelling in the arts and engagement with the community.

"The fact that he is an actor involved in the community is great," he said about Lewis.

"It's about community and creativity."

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
A tumbledown Victorian villa with no planning permission has gone on the market for an eye-watering 22.5 million.

The ten-bedroom Kenmore House, which has vegetation growing through its boarded-up windows, is even described as dilapidated by the estate agents.

But given its prime location in the exclusive Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, they are confident of finding a buyer keen to snap up the 1.7-acre plot.

The house has lain empty for more than a decade and planning permission for an extension and partial rebuild to include a 30,000sq ft superhome elapsed last year.

The sign on the entrance gate to the house / Nigel Howard

In its sales brochure, Mann Smith states: From initial conversations with Barnet planning department there is potential to develop a scheme of luxury apartments incorporating part of the existing building.

However, interested parties are required to make their own enquiries. A subject to planning deal will be considered.

The house for sale is opposite Heath Hall  once put on the market for 100million making it Britains most expensive home.

The 14-bed trophy home was finally sold last year for a knock-down 25million - but is predicted to be worth at least twice that when it has been redeveloped.

The house has been empty for more than a decade

In 2014, there were 16 derelict properties on the street with an estimated worth of 350 million.

Richard Wiseman, chairman of Hampstead Garden Suburb residents association, told the Standard: It is not your normal street.

Many of the homes are empty or are being knocked down and rebuilt. So it looks like a building site a lot of the time but there is a prestige to the place which attracts people.

Saudi Arabias royal family are said to own 10 properties in the road, with other billionaire neighbours including the Sultan of Brunei and Britains richest man, Lakshmi Mittal.

Lulu, Ringo Starr, Sting, George Michael and Annie Lennox are among the famous former residents.

Local estate agent Trevor Abrahamson once described the road as a significant demonstration of status, adding: If you live there, you dont need to explain to people that youre rich.
A south London high street was blocked off by police after four men collapsed and started "fitting" in the street.

A spokesman for the Met said officers were called at about 3pm to reports of four people slumped on the ground, in the middle of Adam's Walk, an alley off Eden Street in Kingston town centre.

The men, said to be known to police, were feared to have shared a dodgy batch of drugs.

They were treated at the scene before three were taken to hospital.

A Met spokesman said: A member of the public called us saying four males were on the floor fitting.

LAS and police in Kingston on Wednesday afternoon Jason Reynolds / Jason Reynolds

It is believed they shared some sort of drug and the drug has obviously been bad or dodgy, and all four have collapsed and started fitting.

Three are being treated on the scene and one has gone to hospital.

Adam's Walk remains closed although Eden Street is now open, after being blocked off by the large numbers of emergency vehicles filling the area.

Witness David Stewart, 49, a sports journalist, said: "There was a huge police and ambulance presence.

"I saw one of the guys be loaded into an ambulance. He looked sedated and the ambulance stayed with him for about 25 minutes, and then shot off to hospital at high speed."

The extent of the injuries was not immediately clear, although one of the men was said to be "more seriously" injured than the others.

They were thought to be in their mid or late 30s.

A spokesman for LAS said: "We were called at 2.58pm to reports of an incident involving men on Adam's Walk, Kingston.

Our crew were on scene within two minutes.

We took two men to Kingston hospital and one to St Georges as a priority.
E nough people to fill three double decker buses were rescued from the River Thames last year, new figures show.

RNLI crews from Londons three lifeboat stations - Tower, Chiswick and Teddington  were launched a total 770 times in 2015 and rescued 245 people.

Across callouts to the three stations, 19 people pulled from the Thames would have died if it was not for the work of the lifeboat crews.

Adam Robson, Londons RNLI community incident reduction manager, said: To think that 19 people would have died in London last year if it wasnt for our lifeboat crews is a sobering thought, but it is one our charitys volunteers, fundraisers, crews and supporters should be proud of.

Plunging into the icy cold waters of the River Thames can cripple even the young and fit.

Cold water shock can take control in seconds causing uncontrollable gasping which draws water into the lungs and makes it almost impossible to swim, or even stay afloat.

The latest figures from the RNLI also show Tower and Chiswick stations were the busiest in the UK throughout last year.

Crews at Tower lifeboat station, next to Waterloo Bridge, were launched 465 times, rescued 90 people and saved 15 lives.

Chiswick lifeboat station, the second busiest in the UK, were called upon 227 times and rescued 135, with three lives saved.

Further along the Thames, volunteer crew members at Teddington lifeboat station were launched 78 times, rescued 20 people and saved one life.

Mr Robson added: The River Thames is used safely by thousands of people every day but people need to respect the water or it will catch you out in seconds.

Slips, trips or falls can happen all too easily especially if youve been drinking.

If you fall in to the rivers fast flowing water, even if youre a strong swimmer, the current will beat you.
A man in a wheelchair has been rushed to hospital with a serious head injury after being hit by a lorry in a south London street.

Police, paramedics and the London Air Ambulance were called to Borough Road, near the junction with Library Street, in Southwark at 8.12am to reports of a collision involving a lorry and a pedestrian.

A police spokesman said the pedestrian was in a wheelchair, despite initial witness reports suggesting a cyclist was involved.

A London Ambulance Service spokesman said a man was treated for a head injury before he was taken to King's College Hospital as a "priority".

@TfLTrafficNews - please avoid St Georges Circus area of SE1 as BOROUGH ROAD closed in both directions while officers deal with RTC.  MPS Southwark (@MPSSouthwark) January 27, 2016

Police have advised motorists to avoid the St George's Circus area after Borough Road was closed in both directions while emergency services deal with the collision.
Z ac Goldsmith launched his business manifesto today with a promise to create a chief digital officer at City Hall to help solve some of Londons biggest challenges.

The Tory mayoral candidate said he would set up a New York-style office of data analytics, which would look at statistics from across the City Hall empire to address crime, housing, transport and quality-of -life issues.

He would also launch an annual 1 million Mayors Tech Challenge to encourage businesses to come up with innovative ideas. Suggestions included a rental app which cuts out estate agents, saving landlords and tenants hundreds of pounds in fees, as well as releasing data to help construction companies cut freight traffic.

Mr Goldsmiths wide-ranging plans for London businesses include setting up a new Business Advisory Group, with members nominated by the business community.

He said he would also use TfLs 560km network of railway routes, tunnels and bridges to rapidly deliver superfast broadband. He would insist the Government responds on Heathrow expansion in the summer as promised, would increase funding for promoting London and boost the capitals image himself, including abroad.

Start-ups would be helped by cutting red tape, with affordable office space in all new developments, and putting adult skills funding into key areas like engineering, science and financial services, with firms able to import talent from overseas if needed. He says he will lobby to ensure 30 hours of promised free childcare reflects the cost of nurseries in London.

Labours Sadiq Khan has pledged to be the most pro-business mayor ever, but Mr Goldsmith said only a Conservative mayor can guarantee growth and stability.
T he grandparents of a severely disabled teenager won a victory today when three senior judges branded the Governments bedroom tax as discriminatory.

Paul Rutherford said he could almost cry with happiness after the ruling that the policy was unfair because grandson Warren needed an extra room for night care. The Court of Appeal also upheld a challenge by a victim of domestic violence, who had a panic room for protection from an abusive former partner who threatened to kill her.

The findings open the door for more people with disabilities or special needs to challenge the bedroom tax, which cuts housing benefit for claimants who have spare rooms. The Government brought it in to try to save about 480 million a year by getting claimants to move into smaller properties.

Mr Rutherford and wife Sue, of Clunderwen, Pembrokeshire, argued it un-lawfully discriminates against seriously disabled children. Warren has a rare genetic disorder which means he cannot walk, talk or feed himself, and is incontinent. His three-bedroom bungalow is adapted for his needs with grandparents living in one room, he in another, and the third for carers staying overnight and for storing equipment.

David Cameron defends bedroom tax despite court ruling it unlawful

Mr Rutherford said: Im a bit lost for words. I could almost cry with happiness. Other people are going to benefit from this decision as well. That was partly why we did it. The other case was brought by A, a single mother living in a three-bedroom council house fitted with a secure panic room.

The judges heard her ex-partner had raped, assaulted and threatened to kill her, but she faced losing 11.65 a week in benefits because her home was deemed underoccupied. She argued that the policy discriminated against women in danger. Her solicitor Rebekah Carrier said: These changes have had a catastrophic impact. Our clients life is at risk and she is terrified.

TODO: define component type brightcove

Jeremy Corbyn called the bedroom tax a cruel and unjust policy. David Cameron said Labours vow to scrap it would cost taxpayers 2.5 billion. Ministers have said they will appeal against the ruling. The case will now go to the Supreme Court.
B ritain's tax deal with Google was today branded very bad by a European fiscal chief who urged George Osborne to appear before an EU committee to be grilled over it.

Eva Joly, vice-chairwoman of the Special European Parliamentary Committee on Tax Rulings, claimed the agreement showed the UK was ready to become a kind of tax haven to attract multinationals.

She spoke out after the spotlight shifted onto Facebooks corporate tax affairs in the UK following the storm over Googles deal to pay 130 million for a 10-year period after an investigation by Revenue and Customs.

French Green MEP Ms Joly told BBC radio: This bad deal is also very bad news for everybody because it shows that the UK prepare itself to become a kind of a tax haven to attract multinationals.

She called on the Chancellor and Googles boss to give evidence to her committee and demanded that such tax agreements be made public.

Ms Joly claimed the Google deal amounted to a tax rate of less than three per cent. Ministers dispute this, saying that the corporate levy is not on overall profits, but on economic activity and assets in a country.

A Treasury spokesman said: This Government has been leading the effort to ensure that major multinational companies pay tax where it is owed.

So this settlement, and the fact that Google has said they will pay more tax in the UK as a result of the changes introduced by this Government, is a positive step.

But David Cameron and Mr Osborne also faced questions over their links to the internet giant, including a series of meetings with executives. Googles executive chairman Eric Schmidt served on Mr Camerons business advisory board until July.

Steve Hilton, a former No 10 adviser whose wife Rachel Whetstone used to work for Google, did not want to comment on the deal, saying the firm had insisted it abided by the law.

But he warned of a growing sense that companies are so big and so dominant, not just in the market place but in the way they relate to governments, in their lobbying efforts and so on, that they really are above the law.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell urged the National Audit Office to investigate the shabby tax deal.

We cant have mates rates when it comes to taxes, but thats what Osbornes cosy deals are offering to giant firms, he said. And rumour has it that similar deals could be offered to Facebook and Amazon.

Amazon, Google and Facebook have denied any wrongdoing over their UK tax obligations.
V eteran crime reporter John Stevens, who covered some of the biggest stories of the 20th century including the Great Train Robbery, has died aged 86.

He reported for the Standard for nearly 30 years until 1991 and was respected by colleagues and police officers alike. As well as the Great Train Robbery, Stevens covered the period of the Kray twins and the IRAs bombing campaign of the Seventies.

Steve, as he was universally known, was one of the old school of journalists, proud to call himself a reporter, never a journalist and certainly not a writer. A reporter, my dear fellow, and the best job in newspapers, he always said.

Small, stout and with a slightly lop-sided handlebar moustache, he will be remembered for his warmth, his mischievous twinkle and with a pint pot in his right hand. Philip Evans, a former Standard executive, said: John had such good contacts we often arrived at the scene of the bombs almost at the same time as the police. We would have a motorcycle with a reporter and a photographer standing by ready to go every night. John was one of the last old- fashioned crime correspondents at a time when murder was a big thing. 

Former Standard news editor Stephen Clackson added: Steve wrote with the unvarnished brevity that was common in the Fifties and Sixties. He was highly respected at the Yard.

His funeral will take place on February 9 at the South West Middlesex Crematorium, Hanworth.
P olice are searching for a nine-week-old puppy stolen during a burglary in Essex.

A white Maltese terrier named Pickle was stolen from a property in West Horndon, Essex, on Monday.

Essex Police released the appeal for Pickle after the puppy was stolen from the kitchen of the house, leaving behind the owners other dog, a three-year-old Maltese Terrier.

A Range Rover also stolen in the incident has since been located in Luton, but Pickle is still missing, Police confirmed.

Owner Adele Rowley said: "I've only had Pickle a week but have grown really attached to her. My other dog is missing her too - her tail has been down since she was taken.

"I just can't understand why someone would take Pickle and need to know she is being fed and looked after.

"Please help share our appeal and if you know anything, please do the right thing and call the police."

Anyone with information is asked to call Pc Paul Burnett at Brentwood police station on 101.
A teenager hoping to travel from Sheffield to Essex decided to fly via Berlin  because it was 8 cheaper than taking the train.

Extreme bargain-hunter Jordon Cox, 18, added more than 1,000 miles to his journey to make the modest saving.

He said a direct train would have cost 47 while two Ryanair flights from East Midlands Airport to London Stansted via the German city were less than half the price, at 21.37.

Adding in costs for food and bus fares for a whistle-stop sightseeing tour in the centre of Berlin, the teenager said he still saved a total of 7.72.

Jordon revealed his cost-cutting adventure on a blog he writes for the Money Saving Expert website.

He wrote: I always go the extra mile to save money, but last week I went the extra 1,017 miles and saved 7.72 by getting back to Essex from Sheffield via Berlin  I even had enough Euros spare for a currywurst sausage by the Brandenburg Gate Wunderbar!"

The teenager conceded that his method was not exactly environmentally friendly, but said the trip earned him a free mini holiday in a city he had longed to visit.

He said he made the trip as he was teaching a class on the use of coupons to save money in Sheffield and baulked at the cost of a one-way ticket back to Essex.

The teenager  who calls himself The Coupon Kid  claims to have previously bought a 600 food shop for just 4p after spending months saving up vouchers.

He added: Even by my usual standards, Ill admit this is a rather extreme way of saving money."
T he organisers of carnivals in Cologne and Bonn next week are handing out rules for participants to obey after the mass sexual assaults by immigrants against hundreds of women on New Years Eve.

Printed in several languages including German and Arabic, the flyers in Bonn read: People dress up to celebrate, sing and dance together. In the carnival time everyone must deal respectfully with one another and observe the laws.

Butzen  that means kisses on the cheeks. Sexual approaches are not allowed! Women and men must always be in agreement. No means no!

A massive police presence, both uniformed and undercover, will be deployed during carnival to try to ensure there is no repeat of the attacks carried out in several German cities on New Years Eve.

The number of complaints of sexual assault in and around the main station in Cologne that night now stands at more than 820.

Carnival is bigger than New Year in the Rhineland where cities such as Bonn, Cologne and Dusseldorf hold a week of parades, dances and fetes. A million people are expected on the streets of Dusseldorf on Monday.

In Bonn, carnival chief Christoph Arnold went with representatives of the police and local integration commissioner Colette Manemann to a refugee home to hand out the leaflets  which welcome migrants to the celebrations provided they behave themselves.

The flyers warn: Swaying to the music also happens during the carnival. For many people drinks and alcohol are part of the carnival celebrations. Please  only in moderation! Urinating in public is forbidden!

In Cologne, one point raised on its leaflets is about alcohol, which Muslims are not supposed to consume.

It reads: Many in Cologne will be drinking beer or other alcoholic beverages at carnival time, but of course there is no obligation to do so. Having fun, singing and dancing can all be done as well without alcohol.

Colognes flyers are also in Arabic. One 19-year-old Syrian called Noble, who has been in Germany for four months, confessed to being bemused by the celebrations. It is not something from my home. People drink alcohol, dress up  this is all very strange, he said.
P olice arrested the leader of an armed militia which has occupied a wildlife refuge in Oregon after a shoot-out in which one person was killed.

Ammon Bundy and four others who had occupied the refuge this month were arrested after temporarily leaving the site.

The group had taken over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon in protest of the jailing of two ranchers who set fire to federal land.

The FBI said in a statement that Mr Bundy, 40, was arrested on a highway along with his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Bryan Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Walen Payne, 32.

Two other activists connected to the group, Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50, were later arrested in Burns, Oregon.

The person who was killed in a shoot-out with officers has not been officially identified but local media reports named him as Robert LaVoy Finicum, a spokesman for the group.

Each of the defendants faces a charge of conspiracy to impede police from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats, the FBI said.

Mr Bundy was on his way to a community meeting in John Day, Oregon, where he was scheduled to be a guest speaker, when officers stopped his car.

The militia group occupied the refuge on 2 January to protest against the imprisonment of two ranchers in rural Harney County.

Dwight and Steven Hammond had set fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006 apparently to clear invasive plants and protect their land from wildfires. They were jailed for four years.

Meanwhile, two people have been killed and three others wounded in a shooting at a homeless encampment in Seattle.

Shots were fired yesterday evening in an area known locally as The Jungle. A man and woman were killed and three others hospiatlised with injuries.
The scam is back, that was the message in a Nebraska Public Power District release Tuesday.

Over the last year, NPPD has issued several press releases, calling attention to a scam in which a caller contacts business owners and residents, falsely claiming that the company is going to shut off electricity unless the customer pays using a pre-paid Greendot card.

The caller insists on urgency  the customer has to pay the bill within 20 minutes or be disconnected. I dont think it takes much for any one of us to imagine the other emotions that the scammers take advantage of  embarrassment that we might have forgotten a bill, panic because none of us want to have our electricity cut off and confusion. Mix all those emotions at once and Im sure that the scammers have been successful at times.

In its press release, NPPD reminds customers:

NPPD does not do business this way, said NPPDs Customer Care Business Manager Robyn Tweedy. If a customer is overdue on their electric bill and subject to disconnection, it will be printed on their monthly bill with instructions on what they can do to settle the account. They should call the number printed on the bill, NOT the phone number of the individual making the phone request.

Customers who receive such a call should not attempt to make any payment. Instead contact local law enforcement and NPPDs Centralized Customer Care Center at 1-877-ASK-NPPD (877-275-6773) to report the request and provide the call-back number. If an individual or business not served by NPPD receives a call demanding payment on their electric bill, they are encouraged to contact their local electric provider to check on their account before making any attempt to pay.

We get several reports a year of scams and during my years reporting, Ive seen a few people taken advantage of by scams. Many of the scams reported to us are known scams  Nigerian scams where people are promised large amounts of money, IRS scams that threaten callers that they will be arrested, scams that you have won big  if you just send hundreds or thousands of dollars to claim your prize. NPPD has posted a video concerning the scam affecting the company that can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azpRmjS0hT8&feature=youtu.be.

As in the NPPD scam, all of these scams take advantage of our emotions so that we act quickly. Sometimes, as was the case with one woman who called me, people think fast enough to get themselves out of trouble by canceling a credit card or other step.

You can take steps to protect yourselves against scams.

In my experience, the number one piece of advice: Stop. Just stop whatever you are doing, pause and think about whatever the caller is saying to you. In many instances, people will tell me, the demands or the claims of the callers dont make any sense to them or they go against what they know about the companys normal procedures. If you stop, pause and think, youre less likely to get scammed.

Tell the caller that you will find your bill, or the company phone number, and call them back. Most of the time, youre going to hear a dial tone, in my experience.

If a call comes from a company that you have no prior knowledge of, I always advise stopping and doing some research on the company. A simple Google search may be all that you need as a large amount of information exists online about scams. Over the summer, my daughter had a friend who lost a significant part of her savings when a person unknown to her offered her a job. Shed been looking for a job and didnt think much of the offer. As soon as my daughter told me about the fantasy job, I knew it was a scam. I Googled the name of the company she had told me about and told her to warn her friend. In just a short amount of time, her friends account had been cleaned out and then some. She was left with hundreds of dollars of overdrawn account fees to her account. My daughter and her friend learned a valuable lesson  you cant trust that people are who they say they are.

And, that takes us to the best warning sign of a scam  If its too good to be true, it probably is. My daughters job seeking friend could not believe her luck and it did sound like a sweet job, which was one of the tip offs for me. We all want that dream job. We arent getting it at 21 without a little bit of work.

Our elderly people are most likely to be scammed. Its amazing how many scams prey on our grandmas, our grandpas, our elderly parents. If you have an elderly relative, take a moment to talk to them about scams, especially if you hear of one circulating in your area. Ask on occasion if they need any support and lend a helping hand. If you know or care for an older adult, warning signs that they may be have been scammed including atypical withdrawals, new persons added to or using a seniors ATM or credit card, unpaid bills and even piling up of sweepstakes mailings, magazine subscriptions or free gifts that may indicate they are on a sucker list, according to tips on the FBI and other sites.

If you think youve been scammed, act quickly. Dont wait and see. Contact your bank, contact your credit card companies and other steps to protect your financial information.

You can also help others by reporting your scam  either to your local law enforcement agency or to other agencies. If enough reports are collected in an area, it may help others for alerts to be sent out to the media and general public proactively warning about the scams.

For more information about protecting yourself against scams, visit the FBIs Scams & Safety for more information, https://www.fbi.gov/scams-safety. You can also visit the Nebraska Attorney Generals website for consumer information about protecting your identity and other related material.
While you may have heard about the research and development (R&D) tax incentive  the Australian Governments tax incentive to encourage innovation  you may be unsure how to apply for the incentive, or...
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Wednesday, 27 January 2016 17:15:17 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

The Brazilian industry and foreign trade ministry's commerce chamber, Camex, announced on January 27 that it has imposed a provisional antidumping (AD) duty on imports of circular seamless pipes with external diameter not exceeding 374 millimeters from China

Accordingly, the antidumping duty rates range from $810.46/mt to $1151.76/mt.

The products subject to antidumping duty currently falls within the Customs Tariff Statistics Position Numbers 7304.31.10, 7304.31.90, 7304.39.10, 7304.39.20 and 7304.39.90.
Wednesday, 27 January 2016 18:03:03 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

Prices in the local Turkish merchant bar market, excluding the Karabuk and Iskenderun regions where prices have remained unchanged, have declined by TRY10/mt during the past week, while demand has remained at low levels.



In the local Turkish market, merchant bar prices depending on size, thickness and region are at the following levels:

Equal Angle Prices:

Region Prices (TRY/mt) Price change (TRY/mt) 20.01.2016 Denizli Region (30-100 mm) 1,170-1,190 ($390-397/mt)  10 Karabuk Region (30-100mm) 1,090-1,100 ($363-367/mt) Iskenderun Region (30-100 mm) 1,070-1,080 ($357-360/mt) - Izmir Region (30-100 mm) 1,140-1,160 ($380-387/mt)  10

Flat Bar Prices:

Region Prices (TRY/mt) Price change (TRY/mt) 20.01.2016 Denizli Region (30-100 mm) 1,200-1,220 ($400-407/mt)  10 Karabuk Region (30-100mm) 1,120-1,130 ($373-377/mt) Iskenderun Region (30-100 mm) 1,100-1,110 ($367-370/mt) - Izmir Region (30-100 mm) 1,170-1,190 ($390-397/mt)  10

NPI-NPU Prices:

Region Prices (TRY/mt) Price change (TRY/mt) 20.01.2016 Denizli Region (30-100 mm) 1,170-1,190 ($390-397/mt)  10 Karabuk Region (30-100 mm) 1,090-1,100 ($363-367/mt) Iskenderun Region (30-100 mm) 1,070-1,080 ($357-360/mt) - Izmir Region (30-50 mm) 1,140-1,160 ($380-387/mt)  10

All prices are ex-works, on actual weight basis, for February shipment and excluding VAT.



It should be considered that offers below the prices ranges in question may be available, depending on the buyer and on the method of payment.
Wednesday, 27 January 2016 15:34:11 (GMT+3) | Brescia

Italian merchant bar producers' base price levels for their domestic market are currently in the range of 50-55/mt ($55-60/mt) ex-works, or even lower in the case of some minor producers. The base prices do not include size extras. Price extras vary in the range of 410-610/mt ($512-665/mt) for domestic sales and at 410-620/mt ($512-676/mt) for foreign markets, depending on dimension and product.

The 20/mt ($22/mt) price hike announcement made earlier this month by the market leader Beltrame Group has not been fully accepted by the market and appears to be losing ground due to weak demand and the decreases seen in scrap prices. Furthermore, sentiment among market players is also poor due to the overall atmosphere of uncertainty, which causes players to keep inventories on the low side.

As regards exports, most Italian offers for the European market are in the average price range of 430-450/mt ($469-491/mt) delivered for medium-sized products.

1 = $1.09
This story was updated at 10:05 a.m. to include news from Wednesday's conference call with analysts. Earnings were released Tuesday evening.

______

United States Steel Corp. is recovering the cost of idling its Granite City mill by running three other mills at higher capacity, top company officials said Wednesday.

Still, the steel giant's operating rates are the lowest since the recession year of 2009, CEO Mario Longhi said on a conference call with analysts.

Longhi again said that the closing of the 2,000-employee Granite City mill is temporary. Layoffs at the mill began late last month.

The company recorded $99 million in charges for idling the mill in its financial report for the December quarter. Longhi said the company had more than made up the cost of the idling by increasing capacity utilization at its Gary, Great Lakes and Mon Valley works.

U.S. Steel on Tuesday reported a fourth-quarter loss of $999 million, reversing a profit a year ago, as revenue plunged 37 percent and the company blamed cheap subsidized imports for hurting the price of flat-rolled steel.

The Pittsburgh-based company said it had a loss of $6.83 per share, versus a profit of $1.83 per share a year ago. Losses, excluding costs such as the major write-down of its deferred tax assets, came to 23 cents per share.

The average estimate of nine analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for a loss of 85 cents per share.

The quarterly loss included $99 million reflecting costs related to the temporary idling of the Granite City Works, where approximately 2,000 steelworkers were laid off in December.

Net sales fell 37 percent to $2.57 billion, also surpassing Street forecasts. Three analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $2.49 billion.

Shares are down sharply Wednesday morning, trading at $6.66, down about 14 percent, at 10:13 a.m. Central.

CEO Mario Longhi said in a statement the company hopes to trim costs this year, saying it is "facing significant headwinds and uncertainty in many of the markets we serve." The company forecast the year to be break-even on an adjusted basis.

For 2015, the company reported a loss of $1.51 billion, or $10.32 per share, swinging to a loss in the period. Revenue fell to $11.57 billion, down 34 percent from $17.51 billion the previous year.

Jim Gallagher of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report by The Associated Press.
ST. LOUIS  A man from Belarus was sentenced Tuesday in federal court to five years in prison for his role in a ring that hacked into a St. Louis-area financial institution and used personal information to commit tax fraud.

Alexsandr Rabikov, 37, acknowledged his guilt but claimed he had been told that he was harvesting unclaimed money and wouldnt get in trouble. He also complained about jail life and his fears of prison.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Albus said Rabikovs laptop computer was replete with the personal information of others, and that he set up control over numerous financial accounts as part of the fraud.

Albus also said that Rabikov and his girlfriend, Yulia Belomyttseva, tried to boil the laptop computer on a stove as Internal Revenue Service agents were trying to get into the couples beachfront apartment in Hallandale Beach, Fla.

U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry imposed the statutory maximum sentence of five years for the extremely serious crime, noting that it involved organized crime with overseas elements.

Rabikov pleaded guilty in October of conspiracy to file fraudulent income tax returns. He admitted that conspirators sought more than $400,000 in refunds in 2013-15 using the identities of more than 50 people. He is a permanent U.S. resident but likely will be deported after his release.

The plea agreement did not identify the financial institution.

Belomyttseva, 28, was also sentenced Tuesday, to 366 days in prison on an agreement by both sides given her lesser role. She pleaded guilty in October to a conspiracy charge. She is a Russian native in the U.S. on a tourist visa.
ST. LOUIS  A former St. Louis prosecutor faces a temporary suspension of her law license after admitting in federal court that she helped cover up a city police detectives assault on a handcuffed suspect.

The suspension is in place pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings by the Missouri Supreme Courts Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, according to a court order Tuesday. The court action was expected after her criminal conviction.

Bliss Barber Worrell, 28, of Clayton, pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of misprision of a felony, with a recommended 18 months on probation. Her sentencing is set for April 13 before U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey.

Worrell and a colleague, Katherine Dierdorf, were asked to resign from their jobs at the circuit attorneys office more than a year ago amid allegations that a detective, Thomas A. Carroll, had assaulted a suspect named Michael Waller, then 41. Waller had been arrested July 22, 2014, by another officer at Ballpark Village and accused of using Carrolls daughters credit card, which had been taken during a vehicle break-in.

Waller was charged the next day with receiving stolen property, fraudulent use of a credit card and escape, along with an escape charge relative to resisting arrest.

Worrell and others reportedly knew of the alleged assault but didnt report it to superiors and assisted in the filing of charges against Waller.

Those charges were dropped when authorities learned of the alleged assault and cover-up.

Worrell, since in private practice, is cooperating with federal investigators who are reportedly looking into the involvement of other officers. Carroll has resigned; his attorney has repeatedly declined to comment. Dierdorfs attorney has said she is a cooperating witness.

Worrell is the daughter-in-law of former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Todd Worrell. Dierdorf is the daughter of former St. Louis Cardinals football player and broadcaster Dan Dierdorf.
UNIVERSITY CITY  Two municipal retired employee pension funds are underfunded by millions of dollars and the situation will soon require action by the city, according to Councilman Stephen Kraft.

"The council needs to start looking at this because the deficits are real," Kraft said during a council meeting Monday night.

Kraft told the council that it will soon need to consider propping up the city's two retired employee pension funds, which he said are collectively underfunded by about $11.4 million. That number is down from that given in a city financial report which reported that the city's net combined pension liability was nearly $12.2 million on June 30. The report gave the city's total pension liability at about $60.4 million with about $48.2 million in assets.

The city maintains two defined-benefit pension plans  one for retired police officers and firefighters, and one for non-uniformed retirees. Kraft, who is the council's representative on the city's pension board, said the city might need to consider increasing its pension contributions or moving to defined-contribution plans.

The level of city contributions, Kraft said, is low when compared to some other public employee plans, especially that for Missouri's public school teachers.

"I think it is underfunded," Kraft said of the city's two plans.

Councilman Terry Crow suggested that the city's plans should be compared to other municipal plans, and not to the Missouri Public School and Education Employee Retirement System. He added that investment returns for the city's plans are normal. Return on plan investment was 12.6 percent for the fiscal year ending last June, the city reported.

"But it does need attention," Crow said of the city's pension program.
A man robbed of a hoverboard Sunday night opened fire on the robbers getaway vehicle, killing the driver and injuring another man, police say.

Ronald Houston Jr., 18, the who initiated the robbery, has been charged with second-degree murder, robbery and armed criminal action, authorities said. Missouri law says someone committing a felony can be held accountable if anyone is killed in the course of the crime, even if the criminal didn't actually fire the shots.

Authorities say Dominick Chambly, 19, was driving a car along Delmar Boulevard with Houston and three others in the car. Houston spotted a man with a hoverboard and announced his intention to rob the man, according to court documents.

Houston got out of the car and pulled a ski mask over his face, the documents say. Houston, who was armed, took the hoverboard and got back in the car.

The robbery victim had his own gun, though. He chased after the car and fired, hitting Chambly and another man, according to court records. The robbery victims identity isnt known, the documents say. Police said they are still looking for the shooter.

Police found Chambly fatally injured with wounds to his neck and side inside the car after it hit a concrete wall on Clarendon. The other injured man, 18, was found outside the car with a gunshot wound to his back.

Chambly was taken to a hospital, where he died. The other injured man was also taken to a hospital. His condition and name were not released.

Hoverboards are popular and pricey devices that have been the target of recent robberies. A hoverboard is a sort of self-powered, self-leveling skateboard on two wheels, typically selling for $300 or more.

Chambly lived in the 5000 block of North Kingshighway, police said.

Houston lives in the 4100 block of Kennerly Avenue, according to authorities.

EDITORS NOTE: An earlier version of this story gave incorrect information about the shooting. This version has been corrected with further information from court documents.
Southeast Missouri State Universitys online bachelors and masters degree programs are thriving and now ranked among the nations best online programs for 2016.

A students success is our main focus and passion, said Chance Franklin, Southeast Online programs specialist. Our goal is to do everything we can to help them reach their goals. We take pride in knowing that we are one of the best online schools, not only in the Midwest, but also in the nation. Our students have the will to succeed, and we provide the way to success.

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the programs 58th nationally. The organization this month also ranked Southeasts online MBA program, online graduate business programs, graduate criminal justice program and graduate education programs.

Southeasts online programs offer to students unique learning experiences and educational opportunities for those not able to attend classes on campus.

The U.S. News ranking comes as Southeast announced plans to launch new tuition rates for students enrolled in online only degree programs beginning in fall 2016.

Regardless of residency, students enrolled in Southeasts online only degree programs will now be charged $265 per credit hour for online undergraduate courses and $325 per credit hour for online graduate courses.

The new rates are an effort, in part, to appeal to working adults and employers who offer programs to reimburse employees educational expenses. Varying rates for in-state and out-of-state students no longer will be charged.

Our new tuition rate is an example of Southeasts commitment to excellence and our willingness to not only make getting an education convenient, but affordable as well, said Leah Michel, Southeast Online academic advisor. The new tuition rate will allow students who receive tuition assistance or reimbursement from their employer to maximize their benefits.

Southeast offers more than 20 academic programs online with opportunities to study business administration, health studies, nursing, criminal justice and other degree programs. Southeast is a leader in the delivery of online programming in Missouri, with more than 1,000 students pursuing a degree completely online.

For information on Southeasts online programs, visit semo.edu/online, email southeastonline@semo.edu or call 573-651-2766.
JEFFERSON CITY  Meagan Beckermann begged a Senate panel Tuesday approve a bill that would let the state buy her home.

She lives in Bridgeton, near the West Lake Landfill. And not much farther away is Coldwater Creek, which is contaminated by nuclear waste. Residents have long complained about rare cancers and other sicknesses prevalent there. She told the committee that since moving into a house near the West Lake Landfill in 2010, her son Trevor, 6, has been diagnosed with a rare form of alopecia, asthma, extreme allergies and tonsils "so inflamed and irritated that they will be removed next week." She blamed everything on where her house is.

Beckermann said she's read enough studies about the problems. She wants out.

"We have the studies, we have the maps, we have the research," Beckermann said. "Please stop studying us, and just save us. Please, we're desperate."

She and others spoke in favor of a bill sponsored by Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, that would allow homeowners within a three-mile radius of the West Lake Landfill, the Bridgeton Landfill or Coldwater Creek to apply to have their property purchased by the state at fair market value.

Those who spoke in favor of the bill said that residents might not have bought homes there had they known about the nuclear waste, which dates back to the early days of the Cold War when St. Louis was a processing hub for uranium.

"These people did not move in here with a warning that this is what they were buying," said Ed Smith, safe energy director for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. "They moved in there with the thought that this was going to be the American dream and it's turned out to be an American nightmare."

No one spoke against Chappelle-Nadal's bill, though there was some discussion about its estimated cost. Chappelle-Nadal said that buying homes within three miles of Coldwater Creek is a starting point, subject to negotiation.

On one extreme, if the state bought the more than 63,000 homes within three miles of Coldwater Creek, it would cost the state an estimated $7 billion.

On the other extreme, if all of the 91 homeowners within a mile of the West Lake Landfill wanted a buyout, it would cost the state about $11 million.

Chappelle-Nadal said federal resources could be made available if a state of emergency were declared.

Sen. Scott Sifton, D-Affton, compared buying out the 91 homes near the West Lake Landfill to a buyout program during Lambert Airport's expansion.

"We've done something much larger than this before  collectively, not just state government," he said. "We've done something much larger than this for a tarmac."

Beckermann fought through tears as she showed the committee pictures of her son and her friends affected, and then posed a question to the committee.

"Why wouldn't you pass this bill?" she said. "And your reason better not be money or politics, because that is not more important than our lives."

Chappelle-Nadal said that the issue transcends racial divisions evident in the aftermath of unrest in Ferguson.

"Bridgeton and Coldwater Creek are bringing us together," she said. "It doesn't matter if you're black, it doesn't matter if you're white, it doesn't matter if you're rich, it doesn't matter if you're poor. People are dying. Death is death."

Chappelle-Nadal's bill is Senate Bill 600.
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JEFFERSON CITY  The new director of the Missouri Department of Transportation continued his call to boost state transportation spending on Tuesday.

At the Joint Committee on Transportation Oversight, Transportation Director Patrick McKenna cast Missouri's problems as fixable, but not without more money.

He told the committee the problem due to a shortage of funds will grow as bridges built during the Great Depression and during interstate construction continue to age.

"We'll be facing a virtual tidal wave of replacement needs as we go forward," McKenna said. "So getting further behind, or just treading water, is simply not good enough."

He said that already 60 percent of Missouri bridges are older than their 50-year design life. About 2,000 bridges are in some way deficient, McKenna said.

He urged lawmakers to get ahead of the problem, and to move beyond simple repairs to prioritize a "21st century transportation system" that McKenna said would increase safety, be a boon to business, and help the state retain contract workers. McKenna said that neighboring states  such as Iowa, Nebraska, Arkansas and Kansas  have moved forward with transportation plans, which make them more attractive for investment.

He said that proposals to increase the state's gas tax should be considered. Missouri's gas tax is 17 cents per gallon and hasn't been raised since 1996.

McKenna said the state can do less with 17 cents now than it could two decades ago.

"We're not getting the same dollar value out of our construction that we could then," he said. "Commodities have gone up. The cost of construction has gone up. Asphalt, steel and concrete has gone up."

Recent attempts to raise revenue for roads have been unsuccessful.

Voters defeated a proposal in 2014 that would've raised the state's sales tax to pay for new roads and bridges. Last year, a bill that would raise the state's gas tax died during the last days of the legislative session.

But senators this year have so far moved fast on a bill that would raise the state's gas tax 1.5 cents for most motorists and 3.5 cents for diesel users.

Sen. Doug Libla, R-Poplar Bluff and bill sponsor, said the tax would generate $80 million, with $56 million going to transportation costs. The bill was voted out of a Senate committee unanimously last week.

A tax increase faces a less certain future in the House, where Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, has so far resisted any increase.
UNIVERSITY CITY  Two city employee pension funds are underfunded by millions of dollars, and the situation will soon require action, according to City Councilman Stephen Kraft.

The council needs to start looking at this because the deficits are real, said Kraft, the councils representative on University Citys pension board.

Kraft told the council at Monday nights meeting that it will soon need to consider increasing its contributions to the citys two retired employee pension funds, which he said are underfunded by a total of $11.4 million. That is down from the amount in a city financial report that said the net combined pension liability was nearly $12.2 million on June 30. The report gave the citys total pension liability at about $60.4 million, with about $48.2 million in assets.

The city maintains two defined-benefit pension plans  one for police officers and firefighters, and one for nonuniformed employees. Kraft said the city might need to consider increasing its pension contributions or moving to defined-contribution plans.

The level of city contributions, Kraft said, is low when compared with some other public employee plans, especially the one for Missouris public school teachers.

I think it is underfunded, Kraft said of the citys two plans.

Councilman Terry Crow suggested the city plans be compared with other municipal plans, not to the teachers retirement plan. He said investment returns for the citys plans are normal. Return on plan investment was 12.6 percent for the fiscal year ending last June, the city reported.

But it does need attention, Crow said of the citys pension program.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The EU allocated about 563 million euros to Azerbaijan from 1992 until today, Sahil Babayev, Azerbaijani deputy minister of Economy said Jan. 27 at the event dedicated to the implementation of the project to improve the country's national statistical system.

Twinning projects are the most successful among those, realization of which have been allocated with these funds, he said.

Twinning projects bring together public sector expertise from EU Member States and beneficiary countries with the aim of achieving concrete mandatory operational results through peer to peer activities.

"Currently, 24 such projects have successfully been implemented in Azerbaijan; nine projects are in progress and 10 projects are in preparation stage," he added.

Relations between the EU and Azerbaijan cover a wide range, Babayev noted.

"The EU is one of the main trade partners of Azerbaijan. Almost the half of the Azerbaijan's trade turnover accounts for the EU countries," he said.

"At the same time, over 45 percent of investments, which were invested in Azerbaijan's economy over 10 years, also accounts for the EU countries," Babayev added.

The EU and Azerbaijan successfully cooperate in many fields, including energy sphere, said Babayev.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The trilateral meeting of the economy ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia will be held on Feb. 19 in the Turkish province of Kayseri, Ihlas news agency reported Jan. 27 with reference to the Turkish Economy Minister Mustafa Elitash.

In addition, the event with the participation of 500 businessmen from the three countries is planned, he said.

According to the State Customs Committee (SCC) of Azerbaijan, in 2015 the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey amounted to almost $1.5 billion, including $1.1 billion of imports from Turkey.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Georgia amounted to $434 million in the last year, including $366 million of exports to Georgia.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli
On Feb. 1, Democrats in Madison County will join Iowa voters to be among the first in the nation to express their choice for the presidential candidate in the 2016 primary election. Although delegates will not be selected until the March 15 primary election, all voters are invited to take part in a caucus style straw poll, according to a press release.

"The Madison County Democratic Party is excited to host a 'straw poll' where voters meet local Democrats and voice their preference for one of the Democratic presidential candidates," Democratic County Chairman Alan Napp said. "Our caucuses will be based on the rules used in Iowa, the results will be released to the media and be used on official Madison County Democratic Party materials."

The caucus will take place in seven locations across Madison County. Each location will open at 5:30 p.m. with the caucus meeting beginning promptly at 6:30 p.m.

Those seven locations are:

 Granite City Township Building, 2060 Delmar Ave., in Granite City

 Neighborhood Social Club, 4168 Ill. Highway 162, in Granite City

 American Legion, 1022 Vandalia Street, in Collinsville

 Knights of Columbus, 7132 Marine Road, in Edwardsville

 Marine Township Senior Citizen Center, 101 W. Silver Street, in Marine

 Machinist Hall Local 660, 161 N. Shamrock, in East Alton

 IBEW Local 649, 3945 N. Humbert, in Alton

"We believe Madison County Democrats will be energized by the opportunity to be among the first to pick their candidates in a presidential election year," county board member Kelly Tracy said. "Why should Iowans have all the fun?"

"This is a great opportunity for rank and file democrats to have a voice in the election. Barack Obama's win in Iowa eight years ago gave him national exposure and created momentum in the early nomination season," circuit clerk Mark Von Nida said. "On caucus night, we will get to hear from voters in an industrial Midwestern county as well as Iowa."

For more information, visit www.Facebook.com/MadcoStrawPoll.
LONDON MARKET OPEN: Stocks and pound suffer as PM's future in balance

Thursday, October 20, 2022 - 09:14

A calamitous 24 hours for the premiership of Liz Truss unsettled markets early Thursday, with both stock prices in London and the pound lower.

The FTSE 100 index opened down 6.04 points, 0.1%, at 6,918.95. The FTSE 250 opened down 56.08 points, 0.3%, at 17,191.47, and the AIM All-Share opened down 3.54 points, 0.5%, at 782.43.

The Cboe UK 100 opened down 0.3% at 690.74, the Cboe UK 250 opened down 0.6% at 14,722.87, and the Cboe Small Companies opened down 0.3 at 12,328.69.

UK Prime Minister Truss is battling to contain the fallout from the resignation of a senior Cabinet minister and an open revolt in the Commons.

Tory members of Parliament are wondering how long the prime minister can go on following the chaotic events, but a Cabinet ally said "at the moment" Truss will still lead the party into the next election.

Sterling was quoted at $1.1230 early Thursday, lower than $1.1242 at the London equities close on Wednesday.

In London's FTSE 100 index, Dechra Pharmaceuticals lost 1.9%

Dechra said it was confident of delivering on market expectations for its financial year 2023, and expects the phasing to be weighted to the second half. Consensus estimates for underlying earnings before interest and tax is 191 million, it noted.

Trading in its first quarter ending September 30 was below the prior year - as expected - due to a challenging comparator with higher demand levels due to the pandemic.

At the other end of the list of London blue-chips was Relx, up 1.9%.

The LexisNexis owner said underlying revenue growth in the year to date was 9%. It said momentum remains strong across the group, and it expects growth in revenue, adjusted operating profit and constant currency growth in adjusted earnings per share to "remain above historical levels".

Burberry added 1.5%, in a positive read-across following a cheery update from fellow luxury goods firm Hermes, which was trading up 1.3% in Paris.

In the FTSE 250, Dunelm shed 1.2%, as it reported a dip in first-quarter sales.

For the 13 weeks to October 1, total sales for the furniture retailer came in at 357 million, down 8% from the previous year. This was "as expected, given the very strong comparative period, with Q1 last year benefiting from pent up demand and our rescheduled Summer Sale", it explained.

Looking ahead, it noted a "challenging" macroeconomic environment, including recent volatility in exchange rate movements. However, Dunelm said it is "very well hedged" for the remainder of the year.

The company reiterated the annual guidance it provided last month.

"Dunelm could benefit from shoppers trading down from the likes of John Lewis but they do have discounters like B&M [European Value Retail] hot on their heels. We expect to see investment in above-the-line advertising to drive customer acquisition," said Third Bridge analyst Lara Martinez.

On AIM, online wine seller Naked Wine surged 36%, as it announced a leadership shake-up, and a restructuring programme.

Darryl Rawlings will step down as chair with immediate effect, with David Stead to take his place. Stead has been a director of the firm since 2017, and is currently chair of the audit committee. In addition, Deirdre Runnette will become senior independent director.

Naked Wines said it was in active discussions with James Crawford to assume the role of chief financial officer on a permanent basis.

It now expects revenue to fall by between 4% and 9% in the current financial year, downgraded from previous expectations of between 4% growth and 4% decline. It also announced a restructuring programme, to further its goal of becoming a "leaner and more focused" company.

"We recognise that in pursuit of rapid growth we have made mistakes," said CEO Nick Devlin.

Liberum raised the stock to 'hold' from 'sell'.

In European equities on Thursday, the CAC 40 in Paris opened up 0.3%. The DAX 40 in Frankfurt opened down 0.5%, after German producer price inflation came in hotter than expected.

According to the Federal Statistics Office, the producer price index rose by 45.8% annually in September, the same pace as in August. This came in higher than FXStreet-cited market consensus of 44.7%.

Meanwhile, in Zurich, ABB was down 1.2%. The firm said it saw steady revenue and order growth as the supply chain normalised, but a booked provision hit profit.

In the third quarter of 2022, the Zurich-based industrial conglomerate said revenue rose 5% year-on-year to $7.41 billion, compared to $7.03 billion.

Orders rose 4% to $8.19 billion from $7.87 billion. Growth in orders was seen across most divisions. Price execution was "robust", with volumes supported by easing supply constraints.

Net profit attributable to ABB dropped dramatically, however, coming in 45% lower at $360 million compared to $652 million. Basic earnings per share dropped similarly to $0.19 from $0.33. "The decline [was] primarily related to the booked non-operational provision which weighed on income from operations," it explained.

The euro traded at $0.9779 early Thursday, lower than $0.9784 late Wednesday.

Against the yen, the dollar was quoted at JP149.98, up versus JP149.77. The strengthening of the dollar is increasing the likelihood of a further intervention by Japanese authorities to bolster the value of their currency, traders think.

Stocks in Asia were lower on Thursday. In China, the Shanghai Composite closed down 0.3%. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong was 1.8% lower in late trade, having hit an intraday low of 16,010.72 - a 13 year low.

The Nikkei 225 closed down 0.9 in Tokyo, while the S&P/ASX 200 lost 1.0% in Sydney.

Gold was quoted at $1,627.90 an ounce early Thursday in London, lower than $1,631.50 late Wednesday. Brent oil was trading at $93.51 a barrel, higher than $90.83.

Still to come in Thursday's economic calendar, there are the eurozone balance of payments at 0900 BST and US initial jobless claims at 1330 BST.

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Bourbon is getting increasingly popular, especially well-aged bourbon. The problem is, you cant just whip up a batch of well-aged bourbon. It takes time. Literally decades.

And yet many of the most sought-after bourbons are those of the extra-aged variety: Pappy Van Winkle 20 and 23, George T. Stagg, Eagle Rare 17, William Larue Weller, and Elijah Craig 20-22. While the suggested pricing of these bottles varies, unless you get lucky you can expect to pay hundreds of dollars for each of these limited offerings.

With that as the background, whiskey giant Diageo (they own Bulleit and George Dickel, plus numerous well-known scotch brands) introduced its Orphan Barrel line of 20+ year old whiskeys that were acquired, one might speculate, from its purchases of Shenley and the closed Stizel-Weller distillery. The first three released Orphan Barrel bourbons were Old Blowhard (26 years old), Barterhouse 20, and Rhetoric 20. (For the record, my favorite of the three is Rhetoric.)

There are lots of details and debate about the Orphan Barrel series bourbons, but one detail that caught my eye about Lost Prophet is that it was distilled at the George T. Stagg Distillery (now renamed Buffalo Trace). According to Whiskey Advocate, it was distilled with the same high rye mashbill as Blantons and Elmer T. Lee, two favorite bourbons of mine.

Orphan Barrel Lost Prophet 22 Year Old Bourbon is a deep copper color that shows the age of the 90.1-proof Kentucky bourbon. The nose is rich with baking spices, wood, and hints of caramel, though you wouldnt necessarily assume its an extra aged bourbon.

On the palate it really flexes its maturity. Theres intense oak, clove spice, vanilla, and leather. Its got the woodiness that demonstrates its years, but isnt as cloying as the previous Orphan bourbons.The spicy finish fades quickly on the roof of your mouth, but lingers on the back of the tongue.

The bourbons traditional proof and finesse mean you dont want an overly bold cigar. I recently reviewed the Illusione Fume dAmour, and its just he kind of cigar youd want with Lost Prophet: flavorful yet not full-bodied.

Judging a $120 bottle of bourbon can be tough, especially when there are so many fine bourbons available, many for around $30. Still, Lost Prophet has a lot going for it as an excellent representation of why people seek out extra-aged bourbon. It just came out so theres actually a chance of finding it on shelves right now. If this sounds good to you, move quickly.

Patrick S

photo credit: Stogie Guys
Formally announced in 2014, the Orphan Barrel Project has been one of the biggest, albeit sometimes divisive, developments in the high-end bourbon market in recent years. The project of industry giant Diageo has brought a number of well-aged bourbons to the marketplace at a time when such releases are becoming very rare and expensive.

The first releases were the 20-year Barterhouse and 26-year Old Blowhard, the latter being one of the oldest bourbons to be sold. Next came Rhetoric 20, a 20-year bourbon distilled at the New Bernheim distillery in Louisville, which is now owned by Heaven Hill, maker of Elijah Craig and Evan Williams.

Next up was the 22-year Lost Prophet and 15-year Forged Oak. The latest release is a 21-year version of Rhetoric, which is part of a planned annual release that will show off the evolution of the bourbon as it ages, perhaps up to 26 years. (Another Orphan Barrel release, Gifted Horse, is due out soon; it will be a combination of 4-year bourbon and corn whiskey blended with 17-year bourbon.)

Rhetoric 21 is 90.2-proof, a smidge higher than the 20-year version (90-proof). It sells for around $100, and I picked up my bottle for $93 online after tasting a sample provided by Diageo.

Rhetoric 21 pours a deep copper color and has a nose that shows off its age with damp wood, vanilla, and green apple taffy. On the palate, the bourbon tastes of oak, baking spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg), vanilla, orange peel, and burnt sugar. The finish is long with cornbread, charred wood, and clove.

At times, the flavors feel slightly muted with the exception of the deep woodiness (over-oaked, perhaps) which is why I prefer the Lost Prophet and Forged Oak. Still, fans of oaky, ultra-aged bourbon will find Rhetoric fits the bill in a way that very few bourbons (you can actually find) will.

For cigar pairings, I think the light wood and sweet spice style of Mexican-wrapped cigars matches up nicely. Specifically, try the Illusione *R* Rothchildes, Room 101 San Andres, Tatuaje The Face, and Drew Estates Undercrown.

Patrick S

photo credit: Stogie Guys
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Aygun Badalova - Trend:

European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic is planning an official visit to Baku around February 24-25, 2016, the EC told Trend Jan. 27.

It is expected that during the visit, the vice-president will hold a number of meetings in Baku with high ranking officials of the country.

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. It envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian Sea region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey.

At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.

As part of the Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.
As of early 2016 the U.S. Air Force struggle to retire all its A-10 ground attack aircraft is over. For the moment at least. The air force now says that the war against ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and the threat from Russia caused this change of mind. The real reason is that the A-10 has long been the most effective and popular ground attack aircraft (according to army and marine combat troops and commanders) and that Congress agreed with these troops rather than the air force generals. The politicians were also quite angry at a late 2015 air force effort to undermine a law Congress passed forbidding the air force from retiring the A-10. Congress also agreed with army and marine (and some air force officer) charges that the air force leadership was lying when it insisted the A-10 could be replaced by F-16s and the new F-35. The beginning of the end came in early 2015 when the general commanding the ACC (Air Combat Command) was fired (because of Congressional pressure) for giving a speech in which he declared that any air force personnel speaking out publicly in favor of the A-10 were guilty of treason. While ACC is in charge of most combat aircraft (fighters, bombers, recon and ground attack) ACC leadership has long believed that the A-10 has outlived its usefulness and that its ground support job could be done just as well by fighters like the F-16 and F-35. Experience in combat has shown that this is not true, but apparently to senior people in the air force backing the truth, at least when it comes to the A-10, is treasonous.

Tactics like these became untenable when the air force, and everyone else, realized that the A-10 was one of the most effective weapons against ISIL and the Taliban. Moreover the fight against ISIL in Iraq and Syria has become largely a U.S. Air Force effort. Some 70 percent of the nearly four billion dollars America has spent on fighting ISIL has gone to the air force and the A-10 is the most popular aircraft in that campaign in Syria and Iraq.

The air force has been trying to retire its A-10 aircraft since the 1990s and starting in late 2014 they tried issuing studies and analyses showing that the A-10 was too specialized and too old to justify the cost of keeping it in service. This generated more opposition, and more effective opposition, than the air forces expected. This was helped by the fact that some of the studies were more spin than impartial analysis. All this created unwanted publicity about something the air force denies exists but is nevertheless very real; the air force has never really wanted to devote much resources to CAS (Close Air Support) for ground forces. Officially this is not true but in reality it is and the ground forces (army and marines) and historians provided plenty of evidence.

The problem is complicated by the fact that the air force does not want to allow the army to handle CAS, as is the case with some countries and the U.S. Marine Corps (which provides CAS for marines and any ground forces the marines are operating with). Soldiers and marines both insist that marine CAS (provided by Harriers and F-18s flown by marines) is superior. The army and marines also have their own helicopter gunships for support but these lack capabilities only the fixed wing aircraft have. Despite all that the air force wants to eliminate the A-10, which soldiers, marines and many allied troops consider the best CAS aircraft ever, and replace it with less effective (for CAS) fighters adapted for CAS. The ground forces dont want that mainly because the A-10 pilots specialize in CAS while fighter pilots must spend a lot of time training for air combat and different types of bombing, The A-10 pilots are CAS specialists and it shows by the amount of praise they get from their customers (the ground troops). To the dismay of just about everyone the air force dismisses all this as much less important than the fact that the A-10 cannot fight other aircraft. That was how the A-10 was designed, on air force orders, but that is somehow irrelevant now.

The air force also does not like being reminded of similar situations like earlier efforts to eliminate the B-52. This heavy bomber entered service in 1955 and the last one was built in 1962. For decades the air force has sought to replace the B-52 with the newer, better and much more expensive aircraft. The first effort (the B-70) failed in the late 1960s and no production models were built. The second effort was the B-1. It was introduced in 1986 and production ceased in 1988. The B-1 did not replace the B-52 but complemented it as the 104 B-1s built eventually proved to be a faster and more expensive B-52 and not much more. The third attempt was the newer, even more better and much more expensive B-2. This was no B-52 replacement either, although 21 were built. The air force spins all this as irrelevant but most others disagree and many books have been written about the lessons of the B-52 and other long-lasting designs like the Sidewinder air-to-air missile.

Meanwhile, as the air force continues trying to gather support in Congress for eliminating the A-10, A-10s are again in demand in Europe (to confront Russia) and the Middle East (to deal with ISIL). While sending more A-10s to East Europe and the Middle East the air force continues to insist that it must retire all of its A-10s in order to deal with a shrinking budget and this time the A-10 has really got to go. The air force had a point because their budget is shrinking and Cold War era aircraft, especially the F-16, need replacing and the replacement is the very expensive F-35. The air force plays down the fact that for CAS missions the fighter jets sometimes used, like the F-16 or even the F-35, are much less effective as well as being more expensive to operate than the A-10. A sortie by an F16 costs 80 percent more than an A-10, F-15E is twice as much, F-22 four times as much and the F-35 is somewhere between the F-15E and F-22.

A-10s were designed during the Cold War for combat against Russian ground forces in Europe. That war never happened and the last American A-10 attack aircraft left Europe (for good, it was thought) in mid-2013. Now it is back. Meanwhile the A-10 proved to be a formidable combat aircraft in post-Cold War conflicts, first in the 1991 liberation of Kuwait and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the last decade the most requested ground support aircraft in Afghanistan has been the A-10. There was similar A-10 affection in Iraq. Troops from all nations quickly came to appreciate the unique abilities of this 1970s era aircraft that the U.S. Air Force is constantly trying to get rid of. In 2011 the air force did announce that it was retiring 102 A-10s, leaving 243 in service. At the same time the air force accelerated the upgrading of the remaining A-10s to the A-10C standard.

The basic A-10 is a 1960s design but in the last decade most still in service have been upgraded to the A-10C. For this new commo gear was added, allowing A-10 pilots to share pix and vids with troops on the ground. The A-10 pilot also has access to the Blue Force Tracker system, so that the nearest friendly ground forces show up on the HUD (Head Up Display) when coming in low to use the 30mm cannon. The A-10 can now use smart bombs, making it a do-it-all aircraft for ground support.

A-10s were worked hard in Afghanistan. For example, an A-10 squadron has a dozen aircraft and 18 pilots. Pilots often average about a hundred hours a month in the air while in Afghanistan. That's about twenty sorties, as each sortie averages about five hours. The aircraft ranged all over southern Afghanistan waiting for troops below to call for some air support. The A-10, nicknamed "Warthog" or just "hog", could always fly low and slow and was designed, and armored, to survive a lot of ground fire. The troops trust the A-10 more than the F-16 or any other aircraft used for ground support.

The A-10 is a 23 ton, twin engine, single seat aircraft whose primary weapon is a multi-barrel 30mm cannon originally designed to fire armored piercing shells through the thinner top armor of Russian (or any other) tanks. These days the 1,174 30mm rounds are mostly high explosive. The 30mm cannon fires 363 gram (12.7 ounce) rounds at the rate of about 65 a second. The cannon usually fires in one or two second bursts. In addition, the A-10 can carry seven tons of bombs and missiles. These days the A-10 goes out with smart bombs (GPS and laser guided) and Maverick missiles. It can also carry a targeting pod, enabling the pilot to use high magnification day/night cameras to scour the area for enemy activity. Cruising speed is 560 kilometers an hour and the A-10 can slow down to about 230 kilometers an hour. In Afghanistan two drop tanks were usually carried to give the aircraft more fuel and maximum time over the battlefield.

If there is another major war in someplace like Korea, Eastern Europe or Iran, the A-10s would once more be one of the most popular warplane with the ground troops, unless the air force manages to get rid of it.
In Iran the commander of the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) recently made public the fact that the IRGC was responsible for training (and often recruiting, arming and paying) 200,000 pro-Iran fighters in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This, in general, is no secret. It was long believed that as many as 50,000 Iranian created militiamen are fighting in Syria. There are somewhat smaller forces in Lebanon (about 25,000), Iraq (over 20,000) and Yemen (more than 15,000). Pakistan and Afghanistan were not happy with the IRGC publicly admitting that Iran has sponsored local (and often illegal) Shia militias.

This is not something new for the IRGC, which since the 1980s has had an elite organization whose main job was forming pro-Iran militias in foreign countries. This is the al Quds Force, which is a component of the IRGC. Also known as the Pasdaran, the IRGC is a paramilitary force of about 100,000 full timers that insures that any anti-government activity inside Iran is quickly eliminated. To assist the Pasdaran, there is a part-time, volunteer force, several hundred thousand Basej, which can provide additional manpower when street muscle is required. The Basej are usually young, Islamic conservative men, who are not afraid to get their hands dirty. If opponents to the government stage a large demonstration, it will often be broken up by Basej, in civilian clubs, using fists and clubs.

The Quds Force is a full time operation for carefully selected men trained to spread the Islamic revolution outside Iran. The Quds force has to also deal with a major obstacle in that they are spreading a Shia Islamic revolution in a world where only 10-15 percent of Moslems are Shia. Most of the rest are Sunni, and many of those Sunni consider Shia heretics. In several countries, there is constant violence between Shia and Sunni conservatives. This has been going on long before the clerics took control of Iran in 1979 or al Qaeda (a major killed of Shia) showed up in the 1990s.

The core operatives of the Quds force comprises only a few thousand highly skilled and very dedicated specialists. There are another 10,000 or so support staff. The core personnel tend to be highly educated, most speak foreign languages, and all are Islamic radicals. They are on a mission from God to convert the world to Shia Islam, and the rule of Shia clergy. The Quds Force has been around since the 1980s, and their biggest success has been in Lebanon, where they helped local Shia (who comprise about a third of the population) form the mighty Hezbollah organization.

The Quds Force has eight departments, each assigned to a different part of the world. While the one that works in the Palestine/Lebanon/Jordan area have been the most successful, the other departments have been hard at it for over three decades and that persistence is paying off. The Palestine/Lebanon/Jordan department went into high gear in 2012 when a rebellion against the pro-Iran Syrian government made unexpected gains. For the next two years saving pro-Iranian Syria was the main task of Quds.

The Western Directorate has established a recruiting and fund raising network in Western nations. Many recruits are brought back to Iran for training, while Shia migrants are encouraged to donate money, and services, to Quds Force operations. Because many of these operations are considered terrorist operations, Quds Force is banned in many Western nations. Currently Quds operatives in the West are monitoring what ISIL is up to there and recruiting local Shia Moslems to fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria. These Shia are have also been very active in aiding Iranian efforts to embargoes on obtaining military equipment and technology.

The Iraq Department long maintained an army of anti-Saddam fighters in exile (in Iran) as well as running an intelligence operation inside Iraq. After the U.S. led coalition toppled Saddam in 2003, Quds Force moved people, money and weapons into Iraq, to form pro-Iranian political forces and militias. These forces were withdrawn by 2008 as the newly elected government demonstrated their power by forcibly shutting down any pro-Iran Shia militias that refused to disband peacefully. By 2014 Quds was invited back in as ISIL took Mosul and parts of northwestern and western Iraq. Now Quds considers their work in Iraq more important than the effort in Syria because Quds trained Iraqi Shia leaders are openly calling for a Shia religious dictatorship to rule Iraq.

The South Asia Department (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India) was active in aiding Afghan Shia who were being persecuted by the Taliban (a Sunni operation) and al Qaeda (a very Sunni operation). Quds has also been caught operating in Pakistan, where Sunni terrorists have been attacking Shia for decades.

The Turkey Department has been active encouraging Shia Kurds to commit terrorist acts. This has not been too successful as the Turks have been major enemies of Shia Iran for centuries and dedicate a lot of resources to monitoring what local, and foreign, Shia are doing in Turkey.

The North Africa Department has an operation in Sudan that long functioned in the open, despite the Sunni conservatives who run the country. This department has been caught providing weapons to the Sunni Islamic terrorists in Somalia. In early 2016 Sudan broke diplomatic relations with Iran and shut down all the Quds activities it could find.

The Arabian Department supports terrorist groups that exist in all the Persian Gulf Arab countries. The Arab Sunni governments in these nations does not appreciate Iran's support for this sort of thing. Quds quietly supported a Shia rebellion in Yemen, which has been simmering for a decade and got really successful in 2013 and by late 2014 controlled the capital and over a third of the country. But now the Arab neighbors (plus Egypt) are getting involved and in late 2015 Iran admitted its long support for Yemeni Shia. Soon after a Sunni Arab coalition entered Yemen and defeated the Shia rebels.

The Central Asian Department supports Shia and Sunni terrorists in countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. So does al Qaeda, but the Quds operation has been more discreet.

Back in Iran, Quds kept an eye on al Qaeda leaders granted sanctuary after 2001. Even though al Qaeda has taken part in many atrocities against Shia outside Iran the Quds leadership saw this a case of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend." Actually, there is a major dispute in the Iranian government over the al Qaeda issue. But the Iranian leadership is more a federation than a dictatorship, so Quds can keep being nice to al Qaeda as long as not too many factions get mad at Quds.

The Iranian leadership, despite their radical sounding pronouncements, have actually been quite cautious. This is in line with ancient Iranian custom. Most of the Hezbollah violence in Lebanon was at the behest of Lebanese Hezbollah leaders. The same pattern has occurred elsewhere. The Quds guys usually counsel restraint, although in Iraq there has been more enthusiasm for violence. Iraq is a special case, as several hundred thousand Iranians died fighting Saddam in the 1980s, and Iranians have not forgotten.

Quds is often described as the most radical part of the IRGC while also being the smallest component. Although by their very nature Quds operations must remain discreet and secret, Quds and IRGC find it good for the image of the religious dictatorship running Iran if some Quds accomplishments are boasted about openly. Thus Quds leaders like to say that because of Quds efforts Iran now controls four Arab capitals (in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen). Given that all four of those countries are currently embroiled in wars and revolutions (often anti-Shia) the boasting appears a little premature.
Turkey is again insisting that the United States stop providing weapons and military equipment to the YPG (the Syrian Kurdish separatists sometimes allied with the Turkish PKK Kurdish separatists). The reason for this latest outburst was that a recent Turkish army raid on a PKK camp in southeast Turkey (Srnak Province, which borders Syria and Iraq) found some U.S. military gear groups like PKK are not supposed to have. One of the items captured in the camp was an American RQ-20A UAV. The United States was known to have given these to the YPG during the intense battle with ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) in north Syrian town of Kobane. The Turks knew of the American aid to the YPG and warned the United States that the YPG often passed on foreign aid to their allies in the PKK.

Turkey has also been shelling Kurdish fighters near the Syrian border (and Kobane) when they move into areas the Turks warmed them to stay out of. Everyone accuses the Turks of being more interested in hurting the Kurds than in stopping ISIL. This became more of an issue when the PKK broke a ceasefire with the Turks in July 2015 and reignited the three decade old war between Turkey and its Kurdish minority (mainly the PKK).

Many, if not most, Kurds see Turkey as tolerating Islamic terrorists inside Turkey if they only attack Kurds and foreigners (especially Syrian refugees). There is some truth to this as the Turkish government has, since 2000, been increasingly tolerant of Islamic conservatives and radicals. Meanwhile some Syrian Kurds (like the YPG) are accused of driving non-Kurds out of villages the Kurds capture from ISIL in what the YPG considers Kurdish territory in northeast Syria. The Americans know that any aid they give to Syrian rebels (which includes the YPG) is likely to be traded or passed around to the allies of the rebels. In the case of the YPG they got aid from the PKK during the 2015 battle to defend the Kurdish town of Kobane in northern Syria. This turned out to be the first major defeat for ISIL and the YPG felt obliged to repay the PKK assistance in Kobane. While the U.S. provided the air support and supplies (like the RQ-20As) it was a coalition of Kurdish groups (including Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds from the PKK) helping the Syrian Kurds (including YPG) defend Kobane.

The RQ-20A Puma, a 5.9 kg (13 pound) UAV with a 2.6 meter (8.5 feet) wingspan and a range of 15 kilometers from the operator, that the United States Army (starting with the Special Forces) has been using since 2008. UAVs like Puma have been most useful in route clearance (scouting ahead to spot ambushes, roadside bombs, landslides, washouts, or whatever). The RQ-20A was particularly useful in Afghanistan, which is windier than Iraq and thus more difficult for the smaller (two kg) Raven to operate.

Top speed for Puma is 87 kilometers an hour and cruising speed is 37-50 kilometers an hour. Max altitude is 3,800 meters (12,500 feet), and the UAV can stay in the air for 120 minutes at a time. Puma has a better vidcam (providing tilt, pan, and zoom) than the smaller Raven and that provides steadier and more detailed pictures. Because it is larger than Raven, and three times as heavy, Puma is much steadier in bad weather. The Raven only stays in the air for 80 minutes. Both Puma and Raven are battery powered.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

Trend:

An OSCE monitoring was held Jan. 26 along the contact line between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.

The Azerbaijani defense ministry has said the monitoring, held in line with the mandate of personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office, passed without any incident.

OSCE's monitoring took place near the village of Alibayli in the Tovuz district of Azerbaijan.

On the Azerbaijani side of the contact line, the monitoring was held by field assistants of the personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office, Yevgeny Sharov and Peter Svedberg.

On the Armenian side, the monitoring was conducted by field assistants of the personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office, Irzhi Aberle, Simon Tiller and Hristo Hristov.



The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.



The two countries signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia, France and the US are currently holding peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented the UN Security Council's four resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Sudan has watched western nations slowly drop sanctions against Iran. For over a decade Sudan has accused the UN of imperialism. It is a curious accusation, but the UNAMID hybrid peacekeeping force put troops in Darfur over Khartoums objections. That was imperialism. Of course, the Sudan government and several senior officials, including President Bashir, were accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Bashir and he still faces charges. In response the UN, Western European nations and the United States were accused of imperialism for placing economic and political sanctions on Sudan. This approach didn't work. Now the Sudan Foreign Ministry is trying a new tactic to obtain sanctions relief. Call it the Peace Gambit. Sudan says that economic sanctions, particularly the heavy economic and trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. inhibit peace initiatives by the African Union (AU). Many of the American sanctions go back to 1997. These were imposed for two reason: Sudans proven support of international terrorist organizations and Sudanese abuse of African Christians and animists in what is now southern Sudan. The sanctions were tightened in 2007 and the reason was genocide in Darfur. Sudan is making several arguments. One of them is that U.S. sanctions limit AU resources. Just how that happens in not quite clear. The AU receives substantial financial and logistics support from the United States and donor nations in Western Europe. But thats diplomacy for you. (Austin Bay)

January 22, 2016: In South Sudan the government and rebels failed to form a transitional government by today, as the peace deal stipulated. The problem is the post-agreement government decision to reorganiuze the country into 28 states rather than the original ten. Meanwhile the rebels have sent a new team of negotiators to the South Sudan capital, Juba and repeated the rebel contention that the government decision to expand to 28 the number of states in South Sudan abrogates the August 2015 ARCISS (Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan). South Sudan was founded with ten states. The rebels contend the December decision by South Sudan President Salva Kiir to expand the number of states from ten to 28 was designed to halt implementation of the peace deal. On December 24, 2015, the government announced the decision to create 28 states. The idea of creating new states was brought up in April 2015 and again in October 2015, but the December announcement was abrupt. At the time the government and several senior rebel leaders were involved in serious talks about distributing positions of power in the unity government that the peace agreement stipulates the government and the rebel SPLM-IO form. One rebel negotiator said government acted deceitfully and this decision could lead to a wider civil war. After the announcement the government moved quickly. New governors were sworn in on December 29. Earlier this month the SPLM-IO pointed out that the borders of the new states break up tribes which belong to the rebel coalition. The structure of the new states also gives the pro-government Dinka tribe more political control. International mediators reported that some members of the rebel coalition have said if 28 states, why not 60 or more? In other words, give each tribe or tribal sub-group a state. The rebel leadership has decided that sticking to ten makes sense because a small ethnic group could always complain and demand another division. (Austin Bay)

January 21, 2016: The UN accused the South Sudan government of using tactics similar to the Sudan government to forcibly displace civilians. Evidence exists that the government has destroyed food resources and burned villages in order to displace people loyal to the rebels. This is a politically significant accusation since it supports rebel allegations.

January 20, 2016: UN observers reported that militia attacks in South Sudan have led to a new wave of refugees seeking safety in Uganda. An armed militia (unidentified) burned and looted a village South Sudans Central Equatoria state. No date was given for the attack but it occurred after January 1. Several hundred people fled to Uganda after the attack.

January 19, 2016: According to the UN tribal clashes in Darfur have intensified over the last ten days. Sudan government troops have fought with rebel tribes in the Jebel Marra area (border of Central, North and South Darfur states). There have also been several firefights in Central Darfur state. Heavy clashes between the government and rebels occurred in Jebel Marra in Fall 2015.

January 18, 2016: The South Sudan rebels accused the government forces of breaking the ceasefire agreement in Unity state.

January 15, 2016:  In South Sudan the army reported that troops had recovered seven vehicles that were stolen earlier this month by a armed youth group. This group had attacked several villages in the Diabio and Ezo counties of Western Equatoria state. However, the official statement referred to the clashes as occurring in Gbudwe state, which is one of the new states created by the government in late December 2015. Western Equatoria was divided into Gbudwe, Maridi and Amadi states. The army also reported another attack occurred near the town of Yambio.

January 14, 2016: South Sudan rebels point out that the boundaries and leadership of the countrys 28 new states divide ethnic groups, to the benefit of the pro-government Dinka tribe (which the president belongs to). One example is the Shilluk tribe (also the Luo Shilluk). The Shilluk are not necessarily part of the rebel coalition. Rebel forces attacked Shilluk villages in 2014. However, the Shilluk matter politically. The Shilluk are the countrys third largest tribe, after the Dinka and Nuer. A number of Shilluk also favor Shilluk independence (ie, their own country). At one time the Shilluk had their own separate kingdom. The Shilluk live in an area along the east and west banks of the Nile River in what was Upper Nile state. The new South Sudan state divisions essentially split Shilluk territory. Upper Nile is now three states. Moving east to west, they are Latjoor, Eastern Nile and Western Nile states. (Austin Bay)

January 12, 2016: The Sudan government has broken diplomatic relations with Iran. Sudan has military units in Yemen serving with the coalition led by Saudi Arabia. The coalition opposes Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels. Sudan has long maintained mutually rewarding diplomatic and security arrangements with Iran. However, the recent execution of a Shia cleric by Saudi Arabia led Iran to break relations with the Saudis. Sudan knows who pays the bills. It is supporting Saudi Arabia. In addition most Muslims in Sudan are also Sunnis.

January 10, 2016: South Sudan appealed to Sudan to reduce the oil pipeline transportation fee it charges to move South Sudanese crude to the Sudan seaport of Port Sudan. South Sudan said the decline of oil prices necessitated the request. Sudan charges South Sudan from nine to eleven dollars a barrel. Sudan indicated it would consider lowering the fee.

January 9, 2016: In Darfur gunmen attacked the village of Mouli (West Darfur state) and killed six people.

January 7, 2016: Gunmen ambushed a UN patrol and wounded one peacekeeper. The attackers also seized several weapons. The attack occurred near the town of Anka (North Darfur state).

January 6, 2016: In South Sudan the Catholic Church is protesting an attack by rebels on a teacher training college in Yambio, capital of Western Equatoria state. Five armed rebels entered the college on December 28 and assaulted and threatened the nuns running the school. According to the nuns, the men demanded they be given money and weapons.

January 1, 2016: Today marks the 60th anniversary of Sudans independence from the British Empire. On January 1, 1956 Sudan became independent of British and Egyptian condominium rule. Muhammad Ali conquered Sudan in 1820, ostensibly on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. Ali was really an independent actor. He made Sudan part of Egypt. From 1899 to 1956, Sudan was officially called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Since 1956 Sudan has experienced at least 13 military coups (perhaps more). The coups of 1964, 1985 and 1989 were successful.
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Although the European (MDBA) air-launched Scalp cruise missile has been in service since 2002 it has not been used heavily since 2oo3. That changed in 2015 when France intensified its war against Islamic terrorism and the new Typhoon fighter-bomber was equipped to use Scalp. With a max range of 560 kilometers the 1.3 ton Scalp has a 450 kg conventional warhead and a highly accurate (capable of hitting ships or small buildings) terminal guidance system. Scalp uses GPS, INS and terrain recognition guidance systems to get close enough for the terminal guidance system to take over. Costing about $1.5 million each some 3,000 have been ordered since the late 1990s and about a hundred used. France bought 600 while Britain ordered nearly a thousand (as Storm Shadow) and wealthy Gulf Arab oil states bought over a thousand. Greece, Italy and Egypt also bought some. The recent use of Scalp in Syria and Mali have been successful. Britain first used Storm Shadow in combat during air campaign against Iraq during 2003. But now all the nations with Scalp/Storm Shadow are using it more frequently against terrorist targets.

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Micromanagement, first seen during the Vietnam War when advances in communications allowed someone in Washington to communicate directly with commanders in combat, has reached new heights and is causing major headaches for another generation of battlefield commanders. The latest disaster is a combination of still better communications in addition to growth of White House staffs. In particular an advisory group like the NSC (National Security Council) has been overwhelmed many additional personnel, most of whom have only opinions to offer, not advice based on long experience. In the beginning, when the NSC was created in 1947, it consisted of senior military and State Department officials based in Washington. These original NSC members all had long experience in their fields and the president used the NSC for advice and to test new ideas. But over the next fifty years more support staff were added to the NSC and after the end of conscription in the 1970s fewer of these staffers had any military experience and even less understanding of how diplomacy actually worked. When the NSC got so large (about fifty members) that the staff seemed to be getting in the way some directors sought to reduce the size. But after 2001 NSC growth got out of control and is currently about 400 people. As a result the experienced people are so outnumbered that they are often considered the enemy by the inexperienced (in national security and diplomacy matters) support staff. The tail was truly wagging the dog. This type of NSC has become an embarrassment and seemingly invulnerable to reform. This mutant NSC is one reason U.S. military and diplomatic policy seems so random and aimless. No one in the government can muster sufficient support to change the situation and return the NSC to its original usefulness.

Meanwhile the ability of the bad advice to quickly make life miserable for the troops (and diplomats abroad) became really noticeable in 2004 when the U.S. Department of Defense decided to provide the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) with a real time combat command capability. This meant that the JCS, led by its chairman, now had a combat command center in the Pentagon where they use satellite communications to directly observe, and sometimes control, combat forces anywhere on the planet. This should not have been a problem because most of these senior officers learned, early on in their military training, the importance of giving subordinates their mission and leaving it to these lower ranking officers to figure out a way to do it. But now, with a generation of senior commanders with no experience of being micromanaged platoon leaders in Vietnam, the insidious and crippling micromanagement disease is creeping back into the White House and Pentagon. Field commanders are being second guessed by nervous superiors half way around the world. These same superiors are now calling in lawyers to help them make the right (for the guy in Washington) decision while the troops are under fire and waiting for permission to proceed. It wasn't always this way.

It was since the mid-19th century that a government could exercise any control at all over armed forces far from the capital. This was first done with the introduction of overland and undersea telegraph lines in the 19th century and world-wide radio broadcasting equipment early in the 20th century. Before that an admiral or general was sent off with orders to accomplish a mission and pretty much allowed to get it done as they saw fit. The generals and admirals rather liked this approach, as their job was hard enough without a bunch of politicians looking over their shoulder and second guessing their every decision. Even with the radio messages from back home, the combat commanders were still left to sort things out on their own. The radio was used mainly to report progress, or lack of it, not ask permission for every move.

But by the 1960s it was possible to patch through a telephone call from the White House to an infantry battalion commander deep in the Vietnamese bush. And it wasn't just the dreaded phone call from the president you had to worry about. The beleaguered battalion commander might have brigade, division, and corps commanders circling overhead in helicopters, all of them observing and offering advice or giving orders. This "micromanagement" was much disliked by the guys on the ground, trying to run a battle they were right in the middle of.

After Vietnam the Department of Defense tried to deal with this problem by establishing regional commands to cover the entire planet and then appointing four star generals or admirals to command all American forces in that region if there were a war. The rest of the time they would keep an eye on things and get ready for any possible war. These commanders in chief (or CINCs as they are still called, unofficially) were sometimes guilty of micromanagement, although all experienced combat commanders recognized that it was best to leave the commanders of the fighting units alone. This was the lesson of history. Micromanagement was bad but it persisted. Why?

Blame it on the media. Just as military communications had improved so had the ability of the media to get the story back to their audience (of voters, pundits, and unfriendly politicians). In the past the commander on the spot might do things that did not look good in the media but it took so long to get the story back that the operation was over by the time it did. If the battle was won many sins would be forgiven. That no longer works. Communications now allow reporters to deliver color commentary while a battle is in progress. The American president, the ultimate (by law and in fact) commander in chief, is held responsible for whatever the troops do. It is not possible, politically, to wait for the combat commanders to finish their job before the president, or his aides, issues new orders.

Examples of micromanagement were abundant in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Washington often had to be consulted before sensitive attacks were made (like having a Predator UAV launch a Hellfire missile at some guy on the ground who might be Osama bin Laden, or some tall Afghan with a beard, a new SUV, and a commanding manner). The JCS Command Post was an attempt to deal with this problem. The JCS and the Secretary of Defense are the president's senior, and most frequent, military advisors. Ultimately, the buck stops with the JCS. So by plugging the JCS into a world-wide command system, politically sensitive decisions can be resolved quickly (in minutes, or at least in less than an hour). The more frequent contact between the president, the Secretary of Defense, and the JSC with combat commanders might build up a degree of trust that would enable sensitive decisions to be made more quickly. This would happen, in a best case situation, because the JCS Command Post had developed confidence in the judgment of the commanders out there.

But the JCS Command Post has just become another layer of management that slows down decision making without improving the ability of the troops to get the job done. The expanding NSC staff often put itself between JCS and the president. Another side effect was a proposal that the CINC be reduced to the status of a staff officer. The CINC and his people (several hundred staff officers and support troops) would be the repository of knowledge about the local situation and would take care of all those logistical and support details that enable the combat operations to happen. So far, the CINCs have successfully resisted this, but it's happening anyway whenever the folks back in Washington want to throw their considerable weight around.

Speaking of staff work, one thing combat staffs are increasingly concerned with is how to deal with politically delicate situations that the media could run with (often in uncomfortable directions). This sort of thing has been seen frequently since 2001. For example, when sandstorms seemed to have "stalled" the American advance on Baghdad in 2003, the president, or at least the Secretary of Defense, had to be in touch with the commanders inside the sand storm and then say something to the press that would defuse the story and wouldn't blow up later if it proved to be false. For those who didn't catch the follow up on the sand storm, the troops were delayed by the need to resupply (especially fuel for their very thirsty M-1 tanks) and the storm actually helped because the Iraqis thought they could safely move Republican Guard divisions under cover of it. They couldn't, as there were American satellites, UAVs, and sensors on the ground that could see right through the sand. Iraqi tanks and troops got shot up on a massive scale before they realized that the swirling sand blinded them more than the Americans.

The ability to quickly communicate between the battlefield and the Pentagon came in handy after Baghdad fell in 2003and the Baath party diehards continued to resist with ambushes. But all of this communication was improvised. That experience naturally led to the idea that better preparation for that situation would have improved communications and decision making. The Pentagon and White House already expected to see real time UAV video coverage of critical events. But there are often dozens of video feeds running through Department of Defense satellites, and the JCS Command Post tries to sort it all out and have the most important videos marked for the attention of the president, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the JCS, or for release to the media.

Micromanagement originally appeared because the technology was there to make it possible. New technology keeps showing up, making more mischief, or benefits, possible. As always, it's up to the people using the technology to make things happen or screw things up. Turns out that you can usually depend on the tech to be more reliable than some of the people using it.
by Austin Bay January 26, 2016

South Sudan's civil war began on the night of December 15, 2013, when a firefight erupted between soldiers serving in the presidential garrison in the capital city, Juba. "Between" is an important word. The battle pitted soldiers from the Dinka tribe (largest in South Sudan) against soldiers in the Nuer tribe (second largest). The government, led by president Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and the rebels, led by Riek Machar, a Nuer, agreed to their first ceasefire on December 31.

Fire and combat, however, never ceased. Instead, it spread. Every ceasefire and peace declaration since has failed to hold. Poor communication between negotiating teams and fighters in the field is one reason ceasefire agreements quickly collapsed. Though South Sudan has several major oil fields, which generate oil export revenue, the country remains largely undeveloped and has few roads. Radio and telephone communications are iffy. An agreement might take hold in one area but fail in another. Word that fighting continued elsewhere would spark skirmishes where the ceasefire was initially observed.

Inter-tribal distrust also undermined ceasefire agreements. Smaller tribes have reasons to fear political domination by the Dinka and Nuer.

UN observers and non-governmental aid organizations operating in South Sudan estimate the death toll at somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 human beings. A couple of sources speculate 30,000 dead is more likely. They base their speculation on poor communications and the number of internally displaced persons .

The UN has around 12,500 peacekeepers in South Sudan, serving with the UN Mission in South Sudan. A substantial number of these troops defend 185,000 IDPs living in six large camps. Relief agencies estimate there are another 1.5 million IDPs inside South Sudan. Some 650,000 South Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries. That last number is fairly solid. The math suggests that at one time or another, the war has forced over 2.3 million people to flee their homes.

That number -- 2.3 million refugees and IDPs -- is the only one big enough to bring occasional international attention to South Sudan's agony. But it is a despairingly big number, isn't it?

The August 2015 peace agreement -- the last major ceasefire -- was the most promising. That agreement even has a name and a diplomatic acronym: Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan.

Unfortunately, ARCISS failed to stop the fighting. Major ceasefire violations occurred in Oct. and Nov. 2015. This January the rebels accused the government of launching an attack in South Sudan's Unity state.

However, a decision made by President Salva Kiir may completely gut the deal, and gut it by design. On Dec. 24, 2015, Kiir announced that he would reorganize South Sudan into 28 constituent states rather than its original 10. He then proceeded to swear in new governors.

The rebels contend Kiir's move violated power sharing agreements central to the ARCISS peace deal. The rebels are right. Kiir imposed a most dangerous gerrymander reminiscent of the worst 19t century European imperialists. Borders of the new states break up tribes, some of which belong to the rebel coalition.

The Shilluk tribe is the country's third largest. Shilluk live in northern South Sudan along the east and west banks of the Nile River in what was Upper Nile state. They now live in two states, Eastern Nile and Western Nile states. The Shilluk are not pleased.

Rebel leaders say Kiir's reorganization will reignite the civil war. It could. If it does, in South Sudan we will witness another example of a leader and his elite cadre undermining a political agreement that would have halted an impoverishing war. And why did the leader do it? Over the short term, the 28 state structure strengthens Kiir's personal control of state power.
Wellesbourne Airfield

A spokesman for HSBC said use of the Studley branch has been declining in recent years, with 81 per cent of contact the bank has with its customers being over the phone.

The decision to close the branch has come under fire from parish councillor Karen Somner-Brown.

She told the Herald the bus service to the next nearest HSBC branch in Redditch was costly and unreliable.

The branch is very convenient for local people, many of whom dont drive or are elderly or disabled, she said.

The closure is going to end up costing quite a bit for the people of Studley whichever mode of transport they use.

It could be disastrous to small businesses who would have extra costs to endure in travelling to Redditch but could also lose trade because customers travelling to Redditch to do their banking may well choose to spend their money there instead of in Studley.

Some small business holders are aware that cash can be paid in at the post office but they have expressed concern because this takes a couple of days to appear in their bank account and being very small business they need their cash to flow much quicker than this in order to pay their bills.

HSBC advertises itself as the worlds local bank, perhaps they should think about that before they close the Studley branch at great inconvenience to their customers many of whom have been loyal to them for many decades.

The HSBC spokesman blamed an increase in the use of online and telephone banking for the closure.

"We never take the decision to close a branch lightly, and we understand it's unsettling for the local community.

We are working with customers who use the branch to help them understand their options, which include being able to use local post offices for their day-to-day banking. There are also free ATMs in the area."

Branches in Kineton and Southam will close on 4th March.
Wellesbourne Airfield

As well as enforcement activity the consequences of being caught driving under the influence were highlighted across social media and local radio advertising took place across the region.

The advertising campaign supported the national month long winter drink drive enforcement campaign that launched on 1st December by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Figures indicate that, over the past three years, ten people were killed and 108 seriously injured in West Mercia following collisions where drink or drugs were recorded as a contributory factor. An additional four people were killed and 74 seriously injured in Warwickshire.
Wellesbourne Airfield

Lucy told the Herald: We have a big job to dispel the myths that have built up over decades. But Im confident we have the winning argument and winning team and that Britain is safer and better off within the EU.

See Thursday's Herald for more of the pro-EU argument from Lucy and Hogan's Cider founder, Alan Hogan.
Wellesbourne Airfield

The jury had previously been told Mr Merrilees stabbed Mr Cornet three times "with severe force", one of which had piereced his heart.

It happened following a furious row between the pair after a booze-fuelled day out with Mrs Merrilees and Mr Merrilees girlfriend, Rebecca Beveridge.

The defence successfully argued that Mr Merrilees actions were out of self-defence and the jury found him not guilty of murder after five hours and fifty minutes of deliberations.

There were emotional scenes when the verdict was returned, with a tearful Mr Merrilees thanking the jury as he left the courtroom.

During the trial the defence painted a picture of Mr Cornet as a man prone to aggression, drawing attention to a number of past occasions when he had been violent.

See Thursday's Stratford Herald for the full story on today's verdict.
Centene (NYSE: CNC) announced that it expects 2015 earnings per diluted share (excluding Health Net merger related costs) to exceed its previously announced range of $2.90 to $2.94. Preliminary unaudited financial information from continuing operations for the fourth quarter and full year 2015 is as follows:

2015 Results Q4 Full Year Premium and Service Revenues (in billions) $ 5.9 $ 21.3 Total Revenues (in billions) $ 6.3 $ 22.8 Diluted earnings per share (EPS) $ 0.91 $ 2.89 Diluted EPS excluding Health Net merger related expenses $ 0.95 $ 3.03

*** The Street sees Q4 revenue of $6.1 billion and EPS of $0.83 and FY15 revenue of $22.6 billion and EPS of $2.92.

The Company also reaffirms its 2016 guidance that was previously announced at its Investor Day in New York on December 18, 2015. For 2016 guidance purposes, the Company is providing combined guidance for Centene and Health Net and has assumed the Health Net transaction closes on February 1, 2016. The Health Net transaction remains subject to regulatory approval and the Company continues to expect the transaction to close early in 2016. The guidance amounts are subject to adjustment, dependent on the actual closing date and financing terms.

For its 2016 fiscal year, the Company expects the following results from continuing operations (assuming a February 1, 2016 closing date):

Total revenues in the range of $41.2 billion to $42.0 billion.

GAAP earnings per diluted share of approximately $2.85 to $3.15.

Adjusted earnings per diluted share of approximately $4.10 to $4.40.

Adjusted earnings per diluted share excludes approximately $0.65 to $0.70 per diluted share of Health Net merger related expenses and total intangible amortization associated with acquisitions of $0.55 to $0.60 per diluted share.

On January 25, 2016, the Company announced an ongoing comprehensive internal search for six hard drives that are unaccounted for in its inventory of approximately 26,000 information technology (IT) devices. This incident resulted from an employee not following established procedures on storing IT hardware. While we cannot estimate the impact with certainty at this time, the Company does not expect the impact of the incident to have a material effect on its future growth opportunities, financial position, cash flow or results of operations.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



Trend:



The report entitled "Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and other occupied territories of Azerbaijan" was not adopted under the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmen's pressure, Emil Huseynli, the head of the 'Support for youth development - Dushunce' public association told Trend Jan. 27.



"This once again proves that the OSCE Minsk Group takes an unfair position," he said.



He said that it is time to change the staff of the OSCE Minsk Group's co-chairing countries.



"I think that Turkey and Germany must be included in the composition of the OSCE Minsk Group," he said. "If the composition of the co-chairmen is not supplemented, their monopoly will only grow and they will become prisoners of the Armenian lobby."



Huseynli thinks that by the recent action the co-chairmen have once again demonstrated that they are monopolists and take an unfair position.



"Why must Azerbaijan turn a blind eye to the activity of the co-chairmen, conducting discussions at one table with the representatives of the separatist regime of Nagorno-Karabakh?," Huseynli asked.



He considers that the unadopted resolutions of PACE on the Azerbaijan's occupied territories showed that foreign states, international organizations follow their own interests, but not the principle of justice.



The chairman of the NGO welcomed the resolution titled "Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water" adopted by PACE and added that this document shows that Armenia is a country-aggressor.



"Thus, yet another international document recognized Armenia as a country-aggressor," said Huseynli.



The resolution titled "Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water" was adopted Jan. 26 at a PACE winter session.



The resolution titled "Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan", prepared by MP Robert Walter (UK), was not accepted.



Earlier, OSCE Minsk Group's co-chairs James Warlick (USA), Igor Popov (Russia) and Pierre Andrieu (France) spread an appeal about discussions of these resolutions, which was condemned by the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.
Hua Chunying, spokeswoman of China's Foreign Ministry, speaks at a regular news conference, in Beijing, China, January 6, 2016. REUTERS/Jason Lee

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Tuesday criticised what it said were "irresponsible" remarks made by a U.S. official this week calling for Beijing to do more to curb North Korea's banned nuclear program.

North Korea said it had successfully conducted a test of a miniaturized hydrogen nuclear device on Jan. 6 which, if true, marks a significant advance in the isolated state's strike capabilities in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions.

China is North Korea's lone major ally. A senior State Department official told reporters North Korea had few avenues to conduct international business that don't involve China, despite several rounds of economic sanctions, adding that Beijing could "clearly" do more.

"Many of the remarks made no sense and were not constructive," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters.

Hua spoke ahead of a visit to China this week by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has promised to press China to push for more curbs on North Korea's nuclear program.

Hua urged "relevant countries" to take responsibility and not "point the finger at other people and make irresponsible remarks".

Kerry is also planning for discussions on the South China Sea, a source of growing tension between China and Southeast Asian countries with rival claims.

(Reporting by Michael Martina, Writing by Megha Rajagopalan; Editing by Nick Macfie)
By Ernest Scheyder

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Continental Resources Inc (NYSE: CLR), North Dakota's second-largest oil producer, said on Tuesday it would slash its 2016 capital budget by 66 percent as it tries to preserve cash amid tumbling crude prices.

Led by billionaire wildcatter Harold Hamm, Continental plans to spend $920 million this year, down from $2.7 billion in 2015.

The cut comes just after rival Hess Corp (NYSE: HES) and Noble Energy Inc (NYSE: NBL) slashed their own 2016 budgets, adding to a chorus of company executives chanting that the plunge in oil prices has made it all but impossible to turn a profit.

Oklahoma City-based Continental, for instance, said it would not become profitable until oil prices return to $37 per barrel.

U.S. oil prices closed Tuesday at $31.45 per barrel.

Hamm famously canceled Continental's oil hedges in the fall of 2014, a bold bet that now appears misguided as the price of crude has only tumbled since then, dragging down Continental's profitability.

Yet Hamm showed little sign of remorse on Tuesday, betting that oil prices will jump before 2017.

"We are dedicated to preserving the value of our premier assets and building operational efficiencies in preparation for crude oil prices to stabilize and start recovering later this year," Hamm said in a statement.

The company does plan to cut its oil output this year by 10 percent from 2015 levels to roughly 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d), a recognition that it can no longer afford to extract and sell oil from the more-than 1 million acres it controls at depressed prices.

The largest plurality of Continental's 2016 budget spending will be in North Dakota's Bakken shale, which the company helped make a global oil play.

Oklahoma's SCOOP shale formation will receive the next-largest share of the budget, followed by other Oklahoma fields and well repair projects.

Overall, Continental plans to complete 71 wells this year, a sharp drop from 2015. The company said it will delay bringing online most of its North Dakota wells this year, increasing its count of drilled-but-uncompleted wells from 135 in December to 195 at the end of 2016.

Shares of Continental rose 10.5 percent to close Tuesday trading at $18.84 per share.

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; editing by Diane Craft)
By Crispian Balmer

ROME (Reuters) - The United States cannot solve any problems in the Middle East without Iran's help and should drop its "hostile" stance toward Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday.

On his first official visit to Europe, Rouhani also took a swipe at regional arch rival Saudi Arabia, saying its military campaign in neighboring Yemen was a failure and a frustration.

Rouhani is midway through a four-day trip to Italy and France, looking to burnish his country's international credentials following the signing last year of a nuclear accord with world powers and the lifting of financial sanctions.

While EU firms are lining up to sign lucrative business deals, the United States is keeping some of its sanctions in place, accusing Tehran of funding what it considers to be terror groups, and ties between the two nations remain terse.

"It's possible that Iran and the United States might have friendly relations. But the key to that is in Washington's hands, not Tehran's," Rouhani told a news conference, saying he would be happy to see U.S. businessmen in Iran.

"I would like to see the Americans set aside their hostility and chose another way, but inside the U.S. there are some problems, there is no unified voice," he said, noting that "the Zionist lobby" was "very influential".

He also rejected accusations that Iran was funding terror organizations. "It is clear that Iran is a country opposed to terrorism and a country that fights terrorism," he said.

The United States is the dominant foreign power in the Middle East, sporting close ties with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, and is militarily involved in both Iraq and Syria, where it is battling Sunni jihadist group, Islamic State.

"The Americans know very well that when it comes to important regional issues they cannot achieve anything without Iran's influence or say," Rouhani said, speaking through a translator.

Shi'ite Muslim Iran is the closest backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while Western countries support his mainly Sunni Muslim opponents. However, Tehran and the West are united in their opposition to Islamic State.

Adding to tensions in the region is the recent deterioration in relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh broke off diplomatic ties with Tehran this month in an escalating row over the Saudi execution of a Shi'ite Muslim cleric.

Rouhani said Saudi was acting out of frustration, branding its 10-month military campaign in Yemen against the Houthi militia, who are allied to Iran, as a flop.

"It is angry because of its failures," he said. "Saudi Arabia has been bombing the impoverished people of Yemen for 10 months and has not achieved anything. It has not had any victory and is hated more than ever by the Yemeni people."

(Additional reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, Sam Wilkin and Philip Pullella; Editing by Louise Ireland)
By Nelson Renteria

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - The U.N. on Monday announced a U.S.-financed pilot program to help fight corruption in El Salvador, a Central American country so torn by drugs and gang warfare that it ranks among the most violent in the world.

The three-year program, with an unknown price tag, will support the government of leftist President Salvador Sanchez Ceren but lacks the broad investigative powers of the U.N.-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

The CICIG was instrumental in gathering evidence that Guatemalan President Otto Perez was part of a customs racket, leading to his resignation and eventual arrest last year.

His fall triggered calls for similar anti-corruption units in other Central American nations, but the prospect of facing the same fate as Perez has made neighboring governments wary.

"This is not CICIG," said Monica Mendoza, who will coordinate El Salvador's effort, which was agreed by the government and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

She said the project will not investigate cases itself but will work with existing institutions and provide technical tools to support their work.

The United States last autumn tried and failed to convince El Salvador to set up a commission similar to the one in Guatemala. Instead, the government agreed to a less powerful $25 million anti-corruption program from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The USAID program is separate from the one announced on Monday.

A commitment to fighting corruption is likely to influence how much aid money Washington offers to help revitalize Central America - one of the world's poorest and most violent regions - and stem the flood of child migrants from the region.

Violence has risen steadily in El Salvador since a 2012 truce between the country's two main gangs began to fall apart in 2014. Last year was the most violent on record, with a 70 percent increase in murders over the previous year..

The homicide rate is more than 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, making the country of 6.4 million among the most violent anywhere, according to Insight Crime, a foundation that analyses organized crime.

(Writing by Enrique Pretel, editing by Anna Yukhananov and Tom Brown)
By David Brunnstrom and Megha Rajagopalan

BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed on Wednesday on the need for a significant new U.N. Security resolution targeting North Korea after its Jan. 6 nuclear test, though there were few signs of concrete progress.

Kerry, on a two-day visit to Beijing, had been expected to press China, North Korea's lone major backer, for more curbs on Pyongyang after it said it had successfully conducted a test of a miniaturized hydrogen nuclear device, though the United States has voiced scepticism as to whether it was that powerful.

China has insisted it is already making great efforts to achieve decentralization on the "Korean peninsula" and Wang rejected any "groundless speculation" on its North Korea stance, following remarks from U.S. officials that China could do more.

"We agreed that the U.N. Security Council needs to take further action and pass a new resolution," Wang told reporters at a joint briefing with Kerry.

"In the meantime, we must point out that the new resolution should not provoke new tensions."

Kerry said the two sides had agreed to an "accelerated effort" at the U.N. to reach a "strong resolution that introduces significant new measures" to curtail North Korea's ability to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

"It's not enough to agree on the goal. We believe we need to agree on the meaningful steps necessary to get the achievement of the goal," Kerry said.

The exchange of goods and services between China and North Korea was one area where steps could be taken to pressure Pyongyang back to talks, he said.

Kerry also said that shipping, aviation, trade of resources, including coal and fuel, and security at border customs, were key areas in the sanctions debate. North Korea is heavily reliant on China for oil, gasoline and trade.

"All nations, particularly those that seek a global leadership role, share a fundamental responsibility to meet this challenge with a united front," Kerry said.

He added that the U.S. would take "all necessary steps" to honor security commitments to allies, signaling that the U.S. was prepared to continue ramping up its military presence in the region, a move that would likely unsettle Beijing.

"North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat, to the world, and it has stated its intention to develop a thermonuclear weapon," he said. "In addition, it has made clear its intent to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile with the capacity to carry a nuclear warhead."

The 15-member U.N. Security Council said at the time of North Korea's test that it would begin working on significant new measures in response, a threat diplomats said could mean an expansion of sanctions.

Since then, diplomats said Washington and Beijing have been primarily negotiating on a draft resolution, but when asked on Saturday if they were nearing agreement, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said no.

After talks on Wednesday, which went hours past schedule, Kerry said details still had not been set.

In a sign that Beijing could be reluctant to take a more hardline stance on North Korea, state news agency Xinhua said it was "unrealistic to rely merely on China to press the DPRK to abandon its nuclear program, as long as the U.S. continues an antagonistic approach wrought from a Cold War mentality".

"Bear in mind that China-DPRK ties should not be understood as a top-down relationship where the latter follows every bit of advice offered by the former," Xinhua said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Xinhua commentaries are not official government pronouncements, but can be read as a reflection of official thinking. Wang added that sanctions should be seen as a path to negotiation, and not as a punitive end in themselves

SOUTH CHINA SEA MILITARIZATION

Kerry said that a need for the United States and China to find a way forward on easing tension in the South China Sea weighed heavily in talks.

"I stressed the importance of finding common ground among the claimants and avoiding a destabilizing cycle of mistrust or escalation," Kerry said. "Foreign Minister Wang Yi accepted the idea that it would be worth exploring whether or not there was a way to reduce the tensions and solve some of the challenges through diplomacy."

Wang said China's activities in the region, which have elicited unease from the U.S. and its allies, should not be construed as militarization.

"China has given a commitment of not engaging in so-called militarization, and we will honor that commitment," Wang said. "We cannot accept the allegation that China's words are not being matched by action."

His remarks came as Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou said he planned a trip to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba, known as Taiping Island in Taiwan, in the sea, a move a U.S. official called "extremely unhelpful" in resolving disputes over the waterway.

China claims almost all the disputed waters in the potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea, parts of which are also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Kerry was in Cambodia on Tuesday after a visit to neighboring Laos as part of an effort to urge unity among leaders of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the sea issue before a summit with President Barack Obama next month.

China insists any disputes should be handled bilaterally.

(Additional reporting by Sui-Lee Wee in Singapore; Writing by Michael Martina in Beijing; Editing by Nick Macfie)
If you don't have time for a half hour of reading on the TPPA, get the skinny here in less than three minutes.

Never before has a free-trade deal provoked so much interest - or so much outrage. With just days until the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA) is signed off, we look at the pros and cons of the deal, the pushback, and what the future might bring.

"TPPA, no way!" more than 5000 New Zealanders yelled, as they marched through central Auckland last year.

Their rhyme was the rallying cry of the movement against the biggest free-trade deal in history, echoed around New Zealand and the world as the 12-member deal inched ever closer.



Their concerns were mixed: Pharmac would be crippled, multinationals could sue our government over any law, online privacy would be eroded. But worst of all was the fog of secrecy, which made it impossible to know what the deal would really do.

PHIL WALTER/GETTY IMAGES A march down Auckland's Queen Street in August, 2015.

READ MORE:

* The TPPA explained in 30 seconds

* The TPPA explained in 30 minutes

In recent years, the vocal opposition to the TPPA has grown and grown, but the talks have been going on for more than a decade - started way back in 2002 by then-Prime Minister Helen Clark, and the leaders of Singapore and Chile.



Although seven other countries - Brunei, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Peru, Canada and Mexico - joined the negotiations in quick succession, it wasn't until 2008, when the United States joined, that concerns about the deal began to sprout.



The US, and later, Japan, changed the face of the deal: the former sought massive concessions for Big Pharma, including up to 12 years of exclusivity on drug patents before member countries could buy generic medicines; the latter wanted to continue its dairy industry protectionism while growing its own exports.

TPPA: What do you think now? Share your stories, photos and videos. Contribute

Both were objectionable to New Zealand, the world's largest dairy exporter, with the most efficient drug-buying agency in the western world.

The final deal, agreed in October, largely assuaged concerns on both points: although Pharmac will have slightly higher costs, the government promises it will foot the bill, so patients don't have to.

But the government itself admits the outcome for dairy is still far from perfect, having failed to convince the US, Canada, Mexico and Japan to remove dairy tariffs in their entirety, while Japan's also retaining some beef tariffs.

CHARLES DRACE/FAIRFAX NZ Over 2000 people march through Christchurch in March 2015, in protests against the TPPA.

In most other areas, tariffs will be gone within 20 years - many, immediately - and non-tariff barriers to trade, including customs delays and regulatory barriers, will also be slashed, making it both cheaper and faster for New Zealand companies - from meat, dairy and wine producers to IT and agribusiness companies, and many in between - to do business.

The TPPA will be signed by all 12 countries in Auckland on February 4 - and it's hailed as a win for New Zealand's diplomatic leadership, if not for its outcomes, although the government says it expects the deal to add an extra $2.7 billion dollars to GDP each year by 2030.

While Kiwi exporters will have greater access to the TPPA markets than ever before, the result for the average New Zealander is perhaps the most surprising aspect: both proponents of the deal, and those against it, agree most Kiwis won't notice any difference.



Consumer goods prices aren't expected to fall, and the government's guaranteed patients won't have to foot the bill for Pharmac's slightly-higher costs.

Despite that, the figurehead of the opposition, Auckland University law professor Jane Kelsey, says the win for freer trade comes at the expense of democracy.

Member governments and their multinational corporations will have new rights to oppose New Zealand's future legislation, and the ability to sue over laws that don't suit their business - which could include efforts to raise taxes on unhealthy foods, or new environmental protections.

Copyright will also extend from 50 to 70 years, costing New Zealand an extra $55 million dollars a year.

SUPPLIED Anger about the deal spread to most towns and cities in New Zealand last year, as the talks progressed.

Although the TPPA includes an exception clause to protect the Treaty of Waitangi, a group of high-profile Maori - including former MP Hone Harawira and lawyer Moana Jackson - are spearheading a Waitangi Tribunal claim against the TPPA over a mix of issues, from a lack of consultation to the contentious, and ongoing, issue of water rights.

The case won't be heard until March - too late to stop a who's who of international trade and diplomacy signing on the dotted line next week.

There's just one other sticking point: the agreement won't come into effect until all member countries ratify the deal, and in the United States, politicking means it's expected to take another two years at the very least before the TPPA comes into effect, and makes an iota of impact.

LAWRENCE SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ Jane Kelsey, who is a professor of law at the University of Auckland and a prominent critic of the deal, talks to the crowds in Auckland.

TPPA AT A GLANCE:

* 12 member countries: New Zealand, the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Chile, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Peru and Mexico

* Tariffs will be removed from 93 per cent of New Zealand's exports to TPPA countries

* Canada, USA, Japan and Mexico will retain some tariffs on dairy, and Japan will lower, but not eliminate, its beef tariffs

* The government estimates an annual $2.7 billion boost to GDP by 2030

* Experts on both sides say the average New Zealander is unlikely to notice any difference from the deal

* The deal will be signed in Auckland on February 4

* Each country needs to ratify the deal before it takes effect, and the US Congress is expected to take the longest

*comments are closed
Wellington's Stone Street Studios are part of the team filming Ghost in the Shell, starring Scarlet Johansson.

A-lister Scarlett Johansson has been spotted sipping cocktails and tucking into tapas in Wellington.

It is understood Johansson touched down in the capital on Saturday and moved into a house in Seatoun before shooting her next film, Ghost in the Shell, at Miramar's Stone Street Studios.

Have you seen Scarlett Johansson in Wellington? Email your newstips, photos and video to newstips@stuff.co.nz

The 31-year-old was spotted with her 1-year-old daughter, Rose, at the studio on Monday.

READ MORE:

* Scarlett Johansson in New Zealand to shoot new movie

* Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson rumoured to be in New Zealand

* Wellington casting call for Scarlett Johansson movie flooded with hopefuls

In breaks in her shooting schedule, the star has been sampling local bars, cafes and gyms, to the delight of locals.

It is understood Johansson enjoyed a quiet dinner at Miramar restaurant Coco at the Roxy over the long weekend.

She was spotted sipping on a cocktail made by champion bartender Ray Letoa, and enjoyed a meal made by Coco's head chef Nick Spicer.

Roxy Cinema staff would neither confirm nor deny the reports.

"I wouldn't have a clue if she's been in, shoot, I'd love to have gotten a selfie," Letoa said.

"She's quite private," said Alice Sisley, head of events and marketing.

Johansson tucked into pumpkin empanadas at Park Kitchen in Miramar on Sunday night, manager Tamara Staples said.

Staples wasn't working when Johansson dined in, but said the A-lister was "really lovely".

"She was with her bodyguard, apparently he was really good looking," Park Kitchen barista Jess Lloyd said.

"Everyone was like 'look at her' and we were like 'look at the bodyguard'," Staples added.

Lloyd had heard the star was staying in Seatoun heights for about two months.

A barista at The Chocolate Frog cafe had also heard the star was staying in Seatoun, "in a multi-million dollar mansion".

"There are houses up there that are only for, like, Hollywood actors who come over here to film," he said.

Park Kitchen has only been open five months, but Staples said staff were used to seeing big names in town due to nearby Weta Studios and Stone St.

"They are just people to us, and they are really nice people. One thing people get when they come to New Zealand is they are not treated like superstars, they should be allowed some normalcy.

"The fact you can come into local suburban restaurants and no one fawns over you, no one is autograph hunting ... i think that's why so many [celebrities] like coming back to New Zealand."

The star also took the time to get in some exercise.

She was spotted at City Fitness in Lyall Bay, but staff there said they were not able to comment on a client.

"Apparently she is training really really hard for her new role," Lloyd said.

Johansson's husband, creative agency owner Romain Dauriac, is also in the country, The New Zealand Herald reported.

The trio  plus entourage  arrived by private jet at the weekend.

The DreamWorks Studios film is based on the acclaimed Japanese manga and anime series, about a cyborg police officer attempting to bring down a villainous computer hacker, played by Johansson.
Pukekohe Showgrounds is set to be showcased on the big screen at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival in February, when acclaimed director Lee Tamahori's Mahana has its world premiere.

Tamahori is a New Zealand filmmaker best known for directing the 1994 film Once Were Warriors, thriller Mulholland Falls and the James Bond film Die Another Day.

Set in the 1960s on the East Coast of New Zealand, Mahana tells of two Maori sheep-shearing families.

In their search for 1960s landscapes with narrow, unsealed roads, filmmakers scouted locations from Bethells to Kaipara.

Production designer Mark Robins travelled to the East Coast for inspiration - and to make sure the team selected locations in Auckland that correctly evoked the East Coast of the 60s.

And it was the central competition between the film's families - the Golden Shears shearing event - that was selected to be staged at the showgrounds.

Franklin A&P Show organiser John Fleet said the shed underwent a paint job, before filming took place in late April last year.

He said the shed, used as the shearing shed for the A&P show, was picked because of its authenticity.

"We added in an extra stand - as six were required and we only have five stands," he said.

Franklin's world record holding shearers, Sam and Emily Welch, were brought on-board to train the actors and find 500 full-wool sheep needed for filming.

In addition to training the actors in the basics of shearing, the Welches made props and searched for real shearers to body-double the actors for the crucial shearing scenes.

The drama is based on Whale Rider author Witi Ihimaera's novel, Bulibasha, and stars Temuera Morrison as patriarch Tamihana Mahana.

Mahana will open in New Zealand cinemas on March 3. The 2016 Berlin Film Festival runs from February 11-21.
Live ammunition left in a park by the Defence Force is an accident waiting to happen, says a man who has found almost 30 blanks in the area.

"If a child was to hit it with a hammer or throw it in a fire, it could explode," Gary Hampson-Tindale said.

"They are like little hand grenades."



The Cambridge man has found 28 live blanks in the Kaimanawa Forest Park on three different occasions.



Hampson-Tindale is a hunter and regularly visits the area. He started coming across the live ammunition in November last year.

EMMA JAMES/FAIRFAX MEDIA He has found 28 of them since November 2015.



He said they were blanks from a military-issue Steyr rifle, and because they still contained gunpowder, he was concerned for the safety of people coming across them who may be unaware of the risk.

Hampson-Tindale found 15 bullets on November, 12 on New Year's Day and three towards the end of January. He handed them all in to the Cambridge Police who disposed of them for him.

All the ammunition he found was at the Waikoko campsite which is a back country campsite on the banks of the Waikoko Stream.

Google Maps They were found at the Waikoko Campsite, otherwise known as the Kaimanawa Rd Campsite.

It is the main camp off of Kaimanawa Rd, adjacent to the Umu Kari Kari track.

The area is highly popular over summer and is regularly used by the New Zealand Defence Forces (NZDF) for training exercises.

Hampson-Tindale said he had no issue with the defence forces training there, but felts they should clean up after themselves more carefully. He suggested using a metal detector.

The Kaimanawa Forest Park is administered by the Department of Conservation (DOC), who have investigated the issue.

When first alerted in early November, DOC contacted the NZDF to conduct a sweep of the camp to ensure all remaining blanks were removed.

However, after recent reports of ammunition still being found at the campsite, DOC conducted a search and found one live blank and a number of discharged rounds.

The blanks do not contain bullets, but do have a regular powder charge which simulates the sound and recoil of a normal projectile round.

Central Plateau conservation services manager Dave Lumley said people going about their normal summer holiday activities had nothing to worry about.

"Our advice from the NZDF is these rounds do not pose a significant threat to public safety, unless they are wilfully mishandled.

"They rust and break down in the environment."

He put the incidences down to a minor communication breakdown with NZDF.

"We have had an excellent relationship with these training activities over many years, without issues in the past.

"Ideally the live and spent rounds would be cleared away after an exercise, but it didn't happen in this case, and we have taken steps to ensure it is no longer an issue."

He encouraged people finding rounds to leave them where they are and let DOC know.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

Trend:

PACE has urged Armenia to withdraw its armed forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the resolution titled "Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water" says.

The resolution was adopted at a PACE session Jan. 26.

The text of the resolution has been promulgated. The resolution was adopted on the basis of the report of MP Milica Markovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina).

The Parliamentary Assembly reminds all its member states that the right to water is essential to life and health, in accordance with the Helsinki Rules of 1966 and the Berlin Rules of 2004 on water resources, and thus constitutes a prior condition for the enjoyment of other human rights.

The Assembly considers that the deliberate creation of an artificial environmental crisis must be regarded as "environmental aggression" and seen as a hostile act by one State towards another aimed at creating environmental disaster areas and making normal life impossible for the population concerned.

The Assembly deplores that the occupation by Armenia of Nagorno-Karabakh and other adjacent areas of Azerbaijan creates similar humanitarian and environmental problems for the citizens of Azerbaijan living in the Lower Karabakh valley.

The Assembly notes that the lack of regular maintenance work for over twenty years on the Sarsang reservoir, located in one of the areas of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenia, poses a danger to the whole border region. The Assembly emphasizes that the state of disrepair of the Sarsang dam could result in a major disaster with great loss of human life and possibly a fresh humanitarian crisis.

In view of this urgent humanitarian problem, the Assembly requests the Armenian authorities to cease using water resources as tools of political influence or an instrument of pressure benefiting only one of the parties to the conflict.

The Assembly also condemned the Armenian parliamentary delegation's refusal from the cooperation in preparing a detailed on-the-spot survey.

The Sarsang reservoir was built to provide residents with water and irrigate agriculture in the border areas. But after the occupation of these lands, Armenia has been using this reservoir as a tool of humanitarian and ecological terror.

In winter, the Armenian side intentionally opens the floodgates and creates conditions for flooding of the surrounding areas. In summer, Armenia doesn't allow to use the reservoir. As a result, there are serious problems in provision of people with water, irrigating agriculture and preserving biodiversity.

The use of water, according to international conventions, is an integral part of human rights.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The two countries signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia, France and the US are currently holding peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented the UN Security Council's four resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Sunny, left, and Wiremu Bayliss will be accompanying their daughter Ellie in her first kids' triathlon.

Ellie Bayliss might need a little more help than other kids tackling their first triathlon event, but she's determined to follow in dad's footsteps.

The Forest Lake School student, who has foetal alcohol syndrome, didn't have to look far for inspiration to enter the Sanitarium Weet-Bix Kids TRYathlon event in Hamilton.

Her father, Wiremu Bayliss, has completed eight triathlon and IronMaori events in the past four years on an incredible journey to lose 150 kilograms.

"Ellie has seen me do the triathlons, and thought she wanted to be like dad and give it a go, so we really want to support her in that," Bayliss said.

READ MORE:

* How one Kiwi lost more than 150kgs

* Hamilton man gets publicly funded surgery to remove 7.5kg of excess skin

"For her, living with foetal alcohol means she struggles with a lot of things most of her peers find easy, such as riding a bike or crossing the road.

"We also have to do a lot of extra learning at home, such as reading, to support her."

Wiremu and his wife Sunny, who are both teachers, will accompany nine-year-old Ellie to help her.

"She isn't an independent swimmer, so I'll go in the pool with her, and I'll also do the run, while Sunny will go on a bike with her to remind her to brake and where to go."

The couple, who first started to care for Ellie when she was two-years-old as a foster child, are making an exception to their usual choice not to do Sunday activities to take part in the event.

"We don't usually do things on a Sunday for religious reasons, but Ellie really wants to do it and we know it will be good for her to be involved," Wiremu said.

"We really want her to feel the emotions of achieving a goal like this, and give her the experiences that she wants and that all her peers are having. And even though it might be tougher for her than some, she'll be smiling and laughing the whole way, she's such a happy girl."

Ellie has been joining her dad on bike rides to train as he prepares for an IronMaori event.

"She's a machine," he said. "She did a 9km bike ride with me, and even though she was tired, she stuck it out."

For Wiremu, who is a weight loss mentor and healthy living advocate through his Facebook page Biggies Journey, sharing the pair's story is important to help encourage other kids to get involved in active and positive events such as the Weet-Bix TRYathlons.

"When I first started doing triathlon events, it was all about competing against myself, and enjoying the social aspect of just participating and completing the challenge, which is similar to what Ellie will get to experience."

The doting parents are looking forward to seeing their girl cross the finish line and feel the confidence boost of having swum, biked and run her way through with them by her side.

"She wants us to be proud of her, and we are."

The event takes place in Hamilton at the University of Waikato on February 14.

The events are open to children aged between 7 and 15 years old, and consist of a swim, followed by a cycle and a run.

Visit try.weetbix.co.nz to sign up.
The bamboo sculpture "Helping Hand", under construction at Kiwiburn in Hunterville. Designed by Nico Woodward, the sculpture will be set alight on Sunday evening.

Hunterville's population has temporarily risen with Kiwiburn festival-goers setting up camp for six days of jumping off the grid.

The numbers of festival-goers peaked this year with 1400 people expected to descend on the annual New Zealand Burning Man event.

Thirty theme camps have been erected including dance, music and art areas and teaching and creating spaces.

WAWRICK SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ Arriving campers walk past this giant effigy, built to burn.

Tents have been spread throughout the tiered paddocks, with many people opting for the shade and shelter of trees.

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WAWRICK SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ. Nico Woodward with the moulding of his father's hand used to create the split bamboo sculpture being constructed in the background.

The ethos of the event is based around ten principles with self expression and self reliance being at the core.

Organiser Shelley Watson said the festival is different every year because things evolve.

"Everything that you see is what people have bought in. We practice radical self reliance, so the only thing you can buy is ice."

Warwick Smith/ Fairfax NZ. Greg Kolbe constructs a sauna beside the river, using bamboo framiNg and an old gas bottle as a stove/heating source.

The burning of an effigy is the climax of the festival and this year's is a giant taniwha-like structure.

An art project called Helping Hand, designed by Nico Woodward, will also be burnt.

Woodward has been assisted by a Kiwiburn arts grant and a team of helpers.

WAWRICK SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ Once known as Centre Camp, the Town Hall sits in the heart of the festival as a public space and cultural hub. It's available for everyone to use for talks, workshops and events.

He said the structure, made out of wooden pallets, demolition timber and split bamboo, was designed to be burned.

"There's a lot of mixed emotion when it burns. It is quite an elating moment. I really like the temporary nature of art here, so you can build something quite freely and on a large scale."

Other temporary structures were being built with a floating bar appearing on the river, an insult booth and a swing structure going up.

WAWRICK SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ Setting up camp with the Rangitikei River cliffs as a backdrop.

Greg Kolbe was finishing off a riverside sauna that he said was a bit of a homemade experiment.

"It's a cool excuse to try to make something like this. It's a good little testing zone."

Self proclaimed Burning Man junkies Meredith Fortner and Cooper Crause were at Kiwiburn for the first time and were impressed by the culture of individuality that they were seeing.

"The Kiwi culture just digs it and figures it out with the tools that you have. There are some amazing things here."

Watson said anything was possible once people got out of the "default or everyday world" and entered "Kiwiburn zone".

Kiwiburn started on Wednesday and will run until February 1.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Anakhanum Khidayatova - Trend:

Romania's Embassy in Baku hosted Jan. 27 a roundtable meeting titled "Current Situation and Perspectives of NATO-Azerbaijan Cooperation".

Opening the event, the Ambassador of Romania to Azerbaijan Daniel Cristian Ciobanu highlighted the strategic importance of developing the NATO-Azerbaijan partnership, read a message from Romania's embassy.

He said that last year Romanian diplomatic mission, in cooperation with local partners, organized numerous public diplomacy activities in various Azerbaijani cities with a goal of increasing public awareness about North Atlantic Alliance and the benefits of NATO-Azerbaijan cooperation.

The diplomat also noted that the embassy will continue efforts to strengthen bilateral relations.

"Azerbaijan is a valuable partner of NATO," said the ambassador.

"Maintaining sustained political contacts at various levels will contribute to the enhancement of relations between NATO and Azerbaijan. Romania will continue to actively support Azerbaijan to develop further its dialogue and cooperation with NATO," he added.

The roundtable meeting was also attended by military attaches and diplomats of several embassies accredited in Azerbaijan.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Anahanum
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

Trend:

Giving preference to application of contemporary technologies and progressive approach Baku Higher Oil School took one more step in this direction.

Referring to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's speech dedicated to the 70 year anniversary of Azerbaijan National Academy of Science, and with the view of contributing the non-oil sector development and benefitting from alternative energy sources, Training and Research Center on Renewable Energy Engineering was established at BHOS.

The Center primarily aims at conducting research and developing recommendations on the use of the wind, solar, thermal and bio energy sources, as well as training highly qualified specialists in renewable energy engineering in accordance with contemporary education programmes and technologies.

It should be pointed out that in the course of the past years very significant projects on renewable energy have been realized in Azerbaijan, and a number of courses on renewable energy sources have been included in the curriculum of certain universities. However, the Center opened at BHOS targets at training of engineers on renewable energy based on an interdisciplinary approach.

To achieve this goal, BHOS with the support of German E.ON Company signed the cooperation agreement with RWTH Aachen University. The agreement envisages creation of appropriate infrastructure at BHOS, providing necessary facilities, carrying out scientific and research work and training of specialists.

In order to gain relevant experience for training of specialists and carrying out research, it was planned to benefit from the scientific and methodical assistance of the mentioned structures, and involve highly qualified specialists who have studied abroad in scientific and lecturing activities, while providing them in-service and on-job training opportunities and ensuring their participation at various international scientific conferences on renewable energy.

Organizational measures for creating the Center have already been initiated and a special area was allotted at the premises of BHOS new campus with an initial personnel appointment.

The knowledge triangle is considered as the primary concept for further activities of the Center that will serve to integrate scientific, educational, industrial centers and business structures of the country.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



Trend:



A new chairman of AZInsurance company's board of directors has been appointed upon a decision of the general meeting of shareholders, the company said Jan 27.



Alexander Kananadze has become a new head of the board of directors. Earlier, he was AZInsurance's first deputy chairman of the board of directors. Earlier, Shadiya Amanova held the position.



AZInsurance's board of directors includes Ziya Talibov (from the previous convocation) and Murad Ahmadov.



The Board of Directors is elected for a term of one year.



Alexander Kananadze graduated from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and got an MBA in finance. Kananadze has a 15 year-experience in the insurance business. He held the managerial positions in the world's largest insurance companies - Allianz and Zurich Insurance Group.



Kananadze joined AZInsurance's team in November 2015. Kananadze has taken up a new position since January 16, 2016.



AZInsurance has been working on the Azerbaijani insurance market since 2006. It has branches and representative offices in many districts of the country, namely, Sumgait, Ganja, Lankaran, Shirvan, Sheki, Gabala, Tartar, Yevlakh and Shamakhi.



According to the State Insurance Supervision Service under the Azerbaijani finance ministry, the company's charges amounted to 32.76 million manat in 2015 with payments in the amount of 7.9 million manat. The company's insurance charges decreased by 10.85 percent, while payments - by 19.2 percent in 2015.

The official exchange rate is 1.6050 AZN/USD Jan 27.
Police are appealing for witnesses following the gunpoint robbery of a security guard outside of a Bay of Plenty supermarket this morning.

The incident happened 11am outside Pak n Save on King Street, Kopeopeo, Whakatane and an unconfirmed amount of cash was stolen.

A scene examination has been completed and police are in the process of taking witness statements, says a statement from police.

At this stage it is understood there was more than one offender and at least one vehicle linked to the robbery. No one was hurt.

There were a number of members of the public around when the robbery occurred and police are appealing for anyone with any information or images on their phones that might assist the investigation to make contact at the earliest opportunity.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Whakatane Police on 07 308 5255.

Alternatively, information can be left anonymously via the Crimestoppers 0800 555 111 line.
All the worlds a stage, and all the men and women merely players wrote Shakespeare.

Tonight The Bard will make a triumphant return to the Te Puna Quarry for Outdoor Shakespeare In The Bays latest production of As You Like It which is on stage until February 7.
The tent is used to greet cruise ship passengers at the Port of Tauranga and to look into rebuilding the former i-site in Salisbury Avenue.

Other measures include increasing yearly operational expenditure funding to Tourism Bay of Plenty by $150,000 for the provision of visitor services. It makes up a shortfall in funding caused by increased activity, particularly at the i-Port.

The proposal is to pay for it through an increase of the targeted economic development rate on commercial properties.

The one-off $150,000 will also come from commercial rates. It will keep the i-Port operating for another two years while the rebuilt at Salisbury Avenue and the provision of satellite i-sites at Phoenix carpark and in downtown Tauranga are investigated.

The council is providing another $100,000 in 2016/17 to fund design and consenting work. This would be loan-funded and repaid through commercial rates.

Construction wont start on the new i-Site until the viability of the proposal has been assessed.

Tourism in the coastal Bay of Plenty is a $2.1M a day industry, totalling over $760M in visitor spend each year.

Tourism spend in the Bay of Plenty has grown by 14 per cent over the six years to March 2015, and 12 per cent in just the last year.

More than 40 per cent of international visitors to New Zealand use an i-Site, and 83 per cent of these participate in additional activities due to their visit, equating to statistically higher spend and longer stays.

The i-Ports temporary structure services approx. 85,000 cruise passengers per season and counting. Tourism BOP says the current combination of the Willow Street i-Site and the i-Port will not be able to provide a quality service and experience for our visitors.

Led by TBOP for TCC, theres been a thorough review of visitor services in Tauranga over the past six months. The review took account of visitor information services across the whole of the Bay of Plenty, with the aim of having a coordinated approach to branding and servicing throughout the region.

The assessment finds that a new primary i-Site on Coronation Park at Salisbury Avenue in the Mount would provide a fit-for purpose solution for the future.

This is the same location as the old i-Site closed in 2012 due to financial constraints and the inappropriateness of the building.

With the growth in cruise visitor numbers, the site provides a potentially efficient option that can serve that market and the other major visitor markets well.

The new i-Site on Salisbury Avenue/Coronation Park would include an area reserved primarily for servicing cruise ship passengers, alongside the main visitor information area. A new pedestrian access may be considered from the Port.

The site will provide better access for visitors in larger vehicles; tour buses, campervans, making use of agreed parking upgrades on Nikau Crescent. The proposed i-Site will also profit from previously agreed upgrades to pedestrian access and the streetscape at this site.

It is also be close enough to the centre of the Mount to service residents, friends and relatives and independent travellers.

The proposed structure could potentially also support events at Coronation Park and be used for other community purposes during the June-September non-cruise ship times.

Tourism Bay of Plenty is contracted by Tauranga City Council to provide information services to visitors to the city, primarily through the i-Site on Willow Street and the i-Port that welcomes cruise passengers into the city and region.
The Government will invest $6 million in a new nine-classroom block at Khandallah School in Wellington, Associate Education Minister Nikki Kaye announced today.

This redevelopment will address structural and weathertightness issues in the schools current main teaching block, says Ms Kaye.

The old eight-classroom block will be replaced by the new block, which will meet full innovative learning environment (ILE) standards and also accommodate projected roll growth.

The project is in its early stages and all interested parties, including neighbours, will be consulted during the master planning process which will determine the exact location of the new block.

The master planning process will consider opportunities to minimise disruption during building works; student and teacher safety; and the best use of outdoor areas.

The Ministry is also currently working with the school to ensure the new teaching spaces will support the schools vision for learning.

The Government is committed to ensuring that students all over New Zealand can learn in environments that inspire and support them to achieve to the best of their potential.

Around $90 million of school redevelopments have now been announced in the Wellington area since last November. This includes an $8.5 million project at Kelburn Normal School, and $12.3 million for projects at Newtown and Ngaio Schools.

Over the last seven years, weve invested more than $4 billion in school property maintenance, growth and modernisation nationwide. This is more than a 30 per cent increase on the previous seven years.

Construction at Khandallah School is expected to start early in 2017, and take approximately 14 months to complete.

Source: Office of Nikki Kaye.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The EU allocated 1.2 million euros to improve the Azerbaijani national statistics system.

The project consists of five components, namely, improvement of statistics data governance and dissemination of statistics information through the geographic information system, as well as statistics data on the population's income and living conditions, disability and tourism, said Tahir Budagov, the chairman of the Azerbaijani State Statistics Committee.

Budagov made this statement at an event dedicated to the twinning project entitled "Support to the State Statistics Committee in modernization of the national statistic system of the Republic of Azerbaijan in line with the EU standards".

He said that the employees of the State Statistics Committee intend to visit a number of EU countries to learn from the European experience in the statistics data preparation.

The twinning project implementation period is two years.

The main partners of the project are the Federal Statistical Office of Germany and the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria. Moreover, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Croatia will support the project.
According to the plans, the stores will open this year, adding to the brands four existing outlets in China.

If you see there is a potential swing with more mainland and less travel proportion, its one more reason to speed up your mainland investments, Bulgari Chief Executive Jean-Christophe Babin told Reuters.

With annual sales estimated between 1.5 and 2 billion euros, Bulgari is the third most successful jewellery brand in China,behind Richemonts Cartier and Tiffany.

More than ever it makes a lot of sense for Bulgari to invest in China, said Babin. Chinese consumers, whether shopping at home or abroad, make up more than 30 percent of sales of Swiss watches, and are notorious lovers of luxury goods in general.

Founded by Sotirios Voulgaris in 1884, Bulgari has grown to become one of the worlds most iconic fashion and jewellery brands.
Called the North Deck, the outdoor space measures around 10,000 square metres and extends 100 metres into the ocean.

The deck was made in Finland and is currently en route to Dubai. Once complete, it will boast 32 beach cabanas, 400 sun-loungers, a fresh water pool, and salt water pool, a restaurant and a bar.

Dubai is renowned for providing exceptional experiences, says Robert Swade, Jumeirah Groups Chief Operating Officer. This is the first time a structure of this nature and size has been built in one country and then transported to another country to be assembled and operated.

We are really pushing the boundaries of innovation and demonstrating how committed we are to positioning Dubai as the most exciting destination in the world and Burj Al Arab Jumeirah as the finest provider of luxury experiences.

Located on an artificial island near Jumeirah beach, the Burj Al Arab hotel is the third tallest hotel in the world.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 26

By Dalga Khatinoglu- Trend:

Iran is capable to sign contracts for purchasing a maximum of 40-50 planes [in the first post-sanctions step], Mohammad Reza Sabzalipour, head of Iran's World Trade Center told Trend.

While Iranian officials say the country is preparing to sign a contract for the purchase of 114 Airbuses during President Hassan Rouhani's visit to France, Sabzalipour says that the lack of financial resources, as well as skilled and trained flight teams won't allow Iran to carry out the mentioned deal.

Iran previously has announced that it is negotiating with other airplane manufacturing companies, from Russia, China, to sign contracts as well.

Back in April 2015, the head of Iran Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Ali Abedzadeh said the country needs to buy up to 500 passenger planes in the next 10 years to renovate its ageing fleet.

Meanwhile, Sabzalipur says Iranian officials have announced the contradictory figures for the needed airplanes.

"For instance, at least $3.5 billion is needed as pre-payments for a contract with worth $15 billion," he said. "Neither government, nor private companies in Iran have financial might to pay this amount."

He also said that Iran has announced that it is planning to purchase several Airbus wide-body planes, but the current runways should be adjusted for landing several wide-body planes.

"Furthermore, the lack of well-trained flight team to operate the advanced airplanes is a problem," he said.

Sabzalipour added that currently 120 passenger planes are operational in the country.

"Iranian companies wouldn't put the current old airplanes out of service and replace them by new ones. We face lack of skilled flight team even for current 120 passenger planes, then how Iran would operate new modern airplanes?," he said.
Syracuse, N.Y.  A well known local development company plans to buy the 21-story State Tower Building, the tallest building in Syracuse since it opened in 1927, and transform its top 13 floors into apartments.

Pioneer Cos. has reached an agreement to buy the tower from Tony Fiorito for $5.4 million and spend $22.15 million to convert office space on floors 9 through 21 into 59 market-rate studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments. Floors 1 through 8 will remain office and retail space.

Fiorito put the 89-year-old building up for sale early last year.

The purchase is expected to close by late March. Mark Roney, Pioneer's chief financial officer, said the work will take 12 to 14 months. Monthly rents will range from about $750 to $1,900, he said.

The building is the latest of many downtown Syracuse commercial buildings to be converted into a mix of office, retail and residential space. Driving the trend is a combination of two things  a weakness in demand for office space and growing demand for downtown living space among empty nesters and young, urban professionals affiliated with the hospitals and schools on nearby University Hill.

Only about 45 percent of the State Tower Building's office space is occupied.

Melissa Zell, Pioneer's chief operating officer, said the renovations will include significant interior and exterior work, including the replacement of about 600 of the building's approximately 900 windows.

Opened in 1927 at 109 S. Warren St., the building stands 311 feet tall. The next tallest buildings in the city are the two AXA Towers, which stand 268 feet tall, according to the building data collection firm Emporis.

Aspects of the State Tower Building's design give it the appearance of being even taller than it is. The building's top 11 floors are set back and smaller than the first 10 floors, and its brick facade gets gradually lighter in color as the building rises.

The building is also known for a nest of peregrine falcons that have made a home on its roof. Zell said Pioneer will try not to disturb the falcons during the renovations.

Pioneer has applied to the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency for tax exemptions. If approved, the company would save up to $669,905 in sales taxes on construction materials and $150,000 in mortgage recording taxes. The agency will hold a public hearing March 8 before voting on the exemptions.

Pioneer's roots date back to the 1960s when its founder, Michael J. Falcone, began building shopping centers and apartment buildings throughout Central New York. Over the past 40 years, the principals of the company have built over 20 million square feet of real estate projects with a value exceeding $1.5 billion, according to the company's website.

Its local projects include the Washington Station and 250 Clinton Street office buildings in downtown Syracuse, and Pioneer Business Park in DeWitt, home to Time Warner Cable's Central New York headquarters.

Contact Rick Moriarty anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148
Bronson Arroyo

Arizona Diamondbacks' Bronson Arroyo pitches against the Los Angeles Dodgers in a 2014 game in Los Angeles.

(Jayne Kamin-Oncea | The Associated Press)

Syracuse, N.Y.  The Washington Nationals have signed pitcher Bronson Arroyo agreed to a minor league contract that could possibly land him on the Syracuse Chiefs at some point.

According to MLB.com, if Arroyo, 38, makes the Nationals out of spring training, he would receive a base salary of $2 million. The incentive-filled contract can earn Arroyo up to an additional $6 million if he makes at least 32 starts.

Arroyo pitched for new Washington manager Dusty Baker in Cincinnati.

Arroyo pitched for the Arizona in 2014 but tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow after 14 starts. He missed all of 2015, but was traded twice  first from Arizona to the Braves and then from Atlanta to the Dodgers.

Arroyo has spent over a year rehabilitating and said he finally felt pain-free and normal in November.

In 15 seasons with the Red Sox, Reds and D-backs, Arroyo is 145-131 with a 4.19 ERA. He pitched 200 or more innings in eight of nine seasons from 2005-13.

Contact Lindsay Kramer anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-470-2151


LYSANDER, N.Y. -- A school bus driver has been ticketed for failing to yield the right of way, which caused a crash involving two other vehicles, the New York State Police said.

The crash occurred just after 8 a.m. Wednesday at the intersection of Drakes Landing Road and Deep Glade Drive in the town of Lysander.

Colleen S. Baker, 58, of Syracuse, was driving a 2008 Chevrolet school bus north on Drakes Landing Road, state police said. The school bus is owned by Durham School Service and was carrying eight students at the time.

When bus turned west onto Deep Glade Road it drove into the path of a 2015 Dodge Durango driven by 32-year-old Brian D. Wolken, of Baldwinsville, state police said. Wolken had been going south on Drakes Landing Road. His vehicle spun and hit a 2010 Lexus driven by 49-year-old Marisa Alberici, of Baldwinsville.

The Greater Baldwinsville Ambulance Corps and the Belgium Cold Springs Volunteer Fire Department responded to the crash along with troopers.

State police said no one was injured in the crash. Baker was issued a traffic ticket for failure to yield the right of way.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:

Azerbaijan will prepare a concept of employment covering 2016-2025, said Minister for Labour and Social Protection of Population Salim Muslimov Jan. 27, according to a message issued by the ministry he heads.

The Ministry for Labour and Social Protection of Population has already held the first meeting of a working group, which will prepare the draft of the concept.

Representatives from the Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Youth and Sports, Taxes Ministry, Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population, the State Statistics Committee, the Council of State Support to NGOs, the Trade Unions Confederation, the World Bank, the UN Population Fund and the International Labour Organization attended the meeting.

Muslimov further said the draft concept, which will cover the years 2016-2025, is planned to be prepared in three months.

"The draft will include the analysis of the current macroeconomic situation and the labor market, future prospects and development trends, upcoming challenges and problems," he said. "It will also include the main goals and objectives of the employment policy for the next years, ensuring a balance between supply and demand on the labor market and other issues."

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Anakhanum Khidayatova - Trend:

The EU is ready to support the diversification of the Azerbaijani economy, the EU office in Brussels told Trend Jan. 27.

"Azerbaijan's exports to the EU consist mainly of mineral fuels (98.9 percent) and the drop of oil prices might primarily affect Azerbaijan's export revenues," the EU office said. "A way to mitigate potential negative impacts on trade revenues would be the diversification of the economy, for which the EU is ready to support."

"Regulatory approximation of Azerbaijan's trade-related legislation and procedures with international standards and increased competition as promoted by the WTO would be effective tools to support the potential of Azerbaijan's trade and of EU-Azerbaijan trade relations," the statement said. "It is also clear that WTO membership would create a more stable investment environment which is key for diversification of the economy of Azerbaijan and would probably attract EU and international investments in a wide range of sectors of the economy."

The EU is the main trade partner of Azerbaijan. According to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, the share of European countries in Azerbaijan's foreign trade amounted to 46.8 percent in January-October 2015. Some 30.51 percent and 59.23 percent of Azerbaijani import and export account for the share of the EU countries respectively.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The licenses of Atra Bank and the Caucasus Development Bank have been revoked upon a decision of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA).

This decision was taken because the total capital of the two banks didn't correspond to the CBA minimum requirement of 50 million manats, the CBA said in a message Jan. 27.

These banks couldn't fulfill their obligations to creditors and didn't manage their current activity reliably and prudentially, said the CBA.

Temporary administrators were appointed at both banks Jan. 27.

Under the country's laws, the Azerbaijan Deposit Insurance Fund will pay the compensation to these banks' clients for insured deposits.

Currently, 37 banks have licenses for banking activity in Azerbaijan.

The CBA has revoked four licenses [Ganja Bank, Bank of Azerbaijan, United Credit Bank and NBC Bank] since last week.

AtraBank began working in Azerbaijan in 1992, while Caucasus Development Bank - in 1997.
Cast of Riverside Theatres Over the River and Through the Woods, from left: Marina Re (Emma), Jon Freda (Nunzio), Sid Solomon (Nick), John LaGioia (Frank) and Kate Konigisor (Aida).

SHARE Sid Solomon and Heather Botts star in Riverside Theatres Over the River and Through the Woods.

By Angela Smith

For some performers, starring in a production is simply a job. For others, it touches them personally.

Kate Konigisor and John LaGioia, two cast members in Riverside Theatre's newest production "Over the River and Through the Woods" opening Tuesday in Vero Beach, could relate to the roles they are playing.

"There's not that many plays that have that," said LaGioia, who plays Frank, one of the grandfathers in the comedy-drama written by Tony Award-winner Joe DiPietro and directed by Riverside's Allen Cornell.

VIDEO | Click here to see get an inside peak at the latest production

The plot centers on Nick (Sid Soloman), a young New York City businessman on the verge of a promotion and big move across the county. Standing in the way are his two sets of Italian-American grandparents trying to get him to stay.

Similar to the characters in the production, LaGioia grew up with a close-knit Italian family and was the first to move away to pursue a career.

"I'm a first generation, my parents came from the other side (Italy)," LaGioia said. "Here's Nick who wants to leave home and the grandparents get very upset and well that's what I did."

Because the theme is universal, LaGioia said anyone will recognize their own family in the play.

"It's the story of how people deal with the American ideal and the American dream," he said. "You'll laugh and you'll cry, then you'll laugh and cry at the same time because it's a very sweet and sensitive piece of work."

In the play, LaGioia's character and his wife, Aida (Konigisor), and the other set of grandparents (Jon Freda and Marina Re) hatch a series of comedic schemes to keep Nick home, including match-making with the eligible Caitlin O'Hare (Heather Botts) and of course, food, which plays an important role in the production.

"My character Aida, she feeds everyone, food is love and I grew up with that concept and I have adopted that concept in my life now and in the show," said Koniglsor, who like LaGioia, grew up with an Italian family living nearby.

"This show is fall down funny and I think people are really going to enjoy that aspect, but you can't get by on just that," she added. "It's also a really beautifully written show and touching and poignant and these are characters the audience will be able to relate to and I think that's what they'll enjoy most about it."

'Over the River and Through the Woods'

When:Feb. 2-21; 8 p.m. opening night; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. matinees Wednesday, select Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays

Where: Stark Stage at Riverside Theatre, 3250 Riverside Drive, Vero Beach

Tickets: $35-$65

Information: 772-231-6990 or www.riversidetheatre.com
Jerome Rigoroso (center) participates in a yoga session at Kashi School of Yoga in Sebastian. (PHOTO PROVIDED BY KASHI SCHOOL OF YOGA)

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By Janet Begley

SEBASTIAN- The Kashi School of Yoga is celebrating its 10th anniversary this weekend with a special yoga and sound healing retreat at the group's Roseland Road studio.

The Friday through Sunday event includes a special session on sound healing and vibro-acoustics presented by sound healer Richard Wyzanski.

Sound healing is the therapeutic application of sound frequencies to the body with the intention of improving a person's health, according to Yoga School Director Shakti Durgaya Zaks.

The Kashi School of Yoga was founded in 2006 by Ma Jaya, the spiritual leader of Kashi Ashram who died in 2012 at age 71. Her Kali Natha Yoga is still practiced every day at Kashi. Many of the school's yoga teachers were taught by the late Kashi leader.

"Ma Jaya always included yoga as part of her teachings since the early 1970s," said Zaks. "As a response to her students' requests that she share the yoga she herself practiced, Ma Jaya began to personally teach her students. By 2005, her students had piloted their first Yoga teacher training program and the school and studio were both founded in 2006."

Anjani Cirillo, director of community relations for Kashi, said many of the people who come to the yoga school are trying yoga for the first time.

As part of an interfaith Saturday program, visitors to Kashi can tour the campus, take a free yoga class and enjoy a vegetarian dinner. The organization is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

"You don't have to have tried yoga before," said Cirillo. "It's really a wonderful experience. People leave the class relaxed and ready to face their day in a positive frame of mind."

In addition to Kali Natha Yoga, the school offers classes and workshops in a variety of healing arts including Qigong, breathing, aroma therapy, meditation and even chair yoga for people with mobility issues.

YOGA AND SOUND HEALING RETREAT

When: Jan. 29-31

Where: Kashi School of Yoga, 11155 Roseland Road, Sebastian

Cost: $220 for the weekend, meals and lodging available

Register: www.tinyurl.com/KSOYJanretreat

Information: For a complete schedule, visit www.kashi.org.
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By Paul Ivice

FORT PIERCE  A Fort Pierce man who had worked for more than two years for the St. Lucie County Tax Collector's Office was sentenced Tuesday to 6-1/4 years in federal prison for receiving and possessing child pornography.

Richard Joseph Ahearn, 56, had previously pleaded guilty to one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography.

U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg delivered the sentenced Ahearn to 6-1/4 years in prison, after which he will be on supervised release for 10 years. Ahearn also will have to register as a sex offender.

Ahearn was arrested July 14 after a search of his residence found images of sexually explicit conduct involving minors on his computer, court records show.

The investigation of Ahearn began when Yahoo! reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children several suspected child pornography images that had been uploaded to a Flickr account traced to Ahearn's residence in Fort Pierce.

The St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office obtained search warrants for the Flickr account and associated email accounts. Examination of those accounts revealed sexually explicit online chats with minors.

Ahearn, who had been hired by the St. Lucie County Tax Collector's Office as an Information Technology professional on Feb. 1, 2013, was terminated from his job on July 31, about two weeks after his arrest, said Jody Williams of the Tax Collector's Office.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice.

Led by U.S. Attorney's Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, go to www.projectsafechildhood.gov.
If you've paddled down the Indian River Lagoon and spotted a large group of dolphins, chances are you came across a family of females.

Scientists studying lagoon dolphins at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute said they often see older females socializing with their calves. Even if the calves are old enough to survive on their own, they tend to stay near their mothers and grandmothers.

Elizabeth Titcomb, a biological scientist with the Dolphin Photo-ID program at Harbor Branch, said multiple generations of female dolphins can be spotted together.

'Sometimes the older moms even have a new calf with them, while socializing with their older calves and grand-dolphins,' Titcomb said.

Dolphin researchers at Harbor Branch have studied the complex social network of the more than 1,500 lagoon dolphins for nearly 20 years.

What they found showed adult female dolphins stay in pods within a 30-mile radius to help raise dolphin calves, while male dolphins venture farther when mating and link up in pairs using the buddy system to help find food.

Meet nine female lagoon dolphins that like to travel with their families.

Hover over the images below to learn more about each dolphin, see a photo gallery of each dolphin and see maps of where they can be found in the Indian River Lagoon.

CATS, MEOW and MIXX

MICA, NICA and PICA

SLIV, KNIT and LOFI

Important contact

Call 888-404-3922 to report an injured dolphin to the Florida Marine Mammal Stranding Hotline, or to report sick, dead or injured wildlife. Do not handle the animal.

Read more about the lagoon dolphin series

About this series

The Indian River Lagoon is home to hundreds of dolphins, each with its own life story. Their families, favorite hangouts, health issues and dorsal fin characteristics  like a thumbprint  are all part of their tale.

Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute has documented more than 1,500 dolphins  three generations so far  from Ponce de Leon Inlet in Volusia County south to the Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County since 1996.

Local knowledge of dolphins by people in our communities will hopefully give them a more vested interest in the health and welfare of our dolphin population,' Titcomb said, 'as well as a better understanding of the challenges facing the dolphins, such as pollution and coastal development.

Thanks to the program's work, the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2009 designated lagoon dolphins, which never venture out to sea, as a separate and protected species from Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, which never venture into the lagoon. Scientists have not determined why or what led the first dolphins into the lagoon.

Christin Erazo contributed to this report.

Map

Explore map to see locations of previously featured dolphins.

Map legend:
SHARE Leonard Villafranco

Name: Leonard Silvio Villafranco

Age: 55

Occupation: Litigation attorney

Seeking: 19th Judicial Circuit Judge Group 6

Party: Nonpartisan race

Position salary: $146,080

Position term: 6 years

Residence: St. Lucie West

Political experience: Ran unsuccessfully for St. Lucie County judge Group 4 in 2014

Volunteer/civic involvement: None

Education: Law degree, Nova Southeastern University, 2001

Family: Wife Tonya; children Michael, Brittany and Nancy Sulzer

More information: Ask the Candidates
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:



Kazakhstan has reduced the oil export customs duty up to $40 per ton since January 1, 2016, according to the Kazakh national economy minister's order, the ministry said.



The oil export duty has amounted to $60 per ton in Kazakhstan since March and until late December 2015.



Kazakhstan exported over 61 million tons of oil in 2015, the Statistics Committee under the Kazakh National Economy Ministry said.

---

Follow the author on Twitter:@E_Kosolapova
On any given morning, some 25 percent of inmates in the Martin County Jail line up to receive their meds.

"I have the biggest mental health facility in the county," said Martin County Sheriff William Snyder, who wishes it were otherwise.

"A lot of them aren't really criminals. Maybe they went off their meds and hit somebody in the head with a brick, or were picked up begging outside Walmart," he said. "They keep offending and reoffending, they get enough points, and now they're in prison."

And that costs taxpayers about $105 a day.

Snyder and other Martin County officials figure there's got to be a better way.

And in recent months, they've been trying to figure out exactly what that "better way" might look like.

Martin County's problem is America's problem. Last summer, The Atlantic Monthly reported that at least 400,000 inmates now behind bars in the United States suffer from some type of mental illness. And the National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that between 25 and 40 percent of all mentally ill Americans will be incarcerated at some point in their lives.

Often, they're poor.

"It's the fragile part of the community we struggle with," Snyder said, "neighborhoods where people are chronically underinsured, split families that don't have the resources" to deal with mental illness privately. "If you don't have money, you're doomed  you're heading for me. I'm going to be your caretaker."

Martin and St. Lucie counties do have a mental health court, designed to keep some offenders out of jail and steer them toward treatment and support. It's been successful, but it's also limited, said Anita Cocoves, Martin County's Health and Human Services manager.

"I have to sit and wait for an email, which usually comes from the public defender's office, usually after a person has gone for his first appearance (in court)," she said. "We want to catch them before that happens, before they even get booked into jail."

For example, she said, an emergency room physician might recognize signs of mental illness in an offender and "Baker Act" the individual (the Baker Act allows for involuntary institutionalization and examination) before he or she gets to prison.

Or maybe an arresting officer notices something amiss and administers a quick mental health screening, including several questions like, "Do you hear voices" or "Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?"

The idea is that there could be some place to send mentally ill offenders, a place  a program  to keep them out of the criminal justice system entirely.

So for the past year or so, local officials have been looking at what other Florida communities have done to tackle the problem. They visited Pinellas County and were impressed with its "Safe Harbor" shelter and program, where the primary purpose is "jail diversion," keeping the homeless out of prison.

The shelter  operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in partnership with the city of St. Petersburg  Pinellas County Government, various Pinellas County cities and several community-based social service and homeless assistance organizations, can house up to 470 people, providing them with meals, clothing, transportation, counseling, classes and medical services.

It costs more than $2 million annually to run, according to news reports, with much of the money coming from the county sheriff's office. But advocates say it saves tax dollars.

"Safe Harbor claims that these people they divert (cost) $13 to $15 per day," Cocoves said. "I think it would be a little more than that (in Martin County), but certainly nowhere near what we're paying to have a person in jail."

Cocoves was quick to point out that Martin County Commissioners have not authorized anything yet. Nonetheless, commissioners are interested in a closer look at the issue, District 2 Commissioner Ed Fielding said.

"This is unfolding, but there are several steps involved," he said. "Some of it has to do with the judiciary, to get support."

And another big question would be: Where?

The answer could be: The Martin Girls Academy on Southeast Monterrey Road, now a maximum-security residential facility.

"That's a building that's constructed on county property, and the lease will terminate May 1, 2019, and we get the building," Fielding said. "That will help us do a number of things with the Sheriff's Office."

Some who work with the homeless  many of whom are homeless because of mental illness  are nonetheless exhilarated to hear county officials talking about it.

"This is a blessing beyond any expectation," said Bob Durst of Can We Help Inc., a Stuart-based charity that ministers to the homeless. "There's a crying need for a facility like this."

Three years is a long time, of course, and depending on a number of factors  like funding  this vision of a different approach to mental illness in Martin County may or may not come to fruition.

But Anita Cocoves remains excited.

"Right now, what we're really doing is punishing someone for being sick, and there's a recognition in the community that there should be a different way," she said. "And if you could be more compassionate while at the same time saving (taxpayer) money  why wouldn't you do that?"
University of Central Florida student John Sparkman (right) and members of the Blue Man Group fit Wyatt Falardeau (center) with a 3-D printed robotic arm in April 2015. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

SHARE University of Central Florida student John Sparkman (right) and members of the Blue Man Group fit Wyatt Falardeau (center) with a 3-D printed robotic arm in April 2015. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO) Cynthia Falardeau (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

By Cynthia Falardeau

It was a pivotal moment. I was asked to sit in on a districtwide discussion regarding literacy rates. My vocation got me the invite. But my passion, as a parent of a child with special needs, allowed me to give another perspective.

Each school team was asked to reflect on their data and identify barriers to their school's success. I listened with great interest. Then I heard the words that made my blood boil.

A school administrator said, "The disabled children are holding our school back."

As my ears and my neck burned with anger, I wrote out on a piece of paper, "THEY ARE DIFFERENTLY ABLED!" With flexed biceps, I shoved the piece of paper across the table. It landed squarely in front of the "not-so-sensitive" offender's school principal.

My furry was founded in the fact that too often children diagnosed with developmental disabilities lose out on important opportunities as services are provided through a one-size-fits-all system.

I had all but forgotten that day. Ironically, on Jan. 13, I was driving to Tallahassee for a statewide meeting of education foundation leaders. Driving along the boring corridor of Interstate 10, a news story reminded me why my voice mattered.

Earlier that day, the Florida Senate voted 39-0 to approve Senate Bill 7030. This landmark decision will provide new postsecondary education options to students with special needs.

Specifically, it sets aside $8 million for colleges, universities and other schools to create higher-education and transition programs for students with intellectual disabilities.

It also designates $1.5 million for a statewide coordination center to help students with "unique abilities" and their parents find programs and services.

Just two days later, I was riveted by an article in the Pegasus, the University of Central Florida's alumni magazine. The article, "The Power of Inclusion," outlined how UCF is creating a pathway to higher education. The piece detailed the implementation of a pilot program that allows students to audit classes. They can translate the learned knowledge and social skills into internships both on and off campus. The ultimate goal is improved employment potential  and hopefully careers.

In the article, I learned that in 2013, Florida Senate President Andy Gardiner, whose son Andrew has Down syndrome, sponsored the Exceptional Student Education Bill. It demanded real efforts toward inclusive education in regular classrooms and also allowed parents to have more say in the creation of individualized education plans  including giving students the option to work toward a regular high school diploma, rather than the "special" one.

Only one word could define my emotions: "WOW!"

Like any rational Mama Bear, I started posting on social media. This is the stuff that parents of special needs children dream of.

I must confess that our connection to UCF is not new. In April of 2015, a group of UCF students (Limbitless Solutions) and the Blue Man Group presented our son, Wyatt, with a 3-D printed robotic arm. I was asked again and again by the press, "What does this arm mean to you?" I felt like my response was honest. However, it lacked the sizzle they were seeking.

I explained, "The arm is awesome! But the greatest gift comes from the mentoring of Wyatt through the process. He has seen what is imaginable through being self-motivated and dedicated to a cause." I continued, "This process has shown him what is possible. He now wants to attend UCF."

As much as I felt like a media flop, I got the reassurance I needed from university leaders. It was a dizzying day of interviews, but one message that came through loud clear, "We have a plan for students like Wyatt, and we want you to know we care."

On Jan. 21, Gov. Rick Scott signed SB 7030, Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities, into legislation. For me and other parents, it's a momentous decision. It promises a four-letter word money can't buy: hope.

Cynthia Falardeau is the executive director of the Education Foundation of Indian River County. She has a son, Wyatt, who has special needs, and attends Gifford Middle School in Vero Beach, Florida.
Florida representatives on the house floor. (FILE PHOTO)

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By Scott Maxwell

When Florida's Legislature is in session, you always have to watch your back.

And your wallet.

And often the Constitution.

But this year legislators have filed a particularly subversive bill you may have missed  one where they hope to extend term limits, so they can stay in office an extra four years.

It's asking for more pain.

If passed, House Bill 711 and Senate Joint Resolution 902 would ask voters to amend the state Constitution so that legislators could stay in office for 12 years instead of eight.

If I had to rank the issues Floridians care about, I'd run out of numbers before I got to this one.

To the contrary, Florida voters voiced strong support for eight-year term limits. In fact, that's why these limits exist today  because in 1992, 77 percent of voters decided to impose them.

Forget landslides. In electoral terms, 77 percent is an avalanche.

But Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate want to change that.

Note that this push is bipartisan. Politicians may have trouble uniting for silly things like education or health care. But when it comes to granting themselves more power, it's All for one and one for all!

Theoretically, the expanded terms wouldn't apply to current legislators; only ones newly elected in 2016 or later. But these guys hopscotch like elementary schoolers when it comes to switching posts. So a House member would get 12 years if he switched to the Senate or sat out a term and ran again.

Those pushing the bill say legislators need more time to learn the ropes.

And there's some truth to that. It takes a while to figure out the process, the committee system and how to form PACs so that lobbyists can provide you with luxury vacations and spending money without violating the state's gift ban.

But if you can't learn that in eight years, maybe you should find something else to do.

Fans of extending terms also argue that short-term legislators are more prone to be led around the nose by lobbyists.

The problem here isn't term limits. It's weak-spined, special-interest suckups. If you elect those kind of people  as Floridians often do  they are going to let lobbyists lead them around whether they are there for two years or 20.

Elect people who know the issues before they go to Tallahassee, and they won't be so easily led.

Proponents also argue that term limits force newbie legislators to start campaigning for leadership positions before they know what they're doing  that the poor things have to start collecting donations and pledges in 2012 if they want to have a shot at being Speaker in 2020.

What a disingenuous crock. Parties can make whatever rules they want for leadership posts. If they want to ban leadership campaigning until the a year or two before the elections, they could.

Instead, they encourage power-hungry know-nothings to prematurely wheel, deal, back-stab and bargain with special interests  and then blame it on you for passing term limits.

In other words: You made them slimy.

To be honest, I don't really think term limits make much difference either way. Lousy politicians will always be lousy politicians. Good ones will be good.

I could probably live with 12-year terms. And I could definitely live with House seats that last four years instead of two, so that politicians aren't campaigning nonstop.

But I'm not pushing for change. Why? Because voters made their opinions very clear. They wanted eight-year term limits. And they wanted them so badly, they put those limits in their own Constitution. So I'm going to respect that.

Also because I know voters would shoot this down faster than a skeet at an NRA convention ... which makes this whole exercise a waste of time.

And any time some lobbyist or legislator starts talking to me about what a utopia Tallahassee would be without term limits  how legislators would supposedly be splendidly independent, unbeholden to lobbyists and operate like a well-oiled machine  I always respond with the same four words:

You mean like Congress?

Scott Maxwell is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Readers may reach him at smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com.
BlackPearl Team-BHP Support



Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Calcutta/London Posts: 3,510 Thanked: 15,913 Times

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Winter Himachal in a White Thar

It was our 10th marriage anniversary and we wanted it to be special. Boss had other plans and all my leave requests were rejected. Suddenly I felt like the most valuable employee of the company. On hind sight it was the best thing that could have happened. If I had got the leaves on time, we would have missed the snow in Himachal and Uttarakhand.



Not so good start to the journey...

A week before the journey I swapped the wheels of the Thar with the Bolero. The Michelin LTX ATs were put on the Thar in anticipation of driving on snow. Just one day prior to the journey, while going to office in the Thar, I felt a wobble in the steering at around 80 kmph. It was a classic wheel balancing issue, at least that is what I thought. On the day of the travel, left office a bit early and got the wheels balanced. The problem remained unsolved. I was facing the biggest dilemma in life, whether to take the Thar or the Bolero. After a lot of discussion with my wife, a part of which was heated as I was blamed for changing tyres at the last moment and causing this problem, finally decided to take the Thar. Called up team-bhp helpline and it was answered by DBhpian SS-Traveler. He suggested to interchange the front wheels with the rear but no shop was open at that time. It was already 11 p.m. when we started from home. We decided to drive slowly through the night and planned to interchange the tyres in the morning at a roadside shop. Progress was slow through the night, partly due to the wobbling issue and partly due to heavy fog. We continued to drive and reached Kanpur at 4:30 p.m. next day. We were not able to find a single tyre shop that had a jack suitable for lifting the Thar.



Pic taken somewhere on NH2





Just before the Kanpur bypass there is a huge Mahindra showroom and service station where we had previously serviced our Bolero en-route to Ladakh. We decided to get the car checked there and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I have taken in my life. One of the service advisers there is Mr. Saleem, a thorough gentleman and immensely knowledgeable. I insisted on meeting Mr. Saleem and brought the issue to his notice promptly. He immediately ordered the car to be put on a ramp. The next thing was a bit of a shock. He showed me that one of the bolts of the lower arm on one side had fallen off and another one on the other side was just about to fall off He had diagnosed the issue within seconds. The car was readied in one hour flat and this included a satisfactory test drive session and a thorough cleaning of the vehicle. Bill amount came to Rs. 289, another shock.







Marching ahead with renewed zest..

After this episode, there was no looking back. Kanpur to Delhi was done blazingly fast. I was in contact with SS-Traveler throughout the journey and even got an invitation to take a quick nap at his home. But unfortunately that did not happen as we did not find it prudent to barge into somebody's house in the middle of the night. After Delhi we encountered heavy fog. I was following a Punjab registered Dzire which was superbly driven. I was thanking my lucky stars for finding such a vehicle amidst the deteriorating conditions. However my joy was short-lived as the Dzire met with an accident. There was a tractor abandoned on the left lane without any light. The Dzire was not able to stop on time and lost a headlight. After this incident none of the vehicles wanted to lead. There was a trail of cars, buses and trucks behind my vehicle and I had no option but to drive ahead. We continued to drive through the second consecutive night and reached Kandaghat (near Shimla) in Himachal Pradesh after a grueling 34 hours drive from Kolkata.



Somewhere after Chandigarh, the road was beautiful





We had no problem in finding the Club Mahindra Kandaghat resort and the manager was kind enough to allow us an early check-in.

We were quite tired after the non-stop Kolkata-Kandaghat stint. Had a quick shower and grabbed some lunch from a local Dhaba and hit the bed. Woke up just in time to catch a beautiful sunset in the hills.







Day 3 - Kandaghat continued..

On the third day we woke up decently early by our standards and headed for Chail. Stopped for a few pictures at Sadhupul, a picnic spot by the stream named Ashwani.







While returning we stopped at Sadhupul again as the place was looking beautiful during dusk, the pictures however do not do justice.











There is not much to see in Chail. We went to see the Kali-Ka-Tibba atop a hill. The route to that place was desolate and we took the opportunity to take out our camp chairs and stove and quickly boiled Wai Wai for lunch.











The temple can be seen in the back drop





Kali-Ka-Tibba is an ancient temple and the view of the Shivalik range from this place is breathtaking.











Next destination was Chail Palace made famous by the Chanchad House in 3 Idiots movie. It is a hotel run by Himachal toursim and entry fee is Rs 100 per person.







A must visit place in Chail as per trip adviser is a small dhaba named Soni dhaba. The food is awesome and one should not miss the Shakkar Roti there.







Day 4 - Kandaghat to Mashobra

Mashobra is a one and half hour drive from Kandaghat. It was time to say goodbye to Club Mahindra Kandaghat after a wonderful 2 days stay.



The driveway in CMH Kandaghat is beautiful, a parting shot





After a lazy 50 kilometers drive we reached Club Mahindra Mashobra. View from the room -





Inside the room





After a quick lunch we visited a small church in Mashobra.





It was pretty cold and I took the opportunity to get warm





The cosy confines of the hotel room was the best place to be. It was a lazy afternoon and we watched the sun go down..





To be continued... The most difficult part of writing a travelogue is gathering the courage to start one! Wrong, for a strictly average photographer like me, even more difficult is to scan through the hordes of pics and choose the ones that are decent enough to be put up on team-bhp. After every good trip, the problem I face is that the images captured in my mind do not match with those taken on camera. The more beautiful a place, the bigger seems to be the gap between these two and depression sets in for not being able to capture the true beauty of nature. So I fall back on my human instincts and find a scapegoat, the 10 year old SLR camera. With one thing sorted out, it is high time to concentrate on the travelogue.It was our 10th marriage anniversary and we wanted it to be special. Boss had other plans and all my leave requests were rejected. Suddenly I felt like the most valuable employee of the company. On hind sight it was the best thing that could have happened. If I had got the leaves on time, we would have missed the snow in Himachal and Uttarakhand....A week before the journey I swapped the wheels of the Thar with the Bolero. The Michelin LTX ATs were put on the Thar in anticipation of driving on snow. Just one day prior to the journey, while going to office in the Thar, I felt a wobble in the steering at around 80 kmph. It was a classic wheel balancing issue, at least that is what I thought. On the day of the travel, left office a bit early and got the wheels balanced. The problem remained unsolved. I was facing the biggest dilemma in life, whether to take the Thar or the Bolero. After a lot of discussion with my wife, a part of which was heated as I was blamed for changing tyres at the last moment and causing this problem, finally decided to take the Thar. Called up team-bhp helpline and it was answered by DBhpian SS-Traveler. He suggested to interchange the front wheels with the rear but no shop was open at that time. It was already 11 p.m. when we started from home. We decided to drive slowly through the night and planned to interchange the tyres in the morning at a roadside shop. Progress was slow through the night, partly due to the wobbling issue and partly due to heavy fog. We continued to drive and reached Kanpur at 4:30 p.m. next day. We were not able to find a single tyre shop that had a jack suitable for lifting the Thar.Pic taken somewhere on NH2Just before the Kanpur bypass there is a huge Mahindra showroom and service station where we had previously serviced our Bolero en-route to Ladakh. We decided to get the car checked there and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I have taken in my life. One of the service advisers there is Mr. Saleem, a thorough gentleman and immensely knowledgeable. I insisted on meeting Mr. Saleem and brought the issue to his notice promptly. He immediately ordered the car to be put on a ramp. The next thing was a bit of a shock. He showed me that one of the bolts of the lower arm on one side had fallen off and another one on the other side was just about to fall offHe had diagnosed the issue within seconds. The car was readied in one hour flat and this included a satisfactory test drive session and a thorough cleaning of the vehicle. Bill amount came to Rs. 289, another shock...After this episode, there was no looking back. Kanpur to Delhi was done blazingly fast. I was in contact with SS-Traveler throughout the journey and even got an invitation to take a quick nap at his home. But unfortunately that did not happen as we did not find it prudent to barge into somebody's house in the middle of the night. After Delhi we encountered heavy fog. I was following a Punjab registered Dzire which was superbly driven. I was thanking my lucky stars for finding such a vehicle amidst the deteriorating conditions. However my joy was short-lived as the Dzire met with an accident. There was a tractor abandoned on the left lane without any light. The Dzire was not able to stop on time and lost a headlight. After this incident none of the vehicles wanted to lead. There was a trail of cars, buses and trucks behind my vehicle and I had no option but to drive ahead. We continued to drive through the second consecutive night and reached Kandaghat (near Shimla) in Himachal Pradesh after a grueling 34 hours drive from Kolkata.Somewhere after Chandigarh, the road was beautifulWe had no problem in finding the Club Mahindra Kandaghat resort and the manager was kind enough to allow us an early check-in.We were quite tired after the non-stop Kolkata-Kandaghat stint. Had a quick shower and grabbed some lunch from a local Dhaba and hit the bed. Woke up just in time to catch a beautiful sunset in the hills.On the third day we woke up decently early by our standards and headed for Chail. Stopped for a few pictures at Sadhupul, a picnic spot by the stream named Ashwani.While returning we stopped at Sadhupul again as the place was looking beautiful during dusk, the pictures however do not do justice.There is not much to see in Chail. We went to see the Kali-Ka-Tibba atop a hill. The route to that place was desolate and we took the opportunity to take out our camp chairs and stove and quickly boiled Wai Wai for lunch.The temple can be seen in the back dropKali-Ka-Tibba is an ancient temple and the view of the Shivalik range from this place is breathtaking.Next destination was Chail Palace made famous by the Chanchad House in 3 Idiots movie. It is a hotel run by Himachal toursim and entry fee is Rs 100 per person.A must visit place in Chail as per trip adviser is a small dhaba named Soni dhaba. The food is awesome and one should not miss the Shakkar Roti there.Mashobra is a one and half hour drive from Kandaghat. It was time to say goodbye to Club Mahindra Kandaghat after a wonderful 2 days stay.The driveway in CMH Kandaghat is beautiful, a parting shotAfter a lazy 50 kilometers drive we reached Club Mahindra Mashobra. View from the room -Inside the roomAfter a quick lunch we visited a small church in Mashobra.It was pretty cold and I took the opportunity to get warmThe cosy confines of the hotel room was the best place to be. It was a lazy afternoon and we watched the sun go down..To be continued... Last edited by BlackPearl : 27th January 2016 at 03:37 .
Netflix users in the United States will lose a binge-watching mainstay this month with the departure of Doctor Who.

On February 1, Netflix will lose all eight modern seasons of the BBC-produced sci-fi series, along with a collection of classic Doctor Who episodes spanning 18 seasons. The disappearance only applies to the U.S. version of Netflix, as the show will remain available in the United Kingdom.

Last year, Doctor Who also appeared to be on its way out, but Netflix later clarified that it had re-upped its content deal with the BBC. This time it appears the Doctor isnt coming back. As SlashGear speculates, BBC may be clearing the way to launch its own streaming service in the United States.

The series has also vanished from Hulu as of February 1. Still, the series is gone from streaming services entirely. Individual episodes and seasons are also available for purchase through on-demand stores such as Amazon Instant Video and Apple iTunes.

Other notable departures from Netflix this month include The Hurt Locker, Rain Man, Terms of Endearment, Fletch, and The Terminator. On the bright side, Netflix subscribers can commence binge-watching the entire first season of Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul on February 1.

Why this matters: Doctor Who has long been one of Netflixs most popular programs, at least according to third-party metrics, and its a great fit for the binge-watching style that the service helped pioneer. Its departure illustrates how Netflix is becoming more interested in original series, and how competition among streaming services can cause popular content to bounce around. Netflix hasnt ruled out getting the Time Lord back down the road.

This story has been corrected to note that Hulu has also lost Doctor Who, and that the BBC may be preparing to launch its own streaming service in the United States.
TechPinas Smartphone Technical Specs Table (TSTST) Name Lenovo K5 Note Type Slate Form Factor (Full Touchscreen) Price Category Midrange Dimensions 152 x 75.7 x 8.5 mm Weight TBD Available Colors Silver, Gold Operating System Android 5.1 Lollipop with Lenovo Vibe UI Display 5.5 inches (~72.5% screen-to-body ratio), Full HD 1080 x 1920 pixels (~401 ppi pixel density), LTPS IPS, capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors, Gorilla Glass 3 Processor 64-Bit Octa Core 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex A53 CPU, Mali-T860MP2 GPU, MediaTek MT6755 Helio P10 chipset RAM 2 GB RAM Internal Storage 16 GB, expandable via microSD card slot supporting up to 128GB Camera Main: 13 MegaPixels, 4128 x 3096 pixels, Auto-Focus, f/2.2, Dual Tone LED Flash, Phase Detection

Front: 8 MegaPixels Video Capture Full HD 1080p 30 frames per second for main camera, Full HD for front camera (TBC) Audio and Video Playback MP3, WAV, eAAC+, FLAC, MP4, H.264 Ports microUSB v2.0, 3.5 mm audio jack Connectivity Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP, EDR, 3G HSDPA, 21 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps, HSPA+; LTE Cat4 150/50 Mbps GPS Yes, with A-GPS FM Radio Yes Sensors Accelerometer, Proximity, Gyroscope, Digital Compass Network 2G bands GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 - SIM 1 and SIM 2, 3G bands HSDPA 2100, 4G LTE band 1(2100), 3(1800), 7(2600), 38(2600), 39(1900), 40(2300), 41(2500) SIM Card Type Dual nanoSIM, Dual Standby Battery Non-Removable Li-Po 3,500 mAh battery Uptime 543 Hours of Standby, 34 Hours of Talk Time Value-Added Features Voice Over LTE support, Vibe UI, Dolby Atmos HiFi Audio, Aluminum Frame Announcement China: January 26, 2016 Availability Philippines: TBA, most likely arriving within Q1 2016 Price Official SRP: 1099

TP Price Guesstimate for the Philippines: Php 8,500 to Php 9,000









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was launched in India just last week. But that didn't stop Lenovo from immediately releasing the follow-up device -- in China earlier today.Maybe its stiff competition - especially coming from, which is currently slaying Lenovo in its home territory - or maybe the company just has far too many phone models to out this year. But whatever the case, the decision of Lenovo to release the two phablets in rapid succession has left consumers who bought the earlier iteration baffled -- and understandably so.Well, anyway. Like what I've said, Lenovo K5 Note is now up for purchase in China, donning an official price tag of 1,099 CNY or roughly Php 8,000. Specs-wise, for that amount, you get a fairly large smartphone with a 5.5-inch Full HD LTPS IPS display and running its Vibe-UI-flavored Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system with the new 64-Bit Helio P10 chipset from MediaTek that incorporates eight ARM Cortex A53 cores and a Mali T860MP2 GPU; This SoC supersedes the MT6573 chip powering the K4 Note in terms of overall performance. It's basically a midrange 64-Bit Octa Core processor that should be good enough to deliver a compelling 3D mobile gaming experience.In terms of design and construction, Lenovo K5 Note obviously borrows elements and accents that are present on some popular handset releases by competing Chinese brands, specificallyand. The smartphone features a CNC-prepared aluminum frame and a fairly 'squarish' footprint reminiscent of those two above-mentioned models.At the back, you will find the device's 13 MegaPixel main camera with f/2.2 aperture and Dual Tone LED flash as well as the Fingerprint Scanner that lets you unlock the device, snap selfies, and purchase items at some supported online stores without having to key-in your password.In front, above the display, there's an 8 MegaPixel selfie cam with 77.4 degrees wide-angle lens that lets you include your whole 'barkada' inside the frame! If you love taking photos with your friends, this should be a treat for you.Finally, this Dual SIM Dual Standby LTE-enabled phablet is powered by a non-Removable Li-Po 3,500 mAh battery delivering up to 543 Hours of Standby and 34 Hours of Talk Time. The pack certainly could be bigger but it could pass off as 'decent sized'.Lenovo K5 Note available in two colors, namely, Silver and Gold. Currently, the phablet is up for purchase only in China but given the popularity of Lenovo phones in countries like India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, there's a good chance that it will eventually be released in those territories. If and when it lands on our shores, I guess Lenovo K5 Note would sell here for around Php 8,500 to Php 9,000.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

The Iranian gas industry will require massive investments to meet European and global demand, Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center and Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center Ariel Cohen said in his report obtained by Trend.

"Only 160 billion cubic meters of gas are produced annually [in Iran], due to technological and financial constraints caused by domestic mismanagement, a lack of expertise, and the Western sanctions that now appear to be lifted... Currently, Iran supplies less than 1 percent of global natural gas exports," Cohen said.

Meanwhile Cohen, who also the Director of the Center for Energy, Natural Resources, and Geopolitics at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and founding principal of International Market Analysis believes that Iran's natural gas deposits, which hit approximately 34 trillion cubic meters in early 2015, according BP's statistics review, could contribute to European energy security, given the recent shift in relations between Iran and the EU.

He noted that the existing Iran-Turkey pipeline, with its 14 billion cubic meters per year capacity would be the first line of supply of Iranian gas to Europe, capable of providing up to 7 billion cubic meters per year.

This could begin to happen in two to three years, Cohen believes. Beyond that, there are plans to build a Persian Pipeline with a capacity of up to 40 billion cubic meters per year to transfer Iranian gas to Europe, he said.

Cohen also noted that building LNG export terminals would be an enormous prize for ensuring Iranian gas supplies to Europe, and one that the Iranian leadership is likely to reach for in the years to come.

Edited by SI

Follow the author on Twitter:@E_Kosolapova
LG has confirmed its next big smartphone release. The LG G5 will be launched next Sunday, February 21, a day before Mobile World Congress opens to the public in Barcelona, Spain. Later that same day Samsung is expected to reveal the Galaxy S7.

A recent leak suggested that the new LG G5 would feature a larger 5.6" screen, a Snapdragon 820 SoC, a fingerprint scanner, and a dual 20MP camera on the back. The LG G4 was well received when it launched last year and made it to our list of the best smartphones you could buy, however by year's end it received a discount in order to compete with similarly equipped phones in the $400 range such as Motorola's Moto X and the newer Google Nexus phones.

By its own admission, 2015 was a "challenging year" for LG. The South Korean company revealed in its quarterly earnings that it lost $36.4 million in its mobile division for the final quarter of last year, a drop of almost $20 million compared to the same period in 2014. Additionally, LG shipped 59.7 million smartphones last year, representing a year-on-year improvement of just half a million. In an attempt to improve its profiability, the company will introduce "two new flagship models" in 2016, along with "a more cost-competitive value chain."

Like so many other smartphone manufacturers, LG faces a constant battle to shift its products in a field dominated by Samsung and Apple. The company will be hoping that its two premium models released this year will help it gain a larger share of the market.

LG has confirmed that it will unveil one of these flagship devices at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. While the firm hasn't revealed what specific model will be on show, it's heavily rumored to be the LG G5, the successor to last year's well-received G4.

A leak last month suggested that the G5 will improve on the G4 by featuring a larger, 5.6-inch screen, a Snapdragon 820 CPU, a fingerprint scanner, and a dual 20MP camera on the back.

Little is known about the second device LG plans to launch, although it is expected to arrive in the second half of 2016. Considering that the company released the G4 and the V10 last year, there's a chance that the second new flagship could be a successor to the dual-display V10.

When LG talks about launching a cost competitive value chain, it is referring to a new lineup of low-cost mobile devices aimed at those consumers who don't want to pay premium-model prices. As more features trickle down from high-end handsets to these 'budget' smartphones, it's becoming an increasingly popular market and quite a lucrative one for the device makers.
Sony sold off its Vaio computer division nearly two years ago, signaling to many the end of a unique (and expensive) option in the PC market. Its new owners, however, are determined to avoid that reality and have been churning out notebooks in the Japanese market for a while.

Now, a few of its creations (heavily inspired by Sony's style) are destined for US shores.

The Vaio Z Flip is without a doubt the flagship device. As the name suggests, its 13-inch, 2,560 x 1,440 touchscreen display can flip over for use as a tablet, slotting it into the crowded 2-in-1 category. Under the hood is your choice of Core i5 or Core i7 Skylake processor, up to 16GB of RAM and speedy solid state drive storage.

Sound expensive? It is. By all accounts, this is a high-end machine designed to compete directly with the MacBook Pros and Surface Books of the world. The base model with a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD starts at $1,799 early next month. There's also a non-flip, clamshell version - the Vaio Z Clamshell - with a lower resolution display that'll start at $1,499.

Last but not least is the "mainstream" machine, the Vaio S. IBT describes it as the notebook for someone looking for a no-nonsense machine that just works. It features a 13-inch, full HD display and is constructed of molded magnesium alloy. Inside you'll find a 15-watt Core i-series processor, 8GB of RAM and up to a 256GB PCIe SSD. Interestingly enough, it features legacy Ethernet and VGA ports so you can leave those adapters at home.

It tips the scales at just 2.34 pounds and will tap your wallet for at least $1,099 when it arrives in early March.

Hands-on images courtesy PCWorld
What's it like to be inside a painting? Thanks to the magic of virtual reality, we can actually experience art.

So far, a lot of the press coverage around virtual reality has revolved around video games. But the core experience of virtual reality has many more applications than just gaming. Gaming, rather, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The wonder of virtual reality is that we can be in two places at once. We can be sitting at our desks while walking along the Great Wall of China during a lunch break at the office. To be be completely immersed in one of those places is the ultimate beauty of VR.

Now, instead of just plainly staring at a painting, we can actually be in one. In a futuristic exhibition at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, an innovative partnership between the museum and Disney is taking museum-going to the next level.

According to the Walt Disney Family Museum, Walt Disney and Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali had a very special bond where both actually created an unfinished work of art together, a short animated film called "Destino." Nonetheless, the friendship between the two continued well into their lifetimes.

To honor that friendship, Disney brought its virtual reality tech to the Dali Museum in an exhibition called "Disney and Dali: Architects of the Imagination." Museum-goers won't forego the traditional walkathon through the museum.

The more immersive virtual reality experience comes after visitors have actually set their eyes on Dali's actual paintings, sketches, correspondence and photos with Walt Disney. After that, they put on VR headsets and step into a completely different world.

This world, dubbed "Dreams of Dali," transports museum patrons inside Dali's "Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus,'" which he painted in 1935. In the painting there are two towering figures made of stone placed in a barren landscape beneath a sulky sky.

"'Disney and Dali' heralds a new era in art exhibitions ... Visitors can expect a multi-sensory environment of moving image, soundscapes, and the transformative aura of exquisite individual paintings. Disney and Dali broke new ground as artists - the Walt Disney Family Museum and The Dali will deliver a brave new world of experience," says Dali Museum Executive Director, Hank Hine.

Using Oculus Rift headsets, viewers can feel like they're moving in the painting itself as other visuals from Dali's works like elephants, birds, ants and even an image of Alice Cooper appear before their eyes.

"You actually have a three-dimensional feeling that you're inside a painting ... It's actually like there are objects closer and further away and you're walking amidst them. It's a vulnerable feeling you give yourself up to. It's not like anything you've ever felt before," says Jeff Goodby, a spokesperson for the agency behind the one-of-a-kind VR experience.

This isn't the first time virtual reality has been used with Dali's works to offer a different kind of museum-going experience. Besides Disney, Dali also had deep relationships with other artists like Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. Those previous exhibitions also made use of new technologies, and this one in partnership with Disney is expected to bring even more foot traffic back to museums.

For those who won't be making any road trips down south to Florida anytime soon, Disney and the Dali Museum have made the VR video available online. The video below allows for a 360-degree view of Dali's "Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus'" but without the immersive experience that only the Oculus Rift can provide for now.

Unfortunately, comments on the video seem to suggest that the neither the iPhone nor Oculus Rift development kits work on it. For the best experience at home, the VR content is best viewed using an Android device using Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear VR.

Photo: Leonard Lin | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Harvard University is set to develop new artificial intelligence systems that work faster, smarter and perhaps better than the human brain. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has awarded $28 million to fund this project.

The challenge is to figure out why the brain is so adept at learning, and then design computer systems able to interpret, analyze and absorb information the way humans do.

Researchers will then record brain activity, particularly activity in the visual cortex, in a fashion never done before. They will map "connections at a scale never before attempted" and reverse-engineer the data to create better computer algorithms.

Such algorithms will be used to come up with a detailed 3D neural map. The venture is a moonshot challenge similar to the Human Genome Project in scope, says project leader David Cox, assistant professor of computer scince and molecular and cellular biology.

The scientific value of recording the activity of so many neurons and mapping their connections alone is enormous, but that is only the first half of the project, he says in a statement.

Cox adds his team will also probe the basic principles of how the human brain learns and design computers matching or outperforming its ability.

Many computers today demonstrate storage power similar to the brain, but they remain inferior to the latters ability to recognize patterns and learn information.

Experts estimate that the brain can store from 10 to 100 terabytes of information, with some pegging it at almost 2.5 petabytes. Just over one petabyte of data is equivalent to around 1.6 million CDs' worth of information.

While a human only needs to look at a vehicle a couple of times to recognize one, an AI system needs to process samples by the hundreds or thousands to retain those details.

The multi-phase project will start in Coxs laboratory, where they will train rats to visually recognize different items on a computer screen and then record activity inside the visual cortex. A portion of the rats brain will then be studied at the lab of project member Jeff Lichtman, where it will be sliced into ultra-thin pieces and imaged.

We are very excited to get started but have no illusions that this will be easy, Lichtman says.

These AI systems are projected to be useful for detecting network invasions, reading MRI images, driving cars and  if humanity gets lucky  just about any human task imaginable.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Googles teaming up with Fox News for the upcoming Republican debate  which is the final one before the primaries  on Jan. 28. Basically, Google will be providing a number of different vectors for folks to learn about the candidates beyond what they might be used to seeing in a given debate.

According to Googles blog on the collaboration, search interest jumps 440 percent during televised debates. In an effort to tap into this by (hopefully) providing more detailed responses to specific questions, the various Republican campaigns will be able to post a variety of responses, including text, photos and videos during the debate that will show up directly in Google Search results as soon as the debate starts at 7 p.m. EST.

So, for example, if someone wanted to better understand something Ted Cruz says and hits up Google, Cruzs campaign might have posted a better, more detailed response. On the other hand, it could also serve as something of a crutch where the candidates merely verbally slap each other and expect folks to go do the digging for themselves to actually figure out where everyone stands on issues. Hard to say before actually seeing it in action, though Googles promotional image of what this might look like seems to indicate that itll mostly be expanded versions of what theyre already going to be stating.

Theyll also be using data from Google Trends to offer up search-related insights like trending terms and questions about various issues during the debate. There will also be polls found in Google Search for folks that are searching Fox News debate  whose results could then be covered live by Fox. What exactly they might try and glean from these polls isnt exactly clear, but lets hope that they provide options and dont allow users to enter in their own answers.

As with many collaborations like this with Google, a couple of YouTubers will be able to pose a question to the candidates. Specifically, Nabela Noor, Mark Watson and Dulce Candy will each look to ask something about an issue that matters to them and their communities. One imagines that those questions will have been carefully-vetted, but it might still make for a memorable moment of television.

Source: Google

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The Doomsday Clock was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back in 1947. The Clock represents the symbolic countdown to the end of humanity. This year, and for a second year in a row, the Clock's hands were set at three minutes to midnight.

In 1984, the clock's hands were also set at three minutes to midnight when the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union reached its "iciest point." However, the closest point humanity has traveled towards it symbolic end was in 1953 when the U.S. pushed for the hydrogen bomb. The U.S. tested its first H-bomb in October 1952. The Soviet Union followed with its own H-bomb test nine months later.

According to the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, three minutes to midnight is "far too close." The decision to keep the Clock's hands unchanged is not good news. Rather, it is a manifestation of dismay towards the world leaders who are failing to focus the world's attention and their collective efforts towards the reduction of potential dangers from climate change and nuclear weapons. The apocalyptic forecast arrived despite the evidence of two diplomatic successes in 2015, namely the Paris climate change agreement and the Iranian nuclear deal.

"When we call these dangers existential, that is exactly what we mean: They threaten the very existence of civilization and therefore should be the first order of business for leaders who care about their constituents and their countries," said the scientists.

The 2016 forecast was based on the global challenges including as climate change and nuclear war. It also included the mounting threats brought by cyberwarfare and the Islamic State in 2015. The scientists said three minutes to midnight is one of the most terrible forecasts since the end of the cold war.

When Barack Obama was elected into office, the scientists lowered the danger setting due to his campaign that promised the abolition of nuclear weapons. The Iranian nuclear agreement was accomplished in 2015, which helped lower the tension. However, the Bulletin believed the internal political constraints blocked The Obama administration from going further in his campaign to end nuclear warfare.

Unfortunately, the said progress was clouded by high tensions bubbling between Russia and the U.S. Moreover, China, Pakistan Russia, India and the U.S. are modernizing their nuclear resources. In Asia, North Korea remains a nuclear hazard with its hydrogen bomb, which was tested on Jan. 5.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Google is continuing its efforts to highlight and acknowledge the contributions of women in Science and Technology, especially if their achievements were not really given attention in the male-dominated field. That is why the Google Doodle of unsung astronomer Beatrice Tinsley on Jan. 27 is a very welcome sight.

The Tinsley-inspired Doodle was created in celebration of what would have been the 75th birthday of one of New Zealand's greatest astronomers. Tinsley, however, passed away because of cancer in 1981 at the age of 40.

"Today's homepage celebrates the scientific genius of Beatrice Tinsley, whose work in cosmology and astrophysics made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the universe and the way galaxies behave within it," Google wrote.

It's not too surprising if Tinsley's name does not ring a bell since, in spite of her contributions to her field, she did suffer from professional jealousy and sexism. It's already 2016 so it's high time that people get to know one of the geniuses who helped astronomers map out the past and future of galaxies.

Who Is Beatrice Tinsley?

Beatrice Muriel Hill was born on Jan. 27, 1941 in England. Her family moved to New Zealand after World War II. She attended the New Plymouth Girls' High School where she played the violin and led the girls' orchestra before she studied at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch for to get her Bachelors and Master's degree.

She became Beatrice Tinsley after marrying her classmate physicist Brian Tinsley. Because her husband was a faculty at the university, Beatrice was not given the opportunity to teach. They both moved to Dallas in 1963 where she also faced a similar situation when she was barred from teaching because her husband worked there. She completed her Ph.D. in 1966 at the University of Texas in Austin where she wrote her thesis titled "Evolution of Galaxies and its Significance for Cosmology."

How Beatrice Tinsley Fought Against The System

Tinsley's thesis gained her recognition and jealousy from her male peers but did not change her situation in Dallas. Despite proving her knowledge in the fields of astronomy and physics, she was still not offered an opportunity to teach because her husband already did. She ended up torn between pursuing a career in a different city and staying home to fulfill her roles as a wife and mother of two adopted children.

Beatrice divorced her husband in 1974. Considering how she had been barred from doing anything with her degree professionally due to her husband's work, it was not a selfish act but rather a way for Beatrice to immerse herself in the field of study she loves.

"The disconnect between her growing international reputation-which by the mid-1970s included visiting appointments at Caltech, Maryland, and UT Austin, and permanent job offers elsewhere-and the lack of tangible recognition at home became an immense source of frustration, as documented in letters to her father at that time," Astronomer Robert C. Kennicutt, Jr. wrote in his tribute.

After freeing herself from the marriage that barred her from exercising her professional freedom, Beatrice accepted a faculty position at Yale University in 1975. In a period of seven years, she published 60 papers on galactic and chemical evolution and cosmology.

Major Contributions

Beatrice lived in a time when computers were not around to make simulations and computations but that did not stop her from coming out with breakthrough contributions in the field of astronomy. She calculated models for the different galaxy types, how galaxies looked in the past and how they would look in the future. In addition, she gave new insight about the expansion of the universe and hypothesized on the possible role of dark matter in evolutionary trends, among many others. All of these were accomplished without the help of modern technology - she had to do the legwork of locating and reading journals and articles, collect evolutionary tracks and diagrams and do some reverse engineering herself because some theoretical data was not yet available.

However, just when she finally seemed to succeed, cancer struck. Of course, she didn't let that stop her. She still kept on working and writing her studies even until the days leading to her death in March 1981. In fact, her very last paper was submitted for publication just days before she succumbed to cancer.

So Who Is Beatrice Tinsley?

She is the genius astronomer who didn't let sexism stop her from literally reaching for the stars and showing everyone how those stars operate.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Wildlife animals are usually fierce-looking that it is impossible for anyone to not take notice. In Tanzania, an extremely rare white giraffe is attracting attention, but it is not because of usual reasons.

North Carolina-based Wild Nature Institute (WNI) spotted the 15-month-old giraffe at the Tarangire National Park. The animal had a pale white skin color and a reddish mane.

Fortunately, the group was able to capture photos. The giraffe was named Omo, after the name of a local detergent brand.

The recent sighting is not the first time that scientists were able to spot the rare animal. Around the same time in 2015, Omo made its first appearance.

"We are thrilled that she is still alive and well," the WNI blog post reads.

Tarangire is the sixth biggest national park in Tanzania and has over 3,000 giraffe species. The white giraffe sighting is very rare that it has only been seen twice in Tarangire within the past two decades.

People may think that the giraffe got its white color from albinism, which is characterized by lack of melanin in the skin. WNI's principal scientist Dr Derek Lee says that is not the case for Omo.

Instead, he explained that the white giraffe has leucism, which involves the partial loss of pigmentation in all bodily cells, including the eyes. As a result, the Omo's eyes are red from the underlying blood vessels.

Giraffe is the national animal of Tanzania, hence, it is unlawful to kill the creatures. Despite the rules, Lee says about 50 percent of giraffe populations are killed during its first year of life due to predators such as lions, leopards and hyenas.

Bush meat poaching is also a problem, not only for the likes of Omo, but for all giraffe species as well. Luckily, Omo lives in a national park, where there are anti-poaching measures, giving the rare giraffe a better chance at survival.

Lee and his wife are currently studying how humans can live with giraffes by going to places where both species frequently have contact. They hope to heighten the survival of Omo and its relatives through their conservation project.

Other giraffes accepting Omo despite its unique appearance speaks volumes to humans, Lee suggests. Humans have this yearning for acceptance and tolerance amid differences, and the situation of the giraffes right now is good example of that.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A quarter of a century after U.S. troops fought in the first Gulf War, research shows toxic exposures led to the so-called Gulf War Syndrome, which affects up to 250,000 deployed military personnel.

This is according to a new review from Boston University environmental health professor Roberta White and her colleagues from other institutions, who reviewed existing literature on the Gulf War Illness especially those since 2008.

The findings were published in the journal Cortex, coinciding with the wars 25th anniversary.

The 1991 Gulf War saw 700,000 U.S. troops win with an astoundingly low casualty rate, but made headlines when the American and British soldiers reported mysterious symptoms upon their return home. The two governments established disease registers that assessed over 100,000 veterans yet failed to find a pattern that will identify a specific condition.

Now, researchers pointed to exposure to pesticides and ingestion of pyridostigmine bromide (PB)  prophylactic medications for protecting against the effects of potential nerve gas  as casually linked to Gulf War Syndrome and its neurological effects in veterans. They also cited multiple studies linking the neurological issues to being exposed to nerve-gas agents sarin and cyclosarin, along with emissions from oil well fires.

The exposures led to damaged nervous and immune systems, including reduced white and gray matter in the brains of the veterans, according to the review.

"Further research into the mechanisms and etiology of the health problems of (Gulf War) veterans is critical to developing biomarkers of exposure and illness, and preventing similar problems for military personnel in future deployments, the authors wrote.

The authors noted that six out of seven studies identified significant links between self-reported exposure to pesticides and their illness. Intake of the military-issued PB pills, too, had been consistently associated with illness in Gulf War veteran populations.

The review also saw separate conditions causing neurological disorders. Deployed troops suffered higher rates of stroke, ALS, and brain cancer compared to non-deployed ones. Other studies detected excess rates of brain cancer deaths and organ alterations among those who were most exposed to nerve agents as well as oil fire smoke.

For over two decades now, the team has been analyzing the health of affected Gulf War troops and their multiple ills, characterized by signs such as joint and muscle pain, fatigue, headaches, memory problems, skin rashes and gastrointestinal problems.

Perhaps due to its mysterious nature, Gulf War Syndrome had often been attributed to mere psychological stress. Kings College London professor Neil Greenberg said that while the symptoms are very real, they cannot seem to be pinned down on a exact physical problem.

"When we're stressed we have a tendency to turn psychological distress into physical symptoms," Greenberg said, also citing the fear likely caused by the five-year gap from when the veterans first complained of illness to the first study into the matter.

But the syndrome is not exactly psychological, argued experts that include White, who directed the 2008 panel Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses mandated by Congress.

The report, for instance, ruled out psychiatric issues, noting that the veterans had lower post-traumatic stress disorder rates and other psychiatric conditions than their military counterparts in other wars.

For 56-year-old Sean Rusling, a former sergeant of the Royal Army Medical Corps of the United Kingdom who served the war and experienced illnesses (including osteoporosis at age 37), the illness should be properly addressed.

"It's an insult that the Ministry of Defense doesn't recognise the condition suffered by me and so many others," he said.

Photo: See Li | Flickr

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Apple has announced that it has more than 1 billion active devices globally, which includes iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac and iPod touch.

On Tuesday, Apple revealed its financial results for its fiscal 2016 first quarter ended Dec. 26, 2015 and confirmed the active devices base. Apple determined the milestone by finding the number of devices that engaged with the company's services within the past 90 days.

"The growth of our Services business accelerated during the quarter to produce record results, and our installed base recently crossed a major milestone of one billion active devices," says Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.

Apple suggests that the 1 billion active devices figure represents 25 percent year-over-year growth.

Devices sold represent one aspect of the business, while Apple devices being actively used by customers is another aspect. In November 2014, Apple confirmed that it has surpassed sales of 1 billion iOS devices.

Apple also confirmed that iPhones, Apple Watch and Apple TV were the key sales drivers in the quarter.

This is the first time that Apple has disclosed figures of its active devices. The popularity of the brand is growing worldwide. The cost of Apple products may be slightly on the higher side but high rate of customer satisfaction is resulting in more customers to upgrade their device or buy more Apple devices.

Apple is trying to expand its global reach and attract more customers to the brand. The Economic Times cites sources and report that Apple has filed an application to open its own Apple branded stores in India with the country's Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP).

Currently, Apple sells its products via authorized dealers in India. The opening of Apple's own store in India will enable the company to put more of its products in display and direct interaction with customers may result in attracting more customers to the brand and retain existing ones.

The iPhone is one of the most popular smartphones in the world. The launch of the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus came with new features such as the pressure-sensitive technology called 3D Touch, which has enticed a large number of smartphone users.

iPad sales have been declining in the last few quarters. Apple has already launched the bigger-sized iPad Pro, which may attract customers looking for a big tablet. Apple is also rumored to introduce 3D Touch in its next-generation iPads in a bid to revive its tablet sales.

One billion active Apple devices is definitely a massive milestone for the company. However, Apple will have to try its best to increase or retain the number so that it gives stiff competition to its rivals.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Aygun Badalova - Trend:

US lifting an oil export ban is not about increasing net oil supply to the world market, but to more efficiently use refining capacity, Peter Hartley, professor of economics at US-based Rice University believes.

The US has abolished the 40-year restriction on oil exports. The first shipments of US crude oil arrived in Europe last week. In late December, the US company Enterprise Products Partners announced an export contract for its oil, becoming the first oil exporter from the US in four decades. The buyer was international trader Vitol Group that intends to send the crude to its refinery in Switzerland.

"The key point that people miss when discussing the lifting of the oil export ban is that not all oil is the same. Refineries are tuned to different grades of oil," Hartley told Trend.

In particular, he said, there is a mismatch between the Gulf Coast refineries that were constructed to refine heavy sour crude from Venezuela and Mexico and the light sweet oil that is being produced from the shale deposits.

Lifting of the ban is all about allowing the new US oil to be exported to where it can be refined most readily, and importing more other oil that can be refined most readily in the existing US refineries, according to Hartley.

"It is not at all about increasing US net oil supply to the world market. It is about using the world's refining capacity more efficiently," he said.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) in its latest report dedicated to the effects of removing restrictions on U.S. oil exports analyze several different baseline cases, each of which uses different assumptions on oil prices and U.S. production levels.

In the EIA's reference case, where US production averages 10.4 million barrels per day between 2020 and 2025, the lifting of the US ban on exports has relatively little impact on the market. In this case, EIA believes, the spread between the US and international oil markets is not significant enough for large shipments of US crude abroad to make enough money.

In the higher production cases, where US production averages between 11.7 million barrels per day and 13.6 million barrels per day, the spread between US oil and international crude shows the potential to grow enough to make it worth it, according to the EIA. In these case, exports will allow oversupplied US markets to shift their oil to the global markets.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has again sent back new, fascinating close-up photos of the Martian terrain. This time, the rover used its new tools to "play" in the red planet's sand and soil.

Last year, the Curiosity rover snapped images of the rippled surface of Mars' Bagnold Dunes, an area that sits along the northwest edge of Mount Sharp.

Now, at its current location, the rover is inspecting an active sand dune called "Namib Dune," which is also part of the Bagnold Dune field.

New photos posted on Curiosity rover's Twitter account featured Martian soil and sand in great detail, where even individual grains can be distinguished and analyzed.

Scooping And Digging Into Martian Soil

After spending more than three years on the red planet's surface, the Curiosity rover has begun to dig into the sand dunes on Mars. The rover added some new maneuvers in order to dig and scoop up some samples of Martian sand.

This is the first time that active sand dunes found on any planet other than Earth have been studied. NASA said this could help reveal how winds shaped the surface of Mars.

Curiosity is now scooping samples from the Namib Dune and "Gobabeb," another dune site. These samples will be sorted by grain size with two sieves.

One of the two sieves, the coarser sieve, is making its debut. For the first time, Curiosity used the coarser sieve for a more efficient way of treating samples.

Doing All The 'Dirty Work'

On Jan. 14, Curiosity scooped its first dune sample. To do so, the rover probed the Namib dune by scuffing the surface with a wheel.

"The scuff helped give us confidence we have enough sand where we're scooping that the path of the scoop won't hit the ground under the sand," said NASA's Michael McHenry, the campaign rover planner for the mission.

After successfully scooping samples, the first sieve on the rover's arm screened out grains that were bigger than 150 microns or about 0.006 inch.

Some of the material that went through the sieve fell into inlet ports from a "portioner" on the device, while material that was blocked by the device was dumped back onto the ground.

On Jan. 19, Curiosity dug its second scoop of sample from Gobabeb. This is where the coarser sieve worked its magic.

Material from the second scoop was fed to the 150-micron sieve, but some of the material did not pass through, so they were transported through the coarser sieve, which screened out grains bigger than one millimeter or about 0.039 inch.

All the scooped-up sand samples were sent to the on-board chemistry lab, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM).

Cool Selfies On Mars

Aside from the photos of Martian sand and soil, Curiosity has also taken several selfies while navigating through the dunes of the planet.

In 2014, Curiosity reached the base of Mount Sharp after studying outcrops closer to its landing site, and then journeying to the layered mountain.

On the lower portion of Mount Sharp, the Mars mission is investigating how the red planet's environment possibly changed from favorable wet conditions for microbial life to its current drier and harsher conditions.

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Over the previous months, LG G4 owners from all over the world have complained about a mysterious bootloop issue that affects the smartphone. For seemingly no reason, the LG G4 will reboot at random times and then get stuck in a bootloop with no fix.

The LG G4 is one of the best Android smartphones of 2015, and users aren't giving up on it that easily. A petition has been recently formed, composed of LG G4 owners affected by the problem, to force the company to acknowledge the problem and to provide free replacements for the defective units.

The petition, which was created by Santiago Archila, claims that the bootloop problem potentially affects all LG G4 devices, and is not specific to certain carrier-branded versions or regional models. Archila added that LG's response regarding the matter has so far been unacceptable, as the company has not handled the problem consistently. Some users have had their smartphones replaced, while others were told that the model number of their LG G4 is not eligible for any replacements or repairs.

Complaints regarding the issue could be seen around the Internet since September last year, with the issue first thought to only affect the early models of the LG G4. The issue was initially flagged as a motherboard problem on certain variants, but even newer models of the smartphone have been affected by the bootloop issue with no solution in sight.

It took a while, but LG has finally admitted that the LG G4's bootloop issue is a hardware defect, after Android Authority picked up the story on the problem and confronted the company regarding it.

In addition to LG acknowledging the problem, the company said it will be repairing the affected devices, stating that the source of the bootloop problem is loose contact between some of the handset's internal components. The company also confirmed that the previous attempts to solve the issue failed because of misdiagnosis, leading to wrong parts undergoing replacement.

LG said customers experiencing the bootloop issue should contact the local carrier from where the LG G4 was acquired or a local LG service center for repairs under full warranty. For customers who purchased their LG G4 from non-carrier retail outlets, they should reach out to an LG service center, though warranty conditions will be different in such cases.

"LG Electronics is committed to providing the highest standards of product quality and customer service and apologizes for the inconvenience caused to some of our customers who initially received incorrect diagnoses," the company said.

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Health officials in Seattle are closely watching a suspected norovirus outbreak at a restaurant that may have sickened up to 50 people attending a private function.

King County Public Health closed Maggianos Little Italy restaurant  located at 10455 NE Eighth Street in Bellevue  and suspended its food business permit as they investigated the Jan. 18 event that may have also affected several of the restaurant workers.

Public health officials stated that pending any laboratory test confirmation, the workers symptoms were consistent with norovirus and they may already have been ill prior to the private party, with some symptoms already existing since Jan. 9 and over the following two weeks.

We are in the early stages of our investigation so information could change, said health officials in the statement.

According to health officials, they learned of the incident Friday, Jan. 22, and that Maggianos is cooperating with them during the investigation.

[There have been] no other reports of any guest outside of this single party becoming ill, a spokesperson said. Maggiano's said it has had no confirmed diagnosis of a foodborne illness to date.

The statement added that staff members have thoroughly disinfected the premises of the establishment, and that they are maintaining strict standards of quality, safety and cleanliness and training every staff member in proper and safe food handling.

"We are taking this isolated incident very seriously, part of its statement read.

Public Health warned those who are ill, vomiting, or have diarrhea for over three days  as well as serious signs like bloody diarrhea  to have themselves checked by a doctor.

Norovirus is deemed the most common pathogen causing acute gastroenteritis in the United States. It is responsible for up to 21 million sicknesses and contributes to up to 71,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths.

The so-called winter vomiting bug attacks the gastrointestinal lining, causing inflamed stomach and intestines. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain are just some common symptoms.

The virus may be contracted by both adults and children by being exposed to an infected individual, having contact with infected surfaces, and consuming contaminated food or water.

"One of the most important things you can do to avoid norovirus and other illnesses is to wash your hands frequently with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds," advised Dr. Karen Smith, California Department of Public Health director.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommends washing vegetables and fruits prior to cooking, as well as cooking raw food like oysters thoroughly.

Photo: Joseph Hunkins | Flickr

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The Samsung Galaxy S7 and the LG G5 are some of the highly-anticipated smartphones of this year. Both handsets are speculated to be launched at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona starting Feb. 22.

Neither LG nor Samsung have revealed any details about their respective next-generation flagship smartphones. Nevertheless, we've gathered some of the rumored specs of the LG G5 and the Galaxy S7.

Display

Rumors point out that the Galaxy S7 will sport a 5.1-inch display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels. On the other hand the LG G5 may boast a 5.5-inch or 5.6-inch screen with 4K display resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels.

Processor and RAM

Samsung used an Exynos processor in the Galaxy S6 but speculations are high that the Korean company may switch back to Qualcomm. Both the Galaxy S7 and the LG G5 may run on the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and have 4GB of RAM.

Storage

Both the Galaxy S7 and the LG G5 are estimated to be available in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB storage models.

The LG G4 comes with a microSD card slot that allows users to expand storage by up to 2TB. It is highly likely that the LG G5 will also come with the same feature.

The Galaxy S6 did not have a microSD card slot, which means that the storage capacity is non-expandable. However, some rumors claim that the Galaxy S7 may include a microSD card that will let users have more space for their data.

The LG G5 may have a 20-megapixel rear-facing camera. A leaked picture of the LG G5 case hints that the mobile phone will have dual cameras.

The Galaxy S7 may come with a 12-megapixel primary camera, which at first seems like a downgrade from the 16-megapixel camera found in the Galaxy S6. Megapixel rating, however, is just one aspect of any camera. Samsung may combine the 12-megapixel with a bright f/1.7 lens and optical stabilization, which can turn the camera to one of the best smartphone cameras of 2016.

Battery

The Galaxy S7 is speculated to get a 3,000mAh battery, while the LG G5 may come with a large 4,000mAh battery, offering longer usage time.

Operating System

Both the smartphones should come running on the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system.

Fingerprint Scanner and Eye Scanner

Neither the Galaxy S6 nor the LG G4 came with a fingerprint or an eye scanner. Rumors claim that the Galaxy S7 will come with a fingerprint scanner as well as an iris scanner.

LG is reported to be working with IRIENCE, which is a Korean technology firm called that specializes in eye-scanning technology. IRIENCE is said to be making eye scanner for the LG G5, which will be able to scan the user's eye from a distance of 50 centimeters (19.69 inches).

The LG G5 is also speculated to include a fingerprint scanner.

The rumored specs of both the LG G5 and the Galaxy S7 are impressive, which might make choosing between them difficult for some. However, a bigger screen with 4K display, bigger battery and the possible option to expand the storage to 2TB may give LG G5 an edge over the Galaxy S7.

LG did not launch the LG G4 during the 2015 MWC. However, the smartphone maker has already sent out press invites for its event on Feb. 21. Moreover, an unnamed LG executive has also confirmed that the company will launch its first flagship handset during the MWC, which makes it highly likely that LG will unveil the LG G5 at the event.

The LG executive is also optimistic that the upcoming LG device will give still competition to rivals, especially to Samsung.

"The unveiling of LG's new flagship handset was delayed months after the release of the new Samsung flagship handset," says the LG executive. "But this year will be different. LG Electronics is ready to take on Samsung."

It remains to be seen whether the LG G5 or the Samsung Galaxy S7 will be unwrapped during the 2016 MWC. Again it is best to take this information with a grain of salt but it is definitely exciting to see a prelude to a possible great battle between upcoming flagship smartphones of LG and Samsung.

Photo: Karlis Dambrans | Flickr

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Online activists are demanding Yahoo to stop the sale of ivory products on its websites in Japan as they blame the Internet company for aiding the near-extinction of elephants.

The online activism network Avaaz, which has made a name for itself after exposing websites involved in illegal ivory trade such as Craigslist, has garnered more than 1 million signatures for the online petition that they launched.

Through the campaign, Avaaz is now appealing to the tech giant to bring an end to the "deadly" ivory trade that takes place through Yahoo Japan's auction site. Yahoo Japan is a company independent of Yahoo, but the latter, currently based in Sunnyvale, California, owns a 35 percent stake in the business.

Avaaz seems to be targeting Yahoo in order to create maximum impact at a time when the company's leadership in a crucial state. Just recently, media reports revealed that the company has refused potential buyers of its core internet businesses.

The campaign alludes Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in the same breath as Yahoo Japan's CEO Manabu Miyasaka, as well as other online companies complicit to the illegal ivory trade.

"The ivory trade is pushing elephants to the edge of extinction, and Yahoo is making a killing from trinket sales in Japan," wrote the activist group. "But right now we have a chance to end this corporate complicity."

Ivory Trafficking In Japan And Other Asian Countries

The illegal ivory trade may seem like something you can only find at the seediest and darkest corners of the Internet, but a huge amount of these tusks are actually being sold on large consumer websites to people who are unaware of where the items came from.

The United Nations said around 100 elephants are slaughtered every day by poachers who take part in ivory trafficking. The large demand for ivory comes from Japan, China and other countries in Asia where the material is viewed as a traditional symbol for status and wealth.

Advocacy group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) carried out an inquiry into Yahoo Japan's auction site. The group discovered that between 2012 and 2014, more than 12 tons of ivory trinkets and whole tusks were sold through the website. This trade was worth $7 million in sales, an amount which Yahoo would take a small transaction and listing fee.

"Yahoo is a household name, an internet giant, and it's making essentially blood money off the back of elephants being killed," said Bert Wander, the campaign director for Avaaz.

Wander added that the Internet company could easily do the world a favor by helping conserve these animals.

Yahoo's Response

Yahoo denied the allegations through a statement, and said that the company understands the concerns raised by the campaign.

"Yahoo, Inc. does not accept ads for ivory under our existing policies (Live Animals & Endangered Species - Yahoo Product Ads prohibits the sale of live animals as well as products obtained from or the actual sale of endangered or threatened species.)," the company said.

Photo : William Warby | Flickr

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An international team of researchers from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have discovered a massive alien planet that orbits its host star at a distance that is 7,000 times farther compared to Earth's distance from the sun.

In a study featured in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers from several research institutions, including the University of Hertfordshire and the Australian National University (ANU), tracked down the host star of a gas giant exoplanet designated as 2MASS J2126-8140.

When it was first discovered, scientists flagged 2MASS J2126-8140 as a potential lonely or free-floating planet because of its relatively young age and low mass.

However, further research [pdf] has shown that the exoplanet does indeed orbit a star but at a far greater distance than anything researchers have ever observed before.

ANU researcher Dr. Simon Murphy and his colleagues found that the star in question is a red dwarf named TYC 9486-927-1, which is located 6,900 astronomical units (AU) from 2MASS J2126-8140. This means that the exoplanet is roughly 1 trillion (1 million million) kilometers or 600 billion miles away from its host star.

"We were very surprised to find such a low-mass object so far from its parent star," Murphy said. "There is no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas."

At this distance, TYC 9486-927-1 would appear only as a moderately lit star in the sky of 2MASS J2126-8140. It would also take almost a month before any light from the red dwarf star reaches the exoplanet.

Murphy and his fellow researchers have been studying the 2MASS J2126-8140 as part of a survey involving thousands of brown dwarfs and young stars that are found near the solar system.

After finding out that the 2MASS J2126-8140 exoplanet and the TYC 9486-927-1 red dwarf star are both roughly 100 light years away from Earth, the researchers proceeded to compare the motion of the two objects through space. They were able to determine that the exoplanet and the star were moving together.

Murphy said that they believe 2MASS J2126-8140 and TYC 9486-927-1 were both formed from a concentration of gas in space that pushed them in the same direction together. This event likely occurred somewhere between 10 million and 45 million years ago.

Murphy added that the two massive objects must have existed in a highly dense environment, causing them to be barely bound together. If there were any other star nearby, it would have caused the orbit between 2MASS J2126-8140 and TYC 9486-927-1 to be severely disrupted.

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A Tennessee Apple store employee received all praises after becoming a hero for a 9-year-old boy with Autism. The mother of the boy expressed her gratitude for what the employee did in a Facebook post.

James, a 9-year old boy suffers from both Down syndrome and autism. While LynnMarie Rink, the child's mother, accompanied her son to an Apple store on Jan. 21 to buy him an Ipad, James got too excited as he might have seen something interesting outside and ran fast towards the door. The problem is, he hit the glass wall instead.

The boy flew backward onto the floor as he hit the Apple store's glass wall in a mall at Green Hills. All the shoppers who witnessed the accident froze as a loud thud was heard as he hit the glass and the floor.

An employee, Andrew Wall, came to Rink and her son. He asked LynnMarie if they were okay and when she told him if they could finish the transaction on the floor so as not to further upset James.

"Your awesome employee sat with James on the floor of the store and set up the new iPad. There are no words to accurately describe how grateful I am that he took the time to 'meet us right where we were," LynnMarie wrote in a Facebook post.

Wall sat down on the floor with James and helped him set up his new iPad.

"There are no words to accurately describe how grateful I am that he took the time to 'meet us right where we were.' He didn't have to sit down on the floor with us. He could have easily waited for us to stand. Could have easily waited for us to come back another day. But he hung out with us in the midst of our pain," she added.

LynnMarie said that James had his first iPad when he was just 3 years old. Because of his condition, the iPad served not only as his toy and a device to play videos, but also a means for him to communicate. James suffers from Down syndrome at birth and was diagnosed with autism when he was 6 years old. His first iPad, however, stopped working so they needed to buy him a new one.

Her friend noticed that her iPhone 5 was not in a good condition and told her that it became James' replacement of his broken iPad.

"To make a long story a bit shorter, that friend happens to be on the board of a charitable organization, The Fiona Rose Murphey Foundation Charitable Trust, who graciously offered to provide James with a much needed new iPad," LynnMarie explained.

She thanked all who helped her get an iPad for her son, The Fiona Rose Murphey Foundation Charitable Trust, the Apple Store at the mall in Green Hills and Andrew Wall, the employee who extended his help to her son with special needs.

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Australian startup Unlockd has a neat recipe of serving ads to lower phone bills, and Boost Mobile is ready to bring it to the United States.

Sprint subsidiary Boost Mobile signed a deal with Unlockd to offer that intriguing advertising platform stateside, enabling more than 9 million U.S. users to take advantage of it.

While ads may be annoying or downright intrusive for many consumers, they might be more acceptable or even desirable if they help lower your bills. That's exactly what Unlockd offers. Basically, it pays users to view ads by reducing their monthly phone bills.

Users who agree to receive ads from Unlockd partners will see the advertisements when they unlock their device, and their monthly phone bill will get a $5 price cut. Unlockd partners currently include Starbucks, Hulu, Lyft and Levi's, all of which teamed up with the startup to deliver advertising content on users' phones.

The new partnership with Boost Mobile and Unlocked also brings Yahoo and Twitter to the table. Yahoo will integrate its search bar into the lock screen of the device, while Twitter users will get exclusive offers and deals through MoPub.

This strategy marks a change in the advertising revenue stream and it's good news for telecom providers as well as consumers, believes Doug Smith, Sprint Telecom director of Prepaid.

"Providing Boost subscribers with options to reduce their cost to communicate is in line with our goal of being the value leader in prepaid," Smith notes in the press release.

This new initiative that brings the Unlockd solution to Boost Mobile users is called Boost Dealz, and is available for both existing and new customers. This option is not mandatory, it gives users the chance to choose.

"Boost Dealz, built on the Unlockd solution, is an industry-first, completely optional opportunity for our customers to earn value in exchange for learning about products and services aligned with their interests. In addition, it delivers a new revenue stream to our business while providing an innovative avenue for advertisers and media publishers to reach a highly targeted audience," adds Smith.

For now, Unlockd will reach the 9 million customers on Boost Mobile, but it could significantly extend if Sprint decides to implement this solution on all of its services. With Sprint on board, Unlockd would reach 58 million customers in the United States, but it remains to be seen whether this will really happen.

Unlockd plans to keep expanding worldwide, and it's already made notable efforts in this regard. The startup currently has offices in Melbourne, London, New York and Seattle, and it's poised to further widen its horizons.

Matt Berriman, co-founder and CEO of Unlockd, says the company already scored deals with telecom operators in the UK, Asia and Europe. Unlockd seems to be on a roll, and Sprint's Boost Mobile could help it gain even more steam.

In a mobile-driven world, phone bills are getting increasingly steep and means to lower costs are becoming more appealing than ever.

Carriers are also striving to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market. Sprint, for its part, recently decided to fire $2,500 employees in a bid to cut down on operating expenses and turn its business around. Competition is fierce with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile as its main rivals, but this new Boost Dealz should open up a new revenue stream.





Unlockd Demo Video from Unlockd on Vimeo.

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HopSkipDrive announced a newly-secured investment deal with venture capital firms UpFront Ventures and FirstMark Capital as lead investors.

The Series A funding, which allowed the company to gain $10.2 million, saw a number of noteworthy participants: existing investors such as 1776 and BBG Ventures, as well as new investors that include Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Greycroft Partners.

The Los Angeles-based company also managed to raise $3.9 million in seed funding. It plans to use the new investment as part of its continuing effort to expand services beyond Los Angeles and to empower the company's product development team.

"We are excited to announce that we have secured the funding to do just that," said co-founders Joanna McFarland, Carolyn Yashari Becher and Janelle McGlothlin of HopSkipDrive. "With a new investment of $10.2 million, we are growing our group of investors, our team, and most importantly our opportunity to help families get their kids where they need to go safely and reliably. We are thrilled to bring our trusted ride service to millions more families in Southern California and beyond."

HopSkipDrive aims to help parents fulfill their responsibility of bringing their kids where they need to go while balancing a busy schedule at the same time. Since the founders are all experienced professionals as well as full-time moms, they understand how other parents could really use some help in dealing with the hectic work of being a parent.

"Families across Los Angeles have shared with us what a relief HopSkipDrive has been for them - in addition to getting kids to and from school and activities," said HopSkipDrive. "We are so proud that we are making life a bit easier for our riders, their families and our CareDrivers."

According to the company, most of its clients use HopSkipDrive several times a week. Moreover, the top 25 percent of its customers reveal that they use the service several times a day.

In terms of screening its drivers, HopSkipDrive said it has developed a comprehensive screening process wherein aspiring drivers must pass several steps and criteria. These include a thorough background check; a clean driving record; more than five years of experience in child care (being a parent is also counted); more than 23 years of age; possession of a 2006 model of car or newer and proof of insurance and references.

HopSkipDrive also announced that Eyal Gutentag, former general manager of Uber in Los Angeles, will also join the company as its COO.

Apart from its plans to expand services beyond Los Angeles in the future, the company also sees potential groups that could benefit from the security of its ride-booking platform, such as seniors or riders who have special needs.

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Taxi companies in France fighting for their livelihoods against Uber just gained a small, but significant victory over the dominant ride-hailing service.

On Wednesday, a Paris court mandated that Uber pays a $1.3 million fine to a French taxi union for violating a French transport law, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

While the amount doesn't exactly rock Uber and what it's doing, the fine does mark a setback for the company in France, where taxi drivers continue their strike against ride-hailing apps for the second consecutive day.

Paris also happens to be the place that taxi drivers have been as vocal  if not the most-outspoken  against Uber worldwide, so this is significant.

Uber told the Journal that the Paris court ordered it to pay the fine due to the company's failure to give its drivers orders that they must return to garages between each fare  a mandated action under the updated 2014 transport law.

This comes after Uber originally appealed that returning-to-garage stipulation of the regulation, but lost that appeal last spring.

That being said, Uber still plans on appealing the $1.3 million fine, while trying to get the European Union to reject the French transport law, altogether, as reported by the Journal.

This marks only the latest of legal entanglement that is engulfing Uber in France, as taxi unions are desperately trying to hold onto whatever is left of their dwindling market share since the ride-hailing juggernaut took over the scene and continues to gain customers.

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Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

Trend:

Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR's President Rovnag Abdullayev participated in a meeting of the management board of the consortium of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), during a visit to Turkey Jan. 27.

SOCAR said on its website that the meeting participants exchanged opinions on the upcoming work in 2016 as part of the project.

The meeting also approved the necessary documents on the TANAP project for 2016.

During the visit, Abdullayev also met with the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources of Turkey Berat Albayrak.

The importance of SOCAR's ongoing projects in Turkey's energy sector was noted at the meeting.

It was also underscored that the works on SOCAR's projects are being carried out in line with schedule.

The sides also expressed confidence that the works on TANAP's construction and the projects underway on the Petkim peninsula will be carried out at a high quality and completed in time.
Mitsubishi is definitely starting the New Year thinking out the box.

The company's Electric leg announced Wednesday that it has developed an innovative antenna system called the SeaAerial, which uses one of the most abundant resources on Earth  seawater.

What makes the antenna system ultra intriguing is that it shoots a column of seawater into the air to create a plume for the transmission and reception of radio-frequency waves. Mitsubishi Electric says the SeaAerial can be implemented offshore or along shorelines with the company already dubbing it as the "world's first seawater antenna capable of receiving digital terrestrial broadcasts for normal viewing."

Mitsubishi Electric accomplished this by utilizing a customized insulated nozzle that transmits radio waves to the SeaAerial antenna, even in times when the plume is connected to the sea surface.

Along the way of developing the antenna system, the company was faced with the challenge of securing adequate antenna efficiency  something they were able to reach by using simulations to hone in on an ideal diameter of the plume, resulting in efficiency levels of 70 percent and the ability to send and receive signals.

According to Mitsubishi Electric, the SeaAerial is part of the company's goal to develop antennas that offer new functions, while still delivering superior performance. As part of that effort, Mitsubishi is looking into "conductive and transmutative liquids as new materials for antennas."

Looks like it already pinpointed seawater as one of those liquids ... and there's plenty of it to go around worldwide.

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It's the end of January, and that means more free games are on the way for Xbox Live Gold and PlayStation Plus subscribers. Hot on the heels of Sony's announcement comes Microsoft with four free titles coming to Xbox owners in February.

On Xbox One players will be able to check out Hand of Fate, the deck-building battler, and Styx: Master of Shadows, where players will become a goblin thief looking to steal the artifact known as the "Heart of the World." Both Xbox One titles should cater to gamers who love traditional fantasy, but Hand of Fate truly stands out for its unique mixture of gameplay elements that combine to create a cohesive whole.

Hand of Fate will be free all month, with Styx going free on Feb. 16 and staying that way until March 16.

Xbox 360 gamers also have two free games to choose from. First up is Gears of War 2. If you don't already own this game, it's one of Microsoft's modern classics, delivering some top-notch cover-based shooting action. It's also perfect for co-op with a friend. Also available will be Sacred Citadel, a brawler set in the fantasy universe of the Sacred RPG franchise. This title supports four-player co-op, so those who love playing loot-filled action RPGs like Diablo should find plenty to enjoy here.

Sacred Citadel will be free from Feb. 1-15, with Gears of War 2 going free the rest of the month. Keep in mind that all Xbox 360 Games with Gold titles are also playable on Xbox One as well, as long as you redeem the free game through your Xbox 360 or Xbox.com. More than a few Xbox One owners likely own Gears of War 2 already (it was given away for free to those who bought Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on Xbox One), but Sacred Citadel should be a welcome addition.

If you haven't already, be sure to download last month's free games, which included Killer Instinct: Gold Edition and Zheros.

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The DeLorean is going Back to the Future ... literally.

The website Click 2 Houston is reporting that the iconic car from the 1985 classic movie Back to the Future is preparing for a return to the production lines, which could see it deliver a new car as early as 2017.

"It's fantastic. It is a game-changer for us. We've been wanting this to happen," DeLorean CEO Stephen Wynne told the website. "That was a green light to go back into production. That was prohibited. It was against the law to do it."

The exciting news comes nearly 35 years after the last DeLorean was built. Wynne, who moved the DeLorean Motor Company to the Houston area in 1987, added that the automaker's new car will be produced in the United States.

How many? Well, Wynne estimates that he has enough stock parts to manufacture close to 300 cars, aiming to scale from building one a month to one per week.

"It's huge for us. It means we're back as a car company again," Wynne said.

Those worrying that DeLorean will fiddle with the iconic look of its car, fear not.

"There's no reason to change the appearance of the car," Wynne said. "As we go into the program, we'll decide what areas need to be freshened up."

Currently, car enthusiasts can purchase a refurbished DeLorean model anywhere from $45,000 to $55,000, but this news marks a brand new car being put into production that is expected to come in under the $100,000 mark.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Its been more than a year since California voters overwhelmingly decided to scale back penalties for several common crimes through Proposition 47. But debate over the new law has only grown more heated.The biggest controversy is whether Proposition 47 caused a crime wave in California. Opponents say the laws sweeping changes  including making misdemeanors out of crimes that were once felonies, including drug possession, theft and kiting checks  have made it much harder for police and prosecutors to go after repeat offenders. Reformers say everyone needs a second chance, but the tragedy is that public safety has suffered as crime rates have soared, Marc Debbaudt, the president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, wrote in an op-ed for the. Residents have become victims under the guise of reforming punishment for so-called victimless drug offenses.Proposition 47 proponents question whether the surge in crime is really as widespread as their adversaries say, and they dispute the notion that Proposition 47 is responsible for the upticks that communities are seeing. Preliminary data show, for example, increases in both violent crime and property crime in the last year in the area served by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. But the San Diego County Sheriffs Department reported lower crime rates at the same time. Reports of higher crime rates are hardly unique to California. Baltimore, Milwaukee, New Orleans, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., for example, all grappled with more murders in the last year, but none of those places had seen any criminal law changes akin to Proposition 47.In fact, Proposition 47 is the latest of many steps California has taken to reduce its jail and prison populations  the state is, after all, under a federal court order to end overcrowding in its prisons. The American Civil Liberties Union of California notes that the decrease in California inmates was bigger in 2000 and in 2010 than it was in 2015. Proposition 47 is the latest focus of the sky-is-falling rhetoric of an impending crime wave, the group wrote in a November report. The fact is that its way too early to assess 2015 crime rates in California at all, let alone potential causes.What is clear, though, is that Proposition 47 made big changes  and fast  to the criminal justice system. Everyone from ex-cons to sheriffs to mental health providers is still getting adjusted to the new reality. The law does seem to make it more difficult to crack down on repeat offenders, because theyre released more frequently and will never serve more than a year in jail as long as they keep committing the same crime. The new measure reduces the number of prisoners who must submit DNA samples to the state: California only collects genetic information from felony suspects, not offenders accused of committing misdemeanors. The downgrades also make it easier for unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes to escape deportation.Another huge worry is that inmates are starting to shun drug courts. In Los Angeles County, for example, enrollment is down by 60 percent. Why would inmates undergo a treatment program that can last two years, when their maximum jail sentence for drug possession is six months?But part of the promise of Proposition 47 is that California will better spend the money its saving from housing fewer inmates  the states prison population declined by 7,700 inmates in its first nine months. State officials will calculate their savings next year, and direct any money toward mental health, anti-truancy efforts, victim services and drug abuse treatment.In other words, it will take a long time before Proposition 47s full impact can be felt. But dont expect advocates on either side to give up the fight in the meantime.
Coding makes this 18 year-old leave a secure job at one word messaging app Yo

Zach Latta had already seasoned out of his Los Angeles, California public high school by the time he as 16 and was working at Yo  a one-word messaging app that came to fame in 2014  as an engineer and lead backend developer.

Now, Latta at 18 is residing in San Francisco and working on his quickly expanding coding organization called Hack Club.

Ive always found myself able to learn the most when I can completely throw myself at something, Latta told Business Insider.

Latta has surely thrown himself strongly into his work as co-founder and executive director of Hack Club. The organization has grown to 54 schools across 12 states and five countries in just one year after founding it.

Hack Club is a non-profit organization with four full-time employees including Latta. The organizations 2014 tax filings indicate the majority of its funding resulted from grants and contributions.

A 2015 Thiel Fellow, Latta has become one of 20 people selected to receive $100,000 and mentorship, on a condition that they skip or withdraw from college for two years. When Latta was 17, he was awarded the fellowship last June and had no plans of attending college.

The thought behind Hack Club is simple, even if the coding behind it is not. Coding classes or clubs may be offered by a few high schools, they generally teach students dated coding standards. According to Latta, coders working in the industry in reality use software written in the past six months.

Using up-to-date standards, Hack Club works with high school students to start and lead programming clubs at their schools. It offers software tools, baseline coding curriculum and community-building training.

The education category saw Latta, and his co-founder Jonathan Leung, 25, earn a spot on Forbes 2016 30 under 30 list due to the innovation and success of Hack Club. Latta was one of the youngest honourees on the list.

Our whole philosophy is that whats cool about coding is that it lets you do what you want to do and it lets you build real things, Latta said. You dont have to have a college degree, you dont have to have years of training. As long as you have internet access you can do whatever you want to.

Many of the apps or websites that Hack Clubs members have built are on display on its site.

For example, there is Kenko, which is funded by Goldman Sachs that labels itself as shazam for food, where you take a photo of any food and receive health insights. It definitely seems targeted at challenging the status quo, even though not all of the coding at Hack Club involves hacking per se.

Latta stated that one group of students in one of his clubs is working to kill Slack and build a better app for communications in workplace. Many companies including Business Insider, use Slack, a real-time messaging service to communicate around their offices.

Some of that establishment-killing attitude is intrinsic in hacking subculture, with its documented distaste for authority. But some of that approach within Hack Club is likely a by-product of Lattas own attitudes about coding.

Before I started focusing on programming, I felt really stuck, he said. I thought the way the world was put together is the way the world was put together, and its always going to be that way. Programming really changed that mindset for me.

Latta started coding in middle school. His interest grew into a love of programming by the time he got to high school. He started a coding club with about 15 students, as Latta did not know anyone at school he could write code with.

It wasnt the greatest club, but just having anything at all made such a profound impact on what I got out of high school, he said.

In order to dedicate all of his time to programming, Latta started concentrating on seasoning out of school early. He designed his own home-schooling program sophomore year and tested out that same year.

While he was thrilled for the chance to pursue programming, his parents, both social workers, were not very sure of his decision, especially when he made a decision to skip college and jump right into the industry.

When Lattas parents saw the success he was finding in the workforce, their unwillingness gave way to support.

He was a 16-year-old without a college degree making market rate as an engineer says Latta when he started working at Yo. While he did not spill how much Yo paid him, a search of Glassdoor indicated that software engineers in San Francisco make an average salary of $103,000.

I think to them at the time that was a ridiculous concept, Latta said.

He considers a college degree isnt that important to employers anymore, for which the internet should be thanked in part.

I think the fundamental idea is that a college degree is a vote, and so many other things can provide the same value as that vote can, Latta said.

During the upcoming year, he plans to concentrate on expanding his Hack Club. Currently, there are clubs in Indonesia, Zimbabwe, and Hong Kong. He plans to expand his reach domestically and internationally.

But at its root, his inspiration is to continue to empower students through coding.

The reason why programming is so special to me is that I think programming shows you that you have power, and that you can do things, that you are your own person, he said.
A 40 anos de Malvinas

"Revisar el pasado es pensar el futuro". La frase de la presidenta de Telam, Bernarda Llorente, resume el espiritu del documental coproducido entre la agencia de noticias y el canal publico de TV sobre la cobertura que los medios de comunicacion hicieron del conflicto, plagada de censura y mentiras. Una autocritica necesaria para mirar hacia adelante en un (ya viejo) contexto de fake news y negocio informativo.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Jan. 28

By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend:

The 43rd session of the ad hoc working group for development of convention on the Caspian Sea's legal status began its work Jan. 27 in Ashgabat, Turkmen government said in a message.

The session is being held at the level of Caspian states' deputy foreign ministers.

Delegations from Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have arrived in Ashgabat to participate in the meeting.

The session's purpose is to continue the discussion on the convention's provisions related with the Caspian Sea's biological resources.

On the first day of the meeting, the heads of delegations outlined their states' positions regarding the issue of legal status and various aspects of cooperation on the Caspian Sea.

The parties also exchanged views on a wide range of issues of mutual interest.

Aside from that, the search for mutually acceptable solutions on the convention's provisions was continued.

The ad hoc working group's meeting will continue its work on Jan. 28.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:



Iran seeks to expand cooperation with South Korea to develop its nuclear industry including the construction of small reactors as well as power plants, atomic chief said.



At a meeting with Kim Seung-Ho, the South Korean ambassador to Iran on Jan. 27, Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi said there are proper opportunities for cooperation in Iran's nuclear industry, IRNA news agency reported.



Saying that South Korea has gained valuable experience in nuclear sector, Salehi further called on Seoul to work together with Tehran for developing the nuclear medicine equipment.



In turn, Kim Seung-Ho also called for the expansion of bilateral ties and cooperation on nuclear program saying the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has opened a new chapter for mutual cooperation with Iran.



In a joint statement on Jan. 16, the EU High Representative Federica Mogherini and Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announced the implementation of Iran's nuclear deal with the P5+1, and the removal of economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic.



The statement said the EU confirms that the legal framework, providing for lifting of its nuclear-related economic and financial sanctions, is effective.



Following the removal of international sanctions, Iranian atomic officials have held several meetings with foreign states including China and Spain to develop the country's nuclear industry.



Earlier Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesperson of the AEOI, announced that Iran and China are in discussions to build two nuclear power plants in the Islamic Republic's southern coastal area of Makran. The Islamic Republic expects the facilities to generate 1000 megawatt of power.



AEOI has stated intention to build a number of 100 megawatt small reactors to produce power.
Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said on Tuesday that Rome will support Tehran's role in the settlement of tensions in the Middle East including the humanitarian crisis in Syria, Irna reported.



He made the remarks in a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Rome.

He said that nuclear deal between Tehran and Group 5+1 will help Italy promote its political, commercial cooperation and investment in Iran.

The Italian minister further noted, 'During the meting, we discussed regional crises, Syrian peace talks, Libyan situation, fighting terrorism, extremism and narcotics and respect for human rights.'

Expressing concern over severe tensions in the Middle East, Gentiloni said the tensions can escalate internal conflicts in the Islamic world and endanger diplomatic efforts to solve regional crises.

Zarif is accompanying President Hassan Rouhani on his official visit to Italy.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:



President Hassan Rouhani's visit to Italy will trigger the expansion of bilateral ties between Italy and Iran, the country's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif believes.



"Opening a new chapter in close cooperation with Italy- both in economy and trade, and in combating extremism," Zarif tweeted Jan. 27.



President Rouhani heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation arrived in Italy on 25 Jan on the first leg of his four-day Euro tour.



During the visit, Iran and Italy signed a number of contracts worth at $18.4 billion covering various sectors including health and transportation.



Rouhani who is the first Iranian president who pays an official visit to the EU over the past 10 years will leave Italy for France today.



Rouhani is expected to discuss the securing of a number of significant trade deals with French officials and companies including aircraft manufacturer Airbus.



It was earlier announced that the Iranian president would discuss purchasing 100 aircraft from Airbus during his visit to France.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Umid Niayesh - Trend:

Resuming friendly ties with the US is possible but the key is in Washington, says Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

"If the key was in Tehran I would have already used that," Rouhani said at a press conference in Rome wrapping up his Italy visit on Jan. 27, Iranian state TV channel IRINN reported.

He added that the US should take steps to improve ties with the Islamic Republic, and called on Washington to stop enmity and pressure against Iran.

"The US should know that regional issues won't be solved without Iran," added the president.

The US should leave the past behind and look forward, he underlined.

Rouhani also said that the American side has taken small steps regarding economic issues, such as removing ban on plane sells to Iran.

"Today, under the current conditions, Iran welcomes US investment in the country," he said, adding Tehran has no problem with US investors' presence in the country for joint production and technology transfer.

The Iranian president further touched upon the issue of terrorism, saying the Islamic Republic is ready to cooperate with other countries in fighting terrorism.

"Iran itself has been a victim of terrorism," Rouhani said, adding he has discussed the fight against terrorism with Italian officials.

During the press conference, Rouhani was asked about Tehran-Riyadh ties, to which he answered that Iran isn't seeking tensions in ties with Saudi Arabia.

"Iran and Saudi Arabia are important regional Muslim powers," he said, adding that Saudis are "angry due to failure of their regional plans."

"They had plans for Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, which failed," Rouhani said, accusing the Saudi Arabia of "supporting terrorists in the region".

He also strongly criticized Saudi attacks on Yemen, urging to halt the war.

The crisis between Riyadh and Tehran erupted after execution of a prominent Shia cleric, Nimr al-Nimr by Saudis on Jan. 2. After the execution, angry Iranian protesters attacked Saudi embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad. Right after the attacks on its diplomatic missions, the Saudi Arabia said it severed ties with the Islamic Republic.

Further speaking at the event, Rouhani said he immediately condemned the attack on Saudi embassy, but rejected the need for apologizing to Saudis on the issue.

"It is Saudi Arabia that should apologize for killing cleric al-Nimr, Yemenis, and for fatal Hajj mismanagement," Rouhani stressed.

He also expressed regret over al-Nimr's execution, saying the cleric wasn't involved in terrorism or any dangerous activities.

Rouhani further urged to restore security in the region, saying the terrorist group "Islamic State" (aka IS, ISIS or ISIL) is a major problem in the region.
He returned to Ireland as the country's second bishop and began his mission to spread the Christian message to those who had never heard it. He converted thousands of people to Christianity and established councils, churches, schools and monasteries across the country.

Legend suggests that Patrick used the three-leaf shamrock on his mission to explain the Holy Trinity, teaching his followers that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit exist as individual elements of the combined entity. While some experts claim this story was invented centuries later, the tale has led to the common practice of people wearing the symbol on the feast day.

Patrick is also believed to have banished snakes from Ireland to help remove the evil and introduce a new age. But experts say this is a myth because of evidence that snakes never existed in the country in the first place.

Around 431 AD, Patrick was appointed as successor to St Palladius, the first bishop of Ireland, and during his later years, he wrote about his spirituality and life in his "Confession".

Believed to have died on March 17, in 461 AD, Patrick's spiritual path led him to become a legendary figure, as he left behind an established church and an island of Christians. Today, his work is commemorated annually on March 17.

Symbols and images associated with Ireland and St Patrick's Day

The national flag of Ireland, also known as the Irish tricolour, is a prominent symbol in St Patrick's Day parades, events and celebrations. The green stripe stands for Irish Catholics, while the orange stripe represents Irish Protestants. The central white stripe also represents the hope for peace between the two groups.

The patron saint of Ireland is traditionally linked to the red Saltire of St Patrick, which was used to form the flag of the United Kingdom.

St Patrick is also associated with the colour blue, after the creation of the Order of St Patrick in the 1780s made it the official colour. "St Patricks Blue" can be found on Ireland's Presidential Standard, and in the plume of bearskins worn by the Irish Guards.

The legend of the leprechaun has also become a modern-day symbol of Ireland. Known for their mischievous behaviour and leaving pots of gold at the end of rainbows, today, the mythical creatures feature heavily as a tourist symbol and some people choose to wear leprechaun costumes and hats to St Patrick's Day parades. Dublin even has its very own Leprechaun Museum.

St Patrick's Day celebrations in Ireland

Unlike St David's Day in Wales and St George's Day in England, St Patrick's Day is a bank holiday in Ireland, allowing the Irish to fully embrace the festivities.

The people of Ireland honour their patron saint day every year by joining parades and dressing head to toe in green, white and orange, the colours of the Irish flag. Dublin's famous St Patrick's Parade usually starts at Parnell Square, and often features bands from around the world.

Historically called the "Feast of St Patrick", it would traditionally begin with families attending church in the morning, before celebrating with dance, drink and a feast of bacon and cabbage. Today, Irish stews and pints of Guinness are often enjoyed as part of the celebration.

As many as 13 million pints of Guinness are poured on St Patrick's Day alone, increasing from the average 10 million glasses poured every day around the world. The Guinness Storehouse is situated in the heart of St James's Gate, Dublin, with visitors able to book a tour of the famous site.

Popular Irish toasts on St Patrick's Day include: "Slainte mhaith", meaning "good health" in Irish Gaelic, and "may the good St Patrick protect ye, and the devil neglect ye".
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:



Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian is in Moscow to discuss Syrian and Yemeni crisis.



Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Amir-Abdollahian will discuss Syrian crisis ahead of the upcoming Geneva peace talks, IRNA news agency reported Jan. 27.



The report added that the foreign ministers will also discuss the issue of extremism and Yemeni crisis.



The UN has announced that the new round of peace talks aimed at finding a political solution to end the Syrian crisis would start in Geneva on Jan. 29 which is expected to continue for six months.



UN Security Council resolution on December 18 approved a draft resolution on peace process in Syria. According to the resolution, talks should be held between Syria's government and opposition should begin in January.



However it is not clear so far that the opposition groups whether plan to attend the talks as they demand the Syrian government to halts bombardments, lift blockades, and release detainees, Reuters previously reported.



Over the past five years more than 250,000 people have died in Syria following the crisis.



Iran's relations with several Arab states, particularly, with Saudi Arabia have deteriorated following the outbreak of crisis in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.



Tehran has consistently expressed support for the Syrian government and Shia-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen as well as dissident Shia groups in Bahrain.



Riyadh accuses Tehran of meddling in the internal affairs of Arab countries, including Yemen - something Iran has denied.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Umid Niayesh - Trend:

The first round of talks between Iran and the EU will be held in early February in Tehran, Iran's deputy foreign minister, Majid Takht-Ravanchi said.

The talks will be held at the level of deputy foreign ministers, Iran's ISNA news agency quoted Takht-Ravanchi as saying Jan. 27.

The EU Deputy Foreign Policy Chief Helga Schmid is scheduled to attend the talks, the top Iranian diplomat said, adding the negotiations will cover various fields, including political, economic, regional and international topics.

The talks are planed to be held every six months in Tehran and Brussels, he added.

The talks come after implementation of the nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers, which led to removal of international sanctions on Iran.

Iran and the P5+1 group of countries (the US, France, the UK, China, Russia and Germany) in July 2015 agreed on a landmark nuclear deal to curb Tehran's sensitive nuclear activities in return for the lifting of international sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

The implementation of the deal started on Jan. 16, 2016.

"Actually, we will have a detailed agenda for talks with the EU," Takht-Ravanchi said, adding both sides will benefit from the negotiations and cooperation.

He further said that the EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini is scheduled to visit Iran next spring for the second time.

Mogherini earlier paid a one-day visit to Tehran on July 28, 2015 following the historic nuclear deal. During the visit, Iran and the EU agreed to start talks on how to confront regional crises, such as terrorism.

According to Takht-Ravanchi, European commissioners will regularly pay visits to Iran.
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Big companies like Google are seen as "above the law" when it comes to paying tax in the UK, according to David Cameron's former adviser Steve Hilton.

Mr Hilton, whose wife Rachel Whetstone was the former head of communications at the Internet giant, said he understood public anger that big companies increasingly appeared to operate "above the law" after Google agreed to pay just 130million in backdated tax.
With the Eurovision Song Contest reaching its crescendo in Kiev this weekend, we took some time to recall the best ever songs written about our favourite form of accommodation.

1. Hotel California  The Eagles

Its actually precisely 40 years since Hotel California was released by The Eagles. The album's eponymous lead single has since become one of the most celebrated rock 'n' roll songs, as well as the most important tune referencing the hospitality industry - even if in a slightly meta sort of way. An accomplishment all the more impressive given how many songs there are about hotels, motels and Holiday Inns. Hotel California was not about a specific accommodation choice but instead an "interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles" in the Seventies, according to vocalist Don Henley, and "a journey from innocence to experience".

That said, there are of course a variety of actual Hotel Californias dotted about the world; a cursory search identifies one in Santa Monica, California, one in Palm Springs, Florida, and another in Baja, Mexico.

2. Hotel Yorba  White Stripes

Written about a former hotel of the same name in southwest Detroit, Hotel Yorba was the first single from The White Stripes 2001 album, White Blood Cells. The single version of the song was recorded in room 206 of the hotel, which is now government subsidised housing. If the lyrics are to be believed, it wasnt a very successful hotel: All they got inside is vacancy.

3. Chelsea Hotel #2  Leonard Cohen

This historic hotel in Manhattan has been home to the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Iggy Pop, as well as the author of this particular tune, Leonard Cohen - sadly a victim to 2016's cull of living greats. It was also where the writer Dylan Thomas died and where Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious, was found stabbed to death. It has featured heavily in pop culture, from books to film, from Andy Warhol to Bon Jovi, but this is our favourite tribute. Find the hotel, currently closed for renovations, on 222 West 23rd Street.

4. Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley

Another song about a fictional hotel, Heartbreak Hotel was instead inspired by the story of man who leapt to his death from a hotel in Miami, leaving a single line suicide note: I walk a lonely street. Naturally, there are Heartbreak Hotel-themed stays available for fans, including the 128-room, boutique offering on Elviss Graceland estate in Memphis. See here for more on sites associated with the King.

5. Stompin at the Savoy

A jazz standard named after the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York City, rather than the Savoy in London, it was composed by Edgar Sampson but has been recorded by a number of famous names, from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong to Al Hirt.

There is something deeply reassuring about The Savoy. In a world of constant change, the hotel retains a tangible sense of tradition, and its restaurants, among them the Gordon Ramsay-affiliated Savoy Grill and Simpsons-in-the-Strand, maintain consistently high standards. Read expert review From  548 per night Check availability Rates provided by Booking.com

6. Fugitive Motel  Elbow

Almost certainly not about a real motel - because if you were actually on the run, the last place you should stay is the Fugitive Motel, right? - but a song about a motel, nonetheless. The track was released as a single in the UK in October, 2003.

7. Copacabana  Barry Manilow

At last - a real hotel. Crooner Manilow's 1978 hit was inspired by a combination of the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro and the nightclub he frequented in New York of the same name.

8. Memory Motel  Rolling Stones

Believed to reference a motel of the same name in Montauk, Long Island, Mick Jagger wrote the song while staying with Keith Richards at Andy Warhol's house. As you do. It is known by Rolling Stones fans as one of the few tracks on which the pair shares vocal duties.

9. Blue Motel Room  Joni Mitchell

Surprise, surprise: a sad song from Joni Mitchell about being vaguely heartbroken in a motel. This song features on the 1976 album, Hejira, reportedly written over the course of a road trip from Maine to Los Angeles.

10. Hotel Room Service  Pitbull

Is there a more important song about a hotel than this? We doubt it. Quoting the Sugarhill Gang in chanting "hotel, motel, holiday inn", Pitbull seems to forget the accommodation theme and get distracted by his guest, singing such gems as "forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room", "Two plus two, I'm gonna' undress you" and "I'm the plumber tonight, I'll check your pipes". Charming.

11. Blue Hotel - Chris Isaak

Wikipedia pretty much sums this one up: "It was a hit in France". There seem to be a number of Blue Hotels around the world, including one in Blackpool, the name of which is prefixed with "Big", and one in Sydney.

12. Holiday Inn  Elton John

Taken from Elton John's 1971 album, Madman Across the Water, Holiday Inn seems to be inspired by the number of various American Holiday Inns John stayed in over the years, from Boston to Cleveland to Maine. Not quite Chelsea Hotel, is it?

13. Home Motel  Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson's Home Motel is on Lost Love Avenue, which Google can't seem to find. However, there is a Home Hotel in Buenos Aires.

14. Hotel  The Antlers

We leave you with a beautiful song from The Antlers' Familiars. Reminiscent of the confusion surrounding Hotel California's check out policy, the song states: "When I check out, it won't mtter how my name's spelled".
On Wednesday, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) raised Venezuela's growth projection to 12 percent by 2022 and 5 percent next year. | Read More
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

Trend:

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani left Rome for Paris on Wednesday after a three-day stay in Italy, IRNA reported Jan.27.

Italy is the first European country Iranian president paid a visit over the past 11 years.

During his stay, Rouhani met and conferred with his Italian counterpart and prime minister as well as Catholic Church leader.

Fourteen agreements on economic and commercial cooperation worth $17 billion were signed in presence of President Rouhani.
KTR ridicules TDP-BJP combine promise

Hyderabad, Jan 27 (INN): Panchayat Raj Minister K. Tarakarama Rao has ridiculed the promise being made by TDP-BJP combine of getting Central funds for development of Hyderabad if they win GHMC elections.



Addressing a meeting with IT professionals in Madhapur here on Wednesday, KTR said that TDP-BJP combine failed to get any funds for the construction of Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh. He said when TDP could not get funds for the State where it is in power, how could it get funds for Hyderabad. He advised the TDP-BJP combine to restrain from making false promises.



KTR expresses satisfaction over the pace of IT Sector growth in Hyderabad. As against the national average of 7%, the IT exports in Hyderabad have touched 16% this year. He said soon Hyderabad would become the IT capital of India. He said that the Telangana Government was providing all facilities to the IT sector in the State. He said both TDP and Congress have failed to develop the city during their tenure and therefore, TRS must be given a chance to rule the GHMC.









News Posted: 27 January, 2016








Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:



Iran's naval forces have staged a "massive" drill, dubbed "Velayat 94", near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, Tasnim news agency reported.



Iran's Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari launched the drills.



According to the report, Iranian navy deployed its marines, missiles and torpedoes in the drills area.



On 26 Jan. Sayyari was quoted as saying that the range of the drills will cover some three million km square area in free waters, and will be held in an area within the Strait of Hormuz and the northern part of the Indian Ocean.



The drill is aimed at demonstrating the capabilities and power of the Iran Navy in terms of safeguarding security, Sayyari said.



He said that the northern part of the Indian Ocean has great importance for Iran due to transit of goods through the area.



In recent years, Iran's navy has been increasing its presence in international waters to protect maritime routes and provide security for merchant vessels and tankers.



In line with international efforts to combat piracy, the Iranian navy has also been conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 to safeguard the vessels involved in maritime trade, especially the ships and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran.
Center keen to showcase scheme of AP

Hyderabad, Jan 27 (INN): Recognizing the best performance of Andhra Pradesh in the implementation of energy efficiency schemes in the in the areas of Domestic Efficient Lighting Programme (DELP- LED programme), LED street Lighting Scheme in municipal and urban areas, the Govt of India is keen to ensure the same rate of success for the implementation of Energy Efficient Agricultural pumpset scheme and showcase the same to other parts of the country for achieving the desired goals of energy savings.



Accordingly Union Minister for Power Piyush Goyal has assured Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu for providing around Rs. 5000 Crs of investment in the energy efficient pumpset scheme which will be a boon for agricultural consumers as well as state economy, said I.Y.R. Krishna Rao, Chief Secretary and Chairman SECM.



While addressing the General Body and Executive Committee Meeting of SECM, participated by Ajay Jain, Secretary/ Energy, I&I, CRDA, K.Vijayanand, CMD/APTRANSCO & MD, APGENCO, H.Y. Dora, and R. Mutyala Raju CMD's of DISCOMs, Sandhya Rani, Commissioner, School education , Senior Executives from Industry, Panchayat Raj, IT E&C, and other senior officers, the Chief Secretary has suggested the official machinery to strive further hard to reach the objective of the Chief Minister to make Andhra Pradesh as the most EE state in the country which ultimately paves the way for saving of around 20 to 30% of Energy on an average in the fields of Agriculture, Industry MA&UD, Panchayati Raj, Domestic sector etc., and helps immensely for economic development of the state. The Chief Secretary specifically suggested that all the Departments to mandatorily procure 5-star rated appliances in all future procurements.



The Chief Secretary congratulated Secretary, Energy, I&I, CRDA and Vice Chairman, SECM and his team for bagging all five national awards from Union Govt. for effective co-ordination and implementation of Energy Efficient Activities. Chief Secretary has also hailed in the services Chairman and Members of Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulations Commission for their proactive approach towards renewable and Energy Efficiency activities and issuing timely orders, which ultimately benefitted the electricity consumers even at national level by getting 7W LED bulbs just for Rs.72/- compared to the initial tender price of Rs. 340/- as against the market value of Rs. 600/-.



The Energy Efficient Street Lighting Program implemented in GVMC (Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation) which has resulted in savings of Rs.458 Lakhs & 75.58 Lakhs energy units in just 9 months, has received International acclaim and attracted the attention of International Energy Agency (IEA), European Union. These achievements were possible due to the unstinted support of the Hon'ble CM for the noble cause of EE&EC which benefits the state, stake holders and posterity, said CS.



During the meeting, Ajay Jain briefed the Chief Secretary about the Pilot project of Energy Efficient Fans program, a first-of-its kind of National program, to be launched in Narsapuram by the Chief Minister very soon. Under this scheme, 5 star rated Fans will be distributed to the consumers and the amount of Fans will be recovered from the consumer's bills upfront or over a period of 24 months. Domestic Consumers would be offered 2 No. of Fans, Five for Commercial & Ten for Institutional Sectors. During the tenders called for the program the final price of 5 star rated fan is realized at Rs. 955/- as against the market price of Rs.1500/- each.



On behalf of the Executive Committee and General Body of SECM, the Chief Secretary has thanked Union Ministry of Power, for their excellent support towards the implementation of Energy Efficient Activities in Andhra Pradesh.



The Chief Secretary released a poster on the LED Street Lighting Program being implementing in Visakhapatnam.









News Posted: 27 January, 2016








Congress advises Majid Hussin to retire from GHMC polls

Hyderabad, January 27: The Congress party workers on Wednesday foiled an attempt by some MIM goons to disrupt their rally in Mehdipatnam ward on Wednesday.



Led by Leader of Opposition in Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir, hundreds of Congress leaders and activists undertook a massive rally in Mehdipatnam ward. While the rally was passing through the lane opposite Gautam Model School between Murad Nagar and Mehdipatnam, some MIM activists allegedly infiltrated into the rally and started raising slogans. They tried to intimidate Congress workers and assault them. The Congress workers too shouted counter-slogans and drove the MIM workers. Shabbir Ali advised them to observe restrain.



Despite this interruption, the rally continued its march. The Congress leaders alleged that MIM candidate and ex-Mayor Mohammed Majid Hussain himself tried to lead a group of miscreants to disrupt the rally. Meanwhile, heavy police forces reached the spot and foiled a possible clash.



Addressing the rally, Shabbir Ali warned the MIM leaders from resorting to old ways of terrorising the opponents. "This is Congress party and we don't get intimidated by such anti-social elements. The days of using goondas to win elections have gone as entire youth community is now supporting the Congress party. It is highly shameful that despite serving as Mayor for three years, Majid Hussain did not leave the old politics of threat and intimidation," he said.



Shabbir Ali advised Majid Hussain to either clarify his stand on allegations of having three children or retire from GHMC elections. Waving a set of birth certificates, Shabbir Ali said there is a clear proof of Majid Hussain having three daughters and if not now, the Congress party would prove this in a court of law immediately after elections and he will be disqualified. By disowning his own daughter, Majid Hussain has tried to defame Islam and entire Muslim community. "By submitting a fake certificate, Majid Hussain has not only violated law, but also shown disrespect to the Shariah of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). This is unpardonable. By resorting to this shameful act, he has proved that he is neither a good citizen nor a true Muslim," he said.



Mehdipatnam ward Congress candidate Mohammed Khaliq (Irfan), senior leaders Jabir Patel, Ateeq Siddique, Vinod Kumar, Md Afzaluddin, GHCC Minorities Department Chairman Shaik Abdullah Sohail, Syed Nizamuddin and other senior leaders were also present.



Shabbir Ali also held road shows and padayatra in Red Hills and Ahmed Nagar wards on Wednesday.









News Posted: 27 January, 2016








AP Ministers campaign for TDP-BJP candidates

Hyderabad, Jan 27 (INN): Ministers of Andhra Pradesh Government on Wednesday participated in the GHMC election campaign in favour of TDP-BJP combine candidates.



Minister Ch. Ayyanna Patrudu participated in campaign in Subhash Nagar ward in favour of TDP candidates. Addressing different meetings, he criticised Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and accused him of halting developmental activities in Hyderabad while focussing on personal growth of his family members. He said that the city was developed during the TDP regime. He asked people to choose between the development of Hyderabad or the growth of KCR family while casting their vote in GHMC elections.



Another minister R. Kishore Babu, while addressing a separate meeting, claimed that the IT sector was given a boost when the then Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu invited the then US President Bill Clinton and Microsoft chief Bill Gates to Hyderabad. He said it was Naidu who took Hyderabad to the global level.



The TDP ministers said that the development brought during TDP regime was quite visible to everyone. They appealed to the people to vote in favour of TDP-BJP combine candidates to restore city's lost glory.









News Posted: 27 January, 2016








KCR did not visit UoH to please BJP: Bhatti

Hyderabad, Jan 27 (INN): TPCC Working President Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka on Wednesday alleged that Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao did not visit the University of Hyderabad to meet family members of Rohit Vemula, the Dalit research scholar who committed suicide, only to please the BJP Government at the Centre.



Speaking at Meet The Press programme organised by Hyderabad Union of Working Journalist here, Bhatti said Rohit's suicide has shocked the entire nation and several national leaders visited Hyderabad from different parts of the country. However, KCR did not even meet Rohit's family members nor visited the UoH. This act clearly shows that KCR wanted to please the BJP-led Central Government, he alleged.



Bhatti also ridiculed TRS stand on Seemandhra people living in Hyderabad. He said that the TRS leaders used offensive and intimidating language against the settlers in the past. However, in view of GHMC elections, they changed their stand and are now claiming that everyone living in Hyderabad was a Hyderabadi. He said Panchayat Raj Minister K. Tarakarama Rao has been claiming to win 100 seats as the TRS has gained expertise in the art of buying out opposition candidates.



Bhatti said that the TRS Government did nothing for the development of Hyderabad during the last 18 months while the previous Congress regimes have developed the city by spending thousands of crores.









News Posted: 27 January, 2016








Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Umid Niayesh- Trend:

Iran's Tourism, Handicrafts and cultural heritage organization signed cooperation document with French Louvre museum.

The Iranian vice president, Masoud Soltanifar, who heads the organization signed the Memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Paris Jan. 27, ISNA news agency reported.

The document covers cooperation in various fields including archeology and local arts.

Soltanifar is in Paris at the invitation of the Jean-Luc Martinez, the museum's head.

Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation also arrived in Paris on 27 Jan. on the third leg of his four-day European tour.

Rouhani who is the first Iranian president who pays an official visit to the EU over the past 10 years, earlier visited Italy and Vatican.

During the Italy visit, Tehran and Rome signed a number of contracts worth at $18.4 billion covering various sectors including health and transportation.

Rouhani is expected to discuss the securing of a number of significant trade deals with French officials and companies including aircraft manufacturer Airbus.

It was earlier announced that the Iranian president would discuss purchasing 100 aircraft from Airbus during his visit to France.
I spent weeks looking for the best eats in New Orleans and here are the results! If youre interested in what to do other than eat in New Orleans, be sure to check out my post on what to see and do in New Orleans.

Our trip to New Orleans started off a little rough. After 9 hours in the car with me, Mr. Texanerin finally caught my cold. The next day, he felt totally run over, I still felt terrible and even more importantly, I still couldnt taste anything. I had lost my taste 5 days previously as soon as I arrived in Dallas. So we napped most of our first full day in New Orleans but thats okay since that left us well prepared to go out and eat everything in sight the following days! And my taste returned after our day of napping, which Im incredibly thankful for. :)

We rarely go out for breakfast but I had read so much about The Ruby Slipper Cafe (TripAdvisor) that there was no way I could pass it up  especially with it being located right across from our hotel! At 9:30, the wait for a table was about 1 1/2 hours so we tried the next morning at 8:15 am. There wasnt any wait at that time but shortly thereafter, there was. So get there early!

Bananas Foster Pain Perdu at The Ruby Slipper Cafe

I had been dreaming about this Bananas Foster Pain Perdu since I saw it on their menu. Does anyone else plan exactly what theyre getting during trip planning? Pain perdu is French for lost bread and is made with old French bread thatd otherwise be thrown away. Im not usually a huge lover of French toast but Bananas Foster French toast was something I had to try. And it was the best French toast Ive ever had!

Mr. Texanerin isnt much for sweet breakfasts so he got their signature dish  eggs cochon, which is slow-cooked, apple-braised pork served on a buttermilk biscuit and topped with two poached eggs and with hollandaise.

Eggs Cochon at The Ruby Slipper Cafe

When it comes to beignets, it seems like there are two big players  Cafe du Monde and Cafe Beignet. We checked out the lines a few times at Cafe du Monde and they were moving pretty slowly, despite all the reviews Id read saying that they do just the opposite. Theres one line where you wait to be seated and another line for the take-out window, which seemed to be even longer and slower than the other line. I just couldnt imagine waiting all that time when there was so much other stuff to do so we skipped Cafe du Monde and went to Cafe Beignet. I loved how there were only about 4 people in line! And I liked how dense and doughy they were.

But Mr. Texanerin really wanted me to try the beignets from Cafe du Monde, just so I could write about them for this post. ;) So after coming back from watching The Treme Brass Band one night, we stopped by Cafe du Monde as the lines were pretty much down to nothing. We were really tired so we went straight to the take-out line and by the time we got back to the hotel 15 or 20 minutes later, the beignets seemed to be not very fresh. So either they need to be eaten almost immediately, or you should avoid the take-out line late at night (its open 24 hours). I so wish we would have gotten a table and had them fresh! By the way, theyre only $3 for an order of three. Crazy!

Cafe Beignet

For dinner, we went to Olde Nawlins Cookery (TripAdvisor). I unfortunately dont have any pictures because the lighting on the balcony at 7pm just didnt do the food justice. Mr. Texanerin got the Taste of New Orleans, which gave him an awesome introduction to three New Orleans specialties (gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and red beans and rice with smoked sausage). He liked all three dishes, but the red beans were really outstanding! I got the Chicken Fettuccini Alfredo, which inspired my healthier Cajun chicken pasta, and bread pudding for dessert, both of which were simply amazing. I actually had bread pudding every day of our trip in New Orleans and theirs was my favorite!

After all the sweets the day before, I was in the mood for something savory for breakfast. Problem is that I dont really like much savory breakfast food. Bacon is pretty much it. I found the solution to my problem at Jimmy Js Cafe, who I found on Trip Advisor when looking for a highly reviewed breakfast place close to the hotel. They offer several unique and fun dishes and I went with the Monte Cristo French Toast. It was SO good. And ridiculously filling. By the way, they pour syrup over the French Toast so tell them if you dont want it. We walked by on Sunday morning and there was a long line out the door so it seems like another breakfast place you need to get up early for! At 8:15, we got one of the last available tables.

Monte Cristo French Toast at Jimmy Js Cafe

Mr. Texanerin didnt get anything here because he wanted to get a muffuletta, a type of sandwich made on sesame-topped Italian bread with salami, Mortadella, ham, mozzarella, provolone and chunky olive salad. It originated at the Sicilian family-owned Central Grocery (TripAdvisor), which is where he got his from. We got there around 8:50 and were second in line (they open at 9:00) and the place quickly filled up. After we picked up his sandwich, we walked a few minutes down the street to get some pralines and other sweets.

Muffuletta at Central Grocery

I did a lot of research prior to going to New Orleans on where to get the best pralines and Lorettas Authentic Pralines, in my opinion, is the place to go! I did try some samples from other places but I didnt think they were anywhere near as good as Lorettas.

Praline Beignets at Lorettas Authentic Pralines

I got there around 9:30 and, although they open at 9:00, they were still setting up and didnt have much ready to be sold. I ordered the praline beignets but the fryer had to be turned on and the beignets made. It was 10:15 before they were ready so if you want to give them a try, I suggest not showing up very early. But Im happy I waited. The praline beignets were absolutely amazing! They seemed to be made out of puff pastry, had a lovely praline cream filling and were so much lighter than the other beignets we had tried. My only issue is that they were $7. $7!

They have all kinds of pralines (including peanut butter!) but the only type they had available at the time were the original kind. Loved them! I just wish I could have tried the others. They have other treats, too, and the sweet potato cookies were my favorite. Soft, chewy and full of spice! Loaded with energy we were headed to the WWII Museum.

Praline at Lorettas Authentic Pralines

After the WWII Museum, we walked two blocks over to Peche Seafood Grill (TripAdvisor), a two-time James Beard Award winner. Even around 3:30, it was pretty busy so make sure to get a reservation.

One of us ordered fish sticks, Brabant potatoes, fried bread with sea salt and salted peanut pie for dessert. The other one ordered white beans and bacon and smothered catfish. Can you guess which order was mine? :D

The potatoes were my favorite part of the meal. They were out of this world good.

Brabant Potatoes at Peche Seafood Grill

And these fish sticks? Nothing like the fish sticks of your youth! They have a light beer-batter breading which is so unlike any other Ive had. The tartar sauce, which had a nice spicy spin, complimented the fish sticks perfectly.

Fish Sticks with LA31 Batter at Peche Seafood Grill

After seeing fried bread on the menu, it was a no-brainer that Id be getting an order of that. They look similar to hush puppies and have a crisp exterior thats lightly coated in honey and rolled in sea salt. The inside is doughy deliciousness!

Fried bread with sea salt at Peche Seafood Grill

They have a nice beer and wine menu of which Mr. Texanerin enjoyed two local beers. He recommends the Gnarly Barley Korova Milk Porter on tap. Whod say no to sweet coffee and chocolate flavor and a silky smooth finish? ;)

White beans + bacon at Peche Seafood Grill

He also enjoyed the white beans and bacon but what he really loved was the smothered catfish. It was perfectly cooked, a little spicy and all-around outstanding!

Smothered Catfish at Peche Seafood Grill

For dessert, I had to get this salted peanut pie. Just look at it! I only shared one bite with Mr. Texanerin and it was worth every last calorie. The perfect finishing touch to an amazing meal! I cant wait to try recreating it in a slightly healthier way.

Salted Peanut Pie at Peche Seafood Grill

Not only was the food exceptional, but the atmosphere was great and the staff friendly and attentive. I know that well be back on our next trip! The Brabant potatoes alone are enough of a reason for another visit. Thanks to Peche for hosting us!

I have another 20+ places I really wanted to try but didnt make it to. Here are some of the places at the top of my list for next time!

Creole Creamery (TripAdvisor)  Ice cream place with loads of unique flavors. Reviewers recommended the 6 mini scoop sampler!

Angelo Brocato Ice Cream (TripAdvisor)  My parents used to go here in the 70s and it still has great reviews! Go for the cannolis and praline gelato.

Domilises Po-boys and Bar (TripAdvisor) or Parasols (TripAdvisor) for po boys. Note that neither of these are fancy places!

The Company Burger (TripAdvisor)  Theres so much amazing food unique to New Orleans that you should probably be eating instead but these burgers are supposedly the best in the city.

High Hat Cafe (TripAdvisor)  People recommended all kinds of dishes at this neighborhood cafe but in my notes, I wrote down pie and grilled glazed doughnuts. Healthy me. :D

Maple Street Patisserie (TripAdvisor)  French style pastries!

District: Donuts. Sliders. Brew (TripAdvisor)  Im not too interested in sliders or beer but I read a number of people saying they had the best donuts theyd ever eaten here!

Do you have anything I need to add to that list? Id love to hear what you think is a must-try in New Orleans!
Ford Motor Company announced it will cease selling its Ford and Lincoln brands in the Japanese and Indonesian markets.

The move is expected to take place in the second half of the year and will lead to a few hundred job cuts.

A spokesperson for Ford confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the automaker has 52 dealerships and 292 employees in Japan and 44 dealerships and 35 employees in Indonesia.

The cited reason was a lack of a reasonable path to profitability.

As drastic as pulling out of the market sounds, the move makes a lot of sense considering the sales numbers involved. In all of 2015, Ford and Lincoln managed just 5,000 sales in Japan.

6,000 sales Indonesia

In Indonesia, where only the Ford brand is offered, the automaker managed a little over 6,000 sales for the year.

That gave Ford market shares of 0.1 and 0.6 percent in the respective markets.American makes have never sold in huge numbers in Japan and as Ford sees it conditions will only worsen.

Demand for cars is expected to continue to fall as the population ages and more and more young people avoid buying a car. In Indonesia the reasons are different. There, Ford faces a tough challenge against brands with local production due to punitive taxes for imported vehicles.

This year, Ford will also cease car and engine production in Australia. However, the automaker isnt exiting the Aussie market completely.

The overall retail sales of Ford Motor Company for the ASEAN region rose 3.3 percent to a record 103,975 units in last year from a year earlier.

Fords record ASEAN sales were driven by record full-year performances in the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as full-year market share gains in Thailand amidst a challenging domestic industry that saw sales decline for the third consecutive year

the carmaker said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27



Trend:



The Georgian Education and Science Ministry has decided to suspend the educational process at 384 public schools due to flu virus, as well as the deteriorating weather, the Georgian media reported with reference to the ministry Jan. 27, Sputnik Georgia news agency reported.



The lessons will be held on Saturdays instead of the skipped days, the ministry said.



The quarantine was introduced at 180 schools in Georgia, including a few dozen schools in Tbilisi. In Georgia, the Health Ministry recommends to postpone the school activity if the percentage of pupils missing lessons due to illness is higher than 20.



By this time, the virus is being observed among 332 people per 100,000 inhabitants of the country, the Georgian National Center for Disease Control and Public Health said. The epidemic threshold for Georgia is 500 cases per 100,000 people.



Georgia's remaining 204 schools have been closed due to adverse weather conditions in four districts of the country, namely, Kakheti, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Adjara and Guria.



Bad weather has been causing problems in Georgia since January 19. The restrictions are periodically imposed for the traffic on the central highways and internal roads due to ice-crusted ground and poor visibility.
Five members of Egypt's security forces were killed when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off remotely in the violence-plagued Sinai Peninsula, Press TV reported.

A security source said the blast occurred on a road in the area of al-Maidan west of the city of el-Arish in North Sinai, the Arabic-language Egyptian news website, al-Youm al-Sabea, said.

The report quoted a medical source as saying that a dozen soldiers also sustained injuries.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest attack, however, Velayat Sinai, previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, has claimed responsibility for most of similar assaults. The group pledged allegiance to the Takfiri Daesh terrorists in November 2014.

On January 21, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said unidentified assailants had opened fire on a security checkpoint in el-Arish, killing at least eight police officers.

On January 14, Egypt's armed forces killed at least 30 militants and foiled an attack targeting a security checkpoint in Sinai.

Over the past few years, militants have used the Sinai Peninsula as a safe haven to carry out deadly attacks mainly targeting Egyptian army and police forces.

The Egyptian army has long been engaged in military operations against the militants in the volatile region, which has been under a state of emergency since October 2014.
Oil's slump shouldn't scare off renewable investors or give a false sense of security about the future of fossil fuels, according to one of the world's biggest money managers.

Governments, investors and businesses alike are committing to a decline in oil and coal use as worries about climate change rise, and that means long-term opportunities for other energy sources, Frederic Samama of Amundi SA, the Paris based company that manages $US1 trillion ($1.42 trillion) in assets, said in an interview Wednesday in New York.

Oil's slide won't stall renewable energy's rise, a conference at the UN hears. Credit:Bloomberg

The political turmoil and concerns about Chinese growth that have hammered oil prices this year are the "usual business" of market volatility, Samama said on the sidelines of an investor summit on climate risk at United Nations headquarters.

"What is really totally different is that investors understand the message about the need to manage climate risks" to companies, he said. "If you don't manage those risks correctly, then you will be screwed up."
Australian of the Year finalist and transgender military officer Catherine McGregor has swiftly apologised after branding the appointment of her former boss David Morrison to the position as a "weak and conventional choice".

After the former chief of army was named Australian of the Year, Group Captain McGregor told the prominent gay and lesbian magazine the Star Observer that the National Australia Day Council board did "not have the courage to go with an LGBTI person".

"I thought it was time  It was a weak and conventional choice," she said.
After going to intense language classes, Ms Muminovic, 45, learnt to speak fluent English, and has created a new life in Melbourne, pursuing a career and buying a home.

"I couldn't speak a word of English; I was assessed as speaking zero English," she says. "Language was my biggest problem because it makes you feel lost when you can't explain yourself."

She had fled the Bosnian war, which claimed almost 40,000 lives, and was grateful to be in a safe country. But she had to start from scratch, including learning the language.

When Amira Muminovic arrived in Australia in 1996 with her husband and four-year-old daughter, she could not speak a word of English.

Ms Muminovic is one of thousands of people who have come to Australia through its humanitarian visa program. While much attention is focused on the long and often frightening journey many people go through to reach safety - and the social and economic benefits migrants have brought to Australia - little is known about how they adapt to not only a new country, but also a new lifestyle.

A study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, called Building a New Life in Australia, surveyed the lives of about 2400 people who came to Australia on humanitarian visas after fleeing their home countries because of trauma or persecution.

Among the positive outcomes are that new migrants report improvements in their health and 70 per cent are working or studying, mostly learning English. Up to 90 per cent of those surveyed said they had so far had a "very good" or "good" experience living in Australia.

However, migrants also reported many hurdles to securing housing, with 75 per cent finding it "hard" or "very hard" to rent a property, because of cost, language problems and a lack of local references.

Of those surveyed, 89 per cent had experienced at least one traumatic event in their home country, such as war, religious or political persecution, violence, kidnapping, natural disaster and extreme living conditions. Many spent time in refugee camps before arriving in Australia.
Marshalltown, Iowa: US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has withdrawn from a debate with party rivals this week out of anger at host Fox News insisting on keeping anchor Megyn Kelly for the last encounter before the primaries get officially started this weekend.

Complaining that "the Republicans go on forever and ever and ever with debates", Mr Trump justified his snub with "it's time that somebody plays grown up".

Mr Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told reporters after a combative news conference held by the candidate that Mr Trump would definitely not be participating in the debate scheduled for Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, and co-hosted by Google.

During the news conference before he addressed a large crowd in Marshalltown, Mr Trump expressed irritation that Fox News planned to leave in place as a moderator the anchor Megyn Kelly, whose questioning of Mr Trump at a debate last August angered him. At the time, he suggested Kelly was tough on him because she had her period.
Police say Canberra's courteous crowds gave them another reason to celebrate on Australia Day.

No charges were laid and no major incidents were reported as thousands of people took part in festivities across the city on Tuesday.

ACT Policing says Canberrans were well behaved on Australia Day. Credit:Rohan Thomson

ACT Policing said one man was caught with cannabis and another man was arrested for breaching the peace during the major celebrations on Tuesday night.

"Overall, Canberrans enjoyed their Australia Day celebrations responsibly. The crowds at events were mostly well behaved and Canberra coped well with a few necessary road closures," Australia Day Operations Commander, Acting Superintendent Rod Anderson said.
Georgina Gilbert is one of 18 Canberrans who beat tough competition to become some of the Australian Defence Force Academy's newest recruits.

The group was welcomed as Australian Army and Air Force officer cadets at an appointment ceremony on Wednesday.

Georgina Gilbert with military recruitment officer Captain Aaron Kogler. Credit:Jamila Toderas

While the young trainees will follow a range of pathways, Georgina is determined to pursue her passion for military policing.

"When I got accepted into joining the army it was in front of four army officers and they were quite surprised with my reaction, because my face and body language just changed from nervous to really relieved," she said.
The ACT government is developing a village plan for Tharwa to guide future development of Canberra's oldest settlement.

Minister for Planning Mick Gentleman, who announced the plan on Thursday, said the final document would align with the ACT Planning Strategy, which promoted Canberra as the "bush capital".

Minister for Planning Mick Gentleman said the final document would align with the ACT Planning Strategy, which promoted Canberra as the "bush capital". Credit:Rohan Thomson

Mr Gentleman said the village's historical significance required the development of a plan, which would involve community consultation.

"Tharwa poses some planning challenges in terms of supply of utilities and its positioning as a rural village," he said.
Ottawa should resume dialogue with Moscow despite differences between the two countries, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion told reporters., according to Sputnik.



"Canada was speaking to the Russians even at the tough times of the Cold War, and now we are not speaking, almost not, because of the former policy of the former government," Dion said on Tuesday. It's certainly not the way to stop to speak with them when the Americans speak with them, and all the Europeans, the Japanese, everybody except Canada."



Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier on Tuesday that the ascension to power of a new Canadian government, headed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, increases the chances for a thaw in Moscow-Ottawa relations.



Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was notorious for his heated anti-Russia rhetoric, and has exacerbated the downward movement of relations between the countries since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine. Supported by a vocal Ukrainian diaspora in the country, Harper has assisted Ukraine with financial and material aid.



Canada, alongside the United States and the European Union, supported economic sanctions against Russia over the Ukrainian crisis. In response to the Western restrictive measures, Moscow announced in August 2014 a one-year food embargo on products originating in states that imposed the anti-Russia sanctions, a move later extended for an additional year.



"In which way it's helping Ukraine? In which way it's helping our interests in the Arctic?" Dion asserted.

The foreign minister added that Canada's policy should be effectively built in a way that Russia understands that Ottawa is "there to work with Russia" and that it "stands for Ukraine."



Many experts have repeatedly expressed hope that Trudeau will not follow Harper's adamant anti-Russia policy line and will normalize relations with Moscow.




Two of the most senior executive posts at ANZ Banking Group remain vacant, with chief executive Shayne Elliott expecting to appoint a new chief financial officer, and a newly-created group executive for digital banking, in the coming months.

Mr Elliott, who is in his fourth week at the helm of ANZ, admitted on Wednesday that allegations about cultural deficiencies in the bank's global markets division, first reported by The Australian Financial Review, had required his attention in recent weeks. "Would it be nice to have every person named and all [the senior management positions] clear? Of course it would be," he said in an interview. "But I need to trade off perfection with our desire to get on with it."

ANZ is looking to appoint a new head of digital banking in the coming months. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

ANZ said it is looking internally and externally for a new CFO, the position Mr Elliott held from 2012 until his appointment as Mike Smith's successor on January 1. The bank's search is "well advanced and is expected to be finalised in the coming months," it said on Wednesday.

The absence of a new CFO might delay ANZ providing detail about its strategy at its first quarter trading update on February 17, CLSA analyst Brian Johnson said this week.
OzTam will launch its highly-anticipated measurement system on February 7, capturing online catch-up viewing as well as linear overnight ratings for the first time.

The first official data will be available a week later, capturing week seven, the second week of the official 2016 ratings season.

The TV industry is under pressure from digital competitors such as Google and Netflix. Credit:Louie Douvis

The Video Player Measurement (VPM) Report is being sold to media buyers and advertisers as a more accurate reflection of the number of people watching television content.

OzTAM is jointly owned by the three commercial metropolitan networks Seven, Nine and Ten. It will capture viewing of their catch up services on computers, tablets, smart TVs, games consoles and mobiles as well as those of the ABC and SBS.
It has been Newcrest Mining's problem child for many years, but the Lihir mine in Papua New Guinea is finally starting to hit its straps.

The 3.1 million tonnes of ore put through the Lihir mill in the December quarter was a record amount, and ensured the asset worked faster than its official capacity.

Newcrest Mining is benefiting from a lower Australian dollar. Credit:Bloomberg

Lihir, which has been the subject of billions of dollars of impairments since being acquired in 2010, produced 26 per cent more gold than in the September quarter and has helped get Newcrest back on target after a slow start to the 2016 financial year.

Despite a major machinery failure at its flagship Cadia mine in October, Newcrest produced 1.2 million tonnes of gold during the past six months, meaning it is now working at a pace that will allow it to meet its full-year guidance of 2.4 to 2.6 million ounces of gold.
The real message to be drawn from CommSec's latest "State of the States" report is that the ACT must continue to diversify its economy if the future is to be as comfortable and prosperous as the past.

Canberra's historic dependence on the public sector for employment growth and economic activity has traditionally left the community unduly vulnerable to shifts in the political wind.

While the private sector has grown in overall size and significance in recent decades, our city state remains a jurisdiction with a lot of its eggs in just one basket.

On the face of it Canberra's performance, which has seen us jump from sixth place in January 2015 to equal third place with the Northern Territory this year, is impressive, but there are some clear causes for concern.
On January 11, a United Nations aid convoy finally reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya. Images of starvation had galvanised international attention in the week preceding the convoy's arrival. The assistance helped alleviate the immediate suffering. But in fact, emergency food aid has played a key role in facilitating the blockade on Madaya and dozens of others places in Syria.

Emergency food aid is most frequently portrayed as the benevolent response of the international community to natural disasters and "complex emergencies". Humanitarian relief efforts are depicted as benign forms of assistance that seek to improve the lot of individuals in need. However, this focus on neutrality - and the regulations, practices and actions seeking to uphold this principle - perversely enables starvation as a weapon of war.

In a recent article published in the January issue of International Affairs, the Chatham House journal, we examine this seeming paradox. Humanitarian organisations fed nearly 7 million Syrians inside the country during 2015, nearly half of the estimated population of 16.6 million. Between 2013 and 2015, we conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with humanitarian workers, local volunteers and Syrian stakeholders to investigate the role of emergency food aid in the Syrian conflict.

We found that the vast majority of food aid distributed in Syria between 2012 and 2015 has been underpinned by what we call the "frame of neutrality". While seemingly innocuous, this way of framing the distribution of food aid shapes the calculus behind who gets aid and when.
Apple's 'find my iPhone' feature allows users to track the location of a lost mobile device. "The majority of incidents happen later at night, after dinner," Lee told the BBC, noting that neither she nor Saba have an idea why the problem persists. On several occasions, Fusion reports, the problem has led to serious misunderstandings, such as an incident in which the couple briefly became suspects in a missing persons case: People living in rural and remote areas are often forced to buy Telstra's mobile services because no other companies have built networks in their region. Credit:Robert Rough In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl's phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn't let him.

On a separate occasion, Lee told the BBC, three "frantic" young men showed up outside their door looking for someone. "The minute Michael opened the door they were, 'like where is he?'" she said. So why is it happening? So far, nobody is entirely sure; but several theories have been floated by experts. To grasp the problem, it helps to rewind history to the mid-1990s, when mobile phone companies were forced to create a way to locate mobile devices so that their coordinates could be sent to police dispatchers. At the time  as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in 2013  a growing number of calls to police were occurring via mobile phone and authorities needed a way to accurately locate the callers. Nearly two decades later, a recent USA Today investigation revealed, the number of calls to dispatchers from mobile phones has increased to 70 per cent; but in many cities around the country, the technology has not always kept pace.

The ubiquity of the technology may leave the impression that location tracking is always reliable, experts say. Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert from Surrey University, told the BBC that trackers rely on GPS, which isn't available in many locations. Without GPS, he noted, phone trackers rely on a less accurate process of determining location known as "triangulation". "All triangulation does is draw a line equidistant between three cell towers and if your house is on that line you'll get visits," Woodward said. "I don't have enough data to know exactly what's going on but I wouldn't be at all surprised [if it was a triangulation error]."

In instances where triangulation doesn't work, a tracker will attempt to use the "the last known Wi-Fi signal the device found," according to the BBC. Ian Williams, a security consultant from Pentest Partners, told the BBC that the problem may arise during this crucial step in the location process. He noted that a moved or stolen Wi-Fi router may still be "registered as being in the vicinity" of the home. "I have actually seen a person's location data hop around a map where a router has been relocated due to a house move and before the databases of the router's location have had the chance to be updated," he said. A similar problem plagued a 59-year-old man named Wayne Dobson, who started receiving unwanted visitors looking for their missing phones at his Las Vegas home in 2011, according to the Review-Journal. "I'm standing there and I'm thinking, 'What are they talking about?'" he told the paper.

"They might as well have said, 'Give me my horse back'." The people pestering Dobson were all customers of US telco Sprint, the paper reported. By 2013, they were still showing up at all hours of the day. Dobson was also searched by police on one occasion and narrowly avoided several other conflicts with strangers. Eventually, he told the Review-Journal, he began to fear for his safety and his domestic life began to deteriorate. "It's very difficult to say, 'I don't have your phone,' in any other way other than, 'I don't have your phone,'" Dobson told the paper.

"It's a hell of a problem," he added. "It would be nice to be able to get a good night's sleep." Sprint eventually located the problem and apologised to Dobson, according to The Verge. Despite similar circumstances, Saba and Lee have not been so lucky. They told Fusion that their home is near three mobile phone towers, the closest of which is belongs to T-Mobile. Efforts to reach out to the company  as well as Google and Apple seeking help  yielded no assistance, Fusion reported. The publication even reached out to the Federal Communications Commission "the agency in charge of regulating wireless devices," according to Fusion  but were told the issue didn't fall under their control. The couple plans to file a complaint with the FCC and their senator.
US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump withdrew on Tuesday from a debate with party rivals this week out of anger at host Fox News (FOXA.O), leaving the last encounter before Iowa's pivotal nominating contest without the front-runner, Reuters reported.



Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told reporters after a combative news conference held by the candidate that Trump would definitely not be participating in the debate scheduled for Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, and co-hosted by Google (GOOGL.O).



During the news conference before he addressed a large crowd in Marshalltown, Iowa, Trump expressed irritation that Fox News planned to leave in place as a moderator the anchor Megyn Kelly, whose questioning of Trump at a debate last August angered him.



He also expressed displeasure at a Fox News statement on Monday night saying Trump would have to learn sooner or later that "he doesn't get to pick the journalists" and that "we're very surprised he's willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly."



"I was all set to do the debate, I came here to do the debate. When they sent out the wise-guy press release done by some PR person along with (Fox News Chairman) Roger Ailes, I said: 'Bye bye, OK'"



"Let's see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate," he added.



The debate is scheduled for just days before Iowa's caucuses, the first nominating contest for the Nov. 8 presidential election.



In the Democratic contest, news channel MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper sketched out plans to host a debate in New Hampshire among front-runner Hillary Clinton and challengers Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, a few days before the state's primary election on Feb. 9.



But the Democratic National Committee raised doubts about whether it would proceed, saying in a statement it had no plans to sanction the debate. It left open the question of whether it would punish any participants by excluding them from the remaining two sanctioned ones.



Spokesmen for Clinton, the former secretary of state who leads most polls, and O'Malley, a former Maryland governor, said their candidates would be happy to take part, at least in theory. The New York Times quoted the campaign manager for Sanders as saying the Vermont senator would sit out the unsanctioned debate.



RATINGS BONANZA



Trump's blunt-spoken candidacy has boosted ratings for the Republican presidential debates. The August debate on Fox News drew 24 million viewers, a record for a presidential primary debate and the highest non-sports telecast in cable TV history.



His boycott will leave Thursday's debate without the leader in the crowded Republican field not only in Iowa but nationally. Ahead of Iowa's caucuses next Monday, Trump leads in the polls over Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom Trump dismissed as a "nasty guy" who "nobody likes."



A boycott could prove risky for Trump as Iowa Republicans seek to take one more look at who they want as their presidential candidate. Rivals like Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson could reap the benefits.



But Trump, a billionaire businessman and former reality TV star said he would hold a competing event to raise money for US military veterans.



"How many debates do you have to do?" Trump told reporters. "The Democrats are finished with their debates. ... The Republicans go on forever and ever and ever with debates. We have people on the stand who have zero (percentage points in the poll), who have one, who have nothing. So it's time that somebody plays grown up."



Trump has been engaged in a public spat with Fox News since the network hosted the first debate and Kelly asked Trump about his treatment of woman, prompting a stream of insults from the candidate.



At the news conference on Tuesday, Trump was introduced by Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has sought tougher measures against illegal immigrants.



"Everything I believe in he's doing and he's going to do it as president," said Arpaio.



Trump, pressed on his plans to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and deport many illegal immigrants, defended his proposal and said he would be able to persuade the US Congress to go along with his plan.



At his campaign event in Marshalltown, Trump expressed confidence in his position in the race, saying if he were to win Iowa, he could "run the table" and roll up subsequent victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond.



"Iowa is very important. So you've got to get out, you've got to get out and caucus," he told his supporters.
"I kind of make it a point," says Charlie Kaufman diffidently, "not to explain why things are or what they mean." Over the years, he has pointedly not explained a lot of things: whether Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is telling us love is an illusion; who the twin brother he gives himself in Adaptation really is; whether the quiz show host in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a Russian spy or not. Right now, an intense German journalist has asked whether Anomalisa, his new film about a man who sees everyone around him as identical, is supposed to be a commentary on the state of America. Even Kaufman has to laugh at that one.

Anomalisa is co-directed by Kaufman with Duke Johnson, who makes stop-motion animation. Directors habitually worry about the so-called "uncanny valley", that effect of CGI that looks almost real but not quite not real enough. With Anomalisa, Kaufman and Johnson move into Uncanny Valley and pull up the drawbridge: it looks very odd. It also sounds odd. Everyone except the two main characters is voiced with eerie blandness by the actor Tom Noonan. Michael is voiced by David Thewlis; Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Lisa, the only person Michael perceives as different from everyone else, his "anomaly".

And now here we are with Kaufman, who doesn't want to explain anything. Actually, he doesn't need to. Everything he wants to say is in the films; you just need to join the dots. I give it a go.

So, where does it all come from? "I don't have a lot of inspiration," Kaufman sighs. "I mostly just sit there and worry that I don't have any inspiration. That is really what I do. I mostly can't write if that is what you are asking. I struggle to do it. There are no set hours  I worry, especially if I'm working on something. I worry for years, sometimes. But non-stop."
Looking for Grace is a film of surprising twists and revelations, but it's also a movie that withholds things. It is a work made up of a series of quiet discoveries  some of them involve understanding what it is we cannot know, or coming to terms with what remains mysterious about those close to us.

"It's one of the things that drives it in the first place," says writer-director Sue Brooks (Japanese Story, Road To Nhill), "the idea that you never quite [get] the full picture of people's lives." For that reason, she's opted for a slightly fractured narrative, despite the story's apparent simplicity  significance emerges out of order and unpredictability, bleakness and comedy co-exist in ways you don't expect.

Odessa Young in Looking for Grace.

Looking for Grace is the tale of Grace (Odessa Young) a teenage girl who goes missing in rural Western Australia, and of her anxious parents, Denise and Dan (Radha Mitchell and Richard Roxburgh) who go in search of her. The viewer might expect that the quest will take some time, but it is resolved sooner that you would expect; there are other puzzles that we will be faced with along the way. Yet, in the midst of anxiety and absurdity there's something restrained about the film's approach. Brooks likes movies that have the confidence to be quiet. "Film is one of those great places where we can have a moment of meditation," she says. In a contemporary world of distractions  "and I'm one of the most easily distracted people you could ever meet" she adds  "I love the fact that when you go into a cinema, you can watch a story unfold in its own way. I love the idea of just sitting there with people, with a landscape, there in the moment."

There are two main locations, one external, one interior: the expansive landscape, and the tightly wound, neat home that Denise has constructed for herself and her family. Both are closely connected to the people that the film portrays. "I wanted characters you love and feel attached to, that you would feel warm about their haplessness. But at the same time I was interested in the aloneness of life, as opposed to loneliness. And we looked for that in images, not to underline it, but to feel it, as well as telling the story.
A rare white giraffe with a genetic condition that causes many of her body surface cells to be incapable of making pigment has been photographed at a national park in Tanzania.

Ecologist Derek Lee, founder of the Wild Nature Institute, which conducts scientific research on at-risk wildlife species, took the amazing photographs in Tarangire National Park.

Researchers fear Omo the rare white giraffe may be targeted by poachers. Credit:Derek Lee/Caters News

"Omo is leucistic, meaning many of the skin cells are incapable of making a pigment. Some are, so she is pale but not pure white, with red or blue eyes, as a true albino would be," Dr Lee explained.

"Omo is the only pale giraffe we are currently aware of, but we have also observed leucistic waterbuck, Cape buffalo and ostrich in Tarangire.
"It goes against what I believe in. This is a substantial issue and, in the annals of public policy, you want to be on the record about your views." Not backing off super reforms: former cabinet minister Eric Abetz. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Senator Bernardi said he still expected Parliament would "respect the views of the Australian people" because not all parliamentarians were as passionate about the issue as he and they would be guided by the plebiscite result. Senator Abetz, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, earlier said he would reserve his judgment following the plebiscite result. "I would need to determine whether [the plebiscite] really is an accurate reflection [of the national view], whether it is all above board or whether the question is stacked, whether all sides received public funding," he told the Guardian Australia.

"But everyone knows my view is very strongly that a marriage between a man and a woman is the foundational institution for socialising the next generation. And every member of Parliament will make up his or her mind after the plebiscite is held. People will take into account the views of the electorate, the views of the nation and their own personal views. It makes you wonder why we would spend millions of dollars on a plebiscite if you're not going to respect the result. "It would be up to each member to decide whether the plebiscite accurately reflects the views of the Australian people, whether it reflects the views of their electorates and whether it is good or bad public policy in their view. "There will be people in the Parliament who could not support the outcome of a plebiscite whichever way it went." Mr Entsch, who introduced a private member's bill to legalise same-sex marriage last year, said a plebiscite would be a complex and expensive process and that politicians should respect the Australian people's verdict.

When asked about Senator Abetz's comments, Mr Entsch told Fairfax Media, "Given he was part of the decision-making process [on a plebiscite], I find it rather extraordinary. "It makes you wonder why we would spend millions of dollars on a plebiscite if you're not going to respect the result. I find it rather bizarre. "If people make a decision either way we should respect that. "It will be a very brave individual - either in the House of Representatives or the Senate - who seeks to challenge the views of the Australian people." Senator Abetz's comments come as Mr Abbott prepares to address US anti-gay marriage group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, in New York.

Mr Turnbull has defended his right to speak at the event, saying there were "fellow members of the Coalition who have different views, and they are ... entitled to express them". Mr Entsch has been working on the wording for a plebiscite question with Attorney-General George Brandis to be presented to the Coalition party room early this year. Coalition frontbencher Steve Ciobo said it would be "passing strange" for politicians to defy the will of the Australian people. "I think any politician, any member of Parliament, would have to think twice about snubbing their nose at the views of Australians," he told Sky News on Wednesday. Another conservative Liberal MP said he would expect many Coalition MPs, including himself, who oppose same-sex marriage to abstain from a vote if a plebiscite proved successful. This would respect the public's verdict while not forcing MPs to vote against their conscience, he said.

The MP, who asked not to be named, said he was concerned about the process leading up to a plebiscite. "I hope this isn't just something being cooked up by Warren Entsch and George Brandis," he said. "There needs to be broad consultation." Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said: "Eric Abetz has let the cat out of the bag, admitting the Liberals are not planning to take any notice of the expressed will of the Australian people. This absurd notion makes a complete joke of our democratic process and renders a $160 million national plebiscite totally pointless." Other opponents of same-sex marriage have previously vowed to vote according to the plebiscite. "Certainly I, as somebody who has advocated for all Australians to have a say, clearly I'll be bound by what all Australians have to say," Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells said last year.
The conservative US group that invited former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott to speak in New York says the event is not "intentionally secretive".

The Alliance Defending Freedom dinner will be held in New York later this week, but the organisation has not publicly announced the date and location.

The pro-Christian, Scottsdale, Arizona-based ADF opposes gay marriage, adoption by same-sex couples and abortion.
The sense of national relief was palpable and the bounce in the polls, gargantuan - from looming disaster to leading the race. Lickety-split.

"This will be a thoroughly liberal government," he told reporters within minutes of his party-room coup, "... committed to freedom, the individual and the market."

Malcolm Turnbull's implicit promise to the Australian people, used to justify his raid on Tony Abbott's power, was to lead a modern government; less narrow, less defensive, and determined to be truly representative.

Yet as his first calendar year begins, promise and reality are straining apart. Labor's refrain that Turnbull was merely Abbott in a better suit, had glanced off in the heady atmosphere of the time, appearing faintly desperate. "All their policies are the same," Bill Shorten had protested lamely.

Illustration: Ron Tandberg

But there was something to this. Turnbull may have replaced nope with hope, but he had expressly traded away his wish to accelerate the same-sex marriage timetable, and had surrendered his signature emissions trading ambitions, in the quest for a conservative majority.

Even within these constraints however, Turnbull somehow managed to cloak his new leadership in the rhetorical garb of optimism. It was as if his reputation as a forward leaner on global warming, marriage equality, the republic, and the internet, cut more ice with voters than the pesky details and squalid compromises necessary to secure the leadership.

As things stand, in January, 2016, support for the government remains high, and for Turnbull, stratospheric. Yet danger looms. Conservative Liberals are on the warpath, hitting back at attempts by moderates to remake their party, and reminding voters that Turnbull's internal authority, especially in the absence of his own mandate, is a matter of perspective.
Public servants at Australia's air safety agency have been told to work longer hours, in line with "community expectations", if they want more money.

Bosses at the Civil Aviation Safety Authority want their public servants at their desks for an extra 45 minutes each week in return for a 2 per cent pay rise.

CASA's chief executive says the offer is all the agency can afford right now but has assured his 830-strong workforce that their conditions and entitlements are safe.

The new proposal at CASA comes as the massive Defence Department moves closer to a vote of its 20,000 public servants on a new wage deal and the Australian Taxation Office prepare for fresh negotiations in the wake of the crushing defeat of a proposed enterprise agreement
Uni student Tom Wade was one of hundreds of thousands of Australians driven to despair by Centrelink's customer service performance.

But instead of getting mad, Mr Wade got busy, accessing the Australian Government Directory and confronting senior Department of Human Services Bureaucrats directly with his complaints.

The administrative blunder was soon sorted, Mr Wade says, and he is encouraging frustrated clients to take their grievances up Centrelink's food chain, saying departmental bosses should be held accountable for the failings at the coalface.
South Korea's President Park Geun-hye is considering a visit to Iran due to the recent lifting of international sanctions, Sputnik reported with the reference to the local media reported Wednesday.



According to the Yonhap news agency, citing Presidential spokesman Jeong Yeon-guk, the exact date of the president's visit remains unknown.



Park, if the visit takes place, would be the first South Korean president visiting Tehran.



South Korea aims to restore economic ties with Iran, which disposes of large reserves of oil and gas.



Oil import from Iran to South Korea in 2005-2008 stood at 76 million barrels per year. In 2010, it dropped to 62 million. Now, however, South Korean experts expect, the import of oil can be increased by 10 million barrels per day.



On January 16, the International Atomic Energy Agency verified Tehran's compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), opening the way for Iran's return to the global oil market. The same day, the United States and the European Union announced that they were lifting their sanctions against Iran.


Just five days after finishing his latest stint on parole, former Comanchero bikie chief Mark Buddle walked up the steps of a privately chartered plane at Essendon Airport, en route for a South Pacific getaway with long-time love, Mel Ter Wisscha.

But just before the twin engines began to kick over, Buddle asked the general manager of the aircraft's operator what should he do about the cash he had stored in his luggage.

Mark Buddle leaves Newcastle Local Court. Credit:Dan Proudman

The once-national president of the Comanchero bikie gang was told to declare it to Customs.

Whether Buddle ever revealed how much the "significant amount" was is unclear. But stuffed between the swimmers, towels and bags sat $60,120 in cash.
The head of the NSW Federation of Housing Associations, Wendy Hayhurst, described the mood after the meetings as "underwhelmed."

But after meetings with the minister and officials on Wednesday morning, the sector's response was notably more downbeat.

Several leading community housing providers responded positively to the government's announcement at the weekend of a "new era of social housing"  which promised $22 billion in construction activity  before they had had the chance to examine the package in detail.

The gloss is starting to come off the state government's social housing package, unveiled with some fanfare by NSW Community Services and Social Housing Minister Brad Hazzard on Sunday.

Although the government had promised 23,500 new and replacement social and affordable dwellings over the next decade, only 9000 of these would be additional stock.

This was well short of the "massive additional need" that was present in Sydney, Ms Hayhurst said, with an official statewide public housing waiting list of nearly 60,000.

She said missing were planning controls requiring a percentage of any major development to include "significant social and affordable housing targets." These should apply to development on government land but also in the private sector where there had been "upzoning", that is developers getting permission to construct more units on sites where they had originally anticipated lower density approval.

"Definitely in areas that Urban Growth (the state government's development arm) is managing  such as Central, Eveleigh, and the inner west Bays Precinct  there is plenty of scope there for very substantial social and affordable housing ... the problem is that they are announcing these major urban developments now, and we are worried that they will miss the boat , that developers will not want to go back and put affordable housing in at a later date."

She said the government should have put the planning policy in place before making its announcement on public housing.
The RSL has condemned protesters opposed to the removal of century-old Moreton Bay fig trees along Sydney's Anzac Parade for using in their campaign a poem to the fallen in World War I.

Despite mounting opposition, the Baird government is standing firm in its decision to allow trees, said to have been planted along the avenue in 1917 in honour of Australian diggers, to be felled for a $2.1 billion light rail line to the city's eastern suburbs.

Contractors began cutting down eight trees on Anzac Parade near the new Albert (Tibby) Cotter Walkway on Wednesday and a further nine on Wansey Road near Randwick Racecourse.

The tram line will link Circular Quay to the eastern suburbs via Anzac Parade, and includes stops near Moore Park and the racecourse.
A Queensland father accused of giving a powerful painkiller to his two-month-old baby didn't tell hospital staff what the child had ingested, a court has heard.

The 22-year-old, who can't be named for legal reasons, was granted bail in Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday but under strict conditions.

Court heard the man didn't inform hospital staff about the drug he's accused of giving the baby at their Carrara home. Credit:Gabriele Charotte

They include a ban on contact with his daughter unless supervised by child safety authorities.

Wednesday's hearing was told the man didn't inform hospital staff about the drug he's accused of giving the baby at their Carrara home earlier this month.
A homeless man accused of starting a bushfire on Melbourne's outskirts with a discarded cigarette butt has been granted bail despite police concerns his lifestyle was a risk to the community.

Glen Boland, 34, is accused of starting a fire that burnt through paddocks either side of the Hume Freeway on December 19 last year.

Glen Boland is accused of starting a fire that burnt through paddocks either side of the Hume Freeway late last year. Credit:Chris Hopkins

The fire forced the evacuation of homes and businesses and the closure of roads in the area.

The blaze also caused $23,000 damage to a clay target shooting club, Melbourne Magistrates Court heard on Wednesday.
It is hardly the sort of scenery to make the Sunday motorist's heart flutter. But for drivers who want to fill the night sky with smoke, the industrial estates on Melbourne's north-west fringe are the ideal spot to meet like-minded revheads.

Usually the biggest casualties are the rear tyres (one driver known to frequent the meets boasted online this week that he had gone through 25 sets during a recent legal burnout event).

A pic of a revhead meeting, believed to have been taken last year at an industrial estate in Melbourne's north-west.

But on Wednesday, only minutes after the drivers of about 100 cars were turfed from the industrial area at Lara Way in Campbellfield, two people who had been at the meet careened off a bridge and died in the fiery wreck of a Holden Commodore ute.
English backpacker Kristina Rennell had only just begun her overseas adventure when she found her way to Mildura last year.

The 21-year-old had travelled through south-east Asia with her best friend before flying to Australia and seeking work, like many backpackers before her, fruit picking in rural Victoria.

Kristina Rennell, 21, died in mysterious circumstances in a Mildura hostel last year.

But, on June 19, barely six months after leaving her home in the outskirts of London, this trip of a lifetime turned horribly wrong.

Ms Rennell was found unconscious by another backpacker in a Mildura hostel, collapsed between two couches. She was unable to be revived by paramedics called to the scene and she later died in hospital.
A baby boom of boys in a bayside suburb has caused a severe imbalance in the classroom.

Hampton Primary School has created a boys-only prep class to accommodate an influx of males who will start school on Friday. Almost two-thirds of the school's preps are boys.

The members of Prep D, an all-boys class at Hampton Primary School. Credit:Joe Armao

Principal Sue Knight joked that there must be something in the water in Hampton.

"I've never seen anything like this before," she said.
Two young people who died in a fiery crash after careering off a bridge were members of Melbourne's illegal racing scene, and had been warned by their loved ones not to speed.

Harley Churchill and Ivana Clonaridis were travelling in Mr Churchill's ute at speeds of up to 160 km/h when the blue Holden Commodore left the EJ Whitten Bridge on the Western Ring Road at Keilor East and flew 100 metres through the air before exploding on the ground below.

It is unclear who was driving the ute, but police believe the driver had been racing the driver of a silver Ford before the accident, which occurred about 1.30am on Wednesday.
A young man found not guilty of murdering a homeless man must spend another three months in prison because there are no beds available in a psychiatric hospital.

Former Melbourne Grammar student Easton Woodhead was in November last year found not guilty of murdering Wayne "Mouse" Perry, 42, although he stabbed him to death on January 5, 2014 at Enterprize Park, near the Melbourne Aquarium.

A Supreme Court jury accepted Mr Woodhead, 21, did not know what he was doing when he stabbed Mr Perry with a large knife in the belief the homeless man had stolen his motorbike. Mr Woodhead lived in a Flinders Street apartment at the time.

Mr Woodhead was found not guilty by way of mental impairment.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 27

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey must lay down their weapons, TRT Haber news channel quoted Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman at Turkish presidential administration, as saying Jan. 27.

Kalin further said the PKK doesn't represent the Kurds in Turkey.

He said the PKK is simply a terrorist organization, which is no different from the terrorist group "Islamic State" (aka IS, ISIS or ISIL).

Over 200 Turkish servicemen were killed in clashes with the PKK in 2015.

The PKK has in recent months become active in the south-east of Turkey, and its attacks on military units and police stations have increased.

The conflict between Turkey and the PKK, which demands the creation of an independent Kurdish state, has continued for over 25 years and has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist group by the UN and the European Union.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Police have initially ruled out any connection between two shootings in neighbouring suburbs in Melbourne's north on Thursday morning.

The first shooting took place about 12.30am at Dallas Drive in Dallas, where police were called after reports of gunfire.

Police don't believe there is a connection between two shootings in Melbourne's west.

A man in his 20s subsequently showed up at a nearby hospital with a suspected gunshot wound to his leg.

Police were later called to Johnstone Street in Jacana about 1.45am, where they found another man in his 20s who had been shot in his pelvis.
As bushfires began to take hold of several areas of Tasmania on Wednesday, Emergency Management Victoria made the decision to assist in the firefighting effort by lending personnel and extra vehicles.

A Toll shipping vessel bound for Tasmania departed on Wednesday afternoon with 12 fire tankers and nine support vehicles. An additional eight vehicles left on board the Spirit of Tasmania that evening.

Country Fire Authority Victoria trucks to help fight the 40 fires in Tasmania are loaded onto the Victorian Reliance. Credit:Joe Armao

The 500-transport-unit vessel usually transports retail products and manufactured goods to and from the island, but made room for the extra vehicles to assist the Tasmania Fire Service in the extreme circumstances.

National sales and marketing manager for Toll, Paul Giotas, said the company had "no hesitation whatsoever" in providing the support.
Police have linked a man found dead in Perth with the rape of at least three women in New Zealand in 2007.

Details of the breakthrough were revealed by Detective Inspector Chris Page during a press conference in Hamilton on Wednesday.

A police image compiled from descriptions of a serial rapist operating in Hamilton in 2007.

The offender left New Zealand in 2008 at the age of 28, Page said. He had been working as a bouncer at a Hamilton bar. He was identified through DNA lodged through Interpol in 2015, which was matched to the body found in Perth.

It is only the DNA evidence that relates the man to the investigation into the 2007 serial rapist case, which Hamilton police dubbed Operation Phil. Page said that in May 2013, the same man was arrested in Australia for a non-sexual minor offence. It was at that point DNA was taken.



The man died in non-suspicious circumstances in July 2013 - weeks after his DNA was taken - and police would not be releasing his name. However, they did say the Operation Phil file would be closed.
Fremantle Labor MP Simone McGurk has poked fun at Premier Colin Barnett after he gave an Australian Day award to a group that has campaigned against his government's controversial Perth Freight Link.

The Rethink the Link group was formed to battle the Barnett government's plans to build the Perth Freight link which will run from Perth Airport to Fremantle Ports.

Rethink the Link protesters at one of their many rallies against Roe 8. Credit:ReThink The Link

The group has also been outspoken about Roe 8 - an important part of the freight link - which will see a five-kilometre extension of the highway from Kwinana Freeway in Jandakot to Stock Road in Coolbellup.



But on Tuesday, the group was given the Premier's Australian Day Active Citizen Award for a community group or event. Rethink the Link was nominated by the City of Fremantle, who is vehemently opposed to both Roe 8 and the freight link.

Ms McGurk couldn't hide her amusement about the group being given a gong.
Perth's Esplanade train and bus complex has reopened following the suspected murder of a man early on Wednesday.

A brawl took place between two large groups of people at the complex about 3.30am, WA Police spokeswoman Susan Usher said.

A 26-year-old man was critically injured and later died at Royal Perth Hospital.

Reports suggest the man was stabbed but police have not confirmed this. St John Ambulance said the patient was found unconscious with no pulse, with wounds to his left shoulder and the left side of his head.
Rio de Janeiro: Brazil's government has decided to deploy 220,000 troops for a day next month to spread awareness about the Zika virus, which has been linked to severe birth defects in thousands of infants.

The move came as Brazil's top health official acknowledged that the country was "badly losing the battle" against mosquito-borne diseases like Zika.

Marcelo Castro, the country's health minister, disclosed the troop mobilisation in an interview with the newspaper O Globo and said he expected it to occur on February 13. A spokeswoman for the Health Ministry later clarified that the troop deployment was expected to last only a day, largely involving personnel from different branches of the armed forces going door to door handing out pamphlets.
Beijing: China has resisted calls from US Secretary of State John Kerry for tougher trade sanctions against North Korea, but agreed to pursue a new United Nations Security Council resolution to rein in the hermit state's nuclear activities.

Emerging after a four-hour meeting in Beijing they both described as "constructive" and "candid", Mr Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi nonetheless presented sharply contrasting positions on how to respond to North Korea's latest nuclear bomb test, as well as rising tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

"All nations have a responsibility to deal with this threat': US Secretary of State John Kerry. Credit:AP

Describing North Korea's nuclear weapons programme as an "overt threat, a declared threat to the world", Mr Kerry had hoped to sway Beijing into supporting new punitive measures reportedly including bans on Chinese oil exports, North Korean mineral imports, and flights between the two nations.

"All nations, particularly those who seek a global leadership role, or have a global leadership role, have a responsibility to deal with this threat," Mr Kerry said.
An Australian father whose wife and three children were killed in a horrific crash in India has died in hospital two weeks after the tragic accident.

Rupen Datta initially survived the crash on the Yamuna Expressway that killed his wife Anamika, their three children - daughters Neetika and Pipasa, aged 12 and 15, and son Tirvijai, 20 - and Anamika's sister Sonia, 25, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 10 January.

Rupen Datta died in hospital two weeks after the horrific crash that killed his wife, three children and sister-in-law in India. Credit:Facebook

But friends and family have been plunged into mourning again after Mr Datta, restaurant owner from Adelaide, died in hospital in the Indian capital Delhi on Monday morning.

"My friend Rupen Dutta passed away this morning in Delhi," a friend of the family told Fairfax Media.
Range Rover and Abercrombie & Kent Launch Luxurious Road Trip on Earth







 Unrivalled trip-of-a-lifetime takes in five continents, eight countries and nine of the worlds best hotels



 Customers experience truly off-the-beaten-track driving experiences from behind the wheel of the most luxurious Range Rover ever produced



 Prices start from 100,000pp, available through select boutiques in the UK, Abu Dhabi and Monaco

MORE INFO Land Rover Research and Buyer's Guide Guide

WHITLEY, England - January 26, 2016: Land Rover and renowned luxury travel partner Abercrombie & Kent have teamed up to launch ?the most luxurious road trip on Earth  a once-in-a-lifetime trip taking in multiple continents from behind the wheel of the Range Rover SVAutobiography  the most luxurious model in the companys history.

The itinerary, developed as a joint venture between the two brands, offers customers 21 days of unparalleled luxury combined with the greatest driving routes the world has to offer, both on-road and off-road.

The trip takes in five continents, eight countries and nine of the worlds best hotels. The locations have been handpicked to not only offer the very highest levels of luxury, but to provide guests with truly off-the-beaten-track experiences at locations only accessible thanks to the peerless capability of the Range Rover.

The one-of-a-kind Abercrombie & Kent itinerary has been developed to mark the launch of the Range Rover SVAutobiography  the ultimate variant of the British manufacturers luxury model line. Featuring unique exterior design enhancements, an exquisitely detailed interior and the most powerful engine ever offered in a Range Rover, the SVAutobiography is exclusively crafted at Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations in the UK.

Mark Cameron, Land Rover Experiential Marketing Director, at Jaguar Land Rover said: We set out to design a trip worthy of the ultimate luxury SUV and thanks to our partners at Abercrombie & Kent we have achieved just that. From Europe to Australia, this trip is all about the epitome of luxury but done so in a Land Rover way  the unexpected, the off-the-beaten-track and the once-in-a-lifetime experiences. This itinerary represents the definitive drive adventure, achieved in the definitive vehicle.

Simon Lynch, Director of Business Development, Abercrombie & Kent, adds: A&K are delighted to be partnering with Land Rover on offering this, the most ultimate of driving journeys. Our love of adventure, combined with exploration and luxury for over 50 years, gave us the inspiration for this expedition, which is packed full of unforgettable experiences. Our pioneering customers will explore landscapes, see wildlife and meet communities well and truly off the beaten track.

Starting at 100,000 per person based on two travellers, this matchless road trip is fully customisable according to guests preferences and is being offered through Abercrombie & Kents bespoke boutiques located in Harrods London; City of London; Abu Dhabi and Monaco, as well as via online enquiries  Enquiry

The A&K SVAutobiography road trip itinerary

Starting in Europe, guests take in the twisting mountain roads of Monaco, the coastal highway to Portofino and the breathtaking vistas of the Italian lakes, all from the leather-lined luxury of their personal SVAutobiography.

Accommodation for the first leg includes Four Seasons Cap Ferrat, the Villa DEste overlooking Lake Como and the San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge in the stunningly beautiful and remote Dolomites region of the Alps. Lunch is taken at world-renowned eateries including Joel Robuchon at the Metropole and unique, bespoke activities include a personalised fragrance making class in the lavender scented hills of Provence and a glacier picnic - by chartered helicopter - in the peaks of the Alps.

The second leg of the trip sees guests fly to Marrakech for a three-night stay at the unsurpassed Royal Mansour. Drives in the region take in the arid desert around Ouarzazate, the perfect territory for guests to develop their off road skills in the SVAutobiography, and a route up into the Atlas Mountains ending with a lunch at Richard Bransons exquisite hotel, Kasbah Tamadot.

The unique climate of the Arizona desert is the destination for the third part of the trip, as guests fly in to experience the one-of-a-kind Amangiri resort in Utah. Amangiri  meaning peaceful mountain  is located across 600 acres, tucked into a protected valley with sweeping views towards the Grand Staircase  Escalante National Monument. The resort is built around a central swimming pool and blends the dramatic surrounds with deep canyons and towering plateaus to create a raw and captivating landscape. Activities for this leg include a hiking and scrambling excursion into Antelope Canyon, a private dinner under the stars at a local Sandstone Butte and breakfast in Zion National Park.

The fourth leg sees guests take an overnight flight to Chile to experience the Atacama Desert  the driest non-polar desert in the world. Staying at Awasi  one of the most luxurious and remote lodges in South America  guests are assigned a personal concierge who designs a wholly bespoke experience customised to their interests. The driving excursions in the area are some of the most epic on earth and include a day drive to the Alamo Observatory, a 1bn telescope that can see the ?beginning of time.

An overnight flight to Sydney marks the final part of the trip. A nights stay at the Park Hyatt gives guests the opportunity to relax after they have experienced both a VIP bridge climb and behind-the-scenes access to the landmark Opera House. A short hop to Tasmania the following day provides the opportunity for a stunning drive through the vast, rugged wilderness, taking in coastal heathland and forest, giving drivers the chance to put the SVAutobiography through its paces. Guests stay at Saffire Freycinet, where they experience a breakfast like no other  standing knee deep in an estuary enjoying fresh oysters and local sparkling wine.

Full itinerary:

Day 1  Nice to Monaco

Lunch at Joel Robuchon at the Metropole, Monaco

Overnight at Four Seasons Cap Ferrat

Day 2  Hills of Provence

Personalised fragrance making class

Lunch at Chateau St Martin

Overnight at Four Seasons Cap Ferrat

Day 3  Coastal drive to Portofino

3 hour drive to Portofino along the coastal highway

Overnight at Hotel Splendido, Portofino

Day 4  Cinque Terre

Drive along the coast to the Cinque Terre

Lunch on the Italian Riviera

Overnight at Hotel Splendido, Portofino

Day 5  Lake Como cruise

3 hour drive to Lake Como

Take a private sunset cruise over the lake to Bellagio

Overnight at Villa DEste

Day 6  Dolomite Mountains

5 hour drive through the Italian lakes into the Dolomite mountains

Overnight at San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge

Day 7  Helicopter picnic

Fly up by Helicopter for a discreet picnic on a glacier

Snow shoeing and crevasse rappelling

Overnight at San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge

Day 8  Fly to Marrakech

Transfer to Venice

Flight to Marrakech

Overnight at Royal Mansour

Day 9  Ouarzazate Desert drive

Day drive into the arid desert around Ouarzazate

Lunch in a private desert camp

Overnight at Royal Mansour

Day 10  Atlas Mountains

Day drive into the Atlas Mountains through Berber villages

Lunch at Richard Bransons hotel Kasbah Tamadot.

Overnight at Royal Mansour

Day 11  Transfer to US

Flight to Las Vegas

Helicopter to Amangiri  Range Rover on standby for drive to hotel

Overnight at Amangiri

Day 12  Monument Valley drive

Drive 2.5 hours to Monument Valley

Antelope Canyon  Hiking and Scrambling excursion

Overnight at Amangiri

Day 13  Grand Canyon by helicopter

Helicopter to North rim of the Grand Canyon

Private dinner under the stars at a local Sandstone Butte

Overnight at Amangiri

Day 14  Utah desert drive

Drive 4.5 hours though the Arizona/Utah desert

Breakfast in Zion National Park

Overnight Flight from Las Vegas

Day 15  Atacama, Chile

Arrival day in the Atacama Desert

Overnight at Awasi

Day 16  Alamo Observatory

Day drive to the Alamo Observatory

Private Lunch

Overnight at Awasi

Day 17  Atacama desert drive

Day Drive into the Atacama Desert.

Overnight at Awasi

Day 18  Transfer to Australia

Overnight flight to Sydney

Day 19  Sydney Bridge climb

VIP Sydney Bridge climb experience and behind the scenes at Sydney Opera House

Overnight at Park Hyatt Sydney

Day 20  Transfer to Tasmania

Fly to Tasmania

Drive 2 and a half hours through Tasmania on stunning roads

Overnight at Saffire

Day 21  Boat trip to Wineglass Bay

Quad bike through the coastal heathland and forest

Boat trip to Wineglass Bay

Overnight at Saffire

Day 22  Return to London

Land Rover Adventure Travel by Abercrombie & Kent offers a variety of incredible driving excursions throughout the year. For more information on further trips please see Land Rover Adventure
In 2015, exports in rail transportation, machine tools, rail industries, and aviation technology grew by 15 to 30 percent. (Photo : Getty Images)

China is expected to export more higher-value-added products this year, as announced by the Ministry of Commerce on Monday, Jan. 25. The exports include products from the aviation, telecommunications technology and transportation sectors, China Daily reported.



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The move is part of China's export policy to transform the country from a low-grade consumer-goods manufacturer into one that specializes in higher-value-added products, all while maintaining a stable domestic economic growth.



In 2015, exports in rail transportation, machine tools, rail industries, and aviation technology grew by 15 to 30 percent.



China's power equipment and telecommunications sectors also expanded their operations in 140 countries and regions. This includes highly developed markets like the United States and the European Union.



The proportion of the country's high-end product exports increased to 43.7 percent in 2014 from a measly 9.4 percent in 2000, according to the Asian Development Bank.



"The country's fast-growing 4G telecom networks and the Made in China 2025 strategy will further lead to improvements in productivity and resource efficiency this year," said Zhi Luxun, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Commerce's department of foreign trade.



"The potential benefits are even greater if they are extended to every stage of the value chain, from suppliers and manufacturers through to customers," Zhi added.



China's labor-intensive industries have been embroiled in a number of issues due to the country's rapid ongoing urbanization process, according to Shi Ziming, deputy director-general of the ministry's department of outward investment and economic cooperation.



These problems include high staff turnover, particularly in the communication, computer and consumer electronics product sectors.



Experts hope that shifting to focus to high-end industrial research and development will help solve such dilemmas, and help deliver strong technical breakthroughs in high-tech sectors.



The Belt and Road initiative, which was proposed by China in 2013, is also expected to boost the country's exports of high-speed rail technology and related products, particularly in the Southeast Asian market. The trade and infrastructure network, which includes the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and the Silk Road Economic Belt, will pass through over 60 countries and regions.



China has already started construction on Indonesia's first high-speed railroad project, and expects other Southeast Asian nations to follow suit.


Foreign tourists and businesspeople from 51 countries can stay in the region for six days or 144 hours, given they will pass through Shanghai or the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. (Photo : Getty Images)

Foreigners without visa can now stay in the Yangtze River Delta region for six days, according to a report by China Daily. The new rule is a product of China's first cross-region visa-free transit policy, which will be implemented starting Jan. 30, the Ministry of Public Security announced on Tuesday, Jan. 26.



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Foreign tourists and businesspeople from 51 countries can stay in the region for six days or 144 hours, given they will pass through Shanghai or the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.



Furthermore, passengers must be able to show valid international travel documents as well as booked tickets to qualify.



A similar policy in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing has already taken effect since 2013. However, this 72-hour visa-free policy is only valid for passengers entering one of the aforementioned cities via an airport. China's new policy expands this rule to include other points of entry such as railway stations and ports.



"This measure aims to transform the city into a regional leader with global influence, which will attract more foreigners to stop in those places and understand local cultures better," said Lu Hanlong, a professor from Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Sociology.



Aside from the addition of the new cross-region visa-free transit policy, travelers without visa can easily transfer to their actual destination thanks to high-speed trains. Nowadays, it only takes travelers around an hour to get to Shanghai or Hangzhou from Nanjing.



Foreign travelers are excited about the new policy, which will make traveling in China much easier and less of a hassle.



"I am excited to hear about the extended visa-free transit policy," said Jennifer Hammond, an American public relations officer, in an interview with China Daily.



"It was quite convenient when I tried the 72-hour one previously, entering Shanghai before heading to Chengdu in Sichuan Province. I would like to try it later when I travel to China again," Hammond said.



Hammond also believes the new policy will entice more foreigners to travel to China.



"It will definitely attract more foreign people who take business trips to China to apply this method to spend a few more days traveling around as a bonus," she said.


"New era" for PwC as regional partner appointed

PARTNER at PwC, Ian Plunkett, is set to succeed Richard Bunter as senior partner in Hull, marking a new era for the firm.

Mr Bunter will retire on 30 June 2016 after 30 years at the firm. He became a partner in 1996 after a spell in Geneva and has built up PwCs Humberside operations since 2010.

Mr Plunkett has been an assurance partner for 11 years. He recently returned to the area from Abu Dhabi where he led PwCs assurance team.

Before that, he spent six years in London working with international clients.

Mr Plunkett is also a non-executive director of Leeds-based not-for-profit Mirrabrook Development Trust.

Outgoing office senior partner Richard Bunter, said: It has been a privilege to have such a long-standing career at PwC, during which time I have worked and engaged with some extremely talented people who have shaped both me and my career.

Ian is respected by his clients, colleagues and peers so I am confident that his international experience will help to build upon the offices successes and grow the practice.

Ian Plunkett, said: Im excited to be given this opportunity. Our Humberside office has grown through the downturn and we have continued to invest in the market with a number of senior hires and record number of graduates recruited this year.

It is also an exciting time for Humberside, with Hull being named City of Culture for 2017, the 15m investment in the Fruitmarket and Dry Dock to create a digital centre, as well as the development of the Enterprise Zone, are all putting the region on the map nationally and globally.

Read next: Entrepreneur launches Wellington Place gym
Chinese nationals, who were jailed for illegal logging, walk out of Myitkyina prison after being released during an amnesty in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, north of Myanmar, July 30, 2015. (Photo : Reuters)

China has given special amnesty to 31,527 prisoners by the close of 2015 under the country's first prisoner amnesty since 1975.



Among the prisoners who received special amnesty are 50 who took part in China's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) and the civil war against the Kuomintang army (1945-490).



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In addition, 1,428 people, who participated in wars to protect the national sovereignty, security, and boarder integrity after the formation of the People's Republic of China before they committed crimes, were also pardoned, according to Xinhua.



The special amnesty also covered 122 prisoners aged 75 years and above, besides those who are unable to take care of themselves because of physical disabilities.



Another group of 29,927 were pardoned because the policy also applies to those who were under the age of 18 when they committed the crimes, and who received a maximum sentence of three years, or juveniles whose remaining prison term was less than a year.



However, the amnesty could not apply to those convicted of serious crimes, including bribery or embezzlement, rape, terror cases, criminal syndicates, and other violent offenses.



The National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee issued the amnesty in Aug. 2015 as part of the celebrations for the 70th anniversary after the end of the Second World War, according to the Global Times.



According to the director of the NPC Standing Committee's legislative affairs commission, Li Shishi, the four categories of prisoners who received special amnesty pose "no threat to society."



Xinhua reported that more than 2.35 million convicts got their files and identities checked by over 2,500 members of the investigation team from national-level prisons prior to granting the amnesty. Quoting parents of some juveniles who received amnesty, Xinhua said that the move mirrors the country's care about the youth, and can help save broken families by giving them hope.



Meanwhile, a constitutional law professor at Wuhan University, Qin Qianhong, told the Global Times that the act shows the government's trust in its governance and legal system.



Similarly, Wang Ping, a criminal law professor from China University of Political Science and law, pointed out that the move is in line with the rule of law and will serve in promoting the authority of the Constitution.


Actor-director-producer Nate Parker made history by inking a landmark $17.5 million Sundance deal to sell his slavery drama The Birth of A Nation to Fox Searchlight, starting his 2017 Oscar campaign a full year early. The vibrant and lyrical portrait of the divisive African American hero is an incendiary inquiry into themes of racism and faith that still echo today.

A perfect storm of elements converged to make Parkers pre-Civil War slavery biopic the most electrifying debut of this year. It began, of course, with the provocative true story of Turner, a slave and preacher turned rebel leader whose violent uprising left 60 white slave-owning men, women, and children slaughtered and has long occupied a morally ambiguous place in American history books.

Then, from Nat to Nate: Parkers own seven-year quest to bring Turners story to the screenboldly co-opting its title from D.W. Griffithss 1915 film, one of American cinemas most famously racist classicssaw him quit acting for a year to finally make it happen after being discouraged time and again. In the end it took a village, as evidenced by end credits naming four production companies, over a dozen exec producers, and special thanks to folks like George Lucas and, curiously enough, Mel Gibson.

And third, the fortuitous confluence of timing that aligned The Birth of a Nations world premiere with peak industry fury over racial homogeny at next months Academy Awards. This years Oscars will be so white, but 2017 now already has its first Best Picture contender of color since 12 Years A Slavenot coincidentally, also about the ugly stain slavery left on Americas past.

As journalists scrambled to ask every marginally famous celebrity about the lack of black Oscar nominees this year in the snowy white-blanketed and predominantly white ski resort town of Park City, Utah, The Birth of a Nation felt all the more urgent and relevant. If it doesnt get nominated next year, I heard a (Caucasian) man joke, cluelessly reaching for the zeitgeist while waiting for a shuttle at Sundance, there could be an uprising!

Some might dismiss the films hot buzz as merely a byproduct of the diversity crisis in Hollywoodparticularly serendipitous timing for a movie directed, co-written, produced by, and starring an African-American filmmaker, about the most despicable era for racial injustice in our countrys history. But its not so much the series of documented events depicted in The Birth of a Nation that earn it its resonance, as it is the stirring, soulful, and incendiary spirit that courses through its veins, anchored by an utterly extraordinary performance by Parker himself.

The real Turner was a slave and homegrown Baptist preacher famed for spreading the gospel in sermons to other slaves. He reported having religious visions and took a solar anomaly in the skies in August of 1831 as a sign from God to commence his bloody insurrection.

In the film, Turners faith is twofold. His visions, depicted beautifully in dreamlike scenes, feature African ancestors who tell him hes a prophet, a chosen one destined to lead his people to freedom. In his waking life, the word of the Christian God is his guide, and his opiatebut as Turners eyes are opened to an increasingly brutal string of atrocities committed with impunity by whites against black slaves, his interpretation of the good word shifts seismically.

Parker, who co-scripted with Jean McGianni Celestin, directs his own career-best performance as the principled but morally conflicted Turner, whose spiritual reawakening is a lifetime in the making.

When his intelligence is noticed at an early age by the matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller), young Nat is taught to readbut is allowed only to read the Bible. Black folks simply wouldnt understand other books, she explains to the boy, who learns early on not to betray the outrage roiling through his veins every time hes subjected to sheer dehumanizing ugliness.

Even in Elizabeths gesture of kindness theres an undercurrent of deep-seated bigotry, a dangerous dichotomy amplified more in her son, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer). Once a childhood playmate of Nats, Sam is given to protecting Turner from the abuses of other cruel white men, and buys a woman named Cherry (Aja Naomi King) for Turner when Turner falls for her across the auction block. But when the cash-strapped Sam agrees to rent out his prized slave preacher to other, harsher plantation owners in their agrarian Southampton County, Virginia, the two bear witness to increasingly dire abuses, including one horrific dental torture of a slave that drives Sam to drink, and Nat to revolution.

Though prone to stagey compositions that can play as distractingly ham-fisted, Parker deftly weaves in flashes of lyrical, haunting symbolism that break up the historical reenactments: A soaring camera glides over a cotton field; crimson blood gushes out of a wounded ear of corn; a butterfly alights delicately on the shirt of a young black boy as the camera pulls back to reveal hes been lynched, his body swinging from a tree.

His full-bodied and sensitive portrayal of Turner is the films revelation. Deeply empathetic and increasingly conflicted by his own role as a pawn to stamp out dissension among slave quarters, Turners gradual awakening explodes after he engages in a fiery Scripture-quoting battle with a white preacher (Mark Boone Jr.). Delivering a blistering, tear-filled guest sermon under the watchful eye of a sadistic slave owner, Turners doublespeak is plainat least, to those listening onscreen and in the audience.

Whats most important is that Parker is playing with larger themes of faith and moral justice, and as the film makes its way into release in 2016, an election year, we should consider what the legacy of a man driven to righteous violence should be. That may be why Parker spends considerably more run time exploring the psyche of the pre-radicalized Turner than he does on the famous uprising and its aftermath at Harpers Ferry. Those scenes explode in purposeful violence, incited by Turners nighttime hatcheting of his own master, and continuing as his growing mob of slaves make their way across the south to the armory where, they believe, theyll be able to restock.

Parker is generous with his supporting cast, too, who are all uniformly good in roles that boast difficult and humanizing dualities. Hammer in particular undergoes a tricky transformation as economic pressures and a creeping conscience turn Sam into just another brutal slave owner. Jackie Earle Haley is perfectly odious as a slave catcher who has it out for Turner, and King is wonderfully open as the purehearted Cherry, whose inner strength emerges unexpectedly in one of the films toughest-to-watch moments.

By the time Turner and his rebels face off for the last time, armed with axes and blades, against an army of musket-bearing militiamen, its pretty much a foregone conclusion what happens next. But Parker for some reason glosses over the lost two months in which Turner was a fugitive at large, and reinvents the way in which he was ultimately captured and punished by death, mythologizing the man to the end.
Evangelical Christians, at the moment, are totally enamored with a candidate who has profited off strip clubs, cheated on his wife, and appeared on the cover of the nations pre-eminent porn magazine.

And to top it off, Jerry Falwell Jr.the heir of the Moral Majority mantlejust endorsed him.

Theres plenty of explanations for conservative Christians Trump-lovin ways, and recent polling shows hes these voters favorite (a new NBC poll shows him with the most support of white Evangelical Republican voters, 37 percent).

But this trend has many Evangelical leaders irate, perplexed, and hankering for some below-the-belt attacks on Trump. The time for policy analysis is over, they saynow its about to get Biblical, Falwell be damned.

Minutes after The Washington Post broke news of the Liberty University presidents endorsement, Russell Moore, a powerful Southern Baptist leader, subtweeted Falwell with a link to the Southern Baptist Conventions 1998 Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials.

[W]e urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character, the statement reads.

Some Evangelical leaders hope Trumps moral character will get a little more attention in the coming days. When it comes to the mogul, theres a ton of material to work withand attacks like these have worked before. Allegations of sexual harassment tanked Herman Cains insurgent-style campaign, and a scurrilous (and untrue) whisper campaign about an affair likely played a role in John McCains loss to George W. Bush in 2000. The fact that Ronald Reagan got divorced even once gave many conservative primary voters pause when he first telegraphed his presidential ambitions. And to this day, most Republican presidential contenders act like caucus-goers are voting for the winner of a Bible verse memorization contest.

So far, Trumps top foes have largely steered clear of attacking him based on his sexcapades and scandals. Even while he and Rubio lob birther-esque attacks at Ted Cruz for being born in Canada, Trump has evaded any hard-hitting criticism for his multiple marriages, casino ownership, and appearance on the cover of Playboy magazine.

A series of tweets from Sen. Ben Sasse, a freshman Republican from Nebraska, may suggest that the days of giving Trump a pass over his New York-values personal life are over.

You brag abt many affairs w/ married women, the senator tweeted on Jan. 24, addressing Trump. Have you repented? To harmed children & spouses? Do you think it matters?

In The Art of the Comeback, Trump boasted about bedding other mens wives.

If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller, he wrote.

Republican voters have forgiven a host of candidates for marital lapses. The process of sin, forgiveness, and redemption is an integral part of conservative Christian faith. Remember George W. Bushs D.U.I.? Neither do Evangelical Christiansbecause he repented in a way they found authentic and sincere. But Trump has given zero indication that hes sorry about his homewrecking ways. In fact, quite the contrary. The fact that at every stump speech, Trump boasts about a book wherein he boasts about sleeping with married women iswell, its the kind of thing that history suggests would give Iowa Republicans pause.

But, for whatever reason, Trumps critics and questionersSasse exemptedhave largely given him a pass on this. And many social conservatives are over it.

The fact that Trump-branded casinos have strip clubs is particularly troubling to some, including Penny Nance, who heads Concerned Women for America.

I think respect for women is very important, and the idea that he profited from strippers and from exploiting women we find very disturbing, she said.

In August of 2013, the struggling Trump Taj Mahal casino became the first casino in Atlantic City, N.J., to have an in-house strip club. Trump no longer operates that casino himself, but 2014 bankruptcy filings reported by The Wall Street Journal showed he held a 5 percent stake in the stock of the company that manages it, Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc.

The seedy underworld of strip joints and sex trafficking and prostitution are often connected, and the idea that Donald profited from the exploitation of women directly is very discouraging to me, said Nance. Its a serious issue. Im not kidding.

And Jeff Kubler, who heads the Oregon chapter of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said Trumps appearance on the March 1990 cover of Playboynext to a model wearing only his tuxedo jacketshould cause him problems with Evangelical Christian voters.

Obviously he wasnt exhibiting, Kubler said. He was just on there as a businessmanhe must have done an interview or somethingbut that he did such a thingits something I wouldnt have done.

There are a number of candidates who have really strong Christian testimonies, and I dont think Donald Trump really has one, he added.

There may be a reason Evangelicals arent up in arms about his appearance on the cover of a magazine famous for nude pics.

I would hope that many of them wouldnt know a thing like that, except secondhand, said Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring USA.

Why wouldnt it come up in a debate, come up as a news item, and let him be called to task for it with 20 million people watching, Hanna continued, of Trumps infidelities. It gets at the very matter of character, of sin, of forgiveness. A mature conservative Evangelical Christian should not hold confessed sin against someone, but unconfessed sin should be a problema theological problem. And unadmitted sin is sort of a step beyond unconfessed sin, isnt it?

Trump has even indicated that he thinks the fact that he cheated on his first wife, Ivanka, is fair game for his opponents. But so far, none have bitten. And that has some social conservativesincluding John Stemberger, who heads the Florida Family Policy Councilirked.

The great Bible says many many times, Do not be deceived, over and over again, Old and New Testament, Stemberger said. And hes deceiving us.
A moon shot to cure cancer might seem an impossible dream even for a generation shaped by JFKs vision. Yet that is the metaphor that Vice President Biden is embracing as he puts the pieces in place to carry out the mission given him by the president for their final year in office.

There couldnt be a more welcome assignment for Biden, the father who lost his 46-year-old son to brain cancer last year, and for Biden the public servant, who lamented when he withdrew from the presidential race that he had hoped to be the president who cured cancer.

In the run-up to that decision, Bidens friend and longtime aide, former Senator Ted Kaufman, asked him this core question: What is it you would want to do as president? One of the issues that came up was cancer. Kaufman told The Daily Beast that when Beau Biden was first diagnosed in 2013, the vice president reacted like any parent was obsessed with trying to help his son through this. He talked to dozens of people, anybody who could help and over that period he accumulated a lot of knowledge about the present state of play around cancer in this country.

Biden says a cancer moon shot is much bigger than his son, but where Beaus illness was the driving force, it was all that time spent with doctors, their assurances of hope, their confidence that better treatments were on the horizon, that influenced Biden. In constant meetings with doctors, he saw the much bigger scope of what could be done, Kaufman says. He really felt if Beau lives another six months, even that, he felt things could be bettermonths not years.

This holding out of hope, perhaps false hope, is familiar to anyone who has navigated the world of cancer. The late Steve Jobs talked of making it to the next lily pad in his effort to outdistance the disease. My late husband fought metastatic kidney cancer for almost five years before it spread to his brain and killed him. The clinical trials he took part in showed promise based on animal testing, and he marveled at the many mice out there who were cured; humans, not so much.

Tom died almost 11 years ago, and he was on the cutting edge then of immunotherapy. He called it shake and bake because the drugs that marshaled his immune system to fight the cancer caused flu-like symptoms with bone-racking chills and then fevers as high as 105 degrees. He often said the treatment felt worse than the disease.

A lot of progress has been made in this area even in the last five years, and Biden says hes looking for quantum leaps. He believes were on the precipice of real breakthroughs in immunotherapy and genomics that will take cancer treatment far beyond the blunt instruments of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

At Davos last week, Biden met with cancer experts from around the world and said, Our goal is to make a decades worth of advances in five years instead of 10 and eventually end cancer as we know it. Were not looking for incremental changes. Im looking for quantum leaps. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who credits Biden with working with Congress to increase the NIH budget to the highest its been in a decade, called the vice president delightfully unplugged as he made his cancer moon shot center stage at the Davos gathering of global leaders.

In the weeks since President Obama tapped him to lead this new cancer initiative, Biden has met with all the major cancer groups, some two dozen, and 200 individuals that Kaufman describes as a whos who in cancer. A formal Presidential Memorandum with Kennedy-era moon shot language will establish a task force of federal agencies and departments from the NIH to the Pentagon, and once that is complete, Biden will convene a meeting at the White House to establish an agenda for the year ahead and the measurables, says press secretary Meghan Dubyak.

At a roundtable at the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center, Biden said he doesnt want anyone to think hes naive in setting such a sweeping goal as curing cancer. He knows it cant be done overnight, but he insists that tremendous leaps can be made by marshaling the resources of the federal government and leveraging whats already happening in the private sector. I for one wouldnt bet against him. Cancer research has never had a cheerleader as high-profile and as committed as Biden. It wasnt that long ago that HIV-AIDS was a death sentence. Can the same great leap forward occur for cancer? A lot of smart people are saying it could.

For something like this, the politics are irrelevant. Everyone wishes Biden well. There are no hidden agendas. What hes doing is primarily to honor his son, but also to do something truly important, to make sure the next Beau doesnt have to die prematurely, says Jonah Blank, who worked for Biden on his Senate staff and is now with the Rand Corporation. Will it happen in the next year? Probably not. The next five or 10? Maybe, as a longshot. But Biden might well have another 20 years of civic contributions, and wouldnt that be a great legacy?

As a society, we pay more attention to former presidents than former vice presidents, but that wont deter Biden. I plan on doing this the rest of my life, he enthused when talking to cancer researchers at the University of Pennsylvanias Cancer Center. And when the breakthrough happens, the headline will write itself: Big f---ing deal.


Print this page Classic Dominica Calypso event set to honor five By The TDN Wire Staff

January 26, 2016 10:13 P.M





Dominica's famous women of calypso will grace the stage. Roseau, Dominica (TDN) Dominicans at home and abroad will be treated to an unprecedented event in the history of calypso on Friday February 29, 2016 when five stalwarts of the art form are inducted in the Calypso hall of Fame. The awards will take place during a classic calypso event featuring the Mighty Sparrow and Dominicas leading female calypsonians of yesteryear. Patrick Pembo Pemberton, Kelly Ras Kelly Williams, Osborne Ossie Lewis, Roosevelt Mico Williams, and Slinger The Mighty Sparrow Francisco will all be honored in this first of its kind event in the countrys history. Adding to the allure of the event will be live Per Pay View exclusive coverage to a worldwide audience through TDN TV. NET. The internet television network will team up with Marpin 2K 4 Ltd, Dominicas premier cable television company to broadcast the show live. The decision to honor the calypso stalwarts was taken by the Administrative Unit of the Dominica Calypso Kaiso Hall of Fame Trustees. Pemberton is being considered for his relentless pursuit for excellence in music, having been an outstanding musician with the Swingin Stars Orchestra, and others, providing quality accompaniment to Calypso since 1970/71. He also served as a Calypso Judge with more than thirty continuous years of service. Kelly Ras Kelly William is the longest serving Head of the Dominica Calypso Association (DCA) and is also an accomplished and experienced musician. In addition he has served for many years as a calypso writer, arranger, composer and calypsonian. Osborne Ossie Lewis: is being honored for having served as a calypso judge for over twenty-five (25) years, including being Chief Judge for an extended period of time. He is said to have had a formidable presence in calypso, from his mastery of calypso commentary, to conducting kaiso workshops and seminars, to hosting elite calypso events. .With an aggregate of 17 calypso crowns, Roosevelt Mico Williams holds the record for highest number of calypso titles in the history of Dominica calypso. He has spent several decades at the forefront of calypso in the town of Portsmouth and is credited for his unwavering commitment, discipline, dedication and incomparable contribution to the art form. For live PPV coverage please go to TDNTV.NET and to islandeventtickets.com for ticket purchase. .




President Xi Jinping is the General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee. (Photo : Reuters)

President Xi Jinping yesterday, Jan. 26, encouraged authorities to establish targeted and specific plans to deliver structural reform on the supply side.



Talking in a meeting of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, Xi said that sound planning is the basis for supply-side structural reform, which aims to increase productivity and realize people-first development, Xinhua reported.



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The president emphasized the significance of extensive research of current economic conditions and up to now, he pointed out that clear objectives were necessary. He added that reform moves should be specified and a system to designate and track responsibility established.



The government has directed its focus on supply-side structural reform, which focuses on better provision for high-quality goods and services and reduce costs for businesses, to address the issues like overcapacity, according to Shanghai Daily.



In the meeting, President Xi emphasized the importance of environmental protection while developing the Yangtze River economic belt.



In addition to the need to preserve forests, Xi said, "The Yangtze is the nation's 'River of Life.' No economic activities related to Yangtze should damage its environment. Its ecological system should only get better, not worse."



Chinese people should maintain the tradition of voluntary tree planting and this will help begin a new round of "returning the farmland to forests."



Xi encouraged cities to go an extra mile in achieving urban greening and called for more attention to be given to national parks for purposes of better protection of endangered animals.



Apart from the supply-side reform issue, Xi also focused on development projects along Yangtze River. The president told the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs that there will be no major projects along the river as a way of protecting the environment.



Premier Li Keqiang, who is also the deputy head of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, also attended the meeting.


Update, 9:38 a.m.: Bryan police received numerous tips and the female has been identified.

Bryan police are asking for the publics help in finding a person of interest in several cases of unauthorized use of a credit card.

According to Bryan police, on Dec. 28 and Dec. 29, numerous unauthorized transactions took place at seven businesses in Bryan, including the Walmart on Braircrest Drive and Target. The total amount of funds unaccounted for at the different locations is $360. Police have released surveillance video footage of a potential suspect walking out of Target on Briarcrest Drive.

Anyone who thinks they may know the identity of the person in the video is asked to contact police at 979-209-5320, or Crime Stoppers at 979-775-TIPS.
A man sentenced to death in the 2010 strangulation of a College Station woman will receive a new punishment hearing, according to a Wednesday ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that said there wasnt enough evidence to prove capital murder.

The 6-3 ruling from the states highest criminal court throws out the death sentence for Stanley Griffin, though it agrees the now 50-year-old intentionally killed Jennifer Hailey, a 29-year-old acquaintance whom he met through his girlfriend.

Griffin now will face five years to life in prison for the crime.

Haileys 9-year-old son - who awakened during the incident - was twice ordered by Griffin back to his room and eventually was stabbed by Griffin with a gardening trowel. The boy lost a significant amount of blood, but regained consciousness and called his grandmother, who called 911.

To convict someone of capital murder, the state had to prove that Griffin killed a person while also committing another felony, such as kidnapping, robbery, aggravated sexual assault, arson or burglary. Capital cases dont allow for aggravated assaults, injury to a child or attempted murder as the secondary crime.

At issue for the six appellate judges who remanded the case back to a Brazos County courtroom was whether the action taken by Griffin against the boy could be defined as a kidnapping, which is what prosecutors asserted and jurors believed.

The 10-page ruling, written by Judge Cheryl Johnson, argued that there was no proof of a kidnapping, suggesting a more likely secondary charge could have been aggravated assault, injury to a child or attempted murder relating to the boy.

Griffin attacked the boy to delay the discovery of the womans murder and the boys injuries were sustained after the murder, Johnson wrote.

In Kevin Yearys 57-page dissenting opinion, he said the law did not require Griffin to truly hold the boy to be defined as kidnapping, but rather to only have had the intent to do so. Yearly said by ordering the child to his room, Griffin was preventing him from getting help for himself or his mother.

The Brazos County District Attorneys Office declined to comment because the case is pending.

The crime scene

The boy testified during the trial that he had been asleep a few hours before getting up to get a drink of water when he saw his mother face down on the couch with Griffin on top of her, appearing to the boy like he was hugging his mother. The boy said he saw his mother slightly move her hand and could see Griffins hands around his mothers neck.

He called out to his mother and asked Griffin by name what he was doing. Griffin tried to convince the boy he wasnt Griffin and ordered him back to bed.

The boy told jurors that he left his bedroom about 10 to 15 minutes later and stood in the hallway where he could see his mom lying face up on the floor of her bedroom. He couldnt tell whether she had fainted or was hurt, so as an effort to get closer to his mother, he told Griffin he had to use the bathroom.

Griffin told the boy he wanted to chill with him, but the grade-schooler said he was going back to bed, in hopes the man would leave.

Griffin instead grabbed him from behind, choked him and repeatedly struck his jaw, back and neck with a garden trowel that he plucked from a utility room.

The boy testified that he passed out in the hallway and when he awoke he was lying on the floor in the living room under a comforter taken from his mothers bed.

Griffin was gone. It was about 5 a.m. when he called his grandmother, who then alerted 911, as well as her son. He was able to get to the apartment before emergency crews, but his sister didnt respond to CPR.

Both mother and son were rushed to the hospital where she was pronounced dead and the boy was admitted with serious injuries.

Appellate disagreement

In Johnsons ruling, he said kidnapping is defined as abducting a person by restraining or holding him in a place where hes likely not be found, or by using deadly force.

To equate the mere use of force with kidnapping is to make every assault into kidnapping, the opinion states, adding that to prove kidnapping the state must prove that he was restrained and there was an intent to keep him from getting free or by using deadly force.

Yearlys dissenting opinion disagreed.

As an adult instructing the boy in no uncertain terms to go back to his bedroom, he effectively confined him there, Yearly wrote, adding that just because the boy acquiesced doesnt mean he did so consensually. The court should not construe the definition of restraint to require that the actor himself physically move his victim from one place to another. It is enough that he cause the victim somehow to move or be moved. Otherwise, it would not be possible purposes of restraint to move a victim by intimidation or deception.

Not mentioned in Johnsons ruling was how Griffin met Hailey. The woman was a friend of Griffins girlfriend, and the girlfriends daughter occasionally babysat Haileys son.

The girlfriend moved out of the house she shared with Griffin after learning his abusive tendencies toward her extended to her son, not just her. She continued a romantic relationship with him but refused to let him return to her house, according to testimony that detailed how on Sept. 17, 2010 she went to church with him at Twin City Mission where he was living. The pair argued in the parking lot because she remained firm on not allowing him to move back in. The dispute prompted others to get involved and Griffin was barred from staying at the mission.

Two nights later he showed up at Haileys house and unleashed the violence.
Foreign family members will be able to get a two-year residency permit in Beijing. The new policy extends the current time allowed and is renewable. (Photo : Getty Images)

Chinese citizens with foreign family members will be able to breathe a sigh of relief as the Chinese government relaxes residency permits, according to a report by China Daily.



Foreign family members will be able to get a two-year residency permit in Beijing, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau announced on Tuesday, Jan. 26. The new policy extends the current time allowed and is renewable.



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Family members eligible for the two-year residency permit include spouses, parents, children, spouse's parents, siblings, spouses of the children, grandparents and grandchildren.



There is no need for foreign family members to go through the Department of Entry and Exit to annually renew their one-year residency permits.



Certain requirements, such as a marriage certificate to prove the relationship with a Chinese citizen, will also be ruled out for foreign family members who are going to renew their residency permits.



There is one catch, however. The two-year residency permit is only based on a family visa and does not affect the time for foreigners currently in Beijing under a work visa.



The new two-year residency permit is just one of a dozen measures meant to streamline procedures for foreigners living in Beijing.



Foreign applicants, who are applying for a residence permit under a work visa, also won't have to submit a copy of the business license of the company where they work.



Applicants are given approximately 30 days to renew their residency in China before the actual expiry date of their permit, said Lin Song, a police officer at the Department of Entry and Exit in Beijing.



Foreigners who are staying somewhere other than hotel are advised to register with the local police within their first 24 hours in Beijing. Their guarantor, or the person in charge of their accommodations, can also help with the registration.



Twenty-five police stations can provide assistance to Chinese nationals traveling outside the mainland. These police stations are authorized to receive applications for passports and issue other certificates needed to enter or exit the country.



The bureau is currently working with major Internet companies to publish entry-and-exit policies for wider dissemination.


BECKVILLE, Texas (AP)  Applause broke out in a fellowship hall at a church in Beckville, about 140 miles east of Dallas, where two brothers-in-arms reunited to share a long-overdue honor  France's premier award.

"We spent so many days just hanging on, but it's a privilege to pin this on one of the bravest men I ever met in my life," Arlie Ray Horn said as cellphone cameras captured him pinning the French Legion of Honor on Jack Harris.

The Legion of Honor, or Ordre national de la Legion d'honneur, is France's premier award. Established by French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to recognize service to France, the honor is that country's combined equivalent of America's Presidential Medal of Freedom for civilians and military Medal of Honor.

Foxhole buddies from Omaha Beach to the Elbe River, Horn and Harris were in the vanguard of D-Day invaders who swept across Europe and ended the Nazi menace of World War II.

Nicknamed "Spearhead and Arrowhead" by the soldiers they captured, the two Texans once stood back-to-back under fire.

"He shot everything in front of him, and I shot everything in front of me," Horn recalled.

Harris, 89, and diagnosed with severe Alzheimer's disease, smiled and nodded as his friend spoke to the group approaching 40 gathered at Pine Grove Assembly Church.

"You ever think about some of those things, Jack?" Horn, of Beaumont, asked his lifelong friend.

"Yeah  not all the time," Harris said, a smile appearing.

Harris didn't let a second tick by when Horn asked whether he were ready to go back to the fight  "Yeah," he said almost before Horn finished the question.

The U.S. Army Special Forces pair has been through so much together.

"We had over 12,000 people killed out of our outfit that (first) day," Horn said. "When they ramped up the beach, we walked right into steady gunfire. ... We fought on the front lines."

It was early in the invasion when the two sealed a bond that already was well-forged by the time they left Dover, England, with the invading force on D-Day. Early in the invasion, they found two captured Americans after searching a few days.

The men had been shot dead by the enemy.

"We said, 'Look. We're never going to surrender after what we saw,'" Horn said, describing how each pricked the skin of his index finger and touched the other's, in the traditional boyhood method of becoming "blood brothers."

"Blood was running out of my finger, and blood was running out of his finger," Horn recalled. "We decided right there we were never going to surrender."

They didn't, and seven decades later, the French government recognized Horn's accomplishment. In November 2014, Horn was awarded that country's highest award by the French consulate general while jets staged a flyover in San Antonio.

But Horn wasn't happy while his buddy was without a similar honor.

Horn's son, Jason, did the legwork securing the medal for Harris.

"He's been all over the world chasing that thing down," Harris' son, Jackie Harris, told the group. "And we appreciate it. ... They've got an over-70-year friendship, a bond that can't be broken  to love each other like brothers."

The two soldiers have remained close friends while Horn worked a 34-year career with Mobil Oil, now Exxon Mobil, and Harris served 55 years as pastor at Pine Grove Assembly.

Horn testified there really are no atheists in a foxhole.

"You got that right," he said, after confessing their ground-level conversations were not always about their favorite Bible verses. "I don't know  about women, I reckon. I didn't know he was going to be a preacher."
One of the last refuges of the mountain gorilla, Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, is under threat from plans to clear fell hundreds of hectares of rain forest for farming.

A group of more than 250 tea growers, backed by district government officials, has announced plans to clear an area of ancient rainforest called the Kafuga Pocket Forest - part of a vital buffer zone on the fringes of the national park intended to protect it from the fast-expanding human population.

The Bwindi Impenetrable Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is home to 400 critically-endangered mountain gorillas - almost half the remaining world population of 880.

At present thousands of people in the densely-populated farmland surrounding Kafuga depend on the forest, for food, medicine, timber and clean water. Kafuga, which was originally within the boundaries of the national park, is part of the same mountain forest eco-system as Bwindi.

Although it no longer has any gorillas, it supports a wide range of plants and animals including afromontane trees, chimpanzees and rare birds.

Destroying Kafuga would put Bwindi and its gorillas at risk

Conservationists are warning that although the mountain gorilla population has stabilised in recent years - it is still precariously low. If the 250-hectare Kafuga Forest is cleared, the long-term prospects for the survival of the Bwindi gorillas and hundreds of other rare wildlife species will be put in jeopardy.

Not only would its wildlife be wiped out, but local people in one of the most economically-deprived areas of East Africa would also be deprived of an important natural resource. This, in turn, would be likely to lead to a big increase in illegal incursions into the national park, degrading the gorillas' habitat and placing them at risk from increased human contact.

"Because the area around the National Park is so densely populated, there is a lot of competition for resources - so the buffer zone is vital for the protection of the gorilla habitat", says Jillian Miller, executive director of the Gorilla Organization, which works with communities living around gorilla reserves.

"When conservation works well it is the people themselves who are the buffer zone. So if people can get the resources they need within the buffer zone rather than having to reach deep into the forest, the gorillas are left alone and it is a win-win situation."

For the long-term survival of the gorillas, which live in different parts of the forest in distinct family groups, it is also important to avoid human contact because of the risk from potentially lethal infectious diseases like tuberculosis, she added.
A nuclear reactor, to be operated by China Guangdong Nuclear Power (CGN), is seen under construction in Taishan, Guangdong Province. (Photo : REUTERS)

China is planning to export indigenous technologies and expand the use of clean energy as part of the main themes of its nuclear power industry and its commitment to be a responsible, climate-conscious country and a leading global nuclear player in the future, China Daily reported.



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The report cited the opening of six nuclear reactors last year and the permit given by government for the construction of eight more domestic reactors.



In November, China signed a $6-billion deal with Argentina to build a nuclear plant, the South American country's fourth, as part of effort to export the technology.



Three nuclear power plants are also likely to be built in the United Kingdom, with possible use of Chinese nuclear technologies.



The report also cited the agreement signed last week by China and Saudi Arabia, aiming for the development of home-grown fourth-generation nuclear technology in the Middle East country.



Experts said that China's innovation, safety and popularization of its technologies has made it stand out among other players.



With nuclear power entrenched in China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), the country has now 28 nuclear reactors in operation with an installed capacity of about 25.5 gigawatts. An additional 30 gW is expected to be generated by the nuclear plants now under construction and those approved for construction, the report said.



Xu Yuming, deputy director of the China Nuclear Energy Association, said that the current program would enable the country to emerge as the largest market for nuclear power plants.



"Speed (of executing nuclear power projects) is not the goal. We should put safety above everything, and improve our ability to innovate and develop our own technologies for use domestically, while at the same time paving the way for their export, as per the new five-year plan," Xu said.



In 2011, China had suspended approval for new reactors as part of the safety-first principle, following the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, while it reviewed safety standards at existing nuclear facilities.



In March last year, the government approved the construction of units 5 and 6 of Hongyan River nuclear power plant in Liaoning Province, the first such project to receive approvals in four years.



The report said that starting in May 2015, the government issued construction permits to units 5 and 6 of Fuqing nuclear power plant in Fujian Province, units 3 and 4 of Fangchenggang nuclear project in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and units 5 and 6 of Tianwan nuclear power plant in Jiangsu Province.



Experts said the country's efforts to use more nuclear power in the future is part of China's pledge to the international community to reduce carbon emissions and generate 20 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2030.



Based on estimates in the draft of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), Xu said China could possibly add five or six nuclear reactors every year from 2016 to 2030.



"By then, nuclear power will account for 8 to 10 percent of the total energy mix," Xu said. Its current share is about 2 percent.



China is planning to have at least 110 nuclear reactors running by 2030, making it one of the largest nuclear energy users in the world.


"Amazonian forest wildlife has been declining through a combination of habitat destruction, habitat degradation and overhunting since the 1950s, but until now there was a poor understanding of the status of wildlife populations in hunted forests that otherwise remain intact and free from other human disturbances.

"We show that dense-wooded, large-seeded Amazonian tree species are replaced by light-wooded trees that produce smaller seeds, which continue to be dispersed in overhunted forests by more resilient smaller mammal and bird species."

Loss of seed dispersers drives forest decarbonisation



The reason for the problem is that many Amazonian trees depend on animals to disperse their seeds. For example the agouti, a large Amazonian rodent, is the only species able to break through the cannon-ball like shell in which Brazil nuts are found. Without them, the majestic (and carbon-rich) Brazil nut tree is unable to reproduce.

Tapirs are another key seed disperser that are sensitive to hunting. When tapirs are lost in addition to large primates, such as woolly monkeys and spider monkeys, nearly nine out of every ten plots will lose forest biomass.

The authors conservatively estimate that an average of 5.8% of the above-ground carbon stock of Amazonian forests could be lost if vulnerable large-bodied fruit-eating mammal species continue to be hunted out, even if the forest is protected against other threats.

Prof Peres said: "Fortunately Amazonian parks, sustainable-use reserves and indigenous territories now cover more than half of the Amazon basin, but these forest reserves should effectively protect the forest megafauna, rather than just the forest cover.

"Our research suggests that if properly managed, these protected areas could still protect most large animals, which are critical seed dispersers that maintain the full spectrum of tropical forest dynamics.

"There has been little evidence to date that the environmental services provided by tropical forests are really conditional on fully functional forest ecosystems that can retain a full complement of wildlife species, but this study shows that biodiversity and natural ecosystem services are inextricably linked."

UNFCCC's REDD+ needs to update in the light of these findings

Another implication of the research is that mechanisms under the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC) and the recently concluded Paris Agreement intended to encourage forest conservation as a means to retain carbon in forests must be updated, says Peres:

"Tropical forest degradation has been entirely defined by REDD+ programs in terms of highly detectable forms of human disturbance, such as timber extraction and wildfires. Yet even apparently intact but otherwise defaunated forests should be considered as degraded because the insidious carbon erosion processes we highlight in this paper are already well under way.

"Even protected areas do not necessarily ensure the protection of large vertebrates in most remaining tropical forests. Either we stand up and effectively protect these wildlife populations, or overhunting will erode their populations until we see major losses in both forest biodiversity and forest ecosystem services."

Considering the variation in biomass changes across plots, the potential economic value of such forest carbon loss in the world's carbon markets could range between US$5.9 trillion and US$13.7 trillion.

Taal Levi, from Oregon State University (USA), and an author on the study, said: "In recent decades, Amazonian countries have made major strides in expanding parks and strengthening indigenous land rights. And our study shows that properly managing wildlife can have big benefits for biodiversity and forest ecosystem services.

"The loss of forest biomass may not sound like a lot but in an area as vast as the Amazon, the impact could be huge - a projected 313 billion kilograms of carbon not being absorbed."

The research team, which includes authors from UEA (UK), the National Institute of Amazonian Research and Fiocruz Amazonia (both in Brazil), and Oregon State University (USA), concludes:

"These findings highlight an urgent need to manage the sustainability of game hunting in both protected and unprotected tropical forests, and place full biodiversity integrity, including populations of large frugivorous vertebrates, firmly in the agenda of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) programs."

The paper: 'Dispersal limitation induces long-term biomass collapse in overhunted Amazonian forests' is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Students write wish cards for the upcoming National College Entrance Exam in a Confucius temple in Shanghai, June 5, 2008. (Photo : Reuters)

A Confucian scholar recently called for a ban on churches in Qufu, the ancient Chinese philosophers hometown, in a bid to save local culture.



Zeng Zhenyu published an article on Jan. 21 on rujiazg.com, a website on Confucian studies, condemning Qufu and Jining's local governments, which administrate Qufu, East China's Shandong Province, for "secretly" constructing a Protestant church 3 km to the southeast of the Confucius Temple, the Global Times reported. The scholar added pictures in his article that he claimed were of the secret church.



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Zeng, who is also a political adviser, claims that in 2012 a deputy mayor of Jining informed him that the administration would not build new churches in Qufu.



Scholars signed an online open letter in 2010, whereby they revealed their opposition to plans for a Gothic-style Protestant church in Qufu, stating that the project would spur religious and cultural conflicts, after a report from the media that there had been a foundational ceremony for a church 3 km from the Confucius Temple.



Authorities planned to build the Holy Trinity Church in Yuzhuang Village in Qufu. The church would accommodate 3,000 members and have a height of 41.7 meters. According to the Xinhua News Agency, an exchange center for Christianity and Confucianism would also be constructed.



Zeng cited anonymous local residents saying that the church had actually been in existence for three years already as a single-storey building, and it will be expanded after the Spring Festival in February.



An unnamed official at the Jining religious department responded saying that he has no knowledge of the new church.



Meanwhile, Yang Chunmei, a professor at Qufu Normal University, said in an article published on Jan. 26 on the news portal thepaper.cn that the stills posted by Zeng were not for a church "secretly built" after 2012, but a provisional church that has existed for a decade.



Zeng pointed out that discussions are underway with local administrators to resolve the issue, and therefore rejected an interview with the Global Times.


The YMCA is celebrating its preschools 10th anniversary!

The Land of Wonder preschool opened its doors on Jan. 31, 2006, according to Director Hope Vaccaro.

During the past 10 years, the preschool has educated more than 500 children from Franklin County and surrounding localities, giving children ages 2 to 5 a safe place to play and grow.

Land of Wonder is a Virginia Star Quality school (through Smart Beginnings), Vaccaro said. She credits the programs success to a strong preschool team and the wonderful support of families and community.

We have a strong program, in part due to the longevity of our teaching staff, she said. We have teachers who have been with us since day-1, not only because they love the Y and the mission, but mostly because they genuinely love children!

We nurture, develop, educate, and care for children, and it shows, she added. We also conduct individual assessments, tailor our program to meet the needs of each child, and were priced appropriately. Our mission is to help build strong children, strong families, and a strong community. Were thankful to have the support of our wonderful families and community members so that we can give back in an extraordinary way.

To mark its anniversary, the children at Land of Wonder will be creating personal time capsules to take home that will contain information about themselves and their wishes for the next 10 years. Their time capsules will be sealed with a reminder to wait until 2026 before they open them.

The preschool will also save the childrens information and create a class time capsule.

Its our hope that in 2026, the children who create the time capsule (who will be teenagers in 2026) will come back to the preschool to read their time capsules to the preschool children attending in 2026, Vaccaro said.

Land of Wonder will also be accepting memory notes from alumni families or children of their time at the preschool. A fond memory can be dropped off, mailed, or may be shared on the preschools Facebook page at the Franklin County YMCA Preschool.

We are thrilled to be marking our 10th anniversary of serving so many wonderful families. We love working with children and watching them blossom during their time with us, Vaccaro continued. Preschool is such a magical time in the life of a child. Were honored to be a part of these precious years, and were excited to be a part of the next 10 years!

The Franklin County Family YMCA preschool program is at capacity with a waiting list. If you would like information about the program or would like to be included on the waiting list, call 540-489-9622(YMCA) or visit the Franklin County YMCA Land of Wonder Preschool at 295 Technology Drive, Rocky Mount, VA 24088.
Perennial legislation that would require public elementary school children to complete 20 minutes of physical activity per day during the school week cleared a Senate Committee last Thursday.

Sponsored by Sen. John C. Miller, D-Newport News, Senate Bill 211 passed the Senate Education and Health Committee by a bipartisan vote of 10-4-1 and now heads to the full chamber for consideration.

Miller has, for years, promoted the bill as a small step to address the growing issue of childhood obesity. A recent study suggests nearly 30 percent of Virginia children are overweight.

But the legislation has stalled in the legislature, largely over concerns that the requirement would take valuable instruction time out of the school day and require local districts to spend more money to hire instructors.

The bill would require 20 minutes of activity per day, or 100 total minutes of activity per week, for students in kindergarten through 5th grade. It would not take effect until the 2018-19 school year. A physical education requirement of 150 minutes per week already exists for students in grades 6 through 12.

For the first time since he first introduced the bill, Miller has a key sponsor for the legislation in the House of Delegates - Del. G. Manoli Loupassi, R-Richmond - fueling his optimism for its passage.

The bill is among a number of bipartisan efforts under way this session to promote physical fitness among adults and children.

In other legislation before the committee, senators unanimously approved Senate Bill 176, which would no longer require Virginia drivers to consent to organ donation each time they renew or replace their license.

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Janet D. Howell, D-Fairfax, now heads to the full chamber for consideration.
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By Keith Ridler Associated Press

BURNS, Ore. (AP)  Federal and state law officers arrested the leaders of an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge, during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country that prompted gunfire and left one man dead.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center Tuesday in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made a total of eight arrests  including Ammon Bundy.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds, the agencies said. Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported (http://bit.ly/1nOammV) that Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her father's death to the paper, saying "he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for "patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."

Early Wednesday, the FBI and Oregon State Police established a series of checkpoints along key routes into and out refuge. The agencies said in a statement that the containment was to 'better ensure the safety of community members." According to the statement, only Harney County ranchers who own property in specific areas will be required to show identification and be allowed to pass.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

Thornton called the arrests "a dirty trick" by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32  apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Ammon Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement. " I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender."

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West. Conflicts over Western land use stretch back decades.

In the 1970s, Nevada and other states pushed for local control in what was known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. Supporters wanted more land for cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting.

___

Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.

Caption 1:

Sgt. Tom Hutchison stands in front of an Oregon State Police roadblock on Highway 395 on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 between John Day and Burns, Ore. The FBI on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a federal wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon for the past three weeks. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Caption 2:

FILE  In this Jan. 6, 2016 file photo, Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum carries his rifle after standing guard all night at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire, and one death, along a highway through the frozen high country. The Oregonian reported that Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. (AP photo/Rick Bowmer)

Caption 3:

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. A more than 50-mile stretch of highway in Oregon has been closed near where an armed group has been occupying a national wildlife refuge. A group led by Ammon Bundy seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Caption 4:

FILE  In a Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016 file photo, Ammon Bundy speaks during an interview at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, near Burns, Ore. Authorities said Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, that Bundy, leader of the armed Oregon group, has been arrested. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Caption 5:

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased." (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Caption 6:

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased." (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Caption 7:

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired Tuesday during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said another person, Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, was arrested in Burns. In a statement, the FBI said one individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased." (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Caption 8:

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. A more than 50-mile stretch of highway in Oregon has been closed near where an armed group has been occupying a national wildlife refuge. A group led by Ammon Bundy seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Caption 9:

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased." (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
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By Erin Schmitt of The Gleaner

Plans for the new Municipal Services Center project are taking shape.

Hafer and Associates gave an update on the renovation and construction project at the Henderson City Commission meeting Tuesday night.

The city has considered a new Municipal Services Center since 2006. Hafer President Jeff Justice told commissioners that this was the best opportunity to date to complete the project.

The plan is to renovate the Sandefur Center to house gas operations, public works, engineering, backup 911 dispatch, the central garage and other amenities. The 20-year-old building will be transformed to give it a modern and updated feel, but also retain a cohesive look with the existing design, said interior designer Natalie Schmidt.

A storage yard with a series of buildings that will house vehicles of assorted sizes, along with a wash pad and a fuel island, will be built on adjacent property, said project architect Jason Barisano. The central garage will be isolated and include three bays to work on vehicles.

Once the plans are finalized and approved by the commission, the city will seek bids for the project. City Assistant Manager Buzzy Newman said he would like to pursue bids by mid-February, open proposals by late February and have the commission award the bids by early March.

It would then take an estimated eight months to finish construction. The project is estimated to cost $5,194,498.

Presentations: Cindy Bickwermert, administrative secretary in the finance department, received a 20-year service award.

Fire Chief Scott Foreman presided over a ceremonial badge pinning for three newly promoted assistant fire chiefs  Ayron Thompson, red shift; Chad Moore, blue shift; Jeremy Baxter, green shift. Each of the new assistant chief's wives pinned the badges on their husbands.

Rescue squad: An annual agreement that establishes a formal relationship between the Henderson City-County Rescue Squad, city and county governments and the Henderson County Emergency Management Agency was approved.

Bonds: Following a second and final reading, an ordinance was approved to issue bonds that will provide funds for public improvement projects like the new Municipal Services Center. The bonds will also refund outstanding taxable Build America Bonds and related costs in the principal amount of approximately $1,685,000 and $8,315,000.

City-County Comprehensive Plan: The commission also approved the City-County Comprehensive Plan after a second and final reading. The plan was originally adopted in 1981 and is updated every five years.

Orderly succession: Orderly succession of the mayor and city offices and departments has been established after an ordinance was approved. A separate ordinance setting up the chain of command for the Henderson Water Utility was also passed.

House numbering plan: The Henderson City-County Planning Commission is now officially responsible for assigning new addresses and changing addresses that don't meet the standards outlined in the city's Code of Ordinances.

Riverfront master plan: The commission approved a master agreement for professional services between the city of Henderson and URS Corp. Nevada for the Henderson Riverfront master plan Phase 4 project in the amount of $139,455.

The city purchased the Borax property last year and is developing a master a master plan for the site. This includes the possible subdivision of the property and transportation and river access, as well as utility and infrastructure upgrades.
In 2010, a 16-year-old named Kalief Browder from the Bronx was accused of stealing a backpack. He was sent to Rikers Island to await trial, where he reportedly endured unspeakable violence at the hands of inmates and guards -- and spent nearly two years in solitary confinement.

In 2013, Kalief was released, having never stood trial. He completed a successful semester at Bronx Community College. But life was a constant struggle to recover from the trauma of being locked up alone for 23 hours a day. One Saturday, he committed suicide at home. He was just 22 years old.

Solitary confinement gained popularity in the United States in the early 1800s, and the rationale for its use has varied over time. Today, it's increasingly overused on people such as Kalief, with heartbreaking results -- which is why my administration is taking steps to address this problem.

There are as many as 100,000 people held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons -- including juveniles and people with mental illnesses. As many as 25,000 inmates are serving months, even years of their sentences alone in a tiny cell, with almost no human contact.

Research suggests that solitary confinement has the potential to lead to devastating, lasting psychological consequences. It has been linked to depression, alienation, withdrawal, a reduced ability to interact with others and the potential for violent behavior. Some studies indicate that it can worsen existing mental illnesses and even trigger new ones. Prisoners in solitary are more likely to commit suicide, especially juveniles and people with mental illnesses.

The United States is a nation of second chances, but the experience of solitary confinement too often undercuts that second chance. Those who do make it out often have trouble holding down jobs, reuniting with family and becoming productive members of society. Imagine having served your time and then being unable to hand change over to a customer or look your wife in the eye or hug your children.

As president, my most important job is to keep the American people safe. And since I took office, overall crime rates have decreased by more than 15 percent. In our criminal justice system, the punishment should fit the crime - and those who have served their time should leave prison ready to become productive members of society. How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people? It doesn't make us safer. It's an affront to our common humanity.

That's why last summer, I directed Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department to review the overuse of solitary confinement across U.S. prisons. They found that there are circumstances when solitary is a necessary tool, such as when certain prisoners must be isolated for their own protection or in order to protect staff and other inmates. In those cases, the practice should be limited, applied with constraints and used only as a measure of last resort. They have identified common-sense principles that should guide the use of solitary confinement in our criminal justice system.

The Justice Department has completed its review, and I am adopting its recommendations to reform the federal prison system. These include banning solitary confinement for juveniles and as a response to low-level infractions, expanding treatment for the mentally ill and increasing the amount of time inmates in solitary can spend outside of their cells. These steps will affect some 10,000 federal prisoners held in solitary confinement -- and hopefully serve as a model for state and local corrections systems. And I will direct all relevant federal agencies to review these principles and report back to me with a plan to address their use of solitary confinement.

States that have led the way are already seeing positive results. Colorado cut the number of people in solitary confinement, and assaults against staff are the lowest they've been since 2006. New Mexico implemented reforms and has seen a drop in solitary confinement, with more prisoners engaging in promising rehabilitation programs. And since 2012, federal prisons have cut the use of solitary confinement by 25 percent and significantly reduced assaults on staff.

Reforming solitary confinement is just one part of a broader bipartisan push for criminal justice reform. Every year, we spend $80 billion to keep 2.2 million people incarcerated. Many criminals belong behind bars. But too many others, especially nonviolent drug offenders, are serving unnecessarily long sentences. That's why members of Congress in both parties are pushing for change, from reforming sentencing laws to expanding reentry programs to give those who have paid their debt to society the tools they need to become productive members of their communities. And I hope they will send me legislation as soon as possible that makes our criminal justice system smarter, fairer, less expensive and more effective.

In America, we believe in redemption. We believe, in the words of Pope Francis, that "every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes." We believe that when people make mistakes, they deserve the opportunity to remake their lives. And if we can give them the hope of a better future, and a way to get back on their feet, then we will leave our children with a country that is safer, stronger and worthy of our highest ideals.

The writer is president of the United States.
A worker checks products on a solar panel production line at a solar company workshop in Yongkang, Zhejiang Province. (Photo : REUTERS)

Major Chinese solar panel makers are making new investments and expanding to other countries, such as Thailand, due to the rising costs and strict anti-dumping duties in the U.S. and Europe, China Daily reported.



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According to the report, many solar power companies have invested in Thailand due to several factors that include supportive government policies, growing demand, high-growth opportunities and low-duty export potential.



The report also said that labor and operations in China are not helping the companies, not to mention the declining prices, overcapacity and rising costs related to office rents.



U.S. Colliers International cited that an office in a prime location in Thailand's big cities costs about $21 per square meter per year, much lower than Shanghai's rate at $46.8.



In addition, Chinese solar panel makers suffered from the U.S. anti-dumping duties in the last few years as the U.S. Commerce Department raised average duties on Chinese products but lowered them for Taiwanese products.



U.S. import tariffs on solar energy products made in China reached 165 percent at the end of 2014, way below the 27.55 percent levy, compared to made-in-Taiwan products.



China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products said that the value of Chinese exports has been reduced by the U.S. tariffs by about $300 million last year, affecting more than 200 Chinese solar panel makers.



Yingli Solar, the Baoding-based company and the world's second largest solar panel maker, has not reported profits since 2011 due to overcapacity and said excessive production caused prices of solar products to plunge.



To cope, survive and expand, Yingli said it will partner with local player in Thailand, Demeter Corp., to set up a 40:60 joint venture to produce multi-crystalline photovoltaic panels. The panels will be sold under the Yingli Solar brand name.



Yingli told China Daily that the partnership will set up a $19-million, 300-mW solar power plant in Rayong.



Aside from that, Yingli has also partnered with telecommunications and electronics giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which is also a big player in the photovoltaic inverter market, to provide a series of solar power solutions to the Thai market.



Another company, Trina Solar, a photovoltaic modules maker based in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, has set up regional headquarters in Singapore as demand for solar panels has grown rapidly in Southeast Asia. The company has also invested about $160 million to build its factory in Thailand in May 2015. This year, it will start construction of the factory that can make solar cells that can produce 700 mW of power annually and solar panels that can generate 500 mW of electricity annually.



The report said that the key factor that makes Thailand attractive to Chinese solar panel makers is that the country does not invite heavy duties in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, the country has a stable investment environment as well as support for the solar power industry.



Since 2008, Thailand has been implementing its alternative energy development strategy, covering all sectors of clean energy, including large-scale solar power station projects.



Experts said that one of the reasons why Chinese companies are setting up factories in the country is due to the huge potential for growth in Thailand's domestic solar power market.



Experts said Thailand could also help Chinese solar panel companies export their products to Europe.


Looking for the big games to watch in Week 9? We have them right here.
Cranes and workers are seen at a construction site at a main pier of the Hutong Yangtze River highway and railway bridge above the Yangtze River, in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China, April 25, 2015. (Photo : Reuters)

During a high-level meeting to finalize guidelines for the economic belt along Yangtze River, President Xi Jinping said there will be no more large projects to be launched along Chinas longest river.



Informing the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, Xi said that no economic projects along Yangtze must cause harm or risk to the environment, according to China Daily.



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With future major exploitation put on hold, all government agencies have a responsibility to protect environmental quality in the Yangtze Valley.



The president explained that there is only room for environmental quality of the Yangtze to get better as opposed to deteriorating. Xi said this in his first public statement about the river's environmental challenges after his inspection trip of the riverside Chongqing City earlier this month.



Xi's comments set the tone for the government's regulation on utilizing and protecting the 6,300-km waterway, as pointed out by many Chinese online commentators.



The same publication reported that China built a 47-meter-high dam on the Yangtze River for the Gezhouba hydropower project in 1988, and later built the 185-meter-high Three Gorges Dam in 2006 for a large hydropower project. The two dams are located on the middle ridges of the river.



Last year saw another hydropower project called Xiao Nan Hai being abandoned by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Furthermore, the central government brought up the idea of collecting all the riverside provinces, cities, and development cones into a more unified Yangtze River Economic Belt to share resources and facilities.



Yangtze River is the third longest in the world, but the longest to flow within one country. The river runs from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau across China before emptying into the sea at Shanghai. It covers an area representing 40 percent of China's population and GDP.



During the Tuesday, Jan. 26 meeting, top-level decisions were also made to promote forestry development and implement the strategy of supply-side reform, a way of phasing out uncompetitive industries.


When the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland in 1986 five of the original inductees, The Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, and the Godfather of it all, Chuck Berry had all appeared on the Coliseum Ballrooms big stage. John Lennon said If they didnt call it Rock n Roll, theyd have to call it Chuck Berry! The Coliseum was a nursery for the infant Rock n Roll in the fifties and sixties and the list of big names that performed there is the stuff of great legend.

On Saturday, February 20th, Build Benld and The Coliseum Documentary Project will present Memories of the Coliseum, at The Gillespie Civic Center. This is a onetime only event to remember the famous ballroom and commemorate the 40th anniversary of Joyce Tarros death.

Build Benld is a civic philanthropic group of some very dedicated people who are committed to keeping the town alive and vibrant and is one of the most prolific and active civic organizations in Macoupin County. Build Benld does many events and fund raisers and distributes the money back into their community. They support the Adopt a Pet Shelter, have donated 18 tables to the Benld Civic Center, built Memorial Gazebo Park on Central Avenue, painted playground equipment and added staggered tires for kids to climb, installed Coliseum Ballroom Dancers kiosk and plaque, back fencing and flood light, hosted five senior Christmas dinners, and as of late donated $1900 to the City of Benld for repairs to be made to the bike trail, among many other community causes.

Lynn Shehorn, the promotions and publicity director for Build Benld, said For many, many years the Coliseum Ballroom and Benld were synonymous. When you thought of one, you thought of the other.and we all knew Joyce. We wanted to commemorate that and all the pieces came together at just the right time to make it happen. She went on to say, All of us have just about the same memories. Saturday night with whoever could get the car that night and heading out to Tarros with our friends. Meeting guys and girls, great bands, dancing, and maybe sneaking a drink before it was legalwhat was better than that when you were 17?

What great memories! We want to try to bring that back and share our memories with everyone again.

The BALLROOM BAND will be playing that night. From Nashville, St. Louis, Chicago and Southern California musicians from all over are coming together to perform for this special onetime event. Everyone in the impressive line-up for the night has played on the big stage at the Coliseum Ballroom.

Chuck Wilson along with band members Rick Rayburn and Charlie Wilson will provide the core group for the night. These loyal Coliseum Ballroom Devotees played with most of the great local bands in the late 60s and early 70s, Serra Leigh, Bulls Eye, Sky High and Seadog, to name but just a few. Chuck went on to work with twice Grammy nominated trumpeter Phil Driscoll and with Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons for many years. Musicians that night will include former members of Serra Leigh, the Far Cryse, Kaleidoscope, Griffin, Seadog, Lomax, Castle, Sky High, Emerald City, The Bob Kuban Band, The Torquays, The Jay Barry Band, Phil Driscoll, and special guest Gary McClain of The Guild. The band will be playing many of the Top Ten songs from 1959 to 1976. Some surprise guests are being planned as well!!

The Coliseum Documentary Project has been in production for well over 5 years and was begun by Jim Marcacci, a retired teacher from Gillespie, who has been active with the Build Benld group since its beginnings. When we started we didnt realize what a monumental task the film would be said Marcacci. We decided early on that we had to tell the whole story from opening night in 1924 to the fire in 2011and everything in between, for all of its 87 years. We decided to make the complete historical record of The Coliseum Ballroom. In just a very short time, maybe 30, 45 years from now, this will be all that is known about this wonderful, magical place and what happened there. We dont think it should be forgotten. Jim is the Director and Narrator for the documentary project and has teamed up with Writer and Emmy Award winning Producer John Ubben. They will be showing a special sneak preview of their upcoming documentary Dance to the Music set for general release this summer.

The Doors open at 6pm, the band starts at 7pm and will play until 11pm. There will be a Cash Bar for beer and wine and set ups will be available (bring your own hard liquor). The tickets are $15 per person and are only available at the door that night.

Dress up in poodle shirts, leather jackets, white tees and cool blue jeans, and get there early for this one time special event! Come join The BALLROOM BAND, playing the music that was popular when you were, as we remember The Coliseum Ballroom and Joyce Tarro.
The Fabulous Fox Theatre proudly presents host/producer Garrison Keillor & friends live at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis for the final time at 4:45 p.m. on June 18 for the popular weekly radio broadcast, A Prairie Home Companion. This performance will be the last time Garrison Keillor will host A Prairie Home Companion in St. Louis.

Tickets are $68, $58, $38 nad are available online at metrotix.com, by calling 314-534-1111, or in person at the Fabulous Fox Box Office.

If you showed up on July 6, 1974, at the Janet Wallace Auditorium at Macalester College in Saint Paul and plunked down your $1 admission (50 cents for kids) to attend the very first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, you were in select company. There were about 12 people in the audience. But those in attendance thought there were worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon, so Garrison Keillor and the APHC team went on to produce close to 500 live shows in the first 10 years alone. There were broadcasts from this venue and that, until March 4, 1978, when the show moved to The World Theater, a lovely, crumbling building that was one plaster crack away from the wrecking ball. (Now fully renovated and renamed The Fitzgerald, it is the shows home base.)

In June of 1987, APHC ended for a while. Garrison thought it was a good idea at the time, but only two years later, the show was back, based in New York and called American Radio Company of the Air. But theres no place like home. So in 1992, it was back to Minnesota and, soon after, back to the old name:A Prairie Home Companion.

There has been plenty of adventure in the past 40-plus years  broadcasts from Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, Iceland and almost every one of the 50 states; wonderful performers, little-known and world-renowned; standing ovations and stares of bewilderment. Weve missed planes, coped with lost luggage, dodged swooping bats and hungry mosquitoes, plodded through blizzards, and flown by the seat of our pants.

Today, A Prairie Home Companion is heard by 4 million listeners each week on nearly 700 public radio stations, online, and on the American Forces Networks, SiriusXM Radio, Radio New Zealand, and KPRG in Guam. Garrison recalls, When the show started, it was something funny to do with my friends, and then it became an achievement that I hoped would be successful, and now its a good way of life.

A Prairie Home Companion is produced by Prairie Home Productions, and distributed nationwide by American Public Media. The program is underwritten by Ford.

Garrison Keillor was born in 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota, and began his radio career as a freshman at the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1966. He went to work for Minnesota Public Radio in 1969, and on July 6, 1974, he hosted the first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul. Today, some 4 million listeners on more than 600 public radio stations coast to coast and beyond tune in to the show each week. Keillor has been honored with Grammy, ACE, and George Foster Peabody awards, the National Humanities Medal, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His many books include Lake Wobegon Days, The Book of Guys, Pilgrims: A Wobegon Romance, Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny, and The Keillor Reader (Viking). He is the host of the daily program The Writers Almanac and the editor of several anthologies of poetry, most recently,Good Poems: American Places (Viking). In 2006, Keillor played himself in the movie adaptation of his show, a film directed by Robert Altman. He has two grandsons and in 2007, he opened an independent bookstore, Common Good Books, in St. Paul, the city where he and his wife and daughter make their home.
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Linkedin Arif Suryobuwono (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

As a ceremony, a chanoyu (Japanese tea ritual) feels like theater, where participants have to perform their roles precisely as prescribed.

Chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony) demonstrations are mostly silent events involving a kimono-clad female host sitting on a chair on a tatami mat floor, religiously preparing a bowl of powdered green tea called matcha.



The frothy whipped tea is served to the guest of honor by the host's assistant followed by other ladies with tea already prepared serving the rest. After all the guests have drunk the tea, the ceremony is over but might be repeated for one or two more rounds.



The publicly showcased act of painstaking, ritualized hospitality, imported to Indonesia as part of Japan's soft power, invokes tranquility, predefined orderliness and courtesy that make the audience feel honored. It brings out the best in both the host and the guests through the exercise of aesthetics and etiquette.



Indonesian Suwarni Widjaja, the first chanoyu instructor of non-Japanese descent ever bestowed with a Japanese Ambassador Commendation, said that a private tea ceremony was usually attended by four or five guests.



It usually consists of four parts: a kaiseki (traditional multicourse Japanese dining) session; a chanoyu session where a bowl of thick tea is shared among the guests; a snack session; and a chanoyu session where thin tea is served in a separate bowl to each guest.



'Chanoyu, (philosophically) also referred to as chado or the way of tea, is held as [part of] a celebration of an important event in a person's life,' Suwarni said.



She was speaking on the sidelines of a recent chanoyu event she held in Jakarta to celebrate the commendation conferred to her by Japanese Ambassador Yasuaki Tanizaki in November last year.



While four of Suwarni's fellow instructors were also recipients, two receiving the same commendation as her and two earning Japanese Foreign Minister Commendations, they were Japanese who have become Indonesian citizens.



Suwarni, who has been studying chanoyu for 28 years, is currently the only Indonesian deemed worthy by Japan of such a commendation.



A short course tutored by Suwarni at her Bungur Tea House, focusing on the ceremony's tatami-seated version instead of the chair-seated ceremony intended for mostly non-Japanese guests, teaches participants in detail all the ritualistic acts and movements they are to correctly, exactly and elegantly follow in silence. So, chanoyu feels like a pantomime theater where participants have prescribed roles to play. There is no room for improvisation nor impromptu acts.



Playing the role of a host or a guest, one has to remember and observe all the ceremony's rules, like wearing white socks (which signify purity) before entering the tatami room, which Suwarni calls 'the room of peace and equality'.





All jewelry, wristwatches and hierarchical or social status attributes have to be taken off as everyone in the tatami room is equal. In the past, even samurai warriors and other combatants have to leave their swords and other weapons outside upon entering the tatami room. Women are not permitted to wear perfume or trousers in the room, which has to be entered with the right foot first and exited with the left foot first.



Upon entry, one has to bow down as a sign of respect ' to the room, to the unassuming chabana (flowers-of-the field arrangement) and to the hanging scroll whose 'harmony', 'respect', 'purity' and 'tranquility' calligraphy echoes the principles established by one of the founding fathers of chanoyu, Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591).



It was Rikyu's philosophical ideals including simplicity and austerity which, Suwarni said, drew her to chanoyu in the first instance.



Then one has to sit seiza-style ' kneeling on the floor, folding one's legs underneath one's thighs, while resting the buttocks on the heels, slightly separating the knees with the back kept straight ' on the tatami floor, which is uncomfortable.



The tea was ceremonial-grade matcha. It is typically bitter although it can also be savory with some sweetness like its culinary-grade counterpart.



The bitterness is balanced by mochi, beautifully crafted bite-sized sweet cakes which, Suwarni said, could be 'more delicious than the tea', and are intended to prevent stomach upsets as drinking matcha means ingesting the whole leaf, not just the brewed water; its caffeine content is thus much higher than a cup of steeped tea, which is not good on an empty stomach.



When returning the bowl, one has to turn to face the host by making two quarter turns counterclockwise. If the bowl is a karamono (priceless porcelain tea bowl from Song or Tang Dynasty China), an extra handling ritual has to be observed to prevent it from breaking.



Throughout the ceremony, the host drinks and eats nothing. Communication has to be non-verbal, with the guest telling the host how good the tea was by making a soft, audible sucking noise upon drinking the last drop.





As the ceremony ends, conversation with the host starts. Guests are to admire the beauty of the bowl and other tea utensils and make enquiries thereof.



'Chanoyu is not only about tea. It encompasses all connected aspects including how to make the perfect charcoal fire [to heat the water kettle], how to look after the utensils and prepare the powdered tea, how to appreciate art [including calligraphy], poetry, pottery, pick wild flowers in the right season for chabana, etc [...] there is so much to learn in a lifetime,' said Suwarni, who periodically goes to Japan to learn more skills.



That is the way of tea, crosscutting and holistic, where the end is not visible as things keep on changing. That is the path traversed by Suwarni and other followers of Urasenke, one of Japan's main chanoyu schools. 'There is innermost pleasure in my heart [whenever] I am in the way of tea,' she said.



' For details on chanoyu workshops, email workshopchado@gmail.com.
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Linkedin Nurul Y. Karunia (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The internet plays a big part in the lives of many people and digital developments continue to transform the connected world. Based on Internet Live Stats data, it is estimated that there were 3.36 trillion internet searches in 2015 around the world. This figure represents a 15.1 percent increase year-on-year (yoy) from 2014. Access to the internet has become more and more widespread in line with rapid developments in the smartphone industry. The internet penetration rate in the world stood at 46.4 percent in 2015, a significant rise compared to the 2010 figure of just 29.4 percent.



In terms of usage, Asia boasted the largest number of internet users in the world in 2015 at 1.6 billion, or 48.2 percent of the world's total internet users. Meanwhile, in terms of penetration rates, North America led the way with an 87.9 percent penetration rate, followed by Europe with 73.5 percent and Oceania with 73.2 percent. Among 20 countries with the greatest number of internet users in the world in 2014, Indonesia, which settled in at 13th place, had the lowest penetration rate, with just 42.3 million people, or 16.7 percent of its population.



The increase in smartphone ownership and expanded access to the internet are likely to facilitate enhanced e-commerce. Based on the huge number of internet and mobile users worldwide, e-commerce is now thriving. The Asia Pacific region, in particular, is considered a key area for future growth and large populations. New communication and software developments are making it increasingly possible for retailers to offer a seamless shopping experience using all the available shopping channels (mobile devices, computers, direct mail, etc). Consequently, online security technology needs to be improved to provide users with protection and to maximize the benefits of e-commerce.



There are still great opportunities for growth in the online commerce market in Southeast Asia,

especially bearing in mind the region's rapidly expanding number of internet users.



Approximately 61 percent of online consumers in Indonesia make purchases through their mobile devices. As purchasing power increases and internet penetration rates increase, the e-commerce market in Southeast Asia is expected to expand by 25 percent every year. The size of the e-commerce market in Indonesia is predicted to reach between US$25 billion and $30 billion in 2017, from $1.3 billion in 2013.



There are several challenges to e-commerce in Indonesia. Currently, the highest traffic for online shopping activities is recorded during 'office hours'. Online shopping traffic tends to be particularly high after employees finish their lunch break. Shoppers feel easier accessing e-commerce websites from their office rather than at home. This is likely because of slower internet connections at home. Furthermore, Indonesia's consumers prefer shopping through older methods such as online messenger groups, online forums and social networking services. The challenge here is for e-commerce industry operators to take strategic steps aimed at educating the market about the awareness of e-commerce security.



The other challenge is related to limited payment services and logistics services. Many e-commerce players are still using manual payment methods including by manual bank transfers instead of using online payment service providers. In terms of logistics, delivery costs remain high. This is compounded by inefficient delivery services due to the poor transportation infrastructure found in many Southeast Asian countries, especially in an archipelagic country like Indonesia.



In order to spur e-commerce growth in Indonesia, a number of things need to be done.



First, expand internet access. Government funds should be used to expand internet availability, enhance inter-regional connectivity and raise public awareness. This will all help improve e-commerce growth in Indonesia.



Second, support the emergence of local operators. Even though there are numerous local players operating, the public often opt to user foreign services as people remain skeptical of the quality of services offered by local operators. Furthermore, a lack of finance, talent and support makes these local operators reluctant to take the plunge and compete in the market. To address this issue, there is a need for financial access to help prospective local operators, for example by providing loans or grants.



Third, strengthen online security. Many consumers are still hesitant about conducting online transactions. An apparent lack of clarity in regulations governing the security of online transactions is one of the factors behind the relatively low confidence that people have in performing online transactions. In addition, the public are still worried about cyberattacks, making them reluctant to perform online transactions.



Fourth, promote e-payments. Indonesia ranks among the countries in the world with the highest number of un-banked residents. This translates into a low level of e-payments by consumers who shop online. Only 4 percent of online consumers in Indonesia use online payments. Therefore, providing access to the majority of un-banked Indonesians to banking services is necessary.



Fifth, enhance the efficiency of logistics and commerce. In addition to upgrading transportation infrastructure, it is also important that logistics services are upgraded to a state of readiness. In this regard, e-commerce operators should cooperate with reputable logistics service providers in order to improve their delivery services.

Upon looking into the opportunities and challenges of the e-commerce market, it is evident that Indonesia has huge potential in the coming years despite constraints such as poor facilities and infrastructure. With more consumers relying more and more on their smartphones in their everyday transactions, the e-commerce market will further flourish.

________________________________

The writer is an industry analyst at Bank Mandiri
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Linkedin Suherdjoko (The Jakarta Post) Semarang, Central Java  Wed, January 27, 2016

As many as 1,281 followers of the Fajar Nusantara Movement (Gafatar), which has been linked to recent missing person cases, arrived at Tanjung Emas Port in Semarang , Central Java, on Wednesday evening.

They arrived on passenger vessel Dharma Ferry 2, which departed from Pontianak, West Kalimantan, and docked at the Semarang port at around 7 p.m. local time.

They are the second batch of Gafatar followers to arrive in Semarang after the arrival of 351 on Monday.

The 1,281 followers will be temporarily accommodated at the arrival terminal of the port before they are transferred to the Donohudan Haj dormitory in Boyolali. They will be provided with healthcare services, meals and psychological counseling. Many family members are under 5 years old.

As many as 975 personnel from the Indonesian Military (TNI), National Police and Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) helped secure the arrival of the Gafatar followers.

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said the administration was ready to provide assistance to the Gafatar followers.

'We can work together to resolve their problems. If they need skills, we can help them. We can assess what they need [to survive], such as financial capital for trading or farming,' said Ganjar.

Separately, Central Java Deputy Governor Heru Sudjatmiko said all Gafatar followers would be temporarily accommodated in the haj dormitory.

'They may stay there for five days while we find solutions for them. There needs to be cooperation with local administrations,' said Heru.

A psychologist from the University of Diponegoro, Hastaning Sakti, said children of the Gafatar followers needed trauma counseling.

'They have been moving from one area to another area. After moving from Java to Kalimantan, their parents began to build new settlements but these children didn't go to school. And now, they have to move again to Java. They need trauma counseling and whether they are successful depends on the assistance provided and the conduciveness of the environment where they are living,' said Hastaning.

'In the haj dormitory, they should be provided with emergency schools. The children need activity to heal,' she added. (ebf)
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Linkedin Dewanti A. Wardhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Jakarta Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat has revealed that he has received reports that a number of the city administration's lawyers, all of whom are civil servants, are 'playing for the other team' and have deliberately lost cases they were handling.



The city's lawyers are all staffers at the Jakarta Legal Bureau. Djarot acknowledged that the legal bureau faced difficult challenges and complicated cases, noting that as such, the division required utmost professionalism and skill from its lawyers.



'We have received reports that some staffers at the legal bureau are playing for the other team. If you are not able to reject millions or billions of rupiah in dirty money, you should just resign right now,' Djarot said during a meeting with bureau staff at City Hall on Tuesday.



According to some of the reports, he went on, certain lawyers had blatantly issued statements that supported their opponents during court trials.



'If I find any of these reports to be true, you will be fired and I will personally make sure that you are jailed,' he told the assembled legal staff.



The city administration intended to overhaul the Legal Bureau, Djarot further revealed, as it was an important working unit, but currently lacked adequate human resources. He added that the city administration would review all cases it had lost and attempt to seek new evidence in order to file counter-lawsuits or submit judicial reviews.



'We will review all the cases that we've lost. If we find new evidence, we will take action,' he said.



Newly inaugurated Jakarta Legal Bureau head Yayan Yuhanah said that the city's lawyers were staffers of the bureau's legal services division, and currently numbered only 10.



In 2015, Yayan said, the legal bureau handled 44 legal cases, most of which were cases regarding assets and took place in East and South Jakarta. There are currently 42 ongoing legal cases.



'We face a number of difficulties, and we win some cases, lose others. However, we always try our best and work with the documents we have,' Yayan insisted during Tuesday's meeting at City Hall.



Separately, Jakarta Legal Bureau legal services head Solafide Sihite denied the reports of corruption among city lawyers, stressing instead that his division suffered from a lack of human resources and was overwhelmed by the number of cases it had to handle.



'There are only 10 employees in the legal services division, so one staffer handles up to four cases at any given time. Ideally, the division would comprise a staff of 25,' Solafide told The Jakarta Post over the phone on Tuesday.



As well as fighting the city's cases in court, he explained, the legal services division also handled legal complaints filed to the administration, as well as providing legal counselling for residents of the capital.



'Starting this year, we will increase the size of our staff and make sure all staffers are given proper legal training by Peradi [the Association of Indonesian advocates],' he said.



He added that most legal cases filed against the city administration regarded assets, requiring the legal bureau to coordinate with the Financial and Asset Management Board (BPKAD). However, he said, the BPKAD chronically lacked the documentation necessary to fighting the city's cases in court.



'We often lose because of the lack of necessary documents to support our case,' the lawyer claimed.
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Linkedin Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The city administration and the police need to take a more strategic approach to rid city of drug-related activities, says a criminologist.



University of Indonesia criminologist and police observer Bambang Widodo Umar said that the administration and the police needed more than just raids in order to fully wipe out drug distribution from the capital.



'Drug-related activity will never be solved if the administration relies only on police raids. All related parties should be involved in fighting against drugs,' he told The Jakarta Post recently, citing the education, economic and religious affairs ministries as examples.



Last week police launched a series of raids in Berlan, East Jakarta, and Kampung Ambon, West Jakarta, two areas in the capital that have long been considered hotbeds for drug-related activity, after an earlier raid in Berlan led to police officers being violently attacked.



On Jan. 8, one officer and an informant were killed in an attack launched by a group of people against officers who raided a house suspected of being used as meeting point for drug transactions in Berlan. Two other officers were injured in the attack that the police said was launched by a group of thugs carrying machetes.



On Thursday, hundreds of personnel from the police, the military and the police military command were deployed to Berlan to search for the perpetrators of Monday's attack and attempt to cleanse the area of drug-related activity. Police officers shot dead the alleged main orchestrator and an alleged attacker in Monday's attack late on Thursday and Friday, respectively, after each suspect reportedly resisted police arrest.



The raid continued on Saturday afternoon, where around 350 personnel from the Jakarta Police and the West Jakarta Police raided Kampung Ambon. Two suspected drug traffickers were arrested during the raid, which didn't meet with any resistance from the suspected drug dealers.



'There are many factors that drive people to use or sell drugs. They can be economic, social or even political factors,' Bambang said, explaining the reason the administration needed further collaboration.



The education and religious affairs ministries could help with improving residents' mentality through counseling while the economic ministries could help with their well-being, he said.



The Jakarta National Narcotics Agency (BNN Jakarta) has also urged the city administration to immediately start rehabilitation programs in Berlan and Kampung Ambon following the police raids in the two areas.



Rehabilitation programs are necessary in a newly raided area to prevent residents from re-engaging in drug-related activity and to cure possible psychological trauma suffered by children, said BNN Jakarta spokesman Sr. Comr. Slamet Pribadi.



'I hope the administration takes part in providing alternative social development in the two areas. The administration could, for example, provide counseling for the children so they will not grow up imitating what they have seen [in their neighborhoods],' he told the Post.



Slamet cited several initiatives his agency had undertaken to curb residents' dependency on drug trafficking, such as providing training around mobile phone and computer services for male residents and baking courses for female residents.



He said BNN Jakarta had so far provided such training for Kampung Ambon residents, but the administration still needed to step in.



'It should not just be the BNN [providing such assistance], the city administration should also take part,' he said.
People walk by a Bulgari boutique in the Ginza district of Tokyo, Japan, on July 10, 2009. (Photo : Getty Images)

Italian designer brand Bulgari is stepping up its investments in China, in the hopes of tapping into the growing reluctance of Chinese shoppers to buy abroad due to security fears, stricter customs checks and the recent devaluation of the yuan.



Bulgari, which is the world's third largest watch and jewelry brand and part of the luxury goods giant LVMH, plans to open two boutiques in the mainland this year, the company's CEO Jean-Christophe Babin said. The stores are on top of three in 2015.



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"If you see there is a potential swing with more mainland and less travel proportion, it's one more reason to speed up your mainland investments," Babin told Reuters on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos.



China's economy rose by 6.9 percent in 2015, its slowest rate in 25 years, putting a damper on China's consumer spending in everything from food to trips overseas. These foreign visits have often been an occasion for purchases of luxury items, as these allow shoppers to avoid the hefty taxes imposed in China.



Babin noted that many Chinese consumers are also nervous about traveling to Europe and other places due to the terror attacks in Paris in November, where 130 people were killed.



"If we sell fewer watches to Chinese when they travel--Paris obviously because people are a bit scared--we see conversely a strong increase in our business in the mainland," he noted.



The shift to domestic purchases is also partly due to the devaluation of the yuan, which makes it more expensive to purchase goods abroad, as well as tightened checks by Chinese customs officials in purchases made overseas.



Chinese tourists returning from overseas are becoming subject to stricter customs controls on what they bring back, Babin said, noting that watches in particular are subject to a 30-percent levy plus a penalty that is a multiple of that for anyone caught not declaring the purchase.



"People are quite scared to buy a $10,000 watch in Zurich or Tokyo and eventually have to pay twice as much as they originally paid," he added.



Bulgari, with annual sales estimated at 1.5 billion euros ($1.62 billion) to 2 billion euros, is third in line behind Richemont's Cartier and Tiffany & Co.



"More than ever it makes a lot of sense for Bulgari to invest in China," said Babin.



Chinese consumers, whether shopping at home or overseas, comprise more than 30 percent of sales of Swiss watch, according to a report by Sina English.



In a report published Wednesday by Bain Consulting, China's spending on luxury items fell by 2 percent year-on-year in 2015 to just 113 billion yuan ($17.2 billion).



Chinese luxury spending on menswear, watches and accessories experienced the sharpest drop by 12 percent, 10 percent and 6 percent, respectively, the report said.


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Linkedin The Jakarta Post  Wed, January 27, 2016

The government launched the first pilot project late last month for large-scale solar power generation to supply rural areas in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara. Now it is palm oil-based biogas that is poised to become a major source of electricity in rural areas that are far from the national grid of the state electricity firm (PLN).



The director general for renewable energy and conservation, Rida Mulyana, announced on Jan. 23 that the government was now finalizing a regulation that would require all palm oil companies to harness their palm oil mill effluents (POME) to produce biogas for power generation.



The potential of POME-based biogas in Indonesia, the world's largest palm oil producer with more than 11 million hectares of oil palm plantations, is huge indeed. The rapid expansion of palm oil mills has so far resulted in the creation of vast wastewater lagoons containing the brown-hued detritus from the processed fruit, which releases a huge amount of methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.



Only a small amount of this methane is currently being captured, but several palm oil businesses have started to realize the commercial use of the liquid waste if the methane can be captured and burned to generate power. So far these small plants (usually with a one-megawatt capacity) are operated mostly to power households around the mills.



It is encouraging, however, that the government has just issued a regulation that sets the feed-in tariffs for excess power from plants fired by POME-based biogas. This means that PLN is required to buy excess power from POME-based biogas-fired power plants.



Mulyana said at the opening on Saturday of the fifth such plant in Riau, which is owned by the Asian Agri palm oil group, that biogas from the liquid waste of the 850 palm oil mills across the country could generate 1,100 megawatts.



The regulation on the feed-in tariff will stimulate the development of POME-based biogas-fired power plants. Like solar power, electricity generated by POME-based biogas is quite suitable for rural electricity supplies because all palm oil mills are located near plantations and most of the households that are not yet connected to the PLN grid live in rural areas. Asian Agri's general manager Freddy Widjaya said his company planned to build 15 more power plants, each with a one-MW capacity, near its mills in Sumatra.



But since palm oil companies have no experience in doing business with PLN to sell power through the feed-in-tariff policy, it would greatly contribute to speeding up the harnessing of POME for power if the government helps facilitate partnerships between palm oil companies, renewable-energy firms and PLN.



Such partnerships will allow the palm oil companies to save their limited investment funds and transfer power investment management to the business partners who can better handle them.



The higher rate of power generation from POME-based biogas will not only accelerate rural electrification, but will also help improve the image of the palm ol industry, which has so far been notorious for alleged deforestation.
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Linkedin Ruslan Sangadji and Andi Hajramurni (The Jakarta Post) Poso, Makassar  Wed, January 27, 2016

Elite troops from the National Police and Indonesian Military (TNI), involved in Operation Tinombala in Poso regency, Central Sulawesi, have moved into the forest to pursue members of the East Indonesia Mujahidin (MIT) terror group led by Santoso.



Operation Tinombala commander Sr. Comr. Leo Bona Lubis said that many of the troops had spread throughout the forest and were now posted at key posts, while others had only recently finished a briefing at Battalion 714 Sintuwu Maroso in Poso.



Lubis, who is also Central Sulawesi Police deputy chief, said the briefing had covered technical matters and details could not be publicized.



'The briefing was to forge synergy in the field,' Lubis told The Jakarta Post at the Poso Regency Police headquarters on Tuesday morning.



Around 1,500 police Mobile Brigade (Brimob) troops are currently deployed in Poso, said Lubis, consisting of pioneer, diving and skydiving members. TNI soldier numbers, according to Lubis, are nearly the same as those of Brimob.



'In total, around 2,500 police and TNI personnel have been deployed,' said Lubis.



They have been deployed to pursue the MIT group, currently thought to consist of 45 members. The location of the manhunt, added Lubis, is very harsh and includes dense forests and mountainous terrain that stretches for approximately 7,000 kilometers.



Besides the rough terrain, several of the MIT members are former illegal loggers and are, subsequently, very familiar with the area, said Lubis.



He expressed optimism that Operation Tinombala would quash Santoso and his followers.



'We managed to kill one member on Jan. 15, 2016, in Gunung Tineba, Taunca, Poso Pesisir,' said Lubis, adding that the body of the deceased member of Santoso's gang, identified only as R, who was shot and killed, was being kept at the Central Sulawesi Police Bhayangkara Hospital's morgue in Palu as it had not yet been collected by relatives.



According to Lubis, the deceased hailed from Java and is thought to have joined Santoso just three months before he was killed in the shootout.



Meanwhile, in South Sulawesi, members of the police counterterrorism unit Densus 88 and Luwu regency Police arrested two Poso terror suspects in Belopa, Luwu, on Monday evening.



Both of them were transferred to Jakarta by plane on Tuesday evening.



Luwu Regency Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Adex Yudiswan said police identified the suspects as Chandra, of Belopa and Ardi, a newcomer who had been staying at Chandra's house for the past two weeks.



According to Adex, Ardi had been on the Poso Police wanted list in Central Sulawesi. He killed two Poso Regency Police members and mutilated their bodies in Taman Jeka, Poso, in 2011.



'The Densus 88 team had also been in Luwu in pursuit of two male terror suspects from Poso and the two men were, by chance, Ardi and Chandra. We immediately teamed up to capture them,' said Adex.



Both suspects resisted, but with bare hands they had easily been overpowered.



Prior to their eventual transfer to Jakarta, Ardi and Chandra were taken to the Luwu Regency Police headquarters for questioning and then sent to Makassar, South Sulawesi.



Densus 88 and Luwu Police personnel seized evidence, including sharp weapons, camouflage clothing that resembled TNI uniforms, police uniforms and a box filled with books and communications gear.
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Linkedin Djemi Amnifu and Farida Susanty (The Jakarta Post) Kupang/Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The livestock vessel KM Camara Nusantara 1, initiated by President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, serving the Jakarta-East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) route, has not enjoyed plain sailing as cattle farmers and businessmen decline to avail of its service, claiming it is not viable.



PT Bumi Tirta, a company with thousands of head of cattle in Oesao subdistrict, Kupang regency, for example, claimed to have suffered losses of over Rp 100 million (US$7,200) from the shipment of 100 of its cattle on Dec. 15, 2015.



'We and other farmers sent 353 cattle and we suffered financial losses,' Bumi Tirta's operational manager Buce Frans said on Tuesday.



He said the losses were mostly due to the price set for cattle being transported on board the livestock ship, which the farmers considered was too low compared to the market price.



Buce said the price of a live animal was set at Rp 35,000 per kilogram using the Camara Nusantara, which is operated by state shipping company PT Pelayaran Nasional Indonesia (Pelni), while private shippers paid higher prices.



'A few days ago we sent 200 cattle to Jakarta using a cargo ship. Our animals were sold for Rp 43,000 per kg live weight,' Buce told The Jakarta Post.



He said if KM Camara Nusantara could at least pay a price of Rp 40,000 per kilogram live weight, it would benefit beef farmers in NTT.



He also guaranteed that if the price was set at Rp 40,000 or even Rp 43,000 per kg live weight, the ship could transport cattle from NTT every two weeks.



'So, if the livestock ship returned to Jakarta empty, it was not because there were no cattle in NTT but because it was paying lower than the market price. We have an abundant number of cattle here,' Buce said.



He was referring to the second voyage of the KM Camara Nusantara, at the end of December, which returned empty.



Buce said that when the livestock vessel first arrived on Dec. 12, his company was certain that it would suffer a financial loss but it went ahead with shipping its cattle as it was a government program.



However, when the price was not increased on its second sailing, his company decided not to use the ship's service because it did not want to suffer further losses.



He appreciated Jokowi's efforts in preparing the livestock ship to transport cattle from NTT, but regretted that it had not yet been managed professionally.



In a related development, senior Transportation Ministry officials, as well as PT Pelni, which runs pioneering routes, have claimed that the price of goods have decreased since the launch of the maritime highway program.



Pelni president director Elfien Goentoro said that based on the company's data, the prices of basic needs including staple foods had decreased by 20 to 25 percent.



'We have seen a 25 percent drop for flour and also sugar. It has helped reduce the prices in the areas [the ships serve],' he said recently.



Pelni has been assigned by the government to manage sea freight on six routes around the country as part of the program, including one connecting Tanjung Perak, East Java, to Timika in Papua, as well as Tanjung Priok and Natuna.



The government also recently tasked Pelni with running at least 52 ships on pioneering routes in its bid to integrate the maritime highway program.



Meanwhile, Transportation Mi-nister Ignasius Jonan said that the decrease in the prices of goods was expected to amount to around 30 percent according to his estimations.



'I can't push for lower logistics costs as they depend on the market,' he said.
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Linkedin Tassia Siipahutar (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Lawmakers at the House of Representatives hope to pass the Financial System Stability Net (JPSK) bill into law in the first quarter to provide legal certainty for policy makers when making crucial financial decisions in times of need.



According to Hendrawan Supratikno of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), also a member of Commission XI overseeing finance and banking, deliberations on the bill are almost complete.



'We're making good progress. We're certain that we can pass it into law in February; in the third week of February at the latest,' he said on Tuesday.



For the second year running, the bill has been listed as a National Legislation Program (Prolegnas) priority, after deliberation of it did not reach completion in 2015.



The JPSK bill is a highly anticipated one, as it will provide legal certainty for policy makers amid tumultuous economic times that could potentially lead to an economic crisis, and the possible collapse of banks.



Once passed, the law will oversee the establishment of a Financial System Stability Committee that will be headed by the finance minister. Its other members will comprise the Bank Indonesia (BI) governor, the Financial Services Authority (OJK) chairperson and the Deposit Insurance Corporation chairperson.



All members of the committee will be required to reach a unanimous agreement when deciding whether or not the country is in an economic crisis. The decision will then trigger a series of measures that are expected to shield the financial system from worsening further, including salvaging key domestic banks.



However, Johnny G. Plate, lawmaker from the NasDem Party, said that the 'crisis decision' was still a big issue that had not been solved by the JPSK bill working committee.



'It's part of our pending matters. We have not decided what will be under the authority of the committee and what will be under the authority of the President,' said Johnny, who is also a Commission XI member.



He added that bailout mechanisms and funding for bailouts were among pending matters that the working committee was facing as well.



Similar to Hendrawan, Johnny said that the lawmakers expected to pass the bill into law in the first quarter, specifically in March.



After the law has been finalized, lawmakers will then proceed with revisions of the BI Law, OJK Law and LPS Law ' all of which closely relate to the mechanism of the JPSK ' hoping to complete them before year-end.



Meanwhile, Tuesday's plenary session also approved the tax amnesty draft being added to the Prolegnas.



As reported before, the tax amnesty is one crucial tool that the government expects will help drive revenue, boost tax compliance and bring fresh funds into the country by pardoning tax evaders.



According to Firman Soebagyo, a Golkar Party politician and deputy chairman at the House's Legislation Body (Baleg), the House is currently waiting for the government to submit the tax amnesty draft and a presidential mandate (Ampres).



'This is because the issue was originally proposed by the government. After that, the steering committee will decide which House body should discuss the matter, the Baleg or Commission XI,' he said.



Separately, Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said that the government had completed the tax amnesty draft. 'The President just has to deliver it to the House.'



Bambang expressed optimism that they would be able to pass the draft into bill and then into law before the first half ended.
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Linkedin Khoirul Amin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

After the European Union (EU) mission to ASEAN official inauguration in Jakarta on Tuesday, the regional bloc aims to take its partnership with ASEAN to the next level.



The newly appointed and first dedicated EU ambassador to ASEAN, Francisco Fontan Pardo, said on Tuesday that the union aimed to move forward into a strategic partnership with its Southeast Asian counterpart, with the ultimate goal for the EU-ASEAN being a free trade agreement (FTA).



'We have a very strong relationship with each member of ASEAN ['], but, at the same time, we have more regional integration, single market-approach, that we will discuss or work more on the bi-regional relationship ['],' he said during the official inauguration ceremony at the EU delegation's office in Jakarta.



Speaking at the same event, ASEAN secretary-general Le Luong Minh said that ASEAN always considered EU one of its most important partners, particularly with the region moving to realize its 2025 vision for a more integrated people-centered region.



'I'm confident that the establishment of the EU diplomatic mission to ASEAN and the appointment of the ambassador to ASEAN will continue to further enhance ASEAN-EU cooperation ['],' he said.



Similarly, the Foreign Ministry's director for ASEAN intraregional cooperation, Derry Aman, said ASEAN-EU cooperation had progressed throughout the years and that Indonesia ' and ASEAN in general ' was looking forward to the road map for the strategic partnership between ASEAN and the EU.



The European External Action Service (EEAS) and the European Commission have adopted a joint communication on the 'EU and ASEAN: a partnership with a strategic purpose', containing a number of points, such as making trade relations with ASEAN more ambitious for region-to-region FTA and more than doubling EU financial support for ASEAN integration.



In its current budget cycle for 2014 to 2020, the EU will support ASEAN integration and the ASEAN secretariat with A170 million (US$184 million), more than double the amount under the previous cycle that was close to A70 million during the 2007-2013 period.



In terms of trade and investment, the EU is among the largest partners for ASEAN. It is ASEAN's second-largest trading partner, with two-way trade in goods and services between the regions hitting A238 billion in 2013, according to EU data.



The 28-member bloc's foreign direct investment in ASEAN accounted for 24 percent of FDI pouring into ASEAN.



EEAS director general for budget and administration Patrick Child said the EU would promote its bilateral relations with ASEAN member countries before eventually reaching the goal for the region-to-region agreement.



'In the months to come, we intend to advance on our bilateral promotion relations while keeping the regional trade agreement as the final objective,' he said.



ASEAN and the EU began negotiating for a bi-regional arrangement in 2007, but the talks have not progressed much since then. With the fruitless attempts at the regional level, the EU then initiated bilateral negotiations with ASEAN member states.



The EU has concluded an FTA with Singapore and is negotiating with several other ASEAN countries, such as Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. It is also in the process of making a comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA) with Indonesia.



Under the administration of President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, Indonesia intends to soon resume talks on the Indonesia-EU CEPA.



Trade Minister Thomas Lembong said on a separate occasion on Tuesday that the President had said at a Cabinet meeting that he wanted talks with the EU to be concluded within two years.



'The President has given the Trade Ministry two years to conclude the talks with the EU,' he said.
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Linkedin Bambang Muryanto (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Activists have chastised the government for its apparent reluctance to remove an article on libel from the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law.



They said the article could kill the potential of internet users to criticize political and business rulers in the country.



'The government's reluctance to revoke the libel article cannot be separated from the main paradigm of President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo's administration to discipline Indonesia's democracy so it won't disturb investment in the country,' information watchdog Yayasan Satu Dunia executive director Firdaus Cahyadi told journalists in Yogyakarta on Monday.



He said the government had handed the draft revision of the 2008 ITE Law over to the House of Representatives but had, as of early 2016, maintained Article 27 (3) on libel. In the draft revision, the government only reduced sanctions imposed for libel to three years in prison from previously six years.



Article 27 (3) stipulates criminal punishment for anyone purposely and without authority distributing and/ or transmitting and/or making electronic information and/or electronic documents with libellous and/or defaming content accessible to the public.



It is further stated in Article 45 (2) that violations of the regulation are punishable with imprisonment of up to six-years and a fine of up to Rp 1 billion (US$72,000).



'It is almost certain that criminalization of internet users will continue in 2016,' said Firdaus.



Yayasan Satu Dunia is an NGO concerned with the openness of information, communication, knowledge and technology for civil societies in Indonesia.



Firdaus said the libel article in the 2008 law caused fear among internet users to criticize the government and Indonesian business power, adding that the internet was a powerful medium of social control.



He claimed it was likely that disciplining democracy in cyberspace was part of the main paradigm of the Jokowi administration to create political conditions that were conducive for investment. This could be seen from a recent statement of Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Panjaitan, who had said that social media had to be disciplined for the sake of national interests.



Gadjah Mada University communication expert Wisnu Martha Adiputra said the libel article had to be removed as it contradicted the 1945 Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of speech and expression.



Wisnu, who is also a researcher at the media regulator, said the ITE Law also failed to protect private data of consumers making transactions via the internet.



In its 2015 year-end report, the Alliance of Indonesian Journalists (AJI) named the ITE Law as one of the obstacles to press freedom in Indonesia, because under the law, online media accused of libellous articles could be brought to justice.



Since the ITE Law was passed in 2008, the number of victims of the libel article in the law has continued to rise. According to Safe Net data, the number of libel cases reached 62 in 2015, sharply increasing from only two cases in 2008. (ebf)(+)
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Linkedin Hans Nicholas Jong (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

As the government accelerates work on infrastructure projects, the Environment and Forestry Ministry is preparing a plan to improve environmental safeguards in a bid to minimize the environmental damage brought about by the expansion of construction work across Indonesia.



Laksmi Wijayanti, the ministry's deputy assistant on natural resource utilization and environmental policy assessment, said on Tuesday that President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo would soon issue a government regulation (PP) on the Strategic Environmental Assessment (KLHS), a document used to evaluate the environmental impact of plans and policies.



'If things go well, then the PP will be issued within the next two to three months,' she told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.



Laksmi said that the PP would strengthen the implementation of the KLHS so that hidden environmental costs could be minimized.



'The PP includes guarantees of quality control, public accountability and the clear division of authority between government institutions to develop their own internal systems and clear standards [of environmental assessment],' she said.



Ultimately, the PP will bring environmental safeguards to the forefront of the environmental agenda, Laksmi said.



'This PP will hand a primary role to the KLHS in decision-making, such as the power to recommend the revocation of permits,' she said.



The government was scheduled to issue the government regulation in 2014. The PP has long been mandated by Law No. 32/2009 on Environmental Protection and Management.



'The biggest challenge [to finalizing the PP] is the shifting focus [of government]. The merging [of the environment and forestry ministries] as well as last year's raging forest fires also affected [the process]. But now the draft has been synchronized with proposals from relevant ministries,' Laksmi said.



According to the law, all major plans will have a KLHS as part of the planning process and not after the plan has been finalized.



In the KLHS, all possible impacts, including biophysical, chemical, social, economic, health and cultural issues, will be assessed in a systematic way.



The KLHS will also focus on strategic issues that cut across boundaries, population groups, regions, areas and projects.



Ideally, the externalized costs of a plan and policy should be calculated to give an idea of what hidden costs may be present.



If done well, a KLHS will act as a policy dialogue tool for planners and policy-makers to engage the public and experts in making policies that are expected to be environmentally-friendly.



However, Laksmi said that the implementation had been hindered by the lack of a PP.



'The problem came from the lateness of the PP, which should have served as a legal umbrella for each [government institution]. At the moment, it's like a free-for-fall where everyone interprets the law by themselves,' she said.



Another problem is that local governments rarely implement a KLHS and almost never include it in their regional spatial planning (RTRW) process.



The government recently came under fire for allegedly bypassing existing regulations as it rushed to complete the permit for the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail project.



Critics blasted the 'irregular' Environmental Impact Assessment (Amdal) approval process, arguing that some necessary steps had been skipped, including the data gathering process, cut down to one week from six months, and the impact of the project on water catchment in the Saguling and Citarum areas near Bandung, West Java.



Besides the KLHS, another commonly used environmental safeguarding tool in the country is the Amdal, which had not been fully respected.



The director of business and activities environmental impact mitigation at the Environment and Forestry Ministry, Ary Sudijanto, said that it was difficult to monitor the implementation of Amdal given that there were more than 500 regencies and municipalities in the country.



'We have to improve our capacity [to monitor the implementation of the Amdal] in more than 500 regencies/cities. That's really difficult.'

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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The government should adhere to the 1945 Constitution in handling the Fajar Nusantara Movement (Gafatar), an organization allegedly involved in recent missing person cases, and not issue any related regulations based on a fatwa from the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), human rights activists have said.



Setara Institute deputy chairman Bonar Tigor Naipospos said since Gafatar had never declared itself as an organization affiliated with a particular religious group, including Islam, the government could not use MUI edicts to take measures against the organization's freedom of belief and association.



"MUI edicts cannot be a source of law [...] A government based on constitutional rights should not have its governing functions limited," Bonar said in Jakarta on Monday.



Even though the MUI, which was established in 1975 during the New Order administration of late former president Soeharto, is a civil society organization, the Council has been given authority to issue edicts on various governance issues.



As a result, Bonar said, the MUI had become a semi-governmental institution, and its function to represent the Indonesian Muslim community had been strengthened by various rules and regulations.



The rights activist said the tendency of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to support the MUI on the issuance of edicts had given the Council a green light to claim its voice in public affairs and undermine minority voices.



'As a result, the government often thinks that MUI edicts should not be ignored,' said Bonar.



Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin on Friday said the ministry would wait for an MUI edict on whether or not Gafatar had promoted deviant religious teachings before making an official announcement on the group.



Meanwhile, Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) chairman Rafendi Djamin said it was still acceptable for the government to consider an MUI edict in making a decision on Gafatar, but added that the government should not use it like a source of law.



"The government cannot refer to the MUI in issuing a law. It should refer to the 1945 Constitution and existing laws," Rafendi said.



In line with international covenants and declarations, the activist said, the 1945 Constitution protected the rights of the Indonesian people to freedom of belief and association as long as their belief did not involve violence and did not tend to make arbitrary interpretations over other religious teachings.



Rafendi said that since Gafatar followers were not proven to have committed religious practices in violation of existing laws and had only migrated to remote areas of Kalimantan to develop agriculture, the government had no excuse not to protect them.



Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH) spokesperson Pratiwi Febri pointed out that Gafatar had disbanded itself in December 2015. Followers of the organization, she said, had never declared themselves a religious group but declared that they were only citizens who pledged allegiance to the state ideology of Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution. Thus, Pratiwi said, it was irrelevant whether the government related the group with deviant religious teachings before first investigating it. (ebf)(+)
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The Jakarta administration is set to increase cooperation with the Egyptian capital, Cairo, the two sides having signed a letter of intent to begin cooperation as sister cities at City Hall in Jakarta on Tuesday.



Egyptian Ambassador to Indonesia Bahaa El Deen Bahgat Ibrahim Dessouki said that like Jakarta, his country's capital suffered from congestion largely caused by daily influxes of commuters from satellite cities. Cairo's population increased from 14 million at night to 17 million in the afternoon, and some households owned up to six cars, Dessouki explained.



'Jakarta and Cairo are very similar, so we can discuss and share our experience and strive to overcome these challenges,' he said after the signing.



Governor Basuki 'Ahok' Tjahaja Purnama added that Jakarta would look to cooperate with the Cairo administration in areas including urban planning and education.



'I hope I can visit Cairo one day as well to maintain our sister city program,' Ahok said.
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

PT MRT Jakarta has reported that the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) project phase I connecting Lebak Bulus in South Jakarta to the Hotel Indonesia Traffic Circle (Bundaran HI) in Central Jakarta is now 38 percent complete.



MRT Jakarta corporate secretary Tubagus Hikmatullah said in a press release on Tuesday that as of Dec. 31, the 6-kilometer underground section of the MRT, between Bundaran HI and Senayan in South Jakarta, was 53 percent complete.



The company, Tubagus said, was now constructing the box structure for underground stations, as well as tunneling, adding that the company was also constructing a depot.



'One of the drilling machines, which was first put to work in November, has drilled 318 meters from the Pemuda Statue [Monument to Youth Advancement] to Senayan station,' he said.



He added, however, that unlike the underground section, the elevated section ' from Senayan to Lebak Bulus ' was only 23 percent complete.



Construction of the elevated section has been delayed by land acquisition issues, with owners of much of the land needing to be purchased unwilling to sell or stalling over purchase negotiations.
President Xi Jinping (front C) poses for photos with guests at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank launch ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 24, 2014. (Photo : Reuters)

The president of the 57-member Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Jin Liqun, said that China has no intention to exercise its veto power with its right based on economic size.



Jin said: "There are still many countries on the waiting list, and when the new members join, China's voting power will be reduced. Such de facto veto power will be lost gradually."



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The president gave this statement at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, according to China Daily.



Member countries of the AIIB, which was established after two years of negotiations, agreed on a vital decision-making procedure. They introduced a "fixed" special majority, made up of two-thirds of members, and representing three-quarters of the voting power.



Jin acknowledged that China is the largest AIIB shareholder with 26.6 percent of the voting power. He added, "We will not increase the special majority to keep China's veto power in the future."



The chief said that this is a major contrast to prior institutions like the World Bank, where the United States has maintained its veto power by amending the articles of agreement. The move increased the special majority when its voting power was reduced after new members joined.



Speaking to the publication, Jin said that when China proposed the idea of establishing the AIIB, there were many doubts and concerns, but the bank is now acceptable in many countries.



Jin said, "This is the process of China gaining credibility and building up mutual trust by collective consultation and making decisions on democratic approaches."



However, he pointed out that the inauguration of the bank is only the first leg of a long journey and that the most significant aspect is to recruit members of staff to make his words become true by meeting the infrastructural demands of states in need.



While the bank is yet to commence recruitment of staff members, the chief aims to seek between 100 and 150 professionals globally this year.



"There is no rush to expand and we need to look for qualified talent and experts carefully," he said.



As opposed to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, which have sometimes established offices in diverse countries, the AIIB will require the experience of the private sector and assign experts and staff members in each business category.


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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Tangerang  Wed, January 27, 2016

The Tangerang city administration is set to build three new bridges in the first quarter of this year.



The head of the Tangerang Roads and Water Resources Agency's road and bridge construction division, Iksan, said on Tuesday that the administration would build new bridges on Jl. Teuku Umar and Jl. Dadang Suprapto, both in Karawaci, as well as at the Sangego U-turn near Pintu Air 10.



The aim of the new bridges, Iksan said, was to ease the congestion that plagued the three areas in the morning and afternoon rush hours.



'On Jl. Teuku Umar, traffic jams occur every morning and afternoon,' Ikhsan said as quoted by wartakotalive.com. He added that the planned bridge would connect Jl. Teuku Umar with Jl. Sudirman.



'The bridge on Jl. Dadang Suprapto will connect the road with Jl. Benteng Raya. Meanwhile, the third bridge at the Sangego U-turn will link Jl. Sangego Utara and Jl. Sangego Selatan.'
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Construction of two planned elevated roads over the Semanggi cloverleaf interchange in South Jakarta is set to commence this April, according to Governor Basuki 'Ahok' Tjahaja Purnama.



Ahok said that the construction would be fully funded and carried out by a Japanese company seeking to increase its building floor coefficients (KLB).



'Construction will begin in April and will be completed in 2017. The construction will be fully funded by a Japanese company, so we will not spend a single rupiah on the elevated roads,' Ahok told reporters at City Hall on Tuesday.



The planned elevated roads will cater to motorists traveling between Ratu Plaza in South Jakarta and Cawang in East Jakarta and Grogol in West Jakarta and Kebayoran Baru in South Jakarta.



The planned elevated roads have been criticized by urban experts, who insist they will do little to lighten congestion, and that the project will ruin the design, considered iconic, of Semanggi.



The interchange, designed by then public works minister Sutami, was built in 1961 under first president Sukarno to reduce traffic congestion in the area. The overpass was named Semanggi, Indonesian for clover, because of its distinctive form.
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Actress Julie Estelle, 27, is tempted to dip her toes into the music industry after playing a musician in her latest film, Surat dari Praha (Letter from Prague).



She had, she said, practiced piano and singing for three months to prepare for the role, according to tempo.co. Julie also sang the film's soundtrack song, 'Nyali Cinta' (Courage of Love).



'It was fun practicing piano. I love music, and I want to be more skillful. However, right now, I'm still focusing on promoting Surat dari Praha. Let's just wait and see,' she said as quoted by kompas.com during the press screening on Monday.



Produced by Visinema Pictures, the film tells the story of an exile who cannot return to Indonesia because of the 1965 coup.



Julie plays Larasati, a young woman largely ignorant of the coup and ensuing violence. Larasati visits Prague to fulfill her mother's last request ' delivering a box and a letter to a man who had once been the latter's fiancA.
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Linkedin Farida Susanty (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Five days after the ceremony to celebrate the ground-breaking of the Jakarta-Bandung high speed railway project, the government has changed its mind, saying that construction cannot proceed as a result of unresolved issues and incomplete paperwork.



Transportation Minister Ignasius Jonan confirmed on Tuesday that he had not issued the building permit as the company developing the railway, PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia China (KCIC), had not submitted the required documents.



The ministry has not issued the concession agreement either, because it is still negotiating a variety of sensitive issues with the company.



'We are very strict [on this] because this is the first time we've conducted this kind of project, and we are not done with the evaluation,' he said at a hearing at the House of Representatives on Tuesday.



Jonan said the ministry was still negotiating the concession agreement with KCIC, which would stipulate the risk of default and the duration of the concession.



'We want to ensure that if the project's development fails in the middle of construction, the government will not be burdened by it,' he said.



He said that among the requirements from the ministry was that KCIC restore everything to its initial condition if the railway was not built for whatever reason.



Jonan said he did not want to repeat the case of the problematic Jakarta monorail project whose ground-breaking in 2004 was attended by then president Megawati Soekarnoputri.



Construction of the monorail project stopped following disagreements between the city and project operator PT Jakarta Monorail.



The company was said to have failed to fulfill at least 15 requirements by the city, including a business plan and a bank guarantee of 5 percent of the project's total investment.



The problems, and doubts about the company's ability to fund the project, led to the project's cancellation, leaving unfinished concrete pillars in several locations in the city.



Jonan stated the concession duration for the high-speed railway would be 50 years, and that after it was over, the company would have to hand the project over to the country, debt-free and properly functioning.



According to Jonan, the ministry was also still awaiting a hydrology study, among other documents, required for the issuance of the building permit.



Previously, the ministry's director general of railways Hermanto Dwiatmoko said the ministry had not even issued the building permit for the first 5 kilometers of the railway.



'We still haven't received the required documents. There are even a lot of documents in Chinese. How can we even evaluate them?' he said, adding that the railway infrastructure operational permit had also to be issued first before the building permit could be issued.



'They want us to issue it in a day. We can't do that.'



The ministry's data cited the lack of a development design, technical illustrations, field data and specifications as the missing documents among the 11 documents needed for the issuance of the building permit, in accordance with Ministerial Regulation No. 66/2013.



President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo pushed ahead with the ground-breaking for the flagship project between Indonesia and China on Jan. 21 despite the permit issues.



Jonan was not present at the event, explaining that he was still working to finish the permits needed for the ambitious project.



In August last year, Jokowi also witnessed the ground-breaking of the 2x1,000 MW coal-fired power plant in Batang, Central Java, which has been touted as the largest power plant in Southeast Asia.



The president went ahead with the ceremony despite incomplete land acquisition for the mega project.



Meanwhile, KCIC has so far received track route permits, a railway transportation firm permit, an environmental impact analysis (Amdal) and toll-road land use permit, among others, from various ministries, including the Public Housing and Public Works Ministry.



The railway, connecting Jakarta and Bandung, West Java, is expected to run trains as fast as 350 kilometers per hour. Construction has been slated to begin this year, with trains operating in early 2019.



The investment required has been estimated at US$5.5 billion, 75 percent of which is being covered by loans from the China Development Bank.



The firm says it needs to procure at least 600 hectares of land for the project.



Hermanto said the ministry expected to issue the concession agreement and the railway infrastructure operational permit on Thursday and Friday, consecutively, if KCIC submitted the required documents.



Meanwhile, the firm has been unable to acquire the rail facilities operational permit, because of a shortfall in the capital requirement, with Rp 1.1 trillion ($79.2 million) recorded of the required Rp 1.25 trillion.

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Linkedin Anggi M. Lubis (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The State-Owned Enterprises Ministry is looking to book higher royalty incomes from state-run miners this year, despite unfavorable commodity prices that put pressure on the financial performance of mining firms last year.



The ministry wants mining royalties paid to the government to increase by about 16 percent from Rp 1.23 trillion (US$885.6 million) last year to Rp 1.45 trillion this year, according to Fajar Harry Sampurno, the ministry's assistant for mining, strategic industry and media. There are three mining firms under his division, namely diversified miner Aneka Tambang (Antam), coal miner Bukit Asam and tin producer Timah.



Fajar said recently that while he acknowledged that government-owned miners were struggling to mitigate impacts from slumping commodity prices, he was upbeat that the companies could meet the government's royalty targets thanks to a number of downstream projects expected to bolster the industry amid a sluggish global market.



'Oil prices have continued their downward trend, pushing down coal prices. Nickel and tin prices are also somewhat unnerving. However, we do believe that commodity prices will improve in the future,' he said.



'There will be more coal-fired power plants in the country, in line with efforts to boost power supply, and the plants will absorb the coal from the market, further boosting up prices. Also, a number of smelters will also start processing nickel, thus opening up a chance for exports,' he added.



Fajar was referring to the government's plan to boost electricity to 35,000 megawatts (MW) by 2019 ' a third of which will be fueled by coal. According to a previous report, about 2,458 MW of new capacity was added to the national electricity system in 2015.



He also added that Antam's ferronickel smelters were also expected to help boost nickel prices and exports.



Antam is expected to finish up the expansion of its facility at its Pomalaa base in Southeast Sulawesi this year. The improvements will see an expansion in production to between 27,000 and 30,000 tons of ferronickel (TNi) from previous production levels of 18,000 to 20,000 TNi. The company is also working on another smelter in East Halmahera, North Maluku.



Antam reported its net losses nearly doubled last year from Rp 590.37 billion to Rp 1.04 trillion on the back of rising costs and slumping commodity prices. The government's ore-exports ban, implemented in early 2014, triggered a significant drop in nickel sales, one of the company's largest sources of revenue.



Meanwhile, Bukit Asam and Timah have also struggled with declining coal and tin prices. Bukit Asam saw its net profits decline by around 5 percent between January and September last year, while Timah saw its bottom line reduced by around 98 percent.



Thermal coal at the port of Newcastle, Australia, a global benchmark, dropped to $50.63 a ton in the week ending Dec. 25, the lowest price since December 2006. Prices declined by 18 percent throughout 2015 according to a report by Bloomberg. Coal prices have been consistently plunging for around five years now, and currently trade at less than half the price registered in 2011. Tin prices, meanwhile, slipped by around 30 percent throughout the past year.



As previously reported, the ministry also plans to set up a holding company for state-run miners, the preparation of which is expected to be concluded by the end of this year.
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Linkedin Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The House of Representatives has established a national intelligence oversight team that will monitor the work of state intelligence officials and their clandestine operations.



'The formation of this team is a follow-up to Law No. 17/2011 on intelligence and the implementation of House Regulation No. 2/2014 on the national intelligence oversight team,' House Deputy Speaker Fadli Zon said during a plenary session on Tuesday.



Hanafi Rais, a National Mandate Party (PAN) politician and member of the oversight body, said that the team would only get to work if there was any indication that intelligence officials had broken the law. For example, by performing illegal wiretapping or unwarranted arrests, he said.



Hanafi said the unit could hold closed-door meetings and had been granted the power to summon whomever they wanted, from state intelligence officials and people deemed relevant to ongoing investigations to intelligence experts.



'But all state secrets will be kept confidential and our meetings will remain closed-door so as to ensure national security,' he said.



He added that the formation of the oversight body had nothing to do with the recent act of terrorism that took place in downtown Jakarta.



'It's been long overdue. The [Intelligence Law] stipulates the formation of an external supervision team, comprising members of the House commission tasked with intelligence matters,' Hanafi said. 'It's high time the team was put together.'



The unit comprises of 14 lawmakers from House Commission I overseeing intelligence, who were sworn in during the plenary meeting under an oath of secrecy, as they will be privy to state secrets and covert intelligence operations while carrying out their duties.



The team includes Commission I chairman Mahfudz Siddiq of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), Gerindra secretary-general Ahmad Muzani, former high-ranking Army officer and Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) politician TB Hasanuddin and United Development Party (PPP) secretary-general Dimyati Natakusumah.



The oath-taking and inauguration ceremony caught several members of the assembly by surprise, while others voiced concern that such processions were out of place in the plenary meeting.



Azis Syamsudin of the Golkar Party said that such a task-specific oversight team could instead have been inaugurated in a commission-level forum.



'Otherwise, if by extension we apply the prevailing jurisprudence at the House, the inauguration of all internal House bodies and their chairmanships must be conducted at the plenary level,' protested Azis.



PKS politician Nasir Djamil concurred with his House Commission III colleague, saying there was no prior notice regarding the inauguration ceremony. 'I'm in my third period at the House and I was flummoxed by the procession earlier. I support what Azis said, that we should take care not to blur the lines [of convention].'



The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (KontraS) questioned the impunity that may arise from having a supervision team consisting of politicians.



Puri Kencana Putri, KontraS' deputy coordinator for strategy and mobilization, took issue with the sudden establishment of the oversight body, which was done without any public awareness campaign.



'National intelligence supervisors need to have rules of procedure. Can the public file complaints with them? It should not be simply because someone is a politician sitting in House Commission I that he or she is so easily included on this committee,' she said.
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The House of Representatives has formed a special team to monitor the work of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN).

Elnino MH Mohi, a member of House Commission I, which oversees defense and foreign affairs, said the monitoring team was expected to help Indonesian intelligence gathering by taking stock of the issues faced by BIN.

The special team functioned both as an advocate for Indonesia's intelligence service and as a critic of its performance, he said on Tuesday.

The team could also detect financial difficulties related to BIN that could hamper the agency's work and suggest budget increases.

Poor intelligence-sharing among different authorities, such as the police, the Indonesian Military and the Attorney General's Office, is believed to hamper the country's intelligence efforts.

"We have high hopes for the special team. We also hope colleagues at BIN will be welcoming," said the Gerindra party politician.

The special team consists of 14 House members: Mahfudz Siddiq (as leader of the team), Tantowi Yahya, Asril Tandjung, Hanafi Rais, TB Hasanudin, A Fernandez, Ahmad Muzani, Joko Pujianto, Budiyotastri, Syaiful Bahri Ansori, Ahmad Zainuddin, A. Dimyati Natakusumah, Supiadin Ari Saputra and M Arief Suditomo. (liz/rin)(+)
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's first year in office produced a mixed record on human rights that lacked major initiatives to tackle the worst abuses, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in its latest report released today.

HRW reviews human rights practices in more than 90 countries in the 659-page World Report 2016, its 26th edition.

"Jokowi's first year as president was a missed opportunity to adopt urgently needed human rights measures," HRW deputy Asia director Phelim Kine said on Wednesday.

"But there is still time for him to adjust his policy priorities to actively protect human rights rather than turn a blind eye to serious abuses," he went on.

HRW noted that Jokowi released some Papuan political prisoners in 2015 and announced a plan to address decades of gross human rights violations, including the massacre of up to 1 million people in 1965-1966.

However, the group said, Jokowi largely ignored security force impunity for rights abuses and violations of women's rights and religious freedom.

"He also embraced the use of the death penalty for convicted drug traffickers, resulting in 14 executions in 2015, including a Brazilian citizen diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia," HRW said.

Citing rights group Setara Institute, HRW said 194 incidents of violent attacks on religious minorities had occurred in the first 11 months of 2015. They included the forced demolition by the Singkil regency, in the Aceh province, of nine Protestant churches in November, following the burning down of a church by militant Islamists on Oct.13, 2015.

The group praised Jokowi's policy to grant clemency to five of Papua's political prisoners in May 2015, followed by the release of Filep Karma, Indonesia's highest profile political prisoner, and in November. Approximately 45 Papuans and 29 Ambonese are still imprisoned for peaceful advocacy of independence, however.

"Despite Jokowi's pledge to thoroughly investigate and punish security forces implicated in the December 2014 deaths of five peaceful protesters in Papua's town of Enarotali, the government has failed to publicly release the results of three separate official investigations into the incident," said HRW, adding that Jokowi also failed to implement its promise to lift decades-old restrictions on foreign media access to Papua.

Citing the National Commission on Violence Against Women, HRW later criticized national and local governments, which passed 31 discriminatory regulations in 2015, leaving Indonesia with 322 discriminatory local regulations targeting women, ranging from compulsory hijab to tolerating polygamy.

The government also failed to end the documented use of abusive and discriminatory "virginity tests" for female applicants to the Indonesian Military (TNI) and National Police.

"The Jokowi government's approach to human rights has been more rhetoric than reality, while serious rights abuses go unpunished," Kine said.

"Jokowi can and should take strong actions to advance justice and curtail abuses in 2016." (ebf)
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post)  Wed, January 27, 2016

Indonesia will change its exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies by catering to China, which is currently in a crucial transition from having an economy based on investment, to one that is based on consumption.



Indonesia once enjoyed a commodity boom in coal and crude palm oil (CPO), but missed a chance to create a downstream industry. Thus, the prolonged moderate prices of commodities have made Indonesian exports to China diminish.



"It was good during the good times, but now their demand is different and they already offer investments. Shifting from trading to investment is important," said Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro during the Mandiri Investment Forum 2016 in Jakarta on Wednesday.



He pointed out that Malaysia and Vietnam created downstream industries and now change commodities into finished goods. Those kinds of goods were in line with China's growing consumer demands.



When the Chinese economy was slowing because of reduced investments, which in turn reduced demand for raw materials import from Indonesia, both Malaysia and Vietnam managed to maintain their exports of finished goods to China.



"It's ironic for us. Our exports to China are experiencing a negative growth because of low demand. We really need to change immediately and start trying to export finished goods," he said.



At the same time, Bambang continued, Indonesia should attract more capital or foreign direct investment (FDI) from China. Despite the high volume of capital inflow from that country, it is still less than what comes from Singapore, the US, Japan and some European countries.



Furthermore, he added that the Investment Coordination Board (BKPM) recorded a lot of investment commitments from China, but only few of them were realized. Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and the US are among the countries with a high number of actual investments.



"Our challenge is to attract potential investment from China and realize the investment in the field. Unfortunately, China is below 10 percent. It means from 100 commitments only 10 become real investments. Too many commitments, but few achievements," said Bambang. (ags)(+)
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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

An Indonesian citizen has reportedly died in Syria after fighting for the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group for the good part of a year.

Salim Rosyidi, a resident of Kedon village in the Bantul regency of Yogyakarta, died in May last year, Salim's younger brother, who can only be identified by the initial H, told kompas.com on Tuesday.

Salim's death was reported by Ulfah, Salim's wife, to the family after hearing the news from a friend living in Syria.

The brother said Salim went to Syria from Jakarta in October 2014. From Jakarta, he took a flight to Thailand and then to Turkey before finally arriving in Syria.

Before his departure in 2014, Salim told his parents on his plan to fight with IS.

"But our parents did not allow him. They got into debates on this," H told kompas.com, adding that Salim insisted on his plan and departed regardless.

The brothers kept in contact with each other through messaging services while Salim was in Syria.

Salim had studied in several Islamic boarding schools after graduating high school in Bantul, H explained.

After married with Ulfah in 2010, Salim studied in the Islam and Arab Science Institute (LIPIA) in Jakarta, where he worked guarding a mosque and teaching the Koran.

H suspected Salim received radicalism training in Jakarta, saying that he and Salim went to the same Islamic boarding school in Bantul but were never introduced to radicalism there.

Hundreds of Indonesians have reportedly gone to Syria through Turkey's borders to join IS for the so-called jihad movement.

At least 100 Indonesians returned home to Indonesia last year after failing to enter Syria from Turkey.

The National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti said last week that the National Police requested the Immigration Office to bar 308 Indonesians living in Syria from returning home. Police suspected those numbers to have joined IS.

Barring their return was meant as a security measure to prevent disturbances occuring in Indonesia, Badrodin said. (rin)(+)
China deported Peter Dahlin, who was suspected of supporting crimes that endangered Chinas state security. (Photo : Reuters)

The foreign ministry of China confirmed on Tuesday, Jan. 26, that the Swedish citizen suspected of funding activities threatening the national security had been expelled from china, as opposed to the previous misleading word released.



China deported Peter Dahlin, who was suspected of supporting crimes that endangered China's state security, on Monday, Jan. 25, in accordance with the relevant law, the Global Times reported.



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Speaking during a daily briefing on Tuesday, China's spokesperson, Hua Chunying, stressed: "I need to correct that he was not released but deported. In accordance with the Criminal Procedure Law, Beijing State Security Bureau placed Peter under compulsory measures of residential surveillance at a designated residence. After inquiries, Peter owned up to the crime."



Hua added that before that, after the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, China informed the Swedish government about the relevant circumstance and arranged for them to visit him.



Dahlin, who had co-founded the China Urgent Action Working Group that was involved in legal affairs, was arrested on Jan. 3.



The Embassy of Sweden in China confirmed with the Global Times by quoting the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Margot Wallstrom, saying, "I welcome that Peter Dahlin has been released and can be reunited with his family in Sweden. This has come about following frequent contact between the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Chinese representatives."



The Swedish national and some other individuals have been operating an unregistered legal aid group in the Chinese mainland. Dahlin received undisclosed amount of money from overseas and carried out illegal activities, according to the Xinhua News Agency in a different report.



Chinese police said that the agency hired and trained others to collect, duplicate and distort information about China, giving "China's human rights report" to firms abroad.



The organization also organized others to interfere in sensitive cases, intentionally spurring disputes and prompting public-government altercations to cause mass incidents.



Dahlin confessed on China Central Television (CCTV) on Jan. 19: "We have become aware that certain people that we have supported . . . have gone on to do acts in clear violation of the law. I violated China's law through my activities here and I've caused harm to the Chinese government. I've hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I apologize sincerely for this."


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Linkedin The Jakarta Post Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo has been advised to be cautious in dealing with the Golkar Party that declared its support to his government in a recent party meeting.



Before declaring its support for the government, Golkar had a key role in the Red and White Coalition (KMP) and therefore, said Pangi Syarwi Chaniago of Indostrategi in Jakarta on Wednesday, Jokowi had to consider carefully Golkar's motive for the change in its political stance.



Pangi believes that Jokowi needs to have a formal agreement with Golkar and other political parties in the ruling coalition so that there is a clear commitment that they will support government policies, particularly in dealing with the Houses of Representatives.



'As long as the government does not violate the Constitution, the Golkar Party and other political parties have to support government policies,' he said, adding that Jokowi needed to learn from former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's government whose policies were jeopardized by members of the ruling collation.



As the nation's second-largest political group, the Golkar Party's support will help the ruling collation to secure more than 70 percent of seats in the House of Representatives. The Golkar decision was made during the party's national leadership meeting in Jakarta that ran from Jan. 23 to Jan. 25 and was attended by representatives of Golkar's regional chapters.



Apart from having to deal with Golkar, Pangi, a lecturer at state-owned Syarif Hidayatullah Islamic University, said Jokowi could also face possible disappointment from political parties that had supported him since the beginning of his administration.



'There is a suspicion and a discontent within the ruling coalition, particularly because existing parties [within the collation] are unhappy that their ministerial positions will be reduced,' said Pangi, adding that it was the task of Jokowi to give a clear explanation about the entry of Golkar to the coalition.



Ahmad Basarah of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) appreciated the entry of Golkar into the ruling coalition, but advised Jokowi to manage the support of political parties wisely to avoid possible friction within the coalition.



'The most important thing is that Jokowi should be able to manage the support of political parties so that their support brings positive energy rather than negative energy [for his government],' said Basarah as reported by kompas.com.



He called on Golkar to immediately end its internal friction so that the party could give full support as an institution to the government. 'The Golkar support is expected to be comprehensive, as an institution and legally and politically legitimate,' he said. (bbn)(+)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Indonesia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) chairman Rosan Roeslani has remained tight-lipped over the controversial plan to sell shares in Bank Pundi ' controlled by his firm Recapital Securities 'to the Banten provincial government.



In a rare public appearance, Rosan, who became well known in local business circles after a US$1.6 billion cooperation deal with Nathaniel Rothschild turned sour, refused to comment on the planned Bank Pundi transaction.



"Now is not the right time. I am currently acting on behalf of Kadin and not as a business owner," Rosan told journalists after the opening bell at the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) in Jakarta on Wednesday.



Rosan, who took the helm of Kadin despite criticism over the delayed payment of severance pay to staff of his defunct Bloomberg TV Indonesia, promised to make a statement on Bank Pundi at another time.



In November 2015, the Banten administration announced its interest in buying Bank Pundi and making it a regional bank, despite there already being a regional bank, PT Bank Pembangunan Daerah Jawa Barat dan Banten (Bank BJB), serving the region.



The government intended to buy 50 percent of Bank Pundi through PT Banten Global Development. However, the acquisition was tainted by bribery allegations, forcing the home minister to instruct Banten Governor Rano Karno to freeze the purchase.



The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) arrested Banten Global Development CEO Ricky Tampinongkol after he allegedly handed over money to members of the Banten Legislative Council (DPRD) to ease the acquisition. (ags)
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Linkedin Prima Wirayani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

State-run pharmaceutical company PT Kimia Farma has established a joint venture with a South Korean-affiliated company to ensure the supply of raw materials for drug production.



Kimia Farma, a publicly listed company, signed, on Tuesday, documents for the formation of PT Kimia Farma Sungwun Pharmacopia, a joint venture company with PT Sungwun Pharmacopia Indonesia, the local arm of South Korean-based Sungwun Pharmacopia Co Ltd.



The joint venture company will establish a business in the chemical industry and plan to specifically produce active pharmaceutical ingredients and high functional chemicals, according to a Kimia Farma statement posted on the website of the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) on Tuesday.



Kimia Farma has injected Rp 20.63 billion (US$1.49 million) in capital into the new company. With such an investment, Kimia Farma holds 75 percent of the joint venture's total shares while the remainder is held by Sungwun Pharmacopia Indonesia.



'That amount of investment is 1.10 percent of our company's equity,' wrote Kimia Farma president director Rusdi Rosman, adding that his company's equity stood at Rp 1.87 trillion as of December last year.



Kimia Farma reported that its costs rose 12.15 percent year-on-year (yoy) to Rp 2.4 trillion during last year's first nine months. Its sales grew 12.9 percent yoy to Rp 3.47 trillion and its net profits expanded 14.9 percent to Rp 166.8 billion.



Earlier this month, Rusdi said his company was looking to raise around Rp 1 trillion from a rights issue to build factories and boost production capacity. His company, he said, needed around Rp 3.9 trillion for capital expenditure over the next three years, and thus needed to source fresh funds.



In December, the firm announced that, in 2016, it would start constructing a Rp 100 billion raw materials plant in Cikarang, West Java.



Raw materials for drugs have become one of the chief concerns of the pharmaceutical industry.



Recently, Indonesian Pharmaceutical Association (GP Farmasi) business development committee head Vincent Harijanto said that up to 95 percent of materials for local drug production were still imported.



He urged the government to offer incentives and to widen the door for foreign investment in the country's pharmaceutical industry to reduce the nation's dependence on imported raw materials for medicines.



The Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) has proposed a plan to allow foreign investors to hold more shares in pharmaceutical companies, from a maximum level of 85 percent currently to 100 percent in a bid to encourage the industry's development.
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Linkedin Erika Anindita (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) on Wednesday summoned Budi Supriyanto, a member of House of Representatives Commission V overseeing infrastructure, as a witness for businessman Abdul Khoir, who has been named a suspect in a graft case relating to an infrastructure project in the Maluku Islands.



"This is Budi's first questioning as a witness for AKH," KPK spokeswoman Yuyuk Andriati told thejakartapost.com in Jakarta on Wednesday, referring to Abdul.



Abdul, the CEO of construction firm PT Windhu Tunggal Utama (WTU), is accused of paying S$404,000 (Rp 3.9 billion) to several parties, including a House member from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), Damayanti Wisnu Putranti, to secure a construction project worth billions of rupiah in the Maluku Islands.



After arriving at the KPK headquarters at 8:59 a.m., Budi was questioned about the construction project, which was earmarked for the Public Works and Public Housing Ministry for the 2016 fiscal year.



Initially, the KPK summoned the Golkar Party lawmaker for questioning on Jan. 22 but he failed to show up as he was sick. Prior to that, the antigraft body imposed a travel ban on Budi and Soe Kok Seng, the director of construction firm PT Mas Cahaya Perkasa, who is also allegedly involved in the case.



The KPK banned Budi and Soe Kok Seng as it feared they would take evidence related to the case abroad.



KPK investigators arrested Damayanti on Jan. 13 for allegedly accepting bribes from a businessman. Damayanti is accused of accepting $99,000 in exchange for helping to secure the construction project in the Maluku Islands.



She is the second PDI-P House member to be arrested by the KPK since the party won the legislative elections in 2014. Last year, the antigraft body nabbed PDI-P lawmaker Adriansyah for accepting bribes on the sidelines of the party's congress in Bali. (ebf)(+)
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Linkedin Fedina S. Sundaryani, Haeril Halim and Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta/Medan  Wed, January 27, 2016

Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Muhammad Nasir has withdrawn his previous statement that members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community should be barred from university campuses.



Nasir said on Tuesday, LGBT communities were allowed to host on campus activities if they had been granted permission from their university. Furthermore, he specified that such groups would be allowed on campus as long they did not promote indecent acts, such as intimacy and sexual intercourse.



'I do not prohibit LGBT members from conducting activities on campus. [However] campuses are guardians of morality, so there should not be any activities that violate the conduct of decency, such as public displays of affection or making love on campus,' he told the press in Jakarta.



'Gathering for academic purposes, as university students, is not the problem. If they want to conduct consultations, research and education that will help them, then go ahead,' he added.



Nasir said that he did not have a problem with members of the LGBT community, adding that he once had a transgender friend during his time in university. 'Even someone who identifies as transgender has the right to an education,' he said.



LGBT activities on campus came into the spotlight recently when conservative media coverage attacked the Support Group and Resource Center on Sexuality Studies (SGRC) at the University of Indonesia (UI), highlighting its LGBT Peer Support Network, a counseling service in cooperation with melela.org, an online platform for LGBT individuals and their supporters to share their experiences. The group also encourages discussions and studies on topics surrounding gender and sexuality.



Messages have been circulating online calling on the public to establish anti-LGBT groups on campus and several lawmakers have slammed the SGRC UI.



Despite Nasir's retraction, the persecution against SGRC UI has triggered mixed reactions among academics.



Indonesian Rector Forum head Rochmat Wahab said that the university campus was not a place for LGBT organization as it went against 'normative' values.



'A campus is a place to develop character, leadership skills, social awareness and academia. If we look through the lens of our social norms, it is clear that it would be a violation to allow such groups to flourish,' said Rochmat, who is also the Yogyakarta State University (UNY) rector.



The North Sumatra Muhammadiyah University (UMSU) in Medan welcomes LGBT individuals to study at the campus.



UMSU spokesman Ribut Priadi said all students in the university were given Islamic education that would prevent them from partaking in any promiscuous act. 'We believe this can prevent the deviant behavior of LGBT from developing,' he said.



North Sumatra University (USU) rector Runtung Sitepu said he would dismiss any of his students involved in LGBT community activities on the campus. 'What will the students become if they no longer maintain moral norms?' he asked.



A lecturer in law at Sam Ratulangi University in Manado, North Sulawesi, Flora Kalalo, said that sexual preference was an individual's right. She said that, as long as LGBT individuals did not disturb activities on campus, they were not 'a problem'.



Lita Aruperes contributed to this article from Manado.

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Linkedin Haeril Halim and Fedina S. Sundaryani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) will press ahead with its probe into, and possible detention of, former president director of state port operator PT Pelindo II, RJ Lino, following the South Jakarta District Court's rejection of his pretrial plea on Tuesday.



KPK deputy chairman Alexander Marwata said that following the ruling investigators planned to question Lino, and other individuals, to complete his case dossier prior to his upcoming trial at the Jakarta Corruption Court.



Lino was named a graft suspect late last year for his alleged role in the rigging of the procurement of loading and unloading equipment worth US$20 million for Pelindo II in 2012.



'After questioning witnesses and the suspect in the case, we will send his dossier to the court,' Alexander said, following the court's decision.



He added that KPK leaders would soon convene with investigators working on Lino's case to decide when Lino would be taken to the antigraft body's detention center.



On Tuesday, South Jakarta District Court's sole judge Udjiati in her ruling deemed the KPK's investigation into Lino legitimate.



Udjiati rejected Lino's pretrial arguments, which claimed the charges brought against him by the KPK lacked legal foundation and evidence.



'The examination has confirmed that the KPK had collected at least two initial items of evidence before naming the plaintiff a suspect, thus, the plaintiff's claim that the KPK failed to collect enough evidence in the case is incorrect and should be rejected,' the judge said.



Udjiati added that she found no argument to order a halt to the investigation, as requested by Lino, because the KPK had collected at least 18 documents and questioned dozens of witnesses in its probe into Lino's role in the graft case.



The judge also ruled that KPK investigators working on the case had clear mandates. 'KPK investigators working in the case are also legitimate because the KPK has the authority to appoint its own investigators as mandated by law. The KPK also questioned [him] in the case before naming him a suspect. So all necessary elements have been fulfilled,' Udjiati said.



The judge also rejected Lino's request to order the KPK to present proof of state losses caused by Lino's intervention in the controversial procurement, which the KPK has claimed resulted in $3.6 million in state losses, saying 'such a request should be made during the hearing of the case at the Jakarta Corruption Court in the future, not at a pretrial hearing'.



Lino's lawyer Maqdir Ismail lambasted Udjiati for what he called a 'dangerous' ruling, saying the judge should have responded to his request for the KPK to present evidence on state losses in the case during the seven-day pretrial hearing.



'You can't just charge someone with corruption, in this case under Article 2 of the Corruption Law, without trying to prove that his or her actions have caused state losses. That's something that the KPK failed to show during the pretrial hearing,' Maqdir said.



The KPK has also accused Lino of abusing his authority by directly appointing an unqualified company, namely Chinese company Wuxi Huadong Heavy Machinery (HDHM), to supply the equipment.



Meanwhile, Lino is now the target of a police investigation and investigators working on his case are expected to name him a suspect soon.



Police investigators are looking into his alleged role in a separate controversial procurement of 10 mobile cranes worth Rp 45 billion ($3.25 million) for nine of Pelindo's ports in 2012 after the police received an audit from the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) confirming a total of Rp 37.9 billion in state losses in the case.



Earlier, BPK spokesman Yudi Ramdan Budiman confirmed that the audit found a number violations of laws and regulations in the crane procurement during the planning, auction and contract-awarding process.

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Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani and Hans Nicholas Jong (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The Health Ministry has said there was no reason to panic over the possible spread of Zika, a virus suspected of causing a rare birth defect. The ministry stated that no infections had been reported in the country, or even in the ASEAN region.



The ministry, however, warned Indonesian nationals against traveling to areas prone to the virus, such as South America.



'The government doesn't see any need to impose a travel ban, but we recommend that people reconsider traveling to those areas until local authorities in those countries declare that the situation is under control' Health Ministry secretary-general Untung Suseno Sutarjo told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.



Meanwhile, Ratna Budi Hapsari, the head of the emerging infectious diseases sub-directorate at the ministry, said that the government would step up its monitoring efforts to prevent the virus from entering the country.



'We have entry points at ports and airports. We will boost [surveillance] there,' she told reporters in Jakarta on Tuesday.



Health authorities have grown concerned with the spread of the dengue-like Zika virus since scientists in northeastern Brazil witnessed a surge in microcephaly cases, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads. The virus can affect motor skills and cause mental retardation.



Since then, Brazilian health officials have linked Zika to the microcephaly cases, with the country recording nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly since October last year.



According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile.



The organization also reported that the disease's rapid spread was due to a lack of immunity among the population and the prevalence of active Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the vector that transmits the virus. The same vector carries chikungunya and dengue fever.



Both Zika and dengue fever show similar early symptoms such as fever, rashes and joint pain. However, the clinical manifestation of Zika is not as severe as dengue fever, which can lead to shock and death.



According to Untung, in a tropical country like Indonesia, the Aedes Aegypti mosquito tends to breed within people's homes and usually produces an outbreak of dengue fever when the rainy season enters its peak.



Untung said that the preventative measures directed toward Zika would mirror those deployed against dengue fever. These measures usually center on eliminating potential mosquito breeding places such as those found in bath tubs, sinks and water tanks.



'We are familiar with dengue fever and we already know what to do. As long as we keep up cleanliness, we are on the right track to preventing Zika,' Untung said, adding that he was more worried about dengue fever than Zika.



Nasronuddin, the head of Institute of Tropical Diseases (ITD) at Airlangga University in Surabaya, said that until now, there existed no medicine to cure the disease.



'To avoid the infection, we really have to keep clean and take care of our immune system,' he said.
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Linkedin Nicholaus Prasetya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Comments from Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Muhammad Nasir mooting a ban on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people from academic life made headlines recently.



His comments, which came amid a furore over the establishment of an LGBT counseling group at the University of Indonesia (UI), were met with furious calls for retraction.



I remember the days when I was pursuing my studies in London. There was an 'open-house' day designed for all communities in the university to set up booths at an exhibition. All the new students were invited to browse the various societies and communities extant within the college.



During my undergraduate study in Indonesia, a similar event was also held at the beginning of each academic year, but I was nonetheless truly amazed by the diversity of the communities at my London university; it seemed there was no prohibition regarding what communities could be established. The booth for the atheists and agnostics was quite close to that of a religious community.



They all freely distributed information about their events, including a discussion questioning God's

existence. There was also a community for LGBT students to provide assistance and perspectives about sexual orientation.



I thought that in Indonesia it would be very likely that the communities would be disbanded or their discussion would be interrupted and urged to stop by hard-liners.



People may argue that the culture in London is very different from that in Indonesia.



However, it's not about East versus West ' the main thing is that such communities exist in an academic sphere. Why is it important to have such communities in the academic space?



The answer is simple: People associated with universities are supposed to think critically, rather than being dogmatic.



A thriving academic space requires open-mindedness.



What would have happened if the theory of heliocentrism had been rejected, just because it was contrary to church dogma?



Progress would have been arrested, and people would still be living in ignorance.



What is more fundamentally important is building a culture of tolerance, not only regarding religion but also of other issues, including sexual orientation.



Humans are not infallible, the philosopher Karl Popper notes. But how can people know when they make mistakes when there is only one existing view?



They should be able to compare different views and be allowed to reach rational judgment. If not, they become closed-minded, as if they live alone on this planet.



This is the main reason that Popper supports the construction of open society: Through exchange of rational argument and developing mutual tolerance with people holding different views, humans approach the truth, since the competing arguments can complement each other and lead people toward greater understanding.



Further, by inculcating intolerance of values that are 'un-Indonesian', Indonesians are actually contaminating their own value. Discussions, free from the threat of violence, should focus on what Indonesian values really are.



On campus at the University of Indonesia, I often saw flyers calling for the establishment of a religious state in Indonesia.



Were any ministers heard speaking out about this, considering that such an aspiration runs contrary to the values of the Pancasila state ideology?



In a democracy, disagreement, including over sexual orientation, is normal, as long as the existence of each group with different views is guaranteed.



The task of the government is to manage the competing views so they can live peacefully side by side.



The minister's statement therefore demonstrates a regrettable lack of understanding of this responsibility, and of the need for open-mindedness in the academic space.

__________________________________



The author, a chemical engineer, won the Ahmad Wahib Award in its annual interfaith writing contest in 2012.
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Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The police are either reluctant to name a suspect in the recent death of Wayan Mirna Salihin, or looking into the possibility of a 'murder mastermind' other than the two friends who were with Mirna at the time of her death, according to University of Indonesia crime expert Eko Haryanto.



Eko applauded the police for their responsive measures, particularly in identifying the chemical used to kill Mirna, but noted that the investigation seemed protracted for such an apparently simple case.



'I think they're worried about fingering the wrong suspect. Moreover, the police may be dealing with important persons in the case,' Eko said.



Mirna came from an affluent family, as do her friends Hani and Jessica Kumala Wongso, who were with her when she died.



The city has abounded with rumors that Jessica is the killer; she has been questioned five times by police, and Hani twice.



The case was not complex, Eko said, as it involved only a handful of figures present at the restaurant, but would become more difficult to unravel if the existence emerged of a plotter not present at the time, and who had 'special access to cyanide'.



'Chemists don't tend to stock cyanide [..] Jessica might have access to it, but did she kill Mirna? We don't yet know,' Eko said



On Tuesday, wartakotalive.com reported that Jessica worked as a graphic designer in the chemical division of a private company.



However, Eko urged the public not to jump to conclusions.



He emphasized that Jessica, along with Hani, might only be a witness with important information regarding the case.



Three weeks into the investigation, the police have yet to name any suspects in the case, which saw Mirna die after drinking coffee at an eatery at a Central Jakarta mall. The police have revealed that they found traces of cyanide in the coffee Mirna drank, as well as in her stomach. Hani also tasted the coffee after Mirna complained of its strange taste.



Jakarta Police general crimes director Sr. Comr. Krishna Murti said on Tuesday that the police were waiting for testimony from experts before moving to name a suspect.



However, Krishna declined to elaborate on the testimony the force needed. 'We need more testimony. We're looking to summon two or three experts,' he said.



The police would spend two days consulting with the experts in question, he added.



The police, he went on, had decided to not rush into naming a suspect following an 'extraordinary recommendation' from the Jakarta Prosecutor's Office advising investigators to collect more expert testimony.



Earlier in the day, investigators from the Jakarta Police met with Jakarta prosecutors for a closed case expose on Mirna's death.



Jakarta Prosecutor's Office general crimes assistant Mochammad Nasrun explained that after the five-hour meeting, the prosecutors had concluded that the police had conducted a well-structured and proper investigation.
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Linkedin Suherdjoko (The Jakarta Post) Semarang, Central Java  Wed, January 27, 2016

Three psychologist teams from the Central Java Police and two state-run universities in the province, namely the University of Diponegoro (Undip) in Semarang and Sebelas Maret University (UNS) in Surakarta, are ready to help Fajar Nusantara Movement (Gafatar) members suffering from psychological trauma, says a police officer.

"We were assigned here when the Gafatar followers were discharged from [ war vessel] KRI Teluk Gilimanuk on Monday. Now, we are waiting for the second batch of arrivals, in which the number of Gafatar followers repatriated may be higher than that day,' the Central Java Police's psychology division head Adj.Sr.Comr.Agus Yulianto told journalists at Tanjung Emas Port in Semarang on Wednesday.

As many as 1,281 Gafatar members traveling with passenger vessel KM Dharma Ferry 2 from Mempawah, West Kalimantan, are expected to arrive at Tanjung Emas Port in Semarang at 7 p.m. local time on Wednesday, two hours late than initially scheduled.

On Monday, 351 Gafatar members, half of whom were children, arrived at the port via KRI Teluk Gilimanuk.

'We have nine psychologists from the Central Java Police. There will be more psychologists dispatched from Undip and UNS as lecturers and other staff experts from the two universities are involved in this task,' said Agus.

He further said the psychologist teams would observe the Gafatar followers as soon as they were discharged from the vessel.

'If there are signs that they are experiencing psychological trauma, we will assist them,' said Agus.

'Those who suffer from trauma need immediate assistance. Here, we will map out their problems. Further assistance will be given at the Donohudan Haj dormitory in Boyolali,' he went on.

The commander of the Indonesian Navy Base in Semarang, Col.Eka Setyawan, said 975 personnel from the Indonesian Military (TNI), National Police, Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) and related institutions were ready to secure the second batch of arrivals in Semarang on Wednesday. (ebf)
Four out of Five U.S. companies affected by Chinas Firewall

A study by American Chamber of Commerce (ACC) has found that majority of American businesses in China are affected by stringent internet censorship. (Photo : Reuters)

A study by American Chamber of Commerce (ACC) has found that majority of American businesses in China are affected by stringent internet censorship.



The recent study compiled data from over 500 companies in China. The trends suggested by this study are claimed to hold true for most foreign companies operating out of China.



Advertisement

Citing excerpts from this study, Tech in Asia reported that four of five American companies are negatively impacted by China's heavy internet restrictions. Companies have difficulty accessing Gmail for correspondence, Facebook for public interfacing, and YouTube for training materials. These global sites are heavily intercepted and sometimes face outright ban by Chinese authorities. Many companies try to get around these internet restrictions by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN,) but using VPN slows down speed.



An earlier study reported by Los Angeles Times in 2015 reported that China's Great Firewall shuts out not just tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter, but also Snapchat, Dropbox, Ustream and Wordpress. Furthermore, American internet companies are also pressurized to turn over user data and intellectual property. Or they are pressurized to transfer technology to their Chinese counterparts.



Very interestingly, ACC's study shows that around 20 percent U.S. companies claim that China's internet censorship has positive impact on their business. Tech in Asia reasons that internet censorship weeds out competition for these 20 percent companies. Curbs on Facebook or Google would certainly benefit companies engaged in offering social networking or internet search services.



According to ACC's study, about 71 percent companies complain that China's censorship inhibit their access to crucial information, create difficulties in data exchange, hinder research capabilities, and hence, lower overall productivity.



An estimate of revenue loss caused to American businesses is yet to be arrived at; however, around 96 percent companies respond that positive changes to present regulatory framework are unlikely to occur in next two years.


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Linkedin Khoirul Amin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The government and automotive industry players are playing down the abrupt exit of Ford from Indonesia, saying it will not dent the country's vision of becoming Southeast Asia's auto hub in the future.



Industry Minister Saleh Husin said the news did not signal an under-performing automotive industry but rather stiffer competition in Indonesia. 'It has no impact on the local industry because Ford imports cars from Thailand. Automotive investment in the country remains pretty good,' Saleh told reporters on Tuesday.



'We have Mitsubishi, Isuzu and Wuling currently constructing their factories [worth around US$1 billion],' he added,



Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) data show that new investment in the sector increased 13 percent year-on-year to Rp 21.6 trillion ($1.55 billion) last year.



Besides Ford, General Motors also decided to shut down its Indonesian operation last year.



Meanwhile, Association of Indonesian Automotive Manufacturers (Gaikindo) chairman Jongkie Sugiarto expressed similar optimism, saying that, 'The two exits do not necessarily mean we can't become an auto hub. We still have other brands investing billions of dollars.'



Jongkie said the auto hub dream was perfectly realizable, given the country's 250-million population, which is both a huge market and a source of manpower.



'The problem now is that we have to maximize current capacity by making more demands and producing more SUV and sedan types to export as they're much sought after worldwide,' he said over the phone.



Currently, annual production capacity amounts to 1.9 million units, however only 1.03 million units were produced in January to November last year due to the economic slowdown.



'We suggest the government lower the luxury tax to boost demand, especially for sedans and SUVs. If the demand is high, investors will automatically come,' he said.



Gaikindo met President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo last October to pass on the message as well as to suggest a tax holiday for spare-part producers to help the industry grow and compete with Thailand, currently the biggest automaker in the region.



ASEAN Automotive Federation data show that for the January to November period last year, Thailand produced 1.76 million units, compared to Indonesia's 1.03 million.



However, the data also show that Thailand's production has declined significantly, by 24 percent from 2.5 million in 2013 to 1.9 million in 2014.



Indonesian production, meanwhile, has been stagnant at around 1 million to 1.2 million since 2013.



Many foreign automakers source their spare parts or unit production locally to reduce costs. Ford, for example, has its manufacturing base in Thailand.



The lack of a factory in Indonesia was also seen by Minister Saleh as one of the factors for its unsustainable domestic sales. 'Ford's presence here is not supported by a local components industry. It's different compared to those who already have a significant proportion of local content,' the minister said.



On Monday, the US-based automaker announced its decision to halt operations in Japan and Indonesia as it saw 'no reasonable path to profitability' in the two countries where it has struggled to gain market share amid competition with Japanese brands.



Japanese brands account for around 95 percent of total auto sales in Indonesia, according to Gaikindo.



Ford Motor Indonesia communication director Lea Kartika Indra said the company would close all of its 44 dealerships before the year-end but would provide spare parts and servicing through alternative means that will be announced prior to its departure.



According to Gaikindo's Jongkie, the Ford exit is not a threat to other smaller players, ranging from Chinese brands to European luxury cars, because 'It's all about offering the right products at the right price at the right time.' (rbk)
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Linkedin Ina Parlina (The Jakarta Post) Dili, Timor Leste  Wed, January 27, 2016

Indonesia and Timor Leste agreed to enhance what they both called already-strong bilateral ties on President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo's first state visit to Dili, and also reiterated a commitment to speeding up land and maritime border resolutions.



Jokowi was in Dili on Tuesday, his first trip abroad this year, and met with Timor Leste Prime Minister Rui Maria de Araujo and President Taur Matan Ruak.



Jokowi said that not only did Indonesia share a similar desire to Timor Leste to enhance the existing close friendship between the two neighboring countries, but that Jakarta had reaffirmed its 'commitment as the main partner in the development of Timor Leste'.



Indonesia and Timor Leste have been negotiating border issues since 2002, soon after the latter formalized its independence from Indonesia following a UN-supervised referendum held in 1999. Indonesia and Timor Leste have agreed on more than 900 coordinates as border points, but two land border areas ' Noel Besi-Citrana and Bijael Sunan-Oben ' remain unresolved.



'Indonesia and Timor Leste are committed to speeding up negotiations on borders; in terms of land borders, to immediately solve the two unresolved segments; in terms of maritime borders, to start talks on the segment in northern Timor Leste in the first quarter of 2016,' Jokowi told a press conference after meeting with Araujo.



The two remaining unresolved land border segments are still under ongoing negotiation, although, during a bilateral meeting between the Jokowi and Araujo in Jakarta late last year, the two countries agreed to seek to resolve the two segments by the end of last year. At that time, Jakarta and Dili also agreed to begin negotiating the delimitation of maritime boundaries.



Technical teams from the two countries have also met to negotiate the land border issues.



According to Araujo, the two countries were indeed committed to resolving the land border issues 'in the spirit of goodwill and solidarity', adding, 'We are confident this can be achieved very quickly.'



Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said that a joint field survey ' which aimed to get input from customary groups with the rights to land in unresolved land border segments ' was expected to be held next month or in March.



On Tuesday, the two neighboring countries also signed 5 memorandums of understanding, covering: cooperation on energy, including joint research and study; illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing; youth and sports, including capacity and entrepreneurship building; climatology and geophysics; and archives.



Araujo said that Jokowi's visit reflected an enhanced, strong and positive bond between the two nations.



'While we have had a difficult past, today Timor Leste and Indonesia are global models for reconciliation and peace in an increasingly divided world. We share an island and we share a future,' he added.



Earlier that day, Jokowi held a meeting with President Ruak in which he was bestowed the highest Timorese honor, the Grand Collar of the Order.



'This award means a big responsibility for us to maintain a friendship and close cooperation that will mutually benefit Indonesia and Timor Leste,' Jokowi said.



While Ruak also appreciated Indonesia for supporting Timor Leste's bid for ASEAN full membership, saying that it would be important for their efforts to improve their economy and social welfare, as well as for attracting investment.
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Linkedin Indra Budiari (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

Tukeni and her neighbors in Cipinang Besar Selatan low-cost apartment (rusunawa) in East Jakarta were checking the progress of dozens pots of kale they had planted a week earlier, when suddenly rain began to fall, forcing them to run to the nearest beverage stall.



'The rain is good for the plants and fortunately they were planted near our houses so we can just go home every time it falls,' Tukeni, who lives at Block A of the rusunawa, told The Jakarta Post.



Tukeni was one of the 41 residents at the rusunawa who registered as a member of the apartment's farmers group that has planted various crops including kale, chili and spinach in the apartments' limited green area.



Residents of all five blocks of the rusunawa have been involved in urban farming since they secured

a permit from the apartment's management in November last year, with chili being the main commodity.



Each block has one farming group, each of which received around 100 square meters to farm. With assistance from the Jakarta Housing and Government Building Agency, Bank Indonesia and agricultural magazine Trubus, the group learned about soil and crop types and how to plant crops.



'Last time my farm group harvested various plants including three kilograms of kale and 2.9 kilograms of lettuce,' Tukeni said, adding that most of the yield was consumed by residents and some was sold to the Housing and Government Building Agency officers.



In the past few years urban farming has become a hot topic among the middle class in Jakarta, especially those wanting to watch the growing process of their food, most of which is produced far from the capital.



Recently the city administration has started to share the idea with rusunawa residents, most of them marginalized citizens who have been evicted by the administration from their houses.



Cipinang Besar Selatan rusunawa management head Eko Mardirianto said that most of the evicted residents from riverbanks did not actually have an agriculture mindset, having lived in an urban setting since they were born.



But, he hoped that they would learn about urban farming as it could provide extra income and even become their livelihood.



Joyce Jendrawati, resident of the apartment and secretary of the farming groups, said the group had also learned about hydroponic farming and received various tools to allow them to practise it from the agency and Trubus magazine.



Trubus magazine is a long-running publication about agriculture as a hobby.



'Some of the residents have basic knowledge about farming as they used to be a farmers in their hometowns, but hydroponic farming is a completely new thing for us,' Joyce said.



The hydroponic system, which has started to become popular in Jakarta, does not use soil, depending instead on water as its medium, requiring nutrients to be dissolved in the water.



According to Joyce, in a bid to have a more focused farmers group, the 41 members have divided themselves to two groups: one that focus on soil farming and the other on hydroponic farming.



Joyce said she was very enthusiastic to learn about hydroponic farming, and emphasized that she hoped it could be applied in other places when she one day left the rusunawa.



'One day my husband and I might leave this place and I hope this farming experience could help me earn a living in a new place,' she said.
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Linkedin Sudhin Thanawala (The Jakarta Post) Stanford, California  Wed, January 27, 2016

Rising tension between Russia and the US, North Korea's recent nuclear test and a lack of aggressive steps to address climate change are putting the world under grave threat, scientists behind a "Doomsday Clock" that measures the likelihood of a global cataclysm said Tuesday.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the minute hand on the metaphorical clock remained at three minutes-to-midnight. The clock reflects how vulnerable the world is to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies, with midnight symbolizing apocalypse.

"Unless we change the way we think, humanity remains in serious danger," said Lawrence Krauss, chair of the bulletin's Board of Sponsors.

Krauss said the Iran nuclear agreement and Paris climate accord were good news. But the good news was offset by nuclear threats, including tension between nuclear-armed states India and Pakistan, and uncertainty that the Paris accord will lead to concrete action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists behind the bulletin adjusted the clock from five minutes-to-midnight to three minutes-to-midnight last year. They cited climate change, modernization of nuclear weapons and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals as "extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity." The clock was previously at three minutes-to-midnight in 1984, when the bulletin said talks between the U.S. and Russia virtually stopped.

From a climate change perspective, if midnight on the clock represents the disappearance of humanity, three minutes-to-midnight is overly dire, said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University who is not affiliated with the bulletin.

On the other hand, Oppenheimer said if midnight means humans have emitted so much greenhouse gas that dangerous climate change is inevitable, then three minutes is a "fair analysis."

"I think the jury is out as to whether the Paris agreement will make a significant difference," he said. "The key is whether countries over the next couple of years are able to agree on some important details that were left out."

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine examining social and scientific controversies, said in an email that the Doomsday clock is "an exercise in pessimism and PR with little connection to the reality of moral progress made in the past half century." Shermer cited reductions in the number of nuclear weapons since the 1980s and the absence of war between Europe's great powers since World War II.

California Gov. Jerry Brown joined former US Secretary of State George Shultz and former US Secretary of Defense William Perry for a discussion at Stanford University after the unveiling of the clock.

Perry raised concerns about rhetoric from Russia about the use of nuclear weapons and said the threat of nuclear disaster was greater today than during the Cold War. Shultz said the U.S. needs to engage Russia and China. Brown warned about "tipping points" in the fight against climate change.

"And around a tipping point, we may not be able to come back to a stable planet or one we'll find very comfortable to live in," he said.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons. The clock was created two years later.

The decision to move or leave the clock alone is made by the bulletin's science and security board, which includes physicists and environmental scientists from around the world, in consultation with the bulletin's Board of Sponsors, which includes more than a dozen Nobel laureates.

The closest the clock has come to midnight was two minutes away in 1953, when the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb that followed a US hydrogen bomb test.

Associated Press writer Kristin J. Bender in San Francisco contributed to this story.
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Linkedin Raras Cahyafitri (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 27, 2016

The status of the export permit extension for PT Freeport Indonesia remains unclear as the copper and gold miner has not responded to the government's request for a deposit that will serve as a guarantee of the company's commitment to complete its smelter development.



Freeport Indonesia, a subsidiary of US-based Freeport McMoRan Inc., currently holds a permit to export semi-finished copper concentrate until Jan. 28.



The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry said last week that a recommendation for another six-month permit would be granted if the miner met two prerequisites in view of the sluggish development of its smelter in Gresik, East Java.



The prerequisites are a mandatory 5 percent export tax, which has been implemented for the past six months, and a surety deposit of US$530 million.



The ministry's minerals and coal directorate general has argued that the $530 million was equal to the money the company should have spent on developing the smelter as scheduled.



'The firm has yet to respond. To my knowledge, they are still working on it [the response],' said Mohammad Hidayat, the minerals director at the ministry, on Tuesday.



Freeport Indonesia's director Clementino Lamury visited the mineral and coal directorate general on Tuesday but he declined to make a statement after the visit.



On Monday, representatives from Freeport Indonesia also attempted to meet Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution but the meeting was postponed.



Clementino had earlier claimed the smelter development in Gresik had progressed by 30 percent, which was calculated based on the planned disbursement of investment.



The company is developing the smelter as part of its efforts to meet the country's downstream policy on minerals.



The government is monitoring the smelter development as the progress will determine the issuance of the export permit.



However, the progress of the smelter development is not as advanced as had been expected.



Freeport Indonesia said earlier that it planned to break the ground for the smelter development in July this year.



The company holds a contract of work to mine copper in Papua.



Its production usually amounts to around 2 million tons of copper concentrate. As much as 30 to 40 percent of the total production is sent to an existing smelter also located in Gresik. The remaining production is sent overseas.



Thus, any disruption to its exports could affect the company badly as sales to the existing Gresik smelter account for less than half of its production capacity.



The new smelter, which is expected to cost $2.1 billion, will be located near the existing one.



Tassia Sipahutar contributed to the story

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Linkedin Arif Suryobuwono (The Jakarta Post)  Wed, January 27, 2016

Just as the well-known kiwi fruit and bonsai originate from China, so too does the globally renowned tea Japanese ceremony, chanoyu, which literally means hot water for tea and philosophically, the way of tea.



Like bread and wine that Christians use as a medium in the Holy Communion to commune with God, tea ' in this case powdered green tea called matcha ' serves as a medium in the elaborately staged ritual to show respect to, and commune harmoniously with, virtually everything in one's surroundings where the ceremony takes place.



Although chanoyu is secular, it has religious elements, growing from the custom of Zen Buddhist monks drinking tea from a single bowl in front of a statue of their founder, Bodhidharma, during their act of worship.



According to several references, this meticulously choreographed tea ritual appears to be modeled after a Chan (known as Zen in Japanese) Buddhism ritual of Song Dynasty China (960-1279), whose rules of etiquette were laid down in detail in 1103 in Chanyuan Qinggui (Rules of Purity for the Chan Monastery), which specifies the ritual required for tea.



Bordering on perfectionism, the monastic code's intricacy and complexity satisfy those with passion for fine detail who strive to hold themselves to very high standards, which today's chanoyu practitioners could easily relate to.



In line with the art of powdered tea prevalent during its gestation period, chanoyu follows the practice of using powdered tea from steam-prepared dried tea leaves and the whipping of the tea powder and hot water together in a bowl that was common in the Song Dynasty.



However, all the complexities and aesthetics of the Chinese tea ceremony on which chanoyu was embryonically based were brought to an abrupt end after a Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) fleet under the leadership of Kubilai Khan destroyed the last bastion of the Song Dynasty at the Battle of Yamen in 1279, which saw Song chancellor Lu Xiufu drown himself with the emperor.



The Mongol rulers erased aspects of Song culture they disliked including the frothy whipped tea as they favored the strong, dark brick tea mixed with fermented milk they were accustomed to.



Although they tolerated the loose leaf tea newly discovered by their Chinese subjects, tea drinking in China has since been reduced to a mere functional act.



The Chinese later developed another tea ceremony called gongfu cha involving successive brewing of loose-leaf tea poured into small ceramic cups to be shared and appreciated.



'Chanoyu and gongfu cha are two different worlds; each is difficult in its own way,' said Suwarni Widjaja, initially a Chinese tea expert who later branched off into Japanese tea culture.



Prior to the Mongol invasion, however, a Japanese monk named Eisai twice visited Song Dynasty China to learn that Chan Buddhism took Chinese tea seeds to Japan along with the Chinese ideas and customs associated with tea under the Chan Buddhism prevailing at that time, which formed the basis of chanoyu.



Subsequent Japanese pilgrims, scholars and tea masters later on built on Eisai's heritage and developed chanoyu into its present form. So, chanoyu is basically a relic of Song tea culture that was adopted and flourished in Japan, where it found a new spiritual home after its Holy Grail in China completely disappeared.



In Confucianism-influenced Japan, where the subservience of women to men was regarded as natural and proper, chanoyu was initially confined to Zen monasteries, among warriors, the upper class, the ruling class (during the 14th through 16th centuries) and the elites, and was thus almost entirely a male pursuit.



It flourished greatly during the Tokugawa (shogunate) period (1603-1868) during which three chanoyu schools (Urasenke, Omotesenke and Mushanokojisenke) were established.



However, in the following Meiji period (1868-1912), chanoyu fell on hard times as its patrons, territorial warrior rulers, were dissolved as a class. But then, in about two decades, chanoyu began to recover.



Urasenke added chanoyu to the instructional curricula of public schools, especially women's schools, as an essential means for training young ladies in proper etiquette, bearing and aesthetic taste.



This started the feminization of chanoyu, which has since been seen as mainly an activity of women. Yet, at its pinnacle, its original patriarchal nature remains intact. 'Only men can become chanoyu masters. The highest chanoyu rank a woman can achieve is instructor or teacher,' said Suwarni.



Despite this glass ceiling, many women continue to learn the art from Suwarni, including a Muslim woman who wears a kimono with a hijab in the tatami room ' a sign of the times that may help to give this ancient ceremony a contemporary flavor.




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Linkedin The Jakarta Post  Wed, January 27, 2016

Your comments on the government's planned revision of the 2003 Terrorism Law in an endeavor to strengthen the country's antiterrorism measures:

To overcome antiterrorism measures there's only one way and that's to lose injustice or to upright justice. No other way, even a nuclear bomb, will help, believe me.



Eduard Iseli



All this time, the police could detect terrorists. And that is why National Police deputy chief Badrodin Haiti and the police named an innocent murdered man a terrorist! You are totally clueless!



And how long did police leadership know this and only now decide to press for a law change?



Once again, reactive instead of proactive.



Willo1246



I do believe that these guys could be charged with crimes against humanity for their actions in Iraq and Syria.



It is fairly easy to cooperate with the international court there and get a summons for these guys as well as the right to prosecute them.



Indonesia signed the international treaty on this and has the right to prosecute its citizens accordingly.



OB



My suggestion is to change Law No. 15/2003 on terrorism to read 'detention without trial', so that these dangerous and thoughtless criminals would have no chance to launch their evil and deadly

assaults on innocent lives within the country.



This means there would be no remission and only the President would have the power to free them.



Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly should be deprived of his power to release anyone under the amended law.



Detention without trial laws are not new in Asia. This is being practiced in Singapore and Malaysia where political detainees are also included.



Luwanto



It is a good start that will isolate the terrorists currently incarcerated and only allow them supervised visits with next of kin.



I want to remind you that this was possible with a totally corrupt prison management bureaucracy.



As usual, attendees will pretend that law enforcement in the country is running smoothly and it will all be a waste of time.



BB

______________________________________

Topic of the day



LGBT on campus



Several public officials have expressed their opposition to the admission of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students into universities because they think the group taints the nation's morality. What do you think?



Send your thoughts by email, SMS, Twitter or Facebook. Include your name and city.
SAT, an entrance exam to get into US universities and colleges, was cancelled this weekend at centers in China and Macau, following concerns that some students might have seen copies of the test in advance. (Photo : Reuters)

SAT, an entrance exam to get into US universities and colleges, was cancelled this weekend at centers in China and Macau, following concerns that some students might have seen copies of the test in advance.



The SAT college board from New York disclosed on Thursday that the tests stand cancelled. Stacy Caldwell, the firm's vice president, confirmed the cancellation of the tests. Cardwell also said that 45 testing centers were affected, but the exact numbers of students not taking the test this weekend were not known. They will likely advise students to appear for a makeup exam, which will be scheduled in a month.



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In China, SAT is administered primarily in international schools, where only a few students of Chinese nationality are enrolled. They generally appear for SAT in other countries, or in the Chinese territories of Macau and Hong Kong. Beijing-based education researcher and consultant Jiang Xueqin said that the issue is more complicated, and many international students were actually Chinese with a foreign passport.



The cancellations also mark a string of test security problems for the College Board and the Educational Testing Service, the non-profit organization that administers and holds the test. They did not disclose how many students have accessed the SAT test in advance, or how they breached the server, owing security concerns.



"We take test security very seriously. When we deliver a SAT score, that score is a fair and balanced score. When we see any sorts of reports of security incidents, we run them down," Zachary Goldberg, the College Board spokesman, reported.



An after-the-fact statistical analysis is being conducted by the college board to find test score patterns that suggest cheating, and may even lead to stringent identification from students, if imposters are found to have appeared for the test.


1. The Revelation of St. Arbitron

And behold, a door was opened, and I heard a voice saying, In the name of Zarathustra and Inherit the Wind and the H.M.S. Beagle, I will cleanse thee of ignorance and iniquity. And I looked, and a throne was set atop the bestseller list, and on this throne sat Richard Dawkins, bearing in his right hand The God Delusion. And a great cry went up throughout the land, yea, even unto the last airport bookshop. Then I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven cigarettes, and upon his cigarettes seven flames, and upon his horns ten copies of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and verily, this was the one called Hitchens. The four angels of radio, print, television, and blog rested not day and night, saying, Holy, holy Hitch; the great day of his wrath is come. And he spake many hard words before going away to the green room of Charlie of Rose to sup on sandwiches of watercress and await the final victory.

So, at any rate, apostles of secularism might recall the mid-Aughts a century from now. Those pre-Crash years also saw the publication of blockbuster critiques of religion by cognitive theorist Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell) and neuroscientist Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation). By the spring of 2007, when the distinguished British philosopher A.C. Grayling brought forth Against All Gods, a collection of polemics against religion, a movementor at least, a cool name for onehad emerged: The New Atheism. But aside from a genre-defining profile in Wired Magazine, the New Atheism was written about more often than well, obscuring the really interesting question. What, aside from a common subject and a serendipity of publication dates, bound these writers together? What exactly made the New Atheism new?

One answer was, simply, the temperature of its rhetoric. Gone was the hedged irony of Voltaire, the allegorical grandeur of Nietzsche, the urbane agnosticism of Bertrand Russell; from titles onward, truculence was the order of the day. (Particle physicist Victor J. Stengers God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, from 2007, surely deserves a special place in the annals of unsubtlety.) Gone, too, was the Grand Bargain biologist Stephen Jay Gould had proposed in the mid-90s: that science and religion coexist as non-overlapping magisteria. For Hitchens, a semi-pro talk-show guest, disagreeing to disagree may have been a point of pride. But for Grayling, an ethicist, it was a matter of principle. For too long, he argued, liberal tolerance had thrown a diaphanous veil over religions most illiberal drivestoward dogma, toward repression, toward conquest and sectarian violence. Dawkins was even more explicit: As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, he wrote, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden.

To the New Atheists credit, their anti-jihad jihad was an interfaith affair, targeting not only bearded Wahabbists but Orthodox Israeli settlers and Bible-thumping televangelists. Hitchens derided the Bush Administration for want[ing] to hand over the care of the poor to faith-based institutions, even as he bolstered the anti-Islamist case for its wars in Greater Petrolia. Dawkins warned of a Christian Taliban in the U.S.

Today, though, the religious foment that seemed just a few years ago to be a species-level threat looks more like random variation in a global evolution toward unbelief. Barack Obama may have been the first U.S. presidential candidate to have to leave his church in order to be elected. Gay marriage just became legal in New York. Osama bin Laden is dead, and the largely secular character of the Arab Spring has muted talk of a Second Caliphate abroad. The Great Economic Stagnation has, give or take a few mosques, redirected our attention from cultural quiddities to our credit-card statements. If a turn toward fundamentalism were truly the alpha and omega of the New Atheist story, we might expect the latter to have run its course.

Instead, its proven strangely durable; witness such recent titles as The Divinity of Doubt and The Christian Delusion and The Belief Instinct and The Religion Virus and Against All Gods (no relation), not to mention Stengers The New Atheism and Harris The Moral Landscape and Hitchens The Quotable Hitchens and Philip Pullmans The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ. How to square this abundance of supply with the dwindling of demand? A solution appears when we turn to what is in many ways the most ambitious and interesting of these second-wave works, Graylings The Good Book: A Humanist Bible. It is, surprisingly, that the New Atheisms quarrel isnt really with God after all.

2. Bringing Down the Velvet Hammer

To the fine art of sacrilege, Grayling brings a lighter touch than Dawkins, the New Atheisms Cardinal Newman, or Hitchens, its Torquemada. (Im the velvet version, Grayling has said.) Where God is Not Great was content to assert that The serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoythan in the mythical morality tales of the holy books, The Good Book aims to demonstrate it. That is, rather than pump out another polemic, Grayling has conceived selected redacted arranged worked and in part written a huge and entirely God-free compendium of what the poet Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said, from Plato to Cato, from the Metamorphoses to The Origin of Species.

This would be a major intellectual achievement in its own right. Owning The Good Book is like having the entire Western Canon on Shuffle (or, depending on your place in the culture wars, being stuck with The White Mans Greatest Hits). And its possible to treat it not as an argument at all, but as a desk reference or even a cheap alternative to freshman year of college.

Still, theres a distinctly New Atheist provocation in Graylings decision to format his diverse sources in the manner of that other Good Book. A one-man Council of Nicea, he has arranged his source material thematically, scrubbed it of attributions, rendered prose into numbered and vaguely iambic verse, and filled in gaps with his own transitional passages. The seams are nearly invisible. What we see instead are fourteen cohesive books, with titles like Proverbs, Acts, and Parables. Graylings ambition, clearly, is not just to secularize religious accounts of the human condition (a la the Jefferson Bible); its to supplant them.

How successful is he? It may be useful to think back to the criteria for belief systems William James laid out a century ago in The Varieties of Religious Experience (still the best book youre likely to find on the subject of faith.) By James first measure, philosophical reasonableness, The Good Book blows most scripture out of the water. The forces underlying everything in its Genesis are the empirically verifiable laws of physics and biology. The apple in this garden is Newtons. And the scientific account of creation leaves little room for the repressions and mystifications of monotheism. No Adams rib, no original sin, and no hang-ups about the body and its urges:

If an individual should be presented to another of the same species and of a different sex,

Then the feeling of all other needs is suspended: the heart palpitates, the limbs tremble;

Voluptuous images wander through the mind

Its interesting that heterosexism should persist even here, but Graylings commitment to objectivity helps dilute it. (Later, in Acts, hell handle the ancient Greek practice of pederasty with nary a blush.) At any rate, its hard to imagine The Good Book driving readers to disown family members on account of sexual preference, or to stone to death women accused of adultery.

The Good Book comes on equally strong in James second category, moral helpfulness. When God said to Abraham, Kill me a son, Ciceros argument against vice in the name of loyalty (paraphrased in a section called Concord) might have come in handy. And to the New Testaments ethic of judgment (Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God), The Good Book counterposes the urbane empathy of Walter Pater:

Not to recognize, every moment, some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of their ways,

Is, in lifes short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

Is virtue possible in the absence of brimstone and damnation? In fact, as the title suggests, a coherent philosophy of virtue is The Good Books signal accomplishment.

Graylings scriptural ambitions, however, impose on the text a split personality. At any given moment, it speaks with the wise mans Apollonian serenity. In the exhaustive and exhausting aggregate, though, The Good Book starts to seem anxious that no ones listening. This anxiety comes to the fore in the penultimate chapter, Epistles, which takes the form of father-to-son letters and reads like Hamlet, if Hamlet were a two-hour monologue by Polonius. Over and over, the writer warns his son that jokers, distractions, and weak minds are all around. We begin to hear echoes of the other New Atheists: of Harris attack on moral relativism; of Dawkins intolerance for semi-believers and Possibilitarians; of Hitchens call for A New Enlightenment. What elevates stronger minds above the masses, in The Good Book, is faith in a very particular strain of the humanist tradition. In fact, that faith is what united the New Atheists all along.

3. Forever and Ever, A Meh

Humanism, as Grayling circumscribes it, is pragmatic, rationalist, and skeptical only in a narrow, scientific sense. The great pessimists and naysayers who haunt Western philosophy appear here and there in The Good Booka soupcon of Hume in The Lawgiver, a dollop of Schopenhauer in Lamentations. (Interestingly, these are where the book comes closest to achieving James third criterion, immediate luminousness.) But in its basic outlines Graylings humanism is that of the nineteenth-century positivists, who built a philosophy around their belief in the perfectability of human nature. For Grayling, and for the other New Atheists, reason doesnt just answer questions about our origins and our ethics; it moves us toward that city on a hill where, The Good Book promises, the best future might inhabit, and the true promise of humanity be realized at last.

But expressed this nakedly, the vision seems Whiggish, even naive. And certainly outdated. For four centuries after Copernicus uncentered the Earth, reason was on the march, claiming more and more of the territory previously arrogated to religion. In the fields of biology and cosmology and paleontology, angels rushed out wherever wise men dared to tread. (Grayling, alone among the New Atheists, has emphasized this historical long view: Todays religious upsurge, is a reaction to defeat, in a war that it cannot win.) More recently, though, various experiments in the sphere of culturelaissez-faire economics, Politburo politics, literary Deconstructionhave suggested that irrationalism persists, or even thrives, where religion has been elbowed aside. (A Good Book-style anthology limited to the post-1960s period would echo Ezekiel, by way of the Byrds: overturn, overturn, overturn.)

To the beleaguered humanist, the hard sciences of the 21st Century offer scant consolation. Indeed the great boom-discipline of the ageneurosciencesuggests that where reason exists, it is, no more or less than its opposite, a mere byproduct of electricity and chemistry, a ghost in the machine. The New Atheists make various attempts to countenance this; in this way they are cousins of the modish authors of Blink and Proust Was a Neuroscientist and The Wisdom of Crowds. Harris goes so far as to suggest, in The Moral Landscape, that brain-imaging studies may lead to a new science of morality. So far, though, Neurobiological Man so far bears little resemblance to the rational paragon of the humanist imagination.

Moreover, the humanists triumphal account of scientific history focuses on the Newtons and Darwins while overlooking the folks tinkering in the lab. Herbert Marcuse long ago pointed out the patent irrationality of the world order to which such tinkering, in the form of the atomic bomb, gave rise. And in the information technologies currently transforming our lives, applied science has allowed us to redraw the line between fact and belief, offering the body politic an inoculation against scientific consensus. On comment-threads and twitter feeds, Arnolds ignorant armies can clash ad infinitum. Evidence is whatever we can Google. No wonder the New Atheists feel like an aggrieved minority.

The truth explains everything, runs one of Graylings Proverbs. Its an article of faith for these writers. But they must sense, even as they affirm it, that the real threat to the cult of human reason in the 21st Century is not the religious, but epistemological. We live today under the dispensation of what one contemporary wise man calls truthiness. In the great ecumenical marketplace of our culture, belief systems thrive not on compulsion, or verifiability, but on narrative interest. This helps explain why, with better-defined enemies in disarray, the air has started to leak from the New Atheist balloonwhy Dawkins forthcoming riposte to J.K. Rowling, The Magic of Reality, sounds so distinctly un-magical, and why Graylings Good Book, laudable in its aspirations, is ultimately more fun to think about than to read.

This is not to say that the scriptures of this particular group of unbelievers hold no interest for us. But even a half-decade on, we can see that theyll someday seem exactly as remoteexactly as poignantas the lapsed religions they sought to supplant. That is, the New Atheism now appears to us godless cosmopolitans like any other faith: as noble, as fallible, as wondrously, humanly, world-historically beside the point.
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Endrtimes does not necessarily endorse or agree with every opinion expressed in every article/video posted on this site. The information provided here is done so for personal edification; It's up to the reader to separate truth from error, and to examine everything (like the Bereans) from a Biblical perspective. Let the Holy Scriptures be you guide! - - - FAIR USE NOTICE: These pages/videos may contain copyrighted () material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available to advance understanding of ecological, POLITICAL, HUMAN RIGHTS, economic, DEMOCRACY, scientific, MORAL, ETHICAL, and SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior general interest in receiving similar information for research and educational purposes.


The horrors of the Nazi regime, and its Holocaust still cast a huge shadow over our world, but the way this effects the lives of those with a direct family link to it is rarely examined.

My Nazi Legacy is a documentary film in which author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands examines the sons of two Nazi war criminals. is a documentary film in which author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands examines the sons of two Nazi war criminals.

He interviews and travels with Niklas Frank and Horst von Wachter, the the sons of Hans Frank and Otto Wachter, who were both prominent figures in Hitlers regime. Frank was the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, and Wachter was Nazi governor of Galicia in Ukraine.

The documentary provides an incredibly powerful, and in many ways disturbing, look at two very different perspectives on the Nazi legacy.

Niklas Frank is evidently well aware of his father's actions and certainly does not try to defend him. He states that he was only his father biologically, illustrating much of modern Europes disgust at this dark past.

Horst's perspective is somewhat more unsettling, with his reflections steeped in denial. He rejects ideas that his father was guilty of any crimes as he was not tried at Nuremberg and there is no documented evidence.

Sands breaks through the frustration to confront Horst with specific evidence that links his father to the mass killing of Ukrainian Jews, including Sands own family.

Horsts rejection of this evidence and clear defence of his father highlights the idea at the centre of the Nazi legacy  that coming to terms with its horrors is a difficult task.

He demonstrates the natural instinct to defend family at all costs, even when they have committed acts of genocide. In many ways his stubborn attitude becomes the sole issue of the film.

Niklas Frank takes the other extreme of complete disgust and rejection of his fathers involvement stating I despise him' and calling him a 'coward'.

The film skilful examines the different coping mechanisms of real human beings that are forced to confront a terrible truth. It also works to place Horsts views in the context of modern Europe.

He does not deny that the Holocaust happened, but refuses to acknowledge that his father was directly involved. He states that it was 'the system', and that his father was just following orders. As Sands and Horst look at a family photo album, there are pictures of Hitler and Himmler. While Sands sees some of the most evil men in history, Horst looks back with nostalgia and sees only happy times.

This rose-tinted vision of Nazi Europe, is played out when the three visit a group of paramilitaries in Ukraine with views reminiscent of the Nazis, who saw Otto Wachter as a decent man, and see Horst as the son of a hero.

This makes his denial even more chilling, as the views his father held are evidently alive today.

The significance of todays Holocaust Memorial Day is completely undermined when there are people who do not look back on the Nazi's actions as cruel, barbarous, and something which must never happen again.

My Nazi Legacy presents an original perspective on what is perhaps the most notorious political regime in modern history.

Often Holocaust documentaries allow audiences to view a survivors or perpetrators perspective. But My Nazi Legacy puts a real human perspective by providing context that makes these war criminals seem like real people, with real families and lives. These mass murderers were family men with wives and children who would continue to live their lives while committing some of the most despicable criminal acts in history.

Philippe Sands finally presents a more human understanding of the Holocaust and its aftermath, which aims to remove an 'us versus them' mentality.

It helps audiences to see that Nazis were ordinary people, capable of facilitating the most appalling acts of murder, who would then return home to loving families with children who saw their fathers as devoted, hardworking and decent men.

In almost normalising Nazis this documentary provides a powerful understanding of the people at the centre of genocide and how this affects us today.
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Foreign man dies after allegedly jumping in front of Phuket tourist bus

PHUKET: An unidentified foreign man died in the early hours of this morning (Jan 27) when he allegedly jumped in front of a bus on Patong Hill. Police are currently investigating the incident and trying to identify the victim.

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By Eakkapop Thongtub

Wednesday 27 January 2016, 12:09PM

The man was allegedly standing in the middle of the road before jumping in front of the bus. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Lt Col Patapee Srichai from Kathu Police received a call from a local resident at 4:20am advising him of an accident near Soi Kwanyang on Prabaramee Rd in Patong where a foreign man had been hit by a bus.

Police arrived at the scene with Kusoldharm rescue workers to find the body of a foreign man lying in the road. The man had suffered broken arms and legs.

A Nakorn Sri Tammarat registered bus was parked at the side of the road and it's driver, Somkhit Wongpan, 34, was standing nearby waiting for police.

Lt Col Patapee said, The man, who is between 40-45 years old and 175-180cm tall, had a shaved head and was wearing shorts and a white T-shirt.

We found no identification on the man and no one in the area knows who he is, Lt Col Patapee said.

According to Mr Wongpan, he was heading down the hill into Patong to pick up tourists at a hotel. He saw a foreign man standing in the middle of road, but then he suddenly jumped in front of the bus. He said he tried to stop but it was too late, he said.

We are not sure whether the victim committed suicide or was drunk, but we are investigating to find out more about this incident and also trying to identify the man so we can contact his embassy and notify his family, he added.

The victim body was taken to Patong Hospital for doctor to determine the cause of death.
Military called in as Phuket sea gypsies injured in land claim clash

PHUKET: Vice Governor Chokdee Amornwat has ordered a security detail to maintain peace at the sea gypsy community in Rawai after several villagers were injured in clashes with private workers hired to clear the area for private development this morning (Jan 27).

landpropertyeconomicsculturemilitary

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Wednesday 27 January 2016, 05:16PM

Military personnel arrived in time to break up the fight. Photo: PR Dept

More than 200 sea gypsies arrived to present a formal request to Deputy Prime Minister Admiral Narong Pipatanasai (centre) to resolve the dispute. Phuket Governor Chamroen Tipayapongtada (left) looks on. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Chatree Madsatun (2nd from left), the legal representative of Baron World Trade Co Ltd, explains the company's rights to the land. Photo: PR Dept

More than 200 angry sea gypsies had gathered at the site by the time officials arrived. Photo: PR Dept

Sea gypsies clashed with workers at the Rawai sea gypsy community this morning (Jan 27). Photo: PR Dept

Military personnel led by Lt Col Sompop Kamkana of the Royal Thai Navy secured the area at about 11:30am, while V/Gov Chokdee and Rawai Mayor Aroon Solos spoke with villagers.

When they arrived, rescue workers were busy transporting villagers injured in the clashes to medical facilities nearby.

More than 200 villagers, including women and children, had gathered at the site, where officials were told that that the fight broke when more than 100 workers started to clear the land with a backhoe and excavators.

Villagers attempted to stop the workers from using an excavator from placing rocks to block off the entrance to the land, which resulted in the workers and villagers trading blows.

Chatree Madsatun, the legal representative of Baron World Trade Co Ltd, which claims to own the land, said the company had full rights to the land and had a Chanote land title deed to prove it.

The Phuket Provincial Land Office conducted a survey of the area on August 13 last year and confirmed at an official meeting that the company had full right to the land, and there many meetings have been held to discuss this matter, but most of the time representatives from the village failed to attend, he said.

The company built a wall to prevent sea gypsies from trespassing on the land, but the wall was pulled down on June 20, 2015. Large rocks were then placed there to keep villagers out, he explained.

Mr Chatree confirmed that the company will pay all medical expenses for the villagers injured in the clashes.

V/G Chokdee launched an inquest into the incident.

Officers will stand by to provide security for the villagers until the committee concludes their investigation, he said.

Military personnel arrived at the disputed site yesterday (Jan 26), though at that time reportedly to ensure that the workers were not impeded from clearing the land. (See story here.)

Meanwhile at Provincial Hall this morning, more than 200 sea gypsies arrived to present a formal request to Deputy Prime Minister Admiral Narong Pipatanasai to resolve the dispute.

The delegation of sea gypsies urged the government to revoke any documents found to support illegitimate claims to land in their community,

They also asked for the central government to investigate why soldiers had refused villagers access to the area and were providing security for a private company.

Sinchai Rupraochin, from the Phuket Justice for the Poor Network, also explained that preventing the sea gypsies from accessing the disputed land had cut off access to a sacred place of worship that the sea gypsies had used for generations.

It also denied them direct to access to the sea, he said.

Us villagers have been bullied by the landowners people, said sea gypsy spokesman Nirandon Yongpan.

They took public land reserved for sea gypsies and got a Chanote. This has upset more than 2,000 villagers, and if the government does not intervene soon, sea gypsies will lose their land to a private company.
Travel: Autumn bliss in heavenly Hokkaido: Part 2/2

Retired Phuket GM Hansruedi Frutiger is enjoying his retirement life through much travel and blogging. Hans recent 10 days, eight nights tour in Hokkaido, was organised through Prime Travel in Singapore. Here is Part 2 of Hans Hokkaido travels. You can check out Part 1 in the January 8, 2016 issue of The Phuket News or at ThePhuketNews.com.

Wednesday 27 January 2016, 08:00AM

Hansruedi Frutiger

editor@classactmedia.co.th

The beginning of day 4 of our 10-day tour began with a great breakfast at the Hokuten No Oka Lake resort and then a drive to Mount Iwo, which is one of the mountains formed by the crater of an eruption years ago. The mountain was being mined for sulfur, still active as the photo shows. We could only stand at the foot of this active volcano.

We later drove to Sunayu. a unique place among the hot springs. You can paddle on the lake, go jogging or simply chill for the day.

We did not have much time to visit our next spot, the Oshinkoshin waterfalls, since sunset was near and there was the threat of a typohoon in the region. We decided to visit the Shiretoko Five Lakes instead, which were filled by underground springs after the eruption of Mount Iwo nearby. The area offered stunning views during this autumn season. We saw small foxes, deers, and a beautiful sunset over the Pacific Ocean during our mountain drive.

Accommodation for that night was in the hotel Shiretoko Daichi. It was massive and reminded me of the Genting Highlands outside Kuala Lumpur but without a casino.

The typhoon set in at 10:30pm and rain was pounding against the hotel window all night. At about 5:30am in the morning, I went for the hot spring and enjoyed the outdoor hot bath (34C) while staring at the heavy downpour. Hours later, as our group was checking out of the hotel, we learned that many roads as well as the airport in Sapporo were closed due to the typhoon.

We drove slowly along the coast line to Lake Agan the third largest of Japans national parks. Unfortunately the rain did not stop so we had to enjoy the hotel facilities instead.

I must say, the experience at the small, boutique Tsuruga Akan Hotel was very good. We enjoyed the afternoon in the hot spring bath and in the evening a sumptuous exclusive Japanese dinner. The day was long so I decided to hit the sack at 10pm in order to be fresh for an early walk the next day around the lake.

The following day, we drove around the lake. It was still drizzling but soon after the clouds gave way and we enjoyed driving through beautiful landscapes.

For lunch we drove to a small town for a delicious bowl of sliced pork on top of rice and then later visited three pastry shops in the afternoon, one with Gelato specialist Hirose Bokujo.

The next day we headed to Hokkaidos main port, Otaru, where we enjoyed the freshest sushi lunch.

Otaru was once a busy canal with many barges though today we see beautiful stoneware houses which have been turned into shops for tourists. Our group visited some of the glass shops which

had some similarity to Italian Murano glass.

The various gas lamps around the canal give off a romantic feel in this picturesque town.

The drive from back to Sapporo took three hours and that evening we checked into the Sapporo Grand Hotel  located in the center of the city  for a two-night stay.

Sapporo is known for having hosted the 1972 Winter Olympics (the first ever in Asia) and for the annual Yuki Matsuri, internationally referred to as the Sapporo Snow Festival, which draws millions of tourists from around the world.

The city is also home to Sapporo Brewery and white chocolate biscuits called shiroi koibito!

The entire trip was enjoyable except I put on weight with all the special lunches, eight course dinners and the many sweets in between our travels. I also need to cure a severe back ache pain

because of the Tatami rooms which I am not used to.

Sayonara Japan!

To read Part I of Hans' Hokkaido travels, click here.
Watertown students who qualify for reduced meal plans eating for free

As of Oct. 11, students within the Watertown School District who qualify for reduced meal plans will eat for free for the 2022-23 school year.
Egypt's Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Magdi El-Agati says the report indicating why MPs voted down the law will be sent to President El-Sisi

In a statement to reporters Tuesday, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Magdi El-Agati stressed that the House of Representatives  Egypt's lower house parliament  will be issuing a report to President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi indicating why MPs voted down the Civil Service Law on 20 January. 

"This report, which is being prepared in consultation with the government, should indicate in clear-cut terms why MPs voted down the law," said El-Agati, also disclosing that "parliament's committee on labour force is playing a leading role in preparing this report because its member-MPs were the ones who fiercely led the attacks against the law and led other MPs to reject it."

The law, which was ratified in March by President El-Sisi in the absence of a parliament and ahead of Egypt's International Economic Conference, aims to reform Egypts administrative apparatus in order to lessen the wage burden on state finances and encourage private investment.

El-Agati indicated that MPs approved 90 percent of the law's articles.

"The articles they rejected amount to no more than 10 percent and most of them relate to penalties to be imposed on government employees and other related issues, such as the rejection of an annual bonus of 5 percent," said El-Agati.

El-Agati said that he believes MPs were under heavy popular pressure to reject the Civil Service Law.

"The discussion of this law came within the context of parliament's review of 341 decrees passed since the new constitution came into effect in January 2014 within 15 days [of the first session], and as a result it did not receive adequate discussion, [all the while] MPs were being slammed as endorsing all the laws," said El-Agati.

El-Agati concluded that once the president and the government receive the MPs' report on the law, the government will move to amend it to reach a common ground with parliament.

El-Agati also said the government is currently preparing to deliver its policy statement before parliament in accordance with Article 146 of the new constitution.

"But this statement will come only after president El-Sisi delivers a public speech before parliament," said El-Agati.

Egypt's House of Representatives will meet 7 February to discuss a new law aimed at updating its internal by-laws and code of conduct to go in line with the new constitution and reinforce its watchdog roles. 

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According to Amnesty International, the student is among more than 700 detainees held for more than two years in Egypt without a trial

International human rights organization Amnesty International has demanded on Tuesday the release of high school student Mahmoud Mohamed Hussein after two years of detention without charge.

Hussein was arrested on 25 January 2014, at the age of 17. He was reportedly targeted for wearing a shirt that read nation without torture.

Amnesty International stated that Hussein should be released immediately according to the Egyptian criminal procedures law.

"Under the provisions of Egypts Criminal Procedures Law (Article 143) a detainee facing accusations that could lead to life imprisonment or the death penalty must be released immediately if he or she is not sentenced within the pre-trial detention limit of two years," the statement read.

According to Amnesty International, Hussein is among more than 700 detainees held for more than two years without a trial across Egypt currently.

Hussein was arrested on 25 January 2014 -- the anniversary of the 2011 revolution -- as he was passing a northern Cairo security checkpoint on his way home after attending a protest against both "military rule and the Muslim Brotherhood."

Supporters of Hussein, who is accused of possessing ammunition and protesting illegally, say he was targeted by police for wearing a shirt with the words "nation without torture" written on it and a scarf with a 2011 uprising logo.

Amnesty International launched a campaign a few weeks ago calling for Mahmoud Mohamed Husseins release.



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An Egyptian minister has said a new version of a civil service law recently rejected by the country's parliament will be put forward to the chamber in a week's time.

Magdy El-Agaty, minister of legal and parliamentary affairs, said in comments carried by Al-Ahram Daily on Wednesday that only 15% of the legislation's articles needs amendment, while denying there is any dispute between the government and the chamber over the issue.

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi earlier this week expressed dissatisfaction with the parliament's rejection of the law, urging the chamber to reconsider the matter for the country's own interest.

"The parliament and the government are holding talks to reach a unified solution," Agaty was quoted as saying.

He said that the government is now drawing up a new version of the law that will be referred to the chamber in a week.

The chamber voted down the bill last week, which aims to reform Egypt's mammoth civil service, as part of a constitutional two-week review of a slew of laws passed in its absence.

The bill, endorsed early in 2015, had sparked widespread controversy, as critics fear it could dramatically trim down Egypt's bloated public workforce of over six million employees. The government says it is important to cut spending on civil servants that consumes over a quarter of the government's budget.

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The court also ordered a fine of LE50,000 each for four women in the same case

Ismailiya criminal military court sentenced on Wednesday Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohamed Wahdan to three years in prison, and his brother to five years, on violence-related charges that date back to March 2014.

Three other young men were sentenced to three years in prison, while one man was sentenced to two years in prison.

They were all fined LE50,000 (around $6,400) each.

The court also ordered a fine of LE50,000 each for four women in the same case. The women were not handed a prison sentence.

The incident dates back to 30 March 2014, when the young men and women were protesting in Ismailiyas Al-Salam district.

They were arrested and charged, by the general civilian prosecutor, with joining a banned group, show of force, violating the protest law, and attacking police forces.

Wahdan and his brother, Abdullah, were charged with inciting violence.

In December 2014, the general prosecutor referred the case to the military prosecution so the defendants would be tried in front of a military court.

Wahdan was arrested in May 2015, in the satellite district of 6 October, west of Cairo.

He was a member of the Brotherhoods guidance bureau. He previously taught agriculture in the Suez Canal University.

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A Cairo misdemeanor court adjourned to 1 February the trial of Amr Ali, the coordinator of 6 of April Youth Movement, and three others on charges of calling for a general strike.

The defendants, who were referred to the court by the North Cairo prosecution on Tuesday, also face charges for the possession of anti-regime publications.

Amr Ali was arrested in September.

In December, police arrested four other leading figures in the political office of the 6 of April for inciting violence and protests on the fifth anniversary of the January 2011 revolution.

Amr Ali was elected as the 6 of April coordinator in October 2013, succeeding its founder and long-time coordinator Ahmed Maher, who is currently serving a three-year jail term on charges of illegal protesting.

The group was founded in 2008 to support protesting workers in the Nile Delta's Mahalla. It quickly developed into one of the leading opposition movements during the Mubarak era. After the ousting of president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the movement continued to play a role in the political scene.

It was banned in an administrative court ruling in April 2014.

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Egypt's prosecution has opened an investigation into a complaint filed by a police officer following 'inflated condom' prank incident.

On the fifth anniversary of the January 25 revolution, a video - that has attracted almost 2 million viewers - showed Shady Abu Zaid, a 22 year-old comedian reporter for the well-known satire show Abla Fahita, and prominent young actor Ahmed Malek, handing out balloons made of inflated condoms to police officers in Tahrir Square.

The video went viral on social media, prompting uproar among police sympathisers and support among some other activists who have few avenues through which to express their views.

Lawyer of Malek, Tarek El-Khouly, told Ahram Online on Tuesday that until now the charges being investigated by the prosecution against the two young men should not result in jail time.

"The charges the prosecution are looking into are defaming the state's interior ministry body. This charge, according to the law, should just lead to a fine," says El-Khouly.

The prosecution on Wednesday has expressed urgency in locating the exact location from where the video was shot.

Meanwhile, the head of Kasr El-Nil Prosecution Deyaa Negm El-Din will listen to the testimonies of police officers who appeared in the video.

The two young men issued differing public statements on their Facebook pages; Malek apologised to all police officers while AbuZaid stood firm on his views.

AbuZaid's statement

Late Tuesday, 24 hours after the video was posted on social media, AbuZaid wrote a public "elaboration" on his Facebook page saying that, although he feels that his days out of prison are few, he is still satisfied.

In his statement, the young satirist stressed that the video was part of a series posted on social media.

"The Constitution of the Republic of Egypt that was approved in 2014 explicitly protects freedom of speech and creativity, and holds all bodies of state up to the duty of protecting those expressing their opinion and creativity," says AbuZaid.

He then highlighted that the video did not contain any footage that "is prohibited by the law, whether in terms of defamation of any person or body (as the parties reporting me otherwise claim), nor did it contain any instigation for violence or discrimination against the state or civilians; It didn't go beyond being a satire video."

By the end of his statement AbuZaid said "the party responsible for my safety is the main entity endangering my well-being and freedom."

Police officers refuse apology, unknown fate for the pranksters

AbuZaid's last quote in his statement came following claims by several police officers who decided to react to the video stressing that they will revenge him and Malek by the law.

Many officers have expressed on their social media their uproar while refusing the official apology made by the young actor Malek.

"I apologise to everyone who saw the video as offensive, and especially to the police. The video indeed has some encroachments that I didn't expect to be shared outside my circle of friends. I'm only 20 and at such an age, reckless ideas always precede rational thinkingI regret such moments, and I tried to delete the video but it went viral before I could save the situation," Malek wrote.

The young actor posted this apology on Tuesday following his suspension from working at the actors syndicate.

The fate of the two pranksters is still unknown. Twitter hashtags concerning the incident on social media pages are still trending between some who see the incident as 'inappropriate', some calling for the arrest of the two young men while others believe that no one should be questioned nor tried for jokes'.

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An Egyptian court rejected the appeal on Wednesday by four 6 of April members against their two-year jail sentences on charges of protesting illegally in November 2015.

In December 2015, a Cairo court sentenced the four members of the now-banned group to prison for protesting illegally and using fireworks as a weapon on the fourth anniversary of the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes of 2011.

The defendants argue that they were holding a peaceful stand on the 6th of October bridge in November 2015 to commemorate comrades who died in the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes.

The defendants included Ahmed Said, a one-time Egyptian resident in Germany physician whose case attracted international attention.

Many of the movement's members, including founders Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel, are currently serving prison sentences for violating the protest law.

Egypts protest law, which was passed in November 2013 following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, stipulates jail sentences of one to three years and fines for participants in unauthorised protests.

April 6, which was founded in 2008, played an important role in fomenting the 2011 uprising against then-president Hosni Mubarak.

The group was named after the day a mini-uprising that took place in the industrial city of Mahalla against Mubarak.

The movement was often targeted by authorities before the uprising but was given a respite after the toppling of Mubarak.

However, since the ouster of Morsi, several Egyptian media outlets have denounced the movement, which opposes both the Muslim Brotherhood and the post-Morsi authorities.

In December 2014, an administrative court outlawed the group.

On Monday, which marked the fifth anniversary of the January 2011 uprising, the movement issued a statement saying it will continue its "efforts in reuniting the revolution's political factions to reclaim its goals, especially since the ruling regime has showed its suppressive practices against the people."

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Roaming the high-energy halls of CES 2016 (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas in January raised the expectation of a big spike in M&A targeting cybersecurity technology -- again.

It's not only that CES hosted its first CyberSecurity Forum this year, with a specialized agenda focusing on the issue. The internet of things (IoT) dominated the show, presenting abundant new-business opportunities, all of which come with formidable cybersecurity challenges. Likewise, car-makers were a predominant presence at CES, touting the connected cars of the very near future -- another prospect rife with large, obvious cybersecurity challenges. Both the IoT and connected car opportunities require ecosystems of cooperating enterprises to realize their full potential. That will drive new forms of partnering, such as industrial mash-ups; they will also exacerbate the cybersecurity challenges involved.

Consider the scope of those cybersecurity challenges. IoT systems in every industry and connected or autonomous cars, in particular, will dramatically multiply the number of "endpoint" devices (or nodes) in information system networks, as well as the volume of information exchange being transmitted. Those endpoints and those transmissions must all be protected. The billions of communicating sensors envisioned as part of IoT networks are essentially endpoints that need protection. The complexity and multidimensionality of the cybersecurity challenge are about to skyrocket -- at a time when many feel that the "good guys" are already falling behind the hackers.

By EY's reckoning, the value of deals targeting cybersecurity leaped 160% in 2015, to $26.8 billion from $10.3 billion in 2014 (I am global sector head for EY's transaction advisory services for the technology sector). And volume increased 46%, to 287 deals from 196 in 2014. But, investors may want to note, this is likely only the start of long-term growth.

We've been studying this issue in part because it's the same disruptive cloud and mobile technologies we saw enabling the digital transformations now sweeping through all industries that have increased businesses' cyber vulnerability. Consequently, nation states with geopolitical motives, "hacktivists" with ideological motives, organized crime with financial motives and a modern cyber version of corporate espionage are all rapidly emerging to exploit that increased vulnerability.

But what will drive the imminent spike in cybersecurity M&A is that organizations throughout the world are all waking up to the true nature of this challenge simultaneously. Their realization demands they look way beyond their IT infrastructure to fully understand their cyber risk. They must think more broadly about all their business relationships and assess their cyber threat environment from economic and geopolitical perspectives as well. Such cyber threat assessments will be far broader than in the past and will require new approaches and new technologies.

Ironically, M&A presents cyber threat actors with particular opportunity. M&A is one of the few times when all functional areas of an organization collaborate to understand and assess risk. A large amount of documentation and data goes back and forth between the companies. That volume of activity creates an extremely attractive opportunity for cyber threat actors, so companies must make an extra effort to protect their M&A process.

Furthermore, because their technology increasingly underpins other global industries, technology companies are particularly attractive cybersecurity targets. If an intruder manages to insert malicious code in a tech product that is then sold to customers, that intruder could potentially infiltrate the tech company's customer base. So tech companies must go further when building cyber defenses.

In fact, our report suggests that cybersecurity is one of those areas in which the best defense is a strong offense. Tech companies in particular, and all companies in general, should proactively hunt for what cyber experts call "advanced persistent threats" (APTs) that may already be lurking in their corporate networks or in the networks of their business partners and M&A targets. Corporations must become proactive cyber hunters, and stay keenly focused from pursuit through actual acquisition/merge.

All of these factors, taken in aggregate, point to a strong year ahead in cybersecurity dealmaking.

Questions? Please contact me atglobaltechnologysector@ey.com.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.
Alibaba (BABA) is set to announce its earnings for the quarter ending Dec. 31 on Thursday before the market opens, and analysts are hoping to get some more details on the company's recent investments.

For the previous quarter ending in September, the Hangzhou, China-based company reported revenue of $3.5 billion, up 32% year over year, with earnings per share of 57 cents. For the December quarter, analysts are expecting revenue of $5.1 billion, with earnings of 88 cents per share, according to averages from Thomson Reuters.

The high expectations stem from from the fact that this quarter included Singles Day, the biggest online shopping day of the year in China. For the 24 hour period of Nov. 11, Alibaba brought in $14.3 billion in sales, up over 50% from the $9.3 billion generated on Singles Day in 2014.

Other positives in the recent quarter include new content partnerships and acquisitions, such as a deal with Disney (DIS) and an acquisition of China's version of YouTube, Youku Tudou, plus the hiring of a new executive to focus on combating counterfeit.

However, according to Thomson Reuters, Alibaba is expected to post its slowest quarterly year-over-year revenue growth on record, much lower than its biggest competitor JD.com (JD) . For the quarter, Alibaba is expected to grow its revenue 26.6% over 2014, compared to JD's expected revenue growth of around 47% to 51%. JD is newer and starting from a smaller base, so it's natural that it would achieve higher growth rates, but the shift hints that the playing field may be evening out between the two companies.

On top of that, Alibaba shares have dropped around 32% in the past 12 months. Those problems plus global concerns about China's economy translate to impatient investors waiting to hear good news from Alibaba.

Here's what analysts are saying about Alibaba.

Bob Peck, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey (Buy, $100 price target)

"While the macro headwinds discussed in the Sept. quarter remain, we feel the market has reasonably discounted these risks. We believe Alibaba will report GMV growth of ~28% and revenue growth ~29% driven by improvements in monetization, mobile, and targeting. Further, we anticipate Alibaba will continue its efforts to provide increased disclosure around these investments and the value they deliver, as well as the impact to the core business."

Tian X. Hou, T.H. Capital (Buy, $84 price target)

"The company has been working on its new strategy to improve the quality and GMV of its Tmall platform, clean up Taobao while increasing its monetization. We believe the strategy can show good results in this quarter.

"As the company is working out of its issues, such as mobile adoption rate, monetization rate and GMV growth, we believe the hardest time is almost behind BABA and the company can start to see stable margin and growth."

Youssef Squali, Cantor Fitzgerald (Buy, $90 price target)

"While sales on Singles day (11/11) were strong, macro concerns around China's economy, health of the Chinese consumer and competition remain key issues. Longer-term, BABA remains a key beneficiary of the growing consumption of a growing middle class in China, and rising cross-border trade, in our view."

Jialong Shi, Nomura (Buy, $91 price target)

"We are forecasting 30% y-y top-line growth to CNY34bn, versus Bloomberg consensus of 26% y-y. The stronger revenue could be attributable to a higher take rate for its China retail business.

"Ali's share price has dropped 32% in the past 12 months, vs. a 19% decline for the MSCI China index. We think macro concerns were a big catalyst for the sell-down, because Ali is generally deemed as a China proxy due to its size and high profile. But China's domestic consumption should remain strong for the next decade, backed by the growing middle class. E-commerce should be a direct beneficiary of this, and we forecast a 33% CAGR in GMV over 2015-17E. We believe the micro gains for Ali should outweigh the macro impacts."
Apple (AAPL) shares were falling in after-hours trading on Tuesday after the company released fiscal first-quarter earnings that beat analysts' estimates but fell short on revenue.

Apple reported earnings of $3.28 a share for the quarter ended Dec. 26, beating analysts' estimates of $3.23 a share. Revenue of $75.9 billion however, came in slightly under forecasts of $76.6 billion. Read the full report by TheStreethere.

The company's stock was down by 2.7% to $97.30 per share as of 7 p.m. ET. Shares closed just shy of $100 in regular trding.



The operative word is deal -- but that's drawing to a close.

Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google will have to pay the United Kingdom 130 million ($185 million) in back taxes for the past 10 years.

But that's just a drop in the bucket compared to what the tech giant -- and other companies that do business overseas -- can expect to pay going forward. A change in tax law in April 2015, dubbed the "Google tax" by the BBC, will penalize Google and other companies diverting profits outside the country.

Under current tax law Google, which earns fees from an Irish sister company and its U.S. parent, benefits by paying taxes on a "cost-plus" basis that may reduce its bill to 5% or less, says Richard Murphy, a professor at who tracks the company's tax arrangements at City University in London.

"That's an astonishingly low rate of tax," Murphy told Quartz. Based on the company's 2014 revenue of $6.48 billion, the company should be paying $336 million, he estimates, four times the current bill -- and every year. Google recently reached a $350 million settlement on taxes with Italy, which had asked for nearly $975 million. Discussions with France, which is demanding $1.4 billion in taxes, are ongoing.

According to BEPS, the Base Erosion and Profit Sharing framework introduced in October 2015 by the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, European countries are losing $240 billion in corporate taxes every year.

Alphabet shares closed Tuesday at $733.79, up a fraction of a percentage point.

Well, Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey finally got some sleep Monday night.

Dorsey didn't tweet news of Leslie Berland's appointment as chief marketing officer until 8:32 a.m. local time. Berland most recently headed up marketing at American Express (AXP) . "She will join as our CMO to help tell the stories of our iconic product!" said Dorsey. Re/code reported on Sunday that Berland was on Dorsey's wish list.



The news lifted Twitter stock by 1.82% in early trading Tuesday, to $17.33 before dropping back down to $17.01 at the end of the day. Investors are clearly skeptical, despite those chirpy Tweets.

Berland tweeted back how excited she was to unleash the product's "power, uniqueness and magic of Twitter." She'll surely need some of all three. Last fall, Twitter launched a big marketing campaign around Moments, its new multimedia feature, to attract new users and woo back current users who have cooled on using Twitter.

In related news, GoPro (GPRO) , the maker of that nifty action camera, announced that it is integrating with Periscope, Twitter's livestreaming app. The move will make it possible for owners of GoPro's HERO4 camera to broadcast their every move directly to Periscope.

The alliance hopes to improve the fortunes of both companies, according to TechCrunch. Both are at a crossroads in attracting new users. On Monday, Twitter stock dropped near an all-time low of $17.02; last week, GoPro stock drove down with the news of several layoffs.

Twitter shares closed around $17 while GoPro rose nearly 3% to $10.88.

Sprint (S) reported a lower-than-expected quarterly loss, which sent the stock soaring 18.85%. Sprint shares ended the day at $2.99.

At the same time, reported Re/code on Tuesday, during a conference call with analysts, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure pledged a "progressive build" to improve customer experiences as plans progress to improve the company's networks.

It doesn't matter that that Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority share of Facebook (FB) said the judge in an investor lawsuit in Delaware County Chancery court. He still has to follow the rules, according to the story, reported by Bloomberg.

Officials at the company will now revise pay schedules. In the lawsuit, Ernesto Espinoza said that Zuckerberg allowed non-employee directors to set their own pay by as much as 43% more than their industry peers, for an average of $461,000 in stock.

Facebook shares closed at $97.34, up a fraction of a percent.
Human Rights Watch said in its annual review on Wednesday that human rights remained in crisis in Egypt in 2015.

In the introduction to the review of over 90 countries, HRWs Executive Director Kenneth Roth wrote the spread of terrorist attacks beyond the Middle Eastled many governments to curtail rights in misguided efforts to protect their security.

Authoritarian governments throughout the world, fearful of peaceful dissent that is often magnified by social media, embarked on the most intense crackdown on independent groups in recent times.

While HRW acknowledged that the threat to Egypts security is real, particularly in troubled North Sinai, New York based rights group said that Egyptian authorities have used torture, disappeared scores of citizens, banned many others from travel, and possibly committed extrajudicial killings.

The Egyptian government has repeatedly criticised HRW reports.

In a June 2015 statement, the Egyptian foreign ministry said HRW does not have credibility among Egyptians, charging that the rights group has been determined to promote lies and false information based on inaccurate, undocumented data.

IThe government also argued that the organisations reports since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 have targeted the Egyptian people and their will to achieve their aspirations.

In their report, the group touched on the military intelligences brief detainment of journalist Hossam Bahgat for two days in November to question him on an investigative report he wrote on a an alleged foiled military coup attempt.

HRW also described the terrorism law, passed last August, as so broad that it could encompass civil disobedience.

In North Sinai, HRW said Egypts armed forces forcibly evicted more than 3,000 families from a town on the border with the Gaza Strip, violating international law, in reference to the city of Rafah.

The Egyptian government has said the relocation of Rafah residents was a necessary step to allow security forces to control the Egypt-Gaza and stop terrorist movement of personnel or weapons. The government also provided monetary compensations to evicted families.

The report also criticised what it described as enforced disappearances of political activists; violation of the international right to freedom of movement by preventing activists, politicians, and academics from travelling; and the use of torture by police in their investigations.

HRW cited an incident that took place in July, when police shot dead nine Muslim Brotherhood members in a home raid, as evidence "[government] killings may have constituted extrajudicial executions.

In that case, the Egyption ministry of interior maintains that it shot dead the Brotherhood members only after they opened fire at police personnel.

Egypt's interior ministry has repeatedly maintained that it remains committed to upholding human rights values.

Listing a relatively positive development, HRW states that in December 2015, the authorities referred to trial several police officers suspected of involvement in a number of torture cases.

Courts have sentenced three of these officers to five years in prison in one of those cases. The sentence can still be appealed.

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Iran, having emerged from economic sanctions and tense nuclear weapons negotiations with the West, has been swiftly taking steps to modernize its automobile industry.

Two French automakers, Renault (RNO) and Peugeot, are poised to sign manufacturing accords, perhaps as soon as this week, and could benefit shortly from the lifting of international sanctions against Iran. Iran's vehicle production and importation have been restricted since 2013. In the meantime, Chinese and local automakers have filled the void in what is one of the largest markets in the region, with sales of about 1.2 million new vehicles annually.

A Peugeot deal could be worth 300 million euros, as part of a 50-50 joint venture with a local Iranian manufacturer.

European automakers that return to Iran will be undertaking risky investments, however, since Iran doesn't adhere to global norms in terms of human rights or amicable relations with neighbors. The country remains embroiled in the Syrian conflict and has openly threatened Israel.

Renault, which already has bet big by investing in Russia, knows how quickly things can wrong: The French automaker has little to show but losses for its investment in that country, which has been hit with sanctions, economic turmoil and international censure due to hostilities in Ukraine. Deliveries of vehicles fell to a six-year low last year. Renault, with its Nissan alliance partner and Avtovaz, the Russian partner, control 40% of the market.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCAU) , incorporated in the Netherlands and operated from Auburn Hills, Mich., might be another automaker that wins Iranian permission to build and sell cars to Iranians. Sergio Marchionne, Fiat Chrysler's CEO, was scheduled to attend a ceremonial dinner in Rome that included Hassan Rouhani, Iran's president.

Wolfgang Bernhard, head of Daimler's (DDAIF) truck division, said "there is a huge demand (in Iran) for commercial vehicles, especially trucks." Last week, the German automaker said it had signed agreements with two Iranian partners, Khodro Diesel and Mammut Group, to return to the market. Daimler left Iran in 2010.

The two large U.S. automakers, Ford (F) and General Motors (GM) , continue to honor lesser sanctions against Iran and say they have no plans to build vehicles there.

GM and Ford will be closely monitoring diplomatic action in Washington, however. Until U.S. sanctions are lifted entirely -- some remain based on grievances against Iranian involvement in terrorism and other complaints -- it's unlikely that either automaker will press anytime soon to initiate export or local Iranian manufacturing. Any such move easily could provoke objection from those interests in the U.S. that distrust Iran. GM and Ford would be wary of becoming involved in political controversy during a presidential election year. Likewise, Boeing isn't likely to challenge European aircraft maker Airbus Group to sell Iran commercial jets, as the latter is set to do.

Doron Levin is the host of "In the Driver Seat," broadcast on SiriusXM Insight 121, Saturday at noon, encore Sunday at 9 a.m.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.
The one sector that stands out the most to us at The Informed Trader this month is the weak price action in the banking sector. Many banking sector names are seeing 15%-to-25% downside moves during January, something we have not seen since the 2008-2009 bear market slide. As the banks go, so often does the broad market.

Lets start by taking a look at the broad Monthly KBE Banking Index chart below:



Chart Composed by The Informed Trader courtesy of Stockcharts.

The index is down a striking 16% this month thus far. Whether its pressure from the tentacles from the rapid fall from oil or global banks coming under recent pressure, as seen in Deutsche Bank, among others, the price action is troubling to say the least. There is some support down at the $55 area, still about 10% or so from current levels.

Next, lets take a look at some individual chart names. The first is Bank of America (BAC) down 20% this month alone:



Chart Composed by The Informed Trader courtesy of Stockcharts.

As seen in the Bank of America chart above, the stock has broken down to fresh multi-year lows this month, with longer term support in the $7.50 area. Next lets take a look at Citigroup (C) :



Chart Composed by The Informed Trader courtesy of Stockcharts.

Citigroup is down even more than Bank of America, a whopping 21.7% this month alone. The 20% means the bank is in a bear market and some of these banks are seeing those type of moves during January, a red flag to us.

Goldman Sachs (GS) has also been struggling along with Morgan Stanley (MS) . We've considered Goldman Sachs a leader in both bull and bear markets and, as seen below, Goldman Sachs has been under some heavy pressure of late, breaking down out of a head/shoulder top pattern:



Chart Composed by The Informed Trader courtesy of Stockcharts.

Next lets take a look at a regional bank, Suntrust (STI) , off the Monthly timeframe:



Chart Composed by The Informed Trader courtesy of Stockcharts.

The recent carnage is not limited to the money center banks, as seen above. Suntrust is down about 18% for the month thus far.

Back in the 2007-2008 period, the banks came under pressure ahead of the market move south. This time around they seem to be moving south in tandem. We have been in a defensive posture for much of the past two-to-three months, in part due to the price action in the financial sector. Until we see it stabilize, we consider odds high that we continue in a bear market move off our 2015 highs.

You see Jim Cramer on TV. Now, see where he invests his money and why Bank of America stock is a core holding of his multi-million dollar portfolio. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells BAC? Learn more now.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.
With Qualcomm (QCOM) stock trading at just 3 points off its 52-week low, investors have little to celebrate so far this new year. Over the past year, the stock is down 33%. Last month, management outlined its strategic realignment plan; it will hold an analyst meeting next month in an effort to get the stock moving higher.

Qualcomm reports earnings on Wednesday. Investors will be watching for clues to see if management can turn this company around. Qualcomm has several catalysts, and this quarter could be a turning point.

Qualcomm shareholders have to be very disappointed. The stock is back to where it started 10 years ago, despite the fact that Qualcomm stock has returned $14 billion in fiscal 2015 to shareholders. The company has repurchased $11.2 billion worth of common stock and paid out $2.9 billion in dividends, all for nothing.

Last month, management outlined its strategic realignment plan, which is designed to get the company headed in the right direction. Management believes it is on track to cut $1.4 billion in spending. The company plans to save almost $600 million this year.

Management is very excited by the possibilities of 5G and believes Qualcomm can lead mobile innovation. In addition, the company sees a $25 billion opportunity in adjacent markets, such as automotive, Internet of Things, small-cell networking, mobile computing and data centers.

While these opportunities seem exciting, Qualcomm has to capitalize on its latest chipset, the Snapdragon 820. Two weeks ago, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Qualcomm announced its first SD820-powered smartphone. But last year, Qualcomm's SD810 chipset was plagued with problems which forced Samsung to drop the chip from its high-end phones.

Analysts expect the Snapdragon 820 will make it into Samsung's forthcoming Galaxy S7 phone. In addition, there are plenty of opportunities in the mid-to-low end smartphone market. While countries like the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Europe are saturated with smartphones, places like China and India have a 25% penetration rate. China has an estimated 700 million subscribers itching to upgrade to 4G, and India has nearly 1 billion people who would like to upgrade to 3G and 4G.

In addition, Qualcomm seems to have settled many outstanding issues with Chinese OEMs. It believes the Chinese vendors will start making "catch up" royalty payments, which could drive upside surprises in 2016. For example, Qualcomm recently signed an agreement with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which could result in a royalty payment of around $260 million, or 14 cents per share, assuming Xiaomi sells about 64 million phones.

Besides a restructuring plan, a new Snapdragon chip and a fresh start in the Chinese market, Qualcomm is facing a 20-year low in its stock's price-to-earnings multiple, trading at just 11.3 times consensus estimates. If you break up the company and use a sum-of-the-parts valuation, it gets you to the mid $70s in terms of stock price. The stock is currently selling for less than $50.

Qualcomm reports first-quarter results Wednesday. Analysts are expecting earnings of 91 cents per share on revenue of $5.7 billion. With a low valuation, several catalysts ahead and an analyst meeting next month, this report could be a turning point.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.
Fatima Naoot was sentenced on Tuesday to three-years in jail and a LE20,000 fine for criticising slaughter of sheep in Adha Eid

Egyptian writer Fatma Naoot appealed on Wednesday a three-year jail sentence and a LE20,000 ($2550) fine she was handed on Tuesday after being found guilty of contempt of religion.

Naoot, who is self-professed secular, was convicted for the content of a Facebook post she wrote in October 2015 criticising the Eid Al-Adha tradition of slaughtering sheep on ethical grounds.

The jail sentence is effective immediately, which means the former candidate for parliament is set to be arrested and incarcerated.

In a Facebook post, Fatima Naoot said that she was ready to serve her jail sentence with her "head high."

On Tuesday, the well-known writer and poet also announced on TV that the first phone call she received after the court sentence was from Helmy El-Nemnem  Egypts Minister of Culture -- who expressed his support to her both as a minister and a writer.

"El-Nemnem has a long history of defending intellectuals in cases related to blasphemy. He is also a friend of mine and we attend a lot of lectures together," she said on ONTV Live.

Fatima Naoot is the second public figure to be convicted of blasphemy in less than two months. In December, TV host and researcher Islam Behery was sentenced to one year in prison for contempt of religion.

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Editors' Pick: Originally published Jan. 27.

Former Federal Trade Commission Chairman Bill Kovacic on Tuesday delivered a surprising assessment of the four top presidential candidates' campaign trail statements on antitrust. His remarks were made during a program by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington examining how the next administration will tackle antitrust issues.

According to Kovacic's analysis, Hillary Clinton has mischaracterized the state of consolidation and antitrust in order to argue that she will pursue a tougher policy against concentration in key industries. Ted Cruz wasn't always the enemy of regulation that the Texas senator has painted himself to be. Bernie Sanders has offered up a standard left-of-center critique of current antitrust practice. And Donald Trump is the only candidate in recent memory to have been a plaintiff in an antitrust case.

Kovacic, FTC chairman from 2008 to 2009 and currently a professor at the George Washington University Law School, has played a key role in developing antitrust policy since his time as a student at Columbia Law School in 1978. He has served as a congressional staffer, lawyer in private practice and had several stints in government in between long periods as a law professor specializing in antitrust and government contracts.

Kovacic conceded that the candidates' few remarks on antitrust provide just enough material for him to make "nascent observations" about how they will conduct competition policy.

"I want to look not just at their comments but at their experience to gauge what they might do," he told the Heritage audience.

At first glance, the candidates seem to have plenty of complaints about how antitrust laws are enforced. "When you comb through all their statements today, none of them has come forth with a robust endorsement of the enforcement status quo," he said.

Kovacic, who was named to a Republican seat on the FTC in 2006 and was the last chairman of the George W. Bush administration, said Clinton in her campaign statements has incorrectly depicted antitrust enforcement as weak. Specifically, he criticized her campaign for allowing her to mischaracterize the state of the FTC's efforts to rein in "pay-for-delay" settlements in which makers of brand-name drugs coming off patent pay generic companies to drop patent challenges and delay the launch of a copycat drugs. The Supreme Court has ruled that pay-for-delay deals are not, on their face, anticompetitive and that regulators and the courts must look at the merits of each case individually.

Kovacic said that Democratic contender Clinton promised to "take steps to stop corporate concentration in any industry where it is unfairly limiting competition." He took particular issue with this quote attributed to her during a stump speech: "Right now it's perfectly legal for a pharmaceutical company to pay a competitor to keep a generic drug off the market."

The former commission chairman said, "You wonder who writes this. It's not perfectly legal."

A law student taking a basic antitrust course would not receive a passing grade if he or she made such a statement, Kovacic said.

Her leading rival for the Democratic nomination, Sanders, has offered "a couple of glimpses" of what his competition policy would be like. The Vermont senator has complained that farmers are receiving unfair prices when they sell their livestock and harvests to major food producers and that large firms in industries with high levels of concentration, particularly financial services firms, need to be unwound. "These are fairly explicit statements about a need for a continuous process of de-concentration," Kovacic observed.

The leading GOP contenders have made fewer statements during the campaign specific to antitrust, but both Cruz and Trump have taken actions during their careers that, despite their electioneering rhetoric attacking federal regulation, suggest they find competition law useful.

In his campaign appearances, "Cruz has made a fairly strong emphatic declaration of skepticism about the regulatory state and [expressed] a desire to pare it back," Kovacic said. But Cruz served from 2001 to 2003 as head of the FTC's Office of Policy Planning, which overlapped Kovacic's stint as agency general counsel. That doesn't entirely mesh with a hostility towards all things regulatory.

Cruz more than once has delighted audiences by saying that the only difference between an insect and a regulator is that you're not allowed to kill a regulator with pesticide.

Kovacic contrasted Cruz's campaign personae with the one he knew at the FTC. "Although Ted is often depicted as being an unlikable man, to the staff and his colleagues he was extremely likable," the former FTC chairman said. "He was a very good colleague and was an enormously effective administrator of his office and indeed played a key role in launching a number of advocacy measures that continue to resonanate within the agency today."

Although Cruz pursued conservative policy goals at the FTC, he was not shy about using the federal agency's powers and persuasive authority to push back against local and state rules for teacher certification, hospital accreditation, and local governments' agreements with cable television, all of which he argued discouraged competition.

"One wonders whether Ted would look back at that experience and say that's the core of a competition program I would like to support over time," Kovacic said.

"In some sense he was a young man in a hurry, but if you were to chase out of the city all who shared those traits you would have the streets roughly as empty as they are today" following the weekend's debilitating snowstorm.

"It's difficult in [Cruz's] case to anticipate whether elements of his past, in a sense his own career DNA, would predict some sympathy for the program that he was part of, or whether you'd see a far more skeptical view taken to the operation of the regulatory state," Kovacic said.

A harder candidate to gauge is Trump, Kovacic said. The billionaire also plays up his determination to push back the role of federal government in average Americans' lives. But Kovacic noted Trump's role in the death of the long-defunct USFL, a professional football league launched to take on the NFL.

Kovacic noted that according to press accounts, Trump persuaded fellow owners to move its season from summer to fall in order to compete directly with the established powerhouse and to file an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL over TV rights and players' salaries. Trump hoped for a financial windfall from the suit, but the USFL ultimately won only $3 and died before the fall season could begin.

"Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate in my lifetime to be a plaintiff in an antitrust case," Kovacic said.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Apple (AAPL) stock is down 3.07% to $96.92 in pre-market trading on Wednesday following the release of the company's first-quarter fiscal 2016 financial results after yesterday's market close.

The iPhone maker has forecast for its first sales decline since 2003 following its slowest-ever rise in iPhone shipments amid weakening demand from China.

Apple expects that revenue for the fiscal 2016 second quarter will range between $50 billion and $53 billion, short of analysts' estimates for revenue of $55.5 billion. For the year-ago quarter, Apple reported revenue of $58 billion.

As widely forecast by analysts, iPhone sales slowed for the most recent quarter. Sales growth increased just 0.4% to 74.8 million units, the lowest rate of growth since the iPhone was launched in 2007, Reuters reports.

The company's March-quarter guidance implies iPhone sales will range between 50 million and 52 million units for the period, which would be its first decline in iPhone sales to date, FBR Capital Markets wrote, Reuters adds.

However, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that 60% of people who owned an iPhone before the launch of the iPhone 6 haven't upgraded to the most recent models, which implies that there is still room to grow, Reuters notes.

In all, Apple reported 2016 first quarter earnings of $3.28 per share on revenue of $75.9 billion. Analysts had forecast for earnings of $3.23 per share on revenue of $76.6 billion.

Insight from TheStreet Research Team:

Jim Cramer, Portfolio Manager of Action Alerts PLUS and Jack Mohr, Director of Research mentioned Apple in a recent post. Here is a snippet of what Jim Cramer and Jack Mohr had to say about the stock:

While investors may be disappointed with the initial 2Q guidance, we'll absorb details of the company's call before we make any judgments. As for the iPhone, units sold came in almost exactly in line with what was expected given that Cook previously had mentioned that they would not be down year over year. Ultimately, we believe that expectations have been reset for the year and the company is set up to outperform given the many catalysts (China, new iPhone upgrade program, new phone models) throughout the balance of this year and in the future.

-Jim Cramer and Jack Mohr "Apple Beats on Earnings, but Guidance Doesn't Shine" Originally Published on 1/27/2016 on Real Money.

Want more like this from Jim Cramer and Jack Mohr BEFORE your stock moves? Learn more about Real Money now!

Separately, TheStreet Ratings team rates the stock as a "buy" with a ratings score of B.

Apple's strengths such as its impressive record of earnings per share growth, compelling growth in net income, robust revenue growth, notable return on equity and expanding profit margins outweigh the fact that the company has had lackluster performance in the stock itself.

You can view the full analysis from the report here: AAPL

TheStreet Ratings objectively rated this stock according to its "risk-adjusted" total return prospect over a 12-month investment horizon. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer's view or that of this article's author.

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Boeing (BA) stock is plummeting 9.51% to $115.84 on heavy trading volume this morning after issuing full-year guidance short of analysts' expectations.

"There are so many questions to be answered about this Boeing call," TheStreet's Jim Cramer said on CNBC's Squawk on the Street this morning. "It is certainly not what I wanted to hear."

One such question that Cramer has for Boeing is, "How could you have such a decline in earnings per share with all those orders that we keep talking about?"Just last week, United Continental (UAL) and Southwest Airlines (LUV) separately announced orders for 40 and 33 Boeing aircraft, respectively.

Cramer pointed out that Lockheed Martin (LMT) stock was similarly getting crushed following its earnings results yesterday. However, shares reversed losses after management explained the quarter during the company's conference call.

Even so, Cramer is not terribly optimistic about Boeing.

He noted that there are only so many cycles occurring at once. As the banking cycle "got crushed," Cramer was clinging to the aerospace cycle just as the South Vietnamese clung to helicopters in Saigon when evacuating the Vietnam War.

Co-anchor David Faber asked whether Cramer is still hanging on.

"No, I got in the helicopter," Cramer responded. "See you later."

Separately, TheStreet Ratings team rates the stock as a "buy" with a ratings score of B+.

Boeing's strengths such as its revenue growth, notable return on equity, good cash flow from operations, growth in earnings per share and increase in net income outweigh the fact that the company has had generally high debt management risk by most measures that we evaluated.

You can view the full analysis from the report here: BA

TheStreet Ratings objectively rated this stock according to its "risk-adjusted" total return prospect over a 12-month investment horizon. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer's view or that of this article's author.

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For Republican presidential candidates, it appears that debate attendance is optional and that it might actually help their campaigns.

Rand Paul proved as much earlier this month when he opted out of the last Republican debate on Fox Business Network. Now, Donald Trump is giving the tactic a try. The GOP frontrunner announced this week that he would not be attending the party's next presidential debate after engaging in a political game of chicken with host network Fox News.

If Paul is any indicator, Trump's bet will work out. After failing to make the cut for the January 14 main stage event held in South Carolina, the libertarian senator went on a week-long media blitz. He stopped by "The Dr. Oz Show," sipped on bourbon with Trevor Noah during a singles night debate on "The Daily Show," and made multiple appearances on cable news networks.

Ratings-wise, the appearances paid off. Based on the show's averages, CNN Politics estimates the Paul interviews were likely watched by at least seven million people. The undercard debate to which the senator had been assigned averaged just two million viewers (the primetime debate had 11 million).

Paul also held a competing event with the debate, hosting his own #RandRally, an interactive town hall live from Twitter's New York City office. "Turn the TV off. Choose liberty, unfiltered and direct from the source," he wrote in a campaign email.

Again, it worked. Paul's event hashtag was the third-most popular hashtag in the U.S. on Twitter, and he gained the fourth-most Twitter followers after the debate of all the GOP candidates.

"I think we've taken not a perfect situation -- because it isn't good to be excluded, and it is unfair -- and turned it into a positive," Paul told Business Insider.

Aside from the ratings and additional attention, the "positive" may be that the Kentucky senator will again be on the main debate stage this Thursday.

Trump's plans appear, to a certain extent, to mirror Paul's. While he is currently out on the campaign trail, with events scheduled today in South Carolina and Friday in New Hampshire, his parallel media blitz, fueled by his controversial decision, has begun.

His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, spoke withABC News' George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning America" Wednesday to defend Trump's decision. "The issue is an issue of fairness," he said, claiming that Fox News anchor and debate moderator Megyn Kelly, who is largely the source of the billionaire's debate gripe, is "obsessed" with the GOP frontrunner.

Like Paul, he has also set up an alternative event: a fundraiser for veterans and wounded warriors. While the rally is not yet listed on his campaign agenda, his camp has said it will take place in Iowa Thursday starting at 9:00 p.m. ET -- the same time the primetime GOP debate begins. No word on whether it will be broadcast or not, but chances are, someone will put it on.

"Donald Trump's decision is a gamble and a test of his thus-far flawless decision-making during his seven-month campaign," said Robert Schmuhl, professor of American studies and journalism the University of Notre Dame.

The Tug-Of-War With Fox

Trump's involvement in the presidential campaign has brought networks record ratings for debates this election cycle, and his absence Thursday could sting. The August 6 showdown, the first GOP debate, also hosted by Fox News, saw a record 24 million viewers -- a fact not lost on Trump.

"FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts," Trump's camp said in a statement.

Though the network still isn't blinking, it is likely aware of the ratings factor -- the last debate, hosted by sister channel Fox Business Network, had the smallest total audience of any GOP debate this season.

Moreover, the network's reputation could be altered as well. This week's tug-of-war with Trump marks a curious point in the evolution of Fox News from an upstart cable-TV network many years ago to one that now has an outsized role in helping to elect Republican candidates.

"There's definitely a power shift," said Mark Feldstein, a former ABC and CNN correspondent and broadcast professor at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. "This is Fox News after all, which in some ways became the tail wagging the dog of the Republican presidential process."

Trump's ability to use his status as the celebrity frontrunner has made for one of the most unlikely political campaigns in U.S. history, and he appears to defy the odds of political norms ateverycorner. And though it's not unusual for frontrunners to dodge debates close to a vote, Trump initially said he would participate in the debate. Then he changed his mind.

Rather than simply charging that he didn't believe Fox to be fair and balanced, he made it personal, Feldstein said, explaining that he would only participate if Fox removed Kelly as a moderator.

"Normally, that would destroy a candidate, but with Trump, the usual rules of political gravity don't seem to apply," Feldstein said.

If debate rebellion didn't backfire on Paul, it's unlikely it will do anything to ding the political unicorn that is Trump. But there are risks.

"If the media narrative becomes that he's avoiding a debate with Megyn Kelly, that would jeopardize the perception of strength that he's emphasized since he announced last June," said Schmuhl. "If the public comes to think that it's a business feud between Trump and Fox News, then his candidacy probably won't suffer. If the ratings tank without him, that, too, becomes an advantage for Trump."

It is also worth noting that Trump, who is polling much higher than Paul, perhaps has more to lose. That may especially be the case if he lands the party's nomination, Schmuhl explained.

"The larger question is whether there might be a prolonged conflict between Trump and Fox News," he said. "A Republican candidate, should he win the nomination, would pay a high price in the fall if that happened."
The U.S. has a literacy problem, and it's a direct threat to the financial health of millions of Americans.

That's no hyperbole - it's the primary takeaway from a new study from Boston-based American Consumer Credit Counseling, which shows the U.S. ranks 14th on the global list of financially literate countries (behind countries like the Czech Republic and Singapore.)

Only 57% of Americans received a passing grade compared to more than 70% in Denmark and Sweden, the survey states.

The ACCC study is no outlier. A separate study from The American College of Financial Services in Bryn Mawr, Pa. reports that only 20% of retirement-age Americans can pass a basic quiz on how to make their nest eggs last throughout retirement.

"In fact, a large majority of people age 60 to 75 with at least $100,000 in assets lack the knowledge they need for a financially secure retirement in areas such as life expectancy, Social Security, long-term care needs, investment risk and more," the report adds.

"No one liked getting F's back in school, but retirement income literacy is a test Americans simply cannot afford to fail," explains David A. Littell, RICP''s retirement income program director at The New York Life Center for Retirement Income at The American College. "Workers are increasingly on their own when it comes to making financial decisions and a dwindling few have access guaranteed income from pension plans. Now is the time to raise retirement income awareness and give Americans the strategies and knowledge they need to address this challenge."

Financial experts say the reason for the lack of basic financial skills is obvious - and it's an issue that starts at a young age for Americans.

"It's really a math problem," says Daniel Feiman, managing director at Build It Backwards, a Los Angeles-based business consulting firm. "So many people have math phobias, even bragging that they would rather go to the dentist than do long division."

Mom and Dad probably don't want to hear it, but bad parenting is also a big part of the problem.

"One component of the problem is the approach parents take to teaching their children about money," says Danielle R. Seurkamp, a financial planner in Cincinnati.

Seurkamp's master's thesis was on the topic of raising financially successful children, and what he learned from his research is that a key component of raising kids who are financial literate is to talk about money with them on a regular basis.



"Whether parents are hiding their financial struggles or their affluence, they often refrain from discussions that could be excellent teaching opportunities for their children," he explains. "While sheltering kids from the reality of family finances may be motivated by love, it can be a disservice to them. Something as simple as explaining your thought process behind why you did or did not buy them the toy they wanted can be a meaningful lesson in your values around money."

Studies show that children who have more frequent conversations about money demonstrate more positive money behavior and are more likely to report feeling knowledgeable about money, Seurkamp adds.

U.S. public schools have to shoulder some of the blame, too, other financial experts say.

"We are lax in financial literacy, because the schools don't focus on teaching kids real world, financial-related lessons," says Carol Berger, a financial planner with Berger Wealth Management in Peachtree City, Ga. "Instead of teaching high school kids geometry and trigonometry, why not require classes that teach a kid about stocks, mutual funds, net worth, balance sheets, income and expenses? Maybe some schools focus on this more now than in the past, but I know they didn't when I was in school. I had no clue what a mutual fund was until I entered college."

When even a smart, successful financial planner admits she didn't know what a mutual fund was until college, the U.S. really does have a serious financial literacy problem.

While there's plenty of blame to go around, there are few signs Americans are smartening up, money-wise - and that's to their long-term financial detriment.
An informed prosecution source speculates that the sons of the ousted president may soon return to prison

Cairo prosecutors appealed on Wednesday the decision by the Court of Cassation to release from prison the two sons of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak, demanding their return to prison to complete their sentence.

According to an informed source from the prosecution, Alaa and Gamal Mubarak could be made to serve the remaining eight months of their three-year sentence, which they received after being convicted on graft charges in the so-called "presidential palaces case."

Earlier this month, the court said that the two had already served their jail terms when taking into account time served during pre-trial detention.

However, the source said that the time served by Gamal and Alaa was for rulings in cases unrelated to the presidential palaces case, and therefore does not count towards the sentence in this case.

The appeal by former president Mubarak  who was moved to the Maadi Military Hospital for health reasons  and his sons against the conviction for embezzling public funds was rejected earlier this month.

Mubarak is the first Egyptian president to be convicted of corruption, as the court ruling upholding his conviction cannot be further challenged.

The Mubaraks were found guilty of embezzling LE125 million in public funds originally allocated for the upkeep of presidential buildings.

In an initial verdict in May 2014, the trio were fined a total of LE125 million and required to pay an additional LE21 million to the state.

At the time, Mubarak received a three-year prison sentence in the case while his sons both received four years, which was reduced to three years on appeal.

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Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty ImagesBackstreet Boy Nick Carter got into some hot water in Key West, Florida earlier this month when he was arrested after a bar fight, and later tweeted an apology. His band mate AJ McLean, who's had his own struggles with substance abuse in the past, says that Nick is just "picking up the pieces," but predicts, "He's gonna be just fine."

"Hes doing fine," AJ tells ABC Radio. "Just kind of picking up the pieces, obviously dealing with the social media backlash from him talking about stuff on Dancing with the Stars about him not drinking. And then, you know, this happens and you kind of have to deal with the backlash."

"We all make mistakes," he continues. "I know when I was going through my rough patch, there was no social media so nobody saw me, thank God! But nowadays you cant do anything without somebody criticizing you, good or bad, you know? So I told him just laugh it off. Thats all you can do."

But AJ says that the good things happening in Nick's life outweigh the bad. "Hes about to be a brand new father so I know thats probably on his mind; hes nervous," AJ explains. "But I promise you hes gonna be a great father. Hes already a great husband and a great band mate, so hes gonna be just fine."

As for the future of the Backstreet Boys, AJ says they're making a new album, which will be followed by a tour, and a lot of other stuff.

"We are hopefully gonna finish the recording process by March or April," he tells ABC Radio. "Were gonna premiere probably a couple of new songs on our BSB cruise in May and then tour to follow, probably not until fall." In addition, he says, "I have my first solo project coming out this year. So trying to work all that out, as well as Im trying to do my clothing line. Theres a lot of things going on!"

What isn't going on -- at least right now -- is the long-rumored joint Backstreet Boys/Spice Girls tour. AJ says it could happen...but not for a while.

"There has been open conversations between us and the girls," he reveals. "They are actually gearing up for their 20th anniversary tour, so we know that they wanna do that first. We are also in our ninth album process right now, which means a brand new Backstreet Boy tour. So maybe once both those tours are done we can then come together."

"Plus," he laughs. "That gives Posh a little bit more time to really make up her mind whether she wants to do it or not!"

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The pan-Arab TV network Al-Jazeera is suing Egypt, saying the closure of its business and harassment of its journalists there had caused losses of more than $150 million (138 million euros), its lawyers said Wednesday.

The international arbitration claim on behalf of the Doha-based channel is being lodged under the jurisdiction of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington.

"Al-Jazeera formally initiates arbitration case against the Arab Republic of Egypt," read a statement from the company's London-based lawyers, Carter-Ruck.

The statement said Egypt was in breach of international law as well as a Qatar-Egypt investment treaty intended to protect business interests.

"A large number of journalists working for Al-Jazeera were subjected to harassment, arrest and detention, either without charge or on clearly spurious and politically motivated charges," the statement said.

"Al-Jazeera's facilities in Egypt suffered attacks by the military, police and gangs supporting the military government," it said.

"Al-Jazeera's licence to broadcast in Egypt was also cancelled and its local branch subjected to a compulsory liquidation procedure."

"Al-Jazeera's very significant investment in Egypt has been confiscated and, at a conservative estimate, it has suffered losses of at least $150 million (138 million euros)", it said.

Following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Egypt closed Al-Jazeera offices in Cairo for operating without proper licences.

Cairo has maintained that the Doha-based network exhibited clear bias in its coverage towards the Muslim Brotherhood, the group which Morsi hails from and which the government labelled terrorist in October 2013.

Three reporters with Al-Jazeera were detained in 2013 and later convicted of fabricating "false" news in support of the Brotherhood.

Their trial sparked international criticism led by the White House and the United Nations.

One of the Al-Jazeera journalists, Australian Peter Greste, was deported and the other two, Canadian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohamed, were eventually pardoned and released.

"Al-Jazeera has now been left with no option but to formally commence legal action," a company spokesman was quoted as saying in Wednesday's statement.

"Al-Jazeers has launched this claim to protect the rights of its staff... together with its own rights under international law," the spokesman said.

Al-Jazeera served Egypt with a formal notice under the Qatar-Egypt investment treaty in April 2014 and Carter-Ruck said that the Egyptian government did not "show any interest at all" in legal discussions.

Incumbent president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former army chief who was elected president in 2014, remains popular with many Egyptians as he seeks to put an end to unrest following the 2011 revolution that toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak.

He has vowed to steer clear of court cases out of respect for the judiciary's independence.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

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In this Jan. 6, 2016 file photo, Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum carries his rifle after standing guard all night at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire, and one death, along a highway through the frozen high country. The Oregonian reported that Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. (AP photo/Rick Bowmer)
A municipal worker gestures during an operation to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, leaves a news conference with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Kerry is in China on the final leg in his latest round-the-world diplomatic mission. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)
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Hospital acquires new surgical robotics technology Burke Health announced the purchase of new robotics technology for use during spine surgical procedures last week. The Globus ExcelsiusGPS is a revolutionary robotic navigation platform system designed to be intuitive and streamline the surgical workflow. Real-time tracking of instruments and implants, along with audible, visual and tactile feedback, enables...

County center wins senior trike Local seniors now have access to an adult tricycle. Director Kimberly Mathis attended the Move Augusta Senior Expo and Bike Rodeo sponsored by Augusta Urban Ministries October 8. The event, held at The Salvation Army Kroc Center, was aimed at people over 50 years old, and included resources and health...

4-H Food Challenge Team takes State For the first time, Burke County 4-H decided to put together a junior food challenge team this summer. Teams are compromised of 2-4 students in the 6th-8th grades. This competition is very competitive and teams must advance to state after the district competition. Our team started practicing weekly in July...

County rehashes trash problem I am bringing up the trash again, Commissioner Evans Martin said during the October 11 meeting. We have to do something about the trash. Martin asked that the record show that he wants to do something about the countys dumpster sites. He made a suggestion that eliminating 10 sites would...
No one claimed responsibility for the attack

Four Egyptian security personnel were killed when a roadside bomb struck their van in the restive North Sinai city of Al-Arish, a security source told Al-Ahram's Arabic site.

Twelve other passengers in the van were injured.

The decade-long Islamist militant insurgency in North Sinai has intensified in the past two years following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed morsi in 2013, with hundreds of army and police personnel killed.

The army has also announced the killing of hundreds of militants over the same period.

ISIS-affiliate Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis has claimed responsibility for most of the attacks in the peninsula.

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Again. The story is here.

In the 22-page opinion written by Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr., the Court of Appeals said Bhatts fence case hints at plenty of potential trouble for the Purple Line and the recreational trail. The court described both as a pair of public works projects . . . cherished by the government and some citizens of Montgomery County. The Court of Appeals found that railroad lines, even ones that are privately owned, legally have been considered devoted to public use, akin to highways. Because no one may claim adverse possession to such public land, the court said, the previous owners of Bhatts home could not have assumed ownership of the trail land from the freight rail company.

Same effect of what was decided in 1994 or 1999.

This is good news for those who want to see the Capital Crescent Trail completed to Silver Spring.

The ruling against a Chevy Chase resident who argued that he owned a 14-foot strip of trail land because it had been fenced into his back yard for decades marks a victory for Montgomery County. The decision means the county wont have to re-purchase land from property owners who have argued that they took adverse posession of land along the trail shoulders by building there when it was owned by a freight railroad company. The county plans to rebuild the recreational trail, known as the Georgetown Branch Trail, alongside the train tracks, but thousands of mature trees will be cut. If the state secures $900 million in federal funding, it plans to begin Purple Line construction later this year or in early 2017 and open the line to service in 2021.

Here's more from Bethesda Magazine which includes a copy of the decision.

in December 2014, a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge dismissed the citation on the basis the county failed to prove the land was a public right-of-way. Court of Appeals Judge Glenn Harrell wrote in the decision released Friday that the former railroad route was a publicly-owned right-of-way. The court also said it has remained a publicly-owned right-of-way since 1988, when the county bought it under the Rails-to-Trails Act.

Bhatt's complaints have some validity to them, but this one

If the County believed that the property behind the fence belonged to it, I do wish that it had taken appropriate action in the 1980s, rather than waiting all these years, Bhatt said Saturday.

is probably not one of them. Even with all of this, he was probably a net winner because they didn't make him push his fence back in the 1980's.

And then there's this
Eight members of the militant group Hamas were missing Wednesday after the collapse of a tunnel in the Gaza Strip caused by rain and flooding, a security source said.

The tunnel collapsed overnight in the area of Jabalia in the north of the Palestinian enclave after several days of rainfall, the security source in the area said on condition of anonymity.

"The resistance tunnel collapsed last night due to the weather and flooding," the source said, adding that the tunnel belonged to Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip.

"There were 11 resistance men inside. Three of them escaped in the first hour after the accident, but the security operation... continues to search for the eight others."

Such collapses have previously occurred in the coastal strip, which is under an Israeli blockade and has seen three wars with Israel since 2008.

On Saturday, a tunnel collapse killed a 30-year-old man, according to Hamas officials. Residents said the tunnel was located in Al-Maghazi in the central Gaza Strip.

In December, 14 Palestinians were rescued after being stranded for hours in a tunnel near the Egyptian border when it flooded and partially collapsed.

During a 50-day Israeli assault in 2014, Israeli warplanes destroyed a large part of the underground network of tunnels used by Gazans.

Hamas has reportedly rebuilt tunnels destroyed in the 2014 conflict that Israeli officials say could be used to carry out attacks.

Israel's blockade severely restricts the movement of people and goods into and out of the enclave.

*The story was edited by Ahram Online.

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U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro told Army Radio on Monday that he regrets the timing of controversial remarks he made last week that were critical of Israeli policies in Judea and Samaria.

Shapiro had said at a conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 18, Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities; too much vigilantism goes unchecked; and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians. Earlier on the same day, Israeli mother of six Dafna Meir was laid to rest in Jerusalem after being stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in Otniel, while a pregnant Israeli woman, Michal Froman, was wounded in a stabbing in Tekoa.

In Mondays Army Radio interview, Shapiro said, I understand the timing [of the comments] was not the best. I started with a condemnation of the attacks in Otniel and Tekoa. There were just one or two lines that caused disagreement, but if this, God forbid, hurt the Meir family or anyone else mourning Dafnas death, may her memory be a blessing, then of course I regret it.

(Source: JNS.org)
Donald Trump on Tuesday bowed out of the final Republican presidential debate before the leadoff Iowa caucuses, saying Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly is a lightweight.

With 48 hours to go before the faceoff, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski confirmed Trumps decision Tuesday evening after a press conference in which Trump lashed out at Kelly and said shed been toying with him.

He will not be participating in the Fox News debate Thursday, Lewandowski said immediately after the press conference.

Trump, who called his decision pretty close to irrevocable in the press conference, said hed hold an Iowa event at the same time as the debate to raise money for wounded veterans. Iowa hosts the nations opening presidential primary contest on Monday.

With me, theyre dealing with somebody thats a little bit different. They cant toy with me like they toy with everybody else, he said. Let them have their debate and lets see how they do with the ratings.

He added, Why do I have to make Fox rich?

On Tuesday nights airing of her Fox News show, The Kelly File, Kelly said shell be at the debate, which will go on with or without Mr. Trump.

In a statement released Tuesday night, a Fox News spokesperson said Trump is still welcome to participate in the debate, but will not be allowed to dictate the moderators or the questions.

Capitulating to politicians ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, Fox said.

The Republican National Committee said the decision was up to Trump.

Obviously we would love all of the candidates to participate, but each campaign ultimately makes their own decision whats in their best interest, said RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer.

Trump had suggested he might skip the Fox debate earlier in the day, drawing a sarcastic statement from the television network that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president.

A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings, the Fox statement said.

The New York real estate moguls presence has helped produce massive ratings in the previous six Republican presidential debates. His decision leaves seven candidates to share the primetime stage Thursday: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Let them have their debate. Im going to raise money during that period of time for the wounded warriors and for the vets. Let Fox play its games, Trump said.

He added, I dont think Iowas gonna care.

At the very least, the high-profile debate feud serves as a major distraction in the Republican contest just six days before Iowa voters cast the first votes in the 2016 primary contest.

Trump, now locked in a tight race with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has proven to be a master of commanding media attention at key moments. Among other things, he has called for a temporary ban on all Muslim immigrants and later questioned Cruzs presidential eligibility given that he was born in Canada.

The provocative declarations have often left little oxygen in the race for his opponents.

(AP)
Ted Cruz is mocking Donald Trumps decision to skip Thursdays FOX News Republican presidential debate, taunting him on Twitter and creating an image of his face on the illustrated body of Disney tycoon Scrooge McDuck, sitting on top of bags of money.

Cruz on Tuesday responded to Trumps decision to skip the debate in Des Moines by challenging him to a one-on-one debate, mano-a-mano. Cruz is following that up on Wednesday with a satirical message on Twitter, linking to a clip of the song Brave Sir Robin Ran Away from a film by the British comedy troupe Monty Python.

Cruz created an online petition showing a mock-up of Trump with the Disney characters body, sitting on bags of money, on top of a mountain of gold coins, encouraging supporters to Tell Ducking Donald: Debate Ted Cruz.

(AP)
Officials in Shaare Zedek Hospital reported on Wednesday afternoon, 17 Shevat, that Adina Cohen, who was wounded in the stabbing attack in Beit Choron earlier in the week, has been released in good general health a short time ago.

BH Cohen survived the stabbing attack, which claimed the life of 24-year-old Shlumit Kreigman HYD. Kreigman arrived in the trauma unit of Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in grave condition and died of her massive injuries during the night.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
A lawyer for a Chinese national who supplied Iran with U.S.-made devices that can be used to convert uranium for nuclear weapons is criticizing the U.S. government for dropping charges against his Iranian co-defendant as part of a breakthrough U.S.-Iran deal.

The criticism was leveled Wednesday during a sentencing hearing for Sihai Cheng, who pleaded guilty in December to supplying pressure transducers to an Iranian company.

Chengs lawyer, Stephen Weymouth, objected to the 15-year sentence recommended by prosecutors, calling it unfair because his Iranian co-defendant, Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, wont face prison time.

Weymouth called Jamili the main actor in the case and said he would have sought the dismissal of charges against Cheng if he had known prosecutors would drop charges against Jamili. Weymouth asked U.S. District Judge Patti Saris to force prosecutors to drop the charges or allow Cheng to withdraw his guilty plea.

In this case, it has been outrageously unfair as far as Mr. Cheng is concerned, Weymouth said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Siegmann said the fact that prosecutors dismissed the indictment against Jamili  someone we couldnt extradite anyway  does not mean Cheng should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea.

Siegmann said Cheng admitted he knew he was supplying parts to an Iranian company the U.S. had designated as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.

Its clear that hes not innocent, she said.

The judge rejected the defense request but said she may consider fairness among co-conspirators in sentencing Cheng.

As part of the deal announced this month, four Americans detained in Iran were sent home and seven Iranians in U.S. custody won their freedom. The U.S. also dismissed charges against 14 Iranian nationals, including Jamili.

The other Iranians who had charges dropped include Jalil Salami, a citizen of both the U.S. and Iran charged with using a company he owned in San Marcos, California, to purchase electronic test equipment and components from U.S. companies and arrange for them to be exported to Malaysia and then sent to Iran; Amin Ravan, indicted in Washington, D.C., on a charge he attempted to obtain military antennas for shipment to Iran; and Behrouz Dolatzadeh, charged in Phoenix with conspiring to purchase hundreds of M-4 assault rifles to export from the U.S. to Iran.

Prosecutors said Cheng set up shell companies in China to receive pressure-measuring sensors known as pressure transducers from the Shanghai subsidiary of MKS Instruments Inc., based in Andover, Massachusetts. The transducers have commercial applications but are strictly controlled under federal law because they can be used in gas centrifuges to convert natural uranium into a form that can be used in nuclear weapons.

Cheng was accused of conspiring with Jamili to send hundreds of transducers to Eyvaz Technic Manufacturing Co., a Tehran company that has supplied parts for Irans development of nuclear weapons.

Prosecutors said Jamili told Cheng that the Iranian end-user of the transducers was Kalaye Electronic Co., which the U.S. designated as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction for its work with Irans nuclear centrifuge program.

Prosecutors have said MKS sent the instruments to China without knowing they were to go to Iran.

(AP)
Turkish prosecutors on Wednesday sought multiple life sentences for two top opposition journalists on charges of revealing state secrets in a report that alleged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government tried to send arms into Syria.

Prosecutors asked the Istanbul court to sentence Cumhuriyet newspaper editor-in-chief Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul each to a penalty comprising one aggravated life sentence, one ordinary life sentence and 30 years in jail, the Dogan news agency reported.

The severity of the demand intensified concerns about press freedom in Turkey, with EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn saying he was "shocked".

It is not unusual in Turkey for prosecutors to seek such combined sentences, but this is done in cases involving violent crimes such as murder.

An aggravated life sentence means tougher conditions, including restricting a prisoner's leisure hours.

Both Erdogan and the head of the National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) Hakan Fidan -- the president's hugely powerful but low-profile ally -- are named as plaintiffs in the 473-page indictment, Dogan said.

Dundar and Gul were placed under arrest in November over the report earlier in the year that claimed to show proof that a consignment of weapons seized at the border in January 2014 was bound for Islamist rebels in Syria.

The pair have been held in Silivri jail on the outskirts of Istanbul ahead of their trial, whose date has yet to be announced.

They have been charged with obtaining and revealing state secrets "for espionage purposes" and seeking to "violently" overthrow the Turkish government as well as aiding an "armed terrorist organisation", according to the indictment.

The penalties demanded by the prosecutors are far heavier than expected.

The case has amplified alarm about media rights under the rule of Erdogan, who had personally warned Dundar he would "pay a price" over the front-page story.

"Shocked by life sentences demanded... Equality (and) proportionality before the law are a must," Hahn, who visited Turkey on Monday, said in a tweet.

He warned Turkey that as it negotiates EU membership it must ensure "full respect" of human rights.

US Vice President Joe Biden, on a visit to Istanbul last week, complained that media were being "intimidated or imprisoned for critical reporting" in Turkey.

"That's not the kind of example that needs to be set," said Biden, who also met with Dundar's wife and son in talks that hugely irritated the Turkish government.

News of the indictment coincided with the publication in Istanbul by Human Rights Watch of its annual report, which denounced the prosecution of the pair.

"We are absolutely clear that Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, in publishing stories on that subject were doing their job as journalists and nothing more than that," HRW's Turkey representative Emma Sinclair Webb told reporters in Istanbul.

"Turkish political leaders, especially the president, have showed an unprecedented willingness over the last years to create a climate of fear for their critics and demonise their opponents."

Delegates from press freedom groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) joined a vigil outside the jail to support the reporters, urging Turkey to free them "without delay".

In a statement, RSF accused the prosecutors who issued the sentencing demand of "culpable cruelty".

Dundar, now detained for a 63rd day according to Cumhuriyet, has not stopped writing columns for his paper and in his latest article attacked Erdogan for seeking to suppress dissent.

"They are trying to limit us, this society, this country and this world to one colour," he wrote.

"Only the 'chief' would be allowed to speak, everyone would praise him and not a single objection would be made."

But he added: "Even if you make us pay the heaviest price, we will continue to tell and write the truth. You cannot defeat us."

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Libya on Wednesday asked the World Health Organization to raise the emergency level in the country to the highest category, saying it would help mobilise resources for people in need.

There are currently five crises that WHO has classified as "level-three" health emergencies: Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and the parts of west Africa hit hardest by Ebola.

In principle, the classification calls for maximum medical personnel and supplies in to be sent to the crisis zone.

"We are asking the WHO today to raise the emergency level for the health system in Libya to the highest possible level," the country's health minister Reida El Oakley told reporters in Geneva.

He said persistent fighting in the conflict-scarred country had forced the closure or partial breakdown of 60 to 70 percent of the country's hospitals and that the country needed $3 million (2.7 million euros) per day to buy medicine.

He added that collapsing oil prices had also hit revenues in the crude producing country, which is hoping to begin emerging from crisis after an agreement on a new unity government was reached earlier this month.

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told AFP that the global health body had received and would review the Libyan request.

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Related Sudan accused of blocking deliveries to Darfur peacekeepers

Some 34,000 people in Sudan's western Darfur region have fled fierce clashes between government forces and rebels around the mountainous Jebel Marra area, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

After several months of relative quiet in the restive region following Khartoum's announcement of a ceasefire late last year, fresh fighting erupted around Jebel Marra around 10 days ago.

Jebel Marra straddles South, Central and North Darfur states and is seen as a stronghold of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA-AW), which has been battling the government since 2003.

"Initial reports indicate that about 19,000 civilians have fled into North Darfur state, and up to 15,000 into Central Darfur state, following fighting in the mountainous Jebel Marra region," said Marta Ruedas, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Sudan.

The vast majority of those fleeing the fighting were women and children, she said.

The ceasefire was extended for a month on New Year's Eve.

Sudan's military said it is committed to the ceasefire and has only responded to rebel attacks, while the SLA-AW has said government troops and militia have tried to fight their way into Jebel Marra, claiming to have beaten back several attacks.

Ruedas said the United Nations had provided some humanitarian assistance but lacked full access to the region.

"While it is encouraging that some humanitarian assistance is being provided, clearly much more is needed," she said.

The UN-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) previously said more than 10,000 people have been displaced in the fighting, and that artillery and aerial bombardments had been used in the clashes.

Jebel Marra is one of the most isolated areas in the Darfur region, where ethnic insurgents rebelled against President Omar al-Bashir nearly 13 years ago, complaining they were being marginalised.

Bashir unleashed a bloody campaign to crush the rebels, using ground forces, jet bombers and allied militia.

The International Criminal Court indicted him on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to the Darfur conflict, although he has dismissed the allegations.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that government troops and militia had used "rape as a weapon of war" in previous battles in Darfur in 2014 and 2015.

"The pattern, scale, and frequency of rape suggests that Sudan's security forces have adopted this sickeningly cruel practice as a weapon of war," HRW's Africa Director Daniel Bekele said.

The watchdog called on UNAMID to do more to document allegations of abuse in Darfur.

The peacekeeping mission deployed to Darfur in 2007, although in late 2014 Khartoum told it to prepare to leave over its attempts to investigate reports of a mass rape in a North Darfur village.

More than 300,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 2003 and there are 2.5 million displaced people living in the region, according to the UN.

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The location of mganwini (arrow) near Luve.

MBULUZI  Two teenage pupils of Ekutsimuleni and Assembly of God Primary Schools drowned on Monday afternoon, just a day before they resumed classes.



Gcwalisile Simelane (13), who was a pupil at Ekutsimuleni Primary School and Temalangeni Dlamini (16) who was a pupil at Assembly of God Primary School, drowned in a stream that feeds the Mbuluzi River.



This happened at Emganwini near Luve which is about 30 kilometres from Manzini. The tributary is said to have been full following the torrential rains that were received countrywide in the past two days.



Bongani Simelane, father of the deceased Gcwalisile, said the duo had just returned from an errand which they had been assigned by their grandfather. He said they came back at about 4pm and upon returning they went to stand next to the stream where they sought shelter under a tree.



While standing there, they decided to swim as their clothes were already wet following the rains. It is said while they were swimming, a boy from around came rushing to cross the tributary before it became flooded and he saw the two teenage girls swimming.



He shouted at them in a bid of telling them to get out of the stream as it was flooding. However, his warning seemed to be a little bit late as he realised that they were being overpowered by the power of the water. He ran along the side of the stream for a distance of about 200 metres in a bid to rescue them but there was little he could do as they disappeared in the stream just before the tributary joined the Mbuluzi River, Simelane said.
MBABANE  Dismissed Swaziland Post and Telecommunications Corporation (SPTC) Senior Manager Sales and Marketing Charles Ndlovu wants to be reinstated with immediate effect.



This comes after the parastatals Managing Director (MD), Petros Dlamini, summarily dismissed him from work despite that he was found not guilty in all the charges he was facing by a chairperson of an independent inquiry. The MD took a decision to dismiss Ndlovu from work after reviewing the ruling of the chairperson of the inquiry, Muzi Simelane.



Ndlovu has since filed an application in the Industrial Court where he is inter alia seeking an order that the review conducted by the managing director on January 22, be reviewed and set aside. He also wants the court to order that, pending finalisation of this application, SPTC be restrained from appointing any person to the post of head of sales and marketing.



Ndlovu further wants the court to declare the MDs unilateral act of dismissing him from work ultra vires and beyond the scope of his employment and unlawful. The first respondent in the matter is SPTC while the MD has been cited as the second respondent. Ndlovu is represented by Macilongo Ndlovu from Masina Ndlovu Attorneys.



Giving a brief background of the matter, Ndlovu stated that on December 7, 2015 he was formally charged with three charges and was invited to a disciplinary hearing which was to be convened on December 10, 2015. He told the court that the hearing commenced as scheduled before and independent Chairperson Simelane of MP Simelane Attorneys, who was acting through the delegated powers of the MD. The disciplinary hearing was eventually concluded on January 14, 2016, submitted Ndlovu.
MBABANE  The current water shortage has seen certain schools turn back pupils on the first day of the opening of schools.



The schools that turned back pupils yesterday were in Mbabane where, ironically, rain fell across the city throughout the day.

Mqolo Central Primary released pupils at 11am according to the Head teacher Archie Thwala.

We gave the children stationery and they were told to go back home. If there is no water tomorrow it will be the same situation, they will be turned back early in the morning because not having water in the school is a health hazard to the children. We told them to go home and cover their books. There is no way the school will function without water, it will be a challenge, he said.



Mater Dolorosa Primary also sent pupils home in the morning. We sent the children home because of the water rationing situation. We are trying to handle the matter before there are issues of illnesses caused by the lack of water, especially in the toilets. We will continue to turn back the children until the situation is normal to avoid them getting sick, Head teacher Thabo Nkambule stated.



St Francis High School also faced the same problem and they let their pupils go at 1pm yesterday. Head teacher Sisana Simelane stated that they did not have water and because the pupils had to use toilets, they decided to let them leave early.



We do not have space to dig pit latrines for the pupils and the mobile toilets will also be a problem because there is no space for them and if we made space who would empty them for us? We received tanks today (yesterday) and we are still making plans to connect them in such a way which they would feed water into the toilets, she said.



The John Wesley Secondary School head teacher said they had tanks which were given to them by government in previous years.

The Head teacher, Gcinaphi Msibi, said they would be affected by the water rationing once the water in the tanks ran out because the tanks would not be enough for all the pupils in the school. We will see tomorrow (today) because the water levels in the tanks are going down. Our pupils were released at 4pm today (yesterday), she said.
Deputy Senate President Ngomuyayona Gamedze clarifies a point during the preparatory meeting for the official opening of Parliament yesterday.

BABANE  Senate Deputy President Ngomuyayona Gamedze is now legally a member of the Parliamentary Service Board (PSB).



This is according to a Swaziland Government Gazette Extraordinary which was issued last week Friday by the Prime Minister, Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini.



The gazette, which is Legal Notice No.7 of 2016, states that both the Deputy Senate President Ngomuyayona Gamedze and Deputy Speaker of the House of Assembly Esther Dlamini shall be alternate Chairperson of the Board in the event that the Senate President Gelane Zwane and Speaker Themba Msibi are not present.



According to the PMs gazette, the Notice was deemed to have come into force on December 18, 2015 which was when the PSB held its first sitting which was not attended by the Speaker after he questioned Gamedze through an SMS on who had given him the powers to call the meeting of the PSB which was chaired by Gamedze.



Once again, the PSB on Monday held a meeting in the Parliament conference room where the coordinators in charge of the different sectors responsible for the official state opening of Parliament were giving feedback.



Both Msibi and Zwane did not attend the meeting and Gamedze continued to keep the fires burning. The legal notice also validates the presence of Senator Chief Kusa Dlamini, Mntfongwaneni MP Mjuluko Dlamini and former Nkilongo MP Trusty Gina who was elected by the House of Assembly.



His Majesty King Mswati III is yet to appoint an additional member of the Board which will bring its total to seven members that include Clerk to Parliament Ndvuna Dlamini who is the secretary and ex- officio member.
International Criminal Court judges ordered an investigation of alleged crimes committed during the 2008 Georgian-Russian over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia - the court's first investigation outside Africa.

The five-day war saw Russia strengthen its grip over largely pro-Russian South Ossetia, which had effectively been beyond Tbilisi's control since 1990. Russian troops pushed through South Ossetia deep into Georgia before withdrawing.

In a statement on Wednesday, judges said there was reason to believe crimes against humanity, including murder and the driving of Georgians from their homes, had been committed during the conflict, as well as war crimes including attacks on peacekeepers by Russian-backed South Ossetian and by Georgian forces.

The ICC, which has handed down just two convictions, of little-known Congolese warlords, has been criticised for bringing investigations only in Africa since being set up 13 years ago.

Last October, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked to open an investigation after finding that up to 113 ethnic Georgian civilans had been killed and 18,500 driven from their homes as part of a "forcible displacement campaign" run by the authorities in mainly Russian-speaking South Ossetia.

Investigators will investigate allegations of crimes committed betweeen July 1 and October 10, 2008, covering periods either side of the five-day August war.

Opposing Georgian and South Ossetian forces appeared to have killed 12 peacekeepers, both Russian and Georgian, while Georgian forces had attacked a medical facility, Bensouda said.

The investigation pits Russia, a non-member of the ICC, against a strongly European-backed court at a time when east-west tensions are running high following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria last year.

The Hague-based ICC is already considering whether to open an investigation into crimes committed in Ukraine, another West-leaning former Soviet republic which is fighting Moscow-backed separatists in the east of the country.

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the workers singing political songs. (Pics: Sibusiso Shange)

MBABANE  Public sector unions have given government until tomorrow to release the salary review report or else they will demonstrate outside the ministry offices in Mbabane every Wednesday, starting from next week.



In a petition delivered to the Principal Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Public Service, Evart Madlopha, yesterday morning, public sector unions vowed not to give up until the report was released by government.



As workers representatives, we have done extensive consultations with our members in the regions and a resolution was taken that union leaders be accompanied by members to get the salary review report. We demand the release of the salary review report by Friday January 29, 2016, reads part of the petition.



In the petition, public sector unions also accused the government Negotiations Team (GNT) of treating them with disdain.

Collectively, we noted that the last meeting we held was on Wednesday October 21, 2015, in which the GNT committed herself (itself) to release the salary review report on the 25th of October 2015, a commitment that was never fulfilled, further reads the petition.



Public sector unions further reminded the GNT, in the petition, that it had voluntarily compiled and presented the timelines for the salary review process without any pressure from unions.



Both parties agreed to the timelines presented by the GNT, except for the implementation date of the exercise, reads the petition.

Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) Secretary General Muzi Mhlanga read the petition in front of demonstrating workers and other union executives before handing it over to Madlopha.



Madlopha, who was in the company of other government officials, accepted the report before making brief remarks.

I accept the petition and my duty is to take it where, according to the law, it is supposed to be delivered. I cannot respond to the petition today. Your leaders know exactly where this matter should be discussed, Madlopha said before returning to his office.
Greece has failed to protect the EU's external frontiers from migrants and faces border controls with the rest of the Schengen passport-free zone in three months if it fails to act, the European Commission said Wednesday.

The highly critical draft report by Brussels heaps pressure on Greece, the main gateway for the one million refugees and migrants who entered Europe last year in the continent's biggest such crisis since World War II.

Based on an inspection at the Turkish land border and on several islands in the Aegean Sea, the EU found Greece was failing to properly register and fingerprint migrants.

"The draft report concludes that Greece seriously neglected its obligations and that there are serious deficiencies in the carrying out of external border controls that must be overcome and dealt with by Greek authorities," Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a press conference.

The report could pave the way for Brussels to authorise other member states to exceptionally extend border controls within the EU's cherished Schengen area, including with Greece, for up to two years, instead of the normal six months.

Dombrovskis said that if a majority of the 28 EU member states adopt the report, the Commission will then draw up a plan for shoring up Greece's borders, especially its sea frontier with Turkey.

"Greece will then have three months to implement remedial actions," Dombrovskis said.

"If necessary remedial actions are not being taken there is a possibility ... which would allow member states to temporarily close their borders."

The Greek government insisted that the situation had changed since the inspection was carried out.

"This report dates from November but important work has been carried out since then. The next reports will be very different," Greek junior migration minister Yannis Mouzalas told AFP in Athens.

Mouzalas rounded on his EU peers earlier this week, accusing them of "lies" as Greece did its best in hugely difficult circumstances.

EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos acknowledged Greece's efforts in dealing with the tide of migrants and refugees fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, but said it was not enough.

"We know that in the meantime Greece has started undertaking efforts towards rectifying and complying with the Schengen rules. Substantial improvements are needed," he said in a statement.

The European Commission report comes at the worst time for Greece, just days after calls from fellow EU members for the country to be suspended from the 26-country Schengen area.

In the last few months, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France and non-EU member Norway have all introduced six-month temporary controls over the migrant crisis.

They took the step to deal with a wave of migrants moving mostly from Greece towards Germany and Sweden, the main destination for refugees and migrants in Europe.

EU interior ministers had asked the Commission on Monday to draw up a plan for a possible two-year extension to the controls.

Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner warned last week that Athens could face "temporary exclusion" from Schengen.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico on Wednesday said the EU was committing "ritual suicide" with its migration policy.

For Athens it is also an unwelcome return to the eye of the storm just months after the EU agreed a huge bailout worth 86 billion euros ($94 billion) to keep debt-wracked Greece from crashing out of the euro currency.

Dombrovskis insisted that the EU would not make Greece's bailout status dependent on how it deals with the migration crisis.

"We are not linking the Greek (bailout) programme with Schengen-related issues," said Dombrovskis, who took a leading role in the protracted bailout talks last year.

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By Bill Parry

For the first time in a quarter of a century there were no fatalities on the Boulevard of Death in 2015.

No wonder Mayor Bill de Blasio came to Queens Boulevard Tuesday to announce his Vision Zero initiative is working so well that 2015 was the safest year on city streets since record-keeping began in 1910, with traffic fatalities down 22 percent and 66 fewer lives lost since 2013.

The mayor pledged to go even further in 2016 by unveiling $115 million in new capital investment for plans to calm traffic as well as expand efforts to crack down on dangerous driving, make hazardous left-turns safer and expand enforcement.

We are serious about saving lives, de Blasio said. Vision Zero is working. Today there are children and grandparents who we might have lost, but who are instead coming home, safe and sound, because of these efforts. This progress is just the beginning, and Vision Zero is going to move ahead with even more intensity in the coming year.

The mayor wants the state to allow speed cameras to be used 24 hours a day as opposed to just during school hours. He also wants speed cameras installed further away from schools.

Were going to push to pass state legislation that will lift restrictions to allow cameras to operate overnight and on other streets, de Blasio said.

The mayor held his press event at the Razi School on Queens Boulevard, the notorious roadway that has been redesigned for safety. The first phase of its reconstruction is taking place along a 1.3-mile stretch from Roosevelt Avenue to 73rd Street.

U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Jackson Heights) spoke of losing a personal friend of his on Queens Boulevard. Woodside resident Marion Kurshuk, 78, was struck and killed by a motorcycle while trying to cross at 58th Street just days before Christmas 2013.

Tragically, we have lost too many members of our community to the dangerous conditions on our roads, Crowley said. And in a city that does more walking than anywhere else in America, we owe it to our family, friends and neighbors to do everything we can to make these streets safer. Vision Zero has clearly saved lives, and I look forward to continuing to work with the city on ways to further reduce the amount of injuries and fatalities in our communities.

Meanwhile, Transportation Alternatives gave Vision Zero mixed reviews as the safe streets advocacy group unveiled its annual report card Wednesday at City Hall. It said while the mayors initiative is working, the city wont meet its goal of zero traffic deaths by 2024.

Transportation Alternatives researchers found that if traffic deaths and serious injuries continue to fall at the current rate, New York City will not reach true Vision Zero until 2055 and an estimated 1,800 more people will die in traffic.

Each day our city comes closer to the moment when no family will have to suffer the loss of a loved one, City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside) said. While we are making progress towards that goal, there is more work to be done.
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By Sadef Ali Kully

Police officials said two men were arrested in connection with the Hampton Inn shooting robbery of a mother and daughter near JFK last week as part of an investigation into a series of incidents at hotel parking areas.

Ex-cons John Howard and Donald Warren were taken into custody Wednesday and believed to have taken part in five robberies in New York City and four in Nassau, NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said, according to Newsday.

Newsday said the two men were suspects in the armed robbery at Hampton Inn near Kennedy Airport last week. Details of the other robberies were not given.

Before the arrests police had said suspects, one of whom was in the getaway car and the other who is suspected of actually robbing the 53-year old mother and 20-year-old daughter, escaped in a white sedan.

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According to police officials and hotel sources, the mother, Andrea Koller, and daughter, Meredith Stifter, had just arrived from Maryland Jan. 21 and were checking into the Hampton Inn at 144-10 135th Ave. when they were robbed at the entrance of the hotel.

Police said while Stifter waited in the car at the entrance, a suspect approached her with a gun and demanded money. She did not have any money, so he stole her rings and then pistol whipped her with the weapon, the NYPD said.

Police said Koller walked out from the hotel as the robbery was taking place and got into a physical struggle with the suspect, who shot her once in the torso. He fled the scene with Kollers handbag, according to the authorities.

The NYPD said the suspect fled the scene in a white 2005-2010 Volkswagen Jetta driven by a second suspect.

Police described the suspects as two black males; the first suspect looked like he was in his 30s, 5-feet-11 inches, medium build, wearing a black ski mask, black Columbia jacket, black pants and black sneakers. Police only described the second suspect as having braided hair.

Emergency responders took both women to Jamaica Hospital. The daughter was released the day of the incident, according to police while the mother was out of critical care by Friday, according to media reports.

Police released a sketch of one of the robbers suspected as being involved in the robbery at Hampton Inn and a string of coordinated gunpoint robberies by a suspected robbery crew across southeastern Queens over the last few weeks.

Police officials said the suspects may have been involved in five reported incidents dating back to the last week of December. The modus operandi of the suspects is to approach men and women who are sitting in a car from both sides, police said.

The suspects, who carry weapons, then attack and rob the victims, police said.

The first incident happened Dec. 28 outside a home on 153rd Lane in Jamaica near JFK Airport. A 64-year-old man was sitting in his vehicle when he was approached by two suspects, police said. Each suspect forced his way into the car and demanded the victim turn over his wallet and threatened to shoot him. The suspects hit the victim before robbing him and fleeing the scene, police said.

Police officials released photos of the jewelry stolen from Stifter Sunday. The rings were described as a silver-metal elephant ring; gold-and-black-metal 2013 Notre Dame High School class ring; silver-metal hammered flat ball ring and a silver-metal hammered flat ring with a blue stone.

Police said there have been no arrests and the investigation was ongoing.

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS (8477). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto Crime Stoppers website at www.nypdc rimes toppe rs.com or text tips to CRIMES (274637), then enter TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.
President Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders talked foreign policy, the economy and "a little bit of politics," Sanders said Wednesday after their first extended sit-down since the senator's presidential campaign jolted the race for the Democratic nomination.

The long-discussed meeting between Obama and his sometime critic was a moment for the president to display public neutrality in the heated and unexpectedly tight primary race to replace him  refuting suggestions that he favors Sanders' rival Hillary Clinton. For Sanders, it was a chance to show he's got some sway with a president still popular among Democrats.

Clinton, Obama's former secretary of state, and Sanders are locked in a close contest in the state of Iowa where Democrats meet next week to cast the first votes in a series of state contests aimed at lining up delegates who formally nominate a party's candidate at a summer convention. Sanders leads Clinton in the state of New Hampshire. Clinton is portraying herself as an experienced leader ready for the nation's top job while Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has struck a chord with the party's liberal activists.

Talking to reporters in the White House driveway, Sanders acknowledged he and the president have had differences, but he said he has largely backed Obama's agenda. Sanders said the president has been "even handed" in his treatment of the candidates vying to replace him, and he showed no interest in trying to strike any sharp contrast with his host.

"We have got to do a lot better to protect the middle class and working families," Sanders said. "But it's also important to remember how far we've come in the last seven years under the leadership of President Obama and Vice President Biden."

The White House said the president considered the 45-minute meeting a chance to discuss ways the two could work together, to reminisce about the thrill of campaigning in Iowa and to talk broadly about the state of the 2016 race.

The president believes Sanders' bid is good for Democrats, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

"That ability to engage Democrats and excite them and inspire them will be critical to the success of Democrats up and down the ballot, whether Senator Sanders is the nominee or not," Earnest said.

But the White House isn't suggesting Obama and Sanders are kindred spirits, or even close political allies. White House officials says the men lack much of a personal relationship and have markedly different approaches to politics. The president this week declared bluntly he doesn't see Sanders' upstart campaign as a reboot of his own battle against Clinton in 2008. Obama allies bristle at comparisons between Sanders and the president.

Their reaction is reminder that even as Obama watches the nomination battle from a distance in Washington, he is personally tied to the outcome. Obama remains focused on ensuring a Democrat wins the White House and on protecting his legacy. Increasingly, it appears, he sees Clinton as his best hope.

With the Iowa caucuses just days away, Obama recently showered praise on Clinton in an interview and threw some cold water on the Sanders. The president cast Clinton as ready to go on Day One, and Sanders as a compelling political star, but also a "bright, shiny object" in need of some more scrutiny.

Sanders said Wednesday he didn't see the interview as a dig. He said he believed the president and the vice president have been "fair and even handed."

"And I expect they will continue to be that way," he said.

Sanders said with a laugh that he didn't directly ask for Obama's endorsement. He did ask for an update on the fight against Islamic extremism and the effort to warm relations with Iran, he said.

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Murray Hunter and Azly Rahman

In concluding our essay on Tawhidic-Singularity as a new philosophy of Islam, we proposed that Muslims need to interpret the core teaching of One-ness from a kaleidoscopic perspective. We asked readers to reflect upon the applicability of Chaos or Complexity Theory to view Islam as an organic and living religion inviting its believers to look at the concept of One-ness as the manifesting of Many-ness. In this essay, we go deeper into the discussion of the soul of the Quran itself and how Muslims could perceive and read it as a postmodern text with multiple-level meanings based on his/her unique life experiences. We wish to propose the worldview of Quantum Islam, as a new way looking at this cultural belief system. We invite readers to think of Islam as more than just unquestioning faith and rites and rituals but as an evolving text to be made alive. The idea of a living Quran is a means of perceiving and feeling ones existence as a world of interconnectedness. This world of deep personal connectivity is a world of the physical, emotional and spiritual self as it exists in the realm of the Universal self as a world designed as a Quantum being in itself.

Multiple Universes and the Quran

Islam is about what cannot at present be explained intrinsically through the science we know today.

The Quran is a deeply layered book of meaning. However, the majority of Muslims have tended to take literal views. The Quran has also foreseen many scientific discoveries and defined the nature of our realities. Such a view of the cognitive and metaphysical nature of the text has been dominant at a time when Islamic philosophy was being conceived, especially in the debates between scholars trained in Greek philosophy with those trying to rid the influence of rationalism in epistemologizing the meaning of existence.

The Quran and Hadiths have shaped the worldview of 20% of the worlds population. But Islam today is viewed as a singular reality, embedded in Arabism and hellfire paradigms, coercing Muslims to follow literal views, within a carrot and stick enlightenment and fear syndrome.

As a consequence Islam has not been the means to a higher level universal wisdom that the Quran can facilitate, if read with this understanding.

Allah rabb al-alamin, the Lord of the Worlds indicates a multiverse with parallel realities. There are parallel universes mentioned within the Quran that we dont have access to. These worlds are widely talked about within the Quran, the world of the jinns, as in the verse And the jinn race, we had created before, from the fire of a scorching wind Quran (15:27)

The 99 names of Allah also suggest multi-existential paradigms.

Challenges of constructing this multi-universal view

The first challenge is to escape the unipolar world and live in, and transcend to the multipolar world the Quran describes. i.e., atoms can be both a particle and wave and thus be in multiple places at the same time. True realities are multipolar dynamics, rather than unipolar statics. Thus, to understand the complexity of the environment, we must develop both our personal self-awareness and social awareness. So where reality is multi-layered and kaleidoscopic, layered and deeper meanings can be derived from the chaotic environment we exist within through contemplating the layered intricacies and meanings within the Quran.

Muslims viewing the text of the Quran as a living and evolving one, can find a meaningful guide to life and the universe, which we propose is what Quantum Islam means. What one sees with the naked eye, a phenomenon to be studied is just a level of Reality that we construct cognitively. However as one reads deeper into the meaning of the Quran, one may find the signs and symbols manifesting themselves in newer ways, which we digest and make meaning of through our self-awareness or spirituality.

The second challenge is that we must understand that we are not at the centre of the world. We must override the assumption that modern humankind has adopted in that humans can control nature and nature is here to serve us. What we think and the assumptions behind our very thoughts may not actually resemble reality, and may not be the truth. Once we shed this egocentric view of the world, we come to realize that we cannot control nature and we must nurture nature. In the Quran it is said: Say: He is Allah, He is One, He is Eternal He Begets not nor is He begotten and there is none equal unto Him Surah Ikhlas 112.

Muslims engaged in a cognitive and metaphysical reading of the Quran may propose that human existence is both physical and conceptual, and that as a Platonic view would content, we are both Forms and Appearance, and that if the self is an invention/creation to manifest the truth. There is a larger truth of being and nothingness, in another world of the unseen,. This is the idea of corresponding reality of existence. Islam proposes that this view of Quantum state of beingness can only be understood if one understands the meaning of selflessness or the destruction of the Ego, and to allow the self to be liberated from the confines of a physical and mechanistic world.

The third challenge is to read the question from a culturally-neutral perspective. This means stripping the notion that all that is Islam is Arabic and with fallacy, to believe that religious belief is not cultural. This is to begin to believe that to be a Muslim, one need not aspire to be or to become an Arab. If Islam is a universal truth, it is not Arab-centric, and many of the rites and rituals cannot be universal, if for example, Islam was to the truth on another planet like Mars. What would Islam be like without the cultural anchors that have grown around it and almost strangled the truth? If, as the last message of Prophet Muhammad would content  that Islam promotes a universal message of peace  and be viewed as the final revelation, and that only 20% of the worlds 1.5 billion Muslims are speakers of the Arabic language, what has been the consequence of Islam as religion that has been too much caught in the semiotics of Arabism? Simply put, why is being Muslim today synonymous of being or looking Arabic?

The three challenges above, namely that we are living in a multipolar world, that our existence is not central to the Universe, and that religion is a cultural construct to present ways for Muslims to view Islam differently. The Quran, in its very first few words of revelation, Read  in the name of thy Lord who created Thee  is a clear enough proposition for believers in this religion to read oneself and to read the world on is living in. It is an invitation for readers to not only read the world but also to write a story of ones life, based on ones own worldview and to unshackle oneself from being defined by others.

The challenges above are existential in nature, given by the Quran to the readers.

Verily in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for men of understanding; Men who remember Allah, standing, sitting, and lying down on their sides, and contemplate the creation of the heavens and the earth (with the thought) Our Lord! Not for nothing have you created (all) this. Glory to you! Give us salvation from the suffering of the fire Quran (3: 190-191)

The Ummah as Singularity in Multiplicity

The Ummah is an interconnection of oneness, not segregated tribes who are at war with each other.

We are left to reflect upon the multiplicity of worlds that were created and understand that we are only a tiny part of it.

This opens up wisdom, develops humbleness, and increases empathy towards there being something greater than ourselves. The quintessential and foundational chapter of the Quran, Al Fatihah, or The Opening offer this idea of mercy, peace, gratitude, and wisdom in choosing between Good and Evil. It introduces the reader to the idea that the path of righteousness or the Siratul Mustaqim is the path of peace that will guide human beings in this journey through the bountiful and merciful world created by The Lord of the Universe. This path is a challenging one, as we can see that even the world Islam can be used to strike terror in others as well as create untold magnitude of destruction. The emergence of the ISIS Islamic State of Syria and Iraq or ISISL, The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant or the Daesh (Darul Islamiyah) and the globalization of terror has is an example of how the word of Islam and the tawhidic message of peace can be misrepresented and be a guide to the path of those cursed as the last verse of the Al Fatihah reads.

This takes us into the tawhidic-singularity realm of Islam with the idea of Gnosticism factored into the belief system  of the alam al-ghaib, the concealed dimension of reality

We are told within the Tawhid to submit to Allah and be part of the greater universe. Yet the behaviour espoused by Islam scholars today tends to deem that OUR humanity is at the centre of the universe. It puts humankind above the natural laws of the universe, in a state of arrogance, detested in the Quran itself.

Today we see many political Islamic ideologies that seek to dominate all.

This is contrary to Allahs scheme of things within the Quran.

The continual return to referencing Allah as the Merciful and the Compassionate reminds us of the need for humility, not hostility and cruelty to humankind.

Choice is open to humankind within the teachings of the Quran. This implies man can choose the realities he wants to exist within:

I control what I perceive

I control what I think

I control how I act

I am responsible for the consequences.

(13:11)

This must occur beyond the bounds of ego-centric consciousness and the assumption that there is only one possible reality.

The action upon literal translation of the Quran is a denial of the true realities that the Quran lays out in front of us. Literal scholarly understanding of the Quran has shackled our understanding to the cultural metaphors that have bounded Islam to its Arabness that we see today. This has blinded us to seeing the deeper dimensions of Islam and the messages of transformation towards Tawhidness. The Quran is a dynamic book, talking about change. Its been interpreted as static dogma and doctrines, losing the central message about our journal of transcendence to the state of Tawhidness.

The paradoxes of metaphoric and material universes

The paradoxes of the Quran advise humanity not to be too self-excessive and egocentric. Our greed, and other negative emotions, narcissism and other neurosis, addictions, pleasures, accumulation of wealth, and how we treat others is a quantum introspection that we are taught within the Quran, in order to assist us seeing other realities (universes), that we have choice to enter and exist within.

Only through this open awareness can we experience the realities of the world around us, learn to submit to the greater universe around us, which is called Allah. Our essence of purity through the state of spirituality is the only paradigm we can use to understand the deep meaning of the Tawhid and its greatness, far beyond any person, society, or time.

Thus the Tawhid provides humanity with a meaning of life; that of being part of a greater existence; a worldview that accommodates not only the multiple worldviews of existing belief system but also respects the process of constructing emergent new ones.

The introspection of a literal Allah is a neurosis that blinds us to Allahs true greatness and our true appreciation of this. This is the true reality.

In Islam, worldviews such as that proposed through Sufism takes Muslims away from the ordered mechanistic world view. The world can be seen for what it is, complex in almost mystical ways, as even the laws of nature itself can be seen beyond cause and effect, beyond karma which is too simplistic to explain reality. This is the Quantum view of Islam, which can also be found in the way Buddhism views the self, Reality, and existence. Buddhist ideas such as the self as non-existence and constantly evolving as the being and becoming bodhisattva journeys towards nibbbana or Nirvana, and constantly being aware of the impermanence of the self and the ephemerality of physical beings, and to live a principle of non-attachment to this mechanistic and material world,, and finally to view that life is a process of samsara or the evolution towards liberation, perpetual happiness, and next to enter the realm of being and nothingness  this view is where the similarity of Quantum Islam and core metaphysical teachings of existing cultural philosophies lie.

Perception and feeling become more important than any form of quantitative measurement in understanding reality. The Quran itself is not a quantitative work. It is a compendium of propositions inviting readers to think of multiple interpretations of the meaning of texts, subtexts, and cultural contexts. It is a postmodern text that has not proper arrangement or a sense of story of creationism. In other words, it is not a structured story about the metaphysics and physics of creation and Mans place in the universe. The Quran, in short is merely a set of annotated readings inviting the reads to deconstruct meanings. It is a book about representations of alternate realities in which even the speaker or narrator of this grand text utilizes shifting pronouns in telling stories and passing down decrees.

Reality and Quantum Islam

The perception of reality is about awareness as the Quran teaches. It is about how individuals transcend the universe through a journey towards a destination and seek the final reality.

Mathematics breaks down in any view of reality, i.e., mathematics cannot explain 10% of infinity. Science cannot explain reality; as if we look at an atom we are not sure whether its a particle or a wave. There is a duality to everything, i.e., atoms can be in more than one place at the same time. Half of what we look at is in decay, so the Schrodingers cat is both alive and dead at the same time. There is a duality of consciousness that we must understand. It is both psychic and physical, full of emotion and emotionless, black and white, good and evil, hot and cold, attracting and repelling. Reality is thus an inter-connectiveness of nature and a web of relationships between humanity and spirituality, that makes up a unified whole within us.

The form of our realities is the product of our observation of this. A tawhidic consciousness is therefore so important in our interpretation of reality.

Prof. Anis Bajrektarevic indicates that it: corresponds with the Buddhist Yogacara assumption that all perceptions do leave traces which make future similar perceptions more probable/plausible  origins of the potentialities within the quantum realm. Finally, professor concludes: This is why mankind kept practicing a prayer.

Seeing this is the order within the chaos that shrouds our minds by focusing too much on the poles of the existential paradoxes. Paradoxes can only be understood through balance. Then one can see the truths within people, relationships, and events.

Many Islamic writers resorted to using poetry to enhance the understanding of non-linear world.

The Quran talks of a transition to a level where the duality of mind and body cannot be distinguished. We shift into a singularity where there is no time, no space, just a transcendence or universal oneness. We transcend the four dimensions that we understand into further dimensions which the Quran speaks of but we have no direct prior experience. This is the state called Syurga.

The direct experience of reality is a psychic and emotional breakthrough to what Islam calls Al-falah.

The only tool needed to see reality is a tawhidic transcending awareness, which is the key to openness and seeing something greater than our selves.

This is why we rely on rituals such as Zikir (where prayer is incorporated) which builds up higher levels of consciousness. Zikir should help us create an empty mind so all thoughts are cleared to enable us to see the greater universe free of our own egocentrism.

This is where insight come from as we experience eureka manifestations of both personal and universal nature. Einstein wrote of this epiphanic moment in his journey to construct the theory of relativity,

Our intellect is developed through our experience, which gathers knowledge and interprets meaning for us. The heart of all knowledge for a human is experience. For example, we cannot know what it is like to scuba dive, without actually scuba diving. 100 hours in a classroom cannot give you the same knowledge as a few minutes under the water.

Without experiencing the universe we are blind. This blindness can only be overcome through being open and empathetic to the world around us. Blindness to the universe is a human neurosis.

Science, sense, and soul

A quantum view of reality puts an end to materialism. It is within this paradigm Quantum Islam that one need to look at reality in a different light, taking into consideration that life is not entirely founded upon Materialism.

The Tawhid espouses us to transcend materialism. The non-physical element of our life is our existence, not material things, only their images and symbolic meanings within our minds. This triggers our emotions which create Al-fasad realities for humankind, bringing humans to a level of personal destruction through greed, etc.

This also has repercussions in thought and future actions, and can be considered ill-intentions, contrary to what the Quran espouses. This is our mystical jihad of finding our true uncorrupted existence.

The worldly realities mediate and shrivel over our Tawhidic consciousness, which tells us what is right. Going against what is right is sin and our physic destruction.

Tawhidic consciousness is the true universal wisdom, just as quarks within atoms possess energy which has its own consciousness described for example, by physicist such as Freeman Dyson. Like quarks, we have the capacity to make free decisions.

The non-physical, all embracing empathetic and compassionate mind is what we can develop through Tawhidic guidance. This takes us into the realm of Allah and Syurga.

Allah exists within our higher levels of consciousness, as we are told many times within the Quran.

The narratives of the Quran are concerned with both individual and social (universal) consciousness, the yin and yang of our existence.

This has great implications which havent been discussed within the Islamic world. Most are restricted to reading from the literal universe of the Quran, and clinging to this unipolar universe.

To see reality, we must discard the concepts of language and images. Structure gives bias and shackles our knowing.

Higher intellect cannot be obtained through the processes thinking within mechanistic realities. This blinds us to the understanding of the essential nature of the universe. With a literal understanding of the Quran we are in a paradigm lock within a singular universe of nature. Without paradox, we cannot see meaning, as paradox is the only way we can interpret. Paradox is the language above all other languages, the only way we can create benchmarks within our mind, in order to interpret the universe around us.

However, these paradoxes are ruled by personal emotions, of which we both project and introspect with the dualities that define our world. It is within these dualities that we define good and evil, right and wrong, virtuous or sinful.

Islam and particularly the Tawhid is a field of potential. It is a reality beyond our materialistic reality, and our consciousness which is intertwined with our ego-self. The Tawhid can only be entered into, discovered, or become an awareness through humility on the inside and compassion filtering to the outside, without the ego-self bounding us back to our materialistic existence. This dimension is a field of human and universal purity, full of wisdom; al-Falah. Islam is really about how we transcend the lower earthly dimensions of ourselves into the higher dimension of Tawhid-purity.

This is Quantum-Islam; the potential to be, the choice that has been given to all humanity within the Quran.

Conclusion

Exploring idea of Quantum Islam, as the name suggests, requires the mind of the Muslim to engage in the phenomenological and metaphysical experience of conceiving worldviews beyond the mechanistic view of the personal and physical self and move toward a higher plane of quantum physics and metaphysics. In other words, Muslims should raise the level of understanding Islam from mere doctrinal and cultural to philosophical and muti-universal and multi-dimensional. This requires a new understanding of what god is, beyond how this concept of a creator is understood. A Kuhnian shift in Islamic metaphysics and ontological evolution is needed, as how the idea of a Heisenberg Principle of observing Objectivity was conceived. Muslims need to explore the semiotics of believing itself and venture deeper into the meaning constructing the meaning of reading their book of readings: The Quran.

About the authors :

MURRAY HUNTER is an Australian academic, entrepreneur, researcher, and writer who has spent more than 35 years within the region. He is a contributor to a number of international news sites around the world. DR AZLY RAHMAN is an academician, long-time columnist for Malaysiakini, an author of seven books on Malaysia and the complexities of hypermodernity and globalisation, and teaches courses in Global Politics, Culture, American Studies, Education, and Philosophy. He currently resides in the United States.





The views expressed in this article are the author\s own and do not necessarily reflect The Times Of Earth\s editorial policy.
Airport development adding to economy, jobs in the region

Pittsburgh may always be known as the Steel City, but a wave of new industries are popping up near its airport to redefine business in the region.
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Hirschi High School Band member Jose Castillo has been selected to the 2016 All-State Band by the Association of Texas Small School Bands.

The ATSSB All-State Bands will meet for rehearsals in San Antonio on Feb. 10-13 and will present a concert at 9:30 a.m. Feb. 13 at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center in downtown San Antonio. Castillo will perform as the first chair of the Jazz Ensemble. He was chosen for this honor in competitive auditions held across the state at region and area levels.

Castillo is a private student of Dr. Andrew Allen and plays the alto saxophone at school. This is his first time to perform as a member of the ATSSB All-State Band. His other interests at school include Youth Symphony Orchestra, French Club, English UIL and Jazz Band. He also is active in church activities at First Baptist, enjoys playing cello, piano and accordion and composing and arranging his own music.

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Stewart Herringshaw, of Sheppard Air Force Base, has been named to the president's honor roll with a 4.00 grade-point average for the fall 2015 semester at Bismarck State College in North Dakota.

Students must maintain a 4.00 grade point while enrolled in at least 12 semester hours of classes to receive this distinction.

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Erica Quinton, of Wichita Falls, has been recognized as one of more than 1,860 students from Valdosta State University in Georgia who made the fall 2015 dean's list.

To qualify, students must achieve a semester grade-point average of 3.50 or higher on nine or more semester hours with an institutional grade-point average of 3.00 or higher.

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Kristen Crock, of Wichita Falls, has been named to the fall 2015 dean's list at Capital University in Bexley, Ohio.

To be named to the dean's list, full-time, degree-seeking students must have achieved a grade-point average of at least 3.5.

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William Flowers, of Wichita Falls, has been named to the dean's list for the fall semester at State Technical College of Missouri. To be placed on the dean's list, a full-time student must earn a semester grade-point average between 3.5 and 4.0 on a 4-point scale.

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Lauren Barnett and Christi Robertson, of Wichita Falls, have been named to the dean's academic honor roll for the 2015 fall semester at Baylor University in Waco.

Barnett is a student in the College of Arts and Sciences. Robertson is studying in the Louise Herrington School of Nursing.

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Danielle Howard, of Waurika, Oklahoma, and Claire Baer, of Wichita Falls, have been named to the Oklahoma City University dean's honor roll for fall 2015

Dean's Honor Roll status is awarded to students who successfully complete a minimum of 12 credit hours and maintain a grade-point average of 3.5 or higher.

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Paige Alexandra Fischer, of Wichita Falls, has been named to the dean's honor roll for her work in the fall 2015 semester at Central Oklahoma State University. To be included on the Dean's Honor Roll, a student must record a 3.5 grade-point average or better for the semester and no grade lower than a B for their work in qualifying classes.
Zundy Junior High

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By Christopher Collins of the Times Record News

Zundy Elementary School has provided extra counseling services to students this week  a response to a Thursday incident in which a teacher lost her job.

A Wichita Falls Independent School District spokeswoman would not disclose on Tuesday what the incident entailed, but some unconfirmed media reports have linked it to the binding of schoolchildren's mouths with duct tape.

A first-grade teacher, who has not been named by the district, is "no longer employed." It wasn't clear Tuesday whether she quit or was fired.

WFISD spokeswoman Ashley Thomas told the Times Record News that letters were sent to Zundy parents informing them that a teacher involved in an incident at the school no longer works for the district. The letter also informed them that counselors would be available for children and administrators would be available to talk to parents.

"I think that anytime there is a situation involving students, we want to make sure they're not scared and that they shouldn't be afraid to speak up," Thomas said. "(Counselors) are available for anybody at the school."

She said Zundy normally employs one staff counselor but circumstances led the district to bring in two others on a limited basis.

The unidentified educator was placed on administrative leave late last week pending a school district investigation. Wichita Falls police have said that they are involved in the investigation, though no criminal charges have been filed.

Thomas said she attended an Leadership Wichita Falls event at Zundy on Tuesday and that the school appeared to be back on track.

"Teachers are back to their normal routine and it's business as usual with the students," she said. "They have some great teachers over there who are doing a great job. It's unfortunate one teacher can put a bad light on all teachers."
Egypt's budget deficit edged up to 4.9 percent of the GDP in the first five months of the current fiscal year, compared to 4.4 percent in the same period last year, due to a surge in subsidies and debt service, showed the Ministry of Finance December bulletin.

The financial monthly published on Tuesday showed that a LE34 billion ($4.34 billion) increase in revenues in the period from July to November 2015 was outweighed by a LE57.6 billion ($7.35 billion) rise in expenditures, leaving the deficit for the period with a LE30.6 billion ($3.9 billion) increase to LE138.5 billion ($17.7 billion).

Egypt has been undergoing a fiscal reform programme since July 2013 with the aim of clenching on the ballooning budget deficit through new taxes and subsidy cuts.

With more than 33 percent of all expenditure  driven by domestic obligations  debt service surged in the first five months of this year by 41 percent to LE96.3 billion ($12.3 billion) from LE68.4 billion ($8.7 billion).

Subsidies and social benefits contributed a fifth to expenses with a 39 percent increase to LE60.6 billion ($70.7 billion) from LE43.6 billion ($5.6 billion).

Wages and employee compensations, contributing almost a third of expenses, increased 6.261 percent in that period to almost LE85 billion ($10.9 billion) from LE79.6 billion ($10.2 billion).

On the other hand, a hike in sales tax collections drove up tax revenues 23 percent to LE112.7 billion ($14.4 billion) from LE91.6 billion ($11.7 billion), showed the bulletin.

Sales tax, which Egypt plans to replace by a value-added tax this fiscal year, saw the most collection, increasing 21 percent to LE51.6 billion ($6.6 billion) from LE43.4 billion ($5.5 billion).

Egypt has budgeted the introduction of a value added tax for the current fiscal year, but the law is yet to be presented to the parliament.

Grants from foreign governments in that period more than tripled to LE2.7 billion ($345 million).

Egypt expects to shrink its deficit in fiscal year 2015/16 to 8.9 percent, down from 11.5 percent in 2014/15.

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By Lana Sweeten-Shults of the Times Record News

Consolidating the Wichita Falls ISD's population of bilingual education students  students scattered over 20 of the district's 29 campuses  may mean more success with the program, which has not performed as well as expected.

"There are concerns about the scores," Bilingual and English-as-a-Second-Language Program Coordinator Greta Benavides said Friday night at a two-day school board work retreat.

The board and administration talked about concentrating those students at four schools, which means busing students to selected campuses.

"It would be much easier for our department to oversee four campuses, not 20," Benavides said.

Superintendent Mike Kuhrt added, "The purpose of what Greta is saying is to bring them to hub campuses."

According to the state, she said, a bilingual program is implemented when 20 or more students speak one language at the same level.

But with students scattered everywhere around the district, "We cannot implement the program properly, so to say the program is not working is not fair.  If we can get them together at different campuses, we can serve them."

Gathering students in one place means reporting a larger number of bilingual students. That translates into being able to hire more bilingual education teachers.

Benavides' plan, if students are brought to the four campuses, would mean hiring 37 certified bilingual teachers. They must be fluent in two languages, as opposed to an ESL instructor, who requires a certification only.

"Right now, we have 25," she said of the Wichita Falls ISD's count of bilingual teachers.

The challenge would be persuading parents to agree to allowing their students to be bused away from their home campus to the four schools that would be the home base for bilingual education students.

Parents, she said, can deny services  and do. Benavides related a case in which a parent denied services because they wanted their child to stay at a particular elementary school.

The student then received "zero help, whatsoever, in their native language," she said. Such students fall further and further behind in their studies.

"How can we expect a 3-year-old to take the SAT (in the future) with no help (now)?"

Board member Kevin Goldstein said, "What would the Hispanic community think?" of busing students to campuses away from their home schools.

"Every Tuesday, I've been going to every campus," Benavides said. " There are a lot of urban legends when it comes to the bilingual program."

Benavides said it would take meeting with families and telling them the benefits for their children, though even then, parents could still deny services.

"We would have the bilingual program through fifth grade. Come sixth grade, there's not a Spanish version of the STAAR (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness) test," Kuhrt said, adding, "The Hispanic coalition is completely behind this."

The goal is, for students who have been identified as qualifying for bilingual education, to be 50 percent proficient in English by third grade.

"In sixth grade and above, they just come into the ESL program," Kuhrt said.

The district serves 220 in the ESL program, he added, from sixth through 12th grades.

The board took no action on any items at its 10-hour, two-day board retreat.
Voter registration card

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By Lynn Walker of the Times Record News

A deadline looms for unregistered Texans who want to vote in the Texas primary elections March 1.

The deadline to register is Monday.

The Texas primary has taken on national significance this year because it is part of the so-called Super Tuesday where the state will be one of 14 holding either elections or caucuses to determine presidential nominees. Texas Republicans will send 155 delegates to their national convention while Democrats will send 252 delegates to theirs, the second largest delegations in the nation behind California. Additionally, county and statewide offices will be on the primary ballots.

"I encourage all qualified Texans who aren't already registered or who need to update their registrations to do so before the Feb. 1 deadline," said Secretary of State Carlos Cascos said in a news release Tuesday. "This primary election will help decide which candidates will be on the ballot in November."

Texans can register to vote in several ways, including downloading a mail-in application at VoteTexas.gov. Applications must be postmarked Monday or earlier to meet the deadline. Eligible voters may also apply in person at their county voter registrar's office. In Wichita County, that's the County Clerk's Office in the courthouse.

Both the Republican and the Democratic parties will hold primaries March 1, but Texans do not have to declare a party affiliation when they register and may vote in whichever party's primary they choose  but not both.

Early voting begins Feb. 16 and continues through Feb. 26. The deadline to request a ballot by mail is Feb. 19.

Photo IDs are required for people who vote in person in early voting or on Election Day. Photos are not required of people voting by mail and no photo ID is necessary to register to vote.

The seven forms of approved photo ID for voting are:

Texas driver's license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS

Texas personal identification card issued by DPS

Texas handgun license issued by DPS

U.S. military identification card containing the person's photograph

U.S. citizenship certificate containing the person's photograph

U.S. passport

Wichita County Clerk Lori Bohanon said there are bout 70,000 registered voters in the county.
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Donald David Decker, 87, of Wichita Falls passed away peacefully on Monday, January 25, 2016 at House of Hope after a lengthy fight with Alzheimer's disease.

A celebration of life will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday, January 28, 2016 in the Chapel of Owens and Brumley Funeral Home with Rev. Harvey McMurry officiating. Arrangements are under the direction of Owens and Brumley Funeral Home of Wichita Falls.

Don was born on August 14, 1928 in Munday, Texas to the late Frank and Alma (Swift) Decker. . Soon after his family moved to Childress, Texas where he graduated from high school in 1945 and then attended Texas A&M University, graduating with a bachelor degree in Agronomy and a Master of Education degree.

Upon graduation he married Donna Horn and joined the Texas Agricultural Extension Service as a County Agent in Brownwood. They had three children, David and twins Daniel and Douglas. They subsequently moved to Belton where Don became the Bell county agent for approximately 20 years and was recognized as outstanding county agent before moving to the same position in Wichita County, Wichita Falls, TX. Don was presented with the district award in 1983.

In 1978 he married Dee James and moved to Iowa Park. He retired from the extension service in 1983 and worked for the First National Bank of Iowa Park for the next 10 years.

Don was a member of the Iowa Park Rotary Club and served on the Iowa Park City council and Iowa Park ISD School Board. He was an avid cyclist and rode in the Hotter'n Hell Hundred from its inception until his health no longer permitted him to do so. He was proud of riding the 100 miles in under four hours while he was in his 70's. His most enjoyable hobby in later life was raising sheep and goats. He was also proud of being a torch carrier for the 1996 Olympics. Don was one of the initiators and organizers of the Wichita Falls Senior Olympics.

Don was preceded in death by his parents and his sister Genevieve White. He is survived by his wife, Dee Decker, his sons, David, Dan and Doug and his stepchildren whom he raised and loved, Scott James and Julie (James) Goodwin, grandchildren Abigail James, Alexandria Goodwin, David Keith Decker and wife Jennifer, Alesha Newby and husband Gary, Tara Mercado (Martin), and Tasha Decker and four great grandchildren.

The family wishes to express appreciation for the excellent care given to Don by Hospice of Wichita Falls, House of Hope and Sterling House employees.

The family suggests that memorials be made to House of Hope, 5100 Stone Lake Drive, Wichita Falls, TX 76310, Alzheimer's Association, 901 Indiana, 350, Wichita Falls, TX 76310, Hospice of Wichita Falls, 4909 Johnson Road, Wichita Falls, TX 76310 and the Iowa Park Friendly Door.

Condolences may be sent to the family at www.owensandbrumley.com
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By Times Record News

Wichita County has been included in state disaster declaration issued by Gov. Greg Abbott following a Christmas-week snow and ice storm that also spawned tornadoes in parts of the state.

"The severe weather that swept through Texas last December devastated many homes, businesses and lives," Abbott said in a press release. "A disaster declaration will provide Texans the resources needed to begin rebuilding after this tragedy."

Abbott also requested individual assistance for Collin, Dallas, Ellis, Franklin, Rockwall and Van Zandt Counties. The governor also requested public assistance for Bailey, Castro, Childress, Cochran, Dallas, Deaf Smith, Dickens, Ellis, Hall, Hardeman, Harrison, Henderson, Hopkins, Kaufman, Kent, King, Lamb, Lubbock, Navarro, Parmer, Rains, Red River, Rockwall, Titus and Van Zandt counties. The declaration comes after preliminary damage assessments were finalized and federal declaration criteria was met. If the request is granted by the president, affected citizens in these counties may be eligible for Individual Assistance grants of up to $33,000 from the federal government, and low-interest disaster loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Wichita County Judge Woody Gossom said he ask the governor for the disaster declaration because of problems that occurred in Electra. The storm that rolled in Christmas weekend knocked out power to most the community and some surrounding areas and emergency help was necessary for about four days, including in emergency generators.

Wichita County was one of four counties that were added to the governor's state disaster declaration that was issued Dec. 27. It authorized the use of "all available resources of state government and of political subdivisions that are reasonably necessary to cope with this disaster."

Wichita County was not included in the request for a presidential disaster declaration.
Troy

Federal agents left with more documents from City Hall and met with city firefighters this month as their investigation of the King Street and King Fuels demolitions expands.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency criminal investigations agents met with Corporation Counsel Kevin Glasheen and requested records, John Salka, a spokesman for Mayor Patrick Madden, said Tuesday.

"The EPA representative requested some additional information," Salka said.

The documents were provided and since then, Salka said, "We have not heard back."

The EPA, FBI, state Labor Department and state Department of Environmental Conservation agents have been examining the removal of asbestos from 4-10 King St. downtown and at the King Fuels site in South Troy when demolition occurred in 2013.

The issue of possible lack of proper asbestos abatement and the circumstances surrounding city oversight has interested the federal and state investigators. Former City Engineer Russ Reeves, who was interviewed at the FBI's Albany Division office in March 2014, raised concerns about the way demolition proceeded at both locations.

The case is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Western District of New York operating out of its Rochester office.

EPA agents attended the Troy Uniformed Firefighters Association meeting in December and January, according to firefighter Frank Razzano, the union president.

"They asked us to cooperate. We're cooperating in any way we can," Razzano said.

"In the interest of public safety we have an obligation to help," Razzano said.

The agents appeared most interested in speaking to firefighters who were on duty on Aug. 6, 2013 when 4-10 King St. was razed as an emergency demolition. Bombers Burrito Bar at 2 King St. remained opened as 4-10 King St. was taken down.

The latest request for documents from City Hall comes 10 months after subpoenas were served at City Hall and on private firms in March 2015 for files related to the two demolition sites and other materials. When agents served the subpoenas

Federal and state agents have interviewed scores of current and former city employees as part of their investigation. Most of the interviews have taken place away from City Hall. City employees have said that the agents have appeared at their homes to interview them or have made arrangements to interview them in neutral settings such as coffee shops.

In 2014, former City Council President Rodney Wiltshire led extensive City Council hearings into the demolition work at 4-10 King St. and at the King Fuels site.

During the hearings, the City Council heard testimony from Reeves; Fire Chief Thomas Garrett about the decision to order the demolition of 4-10 King St. as an emergency; building owner Donald Boyajian; former Mayor Lou Rosamilia; and other city officials. Testimony also was taken on the King Fuels site.

kcrowe@timesunion.com  518-454-5084  @KennethCrowe
Albany

Trying to address a potential public health concern as well as widespread anxiety in a Rensselaer County community, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration on Wednesday said the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics plant in the village of Hoosick Falls will be declared a state Superfund site.

The designation extends from an emergency regulation, issued Wednesday, that will allow state to list perfluorooctanoic acid or PFOA, a toxic chemical that has been found in elevated levels in the village's water supply, as a hazardous substance.

Superfund authority allows the state to investigate the extent of any contamination, and to begin remediation immediately.

State Health Commissioner Howard A. Zucker said the state will initiate a health-risk analysis, re-test private wells in the village and install filters at schools and other gathering places.

The emergency regulations followed an unannounced private meeting Wednesday afternoon at the Capitol between the governor and school and government leaders from Hoosick Falls.

"We found a way for the state to take action which I believe is immediate and will ultimately be conclusive," Cuomo said in an interview with the Times Union.

The governor said the situation in Hoosick Falls was similar to the state's recent experiences with the Ebola virus and Legionnaires Disease, situations in which the impact of very real health threats were worsened by sometimes overblown public fears.

"In Hoosick Falls, there was misinformation, conflicting information," he said, "and it appeared to be a situation that was getting out of control, and people (were) getting anxious. After anxiety comes anger, and the misinformation in and of itself can be destructive."

Cuomo said the fear had emerged primarily "within the community  'What is this? How dangerous is it? How sick am I, how sick are my kids?' And they can talk themselves into a situation that then gets reported in papers where nobody wants to move to Hoosick Falls, and the homes in Hoosick Falls are unsaleable. And people are now disrupted in a way that has nothing to do with reality."

Wednesday's meeting took place after the Times Union reported that school and town leaders have been frustrated, in part, with their dealings with the state Health Department, which is leading efforts to test private wells in that area for contamination. The agency was informed of the toxic pollution in December 2014, but did not begin testing water supplies in that area until last July.

At a hastily called news conference following Wednesday's meeting, Zucker sidestepped questions about why his agency had instructed village leaders in Hoosick Falls for more than a year that the levels of the toxic chemical found in the water were safe for normal use. The Health Department changed its position last month, in part, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned that the water was unsafe for drinking or cooking.

Up to that point, Hoosick Falls Village Mayor David Borge had been telling village residents it was a "personal choice" whether to consume the water.

The meeting with the governor included Borge, Hoosick Falls school Superintendent Kenneth Facin, Hoosick Town Supervisor Mark Surdam, Acting DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos and state Sen. Kathy Marchione, R-Halfmoon.

Elevated levels of PFOA were found in the system in 2014 by Michael Hickey, a former village trustee whose father died of cancer. Hickey sent water samples to a Canadian lab that reported levels of PFOA that the EPA later said are not safe for human consumption.

The EPA has established a guideline that a level of 400 parts per trillion is a safe level for "short-term" consumption of the water. But EPA officials said the agency is expected to lower that level significantly this year. Meanwhile, other states have set far lower acceptable levels of PFOA in public water systems, including New Jersey, which has set a level of 40 ppt.

Zucker said the state Health Department is reviewing its position and will set a new safety limit in the coming weeks on the acceptable levels of PFOA for drinking water. The state's action comes as Hoosick Falls this week began installing temporary filters on its water-treatment plant that supplies water to several thousand customers.

"I think we have taken this very seriously," Zucker said, "and what happens is once we have a number ... obviously we are trying to be, and will be, more aggressive in bringing the level down from 400 (ppt). There hasn't been any health effects that we've noticed on this."

However, Dr. Marcus E. Martinez, who runs a family medical practice here, said he and his father, who opened the practice in 1956, have noted rare and aggressive forms of cancer in patients, as well as thyroid diseased and other health problems. Martinez is also the Hoosick Falls school physician, but he was not allowed to attend Wednesday's meeting with the governor, a person briefed on the matter said. In December, the Times Union reported many residents in the village and town believe their community has been afflicted by rare and aggressive forms of cancer and thyroid disease.

In the news conference, Seggos noted the Superfund designation "exists to enable the DEC to go out and spend money against the state Superfund remedial work. We then go after the polluter to recover those monies."

PFOA is a man-made chemical used to make non-stick and other household and commercial products that are heat-resistant and repel grease and water. Under a deal with the EPA, major PFOA makers began phasing out its use in 2006. PFOA exposure has been linked to increased health effects, including testicular and kidney cancer and thyroid disease.

Although the source of the contamination has not been identified, officials have focused on the Saint-Gobain plant, which is near several wells that supply Hoosick Falls' water treatment plant. The small factory, which Saint-Gobain bought in 1999, used the chemical for decades and is the village's largest employer with about 125 workers. The firm owns a second plant in the village with about 75 workers.

Saint-Gobain used PFOA at its plants until December 2014, when it stopped using the chemical. Its own water tests, done as a result of Hickey's discovery, included results that showed levels of PFOA at 18,000 ppt in the groundwater under its McCaffrey Street plant  several hundred yards from the village's well fields.

The governor's intervention on Wednesday came two weeks after the state called on the EPA to add Saint-Gobain's McCaffrey Street plant "and other possible sources of contamination" in the village to the federal Superfund program and "undertake a full environmental investigation to address the sources of contamination." The state's sudden call for action came on the same day a vocal citizens group, Health Hoosick Water, had scheduled a meeting at the local high school on the contamination. The informational meeting included officials with the state Health Department officials and EPA and drew a crowd of hundreds.

Health Hoosick Water leaders in December said they were frustrated because state and village leaders were declining to heed their warnings about the potential dangers of PFOA in the drinking water.

"I think that we've been very proactive with this right from the very beginning," Borge said at the Capitol news conference. "... This has been a very difficult time, there's no question about it. It's been traumatic for folks not just in terms of health issues ... but just in terms of the fear that people have had and the concerns. Now we have something concrete we can go forward and show people that steps are being taken."

"I am excited about what happened today and very appreciative," said Facin, the Hoosick Falls school superintendent.

Saint-Gobain's decision to stop using PFOA at its Hoosick Falls plants took place the same month that the company told the EPA that PFOA had been found in the public water system.

The state Health Department last month issued a fact sheet to residents downplaying the health risks of the toxic chemical until two weeks ago, when the state took a stronger stand and called on the EPA to set stricter standards on the acceptable levels of PFOA in drinking water. The state also said it would begin "an investigation of the incidence of cancer among village residents."

Hoosick Falls has had a number of manufacturing plants dating to the early 1800s, including other plants that used PFOA or similar synthetic chemicals. In the last three months, the Times Union has interviewed current and former residents who suspect the drinking water may have caused cancer or other serious effects for themselves or relatives.

There are also areas within the town and village, where some of the companies used to dump waste, that are becoming a focus of the EPA's investigation.

The governor's actions occur as the nation is watching state officials in Michigan beset by criticism over their glacial response to lead contamination in the water supply of the once-bustling industrial city of Flint.

Cuomo, who plans to visit Hoosick Falls in the next few weeks, said the state has "a full, aggressive plan to quickly understand the status of the situation, and perform an aggressive remediation."

Matt Hamilton contributed reporting for this story; blyons@timesunion.com  518-454-5547  @brendan_lyonstu
Related Egypt parliament forms committee to investigate corruption claims by top auditor

Egypt dropped one point in the 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index compared to the previous year with a score of 36/100, Transparency International reported on Wednesday, stating that political corruption remains a huge challenge for the government.

Despite the poor score, the most populous Arab nation slightly went up in the ranking of countries, placing 88th out of 168 countries in 2015 against 94th out of 175 in 2014.

The rise of ISIS and the ensuing fight against terrorism have been used by many governments as an excuse to crack down on civil liberties and civil society, Ghada Zughayar, the director of the MENA department at Transparency International, said in the report.

Among the bottom countries in the index were the Arab nations of Sudan (score 12/100), Iraq and Libya (16/100).

The Germany-based NGO said on its website that governments need to give space to civil society to be their serious partner in the fight against corruption.

"Security will only succeed long-term if governments make a genuine break with cronyism and build trust with citizens," said Zughayar. "This will require a huge change in political will."

The Arab Gulf Kingdom of Saudi Arabia saw an upward movement in the index for the third year in a row, scoring 52/100 amid increased participation of women in political life.

Scandinavian countries were registered the least corrupt, with Denmark topping of the list.

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THE ISSUE:

Hoosick Falls has hired a PR firm to get its message about tainted water out.

THE STAKES:

It shouldn't take a professional to understand the need for such an urgent warning.

More Information To comment: tuletters@timesunion.com or at http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion See More Collapse

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Without question, officials in Hoosick Falls had been doing a less than stellar job communicating the dangers in the village's water supply to its 3,500 residents. The question now is whether residents should have to pay for officials to do their job right.

Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admonished Mayor David B. Borge for not properly warning residents of the serious health risks posted by drinking the water flowing from their taps. The water has high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, and the EPA was urging the village to warn people not to drink it or use it for cooking. The chemical has been linked to testicular and kidney cancer and thyroid disease.

After the EPA's criticism, and after Mayor Borge's statements that he was concerned that the water issue could adversely affect economic development and that drinking the water is a matter of "personal choice," the village is going on the defensive. It has brought in a public relations firm that specializes in crisis management.

After mismanaging the dissemination of important public information, it might seem reasonable to get some expertise. But even the circumstances surrounding how the company, Behan Communications of Glens Falls, became involved are as murky as the mishandling of this whole matter.

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Village officials say Behan was hired by the law firm it hired in November to help handle the water situation. We don't know details of the arrangement with Behan, or the law firm for that matter, including how much each company is charging, how long their work will last and where the money is coming from.

The law firm, FitzGerald Morris Baker Firth, also of Glens Falls, is helping the village in what is described as negotiations with Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, which operates two plants in Hoosick Falls, employing about 200. For years, one of the plants had produced Teflon-coated materials, a process which may have polluted the water with PFOA. While long-term remedies are explored, Saint-Gobain is paying to provide each household with five gallons of bottled water daily.

The mayor says Behan Communications has helped the village produce a timeline posted on the village website. The presentation quite favorably lists the steps taken by the village since 2014, when elevated PFOA was discovered by a village resident who on his own sent water samples off for testing.

Municipalities and school districts often turn to consultants for help to manage the message in complicated and nuanced situations. But when public health and safety is at stake, the message should have been crystal clear from the start. As the EPA so succinctly put in its letter last month to Mayor Borge, the village's water is unsafe for human consumption.

This is not a public relations problem. It's a public health and safety problem. The village should focus on managing that, not manipulating public opinion.
One Egyptian official's tough stance on wheat imports carrying a fungus that wreaked havoc in the Middle Ages is baffling global grain traders and putting a spotlight on policy-making disarray in the world's biggest purchaser of the commodity.

Alarm bells began ringing in Egypt when a 63,000 tonne wheat shipment from France arrived in December.

Traces of the ergot fungus were found, and even though they were within the permissible limits stipulated by the country's main state wheat buyer, the agriculture ministry warned that any level of the common fungus would be flatly rejected.

Since then, Egyptian authorities have sent mixed messages about their policy on the fungus.

The ministry of supply and the main state buyer, The General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC), maintain that imports of wheat may contain up to a 0.05 percent level of ergot, a common international standard, while the agriculture ministry insists on a new zero tolerance approach.

The leader of the anti-ergot stance is Saad Moussa, head of the central administration of the agriculture quarantine authority. He has warned even the most minute quantities of ergot are unacceptable.

Traders eager to capitalise on Egypt's lucrative market are shaking their heads over the dispute that has paralysed decision-making among officials charged with ensuring the smooth supply of a strategic commodity vital for feeding millions.

So far, Egyptians appear insulated by the ergot tug of war. Egypt says it has enough strategic wheat supplies to last until May 11. But any hint of disruption is cause for concern.

"The problem is not that easy and I don't think the agriculture ministry will have the upper hand because it's a crucial issue," said Hesham Soliman, president of Med Star For Trading.

The ergot saga has already prompted him to postpone his own 25,000 tonne shipment.

"It's the national security of food and I don't think that they can play with it...If they start to reject vessels, it will definitely affect the supply," Soliman added.

Former president Anwar Sadat triggered riots when he cut the bread subsidy in 1977.

When Egyptians rose up against Hosni Mubarak's rule in 2011, one of their signature chants was "bread, freedom and social justice." The fate of the French wheat shipment to Egypt remained uncertain on Tuesday as Egypt's agriculture ministry again insisted on a strict anti-ergot fungus policy, contradicting assurances made to wheat suppliers by the country's ministry of supply only last week.

Other cargoes booked for the same shipment date in the Oct. 29 tender did not appear to face similar problems. One shipment of French and another of Romanian wheat have already unloaded while a Polish wheat shipment is currently unloading at an Egyptian Red Sea port, according to shipping data.

The French shipment was re-tested, but GASC said although it had received the test results no final decision had been made.

"We have the results of the re-testing but we haven't been notified of any final decision," GASC Vice Chairman Mamdouh Abdel Fattah told Reuters.

Should the French shipment finally be rejected, traders may be hesitant to supply in the future because shipments sent to Egypt are large and difficult to re-sell.

"It is still absolute stalemate and there could be resales from GASC tenders soon if it is not possible to unload the ships," said a European trader.

At GASC's wheat tender last week the 0.05 percent ergot ceiling was maintained, and trading houses --- some of which had threatened to boycott future tenders if the fungus was banned entirely -- participated, though in lower numbers than usual.

Still, the agriculture ministry insisted it would continue to reject all shipments of wheat containing any level of ergot.

"We are completely prohibiting the entry of ergot. This is the final word and this is in accordance with ministry of agriculture legislation," ministry spokesman Eid Hawash told Reuters.

Egyptians are not panicking but local newspapers have warned ergot can cause cancer, putting the Ministry of Supply on the defensive even though the 0.05 percent level had long been accepted.

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[January 27, 2016] IAB Education Foundation and Its iDiverse Initiative Launch First-of-Its-Kind Entry-Level Training, Certification & Job Placement Program

The IAB Education Foundation and its iDiverse initiative announced today the launch of an entry-level training, certification, and job placement pilot program, establishing a first-of-its-kind, user-friendly path for diverse and underrepresented minority candidates to join the digital media and marketing workforce. The program's four-month curriculum will be created in partnership with the San Mateo County Community College District, based in Silicon Valley, and Oasis Learning, a competency-based curriculum provider and technology platform. IAB member companies will also be tapped for insight and expertise in crafting the syllabus. Students can take the course in-person in a classroom setting at San Mateo County Community College District or online through Patten University. In addition, Oasis Learning will work with the IAB Education Foundation to license the curriculum to colleges around the country. Applicants for the program will be recruited through non-profit organizations such as The Mission Continues, Women in Technology, Marcus Graham Project, and the Association of University Centers on Disabilities. Costs for those selected to enroll will be covered by a combination of public and private donations. The first classes are expected to begin in spring of this year. Once the training portion of the program is completed, students will be invited to take the newly created IAB Entry-Level Digital Advertising Certification Exam. Administered by Pearson VUE, the test will cover a broad range of digital advertising topics, such as: An introduction to the digital advertising ecosystem, including media mathematics and compliance standards and policies

Gathering pre-campaign information, including forecasting inventory and aligning creative assets with a media plan

Executing a campaign, including creating a traffic sheet nd generating tags

Monitoring a live campaign, including executing campaign modifications and performing billing and reconciliation activities

Understanding frequent troubleshooting issues, including discrepancies and fraudulent and/or malicious behavior

Campaign reporting and analysis, including providing benchmarks for success and generating and scheduling reports



"Training is the first vital step in generating a more diverse workforce across the digital media and marketing arena - but we're making sure that the iDiverse initiative goes much further," said Michael Theodore, Senior Vice President, Learning and Development, IAB, and General Manager, IAB Education Foundation. "By bringing entry-level education together with benchmark testing and hands-on job placement, we're expecting that this pilot program will lead to expanded efforts and a real move toward increasing racial, gender, economic, and cultural diversity in our industry's workforce."

"The San Mateo County Community College District is pleased to partner with the IAB Education Foundation's iDiverse program, Oasis Learning, and representatives of IAB member companies to develop curricula and training leading to in-demand, entry-level jobs with career advancement potential in the digital advertising industry," said San Mateo County Community College District Chancellor Ron Galatolo. "We are excited that our very own College of San Mateo and Community, Continuing and Corporate Education are helping to build an initiative designed to open the digital media and marketing talent pipeline to women, veterans, and underrepresented minorities in Silicon Valley and beyond." "Patten University is thrilled to partner with IAB and Oasis Learning to deliver high demand training in digital advertising to the underserved," said Dr. Thomas Stewart, President, Patten University. "This is an opportunity to link real world skills to the people who will benefit the most, which is in alignment with Patten University's mission to provide high quality education to adults everywhere without leaving graduates in debt." "The IAB Education Foundation iDiverse program curriculum will prepare students for certification and a successful career in online media," said Kathleen Farley, CEO and Co-Founder, Oasis Learning. "We worked closely with experts in the IAB member organizations to develop rich curriculum designed to help students develop the key competencies desired by digital media and marketing employers." For more information about the IAB Education Foundation and iDiverse, please go to iab.com/idiverse. About IAB The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) empowers the media and marketing industries to thrive in the digital economy. It is comprised of more than 650 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling, delivering, and optimizing digital advertising or marketing campaigns. Together, they account for 86 percent of online advertising in the United States. Working with its member companies, the IAB develops technical standards and best practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising, while also educating brands, agencies, and the wider business community on the importance of digital marketing. The organization is committed to professional development and elevating the knowledge, skills, expertise, and diversity of the workforce across the industry. Through the work of its public policy office in Washington, D.C., the IAB advocates for its members and promotes the value of the interactive advertising industry to legislators and policymakers. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City and has a West Coast office in San Francisco. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005040/en/

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Jason Owen of Vivint Smart Home Named a Utah Business 2016 SAMY Award Winner

Vivint Smart Home, a leading provider of smart home technology, today announced that Jason Owen, vice president of acquisition marketing, is a Utah Business 2016 SAMY Award winner. The Sales & Marketer of the Year (SAMY) Award recognizes Utah's top sales and marketing professionals, and honored Owen for his leadership in driving a record year in inbound marketing and sales volume for Vivint.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160126006739/en/

Jason Owen, vice president of Acquisition Marketing at Vivint Smart Home. (Photo: Business Wire)

"We are extremely proud of the acquisition marketing team at Vivint," said Jefferson Lyman, chief marketing officer at Vivint Smart Home. "The consumer's decision journey has never been more complicated than it is today, and yet Jason and his team have built the most effective and cost-efficient marketing funnel in our industry."







Owen, who joined Vivint in June 2014, is responsible for developing and implementing the acquisition marketing strategy and overseeing digital marketing, web strategy optimization and analytics. His efforts helped Vivint break nearly all of its sales and marketing records in 2015, while achieving its lowest marketing cost structure ever.

"The aspect of my job that I enjoy the most is watching my team succeed," Owen said. "I'm honored to receive this award and share it with the entire group, a talented group of analytical nerds and the best marketing team I've ever known."

Owen was honored today at an awards presentation at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.

About Vivint Smart Home

Vivint Smart Home is a leading provider of smart home technology. Vivint delivers services through a cloud-based platform that integrates a wide range of wireless features and components to provide simple, affordable home security, energy management and home automation. Dedicated to redefining the home experience with intelligent products and services, Vivint serves more than one million customers throughout the U.S. and Canada. For more information, visit www.vivint.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160126006739/en/
[January 27, 2016] Quanterix Announces Expansion into Asia Pacific

Quanterix Corporation, a leader in the transformation to digital medicine with an ultrasensitive single molecule testing for the benefit of human health, today announced its expansion into several prominent APAC markets. With this expansion, Quanterix is meeting a huge, unmet demand for the company's Simoa technology in Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, most recently naming Cold Spring Biotech as its official and exclusive distributor in China. "This is an exciting time for Quanterix and we are thrilled to have found such a strong partner in Cold Spring Biotech to help bring our revolutionary Simoa technology to researchers in China to help fuel more groundbreaking discoveries," said Kevin Hrusovsky, CEO and Executive Chairman, Quanterix. "Some of the world's leading researchers in China have been asking for Simoa since we launched the technology eighteen months ago and now can harness its power in their own labs to drive innovative research in oncology, neurology, cardiology, inflammation, and other disease areas impacting human health." "Cold Spring Biotech (CSB) is extremely pleased to enter into this partnership with Quanterix. We expect to develop and maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with Quanterix and rapidly engage the life science industry in China,"said Pasteur Tai, President of CSB. "China has seen double-digit growth in the biotechnology industry and has become one of the fastest nations in the adoption of new biotechnologies. Simoa is a revolutionary technology which has the world's most sensitive ELISA immunoassay. We are keen for the opportunity to introduce the technology to the automated ELISA market, providing Chinese researchers with the most advanced technology for their biomarker work."



With offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other cities in China, Cold Spring Biotech Corp. distributes instruments, reagents, and consumables for some the biggest manufacturers in the biotechnology market. In addition to its distribution services, Cold Spring Biotech provides R&D consultation services on research projects and experimental techniques. Quanterix first executed on its commercial strategy to expand into Asia earlier this year, announcing its entry into Japan, working with their exclusive distributor SCRUM, Inc., of Tokyo. Now, the company has expanded into China markets, naming Cold Spring Biotech as their exclusive distributor, where they already have several orders pending. Quanterix also recently appointed Research Instruments for distribution in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia and will continue this expansion into Asian markets in 2016.

To learn more about Quanterix and its Simoa technology, please visit: http://quanterix.com/. About Quanterix

Quanterix is a developer of ground-breaking tools in high definition diagnostics. Its Simoa platform uses single molecule measurements to access previously undetectable proteins. With this unprecedented sensitivity and full automation, Simoa offers significant benefits to both research and clinical testing applications. Quanterix was established in 2007 and is located in Lexington, Massachusetts. To learn more about Quanterix and Simoa, please visit: www.quanterix.com. Investors can access a webcast of Kevin Hrusovsky's recent JPMorgan presentation at: https://vimeo.com/151844499. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005693/en/

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[January 27, 2016] Renowned Public Health Virologist Jose Esparza Ushers in New Era for Global Virus Network (GVN) as President

The Global Virus Network (GVN), representing 34 Centers of Excellence in more than 25 countries and comprising foremost experts in every class of virus causing disease in humans, today announced the appointment of Jose Esparza, MD, PhD as President of the GVN. Dr. Esparza's appointment will boost GVN's global impact given his long and distinguished career in global health, and in particular vaccine development, as evidenced by his successful leadership roles at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The GVN also announced the election of Raymond Schinazi, PhD, Hon DSc to GVN's executive committee and the reappointment of Tim Moynahan, Esq. as Chairman of GVN's Board of Directors. The announcement was made today by Robert Gallo, MD, co-founder of the GVN and Chair of the GVN's Scientific Leadership Board. "With the appointment of Jose Esparza as President, Raymond Schinazi as a dedicated member of the GVN leadership team and Tim Moynahan's Board leadership expertise, GVN is well positioned to grow its visibility and presence around the world," said Dr. Gallo, who is also The Homer & Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine and Director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, a GVN Center of Excellence. "Dr. Esparza brings a unique set of expertise in that he is a renowned medical virologist who also has tremendous success in executing and implementing global health policies, while Dr. Schinazi is an outstanding leader in the field and has been enormously successful in translating research to antiviral therapies that have saved the lives of millions of people globally. Mr. Moynahan is a long-time leader of the GVN and brings a wealth of expertise to harvest and focus our Board's multidisciplinary talents." Dr. Gallo continued, "This, combined with their collective passion for, and belief in, the GVN will undoubtedly enhance and grow the GVN's mission to combat epidemics and emerging viral infections through research collaborations, training the next generation of medical virologists, and advocacy." As GVN President, Dr. Espara's priorities include growing GVN's funding base by linking governments, businesses, philanthropic organizations and other entities with interest in safeguarding the globe against existing and future viral threats. Dr. Esparza will also harness his expertise in science to initiate and strengthen international collaborations between top researchers in the GVN as well as to extend GVN's reach to important regions of the world.



"Viral outbreaks know no boundaries," said Dr. Esparza. "Particularly in today's vast global economy, each day brings a new viral threat. And each day, there continues to be an urgent need to bring GVN to all parts of the world as no other organization like it exists. GVN is not tied to politics and is driven by the biomedical research produced by its Centers of Excellence in a singular effort to protect the world from infectious disease." Prior to joining GVN as President, from 2004 to 2014 Dr. Esparza was with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, WA, first as Senior Advisor on HIV Vaccines and subsequently as Senior Advisor on Global Health (Vaccines). He has published seminal work in the field of rotaviruses, combining basic science with epidemiology and clinical work. From 1986 to 2004, Dr. Esparza worked with WHO and UNAIDS, in Geneva, Switzerland, where he became a global leader in the field of HIV vaccines. Dr. Esparza is author of over 180 publications and has served on multiple advisory committees around the world. He is a member of the Venezuelan Academy of Medicine and has received numerous international honors.

As a member of GVN's executive committee, Dr. Schinazi will provide invaluable council to ensure GVN's varying programs and initiatives continue to grow and succeed. Dr. Schinazi, who holds more than 90 issued U.S. and international patents, is a world leader in the area of nucleoside chemistry and is the founder of several biotechnology companies focusing on antiviral drug discovery and development. He is also the founder of highly successful drug therapy conferences, encouraging scholarship and collaboration in the areas of HIV, hepatitis, and mosquito borne virus research. "GVN fills an international gap between virologists via its network and, as such, is an essential global asset and a necessary entity in the collective fight against viral threats around the world," said Dr. Schinazi. "I am pleased to work with such an exceptional group and be a part of this new chapter of GVN." In his reappointed position as Chairman of the GVN Board of Directors, Mr. Moynahan will spend significant time in growing GVN's funding sources and strengthening GVN's public and private sector relationships. Mr. Moynahan, a preeminent litigation attorney and founder of The Moynahan Law Firm, has been a member of numerous corporations and charitable organizations' board of directors, including the Post University MBA Advisory Council, the International Network for Cancer Treatment and Research (INCTR) and President of the Connecticut Chapter of the Ireland Chamber of Commerce in the United States. "It is with great enthusiasm I welcome Dr. Esparza as the newly appointed President of the GVN and Dr. Schinazi as a core leader in the GVN," said Tim Moynahan, Chairman of the GVN Board of Directors. "Since the beginning - even before GVN's formal declaration in March 2011 at the Embassy of Italy in Washington, D.C. - we have passionately believed in GVN's unique vision to fulfill a significant void in the global war on viral infectious diseases, and it is in this spirit that Drs. Esparza and Schinazi will no doubt lead the GVN." The Global Virus Network (GVN) moved its headquarters to 725 W Lombard St. in Baltimore, Maryland. About the Global Virus Network (GVN) The Global Virus Network (GVN) is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization, comprised of leading medical virologists from 34 Centers of Excellence in more than 25 countries. The GVN's mission is to combat current and emerging pandemic viral threats through international collaborative research, training the next generation of medical virologists, and advocacy. For more information, please visit www.gvn.org. Follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @GlobalVirusNews . View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005825/en/

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[January 27, 2016] China Distance Education Holdings Files Annual Report On Form 20-F

BEIJING, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- China Distance Education Holdings Limited (NYSE: DL) ("CDEL", or the "Company"), a leading provider of online education in China focusing on professional education, today announced that it has filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2015 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The annual report can be accessed on the Company's investor relations website at http://ir.cdeledu.com under the section titled "Financials - Annual Reports." CDEL will provide a hard copy of its complete audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2015, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests should be directed to our IR representatives stated below, or in writing to China Distance Education Holdings Limited, 18th Floor, Xueyuan International Tower, 1 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing China, 100083. About China Distance Education Holdings Limited China Distance Education Holdings Limited is a leading provider of online education in China focusing on professional education. The courses offered by the Company through its websites are designed to help professionals seeking to obtain and maintain professional licenses and to enhance their job skills through our professional development courses in China in the areas of accounting, healthcare, engineering & construction, and other industries. The Company also offers other professional education courses for the national judicial examination, online test preparation courses for self-taught learners pursuing higher education diplomas or degrees, test preparation courses for university students intending to take the nationwide graduate school entrance exam, and online language courses. We also offer third-party developed online courses through our Online Open Learning Platform, a proprietary education platform that allows people to share their educational content or deliver live courses online. For further information, please visit http://ir.cdeledu.com. Contacts:







China Distance Education Holdings Limited Investor Relations Department Tel: +86-10-8231-9999 ext 1805 Email: [email protected] The Piacente Group | Investor Relations Brandi Piacente Tel: +1 212-481-2050 Email: [email protected]

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/china-distance-education-holdings-files-annual-report-on-form-20-f-300210503.html SOURCE China Distance Education Holdings Limited

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[January 27, 2016]

CRTC executes warrant in malicious malware investigation

OTTAWA and GATINEAU, QC, Jan. 27, 2016 /CNW/ - The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today announced that it executed a warrant under Canada's anti-spam legislation (CASL) at two locations in the Niagara region of Ontario.

The warrant was obtained as part of an ongoing investigation relating to the installation of malicious software (malware) and the alteration of transmission data. The CRTC launched its investigation further to a lead from FireEye Inc., a vendor specializing in cyber threat protection and forensics.

The CRTC takes online threats very seriously and is working closely with its domestic and international partners, including law enforcement agencies to aggressively pursue investigations of alleged violations under Canada's anti-spam legislation.

Canadians are encouraged to report spam, malware and other electronic threats to the Spam Reporting Centre. The information sent to the Centre is used by the CRTC, the Competition Bureau and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to enforce Canada's anti-spam legislation.

The CRTC does not comment on active investigations, nor does it name the individuals or companies under investigation.

Quick Facts

Canada's anti-spam legislation protects Canadians while ensuring that businesses cancontinue to compete in the global marketplace.

anti-spam legislation protects Canadians while ensuring that businesses cancontinue to compete in the global marketplace. The CRTC has a number of enforcement tools at its disposal and is using cyber investigative techniques to investigate alleged violations of Canada's anti-spam legislation.

anti-spam legislation. The warrant was granted by a Justice of the Peace, from the Ontario Court of Justice, and was executed with the assistance of police officers.

Court of Justice, and was executed with the assistance of police officers. This is the second time a warrant has been executed since Canada's anti-spam legislation came into force in 2014 and the malware provisions which came into force in January 2015 .







"We are working to protect Canadians from online threats by pursuing those individuals and entities who violate Canada's anti-spam legislation. We are grateful for the assistance that FireEye Inc. provided which led to the execution of this warrant, and we will continue to work closely with our domestic and international partners in the fight against cyber threats."

Manon Bombardier, CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer

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SOURCE Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
[January 27, 2016] Invenergy to Provide Clean Power to Google

CHICAGO, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Invenergy today announced that it has signed a 225 MW wind power purchase agreement (PPA) with Google to provide the tech giant with renewable energy to help support its data center operations. Google first announced this deal in December during the COP21 conference in Paris. Invenergy is one of six renewable energy companies Google partnered with for a total 842 MW of renewable energy across three countries. Of the six agreements, Google's PPA with Invenergy is the largest. The announced deals almost double the amount of renewable energy that feed the company's data centers worldwide. In late 2015, Invenergy completed several other wind power purchase agreements with other corporate customers to provide those companies with renewable energy to support their ambitious corporate sustainability goals. Those agreements, along with the PPA with Google, bring Invenergy's total corporate customer wind portfolio to 570 MW. "We are thrilled to bring our innovation in energy to Google, a company famous for their innovation in technology," said Invenergy's Vice President of Sales and Marketing Craig Gordon. "Their commitment to using renwable energy sources to power their data centers represents a significant change in the way big corporations are thinking about sustainability and we are proud to be a part of those efforts."



The agreement with Google includes the sale of wind energy from the Bethel Wind Energy Facility located in Texas. Invenergy will provide 225 MW of capacity resulting in approximately 965,000 MWh of renewable energy annually generated in Texas and delivered into the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), a regional electricity grid. With the addition of Bethel, Invenergy will operate more than 1,700 MW of power plants in the state. As a signatory to the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, of which Google is a founding member, Invenergy is dedicated not only to meeting its own sustainability goals, but to helping its corporate customers achieve their goals. Invenergy is also a founding member of Rocky Mountain Institute's Business Renewables Center, which is a collaborative platform aimed at accelerating corporate renewable energy procurement.

About Invenergy

Invenergy drives innovation in energy. Invenergy provides power generation and storage solutions at scale around the world to create a cleaner energy future. Invenergy and its affiliated companies develop, own, and operate large-scale renewable and other clean energy generation and storage facilities in the Americas and Europe. Invenergy's home office is located in Chicago and it has regional development offices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe. Invenergy and its affiliated companies have developed more than 10,300 MW of projects that are in operation, in construction, or under contract, including wind, solar, and natural gas-fueled power generation projects and energy storage facilities. For more information, please visit www.invenergyllc.com. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/invenergy-to-provide-clean-power-to-google-300210701.html SOURCE Invenergy

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Egypt signed a memorandum of understanding with China Rail Group Limited on Wednesday to construct an Olympic park and six government buildings in the new administrative capital, Minster of Housing, Moustafa Madbouly, was quoted as saying by state news agency MENA.

Egypt plans to build an administrative capital estimated to cost $45 billion as part of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisis plan to boost the economy through a series of mega-projects.

The Chinese conglomerate will present its designs within 30 days of signing the MOU that stipulates that the Egyptian government contribute to 15 percent of the works.

The Olympic park will be built on 2000 feddans and the total area for the six buildings is planned to reach 214,000 square metres.

The project is expected to be completed within a time span of 30 months.

Egypt's government is aiming to complete the first phase of the administrative capital on 10,500 feddans from 170,000 feddans in a period of two years, Madbouly said in October.

The ambitious mega-project was first presented during the March economic conference in Sharm El-Sheikh and an initial agreement was signed with Mohammed Al-Abaar of Capital City Partners to lead developments.

However, as the talks stalled, Egypt signed an agreement with China State Construction Engineering Corporation to study the building and financing of the administrative area in the new city where all the ministries would be moved.

During his visit to Egypt earlier this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping signed a number of cooperation deals -- in the transportation, power generation, and civil aviation sectors -- worth $15 billion, according to the Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Sahar Nasr.

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[January 27, 2016] Half Million Dollar Robotic Art Grand Challenge Seeks Technologist to Build a Classical Artist

SEATTLE, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In the tradition of recent Technological Grand Challenges, RobotArt has pledged over half a million dollars in prizes over 5 years to competitors in a new Robotic Grand Challenge. This Grand Challenge is simple to describe but difficult to master, create a robot that paints with a brush like a classical master. The more skilled and creative the robot, the better. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160126/325966 With a deadline to submit artwork on April 14th, a dozen teams from around the world have already committed. Notable entries include multiple alumnus of the DARPA Grand Challenges that ultimately saw the successful creation of self driving cars including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, UC San Diego, and Purdue. Notable international competition comes from Canada, France, Germany, and India. Though initial registration has already resulted in a competitive field, the organizers of the 2016 RobotArt Competition seeks as many contributors as possible. To encourage more participation in the inaugural year, the competition has committed over $100,000 to a total of 16 cash rewards in 2 categories, Telerobotic and Fully Automated painting robots. The two categories represent competing world views currently held by technologists working in the field of artificial creativity. Engineers interested in the Telerobotics Cateory typically see machines as collaborators with humans. When asked about why she preferred telerobotics, Yeliz Karadayi of Carnegie Mellon University responded.



"I certainly hope that this competition will start a dialogue in which people understand that robots are best utilized as collaborators with humans, instead of as replacements for humans." While technologists with robots capable of producing completely automated artwork share an interest in collaboration, they are more focused on removing the human element from the equation. Oliver Deussen, one of the creators of eDavid, elaborates on this view:

"We are interested to what extent artistic craftsmanship can be implemented when doing machine painting - is it also possible to let the robot find his own style, judge and improve his result autonomously? Fully automatic processes also have the beauty of sometimes getting the unexpected." While some teams are choosing to concentrate on one of the two categories, most are capable of operating in both such as the aforementioned eDavid and Pindar Van Arman's cloudPainter. Regardless of the category each team chooses to compete in, it is notable that this competition requires that all artwork be painted with an artist's brush. When event sponsor Andrew Conru was asked about this requirement he responded, "One of the first signs of human culture was our ability to express ourselves with images. From ancient cave paintings to abstract art, physically generated images have been a universal way for humans to express and communicate." With two months left to register there are currently more cash rewards than registered competitors for the 2016 RobotArt Competition. For more information on how to join the competition and specific rules, visit robotart.org. Event Organizer Contact Information: Andrew Conru

Stanford PhD, Engineer and Artist

abconru at yahoo.com Competitors Available for Comment:

Oliver Deussen

Konstanz, Germany

University of Konstanz

eDavid

oliver.deussen at uni-konstanz.de Pindar Van Arman

Washington D.C.

George Washington University

cloudPainter

pindar.vanarman at gmail.com To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/half-million-dollar-robotic-art-grand-challenge-seeks-technologist-to-build-a-classical-artist-300209883.html SOURCE RobotArt

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[January 27, 2016] iSIGN Updates the Manufacturing of Airport Kiosks under the Licensing Agreement with Rich Multimedia Technologies

Initial Manufacture of First 5,000 Integrated Tele-Digital Store Front Kiosks on Schedule TORONTO, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - iSIGN Media Solutions Inc. ("iSIGN" or "Company") (TSX-V: ISD) (OTC: ISDSF), a leading provider of interactive mobile proximity advertising solutions is pleased to provide an update on the progress of the integration of its Smart Antennas into Rich Multimedia Technologies Inc.'s ("RMT") Tele-Digital Store Front Kiosks ("Kiosks"). The Licensing and Original Equipment Manufacturer Agreement ("Agreement") was signed October 27, 2015. At the time, we announced that the target date for the manufacturer to start integrating our Smart Antenna into RMT's Kiosks was the end of November 2015. Under the terms of this agreement, iSIGN was to review and approve the integration, as well as any changes to the Smart Antenna build. By November 24, 2015, we had supplied Smart Antenna units, as well as the schematics for the unit to the manufacturer, which allowed them to complete the design of a fully integrated Kiosk and to commence the required testing. By the end of December 2015, the manufacturer had submitted, sourced and received our approval for the purchase of upgraded Smart Antenna component parts. At this point, the manufacturer was in the process of preparing pilot units as models for the production run. Samples of the pilot units have now been completed and shipped to our office by the manufacturer, meeting the forecasted January end deadline to have final samples and production units ready for our review and approval. "We are pleased that the progress to date has been smooth, efficient and timely," stated Mr. Alex Romanov, iSIGN's Chief Executive Officer. RMT will deploy 5,000 Kiosks in Mexico City's international airport, transit system and government facilities. Additionally, RMT plans to roll out 3,600 Kiosks in multiple major international airports in the US and Canada by the end of 2016. Under the terms of the Agreement, the lcensing fee will be based upon the number of Kiosks built during the term of this Agreement and any renewal periods, starting with an initial build of 5,000 Kiosks. In addition to the licensing fee, iSIGN will receive a data management fee based on installation and activation of the licensed Kiosks. The combined licensing and data management fees will generate revenues to iSIGN of $3 US per day per Kiosk



About iSIGN Media

iSIGN Media, based in Toronto, is a data-focused, software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that is a pioneering leader in gathering point-of-sale data and mobile shopper preferences to generate actionable data and reveal valuable consumer insights. Creators of the Smart suite of products, a patented interactive proximity marketing technology, iSIGN enables brands to deliver targeted messaging, personalized offers and loyalty perks to consumers' mobile devices in proximity and with real-time proof of redemption. iSIGN's data gathering capabilities provide analytics on price points, typical purchases, in-store dwell time and other shopper metrics that identify emerging consumer behaviors. These insights enable smarter business decisions and provide increased ROI metrics for more transparent marketing. iSIGN delivers relevant, timely messages on an opt-in basis at no charge to consumers, transmitting rich media to consumer mobile devices via Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity in complete privacy as opposed to iBeacons, apps, downloads and required surrendering of personal information. Proven to increase brand engagement and customer loyalty, iSIGN generates preference-based, predictive "clean data" without compromising consumer privacy. Partners include: IBM, Keyser Retail Solutions, Baylor University, Verizon Wireless, TELUS and AOpen America Inc. www.isignmedia.com About Rich Multimedia Technologies

Rich Multimedia Technologies and its executive team has a 25 year plus proven track record in the telecommunications; advertising; in-airport media and retail travel business. With our partners we represent the leading international brands' and In-airport retail concessionaires. We are committed to working in close partnerships with brands, airport operators and suppliers to bring the mobile traveller on-the-go an unrivalled shopping choice and experience. We are relentless in our search for new concepts that will help develop existing and new markets. www.richmediatechnologies.com

 2016 iSIGN Media Solutions Inc. All Rights Reserved. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may include certain forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations, which involve risks and uncertainties associated with iSIGN Media's business and the environment in which the business operates. Any statements contained herein that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking, including those identified by the expressions "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "intend" and similar expressions to the extent they relate to the Company or its management. The forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but reflect iSIGN Media's current expectations regarding future results or events. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations. iSIGN Media assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor Its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility or accuracy of this release. SOURCE iSIGN Media Solutions Inc.

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[January 27, 2016] National Institutes of Health Award Leidos $17 Million Contract

RESTON, Va., Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Leidos (NYSE: LDOS), a national security, health, and engineering solutions company, was awarded a task order by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide software development and technical support to the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR). The single-award firm fixed-price follow-on contract has a six-month base period of performance, nine six-month options, and a total contract value of $17 million if all options are exercised. Work will be performed in Bethesda, Md. The CSR is the gateway for NIH grant applications and their review for scientific merit, and is responsible for organizing the peer review groups or study sections that evaluate the majority of the research grant applications sent to NIH. Under the contract, Leidos will provide software development and technical support including developing and maintaining various web-based, desktop and mobile-based applications in support of CSR's primary mission of scientific peer review. Leidos will also provide technical support for both on premise and remote network access areas, including the installation, configuration, testing and maintenance of hardware and software. "We are honored to continue supporting the CSR with technical excellence to provide an efficient and cost-effective peer review process, better infrastructure controls and expanded collaboration," said Jerry Hogge, Deputy Group President, Leidos Health. About Leidos

Leidos is a science and technology solutions leader working to address some of the world's toughest challenges in national security, health and engineering. The Company's 19,000 employees support vital missions for government and the commercial sector, develop innovative solutions to drive better outcomes and defend our digital and physical infrastructure from 'new world' threats. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $5.06 billion for its fiscal year ended January 30, 2015. For more information, visit www.Leidos.com. Statements in this announcement, other than historical data and information, constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause our actual results, performance, achievements, or industry results to be very different from the results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Some of these factors include, but are not limited to, the risk factors set forth in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended January 30, 2015, and other such filings that Leidos makes with the SEC from time to time. Due to such uncertainties and risks, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.







Contact: Melissa Koskovich Jennifer Moffett

(571) 526-6850 (571) 526-6852

[email protected] [email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20131120/PH20896LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-institutes-of-health-award-leidos-17-million-contract-300210764.html SOURCE Leidos

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Here's what IndyStar investigation of worker safety amid pandemic found

Factory workers that make up the backbone of Indiana's economy told a similar story: Managers pressured employees to show up even when they were sick.
A deal that will see French carmaker Peugeot return to the Iranian market will be signed Thursday as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits France, a French government source said.

Peugeot and its French partner Citroen will work with Iran's Khodro to produce 200,000 vehicles a year using parts manufactured in Iran.

The first vehicles will roll off the production line in 2017, the source said.

Peugeot pulled out of Iran in 2012 as Western sanctions imposed over the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme began to bite.

At the time, Iran was Peugeot's second-largest market after France.

With the lifting of the sanctions, Iran has signed a raft of commercial deals and Rouhani is also expected to tie up an agreement to buy passenger jets during his two-day visit to France.

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This year's Berlin International Film Festival will aim to attract refugees not only with the film programme, but also with many complementary activities

The organisers of this year's Berlinale -- scheduled to take place between 11 and 21 February -- announced that among the principal aims of the event is fostering understanding, tolerance, and acceptance.

"When the Berlin International Film Festival was launched 66 years ago, there were millions of German refugees and traumatised displaced persons in Europe. Last year 79,034 people sought refuge in the German capital (source: Berlin Senate Department of Health and Social Services). They came from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and many other crisis regions around the world," the official press release reads.

Promoting "Berlins culture of welcome," the festival will not only aim to attract refugees through the programming, but also launch several actions aimed at facilitating access of the socially disadvantaged individuals to fully participate in the cultural activities.

The festival will offer a 50 percent discount, as well as a quota of free tickets to those with low income, an initiative run jointly with the non-profit KulturLeben Berlin  Schlussel zur Kultur e.V. The organisers also urge its guests and audiences "to make a donation to the non-profit Behandlungszentrum fur Folteropfer e.V. (Berlin Center for Torture Victims), which provides support for people traumatised by torture, war, migration, and persecution.

The press release continues, saying that the sponsored cinema visit initiative has asked Berlins non-profit refugee aid programmes to nominate volunteers who would like to accompany a refugee to a screening.

Welcome Classes (school classes for refugees) will participate in the school project that the festivals Generation section has mounted for the last ten years in cooperation with Vision Kino. The Culinary Cinema section will take charge of the street food initiative, which among several cuisines, will also serve Mediterranean food from a food truck.

"The Berlinale also asks its guests and audiences to donate, wherever possible, to organisations helping refugees with their everyday needs," the press release concluded.

The 66th Berlin International Film Festival is scheduled to take place between 11 and 22 February.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Egypt's cabinet approved on Tuesday 26 January the recently introduced Chinese initiative to establish a new opera house in the historic governorate of Luxor, MENA reported.

Luxor Governor Mohamed Badr said that the cabinet agreed to allocate a piece of land in front of the Nile in Luxor so that the ministry of culture could construct the project.

The new opera house project in Luxor was introduced during the visit of the Chinese culture minister Cai Wu to the governorate last week with his Egyptian counterpart Helmy El-Nemnem.

Last week, the Chinese president arrived in Luxor to attend a celebration at Luxor temple for the beginning of the new Egyptian-Chinese cultural year and the 60th anniversary of Egyptian-Chinese relations.

El-Nemnem said the choice of Luxor temple to hold the celebration comes in the context of supporting tourism by shedding light on Luxor's Pharaonic monuments for the world to see.

The new opera house aims to attract tourists to the historic city, the statement explained. It will also create a cultural connection between Egypt and other nations.

Egypt was the first country in the Middle East to have its own opera--the all-wooden Khedivial Opera House, which opened in 1868. The opera was a venue for performances of Western classical music, ballet, and opera as well as performances of Arabic heritage.

After the burning of the old opera house in 1971, Egypt had to wait until 1988 to see the opening of a new Cairo Opera House (National Cultural Centre), which was built with the support of the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

The new opera serves as home to several national performing arts companies: Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Cairo Opera Orchestra, Cairo Opera Company, Cairo Opera Ballet Company, and Arabic Music Ensemble, among others. The current chairperson of the Cairo Opera House is Ines Abdel Dayem.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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A late period shrine named Bady Bay is to arrive to the store galleries of the Grand Egyptian Museum on Thursday

Supervisor General of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) Tarek Tawfik said that the Bady Bay shrine consists of 254 limestone blocks engraved with hieroglyphic texts dated to the Late Period.

Since its discovery last century, the shrine was dismantled and stored in Giza Plateau store houses. On Wednesday, the blocks were packed in order to be transferred to the GEM on Thursday.

All the blocks have been also archaeologically documented and photographed.

Eissa Zidan, director of the restoration department at the GEM, told Ahram Online that it is the first time for the museum to receive this particular type of stony shrine. Hence, the GEM team of restorers will inspect the preservation condition of the blocks before receiving it and will then send a report to Tawfik.

He explained that the blocks are to be put in the stones laboratory in order to restore its structure and paintings as well as to reconstruct it to its original shape.

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Cairo's policy toward Libya is driven by two goals: establishing a strong central state structure on its western border and avoiding the emergence of a political entity under control of political Islam

With a striking similarity to domestic politics, Cairo is framing its Libya strategy in terms of a securitised approach against Islamism and Islamist terrorism alike. In that sense, support for the remains of the Libyan National Army (LNA)  to a large extent under control of the anti-Islamist General Khalifa Heftar based in North-Eastern Libya  presents itself as a logical option.

Based on a shared, generous terrorism definition between the Cairo and Tobruk governments  combined with the real need to militarily engage a jihadi insurgency spreading throughout the Libyan territory  Cairo is consistently calling for an end to the arms embargo imposed by the UN on the sovereign Libyan state since then-president Muammar Qaddafis crackdown on protestors in 2011.

But over the past four years, this very state structure has been disintegrating, culminating in an institutional split and generating a failing state. The lifting of the sanctions should therefore be limited to the internationally recognised government in Tobruk, considered an ally by Egypt, to help empower military units under General Heftars command. But with a new Libyan government of national unity potentially in the making under the aegis of the new UN envoy Martin Kobler, Cairo might have to review this stance in terms of feasibility.

However, any agreement requires thorough implementation, including support from the two opposed militia alliances, siding with either Tobruk or Tripoli. As such a stance seems uncertain at this stage of the conflict due to widespread rejection of the proposed unity government; Cairo should be able to continue its Libya policy for the time being.

Yet a closer look at the Libya dossier reveals that Cairo is engaged on a more complex approach, beyond the simple call for ending the sanctions, oscillating between mediation, intervention and containment. This variance is not only an expression of conflicting views, and methods, of the foreign ministry and the presidency, but also reflects Egypts obligatory insertion of preferences of the international community, including the strictly non-interventionist Algerian position. Algeria opposed military intervention against Qaddafi in the League of Arab States in 2011 and continues to this day to reject any armed interference in the Libyan setting.

Lately this preference has been given to the diplomatic process for a negotiated political solution under the helm of the UN. However, having suffered the rejection of the proposal for the Government of National Accord by both conflict parties in October, the efforts of the previous UN special envoy Bernardino Leon for building a viable and representative political structure ex nihilo have not been producing tangible results to date.

External support for allies or proxies such as the LNA, stealthily or more openly, might thus increase. Nevertheless, despite the bleak outlook for a political solution, the negotiation process has been endorsed and is still rhetorically supported by the Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry.

In real terms, the current Libyan setting increasingly comes down to managing chaos. Resulting from a controversial R2P (Responsibility to Protect) intervention, the implications of an ongoing low-intensity conflict and a lacking intra-Libyan political consensus amounting to a self-destructive attitude, even the neighbouring countries are feeling the negative externalities of political instability and a growing jihadi nexus. Following in the footsteps of the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group) and the disproportionate role of Libyans in the former Iraqi core-ISIS, the local Libyan ISIS avatar is part of a powerful international jihadi network, reaching out to the local insurgency in Sinai. Understandably, the Egyptian authorities perceive a double geographical threat, both on its north-eastern flank (in the Sinai Peninsula) and along the highly porous 1,100 km border with Libya. Hence, the Libya dossier is primarily considered from a national security perspective, and less from the diplomatic perspective for a negotiated peace deal.

Therefore, in addition to facing severe cuts in remittances from Egyptian workers in Libya, whose numbers dwindled down to less than a quarter of the previous expat population (reaching less than half-a-million), security considerations have become of overwhelming significance.

The strategic goals for Cairo remain pre-empting the presence of either an utterly failed  or of a Muslim Brotherhood controlled state  on its very border. In light of these interests, the declared Egyptian foreign policy position has been to support the UN National Dialogue process to achieve a political settlement between the Libyan factions, vying for control of Africas largest proven oil reserves and opposed on fundamental ideological differences over a future social contract.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian Armed Forces have opted for a combination of deterrence and containment. By building up their land and air presence along the western frontier, intrusions into Egyptian territory should be foiled.

In addition, the sealing of the border by the erection of a border fence is a second pragmatic step to control the flow of illicit trade. Agreement on a comprehensive border surveillance system was reached with the United States in June last year. At Egypts request, the Pentagons DSCA (Defense Security Cooperation Agency) has given the green light for the construction of a border control facility. In light of the halted EU BAM (Border Assistance Mission) in Libya, and the lack of professional border policing on the Libyan side, this containment approach should help permeating the border.

A third effort to stem the flow of illicit trans-border trade includes tribal politics, an endeavour firmly under control of the Armed Forces. The idea is basically to bring the Egyptian Awlad Ali tribe closer to the official authorities, in addition to nurturing good relations with their kin on the Libyan side of the border, the Obeydat. But following many years of neglect and the existence of real economic grievances, the perception of discrimination and of economic exclusion (mainly from the windfalls of the regional oil and gas industry) will not be easy and quick to overcome. Tribal pact-making is therefore more a work-in-progress than a firm and reliable feature of a strategy to seal-off a problematic border.

The main question that Cairo will need to answer at some point is whether General Heftar can be considered an asset for its approach to the Libyan neighbour. For the time being, the non-military approach favoured by the Egyptian foreign ministry seems to have won over the previously bellicose rhetoric of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, who first called for an international military coalition in February 2015 and then worked, without success, to mobilise the League of Arab States to that end.

Soberly assessing the effect of Heftars Operation Dignity, and its most recent follow-up Hatf (literally death), will therefore be decisive. Have these endeavours led to coalition building among previously scattered jihadi militias, for example under the banner of ISIS? Or have they been capable of structurally weakening the territorial control of jihadist actors?

In other words, is the assumed Egyptian power projection by proxy working out in Cairos favour by making the Egyptian-Libyan border more secure and ridding its Libyan hinterland of jihadi insurgents? The most recent agreement with the US on border security points in another direction, and indicates that a multi-pronged approach is the smartest option for the moment.

Nevertheless, as Libya is pretty much embarked on a path towards Somalisation, Egypt needs to consider a Plan B should the UN-brokered Libyan National Dialogue eventually fail for good. Since several indicators are pointing in this direction, the primarily non-kinetic approach to crisis management in Libya privileged by the Egyptian authorities and Cairos diplomacy might turn out as obsolete. Hence the previous stance, vocally expressed by President El-Sisi last February of favouring direct military engagement might return to the top of the agenda.

In the meantime Cairo will continue to steer a complex approach between conflict containment, tribal politics and indirect power-projection via proxy in order to secure a porous border and avoid jihadi spill-over.

The writer is Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA)

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(Beijing) The director of the National Bureau of Statistics, Wang Baoan, has been detained for "serious violations of party discipline," on January 26, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party's top anti-graft agency said in a statement on the same day.

The party has used that euphemism for corruption frequently since late 2012, when Xi Jinping took its reins and launched a major crackdown on graft. The commission did not offer further details on the investigation.

Wang was at a media briefing at the statistics bureau's offices in Beijing talking about the country's economic outlook just four hours before the CCDI announced his detention on its website. He told the gathering that there was no ground for the further yuan depreciation in the long run, journalists attending the event said, and that the Chinese economy is still in good shape.

Last week, Wang hosted a widely watched press conference to release economic data for 2015, where he revealed that the country's gross domestic product grew by 6.9 percent, the lowest in 25 years.

The 52-year-old was appointed to the top job at the bureau in April. Before that he spent much of his career at the Ministry of Finance rising through the ranks before becoming a vice minister in 2012.

His detention comes weeks after a team of CCDI investigators wrapped up a two-month-long audit at the statistics bureau in December.

But Wang's detention is most likely linked to his work during the 17-year stint at the Ministry of Finance where he headed the ministry's policy planning office. From 2007 to 2009, Wang led the ministry's department of economic construction, which oversees the budget for public investment in infrastructure. The government in 2008 announced a 4 trillion yuan stimulus package to prop up the economy amid the global financial crisis.

Wang is the fourth senior official with a rank of at least a vice provincial governor or a deputy in a central government ministry to be detained in January.

The anti-corruption campaign has nabbed at least 230 top public officials, military personnel and executives at major state-owned enterprises.

(Rewritten by Li Rongde)
Middle and high school students are overwhelmingly au fait with the latest pop music videos but careful sift the grain from the chaff online before downloading the ones they like on their portable gadgets.

A survey of 86 high school and 65 middle school students at a crammer in Noryangjin and another in Mia-dong, Seoul by the Chosun Ilbo reveals that 109 out of 151 had watched the music video for Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra," while 42 and 35 students had seen the raunchy videos for "No Love No More" by Park Jin-young and "Touch Me" by Ivy. Asked by which one or more means they prefer to watch them, 72 percent said the Internet, 18 chose PMP or MP4 players, and 10 mobile phones, indicating that they pick a handful of clips they watch online for repeat viewing.

Industry insiders say it now costs an average of W10-20 million (US$1=W1,164) to produce a music video. Only seven or eight years ago there were plenty of "blockbuster" videos made for billions of won. But the seismic shift in the music industry brought on by online distribution has shifted the trend from high concept to raunchy videos, which are bound to hook adolescent viewers and cost little to make. Music video director Seo Hyun-seung said, "Because girl groups don't differ much musically, they compete in the end by trying to appeal with more graphic visual imagery."

There are concerns that the sexually explicit material is harmful to youngsters. A team led by Shin Yee-jin, a psychiatry professor at Yonsei University College of Medicine, surveyed 155 adolescents who committed sexual offenses and found that 40 percent said they were aroused by material on the Internet and TV and 23 percent pinpointed video clips and online chat as the biggest contributors to their crime.

Ji Jung-soon, a media expert at the Bright Youth Center, said, "Some overtly sexual music videos are especially problematic as adolescents watch them every day but adults don't think it's serious enough to do anything about it." Ji said since adolescents take an avid interest in celebrities and pop culture and will watch any video available, such erotically charged videos can get them aroused in situations where that is inappropriate, and that might lead to sexual offenses.
Perth alt-rock trio OPIA have just dropped the video for their moody track Still Standing the third single from the bands upcoming debut album EON.

Following on from warmly received singles One Minute Ago and Signs, Still Standing marks considerable musical growth for Opia, equal parts epic and delicate  its a perfect introduction to the three pieces unique brand of rock.

Recorded and engineered at Electric City Studios in North Fremantle, Western Australia, by Adam Round, and mixed and mastered by legend Forrester Savell, the anticipated forthcoming LP EON is set for release on February 12th. For more info or to stay updated on Opia visit the bands Facebook page.
Sugar Mountain is unlike any other music festival in Australia. In fact, it feels a little rude to lump the day out in the standard music festival category, as the event rolls together various forms of fresh music, art, media and culinary goodies in one incredible outing.

Returning for another triumphant year at the Victorian Arts College, the pokey laneways of the festivals recently newfound home were swarming with a diverse range of punters, eager to have their senses blown by the unique artistic experience.

Comfortably spread throughout the art school, the campus felt more like the performing artists canvas, with jaw-dropping works such as Ash Keatings towering wall piece that illuminated the Car Park Stage, and perhaps the most intriguing of works, the powerful imagery of the female body by Prue Stent, Honey Long and Clare Longley.

One could easily wander the classrooms and alleyways, completely immersed in the stunning creativity for the entire day  however, Sugar Mountain has plenty more up its sleeve: the music.

Kicking the day off was beat poet Kate Tempest, who closed her set with the poem Europe Is Lost, delivering her spoken word to a deadly still crowd whom exploded with applause at her conclusion. As a first timer to an experience like this, there were zero expectations  but wow, now it is very understood why Tempest possess such a cult following.

It was very proud day to celebrate our home grown talent, with Sydney pub-punk charmers Royal Headache firing the Dodd Street stage up and about just as the sun began to peak through the early afternoon clouds, belting tunes from their killer 2015 record, High, as well as teasing new material.

Melbourne outfit Total Giovanni proved once again that theyre an essential booking for any festival lineup, sending the tightly-packed crowd into a disco-dancin frenzy with their infectious tunes, Cant Control My Love an unforgettable highlight.

With the Bacardi Bar adjacent and plenty more space than the previous year to have a boogie, The Boiler Room proved to be perhaps the best stage set-up this year. Fans of dance were given a 360-view of the likes of Tom Trago and Tim Sweeny who both dropped very tight sets, however, it was the headliners, Hot Chip, who stole the day.

To no surprise, the alt-dance heavyweights from the UK saw the vast majority of the crowd squeeze their way to the main stage, punters climbing on shoulders, bins  just about anything to get ready for the floor.

The London crew performed hits from their impressive catalogue, which were belted out in unison by the adoring audience, as well as including covers of Springsteens Dancing In The Dark and perhaps the song of the day, LCD Soundsytems All My Friends  the perfect close that saw plenty of pals swing their arms around each other in sheer jubilation.

Despite the fall of music festivals in Australia over the past 12 months  Sugar Mountain proved its worth at the beginning of 2015, and after the rousing success of the artistic palate that was Saturdays display, it very much looks like this day of art adventure and music exploration is here to stay.
The Rubens are no doubt on top of the world after coming in at number one on yesterdays triple j Hottest 100 countdown, one of the most highly coveted accolades that can be bestowed upon an Australian artist.

However, not everyone is celebrating. Despite repeated calls to see a rock song top the countdown again, many, including media outlets like Fairfax, have hit out at this years countdown for being unsurprising and safe.

The Rubens have now hit back at the criticism, saying the countdown is not meant to be surprising or dangerous, but simply a representation of the tastes of young Australian music lovers and the songs they voted for.

Unsurprising  thats an interesting way to describe something voted by people, I guess, the band told ABC News Breakfast. Its not meant to be surprising. Though the band admitted they were surprised by some of the entries.

I think we were surprised, but I guess I was really surprised at some of the results, they said. I thought certain songs would have been much higher or lower. And that all comes down to personal taste.

Commenting on the predictions leading up to the countdown, most of which were influenced by social media or betting odds, the band said, If you look at that, it didnt play the way that people expected, but thats good.
Almost a dozen Field Day 2016 punters will now have criminal records after being arrested during the Sydney dance event on drug possession charges, including first-time offenders in possession of less than five pills.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, Magistrate John Favretto cited the recent spate of drug-related deaths at music festivals as he convicted and fined 20-year-old Cameron Dwyer, who was caught with four pills in his underpants.

These offences are too serious as people keep dying. Its got to stop, Mr Favretto said, rejecting the first time offenders pleas for leniency during a hearing at Sydneys Downing Centre Court on Monday.

Mr Favretto said more young first-time offenders are risking arrest at music festivals because they expect to be handed a section 10, wherein the accused is found guilty but does not have a conviction recorded against them.

This years Field Day event saw police charge a total of 184 punters with drug offences, including eight with dealing. A 23-year-old woman also ended up in hospital after a suspected drug overdose, one of 212 people to receive medical treatment at the event.
Description: "With the number of homicides in Kansas City for 2015 having leapt back up, this film, from KCPT and Michael Price, examines violent crime in the segregated community east of Troost."

Kansas City homicide rate discussion coming up this week.featuring polite commentary that is useful and encourages people to do more research but might not reveal what locals are really thinking about increased Kansas City killing.More in a bit . . .
Here's a look at politicos attempting to dictate Missouri's curriculum after protests encountered alleged instructor assault and rage throughout the state. Checkit: Missouri Bill Would Require Free Speech Class in College
Celebrity suicides often lead to a massive increase in suicide-related searches on the Internet, which in turn appear to spur more people to kill themselves.

Based on analysis of searches on Google Trends for suicide-related terms between 2005 and 2010 and comparison with the suicide rate in Korea, Song Tae-min of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs said celebrity suicides cause related word searches to rise up to 2.5 times and suicides up to 1.7 times.

Google Trends is a service that shows how often a particular search word is entered relative to the total search volume in a certain period.

According to Song, 697 people killed themselves in January 2005 but between late February that year, when actress Lee Eun-ju committed suicide, and March, that rose to 1,022, with related word searches also increasing about 2.5 times during the period.

After the actress Choi Jin-sil killed herself in October 2008, 1,793 people killed themselves, up 65.5 percent from 1,083 the previous month, and suicide-related searches rose 1.8 times.

When Choi Jin-young, Choi's younger brother, took his own life in March 2010, suicides and relevant searches increased 42.7 percent and 11.5 percent.

"Suicide attempts are often caused by psychological problems, including depression, but news reports about celebrity suicides also have some influence," Song said.
"I'm sure this has come up for you many times, but have you considered moderating the comments section? It would be a good deal of work, I'm sure. But the amount of spewed hate and profanity is incredible and i think it tends to diminish the good work you do in aggregating KC area news and issues. I'm aware some will trot out the first amendment, but (1) it is your blog, not the commenters', and (2) I do believe it is possible to convey the issues brought up by commenters while editing stuff that in no way contributes to honest, well meaning discussion.





"I'm having second thoughts about the second part. For my money, most of the comments would just disappear under scrutiny of their merits. Or maybe people with something useful to say would do so without fear of trolls and getting buried under a blizzard of crap. Oh well. Maybe the thing for me to do is just not click on comments."

We get a lot of folks ranting about how this blog copes with comments and racists.Given that our blog community is. . . It's important to consider some insightful questions rather than just ranting from lesser bloggers and journalists.Here's honest reader concern thoughtfully expressed . . .This is an apt question and in the end we like how the reader puts the responsibility on himself for what he reads. For the moment, nothing is changing but we just wanted to share this insight and renew our fight against spam but in protection ofwhich most local news outlets have forgotten.You decide . . .
WILL JAXCO EXEC FRANK WHITE FACE VOTER SCORN IF HE SUPPORTS THE CONTROVERSIAL E-TAX NOW UP FOR DEBATE THROUGHOUT MISSOURI?!?!

Facing increased opposition from local tax fighters, the team behind the push to renew Kansas City's Earnings Tax diligently seeks to attain every possible advantage.To wit . . .Newbie JaxCo Exec Frank White is being recruited by the "" campaign to support the contested levy.One campaign insider said:"Jackson County has a stake in this as well and Frank White would be a perfect spokesman for making sure that voter understand how the E-tax helps fund our streets, stadiums and 1st responders."Remember thatthat he eventually blamed on his wife or whatever . . .Still, with Exec Frank White now enjoysvoter approval and voter love from throughout the metro. Given this crisis of political expediency, our blog community must ask . . .Exec White has a great deal to risk and courthouse insiders remind us that popularity at the County can quickly fade.Still, the pressure on Exec White to keep the power players happy must be overwhelming even if it comes at the cost of his political capital.Developing . . .
is a longtime denizen of the Kansas City political scene and now she has set her sights on Missouri's House District 19.She was formerly a school board member who gave up her term a bit early but since then she has volunteered and taken on a great many political efforts around KCMO. Her husbandwas a former Missouri House Rep. for part of this district.Many believe that Ms. Burnett is the front runner and. Check the impressive list of endorsements to start her effort:Developing . . .
"Joins other traditional cab companies turning to bankruptcy proceedings under pressure from ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft"

TKC INSIDER TELLS US: They're blaming UBER for their inability to provide a service no one liked, and no one felt a loyalty towards. KC Cabbies, take note."

Our blog community is always looking at the big picture and a recent development in the transit world piqued our interest. Take a look . . .What does it all mean???And so . . .Despite regulatory winning and a somewhat stringent crackdown on ride-share in Kansas City. It's clear that the Internets and increasing challenges from competitors using new online tactics threatens to change a Kansas City transit tradition.Developing . . .
A place called the "suicide forest" on Japan's Mt. Fuji has the dubious honor of seeing the world's second-highest number of suicides after the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Around 500 people have taken their own lives there since the 1950s. In front of the dense forest is a sign advertising debt relief counseling, put there by a civic group because most people who kill themselves there do so to escape from heavy debts or financial problems after being laid off.

Human life is far too precious to throw away to ease temporary suffering. The German philosopher Artur Schopenhauer hailed suicide as the "absolute right" of every human being. Yet Schopenhauer was an epicure who was also keenly aware of the value of money. The pistol he kept in his bedroom was for self-protection rather than self-slaughter, and he lived to the cantankerous old age of 72.

Statistics Korea recently unveiled Korea's suicide rate showing that a staggering 29.1 per 100,000 people here take their own lives, putting the country at the top of the OECD for the ninth year running. That is 2.3 times higher than the OECD average of 12.5 suicides per 100,000 people. What is even more chilling is the rate of increase. In 1992, the suicide rate here was 8.3, but in just 20 years that has more than tripled. Traffic accidents claim around 5,000 lives in Korea each year, but more than 15,000 people commit suicide, which is unprecedented around the world.

Early this month, a mother killed herself and her two daughters, apparently unable to endure poverty. And a contestant on a TV reality show committed suicide on the set during filming, while the vice chairwoman of a minor political party, the mother of a small child, also took her own life recently. Suicide seems to affect people from all walks of life.

Organizations like the Korea Association for Suicide Prevention try hard to keep people from taking their own lives, but it looks as if the government is not too concerned about the latest epidemic. Korea spent W1.8 trillion over the last five years to prevent traffic accidents, but invested less than W10 billion in suicide prevention (US$1=W1,062).

King David, it is said, had asked a craftsman to make a gold ring and engrave a saying that would stay with him both in good times and bad. His son Solomon, who was already famed for his wisdom, advised the craftsman to engrave the words, "This too shall pass."

Chang Young-hee was an English literature professor at Sogang University who suffered polio when she was just one-year-old and died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 56. Chang is remembered as saying that unendurable sadness, pain and humiliation, as well as happiness and glory, are fleeting. It is a wisdom we would all do well to learn if we are to endure our hardships. But that does not mean the government can simply ignore the gravity of a situation that is causing more Koreans than ever to kill themselves.
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Since over 25 years, Father Gil Fiorini creates aperitifs and liqueurs available for sale. He created the famous Pastis de Nice entirely based on natural products, 8 years ago. Since late May 2015, a boutique now sells this pastis along with many artisanal specialities like the calissons or nougat, at the heart of Nice.



In an area of 300m, it is possible to discover, at no cost, the soaking tanks, bottling and labeling process of the pastis bottles: the entire fabrication method.



Pastis de Nice has no preservatives or coloring, meaning no caramel that often gives this heightened yellow color to industrial pastis - explains Celine Florini, Manager of the Pastis de Nice Boutique - there is no added sugar. It is purely composed of 24 plants and spices that soak in alcohol for several months.



This is why the Pastis de Nice a is lot more smooth tasting than industrial pastis.



Your sustainable contribution: supporting an artisanal and ecological production by buying pastis de Nice and other products from the boutique.
Takaud, a top savings solutions provider, and Takaful International, Bahrains leading Islamic insurance company, have partnered to provide Takafuls individual and corporate life insurance clients with innovative Sharia-compliant investment solutions.



The new partnership will enable Takaful to provide customers of its unit-linked savings policies with the opportunity to invest the savings portion of their policy in Sharia-compliant growth, balanced or prudent investment strategies.



In support of the agreement, Takaud will provide a complete range of services, along with tools enabling customers to identify their investment profiles. Takaud will also provide marketing assistance and training for Takaful agents and others who will be presenting these new investment strategies to customers.



The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Takauds CEO Luc Metivier and Takafuls CEO Younis J Al Sayed, at a ceremony held recently at Takafuls Manama offices.



Metivier said: Takaud is pleased to provide innovative Sharia-compliant investment solutions for the regions leading provider of Islamic insurance. Takauds experts have created a range of investment options that respond to the needs of clients requiring growth-oriented, prudent or balanced investments. This brings innovative investment solutions together with progressive Islamic insurance products for the benefit of corporations and individuals in Bahrain and the wider region.



Al Sayed said: Takaful is a leader in providing Islamic financial products in Bahrain and the wider GCC and Mena region. It is appropriate that we partner with a regional savings- and investment-specialist provider to offer our clients the highest level of expertise in investment solutions. We are pleased to expand our Sharia-compliant offerings while giving our clients opportunities for better value investments. Our organisations are moving forward in tandem to provide product innovations for our clients.  TradeArabia News Service
The residential property market in Saudi Arabia remained resilient despite pressure from lower oil prices and and reduced government spending, said a report.



The kingdom's prime markets were doing fine with capital Riyadh maintaining steady performance, and Jeddah showing continued growth momentum, according to real estate expert JLL.



In Riyadh, approximately 17,000 units entered the market last year, the majority of which were standalone villas or small apartment buildings (with no projects exceeding 150 units), stated JLL in its annual review of the Saudi Arabia Real Estate Market for 2015.



Jamil Ghaznawi, the national director and country head of JLL (Saudi Arabia), said: "We have witnessed a shifting demand in the residential market in both Riyadh and Jeddah, as the trend moves towards property rentals from sales."



"Residential transactions declined by five per cent in the year-to-November 2015 compared to the same period in the previous year. We expect rental demand to continue in 2016 but at a slower rate in comparison to 2015, while little or no change is likely in the sales market in 2016," stated Ghaznawi.



"However, this situation may change once the regulations surrounding the white land tax are released," he added.



Looking ahead at the upcoming supply, JLL said there are a number of large-scale projects including Green Oasis and the second phase of Manazil Qurdoba, which will deliver 930 and 700 residential units respectively.



While 28,000 units could potentially be completed in Riyadh during 2016, actual deliveries are likely to be significantly less.



Around 2,250 land plots were handed over to end users within the Eskan Airport project in Riyadh in 2015. Apart from this development, there are no other major planned or under-construction affordable housing projects in Riyadh, it stated.



Ghaznawi pointed out that lower oil prices have put pressure on economic growth, liquidity, government budgets, the stock market and asset prices.



"This scenario has led to cuts in subsidies and reduced government spending and has also impacted the financing of real estate projects. A more selective approach can be seen, with an increased focus on critical infrastructure and affordable housing projects," he stated.



On the other hand, there is reduced spending on less urgent projects, resulting in delays or scaling back of many projects, he added.



On the hospitality sector, JLL said with new hotels opening in Riyadh this year, there may be downward pressure on ADRs and occupancy rates due to increasing competition.



However, the Jeddah hotel market is likely to remain relatively stable in the near to medium term, the property expert said in the review.



Even though there is new supply of Jeddah hotels, there is strong demand to absorb any new supply, as result of religious tourism and higher occupancies during school and public holidays, it stated.



On the office market, JLL said Jeddah has witnessed a steady and healthy growth along with new supply of quality space. On the other hand, Riyadh rentals have remained relatively stable as occupiers exercised relative caution in terms of expansion as the economy slows down.



Looking into 2016 and beyond, Ghaznawi remarked: "We are entering a very challenging period as oil touches new lows and the government cuts spending and subsidies. It is encouraging to see that the government is taking steps to diversify the Saudi economy."



"Such structural initiatives will have long-term benefits and will contribute towards the positive development of the Saudi real estate market. Moreover, new laws allowing full foreign ownership of wholesale and retail business will attract foreign investment, which will ultimately benefit the real estate market. And finally, religious tourism will remain a growth sector in Jeddah and the Western region, and could support new hospitality supply," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Ericsson, a leading provider of communication technology and services, has appointed three new heads of customer units in Middle East and East Africa to strengthen its market position and accelerate growth.



As members of the companys leadership team within the Middle East and East Africa region, the new heads will be responsible to drive Ericssons business within the assigned customer unit, said the company in a statement.



In a new geographical set up that aims to increase focus and respond faster to the ever evolving customers needs in key markets, Ericssons Customer Unit North East Africa will now become  Customer Unit Egypt and Customer Unit East Africa, it said.



Helene Henriksson has been named the new head of Customer Unit Egypt, succeeding Isil Yalcin, who previously held the role of head of Customer Unit North East Africa. She has 25 years of international experience in the communications sector. Since she first joined Ericssons Swedish headquarters in 1993, Henriksson has held several different positions within the company  spanning Europe, the US and Asia, said the statement.



The company also announced Mathias Johansson as the head of Customer Unit East Africa covering Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. He has over 18 years of international experience in business consulting, product management, business development and sales, it added.



Additionally, Petter Jartby has been named Ericssons head of Global Customer Unit Etisalat. Jartby brings his broad managerial experience, having held various leadership positions since he joined Ericsson in 1996, to his new role. Over the last 20 years he has held various positions in the company including vice president and head of risk management, vice president and head of strategic business investments, and vice president and head of business operations in data networks, amongst others.



Speaking on the new appointments, Rafiah Ibrahim, president, Middle East and Africa (MEA), Ericsson, said: Henriksson, Johansson and Jartby bring varied and relevant market proficiency to their respective roles. Over the years, they have continued to demonstrate their business expertise, strategic skills and results driven approach in their relevant positions.



Moreover, they have proven their leadership ability, and we are thrilled to welcome them to their new roles in the region, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
Police cleared a suspicious package on Tuesday that had led to the evacuation of a building opposite the United Nations headquarters in New York that houses the U.N. missions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.



"It's all over," said John Miller, New York Police Department deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter-terrorism. "It's a couple of household items and a framed picture, no hazard."



"It may just be a gift to the mission, we don't know," he told reporters.



A U.N. security official said the package was found in the Saudi Arabian U.N. mission.  Reuters
Iran has signed contracts with Russia, Spain and Italy to step up exploration and study of its oilfields based on their geological and geophysical features, a report said.



The deal with Russias largest private oil firm Lukoil aims to geologically explore oil in the south-western Khuzestan province, exploration manager of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Hormoz Ghalavand was quoted in the Tehran Times report, which cited Shana.



The contract worth $6 million will be financed by Lukoil, he added.



NIOC signed a contract with Spains University of Barcelona for geophysical exploration and collaborative geological survey in southern Hormozgan province, Ghalavand said.



The project costs 2 million ($2.16 million), which will be provided by Spain, he added.



According to Ghalavand, Iran also concluded a contract with Italys University of Naples Federico II for geophysical exploration and collaborative geological survey in the western province of Kermanshah.



The Italian side would bear the entire cost of project which amounts to $4 million, he added.



Meanwhile, Italian oil giant Eni has proposed to develop Phase 11 of Irans giant South Pars Gas Field at a cost $4 billion, said Fars News Agency.



Eni expects to get the field up and running for production within 36 months.
The U.S. is deploying Global Hawk high-altitude drones at an airbase in Japan to conduct 24-hour surveillance on North Korea. The Global Hawk is capable of 30 hours of continuous flight at an altitude of around 20 km.

The U.S. on Saturday started moving the Global Hawks from Guam to an airbase in Misawa. They will conduct surveillance operations over North Korea from June to October.

A U.S. military spokesman said operations from Guam, which is 3,800 km from Pyongyang, are limited due to frequent storms. They will be remote-controlled from the U.S.

The drones will monitor North Korean missile bases and nuclear test sites and provide the intelligence to South Korea.

Another purpose of deploying the drones in Japan is to bolster reconnaissance operations over the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, which are disputed by China.

The Yomiuri Shimbun said Washington and Tokyo will bolster monitoring of Chinese naval activities in the East China Sea. Japan hopes to buy Global Hawks in 2015 and operate them jointly with the U.S.


So, youre planning your next holiday, but you want to get back to nature? Well, here are some of the worlds very best natural holiday experiences that you should consider trying out.





Gorilla Tracking in Africa





Many people who see gorillas up close describe it as one of the most astounding things theyve ever seen. And there is something impressive about seeing these powerful creatures in their natural environment. They are not simply brutal animals as many people expect. They are also very gentle and graceful. This is the thing that surprises many people when they go gorilla tracking . There are lots of chances to do this in African countries, such as Uganda and Rwanda.





Eco-Friendly Holidays in Switzerland





Much of Switzerlands landscape is made up of vast rivers and huge mountains. This makes it a great place to spend time for swimmers, boaters and hikers . You never run out of wonderful natural things to do when youre in Switzerland. And the peace and tranquility you can find is astounding. But if you want to take your trip to Switzerland a step further, you could take an eco-friendly holiday in the country. The WhitePod Village is a great eco resort located by the water, so its a good option to consider.









Whitewater Rafting in Colorado





If youre looking to combine a natural landscape with a thrilling adventure holiday, head to Colorado. Whitewater rafting is one of the most thrilling activities you will ever try out. If you have never tried it before, you should definitely do it. Its one of those things that you get hooked on once you've tried it for the first time. There are other things like mountain climbing and hiking that you can also do in the vast American state of Colorado. Its a great place for nature lovers.





Exploring the Reserves and Parks of Costa Rica





The most naturally diverse country in the world is Costa Rica . The Central American country is known as the home of conservation. So much money is pumped into making sure that the species and fauna of the area are allowed to thrive in their natural habitat. This makes the country one of the most stunning natural landscapes to visit on the planet. If you love nature, there is nowhere better. There are Wildlife Refuges, National Parks and lots of reserves. So, make sure you visit as many of them as you can.









Whale Watching in Norway
Denmark's parliament has passed new laws aimed at deterring people from seeking asylum there, in a move that has sparked widespread condemnation.

After more than three hours of debate Tuesday, lawmakers overwhelming passed the so-called "jewelry bill" that allows authorities to seize asylum-seekers' property valued at more than $1,450. Items of special emotional value such as wedding rings will be exempt. Some critics likened the decision to the Nazis' confiscation of valuables from Jews during the Holocaust. Another provision calls for the asylum seekers to wait three years, instead of one, before they can apply to be reunited with their families.

The bill is the latest attempt by Denmark's seven-month-old, minority center-right government to discourage the migration of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The Scandinavian country took in a record 20,000 asylum-seekers last year.

In reacting to the Danish parliament's decision, United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric issued a statement that read, in part, "Our reaction would be that people who have suffered tremendously -- who have escaped war and conflict, who have literally walked hundreds, if not thousands, hundreds of kilometers if not more, who put their lives at risk crossing the Mediterranean -- should be treated with compassion and respect and within their full rights as refugees as called [for] by the 1951 [refugee] convention."

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, also described the bill as inconsistent with European Union policies.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, now in Beijing, will urge China to do more to press North Korea to stop its controversial nuclear tests during his talks beginning shortly in the Chinese capital.

Kerry has meetings planned with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi early Wednesday, and the two top diplomats will hold a news conference before they hold further talks at a working lunch, U.S. officials said.

Earlier this month, Pyongyang conducted what it said was a successful test of a hydrogen bomb -- a move that drew international condemnation.

China is an economic lifeline for North Korea. A focal point for Kerry will be urging Beijing to use its leverage to try to convince Pyongyang to stop such tests, which are considered provocative by world powers.

Also, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China's support is crucial for passage of any UN penalties against North Korea.
Alitrip, the online travel agency of China's largest e-commerce company Alibaba, will sell package tours to Korea in collaboration with Korea's Hana Tour.

Hana Tour told reporters Tuesday that it has signed a partnership with Alitrip and is expected to open a virtual store on Alitrip's website by March.

Alitrip sold 800,000 overseas tours on Singles' Day, Nov. 11 last year, reaching sales of 1.5 billion yuan.

Alitrip claims some 400 million Chinese using Alibaba, Taobao, and Alipay are potential customers of Alitrip.

"In the past, only low-budget group tours were available from Chinese travel agencies," it said. "We expect that Hana Tour, the first Korean store on the Alitrip website, will offer genuinely Korean package tours."
The operating hours of subway trains and buses will be extended in Seoul during the lunar New Year, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said Tuesday.

The holiday runs from Feb. 7 through Feb. 10, with lunar New Year's Day falling on Feb. 8.

Subways and buses will run until 2 a.m. on Feb. 8 and 9, and expressway bus services will be increased by 27.7 percent.

"Most people are expected to travel to their hometowns on Feb. 7, while traffic back to Seoul will likely be the heaviest on Feb. 8," a city official said.
The bronze statue of a young woman, which was privately funded, stands in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul as a constant reminder of the atrocity.

Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Tuesday urged the Korean government to remove a monument to women forced into sexual slavery by imperial Japan.

The LDP in a resolution described the statue "damaging to the peace and dignity" of the Japanese Embassy and urges the Japanese government to persuade Seoul to remove it, Japan's Jiji Press reported.

It also urges the Japanese government to "closely negotiate" the conditions of a 1 billion yen "donation" it recently promised to cough up for the victims.

The ruling party also wants Tokyo to press the Korean government to "rectify" views that differ from the current rightwing Japanese administration's version of events.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Joon-hyuk here told reporters that Seoul will not respond to any resolution from any Japanese political party.


News Oct 19th, 2022 at 15:35

The cloud-native IT will continue to be offered as a stand-alone product as well as integrated with the Guestline platform
Waterville Valley Resort announces the 2016 Burton Mountain Festival on-snow demo tour coming February 13-15, 2016. The most anticipated travelling snowboard demo series of the year offers demos, a Riglet Park for kids, womens ride days presented by BurtonGirls.com, an interactive sponsor village and more.



(TRAVPR.COM) USA - January 27th, 2016 - Waterville Valley, NH  Waterville Valley Resort announces the 2016 Burton Mountain Festival on-snow demo tour coming February 13-15, 2016. The most anticipated travelling snowboard demo series of the year offers demos, a Riglet Park for kids, womens ride days presented by BurtonGirls.com, an interactive sponsor village and more. The 3-day event is completely free and open to the public.

Burton is pioneer and an important part of the snowsports industry, said Marketing Director Matt Hesser. Its exciting to see our partnership with them grow as it has this year with lots of new equipment for our guests here on the mountain. The Mountain Festival is an opportunity for us to show off how great their products are for riders of all ages and skill levels.

Even the smallest kids can expect to find Burton snowboards, boots and bindings sized just for them, as well as the revolutionary Riglet Reel, a specially designed reel attached to the nose of youth snowboards that makes learning to ride easier than ever. Kids as young as three-years-old will have the opportunity to experience snowboarding for the first time in the one-and-only Riglet Park located at Waterville Valley Resort, as well as access to entry level snowboard park features including boxes, ramps and rails with certified snowboard instructors on hand. The Burton Girls demo tent is the ideal opportunity to learn more about womens-specific products, made for women by women, and then try it all out for free.

There will also be special setups and giveaways from tour sponsors like Paul Mitchell, Ski-Doo, Clif Bar & Company, BurtonGirls.com, Snowboarder Magazine, and Chill for their support of the Burton Mountain Festival.

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Waterville Valley Resort was designed and planned specifically as a self-contained four season resort. Known as New Hampshires Family Resort, it features 220 skiable acres with an altitude of 4,004 feet and vertical drop of 2,020 feet, 50 trails, and 11 lifts. Lodging options include country inns, condominiums and all-suite hotels. For more information, call 1-800-GO-VALLEY or visit waterville.com.

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Apricot Hotel Hanoi has been honored with TripAdvisors 2016 Travelers Choice Award.



(TRAVPR.COM) VIETNAM - January 27th, 2016 - Apricot Hotel Hanoi has been honored with TripAdvisor

s 2016 Travelers Choice Award. The awards are based on millions of reviews collected in 2015 from TripAdvisor users worldwide, in three criteria: service, quality and value. This is TripAdvisors most prestigious award.



Apricot Hotel Hanoi was also recognized as among the Top 1% of hotels listed on TripAdvisor, and among the Top 25 Luxury hotels in Vietnam.



We are immensely honored to be awarded with this prestigious title, said Ms. Nguyen Phuong Nam, Apricot Hotels representative. Apricot prides itself to be the only hotel in Vietnam to honor Vietnamese art and culture. Each of our staff members is an ambassador of the hospitality and kindness of Vietnamese in general and Hanoians in particular.



Congratulations to the winners of this years Travelers Choice Awards, said Barbara Messing, chief marketing officer for TripAdvisor. Travelers considering their next trip can book confidently selecting from these award-winners that have already delighted millions of members of the TripAdvisor community.



Located in a historic location on Hang Trong Street, with the sweeping view of the legendary Hoan Kiem Lake, Apricot is proud to be one of the top destinations for visitors to Ha Noi. At Apricot, visitors can be immersed in the quintessence of Vietnamese art and culture, while enjoying over 600 original artworks by Vietnams most celebrated artists.



The 123-room Apricot Hotel introduces several exciting venues to the capital city, including rooftop bar One 36, with breathtaking panoramic views of Hoan Kiem Lake, a multi-level basement theatre called Avanti featuring a music stage and LArtiste restaurant with an open-style kitchen.



On the upcoming February 7, Vietnamese Lunar New Year, Apricots rooftop bar One 36 will host Fire Up the Night - offering a sweeping prospect of Hoan Kiem Lake and Hanois skyline beyond replete with a spectacular fireworks display. Tickets are priced at VND 580,000nett [USD 25.85] with a complimentary cocktail or glass of red wine.



Trip Advisor is the largest travel website in the world, with presence in 47 countries. TripAdvisors websites create the worlds largest travel community, with 350 million unique users per month, and over 290 million reviews for over 5.3 million hotels, restaurants and attractions in the world.



For more details about Apricot Hotel, visit the website www.apricothotels.com.

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Punta Cana visitors can now go whale watching by private plane or bus on the new miches high tours which take them to the Samana Bay to watch this amazing sight.



(TRAVPR.COM) DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - January 27th, 2016 -

Between January 20th and March 29th, one of the largest Humpback Whale migrations in the Atlantic Ocean will take place in the Dominican Republic. During these winter months, thousands of Humpback Whales make the migratory journey from the polar regions of the North Atlantic to the safety of the warm Dominican waters to mate and birth their calves.

Humpback Whales are endangered animals, and were almost hunted into extinction. Today around 30% of their original population continue to exist in the wild, thanks to havens like the Sanctuary for the Marine Mammals of the Dominican Republic in the Samana Bay.

The Samana Bay Sanctuary is world renowned, and is one of the largest humpback breeding sanctuaries in the world. It is estimated that during mating season thousands of whales visit the bay and around 300 whales are present at any time. The high concentration of whales is what makes the Dominican Republic one of the principal places for Humpback whale watching. Due to the strict regulations protecting the whales, the only way to get a glimpse of these magnificent creatures is through an organized whale watching tour.

Punta Cana visitors now have two choices when it comes to whale watching tours. Guests can take a whale watching tours by bus, which takes visitors to the Samana Bay. The newly constructed highway makes the ride to the bay, which was previously only accessible through small rugged mountain roads, quick and comfortable.

For those guest really looking to really explore Samana on their Punta Cana vacation can take the private plane tour takes guest from Punta Cana airport to Arroyo Barril Airport in Samana. This tour includes a horseback ride visit to the amazing Limon Waterfall.

Both tours visit the small island of Cayo Levantado, also known as Bacardi Island from its use in the famous commercials. After a tradional style lunch, visitors depart from the island to cruise deeper into the Samana Bay to observe the whales.

Humpback whales are some of the most exciting whales to watch, because they are known to display a number of above water acrobatic displays for whale watchers.

About Caribbean Dream

Caribbean Dream is a tour operator based in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, providing individuals and groups with a wide range of options for excursions and transportation. For more information visit the Caribbean Dream website.

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Perspective Magazine Launches Vacation Industry News App



(TRAVPR.COM) USA - January 27th, 2016 - New for 2016, Perspective Magazine, the leading independent trade publication for the timeshare / vacation ownership industry globally has announced the soft launch of its vacation industry news app  available in Apple Store and Google Play Store by searching Perspective News.

The app will provide the latest news headlines from the resort development industry, including for the first time, the wider hotel, hospitality and travel sectors. News content will range from new acquisitions and resort openings, to the latest technology, sales, marketing and financial announcements.

In addition to the latest industry news being made more easily accessible from cellphones, the Perspective News app also provides access to exclusive editorials, advertorials and digital page-turn editions of the popular magazine.

In a time when it was necessary, Perspective Magazine produced 26 issues a year across 5 regional editions. Now in the ever increasingly socially driven online world, we have adapted our publishing strategy to meet the demands of our audience. Says Paul Mattimoe, President & CEO, Perspective Group. The printed publication is now available 4 times per year, in a larger, global edition and remains the preferred choice of many advertisers to reach key senior-level decision makers. The magazine will also have bonus distribution at more tradeshows and events than ever before this year  but we also wanted to grow our lead in the digital space and so the Perspective News app will be able to deliver more content faster in between printed issues.

Version 1.1 has been released as a soft launch and includes the news, articles and digital magazine sections. An Industry Address Book, Events Calendar and App Only interviews are also in development for imminent release.

Once all tests are completed, Perspective Group will promote the app to their readership of more than 20,000 industry professionals, and then actively promote it to the wider hospitality audience.

The Perspective News app has been built natively for Android and iOS platforms, including a separate iPad version, and is available from the Google Play and Apples App Store now by searching Perspective News.

About Perspective Group Perspective Group provides the vacation ownership industrys most comprehensive, independent multi-media marketing and publishing services globally. Products and services range from intensive PR & Multimedia services such as INTUTION  a brand visibility service that includes custom content creation and distribution, social media monitoring, online marketing and brand reputation management  to the Perspective Magazine brand, which publishes the leading independent trade publication globally as well as custom membership magazines for clients.

Perspective Group is a media sponsor of more than 30 industry events per year and serves on a number of trade association committees. The group also hosts its own annual industry leader event, the Global Networking Expo (GNEX Conference), and Canadian Resort Conference (CRC) on behalf of the Canadian Resort Development Association (CRDA). For more information, visit http://perspectivemagazine.com/

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Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 27

India and Armenia today signed an amended Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty (DTAA) under which both countries will share information on banking and financial transactions.

The Finance Ministry said a protocol to amend the existing Double Taxation Avoidance Convention (DTAC) was signed by both countries today.

"The protocol will enable the two countries to exchange information related to financial and banking transactions under DTAC and facilitate them in addressing tax evasion," the statement added.

The Article on Exchange of Information for tax purposes has been amended to bring it in line with the updated provisions in the OECD Model.

"It is also expected to further strengthen the efforts of the government in curbing generation of black money," it said.

DTAC between India and Armenia has been in existence since September 9, 2004. The amending protocol was signed by Arun Kumar Jain, chairman, Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) and Armen Martirosyan, Ambassador of Armenia to India.
Singapore: Oil prices resumed their slide in Asia on Wednesday as long-running concerns over the saturated market overshadowed talk of possible coordination between some major producers to slash output. At around 0300 GMT, US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for March delivery was down 1.88% at $30.86 and Brent crude for March was down 1.35% to $31.37 a barrel. AFP

New Delhi

OYO Rooms names Dinesh R as chief HRO

OYO Rooms has appointed Dinesh R chief human resources officer of the company. OYO Rooms currently operates in over 165 Indian cities through more than 4,500 hotels offering 45,000 rooms. PTI

Chandigarh

Max Life Insurance leads in claims management

Max Life Insurance has announced significant achievement with its outstanding claims ratio of just 0.07% as on March 31, 2015, as per the latest IRDAI Annual Report. During the last financial year, a total 9,145 claims were received out of which only six claims stand pending. TNS

New Delhi

FIIs withdraw $7 bn from Asian equities: HSBC

FIIs have pulled out funds worth $7 billion from Asian equities in January with India witnessing outflows of $1.64 billion, says an HSBC report. FIIs have been net sellers across the Asian markets, with Korea and Taiwan witnessing the largest outflow at $2.4 billion each, as per the report. PTI

Kolkata

Vodafone deploys technology to reduce call drops

At a time when telecom companies are under fire for call drops, Vodafone India on Wednesday said it has deployed Cisco's Self Optimising Network (SON) technology to deliver superior mobile experience, improve voice call quality and reduce dropped calls. PTI
New Delhi, January 27

Regulator Trai today suggested Rs 11,485 crore per Mhz pan-India base price for premium 700 Mhz spectrum  the highest rate for any telecom frequency band  for the next round of auction even as leading operators have sought holding back sale of the radiowaves in this band.

The telecom regulator for the first time has suggested the base price for 700 MHz which is considered as the most efficient frequencies for high-end mobile services.

The regulator in its recommendations on spectrum price for seven bands, including 700 Mhz and 800 Mhz, released today suggested a base price of Rs 2,873 crore per MHz for pan-India 1800 MHz frequency band  widely known as 2G spectrum.

The suggested price of 1800 MHz band is about 31 per cent higher than the base price fixed by the government in March 2015 auction.

The next round of auction is expected to be held in May-June this year.

As per Trai's paper, the cost of delivering mobile services in 700 Mhz band is approximately 70 per cent lower than 2100 Mhz band, which is widely used for 3G services.

Leading operators had requested the regulator to defer sale of 700 MHz spectrum, saying that ecosystem for providing services in this band was not developed and sale would lead to underutilisation of the spectrum for several years and block industry's crucial funds.

The telecom regulator, which had mooted an idea of removing band-wise spectrum holding limits in its draft paper, however, suggested no change in existing rules.

The regulator also recommended auction of all 3G spectrum available with the government at a marginally high rate of Rs 3,746 crore per Mhz pan-India against Rs 3,705 crore per MHz fixed by government for the same in March 2015 auction.

It also recommended auction of 800 Mhz band, widely in demand for 4G services, at a base price of Rs 5,829 crore per Mhz. The new price is about 60 per cent higher from base price of Rs 3,646 crore fixed in last auctions. Trai has suggested auction of 800 Mhz in 19 out of 22 telecom circles.

Earlier, the government had fixed the highest base price at Rs 3,980 crore per MHz for 900 spectrum band in last auction.

The government had fixed Rs 2,191 crore pan-India (excluding Maharashtra and West Bengal) price for 1800 MHz band in previous auction held in March 2015.

As per the recommendation paper, airwaves in 1800 band were available only in seven out of 22 telecom circles. Of the seven circles, it recommended government not to auction spectrum in Bihar, Rajasthan and North-East due to partial availability of airwaves.

Trai also recommended auction of spectrum in 900 Mhz in six service area  Gujarat at base price of Rs 673 crore per Mhz, Karnataka for Rs 558 crore per Mhz, Haryana for Rs 151 crore per Mhz, UP East for Rs 776 crore per Mhz, UP West for Rs 739 Mhz crore and Bihar for Rs 444 crore per Mhz.

The regulator has recommended to take back 1800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Aircel in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh and Tata Teleservices in Himachal Pradesh as well as 800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Tata in West Bengal and Quadrant (Videocon) in Punjab and put these frequencies on auction.

The regulator also suggested base price for 2300 Mhz and 2500 Mhz band. It recommended Rs 817 crore per Mhz for spectrum in both 2300 Mhz and 2500 Mhz band, about 33 per cent higher than base price fixed for their last auction held in 2010. Reliance Jio in the only player to have 2300 Mhz spectrum across India at present.

The regulator in the consultation paper showed that right to use spectrum of state-run MTNL is also expiring in 2016 but the Department of Telecom later informed it that it will expire in 2019. Hence, it did not recommend auction of spectrum held by MTNL.

Trai also did not recommend price of 800 Mhz in Assam, North East and Jammu and Kashmir service area.

Though Trai had mooted removing band-wise spectrum limit in draft paper, it stuck to existing rules.

"The Authority recommends that existing provision of a cap of 25 per cent of the 'total spectrum assigned' in 700/800/900/1800/ 2100/2300/2500 MHz bands and 50 per cent within a given band in each of the access service area shall apply for total spectrum holding by each telecom service provider," the regulator said.  PTI
Sucha Singh Gill

The youth of Punjab is being compelled to leave Punjab for want of employment opportunities. This is especially true for the aspirational youth. Employment has shrunk in the agriculture sector on a massive scale. The number of persons engaged in agriculture has declined by 5,83,047 (2,61,207 as cultivators and 3,21,840 as agricultural labourers) due to non-viability of small and marginal holdings. There has also been a decline in labour requirement due to a high level of mechanisation of agricultural operations.

The quality of employment on casual or contract basis in manufacturing and sevice sectors is very poor. Service conditions in avenues of informal employment are very poor and the wage level is very low. This does not attract the Punjabi youth to seek employment and they are forced to migrate to distant lands in India and abroad.

Highly educated and qualified youth emigrate legally, while those who are less educated and low-skilled adopt illegal channels. The illegal channels of emigration lead to tragedies like Malta and Panama. Even legal channels can create tragedies in war zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.

Some experts believe that Punjabi youth does not work in Punjab and is bent upon going abroad for greener pastures. This is a half-truth. If this was so then thousands of teachers, nurses, linemen, and other qualified persons or MNREGA workers would not struggle here and become victims of police oppression. There are lakhs of young persons working in private unaided schools, repair workshops, as drivers of trucks and SUVs. They ply auto-rickshaws and work as security guards and engage themselves in small enterprises. They want better working conditions and higher wages.

There is no effort in the state to improve the quality of employment in the unorganised sector. At no stage has it been thought to develop preference or reservation on the pattern of Himachal Pradesh (70 per cent for local population) in the enterprises getting public or government support. It seems that the employment issue for the youth remains abandoned so far as the state is concerned.

The state government organised a survey and brought out a report on unemployment in Punjab in 1998. It was estimated that 14.72 lakh youth in the age group of 18-35 years were unemployed. Out of the total unemployed youth, 62 per cent were educated up to matriculation and above and 38 per cent were uneducated or educated below the matriculation level. After this, there was no effort to update this figure by organising another survey on this issue. The employment exchanges which used to register the unemployed have been either closed or have become defunct with government outsourcing many jobs to private contractors. It has stopped filling vacancies to downsize the government. Thus an important agency giving information on the magnitude of unemployment has been made non-functional. At this juncture, no authentic information on unemployment in the state is available. Whatever figures some times are quoted is guesswork. By applying the simple method of population proportion of employed as the same in 2011 as it was in 1998, it can be estimated that this number must have increased by more than 2 lakh. Even if we assume that the rate of unemployment has not changed, then this figure in 2011 must have increased to 16.80 lakh. As per the earlier survey, the unemployment situation is more serious now for educated youth in the state.

Educated youth want a better quality of employment in which there is regularity of jobs, salary is paid as per proper grade, with regular increments and other permissible allowances, weekly paid holidays and permissible retirement benefits. Even in the private sector, the youth needs to be paid minimum permissible wages or salaries. This is on no one's agenda. It is interesting to note that the state government deliberately kept 1,20,000 jobs vacant for many years. This not only forced unemployment upon 1,20,000 youth but also crippled the working of several essential services like health, education and extension services in the state.

In the election year, the government spokespersons, as an allurement to youth, have announced that the government is going to fill these vacancies. The government does not have a plan to provide employment to a large number of youth beyond the 1,20,000 vacancies in the government sector. The major chunk of employment has to be created outside the government sector, especially in enterprises engaged in manufacturing and service activities.

The state has not been able to create even one software centre near any of two airports in the state. There are reports of closure of manufacturing units at Mandi Gobindgarh, Ludhiana, Goraya and Amritsar. The government has no plan to engage the youth in gainful employment. Without proper planning, jobs cannot be created. There has to be coordination between production, structure of the economy, employment creation and human resource development. All this has been left to the market forces and all the three critical elements are operating independent of each other. This has produced a large crop of educated unemployed youth in the state.

A major proportion of the state population is young and a majority of them is educated. The young population is generally aspirational in nature. They have aspirations to progress and growth in life. They want quality employment in the form of regular jobs or business which is secure and provides them assured career progression.

The recent decision of the government to appoint persons in the government jobs on regular vacancies for four years on basic pay, denying them the grade pay, dearness allowance, house rent allowance and not to count this service for retirement benefits has disappointed educated young job aspirants. This is not so in the neighbouring states. This is driving them to seek employment outside Punjab. Thus more qualified and gifted youth which is not leaving the country is definitely leaving the state. This will deprive the state from the services of its own educated youth. For want of employment opportunities, some of our young people are even seeking employment in war-torn areas like Iraq, Afghanistan Libya Syria etc. This, occasionally creates difficulties for them and their families when they get caught in the crossfire.

The lack of employment also pushes some youth towards activities such as drug abuse, crime and violence. They become available for all kind of lumpen activities for the sake of monetary benefits. This is not desirable for a healthy society and for its sustainable progress. Therefore, keeping the youth unemployed is not in the larger interest of the society. They can be given training, skills, financial support and integrated with the marketing system to harness their productive potential. This is the proper way to enable the country to reap the demographic dividend that a large young population enables. This needs to be a major issue on the agenda of all parties contesting for power in Punjab.

The writer is a Professor, CRRID, Chandigarh.
Thiruvananthapuram, January 26

Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy deposed before the judicial commission probing the solar panel scam for 14 hours and it went on past midnight, during which he asserted there was no need for him to undergo lie-detector test as he has done nothing wrong.

Chandy, who is the first Chief Minister in Kerala to appear before a judicial commission, told the commission that the charges against him and his office were politically motivated.

What is the need for that? (lie-detector test). I have not done anything wrong. None has doubts that I have done anything wrong, he said to a query during cross-examination.

Chandys deposition went on for 14 hours after it commenced at 11 am yesterday and concluded at 1 am on Tuesday, an official said today.

Chandy made a similar remark on the lie-detector test to reporters outside the government guest house.

He told the commission that the charges against him and his office were politically motivated.

Opposition leader V.S. Achuthanandan hit out at Chandy, alleging he had not spoken the truth before the commission.

If he (Chandy) had spoken the truth, why was he not ready to take the polygraph test, he told reporters at Thiruvananthapuram.

The commission was on its final stage of evidence taking on the scam that broke out in 2013 and caused a huge embarrassment to the Congress-led UDF government.

The Kochi-based commission held the sitting at government guest house here to enable Chandy depose as per his earlier request.

Rejecting charges that he and his office had helped Team Solar Company that committed the fraud, Chandy had said that after the scam broke out, the government had taken steps to bring the alleged fraudstersBiju Radhakrishnan and Saritha S Nairbefore law.

Chandy had said that his government had ensured punishment to the fraudsters who were committing the crime since 2005 and that the conviction and sentence of the accused clearly showed his governments commitment towards the scam, he added.

Chandy had also hit out at the opposition, saying they had so far not brought before the commission a single shred of proof to support their charges that he and his office had helped the Team Solar Company.

The opposition CPI(M)-led LDF had launched a massive stir demanding Chandys resignation as the scam took a political turn after it emerged that two members of the CMs staffTenny Joppen and Jikkumonhad alleged links with Saritha.

The government had appointed retired High Court judge Sivarajan as one-man commission on October 23, 2013, to probe the scam.

The scam pertains to cheating several persons of worth crores of rupees by Saritha and Radhakrishnan by offering solar panel solutions. The duo allegedly canvassed business by using high-level names, including that of Chandy.

While Saritha was granted bail after being behind bars for about nine months, Radhakrishnan is still in jail in connection with the murder of his wife.  PTI
Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, January 27

With the recent arrest of four illegal travel agents by the Kapurthala police in the Panama boat tragedy case, 11 families, who had lost their kin near the US-Mexico border in 2011, now see a ray of hope.

The families, in a press conference held today at Jalandhar, disclosed the name of the agents, their state-level handlers along with their contact numbers and addresses. They urged the state government to intervene and arrest the agents who duped them of lakhs on the pretext of sending their sons to the US.

Satnam Singh, executive director, North American Punjabi Association (NAPA), has urged the state government to intervene and to bring to book the agents whose names were provided by these families today.

The case

Eleven Punjabi youths, supposed to board a flight from Delhi to Mexico on September 15, 2011, landed in Nicaragua. They were reportedly travelling along the Mexico-US border with 50 more Indians. The Mexican army conducted a raid near the border. After that, there has been no information about the youths.

Though BJP Rajya Sabha member from Hoshiarpur, Avinash Rai Khanna, has written to Union Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj a month back to take up the matter with the governments of the United States and Mexico, there has been no progress in the case.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 27

The decision of the Congress to boycott the Khadoor Sahib bypoll has sparked a raging debate with some leaders and workers supporting the move and others such as Jagmeet Brar opening a front against PPCC chief Capt Amarinder Singh.

The development has apparently lifted the spirits of the Akali Dal leadership which was reportedly wary of the poll outcome given the anti-incumbency sentiment prevailing in the state. Party president and Deputy CM Sukhbir Badal said: The Congress fled the Khadoor Sahib field out of fear of certain and humiliating defeat. It is categorical admission of defeat by the Congress.

Congress Legislature Party leader Charanjit Singh Channi supported the party decision. He said the reasons for which Congress MLA Ramanjit Singh Sikki had resigned remained unresolved and contesting the election would have defeated the very purpose of Sikkis sacrifice.

A senior leader from Ludhiana said the move would only help the ruling SAD-BJP regime as the Congress workers would get discouraged. It is against the spirit of the Congress, he said.

Congress MLA from Lehragaga Rajinder Kaur Bhattal said she stood by the partys decision.

Bhattal said it was a right move as Sikki had resigned in protest against incidents of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib. She said how the party could field him again when the Badal government, which was responsible for sacrilege incidents, was still running the affairs of the state.

Senior Congress leader Jagmeet Singh Brar, who had recommended the candidature of Ramanjit Singh Sikki for the Khadoor Sahib bypoll, today slammed Amarinder Singh on the social media. In a series of tweets, he said: "Amarinder Singh has committed a fraud with the high command, party and people by withdrawing from the contest."

He claimed: "Party president Sonia Gandhi had approved the name of party candidate and we ran away from the contest. Amarinder has backstabbed the party cadre and people again."

Speaking to The Tribune over the phone, Jagmeet said: "After my firm stand that we must contest the Khadoor Sahib byelection, I received a letter from the Congress president approving the candidate through the office of Shakeel Ahmad. But Amarinder today said boycotting the byelection was AICC's decision."

When asked about his future course of action, Jagmeet said, "What can I do now? The last day for filing the nominations was today. I will disclose in the coming days what happened in the last four days."

Jagmeet had tweeted last night: "News in the air that Congress not contesting Khadoor Sahib byelection. Himalayan blunder. We must reconsider. Akali Dal headstart for 2017."

Jagmeet, whose suspension was revoked by the Congress high command on August 7 last year, earlier served as a Congress Working Committee (CWC) member but is at present not having any party position. He had, on January 14, appreciated the AAP's Maghi Mela rally by tweeting, "AAP, Maghi conference at Muktsar, a record breaker. Never before in Muktsar so many people heard any leader from Punjab or India."

In some other tweets, Jagmeet said: "We have dug our own grave. Nobody to blame... My heart bleeds to write, we surrendered before Badal and Akalis. We have given up.

Meanwhile, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has attacked the Congress for withdrawing from the bypoll.

Party's Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann said: "The entire senior Congress leadership, including AICC general secretary Shakeel Ahmed, had been saying till yesterday that its former MLA Ramanjit Singh Sikki would contest the bypoll."

He said PPCC chief Capt Amarinder Singh and senior Congress leader Rana Gurjit Singh too had said that Sikki would be filing his nomination papers on January 27. "The sudden announcement by Amarinder today that the Congress would not contest the bypoll is nothing short of a conspiracy," he alleged.

AAP's state convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur said by running away from the fray at the eleventh hour, Amarinder had proved that he was hand in glove with the Akali Dal. "The decision was taken to give a free hand to the Akalis in Khadoor Sahib," he alleged.

Trouble for alliance

Tarn Taran: The district unit of the BJP boycotted the Republic Day function here on Tuesday. Akali leader and Chief Parliamentary Secretary Harmit Singh Sandhu was the chief guest. Sources said BJP leaders were not invited officially. Despite that some workers went to the function, but preferred to sit in the public. They left the moment Sandhu started his address. The local district unit has already announced to oppose SAD candidate in the Khadoor Sahib bypoll.

PPCC recast soon, says Amarinder

Chandigarh: PPCC chief Capt Amainder Singh in an effort to keep the flock together has retained the office-bearers of the existing state unit of the party. Interacting with the mediapersons on Wednesday, Amarinder said instead of replacing the sitting office-bearers, he had strengthened it further. Earlier, it was being believed that the reconstitution could see pruning of the jumbo-size party unit. Presently, there are 15 vice-presidents and 35 general secretaries appointed by then PPCC president Partap Bajwa. Amarinder said he had sent the list of new party set-up to the Central leadership for approval. Sources said triggered by defections from the Congress, the former CM has tried to accommodate as many leaders as possible. The PPCC chief said the MLAs and district presidents would be asked be concentrate in their respective Assembly segments only.
Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 27

Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) chief Capt Amarinder Singh on Wednesday said the party would not contest the Khadoor Sahib byelection.

Addressing a press conference here, he justified the decision to not contest, saying that the moral issue on which Ramanjit Singh Sikki had resigned from the Assembly still stood.

Also read: Khadoor Sahib bypoll: Cong officially declares Sikkis candidature

The culprits of incidents of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib had still not been identified and punished. he said.

"Let the party, which calls itself a representative of Sikhs explain this -- 'beadabi' of the living guru -- to people as they approach them for votes. We leave it to them to explain why the Congress too has decided to stay away," he said.

The seat had fallen vacant after Sikki had quit his as MLA from the Assembly segment to protest against the sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib in his constituency last October.

The Congress had only yesterday officially declared the candidature of Ramanjit Singh Sikki for the contest. The decision to field Sikki was taken on Saturday. Congress President Sonia Gandhi had reportedly approved his nomination on the recommendation of Punjab Congress President Capt Amarinder Singh, Punjab campaign committee chief Ambika Soni and Congress general secretary in-charge of Punjab Shakeel Ahmad.

Today, Capt Amarinder Singh said if voted to power, the party would set up a judicial commission to inquire into the incidents of sacrilege and in the Behbal Kalan police firing.

"If Badal is named, he would not be spared, he said at the press conference, adding that Sikki had writted a letter to him a few days back, saying: I will abide by the party's decision, though my conscience does not allow me to contest. Winning or losing a seat is not important. Guru Granth Sahib is supreme."

He said the Punjab Congress had forwarded Sikki's letter to Dr Shakeel Ahmed, who forwarded it to the party president, who left the decision to the state unit. The Punjab Congress after deliberations amongst top leaders of the state had decided to boycott the elections.

Capt Amarinder Singh said the state government had buried the inquiry into the Behbal Kalan police firing for 10 years by giving it to the CBI.

By the time the inquiry report will come, Badal will be dead and gone, said Capt Amarinder Singh.

In 47 years, I have never backed off from a fight. I have a track record of credibility. People know and I will not be misjudged by them, said the former chief minister, while clarifying that the party decision to boycott the election was right.

Reacting to the decision not to contest the byelection, Congress leader Jagmeet Brar in Muktsar tweeted: Amarinder Singh big fraud with high command, party and people to withdraw from contest. Akali endorsement on desecration of G. Granth sahib.

#Khadoor sahib Sonia Gandhi approves Congress candidate, we run away from contest. Humongous fraud, betrayal, Amarinder backstabs again.  Jagmeet Singh Brar (@jagmeetbrar7) January 27, 2016

He said after his firm stand that the party must fight the Khadoor Sahib byelection, he had even received the Congress presidents letter approving the partys candidate.
Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, Jan 26

The Congress is all set to challenge Akalis in the crucial Khadoor Sahib Assembly bypoll to be held on February 13, with the party officially declaring the candidature of Ramanjit Singh Sikki for the contest.

The decision to field Sikki was taken on Saturday. Congress President Sonia Gandhi had approved his nomination on the recommendations of Punjab Congress President Capt Amarinder Singh, Punjab campaign committee chief Ambika Soni and Congress general secretary in-charge of Punjab Shakeel Ahmad.

Official announcement was a mere formality as poll papers had been despatched to Sikki two days ago under Capts signatures.

The seat had fallen vacant recently after Sikki, a devout Sikh, had quit his MLA-ship to protest the sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib in his constituency last October.

The Congress was always up for the contest as it felt Sikki had gathered a position of moral high after resigning on an emotive religious issue.

Canards were being spread that the Congress was not interested in the fight. This is our seat, Shakeel Ahmad told The Tribune on Tuesday.

Sikki will challenge Akali Dals Ravinder Singh Brahmpura in Khadoor Sahib.

Capt Amarinder Singh will accompany him tomorrow for official filing of the nomination papers. Tomorrow is the last date for filing nominations.

The AAP is not contesting the seat, having suffered humiliating losses in Patiala and Talwandi Sabo bypolls earlier.

The Khadoor Sahib bypoll is significant, as it is being viewed as a marker of Punjabs political mood ahead of 2017 state Assembly elections.
Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 27

The Indian governments team, comprising officials from the Punjab and Jaipur police, submitted all documents for seeking the extradition of Paramjit Singh Pamma in a Lisbon court yesterday. The documents were submitted to the General Public Attorney Office in Lisbon, which will now send these to the Minister of Justice in Portugal.

The Portuguese court has, meanwhile, extended Pammas detention till February 15. He was arrested last month while he was in Algarve region of Portugal on a holiday with his family. He had taken political asylum in the UK in 1999 and has since been in the European nation.

Sources in the Punjab government told The Tribune that the documents submitted include the investigations into the cases of murder and under the Arms Act registered against him by the Punjab and Jaipur police, respectively. An assurance from the Indian government that Pamma, if extradited to India, will not be awarded capital punishment or a sentence of more than 25 years, had also been submitted.

Though government officials are sure that they have a water tight case, the Minister of Justice, Portugal will decide if there is a case for extradition, and if so, the defense counsel will be asked to study the Indian governments plea and then contest the claims.

Officials dealing with the extradition case in Punjab said the state governments three-member team, comprising Patiala range DIG Balkar Singh Sidhu and SAS Nagar SP Ashish Kapoor, had reached the Portuguese capital last week. The Ministry of External Affairs has hired a local law firm in Lisbon to initiate the extradition proceedings.

The Indian governments plea before the court is that Pamma had been declared a proclaimed offender in the case of murder of Rashtriya Sikh Sangat chief Rulda Singh in Patiala in 2009. They will also plead that upon the Indian governments request to the UK government after the sensational murder, a few Sikh activists in the UK, including Pamma, had been rounded up.

Sources said Pamma was being represented by lawyer Manuel Luis Ferreira, who had also contested the extradition plea of gangster Abu Salem from Portugal a few years ago.
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, January 27

The police today arrested a man, identified as Saurabh Vats, for allegedly duping people by posing as the personal secretary of Chief Minister Harish Rawat. Vats driver, Nitin Arora, was also arrested.

SSP Sadanand Datte said Sanjay Prasad, a resident of Connaught Place, lodged a complaint that a man posing as the personal secretary of the Chief Minister allegedly duped him of Rs 17 lakh for installing CCTV cameras at stadiums and guesthouses for the National Games.

The complainant alleged that Saurabh Vats give him an assurance that a tender worth Rs 25 crore would be allotted to him.

He gave him token money but Saurabh failed to do anything even after six months. Suspecting some foul play, he approached the police following which Saurabh was arrested.

The SSP said Saurabh was arrested near the Palm City crossing. His SUV had a blue beacon atop and the board of the Government of India in front.

The police has recovered Rs 9 lakh of the Rs 17 lakh given to him by the complainant. According to information, the accused had also hired a security guard and used to carry visiting cards having the Union Government insignia.

Three drug peddlers held

The city police arrested three drug peddlers in Dehradun on Wednesday. Acting on a tipp-off, a police team led by Circle Officer SK Singh arrested Devi Singh, Premchand and Istaiq when they were smuggling hashish at Shashpur. The police seized 3.7 kg of hashish from their possession. They were sent to jail.

The Patelnagar police arrested two burglars with a khukri on Wednesday when they were trying to burgle a shop near the ISBT. They have been identified as Usman and Aslam.
Singapore, January 27

Describing India as a "bright spot" in the backdrop of gloomy economic outlook globally, a senior Singaporean minister has said the country was projected to be the world's fasted growing economy and Singapore's close economic cooperation with it would be mutually beneficial.

Noting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's various economic initiatives and reforms to further boost developments in the country, S Iswaran, Minister of Trade and Industry said "against the backdrop of somewhat gloomy economic outlook globally, India remains a bright spot."

"India is projected to the be world's fastest growing major economy this year. It was the world's top FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) destination in the first half of 2015 with USD 31 billion greenfield investment," said Iswaran at the Republic Day reception hosted by the Indian High Commissioner Vijay Thakur Singh.

Iswaran also highlighted India-Singapore strategic partnership, which elevated the diplomatic relations between the two countries last year, saying it "will allow our two countries to collaborate on a wide range of initiatives and also on opportunities that arise from India's and Asia's growth story."

"Importantly it offers a roadmap of deliverables that would further strengthen our economic links between our two countries. It starts from a strong base, bilateral trade doubling in the past 10 years from SGD 11.8 billion in 2005 to SGD 22.5 billion in 2015," Iswaran said.

He highlighted Singapore's keen interest in India, and shared last year's business milestones with a joint venture airline between Singapore Airlines and Tata Sons, the start of container terminal development in Mumbai by Port of Singapore Authority and completion of a coal-fired power plant in Andhra Pradesh by the city state's Sembcorp group.

"In the area of urban planning, we have worked closely with the government of Andhra Pradesh to masterplan Amaravati, the new greenfield capacity city of the state, and our companies hope to further contribute towards it development," he said.

The minister said that Singapore is also going to share experience in education, in particular skills development with various Indian states.

"Beyond business and trade, this strategic partnership encompasses initiatives to enhance cultural interaction, education and sharing of our experiences," said the Minister.

"India and Singapore share a close friendship and warm affinity at all levels between our people, between our business community and certainly between our leaders," Iswaran told an audience of 1,000 diplomats, business and community leaders at the reception. PTI
Moscow: Russia's federal tourism agency on Wednesday issued a warning that Islamic State jihadists were planning to abduct Russian citizens in Turkey. "According to the competent agencies, leaders of the IS terrorist group plan to take hostages from among Russian citizens in Turkey," it said in a statement. "Hostages can be transferred on to territories controlled by militants to hold public executions and to be used as human shields in combat with Syrian government and coalition forces," it added. AFP

Syria opposition meets to decide on peace talks

Riyadh: The Saudi-backed Syrian opposition met on Wednesday to decide whether to attend UN peace talks, as wrangling over who will go threatens to derail the biggest push yet to resolve the country's war. Members of the so-called High Negotiations Committee, formed in Riyadh last month in an effort to unite Syria's fractious opposition, met in the Saudi capital for a second day on whether to accept a UN invitation to the talks due to start Friday. AFP

Singapore to scan fingerprints of all visitors

Singapore: Singapore said all travellers entering the country by land, air or sea will have their fingerprints taken from June as part of plans to step up border security in the wake of rising terror threat. The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority will be taking the fingerprints of anyone who enters Singapore at its air, land and sea checkpoints, senior minister of state for home affairs Desmond Lee told Parliament on Wednesday. PTI

Migrant boat sinks off Greek island; 7 bodies recovered

Athens: Greek authorities say a total of seven bodies, including those of two children, have been recovered from the sea off the eastern Aegean island of Kos after a boat carrying migrants or refugees sank early on Wednesday. Rescue crews recovered the bodies of three men, two women, a boy and a girl. There were two survivors, a man and a woman. AP
Washington, January 27

After ordering celebrity yoga guru Bikram Choudhury to pay $924,500 in compensatory damages in a lawsuit for sexually harassing and firing a female employee, a US court has told Choudhury to pay $6.47 million in punitive damages.

Plaintiff Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, Choudhury's former legal adviser, said in the lawsuit that he inappropriately touched her and wrongfully fired her in 2013 after she began probing sexual abuse claims from other women.

"I feel elated and vindicated," Jafa-Bodden told the New York Daily News after the Tuesday verdict that was handed down by a Los Angeles jury consisting of six women and three men.

Meanwhile, 69-year-old Choudhury, Kolkata-born founder of Bikram Yoga - a form of hot yoga - testified that he is "almost bankrupt".

Choudhury told jurors he had no income at all last year and his collection of more than 30 luxury cars has been promised to California Governor Jerry Brown for a children's school dedicated to automotive engineering.

Jafa-Bodden filed her lawsuit in 2013 claiming Choudhury sexually harassed her with a barrage of misogynistic comments and threatened her and her daughter's lives when she raised questions about sexual abuse claims brought by numerous women.

Jafa-Bodden testified earlier in the trial that Choudhury made her life a living hell after she moved to the US from India to act as his personal lawyer.

In one dramatic account, she said Choudhury ran his finger across his throat when she asked about accusations he sexually assaulted a teacher during a training programme in Acapulco.

In his closing argument on Tuesday, one of Jafa-Bodden's lawyers, Mark Quigley, called Choudhury's treatment of women "shocking".

He highlighted trial testimony from the former White House lawyer who worked for Choudhury after Jafa-Bodden and filed her own wrongful termination lawsuit in August.

The lawyer, Petra Starke, told jurors earlier this month that Choudhury presided over a "crazy" work environment with a "sexually charged atmosphere", Quigley was quoted as saying.

Choudhury gained fame by popularising his sweat lodge-style yoga system which uses a 26-pose routine in a room heated to nearly 38 degree Celsius or more.

Starke testified that she instituted strict sexual harassment policies and training when she took over as CEO and was shocked when she later witnessed Choudhury receiving oral sex from a teaching student in a limo, Quigley said.

The yoga guru also is facing lawsuits by several other women who claim he sexually assaulted or raped them.

Choudhury's lawyers, however, say their client is innocent and that prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges in connection with the women's claims.

IANS
Receiving a donation of 1,000 bottles of water from Bridgestone, from left, Jimmy Shinkle of Jet Express, Sage Iaconvone from Bridgestone, Jet Epxress President Kevin Burch, and Larry Lynch, Load Planner at Jet Express. Photo courtesy Jet Express

Kevin Burch grew up in Flint, Mich.,, so it's only natural that he would start a campaign to get trucking companies involved in providing bottled water to the city whose water has been poisoned by dangerous levels of lead.

Burch is president of Jet Express, a Dayton, Ohio-based regional truckload carrier (about 250 miles south of Flint). After the first full day of the project, announced Jan. 26, they already had collected 20,000 bottles of water, enough to fill nearly half of a semi trailer.

We have a full load 40,000 bottles headed to Flint for Monday delivery with a direct movement from a donation from Barry Pottle with Pottles Transportation in Bangor [Maine], who teamed up with Nestles who donated all the water, Burch said in an email Tuesday evening.

Nestle earlier this week announced that a joint effort between Nestle, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo, will collectively donate water to meet the daily needs of over 10,000 school children for the balance of the calendar year. That translates to 176 truckloads, or up to 6.5 million bottles of water, to help with relief efforts for those affected by the water crisis in Flint.

Unloading donations of bottled water at Jet Express to be shipped to Flint, Mich. Photo courtesy Jet Express.

Meanwhile, back in Dayton, We are just starting to work out a program with the City of Dayton, Dayton Chamber, other trucking companies, and naturally one case at a time from the motoring public, Burch said.

Other companies, including Dayton Freight Lines, Englewood Trucking and truck dealer Rush International, also have joined the effort, as well as several owner-operators who have agreed to donate their trucks and time.



Burch has long advocated that trucking companies cultivate a good relationship with their local media (and was honored as an HDT Truck Fleet Innovator for those efforts). The media, both print and TV, have been great in informing the public just what truckers due in cases such as this tragedy in Flint, he says.



Two years ago, Flint switched its water supply from Lake Huron to the nearby Flint River. Polluted water from the river has eroded the citys old iron main pipes, causing lead to leach from the pipes into the water. The water coming from the tanks cannot be safely used; its especially dangerous to children, who are more susceptible to lead poisoning.
Japan has always been one of the countries that I find to be incredibly beautiful. I love their courteous and unique culture and tradition, and their lifestyle which is hugely influenced by Zen Buddhism, something that I am very fond of. It is one of my favorite countries in the world.

This article features three of Japans most beautiful villages. The surrounding environment is truly calming, as though even the strongest forces of materialism are unable to penetrate the peace pervading these obscure villages.

When we look at the beauty of these villages and compare it with our lives, only then will we realize that there is no real gain in pursuing a materialistic lifestyle, and that such a lifestyle destroys not only natures beauty but also our inner peace.

Do take a look at these beautiful villages in Japan. Have you ever encountered such quaint and peaceful places as these?

Tsem Rinpoche

3 Amazingly Attractive Villages in Japan

In Japan, there are many beautiful villages. Its hard for tourists to get to villages because of a lack of public transportation, but its well worth visiting them. Here are three of the most beautiful villages in Japan.

1. Nagiso-machi 

Nagiso-machi is located in Nagano prefecture. Its a very popular vacation destination for Japanese people.

The village still has old Japanese scenery and hot springs (onsen).

When you hike into the mountains, you can find waterfalls. There is a camping site, too.

2. Matsuzaki-cho 

Matsuzaki-cho, in Shizuoka, is famous for its terraced rice fields. Its just beautiful.

Its famous not only for its rice fields, though. Matsuzaki-cho has a lot of attractions, such as the old style buildings, beautiful beaches, and nature.

Its especially known for the architecture of the wall called namako-kabe, which is very unique. Namako means Sea Cucumber in Japanese.

3. Kyogoku-cho 

Kyogoku-cho is located in Hokkaido. The nature of the village is awesome. Since it gets really cold in winter, the outside hot spring is so nice there.

The village has a mountain called Yotei-zan. There are four climbing trails to the top of the mountain. The view from the top would blow you away.

Fukidashi Park is also a popular spot to visit in Kyogoku-cho. The park has a spring and a small waterfall.

Source: http://wasa-bi.com/topics/1010/

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BUCHAREST, Romania  Romanias prime minister offered Moldova a loan of $65 million on Tuesday to prevent economic collapse in the impoverished ex-Soviet republic  if certain conditions are met.

To get the money, Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos said Moldova will have to reform its justice system, fight corruption, sign a draft agreement for a loan from the International Monetary Fund and appoint a new central bank governor.

The offer comes as Moldova, Europes poorest nation, is on the verge of economic collapse following the disappearance of more than $1 billion from three banks, one eighth of the entire GDP of the nation.

Ciolos made the announcement during a visit to Romania by Pavel Filip, the sixth prime minister to hold office in Moldova in a year of political turmoil and deep social unrest sparked by the bank fraud.

Filip, considered a symbol by many Moldovans of the nations entrenched corruption because of his ties to an influential businessman, promised to use the money well. Earlier this month, protesters stormed the Parliament to protest his taking office.

If we dont carry on with reforms that are felt in Chisinau and beyond, this political class has no chance, Filip said at a joint news conference with Ciolos.

Ciolos also offered emergency aid for food and heating, which would not have to be repaid.

IMF officials visited Moldova to negotiate a loan to cover salaries and pensions. But the IMF team left after the central bank governor resigned due to protests over the missing money. The governor is still in place, however.

Moldova lies between European Union member Romania and Ukraine, and Moldovans are deeply torn between whether they want deeper integration with the West or Russia.Pro-European parties won an election in 2014 but squandered their chance to improve the lives of the nations 3.5 million people as the country grappled with the fallout from the bank scandal and other examples of corruption. A former prime minister, Vlad Filat, was arrested last year on suspicion that he took part in the fraud. He is awaiting trial.

The state stepped in to replace the funds that were stolen, leaving it tragically short of funds. Experts say that without outside help, the state could soon find itself unable to make payments including state salaries and pensions.
VATICAN CITY  Pope Francis held talks with Irans president Tuesday at the Vatican, calling on Tehran to play a key role in stopping the spread of terrorism as Iran tries to improve its image in the global arena following an agreement on its nuclear program.

The pontiff warmly clasped the hand of President Hassan Rouhani in the first official call paid on a pontiff by an Iranian president since 1999. They held 40 minutes of private talks before Rouhani met with other top Vatican officials.

The talks delved into the conclusion and application of the nuclear accord, and the important role that Iran is called upon to play, together with other countries of the region, was highlighted, the Holy See said.

It added that that role should foster adequate political solutions to the issues plaguing the Middle East, fighting the spread of terrorism and arms trafficking.

The cordial talks also stressed common spiritual values, the statement said.

Usually its the pope who asks his audience to pray for him. This time, after the two men spoke with the help of Italian and Farsi language translators, it was the guest who asked the pope for prayers. I ask you to pray for me, Rouhani said.

The Vatican meeting was a key part of the Iranian effort to take a more prominent place on the world stage after the nuclear deal with Western powers.

Iran, which agreed to limit its nuclear activities in exchange for an end to economic sanctions, is eager to carve out a bigger role in mediating Middle East conflicts. Francis papacy has emphasized mediation and conflict-resolution, including his role in helping Cuba and the United States to normalize their relations.

Rouhani heads to France Wednesday on his four-day European trip seeking to boost Irans image abroad as well as to rehabilitate economic ties with a continent that had been a big trade partner before the sanctions.

Francis gave Rouhani a medal depicting St. Martin giving his cloak to a poor man in the cold, describing the saints act as a sign of unsolicited brotherhood.

Rouhani brought a gift of a hand-made rug that he said was made in the Iranian holy city of Qom.Before going to the Vatican, Rouhani told a forum of business leaders in Rome that Iran is the safest and most stable country of the entire region.

Italy also sees Iran as a potential peacemaker in Syrias civil war, as the Italian government fears the warfare will further destabilize Libya  just across the Mediterranean from southern Italy  fuel terrorism and jeopardize energy security.

Italy has always backed the role of Iran as a regional player in resolving tensions in the area, starting with the Syrian crisis, Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said after meeting his Iranian counterpart, according to his office.

Rouhani has described the political talks leading to the nuclear deal as a potential blueprint for pursuing peace in the Middle East.

His European trip was originally planned for November but postponed because of the attacks in Paris.
STANFORD, Calif.  Rising tension between Russia and the U.S., North Korea's recent nuclear test and a lack of aggressive steps to address climate change are putting the world under grave threat, scientists behind a "Doomsday Clock" that measures the likelihood of a global cataclysm said Tuesday.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the minute hand on the metaphorical clock remained at three minutes-to-midnight. The clock reflects how vulnerable the world is to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies, with midnight symbolizing apocalypse.

"Unless we change the way we think, humanity remains in serious danger," said Lawrence Krauss, chair of the bulletin's Board of Sponsors.

Krauss said the Iran nuclear agreement and Paris climate accord were good news. But the good news was offset by nuclear threats, including tension between nuclear-armed states India and Pakistan, and uncertainty that the Paris accord will lead to concrete action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists behind the bulletin adjusted the clock from five minutes-to-midnight to three minutes-to-midnight last year. They cited climate change, modernization of nuclear weapons and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals as "extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity." The clock was previously at three minutes-to-midnight in 1984, when the bulletin said talks between the U.S. and Russia virtually stopped.

From a climate change perspective, if midnight on the clock represents the disappearance of humanity, three minutes-to-midnight is overly dire, said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University who is not affiliated with the bulletin.

On the other hand, Oppenheimer said if midnight means humans have emitted so much greenhouse gas that dangerous climate change is inevitable, then three minutes is a "fair analysis."

"I think the jury is out as to whether the Paris agreement will make a significant difference," he said. "The key is whether countries over the next couple of years are able to agree on some important details that were left out."

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine examining social and scientific controversies, said in an email that the Doomsday clock is "an exercise in pessimism and PR with little connection to the reality of moral progress made in the past half century." Shermer cited reductions in the number of nuclear weapons since the 1980s and the absence of war between Europe's great powers since World War II.

California Gov. Jerry Brown joined former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry for a discussion at Stanford University after the unveiling of the clock.

Perry raised concerns about rhetoric from Russia about the use of nuclear weapons and said the threat of nuclear disaster was greater today than during the Cold War. Shultz said the U.S. needs to engage Russia and China. Brown warned about "tipping points" in the fight against climate change.

"And around a tipping point, we may not be able to come back to a stable planet or one we'll find very comfortable to live in," he said.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons. The clock was created two years later.

The decision to move or leave the clock alone is made by the bulletin's science and security board, which includes physicists and environmental scientists from around the world, in consultation with the bulletin's Board of Sponsors, which includes more than a dozen Nobel laureates.

The closest the clock has come to midnight was two minutes away in 1953, when the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb that followed a U.S. hydrogen bomb test.
BURNS, Ore. (AP)  The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests - including Bundy.

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for "patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."

Those arrested were Ammon Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, all during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said. Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported ( http://bit.ly/1nOammV ) that Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her father's death to the paper, saying "he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

Ammon Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement. "The leaders of this group are now in custody and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender."

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Deschutes County Major Incident Team and the Harney County District Attorney's Office.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West.

___

Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.

Here is a rundown of how the arrests and their aftermath:

WHAT HAPPENED?

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting Tuesday in a small community near the wildlife refuge to explain to local residents their views on federal management of public lands. In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said police arrested Ammon Bundy, his brother, Ryan, and three others during a traffic stop north of Burns. Authorities said an adult male suspect was killed and another suffered non-life threatening injuries when shots were fired. Authorities didn't identify the person killed, but the Oregonian reports it was an Arizona rancher. Arianna Finicum Brown told the newspaper that the man killed was her father  55-year-old Robert "LaVoy" Finicum of Cane Beds, Arizona. LaVoy Finicum was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking

WHY DID AUTHORITIES TAKE ACTION NOW?

The FBI didn't say Tuesday, although federal officials had come under increasing pressure from Oregon's governor and local leaders to do something. Bundy's group had been free to come and go. They'd held frequent news conferences at the site, travelled to meet with sympathizers and others to espouse their views and some even attended a community meeting last week, where local residents shouted at them to leave. Bundy had been in contact with an FBI negotiator and local law enforcement.

HOW DID THIS BEGIN?

The group took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 after a peaceful protest in nearby Burns, Oregon, over the conviction of two local ranchers on arson charges. Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, said they lit fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006 to reduce the growth of invasive plants and protect their property from wildfires. The two were convicted three years ago. But in October, a federal judge ruled their terms were too short under U.S. law and ordered them back to prison for about four years each. Among the demands by the Bundy group is for the Hammonds to be released.

WHAT CHARGES DO THOSE ARRESTED FACE?

The FBI said the people arrested face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE REFUGE NOW?

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for "patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."
Alicia Lieberman has a way of weaving social issues together, citing research in understandable terms with what seem like common-sense solutions.

Her lifelong work in early childhood issues crosses into domestic violence, health, housing and education. She talks about generational behaviors and how to intervene with families who struggle.

These topics do not exist in silos. By ignoring what happens in a childs first five years of life, we also ignore a safer and healthier future for communities.

For therapists working one on one with families and children, we really need to redefine our job descriptions, she said. We pay attention to much more than internal emotions. We are paying attention to the everyday factors affecting emotions. It is doing social work and clinical therapy hand in hand to make a family feel protected.

This is a preview of what Lierberman will speak about Tuesday during a free lecture starting at 6 p.m. at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa Schusterman Learning Center.

She is the Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair of Infant Mental Health at the University of California-San Francisco and also serves as a professor and vice chairwoman for academic affairs. She is also the director of the Child Trauma Research Program at San Francisco General Hospital and clinical consultant with the San Francisco Human Services Agency.

The heart of the lecture is the fact that we pay a lot of attention to the high school dropout rate as a risk factor for young people moving into delinquency or ensnared in the criminal justice systems, she said. What we dont pay sufficient attention to is how the very early experiences of your child predisposes adolescents to feelings of being unwanted, feelings they dont belong or dont have a place of honor and respect in society.

We need to look at the early childhood approach and help childcare providers and preschool teachers with a safe and protected environment for them.

Lieberman is not referring to surveillance cameras, locked doors or security guards. She is talking about having tools for handling disruptive  even violent  children.

Research out of several universities and early childhood groups has shown expulsions at the childcare and preschool levels are higher than in the older grades. A particularly big jump is evident among the black, male population.

A child expelled in childcare at this young, malleable age sends the message that You are not good. We dont know what to do with you. We are not giving you a place in society,  Lieberman said. A child internalizes that message.

Understanding why a child hits others, bites when agitated or throws chairs and toys is necessary for teachers to help change such behavior, she said. So many times, teachers get frustrated and react in ways that make the child act worse.

Lieberman said having mental-health consultants available would be a significant help. Also, providing education or ongoing training for teachers would provide insight on better interventions.

We need to support childcare providers and preschool teachers with children expressing these behaviors, she said. We have two groups who are not understanding each other and exacerbating each other.

Often children are reflecting what they are seeing at home. This is why having child-parent therapy available in the community is key. By getting parents to reflect on their own actions, they can be part of the solution.

Lieberman said the therapists in her California program have worked with housing authorities to find better placements for families or link them to other social programs. This is how parents can feel better about their surroundings and focus more on their children.

In order to help parents protect their children, we often have to make parents feel protected. We must help them identify their own triggers, she said.

Lieberman refers to generational problems as ghosts in the nursery.

The metaphor is that parents are repeating with their children unresolved conflicts they have with their parents. We talk of building angels in the nursery and creating new memories focused on protection and safety, she said.

Lieberman puts child abuse and domestic abuse in the same category. When she tried this approach with child protection services years ago, officials balked, arguing domestic violence is an adult issue.

Since then, research shows even an infant lying in a crib can be affected by yelling and chaos in the home. For the parents, fuses get short when babies, toddlers and young children cry or need attention.

The most vulnerable time for a child is through age 5, because that is when the most serious and significant child abuse and neglect occurs. Lieberman found an overlap of between 40 percent to 60 percent in child abuse and domestic violence cases.

When California officials started asking about domestic violence when responding to a child-abuse or neglect call, domestic violence reports shot up by 35 percent.

Lieberman also speaks of having a mental-health system that gets out of the office and into homes, childcare centers and schools; a medical system that asks about home-life and emotional well-being during regular exams; and a foster-care system that strikes a balance between returning children too soon to a parents home but not letting them linger for long as a foster child.

We need systems that talk to each other, she said. For every $1 spent on early education, it saves $8 to $18 down the road. It pays off to invest in early childhood.
OKLAHOMA CITY  Members of the LGBTQ community decried a number of bills Tuesday proposed for the state Legislature they say are discriminatory.

LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer.

One measure would bar individuals who are transgender from using the restroom consistent with their gender identity.

Another measure attempts to nullify U.S. Supreme Court action legalizing same-sex marriage.

Yet another measure would allow businesses to refuse service if it violates a persons religious beliefs.

Troy Stevenson, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, said there are 27 discriminatory bills, of which 18 measures are holdovers from last session. Holdover bills are those that did not make it through the legislative process, but still can become law.

If they make it past the governors desk, we will litigate it, Stevenson said.

Pastor Scott Foster of the First United Presbyterian Church in Guthrie said some of the measures improperly attempt to use religious freedom as a means to discriminate against others.

Certain groups are now using the guise of religious freedom to pressure our legislators into allowing them an exception to Oklahoma law, Foster said. They are attempting to legalize discrimination by offering businesses, institutions or government agencies that are religious to bypass the law.

Stevenson warned that there have been economic consequences for other states that pass discriminatory laws.

Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, agrees with his assessment.

Oklahoma is regrettably leading the nation in the number of bills attacking the LGBT people, their families and visitors in the 2016 session, Warbelow said. These vile attacks are shameful, far-reaching and would no doubt be incredibly destructive to this great state, resulting in multiple, expensive legal challenges and a greatly damaged reputation.

Oklahomans across the state must stand up and demand their lawmakers stop these attacks on fairness and equality.

The Human Rights Campaign says it is tracking more than 100 anti-LGBTQ bills in 26 states.Lawmakers return Monday to the Capitol.
The two candidates for a seat on the Tulsa school board spoke at a forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Metropolitan Tulsa on Tuesday night.

Cindy Decker and Stan Minor answered written questions from an audience of about 30 during the forum, which was held at the Schusterman-Benson Library.

Decker, who was appointed to the Office 5 seat in May after the resignation of a board member, said she has board experience and has a track record for asking questions, some of them tough, during board meetings.

Decker, an education researcher, said she is a graduate of Edison High School and a parent of a Tulsa Public Schools student.

Stan Minor, a lifelong resident of Tulsa, also graduated from Tulsa Public Schools.

He has worked with the Nathan Hale Alumni Association for many years and decided to run for the board seat because he said many of the things he thinks are affecting schools are not discussed at board meetings.

Minor has worked in petroleum land management for 33 years.

The candidates were asked about their thoughts on the strengths and challenges of the school district and the board.

Overall, I think the board is fine, and I dont come from an angry position, Minor said.

But he said there are areas that the district should address.

I think that we need to fix the enrollment methods in the schools, he said, noting its very complicated. I dont think its fair when you have admissions committees selecting certain applicants at certain schools and certain other schools have a drawing, and then the other schools take the leftovers.

Decker listed the districts superintendent, Deborah Gist, as one of its strengths.

We have, arguably, the most qualified superintendent of any city here in Tulsa, she said.

Other strengths include community and business support, while challenges include teacher turnover and financial problems, Decker said.

The candidates also were asked how to make Tulsa Public Schools a destination district for teachers, despite low pay.

Many of us know that the reason we stay in our job is not due to pay; its due to feeling engaged and loving what you do and knowing that you make an impact on the children that you serve, Decker said. Therefore, its important that teachers know that theyre making a difference.

They have to have the supports that they need to do that. They also have to be heard. They have to have principals that respond to them, respond to their needs.  They need autonomy in classrooms so that they can design lessons they are proud of.

Minor said: I dont think that big government and top-down decisions and guidance are the only answer. I think that the answer has to come from within.

He also added, I think that school spirit and I think community pride are a way to elevate and make people happy.

Regarding the penny sales-tax proposition made by University of Oklahoma President David Boren, Decker said she supports it although she doesnt think it is a perfect solution.

A sales tax is regressive, she said. That means our lower-income workers are taxed at a larger percentage of their income than higher-income people.  I dont like that part of it. But as I say, we are in a crisis.

Minor said he believes that most people in the state, as well as around the country, are not in favor of additional taxes at this time.

I think that we need to be creative and think out of the box, he said.

In response to a question about cutting the number of administrators, Decker said the districts administrative costs, in terms of a percentage of total expenditures, is lower than the national average.

We do not have excessive administrative costs, she said.

Minor, who noted that his campaign slogan has been Say no to status quo, said he looked at the districts budget and that I think we could find some place to become more efficient and reduce some duplication.

Both candidates said they supported school uniforms, and both would like to see additional opportunities for students to receive vocational training.

The election will be held Feb. 9. District 5 includes Eliot, Lanier, Mayo and Wright elementary schools, as well as Edison Preparatory School.
Bright Smiles  THA Deputy Chief Secretary and Secretary for Tourism Tracy Davidson-Celestine wishes Jamaican hotel magnate Gordon "Butch" Stewart a safe return journey while Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly Orville London, Administrator for Tourism Cherryl-Ann Solomon and Senior Consultant Neil Wilson look on.
This country's cyclists will come up against the region next month when T&T hosts the Ca
The day-long conference was designed for K-12 teachers, administrators, state leaders and partners to discuss topics focused on engineering education.

Co-organizers Amy TrauthNare (left) and Jenni Buckley welcome Vince Bertram, Project Lead The Way president and CEO.

1:14 p.m., Jan. 27, 2016--Pam Lottero-Perdue worked briefly as a process engineer after earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Delaware in 1995, but she couldnt silence the voice in her head that said she should be a teacher.

Now an associate professor at Towson University, Lottero-Perdue shared her approach to science education in a keynote address at a conference, Emphasizing the E in STEM, at UDs Clayton Hall on Friday, Jan. 22.

Sponsored by Project Lead The Way  a national provider of project-based curricula and teacher professional development in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)  the conference focused on bringing an integrated approach to K-12 engineering education.

Lottero-Perdue, who prepares education majors at Towson and K-12 educators in Maryland to teach engineering to children, believes that you have to engineer an engineering education.

To this end, she applies engineering principles  including identifying the problem, working within existing constraints, and reducing those constraints to make things work  to curriculum development and instructional design in this area.

You have to design with what you have and then redesign in response to changes in standards, she said. Iteration is an inherent part of the process.

Lottero-Perdue turned to Project Lead The Way materials when she was first challenged with creating an engineering program out of traditional shop programs at Delawares Hodgson Vocational-Technical High School in 1998. She also has been integral to the development and evaluation of Engineering is Elementary, curricula that engage K-5 students in engineering design.

Pam is the embodiment of masterful STEM teaching, said Amy Trauth-Nare, associate director at UDs Professional Development Center for Educators.

She is a model for experienced and novice teachers alike because she educates teachers in how to balance educational policy with evidence-based teaching that advances student learning in STEM disciplines. Now, more than ever, we need K-12 teachers who are able to comply with education standards while also integrating knowledge and skills in STEM disciplines to make learning relevant and connected.

Keynote speaker Vince Bertram, president and CEO of Project Lead The Way, emphasized the importance of building connections from kindergarten to careers, making sure our students are ready for those opportunities that arise.

It has never been more urgent, he said. We create opportunities or we create obstacles.

Lynn Okagaki, deputy provost for academic affairs at UD, said that interactive lessons can give students insight into what engineering degrees can mean, especially for women.

You as teachers have the knowledge and skills to convey academic content and the ability to motivate, inspire and encourage students, she said. Today, we hope that this conference helps to encourage you in your lessons and your careers.

Conference workshops addressed topics ranging from preparing students for an engineering education and supporting teacher learning in STEM to attracting diverse and engaged students to engineering. In addition, a panel discussed strategies for partnering with industry in K-12 education.

Some 150 students, teachers, administrators, and education researchers attended the conference, which was co-hosted by the University of Delaware College of Education and Human Development, Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Office of Admissions.

The event was co-organized by Trauth-Nare; Jenni Buckley, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Glynis OLeary, director of school engagement for Project Lead the Ways East Region.

This conference was an important first step in building a community for pre-college engineering educators in the state, Buckley said. The partnership between our colleges of education and engineering really positions UD to provide the necessary resources and support to K-12 teachers who are incorporating engineering practices in their classrooms.

Article by Diane Kukich
This commissioned painting by South African artist Garth Erasmus shows the iconic baobab tree of the African savannah, known as the "Tree of Life," which will be featured in the first act of the "Same Story" performances.

Dancers rehearse for "Same Story" in the University of Delaware's Mechanical Hall Gallery.

9:32 a.m., Jan. 27, 2016--When the University of Delawares Lynnette Overby decided that her newest arts-based project would examine past and present racial issues in the U.S. and South Africa, she took the term multidisciplinary to heart.

The developing project, Same Story Different Countries, now encompasses literary and historical research, visual arts, music, poetry and dance.

Participants include student and faculty researchers and performers, composers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, painters and poets  in locations spanning the globe from the UD campus to Wilmington and Dover in Delaware, to North Carolina and South Africa.

By the time the project culminates with several public performances in March, it will have engaged audiences in schools, community centers, art galleries and concert halls, reaching out to communities whose residents arent typically thought of as producers or consumers of the arts.

The project explores themes of oppression, resistance and liberation that are common in the history of the United States and South Africa, said Overby, who is professor of theatre and director of the ArtsBridge Scholars Program at UD, as well as a dancer and choreographer.

We looked at issues in U.S. history, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws, and asked how they relate to South Africas history of apartheid. These are historical issues, but they continue to bubble up today.

The overall goal of the project, she said, is to enable researchers, artists and participants to transform, synthesize and illuminate global racial issues in South Africa and the United States through an artistic lens.

To that end, the production includes acts with such titles as From Oppression to Resilience (The Power of Faith) and From Oppression to Resistance, concluding with a theme of liberation and The Power of Walking Together.

Performances work to integrate historical events with dance and music appropriate to their time, Overby said.

For example, she said, a piece called Four Little Girls remembers the children killed in the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing, exploring the tragedy in dance and poetry and ending with a gospel song.

Performers  including UD dance students as well as dancers from the Christina Cultural Arts Center (CCAC) and the modern dance company Pieces of a Dream, both in Wilmington  are now in preparation for an early February weekend of intense rehearsal. South African participants will come to Delaware for the March performances.

In addition to the production itself, the CCAC and Overby are conducting a related research project seeking to build audiences for the arts in Wilmington and to improve access to the arts for high-poverty, urban communities.

A group of city residents will be selected to discuss the themes involved in Same Story Different Countries and take photos and collect narratives from other community members related to oppression, resilience and liberation.

These participants and those they interviewed will be invited to attend the final performance on March 13 at the Baby Grand, where their art, photos and stories will be displayed in the lobby.

Performances are scheduled as follows, with more details to be available later:

Feb. 26  Dover High School, a morning lecture-demonstration and afternoon workshops.

March 4 and 5  7:30 p.m., Mitchell Hall on the Universitys Newark campus, annual concert for UDs dance minor.

March 11  Schwartz Theatre, Dover, lecture-demonstrations at 9:30 a.m. and noon and an evening performance with other South African artists.

March 12  5:30 p.m., Mitchell Hall, as part of the Master Players world music concert featuring 6ixwire, in collaboration with the "Same Story" Different Countries project.

March 13  3 p.m., Baby Grand, Wilmington.

Participants in the project

The artistic directors of Same Story Different Countries are Lynnette Overby and Colin Miller, the College of Arts and Sciences director for global arts and interim director for African studies.

Choreographers for the project are Overby and adjunct faculty member A.T. Moffett from UD; Lela Aisha Jones of FlyGround in Philadelphia and Ashley Sullivan Davis of Pieces of a Dream in Wilmington, both community performance groups; Tumi Nkomo of South Africa; Lisa Wilson of the University of Cape Town; Vincent Thomas of Towson University; and Teresa Emmons of Dover High School.

The musical director is Ralph Russell of Pennsylvania, with composers Xiang Gao, Trustees Distinguished Professor of Music at UD, and South African drummer Kesivan Naidoo.

Original art has been created by South African artists Garth Erasmus, who last spring was UDs first international visiting artist in residence.

Performances will feature 21 dancers  undergraduate students from UD as well as dancers with the Christian Cultural Arts Center and Pieces of a Dream  and about 10 UD musicians.

Other key contributors working with the project are historians P. Gabrielle Foreman, who is Ned B. Allen Professor of English and a professor of Black American studies, and Elaine Salo, associate professor of political science and international relations, both at UD; poet Glenis Redmond of North Carolina; and Julie McGee, curator of African American art for University Museums and associate professor of Black American studies at UD.

Five UD undergraduates, termed scholar-artists by Overby, conducted research beginning last summer on various aspects of U.S. and South African racial history and issues. Kelsey Daniels examined education and legal segregation in both nations, Dominique Oppenheimer studied womens activism, Nicodemus Williams focused on the impact of music on apartheid and in the U.S. civil rights movement, Kaitlyn Naismyth examined the role of religion in promoting resilience during segregation, and Pernilla Lauren Mpasi studied mothers and resilience during times of oppression.

Support for the project

Key community collaborators with the University have been the Christina Cultural Arts Center and the modern dance company Pieces of a Dream, both in Wilmington.

Financial support for the project has been provided by UDs Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, Arts Bridging Cultures, College of Arts and Sciences and Master Players Concert Series and by the Christina Cultural Arts Center (CCAC) and the University of Cape Town.

The CCAC, in partnership with Overby, applied for and received a $20,000 grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to involve teenagers and young adults in Wilmington in the project and enable them to share their voices and experiences.

The Center for the Study of Diversity helped support one of the scholar/artists. The other scholar/artist funding came from the University's Undergraduate Research Program, the Institute for Global Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Article by Ann Manser

Photos by Dan Dunlap; painting by Garth Erasmus
Uganda is known as the Perl of Africa, comprising of distinctive natural beauty and is among the leading safari destinations in East Africa. The country offers memorable adventure holidays with unique tourism attractions encompassing trekking endangered mountain gorillas, visit Murchison falls, adrenaline white water rafting at the source of the river Nile in Jinja, authentic culture, very good climate all year round. Uganda is totally a travelers dream destination and a must not miss out when in Africa.

The following are a must see Ugandan destinations

Murchison Falls Boat Trips



The Nile in mid western Uganda falls below a hard rock forming the famous Murchison falls. The falls form a mist and permanent rain ball and are among the top adventure attractions in the country. Tourists can view them while on launch cruises at the bottom or can hike and view them from the rock above.

What makes Murchison falls much more unique and attractive are the various wildlife species in Murchison falls national park that include elephants, hippos, crocodiles and number of birds that can be viewed by tourists on boat trips to view the great falls. Other outstanding wildlife species in the park include the lions, leopards, buffaloes and the rhinos at the Zziwa rhino sanctuary in Nakasongola.

Mountain Gorillas



They are located in southwestern Uganda in Bwindi impenetrable and Mgahinga gorilla national parks. Mountain gorilla tracking in Bwindi or Mgahinga gorilla parks offers thrilling forest adventures with sightings of various wildlife species that include a number of primates like monkeys, birds and many others.

Mountain gorillas are very unique mammals with 95% DNA similar to humans and only remaining in Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo. Ugandas Bwindi impenetrable has half of the remaining mountain gorillas on the planet with 14 habituated gorilla families. Each mountain gorilla family can be trekked by only 8 tourists a day and mountain gorilla trekking permits are sold at $600 only.

Source of the River Nile Water Rafting In Jinja



The river Nile adventure is one most exciting tourism activities all adventure travellers and you just cannot skip it on your trip to Uganda. The White Nile in Jinja is referred to the adventure capital of east Africa with rapids that favors white water rafting activities to effectively take place in the area.

The Nile rafting in Jinja offers adrenaline activities in the great river Nile in its early stages. Rafting is an adventure for go getter and not faint hearted people because while on the grade 5 rapids, all of you may find yourselves in the waters of the Nile, there is no need to fear this because there is always a rescue raft team to get tourists out of the water.

This adventurous activity is open all kinds of people and can be enjoyed any day of the year.

Rwenzori Hike



Mountain Rwenzori is located in western Uganda and has the third highest peak Margherita on the continent on mount Stanley standing at 5,109 meters above sea level. The Rwenzori peaks are snow capped with a number of glaciers.

Hiking the Rwenzori is among the adventure activities that tourists in Uganda can engage in however it requires one to be physically fit and stable health wise well equipped with the necessary hiking gear especially heavy coats for warmth because the mountain top freezes below zero degrees.

There are well developed hiking routes uphill and potters who can be hired to carry luggage for the tourists going for the hike. The Rwenzori hike provides en route sightings of some of the rare wildlife species like the three-horned chameleon and a number of birds endemic to the Albertine region. Other wildlife species that can be viewed in the Rwenzori area include forest elephants, leopards, chimpanzees and many others.
The number of attacks launched by the militants on the Ukrainian positions increased dramatically over past 24 hours.

This is reported by the ATO press center.

"The enemy used all available weapons to shell our strongholds near Marinka [35 km south-west of Donetsk]. The militants used grenade launchers of various systems, heavy machine guns and even anti-aircraft mounts," reads the statement.

The tense situation is still observed outside temporarily occupied Donetsk. The enemy used grenade launchers and heavy machine guns to shell Ukrainian military positions near Opytne (11.5km north-west of Donetsk), Pisky (12km north-west of Donetsk), Avdiyivka (18km north of Donetsk), Butovka coal mine (11.4km north-west of Donetsk).

The pro-Russian militants shelled the ATO troops a total of 66 times over past 24 hours.

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Ukrainian MPs have passed the bill on ratification of the Protocol on the implementation of the Free Trade Area Agreement of October 18, 2011 between the Parties and the Republic of Uzbekistan.

234 MPs voted for the bill, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

According to the Protocol, the Republic of Uzbekistan does not impose import and export duties on Ukraine.

Speaking from the Parliaments rostrum, Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister and Trade Representative of Ukraine Natalia Mykolska noted that the Protocol would contribute to countering Russian aggression with its ban on the export of Ukrainian goods.

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Chairman of Zakarpattia Regional State Administration Gennady Moskal during his visit to Romania visited the factory that produces scanners to detect smuggled goods in heavy trucks and informed that Romanians are ready to supply this equipment to Ukrainian border guards.

This is published on the official website of the governor of Zakarpattia.

"It is impossible to check manually each truck crossing the border. Romanians are ready to supply their scanner to us and even show how to operate it at the checkpoint "Diakovo - Halmeu". The preparation has already begun for the testing, to which we are going to invite the Minister of Interior Affairs, heads of the Fiscal Service and Border Service of Ukraine. And if we see the effectiveness of the equipment, we will conclude contracts for its supply, Moskal said.

The plant producing stationary and mobile scanners that help customs officers to check bulky transport is located near Bucharest. Gamma scanners using Roboscan technology are able to scan over 200 trucks per hour and detect smuggled goods (including packs of cigarettes, amber, drugs) without opening the luggage compartment.

"Ukrainian side has no scanners at the checkpoints located in Zakarpattia region. Once there were some, but later this expensive equipment was moved to Odesa where it does not work, said Moskal.
During his visit to Romania Transcarpathian governor Hennady Moskal came to the factory that manufactures scanners to detect contraband hidden in trucks and he said that Romanians are ready to ship this equipment to the Ukrainian border guards.

The official website of the Transcarpathia governor reports.

"Its impossible to check manually each truck crossing the border. Romanians are ready to sell us their scanners and even show their operation at the border checkpoint "Dyakovo - Halmeu." Preparations have already begun for testing which will be attended by the minister of interior, fiscal agency and the state border service of Ukraine chiefs. And if we acknowledge the effectiveness of equipment, we will sign contracts for its delivery," said Moskal.

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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has established Ukraines delegation to participate in talks with Poland to conclude an Agreement on the cooperation in defense sphere.

A relevant resolution was posted on the presidents website.

To create Ukraines delegation to participate in negotiations with the Republic of Poland to conclude an Agreement between Ukraine and the Republic of Poland on cooperation in the sphere of defense, reads a document.

Thus, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister for European Integration Ihor Dolgov has been appointed as head of the delegation.

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Jafar poses with his wife Zeinabou, their baby daughter Fadimata and they nephew Sidi in their shelter in Mentao refugee camp, Burkina Faso, days before returning to Mali.  UNHCR/P. Absalon

TIMBUKTU, Mali, Jan 27 (UNHCR) - Through the long years he was exiled by war, the thing Jafar missed most about his home in this fabled desert city was the ritual of sitting chatting with friends sipping glasses of sweet green tea as the day finally cooled.

For four years since conflict engulfed the desert north of Mali, he moved between temporary refuges and camps in neighbouring Burkina Faso, never feeling settled. Now, with the fighting over, he is finally home again in Timbuktu catching up with friends in the late afternoon sunlight.

Famed as a hub for trade and scholarship in the 1400s and 1500s, Timbuktu lies on the edge of the Sahara Desert northeast of Mali's capital Bamako. It was overrun by militants in 2012, who razed landmark buildings dating back to its Golden Age and drove thousands of residents into exile both within Mali and abroad.

"When I left Mali, it was chaos," said Jafar, 24, who is of Tuareg origin. "When I returned, I found a city that had resumed its economic activities. National and international security forces are present, as well as humanitarian ones. I found my neighbours, everything was fine with them. Our family has started to come back  from Burkina Faso."

Jafar is one of roughly 41,000 Malian refugees who have returned home as a fragile peace agreement signed in mid-2015 has taken hold. Many, however, find their homes ruined, their belongings looted, and their jobs gone. In some places, it is hard to find clean water and enough food. Prices of basic goods have skyrocketed.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, runs community reintegration projects that focus on education, health care, hygiene and water. Populations that remained are supported, as are the returning refugees.

During November and December 2015, 4,307 individuals received one-off cash payments of US$110 per adult and US$50 per child, as part of a financial assistance programme for people coming home. More than 800 repatriated refugees have been verified by UNHCR between August 2015 and January 2016.

Jafar was one of them, but nonetheless said it was a tough decision to leave the safety of the refugee camp where he and his family were living in Burkina Faso, and return to uncertainty.

"When I left the camp for Mali, I was anxious," Jafar said. "Not just because I was travelling an unknown route, but also because I did not want to leave a part of my life and close friends behind. We were very close and living together was good. But we wanted to return to Mali more than anything else."

While he was a refugee in Burkina Faso's Mentao refugee camp, Jafar had met and married his wife, Zeinabou, and together the couple had a baby daughter, Fadimata, who is now 18 months. After five years on the move, and with a young family to look after, the feeling of security now means everything to Jafar.

"It was a lack of safety that forced us to leave Mali," he said. "It is safety that we searched for in Burkina Faso. We found it in the refugee camps. And it is because I knew that Timbuktu had again become safer that I decided to return there with my family."

His main worry is the lack of employment. He desperately needs to support his family, to pay rent, school fees, and for his wife's nursing studies. Before he fled, he was studying and paying his way with contracts as a driver for aid agencies and private clients. Now, he says, "any work will do."

"With my high school education and the experience I acquired at the camp, I plan to do humanitarian work," he said. "But I no longer have any specific contacts in Timbuktu, so it will be difficult to find a job if I do not have a diploma that reflects my skill level. In the meantime, I need to cover our expenses."

These are the difficulties that are keeping many of the 140,000 Malians who are still refugees in neighbouring Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, and the 62,000 who are displaced inside their own country, from going home.

The security situation in northern Mali also remains volatile. The 2012 conflict officially ended with peace agreements in June 2015, but attacks by criminals and militants, as well as human rights violations, persist. Access to some areas where people want to return to remains difficult for aid agencies.

Some refugees may be returning, but other people still feel sufficiently threatened in Mali that they continue to leave. More than 4,300 fled to Niger between July and the end of December 2015, and between January and November another 2,300 Malians arrived in Burkina Faso.

"The security situation is still volatile. Nonetheless, we observe since 2013 that Malians who had found refuge in the sub-region continue to spontaneously return to their areas of origin," said Nsona Vela do Nascimento, senior repatriation officer in the UNHCR office in Bamako.

Vela do Nascimento stressed that UNHCR continues to provide protection and assistance to Malians whether in exile or upon their return, and worked with partners "to ensure smooth reintegration of returnees either through targeted assistance to the most vulnerable ones, or through community projects that support social cohesion in those areas."

For now, Jafar is positive about the future, and encourages other Malians to return to help reconstruct what was destroyed. "We are starting to rebuild our lives little by little," he said.

By Isabelle Michal in Mali and Paul Absalon in Burkina Faso
Aug. 19, 2022

Fitness. When the average citizen thinks of being fit, it is easy for cardio and strength training to come to mind. That is not the case for those serving in the Air Force and Space Force. Comprehensive Airman Fitness teaches that to have overarching fitness and resilience, one must work on his or
Swiss watch exports experience first downturn since 2009

2016-01-27 13:16

GENEVA, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- Witnessing the first downturn inseven years, Swiss watch exports reached 21.5 billion Swiss francs(21.1 billion U.S. dollars) last year, down 3.3 percent compared to2014, the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry reportedTuesday.

The figures reflect the tough environment experienced by themarket as exports dropped from 3.2 percent in 2015's first quarterto minus 7.3 percent by the fourth.

The overvaluation of the Swiss franc, readjustments in HongKong, economic slowdown in China together with tensions in theMiddle East, a weak Russian rouble, and terrorism all contributedto these negative trends, the Swiss watch federation said.

Generating 20.2 billion Swiss francs last year, watchesaccounted for close to 95 percent of all exports with a total of28.1 million timepieces exported, 460,000 fewer than in 2014.

Half of Swiss watch exports by value reached Asia (down 9.1percent), while the value of exports to Europe which accounts forone third of sales increased by 6.1 percent compared to two yearsago.

The value of Swiss watch exports to China's Hong Kong fell 22.9percent last year, with exports to the Chinese mainland and theUnited States also showing a decrease (down 4.7 percent and 0.8percent respectively).

The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry indicated that watchexports for 2016 would at best reach last year's results thoughvisibility is poor. Enditem
Pakistan to hold series of activities to celebrate Chinese New Year

From:chinadaily.com.cn | 2016-01-27 16:33

A press conference for the 2016 "Happy Chinese New Year" in Pakistan was held on Jan 16, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

China Cultural Center in Pakistan and different Pakistani departments will jointly hold a series of activities and events, starting on Jan 26, in connection with the celebrations of 2016 Happy Chinese New Year in Pakistan.

Regarding the celebrations of the upcoming Chinese Year of Monkey starting on Feb. 8, 2016, a joint press conference was held by officials from both Chinese and Pakistani side at the China Cultural Center in Pakistani capital of Islamabad on Tuesday to introduce the main events and activities to be held during the festival.

Introducing the origin of Chinese spring festival, Culture Counselor of Chinese Embassy in Pakistan Zheng Guojin said the Chinese Year of Monkey is symbol of intelligent, prosperity and auspicious, and he believed that the upcoming year will see success, harmony and improvement in people's lives in the both friendly countries.

Zheng said culture activities had played a vital role to improve relations between China and Pakistan, and he hoped that the events on the spring festival will provide an opportunity to Pakistanis to further understand China and Chinese culture.

During the conference, a short documentary about how the Chinese people celebrate their new year was also screened.

On the occasion, Director General of Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) Muhammad Naeem sent warm wishes to all those who celebrate Chinese Spring Festival and hoped that the coming year would bring peace, prosperity and happiness for the people of China and Pakistan.

China Cultural Center in Pakistan with the cooperation of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and National Heritage of Pakistan, the PNCA and other Pakistani departments and institutions will organize the events in different cities of the country.

The China National Theater for Children will organize three stage plays, by presenting two shows in Islamabad on Tuesday and Wednesday, and one show in eastern city of Lahore on Friday.

The Chinese Movie Week, Show of Pak-China Music Band, a variety show to celebrate Lantern Festival, and exhibitions related to Chinese Spring Festival decorations and Silk Road will also be arranged.

A 12-part documentary "The Forbidden City" and a Chinese Cooking Show will be telecasted at the state-run Pakistan Television during the first week of February, 2016.
Various activities set in Latin America to celebrate Chinese New Year

From:chinadaily.com.cn | 2016-01-27 16:33

Chinese Ambassador to Venezuela Zhao Bentang (R) talks with Minister of the People's Power for Culture of Venezuela Freddy Nanez (2nd R) during the presentation of the musical "My Dream" at Teresa Carreno Theater in Caracas, capital of Venezuela, on Jan. 25, 2016. The Chinese Embassy in Venezuela will present the show "My Dream", performed by the China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe, on the occasion of the celebration of the Chinese New Year. [Xinhua/Boris Vergara]

Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia and some other Latin American countries are set to launch diverse cultural activities for the celebration of upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year to allow their people to better learn about China's rich culture.

The Chinese lunar calendar assigns an animal symbol to each year in a 12-year cycle. According to the zodiac, 2016 is the Year of the Monkey. This year marks a year of cultural exchanges between China and Latin America.

To honor this, Venezuela is putting on its first official celebration of the Chinese New Year, otherwise known as the Spring Festival, joining around 140 countries around the world in doing so.

While the Chinese Lunar New Year falls on Feb. 8 this year, Venezuela's Ministry of Culture and the Chinese embassy in the country have teamed up to put on a full program, which will last until late March.

In the presentation of the agenda to the press on Monday, Venezuelan Culture Minister Freddy Nanez said this festival is "necessary for our people to learn about each other's cultures and establish unbreakable bonds of fellowship."

He said Venezuela needs to export its own cultural wealth in order to exchange with countries like China, which could "strengthen our economy and bilateral ties."

One of the key presentations will be of "My Dream", a piece where artists with various disabilities will express their innermost thoughts through music and dance. It will be on show in Venezuela on Jan. 29-31 by the China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe.

Another activity will be a festival of Chinese children's movies, set to take place on Feb. 5-12 at the Celarg cinemas, the Museum of Fine Arts and other cinemas around the country.

A number of movies, including Fireball, the Legend of Rabbit, The King of Milu Deer, and the Dreams of Jinsha, among others, will be on presentation.

TV stations, such as Vive TV and Vale TV, will also dedicate airtime to Chinese films and documentaries on Feb. 15-21, including Confucius, Forever Enthralled, The Knot, and The Volunteer.

The city of Valencia, in the northern state of Carabobo, will also hold a Chinese cultural week from Jan. 31 to Feb. 7, which includes a celebration of the contributions Chinese immigrants have made to the city.

Cuba is not to be left undone, and it will celebrate the Spring Festival in its own way.

This celebration began with the opening of the "Time for China" photo exhibition at the Chinese embassy in Havana.

To mark the Year of the Monkey, martial artists from China's famous Shaolin Temple will put on a Chinese martial arts show on Jan. 29-30 at the Mella theater.

However, the main component of this festival will take place on Feb. 7, when students from the Cuban Wushu School will take to the streets of Havana's Chinatown to perform dragon, tiger and peacock dances.

On Jan. 22 in Bogota, capital of Colombia, China's Jilin Song and Dance Ensemble staged a performance for the local audience.

The Ensemble once performed during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and has toured more than 30 countries.

After the group's first performance in Bogota, Chinese Ambassador to Colombia Li Nianping stressed the importance of cultural exchanges.

"Such exchanges are a good opportunity for the two countries to grow closer together. We hope to welcome more Colombians to visit China, a beautiful Asian country," said the diplomat.
Ford Motor announced on Monday about its decision to pull its operations out of the Asian countries, Japan and Indonesia, before the end of this year. It cited 'closed markets' in both the countries which has made it difficult for the renowned automaker to increase sales or sustain profits.

For Japan, the company stated that the current structure of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement will curb its growth. As represented in The Japan Times, spokesman Neal McCarthy said, "Japan is the most closed, developed auto economy in the world, with all imported brands accounting for less than 6% of Japan's annual new car market." He also mentioned declining auto sales in the coming years mainly due to an aging population and young generation's lack of interest.

The company had developed 52 dealerships with approximately 292 employees. Last year's sales number in Japan was a mere 5,000 and it held a 1.5% share of the imported new car market. Joe Hinrichs, Ford's president of the Americas, has sent out a strong message for the Japanese government. He said, "We hope the U.S. government will send a clear message that any future trade policy with Japan must ensure a level playing field and not come at the expense of American workers."

Likewise for Indonesia, Deal Street Asia discloses facts as to why Ford has decided to exit the Indonesian markets. Bagus Susanto, Managing Director of Ford Motor Indonesia, said, "We have announced the difficult business decision to withdraw from all of our operations in Indonesia in the second half of this year. This includes closing Ford dealerships and stopping the authorized import and sales of all Ford vehicles." The company had entered Indonesia in 2002. It now operates through 44 dealerships and has around 35 employees. Last year's sales totaled 6,000 vehicles and held 0.6% share of the total new car market.

After this news, the automaker's stocks have plummeted big-time, reports WallStreet.org. The shares were already lower recently and now moved further down its $10.44-$16.74 range. It has declined by 0.74% or $0.09 and now stands at $12.05 per share. Around 19.45 million Ford Motor shares have changed hands, which ultimately led to a decline of 19.82% since June 2015.

The company stated that its employees and dealers were communicated about this news on Monday. It plans to provide detailed explanations to its customers regarding its post-sale services like servicing, providing new parts or repairing the old ones under warranties. Ford is now busy tying such loose ends before wheeling its businesses out of Japan and Indonesia before the end of this year.
BMW has become the first vehicle to integrate IFTTT (If This Then That) service with its iDrive, which now lays out many options of "Recipes" that "Trigger" the chosen "Action". In layman's terms, this means that the users will be privy to an array of personalized services like switching on the lights of the house while garaging the car or sending an automatic message to the spouse while picking up kids from school.

Like most automobile companies, BMW has also been testing ways of combining new technology with the in-built ConnectedDrive feature. As a result of all the hard work, its BMW Labs has now been rolled out on January 19 which allows the customers to connect with the IFTTT services through an online platform and check out how the customized services work. The services are only available in English at this moment and have been tested in the US, Germany, France, Spain, and Australia, according to International Business Times.

This free BMW service allows the customers to link apps and smart devices to create personalized "recipes", which when selected "trigger" the desired "action". It not only connects with more than 260 applications like FaceBook, Twitter, Google Drive and emails, but can be connected with some smart home devices like Nest, Philips Hue, and Netatmo.

However, as CNET represents, the users need to integrate their vehicles with navigation and ConnectedDive services via BMW Online. The IFTTT users should have a personal account that gives them access to BMW Labs on the IFTTT website, where they can create personalized "recipes" that will soon become a part and parcel of their lives.

As paultan.org points out, once the technical bit is in place, the world is your oyster. A number of customized services can be fitted into the car, and these small 'actions' will infinitely make life easier. For instance, you will be able to upgrade your autopilot experience so that the garage doors open or close automatically when the car pulls into or out of the driveway. If connected with technology like Philips Hue, the lights of the house will get automatically turned on or off. If you want to keep a tab on your teenager's speed limit when they are out with your car, an email will be sent to you once they cross the speed limit set by you. The exact location of your parking spot will show up in a GMap link and your customized 'recipes' will send automatic alerts whenever you want to.

While IFTTT performs so many functions for the car, the car can also perform a function for IFTTT. For example, when the Samsung SmartThings motion sensor detects any movement, a notification comes up on the iDrive display. A host of personalized 'recipes' is listed on the website so that it becomes easier for the customers to select and customize their own list.
Microsoft launches a news application for iOS users known as "News Pro" today to rival Apple's own news application that the company launches late last year. The news app is aiming to offer a more personalized experience as users can choose topic according to their interest only.

Although the news app has lots of resemblance with the Apple news app, the biggest difference of the two according to the review is that Microsoft "News Pro" is powered by Bing. Another difference according to Tech Crunch is that users have to log in via their social account media account, either LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

The social media login was introduced as a way for the app to read users' interest to deliver a more appropriate content to them.

According to Engadget, what separates "News Pro" from another news application in the market is its extensive options for the type of stories that users can choose. The news site stated that users can use the Explore tab and choose different categories from industries, companies, skills and products.

The news app which was created by the Microsoft Garage team was seen by some critics as unimpressive since there is no fresh innovation in the news app. However, according to the released statement by the tech company, they believe that the app will be able to give users a more career-related topics.

According to Microsoft's statement as reported by Microsoft News, "News Pro helps you search for news around your work every day. Fuel your unique interests with over a million topics to choose from. Get informed efficiently by locating the most important and relevant articles each day based off what interests you. Leverage the power of social networks for your daily news."

However, one noteworthy option provided by "News Pro" is its "Speedy Mode" option which offers a quick-to-load version of an article that a user choose. Critics also claim that the function is similar to Apple, SmartNews function available in iOS.

For now, Microsoft News Pro will not be released for Windows or Android soon as the Microsoft Garage product is not fully backed by Microsoft. Even for the iOS version of the app is only available in the US.

The release of "News Pro" seems like a way for Microsoft to rival with Apple news app as the company announced that it will launch a support paid content for their application soon. With plenty of partnership with other publishers, the Apple app is expected to be able to stand out compared to other news content.
Betty Berry

Q: I am a low-income senior and have heard friends talk about assistance they are receiving from various programs. Do you know where I could obtain information about some of these programs?

A: You have asked a question that might be of interest to many low-income seniors, so mark your calendar for Feb. 22.

Senior Concerns will offer two special events that day: an individual economic checkup program and a financial seminar. Both will be at the Goebel Adult Community Center, 1385 E. Janss Road in Thousand Oaks, and provide a lot of information about finances.

In partnership with the National Council on Aging, Senior Concerns is scheduling one-on-one appointments with senior advocates to review where your money goes every month and provide you with resources that could help with some of these expenses. Appointments will be available from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and can be made by calling 495-6250.

If you are 55 or older and your annual income is less than $29,425 for singles or $39,829 for couples, this program is for you.

In the second event of the day, a presentation from Senior Concerns and Bank of America from 3:30-4:30 p.m. can help you understand the ins and outs of various financial cards (and there are many). Discover how each works and learn about tips, tricks, fees, protections and scams.

Reservations can be made by calling the Goebel Center at 381-2744.

Don't miss this double opportunity to learn where your money goes and possible benefits you are not getting, along with the ins and outs of credit, prepaid and gift cards.

Q: I have my income taxes done each year at the Goebel Center. I have two questions: Will that service be offered again this year, and who is eligible for this service?

A: Tax preparation services will be offered again this year at two locations from Feb. 1 through April 14.

Services will be available from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesdays at the Newbury Park Branch Library, 2331 Borchard Road.

Services in Thousand Oaks will be available from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays in the Conejo Creek South Community Room, 1350 E. Janss Road, across the street from the Goebel Center.

All services are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. No reservations will be taken. These free services are available to seniors 60 or older at any income level and for people of any age with an income of $50,000 or less.

As in past years, taxpayers whose returns include Schedule E (rental income) are not eligible. Also, those with Schedule C (profit and loss from a business) will only be eligible if profit and expenses are under $10,000.

Taxpayers should be prepared to present a Social Security card and a photo ID. They should bring a Social Security benefits statement (SSA 1099), wage and earning statements (W2s and 1099s), a property tax bill, interest and dividend statements (1099 INT, 1099 DIV, 1099 B), and the cost of stocks and bonds sold (with the dates bought and sold). They also should bring a copy of 2014 federal and state tax returns, bank routing and account numbers for direct deposit, and any other relevant information about income and expenses.

HAPPENINGS

Thursday  10 a.m. to noon, "Senior Transportation  Drive or NOT, Van and Bus" in the Camarillo City Council chambers, 601 Carmen Drive. Call Camarillo City Hall at 388-5397 or the Pleasant Valley Senior Center at 483-4881 for more information.

Saturday  9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., Caregiver Recognition Day, "Caregivers Matter, Conejo Cares." If you are a family caregiver for an aging loved one or know someone who is, you are invited to join Senior Concerns at Los Robles Greens, 299 Moorpark S. Road, Thousand Oaks. Reservations are required and can be made by calling 497-0189.

Sunday  2 p.m., History Comes Alive presentation, "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood," at the Goebel Adult Community Center, 1385 E. Janss Road, Thousand Oaks. Tickets are $5 and available at the Goebel Center.

Feb. 3  1 p.m., "Dogs and Cats and Birds  Oh, My Pets in our Lives." Tara Diller, director of Ventura County Animal Services, will talk about animal services at the Thousand Oaks Council on Aging meeting in the Civic Arts Plaza boardroom, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd.

Betty Berry is a senior advocate for Senior Concerns. The advocates are at the Goebel Adult Community Center, 1385 E. Janss Road, Thousand Oaks. Call 495-6250 or email betty@seniorconcerns.org (please include your telephone number). You are invited to submit questions on senior issues.
<p>CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR</p><p>Joshua Packer shows no expression in a Ventura courtroom Friday as he is sentenced to life in prison without parole for the killings of Brock and Davina Husted in their Faria Beach home in 2009. Davina was pregnant at the time.</p>

SHARE CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Chief prosecuting attorney Michael Frawley supports Allane Deboni, the mother of Davina Husted, who was pregnant when she was stabbed to death by Joshua Packer in 2009. Cathy Lampreaht (right) reads Debonias statement in a Ventura courtroom Friday, when Packer was sentenced to life without parole. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Chief prosecuting attorney Michael Frawley (left) listens to John Husted read a statement about the murders of his brother and sister-in-law Brock and Davina Husted as his son, John Husted Jr., gives him support Friday in a Ventura courtroom. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Joshua Packer shows no expression in a Ventura courtroom Friday as he is sentenced to life in prison without parole for the killings of Brock and Davina Husted in their Faria Beach home in 2009. Davina was pregnant at the time. Davina and Brock Husted

By Marjorie Hernandez of the Ventura County Star

After nearly six years and numerous legal battles that included the state Supreme Court, the stabbing deaths of a Faria Beach couple and their unborn son came to a close Friday when Joshua Packer was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Packer, 25, of Ventura, wearing blue and orange jail garb and chains on his hands and waist, sat quietly as Superior Court Judge Patricia Murphy called him the worst of the worst and gave him three consecutive life sentences without parole for the deaths of Brock and Davina Husted and their unborn son.

Husted family members read victim-impact statements Friday before the sentencing.

Isabella Husted, 16, said her parents meant the world to her and Packer took away memories she could have had with her unborn brother.

I dont care what pain he went through as a child, she said of Packer. He is still evil in my eyes. I have no pity. Joshua Packer has caused so much pain ... and nothing can replace moments I couldve had with my baby brother.

Packer did not speak at the hearing. Benjamin Maserang of the Public Defenders Office said Packer thought it would be hollow and self-serving and detract from what the families have said today. Maserang also said Packer did not want defense attorneys to talk about his past and experiences of abuse.

He accepts responsibility for his actions, Maserang said. He is relieved that his family and the victims families will not have to go through the ordeal of a trial or any proceedings in this matter.

After the hearing, Maserang said he could not comment on why Packer killed the Husteds but the defendant was very remorseful.

In addition to the three murder counts, Packer was charged with first-degree residential robbery, forcible oral copulation and various special enhancements, including personal use of a firearm, use of a deadly weapon and murder while engaged in a robbery. For those, he received an additional 30 years and 4 months in state prison.

Murphy said Packer did not show remorse after the murders and instead continued to commit crimes.

This was not the behavior of a reckless youth, the judge said. The defendant sneaked up on this family in the sanctity of their own home, disguised and armed with a gun. He knew and disregarded the fact there were people in the home and children. He robbed these people in the most violent way as defined by the law.

Prosecutors agreed to drop a possible death penalty after Packer pleaded guilty in December to first-degree murder.

The Husteds were watching American Idol on May 20, 2009, when Packer entered their beachfront home through an open glass door and demanded money at gunpoint, officials said. Packer sexually assaulted Davina Husted, then stabbed the couple to death. According to court documents, Davina Husted was stabbed at least 41 times and Brock Husted at least 25 times.

The couples two children were inside the home at the time, prosecutors said.

Packer was arrested in the case in April 2010 through a DNA match. Three months earlier, Santa Barbara County sheriffs deputies had arrested him on suspicion of robbing a gas station and took a DNA sample.

Packers plea came after the state Supreme Court ordered a lower court to hold a hearing on whether Chief Deputy District Attorney Mike Frawley should be removed from the case because his children spent time with Packer in a Christian youth group. The issue could have delayed a trial for months or much longer.

As part of his plea agreement, Packer gave up his right to appeal to a higher court and also waived his right for further motions to recuse Frawley from the case.

In court papers, Frawley wrote that Husted family members had suffered tremendously as the wheels of justice slowly turned.

At Fridays sentencing, Frawley said any remorse Packer expressed was disingenuous and called him a sadist. Frawley said Isabella Husted and her younger brother had to step over their parents lifeless bodies to get help.

When you put this case together, you realize why Mr. Packer never showed any remorse, Frawley said. What he did is who he is. It wasnt just some abhorrent behavior. He never showed remorse because he actually enjoyed the slaughter of the Husteds.

Chief Deputy Public Defender Michael McMahon, however, said Packer had offered to plead guilty in return for a life sentence from the beginning.

In a statement released Friday, Ventura County Public Defender Steve Lipson said Packers sentence was a fair and just disposition and closure. If the case had gone to trial, defense attorneys planned to argue that Packer was physically and sexually abused as a child.

Protracted litigation and the ordeal of a lengthy trial would have served no ones interests and accomplished nothing beneficial, Lipson said. Had the case gone to trial, we are convinced the jury would have arrived at the exact same result we agreed upon today.

Californias administration of the death penalty is broken, overly time-consuming and dysfunctional. We continue to believe that even the most serious of cases can often be settled through frank and honest communication with the victims and with the district attorney.
JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Leisure Village resident Lina Edwards escaped Germany on the Kindertransport, the informal name given to a series of rescue efforts that took thousands of refugee Jewish children out of Germany between 1938 and 1940.

SHARE JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Leisure Village resident Lina Edwards hold photos of her parents, Moritz and Sophie Carlebach, and the piece of jewelry she carried as she fled Germany on the Kindertransport. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Lina Edwards looks at the diamond and pearl jewelry she had with her when she fled Germany on a train as a teenager. Her mother used a handkerchief to conceal the jewelry. My mother could have stopped the whole transport, but she wanted me to have this, Edwards said.

By Michele Willer-Allred

When Lina "Lee" Edwards was 15 years old, her tearful mother dropped her off at a train station, where mostly Jewish children like her were being whisked away from the Nazis and toward freedom.

It was 1939, and Britain had agreed to take in the children via the Kindertransport, or Children's Transport. The first group arrived without their parents at the English port of Harwich on Dec. 2, 1938. Germany closed its borders the next September, and the last transport left for Britain on May 14, 1940, from the Netherlands. By then, 10,000 children had been saved.

At the train station in Germany, Edwards' mother wiped her tears on a handkerchief, which she also used to hide a gift  a diamond and pearl jewelry piece.

Edwards, now a 92-year-old Camarillo resident, still has the jewelry her mother gave her, the only remnant of her life in Germany with her parents, both of whom died in the Holocaust.

From their Leisure Village homes, Edwards and her 95-year-old neighbor Ruth Fridberg recently shared their stories ahead of Wednesday's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day when people around the world commemorate the victims of Adolf Hitler's genocide and reflect on the events that led to it.

Edwards was 10 years old when Hitler came to power in Germany. Her brother and father were placed in Nazi concentration camps, and her mother decided to register her for the Kindertransport.

Edwards said that at the train station, her mother tried to reassure her Hitler wouldn't be in power forever, that her trip would be temporary and that they'd be reunited.

The girl was allowed to take one suitcase, which Nazi guards made sure was open for inspection. The gift from her mother could have been a problem.

"My mother could have stopped the whole transport, but she wanted me to have this," Edwards said, holding her treasured piece of jewelry.

The train took the children to Holland, where they boarded a ship to England. Once there, Edwards was taken in by a young Jewish couple who put her to work as an au pair, helping raise their baby. She returned to Germany after the war to work as a translator.

"There, I found out through the Red Cross that my parents were both dead, but my brother had survived all these years in the concentration camp," Edwards said. "We found each other over in Germany."

Fridberg, too, was able to get out of Germany when she was a teenager.

At 18, she was among 937 German Jews who left Hamburg in 1939 aboard the transatlantic liner MS St. Louis, seeking haven in Havana and Miami four months before war broke out.

Fridberg, who made the trip with her mother, thought the journey was a chance for freedom, "but little did we know that we wouldn't be accepted."

The refugees were refused entry first by the Cubans, then by the United States, because of public anger over immigration and tight quotas. They returned to Europe, where 254 of them died in the Holocaust. Their story was made into the 1976 movie "Voyage of the Damned."

"England was very good to us," said Fridberg, who worked for several years as a machine operator before being allowed into the United States with her mother in 1945.

Edwards said she speaks about her experience to high school students, and that children usually have either little or no knowledge of the Holocaust.

"My generation is slowly fading away," Edwards said. "There's not too many after me who remember. To read it in a book is not the same, so I speak as often as I can."

Fridberg, however, said she doesn't like talking about the past  although she acknowledges that it's important to do so.

"You try to forget about the bad things, but it's also a good thing that things are not forgotten," she said. "I think the Holocaust should never be forgotten."
STAR FILE PHOTO Medi-Cal enrollment in the Gold Coast Health Plan has rocketed to 202,360 people.

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By Staff Reports

More than 150 employees at the Gold Coast Health Plan in Camarillo evacuated Tuesday afternoon after a package described as suspicious was left in front of the building, a Gold Coast official said.

The Ventura County Sheriff's Office bomb squad responded after 3 p.m. and determined the package was harmless, said Capt. Mark Franke. He said the incident happened near Rosewood Avenue and Daly Drive and temporarily shut down traffic on Daly for 300 yards in both directions.

Gold Coast Health Plan is the publicly funded system that administers Medi-Cal health insurance in Ventura County. Steve Lalich, a Gold Coast spokesman, said the package was deemed suspicious because "someone placed it in front of the building and then walked away."

"It ended up being a false alarm," Lalich said, noting Gold Coast's employees were sent home early.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

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By Kathleen Wilson of the Ventura County Star

A board Tuesday prohibited medical marijuana enterprises in unincorporated areas of Ventura County, but allowed that the action may be temporary.

The unanimous vote by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors preserves the county's ability to regulate land use for the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries, manufacturing and cultivation. But the board also asked managers to return in eight to 10 weeks with a list of people who could recommend thoughtful regulations in place of outright bans.

Dr. Jack Patterson, a retired physician, called for such an advisory group.

"I don't know how you can ensure safety until you can ensure a safe supply," the Ojai man told the board. "If you ban it in the county, then it has to come from outside the county, and you have no ability to ensure a safe supply."

More than two dozen people spoke before the board. They called for acceptance of cultivation and dispensing to meet medical needs allowed under a state initiative passed in 1996.

"If you have a heart, medical marijuana should stay in Ventura County," Sebastian Salerno, of Oxnard, told the board at the end of a hearing that lasted more than two hours in Ventura.

The Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq said the drug had helped him deal with post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. Others said marijuana products had helped them deal with cancer, chronic pain and other physical problems.

Supervisors sympathized with the speakers' medical problems, but said they needed to amend land-use ordinances to preserve local control. Under state law, counties and cities must adopt regulations governing cultivation of medical marijuana by March 1 or the state will become the sole licensing authority in their jurisdictions.

"Today's action is to put this in a holding position until we are able to work this out as a community," Supervisor Kathy Long said.

There is no March 1 deadline for adopting regulations for dispensaries or manufacturing enterprises. County managers said such activities are prohibited because they are not specifically allowed in county zoning ordinances, but the board decided last month against relying on that principle.

"This locks it in," Long said.

The board's actions do not restrict possession or cultivation for personal medical use allowed under the state initiative.

Supervisor Linda Parks expressed concerns that nonprofit collectives that provide medical marijuana would also be banned under the vote.

"I will go along with it because I see it as a place holder," she said.
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Ventura County Sheriff's Office Department.

By Staff Reports

A woman's housekeeper was arrested this week in connection with stealing jewelry from her home near Ojai, officials said Tuesday.

The victim reported to Ojai police earlier this month that various pieces of jewelry had been stolen from her home in an unincorporated area east of Ojai, the Ventura County Sheriff's Office said.

The victim suspected the jewelry was stolen sometime between September and December by a woman she hired to clean her house, authorities said. However, there was no evidence to support the victim's claim, officials said.

Detectives lured the woman's housekeeper, Tammi Swim, back to the victim's house Monday by offering her more work, authorities said. The detectives detained Swim as she arrived about 1 p.m. and found the victim's $12,000 diamond pendant around her neck and the victim's $7,000 diamond ring in her purse, officials said.

Swim, 52, of Ventura, was arrested on suspicion of grand theft, authorities said. Ventura man John Schertzer was with Swim when she was stopped and found to be in possession of narcotics, officials said. Schertzer, 52, was arrested in connection with possession of Methamphetamine, possession of drug paraphernalia and being under the influence of a controlled substance, authorities said.
California Highway Patrol

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By Staff Reports

A male bicyclist was hit and killed by a vehicle Tuesday in the Meiners Oaks area of the Ojai Valley, officials said.

The crash was reported just before 1:30 p.m., according to the California Highway Patrol. A box truck was exiting a private parking lot on East El Roblar Drive east of Felix Drive when the crash occurred, the CHP said.

The truck hit the bicyclist, who fell underneath and was run over by its rear wheels, the CHP said. The victim's name, age and residence were not released, pending notification of relatives.

Crews with the Ventura County Fire Department responded to the incident and took the bicyclist to Ventura County Medical Center in Ventura, where he was pronounced dead, the CHP said.

The driver of the truck remained on scene and was not injured, the CHP said.

Anyone with information on the crash should call 477-4100.
ROB VARELA/THE STAR A pontoon boat heads out to sea as a fishing boat comes into Ventura Harbor on Thursday afternoon.

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By John Scheibe of the Ventura County Star

With more than two months to go in the El Nino season, Ventura Port District officials continued lobbying hard on Tuesday for additional federal funds to dredge a sand-filled entrance to the harbor

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to announce on Feb. 8 that at least $4.25 million has been set aside to dredge the area around Ventura Harbor. The money would cover the $1.4 million needed to move the dredging equipment from Long Beach to the harbor, with the remainder going to pay for the dredging of some 465,000 cubic yards of sand.

But the problem is the strong El Nino storm season has left about 1 million cubic yards of sand around the harbor's entrance, making the area extremely dangerous for boats going in and out of the harbor.

"It's critical that we get more funding," Everard Ashworth, a port commissioner with the Ventura Port Disitrict, said on Tuesday. He noted that port officials are staying in close touch with federal officials, including with Rep. Julia Brownley's office.

While dredging was originally supposed to begin around the second week of February, Brownley, D-Westlake Village, said Tuesday that the Army Corps confirmed this week that the rig could be at the harbor as early as Monday, depending on the weather.

Port officials and others are hoping for an additional $2 million, which they said should be enough to remove about 800,000 cubic yards of sand that's accumulated underwater there.

While this will still leave some 200,000 cubic yards of sand, port district officials are hoping that removing 800,000 cubic yards will be enough to keep the harbor entrance navigable for many boats and fishing vessels until the harbor is dredged again early in 2017.

Port officials have been forced to close the harbor to all but essential boats as the area is buffeted by strong currents, waves and an ever-accumulating amount of sand.

Some commercial ships are being escorted into the harbor, but only when conditions allow, John Higgins, harbormaster at the Ventura Harbor, said on Tuesday.

All of this comes as meteorologists are forecasting more rough seas for the area in the coming week, with waves projected to be 12 feet or higher.

"There's no question this will drive more sand down to our harbor," Higgins said.

In a normal year, the entrance to the harbor would be about 40 feet deep, port officials said. But now it's only about 12 feet deep.

A sand trap was built to north of the harbor entrance when the harbor was constructed in the 1960s. The sand trap can hold about 600,000 cubic yards of sand, Richard Parsons, the port district's dredging manager said.

But a more active winter storm season, including stronger ocean currents coming out of the north, has deposited a lot more sand in the area. For example, some 240,000 cubic yards of sand accumulated in the area from Dec. 28 to Jan. 21, Parsons said.

"I've been working with the port district for more than 30 years, and I've never seen anything like this," Parsons said.

Without additional funding for dredging, the sand trap will still be left with about 500,000 cubic yards of sand, all but guaranteeing the sand will continue to overflow into the channel leading into the harbor, making the area unnavigable.

Dredging equipment could be ready as early as Friday, Parsons said. But port officials won't know exactly how much money has been earmarked for dredging until an official announcement by the corps of engineers is made on Feb. 8. And the dredging project is expected to take about 30 days, officials said.

Adding to the sense of urgency is the fact that "our permits only allow us to dredge through March 15," said Oscar Pena, the port's general manager.

The Ventura Harbor is a key part of the region's economy, he added, contributing some $250 million a year in direct and indirect benefits.

Pena and others know that the temporary closure to the harbor already has taken an economic toll on the area and will continue to do so.

Many commercial fishermen have been told that if they leave the harbor in search of squid or other fish, they should find temporary moorage elsewhere. Fortunately for many of them, there isn't a lot of squid to be found off the coast right now because of warmer El Nino waters.

The tall ships Hawaiian Chieftain and Lady Washington, which are in the area as part of their annual educational visit, were forced to leave the harbor last week. The boats are now docked at the Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard.

Boats belong to the Island Packers, which offers whale-watching excursions and trips to the Channel Islands National Park, are also now at the Channel Islands Harbor.

"If we don't get this extra money and get ahead of the problem, we could be back to the same place we are now," Higgins said. "And that's something that none of us want."

Staff writer Bartholomew Sullivan contributed to this report.
SHARE Katie Connell, former Blount County resident killed in a BASE jumping accident in California. (FACEBOOK) CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Mary Katherine Katie Connell, a Ventura woman presumed dead after a bridge-jumping accident in Big Sur.

By Staff And Wire Reports

A celebration-of-life service is planned Saturday in Tennessee for a Ventura woman presumed drowned after BASE jumping from a Big Sur bridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Authorities had yet to recover the bodies of Mary Katherine "Katie" Connell or her companion, who both parachuted from the Bixby Bridge last week.

Relatives said the 30-year-old Connell was a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, living in Ventura while working as a traveling registered nurse. She was reported missing Saturday after failing to report for work. Investigators believe the pair jumped from the bridge Wednesday.

Monterey County sheriff's officials said a video from a helmet camera shows Connell descending roughly 300 feet and landing in Bixby Creek, which feeds into the Pacific. Shortly after landing, large waves overtake her.

Julie Connell said Tuesday that her sister-in-law was an experienced sky diver and BASE jumper with nearly 300 jumps. She said officials speculate that changing wind conditions between the bridge and the water below may have contributed to her death.

"She normally would not jump with any high winds," Julie Connell said. "Katie knew what she was doing. She just got into a situation that no one could get out of."

BASE is an acronym for building, antenna, span and earth  the four fixed objects parachutists jump from in the high-risk sport.

Her sister-in-law said Connell had researched the Bixby Bridge jump for about a year.

Katie Connell was a graduate of the University of Tennessee who later earned a nursing degree from Lincoln Memorial University. She briefly worked as a nurse at a hospital near Knoxville before leaving in 2014 to see the country as a traveling nurse. She had been based in Ventura since September, her sister-in-law said.

Connell's family say they respected her passion for the sport, despite their misgivings.

"Obviously you don't want to see someone you love doing something dangerous," Julie Connell said. "At the same time, Katie died doing something she loved. ... We want people to know she knew what she was doing."

The service is set for Saturday at Hardin Valley Church of Christ in Knoxville.

Monterey County Sheriff Steve Bernal said Connell's companion jumped off the bridge to try to save her. His name and age had not been released, although authorities said he was from Finland.

Julie Connell said the family was informed Tuesday that authorities had called off the search.

The Knoxville News Sentinel contributed to this report.
SHARE ROB VARELA/THE STAR Rep. Julia Brownley.

By Bartholomew Sullivan

WASHINGTON  Just back from a congressional fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, Rep. Julia Brownley said her largest takeaway was that progress is being made but "we need a more comprehensive, longer-term strategy" if the goal is a stable country.

The Westlake Village Democrat, who serves on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, met with the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John F. Campbell, and U.S. Ambassador P. Michael McKinley, as well as Marines from Ventura County serving in Kuwait.

The mission for the 9,800 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan is to train, advise and assist, she said, and Campbell considers that number "adequate."

Her visit followed the most recent of six suicide bombings in the country since the beginning of the year. Brownley was part of an official congressional delegation that included Elizabeth Esty, D-Connecticut, Carlos Curbelo, R-Florida, and John Kline, R-Minnesota.

"I would say my, probably, largest takeaway from the trip is that we're making progress," Brownley said. "On the other hand, if the goal is to have a stable country in Afghanistan, it's going to take a long time to get to stability. I think that probably we as a country need to have a more comprehensive, longer term strategy to ensure stability."

Of her time in Kuwait, where she said the mission is keeping track of what's going on in Syria and Iraq, she came away with mixed conclusions.

"In Iraq, we're succeeding," she said. "Syria, it's fair to say, is still pretty much a mess."

Speaking about her visit with Ventura County constituents  three Marines whose names couldn't be released for privacy reasons  she said she talked about "their duress and the number of tours" they have made overseas. She also saw their pride in representing their country and their commitment to the work they're doing.

Her trip  kept confidential for security reasons  included an overnight stay at a military base near Kabul, a helicopter flight to Jalalabad in the eastern province of Nangarhar and a C-130 flight south to Kandahar.

Brownley was scheduled to return to Washington, D.C., after the five-day trip but the massive East Coast snowstorm that shut down the federal government prompted her to return to California.
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Jeb Bush explained Sunday why he still thinks Rick Snyder has been "a great governor for Michigan" even after the mass lead poisoning because of tainted tap water in Flint.

The disgrace over Flint's water, the Republican presidential prospect told ABC's "This Week," "is related to the fact that we've created this complex, no-responsibility regulatory system, where the federal government, the state government, a regional government, local and county governments are all pointing fingers at one another."

Um, no.

Bush was attempting to muddy the proverbial water by portraying the Flint debacle as a failure of government at all levels. Snyder attempted the same diffusion of responsibility last week, saying that "government failed you  federal, state and local leaders  by breaking the trust you placed in us."

But the Flint disaster, three years in the making, is not a failure of government generally. It's the failure of a specific governing philosophy: Snyder's belief that government works better if run more like a business.

No doubt, the federal Environmental Protection Agency deserves blame for failing to sound warnings more loudly and publicly once it learned last year that high lead levels in Flint were poisoning children.

But the EPA had no role in the decisions that caused the problem, nor was it supposed to. That was entirely the responsibility of Snyder's administration and his appointees.

The governor, former head of Gateway computers, was first elected as part of the tea party wave of 2010 with a plan to use his tech industry skills to run Michigan. He spoke of "outcomes" and "deliverables," and sought to "reinvent" the state to make it business-friendly.

A centerpiece of Snyder's agenda, and one of his first actions, was a new law that gave the state dramatic powers to take over failing municipalities and school boards by appointing emergency managers with unchecked authority. Michigan voters killed that law in a November 2012 referendum, but a month later Snyder got the Legislature, in a lame-duck session, to enact a law very similar to the one voters had rejected. This time, legislators attached it to a spending bill so it couldn't be undone by referendum.

The unelected viceroys had mandates to improve municipal finances but little incentive to weigh other considerations.

In Flint, one such emergency manager, Edward Kurtz, abandoned the city's decadeslong reliance on Detroit as its source of clean tap water in 2013, under the theory that it could reduce Flint's high water bills by tapping into a new pipeline that was still under construction.

Kurtz's successor as Flint's emergency manager, Darnell Earley (now emergency manager of Detroit's schools), made the fateful decision to use treated water from the Flint River as the city's water supply starting in 2014 while the pipeline was being completed  even though Detroit was willing to continue providing high-quality water under a short-term contract. This was supposed to save Flint $5 million.

And Earley's successor as Flint emergency manager, Jerry Ambrose, overruled a city council vote in March 2015 to return to Detroit water. Ambrose called the council's request "incomprehensible" and a waste of $12 million  even though there had already been chemical and bacterial problems with the river water, the quality had violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and the General Motors plant in Flint had stopped using the water because it was rusting car parts.

"You cannot separate what happened in Flint from the state's extreme emergency-management law," said Curt Guyette, who, working for the ACLU of Michigan, uncovered much of the scandal in Flint. "The bottom line is making sure the banks and bond holders get paid at all costs, even if the kids are poisoned with foul river water."

The emergency-manager law, Guyette argued, "is about the taking away of democracy and the imposition of austerity-fueled autocracy on cities that are poor and majority African-American."

Snyder's blaming of local authorities is disingenuous: Because of the emergency-management law, municipal officials can't do anything without the blessing of Snyder's viceroys.

As for federal officials, the EPA warned Michigan as early as February 2015 that contaminants were leaching into the water system in Flint. The EPA didn't press publicly or aggressively to fix the problem, a failure that led to the regional administrator's resignation last week. That foot-dragging postponed action by a few months  an inexcusable delay, to be sure  but the feds had no say in the decisions that caused the problem.

Snyder undertook an arrogant public-policy experiment, underpinned by the ideological assumption that the "experience set" of corporate-style managers was superior to the checks and balances of democracy. This is why Flint happened.

Dana Milbank writes for The Washington Post. Email him at dana.milbank@washpost.com.
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Congressional and Obama administration officials need to launch an immediate inquiry into how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services handled placement of the young Central American migrants who flooded our borders in the past two years.

An investigation by The Associated Press found that the agency relaxed and ignored its rules and policies on placement and, as a result, some of these young people went to homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced into slave labor.

The U.S. government was surprised by the onslaught of migrants, many of them unaccompanied youth, who started showing up at our borders in 2013 and 2014, fleeing gang and drug violence in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. After a perilous journey through Mexico, they would arrive at the U.S. border and drop into the control of federal agencies that clearly were not prepared to deal with them.

The government set up temporary shelters for them throughout the West, including one at Naval Base Ventura County. Many of those who saw the creation of this shelter were surprised at how quickly federal officials moved the children out of the shelter and into homes. Most, we were told, were being placed with relatives who were living in the United States.

Now we know why it moved so quickly. The agency was cutting corners to place the children. First, they stopped fingerprinting adults seeking to claim the children. Then they stopped asking for original copies of birth certificates from the sponsors to prove identify. They stopped requiring forms with sponsors' identifying information. Finally they stopped requiring FBI criminal history checks of many sponsors.

The results were tales of horror, as uncovered by The Associated Press.

For instance, six minors were sent to rural Ohio where they were forced to work 12 hours a day on egg farms under the threat of death. A 14-year-old boy was sent to distant relative in Los Angeles who held him in his apartment and deprived him of food. Others were known to be sexually abused.

HHS officials claim to have corrected the problems in the process and, faced with a new rush of migrant children this winter, promised no shortcuts.

We hope not. But the promise is not enough.

We believe there should be a full-scale investigation to find out exactly what happened and, more importantly, why in happened. If, as it appears, our government placed children in its care with sex offenders or human trafficking rings, then those responsible must be held accountable.
<p>STAR FILE PHOTO</p>

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Two people from Oklahoma were arrested in Ventura early Wednesday on suspicion of possessing an explosive device, a "sparkler bomb," officials said.

The incident was reported about 1:15 a.m. in the 300 block of Paseo De Playa, near the Ventura County Fairgrounds. Patrol officers spotted two people sleeping in a vehicle and approached them.

While speaking with the occupants, the officers spotted what they believed to be an explosive device under the front passenger seat. The two people in the vehicle, a man and a woman, got out and were detained for further investigation, police said.

The Ventura County Sheriff's Office bomb squad was called to the scene, and the item was determined to be a homemade explosive device described as a "sparkler bomb," multiple sparkler fireworks wrapped in electrical tape and duct tape with a fuse attached, explained Cmdr. Sam Arroyo. The bomb squad safely removed the device, officials said.

Ross Warren, 29, and Kambry Cripps, 19, both of Oklahoma, were booked into Ventura County jail on suspicion of felony possession of an explosive device on a public street, police said.
Ben & Jerrys 33rd Annual Free Cone Day, held on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at the District at Green Valley Ranch and Sunset Station Hotel & Casino Scoop Shops was an overwhelming success, giving away more than 10,000 cones (Pictured above: Angel Porrino from Hollys World and Absinthe  Photo credit: Scott Harrison)!

Photo courtesy of Ben & Jerrys.

Every year, the Henderson locations enlist the help of local celebrities to help scoop ice cream to benefit local childrens charities. This year, the Nevada Community Learning Centers (formerly Classroom on Wheels) and St. Judes Ranch for Children raised more than $2,000 combined over the course of the days event.

Photo courtesy of Ben & Jerrys.

The District at Green Valley Ranch location welcomed the help of Josh Strickland (PEEPSHOW and E!s Hollys World co-star), Chippendales Jace Crispin and Kenny King; Lady G from Hot 97.5 KVEG-FMs Morning Show, Lorena and Tracey from Luxors FANTASY, Jersey Boys Peter Saide and Jeff Leibow, Cheaza (PEEPSHOWs Peep Diva); Jelani Remy (Simba in Disneys THE LION KING); Defending the Caveman star Kevin Burke; Thunder from Down Under cast members Ryan and Marcus, Zowie Bowies Chris Phillips; Ryan Ahern (star of Piano! Las Vegas); Mac King (The Mac King Comedy Magic Show); and Angel Porrino (co-star of E!s Hollys World and the newest cast member of Absinthe).

The location also hosted Games2U, a vehicle featuring interactive games and activities.

Photo courtesy of Ben & Jerrys.

Ben & Jerrys Sunset Station Hotel & Casino Scoop Shop welcomed help from Craig, Al & Andy of KOMP-FMs Rock n Roll Morning Show, Absinthes Gazillionaire, Ivana Chekov-Jones and Melody Sweets, and Sunset Stations own acoustic rocker Shawn Eiferman.

More Information

The Nevada Community Learning Centers (formerly Classroom on Wheels) mission is to provide preschool children and their families with quality educational services to empower them to succeed in life. Throughout the years, the success of the COW program has grown tremendously. As a result, the parent organization name has been changed to Nevada Community Learning Centers and the preschool program renamed Three Key Years Preschool Program, while remaining dedicated to providing educational services to economically disadvantaged preschool children and their families. For more information, please call 870-7201.

St. Judes Ranch for Children, located in Boulder City, serves all abandoned and neglected children and families, creating new chances, new choices and new hope in a safe, homelike environment while working to break the vicious cycle of child abuse and provide help and hope to children and families. For more information, please call 294-7100 or visit www.stjudesranch.org.
Beer Industry Set to Grow and Expand to Other Asian Countries

The Vietnam Beer Alcohol Beverage Association (VBA) recently released a report stating that beer production in the country reached 3.4 billion liters in 2015, marking a 4.7 percent year on year increase in output.

With total local production capacity currently standing at 4.8 billion liters annually, the VBA projects production to grow exponentially in the coming years and has set a production target of 4-4.25 billion liters by 2020.

As production and sales continue to grow, the Vietnamese market offers great opportunities to local and foreign brewers. As part of a wider push to spur investment, the government announced plans for divestment from from a number of local beer companies in 2015. This announcement generated significant interest from domestic and foreign manufacturers alike, who want to invest in the beer industry.

Of particular interest to international brewers  such as SABMiller, Kirin Brewery, Asahi Breweries, and Asia Pacific Breweries  is Sabeco, Vietnams largest state-run brewer. With strong name recognition within the region, foreign investment would allow the company to fulfil growing Vietnamese demand and aggressively expand regionally into Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos  collectively representing a prospective consumer base of around 250 million people.

Uber Faces Tax Troubles in Ho Chi Minh City

Reports indicate that Uber  the technology based taxi aggregator service  might face tax troubles and possible fines for its operations Ho Chi Minh City, which currently includes around 4,000 cars registered within the city.

Officials from the municipal tax department indicate that the department plans to apply a tax on Uber and possibly levy fines for late tax declarations. At the same time, officials have indicate they are willing to help Uber navigate the tax landscape and will only pursue legal recourse if Uber fails to cooperate.

Currently, Uber refuses to declare or pay taxes for operating in the city. The Vietnamese corporation of Uber registers itself only as a marketing firm and subsequently only pays taxes for the marketing fees received from its parent company in Netherlands.

Should the imposition of taxes and enforcement of penalties come to pass, it would surely mark a watershed moment for the sector. Such market developments would likely force established start-ups, including as Uber, to rethink their strategies for the Vietnamese market.

Foreign Buyers Step Up Investment in Housing Markets

Vietnams property market has seen an uptake in recent months, with increasing levels of foreign direct investment (FDI), bank loans, and incoming remittances.

Complimenting increases in local demand, around 1,000 expatriates have registered to buy houses  particularly luxury property  in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) between July 2015 and January 2016. These purchases constitute a significant rise compared to the 250 transactions concluded with foreign buyers between 2008 and July 2015.

The HCMC Real Estate Association (HoREA) indicates the drivers behind increasing foreign participation in real estate can be tied to improvements seen under Vietnams revised housing laws.

The new housing laws came into effect around July 2015 and have since spurred investment by making it foreign ownership and land-usage of property a lot easier. Local experts believe that this will ensure more stability in the real estate market and ease concerns that investors and especially foreigners may have about the house ownership.



About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email vietnam@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight. 

Import and Export: A Guide to Trade in Vietnam

In this issue of Vietnam Briefing Magazine, we provide you with a clear understanding of the current business trends related to trade in Vietnam, as well as explaining how to set up your trading business in the country. We also attempt to give perspective on what will be Vietnams place in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2015, and look at some of the countrys key import and export regulations.

Navigating the Vietnam Supply Chain

In this edition of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the advantages of the Vietnamese market over its regional competition and highlight where and how to implement successful investment projects. We examine tariff reduction schedules within the ACFTA and TPP, highlight considerations with regard to rules of origin, and outline the benefits of investing in Vietnams growing economic zones. Finally, we provide expert insight into the issues surrounding the creation of 100 percent Foreign Owned Enterprise in Vietnam.

Tax, Accounting, and Audit in Vietnam 2014-2015

The first edition of Tax, Accounting, and Audit in Vietnam, published in 2014, offers a comprehensive overview of the major taxes foreign investors are likely to encounter when establishing or operating a business in Vietnam, as well as other tax-relevant obligations. This concise, detailed, yet pragmatic guide is ideal for CFOs, compliance officers and heads of accounting who need to be able to navigate the complex tax and accounting landscape in Vietnam.
Before departing for China after a brief trip to Cambodia, US Secretary of State John Kerry highlighted the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal, a court he helped negotiate.

Years ago, as a member of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I traveled here several times in the 1990s to try to help find a way to hold the Khmer Rouge accountable for the terrible events of the killing fields where nearly two million people were killed, Kerry told reporters before his departure.

I worked with Prime Minister Hun Sen and the UN to help create a structure that became the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, he said. And we were able to break a gridlock between the government and the UN that resulted in accountability for the crimes of the Pol Pot era.

Not everyone has been held accountable before the court, Kerry said, including Pol Pot, who died before it came into being. But there are those in prison today as a result of its continued work, and accountability still continues, he said.

Still, many victims of the regime have been disappointed by the court, with only one former Khmer Rouge cadre, Kaing Kek Iev, fully prosecuted, and two former top leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, still undergoing a trial.

Im not happy with this Khmer Rouge court, said Bou Meng, who survived Kaing Kek Ievs notorious Tuol Sleng detention center, but who lost his wife and children to the Khmer Rouge. People have died. Im very worried that the court works too slowly. Its like theyre pulling bamboo against the water current.
US Secretary of State John Kerry discussed improved trade with Cambodian leaders during his visit to the capital on Tuesday, prompting hope amid labor leaders for stronger workers rights, but also that more markets could open.

Addressing more than 100 journalists following talks with Prime Minister Hun Sen and Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, Kerry said trade and investment have traditionally moved the USs relationship with Cambodia forward and would continue to do so.

And I think it is actually quite remarkable that the United States is, in fact, Cambodias largest export market today, even though we have half the world between our countries, he said.

Hun Sen posted on his Facebook page Wednesday that he had met for an hour with Kerry. Hun Sen asked for more US markets for Cambodian goods.

The main purpose of Kerrys visit was to discuss an upcoming US-Asean meeting in California next month, which will include a lot of discussion on trade.

Our trade and investment ties have long served to propel our relationship forward, Kerry said Tuesday. We agree that it is very valuable for Cambodia to have a diverse set of trading partners. There is no choice between one partner or another; there is room for everybody, enormous capacity for growth.

Hor Namhong told reporters he had pushed for tariff breaks on garments and shoes, two of Cambodias main exports to the US.

Cambodias garment, textile and shoe industry employs some 700,000 people, but the sector remains restive, with workers demanding higher wages as the cost of living in Cambodia increases.

Labor leaders said this week they hoped Kerrys visit would prompt Cambodia to improve workers rights. They remain concerned about an impending law to regulate unions, a law they say will hurt Cambodias efforts to create fair wages and improve working conditions.

There should be talks with the government and parliament in order to come up with a better draft law which is in compliance with both local and international law, Ath Thon, head of the Cambodian Labor Confederation, told VOA Khmer.

US influence could improve conditions for Cambodian workers, he said.

The draft law on unions is under discussion at the National Assembly, but labor leaders say they have been disappointed by provisions that make it harder to form unions and that create more red tape, through registration requirements and financial reporting, for unions that already exist.

Kerry said Tuesday that human rights and good governance remain critical to US-Cambodia bilateral relations.

Aside from trade, Kerry, Hun Sen and Hor Namhong discussed security issues.

Hor Namhong told reporters that he had maintained Cambodias neutral stance on the South China Sea issue, which pits China against four Southeast Asian nations, as well as on North Koreas nuclear testing.

Hun Sen said he assured the US that Cambodia will continue to partner on issues of terrorism and extremism, as well as supporting peaceful negotiations for the regions conflicts.


In another major report Wednesday on human-rights concerns, The Freedom House group said more aggressive tactics by authoritarian regimes, an upsurge in terrorist attacks and a global economic downturn have contributed to a disturbing decline in freedom worldwide.

The U.S.-based international human rights group said freedom worldwide declined in 2015, for the 10th consecutive year.

The annual report by Freedom House says 72 countries showed a decline in freedom for the year, the largest number since the downturn began.

The human rights group says of the 195 countries assessed, 50 were rated "Not Free" and 59 deemed "Partly Free." The report says Syria, the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, Somalia, North Korea, Uzbekistan and Eritrea were among the worst offenders.

Turkmenistan, Western Sahara, Central African Republic, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Saudi Arabia also made the list of the worst.

Among worst offenders

The Middle East and North Africa were listed as the worst regions in the world in 2015, followed closely by Eurasia.

The report indicates people in those places suffered significant setbacks, as authoritarian leaders cracked down on rights activists and other critics.

Freedom House said democratic countries, especially in Europe, also clamped down on civil liberties, as they came under pressure from terrorist attacks and the strain of unprecedented numbers of asylum seekers from Syria and other conflict zones. It said rising populism across the European Union cast doubt on the blocs ability to maintain high democratic standards among both current and aspiring member states.

According to Freedom House, the global economic downturn and fear of social unrest led authoritarian regimes in Russia, China and other countries to crack down harder on dissent.

Global economic downturn

In Russia, it said, President Vladimir Putin maintained his policies of repression, including persecution of LGBT activists and independent journalists, and he pursued military intervention abroad. It also cited Putin for his continued support for rebels in eastern Ukraine, and the airstrikes in Syria aimed at shoring up the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

It also cited Putin for his continued support for rebels in eastern Ukraine, and the airstrikes in Syria aimed at shoring up the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Freedom House said China's communist government in 2015 intensified its persecution of human rights lawyers, journalists and minority rights advocates, and singled out new targets for abuse, including labor activists, public health advocates and womens rights defenders.

It said modest reforms such as the institution of a two-child policy could not offset the abuses by the government.

Conflicts, disasters

As the world's attention was diverted to new conflicts and disasters, the report said, the dramatic setbacks for freedom in Thailand, Egypt, Crimea and South Sudan that marked 2014 continued to fester.

Leaders in several countries moved to extend their terms in office during 2015, Freedom House noted, most prominently in Burundi, Bolivia, Ecuador, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

The report did find that 61 nations recorded progress in efforts to establish greater freedoms, and it cited Latin America for praise.

It cited Iran and Myanmar among the countries to watch in 2016.

The report said once the newly elected legislature of Myanmar is seated and a government is formed, the National League for Democracy will be under pressure to deliver on its promises.

In Iran, moderate reformists are preparing for next month's critical elections to the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body that appoints the country's supreme leader.
Bakary Tandia remembers voting for just the second time in a U.S. general election. It was 2008, and President Barack Obama was on the ballot. After voting in New York, he drove to Pennsylvania  a swing state  to mobilize others.

He thinks back to that historic year, and one voter in particular comes to mind  an elderly African-American woman, too feeble to walk and who lacked transportation. Along with other volunteers, Tandia carried her to the polling station that night, so she could cast her vote.

She was singing Hallelujah, Hallelujah, recalls Tandia.  I dont have enough words to describe her feelings and the impact of her feelings on us.

Source of power

Tandia came to the U.S. in 1992 to combat racial discrimination and slavery in his native West African nation, Mauritania, after it had become too dangerous to continue his work domestically. His work in human rights, he says, continues to define him today, and extends to other issues, including advocacy for immigrant rights in New York.

Since becoming a U.S. citizen in 2004, Tandia has never missed a vote  national or local. He says that for him, citizenship represents much more than just a passport: its a source of power, enabling him to use his voice.

As for those who feel disenfranchised, Tandias message is simple: everyone has a role to play, and all roles are important.

In the communities, what happens is people tend to assume that, I dont count. You count, except if you count yourself out, he said.

Tandias choice: Hillary

Tandia votes Democrat. The partys agenda, he says, is more favorable to immigrants  a fundamental issue for him, closely tied to his progressive agenda on human rights.

There is no doubt, he says, that he will vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the upcoming primary election. In his words, it is a matter of being realistic. He believes both Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have similar agendas, and therefore wants to vote for the candidate he sees as better positioned to win the general election.

In addition, he thinks its time for a woman to be president in the U.S., a feat he says is long overdue for a country claiming to be the leader of human rights around the world.

Tandia describes Clinton as experienced, competent and charismatic.

How long will the United States be waiting for another charismatic woman who will be in a position to win general elections? Tandia said. For me this is an opportunity to break this cycle.

Mixed identity

Unlike Tandia, Amanda Lugg first came to the U.S. under rather favorable conditions. It was the 1980s and she was trying to decide what to do with her life. Like Tandia, she found a job she loved, working among immigrant communities, and everything fell into place.

But Luggs is a story of mixed identity and discrimination as an immigrant in the U.S. She was born in London to a Ugandan father and white English mother, and adopted as a four-week-old baby. Her British accent, she says, has served her well. But people are often stunned when they see her for the first time.

I used to say that some of my best work is done on the phone, Lugg joked. Theyre imagining Kate Winslet walking into the room, and then its me. We dont look that much alike.

As Lugg became more politically active in the U.S., she decided to listen to her conscience and become a citizen, despite soaring costs. She felt it was important in terms of maintaining her personal safety, in case she were ever arrested for civil disobedience  an act that could otherwise result in deportation.

Lugg officially gained citizenship in August 2014, just in time for the Fall local elections in New York. Until that moment, she says she hadnt realized the vital importance of her vote  particularly as a liberal, residing in a heavily democratic state.

Unlike countries where perhaps many new immigrants come [from], the president cannot make decisions on his or her own, it has to come through the agreement of Congress, Lugg said. She strongly encourages new immigrants to become politically engaged  in particular among emerging African diaspora communities  referencing a popular expression to sum up her feelings: If youre not at the table, youre on the menu.

Luggs choice: Bernie

Lugg does not like any of the Republican presidential candidates, and says the rhetoric against Muslims in the country has gone off the rails.

Im embarrassed to go home because I know what friends and family will be saying to me: What the hell? Why would you want to stay in this country, she said.

Lugg says Donald Trump and other Republican contenders are responsible for a growing anti-immigration sentiment around the country, calling it a black-and-white race issue.

People say, yeah, what about Ben Carson?, she asks herself, referring to the lone African-American candidate in the 2016 election, a Republican who said in September that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.

She rolls her eyes emphatically, shaking her head.

I dont know how to explain Ben Carson," she said. "How can someone be so smart, and yet so stupid? Youre a neurosurgeon for Gods sake.

Lugg favors Democrat Bernie Sanders for president, even though shes not convinced hell win the Democratic nod. She says his policies support the working-class and those without who strive for more.

Lugg looks forward to her first general election as a U.S. citizen, and first vote in any national election since 1979, a year she voted for former prime minister and leader of the U.K.s Conservative Party Margaret Thatcher.

It was her first time in, I didnt know, she laughs, defensively. My parents were conservative. She was a woman. I thought, thats cool!

Lugg says she is determined to get it right this time.
Local volunteers say Berlins social welfare system for refugees is being overwhelmed by the all the migrants applying for asylum. The volunteers are urging local authorities to address what they describe as inhuman conditions at the central office for registration.

Tensions rise as hundreds of refugees cram into long lines outside Berlins Social Services office, where the migrants dreams of a new life in Germany are often first confronted with reality.



Huge tents have been erected to process the applications for state aid like welfare payments and health vouchers.

WATCH: Berlin Welfare System Overwhelmed by Numbers Of Migrants

Afghan refugee Khaudnazar has been waiting since 8 oclock in the morning. Each time he gets to the front of the line, he says he is told to come back tomorrow.



Morning I come to here, go to the office, and here is take the turn at the counter and come back tomorrow. I come here tomorrow, all they speak, next time come tomorrow," said Khaudnazar.

The chaos at the center - known by its German acronym LaGeSo - has been going on for months.



"I have been here 24 days with no help, and no money," said Mohamed, a teenager from Afghanistan.



Teams of helpers distribute warm drinks and food. Public donations of clothing arrive by the hour, to be sorted by volunteer refugees and locals. Kurt Kettler runs the volunteer organization known as Moabit Hilft.



Its winter time in Germany now, and we still have people arriving without shoes, babies without shoes and jackets or gloves," said Kettler.



Kettler says the German government is failing in its duty of care to the refugees.



Germany cannot take all of the people, obviously, but we have the financial power, I mean the European Union has it. They should be a little bit more flexible and in these crises they have to be a lot quicker," he said.



Germanys bureaucracy is straining under the weight of the numbers of refugees - threatening to cripple the systems designed to provide the most basic care.


Cameroon has closed most of its northern markets on the border with Nigeria after a series of bomb attacks Monday left at least 35 people dead and 70 wounded in the town of Bodo. The country's government spokesperson, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, said it was the 30th attack by suspected Boko Haram fighters on Cameroon since the start of the new year.

Businessman Inoussa Yegie says shock and consternation has gripped the town of Bodo, where Monday's attack took place. He says it will take time for them to recover, in spite of the heavy deployment of troops. The 33-year-old says the decision by the government to close all border markets in their locality may backfire, especially now that Boko Haram fighters are recruiting young people to steal and seize money and goods from farmers and traders.

Yegie says traders are becoming poorer because all their shops have been sealed. He says youths who use commercial motorcycles to transport goods and people from the market to supply towns in Nigeria no longer have jobs, and they may now be tempted to join Boko Haram fighters who promise them better lives.

Bombers disguised as traders

Midjiyawa Bakari, the governor of the far north region of Cameroon, says the decision to close markets on Cameroon's northern border with Nigeria until further notice was taken for security reasons because the four female suicide bombers who attacked Bodo were disguised as traders and hid explosives in bags of vegetables they pretended to sell.

"The decision has been taken to close some markets in the border but people have been persisting to sell and to buy things. They should know that Boko Haram is looking for where people are gathering to do these attacks," he said.

After Monday's attack, Cameroon soldiers launched raids on the Nigerian town of Achigashia, from where they believe the suicide bombers came. Cameroon's spokesperson Issa Tchiroma Bakary says 17 insurgents were killed in the operation. He says Cameroon has counted at least 30 attacks on its territory this year.

"Faced with such harassment both un-grounded and unjustified, our defense and security forces have always retaliated leading the enemy to incur several setbacks that has considerably weakened the group and reduced it to mere acts of cowardice, especially suicide bombings, which have become its modus operandi," he said.

Solidarity in fight against Boko Haram

In Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, groups of people have been visiting and sympathizing with Bodo's elite. Ngufor Jacob, leader of Cameroon's university students association, says that by visiting with people from Bodo, his group shows solidarity with Cameroon and Nigerian forces fighting Boko Haram terrorism.

"I came out to show solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the north who are suffering from the onslaughts of Boko Haram insurgents. I came out to show to the military that we are one, we are together. We may not have guns to join them in the north but they should know that we have them at heart. We are praying for them, we are supporting them," he said.

Cameroon believes the militants have resorted to attacking mosques, markets, churches and palaces of traditional rulers because the terrorist group's firepower has been drastically reduced following attacks on their strongholds within the past two months by Cameroon and Nigerian troops.

Boko Haram's six-year insurgency has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced close to 2.3 million, according to Amnesty International and the United Nations.
In the Central African Republic, the results of the parliamentary elections held on December 30 have been annulled and candidates will have to run again. The constitutional court Monday upheld the results of the first round of the presidential elections, but ruled there were too many irregularities in the parliamentary poll.

In Bangui, the prime minister explained that the biggest irregularity in the poll was the lack of ballot papers.



C.A.R.s Prime Minister Mahamat Kamoun said in a media interview Wednesday that the countrys polling stations were short of 500,000 ballot papers for the parliamentary elections on December 30.



Kamoun was defending the Constitutional Courts decision to invalidate the result of those elections  a decision that has not gone down well with candidates who thought they had won.



Former government minister Ambroise Zawa was one of those candidates.



In my constituency, he said, adding, we had ballot papers. I won with 82 percent of the votes and I deeply regret that the court has rejected the results and is telling us to stand again.



Who is going to pay our bill? he asked, when were already elected.



Zawa also says its unfair that the first round of presidential elections was not cancelled, as there were many complaints about them as well.



Journalist and commentator Eric Bondo rejects Zawas claim that the courts decisions were inconsistent.



He said the court was very clear, that as regards the presidential election, there was no proof shown of irregularities at particular polling stations, whereas in the parliamentary elections there was proof. For example, he said, there was no parliamentary vote at his local polling station.



A spokesman for the national electoral authority, Julius Ngouade-Baba, told VOA the ballot papers had been printed at the last moment and there was no time to ensure they reached all the polling stations.



Why the last minute rush?



Ngouade-Baba says its because they wanted to organize inclusive elections so they were very tolerant with the 1,000 or so candidates who didnt submit their candidatures on time.



He said the time for submitting applications for the parliamentary elections is now over.
Hundreds of children in Flint Michigan are being tested for lead exposure, local officials confirmed on Tuesday.

Volunteers and local nurses manned stations where parents could bring their children to have their blood tested for lead exposure.

Lead poisoning can cause brain damage in children, and is particularly dangerous to children under the age of 6.

The move to test the children comes three weeks after a state of emergency was declared in the city due to contaminated water.

Residents of the city of 100,000 people had complained for months about discolored water, but officials moved slowly to address the problem.

In 2014, Flint began using river water, which was more corrosive than its previous supply and caused more lead to leach from its aging pipes.

Word of the contaminated water has prompted major corporations including Walmart, Coca-Cola, Pepsico and Nestle to donate massive amounts of bottled water to Flint residents.
Authorities in the northern U.S. city of Cleveland said they are firing six police officers who together shot 137 times in a barrage that killed two unarmed people after a high-speed car chase in late 2012.

Public Safety Director Michael McGrath, a former police chief in the Ohio city, did not identify the officers, but the group does include Patrolman Michael Brelo, who was acquitted of criminal charges last year.

Six additional officers who opened fire during the fatal onslaught face suspensions ranging from 21 to 30 days. Another officer facing discipline has retired.

Lawyers for the officers argued that their clients had probable cause to believe the people in the car were a safety threat, and noted that it was not determined until later that the car's occupants were unarmed.

Charged in killing

Brelo was the only officer charged in the killing of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, who died in a hail of gunfire after their car stopped and was surrounded by police.

A subsequent investigation showed Brelo fired 15 shots through the windshield of a car while standing on its hood. He was later acquitted of manslaughter, after a judge said he could not determine whether Brelo alone fired the fatal shots.

A months-long federal probe later concluded that Cleveland police had engaged in a pattern and practice of excessive force.

The U.S. Justice Department investigation led to an agreement with the city to overhaul Cleveland police practices to minimize racial bias and excessive force that many Cleveland residents alleged had become standard operating procedure in the city.
Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are locked in a tight Democratic presidential nominating contest in Iowa, the latest survey in the farm state showed Wednesday.

Quinnipiac University said Sanders, who calls himself an independent socialist Democrat, is winning the support of 49 percent of Democrats likely to participate in next Monday's party caucuses in Iowa, compared to 45 percent for Clinton, the country's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.

The Iowa voting is the first balloting in the months-long process to pick Democratic and Republican presidential nominees ahead of next November's national election to select a successor to President Barack Obama when he leaves office in a year.

As secretary of state, Clinton was a key member of Obama's first-term Cabinet and has met periodically with the president since leaving office as Obama looks to help a Democratic candidate succeed him.

Obama has had a much more distant relationship with Sanders, but met with him at the White House Wednesday to discuss foreign policy, the economy and the current campaign.

As he left the 45-minute meeting, Sanders said Obama has been "even-handed" in publicly staying neutral in the long drawn out campaign, even though U.S. political analysts have long assumed the president favors Clinton's nomination as the Democratic candidate.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama believes Sanders's unexpectedly close race against Clinton is good for Democrats.

"That ability to engage Democrats and excite them and inspire them will be critical to the success of Democrats up and down the ballot, whether Senator Sanders is the nominee or not," Earnest said.

Quinnipiac's Iowa survey, conducted in recent days, showed men, very liberal and younger voters supporting Sanders, who has centered his campaign attacks on Wall Street and corporate interests in the United States that he says have led to a growing wealth gap between the very rich and the rest of Americans.

The poll showed voters 45 and older, along with women, favoring Clinton, who could become the first female U.S. president

Quinnipiac polling official Peter Brown said the Iowa trend could be reminiscent of 2008, when Clinton lost the vote in the central U.S. state to Obama, who went on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

"Perhaps more than other contests, the Iowa caucuses are all about turnout," Brown said. "If those young, very liberal Democratic caucus participants show up Monday and are organized, it will be a good night for Senator Sanders. And if Sanders does win Iowa, that could keep a long-shot nomination scenario alive."

National surveys of Democrats still show Clinton ahead, but with a dwindling margin over Sanders, down to 12 percent in one poll released this week.


Danish lawmakers are defending their country's new law on immigration, aimed at making the small Scandinavian country less attractive to migrants.

Under a law adopted Tuesday, asylum-seekers have to hand over valuables worth more than 10,000 Danish crowns (about $1,500) to help pay for their food and living costs in Denmark. Furthermore, they will have to wait three years before they can bring in family members.

Rights groups have criticized the decision, but Danish officials say the country already has done more than its fair share to help relieve Europe's immigration crisis.

What makes Denmark most attractive to migrants is its generous social welfare system.

"Denmark is in a situation where we have received so many asylum-seekers in the past year that our very small -- you know we are one of Europe's smallest countries -- our welfare economy is under a lot of pressure," said Marcus Knuth, a Danish government spokesman.

To further deter asylum-seekers from heading to Denmark, the parliament has imposed a three-year waiting period for those who want to bring in their family members. A spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency expressed concern about the new measures.

"This relates to a number of things, including reduced social benefits, restrictive access to family unification, and this at a time when the need for solidarity and responsibility sharing at the EU level really is the first priority," said Adrian Edwards, UNHCR spokesman.

Danish officials say the rules that apply to immigrants are no different from those that apply to Danes.

"We're simply asking that if asylum-seekers -- in the rare case where they do come with enough means to pay for themselves then -- following exactly the same rules as for Danish citizens wishing to be on unemployment benefits: if you can pay for yourself, well then you should pay for yourself before the Danish welfare system does it," Knuth said.

Few migrants are worried about this part of the law.

"People who come here, do not have money with them. Right now, I don't have money to cut my hair," one migrant said.

Another migrant said, "If I had 10,000 kroner (1,500 US dollars), I'd never come here."

Separation from families

But many will be affected by the imposed separation from their families, a measure human rights groups have criticized the most.

"And we find there's a quite clear basis in international human rights law to say that that is a violation of the individual rights to family life," said Jonas Christoffersen, head of the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Denmark registered more than 20,000 asylum applications last year, making the country of 5.5 million, one of the top European Union destinations for migrants, along with Germany and Sweden.
U.S. President Barack Obama has called for the rapid development of tests, vaccines and treatments for the Zika virus that has infected people in more than 20 countries in the Americas.

The White House said Obama convened a meeting of senior health advisers to discuss the spread of the mosquito-borne virus and the economic and developmental impacts on the region.

Factbox: Zika Virus Zika Virus Mosquito-borne virus first identified in Uganda in 1947

Known to circulate in Africa, the Americas and Asia

About 20 percent of those infected become ill

Symptoms similar to dengue and chikungunya, which are carried by same type of mosquito

Most common effects are fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes; last 2-7 days

Deaths are rare

No vaccine or treatment available

Best prevention is preventing mosquito bites Source: WHO and U.S. CDC

According to the World Health Organization, Zika virus could be linked to 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly in Brazil, a condition that results in abnormally small heads in newborns and can affect brain development.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned pregnant women against traveling to areas with Zika virus outbreaks.

U.S. health officials confirmed Tuesday that a man in Virginia had tested positive for the virus, but added there was no risk of it spreading to others because it is not mosquito season there.

Denmark case

On Wednesday, a hospital in Denmark said a tourist who had traveled to South and Central America has tested positive.

There is no treatment or cure for Zika virus infections, and the outbreak in the Americas has prompted public health warnings.

Authorities in El Salvador and Colombia have recommended women postpone getting pregnant.

In Brazil, 200,000 troops are traveling to homes to distribute pamphlets with advice on mosquito eradication, while crews are also fumigating areas that will be used for upcoming carnival celebrations and this year's Olympics.

The WHO's regional office in the Americas said Monday the most effective ways to stop the virus from spreading are to reduce mosquito breeding sites and for people to protect themselves from bites with insect repellent, nets, screens and clothing that covers as much of the body as possible.
Upon arrival back in Sweden, expelled rights activist Peter Dahlin, says he is concerned about the safety of three colleagues and close friends, all of whom remain in custody in China.

Im obviously quite happy to be back, but three of my colleagues and close friends are still incarcerated without a quick solution in sight, Dahlin told Swedish Radio. Dahlin did not specify their names and also voiced his gratitude to the Swedish Embassys for their help in his case.

After being held for three-weeks, the 35-year-old says his girlfriend has been released with no allegations against her while he himself was released on medical and diplomatic grounds.

This means that the allegations against me remain and if I return to China I will be put on trial for this crime, he added.

Dahlin was arrested on January 3 and accused by the Chinese government of operating an unlicensed rights group in China to endanger the countrys national security and interfere in its sensitive legal cases.

Prior to his arrest, Dahlin was co-founder of the non-governmental organization Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, which says it was established in 2009 to promote the development of the rule of law and human rights through training and the support of public interest litigation in China.

Unexpected release

Until his colleagues are released, they remain a hostage to Dahlins freedom to speak, which will make it harder to interpret the cases significance, according to Jerome Cohen, professor of law at New York University.

Cohen, in a blog post Tuesday, argued Dahlins unexpected release and preferable treatment mostly reflected his cooperation in detention via a televised confession on the state-run CCTV last Tuesday.

On his TV appearance, Dahlin admitted the alleged wrongdoings of his group, which he said had paid and supported Chinese rights lawyers Wang Quanzhang and activist Xin Qingxian, the latter of whom brought the son of detained rights lawyer Wang Yu across international borders.

David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kongs China Media Project, however, calls Chinas public spectacles of shaming political bullying -- a form of punishment and ritual humiliation for the victims, and a powerful way for the party state to communicate which behaviors it finds unacceptable.

Ultimately, the aim is to crush dissent and the supposed crimes are of middling importance relative to the act of submission itself, the researcher added.

Still room for NGOs to operate in China

Simon Chang, associate professor of politics at National Taiwan University, agrees, saying China has made its point clear that Dahlin and his other peers from foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have crossed a red line.

The red line apparently has been drawn tighter along with tightened policies. That has a direct impact on [foreign] NGOs in the political [service] field, in particular, with relation to human rights issues, Chang said.

It also sends a warning to NGOs in other fields that: dont you come meddling in our sensitive affairs, he said.

The professor added that China recognizes the role NGOs play in public governance, which it believes complements the states declining ruling capacity. Yet, he said, authorities adopt a hard line when it comes to sources which they see may undermine the Communist Partys legitimacy and trigger social unrest.

Thus, there is still room for NGOs to operate in China although some that are unregistered will be treading in risky waters, he said.

Earlier estimates by Tsinghua University showed that there were more than three million NGOs operating in China, of which only 15% were officially registered. The number of foreign NGOs was estimated to be around 10,000.

Sarah Brooks, East Asia program manager of the International Service for Human Rights, said Dahlins case showcases the long arm of China, whose influence now appears to have extended beyond its borders after neighboring countries such as Thailand assisted in the arrests of Chinese dissidents.

You see the willingness of the Chinese public security apparatus to really disregard borders, in terms of implementing their mandate to uphold the will of the party, Brooks said.



She said such intimidation, however, will only end up hurting Chinas own development of civil rights, be it labor rights or education for migrate workers and financially-challenged children.

Policies and laws, and frankly, outright intimidation that prevent NGOs from organizing or human rights defenders from doing their work undermines the very effort to realize the rights that the country claims to preference, the Geneva-based manager concludes.
France's justice minister stepped down Wednesday after objecting to a government move to revoke citizenship from convicted French-born terrorists if they have a second nationality.



The Elysee Palace announced in a statement that President Francois Hollande accepted Christiane Taubira's resignation, just ahead of a Cabinet meeting, and hours before a Parliament commission debate on the citizenship bill.



She is being replaced by Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a lawmaker who is considered a specialist on security issues within the Socialist Party and a close associate of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Taubira had friction in the past with with center-leaning Valls.



Taubira, a politician from French Guiana on the Caribbean coast, has been an advocate for women and minorities in French politics.

Divisive issue

The citizenship bill introduced after Paris attacks on November 13, 2015, which killed 130 and wounded more than 350 people, is popular among conservatives and the far right politicians but is especially divisive for the governing Socialists.



Polls show that most French support the bill, but opponents fear it would unfairly target Muslims. Some compare it to the revocation of citizenship of French Jews during World War II.



Taubira was scheduled to travel Wednesday to the United States, where she was to meet with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and members of Black Lives Matter. She also was to receive an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Abortion rights proponents are cheering and abortion foes are fuming over a grand jurys decision in Houston on Monday to indict two videographers who conducted a covert investigation of a Planned Parenthood clinic that was meant to show such clinics sell body parts from aborted fetuses.

The grand jury began its work two months ago after calls for an investigation of Planned Parenthoods Houston clinic, which the video producers claimed was illegally selling fetal tissue for profit.

But the grand jury found no fault with Planned Parenthood and instead brought indictments against the two people who did the surreptitious video recording, David Dalieden and Sandra Merritt.

Each was charged with a felony for tampering with a government record  in this case, allegedly using fake California driver's licenses. The grand jury also indicted Dalieden for the solicitation or sale of human organs, a misdemeanor. Grand juries rarely indict people on misdemeanor charges, and the felony charge is based on a relatively obscure statute of the Texas Penal Code.

Dalieden, who heads the California-based nonprofit Center for Medical Progress, said he and Merritt used well-established investigative journalism techniques and should be shielded by the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and press.

But in a VOA interview, legal expert Melissa Hamilton, a visiting scholar at the University of Houston, said prosecutors were likely to reject that argument.

If you are purporting to use a drivers license, which is a public record, that is beyond the pale, because there are reasons for society to want to protect the legitimacy of purported government records, she said.

Indictment reactions

Planned Parenthood spokesman Eric Ferrero hailed the indictments, accusing the videographers of having an extreme anti-abortion political agenda.

As the dust settles, he said, and the truth comes out, its become totally clear that the only people who engaged in wrongdoing are the criminals behind this fraud, and were glad theyre being held accountable.

Conservative religious leaders and politicians, however, condemned what they described as the unfair indictment of the anti-abortion video makers. A statement from the Texas Right to Life organization said, When a grand jury indicts the very people who report a crime, rather than indicting the criminals, something goes clearly wrong.

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott said the Houston grand jury decision would have no effect on a state investigation into Planned Parenthoods practices, which he described as ongoing.

Hamilton said the law used to indict the two anti-abortion activists is rarely used, but she said prosecutors most likely would go forward with the case, which she said would continue to draw news media attention.

She said, In the public eye, this case will continue to remain an issue, not because of these particular odd charges, but because the underlying issue is abortion rights.

Divisive issue

The political divide between anti-abortion groups and reproductive rights groups has existed for many years. A womans right to an abortion was affirmed in the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade in 1973, but debates about what states can do to regulate and control abortion have continued.

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not put undue restrictions on abortion clinics to effectively curtail their operations. But some states have continued to use regulations to limit the availability of abortion facilities.

Texas, for example, drew nationwide attention in 2013 with a law that requires abortion clinics to meet standards that would result in the closing of all but 10 abortion facilities in the second most populated state in the country.

The Supreme Court has blocked implementation of some parts of that law and is scheduled to rule on a challenge to the law in June, just before the two major political parties hold their national conventions and the last phase of the presidential election season begins.

The abortion issue entered the presidential campaign debates last July when the videos shot in Houston and at other clinics around the country were first shown.

Republican candidates condemned what they saw as horrible practices carried out at abortion clinics and the alleged illegal sale of fetal organs and tissue, while Democrats attacked the videos for using graphic images to incite audiences and for editing tricks that provided a fraudulent view of Planned Parenthoods practices.

Abortion has not dominated recent debates, but that could change, depending partly on the Supreme Court decision in June, and on news generated by the indictments in Houston; lawsuits filed against the video producers by Planned Parenthood in San Francisco; and results from the ongoing abortion clinic investigations in Texas and other states.
2015 was a year of increasing repression across much of Africa, according to the annual report from Human Rights Watch.

The U.S.-based rights group says many African governments, especially in East and Central Africa, imposed new restrictions or pressure on opponents, journalists and rights activists, often to meet electoral goals.

It says the worst situation was in Burundi, where government security forces killed scores of demonstrators protesting President Pierre Nkurunziza's decision to run for a third term.

"The government's relentless crackdown forced most of Burundi's independent journalists and human rights defenders to flee the country due to repeated death threats, threats of prosecution on trumped-up charges, and beatings," the rights group said.

It says Ugandan authorities increased threats on journalists and radio stations ahead of elections this February, and Rwanda's government severely restricted free speech while promoting new laws that allow President Paul Kagame to stay in office until 2034.

The report says other countries, including Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, ignored calls to reform "draconian" laws and policies meant to suppress any potential opposition.

Human Rights Watch also accused the Sudanese military of using rape as a weapon of war in the Darfur region.

It said Somalia's government is still unable to provide basic security in the areas under its control, as al-Shabab militants continue to attack both government and civilian targets.

The group said another trend was "the failure of multiple governments to respond to serious allegations of unlawful killings, torture, sexual assault and other violations." It said South Sudan's government typified the trend, showing no accountability for the massive atrocities committed during the country's 26-month civil war.
World governments have been using the politics of fear to crush dissent, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).



In its 2016 World Report on human rights in 90 countries and regions around the world, HRW says authoritarian governments that fear peaceful dissent did everything they could to hold their peoples in a tight fist last year.



What we've noticed over the last year in particular is that the autocrats of the world, the authoritarian governments are running scared in the face of civil society, said Kenneth Roth, HRW Executive Director at a press conference in Istanbul.



HRW said societies have been empowered by social media on their mobile phones. This technological tool has allowed civic groups to mobilize large groups of people to protest in countries where organizing individuals would otherwise be impossible due to human rights violations like censorship in media.



The organization warns that the Russian and Chinese governments are imposing the biggest crackdown in recent history.



Both [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping have made an implicit pact with their people. They say we will give you increasing prosperity; you let us govern without any real accountability. And that deal has worked for leaders while the economy improved. But now that the economy is in trouble those leaders are terrified that their people will begin to protest, said Roth.



The Chinese government is accused of using anti-terror law to crush the creation of rights groups in the country. Russia has made it harder for civic groups to exist when they receive foreign funding. Both nations deny the claims. Beijing argues it is running a lawful country. Moscow says it wont allow foreign interference in internal affairs.

Atrocities in Syria



With peace talks to end the conflict in Syria set to start this Friday in Geneva, Roth said HRW worries the diplomatic process wont tackle the atrocities in a country, where hundreds of thousands have been killed during almost five years of conflict.



Secretary [of State John] Kerry and his allies are going about the Geneva talks backwards. They seem to have the view that using Kerry's diplomatic prowess that he can simply knock heads in Geneva and arrive at some kind of accord for Syria without addressing the atrocities taking place on the ground, that they will end the war first and the atrocities will come later, said Roth.

Refugee Crisis Stirs Up Islamophobia



The Syrian conflict created one of the biggest influx of refugees into Europe since World War II. HRW is concerned some European political parties are using the wave to promote Islamophobia. It also says the emphasis on a potential threat by refugees is distracting European nations from really combating terrorism.



The issue in our view has been the chaos, the disorganized nature of the refugee flow. That chaos has given rise to a sense that Europe has lost control of its borders. That has given rise to fears of terrorism, that ISIS would slip operatives into the refugee flow, said Roth.



Terrorism Fears Lead to Privacy Abuse



In the U.S., HRW notes that the terrorism threat is being used by lawmakers in the United States to try to reverse restrictions on intelligence agencies' mass surveillance capabilities. Something that, according to the organization, undermines privacy rights.



In the United Kingdom and France, authorities are also seeking broader monitoring powers. HRW argues these measures havent decreased the risk of terrorist acts.



A number of recent attacks in Europe, the perpetrators were known to law enforcement authorities, but the police were too overwhelmed to follow up, suggesting that whats needed is not more mass data but more capacity to pursue targeted leads, said HRW.



Abuses in Latin America



Jose Miguel Vivanco, Director of Human Rights Watch Americas Division, told VOA deep abuses happened in that region in 2015. Cuba has been one of the biggest human rights violators for more than half a century now in Latin America. And while the U.S. and Cuba reestablished diplomatic relations, Vivanco said not much has changed.



So far, the record of Cuba is exactly the same. What we need here is pressure coming from democratic governments in Latin America as well as Europe and other regions of the world now that nobody could argue that the Obama administration is implementing and promoting a policy of isolation, said Vivanco.



Also of concern: Mexicos drug cartels and corruption, the possibility of impunity for FARC members in the peace process with the Colombian government and abuses by the Venezuelan government.
International Criminal Court (ICC) judges have authorized an investigation into allegations that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed during the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict.



A three-judge panel at the Hague-based court on Wednesday gave prosecutor Fatou Bensouda approval to investigate crimes allegedly committed in and around the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia in August 2008, by rebels possibly backed by Russian forces, as well as by Georgian forces.



The ICC said in a statement that the alleged crimes included crimes against humanity, such as murder, forcible transfer of population and persecution, and war crimes, such as attacks against the civilian population, willful killing, intentionally directing attacks against peacekeepers, destruction of property and pillaging allegedly committed in the context of an international armed conflict."



This is the first such ICC inquiry outside of Africa and the second time an ICC prosecutor has attempted to examine the possibility that war crimes were committed during the brief conflict between Russia and Georgia. In 2010, then-ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo looked into the allegations, and both Georgian and Russian officials briefed the ICC about the events surrounding the 2008 war.



Bensouda submitted her request to open an investigation into the Georgia situation last October.

On August 7, 2008, Georgia's then-president Mikheil Saakashvili, who was backed by the West, ordered an offensive to reclaim South Ossetia. Russian forces quickly reacted, entering Georgias territory. After winning the war, Russia officially recognized both South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, as independent states.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, several hundred people are believed to have died in the conflict, and more than 138,000 were temporarily displaced.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in France Wednesday - the first official visit of an Iranian president there since 1999. Rouhani flew in from Italy where he closed business deals worth $18.5 billion. He is expected to do likewise in France.

The visits come after the sanctions were lifted from the Islamic Republic as part of an agreement with six major powers limiting Iran's nuclear development.

Hes back in business. Thats the bottom line," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist of First Standard Financial company. "So hes going to sell whatever he can. Certainly Europe is the place for him to be and also in emerging markets, more so than the United States.

A charm offensive! declared Iranian expert Richard Nephew, former State Department official and now program director at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. He told VOA that a primary objective of Rouhanis presidency is to restore Irans normal ties with the rest of the world.

But Nephew is suspicious of the trade deals Iran has made: oil to China, gas to Italy, a purchase of more than 100 Airbus planes from France.

Lets see what these trade deals result in. Its one thing to announce a deal with China for $600 billion. Well see what that generates, he said.

Nephew cited previous deals in Africa, where up until now not a single penny was transacted.

Help for ordinary Iranians

Does the lifting of sanctions uplift and aid the Iranian population?

"It might not," Nephew says. "This is a billion dollar question and a lot of Iranians, as I understand, have fairly mixed expectations with a lot of hope that things will turn around but the general glum demeanor is maybe well get something, but it will be a long time and a big effort to trust people who control the economy.'

He added: I think ultimately if trade deals allow for the growth of new industry in Iran, the automotive industry , for example, you will see unemployment go down, youll see a general improvement in the quality of life for the Iranians.

The nuclear deal between Iran and the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany broke a 12- year international standoff, during which Iran was accused of developing nuclear capacity for military purposes and hit with serious economic sanctions. After an agreement was signed in July 2015 to destroy Iran's existing nuclear materials and ultimately dismantle much if its nuclear program, the sanctions were lifted earlier this month.

With the sanctions lifted, Iran was free to sell itself to the world.

De-isolating Iran

According to Columbias Nephew, Rouhanis trip this week to Italy, his trip to France, is all part of the strategy to get Iran out of international isolation.

In Italy, Rouhani met with Pope Francis in the Vatican. The pontiff talked about terrorism, and said that Iran has a role to play in bringing peace to the Middle East. According to Nephew, the most significant role the Iranians can play is halting support for terrorist groups and the use of violence for political ends.

Rouhani also made time for some sightseeing, like visiting the Roman Colosseum and the Capitoline Museums. Museum officials covered up classical Roman statues of nude human beings by building boxes around them. It was done, according to officials, to avoid offending the Iranian president.

Rouhani did request it, but he thanked those responsible for wanting to put their guests at ease.
They endured snow and cold. A few hundred protesters turned out here in Hungary's capital in a show of opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment by Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his governing Fidesz party.

Hungarys combative Orban  a politician who has become a pariah to the European left  wants new emergency powers for the government, allowing it during a state of terror to restrict communications and the media, suspend the right of assembly, shutter the borders and impose curfews for 60 days.

"The plan would put an end to democracy once and for all," protest organizer and former socialist government minister Lajos Bokros warned the crowd Sunday outside parliament as the protesters stamped their feet to keep out the frost.

Anti-government protests are a fixture on most weekends in Budapest these days, much as they were in London in the 1980s during the era of late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, another politician who was determined to shake things up and challenge establishment as well as liberal beliefs.

As far as the Hungarian and European left are concerned, the "state of terror" proposal, scheduled for debate next month by lawmakers in the Fidesz-dominated legislature, is just one more black mark against Orban.

He is winning converts among other right-wing central European populists to his hard-line anti-migrant stance and applause from them for his frequent goading of Brussels. His rejection of more European political integration isnt helping to appease the European left.

Orbans actions denounced

Since his reelection in 2010, critics have roundly denounced Orban for what they see as a dismantling of democratic checks and balances. He has been described both in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe as an autocrat and xenophobe and dubbed a Hungarian Mussolini.

Politico, an American and European news site, has labeled him "Europes Next Dictator."

His defenders say double standards are at work in the use of hyperbolic epithets.

They say Orbans "state of terror" amendment is not different from hard-line security measures requiring constitutional changes being sought by Frances socialist president, Francois Hollande. But unlike Orban, Hollande hasnt earned comparisons with Russias authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, or Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Foes point to a series of other actions to highlight their argument that Orban is an autocrat in the making: from government contracts and procurement tenders being steered to politically aligned businessmen to the treatment of the media. They also note his disdain for foreign-funded NGOs, especially those financed by the European Union and by Hungarian-American billionaire investor George Soros, a human rights advocate. Orban studied at Oxford University thanks to a Soros grant.

Controlling media?

The state-owned media now work as government propaganda organs, they say. And they highlight Orban media laws making it a crime  punishable by fines of up to $900,000  to publish "imbalanced news coverage" or material insulting to "public morality."

No prosecutions have been mounted under the new laws, though.

According to Tamas Bodoky, editor-in-chief of the leftist investigative news portal atlatszo.hu, Orban hasnt had to use the laws.

"It hasnt been necessary," he says, "because the pure economic superiority of the pro-government media is enough to reach a state where average people get the government propaganda."

Orban allies own most of the commercial press, he says.

"There is a huge difference with Turkey or Russia, where you can get jailed if you publish critical stories, and you can get beaten, tortured or shot. And none of this is happening in Hungary. There is political and economic pressure and smear campaigns, but they wont come here and beat me up," says Bodoky.

He says that Orban displays autocratic tendencies, and that who knows what will happen in the future.

A partys evolution

Fidesz began life in the late 1980s  in the final gasp of communism  as a small libertarian student movement. But since the 2008 financial crash, it has morphed under Orban into a populist national conservative party, even turning its back on free market economics  a move that troubles even some of his right-wing defenders. Orbans message is clear: National sovereignty is being undermined by globalization, and nation states and their traditional cultures and lifestyles are being weakened by bankers and Eurocrats.

Gerald Frost, an analyst at the Danube Institute, a center-right research institution in Budapest, says Orban is an intellectual who loves debate and relishes stirring up controversy.

"A lot of the hyperbole about him now can be traced to the deep political animosities remaining in Hungary from the communist era," he says. "There are unresolved conflicts. There has been no real reconciliation. No one was punished for any of their actions during communism."

Orban "is a fearless warrior, a politician with a lot of dexterity and a real understanding of the man in the street," Frost says, adding the politician enjoys nothing better than testing the limits and patience of EU institutions.

He did that last September, ordering a 175-kilometer-long steel and razor-wire fence to be built along the border with Serbia. Since then, he has delivered a stream of scornful condemnations of failed EU bids to bring some order to the chaos of the migrant crisis affecting the continent.

His goading of Brussels partly explains the venomous attacks unleashed on him, argues John OSullivan, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and the founder of the Danube Institute. "He is skeptical toward ideas of supranationalism and global governance that underpin the European Union itself," says OSullivan.

OSullivan argues there is a buccaneering, experimental side to Orban.

In the forward to a new collection of essays on the politician, OSullivan writes: "He is intellectually adventurous. He gets bored by having to stick to the same political line day after day. He wants to explore new ideas. He is prepared to take some risks in doing so. He likes spontaneity. He speculates in public. And, of course, he gets into trouble."

Trouble came quickly a year ago. When thinking aloud at a rally of young supporters, he announced that liberal democracy wasnt doing so well, so maybe illiberal democracy would work better. Says OSullivan, As soon as I heard that, I knew that this phrase would be hung around his neck forever.
The Islamic State group in Afghanistan has added new programming to its radio broadcasts that the Afghan government has failed to take off the air.

The IS-run FM station Voice of the Caliphate, which broadcasts from a remote mobile transmitter on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, this week added Dari broadcasts to its lineup.

Now it airs programs in Pashto and Dari, the two official languages of Afghanistan.

Voice of the Caliphate was launched last year and has been airing a message of terror in a region where IS fighters are active.

The broadcasts reach Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, as well as nearby districts bordering Pakistan.

The station has attracted a large audience in Jalalabad. Local residents say its broadcasts are different from others.

I have been listening to this radio for the last three months. It airs Quranic verses and sayings of the Holy Prophet, said Ahmadullah, 14, who joins a daily gathering of locals who listen to the IS radio.

The broadcasts, which run from 7 to 9 p.m. daily, also include anti-government and anti-Taliban propaganda, invitations to join IS, threats against government employees, interviews with IS fighters, and religious chanting in Arabic, Pashto and Dari.

I have seen a few people who  I dont know if they were joking or serious  who said if the radio keeps broadcasting, they would join IS, Abdul Rahman, a civil society activist in Jalalabad, told VOA.

'They keep moving'

At first, Afghan officials said they would shut down the IS broadcasts and claimed success. However, the provincial government now admits it has failed to hunt down the IS broadcasters.

They keep moving from one area to another. They are not staying in one place. Thats the reason we have failed to take it off air, Attaullah Khogyani, the Nangarhar governors spokesperson, told VOA.

That does not please residents who fear ISs spreading influence.

The government should have stopped the radio, but it is unfortunate the government has failed in doing its job, said activist Rahman.

IS has vowed that NATO and Afghan forces will not able to shut down Voice of the Caliphate."

Nangarhar has recently seen an increasing presence of IS fighters, who have launched multiple attacks on Afghan security forces in several districts.

In an interview with VOAs Afghan service this week, U.S. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said IS has become a threat to Afghanistan.

IS will be very hard to beat. They are growing not only in Afghanistan, but in Libya, Egypt and numerous other countries, McCain said. We dont have a strategy that I believe will stop the growth of IS in Afghanistan.
The United States and China agreed Wednesday to work together to ensure that North Korea ends its nuclear-weapons program, but high-level talks in Beijing indicated the two sides disagree on whether and what sort of sanctions to use against Pyongyang following its underground nuclear test three weeks ago.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, meeting with China's foreign minister in Beijing, stressed the North Korean issue is a high priority for Washington.

The United States will take all necessary steps to protect our people and allies, Kerry said at a news conference after his talks with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.

Kerry and Wang Yi met for more than five hours Wednesday - much longer than scheduled. Wang said China supports a new U.N. resolution opposing Pyongyangs nuclear program, and will discuss possible sanctions. However, he added, any international action against the North should not provoke new tensions.

Kerry called for strong and united U.N. action against North Korea's nuclear tests, and noted, "this is a threat the United States must take extremely seriously."

He noted that Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons, has been the target of more sanctions than North Korea has been, despite its defiance of international condemnation of its nuclear activities.



We dont want to heighten security tensions, Kerry said, "but we won't talk away from any options." He apparently was referring to possible deployment of a missile-defense system in South Korea. The South's president, Park Geun-hye, said after North Korea's nuclear test three weeks ago that she would consider accepting the U.S. defense system.



WATCH: Kerry Meets with Xi in Beijing

Meeting with Xi



After his firm talk about North Korea and sanctions, Kerry met later Wednesday with President Xi Jinping, who spoke warmly about his visit to the United States last year.

Speaking through an interpreter in the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese president said: "Generally speaking, when China and the United States work together we can make good things happen ... for both sides, and that contributes to peace, prosperity and stability in the world."

"The Chinese side is prepared to work with the U.S. side" on many issues, Xi said, "and I am prepared to work with President [Barack] Obama to make efforts to advance a new model of major-country relationship between China and the United States, based on no conflict and no confrontation, 'win-win' cooperation and mutual respect.



Kerry left China later for a return flight to the United States, heading for Washington via a refueling stop in Alaska.

China-North Korea relationship



On the question of China's relationship with North Korea, analysts say Beijing sometimes appears hesitant to impose additional penalties on Pyongyang, because of the two countries' competing interests.



"For China, the challenge is balancing the need to punish North Korea with their concerns about stability in North Korea. So, they want to push but they don't want to push too hard," said Scott Snyder, a Korean studies analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.



U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who traveled to Asia ahead of Kerry, has been discussing the North Korean situation with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.



Blinken said they stand firmly united "in strongly condemning this test, and in our determination, to impose costs for the DPRK's (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) flaunting of its international obligations."

South China Sea



In addition to North Korea, Kerry and Wang said they also discussed the thorny issue of competing territorial claims in the South China Sea. Regional tensions have flared recently over the overlapping claims of China and its Asia-Pacific neighbors, including Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines. The latest incident to aggravate the dispute came when China tested a runway on one of its artificial islands in the sea - structures Chinese crews created by dredging enough material onto tidal reefs to erect permanent structures.



Kerry flew to Beijing Tuesday from Cambodia, where he held meetings on human rights issues and bilateral trade possibilities. He also visited Laos earlier this week.
A committee of key Syrian opposition groups is expected to decide Wednesday whether to participate in U.N.-brokered peace talks in Geneva.

U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura sent out invitations to the negotiations on Tuesday, but did not disclose who was on the list.

The High Negotiations Committee contends it should be the sole opposition delegation, and while members have signaled a positive leaning toward the talks, their final decision is due after more discussion Wednesday.

Several other opposition figures who are not a part of the committee have said they were also invited, including Haytham Manna, a prominent opposition figure who is co-chair of the political wing of a Kurdish-Arab alliance.

Manna on Wednesday criticized the exclusion of some Kurdish and Arab leaders and said he hoped organizers hear those concerns and form a "strong and representative delegation."

"I'll go with my friends or not," he said. "There is no compromise in this question."

Democratic Union Party (PYD) not invited

Syria's most powerful Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), said it had not been invited. Russia wants to include the Syrian Kurds at the talks, but Turkey remains adamantly opposed to their participation.

Turkey considers the PYD and its armed wing to be an offshoot of the banned Kurdistan Worker's party (PKK), which has waged a bloody, three-decade fight against the Turkish government for autonomy in mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Tuesday that the talks "cannot achieve the results we want, a definitive political resolution in Syria," if the Syrian Kurds are excluded from the talks.

More than 260,000 people have been killed in Syria since the civil war began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

At a news conference, the top Russian diplomat said Moscow has not asked Assad to step down and has not offered him political asylum.

Putin's response

Russian President Vladimir Putin had hinted in an interview earlier this month that taking in Assad would be no problem.

Lavrov said that Russia's four-month air campaign backing Assad has helped "turn the tide" in Syria, where the government has been battling rebels for nearly five years and, more recently, the Islamic State group as well.

Western nations have criticized Russia's military operation in Syria, saying it focuses on the rebels in an attempt to prop up Assad, and not on Islamic State, which a U.S.-led coalition has been targeting with an aerial bombardment.

The violence continued Tuesday with a double suicide bombing in the western city of Homs that state media said killed at least 22 people and wounded more than 100 others. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

Making gains

Russia appears to be hardening its position on Syria, as it backed government forces making gains against rebels before the peace talks start.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the Syrian Army, with the help of Russian airstrikes, seized control overnight of a strategic rebel-held town near the border with Jordan.

Syrian opposition groups had signaled they would not participate in talks unless the Russian and Syrian airstrikes were halted and sieges against towns were lifted.

Lavrov said Russias air support had drastically altered the situation in Syria and helped narrow the area controlled by terrorists.

He added, Moreover, we also got a clear picture of who is fighting the terrorists and who is acting in the role of their accomplices, trying to use them in their own egotistic, one-sided goals.

Russia began accusing Turkey of supporting terrorists in Syria after a Turkish warplane shot down a Russian bomber in November along the Turkish-Syrian border. Ankara denies the accusation.

Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State and other terrorist groups in the region.

Russia labels all the rebel groups fighting Assad as terrorists and is accused by Assad opponents of targeting rebels instead of Islamic State terrorists. Russia is accused of having killed hundreds of civilians in its air campaign, while Moscow claims no civilians have been killed.

Moscow-based political scientist Victor Mizin said the differences between the sides vying for control of Syria are stark.

"The rivalries and the divergences in approaches are quite visible. And, I think that ... it is quite evident that they would be also visible in the coming negotiations," Mizin said.
Fighting fires is always a challenge and often carries with it the risk of injury or death. In Sierra Leone, the challenges are even greater because of a lack of equipment and, often, water.

Abulai Ibrahim Koroma suffered a head injury while fighting a fire over the Christmas holiday. He said he ended up paying for some of his treatment, because Sierra Leone firefighters have minimal insurance coverage.

The medication they give us is just first aid treatment," he said. "It doesnt help us recover our health.

His story is typical among members of Sierra Leone's firefighting corps. Firefighters also lack basic gear such as breathing equipment, and there are limited numbers of helmets and pairs of boots.

Alhaji Saccoh, an American firefighter originally from Sierra Leone, visited a fire station in his homeland last month, and he donated more than $50,000 worth of gear, including helmets and coats. He said more was needed to help his fellow firefighters.

"Its passion," Saccoh said. "I have to do something.  I want to give back to home.

The capital, Freetown, has only two operating fire hydrants, and neither is near the fire station, said Sylvester Mtaluva, deputy fire chief. He said it can take more than 30 minutes to get to a hydrant in heavy traffic.

M'taluva also said that when a crew gets to a hydrant, there's another concern: "Normally, not all the hydrants have water.

Longtime problem

The entire country has struggled with a water shortage for decades. The Guma Dam, the main source of water in Freetown, was built decades ago when the city had a population of only a few thousand people. Today, the city has a population of 1.2 million, and demand has far outstripped the water supply.

The government said it has been trying to address the issues firefighters are facing. Joseph Bandabla Dauda, Sierra Leone's minister of internal affairs, said five new firetrucks will be coming soon from China. Others were recently donated from Germany.

Dauda said firefighters are now being asked to let the water companies know when there is a fire. "When they are promptly informed about an area where fire incidents have occurred, then they can divert water supply to that area and make the hydrant there operational, he said.

The hydrant would be closed again once the fire is out.

Dauda said water companies also have large, mobile water tanks that they can bring to fires until a better solution is found.

As for insurance for firefighters, Dauda admitted that improvement was needed but said the government had not received any complaints about firefighters having to pay their own medical bills after recent fires and injuries.
Law enforcement officials had surrounded the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday after a violent confrontation the day before with protesters who had been occupying the wildlife refuge in the northwestern state of Oregon for nearly a month.

U.S. authorities on Tuesday killed one protester and arrested eight others who had been demanding that control of the federal land be turned over to local officials.

Harney County Sheriff David Ward told reporters he was disappointed that the confrontation "ended badly" with the shooting, saying, "It didn't have to happen."

Ward and other authorities vowed to end the siege peacefully at the refuge, where one demonstration leader said another five or six people remain.

Protest leader Ammon Bundy and several of his followers were headed to a community event away from the refuge headquarters Tuesday when the shooting occurred as police stopped their vehicle at a checkpoint. Bundy was among those arrested, with a rancher from the southwestern state of Arizona, Robert Finicum, killed during the confrontation.

Authorities said those arrested will face charges they conspired to impede U.S. authorities from carrying out their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

For much of the time since the standoff started in early January, law enforcement officials have kept a low profile near the refuge, mindful of protests in years past that sometimes ended in large-scale violence.

The protesters originally took over the Malheur refuge to protest the jailing of two local ranchers who were convicted of arson. But the Malheur protest continued even after the ranchers were imprisoned peacefully.

Some residents near the refuge had called for authorities to end the protest. They said that they, too, oppose federal control of the remote lands, but also objected to the refuge takeover. Some of the protesters who seized the site came from other states.

Bundy and his brother Ryan, who also was arrested, are the sons of anti-government Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. The elder Bundy was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The refuge standoff began Jan. 2 when Ammon Bundy led a group of supporters in seizing the site. They complained about the way the federal government manages the land it owns and called for transferring it to local control.
A senior Libyan official is appealing to the international community not to tie humanitarian aid to his countrys political process. He warns the health needs of the Libyan people cannot wait until a government of national unity is formed.

Libya has been in a perpetual state of war since its people took up arms in 2011 to oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Libyas health minister, Reida El Oakley, warns his countrys health system is near collapse. He says up to 70 percent of the hospitals are shut down or dysfunctional.

El Oakley says 80 percent of Libyas highly skilled medical staff was composed of foreign expatriates who left the country. He says the economy is in shambles because Libya is exporting very little oil, once its main money-earner. He says people are unable to obtain the health services they desperately need because of the lack of money.

El Oakley says the international community is reluctant to provide humanitarian aid to Libya because the countrys two competing administrations cannot agree on a government of national unity. He tells VOA this linkage is hurting Libyas health system and the poor patients who cannot receive treatment for their illnesses.

I think the international community, including the U.N., should divorce humanitarian need of Libyan people away from any political dialogue," he said. "Anything short of that, I would consider to be a crimeA similar thing is happening in Syria today where people are dying of hunger simply awaiting a conclusion of a political dialogue.

Vulnerable Population

The World Health Organization reports nearly half of Libyas population of 6.3 million is vulnerable and in need of humanitarian assistance. Of this number, it says 1.9 million are in need of health services.

The WHO representative in Libya, Jaffar Hussain, says most of these people are unable to get even the most basic primary health care. He says the international community cannot afford to ignore their difficult circumstances.

Complacency would lead to much more serious consequences, and we will end up with massive outbreaks. We will end up with mortality and morbidity rates rising exponentially and we will end up compromising the health and the future of the people of Libya, if we do not act now, he said.

WHO reports Libya is at increased risk of communicable diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV-AIDS as a result of large numbers of migrants, many from sub-Saharan Africa, and a collapsed surveillance system.
In Kosovos capital, Pristina, the name Clinton is ubiquitous.

Bill Clinton Boulevard bisects the city, on which a 10-foot effigy of the former U.S. president, and a giant billboard depicting his smiling face stand. Some Kosovars have even named their sons Klinton.

But it is not just Bill who is beloved here. Hillary, too, has been honored with two clothing stores that bear her name.

From outside the shops, several bald, expressionless mannequins wearing outfits inspired by the former first lady can be seen in the display windows. Step inside, and the desire for Hillary to succeed in the presidential primary elections and caucuses  which begin next week  and become the next leader of the United States in early 2017 is unquestionable.

That woman is an idol for us, explained Elda Morina, manager of Hillary Boutique 2 as she proudly showed off photos she took with Clinton, who visited Pristina in 2012. Morina is convinced her compatriots would back Clinton if they could take part in the upcoming elections, because of the name. The surname for us has very, very big meaning.

Bill Clinton's support



Kosovos reverence largely stems from the support Bill Clinton provided the territory during its war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in 1999. At the time, the country consisted of present-day Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo.

US-led NATO bombing ended a campaign of killing by Serbian forces against Kosovos ethnic Albanian majority, which eventually led to Kosovo declaring its independence from Serbia in 2008.

Belgrade still refuses to recognize the Kosovars sovereignty. But during her trip to Pristina five years ago as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said the issue was not debatable. For me, my family and my fellow Americans this is more than a foreign policy issue, she affirmed. It is personal.

Moria said such statements are why many in Europes newest state would like to see Clinton in the White House. Kosovo is not the priority for her but if there was instability here, we would need her, she insisted. Like always, Clintons provide good support.

Regional tensions remain



While it is generally believed serious instability in Kosovos near future is unlikely, ongoing tensions in the region mean the possibility cannot be ruled out.

Lura Limani, editor-in-chief of English language newspaper Prishtina Insight, agreed American support would be important in any future altercation, but believes it would be provided regardless of who is elected president later this year.

The US foreign policy towards Kosovo, or as we like to see it, towards Albanians, has been consistent throughout the twentieth century, Limani highlighted, so in that sense I dont think any sort of election in the U.S. can really change much. And I dont think that that has happened in the past. After Clinton, Bush as well was very popular here."

George W. Bush was one of the first world leaders to recognize Kosovos independence. As a reward, he too had a Pristina street named after him.

Interest in US presidential race



Limani said Kosovars will be closely following this years presidential race.

They dont follow because they think theres going to be a foreign policy change, she explained. Like most other countries they follow it because the U.S. is a world power and it can change the world in general.

We are among the most pro-American people all over the world, proclaimed Afrim Hoti, Head of the Political Science Department at Pristina University. Everyone here is interested in the American elections as they see America as the biggest ally and a partner. Everyone is looking at the US as a friendly country, but not as Republicans or Democrats.

'Ideal model' of democracy

Hoti also said Kosovars look towards the United States  especially at election time  as an ideal model of democracy, as they try to build a strong democratic state of their own  a task proving to be difficult.

Kosovo is experiencing its worst political crisis since declaring independence.

Thousands took to the streets of Pristina earlier this month to denounce the countrys elected officials, eventually setting fire to the governments headquarters. Since October, opposition members of parliament have attacked the chamber with tear gas nearly half a dozen times to protest an EU-brokered deal that provides Serbian-majority municipalities with more autonomy.

Were at a very critical point, admitted Hoti, and I see no progress unless we organize new elections. The government has to go again to the citizens and gather legitimacy.

The opposition has vowed to continue protesting until the government resigns. However, as there are no signs the current administration will acquiesce, it appears the only elections Kosovars will be witnessing any time soon are those in the U.S.

Back at Hillary Boutique 2, Morina finally admitted, no matter who wins in the U.S., its okay. Whats best for America is best for us. She then began to laugh. But personally, those I know want Clinton. And I hope I will have the opportunity to visit her in the White House.
Wednesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 71st anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp in southern Poland. About 1.5 million men, women and children  mostly Jewish, but also Roma, Russians and Poles  were killed by the Nazis there during World War II.

At Auschwitz, dozens of Holocaust survivors lit candles and placed wreaths at a wall, where many prisoners were executed, before attending a ceremony with the presidents of Poland and Croatia.

Ceremonies and observations were also held in Germany and Serbia, among other countries.

In Washington, President Barack Obama will join Jewish leaders for a ceremony at the Israeli Embassy, where four people who risked their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust will be honored posthumously with the Righteous Among the Nations medals.

Righteous Among the Nations is an official title awarded by Yad Vashem, a Jerusalem-based Holocaust education and research center, on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

This will be the first time the ceremony is being held in the United States. Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., said Obama's participation "will be a worthy tribute to the worthiest among us."

Americans Roddie Edmonds of Tennessee and Lois Gunden of Goshen, Indiana, will be honored, along with Polish citizens Walery and Maryla Zbijewski of Warsaw.

Master Sergeant Edmonds participated in the landing of U.S. forces in Europe and was taken prisoner by the Germans. When the Germans ordered all Jewish prisoners of war to report, Edmonds defied the order by figuring out how to keep the Jewish POWs from being singled out for persecution.

Gunden, a French teacher, established a children's home in southern France that became a safe haven for children, including Jewish children she helped smuggle out of a nearby internment camp. She protected the children when French police showed up at the home.

The Zbijewskis hid a Jewish child in their Warsaw home until the girl's mother could take her back.

Israel marks its own Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year will be held May 4. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
The Obama administration has unveiled new actions it says will ensure that low-income children who are at higher risk of food insecurity and poor nutrition get the food they need to grow, learn and succeed in America.



Each year nearly 22 million low-income children in the U.S. get free or reduced-price meals at school. For many of them, that is the best and sometimes the only meal they will get. Only a fraction of those children get the food benefit when school is out of session during the summer months.



On Wednesday, the Obama administration announced its 2017 budget will include $12 billion over 10 years to help reduce child hunger year round.



The plan includes the establishment of a permanent Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (EBT) program. It will provide supplemental food benefits during the summer months to low-income children who qualify for free or reduced price school meals.



The Summer EBT benefits will be provided on an electronic debit card that can only be used for food at the grocery store, filling the food budget gap in the summer, according to the White House.



The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted Summer EBT pilot programs that it found significantly reduce food insecurity among children, said the administration.



The budget item would have to be approved by the Republican-led Congress, which has pushed to cede more authority to states to combat poverty and hunger. Republican leaders also have argued that federal assistance programs are fraught with waste and fraud.



Also Wednesday, the Agriculture Department unveiled a pilot program to help more low-income children access meals through the National School Lunch Program. It calls for allowing states to use Medicaid information to automatically link low-income children to school lunch programs, making the process of certifying students for the nutritional programs far less cumbersome.



The White House also said the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has played a key role in reducing poverty and food insecurity among low-income families.



SNAP and other nutrition programs, like school meals, make a real and measurable difference in the lives of children and their families, and provide a stronger future for the entire country," said the White House.



During a panel discussion Wednesday on reducing child hunger, Dr. Adam Drewnowski, head of the University of Washingtons Nutritional Sciences Program, said low-income families often must eat cheaper, less nutritious foods.



First of all you have overt hurt, but you also have a more persistent and chronic hidden hunger with the lower-income groups really deficient in some nutrients, he said.



SNAP and modest increases in food assistance will nudge the population a bit more away from the energy dense foods which are nutrient poor toward more foods of higher nutritional value, Drewnowski added.
U.S. military forces are on the ground in Libya looking for potential partners in what could soon be an expanded campaign against the Islamic State (IS) terror group.

"There have been some U.S. forces in Libya trying to establish contact with forces on the ground," Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters Wednesday. Get a better sense of who the players are, who might be worthy of U.S. support and support from some of our partners going forward.

Cook described the U.S. contingent as a small group, adding they were in Libya "at the concurrence of Libyan officials.

While not the biggest fighting force in Libya, IS has been growing stronger there in recent months, cementing its hold on the city of Sirte and surrounding areas.

Growing threat in Libya

A U.S. official familiar with the intelligence recently told VOA about 500 key IS officials and fighters who left Syria and Iraq during the last several weeks of 2015 and moved to Libya in what appeared to be a calculated move.

Western officials estimate IS may now have upwards of 5,000 fighters in Libya.

This is a situation that does cause us concern, and were considering what our options might be going forward should that threat, ISIL, become an even bigger threat, Cook said, using an acronym for the terror group.

Cooks comments come just days after the top U.S. military officer warned the Islamic State in Libya posed a pressing regional threat.

You want to take decisive military action to check ISIL's expansion and at the same time you want to do it in such a way that's supportive of a long-term political process," Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a small group of reporters Friday.

"My perspective is we need to do more," Dunford added, saying key decisions about U.S. involvement in Libya could come within a matter of weeks.

The U.S. has already shown a willingness to strike IS in Libya, killing Abu Nabil, believed to have been the top IS leader in Libya, in an airstrike this past November.

Training ground

Islamic State has long used Libya as a training ground for fighters destined for Syria and Iraq, but increasingly it has become part of the terror groups expansion plans.

It now is a destination, Levantine Group security analyst Michael Horowitz said. The local branches of ISIS have spared no efforts to promote Libya as a land for jihad.

Like in Syria and Iraq, the terror group has taken advantage of large tracts of ungoverned spaces as well as political turmoil.

The current fragmentation between and within rival Libyan political camps is also helping ISIS to grow by eroding trust and legitimacy in Libyan politics and politicians as a whole amongst a large swath of the Libyan population, especially the youth, according to Jason Pack, a researcher of Middle Eastern History at Cambridge University and president of Libya-Analysis.com.

Despite the presence of U.S. special forces on the ground in Libya, the Pentagon rejected the notion of sending traditional U.S. forces, or boots on the ground, to Libya.

"Right now, that's not something that's under consideration," said spokesman Cook.
Japan's royal couple arrived in the Philippines Wednesday for a historic five-day visit marking six decades of formal diplomatic ties between the two nations.

President Benigno Aquino greeted Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko with a red carpet ceremony at Malacanang Palace, the official presidential residence, complete with a traditional honor guard and gun salute.

Outside the palace, several hundred people rallied to demand justice for women forced into sexual slavery by women by Japanese forces during the war.

Aquino and Emperor Akihito held talks at the palace before attending a ceremony at the country's largest war cemetery to honor those who died during Japan's occupation of the Philippines.

Tens of thousands Filipino soldiers died marching to Japanese concentration camps or during confinement.

Later, at a state banquet the emperor recalled the fierce battles between Japanese and American forces in the Philippines that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Filipinos.

"Last year Japan marked the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II," Emperor Akihito said.

"During this war, fierce battles between Japan and the United States took place on Philippine soil, resulting in the loss of many Filipino lives and leaving many Filipinos injured. This is something we Japanese must never forget and we intend to keep this engraved in our hearts throughout our visit."

The visit, the first by a sitting Japanese emperor and empress to the Philippines, symbolizes the deepening ties between the Pacific island nations that took root years after Japan's brutal occupation of the Philippines during World War II. More than one million people died during the occupation, including hundreds of thousands killed as U.S. and Philippine forces battled the Japanese to retake control of Manila in 1945.
An outbreak of a fever similar to the Ebola virus has Nigeria on edge.

Lassa fever has sickened at least 57 people and killed 34 since it broke out in Nigeria late last year. The disease is transmitted by rats, and in its later stages shares symptoms with Ebola, which killed over 11,000 people in West Africa after it broke out in 2013. Eight people died from Ebola in Nigeria.

Lassa fever, which is named after a town in Nigerias northeastern Borno State, sickens people who come into contact with rat excrement. Symptoms in the early stage include headache and fever, while in later stages people can bleed from their mouth and other orifices.

The fever broke out in parts of the countrys north, before spreading south to the commercial capital Lagos and to Edo and Akwa Ibom states in the Niger Delta.

Hassan Garba, a hospital director in the northern city of Bauchi, blamed the transportation of crops for the spread of the disease.

When youre moving food material like grains from the north to the south or the east or to the west of the country, you most probably may be moving with rats who can hide among shipments," said Garba.

Thats led to a run on supplies of rat poison in cities across the north. In Kaduna, Adamu Abubakar said he wasnt taking any chances at home.

This fever brought by rat, so that is why Im rushing to the market and Ill buy rat medicine in order to kill all the rat that is in my house, said Abubakar.

Merchant Odundele Benga said his supplies of the poison were exhausted.

People are rushing the rat poison now. I dont even have enough to sell, said Benga.

But the director of the Kaduna state ministry of health Ado Zakari Mohammed warned people to be cautious with the poison, which is deadly to humans.
A new report lists Somalia, North Korea and Afghanistan as the most highly corrupt nations on Earth.

Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index on Wednesday, relying on what it calls expert opinion from around the world to measure perceived levels of public sector corruption.

Low scores mean more corruption, and the report gave Somalia and North Korea an eight, while putting Afghanistan at 11.

No country scored a perfect 100, but a few came close, with Denmark at 91, and Finland and Sweden each at 90.

'Blight' across globe

Jose Ugaz, chair of Transparency International, said the report shows corruption is still a "blight" across the globe.

"But 2015 was also a year when people again took to the streets to protest corruption," he said. "People across the globe sent a strong signal to those in power: It is time to tackle grand corruption."

Transparency International said more than 6 billion people -- the vast majority of the global population -- are living in countries "with a serious corruption problem."

'Serious corruption problem'

The worst performing region is sub-Saharan Africa. Botswana ranks as one of the better countries in the world with a 63, but the report says most of those countries have a "serious corruption problem."

"In many countries, including low scorers Angola, Burundi and Uganda, we're seeing a failure to prosecute corrupt public officials on the one hand, and intimidation of citizens who speak out against corruption on the other," the report says. It calls on governments to make sure the rule of law applies to everyone.

Among the most corrupt nations are countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are dealing with the battle against the Islamic State group and persistent political instability.

Islamic State fighters seized large areas in Iraq and Syria in mid-2014 and have managed to remain in control of major cities despite international military efforts. The report gives Iraq a 16 and Syria an 18 in terms of public corruption.

"The rise of ISIS and the ensuing fight against terrorism have been used by many governments as an excuse to crack down on civil liberties and civil society," Transparency International says, using an acronym for the militant group. "Far from helping, such an approach means that entrenched corrupt networks go unchallenged, often serving as yet further financial fodder for terrorism."

Elsewhere in the region, the report scored Libya at 16, Jordan at 53 and noted improvements in Saudi Arabia, particularly with the expanded inclusion of women in politics, giving the country a 52 on the index.

European rankings

In Europe, Transparency International cited concerns about harsh restrictions on civil society and free media in low-scoring countries Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan.

It also expressed worry about "marked deterioration" in Hungary, Macedonia, Spain and Turkey, saying each once had hope for positive change but now has growing corruption and shrinking democracy.

The region has some of the least corrupt nations in the world, but the report says even leaders Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway have had major corruption cases in the past year.

Asia, the report says, is a region united by corruption, yet shows little sign of taking action against it.

"From campaign pledges to media coverage to civil society reforms, corruption dominates discussion."

Japan easily tops Asian nations with a score of 75, while the index gives China a 37, 35 for the Philippines and 21 for both Cambodia and Myanmar.

Transparency International says countries in the Americas need systemic reform, especially when it comes to making judiciaries free from political influence. It also calls for better regional cooperation to prevent corrupt individuals from hiding in another country.

Canada at 83 is the region's top scorer, with the United States close behind at 76. Uruguay and Chile also score as some of the least corrupt nations, while Haiti and Venezuela rank near the bottom with scores of 17.
South Sudan rebel leader Riek Machar is taking his campaign against President Salva Kiirs plan to create 28 states to the African Union Thursday.

Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, secretary for foreign affairs of the SPLM-in Opposition, said Machar will attend the African Union summit in Addis Ababa from January 28-31 to urge the African leaders who are guarantors of the August peace agreement to tell President Salva Kiir to drop his creation of 28 states.

We wanted to make sure that the peace is implemented. We will be engaging with many leaders in Africa, especially the guarantors of the peace agreement. So most of the key guarantors of the peace agreement will be in the AU summit, and we will be engaging them to make sure that they pressure President Salva [Kiir] to revoke his creation of 28 states because the agreement is talking about 10 states only, not 28, Gatkuoth said.

Creation of new states

In a decree in October, Kirr announced the creation of 28 new states, up from the 10 previous ones.

Kiir said his decision was guided by South Sudans Transitional Constitution. He also said one purpose of the new states is to decentralize power, placing resources closer to the rural population while at the same time reducing the size of the national government.

Rebels leaders have said the division of South Sudan into 28 states will bring about more community unrest because it takes away land from one tribal group and gives it to another.

Machar, a vice president-designate in the country's soon-to-be formed national unity government, returned from the Ugandan capital, Kampala, Tuesday where he urged Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to tell the South Sudanese president to scrap his 28 states decision because it is hindering implementation of the peace agreement.

Seeking new chapter

Gatkuoth said Machar told the Ugandan leader that the rebels wanted to start a new chapter of peace and friendship, and also asked Museveni to continue to play the important role he has been playing in the peace process.

You know, if it is not because of President Museveni, Salva Kiir would not have signed the [August peace] agreement. If you recall, [President] Salva signed the agreement nine days after Dr. Riek Machar signed agreement in Addis Ababa, Gatkuoth said.

Museveni sent Ugandan troops to South Sudan at the start of the conflict. Withdrawal of the troops had been a key demand of the rebels during negotiations to end the conflict.

A panel of U.N. experts Tuesday released a report calling on the Security Council to impose sanctions on both Machar and Kiir for their roles in the countrys civil war.

Gatkuoth said Machar had no role in the violence cited in the UN report.

You definitely need to know that when the war started Dr. Riek was running for his life. He was almost killed, more than 11 ambushes on the way. Myself, I was captured and arrested, taken to court and tried accused of making a coup. But at the end the court of Salva Kiir acquitted us, declaring that there was no coup. So, Dr. Machar had no role in instigating this violence, Gatkuoth said.
You may have suspected it. Now, new research backs it up: The Internet is helping to raise the rancor level in American political discourse.

In a new study, political science researchers say that access to broadband Internet has increased peoples hostility to those in the opposing party.

Its a small effect. But according to the authors, its contributing to an angry election season.

The study, published in the American Journal of Political Science, used public opinion surveys from 2004 and 2008, as access to broadband Internet was growing. The surveys asked people to rate how much they liked and trusted presidential candidates from their own party and the opposite party. They compared those figures with measures of Internet access.

Polarized

Those with broadband were slightly more polarized  they disliked their opponents a little more than those without broadband.

The effect is only about a 1- or 2-point increase in polarization, and polarization in that time period increased about 15 points or so, said study co-author Yph Lelkes, a political communication professor at the University of Amsterdam. So, its not a huge effect. But it is part of the story.

The World Wide Web offers a nearly limitless variety of news and opinions. But research shows that people mostly seek out information they agree with.

What people can end up with are endless opportunities to hear only voices that are similar to themselves, Lelkes said. If you only hear your own side, you become more polarized.

Lelkes acknowledged that the study uses an imprecise measure. However, he added, I think the fact that we found anything despite the bluntness of the instrument and the potential countervailing forces speaks to the strength of this effect.

Small effect

While theres always a risk in this kind of analysis that something else is causing the correlation, Temple University political science professor Kevin Arceneaux said the results fit with what his research is finding. The influence of partisan news media is not one of necessarily persuading people to support their side, he said. Its preaching to the choir and pushing people on the other side even further into their corner.

Its important not to overstate the impact, Arceneaux said. People who seek out political news are probably already sort of ideological. Theres only so much further you can move them.

And most people actually avoid political news, he added.

When you add it all up, though, we do believe that it has some effect. Likely a small effect.

Social media may be increasing the effect. Even if we dont seek it out, partisan news leaks into our lives through Facebook and Twitter. Thats an area Arceneaux and his colleagues are studying now.
The U.S. State Department has expressed disappointment at Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's plan to travel to Taiping island, saying such action does not contribute to the peaceful resolution of disputes in the South China Sea.



President Ma Ying-jeou has every right to make his position clear on the South China Sea. We just disagree with this particular action. We view it, frankly, as raising tensions, said deputy spokesperson Mark Toner on Wednesday.



Taiwan has claimed sovereignty over Taiping island since 1946. While not addressing whether Taiwan would be invited to be part of diplomatic conversations on disputes in the South China Sea, Toner said the U.S. will continue to listen to their concerns and reflect their concerns in the various fora that address this issue.

Mas office says the president will travel to Taiping island Thursday to meet with Taiwanese military personnel stationed there ahead of the Lunar New Year.

The island is in a resource-rich area at the center of territorial disputes between China and its Asia-Pacific neighbors.

Taiping is one of many islands located in the Spratly archipelago, which are claimed by Beijing and Taipei, as well as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.

Taiwan has completed a major upgrade of its facilities on Taiping, including a new lighthouse and an expanded airstrip and port. The expansion is an apparent counterweight to Chinas aggressive construction projects throughout the Spratlys.

Mas visit to Taiping is taking place just days after Tsai Ing-wen, head of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, led her party to a landslide win in recent elections.

Ma's office said the president invited his successor to accompany him to Taiping, but the DPP said it had no plans to do so.

Former president Chen Shui-bian of the DPP visited Taiping in 2008.

Taiwan and mainland China split in 1949, when the ruling Nationalists fled to the island after losing the civil war to Chinas communist forces.

Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province, and has threatened to invade the island if it ever declares its independence.
Thailands northeastern economy, among the poorest in the country, is looking to expand trade with neighboring Laos and business in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) as it recovers from a two-year recession.

The downturn was triggered by an end of populist programs heralded by the former government of Yingluck Shinawatra. The May 2014 coup ended her almost three year administration and brought an end to programs led by a rice price pledging scheme.

Under the program, farmers were paid at rates some 50 percent above the global market before the effort collapsed, costing Thai taxpayers more than $14 billion and leaving farmers across the region deeply in debt.

While the good times lasted, funds triggered a boom in retail and commercial investment and spending. Major department stores sprang up in towns such as Ubon Ratchathani and Udon Thani.

But now retailers report sluggish sales and the Thai central bank warns of growing indebtedness among farmers as rice prices fall to their lowest in six years.

Agriculture accounts for some 20 percent of the regions economy, followed by trade. Household incomes in the Northeast are the lowest in Thailand, at close to $550 a month, well short of the nearly $1,200 earned per month in the Bangkok region.

Border trade

But Athikarn Ringcharoen, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Amnat Charoen province, bordering Laos, said the local economy was starting to pick up although still below levels of two years ago.

Athikarn said government policy support and increased cross border trade with Laos, was helping the recovery. He added that despite the poor state of the global economy, the provincial outlook was OK.

Infrastructure spending is also set to come to the aid of the region.

Athikarn said plans to upgrade a Royal Thai Airforce airstrip to a regional airport less than 30 kilometers from Amnat Charoen town were also welcome.

Long term infrastructure set to benefit the region includes the $10 billion China-Thai 870 kilometer rail-line from Nong Khai, bordering with Laos, to Bangkok. On the horizon is the Japan-Thailand rail-line from Tak province, bordering Myanmar, to Mukdahan, bordering Laos.

Ubon Ratchathani University political scientist, Titipol Phakdeewanich, said cross border trade ties have helped eased the downturn.

Many businesses are now more open to customers from Laos. If you go to different malls  they have signs in Lao [language] and when the market is more connected  to some extent  it helps to provide a cushion to the local economy. So the local economy in the area I dont think its entirely dependent on the global market, said Phakdeewanich.

Government spending

The military governments economic czar, Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak, has announced spending of over $970 million in projects directed to 70,000 villages nationwide.

Analysts say the program mirrors similar initiatives under previous governments of so-called village funds to boost rural consumption.

The Federation of Thai Industries, while welcoming the programs, say more measures are needed to ensure growth is sustained.

The Federation warns the rural sector remains vulnerable to falling commodity prices that may impact some 30 million people in the farm sector  almost half the national population.
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, in its 2016 annual report, has warned of a rise in the politics of fear in Turkey, with the countrys leaders driving an attack on rights. The report was released in Turkey, a country that Human Rights Watch says has seen a marked decline in the respect for human rights and a steady drift toward authoritarianism.

The massive annual report focused on more than 90 countries, while examining global themes and threats to rights. It cited the politics of fear and the crushing of civil society, as threats.

HRWs senior Turkey researcher Emma Sinclair Webb says since Novembers general election victory of President Recep Tayyip Erdogans AK Party, there has been an alarming decline in rights in Turkey.

All the developments of the last months show that Turkey is on the trajectory towards authoritarianism. Basically, Erdogan and the AKP want to get rid of all the checks on the power of the executive. Most shattering of all has been the breakdown of the peace process with the Kurds and the crackdown on the media; plus the lack of an independent judiciary, spell dark times ahead for Turkey, says Sinclair Webb.

Turkish prosecutors Wednesday announced they are seeking life imprisonment for editor Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul of Turkeys Cumhuriyet newspaper for publishing a story accusing government of supplying arms to jihadist fighting in Syria.

EU accused of turning blind eye

In its report, HRW warned the European Union against ignoring the rights situation in Turkey in exchange for cooperation stemming the mass refugee migration to Europe. The report highlighted the Syrian conflict and resulting refugee crisis.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, says fear drove many of the worlds most worrying developments.

Fear of being killed or tortured or starved to death drove millions from their homes from Syria. Fears of what that massive influx would mean for their societies led many in Europe to raise the gates. Fear of terrorism led governments to compromise rights and to scapegoat the refugees and indeed to fuel a rise in Islamophobia that has been unprecedented in recent years, Roth said.

Roth claimed also the fear by the worlds autocrats of being held to account by their own people is driving a crackdown on rights. In Turkey this week, prosecutors opened a case against a mainstream TV news station for quoting an opposition leader accusing President Erdogan of being a dictator.
Turkish prosecutors are seeking life prison terms for two prominent journalists who have been jailed on terror and espionage charges for their reports on alleged government arms smuggling to Syrian rebels, their newspaper said Wednesday amid growing concern for media freedom in Turkey.

The state-run Anadolu Agency said an indictment, prepared by Istanbul's deputy chief prosecutor and submitted to court for approval, accuses the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, Can Dundar, and the paper's Ankara representative, Erdem Gul, of collaborating with a movement led by a U.S.-based Islamic cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's top foe. The indictment accuses the two of working with the movement to create the image that the government was aiding terror groups and to cripple's its ability to rule.

Cumhuriyet, a center-left opposition newspaper, in May published what it said were images of Turkish trucks carrying ammunition to Syrian militants. The images reportedly date back to January 2014, when local authorities searched Syria-bound trucks, touching off a standoff with Turkish intelligence officials.

The paper said the images proved that Turkey was smuggling arms to Islamist rebels. The government initially denied the trucks were carrying arms, maintaining that the cargo consisted of humanitarian aid. Some officials later suggested the trucks were carrying arms or ammunition destined to Turkmen kinsmen in Syria.

The government has accused the journalists of helping the moderate Islamic movement led by Fethullah Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Government officials accuse Gulen's supporters of stopping the trucks as part of an alleged plot to bring down the government. The government has branded the movement a terror organization,'' although it is not known to have been engaged in any acts of violence.

Detained since November

The journalists were investigated after Erdogan said he would not let Dundar get away with it and filed a criminal complaint. Dundar and Gul were detained in November, heightening concerns over conditions for journalists in Turkey.

Last week, visiting U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called on Turkey to protect freedom of expression and met with Dundar's wife, among other people, in a show of support for journalists facing prosecution.

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday defended the two journalists.

We are absolutely clear that Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, in publishing the stories on that subject, were doing their job as journalists and no more than that,'' said HRW senior Turkey researcher Emma Sinclair-Webb. People have an interest and a right to scrutinize the conduct of their governments.''

Also Wednesday, representatives of major media freedom advocacy groups traveled to Silivri prison on the outskirts of Istanbul, where Dundar and Gul are imprisoned, to call for their release. They also denounced Turkish authorities' denial of permission to visit the two.
A U.N. panel is asking the Security Council to set up an inquiry into alleged violations of international law by all sides in Yemen.

The experts say in a new report, obtained by media outlets Tuesday, that the Saudi-led coalition carrying out airstrikes on Houthi rebels launched 119 sorties that may have broken humanitarian laws. The report says many of those airstrikes hit civilian targets, including refugee camps, weddings, schools, markets and residential neighborhoods.

They say there were at least three incidents of civilians being chased by helicopters whose occupants were shooting at them.

Their report also describes tactics that constitute the prohibited use of starvation as a method of warfare.

Not a single humanitarian pause to alleviate the suffering of the Yemeni people has been fully observed by any Yemeni party or by the coalition, the report says.

The experts were not allowed on the ground in Yemen and relied on satellite images and other sources.

U.N. experts say more than 82 percent of the Yemeni population is in dire need of food and medical care.

The Saudi-led coalition, backed by Yemeni and Arab ground forces, is fighting to push out the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control the capital, Sanaa.

The war has killed more than 5,800 people, many of them civilians. U.N. efforts to put together a lasting cease-fire have failed.

The internationally recognized Yemeni government recently returned from exile in Saudi Arabia to set up shop in the port city of Aden.
The United Nations on Wednesday launched an appeal for $393 million in humanitarian assistance to conflict-torn Afghanistan this year to meet the acute life-saving needs of millions of vulnerable people across the country.

Mark Bowden, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator, said Wednesday support related to food, health care, nutrition, safe water and sanitation will reach an estimated 3.5 million people under the 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) for Afghanistan.

Bowden spoke while launching the appeal together with Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah in Kabul.

Bowden said he anticipated an increase in conflict-driven humanitarian needs.

"It is now one of the worlds most long-running, protracted humanitarian crises, in which conflicts remain the main driver of humanitarian needs," he said.

"Last year, violence led to more than 300,000 people fleeing their homes for safety. Thats a 160 percent increase over the year before. This year we estimate that a quarter of a million people will flee their homes due to armed conflict, Bowden added.

Taliban attacks

There has been no let up in Taliban attacks in Afghanistan over the past year and the insurgency's advances have sparked concerns of increased bloodshed when the traditional spring fighting season begins in April.

Bowden said Afghanistan is currently hosting an estimated 40,000 refugee families from neighboring Pakistan who fled the counterinsurgency army operations in the Pakistani border areas.

Moreover, the powerful earthquake that struck the northeastern province of Badakhshan in October left an estimated 130,000 people in need of humanitarian assistance, in a country prone to natural disasters, he said.

Donor nations

Chief Executive Abdullah said the government is hopeful donor nations will match commitments of previous years to assist and support the needs of the Afghan community.

Addressing Wednesday's event, German Ambassador to Afghanistan Markus Potzel warned, It is essential that the most vulnerable Afghans receive appropriate life-saving assistance, quickly. If their needs are not met, Afghans will choose to migrate out of their country as a last resort."

Afghanistan is one of the worlds poorest countries, with high levels of poverty, a lack of livelihood and income generating opportunities, chronic health problems, and poor infrastructure contributing to its humanitarian challenges.
The United States has called on Thai authorities to look into reports that a Chinese editor disappeared in Thailand after fleeing China where he was pressured into being a government informant.



A State Department official who asked not to be named told VOA Tuesday that the U.S. is aware of reports that Li Xin, who was opinion editor for the website edition of the liberal-leaning newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily, has disappeared in Thailand.

We urge Thai authorities to investigate this disappearance and provide any information they may have of Mr. Li's whereabouts to his family, the U.S. official said.



Li was traveling across Thailand earlier this month seeking political refuge.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Li told international media last November he fled China after being forced to work for years as an informant for the State Security Department on the activities of intellectuals, non-government organizations and rights activists.

A spokesman for the Thai government could not be reached on Tuesday.



The U.S. State Department has expressed concern about reports that Chinese journalists are under pressure from authorities.

"We will not be silent when human rights are violated," said Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel last week.



Li Xins wife, He Fangmei, said Thai police refused to discuss his disappearance and asked her to contact the Chinese Embassy in Thailand.



Thailand and China are kicking the ball back and forth, she told VOAs Mandarin service on Sunday. She said her husband fled China because he did not want to be forced to be an informant.



The Chinese government insists it protects the rights of Chinese citizens and respects media freedom.
China watchers are closely observing this weeks political leadership transition in Vietnam, and its implications for future Sino-Vietnamese ties, as the country's Communist Party holds its 12th national congress.

Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung effectively withdrew from the contest to become the Communist Party general secretary after being excluded from an official list of candidates for positions in the Central Committee.

His pro-Beijing rival, Nguyen Phu Trong, was re-elected Wednesday to a second five-year term as general secretary -- the top position in Vietnam's leadership -- according to the official Vietnam News Agency.

Sino-Vietnam relations

Some analysts say this years election process revealed the importance of Sino-Vietnam relations.

The so-called pro-Beijing leaders will come to rule the country, and I think that will be a good sign, from a Chinese perspective," said Xiaohe Cheng, a professor of international relations at Chinas Renmin University.

Other analysts say the election reveals Chinas strong hand in the region, and its pressure on its neighbor.

Members of Vietnams General Assembly visited Beijing in December, where some suspect China voiced its concerns about the governments ties with the U.S.

Dung enacted a set of economic reforms during his decade-long tenure that has helped Vietnam attract a slew of new foreign investment. He was perceived as a supporter of closer ties with the U.S., witnessed by Vietnam recently signing the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact.

While rival Trong has pushed for improved relations with Beijing.

The leadership transition comes at a sensitive time for relations between the two countries.

South China Sea

Last week, Vietnam said China had placed an oil rig in disputed waters of the South China Sea, a move that may have been intended as a warning to Vietnam during the national congress meetings.

A Chinese rig in waters claimed by Vietnam sparked mass protests in 2014. This year, protesters have been mostly silent, and days before the meeting of Vietnams national congress, the countrys military staged a mass exercise in Hanoi.

Carl Thayer, professor emeritas at Australias National Defense Academy, said suppression of voices critical of China is likely to increase after the leadership transition.

So it is to be as inoffensive as possible towards China. To wear Chinese encroachments of Vietnams sovereignty, and protests, in the hopes that the bonds of socialism or Marxist-Leninism that unite the two countries mean that Vietnam will be out of the heat," Thayer said.

Vietnam is one of the last remaining Communist countries in the world, and its ties to China waver between closer relations sought for ideological and economic reasons, and fear of Chinas potential encroachment of Vietnams political and territorial sovereignty.

'Relations need to improve'

I think its currently clear that Chinese-Vietnamese relations need to improve," said Wang Dong, a professor of International Relations at Peking University.

"I think this consensus will be maintained. I think this is very important. And, also, Chinese leaders and Vietnamese leaders share that despite the fact that there are some differences between the two countries regarding the territorial dispute, they also both agree they  share many more common interests," Wang said.

But while this weeks political transition in Vietnam may improve relations with China, territorial disputes continue to ratchet up tensions across Asia.

Vietnam recently announced it will allow India to set up a satellite tracking center in southern Vietnam that will provide it with access to overhead images of the South China Sea.
It has been an uneasy year since Kobani, a border town in northern Syria, was liberated from the Islamic State group.

The liberation of the city was hailed as the first successful case of cooperation between the Western coalition, whose fierce airstrikes helped drive IS from the city, and Kurdish fighters, who pushed IS militants out on the ground.

But the slow recovery also shows how difficult it will be for cities in Iraq and Syria to return to normal life after they have been occupied and controlled by IS.

The air assault and four months of fierce fighting left the town of nearly 300,000 inhabitants in ruins.

Returning refugees came back with determination to rebuild even though most of the city's homes  as many as 80 percent -- were in ruins.

Living in a tent was a humiliation, a still fearful resident who spent months in a refugee camp in Turkey told VOA. I chose to come back, despite knowing life would be tougher here.

Soon after the liberation, a local commission was formed to help rebuild Kobani. In July, an international conference was held at the European Union offices in Brussels to discuss the rebuilding of Kobani and ways to aid the city.

Officials, however, complain that assistance from international donors has yet to be delivered.

"Unfortunately no government or international body has so far stepped in to help us in our efforts, said Choman Kaanani, who heads the engineers association in Kobani.

Most [of the help] we receive is from non-governmental organizations and private Kurdish citizens. But this not enough to rebuild Kobani, he said.

The private donations from organizations in the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world have made a difference in securing basic needs.

Until now we have actually restored up to 80 percent of electricity in Kobani, Hawzhin Azizi, a member of the Kobani Reconstruction Commission, told VOA. We have also built two large bakeries to supply bread to much of the city.

Inadequate services have hindered the return of many refugees to their homes. An estimated 50,000 people - 15 percent of the pre-war population - have made it back home

Refugees are unhappy with the slow pace of the rebuilding process.

I dont know how long this will take. My children have not been in school since we fled Kobani, said Jamal Hamid, a father of four children, in a telephone interview with VOA.

Living in a refugee camp across the border in Turkey, Hamid said his return to Kobani might take longer than what he and his family expected.

Even if we decide to go back [to Kobani], there will be no place for us to stay  much less for my children to be able to go back to school, he said.

Further complicating matters is the fact that the only border crossing between Kobani and Turkey has been shut for the past three months. This has halted many ongoing projects in the city, local officials say.

The border shutdown has also affected the lives of ordinary people in Kobani, who heavily rely on goods coming from Turkey. Consequently, prices of food staples and other products have skyrocketed.

Locals say they now get most of their food staples from other Kurdish areas where agricultural products are relatively abundant. But this is risky, as IS militants control some areas between the various Kurdish regions in Syria.

On the security front, Kurdish forces have maintained a strong grip on the city.

Save for an attack in June 2015 in which more than 50 civilians were killed by IS militants who infiltrated the city, Kurds have largely been able to keep IS at bay.

Kurdish officials are encouraging more refugees to return.

Daesh [IS] is no longer a stronger force. They have lost a lot of ground to our [Kurdish] forces... the threat to Kobani no longer exists, said Ismat Sheikh Hasan, head of the defense commission in Kobanis regional administration.

Now its time for the free world to help us rebuild the city the same way they helped us liberate [it] from those [IS] thugs, Hasan said.
The World Health Organization says there has been a sharp increase in smoking by school-age children in Zimbabwe, despite the illegality of selling tobacco products to children. The findings are part of WHOs Global Youths Tobacco Survey, released Wednesday. Sebastian Mhofu reports from Harare.

The World Health Organization report released Wednesday in Harare revealed that 20 percent of adolescents in Zimbabwe are consumers of tobacco products. The Global Youth Tobacco Survey in Zimbabwe targeted youths between 13 and 17 years old. It was funded by the United States Center for Diseases Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization. The WHO's Dr. Anderson Chimusoro urged the government to increase public awareness of the health issue.

The main worry is that this is almost equivalent to the results that we have in the health and demographic survey which show that 22 percent of adults population is estimated to be using tobacco products," said Chimusoro. "I have a number of issues that we think as WHO the country can take on board to help us in this issue. We propose that the government should promote and strengthen awareness on tobacco control issues including in schools.

Laws not enforced



The survey revealed that some youth smoke while on school premises. In Zimbabwe, smoking and selling tobacco products is prohibited among children under the age of 18.



Public health specialist Shungu Munyati, who headed the research, said President Robert Mugabes government must enforce laws on smoking if stamping out smoking among school age youth is to be achieved. But she says, since tobacco plays a role in Zimbabwes economy, it might be a problem.

It is a conflict of interest. The argument has always been that; yes we are growing tobacco, it is not for our consumption," said Munyati. "We are growing tobacco and then market and sell it out there, and have revenue for the country. But if we are growing and sending it out there [its] fine but, we also manufacture the cigarettes here. There is a market. So it is a dilemma that is faced by Zimbabwe.

Tobacco is one of the cash crops that Zimbabwes tattered economy is depending on for recovery. It contributes 8.5 percent of Zimbabwes Gross Domestic Product.
International rights watchdog, Human Rights Watch, has released its 2016 world report indicating that several Southern African Development Community member countries, including Zimbabwe, narrowed political space for voices critical of the government in the past year.

The report summarizes key human rights issues in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide.

It alleges that President Robert Mugabe consolidated his grip on power and failed to introduce any meaningful human rights reforms in 2015.

It further says those who criticized Mr. Mugabe or his government, including human rights defenders, civil society activists, political opponents, and outspoken street vendors, were harassed, threatened, or arbitrarily arrested by police and state security agents.

The report says there was no progress towards justice for past human rights violations and political violence.

Human Rights Watch senior researcher, Dewa Mavhinga, told VOA Studio 7 the report reflects investigative work that human rights watch staff undertook in 2015, usually in close partnership with human rights activists in the country in focus.

Responding, Zanu-PF spokesman Simon Khaya Moyo said human rights watch must bring evidence not just criticize.
A Zimbabwean has filed a case in the Constitutional Court challenging the constitutionality of life imprisonment.

The Constitutional Court of Appeal today heard an application filed by Obediah Makoni, who was convicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 and now wants his sentence to be declared unconstitutional.



In his application, Makonis attorney Tendai Biti, told the court that sentencing a person to life in jail violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment as well as some sections of Zimbabwes constitution.



Biti said the Zimbabwean legal system did not provide for an independent review mechanism for those who would have been sentenced to life imprisonment unlike in other countries where there is a

judicial review of a prisoners case after 15 years.



But prosecutor Mike Chimombe opposed the application saying Zimbabwean law does not have a provision to review life sentences.

He said the constitutional provision for a presidential pardon was enough to cater for such review under the circumstances.

Chimombe said several prisoners, who had been jailed for life, were released following presidential pardons but this was challenged by Biti. He demanded that the state should give statistics to which the prosecutor failed.



Biti said presidential clemency alone was not enough and the president should not be given a leeway to determine how individual rights should be respected arguing that this was open to abuse.

Biti added that his client now wants to be immediately released from prison, arguing that his rights were violated through his long detention in conditions that are inhumane.

Chimombe, who said prison conditions were in a fair state, opposed Makonis application for immediate release.



Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku and his bench reserved judgment indefinitely.



Several people were sentenced to life in jail after being convicted of various offenses but Studio 7 could not establish the exact number.

Biti recently helped two women, Ruvimbo Tsopodwa and Loveness Mudzuru, to challenge the constitutionality of early child marriages. The constitutional court outlawed child marriages decreeing that any person who intends to get married should be at least 18 years of age.
How China sees Russia and the United States Beijing and Moscow are close, but not allies, by Fu Ying / NATO is killing us with this course, and does so

with the active support of our own German government, Interview with Willy Wimmer / The Russian Federations new security strategy / Demanding to end sanctions against Russia. Huge financial losses for agricultural businesses / Analysis of German intelligence agencies on the state of the union regarding the surging waves of refugees / Limiting the consequences of the finance casino in Switzerland by means of direct democracy. A transaction tax of 0.2 per cent would amount to 200 billion Swiss francs per year, Interview with Marc Chesney / Popular initiative No Food Speculation!, by Marianne Wuthrich / Unpredictable price developments with devastating impact on small farmers, Interview with Caroline Morel / From the parliamentary debate: Arguments of a high standard / Foundations increasingly set the tone in education policy, by Wolfgang van Biezen / Language- and educational policies as imperialistic power policy / Thank God we have the German-speaking Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education, by Michael Schewski / Providing orientation through history. Historical amnesia as a programme, by Carl Bossard.
Last weeks episode ended with a Grinder first: a cliffhanger! Things really seemed to be Going Down in Grinder Town. Stakes were upped and laughs were about to rain down from the heavens.

Thats not really the case, though. Exodus and Blood Is Thicker Than Justice dont come together as a two-part extravaganza; theyre more like one extra-long, pretty-good episode.

This week, most of the jokes come from the vacuum Dean has left in Stewarts life. Dean so quickly and thoroughly ingratiated himself into every part of his brothers life that nothing seems to function without him, even though Dean doesnt seem to be useful at a whole lot of things.

Without Dean to rally them, Stewarts father and co-workers arent really feeling the current prenup case. They have somehow forgotten, as Stewart points out, how they worked at a perfectly functioning law firm before Dean arrived. Stewart tries to rally them with a Dean-style Grinder speech, but everyone leaves before he really gets started.

Sorry, Stewart. Everyone chose a side, and youre the bad guy.

Meanwhile, Dean is feeling pretty rosy on his first day at the firm thats sitting across the aisle from Sanderson and Yao: Rozz & Landy.

Dean: Im looking forward to learning which one of you is Rozz and which one of you is Landy. Rozz: We didnt bring you here to learn our names, we know them.

Things are great for Dean. As Rozz and Landy told him last episode, his new firm found a loophole that allows him to speak in court. After an interaction thatd be more appropriate for awkward ex-lovers than reluctantly feuding brothers, Dean reveals this mysterious loophole: Rozz & Landy registered him as a certified legal intern, which means hes permitted to speak as long as one of his new bosses is present.

After this new development, literally everyone wants Stewart to make nice with his brother: his father, because he doesnt want his boys to fight across the courtroom; the client, who wants to settle; and even Debbie, who knows that Dean just wants Stewart to treat him like a lawyer.

So Stewart gives it a shot, visiting the Rozz & Landy office Dean has done up to look just like the one he has on the Grinder set. Before Stewart can bring up the settlement, Rozz interrupts, talking about all the people he wants Dean to meet. Stewart realizes that his brother is being used to glad-hand clients, and tells his brother as much  but Dean, of course, doesnt take kindly to that suggestion, and tears up the settlement agreement.

Their argument spills over to court the next day. Dean objects to Stewarts opening arguments (not a thing) and then tries to call his objections comments (also not a thing), and then Stewart takes the opportunity to stress how much of a lawyer Dean isnt. They bicker across the aisle for a solid minute before the judge interrupts and calls for a do-over (his actual words, which are delivered hilariously).

During the ensuing recess, Rozz tells Dean that he and Landy are going to do the lawyering, then asks Dean to take the client out for a good time. Dean soberly pieces together that hes supposed to entertain them  which is really freaking dark for this show  and decides to interrupt the reconvened trial with his own questions for the witness.

What follows is that TV thing where two characters talk about one thing, but theyre really talking about each other and the only people who buy the ruse are the people talking. You know the one. So Stewart and Dean project their feelings for each other onto their clients  yeah, this is still giving off vibes that feel way more romantic than fraternal  while Todd concludes, I think theyre talking about personal stuff.

Thus, the Brothers Sanderson are reunited, with one final twist: Dean bought property behind Stewarts house and is building his dream home right there so he can always be near his family

Lets talk about this episode a bit more, though.

The Grinder is at its best when every part of its formula is in play  the gentle family comedy, the legal hijinks, and the Hollywood satire  and it struggles when it chooses to focus on one or two of those elements. Thats not the fault of its cast, which is wonderful, but a bit homogenous. I suspect The Grinder is still missing something, a void that it tries to fill with guest stars like Timothy Olyphant. Maybe it needs a touch more of the absurd, or a bit more diversity, or additional time to flesh out each branch of the formula. Or perhaps, it could use all of the above.

Other Notes:
Fiennes and Jackson.

Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando taking a road trip together sounds kind of like it should be a sleeping-pill commercial, but the possibly real occurrence is the subject of a TV movie for Britains Sky Arts. While Stockard Channing will play Taylor and Brian Cox will play Brando, it was the choice of Joseph Fiennes as king of pop Michael Jackson that has raised eyebrows. Its a tongue-in-cheek, fun, light look at three wonderful characters that we know  Michael Jackson, Liz Taylor, and Marlon Brando  and they go on a road trip together, Fiennes told ET Canada. Some say its an urban legend, and our story basically says, If it happened, maybe it happened like this. Theyre stuck in a car for 500 miles as they drive to Pennsylvania, and we get to hear some of the shtick that goes on. Hmmm  a fun, light look, eh? Sounds about right.
Well, whaddaya know? New Girl screws around with the standard formula, and suddenly comes away with a stronger episode!

Jess has sadly been called away for jury duty  a.k.a. Zooey Deschanels maternity leave  which we learn more about thanks to a news clip on the Celebrity Chef trial and a great courtroom sketch of the annoyingly inquisitive jury. Her absence opens up space for the other characters, introducing a new dynamic between them, and the results are encouraging. All that, plus a very creepy Fred Armisen, makes for a satisfying New Girl experience.

The main story of No Girl is about Schmidts bachelor party. Nick knows that Schmidt longs to go somewhere, and, determined to do it up right, he suggests Tokyo as their bachelor destination. Winston, an unusual voice of reason in the background, keeps saying, Ha, how are we going to pay for this?! to which Nick responds, How does anybody pay for anything! You let me know when you figure that out, Nick.

There are two options: Either Nick and Schmidt invite Todd, their truly abhorrent rich college friend whose grandfather invented the springs that go inside pens, or Nick comes up with an elaborate, illegal scheme to turn the loft into a boutique hotel while theyre away. So obviously, they go with option number two, and thats why Schmidt soon finds himself peeing next to Fred Armisen. Also, its a good thing Nick actually finds renters  he already bought nonrefundable $9,000 tickets to Tokyo.

While Nick and Schmidt dedicate themselves to creating a premiere experience in a competitive marketplace (and, as Nick well knows, the reviews are everything!), Winston has a breakdown. You read that right. Winston gets a whole plot this week. All to himself. With Jess gone, Winston has no one to turn to for lady advice, so he panics after KC posts a picture of herself with another guy. He nearly turns to Jesss advice bowl, but Cece swears that she can help him handle it.

However, Ceces advice is not immediately effective. Her first impulse is to tell Winston to post his own picture with an attractive woman  of course, she happily steps into this role  and KC promptly calls Winston to break up with him. Winstons a mess, and Cece flounders trying to help him, finally offering to make him some tea  before admitting shes not quite sure how. Water and leaves, Cece! Water and leaves!

Winstons disintegration happens amidst a loft packed with boutique hotel guests. Theres a couple with a young girl, who are clearly trying to push her into show business. The kid gives Schmidt a deeply odd (and surprisingly funny) monologue featuring bits from Pacino in Scent of a Woman, Pacino in The Godfather Part II, and Rocky V. Schmidt is dismayed and confused  Of all the Rockys!?

Then, we get to the weakest and most disappointing part of No Girl. One of the guests is an Asian woman named Kumiko, who doesnt understand much English. I get that New Girl is making fun of AirBnB stereotypes. I get that Nick is pretty skeezy. But theres absolutely no need to pull from the Beautiful Asian Woman Who Speaks Very Little English well. Ditto for the dumb innuendos, like how she says the floor is wet by saying, Wet down there! Just  no. New Girl does try to pull a little reversal by revealing that Kumiko thinks Nick is a prostitute, which is funny-ish, I suppose. But its meant to be funny because it would be so much more familiar and expected if we thought she was the prostitute. Again, no. Not cool.

The nadir of Kumiko is offset, thankfully, by the lofty heights of Fred Armisen, who is glorious in this episode. Armisen plays a character named Brandon, who stays in the loft hotel to finish his novel. He begins the episode innocently enough, commenting on how bathrooms have nice echoes and accidentally spilling his drink. Brandon then reads aloud from the novel hes working on, and this scene has echoes of Taran Killams excellent bit as the train-obsessed Fred.

The love scene Brandon reads takes on a life of its own: As his electric car powered down, the first thing he saw was her virgin breasts glowing in the Alabama moonlight. She said, Which one do you want to see? The left or the right? And I said Both! And she said, No! Pick one! It is so weird, and Armisen delivers it so well. And theres a bit about a parakeet? The whole thing is great and bizarre. Also, not the first joke about seeing one breast rather than two in this episode, as Winston comments in the opening scene that hes seen only one of KCs breasts  weird choice of leitmotif, but okay, New Girl.

Eventually, Nick and Schmidt are forced to accept that LoftBnB wont be a good way to pay for Tokyo  Nick can hardly ask Kumiko to pay for her time, after their sexual encounter  and the two go groveling to Todd in the hopes that hell pay for the trip. Todd proves to be as awful as foretold, though. For some reason I honestly couldnt quite grasp, Todd feels that Nick deserves a one-nut slap. Nick is prepared for the punishment in the name of Schmidts dream bachelor trip, but Schmidt declares that enough is enough. Witnessing this heartfelt display, Todd gets weepy about his complete lack of friends, but even this pitiful show of emotion (and the choking incident that follows) is a complete sham. Great job living up to your promise as a terrible human being, Todd.

While Nick and Schmidt have the nice realization that it doesnt matter if they cant pay for Tokyo, Cece guides Winston into the discovery that what he really wants is a woman to cry over him. In spite of her better judgment, and because she promised Jess to watch out for the loft boys, Cece ends up driving to KCs house to execute Winstons plan  telling KC that Winston died, watching KC cry, and then waiting while Winston leaps out to laugh in her face. Against all odds, this is what actually happens! And the plot actually works! As it turns out, Cece realizes that KC was cheating on Winston, which makes her much less sympathetic and the prank far more enjoyable. Winston! You finally pranked someone and it worked out okay! I cant believe the writers didnt make this into a Winston finally gets a prank right! bit.

If this is what a Jess-less New Girl feels like, I am Onboard. Everyone gets more breathing space, relationships that didnt really exist are fleshed out  like Cece and Winston  and despite the Kumiko-shaped missteps, No Girl felt peppier than what weve seen so far this season. And thanks to Brandon, its not as though Jess was completely absent: In the episodes far-and-away best scene, Brandon lovingly fills Jesss shoes, very literally. Wear the stripes, Brandon. They look nice with your face and everything.
Van Zweden will take over in 2017. Photo: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images

The New York Philharmonic, facing a near-future that looks rocky even by the standards of a modern orchestra, has appointed the 55-year-old Dutch violinist and conductor Jaap van Zweden to succeed Alan Gilbert as music director next year. Its hardly an obvious choice. As music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 2008, van Zweden has been slowly ratcheting that groups reputation up from second-tier to mezzanine. The step to the New York Philharmonic is a major leap. In hiring him, the orchestra is acknowledging that the age of the celebrity conductor has passed  only the Los Angeles Philharmonics Gustavo Dudamel has anything resembling popular fame. The choice is also significant for what the orchestra didnt, or couldnt, do: hire a woman (Susanna Malkki and Marin Alsop were plausible options); go for an aged eminence of undisputed gravitas (they are in dwindling supply); pluck a young upstart (conductors mature slowly); poach a competitors exciting chief (the Boston Symphony Orchestras Andris Nelsons or the Philadelphia Orchestras Yannick Nezet-Seguin were unavailable). The Philharmonic also declined to name a conductor who has experience with two unavoidable challenges of the coming years: designing a new hall and keeping the orchestra healthy while its homeless.

Ultimately, the choice of music director depends on a collective emotional reaction and a hunch that his  or, occasionally, her  sensibility will mesh with the orchestras. In van Zwedens case, there was not much to go on. He has led the Philharmonic just four times, most recently in October, when he conducted a program that included Beethovens Fifth Symphony. That performance earned mixed reactions: The New Yorkers Alex Ross objected to van Zwedens habit of pushing for effect; the Times Zachary Woolfe wrote Ive heard [the symphony sound] grander and more propulsive, but never quite so seductive.

With his bald pate, gray perma-stubble, intense stare, and columnar build, van Zweden looks more like Hollywoods idea of an enforcer than a maestro, and he does come with a reputation for toughness: The musicians of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra complained publicly last year about his bluntness and tactics of fear. If theres any accuracy to that characterization, hell find scores of formidable sparring partners in the ranks of the New York Philharmonic.

Van Zweden came late to his current career, but only because he started his first one so early. As an 18-year-old Juilliard violin student, he received a phone call from the great conductor Bernard Haitink, asking him to return to the Netherlands as concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He remained in that job for 17 years. In van Zwedens telling, what eventually nudged him in a new direction was an odd request from Leonard Bernstein, who was conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra on tour in a newly renovated hall in Berlin. Bernstein wanted to hear the balance the way the audience did, so he handed the concertmaster his baton and told van Zweden to conduct the first movement of Mahlers First Symphony. That was pretty bad, Bernstein said afterward. Still, he had perceived a natural gift, which he encouraged the violinist to pursue.

Its too early to sense what the van Zweden era will bring musically: He has solid credentials in the biggies  Mahler, Bruckner, Brahms, and Shostakovich  but he has also championed living composers with gusto. In any case, he will almost certainly have to lead the orchestra out of its current home, David Geffen Hall, in 2019, when the renovations begin, and back again two seasons later. During that period, the Philharmonic will have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, hold on to its audience, and maintain its musical standards under adverse conditions. In Gilbert, the orchestra has had a patient institution-builder with a taste for adventure. During his tenure, the orchestra launched a biennial new music festival, struck a three-year deal with Lincoln Center to stage an opera each summer, started a collaboration with musical institutions in Shanghai, and colonized venues like the intimate new Williamsburg venue National Sawdust and the immense Park Avenue Armory for events that would once have seemed the province of BAM or experimental theater companies. Van Zweden will have to start his tenure at a dead run.
Jaap van Zweden will take over the Philharmonic in 2017. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Shortly after announcing that Jaap van Zweden would become the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, the orchestras executive director Matthew VanBesien (having a van in your name is apparently a plus when leading an orchestra so loyal to Beethoven) explained the selection committees rationale. We were very much concerned not only about the what but the how, he said. We knew that whatever he was conducting, hed be all in.

Every appointment of a music director, like every presidential election, is at least partly a reaction to the incumbent. The current leader, Alan Gilbert, is bold in his programming and judicious in his interpretations. Van Zweden promises consistently intense performances, but his artistic vision seems open to negotiation. Hiring the un-Gilbert was not the point, VanBesien says, and neither was the predictable choice of a middle-aged European strongly rooted in the romantic tradition. We started with a list of virtually every conductor alive. Jaaps fit with the orchestra, his commitment and strength, and what we felt the results would be  that trumped the other variables. Mutual passion dictated the decision more than strategy, and both parties compare the relationship to a whirlwind romance three years in the making. I met my wife, and after an hour I told her that I was going to marry her. I had the same feeling with this orchestra, van Zweden says.

That first encounter took place in 2012, when van Zweden returned to the very first piece he had ever conducted, Mahlers Symphony No. 1. It was a very moving moment, he says  one replete with connections across oceans and decades. It was Leonard Bernstein, his predecessor as New York Philharmonic music director, who first prodded van Zweden to conduct when he was concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Mahler, too, had close ties to both orchestras, as did the legendary Dutch Mahler specialist, Willem Mengelberg. Van Zweden remarks that old Amsterdam and New Amsterdam share a history that expresses itself in music. Even the word Yankees comes from putting together two Dutch names, Jan and Kees, he says.

A prodigious violinist, van Zweden spent 17 years as an orchestra member before he ever grabbed a baton, so he knows how it feels to be led. Still, empathy evidently only goes so far. The musicians of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where he has been music director since 2008, complained loudly and publicly about his high-handed and demanding behavior last year, an incident that caused some concern at the Philharmonic. We talked to him about this, VanBesien acknowledges. The orchestra ultimately decided that his was rudeness in the cause of music.

He holds himself to an incredibly high standard and expects the musicians to do so, too. The New York Philharmonic players respond to that. His motivations all emanate from creating the best artistic results, and if he can be challenging or demanding, hes the guy in the box and he has to figure out how to get those results. What the players here have seen is warmth, and an incredible respect for what they do. All of which suggests that, at least as seen from David Geffen Hall, the Dallas musicians may have gotten a browbeating they deserved.

A strong believer in the continuity of an orchestras DNA, van Zweden says that even after all these years, he still hears Bernsteins signature in the Philharmonics playing. Orchestras change personality more slowly than they change personnel. I remember being in the orchestra and a new member would come in, and it took them just a few weeks to adjust to that DNA, to the soul of the Concertgebouw. Generation by generation its staying there. Still, every music director leaves an imprint, and van Zweden said that he hoped his would be an appreciation for strong colors. I love to exaggerate sometimes the differences of paint.
The Perumbavoor MLA has been directed by the court to appear before the investigating officer on Saturday.
McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna is asking to postpone a Feb. 29 trial setting in the first Twin Peaks shootout case, saying that analysis of some evidence likely wont be completed for a year.

In a 19-page motion for continuance filed late Tuesday afternoon, Reyna asked 54th State District Judge Matt Johnson to postpone the engaging in organized criminal activity trial of Matthew Alan Clendennen, 30, a member of the Scimitars motorcycle group from Hewitt.

Clendennen was arrested the day of the shootout that left nine people dead and at least 20 others wounded.

As our Legislature has mandated, It shall be the primary duty of all prosecuting attorneys, including any special prosecutors, not to convict, but to see that justice is done,  Reynas motion says. They shall not suppress facts or secrete witnesses capable of establishing the innocence of the accused.

Several attorneys for the 106 bikers indicted Nov. 10 on identical charges, including Clendennens attorney, Clint Broden, have pushed for speedy trials for their clients.

But prosecutors have opposed such demands, saying they are not prepared for trial because evidence is still be processed by state and federal agencies.

Reynas motion cites prosecutors obligations under the Michael Morton Act, which requires full disclosure of states evidence  good and bad  to the defense.

Houston attorney Paul Looney, who pushed for a speedy trial for his client, Cody Ledbetter, a member of the Cossacks group from Waco, said at a hearing earlier this month that the trial delay is causing Ledbetter serious and long-standing harm.

Looney said Reynas office is completely missing the boat in its interpretation of the Michael Morton Act.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys are not required to postpone a trial while waiting for evidence that might come about in the future, Looney said.

If the state has provided the defense with all the evidence it currently possesses, then it is in compliance with the Morton Act and can go to trial as long as both sides realize other evidence could be forthcoming.

I dont know any judge around the state of Texas who would put up with that crap, Looney said. The DA has a right to wait as long as they want to go to the grand jury. But when they go to the grand jury, they need to be ready to give a person their trial. No one should be indicted and held in limbo. I hope the judges there wont put up with that, but it appears that they are going to. A person has the absolute right to be acquitted and then go on about their life and business. If you dont have the evidence to convict, then you just dont need to bring an indictment.

Reyna did not respond to phone messages Tuesday.

As of Jan. 14, the state has inventoried and provided to defense lawyers 189 audio files, 1,938 video files and 18,348 documents and photographs in three rounds of discovery, the motion states.

The state anticipates at least two more rounds of discovery to be issued and is waiting for testing and analysis of ballistics, including bullet and fragment comparison, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Walnut Creek, California. The earliest possible completion date for that is in March, the motion says.

Also, firearm DNA analysis sent to the ATF in Washington, D.C., is expected to take up to one year to complete, the motion says.

A tremendous amount of swabs were taken from the firearms, according to the motion.

Other evidence

Other evidence to be analyzed includes:

 Nonfirearm DNA (swabs of nonfirearm weapons and other items of tangible evidence) submitted to the Department of Public Safety lab in Waco and possibly other DPS labs  expected to take up to one year to complete.

 Cellular phones in various stages of unlocking, processing and analyzing by Cellbrite and the Waco Police Department forensic team  unknown amount of time to complete.

 Social media analysis. More than 100,000 pages of communications via social media made by defendants and suspects, ongoing analysis by multiple agencies  unknown amount of time to complete.

 Grand jury testimony. Part of the ongoing grand jury investigation will be witnesses giving grand jury testimony  undetermined amount of time based on number of witnesses and prior non-compliance with grand jury subpoenas, which may necessitate the issuance of writs of attachment to compel witnesses to appear before the grand jury.

The term of the grand jury that returned indictments against 106 bikers in November was extended through March to continue the Twin Peaks investigation.

No date for its return has been set.
Former Waco police officer Bill Biles lives in constant pain, but he knows if a bullet that lodged in his upper spine almost 20 years ago had struck him an inch higher, he wouldnt be here.

Biles, 67, soon will undergo his sixth surgery since July 16, 1996, when Kelvin Dewayne Scott shot him in the right shoulder and neck and then stood over him, aiming at his head, only to have the pistol jam as he pulled the trigger.

I am just thankful to the good Lord that I am still alive, Biles said this week. The doctor told me I was a walking miracle.

Scotts actions ended Biles 17-year career and left him disabled and in pain.

This week, Biles former law-enforcement colleagues and friends showed they havent forgotten Biles  or Scott  by quickly forming a grass-roots movement to try to block Scotts release from prison after serving half of his 40-year sentence.

Biles wife of 45 years, Marie, got a letter Saturday from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles saying Scott is under review for the first time for parole. She called Biles, who was away on family business, to let him know the news.

I think Marie was more upset than I was, Biles said. I think he still needs to serve a few more years. I am kind of a forgiving person in a way. I want to find out about what he has done while he is in prison, if he tried to better himself, got an education and is preparing himself to be a productive citizen. This first time, he needs to be denied. But if he has done those things, I dont mind him getting out and going to work. If he hasnt done any of that, my feelings are he needs to stay where he is.

Scott, who was 17 and had no prior criminal record when he shot Biles, is being held at the Ferguson unit in Midway, about 20 miles northeast of Huntsville.

Prison system spokesman Robert Hurst said details of Scotts disciplinary record or behavior while in prison are not available for public review.

In the meantime, Biles and his friends have taken to social media to encourage others to write the parole board to protest Scotts release.

It is hard to describe, Biles said of the number of replies he has gotten to his protest call in just the past few days. I am kind of overwhelmed by the response I am getting back. Facebook has helped. Back in the day, you would have to write a lot of letters and make a lot of phone calls to get a response like this. I have been very pleased.

Waco police Detective Ken Reeves, president of the Waco Police Association, put notice of Scotts parole review on the WPA website with the address for those wishing to write. The WPA also plans to circulate protest petitions that will be sent to the parole board.

I think the overall goal is to keep him in prison as long as we can, Reeves said. We know from working every day that these guys get out and they are back at it, while Bill is disabled for life. His pain never goes away, and for somebody to be able to make parole the first time for hurting an officer, it just doesnt make any sense. The punishment ought to be severe for that.

Marie Biles said she was upset by the parole board notification, even though she knew it would be coming one day.

You put it in the back of your mind and try to ignore things like that, she said. The way I feel about it is: Bill lives in constant pain. He has had a number of surgeries. This is a life sentence for him and his family. We will have to deal with the effects from this for the rest of his life.

Biles personality has changed, she said. His patience level and temper also have changed, which has affected their marriage. She said they dont go out a lot because he gets nervous quickly and cant handle being in crowds.

If Bill was given a life sentence, (Scott) should do his time, or at least the majority of it, Marie Biles said.

McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna did not return phone messages left at his office, leaving it unclear whether he intends to protest Scotts parole.

Assistant District Attorney Mark Parker, who prosecuted Scott in 1997 with former District Attorney John Segrest, responded to a Facebook post by saying that the DAs office intends to lodge a protest.

Waco attorney Russ Hunt, who represented Scott, said he thinks the jury took into account Scotts youth and lack of a criminal record in arriving at its sentence.

It is a really sad situation, Hunt said. Bill Biles is a fine man.

Biles said his injuries require him to use a cane at times and prevent him from working for extended periods of time. He is in constant pain, and his equilibrium has been affected.

I couldnt pass a field sobriety test if I wanted to, Biles joked, referring to how his balance has been affected.

The shooting

Biles, who lives in the Ross area, said he was on patrol alone when he fielded a call to investigate a domestic disturbance near Pecan Bottoms in Cameron Park. His backup was across town at another call, and he decided to go because he figured those involved in the incident would be gone, because 99 out of 100 times they are.

He saw a car pulled to the side of the road at the edge of Cameron Park. He didnt see any occupants in the car, but when he drove up, two people who had been on the ground beside the car stood up.

Earlier that day, Scott went to the nearby school where his girlfriend was attending summer school. He showed her a gun and said he had six bullets  three for her and three for him. He told her to follow him to the river, which she did, Biles said.

When she got there, Scott tried to drown her in the river. The girl broke away and ran from the bank, but Scott caught her and was assaulting her by the car when Biles arrived about 10:25 a.m.

Biles asked Scotts name. Biles suspected Scott gave him a fake name, so he asked the girl. She gave Scotts name to Biles, and Scott lunged at Biles, striking him in the head with his fist.

I saw stars and he knocked off my glasses, Biles recalled.

He saw Scott reach for a gun. As Biles reached for his, Scott shot him in the upper right chest, rendering the arm with which he was reaching for his gun useless.

He turned to seek shelter behind his patrol car, and Scott fired a second shot that missed Biles. Biles stumbled over the bicycle that Scott had been riding and Scott fired again, striking Biles in the left side of his head just below the earlobe.

The bullet severed his cervical artery and lodged in his spinal column.

An inch higher and it would have gone through my brain, Biles said. After I fell, I see him standing over me and pointing the gun at my head and it misfired. I kicked at him and missed and the next thing I know, he picked up the bicycle and rode around and stopped on my right side. I saw him turn, and he fired his last round. It missed, and he rode off.

Biles said the girl ran away after the first shot was fired. She went home, ran straight into her room and didnt tell anybody about what happened.

Biles hit his emergency button and reported he had been shot. Officers from local, state and federal agencies rushed to the scene and found Scott hiding behind a house in some bushes about 25 minutes later.

Biles sued Texas EZPawn, the store that sold the $45 .25-caliber pistol to one of Scotts relatives less than a month before Biles was shot.

Biles settled the lawsuit for $1.5 million after his attorney, Jim Dunnam, said he was prepared to prove that the sale constituted a straw sale, meaning the company knew that Scotts cousin, Jesse Ogerial Hornsby Jr., was buying the gun for the underage Scott.

Biles said he ended up with about $800,000 after his attorney got his share and he paid his insurance companys subrogation claim for reimbursement of his medical expenses.
Handwritten messages of love and support greeted retired U.S. Army Master Sgt. Marc Seal on the first few steps into his soon-to-be completed home Tuesday afternoon.

You know, it got to the point where I felt almost more comfortable on a deployment than I did back here in Texas, Seal said as he looked around his newly framed home in suburban China Spring.

I am still somewhat that way, but with this, every time I come by to visit the Waco VA, I get choked up every time I drive by.

On Tuesday, Seal saw the bones of his three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in the Lake Estates subdivision that nonprofit group Operation Finally Home prepared to gift to the U.S. Army veteran this spring.

Operation Finally Home members, Seals new neighbors and real estate contractor Sorrells & Co., staged a pre-drywall walk-through at the house  a much larger residence than the RV in Belton where he is living.

I have to pinch myself, Seal said. The master bedroom is just about the same square-foot size that I currently live in inside my RV. You can get five of my RVs into this house.

Seal, a Purple Heart disabled veteran, joined the U.S. Army in 1990 and eventually joined the Texas Army National Guard in 2001. He served four deployments overseas and was injured on three of his four deployments. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and shoulder, neck and spine injuries, among others.

Handwritten messages greeted Seal and offered thanks for his service to his country. Supporters wrote the messages on the interior studs and beams of the home. Although they eventually will be covered by drywall, the messages show the essence of why the nonprofit group and its partners built the home for Seal, said Ronnie Lyles, Operation Finally Home project manager.

We call this the Notes of Love pillar event, because people have come in and written Bible verses, Scriptures, notes of love, encouragements, thanks and to get to see Marc walk through the doors and soak it in. It makes the community come together for him, Lyles said. This is what makes a house a home, and he really does work to pay it forward and will be a big asset to this community.

Seal said he is eager to call the Waco area his home. He said the homes location will allow him to keep in close contact with his family, including five children.

I am just looking forward to having my daughter bringing over my grandkids and all the Christmas mornings here, Seal said.

Steve Sorrells, CEO and president of Sorrells & Co., walked through the home with Seal, noting the layout. Sorrells estimated that Seals home will be ready in the spring, weather permitting.
AUSTIN  Continued uncertainty over the provisions of a new state law allowing the open carry of handguns may prompt future legislative tinkering, Texas lawmakers said Tuesday.

The public is still very confused, and the more we can do to inform the public, the more they understand can I or cant I or do I or dont I, the better it is for everyone, state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said at a hearing of the Senate State Affairs Committee.

The heard heard testimony on the law from law enforcement, business owners, gun safety advocates and Second Amendment rights groups.

The open carry law took effect New Years Day, allowing roughly 826,000 handgun license holders to carry their weapons openly in a hip or shoulder holster.

There have been no major incidents related to the law reported to date. But local officials and business owners are still struggling to interpret some of the laws requirements.

State Sen. Joan Huffman, the Houston Republican who leads the committee, said she called for Tuesdays hearing to lay it all out there so there is an understanding that there is confusion.

Whether police officers can ask those visibly carrying guns to present their permits is among the areas of uncertainty.

So far, it has largely fallen to individual district attorneys and police chiefs to determine proper procedure under the law.

Justin Wood, a prosecutor with the Harris County District Attorneys Office, told the panel that local officials had interpreted the law to allow police officers to ask for a license while engaged in a consensual conversation with someone carrying a handgun.

If the person refused, Wood said, that might then constitute probable cause for the officer to check if the person was unlawfully carrying the firearm.

State Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, was troubled by that approach.

Simply the presence of the weapon is not a reason to believe it is unlawful, he said. There comes a point at which this feels like harassment.

Senators also heard concerns about a requirement that businesses give effective notice in oral or written communication to customers if they prohibit firearms.

Some people have taken that provision to mean they must be verbally told by a business that they are not permitted to carry their firearms, said Al Flores, the general counsel for two Tex-Mex restaurant chains in the Houston area.

Were finding that the first line of defense is often that host who greets that open carry holder, he said. Thats already an intimidating situation  let alone having someone having a few drinks and having a bartender or server say, We can no longer serve you. That presents a confrontational scenario that we are trying to avoid.

As the panel concluded, Huffman asked senators to continue collecting information from their constituents so that lawmakers could prepare to make any little tweaks to the measure during the 2017 legislative session.
The weaknesses in chemical safety oversight and preparedness that allowed the West Fertilizer Co. explosion to occur still pose a risk to the public in Texas and beyond, federal investigators say in a report they will present in Waco on Thursday.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board will hold a public meeting at 6 p.m. at the Waco Hilton on its 265-page report, which stems from a nearly three-year investigation.

CSB officials investigated the causes of the ammonium nitrate fertilizer explosion on April 17, 2013, which killed 15 people, injured 260 and damaged 150 buildings, with an estimated $246 million in property loss. They also recommend significant reforms to the way ammonium nitrate dealers are regulated and insured.

This is one of the most destructive explosions weve ever investigated, said Johnnie Banks, the CSBs lead investigator in the West case, in an interview Tuesday.

Our report found that the limited regulatory oversight, including the lack of real meaningful insurance, inadequate emergency planning and the proximity of the facility to so many homes  those really led to the incidents severity.

CSB chairwoman Vanessa Sutherland said pointing out shortcomings in the regulation and emergency preparedness systems is important to prevent another disaster, but it doesnt excuse West Fertilizer Co.s failure to prevent the explosion.

The company ultimately bears the responsibility for following the law and building things safely, Sutherland said in an interview.

The city of West has joined some 200 other plaintiffs in suing the owners of the plant, Adair Grain Co., along with national fertilizer suppliers. A trial involving some of those plaintiffs is set to begin next week.

The West disaster inspired some state-level reforms, including regular state fire marshal inspections of ammonium nitrate dealers and requirements to store the fertilizer away from flammable material.

But the CSB report suggests that those measures are not enough to keep the public safe. Texas alone has 43 facilities that sell 5 tons or more of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and 19 of those are within a half- mile of a school, hospital or nursing home.

CSB analysis shows that risk to the public from a catastrophic incident exists at least within the state of Texas, if not more broadly, the report states.

Ammonium nitrate is subject to explosion only when subjected to extreme heat, as well as confinement and shock. But the Texas State Fire Marshal has reported that the majority of ammonium nitrate fertilizer facilities in the state are of flammable frame construction, and legislators last year declined to require fireproof storage.

The CSB report recommends mandating fireproof storage and sprinkler systems through the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, with a three-to-five-year phase-in for existing businesses.

The CSB also recommends that fertilizer dealers be required to file a risk management plan with the Environmental Protection Agency outlining how they will safely store ammonium nitrate.

In addition, national fire codes on ammonium nitrate should be stiffened, state-level training for emergency responders should be updated, and underwriting standards for insuring ammonium nitrate dealers should be beefed up, the report says.

The CSB board will vote Thursday to accept the report. The agency is small and has no direct regulatory authority, but it will follow up to make sure the findings are on the agenda of other federal and state agencies, Banks and Sutherland said.

Complex investigation

Banks said the complexity of the investigation explains its long timeline. CSB investigators interviewed company officials and West residents, analyzed spilled fertilizer and blast remains, and even built a model of the West Fertilizer Co. to test detonation theories.

Though the cause of the fire remains undetermined, Banks said the data and analysis will help public safety experts assess the risk of ammonium nitrate for years to come.

Banks said he hopes the end result of the study will be to save lives.

This was such a tragic human-interest story, happening in a town where everybody knows each other, he said. And the fact that this affected emergency responders resonated with us from the outset.

Frank Patterson, who heads the Waco-McLennan County Office of Emergency Management, said he still is reading the report but agrees that better standards are needed for ammonium nitrate handling, including fireproof storage.

Patterson said the explosion destroyed the countys only ammonium nitrate fertilizer facility, but better standards need to be in place in case one is built.

He said local officials have made progress on chemical safety and preparedness since the West disaster.

The first responder community is much more aware, and industry in this county is aware and involved, Patterson said. Were much more aware than three years ago.
More than 94.2 million people in the United States have neither worked nor looked for a job in the past year. Thats not including anyone under the age of 16. While I dont think this is the doomsday crisis some pundits seem to fear it is, its still a problem that we need to address to improve prosperity for individuals, families and society as a whole.

The labor force participation rate  simply the proportion of the civilian labor force either employed or unemployed but looking  has been falling for years. The percentage stands at 62.6 percent, according to December 2015 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). With a large and growing percentage of the population not working, there is more pressure on those who do have jobs to generate output, income and tax receipts. Over time, the situation could become untenable and our standard of living could be affected.

The crucial question: why fewer Americans are working. Slow hiring during the recession and ongoing scarcity of good jobs in many fields and geographic areas are part of the explanation but only part. In fact, the participation rate continued to drop even after the recession ended. Another component is that our population is aging, with the large baby boom generation moving into age brackets in which work is typically less common and ultimately reaching retirement age (at a pace of about 10,000 per day).

Baby boomers retiring

The BLS has analyzed the reasons people are not working, comparing reasons given in response to a survey in 2004 to responses in 2014. As of 2014, the total nonworking population (ages 16 and older) in the United States stood at 87.4 million, which was 35 percent of the total population (16 or older). Of that 35 percent, the most common reason given for being out of the labor force was retirement (15.4 percent), being ill or disabled (6.5 percent), going to school (6.4 percent), home responsibilities (5.4 percent) and other reasons (the remaining 1.2 percent).

The tiny other reasons category includes those who responded that they could not find work.

The 2014 results were compared to 2004, when a significantly lower 31.3 percent of the population was not in the labor force. The percentages not in the labor force due to retirement had the largest gain over the period, which fits with the aging of baby boomers. The second-largest gain was in the percentage who said they werent working because they were going to school, which was particularly common in the 16-to-19 and 20-to-24 age ranges (although data on enrollment dont exactly support the validity of this answer). The proportion who indicated they were not working due to illness or disability increased (from 5.5 percent to 6.5 percent. The percentage citing home responsibilities as the reason for not working was the only category that decreased.

Besides variation by age, results differed significantly with education level. In the prime working age group (25 to 54), those with less education were less likely to be part of the labor force. In 2014, the BLS found that 21.2 percent of men with less than a high school diploma did not participate in the labor force, compared with 14.9 percent of high school graduates, 10.7 percent for those with some college or an associates degree and 5.6 percent of college graduates. For women, the pattern was similar, with 49.6 percent of those with less than a high school diploma not in the labor force, compared with 15.4 percent of college-educated women.

The correlation between education and unemployment is well-documented, with additional education linked to lower unemployment rates (as well as more income). The incentives to stay in the labor force are generally superior with higher levels of education: better salary and benefits and often more rewarding jobs.

Falling labor force participation rates could erode standards of living over time. Besides incentives for work and other actions to better prepare workers for jobs, there is room for improvement in the structure of social services programs. While safety nets are clearly necessary and serve an essential and valuable purpose, at times they can become more of a trap for recipients than a temporary source of relief.

Where are the incentives?

When there is a financial disincentive to work because of the potential for lost benefits, some will choose to stay out of the labor force for longer periods. The fact disability and illness are more common reasons given for not working could point to issues in the way these programs are structured. Bottom line: The longer an individual goes without working, the greater the likelihood of opting out of the workforce entirely.

The edging down of labor force participation rates is not unduly alarming in and of itself. With productivity gains, we can now produce more with fewer workers, and its not all bad that people can retire earlier or not work in order to obtain more education. But if people retire early because they give up on finding a decent job, thats a problem.

Similarly, while young people increasingly respond to surveys that they are not working in order to go to school, the data indicate that only some of them are actually enrolled. All in all, there is reason to believe that the trend we observe is driven, at least in part, by underlying issues with the incentive structure of the current job market. This pattern is worthy of consideration to see what could be tweaked to encourage more people into the workforce.

Ray Perryman is president and chief executive officer of the Waco-based Perryman Group. In 2012, he was selected as Texan of the Year by the Texas Legislative Conference.
I could have been in Saxony, birthplace of the German anti-immigrant movement Pegida: People with German last names were trying to convince me that immigrants were hogging the benefits in their almost all-white state.

But I was in Muscatine, Iowa, in a high school gym where a Donald Trump rally was about to begin.

I worked with them at Allsteel, said Pat Treiburger, 63. Allsteel, an office furniture manufacturer, is a big employer in the town of 23,000. They made no secret that they were coming for the benefits. They talked about bringing their girlfriends and tons of children to feed off the system. I was working my butt off and they were laughing in my face.

Muscatine Countys population is more than 90 percent white, and the state of Iowa has an immigrant population of less than 150,000, or 4.8 percent of the total  one of the smallest percentages in the United States. (Immigrants account for 3 percent of Saxonys population). Yet people said that Iowa was a major hub for Mexican immigration and that Trump was the man to stem the tide.

I have heard and read all kinds of explanations for Trumps front-runner status among Republicans in many states, ranging from his charisma to the authoritarian leanings of his backers, but I reserved judgment till I saw Trump campaign. On Sunday, I waited in line with perhaps 2,000 of his supporters in Muscatine. It was freezing and I suspect some people bought Trump campaign hats just to keep their ears warm. Merchandise hawkers plied the line, offering badges inscribed with Blue Lives Matter (a reference to the police) and Hillary for Prison.

The people in line gave a bewildering variety of answers to the question of why they supported Trump. The national debt needs taking care of, said Matt Zaehringer, 32, a truck driver. How would Trump do that? Like he takes care of his bank account.

Trumps wealth and supposed business acumen were a talisman. Hes a businessman, not a politician, Matt Nichols, 37, said. I am a small-business owner, so thats important to me.

I didnt get the impression that these people wanted an authoritarian leader, someone who would take care of them. They appeared to be drawn to aspects of Trumps personality and political stances.

Then Trump came onstage and it became clear that his political skills werent the reason for his appeal. Im from Russia, and my standards for political charisma and technique are pretty low. This was one of the worst political speeches I have heard. Trump rambled for more than an hour without completing a sentence. He went off on unexpected tangents. One such aside involved eminent domain  the power of governments to take over private property for development. Its not a hot campaign issue in Iowa, but it was the theme of an anti-Trump attack by rival Ted Cruz in a campaign ad that few in that gym had seen.

As the speech meandered, Trump supporters started milling about and talking to one another. The other candidates Ive seen in Iowa  the Democratic front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders  had kept their audiences riveted. Sometimes, the billionaire appeared to remember why he was there and hit his talking points: support for police and the military, the Second Amendment, Americas greatness on the international stage. He got some applause.

But the crowd really went wild when two protesters appeared in the bleachers, bearing a sign that said Love Always! Trump Hates. They were escorted out to chants of Trump! Trump!

The crowd roared again when Trump boasted that he drew bigger audiences than Sanders and complained that television networks refused to acknowledge his popularity. And they made noise when he said stupid was a better word for the government than incompetent.

I began to wonder whether the people around me were really buying Trumps promises to build a wall to keep out immigrants, lower the public debt, make the military stronger or be the best jobs president in history. They shouted Trump, pumping their fists in the air as if they were defying all the bosses who had ever wronged them and all the politicians who had ever tried to sweet-talk them.

He is the only one who can represent me in a honest way, said Rick Sharp, 64, a defense contractor. He doesnt owe anyone anything, and he can say what he thinks.

With his lack of restraint in insulting powerful people, his financial independence and his unfocused anger at the perceived stupidity of the political elite, Trump has become a Sanders for people who dont believe in a redistributive state. He personifies their dream of making a lot of money and telling the boss to take a hike.

Trump  as he seldom misses an opportunity to remind his audience  is smart, and he knows that this, and not any campaign promise, is why people support him. At rallies, his volunteers distribute placards saying The Silent Majority Stands With Trump. He says what most of his supporters think but dare not say. The wave he rides is purely negative, and the lack of specific proposals is no problem.

Trump, however, may not have this silent majority figured out. On my way back from the rally, I drove through Moscow, a community of about 250 just north of Muscatine. I saw a man driving up to a shed with a truckload of firewood and I stopped. Had he heard about the Trump rally in Muscatine?

Yeah, he said. Keep em away. I dont even pick up the phone these days because its always these politicians calling. Its a running joke with us, Who is it today, Hillary or maybe Barack or somebody else? Were gonna get what were gonna get, is what I say.

He wouldnt give his name. I guess he preferred to remain silent.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.
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Indonesia's powerful Salim group has extended its reach into Australia, this time with the purchase of one of the largest coal projects in NSW from Rio Tinto.

For Rio, the sale of its second coal venture in NSW in a matter of months extends its retreat from the coal industry amid the extended slump in coal prices.

The Adani mine would be one of the world's largest. Credit:Darren Pateman

The group has sold the Mount Pleasant thermal coal project to the privately owned MACH Energy Australia Pty Ltd for $US224 million ($320 million). Rio is to also continue to receive royalties from the sale of coal from the mine.

Mach Energy is controlled by Droxford International, which is an entity associated with Indonesia's Salim group, which also has an interest in the Goodman Fielder, the food group.
His booking in Washington has emerged days after Mr Abbott attracted criticism for agreeing to speak to conservative Christian, anti-gay lobby group, the Alliance Defending Freedom in New York on Thursday.

Mr Andrews, who was dumped as defence minister by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in September as part of a purge of Tony Abbott-backers, will miss the first week of Parliament to deliver a speech on "Australia's Global Security and Defense Challenges" to the influential Heritage Foundation.

Kevin Andrews will become the second Liberal backbencher in a week to address a right-wing US lobby group when he speaks at the largest conservative think tank in Washington on Tuesday.

Mr Andrews' decision to fly to the US rather than attend the first sitting of Parliament in 2016 is likely to be interpreted as another conservative Liberal flying the flag for the hard right.

Liberal MP Kevin Andrews is concerned about a Coalition-Greens deal on school funding Credit:Paul Jeffers

Mr Abbott's announcement this week that he will not retire from politics has rallied the faction, with warnings from conservatives like Eric Abetz that the group will not bow to a more moderate approach to issues like same-marriage even if Australians vote for its legalisation in the upcoming nationwide plebiscite.

Mr Andrews has spoken out twice since his removal on the need for Australia to agree to US requests for a greater military contribution in the Middle East. He has called for Australian combat troops to take the fight to Islamic State.

His position has hardened since he was minister when in September he said "We're not contemplating boots on the ground" and "Iraqi boots on the ground" were the right way forward, supported by Australian training.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk insists disgruntled Labor MP Rob Pyne is still part of her team despite quitting the party's left faction.

Her comments come as the minority government was forced to reject suggestions it could collapse after the first-term Member for Cairns announced his factional departure at the weekend.

Cairns MP Rob Pyne has quit the Labor party's left faction. Credit:Chris Hyde

Mr Pyne has also warned he could leave the party altogether if Labor didn't start allowing him the influence to make reforms he was passionate about.

But Ms Palaszczuk played down any fears on Tuesday, saying she was happy to listen to his concerns.
Police have released a composite to help in their hunt for a man who indecently assaulted a young woman in the early hours of Australia Day as she walked home from Bull Creek train station.

A police spokeswoman said the man pretended to be looking for his dog and asked for her help to find it before attacking her.

Police are hunting for a man with light brown short hair and stubble on his chin who spoke in an Australian accent. Credit:WA Police

"Just after midnight, a woman in her twenties exited the Bull Creek train station and was walking south on Bull Creek Drive when she noticed a man standing at the intersection of a pathway into the bush area whistling," she said.

"The man said he was looking for his dog and asked her assistance to find it.
Premier Colin Barnett refuses to be rattled after the CommSec State of the States report ranked Western Australia's economy fifth in the nation.

The report, released on Wednesday, shows WA's economy is only out-performing Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania.

Premier Colin Barnett says there is no need to panic despite damning report. Credit:Aaron Bunch

Mr Barnett said WA was coming from a high with the mining industry now slowing down and, while it was a difficult time, there was no sense of panic.

He said the state's economy was resilient and had been the strongest of all the states over the past several years.
The stable construction and durability- The whole rack and its accessories are made from cast iron and finished with powder-coated. This means it's rust-resistant for long time use and it wont scratch your cookware. The base layers got support feet to touch with the countertop, which makes sure it's stable when you make it stand, you can also lay it down to store or assemble all layers on one side, DIY ways suitable for all kitchens and houses. Easy to assemble: No additional tools or screws are needed, even the elderly or children could easily install them. Just take the layers out, decide what distance you need, and put one side of the layers into the slot of the mainframe. Maximize your space and make your cooking easier- Draw your cookware together and make your kitchen more organized. At the same time, your cookwares are set separately, you can easily pick up the one you need. Adjustable interval- You can control the distance between two layers according to your need, no matter you want to store lids, pans, pots, saucepans, or other cookwares, the adjustable rack would always match your needs. Service- If you got any issues or questions, please feel free to contact us.

Product Type: Freestanding

Primary Material: Metal

Finish: Brown

Handcrafted: No

Mounting Requirements:

Finally, no more disorganized pile of pans and covers! This rack is great for storing skillets and large lids and takes up far less space inside my cabinet than I used to store the same items. The rack is adjustable, it can be extended in length to hold larger pans and lids, or shortened to hold smaller pans. The wire dividers are easily adjusted to whatever amount of space is needed between items. The only disappointment I found is that this rack does not hold small lids in place, it worked best with skillets and larger lids.. Joan. Haverhill, MA. 2021-06-17 20:21:54
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jan. 26, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 26, 2016 | 06:27 PM | PADUCAH, KY

At Tuesday night's Paducah City Commission meeting, officials introduced an ordinance to continue a contract that provides consulting and management services to some city employees.



For the past two years, the city has used Edumedics, LLC to aid employees on the citys health insurance plan who have chronic health conditions such diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), and hyperlipidemia (high cholesterol or triglycerides). The ordinance would continue the contract for another two years term.



In the past two years, employee enrollment in the program has increased and currently 44 percent of the employees are enrolled in Edumedics because they have of one or more of these chronic conditions. The program allows an employee to receive one-on-one in-depth consultations with a nurse practitioner.



Interim Human Resources Director Steve Doolittle says 55 employees are utilizing Edumedics with significant health improvements, especially those with high blood pressure or high cholesterol, and said, We are receiving good feedback from the employees who participate.



Based on the current participation, the City of Paducah will pay Edumedics $4,000 per month.



The Citys participation in Edumedics and improvements in employee health have resulted in discounts from Anthem for the Citys health insurance rates, allowing them to keep premiums from increasing. The vote on this ordinance will be held on February 9.





Other meeting highlights:



 Mayor Kaler presented a proclamation to representatives of the St. Mary School System proclaiming January 31 - February 6 as Catholic Schools Week in Paducah. This is a national celebration with the theme "Catholic Schools: Communities of Faith, Knowledge, and Service."

 Ordinance approved for change order #5 with Bluegrass Uniforms for the Paducah Fire Department. This change order adds clothing items that were not previously incorporated into the contract or have been changed due to product discontinuations.

 Ordinance introduced (vote February 9) to amend the lease agreement approved in March 2015 between the City and AT&T. AT&T leases space on the 800 MHz tower located at 510 Clark Street. The amendment corrects the lease payment amount and provides compensation for back rent owed.

 City Manager Jeff Pederson says staff is working to prepare project lists and a scoring process for the Capital Project Planning Retreat that the City Commission and directors will attend on Saturday, February 6.

 It was noted that the demolition of the building at 432 Broadway is underway.
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By The Associated Press

Jan. 27, 2016 | FRANKFORT, KY

By The Associated Press Jan. 27, 2016 | 10:22 AM | FRANKFORT, KY

There have been two departures from Governor Matt Bevin's administration: John Rittenhouse from the Kentucky Department of Parks and Arnita Gadson from the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission.



Media outlets report Rittenhouse submitted his resignation on Friday, and Gadson departed on Monday.



Rittenhouse stepped down from his post as Director of Resorts after details of a state ethics violation were made public through a Kentucky Open Records Law request filed by the Louisville Courier-Journal. The ethics commission charged that Rittenhouse ``knowingly'' violated an ethics provision in 2013 when he entered into a contract to buy a restaurant that subleased its location from the state.



Gadson says the Bevin administration told her that her services as executive director weren't needed. She says the commission's budget had been drastically cut, and she wasn't given any answer about whether the commission would continue.






I was born in Shropshire in the West Midlands and there's not a great deal to do there for a young person. Me and my mate found out that Shrewsbury Girls School girls went to a local drama group so we went along. I was told to do a poem so I learnt the William Blake poem The Tyger, stood up and did that and sat back down again and one of the girls who was there leant over and said 'that was really good' so I was sold from there really.

Watching my dad [Pete Postlethwaite] onstage and in film definitely had an impact on me wanting to act. I started out doing LAMDA examinations and then I found out about LAMDA drama school so I travelled down to London to audition for a few drama schools and LAMDA accepted me. I've not really looked back.

It's been fantastic working with Gina McKee. Everybody in the show is great, working with Laurence [Boswell] is fun and there's a really good atmosphere. The Mother started in the Ustinov space in Bath and was written by Florian Zeller, a French writer, and translated into English by Christopher Hampton. Gina is absolutely brilliant and the rest of the cast is absolutely fantastic as well. It's a great piece and it's exciting to be in London at the Tricycle.

The Mother is quite a strange play and quite weird in its form and the subjects that it deals with. It's like a kaleidoscope of pain for the mother. It's interesting because when I first started it, I asked my own mum what the hardest thing about having children was - and the main thing that she said was having to say goodbye. I play Nicholas and his mother can't quite let go of him and is losing him to his new girlfriend Elodie. You obviously don't want to hurt your parents in any way but you also have to go off and find your own life.

Florian has an incredible understanding of the uncertainty of life and how different people read different situations. It's not like anything you've seen before in the theatre. It really explores the grey areas of what's real and what's not real and how you interpret situations and relationships.

The Mother runs at the Tricycle Theatre from 26 January to 5 March.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 26/01/2016 (2459 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A jurys rare decision to convict a Toronto police officer of attempted murder in the streetcar shooting death of a knife-wielding teenager may have far-reaching implications in the legal and criminal justice community.

The verdict, which found officer James Forcillo guilty of attempted murder but not guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter when he fired fatal gunshots at 18-year-old Sammy Yatim in 2013, sends a strong signal that courts want to make sure police use the appropriate amount of force when dealing with the public, said University of Winnipegs Kevin Walby, an associate professor of criminal justice.

The decision  which Forcillos defence team plans to appeal  opens the door for Canadian police services to consider changing the way they think about use-of-force training, especially when dealing with people who have mental health concerns, Walby said.

I dont know if it (the verdict) is going to raise public trust in the police. The police might have a trust deficit that theyre working with now because the public might see this as indicative that they do not play by the rules when it comes to use of force. I think it sends a really strong signal to police that they have to be extremely cautious when it comes to use of force, Walby said.

We want public police to protect people in public, but part of the group of persons who theyre trying to protect are also distressed persons  people who arent having their best day, theyre having mental-health problems  and shooting them in the body is not necessarily the best way to help them. In fact, its attempted murder now; the precedent is set.

In the past four months, police in Manitoba have shot and killed three people  two men in Winnipeg (Mark DiCesare, 24, in November and Haki Sefa, 44, in September) and one man in Thompson in November. Those cases are still under investigation by the provinces independent investigation unit. The Forcillo case may impact Winnipeg police, said Winnipeg Police Association president Maurice Sabourin, but not when it comes to use-of-force training, which he says already ranks among the best in the world.

CP Const. James Forcillo leaves court in Toronto on Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. Forcillo has been found guilty of attempted murder in the 2013 shooting death of troubled teen Sammy Yatim on an empty streetcar.

And I think when the members are placed in a situation, they will rely on their training and they will make the right decision at the time, Sabourin said.

Theres no doubt policing is a tight-knit profession, community, and when you see a conviction such as this, it creates concerns. It could have the effect of members starting to second guess whether they should be using lethal force or not, which unfortunately could lead to a serious injury or death of a member, and thats the last thing that we would want to see.

Walby said he doesnt think the Toronto jurys decision should make police feel over-cautious.

I dont think police should be cautious in using deadly force when its warranted. The question is, why do they see it as warranted in cases when most other people would suggest its not? he said, describing Yatim as someone who had a mental health issue and appeared confused at the time of the shooting. Is that actually a situation where deadly force is needed, or are there other tools and expertise that the police can bring in to help resolve that situation in a way that involves less conflict? I think the answer is yes, they can, because they do it in other countries and I think they can do it here in Winnipeg, too.

Walby said hed like to see police put less focus on guns and more on negotiating, such as a model used in the United Kingdom, where its less common for police officers to carry guns.

Winnipeg Police Service officers are taught to de-escalate situations before using force, and they receive refresher courses in use-of-force training every year. They also work with health professionals to receive a four-hour refresher course on mental-health training every three years. A spokeswoman for the Canadian Mental Health Association in Winnipeg said the organization advocates for more mental-health training for emergency responders, but hasnt worked directly with police.

The verdict itself is rare, explains University of Manitoba law professor Debra Parkes, but its not the first time a Canadian police officer has been found guilty of a homicide offence by a jury. A 2008 case saw an Alberta police officer convicted of manslaughter for fatally shooting a man who was being held in an RCMP cell. He received the minimum mandatory sentence of four years. Forcillo faces a minimum mandatory sentence of five years because the gun he used was a restricted weapon.

It does happen. Certainly, its rare, but the reality of these cases is that juries often are fairly sympathetic to police officers and the challenges of their work. And especially if there wasnt video to show like there was (in Yatims death), Parkes said.

The attempted-murder conviction arose after Crown prosecutors separated the first and second rounds of bullets Forcillo fired at Yatim and found that the first shots killed him.

Presumably, the jury deciding Forcillos fate had enough reasonable doubt that Forcillo was acting in self-defence that they couldnt convict him of murder or manslaughter for firing the first set of bullets. But they could, and did, convict him of attempted murder for firing the second round of bullets because they believed he still intended to kill the teen.

That verdict is not about (Forcillo) causing (Yatims) death. Its about him intending to cause his death. But having already caused his death, its a very odd kind of verdict, one that opens the door to a constitutional challenge on mandatory minimum sentences  an uphill battle, for the defence, Parkes said.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

DAVID LIPNOWSKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The scene of Friday's fatal police shooting at the corner of Grant Avenue and Kenaston Boulevard.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/01/2016 (2458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

wfpvideo:4726417419001:wfpvideo

With a nod to the political battles fought in Manitoba 100 years ago, former prime minister Kim Campbell said women are no longer the canaries in the coal mine in global society.

An eloquent speaker and engaging storyteller, Campbell spoke to a crowd of about 150 people at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Wednesday as part of the provinces celebration of the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote and hold public office in Manitoba, the first province in Canada to do so.

Campbell said the value of what happened in Manitoba 100 years ago, on Jan. 28, 1916, continues to resonate today.

Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press Hon. Kim Campbell at the Museum For Human Rights Wednesday evening.

It wasnt a revolution, it was a gradual change of how we understand the role that women can and must play in society, said Campbell, who was Canadas first female prime minister and remains the only woman to have held the nations highest elected office.

She served from June 25 to Nov. 4, 1993.

One hundred years ago, when the Manitoba legislature empowered women in this province to vote and participate in government, they took a very important step in beginning to create the social changes that have resulted in the opportunities that we have today.

Campbell, also Canadas first female justice minister, referred to research and positions of major international corporations that have shown the presence of women in senior management improves corporate performance.

As women have become participants, they have become players and they have changed the agenda and they have also demonstrated their efficacy, Campbell said.

She gave the example of the Ontario Securities Commission, which she said has come out with a comply or explain directive to Ontario registered companies to put women on their boards of directors.

But Campbell didnt try to gloss over the fact that women still have barriers to break down: in traditionally male-dominated professions, and in countries where women are still considered property.

Over the years, theres been a lot of struggle and there are a lot of issues to resolve. But because women did struggle and because they insisted on doing what they knew they could do, many hearts were broken, she said. Not every woman who wanted to make a career in business or who wanted to make a career in a certain profession got an opportunity to do that. But enough did so that their performance has been evaluated and the story is incredibly positive. So for young women today, its not that theres not barriers, there still are. There are male-dominated cultures. But there is no longer any doubt of their ability to do the job. So its a different conversation.

Calantha Jensen, a recent University of Winnipeg graduate with a double major in human rights and conflict resolution, said she enjoyed Campbells candour.

National Archives of Canada Nellie McClung

Ive always been very interested in human rights and womens rights and I feel like she has a lot of in-depth understanding of the issues that women face having held the positions that she has, Jenson, 24, said. She met Campbell personally following the speech.

I feel like she is a very important spokesperson, given her life experience. Im so glad I came here and heard what she had to say. A lot of what she said really spoke to me.

Campbell said theres much more that we need to do but it is important to acknowledged that women have made huge, huge strides.

Theyve made huge, huge advances in changing that conversation and dispelling the notion that they dont belong, Campbell said. As we come to break down those barriers, it helps create a mindset (in male-dominated areas) of less hubris and more willingness to ask questions and willingness to ask, am I making a fair judgment? Or am I making a judgment based on implicit attitudes because Ive accepted people like that as being part of my environment?

She took questions from the floor and from social media at the end of her 30-minute speech.

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 26/01/2016 (2459 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is, in one word, a remarkable ruling.

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled Tuesday that the federal government discriminated against thousands of First Nation children by providing less money for Child and Family Services on-reserve than it provided off-reserve.

Remarkable? At a time when tens of thousands of First Nation children across the country are taken from their homes by child welfare officials, we find out that First Nation families receive substandard support when compared with off-reserve families.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde looks on as First Nations Child and Family Caring Society Caring Society Executive Director Cindy Blackstock speaks about the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal regarding discrimination against First Nations children in care during a news conference in Ottawa, Tuesday, January 26, 2016.

Equally remarkable is the fact that this was a ruling nine years in the making. For it was in 2007 that Cindy Blackstock, an academic and director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, first lodged a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Remarkable as well because the federal government spent millions of dollars fighting Blackstock, including eight separate bids to get the case dismissed.

And, finally, remarkable because the Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations, a co-applicant in the case, were able to pull together a legal team of five lawyers who contributed millions of dollars of their time to argue the case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

This is a rare and unique moment, said Ken Norman, director of the Court Challenges Program of Canada. I cant recall a case quite like this. Given what happened to the Court Challenges program, its certainly the exception, not the rule.

In 2006, the Tory government effectively ended the Court Challenges Program, an arms-length, federally funded office that vetted and then partially funded cases involving substantive violations of language or equality rights. It was allowed to continue with all approved cases but was not allowed to take on new ones.

The program had many legal victories over the years, including protecting English-language rights in Quebec, and guaranteeing constitutional equality for gay and lesbian citizens.

The challenges program convened juries of legal experts to vet potential cases. The funding that was provided to lawyers or organizations heading up the legal challenges was generally below market rates, and capped at $50,000 per case.

Despite the high level of support for the program, the Harper government argued it was misguided and wasteful. It stopped the challenges program from taking in new cases in 2006. Later, it partially restored the challenges programs capacity to take on cases involving language rights.

The former governments argument in curbing support for the challenges program was that it consistently operated in a manner that was consistent with the Constitution and Charter or Rights and Freedoms. As such, providing taxpayer support to people to sue the federal government was unnecessary.

Unfortunately, the long list of constitutional challenges launched against the federal government, and Ottawas woeful record in court, was proof that this argument was thin. All you need to do is bring up topics like safe injection sites, prostitution, assisted suicide and mandatory minimum sentences to know the Harper government was, in fact, constantly testing the limits of the constitution.

The cancellation of funding did not stop motivated citizens or groups from taking the federal government to court. However, it certainly made it more difficult.

In the case of the most recent ruling at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, it took a coalition of five different lawyers, working pro bono, to bring the case to fruition. It took that long largely because the federal government did not spend a significant amount of time arguing the merits of the complaint; the gross majority of time was spent on procedural or jurisdictional matters, according to lawyers involved in the case.

David Taylor, a private bar lawyer from Ottawa who represented the Caring Society pro bono, said if the lawyers involved in the case had charged market rates, it would have cost millions of dollars to battle the federal government.

They did everything they could to draw out the litigation with procedural and jurisdictional points, said Taylor. The case was not focused on determining the merits of the case.

That strategy  slowing down legal proceedings with motions that do not address the merits of the case  has become more the rule than the exception for groups and individuals fighting government in court. It is a cynical strategy that exposes the ugly inequality that is rampant the legal system

From pared down legal aid resources, to the cessation of work by the Court Challenges Program, the lack of financial assistance is making it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for people to have their cases heard in court.

That puts pressure on the new Liberal government to carry forward with an election pledge to restore resources to the Court Challenges Program and update its mandate.

Norman said no details have come forward yet on how much money from Ottawa could be available, or the expanded mandate for the program, but there is hope the upcoming federal budget will help fill in the blanks.

Thats what makes the timing of the Caring Society/AFN ruling so important, Norman said. With this one legal case, Canadians can see both the importance of holding the federal government to account in the courts, and the extraordinary measures necessary to do that in the absence of an effective publicly funded mechanism to support citizen litigation against their own government.

Its very rare that you can get enough pro bono service from lawyers and dedicated support from community members to move a case like this forward, said Norman. With the promise the prime minister made during the election, were pretty encouraged that the (Court Challenges Program) will be renewed and updated.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
The Winona County board on Jan. 5 approved applications for six Amish-owned dog kennels that have stirred controversy over the past month.

The kennel applications received a mixed response from the board, with commissioner Greg Olson voting against every one of them, joined on one occasion by commissioners Marie Kovecsi and James Pomeroy.

There was extended disagreement over the application for the largest kennel, owned by LeRoy Yoder of Utica, whose application was first reduced to 125 dogs, which failed on a vote, and then passed at 85 dogs.

Yoders application also received the highest number of stipulations, with visits every three months for the first year by the county in addition to the yearly inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state Board of Animal Health.

Yoder and the five other applicants were also required to either create or maintain a outdoor yard for the dogs. Only one was in the process of creating one; all others had the yards in place previously.

The other kennel applications were all capped at 50 animals. The conditional-use permits require that owners allow access by the sheriffs department or county for random inspections related to any land-use or specific complaints.

The applicants had a number of supporters, including a veterinarian in Zumbrota who works with the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, who noted that the landowners applying for permits had already been approved by the state, meaning they have already submitted to regular inspections.

A neighbor of two of the farms also spoke in support of the applications.

Will Yoder, who spoke on behalf of several of the applicants, said that despite concerns raised by detractors, some of whom have described the operations as puppy mills, the owners all care for the animals as humanely as possible.

It is our desire to continue to work together for the care of our animals, Will Yoder said. Our goal is to operate above the standards.

Commissioner Marcia Ward pointed out that the legal recommendation was that the board did not have ground for denying the kennels, based on the parameters set by the countys land-use policies.

Ward said she had recently visited the kennels, and walked away with favorable impressions.

These breeders have to be commended, Ward said, noting the heating and overall care. I was pleasantly surprised.

Despite more vocal support for the kennels than at the county planning commission meeting in mid-December, the meeting room was also packed with opponents, several traveling from outside the Winona area to speak against allowing the kennels.

Ann Olson, founder and executive director of Animal Folks MN, encouraged the board to deny the applications or set a temporary moratorium in order to further study the issue.

Its complicated, and its commercial, Olson said. Its about the mass breeding of puppies.

The meeting was more raucous than most, with people upset about the dog kennels clapping or jeering several times throughout the meeting.

Commissioner Olson received the most applause, particularly in his response to why specifically he thought the applications should be denied.

I do have to answer to my constituents, Olson said. And I have to answer to myself.

Most of the people in the audience seats left after the last approval with little trouble, although several did yell angrily at the board while leaving the room, one even to the point of sobbing.

New board chair elected

The board also saw a change in leadership, with Kovecsi elected to the position of chair and Pomeroy to the position of vice-chair. Kovecsi was elected after Olson declined to be nominated.

The board changes the chair position every calendar year; commissioner Steve Jacob served as the 2015 chair.

I appreciate Steves leadership and the model that he set, Kovecsi said, and Ill try to do my best.
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to review lower court rulings overturning North Dakotas ban on abortion at six weeks of pregnancy  before many women know theyre pregnant.

The justices turned away the states appeal of decisions striking down the 2013 fetal heartbeat law as unconstitutional. The law never took effect, and abortion-rights supporters said it was the strictest anti-abortion measure in the country.

The high court last week rejected Arkansas bid to enforce its own fetal heartbeat law, banning some abortions at 12 weeks. Both measures had been struck down by a unanimous panel of three judges appointed by President George W. Bush to the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

We knew it was unlikely and it came as no surprise, North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said of the high courts refusal to review the case.

The Supreme Court gets about 7,500 requests each year but takes on fewer than 100 cases.

It was a long shot, Stenehjem said. And its the end of our litigation on this issue. Even some of staunchest pro-life groups agree there isnt much more we can do at this point.

The appeals panel judges said the laws were inconsistent with the standard set by the Supreme Court that generally ties abortion restrictions to the viability of the fetus. But they urged the Supreme Court to re-evaluate its abortion cases to take account of changes in medicine and science, and the wishes of elected state lawmakers. The current framework discounts the legislative branchs recognized interest in protecting unborn children, Judge Bobby Shepherd wrote for the panel, which included Judges William Benton and Lavenski Smith.

North Dakotas Republican-dominated legislature approved the law in 2013, though it was quickly put on hold after the states lone abortion clinic, the Red River Clinic in Fargo, filed a lawsuit that July.

Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple has called the law a legitimate attempt by a state Legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade. But opponents called it an attempt to shutter the clinic that is backed in its legal fight by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Nancy Northrup, president and CEO of the New York-based group, praised the high courts refusal to review the law.

This utterly cruel and unconstitutional ban would have made North Dakota the first state since Roe v. Wade to effectively ban abortion, she said in a statement.

North Dakota lawmakers set aside $400,000 to defend lawsuits arising from a spate of new abortion laws in 2013, and the Legislature added another $400,000 last year. Records obtained by The Associated Press show the state had used $320,029 to defend the abortion laws as of December, most of which was spent on the fetal heartbeat measure.

No new abortion measures were introduced by the Legislature last year, after two of the most ardent anti-abortion state lawmakers were ousted by voters in the highly religious red state.

Lawmakers need to know that citizens care about all issues, not just one, said Stenehjem, a Republican seeking the nod for governor to replace Dalrymple, who is not seeking re-election.

The Fargo clinic, which performs about 1,250 abortions a year, is served by out-of-state physicians licensed to practice in North Dakota. The nearest other abortion clinics are four hours south to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and four hours away in Minneapolis.
Buffalo County Bluff Prairie Management will host a meeting at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 2 at the Alma Rod and Gun Club in Alma.

From 6 to 7 p.m. there will be an open house featuring staff from various area and state agencies.

This open house will allow guests to meet one-on-one with resource specialists and ask questions about bluff prairie management, cost share opportunities, volunteer work days and other pertinent information to assist landowners with their bluff prairies.

At 7 p.m. James Theler, archaeologist with the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, will present "Prehistory of Western Wisconsin," with an emphasis on the importance of bluff prairies.

The program is free and all are welcome to attend. No pre-registration is required.
A southbound Canadian Pacific freight train derailed Tuesday night in Houston County, Minn., sending six cars into the Mississippi River.

The derailment occurred around 10 p.m. about three miles south of Brownsville.

The cars in the river, which were carrying soybean oil, do not appear to have leaked, said CP spokesman Andy Cummings.

Cummings said a small amount of sodium chlorate powder spilled from one of the 15 derailed cars but none of the chemical reached the river.

Canadian Pacific crews and contractors are assessing the scene.

"CP takes this incident extremely seriously," Cummings said. "Safety will be our top priority."

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and Coast Guard are also responding. The Federal Railroad Administration has a mechanical inspector on site and has dispatched others to the scene, said deputy regional administrator Michael Bodah.

It could take months for the FRA to determine a cause, Bodah said.

Sabrina Chandler, refuge manager for the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, said U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials are on scene as railroad contractors do tests to determine if any of the submerged cars are leaking.

"We always have a concern if there's anything going in the river that's not supposed to be there," Chandler said. "With any kind of oil, even a natural oil, there's always concern about oxygen depletion."

Canadian Pacific had two derailments in Minnesota during 2015, according to the FRA's accident database, which includes incidents through the end of October. Both occurred at relatively slow speeds and did not result in major damages or hazardous material spills.

A CP train carrying crude oil derailed Nov. 8 in Watertown, Wis. No injuries were reported in the incident.

On Nov. 7, about 25 cars on a BNSF freight train derailed near Alma, Wis., spilling up to 20,000 gallons of ethanol into the Mississippi River backwaters. No injuries were reported, and the tracks were back in service after three days.

In December, nearly six weeks after the incident, a BNSF spokesperson said there were no signs of adverse impacts to fish or wildlife at the Alma derailment site.

The incident prompted several Wisconsin legislators to request action on the larger issue rail safety, given a spike in train traffic in the area.
Community members and Amtrak supporters heard about potential options for continuing a level of staffing at the Winona station, following the removal of the stations full-time employee last year.

Just over a dozen people attended a presentation by Winona Mayor Mark Peterson, as well as an Amtrak representative and a station manager from Kirkwood, Mo., to hear about the companys volunteer program and take questions on how something similar could work in Winona.

The removal of the full-time staff member from Winonas station was announced last August as part a company-wide program of attrition, which will leave St. Paul and La Crosse as the only staffed stations in the area.

Charlie Monte Verde, Amtrak government affairs representative, said the decision was based on a shrinking practical need for staffed stations nationwide as more people purchase tickets and make reservations online.

Nationally, and here in Winona, 85 percent of our customers were using e-ticketing, Monet Verde said. With that in mind we had come to the decision to reduce staffing here in Winona.

The plan currently calls for someone to come in and open the station, do maintenance and cleaning, and close the station at night.

Attendees also heard from Bill Burckhalter, station manager for the Kirkwood train station, on the volunteer program that community members in his Missouri city organized.

The program developed through support for the train station in the town, which has both Amtrak and freight traffic, after their station saw cuts similar to Winonas. The group of volunteers, a mix of train enthusiasts and community members, made the task their own and both improve and maintain the station while building rapport between the community and Amtrak.

They started simply with a number of volunteers signing up on paper, and designed to serve in pairs, coming an hour before a train and staying a half-hour after a train, greeting and seeing people off.

The group has evolved to assisting with information, train times and other agent responsibilities. It has also received grants to help run the station.

I like the way the community has come together and surrounded the volunteer program, Burckhalter said. Its grown so much.

Kirkwood bought its station building from Union Pacific and had involvement from the city in the purchase and support of city departments in improvements. Winonas station is owned by Canadian Pacific and part of it is leased to Amtrak. CP still uses part of the station for their workers.

Monte Verde said there hasnt been any cases hes aware of where CP has sold its buildings, but the idea of a volunteer use could still be developed.

I think its an environment where it can at least become a conversation, Monte Verde said.

He noted that that for now, regardless of the development of any volunteer capacities, Amtrak is running the same as it has. We want everyone to know were not leaving Winona because of these staffing changes.

The Winona station has the second-highest use in Minnesota, with 20,318 boardings and alightings, after St. Pauls 94,077, according to 2014 Amtrak numbers.

La Crosse, which will retain its in-person staff, had 24,036 during the same period.

Peterson said that Tuesdays meeting will hopefully be followed up by future meetings and the city will be getting the word out for people interested in working to develop a future beyond the mostly unstaffed station.

Theres an enthusiasm and theres certainly a long, strong heritage in the area of railroads, Peterson said. Weve got enough people here to do something if we want to.
If you followed the Madison news cycle last week, you learned the sky is falling. The state budget surplus is now only forecasted to be around $70 million. Egads. What shall we ever do?

The major headline last week read, Tax shortfall will squeeze state. Wisconsin Democrats called Wisconsins economy a fairytale. Originally expecting at least $94 million more, politicians are going to have to scrap all of the new ways they were planning to spend your money.

Here is a crazy idea. How about not spending any surplus on new expenditures? Maybe we could apply any budget surplus toward paying those dollars toward the outstanding debt balance. The United States Debt Clock puts Wisconsins debt at $44 billion.

The budgets put together by the Republicans have all generated surpluses since Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP took majorities in the Senate and Assembly. Its a much rosier financial picture than it was when the Democrats held control of the state government under Gov. Jim Doyle.

In November 2008, Gov. Doyle announced the state would have a budget deficit of $5 billion. This was a deficit in addition to millions in the budget authorized for state borrowing.

This is the side of state government no one wants to talk about. The states biannual budget will have surpluses and deficits, but built into those budgets is authorized borrowing. Its the same fight the GOP had last fall regarding how much money to borrow for the transportation budget.

The GOP budget included borrowing but contained a budget surplus  unlike the Doyle budget which included borrowing and a budget deficit. In other words, the new and improved budget can afford to borrow money while the old one could not.

Borrowing money has become a necessary evil in state and federal budgeting when you consider the political ramifications. When something like the Marquette interchange, which was forecast to cost $1 billion (it actually only cost $840 million), it is difficult for state leaders to determine which programs should be cut to offset that kind of cost.

When politicians cut programs to pay for infrastructure, the other party argues that grandma was thrown under a bus. Their budget priorities are more important. Totally disregarded is that the Marquette interchange was a disaster waiting to happen  similar to what nearly happened at Milwaukees Zoo Interchange when the emergency repairs were needed in 2009.

The states debt clock is better than it was back in 2009, but not by much. Its not sustainable to have a $73 billion budget while maintaining a debt that exceeds 50 percent of your projected revenue. Lawmakers need to come up with a plan that reduces the states debt load. When the cost for paying that debt is reduced, more money will be freed up to pay for things like Alzheimers and dementia patient programs, like the ones that are currently being discussed under the dome, rather than loan payments.

Another good reason for reducing the states debt load is the federal government's pending train wreck of national debt. Since President Barack Obama has taken office, the national debt has increased 70 percent to an astronomical $18 trillion.

The federal government continues to run budget deficits that run into the billions. According to the Heritage Foundation, within 10 years major entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, take up almost 50 percent of all federal spending and are only expected to increase in size as more Americans age and retire. These programs are projected to consume 100 percent of the governments tax revenue by 2030.

A lot of the estimates for these assumptions were calculated before the economic downturn in China, which despite cautious forecasts predicting otherwise, is a solid indicator of another pending global recession. This potential downturn will only speed up the timeline.

By comparison, Wisconsins debt isnt dire, but it should be when you consider the influence the national economy has on our success as a state. The state always lags behind the nation, but a similar downturn is just as likely.

Ironically, no one is talking about this. Instead, were more concerned with what Donald Trump said and how Ted Cruz reacted. Once Trump bounces Cruz, the chatter will include his next political victim. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders wants another $18 trillion in federal spending while Hillary Clinton tries to match his offer.

The sky is falling, but not because of a $70 million budget surplus in Wisconsin. Its falling because of a national disregard for our federal date with bankruptcy court.
For decades, many liberals have dreamed of a universal health insurance system in which the federal government provides coverage to everyone and pays the cost. Known as single-payer, its modeled on programs in Canada and Britain, among others, as well as Medicare.

Now Bernie Sanders is making that idea a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. He unveiled an outline for Medicare for all on Sunday. And one thing is clear: It has all the qualities of a dream.

If Sanders has his way, private health insurance will be a thing of the past, replaced by a federally administered single-payer health care program that will cover the entire continuum of health care. Patients will be free to choose their doctors, and everything will be simple and free, because there will be no more copays, no more deductibles and no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges.

How would Sanders pay the $1.38 trillion annual price tag he puts on his model? He would raise marginal income tax rates, which currently top out at 39.6 percent, to 43 percent on households earning $500,000 a year or more, going up to 52 percent on those making more than $10 million. He would raise taxes on capital gains, dividends and inheritances.

He would also impose a 6.2 percent income-based health care premium paid by employers and a 2.2 percent income-based premium paid by households. But most people, in his forecast, would come out ahead because theyd no longer pay for private insurance.

Among the things Sanders skates over is the practical impossibility of getting this plan written into law due to Republicans in Congress.

Sanders also wants those covered to think they can have anything they want from medical providers at minimal cost to them. But that 6.2 percent levy on employers will almost certainly come out of wages. And the marginal tax rate increases he wants are so steep they would almost certainly have a negative effect on investment and economic growth  to the ultimate detriment of workers.

The abolition of copays and deductibles, combined with the promise of covering any treatment or medicine any patient wants, would make this program far more generous than Medicare. The first effect would be to stimulate even more demand for services. The second would be to prevent sensible limits on therapies. No system can be financially sustainable under such lavish terms.

Sanders, however, insists he can bring down our total health care spending by $6 trillion over the next 10 years. Dont bet on it. Thats tremendously aggressive cost containment, even after you take the administrative savings into account, Larry Levitt, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Vox.com.

In the long run, choices have to be made and trade-offs have to be accepted. Under Sanders blueprint, either the government would have to restrict access to some things people want, or it would end up spending far more than he claims.

He and his supporters are entitled to dream. But there comes a time when you have to wake up.
JUNEAU | A 34-year-old Reeseville man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was found guilty of 20 counts of possession of child pornography.

Judge Steven Bauer sentenced Adam E. Rogers to 10 years in prison and 10 years of extended supervision for each of the 20 counts of possession of child pornography. The sentence will be served concurrently.

Bauer also ordered Rogers to pay $5,000 of restitution to his victim. He will also pay $500 for each image of child porn, totaling $10,000 in fines. Rogers was ordered to register for the sex offender registry for the rest of his life and will not be eligible for programs while in prison. He was given 1,006 days of pre-sentence credit.

Rogers was found guilty of 20 counts of possession of child pornography following a two-day jury trial. District Attorney Kurt Klomberg expressed sympathy to members of a jury who were forced to view some of the most disturbing images one could imagine.

A Wisconsin Department of Justice analyst testified that Rogers had approximately 40,000 provocative images of children, the majority of which met the definition of child pornography.

Assistant District Attorney James Sempf prosecuted the case for the Dodge County District Attorneys Office. Klomberg expressed his gratitude to Sempf for his hard work in handling a difficult case.

He also said, I feel bad for the members of the jury who were forced to view these images before they could render their verdict  they have my deepest thanks for their service.

According to the complaint, Dodge County detectives, with the assistance of a Division of Criminal Investigations computer crimes analyst, served a warrant to search Rogers residence. A computer was found in the bedroom.

The complaint states that Rogers told officers he and his roommate both used the computer and he had built the computer from old parts. He said he owned the hard drive containing the images for four or five months, but had only installed it a couple of weeks before. He told officers he hadnt reformatted it, so the images were left from the person who had the drive before he got it.

The computer analyst found the data in the files had been viewed in May, June, July and August, during the time when Rogers had said the drive was not in use.
A lawsuit filed this week over the length of time it takes one state agency to respond to open records requests has open-government advocates hoping a court will make clear how long is too long for the state to respond to such requests.

Madison-based Midwest Environmental Advocates, a public interest law firm, filed a complaint this week in Dane County Circuit Court against the Department of Natural Resources alleging the state agency is violating the states Public Records Law by taking months  10 months in one case  to respond to three requests for information related to a group of wetlands permits, concentrated animal feeding operations and air testing data.

The groups suit comes amid criticism of the way Gov. Scott Walkers administration handles requests for public records and in the wake of an unsuccessful July attempt by lawmakers to shield most records produced by the Legislature from public scrutiny.

Weve experienced too many instances where records requests have been unreasonably delayed, the environmental groups staff attorney, Tressie Kamp, said in a statement. Now we and many of our partners in communities across Wisconsin feel that the trust that is inherent in the open records laws is misplaced. Without this trust, the law does not function as intended and citizens lose access to a transparent, responsive government. It was time to ask the courts for help.

DNR spokesman George Althoff said, DNR takes its responsibility to the state open records law very seriously. He said the DNR does not comment on pending litigation.

Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders said hes glad to see a legal challenge over long delays in providing records.

He said delayed responses to requests have been an issue of growing concern over the last several years  not just at the DNR, but at other state agencies, including the Department of Administration, Department of Corrections and University of Wisconsin System.

Lueders said the delays arent just a function of Walkers administration, but rather a gradual confluence of forces is to blame, including state agencies being strapped for staff.

And this is one of the areas they havent fully staffed, said Lueders.

He said despite complaints over long waits, former Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and current Attorney General Brad Schimel havent weighed in on whether a specific deadline for responding to requests should be outlined in the state open records law.

The fact that two (attorneys general) have not wanted to draw bright lines there has kind of emboldened custodians to take even longer, said Lueders.

The open records law does not set a time frame within which a government agency must respond to a request but says agencies should respond as soon as practicable and without delay.

Some other states define a response time in state law. In Illinois, for example, records custodians have five business days to either comply with or deny a request. If custodians need more than five business days, the law allows them to take another five days.

The office of the Attorney General has been reluctant to make these judgments, so I hope this is an area in which the courts can provide guidance, said Lueders.

A spokeswoman for Schimel did not respond to a request for an interview.

The environmental group filed three requests for DNR records on March 9, June 3 and Aug. 19, the complaint states.

The DNR acknowledged receiving the March 9 request for air testing data on April 24 and sent the group an invoice for $162.50. The group sent the money to the DNR on June 29 but did not receive a response or records, according to the complaint. After months of calls and emails, according to the complaint, a DNR official responded on Jan. 12 saying the payment was received after the invoices payment deadline, prompting the request to be canceled.

The DNR took nearly five months to acknowledge the groups June 3 request for information about concentrated animal feeding operations. In that email, a DNR official noted ongoing litigation, according to the complaint. The DNR said the advocacy group might want to resubmit a request. No further communication or records have been received from the DNR, the complaint states.

The last request, submitted on Aug. 19, was acknowledged on Nov. 10, when the agency asked the group to narrow the scope of its request. The group responded to the DNRs emails on Nov. 18 and says the DNR has not provided further communication or records.

In addition to the failed attempt by lawmakers to gut the states records law, earlier this month the state Public Records Board rescinded a controversial decision that allowed public officials to quickly destroy certain records that they deemed to lack lasting significance.

The boards decision drew little notice when it was made in August. But it came under scrutiny last month after Walkers administration cited it to explain why it had no records on file in response to requests from the Wisconsin State Journal and liberal group One Wisconsin Now.
A driver was rescued Tuesday after losing control of a vehicle that then overturned into Spring Creek near Lodi, the Columbia County Sheriffs Office reported.

At 10:13 a.m. dispatch received the call of an overturned car at County Highway J at Fair Street, just north of Lodi. Sheriff Dennis Richards explained in a press release that authorities believe the car was driving on a private driveway when it slid off the road, partially submerging in the water.

The Lodi Fire Department and Lodi Emergency Medical Services responded at the scene, pulling the driver out of the car.

Dispatch requested a MedFlight to take the driver to the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, but due to weather conditions, the hospital was unable to get clearance to take off.

December and January are the worst months for weather, said UW Hospital Critical Care Transport Manager Frank Urdman, listing some of the factors that can ground a flight: heavy snow, low cloud ceiling, visibility, icing conditions  I think we had all four through the day.

The MedFlight operates under commercial FAA rules, as opposed to military or search-and-rescue standards, so in inclement weather, for safety sake, the burden is on local responders on the ground.

Shes really cold, one of the responders reported, getting the driver out of the water at 10:25 a.m.

They were both in the water, responders reported ahead as ambulances were en route at 10:52 a.m.

Lodi EMS then began treatment and brought the driver to Madison. The name and current condition of the driver have not been released. The name and status of the responder who went into the water were also unavailable.

Nothing unusual for snowstorm

Just before the call was made, initial reports were that the overnight snow had largely resulted in widespread inconvenience, including schools starting two hours late.

In Portage, the police were busy with mostly non-emergency situations according to Lt. Keith Klafke, who counted one accident and five reports from officers assisting drivers  stuck vehicles all over the place.

Nothing big on the emergency management side. Better the 6 inches here than the 13 inches out East, said Columbia County Emergency Management Director Pat Beghin.

Weve had a few slide-offs  nothing too unusual for a snowstorm around here.
A group of citizens asked two state legislators for help making the Sauk City railroad bridge part of a proposed recreation trail between Mazomanie and Sauk City.

During a Jan. 22 listening session, State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, and State Representative Dave Considine, D-Baraboo, heard from area residents and local officials interested in making the bridge, in disrepair since 2002, part of the planned Great Sauk Trail.

Sauk City village president Jim Anderson told the legislators the line going through Mazomanie to the bridge has been labeled obsolete by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

We have permission from the DOT to go ahead with our trail from the Sauk bridge into Devils Lake, Anderson said. What wed like to see happen is the Mazomanie line included from Mazomanie into Sauk City across the bridge.

He said he and his wife used to take long bike rides through other communities, and has seen first-hand how those areas have benefited economically from the connection of recreational trails and tourism.

Anderson said the trails connection from Dane County would provide an economic boost for Sauk City and Prairie du Sac.

Trails like that drive businesses up, Anderson said. We would easily spend $100 in a community and maybe get a hotel room. If we could link Madison to Devils Lake, that would be huge.

Considine said he saw a report that said the Sauk City rail bridge could be repaired for between $12 and $13 million, but that cost was to handle train traffic.

Wisconsin Southern doesnt want to let the (Sauk) bridge go, Considine said.

The railroad has argued the bridge and railroad through Sauk City are a backup to the Merrimac Rail bridge, which provides service to Baraboo and Reedsburg customers. However, the Great Sauk Trail Commission has secured permission to remove the rail line from Sauk City to the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area.

The state now owns the main Madison to Reedsburg rail line that includes the Merrimac bridge. In December, the DOT indicated it plans to make $7.6 million in repairs to the Merrimac bridge.

Kim Tollers, rail property manager with the DOTs Rails and Harbors Division said the rail line between Mazomanie and Sauk City is still considered an active rail line.

Wisconsin Southern still has an operating certificate that goes in tandem with the line that was approved by the federal Surface Transportation Board, Tollers said. Its not abandoned and not proposed for abandonment. Wisconsin Southern is still operating on the line up to the river. They are using it for car storage and they make revenue from that. Theyre collecting money for that and renting that space.

Wolf Run Trail Association president Scott Stokes said he believed the rail line between Mazomanie and Sauk City has been unused for almost 20 years.

There are trees growing in the middle of some portions of that track.

If theres a legitimate use, its covered by the railroads contract with the state, Stokes said. If the line is not used for more than six months, it needs to be repaired or abandoned.

Erpenbach said he would contact the DOT to get some of the questions answered.

How long is the contract (with the railroad) and what is it worth? Erpenbach said. I dont know why it hasnt been converted for rails-to-trails already.

The plan for the trail is to start its first segment on the Sauk City side of the rail bridge and wind 5.2 miles on existing unused rail bed to the southern boundary of the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area in the town of Merrimac.

Trail planners have proposed extending the trail into Devils Lake State Park, and to the east along Highway 12, connecting to a trail that dead-ends outside Sauk City, although planning for those segments is a future goal.
A new Catholic faith-based boys school will open for the 2016 school year in Sauk City, and picks up where St. Aloysius grade school leaves off.

The Shoreless Lake School is for boys in sixth through eighth grades, but will open in September starting with one sixth-grade class.

A seventh-grade class will start in September 2017 and eighth grade will commence in 2018.

Staggering the classes ensures that entering students have the prerequisite classes, like lower-level Latin, before starting off in the new school.

Classrooms will be housed in the Divine Mercy Parish at Madison and Oak streets.

Operated and staffed by members of the Madison-based Priests and Consecrated Women of the Society of Jesus Christ the Priest, students will be taught by a pastoral staff, focusing on state-required curriculum integrated with religious teachings of the Catholic Church.

Enrollment is open now, but is limited to those whose families already are of the Catholic faith.

Shoreless Lake principal Father Pedro Escribano said subjects offered would meet all state requirements in English, math, natural sciences, social studies, world languages, history of art, fine arts, technology, physical education and Latin along with Catholic theology, religious teachings and daily Mass.

All those subjects are very important but its more important to build the character of a person so that they value learning as an instrument of getting close to God, Escribano said.

He said Latin is important because it helps students think logically.

Vocabulary expands exponentially when you have access to Latin Escribano said. Latin helps to structure the mind in a logical way.

He said some of the priests of the Society, most of whom are Spanish immigrants brought in by Bishop Robert Morlino in 2009, once were students of the same kind of school in Spain.

Some of the priests of the Society have come from the ranks of the students, Escribano said. They sense something special about the school and dont want to abandon that dream or that idea.

Father Jerry Zhanay is a graduate from the Societys school in Spain, and will be in charge of the math program at Shoreless Lake. He holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Murcia, in Spain.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to give back the knowledge and wisdom I received in our school, Zhanay said.

All priests of the Society are required to hold bachelors degrees. Escribanos degree is in philosophy.

He said he made a life-long decision to enter the priesthood while he was a young teenager in Spain after meeting the Societys founder, Father Alfonso Galvez.

I heard him preaching and met him personally, and he opened up this new world of possibilities of service and knowing God better and it was very appealing to me, Escribano said. That was 40 years ago.
With the price of oil being what it is, it has become almost fun to check the prices at the different gas stations. Maybe what we should have is a price scale next to our faucet. With all the crisis in the world, the one that may be the most severe, the one that has the greatest impact for the future of the world, for indeed the future of mankind itself, is the dwindling supply of fresh water.

As we look out at the Wisconsin River lazily flowing by, and knowing that 70 percent of the Earths surface is water, it is easy to understand why this issue has taken such a back burner to more immediate concerns. But of that 70 percent, only 3 percent is fresh water, and of that half of that is frozen in glaciers and at the North and South Poles. The fresh water crisis that is rapidly developing will have an impact on how countries cooperate, or even fight over the control of fresh water. That impact, erupting into violence, may have already occurred.

Keeping in mind this is only one piece of a multi-faceted puzzle, a massive drought in Syria that began in 2006 drove thousands of farmers to the major cities in search of work.

Using National Geographic and numerous articles from the Smithsonian, they report that Syrian farmers, disgruntled, angry, and fearful for the future of their families, tensions simmered.

Eventually, the Syrian civil war erupted. How much one is related to the other is circumstantial, but the fact that factions with no love for each other were thrown together is never a good situation. That situation began with a drought.

They further report that NASA and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show that the Tigres and Euphates Basin, which includes the countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and the western part of Iran, is losing water faster than any other place in the world except northern India. Tensions have run so high that in the last few years in Iraq there has been a marked increase in the number of murders of government officials in charge of overseeing water irrigation.

These tensions only have greater potential for conflicts in the future. Turkey has developed a number of hydroelectric dams over the past years. These dams constrain fresh water flow from rivers to the south. Some reports say that this has led to an 80 percent decrease in fresh water river flow to Iraq and a 40 percent decrease in fresh water flow to Syria. These two countries have leveled charges at the Turks for hoarding water.

In 2011, a report from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations stated, In central and south Asia particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the impacts of water scarcity are fueling dangerous tensions that will have repercussions for regional stability and U.S. foreign policy objectives. The national security implications of this looming water shortage  directly caused or aggravated by agriculture demands, hydroelectric power generation, and climate instability  will be felt all over the world.

One of the greatest water-stressed areas in the world is the rivers that flow through India and Pakistan. In 1960, the two countries signed the historic Indus Water Treaty that shares water between the two countries.

As Indias economy grows, and Pakistan has become more unstable, the strain over water has increased. Pakistan has accused India of reneging on the treaty by building too many dams for hydroelectric power which the Pakistanis claim restricts water flow through its country. India denies the charge and points to the corruption and mismanagement of water sources throughout that country.

One extremist group in India has called for the stoppage of water flow through Pakistan. An extremist group in Pakistan has called for a water jihad against India. Hafiz Saeed, founder of the group Lakshar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the deaths of 170 people in the attacks at Mumbai, has called for water terrorism against India.

Recently, a Central Intelligence report stated, The likelihood of conflict between India and Pakistan over shared river resources is expected to increase.

India and Pakistan have already fought four wars and had numerous military clashes. Both countries have nuclear weapons.

The United Nations has said that over the next several decades as many as 135 million people will become displaced due to the lack of fresh water.

In addition to cross-boundary tensions and arguments over fresh water, countries have to face their own internal water crisis. Countries around the world and here in the United States are being forced to evaluate water usage. Over the next few weeks, the growing peril of the worlds water shortage and its impact will be explored.
Planning nutrient management prior to harvest

Harvest is always a fast-paced season for growers, that's why it is important to meet nutrient management goals prior to harvest.
Chancellor Gates to discuss new book during W&M Charter Day events

William & Mary Chancellor and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates 65, L.H.D. 98 will discuss his new book, A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform From Fifty Years of Public Service, at William & Marys Phi Beta Kappa Hall on Thursday, Feb. 4.

The event, part of the universitys Charter Day weekend activities, will begin at 5:30 p.m. Gates will offer brief welcoming remarks before taking questions from the audience. A book signing will follow the Q&A. Both events are free and open to members of the campus community as well as the general public. Seating for the book talk will be on a first come, first serve basis. Theater doors will open at 5 p.m. It is recommended that guests arrive prior to 5:15 p.m. Books will be available for purchase at PBK both before and after the talk.

Phi Beta Kappa Hall is located on W&Ms campus at 601 Jamestown Rd. in Williamsburg. Parking will be available in the PBK and Morton lots as well as in the parking garage off Ukrop Way.

A Passion for Leadership follows Gates #1 best-selling memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War released in 2014. Both books are published by Knopf. A Passion for Leadership takes a candid and instructive look beyond the structural and cultural landscapes at large institutions  public and private  to the people that make them run and the role committed leadership can play in yielding real, reformative change.

This book is about people and how to lead them where they often dont want to go. It is about how a leader can make an institution better, both for those who work there and for those they serve, Gates writes in the book.

During a career of both public and private service, Gates served as director of the CIA, president of Texas A&M University and secretary of defense.

One reviewer noted, A Passion for Leadership is a concise distillation of more than five decades of leadership knowledge.

Gates joined the CIA in 1966 and spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence professional, including nine years at the National Security Council. He served as the agencys director from 1991 to 1993.

After leaving the CIA, Gates, who holds a doctorate from Georgetown University, turned to academia. He served as dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University before being named president of that university in 2002. He held that position until 2006, when he returned to Washington as the nations 22nd secretary of defense.

Gates retired as defense secretary in 2011 after leading the U.S. Department of Defense under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. Prior to becoming defense secretary, he held numerous roles in the executive branch  serving eight presidents during his career.

Gates, a history major who earned several accolades at William & Mary, has served as the universitys chancellor since 2012. He is the first alumnus to hold the honorary position in the 323-year-old institutions modern era.
VIMS report helps Virginia win $120.5M in national competition

Coastal Flooding Recurrent coastal flooding is of growing concern throughout coastal Virginia. Photo by R. Fisher/VIMS

Ohio Creek Watershed The Ohio Creek watershed lies along the north bank of the Elizabeth River near downtown Norfolk, Virginia. Image courtesy City of Norfolk/Fugro Atlantic Photo - of - Hide Caption

VIMS partners in center to increase resilience to coastal flooding

Major funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will help William & Marys Virginia Institute of Marine Science continue its leadership role in the Commonwealths comprehensive effort to better understand the threats posed by coastal flooding and increase the resiliency of Virginias coastal communities.

Virginia received $120.5 million in federal funding  announced on Jan. 21 in Norfolk by HUD Secretary Julian Castro and Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe  in response to the Commonwealths successful application to the National Disaster Resilience Competition. Overall, HUD awarded nearly $1 billion to eight states and five cities affected by natural disasters between 2011 and 2013. Virginias qualifying event was Hurricane Irene, which killed five people, left 1.1 million without power, and cost at least $182 million when it impacted the Commonwealth in August 2011. In total, Irene claimed 47 lives and cost the U.S. more than $15 billion in property damage as it moved up the East Coast.

"Climate change is real and we must think more seriously about how to plan for it," said Castro during the announcement. "The grants we award today, and the other sources of capital these grants will leverage, will make communities stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for future natural disasters."

Virginias application package  titled  TH RIV E  for Resiliency in Virginia  was a truly collaborative effort involving state, federal and local agencies; colleges and universities; community groups; residents; and businesses. Drawing on VIMS 2013 report to the General Assembly on recurrent coastal flooding, the application stressed the areas vulnerability to rising seas and more intense storms while offering concrete proposals for building water-management solutions, strengthening vulnerable neighborhoods, and improving economic vitality.

Virginias HUD award goes to two projects: a $112-million plan to increase resiliency in Norfolks Ohio Creek watershed through construction of flood walls, living shorelines, raised roads, and other infrastructure improvements, and the remainder to a Coastal Resilience Laboratory and Accelerator Center that will serve as a hub for technological and organizational innovation. VIMS will participate most directly in the center.

VIMS Dean and Director John Wells says The Accelerator Center will transform the challenge of sea-level rise into an opportunity for Virginia, bringing our best minds together to develop real-life solutions that benefit Hampton Roads and can be shared with the rest of the world. Wells served as a member of Governor McAuliffes Climate Change and Resiliency Update Commission, a bipartisan group of 41 leaders from around the state whose recommendations also helped inform Virginias HUD application.

Mark Luckenbach, VIMS Associate Dean of Research and Advisory Services, says We look forward to working with our academic partners at ODU and Norfolk State, as well as the many government agencies, community organizations, and businesses involved in efforts to make our coastline more resilient. Coastal flooding and sea-level rise affect everyone, and its going to take everyone to increase our resiliency and make these threats into opportunities.

In remarks during last weeks announcement, Governor McAuliffe said the HUD funds will significantly aid our work to protect the economic vitality and quality of life in areas like Hampton Roads by preparing now for the real impacts of climate change and sea-level rise. I look forward to working with our federal, state, and local partners to prepare every community to meet these historic challenges.

McAuliffe also thanked fellow Virginia leaders, including Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, for their support. In November, Kaine and Warner joined with congressmen Bobby Scott and Scott Rigell to send a bipartisan letter to HUD in support of Virginias application for grant funding.

This federal funding is great news for Hampton Roads and a testament to the hard work of the regions municipalities, academic institutions like ODU and VIMS, Naval Station Norfolk, and leaders across the Commonwealth, says Kaine.

Says Warner, By helping communities incorporate innovative policies to address the many challenges presented by extreme weather, we can create long-lasting resilience to protect Hampton Roads against the very real threat of climate change.

The Coastal Resilience Center will operate as an independent non-profit staffed by a small team that will work with external companies to create  and quickly bring to market  innovative solutions to the challenges that rising seas bring to Virginias citizens, communities, marinas, ports, shipyards, Naval installations and other water-based businesses. The center will be managed by a Board of Directors that includes community, business and university leaders.

Wells says that VIMS faculty will contribute to the centers goals by collaboratively pursuing applied research in areas of coastal resilience where they can make unique contributions. Likely areas of research and expertise include modeling of storm-surge and sea-level rise, improved monitoring and communication of shoreline and watershed conditions, refinement and implementation of living shorelines and other shore-protection measures and wetland migration.

The center will also have an important educational component, with particular emphasis on low- and middle-income students. Linda Schaffner, VIMS' associate dean of academic studies, says, The Accelerator Center will provide our graduate students with another opportunity to engage in research that has direct benefits to society. Sea-level rise will threaten the worlds coastlines for decades to come, and we welcome the opportunity to give our students the knowledge and training theyll need to deal with that challenge most effectively.

Center staff will use a number of independent measures to gauge their success and identify areas for improvement. Measures of success will include a decrease in property-damage values and flood-insurance claims for properties in the Ohio Creek watershed during future flood events, an increase in the area of wetland and/or shoreline restoration projects, and market-proven innovations in the management of storm water.




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Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center conducted a study in Hookah bars and found that employees are exposed to the same hazards as tobacco secondhand smoke a report indicates. Hookah bars arent designated under the same laws as tobacco regulations because an alternative, non-tobacco substance is used known as Shisha. Shisha, which is offered in an assortment of flavors, is often made with tobacco but as a substitute can be made with herbs and molasses. A coal is fired up and placed on top of the shisha, which is smoked through tubes connected to the hookah. Although, the citys Department of Health has cracked down on establishments that have used tobacco.

New York banned smoking in 1998 in taxis, places of employment, and required restaurants to have a segregated non-smoking section. In 2003, the law was extended and eliminated smoking in all bars and restaurants and enclosed spaces as well as parks, beaches, and in Times Square in 2011. Dr. Terry Gordon, a professor leading the study said in a press release, Hookah use is often exempt from clean indoor air laws that protect people from secondhand smoke, and adds, Ours is the first study that links poor hookah bar air quality to damaging effects in workers, and the results recommend closer monitoring of this industry to protect the public.

Researchers collected air samples during working shifts of 10 employees at randomized establishments. They measured fine particulate matter, fine black carbon, carbon monoxide and nicotine and workers were tested for blood pressure, heart rate, markers of smoking and secondhand smoke, inflammatory cytokines in blood, and tumor necrosis factor before and after their shifts.

Results concluded that employees suffered the same effects as tobacco-based smoke. Air from the bars had the identified pollutants and the workers exhibited the symptoms of secondhand smoke with significantly higher levels of exhaled carbon dioxide. The air was determined to be proportional to the number of people in the room and the water pipes in use. Thus, the bars included in the study seemed to have been selling tobacco based products, making them a red flag to the Department of Health, which has shut down 13 operations in earlier this month.

I would suspect that if you went into the vast majority of hookah places its going to be tobacco, Thomas Merrill, general counsel for the health department, told amNewYork. Im not surprised these are the results we got.
The FAA intends to use the material for tarmacs because fuel and luggage carriers, snow plows, and workers have vie for limited space.

The Federal Aviation Administration is funding research towards a special concrete that melts snow, according to a report. The mix, studded with electricity-producing chemistry, could aid airports and other high-traffic public areas during inclement weather. The FAAs research involves experimenting with a cost-effective new formula being tested at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln using byproducts from the coal and steel industries. These byproducts would reduce costs up to 60 percent compared to earlier trials.

A 200-square-foot patch has been embedded with steel rods connected to electrodes that are attached to 120-volt AC power source. The conductivity results from coke breeze, a carbon byproduct of mining with steel shavings usually industrial refuse. Professor of civil engineering, Chris Tuan, said,We keep it barely above freezing  somewhere around 40 degrees, noting it doesnt take much heat to make the slab impervious to snow. It doesnt get hot at all.

Heated driveways and roads are currently in use utilizing a network of underground coils, in other words, radiant heat. But Tuan points out that the heating is patchy with cold spots existing between the tubes. But when using the conducting concrete, There is no cold area. He adds that his system is virtually maintenance-free, and requires only about 13 watts of energy per square foot. Runways, however, have plenty of open space for snow plows.

The question remains as to why this technology hasnt been used more frequently. Deborah D.L. Chung, another engineering professor at University of Buffalo  SUNY has studied conducive concrete and points to cost as the major obstacle. Also, A new concrete formulation needs very, very thorough field testing before contractors would dare to use it, because there are liability issues, Chung says. To get a new concrete to be accepted by contractors, its a long haul.

The material has the potential for other applications because it can block electromagnetic waves. Electrical equipment could be protected from lightning strikes and other damaging power surges. Another possibility is for cell-phone communication blocking in high-security buildings.

Tuan has used the technology in the past installed for the 150-foot Roca Spur highway bridge in Lincoln in 2003. The trial was successful, and he pointed out that de-icing the bridge during a three-day storm usually costs around $250, much less than using a brigade of plowing trucks and chemicals, which can also erode the concretes life span. But the state had another state of mind. Tuan retorted, Nobodys going to monitor the bridge or collect data, Tuan says, or turn the power on and off.

With future endeavors in mind, Tuan wants to instill developed sensors and controls into the concrete slabs to automate the heating technology during approaching storms and shutting it off otherwise. Hes looking forward to a second-round of funding for the spring, which involves a prototype to be built in Atlantic City, N.J. Hes also trying to source investment from China, where he developed two demo parking ramps in the icy city of Harbin.
A new study links social media use to unhealthy sleeping habits.

A new study out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is linking frequent social media use with irregular and unhealthy sleep patterns.

According to NBC, researchers analyzed the social media habits of young adults and found that the more time a person spent on social media during the day, the more likely they were to report sleep disturbances. Social media in this context constitutes websites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and more.

This is one of the first pieces of evidence that social media use really can impact your sleep, said lead author Jessica C. Levenson, a postdoctoral researcher in Pitts Department of Psychiatry, in a news release. And it uniquely examines the association between social media use and sleep among young adults who are, arguably, the first generation to grow up with social media.

The study involved a sample of 1,788 U.S. participants between the ages of 19 to 32. These participants were asked, via questionnaire, about their social media habits. On average, they reported an average of one hour of every day as being devoted to social media, with social media being viewed around 30 times in a week.

More than half of the studys participants reported medium to high levels of sleep disturbance. The more frequently a participant reported checking their social media accounts, the more likely the participant was to report sleep disturbance.

The results of the study are intriguing, but Levenson isnt ready to make any specific or conclusive claims based only on the current data.

Future research should work to replicate our findings in other populations, as well as to understand better the reasons why social media use is related to disturbed sleep, Levenson said in an interview with NBC.
Sheep (illustration)

By: Chan Yuan

A boy in Nigeria, was detained by a vigilante group after being caught having sex with a farmeras sheep.

The 15-year-old boy of Enugu state, told the group members that every time he encounters a sheep he gets excited and canat control himself.

On Monday, the owner of the sheep identified as Mr. Uche, demanded that the boy purchase his animal as he doesnt want to keep it on his property.

Uche said that the sheep cannot be normal after its encounter with the 15-year-old boy. The boy, who was not identified, told investigators that he hears voices in his head abefore being led to the sheep.a

He claimed that he doesnat feel attracted to humans and he only likes sheep. So far, no charges have been filed against the boy despite confessing to having sex with sheep.
Sad girl (illustration)

By: Feng Qian

A man was arrested on a charge of extortion after allegedly persuading teenage girls to send him pictures before blackmailing them, police in the United Arab Emirates said.

Sharjah police said that the man, who was not identified, posed as a girl on social media sites and befriended the teenage victims.

After gaining their trust, the man persuaded them to send him their personal pictures and videos. After getting a hold of the pictures, the man threatened to publicize them unless they pay him a large amount of money.

The crimes came to light after one of the victims refused to hand over money and called the police. According to the police, the suspect also used the photos for his sexual pleasure.

During questioning, the suspect admitted to extortion.
The dogs with the letter

By: Mahesh Sarin

A man of the United Kingdom, apologized for stealing a porcelain dog from a bar after believing it was a real and not cared for properly.

The man was at the Sweet Afton bar in Belfast, when he spotted two porcelain puppies at the venue. He grabbed one of them and took it home. The puppies were named Cecil and Cederick.

The animal lover later returned the dog to the bar and left it at their front door with an apology letter that read: aI was in your establishment over the weekend, having a fabulous time, soaking up the atmosphere, admiring the decor and enjoying the gratuitous amount of shots.

aI clearly shouldnt have been drinking. My eyes were instantly attracted to your lovely white porcelain dogs on the shelving at the back of the bar.

In fact, I was so taken aback with the dogs and concerned for their welfare with them being in a drinking establishment where they maybe werent getting the attention they required, I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to adopt one of the them.a
Evangelina Tsadiosou and Darryl Facey

By: Tanya Malhotra

A woman of the United Kingdom, who is known as the aFacebook bride,a is getting ready to marry a man she never saw in person.

39-year-old Evangelina Tsadiosou of Stevenage, England, got to know her fiance Darryl Facey, 37, who is from Canada, through Facebook.

About nine months ago, Facey sent a message to the hot-looking woman on her Facebook page, where she was promoting her singing career.

The two soon became close friends. aWe spoke on the phone several times a day. We just had this immediate connection,a Tsadiosou said.

Facey, a bodybuilder, popped the question via Facebook and Tsadiosou immediately accepted. She said that the two joked about getting married as soon as they laid eyes on each other.

The couple decided to get married on Valentines Day. With the help of airport employees, the pair will tie the knot at Pearson Airport in Toronto.

Airport officials agreed to set up a makeshift chapel for their ceremony. Facey will see his future wife for the first time in her wedding gown.
Jillian Lafave

By: Mahesh Sarin

(Scroll down for video) A married teacher who was accused of having a sexual relationship with special needs student, referred to their relationship as mom and son in more than 13,000 text messages, police in Nevada said.

Las Vegas police said that they have arrested 25-year-old Jillian Lafave, after a school employee caught her engaging in sexual conduct with the 16-year-old student in a classroom.

Lafave was charged with one count of performing a sex act with a pupil.

According to the police investigation, the student was seen spending time with the teacher almost everyday after school hours.

Police said that he was upset when he learned that Lafave was under investigation. He told police that he loved her. The student called Lafave mom and she called him son.

At some point, Lafave told the teen to be more careful because she did not want to get in trouble. When police questioned Lafave, she admitted to kissing the student several times and touching his private parts.
Razor blade (illustration)

By: Chan Yuan

A woman was arrested after she cut her niece with a razor blade because the girl laughed at her while she was having sex.

35-year-old Miriam Mungure of Harare, Zimbabwe, was charged with child neglect after doctors found bruises and cuts on the child.

Prosecutors said that Mungure was upset with the girl because she laughed while she was having sex in a nearby bed. The aunt is accused of cutting the childas bottom with the razor.

The 8-year-old girl and her aunt share the same bedroom. Mungure appeared before the magistrate Batanai Madzingira, and she was charged with ill-treatment and neglect of a child.

Mungure has been caring for her niece since she was 3 years old. The court heard that the girl sometimes laughs while sleeping and that offended her aunt who chastised her for it over last five years.

Mungure denies the charges.

The abuse came to light when Mungureas brother came to visit the child while she was not home. He saw some bruises on the child and reported it to the police.

Doctors found the fresh razor blade cuts on the childas bottom along with some old bruises, pointing to longtime abuse, and Mungure was arrested.

The child told police that she was punished because she laughs while she sleeps. Mungure is being held without bail.
A Texas grand jury investigating alleged misconduct by Planned Parenthood instead indicted two operatives of an anti-abortion group that created doctored videos of the organization last year, which they claimed showed representatives of the health provider selling aborted fetal tissue for profit. Planned Parenthood was cleared of any wrongdoing.

The grand jury in Harris County on Monday indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, both of the misnamed Center for Medical Progress, on felony charges of tampering with a governmental record, according to Harris Country district attorney Devon Anderson.

Daleiden, the groups founder, was also indicted on a misdemeanor charge. According to the New York Times, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood said he believed the misdemeanor charge stemmed from laws prohibiting offers to buy fetal tissue. He said that after the meeting with Planned Parenthood officials in Houston in April, Mr. Daleiden sent an email to them in June offering to buy fetal tissue for $1,600 per sample. Planned Parenthood never responded to the offer.

The felony carries a possible maximum 20-year prison sentence, while the misdemeanor carries a sentence of up to a year.

We were called upon to investigate allegations of criminal conduct by Planned Parenthood, the district attorney said in a statement. As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us. All the evidence uncovered in the course of this investigation was presented to the grand jury. I respect their decision on this difficult case.

Eric Ferrero, a Planned Parenthood Federation of America spokesman, praised the grand jurys action, stating, These people broke the law to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood in order to advance their extreme anti-abortion political agenda.

According to the indictments, which were obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt are related to their use of fake California drivers licenses with the intent to defraud or harm another. The indictment included copies of the fake licenses the pair allegedly used to access Planned Parenthood.

The indictments are an unexpected twist in the case motivated by the undercover videos shot and heavily edited by the Center for Medical Progress. The series of 10 videos purported to show Planned Parenthood officials illegally selling fetal tissue and body parts for profit. The videos were released July to great fanfare by the anti-abortion group, and were seized upon by Christian fundamentalists and right-wing Republicans as ammunition to be used against Planned Parenthood.

In August, the Harris County district attorneys office began investigating Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast after a call for a probe of the videos by Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in July. The Harris County grand jury began hearing evidence in November following an investigation by the district attorney, Houston police and the Texas Rangers (state police).

Planned Parenthood has consistently maintained that it has broken no laws, that the videos in question were edited deliberately to be misleading, and that the health groups clinics legally received money to cover the cost of procuring, storing and transporting fetal tissue for medical research. In October, the group said that it would stop accepting such reimbursements.

Planned Parenthood provides reproductive health services to nearly 5 million each year. These services include contraception, abortions, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, breast exams and counseling. Planned Parenthood is the only accessible and affordable provider of these services for many working class women. The campaign against the organization, including the doctored videos, utilizes religious prejudice against abortion as a cover for undermining womens health services provided by the health group.

Countering this attack, earlier this month Planned Parenthood filed a civil lawsuit against Daleiden and others connected to the Center for Medical Progress, alleging they had engaged in an illegal conspiracy in creating the videos. Planned Parenthood alleged in the suit that the anti-abortion group violated a federal racketeering law by engaging in a pattern of criminal acts.

Despite the grand jurys indictment of the Center for Medical Progresss founder and employee, Governor Abbott says that the inspector general of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the state attorney generals office would continue to investigate Planned Parenthood.

Nothing about todays announcement in Harris County impacts the states ongoing investigation, Abbott said in a statement. The State of Texas will continue to protect life, and I will continue to support legislation prohibiting the sale or transfer of fetal tissue.

Such threats are part of a concerted vendetta against Planned Parenthood, which receives about $528 million, or 41 percent of its annual revenue, from state, local and federal funds. More than 70 percent of this is in reimbursements for services under Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor jointly administered by the federal government and the states.

Congressional Republicans have long sought to defund the group. To this end, following the release of the doctored videos, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards was hauled before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and grilled for five hours. The hearing was timed to coincide with the September 30 budget deadline for funding the federal government.

The year-end spending and tax package passed December 18 by the US Congress, which removed the prospect of a government shutdown during the 2016 election campaign, in the end did not place limits on federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Republicans are sure to continue to target funding for the group, and contenders for the Republican presidential nomination have made it a key focus of their campaigns.

During a Republican debate last September, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina claimed that there were videos showing a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. Despite the fact that nothing of the sort was depicted, even in the doctored videos, the multimillionaire candidate has never withdrawn her statements.

According to Planned Parenthood, officials in 11 statesKansas, Florida, Ohio, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri and South Dakotahave cleared the health group of allegations that it has profited from fetal tissue donation.
Since the beginning of the year, there has been a veritable media barrage in Germany to push the axis of official politics to the right. The various media outlets compete in stirring up hatred against refugees, calling for a strong state and for more military missions. Above all, the New Years Eve events in Cologne have been blown out of all proportion and systematically exploited.

A prime example of this type of witch-hunting journalism is the article The fatal indifference of the ruling class by Die Welts editor-in-chief Stefan Aust, which appeared in the Sunday edition. He sums up many of the themes that are also found in other editorials, and provides a revealing insight into the fears that preoccupy the ruling elites, and the reactionary measures they are considering in response.

Aust counts no fewer than six crises, which Germany currently faces: the Russian hunger for power, the fight against terrorism at home, but also around the world, the international financial and economic crisis, the euro crisis, Europes identity crisis (in this he includes, inter alia, the Trump-ification of European politics and the strengthening of right-wing and left-wing populist forces), and the refugee crisis.

The answers that Aust suggests to resolve these crises fluctuate between hysteria and delusions of grandeur. They could be reduced to the formula: Back to the 1930s. He advocates war on at least two frontsagainst Russia and the Middle East; the driving into bankruptcy of highly indebted euro states; the practical abolition of the right of asylum and the closing up of borders.

His article ends by saying, In the rigidity of the East-West confrontation during the Cold War we have forgotten that calm winds behind the superpowers were not the norm. Now, for a long time, we will again have to live with conditions such as those described in the last century by the pacifist writer Erich Maria Remarque, Never have there been more false prophets, never more lies, never more death, never more destruction and never more tears than in our century.

Aust proposes an uncompromising course against Russia, which he accuses of hard-hitting power politics because of its response to the 2014 coup in Kiev staged by Berlin and Washington. He [Russian president Vladimir Putin] can only be stopped and tamed by deterrence, Aust writes. No round table is needed, as Germans favour, but a realpolitik as pursued from Harry S. Truman up to Helmut Schmidt.

US President Truman opened the Cold War against the Soviet Union in 1947, which ended, luckily, without a nuclear confrontation and the annihilation of Europe, although it almost came to this several times. Now, Aust wants to risk a new nuclear war.

He fiercely attacks the German population who have wanted nothing more to do with war since the madness of the Nazis. They dont want to have anything to do with it, do not understand its mechanisms and thus can respond only inadequately to it.

Aust becomes increasingly bitter and angry. When a crisis eruptsin Europe especiallyGerman society is in fear and would prefer to sit it out with a toddlers trick: Ill cover my eyes, then the others will not see me, he rages.

That should change. Significantly, Aust utilises the arguments and terminology of Humboldt University professor Herfried Munkler, whom he also explicitly quotes. The WSWS has long identified Munkler as one of the spokesmen for a new aggressive German war policy.

In the postwar period, and under the protection of America, German society had transformed itself into a post-heroic society in which realpolitik hardly applies, complains Aust and proclaims an era of permanent war: In the past, people lived either in war or in peace. Today, peace and war prevail at the same time.

Aust retrospectively declares the European Monetary Union and the issuing of loans to Greece to be a big mistake. He justifies this especially with the declining economic power of the West. One has the impression, he writes, that the leading economies have still not done their homework.

By this, Aust means mainly a policy of everyone for themselves. From a German perspective, it was wrong to water down European Union (EU) treaties and to allow the European Central Bank to indirectly carry out state funding, he says. Now it is operating as a money-printing machine, which hastens to aid the deeply indebted southern countries.

Aust wages a particularly nasty campaign against refugees. He accuses the federal government of having broken its own laws by taking in refugees. The consequences are felt everywhere: open borders for millions of peoplefrom Syrians in distress up to terrorists of the Islamic State (IS), with no end of the trouble in sight.

Aust is clear that his agitation for war and against refugees meets with rejection in wide layers of the population. In a revealing sentence, he more or less openly admits that the campaign being conducted by politicians and the media following the New Years Eve events in Cologne was aimed at pushing the governments policy to the right. Since the events of New Years Eve in Cologne, the pressure on the government to initiate a turn is in any case greater, he writes with satisfaction.

The fact that Stefan Aust has placed himself at the head of the current right-wing campaign is significant. Aust started his journalistic career in 1966 as editor of the weekly magazine Konkret, which was close to the banned German Communist Party, and was funded in its first years by the Stalinist regime in East Germany. It then became a mouthpiece of the 1968 protest movement. Among his then colleagues at Konkret was Ulrike Meinhof, the later founder of the terrorist Red Army Faction.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Aust worked for the TV magazine programme Panorama, for which he produced strong investigative reports. For example, in 1978 he brought down the Baden Wurttemberg state premier Hans Filbinger by proving that as a naval staff judge he had passed death sentences against deserting Marines shortly before the end of the Second World War.

From 1988, Aust headed the editorial board at Spiegel TV. From 1994 to 2008, Aust was editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, Germanys largest news magazine. In 2013, he finally became editor-in-chief of Die Welt, part of the right-wing publishing house Springer-Verlag.

Austs transformation into a right-wing agitator is symptomatic of a whole layer of former liberal or leftist intellectuals who, with the growing crisis of capitalism, draw ever nearer to the state apparatus. Faced with growing social inequality and imperialist conflicts, they seek to defend their social privileges by arguing for war and the strong state that inevitably accompanies it.
Around 17,000 Syrians desperate to flee the violent civil war in their country are marooned in a remote and barren area in no-mans land near a military base on the southern border with Jordan, in what a Jordanian official has described as a de facto refugee camp.

More than 4.5 million people have fled Syria, the vast majority to neighbouring countries, since the start of the proxy war led by the United States, its European and Gulf allies and Turkey to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. The exodus intensified in the wake of US airstrikes that started in September 2014 and Russian air strikes that began at the end of September 2015, with more than one million having fled since September 2014.

The number now stranded on the border is growing as Syrias civil war enters its fifth year and neighbouring countries are preventing Syrians from entering.

Lebanon, which according to its government hosts around 2 million refugees, has effectively sealed its borders by requiring Syrians to have an embassy appointment, a flight out of Beirut airport, or a guarantora citizen who takes responsibility for their residencyalmost impossible conditions for the vast majority.

Turkey, which hosts around 1.8 million refugees, has tightened its entry requirements for those who arrive by air or sea. Earlier this month, some 400 Syrians were stranded at Beirut airport when cancelled flights to Istanbul meant they missed the chance to land before the new policy was enforced. They were forced to fly back to Syria.

Jordan has for the last two years strictly controlled the number of refugees coming into the kingdom, which has fallen from several thousand a day in 2012 to just 50-100 a day, and on some days, none at all, as the daily reports in the local newspapers show. Most of these are emergency cases.

While the government in Amman has justified this with concerns about security, it wants to limit the Syrian refugee population, particularly those of Palestinian origin, so as not tip the demographic balance further towards Jordans Palestinians and away from its pre-existing and largely indigenous Bedouin population.

Following Ammans closure of the border, refugees began massing in the desert north of the border in makeshift tent cities at Rukban and Hadalat. In many cases, they had paid smugglers hundreds of dollars to drive them from the north of the country controlled by Islamist militias through government-held territory to the eastern desert in a journey that can take days with little food or water.

Aid workers and Jordanian officials say that this sudden rise in refugees is a consequence of Russias bombing of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)-controlled areas in Homs, Palmyra and Raqqa, contradicting US claims that Russia is not targeting ISIS.

As the number of refugees on the border has grown, so has the need for supplies such as water, food, medicine, tents, medical aid and logistical support that the aid agencies are struggling to provide. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned in December that health conditions were deteriorating, with the emergence of diarrhoea, vomiting and acute malnutrition among children. According to aid officials cited by the Financial Times, tens of Syriansmostly the elderly or childrenhave died there. Many of the women are pregnant, and at least five babies have been delivered at the border, according to the Red Cross.

Jordans King Abdullah sought to justify the border closure in an interview with CNN earlier this month, saying, Part of the problem is that they have come from the north of Syria, from Al Raqqa, Hasaka and Deir Ezzor, which is the heartland of where [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] is. We know there are [ISIS] members inside those camps.

European officials, determined to prevent any refugees reaching Europe, have pressed Jordan to open its borders. But a senior European diplomat added, These people are not fleeing ISIS. They are seeking safety on Jordan's border away from coalition bombing. He added that the large group in Rukban came from Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] areas and will not be let in.

Jordan hosts about 1.4 million Syrian refugees, about 20 percent of its entire population. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to nearly 64 million refugees in the US, which in contrast has allowed just 2,647 Syrian refugees to settlejust 0.06 percent of the 4.5 million who have fled the country since 2011.

The Syrian refugees follow the generations of Palestinians, Iraqis and more recently, Libyans, who have sought refuge in Jordan. According to a World Bank official, one in every three persons [is]  a refugee in Jordan, making Jordan the worlds second largest host of refugees per capita following Pakistan, and host to the fifth-largest refugee population in absolute terms.

According to the World Bank, there are 2.7 million registered refugees in Jordan, including 2.1 million Palestinians, although the UNHCR has only about 700,000 persons from 41 nationalities registered as refugees in Jordan.

Of the Syrian refugees, only about 600,000 have registered with the UNHCR, with some 120,000 living in refugee camps in Zaatari and Azraq. Zaatari has become Jordans fourth-largest city and the second-largest refugee camp in the world. Since July 2014, refugees have been unable to leave the camp without sponsorship from a Jordanian citizen and the payment of a fee, rendering them virtual prisoners.

The vast majority are living outside camps, with only 68 Jordanian dinars ($100, 87 euros) a month in support from the aid agencies. Forced to work illegally in the informal sector, they face the constant threat of being transferred to the refugee camps where only the poorest of the poor live or sent back to Syria.

Jordan estimates each Syrian refugee costs around US$280 per month. Jordan has a public debt to GDP ratio of 85 percent, growing unemployment officially running at about 15 percent (unofficially about 30 percent), rising living costs and an estimated budget deficit of 10 percent of GDP in 2016.

There has been a huge shortfall in the aid pledged at donor conferences, with only $272 million of the pledged $1.2 billion actually paid out. Last September, European Union leaders agreed a miserly $1.1 billion for Syrian refugees in the Middle East, in contrast to the $3 billion bribe to Turkey to ensure it stops the flow of refugees to Europe. In late 2015, Jordan appealed for $7.99 billion for its costs for 2016-18, having received barely a third of the $3 billion it estimates it needs this year to pay for the humanitarian costs of the Syrian crisis.

Last year, Washington announced it would increase annual aid to Jordan to $1 billion from $660 million, although it was unclear how much was of this was military support.

Most of the aid goes to United Nations agencies and the international NGOs that work in the camps, although the majority of the refugees are living in some of Jordans poorest municipalities. Local authorities that manage public services get little or no support, exacerbating already overstretched services such as education and healthcare, and infrastructure, particularly water and waste management, where the build-up of waste is highly visible. According to the US Agency for International Development, the total fiscal cost of the refugee crisis for municipal governments was around $25.4 million in 2013 and $33.0 million in 2014.

Schools are forced to operate two shifts, leading to an increase in the proportion of students attending double-shifted schools from 7.6 percent in 2009 to 13.4 percent in 2014. Nearly half of all schools in Amman and Irbid have classes of 40-50 pupils. Following the ending of free primary and secondary health care for registered Syrian refugees in November 2014, previously eradicated communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, polio and measles have re-emerged.
The establishment media in the United States and much of Europe loudly announced over the past week that Russian President Vladimir Putin probably ordered the murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. These headlines are based on the dubious January 21 report of a British government inquiry chaired by Sir Robert Owen, which in turn relied on the key expert testimony of Oxford professor Robert Service.

While headlines around the world have proclaimed Putins guilt, the Litvinenko inquiry report actually proves no such thing. It is nothing more than a string of speculative inferences, opinions, accusations, and hunches drawn from unsubstantiated hypotheses. One reads the 329-page report from beginning to end in search of some evidence of Putins guilt, and having reached the end one comes up empty-handed.

It turns out that the evidentiary foundation for the much-ballyhooed case against Putin consists almost entirely of the expert witness testimony of Robert Service. Service is the author of a discredited and factually inaccurate biography of Leon Trotsky, which has been addressed in detail by the World Socialist Web Site.

In the summary of his conclusions, Owen makes the revealing admission that much of what constitutes the factual basis for the report would not be admissible as evidence in a court of law. However, I am not bound by the strict procedural rules that apply in court proceedings, Owen adds. This is rather an understatement, since the report does not appear to have been bound by any rules or principled considerations of any kind. The result is not anything that would pass muster in any modern legal system.

It is the sort of empty case, puffed up with inflammatory allegations but lacking any solid evidentiary foundation, which judges around the world are obligated to toss out as a routine matter. Despite the hundreds of pages of text generated by the inquiry, Owens case against Putin would prove nothing in a court of law.

But the purpose of the inquiry was never to establish the objective facts, separate the guilty from the innocent, or discover the deeper causes and motives behind events. As far as 21st century imperialist propagandists are concerned, these are quaint and even amusing concepts. The point is to catapult a lie into as many headlines as possible, so that by the time the truth emerges the damage has already been done.

Litvinenko, a former officer in Russias Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB), died on November 23, 2006, after having been granted asylum in Britain in 2000. Traces of radioactive polonium-210 were allegedly discovered in hotels and airplanes that Litvinenko had used, suggesting that he had been poisoned. Before his death, Litvinenko accused the Russian state of murdering him.

The United States and Britain maintain that he was poisoned by two former Russian KGB agentsAndrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtunwhen he drank tea with them at Londons Millennium Hotel on November 1, 2006. Lugovoi, a politician and deputy of the Liberal Democratic Party in Russias Duma, denies the accusation and claims that he passed a lie detector test regarding his involvement. Meanwhile, Russia has accused British intelligence of being involved in the assassination. It emerged after Litvinenkos death that he was in the employ of MI6, and that he was receiving payments of about 2,000 per month for his services.

The original coroners inquest into Litvinenkos death was delayed and frustrated due to fears in the British government that a public proceeding could reveal sensitive intelligence material. Doubtless there were also concerns about the diplomatic consequences, as well as about the implications for the multitude of Russian oligarchs whose cash fuels Londons real estate and stock markets.

The public inquiry was finally opened, with strict limitations imposed by the government, in January of last year. The inquiry opened against the backdrop of the Western-backed, fascist-led coup in the Ukraine in February 2014, the media furor over the downing of Malaysian passenger flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, and a general crescendo of imperialist saber-rattling directed against Russia.

In response to the publication of the inquirys report last week, Time magazine carried an essay titled, The Russian Dissident Whose Poisoning Was Linked to Putin. The New York Times Magazine headline read, Alexander Litvinenko and the Banality of Evil in Putins Russia.

NBC: Vladimir Putin Likely Approved Murder of Alexander Litvinenko. CNN: Litvinenko case: UK inquiry says Putin probably approved ex-spys killing. The Los Angeles Times: British inquiry finds Putin probably OKd ex-spy Litvinenkos poisoning. The Economist: Litvinenkos murder was probably approved by Putin. The Financial Times: Putin probably approved Litvinenko murder, inquiry finds.

A Washington Post editorial read, A highly anticipated British inquiry into the 2006 killing of Russian Alexander Litvinenko has reached a remarkable conclusion: Russian President Vladimir Putin likely approved the poisoning of the former KGB operative, who died after radioactive polonium slipped into his cup of green tea at Londons Millennium Hotel.

The media was unanimous that Putin probably ordered Litvinenkos murder. But for thinking people, the first clue that something was amiss was that, beyond reporting the findings of the inquiry, very little was reported of the supposed factual basis for that finding.

A good case does not necessarily have to consist of direct evidence. Under the right circumstances, circumstantial evidence can constitute the strongest case. As a great American trial lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, once said of circumstantial evidence, We better know there is fire whence we see much smoke rising than could know it by one or two witnesses swearing to it. The witnesses may commit perjury, but the smoke cannot.

The Livinenko inquiry discovered nothing resembling either direct or circumstantial evidence for Putins involvement. The report proclaims that it makes a circumstantial case, but there are neither witnesses (direct evidence) nor is there any smoke (circumstantial evidence). There is no physical or forensic evidence linking Putin to the murder, no eyewitness testimony, and no video, audio, decrypted diplomatic cables, emails, or other documentary evidence. Instead, one encounters merely baseless speculations, the kind of non-evidence that would be excluded by courts of law around the world as irrelevant, hearsay, argumentative, lacking in foundation, begging the question, improper opinion testimony, or downright misleading.

The first 240 of the 329 pages of the Litvinenko inquiry report concern the background of Litvinenkos career and the circumstances of his death, together with a general history of the Putin administration. The main proof of Putins involvement begins on roughly page 240 and ends on page 245. It consists of the following key evidence:

Since 2006 President Putin has supported and protected Mr. Lugovoy, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Lugovoy has been publicly accused of killing Mr. Litvinenko. During the course of the Inquiry hearings, President Putin awarded Mr. Lugovoy an honour for services to the fatherland. Whilst it does not follow that Mr. Lugovoy must have been acting on behalf of the Russian State when he killed Mr. Litvinenko, the way in which President Putin has treated Mr. Lugovoy is certainly consistent with that hypothesis. Moreover, President Putins conduct towards Mr. Lugovoy suggests a level of approval for the killing of Mr. Litvinenko.

In my judgement, these matters amount to strong circumstantial evidence of Russian State responsibility for the killing of Mr. Litvinenko.

The report also cites Professor Robert Services testimony that Putin generally endorsed what the agency got up to in the years through to 2006 and beyond and that [FSB director Nikolai] Patrushev as its Director knew that he had his Presidents support in its operations.

This is the evidence that provided the foundation for countless banner headlines around the world proclaiming Putins guilt. In other words, the proof of Putins complicity in the murder is that (1) he did not afterwards publicly accuse the alleged perpetrator, Lugovoy, of the murder, and (2) Robert Services testimony that Putin generally approves of the actions of his subordinates. This is not evidence of anything at all, and it begs the question of Loguvoys involvement, as well as the question of whether he acted independently, on behalf of a faction within the Russian state, or on behalf of the Russian state itself (if he was the perpetrator at all).

Saying Putin could have been involved is nothing more than a rhetorical trick, since it is logically the same thing as saying Putin could have been not involved. Based on the evidence that has been revealed so far, it is perhaps true that Putins involvement cannot be ruled out, but neither can the involvement of British or American intelligence.

The totally dishonest method used to convict Putin is easily demonstrated if the tables are turned. For example, it might be postulated that the American and British governments have benefited from the Litvinenko assassination, since they have used it to increase diplomatic and media pressure on Russia, as part of their strategy of advancing their interests in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Therefore, using Owens logic, it follows that the CIA and MI6 would have had a motive to frame visiting figures connected with the Russian state for the murder. Further, it is well known that Cameron and Obama generally approve of the conduct of MI6 and the CIA. Therefore, using Owens logic, Cameron and Obama likely and probably ordered the Litvinenko assassination personally  Q.E.D.!

Litvinenkos brother Maksim, who lives in Rimini, Italy, called the report ridiculous. According to Maksim Litvinenko, the British security services had a greater motive than the Russian state. My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. Its all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government, he told reporters.

In any event, it is well known that the American president routinely orders the assassination of his enemies around the world without charges or trial. If the newspapers can report with so much indignation that the Russian president was probably involved in one assassination, then where are their reports that the American president was definitely involved in thousands of illegal murders?

There is every indication that the Owen inquirys report, together with the extensive media campaign regarding its probable conclusions, is part of the general propaganda effort isolate, provoke, and demonize the Russian government. Aleksandr V. Yakovenko, Russian ambassador to Britain, commented, We view it as an attempt to put additional pressure on Russia, in connection with existing differences over a number of international issues.

The Litvinenko inquirys findings regarding Putin belong in the same category as the baseless media claims around the downing of Malaysian passenger flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. They also recall similar efforts to demonize other foreign leaders whose countries are targeted for imperialist aggression and provocation: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and so on.

Whenever finance capital sees an opportunity for plunder, the imperialist media dutifully discovers that the leader of the targeted country is an evil man. Meanwhile, the blood-soaked dictators and monarchs more closely aligned with imperialismsuch as Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Saudi aristocracyget a free pass.

All of these considerations weigh strongly against crediting the purported findings of the inquiry, but the involvement of Robert Service weighs the heaviest of all.

Professor Service was instructed by the Inquiry to provide expert evidence on Russian history and politics, Sir Robert Owen writes in the report. He produced two reports, both of which I adduced in evidence. He also gave oral evidence at the Inquiry hearings.

I say at once, the report continues, that I found Professor Service to be a most impressive and helpful witness. His mastery of the subject was apparent, but just as notableand of great assistance to mewas the conspicuous care that he took in highlighting the issues where the limited nature of the source material available to him meant that he was unable to express a decided view one way or the other.

Indeed, Services reports include very little actual evidence of anything, notwithstanding pages and pages of sentences like the following: The Putin administration has always been demonstrably secretive, manipulative and authoritarian with a ruthless commitment to protecting its interests at home and abroad.

Characteristically, Service explains events using his own speculative psychological diagnoses of the individuals involved: Putin reacted furiously; This provoked anger; Putin is a Chekist at the level of instincts; and so forth.

The report of the Litvinenko inquiry purports to resemble the outcome of a legal proceeding, and legal terminology is used. Service is designated as an expert witness, and so on. But beyond these superficial appearances, there is little about the inquiry that could be described as legal. The proceedings are best described as a rigged show-trial of Putin in absentia, with only one side permitted to make its case, and with the outcome determined in advance.

From a legal standpoint, it is well settled that a witness cannot testify as to matters about which he or she has no personal knowledge, and expert witnesses can only testify with the appropriate factual and scientific foundation. An expert who proposes to spout inflammatory accusations on behalf of one side of the dispute, without any facts to back up his or her allegations, is not permitted to take the stand.

In the US, for example, Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence only permits an expert witnesses to testify if (a) the experts scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue; (b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data; (c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and (d) the expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case. All four factors must be satisfied for the evidence to be admissible, and it is doubtful whether Services testimony would satisfy any of them.

In his reports, Service appears sensitive about the absence of any facts to back up his speculations, but in the end he attempts to shift the blame onto the Russian state for not being more transparent.

The fact that the Litvinenko inquiry was compelled to call as its key expert witness a right-wing hack like Service is all the more reason to disbelieve the allegations against Putin. If there was a strong case for Putins involvement, why would it be necessary to call as a key witness someone who has made a career out of falsifying history?

On the other hand, if the allegations against Putin are simply the lowest grade of reactionary propaganda, designed to pollute public consciousness for the benefit of definite political interests, then Professor Service would seem like just the man for the job.
In a presidential election campaign that has already defied conventional wisdom and revealed an immense crisis of the American political system, the most significant factor is the broad and growing support for Democratic presidential aspirant and self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator, who has openly characterized his campaign as an effort to reverse flagging support for the Democratic Party and boost its prospects in the 2016 elections, has made the issue of social inequality and the machinations of Wall Street the central theme of his challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. This has evoked a far greater popular response than anyone in the media or political establishment, beginning with Sanders, anticipated.

Just days away from the February 1 Iowa Caucuses, Sanders has, according to opinion polls, either erased or overtaken Clintons lead in a state where the presumed front-runner had spent millions of dollars and supposedly locked in a victory. In New Hampshire, which hosts a primary a week later, Sanders has a double-digit lead over Clinton that seems to be expanding.

The surge in support for Sanders is all the more significant in that it has continued during two months of nonstop media scaremongering over the threat of terrorist attacks following the events in Paris and San Bernardino. Not so long ago, media pundits were gloating that Sanders campaign had become a dead letter because the American people had shifted their attention from economic inequality to the war on terror.

The support for Sanders has exploded a whole series of fictions about the American people and American politics. In a country where anti-socialism has been a virtual secular religion for the better part of a century, where socialist ideas have been excluded from political discourse and banned by the media, and where socialist opponents of the two parties of big business have been kept off the ballot by antidemocratic election lawsit turns out that socialist ideas are immensely popular.

A recent poll showed that a majority of Democratic voters in Iowa identified themselves as socialists as compared to those identifying themselves as capitalists. Particularly among young people, Sanders denunciations of social inequality and Wall Street evoke a powerful response. A YouGov poll of Iowa Democrats showed Sanders leading Clinton among voters aged 18 to 29 by an astonishing 74 percent to 14 percent.

In a country where the entire political, media and academic establishment is obsessed with questions of race, gender and sexual orientation and basic class issues are suppressed, it turns out that what really concern the vast majority of people are fundamental social and economic issues that transcend the preoccupations of identity politics and are common to all working people.

Broad layers of workers and youth are being radicalized by decades of social and economic reaction, which have only intensified under the supposed tribune of hope and change, Obama. They are appalled at the reality of perpetual war and the squandering of vast resources on killing and plunder overseas, together with the looting of the economy at home by a criminal corporate and financial aristocracy.

Having been fed nothing but lies by the politicians and the media, beginning with the claim that America is enjoying an economic recovery, they react with a mixture of surprise and hope that a prominent presidential candidate is talking about the things that concern them.

The rising popular support for Sanders is engendering increasing concern and fear within the ruling elite, not so much because of Sanders himself, but because of the profound shift to the left and growth of social opposition that underlies his rise in the polls.

The past week has seen a mounting campaign by the media and the Democratic Party establishment to counter Sanders rise. Prominent Clinton supporters have attacked Sanders for being insufficiently supportive of African-Americans and others have engaged in redbaiting. On Monday, Obama came close to endorsing Clinton, telling a Politico podcast that he rejected comparisons between his 2008 victory over Clinton in the Iowa Caucuses and Sanders surge in the polls in that state. He went on to praise Clinton for making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.

The Wall Street Journals lead editorial of January 20, Taking Sanders Seriously, was a warning to the corporate-financial elite about the dangerous implications of Sanders campaign. While it greatly exaggerated the radicalism of Sanders reform proposals, claiming, for example, that Sanders would use government to control the means of production, the statement made clear that the financial elite would not tolerate any of the measures, modest by historical standards, advanced by Sanders to rein in the banks and reduce social inequality.

Citing a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Sanders defeating Republican front-runner Donald Trump by 15 percentage points in a hypothetical match-up, the newspaper worried about the possibility of a split in the Republican Party and an extreme election outcome.

But workers and youth who are attracted to Sanders because they identify with the socialist ideals of economic equality and human solidarity are obliged to consider a whole series of questions that arise from the Vermont senators campaignmost fundamentally, what is socialism, and who are the real socialists?

While Sanders inveighs against Wall Streets greed and criminality, he supports the imperialist wars being waged by the Obama administration in the interests of the very same financial elite. How is it possible to oppose what the billionaire class (in Sanders words) does at home and support what it does around the world? Domestic and foreign policy are two sides of the same cointhe global strategy of the American ruling class, and the cost of the trillions squandered in military hardware and war, are inevitably imposed on the working class. There is no struggle for socialism apart from a struggle against imperialist war.

Sanders claims to represent the interests of working people in America, but he promotes economic nationalism and chauvinism, lining up with the trade unions in seeking to divert workers anger over layoffs and wage cuts away from the US corporate elite and instead directing it against the workers in China, Mexico and elsewhere. From its inception, socialism has been based on internationalismthe international unity of the working classin opposition to nationalism.

Sanders is seeking to become the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in the United States. He never explains how his socialism can be achieved within the framework of a political party that is controlled by Wall Street. Socialism is possible only on the basis of the political independence of the working class from all capitalist parties and politicians. It requires not a policy of protest to the powers-that-be, but a revolutionary struggle by the working class for political power and a workers government.

The measures proposed by Sandersthe breakup of the biggest banks, free college tuition, universal health care, a $15 per hour minimum wageare incompatible with the existing economic and political set-up, which Sanders accepts and defends. The editorial by the Wall Street Journal makes clear that the ruling class will never accept the enactment of such measures and will resort to the most ruthless methods to block them. The response of the ruling elite, and both of its parties, to the growth of social opposition is the militarization of the police and the establishment of a police state-in-waiting to violently crush any serious challenge to its profits and power.

To provide jobs, education, housing, health care, a decent retirement and all the other necessities of life, the working class will be compelled to break the power of the financial oligarchy, seize control of its wealth and end its private control over industry, finance and transportation. Socialism is inseparable from public ownership of the means of production under the democratic control of working peoplesomething Sanders has explicitly rejected.

As it enters into great class battles, the working class will, with the help of the World Socialist Web Site and the true socialist party, the Socialist Equality Party, come to recognize in Sanders and his political allies an obstacle to the development of a mass revolutionary movement that must be consciously rejected and cast aside.
Our will is not to enter a government led by the PSOE. These were the words of Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, after the May 2015 regional elections. Nine months later, following the general election on December 20, Podemos is stepping up the pressure on the Socialist Party (PSOE) to form a government.

A coalition government including the PSOE and Podemos is one of the possibilities emerging from the inconclusive result of the December 20 election, which shattered Spainss decades-old two-party system. It produced a hung parliament, with 123 seats going to the ruling Popular Party (PP), 90 to the PSOE, 69 to Podemos, 40 to the right-wing Citizens party, two to the Stalinist-led United Left (IU), and 25 to various regional nationalist parties.

As a result, no party can form a government by itself, and a political crisis has erupted. A report on Spain to be published next month by the European Commission is likely to warn that continued failure to form a government could slow down the agenda of reforms and trigger a loss of confidence and a decline in market sentiment. Such concerns have forced King Felipe VI to intervene, to an unprecedented level for the monarchy in modern times, to broker a solution and arrange another round of talks with all the party leaders today.

The previous talks ended up on Friday with PP acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declining the Kings formal offer to form a new government, saying he had been unable to secure backing from the PSOE for a grand coalition between the PP, PSOE, and Citizens. On the same day, Iglesias emerged from his talks with the King to tell reporters he was ready to form a progressive government with the PSOE and IU, in which PSOE leader Pedro Sanchez would be prime minister and he would be deputy prime minister.

Iglesias followed up this offer with an article, The Government of Change, on Sunday for the pro-PSOE El Pais. He wrote, for the first time it is possible to form a pluralist and progressive government in Spain, sufficiently detached from past practices to ensure the implementation of a social rescue programme during the first 100 days of government. He asked the PSOE to recognise that we cannot fail those 11 million voters which, under no circumstances, want the PP to continue ruling. To PSOE voters, he said a PSOE-Podemos government would be the best guarantee that their party would not fail them again.

To facilitate a deal with the PSOE, Podemos has also retreated from its demand for the holding of an independence referendum in Catalonia. The partys number two, Inigo Errejon, has said that the party is still in favour of a referendum, but is open to alternatives. Iglesias has proposed the creation of a new ministry of plurinationality headed by Xaiver Domenech, leader of the Podemos Catalan faction, En Comu Podem.

Despite intending to occupy a subordinate position to the PSOE, as deputy prime minister, Iglesias has said that Podemos should have half the ministries in a coalition government. He also said he does not believe in backing Sanchez as PM without entering the government.

This was a reference to Portugal, where the pseudo-left Left Bloc and Communist Party support a minority Socialist Party (PS) government from the outisde. The PS has pushed through a 2.2 billion state bailout of failing Bank Banif and submitted a 2016 State Budget to the European Union (EU) for approval that will impose further austerity on Portuguese workers.

While Iglesias has expressed support for the Portuguese PS government, calling its policies firm and brave, he clearly does not intend for Podemos to stay outside a similar government, in Spain, playing the role of BE in Portugal. It is willing to seek a position within a PSOE-led government, providing it with left cover as it moves to attack the working class.

After the experience of BE in Portugal and above all the imposition of austerity in Greece by a government led by Syriza, a key Podemos ally, now it is Podemos turn to come forth frankly as a defender of bourgeois order, hostile to the working class. It is exposing itself as a political ally in all but name of the PSOE, a longstanding party of finance capital that has supported numerous NATO wars and ruthless austerity measures negotiated with the European Union.

Podemos is attempting to mask the reactionary character of its planned alliance with the PSOE behind the fig leaf of a few symbolic proposals to do away with the most widely unpopular and outrageous austerity measures. It is still calling for a handful of limited and ambiguous measures, such as preventing banks from evicting borrowers without lining up alternative accommodation.

In Greece, the Syriza-led government also proposed a similar series of social measures and passed some of them, but within weeks imposed savage cuts in public expenditure and pensions, privatizations, and tax hikes demanded by the troika (European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank) and continues to do so.

Iglesias has supported Syriza since it was first elected in January 2015, defending its austerity measures as sadly, the only thing it could do.

On Sunday evening, Iglesias and Sanchez had a 20-minute phone call during which, according to El Pais, the two leaders disagreed over the time frame for beginning negotiations. Iglesias is insisting on starting them as soon as possible and Sanchez wants to wait. Sanchez also reproached Iglesias for his announcement on Friday following his meeting with the King.

Despite Podemos aggressive courting of the PSOE, however, major obstacles still exist to the formation of a PSOE-Podemos government. Sanchezs room for manoeuvre is virtually non-existent. Iglesiass proposal to become deputy PM and Podemos having half the ministries is based on the fact that Podeoms won 20.7 percent of the popular vote (5,189,463) just short of the PSOEs 22 percent (5,530,779). Recent polls also show that a majority of PSOE supporters prefer a pact with the Podemos rather than the PP, and that Podemos would beat the PSOE into third place should new elections be called.

A PSOE faction led by the partys Andalusian leader, Susana Diaz, is calling for a grand coalition government with the PP, however. Top PSOE leaders including former Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and former deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba are vehemently opposed to any deal with Podemos, which they have branded a threat to Spanish unity. There is talk of Sanchez being deposed and a split in the party.

These factions of the PSOE are pointing to the fact that if Sanchez did agree to form a government with Podemos and IU, the PSOE would still be 15 seats short of a majority. Citizens has said it would oppose any government that included Podemos, meaning that the PSOE would need agreements with two or more nationalist and pro-independence parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The new Catalan regional government is pressing ahead with its road-map for secession from Spain over the next 18 months and creating new Catalan state bodies including a tax office and public bank. It is also wooing the European Union and financial institutions to put pressure on Madrid with promises that an independent Catalonia would be better placed to comply with the troikas demands.
The Maritime Union of Australia, working with the Labor Party and several federal cross-bench senators, has used the sacking of 38 seafarers by transnational mining company Alcoa to launch a reactionary, nationalist campaign directed against foreign shipping workers.

On January 13, company thugs boarded the MV Portland, which workers had occupied for two months, and replaced them with an overseas crew. The MUA had demanded reinstatement and Australian-manned crews for domestic shippingin line with the unions nationalist perspective.

The unions demagogy about defending Australian jobs is an utter fraud aimed at obscuring its own role in enforcing the ever-deeper cuts to jobs, wages and conditions demanded by the major port and shipping companies.

In late October, the federal Liberal-National government granted Alcoa a temporary coastal license, allowing it to use international shipping companies and crews to transport goods between Australian-based ports. Under the countrys cabotage laws, ships trading between domestic ports are currently required to be Australian-operated and crewed unless receiving a temporary exemption.

In early November, Alcoa announced that it was planning to decommission the MV Portland, which transported alumina from Western Australia to Alcoas smelter in Portland, Victoria for 27 years. The ship had been due for a statutory dry-dock in mid-2017. The ships 38 crew members were told that they would be sacked after they had sailed the vessel to Singapore.

Replacing the crew with overseas workers and shipping operators is expected to save the company more than $6 million a year. According to one estimate, crew members from the Philippines are to be paid as little as $207 a week.

On November 14, Portland workers occupied the ship, refusing to leave port. The union immediately sought to isolate them, and direct their anger into the nationalist dead-end of hostility to foreign shipping lines and crews.

The real enemy, however, is big businesswhether Australian or foreign-owedwhich is desperately seeking to boost profits by slashing jobs and conditions. Alcoa, like all the major mining corporations, has been hit by the collapse of the mining boom in Australia and the deepening global economic slump. At the beginning of November, Alcoa also announced that it was idling three of its smelters in the United States. Last Friday, Moodys rating agency warned of a possible downgrade to the companys credit rating.

More broadly, the international shipping industry has been sharply contracting under the impact of falling trade. One indicator is the decline of the Baltic Dry Indexwhich measures the cost of moving dry raw materials by seato 354 points, its lowest level since January 1985. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the index reached peaks of 11,000 points.

George Logothetis, the head of international shipping line Libra Group, told the World Economic Forum in Davos this month that the shipping industrys crisis had reached Armageddon level. Shipping companies are reportedly selling off ships to ensure their liquidity.

With shipping and related industries around the world under pressure, companies are demanding stepped-up attacks on workers everywhere. This agenda has provoked struggles by shipping and port workers, including a port strike in Oakland, California at the beginning of 2015 and strikes by Korean shipbuilders late last year.

The MUA, however, is bitterly hostile to any attempt to unify workers in Australia with their counterparts internationally in a common struggle against the shipping and port magnates to defend jobs, wages and conditions. Instead, the union functions as an industrial police force of the port and shipping companies. It kept the Portland workers isolated, leaving them vulnerable to Alcoas attacks, and subordinated their struggle to the industrial courts.

In late November, the Fair Work Commission, Australias federal industrial tribunal, ordered the workers to leave the ship. The court, which functions as a pro-business instrument of the major corporations, was established by the Gillard Labor government in 2009 with the support of the unions.

When the workers defied the ruling, the MUA directed them into futile court appeals. The union launched an unsuccessful action in the Federal Court to have Alcoas temporary coastal license overturned.

On January 13, at 1 a.m., 30 security personnel hired by Alcoa raided the vessel, hauling off the five workers who were on board at the time. A replacement crew was immediately installed and the ship sent to Singapore. MUA officials, having done nothing to prevent the attack, escalated their nationalist campaign.

At a rally in Portland on Monday of about 300 people, officials from the MUA and a number of other unions assembled behind a banner declaring, Our Coast. Our Jobs. Our Future.

MUA national secretary Paddy Crumlin declared: The ability of a profitable foreign company to replace 40 Australian workers with unregulated, developing world labour should be a concern for every single working man and woman in this country.

Crumlin said that the sackings violated the right of workers to work in their own country. Underscoring the xenophobia of its campaign, the union demanded to know which visas were provided to the replacement crew, and whether they were subjected to criminal and security checks.

Indicating the real motive of the union campaign, Crumlin stated: There was a time when business, government and workers represented by their unions would work together in a mutually beneficial manner. In other words, the union is entirely committed to the agenda of stepped-up productivity and efficiencyits only concern is to maintain its position as enforcers for the company and the government.

Crumlins perspective was embodied in a Coastal TradingIndustry Discussion forum in Melbourne last Friday, which brought together the MUAs senior officials, leading representatives of the Greens, Labor and three cross-bench federal senators, along with the major shipping associations.

The discussion was chaired by Greg Smith, former Fair Work deputy commissioner. The MUA restated its calls for Australian shipping companies to be provided with financial incentives.

Labor, which opposes legislation introduced by the government to effectively abolish cabotage restrictions, has backed the MUAs campaign. Last week, Labor leader Bill Shorten declared: I think its a disgrace that we are seeing, even on the Australian coastline, fewer Australian flag ships.

Shorten, a former national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, and a senior minister in the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, is directly responsible for the destruction of thousands of jobs. He hastened to add that he was opposed to mindless militancy and illegality. His comments were duly posted on the MUAs website.

The unions promotion of xenophobia and racism goes hand in hand with its decades-long collaboration with the major shipping and port companies at the expense of workers jobs and conditions. When Hutchison Ports sacked 97 workers in Sydney and Brisbane by text message last August, the MUA responded by declaring that it was because the company is Hong Kong-based.

While joining with Shorten and other Labor Party figures in denouncing Hutchisons move as un-Australian, the MUA did everything it could to isolate the workers and entered into closed-door negotiations. In November, it struck a deal with Hutchison for 65 redundancies, a boost to casualisation and other pro-company reforms.

The shipping industry is inherently international in character. As a result, any struggle to defend jobs and conditions necessarily requires a turn to workers not only in Australia but around the world and a complete break with the trade unions and their nationalist demagogy.
In an effort to broaden his appeal, Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, has shifted gears in recent weeks and begun making appeals to African American voters. The Sanders campaign is communicating its message with the help of well-known academics, celebrities and Democratic Party politicians.

In several recent public appearances, the US Senator from Vermont has played up his history as a former protester and civil rights activist. According to the New York Times, With a blitz of appearances, ads on black-oriented radio stations, a tour of historically black colleges and the help of well-known and not-so-well-known African-Americans, Mr. Sanders is racing to get the word out: He is a lifelong civil rights advocate who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Sanders took part in a live-streamed, round-table discussion ostensibly to promote Kings historical legacy. Also participating were rap artist Killer Mike [Michael Render], academic and Democratic Socialists of America member Cornel West and former Ohio state senator and minority whip Nina Turner. Sanders took the opportunity during the discussion to liken his campaign to Kings struggle in the 1960s.

Killer Mike seconded this idea. You have to see how his philosophy lines up with that [of leaders from the civil rights era], he stated. In his music, Render has been a vocal critic of the Obama administrations militaristic policies and of police brutality.

At another point in the conversation, Render implored working class African Americans to overlook race and to support Sanders. Its time to understand that people that got washed under in New Orleans were not just black, there were many poor white people that were not able to return  that lost their lives. He followed this entirely legitimate point by suggesting that the beautiful relationship of African Americans with the Democratic Party could only proceed insomuch as Democrats align themselves with the ideas of the greatest Democrats, i.e., King.

Render is correct to emphasize the class issues at the center of the crisis in America and to insist on rejecting racial politics. The conditions in New Orleans and elsewhere are reaching the breaking point, and the social misery afflicts every section of the working population. However, Sandersas a candidate for the presidential nomination of one of Americas two major big business partieswould and could do nothing about poverty, unemployment, low wages, the ongoing attacks on democratic rights and the endless wars. As president, he would inevitably deepen those attacks.

Throughout the January 17 discussion, no participant dared point out the contradiction between the anti-Vietnam war position of King (who famously referred to the US government as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world) and Sanderss own promotion of the war on terror. Kings opposition to the war in Vietnam led him to politically break with Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic president at the time, although not with the Democratic Party.

What has Sanders done? Rather than denounce US imperialism, he has fully embraced the current administrations drive to war, arguing at the Democratic Party debate Sunday that Barack Obama was doing the right thing in regard to his criminal policies in the Middle East. The Vermont Senator called for an even larger portion of the US military budget to be plowed into fighting ISIS and international terrorism. Sanders debate performance occurred just hours after he had made his brief detour to promote himself as the inheritor of Kings legacy.

In terms of Sanderss supposed opposition to social inequality and the billionaire class, one really has to use some degree of political realism. Why should his speeches denouncing the wealthy in very abstract terms be believed? This is hardly the first time in American history that a politician has used populist rhetoric in an effort to channel widespread anger back into the Democratic Party, the graveyard of popular opposition.

Sanders is seeking the nomination of the party whose leading figure in the White House has presided over an economic recovery since 2008-09 that has benefited only the wealthiest portion of society. Some 95 percent of all gains have gone to the top one percent. Meanwhile the median net worth of American families plunged by 39 percent from 2007 to 2010. Sanders cannot explain the contradiction between his vague, essentially toothless criticisms of Wall Street and the commitment of the Democrats to the preservation and enrichment of the elite. The Obama administration has neither prosecuted nor jailed a single financial executive for his or her role in collapsing the economy.

A recent Bloomberg Politics poll of likely voters in Iowa found that 43 percent of Democratic primary voters in that state described themselves as socialists. Sanders is the undeserved beneficiary of the radicalization of sections of the working population and young people.

But other factors and political considerations also play their role in buoying the Sanders campaign. He has the support of relatively affluent members of the middle class who are angry and resentful of the super-rich fraction at the very top of society. Some of the more farsighted among these petty bourgeois layers find Sanders attractive because of their concern that the obscene levels of social inequality will lead to social explosions. Likewise, he has increasingly come to be viewed as a safe pair of hands by representatives of finance capital, acutely sensitive to the danger of social unrest in America.

Sanders has been tapped to contain and render harmless the still-inchoate opposition of young people and workers to the present social and economic order. This was evident in one of Sanderss remarks at the roundtable discussion. One of my great worries is that so many people of all different colors [are] giving up on the political process.  They understand that the system is rigged, and they dont vote.  And when they dont vote, a bad situation gets even worse.

Other participants in the discussion sought to impart their own special brand of political charlatanry and deceit. What is magnificent about the Sanders campaign, declared academic and media commentator Cornel West, is that Martin Luther King, Jr.s legacy is now embodied within the context of electoral politics. We havent had this since 84 and 88 with Jesse Jackson.  And here we actually  have Brother Bernie Sanders who  is still willing to confront Wall Street after having spent time in Congress.  It very well could be Americas last chance for the legacy of King. West uses florid demagogy to conceal the essential social fact: Sanders like Jackson is a political safety valve and an ardent defender of the system that exploits and oppresses the mass of the population.

Ohio State Senator Nina Turner presented an executive order issued by Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich, promoting a community-based policing model across the state, as an example of [laying] down all those things that divide us and coming with what brings us together.

In fact, policies like those ordered by Kasich are reactionary and amount to an intensification of police brutality in poor and working class neighborhoods. According to a 2013 Department of Justice report, community-oriented policing, or COPS, may be a layer added on top of, rather than replacing  traditional methods of intervention (e.g., street sweeps, crackdowns).

Concluding her comments, Turner declared Black folks respect the police  justice and accountability can go hand in hand, because we cant have a civilized society without the police.

Thoroughly establishment figures such as Sanders, West and Turner can promote themselves as heirs to the legacy of Martin Luther King, in the first place, because King himself never broke with the effort to reform the existing system and pressure the Democratic Party. However, one has to add that the degeneration of the official civil rights leadership and liberalism has reached an advanced state. King took courageous stands on the war in Vietnam and poverty that would be inconceivable by those who seek to wrap themselves in his mantle today.

A considerable number of artists (primarily musicians and actors) have signed on to the Sanders campaign. The list includes familiar names from the radical or left-liberal generation of the 1960s and 1970s, including Danny DeVito, John Densmore (The Doors), Elvin Bishop, Marshall Crenshaw, Steve Earle, Bill Frisell, Donovan Leitch, Jackson Browne, Charlie Musselwhite, Jello Biafra, Graham Nash, David Crosby, Bonnie Raitt, Susan Sarandon, Mike Watt, Loudon Wainwright III and Lucinda Williams. Sanders supporters also include figures who have come to prominence in more recent decades: Will Ferrell, Flea, Thurston Moore, Shepard Fairey, Zoe Kravitz, Juliette Lewis, Justin Long, Margaret Cho, rapper Lil B, Adam McKay, Ezra Miller, Patton Oswalt, Jeremy Piven, Killer Mike, Mark Ruffalo, Sarah Silverman and others.

A question almost automatically comes to mind: are these celebrities supporting Bernie Sanders because they mistakenly think he is a socialist and a danger to the status quo, or precisely because they knowor sensethat he is neither? For the most part, the latter is probably the case.

In any case, someone like Michael Render may be articulating the confused feelings of broader layers of the population who are searching desperately for some alternative to the corrupt, wealthy and hated Democrats, including Obama, and the Republicans. But insofar as he and the other artists promote Sanders and the Democrats, they are helping to trap the population in a political set-up that is implacably hostile to them.

For the Socialist Equality Party, it is the interests of these broader layers that matter, not the doings of the big names. Popular support for Sanders may be understandable given the miserable choices that are available in the 2016 election, but the harsh truth has to be stated now, not after future disastersmore war, more repression, even greater social inequality like those which followed the 2008 election of the candidate of change, Barack Obama. The working class and young people need a revolutionary socialist alternative that represents a complete break with capitalism.
On January 18 police arrested Ngatokotoru Puna, a mathematics teacher from the Cook Islands, as he attempted to leave New Zealand with an unpaid student debt. Puna borrowed $40,000 to study at Auckland University more than a decade ago, and the sum had ballooned to $120,000 due to interest.

Puna was released after he paid $5,000 and arranged with the Inland Revenue Department to make future repayments. He told the media that being detained in a police cell and dragged before the court was the worst day of my life. He said his $35,000 annual salary was too low to repay the debt, support his five children and repay a $300,000 mortgage.

Punas arrest was the first under legislation passed in 2014 allowing police to detain people who have defaulted on repayments to the government-run student loan scheme. More than 110,000 borrowers live overseas and reportedly 70 percent of them have defaulted, meaning they could be arrested if they returned to New Zealand.

The National Party government and corporate media used Punas arrest to demonise these former students. Nationals coalition partner David Seymour, leader of the far-right ACT Party, absurdly told RadioLive that student loan defaulters were upper class bourgeois who had ripped off the New Zealand taxpayer.

This comes from a government that has slashed funding for education, healthcare and welfare, while cutting corporate taxes and bailing out the failed company South Canterbury Finance with $1.7 billion. It has spent hundreds of millions on sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, and celebrating New Zealands participation in World War I.

In reality, the growth in the number of people unable to repay their loans is due to exorbitant university and polytechnic fees, combined with cuts to financial support and low wages for graduates. Since the Labour government of the 1980s introduced the first fees for tertiary education, successive Labour and National Party-led governments have chronically underfunded institutions, imposing more costs on students every year. The state subsidy has been reduced to around 75 percent of course costs.

Figures released in December show that total student debt in New Zealand sky-rocketed to $14.8 billion by mid-2015, up from $14.2 billion the previous year and $10 billion at the end of 2007. Debt has increased despite falling enrolments. Last financial year, 176,210 people borrowed from the loan scheme, compared to 202,219 in 201011.

Students and graduates paid off about $1 billion worth of debt last year, but another $1.5 billion was borrowed. The number of people with student loans stood at 728,348, in a country with 4.5 million people. The average loan balance was $20,371, up from $14,246 in 2004.

According to the New Zealand Herald, of the people who left study in 2002, only 50 percent had fully repaid their loans 10 years later, and one quarter had not repaid anything.

The hardship and poverty facing young people has worsened dramatically as a result of the governments austerity measures, especially since the 2008 financial crash. The 201415 financial year saw 540 student loans, worth a record $17.7 million, written off due to bankruptcy. In 19992000, $2.8 million was written off.

Student living allowances, which are based on parental income and only available to about one in five students, have remained stagnant for years. The maximum allowance is $175 a week but students typically pay $120$160 or more on rent alone.

Part-time jobs are few and low-paid, forcing many students to borrow extra for living costs. Official statistics show that 11 percent of under-25-year-olds are not in work, education or training.

In response to the governments funding freeze, universities and polytechnics have axed courses and introduced more stringent academic entry criteria, turning away thousands of prospective students. In 2011 the government banned students from borrowing for more than seven years of study, effectively barring working-class students from expensive postgraduate courses.

Over the past seven years hundreds of staff have been sacked and wages frozen at institutions throughout the country. Most recently, Unitec announced 300 job cuts last November at its Auckland campus, as part of a plan to outsource student services.

Universities increasingly rely on international students, who must pay much higher, unsubsidised fees. Foreign students, largely from China and India, are highly exploited. On January 18, the Herald reported that some apartments housing foreign students in Auckland were severely overcrowded, with a typical advertisement seeking $130 a week for a room shared with three other people.

Shannon Aitken from Crockers property management told the paper there had been an increase in hot-bedding, where one bed is shared in shifts. Someone will be there during the night and someone will be sleeping during the day, Aitken said.

The student unions, which are thoroughly integrated into the university structures, have not called for free education and the wiping of student debt. Speaking to Radio NZ, New Zealand Union of Students Associations acting president Laura Harris criticised Punas arrest and meekly called for a more lenient approach to debtors, but stressed that the associations absolutely are for the loans being repaid.

The opposition Labour Party fully supports Nationals austerity measures, including its attacks on students. Following Punas arrest the Herald reported that Labours education spokesperson Chris Hipkins did not disagree with some of the Governments efforts to increase student loan repayments, including going after overseas borrowers.

In a profoundly dishonest statement on Friday, Hipkins declared that the 19992008 Labour government had a proud track record when it comes to tertiary education ... we capped tuition fees, abolished interest on student loans, and increased access to student living allowances.

In fact, while Labour introduced interest-free loans as an election ploy in 2005, total student debt increased from $3 billion in 2000 to $10 billion in 2007. The party refused to reverse Nationals decision to abolish universal student allowances in 1991. Notwithstanding a temporary fee freeze from 2001 to 2003, Labour presided over continual fee rises of around 5 percent each year. It shares responsibility for the crisis facing students.
Hundreds of Detroit high school students walked out of their classes Monday to oppose the legal persecution of teachers who have launched a series of sickout protests against deplorable conditions in the schools and years of pay and benefit cuts. Students at Cass Technical High School, Communication & Media Arts High School, and Renaissance High School all staged walkouts at various points during the day Monday.

The protests were timed to coincide with the court appearance of 23 rank-and-file teachers whom the districts emergency manager accused of engaging in and encouraging illegal strikes. Emergency Manager Darnell Earley, who after overseeing the poisoning of Flint residents is decimating the Detroit Public Schools, hypocritically accused protesting teachers of harming students and showing no regard for their education.

A video of the Cass Tech walkout by student Trinere Bass can be seen here.

By walking out of the schools, students demonstrated that it was their teachers who were championing their rights, not Earley and other authorities who have starved public education of funding, shut down hundreds of schools and funneled public money to for-profit charter operations. Like the protests by teachers, the walkouts by students erupted outside of the control of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and other unions, and were a further expression of the growing mood of social opposition and militancy in the working class.

Using social media to organize, students at Cass Tech originally planned to walk out of class at 8 a.m. Monday, but school officials launched a campaign of threats to intimidate them. School administrators warned that any student who participated in a proposed walkout would be suspended for five days and face possible additional disciplinary action.

Students defied administrators threats four hours later, however, spilling out onto the street at noon. Students held up signs calling for support of the Detroit 23 teachers facing a potential injunction for fighting to defend their students right to a quality public education. They also denounced teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and the deterioration of school buildings.

School officials were quick to act against students handing out suspensions. I got suspended for five days for an American [democratic] right, one student told a Fox 2 Detroit television crew. Its ridiculous, he continued.

On Tuesday a campaign team from the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) visited Cass Tech and spoke with students about the January 27 emergency meeting on the crisis in Flint and Detroit being held at Wayne State University. Both students and parents greeted campaigners with enthusiasm, expressing a desire to defend the rights of teachers and the working class as a whole.

Students waved SEP members to cross the street to give them leaflets and other literature and approached them with questions regarding the upcoming meeting.

Likewise, parents expressed strong support for DPS teachers and their students. While waiting to pick up their children from school, parents read leaflets and copies of the WSWS Teachers Newsletter, giving campaigners thumbs up, smiles and nods of approval. Students involved in the protests said they would send a delegation to the emergency meeting.

Detroit teachers took part in a wave of sickouts to protest the decrepit state of city schools. This culminated in the shutdown of virtually the entire school district on January 20, the same day President Obama visited Detroit. Teachers denounced and documented roach and rat infestations, as well as the presence of black mold and mushrooms growing out of the walls.

In addition to the serious risks posed by these health hazards, they also pointed to overcrowded classrooms coupled with a lack of textbooks and other basic supplies. Because the Detroit Federation of Teachers has long collaborated with big-business politicians from both parties and successive emergency managers, the teachers took it upon themselves to commence a struggle by calling in sick en masse.

In an effort to curtail the opposition of teachers, national union officials from the American Federation of Teachers and Democratic Party officials, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, organized a tour of the schools and afterwards the mayor ordered health inspections.

The results of the citys inspections of 11 public schools revealed widespread code violations, including multiple instances of rodents, mold, damaged roofs and broken glass, according to the Detroit Free Press. City inspectors found 152 violations, an average of nearly 14 for each school. School officials will have about a month to make repairs.

Responding to the inspection results, Mayor Duggan adopted an angry pose, saying the city will take prompt legal action to enforce compliance if repairs arent made on time. A claim of a shortage of funds is not a defense to violations of building or health codes for any building owner. Were not going to allow our children, DPS employees, or the public to continue to be subjected to substandard conditions, the mayor claimed.

In fact, city and school officials have long known of these conditions and have done nothing about it. A report by local news outlet 7 Action News noted that Emergency Manager Darnell Earley said the story exposing conditions inside Spain Elementary-Middle School was not news to him.

People have known about the condition of Spain, said Earley, who toured the school last year. According to the news outlet, He knew the roof was leaking, and told school workers not to use the gym where the roof was in the worst shape. The district didnt fix it, because it was planning to sell the property to the Detroit Medical Center.

After Earley claimed that the district would never allow threats to the safety of students or school employees, teachers immediately exposed this lie, telling the news station that they had repeatedly contacted the Michigan Occupational Health and Safety Commission after staff was getting sick from the mold. After city inspectors found that the school was far from compliance, Earley told the station, Code violations are not new to Detroit Public Schools.

Fearing that the growing opposition of teachers and students, along with Flint residents, could develop into a broader movement of the whole working class, the judge decided to temporarily delay any legal action against protesting teachers. However, if the DFT is unable to stop the protests, the full weight of the state, including injunctions, massive fines and the threat of jail, will be thrown at teachers.

While slandering teachers for disrupting their students academic progress, school officials had no compunction about suspending students for exercising their right to free speech. The action of the students in solidarity with their teachers no doubt strikes fear in the political establishment, given that teacher sickouts and student walkouts led to the mass demonstrations in Wisconsin in 2011.

Workers throughout the city should come to the defense of the students and demand their reinstatement and the expunging of any disciplinary measures from their records.

What is needed is a unified struggle of all workers to defend their social and democratic rights. This poses the need for the development of a political movement of the working class, independent of both big-business parties, to break the grip of the corporate and financial elites, and reorganize economic life based on the principle of social equality.
Latin America

Argentine transit workers strike to protest firings, persecution, labor conditions

Drivers and other workers for Line 203 in Buenos Aires bus system stopped work indefinitely on January 21 after the firing of 36 of their coworkers. Line 203 is owned by Azul SATA, which also runs other routes in the greater Buenos Aires area.

The trigger for the action was the firing of a driver, presumably for poor effort, and the assault on another driver early Thursday morning, according to notas.org.ar. When the workers held an assembly following the sacking, the company sent an email announcing the firings of 35 more workers.

In addition to demanding the reinstatement of their colleagues, the striking workers are demanding better security, improved working conditions, and an end to persecution and speedups. One worker told reporters that the company anticipates an end to subsidies, and so is pushing to get the same amount of work out of fewer workers. In particular, he complained that the condition of buses has been deteriorating because workers are not given enough time to do adequate cleaning, repair and maintenance.

When asked about the response of the Automotive Transport System Union (UTA) to the walkout, he said, Up to now the UTA hasnt given us any favorable response. The companero is still fired and the 35 others, even though the telegram hasnt officially arrived, the notification by email did arrive. The UTA directors say that since they didnt receive any telegram they arent fired and we say yes, they already know. And that creates discontent in the labor climate.

24-hour strike by Chilean forestry workers over salary, other demands

Workers for Chiles National Forestry Corporation (Conaf) went on a one-day warning strike January 22. The workers, who belong to the 1,300-member National Federation of Conaf Syndicates (Fenasic), had voted December 17 in assembly to down their tools if Conaf management did not address their demands.

The demands include better salaries, an end to arbitrary hiring practices, a restructuring of benefits for years of service and the end of what Fenasic calls the dismantling of priority areas of the nation. The last demand has to do with discussions in the legislature over establishing a new service for biodiversity and protected area projects. Fenasic opposes the likely transfer of its members to the proposed service and wants them to remain in Conaf.

Fenasic officials accused the Conaf director of showing little sincerity and of engaging in illicit practices such as asserting that the unions have refused to engage in dialogue.

Guyanese sugar workers protest factory closure

Scores of workers for a sugar factory in Guyana protested January 22 against the governments decision to close the facility. On January 18, the government confirmed that it would shutter the Wales, West Bank Demerara (WBD) Sugar Estate in the course of the year. The Agricultural Ministry claimed that the finances are simply not available to refurbish WBD and diverting funds from the other estates would seriously jeopardize the future of these estates.

Part of the 2016 Budget and Action Plan of the state-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) is to retire the Wales Estate land following the harvest, use the WBD factory to process the cane and shut it down afterwards. In 2017, farmers cane will be rerouted some 20 miles to the Uitvlugt plant.

According to a Ministry release, Agricultural workers at Wales will be absorbed by Uitvlugt up to the extent of suitable vacancies on that location. Surplus labour would have to be made redundant. The same principle would apply to the other departments. The Wales Estate lands will be diversified, the statement further averred.

The decision was taken without any consultation with the workers. One of the protesting workers told the Guyana Chronicle that management had told them that WBD had been performing well: They even told us that we were ranked the third best performing estate and that they want people from other estates to come and follow our pattern.

Panamanian coffee pickers strike against deplorable living conditions

Some 600 workers at four coffee plantations in the western Panama town of Boquete stopped work on January 21. The mostly indigenous coffee bean harvesters struck to demand improvements in their living conditions.

Eugenio Marcucci, head of the Tierras Altas Indigenous Workers Syndicate (Sitraipei), denounced the many difficulties with lodging, such as the lack of potable water, adequate sleeping quarters and cooking facilities.

Not just that, they demand that we pick the best quality coffee and they pay us two dollars a tin instead of four, and out of the four or five tins that we pick daily, they dont pay us for one, obliging us to present our complaints to the authorities of the Labor Ministry, he told La Estrella reporters.

Strikers say that the owner has threatened to close the plantations if the workers press their demands. The owner also employs minors. On a recent inspection, an operative for the Labor Ministry counted five youths between 15 and 17 years of age; the majority of the rest were under 12 years old.

Tripartite negotiations began shortly after the initiation of the strike.

Mexican university workers strike, protest contract violations

Members of the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca Workers and Employees Syndicate (STEUABJO) held a 12-hour strike January 19. The strike was sparked by the refusal of the administration to respond to a list of demands that the union had submitted to the rector two months ago.

The petition demanded that the rector, Eduardo Martinez Helmes, address contract violations including the refusal to fire personnel contracted without the unions knowledge, not granting permanent status to workers who have accrued enough time and not complying with programs for quality and efficiency, among others.

The STEUABJO strike committee warned that if the demands were not addressed, an indefinite strike could begin on the first of February.

On January 21, the University of Oaxaca Academic Workers Syndicate (STAUO) occupied the buildings of the University to demand that the authorities address their demands, which include compliance with the collective contract, the immediate termination of 300 workers hired in an irregular form, the reinstatement of fired workers in various regions of the state, the handing over of more than 5 million pesos (US$271,000) of dues owed to the union and a salary raise.

Charging misappropriation of funds by both the university and the local arbitration board, STAUO said that it would call out its 800 members on February 22 if the demands are not met.

The United States

Labor board judge orders Walmart to rehire victimized workers

An administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled January 21 that Walmart must rehire 16 workers involved in strikes and protests. During May and June of 2013 workers at 29 stores were involved in work stoppages and some 100 journeyed to Walmarts annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas to protest low wages and working conditions.

Walmart tapped defense contractor Lockheed Martin to help monitor protesters and then fired those it argued were not involved in legal strikes but intermittent work stoppages that are not protected by labor law. Judge Geoffrey Carter ruled that the various walkouts and the time involved in the bus caravan to Walmarts headquarters in Arkansas involved the same risk as organized workers who engage in more formal strike activity.

Carter ordered the 16 workers rehired with back pay and also said the company must hold meetings at the 29 stores involved in the 2013 activities and inform employees of their rights to organize. Jessica Levin with the organization Making Change at Walmart, sponsored by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, declared the decision as a huge victory. Walmart immediately countered that it will appeal the rulings.

The NLRB decision came one day after Walmart announced it would implement a pay raise for 1.2 million workers during 2016. The miserly pay hike will only bring minimum wages at Walmart up to $10 an hour, leaving a considerable number mired in poverty and eligible for public assistance.

Canada

Montreal white collar workers strike

White collar workers for the city of Montreal struck Midnight January 24 as part of a series of rotating strikes aimed at putting pressure on management. About 8,000 workers are involved in the action.

A general strike of all white collar and blue collar city workers is set for March 1, the day municipal taxes are due. Essential services, including police and fire, are to be maintained during the actions.

The Syndicat des cols blancs de lile de Montreal, the bargaining agent for white collar workers, is calling for improvements in salary and better working conditions. The union is also opposing the use of what it calls an excessive number of subcontractors.

Marc Ranger, the union president, called the unions demands reasonable. For its part, the city said it had done its part to reach an agreement with Mayor Denis Coderre, saying the city had done its best to reach an agreement in good faith.
HAVANA (AP) - The Obama administration is loosening the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba with a new round of regulations allowing American companies to sell to Cuba on credit and export a limited number of products to the Cuban government.

Tuesday's announcement is President Barack Obama's third attempt to spur U.S.-Cuba commerce despite an embargo that still prohibits most forms of trade with Cuba. U.S. travel to Cuba has exploded since Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro declared detente in 2014. U.S. hopes of building wider trade between American businesses and Cuba's private sector have been largely frustrated.

Among a host of other measures, the new regulations allow U.S. firms to offer Cuban buyers credit on sales of non-agricultural goods, addressing a longstanding Cuban complaint about a ban on credit.

(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
Jury selection begins in the trial of an FBI agent accused of shooting Malheur Wildlife Refuge protester Robert LaVoy Finicum.
The FBI on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for the past three weeks, conducting a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

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NEW YORK - Real estate magnate and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has announced a scholarship program to pay for American graduate students in the sciences to study in Israel.

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The Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program will provide more than $100 million in scholarships over the next 20 years, Zuckerman said.

It will provide funding for American graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to study at Israeli universities. They include Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Mortimer Zuckerman (Photo: AP)

"At a time when collaboration is essential to advanced scientific research, this program gives the next generations of leading American and Israeli academics the ability to work together on cutting-edge research in ways that stand to benefit their fields for years to come," Zuckerman said as he announced the initiative Monday at the Harvard Club of New York City.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who attended the event, said, "By helping some of America's best and brightest students work and learn alongside leading researchers in Israel, this program gives us a new model for cooperation and partnership that will ultimately better society as a whole."

Nobel laureates Richard Axel, Aaron Ciechanover, Eric Kandal and Ada Yonath also attended the news conference.

Zuckerman is the publisher of the Daily News of New York and US News & World Report and the chairman of Boston Properties.
A Milwaukee man initially planned to travel to Israel in October to attack Israeli soldiers and citizens in the West Bank and then decided to storm a Masonic temple with a machine gun and kill at least 30 people, federal agents said Tuesday after the man's arrest.

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Federal prosecutors charged 23-year-old Samy Mohamed Hamzeh on Tuesday with unlawfully possessing a machine gun and receiving and possessing firearms not registered to him. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney, Dean Puschnig, didn't immediately respond to a question asking why charges were limited to gun possession. Hamzeh's attorney, federal defender Ronnie Murray, didn't immediately return email and voicemail messages left after business hours.

According to an FBI affidavit, agents were tipped off in September that Hamzeh planned to travel to Israel in October to attack Israeli soldiers and citizens in the West Bank. He abandoned those plans due to "family, financial and logistic reasons," the affidavit said, but refocused his efforts on a domestic attack.

Samy Mohamed Hamzeh (Photo: AP)

Hamzeh discussed his plans extensively with two FBI informants. The affidavit said the FBI started recording his conversations with the informants in October.

Hamzeh and the two informants traveled to a gun range on Jan. 19 and practiced with a pistol. Afterward they took a tour of a Masonic temple in Milwaukee. The affidavit does not name the temple and Puschnig declined to identify it.

Masons are members of a fraternal organization that carries out a variety of activities including charity work. Wisconsin has nearly 11,000 Masons in 180 lodges, according to Frank Struble, grand master of Free and Accepted Masons in Wisconsin. The organization is not a religion.

Struble said the allegations were "hard to hear." He said he knew which Masonic center had been targeted but declined to identify it.

"Masons are a part of an organization that helped build this country," Struble said. "I can understand from that standpoint where someone who is against this country would target us."

The owner of a downtown Milwaukee gym said she recently fired Hamzeh after hiring him as a trainer just a few weeks ago.

Delia Luna of 9Round Kickbox Fitness described Hamzeh as "very intense, very militant" as a trainer and said he didn't fit the atmosphere she wanted to create.

"He didn't mix well," Luna said.

Federal agents said that on Jan. 19 and into the early morning of Jan. 20, Hamzeh discussed his plans to attack the temple with the informants, telling them they needed two more machine guns - the group apparently already had one - and silencers. They planned to station one person at the temple's entrance while the other two went through the building, killing everyone they saw. They then planned to walk away from the scene as if nothing had happened.

"I am telling you, if this hit is executed, it will be known all over the world ... all the Mujahedeen will be talking and they will be proud of us," Hamzeh said, according to the affidavit. "Such operations will increase in America, when they hear about it. The people will be scared and the operations will increase. ... This way we will be igniting it. I mean we are marching at the front of the war."

Hamzeh added that he hoped to kill 30 people, "because these 30 will terrify the world. The (expletive) will know that nobody can play with Muslims."

He added, "We are here defending Islam, young people together join to defend Islam, that's it, that is what our intention is."

According to the affidavit, Hamzeh met with two undercover FBI agents on Monday. They presented him with two automatic machine guns and a silencer. He paid for the weapons and silencer in cash and put them in the trunk of his car. The agents then arrested him and recovered the guns and silencer.
High-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann requested a pardon from Israel's president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi two days before was hanged to death, rare documents released in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day showed on Wednesday.

Eichmann made the request after being found guilty of 15 charges, including crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

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The document is one of several released ahead of an event scheduled for Wednesday at the President's Residence. Among the other artifacts are Ben-Zvi's letter rejecting Eichmann's request and the pages on which chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner wrote the famous line invoking "six million accusers" in the trial.

Adolf Eichmann during his trial



"The judges made a critical mistake when assessing my personality, because they cannot place themselves in the time and situation I was in during the war years," Eichmann wrote to Israel's second president. "It is untrue that I was such an important personage that I could oversee or would independently oversee the persecution of the Jews." Eichmann argued that the judges ignored his claim that he "never served in such a high-ranking position that would have involved such decisive and independent authorities."

The war criminal, who was among those most involved in carrying out the Holocaust, further wrote: "I also never gave any orders in my name, but always operated according to orders. Had I been, as the judges assume, the fanatical driving force in the persecution of the Jews, this should have been reflected in a promotion and other rewards, but I was never granted any benefit. A line must be drawn between the leaders who are responsible and people like me, who were forced to be tools by the leadership. I was not in charge of things, and therefore I do not feel that I am guilty. And I ask of you, honorable president, to use your right of pardon and order that this death sentence not be carried out."

Presiding Judges Yitzhak Raveh, Benjamin Halevi, and Moshe Landau

Vera Eichmann, the notorious Nazi's wife, also wrote to Ben-Tzi with a request for a pardon "as a fire and mother to four children". A letter by Eichmann's five brothers was attached to Adolf's letter, which argued that the trial exposed the horrors of the past to the world. "If people thus attain tolerance and an understanding of brotherhood, the purpose of the trial was achieved. As a conclusion to this worldwide rebuke, an act of mercy would emphasize the altruism of the Jewish people and help it by means of advancing friendship between peoples and races."

Eichmann's German attorney, Dr. Robert Servatius, noted in the request that his client was "an unimportant person who was thrust by fate into political events." The lawyer added that the court had not taken into account the historical context of events, which he claimed were grounds for overturning the death sentence. "The condemned did not act out of a position of anti-Semitism, but because he was bound by the bureaucratic coercion system."

Ben-Zvi rejected the request in a concise letter. "After considering the parson requests submitted regarding the Adolf Eichmann case, and after I gave my attention to all the materials available to me, I reached the conclusion that there is no justification for giving Eichmann a pardon or mitigate the punishment passed down by the Jerusalem District Court on December 15, 1961, and which was approved by the Supreme Court on May 29, 1962," wrote Ben-Zvi. "Thus, I am informing you that I have decided to refuse the requests and not use my powers to pardon and reduce punishments in this case."

Also revealed was the handwritten text of then-attorney general Gideon Hausner's opening statement. "When I stand before you, judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone," Hausner said in the memorable statement. |With me here are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point their finger at the man in the dock with the cry 'J'accuse!' on their lips. For they are now only ashes  ashes piled high on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka and strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is stilled. Therefore will I be their spokesman. In their name will I unfold this terrible indictment."
Nashat Melhem, the terrorist who killed three people in Tel Aviv on January 1, told one of the three people suspected of aiding him that he had planned a second attack, it was revealed Wednesday.

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"I've murdered two Jews and the taxi driver because he threatened to inform the police", Melhem told one of the suspects, all three of whom will be served indictments on Wednesday.

After the shooting at a bar in Tel Aviv and the murder of taxi driver Amin Shaban, Melhem went to the his hometown of Arara. At first he hid in a warehouse belonging to one of the suspects.

The three men suspected of aiding the terrorist Nashat Melhem

On the second day he moved to another house, where he was eventually captured by security forces and killed. Melhem threatened the warehouse's owner saying that if he told someone they met, he would hurt his wife and all his family.

Another suspect gave him food and a mobile phone, and a third suspect gave him two packs of cigarettes. One of the suspects even provided Melhem drugs.

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The suspects, all relatives of the terrorist are Mohammed Melhem, Amin Melhem and Ayoub Rashid.

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A relative of the suspect Muhammad said that "it is hard for us to believe he was connected to Nashat Melhem or was involved in helping him. In my opinion there is no basis to anything that was said here. Later we will present evidence that will prove this was all trumped up."

Ali Saadi, the lawyer representing one of the suspects said: "Nashat Melhem threatened my client saying he would harm his family if he gave up any information regarding him. When we receive all the details we will respond regarding the indictments served."
Greece's migration minister says his country is seeking European Union backing for the swift deportation of migrants not considered eligible for asylum from Greek islands back to Turkey.

Ioannis Mouzalas told Skai television Wednesday that EU-supervised screening centers being set up on the Greeks islands could be used to send back ineligible migrants on chartered boats to Turkey "the next morning."

Mouzalas conceded the government was experiencing delays with setting up the island screening centers -- known as hotspots -- but said Athens is seeking additional assistance with the project.
The Shin Bet on Wednesday released the full details of its investigation into Nashat Melhem, a terrorist who murdered three people in Tel Aviv this month, revealing recreational drug use, support for ISIS, and a bizarre message calling on US President Barack Obama to convert to Islam.

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Videos of the terrorist, which he filmed himself, were found on his cell phone that was lost in Ramat Aviv on the day of the shootings. In the video, Melhem talks about smoking hashish and marijuana, drinking alcohol, and "snorting up."

Also found on the phone was evidence that the terrorist had viewed religious material designed as mental preparation for a terror attack. Melhem also spoke of his hatred of "enemies of Islam" in his videos, using phrases similar to those used by ISIS. He also detailed his hatred for Russians.

Video found on Nashat Melhem's phone (:  ")

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Also Wednesday, indictments were issued against three of Melhem's relatives who allegedly helped him hide after the murder: Ayoob Rashid, Mohammed Melhem, and Amin Melhem.

According to the indictments, Melhem decided to commit a terror attack somewhere crowded in Tel Aviv, "with the purpose of causing as many Israeli civilian deaths as possible, and with the intention of helping the enemy in its war against Israel, including the ISIS organization."

On January 1 at around 2:40pm, Melhem arrived at Dizengoff Street with a Koran and a rifle. Next to the HaSimta pub, Melhem fired at least 22 bullets, killing Alon Bakal and Shimon Ruimi and wounding several others.

Melhem fled, leaving the Koran at the scene. He got into a passing taxi driven by Amin Shaban, who drove him northward. Next to the Mandarin Hotel, still in Tel Aviv, Melhem shot Shaban dead when he began suspecting the driver would turn him in to the police.

Still from cell phone video

The terrorist, encountering difficulties with the taxi, abandoned it on Namir Road and reached Ramat Aviv, an area with which he was familiar. He hung a piece of cloth bearing the word "Daesh" (another name for ISIS) from the roof of a building as well as another with the phrase "there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah" in Arabic. He then continued on to the Wadi Ara area on public transportation and then hid in the town of Arara.

Flags left behind by Melhem

Spotted on the bus north

According to a report on Israel Radio on Wednesday, two passengers who were on a bus going north from Tel Aviv at around 3:30pm on the day of the attack saw a man with blood stains on his clothes, who kept his backpack close. They later realized the man was Nashat Melhem on his way out of Tel Aviv.

The two sisters approached the bus driver and shared their suspicions with him, but the driver calmed them down by telling them the suspicious man was about to get off the bus anyway.

The two girls heard the driver tell Melhem "from here (this bus stop) you can go to Wadi Ara, get off here."

Nashat Melhem captured by security camera of store next to the scene of the attack.

At around 8pm, after seeing Melhem's photo on the news and realizing he was the man sitting next to them on the bus, the two shared their suspicions with their employer, and he called the police's emergency call center. The policeman on the other side of the line told the employer he will hear back from the police, and when no call back came by midnight, the employer called the police again.

The emergency call center told the employer to call the police's non-emergency call center, and after waiting half an hour on the line, he gave up and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, when one of the sisters saw no one had returned their calls, she called again, but the police once again paid her no heed and told her to call the non-emergency call center.

On the Monday following the attack, when the second sister called a fourth time, she was told "if no one got back to you by now - it means it's not relevant."

The police said in response: "The call in question was received in the police call center hours after the attack and after the girls got off the bus, and this was one of thousands of calls to the Israel Police call center handled based on several different parameters, including the nature of the information given, the level of relevancy at the time of the call, and more.

"The call was checked and it was found that despite the unclear nature of the call, actions were taken like locating the bus driver and questioning relevant witnesses, as has been done for many other calls in order to strengthen our understanding of the situation."

From a shed to an abandoned apartment

Upon arriving in Wadi Ara, Melhem first hid in a shed belonging to one of those indicted. He moved to another house, where he was eventually found, on the second day. Melhem threatened the owner of the shed and said he would hurt his wife and family if anyone discovered that they had met. Another suspect supplied food and a cell phone, and the third suspect brought him two packs of cigarettes. One suspect even supplied Melhem with drugs. Two of the accused are relatives, while the third met Melhem at a convenience store where he works.

One of the apartments Melhem hid in (Photo: Ido Erez)

In the week between the attack and Melhem's capture, the terrorist hid in several spots in Arara, including a shipping container owned by a relative. Based on investigators' current knowledge, Melhem hid there independently, without his family's knowledge. He also hid in a closet in a relative's home  a relative who was an essential accomplice and knew he was involved in the Tel Aviv shooting. This relative later helped Melhem set up in an abandoned home that belonged to an elderly woman  which is where Melhem was ultimately located by security forces.

The investigation ultimately showed that Melhem planned and committed the terror attack on his own, without anyone else's involvement.

The Shin Bet investigation showed that a limited number of Melhem's associates were aware that he was in Arara, and some helped provide him with food and other necessities. The security service also found that Melhem purchased drugs immediately upon his return to Arara. He also asked accomplices for additional ammunition, apparently in order to commit further attacks.
TEHRAN - Iran's navy warned a US warship to leave an area where Iran has been conducting a naval drill near the narrow Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Wednesday. The US Navy denied that its operations in the region were affected.

The Iranian navy chief, Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, was quoted as saying that the US warship received two warnings before leaving the region.

"They were warned once by maritime patrol aircraft and once again by the Alborz destroyer," he said. "The US warship left the region immediately after receiving the warning," he added, saying he believed that the Americans had approached the area to "learn our tactics."

Iran said the naval drill got underway Wednesday over an area of 3 million square kilometers, including part of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world oil supply passes, as well as the Gulf of Oman and neighboring parts of the Indian Ocean. It is the first Iranian naval exercise since 10 US sailors were briefly captured by Iran earlier this month after drifting into Iranian territorial waters.
Heniya Keltch, a 71 year old Holocaust survivor living in Kiryat Yam, was born two months after the end of World War II. Her parents survived the Holocaust along with their two children by hiding at the home of a Polish family.

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Heniya says she spent her childhood in the shadow of her parents and siblings, who survived the Holocaust but remained scarred in body and soul. When she grew up, she married Aryeh, also a Holocaust survivor.

And then, one newspaper article Heniya saw last April changed her life. According to the article, there were cases in which even those who were still in uterus during World War II, while their mother was persecuted, and were born after the end of the war, were eligible to be recognized as Holocaust survivors and get aid from the Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah NGO in receiving all of the rights granted to Holocaust survivors.

As soon as she finished reading the article, Heniya called the NGO's helpline and spoke to Attorney Liora Zamir, who told Heniya there was a good chance she was eligible to receive rights granted to Holocaust survivors. Zamir invited Heniya to come to the NGO's Haifa "rights center" so she could receive further help.

Caring and professional treatment

The process for Heniya to be recognized as a Holocaust survivor was not a simple one, and lasted several months - during which Heniya was asked to obtain and provide many documents.

"I was despaired and wanted to give up," Heniya says, "But attorney Liora Zamir would not let me. She fought like a lioness for me, dealt with state officials, and encouraged me. It's only thanks to her caring, devotion and professional treatment, that I was recognized as a Holocaust survivor."

Heniya received an initial minimum stipend of NIS 2,200 a month, as well as the rest of the rights and benefits granted to Holocaust survivors, but this was not the end of it.

Attorney Liora Zamir also filed a request to a medical committee on Heniya's behalf to increase her disability rating and a request for increased benefits based on the level of income. The requests were approved and Heniya's yearly stipends increased significantly - almost doubled.

Attorney Liora Zamir with Heniya and Aryeh (Photo: Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah NGO)

For Heniya and Aryeh, Holocaust survivors who have so far lived solely off Aryeh's pension, this has been a significant improvement to their economic situation.

"When I was recognized as a Holocaust survivor, it was a load off my mind. I had a lost childhood and no one recognized the suffering I've been through. This stipend helps us economically and I can even give some money to my grandchildren, which I couldn't do before," Heniya says.

Like Heniya, hundreds of other Holocaust survivors were able to significantly improve their quality of life thanks to a joint initiative by the JDC-Eshel and the Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah NGO, who established "rights centers" - centers aiding Holocaust survivors in getting the most out of their rights within their communities.

So far, 14 such centers have been established across the country with the help of local authorities. At these centers, Holocaust survivors and their family members can receive professional counseling from an attorney specializing in rights for Holocaust survivors. These legal experts accompany the survivors throughout the entire process, until they receive all the rights and benefits they deserve by law. The service is provided pro bono.

Bleak and incredible situation

The Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah NGO and JDC-Eshel recently conducted a customer satisfaction survey among Holocaust survivors who turned to their "rights centers." In addition to the fact that 90 percent of respondents said they were very happy with the professional treatment they received, the survey also revealed a situation that is both bleak - due to the lack of awareness among Holocaust survivors - and on the other hand, incredible - due to the aid Holocaust survivors received in making the most of their rights and benefits.

Some 1,800 Holocaust survivors enjoyed the initiative's services so far.

85 percent of all Holocaust survivors who arrived at the centers were not making the most of their rights and benefits, and the NGO's advisors had recommendations for them on how to improve their situation.

50 percent of the Holocaust survivors who participated in the survey reported that they have already received monthly stipends and benefits they have not received before, and say the help they received at the centers improved their lives "significantly."

An additional 17 percent said the process was still ongoing, while 20 percent refused to share the result of the process.

For every one shekel invested in the initiative, Holocaust survivors received 18 shekels worth of benefits.



'Service provided with love and professionalism'

"The finding that stood out the most is the fact that among the respondents, 85 percent actually learned at the center that they are not receiving all of the rights and benefits they are entitled to by law as Holocaust survivors," says Aviva Silverman, the founder and director of Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah.

"This is a finding which shows how much there's a lack of awareness among the survivors: They're unaware of their right to request that a deterioration in their health is recognized, they're unaware of benefits and grants given to them by other countries, and are not updated with the variety of changes and updates to their rights.

"For half of the survivors who arrived at the centers - the aid led to a significant improvement in their quality of life. There were survivors whose requests were rejected in the past and this time thanks to our help these requests were approved. There were those who thought they were getting all of their rights and were surprised to learn they were wrong. There were survivors who turned to lawyers in the past who charged a lot of money to send one form - and found there are those who provide this service with love, professionalism, and without pay."

Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah NGO's team of advisors (Photo: Benny Lapid)

Attorney Silverman says that one of the biggest successes of these centers was in 2015, when 20 Holocaust survivors aided by the NGO received retroactive pension payments from Germany for their work in the ghetto, reaching a total of NIS 2.5 million.

According to the German ghetto law, the ZRBG, German old age pension should be paid to anyone who lived in the ghetto and worked for any kind of payment at the time, whether monetary, food, or any other way.

Pension from Germany for work in the ghetto

Gila, an 84 years old Holocaust survivor from Bulgaria who is suffering from dementia, is one of the survivors who received the German pension thanks to the help she received at one of the centers. Until getting the NGO's help, she lived off a stipend of only NIS 2,700 a month.

Ronit, Gila's daughter, turned to the Holocaust Survivors' Rights Authority with a request to recognize her mother's dementia and raise her disability rating, but the request was rejected because Gila did not live in the ghetto.

Ronit then turned to the "rights center" in Kfar Saba, where she met with advisor Linda Levy, an expert on Holocaust survivors' rights with the Aviv LeNitzolei HaShoah NGO, who came to her help.

Linda's research found that the area where Gila was living during World War II was within a known area of the Sofia ghetto. She filed a new request to the Holocaust Survivors' Rights Authority and provided documents confirming Gila was indeed living in that area of the ghetto.

Linda also filed a request on Gila's behalf to receive increased pension payments based on income, and later, Linda updated Ronit that Gila was also entitled to receive a pension from Germany for her work in the ghetto, and filed a request to that end as well.

Several months later, the Holocaust Survivors' Rights Authority approved increased pension payments for Gila, and also recognized her dementia and approved the increase of her disability rating. Now, Gila gets NIS 4,500 every month - in addition to her NIS 2,700 stipend.

Meanwhile, Germany also approved the request for pension payments for Gila's work in the ghetto, and she received a retroactive payment of 15,000 euro. She is also getting an 80 euro stipend from Germany every month. The significant increase in her monthly stipends and the payment she received from Germany help Gila's family pay for the nursing home she lives in and for the care she needs.

According to Yossi Hayman, the director of JDC-Eshel, "many resources are invested nowadays in aiding Holocaust survivors, but unfortunately these resources don't always get where they should due to limited accessibility. The initiative's goal is to help thousands of Holocaust survivors and make it easier for them to receive all of their rights, with the process being done within the community, by lawyers who are experts in the field.

"JDC-Eshel and the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute's yearly report shows that every year, some 10,000 Holocaust survivors pass away. Therefore, if we really want to help Holocaust survivors - we must act immediately."

Attorney Silverman adds: "The cooperation with JDC-Eshel and the municipalities allows us to reach Holocaust survivors at their communities and work with the proper authorities to provide them with different rights and benefits that for the survivors could be the difference between poverty and life in dignity.

"Currently, we have 'rights centers' in Kiryat Yam, Acre, Haifa, Kfar Saba, Hod HaSharon, Raanana, Givat Shmuel, Bnei Brak, Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Bat Yam, Rishon Lezion, Ashdod, Modi'in and Tel Aviv.

"This year we're hoping to raise donations that would allow us to buy mobile 'rights centers' that could reach Holocaust survivors who are housebound, or in small communities where there are no 'rights centers'. We must not wait for the survivors to turn to us - our moral duty is to find them and make sure they receive everything they deserve, and allow them to live in dignity and welfare."
MOSCOW - Syrian refugees should be given an opportunity to cast their ballots in the country's future elections, Russia's security chief has told The Associated Press, adding that the international community should focus on creating conditions for a free vote in Syria.

However, demands for the immediate departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad would be counterproductive, said Nikolai Patrushev, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin who serves as the executive secretary of the presidential Security Council.

"Let's remember the sad experience of Iraq and Libya," Patrushev told the AP in a written reply to questions Tuesday - his first remarks ever to a foreign news organization. "Have they succeeded in stabilizing the situation there following a foreign intervention and physical removal of those countries' leaders?"
Officials say France has asked the European Union to consider new sanctions against Iran over recent missile tests, in a request made just days after the EU ended sanctions over Iran's nuclear program.

Two officials from European Union nations tell The Associated Press that the request came last week at a meeting of 28 EU foreign ministers.

That was two days after the EU and the US lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for UN certification that Iran had crimped its nuclear programs.

Neither the French government nor the European Union responded to AP requests for comment by late Wednesday. The two officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

The disclosure came as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited Paris Wednesday to build post-sanctions business and diplomatic ties.
The Israel Police dismissed on Wednesday reports on the failure of its emergency call center in responding to a call by two girls who saw terrorist Nashat Melhem take the bus north shortly after murdering three people in Tel Aviv.

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According to a report by Israel Radio's Carmela Menashe, the two sisters contacted the police four times - twice on the day of the attack and twice in the days that followed - reporting that they saw a man with blood on his clothes who they later realized, after seeing his photos on TV, was terrorist Nashat Melhem.

The head of the Israel Police's Operations Department, Maj.-Gen. Aaron Aksol, called the reports "a storm in a teacup."

"The call was received five hours after the attack. The report was passed on to the Israel Police's intelligence unit," Aksol told reporters on Wednesday evening.

Terrorist Nashat Melhem in image from video found on his phone.

"Even if we had questioned those girls at 8pm, it would not have changed the operational decisions we made that night. The possibility that he was in the north was taken into consideration. That night, the YAMAM raided several homes in Wadi Ara," he added.

Aksol insisted that "The Israel Police acted decisively and clearly and this would not have changed our activity. Catching a terrorist after a week, I can tell you as someone familiar with the intelligence, required a complex intelligence effort. There wasn't even one moment in which we did not have a clear idea of the intelligence picture."

The briefing to the press was supposed to be given by Tel Aviv District Commander Maj.-Gen. Benzi Sau, but it was entrusted to Aksol at the last moment.

Police officials said that behind the scenes, Sau must have refused to be associated with the failure, especially since he is due to retire from the force next week. "I don't know exactly what happened there, but Benzi Sau did the right thing not standing at the front and taking responsibility over a failure he was not responsible for," said a police officer.

According to the Israel Radio report, after a man with blood on his clothes sat down next to them on the bus, the two sisters approached the bus driver and shared their suspicions with him, but the driver calmed them down by telling them the suspicious man was about to get off the bus anyway.

The two girls heard the driver tell Melhem "from here (this bus stop) you can go to Wadi Ara, get off here."

At around 8pm, after seeing Melhem's photo on the news and realizing he was the man sitting next to them on the bus, the two shared their suspicions with their employer, and he called the police's emergency call center. The policeman on the other side of the line told the employer he will hear back from the police, and when no call back came by midnight, the employer called the police again.

The emergency call center told the employer to call the police's non-emergency call center, and after waiting half an hour on the line, he gave up and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, when one of the sisters saw no one had returned their calls, she called again, but the police once again paid her no heed and told her to call the non-emergency call center.

On the Monday following the attack, when the second sister called a fourth time, she was told "if no one got back to you by now - it means it's not relevant."
Culture Minister Miri Regev was received with both applause and booing from artists in the audience at HaBima Theater on Wednesday evening when she took the stage to speak before the debut performance of the musical "Evita."

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The booing came in the wake of new legislation she is promoting that seeks to deny state funding to artists and cultural institutions who denigrate the state flag or state symbols; incite to racism, violence or terrorism; support armed struggle and terrorism against Israel; mark Independence Day as a day of mourning; or deny Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state. Regev said that her proposal is based on previous Knesset legislation.

"I won't stand for the state allowing activity that undermines Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state," Regev told the artists in the audience.

Culture Minister Regev booed at HaBima

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"The Culture and Sport Ministry views HaBima as one of the anchors of Israeli culture, and we are committed to supporting the theater," she said. "As part of the discussions on the state budget, I worked to significantly increase the budget (for the Culture Ministry), so I can implement the policy that would give expression the multi-cultural nature of Israeli society, and also brings to cultural justice and the narrowing of cultural gaps."

She denied reports that she decided to transfer budgets from Tel Aviv cultural institutions to those in the periphery. "These things are incorrect, period. I see great importance in cultural activity in the metropolis. The center and the periphery strengthen each other, influence each other, and inspire one another."

The culture minister's relationship with Israeli artists has been volatile from the moment she was appointed to the post, an appointment that was met with harsh personal criticism directed at her.

Later, she caused an outcry of a political nature when she froze state funding for an Arab theater whose play about a Palestinian prisoner who murdered an IDF soldier angered the right, fuelling accusations that the government aims to suppress productions it deems pro-Palestinian.
Civilians apprehended a terrorist on Wednesday night after he seriously wounded a man about 50 years old in the settlement of Givat Ze'ev near Jerusalem.

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The victim was taken to the trauma center at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in serious and unstable condition. He was taken into the operation room.

The attacker, around 18 years old, opened the door to one of the restaurants at a gas station near the Giv'onim Junction on Route 436 and stabbed a man that was standing there in his upper body.

He fled the scene, dropping his knife, and was caught some 200 meters south of the gas stop by civilians who pursued him. Another knife was found on his person.

The victim being taken to Shaare Zedek medical center (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

When the terrorist threw his knife during his escape, it hit and injured Hillel Hagar, who was chasing after him.

The terrorist was lightly wounded when he was caught, but civilians at the scene blocked the path of an ambulance trying to take him to the hospital. He was eventually taken to the Hadassah Medical Center on Jerusalem's Mount Scopus, suffering from minor bruising.

The terrorist apprehended.

Moshe, who works at a nearby bakery, described the attack: "I was at the bakery and we heard screams. We saw the terrorist running away. He threw the knife and hit one of the guys. Two people tackled him to the ground and then we jumped him - five or six of us - and beat him with stones to the head. Then the police came and took him, and an ambulance evacuated him."

Civilians gathered at the scene of the attack called out "Death to Arabs." One of them said, "Look what's happening here - and what the government cares about is demolishing a synagogue."
NORFOLK - Officials at Northeast Community College in Norfolk have released the Presidents Honor List and Deans Honor List for both full and part-time students for the Fall 2015 Semester.

To be named to the Presidents Honor List, students must earn a perfect grade point average of 4.0 and be enrolled for at least 12 credit hours. Some 167 students made the Presidents Full-time Honor List this fall semester. Students named to the Deans Honor List must have earned a grade point average of 3.75 or above and be enrolled for at least 12 credit hours. Two hundred-ten students were named to the Deans Honor List.
Yellow Ribbon rescue

Maj. Fred Pounds, flight commander of clinical management with the 911th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron here, went to Orlando to attend a Yellow Ribbon Reintegration seminar, expecting to unwind and adjust to life back home. Instead, he ended up averting a crisis and subsequently saving a stranger's life.



"Whether it happened at a Yellow Ribbon event or down the street from my house, I probably would have done the same thing," said Pounds. "I just did what anyone else would have done."



Pounds returned from a four-month deployment to Southwest Asia in September 2015. Like all Air Force Reserve Airmen recently home from a deployment, he was offered the opportunity to attend up to two Yellow Ribbon events to ease the adjustment process. He and his wife decided to take the December trip to Orlando.



On the morning of Dec. 19, 2015, Pounds and his wife left their room to attend a speech on resiliency by former Air Force Reserve Chaplain John Groth. During the speech, Pounds said that he noticed a man at a nearby table repeatedly asking his wife if she was alright. Instead of replying, her head rolled back, and she became unresponsive.



"I immediately went over and asked if anything was wrong," said Pounds. "He told me his wife wasn't responding, and I instructed him that we needed to lower her to the floor."



At this point, several people gathered around to see what was going on. Pounds identified himself as a nurse, and a man standing next to him said that he knew CPR. They checked for her pulse, but there was none to be found.



Pounds, who has been a critical care nurse for 16 years, has encountered a plethora of different health crises and situations over the length of his career. However, the woman's lack of pulse was not at all what he was expecting.



"I usually see people that just pass out and come to within two seconds, and that's what I was expecting at first," he said. "But to check for her pulse and not find one, and to see that she wasn't breathing, was a little scary. I realized immediately that we had to do CPR."



The two men began to try to revive the woman, Pounds doing compressions and the other trying to control her airway.



"I'm not even sure how long it was because it all happened so fast," said Pounds. "But at some point, she gave a few gasps and then started to breathe on her own."



The two men rolled the woman onto her side and waited for the paramedics to arrive. In the meantime, Pounds discovered that the woman had recently had surgery and hadn't been feeling well for a few days preceding the event.



When the paramedics arrived, Pounds followed them out to the ambulance. Though her blood pressure was still low, she was improving and was able to talk before being transported to the hospital.



Airmen often train for real-life situations and crises like this one, but applying that training isn't always so simple, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hutcheson, chief nurse with the 911 AES.



"Airmen with the Air Evacuation Squadron spend about 1,000 hours training for every hour that we spend in that kind of situation and having to make a decision," said Hutcheson. "It can catch you off guard, and it's sometimes hard to apply the training when you need it. The only thing I can ask of our nurses and techs is to be ready when that moment comes."



Pounds also said that being ready for a crisis like this one is crucial. He encourages other Airmen to confidently step up to the plate when crisis strikes, even if they're not part of the medical field.



"Don't be afraid to act," said Pounds. "Even if you don't have the specific training for an event like this, try to offer whatever help you can."



Though Pounds humbly said that he'd done what anyone else would do and doesn't want recognition for his actions, Hutcheson disagrees.



"You'd hope that everyone else would do the same, but that's not always the case," said Hutcheson. "His actions were absolutely a testament to his training, his character, and his willingness and commitment to be ready at all times."


Global property consultancy group Knight Frank has improved economic conditions will help the commercial market in Canberra push into positive territory through 2016.

Recent positive economic signs in Canberra are expected to help underlying market fundamentals, Knight Frank associate director institutional sales - Canberra Nic Purdue said.

This includes a far more stable vacancy rate, stable incentives and forecast rental growth  all signs that the Canberra commercial market has reached the lowest end of its cycle, Purdue said.

The improvement in those market factors, along with the fact that the public service in Canberra provides attractive, long-term tenancy options will prove a drawcard for global capital, especially that which is flowing out of Asia.

The current wave of Asian capital is looking to diversify away from Australias core markets and into higher-yielding regions, such as Canberra, Purdue said.

With some volatility in global markets, Canberra is increasingly being considered as a safe haven within the context of the wider Australian market place.

Australia remains attractive for offshore investors who are drawn by the low Australian dollar, cost-effective borrowing and government stability. And should the global volatility continue there will be a case for the RBA to keep rates on hold, adding to the attractiveness of Canberra as a market.

Earlier this month, CBRE revealed yields in some sectors of the commercial real estate market in Sydney and Melbourne fell drastically over the end of 2015.

While much has been made in recent years of Chinese money being directed to real estate in Australia, Purdue said interest in Canberras commercial sector is set to come from a number of countries.

We are already receiving increased interest from Asian countries including Korea, Singapore and Malaysia.

Canberras commercial sector hasnt yet seen the levels of demand from Chinese investors that other capital cities have seen, but that could also change.

Though improved economic and market factors have increased Asian interest in Canberras commercial market, especially for office blocks and hotels, Purdue said a new physical connection between Canberra and Singapore could soon see even more offshore money flow to the city.

As reported in the media over the past week, if Singapore Airlines does create a direct flight route between Canberra and Asia, this will continue to build the case as an investment destination for Asian investors.
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Recent reports claim that Microsoft China has accidentally unveiled Microsoft Surface Phone and called it Lumia X in a video explaining how the Continuum works.

In a translation of the Microsoft China video, it explained (via Christian Today): "Homemade welcomes mobile phone feature Continuum, this function can convert your phone into a large screen projector and utilities. Use dock or adapter to connect to a TV or monitor, and then use your application on a larger screen and view your content."

The video explained further: "Upon completion, the file will be saved on your phone, then you can continue working. Of course, you can watch videos, view photos, surf the Web and so on. Note: This feature requires a compatible mobile device that is intended for use, for example Lumia 950/XL, Lumia Phone X and Acer Jade Primo."

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The report noted that Continuum was described as a new technology that only works with high-end phones and that it can only work with compatible devices, meaning, with the company's flagship device. And since the only expected flagship device from the Redmond, WA-based tech firm is the surface phone, this can mean that Microsoft is using Lumia X as a name for the awaited Microsoft Surface Phone.

The video in question in now edited to omit the Lumia X description, but some web users were quick to capture the evidence (via Tech Times).

So can the Microsoft Lumia X be the much anticipated Microsoft Surface Phone?

Inferse, in its report, thinks otherwise. The report noted that it is highly impossible for Microsoft to use the Lumia moniker for the surface phones because according to the report, the developers working for the Surface brand work independently from Microsoft mobile, the latter being the developer of Lumia after it acquired the brand from Nokia in 2014.

The report added that Lumia X may be another flagship in the Lumia series and not necessarily the Microsoft Surface Phone.
About ZVTS

Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.



Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions . Dangerous levels of Stupid.



Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
New Delhi: While Indians' growing addiction for porn has become a major cause of concern and leading to various psychological disorders, the Delhi Police is now banking on the new cutting-edge technology in its fight against cyber crime and pornography.

As per a ToI report published on Wednesday, Delhi Police's Cyber Cell will see a total facelift as it would soon be equipped with the state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure for investigating and cracking complex cyber crime cases more effectively.

In order to resolve highly complicated cases of cyber pornography, the city police force has decided to buy 'porn detection sticks' - USB devices with software that can bring back pornographic content from the dead even if they have been completely deleted from computer.

The devices will be used to ''fight cyber crime" as it will help the investigators nail paedophiles, exes playing revenge porn, and sex criminals using photos and videos of their victims for blackmail.

The report quoting sources said that the software can scan computers for porn images, videos and chats even if those have been completed erased from computer. It detects and analyses faces, flesh tones, shapes and curves but leaves no trace of use. This makes it immensely useful in a developing case requiring secrecy, for instance a honeytrap probe.

The revamping of the Delhi Police' Cyber Cell is likely to complete in three months after which it will be equipped with modern gadgets and software that will bring them on par with their counterparts in the West.

As per the report, Delhi Police will purchase EnCase Forensic - computer forensics software of global repute - forensic workstations, email examiners and digital intelligence servers etc.

The need to purchase these high-end devices was felt as investigators were often faced with problems of immediately retrieving data from emails, websites, chat rooms, desktops, laptops and mobile phones while dealing with complex cases.

The new technology will help investigators recover deleted emails and analyse them from the content of their header, subject, body, etc. They can scan through hundreds of email formats.

Besides, cyber forensics will assist them in tracing the origin and destination of the mails.

EnCase Forensic is a top priority for Delhi Police as it will not only allow them to swiftly capture data from a wide range of devices but also help them discover evidence by analysing the content.

The Cyber Cell will be equipped with dedicated data acquisition and access devices, and be aided by CyberCheck Suite, another programme. These technologies will be installed or form part of 'forensics workstations' (portable and static) which are a part of the list as well. These advanced workstations are equipped with high-speed hard drives which help investigators store and analyse the data.

The Cyber Cell will also have high-powered digital intelligence servers, which will help them connect with all the systems of the cyber lab on to a single network and centralise the system for easy access.
Delhi: A balloon was spotted near Indira Gandhi International airport triggering security alert, as per reports on Wednesday evening.

Reports said that the suspicious object was spotted by a resident of Gurgaon.

He then called the police around 5.05 pm and the police then alerted the required authorities.

DCP of IGI airport DK Gupta said all security agencies have been informed about the information though police has not spotted the object.

"The airport was put on high alert after the DIAL call centre received a call about a big balloon spotted near the airport this evening. The call was received around 5 pm and the caller said that the big balloon was heading from the airport to Aya Nagar following which an alert was issued at the IGI and all security agencies have been informed about it," Gupta told PTI.

Meanwhile, a US-made helium-filled balloon that was shot down by a Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft over Rajasthan had come in from Pakistan and could have been an attempt to gauge India's response time, top government sources said today.

The Defence Ministry has now written to the Ministry of External Affairs informing it about the incident.

The shiny 3 metres in diametre balloon, with "Happy Birthday" written on it, was flying at a height of about 25,000 feet in Jaisalmer district when it was picked up by the air force radars which were on high alert in view of Republic Day celebrations.

"Our radars picked up a shiny flying object entering our air space. A fighter jet was quickly scrambled which intercepted it and shot it down," Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said without elaborating, on the sidelines of an event here when asked about yesterday's incident, as per PTI.

The Indian Air Force said in a statement, "Due to heightened security alert, the balloon was shot down as it would have been carrying unknown payload. However, on analysis of the debris it was established that there was no dangerous payload."

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi/Jaipur: A US-made helium-filled balloon that was shot down by a Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft over Rajasthan had come in from Pakistan, as per reports on Wednesday.

It is being said that as per top government sources it could have been an attempt to gauge India's response time.

The Defence Ministry has now written to the Ministry of External Affairs informing it about the incident.

The shiny 3 metres in diametre balloon, with "Happy Birthday" written on it, was flying at a height of about 25,000 feet in Jaisalmer district when it was picked up by the Air Force radars which were on high alert in view of Republic Day celebrations.

"Our radars picked up a shiny flying object entering our air space. A fighter jet was quickly scrambled which intercepted it and shot it down," Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said without elaborating, on the sidelines of an event here when asked about yesterday's incident.

The Indian Air Force said in a statement, "Due to heightened security alert, the balloon was shot down as it would have been carrying unknown payload. However, on analysis of the debris it was established that there was no dangerous payload."

Meanwhile, government sources said that balloon, made by an American company, was flying at an altitude higher than that of an helicopter (18,000 feet) and hence leaving nothing to chance, it was shot down. The wind speed was also high and the threat level was high.

"Investigation is on but it could have been an attempt to check our response time," they said, adding that IAF followed the protocol by scrambling the jet and shooting the object down.

"Imagine, if it was not just a commercial balloon," the sources said, adding that 97 rounds were spent as the fighter plane sprayed bullets as per Standard Operating Procedure, as per PTI.

As per the Aircraft Act 1934, "aircraft" means any machine which can derive support in the atmosphere from reactions of the air, (other than reactions of the air against the Earth's surface) and includes balloons, whether fixed or free, airships, kites, gliders and flying machines.

The balloon was manufactured by Illinois based firm CTI Industries.

(With PTI inputs)
New York: A book on India's partition and its fatal consequences has won a prestigious USD 5,000 prize in the US.

Nisid Hajari's book 'Midnight`s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition' won the 2016 William E Colby Award, a statement said.

Midnight's Furies, Hajari's first book, covers the 1947 partition of India and the violence that surrounded that event.

Named after the former CIA director, William E Colby, the prize is awarded annually by Norwich University to a first-time author in recognition of a work of fiction or non-fiction that has made a major contribution to the understanding of military history, intelligence operations, or international affairs.

Hajari oversees Asia coverage for Bloomberg View, the editorial page of Bloomberg News. He writes editorials on Asian politics and economics and edits Bloomberg's opinion columns and commentary from the region. "I am absolutely thrilled to be named the recipient of the 2016 Colby Award," Hajari said.

"To join the company of such distinguished military and historical writers as Jon Meacham and Dexter Filkins is a tremendous honor, and it`s particularly gratifying that the judges chose to highlight a subject that may be unfamiliar to many American readers."

Carlo D'Este, the executive director of the Colby Symposium and the esteemed author of several books on WWII including biographies of Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, and Winston Churchill, describes Midnight?s Furies as "noteworthy, superbly readable, and very timely."

Winners of the Colby book award receive a USD 5,000 author honorarium provided through a grant from the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation. The award and honorarium will be presented to Hajari at Norwich University during the 2016 William E Colby Military Writers' Symposium on April 6-7.
New Delhi: History was created on the 67th Republic Day celebrations, when French Army soldiers on Wednesday marched down the majestic Rajpath, becoming the first foreign military contingent to take part in the occasion.

For the first time, a contingent from the French 35th Infantry Regiment - elements of which had served in India in 1781-84 - was given the honour of leading the marching contingents and it performed with panache, preceded by a pipes and drums band and saluting in a rather unusual style with the right hand held straight across the chest.

The French infantry regiment recently participated in a joint training exercise with the Indian Army for "Shakti 2016".

The Infantry Regiment was first formed in the early 1600s at Lorraine.

Interestingly, the French troops fought along with Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan against the Britishers. Also, the French were defeated when they attacked the Indian troops of the 24th Bengal Native Infantry and Madras Army on June 25, 1783.

In this war a French soldier Jean Baptiste de Bernadotte was wounded, who later made into Napoleon's Army as a Marshal and finally became the King of Sweden.

Tipu Sultan's cavalry later was named as Mysore Lancers and was further renamed as 61 Cavalry after India got Independence. On this Republic Day, the 61 Cavalry marched right behind the troops of France. They were preceded by a band, including 48 musicians, led by Major Jean-Claude Leberruyer.

India's 67th Republic Day was celebrated across cities and towns on Tuesday, with the country's military might on display in the capital.
New Delhi: In a revelation that has put the role of historians in shaping the fact-based history under scanner, former Regional Director(North) of Archaeological Survey of India KK Muhammad has alleged that an excavation done by a team headed by Professor BB Lal, then director general of the ASI during 1976-77, found the remnants of a Hindu temple at the Babri Masjid site.

According to Firstpost, in his recent memoirs Njan Enna Bharatiyan (I an Indian) in Malayalam, Muhammad has accused Left historians like Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar of thwarting an amicable settlement to the Babri Masjid issue.

"The Babri issue would have been settled long ago if the Muslim intelligentsia had not fallen prey to the brain washing by the Leftist historians. A set of historians including Romila Thapar, Bipin Chandra and S Gopal argued that there was no mention of the dismantling of the temple before 19th century and Ayodhya is Bhudhist-Jain centre. They were supported by historians Irfan Habib,RS Sharma, DN Jha, Suraj Ben and Akthar Ali," Muhammad told Firstpost.

Muhammad further claimed that a Hindu temple existed at the site of the Babri Masjid based on the unearthing of temple pillars during the excavation.

"We found not one but 14 pillars of a temple at the Babri Masjid site. All these pillars had domes carved on them. The domes resembled those found in temples belonging to 11th and 12th century. In the temple architecture domes are one of the nine symbols of prosperity. It was quite evident that the Masjid was erected on the debris of a temple. I went on writing to several English dailies in those days about the finding. Only one news paper published my view and that too in the letters to Editor column," He wrote in the book.

He further accused the Left historians of misleading the Allahabad High Court and alleged that even Qutab Minar and Taj Mahal were also built on Hindu temples.

Muhammad has been working as the director of Aga Khan Trust project in Hyderabad after retiring from ASI in 2012.

While some noted historians have backed Muhammad's claims, a few left historians have snubbed the arguments as baseless.
Delhi: Terror group Janood-ul-Khalifae-Hind or the 'Army of Caliph in India' has emerged as a new threat, as per a media report.

It is said to be a well-funded network of ISIS-inspired group and has recruits across the country.

As per a report by India Today group, investigations by National Investigation Agency (NIA) have revealed that there is a larger financial nexus involved in the recruitment process.

The report said that probe has revealed that those arrested had recruited several others.

At the same time they had also arranged finances so that some recruits could travel to Syria and join the terror group Islamic State or ISIS.

The report quoted sources as saying that Janood-ul-Khalifae-Hind had made pan-India presence in a short time.

They were also reportedly planning terror strikes across the country and were making efforts to identify locations to organise terror training camps.
Jaipur: The mysterious balloon-shaped object, which was shot down by a Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft in Rajasthan's Barmer district on Tuesday, was actually a US made balloon.

According to a news report, the balloon was 3 metre wide/8ft long and no explosives were found in it.

IAF officials on Tuesday said the object was flying in from the western sector (implying Pakistani side) and was shot down.

"Between 10.30 - 11.00 am, unidentified balloon-shaped object was picked up on IAF radar, which was unidentified and was in our airspace. An IAF fighter was launched, which intercepted the object and brought it down. We have launched further investigations into it," a source in the IAF told IANS.

The incident happened in Barmer, nearly 500 km from Rajasthan capital Jaipur, where some villagers have reported an incident of certain metal pieces falling down from the sky.
New Delhi: In a first of its kind meeting of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday laid thrust on quicker delivery of the government's developmental agenda.

Reports said that a decision had been taken to hold such meetings every fourth Wednesday of each month during which similar review of other ministries would be carried out.

PM Modi is also learnt to have expressed concern over the soaring price of pulses in the over three-hour-long meeting during which the status of projects of some ministries were reviewed.

Reviewing the progress of schemes of ministries including Agriculture, Rural Development, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Chemical and Fertilizer and Water Resources, Modi emphasised the need to take the government's initiatives to people.

Noting that the schemes launched so far for cleaning of river Ganga have failed to bring effective results, he called for out of box ideas to ensure greater participation participation of people for the success of his pet Namami Gange project, the sources said, as per PTI.

The PM also sought suggestions for improving various schemes and their effective implementation.

A key highlight of the meeting was the Prime Minister's focus on how to increase the production of pulses in the country.

The discussion on pulses saw PM Modi talking about long term measures required to be taken to increase their production and to create sufficient buffer stock.

The meeting also saw a discussion on rural jog flagship scheme MNREGA.

The issue of direct release of wages to workers for its better implementation and empowerment of the states also came up for discussion.

PM Modi also wanted to know why certain schemes could not gain pace and how the bottlenecks can be removed.

Meanwhile, PM Modi also chaired ninth interaction through PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation) earlier today.

He also tweeted about it:

Issues discussed during today's PRAGATI interaction include progress of UDAY & implementation of National Old Age Pension Scheme.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 27, 2016

Discussions were held on significant projects like Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, DMIC & Jal Marg Vikas Project from Allahabad to Haldia.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 27, 2016

Also called for top-level monitoring of people's grievances relating to the customs and excise sector. https://t.co/iKKdowfvBx  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 27, 2016

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: Experts from the military have reconstructed how the six Pakistani terrorists, who attacked the Pathankot Air Force base earlier this month, divided the task among themselves.

As per their findings, reports NDTV, two of the terrorists were given the task to act as "guides" for the rest.

The report, which has been submitted to the government, said the pair of attackers' job was to lead the larger group to the technical area where fighter jets and helicopters were parked.

The duo were not armed with machine guns, but had Improvised Explosive Devices, incendiary gels, and ammonium nitrate.

They aimed at destroying as many high-value military assets as possible.

The guides had arrived at the airbase on January 1. It is not yet known how they breached the security of the base.

The other four terrorists entered the airbase early on the morning of January 2 by scaling a 10-foot high wall topped with barbed wire. They were detected by thermal devices on surveillance aircraft on January 3, said NDTV.

Notably, it was the group of four terrorists that was killed first by security forces on January 2.

By January 3, the pair of terrorists had taken shelter on the ground floor of a residential building, reported NDTV, adding at least five Air Force officers had locked themselves into rooms on the first floor, who were later evacuated by National Security Guard commandos.

On NSG's Lt Col Niranjan, who was killed while trying to defuse a grenade, the channel quoted a senior official as saying: "The bomb suit weighs about 60 kg, the terrain was undulating and covered by elephant grass, it was not possible to wear the suit, Lieutenant Colonel Niranjan didn't violate any procedure. He was an expert."

Six suspected Pakistani terrorists had attacked the Pathankot airbase in Punjab, leaving seven security personnel dead, after infiltrating the border belt in the Gurdaspur-Pathankot sector.
Ahmednagar: A day after Maharashtra's Shani Shingnapur made the headlines over women's entry ban row, a Muslim group has come out in support of the women's entry into the temple.

Charging "male-dominated bodies" which run shrines with bias, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan said it supports demands by Hindu women to be allowed to enter the 'chabutra' or sanctum sanctorum of the Shani temple in Ahmednagar.

"We salute the women activists for their democratic protest and assertion of their right to worship in the face of all odds placed by the patriarchal male temple administration," Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan said in a statement.

Condemning the police action, Andolan co-founders Zakia Soman and Noorjehan Safia Niaz said they were shocked at the imposition of Section 144 by the district administration to bar the women from proceeding peacefully to the temple.

Maharashtra's Shani Shingnapur temple made the headlines on Tuesday as hundreds of women activists who were on their way to the temple - to protest the entry ban inside the shrine's inner sanctum sanctorum - were stopped by the security officials at Supa village in the state.
New Delhi: Subhas Chandra Bose's daughter Anita Bose Pfaff wants a DNA test to be done on Netaji's remains kept at Renkoji Temple in Japan.

Pfaff believes that her father died in the air crash in Formosa (now Taiwan) on August 18, 1945, en route to Japan.

The secret files related to Netaji were declassified by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23 January, the birth anniversary of Bose.

According to some declassified documents , the Indian government was not inclined to favour the bringing back of Netajis ashes kept in Renkoji temple, Tokyo due to possible adverse reactions from members of Bose's family, as well as certain sections of the public, who refused to believe in his death in the plane crash in August, 1945.

According to a confidential report prepared by the home ministry in 1977, the Indian embassy was paying the temple authorities in Tokyo Rs 5000 a year for the safekeeping of the freedom fighters ashes.
Aurangabad: After launching a 'Roti Bank' here last month, the Haron Mukati Islamic Centre on Tuesday inaugurated a 'Kapda Bank' intended to provides clothes to the poorest of poor.

HMIC founder Yusuf Mukati said that while the 'roti bank' is flourishing with food donations, he had observed that many poor people who came to pick up their food packets barely had enough clothes.

"In fact, I saw many people, especially elders and children, shivering in the biting cold as they were wearing torn or insufficient clothes. This gave me an idea to do something about the problem," Mukati told IANS.

He passed the word around the communities to come forward and donate whatever extra clothes people could manage.

The response was most encouraging, he said.

"The only condition was that though the clothes may be used, they should not be torn or worn out, so we can directly donate them to the poor people. I was surprised when within two days, I got a 'deposit' of around 600 full sets of clothes and we could open the 'Kapda Bank' on the auspicious Republic Day," Mukati said.

All clothes are carefully examined for any wear/tears, missing buttons, hooks, loose stiching, segregated according to size and gender, then sent for dry-cleaning and ironing before they are given in transparent plastic bags to the beneficiaries.

The first day saw a large number of poor men, women and children, mostly slumdwellers, trooping down to collect the clothes.

Mukati's team of volunteers checked out their 'yellow ration cards' indicating they fall in the below poverty line (BPL) category and gave them one set of clothes each after noting down their names, addresses, etc.

"This is to ensure that people don't come repeatedly for more clothes and we can cast the net wide for beneficiaries. We want them to wear and use the clothes and not give them away or even sell them cheap. We want everbody to appear dignified with decent clothes," said Mukati.

Now, people are encouraged to donate their extra or unused shoes, slippers, sweaters, bedsheets, rugs, pillows, mattresses, etc, which can be given to the poor through the Kapda Bank.

This is the second major initiative by HMIC after launching the Roti Bank on December 5 last year, which has elicited response from social organizations and groups across India.

Advised and inspired by Mukati, the Badavara Bandhu Charitable Trust, Mysuru started a Roti Bank which was inaugurated on Tuesday by Rajmata Pramodadevi Wodeyar at Mahaveera Nagar in the erstwhile royal kingdom.

Mukati said that inspired by the HMIC initiative, around 250 organisations from all over India are in touch with him and want to launch similar roti banks in their areas.

Besides the Roti Bank and the Kapda Bank, the HMIC contributes to women's uplift with an academic centre for 2,000 girls in which they impart regular spiritual and vocational education in 15 different vocations, including yoga, fashion designing and computers.
Mumbai: Mumbai Police Commissioner Ahmed Javed, Wednesday, created a buzz on social media with a witty one line tweet on drug abuse.

The Mumbai CP tweeted:

If you roll, we will weed you out. #HoshMeinAao  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 27, 2016

His tweet elicited wide response on the social media with most people, especially, youngsters appreciating the Mumbai Police Commissioner for his innovative approach towards combating the drug menace.

Interestingly, a similar incident was reported from Melbourne in Australia where the Victoria Police invited themselves to an illegal party.

The police wrote on the Facebook wall of the party's organisers: Hi Jai and Clint. This is Victoria Police. We know this party is not sanctioned by Triple J, so we're assuming you haven't got any permits from Port Phillip Council either? If that's the case, we'll pay you a visit on Australia Day and let's hope we don't spoil your party!
Mumbai: Mumbai's iconic Marine Drive, which completed 100 years in December, has finally got its 'yellow glow' back after the civic authorities replaced about 250 white LED lights with yellow lights.

According to reports, the city's civic body is yet to install nearly 400 more yellow lights.

However, the move came a year after the ruling allies  Shiv Sena and BJP - sparred over the LED lights in the area.

"This is a victory for people who wanted queen's necklace back in Marine Drive," Shiv Sena corporator Avkash Jadhav was quoted saying by ANI.

The old sodium vapour lamps were replaced by white LED lights in January last year.

However, the move had run into trouble after Aaditya Thackeray raised objection to replacement of street lights and claimed that the white lights had 'stolen the charm of the Queen's Necklace'.

The Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC) had given a go-ahead to the civic administration to replace the sodium vapour bulbs with white LED.

Later, the Bombay High Court, in August, had directed the civic administration to replace the white LED with yellow LED bulbs.
Imphal: In a shocking revelation, a Manipur Police head constable Thounaojam Herojit Singh has confessed to killing a former Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) terrorist six years back.

Speaking exclusively to 'CNN-IBN', Singh confessed of killing suspected PLA member Chungkham Sanjit Meitei in 1999, whom he claimed was 'unarmed' at that time.

Singh said he shot Meitei with 9mm pistol after receiving orders from the then Additional Superintendent of Police in Imphal.

While expressing fear for his life, the head constable had also alleged that the Manipur DGP and Chief Minister knew about the incident.

The news channel quoted CBI sources saying that they have taken note of Singh's confession and if the claims are true they will re-open the case.

Notably, the state authorities are yet to come forward with an official statement on Singh's claims .

After hearing Singh's confession, Metiei's mother demanded that either the state government ensures justice or the constable be handed over to her.

Earlier, CBI had filed a chargesheet against nine Manipur police personnel in connection with the sensational killing of Meitei.

Meitei was killed by police commandos who had alleged that he was gunned down in an encounter.

In a writ petition, Meitei's mother alleged that her son was shot dead arbitrarily by the Manipur Police commandos.

The Guwahati High Court's Imphal Bench had on December 23, 2009 had transferred the investigation to the CBI.

As per the CBI investigation, the Manipur police commandos, doing their routine frisking on BT Road, came across a youth who fired at them and mingled with the crowd. The police also fired in retaliation in which five persons were injured and one pregnant woman was killed.

Police cordoned the area and started search operations. Meitei, who was present on B T Road, was picked up by police and taken inside the store room of a pharmacy.

"He was not armed at that time and was accosted by the commandos and shot dead by them and a pistol was shown falsely recovered from him. Investigation revealed that there was no such pistol in possession of Sanjit Meitei and police planted the same after it was picked up from nearby GSS Arcade, minutes before the encounter," CBI said.

CBI has cited over 250 witnesses and 125 documents besides several articles along with the chargesheet.
ABC/Fred LeeA Connecticut high school's decision to call off a planned production of American Idiot has drawn a response from Billie Joe Armstrong. In an Instagram post, the Green Day frontman criticized the Enfield High School school board for cancelling the production of the musical, which is based on the punk band's 2004 album of the same name.

"I realize the content of the Broadway production of [American Idiot] is not quite 'suitable' for a younger audience," writes Armstrong. "However there is a high school rendition of the production and I believe that's the one Enfield was planning to perform which is suitable for most people."

Armstrong also claims that Enfield High's cancellation of American Idiot is an issue of "censorship."

"This production tackles issues in a post 9/11 world and I believe the kids should be heard," he writes. "And most of all be creative in telling a story about our history."

Since Armstrong posted his feelings about the American Idiot cancellation, Enfield High drama club director Nate Ferreira has clarified that it wasn't the school board who called off the production.

"I know that Mr. Armstrong posted something in support of our intention to do the show but in fact it wasn't the school board as he thinks that forced us not to do the show," Ferreira tells The Hartford Courant. "It was a decision that the principal and I arrived at together because there were some kids in the group whose parents didn't want them involved."

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
New Delhi: The Congress has once again attacked the BJP over the imposition of President's Rule in Arunachal pradesh.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, Modi government has murdered democracy on Republic Day. Truth is that during Modi jis government, Raj Bhawans have become den of 'Pracharaks' of RSS & that is what happened in Arunachal Pradesh.

Surjewala's comments came on a day when the Supreme Court is all set to hear Congress' plea against President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh.

Former Arunachal chief minister Nabam Tuki said, People are upset over President's rule imposed in Arunachal Pradesh, hope SC would ensure justice.

President Pranab Mukherjee has cleared the proposal by the Centre yesterday. A Home Ministry statement said, President of India has signed a proclamation under article 356(1) of the Constitution, imposing President's Rule in relation to the state of Arunachal Pradesh and keeping the Legislative Assembly of the state in suspended animation with effect from January 26."
Itanagar: After proclamation of President's Rule, Arunachal Pradesh Governor Jyoti Prashad Rajkhowa has assured MLAs that they will be provided security which they are entitled to.

The Governor convened a meeting of senior officers of the state and advised them to ensure that there was no law and order problem in the state.

Laws must be enforced in letter and spirit for safeguarding the interest of the common people, the governor told the officials including Chief Secretary Ramesh Negi in the meeting last evening, a Raj Bhawan release said here today.

Stressing on security coverage for former chief minister and ministers, Rajkhowa said that nobody should have any problem in this regard and all the members of the state Assembly would get security cover as per entitlement.

Rebellion in Congress had precipitated a political crisis in Arunachal Pradesh after its 21 MLAs, up in arms against the then Chief Minister Nabam Tuki, joined hands with 11 of BJP and two independents to 'impeach' the then Assembly Speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue, a move branded as "illegal and unconstitutional" by the Speaker.

27 MLAs in 60-member Assembly, including Tuki and his ministerial colleagues, boycotted the proceedings. The rebels later "elected" another dissident Congressman Kalikho Pul as the new "chief minister" of the state.

Union Cabinet had recommended imposition of President's Rule on Sunday in Congress-ruled Arunachal Pradesh, and the President gave his assent yesterday. The Centre has also appointed former Delhi Police Commissioner YS Dadwal and retired IAS officer GS Patnaik as advisors to the Governor.

Rajkhowa instructed the chief secretary to issue a circular to all departments and offices to maintain transparency in decision making and execution of various works and take firm action against corruption.

On financial matters, the governor advised the officers to give priority on payment of salaries, allowances and pensions as well as establishment expenses and underscored that the development process must not suffer, but should be expedited.

The governor also assured the officers that any financial issue or other subject pending with the central government will be soon taken up to expedite the process of development in the state.

Putting road communication as one of the top priorities, the governor asked the PWD Commissioner to complete the road repair works in the twin cities of Intanagar-Naharlagun and also important roads to Doimukh, Chimpu, Poma-Jotte and Nirjuli besides those in other districts and sub-divisions immediately.

He also asked the commissioners and secretaries for furnishing replies to all pending queries sent from Raj Bhavan on matters of public interest at the earliest, the release said.

He appealed to the people of the state "to carry on normal duties and in case of any difficulty, they might refer the matter to the Governor Secretariat".

He also appealed to the people for cooperation in expediting the developmental works and to maintain communal harmony.
Kathmandu: Nepal's Prime Minister KP Oli today said it would not be appropriate to visit India until the "border blockade" ends, linking his maiden foreign trip next month to the normalisation of situation at the border.

"It would not be appropriate for me to visit India unless the situation returns to normal," Mr Oli told a select group of journalists at his office here when asked whether he will visit India if the current "border blockade" continues.

Mr Oli alleged that India had imposed an "unofficial border blockade" and said that the country will soon lift it.

The Prime Minister said the government is keeping a close eye on separatist movements in Terai.

Mr Oli is expected to travel to New Delhi early next month on his first foreign visit as Prime Minister. Earlier, there had also been speculation that the Communist leader could visit China ahead of India.

During his telephonic conversation with Mr Oli a couple of months ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had invited him to visit India at an appropriate time.

No Nepalese Prime Minister has visited India after Prime Minister Modi's two trips to Nepal last year.

Nepal government has alleged that the "border embargo" had been imposed by the Indian government, a claim which India has denied.

India has made clear that the obstruction in the movement of goods through the Indo-Nepal border was due to the protests by the Madhesis.

Nepal is facing acute shortage of cooking gas, petroleum products, medicines and other essential goods due to the five-month-long blockade of key border trade points with India due to the protests by the Madhesis.

Mr Oli's remarks come after the announcement by Madhesis of new protest programmes on Monday.

Nepal's parliament on Saturday voted to amend the country's Constitution with a two-thirds majority four months after its promulgation, in a bid to resolve the political crisis.

The amendments addressed two key demands of the Madhesis-- proportionate representation and seat allocation in the Parliament on the basis of population.

Madhesis have rejected as "incomplete" the constitutional amendments passed by the Parliament for failing to address their concerns over redrawing borders.

The agitating Madhesi community that shares strong cultural and family bonds with India is demanding demarcation of provinces, fixing of electoral constituencies on the basis of population and proportional representation. At least 55 people have been killed in the protests.
Islamabad: In a fresh setback to the Mumbai attack trial, a Pakistani court has dismissed the government's petition seeking voices samples of 26/11 mastermind Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects in the case.

The prosecution had filed an application in the Islamabad High Court seeking voice samples of the suspects to compare it with the communication intercepted by Indian intelligence and then present it before the anti-terrorism court (ATC) as evidence against the seven suspects in the Mumbai attack case.

The Islamabad High Court on Monday dismissed the petition.

In 2011 and 2015, the issue of obtaining voice samples of Lakhvi had been dismissed by the trial court on the grounds that "no such law exists that allows obtaining of voice sample of an accused".

The prosecution's petition said the Indian intelligence agencies had intercepted communication between the suspects and the terrorists in connection with the Mumbai attack in 2008.

In the recorded intercepts, the suspects are alleged to be instructing the terrorists.

The prosecution lawyers had argued that the samples were essential for concluding the investigation of this high profile case.

The trial court had also rejected another petition of the prosecution requesting the court to declare Ajmal Kasab and Faheem Ansari absconders in order to meet legal formalities.

The prosecution had told the court that unless it declared the two men absconders, the trial against them would remain "inconclusive" as both have been cited as accused in the Mumbai attack case by Indian authorities and that they were also wanted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that was probing the 26/11 case.

Pakistani authorities arrested seven Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) members involved in the planning of the attacks including the terrorist group's operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks.

Six accused -- Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum -- have been in Adiala Jail for more than six years in connection with planning and executing the Mumbai attack in November, 2008, that left 166 people killed.

Lakhvi, 56, secured bail in December, 2014, and was subsequently released from Adiala Jail on April 10, 2015, after the Lahore High Court set aside the government's order to detain him under a public security act.

A trial is underway against them at the ATC since 2009.
Washington: NASA's Cassini spacecraft has successfully completed the second of five planned maneuvers that will lift it out of Saturn's ringplane.

Cassini, which is in final phase of the mission, performed a 35-second engine burn on Saturday, January 23, beginning at 2:47 p.m. PST (5:47 p.m. EST), in preparation for the February 1 flyby of Saturn's huge moon Titan.

The January 23 burn changed the spacecraft's orbital speed around Saturn by about 22.3 feet per second (6.8 meters per second), according to NASA.

Each maneuver in the series sets up a subsequent gravity-assist flyby of Saturn's massive moon Titan, which reshapes the spacecraft's orbit, sending it to increasingly higher inclination with respect to Saturn's equator.

The overall goal of these maneuvers is to get Cassini to a higher plane above Saturn's equator.

"Titan does all the heavy lifting," said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, in a statement. "Our job is to get the spacecraft to a precise altitude and latitude above Titan, at a particular time, and these large propulsive maneuvers are what keep us on target to do that."

NASA said Cassini will not return again to an orbit near the plane of the rings. Engineers are slowly increasing the tilt of the spacecraft's orbit with respect to Saturn's equator to set up the mission's final, dramatic year.

By late November, the spacecraft will be on a path that will carry it high above Saturn's poles, approaching just outside the planet's main rings -- a period the mission team calls the "F-ring orbits."

After 20 F-ring orbits, Cassini will begin its Grand Finale event, in which the spacecraft will pass 22 times between the innermost rings and the planet before plunging into Saturn's atmosphere to end its journey on Sept. 15, 2017.

The next burn is scheduled for March 25, with another Titan encounter on April 4.

(Source: NASA)
Hyderabad: The students protesting over the suicide of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula refused to meet and talk with interim Vice chancellor of Hyderabad University Professor Vipin Srivastava on Wednesday.

The interim VC had gone to meet the students and persuade them to end the protest.

Professor Srivastava left the venue after protesting students raised slogans of 'go back'.

Srivastava was made the in-charge vice-chancellor after the vice-chancellor of Hyderabad University Appa Rao went on leave amidst the Vemula suicide row that has taken a political turn.

His appointment has been opposed by the agitating students and SC/ST teachers' forum, who has accused him of being involved in a suicide case of a Dalit scholar Senthil Kumar in 2008.

Vemula, a Dalit scholar, committed suicide in the campus on January 1, after he was suspended from the University for engaging in a clash with a ABVP leader.
Kano: At least 13 people were killed on Wednesday when three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok, where Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls.

The blasts happened at about midday (1100 GMT) as the remote town in Borno state was packed with traders from surrounding villages for the weekly market, Chibok elder Ayuba Chibok told AFP.

"Ten died on the spot and another one died on the way to hospital," said health worker Dazzban Buba, who volunteered to treat the injured at hospital. A woman and a child died as they were being admitted (to hospital), so now the death toll stands at 13. Thirty others were injured, 21 critically."

The blasts bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has repeatedly hit "soft" civilian targets such as markets, mosques and bus stations as well as military and civilian vigilante checkpoints.

Chibok came to prominence in April 2014 when Islamist fighters stormed a boarding school and kidnapped 276 girls, causing global outrage.

Fifty-seven girls managed to escape in the immediate aftermath but 219 are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video in May that year. Chibok was briefly overrun by the Islamic State group-allied rebels in November 2014 but recaptured by the military after several days.

Ayuba Chibok and Buba both said Wednesday's blasts were suicide attacks and had prompted terrified residents to lock themselves inside their homes or flee in fear of repeat attacks.

"The first bomber set off his explosives at the checkpoint where people coming into the town were being searched," said the town elder. "A second bomber managed to get into the market and blew himself up. A third bomber was identified and residents pursued him. "When he realised he was about to be apprehended he detonated his explosives in an area not far from the market." Buba said he rushed to help his brother who was injured in the first blast in the Bamzir Road area of the town.

The second blast happened shortly afterwards, fitting a pattern of Boko Haram suicide attacks with multiple bombers setting off their devices almost simultaneously. But Buba said it was still unclear whether the third bomber deliberately detonated his explosives or whether the device was triggered when troops opened fire as he fled.

Buba said the 30 injured were mostly suffering from burns and fractures, and that nine had been discharged, he added.
Jerusalem: Eight members of the Palestinian militant group Hamas were missing on Wednesday after the collapse of a tunnel in the Gaza Strip caused by rain and flooding, a security source said.

The tunnel collapsed overnight in the area of Jabalia in the north of the Palestinian enclave after several days of rainfall, the security source in the area said on condition of anonymity.

"The resistance tunnel collapsed last night due to the weather and flooding," the source said, adding that the tunnel belonged to Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip.

"There were 11 resistance men inside. Three of them escaped in the first hour after the accident, but the security operation... continues to search for the eight others."

Hamas`s armed wing, Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, later confirmed in a statement that one of its tunnels collapsed.

It said searches were continuing for the missing, without providing a number or further details.

It comes at a time of renewed focus on tunnels in Gaza, with Israel accusing Hamas of reconstructing them following its 2014 war with Palestinian militants in the enclave when many were destroyed.

Israel says the tunnels could be used to carry out fresh attacks against it.

Such collapses have previously occurred in the coastal strip, which is under an Israeli blockade and has seen three wars with the Jewish state since 2008.

On Saturday, a tunnel collapse killed a 30-year-old man, according to Hamas officials. Residents said the tunnel was located in Al-Maghazi in the central Gaza Strip.

In December, 14 Palestinians were rescued after being stranded for hours in a tunnel near the Egyptian border when it flooded and partially collapsed.

At the end of 2014, Egypt began the construction of a buffer zone in the northern Sinai Peninsula, on the border with Gaza, including destroying hundreds of tunnels it says are used for smuggling weapons.

Israel`s blockade severely restricts the movement of people and goods into and out of the enclave.

Egypt`s sole border with Gaza has also remained largely closed following the 2013 overthrow of the country`s president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, effectively trapping the 1.8 million Gazans into the territory.
Washington: White House hopeful Donald Trump will not participate in Thursday`s Republican debate, bowing out of a nationally televised showdown just four days before Iowa kicks off the presidential nomination process, US media reported.

Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, publicly toyed with the idea of pulling out of the debate during a campaign event Tuesday in Iowa, where he said "probably I won`t be doing the debate."

An hour later, Trump`s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told The Washington Post that Trump would "definitely not" participate.

Trump`s decision to drop out only heightens his feud with Fox News, the host of Thursday`s debate in Iowa and whose moderator Megyn Kelly has been accused by Trump of bias against him.

"I don`t think she can treat me fairly. And I`m not a big fan of hers," Trump told CNN earlier Tuesday.

Kelly moderated the first debate of the campaign cycle, in August, when she was tough on Trump.

Afterwards Trump suggested Kelly treated him unfairly because she was menstruating.

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, in what looked increasingly like a game of high-powered chicken, gave his moderator his support.

"Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist and the entire network stands behind her," Ailes told the Post.

"She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night."

Fox intensified the standoff by mocking Trump, who had asked his five million Twitter followers to weigh in on whether or not he should attend the debate.

"A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings" with the leaders of Iran and Russia, Fox News said in a tongue-in-cheek statement.

Trump`s absence would leave a huge hole on the Des Moines stage, where fellow Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Florida governor Jeb Bush will be making their final pitch to Iowa voters.

Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler blasted Trump`s decision as "erratic" and foolish behavior from a presidential hopeful, especially considering a large segment of voters say they have not finalized their support for a candidate.

Bailing out on a debate "because he has a problem with the host is just childish," Tyler told CNN.
Athens: Seven migrants drowned trying to reach Greece on Wednesday, as the European Union blasted Athens for its handling of the crisis, saying it had "seriously neglected" its duty to protect the bloc`s borders.

The European Commission said Greece could face border controls with the rest of the EU`s passport-free Schengen zone if it fails to secure its exterior borders, with thousands of migrants still landing on Greek beaches from Turkey day after day.

"The draft report concludes that Greece seriously neglected its obligations and that there are serious deficiencies in the carrying out of external border controls that must be overcome and dealt with by Greek authorities," Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a press conference.

The highly critical draft report found Greece was failing to properly register and fingerprint migrants, with security concerns still high after revelations that two jihadists behind November`s Paris attacks slipped into Europe by posing as refugees.

Its findings pile further pressure on a country that has been fending off calls that it should face possible suspension from the 26-country Schengen zone, a cherished symbol of European unity.

The report could pave the way for Brussels to authorise EU members to exceptionally extend border controls within the Schengen area -- including with Greece -- for up to two years, instead of the normal six months.

Greece blasted the report as "unconstructive", accusing its EU peers of trying to shift blame instead of coming up with a joint solution to the continent`s worst migration crisis since World War II.

"This tactic of diverting responsibility is not an effective response to a problem of historic dimensions, which requires joint action," said government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili.

Greece "is doing everything it can to respect its obligations, and we expect everyone else to do the same," she added.

Greek junior migration minister Yannis Mouzalas told AFP the situation had changed since the EU carried out its inspection for the report at the Turkish land border and on several Greek islands.

"This report dates from November but important work has been carried out since then. The next reports will be very different," he said.The bitter wrangling came as rescuers found the bodies of seven drowned migrants, including two children, after their boat sank near the Greek island of Kos -- just five days after 45 people drowned in the Aegean Sea on Friday.

Flimsy boats packed with migrants are arriving on Greek beaches every day, with the passengers -- mostly fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan -- undeterred by cold wintry conditions.

The UN says more than 46,000 people have arrived in Greece so far this year, with more than 170 people killed making the dangerous crossing.

In Brussels, Dombrovskis said that if a majority of the 28 EU member states adopt the Commission`s report, it will draw up a plan for shoring up Greece`s borders, especially its sea frontier with Turkey.

"Greece will then have three months to implement remedial actions," Dombrovskis said.

"If necessary remedial actions are not being taken there is a possibility... which would allow member states to temporarily close their borders."

In the last few months, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France and non-EU member Norway have all introduced six-month temporary controls in a bid to contain the influx.

Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner warned last week that Athens could face "temporary exclusion" from Schengen, while Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico on Wednesday said the EU was committing "ritual suicide" with its migration policy.

Greece is not the only country under fire over its handling of the migrant crisis, with Denmark facing criticism Wednesday after its lawmakers passed a bill allowing authorities to seize valuables from refugees.

Some likened the move to the Nazis` confiscation of gold from Jews during the Holocaust, with Human Rights Watch denouncing the bill as "despicable".

Pia Prytz Phiri of the UN`s UNHCR refugee agency said it was "outrageous and potentially also a violation of international law."

The government insists the law is needed to stem the flow of refugees.
Jakarta: Five more bodies believed to be those of illegal Indonesian migrants were found in Malaysia on Wednesday following a boat tragedy, raising the death toll to 18, police said.

Thirteen bodies were found on Tuesday after their boat capsized in rough seas off southern Johor state.

Local police chief superintendant Rahmat Othman said the five male bodies were found on the beach.

"They were trying to enter Malaysia illegally. We will continue the search and rescue mission because investigations revealed that there could have been between 30 to 35 people on board the twin engine boat," he said.

Rahmat said there had been local reports of some survivors making it alive to shore.

"We believe the remaining missing migrants could have either drowned or are hiding in nearby jungles waiting for smugglers to take them to a safe destination," he said.

Rahmat said the illegal migrants could have departed from the nearby Indonesian island of Batam.

The southern Johor state has a long coastline and shares a maritime border with Indonesia, making illegal entry easy into Malaysia, the third largest economy in Southeast Asia.\

About two million Indonesians, many of them working illegally, now live in Malaysia, generally employed in labour intensive jobs.

Deadly accidents in the strait are not uncommon, with illegal migrants typically attempting the crossing in rickety vessels and often at night to avoid detection.
Tokyo: Japan`s Emperor Akihito will on Wednesday visit a cemetery for tens of thousands of Filipino World War II dead, as he uses a historic visit to the Philippines to promote his pacifist agenda.

The soft-smiling Akihito, 82, and his wife, Empress Michiko, are on a five-day trip to the Philippines to celebrate 60 years of diplomatic ties, but also to honour those who died during Japa`s brutal occupation of the Philippines.

"In the Philippines, many lives of Filipinos, Americans and Japanese were lost during the war," Akihito said before arriving on Tuesday.

Akihito specifically noted the battle for the liberation of Manila in 1945, where an estimated 100,000 people were killed.

"We`d like to conduct our visit by always keeping this in mind," said Akihito, who offered a slight bow as soon as he alighted from his plane at Manila airport.

Akihito`s visit is the first by a Japanese emperor to the Philippines and comes as the two countries fortify economic and defence ties, partly in an effort to counter China`s increasingly assertive actions in disputed regional waters.

He officially launched his visit on Wednesday morning with a red-carpet welcome ceremony at the presidential palace hosted by President Benigno Aquino.

In the afternoon, he is due to visit the sprawling Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes` Cemetery) in Manila, which was built in 1947 to honour Filipino soldiers who died during World War II.

An estimated 100,000 people died during the month-long campaign to liberate Manila in 1945, which saw aerial bombings and gunfire flatten the city.

Tens of thousands also died in an excruciating 100-kilometre (65-mile) march from a Filipino military stronghold in Bataan province to Japanese concentration camps.

The other key symbolic event on Akihito`s agenda will be a visit on Friday to a shrine for Japanese casualties of the war in Caliraya, a lake resort village about three hours` drive south of Manila.

Akihito has previously journeyed to other Pacific battle sites where Japanese troops and civilians made desperate last stands in the name of his father, Hirohito.Akihito`s remorse over the war helps to improve Japan`s international image, counter-balancing his government`s more nationalist bent, according to Manila-based political analyst Richard Javad Heydarian.

"The emperor will serve as the apologetic, sincere face of Japan... it will balance out his government`s controversial, pugnacious and seemingly revisionist statements," he said.

Conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe angered China and South Korea when he marked the 70th anniversary of Japan`s surrender last year by saying that future generations should not apologise for the war.

Abe is also looking to revise Japan`s war-renouncing "peace constitution", which he sees as an embarrassing remnant of its WWII defeat and occupation by the United States.

But while his nationalistic push has caused friction with many of Japan`s neighbours, the Philippines has taken a softer stance with its biggest donor of development aid and top trading partner.

On the 70th anniversary of Japan`s surrender, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said Japan had "acted with compassion" since the war, which led to the two nations rebuilding a "strong friendship".

However, there are still vocal critics who believe Japan has not done enough to atone for wartime atrocities, particularly the forcing of local women into sexual slavery.

About 200 people, including seven of the "comfort women", held a protest near the presidential palace on Wednesday morning to demand justice for the sex slaves.

"To the emperor of Japan, talk to your leader about Filipina grandmothers who are fighting for their rights," one of the former sex slaves, Narcisa Claveria, 85, said over a megaphone.

The women have long demanded from Japan a formal apology, compensation and inclusion of the atrocities in Japanese history books.
Beijing: North Korea`s nuclear programme is a "major challenge to global security", US Secretary of State John Kerry told his Chinese counterpart Wednesday, urging Beijing to increase pressure following its wayward neighbour`s latest atomic test.

The North`s pursuit of atomic weapons is "one of the most important issues for the security of the United States of America", the top US diplomat told Wang Yi on the last stop of his Asian tour.

A US official said earlier the issue would be at the top of Kerry`s agenda, adding: "The Secretary has made no secret... of his conviction that there is much more that China can do by way of applying leverage (on Pyongyang)."

China is North Korea`s chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor, but those ties have become strained in recent years as Beijing`s patience wears thin with Pyongyang`s unwillingness to rein in its nuclear weapons ambitions.

After the latest test on January 6 -- which Pyongyang said was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, a claim largely dismissed by experts -- China said it "firmly opposes" the North`s actions and summoned its diplomats for "solemn representations".

Nevertheless, the Asian power has proven reluctant to follow Washington`s lead on the issue and no substantive actions towards the North have been announced.

Wang welcomed the fact that Kerry`s trip had taken in a number of Asian countries, saying visiting them could help him understand the continent. "It can help you listen to voices more objectively," he added.

As Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, the state-run China Daily ran an article headlined: "Experts have low hopes for Kerry`s China trip."

Before Wednesday`s meeting, the official news agency Xinhua issued a commentary blaming the US`s "uncompromising hostility" and "Cold War mentality" for the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Washington`s actions, such as flying a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber close to the inter-Korean boder, were heightening the North`s "sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship", it added.

China`s leverage over Pyongyang is mitigated, analysts say, by its overriding fear of a North Korean collapse and the prospect of a reunified, US-allied Korea directly on its border.
Jakarta: Indonesia has relocated more than 1,500 members of a controversial sect from their village "for their own safety", an official said Wednesday, but rights groups described their treatment as religious persecution.

Members of the mysterious Light of Nusantara Movement -- or Gafatar -- have been moved from a remote communal farm in Indonesia`s half of Borneo island after a mob attack.

They are now in the country`s main island of Java undergoing "rehabilitation" instruction sessions on Islam and civic duties.

Meanwhile, followers of a separate minority group face ejection from their community unless they convert to mainstream Islam, according to Human Rights Watch.

Indonesia, the world`s most populous Muslim-majority nation, is seen as largely tolerant and pluralist. But a number of high-profile attacks against minority groups in recent years has marred this image.

The controversy surrounding Gafatar, a group accused of luring followers from across Indonesia to practise a deviant blend of the Muslim faith, has captivated national attention despite its tiny following in a country of 250 million.

Last week an angry mob torched their village base in Kalimantan, displacing roughly 500 families -- more than 1,500 people. They were evacuated by government authorities first to temporary shelters then back to Indonesia`s main island of Java, some by warship.

A spokesman for President Joko Widodo said the decision was made "for their own safety" and several government departments had been instructed to handle the crisis.

"We must protect our citizens regardless of their identity. They are also Indonesian citizens," spokesman Johan Budi told AFP.

Gafatar insists that it does not practise deviant Islam. The country`s top clerical body, the Indonesia Ulema Council (MUI), is expected to rule next month on whether its beliefs are heretical.

Anyone charged with heresy under Indonesian law can face five years in prison, said Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono. Police have said they are investigating any criminal links to the Gafatar movement.

The evacuees in Java have begun what officials are calling "rehabilitation" sessions on religion and civic duty, some run by the MUI.

The classes are expected to last five days and include special instruction for women and children and those deemed "ideologues" within the Gafatar movement, said Central Java MUI chairman Ahmad Daroji.

"We are teaching them to come back and be one of us again. We hope after the programme these people can return to their community," he told AFP.

Several local rights groups, including the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute and the Setara Institute, have criticised the treatment of Gafatar.

"It is religious persecution," Harsono told AFP. "This re-education programme is simply an abuse of human rights."

Meanwhile a community of Ahmadis -- a minority Muslim sect -- living in Indonesia`s west has allegedly been ordered to convert to mainstream Sunni Islam or face expulsion, Human Rights Watch said.

The New York-based rights group says the local government is conspiring with religious groups to harass and "unlawfully expel" the small cluster of Ahmadi families from Bangka island off Sumatra.

Ahmadis have long been targeted by hardline groups in Indonesia, who oppose their belief that a lesser prophet followed Mohammed.

In 2011 a mob beat three Ahmadis to death in an attack captured on video and widely circulated. Adherents are frequently harassed and prevented from praying at mosques.
Athens: Six migrants including one child drowned when their vessel sank off a Greek island close to Turkey, the Greek coastguard said on Wednesday, as the perilous crossings towards Europe continue despite harsh winter conditions.

"One man managed to swim ashore from an estimated 10 people on board. The body of a young boy was washed ashore," a Greek coastguard official said.

The sinking took place early on Wednesday north of the Ammoglossa cape of the island of Kos in the eastern Aegean Sea, close to the Turkish coast.

Three coastguard vessels, one military helicopter and two Frontex boats were searching for survivors.

"According to the survivor`s testimony, at least three migrants are missing," the coastguard official said.

More than 600,000 refugees and migrants fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and other war-torn countries arrived in Greece from Turkey last year, risking the short but dangerous sea crossing, often on inflatable rafts. Hundreds have drowned.

At least 43 people, including 17 children, drowned when their boats capsized off two Greek islands near the Turkish coast last week, marking one of the deadliest sinkings for migrants risking the precarious route to Europe from Turkey.
Chicago: Six US police officers who fired 137 bullets into a car carrying two unarmed African Americans lost their jobs, three years after the deadly car chase in Cleveland, Ohio.

City officials said yesterday they hoped the disciplinary actions would bring "closure" to a city struggling to rebuild community trust following a series of high-profile police shootings.

Cleveland police also faced criticism after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy carrying a toy gun, was fatally shot by a white officer at a playground in 2014.

A grand jury declined last month to issue charges in that case. Cleveland pledged to overhaul its police force and aspire to "bias-free" law enforcement under an agreement reached with the US Justice Department in May.

The "consent decree" was announced two days after protesters filled Cleveland streets following the acquittal of a white police officer charged in the deadly 2012 chase.

Patrolman Michael Brelo, 31, was one of 13 officers involved in the 22-mile (35 kilometre) high-speed chase that ended in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

The couple's car had backfired as it drove past Cleveland police headquarters, and police thought the sound was a gunshot. A total of 137 rounds were fired at the car, including 49 by Brelo. He shot the final 15 from the hood of Russell's Chevrolet Malibu. Six of the other officers involved in the chase were suspended and one has retired.

"The politics in this city is absolutely appalling, and those fired will get their jobs back," police union president Steve Loomis told reporters.

"How many people have to tell us this was a justified shooting? It's tragic that it went down this way, but at the end of the day, two people high on crack cocaine, high on marijuana, one of them intoxicated, made the decisions that they made and we responded."

City officials said the officers crossed the line and endangered their fellow officers when they unleashed 137 bullets in just 20 seconds. Mayor Frank Jackson defended the amount of time it took to discipline the officers.

"What we've talked about from the beginning is conducting a process that has due-process at its core and is fair," he told reporters.
Seoul: South Korea on Wednesday rejected allegations -- levelled in a video confession by a detainee in North Korea -- that Seoul was supporting an anti-Pyongyang campaign through missionaries based in China.

"We express strong regret that the truth is being distorted, while our national is being detained for a long period," Seoul`s Unification Ministry said.

Kim Kuk-Gi, one of three South Koreans currently held in the North, was sentenced in June 2015 to life imprisonment with hard labour on charges of spying for South Korea's intelligence service.

A 15-minute video released Tuesday on North Korea`s propaganda website, Uriminzokkiri, showed Kim delivering what appeared to be a scripted confession.

Kim admitted to "monstrous crimes" -- committed under the orders of South Korea`s National Intelligency Service (NIS) -- including distributing forged video clips of torture by the North Korean government and luring defectors to cross the Chinese border.

Kim said a handful of South Korean Christian groups were actively involved in this "smear campaign" orchestrated by the NIS.

"The leaders of South Korean Christianity should hold a meeting or choose a representative to send a letter of official apology," he added.

Foreigners detained in North Korea are regularly required to provide taped or written confessions, which they generally retract after their release.

Kim`s arrest was announced in March last year, along with the accusation that he had been spreading "religious propaganda" from an underground church he allegedly ran in the Chinese border city of Dandong.

Pyongyang views foreign missionaries as seditious elements intent on fomenting unrest and those who are caught engaging in any unauthorised activities in the North are subject to immediate arrest.
Riyadh: An important component of Syria`s opposition resumed discussions in the Saudi capital on Wednesday to decide whether to join peace talks in Geneva.

Speaking to AFP at the venue in a luxury Riyadh hotel, spokesman for the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), Monzer Makhous, said the talks could last "perhaps all day".

"There will be no comment until they finish," he said.

United Nations-brokered talks, now scheduled to begin on Friday, have been delayed since Monday over who will represent the opposition.

The HNC began meeting on Tuesday to debate whether it would attend.

The Riyadh-backed grouping insists it should be the sole opposition delegation.

But several opposition figures who do not belong to the body told AFP on Tuesday they had been invited to the talks.

A source close to the Riyadh meeting said the body had received invitations to Geneva, but discussion on whether to participate was ongoing.

"The response will be a request for clarifications and not an acceptance or rejection," he told AFP, adding that the body wanted to know who else had been invited and under what terms, as well as what would be discussed.

HNC member Salem al-Meslet said the "climate is positive".

The HNC was seeking "clarifications (from the UN) concerning some issues, particularly humanitarian issues", he said.

The office of UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said it had issued invitations to the talks but declined to say who had been invited to represent President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian opposition.

Following months of effort, Riyadh in December brought together about 100 representatives of the main Syrian political opposition and armed factions for unprecedented talks.

They agreed to negotiate with the regime but insisted Assad step down at the start of any political transition.

Riad Hijab, a former Syrian prime minister who defected in 2012, is general coordinator of the Riyadh group`s 33-member HNC.

Moscow, which along with Iran backs Assad, has criticised the Hijab group as unrepresentative.
Lausanne: The co-leader of the Syrian Democratic Council, Haytham Manna, on Wednesday he would not take part in peace talks in Geneva unless two Kurdish leaders, Saleh Muslim and Ilham Ahmed, were also invited to participate.

"I`ll go with my friends or not (at all). There is no compromise in this question," Manna told Reuters a day after the U.N. envoy to Syria, Staffan De Mistura, sent invitations to join the talks, without including the Kurdish leaders.

"We have one day and tomorrow perhaps also to negotiate all of these things with the Russians, the Americans and De Mistura`s staff. Well see if they accept our opinion, our view to have really a strong and representative delegation, we are ready to go.

Deciding who among Syria`s fractured opposition should attend the talks has become the main stumbling block to the first attempt at a peace negotiation in two years. There is no sign of an end to the war pitting a range of rebel groups against President Bashar al-Assad`s government after almost five years and more than 250,000 deaths.

Manna is not part of the main opposition delegation, which was formed at a meeting in Saudi Arabia and has yet to say if it will take part in the peace talks. Its leaders have said Syria must stop bombing civilian areas and allow humanitarian aid access before any peace negotiations can take place.

But Russia, Assad`s main backer, had demanded that the opposition representation was widened beyond the Saudi-backed group, some of whom it regards as terrorists. De Mistura invited Manna and other opposition leaders who had Moscow`s blessing.

But Muslim, co-leader of the Kurdish PYD party, told Reuters on Tuesday he had not been invited to the Geneva talks.

The PYD is fighting Islamic State and has enjoyed military support from the United States but is regarded by Turkey as part of a terrorist movement.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said De Mistura had told him that Syrian Kurdish officials would not be invited,and negotiations for the opposition will be led by the Saudi-backed opposition group.

Manna said that leaving out Muslim and Ahmed had left the invitees looking like "the Russian delegation".

"And Im not ready to be a member of the Russian delegation. We have the right to have our own delegation, Manna said.
Damascus: A major Syrian opposition group Wednesday postponed a decision on joining peace talks in Switzerland, as wrangling over who will go threatens to derail the biggest push yet to resolve the war.

The Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee -- formed last month in an effort to unite Syria`s fractious political and armed opposition -- met in Riyadh for a second day on whether to accept a UN invitation to the Geneva talks.

Salem al-Meslet, a Committee spokesman, said the group cannot make a decision until it has received a response from UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura.

The Committee insists it must be the sole opposition delegation at the talks and wants "clarifications" after the United Nations issued invitations to other regime opponents.

"Whether we say `yes` or `no` depends on the reply of De Mistura," which could come overnight, Meslet told AFP and Al-Arabiya television.

But he added there was a "positive" atmosphere at the Riyadh meeting.

Meslet said the Committee also needs clarification that the international community will address humanitarian issues.

The Geneva negotiations had already been delayed from Monday over the issue of who will represent the myriad forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria`s nearly five-year civil war.

Instead of meeting face-to-face, Geneva delegations are expected to engage in indirect negotiations.

Officials have said the talks, only the second intra-Syrian dialogue since the start of the conflict, would run over six months, with the first round expected to last between two and three weeks.Syria`s regime has designated its UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafari as its chief negotiator.

Diplomats, including US Secretary of State John Kerry who met Committee members last weekend, have pressured the opposition to go to Geneva.

The talks are part of a UN-backed plan, agreed by top diplomats last year in Vienna, that envisages negotiations followed by a transitional government, a new constitution, and elections within 18 months.

The roadmap is the most ambitious plan yet to end the conflict which has killed more than 260,000 people and forced millions from their homes.

De Mistura`s office said on Tuesday it had issued invitations to the talks, but refused to say who had been invited.

The Committee, which earlier this month named Mohammed Alloush of the Islamist rebel group Army of Islam as its chief negotiator, confirmed it had received an invitation, but so did several other opposition figures not belonging to the body.

It was unclear whether the others had been invited as official delegates or as observers.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Wednesday it was his understanding that only the Committee would be recognised as a negotiating delegation.

"(The Committee) is representative and it must be the negotiator, that is what was confirmed to me by Mr De Mistura, even if there can be other people" at the talks, Fabius told France Culture radio.

Committee coordinator Riad Hijab said a UN Security Council resolution calling for an end to sieges in Syria and the delivery of humanitarian aid "should not be ignored".UN aid chief Stephen O`Brien on Wednesday said almost 75 percent of UN requests last year to get aid into "besieged" and other difficult areas went unanswered by Syria`s government.

Many civilians are on the brink of starvation.

In his statement, Hijab referred to the Assad "regime`s attempts to jeopardise the political process through questioning the credibility of the opposition delegation".

The row over who will attend reflects not only internal divisions but also the interests of diplomatic powers embroiled in the Syria conflict.

Russia, a main Assad ally, has pushed for a broader range of opposition at the talks, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying Tuesday that negotiations "will not achieve results" if Syria`s Kurds are unrepresented.

Assad`s other main ally is Iran, Saudi Arabia`s regional rival.

Syria`s most powerful Kurdish organisation, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), said Tuesday it had not yet received an invitation.

Turkey, a leading backer of the opposition, considers the PYD to be an offshoot of the Kurdistan Worker`s Party (PKK) that has waged an insurgency in southeastern Turkey.

There have been no suggestions that jihadist movements, including the Islamic State group which has seized control of large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, should be invited.

Syrian government forces have made important military gains in recent weeks, backed by air strikes launched by Moscow last September.

Pro-government forces this week seized the strategic town of Sheikh Miskeen in southern Daraa province from rebels and took the last opposition-controlled town in coastal Latakia province, Rabia.
Kaohsiung: Taiwan carried out military drills Wednesday with naval chiefs assuring residents the island is safe, as concerns grow that tensions will escalate with China after recent presidential elections.

The drills were the first since Tsai Ing-wen of the China-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) swept to victory in the elections earlier this month.

She ousted the ruling Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), bringing to an end eight years of unprecedented rapprochement with China.

On Wednesday, the Taiwanese navy displayed eight warships and fired flares from a missile corvette during an exercise in waters off Tsoying in southern Taiwan, home to the island`s naval headquarters.

It was the second and final day of the drills which saw a group of elite "frogmen" land on a beach in motorboats Tuesday on the island of Kinmen -- a Taiwan-controlled outpost island near China`s southeastern Xiamen city.

A fleet of F-16 fighter jets were also scrambled in another exercise Tuesday at the southern Chiayi airbase.

"With the Lunar New Year approaching, our citizens can feel at ease we are able to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait," Vice Admiral Tsai Hung-tu, head of the navy`s political warfare office, told AFP.

Military exercises are routinely carried out by Taiwan before the Lunar New Year holidays which fall in February this year.

Although Tsai has pledged to maintain the status quo with Beijing, relations are widely expected to cool as the DPP is traditionally a pro-independence party.

It does not recognise that Taiwan is part of "one China" -- a principle insisted upon by Beijing.

Taiwan is self-ruling after splitting from China in 1949 following a civil war, but has never formally declared independence. Beijing still sees it as part of its territory to be reunified.

China`s state-controlled CCTV last week released footage it claimed depicted a drill carried out by Chinese forces after the elections, off the southeast coast of the mainland, near Taiwan.

Taiwan`s defence ministry dismissed the footage, saying the images were collated from past manoeuvres.
Taipei: Taiwan`s President Ma Ying-jeou will visit a disputed island in the South China Sea on Thursday, his first trip to the self-claimed territory amid rising tensions in the region.

The announcement comes just weeks after Taiwanese coastguards drove off a Vietnamese fishing boat near Taiping Island, a Taiwan-administered islet in the Spratly archipelago.

The chain is also claimed in part or whole by Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.

"The Taiping Island is an inherent part of the Republic of China`s territory," Charles Chen, spokesman of the presidential office, said in a statement Wednesday, using the official name for Taiwan.

The purpose of the trip was to visit Taiwanese personnel stationed there ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, Chen said.

The only time a Taiwanese president has visited Taiping Island was in 2008, when former leader Chen Shui-bian went.

Ma, of the China-friendly ruling Kuomintang, has less than four months left of his term and will be succeeded by Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who won presidential elections in a landslide victory earlier this month.

The presidential office invited Tsai to join the trip, but the DPP said it did not plan to send any representative.

Taiwan has been boosting its presence in Taiping, the largest island in the Spratlys.

As part of efforts to strengthen defence capabilities, it inaugurated a solar-powered lighthouse, and expanded an airstrip and a pier on the island late last year.

Taiwanese officials have also flown to the island in recent years including interior and defence ministers.

China is seen by other Spratly claimants as the biggest threat in the South China Sea.

The Philippines and Vietnam have complained that China is becoming increasingly aggressive in the region.

China also sees Taiwan as part of its territory to be returned to its fold at some point, after the two split following a civil war on the mainland in 1949.

Separately, Taiwan conducted routine military drills Tuesday in Kinmen county, a group of islands off the coast of China`s Fujian province.

There are fears that tensions between Taiwan and the mainland will escalate in the wake of Tsai being elected as president -- the DPP is traditionally a pro-independence party and relations with Beijing are likely to cool following a rapprochement under the KMT.
Hanoi: Vietnam`s top communist leader Nguyen Phu Trong was re-elected Wednesday in a victory for the party`s old guard which some fear could slow crucial economic reforms in the fast-growing country.

Factional fighting overshadowed a week of closed-door talks at the five-yearly Communist Party Congress. But Trong, 72, retained his position while his rival -- reformist Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung -- was pushed from power.

Dung remains prime minister but will step down later this year when the National Assembly convenes to appoint a replacement.

This is expected to be Nguyen Xuan Phuc, currently a deputy prime minister, state media said.

"Delegates to the first meeting of the party`s central committee congratulated Comrade Nguyen Phu Trong who was elected general secretary," the official Vietnam News Agency reported.

Trong, 72, seen as more of a conservative apparatchik and closer to China than Dung, has been party chief since 2011 and will stay on following a compromise deal which analysts say is a move back towards more consensus-based decision-making.

Dung, 66, a two-term prime minister and political heavyweight, is credited with pushing a pro-business agenda and talking tough to China over a festering maritime dispute.

He had been tipped to ascend to the party leader position but in the end he lost out in internal elections. He was not selected for the 180-member central committee, which in effect ends his official political career.

The charismatic Dung was a rare "political celebrity" amid the communist country`s faceless collective leadership, Jonathan London, a Vietnam expert at City University of Hong Kong, told AFP, adding that this style alienated other cadres.

Although both his reformist credentials and achievements in office were debatable, he was unquestionably "someone who had a vision", said London, adding that his exit marked a return to a more moderated style of governance.

"The (Communist) Party has been around for 85 years and always been steered by committee -- in this context, the `go slow` approach makes sense," he added.

Trong`s ascent -- which owes as much to Dung`s divisiveness as to his own popularity -- is unlikely to mark a dramatic change of course on key issues such as a dispute with Beijing over parts of the South China Sea and participation in a series of trade deals, including the US-led Trans Pacific Partnership.

The entire politburo -- which was also elected Wednesday with 19 members -- is committed to economic reforms and the change in leadership is more "a question of style", economist Bui Kien Thanh told AFP.

"I don`t see the machine going backwards... no one is completely indispensable," he said, referring to fears that Dung`s exit would stall economic reforms and integration of Vietnam into the global economy.

Dung himself was hardly "a superstar reformer" and his successor will undoubtedly continue key economic reforms so most foreign investors are not concerned, said Tony Foster, a lawyer with Freshfields.

"The stability in the system is extraordinary, and from a foreign investors` point of view a big positive," he added.

Dung`s 40-year-old son Nguyen Thanh Nghi was elected to the central committee, alongside other politicians seen as his allies, including the Transport Minister Dinh La Thang and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.

Some observers had expressed concern that Trong could end up sidelining competent officials in favour of the party faithful. But one senior state employee played down the problem and said personnel changes were to be expected.

"When you`re part of the system your survival depends on being flexible. It`s the most important thing," she told AFP on condition of anonymity.
This year we did not have one student retreat, but three. One of the major reasons we did this was to try to include more young people and give them the opportunity to experience a discipleship retreat. We had retreats in Gokwe, Gweru and Sanyati. Our longtime partnering and supporting church, friends, brethren, family from First Baptist Murray State KN were three this time, Sanyati boy Warren Edminster, his daughter Lauren and a young man named Joel. I am so grateful for their support and their efforts to come here. I am amazed how they go out of their way to remember Zimbabwe and have a burden to see Zimbabwes young people grow in their faith and transform generations. The Theme for the three retreats was from 1 Peter 2:9-10: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his glorious light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy." Our lessons were based on this scripture and we also used discipleship material from a book by Watchman Nee: The Normal Christian Life.

was held in Gokwe Central Baptist Church at the Gokwe Center. We had young people from most of the different areas of the Gokwe association. Some also came from Kwekwe, Gweru, Bulawayo as well as Tongaland. We had over 50 young people and a few even joined us from the nearby Methodist Church.Pictured here are Warren and some of the young people from Gokwe and Kwekwe, also with him are Pastor Bongola from Tongaland (standing 2nd from right) and student Pastors at the Baptist Theological Serminary Shakie Chekai (standing 1st right) Norman Ncube (seated). PRev Lackson Chiombera is seen here relaxing with some of the advisors. I (Willie Green) am wearing a hat. Also pictured is the new Gokwe Association youth chairman.at the Baptist Conference Centre. Even though there was a much smaller group of young people at this retreat, we had young people from Chinhoyi, Kwekwe, Bulawayo, Harare and some student pastors from the Baptist Seminary.We had great sessions on the theme just as in Gokwe, but also because of our numbers we had a different touch to the retreat, we had opportunities to go into discussion groups with different questions based on the discipleship materials.For some this was a time of renewing acquaintances with young people from different parts of Zimbabwe. For others it was a time of making new friendships.Some of the young men in this picture met together on the last night of the retreat and had a very special and deeply spiritual time of sharing and discussion. They testified to other young people how these retreats had shaped their walk with the Lord and how much they had benefitted from this.at the mission station where we had youth from all the surrounding churches in that association.We had more than 50 young people join us for the evening services.One of the sweetest moments at Sanyati was working with the children at the Vacation Bible School. The students who had come for the retreat went out and invited children to come and participate. They hoped about 30 children would be able to come, but over 140 children participated! It was great to see the young people learning how they themselves can minister to others and teach them what they have learned.We hope and pray to be able to do more retreats in future years and we see ourselves having these in different areas but more particularly in the remote areas so more young people will be able to participate in these discipleship opportunities. God bless our friends from First Baptist Church of Murray, Kentucky, Warren Edminster, the Baptist Convention of Zimbabwe, our Youth Director Rev. Lackson Chiombera and all the young people who benefitted from these retreats. Submitted by Willie Green, President of the Baptist Youth of the Baptist Covention of Zimbabwe.


Classical nude statues at Italy's Capitoline Museum were covered up this week in anticipation of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit. Some politicians and art critics called out the stupidity. From The Telegraph:



The president's aides were also reportedly anxious that he not be photographed too close to a giant bronze statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback.





The Iranians objected to what one Italian newspaper delicately described as "the attributes" or genitalia of the huge horse, which dates from the second century AD.
It's not just dissident Hong Kong booksellers who're being snatched  China's snatch-squads have kidnapped expatriate dissidents (including those with foreign passports) from Sweden, Burma and Thailand.

These dissidents later turn up in mainland Chinese media, having "confessed" to crimes against the state.

It's a Made-in-China version of America's extraordinary rendition program, but with Chinese characteristics  notably, the public appearance of dissidents after their kidnapping to make gestures of remorse for their "crimes" against China.

Western governments have either been silent on the abductions, or made the weakest of protests.

Months after Lee's colleague Gui went missing, he reappeared on Chinese television last week to deliver a choreographed "confession"  for a car crash that took place in 2003. Within the week, in an unrelated case, a second confession by a Swede was broadcast on state television. It featured Peter Dahlin, who has worked to support Chinese lawyers. He disappeared on his way to the Beijing airport on Jan. 3 and was held for nearly two weeks before being given access to consular officials. He was finally released Monday evening and deported, colleagues said. A Chinese journalist, two dissidents and the son of a jailed civil rights lawyer also have gone missing or been forcibly repatriated from Thailand and Burma in the past three months, heightening the perception that for critics of the Chinese Communist Party and their families, nowhere is safe.

Pursuing critics, China reaches across borders. And nobody is stopping it.

[Emily Rauhala and Simon Denyer/Washington Post]
TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - January 27, 2016) - OntarioMD is pleased to announce the launch of its clinical Peer Leader Program to continue to offer this service to Ontario physician practices that are looking to adopt or transition to an OntarioMD-certified EMR as well as those looking to enhance the use of their certified EMR. The program is complimentary and is funded as part of Canada Health Infoway's ("Infoway") Clinician Engagement Strategy: Clinical Peer Leader program and partially funded by OntarioMD.

Infoway provides funding to provinces and territories to establish peer-to-peer networks under the national Clinician Peer Network program to respond to local clinician needs. In Ontario, the program is known as the Peer Leader Program, and is managed and partially funded by OntarioMD, a subsidiary of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA).

The current OntarioMD Peer Leader Program follows the previous, highly successful program, also funded by Infoway, which was available to Ontario clinicians between July 1, 2012 and December 31, 2014. During this period, approximately 8,000 Ontario clinicians benefited from the program to advance their EMR use, an important part of OntarioMD's mandate from the province that aligns with the provincial ehealth strategy.

Each peer-to-peer network is aligned to Infoway's national program objective to sustain and accelerate clinical engagement with a focus on supporting one or more specific initiatives. Ontario's Peer Leader Program is a network of physicians, nurses and clinic managers, 61 in total, across the province who are expert users of OntarioMD-certified EMRs and support OntarioMD's objective to help physician practices realize more clinical value from their EMRs.

OntarioMD Peer Leaders understand the needs and challenges faced by busy community practices. They can assist practices to develop plans that will lead to tangible practice enhancements. Peer Leaders have several years of EMR experience that practices can leverage to advance the quality of patient data in their EMRs to deliver better care and increase practice efficiency. Peer Leaders work closely with OntarioMD's Practice Advisors who support physician practices to connect with provincial health information systems such as the Ontario Laboratories Information System and Hospital Report Manager (HRM).

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"The OntarioMD Physician Peer Leader I worked with gave me good advice around workflow, billing and tracking. She also invited me and my staff to her office to see her workflow and her staff members gave us further advice," said Dr. Richard Chen, a family physician who has benefited from the program.

"Being an OntarioMD Peer Leader has been a very rewarding experience. I have seen my colleagues advance their EMR skills towards comprehensive care in one visit and use their EMR for best practice and population-based medicine. The OntarioMD Peer Leader Program is the cornerstone to enhance the overall patient's care experience and health care delivery in Ontario," observed Dr. Therese Hodgson, a family physician who was a Physician Peer Leader in the previous program and has signed on to mentor her colleagues under the current OntarioMD Peer Leader Program as well.

"EMRs have been implemented by the majority of Ontario's community-based family physicians and an increasing number of community specialists. Physicians and clinic staff would now like more practical advice from their colleagues who use the same EMR," stated Sarah Hutchison, Chief Executive Officer, OntarioMD. "Peer Leaders are an important component of OntarioMD's mission to help clinicians advance EMR use to enhance patient care and address the needs of the practice."

To find out more about the Peer Leader Program and how it can accelerate the success of your community practice by getting more value from your certified EMR, please contact OntarioMD at peer.leader.program@ontariomd.com or connect with the Peer Leader Program on Twitter at #OMDPeerLeads. Past participation in an OntarioMD program is not required.

About OntarioMD

OntarioMD is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA). It manages programs and services that connect EMRs to more patient data collected outside primary care settings. It receives funding from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to support Ontario's physicians to implement an EMR and to optimize EMR use.

The views expressed in this publication are the views of OntarioMD and do not necessarily reflect those of the Province.

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/1/26/11G080278/Images/PL_Program-f3703d739b8e9700bf118541a14e3d75.jpg


The Oxford University Press couldnt seem to find the right words after a scholar pointed out the blatantly sexist and offensive definitions in their dictionary via Twitter.



Michael Oman-Reagan, an anthropologist and Ph.D. candidate, couldnt keep quiet about some of the word choices used for examples, particularly the term rabid feminist to define rabid.

Why does the Oxford Dictionary of English portray women as rabid feminists with mysterious psyches speaking in shrill voices who cant do research or hold a PhD but can do all the housework? Oman-Reagan went on to write about his findings on Medium.

Oman-Reagan points out numerous cases of gender bias in one of the most commonly used academic sources.

They released a series of tweets and linked to a blog post by the head of Content Creation, Katherine Connor Martin, admitting that it was a poorly chosen example and that it distracted from the dictionarys aim of describing and clarifying meaning.


Rumble

Introducing the recipe for seafood Chijimi (Korean pan cake) made with Nira (garlic chives) and squid. Adding carrots adds a gentle sweetness and the indescribably enchanting texture of fluffy, chewy pancake is almost addictive. Thinly cooked with the flavor of sesame oil and dipped in the authentic homemade sauce, this dish is a delicious dinner or finger food. The recipe can easily be modified for restricted diets, substituting the squid for thinly sliced pork, or even subbing all animal based products with vegetarian ones (roasted vegetables instead of meat - vegetable broth instead of chicken, etc). =============================================================  YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDvC...  Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/hungrycooki... ============================================================= 00:38 Prepping Ingredients 01:25 How to Gut a Squid 03:43 How To Make Chijimi Dipping Sauce 05:28 Putting Together the Chijimi 06:43 How to Cook Chijimi  Ingredients (for one chijimi) Weak (Cake) flour... 1/3 cup Potato starch ... 2 tbsp Water... 1/3 cup Garlic chives ... 1/3 bunch Carrots ... 1/8 (about 5cm) Squid ... 1/2~1 Salt Torigara (chicken bone) soup stock base (or Hondashi)  1 tsp  Olive oil  Sesame oil Sauce Soy sauce... 2 tablespoons Vinegar... 2 tablespoons Kochijang... 2 tsp Ichimi chili pepper Sesame oil... 1 tablespoon La-Yu (chili oil) Sesame  Cooking Recipe  Slice the Garlic Chives into 3~5cm pieces and julienne the carrots.  Gut, wash, and prep the squid into about 3-5cm strips.  This is a good time to prepare the sauce, so mix the sauce ingredients together to create the dipping sauce for the pancakes.  Add cake flour and potato starch, mixing loosely. Add water, salt, and torigara (chicken bone broth concentrate) or a different stock base like Hondashi, and stir until smooth. Lastly, add prepped vegetables and squid into the bowl and mix to incorporate.  Place the a pan over high heat and when hot, pour in sesame oil and olive oil. Add the batter made in step 4 into the pan, shape, and cook for 1~1.5 minutes on one side. When solid and lightly browned, flip the pancake and cook the other side through, pressing down with a spatula as needed.  Before completely cooked through, pour sesame oil along the rim of the pan and cook for 1~1.5 minutes more until browned. Reduce heat to medium and cook until both sides are both sides are fragrant and of good color.  After removing from the pan when fully cooked, cut into bite sized pieces and serve with prepared dipping sauce.  Cooking tips Thinly sliced pork is a delicious alternative to squid. This recipe can also be made vegetarian by subbing meats with roasted eggplant or other hearty vegetables, and broth subbed with vegetable broth concentrate. If you like a sweeter dipping sauce, add a pinch sugar when putting the sauce together. If you add an egg the taste will be much richer. However, add more flour to the batter as too small of an amount will result in a heavier, less crispy pancake. A recommended ratio will be about 1 cup of flour to 1 egg. When cutting pancakes, the chives are a little hard to cut and tend to lose their shape so cut them carefully. The pancake is easier to cut if you have a pizza cutter on hand.
Papua New Guinea has been named as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman - with an estimated 70% of the country's female population experiencing sexual assault or rape in their lifetime.

Human Rights Watch has claimed the country's police force is "very rarely prepared" to pursue allegations of domestic violence, even in cases which involved repeated rape or attempted murder.

Even though the PNG government has introduced laws to criminalise violence against women, few perpetrators are ever brought to justice.

In its annual World Report, the not-for-profit group said police officers regularly demand cash from abuse victims before investigating their case - while incidents in rural areas are routinely ignored.

HRW added: "Reports continue of violent mobs attacking individuals accused of 'sorcery' or 'witchcraft', the victims mostly being women and girls.

"Sorcery accusations are often accompanied by brutal attacks, including burning of homes, assault and sometimes murder."

According to Human Rights Watch, those accused of sorcery are in such grave danger that "the main approach" used by non-governmental organisations in the region is to permanently resettle them in another community.

An estimated 40% of Papua New Guinea's population lives in poverty, and other "pressing issues" faced by the country include corruption, gender inequality and excessive use of force by the police - including against children.

Brad Adams, the director of HRW Asia, said: "Papua New Guinea is failing to meet its obligations under international law to protect women and girls from discrimination and family violence."

The ongoing refugee crisis on Manus Island in PNG has also been criticised, where HRW alleges "more than 930 asylum seekers are currently being detained indefinitely in poor conditions".

Many of those at the detention centre have been transferred from Australia for resettlement in Papua New Guinea, or until their refugee status can be determined.

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However, the report claims some of those in the camps have been held for more than two years - and are unable to leave Manus Island to study or find employment.

"The protracted and indefinite nature of detention is causing significant mental health problems for those on Manus Island, including depression and anxiety," the HRW report warned.

Australia is Papua New Guinea's most important international partner, according to the report, as it is set to provide nearly $400m (280m) of aid to the country in this financial year.

But there are concerns that corruption is preventing this development money from being used effectively, and the Australian Senate is currently undertaking an inquiry into how the cash is being used.
Pregnant women have been advised not to travel to Florida or parts of South America in light of the Zika virus health scare.

The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) said that expectant mothers can transmit the virus during pregnancy or at the time of birth, and should postpone their visits.

The warning is not to be taken lightly as the type of mosquito that can carry or spread the disease - the Aedes aegypti mosquito - is found in south Florida and many Latin American countries, including Mexico, Puerto Rico and Brazil.

And with the Rio de Janeiro Carnival set to pull in hundreds of thousands of tourists next week - as well as many more for the Olympic Games in August - pregnant travellers will no doubt be among the revellers.

The Zika virus - that is related to yellow fever and Dengue fever - has already been linked to a brain defect in nearly 4,000 newborn babies.

The virus can cause birth defects including microcephaly, a rare condition where children are born with smaller, damaged brains.

Prevalent: The Aedes aegypti mosquito is found in Latin America and south Florida (Rex)

Public officials are spraying tourist sites with insecticides as a precautionary measure but too many areas are rife with the mosquito.

Florida pulls in millions of tourists every year from across the globe as people descend to Disney World - but the mosquito is not uncommon in the south of the state.

Dr. Paola Lichtenberger, director of the University of Miamis tropical medicine program, told The Globe And Mail: We are special in South Florida because we have the mosquito that could carry it.

The warnings come as a Danish tourist was confirmed to have been infected after visiting southern and central America.

Aarhus University Hospital said the patient ran a fever, had a headache and muscle aches and was found to have the virus.

Locations: The Zika virus thrives in tropical climates (AFP)

But authorities said on Wednesday that it was not the first case in Europe and there was little chance of the virus spreading as the mosquito is not found in Denmark.

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Romit Jain, from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm, Sweden, said there have been confirmed cases of imported Zika virus infections in Germany and Britain.

A Zika virus case was also confirmed in Sweden last summer, but it is not a notifiable disease in the EU.

The mosquito responsible thrives in puddles, and open sewers often found in cities with higher levels of poverty in tropical cities.

Symptoms are similar to a mild form of Dengue fever - that includes fever, headaches, and joint pains - and can only be treated with rest as a vaccine is yet to be created.

Top pic: IB Times
People in Ottawa's indigenous community are hopeful and relieved after the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's ruling that the federal government discriminates against children living in First Nations.

According to the landmark decision, children living on reserve don't receive the same funding and supports as children who live elsewhere in Canada.

Josh Lewis, an outreach worker at the Shawenjeagamik Aboriginal Drop-In Centre on Rideau Street, believes this is an opportunity for all Canadians to understand the child welfare gap between First Nations and other communities.

"Obviously the people on reserve know that that happened, because they experienced it," he said. "But now Canada as a whole can see that this is the truth. I think that's very important."

Lewis says that learning of Tuesday's ruling gave him "goosebumps," and made him think of his young relatives in Wikwemikong and M'Chigeeng, Anishinaabe communities on Manitoulin Island in northern Ontario.

"I hope it means that the whole system kind of appreciates them more, and that they're respected, and they can grow up proud," he added.

The ruling comes nearly a decade after Cindy Blackstock of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada filed an initial human rights complaint against the federal government in 2007.

'Victory for children'

Speaking at a press conference in Ottawa, Blackstock called the decision a "victory for children".

"I want to dedicate this decision to all of the First Nations children who for years and for decades have been denied an equal opportunity to live the life they wished to have had, and sadly too often were judged by a Canadian public who didn't know better, as if they got more," she said.

Federal Indigenous Affairs minister Carolyn Bennett promised to work with Indigenous leaders to come up with solutions to improve child welfare services on-reserve.

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Verna McGregor from Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, about 140 kilometres north of Ottawa, hopes the next steps to improve on-reserve child welfare include a strong cultural component to raise awareness throughout the entire Canadian child welfare system.

"It's good that they acknowledged the human rights of the funding of kids on and off reserve that are not in parity," she said. "But if you aren't looking at cultural differences and understanding, how do you address the whole issue of racism and bias?"

She's hopeful this decision will lead to a better future for First Nations children in Canada, and Lewis agrees.

"They don't have to grow up on reserve thinking their life is terrible," he said. "Maybe the school systems will become better on the reserve. And I'm hoping that my future generations just become proud."
By Crispian Balmer ROME (Reuters) - The United States cannot solve any problems in the Middle East without Iran's help and should drop its "hostile" stance toward Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday. On his first official visit to Europe, Rouhani also took a swipe at regional arch rival Saudi Arabia, saying its military campaign in neighboring Yemen was a failure and a frustration. Rouhani is midway through a four-day trip to Italy and France, looking to burnish his country's international credentials following the signing last year of a nuclear accord with world powers and the lifting of financial sanctions. While EU firms are lining up to sign lucrative business deals, the United States is keeping some of its sanctions in place, accusing Tehran of funding what it considers to be terror groups, and ties between the two nations remain terse. "It's possible that Iran and the United States might have friendly relations. But the key to that is in Washington's hands, not Tehran's," Rouhani told a news conference, saying he would be happy to see U.S. businessmen in Iran. "I would like to see the Americans set aside their hostility and chose another way, but inside the U.S. there are some problems, there is no unified voice," he said, noting that "the Zionist lobby" was "very influential". He also rejected accusations that Iran was funding terror organizations. "It is clear that Iran is a country opposed to terrorism and a country that fights terrorism," he said. The United States is the dominant foreign power in the Middle East, sporting close ties with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, and is militarily involved in both Iraq and Syria, where it is battling Sunni jihadist group, Islamic State. "The Americans know very well that when it comes to important regional issues they cannot achieve anything without Iran's influence or say," Rouhani said, speaking through a translator. Shi'ite Muslim Iran is the closest backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while Western countries support his mainly Sunni Muslim opponents. However, Tehran and the West are united in their opposition to Islamic State. Adding to tensions in the region is the recent deterioration in relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh broke off diplomatic ties with Tehran this month in an escalating row over the Saudi execution of a Shi'ite Muslim cleric. Rouhani said Saudi was acting out of frustration, branding its 10-month military campaign in Yemen against the Houthi militia, who are allied to Iran, as a flop. "It is angry because of its failures," he said. "Saudi Arabia has been bombing the impoverished people of Yemen for 10 months and has not achieved anything. It has not had any victory and is hated more than ever by the Yemeni people." (Additional reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, Sam Wilkin and Philip Pullella; Editing by Louise Ireland)
By Tom Finn DOHA (Reuters) - When Qatar announced the closure of Al Jazeera America this month, the decision by its new ruler marked a more cautious approach to public diplomacy by the tiny Gulf state after years of cultivating a high-profile international role. Departing from a crowded U.S. media market after a foray costing perhaps $2 billion is also consistent with a retreat from confrontation with Gulf Arab neighbours over Qatar's promotion of Islamists in the 2011 Arab uprisings. While the gas-exporting nation is still determined to remain a power broker in the Middle East turmoil, its use of Al Jazeera as a megaphone in support of that goal appears to be on the wane under the young emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, former Qatari officials and Arab commentators say. The days of unstinting Qatari financial support for the trail-blazing channel, whose reporting of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings won it millions of viewers and brought resentment from Arab governments at its airing of dissident views, appear over, media analysts and commentators say. Al Jazeera America was launched in 2013, an ambitious bid by Qatar to infiltrate the U.S. media market, but the channel was plagued by low ratings, wavering between 20,000 and 40,000 viewers in prime time. The channel also struggled to shake off a perception, held by some Americans, that its corporate parent, Al Jazeera, was anti-American and a source of propaganda, a view articulated in 2004 by then-President George W. Bush. Sheikh Tamim, who succeeded his father Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani in 2013, prefers a different role for Qatar and more conventional forms of "soft power" like trade and investment, diplomats say. As a result of this, support for the entire Al Jazeera operation, which includes Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, Doha-based but editorially separate entities, is in question, they say. "ERA OF THROWING MONEY ENDING" "The era of throwing money at Jazeera is ending," said Hafez al-Mirazi, a former Washington bureau chief at Al Jazeera Arabic who directs the Kamal Adham Center for Television and Digital Journalism at Cairo's American University. "Al Jazeera fulfilled its mission: making Qatar a household name, influencing politics, at one point it was a powerful tool of foreign policy but all of that is over now," he said, adding that current low oil prices had given the Qatari leadership an excuse to end "the extravagance of Jazeera which has lost credibility in parts of the Arab world". "It no longer represents both sides of the argument in the Arab world," said Mirazi. Al Jazeera executives and representatives of the royal family or the Qatari government declined to comment on the future of the channel and its funding for this article. The channel cheered on Doha's bank-rolling of the Arab Spring revolts, particularly a mass uprising in Egypt, but now faces aggressive competition in its home region, and suspicion from many governments over air time given to Islamist groups in Syria, Libya and elsewhere. Al Jazeera's spectacular growth took place under Sheikh Hamad who, unlike other Gulf Arab leaders, backed Middle East protest movements and played mediator in a host of wars. Expanding into America was conceived under Sheikh Hamad. Under Sheikh Tamim, Qatar has toned down its foreign policy. Since taking over in 2013, the Arab world's youngest head of state has adopted more conciliatory and inward-looking policies, analysts and diplomats say. LESS NOISY, MORE CAUTIOUS "Sheikh Tamim wants Qatar to remain relevant on the world stage, but he wants to do that without squandering money or angering neighbours ... he doesn't want to be sucked into conflicts in the region," said a former Qatari diplomat, who declined to be named. "The new approach is less noisy, it's more cautious." Founded in 1996 as part of Qatari efforts to turn economic power into political influence, Al Jazeera offered free-wheeling, uncensored debate rarely seen on Arab televisions. Its talk-shows hosted guests who challenged the wisdom of Arab rulers and adopted the role of supporter of the dispossessed. Reporters broke with a widespread taboo of the Arab news media by interviewing Israeli officials. Funded by Qatar's royal family, Wadah Khanfar, a Palestinian journalist who was director general of the network between 2006-2011, helped turn the Arab satellite channel into a world network with millions of viewers and more than 20 channels broadcasting in languages including Arabic, English and Swahili. With Al Jazeera's expansion came unprecedented influence in the Arab world, but also new enemies. "The more successful Al Jazeera became, the higher the stakes became," said William Youmans, a professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. "Qatar started paying a political price for the channel. Its popularity incurred new pressures and costs." BOMBED, RAIDED AND SHUTTERED In the last decade Al Jazeera's bureaux have been bombed, raided, and shuttered and its reporters imprisoned and killed. Critics of Al Jazeera accused the network of aggressively covering unrest in Syria and Libya, while skirting over protests in Bahrain, Qatar's small neighbour in the Arab Gulf, which Qatar's ruling elite has an interest in seeing remain stable. In 2014, Al Jazeera said it provided objective coverage of all opposition groups. Mostefa Souag, the network's acting director general, told Reuters that the channel is under pressure from authorities in several places because "it is the most transparent, balanced and unbiased of all Arab channels". The channel now faces stiff competition from media outlets that have emulated its assertive style of news reporting including U.S-funded Al Hurra, Sky News Arabia and Al Arabiya, a rival Saudi-owned channel, which reflects the more conservative view of Qatar's neighbours now in the ascendant in the region. Qatar is trying its hand at media diversification. Last year the Gulf state opened a London-based news channel, Al Araby Al-Jadeed, with links to Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian who advises Sheikh Tamim and runs a think-tank in Qatar. Khanfar, the former Al Jazeera director, runs the Arabic version of the American online news aggregator, Huffington Post. Some at the channel suspect that Qatar's commitment to Al Jazeera, along with its influence, may be waning. According to two employees at Al Jazeera Arabic and a senior journalist at Al Jazeera English, plans to cut staff scheduled for September 2015 are expected to happen over the summer. "We were told three months ago that we were going to face significant cuts, but there was some kind of intervention from the top that stopped them happening," said the Al Jazeera English journalist. "I think we will see cuts though. Al Jazeera America was a huge drain on resources and honestly we don't even know what commitment there is anymore (to other parts of Al Jazeera)." "There is this feeling that Jazeera has done what it was supposed to do." (Reporting by Tom Finn, Editing by William Maclean and Peter Millership)
VALENCIA, Calif., Jan. 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Envoy Group Corp (OTC:ENVV) is pleased to announce the company has signed an exclusive agreement with BVD Ltd for the exclusive distribution rights for the Louis XIV Energy Drinks within Taiwan.



Presently, the Louis XIVs unique line of energy drinks are only available in Europe. The sensational core line of Louis XIV products boasts four revolutionary, unique and vibrant energy drinks. Each Louis XIV product has an outstanding look and taste, which stands alone as a perfect refresher or as complementary mixer in a variety of cocktails.

Energy Drinks have seen tremendous growth in popularity and consumption by all age groups. According to BeverageDail.com the industry has now reached $50 Billion globally. The Asian energy drink beverage market is still growing in double digits and contains huge future growth potential.

Harp Sangha, Envoys CEO comments We are delighted to be bringing the premium Louis XIV Energy Drink line to Taiwan. Taiwan is a large market and like the rest of the world energy drinks have taken the country by storm. This new market presents an enormous opportunity for our entire line of drinks. The Energy drink market is poised for further growth and Taiwan is a high density exciting growth market for our product.

Harp further states, Two of the leading three energy drink companies are privately owned, thus we hope investors who want exposure to this lucrative beverage market will see Envoy as a key company to watch in 2016. We feel the superior taste, advanced formula and the sophisticated look of the Louis XIV brand has exceptional consumer appeal and will gain prominence in the multi-billion dollar energy drink market.

Envoys comprehensive marketing and distribution campaign is currently in the works and product roll out will commence as soon as regulatory measures are met.

Envoy Group website link http://envoygroupcorp.com/lxiv/

Louis XIV website link: http://www.louisxivenergy.com/en/

www.facebook.com/louisxivenergy/

Stuart T. Smith: 1-512-267-2430 info@smallcapvoice.com

Harp Sangha Chairman/CEO

Email: hsangha@envoygroupcorp.com

Safe Harbor Statements

Certain information contained in this news release constitutes forward-looking statements as such term is used in applicable United States and Canadian laws. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as expects or does not expect, is expected, anticipates or does not anticipate, plans, estimates, intends or believes, or that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur, or be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Many of these factors are beyond the Companys ability to control or predict. Important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially and that could impact the Company and the statements contained in this news release can be found in the Companys filings with the SEC. Such risks and other factors include, among others, the ability to locate and acquire suitable interests in alternative medicine manufacturing operations on terms acceptable to the Company, the availability of financing on acceptable terms, accidents, labor disputes, acts of God and other risks of the alternative medicine industry including, without limitation, delays in obtaining governmental approvals or permits, title disputes or claims limitations on insurance coverage. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements included in this news release are reasonable; however, no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct, and such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. The Company assumes no obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
HAMPTON , Va., Jan. 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With Dr. and Mrs. William R. Harvey's latest $100,000 gift to the William R. Harvey Leadership Institute, HU's University President has given more than $3 million to the institution of higher learning that has grown exponentially under his leadership. That personal donation dollar amount is $3,066,327. The gift speaks to the couple's heartfelt commitment to the "Standard of Excellence" that is Hampton University. Dr. William R. Harvey and Mrs. Norma B. Harvey are more than President and First Lady of the Hampton University community. They have dedicated their lives to the success of the university.



All university presidents are called upon to enhance the quality of the university's student population, academic programs, faculty, physical facilities and financial base. That's the job. What Dr. Harvey has done extends beyond any official expectation. His giving is best described as 'not just talking the talk, but walking the walk.' He has done all that is in his power to support the historic institution, from the Emancipation Oak to the shoreline that hugs the campus on three sides.



As a visionary, Dr. Harvey, has embraced HU founder General Samuel Chapman Armstrong's mission to have everything at Hampton University excel. And excel it has under Dr. Harvey's leadership. The Harvey years, 38 and counting, will grace the record books as an unparalleled accounting of mega success, not just for the HU students, faculty and staff whose lives give testimony to the results of his labor; but for the global community of stakeholders who will continually reap the benefits of his astute leadership for generations to come.



Dr. Harvey has introduced innovations, which have solidified Hampton University's stellar position among the nation's colleges and universities. Seventy-six new academic programs, satellites on active missions in space, the largest free-standing proton therapy cancer treatment center in the world, all of what Dr. Harvey has accomplished speaks to his desire to leave the world better than he found it.



The Brewton, Alabama native is a servant leader who faces each day determined to enrich the lives of others. His blessed path led him from a small town in Alabama to the coveted classrooms of Harvard University. With his Ivy League degree in hand, Dr. Harvey could have taken any one of so many prestigious university offers. However, Dr. Harvey, the true educator, chose to lead at an HBCU where he could make a real difference in the academic worlds of young people who yearned for better lives. Dr. Harvey, the businessman, put his acumen to work placing Hampton on the fast track for growth and development as a world-class university.



Dr. Harvey has reached into his own pocket several times to help members of the university community. He has covered salary increases during the lean financial periods. For example in 2011, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey gave a gift of $1 million to be utilized as incentives to increase faculty salaries. In 2011 and again in 2014, the Harveys gave donations of $166,000 and $108,403 respectively, to support wage increases for full-time permanent HU staff. The Harveys also made a generous donation to scholarships in 2001. That year they gave a gift of $1 million to fund scholarships for students interested in becoming K-12 teachers.



"My parents were my first role models," Harvey said. "Establishing the W.D.C. Harvey Endowed Scholarships in my father's name is my way of honoring all of the life lessons they shared. They taught my sister Anne and me the benefit of giving and sharing to improve the world we live in. The scholarships will assist in making it possible for the next generation of leaders to emerge.



This latest gift of $100,000 will provide an endowment of at least $3,000,000 in scholarships for students to attend the William R. Harvey Leadership Institute (WRHLI). The students will become "Harvey Scholars" after a rigorous selection process. Upon completion of the program, the fellows receive an 18-hour-minor in leadership studies.



The WRHLI was the brainchild of Dr. Harvey who convened several of his closest academic advisors with the clear purpose of creating an institute with a curriculum focused on character development, critical thinking, leadership theory and application, ethics and policy development.



Dr. and Mrs. Harvey's most recent personal contribution of $100,000 will support scholarships for 25 "Harvey Scholars" each year over a period of four years for a total of 100 scholarships. The Institute provides an impressive curriculum designed to teach Dr. Harvey's ten-point leadership model--vision, work ethic, academic excellence, team building, innovation, courage, management, fairness, fiscal conservatism, and results.



The proof of performance for the William R. Harvey Leadership Model is in the career stories of executives who have studied the model under Dr. Harvey's mentorship and as a result reached the height of their careers. An unprecedented 17 executives attribute their positions as President or C-E-O of a university or institution, to Dr. Harvey and the effectiveness of his leadership model.



The newly financed William R. Harvey Leadership Scholarships will be awarded in Fall 2016.

A photo accompanying this release is available at:

http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=38660
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Just to make sure you're up to speed - Miley was seen sporting the engagement ring Liam Hemsworth gave her in 2012 before they split in the latter part of 2013. Then she reportedly moved back in with him. So now they're going to get married like they initially planned and live happily ever after, right?! Just in case everyone didn't already jump to that conclusion, news broke over the weekend that they were officially engaged again.



Well, "They are telling friends theyre engaged." This is according to a Us Weekly source, who added that26-year-old Liam "never formally proposed again." He just "noticed" (along with everyone else) that Miley was wearing the engagement ring he helped to design alongside jeweller Neil Lane. The source also offered this earth-shattering insight: "Miley is definitely ready to settle down."

Exclusive! Liam Hemsworth "never formally proposed again" to Miley Cyrus: https://t.co/ji7UXkayjq pic.twitter.com/fIbhKkIofi  Us Weekly (@usweekly) January 27, 2016

While Miley may be ready, we're not. We're still trying to get over Liam's phantom relationship with Jennifer Lawrence (they made such a lovely couple). And, if we're being honest, things are just moving a little too fast for us. True, they were together for quite a while before splitting, but a lot can happen in two years - and they only got back together at New Years!! Apparently Miley flew to Australia to ring it in with Liam and her in-laws.

OK, we'll try to get used to the idea, but we're not making any promises. As ever, someone on twitter said it all.

If Miley and Liam can get re-engaged after all she did, there is hope for your love life.  Megan McElroy (@MissMeggyMac) January 27, 2016

If you're wondering what big brother Chris thinks about it all, he summed it up with a subtle: "I'm happy if he's happy, whatever he's doing in life." As for the nuptials: "I can't confirm any of that but, you know, he's smart [and] he's happy."
We'll just leave you with that headline for a moment. If you think that's a lot to take in, wait 'til you hear who was in the car with him...



While it's good that Ralph Fiennes' brother is getting a bit of the spotlight, a few eyebrows will surely be raised at him being cast as Michael Jackson (in a road trip movie... about 9/11). Or is the British actor the perfect person to play him?

According to People Magazine (via The Guardian): "Fiennes will portray Michael Jackson in an upcoming film based on an alleged road trip following the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York... The drama is based on a 2011 story in Vanity Fair, which revealed details of the expedition after all air travel to and from New York was grounded as a result of 9/11."

Hang on, it gets better: "The King of Pop reportedly drove from the Empire State to Ohio along with friends Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in an attempt to make it back to California, according to Vanity Fair."

While a former employee of the King of Pop told VF that "They actually got as far as Ohio - all three of them, in a car they drove themselves," a rep for Taylor insists she wasn't part of the expedition. She: "chose to stay in New York visiting Ground Zero and praying instead."

Needless to say, producers are including the iconic actress in the line up regardless, with Stockard Channing slated to play her. As for who's playing Brando? Brian Cox. The Scottish actor, not the d-reamy physicist.
It was announced today in the High Court that Xtra-Vision, Ireland's longest-standing movie rental chain, is to cease trading today with the closure of 80 stores and the loss of 580 jobs.

A statement released by Oxtermont Ltd., Xtra-Vision's holding company, stated that the move was "a direct result of the market decline of shop counter rental", with a 30% drop year-on-year in over-the-counter DVD rental. According to the press statement, Xtra-Vision will cease to trade from all stores from today.

The move comes as customers across Ireland move further and further away from DVD and Blu-Ray to streaming services like Netflix.

Meanwhile, a statement by Grant Thornton, the liquidators appointed to Xtra-Vision reads that their "first priority is to meet and brief employees at all 83 locations and process their entitlements for redundancy. Over the coming days we will be in contact with all creditors of the company however, it is important to note that any Xtra-Vision gift vouchers will be honoured by HMV which is not affected by this liquidation."

Xtra-Vision was sold to HMV's owner, Hilco Capital, in 2013 for an undisclosed sum.
Good news today, if you're a fan of girl bands from the 1990s.

No, there's still no official word on that rumoured Spice Girls reunion - but on a brighter note, All Saints will release a new single next month.

The Londoners reformed a few years back as part of ITV's The Big Reunion, and now Popjustice are reporting that 'One Strike' will be released on February 26th.

And it's not just a one-off - their fourth album 'Red Flag' arrives in April.

Interestingly enough, One Strike was allegedly written by Shaznay Lewis about her bandmate Nicole Appleton's split with Liam Gallagher. She said 'It's about conversations that I was having with Nic at the time when she was going through personal things in her life, and as a friend I was inspired to write about it.'

We'll let you hear it as soon as we do...
Paris (AFP) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will on Thursday agree a host of commercial deals during a visit to France that offers the clearest demonstration yet of the Islamic Republic's post-sanctions buying power.

Rouhani was formally welcomed to Paris by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius with military honours and national anthems, for the first visit to France by an Iranian president for 17 years.

It is the second leg of a trip signalling Tehran's rapprochement with Europe following the lifting of the punishing sanctions imposed over its nuclear programme.

The real business of the visit will come when Rouhani officially signals Iran's intention to buy 114 passenger planes from European aircraft maker Airbus.

Rouhani will also rubber-stamp a deal paving the way for the return of French carmaker Peugeot to Iran, according to a French government source.

Although the red carpet is being rolled out for Rouhani, the Iranian opposition will hold a human rights demonstration and Jewish groups also intend to protest in Paris.

Rouhani is to hold talks with President Francois Hollande which are expected to include Iran's role in Syria, where it is backing President Bashar al-Assad in a war that has killed 260,000 people.

Talks are due to begin Friday in Geneva to take tentative steps towards ending the conflict.

After arriving from Italy, where he sealed deals for steel and pipelines worth between 15 and 17 billion euros ($18.5 billion), Rouhani began his Paris visit on Wednesday by meeting top French business leaders.

France's economy minister Emmanuel Macron said Rouhani had unveiled a new scheme to guarantee investment by French firms in Iran.

- Huge boost -

A source involved in the deal to buy Airbus planes said that only letters of intention will be signed at this stage, because some sanctions are still in place.

However, Iran is said to be keen to bring its ageing fleet of mid- and long-haul aircraft up to date, so the deal is widely expected to go ahead soon, giving a boost to the European aviation industry.

Story continues

Under the Peugeot deal, it will produce 200,000 vehicles a year in Iran from 2017, in partnership with Iranian manufacturer Khodro. The French carmaker pulled out of the country in 2012 as sanctions began to bite.

In another potential bonanza, French oil giant Total is said to be interested in buying Iranian crude.

Rouhani's meeting with Hollande is also expected to touch on Iran's bitter feud with regional rival Saudi Arabia.

At a press conference rounding off his Rome visit, Rouhani was defiant when asked whether Iran would apologise to Saudi Arabia for an attack on its embassy by demonstrators furious over Riyadh's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr.

"Why should we apologise, because Nimr al-Nimr was executed? We are the ones to apologise because they are killing the people of Yemen? Apologise to them because they are helping terrorists?" he asked.

The Paris visit was originally scheduled to take place after the November 13 jihadist attacks on Paris, but was postponed.

In Rome, Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi met at the Capitoline Museum where nude statues were covered up out of respect for the Islamic Republic's strict laws governing propriety.

But Rouhani denied he had asked his Italian hosts to cover up the statues and Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, who accompanied Rouhani on the museum trip, called the move "incomprehensible".

Rouhani also visited the Vatican for the first time and met Pope Francis, who has urged Iran to work for peace in the Middle East.

Rouhani, a 67-year-old former academic and diplomat who is seen as a pragmatist, was elected in 2013 on a pledge to end sanctions and improve relations with the West.
Burns (United States) (AFP) - Armed anti-government protesters occupying a US wildlife refuge for the past three weeks are refusing to leave even after one of their group was killed as police tried to arrest him, officials said Wednesday.

Eight protesters including the protest leader Ammon Bundy were taken into custody in a dramatic twist to the standoff in Oregon involving ranchers and farmers angry over federal land management policies.

Local authorities and the FBI called on those still holed up at the refuge to give up and go home.

"It's time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on. There doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community," Harney County sheriff David Ward told reporters.

Authorities have now blocked the access road leading into the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But the occupiers are free to leave, although they will be identified as they do so, and authorities want to end the ordeal peacefully, said Greg Bretzing, head of the FBI's Portland office.

"We will continue to look for safe, peaceful procedures on how to bring this to a peaceful conclusion," he added.

Authorities gave few details on the arrests, one of which took place in Arizona, and the fatal shooting incident.

Ward said some of the protesters went to his office Tuesday and "had ultimatums that I couldn't meet." He did not elaborate.

The FBI said it and local authorities later devised a plan to arrest members of the group as they drove on a highway -- far from any innocent bystanders.

They were reportedly headed to a meeting with local people.

But police stopped them on the way. One man died of a gunshot wound as police tried to arrest him, Bretzing said. Five others were arrested at the scene.

- Arrest 'ended badly' -

"I'm disappointed that a traffic stop yesterday that was supposed to bring peaceful resolution to this ended badly," Ward said.

He added: "It didn't have to happen. We all make choices in life. Sometimes our choices go bad."

Story continues

Bretzing did not say how many occupiers remained at the refuge.

Ammon Bundy, the rancher who led the initial January 2 occupation in the northwestern state, was among the five arrested on the highway, the FBI said Tuesday night in a statement.

Bundy, 40, and the others face a federal felony charge "of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats," the FBI said.

After the highway incident, the FBI and Oregon state police arrested two other men in Burns, the town nearest to the refuge.

An eighth person surrendered to police in Arizona on the same charge, police said.

Bretzing would not identify the dead person. But The Oregonian newspaper said it was group spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum.

The FBI said another person suffered non-life threatening injuries and was rushed to a hospital before being placed under arrest.

The Oregonian reported that two men -- including Bundy's 43-year-old brother Ryan -- had disobeyed orders when agents stopped the two cars they were travelling in, and resisted arrest, resulting in shots being fired.

The Bundy brothers are the sons of Cliven Bundy, 69, a vitriolic anti-government activist who in 2014 engaged in an armed standoff with federal authorities over unpaid cattle grazing fees at his Nevada ranch.

Cliven Bundy confirmed Finicum's death on his Facebook page, saying that he "was Shot and murdered in Cold blood today in Burns Oregon" (sic) by the FBI and state police.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is some 30 miles (48 kilometers) away from Burns, which has a population of 3,000.

Last week, some 30 people, including women and children, were at the site, but it was unclear how many were present on Wednesday.

The gunmen originally took over the reserve in protest at the jailing of two local ranchers, Dwight Hammond and his son Steven, who were convicted of arson.

Their demands soon grew to include calls for the government to turn over area federal land to local ranchers. In Oregon, nearly 53 percent of the land is federally owned.

The Hammonds distanced themselves from the movement and voluntarily began their scheduled prison sentences after the occupation began.

Several members of the local community, notably the Oregon Cattlemen's Association, had condemned the takeover of the reserve, while expressing sympathy for the Hammonds.
Sunderland (United Kingdom) (AFP) - Relegation-threatened Sunderland on Wednesday signed Ivory Coast defender Lamine Kone from French side Lorient for an undisclosed fee, the English Premier League club announced.

The 26-year-old French-born centre-back signed a deal which will keep him at the Stadium of Light until the end of 2020 season.

"Strengthening our defensive options was a priority for us and Lamine is a player that has impressed me when I've seen him play," said Sunderland manager Sam Allardyce.

"He is big and strong, attributes you need to play in central defence in the Premier League, and his arrival will give us healthy competition for places in a key position."

Kone represented France at youth level before making his full international debut for the Ivory Coast in 2014.

Sunderland are currently second from bottom of the table, having conceded 46 goals in 23 games for the worst defensive record in the top flight.
Charlie Cox says his return as Daredevil "still feels too good to be true"
By Tom Perry, Tom Miles and John Irish BEIRUT/GENEVA/PARIS (Reuters) - Plans to hold the first negotiations to end the civil war in Syria for two years were in doubt on Wednesday after the opposition said it would not show up unless the United Nations responded to demands for a halt to attacks on civilian areas. The Syrian government has already agreed to join the talks that U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura hopes to convene in an indirect format in Geneva on Friday with the aim of ending the five-year-old war that has killed 250,000 people. Washington urged Syrian opposition groups to attend. "Factions of the opposition have an historic opportunity to go to Geneva and propose serious, practical ways to implement a ceasefire, humanitarian access and other confidence-building measures, and they should do so without preconditions," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. Preparations have been beset by difficulties, including a dispute over who should be invited to negotiate with President Bashar al-Assad's government as it claws back territory with help from Russia and Iran. Kurds, who control a swathe of northern Syria, were not invited and predicted the talks would fail. A Saudi-backed opposition council that groups armed and political opponents of Assad broke up a second day of meetings in Riyadh, saying it was waiting for a response from the United Nations to demands before it decided whether to attend. While it has expressed support for a political solution and talks, the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) says attacks on civilian areas must stop before any negotiations. In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, it also called for the lifting of sieges on blockaded areas among other steps outlined by the U.N. Security Council in a resolution passed last month. "We are waiting for the response of de Mistura first, and then Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, which is the most important ... If it is positive maybe there will be an agreement to go," Asaad al-Zoubi, an HNC member, told Saudi TV channel Al Ikhbariya. Diplomacy has so far failed to resolve a conflict that has forced millions from their homes, creating a refugee crisis in neighbouring states and Europe. With the war raging unabated, the latest diplomatic effort has been overshadowed by increased tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran. KURDS LEFT OUT The Syrian government, aided by Russian air strikes and allied militia including Iranian forces, is gaining ground against rebels in western Syria, this week capturing the town of Sheikh Maskin near the Jordanian border. Russian air strikes that began on Sept. 30 have tilted the war Assad's way after major setbacks earlier in 2015 brought rebels close to coastal areas that form the heartland of Assad's Alawite sect and are of great importance to the state he leads. While the Saudi-backed HNC includes powerful rebel factions fighting Assad in western Syria, Russia has been demanding wider participation to include Syrian Kurds who control wide areas of northern and northeastern Syria. The Syrian Kurdish PYD party, which is affiliated with the Kurdish YPG militia, was however excluded from the invitation list in line with the wishes of Turkey, a major sponsor of the rebellion which views the PYD as a terrorist group. The PYD's representative in France, Khaled Eissa, who had been on a list of possible delegates proposed by Russia, blamed regional and international powers, in particular Turkey, for blocking the Kurds and forecast the talks would fail. "You can't neglect a force that controls an area three times the size of Lebanon," he said. "We will not respect any decision taken without our participation." Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the PYD could join the talks at a later stage. Haytham Manna, a prominent opposition figure allied to the PYD and invited to the talks, told Reuters he would not attend if his allies were not there. Manna is co-leader of an opposition group called the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), which includes the PYD and was formed in December in Kurdish-controlled Hasaka province. Ilham Ahmed, a Kurdish politician who co-chairs the SDC, heaped criticism on de Mistura. "We hold him responsible - not America or Russia - him and the United Nations. He was tasked with forming the delegations in a balanced way and in a way that represents all the elements of Syrian society," she told Reuters. "When the whole of northern Syria is excluded from these negotiations, it means they are the ones dividing Syria. They are always accusing the Kurds of dividing Syria, but they are the ones dividing Syria." (Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny and John Davison, John Irish, and Omar Fahmy in Cairo; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Giles Elgood/Mark Heinrich)
By J.R. Wu TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's planned trip to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba in the disputed South China Sea is "extremely unhelpful" and won't do anything to resolve disputes over the waterway, a U.S. official said on Wednesday. Ma's office earlier announced that the president, who steps down in May, would fly to Itu Aba on Thursday to offer Chinese New Year wishes to residents on the island, mainly Taiwanese coastguard personnel and environmental scholars. But Ma's one-day visit to Itu Aba, known as Taiping in Taiwan, comes amid growing international concern over rising tensions in the waterway and quickly drew the ire of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei in the absence of formal diplomatic ties. "We are disappointed that President Ma Ying-jeou plans to travel to Taiping Island," AIT spokeswoman Sonia Urbom said in an email to Reuters. "Such an action is extremely unhelpful and does not contribute to the peaceful resolution of disputes in the South China Sea." The United States wanted Taiwan and all claimants to lower tensions, rather than taking actions that could raise them, Urbom added. On a visit to Beijing on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington and Beijing needed to find a way to ease tensions in the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. "We talked about the possibility of a diplomatic way forward and Foreign Minister Wang Yi accepted the idea that it would be worth exploring whether or not there was a way to reduce the tensions and solve some of the challenges through diplomacy," Kerry said. Both Taiwan and China claim most of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims. Vietnam's most senior official in Taiwan said Hanoi "resolutely opposes" Ma's planned visit. NEW PORT AND LIGHTHOUSE Itu Aba lies in the Spratly archipelago, where China's rapid construction of seven man-made islands has drawn alarm across parts of Asia and been heavily criticized by Washington. Taiwan has just finished a $100 million port upgrade and built a new lighthouse on Itu Aba, which has its own airstrip, a hospital and fresh water. Ma's visit follows elections won by the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ma's office said it had asked DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen to send a representative, but the party said it had no plans to do so. Beijing, recognized by most of the world as the head of "one China", deems Taiwan a wayward province to be retaken by force if necessary. Yann-huei Song, a prominent Taiwan scholar who advises the government on South China Sea issues, said Ma was making the trip to make sure Taiwan, recognized by only a handful of countries, had a voice. "No one is listening to Taiwan," Song, who is a research fellow with the prestigious Academia Sinica in Taiwan, told Reuters. "You are not allowed to participate in the multilateral dispute mechanism. What would you do?" Ian Storey, a South China Sea expert at Singapore's ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, said he expected the Philippines and Vietnam to lodge a strong protest. "But I do think it is unlikely they would stage a similar visit involving a senior political figure going to one of their own occupied islands ... that would risk inflaming relations with China and neither want to go that far," Storey said. CHINA UNFAZED Asked to comment on Ma's planned visit, the mainland's Taiwan Affairs Office reiterated that China and Taiwan had a common duty to protect Chinese sovereignty in the waterway. "Safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as safeguarding the overall interests of the Chinese nation is the common responsibility and obligation of compatriots across the straits," spokesman Ma Xiaoguang told reporters in Beijing. The claims of both China and Taiwan are based on maps from the late 1940s belonging to the Nationalists, when they ruled all of China. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong's Communists. But it has appeared unfazed by Taiwan's upgrading work on Itu Aba. Military strategists say that is because Itu Aba could fall into China's hands should it ever take over Taiwan. Dustin Wang, a long-time Taiwanese scholar on the South China Sea who has visited Itu Aba, said one of Ma's goals was to highlight the island's civilian uses. "Ma will demonstrate that facilities on the island, like the hospital, provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief," he said. Itu Aba was now the fourth largest island in the Spratlys after China's land reclamation work on Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef and Subi Reef, Taiwan's coastguard said in October. The island supports around 180 people, about 150 of them coastguard personnel who have had oversight of the 46-hectare (114-acre) island since 2000. (Additional reporting by Michael Martina and David Brunnstrom in Beijing, Sui-Lee Wee in Singapore and Greg Torode in Hong Kong; Writing by Dean Yates; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Freetown (AFP) - Three youths were seriously injured in clashes with police in Sierra Leone Tuesday after authorities ordered village traders to shut up shop while they hunted for people who may have had contact with an Ebola victim, witnesses said.

Angry youths allegedly burnt down a police post in the northern village of Barmoi Luma, reports said, as police fired tear gas to disperse angry crowds.

Witnesses told AFP by telephone that three youths were seriously hurt, with one shot in the head and another in the leg.

Authorities said the trouble started Saturday when 30 local people were quarantined for having potentially had contact with Marie Jalloh, a 22-year-old who died of Ebola on January 12.

Some 50 others who may have come into contact with Jalloh went into hiding in the community, which is deeply suspicious of western treatments for the deadly virus.

A town chief told AFP that police in Barmoi Luma had ordered market traders to halt business and shops to close from Saturday "to minimise any risk of contact with the runaway contacts", and they had remained shuttered.

"This has angered residents who said the actions of the police were arbitrary since Marie Jalloh did not die in Barmoi Luma but in Magburaka," he said.

Health authorities believe Jalloh fell ill in Barmoi Luma before travelling to the city of Magburaka some 100 kilometres (62 miles) away.

Witness Fatu Jalloh told AFP: "Temper flared up this morning when the police tried to enforce the no-trading order and dozens of youths and women rushed into the streets, hurling sticks and stones at police search teams."

She added: "I saw seven people injured, three of them seriously... There were lots of tear gas smoke and people were dashing for cover."

Doctors at the Italian-run Emergency Hospital in the capital Freetown confirmed that three seriously injured patients had been brought from the area but declined to give further details.

Story continues

Police have denied using live bullets to quell the disturbance.

Francis Hazeley, a local police commander, told reporters: "We did not use live shots but used tear gas canisters to disperse the protesters."

Reports said the area was now calm, with police withdrawing to the nearby town of Kambia on the request of community leaders.

Senior officials including Health Minister Abu Bakarr Fofonah and national police chief Francis Munu were holding urgent talks with local authorities in Kambia.

Jalloh's death came just a day after west Africa had celebrated the end of the Ebola epidemic which cost 11,000 lives.

Her aunt has since also been diagnosed with the virus, with an official saying Friday that she was responding well to treatment.
DOT Awards $1.96 Billion in National Defense Reserve Fleet Contracts

"Since 1946, National Defense Reserve Fleet vessels have facilitated U.S. strategic sealift, natural disaster response, and humanitarian operations all around the world," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "From supporting our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and providing humanitarian support for Haiti to supporting the United Nations' at-sea neutralization of Syria's chemical weapons, this fleet reliably, economically, and efficiently advances U.S. contributions to global peace and prosperity."

TOTE Services, Inc., Jacksonville, Fla., received the largest contract, worth $461,164,825.799, for a total of nine vessels, when DOT's Maritime Administration recently awarded a total of $1.96 billion in contracts to seven companies to manage, maintain, and operate 48 National Defense Reserve Fleet vessels through January 2024. The contracts are funded by the Department of Defense National Defense Sealift Fund to support DoD's strategic sealift mission.

All of the 18 contracts include firm-fixed fees for the four-year base contract and two two-year options, without future economic price adjustment, plus estimated reimbursable costs for eight years.

TOTE Services operated the El Faro cargo container ship that sank Oct. 1, 2015, off the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin.

"Since 1946, National Defense Reserve Fleet vessels have facilitated U.S. strategic sealift, natural disaster response, and humanitarian operations all around the world," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "From supporting our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and providing humanitarian support for Haiti to supporting the United Nations' at-sea neutralization of Syria's chemical weapons, this fleet reliably, economically, and efficiently advances U.S. contributions to global peace and prosperity."

The companies that won the contracts are responsible for maintaining the ships in good mechanical condition and ensuring crews are available to operate them when needed. Forty-six of the ships are part of DOT's Ready Reserve Force, a fleet managed by the Maritime Administration. Two are used to support Missile Defense Agency operations. Each vessel is maintained so it can be fully activated and deployed quickly; according to MARAD, the 46 Ready Reserve Force vessels have been activated hundreds of times since 2002. "The U.S. Merchant Marine and National Defense Reserve Fleet play a crucial role in our nation's security," said Maritime Administrator Paul Jaenichen. "These contract awards will allow our commercial maritime companies to continue providing top-notch support to our troops who are stationed or deployed around the world."

Other companies receiving contracts were Crowley Technical Management, Inc., Jacksonville, Fla.; ($149,755,923.82); Keystone Shipping Services, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. ($411,596,846.85); Matson Navigation Company, Inc., Oakland, Calif., ($174,612,435.39); Ocean Duchess, Inc., Houston ($342,263,690.65); Pacific-Gulf Marine, Corp., Gretna, La. ($194,254,798.52); and Patriot Contract Services, LLC, Concord, Calif. ($227,068,183.07).
European Counter Terrorism Centre Launched

The new center allows European Union Member States to share information about threats and to improve their strategies for handling them.

With Europe facing the most significant terrorist threat in more than a decade, following the November 2015 Paris attacks, the European Commission on Jan. 25 launched Europol's European Counter Terrorism Centre. The new center allows European Union Member States to share information about threats and to improve their strategies for handling them.

"EU institutions responded swiftly and strongly to the terrorist attacks of last year and moved to augment the European Union's capacity to deal with the terrorist threat. As foreseen in the European Agenda on Security put forward by the European Commission, the establishment of the European Counter Terrorism Centre is a major strategic opportunity for the EU to make our collective efforts to fight terrorism more effective. I call on EU Member States to trust and support the European Counter Terrorism Centre to help it succeed in its important mission," said Dimitris Avramopoulos, European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship.

The center "will improve the exchange of information between law enforcement agencies. This is the kind of cooperation Europe needs in the fight against organized crime and terrorism," said Ard van der Steur, minister of Security and Justice of the Netherlands, which currently holding the presidency of the Council of the EU.

After the Paris attacks, Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency that is based in The Hague, assigned up to 60 officers to support the French and Belgian investigations in Taskforce Fraternite. Significant information has been received from those two countries, resulting in 800 intelligence leads and more than 1,600 leads on suspicious financial transactions, according to the law enforcement agency. "Our ambition is for the European Counter Terrorism Centre to become a central information hub in the fight against terrorism in the EU, providing analysis for ongoing investigations and contributing to a coordinated reaction in the event of major terrorist attacks. Europol is grateful for the support of the Member States, the European Parliament, and the European Commission in the establishment of the ECTC. It will lie at the heart of a stronger EU standing up to the threat of terrorism," said Europol Director Rob Wainwright.

The center's head is Manuel Navarrete Paniagua, a high-ranking officer of the Spanish Guardia Civil with extensive practical counter terrorism experience. He was already the head of the counterterrorism unit at Europol. Currently, 39 staff members and five seconded national experts work in the center.
Massachusetts Roofing Contractor Exposes Workers to Fall Hazards: OSHA

A S General Construction faces $188,760 in OSHA proposed fines.

OSHA has cited a contractor with a history of safety violations for exposing employees to potentially fatal fall hazards. According to the agency, employees of A S General Construction of Framingham, Mass., risked falls of more than 26 feet from an unguarded roof and an improperly constructed and erected ladder-jack scaffold at a job site.

"The danger to these employees was real and present and known to this employer. Not only did A S General Construction not provide required fall protection, it did not train the employees to work safely on scaffolds and had the workers climbing damaged and improperly set up ladders. The result was that these workers were steps or seconds away from deadly or disabling falls," said Anthony Covello, OSHAs area director for Essex and Middlesex counties.

In total, the company was cited for 16 violations and faces $188,760 in proposed fines. Additional hazards included a lack of safe access to the roof and scaffold, not inspecting the scaffold and its components for defects, failing to remove nails and debris from the work area, and lack of head protection and safety glasses.




Early 2016 Mining Deaths 'Troubling,' MSHA Chief Says

Assistant Secretary Joseph A. Main said the agency plans to ramp up enforcement, education, and outreach efforts in order to respond to the troubling number of mining fatalities to happen so far this year.

MSHA Assistant Secretary of Labor Joseph A. Main issued a statement regarding the first three coal mining deaths of 2016, saying the agency plans to ramp up enforcement, education, and outreach efforts in order to respond to the troubling number of mining fatalities to happen so far this year.

The coal industry has faced three fatalities in three separate mining accidents, the highest number of accidents to occur over this period since January 2006.

"In light of declining coal market conditions, we all need to be mindful that effective safety and health protections that safeguard our nation's coal miners need to be in place every day at every mine in the country," Main said. "All miners deserve to work their shifts and return home at the end of the day, safe and healthy. To that end, the Mine Safety and Health Administration plans to ramp up its targeted enforcement, education and outreach efforts to respond to the troubling number of mining fatalities that have occurred so far this year. Today, MSHA widely disseminated to industry stakeholders an alert on these deaths, emphasizing the need for continued vigilance in miner safety and health."

Bolstering Main's point, U.S. coal production fell by 11.9 percent in the 52-week period that ended in mid-January 2016 from the same period in 2015, according to the Energy Information Administration's latest data.

The three January 2016 deaths were:

Jan. 4, a 53-year-old miner was killed when he became entangled in a moving underground conveyer in West Virginia.

Jan. 16, a 31-year-old miner was killed when falling material pinned the victim to the mine floor in Pennsylvania.

Jan. 19, a 36-year-old miner was killed when he became pinned between a continuous mining machine and a coal rib in Kentucky.

The National Mining Association and MSHA recently hailed the data showing there were only 28 fatalities for all U.S. mining in 2015 -- 17 in U.S. minerals mining and 11 in coal mining, making it the safest year on record for the industry. "We're very gratified by this continued progress because it confirms the result of our commitment to make American mines the world's safest," said National Mining Association President and CEO Hal Quinn. "The record confirms the value of our safety initiatives and our on-going determination to return every miner home safely after every shift."

One NMA initiative that the association reports has been especially successful is the CORESafety framework, which aims to eliminate fatalities and reduce injury by 50 percent in five years by offering a management system approach to mine safety -- an adaptable framework for operations of all sizes.
News

Support Clock Ticking for Some Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs

A list of of Intel Skylake-based PCs that can run Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 but will have truncated Windows product lifecycle support was released by Microsoft late last week.

Skylake is Intel's processor technology that succeeds its Haswell line. Buyers of new PCs will get Skylake technology when they buy machines with familiar Xeon, Pentium and Celeron processors that bear Intel's sixth-generation Core branding. However, in an announcement this month, Microsoft noted that it is altering its Windows product lifecycle support policies for Skylake-based machines running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 OSes.

Those Skylake-based machines that can run Windows 7/8.1 will have to upgrade to Windows 10 by July 17, 2017 or risk running "unsupported" Windows versions. In Microsoft's phraseology, running unsupported software means using software that does not get security patches or hotfixes from Microsoft, which is a potential security risk for individuals and organizations.

Microsoft's list of those Skylake-based computers affected by the new Windows support policy changes can be found at this page.

At press time, links to Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC machines were shown. The Dell link didn't work for me using the Chrome browser but it did work using Internet Explorer. The NEC list defaulted to Japanese, rather than English.

Microsoft plans to update its Skylake list page on an ongoing basis. Organizations or individuals wanting to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on newly purchased Skylake-based PCs likely will want to bookmark that page.

The policy change could be a factor for organizations that exercise downgrade rights when buying new PCs. The truncated July 17, 2017 end-of-support date will have to be kept in mind.

That July 17, 2017 end-of-support date likely will be confusing for individuals and organizations. Microsoft's Windows lifecycle fact sheet shows Windows 7 Service Pack 1 with "extended support" through Jan. 14, 2020 and Windows 8.1 with extended support through Jan. 10, 2023. However, those support dates just apply to older processor technologies, not to Skylake and newer technologies.

For Skylake-based Machines, Microsoft shortened its Windows lifecycle support policies by three years for Windows 7 and six years for Windows 8.1.

Microsoft's announcement made it somewhat clear that emerging new hardware technologies only would be supported for Windows 10, going forward. The company specifically pointed to Intel's "Kaby Lake," AMD's "Bristol Ridge" and Qualcomm's "8996" emerging technologies as only having Microsoft's support when running Windows 10.
News

Microsoft To Deliver Azure Stack Preview this Week

Microsoft announced today that it plans to release the first technical preview of its Azure Stack solutions on Friday.

Azure Stack is the fabric for Microsoft's software-defined networking, compute and storage technologies that's used for its Azure datacenters, but it's being made available for use across an organization's datacenter infrastructure. While Azure Stack is at the testing stage right now, its product release is associated with Microsoft's 2016-branded wave of products. Microsoft explained that point during its Ignite event back in May.

Consequently, Azure Stack likely will see product release sometime this year, alongside Microsoft's 2016 server products. See "The 2016 Microsoft Product Roadmap" article, now available at Redmond Channel Partner, for the approximate timeline. Rob Helm, vice president of independent consultancy Directions on Microsoft, suggested Q4 for a partly production-ready Azure Stack.

Microsoft is planning to provide more details about Azure Stack on Friday, Jan. 29 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time in a Webinar. This event will feature discussions by Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's Azure Chief Technology Officer, and Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft's Enterprise Cloud Technical Fellow.

Hybrid Network Support

Microsoft has been promoting Azure Stack as something that will make things easier for organizations running "hybrid" networks, allowing them to more easily combine local datacenter infrastructures with Azure services. Azure Stack supports infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service types of services. It's all made easier because of the common service fabric that Azure Stack provides.

Microsoft claims that the same tenant, scripting and developer experiences available with Azure are accessible on customer infrastructure using Azure Stack. The same Azure portal is used to manage resources, and the same PowerShell scripts can be used both locally and for Microsoft's cloud. The Visual Studio development environment works across Azure and Azure Stack. Organizations can use Azure Resource Manager templates across both, which are JSON based. In addition, Microsoft claims that Azure Stack has an extensible model that will permit its partners to build add-on solutions. Developers get common APIs.

Organizations may be sticking with their datacenters, but Azure Stack will provide a bridge to access public cloud services, too, according to Al Hilwa, program director for software development research at consulting firm IDC.

"The key distinguishing characteristic is that this is semantically Azure," Hilwa explained in an e-mailed comment. "From a management API and app model perspective it is a proper subset of the broad services available in Azure. Prior offerings aimed at this space by Microsoft and others have not typically provided enough congruence between the on-premise world and the public cloud services it maps to. Azure Stack appears to move the bar significantly in this area because for the first time Microsoft is providing an identical application model for both scenarios."

It's Not Windows Azure Pack

Microsoft has a Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server 2012, but it's not the same thing as Azure Stack. Microsoft explained the difference in this Redmond article by saying that "Windows Azure Pack is not the full stack implementation of the Azure innovations." Back in May, Microsoft had promised that Azure Pack wasn't going away, but instead would get updated separately from Azure Stack.

Azure Pack is also more heavily dependent on the use of System Center for management tasks, according to Microsoft Technical Evangelist and MVP Darryl van der Peijl.

"In contrast to Windows Azure Pack, where we needed System Center to perform tasks on the underlying fabric, Azure Stack does this by directly communicating with the resource providers," van der Peijl explained in a blog post. "Microsoft Azure Stack will manage all the software defined components and be used to provision services on the fabric."

Azure Stack, while offering access to software defined components, actually has hardware requirements for customer premises environments. A dual-socket server with a minimum 12 physical cores is needed for the task, according to Snover, in this Microsoft blog post. Snover's video in that blog post shows the common tools that will work across both Azure and Azure Stack environments.

While the underlying hardware will be different for the organizations that use Azure Stack, its software-defined components will permit organizations to "build a hybrid cloud with a very high degree of consistency between Azure and Azure Stack," according to van der Peijl.
A hunger-striking Palestinian journalist will remain in jail despite warnings over his deteriorating health, Israel's top court ruled on Wednesday. The Supreme Court said it would not release Mohammed al-Qiq immediately but would follow his health on a daily basis. Qiq has been on hunger strike for 63 days over his detention under Israel's administrative detention law and his organs are at risk of failure any day, his legal team says. The European Union on Wednesday said it was "especially concerned" about his deteriorating health. His lawyer Jawad Boulus asked the Supreme Court to release him but the three judges ruled that an earlier decision by a military court to detain him was legal. Boulus said the judges were "briefed on classified material and are convinced that Muhammed al-Qiq constitutes a danger to the security of Israel," so declined to overturn the military court's ruling. Under Israel's controversial administrative detention law, the state can hold suspects for renewable six-month periods without trial. Qiq, a 33-year-old father of two and a correspondent for Saudi Arabia's Almajd TV network, was arrested on November 21 at his home in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security service, said he was arrested for "terror activity" as part of the Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. He denies the charges and has been refusing food since November 25 in protest against the "torture and ill treatment that he was subjected to during interrogation", according to Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organisation. Qiq was jailed for a month in 2003 and then for 13 months in 2004 for Hamas-related activities. In 2008, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison on charges linked to his activities on the student council at the West Bank's Birzeit University.
ALL of furniture designer Ben's dreams are coming true. First, he meets Amy Schumer (not online, you guys), then they fall in love, then they attend some award ceremonies, and now he appears to be getting a spot on Inside Amy Schumer.

It seems Ben is also an "aspiring actor" so the last bit must really have him pinching himself ninety. According to Vanity Fair: "buried in a 2014 interview for a site called Five OClock, Hanisch is described as an aspiring actor who spent all his money on acting classes upon moving back to Chicago." He starred in a short called Last Train to Linden in 2014.



Anyway, he's just posted the below to Instagram captioned "Yesterday's surgery went really well." Looking forward to seeing your work on Comedy Central, Ben *doffs cap*


The grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has been excluded from contesting elections next month, his son said Tuesday. Hassan Khomeini, a 43-year-old cleric with close ties to reformists, was not verified as having sufficient religious competence by the Guardian Council, his son Ahmad said on his Instagram account, despite "testimony from dozens of religious authorities". Khomeini had hoped to be a candidate for election to the Assembly of Experts, a powerful group of clerics which monitors the work of Iran's current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and will be responsible for selecting his successor. Khamenei, now 76, took over from the elder Khomeini who died in 1989. Elections to the 88-member Assembly and for parliament's 290 lawmakers will take place on February 26. Members of both bodies are elected in votes open to the general public. However the 800 candidates for the Assembly first have to pass a vetting process conducted on behalf of the Guardian Council. Khomeini, who would have been the first member of the family to take a prominent place in public office since his grandfather's death, was among hundreds of hopefuls excluded. A spokesman for the Central Elections Supervising Committee, the vetting arm of the Guardian Council, said on state television that rejected candidates had until Saturday to lodge an appeal. Siamak Rah-Peyk said 166 candidates had been approved for the Assembly election, 111 were not authorised, 207 were disqualified and 58 had withdrawn. The younger Khomeini has not been a prominent public figure but his candidacy had been contentious because of his connections to reformists, who have been hoping for a political comeback after long being sidelined. The Guardian Council is dominated by conservatives and its role in picking who can run for office is contentious because of the deep divide between Iran's competing political factions. Khomeini's son added on Instagram: "In my opinion, the reason for non-verification is clear to everyone." On January 5, a member of the Guardian Council said Khomeini could be excluded from the elections because he did not attend an exam to certify his religious credentials. However sources close to the cleric, who currently runs the mausoleum to the Islamic republic's founder in Tehran, later said there were other ways in which his religious knowledge could be verified. At the time, a source close to Khomeini, who has ties to reformist former president Mohammad Khatami, told the official IRNA news agency he had not received any "invitation or text message" to go to the exam. "At the time of examination, he was giving a lecture" on theology, the source said. On Tuesday, Rah-Peyk said that 152 candidates had not attended the qualification exam.
By Crispian Balmer ROME (Reuters) - The United States cannot solve any problems in the Middle East without Iran's help and should drop its "hostile" stance towards Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday. On his first official visit to Europe, Rouhani also took a swipe at regional arch rival Saudi Arabia, saying its military campaign in neighbouring Yemen was a failure and a frustration. Rouhani is midway through a four-day trip to Italy and France, looking to burnish his country's international credentials following the signing last year of a nuclear accord with world powers and the lifting of financial sanctions. While EU firms are lining up to sign lucrative business deals, the United States is keeping some of its sanctions in place, accusing Tehran of funding what it considers to be terror groups, and ties between the two nations remain terse. "It's possible that Iran and the United States might have friendly relations. But the key to that is in Washington's hands, not Tehran's," Rouhani told a news conference, saying he would be happy to see U.S. businessmen in Iran. "I would like to see the Americans set aside their hostility and chose another way, but inside the U.S. there are some problems, there is no unified voice," he said, noting that "the Zionist lobby" was "very influential". He also rejected accusations that Iran was funding terror organisations. "It is clear that Iran is a country opposed to terrorism and a country that fights terrorism," he said. The United States is the dominant foreign power in the Middle East, sporting close ties with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, and is militarily involved in both Iraq and Syria, where it is battling Sunni jihadist group, Islamic State. "The Americans know very well that when it comes to important regional issues they cannot achieve anything without Iran's influence or say," Rouhani said, speaking through a translator. Shi'ite Muslim Iran is the closest backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while Western countries support his mainly Sunni Muslim opponents. However, Tehran and the West are united in their opposition to Islamic State. Adding to tensions in the region is the recent deterioration in relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh broke off diplomatic ties with Tehran this month in an escalating row over the Saudi execution of a Shi'ite Muslim cleric. Rouhani said Saudi was acting out of frustration, branding its 10-month military campaign in Yemen against the Houthi militia, who are allied to Iran, as a flop. "It is angry because of its failures," he said. "Saudi Arabia has been bombing the impoverished people of Yemen for 10 months and has not achieved anything. It has not had any victory and is hated more than ever by the Yemeni people." (Additional reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, Sam Wilkin and Philip Pullella; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Private Mauritanian news agency Al-Akhbar said Tuesday that it had received a video purportedly from the Al-Qaeda-linked Emirate of the Sahara group claiming responsibility for this month's kidnapping of Swiss woman Beatrice Stockly in northern Mali. "We announce our responsibility for the kidnapping of this evangelising disbeliever who, through her work, has succeeded in driving large numbers of Muslim sons from Islam," Al-Akhbar quoted a spokesman for the group as saying in the video, which was not broadcast. In return for her release, the jihadists called for the release of a number of their fighters jailed in Mali and one of their leaders, Abu Tourab, detained at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, according to the agency. Abu Ahmad Tourab is the nom de guerre of Ahmad al-Faki al-Mahdi, who is accused of ordering the destruction of historical monuments in Mali's fabled city of Timbuktu in 2012. Tourab, who was a leader of the Al-Qaeda-linked Malian group Ansar Dine, is the first jihadist to appear before the war crimes court. An official from the news agency told AFP that Al-Akhbar had no plans to distribute the video. It was the second time Stockly has been taken captive, following her kidnapping from Timbuktu in April 2012 by Islamist fighters. The social worker, who has lived in Timbuktu for years, was said at the time to be the last Westerner living in the desert city, which she refused to leave when it fell to Islamist Ansar Dine rebels on April 1 that year. Two weeks later, special forces from Burkina Faso swept into rebel-held northern Mali aboard a helicopter and whisked her to safety in a pre-arranged handover by Islamist rebels. At the time a loose alliance of Tuareg and Islamist rebels took advantage of the political chaos in Mali's capital that followed a March coup by capturing the country's vast desert north, including Timbuktu. Stockly's capture that year brought to 24 the number of hostages seized in the Sahel region, 20 of them held by Al-Qaeda's north Africa branch, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and another Islamist group, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). Almost all were subsequently released, but three foreign hostages seized, a South African, a Swede and a Romanian remain in captivity. After Stockly's kidnapping in 2012, the Swiss foreign ministry said it had discouraged her from another stay in Mali. The jihadist fighters were chased from Mali's vast remote north in 2013 by a French-led military intervention. A regional French counterterrorism force is still conducting operations in the area. But entire swathes of the north remain beyond the reach of both the Malian army and foreign troops. In November, 20 people, 14 of them foreigners, were killed in an attack claimed by jihadist groups on the Radisson Blu hotel in the capital, Bamako.
AWKS ALERT. Well, at least you know he's a Game of Thrones fan... why else would he call Kit 'Jon' during an interview? As for Kit's reaction, well, it was typically Haringtonesque. "It happens."

As for what the interview is all about, you can watch it in full below. It includes such topics as the well dodgy pilot to GOT, as well as his latest venture in a play about Doctor Faustus - a stage magician who sold his soul to the Devil (he run starts in April, if you happen to be in London around April), and how he's only ever been known for one character...

As you can see, Dr. Faustus is keeping 'Jon Snow's' hair do. Nope, we'll NEVER give up hope - despite him crushing our dreams by confirming (yet again) that Jon Snow is definitely dead. "But his spirit may live on".
By Shelby Sebens PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - An Oregon judge who has refused to perform gay marriages and has drawn a formal ethics complaint for a raft of other issues should lose his job, a judicial commission leading an investigation into his conduct has found, court documents showed on Tuesday. Marion County Circuit Court Judge Vance Day engaged in the "discriminatory" practise of instructing his staff to screen marriage applicants for same-sex couples and for refusing to perform the marriages and referring them to other judges, the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability has found. The Commission also found that Day allowed a veteran with a felony to handle a firearm, solicited and collected money from lawyers who appeared before him, and issued a veiled political threat when another judge asked him to take down a picture of Adolf Hitler in his courthouse. "Judge Day does not appear to recognise situations that either impugn his integrity or trigger ethical violations," the Commission wrote in a 48-page decision filed on Monday with the Oregon Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court will make the final decision on Day's job. A hearing has not yet been scheduled, court officials said. The commission's findings stem from a formal complaint it prepared last year that alleged Day violated the Oregon Code of Judicial Conduct, and triggered an ethics probe and hearings. Day, who is married and was appointed to the Marion County bench in 2011, has denied any wrongdoing and launched a legal defence. Day's spokesman, Patrick Korten, said the commission's findings are "at odds with evidence presented at the hearing, and some have no evidentiary support at all." "The opinion is especially troubling because it disregards Judge Day's First Amendment rights to freedom of religion, speech and association," Korten said. The Commission cleared Day on allegations that he exposed veterans to media, which worsened their post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, and that he failed to give staff required lunch breaks. A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last year legalized gay marriage in all 50 states, but a small number of elected clerks and lower-court judges have voiced opposition on religious grounds. In Alabama earlier this month, the chief justice of the state's top court ordered the state's probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and at least two counties stopped giving out the licenses altogether. (Reporting by Shelby Sebens; Editing by Eric M. Johnson and Sandra Maler)
Saudi Arabia said it would investigate claims that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak had returned to the Saudi royal family US$620 million from the US$681 million (RM2.6 billion) that was channelled into his private bank accounts in 2013, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. The daily, however, reported that a spokesman for the Saudi Foreign Ministry refused to comment further on the matter. Yesterday, Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali said there was insufficient evidence to implicate Najib of any offence in receiving the money. Najib had said the money came from Saudi Arabia to help his ruling coalition's election campaign in 2013. Riyadh has largely stayed silent over the issue, which was first revealed by The Wall Street Journal in July last year. "Evidence obtained from the investigation does not show that the donation was given as an inducement or reward for doing or forbearing to do anything in relation to his capacity as a prime minister," Apandi told a press conference yesterday. "Furthermore, in August 2013, a sum of US$620 million (RM2.03 billion) was returned by the PM to the Saudi royal family because the sum was not utilised." BBC today quoted an unnamed Saudi source who confirmed the kingdom donated the RM2.6 billion to Najib, saying it was to counter influence from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, in what is seen as targeted to ensure Islamist party PAS did not win the 2013 polls. At the time of the donation, the Saudis were already upset at events in Egypt, where then President Mohammed Morsi was busy consolidating the Brotherhood's hold on the country. "It would be another three months before Morsi was to be deposed by the army, and the Saudis were convinced that the opposition was being supported by the Brotherhood and Qatar, which backed the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the Middle East," the BBC report added. The report also quoted a British corporate investigator with extensive experience of the Middle East as saying that the US$681 million was paid through the Singapore branch of a Swiss bank owned by the rulers of Abu Dhabi. "It is very murky", he said. "This case will never be fully cleared up until the Saudis and the Malaysians release all the transaction data, and that has not happened." Meanwhile, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission said it was seeking a review of Apandi's decision, and would present its investigation papers on Najib to the operations review panel, which monitors the anti-graft agency.  January 27, 2016.
If a banks merchant is selling illegal goods online, Jewel Paymentech wants to be the company in charge of finding the perpetrator

Jewel Paymentech, a Singapore-based financial risk management startup, announced it has raised S$1.5 million (US$1 million) in Series A round of funding, led by Singapore-incorporated Tuas Capital Partners Pte Ltd.

Singapore-based 8capita, an investment partnership focussed on Internet and mobile, along with a few unnamed institutional and private investors, also contributed to the round.

The funds will be used to hire developers, data scientists and business development managers, as well as to roll out new solutions to online financial risk problems.

Founded in 2014, Jewel Paymentech aims to improve the security and visibility of e-payments for banks. It is essentially selling a service that alerts banks to potential sources of illegal online commerce, giving the banks a heads-up so they can act accordingly.

What we have seen in the past couple of quarters is that [institutions] have hosted merchants that are illegal. So, thats where our application comes in  to identify illegal activities early on, Group Managing Director for Jewel Paymentech Wooi Siang Lee told e27.

Typical illegal merchant activity might include selling counterfeit goods, hosting online gambling sites or using the Internet to facilitate prostitution.

The bank [can then] make sure the merchant gets the penalties, not the banks, said Lee.

Also Read: The rise of fintechs next generation

Jewel Paymentech uses machine learning technology and applies predictive analytics on merchants, so banks can evaluate due diligence and potential risks of fraud. The company also uses automation to detect illegal and counterfeit goods.

We look to see if a merchant has a website, what has been trending and what they have been talking about. We put it together to score it. [If it is worrisome] we tell the bank, Hey there was an exceptionally high level of engagement and it was exceptionally negative so you need to engage your merchant, Lee said.

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The company operates on a subscription-based revenue model, and the pricing varies depending on the number of merchants of the bank.

Lee said one of the top goals for Jewel Paymentech in the coming year is to find partners across Southeast Asia. Top-tier banks are certainly an aspiration as the merchant portfolio will be much larger.

Currently Jewel Paymentech is working with some banks, including DBS Bank in Singapore, on a pilot basis.

Also Read: Meet 7 leaders who are changing the face of fintech in Asia

Jewel Paymentech also offers a hardware called FW-100. It is a transaction router that can swipe e-payments during the period between paying for goods or services and approval by the bank.

It identifies Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. The hardware is a solution that flies in between [the transaction]. It generates lots of information for the banks, said Lee.

Jewel Paymentech was named by SWIFT Startup Challenge as a promising fintech company and also received the ACE startup grant award from Singapores SPRING institution under the Ministry of Trade.

The post Singapores financial risk management startup Jewel Paymentech raises US$1M appeared first on e27.
By Melissa Fares and Amy Tennery (Reuters) - Airlines, hotels and cruise operators serving Latin America and the Caribbean are facing growing concern among travellers spooked by the mosquito-borne Zika virus. The outbreak of the virus, linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, comes as a record percentage of Americans plan a vacation in coming months and a near-record proportion of them look to take advantage of a strong U.S. dollar by going abroad. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned travellers via Twitter to consider postponing travel to areas with ongoing Zika transmission. Canada and Chile are the only countries in the Americas the virus is not expected to reach, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. United Airlines said it was allowing customers who had reserved tickets for travel to Zika-impacted regions to postpone their trips or obtain refunds with no penalty. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd and rival Carnival Corp said they would allow expectant mothers covered by the CDC advisories to reschedule cruises to a later date or switch to an itinerary outside the affected countries. But some Twitter users lamented their inability to get a refund from tourism operators. Stu Privett, a human resources systems specialist for the Royal College of Nursing in London, tweeted about cancelling a trip to Barbados with his wife, who is in her first trimester. Privett said he was unable to get a refund from Virgin Holidays. "They basically said it was our choice not to go on the holiday," Privett said. "Basically (its) a case of 'we just lose all the money we've spent.'" A representative for Virgin Holidays, which is owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Group, said the company would look into the claim. Still, many airlines and tourist authorities said they have seen minimal impact. "There is no reason tourists cant walk around in bikinis," Cancun tourist association president Carlos Gosselin said. A Carnival spokesman said there had been less than 10 requests to reschedule trips or change itineraries. A Norwegian spokeswoman said it had a single cancellation and no itinerary change requests. Hotel chain Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc said in a statement it was working closely with local health authorities throughout the region to follow CDC prevention recommendations. Still, some tourists with short-term travel plans to Latin America were having second thoughts. "Its the people who are going to travel in the next few weeks who are starting to ask more questions and rethink their plans," said Jennifer Michels, a spokeswoman for the American Society of Travel Agents, in Alexandria, Virginia. Data released Tuesday from the U.S. Conference Board as part of its monthly Consumer Confidence Index showed a record 54.4 percent of Americans plan a vacation in the next six months. Some 11.2 percent said they plan to travel overseas, one of the highest readings in the surveys history dating back to 1978. (Reporting by Melissa Fares and Amy Tennery in New York; additional reporting by Eleanor Whalley, Paulo Prada in Rio de Janeiro, Isela Serrano in Cancun, Jeffrey Dastin and Malathi Nayak in New York and Abhijith G in Bangalore; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Lisa Shumaker)
Three Hills Capital Partners has soared past 1bn for the final close of its fourth flagship fund, almost doubling the total it collected for its predecessor vehicle.
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Dr. Kathleen M. Anderson is thankful for the mentorship shes received over the years. Now, as president of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, shes hoping to do the same for future horse veterinarians like herself, especially in the areas of practice ownership and management.

Dr. Anderson frequently has externs and interns come through her practice, Equine Veterinary Care P.C., in Elkton, Maryland.

When she talks with students, often she asks them, What are your plans for ownership? Because thats the way out of the debt tunnel. Thats being part of the process and not a victim of the process. Its like buying a house, plus it gives you the ability to manage your lifestyle because you are a decision-maker and have the ability to have power over where the growth of the practice goes.

Dr. Anderson says when theyre sitting in a truck driving to a call, students become more excited about the prospect after a thoughtful conversation during which Dr. Anderson points out how they could become owners. But in a casual situation, often she hears students say that theyre in too much debt to consider buying a practice.

Its giving confidence and offering a hand. The information they need to get has to be from seeing how it works and having role models, she said.

A terrific experience

Growing up, Dr. Anderson was a self-described very active, horse-crazy kid.

After high school, she worked as a rider and trainer. Then at 22, she encountered a young woman starting veterinary school, and a lightbulb went on.

I figured it was a way to be with horses without mucking stalls the rest of my life, she laughed.

2016 American Association of Equine Practitioners President Kathy Anderson (Courtesy of K. Rengert)

Dr. Anderson studied at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan but missed the first three weeks of class to be a groom for the Canadian Equestrian Team at the 1982 World Equestrian Games in Germany. There she met her mentor, then United States Equestrian Team veterinarian, Dr. A. Martin Simensen. She asked him if she could do an externship with him, which she did during her third year of veterinary college. That stint resulted in a job offer after graduation.

So, in 1986, she entered private practice in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, under Dr. Simensen. Her days were spent at Suffolk Downs in the morning and working with eventing horses in the afternoon. She enjoyed working with the two types of athletes.

He also encouraged her to become accredited by the International Federation for Equestrian Sports, which she has been since 1998. She previously had competed in their events.

It was a terrific experience. I hold him as an example of what we all want to do and aspire to as a veterinarian, a mentor, and as a person, she said.

Staying ahead of the curve

Dr. Anderson had dreamed of being in an ownership position with him, but Suffolk Downs closed in 1989. Eventually, she left New England for the Mid-Atlantic, where she worked in an associate position before establishing an equine veterinary care relief service that served 25 practices in five states. Now, she owns one of those practices.

Relief practice required her to observe each clinic, allowing Dr. Anderson to learn and assimilate the various management styles as well as learn the differences among states with regard to rules and regulations. It also helped her create a great network base among clients and colleagues.

And, as a small business owner, I learned that the opportunities were there, you just had to reach for them and go for them, Dr. Anderson said. The AAEP was instrumental in practice ownership development for me. My entire career has dovetailed with what Ive learned from AAEP resources and technology.

Its giving confidence and offering a hand. The information they need to get has to be from seeing how it works and having role models. Dr. Kathy Anderson, 2016 AAEP president, on helping veterinary students see the benefits of practice ownership

Providing innovative services is another tried-and-true method, Dr. Anderson says, that has allowed her to grow her practice. When she first started on her own in the early 1990s, no one was doing ambulatory ultrasound in the Mid-Atlantic. So, she bought a portable ultrasound machine, honed her skills, and went to the local racetracks and marketed her service.

When the equine stomach ulcer product GastroGard came out in 2005, she bought a gastroscope so she could properly diagnose stomach ulcers to justify the medicine. And, when digital radiography debuted, she recognized that it would be a game changer in on-site veterinary diagnostics.

Right now, were at the cutting edge on dynamic video endoscopy. Im excited where thats headed with performance horses. But all of those things cost money, so its incumbent on a practice owner to combine the want list with the how-to list. Youve got to market a new service for clients to see the value, she said.

Big decisions

Dr. Anderson says the economic challenges veterinary students face are an area of concern for the AAEP but too big for the association to tackle alone.

The AVMA is tackling it, and we support that, she said. The eternal question is Do new veterinary graduates have to have an internship to get a job? That depends on the person.

When she graduated, a veterinary graduates first job was often as an associate. Since then, the trend for recent graduates going into equine medicine has been to serve internships prior to practice. She says now, students who do externships with her increasingly say theyre not serving an internship, because of economic pressure, so it seems the pendulum is swinging back to the middle.

Dr. Anderson, while supportive of students desire to go into practice rather than an internship, stopped short of saying the AAEP would do something similar to what to the American Animal Hospital Association did. The association announced early in 2015 it would begin voluntary accreditation of internship and mentorship programs at AAHA-accredited hospitals.

The 2016 AAEP officers: Drs. G. Kent Carter, immediate past president; Kathy Anderson, president; R. Reynolds Cowles, president-elect; Margo Macpherson, vice president; and Jack Easley, treasurer. (Courtesy of AAEP)

The AAEP certainly has a listing of externships and internships. And we are adding the ability for students to answer a questionnaire on their experiences with those positions. But were not in a position to regulate how those externships and internships are operated, she said.

Recent graduates want a job where theyre mentored, valued, and invested in for the long term, Dr. Anderson said.

The trick is always finding a practice that will provide that transition with mentoring. A new graduate is not necessarily an income machine their first year, but maybe by the second year, she added. Practice owners just have to be willing to give them a chance.












    Dr. Richard Breitmeyer  Dr. Kevin Petersburg  Dr. Dustin Oedekoven   



    Dr. David Schmitt  Dr. Boyd Parr  

Event: 119th annual meeting, Oct. 22-28, 2015, Providence, Rhode Island

Program: The meeting, held jointly with the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians (see page 361), drew more than 1,200 attendees. The joint plenary session, Future of Livestock and Poultry: Food Security for the Next Decade, addressed various perspectives and key issues impacting food production, and featured speakers Gary Woodward, deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the Department of Agriculture; Don Villwock, president of the Indiana Farm Bureau; Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director in the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases at the Centers for Disease and Control and Preventions National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Michael Murphy, a veterinary medical officer with the Food and Drug Administrations Center for Veterinary Medicine.

Awards: USAHA Medal of Distinction: Dr. Richard Breitmeyer, Davis, California, for outstanding leadership and contributions to the association and its stakeholders. A 1980 graduate of the University of California-Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Breitmeyer is director of the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System. Earlier in his career, he served as California state veterinarian. Dr. Breitmeyer is a past president of the association and has served on several of its committees and task forces. USAHA Federal Partnership Award: Dr. Kevin Petersburg, Des Moines, Iowa. A 1984 graduate of the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Petersburg is assistant director of surveillance, preparedness, and response services for Iowa and Wisconsin with the Department of Agricultures Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Earlier, he served as area veterinarian-in-charge for several years. Dr. Petersburg was honored for his collaborative efforts and leadership. APHIS Administrators Award: Dr. Dustin Oedekoven, Pierre, South Dakota, for his dedicated service to animal health. A 2002 graduate of the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Oedekoven is South Dakota state veterinarian and executive secretary of the South Dakota Animal Industry Board. He worked closely with federal, state, and local officials during the avian influenza outbreak in 2015. National Assembly Award: Dr. Bob Meyer, Cheyenne, Wyoming, A 1974 graduate of the Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Meyer is assistant state veterinarian at the Wyoming Livestock Board. He was honored for his dedication to animal health and for his work with tuberculosis control.

Business: The USAHA continues to implement the 2014 strategic plan for its work in animal health and regulatory medicine. The association approved 19 resolutions. The association also launched www.InterstateLivestock.com, a single source for livestock interstate movement requirements. The site was established in partnership with the National Institute for Animal Agriculture. The first species covered in the project is bovine, with plans to incorporate other major livestock species.

Officials: Dr. David Schmitt, Ankeny, Iowa, president; Dr. Boyd Parr, Columbia, South Carolina, president-elect; Barbara Determan, Early, Iowa, 1st vice president; Kristin Haas, Montpelier, Vermont, 2nd vice president; Dr. Martin Zaluski, Helena, Montana, 3rd vice president; Dr. Annette Jones, Sacramento, California, treasurer; and Dr. Bruce King, Axtell, Utah, immediate past president
Legal Help

A $2.8 million settlement has been reached in an employment class action lawsuit pending against 3PD Inc. The lawsuit was filed by delivery drivers who alleged the company wrongfully classified them as contractors in order to place the cost of trucks and damage to goods on to the drivers.Specifically, the drivers claimed they worked 12 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days per week, delivering furniture and appliances from stores like H.H. Gregg and Macy'. While performing these tasks they were required to pay their own expenses related to the work.The lawsuit was filed in 2013 by 3PD drivers Marvin Brandon, Rafael Aguilera and Aldo Mendez-Etzig. The alleged that as contractors they were required to provide or lease their own delivery trucks and had deductions taken from their checks for fuel, insurance, administrative costs and costs associated with damage to the delivered goods.Under the terms of the settlement, the drivers will receive more than $1.8 million of the settlement funds. To date, 115 of the 258 eligible drivers have filed claims, which could result in an average payout of $15,000, according to the settlement agreement. Two of the class representatives will receive $20,000 and one will receive $10,000.The case is Marvin Brandon et al v. 3PD Inc., case number 1:13-CV-03745, in the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois.If you have a similar problem and would like to be contacted by a lawyer at no cost or obligation, please fill in our form.
Who is Generation Z? The New York Times describes this segment of the population as 60 million Americans, aged 5 to 19 years old, outnumbering Millennials by a million. Last years freshman class was the first of this generation to join the college experience and 30 percent will be employed in the next four years, according to The Huffington Post.

Today, households with Gen Z in the mix are valuable to your business because of your opportunities to serve older members of this vibrant segment  and their Generation X parents. And, as more of the Gen Z population reaches young adulthood, the wealth of their parents will be growing with them: Deloitte University Press forecasts Gen X to have a net worth of $37 trillion by 2030, passing boomers as Americas wealthiest generation not long afterwards.

With this in mind, its not hard to connect the dots on potential membership opportunities as Gen Z continues growing up. But, theres also an opportunity to add immediate value for these households because research shows Gen Z is out of touch with the realities of paying for college:

A study from Northeastern University revealed that 75 percent of students aged 16 to 19 have no college savings plan, 29 percent say they havent talked with their parents about saving for college and one-quarter think no amount of student loan debt will be manageable after college.

At CUNA Mutual Group, were joining The National Credit Union Foundation to address this need for financial literacy thanks to scores of credit unions across the country who paid it forward in social media posts last year.

In November, we pledged to give as much as $10,000 to the Foundation by way of $5 matches for each holiday giving photo or video tagged with #CUGiveBack by the end of 2015. By New Years Eve last year, credit unions and social media enthusiasts had posted hundreds of images and videos via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. This inspired us so much so that we opted to provide our maximum pledge of $10,000 to the Foundation.

The gift means youll see a national tour of 20 experiential learning sessions for teens this year. The Foundation calls the series of events Reality Fairs. Theyll provide financial literacy and money management skills for 2,000 to 5,000 students and will be hosted in credit unions and league facilities across the country.

We want to share a big thank you to all the credit unions and social media friends and followers who shared photos and videos with us through #CUGiveBack. The tour youve supported will help many young people prepare stronger financial futures and will give their Generation X parents a helping hand in preparing their children to manage finances as they get ready for college and life afterwards.

Well provide more information on the tour dates and locations soon. It may provide your credit union with valuable opportunities to connect with Gen Z and Gen X family households in your local community.

For more information on the fairs, click here. Or, if youre interested in connecting with the tour this year, contact Christopher Morris, communications director, National Credit Union Foundation, at cmorris@ncuf.coop or (608) 231-4374.
Federal credit union examiners are on notice that when a credit union meets certain statutory requirements it no longer must send annual privacy notices.

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) notified credit unions of this in a letter to credit unions (16-CU-03) issued this week. The letter reflects clarifications that the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) sought from the agency.

CUNA led efforts for the modernizations to privacy notices that were signed into law last month as part of the wide-ranging Fixing Americas Surface Transportation (FAST) Act.

The new NCUA letter reminds that the exception for annual privacy notices is available to a credit union:
The importance of independent fiscal councils

Opening remarks by Benoit Cure, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the workshop on Fiscal councils, central banks and sound public finances, Frankfurt am Main, 27 January 2016

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Setting the stage for a workshop at the ECB on fiscal councils, central banks and sound public finances, Benoit Cure underlines in his opening remarks that sound public finances in all euro area member countries is a precondition for completing Economic and Monetary Union. Even if these days there is no appetite for moving towards a United States of Europe, he says, there is a common understanding that euro area member countries need to further integrate their fiscal and economic policies. Benoit Cure focuses on the requirements that need to be met for national fiscal councils and the European Fiscal Board (EFB) to be fully effective. Independence is the key word at both national and European levels. The EFB is also charged with the important task of coordinating fiscal policy in the euro area to avoid pro-cyclical fiscal policies. At this juncture using fiscal space would speed up the euro areas return to growth and support the ECBs objective of medium-term price stability, says Benoit Cure. But, in many countries, such fiscal space simply does not exist, because rules have not been enforced in the past. Setting up independent institutions such as the fiscal councils at the national level and the EFB at the European level could prove to be a decisive step in this direction.

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Dear guests from the Network of EU Independent Fiscal Institutions,

Dear colleagues from the European System of Central Banks,

Ladies and gentlemen, [1]

It is a great pleasure for me to open this high-level workshop.

The European sovereign debt crisis has reminded us painfully that sound public finances in all euro area Member States are an indispensable prerequisite for the smooth functioning of the European monetary union.

This has, of course, been well understood for a long time. For example, the Delors Report of 1989 stressed that uncoordinated and divergent national budgetary policies would undermine monetary stability and generate imbalances in the real and financial sectors of the Community. [2]

To address these concerns the Maastricht Treaty introduced a number of safeguards: the no-bail-out clause, the excessive deficit procedure and the monetary-financing prohibition. Yet, for well-known political reasons, the Maastricht Treaty stopped short of assigning responsibility for fiscal and economic policies to the central level. Member States retained responsibility for these policy fields. At the same time, the Treaty called on governments to treat such policies as a matter of common concern. It also entrusted the task of ensuring appropriate coordination of national policies to the European Commission.

In the monetary field, a new, fully independent body was created, namely the European Central Bank. The responsibility for the conduct of euro area monetary policy was delegated to the ECBs Governing Council. At the same time the independence of national central banks was strengthened considerably in many countries. The institutional set-up for monetary policy was thus starkly different from that for fiscal and economic policies.

The crisis exposed the flaws in the set-up governing fiscal and economic policies. Over the past six years there have been numerous initiatives to rethink the fiscal and economic governance framework. The political reality is that there is no appetite for moving towards a United States of Europe, as foreseen by Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill, and envisaged by Jean Monnet at the beginning of the 1950s, when the precursor of the European Commission was created (the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community). [3] However, there is a common understanding that euro area Member States need to further integrate their fiscal and economic policies if the euro area and its member countries are to prosper in the future. This point is made forcefully in the Five Presidents Report which was published in June last year. [4]

The Five Presidents Report proposed a multi-stage process towards genuine Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The first step is to revive economic convergence among Member States. This requires Member States to put their public finances on a sound footing. It also requires Member States to undertake the necessary structural reforms to strengthen their growth potential and resilience to shocks. Making determined progress in these fields is an economic and political precondition for moving on to the second stage, for which a joint shock-absorption mechanism could be envisaged. [5]

In this respect, I am convinced that national independent fiscal institutions and the European Fiscal Board can make decisive contributions to the success of stage one when it comes to ensuring responsible fiscal policies.

Of course, there are important differences between monetary and fiscal policies in terms of the potential for delegation to technocrats. Monetary policy is a technical task aimed at minimising market distortions and undesirable economic fluctuations. In order to overcome commitment problems, central banks were made independent and provided with a price stability mandate.

By contrast, fiscal policy has strong allocation and redistribution dimensions, which need to reflect national political preferences. Accordingly, fiscal policy has remained the innate prerogative of democratically elected governments. This is supported by the findings of the political-economy literature, which points to the need for limits on the delegation of these policies to independent experts. [6] Proposals have been made to set up independent fiscal agencies with a clearly defined and limited role, such as deciding on the overall fiscal balance, and then leaving it to the political system to decide on taxes and expenditures [7], but they have not gained much traction.

In any case, there is general agreement that independent fiscal councils can play an important role in overcoming the commitment problems which often prevent governments from pursuing sound fiscal policies in a time-consistent manner. [8] Importantly, this argument holds true both when the commitment problems arise from policy rules and when they result from discretionary decisions. Therefore, fiscal councils are likely to play a key role in any evolution in the institutional set-up of the euro area, including moving from rules-based to institutions-based fiscal decision-making.

In the remainder of my remarks, I would like to focus on the general requirements that need to be met for national fiscal councils and the European Fiscal Board to be fully effective.

The key role of national independent fiscal institutions

The European Union fiscal governance framework was strengthened with the six-pack and the two-pack legislation. The two-pack introduced a requirement for euro area countries to set up an independent body, such as a fiscal council, that is responsible for monitoring compliance with numerical fiscal rules. Moreover, it also required that macroeconomic projections should be produced or endorsed by an independent body.

In doing so, fiscal councils can ensure transparency on rules and their implementation. Moreover, fiscal councils can foster national ownership of the governance framework and increase the reputational cost to governments when they violate the fiscal rules. [9] Unfortunately, regulation that is jointly agreed at the European level is often portrayed as having been imposed by Brussels. Members of national fiscal councils  particularly if they build up a good reputation  can counter this argument by explaining the economic virtues of a stability-oriented fiscal policy framework.

To effectively deliver on their tasks, fiscal councils need to build and maintain strong institutional credibility. This requires insulation from political interference, and it is here that the experience of independent central banks can provide important lessons.

First, similar to central banks, fiscal councils require institutional independence. That is, they should have a legal identity which is separate from other bodies of government. At the same time, it should be ensured that fiscal councils have broad and timely access to information, particularly detailed budgetary data.

Second, fiscal councils should be functionally independent. They should be free to choose how to assess and communicate on fiscal policies. Importantly, fiscal councils need to be able to communicate publically in order to effectively mobilise public opinion and, if necessary, to counteract political incentives for unsound fiscal policies.

Third, decision-makers in national fiscal councils require personal independence. They should be appointed on the basis of their professional qualifications for a fixed term. They should be relieved of their duties only in exceptional circumstances, for example if they no longer fulfil the conditions required for the performance of their duties or if they have been found guilty of serious misconduct.

Fourth, fiscal councils require financial independence. That is, they require sufficient resources to deliver on their mandate. To this end, the financing of independent fiscal institutions should be outside of the governments immediate discretion. They could, for example, be funded directly by parliament rather than from the government budget.

Evidence suggests that, where these principles of independence are met, fiscal councils can improve budgetary discipline. [10]

Complementing national independent fiscal institutions with the European Fiscal Board

Ensuring sound public finances in Europe will also require changes to the EUs fiscal governance framework. European legislators should make it a priority to reduce the excessive complexity of the rules. A lack of transparency can make fiscal rules appear arbitrary and undermine their legitimacy. A review of the fiscal rules should add clarity and facilitate the assessment of compliance with them, while preserving their stability-oriented nature. The International Monetary Fund has made such proposals in the past. [11] The European Commission has announced that it will come up with proposals to simplify the framework soon. [12]

It can be argued that complexity results from a lack of trust in the institutions in charge of enforcing the rules, preventing full delegation and making it necessary to write an all-encompassing contract that covers all possible states of the world. The institutional set-up therefore needs to be strengthened.

In October last year the European Commission published a decision setting up a European Fiscal Board (EFB). [13] In line with the recommendations of the Five Presidents Report, the EFB should provide an independent assessment of the Commission and the Councils application of the Stability and Growth Pact. While the European Commission should continue to enforce these rules, it should provide a justification where it deviates from the views of the EFB. This will help to increase the transparency and consistency of fiscal surveillance at the European level.

Beyond fiscal surveillance, the EFB can also play an important role in fiscal policy coordination in the euro area. The sum of national budget balances should lead to an appropriate fiscal stance at the level of the euro area as a whole. While effectively steering the euro areas fiscal stance will be challenging as long as there is no central fiscal capacity, coordinating national fiscal policies is key to avoiding pro-cyclical fiscal policies and facilitating the smooth functioning of EMU.

When defining the role of the EFB, we have to acknowledge that there may be a trade-off between the breadth of its mandate and the effectiveness of its actions. This should be taken into account when thinking about the allocation of tasks between the EFB and national fiscal councils.

You will have the opportunity for an in-depth discussion on the EFBs set-up and its mandate in one of the sessions. In my view, the following questions are of particular interest: Is the EFB sufficiently independent to fulfil its tasks? Are there conflicts between the main elements of the EFBs mandate? How can we ensure that the EFB complements and reinforces the role of national independent fiscal institutions?

Overall, we are all hoping that the European Fiscal Board will contribute to better compliance with the common fiscal rules, a more informed public debate and stronger coordination of national fiscal policies.

To achieve these objectives, the EFB should not fall short of the principles established in the context of the creation of independent fiscal councils at the national level. Looking ahead the mandate and institutional independence of the EFB should be clarified and strengthened to ensure that it can play a key role in increasing transparency and improving compliance with the fiscal rules. [14]

Conclusions and outlook

Let me conclude.

I have argued that, in the light of the European sovereign debt crisis and persistent sustainability concerns, it is more important than ever to make a credible commitment to stability-oriented fiscal policies. This is a necessary condition for fiscal policy to be in a position to support and complement the ECBs monetary policy. [15] We can see today how much a lack of compliance with the rules has hampered the euro areas ability to deliver an efficient macroeconomic policy stance. At this juncture using fiscal space would speed up the euro areas return to growth and support the ECBs objective of medium-term price stability. But, in many countries, such fiscal space simply does not exist, because rules have not been enforced in the past. Setting up independent institutions such as the fiscal councils at the national level and the EFB at the European level could prove to be a decisive step in this direction. While achieving credibly sustainable public finances is an important goal in itself, it is also the precondition for completing EMU.

In todays workshop, you will discuss in much more detail some of the critical issues that I touched upon in my opening remarks: Where do we stand with the establishment of independent fiscal institutions in European countries? What experience do we have in terms of the effectiveness of fiscal councils in European countries? How should fiscal rules be designed in order to make them transparent and enforceable? How should the responsibility for fiscal policies be divided between the national and the European levels?

I am looking forward to hearing some fruitful discussion. Thank you very much for your attention.
French farmers stepped up their protests against low prices with a series of roadblocks in western France.

More than 500 farmers used dozens of tractors to block a number of main roads in the west of France on Wednesday (27 January).

The roadblocks, which began in Brittany last Wednesday (20 January), spread to parts of Normandy and the Pays de la Loire in a day farmers dubbed Black Wednesday for travellers.

According to local reports, French farmers claimed all the major roads into the west of the country were blocked on Wednesday.

See also: French farmers torch tyres in roadblock protests over low prices

Farmers blocked motorways with farm machinery and piles of tyres, as they demanded more help from the government amid worsening living conditions.

Tyres were torched across several locations sending plumes of thick black smoke billowing into the air.

French farmers took to Twitter to express their fury.

Premiers feux allumes : la RN 12 bloquee par les agriculteurs a Plounevez-Moedec dans les Cotes d'Armor pic.twitter.com/fFUaOmVkGN  herve bride (@HerveBride) January 27, 2016

(Herve Bride said: First fires lit: the national motorway no.12 blocked by farmers at Plounevez-Moedec in the Cotes dArmor)

Frances main farming union, the FDSEA, organised the action to protest against the low prices farmers were receiving for milk, meat  especially pork products  and some vegetables, which were well below the cost of production.

On Tuesday (26 January), French agriculture minister Stephane Le Foll announced he was freeing up a further 290m (220m) of aid to help the countrys struggling farmers.

This follows a 600m (422m) package of emergency help to placate farmers announced in the summer.

But farmers are demanding more from government, saying they cannot afford to pay their bills.

(Antoine Esteve said: Blockades in La Rochelle: weve put up barriers. Further action to come)

Pig farmer Didier Lucas, president of the FDSEA, told France Info that although the blockades annoyed French citzens, they were the only way for farmers to get their voices heard. He said farmers felt the government despised them.

Farmers were demanding better labelling from retailers to tell consumers where meat and dairy produce are sourced.

Mr Lucas also called for a fairer distribution of returns in the supply chain. When pig prices were 1.40/kg [1.06/kg] last summer, consumers paid 8/kg [6.08/kg] for sausages.

Today, the farmgate price of pork is 1.08/kg [0.82/kg], but the consumer still pays 8/kg. These reductions are not being passed down the chain to the farmer.

Manif des agriculteurs dans le #Morbihan des 9h30 N.165 (Arzal, Auray) N.24 (Ploermel et Baud) D.768 (Pontivy) D.769 (Plouay) @FDSEA56  ElodieBaudetFournier (@ElodieBF) January 27, 2016

(This tweet lists four major roads where farmers were staging protests from 9.30am on Wednesday)

Further farmer protests were expected to take place in France on Thursday (28 January).

Earlier this week, the NFU warned that a ruthless price war was decimating dairy farms in the UK.

With no sign of an upswing in prices on the horizon, NFU dairy board chairman Rob Harrison urged every dairy farmer to look at their business and decide whether it could survive another period of low prices.

Its a bloodbath and those suffering the most are our hardworking dairy farmers, he said.
On January 23, hundreds of local activists met the anti-choice Walk for Life at Market and Powell Streets, shouting down their repressive message with loud, spirited, no-holds-barred pro-choice chants. The religious-based walk busses in thousands of anti-choice activists annually on the anniversary of Roe v Wade in an attempt to drown out locals in the pro-choice city of San Francisco.Walk for Life marchers are told to keep eyes forward and not engage with their adversaries, but some members of the anti-abortion group giggled, pointed and stared when they witnessed a counter-demonstrator in a clever vagina costume on the sidewalk alongside their march. The two sides were kept apart by a long line of policemen with riot gear. Other street theater tactics included women wearing bloodied white pants and men waving hangers. One of the Raging Grannies held up a twisted wire hanger and a knitting needle shouting, "illegal abortions...never again!"Stop Patriarchy organized the pro-choice response for the second year in a row, bringing a renewed radical presence to the annual event. The Walk for Life has marched through San Francisco since 2005 (2015)
The report takes a patient-centered approach, evaluating programs on how effective they are in meeting patients needs. ASA is asking their members to share the report with their state representatives. "With the increased interest in medical cannabis access around the country, it is imperative that we ensure that new and existing programs adopt regulations and standards that provide patients with safe medicine while protecting their rights," said ASA Executive Director Steph Sherer. "This report will help policymakers create and maintain programs that put the patients first."



Patient advocates across the country continue to fight for medical cannabis laws that both protect patient access and ensure product safety. Advocates spend thousands of hours every year in legislative briefings, and administrative hearings  analyzing new regulations and laws, and lobbying their elected officials  to help move their state closer to a functioning medical cannabis program. The good news is, these efforts are having a true impact on individual patients.



Fifty-one year old mother and grandmother Tamra Howard of California suffers from renal kidney failure. She says, Medical cannabis gives me an appetite and keeps me from being depressed. As a transplant candidate, Tamra was relieved when the Governor of California approved AB258 in July, 2015. The measure protects medical cannabis patients from being excluded from the transplant list which, if not protected, would be devastating for Tamra. Thanks in part to the efforts of Assembly Member Marc Levine who introduced the legislation, Tamra is currently on the transplant list, and able to use her medicine without fear of losing her spot on the list.

PRESS RELEASEAmericans for Safe AccessFor Immediate Release: January 26, 2016Contact: ASA Government Affairs Director, Mike Liszewski at mike [at] safeaccessnow.org or ASA Communications and Outreach Director, Beth Collins at beth [at] safeaccessnow.org or 202.618.6978State Officials and Experts Applaud New Report that Evaluates Medical Marijuana Programs Nation-widePatient Advocates Hope Report will Help State Legislators Make the Grade in 2016(Washington, D.C.)  Americans for Safe Access (ASA) issued Medical Marijuana Access in the US: A Patient-Focused Analysis of the Patchwork of State Laws, today. The annual report evaluates the array of differing state medical cannabis programs across the country from a perspective often overlooked in policy debates: the patients and provides policy makers with model legislation and regulations. With dozens of states already seeing legislative and regulatory proposals in 2016, this groundbreaking report will provide state lawmakers with timely tools they need to improve their medical cannabis programs to truly meet the needs of the patients they are meant to serve.Eighty-one percent of Americans favor the legalization of medical marijuana according to a May 7, 2015, Harris Poll. This broad support has led to unprecedented progress in state medical marijuana programs in 2015. Nineteen states introduced legislation to legalize medical marijuana during the year. In addition, many of the twenty three states with current medical marijuana laws passed legislation to expand or improve their programs in 2015, including New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Connecticut, Oregon, California, Washington, Maryland, Hawaii, Illinois, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Other states, like Nevada and Vermont, expanded and improved their programs through new regulations.This report comes at a perfect time to inform improvements to existing medical marijuana programs and guide legislators who are creating or expanding laws and programs. Too often, patients are denied life-saving treatments solely because they are using medical cannabis, said California Assemblymember Marc Levine, champion of the Medical Cannabis Organ Transplant Act (AB 258), It is imperative for state lawmakers to take advantage of vital resources like ASAs report to improve their state programs.The report uses a point system to grade each medical marijuana law on: 1) patients' rights and protection from discrimination, 2) access to medicine, 3) ease of navigation, 4) functionality, and 5) product safety protocols. The report found that while many states have important elements helpful to patients, no state has yet established an ideal, comprehensive program.The most notable trend in 2015 was the adoption and implementation of comprehensive product safety regulations. With Marylands medical marijuana program projected to begin serving patients in 2017, the state received the highest grade for product safety by working with ASA to combine its own stringent safety and quality control measures with those of the American Herbal Product Associations (AHPA) Recommendations to Regulators in the areas of: cultivation, distribution and manufacturing. The tools provided by Americans for Safe Access and the Patient Focused Certification program have been tremendously helpful in creating product safety regulations that will ensure Maryland patients are receiving the highest quality products and medicine possible said Hannah Byron, executive director of the Natalie M. LaPrade Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission.Maryland is not the only state adopting the best practices and AHPA recommendations and standards. New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Washington have also done so. Michael McGuffin, President of AHPA, notes, "The report highlights how best practice guidance such as the Cannabis Committee's Recommendations to Regulators documents can assist states in establishing regulations that ensure the quality and safety of cannabis products."The report takes a patient-centered approach, evaluating programs on how effective they are in meeting patients needs. ASA is asking their members to share the report with their state representatives. "With the increased interest in medical cannabis access around the country, it is imperative that we ensure that new and existing programs adopt regulations and standards that provide patients with safe medicine while protecting their rights," said ASA Executive Director Steph Sherer. "This report will help policymakers create and maintain programs that put the patients first."Letter-grades for all 23 state laws and Washington, D.C.: Alaska (D-), Arizona (B-), California (B+), Colorado (B), Connecticut (C+), Delaware (C), Hawaii (B), Illinois (B+), Maine (B-), Maryland (B), Massachusetts (B), Michigan (D+), Minnesota (C), Montana (D-), Nevada (B), New Hampshire (C), New Jersey (C), New Mexico (B+), New York (C), Oregon (B), Rhode Island (C-), Vermont (D+), Washington (B+), and the District of Columbia (C).
Business As Usual Disrupted in San Francisco's Financial District. by D. Boyer

No business as usual, and ICEoutofSF were the mantra's being communicated at a protest over the treatment of immigrants in downtown San Francisco on Wednesday January 26, 2016. Women, men, teenagers, and children blocked two intersections in San Francisco's Financial District for several hours culminating in the arrests of at least 15 of them over the treatment of immigrant's by the U.S. Federal government.

Video and Photos from that protest.





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Recently and only weeks after San Francisco swore in newly elected Sheriff Vicki Hennessy a person by the name of Pedro Figueroa was detained by the San Francisco Police Department for simply reporting that his car was stolen. As part of that process the victim has to give the police identifying documents such as a drivers license and proof of ownership. Figueroa handed over the documents at which time the police "ran his name," and found warrants. So he was briefly detained by SFPD. The San Francisco Sheriff's Department called the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department aka ICE as part of their process. However Figueroa was released because there "were no details on the warrant." Coincidentally an ICE agent was parked outside the Southern Police Station in San Francisco when he was released. The ICE agents took him into custody. ICE said The Fugitive Operations officers targeted Mr. Zarceno-Figueroa for arrest based upon his conviction for DUI and an outstanding order of removal issued by an immigration judge in 2005. Mr.Zarceno-Figueroas case is now being reviewed by the immigration courts to determine whether he has a legal basis to remain in the U.S. Pedro Figueroa is from El Salvador.



That is just one more horror story featuring recent immigrants, so they take to the streets and protest and peacefully assemble and risk arrest to get their voices heard. Their are hundreds of other horror stories over the treatment of recent immigrant's by the US Federal government. Until their demands are met they promise there will be no business as usual.



Their demands are "Stop the Raids, and Stop the Deportations, #ICEoutofSF, and an end to the systemic abuse by an outdated immigration system. It appeared that at least 15 people were arrested, and taken away in paddy wagons.
The Muslim cleric Fedullah Gulen is trying to expand his publicly funded charter school empire with a new school in Fremont, California. The cult school is opposed by the school district and the Turkish government which is fighting with Gulen. Gulen was a supporter of the AKP Erdogan but had a falling out. That is why the Turkish government is opposing the schools. They fund large number of fundamentalist religious schools in Turkey and are attacking Kurdish teachers and public teacher unions and help support and fund ISIS terrorists.

Government of Turkey wants Fremont school board to reject Gulen run charter school-Religious Cult Running Magnolia US Publicly Funded Charter School Chain?January 27, 2016 Protest At Fremont School Board Against Gulen Schools6:30 p.m. WednesdayWhere: 4210 Technology Drive, Fremont http://www.contracostatimes.com/ /turkey-wants-fremont-schoBy Rebecca Parrrparr [at] bayareanewsgroup.com POSTED: 01/25/2016 03:00:23 PMPennsylvania, United States. A U.S.-based Muslim cleric, who has become Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan s chief foe, went on trial in absentia in Istanbul on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2016 accused of attempting to overthrow the government by instigating corruption probes in 2013 that targeted people close to the Turkish leader. Gulen and 68 other people, including former police chiefs, have been charged with attempting to overthrow the Turkish republic through the use of violence, leading a terrorist organization and "political espionage." Prosecutors are seeking life imprisonment for Gulen and others. (AP Photo/Selahattin Sevi, File) ( Selahattin Sevi )FREMONT -- A Southern California charter school wants to expand into Fremont, despite a history of financial problems and accusations of it being linked to a controversial Turkish cleric, which its leaders emphatically deny.In a bizarre twist, an attorney representing the Turkish government spoke against the Magnolia Public Schools charter application at a recent Fremont school board public hearing, saying it has ties to Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen. John Martin of Amsterdam & Partners in Washington, D.C., also alleged that Magnolia was not factual in its application.Magnolia's chief executive officer called the accusations strange and baffling."He seems to believe that we are associated with a religious group, which we are not," Magnolia CEO Caprice Young said at the Jan. 13 school board meeting."We're not affiliated with anything but educating public school students in California," Young said Friday. The school has straightened out its finances, she said.The Fremont school board on Wednesday will consider Magnolia Public Schools' request to open a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school. District staff is recommending the petition be denied.Fremont Unified did not investigate possible connections between Magnolia and the Gulen movement, Superintendent James Morris said."We did our analysis of the charter based on the merits of the petition that (was) submitted," he said.AdvertisementMartin said his law firm was hired by the Turkish government to investigate Gulen and his movement. That investigation led him to Magnolia schools, he said.Followers of Gulen, a Muslim imam, have U.S. charter schools that emphasize math and science. Martin and others, including the American magazine the New Republic, allege those include Magnolia. There have been accusations of improper use of public funds and importing Turkish teachers in other states, but Magnolia has not been linked to those investigations.Gulen's followers are believed to operate schools, universities, corporations, nonprofits and publications around the world, according to articles in the New Republic.Young said she was mystified by the Gulen accusations. Magnolia's founders did include Turkish immigrants who are progressive Muslims who "believe in peace and interfaith dialogue and who see education as a priority, and Gulen is not the only world leader who is professing these things," Young told the Orange County Register.In 1999, while in the United States, Gulen was charged in Turkey with trying to create an Islamic government. Since then, he has lived in Pennsylvania.DISTRICT STANCEThe school district's staff report lists three reasons it is recommending the charter petition be denied: Magnolia is unlikely to be successful; the petition does not have enough valid signatures; and it does not have comprehensive descriptions of everything required in a charter petition.The staff report noted that, at a recent public hearing, no parents, students, teachers, district staff members or residents spoke in support of the petition. Several speakers raised concerns about the petitioners and the petition, according to the staff report.Charter schools are public schools, funded with taxpayer dollars.Magnolia emphasizes science, technology, engineering and math, and reports high student achievement and test scores."We were approached by a group of parents who saw success of our Santa Clara school," Young told the board regarding Magnolia's interest in Fremont.In Santa Clara County, Magnolia Science Academy won a five-year renewal of its school's charter in 2013 despite concerns about its finances. But the board did compliment the school on its academics.Enrollment at Magnolia's San Jose school has declined for several years, dropping to 25 percent of projected students in 2015, when it moved from Santa Clara.Los Angeles Unified School District tried to close three of the eight Magnolia schools because of financial problems, according to the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 state audit confirmed problems with spending controls, but also found that Los Angeles Unified did not give the schools time to get their finances in order before revoking the charters.Magnolia has addressed the concerns mentioned in the state audit, said Young, a former Los Angeles school board member who was named Magnolia CEO last year."We've made some big changes. I contracted out all our accounting to a professional firm. I hired a new chief financial officer," she said.During the period the state audited, Magnolia hired a number of employees who were not U.S. citizens, primarily from Turkey, according to the state."As you know, there's a tremendous shortage of math and science teachers," Young said.Magnolia submitted charter school applications in several Southern California school districts late last year and many of the teacher signatures on Magnolia's Fremont application also appear on those petitions, according to the staff report. Eight of the teachers live in Los Angeles County and work at other Magnolia schools. Magnolia is aware of the problems with teacher signatures and has withdrawn its petition in other districts, the staff report said."What we want to do is make sure our top teachers become seed teachers in our new schools so that what's good about one Magnolia school becomes good about other Magnolia schools," she said.Martin, the attorney, questioned why Magnolia has only had one local meeting with parents at the Islamic Center of Fremont. The staff report also noted the single gathering."Despite asserting the intent to target Latino students, its single outreach effort did not result in signatures reflecting meaningful interest in enrolling Latino students," the report said.Young said if the charter was approved, there would be outreach enrollment meetings throughout Fremont."We're a public school; we're secular," she said. "We make a point of welcoming all students and all families."Contact Rebecca Parr at 510-293-2473 or follow her at Twitter.com/rdparr1.Fremont Unified School BoardWhen: 6:30 p.m. WednesdayWhere: 4210 Technology Drive, FremontMore on Gulen Charter SchoolsMore video on Gulen Charter SchoolsFBI Whistleblower and Teacher Expose Islamic Gulen Movement Infiltrating U.S. Through Charter SchoolsWhen asked if she considers Gulen a threat to U.S. interests, she responded, 100%, Absolutely.By Joshua Cook -Jul 28, 2014What Is The Islamic Gulen Movement?In rural Pennsylvania, a Turkish-born Muslim imam lives in self-imposed exile.The imam, Fethullah Gulen, came to the United States in 1999 due to cited health problems and has stayed in the United States after gaining his visa with help from former CIA officials. The FBI previously resisted granting permanent residency status to Gulen. According to leaked cables, parts of the U.S. government believe that Gulen is a radical Islamist whose moderate message cloaks a more sinister and radical agenda.In an interview with 60 Minutes, Gulen followers claim that he does not control or have anything to do with the day-to-day dealings of the massive network of charter schools he helped found.Gulen-inspired schools are the largest charter network in the U.S. and receive approximately $150 million a year in taxpayer money. There are about 130 of these charter schools in 26 states where the majority of the teachers are from Turkey, as well as many of the contracts for construction and operation have gone to Turkish businesses. Those actions have raised red flags for the U.S. government.The schools themselves are considered high quality and are focused on STEM-based learning  something that proponents of the Gulen Movement claim is lacking in U.S. education.According to 60 Minutes, in Turkey, Gulen schools are everywhere and considered the best. But recently Turkey passed a law to shut down Gulen schools, a main source of the movements revenue.Why Are My Tax Dollars Funding an Islamic Movement?In the United States, many of the Gulen schools have long waiting lists. But that comes at a price for our American teachers:Our tax dollars are paying for them to come over here and take our jobs, said Mary Addi, a teacher. They want to give you the impression that theyre just hard-working guys over here to try and educate our kids, because American teachers are just too stupid.According to Addi, those Turkish teachers visa applicants oddly include English teachers. Gulen brings in foreign teachers and then takes a cut of their salary. She learned this after marrying a Turkish teacher. She said that after he was paid. Hed cash the check and return 40% of his salary back to the school for a secret fund used by the movement.These allegations have caused the U.S. government to investigate for immigration fraud as well as misuse of taxpayer money. It has also caused many to wonder about the actual intent of the Gulen school.According to a secret U.S. government document released by Wikileaks, Deep and widespread doubts remain, however, about his (Gulen) movements ultimate intentions. We have anecdotal evidence of the pressure that the various circles of his movement put on people they have drawn in, for instance severe pressure on businessmen to continue to give money to support Gulenist schools or other activities. We have multiple reliable reports that the Gulenists use their school network (including dozens of schools in the U.S.) to cherry-pick students they think are susceptible to being molded as proselytizers and we have steadily heard reports about how the schools indoctrinate boarding students.One public school teacher from the South spoke with Benswann.coms Joshua Cook on condition of anonymity, said her students recently won a free cultural trip to Turkey through an art contest sponsored by a Gulen organization called the Atlantic Institute.The teacher had a terrible experience. They take you on this grueling 10-day death march through Turkey, said the teacher. It was exhausting.After being food deprived the Gulenist hosts brought us to a building called the Journalist and Writers light house which was a compound. This is where we got the cult spiel for 2 hours. The speaker told us, Fethullah Gulen, he is the imam that sheds light on the dark waters of our time,' said the teacher.This trip was not about a moderate message of interfaith dialogue or Turkish culture. The whole purpose was to promote the imam Fethullah Gulen, said the teacher.The teacher added, the Gulen movements ultimate goal is to open charter schools in the U.S. to funnel U.S. tax dollars to back into the Gulen movement in Turkey. They skim just enough off the public taxpayers from these charter schools so it wont look suspicious.Gulen schools are among the nations largest users of the H1B visas. In 2009, the schools received government approvals for 684 visas  more than Google Inc. (440) but fewer than a technology powerhouse such as Intel Corp. (1,203), reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.Critics also find it hard to believe that qualified American teachers in math and science are hard to find.Former president of the parents group at the Young Scholars of Central Pennsylvania Charter School, Ruth Hocker started asking questions when popular, certified American teachers were replaced by uncertified Turkish men who often spoke limited English and were paid higher salaries. Most were placed in math and science classes.They would tell us they couldnt find qualified American teachers, Hocker told the Philadelphia Inquirer. That made no sense in Pennsylvania State Universitys hometown, she said: They graduate here every year.Other school parents described how uncertified teachers on H1B visas were moved from one charter school to another when their emergency teaching credentials expired and told of a pattern of sudden turnovers of Turkish business managers, administrators, and board members.Leaked communications from a diplomatic cable suggests that some Gulen teachers maybe using the school as cover to get to the U.S.From Wikileaks: we are concerned by the link with charter schools in the U.S. that have petitioned for marginally-qualified H1B candidates (The Kentucky Consular Center and our posts in Turkey have started compiling a list of these Gulenist charter schools in the US for use in visa adjudication). These applicants were simply not convincing, did not seem as fully in tune with Gulens approach to education and might be using the reputation of the school as a cover to get to the U.S.Recently, FBI agents carried out raids at 19 Gulen Charter schools in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio as part of an ongoing white-collar crime matter.Many oppose the Gulen movement due to their lack of transparency, the cloud of suspicion regarding their funding, hierarchy, their pursuit of buying political influence, and their true purposes, and leaving U.S. taxpayers in the dark.Tax payers being forced to indirectly support Islamist movements is one thing but is there something more insidious planned by the Gulen movement?While Gulen followers and some U.S. officials claim Gulen teaches a moderate version of Islam, some believe it is only part of a strategy to infiltrate the U.S.According to The Middle East Quarterly, in 1999, Turkish television aired footage of Gulen delivering sermons which revealed his plan to implement Sharia law and use controversial tactics to achieve those goals.In the sermon, he said:You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers  until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria  like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it  You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey  Until that time, any step taken would be too earlylike breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you allin confidence  trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.Is Gulen a Front for the CIA?A classified communication reveals that many secularists in Turkey are convinced that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is the creation of the United States Government (USG), and that Washington bolsters and funds the Fethullah Gulen movement.Is the CIA or another agency in the USG using the Gulen movement to fund cold war operations overseas? Is the USG using the Gulen Islamic schools to influence Central Asia with a more moderate version of Islam to rival more racial Islamic sects?Some claim that Gulen is a front for the CIA. See here and here.If there is anyone who knows the truth about the inner workings of U.S. and Turkey relations it is FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds.Edmonds is considered the the most gagged person in American history. The USG invoked state secrets privilege in her case and she is prevented from revealing government corruption and cannot discuss certain aspects of her knowledge regarding her case. The DOJs Inspector General stated her claims are credible and Edmonds says her claims can be backed up by FBI files.Benswann.coms Joshua Cook asked Edmonds via email about her thoughts regarding Gulen. Edmonds has been covering the Gulen movement for years and has extensive research on her website.Cook asked Edmonds, is Gulen a threat to US interests?This has to do with Gulens role in terrorism, said Edmonds. Under the guise of schools [Madrasas] in Central Asia & Caucasus his network is involved in training terrorists [from Chechens to other Islamic Jihadis in the area]. The bureau had him under investigations since 1998. However, they were prevented from pursuing the cases [despite all evidence collected] due to direct pressure from the CIA/State Deptment. How do I know? Some of the case files were under the division where I worked [counterintelligence]. Other investigations were being conducted under the FBIs crime & terrorism division.Cook asked, Is the CIA using the Gulen network to fund CIA ops in Turkey?They did, said Edmonds. It was also a channel for money laundering for their $20 billion worth network. They bring teachers from Turkey. They provide them with decent/high salaries, but then, they force them to voluntarily and individually contribute over 50% of their income to their various front charity organizations  I met with several ex-teachers and spoke with them in 2006-2008; however, because of overt and covert threats from Gulens network to their families in Turkey, they were not willing to come forward or go on record.While under oath during a legal disposition, Edmonds, was asked if she had any information regarding Fethullah Gulen.He landed on the Turkish governments wanted list and was going to be persecuted for wanting to replace Turkeys secular government with an Islamic/Sharia-type of government. When he was wanted in Turkey for that and was going to go jail, he actually got on a plane and came to the United States, and was given immediately a visa to stay in the United States, said Edmonds.Edmonds states that Gulen has close ties to training militant Muslims.Edmonds claims in her testimony that Gulen established more than 300 Madrasahs in Central Asia and what he calls universities that have a front that is called Moderate Islam, but he is closely involved in training Mujahideen (Al-Qaeda)  like militia Islam who are brought from Pakistan and Afghanistan into Central Asia where his Madrasahs operate, and his organizations network is estimated to be around $25 billion, and that he has close ties to training militant Muslims.When asked if she considers Gulen a threat to U.S. interests, she responded, 100%, Absolutely.Watch Sibel Edmondss testimony regarding Gulen Schools and U.S. Foreign Policy Connections.Gulen Cult Gets $8.7 million from California To Build Charter SchoolOffice of Public School Construction Helps Break Ground for New Orange County SchoolAugust 11, 2015The Office of Public School Constructions (OPSC) Executive Officer Lisa Silverman joined local officials in a groundbreaking ceremony on August 7 for the Magnolia Science Academy in Santa Ana.The new K-12 charter school will provide learning space for up to 1,020 Santa Ana Unified School District students, while the construction of the project will bolster the local economy through the creation of jobs and the purchase of building materials.The project will receive approximately $8.7 million in state funding from the State Allocation Board, and $8.7 million from a state loan. The project will provide 33 new permanent classrooms, and include robotics and computer labs, along with a new gymnasium and restrooms.OPSC serves as staff to the State Allocation Board and implements and administers a $35 billion voter-approved school facilities construction program.Repeal Charter School Laws Recipient CommitteePetition to Support Ballot Initiative to REPEAL the CA Charter School Act of 199REPEAL Charter School Act of 1992 in CA Ballot InitiativeVoices Against Privatization of Public EducationKurdish public school teachers disobey Turkish government order to evacuate Kurdish towns: We will stay and keep our students alive! "teachers organized under the Egitim-Sen, the teachers Union decided to resist the move to abandon their students."Tarih: 14 Aralk 2015Yesterday Turkish government ordered all schools closed, all dormitories shut down and teachers to leave the towns of Cizre and Silopi in the Kurdish area of Turkey. This order came at the time the Turkish military started amassing outside the towns and extra police force was ordered to move to these towns, already bustling with cops from all over Turkey.Kurds are in the way of Turkish president Erdogans fantasy of building the defunct Ottoman Empire, the last Turkish, Sunni Muslim empire that crumbled as the modern Turkey came to life in 1923. In order to create the greater Islamic empire Kurdish regions in Turkey, Syria and Iraq will need to be invaded by Turkey.Recently, implementing democracy in accordance with the European Union vision and to break the dependency to the central government mostly the towns and villages in Eastern Turkey (Kurdistan) started a self-sufficiency and self-governance model.In the Turkish tradition of central state this is nothing that could be tolerated. Democracy, freedoms and equality is only permissible as much as the central government and the state allows.Having had enough with racist and authoritarian governors appointed by the central government, some Kurdish towns decided to implement democracy where the daily business of running the towns would be transparent instead of being secretive as it is currently, true to the Turkish tradition. In order to bring more real democracy, the progressive HDP party is electing a women as co-mayors to every town they were elected. Bringing a system of co-mayors HDP, a pro-Kurdish party, is promoting women in all levels of local governance in an area known to be the most male dominated, religious and patriarchal.It is easy to see how the Muslim central government finds this repulsive.When the progressive HDP was able to pass the 10% threshold to gain votes away from the ruling Islamic AKP (JDP) party in the June elections, it became the target of all conservatives, Muslims, fascist parties and the traditional Kemalists. Muslims oppose the HDP for its progressive ideology and for opposing their government. Nationalists, fascists and Kemalists consider the HDP a threat because it advances a pro-Kurdish stance instead of the traditional Turkish nationalist propaganda.Since the HDP governing towns and villages in Turkish Kurdistan started this experimentation with democracy as self-governance, central Turkish government forces have attacked in full force. Many towns were shelled with heavy military artillery and police joined forces with Syrian jihadist terrorists to attack the residences as the central state declared curfew. Snipers on roof tops murdered people who stepped outside looking for food after being confined to their homes for more than 5-6 days for 24 hours. Turkish police first destroy the electrical power transformers during a curfew leaving the residents in dark. Then the Turkish state attacks start, usually at night where the cops and the terrorists from Syria together begin raiding the Kurdish homes and breaking down doors mostly randomly. It is a common practice of the Turkish police and special forces to just start spraying entire neighborhoods with automatic rifles, even though the streets are empty. Also, the cops using the curfew as a cover deface the store fronts and walls with racist threats, writing, If you are a Kurd, you must obey, if you are a Turk you must rule!Due to these attacks with the help of Turkish military and helicopters nearly 50 people have lost their lives in the last few months in the Kurdish region alone from police attacks.Nearly all mayors and co-mayors of these towns have been arrested by the Turkish AKP government.Two days ago these attacks against the Kurdish democracy of self-governance took a steep hike.Army units from all over Turkey as well as extra police units have been summoned to the towns implementing co-mayors and giving women the opportunity to govern the towns.All hospitals in the towns of Silopi, Cizre in Sirnak have been put on notice to expect high activity and be prepared.Government ordered teachers to leave town immediately. With schools and student quarters closed until further notice, some teachers and their families scrambled to leave their homes. All buses being full, these teachers and their families had to walk around 3 miles to reach a nearby highway to find any means of transportation to evacuate the Kurdish town.However, progressive teachers organized under the Egitim-Sen, the teachers Union decided to resist the move to abandon their students.The co-chair of Egitim Sen Union in Sirnak, Serhat Ugur, confirmed the military buildup in their town before the expected Turkish state attack. He said, I heard from the 1990s generation (where the Turkish state had the entire Kurdistan under siege and murdered more than 40,000 people in its war against the Kurds) however we are now in a situation worse than those days. We are living atrocities many times worse than the 1990s. However, I am still going to school, facing all obstacles. But what kind of hatred, what kind of preparation is this that we are seeing, I am unable to comprehend. What will they say to this population tomorrow? They keep repeating that the main reason for these assaults is for the defense of the country and all else is detail. We are seeing a level of military transfer to the region never seen before.Tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery are moving to the towns implementing democracy from all over Turkey as far away as 800 miles. Planes are whizzing in and out of the local airport carrying soldiers, police, special forces and of course their associate Syrian jihadist goons.Ugur added that it was impossible to see the end of the military convoy as they rolled into his town. It is as if we have a war here. They are coming as if to destroy our whole town and raze it to the ground. How could such a move be justified? If this happened in Palestine everybody would be up in arms, we are following the news, but not a whisper of the events here is heard. We are facing a total annihilation. They (the government) are coming here as if to confine us inside for about 10-15 days. He called for all to stand up and resist this buildup and the upcoming attack.Ugur, the co-chair of the union, said the central government, through the ministry of education, ordered the teachers to evacuate the towns and most teachers had done so. I am a teacher for more than 10 years. Ive never seen such an order. We liken this order to evacuate the town to the threats received from ISIS before they take over a town where they promise to severe the heads of the people. We are wondering if the Esedullah team (an illegal, Islamic and racist organization inside the Turkish police force) will be raiding us. Our lawyers called the education ministry but the local department head replied that he is not aware of such an evacuation order. We are now in doubt as we are ordered to evacuate but the government is not standing behind its orders. Will they send the order in writing after the fact, we dont know. Majority of the teachers have left town, but there are some left behind. I will not leave. We have teacher friends who say, I am not only a teacher when the student has his/her school uniform on and refuse to leave and abandon their students. We have teachers who are from all over the country and refusing to abandon their students.Trying to describe the mood of the people in the region, Ugur added, People are thinking, just imagine what may happen if they even pull their teachers from my town. People will ask, will this be a surgical strike or a mass massacre. We have tens and hundreds of teachers who are disobeying the order to evacuate. We are not teachers only when our students are in their school uniforms. If any of our teachers are thinking about abandoning the town our suggestion is to stay here instead of leaving. We are teachers who also teach life and the obstacles and challenges in life and we are also the teachers for the entire population of the town and not only the students. We will stay here and stand by our people to keep them alive. We are not only tasked with teaching history or geography. Our students search for answers by looking directly into our eyes. If we leave, how can we look into their eyes, look at their faces when we return? There is a so-called policy to keep the children away from the war; however they are bringing the war to the children.Sendika.org News. (Mehmet Bayram)Council of Europe reacts to Turkish journalists arrestsSunday,November 29 2015, Your time is 11:30:13 PM PSTCouncil of Europe reacts to Turkish journalists arrestsIpek Yezdani - BRUSSELSA man holds a Cumhuriyet newspaper on November 27, 2015 in front of the media headquarters, during a demonstration after the arrest of the Editor in Chief. AFP PhotoThe arrest of prominent Turkish journalists Can Dundar and Erdem Gul has again raised concerns about media freedom in Turkey, a spokesperson from the European Council has told daily Hurriyet, with the reporters urging the EU not to ignore human rights violations in Turkey as it bargains with Ankara on refugees.The statement made by the spokesperson of European Council Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland noted that Turkey itself has adopted an action plan to prevent future violations of the European Human Rights Convention and that this included violations against Article 10 on freedom of expression and freedom of the media.We will raise the most recent issues at the meeting of the working group which will be held between the Justice Ministry of Turkey and the Council of Europe in mid-December. Mr. Jagland will address our concerns with the Ministry of Justice, Jaglands spokesperson said.Regarding the arrest, the spokesperson confirmed this case and others would be raised at a meeting between Council of Europe experts and Turkish officials in Ankara on Dec. 17.The spokesperson said the council was concerned about yet another issue regarding freedom of expression and media freedom in Turkey which needed to be resolved and protected under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Otherwise, more cases might come to the European Court of Human Rights, he added.The statement came as Dundar and Gul, who were detained Nov. 26 on charges of espionage and assisting a terrorist organization through a news report on the alleged supply of arms to fighters in Syria, sent a letter to EU leaders just a day before a Turkey-EU summit that will take place in Brussels to broker a deal on the growing refugee crisis, urging the EU not to compromise on an agreement with Turkey to help stem the flow of migrants to Europe.We sincerely hope that the meeting produces a lasting solution to this problem. We would also like to hope that your desire to end the crisis will not stand in the way of your sensitivity toward human rights and freedom of the press and expression as fundamental values of the Western world, read the letter penned by Dundar, Cumhuriyets editor-in-chief, and Gul, the papers Ankara bureau chief.We remind you that our common values can only be protected by a common stand and solidarity and that this solidarity is both vital and urgent, the pair said.The U.S. State Department also expressed concerns over press freedom in the country, calling on Turkish authorities to ensure freedom to freely voice opinions and criticisms.We are troubled by the pre-trial arrest yesterday of senior editors of the respected Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, the U.S. State Department said in a written statement on Nov. 27, a day after the arrest of Dundar and Gul.The investigation, criminal charges, and arrest raise serious concerns about the Turkish governments commitment to the fundamental principle of media freedom. These events are only the latest in a series of judicial and law enforcement actions taken under questionable circumstances against Turkish media outlets critical of the government, it said.We call on Turkish authorities to ensure that all individuals and organizations  including but not limited to the media  are free to voice a full range of opinions and criticism, in accordance with Turkeys constitutional guarantees of media freedom and freedom of expression. This will ultimately strengthen Turkeys democracy, it added.Dundar and Gul were sent to Silivri Prison late Nov. 26 after an Istanbul court ordered their arrest on the publication of footage purporting to show the state intelligence agency helping send weapons to Syria.Footage released by Cumhuriyet on May 29 showed gendarmerie and police officers opening crates in the backs of trucks which contained what the daily described as weapons and ammunition sent by the intelligence service to fighters in Syria in January 2014.In the aftermath, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said those that published the story would pay a heavy price while reiterating that the goods were just destined for Turkmens in Syria.Making remarks on the arrest, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu signaled that Dundar and Gul could be tried without arrest, daily Hurriyet reported.A trial [of Dundar and Gul] without arrest could be seen as more convenient, the premier told a group of reporters in parliament in Ankara on Nov. 28, adding that the decision to try Dundar and Gul without arrest did not depend on their initiative, but on the countrys independent judiciary.Republican Peoples Party (CHP) Kemal Klcdaroglu, meanwhile, described the arrest as a black spot on the countrys democratic history.Imprisoning two journalists is a black spot in our history of democracy, Klcdaroglu said on Nov. 29 while visiting the offices of Cumhuriyet in Istanbuls Sisli district.November/30/2015
Erin Brockovich continues her battle for environmental justice and will be heard streaming live Thursday at 2 PM Pacific time. She's seen here demanding action on the SoCal Gas leak.

Socal Gas stores enough methane in their Aliso Canyon storage facility to supply all of Southern California for a full month, but for 3 months they've been releasing it directly into the air. During this time, California's greenhouse gas output has increased by 25%. On Tuesday, South Coast Air Quality Management District filed suit against SoCal and is asking $25 Million in damages from the company for creating a public nuisance by their negligence. action to protect the interests of life on this planet.

132 residents of the affected Los Angeles neighborhood, Porter Ranch, were evacuted and thousands more have either moved or are relocating due to respriatory problems caused by additives to the gas. 2000 attended a community meeting last month led by Erin Brockovich , demanding action.

The Daily News reported:

I feel compelled to be here and to help my neighbor, she said. I certainly understand your plight and that we all have so much in common. Brockovich brought an attorney from law firm Weitz & Luxenberg  where she works, a law firm spokeswoman said  a meteorologist and a water pollution expert who gave about an hour presentation and answered questions from residents. Residents asked about health concerns and whether air filtration systems installed on their homes by the gas company would be effective. More than 3,600 residents have left their homes or are in the process of relocation due to the odors emitted by a leaking gas well at the Aliso Canyon storage facility in the Santa Susana Mountains above Porter Ranch. Mercaptan, an additive to natural gas that smells like rotten eggs, has caused symptoms of nosebleeds, headaches, nausea, respiratory problems and stomach discomfort among residents.

Brockovich became a household word at the turn of the century when Julia Roberts portrayed her in a movie about her campaign against groundwater contamination by Pacific Gas and Electric in 1993, but the real brockovich is not frozen in time and the Socal leak is not her only project.

Thursday at 2PM PST, she will stream live as a guest on The Reverend Billy Show, hosted by Billy Talen and his "Stop Shopping" Gospel Choir. The WBAI live stream address is -

http://stream.wbai.org:8000/wbai_128

They've annouced the time as 5-6PM EST, which means it starts at 2PM on the West Coast.

IndyRadio will rebroadcast the show Sunday, time to be annouced at https://indyradio.info - if you have an older browser, use http://www.rd0.org

David Roknich,

INDYRADIO The future of radio belongs to us. Stream more IndyRadio playlists at http://ch0.us and http://rd0.org
New York, NY A judge has reportedly denied GlaxoSmithKlines motion to dismiss A judge has reportedly denied GlaxoSmithKlines motion to dismiss Zofran lawsuits , which alleged the morning sickness drug caused birth defects in infants exposed to the medication prior to birth. Plaintiffs in the Zofran side effects lawsuits argued its too early to dismiss the lawsuits because no discovery has happened yet, and because animal studies suggest a link between Zofran and birth defects.

On January 22, a Massachusetts federal judge agreed with plaintiffs and rejected GlaxoSmithKlines motion to dismiss. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV said he couldnt dismiss the lawsuits without giving the families a chance to examine the facts. GlaxoSmithKlines motion to dismiss was based on federal preemption law, with Glaxo reportedly arguing that past decisions by the FDA regarding Zofran indicated it would reject a stronger label for the drug.Lawsuits filed against GlaxoSmithKline allege women were given Zofran off label for morning sickness and were not warned about the risk of birth defects they argue are linked to use of the drug. Because the drug was prescribed off label to treat morning sickness - which is not against any rules - the families argue the FDA may not have seen evidence about the risks of using Zofran while pregnant.Plaintiffs do not know whether GSK ever provided the FDA this or any other evidence of severe heart defects, families wrote in response to GlaxoSmithKlines motion to dismiss (as found in court documents). What Plaintiffs do know, however, is that the Zofran warning labels and available marketing materials were silent as to such evidence. Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone at the FDA ever considered these animal studies in conjunction with the Woodcock letter. (The Woodcock letter is an October 2015 letter from Janet Woodcock of the FDA in response to a citizens petition regarding Zofran.)The families further argued that animal studies suggest a link between Zofran and potential birth defects, and they believe GlaxoSmithKline has that evidence. In 2012, GlaxoSmithKline settled allegations from the US Department of Justice that the drugmaker had illegally promoted multiple drugs - including Zofran - for off-label use. Although prescribing medication off label is not illegal, promoting it for such uses is.According to court documents, there are 211 lawsuits consolidated for pretrial proceedings in MDL 2657. A class-action lawsuit has also been filed in Canada alleging babies were born with birth defects - including cleft lip and cleft palate - after being exposed to Zofran prior to birth.The lawsuit is In Re. Zofran (Ondansetron) Products Liability Litigation, case number 1:15-md-02657, in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
- Cameroonian troops chased suspected members of the Boko Haram sect

- Bullets from the shootings killed at least 40 villagers

- Villagers who are still trapped in Gwadale community narrated their ordeal

According to witnesses, bullets from the shootings killed many innocent people.

At least 40 villagers in Gwadale border community in Gwoza local government area of Borno state were allegedly killed on Monday, January 25, by Cameroonian soldiers.

According to witnesses, bullets from the shootings killed many innocent people by Cameroonian troops who claimed they were chasing suspected members of the Boko Haram sect.

Leadership reports that Muhammad Abba, a former ward secretary, said that he received a chilling call from his relatives who are still trapped in the community.

I still have my family, including my eldest son, there in Gwadale. But those that called me yesterday using the Cameroonian mobile network said most of the corpses are still left unattended.

READ ALSO: Twenty-five Dead As Four Suicide Bombers Attack A Village

[article_adwert]

One of my brothers who survived the shootout said the Cameroonian soldiers arrived Gwadale in early hours of Monday, and began to shoot sporadically. Most of our people who ran out of their houses in fear were killed by bullets; up till now, as they said, corpses still litter the grounds with no one attending to them, because those remaining in the village are aged men and women.

I have not heard from my eldest son since the attack; and those that called said they had run into Ashigashiya, he said.

Confirming the incident, Muhammed Gava, the spokesman of the vigilante group in the area, said: Our people are being killed by Boko Haram and Cameroonian soldiers, yet our government is watching.

This is the third time troops of the Cameroonian troops are being accused of reckless cross border activities.

In November 2015, Cameroonian troops were said to have crossed the border into the Nigeria, killed about 150 villagers and burnt their houses.

A similar incident happened in December 2015, when more than 70 Nigerians were reportedly killed by the Cameroonian soldiers who invaded Kirawa-Jimni village in Gwoza local government area of Borno state.

Source: Legit.ng
- President Buhari on a three-day visit to Kenya

- Buhari would attend a memorial service for Kenyan soldiers

- He would also preside over a Kenya-Nigeria Business Forum

President Muhammadu Buhari has left Abuja today, January 27 on a three-day official state visit to Kenya.

President Buhari on his way to Kenya

Buhari will join his host, President Uhuru Kenyatta and other dignitaries at a memorial service for Kenyan soldiers killed by Al-Shabaab militants in Somalia on January 15.

He will also attend bilateral talks in Nairobi on Thursday with Kenyan government officials led by President Kenyatta. Read more news in Kenya today at tuko.co.ke

Buhari will attend a memorial service for Kenyan soldiers killed by Al-Shabaab militants

Both presidents will preside over a Kenya-Nigeria Business Forum in Nairobi.

READ ALSO: Five major highlights Of President Buhari's trip to Kenya

Those accompanying Buhari to Kenya include the ministers of Foreign Affairs, Finance, and Industry, Trade and Investment.

Buhari left this morning for Kenya

After his visit, the president will leave Kenya on Friday to Addis Ababa for the 26th Summit of African Union Heads of State and Government. He will participate in a meeting of the African Union's Peace and Security Council before returning to Abuja on Sunday, January 31.

Kenya and Nigeria have signed several agreements in the past and Buharis visit is expected to strengthen several agreements signed previously and boost business interactions.

Source: Legit.ng
- The judge ruled that Olisa Metuh must perfect the conditions of bail for him to be released from prison.

- The judge said: ''The court cannot be expected to sit on appeal over its decision.''

- Metuh is accused of money laundering by the EFCC

[article_adwert]

The judge of the federal high court in Abuja, Justice Okon Abang has ruled that Chief Olisa Metuh, spokesman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), must perfect the conditions of bail for him to be released from prison.

Metuh heading to the court room on Monday, January 25

READ ALSO: Metuhs Handcuffs: PDP Chieftain Condemns Presidency

According to Justice Abang, ''The court cannot be expected to sit on appeal over its decision.'' He however relaxed the conditions for sureties.

He therefore directed Metuh to go on appeal against the ruling of the court if he was not satisfied with its decision.

On the amendment of his bail conditions, the judge held that the scope of ownership of property for the sureties was now expanded to include all parts of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and not just at Maitama as earlier pronounced.

Recall that the defence counsel, Emeka Etiaba, had prayed the court to vary the conditions of Metuhs bail on six grounds. One of the grounds was that the order requiring the provision of two sureties who must have landed property at Maitama, Abuja, be varied.

But counsel to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Tahir Sylvanus had said: The prosecution is fundamentally opposed to the application of the first defendant for variation of bail.

In response, the defence counsel argued that the prosecution had no right to oppose the application since it did not file a counter-affidavit ,and asked the court to exercise its discretion and vary the conditions of the accused persons bail.

READ ALSO: Dasuki Gate: Court Adjourns Hearing On Diversion Of N19 billion

At his trial on Monday, January 25, two prosecution witness gave details of how they received millions of naira, changed currencies and made investment for Metuh.

At the beginning of the hearing of the PDPs spokesman, he was docked at the court, as he was again brought to the court in handcuffs.

Meanwhile, Adeyanju Deji, the PDPs director of new media, recently accused President Muhammadu Buhari of denying him access to Metuh.

Source: Legit.ng
- Iranian ambassador in Nigeria condemns the detention of Ibrahim El-Zakzaky.

- Calls for independent and fair investigation into the Zaria clash.

- Demands compensation for Zaria victims and rights for Nigerian Shi'ites.

Iran has described the continued incarceration of the leader of the Shiite Islamic Movement in Nigeria, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, as illegal and unfair.

This is according to the countrys ambassador to Nigeria Saeed Koozechi, who made his comments in an interview with journalists in Abuja on Tuesday.

Iranian ambassador Saeed Koozechi with President Buhari

He said that the official position of the Islamic Republic of Iran is that El-Zakzaky, who suffered gunshot wounds during the Nigerian Armys clash with the Shiite sect in December 2015, should not be kept in detention for a long time.

The Shiite is a small minority group in Nigeria, they engage in peaceful religious activities, they are not harmful to anyone, Koozechi said.

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We have never heard of unrest and extremism from the Shiite followers in Nigeria.

Ambassador Koozechi descried the Zaria incident as unfortunate and regrettable, while making it clear that his country expects the investigation into what exactly happened to be fair and transparent.

READ ALSO: Islamic Movement in Nigeria releases Zaria missing list

He also called on the Nigerian authorities to provide financial compensation to those who suffered as a result of the massacre.

We dont believe the continued detention of El-Zakzaky is legal or fair, he shouldnt be kept for a long time. We look forward to seeing his release and his wife soon.

The Shiite are Nigerians too and they have rights like other citizens. The government must be clever to not pour fuel on fire. Recognizing the rights of minorities is a real value to social development, the ambassador said.

READ ALSO: Zaria bloodbath - 57 Shi'ites sentences to prison

The Zaria massacre, which saw hundreds of Shia Muslims gunned down by the army, has raised tensions between Nigeria and Iran, the world's most powerful Shia nation.

The Iranian government has called on Nigeria to prevent further violence against Muslims and to protect holy sites in the country.

The Nigerian army said it opened fire after the Shi'ites blocked roads and tried to assassinate a general, which the Islamic Movement in Nigeria strongly denied.

Source: Legit.ng
- An explosion was recorded on this day in 2002 at the Ikeja military cantonment

- Over 1000 Nigerians died, with at least 5,000 people injured and over 12,000 homeless.

- Survivors talk about the incident 14 years after

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READ ALSO: Nigerian Army Kills 14 Boko Haram Fighters In Yobe

The Ikeja military cantonment was a large military cantonment and storage area in the city of Lagos and in January 2002, the base was being used to store a large quantity of "high calibre bombs", as well as other sundry explosives. However, on the afternoon of January 27, a fire broke out in a street market being held next to the base, which was also home to the families of soldiers and at around 6pm, the fire had spread to the base's main munitions store, causing a loud explosion.

Immediately, the blast killed many of the base staff and their families and destroyed several nearby streets as the flying debris starting numerous fires further afield, collapsing many buildings in the process. But as people fled the flames, some stumbled into a concealed canal and were drowned, many of them children separated from their families in the confusion.

However, the erstwhile president Olusegun Obasanjo arrived at the scene of the disaster on January 28 along with most senior city and national politicians, and he told the crowd waiting to see him: I took the opportunity to come to Lagos very early this morning to assess the situation on ground, I dont have to be here (he muttered when the angry crowd refused to listen).

The GOC has reported to me, the governor has reported to me and I have deliberated with them on what we have to do to provide relief and immediate attention. We will connect children with their parents and to provide food for those who are scattered from their homes.

We have decided to make sure this is looked into. We will help you as much as we can but you should also help us to be able to help you, all that needs to be done will be done.

14 years down the line, Legit.ng remembers the over 1,000 Nigerians killed in the explosion. Our correspondent embarked on a mission to the Ikeja military cantonment to speak to some survivors and find out what sort of renovations had taken place in the cantonment.

Some eye witnesses who spoke to our correspondent also narrated how many Nigerians lost their lives in the horrible scene.

An eye witness on the condition of anonymity told Legit.ng: It was January 27, 2002, I think 4pm if I can remember well. It was on a Sunday and I just got back from Church and I was supposed to go to a place within the Barrack with my family which was very close to where the bombs were kept. I wanted to do a dental surgery but the dentist wasnt around, so I had to take my family back home, that was when we suddenly heard a very loud explosion and that was it.

The next minute everybody took to their heels but fortunately for my family we found ourselves after we were separated and so we were able to run together which a lot of families couldnt. Some people went north, some went south. It was very down casting because it was like the world was coming to an end at that particular point. What I had in my mind was to just run out of Lagos because the explosion continued. For me and my family we ran from Ikeja to Mile 12 to stay with my sister, some people ran to Ikorodu. In Mile 12, we had to follow update on radio of what was happening back within the Ikeja axis. But I believe that those that really died were not from the Barrack, I can say 90% of those that died were those outside. Due to anxiety, many of them fell into a concealed canal but there were a lot of bombs scattered in the whole place which had not detonated, so coming back to the barrack was dangerous. However what the government did was to take many of the affected people to different camps across the state to feed them. This lasted for about three months and gave opportunity for some International bodies to come around to inspect the barracks.

In the process, they realize some bombs lying around the territory which they eventually took care of. The government didnt do much renovation because what they did was just to fix the damages in some buildings and the renovations didnt even start immediately so we were living dangerously. A lot of people renovated their houses themselves as government didnt take immediate action towards that. If you go round the barracks, youll see some houses have been abandoned. If you go there you wouldnt know some people once lived there.

Another eye witness told Legit.ng: Thats still my worst experience in this country, so many people died that night especially little children. Some days even after the incident, some still lost their lives because I can recall that there was a man who went farming with his wife. In the process of trying to cut the grass, he mistakenly hit a bomb with his cutlass and it exploded, killing him and his wife. It was just so sad.

Speaking to our correspondent, a civil servant narrated how he drove all the way to Shomolu with his family to escape from the scene. He said: I was at home when we suddenly started hearing loud explosion and I thought a war was about to start. I immediately told my kids to enter the car with my wife and we drove to my office at Shomolu. We were there and I could still hear the explosion, that is to tell you the intensity of the sound.

After hours the sound stopped and I took my family back home and we realized that all our windows had broken and our doors were opened as a result of the explosion. It was really bad that night.

Our correspondent went round the Ikeja cantonment to see what sort of renovations had been done after 14 years but it was learnt that some houses were indeed abandoned as some our sources had earlier stated

See pictures below taken amid tight security:

Aftermath of the Ikeja military cantonment after the January 27, 2002 bomb blast that killed over 1000 Nigerians

A deserted house after the Ikeja military cantonment after the January 27, 2002 bomb blast that killed over 1000 Nigerians

Another deserted house after the Ikeja military cantonment after the January 27, 2002 bomb blast that killed over 1000 Nigerians

Yet another deserted house after the Ikeja military cantonment after the January 27, 2002 bomb blast that killed over 1000 Nigerians

Renovation at the entrance of the Ikeja military cantonment after the January 27, 2002 bomb blast that killed over 1000 Nigerians

READ ALSO: Boko Haram Launches Fresh Attack On Adamawa

May their souls continue to rest in peace!

Source: Legit.ng
-- The Supreme Court of Nigeria has passed a verdict on the Rivers state gubernatorial tussle.

-- Governor Nyesom Wike's mandate has been upheld by the apex court.

-- Reasons for the verdict are yet to be stated.

Governor Nyesom Wike's mandate has been upheld by the Nigerian Supreme Court on Wednesday, January 27.

READ ALSO: Read What Tinubu Says About Those Who Are Joining The APC

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The Supreme court has upheld the result of the April 11 gubernatorial polls in Rivers state, declaring Wike the winner.

The Vanguard reports that the apex court's judgement was unanimou, thus, validating the result of the April 11 poll by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)

According to Justice Kekere-Ekun who delivered the lead verdict, three separate appeals that were filed by Wike, PDP and INEC, were meritorious.

Supreme Courts upholds Wike's mandate

READ ALSO: Rivers APC Uncovers Plot By PDP, Cult Group To Assassinate Council Leaders

Concurrent judgments of both the Rivers state governorship election petition tribunal and that of the Abuja division of the Court of Appeal, were all set aside by the Supreme Court.

However, the court panel did not make statements regarding the reason for the judgement.

READ ALSO: Appeal Court Sacks Only APC Member In Rivers State Assembly

The panel which is led by the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Mohammed reserved their reasons for the judgement till Friday, February 12.

Meanwhile, The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers state has accused Governor Nyesom Wike of abandoning all construction activities at all work sites in the state.

APC spokesman, Chris Finebone, said one of the most visible projects that have now been abandoned by the governor is the Eleme JunctionTrailer Park Junction interval of the East/West Road.

Source: Legit.ng
Office occupancy costs are increasing across the globe as the service sector accelerates away from the recession. According to CBREs 2015 Global Prime Office Occupancy Costs survey, prime occupancy costs in the worlds office hotspots rose by 2.4 per cent last year. Whats more, its a trend we are likely

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CA Immo has sold eigth building plots with a total area of around 25,000 m in Berlin's Europacity. The buyer is a joint venture between Benson Elliot and KauriCAB. In total, the building plots will enable the construction of approx. 70,000 m of floor space. The intention is to create

Photos: CA Immo



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The new satellite facility for Munich Airport's Terminal 2 will be commissioned on April 26, 2016  exactly three months from today. That date has now been finalized by Munich Airport and Lufthansa. The additional handling capacity for a total of 11 million passengers per year will boost the overall

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Expected to be launched at the 2016 Auto Expo in February, BMW India has surprisingly launched the much awaited 2016 BMW 3 Series in India today. The entry-level sedan from BMW has priced in India from INR 35.90 lakh, ex-showroom. Like its predecessor, it will continue to be assembled at the company plant in Chennai with close to 50% of components locally sourced.

Exteriors of 2016 BMW 3 Series will be seen with full LED headlight clusters along with LED daytime running lights while at the rear, new LED tail lamps will also be evident while the facelift will sit on new 17 alloy rims in a different design.

Interiors will get a new head-up display and navigation module with 3D graphics adding to its premium appeal. Parking Assistant will allow the new 3 Series to gain parallel parking automatically. Chrome accents, AC vents, and controls along with cup holders on floor console will also be some of the new features inside the new BMW 3 Series.

Engine specifications where the 2016 BMW 3 Series in India is concerned could include a 2.0 liter, four-cylinder, TwinPower turbo engine capable of 190 bhp peak power and 400 Nm peak torque mated to an 8-speed ZF automatic transmission.

New 2016 BMW 3 Series rivals the likes of Mercedes-Benz C-Class and Audi A4. Apart from the new 3er, the Munich based automaker will also be showcasing the new BMW 7 Series and X1 SUV at the upcoming 2016 Auto Expo.

Price

BMW 320d Prestige  INR 35.90 lakh

BMW 320d Sport Line (Navigation)  INR 41.50 lakh

BMW 320d Luxury Line (Navigation)  INR 41.50 lakh

BMW 320d M Sport  INR 44.50 lakh

All prices above are ex-showroom. Colour options on offer are Alpine White as non-metallic color and Black Sapphire, Platinum Silver, Jatoba, Imperial Blue Brilliant Effect, Melbourne Red, Mediterranean Blue and Estoril Blue as metallic colors. Petrol variants will be launched later this year.

News Release

2016 BMW 3 Series  Photos
Showcased earlier at the EICMA Show in Milan last year, Benelli is all-set to showcase some of those bikes at the 2016 Auto Expo in Delhi next month. A few of the new bikes Benelli plans to launch in India this year are  Tornado 302, TNT 400, and Benelli TRK 502. All three are expected to be on display at the 2016 Delhi Auto Expo, along with the Leoncino Scrambler concept.

Apart from this, the Italian brand also plans on introducing updates of the existing 600i and 600 GT during the year. The companys current lineup in India includes six premium bikes consisting of TNT 25, TNT 300, TNT 600i, TNT 600GT, TNT 899, and TNT R.

Benelli Tornado 302, unveiled at the EICMA 2015 is the first fully-faired bike from the company following Tornado 110 launched in 2003. Tornado 302 is powered by a parallel twin 2 cylinder engine mated to a 6-speed transmission. The engine produced 35.4 PS peak power and 27 Nm torque at 9,000 rpm while the company claims it has a top speed of 170 kmph. Benelli Tornado 302, when launched in the first quarter of 2016, will take on the Yamaha YZF R3 and Ninja 300.

Next in line is Benelli TNT 400. It is expected to be launched in the first half of 2016. Set to come in with an upgraded 400cc engine, the bike gets the sportier stance and will compete with the other two-cylinder bikes from Japan while pricing will be highly competitive.

Leoncino Scrambler Concept will also be on display at the 2016 Delhi Auto Expo. As seen at EICMA, Leoncino will sport a quality finish with LED headlamp inserts and an Alcantara leather seat. It will be powered by a 499.6 cc twin-cylinder, liquid-cooled DOHC engine offering 46.9 bhp power and 4.6 kgm torque. Fitted with ABS, the bike could enter production later this year or early next year.

Benelli TRK 502 is the next bike which is expected for launch in India at an expected price of around INR 4-4.5 lakhs. It will be an adventure motorcycle with the same engine as seen on the Leoncino. It receives upside-down forks on front and mono-shock at the rear while braking is via 320mm discs in the front and 260mm discs at the rear.

Besides launch of these four new models, Benelli is also expanding operations. A new manufacturing plant near Pune is being set up while dealership network is also being expanded. More details from the launch floor on 3rd Feb as we cover the 2016 Auto Expo LIVE.

Benelli Leoncino  Photos

Benelli TRK 502  Photos

via AutocarIndia.com
So far 2016 has been free of Islamic terrorist violence. There are still several hundred armed Islamic terrorists active and the continuing army patrols are finding and destroying more Islamic terrorist supplied, weapons and hiding places. Few Islamic terrorists are encountered and most of those that are found fight to the death. Troops prefer to take them alive because interrogation often yields valuable information on other Islamic terrorists and makes it easier to find them. But most of the Islamic terrorists still active are hard core, know the risks of being taken alive and usually prefer to die fighting. As Algeria has been fighting Islamic terrorists since the 1990s the intelligence services are among the best in the world when it comes to keeping up with local Islamic terrorist activity. Thus it is known that most Algerian Islamic terrorists have been killed, captured or left the country. Those that head for Europe tend to retire from the terrorist life. But those that go to places like Mali, Egypt and Syria are still active and some of those eventually try and return to Algeria to fight again. That has been happening less likely but may change. Islamic terrorists who face too much pressure in one place tend to move somewhere more hospitable. Algeria has found the best way to keep Islamic terrorists out (or at least quiet) is to create a hostile atmosphere for them. So the frequent and aggressive army and police patrols continue, as does general public support for this effort. Meanwhile the intel community has kept quiet about what they know of how rampant corruption and government mismanagement continues to generate new Islamic terrorist recruits. Intel officials who mention that problem too often or publicly tend to be fired or retired, no matter how senior they are.

Germany is pressuring Algeria (and other North African countries) to take back their citizens who entered Germany illegally. Germany and Algeria have a repatriation agreement but many illegal migrants purposely enter Germany without any identity documents, which makes it easier for them to make up any story that works to get them officially accepted for asylum as victims or persecution or whatever. Algeria often uses this lack of documents as a reason not to take back illegal migrants. This is common with Moslem countries, who are glad to be rid of anyone who does not want to stay in their homeland. This is often justified as a security measure so that an Islamic terrorist or criminal does not return. Germany has accepted this excuse in the past but German voters are now very angry at the increasing bad behavior of Moslem illegals and the government is under increasing pressure to send as many back as possible. The vast majority of these illegals are young men and many of them often turn to crime, and occasionally Islamic terrorism. Germany identified 847 Algerian illegals arriving in June 2015 but because of news that Germany was letting just about anyone in that number increased to 2,296 in December. Meanwhile Algeria identified 16,792 illegal African migrants entering Algeria from the south. Using repatriation agreements 43 percent of them were sent home.

Despite the problem with repatriation Algeria has been increasingly cooperative and helpful to European police and intelligence organizations, especially when it comes to Islamic terrorism. Unofficially, Algerian officials admit that are not too concerned about most of the refugees and will report any of their known or suspected Islamic terrorists who are believed to have headed north. The Algerians also help identify Algerian illegals who get arrested in Europe and are suspected of being involved with Islamic terrorism. If Algeria cannot identify a suspect right away they will start an investigation in Algeria. There is some self-interest involved here because it sometimes happen that an Algerian illegal migrant will get radicalized in Europe and either return to Algeria or support others who wish to do so in order to commit terrorist acts in Algeria. This cooperation has been going on the longest with France, which was one of the first European countries to attract Algerian terrorists. Thats because France occupied Algeria as a colony for over a century before leaving (involuntarily) in the early 1960s. Many Algerians had already migrated legally to France by then and many Algerians still learn French in school or from parents. So France has long been a favorite destination of legal and illegal Algerian migrants.

A major reason for migrating is the lack of jobs, and much else, in Algeria. In addition to the persistent corruption Algeria has an even more serious economic problem with a growing shortage of money. The main cause of this is the continued low oil price. This means Algeria is getting less than half the income from oil sales in 2015 compared to the same period in 2012, before the price of oil began to tumble. In 2015 the price of oil fell another 34 percent. The impact of this can be seen in the decline in foreign exchange holdings, which declined 16 percent (to $151 billion) in 2015. This does a lot of damage to the economy but the government says it has a plan to cope and that seems to be working because GDP continues to grow (at about three percent a year) but at a lower rate than in the past. Algerians in general are coping. For example imports of luxury and non-essentials are down over 35 percent in 2015. This includes automobiles. The decline in oil income is likely to get worse in 2016. In late 2014 Algeria prepared its budget for 2015 based on oil selling for an average of $37 a barrel (a price that was reached at the end of 2015). That follows price of oil falling 50 percent since 2013 (from $120 to $40 a barrel) in early 2015. In early 2016 the price went below $30 a barrel. The government only expects to receive $25 billion from oil and natural gas in 2016 and cash reserves will shrink another 20 percent (to $121 billion) by the end of that year.

January 22, 2016: In the southeast, in Guezzam on the Niger border, an army patrol arrested smugglers and seized two vehicles, three assault rifles and 142 rounds of ammo. The weapons were apparently meant to be sold in Algeria.

January 20, 2016: A Chinese firm signed a contract to build a new port facility 60 kilometers west of the capital. This will cost $3.3 billion, with China paying for it and Chinese builders handling the construction on an effort which will take about seven years. The 23 docks in the new port will be able to handle 26 million tons of cargo a year, most of it in containers. China and the Algerian government will operate the port, which will be one of the largest in North Africa. China is becoming a major presence in Algeria. By 2013 Chinese firms had invested $1.5 billion in Algeria and there were some 30,000 Chinese working in Algeria for fifty Chinese companies. Since 2013 Chinese investment has grown enormously and by the end of the decade will amount to more than $1o billion in just twenty years. Most of the Chinese are working on transportation (roads, ports and railroad) projects. Although Algeria has lots of unemployment, there are few people with the necessary skills for many of these projects, so China brings in skilled workers from China. Some of those Chinese will settle down in Algeria, but not as many as in non-Arab Africa. The Arabs are not as accepting of foreigners as many other cultures are. While many oil-rich Arab states import foreigners for most of the civilian jobs, these workers are not encouraged to stay and there are strict laws governing the presence of the foreign workers. Algeria sees the Chinese investments, especially in infrastructure, as a way to get the local economy growing and thus provide jobs for the many young Algerians who are increasingly angry about being unemployed. The Chinese workers are very efficient and tend to get their projects done on time and on budget. This makes the Chinese popular with the government which, mainly because of corruption, is notoriously inefficient, especially when it comes to building things for the public.

January 19, 2016: In the east (Boumerdes province) troops found and destroyed four bunkers built by Islamic terrorists as hideouts.

January 17, 2016: In the southeast near (Amenas near the Libyan border) found a hidden assault rifle and 129 rounds of ammo. It was unclear if the weapon belonged to smugglers, local criminals or Islamic terrorists.

January 15, 2016: In Batna (500 kilometers east of the capital) troops encountered an armed Islamic terrorist who refused to surrender and was shot dead. Troops seized an assault rifle, ammo, binoculars and five cell phones.

January 14, 2016: In the northeast, just across the Tunisia border in Tabarka police arrested a known Algerian Islamic terrorist who was trying to sneak into Algeria.

January 12, 2016: In the southeast near the Amenas gas plant, the scene of a major Islamic terrorist attack in 2013, troops ambushed and arrested seven Islamic terrorists and seized three vehicles. Interrogators are still trying to find out what the men were doing in such an isolated area near the border.

January 8, 2016: In Batna (500 kilometers east of the capital) troops found and destroyed nine sites where Islamic terrorists had stashed supplies. Most of it consisted of food and clothing but there was also five bombs, bomb components and rifle ammunition.

January 5, 2016: Troops searching Bouira province (120 kilometers southeast of the capital) a weapons caches containing 15 kg (33 pounds) of explosives, two RPG launchers and two bombs.
A group of beached whales have, naturally, attracted much attention in Skegness, England - after all, it's not every day people get to see a massive deep sea mammal up close. The images are surreal.

A photo of a man in Skegness allegedly taking teeth from one of the deceased whales was just the tip of the iceberg.

However, the latest developments in the ongoing story of the five dead sperm whales who washed ashore on England's beaches have caused quite the outcry on social media.

In addition to the alleged looting, people are also taking photos with the dead whales and tagging their bodies with graffiti.

In response to the controversial photo, local officials have warned future onlookers against taking "trophies" from the beached whales, which is an illegal act, ITV reported . The man shown in the photo above was contacted by the police and claims he did not take anything from the whale.

These beachings are the "worst sperm whale stranding off the English coast since records began in 1913," according to the Guardian. The first whale appeared on a beach in Hunstanton on Friday. Three other whales followed shortly after on Sunday, appearing on a beach in Skegness. The fifth whale beached himself in Wainfleet on Monday, Sky News reported. They're all believed to be members of the same pod.

Some scientists believe the whales may have became disoriented when they approached shallow waters in their hunt for food, the Guardian reported. Sperm whales are typically deep sea creatures and are listed as vulnerable by International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

This isn't the first time whales have beached themselves, and it probably won't be the last.

It's a global phenomenon that keeps on happening - whales have also recently washed ashore on beaches in Germany and the Netherlands. "The cause of mass strandings in pilot whales remains one of the great mysteries in the social behavior of whales and dolphins," C. Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, told The Dodo in a previous story about a recent, massive beaching of whales in India.

"Although strandings of some species, such as beaked whales, are now known to be the result of human disturbance, such as navy sonar or seismic surveys, the mass strandings of pilot whales seems to be a natural phenomenon that results from their strong social bonds," he added.

That means, he said, that the whales may be intentionally beaching themselves: "The close social bonds presumably result in a kind of 'herd panic' or 'herd cohesion,' bringing the entire social group (the pod) into the shallow waters and at risk of stranding." Climate change, which can affect the locations of whale food sources, may also cause whales to travel farther than is typical and, therefore, into more shallow waters.

Graffiti on the whales, however, seems to blame humans for the beachings.
Meet the zoo animals who were left to die. Three lions, two bears and two guinea pigs were stranded in the small town of Gyumri, Armenia, after their owner abandoned them. For months they've lived in "horrific conditions," International Animal Rescue (IAR) reported, trapped in tiny concrete cells and, at times, without food or water. Roger Allen

Roger Allen

And the horror of their circumstances has begun to take its toll. Photos show haggard and disheveled animals peering out from their would-be coffins. The bears look particularly affected, their matted fur filled with straw and dirt. One of the bears collapsed a few weeks ago, IAR said, and is still very weak. One of the lions has wounds on her head from repeatedly slamming it into the bars of her cage. Roger Allen

Dodo Shows Comeback Kids Family Stops At Nothing To Help Their Great Dane Run

Roger Allen

"The animals are in an appalling state," Roger Allen, a photographer who recently shot the dilapidated zoo, told The Dodo. "The bears were pacing around in circles in frustration and desperation at being caged in such a small area. The lioness, Mary, the mother of the two cubs, hardly moved. She lay with her head against the bars." "Her cubs prowled, restless, around their two separate cages which was a metal lorry container," Allen said. "On the back wall of their cages were holes in the wooden panels where the cubs had tried to claw their way out." Roger Allen

Roger Allen

It's still unclear exactly how the animals ended up in the ruins of the zoo - Allen said they were the former pets of an Armenian billionaire oligarch who purchased them to use at jungle-themed parties. At some point, he said, the owner abandoned them and his whereabouts are currently unknown. Armenian outlets have named the owner as Stepan Vardanyan, a businessman who set up the zoo in 2010 but later ran into financial and health troubles. He's reportedly told local media that he can't care for the animals but doesn't want to see them put down, according to Armenia Now. In any case, the end result was that the animals were left to die. According to some reports, many of them did and the seven left are just the survivors. Roger Allen

Roger Allen

But where officials and the owner turned their backs, locals stood up to help. According to Allen, a local elderly couple, Hovhamnes and Alvina Madoyan, stumbled on the remains of the zoo and couldn't bear to let the animals waste away and die. "I lost my job, I had nothing, my wife and I were walking by the deserted zoo when we heard these terrible cries of animals in torment," Hovhamnes told Allen, according to a statement released by the photographer. "We came in to see the lioness and her cub literally frothing at the mouths from lack of water." Since then Madoyan and his wife, Alvina, have dedicated their lives to caring for the animals. Though the couple is retired and of limited income, they moved into a nearby shack and feed the animals with what little scraps of food they can find. Roger Allen

Roger Allen

"My wife and I can't bear to see God's creatures in pain," Hovhamnes reportedly said. "We fetched water from them and then organized some meat from a local slaughterman. That is how we scrape by." Both the Madoyans and Allen reported that the animals seemed to be losing their minds in the tiny confines of their cages. "They are sad and lonely and, when they can be bothered, pace up and down their cages, showing the signs of being driven mad by boredom and inactivity," Hovhamnes said. Roger Allen

Roger Allen

But for the first time, real help might be on the way. An international coalition of animal rescue groups has come together to bring help to the abandoned animals and finally give them a real home - and some of the animals are already on their way there. On Friday a ground team led by Worldwide Veterinary Service (WVS) transported the bears to a temporary enclosure at the Yerevan Zoo, where they'll await permits before moving to the Libearty Bear Sanctuary in Romania. As the animals were not microchipped or vaccinated, relocating them is a complicated process. "They are still quite weak, each weighing only around 50 kg, but are being fed and cared for," WVS said in an email provided by IAR. Next up are the lions, who need to be relocated to a more spacious temporary home before they decline further. WVS said the lioness with the head wounds is in need of treatment. "We still have a long way to go," WVS said. Roger Allen

Roger Allen

But while saving these animals is the main focus for rescuers right now, their plight also raises bigger issues about the state of animal welfare in the country. "The animals at Gyumri Zoo are just a few of the animals being kept in substandard conditions in Armenia," WVS wrote. "There is an urgent need for legislative change to protect wild animals in Armenia, not least to protect the welfare of the 60+ bears currently kept in abhorrent conditions across the country." But the first step will be lifting the Gyumri animals out of the hell they've lived in for so many years - which promises to be a lengthy journey. Roger Allen

Roger Allen
<p>Erin Kobayashi</p>

It happens in an instant. Snarl. Snap. Cry. And your best friend is hurting. Cue the panic. Baby's hurt. The dog park crowd gathers round. And then what? Well, in most cases of dogs hurting other dogs, two types of owners emerge.

As chief field supervisor at Multnomah County Animal Services in Oregon, Randall Brown has seen them both. He's attended scenes where a dog has been nicked, scratched, even outright killed by another dog. And in the end, it's always come down to those two types of people. "We have people who stand around and say, 'My dog caused damage to your dog and they feel responsible for it. Here's my information. Or I'll go to the vet with you. I'll cover your vet bills.'" "We have people who do that," he told The Dodo. "And we have people whose dog bites another dog and they walk away from it." In the end, he says, outside of a civil lawsuit to try to recoup medical bills, there's not much anyone can do when the unthinkable happens.

Dodo Shows Adoption Day Hairless German Shepherd Puppies Find The Perfect Families

Are there any laws that obligate people to stand around after a dog-on-dog bite and surrender their personal information - kind of like exchanging insurance details after an accident? "I haven't heard of that," he says. "I always tell people that if their dog is the one that did the biting, you may want to do a neighborly thing here."

Trouble is, in the wake of a dog fight, establishing blame can be tricky. Murkier still is the extent of a dog's injuries - which makes it even more vital to exchange that information. "The thing that I tell people up front all the time is that the degree of injury you see on the surface with your own two eyes is often not the full story," Ladan Mohammad-Zadeh, critical care specialist at DoveLewis Animal Hospital in Portland, Oregon, told The Dodo. Imagine, if you will, a big hairy dog. Your big, beautiful, hairy dog. "You might see just one little puncture on the side of their face," Mohammad-Zadeh explains. "But you have no idea what's underneath all of that fur - and what's inside that puncture wound."



Erin Kobayashi

For one thing, the skin could be separated from the underlying muscle tissue, making it a much more serious wound than it would appear. Or infection could set in. A dog's teeth can carry bacteria. And a puncture wound is a good way to get that bacteria under the skin. In the U.S., about one percent of dog bites result in infection to humans, according to the American Society for Surgery to the Hand (ASSH).

With what amounts to an honor system among dog owners to pay vet bills that can easily skyrocket, the focus might be better spent on prevention.

Erin Kobayashi

"One good way to prevent dogs biting dogs is to be cautious when bringing your dog into social settings with other dogs," John Gicking, an emergency and critical care vet with BluePearl Veterinary Partners, told The Dodo. "Dog parks and pet stores bring lots of different dogs together, and you need to carefully monitor these situations for safety." No matter how cautious an owner may be, dogs are going to disagree from time to time.

Erin Kobayashi

"Dogs get into arguments," Terri Bright, director of Behavior Services at the MSPCA-Angell, told The Dodo. "There are usually signs that dogs are not going to be able to resolve their arguments without aggression." The problem is many of us don't recognize those signs. Body language is critical. On one hand, "play bows" - when dogs put their paws on the ground and their posteriors in the air - typically suggest good times all around. On the other hand, stiff movements, tense muscles and placing a paw or head on the other dog's back suggest a different story. "To dogs, those are fighting words," Bright says.

Bree-Anna Macdonell

"If someone's dog does that to every other dog in the dog park, then that dog probably shouldn't be in the dog park. That dog, at some point, is going to run into another dog who's going to get mad." "Then there's going to be a dogfight."

Erin Kobayashi
It only takes a few seconds to see that love between a mother and child transcends species. YouTube/dswtkenya

When people in Kenya noticed a baby elephant with a poacher's snare around his ankle in October, they reported that the calf needed help. The Olare Motoragi Conservancy dispatched rescuers to locate the calf - and they found him being protected by a herd of 23 elephants, including his deeply devoted mother. YouTube/dswtkenya

Dodo Shows Pittie Nation The Sweetest Pittie Was Living Under A Jeep

The rescue would be complicated, so rescuers called on the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DSWT), which sent a veterinarian via Sky Vet, a program in partnership with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) that flies expert veterinarians to help African wildlife in peril. A vet got on a plane that same day to relieve the baby elephant. YouTube/dswtkenya

This browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/dswtkenya

"Given that the mother was very protective of her calf, it was decided that both mother and calf should be darted," a representative for DSWT told The Dodo. After the vet darted the calf, a few heartbreaking moments, caught on camera, began - the mother, fearing the worst, desperately tried to revive her sleeping calf. Rescuers darted the loyal mother to keep her calm while they treated her baby. YouTube/dswtkenya

"The baby is not in any danger and is simply succumbing to the anesthetic. Her actions are demonstrative of her protective behavior but the calf is not in danger at this moment," the DSWT said. Sometimes, if a baby elephant becomes injured by a snare, he can't keep up with the herd and is lost in the wilderness - so it was of the utmost importance that rescuers remove the snare quickly, before the herd moved on. YouTube/dswtkenya

Rescuers cut the snare from the calf's leg with a wire cutter, and both mother and baby soon woke up and happily rejoined their herd. YouTube/dswtkenya

"Though AK47s and cyanide poison might be the most recently reported weapons of choice for elephant poachers, snares cause much suffering and a terrible and painful death," according to DSWT. "They are indiscriminate and much easier to obtain than firearms." Anti-poaching teams in the area have confiscated more than 135,000 snares that have been laid by bush-meat poachers and ivory poachers to date. YouTube/dswtkenya

To help support The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust click below: Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise
This week, the internet lost its collective mind over Tun, a sweet raccoon dog rescued as an abandoned pup by a Japanese Twitter user.

Dodo Shows Soulmates Dog Goes Everywhere In His Dad's Kangaroo Pouch

One photo of Tun curling up to a space heater, for instance, racked up over 10,000 retweets by Tuesday afternoon.

As the name suggests, raccoon dogs like Tun certainly resemble America's native trash bandits. However, the species is much more closely related to domestic dogs, a fact that pictures of the playful canine seem to bear out.

In November, that seemingly subtle difference turned into a major controversy for Canadian clothing maker Kit and Ace, who maintained that hats made out of the animals were "raccoon fur (not dog)."

Even more alarmingly, major retailers like Macy's and Kohl's havebeencaught selling products made out of raccoon dogs as "faux fur" in the past. While clothing companies can claim that they're raccoons and not dogs, it's hard to argue that the millions of animals like Tun killed for their fur each year are "fake."
The remarkable news is that caretakers expect Smurf to make a full recovery. Veterinarians at the Nine Lives Foundation (NLF) animal shelter performed emergency surgery, and hundreds have since offered to adopt him. The flood of compassion on social media and in the news has been truly inspiring. It shows something wonderful about humanity and our capacity to care about the animals who share this world with us.

The unfortunate news, as many animal lovers know, is that countless animals are still suffering like Smurf did. Other young animals are abused and killed for sport in dogfighting rings and fox hunts. Beagles and primates are subjected to cruel experimentation, for both medical reasons and cosmetic. And billions of intelligent animals like pigs and chickens endure confinement, chronic health issues and violence in our food system. Even while we help one animal, many others are still suffering.

Take a moment to reflect on your feelings after reading that last paragraph.

Does it feel bleak? Do you feel less anger and empathy than you did when reading about Smurf's story? Do you feel hopeless?

You're not alone. Psychologists refer to the human tendency to feel less concern when presented with a larger problem as the collapse of compassion. It's been documented in experiments studying our reactions to both human and animal issues and is well-captured in the saying, "A single death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic."

Many of the people who care about Smurf may not adopt another animal, even though local shelters are full to the brim in many areas. But surely these animals deserve just as much compassion.

So why don't we feel just as compelled to help those larger groups of animals, and what can we do about it?

If we feel too much compassion, we'll spend too many resources trying to help.

Emotions motivate us. They get us out of the bed in the morning, whether it's excitement for the day ahead or stress at the thought of not arriving at work on time. Our minds are trained to trigger our emotions only when they'll lead to good outcomes. Too many emotions at the wrong time can lead to bad outcomes, such as angry outbursts, debilitating depression or an investment of money or other physical resources on an unsolvable problem.

Does this mean our minds could prevent us from feeling compassion when we hear about an abundance of animals who need our help? Psychologists Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne conducted a series of experiments to answer this question. Among other results, they showed that the collapse of compassion occurred only when participants expected a request for donations.

Although much more research is needed to fully understand and confirm this mechanism, in practice, these findings suggest we feel less compassion for large groups of animals because we worry about having to spend too many resources on helping them.

It's hard for us to intuitively understand large numbers.

Scientists have conducted experiments that investigate how we think about large numbers when it comes to helping others, both humans and animals. In one study, researchers told participants about the issue of waste-oil holding ponds, created by the oil and gas industries, that cause the deaths of many migratory birds in the southern United States.

Participants were divided into three groups and told that a new project could save either 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 of these birds. Researchers asked them how much their household would be willing to pay to help these animals. From an outside perspective, it seems like our willingness to pay should increase linearly with the number of individuals being helped, right?

Unfortunately, the willingness to pay for each group was $80, $78 and $88 respectively. That means participants who were told 10 or 100 times as many birds could be saved failed to adjust for that huge difference in the amount they were willing to contribute.

This is known as scope insensitivity. Together with the collapse of compassion, it makes it difficult for us to feel as much empathy as we should for large groups of animals.

Tell a story before describing the larger issue.

How can we overcome this bias and help ourselves, and others, feel more compassion for large groups of animals?

One way might be by telling stories. We usually shouldn't introduce a large issue by describing its scale, even though this might be its most compelling feature from a rational perspective. Instead, it's probably more compelling to begin with a story or description of the individuals involved to establish empathy and a moral connection.

This works especially well when you know of an animal who has been rescued from abuse and now lives at a sanctuary or in a loving person's home, because it shows animals aren't inherently miserable and one-dimensional beings only capable of suffering about which we can do nothing, but complex individuals with a desire for happiness and a good life.

Our chickens, Snow and Dualla, were rescued from battery cages in 2014. Snow even has her own Facebook page.Jacy Reese
Stephen King is among more than 100 authors expected to appear at the festival. (Shane Leonard)

Even as Washington digs out of snow, the Library of Congress is busy planning the National Book Festival for the golden days of fall.

The list of attending authors, which is still being developed, already contains some of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers in the world, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Annette Gordon-Reed and Bob Woodward.

In its 16th year, the festival will again take place indoors at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. For the past two years, the mammoth bookfest ran during the Labor Day weekend, but this year, it will be several weeks later, on Sept. 24. Moving the festival away from that travel-heavy holiday may attract even more visitors. (Organizers stopped releasing attendance figures, but estimates in recent years have run as high as 200,000.)

Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu will design this years official festival poster. An instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Shimizu has created advertisements for a variety of corporations as well as book jackets for Penguin, Scholastic and DC Comics. Last year, she illustrated Michael Cunninghams A Wild Swan: And Other Tales.

[Look back at Peter de Seves poster for the 2015 National Book Festival]

Author and broadcaster Diane Rehm. (Knopf)

To accommodate larger crowds at the most popular sessions, the organizers plan to add a Main Stage that can admit more than 2,000 people. Marie Arana, a senior adviser for special projects at the Library of Congress, said, In previous years, we found ourselves oversubscribed for presentations by bestselling writers such as David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kate DiCamillo and Buzz Aldrin, so we decided to create a special venue that will allow more people to see and hear them.

The library also plans to add more time between sessions. We want navigation to be easier, Arana said.

As in previous years, the authors will appear in a variety of pavilions designed to appeal to book lovers of all ages: Children, Teens, Contemporary Life, History and Biography, Fiction and Mystery, Graphic Novels, Picture Books, Science, Poetry and Prose, and Culinary Arts.

[Why isnt the book festival on the Mall anymore?]

Additional authors who have agreed to attend the festival include Kwame Alexander, Douglas Brinkley, Christopher Buckley, Newt Gingrich, Philip Glass, Winston Groom, James McBride, Jon Meacham, Ed Piskor, Michael Ramirez, Diane Rehm, Stacy Schiff and Luis Alberto Urrea.

Gene Luen Yang, the recently appointed National Ambassador for Young Peoples Literature, will also speak at the festival.

[Yang: Im really attached to furthering the integration of the book and comic-book worlds.]

The library staff will release the names of additional authors  more than 100  during the next few months.

This will be the first National Book Festival not hosted by former librarian of Congress James H. Billington, who launched the festival with first lady Laura Bush in 2001. Billington retired in September.

Acting Librarian of Congress David S. Mao said, The National Book Festival is a day for all to celebrate the joy and power of reading by connecting with their favorite authors and discovering new ones. No matter your age or favorite type of book, there is something at the National Book Festival for you.

The festival, which will be held 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., is open to the public and free of charge. It is funded by the library, corporations and private donors, most notably Washington philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, co-chairman of the National Book Festival.

The Washington Post is a charter sponsor of the festival. Book World will publish its annual guide to the festival on Sept. 18.

Ron Charles is the editor of Book World.
When New York City Ballet principal dancer Darci Kistler retired six years ago, the final bows she took on a rose-covered stage marked the end of an era. Reviews read more like obituaries. The last Balanchine ballerina retires, mourned Sunday morning news shows.

Kistler became a principal dancer at City Ballet in 1982 as a leggy 17-year-old who loved unicorns, glittery barrettes and green leg warmers. She was the final dancer chosen for the company by George Balanchine himself. The great choreographer, a Russian emigre, died a year later.

Girl Through Glass, Sari Wilsons debut novel, presumes that Balanchine singled out one more muse after Kistler: Mira Able, a girl whose career was derailed by the undue attentions of a debonair City Ballet donor who often waited for her after class by the Lincoln Center fountain.

Sound a bit creepy? It is, but artfully rendered through the viewpoint of an adolescent dancer who performs with great maturity while remaining fatefully naive. Girl Through Glass adds another title to the growing list of films, television shows and novels that exploit ballet for its supposed seamy, sequined underworld rife with backstage drama. The Red Shoes and The Turning Point are historical examples, while Black Swan, the reality show Breaking Pointe and Starzs new series Flesh and Bone represent the current revival.

[Flesh and Bone: Sex and drugs and a stripper pole. Oh, and ballerinas]

Author Sari Wilson (Elena Seibert)

Writers have used Balanchine as a plot device or archetype before. Some results are tawdry, such as Varley OConnors novel The Masters Muse (2012), but a few rise above the genre to become outstanding works of literary fiction, such as Maggie Shipsteads Astonish Me (2014). Wilsons effort falls somewhere in the middle.

Girl Through Glass is split into two narratives. One track follows young Mira, while a second is the first-person account of her attempts, some 30 years later, to piece together how she went from being one of Mr. Bs girls to a bitter woman who left ballet behind.

[Review: Maggie Shipsteads Astonish Me]

Older Mira  who has changed her name to Kate  is a floundering academic who earned a PhD in dance history but never landed a stable job. The events that send her back to New York and the secrets she uncovers there smack of melodrama and coincidence. To both herself and to readers, Kate is a disappointing contrast to the flinty young Mira, the girl who moves out of her mothers volatile home at 11 and stars as Marie in City Ballets Nutcracker at 12. While Kates name-dropping  such as her cliched assessment of contemporary choreographer Mark Morris  feels forced, the supporting characters in Miras life are believable. She appears onstage with the great Patricia McBride, accepts compliments from Heather Watts and looks up to Kistler, who is a mere two years older.

Wilson grew up dancing in New York in the same era Mira did, although not at the same level. She admits that she stole liberally from her own childhood. Maybe thats why the studio scenes feel so visceral, so real  as when Mira dances with an older boy for the first time at the small school she attends before moving on to Balanchines School of American Ballet. Learning to partner, Wilson writes, is nothing like dancing on your own. . . . [It is] all sweating and grunting and hard-edged bones, hip bones jabbing into finger bones and taut thighs ricocheting, straining against a heaving shoulder, slick with sweat.

The night she makes her big debut, a confused Mira watches as her prince swigs liquor from a flask and kisses another male character at intermission. Much later in Kates too-maudlin narrative, that prince will die of AIDS. But the plot isnt the reason to read Girl Through Glass; its the tragic depiction of a girl adored far too soon by a grown-up world.

Rebecca Ritzel is an Alexandria-based freelance writer who also reviews dance for The Washington Post.

From our archives: Fast Rising: Darci Kistler in 1980
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that 16 Democrats have been president. Sixteen presidents have been Democrats; Grover Cleveland counts twice because he was both the 22nd and 24th president. This story has been updated.



(The Washington Post)

You may already know that 2016 is a presidential election year. Under the Constitution, Barack Obama cannot seek a third term, so in November, voters will elect a new president, who will be sworn in next January.

The field of would-be presidents is big. The two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, will choose their partys nominee through a series of events called state primaries and caucuses. That process begins Monday in Iowa.

The two parties hold their national conventions in July. Thats when their choices for president and vice president (known as the partys ticket) will be formally approved.

In addition to the Republican and Democratic candidates (pictured on this page), there are several independent and third-party hopefuls in the race. It promises to be a mad dash to the finish line on Election Day.

Who can run for president?

The Constitution lists three requirements: You must be at least 35 years old, have been a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and be a natural-born citizen of the United States.

That last requirement is tricky. The Founding Fathers did not spell out what natural-born means. One of the 2016 Republican contenders is Ted Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas. He was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. His mothers American citizenship automatically made Cruz a U.S. citizen. But is he a natural-born citizen? A court might be asked to decide.



The two major political parties choose their candidates for president and vice president at national conventions. Balloons cascade the crowd at the 2012 Republican Convention, which was held in Tampa, Florida. (Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Press via Getty Images)

Political parties

People who share political views join together to win elections and advance their goals. The two major U.S. parties are the Republicans (also known as the GOP, or grand old party) and the Democrats.

The Democrats trace their history to the 1790s and Thomas Jefferson. The Republican Party formed in the 1850s, before the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, elected in 1860.

In all, 18 presidents have been Republicans and 16 have been Democrats. (Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, counts twice; he was the 22nd and 24th president.) The last one from a different party was Millard Fillmore in the early 1850s. He was a Whig.



Johnnie P. Patton, a delegate to the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, wears a hat showing her support for President Obama. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Where they stand

At their nominating conventions in July, each party will approve a platform of its positions on many issues. Their candidates will usually support those positions, but they arent required to.

In general, Republicans favor a smaller federal government, with more power given to the states. They favor widespread tax cuts as a way to boost the economy. Democrats believe in a bigger federal government that makes rules for business and that spends more money on social services such as health care. They back some tax cuts but not for the wealthy or corporations.

The issues

Education, climate change, the environment and foreign policy are among the important issues the candidates face. Here are a few more:

Immigration: Should people who entered this country illegally be allowed to stay?

Gun control: Should there be stricter rules about guns and who can buy them?

Health care: What role should the government play in providing this and other social services?

Terrorism and national security: How should the government protect America and its allies, or friendly foreign countries?

The economy: What should be done to boost the recovery from the 2008-2009 financial crisis?

Did you know . . . ?

Donkeys and elephants

The Republican symbol is an elephant. The Democrats is a donkey. The donkey dates to the election of 1828, when opponents of Andrew Jackson labeled him a jackass. He thought it was funny and featured the image in campaign posters. In 1870, political cartoonist Thomas Nast used the donkey to refer to the Democratic Party. A few years later, Nast drew a cartoon that included an elephant with the words the Republican vote on its side. Soon after, the animals became widely associated with the two political parties.



On election night in 2004, workers walk on a giant presidential election map in the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The states in red went for President George W. Bush and the blue states for Senator John Kerry. The white states were undecided at the time. (Kathy Willens/AP)

Red versus blue

More recently, the colors red and blue have been used to distinguish one party from another. The practice began in 2000, when the TV networks colored their maps to indicate which party was winning where. States that voted for the Republican presidential candidate were shown in red; those that voted for the Democrat were blue.

Family ties

Two of the 2016 candidates are hoping to keep the White House in the family. Democrat Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state and U.S. senator, is married to former president Bill Clinton. And Republican Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida, is the son and brother of two former U.S. presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

On the other hand . . .

Three of the Republican candidates have never been elected to a state or national office. They are businessman Donald Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former business executive Carly Fiorina.

Whats the tab?

Democracy doesnt come cheap. Estimates of the cost of the 2016 election start at $3 billion. It will be spent on campaign ads, air travel, hotel stays, staff salaries and other expenses.



A trip to the polls, or voting locations, can get you a sticker  and a sense of pride. (Seth Perlman/AP)

Get out and vote

You must be at least 18 years old to vote in a presidential election. In 2012, fewer than 6 in 10 eligible voters cast ballots, a slight drop from 2008. Minnesota led all states, with more than 75 percent of eligible voters going to the polls. Hawaii was last, at 44 percent.



Click to read timeline. (The Washington Post)

Let us hear from you

KidsPost will be checking in on the campaign between now and Election Day in November. Tell us what you would like to read about. More about the candidates? Is there an issue you want us to explore? Are you interested in presidential history? Presidential pets? Kids who lived in the White House?

Send your suggestions and questions to kidspost@washpost.com or KidsPost, The Washington Post, 1301 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.
1 of 21 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  See photos from Diane Rehms career View Photos A look back at the public radio icons career as she steps away from the microphone to champion the right to die, the subject of a new memoir. Caption After 37 years, Diane Rehm steps away from the WAMU microphone. Radio host Diane Rehm in her apartment in D.C.s Glover Park. She will host a weekly podcast at WAMU-FM, but after 37 years The Diane Rehm Show is ending. Matt McClain/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

In theatrical makeup and camera-ready attire, her hair an ivory meringue, Diane Rehm is an intensely visual person  I love clothes more than I love food, she likes to say  whose medium happens to be radio.

Her voice sounds ancient and fragile, as though dragged through shattered glass and gravel. She was diagnosed almost two decades ago with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes spasms of the vocal cords and should have axed her career. Instead, it helped distinguish her from the dulcet chorus of NPR voices. The Diane Rehm Show, which airs locally from 10 a.m. to noon, is heard weekly by 2.4 million listeners on nearly 200 stations.

She is dramatic in a job that demands restraint, given to maestro-level gestures lost on listeners. Ive been an actress all my life, she declaims. A wren of a woman with an XXL personality, shes known for a hailstorm of 0pinions.

Shes very challenging. We had our first fight before I even got here, says J.J. Yore, manager of WAMU-FM (88.5), a Washington NPR affiliate. Earlier this month, before she took a sabbatical for her thrice-yearly voice treatments, they had an hour-long dustup. Says her dear friend Mary Beth Busby, You dont ever ask Dianes opinion if you dont want it, because youre going to get it. Yet Rehm is celebrated for moderating civil discourse between often vehemently opposed guests.

Now 79, the most unretiring Rehm announced last month that she plans to leave the show, not retiring, exactly, but stepping away from the microphone. Mind you, this will happen almost a year from now, Dec. 31, giving her time for an extended victory lap.

But shes ready for her next act. She doesnt plan to fade away. Among other things, she will raise funds for the station. In 1995, she raised $250,000 to take her show national.



John and Diane Rehm on the publication of their 2002 joint memoir, "Toward Commitment: A Dialogue About Marriage." John Rehm ended his life in June 2014 after years with Parkinsons disease. (Lucian Perkins/The Washington Post)

Most likely, she will become more outspoken. Her new memoir, On My Own, recounts her husbands decision to end his life in June 2014 after his physician was legally barred from helping. John Rehm was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease in 2005, and after two years in an assisted living facility, he refused food, liquids and medication.

It took 10 days for him to die, an eternity.

I rage at a system that would not allow John to be helped toward his own death, Rehm writes of watching her spouse of 54 years wither away.

[Review: In On My Own, Diane Rehm argues for the right to die.]

The experience sparked her advocacy in the right-to-die movement. I feel the way that John had to die was just totally inexcusable, she told The Washington Post last year. It was not right.

Her public stand, and a commitment to host three dinners for the organization Compassion & Choices, which advocates for legalizing physician-assisted suicide, resulted in an admonishment from a room full of station and NPR brass. Rehm is supposed to moderate news issues, not make them.

I was annoyed, Rehm recalls of the experience. Political issue or not, its also an extraordinarily personal one to me because of John.

[Following criticism, NPR host Diane Rehm scales back efforts in right-to-die debate. ]

In June, Rehm landed in trouble again. On air, she said to Sen. Bernie Sanders, You have dual citizenship with Israel, which he does not. The source was a Facebook posting, part of an Internet conspiracy reportedly leveled at Jewish legislators.

Worst mistake of my career, Rehm says, slapping her thigh. I took full responsibility for that. I should have checked and checked and checked. She felt, she says, terrible, terrible. Worst of all to have insulted that man, because he is such a decent man.

So, not an easy year. She had already discussed leaving the show. She turns 80 in September, a good time for change, an end to 5 a.m. wake-ups, but she opted to work through the election.

Its time for me to retire, especially on the issue of right-to-die, to be able to speak out and to speak freely, she says, sitting in her crescent-shaped office in upper Northwest, which is filled with family photos, honors and an image of Mr. Rogers. (I. Just. Loved. That. Man.) Her limping, long-haired chihuahua, Maxie, 12, naps at her high-heeled feet.

Like her owner, Maxie is tiny but fierce. Unlike her owner, Maxie is also an accomplished biter who loves few others. Rehm tends toward unbridled enthusiasm, routinely embracing guests.

Her life is an open book. Actually, several books. If listeners feel that they know Rehm, a mother of two and grandmother of four, thats because she has shared plenty.

Finding My Voice is the 1999 account of her improbable career, rising from volunteer on a home show to radio dominance. She grew up in Washingtons Petworth neighborhood, the daughter of Christian Turkish and Egyptian immigrants. Her family owned a food market at 19th and Wyoming. There was no money for college, no discussion either. I had no ambition other than to be a good secretary, she says. She learned to type 120 words per minute in courses at Roosevelt High School.

Toward Commitment: A Dialogue About Marriage is a frank, moving 2002 memoir written with John Rehm, an attorney she first met while working as a secretary at the State Department. (She invariably refers to her late husband by his full name or by Scoop, his childhood nickname.) Theres even a book about Maxie. (We did not read that one. Maxie is not an amiable beast.)

Rehm finds privacy overrated. Commitment recalls both Rehms being attracted to other people, though not acting on it. On My Own writes of Johns deliberately emotional abusive behavior, executed through silence and withdrawal that could last a month at a time. Does she regret sharing so much?

There aint no perfect marriages in this world, but people pretend. John and I were determined not to pretend, she says. I think that in writing that book, it was the most profound experience next to his dying that we could have had.

Knopf editor Robert Gottlieb once told her, You have to be mindful of how much you want to expose. How much do you want the public to know about you?

The night after he said that, she dreamed she was whitewashing the walls. She has held back little since.



President Obama awards the National Humanities Medal to Rehm in 2014. (Charles Dharapak/Associated Press)

Some things to know about Rehm: No, it doesnt hurt to talk. Yes, everyone asks her this. If she likes something shes said, shes prone to uttering it twice.

Show topics she avoids: Shakespeare, physics. Also, abortion and gun control, though she recently did one on the latter. Its like butting heads! she says. Were not making progress! Favorite guests: Margaret Atwood, Mandy Patinkin, Julie Andrews, Hillary Clinton.

She doesnt eat much, and rarely lunch, and dropped 25 pounds when John was dying. Every evening, whether shes out or in her 14th-floor apartment in Glover Park, she enjoys two glasses of champagne. Nothing pricey, Korbel Brut. Champagne doesnt put pounds on me, she says. Food puts pounds on me. On the weekends, she wears casual clothes. (Well, she claims she does. There is no evidence of this.)

In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal. When President Obama put the crimson ribbon around her neck, she asked when he was coming back on the show.

She has astounding recall; shes able to name many of the women on her State Department softball team of nearly 60 years ago. She played second base. I was such a good athlete!

She drives a 2002 Toyota Avalon, which I hope to drive for the rest of my life. Shed rather spend her money on clothes.

She doesnt read the books for her show. Thats left to her dedicated, all-female staff of producers, five full-time and three part-time. They give me really, really first-rate notes, included in detailed scripts, she says.

Shes a demanding boss in a really good way, says producer Sandra Pinkard, who has been with Rehm since 1993. The shows a democracy, with one persons vote counting a whole lot more than everyone elses. Guests are pre-screened and interviewed to weed out the duds. Says Rehm, They might be good writers, but not good talkers. Occasionally, a dud squeaks through. She was none-too-pleased when former Maryland governor and presidential candidate Martin OMalley missed a September studio interview and excoriated him on the air. Or in 2007, when Newt Gingrich left a phone interview 40 minutes into a planned full hour. Rehm chewed him out, too.

She is intensely social and goes out constantly. Says Busby, If you called 20 different women in this town, every one would say, Diane is my very best friend. Im one of them. People confide in her. They know they wont be judged.

She wont marry again. She has had her true love. Close to her two children  Jennifer is an internist outside Boston, David is provost of Mount St. Marys University in Maryland  she likes living on her own. I dont have to ask or check with somebody else about what Im going to do or where Im going, she says, leaning forward and stressing every word. Its the first time in my whole life I have lived alone. And Im fine with it! Im fine with it! There is freedom. There is choice. There is security.



Rehm in the Oval Office with President Bill Clinton in 1998. (WAMU American University)

The program is called The Diane Rehm Show. For WAMU, the transition wont be easy. She represents huge stature for the station, our face to the world, not just to the city, says Yore, who has a list of about 35 candidates to replace her on the next incarnation of the program.

The last thing I would ever want to do is manage a transition with a revered, iconic figure in a way that doesnt honor everything she has done and contributed and all that she represents, says Yore, who suggested that Rehm try fundraising, along with a couple of dozen other ideas. In developing the stations next chapter, Yore says, I see her as a really important partner.

I plan to work for the station forever, she says, initially working three times a week raising money and helping in other ways. I dont want ever to retire from everything, and to work as long as I am able.

After she stops hosting the show, Rehm plans to speak out on Parkinsons, Alzheimers and the right to die.

When her time comes, if there is no physician-assisted way to end her life, she will do exactly the same as John did.

If I can no longer do what I physically want to do, Im out of here! she says. Death is not something I feel frightened of.

Leaning over in her sunny office, as if sharing a big secret, as if she has secrets, she says in a near whisper, You know, Ive had a great life! Great!

Diane Rehm book launch events WAMU will host a book party Tuesday at the Newseum, $60 per ticket, registration required. drbooklaunch.eventbrite.com. Rehm will also talk about the memoir March 2 at Sixth & I, tickets and $20 minimum registration. sixthandi.org.


Sleepover guests prepare for bed at the Penguins + Pajamas overnight event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. (Kathryn Whitney/California Academy of Sciences)

Outside the California Academy of Sciences, children struggled under the weight of overstuffed backpacks, and parents tussled with bulky sleeping bags and pillows. I was traveling much lighter  a nylon sack with a toothbrush and sweatshirt  but I also carried a load on my shoulders.

My burden: Would I choose penguins over my best friend from childhood?

The line moved up an inch. Through the glass entrance, I noticed a stuffed toy penguin on the check-in desk. A telling sign.

Nearly once a month, the natural history museum in San Franciscos Golden Gate Park transforms into a sleepover science camp. The Penguins + Pajamas event, now in its sixth year, starts after daytime visitors have departed and before most childrens meltdown hour. In addition to apres-hour roaming privileges, slumber partiers can participate in special programs (including live animals) and camp out among the exhibits (ditto).

Since the event takes place after normal hours, sleepover guests have a much more intimate museum experience, said Kelly Mendez, a spokeswoman. We hope they leave inspired by the natural world.

[Bring your own pillow: More museums are offering slumber parties for their visitors]

Doors open at 6 p.m. However, a sentence in my confirmation letter  sleep cards are handed out on a first come first serve basis for each area  set off a warning bell. The museum offers five sleeping districts, and each has limited capacity. If I arrived too late, I could end up dozing with natural disasters (Earthquake) or an albino alligator (Lower Swamp) instead of with my preferred bedmates, African penguins (African Hall). In addition, the museum requires all members of your party to be present when selecting an area. The other members of my crew were wedged in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge.



Kids sleep with the fish in the Aquarium, one of five slumber areas at the museum. (Kathryn Whitney/California Academy of Sciences)

I started polling other participants about their top two choices. A dad from Davis, Calif., whose son was splayed on a sleeping bag, said Aquarium and African Hall. I told him that I had heard that Aquarium was way cooler. I flagged down a staff member and asked him which sleeping chambers fill up first. He confirmed my fears.

I was all ready to sacrifice my friendship when I noticed two familiar faces by the T. rex in the lobby. Chrissy and Lindsay, my friends teenage daughter, had accidentally entered with a Boy Scout group and were checking in  swing goes the karma. An employee stamped our hands with an inky penguin. I pressed the backs of my hands together to make a pair.

We dropped off our gear in the African Hall, a temporary storage unit for the 300 guests that mid-November evening. I noticed a barrier separating the sleeping space from the habitat where 15 penguins resided.

You cant sleep up against the glass, a staff member said. You have to stay 20 feet away. They need space.

I would give them their personal space, but not their privacy. I scanned the long, high-ceilinged room and located the spot with the closest penguin views: front-right corner, by the Hunters hartebeest. According to the schedule, we could set up our permanent settlement at 10 p.m. Till then, we would prowl the halls like a pack of nocturnal animals.

[Dont mind the wet nose: TSA enlists more dogs to screen passengers]

It kind of feels like weve broken into a museum, said Lindsay. But thats cool.

We studied the list of activities and shouted out our favorites. Lindsay, a high school freshman in Marin County, Calif., was learning about the solar system and selected two planetarium shows. Chrissy chose the four-story rain forest, where she could face some of her phobias. I selected the Animal Color Encounter because, well, it was starting in five minutes.

In the Color of Life section, two staff members explained the concept of camouflage to a young, bouncy audience seated in bleachers. To illustrate their point, they produced a ball python as thick as a chunky scarf.

The python uses its color to hide and eat mice, the expert said. How wide does his mouth open?

Hands shot up, then approximated a maw that could fit a bowling ball.

Halfway through the talk, I looked around and realized that two-thirds of my group had wandered off. I found them by an exhibit featuring California newts. My friend, clearly alarmed, urged me to read the informational sign, which explained how the toxin in a single newt can kill thousands of mice.

Why havent we heard about these? she said in her protective mother voice.

We decided to look for critters with kinder dispositions.

En route to the rain forest, we passed a gaggle of dads tossing back bottles of beer.

Is there a moms wine corner? she asked.

(Yes, in the Academy Cafe, which has a stocked cooler of reds and whites.)

On average, upwards of 4,000 people visit the museum each day. Entering the rain forest can require significant time and patience. We, however, breezed right in, pausing only to consider the photographers question: Do you want to take a penguin picture? (Unfortunately, not a real bird but you in a penguin hat.)

We climbed the ramp, passing under a wireless mobile of butterflies. I peeked into glass boxes housing exotic creatures, such as Borneo gliders and golden mantellas, vibrant frogs from Madagascar that looked as if they had fallen into Benjamin Moore paint cans. Chrissy, meanwhile, was admiring a fluttery insect with a pair of trompe loeil eyes on its wings.

I think Im getting over my fear of moths, she said. This one is so pretty and peaceful.

I didnt have the heart to tell her that her breakthrough moment involved an owl butterfly, not a moth.

A few minutes shy of 8 p.m., the staff started to clear the ecosystem. Its inhabitants follow the same sleep schedules as fourth-graders.

The animals in the rain forest have an early bedtime, an employee said as we exited.

[Tips on how to travel light without sacrificing comfort and style]

Before the first planetarium show, we ducked into the cafe for dinner. As a special treat, the kitchen staff allowed guests to make their own pizzas. A chef in a white coat invited me behind the counter and handed me plastic gloves, which I slipped on and plunged into bowls filled with olives, pineapple, spinach and zucchini. He seemed relaxed and good-humored, even as I was butchering flavors.

At Tour of the Night Sky, a jocular employee read a few announcements. He told us that we would have to stow all flashlights and electronics at night, so as not to disturb the animals. A couple of youngsters gasped, but he assured them that none of the sleep areas would be cave dark. He also informed us that we would have to rise at 6:30 a.m., which caused this adult to howl. We also had to vacate the museum by 8 a.m. so the biologists can begin their work, but we were welcome to return for free when the museum reopened later that morning.

Then the lights went down and the stars came up.

We learned about cosmic dust, or star dandruff, and that the Milky Way supposedly tastes like raspberries. We also viewed Orion, who is a hunter, not a thinker. Throughout the presentation, a chorus of kids would sing out, Black hole! The educator swatted away the interruptions, but I could feel Lindsay rolling her eyes to the heavens above.



Families set up camp in the African Hall, which is also home to the (live) African penguins. (Andrea Sachs/The Washington Post)

Bed assembly time was nearing. Chrissy ran down to the car to grab extra blankets, and Lindsay and I climbed to the rooftop to peer through a telescope at Capella, two polka dots on a velvet skirt. We arrived at the African Hall a few minutes before 10 p.m. An employee said we could sleep anywhere except under the tree with the leopard crouched on the top branch. A mother and her son had already nabbed the prime penguin spot. We walked through the gallery of dioramas, past a pride of lions, a pair of zebras and a cheetah hunting a Thomsons gazelle. We stepped around sleeping bags, air mattresses and a low wall of rolling luggage. We finally found a space in the back, under an empty vitrine. The only consolation: I had an outlet within arms length.

For my evening ablutions, I went to the public bathroom and waited for a sink behind a girl in Frozen pajamas and a mom in yoga pants. Instead of heading right to bed, I crept downstairs to the aquarium, where rows of heads rested against tanks that glowed like lava lamps. I took the long route back. The California Academy of Sciences felt like my own private museum, and I wanted to prolong the fantasy.

In the African Hall, I tiptoed up to the penguins to say good night. Four birds stood like chess pieces, waiting for the next move. Eventually, the lights went out in their home, a signal that it was bedtime for all species.

Chrissy and Lindsay were fast asleep. I fluffed my blanket and pillow and closed my eyes. The room was silent until I heard a man trying to expel a warthog through his nose. The snoring was primal and penetrating. I jammed squishy earplugs, a gift from the museum, into my ears. Useless. I moved around the corner, cozying up with the African hunting dogs. I could still hear the loud snorts. I rolled up my bedding and embarked into the unknown. I walked over to Color of Life, but cocooned bodies occupied most of the nooks. Earthquake was too exposing; Aquarium was filled to capacity. I finally discovered a secluded corner shaded by two giraffes. I didnt have to worry about the pair snoring; their noses were stuffed.



The author finds quiet quarters under the giraffes. (Andrea Sachs/The Washington Post)

Guests can sleep within viewing distance of the African penguins. But eventually, its lights out for all species. (Andrea Sachs/The Washington Post)

The staff woke us up with a cheery camp-counselor announcement to rise and shine. We packed up our belongings and ventured over to the cafe for breakfast. Chrissy grabbed a table by the spotted cuscus, and we discussed the overnight-at-the-museum experience.

I had a really good sleep. The floor wasnt as hard as I thought it would be, Lindsay said, adding: Its funny that they call it sleeping with penguins. Youre really sleeping with the Academy of Sciences.

Chrissy, who had been initially wary of the event, shared her epiphany.

Its not all about your comforts, she said triumphantly. This made me feel like I can go ahead with other adventures.

My friends left shortly thereafter. I stayed behind and returned to the African Hall, now cleared of last nights evidence. I faced the penguins and watched them slowly come out to greet the new day.

More from Travel:

At a Namibian sanctuary, you dont just see the wildlife  you care for them

Blond hedgehogs, and more alluring strangeness of the Channel Islands

In the Bay Area, the Grateful Dead will live  and twirl  forever
Startups from China enjoy record year for financing Updated: 2016-01-27 07:42 By Cai Xiao(Chian Daily)

Li Xiaoning, founder of vc.cn, shares his insights with Xu Xiaoping (right), founder of ZhenFund, during an interval of an "angel dinner". [Photo/Provided to China Daily]

Venture capital firms invest in 1,555 China deals, with investment funds totaling $37 billion

Startup companies from China made a record in terms of financing value from venture capital investors last year, with encouraging policies, ample sources of capital and a strong entrepreneurial spirit seen as the factors driving this.

According to London consultancy Preqin Ltd, venture capital firms invested in 1,555 China deals and their investment funds totaled $37 billion, more than double the previous year's total.

"Encouraging policies on entrepreneurship are an important reason for the boom in startups," said Xiong Gang, chairman of ASBVentures (China) Holdings Ltd.

"Different from other countries, the Chinese government offers funds as well as system arrangements."

On March 5, Premier Li Keqiang mentioned the concept of the "Internet Plus" when delivering the annual Government Work Report. The State Council also released a guideline in September to accelerate its exploration of new models to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

According to Xiong, China was aiming at industry transformation and upgrading, so the innovation demands of both traditional enterprises and startup companies were strong.

"With 30 years of wealth accumulation, Chinese people have ample capital resources and investing in start-up companies has become a means of wealth management," said Xiong.

Funds available for China's private investors would total 114.5 trillion yuan ($18.46 trillion) at the end of this year, according to the report, released by Forbes magazine and CreditEase Corp.

Song Qingsong, founding partner at Beijing-based venture capital firm Junda Capital, said that the United States has been a global technology leader because of strong innovative and financial capabilities.

"But China is becoming a new leader because of its rapid economic development and mass entrepreneurship environment," said Song.

According to Song, many Chinese institutions and talents are participating in start-up business, which attracted venture capital funds at home and abroad.

"Chinese high-tech companies, especially Internet companies, have been global leaders and this trend will not change," said 31-year-old Liu Chunhe, founder and CEO of the Beijing-based New-Born Town, the fast-growing developer of mobile-based search platform Solo System.

The company recently completed a new round of financing, with its valuation reaching $500 million.

According to Liu, many Chinese Internet companies including start-ups were stepping up the pace of their globalization.

"China's capital markets also provide us with a good method of financing," said Liu.

But Xiong Gang said as China is full of capital, the prices of investment deals were not cheap, but good deals would be always popular.

Xiong also said Chinese investors should pay more attention to medium- and long-term investment, and recognize the risks in the venture capital business.
An adult emerald ash borer. Officials in Montgomery Countys parks department expect almost 3,000 trees will have to be removed this year after being infested by the beetles larvae. (Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources - Forestry )

Follow the woodpeckers.

Thats the mantra of horticulturists, arborists and nature lovers who monitor the health of ash trees. When the birds chisel away tree bark, its because theyre feasting on a green beetles larvae, and experts know its too late. The beetle, known as the emerald ash borer, has infested the tree and will eventually kill it.

Unfortunately, theyre so hard to detect that often the woodpeckers find trees that are infested before we can, said Patrick Harwood, a horticulturist for Montgomery Countys parks department as he inspected an infested ash tree along Rock Creek Trail in Kensington this month.

Ash-tree infestations are occurring at what arborists say is an alarming rate.

Last year, Harwood said, the county had to cut down about 80 infected trees. This year, county park officials expect that almost 3,000 will have to be removed, and they have already started.





The winter cutting targets the dead and extremely fragile trees that are the most likely to fall and hurt someone, Harwood said. About 1,800 need immediate attention, mostly along Rock Creek Trail.

Native to China, the emerald ash borer feasts on ash trees. And other than the woodpecker, it has no known natural predators in the United States.

[The emerald ash borer is one of the most destructive invasive animals in the U.S.  now meet 11 others]

The beetles journey to Maryland, experts believe, probably began when the species hitched a ride on ash trees from Michigan, the first state the ash borers were spotted in. The bugs were found in a Prince Georges County tree nursery in 2003. Today, the ash borer can be found in every county in Maryland.

It happened all of a sudden, Harwood said of the infestation, which emerged last spring. Park officials took notice.

One of the trail volunteers noticed it and brought it to our attention that there was a tree that looked like it had EAB  emerald ash borer  just one. And then we get there and its acres-worth of trees that were all completely dead. The tops were starting to shatter out and fall over.

Though it can take one to three years for emerald ash borers to destroy a tree, Montgomery County park officials say this once slow-moving locomotive is now a speeding bullet. Ash trees in county parks are dying more than 30 times faster than they had last year.

Patrick Harwood, a horticulturist for Montgomery County parks, inspects trees downed by emerald ash borers in Kensington, Md. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

But the trees fared well in this weeks snowstorm. What does well mean for a park where most ash trees are infested by the emerald ash borer?

They didnt fall down.

Montgomery County is not the first American community to deal with the ash borers destruction. The beetle is found in more than 20 states, as far south as Louisiana and Georgia and as far north as Minnesota and New Hampshire. Theyve also been found in Canada.

[A destructive beetle threatens trees  and people who live near them]

One of the first recorded American emerald ash borer outbreaks occurred in the summer of 2002 near Detroit. Deb McCullough, an entomology professor at Michigan State University, remembered the first time she examined an affected tree.

When we took the bark off and saw, the S-shaped trails the emerald ash borer larvae leave behind, we knew it wasnt a native insect that does that.

The trails prevent water and nutrients from flowing through the tree, essentially strangling it from the inside.

There were six of us and we just looked at it and scratched our heads, McCullough said of that first encounter with the metallic-green beetle. I remember going home and telling my husband, I said, I think this is going to be a big deal. 

[Read about how a 2014 winter freeze stopped ash borers and stink bugs cold]

At the time, she said, there was very little written about the life cycle of the beetle. A decade later, heres what experts know: The beetles live for about a month, and during that time, they emerge, mate, lay eggs and die.

One ash tree can have more than 10,000 larvae in it. They bore into the tree and feed on its living parts. After the 1- to 1.25- inch wormlike larvae feed, they overwinter and emerge as adult green beetles in early spring through D-shaped holes in the tree.

[The emerald ash borers domino effect on human health]

Putting an end to the life cycle is the key to saving ash trees. There are insecticide treatments, but they can be costly and dont save the tree. Researchers are studying  and rearing in labs at the University of Maryland  a wasp native to China that is the emerald ash borers natural predator. But specialists say it could take some time.

And time is not on the side of the ash trees. Over the next decade, Jerry Langham, senior arborist for Prince Georges Countys park and planning commission, said the bug could change the landscape of Maryland. Unless the ash trees, which are relatively inexpensive and line many of Marylands communities, are treated continually, they could all die.

Its moved beyond me trying to get control of it, said Langham. Its mainly removal.

[Civil War battlefield in Virginia is site of new invasion: emerald ash borers]

In Maryland, after the trees are cut down, there are plans to replant. But some parkgoers wonder about the lasting effect of the infestations.

Richard Baker, 75, bought his house because it was right behind the Rock Creek Trail. He shook his head when he was told about the borers devastation.

When you think of the weeding out of the species, whether its a species of trees or animals or birds, all of that is very sad, Baker said. At the same time, we cherish what we have. And there is a price to be paid for living in an industrial society. And this is part of the price.
Animal Welfare League of Alexandria seeks an animal control officer. For information, go to alexandriaanimals.org. Send applications to careers@alexandriaanimals.org.

Arlington County Invasive Plant program needs volunteers to remove invasive plants: 9-11 a.m. first Saturdays, Haley Park; 2-4:30 p.m. second Sundays, Gulf Branch Nature Center; 10 a.m.-noon third Saturdays, Tuckahoe Park; 2-5 p.m. third Sundays, Long Branch Nature Center; 10 a.m.-noon fourth Saturdays, Benjamin Banneker Park; 10 a.m.-noon fourth Sundays, Fort Bennett Park. Information: environment.arlingtonva.us. To register, call 703-228-1862.

Arlington Neighborhood Village needs volunteers to help senior citizens with various tasks. Must pass a background check. arlnvil.org.

Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment has board of directors and committee openings. 703-228-6427 or arlingtonenvironment.org.

Travelers Aid needs volunteers to help travelers at Reagan National Airport. Must be able to work evenings and weekends, and commit to six months. Parking provided. 703-417-3975, travelersaiddca@mwaa.com or travelersaiddca.com.

Virginia Hospital Center Auxiliary in Arlington County offers opportunities to help on information desks, the surgical center and in gift shops. 703-558-6401.

Wildlife Rescue League needs hotline volunteers, transporters and wildlife rehabilitators. 703-391-8625 or volcoord@wildliferescueleague.org.

Volunteer Alexandria: Call the numbers below or contact Volunteer Alexandria at 703-836-2176, mail@volunteeralexandria.org or volunteeralexandria.org for information on the following opportunities:

Capital Caring needs volunteers for We Honor Veterans program. handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org.

DC Paws Rescue needs volunteers to handle animals during the adoption event at the Dog Park in Alexandria, 1-3 p.m. every fourth Saturday. handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org.

Hammond Middle School needs a math tutor and mentor for the Reach and Rise for Excellence after-school program. handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org.

Reset STEM Education needs volunteer scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians in elementary schools and pre-kindergarten centers to lead students in STEM learning. handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org.

United Community Ministries needs an assistant community center supervisor, handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org; a back porch cashier/sales associate, handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org; a basic-needs counselor, handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org; and a food pantry assistant, handsonconnect.volunteeralexandria.org.

Volunteer Arlington: Call the numbers listed below or contact Volunteer Arlington at 703-228-1760 or volunteer.truist.com for information about the following:

Arlington County DHS Community Outreach Program needs citizenship instructors. 703-228-1317 or volunteer.truist.com.

Arlington County DHS Aging and Disability Services Division needs VICAP volunteers. Training provided, volunteer.truist.com; customer service volunteer, volunteer.truist.com; and court appointed guardians and conservators for seniors, volunteer.truist.com. 703-228-1700.

Arlington library system needs an experienced and professional graphic designer, volunteer.truist.com; and high school volunteers for the Rosie Riveters Internship program at Shirlington Library, volunteer.truist.com. 703-228-7688.

PRS CrisisLink needs crisis worker hotline volunteers. volunteer.truist.com.

Virginia Cooperative Extension Service, Arlington County, seeks volunteers for the master financial education program. Must attend training sessions scheduled May 7, 14, 21 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at Fairlington Community Center, 3308 S. Stafford St., Arlington. Application deadline is April 1. volunteer.truist.com; and applicants for master food program. Training dates are March 1, 8, 15, 22 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Applications are due Feb. 15. volunteer.truist.com. 703-228-6417.

 Compiled by Ria Manglapus

TO SUBMIT AN ITEM

Email: axliving@washpost.com

Fax: 703-518-3001

Mail: Volunteer Opportunities, The Washington Post, Alexandria-Arlington Local Living, 526 King St., Suite 515, Alexandria, Va. 22314.

Details: Announcements are accepted on a space-available basis from public and nonprofit organizations only and must be received at least 14 days before the Thursday publication date. Include event name, dates, times, exact address, prices and a publishable contact phone number.
In the latest wintry drama pitting a D.C. politician against snow, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser unleashes a flurry of tweets to battle a monster blizzard and inspire the confidence of her constituents.

Bowsers Twitter-ized snow wars thriller  call it @MayorBowser vs. #Snowzilla  begins with a show of contrition following an initial defeat. Her government, @TeamMuriel, has just been blindsided by the leading edge of what was then being referred to as #winterstormjonas.

Last night the District failed to deploy the necessary resources in response to the snow  for that I am sorry, Bowser (D) tweeted last Thursday after an inch of snow coated the region, iced the roads and stranded motorists for hours upon hours. So much for #DCSnowReady, a hashtag that Bowser used at one point.

Among the deluge of replies  some not so nice  was a welcomed one from a grizzled veteran of city snow wars past, @TonyWilliamsDC. He was the Districts mayor during the blizzard of 2003  and survived unscathed. Williams tweeted: Way to go. Open. Transparent.

Meanwhile, Capital Weather Gang meteorologists at The Washington Post had picked the winner of a contest to name the approaching storm. #Snowzilla was coming. The Capital Weather Gang went so far as to depict the snow on its blog as Godzilla spewing ice crystals along the Atlantic seaboard, freezer-burning the District, Maryland and Virginia completely off the weather map.

[A storm named Snowzilla]

No city or state could be truly prepared for something like that.

On the other hand, a mayor or governor could give the appearance of being ready or at least convey a sense of being engaged. Perception, thats what mattered most, as Marion Barry had learned the hard way as mayor during a snowstorm in 1987.

Barry was in Southern California for Super Bowl XXI that year and refused to return when the snowstorm struck. He argued that his director of public works was capable of handling a snowstorm. And what the city couldnt remove, the sun would melt. So why risk flying into a blizzard for nothing?

Residents were furious. Twin storms had hammered the city with more than 20 inches of snow, leaving roads clogged with snow drifts for days. Barry would apologize upon his return, but even some who had overlooked his personal indiscretions would not forgive him for being AWOL during a crippling snowstorm.

[Elected officials see storm as a test]

Williams learned from Barrys mistakes. He had been vacationing in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when he got word of the approaching snowstorm in 2003. He didnt want to fly into a blizzard, either. So he caught flights that circled around the storm and got back to the city just as the snow was starting to fall.

People just want to know that their leaders are with them, that everyone is in this together, Williams said at the time.

Of course, if there had been Twitter back then, both of them might have been able to make their presence felt with a tweet. Barry could have sent assurances that he had the snowstorm in 1987 under control #SomewhereinDC.

To her credit, Bowser also held many media briefings  in person. Remarkably, though, @TeamMuriel still used the same reasons as Barry for why snow removal doesnt go as well in the District as it does in places such as Buffalo or Minnesota.

Washington just isnt built to handle snow.

But it was the barrage of hashtags and ampersands that conveyed her minute-to-minute engagement in the crisis. For millennials, who represent the largest number of newcomers to the city, Bowsers tweets satiated a craving for instant updates and news nuggets, no matter how insignificant.

Any latent fears that group might have about Yoyo (Twittertalk for Youre on your own), @MayorBowser made clear they were not.

Although the District would get the least amount of snow of any jurisdiction in the Washington area and has only 4,400 miles of road to clear  compared with, say, 71,000 miles of road in Maryland and 162,000 miles of road in Virginia  @MayorBowser and @TeamMuriel would come to personify the regional resistance movement in #Snowzilla #Blizzard2016.

She would protect her city #StaySafeDC and enlist every able-bodied resident in the counterattack #DCDigOut. Not everyone was pleased. After the defeat against Jonas, some fumed displeasure @MayorBowser #Shameful.

On Monday, she tweeted: This afternoon the @WhiteHouse reached out and pledged to support the District as we dig out. Thank you @POTUS.

Reinforcements were on the way. Washington, under the command of @MayorBowser, had weathered the storm.

As for #DCDigOut, to be continued . . .

To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.
A lawsuit filed by a transgender teen in Virginia over the right to use the boys bathroom at his high school rather than a gender-neutral bathroom similar to the one pictured above could affect school policies across the country. (Toby Talbot/AP)

A transgender teens fight to use the boys bathroom at his high school in a rural corner of Virginia could shape how schools across the country deal with the question of whether transgender teens have the right to use bathrooms in accordance with their gender identities.

Gavin Grimm, 16, and his attorneys on Wednesday took the teens case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, where judges will determine whether banning Gavin, who was born a girl, from the boys bathroom constitutes sex discrimination and violates federal law. Gavin sued the Gloucester County School Board in the fall, asking for a preliminary injunction to allow him to use the boys bathroom.

Fights over whether transgender students should be allowed to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity have sprouted around the country. But this is the first time a federal appeals court has taken up the question of whether bathroom restrictions for transgender students violate Title IX  the federal law barring discrimination based on gender in schools  and the case is being closely watched by activists on both sides of the issue. Four states and two governors have filed amicus briefs supporting the school board.

It will likely be a bellwether one way or another that people will look to in the immediate future to look to see where courts are headed, said Joshua Block, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney arguing Gavins case. David Corrigan, who is representing the Gloucester County school board, did not respond to a request for comment.

If the judges rule in Gavins favor, it could clear the way for other transgender students to assert their rights to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity and for supporters of transgender students to argue for greater protections in the nations schools. If they rule against Gavin, it could give those fighting for bathroom restrictions more ammunition.

Gavin, who was born a female but came out as male when he was 15, said this is an important fight. He said being forced to use a separate, unisex bathroom has exacerbated the anguish of being a transgender teenager. His legal fight, too, has made him the target of ridicule.

I feel humiliated and dysphoric every time Im forced to use a separate facility, Gavin said in a conference call Monday.

Those who support the bathroom restrictions have called them common sense and have argued that allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms in accordance with their gender identities could frighten other students or violate their privacy.

I think the ACLUs attempt to twist Title IX is way beyond the intent of the law, said Mat Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, which is representing a Virginia woman suing a local school district for passing a law protecting LGBT students and staffers from discrimination.

After Gavin came out as male, he began using the boys bathroom at Gloucester High. After seven weeks, angry parents raised the issue with the school board. Their complaints prompted the board to pass a policy requiring students to use the bathroom that corresponds with their biological gender and requiring transgender students to use separate, unisex facilities.

With the help of the ACLU, Gavin fought the policy in federal court, asking for a preliminary injunction that would allow him to use the boys bathroom. The Justice Department backed Gavins position. But in October, Judge Robert G. Doumar of the Eastern District of Virginia denied his request. Gavins attorney appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond.

[Judge denies transgender students request to use boys bathroom]

School districts have struggled with whether to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identities, in large part due to concerns about the privacy of other students using those facilities.

The U.S. Education Department, ruling that locker-room restrictions for transgender students constitute sex discrimination, pressed an Illinois school district in December to allow a transgender student to use the girls locker room.

[Under federal pressure, Illinois school district allows transgender student to use locker room]

In Virginia, a state lawmaker recently proposed a bill that would require schoolchildren and others to use public bathrooms that corresponded to their anatomical sex and called for fining those who dont comply.

Fairfax County, the states largest school district, has been taken to court over its decision to enact protections for LGBT staffers and students, although the district has yet to implement a specific policy around bathrooms and locker rooms. Andrea Lafferty, head of the Traditional Values Coalition, and an anonymous student sued the district in December, arguing that the school board acted outside its authority by extending protections to gay and transgender students and staffers. The male student, in a court filing, called the possibility of using a locker room with a transgender student who has female anatomy terrifying.

Gail Deady, a legal fellow with the ACLU of Virginia, said if judges rule that bathroom restrictions constitute sex discrimination, it would send a strong signal to state courts and state lawmakers that restrictive bathroom policies run afoul of federal law. If judges rule against Gavin, it could lead more school districts to pass restrictive bathroom policies.
Marylands Board of Public Works on Wednesday lifted a ban on using state money to purchase window air-conditioning units for public school classrooms.

The rule was designed to promote energy efficiency, but it came under scrutiny at the start of the school year, when children and teachers in Baltimore City and Baltimore County found themselves sweltering in classrooms amid higher-than-usual temperatures.

Seventy-six of the 145 city schools are without air conditioning and 48 of 175 in the county.

Comptroller Peter Franchot (D), one of three members of the board, described the situation Wednesday as our Flint, referring to problems with lead-tainted drinking water in that Michigan city. He said that without window units, students, teachers and school employees were subjected to conditions that few of us would even expose our animals to.

Gov. Larry Hogan (R), another member of the board, said the unanimous vote to change the regulation provides an immediate solution to a terrible problem.

Some school officials have expressed concern that the districts would have to shift funds from other projects in order to pay for the portable air-conditioning units. State Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp (D), the third member of the board, said districts should report back on where they find money for the installations.

Gregory Thornton, chief executive of Baltimore City schools, estimated that the cost for his district would be $17 million. Baltimore County superintendent Dallas Dance said the figure would be between $8 million and $10 million for his schools. Hogan and Franchot said they expect the districts to install the units quickly.

After addressing its regular agenda, the panel moved on to an annual ritual known as the Begathon, in which state education and political leaders plead their case for money to build and renovate schools. The requests continue for hours on end, this year with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

[Hogan proposes $42.3 billion budget that includes modest tax relief]

In the past, lawmakers have criticized the event as a waste of time, with local delegations making the trek to the State House only to stand outside the governors office waiting to be heard.

Former governor William Donald Schaefer (D) had a reputation for bawling out school superintendents and city leaders during the meetings. Another former chief executive, Martin OMalley (D), described the events as mind-numbing and pushed to limit the 2008 participants to education leaders.

Franchot pushed back against OMalleys proposal, inviting all county executives and city leaders to join the hearing in order to make the process as open and participatory as possible.

During Wednesdays begathon, Hogan had a heated argument with Carroll County schools superintendent Stephen H. Guthrie over whether Guthrie was rejecting $4 million in state money to help the county devise a plan for closing under-enrolled schools and redistricting students.

The governor demanded to know why Guthrie didnt want the funds, which were included in the fiscal 2017 budget Hogan proposed last week. Guthrie countered that the funds might not be approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature. He told the governor he may have to make key fiscal decisions for his district before lawmakers act on the budget, suggesting he has to plan as though the funds will not be available.

At this point, I wouldnt count on the money if I were you, Hogan said.
A funding dispute between Maryland Democrats and Gov. Larry Hogan could threaten the viability of a long-planned regional hospital complex that is supposed to improve health care and spur economic development in Prince Georges County, officials involved with the project say.

For the second year in a row, Hogan (R) has ignored a request for a $15 million operating subsidy for the countys main hospital, which is being jointly run by Dimensions Healthcare and the University of Maryland Medical System as a precursor to the more expansive teaching facility.

Health-care officials say the funds are needed to keep Prince Georges Hospital Center functioning, which is an important component of getting the regional hospital approved by state regulators. John Ashworth, UMMS senior vice president of network development, called the subsidy one of the cornerstones of making our financials work.

[Hospital project approved by county, waiting for states green light]

The state agreed in 2011 to provide $15 million annually as part of the transition of the Prince Georges health-care system. But the agreement, negotiated during the administration of former governor Martin OMalley (D), expired after Hogan took office last year.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., right, says he is frustrated by Gov. Larry Hogans unwilliness to include funds for a proposed regional hospital center in Prince Georges County. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

Aides to Hogan said he is under no obligation to continue the subsidy  a stance that prompted state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) to sponsor legislation that would require the state to make the $15 million annual payments.

A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

It didnt have to be that way. . . . It should have been in the governors budget this year, Miller said. But since it wasnt, were going to move forward.

Miller said a regional teaching hospital is critically needed in Prince Georges, where residents suffer from higher rates of chronic disease and death than elsewhere in the Washington region. Were going to make it happen on behalf of the people, especially the people who need health care, Miller said. I guarantee its going to happen.

The Maryland Health Care Commission, the state agency that approves health-care projects, has been reviewing the Prince Georges application for more than two years. One major step in the process is obtaining a positive recommendation from the Health Services Cost Review Commission, the state body responsible for setting hospital prices and capping annual spending.

In October, the commission sent a letter questioning the financial feasibility of the regional hospital project. That letter has triggered a protracted question-and-answer cycle with state officials over the costs, scope and size of the proposal.

Donna Kinzer, executive director of the commission, said the panel is committed to working out a solution with Dimensions, but that could mean modifying the size of the hospital plan. The two parties recently agreed to adjustments in financial projections and are negotiating the details.

[Stronger primary-care network called key to success of new hospital]

The snails pace is frustrating for county officials. They keep asking questions, we keep answering questions, and its a never-ending cycle, said Thomas Himler, deputy chief administrative officer for County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D). We are so close to the finish line that if everyone can get out of each others way, we can declare victory and move to a groundbreaking  and everything will be fine.

Bakers administration sent Hogan a new memorandum of understanding in October, but the governor has not signed it. Hogan further angered Baker and state Democratic leaders by including $27.5 million for the construction of the new hospital, even as he withheld the operating funds.

If he doesnt live up to his responsibility to make sure there is health care in Prince Georges, then the legislative body will step in, said Baker, who is considered a rising star in the Democratic Party and a potential challenger to Hogan in 2018. If this system goes down, it will be up to the state to deal with it.

A spokesman for Hogan said the governor is in talks with Miller and Busch about the funding, although Miller says he has not had such a conversation with the governor.

Its disappointing that when they dont get what they want when they want it, they enact more mandates, Hogan spokesman Doug Mayer said.

The bills being sponsored by Miller and Busch would require a $15 million operating subsidy in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019, followed by $5 million each in fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2021.

By that point, the new hospital is expected to be up and running. Its success, officials say, would depend in large part on luring doctors who prefer to work at larger hospitals elsewhere in the region, and attracting patients from Prince Georges and nearby areas who travel to the District, Montgomery County or elsewhere for medical care.

The regional hospital is an incredibly important project for Prince Georges County, Ashworth said. He said he hopes that the project will be approved in late spring or early summer.
Montgomery County

The following information, provided by the Montgomery County Police Department, shows only initial calls for service received by the 911 center. Many of these reported incidents could turn out to be classified under a different crime category or determined to be unfounded. And some calls for service could be resolved with no further action needed.

REWARDS FOR INFORMATION

Crime Solvers of Montgomery County, a nonprofit organization, pays up to $1,000 for information leading to an arrest and indictment in connection with felonies. Call the 24-hour hotline at 800-673-2777. Callers may remain anonymous.

District 1

Rockville Station

Telephone: 240-773-6070

SEXUAL ASSAULTS

Calhoun Pl., 7300 block, 4:27 p.m. Jan. 12. A sexual assault was reported.

Osprey Dr., 7200 block, 9:16 a.m. Jan. 15. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Baltimore Rd., 2500 block, 2:55 a.m. Jan. 14.

Garden View Sq., 300 block, 2:26 a.m. Jan. 12.

Maryland Ave., unit block, 1:53 p.m. Jan. 13.

Rockville Pike, 200 block, 5:49 p.m. Jan. 16.

Rockville Pike, 12000 block, 6:06 p.m. Jan. 15.

Taft Ct., unit block, 10:42 a.m. Jan. 15.

ROBBERY

Shady Grove Rd., 16000 block, 8:08 p.m. Jan. 17. Robbery reported.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Botany Ct., unit block, 10:54 a.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Bou Ave., 5700 block, 7:15 p.m. Jan. 13.

Bou Ave., 5700 block, 9:01 p.m. Jan. 13.

Bou Ave., 5700 block, 4:42 p.m. Jan. 16.

Carr Ave., 700 block, 10:02 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Darnestown Rd., 12100 block, 10:49 a.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Edison Park Dr., 100 block, 1:54 p.m. Jan. 16.

Elmcroft Blvd., 400 block, 5:35 p.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Elmcroft Blvd., 500 block, 3:37 p.m. Jan. 13.

Fallsgrove Dr., 700 block, 3:23 p.m. Jan. 18.

Freas Ct., unit block, 4:22 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Gibbs St., 100 block, 6:14 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Greenbriar Rd., 12700 block, 4:11 p.m. Jan. 12.

Higgins Pl., 1100 block, 7:19 a.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Hungerford Dr., 300 block, 4:31 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Hungerford Dr., 600 block, 11:31 a.m. Jan. 16.

Hungerford Dr., 700 block, 3:59 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Hungerford Dr., 700 block, 7:33 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Ivymount Terr., 7800 block, 5:30 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Jefferson St. E., 600 block, 7:30 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Jefferson St. E., 1700 block, 8:12 p.m. Jan. 13.

Longhorn Cres., 400 block, 12:19 p.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Maryland Ave., unit block, 6:39 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Maryland Ave., unit block, 11:34 a.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Montgomery Ave. W., unit block, 3:29 p.m. Jan. 14.

Redland Rd., 16000 block, 7:33 p.m. Jan. 16.

Rockville Pike, 200 block, 10:16 a.m. Jan. 14.

Rockville Pike, 700 block, 2:53 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Rockville Pike, 700 block, 7:09 p.m. Jan. 15.

Rockville Pike, 1300 block, 7:15 a.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Rockville Pike, 1500 block, 5:59 p.m. Jan. 14.

Rockville Pike, 1600 block, 5:20 p.m. Jan. 18.

Rockville Pike, 12000 block, 7:34 p.m. Jan. 12.

Rockville Pike, 12100 block, 12:10 p.m. Jan. 13.

Rockville Pike, 12100 block, 4:56 p.m. Jan. 16.

Shady Grove Rd., 14900 block, 5:59 p.m. Jan. 12.

Shady Grove Rd., 14900 block, 4:19 p.m. Jan. 15.

Shady Grove Rd., 15700 block, 3:09 p.m. Jan. 16.

Shady Grove Rd., 15700 block, 6:46 p.m. Jan. 18.

Southlawn Ct., unit block, 8:57 p.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Southlawn Lane, 500 block, 4:21 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Washington St. N., 200 block, 6:46 p.m. Jan. 15.

Watchwater Way, unit block, 10:28 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

VEHICLE THEFTS

Gibbs St., 100 block, 9:27 p.m. Jan. 18.

High Meadow Rd., 12700 block, 11:59 a.m. Jan. 14.

McLane Ct., 400 block, 1:02 p.m. Jan. 17.

VANDALISM

Randolph Rd., 5400 block, 1:28 p.m. Jan. 14.

District 2

Bethesda Station

Telephone: 240-773-6700

ASSAULTS

Blackthorn St. and Connecticut Ave., 1:12 p.m. Jan. 17.

Darby Ct., unit block, 11:57 a.m. Jan. 16.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 11:31 a.m. Jan. 17.

Maple Ave., 11900 block, 5:52 p.m. Jan. 12.

Old Georgetown Rd., 8600 block, 6:28 a.m. Jan. 16.

Pennsylvania Ave., 9000 block, 4:15 a.m. Jan. 13.

Sangamore Rd., 4500 block, 12:07 p.m. Jan. 16.

St. Elmo Ave., 4900 block, 1:40 p.m. Jan. 15.

Wilson Lane, 5000 block, 7:45 a.m. Jan. 12.

Wilson Lane, 5000 block, 1:13 p.m. Jan. 13.

Wisconsin Cir., unit block, 8:47 p.m. Jan. 18.

ROBBERY

Massachusetts Ave. and Onondaga Rd., 1 a.m. Jan. 15. Robbery reported.

INDECENT EXPOSURE

Woodmont Ave., 7000 block, 1:11 a.m. Jan. 18.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Arlington Rd., 7400 block, 8:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Beechwood Dr., 7000 block, 12:55 p.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Blackthorn St., 3800 block, 2:56 p.m. Jan. 12.

Bradley Blvd., 5000 block, 8:33 a.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Butler Rd., 5400 block, 10:39 a.m. Jan. 16.

Cleveland St., 3900 block, 12:31 p.m. Jan. 18.

Commonwealth Dr., 11400 block, 10:55 a.m. Jan. 13.

Connecticut Ave., 10500 block, 3:52 p.m. Jan. 14.

Creek Shore Dr., 4600 block, 9:33 p.m. Jan. 15.

Democracy Blvd. and Old Georgetown Rd., 11:17 a.m. Jan. 12.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 11:25 a.m. Jan. 12.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 6:09 p.m. Jan. 12.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 11:08 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 5:28 p.m. Jan. 13.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 8:02 p.m. Jan. 13.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 1:21 p.m. Jan. 14.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 1:19 p.m. Jan. 15.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 10:30 p.m. Jan. 15.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 2:04 p.m. Jan. 16.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 6:27 p.m. Jan. 16.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 6:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 2:51 p.m. Jan. 17.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 5:41 p.m. Jan. 17.

Democracy Blvd., 7100 block, 9:04 p.m. Jan. 18.

East-West Hwy., 2700 block, 2:34 p.m. Jan. 14.

Fairfax Rd., 6600 block, 1:02 p.m. Jan. 17.

Fernwood Rd., 10400 block, 2:25 p.m. Jan. 13.

Friendship Blvd., 5500 block, 2:21 p.m. Jan. 15.

Kirkdale Rd., 9100 block, 2:33 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Lyttonsville Rd., 2400 block, 8:54 p.m. Jan. 18.

Maple Ave., 4500 block, 1:13 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Montgomery Ave. and Waverly St., 5:03 p.m. Jan. 15.

Nantucket Terr., 10800 block, 8:20 a.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Nicholson Lane, 5100 block, 4:07 p.m. Jan. 12.

Old Georgetown Rd., 8300 block, 2:05 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Old Georgetown Rd., 10200 block, 6:09 p.m. Jan. 14.

Old Georgetown Rd., 10200 block, 5:54 p.m. Jan. 16.

Old Georgetown Rd., 10200 block, 3:40 p.m. Jan. 18.

Old Georgetown Rd., 11500 block, 12:36 p.m. Jan. 18.

Old Georgetown Rd., 11600 block, 2:14 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Old Georgetown Rd., 11600 block, 7:03 p.m. Jan. 14.

Oldchester Rd., 5700 block, 5:19 p.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Overlea Rd., 6000 block, 10:05 a.m. Jan. 12.

River Rd., 5500 block, 7:25 p.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Rock Spring Dr., 6400 block, 6:13 p.m. Jan. 13.

Rockville Pike, 11500 block, 9:42 a.m. Jan. 12.

Rockville Pike, 11500 block, 1:26 a.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Ross Rd., 2400 block, 7:45 p.m. Jan. 17.

Thornapple St., 3600 block, 1:39 p.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Westlake Dr., 10300 block, 1:21 p.m. Jan. 16.

Wetherill Rd., 4500 block, 12:38 p.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Willard Ave., 4400 block, 11:11 a.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Wilson Lane, 5200 block, 3:19 p.m. Jan. 13.

Wisconsin Ave., 5400 block, 8:45 a.m. Jan. 14.

Wisconsin Ave., 6800 block, 4:12 p.m. Jan. 16.

Wisconsin Ave., 7300 block, 9:23 a.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Woodmont Ave., 7100 block, 10:32 a.m. Jan. 17.

VEHICLE THEFTS

Hoover St., 5600 block, 6:02 a.m. Jan. 12. Stolen vehicle.

Wisconsin Ave., 7700 block, 11:04 a.m. Jan. 13.

VANDALISM

Blackistone Rd., 5300 block, 7 a.m. Jan. 15.

District 3

Silver Spring Station

Telephone: 240-773-6800

SEXUAL ASSAULTS

Blackburn Lane, 3900 block, 9:18 a.m. Jan. 15. A sexual assault was reported.

Mount Pisgah Rd., 9700 block, 4:24 p.m. Jan. 12. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Bayfield St., 700 block, 2:48 p.m. Jan. 12.

Cameron St., 8600 block, 10:36 p.m. Jan. 14.

Colesville Rd., 8600 block, 10:54 p.m. Jan. 17.

Columbia Pike and Greencastle Rd., 4:34 p.m. Jan. 16.

Georgia Ave., 8200 block, 11:47 p.m. Jan. 14.

Georgia Ave., 8400 block, 3:14 a.m. Jan. 12.

Georgia Ave., 8700 block, 1:05 a.m. Jan. 17.

Georgia and Wayne avenues, 3:21 a.m. Jan. 17.

Milestone Dr., 1000 block, 5:48 p.m. Jan. 12.

New Hampshire Ave. and Powder Mill Rd., 3:01 p.m. Jan. 18.

Outlet Dr., 13800 block, 3:54 p.m. Jan. 12.

Piney Branch Rd., 9300 block, 2:37 a.m. Jan. 14.

ROBBERIES

Mount Pisgah Lane, 1700 block, 10:03 p.m. Jan. 13. Robbery reported.

Serpentine Way and Turquoise Terr., 1:27 p.m. Jan. 18. Robbery reported.

Thayer Ave., 500 block, 8:40 p.m. Jan. 18. Robbery reported.

WEAPON

Carroll Ave., 8600 block, 11:12 a.m. Jan. 14.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Antler Ct., 2600 block, 5:34 a.m. Jan. 16.

Briggs Chaney Rd., 2900 block, 12:48 a.m. Jan. 12.

Briggs Chaney Rd., 3300 block, 1:57 p.m. Jan. 18.

Broadbirch Dr., 2300 block, 1:26 p.m. Jan. 15.

Cameron St., 8700 block, 5:18 p.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Cameron St., 8700 block, 6:17 p.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Carroll Ave., 8700 block, 9:18 a.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Castle Blvd., 14200 block, 11:44 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Cherry Hill Rd., 11400 block, 3:43 p.m. Jan. 12.

Cherry Hill Rd., 12000 block, 2:29 p.m. Jan. 14.

Cherry Hill Rd., 12000 block, 2:26 p.m. Jan. 17.

Cherry Hill Rd., 12000 block, 8:58 p.m. Jan. 17.

Childress Terr., 3500 block, 4:28 p.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Colesville Rd., 8400 block, 12:54 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Colesville Rd., 8400 block, 8:44 p.m. Jan. 15.

Colesville Rd., 8400 block, 4:07 a.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Colesville Rd., 8400 block, 11:20 p.m. Jan. 16.

Colesville Rd., 8400 block, 9:43 a.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Colesville Rd., 8700 block, 12:34 a.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Colesville Rd., 8700 block, 6:17 a.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Colesville Rd., 9100 block, 4:11 p.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Columbia Pike, 11400 block, 4:51 p.m. Jan. 15.

Cornet Ct., 2800 block, 4:01 p.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Crestmoor Dr., 10400 block, 9:15 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Deer Ridge Dr., 2600 block, 8:57 a.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Dixon Ave., 8200 block, 10:25 p.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Dixon Ave., 8200 block, 9:32 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Dunoon Rd., 1100 block, 7:13 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

East-West Hwy., 1300 block, 3:58 p.m. Jan. 15.

East-West Hwy., 1400 block, 9:37 p.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Ellsworth Dr., 800 block, 6:03 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Ellsworth Dr., 900 block, 8:29 p.m. Jan. 15.

Evergreen St., 9500 block, 1:57 p.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Featherwood Ct., unit block, 4:51 p.m. Jan. 14.

February Cir., 11500 block, 1:31 p.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Fenton St., 8100 block, 1:58 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Fenton St., 8300 block, 2:42 a.m. Jan. 12.

Fenton St., 8500 block, 4:08 p.m. Jan. 16.

Fenton St., 8500 block, 8:38 p.m. Jan. 16.

Fenton St., 8500 block, 10:50 p.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Fidler Lane, 1100 block, 2:16 a.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Garland Ave., 8300 block, 10:47 a.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Garland Ave., 8600 block, 4:35 p.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Garland Ave., 8800 block, 7:05 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 8000 block, 3:14 p.m. Jan. 15.

Georgia Ave., 8000 block, 11:11 p.m. Jan. 15.

Georgia Ave., 8400 block, 7:23 a.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 9900 block, 8:25 a.m. Jan. 12.

Gershwin Way, 13000 block, 8:44 a.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Gilmoure Dr., 500 block, 4:52 p.m. Jan. 14.

Grayson Ave., 10000 block, 9:45 a.m. Jan. 13.

Hamilton Ave. E., 200 block, 11:16 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Herrington Manor Dr., 12300 block, 7:17 a.m. Jan. 16.

Industrial Pkwy., 2100 block, 8:37 a.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Kimberly Rd., 1800 block, 11:09 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Kinloch Rd., 10700 block, 8:15 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Lockwood Dr., 11100 block, 10:17 p.m. Jan. 17.

Lockwood Dr., 11300 block, 10:32 p.m. Jan. 12.

Lyric Lane and Oak Leaf Dr., 5:01 p.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Mac Tavish Pl., 3600 block, 1:28 p.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Marlow Farm Terr., 2900 block, 8:51 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Marlow Pl., 12800 block, 9:28 a.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Milestone Dr., 1000 block, 11:35 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Milestone Dr., 1000 block, 6:22 a.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Naglee Rd., 10300 block, 4:35 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Naglee Rd., 10400 block, 8:26 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

New Hampshire Ave., 9400 block, 4:09 p.m. Jan. 15.

New Hampshire Ave., 10100 block, 8:43 p.m. Jan. 16.

New Hampshire Ave., 11100 block, 1:05 a.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

New Hampshire Ave., 11200 block, 5:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

New Hampshire Ave., 11200 block, 10:20 a.m. Jan. 15.

Northwest Dr., 800 block, 1:56 a.m. Jan. 14.

Northwest Dr., 800 block, 9:58 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Oak Leaf Dr., 11200 block, 9:32 p.m. Jan. 13.

Oak Leaf Dr., 11200 block, 7:44 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Oak Leaf Dr., 11200 block, 9:34 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Oak Leaf Dr., 11200 block, 10:32 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Old Columbia Pike, 11700 block, 4:48 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Old Columbia Pike, 15500 block, 12:06 p.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Old Columbia Pike, 15500 block, 4:33 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Outlet Dr., 13800 block, 1:21 p.m. Jan. 12.

Park Valley Rd., unit block, 2:03 a.m. Jan. 15.

Perrywood Ct., unit block, 7:41 p.m. Jan. 15.

Pickwick Village Terr., 9000 block, 3:02 p.m. Jan. 18.

Piney Branch Rd., 8500 block, 3:38 p.m. Jan. 16.

Portland Rd., 10100 block, 4:07 p.m. Jan. 18.

Prosperity Dr., 12500 block, 5:07 p.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Quartet Lane, 3100 block, 8:27 a.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Rabbit Run Terr., 11500 block, 8:19 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Reddick Dr., 10000 block, 2:09 p.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Reddick Dr., 10000 block, 9:35 a.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Ruatan St., 1000 block, 4:15 p.m. Jan. 16.

Ruppert Rd., 1300 block, 9:28 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Sheffield Manor Terr., 3500 block, 9:55 a.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Spring St., 1000 block, 2:17 p.m. Jan. 15.

Star Pointe Lane, 4100 block, 5:31 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Stepping Stone Way, 14400 block, 2:17 p.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Tahona Dr., 8300 block, 9:10 a.m. Jan. 12.

Tech Rd., 12200 block, 3:44 a.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Thayer Ave., 800 block, 2:44 p.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Tracy Dr., 1000 block, 8:16 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Turbridge Dr., 3500 block, 12:22 p.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

University Blvd. E., 600 block, 3:46 a.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

University Blvd. E., 700 block, 8:44 a.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Walden Rd., 9100 block, 5:02 p.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Woodlake Dr., 3500 block, 6:09 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

13th St., 8000 block, 12:47 p.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

16th St., 8500 block, 7:25 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

VEHICLE THEFTS

Eastbourne Pl., 1100 block, 5:21 a.m. Jan. 18.

Old Columbia Pike, 11800 block, 9:22 p.m. Jan. 16. Stolen vehicle.

Selim Rd., 900 block, 9:44 p.m. Jan. 15. Stolen vehicle.

VANDALISM

Dunmoor Dr. S., 10600 block, 1:15 p.m. Jan. 14.

Industrial Pkwy., 2100 block, 8:29 p.m. Jan. 17.

Old Columbia Pike, 11700 block, 12:05 p.m. Jan. 17.

Royal Rd., 10400 block, 6:26 a.m. Jan. 14.

Sutherland Rd., 10100 block, 7:23 a.m. Jan. 15.

13th St., 8000 block, 8:21 p.m. Jan. 16.

District 4

Wheaton Station

Telephone: 240-773-5500

SEXUAL ASSAULT

Edgemont St., 12100 block, 11:28 a.m. Jan. 14. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Beaverwood Lane and Bel Pre Rd., 5:32 p.m. Jan. 15.

Bel Pre Rd., 2200 block, 9:38 p.m. Jan. 16.

Bushey Dr. and Greenly St., 3:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

Dewey Rd., 12300 block, 8:33 p.m. Jan. 16.

Goodhill Rd., 12700 block, 8:40 a.m. Jan. 15.

Norbeck Rd., 2700 block, 5:20 p.m. Jan. 17.

Norwood Rd., 300 block, 12:08 p.m. Jan. 15.

Olney Sandy Spring and Spartan roads, 11:58 p.m. Jan. 16.

Prince Philip Dr., 18100 block, 12:34 a.m. Jan. 12.

Richwood Lane, 3300 block, 10:49 p.m. Jan. 16.

Tenbrook Dr., 10600 block, 1:46 p.m. Jan. 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 6:33 p.m. Jan. 15.

Whispering Pines Ct., 14100 block, 6:53 p.m. Jan. 15.

ROBBERIES

Georgia Ave., 11100 block, 2:46 p.m. Jan. 18. Robbery reported.

Georgia Ave., 11400 block, 12:16 p.m. Jan. 16. Robbery reported.

Pear Tree Ct., 3500 block, 11:07 p.m. Jan. 18. Robbery reported.

Randolph and Veirs Mill roads, 1:07 p.m. Jan. 17. Robbery reported.

WEAPON

Layhill Rd., 14200 block, 3:20 p.m. Jan. 14.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Aspen Hill Rd., 3900 block, 3:05 p.m. Jan. 12.

Aspen Hill Rd., 3900 block, 2:04 p.m. Jan. 15.

Aspen Hill Rd., 3900 block, 5:56 p.m. Jan. 17.

Batchellors Forest Rd., 16200 block, 1:05 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Bel Pre Rd., 3500 block, 2:32 p.m. Jan. 13.

Blueridge Ave., 2300 block, 1:58 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Briarwood Terr., 14400 block, 9:01 a.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Briarwood Terr., 14400 block, 9:26 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Centerfield Way, 16800 block, 7:40 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

College View Dr., 11500 block, 3:11 a.m. Jan. 13.

Connecticut Ave., 14000 block, 11:38 a.m. Jan. 12.

Connecticut Ave., 14000 block, 5:14 p.m. Jan. 13.

Crossway Rd., 14600 block, 7:28 a.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Danvers St. and Parkland Dr., 3:40 p.m. Jan. 17.

Elby St., 3700 block, 10:09 p.m. Jan. 16.

Emory Church Rd., 3300 block, 4:01 p.m. Jan. 12.

Gelding Lane, 3800 block, 3:34 p.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Georgia Ave., 11200 block, 9:20 a.m. Jan. 15.

Georgia Ave., 11200 block, 8 a.m. Jan. 18.

Georgia Ave., 11300 block, 12:09 a.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 12200 block, 1:56 p.m. Jan. 14.

Georgia Ave., 12300 block, 4:28 a.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 12300 block, 8:59 a.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 13600 block, 3:49 a.m. Jan. 12.

Georgia Ave., 13600 block, 4:28 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 14000 block, 9:19 p.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 14100 block, 1:58 p.m. Jan. 16.

Georgia Ave., 18000 block, 6:03 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 18000 block, 2:17 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Georgia Ave., 18000 block, 5:58 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Georgian Woods Pl., 2000 block, 1:28 p.m. Jan. 13.

Glenallan Ave., 2200 block, 12:10 a.m. Jan. 12.

Glenallan Ave. and Layhill Rd., 9:11 a.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Grandview and Parker avenues, 10:05 a.m. Jan. 16.

Hallet St., 4400 block, 3:50 a.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Highwood Rd., 4200 block, 10:55 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Homecrest Rd., 14600 block, 6:20 a.m. Jan. 17.

Mahan Rd., 4300 block, 9:07 a.m. Jan. 12.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Minuteman Dr., 4500 block, 4:31 a.m. Jan. 16.

New Hampshire Ave., 17500 block, 2:09 p.m. Jan. 14.

Northwyn Dr., 14100 block, 11:38 p.m. Jan. 15.

Queen Mary Dr., 3600 block, 11:58 p.m. Jan. 14.

Reedie Dr., 2400 block, 3:13 a.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Rolling Meadow Way, 18100 block, 5:33 p.m. Jan. 14.

Rolling Meadow Way, 18200 block, 2:02 p.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Schoolhouse Cir., 2900 block, 2:06 p.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Shady View Lane, 18600 block, 12:05 p.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Town Center Dr., 18100 block, 5 p.m. Jan. 12.

Twig Rd., 14300 block, 4:21 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. W., 2700 block, 11:48 a.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

University Blvd. W., 2700 block, 1:24 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 1:56 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 1:58 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 2:36 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 2:47 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 3:11 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 5:33 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 6:59 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 8:18 p.m. Jan. 12.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 8:46 p.m. Jan. 13.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 7:39 p.m. Jan. 14.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 11:37 a.m. Jan. 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 1:30 p.m. Jan. 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 4:59 p.m. Jan. 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 8:08 p.m. Jan. 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 8:50 p.m. Jan. 15.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 2:17 p.m. Jan. 16.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 8:10 p.m. Jan. 16.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 10:52 p.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 12:51 p.m. Jan. 17.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 3:17 p.m. Jan. 17.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 3:56 p.m. Jan. 17.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 3:04 a.m. Jan. 18.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11100 block, 9:20 a.m. Jan. 18.

Veirs Mill Rd., 11500 block, 2:04 p.m. Jan. 18.

Veirs Mill Rd., 12200 block, 7:19 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Veirs Mill Rd., 12200 block, 10:58 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Village Center Dr., 18200 block, 2:22 p.m. Jan. 13.

Westbury Rd., 14700 block, 3:49 p.m. Jan. 12.

Westchester Dr., 1700 block, 11:01 p.m. Jan. 13.

Woodcrest Dr., 14200 block, 6:05 p.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

VEHICLE THEFTS

Claridge Ct., 3300 block, 9:36 a.m. Jan. 17.

Hewitt Ave., 3100 block, 4:36 p.m. Jan. 12. Stolen vehicle.

VANDALISM

Elm Grove Cir., 1300 block, 5:58 p.m. Jan. 15.

District 5

Germantown Station

Telephone: 240-773-6200

SEXUAL ASSAULTS

Aircraft Dr., 20000 block, 5:05 p.m. Jan. 18. A sexual assault was reported.

Crystal Rock Dr., 19600 block, 7:17 p.m. Jan. 15. A sexual assault was reported.

Dark Star Way, 18200 block, 4:54 p.m. Jan. 15. A sexual assault was reported.

Frederick Rd., 19500 block, 11:35 a.m. Jan. 14. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Brink and Wildcat roads, 3:53 p.m. Jan. 16.

Century Blvd., 20100 block, 12:04 a.m. Jan. 16.

Frederick Rd., 19500 block, 8:53 p.m. Jan. 16.

Frederick and Germantown roads, 2:32 a.m. Jan. 14.

Hopkins Rd., 13800 block, 4:59 p.m. Jan. 17.

Roberts Tavern Dr., 23200 block, 6:13 p.m. Jan. 15.

Smoke House Ct., 18200 block, 8:55 p.m. Jan. 13.

Waring Station Rd., 18800 block, 9:01 a.m. Jan. 14.

Whelan Lane, 22800 block, 3:45 p.m. Jan. 14.

ROBBERIES

Frederick Rd., 20500 block, 8:43 p.m. Jan. 18. Robbery reported.

Wisteria Dr., 12600 block, 6:06 p.m. Jan. 15. Robbery reported.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Aircraft Dr., 20000 block, 11:40 a.m. Jan. 14.

Aircraft Dr., 20000 block, 3:54 p.m. Jan. 18. Theft from auto.

Bear Creek Dr., 14200 block, 10:54 p.m. Jan. 16.

Bunyan Cir., 21200 block, 10:07 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Century Blvd., 19900 block, 6:15 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Century Blvd., 19900 block, 7:30 a.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Century Blvd., 20000 block, 9:39 a.m. Jan. 18.

Circle Gate Dr., 19300 block, 7:43 p.m. Jan. 14.

Clarksburg Rd., 23300 block, 8:23 a.m. Jan. 17.

Crystal Rock Dr., 19700 block, 11:31 a.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Cutsail Dr., 24700 block, 7:29 a.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Davis Mill Rd., 22200 block, 10:14 a.m. Jan. 13.

Dovedale Way, 13300 block, 9:54 a.m. Jan. 18.

Frederick Rd., 19700 block, 11:41 a.m. Jan. 14.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 6:45 p.m. Jan. 12.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 7:51 p.m. Jan. 12.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 5:28 p.m. Jan. 14.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 12:36 p.m. Jan. 15.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 4:47 p.m. Jan. 15.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 6:21 p.m. Jan. 15.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 10:46 a.m. Jan. 17.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 9:50 p.m. Jan. 17.

Frederick Rd., 20900 block, 11:38 a.m. Jan. 18.

Frederick Rd., 21900 block, 2:54 p.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Germantown Rd., 19700 block, 1:37 p.m. Jan. 15.

Germantown Rd., 19700 block, 4:10 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Henderson Corner Rd., 21000 block, 10:27 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Laurel Hill Way, 20200 block, 3:57 a.m. Jan. 15.

Majestic Maple Dr., 12200 block, 8:07 a.m. Jan. 15.

Mateny Rd., 18000 block, 6:04 p.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Middlebrook Rd., 12300 block, 8:01 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Middlebrook Rd., 12500 block, 1:58 p.m. Jan. 15.

Middlebrook Rd., 12900 block, 9:03 a.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Middlebrook Rd., 13000 block, 3:27 p.m. Jan. 18.

Quail Woods Dr., 12300 block, 10:43 a.m. Jan. 17. Theft from auto.

Ridge Rd., 23400 block, 11:19 p.m. Jan. 12.

Smoke House Ct., 18200 block, 7:45 a.m. Jan. 12.

Summer Oak Ct., 18800 block, 1:34 p.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Summer Oak Dr., 11600 block, 8:04 a.m. Jan. 12. Theft from auto.

Sweetleaf Lane, 22400 block, 10:34 a.m. Jan. 13.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Wisteria Dr., 12700 block, 10:21 a.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Wisteria Dr., 12900 block, 12:01 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

VEHICLE THEFT

St. Johnsbury Lane, 19300 block, 6:11 a.m. Jan. 16.

VANDALISM

Frederick Rd., 20000 block, 9:43 a.m. Jan. 13.

Gladys Farm Way, 9200 block, 7:37 p.m. Jan. 16.

Teakwood Lane, 13500 block, 3:41 p.m. Jan. 13.

District 6

Gaithersburg Station

Telephone: 240-773-5700

SEXUAL ASSAULT

Mayapple Ct., 18400 block, 9:26 p.m. Jan. 15. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Broschart Rd., 14900 block, 4:50 p.m. Jan. 16.

Contour and Lost Knife roads, 2:59 p.m. Jan. 14.

Copley Pl., 300 block, 4:14 p.m. Jan. 16.

Crabbs Branch Way, 16900 block, 9:31 p.m. Jan. 14.

Frederick Ave. N., 400 block, 12:33 p.m. Jan. 12.

Frederick Ave. N., 600 block, 2:36 p.m. Jan. 18.

Frederick and Shady Grove roads, 12:57 p.m. Jan. 15.

Hellingly Pl., 9800 block, 8:52 p.m. Jan. 13.

Lost Knife Cir., 18400 block, 1:27 a.m. Jan. 17.

Lost Knife Rd., 9600 block, 11:19 p.m. Jan. 15.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19300 block, 1:15 p.m. Jan. 15.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19300 block, 1:52 p.m. Jan. 15.

Montgomery Village Ave., unit block, 6:24 a.m. Jan. 17.

Park Ave., 200 block, 1:38 a.m. Jan. 17.

Pruitt Ct., 20600 block, 9:19 p.m. Jan. 17.

Ridgeline Dr., 10200 block, 8:24 p.m. Jan. 16.

Sandpiper Lane, 18600 block, 8:44 p.m. Jan. 13.

Summit Ave. N., 300 block, 12:04 a.m. Jan. 17.

ROBBERY

Ridgeline Dr., 10000 block, 9:06 p.m. Jan. 16. Robbery reported.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Alliston Hollow Way, 8900 block, 9:10 p.m. Jan. 13.

Broadwater Dr., 9200 block, 6:12 a.m. Jan. 15. Theft from auto.

Bureau Dr., unit block, 6:23 p.m. Jan. 14.

Clopper Rd., 700 block, 9:32 a.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Copley Pl., 300 block, 7:55 p.m. Jan. 17.

Coriander Dr., 7900 block, 6:15 p.m. Jan. 16.

Diamond Ave. E., 200 block, 5:08 p.m. Jan. 14.

Eclipse Pl., 9700 block, 11:25 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Elioak Terr., 7600 block, 3:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Emory Grove Rd., 9500 block, 1:02 p.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Flower Hill Way, 18200 block, 11:21 a.m. Jan. 13. Trespassing.

Frederick Ave. N., 100 block, 8:24 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Frederick Ave. N., 100 block, 6:09 p.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Frederick Ave. N., 200 block, 5:44 p.m. Jan. 14.

Frederick Ave. N., 400 block, 2:33 p.m. Jan. 15.

Frederick Ave. N., 500 block, 7:58 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Frederick Ave. N., 600 block, 2 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Frederick Ave. N., 600 block, 9:05 a.m. Jan. 18.

Gaither Rd., 9200 block, 8:14 a.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Girard St., 400 block, 9:50 a.m. Jan. 12.

Girard St., 400 block, 6:50 p.m. Jan. 14.

Goshen Rd., 20000 block, 6:48 p.m. Jan. 13.

Goshen Rd., 20000 block, 7:46 p.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Goshen Rd., 20000 block, 12:51 p.m. Jan. 16.

Goshen Rd., 20000 block, 5:15 p.m. Jan. 17.

Goshen Rd., 20200 block, 11:34 a.m. Jan. 12.

Grand Corner Ave., unit block, 3:58 p.m. Jan. 18.

Harmony Hall Rd., 100 block, 10:36 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Kent Oaks Way, 600 block, 8:14 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Lost Knife Cir., 18300 block, 10:07 a.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Lost Knife Cir., 18400 block, 8:05 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Lost Knife Cir., 18400 block, 9:29 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Medical Center Dr., 9900 block, 7:08 a.m. Jan. 16. Trespassing.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19100 block, 6:21 p.m. Jan. 13.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19100 block, 12:42 p.m. Jan. 14.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19200 block, 7:23 p.m. Jan. 14.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19300 block, 5:33 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19300 block, 5:46 p.m. Jan. 14. Trespassing.

Montgomery Village Ave., 19300 block, 2:47 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Montgomery Village Ave., unit block, 1:09 a.m. Jan. 17. Trespassing.

Muddy Branch Rd., 200 block, 10:55 a.m. Jan. 18.

Nathans Pl., 18700 block, 2:31 p.m. Jan. 14.

Oakmont Ave., 16700 block, 4:02 a.m. Jan. 12.

Pawnee Dr., 12100 block, 10:42 a.m. Jan. 13. Theft from auto.

Pensacola Dr., 500 block, 3:43 p.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

Quince Orchard Blvd., 700 block, 1:23 p.m. Jan. 17.

Quince Orchard Rd., 600 block, 10:37 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Remsbury Pl., 20400 block, 7:48 p.m. Jan. 15.

Ridgepoint Pl., 300 block, 1 p.m. Jan. 13.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 1:48 p.m. Jan. 12.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 11:45 a.m. Jan. 14. Theft from auto.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 2:04 p.m. Jan. 14.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 5:47 p.m. Jan. 14.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 7:39 p.m. Jan. 14.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 10:34 a.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 1:45 p.m. Jan. 15.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 4:40 p.m. Jan. 15.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 5:59 p.m. Jan. 16.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 5:56 p.m. Jan. 18.

Russell Ave., 700 block, 6:29 p.m. Jan. 18.

Russell Ave., 800 block, 2:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

Russell Ave., 800 block, 7:15 p.m. Jan. 12. Trespassing.

Rydal Terr., 7800 block, 7:58 p.m. Jan. 13.

Shady Grove Rd., 15200 block, 1:31 p.m. Jan. 17.

Shady Grove Rd., 15700 block, 3:41 p.m. Jan. 14.

Spectrum Ave., 200 block, 9:57 p.m. Jan. 16.

Sugar Notch Cir., 19900 block, 4:38 p.m. Jan. 16. Theft from auto.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Washingtonian Blvd., 9800 block, 5:41 p.m. Jan. 12.

Washingtonian Blvd., 9800 block, 6:13 p.m. Jan. 18. Trespassing.

Watkins Mill Rd., 18800 block, 11:19 a.m. Jan. 17.

VEHICLE THEFT

Diamond Ave. E., 500 block, 3:08 p.m. Jan. 13.

VANDALISM

Crested Iris Way, 19700 block, 2:01 p.m. Jan. 16.

Deer Park Dr. E., unit block, 4:09 p.m. Jan. 13.

Driscoll Ct., unit block, 1:34 p.m. Jan. 13.

Takoma Park and other areas

ASSAULTS

New Hampshire Ave., 7400 block, 11:59 p.m. Jan. 16. Stabbing.

New Hampshire Ave., 7400 block, 10:01 p.m. Jan. 18.

New Hampshire Ave., 7600 block, 4:35 p.m. Jan. 12.

ROBBERY

Maple Ave., 7100 block, 8:38 p.m. Jan. 12. Robbery reported.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Eastridge Ave., 8300 block, 6:47 p.m. Jan. 12.

Flower Ave., 7600 block, 3:39 p.m. Jan. 12.

Holly Ave., 7200 block, 7:23 p.m. Jan. 18.

Maple Ave., 7600 block, 11 a.m. Jan. 13.

Medd Ave., 3500 block, 4:32 p.m. Jan. 14.

Takoma Ave., 7600 block, 7:43 a.m. Jan. 15. Trespassing.

University Blvd. E., 1100 block, 2:55 p.m. Jan. 16.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 12:25 p.m. Jan. 12.

University Blvd. E., 1300 block, 2:41 p.m. Jan. 12.
Songwriting contest finalists to perform in Bethesda

The nine finalists of the Bernard/Ebb Songwriting Awards, produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, will perform March 4 at the Bethesda Blues & Jazz Supper Club, 7719 Wisconsin Ave.

The finalists were selected from more than 200 entries from songwriters in Maryland, Virginia and the District.

Six songwriters have been chosen as finalists. The winner will receive $10,000:

Jason Byrd (Americana, rock), Bethesda

Justin Jones (adult contemporary, rock), Arlington

Connaitre Miller (vocal jazz, gospel/inspirational), Adelphi

Mike Ounallah (rock/alternative, soul), the District

Frank Solivan (country/bluegrass), Alexandria

Cecilia Sugarman (pop), Towson

Three songwriters from the Young Songwriter category (applicants younger than 18) will also perform and compete for $2,500:

Maddy Clark (folk/acoustic), McLean

Madison Gestiehr (pop), Bethesda

Eli Pafumi (folk/acoustic), Sterling

The competition was created by local philanthropist Cathy Bernard in honor of her uncle, Fred Ebb, an American songwriter and creator of Broadway hits, such as Cabaret and Chicago, and iconic songs including New York, New York.

Audience members can arrive at 6 p.m. to buy dinner and drinks at the theater before the 8 p.m concert. Cabaret-style seats are $15 and theatre-style seats are $10. Food and drink is not included in the ticket price.

For details and tickets, visit bethesda.org or call 301-215-6660.

Montgomery has an opening on housing opportunities panel

Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) is accepting applications to fill a vacancy on the Housing Opportunities Commission.

The seven-member panel is responsible for building, managing and financing housing for low- and moderate-income residents. Members serve five-year terms without compensation, but they are eligible for reimbursement for travel and dependent care for meetings attended.

Meetings are held first Wednesdays in Kensington. Members are expected to attend regular meetings of committees and boards of directors of properties, to which they are assigned. Additional meetings are scheduled as needed. Members are required to attend at least 75 percent of the scheduled meetings.

The deadline to apply is Feb. 5.

To apply online or view other vacancy announcements, go to montgomerycountymd.gov.

If I were mayor essay contest for Maryland fourth-graders

In a statewide essay contest, Maryland fourth-graders are being asked to share their views on what it takes to be a mayor.

Entrants must write a 275-word essay on the theme Rising to the Challenge. They must answer three questions:

What new programs or services would you create to help citizens lead a healthier life/make the town a healthier place to live?

How would you get citizens to participate?

What things would you do as mayor?

All essays must open with the line: If I were mayor, I would . . . The children should use grade-appropriate language and demonstrate strong language art skills and knowledge of civics and social studies.

Eleven entrants will be selected to receive a $100 prize, governors citation and an Annapolis boat cruise. Winners will also be honored at a ceremony at the State House.Essays must be received by March 31. For information, visit mdmunicipal.org or call 410-268-5514.

The contest is sponsored by the Maryland Municipal League and the Maryland Mayors Association.

 Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton and Jillian S. Jarrett
Statewide essay contest is open to fourth-graders

Maryland fourth-graders are being asked to share their views on what it takes to be mayor in a statewide essay contest sponsored by the Maryland Municipal League and the Maryland Mayors Association.

Entrants must write a 275-word essay on the theme Rising to the Challenge. They must answer three key questions:

What new programs or services would you create to help citizens lead a healthier life/make the town a healthier place to live?

 How would you get citizens to participate?

 What things would you do as mayor so your town does not end up on the Worst Towns list?

All essays must open with the line If I were mayor, I would. . . . They should use grade-appropriate language and demonstrate strong language art skills and knowledge of civics and social studies.

Eleven entrants will be selected to receive a $100 cash prize, governors citation and an Annapolis boat cruise. Winners will also be honored at a ceremony at the State House.

Essays must be received by March 31. For a contest form and rules, visit mdmunicipal.org or call 410-268-5514.

Bowie seeks input from local business community

The city of Bowie seeks local business owners, managers, or senior-level personnel to rate the citys sustainability efforts in a 10-question online survey as part of a Sustainability Plan initiative for the city.

As part of its 100th anniversary, the city is working with state and citizen organizations to create a sustainability plan. The survey will help determine what factors are important to operating a business in the community and how businesses are implementing sustainability in their operations.

Take the survey through Jan. 31 at surveymonkey.com/r/GreenBowieBusiness. For information, call 301-809-3047 or visit cityofbowie.org/greenbowie.

Deadline to sign up for health coverage is Sunday

Residents have until Sunday to sign up for health coverage under the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange. Prince Georges County residents can visit enrollment centers throughout the county for free, in-person assistance navigating the states online marketplace.

Under the federal Affordable Care Act, all residents must have health insurance. The exchange site offers an online market for residents to shop for, compare and purchase available insurance plans. Financial assistance is offered to those who qualify, and Medicaid recipients must reapply for coverage annually.

For information, visit marylandhealthconnection.gov.

 Compiled by Jillian S. Jarrett
Ancient French wine brotherhood honors Chinese museum founder Updated: 2016-01-27 16:23 By Liu Jia in Bordeaux, France(chinadaily.com.cn)

Li Xuan, second right, is dubbed a 'knight' of the Left Bank Bordeaux. [Photo by Liu Jia for China Daily]

The founder of China's first international wine museum has received a "knighthood" for forging closer Franco-Chinese ties in the sector.

At the ceremony on Jan 19, Li Xuan, the 33-year-old curator of the Shanghai International Wine and Spirits Museum, became the youngest recipient of a "knight medal" granted by the Commanderie du Bontemps de Medoc, des Graves, de Sauternes et de Barsac, also known as the Left Bank Bordeaux.

With a history dating back to the Middle Ages, Left Bank Bordeaux is one of the oldest and largest wine brotherhoods in France.

Philippe Blanc, director of Saint-Julien-based Chateau Beychevelle, the winery where the ceremony took place, said Li had been recognized by the most celebrated estates and wineries in Bordeaux for a distinguished contribution made to France.

Awarded with the top honor, Li pledged that his museum team would keep on promoting France's centuries-old wine tradition and culture to the growing number of wine lovers in China.

Li's museum is built in a cave at Sheshan Mountain in Shanghai. With a total area of more than 20,000 square meters, it is the largest wine-themed museum in Asia.

The museum, which began operations in December 2015, offers Chinese wine lovers an unprecedented opportunity to experience wine culture of the world at home.

Through the platform, foreign wine producers show their products, history and culture to Chinese consumers without paying any exhibition administration fee.

Li said those interested in entering the Chinese market can transport limited stock to the bonded warehouse at the museum free of charge.

"The total storage capacity of the museum warehouse is 24 million bottles. We have collections from all over the world. Wine from Bordeaux - the largest quality wine origin-ranks the top in terms of number of bottles on display," he said.

"There are 22 bottles of Bordeaux wine opened in the world every second," said Christophe Chateau, communication director at the Inter-professional Council of Bordeaux Wine, the organization representing more than 7,000 wine producers from the region.

"The French market is shrinking, but export is climbing, especially to Chinese market. In 2013, over 80 million bottles are exported to China, Macau and Hong Kong. China is the largest export market for Bordeaux wine," he added.
Washington homicide detectives are investigating the fatal shooting Friday of a 37-year-old District man who police say may have been targeted for suspected marijuana in his apartment, including some kept in jars labeled with names such as Girl Scout cookies.

Police arrested David Davalier Harvey, 18, of Northwest Washington in connection with the shooting death of Matthew Shevlin, who was found outside his condo in the 400 block of M Street NW in Mount Vernon Triangle. Shevlin had been shot twice, once in the head and once in the chest, according to charging documents filed in D.C. Superior Court.

Police received a call just after 10:30 a.m. Friday for multiple gunshots. When police arrived, they found Shevlin in a small courtyard of the condo building. Minutes later, police discovered Harvey stumbling out of the building. According to the court documents, an officer found a Glock .45-caliber handgun with an extended magazine stuffed in Harveys pants leg. Harvey told the officer that there was a man inside the building who was hurt and that he had seen two people trying to break into an apartment.

Inside Harveys jacket, police found a Mason jar filled with a green weed substance. The jar was labeled White Fade Out.

After securing a warrant to search Shevlins condo, police said, they found multiple jars of pot-like substances similar to the one found on Harvey, according to the charging papers. Police tested the contents of one of the jars and said the leaves were determined to be marijuana.

Also inside the condo, police found many large and small plants, which they said were consistent with marijuana, according to the charging papers. Police also found a storage bin full of suspected marijuana.

It is legal in the District for adults to possess up to two ounces of marijuana, to use it on private property and to grow up to six plants in their residences.

Outside on the buildings steps, according to court papers, police recovered a silver .40-caliber casing.

Police said they recovered security footage that shows three men approach the front of the building just minutes before the shooting. One of the men in the video, police said, was wearing a jacket and clothing that match those Harvey was wearing when he was arrested.

The video shows Shevlin being chased by a man with a gun and later knocking on neighbors doors for help, the documents state. That man is later seen on video climbing over a fence at the rear of the complex.

According to the court documents, in a police interview, Harvey told the detectives he met up with an unknown man at the corner of Fifth and M Streets NW and they went to the apartment complex.

Harvey told the detectives that he and the man went into the apartment building and that he saw Shevlin run out of his condo unit. Harvey told the detectives he walked into the condo, took the Mason jar off the counter and left the building.

Harvey told detectives he went to the building so he would get some of the weed, police said in the charging papers. He told authorities he did not witness the shooting.

Harvey was later charged with first-degree murder while armed. At a hearing Monday, a judge ordered Harvey to remain in D.C. jail until his preliminary hearing on Feb. 12.

Shevlins family declined to comment.

Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
A boy was arrested Tuesday in connection with two bomb threats that were called into a Southeast Washington school this month, D.C. police said.

The juvenile was charged with two counts of threats to do bodily harm, according to a police department news release. Police did not release his age.

Authorities said Wednesday that both calls were made on Jan. 12  at 10 a.m. and 11:52 a.m.  to Somerset Preparatory School on Wheeler Road. Both threats were made by a male caller through a blocked telephone number, the release said.

Police searched the school that day and found no hazardous materials.

Investigators from the departments telephone support unit traced the phone calls, which revealed a link that led to the boy, authorities said.
A man being sought by D.C. police and suspected of threatening government officials has been taken into custody in Jessup, Md., south of Baltimore, according to District authorities.

Adrian Daigle, 36, was the subject of an urgent police bulletin issued Monday night by D.C. police. At the time, they would only say Daigle was wanted for questioning in reference to an active police investigation involving threats.

On Tuesday, Lt. Sean Conboy, a police spokesman, said the case involved threats against government officials in the area. He would not provide more specifics.

Howard County police said Daigle was taken into custody early Tuesday on an emergency petition. He was taken to a hospital to be evaluated to determine if he is a threat to himself or to others, according to a police statement.

The statement says that no criminal charges have been filed in Howard County and that authorities do not anticipate charging him in the near future. That does not rule out charges being filed by federal authorities or in the District.

Adrian Daigle, 36, was the subject of an urgent police bulletin issued Monday night by D.C. police. At the time, they would only say Daigle was wanted for questioning in reference to an active police investigation involving threats. (D.C. police)

Police believe Daigle is from Louisiana; he had last been seen driving a 1999 silver Lincoln Town car with Louisiana license plates.
Baltimore Officer William Porter, right, and his attorneys, Joseph Murtha, left, and Gary Proctor. An appeals court is considering whether Porter can be forced to testify against officers charged in Freddie Grays death as he awaits retrial in the case. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters)

Prosecutors who are forcing William G. Porter to testify against co-defendants charged in the death of Freddie Gray are using the officer as a designated whipping boy in their thirst to convict others, Porters attorneys argued.

The accusations were part of the latest round of legal briefings to a Maryland appeals court as Porters attorneys seek to prevent him from taking the witness stand against Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. and Sgt. Alicia D. White as he awaits retrial.

Porters first trial in December ended in a hung jury. A Baltimore City Circuit Court judge this month ordered Porter to testify against White and van driver Goodson, but the officer has appealed.

In papers filed Tuesday with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, Porter attorneys Gary Proctor and Joseph Murtha underscored their concerns with making the officer testify. Despite prosecutors promises that they will not use Porters statements against him at a retrial, defense attorneys say the forced testimony would hurt Porters chances for a fair trial, taint future jury pools and put him at risk if federal charges are filed in Grays death.

Immunity is typically granted in plea deals and for grand jury testimony, but legal experts said this would be the first time in Maryland that it would be extended to someone facing trial.

There are witnesses, and there are defendants with pending homicide trials, Porters attorneys wrote. Its time to tell the state that never the twain shall meet.

[Complete coverage of the Freddie Gray case]

Prosecutors have said they cannot win convictions against Goodson (who faces the most serious charge, second-degree murder) and White (who faces manslaughter and other charges) without Porters testimony.

Porter, who faces manslaughter and other charges, was at five of six stops a police van made during the April arrest and transport of Gray, 25. Gray suffered a serious neck injury in the back of the van and died a week later, sparking protests and riots.

[Who was Freddie Gray, how did he die and how did the first trial end in a hung jury?]

The state said officers were responsible for Grays death because they did not buckle him into his seat in the van and failed to call for medical assistance when he asked for help. But defense attorneys argued that Gray showed no immediate signs of distress and that arrestees were rarely strapped in while riding in the back of police wagons.

Porters attorneys said they are worried that prosecutors will attempt to use the officers forced testimony against him later, regardless of their promises of immunity.

Any statement the officer gives that may be inconsistent with previous testimony could be considered perjury, which is not protected under any sort of immunity and could prevent him from testifying at his own trial, Porters attorneys said.

The state alleged that Officer Porter lied and attempted to cover up facts when giving a statement to police officers, and when taking the stand in his own defense, Porters attorneys said. Effectively, the State wishes to compel Porter, through the farce of a grant of immunity, to lay a foundation for evidence that the State has deemed as constituting an obstruction of justice and perjury.

Prosecutors must file a legal response to Tuesdays brief next month. The Court of Special Appeals is scheduled to hear the matter March 4.

Officer Edward Nero  who has been charged with second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment  is the next defendant set to go to trial, on Feb. 22.
The principal of a D.C. high school and an administrator of another school were shot Monday night while sitting in a parked car in the Barry Farm neighborhood of Southeast Washington, authorities said.

Their wounds were described by police as serious but not life-threatening. Police said they were searching for a suspect who has been charged in an arrest warrant with assault with intent to kill. He is identified as Justin Headspeth, 23.

Letters sent home to parents on Tuesday identify the victims as Eugenia Young, 37, the principal of Roosevelt STAY, an alternative high school in the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest, and Otis Grandson, 31, dean of students for Ballou STAY in Southeast.

The shootings occurred about 7:20 p.m. in the 1500 block of Eaton Road SE. A D.C. police report says that officers responded to the street for a report of gunshots and found both wounded victims inside a vehicle.

Young told the officer that a gunman walked up to the car, pulled out a gun and fired several shots. Young was struck in the abdomen and right forearm, according to the police report; Grandson was struck in the back of his head and left arm, the report says.

Justin Headspeth, 23 (D.C. police)

It is unclear what the victims were doing at the time, but a statement from the school system says the shootings were not related to the schools. Barry Farm is a neighborhood near Anacostia, just off Suitland Parkway.

The D.C. public schools community is shocked and saddened by the violence against our administrators and are hoping for a swift recovery of our colleagues, the school system said in a statement.

In the letter to Roosevelt STAY parents, a school superintendent wrote that officials understand that this incident is sure to raise many emotions, concerns and questions for our entire school, especially our students.

Headspeth was arrested in June on Birney Place Southeast, also in Barry Farm, when a police officer reported seeing him strike a woman several times in the face as she sat in the drivers seat of a car, according to court documents.

The victim told police that Headspeth tried to grab the keys and then began hitting her in the face. He was charged with misdemeanor simple assault. He was freed pending trial but failed to appear for a court hearing and was charged with violating the terms of his release. His trial is scheduled for Feb. 4.

Police have posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Keith L. Alexander and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
Authorities warned Washington area residents Wednesday that the morning commute  whether by subway, bus or car  was going to be long and tough as more offices and schools reopen after a snowstorm for the record books.

D.C. Public schools were in session, but officials advised parents to use discretion in sending their kids. Many other area school districts remain closed. The federal government was opening three hours late.

The biggest snarls in the early morning commute were three separate crashes that all involved tractor trailers on normally busy highways. Two incidents were on Interstate 270  one in the Rockville area and another just south of Frederick. Another crash was blocking some lanes on the southbound side of the Capital Beltway near Braddock Road.

The cause of the crashes was not immediately known.

[Passable doesnt mean easy]

With nearly 3.5 billion cubic feet of snow falling on the Washington, D.C. area, there's small mountains of snow to remove. But where do you put all that snow? For the District, the answer is RFK Stadium's Parking Lot 7. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)

Crews around the region have been working long shifts to plow highways, roads and neighborhood streets. But many area residents were still faced with snow-clogged streets. And overnight many crews continued to plow roads and spread salt treatments.

But a big problem for drivers, officials said, will be big mounds of snow that have been pushed off streets. They create reduced visibility, reduce the number of lanes on some roads and make lanes more narrow on area streets.

[Three crashes snarl traffic in Maryland and Virginia]

It is going to be a slow, difficult commute, said Jennifer McCord, spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Transportation. Were expecting quite a bit more traffic today as more commuters are venturing out.

She warned drivers should be cautious and slow down, as those mounds of snow are likely to be around for weeks as the snow melts.

Another concern area officials said is the potential for refreezing from low temperatures overnight.

On Metro, there was finally some good news for riders as the transit agency reported that all six of its rail lines, including the Silver Line, were back in service. And Metro was running buses on 160 of its 300 bus routes, but has warned of possible delays and detours. Amtrak and area commuter trains, including MARC and VRE were running.

1 of 54 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What the D.C. area looks like after the epic blizzard View Photos The storm has stopped, and the cleanup is only beginning  but not without a snowball fight or some sledding first. Caption The storm has stopped, and the cleanup is only beginning  but not without a snowball fight or some sledding first. Jan. 26, 2016 Mike Mazza and his son Gabriel stand outside their subdivision attempting to get plow service for their street in Gaithersburg, Md. Gary Cameron/Reuters Wait 1 second to continue.

[Silver Line is back; heres the transit picture for Wednesdays commute]

Another bright spot was at the three area airports, where flight delays were reported to be minor.

The blizzard shut down virtually everything through Tuesday, costing the region an estimated $570 million in lost economic activity, according to the investment firm Moodys.

The District said it has spent more than $12 million on snow removal. Thats about twice what the city budgeted for the whole year. The city ended its snow emergency at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The Districts emergency management chief, Christopher Geldart, said the citys goal also was to have at least one lane open on all streets by Wednesday morning. But Geldart, like officials regionwide, conceded that they may not get to all of them.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) told business owners to get out and shovel their sidewalks or face a $150 fine.

In Loudoun County, where 36 inches of snow fell in some areas, two Virginia Department of Transportation snowplows damaged their blades while carving through the stubborn mounds of snow and ice.

This equipment being worked that hard, its not uncommon to have some breakdowns and some issues with machinery, McCord said.

Facing an increasingly impatient public, the District, Montgomery County and Virginia state officials all said they hope to have neighborhood roads passable by early Wednesday. Arlington and Alexandria set similar goals. Prince Georges County made a 9 p.m. commitment, saying that was more realistic.

In Fairfax County, Sharon Bulova, chair of the County Board of Supervisors, said that plows were making progress, but that the cleanup effort could take several days more.

Theyre now saying that the clearing may not be completed until the weekend, which is frustrating for homeowners and businesses, Bulova said.

Staff writers Ashley Halsey III, Paul Duggan, Michael Laris contributed to this report.
D.C. Council member Jack Evans was formally recommended Tuesday to be Metros next board chairman, virtually ensuring that he will take over leadership of the top governing body of the troubled transit system, board members said.

Evanss ascension to the chairmanship could lead to significant restructuring of how Metro operates. He has been a leader of a faction on the board that pressed for a financial turnaround expert to be the next general manager. Board members also noted that he and others have said the 16-member board is too large.

If selected chairman, Evans has said, he will seek to be the public face of a campaign to press the federal government to give Metro more money. His argument would be that the government should pay more because the system transports so many federal employees to and from work each day.

In a telephone conference call Tuesday, the boards governance committee selected Evans as chairman in the slate of leaders it will submit to the full board for its next regular meeting, board members said. That meeting will be Thursday.

The board members spoke on condition of anonymity because the selection process is supposed to be confidential. But four board members said they viewed Evanss election as what one called a done deal.

[D.C. Council member Jack Evans now leading contender for Metro chairman.]

Another board member was more cautious, saying, Nothings ever done until its done with this group. Thursday, well find out for sure.

Evans, who declined to comment, has been campaigning openly for the job since the current chairman, Mortimer L. Downey, decided not to seek reelection. Downey chose to step down partly because of his frustrations over the deep divisions on the board, which delayed selection of a new general manager for more than a year.

In November, the board finally selected Paul J. Wiedefeld, a former chief executive of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, as its general manager.

The Metro boards governance committee also nominated Jim Corcoran, president of the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce, to be a vice chairman.

He was seen as the leading candidate to be chairman until he unexpectedly said on Jan. 14 that he would not allow himself to be considered for the job. Corcoran said he couldnt spare the time to serve as chairman because of his obligations as president of the chamber.

His withdrawal aroused concern among some board members, who viewed him as someone in a good position to unite the board. Evans, according to some members, was too closely identified with a faction that includes District and Maryland members who were strongly critical of how the board operated under Downey.

Corcoran declined to comment about the recommendation that he become a vice chairman.

Evans, 62, is a veteran member of the D.C. Council, representing Ward 2, which includes Georgetown. A Democrat, he is the longtime chair of the councils finance committee and has twice run unsuccessfully for mayor.

Evans began his current stint on Metros board in January 2015, when he was selected by the council as its principal representative. He also served on the Metro board from 1992 to 1999 and was chairman in 1994 and 1997.
Red lights as far as the eye can see on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. If theres one thing travelers want traffic signal engineers to do, its manufacture more green-light time. (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg News)

Traffic signals rule our lives, so when the man who ruled D.C. traffic signals retired, many readers paid attention.

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

I appreciated your column about William McGuirk. As a public servant myself, its good to know of public servants dedicated to their job. I particularly liked the attitude reflected in the quote in the last paragraph of the article.

There was many a time that I would have liked to contact someone in D.C. government about such things as too short a crossing time on 14th Street below Thomas Circle, given that theres a retirement community at Thomas Circle and its residents shop at CVS on 14th Street. However, I thought finding the right office or person would be a hassle.

Jane Walstedt, the District

[Travel tips for 2016s commuters]

DG: What McGuirk said in the last paragraph was, You can find something at every intersection you can turn into a work order. He told staffers at the District Department of Transportation that field inspections can always turn up something that can be improved, whether its the signal timing or some branch trimming to improve the signals visibility.

The theme in these next two letters is that signal timings need a lot of improvement.

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

Theres one thing Id like to offer some pushback on: District traffic-light timing.

In a word, its abominable. Worse than any other city Ive lived in, big or small.

At intersection after intersection, in neighborhood after neighborhood, for pedestrians and drivers alike, traffic signals are simply not appropriately timed.

Light cycles are either too long or too short. Though I am not a traffic engineer, the timing does not seem to be synced to other intersections. It promotes gridlock and dangerous maneuvers, rather than traffic flow and safety.

Jonathan Make, the District

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

What the District needs are traffic engineers who know about the timing of traffic signals. It appears that they cant be found locally, Fairfax County is another example where so many lights change to red just as one drives up to the next intersection.

I have driven in Europe and I find that the timing of traffic signals, particularly in Germany and Switzerland, is excellent, with many thoroughfares in cities and suburban areas having what they call the green wave that enables a motorist driving at the posted speed limit to travel with a minimum of stops. This saves time and money on gas and also cuts down on the pollution that results from idling engines. Perhaps we can lure some overseas talent to help us solve our problem.

George H. Spencer, McLean

DG: McGuirk, like the other signals experts Ive met in the Washington region, was used to getting complaints and willing to discuss travelers frustrations. These are some of the tips that he gave me.

Complaints. If you think a D.C. signal is busted, you might be right. But how can you tell whether you should contact the 311 D.C. service line to ask DDOT to check? McGuirk said commuters who follow the same routes every day are in a good position to spot sudden changes that were unintentional.

Deploying signals. The District has 1,657 signalized intersections. Some think thats not enough. They argue streets in their neighborhoods would be safer with the addition of signals. McGuirk said DDOT studies requests to add signals, but sometimes decides against it, or goes for a signal style other than the traditional green, yellow, red.

At some locations, a traditional signal might do more harm than good. Or there might be a more specialized type of signal needed. DDOT, along with other jurisdictions in the region, has deployed some newer types of signals designed specifically to protect pedestrians. The signal to halt traffic may be dark until a pedestrian hits the button on a pole to activate the red lights for drivers.

Syncing. DDOT is in the midst of a large-scale resyncing of its traffic signals to improve the flow, McGuirk said. This program is using a great deal of traffic data and is meant to be comprehensive on a large scale, dealing with entire corridors of travel. But its not the only effort to deal with traffic signal timing. McGuirk said DDOT does about a hundred timing changes a month.

Green time. The laws of nature dont allow signal engineers to manufacture time. They can only distribute it differently. A guiding principle: Two objects cant occupy the same space at the same time, McGuirk said. He often gets asked why the District cant be more like New York City in coordinating its traffic signals. Well, he said, the District isnt like New York in the extent of its grid pattern of streets and the number of streets that are one-way only. The District sometimes has to deal with a more complicated stage in organizing its traffic ballet.

I can make your traffic look perfect, but the guy going in the other direction will be on the phone that morning wanting to know what I did to so drastically reduce traffic flow, he said.
German software maker helps smarten Chinese manufacturing Updated: 2016-01-27 20:55 By Liu Ce in Shenyang and Ma Si in Beijing(chinadaily.com.cn)

The Chinese Academy of Sciences partnered with German software company SAP SE on Wednesday to offer smart plant solutions to local enterprises as the country aggressively promotes high-end manufacturing.

The national academy's Shenyang Institute of Automation and SAP unveiled a model of their jointly-developed intelligent assembly lines, which can help companies quickly produce tailor-made products by leveraging robots and software.

During the event in Shenyang, the two sides signed a strategic cooperation agreement. Under the deal, the two sides will extend technologies which support agile manufacturing and Internet services to promote automated manufacturing in China.

Agile manufacturing requires enterprises to respond directly and speedily to users' demands, and to customize goods that others mass-produce.

"We have decades of experience in engineering and intelligent systems. The partnership with SAP will lead to more cutting-edge products that can help boost China's manufacturing capability," said Yu Haibin, the head of Shenyang Institute of Automation.

Under the deal, SAP will integrate its software with robots and other hardware developed by Shenyang Institute of Automation so that each assembly line can produce more than just one product.

China has been promoting high-end manufacturing through the "Made In China 2025" initiative, which encourages traditional enterprises to embrace the Internet, automated machines and software to boost productivity.
As the World Health Organization decides whether to declare the Zika virus outbreak a global public health emergency, here's a look at other pandemics that made it to our shores. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

As the World Health Organization decides whether to declare the Zika virus outbreak a global public health emergency, here's a look at other pandemics that made it to our shores. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

With the Zika virus now circulating in two dozen countries and territories across the Americas, the mosquito-borne pathogen seems destined to reach the United States, and probably sooner rather than later.

What is far less certain, say public health and infectious disease experts, is Zikas potential reach and impact here. The South is seen as especially vulnerable because of its warm, humid climate and pockets of poverty where more people live without air conditioning or proper window screens. Plus, the region is already home to mosquitoes that can transmit the virus.

Some models estimate as many as 200 million people live in areas that might be conducive to the spread of Zika during summer months  including the East and West coasts and much of the Midwest. That makes for a huge target as researchers scramble to determine how the virus manifests itself in the human body, who is particularly at risk, and why.

[WHO: Zika virus spreading explosively, level of alarm extremely high]

Their urgency comes amid reports from Brazil, the epicenter of Zika, of thousands of newborns with microcephaly. The rare condition involves an abnormally small head and brain. Brazilian doctors have also seen a surge in another rare syndrome, Guillain-Barre, which can lead to paralysis. With both issues, a link to Zika is suspected.





On Thursday, the World Health Organiation announced it will convene an emergency meeting on how to stop transmission of the virus, which officials said is spreading explosively in the Americas.

The level of alarm is extremely high, as is the level of uncertainty, said Margaret Chan, WHOs director-general. Chan has called the circumstantial evidence connecting Zika to microcephaly extremely worrisome.

Already, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador and Jamaica have urged women to postpone pregnancy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an ever-expanding advisory urging U.S. women who are pregnant to avoid traveling to those 24 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Central and South America that have local transmission.

President Obama received a briefing Tuesday about the situation from his health and national security teams, including Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, CDC Director Thomas Frieden and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

[CDC adds U.S. Virgin islands and Dominican Republic to travel advisory]

So far, experts are divided about what lies ahead for the United States. Nearly three dozen cases have been confirmed to date in 11 states and the District of Columbia, but CDC acknowledges that the number is growing rapidly. In each, the person was believed to have been infected while out of the country.

Fauci is playing down the potential for a significant eruption of Zika here. He notes that dengue and chikungunya, diseases transmitted by the same kinds of mosquitoes, are widespread in Latin America. But their foothold in the United States has been controlled, with only small clusters of cases.





It is unlikely that we will have a major outbreak of Zika in this country, Fauci said.

Yet, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, has fears. He recalls spending much of 2014 insisting that the Ebola outbreak would not become a significant problem in the United States. But he gives no such assurance now.

I think were in for real trouble in the United States, he said, considering how swiftly Zika can spread. He focuses on conditions throughout the Gulf Coast, where stagnant water sources  in uncollected garbage, discarded tires, untended bird baths  can be ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes much of the year.

Youve got to assume the worst-case scenario, Hotez said.

[As Zika fear spreads, Brazilian moms opt for mosquito-resistant baby clothing]

Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, which can transmit the virus, is present from Florida to Connecticut and as far west as Illinois, said Laura Harrington, chair of Cornell Universitys entomology department. It bites people as well as animals. A second species, Aedes aegypti, the yellow-fever mosquito, has a more limited geographic footprint and bites only people. But it is the primary vector for Zikas transmission.

Taken together, there are many parts of the United States that are vulnerable because of where the mosquito populations are, Harrington said.

The experts acknowledge that projections are hampered by a limited knowledge about the disease. It takes 10 to 11 days for a mosquito to become fully infected and able to pass on the virus, according to Nikos Vasilakis, an arbovirologist at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, where researchers are working in collaboration with scientists at Yales School of Public Health in Brazil. They dont yet know what the risk is for pregnant women who are bitten by an infected mosquito and contract the virus, much less what the risk is for their fetuses.

The CDC has issued guidelines for pregnant women and newborns. For example, it recommends testing for the virus when babies have microcephaly and their mothers traveled to or lived in Zika-virus regions while pregnant. On Tuesday, agency officials held a televised briefing with clinicians nationwide to go over guidelines as part of increased vigilance and public education.

In the Brazilian cases, most of the exposure to Zika appears to have been during the first trimester of pregnancy. But CDC officials have said there is also evidence that a fetus can be in danger into the second trimester.

There is no drug to treat Zika or a vaccine to prevent it, although Fauci said researchers are working on the latter. Common symptoms of infection are fever, rash, joint pain and red, itchy eyes. Symptoms are usually mild and last several days to a week.

One of the biggest problems in researching the possible link between Zika and cases of birth defects has to do with the widespread presence of dengue disease in the countries with high Zika infection, said Lyle Petersen, director of CDCs vector-borne disease division. Humans produce antibodies in response to both viruses, but current tests cannot differentiate between them.

In people with previous dengue exposure, theres no test to be able to sort that out, Petersen explained.

Past outbreaks of Zika occurred among small populations in the Pacific islands, and uncommon kinds of birth defects were not noticed right away. After Brazil began reporting increased prevalence of microcephaly last October, authorities in French Polynesia went back and analyzed their 2013-2014 Zika outbreak involving more than 30,000 people. They found an increase in microcephaly cases and of Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Brazil has said it wants to expand an experiment using genetically modified mosquitoes produced by a British company called Oxitec. The company says they can be effective at controlling pest populations: Altered male mosquitoes are released into the wild to mate with females. The offspring never reach adulthood, blocking the next generation from carrying diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika virus.

Oxitec says that trials involving its mosquitoes in Brazil, Panama and the Cayman Islands resulted in a greater than 90 percent suppression of the Aedes aegypti population. This month, the company announced that the city of Piracicaba, Brazil, would expand its effort to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes. But its unlikely that genetically engineered mosquitoes will be buzzing around the United States anytime soon.

Beth Ranson, a spokeswoman for the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, which has partnered with Oxitec for a proposed trial, said that before any altered bugs could be released there, the Food and Drug Administration must complete an environment assessment. Its findings must then be opened to public comment. Once finalized, a local board would need to approve the trial  over the expected opposition of some residents.

In Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, mosquito control director Mustapha Debboun said that if local transmission of Zika occurred, workers with handheld equipment would probably begin target spraying small areas where mosquitoes breed.

We all have to do something. This darn virus is spreading fast, he said. We dont want it to get established in the United States.
TEXAS

Indicted activists plan to turn themselves in

One day after Texas authorities mounted criminal charges against two antiabortion activists behind a series of undercover videos targeting Planned Parenthood, the pairs lawyer said they plan to leave California for Houston to turn themselves in.

The announcement follows a Harris County grand jurys indictment of David Daleiden, the director of the Center for Medical Progress, and his employee, Sandra Merritt, on felony charges of tampering with a governmental record. The grand jury, assembled to investigate accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood, cleared the organization of all wrongdoing Monday and pinned fault instead on the duo who sparked the inquiry.

The felony charges carry up to 20 years in prison. Daleiden, the highly public face of the Center for Medical Progress, also faces a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human tissue.

Murphy Klasing, the Houston lawyer representing Daleiden and Merritt, would not say when, exactly, the activists plan to visit the Harris County Sheriffs Office, which has issued warrants for their arrest.

Josh Schaffer, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood in Houston, said he believes the tampering charges stemmed from the activists use of fake IDs, which resembled California licenses, according to court documents.

Danielle Paquette and Sandhya Somashekhar

OHIO

6 officers linked to 2012 fatal shootings are fired

Authorities in Cleveland on Tuesday said they were firing six police officers involved in a 2012 chase that began with officers mistaking the sound of a car backfiring for gunshots and ended with police fatally shooting two unarmed people, firing 137 shots.

In addition to the officers who were fired, six other officers are being suspended without pay for between 21 and 30 days, officials said. Another officer retired last year.

The action comes less than a year after a judge acquitted one of the officers involved on two counts of felony manslaughter. The judge said that Michael Brelo was not guilty in the deaths of Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30. Brelo was one of the officers fired Tuesday.

 Mark Berman

CALIFORNIA

Report of gunshots prompts lockdown at Navy facility

A Navy medical facility in San Diego was locked down for several hours on Tuesday after a report of gunshots, but officials said they found no indication that a shooting had occurred.

The Navy said that the situation at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego was prompted by one person reporting that they may have heard multiple gunshots at about 8 a.m.

First responders searched the building where the shots were reported and found no evidence of shooting, according to Cmdr. William Marks, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon.

 Mark Berman and Dan Lamothe

Man shoots Craigslist respondents who tried to rob him: Two men who responded to a Colorado homeowners Craigslist posting offering some items for sale robbed the man, who later opened fire on the duo, authorities said. One suspect was killed in the encounter, which authorities say happened Sunday morning in Littleton, Colo. The sheriffs office was still searching for the second suspect.

 Sarah Larimer
Cosco sets sights on Cyprus port of Limassol in bid for Mediterranean supremacy Updated: 2016-01-27 19:33 By Maria Petrakis(chinadaily.com.cn)

Piraeus port is seen as a key entry way for Chinese goods. Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP

Fresh from success in securing control of Piraeus Port Authority SA, Chinese shipping giant Cosco is also bidding to run the port of Limassol on the divided island of Cyprus, in a bid to extend its reach in the Mediterranean Sea.

Cosco was among investors who expressed interest in running the container terminal and the multi-purpose terminal, according to a senior source in the Cypriot government. The Ministry of Transport, Communications and Works said on Jan. 21 that a total of 14 investors had placed bids for three concession opportunities.

Cosco is one of the six bidders for the port's container terminal and one of five vying for the multi-purpose terminal, according to the source. Another three companies have placed bids to run a marine services concession, according to the Jan. 21 statement.

Other companies interested in the concession opportunities at the Cypriot port are DB World of Dubai and Phillipines-based International Container Terminal Services Inc., the source said.

Cosco's interest in the Limassol port came after it was declared the preferred, and only, bidder for a controlling stake in Piraeus Port, Greece's biggest harbor, and one of the largest in the Mediterranean.

Cosco increased an initial offer in response to a Greek request and will pay 368.5 million euros for a 67 percent stake in Piraeus, a gateway that is key to China's plans to create a modern commercial empire pumping Chinese goods throughout Europe.

Limassol Port is the main port of the Republic of Cyprus, serving most of the island's seaborne cargo and passenger traffic. The port accounts for nearly all container traffic, about half of total cargo and 75 percent of passenger traffic on the island, according to the tender documents.

Andreas Michaelides, the general director of the ministry, said in the Jan. 21 statement that the country's aim was to make the port of Limassol a gateway for development for the future.

The Cypriots hope to draw investment to a port that may well be able to offer hydrocarbon support services in the future to support a burgeoning offshore oil and gas industry in the region, considered instrumental to Cyprus's future economic development.

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a visit to Nicosia last month that China was interested in operating Cypriot ports and wanted to help turn the eastern Mediterranean island nation into a regional shipping hub, AP reported at the time.

Chinese investment in the region is a key part of China's One Belt, One Road policy, which envisages creating the 21st century land and maritime equivalent of the Silk Road. Since the Chinese shipping behemoth started container operations in Greece in 2009, traffic has surged at Piraeus, making the harbor one of the fastest-growing ports in the world.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkey invaded in response to an abortive coup by a Greek military regime to unite the island with Greece. Limassol port evolved into the internationally-recognised Republic of Cyprus's biggest port following the division of the island, when the port of Famagusta, Cyprus's main port for centuries, fell under the control of Turkish forces. .

Hiving off licences for the port's activities is part of terms for the 10 billion-euro bailout the country agreed with European partners and the International Monetary Fund in 2013 when Greece's debt restructuring imposed losses on Cypriot banks, forcing the country to seek international aid, impose capital controls and seize deposits at the country's two biggest banks.

But Cyprus has adhered faithfully to the terms set by lenders and is on track to exit its bailout program on time in March, Finance Minister Haris Georgiades told European parliamentarians in Brussels this week.

Preferred bidders for the port concessions will be announced before the end of March, according to the statement.

The author is a freelance writer who contributed this story to China Daily.
FRANCE

Justice minister quits over terrorism bill

Frances justice minister unexpectedly resigned Wednesday after objecting to President Francois Hollandes push to revoke the French citizenship of convicted terrorists with dual nationality.

Hollande announced Christiane Taubiras resignation hours before a Parliament commission took up the citizenship bill.

Taubira, a black politician who was born in French Guiana, has been a pioneer for women and minorities in French politics but has also been subject to racist attacks by the far right.

Im leaving the government on a major disagreement, she told reporters Wednesday.

The citizenship bill, prompted by the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, is popular among conservatives and the far right but is divisive for the governing Socialists. Polls show that most French support the idea, but opponents fear that it would unfairly target Muslims. Some critics compare it to the revocation of French Jews citizenship during World War II.

French and Belgian extremists linked to the Islamic State group, some of them of Moroccan descent, were behind the Paris attacks, which killed 130 people.

The bill includes measures such as depriving convicted terrorists of the right to vote and the right to become a civil servant.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls, however, made a last-minute modification to find a consensus that would satisfy both the left and the right. Valls said that no mention of dual nationality would appear in the constitution.

 Associated Press

NIGERIA

12 killed in town where girls were abducted

Police and residents said at least 12 people were killed Wednesday when two female suicide bombers struck in a market in the Nigerian town of Chibok, where Boko Haram militants abducted more than 200 girls about two years ago.

Boko Haram has been waging a six-year-long insurgency in Nigerias remote north to build an Islamic state, killing thousands of people and displacing more than 2 million.

There was no assertion of responsibility for the Chibok attack, but it bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has been using suicide bombers since the army expelled the group from much of the northern territory it had captured.

In April 2014, Boko Haram militants raided a Chibok school and abducted about 300 girls. About 50 of them escaped, and more than 200 remain missing.

 Reuters

IRAN

Volunteer advisers being trained for Syria

A senior commander in Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps said Wednesday that it is training volunteer advisers to serve alongside President Bashar al-Assads forces in Syria.

Gen. Mohsen Kazemeini said Iran feels an obligation to send military advisers to Syria to protect Shiite shrines at the request of the Assad government. His comments were posted Wednesday on a website for the Basij, a paramilitary division of the Revolutionary Guard.

The Basij division of Tehran carries out registration of volunteers for advisory activities in Syria, Kazemeini said. Only a few of those trained are dispatched to Syria.

Tehran has acknowledged that Revolutionary Guard officers are in Syria in an advisory role but denies it has sent combat troops. A number of Iranian soldiers have been killed in Syria. Wednesdays statement was the first time Iran has publicly acknowledged training volunteers to go to Syria. Iran is a key ally of Assad and has provided military and financial support throughout the civil war.

 Associated Press

Singapore to allow more opposition lawmakers: Singapores prime minister announced constitutional amendments that would result in more opposition politicians in Parliament, long dominated by his ruling Peoples Action Party. The move comes as a surprise. Lee Hsien Loongs father, Singapore founding leader Lee Kuan Yew, had no tolerance for opposition voices. The proposed changes need to be voted on in Parliament after Lee files a request, which he said he will do during this term.

Suspect charged in Americans killing in Grenada: Police in Grenada said a suspect has been charged in a machete attack on a U.S. couple that left an Atlanta woman dead. Jessica Colker and her husband, Brian Melito, were attacked along a remote beach on the southeast of the island. Authorities have not disclosed a motive in the attack.

 From news services
The senator from Vermont is Hillary Clintons rival in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The senator from Vermont has become Hillary Clintons chief rival in the contest for the Democratic nomination.

The senator from Vermont has become Hillary Clintons chief rival in the contest for the Democratic nomination.

I adore Bernie Sanders.

I agree with his message of fairness and I share his outrage over inequality and corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his authenticity.

And I am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems calculating and phony.

And yet if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, theyll need to hold their noses and nominate Clinton.

Bernie Sanders regularly calls for a "political revolution" in America, but what does that mean? (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

Ultimately, I expect thats what Democrats will do  because as much as they love Sanders , they loathe Donald Trump more. It seems more evident each day that Republicans have lost their collective reason and are beginning to accept the notion that Trump will be their nominee. And I doubt Democrats will make an anti-immigrant bigot the president by nominating a socialist to run against him.

Sanders and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading: Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter- century, but nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders.

Watching Sanders at Monday nights Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump  or another Republican nominee  would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

The first questioner from the audience asked Sanders to explain why he embraces the socialist label and requested that Sanders define it so that it doesnt concern the rest of us citizens.

Sanders, explaining that much of what he proposes is happening in Scandinavia and Germany (a concept that itself alarms Americans who dont want to be like socialized Europe), answered vaguely: Creating a government that works for all of us, not just a handful of people on the top  thats my definition of democratic socialism.

But thats not how Republicans will define socialism  and theyll have the dictionary on their side. Theyll portray Sanders as one who wants the government to own and control major industries and the means of production and distribution of goods. Theyll say he wants to take away private property. That wouldnt be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists dont win national elections in the United States .

Sanders on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases  one of the biggest tax hikes in history, as moderator Chris Cuomo put it  to expand Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and France, allowed that hypothetically, youre going to pay $5,000 more in taxes, and declared, W e will raise taxes, yes we will. He said this would be offset by lower health-insurance premiums and protested that its demagogic to say, oh, youre paying more in taxes.

Well, yes  and Trump is a demagogue.

Sanders also made clear he would be happy to identify Democrats as the party of big government and of wealth redistribution. When Cuomo said Sanders seemed to be saying he would grow government bigger than ever, Sanders didnt quarrel, saying, P eople want to criticize me, okay, and F ine, if thats the criticism, I accept it.

Sanders accepts it, but are Democrats ready to accept ownership of socialism, massive tax increases and a dramatic expansion of government? If so, they will lose.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor who floated a trial balloon over the weekend about an independent run, knows this. As t he New York Times reported: If Republicans were to nominate Mr. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz, a hard-line conservative, and Democrats chose Mr. Sanders, Mr. Bloomberg . . . has told allies he would be likely to run.

President Obama seems to know this, too  which would explain why he tiptoed beyond his official neutrality to praise Clinton in an interview with Politicos Glenn Thrush. I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, he said. He portrayed Sanders as the bright, shiny object that people havent seen before.

It doesnt speak well of Clinton that, next to her, a 74-year-old guy who has been in politics for four decades is a bright and shiny object. The #feelthebern phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.

I share their frustration with Clinton. But that doesnt make Sanders a rational choice.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbanks archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Supreme Court briefs tend to be the driest of documents, stuffed with citations to precedent and recitations of lower- court proceedings. Not one filed this month in an abortion case now before the justices. This friend-of-the-court brief mentions precisely three cases, one statute (the Texas abortion law being challenged) and zero law review articles.

Instead, it tells stories  not about law but about lawyers. Specifically, about lawyers who have had abortions. Their point is to explain to the justices how exercising this constitutional right allowed them to proceed with the practice of law and with their lives. Their point is to let the justices know that, even if they do not realize it, they almost certainly know women who have had abortions, women whose biographies are not so different from theirs.

Its the justices community  its their colleagues and people who have argued before them and former law school classmates and co-clerks, one of the briefs authors, Alexia Korberg of the law firm Paul Weiss, told me.

Indeed, the most powerful part of the brief is a 10-page appendix listing the 113 signatories: corporate lawyers, partners at major law firms, retired judges, law professors and law students who each took the brave step of going public with her decision to have an abortion.

Their testimonies were collected in a two-week sprint over the winter holidays, a deluge that surprised the lead author, Allan Arffa. I thought it was a hard ask, he said.

Lawyers are notoriously cautious, fearful of offending partners or clients. So Arffa worried that only retired lawyers, or those working for liberal-leaning groups, would go public. Instead, he said, We were just overwhelmed, not just by the number but by the breadth. Theyre from all portions of the legal profession.

The brief notes that 1 in 3 American women will have an abortion in her lifetime. Yet the decision to terminate a pregnancy is so private  it remains so stigmatized  that few are comfortable discussing it.

That disconnect between private reality and public discourse has real-world consequences inside the Supreme Court chamber. Justices instinctively hostile to abortion rights reinforce their legal conclusions with the paternalistic supposition that they are shielding women from shattering consequences.

Thus, Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a 2007 partial-birth abortion case: It seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.

Kennedy, likely to cast the deciding vote in the Texas case, cited an amicus brief filed in the name of Sandra Cano, the former Mary Doe of a 1973 abortion ruling, featuring affidavits from women who described how they were psychologically devastated by the decision to have an abortion.

Now comes the female lawyers brief. The experiences they relate are not of regret but of relief and even liberation. Those words no doubt jar those who believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, but they express the reality experienced by many women who have chosen to terminate pregnancies.

I am the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother, the brief quotes one woman, a public defender who had an abortion at 16. Access to a safe, legal abortion broke the familial cycle of teenage parenthood and allowed me . . . to graduate from an elite college, work for one of the nations most storied civil rights organizations, and go on to graduate from the University of Michigan Law School.

An in-house counsel to a major university recalled becoming accidentally pregnant just before starting law school. I was heading to New England and I didnt even own a winter coat, she recalled. How could I have a child? . . . Had I not had an abortion, it is entirely possible that I would not have been able to finish law school  I might not have even been able to manage starting law school.

Although the women are listed in the appendix, they are not identified by name in the body of the brief. The lawyers said this was to underscore the universality of their stories; to my mind, it would have been even more powerful to attach names to individual narratives.

Morrison & Foerster partner Janie Schulman, one of the lead signers, had a late-term abortion after an ultrasound revealed a fatal heart defect. Its very important for the public and the court to see that the people who have relied on this access . . . are not a group of irresponsible people who have an abortion without a thought, she told me.

Justice Kennedy, read this brief, please. You have the power to say what the law is, but dont rule based on assumptions about what is best for women. Your colleagues at the bar  like the rest of us  can judge that for themselves.

Read more from Ruth Marcuss archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.
Supporters from both sides of the abortion issue share the sidewalk next to the Planned Parenthhood clinic in West Glenwood, Colo., in 2012. (Kelley Cox/Associated Press)

Janice Mac Avoys Jan. 24 Sunday Opinion commentary, Im a successful lawyer and mother, because I had an abortion, described a success story with roots in a family of low accomplishment. She has achieved far more than most American women, and her perseverance is noteworthy.

Unfortunately, attributing that success, in part, to the death of a fetus is sad. Granted, womens rights have made significant progress, with a whole lot more yet to be done, but I wonder about the statement my mother . . . wished that she had had the choices that were available to me.

Think about it, Ms. Mac Avoy and readers  maybe there would have been no Janice Mac Avoy to succeed.

Ron Bishop, Spotsylvania, Va.

In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson didnt pull our three unalienable rights out of a hat. Clearly, he meant that in a free and just society, life trumps liberty and liberty trumps the pursuit of happiness.

Janice Mac Avoy made a laudable decision to break the cycle of poverty and teenage pregnancy that had shaped the lives of the three generations of women in [her] family  all mothers by age 18. However, as a teen she faced two serious challenges to that goal, not one. The second, not the first, was to abort the boy or girl in her womb. Before that, for whatever reason, she decided to have sex, irrespective of the effects on her goal.

Ms. Mac Avoys rationale is disturbing, not merely because as a teen she had sex and then had an abortion.

It is that she is a lawyer who does not understand the danger of flipping Jefferson on his head; to wit, the pursuit of happiness trumps liberty and liberty trumps life.

When lawyers (and politicians) begin to think that way, it is the harbinger of an unjust society. In a just society, the focus should be on preventing teen pregnancies and abortions rather than justifying and enabling them.

Michael F. Johnson, Falls Church
Our local governments said they were ready for a historic 24-to-30-inch snowfall. Instead, they appear to have been playing with a 6-inch snowfall playbook. What do we need to do to surge beyond the usual responses? Why is it okay to say we all have to wait for days for help when contracting for additional resources in advance would have hastened the cleanup and, just as important, prevented the serious and large loss of economic productivity experienced because of the need for everyone to hunker down and stay off the streets indefinitely?

Why cant we have serious reporting about this? A serious accounting by the media might lead to creative thinking the next time around.

Judith Miller, Chevy Chase

With this weekends storm, thousands of flights were canceled and thousands of miles of highways were closed. Millions of person-hours were lost at workplaces.

Sadly, Congress continues to nibble at funding for our rail system: Amtraks 2016 funding remains flat, equivalent to a cut from 2015 dollars. Congress also irrationally expects Amtrak to make a profit, while other developed countries fund robust rail systems as a public service.

There will be a time when we will need to diversify our intercity transportation system, not only for emissions reductions but also to keep people and goods moving efficiently regardless of weather or other factors. And the best way to do this is to finally develop a high-speed intercity rail system worthy of the 21st century. We better start now.

Michael Wright, Glen Rock, Pa.

A visit to my local library on Jan. 22 showed that people are just as interested in getting good books and videos as they are groceries. There were long lines at the checkout counter and people with arms full of books. As one person said to me while we waited to check out, doesnt this make you feel good about the role of libraries in our lives?

Edith Ching, Silver Spring

I know some customers are annoyed when Pepco trims their trees or removes trees that they think do not need to be removed.

I have a row of beautiful 40-foot-tall pin oaks that Pepco cut pretty drastically. When people asked me what happened, I just said that I thought Pepco was on target doing what needed to be done to ensure service. So after the excellent reliability during the blizzard of 2016, I thank Pepco and encourage it to keep on pruning!

Bill Mooney, Olney
Record number of Chinese tourists visited UK in 2015, VisitBritain says Updated: 2016-01-28 00:49 By Chris Peterson(chinadaily.com.cn)

Chinese visitors at Stonehenge, a prehistoric site in Wiltshire, England. [Photo by Zhang Guilan / For China Daily]

A record number of Chinese tourists visited Britain from January to September last year, an increase of 37 percent from the same period the year before, according to VisitBritain, the organization in charge of tourism in the UK.

According to VisitBritain, 214,000 Chinese tourists came in the first three-quarters of last year, compared to 157,000 the year before.

They spent an average of 2,023 pounds per head, a rise of 4 percent from the year before.

Their total spend of 435 million was "great news" for the UK economy, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale told the BBC.

"We are making it even easier for Chinese tourists to come and enjoy the best of Britain and our recently-launched two-year visa scheme will encourage even more to visit," he said.

To contact the reporter: chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com


Donald Trumps announcement that he will boycott Thursdays Fox News debate is a major strategic blunder  the first of his otherwise brilliant presidential campaign. If he follows through on his threat, he could regret it.

First, skipping the debate makes Trump look weak. Trumps campaign is centered on his image as the toughest candidate out there, Republican or Democrat  the man who can face down China, Iran and the Islamic State. He takes pride in throwing hecklers out of his campaign events. In October, a few months after Black Lives Matter protesters took the microphone from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a campaign rally, Trump mocked Sanders mercilessly and said it showed such weakness. He even put up a Web ad that asked how Sanders could fight the Islamic State if he could not handle Black Lives Matter protesters.

Well, how can Trump fight the Islamic State if he cant handle a few tough questions from Megyn Kelly? If Trump does not show up, he wont look tough  hell look like a big baby. Hell look as though he is running from a fight. And running from a fight is not a New York value.

Second, hes handing the stage to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). If Trump was the front-runner with a wide lead over Cruz, that might not be a big deal. But Trump only recently regained the lead over Cruz in Iowa and is ahead by just two points, which means the two candidates are statistically tied. Giving your opponent free airtime in which to attack you without response is dumb in any circumstance  but in a neck-and-neck race like this it is political malpractice.

In the last debate, Trump did very well against Cruz, skillfully parrying Cruzs attack on Trumps New York values by wrapping himself in the mantle of 9/11. But this time Trump wont be on the stage to deliver his rebuttal. Cruz is running very effective ads in Iowa showing Trump calling Iowa voters stupid, declaring Hillary Clinton a terrific woman and saying I lived in New York City, in Manhattan, all my life so my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa. Cruz will level these attacks in Thursdays debate whether or not Trump is there to respond.

Third, not showing up risks insulting Iowa voters. No doubt Trumps hard-core supporters will applaud his decision to skip the debate, but undecided or persuadable voters might not see it that way. And there are a lot of them. A new Quinnipiac poll shows that about 4 out of 10 Iowa voters say they could still change their minds about which candidate to support. The Fox News debate will help them make up their minds. The debate is in Iowa, which means a significant number of voters Trump needs will actually be in the debate hall to assess the candidates in person. These Iowans, and those watching on TV, may not appreciate Trumps refusal to show up or answer questions a few days before they vote.

There is a lot at stake for Trump. If he wins Iowa and then goes on to win New Hampshire (where he has a commanding 20-point lead over the rest of the field), it is hard to see how he loses the GOP nomination. This move could cost him that crucial first victory in Iowa.

Perhaps Trumps decision wont hurt him, and hell win Iowa all the same. Or perhaps Trump will still show up, as he has the last three times he toyed with skipping a debate. If he does, his boycott will be not a blunder, but another example of his political genius. It will mean that, once again, he has focused all attention on himself  sucking up all the oxygen in the media atmosphere with the saga of whether he is going to show up.

But if Trump does not show, and loses Iowa, he will look back at this decision as the turning point that cost him a chance to bury Cruz. As Cruz himself put it yesterday, If Donald wins Iowa, he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire. If he went on to win New Hampshire as well, theres a very good chance he could be unstoppable.

Cruz is right. Trump has a chance to put a stranglehold on his competition in Iowa  and hes risking it all because he is afraid of taking questions from Megyn Kelly?

Now that would be weak.

Marc Thiessen is a Fox News contributor. Read more from Thiessens archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
The senator from Vermont is Hillary Clintons rival in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The senator from Vermont has become Hillary Clintons chief rival in the contest for the Democratic nomination.

The senator from Vermont has become Hillary Clintons chief rival in the contest for the Democratic nomination.

Growing up, Bernie Sanders followed the path of many young American Jews. He went to Hebrew school, was bar mitzvahed and traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz.

But as an adult, Sanders drifted away from Jewish customs. And as his bid for the White House gains momentum, he has the chance to make history. Not just as the first Jewish president  but as one of the few modern presidents to present himself as not religious.

I am not actively involved with organized religion, Sanders said in a recent interview.

Sanders said he believes in God, though not necessarily in a traditional manner.

I think everyone believes in God in their own ways, he said. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.

Here's the answer to one of the most Googled questions about one of the most Googled candidates. (Osman Malik and Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Sanderss religious views, which he has rarely discussed, set him apart from the norm in modern American politics, in which voters have come to expect candidates from both parties to hold traditional views about God and to speak about their faith journeys.

Every president since James Madison has made the pilgrimage across Lafayette Square to worship at St. Johns Church at least once, according to the White House Historical Association. Only three presidents, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, have been unaffiliated with a specific religious tradition, according to the Pew Research Center for Religion and Public Life. And President Obama and his predecessors have regularly hosted clergy for White House prayer sessions.

Sanderss chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, emphasized her lifelong affiliation as a Methodist during an exchange Monday with voters in Iowa. Clinton did not mention Sanders, but her words underscored the stark contrast between her more traditional approach and that of her rival.

I am a person of faith. I am a Christian, Clinton said. I am a Methodist. I have been raised Methodist. I feel very grateful for the instructions and support that I have received starting in my family but through my church.

Reticent on faith

For Sanders, rejecting the formal trappings of religion adds to the unconventional nature of a candidacy that has energized many liberals but could prove problematic in a general election. He is a self-described democratic socialist who has refused to shy away from policy positions that would expand government and increase taxes.

Sanders often presents his support for curbing Wall Street banks and ending economic inequality in values-laden terms. He recently described it as immoral and wrong that the highest earners in the country own the vast majority of the nations wealth.

[Bernie Sanders, who could get further than any Jewish candidate for president, has just opened up about his Jewishness]

Even so, Sanders has appeared reluctant to delve into discussions about his faith, prompting many to assume on social media that he is more secular than God-fearing.

When late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel asked Sanders in October whether be believes in God and if that matters to the American people, the senator seemed to avoid a direct response:

I am what I am, he said. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that were all in this together.

Sanders, 74, told The Washington Post that his upbringing as the son of an immigrant father and first-generation American mother in Brooklyn instilled in him a sense of morality found in Judaism and many other faiths.

I want to be treated with dignity and respect, and I want other people to be treated with dignity and respect, he said.

I think it is important that a sense of morality be part of our politics.

A Jewish upbringing

Sanderss father, Eli, grew up in a rural village in southern Poland and crossed the Atlantic in 1921, driven by penury rather than prejudice to seek opportunities in Brooklyn, where an older brother had settled. He married the daughter of Polish immigrants and made his living as a paint salesman, finding community among a circle of like-minded relatives and friends.

Bernie Sanders, born in 1941, was raised only blocks from where his second wife, Jane OMeara, later grew up, but it was culturally distant from her Catholic quarter.

It wasnt a question of Are we Jewish?  recalled his older brother, Larry Sanders. It was just as uncontested as saying youre an American.

Almost seven years apart in age, the Sanders boys shared a bedroom in a modest but comfortable apartment. Passover Seders would rotate among neighbors. When their father went to synagogue on Yom Kippur, the boys would sometimes wait outside, listening to the World Series. Bernie Sanderss bar mitzvah was a big gathering, Larry Sanders recalled, at which the adolescent looked younger than his 13 years.

Their Jewish education was unsophisticated, Larry Sanders said, grounded in a simple moral code of right and wrong.

He could read a prayer in Hebrew, Larry Sanders said, but not with a great deal of understanding.

Larry Sanders doesnt remember Judaic teachings  or even the Holocaust  being a common topic of conversation within the family, although a pall hung over the household after the Red Cross brought news that an uncle in Poland had been shot by the Nazis.

Their parents were ardent New Dealers, said Larry Sanders, who went on to become a Green Party member and county council member in England.

By the time Bernie Sanders graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 and traveled overseas, he was examining ways in which the rest of the world was implementing socialist strategies, his brother said.

When Sanders and his first wife, who was Jewish, decided in 1968 to settle in Vermont, they joined a flow of urban Jews who resisted the materialism of postwar America, according to Benson Scotch, a former ACLU lawyer who was part of the same migration.

They were looking for something more open to community, said Scotch, who said he never expected the young idealist to follow the career path he is now on.

The ethical thing to do

People who have known Sanders over the four decades of his political ascent in Vermont  as a member of the leftist Liberty Union Party, mayor of Burlington, and subsequently as an independent member of the House and the Senate  say Sanderss central interest has always been politics, not religion.

I cant tell you how seldom we talked about religion, said Stanley Huck Gutman, a professor of English at the University of Vermont and Sanderss former chief of staff. Gutman then described his friends moral code in terms of core religious tenets.

He often talks about the ethical thing to do,  said Gutman, and his ethics are shaped by a concern for social justice and for other human beings that is part of a Judeo-Christian tradition.

Larry Sanders sums up his brothers views this way: He is quite substantially not religious.

A vivid illustration of Sanderss approach came in September, on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. While many Jews took the day off from work and school to worship, Sanders was campaigning  at Liberty University, the evangelical Christian school in Lynchburg, Va.

In his speech, Sanders sought a religious common ground by alluding to a New Testament passage from the Sermon on the Mount that outlines Jesus moral teaching.

I am motivated by a vision which exists in all of the great religions  in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, Buddhism and other religions  and which is so beautifully and clearly stated in Matthew 7:12, Sanders said. And it states: So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets. 

In the interview with The Post, Sanders sought to explain how his approach to political issues, from climate change to income inequality, is grounded in a moral understanding that transcends religious and political partisanship.

In terms of climate change, you have people as conservative as the evangelicals, many evangelicals, who understand that you cannot destroy Gods planet. And you have Pope Francis, who as you know, I admire very, very much, talking about this planet and the suicidal direction regarding climate.

Sanders has also used his family history to draw what he says are important lessons about the dangers of democracy when it is untethered from morality. He recalled during a recent breakfast with reporters how a trip he and his brother took to their fathers ancestral village in Poland reminded him of what happened when elections precipitated the rise of the Nazis, leading to the death of 6 million Jews, including three members of Sanderss family.

What I learned as a little kid, Sanders said, is that politics is, in fact, very important.

Playing down his roots

But the man who would succeed Americas first black president, and who is in a neck-and-neck race for the Democratic nomination with a woman who touts her history-making potential as the first female president, has done little to promote his own possible historical achievement.

And many of the countrys most prominent pro-Israel donors have lined up behind Clinton, who has long nurtured close ties with the U.S. Jewish community and showcased her strong support for the Jewish state.

Sanders, in contrast, has emphasized his pro-Israel views less over the course of his political career. In recent days, Clintons campaign has attempted to portray Sanders as misguided on Middle East issues.

When I go to a [Clinton] fundraiser, I feel like Im going into Rosh Hashanah services, joked Marc R. Stanley, a Texas lawyer and former chairman of the board of the National Jewish Democratic Council. Stanley has supported Sanderss Senate campaigns but is backing Clinton this year.

Perhaps most puzzling is Sanderss reluctance to cement cultural connections with fellow Jews by sharing stories from his past  among them which kibbutz he stayed on in the early 1960s.

In Israel, the Kibbutz Movement  the umbrella organization for the 250 communal settlements  launched a Facebook campaign to find out, featuring a Photoshopped picture of the presidential candidate wearing a symbolic Israeli tembel hat. After Naomi Zeveloff published an article in the Forward about the search, readers wrote in, wondering why Sanders wasnt releasing the information:

Whats the big deal? they asked. Thats my question as well, Zeveloff said.
Hillary Clintons voice thundered through a bowling alley as she railed against corporate treachery and greed  then turned soft and thoughtful as she promised to work my heart out if elected.

Clinton barely mentioned Sen. Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, during the appearance Wednesday morning, though her angry rant against corporate inversion deals and prescription drug price-gouging borrowed a leaf from his populist playbook.

Here in the final, five-day sprint of an uncomfortably close Democratic contest in Iowa, Clinton has largely abandoned a strategy that appears to have done little to improve her standing with voters here: trying to directly discredit the senator from Vermont and his unstintingly liberal proposals.

Clinton is still making comparisons with her late-surging opponent. But she is refraining from attacks that cast Sanders, and by extension his loyal, liberal followers, in a negative light.

She has debuted a sunnier, more optimistic version of herself here this week while lacing her campaign appearances with some of the populist anger that animates Sanders. And she is asking humbly for caucus votes in Iowas first-in-the-nation contest, which is Monday.

In a state where Clinton held a huge advantage until recent weeks, many Clinton allies have concluded from the lack of movement in recent polls that attacking Sanders didnt help. And although they are now focused on merely squeaking to a victory here, they say they are more confident this week that she will do so. Clinton appears to be trying to project that confidence on the trail with a new measure of verve.

I think thats great! Clinton exclaimed during a town hall broadcast Monday on CNN, after she was shown a Sanders television spot called America that featured uplifting scenes of supporters and seemed to try to replicate the sense of momentum that Barack Obama built heading into his Iowa win in 2008. I think thats fabulous. I loved it!

Clintons shift comes at a perilous moment for the onetime Iowa front-runner  and reflects the continuing threat that Sanders and his impassioned supporters present for her. In trying to inject more life into her speeches  and to shore up her own liberal policy credentials  Clinton is clearly trying to resonate with the base that has fueled Sanderss rise.

Theyre angry, Clinton said of voters in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on Tuesday. But youve got to do something about that. Im angry too!

[Sanders: Clinton is running a desperate campaign that lacks excitement]

On Wednesday, the former secretary of state, senator from New York and first lady shouted her disgust at what she called an underhanded tax dodge by Johnson Controls, a Michigan auto-parts manufacturer that benefited from the federal auto bailout but now seeks an offshore tax advantage.

Here is as direct an example of whats wrong with the thinking and acting of American corporations, Clinton told the enthusiastic crowd in tiny Adel. Because here is a company that all of us in this room helped to save, she said.

They were happy to take that help, regardless of how hard it was for you during that time, she said, asserting that the bailout worked to save jobs.

It is wrong! she shouted, referring to the European merger announced this week.

Clinton continues to frame her own qualities in terms that are meant to draw a contrast with Sanders. During a long day of campaigning Tuesday, she gently asserted that her Wall Street reform plan is more comprehensive than Sanderss and her college tuition program more fair.

Even though I do have differences with my esteemed friends who are with me on the Democratic side, I am very proud of the campaign we Democrats have run, she said in Decorah.

She is also waxing long on her decades in public life, the nerve-racking decisions in the Situation Room when she was President Obamas secretary of state and the political combat that has made her a polarizing figure in American political life. She seemed to be trying to demonstrate that she can muster the grit and fire that voters have come to expect more from the messy-haired, 74-year-old democratic socialist. She regularly mentions her many fights for progressive causes, notably the ugly battle with Republicans over universal health coverage, which she lost in the 1990s.

Several Clinton backers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about internal strategy said Clinton is more comfortable talking about her own qualifications than Sanderss flaws.

That discomfort was amplified by the fact that many of the high-profile surrogates who fanned across Iowa last weekend were avoiding any direct attacks on Sanders. That left Clinton  and her husband, Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea  largely alone in attack mode

Democratic Sens. Timothy M. Kaine (Va.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) have campaigned in the state on Clintons behalf, and only McCaskill has vocally noted that Republicans would be eager to attack Sanders as a socialist.

Youll find among Democrats in the Senate that we all love Bernie, said former senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who supports Clinton. I would never criticize him.

In 2008, Clinton was broadsided by Obamas superior operation on the ground  and also by the liberal optimism of his message.

Hillary Clinton did the 40,000-foot bombing over Iowa, said Harkin, who remained neutral in 2008. Barack Obama was like the Marines: down in the weeds, door to door, house to house.

This time, Clinton dramatically shifted her field operation to try to replicate Obamas success identifying voters. But she has continued to struggle to connect with Iowa Democrats on an emotional level.

Anytime you go negative, you run the risk of turning off your own supporters, said Paul Tewes, who ran Obamas 2008 campaign in Iowa. Their liberal tendencies tend to be on the optimistic side. When negative things happen, they dont always respond well.

Clintons troubles in Iowa are especially acute among voters such as one she encountered at the town hall Monday at Drake University: a young man leaning toward Sanders who told Clinton that his friends think she is dishonest.

You know, look, Ive been around a long time. People have thrown all kinds of things at me, Clinton said as she paced the floor and waved her hands to punctuate her response. And Im still standing.

[At Iowa town hall, Clinton gave an impassioned answer to Sanders supporters who doubt her character]

As Sanders erased her once-steady lead over several weeks in December and January, Clinton began attacking Sanders as naive and his proposals as unrealistic.

Her campaign tried to discredit Sanderss support for single-payer health coverage as an effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

There was also a seemingly endless flow of snarky Twitter messages and telephone press conferences to needle Sanders. In one characteristic jab last week, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted, In one wk, Sanders flipped on gun vote he defended for months, rushed out changes to 20yr health plan & walked back insult to @PPact & @HRC.

But it has done little to move Iowans, according to recent polls, which show Sanders with 46 percent and Clinton at 45.8 percent, according to an average compiled by RealClearPolitics. Sanders, on the other hand, claimed to have raised more than $1.4 million from his army of supporters online during the 24-hour period of the heaviest attacks earlier this month.

[Clintons attacks produce windfall of campaign cash for Sanders]

Now, Clinton takes pains to emphasize that she and Sanders share exactly the same goal of universal coverage. She continues to say that her plan would reach the goal sooner by building on the current law rather than starting over entirely.

She also pledged this week to tackle reducing college tuition costs  a major issue that has drawn young supporters to Sanders  within the first 100 days of her presidency. She pledged to crack down on the greed of corporations that raise drug prices on sick Americans, and she noted that Wall Street barons are urging Iowans to vote against her because they know she will come right after them.

Meanwhile, in a pair of powerful ads on Iowa airwaves this week, the Sanders campaign has shifted to a message aimed at inspiring the same feeling of hope and change that propelled Obama to the presidency in 2008.

(Sanders has also questioned Clintons commitment to Wall Street reform and likened her to former vice president Richard B. Cheney. The Clinton campaign accused Sanders on Wednesday of waffling on his earlier pledge never to run a negative campaign.)

Clintons messaging on Iowa airwaves is also morphing to become more biographical  leaning more heavily on her work advocating for children and families.

In a recent spot focused on her efforts to elevate womens rights issues on a global scale, Clinton closes the ad with a fresh tagline: I am Hillary Clinton, and I have always approved this message.

It is the kind of message anxious supporters such as 50-year-old Alma Garza hope to see more of.

I think shes awesome. But how do you translate that into her commercials, into her? I dont know, Garza, who had waited about two hours outside in the subfreezing temperatures to see Clinton speak in a Des Moines high school auditorium this week. Bernie Sanders has an ability to connect in a charismatic way.

Its that magnetism that shes not inherently able to transmit, Garza added. Shes got it. . . . But we dont get to see those moments often.

Phillip reported from Des Moines.
Members of National Nurses United cheer as Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally in Des Moines on Tuesday. (Joshua Lott /for The Washington Post)

People for Bernie is organizing volunteers through social media. National Nurses United is crisscrossing Iowa in its big red bus, working to turn out supporters at Mondays presidential caucuses. Progressive Democrats of America is already focused on states later in the primary calendar, holding house parties in Alabama, Florida and Virginia.

As he barrels toward the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) is being boosted by a wide constellation of independent groups aiming to compete with the organizational muscle arrayed behind former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, his Democratic competitor.

While Clinton has powerhouse allies such as Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association and two big-money super PACs on her side, the pro-Sanders effort is being driven by a combination of self-directed activists and liberal organizations such as MoveOn and Democracy for America.

The ad hoc network working on Sanderss behalf is doing so in keeping with the spirit of his anti-establishment bid. But it is also employing professional political tactics, such as the use of entities that can raise and spend unlimited sums of money on campaigns as a result of the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision.

In some ways, their efforts cut against Sanderss insistence that, unlike Clinton, he does not have a super PAC flanking his campaign  a declaration he repeated Tuesday in Des Moines after leading a rally at a union hall attended by several nurses in their unions signature red T-shirts. In other ways, they dont. Although these entities can accept massive checks from individuals and corporations  a practice Sanders abhors  they do not appear to be doing so, relying instead on small donations from grass-roots supporters.

The difference is a pretty simple difference, he said. Hillary Clinton goes out raising money for her own super PAC. I dont have a super PAC, and in the best of all possible worlds, which I hope to bring about, we will get rid of super PACs, we will overturn Citizens United. I do not have a super PAC, Ive never raised a nickel for a super PAC, I dont want a super PAC.

A super PAC financed by the nurses union already has plowed nearly $1 million into mailers, phone banking and a multistate bus tour to promote Sanders. Friends of the Earth Action, a nonprofit environmental group, spent nearly $22,000 to run a cable ad last week touting his record in Iowa and New Hampshire.

[Ahead of their White House meeting, a look at the (nonexistent) Obama-Sanders relationship]

Leaders of the nurses union and Friends of the Earth Action argue that they should not be lumped in with the single-candidate super PACs backing other White House hopefuls, which have been financed largely by six- and seven-figure donations.

This is our dues money, said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United (NNU). Nurses arent millionaires. These are individual contributions that made this possible.

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth Action, said the nonprofit group paid for the ad out of small donations it receives from supporters. If the group does any further spending to support Sanders, it will voluntarily disclose the name of any contributor who gives more than $200 for that purpose, he said.

Still, Pica acknowledged that his group had some hesitancy about running an independent ad supporting Sanders because of the senators frequent condemnation of super PACs. (Friends of the Earth Action is a tax-exempt advocacy group, but like a super PAC, it can raise unlimited donations.)

The other thing Senator Sanders has been saying on the campaign is that he cant do it alone, Pica said. The work, we have to do together. And for us, Senator Sanders isnt going to win this nomination on his own.

In all, at least half a dozen independent groups  including some that are loosely affiliated  are mustering substantial campaigns on Sanderss behalf, while hundreds of other hyperlocal endeavors, such as Brews for Bernie and Babes for Bernie, are doing their own organizing.

We gave up trying to keep track of them all, said Charles Lenchner, a Brooklyn-based political marketing consultant who co-founded People for Bernie, one of the earliest efforts to harness grass-roots support.

Lenchner started the project in April with activist Winnie Wong, a fellow Occupy Wall Street organizer, after they first tried to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) into the race. When Sanders announced his campaign, People for Bernie helped supporters organize house parties and quickly established social-media profiles for a collection of constituency groups, including Millennials for Bernie and African Americans for Bernie.

The group was also the first to coin the hashtag #FeelTheBern, tweeting it in early May and then watching it go viral.

People for Bernie now uses its large online following to promote Sanders and help connect volunteers to the official campaign.

Were curating the news, supporting the grass roots, getting them information, Wong said.

The project has received a boost from the nurses union, which is hosting Wong on its Iowa bus tour this week and has allocated $45,000 to People for Bernie to run online ads to expand its social media presence, said Michael Lighty, NNUs policy director.

[Nurses union vows to continue backing Bernie Sanders through its super PAC]

Because People for Bernie is not set up as a legal entity or registered as a political committee, NNU gave the money to Progressive Kick, a liberal super PAC, to administer the effort, Lighty said. Joshua Grossman, president of Progressive Kick, confirmed the arrangement but declined to comment further.

In many ways, the 185,000-member nurses union is functioning as the hub of the pro-Sanders efforts. At an event in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on Sunday, Sanders pointed out several supporters in the audience wearing NNUs red T-shirts and hailed the union as one of the sponsors of my campaign.

DeMoro, NNUs executive director, said that the union will spend whatever we need to help elect Sanders, and that members are buoyed by his pledge of Medicare for all.

We have had high-pitched campaigns, but I have never seen the grass-roots enthusiasm like this, she said. Bernie is golden with our members.

The union has been targeting voters in Nevada and Iowa with mailers and phone calls, and it plans to be active in states including South Carolina, Colorado and Minnesota.

We really want to be in every single primary or caucus state, Lighty said.

In Illinois, NNU is funding a group called Reclaim Chicago to organize community leaders, Lighty said, one of several organizations it is backing to do specific pro-Sanders campaigns. He declined to name them all, citing internal strategy.

Lighty is also on the advisory board of Progressive Democrats of America, a political action committee that launched an effort to draft Sanders to run in the spring of 2014.

[How Bernie Sanderss sharp words for Obama led to his own presidential bid]

The PAC is now active in 31 states in support of Sanders, with the aim of organizing volunteers in places holding primaries and caucuses later this spring, where the Sanders campaign has less of a presence.

We try to keep our eyes peeled for where we see there may be not a lot of activity and where we want to fire people up, said Donna Smith, PDAs executive director.

That has not been a hard lift, she added.

We did not even see this level of excitement going into 2008 with Obamas campaign, Smith said. Sanderss message is resonating in a very deep way with people, much more than many of us may have anticipated.

One immediate byproduct: Sanderss campaign has helped lift the profile of Democratic Socialists of America, a nonprofit advocacy group that has gained hundreds of members since he began running.

The organization has spent about $42,000 in support of Sanders, largely on volunteer-staffed training sessions to educate people about socialism, or tables at farmers markets and other community events to promote his candidacy, said Maria Svart, the groups national director.

We believe in spreading socialist values, because we believe many Americans, if they understood socialism, would like it, she said. Thats what so exciting about Bernie. Our perspective is, whether hes elected or not, we need to have an organized, aware grass-roots movement.

John Wagner in Des Moines and Anu Narayanswamy in Washington contributed to this report.


Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a Democratic Town Hall event in Des Moines, Iowa. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)

Hillary Clinton speaks during a Democratic Town Hall event in Des Moines, Iowa. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)

Hillary Clinton holds a double-digit, but narrowing, lead nationally over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Clinton is seen as more electable and stronger on most issues but has a deficit against her rival on the question of honesty and trust.

Clintons reduced lead nationally reflects heated competition underway in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states on the primary-caucus calendar. While Clinton is still seen as the front-runner in the Democratic race, victories by Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire could quickly change perceptions nationally and probably would result in a more prolonged and costly battle for the nomination.

Over the past month, the former secretary of states national margin has shrunk by 12 percentage points. The current poll shows her leading Sanders by 55 percent to 36 percent among registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. That compares with Decembers poll, which showed her the choice of 59 percent to 28 percent for Sanders. Former Maryland governor Martin OMalley runs far back in third place with just 4 percent.





Clinton owes her national lead to overwhelming support among nonwhite voters. Among white Democrats, she and Sanders are about even (45 percent to 43 percent). Among nonwhite voters, she leads by 67 percent to 28 percent, although Sanders has cut into that margin in the past month.

That disparity between white and nonwhite support illustrates the challenge for Sanders once the campaign moves from two largely white states to South Carolina, Nevada and elsewhere, where African Americans and Hispanics play a more significant role.

Another fault line the poll highlights is Clintons strength among self-identified Democrats and Sanderss support among independents. Clinton leads by 26 points among self-identified Democrats, while Sanders has a slender (49 percent to 43 percent) lead among independents who lean Democratic.

[Top Democrats show contrasting views of the presidency]

The other big demographic line of demarcation is the split between younger and older voters. Among voters under the age of 40, Sanders leads Clinton by 19 percentage points. Among those age 40 and older, Clinton leads by 36 points.





The poll finds only modest differences in support along ideological lines, despite each candidates significantly different proposals for governments role in the economy and health care. Clinton leads by 25 percentage points over Sanders among moderate and conservative Democrats, and by 10 points among liberals.

The poll also underscores the degree to which Clintons recent efforts to tie herself more closely to President Obama can help her. The poll shows that 83 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents approve of Obamas job performance, with 57 percent approving strongly. Among those who strongly approve of the job Obama is doing as president, she leads Sanders by about 2 to 1. Among those who disapprove or say they only somewhat approve of his performance, she and Sanders are even.

Clinton has made electability part of her closing argument before Iowa, and the poll shows that nearly 2 in 3 Democrats see her as more electable than Sanders in a general election. She also holds a wide lead (58 percent to 30 percent) on the question of which candidate has the temperament and personality to serve as president.





Clinton and Sanders are more evenly matched on two other attributes. Although the Vermont senator is running as the politician who would shake up the status quo, slightly more Democrats (49 percent to 42 percent) say Clinton would bring needed change to Washington. On the question of which candidate is closer to you on issues, the results are Clinton 47 percent and Sanders 43 percent.

Sanders, however, has widened his advantage on the issue of who is more honest and trustworthy. In October, the two were at parity on this question. That became a six-point advantage for Sanders in December. Today, it is a 12-point advantage, with 48 percent saying he is more honest and trustworthy to 36 percent for Clinton.

[Clintons answer to Democrats torn between head and heart]

Democrats see Clinton as far better prepared to handle most of the major issues. She enjoys leads ranging from 18 points to 41 points on the economy, immigration, health care, the threat of terrorism and dealing with an international crisis.

Sanderss lone advantage is on the issue of regulating banks and other financial institutions, where he is favored by 48 percent of Democrats to 42 percent for Clinton. Sanders has called for breaking up the biggest banks and has complained that no executives from financial institutions went to jail after the 2008 economic collapse.

Yet Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist who favors transformative expansion in governments role in health care and the economy, has so far avoided the perception that he is too liberal to win a general election.

More than two-thirds of Democrats in the survey expect Sanders would defeat potential Republican nominees Sen Marco Rubio (Fla.), Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and businessman Donald Trump in a general election. Still larger majorities are confident in Clintons ability to win against each of these candidates.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted Jan. 21-24 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on land-line and cellular phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is 5.5 percentage points among the sample of 406 Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent registered voters.
Republican Donald Trump is saying he "most likely" won't attend the debate Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is set to co-moderate. Here's a look back at the clash that started with an earlier debate in August 2015. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Republican Donald Trump is saying he "most likely" won't attend the debate Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is set to co-moderate. Here's a look back at the clash that started with an earlier debate in August 2015. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump abruptly announced here Tuesday that he would not participate in Thursdays scheduled debate, escalating his off-and-on feud with Fox News Channel and throwing the GOP campaign into turmoil.

Trumps assertion, which his campaign manager insisted was irreversible, came less than one week before the kickoff Iowa caucuses. He once again defied the conventional rules of politics, and used his power and prominence to shape the campaign agenda and conversation.

So far, Trumps untraditional moves have only expanded his support, but his threatened boycott leaves him open to criticism that for all his tough talk he is ducking face-to-face confrontations with his opponents and scrutiny from the Fox moderators.

Given Trumps past flirtations with boycotting Fox, many will doubt his declaration until they see the other candidates take the debate stage on Thursday night without him.

The Republican debates have become must-see television, in part because of the allure of Trumps star power and unpredictable candidacy. But he said Tuesday that he thinks Fox and other television networks have been taking advantage of him by selling advertisements for their debates at a high premium.

1 of 45 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Trump captures the nations attention on the campaign trail View Photos The Republican candidate continues to dominate the presidential contest. Caption Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the partys convention in Cleveland. Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami. Carlo Allegri/Reuters Wait 1 second to continue.

Why should the networks continue to get rich on the debates? Trump told reporters at a news conference in Marshalltown. Why do I have to make Fox rich?

The debate is scheduled to be in Des Moines on Thursday, and Trump said he would instead host a competing event in the state designed to raise money for wounded veterans.

It would be an unprecedented move if Trump withdrew from the debate at such a consequential moment on the primary calendar.

Trump long has objected to the participation of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as one of the three moderators, claiming she has treated him unfairly with both her questioning of him at last Augusts debate and her commentary since then.

Trump also said that a wise-guy press release that the network issued earlier on Tuesday belittling him was inappropriately antagonistic and childish.

Foxs statement said that network officials had learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president.

The statement added that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.

After reading it, Trump said: I said, Bye-bye. 

Fox is playing games, Trump said. They cant toy with me like they toy with everybody else. Let them have the debate. Lets see how they do with the ratings.

Earlier Tuesday, Fox News Channel Chairman and Chief Executive Roger Ailes said the network would defend Kelly even if it means losing Trump in the debate.

Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her, Ailes said. She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night.

In Iowa, Trump is in a fierce and increasingly nasty fight with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Both men have traded places atop recent polls here, and the outcome of Mondays caucuses could have a profound effect on the direction of the nominating contest.

By announcing that he will not debate, Trump likely will dominate news coverage and deny Cruz and other opponents a face-to-face confrontation before Iowa Republicans go to caucus.

Trumps decision also allows him to avoid direct questioning from Kelly and her co-moderators, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, at a time when he has come under increased scrutiny over his past positions on social issues that are important to many Iowa Republicans.

The reaction from Trumps rivals ranged from criticism to mockery.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has been Trumps most persistent tormentor of late, immediately tweeted: .@realDonaldTrump Do you know who else is scared of tough qs from Fox & @megynkelly? Barack Obama. Enough whining.

Cruz said on Mark Levins radio show: If Donald is afraid to defend his record, that speaks volumes. If he thinks Megyn Kelly is so scary, what does he think hell do with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin?

Cruz challenged Trump to a one-on-one debate sometime over the next week.

Im happy to go an hour and a half mano-a-mano  me and Donald with no moderators anytime before the Iowa caucuses, he said.

At an event Tuesday night, Cruz said: Donald is a fragile soul. You know, if she asks him mean questions, I mean his hair might stand on end. He likened it to skipping a job interview.

The Republican National Committee, which sanctions and helps organize the official debates, vowed late Thursday not to intervene in Trumps dispute with Fox.

Candidates can choose whether to participate in a debate or not, RNC chief strategist and spokesman Sean Spicer said.

When Trump addressed reporters before a rally in Marshalltown, he said he most likely would skip the debate. He then said the decision was pretty irrevocable.

This was not the first time Trump had threatened to boycott a debate, though in the past the threats were merely stunts.

Trumps campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, insisted this time was different. Speaking to reporters at the back of the venue while Trump was rallying his supporters, Lewandowski vowed that the decision was final.

Hes definitely not participating in the Fox News debate, Lewandowski said. His word is his bond.

Asked whether there was anything Fox executives could do to persuade Trump to reconsider, Lewandowski said that there was not and that there were no ongoing negotiations between the campaign and the network.

The Trump campaign later issued a statement affirming the decision, saying: Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesnt play games.

Earlier in the day, Trump and his advisers had been preparing for the debate. Adviser Sam Clovis was putting together briefing books and assisting with policy discussions, and newly hired adviser Stephen Miller was set to join him.

Trump signaled on Monday that he had reservations about the debate, telling CNNs Wolf Blitzer that he had issues with Kelly. I dont like her, Trump told Blitzer. She doesnt treat me fairly.

Trump and Kelly tangled at the first GOP debate in August in Cleveland. Kelly asked Trump to explain offensive comments denigrating women, and he took offense to the question.

Later he escalated the attacks against Kelly. In an interview with CNN two days after the debate, Trump said: She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes  blood coming out of her wherever. In my opinion, she was off base.

Since then he has carried on his feud with the Fox anchor. On Tuesday, explaining his decision not to debate this week, he referred to Kelly as a lightweight and a third-rate reporter.

Throughout the controversy, Kelly has held her ground, saying her questions were tough but fair.

Fox News issued a statement late Tuesday night alleging that Lewandowski threatened in a Saturday phone call a repeat of the rough treatment Kelly received following her August clash with Trump.

Capitulating to politicians ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, the statement read. The network added: We cant give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees. Trump is still welcome at Thursday nights debate and will be treated fairly.

Some of Trumps supporters said in interviews Tuesday night that they support his decision because they think he has been treated unfairly in past debates.

It could turn out to be a very smart move on his part, because one of the moderators is Megyn Kelly, and him and her dont get along real well  theyre almost like an ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend, said James Wachendorf, 30, who awaited Trump at a rally in Iowa City.

Wachendorfs wife, Tara, 27, said of Trump: Everything that he does is so well-thought-out. Hes good at creating controversy, and thats whats bringing him more voters. People like that.

The couple wore matching red Make America Great Again hats, and they both plan to caucus for Trump on Monday. They said they watch all of the debates. But if Trump doesnt show on Thursday, they said they might not tune in.

Ed OKeefe in Marshalltown, Katie Zezima in Ottumwa, Iowa, and Callum Borchers and Robert Costa in Washington contributed to this report.


by Tom Kando



Lately, our analytics indicate that we are getting thousands of hits from Russia. We are also getting hits from many other countries - China, Australia, all over Europe, etc. But for some reason, Russia is suddenly surpassing every other country, including the US. I have no idea why, but its fine with me.



So I want to welcome Russians, and let them know how I feel about their country, their people, their culture: In four words: respect, admiration, sympathy and ambivalence.



I grew up with Russian culture and people around me: In World War Two, the Red Army invaded my country of birth - Hungary - and kicked Hitler out. In the process, they requisitioned the house by Lake Balaton where we had taken refuge, and we cohabited with several wild Russian soldiers. I was four years old. I remember the soldiers taking apart, showing me and letting me play with their guns. I also remember many of them dying atrociously in the lakes icy water.





Later, my mother urged me to read the Russian classics. This was a family tradition. I started with Dostoevskis The Idiot. I got confused by all the Russian names, could only remember that of Prince Myshkin. Starting to read Dostoevski at twelve may be somewhat premature. Even so, although I was bored at first, by the time I read Crime and Punishment a couple of years later, I was hooked. Is there anyone on earth who doesnt identify with Raskolnikov, at least a teensy bit?



When we lived in Paris, we also had many contacts with the large Russian emigre colony there.



As an adult, I traveled extensively in Russia. That had to wait until I acquired a citizenship. Because until I moved to the United States in 1970, I was a refugee, an apatride, a stateless person, a man without a country. Not until 1970 could I travel freely anywhere. So that year, I went back to Europe for the first time since my arrival in the US, and while I was at it, I also decided to check out the Soviet Union. I wanted to see first-hand what all the brouhaha was about, with that superpower.



It was a wild trip. I was twenty-nine. I rented a Volkswagen in Amsterdam, drove up to Helsinki, from where I crossed the Russian border to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). I then drove around the Soviet Union for several weeks, camping out in the suburbs of major cities, including Moscow, Smolensk and Kiev. The authorities were omnipresent. They occasionally stopped me, frisked me, confiscated my Time Magazine and my camera. I was once hauled into a local police bureau for questioning because I had taken pictures of some bridge.

But all in all, I had a blast. Under the harsh Soviet regime, the streets were much safer than they are now. I spoke no Russian whatsoever. I picked up hitch-hikers whenever I could (especially women), and I relied on them to guide me to my destinations. I befriended many young, progressive Russians and stayed in their apartments as their guest.



**********



There has never been any doubt in my mind that Russia and its culture are second to none, whether it is its literature, its music, its ballet, its cinema, or its science. What a talented people! From pop hits like Tchaikovskys Nutcracker and Prokofievs Peter and the Wolf to Stravinskys Petrushka and Rite of Spring, Russian creativity never seems to run empty. And dont forget Russian science: From Mendeleev to Sputnik and rocket science, the countrys scientific achievements are also second to none.



But Russia is also a contradiction. Its history has often been tragic. It has had difficulty forging a good government, one that is democratic, progressive and benefits the Russian people. The archaic Tzarist regime was replaced by a regime which idealists hoped would bring about justice, but Stalinism turned out to be a monstrosity. When Communism fell, it was hoped that this was finally the dawn of freedom, democracy and justice for that country. Now they have Putin. Not the worst, but not the best either...



Is Russia better off today? Most people (including me) probably agree that its seventy year long experiment in Socialism was a failure.



In my view, that experiment had at least one salutary effect on the West: As long as the specter of Communism existed, the Capitalist world (including the United States, its epicenter), felt at least obligated to avoid inequalitys grossest excesses. The very existence of the Soviet Union was a check on carrying the exploitation of the working class in the West to an extreme.

After the Russian revolution, the Western ruling elites probably thought, there but for the grace of God, go we... During the Cold War, most of the Western democracies had vigorous Communist parties and there was a good chance that Communism might be exported to many countries, including large parts of the Third World. Thus, most of Europe became a social democracy, and America had Roosevelts New Deal, Trumans Fair Deal, Johnsons Great Society, the War on Poverty, and other progressive programs. This defused class consciousness and averted the potential for revolution in the Capitalist world.

Now,the Western plutocracy no longer needs to fear Communist contagion, since its source has disappeared (what China is up to is anybodys guess). Class consciousness in the US, if it ever existed, is now nowhere to be found. Labor unions are dying. Wall Street CEOs make in ONE HOUR as much as workers earn in five months.

So while Soviet Communism became a nightmare Russia, the fear of it helped the working class in the West by attenuating the worst features of Capitalism there.



Russia is now facing a variety of difficulties, as it has throughout its history. Prime among them is its poor public health, which results in a declining population. Furthermore, it has a one-commodity economy, which makes it highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the free market. And of course, it is not really very democratic.



But the Russians are a resilient people. I have faith in them. I consider Russia a friend of the West. For example, working together in Syria is a no-brainer. Reviving the Cold War would be idiotic. The interests of Russia and the West coincide. I am confident that Russia will be able to muddle through, just like the United States. It doesnt take a (Russian) rocket scientist to see this.



 Tom Kando 2016



leave comment here
Errors by real estate agents in entering home sales data might lead to appraisers to assign mistaken values to houses that are being bought and sold. (iStock)

Are some realty agents hyping the pricing information on closed sales they report to their local multiple listing service, or MLS? And if so, should you care?

A first-of-its-kind study by appraisal and real estate experts suggests that maybe they are and maybe you should. Researchers compared closing documents  which are supposed to indicate the final price in sales transactions  with the prices that agents actually reported to their MLS and found that in nearly 1 of every 11 cases (8.75 percent) there were discrepancies. Overstatements of final price exceeded understatements by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. In one case, the price reported to the MLS was 21.4 percent above the actual closing price.

The study, published in the latest issue of the Appraisal Journal, is unusual because the settlement statement (traditionally this has been the HUD-1 form; now it is called the Closing Document) is not public. The researchers, three professors at Florida Gulf Coast University, obtained the HUD-1 statements from two banks that had extended mortgages on the properties. They then matched them up with the prices reported by realty agents to the local MLS. A total of 115 listing agents or brokers made the reports on the 400 sales in the statistical sample.

[More Harney: One-third of realty transactions are plagued by delays, some of them fatal]

One of the authors, Kenneth M. Lusht, a past president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, told me that some of the errors could simply be clerical mistakes  typing errors  but others could be the result of agents purposely inflating the prices they reported to the MLS.

Though the average overstatement was not huge  6.7 percent  the authors expressed concern that because the home appraisal system depends on accurate price-reporting to the MLS, errors can distort appraisers valuations. Appraisers use MLS pricing data to identify comparable houses to help estimate the values of homes on the market for sale.

Accurate appraisals are important to home buyers because lenders use them to help decide whether to approve their applications. Inaccurate appraisals also pose potential risks for lenders: If values are overstated, they may have less true collateral backing the mortgages they make, as they found to their horror during the housing bust of the past decade.

Multiple listing services exist to share property data among member brokers, appraisers and other real estate professionals. According to the Council of Multiple Listing Services, there are more than 800 such services in the United States, typically with rules emphasizing data integrity. Individual agents are supposed to report pricing and other property information to the MLS so that it can be viewed and used by other members.

Realty brokers, agents, appraisers and MLS officials I spoke with last week had starkly different interpretations of the study results. Several brokers and agents said they observe inaccuracies in pricing reports to their MLS frequently or occasionally. Several appraisers agreed. Others said they encounter little or none.

[More Harney: Home buyers dont seem to be using new tool to shop for mortgages]

Joshua Hunt, founder and chief executive of Trelora, a Denver realty brokerage, said many agents aim to show a higher closed sale price to show that their list-versus-sold percentage is higher, [and] they will use this in their listing pitch to show how great they are. They do this, Hunt said, by omitting seller concessions  adjustments to the final price that reflect either repairs or closing costs the seller agreed to fund  from the price they report to the MLS. The MLS doesnt pick up these intentional misreportings, he said, because there really is no audit system in place to spot them.

Alexis Eldorrado, managing broker at Eldorrado Chicago Real Estate, says this is not common in Chicago, mainly because the local MLS has an anonymous violation-reporting system that allows agents who observe misreporting of final prices to flag them for disciplinary action by the MLS if the errors are not quickly corrected.

Kathy Condon, president of the national MLS council and chief executive of Massachusettss largest MLS, agreed. In an interview, she said most MLSs do self-policing rigorously to guard against inaccurate data. At her MLS, five staffers monitor reports and search for errors.

Bottom line: The jury is out on this one. Maybe the pricing errors found in the study sample were not typical. But maybe errors are more common than MLSs care to admit. As one Virginia appraiser told me, We find inaccuracies quite often and have to verify information [on prices, square footage, etc.] before we use it. He said he has seen pricing inaccuracies more than two dozen times in the past year alone.

Ken Harneys email address is kenharney@earthlink.net.
Charred vehicles sit at the Shahrak police station on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. The car on top was destroyed by a magnetic bomb hidden on its underbelly, killing the driver. The van on the bottom was damaged by a suicide bomber.

Jan. 13, 2016 Charred vehicles sit at the Shahrak police station on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. The car on top was destroyed by a magnetic bomb hidden on its underbelly, killing the driver. The van on the bottom was damaged by a suicide bomber. Michael E. Miller/The Washington Post

The charred debris that now sits on the grounds of the Shahrak police station on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, tells stories of attacks.

The charred debris that now sits on the grounds of the Shahrak police station on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, tells stories of attacks.

The charred debris that now sits on the grounds of the Shahrak police station on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, tells stories of attacks.

To understand the terror the Taliban has wreaked upon Afghanistan, head to the outskirts of the capital, down a lane of shin-deep mud, through mounds of garbage picked over by sheep and street urchins, over a putrid moat and past armed guards.

There you will find Shahrak police station  the final resting place for the wrecks that carried Kabuls car bombs.

Here lie the charred husks of more than a dozen vehicles. Like exhibits in a macabre museum, the ruined cars recall the violence that has consumed the city in recent years. To one side sits the skeleton of a Taliban truck bomb that targeted the Afghan parliament. Nearby, a suicide bombers scorched turban slowly fades in the sunlight.

Years of pain are piled up at Shahrak.

We are used to it by now, said police officer Miragha Gulbahari, holding the turban up for a reporter to see. We have seen a lot of terrible things.

Officer Miragha Gulbahari picks up a piece of a rocket-propelled grenade from inside a charred minivan the Taliban used to target the Afghan parliament building last year. (Michael E. Miller/The Washington Post)

Afghans are hoping the terror ends soon. On Jan. 18, officials from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States met for the second time to plan a tentative peace process. Afterward, the four countries said in a statement that they had made progress on a road map toward initiating peace talks with Taliban groups.

But Shahrak stands as a stark reminder of how far Afghanistan has to go and how hard it will be to strike a deal with the Taliban.

In contrast to several cities overrun by the Islamists in 2015, Kabul has remained firmly under government control since the Taliban fled in 2001. Yet a glance around this vehicular graveyard shows that even the capital is now well within the Talibans deadly reach.

This one happened about a week ago, said a young police officer, pointing to a shredded white Toyota Corolla. The driver detonated his suicide vest Jan. 4 near the Kabul airport but managed to kill only himself. A few hours later in almost exactly the same spot, a powerful Taliban truck bomb proved deadlier, killing one bystander, injuring dozens, shattering concrete blast walls and leaving a 15-foot crater in the road.

[Kabuls blast walls protect a powerful few while causing misery for many]

The double blasts brought the weeks tally of car bombs to four, including another Taliban attack near the airport and a Taliban siege of an upscale restaurant frequented by foreigners and Afghan officials. Authorities said the string of attacks was both seasonal and a negotiating tactic ahead of potential peace talks.

Whenever the summer is gone we have a decrease in attacks in the provinces, and then the cities become the target, said Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi. And whenever you hear about peace talks, you also see an increase in attacks.

But the recent uptick in suicide attacks in Kabul has left officials and analysts concerned.

We have witnessed far more suicide attacks than in the past, said Atiqullah Amarkhail, a retired general who is now a security analyst in Kabul. The security situation is deteriorating.

Sediqqi said having four car-bomb attacks in one week was worrying.

Imagine how they get ready for this, how they prepare themselves for this, how they assemble all these explosives in a truck and bring them, he said.

Sediqqi, whose ministry presides over local and national police, said car bombs continue to stump his officers.

There is a big possibility that they make these bombs in some areas surrounding Kabul, he said, but we do not know exactly where they come from or how they get here.

Wherever they come from, many of the cars eventually end up here in Shahrak. So, too, do the vehicles that were on the streets near the explosions.

If the car bomb goes off inside the city, they bring the wreckage here so it doesnt disturb people, Gulbahari said. If it happens outside the city, they just throw it on the side of the road.

Bystanders lucky enough to survive suicide bombings sometimes come to Shahrak to claim their damaged cars, he said. A blue delivery truck with its windows shattered and back blown off awaited its owner, a load of charcoal still visible inside.

Cars belonging to the suicide bombers normally arrive in much worse shape. The twisted mounds of metal look more like avant-garde sculptures than automobiles, but they are stained with blood.

Sometimes, when the cars arrive here, they still have human bits inside, usually belonging to the suicide bombers, said Gulbahari, a veteran traffic officer with a thick mustache and blunt delivery. In Afghanistan, police officers have to be like doctors. We dont get affected by the bloodshed anymore.

In addition to the wreckage from car bombs, the stations sprawling grounds also store thousands of vehicles towed after traffic accidents or for infractions. In fact, so many vehicles have suddenly disappeared only to end up impounded here that Kabul residents have wryly given Shahrak the nickname Guantanamo.

Gulbahari gave a reporter a tour of the torched debris. He began with the Corolla that was blown up near the airport, then pointed to an unrecognizable chunk of metal: the remnants of a car bomb that had been used to target Shukria Barakzai, an outspoken member of parliament who ran a secret school for girls during the Talibans reign. Three civilians died in the November 2014 blast, and Barakzai survived only by magic, she told The Washington Post at the time.

[Bombings threaten Kabuls nascent civic and cultural life]

Gulbahari stopped next to two charred cars, one stacked atop the other. The one on the bottom was damaged by a suicide attack last year, he said. The one on the top exploded near Shahrak several months ago after someone attached a magnetic bomb to its underbelly, killing the driver.

The tour had a grisly finale: a minivan burned down to a brown metallic shell. Last summer, the Taliban loaded the van with explosives and drove it toward the Afghan parliament building. When security forces shot at the attackers, the van exploded, rattling parliament and sending politicians scrambling for cover. After the blast, Taliban gunmen broke into the building but were killed by guards.

Even that powerful explosion was not the worst Gulbahari has seen, he said. The most devastating car bomb was used in a 2013 attack on the Supreme Court that killed 17 people and wounded at least 39.

Shahrak captures the strange limbo in which Kabul residents now live. Like peace talks, the front lines in the conflict with the Taliban are still far away. Yet the Islamists are nonetheless able to sow uncertainty in the capital, periodically puncturing everyday life with frightening suicide attacks.

A mix of anxiety and resignation washed over Najib Ullah as he stood in Shahraks muck-filled lot. The 25-year-old taxi driver had come here to retrieve his red Corolla station wagon only to discover it was boxed in by an abandoned bus.

As he waited for help, his eyes fell on the mangled wreckage of the airport bombing. Najib Ullah had often passed the smoldering aftermath of car bombs while driving passengers on the highway, but he had never seen one so close up.

Everywhere we go, he said, we have to be careful.

Sayed Salahuddin and Mohammad Sharif contributed to this report.

Read more:

Suicide blast targets major Afghan media group, killing 7

Four-way talks on Afghanistan start, with much to overcome

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi approach to shake hands after their news conference in Beijing. (Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin/via Reuters)

Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Chinas foreign minister agreed Wednesday to move ahead with a U.N. resolution condemning North Korea for its latest nuclear test, but they appeared as far apart as ever on how far to push Pyongyang.

The United States says any additional U.N. action against the North is likely to include expanded sanctions. Beijing, a key ally of North Koreas, expressed anger at the nuclear test this month but has not indicated whether it will endorse further pressure.

As a permanent U.N. Security Council member, China could use its veto power to block any measures.

After a five-hour meeting between Kerry and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the two diplomats appeared before reporters with tension written across their faces. Wang drummed his fingers on the side of his lectern as a grim-faced Kerry excoriated the actions of North Korea and its erratic leader, Kim Jong Un.

Kerry used unusually forceful language about the dangers posed by Pyongyang. Wang repeatedly mentioned the need for stability on the Korean Peninsula. While both agreed that more sanctions are warranted, they said the details would have to be resolved in talks at the U.N. Security Council in coming days.

1 of 50 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What life looks like inside North Korea View Photos Scenes from inside the hermit kingdom. Caption Scenes from the hermit kingdom. April 14, 2016 A girl dances ballet at the Mangyongdae Childrens Palace in the Pyongyang suburbs. The large facility, opened in 1989, has hundreds of rooms for various activities, including mathematics, chemistry, computer science, sports, music and dance practice. Franck Robichon/European Pressphoto Agency Wait 1 second to continue.

[South Koreas appeal to China: Make North feel pain over nuclear test]

Kim Jong Uns actions are reckless, and they are dangerous, Kerry said of the leader whose regime has been backed by China for six decades. Whether or not he achieved the explosion of a hydrogen weapon is not what makes the difference. Its that he is trying.

Six-party talks, also involving South Korea, Russia and Japan, began in 2003 but failed to make headway. North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 and finally quit the talks in 2009. It has since conducted three tests, the most recent on Jan. 6.

China has voted in the U.N. Security Council to sanction North Korea over its previous nuclear tests, and it has condemned the latest one. But Wang made clear that China is prepared to go only so far.

Sanctions are not an end in themselves, he said. Our goal should be to bring the nuclear issue on the Korea Peninsula back to the negotiating track.

[Global condemnation over North Koreas nuclear test]

Kerry declined to be specific about what sectors might be affected by sanctions. But he suggested they might include trade involving the flow of goods and services between North Korea and China, shipping and aviation, as well as resource exchanges involving coal and other fuel.

There are many different ways, we think, in which non-

punitive to the people of North Korea but nevertheless effective steps can be taken, he said.

Kerry came to Beijing as part of an effort by U.S. officials to persuade the Chinese government to press Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program. He said China has a special role to play because it serves as the Norths lifeline, providing food, fuel and a conduit for most of its trade and financial transactions.

In Beijing, analysts and state media argued that pushing North Korea further could make it more aggressive or hasten the regimes collapse, propelling a stream of refugees into China and potentially installing a U.S. client state on its border. Washington is exacerbating the situation, they said.

But Kerry made clear that the strategy of relying on Beijing to prod Pyongyang needs to change. He said North Koreas stated intention of acquiring intercontinental ballistic missiles threatens the United States, which he said will never accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state.

The United States will take all necessary steps to defend the American people and to honor our security commitments to allies in the region, he said. I say that, making clear we do not want to raise military tensions, we are not seeking additional steps other than U.N. Security Council resolutions, but we will not walk away from any actions necessary to achieve the goal.

Kerry also held out a carrot to North Korea, saying it would get sanctions relief, economic help, energy and food aid plus direct humanitarian assistance if it ends its nuclear program.

Yet even as he stood alongside Wang after their lengthy meeting, which extended into lunch, Kerry seemed to be pleading with China to do more to rein in its neighbor, noting that China was one of five countries that negotiated an agreement to trim Irans nuclear program.

Nuclear-related sanctions against Iran were lifted this month, once Iran pared down its uranium stockpiles and disabled or mothballed parts of its nuclear facilities.

With all due respect, more significant and impactful sanctions were put in place against Iran, which did not have a nuclear weapon, than against North Korea, which does, he said.

In contrast, Wangs words were laced with reluctance.

Our position will not be swayed by specific events or the temporary mood of the moment, he said.

Wang said China is committed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, but he said two other principles are equally important: The commitment to uphold peace and stability. The commitment to resolve the issue through dialogue and consultation.

In the past, Washington has used less confrontational language than Kerry employed Wednesday, hoping China would use its clout to pressure North Korea on its own. But in recent weeks, U.S. officials have shown signs that their patience is wearing thin.

Yanmei Xie, senior China analyst with the International Crisis Group in Beijing, said U.S. officials may have recognized the limits of their softer approach.

Now they appear to be trying a different approach, raising the stakes for China of what the U.S. sees as inaction over North Korea. she said. I think the U.S. is not pretending anymore.

Read more:

The slow death of the nuclear deal with North Korea

North Korea blast reverberates in Beijing

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world
A man holding a baby arrives Tuesday at the transit center for refugees near the northern Macedonian village of Tabanovce, before continuing a journey to Serbia. (Boris Grdanoski/AP)

The European Commission warned Greece on Wednesday that it could face more border controls with other states of the free-travel Schengen zone in May if it does not fix serious deficiencies in its management of the areas external frontier.

European Union countries have been increasingly critical of Athenss handling of the continents worst migration crisis since World War II. More than 1 million migrants reached Europe last year, mainly through Greece.

If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to . . . allow member states to temporarily close their borders, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said at a news briefing.

He was speaking after the commission, the E.U.s executive body, accepted a report saying cash-strapped Athens had seriously neglected its obligations to fellow Schengen states.

The use of that phrase could pave the way for E.U. governments to exercise the option of reinstalling controls on their national borders for up to two years once short-term measures in place expire in May.

Several E.U. member states have instituted emergency controls on their borders and warned that they may effectively suspend Athens from the passport-free zone. Most of the irregular migrants arriving in the E.U. have come from Turkey via Greece and trekked northward to Germany.

Dombrovskis said Greece was not effectively identifying or registering people arriving, not uploading fingerprint data to relevant databases systematically and not checking travel documents properly and against key databases.

Greece responded by saying that E.U. interior ministers had concluded at a meeting on Monday that Turkey held the key for tackling the crisis and that it must deliver on agreed measures.

We think that trying to isolate Greece is not constructive, government spokeswoman Olga Gerovasili said.

E.U. border agency Frontex said its mission to the Greek island of Lesbos in January showed improvements in registration procedures. But E.U. officials carried out an assessment in Greece in November that led to Wednesdays conclusion alleging serious deficiencies in Greek frontier control.

Gerovasili said that Greeces request for support from Frontex had been only partially met and that a plan to relocate refugees had stalled, with only 414 out of 160,000 refugees relocated.

The step of imposing border controls can be taken for up to six months and can be renewed up to three times for a total of two years.

Greece has no land borders with the rest of the Schengen zone, so instituting new frontier checks would affect only air and sea ports.
The Legacy Theatre 101 E. Lawrence, Springfield Downtown

Theater & Comedy

Based on a true story, Charlie Price has inherited his fathers shoe factory, which is on the verge of bankruptcy.Trying to save the family business, Charlie finds inspiration in the form of Lola, a fabulous entertainer in need of some sturdy stilettos. As they work to turn the factory around, this unlikely pair finds that they have more in common than they ever dreamed possible. A moving and powerful story, Kinky Boots will have everyone dancing in the aisle and discovering why, sometimes, the best way to fit in is to stand out.Winner of six Tony Awards, including Best 800-838-3006
A man from Kosovo accused of hacking into a U.S. companys server and passing the personal information of American service members to the Islamic State appeared for the first time in a U.S. court Wednesday.

Dressed in a green jail jumpsuit, Ardit Ferizi, 20, said only yes, sir during a brief appearance in front of Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis in federal district court in Alexandria. The judge appointed the public defenders office to represent Ferizi, who was led away by U.S. marshals. He is next scheduled to appear in court Friday.

[U.S. accuses hacker of stealing military members data and giving it to ISIS]

Ferizi was detained last year in Malaysia on a U.S. provisional arrest warrant and extradited several days ago to the United States, authorities said. He is facing several charges, including providing material support to a terrorist organization and aggravated identity theft.

U.S. authorities have accused Ferizi of stealing the American service members data, then passing it to Junaid Hussain, a British citizen and Islamic State member.

Hussain in August posted links on Twitter to the names, email addresses, passwords, locations and phone numbers of 1,351 U.S. military and other government personnel. He was killed in a drone strike later that month.
The US military plans to maintain a presence of thousands of US forces in Afghanistan for decades, unnamed senior US military officials told the Washington Post Tuesday.

The US was supposed to leave Afghanistan by 2017. Now it might take decades, unnamed US military leaders cited by the Post said.

The confirmation of long-term US troop deployments to Afghanistan has been prompted by the instability of the US-backed regime in Kabul, whose tenuous hold over the capital is threatened by insurgent forces including the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS, the US officials said.

Current Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is a US and NATO stooge imposed through a managed election geared to deflect popular hatred of the previous US- backed ruler, Hamid Karzai. Ghani was described by the US officials as a willing and reliable partner who can provide bases to attack terror groups not just in Afghanistan, but also throughout South Asia for as long as the threat in the chronically unstable region persists.

US officials added, Theres a broad recognition in the Pentagon that building an effective Afghan Army and police force will take a generations commitment, including billions of dollars a year in outside funding.

The US-NATO intervention in Afghanistan will also require constant support from thousands of foreign advisers on the ground, the officials said.

Weve learned that you cant really leave, an unnamed Pentagon official said. Youre going to be there for a very long time.

Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed the White Houses support for the plans, saying that the US intervention is analogous to that in South Korea, where Washington has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers since the end of the Second World War to cement its domination over the Pacific Rim.

The Post report, which amounts to a de facto US government press release, comes amid a broader upsurge of escalatory moves by the US military in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Last week the Obama administration signed orders authorizing the US military to expand its military operations in northeast Afghanistan in the name of targeting the Islamic State. US Department of Defense chief Ashton Carter announced further deployments of US ground forces to Iraq, pledging to put boots on the ground. US Vice President Joseph Biden declared that Washington is prepared to seek a military solution in Syria.

On Friday, US General Joseph F. Dunford said that the US is on the verge of launching decisive military action in Libya, in coordination with a NATO coalition.

Dunfords statements have signaled the opening of a third front in the war against the Islamic State, according to a New York Times editorial Tuesday. The new US war in Libya could easily spread to other countries on the continent, the Times admitted, before calling for the US Congress to pass a new authorization to use military force.

With the US and European powers engaged in a competitive scramble over the redivision of the world, the announcement that US forces will remain in Afghanistan for untold decades underscores the centrality of the Central Asian region in the strategic calculations of US imperialism.

The US ruling class and military establishment seek to utilize Afghanistan as a permanent military outpost for operations throughout South and Central Asia. Washington is determined to project power throughout the entire Eurasian landmass as part of its campaign to destabilize Russia and China and foster conditions more suitable to US control over the worlds decisive economic centers.

On Sunday, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent US think tank, noted, Major geopolitical shifts and internal dynamics are setting the stage for possible increased great-power competition in Central Asia. The Carnegie report calls for the US to prioritize regional engagement with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and harness Russian and Chinese actions to advance US interests.

The US military presence in Afghanistan is a key component in the global struggle against Moscow and Beijing, as US imperialisms strategists openly state. As a result of increased involvement by Russia and China, the region is becoming less hospitable to the projection of US power, the Carnegie Endowment wrote.

Last April, the Obama administration released a plan, An Enduring Vision for Central Asia, laying out provisions to deepen US security and military ties to the region and build up human rights organizations.

US Secretary of State John Kerry followed up on the White Houses vision by visiting the region in November for talks with leaders of five Central Asian governments, establishing a new forum known as the C5+1 to streamline the collaboration of US-aligned forces in the region.

Central Asian states have aided in the War on Terror and have the potential to serve as a bulwark to Russian and Chinese influence, George Washington Universitys International Affairs Review noted last week in a report, Achieving Americas Vision for Central Asia.

Chinas energy-rich western province of Xinjiang has also increasingly become a focus for US imperialisms network of State Department-backed NGOs. Xinjiang Seethes Under Chinese Crackdown, the New York Times warned at the beginning of January.

The Chinese ruling elite has sought to deepen its own involvement in Afghanistan, spurred on by the crisis of the US-backed regime. Beijing strives to insert itself into the US- and Pakistan-backed Afghanistan Peace Process, as part of its efforts to construct a Eurasian-wide economic and political alliance to counter efforts by the US to isolate the Chinese economy.

Afghanistans foreign ministry arrived in Beijing on Monday for week-long talks aimed at a political deal that would integrate sections of Afghanistans economic elite into the commercial and infrastructure network being developed by the Chinese government.

A stable Afghanistan could become a critical transportation hub and market for Chinese goods, and another investment opportunity for President Xi Jinpings grand economic plans for Central Asia, the Times wrote in a report Sunday, China Considers Larger Role in Afghanistan Peace Process.

The big backdrop is that the United States will have withdrawn most of its troops from Afghanistan with the antiterrorism mission unfinished, Du Youkang of Shanghais South Asia Studies Center at Fudan University in Shanghai told the Times on Sunday. The Post report is a statement from the Obama administration and the military that, in fact, the US has no intention of withdrawing its forces.
(Photo: Corbis)

Four people who had returned from travel abroad have tested positive in New York state with infections with the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, local health officials said on Wednesday.

Two tested positive in New York City, city health officials said. Neither had severe complications, they said.

A person who resides in Nassau County had traveled to a country with documented transmission of the virus and developed symptoms in August, had a mild illness, was not hospitalized and has completely recovered, a county health department spokeswoman said.

An Orange County resident who had traveled to South America tested positive, the county health commissioners office said. The office did not provide information on the persons condition.

More on the

Zika virus on Yahoo Health

Read This Next: Do Pregnant Women in the U.S. Need to Worry About Zika Virus?
Could last weekends winter storm Jonas be responsible for a baby boom nine months from now? Some experts say yes  thanks to a combination of treacherous weather outside and bored people stuck inside.



With low-level, low-severity storm advisories, we actually found an uptick in births nine months later, Richard Evans, a professor of economics at Brigham Young University, said in an interview with NPR. The story there is that if the lights go out and theres no TV, it kind of sets the table for romance.

STORY: Why Kids Never Sled Alone Anymore  But Should

Evans is the co-author of a study published in 2007 that found birthrates go up only after certain natural disasters. If extreme conditions cause people to evacuate or fear for their lives, birthrates will actually go down. If youre running for your life, you cant make babies, Evans said.

But that wasnt the case with #Blizzard2016s Jonas  where authorities gave people plenty of notice to stock up, hunker down, and prepare for power outages.

STORY: Why I Refuse to Fight With My Kid About Wearing a Coat When Its Cold



With no electricity, theres no binge-watching TV, and limited social media access. And even with the electricity on, you can only watch so much Netflix over a long, snowy weekend.

Those seem to be the conditions that generate more babies, Evans said.

You only need to go back as far as 2014s Snowvember in upstate New York to find this theory proving true. Nine months after a brutal snowstorm hit the Buffalo area, trapping residents in their homes for days, local hospitals reported a dramatic increase  up to 30 percent  in the number of births.

Before that, in 2012, Hurricane Sandy kept many people inside, and health officials reported birthrates in the areas affected did indeed rise nine months later  one hospital in New Jersey saw a 25 percent increase, according to the Guardian.

Nine months will tell whether or not Jonas spurs a similar baby boom. One thing is certain, however: A number of new couplings were born, with some New Yorkers advertising on Craigslist for snow mates  writing ads like Fun personal guy seeking snow cuddle buddy  and popular dating app Hinge reminding female users that blizzard boyfriends were available with a simple swipe right, according to the Daily Mail.

Story continues

(Photo: Getty Images)

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After six months of recovery, a mother of four is sharing her upsetting birth story  in which doctors gave her an emergency C-section only to find, when they cut her open, that her son had already been born naturally.

STORY: Woman Sues Hospital Over Traumatic Birth That Turned Our Family Life Upside Down

Amber Hughes (pictured above), of Leicester, England, told Yahoo Parenting in a statement that she had gone into premature labor in July when she was 30 weeks pregnant, and that after 36 hours in labor and remaining only 3 centimeters dilated, doctors rushed her into the operating room for a cesarean section because they feared infection.

But Hughes, 21, said the doctors were shocked to find no baby in her uterus after cutting her open because she had apparently delivered him vaginally at the precise moment the surgery began. Doctors only discovered the newborn, named Olly, in the sheets after he started crying.

STORY: Mom Sues Doctor Over C-Section Fight: I Was Treated Like a Child

It was horrific, she said, regarding the birth at Leicester Royal Infirmary. I was expecting my bundle of joy to be passed to me, but instead I watched panic spread over doctors faces. For two whole minutes they were truly baffled until they heard little cries coming from my lap and pulled up the sheet to find Olly lying in between my legs. I wondered if it was the drugs I was on and I was imagining it, not only was I cut open unnecessarily, but my poor baby was under a sheet alone.

Newborn Olly. (Photo: Amber Hughes/Talk to the Press)

The mom, already a parent to three other children ages 2, 4, and 6 with partner Daniel, 25, added, I didnt even receive an apology. The doctor just explained that my baby had already begun his descent in the birth canal when they cut me open, and it was an odd situation. I now have a visible scar that wasnt needed, and Im still recovering from my C-section.

Elaine Broughton, head of midwifery for Leicesters Hospitals, said in a statement released to Yahoo Parenting: We were really very worried about Amber and her baby as there were signs of infection and her water had broken quite some time ago, yet the delivery didnt appear to be progressing. The decision to carry out an emergency caesarean is never taken lightly but we thought it was for the best in this case. Clearly, between the decision to operate being taken and Ambers arrival in theatre, Mother Nature had once again taken over. Were looking at the chain of events in detail and will share our findings with the parents. Were sorry that this happened but glad that mum and baby are doing well.



Story continues

Olly with mom and dad. (Photo: Amber Hughes/Talk to the Press)

Amber recalled how after the surgery doctors frantically moved around her bed, looking for the newborn. I was literally going into meltdown, she said. Where had my baby gone? It couldnt just disappear.

A doctor later explained to the couple that as they performed the successful C-section, Olly had already begun his descent in the birth canal. For two minutes they had lost my baby, she said. That is just ludicrous.

Isabel Blumberg, MD, an obstetrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, tells Yahoo Parenting she has never heard of such a situation before and finds it bizarre. Still, she says, on one occasion she had called for a patient to have a C-section and then gotten bumped from an operating room. While awaiting a free one, Blumberg explains, she reexamined her patient, found that she was 10 centimeters dilated, and canceled the surgery. That happens, she says. Sometimes we call C-sections prematurely.

With Hughes, she supposes it was one of those weird flukes, noting that it is entirely possible that the experienced mom didnt feel her son being born.

Hughes, Daniel, and their four children. (Photo: Amber Hughes/Talk to the Press)

This was her fourth baby, Blumberg says. He was small and, instinctively, the body will push it out. Her uterus contracted it out as they opened her up, and she didnt even feel it with the level of anesthesia required for a C-section. Between when the need for surgery was declared and the first cut was made, she adds, Hughes transitioned in a very short period of time.

And until the baby cried, doctors would have had no reason to think it was anywhere else but inside the mom. Theyre just looking at the abdomen. You dont see the vagina during a C-section, Blumberg says, describing the setup, where the mom is draped everywhere. Youre only looking at that one spot.

Gil Weiss, MD, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Northwestern University and an ob-gyn in Chicago, agrees that the situation is definitely unusual but also notes that labor conditions can change between the time of declaring a cesarean section and actually performing it. Its happened to all of us before that somethings changed and that shes now ready to deliver, and so we wheel her out of the OR.

Blumberg says she understands Hughes being shaken and wanting an apology. I think she has a right to be upset  she had an unnecessary surgery, she says. There would definitely be a lawsuit [in this country].

Weiss, though, stresses the final outcome of little Ollys birth when asked whether Hughes should be angry or not. That depends what her goal was, he says. If it was to have a healthy baby, healthy mom, thats what happened. If it was to have a vaginal delivery, she might be a little bit disappointed.

(Top photo: Amber Hughes/Talk to the Press)





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Four years ago, Donald Trump was scheduled to moderate a Republican debate in Iowa, but just two candidates agreed to participate in the Newsmax-hosted event because the then Celebrity Apprentice host would not rule out an independent run.

Were not seeing a lot of courage here, Trump told Fox News Megyn Kelly in a 2011 interview. These Republicans, theyre supposed to be brave.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum agreed to take part in the late-December debate, which was scheduled to be broadcast live from Des Moines on the ION Television network.

But the rest of the field, including Mitt Romney, declined.







The selection of a reality television personality to host a presidential debate that voters nationwide will be watching is beneath the office of the presidency, Ron Pauls campaign said in a statement, and flies in the face of that offices history and dignity.

Trump subsequently bowed out as moderator, and the event was ultimately canceled.

I believe this would not only have been the most watched debate but also the most substantive and interesting debate, Trump said in a statement thanking Gingrich and Santorum for having the courage, conviction, and confidence to agree to participate.

Trumps decision to boycott Thursdays Republican debate over his ongoing feud with Kelly and Fox News is sending shock waves throughout the 2016 GOP race. The Republican frontrunner had threatened to skip the event if Fox News chairman Roger Ailes did not remove Kelly as moderator.

Megyn Kelly is a lightweight, Trump said at a press conference in Iowa Tuesday. Megyn Kelly shouldnt be at the debate.

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But in their 2011 interview, Trump heaped praise on Kellys moderating skills.

I could never beat you. That wouldnt even be close. That would be no contest, Trump said. You have done a great job, by the way. And I mean it.

While announcing his decision to skip Thursdays debate, Trump reiterated his complaints that Kelly is biased  a charge he said was proved at the first Republican debate in August, when she called him out for his history of misogynistic comments.

Youve called women you dont like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals, Kelly said. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?

Honestly, Megyn, if you dont like it, Im sorry, Trump replied. Ive been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be based on the way youve treated me.

Kelly addressed the controversy on Tuesdays Kelly File.

In the months since, Mr. Trump has repeatedly brought up that exchange as evidence of alleged bias on my part, she said. I maintain it was a tough but fair question and we agreed to disagree.

Her comments came hours after the cable network released a statement mocking Trump and backing Kelly.

Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her, Ailes said in a statement. She will absolutely be on the debate stage Thursday night.

Trump is not used to not controlling things, Kelly added. But the truth is, he doesnt get to control the media.

In a 2011 interview with Megyn Kelly, Donald Trump scolded Republican candidates for skipping his event  and heaped praise on her moderating skills. (Fox News)


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Using as his pretext the British governments closure of a noncompliant illegal haredi school in London, Talmud Torah Tashbar, Rabbi Eli Riss, the chief rabbi of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia  better known to many Jews as "Birobidzhan  which is located due north of North Korea, issued a public statement Tuesday calling on Diaspora haredim to leave their home countries and move to his community.

Attention Haredim! Dont Like Following Education Law In Britain Or The US? Youre Invited To Immigrate To The Jewish Autonomous Oblast Of Russia

Shmarya Rosenberg  FailedMessiah.com

Give us your perpetually irritated, vastly undereducated, self-made poor.

Using as his pretext the British governments closure of a noncompliant illegal haredi school in London, Talmud Torah Tashbar, Rabbi Eli Riss, the chief rabbi of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia  better known to many Jews as "Birobidzhan  which is located due north of North Korea, issued a public statement Tuesday calling on Diaspora Jews, especially Yiddish-speaking haredim, to leave their home countries and move to his community where they can find refuge from the pesky demands of other governments which actually require schools to teach math, science and the language of the country.

Its shocking, that in this day and age, that a Jewish school is being ordered to shut down because of its firm commitment to offer instruction in a religious framework. Here in Birobidzhan, as with the rest of the former Soviet territories, Jewish schools were also [in the past] forced to close by government directive and weve seen how religious observance and the Yiddish language has suffered as consequence, Riss said, according a report in Yeshiva World.

Riss was referring to Talmud Torah Tashbar, which was closed by the British government for being illegal and for failing to teach students any secular subjects, even English.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently issued a similar invitation for Jewish immigration to all of Russia, which he billed as a haven from anti-Semitism in Western Europe, when he spoke recently to the European Jewish Congress.
Succumbing to pressure from the Ashkenazi haredi United Torah Judaism Party, Israels Zionist Orthodox Education Minister Naftali Bennett has apparently agreed to write  and, allegedly, champion  a bill that would abolish the legal requirement for haredi boys schools to teach secular subjects.

Israel Set To Allow Haredi Boys Schools To Teach No Secular Subjects At All

Shmarya Rosenberg  FailedMessiah.com

Succumbing to pressure from the Ashkenazi haredi United Torah Judaism Party, Israels Zionist Orthodox Education Minister Naftali Bennett has apparently agreed to write  and, allegedly, champion  a bill that would abolish the legal requirement for haredi boys schools to teach secular subjects, the Jerusalem Post reported based in part on a report in Behadrei Haredim.

The current law, put in place by the centrist Yesh Atid Party in the previous government, requires at least 11 total hours per week of English, math and science to taught in haredi boys schools  far less than what is taught elsewhere. Haredi schools not meeting that target should have seen their government funding proportionately reduced, but the law was never properly enforced.

UTJ says the repeal of that law was one of the promises made to the party by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to induce it to join the current coalition government. Without the support of UTJ and the Sefardi haredi Shas Party, Netanyahus coalition would not have enough seats to rule.

Through a spokesman, Bennett said that he would not agree to champion it until the ruling coalition approves it.

In theory, that approval could be granted as soon as Sunday.
Jack Townsend offers this blog on Federal Tax Crimes principally for tax professionals and tax students. It is not directed to lay readers -- such as persons who are potentially subject to U.S. civil and criminal tax or related consequences. LAY READERS SHOULD READ THE PAGE IN THE RIGHT HAND COLUMN TITLE "INTENDED AUDIENCE FOR BLOG; CAUTIONARY NOTE TO LAY READERS." Thank you.
A UK book publisher says congestion at Felixstowe Port has left it with no books to sell in the lead up to Christmas. Colin Hoad and Matt Gr...
Handled carelessly.

As the worlds elephant and rhino populations dwindle, wildlife advocates are putting pressure on Japan to curb its ivory trade. And activists are accusing Yahoo Japan, a hotspot for online ivory commerce, of facilitating illegal transactions and enabling poachers and smugglers.

The UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) released a report in December claiming that Japan is awash with ivory of dubious origin and not a shred of real evidence is required by law to ensure that ivory is of legal origin and acquisition. And the volume of ivory traded in the country has grown in recent years (PDF, p.3).

The EIA also discovered that more than 12 metric tons (tonnes) of ivory were sold on the Yahoo Japan auctions site between 2012 and 2014. Unlike Amazon and Google, which have banned ivory sales on their sites, Yahoo has reportedly been unresponsive to conservation groups concerns about the online ivory trade.

Yahoo Japan is a joint venture between US-based Yahoo and the Japanese tech firm SoftBank, which has a controlling stake. It is also the only Japanese online retailer that still sells whale and dolphin meat, according to The Guardian. More than 1 million people have signed a petition on Avaaz.org addressed to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo Japan CEO Manabu Miyasaka, and all other companies allowing ivory sales online.

Japan is one of 179 signees of the United Nations Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which bans international ivory trading with a few exceptions, such as ivory collected before 1976. It is under those exceptions that a technically legal commercial market for ivory has flourished in Japanjust like it did in China until 2015.

Distinguishing legal and illegal ivory is increasingly difficult thanks to high demand for the tusks and corruption at every step of the trade regulation process. And researchers are becoming more convinced that its impossible for any legal ivory markets to co-exist with the CITES ban, which is designed to protect endangered elephants and rhinos from poaching. Inevitably, the legal markets become flooded with blood ivory collected illegally, and modern poachers remain incentivized to kill.

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(Adds comments from union head)

By Anthony Esposito

SANTIAGO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Chile's Escondida, the world's biggest copper mine, will implement a new round of personnel cuts equal to 2.4 percent of its current workforce as prices for the red metal linger near multi-year lows.

"Escondida is putting in place a plan to reduce the number of employees by 2.4 percent, which is equivalent to around 90 roles," a spokesman for Escondida's controller, global miner BHP Billiton , said on Wednesday.

"That was in response to the continued deterioration of the copper market, which has seen prices drop more than 30 percent over the last 12 months," the spokesman added.

In response to the layoffs, workers have blocked the access road to Escondida, located at high-altitude in Chile's arid north.

"We've been blocking the access road since the early hours of the morning ... at 3 p.m. (local time) we're going to meet with company representatives," said union head Patricio Tapia.

Due to the blocked roads, the mine is operating at 50 percent though the plant is functioning normally, he added.

The Escondida spokesman said he would not comment on the actions taken by protesting workers.

"Escondida is taking advantage of this situation with copper prices to layoff workers that have become a headache for the company because they have professional illnesses or have been hurt in accidents on the job," said Tapia.

In February 2015, Escondida said it had begun a voluntary redundancy program for its workforce as part of an ongoing plan to improve productivity and cut costs.

(Reporting by Anthony Esposito; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)
CENTENNIAL, CO--(Marketwired - Jan 27, 2016) - CannaGrow Holdings, Inc., (OTC PINK: CGRW) -- A Liaison and Consultant providing Turn-Key solutions to licensed Growers announces an update on the Colorado project.

Delmar Janovec, CEO, states, "Due to the number of inquiries and ongoing discussions with parties interested in leasing, building, or entering into Joint-Ventures with CannaGrow Holdings on the Colorado Buffalo Ranch Filing No. 5-Lot 61 Property, the Company has secured an option to lease the remaining 15 acres on Lot 61 from NuGro Industries, Inc. The current Five (5) Phase Build Out is already spoken for and leasing details are being negotiated with the future tenants. We are of the opinion the reason for the growing number of inquiries is because of the underlying issue of sufficient access to a water source.

"Shareholders will recall that on December 1, 2015 CannaGrow Holdings, Inc. announced the Colorado Division of Water Resources approved the NuGro Industries Water Well on the Colorado Buffalo Ranch Filing No. 5-Lot 61 for Commercial Use. To date, this is the only water well in unincorporated Huerfano County to be approved for Commercial Use for a Cannabis Grow Facility.

"Construction on Phase I & II continues and progress is accelerating. The foundations (footings and stem walls) have been completed for both the Nexus Greenhouse and Olympia Head-house. The Greenhouse construction subcontractors moved onto the project site on Monday, January 25, 2016, to begin erecting the facilities."

Janovec continues on, "Phase I & II consists of site grading for the ingress & egress roadways, a 3,200 sq. ft. head-works building, six (6) 2300 sq. ft. hoop-houses for outdoor grows, an approximate 3,300 sq. ft. state-of-the-art Nexus Greenhouse that utilizes the most up-to-date technology for the growing of cannabis. The Nexus Greenhouse and the Olympia Head-house buildings will provide a premier work and growing facilities for an approved Licensed Grower's operations which will optimize all operations, from seed-to-sale.

Story continues

"CannaGrow Holdings, Inc., the Liaison and Representative for NuGro Industries, will continue in that capacity, working with the various Contractors and State/County Agencies, to see the Multi-Phased project through to an operational status. The completion of this Project will provide CannaGrow the basis to begin generating revenues from the licensed Growers sub-leasing the Turnkey Growing Facilities being built to the specifications of Dr. John P. Janovec, COO of CannaGrow and consultant, Jason Wells. CannaGrow has received numerous inquiries from perspective tenants and are also exploring additional business ventures within this industry that could further enhance shareholder value."

The site plan, grading plan, and phasing plan that was submitted by NuGro Industries, the landowner and developer, can be viewed on our website at: http://cannagrowholdings.com.

About CannaGrow Holdings, Inc.:

CannaGrow Holdings, Inc. has entered the Medical/Recreational Cannabis Industry as a Lessor, Liaison, and Consultant to licensed Growers providing them with turnkey Growing Facilities in the State of Colorado. The Company intends to expand this business model within this industry as business opportunities evolve whereby providing for the highest return to its shareholders.

CannaGrow Holdings, Inc. is currently working with a website designer to update its website to better reflect the business model the Company is engaged in within the Cannabis Industry.

CannaGrow Holdings, Inc. does not and will not, until such time as Federal law allows, grow, harvest, distribute or sell marijuana or any substance that violate the laws of the United States of America.

CannaGrow Holdings, Inc. encourages the public to read the above information in conjunction with its year-end statement for December 31, 2014, and the quarterly statements filed in calendar year 2015, at www.otcmarkets.com.

The information contained in this press release may include forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements usually contain the words "may," "could," "possibly," "feel," "estimate," "anticipate," "believe," "expect," or similar expressions that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include the Company's uncertain profitability, need for significant capital, uncertainty concerning market acceptance of its services, competition, limited service facilities, dependence on technological developments and protection of its intellectual property. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those discussed herein.
Speculation of Weaker Output Supported Grain Prices

Corn prices fell

Corn futures on the CBOT (Chicago Board of Trade), for March delivery, fell by 0.14% and settled at $3.69 per bushel on January 26, 2016. Corn prices rose due to speculation of higher planting in North America for marketing year 20162017. The Teucrium Corn Fund (CORN) traded on the heels of the CBOT. It fell by 0.23% on January 26, 2016.

According to the report from DuPont on January 26, 2016, farmers might focus on the relative economics between crop alternatives for the planting decision during marketing year 20162017. From the report, the relative higher yield and favorable weather conditions during the past two major growing seasons would push farmers to choose higher corn planting for the upcoming season. The conditions are similar in North America and Brazil. Farmers are expected to choose Safrinha corn, or the second corn crop, during marketing year 20162017. The seed purchase orderbook also confirms this point. The speculation of more planting and a turn in the supply dragged corn prices down on January 26, 2016.

The weather in the Argentine corn-belt has been unfavorably dry and hot since mid-December 2015. This is expected to continue in the near term. Contrary to the traditional El Nino pattern, warm and dry conditions stressed the corn plants. The continuation of drought-like conditions could add to the woes for the corn crops quality. The fear of damaged corn crops due to unfavorable weather conditions might weigh on the corn output. The speculation of adverse weather conditions hurting the Argentine corn exports supported US corn on January 26, 2016.

Stock discussion

The decrease in corn prices negatively influenced businesses in the corn producing and trading industry. Companies including Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Ingredion (INGR), ConAgra Foods (CAG), and CHS (CHSCP) rose by 3.7%, 1.9%, 1.0%, and 0.46% on January 26, 2016. The PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund (DBA) rose by 0.15% on January 26, 2016, even though corn prices declined on the day.

Story continues

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By Lawrence White HONG KONG (Reuters) - HSBC's board meets on Wednesday to consider moving headquarters to Hong Kong, and concerns about China's increasing influence over the financial hub and its independent status may be a factor in the decision, said a senior source at the bank. At the two-day meeting, directors will also focus on the bank's strategy, with a decision on the domicile issue possibly coming as early as this week. Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver will lead the board in assessing the results of a nine-month review into a potential relocation, drawn up amid worries over tighter regulation and higher taxes in Britain. The bank may also want to be closer to faster-growing Asian markets, which account for around two thirds of its profits. Reuters reported that a relocation to Hong Kong is unlikely to save the British bank much tax, and may actually increase its bill, while signs Beijing is encroaching on Hong Kong's partial autonomy are further playing on directors' minds. "The situation in Hong Kong appears to be getting worse. You have to wonder if the city will remain a suitable base for an independent-minded, top global financial institution," said an HSBC insider, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. Since independence from British rule in 1997, Hong Kong has been governed under a "one country, two systems" formula, which gives it partial autonomy from mainland China. That has ensured judicial independence, a key attraction for international companies seeking an Asian base, and prevented mainland police from operating in the financial centre. But a series of disappearances among Hong Kong's bookseller community has prompted fears that mainland Chinese authorities may be using shadowy tactics that erode that formula. AT LEAST 11 FACTORS Lee Bo, one of the owners of a publisher and bookshop specialising in books critical of China's Communist Party leaders, vanished in December amid widespread speculation that Chinese authorities may have abducted him in Hong Kong and spirited him across to China for an investigation. Lee, a British passport holder, surfaced on Saturday, meeting his wife at a guesthouse in mainland China, Hong Kong police said. HSBC in Hong Kong declined to comment on whether Lee's disappearance could be a factor in the domicile decision. Earlier this month, thousands of people took to the streets of Hong Kong demanding to know the whereabouts of the men, who were all linked to a publisher that was reportedly planning a new book on the private life of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. So far, Chinese authorities have not responded to multiple requests for comment from Reuters, nor have they made any substantial statements explaining Beijing's role in the disappearances nor the fate of the men. HSBC's review of whether to relocate considers at least 11 factors, the bank has said, including the transparency and robustness of the business and legal environments in a given city as well as its long-term stability. The bank has never publicly said which financial centres it is considering for a possible relocation, but Hong Kong, HSBC's main base since its creation 150 years ago until 1993, is viewed as the favourite by analysts and investors. Staying in London would mean the bank remains in one of the world's largest financial centres, although that might be affected by Britain's possible exit from the European Union following a referendum that could take place later this year. Local regulators including the Hong Kong Monetary Authority have said they would welcome a move to the Asian city, a major source of global revenues for HSBC. Yet, as Chinese growth slows to its weakest in a quarter of a century and Hong Kong's own growth suffers, those revenues' contribution may be eroded. (Editing by Mike Collett-White)
By Tim Hepher

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran courted Western aviation firms this week with a blueprint of regulatory reforms aimed at setting aside 40 years of sanctions and rebuilding its airways with new jets.

But despite talk of a major plane order from Airbus (AIR.PA), a raft of legal, financial and regulatory hurdles remain as Iran seeks foreign investor backing for plans to overhaul its dilapidated aviation sector.

"We are seeing massive opportunities in Iran," said Peter Harbison, chairman of the Centre for Aviation (CAPA), an Australian consultancy, adding that Tehran needed funding, organisation and manpower to do everything its airlines intend.

"Without each of those ingredients, the growth is going to be much less than optimal," he said after chairing a major Tehran aviation conference.

A shopping list for over $20 billion of Airbus jets carried to Europe by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani this week is seen as a test case for post-sanctions trade because of the sums involved and state-of-the-art financing used in the jet market.

Although Boeing jets are not involved, completing the Airbus deal depends on the approval of the U.S. Treasury, which must approve sales to Iran of jets with over 10 percent U.S. parts.

Even then, Iran must work out how to pay for the jets, delegates at the Iran Aviation Summit organised by CAPA said.

Iran on Monday urged Washington to remove any lingering obstacles to implementation of the accord under which sanctions were lifted in return for curbs on its nuclear activities.

"I expect a very short process. Actually we expect them to expedite all these efforts to .. open the way for legal business cooperation between Iranian and foreign entities," deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi told reporters at the CAPA event.

Washington has said Iran may still not use its financial system, raising potential difficulties for jet deals denominated in dollars. If Iran pays for its planes in euros, any money subsequently converted into dollars may create problems.

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A senior Iranian official said Tehran was in touch with the U.S. Treasury to clarify the status of such transactions. U.S. officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Iran meanwhile faces warnings that Western banks may hold off from backing aircraft and other deals until rules are clear.

"I think we need much more clarity on what (the U.S. Treasury) is going to authorise or not," said Bertrand Grabowski, a managing director at Germany's DVB Bank.

In a further twist, Iranair remains locked out of a dedicated global financial system for air tickets because it is based on laws of Canada, which has not lifted sanctions on Iran.

"To have Western banks effectively financing directly aircraft to Iranian airlines is going to be a tough call. This isnt going to happen in the next 18 months," Grabowski said.

However, he said some banks may be more willing to support the activities of leasing companies working in Iran.

POSITIVE SIGNAL

Aircraft leasing companies, who control about 40 percent of the world's fleet, eagerly touted for business at the Tehran event, joined by suppliers from 35 nations offering Iran badly needed wares from avionics to airports.

"We are behind, we admit that," Deputy Transport Minister Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan said.

"Therefore we have decided to ... look for the solutions and try to find proper responses to any questions" on funding.

Kashan said Iran was looking at joining the 2006 Cape Town Convention, a treaty of more than 60 nations designed to boost trade by protecting aircraft owners in return for cheaper financing.

"That is a very positive signal for me," said Dick Forsberg, head of strategy at Dublin-based leasing company Avolon, while warning investors Iran would not be a "gold rush".

Privately, some foreign delegates said doing business in Iran was still a complex puzzle, further obscured by upcoming elections.

President Rouhani, a pragmatist, has been trying to attract technology and investment to bolster Iran's shattered economy. But some analysts say political in-fighting, and the possibility of fresh sanctions if Iran violates the deal, worry investors.

Allies of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last say on state matters, have already begun to criticise new oil contracts that are also designed to attract investors.

While Iranian officials gave assurances that they would respect foreign investors' ownership rights, some delegates at the aviation conference saw potential sticking points over Iran's attitude to collateral on some transactions.

Britain's export credit agency said last week it was open to doing business in Iran, boosting the prospect of aircraft sales. But such agencies typically demand security on the jet even if the buyer is government controlled and can put up a state guarantee to pay money owed.

That may be a problem for Iran, which regards its sovereign-backed guarantees as word enough and is reluctant to offer collateral on the asset as well, delegates said.

Grabowski said Iran had reassured investors but "they need to deliver, and this is where it is going to be difficult".

(Reporting by Tim Hepher; Editing by Peter Graff)
JAKARTA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Indonesia's mines minister said on Wednesday he was certain a solution would be found to the issue of extending Freeport's permit to export copper, amid discussions with the company.

The government has said it will not renew Freeport's six-month export permit, due to expire on Thursday, unless the company pays a $530-million deposit for a new smelter.

"We still have a couple of days to seek a solution," Energy Minister Sudirman Said told reporters.

"I am certain (a solution will be found) because our orientation is how to maintain continuity of their operation so that this doesn't impact the local economy and industry."

The government would continue to communicate with and meet the U.S.-based mining company to "seek common ground" and find a solution, Said added.

(Reporting by Wilda Asmarini; Writing by Fergus Jensen; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
* Energy & mines minister indicates room to negotiate on deposit

* Freeport must still show commitment to new smelter -minister (Adds quotes, details)

By Wilda Asmarini

JAKARTA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Indonesia's mines minister and Freeport McMoRan Inc expressed confidence on Wednesday that the two sides will find common ground to enable the U.S. mining giant to continue shipping copper concentrate for at least another six months.

Freeport's current six-month export permit is due to expire on Thursday. The government has said it will not be renewed unless the company puts up a $530 million deposit for a new smelter.

A halt in exports would deal a blow to Freeport's profits and deny the Indonesian government desperately needed revenue from one of its biggest taxpayers. A stoppage would also buoy global copper prices that have slipped nearly 4 percent so far this year on worries about oversupply.

Energy and Mines Minister Sudirman Said said he was certain a solution would be reached to "maintain continuity of their operation so that this doesn't impact the local economy and industry."

He indicated that there was room to negotiate with Freeport over Jakarta's demand for a $530 million deposit.

"They (Freeport) wrote a letter, which basically says they will be cooperative and will try to comply with the government requirements," Said told reporters.

"We can understand that moving $530 million will hit their balance sheet. We are seeking a solution."

A Freeport spokesman said the company was confident it would receive a new export license from the government.

Jakarta wants the half-a-billion dollar deposit as a guarantee that the Phoenix, Arizona-based company will complete construction of another local smelter. The amount would add to an estimated $80 million that Freeport set aside in July 2015 to obtain its current export permit.

Said said if Freeport doesn't want to provide the deposit, the company must offer an alternative to demonstrate their commitment to expanding Indonesia's smelter capacity.

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Freeport CEO Richard Adkerson said late Tuesday the government's demand for a smelter deposit was "inconsistent" with an agreement reached between the two sides in mid-2014.

According to those agreements, Freeport must sell the government a greater share of the Grasberg copper and gold mine and invest in domestic processing to win an extension of its mining contract beyond 2021.

(Additional reporting by Fergus Jensen and Michael Taylor; Writing by Randy Fabi; Editing by Tom Hogue)
JAKARTA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Indonesia's government will work with Freeport McMoRan Inc to find common ground so the U.S. mining giant can continue to ship copper concentrate for at least another six months, the mines minister said on Wednesday.

Freeport's current six-month export permit is due to expire on Thursday and the government has said it will not be renewed unless the company pays a $530-million deposit for a new smelter.

"They wrote a letter, which basically says they will be cooperative and will try to comply with the government requirements," Energy and Mines Minister Sudirman Said told reporters.

"We can understand that moving $530 million will hit their balance sheet. We are seeking a solution." (Reporting by Wilda Asmarini; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
AP_631502930617

Republican president candidate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended his answer to a student who asked him at a New Hampshire event Monday about his response to flooding in his home state, calling it a "joke."

The student said she had friends and family members "all over the state" sending her pictures of flooded areas after Winter Storm Jonas led to some coastal flooding in New Jersey.

After questioning her characterization of flooding "all over the state," he quipped back: "Do you want me to go down there with a mop?"

In a Tuesday press conference, Christie hit back at critics of his comments.

"No, it's a joke, you don't like the joke. You don't like it, that's all," he said to a reporter. "It was a joke. If you don't like the joke, you can tell me you don't like the joke. It's a joke. And [New Jersey residents] can tell me the same thing. I don't think you represent the voters of New Jersey, the last time I checked."

He also accused the female student who asked the question of being a "plant" for another campaign, after she did not give him the phone numbers of her supposed friends and family in New Jersey. Christie asked her at the rally to give him the phone numbers so that he could personally call all of them later that night.

"I asked her for them. She wouldn't give them to me," he said. "I think she was a plant. Not only because I asked her, but a whole bunch of reporters asked her, too. And she wouldn't give them to anybody. ... Either she's a really shy person who asked the first question in a town hall meeting and overcame her shyness ... or something else was afoot. I suspect it was the latter."

Christie did apologize Tuesday to another person who said he was offended by Christie's Monday response to the student's question: North Wildwood, New Jersey, Mayor Patrick Rosenello (R). Christie called Rosenello "crazy" for saying that the flooding from Winter Storm Jonas was worse than it was from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

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"I heard one crazy mayor down in South Jersey say this is worse flooding than Sandy," Christie said at the Monday rally in Hooksett, New Hampshire. "Here's the one thing you need to know about that mayor. His town didn't get hit by Sandy. So of course it's worse than Sandy for him!"

Rosenello, who said Christie's lack of compassion to those who suffered through the storm was unlike anything he'd ever seen before, seemed to forgive the candidate for his comments.

"He apologized to me. He also asked me to apologize to the first responders and the residents and the the business owners," he told 98.7 The Coast. "I think he recognizes that he misspoke, and he did."

"I think he knows he misspoke," he continued. "We know that he misspoke."

Christie's comments led another Republican politician in New Jersey to have "pause" on his endorsement of the governor for president.

All along, Ive felt that Christie becoming president would mean good things for New Jersey, so he has had my endorsement," New Jersey Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R) told Politicker New Jersey. "That said, some of his comments over the past few days give me pause. ... Based on his comments, Im considering reconsidering."

Here's what the front pages of some New Jersey newspapers looked like this morning in the aftermath of Christie's "mop" comment:

NJ_DR

NJ_SL

NJ_APP





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Jan 27 (Reuters) - Massachusetts' attorney general is studying whether the prices of Gilead Sciences Inc's blockbuster treatments for hepatitis C violate state law, according to a letter the prosecutor sent to the California drugmaker.

The letter from Attorney General Maura Healey to Gilead Chief Executive Officer John Martin, dated Jan. 22, asked the biotechnology company to reconsider its pricing for Sovaldi and Harvoni, Gilead's treatments with list prices of $84,000 and $94,500, respectively, per course of treatment.

"My office is considering whether Gilead's pricing strategy with respect to Sovaldi and Harvoni may constitute an unfair trade practice in violation of Massachusetts law," Healey said in the letter, a copy of which was supplied by email to Reuters.

Gilead has been harshly criticized by insurers, politicians and patient groups for prices of the two treatments, which can cure well over 90 percent of patients with the liver disease. The Foster City, California-based company has defended its prices, saying the drugs greatly reduce long-term costs to the healthcare system by preventing liver cancer and the need for liver transplants.

Gilead did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Additional reporting by Bill Berkrot; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Fuel overflows as an Iranian man pumps gasoline into his car at a gas station in Tehran January 21, 2007. REUTERS/Caren Firouz (IRAN)

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil futures surged on Wednesday after Russia indicated there was a possibility of co-operation with OPEC, fanning hopes for a deal to reduce a global oversupply that sent prices to the lowest levels in over a dozen years last week.

A statement from Russia's energy ministry left the door open to talks with OPEC, moments after the head of Russia's pipeline monopoly said officials have decided they should talk to Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members about output cuts.

The top non-OPEC producer, Russia has in the past been unwilling to cut oil output, as it battles for market share with OPEC output leader Saudi Arabia.

"I remain skeptical, at the end of the day, about that happening as the oil producers are looking at the other guy to cut production while maintaining their own levels," Andrew Lipow of Lipow Oil Associates said.

"I think the geopolitical factors in the Middle East are playing a bigger part in the actual oil production than the statements from energy ministers who'd like to see higher prices."

Hints of a possible deal between OPEC members and rival producers had already helped oil rally 4 percent on Tuesday.

Brent crude rose $1.30, or 4.1 percent, to settle at $33.10 a barrel, after touching a session high of $33.49.

U.S. crude settled up 85 cents at $32.30 per barrel, a 2.7 percent gain, having topped out at $32.84.

Oil prices barely budged after the Federal Reserve right before the close left U.S. interest rates where they were and said it still expected downward inflationary pressure from lower energy prices to prove temporary.

U.S. prices have risen 6.4 percent and Brent is up 8.5 percent over the last two sessions. They were looking firm even before the Russia news, on the back of a morning U.S. Energy Department report showing a surprise spike in demand for refined products like heating oil last week, when a massive blizzard hit the U.S. Northeast.

Heating oil futures rose over 6 percent but gave up some gains after updated weather forecasts tempered the outlook for cold temperatures over the next two weeks.

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The U.S. Energy Information Administration said inventories of distillates, fell more than 4 million barrels, trumping expectations for a rise of about 2 million.

"The draw in distillate stocks is bullish, but we know there was cold weather in the United States in the last week, so I would say the reason behind the draw has something to do with the cold winter weather and, as such, the impact should be short-lived," Tamas Varga of PVM Oil Associates said.

The data also showed U.S. crude oil stocks hit their highest on record in the week to Jan. 22, due largely to increases on the U.S. Gulf Coast, a major oil hub.

That inventory surge helped fuel the rally instead of fanning worries about excess supply, amid relief it fell short of an 11.5 million-barrel build reported by the American Petroleum Institute late Tuesday. [API/S]

"I think we're in this mode where little things can set the market off into a reversal," Energy Management Institute analyst Dominick Chirichella said. "We're heading into a choppy trading period right now"

Still, after three U.S. energy companies said Tuesday they were slashing spending, the market is looking for additional U.S. production cuts to rebalance the oversupplied market.

(Additional reporting by Amanda Cooper in London, Catherine Ngai in New York and Meeyoung Cho in Seoul; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Alden Bentley)
(Adds details, context)

By Fatma Alarimi

MUSCAT, Jan 27 (Reuters) - An Omani sovereign wealth fund has signed an understanding with Iran's biggest auto maker, Iran Khodro Industrial Group, to study a proposal for a $200 million auto plant in Oman, a fund official said on Wednesday.

The memorandum of understanding is one of the first signed between a major Iranian company and a Gulf Arab state since international sanctions against Iran were lifted earlier this month. Traditionally, Oman has had closer ties to Iran than its Arab neighbours.

Saudi Arabia said this month it was cutting all ties with Iran, including business links, when its Tehran embassy was attacked by Iranian protesters after the kingdom executed a leading Shi'ite cleric.

Oman Investment Fund agreed with Khodro to study the creation of a venture, Orchid International Auto, that would set up a plant at the southern Omani port of Duqm, Khalid al-Yahmadi, investment director for resources, manufacturing and logistics at the Omani fund, told Reuters.

The venture would be owned 60 percent by the fund, 20 percent by Khodro and 20 percent by an Omani investor, Issa al-Ryiami. It would start as an assembly facility and move gradually towards manufacturing automobiles, Yahmadi said without elaborating on what kind of vehicles would be assembled.

"The total investment is expected to be $200 million for all the phases," he said, adding that a feasibility study would be completed in months and the partners hoped to break ground before the end of this year.

Oman, seeking to diversify its economy beyond oil, is keen to establish industrial ventures. France's PSA Peugeot Citroen supplied kit versions of its 206 and 405 models to Khodro for assembly before 2012, when the sanctions forced it to withdraw from Iran; Peugeot is now trying to renegotiate a new tie-up with Khodro.

Afshin Dastani, an executive who identified himself as a manager at Orchid International Auto, said construction of the plant at Duqm would take a year and it was expected to start production by 2017.

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The executives were speaking at an exhibition for Iranian companies that opened in Muscat on Wednesday. Almost 70 firms participated in the event, mainly manufacturers with a focus on automobiles, tyres and spare parts.

Oman's energy minister said last week that he expected speedier completion of a planned pipeline to import natural gas from Iran now that international sanctions against Tehran had been lifted.

(Writing by Andrew Torchia; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
Id been dreading my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau for months. It would be the hardest part of an already-difficult group trip through Poland and the Czech Republic that Id signed up for on a whim before my 24th birthday.

Auschwitz was the biggest of the Nazi concentration camps, where some 1.1 million people died before it was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945, 71 years ago Wednesday.

Id learned about the death camp in Hebrew school, seen pictures at the Holocaust memorial in Israel, and read Elie Wiesels memoir Night.

But I knew the visit would bring a painful reality to my abstract understanding of the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were exterminated by Nazis.

Like many of the 40 young, Jewish New Yorkers on my trip, which was organized by a nonprofit that ran programs for alumni of Birthright Israel, I did not have relatives who died in the Holocaust. (Mine had escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms of Russia, arriving at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century.)

Even so, my stomach turned at the idea of seeing the stacked bunks, the abruptly ending railroad tracks, and the Arbeit Macht Frei gate I had seen in so many photographs.

The first thing that struck me when we arrived on that crystal-clear day in March 2009 was the sheer size of the complex. It stretches farther than the eye can see, covering more than 15 square miles. And it was clearly designed for evil efficiency, with its railroad hub, gas chambers, and ovens laid out in a row, a twisted assembly line.

At Birkenau, the death camp, we followed the path taken by so many prisoners, who arrived by the thousands in cattle cars from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. It led nearly a mile down a dirt path surrounded by barbed wire; on either side, hundreds of decrepit brick chimneys rose from the ground, the only remains of the wooden barracks that were torched by fleeing Nazis as the Soviet troops approached.

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We paused in a green clearing, a cool respite from the dusty stretch. Then we were told: This was the last stop for prisoners before they were ordered to undress and handed a piece of soap for a supposed shower. Then they were marched into the gas chamber and hit with Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide.

When our guide explained that Nazis would bring prisoners to this birch grove 200 at a time, I was struck with a horrifying thought. That was the number of guests at my Bat Mitzvah, 10 years before. That was all my friends and family huddled among those trees, naked, waiting to die. When I pictured it like that, I got it. It would have been all of them, and it would have been me.

The afternoon was spent at Auschwitz I, the main camp (now a museum) built in a former Polish army barracks. We walked beneath the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gate and past the block where the notorious Nazi physician Josef Mengele performed experiments on prisoners.

Some of the barracks had been converted into exhibitions, filled with the possessions of the prisoners. One entire room contained piles of leather shoes; another, eyeglasses. The leather had faded over time but a few red shoes stood out. I saw one shoe with a small heel, not very different from a pair I had recently purchased. There were thousands of suitcases, display cases filled with human hair, even stacks of artificial limbs.

Before departing, we stopped in a memorial near the bombed-out ruins of the crematoria back at Birkenau. The walls were covered in photos, mementos left by those who perished at the camp. A friend paused by a portrait of a young woman and I heard her say, Doesnt she look a lot like Julie? People wandered over and started to nod.

Staring solemnly into the camera, with her hair pinned to her head, she did look like me, perhaps a few years younger. I didnt know her name or her age in the photo or where she was born. But the feeling was overwhelming: That would have been me.

When I think now about the Holocaust, I picture these two things: my Bat Mitzvah guests in the woods, and the solemn girl with the familiar face. Its impossible to comprehend the death of 6 million Jews. But those two visions make it a little more real.

NOW WATCH: This 90-year-old Holocaust survivor performed a moving dance about her time in a concentration camp





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Zika virus microcephaly

President Barack Obama called for the rapid development of diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments for the Zika virus, which poses a growing threat to most of the Americas.

Obama was briefed on the topic as the virus spread to more countries and territories, including the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. People with the virus have also been identified in multiple US states after traveling to infected areas.

"The president emphasized the need to accelerate research efforts to make available better diagnostic tests, to develop vaccines and therapeutics, and to ensure that all Americans have information about the Zika virus," the White House said.

The Zika virus is primarily transmitted by Aedes aegypti, the type of mosquito responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever, and numerous other infectious tropical diseases. The mosquitoes pick up the virus from infected people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, partially because it didn't become a widespread problem until about 10 years ago. The virus is difficult to diagnose because people who are infected have fairly minor symptoms like fever, rash, painful joints, and pink eye, though some short-term neurological conditions have been connected with the disease as well. It's the troublesome connection between infected pregnant women and an increased incidence of birth defects that makes containing the Zika virus a top priority.

Brazil, one of the areas hit hardest by the disease, had about 20 times as many babies born with a condition called microcephaly in 2015 as it did in 2014. This birth defect, in which the brain is abnormally small, was often found in children of mothers who had symptoms associated with the Zika virus early in the pregnancy.

Researchers still aren't sure whether the virus causes birth defects, but there does appear to be a link. Early last week, the CDC issued interim guidelines for pregnant women traveling to countries where the disease is being transmitted, while several countries including El Salvador have gone as far as to advise citizens not to get pregnant.

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While few treatments or vaccines are in development, companies are jumping on board to find possible ways to fight back against a possible epidemic. Others are trying to target the mosquito itself to keep the disease from spreading, but it might be a while before those efforts are widely spread.

NOW WATCH: An untreatable virus that's linked to birth defects is now affecting the US





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DOHA (Reuters) - Qatar's emir issued a decree on Wednesday replacing the foreign minister and merging some portfolios, the state news agency said, in what was seen as a move to consolidate his power and cut costs after a sharp drop in oil prices. The world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, Qatar is one of the Gulf's richest countries, although the value of its energy exports almost halved last year. The new foreign minister was named as Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, a member of the royal family. Khalid al-Attiyah, the outgoing foreign minister whose father was the founder of the Qatari armed forces, will become state minister for defence affairs. The emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who took over in 2013 after his father stepped down, holds the post of defence minister. Late on Wednesday Sheikh Tamim said that Qatar needed to diversify its income and he urged an end to corruption. He said citizens should not "fear or panic" about the tumbling price of hydrocarbons. "As citizens your responsibilities are greater due to the low oil prices; however, citizens' welfare and way of life should not be affected by the situation," he said in a speech carried by Qatari state news agency QNA. Sheikh Tamim, like his Gulf neighbours, is seeking to diversify the economy to reduce Qatar's dependence on oil and gas, which the International Monetary Fund says constitute 90 per cent of government revenues. He has used the slump in oil prices to emphasise that the government can no longer provide for everything for its population, and to encourage private sector employment. Qatari is set to spend around $200 billion (131 billion pounds) on infrastructure projects over the next decade, many related to its hosting of the 2022 soccer World Cup. Construction industry sources say some projects have been delayed or suspended in the past year, partly to avoid waste and ensure quality. A Western diplomat in Doha said cost-cutting was one reason for the ministerial changes, following the sharp decline in oil prices. The decree merged several ministries, including communication and transport and culture, youth and sports, heralding the possibility of many job cuts. "But this is also about Sheikh Tamim's slow consolidation of power after 2-1/2 years in the job," the diplomat said. "He's still pushing out the old timers loyal to the former emir who were not necessarily that effective but couldn't be sacked all in one go." The outgoing minister of state for defence affairs, Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, was appointed as an adviser to the emir with rank equivalent to a prime minister, QNA said. The public health minister was also replaced. (Reporting by Omar Fahmy in Cairo; Writing by Tom Finn; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Global miner Rio Tinto Plc has agreed to sell one of its last remaining coal mines in Australia to a group owned by Indonesia's third-richest man, Anthoni Salim, continuing an exit from coal as it battles a sharp slump in prices. Rio Tinto said on Monday it was selling its Mount Pleasant thermal coal assets in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales to a private company, MACH Energy Australia Pty Ltd, for $224 million plus royalties. MACH is an entity owned by Indonesian conglomerate Salim Group. The royalties from the mine would only be paid when coal prices top $72.50 a tonne, well above the current price of $47.37 . "We believe Mount Pleasant can have a very positive future under its new owners with different priorities for development and capital allocation," Rio Tinto copper and coal chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques said in a statement. The sale of the Mount Pleasant mine, which has marketable reserves of 474 million tonnes, follows Rio Tinto's sale of its stake in the Bengalla joint venture last year for $606 million and leaves it with the Hunter Valley Operations and Mount Thorley Warkworth mines. (Reporting by Sonali Paul)
putin kerry

Two Western intelligence sources told the Financial Times last week that Russia sent an envoy to Syria late last year to ask Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, raising questions about whether Moscow's support for the embattled leader has dwindled over the past four months.

But experts are skeptical that Russian President Vladimir Putin  a staunch supporter of Assad and his regime  would seek the leader's ouster now, when pro-government forces are finally starting to win consecutive battlefield victories in Latakia and Aleppo provinces.

"I don't think that the message Moscow is telling Assad is 'go' so much as, 'You may have to go,'" Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security affairs and a professor of global affairs at New York University, told Business Insider.

He added:

At this stage, the Kremlin has nothing to gain from Assad stepping down and potentially much to lose as there would be a difficult transition. This is one of their highest value cards: They will only play it when they know they will gain something concrete in return.

Moscow was quick to deny reports that it ever asked Assad to step down. But the extent of Russia's support for the London-educated autocrat has been disputed. Some analysts insist that Putin is not as interested in preserving Assad as he is in preserving the state institutions the Assad clan has erected over the course of its nearly 45-year reign.

russiaairstrikesmap

Those institutions and the people who control them have allowed Russia to retain its port of Tartous, the only warm-water port Russia retained after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a key foothold for Moscow to continue projecting power into the Mediterranean.

Some claim, however, that those institutions would cease to exist without Assad.

"The biggest myth out there is the existence of 'state institutions' separate from Assad," Tony Badran, a Middle East expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider in October.

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To that end, many experts insist that Russia's stake in Syria is much bigger than Tartous.

"It is the perception of thwarting violent regime change  not a naval gas pump in Tartous  that is most important to Vladimir Putin," Frederic C. Hof, a former special adviser for transition in Syria under US President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in The Huffington Post on Monday.

Maintaining that perception is important, some experts say, because it helps Russia present itself to the international community as an agent of stability and bulwark against terrorism. Moscow has long considered any and all opponents to Assad's regime, including those supported by the US, to be "terrorists."

That Russia sees the only alternative to an Assad regime as a power vacuum dominated by rebels hostile to Moscow's interests means, implicitly, that Assad must keep his seat in Damascus  at least, as Putin has insisted, until Syrians vote him out of power in a national election.

putin assad

"There is not the slightest evidence that Putin wants Assad to leave," Mark Kramer, the program director of the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, told Business Insider on Friday. "The whole purpose of Russia's intervention in Syria was to stabilize Assad's regime and strengthen its hold on power."

He added: "The notion that Putin designated the head of military intelligence to deliver such a momentous proposal to the head of a regime Putin wants to stabilize stretches credulity. I don't attach any credence to it."

Other experts have noted, too, that if Putin really wanted Assad out of power, attempts at a transition would have been made long ago.

"If Putin wanted to push forward a transition, he could use the large amount of leverage Russia has now as Assad's de facto air force," Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert at the Washington, DC-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider.

"These stories keep popping up, but talks continue to stagnate and Assad seems to be entrenched," he added.

FSA fighter

Indeed, one of the opposition's central demands  that peace negotiations address, first and foremost, Assad's transition out of power  has reportedly been sidelined in favor of a joint Russian-Iranian plan. That proposal would establish a "national unity government," the composition of which would be decided by Syrian voters in an election monitored by the UN.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has reportedly been pressuring the main opposition council, the Saudi-backed High Negotiating Committee, to accept this plan before attending Friday's peace talks in Geneva.

In that sense, the US has aligned itself with Russia, to some extent  at the risk of alienating the rebels  in an effort to get everyone to the negotiating table. That risk could feasibly be alleviated, however, by hinting about Russia's supposed flexibility on Assad's future.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Zilberman, of the FDD, said. "Until then, it's messaging."

NOW WATCH: Shockingly common misconceptions about Islam





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By Denis Pinchuk and Margarita Papchenkova

MOSCOW, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Russia's government is not discussing cooperation with OPEC, two senior Russian officials told Reuters, after a co-owner of the country's No. 2 oil producer Lukoil said Moscow and the exporter group should join forces to battle low oil prices.

The comments from Lukoil co-owner Leonid Fedun contradicted a long-standing stance by Russian officials that if Russia bowed to any OPEC request to cut production jointly, the country would lose market share.

The two senior officials, who are familiar with the matter, said Fedun's comments were his personal opinion, not agreed to or supported by Energy Minister Alexander Novak or others in the industry.

"There are not any measures on possibly cutting production being discussed now. Neither Fedun, nor Lukoil offered anyone anything," one of the sources said.

Another official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, also said Fedun was voicing his own opinion. "It is impossible to coordinate the process and stop production in Russia," the second source said.

RISING PRODUCTION

Oil prices have fallen close to $31 per barrel from around $115 in the middle of 2014, causing problems for Russia's cash-strapped budget and pushing the Russian economy into recession.

Some members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries want coordinated output cuts to push up the price.

Yet oil production in Russia reached a new post-Soviet high in December of 10.80 million barrels per day, as a weak rouble helped Russian oil firms to offset falls in the price of crude.

A manager at a top-four Russian energy firm said coordinated cuts would not be welcomed by an industry that was fighting the possibility of declining production because of a rising tax burden and ageing fields.

"Russia has too much risk of seeing a natural decline anyway, without any agreed special steps," the manager said, playing down the possibility of agreed action.

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Another oil company source said: "We've heard nothing of any specific actions."

The Russian Energy Ministry declined to comment, as did Rosneft, Russia's top oil producer. Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegaz did not reply to Reuters requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, in charge of the energy sector, declined to comment.

Russia holds regular discussions with various countries, including oil-producing ones, on the situation on oil markets but there are no plans as of now for coordinated actions, the Kremlin's spokesman said on Wednesday.

(Additional reporting and writing by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Christian Lowe and Dale Hudson)
The OPEC logo is seen at OPEC's headquarters during a meeting of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna, Austria, June 5, 2015. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader

By Jack Stubbs and Katya Golubkova

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian officials have decided they should talk to Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries about output cuts to bolster oil prices, the head of Russia's pipeline monopoly said on Wednesday, remarks that helped spur a sharp rise in world prices.

Oil futures surged more than 5 percent after the comments by Nikolai Tokarev, head of oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, which gave the strongest hint yet of possible cooperation between the top non-OPEC oil producer and the cartel to try to reverse a record glut.

Brent crude rose by over $2 to $32.95 a barrel, after a session low of $30.83. It was also boosted by U.S. demand following a blizzard.

But there was still a long journey from starting discussions to actual cuts by Russian oil producers, with many of them saying reducing output was technically very difficult and could lead to Russia losing market share to its competitors.

Tokarev said oil executives and government officials meeting in Moscow on Tuesday had reached the conclusion that talks with OPEC were needed to shore up the oil price.

"At the meeting there was discussion in particular about the oil price and what steps we should take collectively to change the situation for the better, including negotiations within the framework of OPEC as a whole, and bilaterally," Russian news agencies quoted Tokarev as saying.

"The main initiative is being shown by, of course, our Saudi partners. They are the main negotiators. That means that they are the ones we need to discuss this with first of all."

He said output cuts would be on the agenda for talks with OPEC countries: "Yes, that is one of the levers or mechanisms that would allow us to in some way balance the oil price."

An energy ministry representative confirmed to Reuters that possible coordination with OPEC had been discussed at the meeting, which the ministry hosted.

"The meeting participants discussed the possibility of coordination of actions with OPEC members amid unfavorable market conditions on the global oil market," the Energy Ministry official said.

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LOW PRICES PRESSURE

Oil prices have fallen from around $115 in the middle of 2014, causing problems for Russia's cash-strapped budget and pushing the Russian economy into recession. Some members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries want coordinated output cuts to push up the price, and they have been pressing Russia to play its part.

If discussions with OPEC begin in earnest, that would be a major reversal in Russia's stance. Russian production reached a new post-Soviet high in December of 10.80 million barrels per day. That puts it on par with Saudi Arabia, OPEC's biggest producer, which also pumps more than 10 million bpd.

OPEC, which collectively accounts for a third of global output, failed to agree any cuts at a meeting last month, with the Saudis apparently determined to maintain their market share and drive out high-cost producers in the United States.

Iran, previously kept from international markets by sanctions lifted this month, is also planning to increase its production rapidly into a world that produces 1.5 million barrels per day more than it consumes and has been running out of capacity to store it cheaply.

So far, within OPEC, only Algeria and Venezuela have clearly expressed support for a production cut.

However, Iraq, OPEC's second biggest producer after Saudi Arabia, also showed signs on Wednesday of softening its stance. Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview that Baghdad was ready to take part in an extraordinary OPEC meeting and even reduce its oil output if all OPEC members and non-OPEC producers agree.

"Its interesting to see how the positions from both Russia and Iraq seem to be softening slightly  but I don't think it means a thing because the Saudis continue to say that they will only take action with collaboration from Russia, Iraq and Iran," said Societe Generale oil analyst Michael Wittner in New York.

INDUSTRY RELUCTANT

Considerable obstacles remain to cutting Russian production. Speaking to Reuters before the meeting at the energy ministry took place, two senior officials said no groundwork had been laid for cooperating with OPEC on output.

"There are not any measures on possibly cutting production being discussed now," said one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Another official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, echoed that. "It is impossible to coordinate the process and stop production in Russia," the second source said.

A manager at a top-four Russian energy firm said coordinated cuts would not be welcomed by an industry that was fighting the possibility of declining production because of a rising tax burden and aging fields.

"Russia has too much risk of seeing a natural decline anyway, without any agreed special steps," the manager said, playing down the possibility of agreed action. Another oil company source said: "We've heard nothing of any specific actions."

Helima Croft, Global Head of Commodity Strategy at RBC Capital Markets sounded a sceptical note.

"Ultimately, if we want to see cuts, we have to see this driven by (President Vladimir) Putin. Or even (Rosneft boss) Igor Sechin, who is close to the inner circle. But, hes been publicly emphatic that there will be no cuts."

"Last year, the Saudis kept saying publicly and privately that they had asked the Russians to cut production in the run up to the November meeting. They decided they had no way to balance this on their own because Russia would just take their market share," Croft said.

Mikhail Leontyev, spokesman for Rosneft, Russia's biggest producer, said "he saw no grounds" to comment on the Energy Ministry's statement. Gazprom Neft, Russia's fastest growing oil company by volume, declined to comment.

A spokesman for Lukoil, Russia's No.2 oil producer whose vice-president said earlier this week that Moscow should start talking to OPEC, declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, in charge of the energy sector, also declined to comment.

Russia holds regular discussions with various countries, including oil-producing ones, on the situation on oil markets but there are no plans as of now for coordinated actions, the Kremlin's spokesman said on Wednesday.

(Additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin, Margarita Papchenkova and Denis Pinchuk in Moscow, Jessica Resnick-Aultand in New York; Writing by Jack Stubbs, Christian Lowe and Katya Golubkova; Editing by Peter Graff)
Can't we just sell more oil?

Saudi Arabia, once the worlds largest energy producer before the US took over with huge amounts of shale gas, is facing its biggest economic challenge in a decade. Oil prices continue to crash with no clear end in sight; last week, the price of oil fell below the price of an actual barrel. The IMF says Saudi Arabia is in danger of draining its financial reserves within five years.

So the energy-dependent nationoil made up 73% of revenues last yearwill try to tackle its almost $100-billion deficit with ambitious new plans to strengthen other industries, which range from information technology to tourism, and diversify away from oil.

But can Saudi Arabia wean itself off its most precious resource?

Some are skeptical, and for good reason. Other countries have struggled to do just that. Take Brunei, whose people benefit from no income tax, free education, and access to social housing because of its oil and gas sector, which accounts for 60% of its economic output (paywall).

But its also down to oil that the small wealthy nation is now facing an uncertain future, despite a great deal of effort to diversify its economy going back as far as the 1950s. According to the BP World Energy Outlook, the country has enough oil left for just 22 years at its current pace of extraction. (Saudi Arabia has 63 years.)

Brunei has a new development planVision Brunei 2035 to build other parts of its economy. The government has targeted a number of key sectors, including halal manufacturing, information technology, and tourism. But despite the governments best efforts, these prioritized sectors have failed to kick off.

According to the Financial Times, Bruneis fiscal deficit was expected to reach 10% of GDP in 2015compared with a 28% surplus in 2011. More than half the population are still employed by the public sector.

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I dont think any economist would be very bullish about the future of Bruneis non-oil and gas sectors, to put it mildly, Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, told The Globe and Mail. Faced with a slump, Brunei has decided to double down and deal with the oil crisisby producing more oil.

Heres hoping the Saudis have an easier time. In Saudi Arabia, only 16% of the workforce is in the private sector and its coming off a huge boombetween 2003 and 2013, Saudi Arabias GDP doubled and household income rose by 75%, according to the consultants McKinsey.

Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news.

More stories from Quartz:
donald trump

Real-estate mogul Donald Trump just embraced his threat to boycott the Fox News primary debate on Thursday.

At a Tuesday-evening press conference, the Republican presidential front-runner stressed that he "probably" would be skipping the Fox-hosted event.

"I'm going to be making a decision with Fox, but I probably won't bother doing the debate," Trump said in Marshalltown, Iowa.

His campaign later released a statement firmly declaring that Trump "will not be participating in the Fox News debate." He will instead host an event on behalf of veterans that night, his press release said.

Trump's chief complaint was that Fox News host Megyn Kelly will be one of the three moderators. He has complained about her supposedly biased coverage for months.

"I'm not a fan of Megyn Kelly. I think she's a third-rate reporter. I think she, frankly, is not good at what she does. And I think they could do a lot better than Megyn Kelly," Trump said at the press conference, later criticizing her as a "total lightweight."

Earlier in the day, Trump conducted a Twitter poll asking his followers if he should do the debate. He attached an Instagram video in which he said Kelly couldn't be a fair moderator.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes issued a statement defending Kelly, who he said would definitely be moderating his network's Thursday-night debate. And a Fox representative also fired off a sarcastic response that wondered how a potential President Trump would expect world leaders to treat him fairly:

We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president  a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.

donald trump megyn kelly

Trump criticized Fox's "wise guy" statement at his press conference.

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He said:

I didn't like the fact that they sent out press releases toying, talking about Putin, and playing games. I don't know what games Roger Ailes is playing, but what's wrong over there? Something's wrong. But when they sent out that press release ... I said, "Who are these people playing games?" So most likely I won't be doing the debate.

"Let's see how they do with the ratings," Trump said of the debate without his presence. "Let's see how many people watch," he added.

Fox News issued a lengthy statement saying that the network "can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees," and that "Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate," where he would be treated fairly:

As many of our viewers know, Fox News is hosting a sanctioned debate in Des Moines, Iowa on Thursday night, three days before the first votes of the 2016 election are cast in the Iowa Caucus. Donald Trump is refusing to debate seven of his fellow presidential candidates on stage that night, which is near unprecedented. We're not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing  Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage.

Capitulating to politicians' ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly. In a call on Saturday with a Fox News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a 'rough couple of days after that last debate' and he 'would hate to have her go through that again.' Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees.

Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly, just as he has been during his 132 appearances on Fox News & Fox Business, but he can't dictate the moderators or the questions.

Trump has been launching raging attacks against Kelly since August, when she was one of three moderators at the first Fox-hosted event. Kelly infuriated Trump at the time by asking a critical question about disparaging comments he's made about women's looks.

Fox News told the Los Angeles Times in August that the three moderators of that debate  Kelly and Fox anchors Bret Baier and Chris Wallace  would be returning to moderate the network's January debate. Kelly has declined to directly respond to Trump.

In his statement released Tuesday night, Trump said that instead of being at the debate, he would "host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all-talk, no-action politicians."

View the full Trump statement below:

(New York, NY) January 26th, 2016 - As someone who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time, The Art of the Deal, who has built an incredible company, including some of the most valuable and iconic assets in the world, and as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts.

Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn't play games. There have already been six debates, and according to all online debate polls including Drudge, Slate, Time Magazine, and many others, Mr. Trump has won all of them, in particular the last one. Whereas he has always been a job creator and not a debater, he nevertheless truly enjoys the debating process - and it has been very good for him, both in polls and popularity.

He will not be participating in the FOX News debate and will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. Like running for office as an extremely successful person, this takes guts and it is the kind mentality our country needs in order to Make America Great Again.

NOW WATCH: Watch 200 years of US border changes in 2 minutes





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Jon Ritzheimer

A self-avowed anti-Islam activist who allegedly participated in the militiamen occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon has been arrested.

Authorities released a statement Tuesday night announcing that the FBI's Phoenix Division took Jon Ritzheimer into custody Tuesday night "on a federal charge related to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge."

According to the statement, Ritzheimer surrendered to police in Peoria, Arizona, after the militia's leader, Ammon Bundy, and several others were arrested in eastern Oregon.

Police say Ritzheimer was taken into custody without incident.

He's being held on a felony charge in connection with the takeover of the federal facility in Oregon.

Ritzheimer posted a Facebook message Tuesday night asking for donations and legal help before surrendering:

Ritzheimer FB post 2

In the post, he says he returned to Arizona to visit his family, and acknowledged that "The Feds know I am here and are asking me to turn myself in."

Federal authorities had been watching Ritzheimer closely in recent weeks, after he aligned himself with the militiamen who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early January.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Heidi Beirich with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project called Ritzheimer "unhinged," and said "he's potentially very dangerous ... He's rabid about everything."

Jon Ritzheimer oregon protest

Ritzheimer first became nationally known in May last year when he organized an anti-Islam rally that was held in front of a mosque in Phoenix. At the time, Ritzheimer called it a "freedom of speech" rally to "push out the truth about Islam," and encouraged participants to "utilize their Second Amendment rights" while at the gathering.

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When local government and civil rights groups overwhelmingly denounced the rally, Ritzheimer declared "I can't let my kids grow up in a society where tyranny is reigning over," and asked for donations so his family could "go into hiding."

NOW WATCH: This is why gunmen in Oregon took over a federal building, and why it has people so angry





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TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - January 13, 2016) -

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Sherritt International Corporation ("Sherritt" or the "Corporation") (TSX:S.TO) announces an expected impairment of Ambatovy Joint Venture assets due to lower forecast nickel prices. Using a long term nickel price of US$8.50/lb, on a 100% basis, an impairment loss of approximately US$2.4 billion after-tax is expected to be recognized at the Ambatovy Joint Venture level. Sherritt expects to record an impairment expense of approximately C$1.6 billion (40% basis, after-tax) within Sherritt's share of loss of an associate in the Consolidated Statement of Comprehensive Income (loss) for the year ended December 31, 2015. The total impairment consists of approximately C$1.3 billion being Sherritt's 40% share of Ambatovy's impairment and C$0.3 billion from the incremental carrying value of Sherritt's investment in an associate, primarily related to mineral rights acquired from Dynatec in 2007. The impairment loss is a non-cash item with no adverse impact on cash flow.

Forward-Looking Statement

This press release contains Expectations about asset impairments related to the Ambatovy Joint Venture and the expected reporting of impairments on the Corporation's financial statements constitutes "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. There can be no assurance that such forward-looking information will prove to be accurate. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management of Sherritt as of the date such information is provided and is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Key factors that may result in material differences between actual results and developments and those contemplated by this press release include business, economic and political conditions in Madagascar. Other such factors include those risk factors listed from time to time in the Corporation's continuous disclosure documents. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is made as of the date hereof and the Corporation undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. The forward-looking information contained herein is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement.

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About Sherritt

Sherritt is a world leader in the mining and refining of nickel from lateritic ores with projects and operations in Canada, Cuba, and Madagascar. The Corporation is the largest independent energy producer in Cuba, with extensive oil and power operations across the island. Sherritt licenses its proprietary technologies and provides metallurgical services to mining and refining operations worldwide. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol "S".

Source: Sherritt Investor Relations
MS 13 member tattoo

One of Latin America's largest and most powerful street gangs has come to be known by a simple moniker: Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

And the garish tattoos that adorn the faces and torsos of its members often do more to announce the gang's presence than the formal name.

But the somewhat sinister name and the gang's extensive operations are a far cry from its humble origins.

Migrants from Central America, El Salvador in particular, fled civil wars in the region in the 1970s and '80s, with a large number of them ending up in LA and Southern California.

Many of those young men, who arrived in the US without family networks or any other connections, gravitated toward gangs.

MS 13 gang member signs

Some of them, according to Ioan Grillo's "Gangster Warlords," joined up with Barrio 18, an established gang that was started by Mexican immigrants but had begun letting in members of other nationalities.

Other migrants, at the time just teenagers on the streets of LA, started a new gang. Grillo, citing the work of anthropologist Juan Martinez and the dogged reporting of Spanish-language news site El Faro, described how they arrived at their new organization's name:

Bizarrely it comes from a Charlton Heston movie. Back in the 1950s, the film The Naked Jungle was a hit in El Salvador with the weird translation of "Cuando Ruge la Marabunta" or "When the Ants Roar." Following this, Salvadorans took the name Mara to mean to mean group of friends, who like ants protect each other.

As Grillo describes, the first wave of Maras in LA saw themselves as rockers, dressing the part, listening to heavy metal, and calling themselves the "Mara Stoners."

Their newness and odd attire marked them as targets for other LA gangs, who attacked them throughout the early 1980s.

But by 1984, according to Grillo, the Maras had changed.

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"To sound tougher and reinforce their Salvadoran identity, the Stoners re-baptized themselves as the Mara Salvatrucha," Grillo writes. "People have speculated that Salvatrucha might be a play on words of Salvadoran and trucha, meaning 'street smart.' Others say it just sounded good."

As the civil war in El Salvador deepened in the 1980s, more Salvadorans arrived in LA and found their way to Mara Salvatrucha.

This influx of new recruits, ones hardened by the horrors of the civil war back home, helped make the Maras better able to strike back at their rivals.

ms13

As time went on, the violence MS-13 members instigated and participated in got them thrown in jail, where, according to Grillo, the dynamics of gang life were different.

Rather than acting as upstarts carving out their own territory, Maras had to look for a bigger organization for protection:

Mara inmates realized they had to join La Eme [The Mexican Mafia] to survive, and the mob was happy to add war-hardened machete wielders to its cell-block armies. The Mexican Mafia uses the number thirteen (M as the thirteenth letter of the alphabet), so as Maras joined up, they became the Mara Salvatrucha 13.

MS-13 has only grown in the years since. As of 2012, the UN estimated that it had 19,000 members in Honduras and El Salvador, and members have been arrested as far away as Washington, DC, where the surrounding counties are believed to be home to as many as 3,000 members.

While the gang mainly focuses on local-level crime  extortion, drug dealing, and theft  it also has links to Mexican transnational drug cartels. It reportedly does street-level drug distribution for the Sinaloa cartel, helping that Mexican organization secure the vast majority of the US drug market.

NOW WATCH: Inside the cartel days of El Chapo  the drug lord who escaped from a Mexican prison six months ago





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Despite the occasional rebound, its still a tough start to the year for stocks. And there might be a few reasons why the slide will resume.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) rallied on Tuesday, but it remains down for the year, with weaker oil and worries about China among the reasons being blamed for the downturn.

But those two factors hint to increasing pessimism about global growth. A week ago, the IMF reduced its global growth forecast for 2016 to 3.4% from 3.6%.

Some believe those estimates are too optimistic.

Global growth is going to continue to decelerate on the back of the emerging market slowdown, said Chad Morganlander, portfolio manager at Stifel Nicolaus Washington Crossing Advisors. I would not be surprised to see 2.5% global growth.

He doesnt see this as just a cyclical downturn. Instead, Morganlander sees this as a structural shift in the worlds economy as emerging markets decelerate the debt that helped fuel their earlier growth.

That could put a damper on commodity demand. And global profits could also suffer.

Earnings growth is not going to be as robust as everyone's expecting, warns Morganlander. We're going to be in a low return environment not only here in the United States but also in the developed markets and, in particular, in the emerging markets.

To protect against a slowdown, Morganlander recommends investors shift to a defensive position and away from too much exposure to market risk.

We've been very bearish on the market or, I should say, more pragmatic about the market, advising our clients as well as structuring our portfolios to move up the quality spectrum, move away from the high-beta, highly volatile stocks to more low volatility companies, he said. Look at consumer staple companies, utilities. Have some bonds in your portfolio and be underweight equities at this juncture. We still believe that there's going to continuation of volatility over the next several months.

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Why traders are really bearish on oil

These charts show why investors should be worried

Millennials' financial illiteracy could be "disastrous" for the economy: Study
(Adds number of cruise cancellations starting in paragraph 13)

By Melissa Fares and Amy Tennery

Jan 26 (Reuters) - Airlines, hotels and cruise operators serving Latin America and the Caribbean are facing growing concern among travelers spooked by the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

The outbreak of the virus, linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, comes as a record percentage of Americans plan a vacation in coming months and a near-record proportion of them look to take advantage of a strong U.S. dollar by going abroad.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned travelers via Twitter to consider postponing travel to areas with ongoing Zika transmission.

Canada and Chile are the only countries in the Americas the virus is not expected to reach, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

United Airlines said it was allowing customers who had reserved tickets for travel to Zika-impacted regions to postpone their trips or obtain refunds with no penalty.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd and rival Carnival Corp said they would allow expectant mothers covered by the CDC advisories to reschedule cruises to a later date or switch to an itinerary outside the affected countries.

But some Twitter users lamented their inability to get a refund from tourism operators.

Stu Privett, a human resources systems specialist for the Royal College of Nursing in London, tweeted about cancelling a trip to Barbados with his wife, who is in her first trimester. Privett said he was unable to get a refund from Virgin Holidays.

"They basically said it was our choice not to go on the holiday," Privett said. "Basically (it's) a case of 'we just lose all the money we've spent.'"

A representative for Virgin Holidays, which is owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Group, said the company would look into the claim.

Still, many airlines and tourist authorities said they have seen minimal impact.

"There is no reason tourists can't walk around in bikinis," Cancun tourist association president Carlos Gosselin said.

Story continues

A Carnival spokesman said there had been less than 10 requests to reschedule trips or change itineraries. A Norwegian spokeswoman said it had a single cancellation and no itinerary change requests.

Hotel chain Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc said in a statement it was working closely with local health authorities throughout the region to follow CDC prevention recommendations.

Still, some tourists with short-term travel plans to Latin America were having second thoughts.

"It's the people who are going to travel in the next few weeks who are starting to ask more questions and rethink their plans," said Jennifer Michels, a spokeswoman for the American Society of Travel Agents, in Alexandria, Virginia.

Data released Tuesday from the U.S. Conference Board as part of its monthly Consumer Confidence Index showed a record 54.4 percent of Americans plan a vacation in the next six months.

Some 11.2 percent said they plan to travel overseas, one of the highest readings in the survey's history dating back to 1978.

(Reporting by Melissa Fares and Amy Tennery in New York; additional reporting by Eleanor Whalley, Paulo Prada in Rio de Janeiro, Isela Serrano in Cancun, Jeffrey Dastin and Malathi Nayak in New York and Abhijith G in Bangalore; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Lisa Shumaker)
(Adds additional Fox News statement)

By Steve Holland and Ginger Gibson

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa/IOWA CITY, Iowa, Jan 26 (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump withdrew on Tuesday from a debate with party rivals this week out of anger at host Fox News, leaving the last encounter before Iowa's pivotal nominating contest without the front-runner.

Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told reporters after a combative news conference held by the candidate that Trump would definitely not be participating in the debate scheduled for Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, and co-hosted by Google.

During the news conference before he addressed a large crowd in Marshalltown, Iowa, Trump expressed irritation that Fox News planned to leave in place as a moderator the anchor Megyn Kelly, whose questioning of Trump at a debate last August angered him.

He also expressed displeasure at a Fox News statement on Monday night saying Trump would have to learn sooner or later that "he doesn't get to pick the journalists" and that "we're very surprised he's willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly."

"I was all set to do the debate, I came here to do the debate. When they sent out the wise-guy press release done by some PR person along with (Fox News Chairman) Roger Ailes, I said: 'Bye bye, OK'"

"Let's see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate," the billionaire businessman added.

Trump has been engaged in a public spat with Fox News since the network hosted the first debate and Kelly asked Trump about his treatment of woman, prompting a stream of insults from the candidate.

The debate is scheduled for just days before Iowa's caucuses on Monday, the first nominating contest for the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Trump's campaign announced that instead of participating in the debate, he would hold a fundraiser for "Veterans and Wounded Warriors."

Fox News responded by releasing a statement charging Trump's campaign manager with threatening Kelly, saying during a call Lewandowski had referred to her "rough couple of days" after the previous debate she moderated and added that he would "hate to have her go through that again."

Story continues

"We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees," Fox said in a statement.

The network added that Trump remains welcome to participate in the Thursday night debate.

Trump's Republican rivals quickly criticized him for opting out of the debate.

"The fact that Donald is now afraid to appear on the debate stage, that he doesn't want his record questioned, I think that reflects a lack of respect for the men and women on Iowa," Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is in a tight race with Trump for first place in the state, said on Mark Levin's radio program.

"If Donald is afraid of Megyn Kelly, I would like to invite him on your show to participate in a one-on-one debate between me and Donald, mano-a-mano," Cruz said, adding: "If he thinks Megyn Kelly is so scary, what exactly does he think he'd do with Vladimir Putin?"

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush criticized Trump on Twitter, saying: "exactly" in response to a conservative commentator who cast doubt on whether Trump could run against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton if he were afraid of Kelly.

DEMOCRATS DEBATE ADDITIONAL DEBATE

In the Democratic contest, news channel MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper sketched out plans to host a debate in New Hampshire among Clinton and challengers Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, a few days before the state's primary election on Feb. 9.

But the Democratic National Committee raised doubts about whether it would proceed, saying in a statement it had no plans to sanction the debate.

It left open the question of whether it would punish any participants by excluding them from the two remaining sanctioned debates.

Spokesmen for Clinton, the former secretary of state who leads most polls, and O'Malley, a former Maryland governor, said their candidates would be happy to take part, at least in theory.

The New York Times quoted the campaign manager for Sanders as saying the Vermont senator would sit out the unsanctioned debate.

RATINGS BONANZA

Trump's blunt-spoken candidacy has boosted ratings for the Republican presidential debates. The August debate on Fox News drew 24 million viewers, a record for a presidential primary debate and the highest non-sports telecast in cable TV history.

But a boycott could prove risky for Trump as Iowa Republicans seek to take one more look at who they want as their presidential candidate. Rivals like Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Bush, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson could reap the benefits.

"How many debates do you have to do?" Trump told reporters. "The Democrats are finished with their debates. ... The Republicans go on forever and ever and ever with debates. We have people on the stand who have zero (percentage points in the poll), who have one, who have nothing. So it's time that somebody plays grown up."

At his campaign event in Marshalltown, Trump expressed confidence in his position in the race, saying if he were to win Iowa, he could "run the table" and roll up subsequent victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond.

"Iowa is very important. So you've got to get out, you've got to get out and caucus," he told his supporters.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Ginger Gibson; Additional reporting by Eric Walsh in Washington and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney and Simon Cameron-Moore)
* Museveni seeking to extend 30-year rule

* Critics say ruling party and state indistinguishable

* Opponents claim harassment by security forces

* Government says ruling party not spending taxpayers' cash

By Edith Honan and Elias Biryabarema

MBARARA, Uganda, Jan 26 (Reuters) - At an election rally this month, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni awarded city status to the town of Mbarara - a minor distinction on the face of it, but one that promises more public sector jobs for local voters.

As top musicians played for thousands of dancing supporters, critics said it was another example of Museveni spending freely on government patronage in a campaign to extend his three decades in office while teachers go unpaid and clinics run out of drugs.

"For 30 years, it has been the same face, the same system, the economy in the hands of a few people," said 53-year-old Steven, who did not want to give his full name. "He has the state machinery buying the election."

Museveni, whose government denies squandering state cash on campaigning for the Feb. 18 presidential vote, has brought a measure of peace and economic stability since he took control of the country in 1986 after winning a protracted bush war.

His achievements since then pleased Western allies, who value Uganda for sending peacekeeping troops to hotspots like Somalia. But as the 71-year-old seeks a fifth term, Western donors frustrated by his lengthy grip on power are calling more loudly for him and other entrenched African leaders - such as Paul Kagame in neighbouring Rwanda - to relinquish office so a tradition of peaceful transition of power can be established.

Museveni's opponents at home complain that the rebel-turned-statesman treats the treasury as his personal fiefdom in a nation that remains among the poorest in Africa.

Museveni "simply believes that anyone has a price, and he is purchasing people as if they are some chattel in some market", candidate Amama Mbabazi, a former ally who was sacked as prime minister last year, told Reuters.

Story continues

RIVALS CLAIM HARASSMENT

Mbabazi and Kizza Besigye, a longtime opponent who has lost three previous elections, are Museveni's main election rivals.

They command big crowds and draw cheers when they criticise runaway government spending. Mbabazi promises to cut the budget of the State House, or the presidential office, by 60 percent.

Both candidates say the government uses the security forces to harass them and their supporters, which the police deny.

When the pair were detained last year, police said they had broken the law by campaigning before it was allowed.

Government spokesman Shaban Bantariza said the idea that Museveni's party was using taxpayers' money on the campaign was "purely speculative". He said a costly bureaucracy was the "the price of democracy".

But in the budget for 2015/16, the year that covers the election, government spending rose by 71 percent, helping to push the Ugandan shilling to all-time lows.

"His entire governance is based on a system of patronage," said Nicholas Opiyo, a Kampala lawyer, in comments echoed by other observers. "The line is so blurred that you often can't tell which is the state and which is the ruling party. Museveni is the state and the state is Museveni in Uganda."

In September, the government ran out of antiretroviral HIV drugs and activists accused it of diverting funds to its election campaign. Officials denied this and blamed a shortage of foreign currency. Last year, teachers from several regions complained that they had not been paid for months.

DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES

The scale of election spending is hard to establish. Museveni's party, the National Resistance Movement, does not release financial reports.

Portions of the government budget are not publicly allocated or, as with parts of the bill for security, are secret.

The State House covers the president's campaign travel and accommodation costs, but does not say how much it spends.

After the 2011 election, the European Union's observer mission said "the distribution of money and gifts by candidates, especially from the ruling party" was "inconsistent with democratic principles".

Analysts say this presidential vote follows a trend. Each election season, Museveni creates new local government districts, each with upwards of 100 new jobs, says budget analyst Godber Tumushabe.

Museveni himself has more than 100 presidential advisers, Tumushabe said, all with salaries, official cars and money for their running costs.

It was not immediately possible to obtain a list of advisers from the government. But Bantariza said: "If the opposition thinks (such positions) are useless they should have brought a bill to amend the constitution and abolish these provisions."

Opposition bills are usually shot down in a parliament dominated by Museveni's supporters.

Opponents say Museveni's campaign pledges will do little to reassure those who worry about fiscal prudence. They include a promise to give 18 million hoes to farmers, costing the Agriculture Ministry about 28 percent of its budget.

Museveni's long years in office make it difficult for many Ugandans to imagine any other leader. Most people in the young nation cannot remember another president.

"He's not our choice but if he wants to stay, whether we like it or not, he will stay," said Steven in Mbarara. "You know, it's African politics."

(Writing by Edith Honan; Editing by Edmund Blair and Giles Elgood)
* Slowing output, lower stockpiles support

* Market seen holding on bullish factors -trader

(Updates latest prices)

By Emily Chow

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Malaysian palm oil futures

rose for a third straight session on Wednesday to hit their

highest level in 19 months on tighter supplies.

The palm oil contract for April on the Bursa

Malaysia Derivatives Exchange rose as much as 1.41 percent in

afternoon trade to touch its highest level since June 25, 2014

at 2,510 ringgit ($590.17) per tonne, before settling up 1.1

percent at 2,502 ringgit.

Traded volume stood at 62,044 lots of 25 tonnes each.

"The market will hold... The reason is tight availability of

crude palm oil. Moving forward there will be a production

decline and stocks are manageable," said a trader with a Kuala

Lumpur-based brokerage that deals in palm oil.

Palm oil output growth may decline this year in Southeast

Asia as dry weather caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon

affects fresh fruit yields and lowers productivity.

Malaysian palm output will rise only 0.7 percent in 2016

from a year ago to 20.1 million tonnes, the Malaysian Palm Oil

Board is forecasting. Indonesia, the world's biggest palm-oil

producer, will see exports drop to about 23-24 million tonnes,

the Indonesian Palm Oil Association has predicted, the first

decline in five years as supply is directed to domestic uses.

Palm oil shipments from Malaysia have fallen about 8 percent

so far this month, according to data from cargo surveyors, on

slowing economic growth in top consumer China.

Stockpiles in Malaysia as of end-December were at 2.6

million tonnes, down from an all-time high of 2.9 million tonnes

a month ago. (MYPOMS-TPO)

In related markets, crude oil prices fell to

around $30 per barrel on a surprise rise in U.S. inventories,

which could take a drag on palm oil prices as the vegetable oil

is used for blending into fuel for biodiesel.

The U.S. March soyoil contract gained 0.2 percent,

while the May soybean oil contract on the Dalian

Story continues

Commodity Exchange rose 0.6 percent.

Palm, soy and crude oil prices at 1017 GMT

Contract Month Last Change Low High Volume

MY PALM OIL FEB6 2413 +26.00 2380 2414 533

MY PALM OIL MAR6 2476 +29.00 2439 2481 4538

MY PALM OIL APR6 2502 +27.00 2463 2510 27834

CHINA PALM OLEIN MAY6 4750 +76.00 4686 4750 1084532

CHINA SOYOIL MAY6 5642 +36.00 5586 5644 617330

CBOT SOY OIL MAR6 30.80 +4.10 30.57 30.93 5291

INDIA PALM OIL JAN6 433.00 +4.10 429.50 433.60 1178

INDIA SOYOIL FEB6 612.20 +2.85 610.00 613.60 23590

NYMEX CRUDE MAR6 30.24 -1.21 30.14 31.22 83043

Palm oil prices in Malaysian ringgit per tonne

CBOT soy oil in U.S. cents per pound

Dalian soy oil and RBD palm olein in Chinese yuan per tonne

India soy oil in Indian rupee per 10 kg

Crude in U.S. dollars per barrel

($1 = 4.2530 ringgit)

($1 = 68.0300 Indian rupees)

($1 = 6.5779 Chinese yuan)

* For a table on Malaysian physical palm oil prices,

including refined oil, Reuters Terminal users can double click

on or type.

* To view freight rates from Peninsula Malaysia/Sumatra to

China, India, Pakistan and Rotterdam, please key in

and press enter, or double click between the brackets.

* Reuters Terminal users can see cash and futures edible oil

prices by double clicking on the codes in the brackets: To go to

the next page in the same chain, hit F12. To go back, hit F11.

Vegetable oils --

Malaysian palm oil exports --

CBOT soyoil futures --

CBOT soybean futures --

Indian solvent --

Weekly Indian vegetable oils --

Dalian Commodity Exchange --

Dalian soyoil futures --

Dalian refined palm oil futures --

Zhengzhou rapeseed oil --

European edible oil prices/trades --

(Reporting by Emily Chow; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and

Subhranshu Sahu)
Vietnam's top communist leader Nguyen Phu Trong has been party chief since 2011 and will stay on following a compromise deal which analysts say is a move back towards more consensus-based decision-making (AFP Photo/Kham)

Hanoi (AFP) - Vietnam's top communist leader Nguyen Phu Trong was re-elected Wednesday in a victory for the party's old guard that some fear could slow crucial economic reforms in the fast-growing country.

Factional fighting overshadowed a week of closed-door talks at the five-yearly Communist Party Congress. But Trong, 72, retained his position while his rival -- reformist Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung -- was pushed from power.

Dung remains prime minister but will step down later this year when the National Assembly convenes to appoint a replacement.

This is expected to be Nguyen Xuan Phuc, currently a deputy prime minister, state media said.

"Delegates to the first meeting of the party's central committee congratulated Comrade Nguyen Phu Trong who was elected general secretary," the official Vietnam News Agency reported.

Trong, 72, seen as more of a conservative apparatchik and closer to China than Dung, has been party chief since 2011 and will stay on following a compromise deal which analysts say is a move back towards more consensus-based decision-making.

Dung, 66, a two-term prime minister and political heavyweight, is credited with pushing a pro-business agenda and talking tough to China over a festering maritime dispute.

He had been tipped to ascend to the party leader position but in the end he lost out in internal elections. He was not selected for the 180-member central committee, which in effect ends his official political career.

The charismatic Dung was a rare "political celebrity" amid the communist country's faceless collective leadership, Jonathan London, a Vietnam expert at City University of Hong Kong, told AFP, adding that this style alienated other cadres.

- 'Go slow approach' -

Although both his reformist credentials and achievements in office were debatable, he was unquestionably "someone who had a vision", said London, adding that his exit marked a return to a more moderated style of governance.

Story continues

"The (Communist) Party has been around for 85 years and always been steered by committee -- in this context, the 'go slow' approach makes sense," he added.

Trong's ascent -- which owes as much to Dung's divisiveness as to his own popularity -- is unlikely to mark a dramatic change of course on key issues such as a dispute with Beijing over parts of the South China Sea and participation in a series of trade deals, including the US-led Trans Pacific Partnership.

The entire politburo -- which was also elected Wednesday with 19 members -- is committed to economic reforms and the change in leadership is more "a question of style", economist Bui Kien Thanh told AFP.

"I don't see the machine going backwards... no one is completely indispensable," he said, referring to fears that Dung's exit would stall economic reforms and integration of Vietnam into the global economy.

Dung himself was hardly "a superstar reformer" and his successor will undoubtedly continue key economic reforms so most foreign investors are not concerned, said Tony Foster, a lawyer with Freshfields.

"The stability in the system is extraordinary, and from a foreign investors' point of view a big positive," he added.

Dung's 40-year-old son Nguyen Thanh Nghi was elected to the central committee, alongside other politicians seen as his allies, including the Transport Minister Dinh La Thang and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.

Some observers had expressed concern that Trong could end up sidelining competent officials in favour of the party faithful. But one senior state employee played down the problem and said personnel changes were to be expected.

"When you're part of the system your survival depends on being flexible. It's the most important thing," she told AFP on condition of anonymity.
megyn kelly donald trump fox news

Fox News host Megyn Kelly covered Donald Trump's sudden announcement that he won't attend the Fox-hosted presidential debate during an unusual Tuesday segment of her show.

Trump has repeatedly complained that Kelly, one of the debate moderators, would be unfair to him at the Thursday-night event.

After Fox mocked him for polling his Twitter followers about whether he should go to the debate, given Kelly's alleged bias, Trump announced he would boycott it.

"Breaking tonight. Just 48 hours before the final presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses takes place ... Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump now says he'll skip the Fox News/Google debate," Kelly announced to her viewers Tuesday.

Trump has been launching raging attacks against Kelly since last August, when she was one of three moderators at the first Fox-hosted debate. Kelly infuriated Trump at the time by asking a critical question about disparaging comments he's made about women's looks.

She replayed that moment after announcing the debate news on "The Kelly File."

"This controversy debates back to August 6 and the very first Republican debate, co-moderated by yours truly. Mr. Trump took issue with this question that I posed to him," Kelly said.

After playing a clip from the August debate, Kelly continued:

In the months since, Mr. Trump has repeatedly brought up that exchange as evidence of alleged bias on my part. I maintain it was a tough but fair question and we agreed to disagree. This past weekend, Mr. Trump resumed his complaints about yours truly, arguing that Fox News chief Roger Ailes should ban me from the debate this Thursday. Fox News had announced back in August that Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and I would be the moderators of this next debate.

Mr. Trump's complaints continued through the week, ultimately resulting in a video today he posted to Instagram hitting this issue again. Fox News responded and we'll get to all of that in a moment. As the front-runner, he was scheduled to be front and center on Thursday night, when Fox News hosts the Republican debate in Iowa. Now he says he will not show.

Story continues

Kelly then discussed the impact of Trump's announcement with Fox correspondent Carl Cameron and Fox political analyst Brit Hume. Trump said instead of doing the debate, he would host a fundraiser for wounded veterans.

Watch Kelly announcing and discussing the news below:

NOW WATCH: Watch Trump go head-to-head with a reporter and attack Megyn Kelly for being a lightweight reporter





More From Business Insider


Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is in Europe as he tries to drum up trade and investment with European businesses.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is in Europe as he tries to drum up trade and investment with European businesses after years of sanctions and economic and diplomatic isolation.

In his first visit to Europe since his election in 2013, Rouhani and his 120-strong entourage of business leaders and ministers began their continental tour in Rome on Monday and are due to head off to France on Wednesday. Already multi billion-dollar deals worth up to 17 billion euros ($18.4 billion) have been signed, according to Italian officials quoted by Reuters.

Among the deals struck on Monday were a pipeline contract worth between $4 billion and $5 billion for oil services group Saipem, up to 5.7 billion euros in contracts for Italian steel firm Danieli and up to 4 billion euros of business for infrastructure firm Condotte d'Acqua, Reuters added.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Rouhani had held "held friendly and constructive talks geared towards enhancing bilateral cooperation and deepening consultation on the main regional and international issues," the Italian government statement said on Monday.





Ahead of the trip, the Iranian government stated on its website that Rouhani's aim was to "develop relations with European Union countries and the trip to Italy and France is aimed at growth and development, as well as job creation for the country."

"This trip is happening during a very important historic point and post-JCPOA (the "joint comprehensive plan of action" commonly known as the Iran deal on its nuclear program) and post-sanctions era and, therefore, it is significantly important," Rouhani told reporters as he left for Europe. The Iranian leader also tweeted that he was looking forward to exploring opportunities in Italy.

Rouhani is expected to address an Iran-Italy business forum on Tuesday and will then meet Pope Francis where human rights issues and ongoing conflict in the Middle East, including Syria, are expected to be discussed. The trip comes as Iran itself tries mend relations with the West after almost economic sanctions on the country were expanded in 2006 for its alleged building of nuclear weapons.

Story continues

That isolation came to an end after trade restrictions were lifted earlier in January after Iran was deemed to have complied with international obligations to curb its nuclear program. Iran has certainly wasted no time in signing deals in an attempt to get its economy back on a global stage.

On Sunday, Reuters reported that Iran planned to buy 114 aircraft from European plane maker Airbus as soon as March The republic could need as many as 500 new planes over the next three years, lawmaker Mahdi Hashemi, the chairman of the parliament's Development Commission, said.

Read More Iran's stock market roars as sanctions go away



More announcements could be announced on Wednesday as Rouhani heads to Paris. He is expected to be received at the Elysee Palace on Thursday but there will be no state dinner for Rouhani and his ministers after France refused an Iranian request for no wine to be served at such an event. Italy was reportedly far more compliant by agreeing to the request from the strict Islamic Republic.

There was some scepticism from analysts over the trade deals. Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of Teneo Intelligence, said the deals should be scrutinized.

"Trailing along with him will be an entourage of businesspeople, bankers and ministers. It will be important to ignore the numbers that will be bandied around concerning the various accords that are being signed and instead pick through any more concrete trade agreements and deals as this will be the area in which the first real commercial exchanges will take place," Piccoli said in a note on Monday.

"Investment agreements will take far longer to negotiate and much of the information that is released about such putative deals this week will be largely hyperbole."

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mike huckabee

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's (R) campaign on Wednesday released an Adele-themed campaign video set to the tune of her mega-hit, "Hello."

While Adele's version is a reflection on the nature of personal growth through the lens of an intense breakup, Huckabee's take presented more of a meditation on the greatness of local Iowa businesses and restaurants.

The campaign's song replaced lyrics like, "Time's supposed to heal you/but I ain't done much healing," with, "Try the pork chops/baked beans."

The video showed Huckabee taking phone calls on a bus, shaking hands with Iowans, playing the bass, and shooting a Thompson sub-machine gun at a firing range.

Huckabee's campaign also deftly weaved some political memes into the video. It showed a fictional text message exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Huckabee discussing the senator's Canadian roots, as well as some footage of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton dancing on "Ellen."

Huckabee has produced some eyebrow-raising advertisements and videos over the course of the election. Last fall, the governor released a video comparing Washington to strippers that "danced for the donor class."

Despite winning the Iowa caucus in 2008, Huckabee has languished in the polls this cycle. He again did not qualify for the main-stage Republican debate on Thursday, instead being relegated to the lower-tier affair.

Watch below:

NOW WATCH: Here's the story behind the incredible performance by 3 young children at a Donald Trump rally





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martin sorrell

WPP, the world's biggest advertising agency holding company, spent huge amounts on advertising with the largest global digital media giants last year.

Speaking with Business Insider at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell listed the growing amounts the company has been spending on behalf of its clients with Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and AOL.

Here are the figures, for 2015:

Google: $4 billion (up 38%, from $2.9 billion in 2014)

Facebook: $1 billion (up 56%, from $640 million in 2014)

Yahoo: $400 million to $430 million (flat or slightly up on $400 million in 2014)

AOL: $100 million to $125 million (flat or slightly up on $100 million in 2014)

Twitter: $150 million to $225 million (flat or slightly up on $150 million in 2014)

Snapchat: "Much smaller"

WPP will most likely provide the full details during its preliminary 2015 full-year results on March 4.

Here's how WPP's digital media spending stacked up last year.

wpp spend

The rankings haven't changed, but it's interesting to see just how much WPP's spending on Google and Facebook has increased year-on-year  particularly Facebook, where spending most likely spiked because of Instagram's seriously ramping up its monetization over the past 12 months. It's an incredible sign of confidence in their advertising offerings.

We don't have full-year results from Google or Facebook yet. Analysts expect Facebook to report revenue of $17.45 billion for 2015, which would make WPP (on behalf of its clients) responsible for about 6% of that. Meanwhile, analysts are estimating Google will generate $74 billion in revenue for 2015, making WPP ad spending responsible for about 5% of the total.

Sorrell said he expected WPP to spend more with AOL in 2016 after Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition of the digital media company last year.

"I think Verizon will be aggressive," Sorrell said. "Obviously Lowell [McAdam, Verizon's CEO] and [Diego] Scotti [Verizon's chief marketing officer] are changing Verizon, obviously as a result of what they are doing with companies like AOL. Tim [Armstrong, AOL's CEO] staying there is a good signal. It's likely they will grow quite rapidly."

Story continues

In its last annual earnings, WPP predicted digital advertising would account for 40 to 45% of its revenue by 2019.

wpp revenue

NOW WATCH: Research reveals why men cheat  and it's not what you think





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A mosquito-borne illness called the Zika virus is now spreading rapidly in South and Central America and the Caribbean, and it could arrive in the U.S. soon. It can make anyone sick for up to a week with symptoms like fever, rash, joint pain, and red eyes. But it's especially dangerous for women of childbearing age who are pregnant or considering pregnancy because it has been linked to microcephaly, a serious birth defect that causes an abnormally small head and incomplete brain development.

The outbreak has prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a warning to take precautions for anyone traveling to 24 destinations in the Americas, but, most important, the CDC is recommending that all pregnant women should consider postponing their trip altogether. Here's what you should know to protect yourself and your family.

Why Zika Is So Concerning

The Zika virus normally does not cause illness that requires hospitalization or leads to death. Roughly one in five people infected with the virus develop symptoms, which are usually mild. The time from getting bitten to getting sick is likely to be a few days.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reports more than 16,000 Zika illnesses since the first cases were confirmed in Brazil in October 2015. Local transmission of the virus has been confirmed through lab testing in several countries in the Americas.

"The number of cases being reported is significantly lower than the actual number of cases." says Candice Burns Hoffmann, a CDC spokeswoman. "Many countries do not regularly test for Zika virus. Also, once the outbreak becomes common in an area, most people will not go to the doctor or get tested for the virus."

Brazil has reported 4,180 cases of microcephaly, according to The New York Times, and Colombia has reported Zika infections in 1,090 pregnant women, a spokeswoman for PAHO told Consumer Reports. In addition, Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis, has been reported in patients with a probable Zika infection in French Polynesia and Brazil. The CDC says it is examining the link between Zika and the disorder.

Story continues

Because there is neither a vaccine nor medication available to prevent a Zika virus infection, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that women who are pregnant or considering pregnancy follow CDC guidelines and delay travel to those regions where Zika outbreaks are occurring.

"There is much that we do not yet know about the Zika virus," Mark S. DeFrancesco, M.D., president of the ACOG, said in a statement. "However, because of the associated risk of microcephaly, avoiding exposure to the virus is best." Women who have traveled to South and Central America and the Caribbean should be evaluated for Zika virus infection.

How to Prevent Bites

For those who are planning to travel in spite of the warnings, the CDC asks that pregnant women, women who are trying to become pregnant, and everyone else should strictly follow steps to protect themselves. Because the mosquitoes that spread Zika are aggressive daytime biters and live indoors and outdoors, it's especially important to follow the CDC's precautions during daylight hours.

That includes using insect repellent containing deet, picaridin, lemon eucalyptus, or IR3535. All have been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for use during pregnancy. Also wear long-sleeved shirts and pants, the CDC says. At night, CDC recommends sleeping in a screened-in or air conditioned room or under a mosquito bed net.

Consumer Reports' recent tests of insect repellents found that the most effective product, Sawyer Fishermen's Formula with 20 percent picaridin, was also one of the safest, helping to keep away Aedes mosquitoesthe same type that transmit Zikafor at least 8 hours. Off Deepwoods VIII with 25 percent deet also kept Aedes mosquitoes at bay for 8 hours. Our tests showed that repellents containing natural plant oils, such as citronella and lemongrass, did not work against mosquitoes.

More Actions to Take

All cases of Zika virus in the U.S. so far have been found in returning travelers to the regions mentioned above. No one has gotten sick from being bitten in the U.S. But that may be changing as the two mosquito types known to carry the disease, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, can be found here (see maps above). If a homegrown mosquito bites an infected returning traveler it could pick up the virus and then pass it along to other people in the U.S.

For this reason, its wise to use insect repellent, as noted above. You can also make it harder for mosquitoes to set up shop in your backyard. Female mosquitoes lay several hundred eggs on the walls of water-filled containers. The eggs stick like glue and remain attached until they are scrubbed off. If water covers the eggs, they hatch and become adults in about a week. To prevent them from hatching:

 Empty and scrub, turn over, cover, or throw out items that hold water, such as tires, buckets, planters, toys, pools, birdbaths, flowerpots, or trash containers. Do this once a week.

 Tightly cover water storage containers (buckets, cisterns, rain barrels) so that mosquitoes cannot get inside to lay eggs.

 Use wire mesh with holes smaller than an adult mosquito if you don't have lids.

If you have a septic tank, repair cracks or gaps, and cover open vents or plumbing pipes.







More from Consumer Reports:

8 Ways to Boost Your Home Value

Why your cable TV bill is going up

Get the Best Cell Phone Plan for Your Familyand Save up to $1,000 a Year





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Yet Another Treatise on Trash





I have a three hour wait for my connecting water taxi back to Sarteneja. As a low budget traveler, I don't get too extravagant with my spending. Of course just being here in this country is extravagant.

Having said that, I found a cafe and thought I'd write some notes over some "real" cofee. I am a bourgeoise snob.

I came in and the gentleman behind the counter inquired if I would like something. "Why yes", I said with exuberance "As long as you promise not to wrap it, pour it or otherwise serve it in plastic or paper". He smiled but looked a little puzzled. He then made me a splendid Americano and served it in a porcelain cup.

I never did understand people who sit inside a cafe drinking coffee out of a paper cup. It shows a lack of appreciation for the beverage. Not to mention the amount of trash created. It boggles my mind that people are really that unconscious. I think well meaning people choose simply to ignore their impact. In my own community of Durango, Colorado folks love to proclaim their commitment of a greener world. Those same are often the ones drinking coffee from paper. Locals had the audacity to raise hell about the King Mine spill. Those mines have been leaching crap into the river for a hundred years . Very few people seemed to care. But now there is the EPA to blame. Anyone with any kind of cell phone, computer, television etc has bought into the mining industry because most consumer goods contain raw materials from a mine somewhere on the planet. Even my bicycle has mined materials. It's all fine and good to be vocal about Climate Change, plastic and carbon emissions. That is until it threatens one's own sense of convenience.

I'm traveling in Central America at the moment and there is little if any infrastructure to deal with rubbish. There are municipal collection points but much of it lines the road sides and public beaches.





Does Eco-tourism really exist? Can tourists really practice environmentally responsible tourism? If so, how?





The island of Caye Caulker off the coast of Belize is suffering under the weight of it's own refuse. I don't think there is any kind of system in place to remove the garbage from the island. In my explorations of the island, I found much of the trash dumped in less populated areas and mangroves.

I think locals and tourists alike share the responsibility in the production of all this garbage. That includes me. It is almost impossible to buy food or drinks on the street or from take out restaurants without it being wrapped in plastic or styrofoam. I simply cannot handle one more fucking plastic bag or styrofoam take away container being handed to me through the window of a restaurant or street food vendor. I don't eat much restaurant food while traveling, it gets too expensive. I prefer to cook when I have access to a kitchen or eat fruit, bread, cheese and what have you. Fruit comes in it's own neat little package. It takes energy to make conscious decisions like this and sometimes even I don't have it. But just like the adage says, "if you're not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem."

Of course if I really look at MY footprint on Earth, I see that my carnivorous tastes are also responsible for the degradation of Earth's ecology overall. Not to mention flying to Cancun, MX. I read a blurb about a woman cycling around the world and hopping continents by ship.

Some countries in the industrialized world are taking steps to reduce the use and waste of plastics and single use items. Bangladesh banned the use of single use bags back in 2002. It was discovered that plastic bags led to 2/3 of the country being submerged during heavy rains because plastic bags had clogged up drains. It may only be major disasters that will force governments to act.

However environmentally conscious people may be at home in north America or Europe, it's easy to let it go by the wayside once off home soil. People go "on vacation" to get away from the stress of work and other demands. They don't want to think about anything. This includes their impact on the host countries. Maybe I am giving these industrialized, "enlightened" cultures too much credit. I was surprised to see North American and European tourists walking out of the markets with 3 or 4 plastic, single use bags filled with plastic water bottles. In fact, now one can buy a four ounce bag of water. Bite off the corner of the bag and voila! Clean drinking water is not ubiquitous in this part of the world. It is not a given that one can turn a tap and fill a glass with safe drinking water. Many municipalities have built water treatment facilities to remedy this. Thankfully for this, entire communities are free of serious health threats that come from dirty water.The majority of the purified drinking water is delivered through re-usable 5 gallon bottles. In Mexico, many accommodations provide access to drinking water dispensers and one could fill a glass or reusable water bottle for pennies. But not every country or township is the same. Subsequently, tourists in less developed areas are forced to buy water in single use plastic bottles. it's everywhere, but the bottles go in the trash when empty. I have a small water filter that I use if I can at least see through the water coming out of the tap.

My experience in Tullum, Mexico on the south coast of Yucatan has become a center for eco tourism. One can find, yoga on the beach, massage, and an assortment of shaman selling peyote ceremonies in the jungle (no shit,I actually heard a guy trying to sell this to some "hippies"...). Tullum attracts a certain kind of tourist. Usually young, "hip" and enlightened. It's a stereotype and we all know what I mean. Tullum went from a small seaside village to a bustling tourist metropolis replete with yoga studios and advertisements for "Ecologically" friendly accomodations. On closer inspection, I discovered that some so called "Eco-lodges" near the beaches got their electricity from large diesel powered generators. These were usually out of sight of the main areas of the lodge. Out of sight but not out of hearing range of anyone else going to the beach and certainly the plumes of gray smoke and smell from the exhaust was pervasive.

This brings up more questions: How can tourists be responsible to the planet; is it even possible?

The questions I ask myself are, "Does it matter in the long run and is it just my own western sensibilities that are affected because of my personal aesthetics involving the landscape?"
Nebraska Department of Roads held a series of meetings asking for input on projects for the Build Nebraska Act. This is a group of projects that received additional funding from the Legislature several years ago. The 17 projects in the first ten years are underway with four completed, five under construction and eight are under development. These represent the first $600 million in funding. The second $600 million is for projects starting around 2023.

Highway 75 from Plattsmouth north and from Plattsmouth to Murray are in the first phase. The meeting was basically about setting the priority system for the second ten-year phase of the Build Nebraska Act projects. Projects in Cass County that are potentials for the second phase are Murray South, Louisville North and 34 around Eagle. They would like additional input on the value of these projects and asked for any projects that they had missed. They are also including economic performance in their criteria and are asking for guidance in how to incorporate this.

Louisville Mayor Roger Behrns is encouraging people to give input on the value of the aforementioned projects.

He hopes everyone will look and comment to the NDOR especially on the value of the local projects and what it means to local business. With the 59 projects listed, and surely more to be added, totaling far beyond a billion dollars only a few of the listed projects will be done.

Im sure that everyone believes that the projects in their area should be selected, but we need to make sure that our voices are heard. I believe that the economic benefit to improving highway 50 is real. We need to tell them how we see it, Behrns explained in an email.

The web site is http://roads.nebraska.gov/projects/bna/next10 Scroll down and you can find the meeting documents.

At the bottom of the web page you can scroll through the candidate projects for their descriptions using the arrows at the left. Highway 50 is broken into three projects, Springfield south, Louisville North and Louisville south. These are numbers 49, 27 and 20 on the map.

http://roads.nebraska.gov/media/3802/highway-improvement-projects.pdf is the map showing both the first decade and possible second decade as well as their regular projects.

http://roads.nebraska.gov/media/3803/candidates-map.pdf is the map and listing of the potential next 10 projects.

http://roads.nebraska.gov/media/3804/bna-meeting-handout.pdf is the meeting handout recommended ot read There is a comment form that is accessed from the yellow header menu bar that should give a good place to give them feedback or comments can be submitted to sarah.kugler@nebraska.gov no later than Feb 5.

They will take the inputs from everyone and come back with proposals in a spring meeting for public comments and the final selection will be announced this summer, Behrns wrote. The fifth street bridge is not part of the Build Nebraska Act, but is on their regular schedule of projects. Talking with Tim Weander, the district engineer, the bridge is scheduled for 2019 which would mean hearings and input during 2017. The railroad is still one potential major problem, but we are hopeful.
After years of earning Boy Scout merit badges as part of Troop 711 from Springfield and finishing community betterment projects, brothers Carter Jose Luellen and Patrick Fabian Luellen were presented to the Order of the Arrow Eagle Scout Honor Society Jan. 23 at First United Methodist Church in Louisville.

There are 13 required and a minimum of nine elective merit badges needed to earn the Eagle rank, said master of ceremonies Evan Stohlman. Patrick currently has 80 merit badges and only has 20 more to meet his personal goal of 100 merit badges.

Carter had earned the Eagle rank more than a year before his brother, but he waited for the ceremony until Patrick had also achieved this prestigious rank. The two brothers are members of the Omaha Tribe Order of the Arrow. They have a strong blood bond having been adopted as toddlers together by Manley resident Nada Bergmann.

Carters Eagle project involved helping children at Camp Catch Up who have been separated from their brothers and sisters while in foster care or adopted. Carter and Patrick know how it feels to be separated from their siblings.

Can you imagine having a brother or sister and never getting to have a pillow fight at night, going swimming together or having holidays together? Carter writes in his Eagle project description. Well, Camp Catch Up provided many of those experiences for my brother and me to catch up with our other siblings that we were separated from when we were adopted.

Carter explains the three parts of his project in the description. The first part was to obtain food donations from local businesses and cook a breakfast for the 42 campers and staff for the weekend camp in November, he writes. The second part was to make blankets for each camper to be able to take home with them.

All the materials for the blankets were provided by Nebraska Children and Family Foundation. The third and final part was to do a game drive to provide Camp Catch Up with a variety of games for the campers to utilize while at camp with their siblings, Carter writes.

The goal of an Eagle Scout project is to help a community. My community that I chose covers the entire state of Nebraska by bringing together brothers and sisters in foster care who have been torn apart from each other. This time together gives them heart connections and healing to make them stronger and healthier adults in the future, Carter writes.

Patrick also chose an Eagle project that had a positive impact on children and fulfilled a personal wish as well. His goal was to organize a book drive for children in the Omaha Nations Head Start program.

My grandmother could not read or write and my mother could write her name and read very little, Patrick explains in his description. This was very troubling to me. Reading and having books available to read is very important to me.

Through his research, he learned the children in the Omaha Nation Head Start program had 1-3 books at home.

My goal was to get enough books to send each child home with two or three books each, he writes. The response was overwhelming and I ended up receiving enough donated books to send home six books with each of the 101 students.

Patrick personally delivered the books to the children. I was able to see their faces and the personal impact my project made on them, he said.

Carter and Patricks Eagle Scout Ceremony included participation from the Wagon Wheel District Boy Scouts. They dressed in Native American regalia and represented the Chief, East Wind, West Wind, South Wind, North Wind, Guide and Medicine man.

After taking the Eagle Scout pledge, Patrick and Carter honored their adoptive mother by giving her a red rose, miniature Eagle pin and a kiss on the cheek.

They also honored their grandparents Mr. and Mrs. Luellen, their Scoutmaster Joseph Hagerty II and their mentors. Grandma and Grandpa Luellen thank you for teaching us what family means and how to be part of the family. Mom, thank you for loving us, caring for us, feeding us, buying clothes for us, driving us everywhere and oh, just for everything, Patrick and Carter read together.
Bea Karp has been telling nearly the same story for more than 52 years, and even though she is now 83 years old, her tale is just as relevant today as it was when she started sharing it more than half a century ago.

Karp, who was sent by the Gestapo to the Gurs Internment Camp in late 1940, plans to share her story of overcoming nearly insurmountable odds during the Holocaust with Logan View and Scribner-Snyder students at 1 p.m. Monday in the Logan View Jr./Sr. High School gymnasium.

The event is also free to the public, said Ben Schole, one of the events coordinators.

The speaking engagement was coordinated by Men in Mission, a church group comprised of men in the Uehling, Hooper and Scribner area.

For the past three years, Men in Mission has looked for various ways to educate students and the public about important, pressing issues.

In 2014, a program was held at Logan View where a Vietnam veteran spoke about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and in 2015, a speaker addressed issues facing correctional facilities at Scribner-Snyder Community Schools.

Schole said that he feels privileged that he can play a role in providing students with additional learning opportunities.

It provides citizen input into what our kids get to hear and be educated on  some of those things that they dont get to learn all about in a text book, he said.

Hearing Karps testimony is a perfect example of this, he said.

Karp was born in Lauterbach, Germany, and lived peacefully until she and her family were sent to Gurs in 1940. Both of her parents died during the Holocaust, along with approximately 5 to 6 million other Jews.

Following World War II, Karp moved to England and then to the United States where she later married and raised four daughters with her husband in ONeil.

Karp lives in Omaha where she continues devoting her time to speaking to area schools, churches and community groups, released information says.

In addition to speaking, Karp enjoys volunteering, traveling and spending time with her friends.

Schole said that Karps message is one that everybody should hear.

She is a very important woman who has a tremendous story to tell, Schole said. Its so important because people need to recognize what happened in Germany because of the fear and misinformation that Hitler spread. It led to the Holocaust. This is what happened because of those things, the Jewish people were persecuted and killed.

Karps story is one that everybody should be able to take something away from, he said, and he believes she will continue taking speaking engagements as long as she is physically able to.

She plans on speaking until she cant anymore. Its kind of her quest, he said. She wants people to take a stand against bullying and prejudice, and to tell them to not judge others when you know nothing about them. These are Beas words, and this is what she wants the kids to know.
The Salvation Army is seeking nominations for its D.J.s Heroes Awards.

Criteria for selecting honorees include: Nebraska residency, high school senior, commitment to others and to the community, courage to act independently, greatest achievement in life, and ability to overcome challenges/adversity.

Honorees receive a $10,000 scholarship toward their selected college or university. D.J.s Heroes will be recognized at the D.J.s Hero Awards Luncheon on May 10 at CenturyLink Center Omaha. Proceeds from the luncheon benefit Salvation Army programs for children and families.

Nominations must be postmarked by March 2 to be eligible for entry. Forms are available at most Nebraska high school guidance offices, online at www.salarmyomaha.org or by calling 402-898-5906.
Latvian airline airBaltic has reached a codeshare agreement with Iberia. This cooperation will offer convenient connections to Southern Europe for airBaltic customers, while Iberias passengers will benefit from better access to Northern Europe.

Wolfgang Reuss, SVP of Network Management of airBaltic said, Current code-share partners include most of the major European airlines. We are very pleased to add Iberia to this growing family.

Neil Chernoff, Iberias Senior Vice President of Network Planning and Alliances said, With this agreement Iberia and Air Baltic improve their product offering for customers travelling between the Baltic States and Spain and Southern Europe, through competitive connections in Brussels, Dusseldorf, Munich, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

The new partnership will offer passengers convenient connections between Riga (Latvia) and Madrid (Spain) Riga through common gateway airports in Europe.
Istanbul, the city where two continents meet, welcomes millions every year. And once again in 2015, Istanbul has been selected as the best meeting destination for the second time.

Istanbul Convention & Visitors Bureau (ICVB) announced that Istanbul won the Meetings Star Awards 2015 for the second time in a row by Kongres Magazine. Istanbul has been ranked among the best meeting destinations in the region with a total of 4,61 points followed by Prague and Belgrade.

The Meetings Star Awards are presented annually by Kongres Magazine which focuses on MICE in Central and South East Europe. The winner were announced and awarded during Conventa trade show, on Wednesday 20 January in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

This year, they analyzed 60 meeting destinations and when evaluating individual destinations the following criteria are taken into account: Natural and cultural factors, General and transport infrastructure, Tourist infrastructure, Meetings infrastructure, Subjective grade, Marketing buzz. They included the current ranking on ICCA scale and Numebo Quality of life Index.

Istanbul CVBs General Manager Ozgul Ozkan Yavuz said, We are proud of that Istanbul has been selected as the best meeting destination for the second time. As a meeting point between East and West and spanning two continents, todays Istanbul is the Worlds Top 10 Congress destination. The city has the capacity to host every type of event, from bespoke incentives to meetings for up to 30,000 for corporate and leisure visitors alike.
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December new home sales surged well over the high end Econoday estimate.



The outlook for the housing sector just got a boost from a sharp jump in new home sales, up 10.8 percent to a 544,000 annualized rate that is 44,000 over the Econoday consensus and 24,000 over the high estimate. The gain, however, may have been boosted by discounting as the median price slipped 2.7 percent to $288,900 for a year-on-year rate of minus 4.3 percent.



With builders slow to bring new homes to market, low supply remains a central factor holding back sales. Supply did rise 6,000 in the month to 237,000 but supply relative to sales fell back to 5.2 months from 5.6 months. A reading of 6.0 months is considered to be the balance point between supply and demand.



Regional data show a 32 percent sales surge in the Midwest where the year-on-year rate of 39 percent is the strongest. Sales in the West and Northeast both rose 21 percent in the month with the year-on-year rate in the West, which is a key region for new housing, up 22 percent while the Northeast, which is a very small region in this report, down 6.5 percent on the year. The South, which is the largest region, shows a fractional gain in the month and no change on the year.



For full year 2015, new home sales rose 14.7 percent to 501,000 from 437,000 in 2014. Sales of new homes have been noticeably higher than prices, suggesting that prices have room to accelerate. This report follows special strength in existing home sales with both perhaps benefiting from December's warm weather but with both pointing nevertheless to new momentum for 2016.

The worlds economic woes -- from China to Russia to South America -- are damping sales in the high-end real estate market. Haywire overseas stock markets and dropping currency values caused in part by plummeting oil prices are dulling demand for mansions, penthouses and winter escapes.



Luxury Pfft







Prices for the top 5 percent of U.S. real estate transactions remained flat in 2015 while all other houses gained 4.9 percent, according to data from Redfin Corp., a real estate brokerage and data provider.



Stronger Dollar



The stronger dollar is driving South American buyers away from the 23,000 condos in the pipeline for Miamis downtown area, said Peter Zalewski, owner of South Florida development tracker CraneSpotters.com. Buyers signed about one-fourth fewer pre-construction contracts last year than in 2014, according to Anthony M. Graziano, senior managing director at Integra Realty Resources Inc., which tracks condo data for the Miami Downtown Development Authority.



In nearby Sunny Isles, Florida, faraway currency fluctuations are endangering the sale of a $3.7 million condominium.



In Houston, the plunge in oil prices to a 12-year low is killing the luxury boom. Sales for homes priced at $500,000 or more dropped 17 percent in December from a year earlier, according to the Houston Association of Realtors.



Manhattan resale prices for the top 20 percent of the market peaked in February and have fallen every month since, according to an analysis through October by listings website StreetEasy.



Even in San Francisco, where the market for luxury properties remains strong, the inventory of listings for $2 million or more jumped in October to a record level, said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for Paragon Real Estate.



More sellers are jumping in and more buyers are holding off because theyre worried about where the volatility is going, Carlisle said.



Buyers are now on the hunt for deals, said Nela Richardson, chief economist at Redfin.



Theres a limit even to what a wealthy person will spend, she said.

Why did sales surge 39% in the Midwest? Because this was one of the warmest December on record even discounting global warming silliness.Bloomberg calls this "" for 2016. Indeed it is, but that momentum is negative.This statement by Bloomberg caught my eye: "I suggest home prices have room to fall. Curiously so does Bloomberg, albeit in different ways, and in a different article.Please consider Bloomberg's article The Surge in U.S. Mansion Prices Is Now Over , published just two days ago.Bloomberg did not make the necessary connection, but they did provide the chart. Let's tie up some loose ends.In bonds, rot starts with junk and spreads to the core. With homes, price rot starts at the high end.With Chinese West-coast buyers now not feeling so wealthy after a 47% plunge in the stock market, and with "Temporary" Capital Controls likely on the way, that segment of the high-end market is toast.The strong dollar is having the same effect in Florida. And in New York, well ... "Theres a limit even to what a wealthy person will spend."And every decrease in the price at the high end, affects every level below it. A mansion that was $1,000,000 but is now $900,000 will affect the price of homes listed for $850,000 to $900,000, etc., all the way down the ladder.Let's return to the Econoday "room to accelerate" misanalysis.If homebuilders could sell more expensive homes, they surely would. And at the very high end, it appears we have hit the peak. That group is "all in".It was one hell of a bubble-reblowing effort by the Fed, but another slide lower awaits. New homes prices will likely get cheaper and cheaper with more and more features added.In turn that will lower the price of similar existing homes. This stuff does cascade. We have seen it before.There's plenty of talk about lack of supply. Actually, there's an ample supply of homes. There's just no supply at prices people are willing and able to pay.Expect lower, not higher prices. And if you need to get out, beat the rush, if you still can.Mike "Mish" Shedlock
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"Levels Not Seen in 80 Years"



The supply glut in oil storage continues as crude. Inventories hit new all-time highs this past week.







The above charts from EIA Weekly Supply Data shows the crude inventory of 494,920,000 (not counting strategic reserves) passed the previous high of 490,912,000 set on April 24, 2015.



Reserves, including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), reached 1,190,038 barrels, also a record high.



Comments From EIA Weekly Report



Here are some interesting comments from the Weekly EIA Report.



"At 494.9 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories remain near levels not seen for this time of year in at least the last 80 years. Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 3.5 million barrels last week, and are well above the upper limit of the average range. Both finished gasoline inventories and blending components inventories increased last week. Distillate fuel inventories decreased by 4.1 million barrels last week but are near the upper limit of the average range for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories fell 6.2 million barrels last week but are well above the upper limit of the average range. Total commercial petroleum inventories decreased by 1.0 million barrels last week."



Crude Jumps on News Russia May Cooperate with OPEC



Despite the record inventory surge, crude jumped a bit from extremely oversold levels on news Russia Dangles Prospect of OPEC Cooperation.



Oil futures surged on Wednesday, after Russia said it was discussing the possibility of co-operation with OPEC, fanning hopes that a deal was in the works to reduce oversupply that sent prices the lowest levels in a dozen years last week.



Russia's energy ministry said possible coordination with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was discussed at a meeting with Russian oil companies on Wednesday.



"I remain skeptical, at the end of the day, about that happening as the oil producers are looking at the other guy to cut production while maintaining their own levels," Andrew Lipow of Lipow Oil Associates said.



Crude was looking firm before the Russia news on the back of a U.S. Energy Department report showing a surprise spike in demand for refined products like heating oil last week, when a massive blizzard hit the U.S. Northeast.



The U.S. Energy Information Administration said inventories of distillates, fell more than 4 million barrels, trumping expectations for a rise of about 2 million.

Despite the small drawdown in fuel oil please recall the report stated "Distillate fuel inventories are near the upper limit of the average range for this time of year."Economists can be surprised by anything including the possibility blizzards and cold weather may increase the demand for fuel oil in the Northeast!Mike "Mish" Shedlock
CEDAR FALLS | Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the Cedar Valley on Tuesday night she wants to help Americans whove been knocked down to get up again.

Throughout the event, six days before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, Clinton also made clear shes ready to get to work doing just that.

I want you to know that Im not just shouting slogans. Im not just engaging in rhetoric. Ive thought this through. I have a plan, Clinton told a crowd of more than 500 people at Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center on Tuesday. I dont think you can get what we need done in this election, or in the presidency, unless you level with people.

Clinton, the former secretary of state, said shes leveled with the American people in offering up detailed plans on her website, explaining how much her proposals will cost and making clear she will not raise taxes on Americans.

If people have better ideas about how to actually create more good jobs and raise incomes, Im open to hearing them, but based on the evidence and what Ive seen work in the last 35 years, I think I have a plan that together we can get to work to implement, Clinton said.

Throughout a nearly 40-minute speech, Clinton touched on a multitude of topics, jumping from Wall Street reform to health care issues to dealing with the threat of the Islamic State. And as she did so, she drew a contrast with both her closest Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders and her potential Republican rivals.

She argued Sanders rallying cry to tear down the big banks is possible through the already-enacted Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, adding her plans go further in tackling the shadow banking sector.

Its important to look at what the potential next problem is. Dont just fight the last war. Weve got the authority to do something about that, Clinton said. Join me to make sure we stop the next problem from ever occurring so that we never go through anything like we did back in '07, '08.

Clinton also argued against both Republicans and Sanders on health care. She said Republicans want to repeal the federal health care reform law without replacing it, and Sanders would make the country start over to gain universal coverage rather than working from the current 90 percent covered.

On the threat of the Islamic State, she noted the new phrase being used by the Republican campaigns in calling it the Obama-Clinton foreign policy in its criticisms. Clinton said in response she sent them her book, Hard Choices, to explain what she did during her tenure as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.

Clinton also charged wealthy Republican donors with spending money to advertise for Sanders in order to help him win the nomination.

They know I say what I mean. I mean what I say, and I will go after them. I will not permit the right-wing billionaires to do what they want to do to our country ever again, and they do are doing everything they can to make sure they dont have to run against me, Clinton said. I find it perversely flattering.
FRISCO, Texas, Jan. 26, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Greatbatch Inc., (NYSE:GB) today announced that a jury in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware returned a verdict finding that AVX Corporation and AVX Filters Corporation infringed two Greatbatch patents, and in the process awarded Greatbatch $37.5 million in damages. The complaint, filed in April 2013, alleged that AVX had infringed Greatbatch patents by manufacturing and selling filtered feedthrough assemblies used in implantable pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators that incorporate its patented technology.



The jury's decision marked an important milestone in Greatbatchs effort to defend its patented technology. Greatbatch is committed to challenging willful and deliberate patent infringement and to taking all steps necessary to ensure that our intellectual property is protected, said Thomas J. Hook, Greatbatch president & CEO. "I want to express my sincere appreciation for the time and careful attention the Court and the jury gave this important case."

During trial, Greatbatch presented evidence that certain AVX products infringed claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 5,905,627 and 5,333,095. In advance of trial, the Court determined that the jury should also include damages for infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,888,715.

In awarding Greatbatch $37.5 million in damages, the jury also confirmed the validity of Greatbatchs asserted patents, as well as two other Greatbatch patents that AVX had challenged.

Additional information about the case  Greatbatch Ltd. v. AVX Corporation and AVX Filters Corporation, Civil Action No. 13-cv-723-LPS  can be obtained from publicly available court records. Greatbatch was represented in this case by Harris Beach PLLC.

About Greatbatch, Inc.

Greatbatch, Inc. (NYSE:GB) is one of the largest medical device outsource (MDO) manufacturers in the world serving the cardiac, neuromodulation, orthopaedics, vascular, advanced surgical and portable medical markets. The company provides innovative, high quality medical technologies that enhance the lives of patients worldwide. In addition, it develops batteries for high-end niche applications in energy, military, and environmental markets. The companys brands include Greatbatch Medical, Lake Region Medical and Electrochem. Additional information is available at www.greatbatch.com.

In October 2015, Greatbatch, Inc. completed its acquisition of Lake Region Medical, with the combined company expected to be renamed Integer Holdings Corporation later this year (subject to shareholder approval).
NEW YORK, Jan. 26, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Guggenheim Investments, the global asset management and investment advisory business of Guggenheim Partners, today announced the successfully completed merger of Guggenheim Russell 1000 Equal Weight ETF (EWRI) into Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP).



In connection with the merger, shareholders of EWRI will receive 0.61652528 shares of RSP for each share of EWRI held, plus a cash amount to be determined. Any fractional shares that result will be paid in cash. This may cause some shareholders to realize gains or losses, which could result in a taxable event.*

For more information, please visit http://www.guggenheiminvestments.com/etf or call 888.WHY.ETFs to speak to a representative.

About Guggenheim Investments

Guggenheim Investments is the global asset management and investment advisory division of Guggenheim Partners, with $198 billion1 in assets across fixed income, equity, and alternative strategies. We focus on the return and risk needs of insurance companies, corporate and public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and foundations, consultants, wealth managers, and high-net-worth investors. Our 275+ investment professionals perform rigorous research to understand market trends and identify undervalued opportunities in areas that are often complex and underfollowed. This approach to investment management has enabled us to deliver innovative strategies providing diversification and attractive long-term results.

*Contact a professional tax advisor about any potential tax implications from this event.

1 Guggenheim Investments total asset figure is as of 12.31.2015. The assets include leverage of $11.976bn for assets under management and $0.487bn for assets for which we provide administrative services. Guggenheim Investments represents the following affiliated investment management businesses: Guggenheim Partners Investment Management, LLC, Security Investors, LLC, Guggenheim Funds Investment Advisors, LLC, Guggenheim Funds Distributors, LLC, Guggenheim Real Estate, LLC, Transparent Value Advisors, LLC, GS GAMMA Advisors, LLC, Guggenheim Partners Europe Limited and Guggenheim Partners India Management.

Read a funds prospectus and summary prospectus (if available) carefully before investing. It contains the funds investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses and other information, which should be considered carefully before investing. Obtain a prospectus and summary prospectus (if available) at www.guggenheiminvestments.com or call 800.820.0888.

The referenced fund is distributed by Guggenheim Funds Distributors, LLC. Guggenheim Investments represents the investment management businesses of Guggenheim Partners, LLC (Guggenheim), which includes Guggenheim Funds Investment Advisors, LLC ("GFIA"), the investment advisor to the referenced fund. Guggenheim Funds Distributors, LLC is affiliated with Guggenheim and GFIA.

NOT FDIC INSURED  NOT BANK GUARANTEED  MAY LOSE VALUE

Member FINRA/SIPC
DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Jan. 26, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mister Goody, Inc. (OTC Pink: MSGO) announces that Joel Arberman tendered his resignation as Director and all officer positions effective January 25, 2016 and that Holli Arberman has been elected Director and CEO.



About Mister Goody, Inc. (OTC Pink: MSGO)

Mister Goody provides management consulting services to its partially owned subsidiary The Naked Edge, LLC. Naked Edge manufactures Veggie Gos, an organic fruit and vegetable snack currently sold in more than two thousand retail locations in the United States and Canada. As of January 25, 2016, Mister Goody, Inc. has 60,823,334 common shares outstanding.

Safe Harbor Statement

The information posted in this release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by use of the words "may," "will," "should," "plans," "explores," "expects," "anticipates," "continues," "estimates," "projects," "intends," and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic and business conditions, effects of continued geopolitical unrest and regional conflicts, competition, changes in methods of marketing, delays in manufacturing or distribution, changes in customer order patterns, changes in customer offering mix, and various other factors beyond the company's control.
PARIS, Jan. 26, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ESI Group , pioneer and world-leading solution provider in Virtual Prototyping for manufacturing industries, announces the latest release of its flagship software Virtual Performance Solution. This newest version provides industry leaders with new applications for water flow simulation, enhanced performances for the full NVH chain, and improved CAE process efficiency for virtual testing. Using a single core model to run simulations across multiple domains, engineering teams from various departments and from different geographical sites can collaborate efficiently towards the creation of a full virtual prototype. This virtual prototype is in turn used to predict the future behavior of industrial parts or products, in all domains of performance. Used by most automotive OEMs and their suppliers, Virtual Performance Solution also supports industry sectors ranging from aerospace to energy, heavy machinery, electronics, and consumer goods.

Photo courtesy of Dirisolar.

Mr Eisei Higuchi, Chief Engineer, HONDA R&D Co. Ltd, states: "HONDA R&D has been using ESI's Virtual Performance Solution for over 20 years. Today, we are leveraging the capacities of Virtual Performance Solution's single-core model on a full car for our latest vehicle platform development. The consistent chaining of virtual manufacturing results and virtual performance - not only for crash and safety domains but also for NVH and durability - is a definite technological breakthrough. Virtual Performance Solution enables us to ensure the right levels of product performance for lightweight design, and to face challenges related to evolving regulations." Relative to the newest features added to Virtual Performance Solution, Mr. Higuchi continues: "We look forward to implementing ESI's advanced water management solutions and to benefiting from the latest enhancements of Virtual Performance Solution, especially regarding NVH."

ESI's Virtual Performance Solution 2015 delivers new functionalities that extend virtual testing capabilities across multiple domains, while improving Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) process efficiency. For instance, the improved High Performance Computing efficiency for the full NVH (Noise, Vibration & Harshness) chain enables users to investigate larger NVH models in more details, including the complete car trim interior.

Additionally, ESI's Virtual Performance Solution includes features relative to modular input, to allow CAE teams to organize models in a more flexible way. By supporting increased model granularity, the modular input function is better adapted to end-to-end Virtual Prototyping processes, allowing engineers to refine models as they advance along the product development phase.

Furthermore, new improvements for chaining manufacturing results with performance testing empower industrial manufacturers, from early on in the product design stages, to predict the impact of manufacturing effects onto product performance.

Image : Water drain around rear mirrors, as simulated using the new Water Flow simulation capabilities,

in ESI Virtual Performance Solution. Image : Tank sloshing, modeled using ESI Virtual Performance Solution.

Thanks to the new Water Flow simulation capabilities in VPS, automotive manufacturers can now predict how water is drained around different parts of the car. Indeed, Virtual Performance Solution 2015 enables the virtual testing of water flows on sealing, closure and car body, in order to improve seal design and thus prevent water leakages. By coupling this new capability with crash simulation, automotive manufacturers can also anticipate tank sloshing effects.

For more information about ESI Virtual Performance Solution, please visit www.esi-group.com/VPS

Join ESI's customer portal myESI to get continuously updated product information, tips & tricks, view the online training schedule and access selected software downloads: https://myesi.esi-group.com

For more ESI news, visit: www.esi-group.com/press

ESI Group - Media Relations

Celine Gallerne

Celine.Gallerne@esi-group.com

+33 1 41 73 58 46

For additional information, please feel free to contact our international communications team:

About ESI Group

ESI is a world-leading provider of Virtual Prototyping software and services with a strong foundation in the physics of materials and Virtual Manufacturing.

Founded over 40 years ago, ESI has developed a unique proficiency in helping industrial manufacturers replace physical prototypes by virtually replicating the fabrication, assembly and testing of products in different environments. Virtual Prototyping enables ESI's clients to evaluate the performance of their product and the consequences of its manufacturing history, under normal or accidental conditions. By benefiting from this information early in the process, enterprises know whether a product can be built, and whether it will meet its performance and certification objectives, before any physical prototype is built. To enable customer innovation, ESI's solutions integrate the latest technologies in high performance computing and immersive Virtual Reality, allowing companies to bring products to life before they even exist.



Today, ESI's customer base spans nearly every industry sector. The company employs about 1000 high-level specialists worldwide to address the needs of customers in more than 40 countries. For further information, visit www.esi-group.com

Connect with ESI on

News Release in PDF http://hugin.info/156812/R/1981460/725962.pdf

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PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 26, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via PRWEB - The University of Pennsylvania announced that student team Fermento won the $10,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 Y-Prize Competition, which includes rights to commercialize their application of Penn-owned biomedical engineering technology. The prize was awarded on the University of Pennsylvania's campus at the fourth annual Y-Prize Grand Finale on January 25, 2016.

The winning proposal would speed up the fermentation process in beer production by up to 9 times while maintaining alcohol quality and composition at an industrial scale, leading to substantial cost reductions. The Fermento team, consisting of Alexander David, Shashwata Narain, and Siddharth Shah, students in the Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, selected microfluidic fabrication technology developed by Dr. David Issadore's lab as the basis for a technological solution to this problem.

The team proposes using the microfluidics technology to accelerate the rate at which yeast converts sugar to alcohol by 70%, accomplished by increasing the surface area of liquid sugars exposed to the yeast. This process typically takes up to three weeks in a standard batch reactor setting, making it the longest step in the $520 billion global industry's production process.

This is not the first entrepreneurial venture for team members Siddharth Shah and Shashwata Narain. The former is the founder and CEO of two startups, in Dubai and in India, in the financial services and ecommerce industries respectively, and the latter has worked in product development at a logistics technology startup in India. They have also entered their winning idea in the Wharton Business Plan Competition. Their advisors include executives at MillerCoors, Anheuser Busch InBev, Biocon India, and Heineken.

Fermento went head-to-head against two other teams at the Grand Finale with ten-minute presentations followed by questions from a panel of judges. The panel consisted of biotechnology experts and venture capitalists who evaluated the market potential and technical feasibility of each pitch.

Co-sponsored by Penn Engineering, the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Wharton Entrepreneurship, and Penn Center for Innovation, the Y-Prize is a cross-disciplinary competition in which student teams propose innovative commercial applications for technology invented by University of Pennsylvania researchers. In its fourth year, the focal technology was biomedical engineering technology developed by researchers at The Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory, the Penn Center for Neuroengineering & Therapeutics, and the Issadore Lab. Current Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar co-founded the competition in 2012 with David Hsu, Richard A. Sapp Professor at the Wharton School, and Mark Yim, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics.

This article was originally distributed on PRWeb. For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/01/prweb13184430.htm
CHICAGO, Jan. 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The chapter of Phi Alpha Delta (PAD) Law Fraternity at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago recently was named among the top law school fraternities in the nation.

John Marshall's chapter was ranked third in the country by its peers at other law schools at PAD's national conference. Phi Alpha Delta is a fraternity that encourages professional integrity and service to the community through interaction between law students and members of the bar and bench.

"I am very proud of how hard the Executive Board worked last year," said John Marshall PAD President Joseph Stacho. "Without their dedication and commitment, we would not have had such a successful year."

James Nowak, the treasurer of John Marshall's Lincoln PAD chapter, was awarded the David A. Benamy Grant Award for young law school alumni. He was one of just 20 in the country to receive the award. Nowak also received second place for the Dalphine MacMillan Outstanding Treasurer Award, honoring the country's best fraternity treasurer.

PAD is one of more than 50 student organizations available to law students at The John Marshall Law School.

About The John Marshall Law School

The John Marshall Law School, founded in 1899, is an independent law school located in the heart of Chicago's legal, financial and commercial districts. The 2016 U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Graduate Schools ranks John Marshall's Lawyering Skills Program fifth, its Trial Advocacy Program 16th and its Intellectual Property Law Program 17th in the nation. Since its inception, John Marshall has been a pioneer in legal education and has been guided by a tradition of diversity, innovation, access and opportunity.

For more information, contact Christine Kraly at 312-427-2737 ext. 171 or ckraly@jmls.edu.
The Gorilla Radio archive can be found at: www.Gorilla-Radio.com. G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in State and Corporate media. Gorilla Radio airs live Thursdays between 11-12 noon Pacific Time. Airing in Victoria at 101.9FM, and featured on the internet at: http://cfuv.ca and www.pacificfreepress.com. And check out Pacific Free Press on Twitter @Paciffreepress
Governor Andrew Cuomo raised eyebrows earlier this month when he proclaimed that "the future is mass transportation"only to announce that 30 subway stations would be shut down for months at a time in the name of new signage and lighting. Also on the docket, he proclaimed, is system-wide Wi-Fi by the end of the year, cellphone service in 2017, and hundreds of USB charging stations on subway cars.

"The governor's speech had some substantive stuff and some stuff that's kind of silly, and none of it's funded," said Nick Sifuentes of the Riders Alliance. "Whether it's cosmetic or substantive, there's just no money."

Sifuentes was among a group of transit advocatesfrom the Straphangers Campaign and Tri-State Transportation Campaign in addition to the Riders Alliancewho gathered outside the Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday to critique the language of Governor Cuomo's 2016-17 budget proposal. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio announced in October that they had finally come to an agreement on funding for the 2015-2019 MTA capital plan$2.5 billion from the City, and $8.3 billion from the State. The Governor's budget reiterates this commitment, but without a specific timeframe for the payoutan omission advocates deem crucial. From the budget proposal [emphasis ours]:

The additional funds provided by the state... shall be scheduled and made available to pay for the costs of the capital program after MTA capital resources planned for the Capital Program, not including additional city and state funds, have been exhausted, or when MTA capital resources planned for the capital plan are not available.

From the advocates' perspective, the language in Cuomo's budget is too vague for comfort. "It's basically governance by press release," Sifuentes said. "Cuomo basically wrote a big IOU and the IOU has no date on it."

Reached for comment, both the Governor's office and the MTA confirmed that the budget proposalyet to be approved by the State legislaturedoesn't include a set date for when funds would be allocated. However, both offices insisted that the proposal is "iron-clad" in its eventual funding commitment.

Jamison Dague, a researcher for the Citizens Budget Commission, said this afternoon that there's truth to both sides of the argument. On the one hand, the budget's language does technically back up Cuomo's funding commitment. On the other hand, "It does punt on how and when.... The State sort of made themselves a funder of last resort."

"The Governor has not included anything about where the money will come from," Dague added. "They could require the MTA to borrow from them. The concern is that the State wouldn't support [the MTA's] debt in the future." In other words, the current language doesn't protect the MTA from future debt if the State decides to loan its $8.3 billion, rather than grant it.

According to the MTA, State funding will be "necessary"i.e. the $8.3 billion will become availableas soon as the agency has committed the remainder of its 2010-2014 Capital Plan. This could take a while, although the agency did not confirm how long exactly. The process of allocating MTA capital funds is slow by nature, since the agency has to decide what projects to prioritize before tackling the logistics of getting shovels into the dirt. In June, a report from the Independent Budget Office revealed that about $10 billion of the MTA's previous plan was still available for allocation.

This, of course, does not mean that the MTA is sitting around burning money. MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg said in June that, without full Capital Plan funding, "the MTA will be forced to make difficult choices between key priorities such as buying new subway cars, rail cars and buses, replacing tracks and rebuilding switches, installing more countdown clocks and extending the Second Avenue Subway into East Harlem."
Taxpayers are shelling out nearly $3 million after a scooter-riding police officer slammed into a pedestrian and sent him flyingand then threw him in jail with a broken neck. According to Jose Flores's lawyer, Steven Goldstein, the case was scheduled to go to trial yesterday, but lawyers reached the $2.9 million settlement on January 21st.

"I wasn't surprised they eventually settled it," Goldstein said when reached by phone today. "It's a terrible case. It was the worst-slash-best case I've ever had. The city just did everything they possibly could to make this a great case. Everything they could have possibly done to make the case better and better, they did."

The crash occurred on August 7th, 2012, when Flores was crossing the street near the intersection of Liberty Avenue and Barbey Street in Cypress Hills. As surveillance video shows, the great-grandfather looked both ways before continuing across the street, but then-police officer Thomas Hopper ran him over while speeding by on a motor scooter, sending Flores spinning in the air.

According to Goldstein, Hopper then proceeded to charge him with endangering the life of a police officer, which is a misdemeanor. He told Sergeant Colleen Price that Flores had crossed between two parked cars and appeared from out of nowhere, and that he had no way to avoid the collision. But the video shows Flores crossing the street in plain view.

Flores was transported to the nearby Brookdale Hospital, where his lawyer says he was handcuffed to the bed in the emergency room and discharged shortly after being admitted, despite complaining of pain in his neck. The lawsuit alleges that Price and Hopper encouraged the hospital to discharge him without even performing an X-ray.

Upon his discharge, Flores was arrested on an open warrant for an open container summons from 2009 and thrown in jail. He remained there for 36 hours while complaining of severe pain in his neck. According to Goldstein, Flores said that while he was in jail, the other inmates gave him their sandwiches so that he could make a pillow for his neck.

After over 36 hours, a judge dismissed the warrant and suggested that Flores seek medical attention. He immediately went to Jamaica Hospital in Queens, where he was diagnosed with two fractured vertebrae in his neck. He remained in the hospital for four months in a halo brace; another four months after that, he had major surgery performed on his neck.

Among many things, the lawsuit accuses Hopper and Price of falsifying facts on the police report to absolve Hopper of any liability in the collision; putting pressure on Brookdale Hospital to release him prematurely; and charging Flores with a jaywalking violation, despite the fact that he was not jaywalking. Goldstein eventually took the jaywalking case to trial, and Flores was acquitted.

Flores is now 72, and his injuries persist to this day, his lawyer said. And Flores's wife, who had been diagnosed with dementia a month before he was struck in 2012, was so worried that her husband would be put in jail for endangering a police officer that she suffered a heart attack three months later and died.

Goldstein added that Hopper was suspended from the police force in 2009 for pulling a gun on another officer.

A spokesperson for the city's law department declined to comment beyond saying that the [s]ettlement was in the citys best interest.
It's hard to forget the story of Niall Rice, a 33-year-old consultant from England who was living in East Williamsburg when he was duped into paying two Midtown psychics a total of $718K in a desperate attempt to fix his life and find his soulmate. One of those psychics was Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, who was found guilty of grand larceny charges last May. The Times reports she was released from jail after only eight months this week thanks to a plea dealand she hasn't been ordered to pay restitution to the man who she bilked out of $550K.

To catch you up: a depressed Rice first visited a Delancey Street psychic named Brandy, and started paying her money in the vain hope she could reunite him with the woman he loved, whom he had met and fallen for during rehab in Arizona.

After paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars, he turned to Delmaro in 2013; she started asking for large payments so she could talk to the spirits on his behalf. When she said she needed diamonds to protect his energy, he paid $40,064 for a ring from Tiffanys. Things escalated: she asked for money for special crystals, a fake funeral ritual, a time machine and an 80-mile bridge made of gold (costing $80,000).

Even after Rice discovered that Michelle had died in February 2014, the payments kept coming. Delmaro swore she could reincarnate Michelle inside another woman who he would meet in California. The man lost his apartment, sold his car, and went into debt paying her.

Delmaro eventually admitted to the fraud: "Im very sorry for what happened," she told a judge in court. The Times said that Rice is furious over her lenient sentence, writing a victim-impact statement railing against the plea deal:

Think of a person, Mr. Rice wrote, going through difficult times. Perhaps its a death in the family, addiction, they could have just been let go from their job, even an illness or physical injury. Each one of those people you are thinking of has the potential to be a future victim of this crime.

It seems there were two main reasons Rice got the plea deal: it was hard to find other victims to testify ("For those that do, like myself, they face instant criticism, are judged as a sucker  an idiot," Rice said of fellow victims), and Rice and Delmaro had sex once:

On one occasion, Mr. Rice and Ms. Delmaro had sex, Mr. Rice and Ms. Delmaros lawyer, Jeffrey Cylkowski, have both said. The change in their relationship could have made the payouts look like gifts, potentially hurting his credibility as a witness in the case. Delmaro will have profited $71,125 a month, tax free, for each month she was required to spend in jail, Mr. Rice wrote. His statement was critical of the prosecutor in the case for not seeking out other victims by obtaining a search warrant for Ms. Delmaros cellphone. He also submitted accounts of a video that purports to show Ms. Delmaros companion, Bobby Evans, boasting that he was a millionaire and that, apparently using her middle name, Kelly did it.

As a final indignity, Rice's statement was not read outloud in the court. Delmaro, who has three children, will serve four years of probation.

As we've noted before: fortune tellers and "psychics" are garbage entertainers who prey on the weakness of the gullible and vulnerable for financial gainthis has proven true again and again and again and again and again and again. It's all fun and games until someone who is damaged (in some sense) loses their life savings.

As one convicted fortune teller put it: If they are taking your money, they are not for real."
[UPDATE BELOW] Two women were shot earlier today in Far Rockaway, and one died from her injuries, police said. The shooter is still at large.

Officers responded to a 911 call at around 11 a.m. to 333 Beach 32nd Street, where they found a 51-year-old woman in the lobby with a gunshot wound to the hand and a 36-year-old woman in an apartment with a gunshot wound to her torso. The former was transported to St. John's University Hospital, and the latter was pronounced dead at the scene.

The shooting may have been the result of a domestic dispute, sources told NBC 4 New York, which is also reporting that the gunman is thought to have been the 36-year-old woman's boyfriend.

According to the Daily News, witnesses at the scene said that the 51-year-old woman also lives in the building, and that she and her son were arguing with the 29-year-old gunman before he shot her in the wrist.

"Somebody killed my daughter," the tabloid quoted a woman at the scene shouting. "Why? Why did he kill my baby?"

Police have not yet identified the deceased victim. Officers are still searching for the gunman.

UPDATE: Police have identified the shooter as 29-year-old Tyquan Long. They're asking anyone with information to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS.
More than 19,000 NYPD officers are now equipped with Sabre 5.0, a pepper spray thats three times more concentrated than the spray the department has long used.

"A more effective pepper spray can help reduce the amount of force needed to gain control of a suspect or emotionally disturbed person," NYPD Deputy Chief Edward Mullen told the News. According to the tabloid, the NYPD has argued that the less-potent spray had proved "unreliable" in achieving its guidebook-mandated purpose: to "subdue" an individual resisting arrest, or as self defense against an emotionally disturbed individual.

Sabre 5.0, with its concentration of .67%, is less concentrated than the strongest spray on the market, which clocks in at 1.33% and is the spray of choice in Boston and Suffolk County.

There have been several incidents in recent years of alleged and court-ruled excessive force involving pepper spray. Last July, three Occupy Wall Street protesters won $175,000 from the city after being pepper sprayed by Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna back in 2011, apparently without provocation. Ultimately, Officer Bologna was not prosecuted.

A month later, fellow OWSer Imani Brown won the right to sue the NYPD for excessive forcein 2011, two officers arrested and pepper sprayed her outside of a downtown Starbucks where she was hoping to use the bathroom. And last October, a cop used pepper spray and what appeared to be a chokehold on a skateboarder in Columbus Circle. According to the NYPD, Yibin Mu, 22, ignored an order to sit still while an officer filed a report for skateboarding in an unauthorized area. Mu maintained that the forceful arrest came "without warning."

According to the NYPD, pepper spray was used 284 times in arrest situations last year, down from 337 in 2014. In 2015, 10 out of 100 forceful arrest complaints involving pepper spray fielded by the Civilian Complaint Review Board were substantiated.
News

84 per cent of Indians think global warming is happening: Survey

The survey also revealed that 54 per cent of Indians either know just a little about global warming or have never heard of it while 9 per cent stated...
Helena can expect continued moderate economic growth in 2016, thanks largely to a stable, if unremarkable, rebound in state and local government spending.

That's according to Paul Polzin, director emeritus at the University of Montana's Bureau of Business and Economic Research and one of 10 speakers at the bureau's annual economic outlook seminar in Helena on Tuesday.

Polzin, who gave a presentation on Lewis and Clark County's economic forecast, said state worker wage freezes and a general slowdown in public sector growth had muffled the county's government-driven economic engine over the past three years.

He predicts that will change over the next two years, a period he said should see the county keep pace with a 2 to 3 percent economic expansion projected across Montana.

Polzin said the public sector accounts for around 70 percent of Helena's workforce, meaning the city will continue to go only about as far as the government takes it.

But he mentioned one notable exception: Boeing Helena, the airplane part maker that helped the manufacturing sector account for 5 percent of the countys economic base over the past two years.

The resources Boeing was able to bring to that company have resulted in significant increases in employment, Polzin said. Thats really a bright point for manufacturing here in Lewis and Clark County.

Helena Chamber of Commerce President Cathy Burwell, another speaker at Tuesday's seminar, honed in on some of the more visible growth in and around Helena, including a bevy of new and under-construction apartment and condo complexes.

She also mentioned well over a dozen multimillion-dollar commercial and public sector building projects, touching on major expansions undertaken by Boeing, Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

Burwell said hotel occupancy and tourism revenue were both up in 2015, mirroring a recent 20 percent rise in Helena hotel rooms.

All in all, she said, things are looking up.

Chamber (of Commerce) requests for information remain very strong, Burwell said. We received over 2,000 requests for relocation information last year. We distributed almost 20,000 tourist packets via mail and 10,000 at the visitors centers.

Were busy.  We hope they move here and become workers.
High staff and student turnover and an uncertain future are some of the issues facing Central-Linc Elementary School.

These were a few of the topics touched on Tuesday at a Helena Public Schools Board of Trustees Work Session at the school, when staff and parents spoke of the schools successes and challenges.

The meeting started on an upbeat note with the schools new honors choir performing two songs under the direction of music teacher Abby Nyhof.

Central-Linc moved into its current building at 1325 Poplar St., shortly after Central School was suddenly closed in March 2013, following an engineering safety report.

The school's typical daily enrollment is about 257 students, according to principal John Stilson, which is on par with other years.

But since the move theres been a turnover of students, as well as staff, including two principals, four nurses, three physical education teachers, numerous paraprofessionals and two-thirds of the teachers.

That impacts a community and its tough, said Amy Casne-Fetz, a Central School teacher, who has been with the school eight years.

We believe in this school, she said, noting that she and five other teachers at Central have children attending the school.

The teachers and parents have created a series of events -- caroling, a movie night, an art walk, as well as math nights and reading nights -- to build community and create camaraderie.

One major barrier to building community is that many of the students, more than 100, dont live in Central Schools boundary.

In the classroom

Much of Tuesdays board work session focused on the school's academic progress.

The school implemented block scheduling to better focus on building core skills in math and reading, reported special education teacher Lonni Brooks.

It consists of a 90-minute block of instruction focusing on reading skills and 90 minutes on math.

While 64 percent of the students scored benchmark, or at grade level, in fall 2015 on the standardized STAR assessment test in both math and reading, 36 percent of the students need more intervention.

The block schedule provides 30 minutes for teaching the core subject, but then provides 30 additional minutes for those needing more work on skills and another 30 minutes for those who need to be pulled from class to work intensively on skills with specialists.

Those who are already at grade level use the extra time for enrichment and academically challenging activities, said Stilson.

According to school superintendent Kent Kultgen, Central Schools STAR scores were around the middle of the pack for the districts elementary schools.

Since the fall assessment, Centrals students are showing marked improvement, said Brooks.

For instance, approximately 8 percent of the fifth grade students required intensive interventions to work on reading skills in fall, and now 3 percent or fewer require that level of intervention, Brooks said. The rest have moved into a higher skill level.

This is a huge change from fall to winter, Brooks said of the academic progress, in an interview following the meeting.

Our ultimate goal is a years growth in a year of education, said Stilson, and were seeing that.

An additional challenge is that Central-Linc has a higher percentage of special education students, approximately 16 percent of the student body, compared to 8 to 10 percent for the school district.

Annalisa Luker, a speech and language pathologist, had board trustees try out a few of the aids she uses with students who need special accommodations to take tests. These include sound-muffling headphones, squishy putty for those who are nervous, compression vests for sensory-stressed students, a screen for those needing less visual distraction and a test block that has students focus on one test question at a time.

Stilson also reported on behavior problems: 209 students have had zero to one discipline referrals, while 10 students have had five or more referrals and 38 students fall in between with a few referrals.

Wanting a permanent home

Closing the meeting, several parents spoke out in support of the school and staff, but also asked for some action that would give the school a real home.

Kristin Bishop spoke of the teachers at Central who make so many accommodations to help the students. The stress, instability and uncertainty of our future are taking its toll, she said, adding that it prevents teachers from working at their full potential.

We are the little engine that could, said parent Darby Bramble, who spoke in support of staff, but pointed out concerns for safety with students coming and going between three buildings on the campus, and with an adjoining park thats open to the public.

Central parent Jennifer McKee told the board, youve heard a lot about how special our staff at Central is, and acknowledged how well theyve handled what to us has felt like a three-year disaster.

Central has been proud of its diversity, educating the poor and homeless and those with disabilities, she said. But we also feel acutely how very fragile we are.

"This community has talked so much the last three years, she said, and they are probably great conversations. But they have been extremely expensive to us and we would like to talk about what could happen right now. ... It doesnt have to be an airy-fairy bond. ...What can we do now to keep us going strong?

Im asking for some practical, real solution. Could we move into Ray Bjork?," she asked.

If Central families had known they would be three plus years at the Poplar Street location, they might have requested the Ray Bjork Learning Center instead, she said. We commit to working with you...and we will partner with you.

Kultgen responded that the district has no other location for placing 260 students at this time. Even if the district split up the students, they wouldnt fit at the existing schools, nor would modular classrooms work.

In other matters, the board also approved first reading of the 2016-17 academic calendar. It calls for a winter break from Dec. 23 to Jan. 2, which is shorter than usual because Christmas and New Years Day fall on weekends. Final approval of the calendar is slated for the Feb. 9 school board meeting.
Karen Frances Parker Hatch died January 22nd from head injuries suffered in a fall on the ice on January 14th. She was born on January 9, 1935 to Edna Maughan Parker and Fred Cooper Parker at home on the ranch near Hall, Montana, the 7th of eight children.

She attended the two room school in Hall, graduating from the 8th grade in 1948, and then attended Drummond High School, graduating in 1952. She received a B.S Degree in English education from Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, in 1956, and taught high school English in Oakdale, California, and Ely, Nevada until 1960 when she returned to BYU to pursue an M.A. Degree in English which she received in 1962. She then taught English at BYU until 1968.

In the summer of 1964 she attended the University of London, in London, England, for a six week course in 20th Century English Literature, and received a certificate of completion in August 1964. While in London she attended a play at which Queen Elizabeth II was also present.

For the academic year 1967-68 she studied at UCLA at Los Angeles, California, and successfully completed a specialized course of post graduate studies in teaching English as a second language.

On September 13, 1968, Karen married Carl A. Hatch in the Logan Utah Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and lived in Helena, Montana since then. For the next 30 years she focused on raising their six children, which she considered her most important work. Karen was an avid reader, and enjoyed traveling, opera, and classical and jazz music, but was always looking for an adventure whether it was riding in a hot air balloon in Albuquerque, on camels in China and Egypt, on elephants in Thailand and Myanmar, or snorkeling in the Caribbean at Cancun, Mexico, to celebrate her 80th birthday. However, she found homemaking, marriage and being a mother and grandmother the most fulfilling of all her life experiences. She loved her fifteen grandchildren and used her sewing skills to make each a unique blanket.

When her children were grown she worked for the Federal Government and the State of Montana in gathering labor and census information.

She and her husband taught English at Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China for the academic years 2003 and 2004. From 2006  2008 she and her husband were called by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to serve a humanitarian mission in the Thailand Bangkok Mission as country directors of LDS Charities in Myanmar, living in Yangon. During this mission she was involved in providing clean water to villages, education and medical institutions; in furnishing wheelchairs and prosthetics to the disabled; in having specialists from the United States, Japan, and other countries, train Myanmar doctors, nurses and other medical professionals neo-natal resuscitation; and in teaching English to governmental officials, young adults pursuing advanced education and hotel service employees.

Her devoted, lifelong membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided her opportunities to serve in many callings: teacher, choir director, Young Womens President, Primary President and Relief Society President. Since October 2001 to the present she has served as an ordinance worker in the Billings Montana Temple. She followed the invitation of Moroni, the last of the Book of Mormon prophets, who wrote: Come unto Christ, and be perfected in Him.

Karen is survived by her husband, Carl, and their six children and fifteen grandchildren: Emily and James Lynn (Brendan, Connor, Ian and Erin) of Lethbridge, Alberta; Maureen Hatch of West Jordan, Utah; Jonathan and Tara Hatch (Caleb, Alyssa and Natalie) of Auburn, Washington; Jennifer and Christopher Childers (Ansel, Jonas, Owen and Sadie) of Richland, Washington; Lucy and Jay Johnson (Seth, Samuel, Henry and Daniel) of Durango, Colorado; and Sarah Hatch of West Jordan, Utah.

The family will receive friends from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Friday, January 29th at Anderson Stevenson Wilke Funeral Home, 3750 N. Montana Avenue. They will also receive friends at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1260 Otter Road on Saturday, January 30th beginning at 9:00 a.m. with a funeral service to be held at 10:00 a.m. A funeral reception will follow in the cultural hall of the church. Interment and dedication of the grave will be in the Sheridan Cemetery at Sheridan, Montana at 3:00 p.m. Please visit aswfuneralhome.com to offer the family a condolence or to share a memory of Karen.
Orrin E. Skunes passed away at St. Peters Hospital on January 23, 2016. Orrin was born on Halloween 1930 to Edwin and Tillie Moen Skunes in Warren, Minnesota. He attended Burnside Country grade school and Warren High School. During high school Orrin and his brothers worked at their mothers Drive Inn restaurant where he met his future wife Emily Kemp.

After graduating from high school, Orrin joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea where he was wounded in battle. Upon receiving an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, Orrin returned to Minnesota where he married Emily Kemp on September 21, 1953. They resided in Argyle, Minnesota where he owned the Hardware store. In February 1955 his only child Cynthia was born. In the summer of 1963, his hardware store was severely damaged by fire. Without sufficient insurance to rebuild, Orrin and his family relocated to Helena, Montana where he worked as a Manager at Power Townsend until 1972. Orrin then worked for Johnson Builders for several years before opening his own construction company Skunes Construction, also known as Old Farts Construction. During his construction years, he built numerous duplexes, fourplexes, and homes in Helena and East Helena area.

Orrin and Emily spent countless hours with friends and family at their cabin on Canyon Ferry Lake. Upon his retirement from construction, Orrin and Emily took special pleasure in traveling the world together. But to avoid Emilys honey-do list when they were at home, Orrin purchased and renovated homes throughout the area. Having the cabin restricted their travel, so they sold it in the early 1990s, and began spending winters in Arizona, traveling back to Helena during Christmas to spend the holidays with the family and then returning back to Arizona until around April.

Orrins greatest pride in life was his family which included his special grandchildren and his greats as he called his four great grandchildren.

Orrin is preceded in death by his wife Emily, Parents Edwin and Tillie, sister Fern and brothers Harold and Darrell.

Orrin is survived by a daughter, Cindy (Jerry) Steinmetz; two grandchildren, Amber (Ty) Lamping and their children, daughters, Ashlyn and Madilyn and son, Connor; Josh (Amy) Steinmetz and their son, Dylan; a brother Lee (Maxine) Skunes, two sister in laws and numerous nieces and nephews.

Orrin often said that Minnesota was a great place to be from, but Helena was truly his home. His love for God, family and the outdoors will never be forgotten.

The family would like to extend a special thank you to the staff of the St. Peters medical and surgical floors for the wonderful care and compassion they provided to Orrin and his family during his final month.

Per Orrins request only graveside services will be held. Burial will take place at Fort Harrison Montana State Veterans Cemetery on Friday January 29th at 11:00 a.m. with full military honors. All friends and family are welcome. Reception will be held following interment at Our Redeemers Lutheran church, 3580 N. Benton Ave., Helena.
The Helena City Commission gave final approval this week to the creation of a new district that will allow tax revenue from construction and property improvements to go to infrastructure projects in the area.

Approval of the ordinance creating the Railroad Urban Renewal District also included an urban renewal plan and the provision to use property tax revenue greater than what is currently collected to improve the district.

The future increase in property taxes produced in the district can be spent only in the district, it was noted during the city commission meeting.

The district is generally bordered by Last Chance Gulch on the west and Interstate 15 on the east. Its northern boundary includes Phoenix Avenue, and Cooke and Poplar streets.

Its southern boundary is more irregular and includes Boulder Avenue before carving its way south and west.

Extending through the center of the district is the Montana Rail Link tracks.

The Montana Department of Revenue will now certify that all of the required steps were taken by the city, said Sharon Haugen, the citys community development director.

The state will also establish what the district is generating now in property taxes, which will allow the city to set aside future tax collections in excess of that threshold for projects in the district.

While the taxable value of properties across Helena has risen almost 50 percent in the last 10 years, an August report by the WGM Group, which is assisting the city in the districts creation, noted more than a third of the properties within the district lost value in that time while others increased in value at a far slower rate than other properties outside of the district.

Creation of a district does not increase anyones property taxes, city officials have said.

What is intended to happen is that reinvesting in infrastructure such as streets, sidewalks, street lights, water and sewer mains will improve property values and make the area a more desirable place to open a new business or expand an existing business.

Concern has been voiced previously that as property values in the district rise with accompanying infrastructure improvements, so will property tax bills.

The new tax revenue created by new and expanding businesses could also help fund environmental cleanups or assist a business owner who wants to remove a dilapidated building and replace it with new construction.

An urban renewal district has a 15 year life, although it can be renewed to extend it 25 years, which would result in its being in place for 40 years, Haugen said.

Districts are typically extended to repay bonds sold to finance improvements in a district, she explained.

However, city officials have said they don't expect bonds to be sold to finance improvements within the districts first five years to allow the district to better gauge how much tax revenue it would have to repay bonds.

Among those who commented during the commissions public hearing Monday on the urban renewal district were those who said the notice that was mailed to them by the city left them uncertain what would happen to their homes if the district was created.

Another concern was that the notice was the first that residents heard of the citys plans for the creation of a district.

Fears of a zone change for areas currently zoned for residential use were also expressed.

Bonnie Lorang, president of the Midtowne & Sixth Ward Neighborhood Association, expressed the organizations support as the district includes the neighborhood.

A district will not only help the neighborhood but will have a ripple effect for other areas of the city, she said.

The commission was also encouraged to create the district as it represents a symbolic effort to say it wants to be involved and represented the tipping point for opportunity, said another speaker.

Also in favor of the district was a woman who said she walks and was pleased by the possibility of sidewalks being installed through the tax increment financing provision of the district.

Haugen, questioned by Commissioner Andres Haladay, addressed concerns and said no one would be required to tear down structures or improve their properties as a result of the district.

There is nothing in the proposal for a district that speaks to rezoning or sets it in motion, Haugen said.

Commissioner Dan Ellison asked city staff and the consultants hired to help with the creation of the district to respond to those who had contacted the city with concerns and questions about the district.

The urban renewal plan for the district can be found online at www.helenamt.gov/cd/planning/current-projects/proposed-railroad-tax-increment-finance-district.html.
BURNS, Ore.  One militant is dead and the top leaders of the refuge occupation  including Ryan W. Payne of Anaconda  are in police custody after law enforcement officials stopped vehicles Tuesday afternoon about 15 miles north of Burns.

Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nevada, suffered a minor gunshot wound and was taken into custody in a highway stop conducted by the FBI and the Oregon State Police.

Also arrested were his brother, Ammon Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho, and Payne, 32, Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada, and Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah. They were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony.

The identity of the person killed in the shootout was not released by authorities, but the daughter of Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, 55, of Arizona, said her father was to be part of the entourage going to John Day.

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said that Ammon Bundy called his wife Lisa Bundy from the back of a police car on Tuesday night.

Fiore, a vocal supporter of the Bundy family, said that Ammon Bundy told his wife that Finicum was cooperating with police and had put his hands up. Then, Fiore said, Bundy told his wife that he watched police shoot Finicum three times. She said that Ammon Bundy also said Finicum was on the ground when he was shot.

In Burns, Oregon State Police also arrested Joseph D. O'Shaughnessy, 45, Cottonwood, Arizona. He is known in militia circles as "Captain."

Several hours later, Jon Ritzheimer, 32, a key militant leader, surrendered to police on the conspiracy charge. He gained national fame for complaining on a video about the delivery of sex toys to the refuge in response to the occupiers' plea for supplies.

For more of this story, go to http://www.oregonlive.com/.
DECATUR  After deliberating for two hours, a jury of seven women and five men returned verdicts of guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder for Rickie Kendricks, with enhancements for using a firearm and killing a witness in a criminal case.

Kendricks, 28, showed no emotion as Associate Macon County Judge Thomas E. Little read aloud the verdicts at 5:10 p.m. Tuesday. Kendricks leaned forward with his arms on the defense table, flanked by his two attorneys.

The gallery, with four Kendricks supporters on one side and six members of the Macon County State's Attorney's Office on the other side, was silent as the judge read from the nine verdict sheets.

He will be sentenced to 45 years to life in prison at a hearing; the date of that hearing will be determined at a status hearing on March 4.

Kendricks shot to death 21-year-old Isaiah Wiley, a key witness against Kendricks associate Demarta Cunningham, the afternoon of Dec. 9, 2012, in a hail of 13 bullets from a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Cunningham shot to death two people in similar style eight months earlier and was awaiting trial when Wiley was killed. He was convicted by a jury for killing his cousin Freedom Cunningham over a drug debt and his cousin's wife, Central Cunningham, because she was a witness at the scene.

Demarta Cunningham, 31, who grew up with Kendricks in Detroit, is serving a life sentence in the Illinois Department of Corrections. Jail audio tapes between Demarta Cunningham and Kendricks, in which they used code to discuss Wiley's murder, were key elements in the trials of both defendants.

The key witness in the Kendricks case was a woman who was sitting on the porch of an abandoned house at 416 E. Waggoner St. while Wiley, her boyfriend, stood a few feet away.

During his closing argument, lead defense attorney Travis Strobach contended that this woman's testimony should not be believed, because she initially identified another specific individual as the shooter and later said she was certain it was a different man, also not Kendricks.

Strobach told the jurors that she was the only one who placed Kendricks at the crime scene and the only one who placed a gun in his hand. She reminded jurors that the woman testified that after the shooting incident she smoked marijuana regularly and experienced hallucinations.

After much testimony during the six-day trial showed that Jon Gotti Whittle, a heroin dealer associated with Demarta Cunningham, was with Kendricks the day of the Wiley murder, Strobach used his closing to advance the theory that Whittle was the shooter. Whittle, who is serving a 24-year prison sentence for being an armed habitual criminal, was arrested with the murder weapon in April 2013.

Whittle was not mentioned by the eyewitness as a possible suspect.

During her closing argument, Assistant State's Attorney Kate Kurtz said there was plenty of evidence that placed Kendricks at the crime scene, which exactly fits the testimony of Wiley's girlfriend.

Kurtz said that Strobach's idea that Whittle did it is not that different from the state's theory. She said they both were talking on the phone to Demarta Cunningham that day and were both at the scene.

But it was Kendricks who told Demarta Cunningham in a taped jail call It's all black shortly after Wiley was killed.

It's this defendant that's elated and proud and bragging about what he's done to Isaiah Wiley, Kurtz said.

She replayed audio tapes of the calls, in which Kendricks, talking in a code that speaks of building a house instead of killing the witness, said, I got a visual on that house yesterday.

Demarta Cunningham told him, You can build a house by yourself.

Kurtz said people don't build houses by themselves, and there was no evidence Kendricks did any construction work during that time.

This house (expletive) is the most important (expletive), Cunningham said.

It's the only thing I think about, is you in this crib, Kendricks told him, referring to the jail.

Kurtz said that before the murder occurred, He's got his eye focused on one thing and one thing only.

During the closing, Kurtz replayed the surveillance video from a nearby high-rise building, which shows a white car, believed to be to the one Kendricks was riding in, in front of the crime scene at the time of the shooting.

Kurtz reminded the jurors that after Kendricks was engaged in numerous jail calls in which he offered to help out Demarta Cunningham in many ways, including bringing him phone cards, he told a different story to a detective the day of his arrest.

Kurtz played the videotape of the interview, which took place the day of Kendricks' arrest, July 29, 2013.

After telling detective Barry Hitchens that he only talked to Demarta Cunningham a few times on the phone, Hitchens asked him if was doing anything for him while he was in jail.

Kendricks replied: I couldn't do nothing, adding that he couldn't even feed himself. How could I do something for him?

Kendricks, who has been held in jail without bond since his arrest July 29, 2013, will continue to be held without bond, pending transfer to the Illinois Department of Corrections.
The lack of a state budget, and subsequent lack of funding, has seeped into many lives in ways large and small.

In one of the larger ways, at least for those in the program, the Decatur School District suspended its Adult Education program last week.

Because of the state budget impasse, the program has not received necessary state funding. Rocki Wilkerson, executive director of the department, said the classes would not resume without funding.

The only class allowed to continue was a nurse assistant class that will end March 2. The announcement does not affect classes at Heartland Technical Academy, which is still enrolling new students.

Many of the adult students are taking the classes in order to better themselves. For example, as reported by Herald & Review reporter Valerie Wells, Robert Brown comes to class even though he works an overnight shift that end at 6 a.m. He is working on improving his reading skills and hopes to enroll in a nurse assistant class and eventually study to become a nurse practitioner.

Youre taking away from people who are trying to learn, he said. Brown said he was more than a little angry that the state government cant come up with a budget.

When Gov. Bruce Rauner gives his State of the State speech today, he would do well to mention people like Brown, who depend on programs that the state has traditionally funded.

But Rauner doesnt need to take all of the blame. At the base of the states budget problems are years of spending money the state simply doesnt have. Legislators and compliant governors adopted a spend now, pay later mode that has caught up with the state. The solution for many legislators, at least if history is any indicator, is to raise taxes on residents. That solution, however, has resulted in Illinois businesses and residents leaving the state in droves and taking good jobs with them.

Brown, and other adult education students, probably isnt concerned about the political intrigue surrounding the states budget. They simply want to live in a state where programs that they have come to rely on arent shut down in the middle of the year.

Thats one of the difficulties of the state budget impasse. Service providers simply cant predict when or if state funding will continue for programs. Cutting programs can be difficult, but it may be better than not knowing if state funding is going to continue.

The current situation isnt in any way fair to the adult education students, or the thousands of others that expect help from state services. Our political leaders in Springfield, on both sides of the aisle, need to understand that and move ahead to solve the states mounting list of problems.
SPRINGFIELD -- The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has issued proposed rules for the states first legal bobcat hunt in decades under a new law that took effect Jan. 1.

If adopted, the rules would establish a hunting season for the once-threatened species from Nov. 10 through Jan. 31, with breaks during firearm deer hunting season. Trapping bobcats would be allowed from Nov. 5 through Jan. 20 north of U.S. 36 and from Nov. 10 through Jan. 25 south of U.S. 36.

Hunting and trapping would be prohibited in the region north of U.S. 36 and east of U.S. 51.

Hunters and trappers would be required to get a $5 permit from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources before trying to take the cats. The department says it will issue a limited number each year on a first-come, first-served basis.

There would be a limit of one bobcat permit hunter or trapper per season, and there would be a $5 registration fee after each animal is captured.

The department has presented its proposal to the General Assemblys Joint Committee on Administrative Rules for review, and the public has the opportunity to comment on them until March 7. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also will review the rules to ensure that they comply with federal regulations.

The law allowing bobcat hunting in Illinois for the first time since 1972 was met with opposition from those who said the practice led to the species addition to the state list of threatened animals. It was removed from the list in 1999.

The Humane Society of the United States was one of the most vocal opponents.

State director Marc Ayers said the proposed rules dont allay any of the organizations concerns.

The rules would jeopardize a still recovering species by allowing the same methods that led to their demise in the first place, Ayers said.

Supporters and the Department of Natural Resources have said hunting and trapping will be carefully regulated to preserve the population.

Bob Dewey runs Deweys Hunt Club in Heyworth, which is in the area where bobcat hunting would still be prohibited. He said thats just fine with him.

Theres not enough here to really cause a concern, Dewey said.
SPRINGFIELD -- Social service agencies, union members, college students and others came to the capital city Tuesday, a day before Gov. Bruce Rauner is set to deliver his second State of the State address, to sound the alarm that Illinois is in a state of crisis.

The cause of that crisis, they say, is the first-term Republicans ongoing budget standoff with the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. Rauner has said hes open to discussing tax increases, but only after the legislators adopt parts of his turnaround agenda, which includes changes to the way legislative districts are drawn, term limits for lawmakers, and a property tax freeze paired with new limits on collective bargaining for local government workers.

The Responsible Budget Coalition, made up of more than 200 organizations from across the state, held a news conference at the Capitol to highlight some of the effects of the budget impasse.

Those include the loss of support services for homeless veterans in Decatur, a 25 percent reduction in hours for all staff at a Charleston rape crisis center, and cuts to staff, hours or programs at 75 percent of county health departments south of Interstate 70, according to the group.

Its wrong to put other issues, other agenda items, other personal agenda items, in front of coming up with a state budget, said Dan Lesser, director of economic justice at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago. You can see the pain thats being caused by this insistence on preconditions to actually negotiating and enacting a state budget.

Julie Mavec runs Lutheran Child and Family Services veterans assistance program in Decatur. She said her program hasnt been able to provide services such as transportation to homeless veterans since the states fiscal year began July 1.

I cant stress enough how important this funding is to all the veterans in my program, Mavec said.

The coalition wants the governor and lawmakers choose revenue to resolve the deadlock, beginning with returning individual and corporate tax rates to 5 percent and 7 percent, respectively. They dropped to 3.75 percent and 5.25 percent last year under a partial rollback of a 2011 increase.

The Responsible Budget Coalition should know the first step in having a responsible budget is having a truly balanced budget, Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly wrote in an emailed response to a request for comment. Gov. Rauner stands ready to pass structural reforms and a balanced budget that will help fund social service programs and jump start our economy.

In his speech today, Rauner is expected to continue his push for redistricting reform, term limits, property tax relief and other portions of his agenda, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks.

Hes also expected to highlight education reforms that will focus on eliminating wasteful bureaucracy, putting more money into our classrooms, and holding our schools truly accountable for results and changes to health and human services that he believes will repair a broken patchwork of reactive, expensive, and ineffective interventions.

A group of union members gathered earlier Tuesday at the Illinois AFL-CIO headquarters in Springfield to urge the governor to end the standoff and work with legislators to pass a budget. Many of Rauners policy priorities would weaken the power of labor unions.

The governors radical demands are holding up the budget, said Michael Carrigan of Decatur, president of the Illinois AFL-CIO.

Boris Rosas and Mary Diener of Decatur, members of the Laborers Local 159, are engaged to be married in October. They said their union jobs have helped them stay in the middle class and provide for their daughters, ages 11 and 13.

They said they wish Rauner understood the importance of their union and the impact the lack of a budget has on peoples lives.

I just want him to really focus on trying to relate to people who are making  $25,000 a year, Rosas said.

Kim Clarke Maisch, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said its unfair to lay all the blame for the impasse at Rauners feet.

Organized labor represents a very small percentage of the working people in Illinois, but they have done very well under the status quo, Maisch said. And so its no surprise that Gov. Rauner, who is obviously shaking things up in Springfield, is causing them a lot of heartache.

Despite Rauners signals that hes open to a tax increase, Democrats have refused to truly negotiate, she said.
Social service agencies, union members, college students and others came to the capital city Tuesday, a day before Gov. Bruce Rauner is set to deliver his second State of the State address, to sound the alarm that Illinois is in a state of crisis.

The cause of that crisis, they say, is the first-term Republicans ongoing budget standoff with the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. Rauner has said hes open to discussing tax increases, but only after the legislators adopt parts of his turnaround agenda, which includes changes to the way legislative districts are drawn, term limits for lawmakers, and a property tax freeze paired with new limits on collective bargaining for local government workers.

A group called the Responsible Budget Coalition, made up of more than 200 organizations from across the state, held a news conference at the Capitol to highlight some of the effects of the budget impasse. Those include the loss of support services for homeless veterans in Decatur, a 25 percent reduction in hours for all staff at a Charleston rape crisis center, and cuts to staff, working hours or programs at 75 percent of county health departments south of Interstate 70, according to the group.

Its wrong to put other issues, other agenda items, other personal agenda items, in front of coming up with a state budget, said Dan Lesser, director of economic justice at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago. You can see the pain thats being caused by this insistence on preconditions to actually negotiating and enacting a state budget.

The group wants the governor and lawmakers choose revenue to resolve the budget deadlock, beginning with returning individual and corporate tax rates to 5 percent and 7 percent, respectively. They dropped to 3.75 percent and 5.25 percent last year under a partial rollback of a 2011 increase.

The Responsible Budget Coalition should know the first step in having a responsible budget is having a truly balanced budget, Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly wrote in an emailed response to a request for comment. Governor Rauner stands ready to pass structural reforms and a balanced budget that will help fund social service programs and jumpstart our economy.

A group of union members gathered earlier Tuesday at the Illinois AFL-CIO headquarters in Springfield to urge the governor to end the standoff and work with legislators to pass a budget. Many of Rauners policy priorities would weaken the power of labor unions.

The governors radical demands are holding up the budget, said Michael Carrigan, president of the Illinois AFL-CIO.

Kim Clarke Maisch, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said its unfair to lay all the blame for the impasse at Rauners feet.

Organized labor represents a very small percentage of the working people in Illinois, but they have done very well under the status quo, Maisch said. And so its no surprise that Gov. Rauner, who is obviously shaking things up in Springfield, is causing them a lot of heartache.

Despite Rauners signals that hes open to a tax increase, its Democrats whove refused to truly negotiate, she said.

This story will be updated.
Qatar Airways, the national carrier of the State of Qatar, announced on its website that on May 15 it will be starting non-stop flights between Doha and Yerevan four times weekly.

Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive Akbar Al Baker has said that passengers on the new direct service to and from Yerevan will benefit from easier access to the rest of the world via Qatar Airways global network.

Dohas Hamad International Airport, the worlds newest air hub, opened for operation in 2014. From here Qatar Airways services more than 150 routes to six continents.

Interestingly, Qatar Airways currently has offices in all Middle East countries except Armenia and Israel. That should soon change in the case of Armenia.

The airline, founded in 1993 and flying since 1994, today operates a fleet of 175 aircraft.

In its statement, Qatar refers to Yerevan as, The administrative, cultural and industrial centre of Armenia and offers visiting business and leisure passengers a rich and diverse history. With a city backdrop of the snow-capped Caucasus mountain range, Yerevan is one of the world's oldest continuously-inhabited cities and its diverse architecture and atmosphere is easily explored on foot.

Ruben Grdzelyan, press secretary for Armenias General Department of Civil Aviation (GDCA), writes in his Facebook page that GDCA Chief Artyom Movsesyan has high praise for the preparedness of Qatar Airways professional team and its friendly attitude. I am pleased that there was a successful outcome of our two years of negotiations, writes Movsesyan.

Qatar Airways will use an Airbus 320 for the Doha-Yerevan-Doha flights. (Air travel time is approximately three hours one way)

Doha-Yerevan flights are scheduled for Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

(QR 285 departs DOH at 20:25; arrives EVN at 00:40+1). Yerevan-Doha flights are scheduled for Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. (QR 286 departs EVN at 03:25; arrives DOH at 05:30) - All times local.

Qatar Airways will become the tenth company to fly to Armenia from the Middle East. The others are Georgian Airways (Georgia), Atlasjet Airlines (Turkey), Middle East Airlines (Lebanon), Arkia Israeli Airlines (Israel), Iraqi Airways (Iraq), Mahan Air (Iran), Iran Aseman Airlines (Iran), FlyDubai (UAE), Air Arabia (UAE).

Etihad Airways, which started to fly between Abu Dhabi and Yerevan in 2014, dropped the route this past September.

Qatar, a country of 11,500 square kilometers on the shore surrounded by the waters of the Persian Gulf, has the third largest reserves of natural gas in the world. It ranks 21st in terms of oil and oil product exports. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Qatar ranks first in the world in terms of per capita GDP.

Armenia and Qatar forged diplomatic relations in 1997. The Armenian ambassador to the UAE represents Armenia in Qatar, and Qatars interests in Armenia are represented by the countrys ambassador to Iran.

Trade between Armenia and Qatar only amounted to US$800,000 in 2013-2014. In 2013, Armenia imported 329 tons of plastic and plastic-items ($500,000) from Qatar, and exported 67 tons ($263,000) of live animals.

In 2014, Armenia imported 198 tons of plastics ($272,000) and exported 150 tons ($498,000) of animals.

The below charts are based on Armenian National Statistical Service data.
Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian today discussed the current state of Minsk Group negotiations regarding the Karabakh issue with EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Ambassador Herbert Salber, now visiting Yerevan.

Ambassador Salber mentioned the results of the meeting in Bern between the presidents of Armenian and Azerbaijan in this context, reaffirming the EUs commitment to assist the Minsk Group in finding a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The two sides broached Armenia-EU cooperation and exchanged views on the results on the 16th session of the Armenia-EU Cooperation Council.
No one at Masko Mine, the parent company of Akhtala Mountain Enrichment Combinat (AMEC), wants to talk to workers, Akhtala resident, or the press regarding the problems AMEC is facing due to a drop in world copper prices.

Masko Mine owner Martun Hakobyans secretary informed me today that AMEC has no press affairs person and that the only person capable of providing information on the matter is Martun Hakobyan.

Hakobyan, however, stubbornly refuses to meet with Hetq or to speak to us by phone.

Vasak Tarposhyan, press secretary at Armenias Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, today advised Hetq to take AMEC to court over the information given that its a private company.

Akhtala Mayor Haygaz Khachikyan told Hetq that he isnt surprised at the lack of transparency displayed by AMEC.

Khachikyan said that on several occasions he has advised Martun Hakobyan to talk to workers and clarify what is going on at AMEC, but to no avail. The mayor says that 265 workers have been fired at AMEC and the remaining 435 are afraid theyll lose their jobs as well if things continue as they are.

I believe that if things get worse or, if god forbid, the plant closes, a social catastrophe awaits Akhtala because the town was created surrounding the mines. There is no talk yet of closing the plant but people have heard that the Sagamar Company shut down in neighboring Armanis and they are worried, said Mayor Khachikyan.

AMEC hasnt paid workers for the past three months. Employees have thus been forced to buy food and other staples on credit at local stores. Storeowners are now at their wits end and tensions in the town are bubbling. Some stores in town have closed due to the unpaid debts amassed by AMEC workers.

Akhtala shop owner Valery Bezhanyan says hes been forced to hock some gold just to keep his grocery store open.

We are carrying too much debt. Most of the people who owe me money are AMEC workers.

The company doesnt pay its workers and those workers now cannot pay me. Some 300 AMEC employees have unpaid tabs at my store.

Laura Ramazyan, a customer we met coming out of Bezhanyans store, said she has a 50,000 AMD debt there. What can we do? We are angry at the government. My three kids dont work. Neither does my husband, nor do I. I had to borrow 1,000 dram just now from somebody to buy a bit of food.

The people dont get paid so they are forced to ask for credit from us for food, said shopkeeper Ruzanna Khachikyan. I had to close the store for three days. We have been forced to buy supplies on credit. This situation cant continue. Its just too taxing on all of us.

Ruzanna has affixed a large No Credit sign on the wall of her store.

Rutik Parsadanyan, another Akhtala store owner has affixed a sign with a similar message but target to a specific audience. It reads, AMEC employees, dont ask for credit.

On the day Hetq visited Parsadanyans store, it was empty.

People dont have money. Why should they come here? Some think they will come and ask for more credit on top of what they already owe. But how will they pay for it all in the end? Parsadanyan said.

According to the shop owner, his business goes up whenever AMEC workers get paid. Business remains good for a few days afterwards, Parsadanyan said.
The following is a press release issued by the Ofice of the President of Armenia.

On the occasion of Army Day in Armenia, a group of servicemen received high state awards and military distinction for their dedication, courage and outstanding service rendered in the course of their military duty. The award ceremony took place today at the Presidential Palace. The President of Armenia, Commander-in-Chief Serzh Sargsyan, sent a congratulatory message on the occasion of Army Day and congratulated the awardees.

Congratulatory remarks by President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Army Day

Dear Compatriots,

I cordially congratulate you on the occasion of Army Day.

This year, we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of independence of the Republic of Armenia. Its been a quarter of a century that we have a free and independent statehood. Throughout this time, we never doubted that our twenty-five year long journey would be possible without the Army which we created.

The Armed Forces of Armenia became the cornerstone which was laid in the foundation of our statehood. It was the dictate of the time and the region we live in. We knew all too well who we are and where we live. We are Armenians, and as one of the ancient nations of the Middle East and Western Asia, we had the millennia long experience.

Tragic events which are taking place today in the Middle East and in the areas which generally are very close to us, are painfully familiar to us and have been repeated regularly. We were the witnesses, contemporaries and chroniclers of similar events. They occurred right before our eyes in last centuries and during two millennia. Twenty-five years ago, when we assumed the responsibility for our own destiny, we were well aware that it was tantamount to entering a battlefield.

And we did. We entered the battlefield for the human and peoples rights, for freedom. We had already seen the smoke rising from the Armenian Church in Baku, and it was the last and most convincing sign for those who still had doubts. Later, in our days, the smoke rising from the burnt and blown up religious sites shuddered and astonished the world.

We shuddered in 1988, and the spontaneously formed self-defense units were our first steps in the struggle for survival. We also knew that the Fidayi movement would be doomed to failure, unless it became a regular army. The Armenian regular Army, our victorious Army, withstood the test of war because in those days Artsakh and Armenia, the entire Armenian nation became what a historian called the Askanazian nation, while the Holy Book calls it the Askanizian regiment, which represents the country, the nation and the armed forces.

Dear Soldiers and Officers of the Armenian Army, distinguished Veterans,

This glorious holiday is certainly a state and national holiday, but first of all it is your holiday. We trust in your dedication, in your professional skills, in your high combat spirit. We wish that from now no soldier is killed on the border. To you and our entire nation, I wish peace for our countrys freedom, for diligent work, which is a prerequisite for any progress.

Dear Awardees,

I congratulate you on the occasion of Army Day and on receiving Motherlands high awards and distinctions.

It is thanks to you and your comrades-in-arms that the Armed Forces of Armenia are carrying out their mission, and fulfill the tasks set before them. You are doing it with honor and you are doing on a high professional level.

You are the worthy followers of those who in the fires of the heroic Artsakh war laid the foundation of our future Army. Many of them died, giving us life and freedom. Today, on this sacred day, we bow to their blessed memory. You are their worthy followers who are true to the behest of the martyrs and to the values they entrusted.

God bless the Armenian Land!

Long live the Armenian Nation and it warrior sons!
One of downtown La Crosses anchor storefronts will have a new tenant in June when Duluth Trading Co. opens a clothing store in the Doerflinger Building.

The Belleville, Wis., based clothier announced Monday it plans to open a 10,500-square-foot retail outlet in the historic building at Fourth and Main streets.

Its going to be a very strong anchor for downtown, said Robin Moses, executive director of Downtown Mainstreet Inc., who helped court the rapidly-growing retailer whose lifestyle clothing and quirky marketing campaigns have built a cult following.

Moses said customers travel more than 100 miles to visit other Duluth Trading Co. stores, which she anticipates will be a boon for other downtown businesses.

The store will occupy the buildings first floor, including the primary space previously occupied by Three Rivers Outdoors, a locally-owned outdoor outfitter that closed in November after 15 years in the renovated department store.

It will be the companys 10th retail store and its fifth in Wisconsin. The company also maintains stores in Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota.

This is going to be a game changer, said building owner Mike Keil. An absolute game changer to have all these people coming to downtown that dont normally come to La Crosse.

The move will displace Studio Fit, which Keil said will move next month to East Ward, the former CenturyTel building he co-owns on East Avenue. Two other retailers, Weddings By Nancy and Angies Skin Care, will remain in the Doerflinger, along with Michaels Energy and Authenticom, a data management company that occupies the buildings upper floors.

The store will employ two salaried and up to six full-time employees plus as many as 28 part-time workers, said district store manager Mark Pickart.

This will be our fifth downtown store, Pickart said. The Doerflinger is a gorgeous building and it should be a great fit for our brand.

Keil did not disclose the terms of the lease but said Duluth Trading would be making a significant investment in the build-out and staffing.

Founded in 1989 in Duluth, Minn., Duluth Trading Co. is rapidly expanding from a mail-order model, and said in a news release that it had sought to establish a storefront in western Wisconsin, a place where many hardworking men and women call home.

Parent company Duluth Holdings Inc. went public in November, raising $83.7 million. The company posted third quarter net income of $1.5 million on $55.3 million in sales.

Its plans call for accelerating retail expansion as well as growing its sales to women.

Built in 1904 to replace an earlier site destroyed by fire, the four-story building at Fourth and Main was home to Doerflingers, the citys premier department store, for eight decades before Valley View Mall began drawing shoppers to Hwy. 16.

Keil purchased it in 2004 after previous efforts to renovate the landmark had failed.
The Food Enterprise and Economic Development (FEED) Kitchens opened in late 2013 as a place for food entrepreneurs to work and prepare their p

Users of FEED Kitchens

These are some of the ongoing commercial users of FEED Kitchens.

This does not include one-off users, like wedding caterers, pie bakers, fundraiser preparations and Girl Scout troops. Nor does it include those classified as "casual" users, like Bowen Appetit (cooking classes), Healthy Food for All (vegetable/ premade food processing) and Creme de la Coulee (cheesemaker).

100 Mile Sauce

Bubbles Doubles, food cart

Cafe Costa Rica, catering and sauces

Cajun Cook, caterer/ packaged foods

Curtis & Cake, specialty baker

Delights, food cart

Divine Orders, caterer

Equinox Community Farm

Farm to Jar, fermenter

Grow Academy, baked goods

Guilty Pleasure Desserts

Haynes Kitchen, food cart

Hivecraft Honey

Home Place Honey

Ich Liebe Dich Mac N Cheese, food cart

Imperial Pops, food cart

Jireh Catering

JUST Bakery, bakery/job training

Le Personal Chef

Looking Glass Bakery

Ma & Pop, catering/ event planning

Mad Mac's Coffee

Mad Maiden Shrub

Madison Chocolate Company

Mandy's Mood Foods

Misso's Catering

MoJo's MaJik, sauce maker

Oak Ridge Farm

Oro Negro Cuitlacoche

Paradox Sugar Free Sweets

Peppino's of Madison

Pickle Jar, food cart/ smoked meats

REAP, fresh produce processing

River Bakery, bakery/job training

S & S Sweet Treats, ice cream truck

Sabores Latinos, food cart

Shaivan Cafe & Catering

Spark Spices

Sweet Hartley's, baked goods

Tart, baked goods

The Artisan Foodie, packaging

The Green Mustache Juice Bar

The Quilter Cook, baking mixes

WaunaQue BBQ, barbecue competition/ events

Wisco-N-Sin, drink mixes

Zam Zam, food cart
A file photo of the Wisconsin state Senate from February 2015. On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Labor and Government Reform heard public comment on a bill that would reform the states asset forfeiture law, which currently allows law enforcement officers to seize property from citizens who are suspected of a crime, regardless of whether they are ever indicted or convicted.
Fools Cap Brewery hopes to open this fall at 849 E. Washington Ave., which also houses Bos Meadery.
A Monroe County teen has been charged for making a bomb threat that temporarily caused an evacuation at Los Angeles International Airport.

Clint O. Terrell, 17, confessed that he was the one who called in the Jan. 8 threat that forced the evacuation of Terminal 1 at LAX and said he did it to prove himself worthy of joining an online hacking group, according to the Monroe County Sheriffs Department.

The district attorneys office has charged the town of Byron teen with causing a bomb scare and impersonating an officer, both felonies, and disorderly conduct and using a computer to make a threat, both misdemeanors. He was released Thursday on a $1,000 cash bond and will make an initial court appearance today (Monday).

Terrell also could face federal charges.

Terrell contacted authorities to confess about a week after the threat, which reportedly was made and recorded through a Skype account on his computer and later uploaded to YouTube.

Terrell reportedly called the airport and identified himself as a federal agent. He claimed there was a suspect possibly part of ISIS with a bag of explosives, according to the report.

Terrell identified himself as someone else during the call but refused to give specifics of his identity. He said the airport only had five to 10 minutes to do something and then hung up.

The terminal was evacuated but reopened about an hour later after the FBI found the threat to be non-credible, according to news sources.

LAX is the fifth busiest airport in the world and second busiest in the United States, according to the airports website.
KENOSHA COUNTY  A Brighton man who found a deer carcass on his property last week believes the deer was killed by a mountain lion.

What really caught my eye was there were the hoof prints of the deer and right behind it were the large prints, Larry Zamba said.

Zamba, 58, resides on a 6-acre property situated between Bong State Recreational Area and Highway 45, a couple of miles south of the Racine County line. He claims a deer carcass he first observed coyotes picking apart on his property on Wednesday was killed by a mountain lion, based on footprints he noticed next to the carcass.

I dont know what came first, the lion or the coyotes, because there were prints from both, he said. Theres like no waste on this thing.

Zamba, who has his own photography business in Paddock Lake and ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly in 2008, contacted the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which sent a wildlife biologist to take a look at the scene Friday. From his interaction with the biologist, Zamba believes one of the prints to be consistent with a large mammal, possibly a cougar, also known as a mountain lion.

A DNR spokeswoman confirmed the visit, but insisted they have no reason to believe the deer was killed by a cougar.

Its nothing, DNR Spokeswoman Jennifer Sereno said. Its a dead deer.

Sereno couldnt provide specific details about the incident, but stressed that the DNR did look into it and have no evidence that the situation involved a cougar.

We receive many reports of various animal sightings throughout the year, she said. We work with citizens to try and understand what is occurring on the landscape.

Sereno encouraged anyone who sees evidence of a cougar to report it using the DNRs large mammal observation form available on the agencys website. Zamba said he filed a report using the form over the weekend.

As for the print Zamba attributed to a cougar, Sereno said it was one of numerous walking prints surrounding the carcass and doubled down on her assertion that its nothing.

For Zamba, that explanation doesnt account for the validity he felt the biologists visit gave his claim.

He sure came out there and spent a lot of time for nothing, Zamba said.
A bill to make it easier for private companies from outside Wisconsin to buy ailing public drinking water systems is coming under fire from critics who say it would hamstring the ability of citizens to block sales of vital public assets.

The proposal, scheduled for a vote in a state Senate committee Thursday, would make a public referendum on the sale of water and sewage disposal systems optional instead of mandatory as is currently the case.

And if residents gathered enough signatures to force a vote, it would take place before the terms and conditions of a sale are known.

I dont know why we would want to go out of our way to make it easier for private, for-profit companies to come in and own our water utilities, said Amber Meyer Smith, a lobbyist for Clean Wisconsin. I would think we would want the highest and best level of accountability with something as important as water quality.

The legislation was introduced at the request of a private water and sewer corporation based in Pennsylvania that may wish to acquire water utilities here, said Rep. Tyler August, R-Lake Geneva, the proposals lead author.

August said he was surprised by opposition because the state would continue to regulate water quality, sewage discharges and rates paid by customers for private systems just as it does for public ones.

This idea that these companies can come in and do whatever they want to is just factually incorrect, August said.

August said he wasnt aware of any municipalities that are interested in selling, but this would streamline a path for any that wanted to unload failing systems that required costly maintenance and repairs.

Making votes by the public optional would cut down on the wasteful expense of having a referendum even when there is no opposition to a sale, Tyler said.

But opponents noted that the state provides loans and grants to municipalities that need to make repairs, and they scoffed at the idea that private owners would simply absorb costs instead of passing them on to ratepayers.

If a private utility is going to buy a municipal system, they arent doing it to break even, which is what these systems do, said David Lawrence, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association. They are going to do it to make money.

Aqua America representative Jim Bilotta told legislators the company can be especially helpful to smaller communities because its assets create economies of scale that can result in lower rates.

The Assembly has already passed its version of the legislation, Assembly Bill 554. Senate Bill 432 goes before the Senate public works committee Thursday.

Passage would pave the way for a vote of the full Senate. A spokeswoman for Gov. Scott Walker didnt respond to a request for comment.

Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, but a Democratic member of the committee said he would fight the bill.

This means that out-of-state water barons and corporations could control our shared, public water, Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, said in a statement.

Larson noted that loss of local control preceded lead-poisoning of water in Flint, Michigan, but August said the Flint case was irrelevant because a state-appointed emergency manager, not a private water company, had taken control from locally elected officials.

Under current law, a municipality that wants to sell a water or sewer utility goes to the state Public Service Commission, which sets the terms of sale. Then the deal must be approved by the majority of voters.

Current law allows Wisconsin companies to buy utilities, but there are none in the market now, August said.

PSC records indicate Superior has the only major water system in the state that is privately owned. There are about 100 major publicly owned systems.

Beloits water system was owned by Alliant Energy until 2005 when the city purchased it, said PSC spokeswoman Elise Nelson.

Aqua America Inc., Associated Builders and Contractors and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities registered in favor of the legislation.

Curt Witynski, assistant director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, said the group supports the legislation because it typically pushes for laws that put decision-making in elected officials hands instead of referendums.

Investor information published by Aqua America indicates that the corporation increased earnings 15 consecutive years through 2014. It operates water and sewer utilities serving 3 million people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, New Jersey, Indiana and Virginia.
The prosecutors in the halted John Doe probe into Gov. Scott Walkers campaign want to take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court with help from the same law firm that successfully argued a case involving similar issues.

The motion for the first time spells out that district attorneys John Chisholm of Milwaukee County, Ismael Ozanne of Dane County and Larry Nelson of Iowa County plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state courts July decision ending the probe.

In July the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a 4-2 decision said the prosecutions legal theory that was used to obtain search warrants in 2013 had no basis in law, effectively ending the investigation. Critics of the decision said at least two of the justices in the conservative majority should have recused themselves because the groups under investigation spent heavily to help get them elected.

The motion also reveals the prosecutors are seeking outside legal representation from the same law firm that argued a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Caperton vs. A.T. Massey Coal Co., in which the court forced a West Virginia Supreme Court justice to recuse himself because the defendants CEO had donated $3 million to a group that supported the justices election.

The John Doe probe was looking into whether Wisconsin Club for Growth, led by Walker campaign adviser R.J. Johnson, acted as a hub for political contributions that it funneled to groups such as Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce to help beat back the 2012 attempt to recall Walker and several Republican legislators.

The club spent $1.78 million and WMC spent $5.56 million to elect conservative justices to the court over the past six elections.

The motion asks the state Supreme Court to grant three lawyers and an administrative assistant from San Francisco-based law firm Reed Smith LLP and a printing company access to sealed case files. The motion was filed under seal on Monday and partially released by court order on Wednesday.

Brian Sutherland, one of the Reed Smith lawyers, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. The other two lawyers are Kasey Curtis and M. Patrick Yingling, who referred questions to Sutherland.

The filing says the law firm has offered its services at no expense to prepare a filing and present oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The prosecutors have until March 1 to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court gave other parties involved in the case until Monday to respond to the motion before ruling on whether to allow the private lawyers access to the case files.

The state Supreme Court allowed the prosecutors to intervene in the case after removing the investigations only representative, special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, from the case in December.

Chisholm launched the investigation in 2012 based on evidence collected in a previous John Doe investigation into Walkers Milwaukee County executive office that yielded six convictions. Walker has not been charged in the investigations.

Chisholm asked then-Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to take over the case, but he declined citing a potential conflict of interest. Chisholm then worked with the Government Accountability Board and four other district attorneys before handing the case over to Schmitz, who identified himself in court filings as a Republican.

The Dodge and Columbia county district attorneys involved in the case, both Republicans, declined to intervene. Chisholm, Ozanne and Nelson are all Democrats.
The movie Thank You, Dad by Hrach Keshishyan tells a story of an American-Armenian girl, named Virgy. Although, she had hardly ever see...
All of us, every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth were born with the same unalienable rights; to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if the governments of the world can't get that through their thick skulls, then, regime change will be necessary.
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SPRINGFIELD - State lawmakers and candidates for state office were ready to react to the governor's comments as soon as he left the House floor:

State Representative Tom Morrison (R-Palatine) said the governor's comments could turn

I appreciated Governor Rauners renewed commitment to turning around Illinois economy, and was pleased to see that his agenda aims to transform every area of government to maximize efficiency and to improve the value for taxpayers. Restoring the publics trust in government is imperative, and today the Governor outlined a comprehensive agenda that puts Illinois onto a path toward improved results and more disciplined spending. The positive outcomes could be far-reaching, and I look forward to the day when Illinois citizens can once again trust their government officials.

From State Rep. Jeanne Ives' (R-Wheaton) comments:

Under Illinois political class, The State of the State has fallen into disgrace. It is a disgrace that our families and businesses have been put on the hook for the deception and failure of politicians. It is a disgrace that Lutheran Social Services had to cut 43% of their staff and 30 programs serving 4,700 people because the agency has not been paid the $6 million it is owed by the state, and other contractors are part of $8 billion more of unpaid bills. Its a disgrace that taxpayers shoulder the burden for public sector pensions that those same taxpayers will never see, and that politicians promised but didnt fully fund. As we learn of the State of the State, many are  understandably  frightened, and believe the governor should just agree to a budget and leave his Turnaround Agenda items for another day, but that approach doesnt work. Illinois just had a four-year case study on it. Illinois Democrats raised income taxes by 67 percent in 2011, and the tax increase was in place for four years. At the end of those four years, Illinois still has many of the same problems it had before the tax increase was passed. At the end of those four years, Illinois still had a huge pile of unpaid bills. We still have the worst-funded pension system in America. Our schools continue to struggle. Our largest city and economic engine, Chicago, and our largest school system, Chicago Public Schools, are in dire financial straits. During the four years of the tax increase, Illinois received several credit-rating downgrades, dropping us to the lowest-rated state in the nation. Again, while the tax increase was in effect, our financial position deteriorated, and the independent rating agencies punished us for it. Ignoring harsh realities in order to curry political popularity isnt leadership.

State Rep. Ron Sandack (R-Downers Grove) :

A recurring theme of today's speech was bipartisanship, compromise and collaboration. Governor Rauner clearly articulated his willingness to meet Democrat legislative leaders in the middle. I hope his renewed invitation is accepted by Speaker Madigan and President Cullerton, and that very soon we will see tangible results. I am pleased to know that term limits/redistricting reform, relief from state mandates, and pension reform remain at the top of our Governors agenda. In this era of extreme distrust in elected officials, limiting lawmaker terms and taking the process of drawing legislative boundaries out of politicians hands, are a great first step. Promoting more local control by removing burdensome state mandates is another meaningful step in restoring the publics faith in their government, and pension reform is a must for creating manageable and sustainable budgets.

Senator Jim Oberweis (25th District) said:

Gov. Rauner said he remains committed to a new direction for Illinois, asking lawmakers again to work with him to achieve fiscal responsibility and a fundamental change in the way state government works.

Senator Sue Rezin (38th District) said:

Governor Rauners State of the State address was one every Illinoisan can appreciate. His plan to turn around the states economy, making state government more efficient, and focusing on reforms to right Illinois fiscal ship are all much needed. His address makes it very clear, we must all work together to solve Illinois problems. We can all agree, Illinois must focus on reforming Illinois education system, reforming the states criminal justice system, passing a balanced budget, and improving the lives of all citizens. Restoring trust in government, moving Illinois forward, and remaining optimistic are all themes I completely agree on with the Governor. I hope we can start to make these themes a reality this year.

State Senator Mike Connelly and State Rep. Jeanne Ives, both from Wheaton



State Sen. Michael Connelly (R-Wheaton) says the governor is willing to meet mid-way with the Democrats:

Governor Rauner has shown a willingness to meet the legislative majorities 'mid-way' on his Illinois transformation agenda. The Governor has already made significant compromises with the Senate President on topics of pension reform, economic development, and areas of government modernization. We are achieving results under Governor Rauner's leadership on criminal justice reform, ethical advancements, and some common-sense approaches to business development. The Governor has shown on major portions of his Turnaround Agenda that he is willing to bridge differences with the other side, only to be turned back by the legislative majority. Despite all of the obstacles, Governor Rauner continues working to bring Illinois back to its prominence. The Republican Caucuses stand ready to work with the legislative majorities to settle the budget impasse and resolve the long-standing issues that have held Illinois back.

Jerry Long, candidate for State Representative in the 76th District said he was pleased about the governor's focus on job growth:

I was pleased that Gov. Rauner focused on job growth. As a union truck driver, I understand that families in our district need good-paying jobs, so we must have job creation. In order to increase wages and benefits, we need employers competing for employees. And in order to save important state jobs, we must have a thriving private-sector economy. As Gov. Rauner said, it is unacceptable for Illinois to be losing jobs to other states. Michael Madigans stronghold on our government has crippled our economy with big spending and high taxes. We have to lift that burden off working families and their employers in order to grow our economy again."

Allen Skillicorn, Republican Candidate for the 66th Legislative District, said Governor Rauner has made it clear things have changed in Springfield:

Today, we didnt just hear soundbites and political pandering. We heard from a governor who is taking on Illinois challenges, even though its politically difficult. Governor Bruce Rauner is right, the Illinois political class consisting of Speaker Madigan and his special interest allies are crushing both employers and families. The agenda the governor laid out today is a broad agenda, but a necessary agenda. Hes ready to move the state forward, to be competitive, and build higher paying jobs. Illinois desperately needs pension reform, education reform, criminal justice reform, and improvements to the way Illinois delivers services. Without modest reforms unions will have no jobs to unionize and trial lawyers will have no businesses to sue. It is clear that the debate in Springfield has changed. Today, Governor Rauner outlined the next steps. We must make even bigger changes in 2016, if Illinois is to be a place where families choose to live and work, and can afford to live and work.

More to come ...
Candidates, Morris says, like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum will be irrelevant by March 15th. In The Hill, Morris wrote Tuesday:

So all the talk about when Bush or some other candidate will drop out is quite irrelevant. It doesnt matter when reality dawns on them  they will be forced out by the math of the process in the month of March.

Unfortunately, the voters in the March 1 proportional threshold states may not understand all this, with many casting wasted ballots for candidates who have no chance of passing the threshold. In early March, this lack of understanding of how the process works will cost the two front-runners delegate votes, but the voters will soon catch on and vote primarily for one of the top two.

This will create a new dynamic in the GOP nominating process. Now, in a dozen-person beauty contest, we vote for who we like the best. But when it comes down to two candidates, many voters who may not have voted for Trump or Cruz as their first choice will have to choose the lesser of these two evils.
SPRINGFIELD - As soon as Governor Rauner concluded his address, responses from organizations, lawmakers, candidates and trade associations hit the media's email inboxes.

One association that represents several of the state's largest manufacturers said they agree with the Governor's concern that Illinois' economy should be a top priority. The Illinois Manufacturers Association said:

Illinois cannot afford to wait and risk losing another 14,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs this year that serve as the backbone of our middle class. Many items outlined by the Governor including workers' compensation reform, creation of a new economic development partnership, and investing in education from pre-K through college are critically important for improving the lives of Illinois families and businesses. We are hopeful that leaders on both sides of the aisle can come together to achieve innovative solutions that will move Illinois forward.

Illinois Working Together, a coalition representing major unions, didn't mince their criticism of the Governor's comments:

Governor Bruce Rauners administration has been an unmitigated disaster for the working people and most vulnerable citizens of Illinois. He has repeatedly shown an inability or unwillingness to work together, instead forcing conflict and demanding divisive policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. He said nothing today to change that.

The education group "One Chance Illinois" sent out these comments:

Its clear that the Governor and leaders on both sides of the aisle are focused on improving how we educate our most at-risk children, and One Chance Illinois applauds them all. Providing disadvantaged kids access to high quality education is essential to Illinois' future. 90% of Illinois low-income students aren't proficient in math, and 80% don't read at grade level. We need to put aside historical differences and provide kids the necessary resources to flourish. One Chance Illinois supports the Governors pledge to "create more quality school options for low-income children stuck in failing schools. One Chance Illinois believes that traditional, charter and private school providers can come together on a policy that benefits the neediest children, and rewards quality providers. Partnerships between high schools, community colleges, and local employers are critical to ensuring young people can be ready for both college and career. One Chance Illinois believes there are solutions to support college and career readiness and looks forward to working with the Illinois General Assembly. Kids only get one chance at a high quality education, and we must do everything we can to ensure that Illinois' children get the quality resources they need and deserve today. -Myles Mendoza, Executive Director, One Chance Illinois

Americans for Prosperity - Illinois' executive director David From applauded the Governor's efforts:
Trump says Kelly is "unfair" because of a question she asked him in August 2015 at the first Fox News debate.

DES MOINES - Donald Trump's campaign announced Tuesday night that he would not be participating in the last scheduled debate before Iowa's primary caucuses next Monday night. His reason? Fox News would not oust Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly from the panel questioners.

[Megyn Kelly] opened the debate segment with, "Our first round of questions is on the subject of electability in the general election." Ben Carson was asked about his absence of political experience. Marco Rubio about his absence of experience as an executive. Bush about dealing with the mentality that "the last thing this country needs is another Bush." Then Kelly turned to Trump. "You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs, dogs, and disgusting animals' ... how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton ... likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?"

Parker reviews the Republicans' failed history of winning American women's votes, why it is important that those votes are recovered in 2016 and then writes:

Projections indicate that the percentage of the American electorate in 2016 that is white will be down to 70 percent, a historic low. And of the total American electorate, 53 percent are women. How much clearer can it be that it will be impossible to elect a conservative Republican in 2016 if that candidate does not have the skill and persona to attract some voters who don't traditionally vote Republican? The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the women's vote was 25 years ago when George H.W. Bush squeaked by Michael Dukakis with 51 percent. The women's vote will be a particular challenge in an election in which Democrats run the first woman candidate for president.

Parker, a black woman who worked herself up from welfare to head a nationally-recognized business and become a conservative leader, says the question that angered (and more so embarrassed) Trump was a very fair question.

So Megyn Kelly's question to Trump was smart, on target and very fair. The real question is how could Trump -- whose big selling point is being a smart businessman -- call this "unfair"?

So, we ask, what was so unfair about Megyn Kelly's question?

Trump's anger continued to boil as later on in the evening he tweeted:

Parker's August 11, 2015 column is HERE.

The Fox News debate will be broadcast live from Des Moines Iowa Thursday night, January 28, beginning at 5:00 PM CST with the first panel of Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmore. The second forum begins at 7:00 PM CST and will include Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich.
Congress workers were seen celebrating outside Mallikarjun Kharge's residence after he was elected as the new party chief. The dance of one such supporter has gone viral. Watch and find out why.
Reyat, a former resident of Duncan, was charged with perjury in 2006 for repeatedly lying during his testimony at the trial into the bombing deaths of 331 people, mostly Canadians.

Reyat, born in 1952, is set to serve the rest of his sentence, which ends in August 2018, at a halfway house.

By India Today Web Desk: The only person convicted in the 1985 Air India bombing has been granted statutory release from prison to a halfway house.

Inderjit Singh Reyat, a former resident of Duncan, was charged with perjury in 2006 for repeatedly lying during his testimony at the trial into the bombing deaths of 331 people, mostly Canadians.

Reyat was found guilty in 2010 and sentenced to a record nine years in prison, or seven years and seven months after accounting for time served.

Under the law, offenders must be granted statutory release after they have served two-thirds of their sentence.

FROM THE MAGAZINE | Flight 182: Destination disaster



Parole Board of Canada spokesman Patrick Storey said Reyat must abide by several conditions as part of his release, including not possessing extremist propaganda or possessing components used to build an explosive device.

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He is also not allowed to contact victims' families or anyone who is believed to hold extremist views. He will be monitored by a parole officer and must complete counselling.

Reyat, born in 1952, is set to serve the rest of his sentence, which ends in August 2018, at a halfway house. Storey said he could not disclose the location of the residence due to privacy legislation.

Reyat was working as an electrician in Duncan on June 23, 1985 when a bomb exploded as luggage was being unloaded at Tokyo's Narita airport from a CP Air flight that had arrived from Vancouver. Two luggage handlers were killed. About an hour later, Air India Flight 182, travelling from Montreal to Delhi, exploded in the air off the Irish coast, killing all 329 people aboard.

After a lengthy trial, Reyat was convicted of manslaughter in 1991 for the two Narita airport deaths. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for his role in the Air India bombing.

Court testimony revealed that Reyat had bought materials and built the bombs while living in Duncan. Federal agents, conducting surveillance, spotted him and another man on June 4, 1985 going into the bush near Duncan. Observing from a distance, they heard a loud bang. When police later searched the area, they found bomb parts.

The parole board ruling for Reyat's release this week said a psychologist's assessment in 2013 found the man's risk was "relatively high" for future group-based violence and that he lacked remorse for the victims of the bombings.

"The loss of life had a profound and long-lasting impact on the families who lost their relatives in these incidents, and had far-reaching impact on people around the world," the decision said.

"Until recently, you took limited responsibility for your role in this catastrophic disaster, you lied in court and protected others involved."

If Reyat breaches any of the conditions, he can be sent back to prison, Storey said.

A parole officer could also recommend that Reyat be released early from the halfway house.

Eligibility date for Reyat's statutory release is today. Correctional Service Canada can release him a day early, but spokesman Jean-Paul Lorieau said privacy legislation prevented him from confirming whether Reyat had already left prison.

Bal Gupta, whose wife Ramwati died aboard Air India Flight 182, said Reyat's release is a difficult reality of the justice system for families who lost loved ones.

"This is justice taking its course and whether we are happy with it or not that's a different issue," said Gupta, of the Air India Families Association.

"Life goes on but this kind of pain, it disappears on the face but inside it will go with us when we go," Gupta said from his home in Toronto.

"Twenty-nine families were completely wiped out - husband, wife, children, they were all gone. Seven couples lost all their children, and some of them are now in their late 60s or even early 70s. He'll be back with his family but for those people it's a punishment for a lifetime."

Ripudaman Singh Malik of Vancouver and Ajaib Singh Bagri of Kamloops were acquitted in March 2005 of murder and conspiracy charges in the two bombings connected with state-owned Air India.
India Today has accessed reports of an investigation ordered by the revenue officer of the district in September 2015.

The suicide of three students fuelled a series of protests and demonstrations by political parties and student organisations. (Photo: Twitter)

At a time when SVS Naturopathy and Yoga Science College is in the midst of a controversy, fresh revelations have brought poor facilities and lack of infrastructure to the fore.

India Today has accessed reports of an investigation ordered by the revenue officer of the district in September 2015. It was found that the allegations levelled by protesting students are true.

The report revealed that the investigation was initiated only after the students protested in front of the collector's office and that the Tamil Nadu government was aware of the irregularities.

According to the report, doors were found missing in toilets and bathrooms and girls were instructed to use them before 9 am, after which boys were allowed. Lack of water supply left toilets and bathrooms dirty and unusable.

The college's 4th floor houses a biochemistry, psychology and anatomy laboratory which have been left unused due to lack of equipment and lights. The report went on to reveal that the college library lacks books. When asked, the college management said that there was no need for lights since experiments are done during day.

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Thirty female students staying on the first floor of the hostel lead a harsh life due to extremely limited space. The hostel resembles a prison with four fans, out of which only two work, the report said.

Life in the boys hostel is no different. Boys are forced to cook food on stone stoves on an open ground due to lack of amenities in the kitchen. Students are compelled to pull water from an open well since the college faces massive water shortage.

The college campus in Villupuram has no lights and students often feel unsafe, the report revealed.

The SVS Naturopathy and Yoga Science College stoked controversy after three female students committed suicide by jumping into a well on Saturday. The incident fuelled a series of protests and demonstrations by political parties and student organisations, who demanded stern action against the college management.

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Around 60 students, who were demanding the resignation of Union Minister Smriti Irani in connection with the suicides of Hyderabad research scholar Rohith Vemula and three medical students in Tamil Nadu, were today detained in Chennai.

By India Today Web Desk: Around 60 students, who were demanding the resignation of Union Minister Smriti Irani in connection with the suicides of Hyderabad research scholar Rohith Vemula and three medical students in Tamil Nadu, were today detained in Chennai.

Over a thousand students from various universities had gathered at the University of Hyderabad campus demanding Irani's sacking, and student organisations from across the country have called for a one-day strike in all universities.

A national joint action committee, comprising of 200 student associations, will spearhead the agitation, and they have made plans to mark Rohith's birthday on January 30 with a march to Delhi.

Rohith Vemula, 26, had committed suicide at the Hyderabad Central University 10 days ago, and last week, bodies of three young women were pulled out of a well just opposite their medical college in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram.

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A suicide note that they allegedly wrote described the appalling lack of even basic facilities at the college and their struggle to be heard by the administration.

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Rohith Vemula suicide: Hyderabad university vice-chancellor Appa Rao goes on indefinite leave


The move came after Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu had asked the Delhi government to explore new routes to reduce traffic congestion in Delhi.

By Rakesh Ranjan: After scrapping the controversial Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) Corridor from Moolchand to Ambedkar Nagar, the Delhi government may now come up with elevated corridors exclusively for public buses.

The idea, according to government sources, is to facilitate unhindered movement of buses as promised by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government. The government has already started dismantling the existing BRT corridor and will complete the process by February 20.

As part of the elevated BRT corridor project, a team of Public Works Department (PWD) engineers and transport department officials led by PWD minister Satyendra Jain will visit Malaysia in February in an attempt to study the model, sources told Mail Today.

Following this, officials said, a study will be conducted on a couple of stretches in the Capital to identify the corridors. "In keeping with the government's plan to facilitate swift movement of buses, the study will be conducted on two corridors before chalking out a detailed plan," said an official. The concept of elevated bus corridors has been successful in foreign countries like Malaysia and Turkey.

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BRT corridors in Delhi are also important keeping in view the odd-even policy of the Arvind Kejriwalled Delhi government. According to government officials, more people in the Capital would opt for public transport buses if they moved at a faster pace and are less crowded. The Delhi government will spend nearly Rs 11 crore for removing old structures and physical segregations on the roads. The BRT corridor was constructed at the cost of Rs 190 crore by the Sheila Dikshit government and was inaugurated in 2008.

Sources said development of BRT corridors in the Capital assumed significance keeping in view the Delhi government's odd-even policy. They said more people would opt for buses if they moved at a faster pace and were less crowded. Exclusive corridors for buses ensure less time consumption to reach the destination. Moreover, it would also increase the speed of other vehicles on arterial roads and help reduce vehicular pollution.

Public Works Department officials said the elevated BRT corridor will do away with the physical obstructions on roads, which essentially lead to traffic snarls while segregating the traffic. This, officials said, led to longer signal cycles on traffic intersections and further resulted in huge pile up of vehicles.

Notably, Chirag Dilli was the worst-hit traffic intersection on the existing BRT corridor where the duration of a signal cycle was as long as 30 minutes during peak hours.

Flaws

This corridor had several other flaws that led to its failure. With all traffic except buses crammed into a two-lane carriageway, the busy stretch saw massive jams. Even the dedicated bus lanes running through the middle of the road weren't snag-free. The project also faced stiff criticism for lack of facilities for pedestrians, especially while crossing roads to reach bus shelters that are built in the middle of roads. This made pedestrians vulnerable to road fatalities.

In the case of elevated corridors, according to sources, there will be no provision for pedestrian movement.

Government sources said the proposed elevated BRT corridors would be on the lines of the East-West elevated corridor conceived in 2007 by the then Sheila Dikshit government. The plan was revived in 2014 when the Delhi government proposed an East-West corridor starting from the Anand Vihar bus terminal and ending at Peeragarhi, and a North-South corridor starting from the Signature Bridge and ending at National Highway (NH)-8 to decongest the Capital's roads.

New routes

The move came after Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu had asked the Delhi government to explore new routes to reduce traffic congestion in Delhi.

Earlier, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had said the government was keen on building two-tier elevated Bus Rapid Transit corridor and an expressway to decongest city roads.

According to the government, it is required to build elevated roads before bringing in a BRT corridor. Sources also said the elevated corridor will be much cheaper than the Metro, which costs the exchequer Rs 500 crore per km.

"The idea is to decongest roads across the city. Implementing the BRT is crucial for that," officials said.

Meanwhile, the government will spend nearly Rs 11 crore to dismantle the scrapped the BRT corridor from Moolchand to Ambedkar Nagar. The BRT corridor was built at the cost of Rs 190 crore by the Sheila Dikshit government and was inaugurated in 2008.

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Since then, the 5.8-km corridor has been mired in controversies due to faulty design, resulting in massive traffic jams and frequent road accidents.

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Post odd-even, Delhi witnesses massive traffic jams

Will introduce BRT corridors in future, says Kejriwal
Doctors from Deen Dayal Upadhyay (DDU) Hospital and Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital have conveyed their disinterest in using the mobile application to monitor the daily performance of doctors.

By Astha Saxena: The Delhi government's decision to monitor the daily performance of doctors through a mobile application has not gone down well with the medical fraternity. According to senior government officials, doctors from Deen Dayal Upadhyay (DDU) Hospital and Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital have conveyed their disinterest in using the mobile application.

For administrative duties, doctors have to specify the number of meetings - if any - that they attended, number of files they "disposed" of and other tasks. They also have to specify the number, nature and duration of classes they took and the number of students who attended these lectures.

"The plan to monitor doctor's work through a mobile application is not at all justified. We have prepared a representation and will soon be submitting it to the government. We condemn the entire plan," a senior doctor from DDU told Mail Today.

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"We are dealing with a large number of patients on a daily basis. Sometimes, a patient takes a lot of time and we end up dealing with a single case only. How is it justified to calculate our work by looking at the number of patients? We do not agree with this concept and will reach out to the government," a senior doctor from Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar hospital told Mail Today.

The Delhi government recently issued a notice to all hospitals asking them to use the web-based monitoring system.

"Many doctors have approached us and expressed their stand on the newly introduced mobile application. Though, everyone was supposed to update it by January 20, they have not started using the application so far. The application is gaining a lot of controversy," a senior government official told Mail Today.

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The Gurgaon control room has informed Delhi airport security that the balloon was seen moving from Gurgaon towards Delhi's Aaya Nagar airforce station.

By India Today Web Desk: A suspicious balloon has been spotted near Delhi airport.

The Gurgaon control room has informed Delhi airport security that the balloon was seen moving from Gurgaon towards Delhi's Aaya Nagar airforce station.

Delhi airport's Air Traffic Control (ATC) and the police have also been informed about the suspicious object.

At about 3.15pm today the patrol guards at Air Force Station located on Gurgaon Faridabad Road reported sighting a red and white coloured unidentified balloon, about 1 meter in diameter, flying between 1-1.5km high, and flying towards Aya Nagar in Delhi from Gurgaon Faridabad Road side. Upon this the Delhi and Faridabad Police Control Rooms were alerted by Gurgaon Police Control Room. No balloon has been recovered yet.



On Tuesday, a fighter jet accidently dropped five bombs over Gugdi town in Rajasthan's Barmer district. The sound of the explosion could be heard in a 10 km radius. Barmer is a village which is very near to Pakistan border.

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However, the Indian Air Force in its statement said that its radar had spotted an unidentified balloon-shaped object and that a fighter jet was launched to intercept the object.

"Between 10.30 - 11.00 a.m., unidentified balloon-shaped object was picked up on IAF radar, which was unidentified and was in our airspace. An IAF fighter was launched, which intercepted the object and brought it down. We have launched further investigations into it," a source in the IAF said.

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Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and French President Francois Hollande talked about films and the Cannes International Film Festival during the Republic Day luncheon in Delhi.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is said to have had a "hospitable" experience when she met French President Francois Hollande at a special luncheon in the capital on Republic Day, looking radiant and ravishing in a red Banarasi sari.

ALSO READ: Photo of the day - Aishwarya meets French President Francois Hollande for Republic Day luncheon

SEE PICS: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan leaves for Delhi with Aaradhya for Republic Day lunch with French President Hollande



Ash and Hollande's conversation ranged from talking about movies to her experiences at Cannes, a guest at the lunch told IANS, adding that Hollande even made Aishwarya join him at his table.

"The French president was very warm and friendly," the insider said.

Aishwarya, who has been in the midst of shooting her new film Sarbjit, took out time from her busy schedule to attend the lunch, which was hosted by French Ambassador Francois Richier in Delhi.

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The former beauty queen, a past recipient of the prestigious Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, a civilian award by the French government, was the only Indian actor to be present.

Hollande attended the lunch following his appearance at the country's colourful Republic Day parade on Rajpath as the chief guest.

Other guests at the lunch included designers Ritu Beri, who has earlier received the Chevalier Des Arts et Des Lettres award, one of the highest civilian awards by the French government, for her contribution to the enrichment of Indo-French cultural relations; and Manish Arora, who shares a deep connect with Paris, the source said.

There were other politicians and businessmen at the gala.

For the occasion, Aishwarya chose a perfectly suited ensemble - a sari from designer duo Swati and Sunaina.

Made in Banaras, the six-yard wonder that the actor wore, was woven with fine mulberry silk and zari made from pure silver threads dipped in gold.

Only natural fibres and eco-friendly dyeing was used in the making of the sari, a source close to the designers told IANS.

It was only fit that that Aishwarya chose a creation so deeply rooted in Indian technique and craft to meet the president of France, a country that she's had a great connect with for long.

She's a regular at the Cannes International Film Festival, where the first look of Jazbaa - her comeback film post pregnancy - was launched last year.

An actor who has featured in Bollywood films like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Dhoom 2, Guru and Devdas, Aishwarya is also an ambassador of French cosmetics and beauty company L'Oreal Paris, for which she recently starred in an ad with Eva Longoria.

In fact, she even shot for her international film Pink Panther 2 in Paris.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is heading to Bengaluru today for a 10-day naturopathy treatment at the Jindal Nature Cure Institute, where he had undergone treatment for his chronic cough in March last year also.

By India Today Web Desk: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is heading to Bengaluru today for a 10-day naturopathy treatment at the Jindal Nature Cure Institute, where he had undergone treatment for his chronic cough in March last year also.

According to reports, Kejriwal, who also suffers from high sugar level, was supposed to leave for Bengaluru on December 22 but postponed the visit to oversee the implementation of the odd-even scheme in the national capital.

The Aam Aadmi Party leader is also expected to address a rally in the city on January 31.

Last year, Kejriwal had returned to Delhi fitter after undergoing treatment at the naturopathy centre.

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Terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) are armed with unmanned aerial vehicles and Barmer incident could be a reconnaissance attempt by Pakistan-based terror outfits to test India's preparedness.

By India Today Web Desk: A US-made helium-filled balloon that was shot down by Indian Air Force's Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft over Rajasthan's Barmer on January 26 had come in from Pakistan. Top sources in the government said the balloon could have been an attempt by Pakistan to gauge India's response time.

The Defence Ministry has now written to the Ministry of External Affairs informing it about the incident.

The shiny 3 metre in diametre balloon, with "Happy Birthday" written on it, was flying at a height of about 25,000 feet when it was picked up by the air force radars which were on high alert in view of Republic Day celebrations.

"Our radars picked up a shiny flying object entering our air space. A fighter jet was quickly scrambled which intercepted it and shot it down," Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said today without elaborating much about the incident.

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A balloon similar to the one shot down in Barmer was spotted near Delhi airport on Wednesday evening. Delhi Police, however, claimed that it belonged to the MeT Department. But there is no confirmation yet.

Terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) are armed with unmanned aerial vehicles and Barmer incident could be a reconnaissance attempt by Pakistan-based terror outfits to test India's preparedness.

Experts told India Today that the Barmer incident is similar to textbook precursor activity for what could be a much larger and sinister intrusion either with an aircraft or a drone.



Series of hoax calls

Jet Airways flight 9W260 from Delhi to Kathmandu and an Air India flight were grounded at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on Wednesday following threat calls. Later, it turned to be hoax calls.

Five flights have been grounded in the country in the last five days due such hoax calls sending airport security into a frenzy and national security on edge.

Can this anti-national mischief be ignored as stray incidents or it is an attempt to bleed the already volatile civil aviation sector?

Bomb hoaxes have always plagued the aviation industry the world over but with India already facing a heightened terror threat the big question is could this be a precursor of something bigger and dangerous?

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After Rajasthan's Barmer, suspicious balloon spotted near Delhi airport



Air Force jet shoots down unidentified balloon-shaped object over Rajasthan's Barmer


BJP MP Babul Supriyo was today barred by Asansol police from entering Jamuria in West Bengal to visit the house of a minor who was raped and killed in his parliamentary constituency.

By India Today Web Desk: BJP MP Babul Supriyo was today barred by Asansol police from entering Jamuria in West Bengal to visit the house of a minor who was raped and killed in his parliamentary constituency.

The police told Supriyo that he can not visit the area as Section 144 was imposed there. BJP workers tried forcing their way through after the MP was prevented from entering his own constituency. The area continues to be tense after the body of a minor was recovered on Tuesday, 26 Jauary, with multiple bruises.

Family of the girl had alleged rape and murder. The accused who is a minor too was arrested yesterday but people had been complaining of police inaction. Supriyo wanted to meet the family being a local MP but he was not allowed to do so by the local administration.

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Earlier today, Human Resource and Development Minister Smriti Irani, who was also stopped from meeting the family, slammed the Mamata Banerjee-led government on recent incidences of violence in West Bengal.

"In Malda, a police station was burnt. Police watched the tamasha and Mamata did not say a word. Nobody said anything when the law was being torn apart," she said.

Irani also criticised the Mamata's Trinamool Congress over the hit-and-run case in which an IAF corporal was killed in Kolkata. The man behind the Audi, which mowed down air force officer during Republic Day parade rehearsal, was the son of a local RJD leader, Mohammed Sohrab.
The car of the persons who were searching a hotel in Bhubaneshwar has been traced to Vishakhapatnam. Sources have confirmed that the car with suspects had crossed Palasa Toll Gate of Visakhapatnam at 4 pm on Tuesday.

By India Today Web Desk: The car of the persons who were searching a hotel in Bhubaneshwar has been traced to Vishakhapatnam. Sources have confirmed that the car with suspects had crossed Palasa Toll Gate of Visakhapatnam at 4 pm on Tuesday.

The port town is an important centre for Navy. A massive search operation and alert has been sounded at the city headquarter of Navy's Easter command.

On Tuesday, a high alert was sounded in Odisha after four men, presenting themselves as Iraqi nationals, disappeared when asked to produce their identity proof at a hotel.

The four men, with an estimated height of 6.5 feet and speaking in Hindi or English, came to the hotel in a car with a Delhi registration number which turned out to be fake, police said.

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Bhubaneswar Police Commissioner R P Sharma said the car in which the suspects arrived at Hotel Arya Mahal had a fake Delhi registration number.

Hotel manager Siba Narayan Mohapatra said one out of the four men came to the reception desk, while three others stayed inside the car parked outside.

The CCTV captured the photograph of only one suspected terrorist.

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Over 1.5 lakh employees from sanitation, health, education, engineering and other departments have threatened to go on an indefinite strike from February if their salaries are not paid immediately.

By Sneha Agrawal: Planning to visit the municipal office any time soon for a birth certificate, trade or health licence or to get a building plan sanctioned? You will most likely be disappointed as over 1.5 lakh employees of the three MCDs have decided to go on strike for non-payment of salaries.

This may lead to an unprecedented breakdown of civic services in the Capital as employees, including those from sanitation, health, education, engineering and other departments, have threatened to go on strike from February if their salaries are not paid immediately. As a token of protest, they will be on a three-day strike from Wednesday. If their demand still remains unfulfilled, they would go on indefinite strike.

Even senior officers like directors, deputy directors and assistant commissioners have not been paid their salaries since October last year. Some Group C and D employees have recently been paid their salaries but senior officers are yet to get paid.

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Notwithstanding the monetary dispute between the Delhi government and the BJPruled MCDs, employees have decided to protest at Jantar Mantar, outside Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence and the Civic Centre, the headquarters of the North and the South Delhi Municipal Corporations.

MCD officials said as a result of the protest, services that the MCDs provide will be hampered. "MCD employees will protest against the non-payment of salaries which are due for months and is resulting in immense financial burden for them. The Capital will suffer for at least three-four days from Wednesday," said Rajender Mewati, general secretary of the United Front of MCD Employees Associations.

Employees from sanitation, health, education, engineering and other departments have threatened to go on an indefinite strike from February if their salaries are not paid immediately. Even senior officers like directors, deputy directors and assistant commissioners have not been paid their salaries since October last year. Some Group C and D employees have recently been paid their salaries but senior officers are yet to get the same. The employees of the municipal corporations have decided to protest at Jantar Mantar, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence and Civic Centre, the headquarters of the North and the South Delhi Municipal Corporations. MCD officials said the protest would certainly come at a cost of the services being provided by the agencies. Officials expressed helplessness saying the Capital will be buried in heaps of garbage as sanitation workers and supervision staff will be on strike for three days. Delhi generates approximately 9,000 metric tonnes of waste every day.

Officials expressed helplessness saying the Capital will be buried under heaps of garbage as sanitation workers and supervision staff will be on strike. Delhi generates approximately 9,000 metric tonnes of waste every day. There are over one lakh sanitation workers waiting for salaries. While the issue of sanitation workers being unpaid is pending since long, employees of other departments too have been hit by the fund crunch.

The employees' union said they would also demand the unification of the three municipal corporations as they feel it is the only way to cut short expenses of the civic bodies. Notably, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation has also proposed unification of the three civic agencies. On the other hand, the Delhi government has set up a team to audit the accounts of the MCDs before extending any monetary aid. The Aam Aadmi Party has also been alleging financial bungling by the BJP-ruled MCDs.

AP Khan, general secretary of the Forum of MCD Engineers, said, "The state government are resorting to blame game and have ignored the interest of the employees. No engineer in the three corporations has been given salary since November. It has been a year since the issue has been dragging on. While some employees have received salaries for October, there are some who have still not been paid their salaries."

Another senior official from north corporation said 50 per cent of the staff of north and east corporations have not received their salaries. The salary expenditure of north corporation is Rs 220 crore per month while it is Rs 80 crore for the east corporation.

MCD claims to have undertaken several measures that include meeting the chief minister and President Pranab Mukherjee to come out of this crisis. It has even proposed to sell off its properties to pay the staff. BJP leaders, who run the MCDs, however said Kejriwal has made it a political issue and wants to make it a ground to contest MCD polls in 2017.

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Ravinder Gupta, Mayor, North Delhi Municipal Corporation said: "The Delhi government has made the issue of releasing funds political so that it could give a ground impression that the BJP-led municipal corporation did not work for citizens and use it to garner votes for the MCD polls. He (Kejriwal) has not only violated the Constitution but also disobeyed the Delhi HC order."

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The NIA has learnt that a few months ago Maulana Anzar Shah Qasmi and six suspects parted ways over ideological differences. While the terror suspects were inclined towards the ISIS, Maulana was following the Al Qaeda policy.

By Mail Today: The six terror suspects arrested from different parts of Karnataka by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) last week were ardent followers of Maulana Anzar Shah Qasmi (nabbed earlier this month) and they had split recently over ideological differences.

All six suspects frequently met Qasmi and discussed their strategy in the jungles of Devarayanadurga near Tumakuru, 79 kilometre from Bengaluru.

The NIA is piecing together information obtained from various sources and after interrogating the terror suspects in the national Capital. The focus on terror-related activities in Karnataka has been restricted to the communally sensitive coastal Karnataka region and a few districts, such as Hubballi, Chikkamagaluru and Kalburgi.

As a consequence, to evade police monitoring, the terror suspects set up an informal base in Tumakuru, which is an educational hub, according to sources in the Karnataka Police, who are part of the investigation.

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"Our personnel are now combing the Devarayanadurga forests to ascertain whether these terror suspects went beyond routine meetings to conduct any arms training.

Whatever material evidence we have gathered so far have been handed over to the NIA. We will continue to monitor the movement of the suspects' friends in Karnataka," the sources added.

It is said that Syed Mujahid Hussain Pasha, who was arrested by the NIA, facilitated the Tumakuru meetings for the group members. "The Devarayanadurga forests are more of a picnic spot. Even a meeting of the terror suspects could easily pass off as a picnic.

We are speaking to their accomplices. More arrests by the NIA are not ruled out," the sources said and noted that surveillance had been increased in Tumakuru as well the neighbouring Chitradurga district.

The NIA has learnt that a few months ago Qasmi and six suspects parted ways over ideological differences. While the terror suspects were inclined towards the ISIS, Maulana was following the al-Qaeda policy.

It has been reported that the NIA also recovered explosives from two terror suspects and are trying to identify the source.

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Your trip to Las Vegas is set to become more convenient with US state Nevada's soon-to-be-launched tourism office in New Delhi.

Las Vegas Strip casinos are seen from the 550 foot-tall High Roller observation wheel, the tallest in the world, in Las Vegas. Picture courtesy: Reuters

By India Today Web Desk: The first place that comes to the mind of any Indian traveller when somebody mentions Nevada, is Las Vegas. Well, that's not the only place that this US state has. There are a lot more that Nevada has in store for a traveller -- untouched mountains, adventure sites, cowboy trails and so on.

In order to make the Indian travellers aware of these places and plan their next holiday to this place, Nevada will soon open a new tourism office in New Delhi. The main purpose of having this office will be to promote Nevada's travel and tourism sector in India, an official said.

Also read: Travel to Washington DC to see 5 planets at the same time!



Nevada Lt Governor Thomas Hutchinson before embarking on an India trip for its launch told PTI, "Opening an office in India will provide Nevada with greater opportunities to promote international travel and tourism to our state".

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This move comes in response of a travel market in Nevada, which has been getting tourists from India. In fact, Hutchinson pointed out that state already has 6.5 per cent share of the Indian travel market and the research indicates that the top reasons for travel from India is to visit family living the US. He said, "With a new office in New Delhi, I am confident that our increased presence will encourage even more tourists from India to visit the Silver State."

Also read: Indians rank number 1 in considering mobile as the most important travel companion



In another interesting revelation made by him, an Indian traveller's maximum annual budget for an international trip is USD 5,451 (Rs 3,70,370 approximately). Hutchinson also brought it to notice that when it comes to the choice of accommodations, Indian travellers usually prefer staying in mid-priced hotels.

(With inputs from PTI)
Anupam Kher, who led the charge against those who said intolerance was rising in India, spoke to Mail Today on Wednesday in an exclusive interview after receiving the Padma Bhushan on Republic Day.

By Abhijit Majumder: Thirty-one years after the angry, old man of 'Saaransh' exploded on to the big screen, his long shadow has touched a new milestone. Anupam Kher, who was just 28 when he played the rebellious, aged headmaster, is no less rebellious after all these years.

The actor, who led the charge against those who said intolerance was rising in India, spoke to Mail Today on Wednesday in an exclusive interview after receiving the Padma Bhushan on Republic Day.

Did he get the award - as some alleged, particularly on social media - because he is close to the ruling BJP?

"That means in the last 67 years, whosoever got it must have got it because of their proximity to governments. It includes Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Hassan, Shivaji Ganesan. Can one nullify their work? These great performers are the reason why we became actors," Kher said on phone. "If I had got an award for dancing, painting or singing, one could understand the criticism. I am one of the finest actors of this country. I have great sympathy for this lot [his critics and trolls]. They have no life."

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'Risen from gutter'



On whether his campaign against the intolerant India narrative would have a professional backlash, he said: "The backlash could be subtle. Some may not want to work with me. That's all right. I came to Mumbai with Rs 37 in my pocket. I've risen from the gutter, and not taken favours. You can't demolish a self-made man."

He said he didn't fear not getting jobs. "If I go to the streets playing a dugdugi, people will throng."

Kher made it clear that he would not accept government positions.

"No, I will not. They did offer me one or two positions. They offered me NFDC chairmanship. I declined. Taking up a post is an obligation. But an honour, anytime," he said. "When I agreed to head the Censor Board, I thought it was offered because of my capability. I didn't realise it was a political position which was taken away when the Congress came to power."

On intolerance, Kher took a sharp jibe at some of his co-actors. "Today, all those who said India was intolerant are saying 'I never said that'. That's because the country has not accepted that statement."

He stressed the importance of speaking up, even risking unpopularity. "Why should I be made to feel self-conscious about putting a teeka or wearing gerua as a Hindu in this country? Why shouldn't 26 years of Kashmiri Pandits' exile be the theme of my talks?"

Kher said no party, including the BJP, did much for Pandits. "But I would like to give this government five years," he said.

He describes, laughing, how he changed his voice when he got a call from an unknown number during the Jaipur Literary Festival while travelling in a bus with actor Abhishek Bachchan. "When he said he was from home ministry, I said, 'This is Anupam Kher speaking'. He broke the award news to me and asked: 'Kya aap isko sweekar karte hain [do you accept the award]?'

"I said, 'Main bus mein leyt ke sweekar karta hoon [I accept it rolling on the bus floor]'."

Anupam Kher receives India's fourth highest civilian award, Padma Shri, from President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam at a ceremony in New Delhi June 30, 2004. (Photo: Reuters) Anupam Kher receives India's fourth highest civilian award, Padma Shri, from President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam at a ceremony in New Delhi June 30, 2004. (Photo: Reuters)

Kher, arguably the first to tell his own story on stage, had got a Padmashree in 2004.

"This country has allowed me to be what I am. My father was a clerk in the forest department. He got Rs 90 a month and with 14 in the family to support. I went to a municipal school."

In Class V, Kher acted in his first play. "It was a disaster. I didn't get an award. My father plucked a bunch of yellow flowers in Shimla and told me: 'This is your award.'"

After a three-year course at National School of Drama and teaching theatre in Lucknow, Kher arrived in Mumbai on June 3, 1981.

"I was on the streets on Mumbai, looking for work, compromising with my dignity, sleeping on railway platforms sometimes. But those yellow flowers my father brought every time I failed kept me going."

He recalled his first rented house in Mumbai. "My landlady was a washerwoman. I shared a small room with four others; she and her children slept in the kitchen. Ironically, my address was 'Anupam Kher, 2/15 Kherwadi, Kher Nagar, Kher Road.'

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Big break



Then, the fateful role in Saaransh.

"For that, I didn't get a national award. Again my father landed up, this time with a woolen muffler made by my mother. He was this magic box, and he created this amazing feeling."

So, when 31 years and 419 films later he got the Padma Bhushan, he wished his father was there. Every time I get something, I think about that small town where I lived."

Does he see himself in active politics?

"If you are saying all these moves?March for India etc?are a precursor, they are not. The day I want to join politics, I'll announce it from the top of the world," he said. "Not yet. Not for another five-six years. But I don't want to rule it out. After all, Kucch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai (Anything can happen)."
Scores of people braved the morning chill to witness the grand showcase of nation's valour and diversity.

By Sneha Agrawal: If the moderate jog of the fearsome elite para commandos performing strenuous double march clutching their rifles pumped in adrenaline, the easy steps of the French contingent set the perfect pace for the 67th Republic Day parade on Rajpath.

Amid tight security, scores of people braved the winter chill and thick security cover to witness the grand event which for the first time saw march past by a foreign contingent. With French President Francois Hollande as the chief guest, personnel from the French 35th infantry regiment of the 7th armoured brigade went down in history when they walked down the road from Rashtrapati Bhavan to India Gate.

The parade had all its usual flavour, impeccable display of march past by various regiments of the Indian Army and showcasing of the soft power. The military display had T-90 tanks of Russian origin rolling down Rajpath with gun mounted infantry combat vehicle BMPs in tow.

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A breathtaking bird's eye view of the 67th Republic Day parade at Rajpath in the Capital on Tuesday.

The special forces contingent, sporting their signature maroon berets, returned to the parade this year after a gap. Also making a comeback was the Indian Army dog squad. The German Shepherds and the Labradors matched steps with the handlers in a display of impeccable man-animal synergy.

The visiting French delegation accompanying the president, the bike stunts by "Daredevils" and the colourful camel contingent was the biggest draw as cellphones were out the moment the mounted BSF soldiers passed the dais. Women power was showcased as well with the Troop Level Radar, the indigenous radars, led by Major Neha Singh while the CRPF contingent had 148 women. Flight Lieutenant Shashikala Maitri and Shilpa Bhatla too, were a part of the Indian Air Force contingent

In a first, military veterans had their representation on display at the parade amid their continuing agitation over OROP. The tableau, which was put out by Directorate of Army Veterans, showcased the role of veterans in nation-building.

The grand finale was the fly-past by IAF fighter jets. The sky had cleared by the time when the Sukhoi-30 MKIs and the Jaguars roared passed the saluting dais to wild cheers. The ultimate act was reserved for the end when a sole Sukhoi made a thunderous entry into the parade airspace at 900 kmph and climbing straight out in a standing position with nose up, completing a perfect trademark vertical Charlie manoeuvre.

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Republic Day: BSF-Pak Rangers exchange sweets, India-China hold ceremonial border personnel meeting


A revamped nightclub, new service apartments, a fashion label, and much more awaits you in Kolkata at the start of a new year.

By India Today Web Desk: A new year has started and Kolkata's welcoming it with open arms. There's a buzz in the city with several new and exciting developments in the fields of art, food, culture and hospitality.Take at look at what's up.

1) Lounge with a view

Southern Avenue in South Kolkata has long been a coveted address for residential areas. But now there is something for food enthusiasts as well. What's Up, a newly-opened rooftop lounge-cum-cafe on Southern Avenue promises an unforgettable scenic view of the verdant green trees that line the roads, a vast lake and open fields.

The lounge is divided into three areas--wooden interiors with an English pub-like feel with cosy sofas and a wrap-around window; an area styled as a modern lounge that has foot massagers and low-seating; and the third is the open air section with high stools and Jacuzzi chairs (with heated water for the winters for diners to soak their feet in).

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The menu is focused on sharing platters of snacks with a couple of options for mains. We began our meal with strawberry cheesy shake. Thick and creamy with just the faintest hint of cream cheese it hit the spot perfectly. Next up was the chicken crostini and chicken roulade. The crostini, perfectly crusty and warm with dollops of mozzarella and chicken as toppings, may seem like a starter but given its generous portions, it can be quite filling. Most of their pizzas are thin crust except the boat shaped-pizza, pan-tossed and topped with lots of cheese and bell peppers.

Meal for two: Rs 1,000, At 122A, Sixth Floor, Southern Avenue. Tel 30859105

2) Home and away

If you're visiting the city for long and would prefer the comforts of living on your own instead of a hotel, take a look at Novotel's serviced apartments, which are also the city's first in-house serviced apartments in a five-star hotel.

The hotel offers 48 studio and one bedroom apartments that are complete with amenities like a kitchenette with microwave, induction plate, toasters, cooking utensil and crockery you can skip the hotel food for a home-cooked meal any time.

At Kolkata Hotel and Residences, CF-11, Action Area 1C, New Town, Rajarhat. Tel 40323333

3) Eat your heart out

It's not every day you get the offer of unlimited kebabs and buffet for an almost paltry sum. Which is why The Great Kebab Theatre is such a must-try. Find on the menu 10 kinds of kebabs (five non-vegetarian and five vegetarian) along with an expansive main course buffet.

Kebabs to die for include Lahsuni Machchi, Mutton Kakori Kebab and Anarkali Mahi Tikka. Vegetarian options include Tulsi Paneer Tikka and Soya Ki Galouti.

Meal for two: Rs 999, At Astor, 15 Shakespeare Sarani. Tel 22829957

4) Child at heart

Kaji Kids is the newest "baby" of the home decor brand, Kaji. Designers and owners Shrivant and Devina More have conceptualised and curated furniture, bedding, wall accents, decor, toys, gifting, birth announcements and much more for children. The store isn't just dotted with products but conceptualised around different themes, with rooms dedicated to nursery, bedrooms, playrooms and functional study areas.

The brand also offers a range of textiles--from cot bedding, to baby blankets and cushions for teens.

Price Rs 300 onwards, At Kaji, Garcha First Lane, Ballygunge. Tel 32507924

5) Fashion forward

Browse through upcoming designer Amrita Chatterjee's label Ahamori's new collection. Inspired by artist Frida Kahlo, the collection is boho-chic with an easy-to-wear style.



Price Rs 1,500 onwards, At Maka Maka 4A/1, Motilal Nehru Road. Tel 983056253

6) Milestones and more

Artist Arpana Caur brings her collection back to the city after a gap of nearly 12 years. Crossing 60 is a collection of her small canvases and compiles more than 30 years of work in pencil, pastel and ink.

At Emami Chisel Art, Emami Tower, 687 Anandapur, EM Bypass. Tel 40113182; Till February 8

7) New in town: UG Reincarnated

Party destination

Everything about UG Reincarnated, the newly revamped nightclub by Hotel Hindusthan International, reads old wine in a new bottle. But that isn't a bad thing. First Anticlock, then Underground, and now UG Reincarnated, this space isn't new to reinventions. Done up by designer Asha Dhody, UG Reincarnated is done up in a chic combination of steel grey with blue accents. A 40-foot long bar and a specialised butler service are just some of the highlights of the club. The menu includes Italian, Mexican and Oriental cuisine with a focus on healthy food.

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UG Reincarnated also has a private lounge, Zingg, which is separated from the the main club by a virtual curtain created by a laser screen. The lounge has its own bar and comfortable seating, apart from all the facilities of UG Reincarnated.

Meal for two: Rs 1,500 onwards, At UG Reincarnated, Hotel Hindusthan International, 235/1, A.J.C. Bose Road. Tel 22830395

By Malini Banerjee

8) Let there be light

See your home in a different light with products from MarIci Experience Centre. The 5,000 sq ft store dedicated to lights has a variety of solutions for your home's lighting needs. The store includes a wide range of products, from recessed to surface mounted ceiling fixtures, underwater to ground-embedded fixtures, fans to chandeliers, table lamps to floor lamps, all running on a centrally operated intelligent lighting control system with sections dedicated to architectural lighting, outdoor, lighting, decorative lighting and fans.

If you are looking to renovate your home dcor or decorate your new house, there is something for everyone here.

Price On request, At Marici Experience Centre, CB69, Sector 1, Salt Lake.

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TEL +919007493240

9) Exhibit preview/Line by line

A thin line

Line by Line, an exhibition of drawings by Sudhir Patwardhan brings together sketches, preparatory drawings and independent drawings by the artist. Patwardhan's engagement and participation in the cultural activities in Mumbai gives him an acute insight into the cultural, social and political life of the metropolis.

His observations of the unstructured growth of the city over the decades, along with a paradigm shift in the social and familial mores of the city, forms the basis of Patwardhan's intimate and charged drawing process.

Patwardhan believes that sketches serve three functions in an artist's practice. "I believe drawing is primary to my artistic practice, as indeed it is for many artists. It has three different roles to play--as sketch, as preparatory drawing and as finished, independent drawing. In the sketch book ideas get their first formulation. More structured preparatory drawings become the foundation of paintings, and others are just independent, stand-alone drawings." His independent and standalone drawing, or sketches that didn't serve as a springing board for other art, are more contemporary in nature and revolve around the human figure.

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"The single human figure under different conditions of stress--social, domestic and existential, is a recurring subject. Other, related subjects include the urban and suburban environment, home, illness, and the relationships between people," says the artist. Pictures may say a thousand words, but for Patwardhan the truest words come from bare sketches. "I do believe that because of the directness and bareness of the drawing activity, things can get said in drawing that may escape the more layered and complex processes of painting," he says.

Till February 6, At Galerie 88, 28B Shakespeare Sarani. Tel 22902274

By Malini Banerjee

10) All in one

There's one more dine den in Kolkata's IT hub. Jaisalmer, though named after the Rajasthan's fort city, doesn't just serve Rajasthani or even North-West Frontier cuisine but also Asian and Chinese, and grills and tandoor.

Done up in bright colours, with window shutters in vivid colours dotting the walls, it has a welcoming vibe. The menu includes everything from fail-safe classics like reshmi and tikka kebabs to Konjee Crispy Lamb and Kung Pao Chicken.

Meal for two: Rs 900, At Jaisalmer, Podium Floor, Globsyn Crystal, Sector 5, EP & GP Block, Salt Lake. Tel 7044363636

11) Ladies special

If you're in a bind over where to party with the girls in the middle of the week, worry no more. Not one, but two nightclubs at The Park have offers dedicated to women on two nights of the week. For a girls night out at Tantra, the drinks are on the house as DJs Hussain and Aaditya churn out chart-topping hits.

At Roxy, every Thursday is Blush Thursday with different themes for the night. Themes range from Orange is the New Black to monochrome parties. Drinks are on the house for the girls while DJs Rudra and Rishi play the best of contemporary EDM. Boys can drink till they drop for a fixed price as well. While Roxy with its contemporary vibe, edgy decor and wide cocktail and wine menu is perfect for stylistas in the city looking to lounge with a Cosmopolitan, Tantra is known for its peppy vibe. If all you want to do is dance and in between, grab a few sips of beer and drags on a sheesha, these are the clubs you need to visit.

Price Rs 1,100 per person for stags at Roxy, and Rs 1,200 all inclusive for unlimited drinks at Tantra. At Roxy every Wednesday and Tantra every Thursday, The Park, 17 Park Street. Tel 2249 9000
In some shocking revelations, the ISIS suspects, who were arrested ahead of Republic Day celebrations, today said that they had plans to topple the Indian government.

By India Today Web Desk: In some shocking revelations, the ISIS suspects, who were arrested ahead of Republic Day celebrations, today said that they had plans to topple the Indian government. The suspects further disclosed that they wanted to impose the Sharia law in the country.

The terror suspects, who were picked up from different parts of the country, told National Investigation Agency (NIA) sleuths that only Sharia law could impose stringent punishment for offenders.

During the course of the probe, the suspects also revealed that they had plans of obtaining weapons.

The Home Ministry has decided to seek information and aid from American, German, Australian and Israeli investigative agencies regarding the suspects. It is suspected that the terror network in India may be larger.

Meanwhile, 12 terror suspects have been sent to police custody till February 5 by a special NIA court. In the remand application the NIA said that the suspects were in contact with some active Islamic State (IS) members through apps like Trillian and Skype, sources said.

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The arrests were made following simultaneous searches and raids conducted at 12 locations in six cities- Bangalore, Tumkur, Mangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Lucknow on Saturday with the support of local police forces.

Circuits for detonating explosives were recovered during the searches. The NIA said that certain incriminating articles, including but not limited to mobile phones, laptops, unaccounted cash, jihadi literature and videos and certain material for preparation of bombs were recovered from these places.

According to sources, the arrested people were part of a group named 'Janood-ul-Khalifa-e-Hind' (Army of Caliph of India), a terror group which has almost similar ideologies that of ISIS.

They said the suspects had been under surveillance for quite sometime and the decision to arrest them was taken as the group received 'instructions' for carrying out 'some sensational' attacks in the country.

Watch full video here:

Also read:

ISIS recruiter in India received Rs 8 lakh through hawala

ISIS offering Indian hackers $10,000 per job
In his letter, Khalid Khan has claimed that TMC leader Mohammad Shorab's brother, Mohammad Ali, also known as Raju, was trying to frame Shahnawaz to save Sambia Sohrab.

By Indrajit Kundu: The brother of one of three persons arrested in the Kolkata hit-and-run case has alleged tampring of evidence and attempts to frame them. The brother of Shahnawaz alias Shanu, arrested the case has claimed that the family of the main accused (TMC leaders son Sambia Sohrab) was trying to tamper with evidence and frame an innocent.

Shahnawaz's brother Khalid Khan has now written to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seeking action against such people and 'fair and clean' probe. In his letter, Shahnawaz's brother Khalid has claimed that TMC leader Mohammad Shorab's brother, Mohammad Ali, also known as Raju, was trying to frame his brother to save Sambia Sohrab. The letter also refers to a recorded phone call made allegedly by Raj, a man close to Sambia, to the brother of the third person arrested in the case. The letter says Raj asked that Jonny tell the police that Shanu and not Sambia was driving the Audi when it hit the corporal.

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Incidentally, both Jonny and Shahnawaz have reportedly told the police that Sambia was driving drunk while driving and that he refused to pay heed to their advice to avoid drunk driving.

On January 13, an Air Force corporal was killed when a speeding Audi violated traffic regulations and hit him on Red Road. The corporal, 21-year-old Abhimanyu Gaud, was rehearsing for the Republic Day parade with other defence personnel. Three men have been arrested in the case - TMC leader Md Sohrab's son Sambia Shorab, who was allegedly driving the car, and his friends Shahnawaz Khan and Johnny.

ALSO READ:

Kolkata hit-and-run case: Another accused Shahnawaz arrested from Delhi

BJP MP Babul Supriyo stopped from meeting rape victim's family in Bengal


As the telecom providers do not register the Media Access Control address of the lap top, it becomes an impossible task for the cops to trace it, allege police officers.

By Shashank Shekhar: Purchasing a second-hand laptop? Beware, it might be a stolen one. Sale of stolen laptops is thriving in the national Capital as recovery of such devices is negligible. On an estimate over two dozen laptops go missing or are stolen from Delhi and NCR on a daily basis.

According to the cops, if a mobile phone is misplaced or lost, the security agencies take help of telecom service providers to track its location using the unique IMEI number.

Similarly in case of laptop it can be done through Media Access Control address (MAC address) as each laptop carries a unique number. Police officers allege that as the telecom providers do not register the device so it becomes an impossible task for the cops to trace it.

Police said that it becomes really easy to track a person if the location of the device is known but in most of the cases of stolen laptops it meets a dead end as there is no help from the telecom service providers.

All stolen laptops are being reused and the recovered rate is negligible These laptops are sold at half the price of a new one based on its condition Only BSNL has infrastructure to give MAC details while rest of service providers are violating Telecom Ministry's Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) guidelines. Stealing laptops from parked cars is among the most common street crime nowadays

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"As smartphones have IMEI number, laptop carries MAC address. All stolen phones are tracked through IMEI. Even in cases of heinous crimes, we take help of the mobile location which is given by service providers.

But cases of laptop theft reaches a dead end as there is no support from the telecom service provider. They do not register it in their system and therefore fail to furnish its location," a senior officer of Delhi Police cyber cell said adding that there are many crucial cases which can be cracked if MAC addresses is given but are still pending as cops could not track the device used to commit the crime.

"These days all the laptops are connected to Internet. Even stolen laptops are being resold. As soon as a stolen or missing laptop gets connected to the Internet, the telecom operator should inform the cops but telecom companies do not have mechanism to track it," the officer added.

Like mobile phones, cases of laptop theft has seen sharp rise. Stealing laptops from parked cars is among the most common street crime nowadays. There are many cases when the user misplaces his/her laptop or forgets it after keeping it in a place.

In such cases police are also reluctant to register an FIR and simply note down a missing complaint.

Surprisingly, even after having the information that stolen laptops immediately reach the markets for resale, the Delhi Police or their counterparts in Noida and Gurgaon have not managed to bust any of these gangs who are involved in the crime.

As per Delhi Police record, their elite force - Crime Branch and Special Cell - could manage to recover 17 laptops in 2015. These recoveries were parts of total seizure made by them.

"All stolen laptops are being reused and the recovered rate is negligible. These laptops are sold at half the price of a new one based on its condition. We have also found that these laptops are also being used for heinous crime and cyber crimes.

Only BSNL has infrastructure to give MAC details while rest of service providers are violating Telecom Ministry's Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) guidelines. I have time and again written to service provider to help security agency by providing MAC details," said UP STF's additional superintendent Triveni Singh adding that this problem can become serious national threat.

ALSO READ:
At least six policemen have reportedly been killed and several injured when Maoists triggered a landmine blast targeting their vehicle in Jharkhand's Palamu district today evening.

By India Today Web Desk: At least six policemen have reportedly been killed and several injured when Maoists triggered a landmine blast targeting their vehicle in Jharkhand's Palamu district today evening.

According to reports, Maoists triggered a landmine blast targeting a police vehicle in Chattarpur area of the district killing six policemen on the spot. The driver of the vehicle was also killed in the attack. The injured securitymen have been taken to Daltonganj for treatment. "We are trying to bring them to Ranchi by helicopter by tonight," IG Operations MS Bhatia said.

After the blast, Maoists opened fire on the police party. The encounter between the police and Maoists is still on.

"Maoists targeted a vehicle carrying 12 policemen in Chattarpur village of the district," Palamu DSP Prabhat Ranjan told news agency ANI.

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Palamu DIG Saket Kumar Singh along with other top police officers have rushed to the spot. A massive combing operation is on in the area, which is considered to be a Naxal hot bed.

Earlier on Wednesday, three Maoists were killed in an encounter with the police in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh.
By India Today Web Desk: Disappointed with the response he has been getting from social media users, Justice Markandey Katju, former chairman of Press Council of India, has decided to quit being on social media.

Katju blasted Indians calling most of them 'stupid' and 'arrogant' with no desire to learn.

In a post initially published on Facebook he said, "I tried to pass on all my knowledge I acquired in my life to you, so that you may benefit? But what did I get in return? I got mostly abuses from most of you, because most of you are stupid and arrogant, and have no desire to learn", (SIC) and added "I am sorry I even tried to teach you".

He then took a screenshot of the post and posted it on Twitter with a caption reading 'Goodbye'.



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Probably not able to vent all his anger, Katju then 'pinned' another Facebook post, this time only longer, to his Twitter profile, that currently has over 1,08,000 followers.

In this post he said, "I have been passing on to you through my Facebook posts and blogs the knowledge I had acquired after over half a century tremendous study, discussions and reflection, to help you get over India's massive problems, and this I did as my duty to my country." (SIC)

He also said he gets exhausted after writing long posts to share his knowledge, and summed in up in three points.

1) India has all the potential of becoming a first rate industrial power, with its people enjoying a high standard of living.

2) But to achieve this in reality will require tremendous sacrifices by our patriotic people.

3) Our national aim must to be to create a just social order, with all our people enjoying decent lives.

and ended this post saying, "now I intend to write fewer posts and only when they are required by the changing circumstances", hinting he is not leaving social media anytime soon.



Katju has been active on both Facebook and Twitter and regularly blogged, and he has lashed out at everything and everyone.

Yes, exaggerating, but he made us feel he did.

His January 25 Facebook post about the Republic Day, for instance, said, "Republic Day celebrations are only a joke".



Republic Day celebrationsRepublic Day is being celebrated today in India . But what is there to celebrate about...Posted by Markandey Katju on Monday, January 25, 2016
In an embarrassment to the Congress government in Karnataka, a minister has boasted about his role in the abrupt transfer of a senior woman police official for putting his call on hold on her mobile phone.

By Press Trust of India: In an embarrassment to the Congress government in Karnataka, a minister has boasted about his role in the abrupt transfer of a senior woman police official for putting his call on hold on her mobile phone.

A video footage showing Labour Minister P T Parameshwara Naik making a boastful claim for the shunting out of Deputy Superintendent of Police of Kudligi sub-division in Ballari district Anupama Shenai has gone viral.

The claim by Naik, the district minister in charge, to party workers in Hadagali assembly constituency, has added more embarrassment as it comes only a few days after he rejected any role in the transfer as "far from the truth."

The Minister had then claimed that the officer has been transferred for administrative reasons.

"You are important for me, not officers, I have never played politics on officials. For 42 seconds, DySP spoke to me, it is 42 seconds not minutes," Naik is seen telling a group of party workers in the video.

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"When I called her again, she did not receive, so I have got her transferred, this is true. Why do we want officials who don't take district Minister's phone?" he said.

Shenai had reportedly received a call from a number which said the Minister would speak to her.

At the same time, she also received a call from the Superintendent of Police, Ballari and she allegedly put the Minister's call on hold and spoke to the SP.

Angered by this, Nailk reportedly took her to task and also complained to her higher-ups.

Meanwhile, Home Minister and State Congress Chief G Parameshwara has said that the DySP has not been transferred.

"I want to clarify to you she has not been transferred, she has been sent on OOD (On Official Duty) by concerned head of the department, we also won't know about it. It happens naturally in administrative and official setup," he said.

The minister drew flak from BJP, with its state unit President Prahlad Joshi, alleging that the morale of the state police had considerably gone down due to the action of politicians like Naik.
A Goa-bound Air Asia flight from Bengaluru was delayed after a bomb scare today. Flight I5 1721's departure was put on hold after a threat letter was found in the washroom of the Kempegowda International Airport.

By India Today Web Desk: A Goa-bound Air Asia flight from Bengaluru was delayed after a bomb scare today. Flight I5 1721's departure was put on hold after a threat letter was found in the washroom of the Kempegowda International Airport.

This was the third incident of bomb scare on a plane today.

An Air India and a Jet Airways flight travelling from Delhi to Kathmandu were delayed earlier following a bomb threat call. Authorities said the caller, who claimed to be from Turkey, was using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP)due to which the call could not be traced.

A Kathmandu-bound Jet Airways flight with 111 people on board was on Monday halted minutes before take-off from Delhi's IGI Airport after a bomb threat. The caller claimed a "gift on a seat' and signed off saying "Happy Republic Day". The call was a hoax.

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Tackling hoax bomb calls are a regular thing for security authorities ahead of important dates like - January 26 and August 15. However, this year the frequency of hoax calls has been unusually high.

With the country facing a heightened security threat in the wake of Pathankot terror attack and ISIS, Al Qaeda associates being arrested in raids across the country in the past week, security agencies are taking no chances. But no arrest has been reported in such cases so far which certainly raises a few questions.

Fact factory:

January 27 - 2 flights from Delhi to Kathmandu delayed due to bomb threat.

Goa bound Air Asia flight from Bengaluru delayed after a bomb threat.

Suspicious balloon spotted near Delhi airport.

January 25 - Kathmandu-bound Jet Airways flight from Delhi deplayed after report of a box on aircraft's seat.

January 24 - Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport received an anonymous call threatening to blow up the airport on February 2.

January 23 - A GoAir flight from Bhubaneshwar to Mumbai makes an emergency landing in Nagpur following a bomb scare.

Also Read



Air India, Jet Airways flights from Delhi to Kathmandu delayed after bomb scare

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The Islamabad High Court today dismissed the Indian government's petition seeking voice clippings of the alleged masterminds and of six other suspects in the case due to non-prosecution.

People run past the Taj Mahal Hotel during a terror attack in Mumbai on November 29, 2008. (Reuters photo)

By India Today Web Desk: In a massive blow to the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks investigation, the Islamabad High Court today dismissed the Indian government's petition seeking voice clippings of the alleged masterminds and of six other suspects in the case due to non-prosecution.

The prosecution was seeking voice samples from the suspects to compare it with those communications intercepted by the Indian intelligence agencies. The petition said that the samples were essential for concluding the investigation of the case.

According to Pakistan law, the accused has to give their consent for voice samples.

In a major breakthrough, a Mumbai court in December 2015 had granted pardon to David Coleman Headley, one of the main accused in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks case. He was accepted as a prosecution witness in return.

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Earlier this month, the Pakistan government had also turned down India's proposal to jointly interrogate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar and other suspects linked with the January 2 Pathankot airbase attack.



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Islamic State-inspired group Janood-ul-Khalifae-Hind or the Army of Caliph in India, was planning terror strikes across the country and was looking for recruits willing to travel to Syria.

By Abhishek Bhalla : A well-funded network of ISIS-inspired group Janood-ul-Khalifae-Hind or the Army of Caliph in India, that had recruits across the country, has emerged as a new threat as investigations by National Investigation Agency (NIA) reveal that there was a larger financial nexus involved in the recruitment process.

After busting the 14-member module following a nationwide crackdown, the investigators have launched another manhunt as the probe has revealed that those arrested had recruited several others and also arranged finances for some to travel to Syria and join terror group Islamic State.

NIA's application seeking custodial interrogation of those arrested said that they were in communication with some active members through chatting applications in order to motivate them to join Islamic State.

Sources said the new terror group Janood-ul-Khalifa-e-Hind had made pan-India presence in a short span planning terror strikes across the country and was looking for recruits willing to travel to Syria.

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Investigations have revealed the group was making efforts to establish a channel to procure explosives and weapons, identify locations to organise terror training camps and motivate new recruits to target police officers, foreigners in India and to carry out terrorist activities in various parts of India.

The arrests were made as the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and security agencies carried out a manhunt ahead of Republic Day amid heightened intelligence inputs that the module could strike during the celebrations.

Sources said most of the arrested were in touch with Shafi Armar, the brother of Maulana Abdul Qadir Sultan Armar, a former IM member who joined ISIS and was identified as a handler for the group who was indoctrinating young Indians and convincing them to be part of ISIS before he was reportedly killed in the battlefields of Syria.

His name figures in intelligence reports among the six Indians who have died fighting for ISIS.

Initial investigations have indicated that the remnants of Indian Mujahideen in India were being used by Armar brothers who through their old contacts were recruiting in the name of ISIS.

Following the arrests, security agencies are making efforts to identify more recruits in states like Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Telanagana.

The NIA had registered a case in December 2015 after credible information was received that the Islamic State was engaged in radicalisation of Indian youth and motivating them to join the terrorist outfit. Due to this, some Indian nationals have already joined it or are in the process of joining it for committing terrorist acts in the conflict zone of Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The ISIL is also contemplating to expand its activities to other parts of the world including India, the NIA FIR said.

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The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2015 has India at the 76 rank with 38 scores, unchanged from 2014. Report blames it on the failed electoral promises of the leaders.

By India Today Web Desk: Common people in India, tired of the rampant corruption spread across all levels of public sector, decided to make a change with the power democracy promises - the power to vote.

Some believed in the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party and voted them to power in 2014, where as Delhiites believed in the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party and voted them to power in 2015. During election campaigns, all the parties had made big anti-corruption promises. Did people make right choices by voting these parties and leaders to power?



Not quite.



The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2015 has India at the 76 rank with 38 scores, unchanged from 2014. The yearly study which is carried out by a global body called Transparency International, released the 2015 CPI today.

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The scoring system of CPI measures perceived levels of public sector corruption world-wide and countries with high score points on a scale from 0-100 shows corruption levels are low.

Countries that improved:

The study states 2015 was the year when people worked hand in hand to fight corruption, thereby improving the scores as compared to previous years.

With an impressive score of 91, Denmark leads the world in being corruption free, second year in a row. Finland and Sweden follow suit with 90 and 89 points, respectively. The table also shows Greece, Senegal and UK have significantly improved their scores since 2012.

The main reasons for some of these countries to consistently remain at the top of the index are government openness, civic activism, and social trust and rock solid accountability mechanism that helps them monitor every move of their politicians.

Countries that got worse:

Despite the improvement shown by many countries corruption still remains a blight across the world.

Neighboring countries of India like Bhutan stands way up in the table, occupying the 27 position, with a score of 65 as compared to India's 38 points. The scores of Pakistan, Lankan and Nepal have not shown any drastic improvements.

Bangladesh and China have also shown no improvement. While former is putting pressure on civil society to handle the crisis the latter has employed a draconian prosecutorial measures which has not helped the situation in any way.

The report states Asia Pacific as a whole has shown zero improvement with leaders failing to stick to their tall electoral promises.

The scores of countries such as Australia, Brazil, Libya, Spain and Turkey has significantly deteriorated.

At the bottom of the table is North Korea and Somalia but Brazil fell 7 positions in 2015. The country was rocked by the Petrobas scandal due to which "tens of thousands of ordinary Brazilians have lost their jobs already. They didn't make the decisions that led to the scandal. But they're the ones living with the consequences, states the report.

Poor score is a sign of rampant bribery, lack of punishment for corruption and public institutions which are hardly accountable to its citizens.


Obama says he hopes to visit Cuba before he leaves office but a trip would depend on the progress being made in relations between the two countries.

By AP: The Obama administration is loosening the US trade embargo on Cuba with a new round of regulations allowing American companies to sell to Cuba on credit and export a potentially wide range of products to the Cuban government for the first time, officials said.

The changes are President Barack Obama's third attempt to spur US-Cuba commerce despite an embargo that still prohibits most forms of trade with the island.

US travel to Cuba has exploded since Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro declared detente in 2014. But US hopes of building wider trade between American businesses and Cuba's private sector have been largely frustrated by Congressional reluctance to end the embargo itself and by the island's labyrinthine restrictions on imports, exports and private business.

Obama says he hopes to visit Cuba before he leaves office but a trip would depend on the progress being made in relations between the two countries.

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Yesterday's move appears designed to jumpstart commerce between the two countries and remove some of Cuba's biggest excuses for not opening its economy to trade with the US.

"Just as the United States is doing its part to remove impediments that have been holding Cubans back, we urge the Cuban government to make it easier for its citizens to start businesses, engage in trade, and access information online," National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.

Among a host of other measures, the new regulations allow US firms to offer Cuban buyers credit on sales of non-agricultural goods, addressing a longstanding Cuban complaint about a ban on credit.

The vast majority of Obama's new regulations have been aimed at spurring US trade with Cuban entrepreneurs instead of with the state-run firms that dominate the economy. The Cuban government says that US focus on private business is partly responsible for the island not opening its economy in response to the US loosening of the embargo.

The US Commerce Department said Tuesday that it would now allow US exports to Cuban government agencies in cases where it believed the Cuban people stood to benefit.

It cited agriculture, historic preservation, education, food processing and public health and infrastructure as government-controlled sectors that it would now allow to receive goods from the US on a case-by-case basis, potentially opening up a huge new field of commerce between US business and the Cuban government.

Also read: Cuba says Obama welcome to visit but not to meddle


By Mail Today: Public sector oil marketing companies Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) along with Engineers India Limited (EIL) will invest Rs 1.5 lakh crore for setting up the country's biggest refinery with a capacity of 60 million tonnes (MT) per annum on the western coast, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Tuesday.

"Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), the nation's biggest refiner, will be the leader of the consortium to build an oil refinery in Maharashtra along with BPCL, Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) and Engineers India Ltd (EIL) as partners," Pradhan said in a Twitter post. "Refinery to be built in 2 phases (40+20 million tonnes); 1st phase will have more than Rs 1 lakh crore investment (biggest in India)."

IOC has been looking at the west coast for a refinery in order to reduce cost of operations as catering for customers in west and south was difficult with its refineries mostly in the Northern hinterland. HPCL and BPCL have also been looking at setting up bigger refineries as their units in Mumbai cannot be expanded further due to a lack of space.

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The refinery will produce petrol, diesel, LPG, jet fuel and feedstock for petrochemical plants to cater for the plastic, chemical and textile industries in Maharashtra, said Pradhan, who discussed the setting up of the refinery with Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai on Monday.

"The government of Maharashtra and ministry of petroleum and natural gas will closely work for early identification of land for refinery and finalisation of details of project," Pradhan said. Until now, a refinery with a 15 MT annual capacity is the biggest that any public sector unit has set up in one stage. IOC recently commissioned its 15 MT refinery at Paradip on the eastern coast in Odisha.

Mukesh Ambani-run Reliance Industries Limited holds the distinction of building the biggest refinery in India till now.

The company had set up its first refinery at Jamnagar, Gujarat, with a capacity of 27 MT, which was later expanded to 33 MT. RIL has set up another refinery adjacent to the first for exports with a capacity of 29 MT.

The refinery being planned by the state-owned firms will be bigger than the RIL refineries. The phase-1 itself will be bigger than any one single unit. It will cost `2,500 crore per MT and for the entire 60 MT capacity, the cost works out to `1.5 lakh crore. It will also be accompanied by a petrochemical complex. The costal location of the refinery will be major advantage for IOC as crude oil can be easily sourced from the Middle East and Africa enabling it to operate with a lower inventory of crude oil as imports can be land at short

notice. Consequently, funds will not be locked up in huge crude oil stocks which have to be maintained in the case of inland refineries, where it take as much longer time for crude imports to arrive.

The west coast refinery will be the second coastal refinery being set up by IOC, which has most of its refineries located in the hinterland in places such as Panipat, Mathura, Koyali and Barauni.

IOC has six refineries with a total capacity of 54.20 MT. It also has subsidiary refineries with 11.50 MT capacity. With the Paradip refinery going on stream, the refining capacity of the oil behemoth has gone up to 80.7 MT.

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'Mehbooba ji form a government and if your father has not reached out to people you reach out to them. If you don't want to form a government then for God's sake dissolve this Assembly and give people the choice to decide,' Omar Abdullah said.

By Naseer Ganai: As Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president Mehbooba Mufti continues to be indecisive about government formation and re-alliance with the Bharatiya Janta Party in Jammu and Kashmir, National Conference working president Omar Abdullah today addressed his workers in his Beerwah constituency asking the PDP president to either form a government or go for new elections.

"They (PDP) say there is an alliance. Then they say alliance has not broken. They speak in two languages. They also say the agenda of alliance is not good, and then they say it is sacred document."

"Mehbooba ji form a government and if your father has not reached out to people you reach out to them. If you don't want to form a government then for God's sake dissolve this Assembly and give people the choice to decide," Abdullah said amid cheers.

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Abdullah said PDP was terrified of fresh elections in the State due to its ten-month tenure of failures. He said it was surprising that people found the administration more responsive and effective under Governor's rule than it was under the rule of the PDP-BJP government- which is a tragic indictment of the PDP-BJP government.

Since the death of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed on January 7, Mehbooba Mufti has confined herself to her Fairview residence and is not coming out. The only exception was her maiden appearance on Tuesday attending the Republic Day parade here.

Enlisting the works done in his tenure from 2008 to 2014, Abdullah said National Conference had 28 MLAs and with those 28 MLAs it did a lot for this State. "From New Administrative Units across to the Mughal Road to landmark developmental initiatives or our Welfare and Entrepreneurship Assistance Programs for unemployed youth, we delivered as a Government? PDP has the same number of MLAs and look at the state of misgovernance, helplessness and chaos in the State today,", Abdullah said thus demonstrating that in case of fresh elections he would be targeting the PDP on governance issues and for forging alliance with the rightwing party the BJP. He said since past one year the PDP has forced Governor's rule on the state twice.

Making case for fresh elections in the state, Abdullah said PDP was afraid of fresh elections. "They (PDP) will not form a government but at the same they will not go for an alliance. Because they are afraid of election. They know if today fresh elections will be held in Jammu and Kashmir, National Conference will win. It will be National Conference government. National Conference will form the government on its own without any alliance. That is why they don't want to have elections," Abdullah said throwing a challenge to the PDP.

He said the people will not tolerate PDP's deliberate indecisiveness for long. "Mufti Sahab too had done this last year. But that time situation was different. That time after 2014 floods people were waiting for relief and rehabilitation. When Mufti made people wait, they became uneasy. They wanted there should be government and when the BJP and the PDP came together, people didn't object to it. Mehbooba is also working on the same scheme these days. She thinks she would make people wait and people would become uneasy again and would insist Mehbooba Mufti to form the government anyhow," Abdullah said.

"People will not be taken ride by such tactics again," Abdullah said.


In a massive crackdown on internet pornography, Pakistan is set to block access to more than 400,000 adult websites featuring pornographic material.

By Asian News International: In a massive crackdown on internet pornography, Pakistan is set to block access to more than 400,000 adult websites featuring pornographic material.



According to the Express Tribune, access to such sites will be restricted at the domain level and the Telecommunication Authority has asked Internet Service Providers across Pakistan to block over 400,000 'pornographic websites'.

The move comes following a recent order by the Supreme Court wherein the telecom sector's regulatory body had been asked to "take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan".

However, officials have said that blocking such websites at the domain level is a colossal and expensive exercise, since it would require changes in their systems and special equipment to block such a large number of websites - not to mention a significant amount of man hours needed for this purpose.

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Nevertheless, they said that they had started work on the order since they were bound to abide by the law.


The Central Board for Film Certification of Pakistan had initially allowed screening of the film and it actually did business in select theatres for two days before the censors decided to invoke the ban.

By Mail Today: Pakistan is not ready for Bollywood brand of porn-com. Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3, Ekta Kapoor's gag bag of raunchy jokes, has been banned in the neighbouring nation.

The Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC) of Pakistan had initially allowed screening of the film and it actually did business in select theatres for two days before the censors decided to invoke the ban. The film had released in Pakistan on Friday along with India.

"The film is full of nudity and has a lot of vulgar content in its dialogues. The board has officially disallowed the film from public viewing," agencies quoted CBFC chief Mobashir Hasan as saying. Hasan further termed KKHH3 as an "out and out obscene film" not fit for public viewing in Pakistan even with an adult certification.

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Hassan added the distributor who imported the film would be penalised. "We have issued a showcause notice to the distributor who faces a hefty fine for importing this film," he said.

The censors, however, were not clear on how the film managed to find its way into the theatres in the first place if it was deemed unsuitable for public viewing in Pakistan.

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A district court in Patna today closed a case against RJD President Lalu Prasad. The case is related to an FIR registered against him during 2014 Lok Sabha elections, on the plea of the state government.

By India Today Web Desk: A district court in Patna today closed a case against RJD President Lalu Prasad. The case is related to an FIR registered against him during 2014 Lok Sabha elections, on the plea of the state government.

Judicial Magistrate Gayatri Kumari ordered closure of the case against Lalu registered against him with Parsa bazar police station in Patna district in 2014 on the request of the Public Prosecutor.

The case was registered against the RJD chief on April 5, 2014 on the basis of the statement of Circle Officer of Phulwarisharif Sunita Prasad in connection with preventing a photographer deployed by her to shoot the roadshow of Prasad during campaign in Patliputra Lok Sabha seat.

The FIR was registered against Prasad under section 171 F (punishment for undue influence or personation at an election), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public function) and 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of IPC.

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Today's order to close a case against the RJD chief came close on heels of state government withdrawing a case against him, his two minister-sons and others for alleged vandalism and stopping government officials during an RJD-sponsored bandh last year.


The Congress cried hoarse and called the move a 'murder of democracy' on a day India celebrated its 67th Republic Day and accused the BJP of creating trouble in Arunachal Pradesh to oust the present government of Chief Minister Nabam Tuki.

By Amit Agnihotri: In a big setback for the Congress, President Pranab Mukherjee gave his nod to bring Arunachal Pradesh under central rule. The border state has been witnessing political crisis since October last year leading to a bitter fights between the Congress and the BJP.

The approval for central rule came a day after Mukherjee sought clarifications from the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on the government's move.

On the same day, the Congress sent a petition against the recommendation to the President and moved the Supreme Court, which is expected to hear the case on Wednesday.

The Congress cried hoarse and called the move a 'murder of democracy' on a day India celebrated its 67th Republic Day and accused the BJP of creating trouble in Arunachal Pradesh to oust the present government of Chief Minister Nabam Tuki. Tuki met former Union Minister and Congress leader Kapil Sibal to discuss the fate of the party's petition in the apex court and the future course of action.

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The Congress, which had raised the issue of constitutional crisis in Arunachal Pradesh during the previous winter session of parliament, said it will co-opt other political parties to broadbase its offensive against the BJP in the budget session scheduled to start next month.

"Moving beyond the slogan of Congress-mukt Bharat, the BJP is now working to create an Opposition-mukt Bharat," Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said. "We will fight the battle in the court, inside the parliament and outside," he said. The move has seemed to unite the Opposition.

"This is a black day for the republic on the 67th Republic Day. This is against the spirit of co-operative federalism," said JD(U)'s KC Tyagi.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also criticised the Centre's move while invoking BJP veteran LK Advani, who has been out of saffron party's leadership since the Modi government came to power.

"Prez rule in Arunachal. Advaniji was right in saying there are emergency-like conditions in the country," Kejriwal tweeted.

"Point to me a single law and order problem in Arunachal Pradesh. You can't, because there is none," a miffed Tuki said.

The Centre had said the law and order condition in the state has deteriorated, an assembly session had not been held for favour with the six months and lawmakers were denied access to the assembly because the speaker had the building locked up.

The political crisis surfaced in Arunachal Pradesh in December when around half of the Congress lawmakers joined hands with the BJP in rebellion and supported a move to remove the speaker and chief minister at an assembly session convened by Governor JP Rajkhowa.

The rebel lawmakers held their meeting first in a community hall and then in a hotel, raising eyebrows.

Congress leader Kalikho Pul blamed CM Tuki for the problem. "This is unfortunate. Arunachal Pradesh had to see this day because of Tuki," said Pul denying the BJP was behind the crisis. "The BJP never said they want to form the government. They are not trying to do that," he said.

Sibal, who accused the Arunachal governor of being a BJP agent, said RSS-backed governors in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Assam and Tripura were partisan and were implementing the ruling party's agenda.

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Press reports claimed that Vadra-promoted Sky Light Hospitality had been given a clean chit in a case pertaining to charges of grabbing 69.55 hectares of land in Bikaner.

By Mail Today: No clean chit has been given to Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra in an ongoing land grab case in Bikaner in Rajasthan as reported by a section of the media leading to a flutter on the social media. Reacting sharply, the state government and Bikaner police rubbished the report saying the probe against Vadra is still underway.

State home minister Gulab Chand Kataria also clarified that no such action (giving clean chit) had been taken. "There is no clean-chit given to Robert Vadra. There is no such report. The investigation is still underway, we are awaiting the result. We can't say anything until then," Kataria said.

Press reports claimed that Vadra-promoted Sky Light Hospitality had been given a clean chit in a case pertaining to charges of grabbing 69.55 hectares of land in Bikaner. The case had been lodged by the Vasundhara Raje government in 2014. The reports said Sky Light Hospitality itself was a victim of conspiracy and cheating as grabbed land was sold to it.

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Deputy superintendent of police (DySP) Ramavtar Soni, whom some of these reports quoted as having said that Vadra had been defrauded and cheated in the land deal, told Mail Today that they were "false".

"It has been falsely reported that any clean chit has been given to anybody in the case. The investigation is still on and we have not yet filed a chargesheet. At this stage how can clean chits be given?" Soni said.

Many cases

Member of Parliament (MP) from Bikaner Arjun Ram Meghwal said there was no truth to such reports. "Several cases had been filed in this case that pertains to grabbing almost 70 hectare of land. The investigation into the matter is still underway and no clean chit has been given to Vadra," he said.

Of the many cases that had been registered by the Bikaner police in the alleged land grab case, four relate to the land sold to Vadra-promoted Sky Light Hospitality Pvt Ltd.

Vadra is facing probe in cases of land grab not only in Rajasthan, but also BJP-ruled Haryana. The Manohar Lal Khattar government in Haryana had earlier established a single-member judicial commission presided by Justice SN Dhingra to look into allegations of murky land deals during the Bhupinder Singh Hooda regime.

The report hit the BJP by surprise as social media came alive with reactions and comments. The party had made the alleged dubious deals of Robert Vadra as a major poll issue and the report had suggested that the probe against him had ended in a whimper.

The leaders moved fast to stop the report from sending a misleading message and the state unit dispelled rumours based on a false report. Even Congress leaders were surprised as they were not expecting the development.

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Activist Trupti Desai sought Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis's support for ending gender bias at all religious places across Maharashtra but will the chief minister ensure #RightToPray?

By India Today Web Desk: The Ranragini Bhumata Brigade, headed by activist Trupti Desai, staged a protest on the 67th Republic Day to defy the age-old patriarchal tradition of barring women from entering the inner sanctum of the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra.

Desai today sought Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis's support for ending gender bias at all religious places across Maharashtra and handed over a memorandum of demands to him requesting to allow free entry of women at all sacred places in the state.

But, will the chief minister ensure #RightToPray? Founder of Divine Wisdom A New Way of Life, Soniyaa Didi, columnist and novelist Shobha De, author Sadia Dehlvi and actor Kishori Shahane discussed the issue on the News Today with Rajdeep Sardesai show.

While Soniyaa Didi was of the opinion that Trupti Desai's agitation is politically motivated, Desai clarified she is not associated with any political party, but was fighting for women's rights.

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"If Trupti Desai is doing this entirely on her own without any political party backing, I support her," Shobha Dee said, and added, "are we going to see any female Pope? This is a century-old practice of keeping women away from religion."

Sadia Dehlvi expressed hope that Dargahs become more open to women.

Watch the show here:


The curvaceous actress has filed a lawsuit against a beauty brand for using her face without her permission to endorse their products.

By India Today Web Desk: Sofia Vergara is very unhappy with a beauty brand and the Modern Family actress has expressed her displeasure by taking the company to court for using the star's face to endorse their products without paying the actress, who charges USD 15 million for such endorsements.

Also read: Sofia Vergara-Joe Manganiello hitched! Check out pictures from their dream wedding

Vergara claimed that the brand, Venus Concept, blew up her images and used these to promote its products around the world. In the lawsuit, she said that the whole thing started with an innocent Instagram post, reports tmz.com.

The actress added that she had got Venus' Legacy treatment, a skin tightening massage, in August 2014 and she posted a photograph of herself on the table which got about 40,000 likes.

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The Hot Pursuit star said that she didn't actually like the treatment and found it "a waste of time and money with little in the way of any results."



Also read: Sofia Vergara slams rumours that she was Bill Cosby's victim

Nevertheless, she added, that the beauty brand took the opportunity of putting up photos of her at exhibition booths and on its website with captions like, "Loved by...bombshell actress Sofia Vergara."

Sofia claims that the brand never paid her anything for using her pictures.

(With inputs from IANS)
Following reports of not much changing on the ground, PM Modi wants to reboot SBM and sought a revised action plan on all that needs to be done to realise his 'Clean India' dream by October 2, 2019.

By Darpan Singh: The government would on February 3 brainstorm with all states and Union territories (UTs) to review and rev up Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship sanitation programme.

There would be a strict scrutiny of the status of toilet-building. Claims regarding open defecation-free villages would be put to multi-layer verifications. India's mounting garbage crisis is also on the agenda.



Health risks

About 95 lakh toilets have been constructed during the first year of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) that Modi launched in October 2014. The target is 6.84 crore new toilets in rural areas by 2019, and zero open defecation in India's 2.5 lakh gram panchayats comprising 6 lakh villages. Roughly half of India's population relieves itself outdoors - a serious risk to health.

Following reports of not much changing on the ground, PM Modi wants to reboot SBM and sought a revised action plan on all that needs to be done to realise his 'Clean India' dream by Oct 2, 2019. He has already received ideas from a group of secretaries after they were told 'enough is enough, and it is time for real action'.



Renewed focus

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Before meeting the PM, the group spoke to ministries, states, industry, civil society and local bodies. The renewed focus is on people's involvement, sustainability and time-bound results.

Drinking water and sanitation minister Chaudhary Birender Singh has written to all chief ministers, asking each of them to send in a minister and an officer who would represent them in the meeting that would also review the progress made in the Centre's 'water for all' scheme.

The meeting would discuss what all new initiatives are needed to make the two schemes a success. This was followed by a letter from Satyabrata Sahu, a joint secretary in the in the ministry of drinking water and sanitation (MDWS), to all states and UTs, underlining how the access to safe and adequate drinking water was key to the success of Swachh Bharat.

Saraswati Prasad, an additional secretary in the MDWS, has also sent in a missive, saying the minister would hold the daylong meet that would, among other things, look to adopt best practices from across the country.

Losing sheen

Modi wielded the broom in Delhi 15 months ago to launch the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, fuelling hopes of cleaner public places, better waste management and eradication of open defecation in villages by 2019. While toilet building has picked up pace, and the prime minister has been able to nudge people into caring for hygiene, many believe the initial enthusiasm has been waning.

As for water, a person does not get the minimum 40 litres of safe drinking water a day in about 25 per cent of the total 17,13,003 habitations in the country.

A total of 3,60,415 habitations are partially covered.

Groundwater contamination is a serious public health crisis, particularly in rural pockets, affecting over 3.61 crore people in 63,831 pockets across half of India's districts.

The government aims to cover 90 per cent of the rural population through piped supply schemes by 2022.

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We need to be aware of this deadly virus.

By India Today Web Desk: A mosquito-borne virus called Zika is raising concern worldwide because if infected, it can cause a neurological birth disorder.

In Pics

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Government of Canada had earlier issued a warning for those traveling to the Caribbean countries about Zika virus.

Soon, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said the virus might spread to all American countries, excluding Chile and Canada. It has already spread to at least 25 counties.

People travelling Zika infected countries have been asked protect themselves from the vector - mosquitoes - and pregnant women have been specially advised to avoid going to such countries till the time the virus is contained.

In some countries women are being asked not to conceive for at least two years because the infection of this virus can result in babies being born with abnormally small heads or with developmental issues, and at worse, be still born.

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This virus has now been shown to pass through amniotic fluid to the growing baby.

But, what is this virus?

Transmitted by an aggressive Aedes aegypti mosquito, Zika is a part of the same family as yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and dengue.

Why is there a need to worry?

Researchers and scientists have not been able to come up with a cure for this infection. There is no vaccine to prevent Zika either.

How is it transmitted?

Aedes mosquito is the carrier of this infection. If it bites a person who is already infected and then bites those who are not infected, they become carriers too.

There has been a warning it can be transmitted through sexual-intercourse as well. However, there have been only two documented cases till now. The WHO has said this potentially means it may even spread through blood transfusion.

What are the symptoms?

From fever, headache, rash to a possible pink eye, the symptoms are many but most of the infected people never find out about the disease till it's late.

Effects

Microcephaly has been linked to this virus infection. According to reports, newborn babies of mothers who were infected with Zika during pregnancy are at an increased risk of getting this birth defect.

Microcephaly is a birth defect and is caused by below-normal brain development in utero. The Brazilian Ministry of Health has confirmed the relation between the Zika virus and this birth defect.

Health officials are also investigating its link to a paralysis syndrome called Guillain-Barre. It strike patients after they have suffered from influenza or other viruses.

WHO and Pan American health Organisation warned in a report that they came across multiple cases wherein people had this syndrome shortly after contracting the Zika virus.

The Guillain-Barre syndrome can cause bedsores, pneumonia but can be treated with infusion of plasma.

Infected countries

According to the CDC, the Zika virus has now spread to Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Paraguay, the US Virgin Islands, Venezuela, among others.

Brazil has already seen 4,000 cases of microcephaly in babies born to women who were infected with Zika while they were pregnant.

How to protect yourself?

Due to lack of a medical answer to this virus, it is better to avoid traveling to areas affected by this virus. If it cannot be avoided, then use an EPA-approved repellent over sunscreen, wear long pants and long sleeved shirts.

Source: Reuters



What about its spread to India?

After being described in the scientific community as a "cousin" of India's endemic dengue virus, it is also considered Indians have developed a passive immunity to this infection.

The traces of this virus were seen only in 1952-53. But as they say, prevention is better than cure and that too from an infection that has NO CURE at all.







Also read: Obama calls for rapid Zika research as deadly virus starts spreading

Also read: Will Indian government wake up to the Zika threat late?


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The Individuals' Deposit Guarantee Fund has declared void over 150 deals worth around UAH 20 billion signed with the purpose of removing funds from Delta Bank (Kyiv), the liquidator of the bank Vladyslav Kadyrov said at a press conference on Tuesday.

"There was an attempt of removing assets worth around UAH 20 billion. They tried to remove secured good credits and solvent credits. We declared these transactions void, stopped them and returned to the balance sheet. Now they are as a debt on the balance sheet officially," he said.

At present, court hearings are being held on these deals, Kadyrov added.

He said that among the deals was an attempt of Cargill to remove a credit worth over $100 million from Delta Bank with the help of a letter of credit.

"We saw that those letters of credit are void and we filed a claim to court. In general, 17 false letters of credit worth over $100 million were signed for Cargill. This is so-called "off-balance sheet collapse" worth around UAH 2.5 billion that the bank loses," he said.

He said that the similar scheme was used for deals with Oschadbank (UAH 2 billion), Foxtrot (UAH 2 billion), Avant Bank (UAH 500,000), the State Mortgage Institution and MTS mobile communications operator.

"Oschadbank signed assignment agreements for good credits with good collateral worth UAH 2 billion. Our commission declared these agreements void, and thus we returned the money to the balance sheet. We're fighting for Delta Bank to be the creditor on these credits, not Oschadbank. Oschadbank did not comment on the situation," he said.

The liquidator believes that if the fund manages to return the whole sum of assets to the balance sheet of the bank, the financial institution will be able to settle the problem of the fourth line (deposits worth over UAH 200,000), and total claims on them are some UAH 10-12 billion, according to preliminary assessments.

Kadyrov said that the total sum of approved and accepted claims is around UAH 53 billion.

In turn, Director of the bank insolvency settlement department at the fund Natalia Soloviova said that the deals where shareholders sign agreements for realizing the schemes to remove assets were recorded almost in all banks that are under liquidation.

"Now, as soon as banks face problems, we see that a scheme for removing assets from the balance sheet is being prepared," she said.

She said that this situation was seen with the debt of Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) to bank Finance and Credit worth $9 million, which is considered paid under a court ruling, and in IMEXBANK (all based in Kyiv) where the credit of UAH 1 billion was sold for UAH 30 million.

"We consider these agreements void while courts do not," the fund said.

Delta Bank was founded in 2006. Its largest shareholders in early 2015 were Mykola Lahun (70.6059%) and Cargill Financial Services International, Inc. (29.3941%).

Delta Bank ranked fourth among 158 banks operating in the country on January 1, 2015 by total assets (UAH 60.303 billion), according to the National Bank of Ukraine.

  
Energy and Coal Industry Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Demchyshyn has said he favors trilateral gas talks with Russia in a long-term outlook.

"The agreement somehow or other will be signed as we did it before. Because this is important to have an opportunity to bid for the better price," he told the journalists after the sitting of the Cabinet of Ministers on Wednesday.

According to Demchyshyn, a presence of such agreement influences Ukraine's purchases of natural gas in Europe.

"Because the Europeans understand how much we buy and what is a price and respond respectively," he said.
Foreign Affairs Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin and his counterpart from the Republic of Korea Yun Byung-se have discussed the ways to strengthen the pressure on the authorities of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the view of its holding nuclear tests.

"On January 25, 2016, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin held a telephone conversation with Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea Yun Byung-se, initiated by the South Korean side. During their phone talk ministers discussed prospects for strengthening the international pressure on North Korea as a result of the nuclear tests on January 6," reads a statement posted on the website of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday.

Klimkin confirmed Ukraine's position that violations by Pyongyang of the nuclear non-proliferation regime is unacceptable and reassured Seoul of the further support by Ukraine for the initiatives on this matter within international organizations, particularly the UN Security Council.
Normandy Quartet foreign ministers may meet in first half of February

The foreign ministers of the Normandy Quartet (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine) may meet approximately during the second week of February, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said.

"We plan this for the beginning of February. I so far cannot give you the final date, this is likely to be the second week," Klimkin told journalists in Kyiv on Wednesday in reply to a question from Interfax.

The meeting's date, venue, and agenda will be determined next week, he said.

Klimkin had told Interfax earlier in Davos that the Normandy Quartet foreign ministers might meet in Paris in early February.

The previous meeting between the Normandy Quartet foreign ministers took place in Berlin on November 6, 2015.
Time to reveal my first investment in a truly Japanese company (that is bought with Yen and only listed in Japan). What really triggered me to pull the gun...
* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati received the 2022 Adepi Award

* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati listed as one of the World Intellectual Property Review's "Influential Women in IP" of 2020.

* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati listed as one of the Managing Intellectual Property magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People" of 2018.

* IPKat founder and Blogmeister Emeritus Jeremy Phillips listed as one of the Managing Intellectual Property magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People" of 2005, 2011, 2013, and 2014.

* Recommended by the European Patent Office as reading material for candidates for the European Qualifying Examinations, 2013.

* Listed as "Top Legal Blog" in The Times Online, March 2011.

2010 ABA Journal 100. * One of the only two non-US blogs listed in the Blawg100.

* Court Reporter Top Copyright Blog award winner, November 2010.

* Number 1 in the 2010 Top Copyright Blog list compiled by the Copyright Litigation Blog, July 2010.

* Selected by the United States Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Legal Blawgs as of 2010.

* Top Patent Blog poll 2009: 3rd out of 50 in the "Favourite Patent Blog" poll and 2nd out of 50 in the "Most-read" poll.

Blog of the Year, 20 August 2008. * ComputerWeekly IT Law and Governance, 20 August 2008.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.  Arthur Conan Doyle



Republic of dan dan A big part of this journey is discerning disinformation. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and its best not to invest too much in any one belief apart from believing in your own innate sense of right and wrong. This will protect your free will which is the only thing that is truly valuable,There are groups which seek to ensnare and control free will because it is the true currency. Goodness and decency are not the sole dominion of religion you are born "nice". As a species we evolved through co operation not "survival of the fittest" and we are not "born of sin" we are born to co-operate and be friendly as the best means of survival and advancement of the species. No external system of belief has value other than as a beacon to which free will gathers around. Popular culture and religion is the hunting ground of the elites because it is where people are most willing to hand over their free will and enter into contracts they have no knowledge of. The Illuminati are a very small part of the picture. You will find that we are all conditioned to ridicule certain ideas and these ideas are exactly the ones that should be taken seriously. Dan View my complete profile

"YOU ARE FREE TO BELIEVE WHAT YOU WANT BUT YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO KNOW FOR SURE."



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If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.  Joseph Goebbels

Facebook is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the worlds most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence. The Internet is the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.  Julian Assange

The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence  on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.  John F Kennedy



We are clearly massively missing the point. The vast majority who investigate this will not go any furtherbecause a.) Their belief systems wont let them and b.) They fear what other people will think about them. There is the level we see unfolding in the news, and then there is the other dimensional non-human level. The rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper. It is all about the control and programming of perception at one level we see the dark-suits sitting at the big round table making the decisions, then at the next we have the secret societies, and then we go beyond the frequency of visible light Satanism is a network that interacts with the beings that are controlling our vibrational state from a frequency above us. Icke says











"You're all beautiful, both inside and out. You mustn't worry about anything; nothing is important except finding love within yourself and being all honourable and glorious and beautiful. Take things dead slowly 'cause nothing you can attain externally has value, only that which is within yourself already is valuable."

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I WRITE NEWS ABOUT AND PUT NEWS ARTICLES ABOUT ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM PERTAINING TO BIBLE PROPHESY HAPPENINGS.JOEL 3:20 But Judah (ISRAEL) shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.(THATS ISRAEL-JERUSALEM WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED AGAIN)-WE CHRISTIANS ARE ALL WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THE PRE-TRIBULATION RAPTURE TO OCCUR.SO WE CAN GO TO JESUS AND GET OUR NEVER DYING BODIES.SO WE CAN RULE OVER CITIES OURSELVES.WHILE JESUS RULES FROM DAVIDS THRONE FOREVER IN JERUSALEM.
Group Managing Director United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, Mr. Phillips Oduoza; US Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker; UBA Chairman, Mr. Tony Elumelu during the panel and roundtable discussion between members of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa (PACDBIA) and a diverse community of entrepreneurs hosted by Tony Elumelu Foundation and UBA Plc in Lagos yesterday.





The Tony Elumelu Foundation and United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) partnered with the United States Department of Commerce to host a panel and roundtable discussion between members of the U.S. Presidential Council on Doing Business in Africa (PCDBIA)and a diverse community of African entrepreneurs.





The 11 person U.S. delegation, along with representatives of several U.S. government trade and investment-focused agencies, was led by the Honourable Penny Pritzker  U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The Council visited Lagos as part of a fact-finding mission to help inform their upcoming report to President Obama on how to strengthen commercial engagement between the U.S. and Africa, which will result in mutually-beneficial growth.





The event  titled Unleashing Africas Entrepreneurs: Strengthening the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem to Empower the Next Generation of Africas Business Leaders  brought together American business leaders and Nigerian entrepreneurs to discuss challenges, solutions and innovations in the current African business environment. The event was designed to allow representatives of the U.S. Government to participate in direct and substantive discussions with Africas emerging business leaders  an opportunity to engage in a dialogue that has the potential to influence U.S. foreign policy for Africa.





"President Obama believes, as I do, that the American private sector, working in partnership with the African business community, and African entrepreneurs can help address many of the continents most pressing challenges, including creating jobs and opportunity for young people across the continent," said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. "I am proud to lead our Administrations effort to support and empower aspiring entrepreneurs, both in the United States and across the globe."





UBA Chairman Tony O. Elumelu, through his eponymous Foundation, hosted the delegation, and expressed gratitude for the collaborative approach the Council and U.S. Commerce Department are taking in engaging local entrepreneurs as part of their deliberations.





Too often, well-meaning foreign policy-makers develop strategies to help Africans without actually engaging us, he said. In order to effectively help or support people, we should ask them what kind of help they want. So, I thank you for doing that with African businesses.





For the U.S. Government, this trip begins the Road to GES 2016  the Global Entrepreneurship Summit; an annual gathering of entrepreneurs at all stages of business development, designed to demonstrate the U.S. Governments commitment to fostering entrepreneurship around the world.





Expressly designed to address the needs of and provide opportunities for the next generation of African entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurs in attendance included SMEs supported by UBA Plc, UNCTADs EMPRETEC Nigeria Foundation and those selected for the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme (TEEP)  a 10-year, $100 million commitment by the Tony Elumelu Foundation to empower the next generation of Africas entrepreneurs with businesses that have the potential to generate income and jobs for their nations.




[January 26, 2016] Fitch Affirms AnMed Health's (South Carolina) Revs at 'A+'; Outlook Stable

Fitch Ratings has affirmed the 'A+' rating on the following South Carolina Jobs-Economic Development Authority (SC) hospital refunding revenue bonds issued on behalf of AnMed Health (AnMed): --$22,130,000 series 2010; --$34,585,000 series 2009A*; --$111,100,000 series 2009B; --$56,350,000 series 2009C; --$18,545,000 series 2009D*. *Underlying ratings. The bonds are secured by an irrevocable direct pay letter of credit from Wells Fargo (News - Alert) Bank, N.A. The Rating Outlook is Stable. SECURITY Bonds are secured by AnMed's gross revenues and pledged assets, excluding standard permitted encumbrances. KEY RATING DRIVERS CONSISTENTLY STRONG OPERATING RESULTS: AnMed has been able to sustain solid and consistent operating results over the past four years. Operating EBITDA margins have exceeded 13% in fiscal 2013 and 2014 and through the nine-months-ended Sept 30th which exceeds the 'A' category median of 10.3%. Fitch believes AnMed's strong profitability reflects the benefits of its affiliation with Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS) and its ability to maintain its dominant market position in Anderson County. ROBUST LIQUIDITY: AnMed's strong cash flow generation has resulted in further improvement in unrestricted cash and investments. At Sept 30th, unrestricted cash and investments totaled $458.1 million which is up from $419.2 million at FYE 2013. Days cash on hand of 386.0 and cash to debt of 169.4% both exceed 'A' category medians and provide a solid financial cushion to offset concerns about AnMed's payor mix and limited geographic diversity. AFFILIATION WITH CAROLINAS HEALTHCARE SYSTEM: Since 2009, AnMed has operated under a ten year Management Services Agreement with CHS. Management attributes some of its financial success to the improved revenue cycle management, supply chain initiatives, and access to analytics and strategic planning that it has derived from this affiliation. LIMITED GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSITY: While AnMed maintains a dominant 72.2% inpatient market share (2015 data) in its primary service area of Anderson County, it faces significant competition from nearby Greenville Health System (revenue bonds rated 'AA-') and Bon Secours St. Francis Health System (revenue bonds rated 'A') limiting its ability to grow into areas northeast of Anderson. RATING SENSITIVITIES STABLE OPERATIONS EXPECTED: Fitch expects AnMed's operating performance to remain relatively stable over the rating period. While there may be some erosion in 2015 and 2016 results due to the non-recurring costs associated with the termination of its defined benefit pension plan (non-cash), operating results are expected to be consistent with historical levels. Liquidity is expected to remain strong through manageable capital plans including an $85 million IT project. CREDIT PROFILE AnMed Health is comprised of two separately licensed facilities consisting of 533 licensed (389 staffed) beds located in Anderson, SC. The main campus includes the AnMed Health Heart and Vascular Center, while the North Campus contains the Women's and Children's Hospital and the AnMed Health Cancer Center. AnMed is currently the only obligated group member. Non-obligated system entities include the AnMed Health Foundation, AnMed Health Enterprises (holding company for certain joint ventures), a taxable physician practice management services and a taxable home care and pharmacy services entity. The 40-bed AnMed Rehabilitation Hospital (a joint venture with HealthSouth Corporation) located on the North Campus and Cannon Memorial Hospital, a 55-bed hospital in Pickens that was integrated into the health system in 2014, are not members of the obligated group. The analysis in this report is based on obligated group financial reports. In fiscal 2014, the obligated group represented 95% of all system assets and 94% of total system revenues. SOLID FINANCIAL PROFILE Since Fitch's last rating action, AnMed has continued to deliver strong operating results by focusing on core clinical delivery, leveraging its affiliation with CHS, and benefiting from a modest improvement in payor mix. The result is manifested in a 4.1% operating margin in fiscal 2014 from 3.5% in fiscal 2013. Margin is likely to be impacted by the decision to terminate the defined benefit plan in 2016 that was frozen as of December 31, 2009. The pension plan is actuarially fully funded, but the termination will result in a non-recurring $64.5 million non-cash charge, $4.3 million of which is expected to be reflected in the fiscal 2015 audit. Nine-month interims through September indicate a 3.2% margin, before the expected non-cash charge of $4.3 million related to the planned termination of the pension plan. Consequently, there will be an impact on the income statement in fiscal 2015 and 2016 but the balance sheet strength will be preserved. Historical coverage of MADS ($16.1 million ) by EBITDA has been solid at 5.7x in 2014 and 5.1x through 9 month interim period reflecting AnMed's strong profitability and exceeding the 'A' category median of 4.2x. Despite its dominant market position in Anderson County, the medcal center faces significant competition 30 miles north from Greenville Health System and Bon Secours St. Francis Health System, limiting its ability to grow into areas northeast of Anderson. Instead, the medical center has strategically focused on maintaining its position in the primary service area by growing its active medical staff to 520 physicians as of September 2015 from 471 physicians in December 2013. Part of the physician growth was driven by an emphasis on physician employment which increased to 173 from 145 employed doctors in the comparable period. Despite the increase in financial losses on physicians in 2014 and 2015 due to routine start-up costs, AnMed generated adequate growth, particularly in outpatient surgeries, to sustain high operating margins. The inpatient admissions have softened in 2015 to 18,860 from 19,248 as observation stay classifications have grown to 7,430 from 6,526.



AnMed has shifted its physician strategy over the past two years to employing specialists as opposed to earlier efforts on primary care physicians. To that end, the medical center acquired practices in endocrinology, oncology and hematology in 2014 (among others) and an eight physician surgical practice in 2015. Primary care physicians still represent 74% of AnMed's employed medical staff. With a strong clinical reputation and a staff of employed physicians, AnMed has maintained its dominant market position and experienced a slight uptick in the acuity level for patients in 2015. Medicare CMI in 2015 was 1.6. AnMed also benefited from stability in Medicaid rates in the past two years (representing 14% of gross revenues) and an increase in its combined Medicare and Medicaid disproportionate share payments (DSH) to $20.7 million in 2014 from $14.8 million in 2012. The combined figure in 2015 was approximately $18.7 million. While management is not expecting any additional cuts to Medicaid funding in 2016, Fitch views DSH funding reductions at the federal level to be a longer term credit concern particularly since South Carolina has not participated in expanded Medicaid eligibility.

Additionally, AnMed's self-pay decreased from 6% of gross revenues in 2013 to 3% of gross revenues as of September 2015, while benefiting from increases in Medicaid and managed care. This swing is due to both increasing Medicaid qualifications as well as an improvement in the local job market. Despite AnMed's strong financial profile, it does not benefit from wide geographic or revenue dispersion and as such is more susceptible to changes in the local economy. POSITIVE AFFILIATION WITH CHS AnMed is one of the largest hospitals affiliated with CHS through a Management Services Agreement. Fitch views this affiliation favorably as the medical center has been able to benefit from supply chain initiatives, revenue cycle management improvements, contracting, and other strategic alliances. Currently, CHS has been providing access to analytics and other tools needed as AnMed begins to prepare for future value-based payments or population health management needs that have not yet arrived in its market. AnMed's managed care contracts are still based on more traditional fee-for-service models. The affiliation with CHS has also helped AnMed expand and grow its oncology services as its cancer center is a charter member of CHS' Levine Cancer Institute. The affiliation contract with CHS expires in 2019, and while it is too early to determine whether it will be renewed, AnMed continues to view this relationship favorably. MODEST CAPITAL PLANS SHOULD PRESERVE LIQUIDITY STRENGTH As indicated in the last review, AnMed borrowed $35 million in a private bank placement debt issuance in 2014 for certain renovations at the hospital campuses and the replacement of its central information system. This information system upgrade comes at a total cost of $85 million; $13 million in 2015, $42 million in 2016 and $23 million in 2017, and $7 million in 2018. Other than this project, the annual capital budget is dedicated to routine capital expenses. Consequently, Fitch expects that barring any major unexpected billing or productivity disruption as the information system is converted, AnMed will be able to maintain ample cash reserves over the two-year outlook period. At Sept. 30, 2015, AnMed had $458.1 million in unrestricted cash and investments, which equates to 386 days cash on hand, a 28.5x cushion ratio, and 169.4% cash to debt. While these numbers represent a slight softening from fiscal 2014 year-end liquidity ratios of 415.4 days cash on hand, 29.0x cushion ratio, and 168.7% cash to debt, they remain significantly above Fitch's 'A' category medians. DISCLOSURE AnMed Health covenants to disclose only annual information to EMMA and disclosure to date has been timely. Management does voluntarily disclose quarterly information including balance sheet, income statement, cash flows statement, utilization indicators and a management discussion and analysis. Additional information is available at 'www.fitchratings.com'. Applicable Criteria Not-for-Profit Hospitals Rating Criteria (pub. 04 Dec 2015)

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=874120 Revenue-Supported Rating Criteria (pub. 16 Jun 2014)

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=750012 U.S. Nonprofit Hospitals and Health Systems Rating Criteria (pub. 09 Jun 2015)

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=866807 Additional Disclosures Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Form

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=998415 Solicitation Status

https://www.fitchratings.com/gws/en/disclosure/solicitation?pr_id=998415 Endorsement Policy

https://www.fitchratings.com/jsp/creditdesk/PolicyRegulation.faces?context=2&detail=31 ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: HTTP://FITCHRATINGS.COM/UNDERSTANDINGCREDITRATINGS. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON (News - Alert) THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEBSITE 'WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM'. PUBLISHED RATINGS, CRITERIA AND METHODOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE AT ALL TIMES. FITCH'S CODE OF CONDUCT, CONFIDENTIALITY, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, AFFILIATE FIREWALL, COMPLIANCE AND OTHER RELEVANT POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ARE ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE 'CODE OF CONDUCT' SECTION OF THIS SITE. FITCH MAY HAVE PROVIDED ANOTHER PERMISSIBLE SERVICE TO THE RATED ENTITY OR ITS RELATED THIRD PARTIES. DETAILS OF THIS SERVICE FOR RATINGS FOR WHICH THE LEAD ANALYST IS BASED IN AN EU-REGISTERED ENTITY CAN BE FOUND ON THE ENTITY SUMMARY PAGE FOR THIS ISSUER ON THE FITCH WEBSITE. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160126006537/en/

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[January 26, 2016] EMC Names Denis Cashman CFO

HOPKINTON, Mass., Jan. 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that 28-year EMC financial executive Denis Cashman has been named EMC Chief Financial Officer, effective March 1. Cashman will be responsible for all internal and external financial responsibilities for EMC's consolidated business. Mr. Cashman will succeed Zane Rowe, who will become Chief Financial Officer of VMware, also effective March 1. Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented, "Denis stands among EMC's most accomplished and highly respected leaders, and it's my great pleasure to welcome him to his new role as EMC's CFO. I look forward to Denis' continued contributions as we embark on an exciting year ahead, including some of the most significant portfolio enhancements in our company's history." Denis Cashman added, "I'm incredibly proud to be part of an exceptional team of people who, together, have accomplished a great deal over my past twenty eight years at EMC. It's a privilege now to take on the CFO role. I'm honored to continue to lead this world-class global finance team and to partner with the EMC executive management team as we advance our business and work toward combining forces with Dell." Mr. Cashman began his professional career with EMC in Ireland in 1988 as the Finance Controller for EMC's Cork manufacturing facility. Since then, he has held numerous financial positions including European Financial Controller, International Financial Controller, Vice President of International Finance, Corporate Controller, Chief Accounting Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Finance, and most recently Chief Financial Officer for EMC Information Ifrastructure and EMC's Chief Accounting Officer, where he was responsible for worldwide financial operations, including planning and analysis, SEC reporting, tax, treasury, governance and compliance.



About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset  information  in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com. EMC is a registered trademark of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) risks associated with the proposed acquisition of EMC by Denali Holding Inc., the parent company of Dell Inc., including, among others, assumptions related to the ability to close the acquisition, the expected closing date and its anticipated costs and benefits; (ii) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (iii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iv) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (v) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (vi) component and product quality and availability; (vii) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (viii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (ix) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (x) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xi) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xiii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiv) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xvi) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/emc-names-denis-cashman-cfo-300210138.html SOURCE EMC Corporation

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MATTOON -- Williams Elementary School Principal Kris Maleske said he felt some anxiety a few years ago when, as an adult, he returned to the gym and started a workout routine.

However, Maleske said he found that his gym, the Mattoon Area Family YMCA, provides a welcoming and supportive environment for community members to meet their fitness goals. He said the YMCA and Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center's Health Management Resources program helped him lose 113 pounds and improve his health.

"I am a work in progress, but I am happy with the results," Maleske said. "The YMCA could not be a better supporter for me."

Maleske shared this story on Tuesday during the kickoff event at the YMCA for the 2016 fundraising campaign for the Y's community fitness and health programs, and for its facility. This campaign will culminate with the 27th annual May Merriment benefit dinner and auction on May 14 at the Eastern Illinois University Grand Ballroom.

YMCA Chief Executive Officer Blake Fairchild said the Y use to seek donations from the community throughout the year but switched five years ago to an annual "one-time ask" fundraising campaign, which runs from February through mid-May. He said they have tied this campaign in with the May Merriment event.

May Merriment board representative John Covington said philanthropic giving provides more than 20 percent of the YMCA's annual operating funds. He said the Y's leadership has set a goal this year of raising $190,000 via the campaign and $140,000 at the event. He said donors have already committee $115,000 to the campaign.

Fairchild said funds raised by the May Merriment campaign and event helped make it possible for the YMCA to provide $198,000 in "Membership for All" financial assistance last year for individuals youths and adults and for families to join the Y and enroll in various fitness and health programs.

In addition, Fairchild said this philanthropic giving has helped make it possible for the YMCA to serve its more than 6,300 current members and to enroll more than 5,000 local youths in various programs last year.

"We enable kids to take part in programs that are literally developing them into the leaders of tomorrow," Fairchild said.

This year, Consolidated Communications is partnering with the YMCA to host the May Merriment event.

Consolidated representative Steve Childers said the YMCA is a great community resource for all ages, including Consolidated's employees and their families. He said new employees from Chicago, St. Louis and other metropolitan areas are typically impressed when they see Mattoon's YMCA.

"They have always commented about how first class the facilities there are," Childers said.

More information about May Merriment is available by calling the YMCA at 217-234-9494 or going online to http://mattoonymca.org/.
The magic wand that secured President Muhammadu Buharis electoral victory in the March 28, 2015 presidential election was his anti-corruption antecedents and pledges. While he was a Head of State between January 1, 1984 and August 27, 1985, he set up several military tribunals to summarily try elected politicians of the Second Republic (1979  1983). Many of them were found guilty of graft and abuse of office and sentenced to long years of imprisonment. The electorate in 2015 wanted change from the deepening rot in governance and decided to vote for a man who they perceived had done it before and who had promised to do it again. That was how Buhari, on his fourth attempt as presidential candidate, was able to do the impossible in Nigerian history by defeating an incumbent President!

President Buhari has been in the saddle for the past eight months and expectations are high. Since his inauguration on May 29, 2015, Mr. President has taken a number of bold steps aimed at fighting corruption. They include the sacking of some purportedly corrupt heads of some government agencies such as Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, among others. He also decided to enforce the Treasury Single Account initiated by his immediate predecessor in office. He has also been junketing across the globe seeking help and signing bilateral and multilateral agreements with some countries for the repatriation of the countrys stolen wealth.

Just last week Tuesday, January 19, he signed the Mutual Legal Assistance on Criminal and Commercial Matters treaty, which will allow the United Arab Emirates government return monies hidden or invested in banks and real estates in the country. Since his second coming, all the anti-corruption agencies have become energised. Many past and present political office holders including ex-governors, lawmakers, ministers, commissioners and indeed a former National Security Adviser had been dragged to court to answer corruption charges.

Take for instance the recent alarm raised by the Minister for Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, that 55 well-placed Nigerians stole a whopping N1.34tn between 2006 and 2013. At a press conference he addressed in Abuja on Monday, January 18, to mark the beginning of the war against corruption in Nigeria, the minster was quoted as saying that, Out of the stolen funds, 15 former governors stole N146.84bn; four former ministers took N7bn; 12 former public servants both at federal and state levels stole over N14bn; eight other Nigerians in the banking sector made away with N524bn, while 11 businessmen cornered N653bn. How reliable are these figures? These are mere allegations that have yet to be proved in court. Moreover, they are sweeping statements devoid of details of the identities of those being accused.

Now, for a government that says its committed to fighting corruption, I found it difficult to reconcile that stance with the humongous amount allocated to the State House in this years budget. How on earth can a supposed austere government justify the purported increment of the capital budget of the Presidency from N4.3bn in 2015 to N19bn this year? What defence has the Presidency for voting a whopping N15bn as security vote; N3.2bn for the State House Medical Centre; N5bn for the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System; N3.63bn for purchase of BMW saloon cars; and N800m for a website, to mention but a few? Why is the Buhari administration sustaining the profligate legacy of the past administration by voting monies for sponsorship of pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia and Israel?

A government that was voted to power on the mantra of change cannot rule the way of it predecessors and expect people to believe that it is different. Albert Einstein said it is insane to do things the same way and expect a different outcome. Given that a chunk of the 2016 budget will be financed through loans, then I expect to see none of those ridiculous and incredible budget sub-heads. If at all there is any justification for them to be there, under this zero-based budgeting, I do not expect the mind-blowing sums earmarked for them.

To expose the wrong priorities of this present administration, while increasing the budget for the Presidency, the total vote for nine anti-corruption agencies is put at a mere N27bn according to The Nation of January 12, 2016. The newspaper reported that, The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, for instance, had about N13.8bn allocated to it in 2011. It suffered a decline to N10.6bn in 2012, N9.8bn in 2013, N10.2bnin 2014 and N10.4bn last year. The Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission received N3.6bn in 2011, N4bn in 2012, N4.5bn in 2013, N4.6bn in 2014 and N4.9bn last year. For the Code of Conduct Bureau, it was N1.4bn in 2011, N3.9bn in 2012, N2.9bn in 2013, N2.8bn in 2014 and N2.3bn last year. The Code of Conduct Tribunal was allocated N359.6m in 2011, N461.2m in 2012, N517.1m in 2013, N512.6m in 2014 and N806.9m last year. The Fiscal Responsibility Commission got N336.8m budget last year; the Bureau of Public Procurement had N1bn and so did the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. The Public Complaints Commission had N2.5bn and the office of the Auditor-General of the Federation had N3.2bn.

The Chairman, ICPC, Mr. Nta Ekpo, was reported to have cried out that the anti-graft agency had been unable to successfully carry out its statutory responsibility of fighting corruption due to insufficient funds. Nta stated this on Friday, January 15, 2016 when he hosted members of the Senate Committee on Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes headed by Senator Chukwuka Utazi in his office. The ICPC boss reportedly told his visitors that the yearly budget of his agency was insufficient to carry out its responsibilities and fight corruption. He said, In 2015, the commission proposed N9.5bn, but N4.9bn was appropriated, while N4.2bn was released. Note the differentials between the amount budgeted and actual release.

If the anti-corruption agencies of government are starved of funds, how can this administration win the war against the monster? I laughed at the recent order by the new Comptroller General of Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, and Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Tukur Burutai, that all their personnel should declare their assets. While it may be a good idea, the question is: What follows? How will the CCB whose mandate is to verify these declared assets go about that operation in the face of dwindling financial resources for its operations? This administration, if it is serious about fighting corruption, should have ensured that the anti-corruption agencies are well-resourced starting from this 2016. It needs be emphasised that this administration will be judged, not on the number of media trials it conducted or indeed number of persons charged to court for prosecution but the number of persons convicted.

We heard that some former top government officials have, of their own accord, decided to return part of their loot to government coffers. Nigerians await the official announcement of how much has been voluntarily returned, who collected the returned loot and where it is being kept. While it may be true that this administration, through its anti-corruption agencies, has charged many to court for corruption, it has been doing much of media trial than actual prosecution. Furthermore, very vital documents which should have been used to prosecute those arrested for corruption are finding their way into the public through various media outlets. There have been much of name-calling, labelling, spurious statistics of corrupt officials and how much they stole being bandied around.
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Job Description

Oromia International Bank S.C invites qualified and competent applicants for the following positions.

1. Branch Manager I

BA/BSC in Accounting/Management/Economics or related fields with 5 years relevant banking experience. Having managerial experience is an advantage.

Place of work: Bahir Dar Branch (Amhara Regional State), Arero Branch (Oromia Regional State-Borena Zone-Arero Woreda Meta Gefersa Town), Nekemte 3rd Branch (Oromia Regional State- Nekemte Town) and Wayu Branch (Oromia Regional State- Horo Guduru Welega one Jimarare Woreda- Wayu Town)

Number Required: 4

2. Accountant

BA/BSC in Accounting /Management /Economics /Banking & Finance or related fields with 2 years relevant banking experience

Place of work: Arero Branch (Oromia Regional State Borena Zone Arero Woreda Meta Gefersa Town), Nekemte 3rd Branch (Oromia Regional State- Nekemte Town) and Wayu Branch (Oromia Regional State- Horo Guduru Welega Zone- Jimarare Woreda- Wayu Town)

Number Required: 3

3. Senior Customer Service Officer

BA/BSC or Level IV/Diploma in Accounting/ Management/ Economics or related fields with 3 years relevant banking experience for Diploma or 2 years relevant banking experience for BA/BSC.

Place of work: Nekemte 3rd Branch (Oromia Regional State- Nekemte Town) and Wayu Branch (Oromia Regional State- Horo Guduru Welega Zone- Jimarare Woreda- Wayu Town)

Number Required: 2

4. Customer Service Officer

BA/BSC or Level IV/Diploma in Accounting/ Management/ Economics or related fields with 2 years relevant banking or Micro Finance Institutions experience for Diploma or 1 year relevant banking or Micro Finance Institutions experience for BA/BSC.

Place of work: Nekemte 3rd Branch (Oromia Regional State- Nekemte Town) and Wayu Branch (Oromia Regional State- Horo Guduru Welega Zone- Jimarare Woreda- Wayu Town)

Number Required: 4

Note:

Terms of employment: Permanent Basis,

Salary & Benefit Packages: As per the salary scale of the Bank,

Registration deadline: February 4, 2016,

Language: Proficient in Speaking, Writing, Reading, & Listening of Amharic English and Afan Oromo languages, except for Bahir Dar Branch Manager position for which Afan Oromo is not required

Additional/Special Skill Leadership skill for position No. 1 and knowledge of basic computer operations for all positions.

Applicants are required to clearly express the place of work or Branch they are applying for,

Only short-listed applicants will be contacted,

Applicants who do not meet the above requirements shall not be considered.

Closing date: Feb 04, 2016









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Interested and qualified applicants fulfilling the above requirements can submit their non-returnable application letter CV and copies of supporting credential with original copies in person to Human Resources Management Department on OIB Building located at Bole Africa Avenue adjusent to Getu Commercial Centre 11th floor Office No 407 -11- 3 or mail through









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Wednesday, January 27, 2016 Another Body Slam For NM As Jobless Rate Remains Highest In Nation; Wage Stagnation Continues, Plus: NM Senators Point To Long-Term Way Out Of The Economic Funk, And: R's Field BernCo DA Contender



Mining (oil, gas etc.) contracted by 2,600 jobs, or 9.2 percent, in December. Growth has been negative since May.



As has been true since the economy went south over five years ago, it is jobs held by the non-college educated portion of the workforce that is feeling the most pain. Take a look:



Construction was down 1,500 jobs, or 3.5 percent. Similarly, transportation, warehousing, and utilities was down 5.1 percent, representing a loss of 1,300 jobs. Retail trade posted a loss of 900 jobs, or 0.9 percent. Manufacturing lost 700 jobs, representing a decline of 2.5 percent.



That trend in losing working class jobs continued when nearly 300 call center staffers



In the short-term state lawmakers can help by tapping into some of the hundreds of millions of unspent capital outlay dollars that are gathering dust, according to the state auditor. That would spark construction activity.



The state says the generally low-paying leisure and hospitality industry continues to score big gains.



MORE BIZ BEAT



Not only does NM have the highest unemployment rate in the USA report, there's



Wages are low and stagnant: The October 2015 average weekly wage of $709 was the third lowest in the country. Wages fell 0.7% between October 2014 and October 2015, the seventh-worst change.



Again that takes you back to all those waitress and waiter jobs being created here, but not the higher-paying variety. Not that that's all bad. For a state with a meagerly educated workforce, they can be a lifesaver. And the Martinez administration and the Legislature have stepped up. Spending on advertising and promotion went from $2.5 million in FY11 to $9.1 million in FY 16.



SIMON SAYS



Kubiak The R's haven't had a Bernalillo County District attorney since the 1990's but attorney



The DA's office hasn't prosecuted misdemeanor marijuana cases for 20 years. Those are police officer prosecutions. The same for prostitution. Kubiak's plans aren't really anything new. Just like the Republicans to sell you something you already had--and might not have known it.



Well, that's a taste of what Simon will receive in the general election. He most recently challenged Dem BernCo County Commissioner Debbie O'Malley but lost in the heavy Dem district.



Dem DA candidates so far are Ed Perea and Raul Torrez. They will duel out in the June primary. Kubiak, 41, a graduate of Valley High, will be the decided underdog but remember back in the day when R's got elected regularly to the DA post?



DA Kari Brandenburg has not made a formal statement on re-election plans. She has held the office since 2001.



IT'S LONG BALL



Senators Udall & Heinrich The



. . . A disproportionately high number of New Mexico's children tragically and unfairly experience hunger, poverty and poor health, Udall and Heinrich wrote. New Mexico is at a critical juncture. The economy is stalled, families are struggling, and more needs to be done to ensure our children are in the best possible position to succeed later in life.. . Education provides children with an opportunity to improve their own lives and the lives of their families. Unfortunately, our education system is also failing. New Mexico ranked 49th in education in a recent national report, yet study after study shows that children who have access to high-quality child care and pre-kindergarten programs are more likely to succeed in later grades, leading to higher graduation rates and providing a path to the middle class. We owe it to our children and our economy to make smart investments in effective early childhood programs that we know can help families break the cycle of poverty. Nothing is more important for our state at this time than improving the well-being of our children," the senators concluded. If we fail at this, we fail at everything else, including long-term economic progress.



Critics of the Senators claim taking money from the immense fund is a "raid" that will harm future generations. Hmm. What would the generations from the 1950's and 60's think of New Mexico having the worst childhood poverty in the USA and ranking nearly last in education? Is that the future they envisioned?



This is the home of New Mexico politics.







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( c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2016 Another body slam for New Mexico as our unemployment rate in December came in at 6.7%, making it the highest in the nation for the second month running. The state reports the crash in oil prices has, as expected, led to a crash in energy jobs:As has been true since the economy went south over five years ago, it is jobs held by the non-college educated portion of the workforce that is feeling the most pain. Take a look:That trend in losing working class jobs continued when nearly 300 call center staffers were let go when Sprint in Rio Rancho this month announced it was closing.In the short-term state lawmakers can help by tapping into some of the hundreds of millions of unspent capital outlay dollars that are gathering dust, according to the state auditor. That would spark construction activity.The state says the generally low-paying leisure and hospitality industry continues to score big gains.Not only does NM have the highest unemployment rate in the USA report, there's this Again that takes you back to all those waitress and waiter jobs being created here, but not the higher-paying variety. Not that that's all bad. For a state with a meagerly educated workforce, they can be a lifesaver. And the Martinez administration and the Legislature have stepped up. Spending on advertising and promotion went from $2.5 million in FY11 to $9.1 million in FY 16.The R's haven't had a Bernalillo County District attorney since the 1990's but attorney Simon Kubiak will try to change that this year. He says he will seek the GOP nomination for the DA slot. And he's doing it with an interesting Libertarian twist. He says, if elected, the office will not go after recreational users of marijuana or prostitution cases, but instead husband resources to take on more serious crimes. That sounds new, but one of our Legal Beagles counters with this:Well, that's a taste of what Simon will receive in the general election. He most recently challenged Dem BernCo County Commissioner Debbie O'Malley but lost in the heavy Dem district.Dem DA candidates so far are Ed Perea and Raul Torrez. They will duel out in the June primary. Kubiak, 41, a graduate of Valley High, will be the decided underdog but remember back in the day when R's got elected regularly to the DA post?DA Kari Brandenburg has not made a formal statement on re-election plans. She has held the office since 2001.The long term challenge the state faces in pulling itself out of second-world status is not lost on NM Senators Udall and Heinrich. On the opening day of the current legislative session they again urged the lawmakers to approve a constitutional amendment that would ask voters to use a small portion of the state's nearly $15 billion Land Grant Permanent School Fund for very early childhood education:Critics of the Senators claim taking money from the immense fund is a "raid" that will harm future generations. Hmm. What would the generations from the 1950's and 60's think of New Mexico having the worst childhood poverty in the USA and ranking nearly last in education? Is that the future they envisioned?This is the home of New Mexico politics. E-mail your news and comments. (jmonahan@ix.netcom.com)
Nebraska lawmakers are pooling their cash to benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Members of the Legislature, led by state Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, have so far contributed more than $8,500 to the Memphis, Tennessee, hospital known for its TV commercials featuring Hollywood stars.

Chambers plans to bring that figure to an even $10,000.

He has already drawn a check for $3,200 himself, he said, and will continue to collect money from other senators through Thursday.

"If no additional contributions are received, I'll make up the difference (since I started this, I'm obliged to finish it)," he wrote in a message distributed to his colleagues Tuesday.

The donations are the result of a challenge leveled by Chambers earlier this month  for every senator to donate $100 to St. Jude  and a pledge that he would match the $4,800 total.

He pitched it as an alternative to buying Powerball tickets.

"You'll do something good," he said, "because you weren't going to win anyway."

As of Tuesday morning, 31 senators and five non-senators had contributed to the pool, totaling $8,576. Several senators gave $500 or more.

"I think it's great," said Sen. Merv Riepe of Ralston, a retired hospital administrator who spent time at Children's Hospital in Omaha.

Riepe plans to deliver the money once Chambers is done collecting it. He's also working on a way to help St. Jude's thank senators for their contributions and Chambers for leading the effort.

Chambers has long shown a fondness for young people, meeting with school groups in the Capitol and invoking children  both their defenselessness and limitless potential  during legislative debate.

"There is a soft spot in the guy," Riepe said.
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An Omaha senator kept the introduction of her bill that would strengthen a prescription drug monitoring system tear-free and to the point.

Sen. Sara Howard told senators how deeply personal her mission was to do what she could to prevent the abuse of prescription narcotics, which are used as painkillers and sedatives, and can cause addiction, misuse and death from overdose.

Her bill (LB471) advanced from a first round of debate on a 47-0 vote.

Howard was raised by her mother, former Sen. Gwen Howard, and her older sister after her father died shortly before her birth.

Her sister had been through multiple car wrecks and surgeries, including a spinal fusion, for which she was prescribed oxycontin for the first time. For the next five years after that surgery, the small family battled her sisters narcotic addiction by themselves, she said.

When we lost her in March of 2009, we didnt know that we weren't the only people who were dealing with this problem, Howard said.

They didnt know that 33-year-old Carrie Howard had become a statistic of a larger epidemic.

According to Dr. John Massey of Lincoln, state representative to the American Academy of Pain Medicine, Nebraska and Missouri are the only states that have not yet implemented a functional prescription drug monitoring program.

The current system allows people to opt out and doesnt record Medicare patients and those who pay cash, as drug seekers and traffickers typically do. And not all prescribers and dispensers have access to the system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 23,000 prescription opioid/benzodiazepine deaths nationally in 2013 -- 63 a day. An additional 1 million emergency department visits were for prescription overdoses.

Opioids are often the best weapon for acute pain but are much less effective at reducing chronic pain, Massey said in a fall 2015 Nebraska Medical Association report. The drugs tend to show a benefit for the first four to 12 weeks and then can steadily lose their effectiveness.

Howard said theres no way to know how many prescription narcotic overdose deaths there are in the state because theres no box to check on death certificates.

Anecdotally, information from the Douglas County morgue estimates that annually it sees 90 to 100 unintended overdose deaths from narcotic painkillers, Howard said.

It has been documented that people from 38 states have come to Nebraska to fill prescriptions for narcotic pain medications, Howard said. Three hundred people came from Florida after that state tightened its monitoring program.

Nebraska has a rate of 79 painkiller prescriptions per 100 people.

Thats enormous, she said.

A September Department of Health and Human Services alert to medical professionals reported that during January to July 2015, 84 drug overdose deaths were reported in the state -- the highest for the time period in the past five years.

The majority were unintentional, occurred among males and people ages 45 to 64 and involved prescription or illicit opioids.

Howard's bill would enhance the states prescription monitoring system to better prevent misuse of prescription drugs by requiring dispensers of prescriptions to report and by making the system free and accessible to all prescribers and dispensers.

It would prohibit any patient from opting out of the monitoring system, and require all prescriptions dispensed in Nebraska or to an address in the state to be entered into the system.

HHS has applied for and received two enhancement grants for the program, from the CDC and through the U.S. Department of Justice.

So well have about a half a million dollars for the next four years to fund this program, Howard said.

It would begin Jan. 1, 2017.

Another amendment adopted Wednesday would allow veterinarians to begin reporting a year later and create a task force to develop recommendations of which controlled substances would be reported by a veterinarian.
Concerns about gun violence in Nebraska's two largest cities trumped an effort to banish local firearm laws in the Legislature on Wednesday.

A proposal to eliminate cities' ability to restrict firearms beyond what is included under state law failed to overcome a days-long filibuster, falling short by a single vote.

"It was an exceedingly sweeping bill," said Speaker Galen Hadley of Kearney, who joined opponents in voting to block the measure.

As written, the bill would have pre-empted local ordinances in Lincoln that ban guns from domestic violence shelters and drug abuse treatment centers, and prohibit a wider range of offenders from possessing firearms than is covered under state law.

In Omaha, the measure would have dashed a local law aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of juvenile gang members and a registration requirement that allows police to deny handguns for those who are mentally ill or involved in documented gang activity.

Supporters, including the bill's sponsor, Sen. Laura Ebke of Crete, said those local ordinances encroach on Nebraskans' constitutional right to bear arms and threaten responsible gun owners who might unknowingly break the law while traveling throughout the state.

They also called the local laws ineffective.

"These feel-good attempts have done nothing," said Sen. Mike Groene of North Platte, pointing to Omaha's climbing murder rates and calling that city's handgun registry requirement a joke.

Still, Ebke and senators from Lincoln and Omaha spent days attempting to hammer out a compromise that could protect certain city ordinances while preserving the essence of the overall bill.

Those talks failed, and both sides Wednesday morning accused each other of being unwilling to waver  using virtually identical language.

Several senators said they were prepared to support Ebke's bill with an amendment proposed by Lincoln Sen. Adam Morfeld. His proposal would have rewritten the measure to reflect a federal law protecting gun owners who travel between states.

That point  to protect responsible gun owners from elsewhere in the state from unknowingly breaking local laws  was the main argument raised in favor of Ebke's bill during a public hearing on the measure last year, Morfeld said.

Ebke said Morfeld's proposal would have gutted her bill.

It's unclear whether the amendments could have been adopted anyway, with Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers saying he would use legislative rules to block changes that would cause more of his colleagues to support the bill.

During debate that grew emotional at times, opponents argued cities are best positioned to restrict guns in their communities, based on the first-hand experiences of local law enforcement.

"They live on those streets every single day," Morfeld said.

Sen. Rick Kolowski of Omaha recounted being held at gunpoint with a group of travelers on the Amazon River in Peru in the 1990s. One member of his group was shot.

"You don't want that to happen in your life," Kolowski said. "You don't want to see that happen to a member of your family. You don't want to see someone bleeding on the floor in front of you while pressing his wound with a tablecloth."

Ebke read an email from a Lincoln defense attorney, Korey Reiman, who questioned the city's ordinances on practical and legal terms.

Reiman argued anyone who brings a gun into a domestic violence shelter with the intent to do harm wouldn't be worried about the city's ban because that person would already be facing felony charges for making terroristic threats. And people convicted of misdemeanor crimes already unknowingly break the law under Lincoln's more expansive gun ban.

"A city should not have the power to add on (an) additional misdemeanor offense, where a guy gets a $100 fine, to strip him of his constitutional right," Reiman said.

But opponents of Ebke's bill cited concerns raised by the Omaha police union and Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler.

Sen. Heath Mello of Omaha said the handgun registry is a tool law enforcement uses every day in his city.

"We could have more homicides if this would go away," he said of the registry.

Wednesday's vote made Jan Hobbs, an anti-gun-violence activist from Franklin, ecstatic.

She survived 15 minutes at gunpoint by a friend's abusive husband 38 years ago and says she drove 2 hours from her hometown to the state Capitol each day this week to watch the debate.

The outcome doesn't just protect people in Omaha and Lincoln, she said.

"I think that it was a very good thing for Nebraska."
Religious groups aren't giving up the fight to keep Nebraska's same-sex marriage ban on the books.

On Wednesday, Nebraska Family Alliance and the Nebraska Catholic Conference both came out opposed to measures that would update language in state law to reflect last year's U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down bans on gay marriage.

"Regardless of what a narrow majority of the Supreme Court may declare at this moment in history, the nature of human person and marriage remain unchanged and unchangeable," Greg Schleppenbach, executive director of the Catholic Conference, told members of the Legislature's Judiciary Committee.

The groups outright opposed a proposed constitutional amendment (LR389CA) by state Sen. Burke Harr of Omaha that would strike the wording of Nebraska's same-sex marriage ban from the state Constitution.

"I don't want this kind of hatred to remain on our books for 80 years afterward," Harr said.

The Family Alliance and Catholic Conference also voiced concerns about a measure (LB944) from Lincoln Sen. Matt Hansen that would replace the words mother and father with the nongendered term "parent" in state statute.

And the alliance opposed a Hansen bill (LB943) to exchange "husband" and "wife" with "spouse" in the state's lawbooks.

Hansen and a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska argued those updates could help prevent patchwork litigation down the road.

"Statutes ought to reflect what the law actually is," ACLU lobbyist Spike Eickholt told committee members during the public hearing. "Why allow these things to be decided on a case-by-case, ad-hoc basis?"

Courtney Phillips, CEO of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, raised technical concerns.

Harr's proposed constitutional amendment  which would require a vote of the people  drew broader opposition despite Nebraska's existing ban being unenforceable.

Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, a committee member from Lincoln whose son is gay, criticized the religious groups for their opposition.

"For your groups to come in and continue to harbor on and hold onto the hatred and lack of respect and lack of compassion for my family and for many other families  I just cannot believe you are still doing this."
A Saunders County correctional officer injured in a Sunday morning wreck died Friday night.

Officer Tanner Hauck, 32, died a little after 8 p.m., according to a Saunders County Sheriff's Office news release.

Hauck's fiancee, Jessica Thomas, died in the accident that happened about half a mile west of Wahoo at the intersection of Nebraska 92 and U.S. 77.

Thomas, 29, of Wahoo, was driving west on Nebraska 92 when her 2008 Pontiac collided with a 2000 GMC pickup headed north on U.S. 77 about 10 a.m.

Witnesses said pickup driver Douglas Cerny, 43 of Osceola, failed to stop at a stop sign.

Hauck, who was a passenger in the Pontiac, was flown to Bryan West Campus in critical condition.

Saunders County Sheriff Kevin Stukenholtz said the case remains under investigation.

Neither Hauck nor Cerny were wearing seat belts, the sheriffs office said. Thomas was wearing a seat belt.
Grand Island school officials evacuated Walnut Middle School early Wednesday afternoon after an unidentified object was found there.

"Erring on side of caution, we are evacuating all students to Grand Island Senior High," school district spokesman Jack Sheard said in an email. "Parents have been notified via district communication with instructions on picking up their students."

At 3:15 p.m., Sheard said the Nebraska State Patrol notified them there was no threat to students.

He said the students were being released early and required to sign out saying how they were getting home.

All events at the school are canceled for Wednesday night.
A van carrying Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts was in an accident at 13th and Washington streets Wednesday morning.

Lincoln police said neither the governor nor the Nebraska State Patrol trooper driving the van was injured in the wreck that happened just before 6:50 a.m.

A 2000 Ford F150 truck was eastbound on Washington, and the governor's van was southbound on 13th Street, Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood said.

The two vehicles collided in the intersection, and pickup driver Richard G. Deollos, 56, was cited for running a stop sign, Flood said in an email.

Deollos was taken to a hospital and released after treatment for minor injuries, she said.

Ricketts says he was reading when the trooper hit the brakes.

Ricketts spokesman Taylor Gage said the 2006 Econoline van is owned by the patrol. He said the governor was headed for a physical therapy appointment. He had knee replacement surgery in Chicago last month.
A Lancaster County judge has sentenced a 22-year-old Hickman man to one to two years in prison for fleeing arrest last summer on his motorcycle at speeds that topped 115 mph.

Nebraska State Patrol troopers caught Andrew Naderhoff when his bike ran out of gas.

On Wednesday, District Judge Andrew Jacobsen sentenced him to prison and revoked his license for two years from the date of his release for operating a motor vehicle to avoid arrest. He pleaded no contest.

The chase started at 6:15 p.m. June 15 after a trooper clocked a motorcycle going 115 mph in a 55 mph zone just west of the U.S. 75-Nebraska 2 junction near Nebraska City.

Troopers chased Naderhoff for 38 minutes, reaching 118 mph at one point. Naderhoff ran out of gas, then took off on foot, in Lancaster County near 120th Street and Wittstruck Road.

At the time, Naderhoff was wanted on a warrant out of Lancaster County for third-degree sexual assault. A jury found him not guilty of the misdemeanor charge in December.
A 28-year-old Lincoln man who planned a Columbine-style attack at Malcolm High School in 2004 is progressing but still needs to be under order of the court, Chief Deputy Lancaster County Attorney Pat Condon said at an annual review hearing this week.

Joshua L. Magee has been living on his own in an apartment near the Capitol for the past year.

He was committed to the Lincoln Regional Center in 2006, after he was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of mental illness. He stayed there for nine years before being transferred to a supervised residential program for adults with serious mental illness.

Last year, District Judge Paul Merritt Jr. allowed Magee to live independently at the D Street apartment.

At the mental health review hearing Tuesday, Deputy Public Defender Kristi Egger-Brown told District Judge Susan Strong that Magee's focus right now is on working toward an associate degree at Southeast Community College.

At the end of the hearing, she found that Magee remains dangerous by reason of mental illness and set his next review hearing for next year. In an order issued later, she continued his treatment plan with Blue Valley Behavioral Health, which has responsibility for his psychiatric treatment and social support needs.

Magee is subject to periodic medical tests, including random urine and blood tests, to ensure he is taking his medication and abstaining from using alcohol and illegal substances, according to the order.

In 2004, when he was 17, Magee planned an attack at Malcolm High but changed his mind in the parking lot and told the principal.

After law enforcement found rocket-style fireworks packed with drywall screws, Molotov cocktail gasoline bombs and other explosive devices in the trunk of Magee's vehicle, prosecutors charged him with attempted first-degree murder.

At the end of a three-day trial, District Judge Karen Flowers found Magee not guilty by reason of mental illness.
A federal judge has set a tentative June trial date on the claims of six men and women convicted of rape and murder -- and later cleared by DNA -- against Gage County, the former sheriff and deputies behind the cold-case investigation.

In August, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a new trial to Joseph White, Ada JoAnn Taylor, Tom Winslow, James Dean, Debra Shelden and Kathy Gonzalez.

The judges found that the Nebraska judge had erred by not letting the civil case go forward against Gage County, the late Sheriff Jerry DeWitt and deputies Burdette Searcey and Wayne Price in their official roles.

Last week, the case returned to Nebraska after the Eighth Circuit turned down a request by attorneys representing Gage County seeking a rehearing to the full court.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf set a pretrial conference for March and tentatively scheduled the trial to start June 6 in Lincoln.

In 2008, White's conviction was overturned and the others were pardoned based on new DNA testing that pointed to a drifter who since had died as the man who raped and killed Helen Wilson.

White and the others  who have come to be known as the Beatrice 6  sued Gage County, the then-sheriff and deputies who put them behind bars. Their attorneys called the 1989 cold-case investigation so reckless it "shocked the conscience" and violated their constitutional rights.

Searcey reopened the case four years after Wilson's death and arrested the six. Except for White, they all confessed to or entered pleas in the case. White went to trial and was found guilty.

He served nearly 20 years before he was released after DNA cleared him.

White died in a workplace accident in Alabama in March 2011, about 2 years after his release from prison and before the civil rights case went to trial in Lincoln.
It may be too early to make a definitive overall assessment of Gov. Pete Ricketts' property tax reduction plan, but its not too early to say which part has the most initial appeal.

That would be the proposal to limit the aggregate growth in agricultural land valuations to 3 percent a year.

Under the plan, as called for in LB958, introduced by Sen. Mike Gloor, the state Revenue Department would take the information on land valuation in Nebraskas 93 counties and, if necessary, reduce valuations by a favor that would be applied equally statewide to each parcel.

The plan would take square aim at one of the biggest tax problems in the state  the spike in agricultural land valuations.

The prices paid for farm and ranch land have soared by double digits in recent years.

In part the price of farm land was driven upward by near record prices for corn and soybeans.

The prices for those commodities have returned to more normal levels, but the prices for agricultural land have remained high, presumably because investors see land as a good long-term investment.

The upshot is that farmers continue to pay more in taxes, which adds to the cost of production with no commensurate increase in income.

Theres little doubt that capping valuations in agricultural land would slow shift toward farmers and ranchers bearing a bigger share of the tax burden, leaving owners of other types of property to bear a bigger share of the tax burden than they would otherwise.

Thats exactly the intent of the proposal.

What lawmakers must be wary of its unintended consequences, as tax expert David Merriman of the University of Illinois warned at a symposium organized earlier this year by the OpenSky Policy Institute.

One of the drawbacks cited by Merriman is that the caps break the link between observable market value and tax valuations.

Nonetheless, the Ricketts proposal to cap the farm and ranch land deserves serious consideration.

The other parts of the Ricketts plan, which are also part of LB958 and LB959 introduced by Sen. Kate Sullivan, would place more limitations on taxing and spending decisions by school boards and other units of local government.

The state-imposed limits can fairly be criticized for reducing local control by locally elected officials.

Also in the tax reform mix is Gloors LB1013, which would boost the cigarette tax and designate much of the proceeds for property tax relief.

As the legislative process unfolds it might be that the Gloor-Sullivan package will be dropped in favor of a Gloor-Gloor package. That outcome would be significant win for those with hefty property tax bills, with farmers and ranchers first in line.
How sad I was to learn that Sen. Mark Kolterman has introduced a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that would allow adoption agencies to refuse to place children in the homes of qualified LGBT parents. LB 975, the Welfare Services Preservation Act, purports to be about protecting adoption agencies from being forced to close their doors. In fact, the bill, if enacted, would discriminate against qualified LGBT parents and negatively impact vulnerable children in need of loving, qualified permanent homes.

I have a lengthy history of licensing foster homes and approving adoptive homes for the state of Nebraska. The fact is, same-sex marriage is now legal in this country and Nebraska's children need all the qualified foster and adoptive homes the state can provide. If some faith-based agencies are dragging their heels at the prospect of placing children in LGBT homes, then they are the problem, not the LGBT parents, and perhaps they need to close or adopt more enlightened policies regarding what constitutes a qualified home.

Many of us grew up with prejudices against same-sex relationships but many of us have strived and are striving to overcome the negative stereotypes about LGBT people that still exist. I know Senator Kolterman to be a reasonable man based on his courageous votes to end the death penalty in Nebraska and to override the Governor's veto. Therefore, I am disappointed that he is allowing himself to be used to serve the interests of the most regressive and narrow-minded among us. If he feels there is something wrong with placing children in a LGBT home, then he has obviously not encountered some of wonderful LGBT families I have.

It's a brave new world out there, Senator. I think I speak for many in your district who would urge you to withdraw LB 975.

Stephanie Rouse, Seward
Rep. Jeff Fortenberry is heading to Iowa to campaign for Carly Fiorina in advance of Monday's Republican caucuses that begin the countdown toward the presidential nomination.

Fortenberry, who earlier endorsed Fiorina, said she's his choice because she is "clear, smart and strong (and) not willing to accept the current political, economic or cultural environment."

During a telephone interview on Wednesday before leaving for evening events in Des Moines and Waukee, Nebraska's 1st District congressman dodged a question as to whether he'd be comfortable with Donald Trump emerging as his party's nominee.

"My default answer is I have come out for Carly," he said. "She offers a reasoned alternative to the current GOP cage fight.

"What Trump has done is tap into a deep-seated anxiety about where the country is headed," Fortenberry said. "There is an anxiety that is real and sincere. Many people feel helpless."

But, he said, Trump's rhetoric "lacks proposed solutions that are constructive."

Six months ago, the Lincoln congressman said, he could not imagine Trump delivering the next State of the Union address.

Now, he said, he can -- because Trump could win.

Fortenberry is the second member of the Nebraska congressional delegation to travel to Iowa this week.

Sen. Ben Sasse arrived in the state Tuesday night on a mission to derail Trump and headed directly to Archie's Event Center in Keosauqua to join Sen. Ted Cruz at a rally. He is also scheduled to attend an event with Sen. Marco Rubio and may add other stops to his itinerary.

"Presidents are not kings," Sasse said during a telephone call from the car in which he was traveling Tuesday night. "Our front-runner says when he's president, 'I'll do whatever I want.'"

Trump is "a guy who talks the loudest," he said.

Sasse said that when he was in New Hampshire, the first presidential primary state, a few days ago, "people told me they like Trump and the fact that he speaks bluntly, although they don't know what he actually believes in."

Fortenberry will join Fiorina at a meet-and-greet session and a town hall meeting. Sasse added a stop at the Florina town hall event to his schedule.

Although trailing far behind in recent polling, Fiorina emerges with "favorable ratings higher than anyone else" in the surveys, Fortenberry said.

"Hopefully, she has some sustainability in the race."

Fiorina is former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
Sen. Ben Sasse is headed to Iowa to essentially make a case against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in advance of Monday's Iowa caucuses.

Most polls show Trump on the verge of winning the first-in-the-nation GOP presidential showdown, although polling is not always a reliable indicator of which voters will show up at party caucuses.

Sasse announced Tuesday he will appear with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas at separate campaign events and may appear with other "constitutional candidates."

"I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances," Sasse said. "I'm pro-Constitution and if that makes me anti-Trump, that's Mr. Trump's problem.

"Although Sasse has not endorsed any candidate, he has strongly questioned GOP front-runner Donald Trump," the Sasse news release stated.

In recent days, Nebraska's freshman Republican senator has taken after Trump on Twitter in a series of messages.

Sasse questioned Trump about whether he still favors a single-payer health care insurance plan, still "hate(s) the concept of guns," and still favors a $6 trillion tax hike. He also questioned Trump's "affairs with married women" in a tweet.

"You're very talented and on a huge roll," Sasse tweeted. "If I were betting -- you're likely next POTUS. Congrats. But...."

In Tuesday's statement, Sasse said: "America already has one post-constitutional party; we don't need another."

"We have a president who does not believe in executive restraint," he said. "We do not need another."

"I am not endorsing any candidate," Sasse said. "I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances."

Sasse's trip to Iowa follows a journey last week to New Hampshire, site of the first Republican presidential primary election on Feb. 9.

In Nashua, Sasse substituted for former Vice President Dick Cheney as keynote speaker at a Republican town hall.

"We need to be able to explain to people what we're for," he said, according to a story in the New Hampshire Union Leader in Manchester.

"It's not enough to just be against the establishment. I am, but we need to be for America."

Sasse did not mention Trump by name in Nashua.
Dear Dr. K: I saw an ad for something called a "tDCS brain-stimulating device." It supposedly helps improve memory and thinking. Is it worth a try?

Dear Reader: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) transmits a current into the brain through electrodes (little metal plates) on the forehead or scalp. The current is weak; it comes from a 9-volt battery (the size used in a smoke detector). People who undergo tDCS may feel their scalp tingle and hear a humming noise. Doctors can control whether the current activates -- or suppresses -- the neurons in your brain that lie beneath the electrodes.

The technique of tDCS has been tried on and off for more than 100 years. The technique is different from another increasingly used technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation.

I spoke to Dr. Daniel Press, a neurologist with the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He says that brain stimulation, if used carefully, looks promising. That's especially true if combined with other therapies. Several studies are underway to see if, and how, tDCS can be used to sharpen mental skills and treat symptoms of mind-body disorders.

For now, tDCS is only FDA-approved to speed the absorption of certain medications through the skin. But it is being used "off label" to treat many other conditions. These include:

* Chronic pain: tDCS may be effective for treating nerve pain. This includes back and leg pain, pain and numbness in hands and feet caused by diabetes, and fibromyalgia.

* Damage from stroke: Early research suggests that tDCS may improve a person's ability to move and speak and to overcome spatial neglect. That is the inability to notice or recognize objects on one side of the body.

* Eating disorders: In early studies, tDCS has reduced episodes of binge eating and bulimia in women with those eating disorders.

* Memory and learning: Many recent studies have evaluated the effect of tDCS on people's ability to perform mental tasks. Studies have focused on tasks that involve recognizing visual patterns, recalling lists of unrelated words or doing math problems. Overall, the results indicate the technique is most likely to improve mental function when used together with other types of training, such as learning new systems for remembering names.

Some manufacturers are selling tDCS devices directly to consumers. But these devices aren't regulated by the FDA, and there is no guarantee they are safe or effective. I would avoid them.

I also would avoid going to a doctor who uses tDCS without studying its effects. It is an unproven treatment, though adverse effects seem to be few (temporary nausea, headache, irritation of the skin under the electrode).

More important, tDCS is of unproven value. For that reason, the thing to do, if you're interested in trying tDCS, is to enroll in one of the many clinical trials seeking volunteers. To find one in your area, go to the study database maintained by the National Institutes of Health at clinicaltrials.gov.
Editors note: Because of a production error, a previously published article about the Clark Street redevelopment appeared in Wednesdays issue. The report that was intended to run follows.

RACINE  The more than $15 million Uptown redevelopment to create affordable housing for veterans is on track for an April start.

The proposal for the 1500 block of Clark Street is a redevelopment by Indianapolis-based Herman & Kittle Properties of a former long-time industrial site. The complex of 19 buildings and additions is to be converted to 74 apartments for veterans, with completion expected in late 2017.

The project encompasses more than 3 acres and some of Racines oldest industrial buildings. The redevelopment area stretches from 15th to 16th streets and from Clark Street to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks that cut through that block. Only a tavern at the south end of that area is not included.

The project was announced in December 2014 and so far has most involved only work behind the scenes. But Sarah Beck, HKPs director of development for Wisconsin and Illinois, said Tuesday that much critical preliminary and financing work has been done.

It sounds like it goes dormant for a while; its not dormant, she said. This is a really, really big project with a lot of unknowns.

The site is being referred to as the Ajax facility and was once the site of a company by that name, Matt Sadowski, the citys interim director of city development has said. The buildings there may be some of the citys oldest industrial buildings, he said.

The redevelopment will be faithful to those old buildings, HKP says. In fact, the site is in the process of being listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has qualified for such designation, Beck said. That will be worth about $5 million in state and federal tax credits toward the projects estimated $15.5 million cost.

Getting historic status and tax credits means that we have to honor what the site looks like, Beck said.

Housing tax credits

The largest chunk of money will come in the form of low-income housing tax credits, for which HKP has been awarded slightly more than $800,000 per year for 10 years, or a total of about $8 million, Beck said.

Winning those tax credits, she said, is Incredibly competitive. When you get it, you dont give it back  you move forward.

The result of the low-income housing tax credit, she said, is that apartment rents will be set at rents affordable to tenants earning 30, 50 and 60 percent of the areas median income, as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Another financing piece, an $850,000 affordable-housing grant, will come from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, a private entity, Beck continued.

And the City of Racine has approved a $439,000 home loan for the project.

Contamination, schedule

Environmental cleanup of the former industrial site is an essential aspect of the project. City Community Development Specialist Jeff Vitton has said solvents and other chemicals have been found on site.

Beck said there will be an estimated $1.3 million in environmental cleanup costs, with many loads of soil to be hauled away and a vapor mitigation system created to ensure safe housing.

The first four months will consist of simultaneous cleanup and demolition, she said. What will remain will be four stand-alone structures.

Amenities will include indoor and outdoor off-street parking, covered atrium, train watching patio, landscaped courtyards, business center, community room with kitchen, media/theater room, library, medical office and chapel.

HKP, which builds and manages thousands of housing units, has said the development will showcase original architectural features including exposed brick walls, spacious floor plans and high ceilings.
MOUNT PLEASANT  The head of a local nonprofit will be in Flint, Mich., today and Thursday to help students there share how they are coping with the citys water crisis.

Due to high-levels of lead in their tap water, Flint residents have for months been forced to use bottled water to drink, cook and even bathe. Concerns about the water first surfaced in April 2014, when in an effort to save money, officials began drawing the citys water from the Flint River, instead of relying on water from Detroit.

The move was considered temporary while the city waited to connect to a new regional water system, but residents immediately complained about the smell, taste and appearance of the water. They also raised health concerns, reporting rashes, hair loss and other problems. It was later discovered that that the river water was corrosive and had caused damage to the citys pipes, allowing high-levels of lead to leach out.

Kids talking

To bring the stories of children caught in the middle of the crisis to children here in Racine and other places, local water educator Joan Roehre will be connecting high school students at Mott Middle College in Flint with students across the country via online video conference connections.

I have about 17 classrooms from across the country that have signed up to be a participant in a 45-minute town-hall session, said Roehre. The students from Flint  are going to give us a summary of what a day in their life is like right now with this water crisis.

In turn, the students in the other classrooms  including a group of fourth- and fifth-graders at Racines Mitchell Elementary School, 2713 Drexel Ave., will be able to ask questions of the high school students.

The project will be the first time Roehre  and her one-woman her water education nonprofit Adventure Kids Learning  will be in a U.S. city to help tell its water story. An environmental education organization focusing on the global water crisis, AKL typically spends its time Guatemala doing about 30 video conferences a year.

After learning about the crisis in Flint, however, Roehre said it was important to get kids talking.

In addition to Wednesdays 1 p.m. event, the Mount Pleasant resident will be hosting connections at the school at 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Thursday. She still has spots available for classrooms interested in talking part in those events.

For me, as a water educator, I thought it was important to get this conversation going for students so that this never happens again, Roehre said.

Carmen Janecky, one of two Mitchell Elementary School teachers that will be taking part in todays broadcast, said her students, who have been studying water scarcity and the Flint crisis, are excited for the interaction.

I have shown them pictures of the water coming out of the tap, but I just think it is going to be a very different experience having the opportunity to talk with people who are genuinely effected by it, Janecky said.

Flints situation

Preliminary estimates of the cost of repairing Flints water distribution infrastructure  damaged by the river water that was not treated with corrosion control chemicals from April 2014 through October 2015  range from millions of dollars to as high as $1.5 billion, the Detroit Free Press reported Tuesday.

It wasnt until more than a year, on Sept. 29, that the state acknowledged there was a problem with the current water supply.

More than 176,000 cases of water, 93,000 water filters and 29,000 water testing kits had been distributed to residents since Jan. 6, the day after Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency, the Associated Press reported on Jan. 16. Those numbers include donated items, as well as state purchased items, the news agency reported. Some of that water has come from Racine; much of it through a partnership with Racine Police, local pastors and Merchants Moving and Storage.

Roehre herself will be donating water when she arrives in Flint.

I have 20 cases of water in my car, she said Tuesday.
RACINE  Employees of a Mount Pleasant restaurant reportedly robbed by three teens  one of whom fired off two shotgun blasts before leaving  spoke on Tuesday of the utter fear they felt that night.

I was held on the ground at gunpoint after the gun had been shot twice. All I could do was think of my two kids, said Joses Blue Sombrero server Renee Roediger. Its changed a lot for me.

Since the armed robbery at about 11:49 p.m. on Nov. 22, 2014, Im scared to walk to my car after work now, Roediger said during Jose A. Mendozas sentencing.

Mendoza, 19, of Racine, is one of the teens accused of entering the restaurant at 6430 Washington Ave. and stealing $4,145 in cash. Jorge M. Martinez, 18, of Racine, also was charged in 2014 in connection to the incident, as was a juvenile.

Racine County Circuit Judge John Jude sentenced Mendoza on Tuesday to three years behind bars and six years on extended supervision. Jude said the seriousness of the crime, and the effect on those inside the restaurant that night, demanded a prison term.

Assistant District Attorney Antoinette Rich recommended Mendoza be sentenced to prison, but didnt specify an amount. She said he was active in wrestling at Park High School and appeared to come from a good family, but was using drugs that day.

Mendozas defense attorney, Christy M. Hall, said Mendoza had been using marijuana, Xanax and alcohol and the armed robbery was totally out of character. She requested four years on probation plus imposed and stayed time of two years in prison plus three years on extended supervision. The latter sentences wouldnt kick in unless he violated probation.

They dont deserve what I put them through, Mendoza said during the hearing, apologizing to the employees. I was raised better than what I have showed. I am truly remorseful.

Mendoza, who said he wants to become a social worker or counselor, pleaded no contest Dec. 1 to being a party to the crime of armed robbery. He will receive credit for 263 days in jail.

The allegations

A restaurant manager reportedly told Mount Pleasant police she was in the office documenting money collected in two cash registers and had just placed money in the safe when two men entered. One brandished a shotgun while another  wearing a white mask  grabbed money on the desk while the first ordered her to open the safe, according to their criminal complaints.

Hall said the third teen has been convicted. She said that teen, whose name is not being used because he was charged as a juvenile, brandished and fired the gun that night. Hall said Mendoza was wearing the mask and grabbed the money.

The offense itself was arranged by their co-worker, Jorge Martinez, Hall said, adding Martinez texted Mendoza and the third teen to come to the restaurant after he propped open the kitchen door.

A white mask with an elastic strap, a dark blue Chicago Bears hat and a red Wisconsin Badgers backpack  with the name Mendoza written on it  were found near the parking lot.

The next day, a Racine police investigator passed along a tip that Martinez and Mendoza were responsible for the robbery. Mendozas Instagram account included a picture of him, posted about two hours after the robbery, showing off a large amount of U.S. currency, the complaints state.

Mendozas parents identified the backpack and mask as Mendozas, the complaints state.

Martinezs plea hearing is set for Monday.
RACINE  A Racine woman who allegedly racked up more than $20,000 in food stamps in a three-year period has been charged with fraud.

Lisa M. McCue, 41, of the 2400 block of 21st Street, was charged with food-stamp fraud in December after a lengthy investigation by the Racine County Sheriffs Office concluded that she lied about her living and income situation during a food stamps eligibility review in 2011. Police say McCue was overpaid $20,398.

McCue posted $1,000 bond on Jan. 12 during her initial appearance and made another appearance in court Tuesday, according to court records. On both occasions, the hearing has been adjourned for McCue to obtain counsel, court records indicate.

According to the criminal complaint, McCue first applied for food stamps on April 26, 2011. At the time, she claimed the only people living in her home were her and her three children and that the home had no source of income, police said.

She claimed that the same information held true in five other reviews from September 2011 to September 2013, according to the criminal complaint.

Police said they began an investigation into the legitimacy of those claims in October 2012, after they determined McCue was married and her home was owned by her husbands parents. According to the criminal complaint, her husband had numerous police contacts, beginning in May 2011, where he listed his home address as the same one that Lisa listed on her food-stamp reviews.

Additionally, police said McCues husband was listed as the account holder on the We Energies account for her home. According to the criminal complaint, McCues husband was employed full time at Metalworld Inc. for the duration McCue claimed she had no source of income on her eligibility reviews.

In February 2014, investigators interviewed McCue, who told them her husband had been living with her for the past three to four months, but had stayed with his daughter for the two years prior to that time, according to the criminal complaint. McCue did say that her husband was staying over at her home five to six nights per week during the two years he was living with his daughter, police said.

According to the criminal complaint, investigators spoke with McCues husbands daughter, who said her father never lived with her and has been living at McCues residence for as long as she can remember.

If convicted, McCue faces up to five years behind bars, another five years of extended supervision and a fine capped at $25,000. She is net due in court on Feb. 3.
President Barack Obama added another chapter to his reputation for running an imperial presidency last week when his administration announced plans for visa entry program changes that created a carve-out for travelers who have been in Iran.

It was Congress, however, that was really carved out and Republicans wasted no time in lambasting the president for his unilateral move.

The Obama administration is essentially rewriting the law by blowing wide open a small window of discretion that Congress gave it for law enforcement and national security reasons, said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R.-Va., the head of the House Judiciary Committee.

In fact, the categories of people that the Obama administration is exempting from the law were expressly rejected by Congress.

When Congress passed  and Obama signed  legislation at the end of last year, it was intended to tighten the reins on travelers who have visited Iran, Iraq, Syria or Sudan in the last five years in an attempt to dampen the threat of European nationals involved with the Islamic State from entering the country.

Congress allowed a waiver of the visa restrictions for reasons of national security or law enforcement  but rejected proposals easing restrictions for other reasons.

Yet the administration issued the carve-outs for Iran that would allow business travelers to be included under that exemption, saying it was intended to balance security and economic interests.

We want to make sure that we are doing everything to keep the country safe, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest, But we also dont want to unnecessarily disadvantage American business that are trying to do business overseas.

No, no and no.

Congress explicitly rejected that notion, but the president, enamored with Irans supreme leader and the implementation of the Iran nuclear accord, has chosen to throw it out the door  and write laws of his own  much in the same way he did with his shielding of as many as 5 million immigrants from deportation.

That use of executive power is currently headed for the Supreme Court.

The visa carve-out should as well. This is a republic, a nation of laws  not a kingdom that is ruled by royal decree.

Congress should reassert its decision, challenge the president and take away Obamas crown.
Attorney General Brad Schimel is starting the substantial task of updating the states open records law at a time when voices of outrage are still reverberating in the Capitols halls over a recent unsuccessful attempt by leading lawmakers to significantly diminish public scrutiny.

This is a big beast, said Schimel of the task, who has said since he was elected in November he wanted to update the states open records law for the first time since 1981 to, in part, better reflect government officials use of modern technology.

I dont believe youll find the word electronic in (the records law) anywhere, he said Friday.

Schimel will host a daylong summit on open-government issues Wednesday, an event scheduled before the release of a proposal drafted by legislative leaders and Gov. Scott Walker that was later dropped from the state budget that would have kept virtually all records and communications by state and local lawmakers private and restricted public access to drafting files of legislation. Schimel said on Friday the two events had nothing to do with each other.

City and county attorneys, journalists, open-government advocates and government officials at the event will discuss discrepancies in the states open-government laws, the effects of new technology for police officers like body and car dash cameras and how the open records law applies, as well as the costs of fulfilling open records requests, among other topics.

Schimel said it begins a process that will likely end with recommendations to alter the records law  a sensitive idea for some open-government advocates still reeling from the budget proposals.

We are still supportive of a process that would selectively and strategically update portions of our open records law, said Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders. But its also fair to say that we are much more concerned now about the potential consequences of opening our open records law for revisions now that we know there are people in the Legislature who have so little respect for our traditions of open government that they would try to do what they did.

Technological changes

While the budget proposal was drafted by Republican lawmakers including Gov. Scott Walker, Schimel, also a Republican, denounced the proposed changes to the records law, saying it would take the state in the wrong direction.

The aim of changes that result from the summit and subsequent talks is largely to update the law to reflect modern technology and how governmental bodies use it, he said.

(Technology has) created difficult questions that the law doesnt answer, and what we have been doing for almost four decades is weve been dealing with it on a case-by-case basis, Schimel said, adding that in updating the law you dont want to do anything, though, that limits access.

When Schimel proposed the idea of an open government summit, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council in a May 20 letter to Schimel offered a few ideas for updating the law including requiring public officials and government employees to:

Use only official government email accounts to conduct business.

Require electronic communication be kept as long as paper communication.

Ban emailing, text messaging and instant messaging between members of a government body during public meetings if the chatter relates to the meetings business.

Require an audio or video recording of closed meetings.

Representatives from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association and Wisconsin Broadcasters Association also proposed in a May 29 letter to Schimel that Wednesdays summit include a discussion about whether the states open records law should spell out which records and information are always public and which are always confidential in investigations of alleged misconduct by public employees and in law enforcement investigations.

Open government review?

Schimel said lawmakers have said they wish to start studying the states open-government laws in the fall to see if any changes could be made, and said he would like to have recommendations ready before any legislative study committee is formed.

Lueders said Friday that he hopes a committee of lawmakers would not be formed to study the states open-government laws.

I would be concerned it would be an instrument for the lawmakers who wanted to gut the open records law to, in fact, enact significant curbs on public information, Lueders said.

Brett Healy, president of the free-market think tank MacIver Institute, said he wasnt afraid of such a committee.

The public hasnt seen anything from the Legislature to suggest that changes are needed. If the Legislature really, truly believes theres a problem, they have a responsibility to share with the public what the problem is and why changes are warranted, Healy said. Im hopeful that if the Legislature follows through and forms a study committee, everyone will have a seat at the table and we can have an honest and open and deliberate conversation about the open records law and whether it needs to be changed.

I think the Legislature realizes now, from the reaction to the proposed changes in the budget, the public is not going to allow less sunshine.

Scot Ross, executive director of the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now, said he would look at Schimels effort to update the laws without prejudging, but just seeing how these folks have operated I think something that involves the Legislature and the governor at this point, people should have huge skepticism, given what they tried to pull on Wisconsin.

Walker, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed for this report.

Host of new issues

Schimel said the list of issues and situations to explore in advance of potentially updating the states open-government laws is exhaustive, ranging from elected officials attending public meetings via Skype to body cameras for police officers.

Schimel said one result of these talks could be local governments viewing open-government issues as more central to their operations and altering their budgets to accommodate the costs of fulfilling requests instead of asking those filing the requests to pay more.

(Maybe well) see government bodies understand thats part of the cost of being a governmental body, Schimel said. So we could see positive changes that arent necessarily changes to the (open records) law.

Schimel also noted that lawmakers now send drafts of documents or legislation to each other by email, which is public under the states open records law. He said he understood the spirit of one of the June proposals, which would have created an exemption for electronic communication that are considered part of the drafting or deliberative process.

If thats a record that is subject to public access, [someone might say] Theres just an opportunity to make me look foolish when all I was trying to do was develop an idea,  Schimel said. I can understand what they are trying to accomplish, and I think we can look at that at the summit  is there a way to address the draft issue that doesnt compromise public access?

Lueders said even if a narrow exemption is applied for draft materials related to the state budget, for example, it could end up being applied widely and to other levels of government and then well be to the place that they tried to get to already.

The basic lesson that you learn from watching the open records terrain is, you give them an inch, theyll take a mile, Lueders said. And what they tried to do with the proposals put into the budget was to take a mile.
A state board will reconsider a controversial public records decision that Gov. Scott Walkers administration has cited as the basis for not retaining certain records.

The Public Records Board, which decides how long state agencies must retain public records, voted in August to scrap a requirement for agencies to keep so-called transitory records deemed to lack long-term significance.

This month, the boards vote came under fire after the Wisconsin State Journal reported the administration said it had no records in response to a request for certain text messages from staff.

The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a government transparency group, filed a complaint against the board on Monday with the Dane County District Attorneys Office. It charges that the board held the transitory records vote without proper public notice, in violation of state open records law.

On Thursday, the board announced it is backing away from the vote.

Public concern over the management of transitory records has led the board to reevaluate the matter, board chairman Matthew Blessing said in a statement. We believe it is in everyones interest to revisit that discussion about transitory records with clear notice to the public of the intent to address that issue.

Blessings statement also said: We hope that this will alleviate any need for the public to suffer the cost of any litigation relating to the complaint filed in Dane County.

The statement said the issue will be placed on the boards agenda for an upcoming meeting but doesnt say when.

A spokesman for Walkers Department of Administration, Cullen Werwie, didnt address a request for comment on the matter late Thursday.

It started when the State Journal made a records request for text messages from Walker administration officials related to a failed $500,000 loan by the states jobs agency, Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., to a struggling Milwaukee construction company owned by a top Walker donor.

In August, the Public Records Board voted to change the states definition of transitory records. A day after that vote, Walkers Department of Administration cited the revised policy in saying it had no records responsive to the request. It noted that texts are transitory records and thus arent retained.

Prior to the August changes, such records had to be retained until no longer needed. Under the new definition, they dont have to be retained at all.

The previous definition said transitory records were correspondence and other related records of short-term interest which have no documentary or evidentiary value.

Under the new definition, they are records of temporary usefulness that have no ongoing value beyond an immediate and minor transaction or the preparation of a subsequent (final) record.

Examples of transitory records provided under the new definition do not include text messages about state loans, noted Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.

The other recent example involving transitory records came when the Walker administration also said it had no records in response to a request for some daily visitor logs to the governors executive residence in Maple Bluff.

In response to a request from liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now, the Department of Administration released the reports since April 8 but said prior reports are transitory records.
State lawmakers claimed more than $1.1 million in reimbursement for working in the Capitol in 2013, a hefty increase from 2012 that was consistent with past non-election year amounts.

In 2012, the average living expense, or per diem, claimed for each Assembly district was $5,575. That average amount rose more than 55 percent in 2013 to $8,672. In the same period, claims by state senators rose by a third, with the average senator taking in $9,230 in 2013.

Per diems are meant to cover food and lodging costs while lawmakers are in Madison doing state business. Those who live in Dane County can claim $44 a day while those from outside Dane County receive $88 a day. The amounts are on top of legislators nearly $50,000 annual salary.

While the 33 members of the Senate claimed a total of $304,585 in 2013, the 101 representatives who served in the Assembly in 2013 claimed $858,480, for a total of $1.16 million. In 2012, the total claimed by both chambers of the Legislature was $780,314.

Between 2007 and 2010, per diem expenditures averaged $1.18 million in odd-numbered years and $872,000 in even-numbered years, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. There are fewer session days held in even-numbered years because of elections.

Rep. Scott Krug, R-Nekoosa, saw the biggest jump in per diem pay, receiving $10,648 in 2013 after promising during the 2010 campaign not to claim any per diems.

We need to cut legislative per diems, Krug told the State Journal in 2010. My first spending cut is promising not to collect one cent of (legislative) per diem money ever.

He kept that promise in 2011 and 2012 but said in an interview last week he didnt intend the promise to extend beyond his first term. He also said he was in the Capitol a lot more in 2013, meeting with legislators, negotiating with trade groups and heading up the Assembly Children and Families Committee.

It might have been a slip to say ever, but my intention was to help out in a tough budget time, Krug said. I try to help people understand Im not getting extra salary; its reimbursements for travel. Krug said he hasnt heard anyone complaining about

the cost of per diem payments to taxpayers. Of the three legislators who didnt take any per diems in 2012, he said, he was the only one re-elected.

Two of them were voted out because there was a perception they werent doing their job, Krug said.

Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, claimed the most days of any lawmaker last year at 243, and received $10,692. He said he doesnt claim mileage reimbursement for in-district travel, which is a separate amount from per diem payments. Unlike some lawmakers, who have separate district offices, Erpenbachs district office and Capitol office are the same.

Its just easier to do per diem and not claim any mileage per district, Erpenbach said. A lot of these guys have big Senate districts. If theyre not taking per diem, theyre probably claiming mileage. I just dont.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, had the highest per diem compensation for the second year in a row, receiving $16,544 for 188 days claimed.

Spokesman Dan Romportl said members of leadership typically have more responsibilities that require them to be in Madison, resulting in more per diem claims.

In the Assembly, former majority leader Scott Suder, who resigned in September and became a lobbyist, got the most in such payments, receiving $13,288 from the state.

Of the 103 lawmakers who were in office in both 2012 and 2013, all but 11 increased the amount they claimed in per diem expenses.

Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, the longest-serving legislator in the United States, was one of the 11 whose expenses went down in 2013. He also had the second-most days claimed at 206.

I am in my Senate office practically every workday of the year meeting with constituents, taking walk-in visitors, meeting with legislators and receiving international visitors from all over the world, Risser said. My constituents expect me to be accessible to them. It is my opinion that whether it is an election year or not, my duties as a legislator remain the same and it is my privilege to represent my constituents as I have been elected to do.

On average, Democrats claimed slightly more in per diems than Republicans. The average Democratic lawmaker claimed 116 days for $8,759 in 2013, while the average Republican claimed 100 days and $8,626. In 2012, the average Democrat claimed 83 days and the average Republican claimed 63.
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JURIST Guest Columnist Glenn C. Smith of the California Western School of Law discusses the latest challenge to President Obamas immigration policy

Speculation about whether the US Supreme Court would wade into controversial issues involving immigration policy and presidential powerin an election year, no lessis over. On Tuesday, January 19, the justices announced that they would hear oral argument on the arcane issues of justiciability and administrative law on which US v. Texas has so far turned.

But the court also upped the ante by announcing that it would consider constitutional arguments the lower courts punted on when enjoining President Obamas DAPA program (the 2014 Department of Homeland Security Guidance Memo offering deferred legal statusi.e., three years of freedom from deportation, with potential eligibility to work and receive some government benefitsto millions of undocumented aliens whose children are US citizens or permanent legal residents and who meet five other criteria).

This commentary provides a court-watchers guide to the complex and cascading issues at stake in this important and high-profile case.

But, first, its worth emphasizing that US v. Texas is a textbook example of a phenomenon often true of law in general and constitutional law in particular: how political and social controversies get skewed and narrowed when the they end up in court. Ask most Americans (law-trained or not) what the big issues are surrounding the DAPA policy, and theyd likely cite personal hardships felt by undocumented immigrants hiding in the shadows of American law and society, the unfairness of letting some immigrants jump the line ahead of others seeking a path to citizenship through more conventional means and the like. These Americans would likely be surprised to learn that the Obama Administrations loss to date has turned instead on arcane (yet highly significant in their own right) questions of standing to sue and administrative procedure. Of further surprise might be the strong possibility that the court will resolve the litigation without ruling on much-ballyhooed political claims that the administration is acting unconstitutionally by seeking to change immigration realities without congressional involvement.

The Challengers Standing to Sue

The first set of disputes in US v. Texas involves an issue often arising preliminarily in public-law litigationwhether the challengers have legal standing to sue government defendants. Under current standing doctrines, the challengers must suffer an injury that extends beyond a mere abstract policy dispute; in the words of a 2013 court decision [PDF], plaintiff must suffer an injury that is concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the challenged action; and redressable by a favorable ruling.

Both the judge in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas and two of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found standing based on the economic injuries that Texas (and perhaps other states among the 25 others joining the legal challenge) would suffer when DAPA applicants succeed in achieving deferred legal status. Specifically, jurists assumed that a substantial number of the estimated 500,000 newly deportation-free Texas residents would apply for drivers licenses, which are substantially subsidized by the state. The cost in Texas alone could be several million[s of] dollars.

This assertion of economic-injury standing presents the Supreme Court with doctrinal complications of broader import to the accessibility of federal courts as forums for resolution of highly salient controversies. For example, should Texas injuries be ignored under the doctrine that plaintiffs cannot manufacture standing by self inflicted injuries, because it is Texas decision to subsidize license fees for all residents, including non-citizens? Further, both the district judge and the circuit-court majority prominently invoked language from a recent court global-warming case [PDF] stating that sovereign state challengers deserved special solicitude. Thus, a dispute with bigger ramifications roils about the extent to which state governments will be able to claim standing in future cases by asserting injuries that could not successfully be claimed by non-state challengers.

Even more legally troublesome is the additional argument that states suffer injuries sufficient to confer standing merely when federal actions impos[e] substantial pressure on them to change their laws. As the dissenting Fifth Circuit judge noted, this is arguably a breathtaking expansion of state standing allowing limitless state intrusion into exclusively federal matters by effectively enabling the states, through the courts, to second-guess federal policy decisionsespecially decisions involv[ing] prosecutorial discretion.

How Much Discretion Does DAPA Really Allow to Implementing Officials?

If a majority of the court agrees with lower-court judges that the challengers have standing, the justices will then face an intricate set of nested issues relating to administrative law and procedure. Despite distinct doctrines and precedents, these several disputes turned on a common question: Are DAPA deferrals, like other forms of prosecutorial discretion, nonbinding and revocable determinations made on a case-by-case basis (as the Administration argues)? Or, despite its facial language and the professions of federal officials, is DAPA, as the Fifth Circuit majority found, a program of significant legal consequences for millions implemented without discretion to deny applications.

Deciding among the competing characterizations requires answering several complicated factual and policy questions. Did lower-court judges justifiably discount as merely pretext Obama Administration claims that DAPA is discretionary? Is it fair to do that based on experience with a previous deferral program, the length of DAPA guidance (150 pages), political puffing by Obama or the testimony of the head of a public-employee union (who may have an axe to grind based on where DAPA decisional authority is lodged in the DHS hierarchy)? And did lower courts correctly rely on the inability of the Administration to show how many deferral applications were denied under a similar previous (DACA) program? Or is this what the dissenting circuit judge called illegitimate burden shifting because it was up to challengers to carry the evidentiary burden?

Answering these and other questions goes to the heart of whether the anti-DAPA challenge is precluded by Section 701(a) of the Administrative Procedure Act, which denies judicial review in the event of statutory preclusion or when agency action is committed to agency discretion by law. The discretion-versus-dictation issue also determines whether DHS could validly promulgate the DAPA policy without resorting to APA Section 553 notice-and-comment rulemaking. The APA exempts general statements of policy and procedural rules from notice and comment; in varying ways the extent and finality of the policy change accomplished by DAPA influences the availability of this rulemaking exception.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the majority of judges to date, DAPA would return to the rulemaking drawing board and face months of rulemaking procedures and a likely new round of post-promulgation court challenges. This would likely run out the clock on the Obama Administration, leaving DAPAs fate to the next administration. If a Republican wins the White House, DAPA rescission would probably be high on the agenda.

Do Immigration Statutes and Past Practice Permit DAPAs Policy Change?

And just in case this needs to get more complicated, the Fifth Circuit panel majority opened up a second, substantive front in the Administrative Procedure Act attack. Unlike the district court, which was content to invalidate DAPA on procedural (i.e., lack of notice-and-comment) grounds, the circuit-court judges additionally opined that DAPA violated separate APA Section 706(2)C because DAPA is in excess of statutoryauthority.

If the Supreme Court similarly reaches this substantive dimension, the justices will be plunged into detailed disputes about the meaning of federal immigration statutes and the significance of past legal-status deferrals adopted by previous congresses and administrations. The Fifth Circuit majoritys statutory exegesis concluded that DAPA was manifestly contrary to Congress careful plan about how parents may derive an immigration classification on the basis of their childs status. By contrast, the appeals-court dissenter saw these past enactments as endorsing broad DHS discretion generally and approving generous legal-status deferrals specifically.

Reaching the Big Constitutional Controversy?

The most provocative question of all is whether and how the court will end up deciding the constitutional question that it ordered litigants to additionally brief.

Under standard judicial-restraint principles, the justices should only assess the question of whether DAPA violates the Take Care Clause of the Constitution, Art. II, 3 if they fail to resolve the controversy on less-fundamental grounds of APA compliance or standing.

If core separation-of-powers issues are reached, the statutory and practical questions posed by the Fifth Circuits substantive Administrative Procedure Act claim become wrapped in a doctrinal framework dating back to the 1952 decision invalidating President Trumans executive order temporarily seizing steel mills during the Korean war and still not definitively resolved. Thus, the justices would consider whether DAPA faithfully executes congressional immigration policy to dateor is instead an unconstitutional example of a president direct[ing] that a presidential policy be executed in a manner prescribed by the president. Pragmatically, it will matter whether the administration seems to be acting with the acquiescence, opposition or indifference of Congress.

Because the lower courts did not opine on this constitutional dimension, the merits briefs filed with the court will be of even greater significance.

In the meantime, stay tuned!

Glenn C. Smith is a professor of Constitutional Law at California Western School of Law in San Diego. He is the co-author of CONSTITUTIONAL LAW FOR DUMMIES, a Dummies-brand guide for law students, legal practitioners and interested laypersons.

Suggested citation: Glenn C. Smith, In Deciding DAPA Dispute, Will the Justices Reach Constitutional Questions? JURIST  Academic Commentary, Jan. 27, 2016, http://jurist.org/forum/2016/01/glenn-smith-immigration-policy.php.

This article was prepared for publication by Dave Rodkey, an Assistant Editor for JURIST Commentary service. Please direct any questions or comments to him at commentary@jurist.org
[JURIST] Danish lawmakers [official website] on Tuesday approved a controversial bill [text, PDF, in Danish] that will allow Danish authorities to seize assets from immigrants seeking asylum in order to cover their expenses. Under the law, police will be allowed to search and seize [The Local report] immigrants cash or belongings valued over 10,000 kroner (USD $1,450). This amount was raised [BBC report] from 3,000 kroner (USD $ 435.84) after severe backlash. Belongings with sentimental value, such as wedding bands, are exempt from seizure. Several human rights organizations have criticized the law [Al Jazeera report], likening it to the seizure of valuable belongings by Nazi forces during World War II. However, lawmakers have defended the law stating that it aligns with the welfare model of Denmark. Immigration minister, Inger Stojberg, said that Danish lawmakers found the law to be fair and reasonable as those asylum seekers who do bring enough assets with them should cover the costs of their food and lodging during the asylum process. This, however, has not stopped some from believing that the measure, which also includes provisions allowing for the delay of reunification to three years, as a measure considered to deter immigration in the country.

The rights of migrant populations has emerged as one of the most significant humanitarian issue around the world, as millions seek asylum from conflict nations. Earlier this month Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] reported [JURIST report] saying that Lebanese residency laws risked creating a large undocumented community of refugees living at the margins of society. In November UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed [JURIST report] the UN General Assembly and cautioned the international community to avoid discrimination against Muslims, especially refugees and migrants entering Europe, as a result of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Also that month Amnesty International analyzed [JURIST report] the EUs approach to the refugee crisis and recommends changes to ensure international law is followed and human rights are appropriately valued. In October HRW called on [JURIST report] the EU and Western Balkans states to focus on remedying what it characterized as deplorable conditions for asylum-seekers in Europe. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights gave the opening statement [JURIST report] at the 30th session of the Human Rights Council in September in which he addressed, among other pressing human rights issues, the migrant crisis.
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] ruled [order, PDF] Tuesday that the presidents National Security Council (NSC) [official website] is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [official website]. The appeals court denied an appeal from Main Street, a group at the City University of New York School of Law [academic website], which was seeking records from the NSC related to US targeted drone strikes. One of the key requirements to be subject to open records laws is that the organization must have independent authority. Main street argued that the pervasive decision-making role of the NSC in foreign policy and security issues has made it a federal agency subject to FOIA. Judge Raggi, along with Judges Lynch and Wesley disagreed [The Hill report], stating: This structure confirms that the Council is more appropriately viewed as a forum attended by actors exercising independent authority within their respective spheres, not an actor itself, much less one exercising authority independent of the President, therefore the NSC does not fall under the FOIA. NCS record were accessible under FOIA until 1996, when the DC Circuit ruled [Politico report] that the NCS was not an agency under the terms of FOIA.

The use of drones [JURIST backgrounder] is controversial in both the international arena and in domestic circles. In November the Second Circuit ruled that the US government may keep secret memoranda [JURIST report] related to the legal justification for the use of drones for targeted killings of those in other countries believed to be involved in terrorism. The case was the result of FOIA requests by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times for documents prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel of the US Department of Justice regarding the drone strikes. In June the families of two Yemeni men killed by US drone strikes filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against the government, claiming they were wrongfully killed. In December 2010 a judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a lawsuit [JURIST report] challenging the Obama administrations ability to conduct targeted killings [JURIST backgrounder], a challenge spurred because one subject of a targeted killing, al-Awlaki-Khan, was a dual US-Yemeni citizen.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) [advocacy website] filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF] Wednesday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan [official website] seeking the replacement of lead water pipes in the city of Flint. The lawsuit, filed in conjunction with Concerned Pastors for Social Action, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and Flint resident Melissa Mays, seeks to force city and state officials to mediate alleged violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act [materials]. The alleged failures include improperly treating the water for corrosion, not testing tap water for lead, and inadequately notifying residents of the results of such tests. Sarah Tallman [NRDC profile], one of the filing attorneys and a litigation fellow with the conservancy group said [t]he only way to permanently and completely fix the problem of lead in drinking water is to conduct the full replacement of the lead-containing pipes and solder in a water system.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette [official website] announced Monday that he has appointed a former prosecutor [JURIST report] to act as Special Counsel in his investigation into the water contamination crisis in the city of Flint and that Andrew Arena, a retired Detroit FBI chief who now leads the Detroit Crime Commission [advocacy website], will also participate in the investigation. Schuette said earlier this month that he planned to investigate the water contamination crisis [JURIST report] in Flint. On the same day, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder [official website] asked President Barack Obama to issue a federal disaster declaration. Flints drinking water supply was switched from Lake Huron water treated in Detroit to water from the Flint River treated at the Flint water treatment plant in 2014 to save money. The new supply was not treated with required corrosion control chemicals and caused lead and pathogens [report] to get into the towns water supply from pipes. Researchers from Virginia Tech concluded that lead levels were high enough to be designated as toxic waste [WP report]. Lead can cause mental and physical issues or deathespecially in children.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] on Wednesday released its annual report [text, PDF] discussing human rights issues in more than 90 countries throughout 2015. World Report 2016, the rights groups twenty-sixth edition of the report, which spans 659 pages, includes short summaries of important rights topics before breaking down rights concerns by country. One major theme of this report is the treatment of refugees worldwide, especially those driven out of Syria by the Islamic State (IS), calling Europes approach to refugees counter productive. It calls on some countries, like Egypt, to create national asylum procedures and institutions in order to avoid the risk of arbitrary detentions and rights abuses, and on those with procedures already in place, like Greece, to improve those procedures in order to provide greater protections and fight discrimination. Another primary focus of the report is the threat to or limitations on freedom of expression throughout many countries worldwide, with autocratic governments placing limitations on journalists, social media and protest rights, and harshly prosecuting those who express dissent. The report covers a large number of other concerns as well, including the protecting the rights of children through the ending of child marriage and the overincarceration of juveniles, and protection of LGBT rights. The report is based on investigative work performed by HRW staff in 2015, often in partnership with human rights activists in the countries they were investigating.

The rights of migrant populations has emerged as one of the most significant humanitarian issue around the world, as millions seek asylum from conflict nations. In November UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed [JURIST report] the UN General Assembly and cautioned the international community to avoid discrimination against Muslims, especially refugees and migrants entering Europe, as a result of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris a week earlier. Also that month Amnesty International analyzed [JURIST report] the EUs approach to the refugee crisis and recommends changes to ensure international law is followed and human rights are appropriately valued. In October HRW called on [JURIST report] the EU and Western Balkans states to focus on remedying what it characterized as deplorable conditions for asylum-seekers in Europe. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights gave the opening statement [JURIST report] at the thirtieth session of the Human Rights Council in September in which he addressed, among other pressing human rights issues, the migrant crisis. Germany announced [JURIST report] that month that it was invoking temporary border controls at the nations southern border with Austria, after thousands of immigrants entered the country.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced [press release] Monday that he has appointed a former prosecutor to act as Special Counsel in his investigation into the water contamination crisis in the city of Flint and that a retired Detroit FBI chief will also participate in the investigation. In order to establish an ethics-based conflict wall between him and his investigation team, Schuette, has created a team defending the governor and state departments and another team investigating the crisis. Todd Flood is a former assistant prosecutor for the Wayne County Prosecutors Office and is now a private practice attorney in southeastern Michigan. Andrew Arena is a retired Detroit FBI chief who now leads a non-profit organization aimed at reducing criminal activity called the Detroit Crime Commission [advocacy website]. The Michigan Democratic Party has denounced the decision to place Flood in the investigation because he has contributed to the governors campaign in the past [NYT report].

Schuette announced [JURIST report] earlier this month that he planned to investigated the water contamination crisis in Flint. On the same day, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder asked President Barack Obama to issue a federal disaster declaration. Flints drinking water supply was switched from Lake Huron water treated in Detroit to water from the Flint River treated at the Flint water treatment plant in 2014 to save money. The new supply was not treated with required corrosion control chemicals and caused lead and pathogens [report] to get into the towns water supply from pipes. Researchers from Virginia Tech concluded that lead levels were high enough to be designated as toxic waste [WP report]. Lead can cause mental and physical issues or deathespecially in children. The National Guard was activated [CNN report] earlier this month in order to distribute bottled water and water filters. Officials have come under fire [The Atlantic report] for their response to the crisis, as it took 20 months after the initial switch for an emergency to be declared by the state. The Justice Department has also opened an investigation [Huffington Post report] into the situation.
US President Barack Obama [official profile] on Monday announced a ban on the federal prison systems use of solitary confinement for juveniles. Obama stated in an op-ed [WP op-ed] Monday evening that after a review of US prisons by the Department of Justice [official website], he is adopting new rules based on their recommendations:

These include banning solitary confinement for juveniles and as a response to low-level infractions, expanding treatment for the mentally ill and increasing the amount of time inmates in solitary can spend outside of their cells. These steps will affect some 10,000 federal prisoners held in solitary confinement  and hopefully serve as a model for state and local corrections systems.

Some states have already begun limiting solitary confinement, and JURIST Guest Columnist Steven Zeidman [official profile] suggested that New Yorks decision to ban solitary confinement [JURIST report] in February 2014 would lead to a larger discussion on the topic [JURIST op-ed]. The presidents ban could contribute to more reform on the state level as well.

The legality of solitary confinement has been an ongoing debate in the US, with many calling for comprehensive prison reform [JURIST podcast]. In September the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) [official website], in partnership with the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School [website] released a report [text, PDF] estimating that between 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners were in what correctional officials call restrictive housing in 2014. Also in September California agreed [JURIST report] to restrict use of solitary confinement based on a class action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights [advocacy website]. In March the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] that Virginia could continue to automatically house death row inmates in solitary confinement. In June 2014 Colorado enacted a law [JURIST report] changing its traditional methods of solitary confinement by mandating psychiatric evaluations and therapy for inmates diagnosed with mental illness and qualifying for disciplinary intervention.
[JURIST] The UN Security Council [official website] on Monday unanimously approved a resolution [text] authorizing the creation of political peace mission in Colombia to monitor the disarmament between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples Army (FARC). The mission is to last 12 months, and a team of unarmed international observers will monitor and verify the disarmament as the government and FARC end the civil war that has persisted for nearly 50 years. US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power [official profile] released a statement explaining [text] her vote in favor of the resolution. Noting that this conflict has taken on the Colombian people over the last 50 years, she concluded that todays vote recognizes Colombias step in [the] direction of peace. This mission is a part of the cease-fire agreement [text] the Colombian Government and FARC reached last week implementing a tripartite mechanism of monitoring and verification of the accord for a bilateral and definitive cessation of fire and hostilities and leaving aside of weapons which included members of the Colombian Government, members of FARC, and an international component that will serve to monitor progress.

Criminal activity by illegal armed groups has been an ongoing issue within Colombia, with progress made during peace talks last year. Last year Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos pardoned [JURIST report] 30 former guerrilla soldiers in jail for non-violent crimes. In June 2014 the countrys government and the FARC rebels agreed to create [JURIST report] a truth commission to investigate the deaths of thousands of people in the last five decades of the countrys conflict. In March 2014 Human Rights Watch issued a report [JURIST report] stating that illegal armed groups have caused hundreds of people [official report, PDF] to flee Colombias main Pacific port of Buenaventura in the previous two years. And in August 2013 Colombias Constitutional Court ruled [JURIST report] that a law providing reduced penalties for rebels who confess crimes related to their membership in illegal armed groups is constitutional. FARC has been fighting the Colombian government since 1964, seeking to establish a communist government in the Republic of Colombia.
What???

Ammon Bundy and Five Others Are Arrested, and One Is Killed, in Oregon

Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed seizure of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, was arrested and one was person was killed Tuesday night during a traffic stop in rural Oregon, the F.B.I. and the Oregon State Police said.

Five other people, including Mr. Bundys brother Ryan Bundy, were arrested, the authorities said.

The Bundy brothers and four supporters were arrested during a traffic stop along Highway 235 around 4:25 p.m., officials said in a news release. Shots were fired during the arrests, and two people who were with the Bundys were struck. One of them died, and the other was arrested and taken to a hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.

Officials did not say who fired the shots, or if there was an exchange of gunfire.

Yeah, well, the authorities better get their story together pretty quickly and credibly [More]. This simply was not a gun situation (cf "Get Shorty"), however delighted progressives might be that an armed white right-wing nut job was killed.

ON THE OTHER HAND, AND ANOTHER CONTINENT: Maybe not a gun situation, but a bit beyond the equipment they had, which seemed to emphasize track shoes. Immediate threat, imminent danger, inadequate response.
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Birgunj-Raxaul point shut for 2 hrs

Indian authorities halted the movement of Nepal-bound bicycles and motorcycles at the Raxaul-Birgunj border point for two hours on Tuesday.
Buildings yet to be demolished

Planes taking off and landing at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) continue to face flight safety risk, as buildings around the runway, which were during a study last month found to be too tall, are yet to be demolished.
Achyut Wagle holds PhD in economics and is currently a professor at the Kathmandu University School of Management. He is an econo-political analyst, writing for The Kathmandu Post for many years.
Denmark approves controversial migrant assets bill

The Danish parliament has backed a controversial proposal to confiscate asylum seekers' valuables to pay for their upkeep.
Forest encroached in Jhapa

Around five hectors of forestland belonging to Pragati Community Forest has been encroached in Charali, Jhapa district.
Help pours in for families of those killed in Rangeli police firing

Offers of help have started pouring in for the families of those killed in police firing in Rangeli of Morang district during a clash with protesters on January 21.
Himalaya Airlines plans to start ops by March-end

Himalaya Airlines, a new Nepal-China joint-venture company, plans to launch its international commercial operations by the March-end.
IRD examines tax issues in sale of Ncell shares

TeliaSonera has been moving to finalize the sale of its 60.4 percent stake in Nepali telecom giant Ncell to Malaysian-based Axiata, but the government hasnt decided whether or not to charge capital gains tax on the countrys biggest ever acquisition deal.
Nepali Diaspora participates in Australia Day celebration

Nepali Diaspora based in Australia took part in Australia Day which is celebrated as national day in Australia on Tuesday.
Off the record

Formalisation per se does not support Nepali women to expand and ensure the sustainability of their business
Official engagements to resume this week

After a long hiatus, meetings of bilateral mechanism between Nepal and India are set to resume, beginning with a meeting of energy secretaries this week.
Scottish theme event in Nepal

Hotel Yak and Yeti hosted a Scottish themed event for the first time in Nepal at the hotels premises on January 25.
Senegal detains 900 people in security drive

Police in Senegal have detained 900 people as part of a security operation following militant attacks in Burkina Faso and Mali.
We'll not back down from presidency election: Poudel

Nepali Congress (NC) Vice President Ram Chandra Poudel has said that he would not stay back from filing his candidacy to the post of president in its upcoming 13th general convention.
Yadav lashes out at Oli

Sanghiya Samajbadi Forum Nepal Chairman Upendra Yadav said on Tuesday that Prime Minister KP Olis arrogance, ego and insensitive remarks had spoilt the environment of political consensus several times in the past.
1. Yes. Its important to cast my votes early and avoid the lines on Election Day.

2. Yes. With nearly two weeks of early voting, its a more convenient way to take part.

3. No. Its better to wait until Election Day, in case any last-minute information surfaces.

4. No. Im not planning to vote early or on Election Day. It isnt worth my time.

5. Unsure. It depends on how the campaigns are shaping up. Ill play it by ear.

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AMISOM Acting Force Commander, Maj Gen Nakibus Lakara says they will not relent despite a recent attack by Al Shabaab.

He was speaking during a visit to the El-Adde base that was attacked by Al Shabaab on January 15th killing Kenyan troops.

Meanwhile Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari will today join his Kenyan counterpart at the Moi Barracks in Eldoret, in praying for the fallen soldiers.

This is his first official visit to Kenya since winning the presidency in April last year.

According to State House spokesperson Manoah Esipisu, the two Presidents will be joined by Somalias Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud for a special inter-denominational service to celebrate the lives of KDF soldiers.

Buhari and Somalias President Mohamoud are among the Heads of State who condoled with Kenya after the attack on the KDF camp in El Adde.

Story By Catherine Ageno
Police Forces in East Africa have embarked on re-enforcement of the Criminal Investigation Department to counter transnational crime.

With the help of the Germany Federal Police, the Directorate of Forensic Services has started training criminal investigation trainers from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda specifically in methodology and complex investigation processes.

Speaking at the launch of the one week course in Kampala on Wednesday, the police deputy director human resource development Felix Ndyomugyenyi said the forces have a limited number of professional trainers and this has subsequently affected the quality of investigators.

Story By Samuel Ssebuliba
The Police Chief Gen Kale Kayihura has been advised to respect the law.

This is after he said the police would not allow the handover of power to an opposition government.

Passing out crime preventers over the weekend in Eastern Uganda, Gen Kale Kayihura is quoted by the observer newspaper as having said that police has a mandate to keep law and order and therefore cannot allow to country to sink into anarchy.

However in response, the executive director, NGO Forum Richard Ssewakiryanga says all that matters is rule of law and leaders should refrain from making such reckless statements.

The Prime Minister Dr Rukahana Rugunda,while speaking at the same function assured the nation that his government was ready to hand over power peacefully in the event that it is fairly voted out

Story By Hadijah Mwanje
The United Nations sanctions monitors have suggested that President Salva Kiir and the leader of the SPLM in Opposition, Dr. Riek Machar should be sanctioned over atrocities committed in the country.

This comes a day after Dr Machar met president Museveni and expressed total commitment to restoring peace in his country.

According to Juba- based Eye Radio, the monitors say the atrocities have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals in the highest level of government and within the opposition.

In an annual report, the panel of UN monitors says President Salva Kiir and Dr Riek Machar maintain command responsibility for their respective forces; and are therefore directly to blame for killing civilians.

They also recommend that the Security Council imposes an arms embargo on South Sudan.
OO Tea

OO Tea recently opened inside Ranch 99 market, serving Taiwanese tea drinks. The chain is said to originally be from Taiwan and claim to be the No. 1 milk tea store in Taiwan. With so many milk tea places in Taiwan, I have no idea if that is true, but it seems like nearly every chain that opens from Taiwan makes this claim. Sharetea makes a similar claim too.



Since the opening, theres been a steady line of customers. While doing some shopping the other day, I saw a small break in the line, and decided to finally see if it was worth the long lines. They opened around the last week of December and seem to still be working out the kinks. One big issue is that they are constantly running out of boba or pearls (which is what they call their mini tapioca balls). On our visit they were out of green tea and pearls.



Large Milk Tea (no ice), Large Boba Milk Tea (half sugar, no ice)



Here were our drinks. I usually get the medium size, but the large was only 25 cents more, so I ended up getting a large. For all the drinks, you can choose the level of sweetness and amount of ice. This is a customization that is allowed pretty much everywhere now, but I like that they have a little chart at the register that reminds you that you can change ice and sugar levels. When we were in Taiwan last spring, Mr. K would point at the chart to communicate his drink orders.



I liked the level of sweetness of the milk tea. Most of the milk teas I order in the US at full sweetness are far too sweet for me. But the ones here tasted more like the level of sweetness of the drinks we get in Taiwan.

The boba, however, was extremely rubbery. I love chewy boba but it took a vigorous number of chews to even begin breaking down the tapioca balls. Next time, I might try the pearls (their mini tapioca balls), which seem to be the more popular option as they were all out when I placed my order.

Overall, Im happy to see a Taiwanese tea shop open inside Ranch 99 as it makes it very convenient to get a drink while shopping or after shopping. I hope that they work out the kinks and are able to provide a more steady supply of ingredients soon. I dont think their drinks are worth waiting in line for, but Ill stop by again when they arent any lines.

OO Tea (inside Ranch 99)

7330 Clairemont Mesa Blvd #106 San Diego, CA 92111


South Korea's point man on inter-Korean affairs said Tuesday the international community should be united in making North Korea "face consequences" by slapping stronger sanctions over its latest nuclear test.

"Through sanctions, the international community should clearly let North Korea know that it was wrong and it should not repeat such misbehavior," Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo said at the start of a meeting with researchers from the U.S. Brookings Institution.

The United Nations Security Council is working on a fresh resolution for drawing up stronger sanctions over North Korea's fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6.

Hong stressed an importance of seeking international cooperation in deterring the North from making another provocation.

"South Korea will make efforts to have one voice with the global community (in dealing with the North's nuke issue). In that sense, it is important to have close coordination with the U.S. and other countries," he added.

In respond, Richard Bush, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, echoed such a view.

"I agree with you 100 percent that (the North's) misbehavior should have consequences," Bush said, adding that forming a wider coalition of countries is important as it sends a "strong" message against the North. (Yonhap)
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One serious case

Two or more serious bouts

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The following editorial was published in the Jan. 19 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Gov. Scott Walker spun a dream on last week in his State of the State address, a dream we wish were true. The dream: Wisconsins economy is back.

The Wisconsin comeback is real, he said.

Well ... not entirely.

Yes, the unemployment rate is down, and the most recent monthly jobs report was stronger.

But in reality, Wisconsins economy still is being outperformed by other states in the upper Midwest. The state ranked 32nd in private-sector job growth among the 50 states in the five-year period that ended in June, according to federal government figures released in December. During that period, which encompasses the entire recovery since the Great Recession, Wisconsin private-sector jobs increased only by 7.6 percent while the national rate of job growth was 11.2 percent. Most nearby states did better than Wisconsin.

The sluggish growth is not necessarily Walkers fault. No matter what powers he claims, a governor has limited options against the swirling winds of a global economy, particularly in a state still so reliant on heavy industry.

And the state continues to have a serious mismatch between available qualified workers and available jobs. Recognizing this, Walker said Tuesday night: We must value our students who choose to be highly skilled welders, IT technicians or certified nursing assistants as much as we do those who choose to be doctors or lawyers. Each of these professions is vitally needed for a strong economy in Wisconsin, he said. Hes right.

Walker should get credit for bringing discipline to state spending if not always in a thoughtful manner.

Walker has reduced taxes and cut spending, and while its a good thing to keep taxes in check, his spending cuts sometimes have harmed state services. We worry about Walkers obsession with cutting higher education. Walker bragged about freezing tuition in his speech. But the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which educates more Wisconsin students than any other campus, faces wrenching decisions this spring as a result of that decision and spending cuts. That may harm students in the end.

We like the pilot program the governor mentioned in which students would get career planning earlier. That could be an important aid to families. We believe the idea of a three-year degree program that could start in high school may make sense and sounds like it could be an innovative way to reduce costs and get young people on the job sooner.

And we think that Walkers statewide listening sessions this year are a good idea.

Walker could start, though, by listening to Democrats in the Legislature. He could start a new politics in Wisconsin by pledging to work with them on the issues that really matter: jobs, schools, higher education.

As Walker contemplates running for a third term, heres hoping hell do what he says hell do this year: Listen, especially to those who may disagree with him.
BROWNSVILLE, Minn.  A Canadian Pacific freight train derailed Tuesday night in Houston County, Minn., sending six cars into the Mississippi River and spilling food-grade oil into the water.

The southbound train derailed around 10 p.m. about three miles south of Brownsville. There were no injuries reported.

CP spokesman Andy Cummings said a small amount of sodium chlorate powder spilled from one of the 15 derailed cars but none of the chemical reached the river.

Primarily used in a bleaching agent for the pulp and paper industry, sodium chlorate can cause fire or explosions when mixed with other materials, according to the manufacturer.

It could kill algae and other aquatic plants if spilled into the river, said Mark Sandheinrich, a professor of biology and director of the River Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

CP has not said what other materials the mixed-freight train was carrying.

Dozens of contractors and government officials were on the scene Wednesday removing overturned cars and repairing the damaged track.

Crews were cutting through ice to install wooden barriers downstream after discovering a sheen consistent with soybean oil, according to the railroad. CP said Monday afternoon that it planned to empty the tanker cars before pulling them from the river.

Canadian Pacific takes this incident extremely seriously, Cummings said. Safety will be our top priority.

The railroad said it anticipated the line, which carries about six trains per day, would reopen Wednesday night. Removal of the oil tankers depends on how quickly it could get empty cars to the site to hold the oil.

The Federal Railroad Administration had inspectors on the scene, though it could take months to determine a cause, said deputy regional administrator Michael Bodah.

The Environmental Protection Agency, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Coast Guard and Mississippi River Basin Association were also at the site.

Sabrina Chandler, refuge manager for the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, said oil can coat fish and mussels, preventing them from absorbing oxygen.

We always have a concern if theres anything going in the river thats not supposed to be there, Chandler said.

The derailment occurred under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service overlook that is a popular spot for watching tundra swans and other migratory birds. Chandler said it wasnt clear what impact the activity might have on future migrations but noted the oil itself would not pose a risk.

Its certainly not the same situation as if it was crude oil, Chandler said.

Canadian Pacific had two derailments in Minnesota during 2015, according to the FRAs accident database, which includes incidents through the end of October. Both occurred at relatively slow speeds and did not result in major damages or hazardous material spills.

About 31,000 gallons of liquid fertilizer and an unknown amount of diesel fuel leaked into the Mississippi River when two CP trains collided in 2008 near Dresbach, Minn.

Railroads have come under increased scrutiny in recent years with the rapid growth of crude oil shipments. According to the latest available reports, an average of nine trains per week run on the CP line through Houston County carrying more than a million gallons of crude. Most cross the Mississippi River at La Crescent, continuing east through La Crosse County.

Last year the railroad launched four projects on its southeastern Minnesota line, including a bridge replacement and new sidings to allow trains to pass on the Marquette line, which continues south through Iowa and west to Kansas City.

A CP train carrying crude oil derailed Nov. 8 in Watertown, Wis., one day after a BNSF train derailed near Alma, Wis., spilling ethanol into the Mississippi River. No injuries were reported in either of those accidents.

Citizens Acting for Rail Safety issued a statement Tuesday saying the derailment brings to light the potential for serious accidents that can cause disastrous consequences to our communities and environment. The rail safety group noted that hazardous materials besides oil and ethanol traverse the area daily.

Canadian Pacific takes this incident extremely seriously. Safety will be our top priority. Andy Cummings, CP spokesman
WASHINGTON (AP)  All adults, including pregnant women and new mothers, should be screened for depression as a routine part of health care, a government advisory group recommended Tuesday.

Depression is a common public health problem, and screening simply involves health workers asking about certain symptoms even if patients don't mention them.

The second part of the recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is more difficult  ensuring systems are in place to properly diagnose and treat people identified through screening.

And the guideline, published by the Journal for the American Medical Association, couldn't determine how often adults should be screened.

Some things to know about depression:

DEPRESSION IS MORE THAN NORMAL SADNESS

Officially called major depressive disorder, depression interferes with people's ability to function in their daily lives and can even lead to suicide. Nearly 7 percent of U.S. adults experience a depressive episode each year, the National Institute of Mental Health estimates. Symptoms can include persistent sadness, feeling hopeless, difficulty concentrating, problems sleeping and loss of interest in once-pleasurable activities. People sometimes also experience physical symptoms, such as headaches or back pain, which can confuse diagnosis.

NO SINGLE CAUSE

Depression can affect anyone, and there are multiple risk factors. A personal crisis, such as loss of a loved one, sometimes precedes depression, but it also can occur without any obvious trigger. Depression and other mood disorders tend to run in families, and depression frequently accompanies serious physical disorders.

Hormones can play a role, during pregnancy and after a woman gives birth. The task force cited a study that found about 10 percent of new mothers experienced a postpartum depression episode, more serious and lasting longer than so-called "baby blues."

WHY SCREEN?

Depression can go unrecognized, especially if patients don't seek a diagnosis. Updating 2009 guidelines, the task force reviewed years of research and said Tuesday that screening for depression remains an important part of primary care for adults of all ages. This time around, the guideline separately addresses pregnant and postpartum women, concluding they, too, benefit from screening.

A variety of screening questionnaires are available, such as one that asks how often, over the last two weeks, patients have felt bad about themselves or felt like they're a failure, had little interest in doing things or experienced problems sleeping, sleeping or concentrating.

Still undetermined, the task force said, is how often to screen, given that a person's circumstances and risk could change over time.

Those aren't new recommendations; several other health groups also have long urged depression screening, although there's no data on how often it's done. But the task force says one key is that appropriate follow-up be available to accurately diagnose those flagged by screening  and then to choose treatments that best address each person's symptoms with the fewest possible side effects.

SCREENING IS A FIRST STEP

Treatment options include psychotherapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy, a variety of antidepressants or some combination. One challenge is that there's little way to predict which patient will respond to which treatment, Dr. Michael Thase of the University of Pennsylvania, who wasn't involved with the task force, said in an accompanying editorial in JAMA. Many antidepressants have modest effects, and typical first-line therapies may not be enough for more severely affected patients, he noted.

Pending a better way to choose, primary care doctors may need to get creative to be sure patients don't abandon treatment, Thase said. He suggested that health workers call to check if patients have filled their antidepressant prescriptions, or trying web-based symptom monitoring to see if they're responding to therapy or need a switch.

A bigger challenge can be finding a specialist to whom primary care doctors can refer their more seriously affected patients, said Dr. Michael Klinkman of the University of Michigan, who also wasn't involved with the task force.

"Either the capacity is not there, or the wait times are so long that a patient who is referred is in limbo for weeks and weeks while they might be fairly sick," said Klinkman, a family physician who works with rural primary care providers to develop needed support systems.
The quest for finding out the fate of the Rev. W. H. Parri-Jones began last fall when a researcher visiting the Black River Falls Public Librarys history room realized her ancestors were among the founding fathers of the North Bend Presbyterian Church.

The late Parri-Jones served the North Bend congregation from December 1914 to June 1920 and also served the outlying preaching point at Mindoro. While Jackson County History Room Historian Mary I. Murray Woods was assisting the researcher, she also received a call from Linda Achterkirch of the Mindoro Presbyterian Church. Linda was working on the churchs centennial celebration, which is planned for next summer, and also was wondering what happened to Parri-Jones.

Woods checked the local newspapers to see if anything could be found about his assignments after leaving this area. Searching online, she found an article published June 23, 1920, stated, At a meeting of the Presbytery of La Crosse, June 14th, the pastoral relation between Rev. W. H. Parri Jones and the North Bend Church was dissolved, after seven years of congenial labor. The pastor goes to Portland Presbytery. This is one of our substantial rural parishes, with an outlying preaching point at Mindere (Mindoro).

A July 2, 1920, article noted, The North Bend Birthday Club and the ladies of the North Bend Presbyterian Church tendered Rev. and Mrs. W. H. Parri-Jones a farewell surprise. Rev. and Mrs. Jones depart for their new pastorate at Astoria, Oregon this week.

Woods research into Parri-Jones new assignment in Oregon provided no results. She then realized that checking newspapers for anniversary celebrations for the two local churches may prove worthwhile, and an article about the 60th anniversary of the North Bend Presbyterian Church printed a letter, congratulating the congregation, from Parri-Jones from Yates City, Ill.

Woods then turned to the community of Yates City, Ill., in hopes of finding more about Parri-Jones.

However, the research became more complex when she located a cemetery monument with only his wifes name, Anna, engraved. She then turned to the Salem Township Public Library in Yates City for assistance. After explaining the situation to head librarian Denise Hayes, she offered to go the cemetery and do some research.

The stone only had engraved, Anna, wife of W. H. Parri-Jones June 17, 1870  May 29, 1925. However, the cemetery sexton happened to be in the cemetery, so she directed her questions to her. The importance of good record keeping proved worthwhile. In her records, a coupon showed that William Parri-Jones, age 59, died at Fr. Madison, Iowa, on Dec. 28, 1928, and his body was to be removed to Yates City Cemetery in Knox County, Iowa, and there to inter body of said deceased person. Another paper, signed by the Sexton John Bowman from Jan. 1, 1929, stated that the body was interred. In talking with the current cemetery sexton, Hayes was assured that there appears to be an unmarked grave next to Anna Parri-Jones. One can assume this was the resting place for her husband, the Rev. Parri-Jones.

Among the questions unanswered is why Parri-Jones name was never put on the stone. However, it seems pretty understandable. Parri-Jones and his wife had no children or no known relatives. An obituary could not be found for either of the deceased. However, census records show that Anna was born in Llanrwst, N. Wales, and naturalization records, filed in Jackson County, Wis. for Rev. Parri-Jones, show that he was born in Ruthin, North Wales. He was naturalized on April 9, 1917. Both applied for passports in May 1923 to visit relatives in Great Britain.

With some questions answered as to what happened to the reverend and locating his final resting place, Woods felt that one act of kindness needed to be suggested. She suggested to Achterkirch that the Mindoro and North Bend churches go together and have Parri-Jones name engraved on the stone.

Woods said that it bothered her that the final resting place for a minister was not known, and would be lost forever and forgotten. Expressing their appreciation for her suggestion, Achterkirch contacted Lori Stuhr, secretary for the North Bend Church. With approval from both congregations, financial support now allows the final resting place for Rev. Parri-Jones to be engraved on the stone he shares with his wife thanks to the cooperation of several officials.

This is just one of many wonderful and caring examples of people connecting through research, and an act of kindness that will have an everlasting effect on a minister and his wife, other researchers, two churches and a cemetery, Woods said.
The Driftless Regions diverse landscape provides habitat for some little known but important plants and animals. The Friends of the Black and their guests learned about these mostly overlooked species at a program presented at the groups Jan. 13 meeting.

Armund Bartz, Driftless Area ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Natural Heritage Conservation program, brought greater awareness of the role the plants and animals played in the eco-system.

The Natural Heritage Conservation program is responsible for monitoring the states endangered resources, nongame animals and state natural areas.

Working for the DNR for 16 years, Bartz has focused on the inventory, management and protection of Wisconsins rare species and their natural communities. Assigned to the La Crosse station, Bartz is familiar with the Driftless Region and has studied the remnant prairies and savannas of the region.

Because of his knowledge of the local environment, Bartz was part of the team that developed the Black River State Forests master management plan.

Hes found the bluffs and coulees of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa offers habitat to some unique plants and animals. These species have been able to survive in the scattered remnants of the area, in land unused as pasture or for raising crops or development.

His talk centered on the two types of prairie found in the area. Along with the lower lying sand prairies, Bartz also monitors hill or goat prairies located at the top or near the tops of bluffs. The Black River Falls area had a substantial number of these prairie habitats until European settlers arrived.

According to Bartz, only about 100 acres of deep soil mesic prairie remain in Wisconsin today. This soil has organic matter of over six feet in depth because of the deep roots of prairie plants.

Before the arrival of European immigrants, Native Americans intentionally set fires to protect their villages from large fires, chase game and encourage vegetation that attracted desired food sources. These fires maintained the prairie. However once suppressed, trees quickly grew and now cover most of the landscape.

The list of some of the true prairie life forms include such plants as the Indian paintbrush, phlox, Ladys Tress Orchid, birds foot violet, hairy puccoon, wild lupine and clustered poppy mallow, yellow star grass and purple milkweed, sand cancer root, silky prairie clover, leadplant and prickly pear cactus.

Little known insects found in the sand prairie habitats include the leadplant flower moth and the juniper hairstreak, the monarch and the Ottoe skipper butterflies.

Animals of concern making their homes in the region include the prairie racerunner lizard, the prairie ringneck snake and the timber rattlesnake. Among the birds the conservation organization is keeping a watch on is the redheaded woodpecker. Several species of dry prairie snails also are on the watch list. Animals on the watch list are protected and harvesting them is prohibited.

For more information about FBR, e-mail to info_fbr@yahoo.com.
A conservative advocacy group is standing by its claim that former Sen. Russ Feingold was warned of problems at the Tomah VA Medical Center and failed to respond, which Feingold  and the author of a memo central to the claim  are disputing.

The group, Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, featured the claim in an ad in the Green Bay Press-Gazette this week and hasnt ruled out running more such ads.

Feingold responded a day later, flatly saying the attack ad is not true.

The Tomah VA center has been in the headlines since an investigation by the VAs Inspector General found deficiencies in care at the facility contributed to the 2014 death of a U.S. Marine from Stevens Point, Jason Simcakoski. The facilitys director and chief of staff were fired last year after those findings were disclosed.

Other lawmakers such as U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, have faced blowback about their offices handling of the matter.

Now comes the anti-Feingold ad, based on a memo written in 2009 by a union official at the Tomah VA facility and marked hand-delivered to Feingold  then a U.S. senator  and U.S. Reps. Ron Kind and Dave Obey. The memo warned that veterans were being over-prescribed narcotics at Tomah.

But the author of the memo  Lin Ellinghuysen, president of AFGE Local 0007, the local union representing most workers at the Tomah VA  changed course last year, saying the document never was delivered to Feingold or his staff.

Feingold noted that in his rebuttal to the ad, adding that his office searched for the memo and had no record of receiving it.

Ellinghuysen said that she wrote the 2009 memo to a union official at the VA medical center in Iron Mountain, Mich., after the official told her he would testify to a congressional panel about problems at his facility. Before he testified, Ellinghuysen said she told Balkum about her plans to write the memo and that Feingold and Kind represented the Tomah area in Congress. On that basis, Ellinghuysen said she mistakenly assumed Balkum would deliver the memo to them while in Washington, D.C., and wrote that on the document.

Last year, when a reporter contacted Ellinghuysen to inquire about the memo, she said she contacted Balkum to ask if he hand-delivered it, and he said he did not.

Attempts to reach Balkum were not successful.

The memo became a public document after Ellinghuysen provided it to police when they were investigating the suicide of a former psychologist at the Tomah VA, Christopher Kirkpatrick.

I made a bad assumption, Ellinghuysen said. Russ Feingold did not receive my memo addressed to Ben Balkum.

A spokesman for Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, Chris Martin, asked in a statement why Ellinghuysen changed her story.

Im more inclined to believe what someone wrote down at the time and submitted in an official police report than what they are now saying five years later under immense political pressure, Martin said.

AFL-CIO, which is affiliated with AFGE, has contributed significantly to Feingolds past campaigns.

When asked if anyone urged her to change her story about the memo, Ellinghuysen said no.

Feingolds opponent in the November election, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, has faced questions of his own regarding his response to the Tomah VA scandal.

Johnson, who succeeded Feingold in 2011, was criticized after it was reported that his office failed to act on whistleblower tips about problems at the Tomah VA. Johnson later acknowledged his office could have done more to respond.
A New Jersey man was sentenced to serve jail time for stealing a vehicle near Black River Falls and leading authorities on a high-speed chase into Monroe County.

Andrew J. Bae, now 22, received 90 days jail last fall and was given credit for 84 days served for the August 2015 incident in which he took a vehicle near Walmart in BRF and then led a deputy on a chase that reached speeds of 100 mph.

Bae last fall pleaded no contest to charges of negligent operation of a vehicle, operating a vehicle without consent and resisting or obstructing an officer, all misdemeanors. Judge Anna Becker also ordered Bae pay court costs and other fees.

He previously had been charged with second-degree recklessly endangering safety, taking a vehicle without consent and fleeing an officer.

Bae had been recently released from Jackson County Jail when he took the vehicle from an auto sales area near the store and then led authorities on the chase down Interstate 94 where he weaved through traffic and construction zone areas where workers were present.

The stolen vehicle got two flat tires when it went off the road and passed two semis in the median before the Wisconsin State Patrol assisted the deputy in taking Bae into custody near mile marker 142 near Tomah.

Bae also was cited for speeding 45 mph or more over the limit in a work area.
Monroe County authorities have charged a mental health worker accused of sexually assaulting patients at the Tomah VA Medical Center with sexual exploitation by a therapist.

Charles W. Davis, a peer support specialist, was arrested earlier this month after two female patients accused him of ongoing harassment, exposing himself and receiving oral sex in his office.

Davis, 47, was charged in Monroe County Circuit Court with two counts of sexual exploitation by a therapist, each of which carries a maximum 12-year sentence. He was also charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, a misdemeanor.

According to the criminal complaint, Davis made repeated sexual advances to two patients, including a 26-year-old veteran receiving treatment for past military sexual trauma.

She told VA police that Davis called her into his office in December and exposed himself.

A 32-year-old patient said Davis sent her sexually explicit pictures of himself and that she gave him oral sex in his office, according to the complaint.

Both women said Davis would frequently rub his crotch and make lewd gestures in common areas, the complaint stated.

Davis, whose bond stipulates he may not possess a cell phone, could not be reached for comment.

According to the VA, Davis was hired in 2013 as a housekeeper and promoted several months later to peer support specialist. VA spokesman Matthew Gowan said Davis was certified by the VAs own peer support training program, which requires more ongoing training than a similar state program.

Gowan said Davis had maintained his certification through the past fiscal year.

Peer support specialists have experienced mental illness or substance abuse themselves and have specialized training. They are certified in Wisconsin by the state Department of Health Services, although the state provides no way of independently verifying that certification.

Davis, who is prohibited by the court from having contact with the Tomah VA, is on unpaid leave, according to the VA.

The Tomah VA has been plagued with scandals since a story by the Center for Investigative Reporting last year detailed high levels of opioid prescription at the facility, which patients dubbed Candy Land because physicians there dispensed prescription painkillers so freely, and a pervasive culture of intimidation and retaliation against employees who spoke out.

A 35-year-old Marine veteran died in the hospital from a lethal combination of prescribed medications.

At least three top officials  including the medical chief of staff and the centers director  were later fired.

In November, a nurses aide was cited for disorderly conduct after allegations that he shoved a patient in the mental health unit. The VA has yet to identify the aide or release reports requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
This letter concerns the story printed in the Jan. 20, 2016, edition of the Jackson County Chronicle entitled, Frac sand mine opposition heating up.

According to the article Mr. Rake stated: We just feel having this there  its just not the place for it, said Steve Rake, president of Friends of the Black River, a Jackson County-based conservation organization. Put it somewhere else.

With all due respect Mr. Rake, just where should this load out facility be put? As president of the Friends of the Black River, are you not concerned with other rivers of this state? I hope that you misspoke in your irresponsible words to, Put it somewhere else. This facility should not be put anywhere to degrade other individuals property and destroy our environment.

When will these town boards throughout the state begin to represent the majority of the people they have been elected to represent? To wait for an election to vote them out of office is to wait too long in protecting the environment. Irreparable damage to the citizens health and property. Irreparable damage to the environment of this state will occur before forthcoming elections.

These board members have sworn to uphold the health, safety and welfare of the individuals of their respective communities. This is their first and foremost responsibility to their constituents, an awesome responsibility not to be taken lightly when they agree to serve as this, nor any, communitys representatives.

In this instance this board, comprised of illegality and deceit by its members, has fallen far short in this first and foremost responsibility. Certainly these board members are not representing the majority of this community when so many members of the public attended this meeting speaking against the conditional use permit.

I commend those citizens who have the courage to stand up to this company through a lawsuit.

I commend their attorney, Mr. Tom Lister, for taking on this mining company for the citizens of this community. Thank goodness for those good people and their attorney in their attempt to stop even more destruction to our state.
The article Frac sand mine opposition heating up, published on Jan. 20, was an interesting read. It is well within the rights of residents to bring legal challenges against the industrial sand mines. However, alleging that the rail load-out facilities will impact the health and welfare of landowners more than a mile away is not supported by the best available scientific data and is irresponsible fear mongering.
BROWNSVILLE, Minn.  A Canadian Pacific freight train derailed Tuesday night in Houston County, Minn., sending six cars into the Mississippi River and spilling food-grade oil into the water.

The southbound train derailed around 10 p.m. about three miles south of Brownsville. There were no injuries reported.

CP spokesman Andy Cummings said a small amount of sodium chlorate powder spilled from one of the 15 derailed cars but none of the chemical reached the river.

Primarily used in a bleaching agent for the pulp and paper industry, sodium chlorate can cause fire or explosions when mixed with other materials, according to the manufacturer.

It could kill algae and other aquatic plants if spilled into the river, said Mark Sandheinrich, a professor of biology and director of the River Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

CP has not said what other materials the mixed-freight train was carrying.

Dozens of contractors and government officials were on the scene Wednesday removing overturned cars and repairing the damaged track.

Crews were cutting through ice to install wooden barriers downstream after discovering a sheen consistent with soybean oil, according to the railroad. CP said Monday afternoon that it planned to empty the tanker cars before pulling them from the river.

Canadian Pacific takes this incident extremely seriously, Cummings said. Safety will be our top priority.

The railroad said it anticipated the line, which carries about six trains per day, would reopen Wednesday night. Removal of the oil tankers depends on how quickly it could get empty cars to the site to hold the oil.

The Federal Railroad Administration had inspectors on the scene, though it could take months to determine a cause, said deputy regional administrator Michael Bodah.

The Environmental Protection Agency, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Coast Guard and Mississippi River Basin Association were also at the site.

Sabrina Chandler, refuge manager for the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, said oil can coat fish and mussels, preventing them from absorbing oxygen.

We always have a concern if theres anything going in the river thats not supposed to be there, Chandler said.

The derailment occurred under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service overlook that is a popular spot for watching tundra swans and other migratory birds. Chandler said it wasnt clear what impact the activity might have on future migrations but noted the oil itself would not pose a risk.

Its certainly not the same situation as if it was crude oil, Chandler said.

Canadian Pacific had two derailments in Minnesota during 2015, according to the FRAs accident database, which includes incidents through the end of October. Both occurred at relatively slow speeds and did not result in major damages or hazardous material spills.

About 31,000 gallons of liquid fertilizer and an unknown amount of diesel fuel leaked into the Mississippi River when two CP trains collided in 2008 near Dresbach, Minn.

Railroads have come under increased scrutiny in recent years with the rapid growth of crude oil shipments. According to the latest available reports, an average of nine trains per week run on the CP line through Houston County carrying more than a million gallons of crude. Most cross the Mississippi River at La Crescent, continuing east through La Crosse County.

Last year the railroad launched four projects on its southeastern Minnesota line, including a bridge replacement and new sidings to allow trains to pass on the Marquette line, which continues south through Iowa and west to Kansas City.

A CP train carrying crude oil derailed Nov. 8 in Watertown, Wis., one day after a BNSF train derailed near Alma, Wis., spilling ethanol into the Mississippi River. No injuries were reported in either of those accidents.

Citizens Acting for Rail Safety issued a statement Tuesday saying the derailment brings to light the potential for serious accidents that can cause disastrous consequences to our communities and environment. The rail safety group noted that hazardous materials besides oil and ethanol traverse the area daily.
The last thing members of La Crosse Area VOAD want is a disaster, but thats the first thing on their minds as they ramp up preparations in case of a calamity.

We dont want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to be prepared, because its chaos when flooding swamps a neighborhood, a train derailment releases toxic gases or a tornados funnel tags a neighborhood for destruction, said Dan Schreiter, chairman of the La Crosse Area Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, an umbrella organization to mobilize agencies, organizations and volunteers if disaster hits.

The group, formed in 2013, convened its annual meeting last week, where the agenda included enlisting more volunteers and lining up resources to help in the event of a catastrophe, Schreiter said.

We want to create a better database of people who say, Hey, call us if we need help, especially at oh-dark-30, said Schreiter, business continuity administrator for Kwik Trip.

The groups help is more than welcome, said Keith Butler, La Crosse Countys emergency management coordinator, who attends most of VOADs meetings.

Oil train mishaps such as the blazing derailment of a BNSF Railway train March 5 along the Mississippi River near Galena, Ill., and another BNSF incident in which 25 rail cars jumped the tracks Nov. 7 near Alma in Buffalo County, spewing denatured alcohol into the Mississippi River, raise the specter of similar crashes in La Crosse, Butler said.

Both of those incidents resulted in limited, voluntary evacuations, but a cataclysmic crash could force large-scale evacuations of people and businesses, he said.

La Crosses landlocked position presents challenges, Butler said, adding, Its a real pickle, with just a couple of ways in and out, especially in the industrial area.

A coordinated evacuation plan is needed so that traffic moves in an orderly fashion, Schreiter and Butler said.

As another example, one of the lessons learned when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 was that influxes and deployment of volunteers must be coordinated, Butler said. Busloads of well-meaning volunteers rushed there and to other Gulf cities, which didnt have the resources to house and feed them, multiplying the havoc, he said.

VOAD, which includes agencies and businesses such as WAFER, the Hunger Task Force, Catholic Charities, The Salvation Army, Great Rivers 2-1-1, the Coulee Region Humane Society, Kwik Trip, Festival Foods and many faith-based organizations, among many others, has mobilized a few times. Its most notable efforts came in 2014, when a polar vortex caused such brutal weather conditions during the winter that the South Hall of the La Crosse Center was used as a warming shelter because the existing shelters were overwhelmed.

For those types of things, its amazing what a small amount of help can have, Schreiter said.

There are a lot of moving parts, Butler said, noting that unmet needs include often-forgotten aspects such as identifying translators and pinpointing kitchens that could help provide food for evacuees in a large-scale exodus.

Particular plans must be in place to make sure the elderly are taken care of, as well as which shelters would accept pets, as the La Crosse Center did in 2011.

There are horror stories of people saying, Im not leaving until I can take Fluffy, Schreiter said.

VOAD hopes to rally resources to be the one-stop shop for assistance.

We need to know who we can contact after business hours to help, Butler said. If somebody needs 10 pieces of plywood for repairs, we also would have to find somebody with a truck and, maybe, a driver. That would be three phone calls instead of one.

Schreiter, saying he has no doubt that people will pitch in, cited the May 22, 2011, tornado that cut a swath through La Crosses South Side as proof.

A lot of people stepped forward and provided compassionate service. The community is resilient, and I know people will step up, he said.

VOAD, which has a national counterpart and is connected with the Wisconsin Office of Preparedness and Emergency Health Care, has plans not only to recruit volunteers but also to train them in the assorted duties a disaster plan sets down. Such duties might include working a phone bank, logging volunteer opportunities, directing volunteers to appropriate areas, running forms from one station to another and maintaining order.

The state has set six regional training sessions for reception center volunteers. One will take place Feb. 22 at Stoney Creek Hotel and Conference Center in Onalaska.

In the meantime, individuals and businesses should make their own plans in case they have to move out fast, Schreiter said.

He cited the example of his sister in Lockport, Miss. She has a go bag, with important papers, basic foodstuffs, clothing and personal care items, near the front door so she can hit the road in a hurry.

We need good judgment and personal preparedness, Schreiter said.
MADISON  Beware, overdue book borrowers. Wisconsin lawmakers are thinking about sending out the library police.

The state Senates Elections and Local Government unanimously approved a bill Tuesday that would create exceptions to privacy laws protecting library users identities so libraries could report delinquent borrowers to collection agencies and police. The committee vote clears the way for a full vote on the Senate floor.

The bills author, Sen. Sheila Harsdorf, a River Falls Republican, said in written testimony to the committee that the proposal would give libraries tools they need to recover their materials and collect fines.

The financial loss of unreturned library materials and unpaid fines ultimately fall on taxpayers, she wrote. I urge your support of this legislation that provides options for libraries ... in an effort to save taxpayer dollars.

Wisconsin Library Association lobbyist Steven Conway said the bill would help establish uniform procedures for recovering overdue materials. Right now, he said, different municipalities are advising libraries to use different strategies, including assigning a librarian to make calls, referring borrowers to collection agencies and turning to police.

But its unclear whether those tactics are legal under borrower privacy protections, Harsdorf aide Alison Zikmund said. The bill clarifies that collection agencies and police are clearly options, she said.

Under current Wisconsin law, libraries are generally prohibited from disclosing the identity of borrowers or people who use library resources. They can disclose their user information to staff members acting in their official capacity, to other libraries to facilitate interlibrary loans and to parents of borrowers under 16. They also must release records pursuant to a court order and surveillance camera images to police if officers are investigating a crime at a library.

The bill would allow libraries to give collection agencies information about a delinquent borrowers accounts, including the persons name and contact information. Libraries also could report that information to police if the unreturned materials are worth at least $50.

The Senate committee approved the bill without any discussion. Its unclear whether the full Senate will vote on the measure. Myranda Tanck, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Republican senators havent had a chance to discuss the bill.

Lawmakers are flooding their leaders with proposals as the session winds down and they get ready to hit the campaign trail. Fitzgerald has said he expects the Senate to finish in March. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos wants to finish even sooner than that, perhaps by the end of February.
MADISON  The point person in the United States for a country dealing firsthand with a refugee crisis, an oil crisis, global warming, rebuilding Afghanistan and a growing border conflict with Russia leaned forward in a comfy chair in a nondescript Madison building on Monday and quietly showed his diplomatic chops.

Kare R. Aas, a career diplomat who is the Norwegian ambassador to the U.S., was on a goodwill tour of the Midwest, successfully avoiding the blizzard in Washington for the relatively calm weather of Iowa and Wisconsin.

Here he visited Livsreise, the new Norwegian heritage center in Stoughton, and the Norwegian American Genealogical Center & Naeseth Library, 415 W. Main St.

In an interview, he touched on concerns that Norway shares with the United States, the most pressing on a daily basis being questions about the handling of migrants from Syria. Uniquely, Norway is dealing with a tense dispute with Russia at its northernmost border, where refugees have been arriving regularly after traveling through Russia.

Its important for Norway to explain what is going on with a continuous dialogue with the United States, said Aas, adding that the refugee problem is a global issue that requires a global solution. Aas sees a meeting Feb. 4 in London as a potential avenue for a solution.

Having served as ambassador to Afghanistan during two turbulent years (2008-10), and having led the Foreign Ministrys security division for five years, Aas has participated in serious issues at the highest level.

In the U.S., Norway has spent its pension funds oil money investing in 2,000 of Americas largest companies. Its climate research in the north is considered the gold standard, and its efforts at world peace seem perpetual.

But here is the ambassador driving around Madison with honorary consul Anne Lindblom, of Verona, stopping in at a genealogical center to chat.

Its important (for me to be here) because the Norwegian-American community of 6 million plays a significant role in the bilateral activities of our two countries, he said.

And culturally, the (Norwegian-Americans) today have a better understanding of what happened with the immigration than do the Norwegians.

Aas dodged what has become the most controversial issue for those Norwegian-Americans: the failure of Congress to approve President Barack Obamas appointment of Minnesota lawyer Samuel Heins to be the U.S. ambassador to Norway.

Heins, an Obama fundraiser and human rights advocate, was nominated last spring but the position has been open since September 2013.

We ask a lot of Norway, yet the Senate does not have the decency to send the personal representative of the president to his post in Oslo, Sun Prairie native Tom Loftus recently wrote.

Loftus, a longtime Wisconsin politician, was U.S. ambassador to Norway from 1993 to 1998. It is common to describe the Senate as dysfunctional, and this has become nothing but a kind way to describe collective arrogance. Our allies dont understand.

Aas was more diplomatic: It is of benefit to both countries, not just Norway, for the United States to have an ambassador there, said Aas, adding that Norwegian ambassadors are career diplomats appointed by the government.
MADISON  Gov. Scott Walkers effort to bridge rural broadband disparities falls well short of a solution for most subscribers outside of urban areas, according to Internet service providers and industry experts.

The governor, in last weeks State of the State speech, touted a plan to triple funding for Wisconsins Broadband Expansion Grant Program, which started in 2014 with up to $500,000 annually in matching funds to allocate.

In its first two years, the program has benefited a few thousand households served by 14 Wisconsin service providers, but despite the increase to $1.5 million annually, rural broadband advocates say the programs impact will be hardly noticeable.

The amount of money were talking about is insignificant to the amount of money needed to upgrade rural areas to real broadband, said Barry Orton, professor emeritus of telecommunications at UW-Madison. So, the increase is only slightly better than nothing.

The Federal Communications Commissions definition of broadband has been a moving standard since the inception of high-speed Internet access. The agencys current standard is a download speed of 25 megabits per second (mbps) in cities and 10 mbps in rural areas. Netflix recommends 5 mbps for streaming its high-definition video and 25 mbps for ultra high definition.

But with data usage rising and networks strained everywhere, access to broadband in rural areas has emerged as a nationwide problem, and companies that provide Internet service have shied away from expensive infrastructure improvements that would affect only a small customer base.

A draft of an FCC annual report found that only 39 percent of Americas rural population has access to wired broadband. But access problems exist even in near large metropolitan areas.

Many people in rural areas have only one option for wired service providers, and satellite Internet service remains a limited and expensive alternative.

Orton said Wisconsins deregulation of the telecommunication industry over the past 15 years has created a situation where companies decide levels of service for certain areas without sufficient oversight from the Public Service Commission.

Cable service, landline service, broadband service is all marketplace driven, Orton said. So, what happens if youre in a rural area where the market is not so good? Youre out of luck.

Internet service providers have looked to states and the federal government to help make extending service more cost feasible, but in many cases, Wisconsin is behind its peers in rural broadband funding.

In 2011, state officials returned $23 million in federal stimulus money that was earmarked for expanding high-speed Internet access, calling the requirements that came along with the money risky.

The amount of money in its broadband grant program is also on the low end.

Minnesota, by comparison, spent about $20 million on matching grants in 2014 and $10 million last year. Just last month, Gov. Mark Dayton asked lawmakers to approve $100 million of the states $1.2 billion surplus for broadband grants during the upcoming legislative session.

Walkers spokeswoman Laurel Patrick said the programs $1.5 million combines with local and private matching funds to equal an investment of about $5.5 million.

Governor Walker realizes the importance of investing in broadband services, which is why he created the Broadband Grant Program in his first budget and worked to triple funding in the most recent budget, she said in a statement.

The communications companies want the FCC to reallocate dollars from telephone service to modernizing the nations broadband infrastructure.
A proposed change to the city of La Crosses anti-nepotism policy is raising concerns among police and firefighters, who argue it would hurt recruitment and retention efforts in the city.

The policy, as written, disqualifies any candidate who would be supervised by or supervise a family member. Whats more, if one employee becomes an immediate family member of another employee and results in one of them supervising the other, one of them must transfer to another department, take a demotion or quit within six months.

The policy change, proposed by Human Resources Director Wendy Oestreich, will go before the Finance and Personnel Committee on Feb. 4. Oestreich said the proposal was not introduced in response to a specific incident, but rather it was intended to update the citys outdated 2003 policy.

You cant be hired to work under an immediate family member, she said.

The proposed policy includes a new section to address situations where one employee becomes a family member of another, either by marriage or by one employee marrying anothers relative. Police and fire chiefs said those changes will penalize their employees, who tend to share an occupation with their spouses or other family members.

The changes would have an immediate impact and could hurt recruitment, Fire Chief Gregg Cleveland said.

Firefighters are insulted by a policy that penalizes them for personal relationships, La Crosse fire union president Lt. Lance Tryggestad said.

We hire great employees and because their marital status changes, youre going to penalize them? he said.

The proposal could disqualify top candidates for a position because of a relationship that doesnt impact their work ethic, he said.

This will affect us and harm our department. Firefighting and policing, thats in our blood, Tryggestad said. Its a family thing all over the world.

The fire union suggests removing the portion that would require an employee to transfer, take a demotion or quit if their position would require them to supervise a family member. Currently, a La Crosse fire captain and a firefighter are brothers-in-law.

La Crosse Police Chief Ron Tischer also is working with the two police unions to propose a similar amendment, according to a statement he released last week. The policy would affect at least four officers.

Retired La Crosse police Lt. Dan Marcou, who has written two books on the agency, said the city already has lost out on good cops because of the anti-nepotism policy, and it would be a mistake to expand it.

Ive seen the quality that comes out of families of law enforcement, and the city should be striving to benefit from that, not to prevent it, he said.

Marcou, whose brother is La Crosse Municipal Court Judge Dennis Marcou, said arrangements can be made to avoid any partiality, preferential treatment or conflicts of interest with proper monitoring.

You deal with unfairness when you find it, but you dont punish everybody to avoid what might happen, Dan Marcou said.

La Crosse Mayor Tim Kabat said the policy reflects the citys responsibility to ensure operations arent affected by family relationships.

There have to be safeguards in place, he said. I think for the most part this is trying to codify what is the current practice.

Kabat and Oestreich each stressed that the policy could be amended by a committee or the La Crosse Common Council.

Of course, the last thing we want is for our good employees to be penalized or any type of policy that would injure recruiting new employees to come on board or hurt retention efforts, Kabat said.

Kabat said that he didnt want the city forcing anyone to resign, adding that the police departments three shifts allow for greater flexibility to ensure a supervisor is not directly in charge of a family member.

The policy includes a clause allowing for the director of human resources to waive the provisions in exceptional circumstances.

Oestreich said her primary motivation in updating the policy was to ensure that all employees, including those who are part-time or seasonal, were subject to the policy, rather than only full-time employees.

She also has proposed changes to the policy that would relax rules to allow family members of city employees who work in the finance or legal departments, as well as the treasurers and mayors offices, to be employed by the city.

The definition of immediate family member also would expand to include stepparents, stepchildren, stepsiblings, grandchildren and grandparents.

Ive seen the quality that comes out of families of law enforcement, and the city should be striving to benefit from that, not to prevent it. Dan Marcou, retired La Crosse police lieutenant
BURNS, Ore. (AP)  Federal and state officials were restricting access on Wednesday to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested.

The group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2. They want federal lands turned over to local authorities.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge.

Details of the fatal encounter were sparse. It happened as Bundy and his followers were heading to a community meeting late Tuesday afternoon in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed that her father, Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, was the man killed, the Oregonian reported. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

"This is where I'm going to breathe my last breath, whether I'm 90, 95 or 55," Finicum told The Associated Press on Jan. 5. " ... I'm going to not spend my days in a cell."

The FBI and Oregon State Police would only say the man killed in the police shooting was wanted by federal authorities, and said no more information would be released pending identification by the medical examiner.

Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the occupation, told radio station Oregon Public Broadcasting that five or six group members remain inside the refuge.

For weeks law enforcement vehicles have been noticeably absent from the roads surrounding the refuge. Wednesday, however, marked law enforcement cars are dotted throughout the region. The FBI and Oregon State Police said they were setting up checkpoints and only allowing ranchers who own property in specific areas to pass.

Police and news media have converged on the nearby town of Burns, where most hotels are booked to capacity.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

Thornton called the arrests "a dirty trick" by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32 - apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

Law enforcement previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies but opposed the refuge takeover.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The group, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.
The column by Charley Swayne, a former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse part-time instructor, questioned the work ethic of UW-L faculty, the quality of the education at UW-L and the role of tenure in higher education (Sundays Tribune).

We want to address some of the factual inaccuracies and to share some perceptions in regard to our service as faculty and as public employees of the state of Wisconsin.

Facts first:

1. Tenure is a system designed to protect the quality of faculty teaching and veracity of the scholarship that faculty perform. Although often seen as a type of employment for life perk, it is, instead, an essential protection to faculty to be able search for truth through their research or to teach students about politically sensitive topics.

2. National and regional workload surveys during several decades continue to indicate that both tenured and untenured faculty and instructors work longer hours than those for which they are paid. The most recent survey indicated that faculty work an average of 61 hours per week. Faculty in most disciplines at UW-L teach 12 credits each semester (such as four three-credit courses) and are responsible for more than 100 students per semester on average.

3. The greater portion of faculty work associated with teaching is outside of the classroom and largely unseen. Faculty advise students, grade papers, create and revise curriculum to stay current with employer needs, societal trends, and innovations in their discipline. Students benefit directly from this unseen work.

4. In every known measure of excellence, student outcomes and affordability by which universities are judged externally, UW-L scores well. Ninety-three percent of our seniors rate their overall experience at UW-L as excellent or good.

5. All faculty are reviewed annually on their work (teaching, scholarship and service) and, in addition, tenured faculty have a more rigorous review every five years as part of post-tenure review. Student feedback on teaching is considered as one form of evidence, alongside examination by other faculty, assessment of student learning and teaching outcomes. When instructors are unable to provide evidence of quality teaching, they are not rehired or not tenured.

6. Of the 378 full time tenure-track and tenured faculty at UW-L, 94 percent earn less than $100,000, and the median salary is $58,000. Its not a profession one chooses for personal wealth. Nationally, individuals with doctorates spend a median time of seven years (after earning their undergraduate degree) to earn their degree, and as many as 40 percent graduate with student debt. The debt load is highest for those in the lowest-paying disciplines such as the humanities.

7. All faculty at UW-L have experienced the equivalent of a pay cut during the past 10 years. In the past decade there have been only two years where there was a state pay raise (1 percent each time), while both health care costs within the system and the standard cost-of-living for all Wisconsinites have increased. On average, our tenured faculty earn 90 percent of the salaries of our peers at comparable upper Midwest public universities.

8. UW-L is one of the top 10 largest employers in La Crosse County, and our students and employees provide a substantial positive economic impact on the region.

Now for the perceptions:

We find the overwhelming majority of our colleagues to be passionate and caring individuals who put students first and contribute to society as teachers, scholars and community members. Despite the low morale associated with multiple rounds of state budget cuts, most faculty recognize the privilege they have in working with undergraduate and graduate students and the benefit of working in the context of intellectual freedom.

If asked, either of us can happily point to evidence and numerous individual examples that promote the accurate view that faculty are a committed group of productive individuals who work hard to help educate the citizens of tomorrow.
After reading Don Foys anti-gun letter to the editor (Monday's Tribune), I had to respond to two of his points.

First, automatic weapons are not the same as semi-automatic ones. Perhaps he (and many other anti-gun zealots) should learn the significant difference between the two.

Automatic weapons have been highly regulated for most of the past century, and they have been legally unavailable to the general public since 1986. None of the recent mass shootings have involved fully automatic weapons.

Secondly, I take issue with Foy's statement that America is less safe because gun worshipers have poisoned our society. Law-abiding legal gun owners do not make America less safe  criminals do. And usually it is ones with long criminal rap sheets.

Also, criminals rarely buy guns legally. No number of additional laws and expanded background checks will deter a criminal from buying a gun illegally from another criminal or from stealing one. Gun crimes committed by legal gun owners, especially those with concealed carry permits, are statistically almost non-existent.

I know many people would like to see all guns  at least those purchased and held primarily for self-defense  out of private hands. If you choose not to own a gun, I fully support your right to act upon that belief, but do not try to impose your anti-gun practices on me and other law-abiding gun owners.

The more you try to do it, the more we will resist your efforts.
Defrauding the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. would be a felony under a bill approved by an Assembly committee Wednesday.

The bill would make defrauding the agency a Class E felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and five years of extended supervision and a $50,000 fine. Also, anyone who commits fraud against WEDC would be ineligible for state assistance for seven years and WEDC could also bring a civil lawsuit to recoup any lost money.

The bill has bipartisan backing from more than three dozen legislators. Gov. Scott Walker has said he supports it.

The Wisconsin Economic Development Association has warned the bill could have a chilling effect on economic development in the state.

The bill passed the committee 11-3 with one Republican member absent and three Democrats voting against it. All other Republicans and two Democrats voted for the bill.

Rep. Tod Ohnstad, D-Kenosha, echoed WEDAs concerns during a brief committee discussion.

I want to make sure good legitimate Wisconsin businesses are not chilled from going forward in seeking the funding they need, Ohnstad said, adding he would work on amendments to the bill to ensure businesses that unintentionally mislead the agency arent punished.

Rep. Mike Kuglitsch, R-New Berlin, urged both Democrats and Republicans to support the bill as a way of ensuring companies that receive taxpayer dollars are held accountable.

Weve been in bipartisan support of these measures to make sure that as stewards of the tax dollars we arent deceived, Kuglitsch said.

Laura Smith, a spokeswoman for Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, said some Democrats are concerned the bill doesnt go far enough to address issues at the WEDC.

The bill comes in the wake of a Wisconsin State Journal report in May that found a struggling Milwaukee business owner received a $500,000 WEDC loan in 2011 despite including misinformation about past lawsuits and the projects partners on his loan application.

Building Committee Inc. owner William Minahan made a maximum contribution to Walkers campaign, hired a top lobbyist to help secure state funding and met with top Walker administration officials before receiving the loan.

Walkers then-Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch pushed WEDC officials to provide the company additional funding. The agency sued the company and has received a financial judgment, but the loan has not been repaid.

If signed into law, the bill would not be retroactive, but author Rep. Samantha Kerkman, R-Powers Lake, said it would serve as a deterrent to fraudulent behavior in the future.

A companion bill in the Senate is sponsored by Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay. It has yet to receive a committee hearing.
Walker says high likelihood of seeking third term  JANESVILLE, Wis.  Gov. Scott Walker is hinting again that hell seek a third term as governor. Walker made the comments to reporters Tuesday after he signed a bill at the Rock County Courthouse expanding the states Family Care program to the county. Walker says he will wait until late 2016 or after the end of the year to make a formal decision, but he says he feels good about the progress hes made and thinks he can build off it.

Man cited in wagon crash that killed father, son  WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis.  A Necedah man wont face criminal charges in a crash that killed a father and son riding in a horse-drawn wagon last year. Thirty-one-year-old Seth Nelson was cited Tuesday for first-offense drunken driving in the crash that killed the wagons driver, 31-year-old Christian Kempf of Vesper, and his 10-year-old son, Melvin. Nelson is suspected of driving a pickup that crashed into the back of the wagon on Nov. 20. An accident reconstruction report finds lack of lighting on the wagons rear was a significant factor.

Low grain prices make conservation program more attractive  ADRIAN, Minn.  Low grain prices are making it more attractive for Minnesota farmers to put their land in a program that pays them to replant it with trees and grasses benefiting wildlife and reducing erosion. Minnesota farmers enrolled just over 1 million acres in the longtime federal Conservation Reserve Program last year, Minnesota Public Radio News reported. Val Dolcini, who oversees the program, said about 23.5 million acres are in the program across the country.
Westby Times

Jan. 26, 2006

10 Years Ago

With time running out and Mother Nature still in a state of confusion, some community members and Snowflake Ski members are wondering whether or not they will be able to hold the 83rd annual ski jumping tournament in Timber Coulee Feb. 11 and 12.

The Westby Bar W Riders held a raffle and raised enough money to purchase a digital camera for Special Riders.

Harry and Lorraine Davidson celebrated their 50th anniversary with a family celebration, Jan. 24, at the FireHouse in Viroqua.

Westby Middle School January 2006 Students of the Month are 5th graders, Tyler Ihrcke and BreAnna Eno; 6th graders, Haley Herr and Karlee Mikkelson; 7th graders Ethen Wyman and Olivia Wilkins; 8th graders Anna Melian and Kayla Thurk.

The Times

Jan. 24, 1991

25 Years Ago

The Heiren/Wold home, circa 1871 and all its furnishings are property of Norskedalen, and has been moved a 9 mile descent down Highway 14 to Coon Valley and its permanent site on the Thrune Farm.

The Snow Ski Club has announced that that the Coors Brewing company and Scandinavian Airlines System will again be major sponsors of the Snowflake International 90 Meter Ski Jumping Tournament on February 9th and 10th.

Air Force Staff Sgt. Jeffery J. Peterson, a space system equipment maintenance technician, has arrived for duty at Onijuk Air Force Base, Sunnyvale, Calf.

Hjalmer and Hildur (Swiggum) Holte were married January 24, 1931 and celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary.

The Westby Times

Jan. 27, 1966

50 Years Ago

Linda Starkey, a 17-year-old Sparta High School senior, was named 1966 Snowflake Ski Queen and will reign over the big 43rd annual Snowflake Ski Tournament annual Snowflake Ski Tournament on February 5th and 6th.

The Scenic Central Wrestling Tournament will be held at the Westby High School Gymnasium February 5.

Frank R. Schneider, La Crosse State Commander of the Wisconsin American Legion, will speak at the annual American Legion birthday dinner at Westby, January 29.

Patricia Ann Grindle became the bride of Ronald G. Hagen in a ceremony performed at Our Saviors Lutheran Church in Westby on January 8,

The Westby Times

Jan. 22, 1941

75 Years Ago

Announcement has just been made that Theodore Broch, mayor of the city of Narirk, Norway, will give a lecture on the invasion of Norway in Our Saviors Lutheran church on February 3.

Vocational training for individuals between the ages of 17 and 25 will be offered at the high school starting February 1st.

Dr. C.C. Smith, who for several years has been located in the Stevling building has moved his dental parlors to the first floor of the Bank of Westby building which he recently purchased.

Only twenty-four voters turned out last Thursday evening to attend the special meeting of the local school district, calling for the purpose of voting on authorizing a loan of $2,500 to erect a vocational shop. Every voter present voted for the proposal, the vote being unanimous.
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A warning has been issued for SoCal travelers, especially those who are pregnant, after a reported case of Zika virus in L.A. County. Today, L.A. County health officials are warning of the Zika virus, as an outbreak has been reported in 21 countries, including Puerto Rico, Mexico and El Salvador. So far, there's only been one confirmed case of the virus in L.A. County. In this particular instance, the infected was a young girl who had traveled to El Salvador in November. She has since recovered. Another case was discovered in Arkansas, and another in Virginia.

According to the CDC, symptoms include fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes, and they typically kick in after a few days. About one in five people who are exposed will actually become sick. The illness usually isn't too severe, but can last up to a week. Most people will not have to go to the hospital and deaths are very rare. However, the virus is particularly dangerous for pregnant women, as it has been associated with developmental disorders and miscarriages. Some reports from Brazil indicate that pregnant women who were exposed to the Zika virus had babies born with microcephaly, or, a smaller than usual head. Microcephaly can lead to intellectual disability, seizures and issues with vision, hearing and balance. The CDC cautions that more studies will have to be done on the relationship between pregnancy issues and Zika virus, however.

Zika virus spreads via Aedes mosquitos. This type of mosquito can be found in the San Gabriel Valley, but in order for it to be a problem, one of those mosquitos would have to bite an infected person, then bite other people. So far, all cases of Zika virus in the U.S. have occurred in people who recently traveled to an affected country, meaning that we have no evidence yet to conclude that it's being spread locally.

Health officials suggest wearing clothing that covers arms and legs and to use bug spray when traveling. If you're pregnant, they suggest avoiding affected areas altogether.

The affected countries are: Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Saint Martin, Suriname, Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

You can access all of the CDC's travel advisories here.
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27 (4) Jul 26 (6) Jul 25 (4) Jul 24 (3) Jul 23 (6) Jul 22 (3) Jul 21 (5) Jul 20 (4) Jul 19 (3) Jul 18 (3) Jul 17 (4) Jul 16 (6) Jul 15 (4) Jul 14 (4) Jul 13 (4) Jul 12 (4) Jul 11 (3) Jul 10 (5) Jul 09 (4) Jul 08 (3) Jul 07 (4) Jul 06 (3) Jul 05 (3) Jul 04 (3) Jul 03 (3) Jul 02 (4) Jul 01 (4) Jun 30 (4) Jun 29 (3) Jun 28 (4) Jun 27 (4) Jun 26 (3) Jun 25 (4) Jun 24 (5) Jun 23 (6) Jun 22 (4) Jun 21 (5) Jun 20 (3) Jun 19 (4) Jun 18 (3) Jun 17 (4) Jun 16 (4) Jun 15 (4) Jun 14 (4) Jun 13 (3) Jun 12 (5) Jun 11 (5) Jun 10 (6) Jun 09 (5) Jun 08 (4) Jun 07 (4) Jun 06 (4) Jun 05 (3) Jun 04 (5) Jun 03 (3) Jun 02 (3) Jun 01 (4) May 31 (4) May 30 (3) May 29 (3) May 28 (5) May 27 (3) May 26 (4) May 25 (3) May 24 (6) May 23 (4) May 22 (5) May 21 (5) May 20 (4) May 19 (5) May 18 (6) May 17 (6) May 16 (4) May 15 (4) May 14 (5) May 13 (4) May 12 (3) May 11 (4) May 10 (5) May 09 (2) May 08 (4) May 07 (4) May 06 (4) May 05 (4) May 04 (4) May 03 (3) May 02 (3) May 01 (4) Apr 30 (4) Apr 29 (6) Apr 28 (6) Apr 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(6) Apr 28 (9) Apr 27 (6) Apr 26 (5) Apr 25 (8) Apr 24 (7) Apr 23 (8) Apr 22 (6) Apr 21 (5) Apr 20 (10) Apr 19 (7) Apr 18 (7) Apr 17 (8) Apr 16 (5) Apr 15 (6) Apr 14 (9) Apr 13 (11) Apr 12 (8) Apr 11 (5) Apr 10 (10) Apr 09 (7) Apr 08 (5) Apr 07 (9) Apr 06 (10) Apr 05 (5) Apr 04 (5) Apr 03 (7) Apr 02 (6) Apr 01 (5) Mar 31 (3) Mar 30 (3) Mar 29 (1) Mar 28 (5) Mar 27 (7) Mar 26 (8) Mar 25 (4) Mar 24 (8) Mar 23 (5) Mar 22 (4) Mar 21 (5) Mar 20 (7) Mar 19 (5) Mar 18 (8) Mar 17 (8) Mar 16 (3) Mar 15 (6) Mar 14 (9) Mar 13 (6) Mar 12 (6) Mar 11 (7) Mar 10 (6) Mar 09 (8) Mar 08 (5) Mar 07 (5) Mar 06 (6) Mar 05 (9) Mar 04 (7) Mar 03 (6) Mar 02 (5) Mar 01 (7) Feb 28 (8) Feb 27 (7) Feb 26 (4) Feb 25 (9) Feb 24 (6) Feb 23 (6) Feb 22 (7) Feb 21 (3) Feb 20 (6) Feb 19 (5) Feb 18 (5) Feb 17 (4) Feb 16 (4) Feb 15 (5) Feb 14 (8) Feb 13 (6) Feb 12 (4) Feb 11 (5) Feb 10 (6) Feb 09 (7) Feb 08 (6) Feb 07 (6) Feb 06 (6) Feb 05 (5) Feb 04 (5) Feb 03 (10) Feb 02 (9) Feb 01 (3) Jan 31 (8) Jan 30 (4) Jan 29 (9) 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a website dedicated to express views on topical legal issues, thereby generating a cross current of ideas on emerging matters


Federal and state police officers have exchanged gunfire with members of an armed group in Oregon, killing one person. The armed group had taken control of a federal wildlife area in the eastern part of the state.

A shootout happened when police stopped cars carrying members of the group. The protesters were reportedly driving to a meeting with people who live near the wildlife area.

The Oregonian online newspaper reported that the man who was killed was Robert Finicum. He often served as the groups spokesman.

Reports say the leader of the group -- Ammon Bundy -- and six others have been arrested. It is not clear how many members of the group are still in control of the federal wildlife area.

The group, which calls itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, illegally occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2nd. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and local officers had watched the protest for weeks without intervening. People from states as far away as Arizona and Ohio had joined the protest.

Some members of the group have for many years criticized the federal governments management of public lands in the West.

Many people who live near the wildlife area had been calling for the group to leave. Many of them agree with the groups criticism of the federal government. But they opposed the occupation of the wildlife area because they feared it would end violently.

The group wants control of federal lands to be given to local officials. The federal government controls about half of the land in the western United States. Disputes about management of public lands have been taking place for many years.

In the 1970s, Nevada and other states pressured the federal government to give state and local governments more control of the land. People want to use the land for cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting.

Im Mario Ritter.

Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted this story for VOA Learning English based on the Associated Press report. Mario Ritter was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page.

_________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

occupy  v. to take and keep control of (a town, foreign country, etc.) by using weapons or military power

intervene  v. to become involved in something (such as a conflict) in order to have an influence on what happens

wildlife  n. animals living in nature; wild animals (often used before another noun)

graze  v. to eat grass or other plants that are growing in a field, pasture, etc.


The United States and China say they want the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons, but they have not agreed on new actions after North Koreas recent nuclear test.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met Wednesday in Beijing.

After the meeting, Wang said his country was preparing to support a new United Nations resolution against North Koreas nuclear program. But he did not identify any specific punishment. And he said the resolution should not fuel new tensions.

Tensions in East Asia rose after North Korea claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb underground on January 6.

Kerry said agreement needs to be reached on a strong U.N. resolution.

The U.S. is reportedly a supporter of stronger international sanctions. This could include a ban on exports of oil to North Korea and imports of minerals from the North.

Wang and Kerry also discussed territorial disputes in the South China Sea. But there was no discussion of any agreement on steps to reduce tension in the sea. China and others in Asia have competing claims to islands in the waterway. They include Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan.

China was the last stop during Kerrys three-nation trip to Asia. Other stops included Laos and Cambodia, where human rights and trade issues were discussed.

Im Jim Dresbach.

VOAs Pam Dockins and Brian Padden reported on this story. Youmi Kim in Seoul also provided information for this report. Jim Dresbach adapted the story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

peninsula  n. a piece of land that is almost completely surrounded by water and is connected to a larger land area

penalties  n. punishments for violating a rule or law

sanction  n. an order that is given to force a country to obey international laws by limiting or stopping trade with that country

specific  adj. exact or detailed


U.S. President Barack Obama has called for immediate development of tests, vaccines and treatments for the Zika virus.

The Zika virus has infected people in more than 20 countries.

Spread of zika virus

Just this week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that two people have tested positive for the virus in the states of Arkansas and Virginia. Health officials said that both became infected recently after traveling to countries where Zika virus transmission is ongoing.

Health official also reported that a baby recently born in Hawaii was infected with the virus in the mothers womb. The mother had emigrated from Brazil early in her pregnancy.

In Puerto Rico, health officials are reporting 18 cases of the virus, according to Reuters. The virus was first reported in the U.S. territory last December.

In Europe, a hospital said a Danish tourist who had traveled to South and Central America has tested positive for Zika virus. This came after British health officials confirmed five cases of returning travelers infected with the virus.

Where did the virus come from?

The CDC said that Brazil reported its first case of Zika virus in May 2015. Since then, the virus has spread by mosquitos and has caused infections in many Brazilian states and other countries in Latin America.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said the Zika virus could be linked to 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly in Brazil. Microcephaly is when babies are born with extremely small heads. It causes severe brain damage.

After the outbreak, Brazilian officials sent 200,000 troops to homes to deliver information on how to get rid of mosquitos. In areas that will be used for upcoming carnival celebrations and this year's Olympics, city workers sprayed chemicals to kill mosquitoes and their eggs.

Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Jamaica have recommended women postpone getting pregnant. Womens health advocates, however, said that advice was not appropriate.

Monica Roa is vice president of strategy for Women's Link Worldwide, a women's rights group. She said it is incredibly naive for a government to ask women to postpone getting pregnant in a context such as Colombia where more than 50 percent of pregnancies are unplanned and across the region where sexual violence is prevalent."

WHO Director General Margaret Chan said Zika might spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile.

"The explosive spread of Zika virus to new geographical areas, with little population immunity, is another cause for concern, especially given the possible link between infection during pregnancy and babies born with small heads."

Symptoms and advice on the virus

Symptoms for Zika include mild fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes. These symptoms can last from a few days to about a week.

However, an estimated 80 percent of people infected with the virus have no symptoms at all. This makes it difficult for pregnant women to know whether they have been infected. Researchers and health experts warn that there are many unknowns about the Zika virus.

The World Health Organization said there are two effective ways to stop the virus from spreading:

reduce the areas where mosquitos breed

and protect people from getting bit by mosquitoes by using insect repellants, nets, screens and clothing that covers as much of the body as possible.

The CDC suggests that pregnant women avoid traveling to 14 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Latin America affected by the virus. These areas include Puerto Rico, Martinique, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Brazil, Colombia, French Guyana, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela and Mexico.

The agency also warns that women who have recently traveled to these places during their pregnancy be examined and monitored for the virus.

Im Anna Matteo.

Anna Matteo adapted this story from VOA News reports. Hai Do was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

postpone to put off to a later time

repellant  n. serving or tending to drive away or ward off often used in combination <a mosquito-repellent spray>

naive  adj. deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgment

prevalent  adj. common or widespread


Moscow New Year 2016

Children's World store in

It was during the war Bulgaria against the Ottoman Empire.

For my friend Peter.Nikolskaya streetNikolskaya street againThe Bolshoi TheatreLubyanka Square. As you can see - no snow. Snow falls later.Children's World storeMonument grenadier, Heroes of Plevna.The chapel was opened in 1887 at the tenth anniversary of the Battle of Plevna.The author was the sculptor Sherwood. The funds for the construction of the chapel were assembled grenadiers that participated in the battle for the liberation of Pleven, in honor of their fallen comrades. Every year, in a solemn ceremony held in the chapel service for the Russian grenadiers who fell in battle at Plevna.
By Paul Hammel

World-Herald Bureau

LINCOLN  State Sen. Bob Hilkemann of Omaha knows the pain felt by families when a slaying goes unsolved.

Eighteen years ago, a second cousin of Hilkemanns was killed in La Jolla, California. It took several years before an arrest was made.

The senator introduced a bill last week that he thinks would help speed arrests in dozens of criminal investigations and help resolve long-unsolved cases, like that of his cousin.

Under Legislative Bill 1054, anyone arrested on suspicion of certain felony crimes in Nebraska would be required to submit a DNA sample that could be compared with evidence in other crimes.

In Nebraska, such DNA samples

are required only after a person is convicted. Iowa has a similar law.

Hilkemann said 28 states have laws requiring that DNA collection be done earlier, upon an arrest. That list includes four neighboring states: Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and South Dakota.

It would help solve a lot of cold cases, the senator said. We do fingerprints on all of (those arrested). Why dont we do something thats even more effective.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha said he cannot support the bill, saying it would give police unreasonable powers to arrest people, just to get their DNA.

Theres a proper way this should be done in a democracy, and this is not it, Chambers said.

He cited, as an example of abuse, a dragnet conducted by Omaha police in 2004 in which several black men, including some who worked for the Omaha Public Power District, were asked to voluntarily give DNA samples as part of an investigation into a series of rapes. Some were threatened if they didnt comply.

Chambers and others maintained in 2004 that there was not a reasonable suspicion that those asked for DNA samples were suspects. Some of the men said the only reason they were targeted was that they were black. No arrest has been made in those cases.

Hilkemann, though, said that his bill, drafted with the help of the Nebraska Attorney Generals Office, is on solid legal footing.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Maryland law that allowed a forensic DNA sample to be taken after a person was arrested on suspicion of a violent felony. The court ruled that taking the DNA sample does not violate the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Justices in the majority compared it with taking fingerprints or snapping a mug shot after an arrest.

But more recently, a voter-approved California DNA law has run into legal difficulties. A state appeals court ruled that it was unconstitutional, though the California Supreme Court recently said it will soon hear an appeal of that ruling.

The California law is broader than the Maryland statute affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In California, those arrested for any felony crime must give a DNA sample. In Maryland, as in the Nebraska proposal, it applies to a shorter list of crimes.

In Maryland, if the felony charges are dropped or do not result in a conviction, a persons DNA is automatically purged from the law enforcement database. Under Californias law, as in Hilkemanns proposal, a person must apply to get the DNA expunged.

A representative of the ACLU of Nebraska said he understands the senators motivations for the bill but said the civil rights organization is worried about requiring a DNA sample before someone is convicted or even charged with a crime.

We are concerned about the slippery slope of government collecting more and more information from its citizens in different ways, said Spike Eickholt of the ACLU.

The push for an arrestee DNA law in Nebraska is backed by a national group, DNA Saves, that provided Hilkemann with literature and a video about the measures benefits.

On one video, John Walsh, of Americas Most Wanted fame, is quoted as saying that fingerprints are not always found at a crime scene and that an expanded DNA law would fully utilize a more accurate technology.

Under LB 1054, which is co-sponsored by Omaha Sen. Bob Krist, DNA samples would be required of those arrested on suspicion of 17 violent felonies, as well as burglary and robbery.

The bill provides that a person who is arrested but not convicted could request to have his DNA expunged from the states database. Hilkemann said he chose that approach to make it easier for the states crime lab to manage its DNA files.

Nebraska could get help financing the expansion of its DNA collection efforts, the senator said. The federal Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act provides grants for states to expand their programs. The act was named after a 22-year-old New Mexico woman who was raped and strangled in 2003. A suspect was arrested three years later and convicted.

Hilkemann said the case could have been solved much earlier if DNA had been taken from the killer when he was arrested in an unrelated crime three months after the slaying.

It also would have saved thousands of dollars in investigative expenses if an arrest had been made earlier, he said.

Such tests could prevent other crimes, Hilkemann said. DNA Saves, in its literature, states that a case study of 20 criminal offenders identified 170 crimes that could have been prevented by doing DNA tests at the time of their arrests.

The senator said an expanded DNA database also could help more quickly clear someone who was wrongly arrested or convicted of a crime, by identifying the real perpetrator.

All 50 states require that DNA samples be collected from felons. Nebraska is part of the national Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, in which states collect and share DNA results.

Hilkemann said he has other reasons to support his DNA proposal besides the slaying of his cousin, David Stevens. (He was found shot to death in his torched car in California in 1998; in 2001, an auto mechanic was arrested after his girlfriend went to police. Both were eventually convicted of murder.)

Expanding the collection of DNA, the senator said, will not only solve more crimes, but will better utilize the best crime-fighting technology.

It helps law enforcement move into the 21st century, the senator said. It will give them one more tool to make Nebraska safer.
There are a handful of companies in the US offering super-fast gigabit internet service, and most are using fiber-optic cables to do it. But a new startup wants to deliver the same speeds using wireless technology.

Starry is a new company from the founder of the now-defunct TV-over-the-internet service Aereo, and the companys plan is to use millimeter wave band active phased array technology to transmit super-fast data. but Starry officials arent really providing a lot of details about how the technology works at this point.

What we do know is that Starry plans to launch a beta test in Boston this summer, with additional cities coming online later in the year.

Starry hasnt said which cities are next, but Varietys Janko Roettgers did a little digging recently and figured out what Starry was up to almost a week ahead of the official announcement. He notes that Starry has submitted applications to test its service in 15 markets including Boston and New York (where the company is based) and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, among others.

Theres no word on how much Starry service will cost, either during the beta or if/when Starry exits beta.

While Starry wont be ready to offer internet service until this summer, the company does plan to launch its first product ahead of that: a $350 WiFi router called the Starry Station.

Its basically a funny looking 802.11ac WiFi router that has a 3.8 inch touchscreen display which can show details about your network including speed, connected devices, and more. The router also supports the upcoming 802.15 standard.

Note that the router is not the same device youll actually use to connect to the Starry network. Thats a separate access point that will probably be located outside your home in order to receive wireless signals from Starry and then youd connect the Starry Station (or possibly a different router, if its supported) to that device to blanket your home with internet access.
After spinning off from Sony, VAIO began selling premium laptops and tablets first in Japan, and then the US. Now the company is getting ready to launch a few new models with premium specs and premium price tags.

The VAIO S13, VAIO S15, and new VAIO Z laptops should be available starting in February.

VAIO Z series

The most impressive of the bunch is probably the VAIO Z Flip, a 13.3 inch notebook with a 2560 x 1440 pixel touchscreen display that can flip around so that you can hold the computer like a tablet. The computer also has an active digitizer with support for pressure-sensitive pen input.

VAIO says the convertible notebook features 8GB to 16GB of RAM, 256GB of solid state storage, and the PC measures less than 0.66 inches thick and weighs about 3 pounds.

The company will also offer a non-touch VAZIO Z notebook that weighs 2.6 pounds, has a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, at least 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a Core i5-6267U processor. This model should get longer battery life.

Both VAIO Z laptops will feature Intel Skylake chips, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, two USB 3.0 ports, and SDXC card readers.

The Vaio Z Flip is expected to be available in the US in February for $1800 and up, while the non-touch version of the laptop should sell for $1500 and up.

VAIO S series

The VAIO S13 and VAIO S15 laptops, meanwhile, are more affordable systems with less sleek designs theyre still not exactly cheap though. US prices are expected to start at $1100.

The 13.3 inch model measures about 0.7 inches thick and weighs about 2.3 pounds, and features an Intel Skylake processors, at least 4GB of RAM, 128GB of solid state storage, full HD displays, three USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac WiFI, Bluetooth 4.1, and SDXC card slots.

VAIOs 15 inch model measures about an inch thick and weighs about 5.5 pounds, but it has beefier specs including 8GB of RAM, 1TB of solid state storage, and HDMI and VGA ports.

via PC Watch (1) (2) VAIO, and Engadget
Many of Bernie Sanders supporters are quite vile and rude if you're supporting Hillary Clinton or try to engage them in a civil conversation of the differences. I have been called every name in the book. It has bothered me so much that it is starting to sour me on Bernie Sanders himself, if he should become the nominee. With Bernie going to run a positive campaign, do you think it is his responsibility to try tapped them down a bit. If it was one or two, it would be different. But its not its an ungodly amount of them. Jonathan Capehart even address this last night in an article. What do you think?
Hours after lyricist Prasoon Joshi criticized Sunny Leone's past profession - porn star, the actress said she will have too google Joshi's name to figure out who he is before she comments on what he said.

I dont know who Prasoon Joshi is. I will google him and then I will comment, Leone said while on a visit to Lawman's store in Mumbai, reports The Indian Express. Tweets on the Leone's latest quote are doing the rounds ahead of sex comedy Mastizaade's release on 29 January.

Before Sunny Leone forayed into Bollywood, she was popular as an Indo-Canadian porn star.

"I don't support Sunny Leone's past profession and I don't even want the youth to get inspired by that," Joshi said.

"I would like to say that you can have a comment on someones professional choice. Because it is not necessary that every profession has to be a good one and if it is not a good profession, it should be criticised. I would like to say this. Sometimes we start praising a profession to the skies. It is important that the profession which is connected to our lives should do great work for the society. It should do something positive for the society." he added.

Joshi's comments came after Aamir Khan told a media person during the event that he would love to work with her. "I hope she wants to work with me," Khan joked.

Earlier last week, Bhupendra Chaubey had asked Leone if Aamir Khan would work with her. She had said, "Probably not." To which Aamir had tweeted at her saying he would love to work with her.

Chaubey's interview, where he had repeatedly interrogated Leone about her 'porn' past, had faced major backlash on social media.

During the interview, Chaubey asked Sunny Leone if Aamir would work with her and attempted to answer that himself with a negative. Leone said 'probably not' and soon enough, Aamir Khan came out in Sunny Leone's support and expressed a desire to work with her in near future.

The 34-year-old Indo-Canadian actress, who is an ardent fan of the 'PK' star, said Aamir's tweet about her is a great gesture. "I can't express in words how happy I am. It was a very sweet and amazing gesture by him because as actors we all live in a bubble. He took his phone out and expressed his opinion... He supported me and it's a great feeling," Sunny told PTI.

"I think anybody in the entire world would like to work with an actor like him. He is someone for whom I have immense respect. Regardless of what happens in the future, I will always be Aamir's fan. I have always said that I am a fan of Aamir and I always watch his movies," she said. The actress was in the capital to promote her upcoming adult comedy Mastizaade, in which she is donning a double role.

The Jism 2 actress feels it's tough to make people laugh. "It's probably one of the toughest jobs because everybody is expecting to laugh when they sit on their seats with their popcorn. There is definitely an expectation, which is already set in people's minds. Besides me, Vir (Das) and Tusshar (Kapoor), our supporting cast is very funny and those are the people who elevate the lead actors' performances." Directed by Milap Zaveri, the film hits theaters on 29 January.
New Delhi: Foreign institutional investors have pulled out funds worth USD 7 billion from Asian equities in January with India witnessing outflows of USD 1.64 billion, says an HSBC report.

"Foreign investor sentiment has dipped sharply, with FIIs withdrawing over USD 7 billion of funds so far from Asian equities in 2016 (up to January 24)," the report said adding "this is the highest fund outflow recorded in January since the 2008 global financial crisis".

FIIs have been net sellers across the Asian markets, with Korea and Taiwan witnessing the largest outflow at USD 2.4 billion each, as per the report titled "The Flying Dutchman". India witnessed a net outflow of USD 1.64 billion, while the Philippines, the smallest market in the region, saw the

least outflow of USD 97 million.

"The start to the New Year has been rather challenging for the Asian equities. Lacklustre macro numbers and RMB volatility accompanied by a further dip in oil prices have increased uncertainty in the equity markets," the report noted.

Meanwhile, mutual funds have also seen withdrawals. The EPFR Global tracked funds withdrew USD 1.2 billion from Asia ex-Japan equities in the last 4 weeks (ending January 20, 2016).

Taiwan and India are the only two markets where mutual funds have an overweight position, while they cut down their holdings in Chinese equities to a five-year low. Global funds, meanwhile, increased their exposure in China, which is now the only market in the region where they are overweight. Global funds are neutral on India and Taiwan.

The global brokerage firm is 'overweight' on Singapore, the Philippines, and China; and 'underweight' on India, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

PTI
Veteran industrialist Ratan Tatas comments on government dictating people what to do or what they shouldnt, during a chat with students in a Chennai-college, was almost instantly linked with the intolerance debate that has dominated the Indian polity in the last few months.

Speaking to students of SRM University at Kattankulathur, Chennai, Tata, currently the chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, said if India has to shine now and in future, people must have the freedom to decide. While governments can be in the business of monitoring, they should have no role in telling people what to do," Tata said. It is indeed much easier to link Tatas statement to intolerance  an often used word in Parliaments washed out winter session.

But, in a separate context the statement also reminds one of the promise Narendra Modi made to a group of US investors in October 2014, a few months after he took over oath as the Prime Minister with a clear majority over the Congress party-led opposition.

It is not the government's business to run a business, Modi had told a group of 300 investors at the US-India business council. "Our job is that of a facilitator to create new opportunities," Modi said.

Exactly 20 months later (Modi took oath on 26 May 2014), if one looks at this promise in the context of the much-needed privatisation agenda, Modis words have hardly been translated into meaningful action. Even today, the government is very much in the business of running business. It continues to be the owner of 277 central public sector entities, including 27 public sector banks, many of which are loss making companies draining the exchequer. There are no signs from the government yet that shows its intent to gradually exit its holdings in state-run enterprises.

In 2014, an RBI-committee under former Axis Bank chairman PJ Nayak had recommended that the government should move towards privatization of state-run banks by cutting stake below 51 percent and, thus, letting these entities operate as private entities.

The governments interference in the running of PSUs (or in simple words telling them what to do and what not) is cited by experts as one of the major reasons for their poor performance since they are obliged to follow ministry diktats first before taking decisions in their own business interest.

Read the Tata comment again: While the governments can be in the business of monitoring, they should have no role in telling people what to do.

Fiscal pains

The governments reluctance to let off control of PSUs also have fiscal implications. As finance minister, Arun Jaitley is busy drafting the union budget for 2016-17, one of his biggest headaches is finding money to feed the capital-hungry public sector banks (PSBs), which are staring at least Rs 2.5 lakh crore capital requirement in the next three years to meet the Basel-III capital requirement norms, provisioning requirement on bad loans and the capital required to expand credit productive sectors.

The government has so far announced a capital infusion of Rs 70,000 crore to state-run banks with a direction to raise another Rs 1.1 lakh crore from the market. Raising funds from the market will be, as Firstpost has noted before, quite difficult for the badly managed, bad-loan-ridden public sector banks since there will be little investor interest in these companies. Most likely, these entities would likely return to the government with a begging bowl for money  something that would further constrain the exchequer.

Already, its a tight rope for Arun Jaitley to meet his word on fiscal consolidation on account of higher spending need to implement 7th pay commission in the 2016-17. With the disinvestment progressing at a slower pace (just Rs 12,648 crore raised as against a target of Rs 70,000 crore in 2015-16), the governments aim to lower the deficit target to 3.5 per cent in 2016-17 is already under threat. Jaitleys options to meet his fiscal consolidation path include aggressively cutting down public expenditure or to raise money, going for a sharp increase in taxes to make up for the deficit or selling stake in PSUs to raise funds.

Theoretically, if the government sells its holdings in the 113 listed state-run entities, it can raise Rs 14,50,000 crore at current market prices. If it goes to pare the holdings in state-run banks alone, the amount it can raise will be Rs 2,90,000 crore. This could free up lot of funds that can be put to use to stimulate growth.

The point here is not that the government should go blindly aggressive and sell the family silver at cheaper rates, but it should show willingness to expedite radical reforms by letting go of control wherever possible. There is no reason why the government continues with its 100 per cent in Air India and over 75 per cent stake in at least nine sarkari banks. It could also consider other heavyweights like Air India and BSNl.

The world didnt care much when the previous NDA government privatised host of PSUs such as Maruti, Balco, Hindustan Zinc, VSNL and IPCL. To begin with the government could sell with smaller private banks and Air India and act later on other entities based on this experience. It can still retain control of larger entities needed to push social welfare schemes and keep strategic interests.

The short point is Ratan Tatas advise is bang on in the backdrop of the governments indulgence in the running of several PSUs by virtue of its ownership in these companies. The government should stick to monitoring and should not tell people (and institutions) what to do.

(Kishor Kadam contributed to this story)
Mumbai: Mumbai's police force was late to Twitter, but it has made up for lost time since joining last month with a series of pun-filled tweets.

The term "Mumbai Police" was trending on the social media site in India on Wednesday after the commissioner's official account posted its latest warning, to mark anti-drugs awareness week.

"If you roll, we will weed you out," read the @CPMumbaiPolice tweet, which was quickly re-tweeted more than 1,000 times and won praise from Indian Twitter users.

If you roll, we will weed you out. #HoshMeinAao  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 27, 2016

"Mumbai police account is giving Twitter stand-up comedians a good run for their money," posted one user.

Another tweeted: "Ok, Mumbai Police just killed it. The rest of you, go home."

The Mumbai police commissioner's account has grown to have at least 22,000 followers since launching alongside the force's other official account, @MumbaiPolice, on 27 December. The latter has more than 30,000 followers.

Wednesday's tweet wasn't the first by police in the western Indian city to have caught Indian netizens' imagination with its use of humour to get across a serious message.

"Your creepy comments on her photo will get you a long date with us," read a tweet from the commissioner warning against posting inappropriate or offensive comments online.

Your creepy comments on her photo will get you a long date with us. #CyberSafetyWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 19, 2016

"Giving out your personal details to strangers may land you in a 'web' of problems," was another post put out to promote their online security campaign.

Giving out your personal details to strangers may land you in a "web" of problems. #CyberSafetyIn140 @PlainJane_S  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 24, 2016

The force's traffic awareness week, also earlier this month, was marked with some puns as well, including a tweet which read: "Helmet or Hell-met. Choose Wisely."

Helmet or Hell-met. Choose Wisely #TrafficAwarenessWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 14, 2016

Deputy commissioner Dhananjay Kulkarni told AFP that the twin accounts were being run by Indian content marketing and digital media agency Trivone Digital Services.

"The tweets are approved by police first," he said.

AFP
The Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday the Congress' plea challenging the imposition of the President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh.

An apex court bench headed by Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar said that the matter would be heard at 2 pm.

Meanwhile The Hindu reports that Justice JS Khehar, one of the judges on the bench, noted that there were several defects in the Congress's plea including a shortfall of Rs 800 in the court fee paid to the Supreme Court Registry.

The report also quoted Khehar as saying, "they (Registry) have also objected to the font used.... what font have you used here..."

The fresh plea was mentioned for urgent hearing by senior advocates Fali S Nariman and Kapil Sibal.

The bench, meanwhile, asked the lawyer to remove the defects, pointed to by the apex court registry, as early as possible.

The petition has been filed by the state Congress Chief whip Rajesh Tacho.

In the petition, there has been a challenge to the report and the recommendation of the Union Cabinet for promulgation of President's Rule in the state.

The fresh plea assumes significance as the five-judge bench is examining constitutional provisions on the scope of discretionary powers of the Governor, amid continuing month- long impasse over Nabam Tuki-led Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh.

In an earlier plea filed by Nabam Rebia, who was allegedly removed from the post of Speaker by rebel Congress and BJP MLAs in an assembly session held at a community hall in Itanagar on December 16, has listed out legal questions, including the Governor's power to convene the assembly session without the aid and advice of the government for adjudication by the apex court.

It was also alleged that the Governor had advanced the assembly sitting from January 14 to December 16 without the aid and advice of the Chief Minister and his council of ministers.

Congress, which has 47 MLAs seats in the 60-member assembly, suffered a jolt when 21 of them rebelled. Eleven BJP MLAs backed the rebels in the bid to upstage the Nabam Tuki government. Later, 14 rebel Congress MLAs were disqualified.

The Governor then called assembly session on December 16 in which Deputy Speaker revoked disqualification of 14 rebel Congress MLAs and removed Rebia from the post of Speaker. This sitting was held in a community hall in Itanagar.

Various decisions of the Governor and the Deputy Speaker were challenged by Rebia in Gauhati High Court which passed an interim order keeping in abeyance these decisions till February one.

With inputs from PTI
Srinagar: The trend of snatching and stealing of service rifles by potential militants has landed security forces in Kashmir in a spot of bother. There has been a steep rise in such incidents in the recent years and most of the stolen weapons are ending up in the hands of Hizbul Mujahideen militants.

A wary J&K Police has now asked its personnel not to retain their weapons while going on leave and instead deposit them in the post or nearest police station, according to a PTI report.

On 24 December, deputy superintendent of police Irshad Ahmed Rather was on duty to check security arrangements for an ongoing Eid-e-Milad procession in Bijbehra town of south Kashmir when militants fired at him. Rather and Tanveer Ahmad, the constable accompanying him, received multiple bullet injuries.

Twenty-four days after the incident, Shakoor Ahmad, a constable and Personal Security Officer (PSO) of Rather, went missing with four service rifles and two of his friends. Although the friends - Gazi Ahmad Dar and Aaqib Ahmad Dar - were arrested, he still remains at large and has possibly joined militancy.

He was roaming in the Shopian area with these weapons before we arrested his two accomplices and he has obviously joined militancy. But he would be caught soon, DIG South Kashmir Nitish Kumar told Firstpost in Anantnag. The police are looking at the possibility that the attack on the DSP might have been carried out by militants in collaboration with missing Ahmad.

The first incident of a policemen decamping with a service rifle in Kashmir happened when Naseer Ahmad Pandit, a constable posted at the residence of Altaf Bukhari, a minister in the PDP-BJP coalition government, decamped with his service rifle in March 2015. He later joined Hizbul Mujahideen and was later seen in a picture with militant commander Burhan Wani. The picture went viral on social media.

Two incidents of policemen decamping with service rifles have been reported so far and there have been some where they have been attacked for weapons. A pattern is visible. Those who wanted to join militancy in recent years have first snatched weapons from security forces and then become part of mainly Hizbul Mujahideen group.

In one instance, we arrested a boy hours before he was supposed to be approached by militants on the outskirts of Srinagar. He had stolen a pistol and was waiting for militants to approach him, according to a police officer.

A daring attempt was carried out in September last year when unidentified gunmen decamped with a service rifle of a policeman posted outside the district court complex in Kulgam district in south Kashmir. The pistol borne attackers sprayed chilli powder into the policemens eyes before snatching his rifle.

Unlike in the past, when after becoming a militant there was a chance of returning to normal life, security agencies say, now militants exhaust all the options of leading a normal life.

It is a loyalty test. The new Kashmiri militants wont allow anyone to be part of their groups until he either snatches a weapon or kills policemen, and then all the doors of leading to normal life gets closed, a police official said.

According to sources in Jammu and Kashmir Police, all those who have snatched weapons or stolen in recent years have ended up with militant group Hizbul Mujahideen, whose cadre largely comprises local Kashmiri militants led by the commander of the group Burhan Wani.

Kumar, the DIG, said there were two reasons behind the number of weapon-snatching incidents going up. One is they (militants) dont have weapons and they cant buy them in Kashmir because the government here doesnt make weapons. Second is the strict guard at the Line of Control (LoC), he said.

Infiltration from across the LoC has witnessed a dramatic decline in recent years. One of the reasons attributed to this is strengthening of the counter infiltration grid along the LoC to prevent militants from sneaking in.

Lt Gen SK Dua, General Officer Commanding (GoC) of 15 Corps, told Firstpost recently that although militants are eager to cross the LoC and are waiting at their launching pads there had been almost zero infiltration in the Valley in the year 2015.

The Jammu and Kashmir Police refuses to make public the number of incidents in recent years in which weapons were snatched, but acknowledges it as a challenge.

In the past two years, militants have resorted to more than half a dozen hit and run attacks besides injuring the forces and snatching their rifles. This is worrisome, a police official in south Kashmir said.

It is a disturbing new reality, but most of the times attempts made to snatch weapons have been foiled. Efforts have been made to to ensure this doesnt get repeated, Director General of police, K Rajendra had told Firstpost last year, after a weapon-snatching incident.

The new Kashmiri militants, who have joined the different groups in recent years, have largely survived without much arms and ammunition, according to experts, something, which was not the case in early nineties when crossing the LoC was easy and manageable.
By Chaitanya Mallapur/Indiaspend.com

There are four years left for the government target of ensuring all Indians use toilets, but in urban India alone, no more than 30% of sewage generated by 377 million people flows through treatment plants.

The rest is randomly dumped in rivers, seas, lakes and wells, polluting three-fourths of the countrys water bodies, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of various data sources.

An estimated 62,000 million litres per day (MLD) sewage is generated in urban areas, while the treatment capacity across India is only 23,277 MLD, or 37% of sewage generated, according to data released by the government in December 2015.

Further parsing of this data reveals that of 816 municipal sewage treatment plants (STPs) listed across India, 522 work. So, of 62,000 MLD, the listed capacity is 23,277 MLD but no more than 18,883 MLD of sewage is actually treated.

That means 70% of sewage generated in urban India is not treated.

While 79 STPs dont work, 145 are under construction and 70 are proposed, according to the Central Pollution Control Boards (CPCB) Inventorization Of Sewage Treatment Plants report.

No improvement over the years; towns, cities pollute their own water

Indias towns and cities contaminate their own water, with no improvement over the years.

Sewage generation in India from class-I cities (with a population more than 100,000) and class-II towns (population 50,000100,000) is estimated at 38,255 MLD, of which only 11,787 MLD (30%) is treated, according to the Faecal Sludge Management report by Water Aid, a safe-water and sanitation advocacy, quoting a 2009 CPCB report.

The untreated sewage is dumped directly into water bodies, polluting three-fourth of Indias surface water resources, the FSM report said. Up to 80% of water bodies could be polluted, the report said.

Operation and maintenance of existing treatment capacity is below par, with 39% plants not conforming to environmental rules for discharge into streams, the CPCBs 2009 report said.

An estimated 75% to 80% of water pollution is from domestic sewage, discharged untreated into local water bodies.

A general, growing shortage of (working) sewage-treatment plants

Of the 522 working STPs across India, maximum are in the northern state of Punjab, which has 86. But no more than 38 work.

Uttar Pradesh has the most working STPs, 62, followed by Maharashtra (60) and Karnataka (44).

About 85 million in urban India lack adequate sanitationmore than Germanys population

About 17 million urban households lack adequate sanitation facilities in India, with 14.7 million households having no toilets, the FSM report said.

If you consider five people per family, that means about 85 million peopleor more than the population of Germanyare without adequate sanitation in urban India.

In terms of rural households, only 48.4% (87.9 million) have toilet facilities as on December 7, 2015, according to a reply in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.

Around five million (7.1%) urban households having pit latrines that have no slabs or are open pits, and about 900,000 toilets dispose off faeces directly into drains.

Only 32.7% of urban households that have sanitation facilities use toilets connected to an underground sewage network.

As many as 30 million urban households (38.2%), of the 79 million households with septic tanks, have no clear method for sewage disposal.

Open defecation remains a major challenge

About 12.6% of urban households defecate in the open. This number is higher for slums, with 18.9% of households defecating in the open.

Around 1.7% of households across India defecate in the open despite having toilets, the government informed the Lok Sabha in a reply last month, based on the National Sample Survey report 2012.

In Madhya Pradesh, around 22.5% urban households defecate in open spaces, followed by Tamil Nadu (16.2%), Uttar Pradesh (14.8%), Gujarat (8.7%), Maharashtra (7.7%) and Delhi (3%).

As many as 55% of rural households defecate in the open, according to data tabled in the Lok Sabha on May 7, 2015. Odisha tops list, with 86.6% of rural households defecating in the open. In Kerala, no more than 3.9% of households defecate in the open.

The global story: Open defecation has fallen by half over 25 years

The proportion of people practising open defecation globally has fallen almost by half, from 24% in 1990 to 13% in 2015.

About 68% of the worlds population had access to improved sanitation facilities, including flush toilets and covered latrines, in 2015, according to the World Health Organization(WHO).

However, nearly 2.4 billion people across the world lack basic sanitation facilities, such as toilets or latrines. Of these, 946 million defecate in the open, according to the WHO.

Will building toilets address the issue? The jury is out

The Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission, launched by the National Democratic Alliance government on October 2, 2014, aims to make India open-defecation-free by October 2, 2019.

The government plans to construct 2.5 million individual household toilets in urban areas by 2015-16, of which 882,905 were constructed upto December, 2015, according to latest dataavailable.

As many as 32,014 out of 100,000 community and public toilets have been built under the Swachh Bharat Mission. The rural sanitation programme, in its first year, saw the construction of 8.8 million toilets, against the target of 6 million.

(Indiaspend.org is a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit)
There is a sense of deja vu in the developments in Arunachal Pradesh. The story of toppling elected governments in states by a bunch of legislators subscribing to the principle of political mercenaries is not new.

Though the Congress has gone to the Supreme Court as the last resort to retain power in the state, it is unlikely to get relief when the matter is taken up today. There is every possibility that governor JP Rajkhowa will soon appoint a chief minister of his choice, duly endorsed by his political masters in Delhi, to run the state. And there is little doubt that the Raj Bhavan at Itanagar will become a palace of political intrigue where the governments direction will be set.

Given the past experience of such political coups engineered in states by the Centre, irrespective of political denomination, it can be safely assumed that the events at Itanagar will follow a familiar script.

In six short steps, this is the way the situation will unfold in the next few days:

1) Congress rebel MLAs and BJP legislators will soon throng the palace of intrigue to forge a coalition and project a chief minister.

2) Within less than a fortnight, Rajkhowa in consultation with the home ministry in Delhi, will appoint a chief minister who will be asked to prove majority on the floor of the House.

3) A session of the Vidhan Sabha will be called where Rajkhowa will exercise his constitutional power to send a message to the House and set the agenda.

4) Instead of moving the trust-vote by the new chief minister, the House will first take up the no-trust motion against the Speaker to remove the first obstacle before the new government.

5) The removal of the Speaker will evoke strong hostilities, but will set the stage for the trust-motion for the new government with the new Speaker.

6) The new Speaker will give temporary recognition to the break-away faction by citing precedents which define defection as a continuing process.

This script is so familiar and has been replayed so many times that it hardly evokes any indignation now. The Congress and the BJP have learnt the art of wantonly violating the spirit of the Constitution, while seemingly adhering to letter.

What happened in Arunachal Pradesh is nothing but a subversion of popular will reflected through an elected Assembly. The Congress had won the elections and got the mandate to rule the state. It is equally true that the Congress legislature party was vertically split after Chief Minister Nabam Tuki sacked his finance minister Kaiko Pul. The split rendered the Congress a minority with rebels openly siding with the BJP.

Political morality would have dictated that the Congress acknowledged its minority status in the House. Similarly, the BJP should have avoided the temptation to entice the rebels and topple the government through machinations, and not by the ballot. But such an expectation from either the BJP or the Congress will be quite like asking the devil to quote the scriptures.

There is no doubt that after the SC judgment on SR Bommai case that made imposition of presidents rule as justiciable, the exercise of Article 356 at random by the Centre become impossible.

It also has to be ratified mandatorily by both Houses of Parliament. Given the BJPs minority in the Rajya Sabha, the notification would not get the endorsement of the Rajya Sabha. But that formality is not required if the government is formed at Arunachal Pradesh.

That is why we will have a new government in Arunachal Pradesh by mauling the Constitution, sooner than later.
New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Road Minister Nitin Gadkari will meet tomorrow road developers bankers to sort out key issues to put back on track 20 stalled highway projects of worth Rs 20,000 crore.

The meeting assumes significance as the government after a series of meetings with bankers and developers had resolved issues pertaining to 58 projects but 20 projects worth over Rs 20,000 crore are still stuck.

Running out of patience for stalemate over these 20 projects, the government has warned non-serious developers and bankers of terminating these contracts.

According to the sources, there are 19 projects with a total cost of Rs 16,100 crore that have been stalled for various reasons. With the projects missing deadlines, cost has escalated to about Rs 21,000 crore.

The stuck projects belong to players like Larsen & Toubro, HCC, Gammon, Madhucon, Soma and Essel Ifra, among others, while the list of lenders includes top names like State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank and Bank of India.

A top official last month had said that the government was "reaching a stage of impatience" over the stalled projects.

"The concessionaires and bankers are not realising that we are reaching a stage of impatience, and people who are users of these roads are not going to be waiting any more," the then Road Transport and Highways Secretary Vijay Chhibber had said.

"If developers and bankers fail to mend their ways and initiate correctives to roll out projects by January-end, the government will start terminating contracts in PPP mode and repackage them," he had said before his retirement.

The government recently "offered a full package", which among other steps extends the concession period of projects where delays are not attributable to developers.

PTI
Sharing its borders with China and Myanmar, the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh has had never been subject of so much national attention barring those times when Beijing mischievously issues stapled visas to the people from the state seeking to visit the neighbouring country. Another issue that draws national attention towards this state is when students and job seekers from the state face either harassment or violence in places like Delhi or Bangalore.

The kind of nonpareil attention the unfolding political situation in Arunachal Pradesh is getting marks a new phenomena for the state. That could be taken as one healthy development out of an ugly saga of political intrigue. After all, the seven-sister states in the North-East have so far seen imposition of President's Rule or an extension of it for 27 times but it has never ever dominated political and public discourse earlier up to this level.

The Supreme Court's order on Wednesday seeking the governor's report in flat 15 minutes that suggested breakdown of constitutional machinery in the state and recommended imposition of President's Rule is interpreted differently by various political parties. After hearing Congress' petition the apex court issued notices to the Centre seeking its response by Friday before fixing coming Monday as the day of next hearing. The Congress will file fresh petition challenging the President's Rule. Today's hearing was on a related constitutional matter emanating due to conflict between the stance of the state Governor on the one side and Assembly Speaker and chief minister on the other.

The issue here is three-fold -- legality and constitutionality, morality and of political dynamics. The proceedings in the apex court and the view it takes will of course be on the legality and constitutionality but it will have a huge bearing on polity and on the question of morality and ethics for BJP and the Congress.

The Centre is convinced that the governor had satisfied himself that there was indeed a breakdown of constitutional machinery in the state. The state did not see an Assembly session within six months of the last one held as is mandated by the provisions of the Constitution. Then there was the lockdown of the state Assembly following which the Winter Session could not be held. A no-confidence resolution against the Speaker that was to be held as per the directive of the Governor also could not be conducted. The governor had reportedly without consulting the chief minister or his council of ministers advanced the date of session from 14 January to 16 December and even sought the removal of the Speaker of the Assembly as the first item on the agenda.

Nevertheless, based on the report of the governor, the Union cabinet on 25 January decided that the circumstances were such in the state that required President's Rule to be imposed. President Pranab Mukherjee taking his own time in deliberating over the issue including seeking clarification from the Centre and seeking legal opinions from leading constitutional experts finally gave his assent to the decision of the Union cabinet.

The Congress obviously thinks otherwise and the matter is now before the Supreme Court. In its press conferences Congress has chosen to blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the RSS for a vertical split in its own party and for allegedly using the governor's offices to settle political scores.

The Congress on its part however has a lot of explanation to do. The party is silent on what caused the vertical split in its legislature party in Arunachal Pradesh. The party neither called a meeting of its legislators nor it sought to prove its majority on the floor of the House when it was obvious that the Nabam Tuki-led government was reduced to a minority. The Congress went to the extent of disobeying gubernatorial orders on holding an Assembly session and blocked a no-confidence motion against the Speaker. It rather sought to blame the prime minister by terming it as a part of his intolerance politics.



Politically this issue becomes important because the Congress is using this as an opportunity to unite other opposition parties against the Modi government. JD(U) and AAP are already in its side. Notwithstanding the political factor, the BJP is trying to make it amply clear that it was only responding to a situation of "breakdown of constitutional machinery" in the state. It's clear that the BJP has a political motive as it is backing the Congress rebels. But does it actually have enough ground to dismiss the Tuki government is the key issue. The answer to this question will to an extent determine whether it will get support of other parties in getting the presidential proclamation ratified by the both Houses of Parliament in the Budget session.

Firstpost has learnt that after closely watching the Supreme Court's observations, the BJP will decide on its next move -- formation of an alternate government (as of now Congress rebels count 21, BJP 11 and 2 Independents in the 60-member state Assembly) or seek dissolution. That move will have to be done before the Supreme Court gives its final order. The courts are known to take their own time on pronouncing its judgment when the issue of constitutional validity of a decision is to be decided.

The BJP believes that the number of Congress rebels would swell in due course and an alternate government led by Congress rebels would be installed. In that case the Modi government would be able to avoid the trouble of managing numbers in Rajya Sabha for ratification of President's Rule. The Modi government has played a bold political gamble. It could even be a calculated risk. Senior party leaders are just hoping that this time around they don't have to suffer any ignominy.
Comic character Dilbert and poet Mirza Ghalib have nothing in common.

But the current finger-pointing and breakout of an epidemic of righteous indignation among political parties on the imposition of President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh remind us of what both of them once said and warned against.

Dilbert (BJP, please note): "Sometimes you are the pigeon and sometimes you are the statue."

Ghalib (Congress, please note): "Kahaan maikhane ka darwaaza Ghalib aur kahaan waiz, Par itna jaante hain ki kal woh jaata tha ki hum nikle."

The comic strip corporate character, in his trademark pragmatism, had pointed out that in the circle of life, the poop you drop on others, one day falls on your own head.

Article 356 in the Constitution gives the Centre the right to recommend President's Rule if the "the situation has arisen in which the government of the state cannot be carried on". But, it has almost always been used to sack a state government headed by the party in power in Delhi. The BJP is obviously forgetting that today's perpetrator can be tomorrow's victim.

Ghalib, India's great poet-cum-philosopher, had smirked at the hypocrisy of preachers, of their moral audacity of finding wrong in others what they themselves practice.

The Congress has accused the Centre of murdering democracy by imposing President's Rule in the northeastern state. "Bharatiya Janata Party wants its government everywhere. You can't impose President's Rule because people didn't favour you. We will fight in the court and also tell the people how the BJP misuses its power. It is very unfortunate and it is a murder of democracy," Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said.

Kharge should be reminded the Congress is the pioneer of the tradition of misusing Article 356 for dismissing state governments of rival parties.

In July 1959, when Jawaharlal Nehru dismissed the EMS Namboodiripad government in Kerala, in spite of the Communist CM having the support of the majority in the House, he started a tradition that has become a bane of Indian democracy. Later, during the 1970s and the Emergency, Indira Gandhi and the Janata government turned Indian democracy into a game of musical chairs by dismissing elected governments just to teach their rivals a lesson, or sneak into power through the backdoor.

The Sarkaria Commission, set up in 1983 to examine the Centre-state relationship, examined the issue in its 1988 report and pointed out that the use of Article 356 has been rising with the passage of time. "Whereas between 1950 and 1954, it was invoked only on three occasions, it was invoked on nine occasions between 1965 and 1969; it rose to 21 instances during the period 1975-1979 and to 18 during the period 1980-1987."

Democracy, in fact, became a relay-race of political farce between 1975 and 1980 when Indira dismissed several non-Congress governments and, in retaliation, the Janata government dismissed most of the Congress government after winning the 1977 election. In 1980, when Indira returned to power, she dismissed governments led by Opposition leaders.

The ugly game stopped under Rajiv Gandhi a bit, but only because the Congress emerged victorious in many states during the period. Then in 1992, the PV Narasimha Rao government sacked the BJP governments in four states in the wake of the Ram Mandir agitation.

The BJP got its comeuppance after 1996, when it first tasted power under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. By then, rampant misuse of Article 356 had been restrained by the Supreme Court verdict in the SR Bommai case that allowed President's Rule only under specific circumstances and after following strict guidelines. But the BJP set into motion Dilbert's principle with a series of undemocratic decisions.

The BJP's biggest misadventure was in Bihar, when it dismissed the Rabri Devi government in 1999, citing deterioration of law and order in the state. The Vajpayee government had to, however, revoke the decision because it lacked a majority in the Rajya Sabha to get the decision ratified by Parliament. (You can see the full list of instances of President's Rule here)

When powers of dismissing state governments were given to the Centre, several architects of our Constitution had warned against its misuse.

However, Dr BR Ambedkar silenced the sceptics by arguing that no provision of any Constitution is immune from abuse as such and that the mere possibility of abuse cannot be grounds for not incorporating it.

"In fact I share the sentiments expressed by my Hon'ble friend Mr Gupte yesterday that the proper thing we ought to expect is that such articles will never be called into operation and that they would remain a dead letter. If at all they are brought into operation, I hope the President, who is endowed with these powers, will take proper precautions before actually suspending the administration of the provinces... I hope the first thing he will do would be to issue a clear warning to a province that has erred, that things were not happening in the way in which they were intended to happen in the Constitution."

By proving Ambedkar wrong, politicians have proved that they learn from nobody.

Not even from Dilbert and Ghalib.
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OTTAWA/MONTREAL Canada confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that it plans to lift its sanctions on Tehran and said that if Airbus (AIR.PA) is allowed to sell to Iran, then its aircraft maker Bombardier Inc (BBDb.TO) should be allowed to export there as well.

"If Airbus is able to do it, why (will) Bombardier not be able to do it? In which way (is it) helping Canada, or the Iranian people, or Israel, or anyone, that Canada is hurting its own industry?" Dion said in an exchange with reporters.

Asked specifically if Bombardier would be allowed to do business with Iran as soon as sanctions are lifted, Dion said: "Legitimate business, certainly."

Iran announced plans at the weekend to buy more than 160 European planes, mainly from Airbus, and Dion said reluctance to lift sanctions on the part of Canada's Conservative opposition had helped Airbus and not Bombardier.

The United States, the European Union and other major nations have already lifted some of their own punitive measures.

"Canada will lift its sanctions but what Canada will maintain is our suspicion of a regime ... that must not return to (trying to obtain) nuclear weapons," Dion told the House of Commons moments before meeting journalists.

Dion also said Iran had a poor human rights record and was not a friend of Canadian allies such as Israel.

Dion said any lifting of sanctions would be done carefully in conjunction with allies, seeking to ensure nuclear and other military activity is prevented.

Bombardier spokeswoman Marianella de la Barrera called Dion's comments a positive step but said that the company was still respecting the Canadian sanctions.

"We're monitoring it very closely," she said. "Nothing official has been communicated to us."

She said sanctions had not prevented Bombardier from speaking with Iran about its aviation needs: "It doesn't preclude us from engaging in strategic discussions, which we are doing."

Montreal has the third-largest aerospace hub in terms of employment, following Toulouse and Seattle.

Suzanne Benoit, president of Aero Montreal, which represents the aerospace sector there, said it would be excellent news for the industry if the embargo is lifted.

"Right now we are not in a fair competition with Airbus because Airbus can sell to Iran."

Iran is looking to upgrade its aging fleet partly with aircraft with the same range and seats as Bombardier's 100- to 150-seat CSeries.

(Additional reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Sandra Maler and Bernard Orr)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
President Francois Hollande's visit to India resulted in the signing of 16 important Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) between the two nations covering a wide range of sectors like urban development, urban transport, water and waste treatment and solar energy.

But perhaps one of the most important development to emerge from the bilateral talks is the partnership to launch India's next Mars mission.

Impressed by Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro)'s landmark launch of the low-cost Mars orbiter Mangalyaan, France will join India to launch its next Mars mission, which is set to roll out in 2018.

"India's Mangalyaan is very impressive, a good example of Make in India and of low-cost space exploration," Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the French Space Agency CNES told NDTV.

So what next after the MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission)?

"After India's Mars orbiter, the next step has to be a lander. A lander on Mars is not easy, but it will be interesting to undertake," added Le Gall.

If the joint venture between India and France succeeds, it will be only the second rover on the surface of the Red Planet. The US' Curiosity Rover is the only successful Mars landing so far.

A joint statement issued in the wake of the summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande says, both leaders welcomed the announcement of collaboration through the participation of the CNES in future space and planetary exploration missions of the Isro," reports the Deccan Herald.

In 2014, India had scripted space history when it successfully placed its low-cost Mars spacecraft in orbit around the Red Planet on its very first attempt, breaking into an elite club of three nations. The space probe entered the Mars orbit on 24 September, almost a year after its launch, and made its home around the planet.

With inputs from PTI
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was in Italy to sign deals worth billions of dollars  a visit aimed at rekindling Iran's ties with Europe after many years of economic sanctions. Rouhani went to Italy on Monday and as a sign of respect for Islamic traditions, Italy covered up a few "racy" exhibits in the Capitoline Museum.

Italian Premier, Matteo Renzi who signed contracts worth $17 billion with Rouhani, according to The Local, was not particularly keen on ruining business over some nudity. Times of Israel reported that all female statues at the Museum's Esedra Hall were covered with four white panels.

Times of Israel also reported that the Italian administration was keen on not offending the Iranian delegation in anyway, so much so that Renzi and Rouhani's "podium was placed not in front of, but next to, the iconic equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, for fear that press and TV cameras would capture the horses genitalia behind the two world leaders."

Not everyone felt this way about the 'cover-up', The Guardian reported that Luca Squeri, legislator from Forza Italia party said, "Respect for other cultures cannot and must not mean negating our own...This isnt respect, its cancelling out differences and its a kind of surrender."

Italians did not take kindly to this and lashed out Twitter starting hashtags like #CiaoRouhani (Goodbye Rouhani) and #StatueNude.

... and deliberately posted pictures of statues and sculptures that showed genetalia.
Manila, Philippines: Philippine President Benigno Aquino III laid out a red-carpet welcome to Japan's emperor on Wednesday in a sign of the blossoming ties of the Asian nations territorially at odds with China while further moving past painful memories of Japan's World War II aggression.

Aquino and Emperor Akihito held talks at Manila's Malacanang presidential palace, where Philippine and Japanese flags were displayed side by side and Filipino troops fired cannons in a traditional salute. Aquino is to host a state banquet later for Akihito, whose visit marks the allies' 60 years of diplomatic relations.

The brief discussion by Aquino and Akihito touched on the emperor's previous visit to the Philippines in 1962, when he was still the crown prince, to upbeat developments like the robust sales of Japanese-made cars that have contributed to Manila's heavy traffic and the entry of Japanese retail store Uniqlo, presidential spokesman Herminio Coloma Jr.

Akihito, who is a revered symbol of Japanese unity but plays no political role in his country, has no plans to discuss contentious security issues such as the territorial disputes or demands for an apology by Filipino women who have accused Japanese forces of forcing them into wartime sex slavery, according to Hatsuhisa Takashima, the emperor's press secretary.

Relations between Japan and the Philippines have improved dramatically in the seven decades since the war, with Japan becoming a major trading partner and aid donor for the Philippines. Akihito's visit is seen as a strong sign of a further deepening of ties as the countries, both close American allies, confront China over long-contested maritime territories.

Japan's Self Defense forces have staged joint search and rescue exercises with the Philippine navy near the disputed South China Sea and are providing the Philippines with coast guard patrol boats.

Still, six elderly Filipino women led a protest outside the presidential palace on Wednesday and asked the Japanese government to formally apologize and compensate wartime sex slaves abused by Japanese forces in the last world war. They carried placards that read: "No to rising Japanese militarism."

Before leaving Tokyo for Manila on Tuesday, Akihito said his nation must remember the tremendous loss of life in the Philippines in World War II.

"Many Filipinos, Americans and Japanese lost their lives in the Philippines during the war," he said. "Especially in the battle in Manila, a tremendously large number of innocent Filipino civilians were victims. Upon making this visit, we need to bear this in mind at all times."

The 1945 battle for Manila between Japan and allied U.S. and Philippine forces leveled the capital city and left more than 100,000 dead, according to Philippine historians.

Akihito is to pay his respects at memorials for both Philippine and Japanese war dead during his visit, which ends on Saturday.

AP
Moscow: Russia intends to build relationships with western countries on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, and it will no longer yield to external pressure, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said here.

"Our western colleagues sometimes say that there will be no more 'business as usual' with Russia, and I am convinced that this is true," Lavrov said during his annual press conference broadcast online on Tuesday, Xinhua reported.

"(Such statements by western countries) imply attempts to impose on us agreements that take into account primarily the interests of the European Union or the US, and to persuade us that they would not damage our interests. This story is over," the minister said.

Lavrov said that Russia was implementing structural reforms and substituting imports in order not to be dependent on "zigzags" in western politics.

Meanwhile, Moscow remains open and ready to cooperation with the West, but only on the basis of equality and all other principles of international law, he said.

Mentioning Nato's eastward expansion close to the Russian border and the establishment of the US's global missile defence system in Europe and Northeast Asia, the Russia's top diplomat said such "unconstructive and dangerous" policies are "short-sighted and destabilising."

Attempts to reverse this situation have been met with poor results, he added.

The minister also noted that a unipolar ideology can no longer dominate international politics.

"The world is leaving behind the epoch of the total domination of the West and is now in a long transition period to a more stable system, where there will be no single pole of domination," Lavrov said, adding that the emergence of a truly multi-polar world may take a "long and painful period as old customs take a long time to fade away."

With regard to Russia's relations with China, he considered it a model of international cooperation.

"It is in fact the best in the history of relations between our countries and our peoples... There is no other country with which we have such an extensive network of cooperation mechanisms," Lavrov said, hailing the ties as "systemic" and having led to "impressive results".

IANS
San Diego: An initial inspection at Naval Medical Centre San Diego found no sign of a gunman or a shooting, the Navy said Tuesday.

Navy spokesman N Scott Sutherland said military police had checked Building 26 after a person reported hearing three shots in the basement earlier in the day.

School officials said a lockdown has ended and instruction has resumed at three schools near the medical center.

In addition, TV images showed uniformed Navy personnel walking outside the medical facility. Their hands were in the air and they were being patted down by base police as a precaution.

The Navy hospital previously said on its Facebook page that an active shooter was reported and people were told to run, hide or fight.

Earlier, an "active shooter" was reported at a San Diego military hospital Tuesday, the facility in southern California said, warning people inside to take cover or fight back.

"An active shooter has just been reported in building #26 at Naval Medical Centre San Diego. All occupants are advised to run, hide or fight," the facility posted on its official Facebook page.

The nearby Naval Base San Diego also posted information online about a possible shooting.

"If in immediate danger, hide or seek shelter in secure space," the base wrote on Facebook.

"Barricade the door and dial 911. Silence phones and other devices."

Local news station CBS 8 reported that police had confirmed shots were fired outside Building 26 on the hospital's third floor.

San Diego, the southernmost city on the California coast, has a sprawling military infrastructure and is a major port for the US Navy.

The hospital is located in Balboa Park, close to San Diego's famous zoo.

AP
By Seema Guha

The first NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee had great regard for France for refusing to hector India over its 1998 nuclear tests. Indias ties with France had warmed considerably since then, as successive governments recalled its sensitivity to Indias views at a time when others were out to slap punitive sanctions on Indian entities.

Soon after the nuclear tests, India had few friends in the world. The US, UK, Australia as well as China all lined up against India. Former US president Bill Clinton and Chinas then president Jiang Zemin issued a joint statement on the situation in South Asia after the India-Pakistan nuclear tests expressing their deep concern and promised to work together to prevent a nuclear race in South Asia.

India is well aware that at the European Union Summit which was held in England soon after the tests that year, it was France who vetoed the suggestion that the EU, as an entity, must pass sanctions against an unrepentant India. Instead the French suggested that each country that so wanted could slap sanctions on India at a bilateral level, but not as a collective EU move.

Soon afterwards, Brajesh Mishra  Vajyaees national security advisor  flew to Paris and wrapped up Indias first strategic partnership with France. This was the first strategic agreement with any country, signed in 1998. Since than there have been many more.

France disappointed many of its Western allies by its soft line.

The word was that France, always business-minded, was eager to get a part of Indias nuclear pie. After the Nuclear Suppliers Group granted a waiver to India in 2008 a framework civil nuclear agreement with France was signed and sealed. Jaitapur in Maharashtra was allotted to France. But there was little forward movement till the Narendra Modi government tweaked Indias tough nuclear liability laws and made doing business in India worthwhile for reactor companies.

In the joint statement released after talks between Modi and French President Francois Hollande on Monday, the two sides decided to fast-track the languishing Jaitapur nuclear project. They directed their industrial companies to complete technical and commercial negotiations for the plants by end of the year, and begin building by 2017. But even if all technical problems of cooperation are solved, it will be a slow tedious project to get the six nuclear plants going with a people's movement against the construction.

Much of this has to do with the public revulsion to nuclear power.

While in the early years, it was just a handful of environmental groups that took note of these issues, today awareness of the dangers has spread across the world. The radioactive leaks from Japans Fukushima nuclear plant following the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 has turned public opinion against nuclear power. Citizens are concerned about the fallout from nuclear plants. Even in France, which gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, the public mood has turned anti-nuclear. The reverberations of Fukushima have also been felt in India. The massive protests against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant being built by Russia is an indicator.

In Jaitapur, the villagers living in and around the proposed site have objected to the government's plans ever since the project was announced.

The Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) noted that the farmers and fisherfolk around Jaitapur will be protesting the government's decision to go ahead with the UPAs plans for the project. The CNDP said that the nuclear reactors imported from France 'threaten their lives, livelihoods and the local ecology'. Apart from seismic fault-lines beneath the proposed site, the CNDP also questions the design of Areva (the French company) that was questioned by Frances nuclear regulator. The regulator found weak spots in the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) that Areva was building. France will be providing the same EPR reactors to India.

According to the CNDP, the environment impact assessment report for Jaitapur was pushed through by the previous UPA government without looking into crucial aspects of radiological releases. While in Opposition, the BJP had demanded a fresh environmental report for the project, but has changed its mind since coming to power. The BJP has also gone much further than the Congress to placate the nuclear vendors unhappy with Indias Nuclear Liability laws. Modi has promised vendors that in case of a nuclear accident, India will provide an insurance pool to the nuclear suppliers from public money.

The cost of power per unit provided by each EPR reactor in India, according to the critics of the Jaitapur plant would be as much as Rs 15 to 20, and not Rs 6.50 as claimed by the Atomic Energy

Commission. "In the interests of common people of India, we oppose this unsafe, expensive, eco-destuctive and anti-people project," the CNDP said in a statement signed by activist Aruna Roy and Kumar Sundaram.

The government is likely to have a tough time convincing the local population.
Brooks says judge can't 'tell him what to do' on Day 13 of Christmas Parade trial
NSW universities are admitting students with ATARs as low as 30 into some of the state's top tertiary degrees, a Fairfax Media investigation into confidential university data has revealed.

Students with marks up to 40 points below the advertised course cut-off are being accepted in fields such as business, teaching and engineering, according to the 2016 admissions figures from the University of Sydney, UNSW, Macquarie University and Western Sydney University.

An ATAR [Australia Tertiary Admissions Rank] is awarded to more than 50,000 NSW high school students in December each year. Universities set an ATAR cut-off according to what they believe is the minimum academic standard required to complete a course, as well as supply and demand for the degree.
Less than six months since his "wedding of the year", Salim Mehajer and the Auburn City Council convened for potentially the final time.

The council met on Wednesday to respond to last week's announcement by Local Government Minister Paul Toole that he was giving the council 14 days to show why it should not be suspended.

Its planning decisions will come under a review by Sydney silk Richard Beasley.

An attempt by George Campbell, a member of the council's minority bloc - the "poor four", as Cr Mehajer has dubbed them - to welcome the minister's move and ask that innocent councillors be spared punishment was a non-starter.
T he Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) expects the number of tourists to increase slightly by one percent year-on-year, both during the upcoming CNY holidays and throughout the entire year.

The head of the MGTO, Helena de Senna Fernandes, said during the bureaus annual press conference at the Sheraton Hotel yesterday, even in the most optimistic view, a one-percent increase would be a good outcome for the local tourism industry. We want to maintain this number  30 million  but our focus will be to attract more overnight tourists and visitors from outside the Guangdong province.

The director recognized that the local economy was impacted by whirlwind forces, forcing the tourism sector to go through a period of adjustment. With the number of tourists registering a 2.6 percent drop in 2015 (totaling 30.7 million), the bureau expects to diversify the origins of visitors. As the numbers stand now, most tourists come from the Chinese mainland (20.4 million), with tourists from the Guangdong Province representing 44 percent of that figure. The number of international visitors dropped by 3.9 percent last year. Preliminary data also indicates that a total of 8.52 million tourists came to visit in tour groups last year, a year-on-year decline of 8 percent.

Demonstrating the consequences of the gaming slump, it was said during yesterdays event  which was attended by hundreds of representatives from the hospitality sector  that visitor expenditure between January and September totaled USD26.3 billion, a fall of 36.4 percent.

Presenting a review of the year, the director cited preliminary figures indicating that the average occupancy rate of hotel establishments in 2015 was 81 percent, a decline of 6 percent year-on-year. The average room rate for three to five-star hotels was USD187, down by 7.8 percent. There are currently 110 hotels in town (including 46 budget accommodation establishments) supplying 33,047 rooms in total. That offer will certainly increase this year, with three new hotels and seven hostels currently undergoing the licensing process. Senna Fernandes estimated that the new hotel facilities will feature 3,000 new rooms.

At this point, the hotels are targeting tourists from other countries. Previously, perhaps the mainland tourists would be sufficient, but given the 4 percent drop in that market, now we are led to think that, besides China, we should look further away. That was always a MGTO bet, but now we have the support from the [hotel] trade, she said.

1.3 million visitor inquiries

The local tourist information counters handled over 1.3 million visitor inquiries, material requests and suggestions last year, according to data revealed yesterday. Implementing measures to tackle illegal accommodation, an interdepartmental task force inspected over 1,100 apartments and sealed 153 of them. MGTO submitted an analytical report to the government on a proposed amendment to the Law on Prohibition of Providing Illegal Accommodation.
Western governments fearful of terror attacks and the potential threat posed by refugees are adopting counterproductive policies in the name of security, Human Rights Watch said in its world report yesterday.

HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said fear of being killed or starved drove millions of people to flee Syria and other conflict zones in 2015, while fear of what that influx of asylum-seekers would mean, particularly in Europe, led many governments to try to raise the gates to block refugees.

He chided Europe and the United States for allowing fear of terrorism  particularly since Novembers Paris attacks  to give rise to blatant Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees which alienates the very communities that could help in counterterrorism efforts.

As a counterterrorism measure, Islamophobia is the last thing you would want, he said.

The organization unveiled its annual report reviewing human rights practices around the world in Istanbul. Turkey is home to 2.2 million Syrian refugees and the main departure point for migrants headed to Europe.

Roth urged Turkey, which has been promised USD3 billion by the European Union in aid to prevent the outflow of migrants, to avoid measures such as turning refugees back to Syria or becoming party to any EU effort to deny the basic rights of people to flee persecution.

The estimated 1 million asylum seekers who reached Europe by sea in 2015 would represent only 0.20 percent of the European Union population if member countries shared in resettlement, he said.

Creating a safe and orderly way for refugees to make their way to Europe would reduce lives lost at sea while helping immigration officials to screen out security risks, Roth said.

Policy makers in the U.S. and Europe, the report said, are using the terrorist threat as an opportunity to expand law-enforcement powers, including mass surveillance.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have embarked on the largest crackdown on civil society in decades, according to the 659-page report reviewing more than 90 countries. It noted similar trends in Turkey, Kenya, Sudan, South Africa and Israel.

Human Rights Watch celebrated gains for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in 2015 

including the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ireland, Mexico, and the United States. Mozambique decriminalized homosexuality. AP
Chinas government has released and deported a Swedish man it accused of training and funding unlicensed lawyers in the country, after he made an extraordinary confession broadcast on state television.

Swedish Embassy spokesman Sebastian Magnusson confirmed yesterday that Peter Dahlin had left China, but was unable to provide further details.

Dahlin, co-founder of China Urgent Action Working Group, was featured in a 10-minute segment on state broadcaster CCTV last week in which he confessed to helping unlicensed lawyers take on cases against the government in clear violation of the law.

He was arrested Jan. 3 on his way to Beijings international airport, becoming the first foreigner to become entangled in a wide-ranging crackdown on the countrys increasingly assertive legal rights movement.

Another co-founder of the group, Michael Caster, who lives in the United States, tweeted that Dahlins girlfriend Pan Jinling had also been released from detention but remained in China.

China often releases people without trial on condition that they not speak publicly about their case. That often comes with the explicit or implied threat of being returned to detention or having trouble visited on family members or acquaintances.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Dahlin had been expelled on Monday after being suspected of financing criminal activity that jeopardized national security.

After questioning, [Dahlin] confessed to his suspected criminal activity, Hua told reporters at a daily briefing yesterday.

The Swedish Embassy issued a statement Friday in which it expressed deep concern over the cases against Dahlin and another detained Swedish national, Gui Minhai.

Many unanswered questions remain in both cases and we continue to request clarification of what our citizens are being accused of and the formal status of their arrests, the statement said.

In its broadcast, CCTV said Dahlin had established an activist organization in Hong Kong with the help of employees of the human rights-focused Fengrui Law Firm in Beijing, whose lawyers have been charged with subverting state power.

Dahlins group called the confession apparently forced and rejected accusations that the group manufactured or escalated conflicts inside China.

The group says it has been working since 2009 to help advance the rule of law by organizing training programs by lawyers for rights defenders focusing on land rights and administrative law. It also releases practical guides on the Chinese legal system.

Under President and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Chinas authoritarian government has aggressively pursued those attempting to use the legal system to assert basic rights, framing their advocacy as a challenge to state security. That campaign appears to have intensified over the past year.

Hundreds of lawyers have been rounded up and accused of stirring up hostility toward the government and manufacturing cases to enrich themselves.

Dahlins group was not legally permitted to operate in mainland China. CCTV said it accepted foreign funding and paid lawyers and petitioners within China, who provided negative information in order to tarnish the countrys image.

In the CCTV program, Dahlin said the people his group supported had gone on to do acts in clear violation of the law. He apologized for hurting the Chinese government and Chinese people.

The official Xinhua News Agency cited witnesses as saying Dahlin had been planted by Western anti-China forces to gather negative information about China and fan opposition to the ruling party.

Gui, the other detained Swede, is a Hong Kong-based publisher of sensitive books banned on the mainland who disappeared in October from his apartment in Pattaya, a Thai beach resort.

He also reappeared last week on CCTV, saying he returned to China to turn himself in for an old crime. His friends insist Gui was forcibly taken away.

Chinese authorities have since 2013 frequently used televised confessions of dissidents and activists on state TV to sway public opinion against them ahead of their trials. At least 18 such confessions have been made by high-profile activists, bloggers and journalists.

The confessions have brought calls from journalists and human rights organizations for sanctions against CCTV, which has been pushing hard to build its brand internationally to compete with CNN and the BBC.

By knowingly peddling lies and statements [that] were presumably obtained under duress, CCTV and Xinhua [News Agency] become mass propaganda weapons and cease de facto to be news media, Benjamin Ismail, the head of Paris-

based Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific desk said in a statement last week. Christopher Bodeen, Beijing, AP
Dozens of people who were arrested in Iran for crimes committed before they turned 18 remain at risk of the death penalty despite recent reforms, with many having already spent years on death row, according to a report by Amnesty International released yesterday.

The London-based group also found that Iran has executed at least 73 juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2015, including at least four last year.

Amnestys 110-page report intensifies pressure on Iran at a time when Tehran is working to rebuild relations with the West following last years landmark nuclear deal. The agreement came into force this month after Iran took steps to curb its nuclear program, leading to the lifting of crippling international sanctions.

Earlier this week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in Rome at the start of the first European trip by an Iranian president in almost two decades. The visit, which will also include stops at the Vatican and France, is expected to lead to a raft of business and trade deals.

Iran is one of the worlds largest users of the death penalty, ranking second behind China in 2014, according to the most recent figures from Amnesty. Most executions overall in Iran are carried out for drug smuggling. The country straddles a major narcotics trafficking route linking opium-producing fields in Afghanistan to Europe.

Amnestys researchers were able to identify the names and locations of 49 juvenile offenders who face the death penalty, though the group notes that actual numbers could be higher. A 2014 U.N. report put the number of juvenile offenders at risk of execution at more than 160.

The majority of the 73 juvenile offenders Amnesty identified who were put to death over the past decade were convicted of murder. Others were executed for crimes such as rape, drug-related crimes and national security offenses such as enmity against God.

The group noted that reforms introduced in 2013 give judges more discretion to take into account juvenile offenders mental maturity and potentially impose less harsh punishments, and that the Supreme Court has since said juvenile offenders facing execution could have their cases retried. Additional reforms introduced last year require that cases involving juveniles must be heard in special juvenile courts.

Still, Amnesty urged Iran to do more.

Despite some juvenile justice reforms, Iran continues to lag behind the rest of the world, maintaining laws that permit girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 to be sentenced to death, Amnesty said.

Iranian officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

In late October, the United Nations special investigator on the human rights situation in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, warned that executions in Iran have risen at an exponential rate since 2005 and could top 1,000 in 2015. He said Iran puts more people to death per capita than any other country, adding that the majority of executions do not conform to international laws banning the death penalty for juveniles and non-violent offenders.

The head of Irans Human Rights Council, Mohammad Javad Larijani, subsequently dismissed the U.N. report as a collection of baseless accusations. Adam Schreck, Dubai, AP
Irish virtuoso flutist Sir James Galway, nicknamed The Man With the Golden Flute, is set to perform at the Macau Cultural Center on Friday. The legendary musician told local journalists yesterday that his much anticipated recital will include classical and modern music, which has been extensively rehearsed.

Regarded as a passionate advocate for the making and teaching of music, Galway was asked about how he felt towards Chinese parents who push their children to learn instruments from an early age. He replied, I think any sort of learning anything is a good thing. I think the first approach of learning to play music is rather like reading a book.

The musician has toured the world extensively, having sold over 30 million albums. He often tours with his wife, the flutist Jeanne Galway, who will also play on Friday. Asked to reveal some of the concerts highlights, she said that they will include the pieces Galway is famous for.

The musician-turned-educator also administers the Galways online teaching classes, and he talked about his online music course, a platform that allows anybody to learn from famous musicians. The online series that we created has been a big success with older people who are just starting with musical instruments. It is enhancing the traditional teaching. We have one lady who started at the age of 70 and she just picked up the flute and has been learning online. Its never too late, Jeanne Galway said.

Sir James Galway was honoured twice by Queen Elizabeth II, first in 1979 and again in 2001, for his services to music. Staff reporter
Oliver Tong, associate director of retail properties at Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), said yesterday that next-generation retail in Macau should target the local market over the tourist sector. He added that it should strive to introduce value-adding services that differentiate between online and in-store shopping experiences.

Tong made the comments during a presentation at a business luncheon, in which he summarized the health of the retail market. The event was co-organized by the British Business Association of Macau and the American Chamber of Commerce in Macau, both of which are celebrating their tenth anniversaries this year.

Evaluating the state of the industry, the JLL associate director claimed that total retail sales in Macau had dropped 10 percent in the first three quarters of 2015, compared with sales in the same period of 2014.

Luxury goods fared predictably worse, plunging 25 percent, as the drop in consumer traffic, instigated by President Xis anti-

corruption drive on the mainland, continues to slash demand.

However, not all retailers are doing badly, Tong said. He echoed JLLs predictions from last years annual forecast, by saying that cosmetics, fast fashion and sportswear had all continued to perform strongly in 2015.

His solution to reversing the downward trend is to develop value-adding services to physical shopping locations that would help to differentiate stores from their online competitors. Tong posits that the retail sector needs to consider the question: What can they do offline that they cannot do online?

Services like free Wi-Fi, customer lockers and umbrella stands are all very popular in Hong Kong and other major shopping destinations, because they add convenience to the shopping experience.

The umbrella stands are an interesting example, he says. Customers initially pay a refundable deposit in return for use of the umbrella, but they must return to the shop or shopping mall to return the umbrella, making it more likely that they will spend more.

The research shows that these [services] make people come back more, spend more time in the shop, and spend more money, added Tong.

JLL also revealed that, according to data released by the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), only 40.1 percent of total retail spending in the MSAR comes from the approximately 30 million visitors to Macau each year. The majority surprisingly stems from a local population of just 636,000, as recorded at the end of 2014.

JLL added that the Macau retail sector is missing an opportunity by continuing to focus on tourism, and neglecting the local promotion of their products.

At a press conference at JLLs headquarters last week, the associate director told the Times that casino operators are in the early stages of targeting the local market, but that little progress has been made thus far.

Additionally, the untapped local opportunity is set to continue growing. According to DSEC, the medium income of Macau residents has consistently risen over the last 12 years. Today, local people are the wealthiest they have ever been in absolute terms, with the medium income reaching MOP15,000 as of the third quarter of 2015. Staff reporter

giant rubber duck on its way

On the sidelines of the BBAM business luncheon at the Mandarin Oriental yesterday, Oliver Tong of Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) publicized the planned arrival of a giant rubber duck in Macau. The giant inflatable duck will arrive in April and will be located near the Science Center in the NAPE area. The JLL associate director said that creative installations such as the giant duck can create a positive impact on nearby retailers, citing the effect the project has had in other locations it has visited. Tong added that the installation could help to drive locals and tourists to visit the area.
TWIN FALLS  Anyone can sample dozens of chocolate delicacies this week during a Death by Chocolate fundraiser.

The 11th annual event  organized by Rotary Club of Twin Falls  is Thursday, Jan. 28, at Canyon Crest Dining & Event Center. Proceeds from the popular event will benefit local charities and projects.

Its nice to be part of a fundraiser that so many people enjoy coming to, said event chairwoman Jill Skeem.

Local bakers are preparing a total of 25,000 samples of chocolate desserts. Theyll compete against each other in five categories: best chocolate, brownie, cake, candy and unique dessert.

Attendees will vote for their favorites. A panel of judges will also give out awards in each category, for the best high school that enters and for best of show.

In addition to lots of chocolate, the fundraiser will include a no-host bar, silent auction and raffle. Live music will be performed by the Jason Lugo Band. Coffee and water is free.

When Skeem lived on the East Coast, she started a Death by Chocolate fundraiser for her Newton, Mass., Rotary Club in 2002.

After moving to the Magic Valley in 2003, she joined the Rotary Club of Twin Falls the next year and gave the group 12 fundraising ideas.

Club members voted on Death by Chocolate as their favorite. Over the past decade, the fundraiser has grossed about $255,000 for local charities.

Rotary Club receives requests for funding, and a committee reviews and votes quarterly on the requests.

We tend to support the charities that have a project, Skeem said, and that arent seeking money to cover administrative costs.

Skeem said the club also prefers to spread out money to help many organizations. Even with a small donation  such as $500  groups are so touched by it, she said.

Last year, about 850 people attended Death by Chocolate. With so many people sampling chocolate and learning about local offerings, it provides a boost for local businesses, Skeem said.

A lot of vendors want to keep their chocolate creations a secret until the event and have been doing taste tests with their employees.

At Canyon Ridge High School, participating students typically give out dessert samples to teachers to decide which one is best. But this year, their teacher Barbara Morales chose the recipe  caramel brownies.

Students are preparing more than 1,000 brownies for attendees to sample. The preparation and baking process started earlier this week.

We pre-measure everything throughout the week, said Yahaira Tolentino, 17.

On Thursday, students will spend all day cooking and preparing for the event and will serve the finished product that night. Youre on your feet all day, Yahaira said.

You cant really prepare yourselves for whats to come, said classmate Isabel Lopez, 17, but added the event is so fun. Its the fourth year shell participate.

Yahaira enjoys talking with attendees and receiving compliments. Shes considering culinary arts as a career.

This year, Canyon Ridge students have an added challenge: They have to finish the brownies early so the caramel can set, Isabel said.

The schools Family, Career and Community Leaders of America are participating in the competition.

Its the third year Yahaira has participated in Death by Chocolate. You get the feel of what its like to be a pastry chef, she said, adding it takes teamwork.

Canyon Ridge students are competing not only against professional bakers but other high schools.

We kind of want to beat Twin (Falls High School), Yahaira said, and laughed.

Four years ago, Canyon Ridge took first place in the cookie category with its triple chocolate cookies. Our cookies got really rave reviews, Morales said.

At Twin Falls High, about 25 FCCLA students are also getting ready for Death by Chocolate. Theyll be assisted by the introduction to food and production class. Students are led by teacher Tessa Molyneux.

The food-production class tried out about five recipes. After asking students and teachers to sample desserts, they narrowed down the options and chose a peanut butter and chocolate bullseye cookie.

The first step before baking was buying ingredients and doing prep work. Usually, we go shopping the day before, said Alex Dayley, 17.

Then, students will bake all day Thursday in at least seven groups. Theyll bake about 1,300 samples  including 300 extra, just in case.

Its stressful making sure theres enough samples, Alex said. Plus, its challenging making sure each groups cookies turn out similar.

If one group makes two-inch cookies and another makes nine-inch cookies, youre going to run out (of ingredients) real quick, said Trey Lemmons, 17.

Alex enjoys seeing what other bakers make for the event. Trey likes trying out the desserts.

After high school, Trey plans to continue baking as a hobby and wants to work in law enforcement. Alex has interviewed with the College of Southern Idahos culinary arts program and ultimately wants to pursue a career in child nutrition.
SHOSHONE  A manhunt is underway for two men in a kidnapping and execution-style shooting in the desert southwest of Shoshone.

Court documents filed Tuesday painted a ruthless picture of a robbery and the attempted murder of a Jerome man over a $3,000 debt. Prosecutors say the suspects also kidnapped and intimidated a witness to cover up the crime.

Francisco Javier Bravo-Martinez, 29, survived the shooting and is recovering in a hospital, while police have arrested one of his assailants, issued an arrest warrant for the man accused of shooting him in the head and are working to identify a third man who shot him in the stomach and left leg.

Bravo-Martinez was in fair to serious condition in a hospital Tuesday afternoon, Lincoln County Sheriffs Sgt. Scott Denning said.

David Gonzalez Ceballos, 24, is wanted for attempted murder and two kidnapping charges in the shooting. A warrant for his arrest with a $1 million bond was signed Tuesday by a Lincoln County judge.

Ceballos is about 5 feet 10 inches tall, 170 pounds with brown eyes and black hair. Hes believed to be armed and dangerous, Denning said.

Erik Lopez, 23, of Wendell was arrested Sunday night and charged with three felony counts in connection to the shooting. The Lincoln County Sheriffs Office is pursuing a third suspect, believed to be a Hispanic man.

Were working as fast as we can to identify the third man, Denning said Tuesday.

Prosecutors say Ceballos, Lopez and the unidentified man left Bravo-Martinez to die in the desert after shooting him early Saturday. Bravo-Martinez called 911 about 10 a.m. to report the shooting and gave deputies Lopezs and Ceballos names.

At the hospital, he told investigators a more complete story of what happened, court documents said.

The assailants showed up at Bravo-Martinezs house about 4 a.m. and wanted to party, Bravo-Martinez told investigators. The men drove separate vehicles into the desert north of Jerome where Bravo-Martinez got out of his vehicle to check on a problem with one of his headlights.

While outside his vehicle, Bravo-Martinez heard someone yell hey. When he turned around the unidentified man shot him in the stomach, he told investigators. When he tried to run away, he was shot in the leg and fell.

After he fell down on to the ground Bravo-Martinez said that Ceballos walked to where he lay, pointed a pistol at his head, said bye, bye ass and then fired approximately three times before he was struck in the head, court documents said.

The men are also accused of kidnapping a woman later that day and threatening to kill her family if she told anyone what she knew about the shooting.

Lopez was arrested by Jerome police Sunday night, transferred to Lincoln County custody and arraigned Tuesday in Lincoln County Magistrate Court on two felony counts of kidnapping and one felony count of intimidating a witness. He is being held in Jerome County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bond.

In the criminal complaints filed by Lincoln County prosecutors, Ceballos is charged with attempted murder for shooting Bravo-Martinez in the head.

Lopez is charged with kidnapping and Ceballos is charged with conspiracy to kidnap for encouraging Bravo-Martinez to accompany the three men to Lincoln County under false circumstances to recover $3,000 owed them.

Lopez and Ceballos are also charged with second-degree kidnapping for taking the woman against her will; Lopez is charged with intimidating a witness for threatening to kill her children and family if she told anyone what happened to Bravo-Martinez.

The two men at-large are considered armed and dangerous and should not be approached, Denning said.

Anyone with information about Ceballos, the unidentified man or the shooting can call the Lincoln County Sheriffs Office at 208-886-2250 or SIRCOMM at 208-324-1911.
TWIN FALLS  Police are seeking to return about $10,000 in filched items to their rightful owners after busting a Twin Falls man with the stolen goods in his home last week.

While serving a search warrant for drugs and stolen construction equipment last week, Twin Falls officers say they found more than $20,000 worth of stolen items in the home of Gerami Shaun Secord, 36, in the 200 block of Caswell Avenue.

Secord was arraigned Friday in Twin Falls County Magistrate Court on a felony count of grand theft. Hes being held in Twin Falls County Jail in lieu of $50,000 bond, and a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Friday.

Officers found the stolen items while searching the house believing that drugs were being made, sold and used in the presence of children, city spokesman Josh Palmer said.

The stolen items include antique silverware and collectibles, construction equipment, air guns and specialized tools, Palmer said.

Detectives have so far returned about half of the stolen items but are seeking other recent victims of home, vehicle and job-site burglaries, Palmer said.

Many of the items were identified quickly by police as items that were reported stolen, court documents said. An air compressor, chainsaw, ground compactor, binoculars and a pellet gun were all returned to their owners after officers identified them as items recently reported stolen.

Secord told police he bought several of the tools from the back of a mans truck in the parking lot of a store, though he couldnt remember which store, court documents said. He told police some of the other items belonged to a friend and he was just storing them.

Police ask anyone who has been the victim of a burglary in recent weeks to call Detective Ken Rivers at 208-735-7211. Victims will be asked to describe their stolen items.
BOISE  The funding is still very much in the air, but Health and Welfare Director Dick Armstrong expects to be able to introduce legislation next week to implement a plan to extend primary care coverage to the uninsured.

Armstrong told the Senate Health and Welfare Committee on Tuesday that he has a draft bill. However, he said, the financing still needs to be worked out and is holding up its introduction. He told the Times-News he isnt sure whether it will end up being one bill or broken into two separate ones that would go through the health and tax committees, respectively.

It depends on the financial decisions on how to fund it, he said. Were prepared to go either way.

At the beginning of the session, Gov. C.L. Butch Otter proposed funding the program, which would connect uninsured adults in the Medicaid gap with primary care doctors through community health clinics, by shifting existing cigarette and tobacco tax monies that are paying for other programs now.

However, on Monday House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, proposed paying for it with a combination of savings from the catastrophic health care program  spending has been dropping as more people sign up for health insurance  and money from the Millennium Fund, which is the state endowment fund that holds the money Idaho got from the settlement with the big tobacco companies in the 1990s.

House Health and Welfare Committee Chairman Fred Wood, R-Burley, backs Bedkes idea. Wood said the tobacco/cigarette tax shift might not get through the House Revenue and Taxation Committee, and that there is a logical nexus between health care savings and health care funding.

I applaud the Speaker for thinking outside the box, Wood said.

Armstrong, too, said he is fine with that idea.

Smoking is related to health care, and youve got to deal with it, he said.

The Primary Care Access Program would cost an estimated $30 million yearly, the estimate based on spending $32 a month for each of the 78,000 people in the Medicaid gap. Those Idahoans dont qualify for Medicaid but are too poor to qualify for tax credits to buy health insurance on the state exchange.

If the Legislature approves the program, it would start to serve people on Jan. 1, 2017. Armstrong said enrollees would be assigned to a primary care doctor and get a screening, after which they would receive occasional basic care if theyre healthy. People with more serious problems would meet with their doctors to develop self-care plans.

Also, Armstrong said, PCAP participants would get steeply discounted prescription drugs through the health clinics.

Armstrong went into some detail about people in the gap. Sixty-five percent of them live in a household where someone is working, 55 percent are women and 65 percent live in households with at least one child. One thing they have in common: They dont receive any preventive care.

These gap adults are only entering the system when they have an acute episode, he said.

Using food stamp data, Armstrong pushed back on the idea that people who receive government benefits stay on them for life, and said he would expect some people who would be on PCAP to get off of it at some point. Out of the 575,000 people who have been on food stamps over the past six years, Armstrong estimates only 4 percent fall into the category of people who have been on the program long-term, and three-quarters moved on quickly.

Armstrong also said the program wouldnt be an entitlement. The department will work with the money its given and provide what service it can with it, he said. If the department has to, Armstrong said, it would ration the money.

This is all our money, he said. This is state of Idaho. We can drive the program as we see fit.

By directing more money to the health clinics, Armstrong said PCAP could help them to hire more staff and expand their capacities.

With this approach, we give them the opportunity, the clinics, to bring up their staffing levels to what is really going to be needed, Armstrong said.

He estimated CAT fund spending could drop by a little less than half if PCAP is passed  using 2015 numbers and looking at the diagnosis codes, he estimated $16.8 million of the $36.3 million spent that year might not have been needed had PCAP been in place.

We know there are some significant dollars being paid out today where we could make a difference, he said. So theres great potential.
BOISE  An Idaho House panel has introduced a proposal that would allow students to use public funding toward religious school tuitions.

Republican Rep. Ron Nate of Rexburg says the bill, also known as the Blaine Amendment, would amend a section of the Idaho Constitution that currently forbids the direct public funding of religious institutions. Nate told the House Education Committee on Tuesday that students are already using public scholarship funds to pay for tuition at religious schools and the proposed measure would protect the state from potential lawsuits.

We dont want to find ourselves in court for programs that we come up with that are meeting the needs of Idahos students, Nate said.

According to the proposal, students or students parents would be allowed to use state funds  in the form of a grant, donation or payment  toward tuition at a religious institution.

Two Democratic lawmakers on the committee questioned the need for the measure, including Rep. Ilana Rubel of Boise who called the bill ill-advised.

Are you contemplating that if successful, this bill would lead to a system in which taxpayer money could be distributed in the form of vouchers and used to pay for tuition at religious schools? she asked.

Nate said the measure would only protect the scholarships programs that currently exist.

Who knows what would be in Idahos future when it comes to scholarship or voucher programs, he said. But at least we will have the clarification in place should that ever happen.

The measure passed its first hurdle unanimously. However, constitutional amendments must pass with a two-thirds majority in both bodies and then win a two-thirds majority in a statewide vote come November.
KIMBERLY  The owner of a Twin Falls demolition business has been cited again for illegally dumping at a site west of Kimberly.

Cord Thorpe, owner of Thorpe Demolition, received his third violation  a misdemeanor  on Jan. 19.

Neighbors have complained about Thorpes operation since he bought the parcel several years ago. His five-acre lot sits in an agriculture zone within Kimberlys impact area.

Thorpe has twice been cited and fined for operating an illegal solid-waste site at his property. Both violations were civil infractions.

But the mountain of concrete and asphalt continued to grow, leading deputies to monitor the property.

Its now an active criminal investigation, sheriffs Lt. Daron Brown said Tuesday. (Thorpes) going to test the grounds (of the law).

In 2014, Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs charged Thorpe with a misdemeanor zoning violation for conducting his demolition business in an agriculture zone. But Thorpe denied doing business on the property and convinced the court the property is the site of his future home.

Thorpe was found not guilty.

If he says hes going to (use demolition materials to) build a house, I cant dispute that, Planning and Zoning Administrator Rick Dunn said.

Thorpe says the asphalt and concrete littering the site will soon be crushed and used for gravel around his home, which he moved to the property and set on a foundation.

But neighbors argue that the illegal dump site is proof Thorpe is using the property to conduct his demolition business.

Thorpe failed to appear at a Jan. 13 meeting with county commissioners  a meeting he had requested. The following day, Thorpe asked for a Jan. 25 meeting, but after Radmall served Thorpe his third citation, the county took him off its agenda.

Its not always a quick process, Radmall, a code enforcement officer, said Tuesday. Itll take time to work its way through the prosecutors office and through the courts.
TWIN FALLS  The Twin Falls Public Library has launched a new reading and discussion series called Magic Valley Reads.

This new series will highlight three Idaho authors and their books about local history and culture. People are invited to check out a set of the three books to read before the author presentations.

Jim Gentrys book A History of the College of Southern Idaho will open the season at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 18 at the Twin Falls Public Library. A short presentation given by Gentry will precede the discussion of the book.

The second program of the series at 6:30 p.m. March 3 will focus on the classic novel Buffalo Coat by Moscow native Carol Ryrie Brink. Copies of the book have been loaned to the library by the Idaho Commission for Libraries in celebration of Idaho Day on March 4.

The series will finish at 6:30 p.m. March 17 with a discussion of Gifts of Heritage by Donna Scott and ZoeAnn Shaub. The book offers a number of Twin Falls memories and participants may share their own Magic Valley stories for inclusion in a volume that will be archived in the librarys Idaho Room.

Our community has such a robust interest in local history, and we wanted to be able to encourage that interest while providing a fun and creative way to explore it, said Jennifer Hills, reference librarian, in a statement. Were looking forward to sharing unique voices and stories that have had impact on life here in the Magic Valley.

Community members who have not read the books are still welcome to attend the programs. All library programs are free. For more information, go to twinfallspubliclibrary.org.
BURLEY  In another sign of distrust between the city of Burley and Cassia County, commissioners have stalled a joint task force formed to save the regional airport.

Cassia County Commissioner Dennis Crane said he distrusts the city, which currently manages the airport, the media and a governors representative who has studied the airports economic impact.

I dont think its the countys responsibility to fix the airport, Crane said. I think the city has been negligent in how it was taken care of. I see this as: Do we want ownership as a county and how to pay for it.

The city called for forming the joint task force to find a regional solution to save the airport. Expected to lose Federal Aviation Administration funding if it doesnt lengthen its runways or move to a new location, the airport may be forced to close soon, jeopardizing millions of dollars in regional commerce. The task force was to include two appointed members from Cassia and Minidoka counties along with the cities of Burley, Heyburn, Paul and Rupert and the Airport Users Association. The group was asked to review the master plan for the airport, look at new sites and decide how the facility should be governed.

The Cassia County commissioners on Monday directed Administrator Kerry Murray to draft a letter to the city asking for clarification on several points before they even consider whether to join the task force. The county will review the letter in two weeks.

Despite warnings from the FFA to act soon  and pleas from Burley leaders to act quickly  Crane and Commissioner Paul Christensen said there is plenty of time for the county to respond to the citys request.

I dont think there is a big deadline, Crane said.

Christensen distrusts the statistics and the findings that have been presented to date, and he wants the task force to review them, work which was performed by an engineering firm, the FAA and the city. He said it was also unclear if the city was asking the county to sponsor the airport. If county representatives are appointed to a task force, Christensen said, it is their right and responsibility to look at the evidence.

Crane said past airport relocation efforts were overloaded with city and airport users representatives.

Clearly opposed to his fellow commissioners was Bob Kunau, who said every one of the commissioners questions has been answered in newspaper articles and at the airport meetings.

We dont need to ask the task force to start over, Kunau said, reminding the board that the city wants the task force to locate a site within six months.

I dont trust the newspaper or the city of Burley, Crane said.

Crane said he also does not trust the hotshot from the governors office (Mike Pape, director of the Idaho Division of Aeronautics) who spoke in Burley about the economic impact of the airport. Crane said he was a cheerleader who just wants to throw away the airport and get a new one.

The FAA has said it will not continue to fund the airport master plan study, or continue to provide maintenance funding for the airport, unless the community gets on board with relocating the airport. Without the maintenance funding, the city will be forced to close the airport, Burley Administrator Mark Mitton has said.

But Christensen said he doubts whether actual abandonment is really an issue. And Crane questioned how much of the business use at the airport is blue sky that is not needed.

Crane said loaded agricultural spray planes cant fly out of the airport now, and unlike the UPS planes that fly into the Burley airport, FedEx flies into Twin Falls and transports packages to the area by truck.

I dont know if it is really a big deal, Crane said.

Kunau attempted to justify the airports significance, mentioning a letter written by Anthony Soto, Burley general manager of DOT Foods Inc., to Burley City Council President Randy Hawkins asking the city to continue to pursue a new airport and the benefits it would bring to the community.

Christensen also questioned how much the airport is really needed for medical flights. Fixed-wing medical flights are going out now, Crane said.

It must be adequate, he said.

Kunau disagreed.

We wont be able to use the airport if the FAA wont certify it, Kunau said.
For most of his first eight years in office, Gov. Butch Otter has used his online newsletters to shed the best light on a sorry economy.

Prudent budgeting and conservative fiscal management were buzz phrases to mask what was really going on  which were deep cuts in education and the substantial dismantling of state government.

The latest edition of his newsletter, which bubbles with optimism, paints a far different picture. Maybe the states song should be changed to Happy Days Are Here Again.

Otter again mentions prudent budgeting and conservative fiscal management, but in a different context. Those elements, along with a business friendly environment, have Idaho doing very well financially, he said.

Rep. Tom Loertscher of Bone, in a recent newsletter to constituents, describes a conversation with the governor that says it all.

Tom, we have the money, Otter told Loertscher.

And thats what drives the conservative base batty. Fiscal hawks know what to do when businesses close, unemployment skyrockets and foreclosures go up. They dial down state government, while taking an axe to education budgets and health service programs. Seven years ago, the tight-fisted Legislature refused to grant a two-cent road tax for crumbling roads  as if a two-cent tax would drive people to the poor house.

According to the governor, all that gloom and doom is in the past. As outlined in his newsletter, hes proposing a 7.9 percent increase for public schools, a 9.6 percent increase for community colleges and an 8.8 percent increase for universities. His grand plans include a four-year tuition lock and a full-fledged community college in Idaho Falls.

Otter says he hasnt given a moments thought about his legacy, but this budget is how legacies are built. I imagine Otter would rather be seen as an education champion than the only Idaho governor in modern history to blow up education budgets.

Of course, not everyone is on board with the governors budget, including Loertscher, one of the Legislatures most fiscally conservative members. He warns that while revenues are up today, reversals can happen very fast.

House Majority Leader Mike Moyle of Star agrees. He notes that businesses fail because of what they do during the good times, not the bad. Spending too much during the good years can lead to problems. Moyle has seen enough holdbacks to realize the same principle applies to state government.

Moyle gives measured support for Otters education proposals, which is more than House Majority Caucus Chairman John Vander Woude of Nampa offers.

I thought he had a nice Christmas tree, and he put a lot of decorations on it, Vander Woude said of Otters message. The money he is talking about spending is way over the top. There will be pushback all the way around.

Rep. Maxine Bell, co-chair of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee that ultimately will make most of the budget decisions, told the Idaho Statesmans Bill Roberts that she was skeptical about Otters call for a four-year lock on tuition. Rep. Janet Trujillo of Idaho Falls, vice chair of the Revenue and Taxation Committee, says shed like to see more tax relief than the governors wish list. With Moyle on the same committee, she might get her wish. He says tax relief should have been a bigger part of Otters message.

My thought is that a third of the money should go to education, a third should go to tax relief and a third should go to everything else, Moyle said. The money you put back into the economy is not stagnant; it rolls.

Moyle, in his ninth term, has spent his political career fighting for tax relief. He says Idahos tax system is out of whack compared to other states.

If people lived in Washington, they would pay absolutely no income tax and almost the same sales tax, Moyle said. If they lived in Nevada, theres no income tax. In Oregon or Montana, theres no sales tax. And, by the way, all those states have lower income tax rates, other than Oregon. But to be in Oregons upper rate, youve got to be at $250,000 in adjusted income. In Idaho, its $10,800.

Moyle thinks the Legislature will find a balance that gives more back to the taxpayers, while making appropriate investments in education.

So, the governors budget was not dead on arrival in the Legislature. But at the moment, it is on life support.
When Idaho Fish and Game took over wolf management in 2011, the wolf population had grown unchecked for more than a decade after reaching federal recovery levels of 10 breeding pairs and 100 wolves 11 years earlier. This was due to repeated lawsuits that stalled delisting and delayed transfer of wolves to state management.

As a result, wolf conflicts with livestock and elk populations were rampant in most parts of Idaho north of the Snake River and livestock producers and hunters grew increasingly frustrated.

After five years of state management of wolves in Idaho, were seeing positive results:

 In 2010, the year before wolves were delisted, there were 109 confirmed wolf depredations on livestock in Idaho. Now livestock depredations by wolves are down by almost 50 percent (59 in 2015).

 The most recent livestock attack by wolves occurred last October. We havent had a depredation-free stretch last this long since 2004.

Im also pleased to report Idahos elk herds are rebounding too, but there are still some places in Idaho where predation impacts are unacceptable. Conflicts are decreasing because regulated wolf hunting and trapping seasons are helping us balance predator and prey populations.

As I write this, Fish and Game scientists are conducting the latest wolf population surveys. While these are not yet complete, its obvious we far exceed federal recovery levels of 100 wolves and 10 breeding pairs, and have met these levels for at least 16 years in a row.

The bottom line is Idaho has a healthy, sustainable wolf population that is over seven times higher than the federal recovery goal. Idaho Fish and Game has proven we can responsibly manage wolves, provide regulated hunting and trapping opportunity, and reduce conflict. That is good both for the people of Idaho and our wildlife, including wolves.

In a few short months, the federal five-year post-delisting oversight window will close and Idaho will continue to sustainably manage its wolves.

A few advocacy groups are determined to keep federal oversight in place and their lawyers are already publishing articles making all sorts of claims that simply arent true. Professional wildlife scientists at Idaho Fish and Game monitor Idahos wolf population and all our monitoring reports are available on our website. The 2015 report will be available in early April.

We at Fish and Game are proud of our demonstrated ability to scientifically manage wolves and elk. We will continue to do so in a manner that upholds our mission to preserve, protect, perpetuate and manage our wildlife.
About Me Mohd. Kamal bin Abdullah I am Mohd. Kamal bin Abdullah, who resides in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. I hold a post-graduate law degree from the United Kingdom. I blog to tell MALAYSIANS THE TRUTH. View my complete profile

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Chinas slowing growth has crushed shipping rates to such an extent that hiring a 1,100-foot merchant vessel would set you back less than the price of renting a Ferrari for a day.
By Scott A. Morgan





Courtesy of The North African Post).





Already several steps have been taken by Nations in the region. In Dakar and in NDjamena hotel security is increasing . Senegal and Chad are close allies of both Paris and Washington in the effort to defeat Islamist Groups. Chad itself has been targeted by the Nigerian Islamist Group Boko Haram on more than one occasion during last year.

So its not that much of a stretch of the imagination to conclude that Dakar could be the next target of the Islamists. There is another interesting wrinkle that could be exploited by the Islamists: neighboring There is another interesting wrinkle that could be exploited by the Islamists: neighboring Gambia has declared itself an Islamic State recently . Due to the close proximity it is also a host for some of the Gambian Opposition Parties as well. Since the 2014 coup attempt, in Banjul, the US and Dakar are now sharing Intelligence regarding what is occurring in the region

Al-Qaeda had a presence in the region during the Sierra Leone Conflict during the 1990s . The Group was involved in the Blood Diamond Trade in order to raise funds to launch Operations against American and other interests.

Both Guinea and Bissau have had a history of Coups and poor Governance. They sit on historical trade routes as well, so this means that there is an opportunity to find an interest to exploit and raise funds that way. Two things that could generate some interest are the trade in both Narcotics and Human Beings. Also the Extractive Mining Industry in Guinea could be a quick and easy source of revenue.



[The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dissecting Society]

Over the last two months AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb) or the Al-Moulatan Brigade has launched two high profile and successful attacks in Bamako and in Ouagadougou. These attacks targeted Western (UN and French) Interests and hotels in both cities. In both instances Western Forces assisted in the recapture of the hotels ( source I source II ).It appears that the Islamists suspect that the outsiders were using these facilities in an effort to gather intelligence regarding future operations. Several Nations in the region suffer from the classic formula that allows groups like this to thrive: weak Governments with porous borders acting as incubators for such groups.History bears that out for AQIM. It was formed in 1998 after the turbulent period of time in Algeria . It was known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GPSC) and it changed its name, in January 2007, after formally joining Al-Qaeda in 2006. Previously the group has used Northern Mali and Southern Algeria as a base of Operations, however it is suspected of moving into both Tunisia and Libya.So the question now becomes what will become the next target or base of operations? There are plenty of opportunities in West Africa but recently one event occurred that has French Speaking Media Outlets talking openly about the region: it appears that a Mauritanian National who was a member of Al-Qaeda, and had escaped Death Row after admitting his role in a Car Bomb Assassination Plot against the President (and escaped) was captured along the Border between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau . The question about whether or not AQIM was attempting to form a cell has probably been answered in the affirmative; however the question of where it is located - be it in either Guinea or Guinea-Bissau - has yet to be determined.Above is a picture of the Mauritanian Terrorist Saleck Ould Cheikh who was captured on the border between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau (
UN Secretary General Ban ki-moon condemned the stabbings and killings going on between Palestinians and Israelis underlining that the Palestinian frustration after almost 50years of Israeli occupation and failed peace processes drove a profound sense of alienation and despair among some Palestinians.

This deep despair is especially strong among the youths, Ban Ki-moon said during a meeting with the Security Council. He warned that Israels security measures alone will not stop the violence. Israel reacted to the statements with Prime Minister Netanyahu alleging that the UN Secretary General supports terror.

Ban said the illegal Israeli settlements are an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community adding that he is deeply troubled by reports that Tel Aviv approved construction plans for more than 150 new homes in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. He said these provocative acts are bound to increase the growth of settler populations, further heighten tensions and undermine any prospects for a political road ahead.

Netanyahu said such comments encourage terror and there is no justification for terror. He claimed the Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state but to destroy Israel and murder Jews for being Jews. Netanyahu deplored that the UN has long lost its neutrality and moral power; these comments by the Secretary General do little to improve its standing.

US ambassador to the U.N, Samantha Power, told the Security Council that steps aimed at advancing the Israeli settlement program are fundamentally incompatible with the two-state solution and raise legitimate questions about Israels long-term intentions.

The U.N secretary General urged Israel to review its policies because, he said, as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.
Suspected Boko Haram members have attacked a military base of a regional Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) in Mora, Cameroon, in the early hours of Wednesday, local media reported.

According to the reports the base was struck by several explosions. Causalities remain unknown.

The MNJTF base in Mora, which was manned by troops from Cameroon and Chad to interdict criminal activity in the Lake Chad area, was expanded in 2015 to help fight the spread of Boko Haram activity in the area where the borders of Nigeria, Chad and Cameroun intersect. More than two thousand Cameroonian soldiers are at the base.

Boko Haram has had success in overrunning large military bases in the past.

Last year hundreds of fighters from the jihadist group attacked a Nigerian Air Force base, using trucks and a stolen armored personnel carrier.

In October and November 2015, Boko Haram ramped up its attacks not only on Nigeria, but also on Cameroon, Chad and Niger. These attacks have led Chad and Niger to declare state of emergency and to refocus their security efforts on their own territories.
Authorities in Senegal interrogated more than 900 people last weekend as part of increased efforts to prevent attacks by Islamist militants, the countrys police revealed on Tuesday.

The detentions, which were not terror-related, took place over the weekend in the capital Dakar and Thies, the BBC reported.

The threats come as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has killed at least 50 people since November in the capitals of Mali and Burkina Faso at hotels popular with foreigners, signaling the organization is moving to target civilians in capitals south of its bases in northern Mali.

Senegalese President Macky Sall has warned that extremism has no place in his country, where Muslims and Christians live together peacefully.

Local media reported that security has been visibly increased, in the capital, Dakar.

French officials have reportedly issued warnings to governments in Senegal and Cote dIvoire saying that militants were plotting to wage attacks in West African cities.

Diplomats have denied rumors of a specific threat weighing on the Senegalese and Ivorian capitals, Dakar and Abidjan, which are both major West African hubs for Westerners working in the aid, diplomacy, and financial sectors.

The US embassy in Abidjan which said that it wants to avoid an unnecessary psychosis among both Americans and Ivorians, has however urged citizens to remain prudent.
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From: samira ibrahim < samiraibrahim4@hotmail.com >

Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2016 6:27 PM

Subject: DARLING PLEASE I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE Dearest One,

Thanks for your Immediate response, How are you doing today? hope fine and you are perfectly doing well in health. My name is Samira Ibrahim Fred.I am from Libya Tripoli in North African. 24years old, 5ft 8inches tall, Single never married, black hair and brown eyes. I want to assure you that Color, Race, Religion, or Nationality makes no difference to me . What i see in people are their Personality and Character. I promise you all that makes up a defined and a refined LOVE and i have a special reason why i decided to contact you immediately going through your profile which i was well satisfied with. I decided to contact you because of the urgency of my situation here. I am presently living in Senegal due to the Civil War fought in my country. My Father ( Dr Ibrahim Fred was the CHAIRMAN MANAGING DIRECTOR OF Fred & SONS INDUSTRIAL COMPANY IN THE CAPITAL CITY OF MY COUNTRY ( Tripoli ), Also the PERSONAL ADVISER to the former HEAD OF STATE, before the

rebels

attacked our house one early morning & kill him with my mother, together with My younger sister.



It's only me that is alive because I wasn't around when this happened, I was in the University where am schooling, I'm doing my first year in accountant, I then manage to abscond to follow west African country (SENEGAL ) where am residing now in '' REFUGEE CAMP''. I decided to contact you, due to the problematic situation which am passing through here in this camp. We are not eligible to go out from the camp unless we took permission. It's just like one staying in the prison, but I believe by God's grace i will extricate here soon.



l don't have any relatives now whom l can go to all my relatives abscond in the middle of the war the only one l have now is Rev Patrick James who is the pastor of the (United Church of Christ, Dakar Branch) here in the camp he has been very nice to me since i came here but i am not living with him rather i am leaving in the female's hostel because the camp have two hostels one for women & the other for men.



Please listen to this, i have my late father's statement of account and death certificate here with me which i will send to you later, because when he was alive he deposited some amount of money in one of the leading bank which he used my name as the next of kin, the amount in question is $7.4M(Seven Million Four Hundred Thousand US Dollars). So i will like you to help me transfer this money to your account and from it you can send some money for me to get my traveling documents and air ticket to come over to meet with you. I kept this secret to people in the camp here, the only person that knows about it is the Reverend because he is like a father to me.



The Pastors Tel. number is ( + 221-77-593-28-04 ) If you call tell him you want to speak with me, then he will send for me in the female hostel. As a refugee here i don't have any privileged to anything be it money or whatever because it is against their law. I want to go back to my studies because i only attended my first year before the tragic incident that lead to my being in this situation now took place.



NOTE; As soon as I receive your positive response showing your interest, I will put things into action immediately and will educate you more on the way you will assist me receive the money, in the light of the above, I shall appreciate an urgent response indicating your ability and willingness to handle this transaction sincerely.



Regarding to the above i will like you to be confidential and don't tell it to anyone for i am afraid of loosing my life and the money if people gets to know about it. Remember i am giving you all this information due to confident I confide on you. I like sincere, kind, respectful, honest and understanding people, truth and hard working. I love English language but I would like to know many others if God gives me the opportunity but i speak English very well. However I will like you to call me because we still have a lot to discuss. I want to know a bit about you and you can send your picture to me too because i have just sent mine here as an attachment.Thanks & God bless you, looking forward to your urgent and earliest response and have a pleasant day.

Yours In Love Samira









From: samira ibrahim < samiraibrahim4@hotmail.com >

Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2016 6:21 PM

Subject: DARLING CONTACT THIS BANK TODAY FOR MORE INFORMATION, Dearest Love.

I received your email with thanks. Thank you also for your acceptance to assist me to get the money my late father deposited with ISLAMIC BANK OF BRITAIN in their suspense account. I contacted you to be my Guardian/Foreign Partner so that you will look after me and help to look for a better investment, so that I can invest wisely when the money transferred to you.



Everything I told you about this money is real and legal. I have surferred a lot since my father died. I don't have any body to look after me, but I have some hopeless ones who want to kill me too and have the money to enrich themselves. That is why I don't want to have the money invested in my country Libya and that's why I ran away from there.



Remember i trust you honey that is why i am giving you all this information my love is for you and you alone,i will like to hear your voice please,just call the Rev and tell him that you want to speak with me and he will send for me immediately.You can call the Reverend around 13 GMT.1oclock my time i will be there waiting your urgent call and ask him the best time to call me.



Notice: I am not going to give your love to another man you will satisfy me,so needless of looking for another man. Please i have not told anyone except you about the existence of this money and i will like you to please keep it secret to other people because since it is (MONEY) all eyes will be on it.



I contacted you to please do this following thing for me, to help and make sure that this money will be smoothly transferred into your account, you will also help to source for a nice investment where you will invest and manage the money for me. You will make arrangement for me to come over to your country to continue my studies. I will give you the 18% of the total money and 30% for me, while 7% for any inevitable expenses that will be make on process to transfer this fund and the rest will be in invest and manage by you into any profitable/lucrative business of your choice that will benefit us in future.



Bear in mind that TRUST is the key to achieve success in every business, so with TRUST we are going to achieve this opportunity giving to us.that's why I trusted you after going through your profile and you sound so matured and integrity. I am so much more than happy, and I have every confidence and trust with you in this business transaction which we will carried out on a good faith.



I have informed the bank about my plans to claim,this money and the only thing they told me is to look for a foreign partner who will stand on my behalf due to my refugee status and the laws of this country. In this regards i will like you to contact the bank immediately with this information,tell them that you are my foreign partner and that you want to know the possibilities of assisting me transfer my 7.4million dollars deposited by my late father of which i am the next of kin to your account in your country.The contact information of the bank are as follows.



ISLAMIC BANK OF BRITAIN P L C

E-Mail address, islamicbank@onlinbanking.co.uk

The name of the transfer officer is.Mr Robert Owen

Telephone number + 447-866-075-778 .And fax + 44-703-194-1849.





ISLAMIC BANK OF BRITAIN P L C.

Attn Sir,

My name is Mr. . . . . and I am standing for the family of Late Dr Fred Ibrahim,to request the funds of $7.4 (Seven Million Four Hundred Thousand US Dollars)(USD$7,400.000.00) on hold be forward to my account in my country .As late Dr Fred Ibrahim Business Partner, I am helping her daughter Miss Samira Ibrahim, move to my country as soon as possible.



I am writing ISLAMIC BANK OF BRITAIN P L C.UNITED KINGDOM (IBB, PLC) on Miss Samira Ibrahim behalf, to request the Funds of her late father, Dr Fred Ibrahim whose account (No.BLB745008901546/QB/91/A) be released and transferred over here in my country to me so she may start coming to my country. My plan is to have Miss Samira Ibrahim continue her education as soon as her inheritance is Transferred before we start discussing the best kind of business for her to invest in here in my country.Please could you let me know what to do in order to achieve this.Thanking you for your co-operations.



Mr . . . . .





Contact them now with the above text on how to transfer the $7.4 (Seven Million Four Hundred Thousand US Dollars)deposited by my late father which i am the next of kin. My dear i am glad that God has brought you to see me out from this situation and i promise to be kind and will equally need you in every area of my life Including investing this money since i am still too young to manage it.



As i told you before,this camp is just like a prison and my prayers is to move out from here as soon as possible.Please make sure that you contact the bank so that after the transfer you can send some money from that money for me to prepare my traveling documents to meet with you in your country.

Yours forever in love.

Miss Samira Ibrahim Subject: I need $350 Dollars to get Passport I will use to come to your country.

Sent: Jan 30, 2016 12:57 PM

From: samira ibrahim < samiraibrahim4@hotmail.com >

Cc:



Hello Dear,



How was your day and how are you doing,i hope you are doing fine and great. The Reverend Father told me that to travel to come to your country requires Passport and other things but he said that first of all i must have Passport before Visa and Ticket Flight. Here is the inquiry i made from him concerning the amount to get Passport. The Reverend Father told me that he will help me to make an arrangement to get the Passport for me as soon as you send me the money i will use to get the Passport. This is the cost to get Passport from the immigration office here. I want you to send the money, it is once you send me the money then i will be able to get Passport from the immigration office here through my Reverend Pastor's assistance.



Passport = $320 Dollars

Please kindly use this information to send the money to me through Western Union

Receiver's Name: Patrick James

Receiver's Address: Rue 12 Grand Medina Dakar Senegal

Country: Senegal

City: Dakar



The information belongs to the Reverend Pastor that is in charge of us in the refugee camp. He is a missionary that is doing voluntary and charity work in the refugee camp. The Reverend Pastor is like a father to us,once you sent the money to me,he will receive it and submit to me. I want you to send the money that i will use to process the Passport as soon as possible and do let me know once you send the money. I wish to let you know that many people have already died in the orphanage camp as a result of hunger, dirty environment and unclean water. Please kindly rescue me from the camp and bring me in your country.



I want you to know that the condition in the orphanage camp is too boring and horrible,i am dying in hunger as i am writing and sending this mail to you, i need an urgent help and assistance from you. Please kindly rescue me from the camp and bring me in your country. I urge you to do your very best and what you ought to do to render to me the help and assistance i seeks from you. I pray that God will bless you abundantly as you are helping and assisting me. I hope and expect to have positive response from you as soon as possible. Have a good and happy day and do always think about me and my situation.



Yours Lovely

Miss.Samira If you received a similar letter, please ignore it. Do not answer it. If you do, you will end up on more of the mailing lists used by the criminals behind this fraud. Read more....
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(HealthDay)Jonas, the massive snowstorm that hammered the East Coast, has led to a shortage of blood products and there is an emergency need for both blood and platelet donors, the American Red Cross said Tuesday.

"The impact of this weekend's winter storm continues to affect multiple states along the East Coast, and more blood drives will likely be canceled. Right now, blood products are being distributed to hospitals as quickly as donations come in," the Red Cross said in a news release.

Since Jan. 1, severe winter weather has led to the cancellation of more than 300 blood drives in 20 states, resulting in about 9,500 fewer donations to an already low winter supply, the Red Cross noted.

Blood products can be transported where and when they are most needed, so donors in areas unaffected by the winter storm are encouraged to make blood and platelet donations, the Red Cross said. Donors in areas affected by the storm should donate only when travel is considered safe.

To make an appointment to donate blood or platelets, call 1-800-733-2767, download the Blood Donor App or go to the Red Cross website. At check-in, a blood donor card or driver's license and two other pieces of identification are required.

To be eligible to donate, people have to be age 17 or older (16-year-olds can donate with parental consent in some states), weigh at least 110 pounds, and be in generally good health. Donors age 18 and younger also have to meet certain height and weight requirements.

The Red Cross needs about 14,000 blood and platelet donations a day to meet the needs of patients at about 2,600 hospitals and transfusion centers across the country. The donated blood and platelets benefit a wide range of patients, including accident and burn victims, those having heart surgery and organ transplants, and those being treated for leukemia, cancer or sickle cell disease, the agency said.

Explore further Red Cross issues emergency call for blood donations

More information: You can learn more about donating blood at the You can learn more about donating blood at the American Red Cross

Copyright  2016 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Municipal workers sprays insecticide to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus at the Imbiribeira neighborhood in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

New figures released Wednesday by Brazil's Health Ministry as part of a probe into the Zika virus have found fewer confirmed cases of a rare brain defect than first feared.

So far, only 270 of 4,180 suspected cases have been confirmed as microcephaly, with the brain damage associated with the defect ruled out in 462 cases. Researchers are still studying 3,448 of the cases, which were recorded from Oct. 22

Brazilian officials still say they believe there's a sharp increase in cases of microcephaly and strongly suspect the Zika virus, which appeared in the country last year, is to blame. The concern is strong enough that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned pregnant women to reconsider visits to areas where Zika is present.

The rare birth defect, which also can be caused by factors such as infections, malnutrition or drugs, means babies have unusually small heads, 32 centimeters (12.6 inches) or less in circumference, and it can cause lasting developmental problems.

The cases reported to the Health Ministry include delivered infants, stillborn and miscarried babies, and fetuses shown to have unusually small heads by ultrasound or other diagnostic tests, the ministry said. It then tests to see if neurological imaging shows the brain has been affected.

Municipal workers pause to refill the insecticide sprayer during an operation to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus at the Imbiribeira neighborhood in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Officials said babies found to be microcephalic and their mothers are given additional tests to see if they had the Zika virusoften a difficult process. Six of the 270 confirmed microcephaly cases were found to have the virus. Two were stillborn and four were live births, three of whom later died, the ministry said.

Brazilian health officials estimate they had 150 cases of microcephaly in all of 2014.

The Health Ministry said Brazilian states were not required to report microcephaly cases before November. That could mean the 2014 list didn't fully account for all cases, though the ministry dismissed the idea there might have been a large number of unreported cases.

A municipal worker gestures during an operation to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects, but he also says the war is already being lost. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

The U.S. CDC says about the rate of microcephaly in the U.S. is about 2 to 12 per 10,000 live birthsa figure far higher than Brazil's estimates for earlier years.

On Tuesday, Brazil's health minister, Marcelo Castro, announced that 220,000 military personnel were being deployed to bolster efforts to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Castro said the government also would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

A municipal worker sprays insecticide to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus at the Imbiribeira neighborhood in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm as the virus' symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. Then late last year, Brazilian researchers reported they suspected Zika was linked to the dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly.

The World Health Organization has stressed that a link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.

The CDC is advising pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks. Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.

A Brazilian Army soldier inspects a house during an operation to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Explore further Brazil trying to develop vaccine against Zika virus

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Distinct patterns of neural activation simulate the cocktail party effect of hearing multiple speakers. (Isomura et al., 2015)

While dining with a friend at a noisy restaurant, you listen attentively to her entertaining account of last night's date. Despite the cacophony flooding your auditory system, your brain remarkably filters your friend's voice from the irrelevant conversations at neighboring tables. This "cocktail party effect," the ability to attend to select input amidst a distracting background, has fascinated researchers since its characterization in the 1950's. Although psychological and sensory models have offered insight into why human brains are so exquisitely equipped to perform this selective attention, researchers haven't yet pinned down how neurons process mixed information to respond to the important and suppress the irrelevant. In their new paper published in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from the University of Tokyo revealed that individual neurons learn to "tune in" to one input while ignoring others, offering an intriguing explanation for how rapid neural plasticity may give rise to the cocktail party effect.

Sending neurons mixed messages

Based on many earlier studies showing that neural networks can learn by changing their activity based on experience, the authors wondered whether neurons could also be trained to distinguish among sensory experiences. To test this idea, they recorded electrical activity from cultured rat cortical neurons. They electrically stimulated the neurons according to two stimulation patterns, to provide two unique hidden sources of input, simulating the cocktail party effect of hearing a mixture of voices. In some conditions both input patterns were activated, while in others one, the other, or neither input pattern was activated. They repeated variations of these stimulations for 100 trials in many samples to track how the neural responses changed over exposure to the stimuli.

Learning to discriminate

Over the course of training, neurons altered their likelihood of spiking to the input patterns. Roughly half of the neurons increased their response to one source and reduced their response to the other, while the other half increased responsiveness to the other source. A discrimination index used to measure preference for one input over the other showed that this bias increased across all electrodes over the training period. Even neurons exposed to the stimuli only briefly  trained on only a fraction of the trials  still demonstrated a response preference up to a day later, suggesting that neural learning occurred rapidly and was long-lasting. Although first author Takuya Isomura speculates that "this could last several days," it's not permanent. "We have confirmed that training with another stimulation pattern could overwrite the neural preference to the past source. That is, even cultures that have learned a pattern set could learn another one."

Neurons increased their discrimination (DKLi) over the course of training when fully trained (red) and partially trained (white) but not when NMDA receptors were blocked (black). (Isomura et al., 2015)

But how, since biological systems can learn in various ways, did these cells so efficiently acquire and maintain this source bias? Blocking the cultures with an NMDA receptor antagonist largely prevented the neurons from developing an input preference, suggesting that learning occurred through NMDA receptor-dependent signaling, known to be important for long-term synaptic plasticity supporting memory formation. Furthermore, neurons only demonstrated discriminability if there was variance in the balance and frequency of the input patterns. This requirement for variance hinted that the neurons may follow independent components analysis (ICA)-like learning rules.

To better understand these learning dynamics, Isomura's group examined changes at the neuronal population level. A simple Hebbian learning model predicted that connectivity should increase both within and across neuron groups. Instead, synaptic connectivity increased between neuron groups with the same source preference, but decreased between neuron groups with different source preferences. A modified model of Hebbian learning (including state-dependent plasticity) better accounted for these observations, as it allowed for competition between neurons. As Isomura explains, "state-dependent Hebbian plasticity could facilitate the neural response to the source that effectively stimulates the nearest electrode, while it could depress that to the other source. In the future, using the connection strength estimation, we might be able to predict the neural preference before the stimulations."

As the neural networks changed, their internal and free energy decreased, whereas entropy increased. These energy changes did not occur with NMDA receptor blockade, suggesting that they are indeed attributable to learning-related synaptic plasticity. As connections strengthen between a neuronal group and its preferred source, the authors explain, mutual information increases between the neural system's inputs and outputs, lowering its overall free energy.

How does a discriminating neuron make a discriminating brain?

Although it's well established that neural activity changes with experience, Isomura and colleagues have shown for the first time that neurons can invoke these learning mechanisms to recognize and discriminate information. Neural networks accomplished this impressive feat by performing unsupervised learning  adhering to ICA and free-energy principles  to self-organize via activity-dependent plasticity.

So how might these findings help you stay engrossed in your friend's tale of first date mishaps, amidst distraction? There are obvious differences between an integrated brain, which can direct its attention at will to a sound it deems meaningful and important, and a neuronal culture, which (presumably) lacks this power of guided attention. However, in both cases, a brain or neuron must decorrelate a mishmash of inputs. Although speculative, the authors propose that attentional shifts towards important information can only occur if the brain can distinguish sensory input, beginning at the level of discrimination by individual neurons. Further research will help to explain how feedback between attentional and sensory systems orchestrates this elegant goal-directed sensory filtering. Despite the sense that "tuning in" to a friend's voice is automatic and effortless, studies have shown that this is a learned skill acquired early during life. Like other forms of learning, developing this ability likely relies on the plasticity of neurons adapting and responding to their experiences.

To Isomura, it's "a fascinating mystery why people can learn faster than machine learning that typically needs huge training. Interestingly, some learning properties (e.g., speed) of culture networks are more similar to machine learning rather than human behavior, while they consist of living cells. Thus, a series of this kind of studies might have a potential to fill the gap."

Explore further First direct evidence for synaptic plasticity in fruit fly brain

More information: Bronkhorst AW (2015). The cocktail-party problem revisited: early processing and selection of multi-talker speech. Atten Percept Psychophys. 77(5):14651487. Bronkhorst AW (2015). The cocktail-party problem revisited: early processing and selection of multi-talker speech. Atten Percept Psychophys. 77(5):14651487. DOI: 10.3758/s13414-015-0882-9 Cherry EC (1953). Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears. J Acoustic Soc Amer. 25:975979. doi: dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1907229 Hohwy J (2014). The neural organ explains the mind. Open MIND. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group Isomura R, Kotani K, Jimbo Y (2015). Cultured Cortical Neurons Can Perform Blind Source Separation According to the Free-Energy Principle. PLOS Comp Biol. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004643 Jimbo Y, Tateno T, Robinson HPC (1999). Simultaneous Induction of Pathway-Specific Potentiation and Depression in Networks of Cortical Neurons. Biophys J. 76(2):670678. DOI: 10.1016/S0006-3495(99)77234-6 Plude DJ, Enns JT, Brodeur D (1994). The development of selective attention: a life-span overview. Acta Psychol. 86(2-3):227272 Tsien JZ, Huerta PT, Tonegawa S (1996). The essential role of hippocampal CA1 NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity in spatial memory. Cell. 87(7):13271338. DOI: 10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81827-9 Journal information: PLoS Computational Biology

This story is republished courtesy of PLOS Blogs: blogs.plos.org.
An outbreak of swine flu has claimed some 22 lives in Russia's second city Saint Petersburg and combined with high rates of seasonal flu to force authorities to close schools and send residents flocking to pharmacies.

Saint Petersburg has recorded the highest number of swine flu deaths in an outbreak that has claimed some 80 victims nationwide since the start of the winter, according to AFP calculations based on statements by regional officials.

Authorities say there are treating some 12,000 people with flu symptoms every day and up to 80 percent of these cases could be swine flu, also known as the H1N1 virus.

To stop regular flu and the H1N1 virus from spreading, the city's primary schools will be closed for two weeks from February 1, and some parents have already taken action.

"I don't want to take any risks," said Lyubov Anikanova, who has refused to send her daughter to school over fears she could catch the flu.

"We are hearing that swine flu is very dangerous this year."

Russian officials have tried to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak with health minister Veronika Skvortsova saying Monday that the swine flu situation in the country was "completely under control."

The country's top doctor said on Tuesday that the recent uptick in flu figures was not out of the ordinary.

"The incidence of flu is above average in some regions," the country's top doctor, Anna Popova, told Interfax news agency. "But overall the number of cases does not exceed the average over many years."

Rush at the drugstore

Despite the assurance from officials the recent flu cases have seen residents of Petersburg head to drugstores to stock up on medication and masks, emptying the shelves of pharmacies across town.

Some chemists have now already run-out of prescription flu medication and other flu-season essentials.

"We haven't had many popular medications for a week now," said pharmacist Natalia Selezneva.

Health authorities have pledged to restock pharmacies with 100,000 masks and flu medication to face increasing demand.

"I would like to resist the panic," 67-year-old pensioner Maya Yakovleva told AFP. "But right now, the flu is everyone's favourite topic: where to buy (medicine), the number of people who have died. It seems this is all we talk about."

Explore further At least 50 deadly swine flu cases reported in Russia

 2016 AFP
Credit: Flickr

Society views men struggling with depression with compassion and understanding, while men view their problems in a very negative light, according to a new study from UBC, funded by the Movember Foundation.

Study lead author John Oliffe says the men tend to think of themselves as a burden to other people and a disappointment.

The study surveyed 901 men and women across the country360 had direct experience with depression or suicide and 541 didn't.

"While it was reassuring to find that Canadians in general don't stigmatize male depression or suicide, it was concerning that the men with depression or suicidal thoughts felt a strong stigma around their condition, and many were afraid of being discovered," said Oliffe, a UBC nursing professor who focuses on men's health.

That fear and anxiety about speaking out can prevent men with depression from seeking help and deepen their feelings of isolation.

"Social isolation is one of the biggest risk factors for male suicide," said John Ogrodniczuk, co-lead author and UBC psychiatry professor. "By reaching out, even with a simple question like 'how are you doing?' or offering to do something together, such as taking in a game, we can help reduce the risk of self-harm."

Resources like www.headsupguys.ca could also help to break down some of the stigma around depression. Ogrodniczuk also recommends gender-specific health programs such as anti-stigma workshops focusing on male depression and suicide, and programs for school-aged children to challenge long-held stereotypes.

"We're looking at the issue of mental health through the male lens to ensure that the programs we fund and support are tailored towards men," said Jesse Hayman, Director of Community Engagement, Movember Canada. "Our goal is to help men live happier, healthier, longer lives, and this study supports the importance of helping men stay socially connected, so that they feel they have the support they need."

"Stigma in Male Depression and Suicide: A Canadian Sex Comparison Study" was published in December 2015 in the Community Mental Health Journal. To download a copy, click here.

Explore further Male desire to be strong and protect family key to preventing suicides: study
The MERS coronavirus has killed a man in the United Arab Emirates, the Abu Dhabi health authority said on Tuesday.

The 73-year-old was confirmed to be infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) earlier this month and also infected a woman who has since recovered, the authority said in a statement carried by WAM state news agency.

In June 2014, UAE authorities said MERS had killed 10 people and infected 68 others in the seven-member federation since March 2013.

Neighbouring Saudi Arabia remains the country worst hit by the virus, with 1,286 cases of infection and 551 deaths, according to Saudi authorities.

Globally, there have been 1,630 confirmed cases and 586 fatalities, according to the World Health Organization.

MERS is considered a deadlier but less transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that appeared in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine percent of whom died.

Like SARS, it appears to cause a lung infection, with patients suffering coughing, breathing difficulties and a temperature.

MERS differs in that it also causes rapid kidney failure.

Explore further Oman reports first MERS death in nearly a year

 2016 AFP
Check out my other blog Among Other Things where non-gender issues are discussed. Anything from politics to culture to sports will be there and it will be updated more frequently than it was before. Also petitions that are not related to gender issues will also be there i.e. politics,free speech,limiting government and more so check it out on a regular basis.

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We have petitions that need signing so when you go to a post and it's a petition post we would really appreciate it if you sign it. Signing these petitions is contributing good to society for when you do sign them you are standing up for justice and reining in tyranny so if you haven't please take the time to sign them. Rein in the tyranny before it reins you in. Sign today.
Georgia joins Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank opening ceremony in China

Georgias Finance Minister Nodar Khaduri has joined top officials from 57 countries to celebrate the opening of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in China.The China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank opened Saturday in Chinas capital Beijing.The 57 member nations, including Georgia, have contributed $100 billion in capital to the AIIB, making it nearly half the size of the World Bank as it begins operations. China provided 30 percent of the new bank's capital, the largest share.While visiting China, Khaduri has met the AIIBs President, Jin Liqun, to discuss potential investment projects.At the meeting, Georgias Finance Minister expressed his readiness to be actively involved in the Banks activities.The AIIB is an international financial institution that supports economic development and improves infrastructure in Asia, as well as promoting regional partnerships and establishing cooperative relationships with other financial institutions.Georgia joined the AIIB as a founding country on June 29, 2015. Georgia was the 45th country to join the AIIB.Georgia became the first country to ratify the founding document of the Bank.By joining the AIIB, Georgia will be able to attract preferential financial resources for implementing infrastructural projects.Supposedly one of the first projects financed by the AIIB will be implemented in Georgia.Georgia has also hosted the sixth round of negotiations of the AIIB on August 24-25, which elected the Banks first president.At a negotiators meeting, member shareholders chose Jin Liqun, Chinas former Vice Finance Minister, as president-elect of the AIIB.
Bringing inquisitive minds to Irelands shores

In the latest instalment of Metro Eireanns Meet The Boss, SANDY HAZEL speaks to Sylvia Katete Gavigan, an education recruitment consultant based in Dublin

Sylvia Katete Gav-igan, from Uganda, has been living in Ireland for the last 14 years. Gavigan came to Ireland to further her studies with a Masters degree in Management Consultancy from UCDs Smurfit School of Business, and she is currently pursuing PhD research on Ethnic Entrepreneurs in Ireland at DCU. Her company, International Educational Recruitment Consultancy, specialises in bringing prospective students  like she was  to Ireland for further study. She explains to Metro Eireann how she got started.



With my studies I was lecturing at third level, she says. I saw that Irelands colleges and universities were in need of third level students from countries outside the EEA (European Economic Area) as these students were able to pay fees. I saw that colleges could use the services of one who knew the colleges well and also had contacts in other countries.



There was a niche there. I spoke to the colleges and to students. It was very encouraging. I started finding the best way to bring international students into Ireland to do their third level studies.



Gavigan already has a good network of contacts around the world in the education sector. She also had some good experience with First Step, an entrepreneur support association in Ireland.



I am working with First Step as a consultant, and although I have had no financial set-up from them, their support has been good, she says. Seeing other ethnic entrepreneurs setting up, against odds, is inspirational. But more needs to be done.



Gavigan encountered some problems in setting up her own business: Lack of information, bureaucratic requirements for ethnic start-up business and Government policies in relation to business permits for minorities are not clear and balanced. While Africans can sell African food to Africans and run a good business, it turns into a different story when the immigrant wants to run a mainstream business. There are still gaps in this market. It is still not open enough.



Gavigan travels to Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Malawi giving presentations to prospective schools and students about the universities and colleges in Ireland. I asked my contacts to be my business partners in this project, which has worked well, she notes. They help with marketing around the colleges in their countries.

She explains about Ireland and the qualifications required to enter as a student, the level of English necessary and other details. The university and college then pay Gavigan a fee for recruited students.



At the moment Gavigan is recruiting students for the College of Business and Service Management on Upper Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin, and she has also supplied students for Portobello College in Dublin. She brings prospectuses from other Irish colleges too, and if the students are interested she will let that institution know.



So how does Gavigan react to the perception that international students are paying over the odds for the privilege to study here, that it is unfairly expensive for them?



I tell the prospective students that the fees are justified as the level of education and the standard of their degree will be very high, she responds. It will put them into the global marketplace for jobs. The universities here offer more than just education too, they offer excellent support networks and the social side of college life; the extracurricular clubs and societies are world class.



But I also tell students that it will not be easy. Although their families can afford to pay the college fees, the student will more than likely have to work to pay for their living expenses here. I explain that living in Ireland is not cheap.



The experience they gain by studying overseas is wonderful, it opens the mind. I will open up Ireland to the world as a place to learn.



Gavigans own spare time is spent developing her charity the Childrens Educational Development Fund, which has been set up to raise funds for children in her home village of Lwanunda Masaka.



We are running a Christmas event at the Teachers Club on Parnell Square, Dublin on Saturday 15 December to raise money for these children, many who have been orphaned by Aids.



Anyone who can come please contact me at skgavigan@yahoo.com.
Going the extra mile for Nigerians in Ireland

In the latest instalment of Metro Eireanns Meet The Boss, SANDY HAZEL speaks to Adebayo Adeniyi, owner of Baymar Cargo, which ships from Dublin to Nigeria

Adebayo Adeniyi is from Nigeria and has been in Ireland for seven years. When he first arrived, he was seeking asylum so he could not work. I went to college to study media and marketing at the Dublin Business School, he explains. I studied there for four years and got my BA degree there.



At that stage my wife Mariam and I had a child and so we applied for the permit for residency. I then started to apply for various positions but found it difficult, as everywhere I went they were looking for previous experience. It was a catch-22 situation as I needed to build up that experience.



But Adeniyi was undaunted. It was then that I decided to run my own business, he says. I did a course with the Blanchardstown Partnership, which involved mentoring. I learned about how to negotiate the Irish business world, how to develop contacts and how to keep accounts in order. It was a valuable course.



I also attended a course run by Emerge, which was good for learning networking. This course helped me to develop my idea for the business and to figure out if it might work.



Adeniyi decided to develop a cargo business which would deliver goods to Nigeria  the result was Baymar Cargo.



I did a lot of research and spoke to people all over Ireland, he says. I went to the churches to advertise my business too. I went to Dundalk and to other places outside of Dublin to get customers and agents. I found that the big city like Dublin is well catered for with cargo companies but that there are also customers to be found outside the city.



Adeniyi finds that word-of-mouth is one of the best ways to get business. I am also an agent for Checkpoint, a money transfer service which is a good service for Nigerians living in Ireland, he says. Providing this service also allows Adeniyi to network and build up contacts.



Many of the items that we ship are things such as used computers and used clothing, he explains. These things have a high value to families and businesses in Nigeria but are relatively cheap to obtain here and to ship, so it is a value-added exercise, recycling at its best. These goods are not for resale  they are being donated. Good use is made of these items.



My business will take items and use an agent at the airport to handle goods to ensure clearance on the way to Nigeria. I employ the agent to organise customs and paperwork. We find that the Nigerian customs are very strict about certain items and will not allow any contraband, so we have to be sure that we are not carrying it at all as that would reflect badly on the business. Foodstuffs also are not allowed. At the Nigerian end, the recipient can either pick the item up at my contact depot or we will deliver directly to the address in Lagos.



One of the problems Adeniyi faced when starting up his cargo business was the attitude of lenders. I learned that it may be possible to obtain a business loan to help me get started, he says, but when I applied I was told that it would not be feasible as my business had not been established enough. What is strange, though, is that the same bank would happily give me a personal loan if I had wanted one of those.



In the end, my wife and I are investing our own capital in the set-up. We are better off. It is working and I would never do anything else.
A taste of Italy in the heart of Dublin

In the latest instalment of Metro Eireanns Meet The Boss, SANDY HAZEL speaks to Bettina Rabbitte of Little Italy, a Dublin-based Italian food/wine importer

Bettina Rabbitte is Ireland born and bred, but with plenty of Italian connections. She manages a family-owned business called Little Italy, which sources and imports Italian food and wine and is situated at 139 North King Street, just off Smithfield Square.



My grandparents were Italian and came to Ireland in the 1930s, says Rabbitte. My grandfather started out making ice-cream at the Pillar Cafe and Ice-Cream Parlour on OConnell Street. His daughter married my dad, who is Irish, so I am half-Italian. My parents started this business in the old Smithfield Square, before this premises was established.



Rabbitte went to school at Holy Faith in Clontarf and finished her education at the Dublin Business School, and admits that studying the theory of business was not quite the same as being in business.



It [theory] doesnt exactly prepare you for the real world. The theory and the practical are different. All the time I was at school and in college I would be helping out in the shop. I would be at the till, dealing with customers and working on the deli counter, answering the phone, taking orders. This is great experience.



After I finished college I started here properly. My sister had been managing it previously. Things really started to pick up during the 1980s and 1990s. During the World Cup in particular there was great interest in all things Italian. People were going to Italy and coming back with an interest in Italian food and wine.



There is plenty to keep Rabbitte busy: As soon as we got more organised I moved into the purchasing and accounts which needs attention to detail. While we import directly from Italy and then sell on to hotels, coffee shops, restaurants nationally, we also do retail business from our shop, offering Italian food and wine to the public. There are many other logistics involved. We deliver nationally and have a fleet of between six and eight trucks. It takes a lot of organising between taking delivery and organising times, dates and drivers.



One of the main perks of the job is the buying trips to Italy, a place that Rabbitte obviously loves. Yes, I have been twice this year and I will use the time to also catch up on family that is still there - we still have cousins that we will call on. I also love buying and making the decisions on what will be on the shelves. I also enjoy trade shows and getting our name out there.



The downside at the moment is that there is some more competition in the marketplace: There is definitely extra competition now that wasnt there a few years ago, says Rabbitte. There are Polish shops and Asian shops and speciality shops everywhere now, but we have decided to stay Italian. Plans for the future include a possible expansion to Galway.



And what is her expert tip on the best Italian food in town? I like Italian food too much. Nicos on Dame Street is one of Dublins oldest Italian restaurants and I have recently discovered the new Bar Italia in the IFSC. They do pretty good pizza.
Part 40: The path least travelled (part 18)

Metro Eireann presents the latest weekly column by the entrepreneur coach and business growth specialist, designed to help you overcome any obstacles and reach your dreams

Previously: Deciding to go back to nature, our four travellers have decided that a spot of fishing is called for. And as always, a lesson has been learnt by the team. The maxim Do onto others as you would have them do onto you does not always apply, especially if others do not like the same things as you do. In order to get the most out of life and get on with people, to have them help you on your journey, it pays to try to understand what it is that they like



I rather fancy continuing this nature thing, said Nunco, so why dont I go back the way we came? I saw some bilberry bushes as we came down the mountainside, they look quite like blueberries, and they are very tasty.



How do you know they are not poisonous? asked Preteritus. I was always brought up to avoid eating wild berries.



Interesting, mused Nunco, how what we have been told can influence our lives so strongly. Would you in any way feel that what we believe, without knowledge, could affect what we can actually get out of life?



Yes I do! exclaimed Electra, rather excitedly. Its just like the dont talk to strangers phrase we discussed before. This can lead to people later on in life being afraid of public speaking, until they are finally made to realise where that fear comes from.



So in effect, what youre saying, added Prostremo, not wanting to be left out of the conversation, is that beliefs you take on blindly  lets say on faith, without actually experiencing the truth or indeed the lack of truth in them  can limit what you achieve?



Exactly! said Nunco. In fact, many people refer to this blind faith as a limiting belief.

A great example of this is a story about a new wife, who was cooking a joint of pork for her husband. He happened to be in the kitchen when she was preparing the joint for the oven. Before adding the usual seasoning and slices of garlic under the fat after scoring the skin with a sharp knife, she cut off both ends of the joint.



The husband wanted to know why she did that, which to him seemed rather a strange thing to do, but assumed that since she was Irish and he was from an other country, this may have been an Irish custom he did not know about yet.



The wife told him that she guessed it might have been Irish, but she was not sure as her mother had always done it. The husband appeared to accept this, but in the back of his mind, being a stubborn beast, he vowed to get to the bottom of it.



About three weeks later they were asked over to dinner by her mother and grandmother. After the usual chit-chat, the wifes mother went into the kitchen to put the final touches on the meal.



As luck would have it, she was preparing a roast pork joint, along with the usual Irish trimmings such as, carrots, peas, roast potatoes, mash potatoes, apple sauce and lashings of gravy!



As the husband sidled into the kitchen, his mother-in-law was taking the pork out of the oven to cut off the fat for the roast potatoes, to give them a nice crunchy crackling. He noticed the ends of the joint, now slightly browned, were also cut off. He innocently asked why she cut the ends of the joint.

Somewhat perplexed at the question, she replied in the same vein as her daughter, telling him that she had watched her mother do it when she was a child, and funnily enough had never thought to ask why. She reckoned that it was just an old Irish custom.



Not giving up, the husband decided that he would wait for the appropriate time to ask the grandmother where she had come across this custom. After a sumptuous dinner, settling back with a coffee and a delicious home made chocolate, the opportunity arose when his wife and her mother left the room to clean up the kitchen. Seizing his opportunity, the husband asked the grandmother.



It was simple, she replied, telling him that when she had first got married, she and her husband had not much money. Her mother before her had taught her to always buy the largest joint of pork, as roast pork would keep for a long time.



However, she only had two small roasting dishes, so she would cut the ends off the joint so that she could fit it into one of the dishes, while the two ends were roasted separately with the roast potatoes.



What this means, said Electra. Is that the custom, which was passed down through practicality, was now resulting in a poor practice due to the limiting belief that this was the best way to cook a joint of pork?



So, going back to the original issue of Pre eating or not eating wild berries, said Nunco, what would make more sense for him to believe would be to ensure that he only eat wild berries that he knows are safe and are not poisonous!



Does that mean we have to experience everything for ourselves, then? asked Preteritus.

On the contrary. replied Nunco. We cannot be experts at everything in life, so it makes sense to consult with someone else who does know the answer.



Like the wife in your story, said Prostremo. She asked her mother the reason and yet she accepted half an answer, since her mother was not the actual expert.



As so many people do in life, added Nunco. They just take the answer that seems the easiest to accept, without question. This way they do not need to delve any further and their life can continue trudging on.



Remember, it is the path least travelled that has the most difficult passage, yet it is often the one that holds the greatest rewards, because down this path are opportunities for learning and discovery, since the way has yet to be picked clean of goodness by hoards of people preceding you.



Thanks for the lesson in philosophy, Nunco, said Preteritus. Can we go now and get these bileberry thingies? Ill even go with you so that I can learn, and more importantly  Im bleeding starving!



Great, lets go, said Nunco. And to start the learning process, they are actually called bilberries, blueberries or frochans!



Whatever, replied Preteritus sullenly.

While you are gone, said Electra, Prostremo and I will cook the fish.

I hope thats all you cook! said Preteritus, with another of his knowing grins.



Nunco and Preteritus headed together back up the path they had come down earlier, and after about 200 metres, they branched off, slightly up hill. The going got more difficult as they were no longer on an deer track which, as Nunco explained, would ensure they had a better chance of finding some berries, since the animals had not yet eaten them.



Everything was fine for about 30 metres, until Preteritus tripped over a rock hidden in the heather. Mouthing a string of purple obscenities, he got up and looked down at his hands, which were stained in a mottled pattern, with a kind of purplish coloured dye.



Oh no! he exclaimed. Looks like Ive just landed in some rabbit droppings!

Let me see, said Nunco, taking hold of Preteritus hand and looking at his palm where the stains were. Aha, looks like youve found some bilberries!



Crouching down to look at the little bushes  about the same size as the heather, with small oval leaves, green and mottled brown, with slight serrations  Nunco could see the small berries. They were about the size of a blackcurrant, their bluish skin slightly cloudy, yet shiny where he had held it picking it from the bush. Eating the first one, he picked another couple and handed them to Preteritus.



Are you sure that these are okay to eat? asked Preteritus

At that moment Nunco, giving a slight groan, suddenly collapsed into the heather, clutching his side, a small trickle of purple saliva dripping from the side of his mouth as he writhed on the ground.

Oh my God! shouted Preteritus. Are you okay Nunco? Answer me! Are you okay? What happened?!



To be continued next week

peter@3r.ie
Part 27: The path least travelled (part 5)

Just because we dont know that something exists does not necessarily mean that it is not actually there. Indeed, our three friends have discovered that the three earlier travellers, who had been presumed lost, are alive and well.

In an instant, many of the fears of failure that Preteritus was entertaining have been proved to be without foundation. Prostremo is already looking into the future again by asking if the treasure their predecessors found has met their expectations. Of the three, Nunco is the most relaxed since he is firmly rooted in the present, while his friend Prostremo is always searching for answers in the future and Preteritus spends his life fighting the demons of his past.



As our three friends sat down, sipping their tea, Santiago  one of the three travellers once thought to be lost  continued his tale. It is important before I start that you all really want to hear our story, he said. If any of the three of you is unsure about knowing the outcome, then will I not tell any of you about our journey or the treasure!



Indeed, he continued, unless you all have the same burning desire to find this treasure, no matter what you believe it actually to be, I cannot tell you. And what is more, you are probably also wondering what we have done with the treasure as well. So before I start to tell you our story, let me ask you the following question. Do you know what you are looking for? I mean do you know exactly what the treasure you are seeking looks like?



Yes! shouted Preteritus and Prostremo simultaneously, while Nunco said No. His friends, who had been so sure what they were looking for only moments before, started at Nunco in amazement.



The third traveller, a man of medium build balding slightly whose name was Andreas, interjected: How will you recognise the treasure when you find it?



Preteritus and Prostremo were silent, pondering this question, but Nunco answered. Because it will let itself be known to me.

I think, he added hesitantly.



Nunco, a man of few words who had never seemed unsure about anything before, continued: I feel intuitively that there is something I need to find and I dont yet know what it is. By being with my two friends I am already finding something amazing in their company. I cant however put my finger on what exactly the treasure is. I feel that to try and understand it now would be like running after a rainbow to find the pot of gold.



I normally know exactly what I want and set out to achieve it. And yes, I do want to find the treasure. But now that you ask, it seems almost amazing to me, that I have not clearly identified the reason for my journey. And yet again I know I must keep going. Does that make any sense to anyone?



Preteritus and Prostremo looked at each other curiously.

My apologies, my friends, said Santiago. I really seem to have opened a can of worms here. But dont let that upset you, as we were in the exact same position ourselves, which leads me back to my story.



He was about to continue when Preteritus suddenly got up and ran back along the path that they had come from. Nunco ran after him, while Prostremo stayed where he was and asked Santiago to continue with the story.



I cannot continue, said Santiago, because I must tell it to the three of you or none at all. And what is more, you all must deeply want to know what we found.



Meanwhile Nunco, out of breath, finally caught up with Preteritus back at the mountain stream that they had passed earlier. What is up, my friend? he enquired, looking at his travelling companion with concern.

I have ruined it all, said Preteritus. I just dont want to hear what it is they have to say. Maybe their treasure is different to ours; maybe knowing what they found will mean that what I am looking for will not have the same magic.



Oh, why did I run away? Now they wont tell us at all, and I have ruined it for you and Prostremo. Especially him; I know he wants to know, he always wants to know everything, its like he wants his whole life planned out  isnt it, Nunco?

And what is important in your life, Preteritus?



I want to avoid making the same mistakes that I have always made. I go over and over them in my head, its as though I feel I can undo the past if I focus on it enough.

And can you? 



Okay, Nunco, I know, you are always suggesting that I should enjoy where I am right now. But come on, get real, how can I possibly be happy right now? Look what I have gone and done, I have just ruined it for everyone! Oh, I wish I hadnt. Oh, why did I do it? I am always making a mess of things, arent I?



How has running out here, apart from making me feel knackered, actually harmed anyone? aid Nunco.



Because now we will never know what treasure these guys found.

Is that important?



Well, I guess it was for Prostremo, I saw the look he gave me; I bet he is right now trying to persuade Santiago to tell him the story. He always does that, doesnt he? He might have even set off already to get a head start on us.



In fact, added Preteritus, that is probably why I didnt want to hear about it at all. What If I had been wrong and Prostremo was right? I would never have heard the end of it. In fact I dont know why I am feeling guilty at all, it really is his fault.



His fault? queried Nunco.

Okay, so I cant really blame him, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if I could, wouldnt it?

Would it be easier because then you would not be blaming yourself and thus you could avoid what we often classify as guilt?



Okay, youre right Nunco, I cant blame him at all, I just hate feeling guilty, because I know it is really my fault and that feeling really burns one up.



So, decide now not to feel guilty then. After all, we can never now know what would have happened since it has all passed, so does feeling guilty make you feel better?

Of course not, how could feeling guilty make anyone feel good? 



You are right, you can never feel good feeling guilty  so maybe instead, you could start looking at what good can come of this. Do you want to give that a try? 



Hang on Nunco, are you saying I should just forget all about this and treat it like it never happened?



No, he replied. I am asking you what lesson you can learn from it, as a way to actually make you feel better.



Well, if we knew what the treasure was and we did not want it, we would have nothing left to strive for, mused Preteritus.



As Preteritus started to relax and start thinking about what good could come out of his bolting, the two of them headed back to the others. Preteritus actually felt himself looking forward to collecting Prostremo and continuing on their adventure. Nunco started thinking how important it was that no matter what it is you seek, you can still live and enjoy each moment.



Maybe part of the treasure was the journey itself  after all, without winning the Lotto you cant suddenly materialise 1m euro out of the air, you actually have to work for it. The more you work for something that you truly love doing, the easier earning your riches will become.



Nunco was starting to share these thoughts with Preteritus as they rounded the corner. When they returned to the others, however, they found only the three travellers. Prostremo and Electra were nowhere to be seen



To be continued next week

peter@3r.ie
Ownership and responsibility

Whos really in charge of running your business?Founder of OBriens Sandwich Bars, BRODY SWEENEY, continues his series on how to cope with the stresses and strains of starting a new enterprise

Starting up the OBriens business was by far the hardest thing I have ever done in my now fairly long life. I thought I knew it all. I had spent eight years running the Prontaprint business in Ireland, knew about the importance of site selection, had gained some experience in retail marketing and had developed a sound business concept. I knew the importance of a good business plan, and having enough money for the project (although in the business textbooks, I had never come across my particular method of fund-raising!). I had that youthful male arrogance which said that I knew everything, that nobody else could teach me anything, and that I was so good at what I did that I simply couldnt fail. In short, external factors aside, there was no reason for the business not to succeed.



But it didnt succeed. The early years of the business were disastrous: not just bad but chronically awful. And worse than that, there was nobody else to blame: I had started, stirred and created the mess I was in myself. Sure, I could have blamed the banks, or the fact that the market wasnt ready for our products, or that my competitors tried to put me out of business, but in truth my problems were of my own making. The first positive step I took in terms of sorting things out was to admit to myself that I hadnt been very good at it thus far.



Few people mention the driver factor when starting a new business. The driver of the business is the person who dreams up the idea, executes it, and steers the business during its formative years. Comm-entators talk about the success of a new business venture being dependent on the state of the economy, or the market for widgets, or the need to secure the necessary finance, or the technical qualities of a particular product compared with what is already in the market. You hardly ever hear people talking about the ability of the companys founder to run the damned thing. External factors always have some influence on the success of a venture, but the single most important factor in my experience is the quality of the driver, or owner, of the business.



Our second OBriens store in the UK was opened in Cambridge by a young couple called Rob and Carol Shields. It was the couples first ever attempt to run their own business. Prior to joining OBriens, Rob  a Geordie  had worked as a clerk of works involved in motorway construction. I think they were very brave. Here they were, moving to a strange town to set up a new business for the first time, with a fledgling Irish sandwich-bar chain that had yet to prove itself in Britain. I visited Cambridge with them and walked the streets of the city to try to find a suitable location for the store. After some months of searching, we found a good

location not far from the city centre, just outside the gates of one of the university colleges.



We opened the store in 1996, and Rob and Carol worked extremely hard to try to make the business a success. But six months after opening, it wasnt really happening. Sales were less than anticipated, and the money the couple had borrowed from the bank was running out.



Rob and Carol were concerned; I was very concerned, as there was a real possibility that the problem was our new Irish brand. Often, when a new store isnt working, it can be apparent that the new operators are having personal difficulties running the store. But in this case, I was convinced that Rob and Carol were doing an excellent job. This was why I was so worried.



A meeting was arranged in Cambridge with Rob and Carols financial advisers, and we debated what to do about the situation. I was stumped. These were good people, trying to operate the business according to the approach laid down in our operations manuals, and it wasnt working. Because theirs was one of the first stores in Britain, I began to have doubts about the viability of the OBriens concept in the UK. Maybe people didnt like the Irish brand, or the sandwiches. The meeting was inconclusive, and I returned to Ireland seriously concerned about the whole future of the company in the UK.



Meanwhile, Rob realised that he was in trouble and that if he didnt do something about it, he was going to go bust. To his credit, he never blamed OBriens for his predicament, but as far as I was concerned, we were very responsible for the situation he and Carol found themselves in. We had persuaded them to trust us with their life savings, and we were letting them down.



Rob decided that the business was not going to survive on the store sales alone, so he put on his best bib and tucker and started knocking on doors in the area, offering a delivery service for meetings and the like. His positive attitude to getting out there and doing whatever it took to succeed made the crucial difference. Slowly, he began to turn the business around. Soon afterwards, the store started to break even overall, and they were on their way. Today, Rob and Carol are enjoying the fruits of their success after building up and selling four OBriens units in Cambridge.



Rob and Carol should, by rights, have failed. They had every excuse to do so. But Rob took ownership of the problem and succeeded where many people would have given up. I have no doubt that a lesser person than Rob would not have survived to tell the tale. It proved to me forever more the importance of the driver.



Cash is king

Cash has rightly been described as the oil that makes the wheels of commerce turn. You can be so busy running around doing other things that keeping an eye on the cash slips way down the priority list, until its too late to do anything about it.



A surprising number of businesses run out of cash before they become established. There are many and varied reasons for this, from having little or no credit control so that some customers take advantage of you, to not making sure youre achieving the margins you need in order to generate enough cash. Lack of cash control signifies lack of control of the business; this means that theres no one in charge.



Next week: Ownership and responsibility continued



_ Taken from Making Bread  The Real Way To Start Up and Stay Up in Business by Brody Sweeney, published by Liberties Press  buy at www.libertiespress.com and get a 10 per cent discount
My reputation is important to me

In the latest instalment of Metro Eireanns Meet The Boss, SANDY HAZEL speaks to Mustapha Aboubi, owner of The Olive Tree restaurant in Castlebar

Mustapha Aboubi, from Algeria in North Africa, came to Ireland 11 years ago for a holiday; he liked the mellow and down to earth life that he found here, and decided to stay. Soon after he met his wife Patricia, from Mayo, and the couple settled in Castlebar.



Aboubi had originally trained as a catering consultant in the UK, in the business of helping others to set up their businesses in the catering industry. From start to finish he would guide restaurateurs in planning and setting up restaurants. But on his arrival in Ireland, there was very little call for this business at the time, so he applied for work as a chef.



I was overqualified and it was apparent when I applied for other jobs, he says. They would look at my CV and see my work history. I was seen as a threat to head chefs in different restaurants and so I wasnt getting the work. At the time England, where I had worked previously, was more advanced than Ireland in the catering and restaurant industry, so I was more advanced in my skills.



Aboubi eventually got a job in a cafe: It was okay but it didnt really suit me as my job was really more upper-class, I only stayed a week. But people said to me you have to start somewhere.



As luck would have it, a head chef position came up at The Grapevine in Galway where Aboubi could build up his reputation and make the right contacts. A consultancy came through this position. and Aboubi became the driving force behind the opening of an Italian restaurant called The Leaning Tower. He was on his way, but getting restless.



I got sick of working for people and decided it was time to do it on my own, he says. I wasnt being appreciated. My reputation is important to me.

In 1999 Aboubi saw an opening in the area for a Mediterranean food shop and deli. With assistance from Enterprise Ireland in the form of an interest free loan, Aboubi was able to meet with all safety standards in relation to the premises he had found and its food preparation areas. A take away and outside catering happened then. The operation  which also included a take-away and outside catering  became so successful that Aboubi took over the premises next door to expand into a full restaurant, The Olive Tree.



The camera-shy Aboubi employs three staff from Latvia and North Africa at The Olive Tree, which has received rave reviews and is changing the way people in the area think about Mediterranean food.



The success he has achieved here is not just down to hard work. According to Aboubi, the customer is king. You can work all you like and still not have a successful business, he explains. You must first of all get the clients, then you must keep them. But you must not just look to what is in the customer's pocket; you must first look to what is in his heart and what he wants. The customer pays for the mortgage and pays the bills. Once you look after the customer, then you will be a success.



However, success isnt everything. You really need to know where to draw the line, says Aboubi. When you are self-employed there is a temptation to work every hour in the week. But what is the point? You must also know when to stop and close the door. Spending time with family is what I do when I go home to relax.



Aboubi feels that the mellow life that attracted him to Ireland is disappearing, and he claims it started to vanish when Sunday trading was introduced. Shopping is the new religion and shopping centres are the new cathedrals, he says. There is no sacred time off anymore and now it is all non-stop rush, even on a Sunday. Workers work all week and yes it can be handy to have the possibility to shop on a Sunday, but Sundays are the busiest day of the week now. It is a shame.
In the latest instalment of Metro Eireanns Meet The Boss, SANDY HAZEL speaks to James Anderson, proprietor of Pegas Computers in Dublins north city centre

James Anderson is originally from Liberia, and has been in Ireland for 10 years. Anderson studied Electrical Engineering to third level in Liberia but he furthered his studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology, gaining three more years of Electronics and Telecommunications. A stint with Gateway Computers in north Dublin gave Anderson valuable experience in the industry, but when they closed he used the opportunity, and the redundancy package, to his advantage.

Anderson explains: I wanted to start up a business. I had the redundancy package but I also used my credit card. An expensive way to start it seems  why not go to the bank for a loan? Back then it was harder, he says. The banks could see that I did not have a business record so I funded it from my own pocket. My family also helped. Now that the business is running it would not be a problem to get a loan. Using the credit card to buy supplies, it was tough at the start, until a good relationship was established with suppliers and companies. That card loan is now well paid off.

Metro Eireann asked Anderson the reason why he chose a computer shop  isnt that an area well served with plenty of competition? Yes it is. But in every small town or local area there is a need for a smaller computer company. I found a location where the bigger players are not around. It gives me an edge. Businesses in the area and people who live in the community here need a company that can provide IT services. Because we are smaller we offer a level of service that the big companies could never match.

His business, Pegas Computers, sells computers, software and accessories, and offers networking and software development, accountancy programming, web design and retail solutions. Anderson is also looking into chasing up bigger tender contracts that are put out regularly by the various government departments. Pegas is currently an IT provider for several CDVEC schools.

So business is looking good for Pegas Computers, but it was not always so. Anderson has learned from some past business decisions: I ventured into another business in a partnership and it didnt work out. I became wary then of working with anyone in that situation again. I lost money. Here at Pegas was tricky, too, at the start. Getting customers was really difficult. But once you supply a good service to a few, then their referrals to friends and families or back to their companies is invaluable. No amount of advertising can buy you that kind of business.

However Pegas does place adverts in national newspapers regularly. Anderson explains: Although we are a local operation we can and do supply nationally. Also, people who read national papers tend to be decision makers and the decision to buy or negotiate could come our way if they see our advert.

Pegas employs two full-time staff from Brazil and Nigeria, and Anderson is quick to point out that he could not commit to the business without the support of his wife Aislinn ORourke. He is keenly aware that family life can suffer if the business takes too many hours, so he is starting to take some weekends off now that they have a small child.

What advice does Anderson have for budding entrepreneurs? Start small, see how it goes and then expand.


WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DEMOCRAT PARTY? I can no longer remain in todays Demo Party that is now under the control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively undermine our freedoms, are hostile to people of faith, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after opponents.TULSI GABBARD
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@PatriciaMazzei

DES MOINES -- FOX News Channels monster TV ratings when it hosted the first Republican presidential debate back in August were undoubtedly helped by the fact that one of three moderators, Bret Baier, got the presidential candidates to make news with his very first question.

Is there anyone on stage  and can I see hands  who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party, and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person? Baier asked.

One man raised his hand: Donald Trump. Viewers were hooked.

If you remember, back then, that was the issue, and it was the question that everybody was talking about, Baier told the Miami Herald last week. It was shortly thereafter that [Trump] signed the RNCs pledge, even though he didnt do it on stage that night.

Now Baier gets to do it again, five months later, this time in the last GOP faceoff Thursday night before voting begins. Baier, the networks chief political anchor, will team up with co-moderators Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace in a Des Moines debate that will take place four days before the Iowa caucuses.

Eight candidates made the cut, Baier announced on Special Report with Bret Baier Tuesday from Des Moines: celebrity businessman Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Trump, unhappy once again with moderator Kelly and with the network, said later that he would boycott the debate. He had threatened to do so, which FOX had dismissed as a way to build up audience for the televised event. The network also called him a wise guy.

More here.
@ByKristenMClark

A plan to let Florida school districts and parents choose alternative tests in lieu of the controversial statewide assessments cleared its first Senate committee on Wednesday with strong bipartisan support.

But the state's top education official has voiced resistance to the idea, its chances appear bleak at getting heard in the Florida House and critics who oppose Common Core standards and high-stakes testing said the proposal doesn't go far enough to fix Florida's flawed education accountability system.

Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, said his bill (SB 1360) is about offering choice and eliminating duplicative testing -- not replacing the Florida Standards Assessments, which debuted last year with myriad technical and administration problems.

"If you want to repeal the FSA, this is not your bill," Gaetz said. "If you dont like tests that have consequences and measurements that have results, this is not your bill."

Acknowledging the FSA's "rocky start," Gaetz said his proposal "saves the infrastructure of accountability" Florida has for K-12 public education and it would save hours of teaching time spent on redundant assessments.
@PatriciaMazzei

DES MOINES -- Jeb Bush had an apology for the people assembled to see him Wednesday.

"I'm losing my voice," he said.

This, he conceded, was "not a good thing" five days before the Iowa caucuses. And, though he didn't mention it, a day before the last nationally televised debate before voting begins.

Bush soldiered on. He spoke to a couple hundred Nationwide Insurance employees, gathered in their downtown Des Moines regional office as part of the company's long-standing Civic Action Program, which has hosted presidential candidates -- including Bush's father and brother -- since 1980.

"I'm not an agitator-in-chief. I'm not the divider-in-chief. That's not my mission here," Bush said. "I hate it, in fact, to see politicians who make themselves look better."

When a woman in the audience what Bush would do first in the White House, he answered he would repeal Obama-administration rules that exceeded executive authority. Then he turned to the woman and asked her what she'd do in that position.

She didn't know, so he offered his email address -- jeb@jeb.org -- to follow up, noting he answered Floridians' emails as governor.

"Take me up on it," he said. "Try it out."
Former Maryland Gov. Martin OMalley, who is running a distant third in the race, has agreed to participate. Aides to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders did not immediately respond to questions.

In keeping with the best traditions of the New Hampshire primary, we have always believed that the voters of the Granite State deserve more than one opportunity to see their candidates for president debate side by side, said John Bivona, OMalleys New Hampshire state director. Thats why Gov. OMalley was the only Democratic candidate for president to consistently call out the DNC for its unprecedented role in silencing debate, and to lead the charge for more debates.

The Democratic National Committee had said any candidates who participated in non-sanctioned debates would not be invited to the official six. Four debates have been conducted, but the next DNC debate doesnt come until Feb. 11.

More here.
As Florida lawmakers decide the fate of the future of gambling in the state with the governor's proposed agreement with the Seminole Tribe, one unpleasant issue continues to emerge -- cannibalization.

It's the term used by state economists when one business feeds off the other to expand. The official definition: "creating demand for one product at the expense of another" and it is central to the success of any changes in state gambling law now being debated by lawmakers.

The proposed agreement signed by Gov. Rick Scott with the Seminole Tribe would allow the tribe to expand its casino games to include craps and roulette at its seven casinos, and add black jack at the two slots casinos that currently do not offer them. It also allows for the dog track in Palm Beach County to add slot machines and creates an opening for a fourth slot machine license in Miami-Dade County.

With each new gambling option allowed by law, the money must comes from somewhere and, state economists conclude, most of it comes from within the state -- either replacing the purchase of another good which would have been taxed in a different manner, or replacing what would have been spent on another gambling products.

A 2013 report by Spectrum Gaming Group, a New Jersey-based research firm hired by the Florida Legislature to assess the economic and social costs of expanded gambling in Florida, found that 93 percent of the gambling in the state is done by Florida residents, generating $2.4 billion in revenue for casinos.

"It matters not so much how much those two new slots generate but where the money comes from,'' said Amy Baker, head economist with the Legislature's Economic and Demographic Research at a workshop on the gaming compact at the Senate Regulated Industries Committee.

"If we say it's a shifting of the gambling dollars from one type of gambling to another, then the amount of money that you bring in would be less,'' she said. "It matters the location and the amount of money you bring in."
The Florida House smacked down a series of Democratic amendments aimed at weakening a bill that prohibits local governments from banning high pressure well stimulation known as fracking and positioned the bill for approval by the full House on Wednesday.

The amendments, by Reps. Mark Pafford, D-West Palm Beach, Jose Javier Rodriguez, D-Miami, Amanda Murphy, D-New Port Richey, Dwight Dudley, D-St. Petersburg, and Kristin Jacobs, D-Coconut Creek, would have allowed local governments to regulate the activity, impose testing of water quality and water wells, study the effects of the fracking chemicals on human health, and require local voter approval before fracking activities being.

Fracking involves the pumping of large volumes of water, sand and chemicals into the ground using high pressure to recover oil and gas deposits.

The bill, HB 191, is sponsored by Rep. Ray Rodriques and is being pushed by the oil and gas industry. But it is also vigorously opposed by environmental groups and 41 cities and 26 counties -- including Miami Dade and Broward counties.

A similar measure, SB 318, is also moving quickly in the Senate. According to an analysis by the Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau, the oil and gas industry contributed at least $443,000 to the political committees of top Republican lawmakers since the last election.

The top contributor, the Barron Collier Companies, which wants a permit to use hydraulic fracturing to drill for oil and gas in Naples, steered $178,000 to lawmakers since December 2014, including $115,000 since July. Other members of the petroleum industry have contributed another of $265,000 this election cycle.

Proponents of the bill said they won the support of the Florida Association of Counties and the League of Cities with a provision that postpones the prohibition on fracking bans until a study on the impact of the state's geology is completed in 2017.

After that, the bill allows the controversial practice to go forward with minimal local regulation but requires the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to enact rules to regulate and monitor the practice. The rules would then have to be ratified by the Florida Legislature.

A similar bill, by Sen. Garrett Richter, R-Naples, has passed one committee in the Senate, where the bill died last year.

Photo: Ray Kemble, a former fracking industry worker from Dimock, Penn., shows water from his and neighbors well after infiltrated by fracking chemicals.
From the Tampa Bay Times:

The Right to Rise super Pac backing Jeb Bush has released a new ad in Iowa that attacks Marco Rubio for his personal use of Republican Party of Florida credit card.

It is the first time an opponent has used the controversy surrounding the credit card in an attack ad.

For years, Rubio has tried to get past the scandal of his spending on the RPOF credit card when he was speaker of the Florida House. Last November, he took the unusual step of releasing nearly two years of American Express statements to show how he spent the party's money.

In the new commercial, Right to Rise says Rubio put "$22,000 in personal expenses on a Republican Party credit card.

Rubio's communications director Alex Conant told the Times, "It's pathetic that Jeb Bush's PAC would recycle this false attack that the establishment flopped with in 2010. Jeb Bush endorsed Marco in 2010 and recommended him to be vice president in 2012 knowing these issues are totally false and discredited. It's sad how this campaign has changed Jeb into a desperate establishment politician reaching for new lows in order to save himself."
@PatriciaMazzei

The Obama administration published new regulations Tuesday for U.S.-Cuba exports. Once again, the president's move to normalize relations between the two countries was slammed by Miami's Cuban-American Republican members of Congress, starting with Florida senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio.

"The Obama Administration's one-sided concessions to Cuba further empower the regime and enable it with an economic windfall," Rubio said in a statement. "These regulations are more proof that the Obama Administration's intent has never been to empower the Cuban people but rather to empower the Cuban government's monopolies and state-run enterprises.

"Our U.S. policy toward Cuba should be driven by our national security interests, securing greater political freedoms and defending the human rights of the Cuban people, none of which are advanced through Obama's latest concessions."

U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart also weighed in with a statement accusing President Barack Obama of trying to undercut the trade embargo that can only be lifted by Congress.

This brazen attempt to allow direct trade with the Castro regime has revealed fully that President Obama's policy has nothing to do with supporting the Cuban people but has everything to do with propping up a brutal, anti-American dictatorship 90 miles from our shores.

With political arrests surpassing 8,000 last year and brave political prisoners such as Vladimir Morera Bacallao, Danilo Maldonado Machado ('El Sexto'), and Misael Canet Velazquez nearly perishing in prison over the past several months, the Castro regime's human rights record remains the worst in our hemisphere. Shamefully, for the first time since the murderous Castro regime seized power decades ago, we have a U.S. president who repeatedly sides with the oppressors over the oppressed.

However, the majority in Congress and every Cuban-American member, whether Democrat or Republican, whether in the House or Senate, continues to fiercely oppose President Obama's appeasement of the Castro regime. In contrast to the President, we remain in steadfast solidarity with Cuba's true leaders -- the political prisoners and human rights activists who risk everything to demand change in Cuba. We will continue to oppose the Obama-Castro deals that undermine the Cuban people's struggle for freedom by supporting their jailers.
@doug_hanks

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez arrived for his State of the County address Wednesday to a phalanx of protestors from some old foes.

A line of about 60 people stood outside the Miami-Dade County Auditorium, chanting "ABC: Anyone But Carlos" and holding signs with anti-Gimenez messages. Inside, Gimenez prepared to give his final yearly address before facing reelection in 2016.

"We helped put him in. And we're going to help put him out," said Antonio Brinson, a Miami landscaper holding a placard saying Gimenez "doesn't give a damn about black people."

Brinson wore a neon yellow t-shirt with a similar slogan, part of the group protesting Gimenez's redevelopment plan for the Liberty Square housing project. There were joined leaders of the police and transit unions, honking taxi drivers protesting his push to legalize Uber, and members of the Pets' Trust group advocating more money for sterilization and animal programs.

"He adopted a rescue dog yesterday to make people think he loves animals," said Rita Schwartz, founder of the Pets' Trust group pushing for a special tax to fund animal services. She was referring to a tweet Tuesday from the mayor's account announcing he and his wife's adoption of a Shih Tzu named "Mercy" (short for Mercedes). "What the mayor is doing is just a facade."

Gimenez's 2016 rival, school board member Raquel Regalado, briefly greeted the protestors and then headed inside for the address. She plans a live rebuttal at a nearby restaurant afterwards
















@MrMikeVasquez

Miami lawmaker Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez blasted Floridas for-profit college oversight agency on Tuesday  questioning whether it has the political will to crack down on misbehaving schools.

Rodriguezs harsh words came nearly three months after the disastrous closure of Coral Gables-based Dade Medical College. Dade Medicals roughly 2,000 students were left in limbo because the school never gave the state a plan to teach out the students at another college, which is required by Florida law. Violating that law is a misdemeanor.

Floridas for-profit oversight agency, the Commission for Independent Education, has the power to refer Dade Medical owner Ernesto Perez to prosecutors because of how the closure happened. But so far, the CIE  which is dominated by for-profit college executives  has taken no action.

In a letter e-mailed to CIE Executive Director Samuel Ferguson, Rodriguez wrote he was deeply disappointed in the agencys response.

Most telling is the commissions repeated and continued failure to simply be available to students in Miami, wrote Rodriguez, who is a Democrat. Despite repeated assurances to me since early November that plans are underway to send staff to South Florida to meet with and assist affected students, three months after the closure we continue to wait.

Under its own agency rules, the CIE is supposed to send a staffer to any school that closes.
@NewsbySmiley

Miami's mayor says the city is finally on the verge of enacting police reforms mandated by the U.S. Department of Justice following a spate of police-involved shootings in 2011.

"We have an agreement with the Department of Justice, and we may have the attorney general in Miami to announce an agreement very soon," Mayor Tomas Regalado said Tuesday night, speaking to a group of Hadley Park homeowners.

Negotiations have been slow-going and at times contentious since Justice found in the summer of 2013 that Miami police had shown a pattern of "excessive force" when pulling the trigger. Federal authorities reviewed 33 police-involved shootings in Miami from 2008 to 2011 and found several were "unjustified." In one such case, in which an unarmed man was shot and killed during a hectic traffic stop, the city approved a $1 million settlement last year.

Justice ordered in 2013 that Miami police institute a series of reforms to be reviewed by an independent monitor. But while the city has already addressed some of Justice's broader concerns related to aggressive tactics, two-and-a-half years of talks have so far failed to yield any kind of an agreement.

Regalado says a deal is all but done. But police chief Rudy Llanes says expectations should be tempered.

"Close," he texted a reporter, "But no cigar yet."
@PatriciaMazzei

MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews is apparently worried about rival Fox News Channel's debate ratings.

When front-runner Donald Trump said Tuesday he'd skip Fox's Thursday night debate in Iowa, the Hardball host asserted a televised exchange led by Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz wouldn't be worth it. He chose to dismiss Cruz and Rubio as "the two Cuban guys."

"Who's going to watch a debate between the two Cuban guys?" Matthews asked a reporter who was at Trump's event in Marshalltown, Iowa. "Who's going to watch the debate between Rubio, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz? Who cares?

"Because, you know, they've been sort of fighting in this little inter-league fight over who's the hawkish guy, or whatever. Who's going to watch that Thursday night? Maybe I'm building it up too much."

Neither Rubio nor Cruz were born in Cuba and don't have Cuban citizenship. Rubio was born in Miami to Cuban parents. Cruz was born in Canada to a Cuban father and American mother.

Watch the clip here.
@ByKristenMClark

U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, plans to make a "major announcement" Friday morning in Pompano Beach with leaders of the Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA).

A media advisory from the campaign includes no details on the substance of the announcement, but it looks to be another endorsement for the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who continues to rack up endorsements from the party establishment and key interest groups.

Murphy is running in a competitive primary against fellow U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, of Orlando, who's drawing his support from progressives and grassroots donors. North Palm Beach attorney Pam Keith is also seeking the Democratic nomination.
@ByKristenMClark

A new statewide poll commissioned by the Florida Charter School Alliance finds significant support for charter schools -- including support for a statewide authorizer, one of the alliance's top legislative priorities this year that school districts fear would take away local authority over public education.

The Herald/Times was given a copy of the poll results ahead of their official release, expected later this evening.

The alliance spent nearly $11,000 for National Victory Strategies to conduct the poll not knowing what the results would be, said Ralph Arza, a lobbyist for the alliance and a former Republican state lawmaker from Miami.

It's the first statewide poll Arza said he is aware of that focuses solely on education policies for charter schools -- which are publicly funded but privately managed. The alliance wants to use the results to inform and influence lawmakers in Tallahassee and school officials across the state, he said.

"Its important for the members to see how the folks back home feel about charter schools and school choice," Arza said. "It's exciting to know you're on the right track and on the right side of these issues. Floridians want more choice not less, no matter where in the state."

But the poll isn't exactly unbiased. Some of the questions in the poll appear to lean in favor of charter schools -- Arza acknowledged writing them -- and the small sample size for community-level results could call into question the reliability of those specific findings.
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Parts of the sidewalks edge on the university side of the Madison Street Bridge have crumbled away, leaving a gap in one spot through which a wayward leg could fit easily and uncomfortably.

On the other side, Missoula's traffic services coordinator Wayne Gravatt plugged a hole through the walkway with an inverted orange cone early Monday  and figured it was time to call in the posse.

Major bridges like this one are built and repaired by the Montana Department of Transportation. Dave Crumley, bridge maintenance engineer for MDT, drove over from Helena on Tuesday to inspect the damage from a bucket lift.

"What we found is the sidewalk portions are structurally deficient," said Steve Felix, MDT's Missoula maintenance chief. "We've got support piers for the sidewalks that are not in very good shape."

"We won't be reopening the sidewalks any time soon," he added.

Felix stressed that the bridge itself remains safe to drive on. It's scheduled for an extensive rehabilitation in 2020, sidewalks and all.

"We were hoping to get it to that project, but we aren't going to be able to," Felix said.

Spalling  deterioration of the concrete caused by freeze-and-thaw cycles  has reached a point on both sides of a 60-foot section of bridge deck that walkways lining them are safety hazards. Some chipping underneath has occurred, though no one has reported bridge debris falling on them.

By Monday afternoon, would-be pedestrians at both ends and either side of the bridge were greeted by upright cones and signs that read Sidewalk Closed. Use Other Route. Luckily theres a good alternative  a $1.25 million under bridge for walkers and bikers that opened in 2006.

A section of the Ron MacDonald Riverfront Trail directly under the problem area has been barricaded off with an off-pavement detour assigned. Felix said the Missoula Parks and Recreation Department will install a chain-link fence in place of the barricades on Wednesday.

A complete repair plan had not been settled on by Tuesday evening.

The Madison Street Bridge, farthest upstream of five vehicular bridges that span the Clark Fork River in Missoula, was built in 1958 and last rehabilitated in 1981.

Why only one section of its sidewalks is deteriorating  the one above the riverside trail  is a matter of speculation.

"We're not totally sure," Felix said.

He and Crumley speculated it might have something to do with the railroad.

What's now the Riverfront Trail was once the bed of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific railroad  aka the Milwaukee Road  which ran trains powered by overhead electric lines from 1917 to 1974. The last Milwaukee train came through town in 1980, the year before the most recent bridge rehab.

A Missoula bridges planning study completed in 2014 recommended that the Madison Street and Higgins Avenue bridges be rehabilitated with new decks that include wider bike lanes and sidewalks. Downstream, the Russell Street Bridge is due to be totally replaced in 2017.

Shane Stack, MDTs Missoula project engineer, said that while work on the Madison Street Bridge is scheduled for 2020, "that can always change."

The Higgins Avenue Bridge project has yet to be scheduled, he said.
The Missoula County Attorney's Office has released a report on some of its activities during the past year, including insights and trends from the 1,687 cases its criminal division filed in 2015.

Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst said this is the first time a year-end report has been compiled by the office she now leads, and it is designed to increase transparency and provide the public with more detail on the types of cases her staff handles.

"Sometimes, people don't really understand that at any given time we have 1,600 open cases active," she said

The total number of criminal cases filed by the County Attorney's Office in 2015 is only a handful less than the previous year, although the number has fallen by more than 150 over the past four, largely due to fewer misdemeanor charges.

"Part of the decrease in misdemeanors is us backing off misdemeanor marijuana and putting those resources toward prosecuting felony drug charges," Pabst said.

More than any other issue, response to sexual violence defined Pabst's first year in office. Six months before she was sworn in, the Missoula County Attorney's Office reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to improve its attention to sexual assault cases with oversight by the state Attorney General's Office.

Part of Pabst's response to the agreement has been to form a special victims unit dedicated to working on crimes such as sexual and domestic violence. Pabst said such cases used to be handled by a single attorney at any given time, but four prosecutors and other staff members are now dedicated to them.

The SVU attorneys have gone through additional training and are given smaller caseloads to allow them to focus on sexual violence, which often can be more time-intensive to prosecute, Pabst said.

As part of the SVU, Jordan Kilby, a lawyer in the County Attorney's Office, is now co-located at the Missoula Police Department, working with investigators to examine possible cases and providing support to detectives even before those cases are referred to SVU prosecutors.

"That early communication improves cases and reduces the time it takes to investigate crimes," Pabst said.

Victims also go through a survey process asking how their case was treated by investigators and prosecutors, and Pabst said so far, they have had a 100 percent positive response.

In September, Attorney General Tim Fox issued a quarterly report about the agreement, praising Pabst's department for its advances.

"This report shows that our work together has resulted in a drastic decrease in the time it takes for the MCAO to make decisions and communicate with victims on sex assault cases referred for prosecution," he wrote.

Pabst said her office is working with Fox's to design curriculum to teach other communities in the state how to put together a special victims unit and re-examine policies about handling cases involving sexual violence.

The Missoula County Attorney's Office year-end report says it expectes completion of it agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in early 2016.

***

Of the cases the Missoula County Attorney's Office opened in 2015, 20 percent were drug crimes.

The number of methamphetamine cases was up 15 percent over the previous year, and up even more significantly  137 percent  compared with two years ago. Pabst said the rate of meth cases coming through her office has been on a steady rise, and that an uptick in heroin has been seen recently as well.

"We're seeing a huge increase in the amount of meth used in Missoula," she said. "In 2007, our numbers went down to almost zero, a lot of that due to the Montana Meth Project and other efforts to address the issue."

Another change related to meth use, Pabst said, is that most charges involving the drug before 2007 dealt with resulted from local production.

"Now, almost all of it is being imported from out of the county," she said.

Drugs are also a contributing factor to other types of crime the County Attorney's Office handles.

"We see a direct correlation between meth and child abuse and neglect and serious domestic abuse cases," Pabst said.

Child abuse and neglect cases have made a sharp turn upward, from 110 filed in 2012 to 173 in 2015. Pabst said the trend is disturbing, and last year she increased the number of civil division attorneys handling such cases to three.

"It doesn't look like it's going to taper off," she said.

Partly as a result of looking back at cases from the past year, the County Attorney's Office recently changed how it tracks crime statistics, adding the ability to attach different attributes, or "tags," to files.

These tags mean prosecutors will not only be able to look at the number of burglary or criminal endangerment cases filed, for example, but also will now be able to see if children were present or if a certain type of drug was involved.

"The total number is just a snapshot. It's more important to look at how that breaks down," Pabst said.
MISSOULA  Eugene Joseph Hertz, a longtime Missoula resident, passed away peacefully Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016. He was 84. Eug, as he was known to all who loved him, was born Aug. 7, 1931, in Glen Ullin, North Dakota, the second son of August Hertz and Anna Skalsky. Eugs maternal mother passed away when he was only 2 years old, and his father came to marry Albertina Doll, who he knew as his mother.

When Eug was a young boy, his father and Albertina moved to Charlo. Eugs childhood was spent constantly outdoors, working on the family farm with his beloved older brother Richard, and he was soon joined by brothers and sisters, Loretta, Erwin, Duane, Clem, Linda and Douglas. Eug was known as an accomplished horseman, and the family farm is where he learned the strong work ethic and love of fixing things that would accompany him throughout his life. He graduated from Charlo High School in 1952, and joined the Army. He was stationed in Germany during the Korean War.

In high school, Eug met the woman who would become his wife, JoAnn Johnston, and he loved telling stories of how he would help her milk the cows from her family farm so that he could take her on dates. Eug and JoAnn were married Nov. 26, 1955, at the DAste Catholic Church, and celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last year. Eug and JoAnn moved to Missoula after their wedding and raised seven children. Eug was a certified lumber grader at the Bonner mill for 35 years, and retired in 1992. Retirement brought him great satisfaction. He started a handyman business and loved helping people all over western Montana with their fix-it jobs. He also found time to eat plenty of doughnuts and drink coffee with his buddies.

Eugs proudest accomplishment by far were his seven children. He was a devoted, loving and supportive father, and will be so sorely missed by his family and friends. He is survived by his wife, JoAnn Hertz; their children, Judy Sackett and her husband Dave of Phoenix, Janet MacDonald and her husband Mike of Missoula, Rodney Hertz and his wife Sharlyn of Arlee, Raymond Hertz of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, Ronald Hertz and his wife Karla of Scottsdale, Arizona, Jolene Silveira and her husband Dave of Winters, California, and Jennifer Hertz and her husband Josh Cummings of Hingham, Massachusetts. He is also survived by 11 grandchildren. His first great-grandchild is due in April.

Eugs wish was to be cremated and his ashes spread at the foot of his fathers grave at the St. Ignatius Mission. A vigil for Eug will be held at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 29, at Christ the King Church, 1400 Gerald Ave., followed by a funeral Mass at 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, at the church. Following the funeral there will be a reception upstairs at the Iron Horse, 501 N. Higgins Ave.

The family wishes to thank Rocky Mountain Hospice, the Missoula Veterans Association and the staff at The Living Centre in Stevensville for their amazing support and assistance during Eugs last days.
STEVENSVILLE  Joseph Piazza passed away peacefully at the age of 86 Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016, while at Marcus Daly Hospital in Hamilton, surrounded by his loving family.

Born June 9, 1929, to John and Angelina (Russo) Piazza in Greenville, Pennsylvania, Joseph was the third of a sister and two brothers. As the son of a local businessman, Joe was always acutely aware of the importance of owning your own business. His father owned several businesses in Greenville, and Joe continued that tradition by owning and operating his own bar and restaurant, The Hilltop in Greenville, for several years after graduating from St. Michaels School in 1947.

He later was employed by Westinghouse Electric in Sharon, Pennsylvania, for 38 years as a group leader in the pipe-fitter division, retiring in 1984. His employment there was interrupted for two years of service in the Armys Military Intelligence Division during the Korean conflict; he was stationed in Germany.

After being discharged from the Army, Joe met Karen Jean Goodwill of Meadville, Pennsylvania, and they were married Jan. 31, 1955. They celebrated 39 years of marriage before she passed away in 1994. They raised their three daughters and remained in Sharon.

Joe was a lifelong member of several clubs, those being BPOE Lodge No. 145, VFW No. 3374 and the IUE Local No. 617. He was a member of St. Josephs Church in Sharon for many years. He was a devoted husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Family was the most important thing to him and after living in Pennsylvania for most of his life, he decided to move to Montana to be near family. Even though many miles separated him and his daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Joe always lived for the moments when we could all be together. He resided in Stevensville for the last five years, and boy, did he make the most of it! He was fond of saying, Big Sky Montana! I aint never leavin it! He lived with his two daughters, son-in-law and grandson and will be sorely missed.

He was also a member of St. Marys Parish in Stevensville and was an enthusiastic supporter of Sunday morning coffee hour through which he made many close friends!

He is survived by daughter, Theresa H. Kilmer and Bridget A. (Steve) Yazvac of Stevensville; daughter, Mia Piazza and son-in-law Les Hofius of Southern Pines, North Carolina; three grandchildren, Ivan J. Yazvac of Stevensville, Angela M. Pagliaroli of Butler, Pennsylvania, and Elizabeth R. Kilmer of Hermitage, Pennsylvania; two great-grandsons, Emeric O. and Carter C. Tillman of Hermitage, Pennsylvania; and brother, Cecil Piazza of Boulder City, Nevada.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Karen J. Piazza; brother, Samuel Piazza; and sister, Jennie Martin.

We would like to thank all the nurses, doctors and staff at Daly Memorial for their unending support for Joe and our family who so appreciated it. Finally, we are extremely grateful for the many stories and recollections of our father and how he touched individuals lives that were relayed to us verbally or in cards and letters. This is to what we as his family can refer when we experience periods of grief. As his family, we were very aware of all of the good deeds, caring actions and funny sayings Dad did and said in his lifetime.

A funeral service is planned for 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, at St. Mary Mission Catholic Church with a reception to follow in the churchs family center. Condolences and memories may be shared with the family at whitesittfuneralhome.com.
When a couple of ranchers face the death penalty for accidentally burning 140 acres of public land, but federal bureaucrats burn thousands of acres of public  and even private land  without consequence, something is terribly wrong.

A few weeks ago, several hundred citizens marched in protest to the ranchers' conviction in the rural town of Burns, Oregon. Afterwards, about 15 protesters went to a nearby wildlife refuge to occupy the remote federal outpost. This act of civil disobedience, led by cowboys and backed by well-armed military veterans, has attracted worldwide media attention.

The protesters say they simply want the ranchers released from prison, and control of the federally managed public lands turned over to local authorities.

According to court records, the two ranchers (Dwight and Steven Hammond) lit grass fires to create a fuel break, or backburn, on their own ranch to stop summer lightning fires headed in their direction. Years before, they had ignited a prescribed burn in autumn, also on their own land, to improve range health.

Although the Hammond family ranch fires worked perfectly to improve and protect the range, the fires did encroach slightly onto adjacent federally controlled public land. The Hammonds openly acknowledged having lit the fires, a common range management practice. They also put the fire out when it wandered off of their property.

But because a portion of land under federal control was burned, the father and son duo faced a minimum penalty of five years in prison and a maximum sentence of death under the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law enacted by Congress in response to the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing.

When the judge recognized the charges were not at all conducive to the stiff sentencing under the terrorism law, he issued a much lighter sentence. But federal bureaucrats in charge of public lands persisted until the ranchers were resentenced under the harsh federal terrorism law. And that is what caused the uprising in Oregon.

Under local control, it is unlikely this controversy would have happened. The situation would have been resolved under state law by local juries, judges and officials accountable to their local communities. The conflict would have been resolved in harmony with the will of the people, which is the way American government was designed to operate.

Its hard to disagree with Nicole Kuchenbuch, the Farm Bureau president who said its outrageous and hypocritical of our federal government to bring terrorism charges against the two Oregon ranchers when the federal government itself uses the same practices.

Last summer Kuchenbuch fought a fire alongside firefighters at her family ranch and instructed them not to backburn 1,000 acres of her familys private land. But the federal agency did it anyway, destroying the private ranchs timber, family cabin, corrals and several miles of fencing. We were told afterward that there is no restitution for our losses, Kuchenbuch said.

Over 20 ranches have been lost as a result of wildfire in Okanogan County, Washington, these past two summers. According to Okanogan County Commissioner Jim DeTro, one-third of the acres lost in the fires of 2015 were caused by federal agency backburning. Several ranches lost private timber, grazing grounds, hay, barns and equipment to agency backburning.

In 2013 a U.S. Forest Service prescribed burn near Lemmon, South Dakota, accidentally consumed 11,000 acres of public and private land. When locals sued for damages, the federal government responded, Our review of the claim discloses no liability on the part of the United States. Therefore, your Federal Tort Claims Act claim is denied.

Conflict with federal land policies is nothing new, but the Oregon protest brings new light to the widespread problem of having a distant federal bureaucracy in control of local land management decisions. As the chair of Montana's study of federal land management, I can attest the problems are severe and numerous throughout western America.

I understand the frustrations, but pray the situation in Oregon is decided peacefully. There is little reason to expect that serious conflicts with federal land management will cease until a more reasonable, locally driven approach to public land governance is instituted. This is why I strongly support real, lawful solutions advocated by www.americanlandscouncil.org to #FreeTheLands.
The proposal by a local group to relocate Syrian refugees to Missoula through the auspices of national refugee organizations could have a significant impact on the future of Missoula and indelibly change our city into something we may not recognize.

Refugee resettlement agencies are part of an industry that receives more than a billion dollars a year in government funds. Some refugee resettlement agency CEOs make $250,000 a year. They have their own lobbyists who rally Congress to increase the number of refugees, as they stand to increase their bottom line. This is a direct conflict of interest with host communities who are lured into sponsoring refugee resettlement, without any knowledge of the consequences.

The host city and state have absolutely no say in these programs and receive no information. Only the refugee resettlement organization will know the number, type, religion, sex or familial status of incoming refugees. And once they start sending refugees, they keep sending them and there appears to be no way to turn the spigot off.

After a refugee is resettled, the entire cost of their needs are born by taxpayers. School budgets must go up to accommodate their overwhelming need for social workers, language specialists, etc. They are eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, social and welfare benefits, Section 8 housing, etc. This and other requirements make it even more costly to relocate refugees to smaller communities such as Missoula.

This does not even address security concerns and the safety of Missoulas women, assimilation, culture, religion and the enormous cost of health care. The residents of Missoula should make the decisions regarding who we will take in and support, not some organization that makes a killing while bringing social and economic hardship to receiving communities.

Laurie Chase,

Huson
HELENA  Months after a district court judge ruled that the booking photo of a registered violent offender could be released as "public justice information," attorneys are at odds about whether the ruling applies statewide.

The Montana attorney general's office cited District Judge Jon Oldenburg's October ruling in declining to issue an opinion on whether booking photos are protected as confidential criminal justice information.

Some counties in Montana routinely release booking photos to the media, while others  including Missoula County  refuse media requests to release the photos, saying they are confidential criminal justice information.

Gallatin County Attorney Marty Lambert sought the attorney general's opinion on the matter in September at the request of Bozeman Daily Chronicle managing editor Nick Ehli on behalf of the Montana Newspaper Association. Lambert argued that booking photos should be confidential unless a judge orders them to be released, because they are not specifically listed as public information in state law.

The attorney general's office in December declined to issue an opinion, saying Oldenberg considered the same arguments when he found Park County should release to the Livingston Enterprise the booking photo of Jovanne Lee Ashley.

"In balancing the public's right to know with the defendant's right of privacy, the Court finds that the defendant's expectation of privacy is greatly diminished as his name appears on the daily jail occupancy roster and the violent offender registry," Oldenburg wrote. Ashley was charged with attempted deliberate homicide and aggravated assault.

Montana Freedom of Information Hotline attorney Mike Meloy said Wednesday he believes that the attorney general's decision against writing an opinion is an affirmation of Oldenberg's decision and that booking photos are public records. "Unless the Montana Supreme Court rules otherwise, booking photos should be publicly accessible," Meloy wrote in an email to the Associated Press.

Lambert noted that Oldenberg's decision found the defendant's privacy expectation was diminished, in part because his name appeared in the violent offender registry. He also noted the Oldenberg also found his booking photo had no evidentiary value.

Oldenberg's decision does not address the law that requires that all copies of booking photos be returned at the request of someone who is never charged or is acquitted, Lambert said, adding that it would be nice if the Legislature clarified the issue.

In the meantime, Lambert said he will still require media outlets to file a motion asking a judge to rule, on an individual basis, whether a booking photo should be released. That process can take a week or more, by which time the defendant may have already appeared in court, where a photograph could be taken.

Meloy argues that people who have been arrested can't expect their image to be private because it is "readily available" to witnesses, law enforcement, fellow inmates and to anyone who attends an initial court appearance.

Reporter Chuck Johnson first wrote about the attorney general's decision for the Montana FOI Hotline.
The Mississippi Library Commission is committed  through leadership, advocacy, and service  to strengthening and enhancing libraries and library services for all Mississippians.
Senegal said Tuesday that the police had questioned about 900 people over the past few days as part of a heightened security operation after terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso and Mali. Soro Diop, a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice, said the operation was a response to the growing threat of extremism in the region, not a specific threat. About 520 people among those questioned were arrested on charges related to drugs, counterfeit currency and missing documents. Despite Senegals reputation as a peaceful country, Mr. Diop warned that the nations residents must stay vigilant.
TAIPEI, Taiwan  On a drizzly Tuesday night earlier this month, Chen Li-hung, a celebrity news television host, strode onto a stage in Changhua, in central Taiwan, and launched into a passionate speech, feeding red meat to his Democratic Progressive Partys assembled faithful.

My parents are from mainland China, he told the crowd. Yet I was born in Taiwan. I grew up in Taiwan. So why did the teachers in school tell me I am still Chinese? Since my youth, I have felt that I am not Chinese, I am Taiwanese! He ripped into the incumbent president, Ma Ying-jeou. Eight years ago, President Ma won himself a pretty nice electoral victory, but he is walking us closer and closer to China, and has Taiwan gotten any better?

For hours, speakers like Mr. Chen raised the crowd to a fever pitch. Then Tsai Ing-wen, the partys presidential nominee, arrived to cool them down.

Ms. Tsai, a former law professor and trade negotiator, let her surrogates fire up the base during the election campaign that ended on Jan. 16 in victory for her and her party. She knew that if voters detected too much populism, they would have turned on her. And she realized that Beijing and Washington watch her words closely.
WASHINGTON  The Senate on Wednesday started debating its first comprehensive energy legislation since the George W. Bush administration, a bipartisan measure meant to update the nations power grid and oil and gas transportation systems to address major changes in the ways that power is now produced in the United States.

Since passage of the last major energy law, in 2007, the United States has gone from fears of oil and gas shortages to becoming the worlds leading producer of both fuels. The use of wind and solar power is rapidly accelerating as those sources become cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the country. And President Obamas clean air regulations are reshaping the nations power systems, as electric utilities shutter coal-fired power plants and replace them with alternative sources.

But the nations energy infrastructure has not kept pace with those changes.

Throughout the Obama administration, partisan differences over energy policy and climate change meant that meaningful energy legislation had essentially no chance of passage. When bills were offered, they were partisan measures meant to score political points rather than to enact substantive policy.

People tracking the process on both sides of the political divide express some optimism that this time may be different and that the new legislation could make it to the presidents desk. That will depend on whether debate over the bill spills into the presidential campaign, where it could be used as a proxy for issues like climate change, oil and gas drilling and Mr. Obamas regulatory agenda.
The dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei said on Wednesday that he would close his current exhibition at the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen in protest of a new law allowing Denmark to confiscate refugees valuables to help pay for their stay in the country.

The law, which was Parliament approved on Tuesday, requires refugees to hand over any assets worth over 10,000 kroner, or about $1,450, although exceptions would be made for items with sentimental value, like wedding rings.

Mr. Ai made the announcement on Instagram, and the Faurschou, a contemporary art gallery, confirmed on both its Instagram account and its Facebook page that the exhibition, Ruptures, would close ahead of schedule.

In a statement on Instagram using language identical to that of Mr. Ais post, the museum said that its owner, Jens Faurschou, backed the artists decision. It cited regrets over the Danish Parliaments decision to be in the forefront of symbolic and inhuman politics of todays biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe and the Middle East, instead of being in the forefront of a respectful European solution to solve the acute humanitarian crisis.
BRUSSELS  The European Union authorities on Wednesday raised pressure on Greece to step up its efforts to slow the flow of migrants and tighten control of the blocs external borders, the first step in a process that would allow some countries to its north to extend their border controls for up to two years.

Valdis Dombrovskis, a vice president of the European Commission, the blocs executive body, said that Greece was seriously neglecting its obligations by failing to properly register and fingerprint migrants. That conclusion led the commission to file a report to member states detailing persistent and serious deficiencies by Greece at controlling its borders.

More than one million migrants arrived in the European Union last year, many of them using routes through Turkey to reach Greece and other countries farther north.

The filing of the report, which member states will now evaluate, begins a process that could allow governments in countries like Austria and Germany to maintain controls on their national borders for up to two years once current controls expire in mid-May.
They were eager to expose big cases, and I was the ultimate big case, said Mr. Modanlo, who regarded the entire prosecution as politically motivated because of his Iranian heritage.

Mr. Modanlos punishment was among the most severe in any criminal case arising from American economic prohibitions on doing business with Iran. It was also one of the biggest and most complex white-collar prosecutions ever pursued in Maryland.

Asked about Mr. Modanlos case, Rod J. Rosenstein, the United States attorney for Maryland, said in a statement that publicly disclosed evidence had proved his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. He would not address questions relating to the terms of Mr. Modanlos release.

Mr. Modanlo was once a prominent NASA contractor with an international business worth $500 million and a home in Potomac, Md., an affluent Washington suburb. He came to the United States in 1979 to study engineering at George Washington University, and met his wife in college. They had two children, now 24 and 21, and he got into the satellite industry in the early 1990s.

A target of government investigations stretching back more than a decade, he was accused of hiding his dealings with Iran through intermediaries. He lost his business and home, which he had to mortgage and remortgage multiple times to help pay legal bills and other expenses that he estimated were in the millions of dollars.

Whether his reluctance to take the commuted sentence offered by the prisoner deal threatened the entire agreement remains unclear. Justice Department officials declined to comment on the terms or on why the government had exerted such pressure on Mr. Modanlo to accept.

But for Mr. Modanlo, whose soft-spoken English is laced with legalese, the idea of waiving his right to pursue vindication in court was especially difficult. His lawyers had filed an appeal last year that alleged a pattern of prosecutorial actions that had denied him a fair trial.
Ms. Poitras, 51, has of course already irritated the United States, its allies and some of its enemies by helping bring worldwide attention to the Snowden material through other media: newspaper articles for which she shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, and a documentary, Citizenfour, which won an Academy Award in 2015. (She also won a MacArthur genius grant in 2012  in all, an award hat trick so unusual that she may be the only person who has accomplished it.)

It seems dissonant at first to think of her embarking on what seems to be a left-field third act (a fourth act, if you count an earlier career in cooking). She has never had a solo art exhibition before and is not even represented by a gallery. But this new installation, using a mix of media, reflects the same sort of preoccupations that have fueled all of her work: government excess; the mass surveillance of citizens; the use of drones; the paranoia that she says has driven so much intelligence policy since 9/11; the long arm of what Ms. Poitras calls the deep state, meaning, she said in an interview, the hidden state, the one we dont elect.

It was early in January, and she was at her studio in TriBeCa, surrounded by her very busy production team and racing against the clock to make various Whitney deadlines. The exhibition, opening Feb. 5, takes up the entire eighth floor, with five separate pieces comprising videos, written materials and photographs from the Snowden files and other sources, including government documents about surveillance of Ms. Poitras that she procured only after suing the government for their release.

She tends to work furiously and long into the night, tweaking her material until the last minute while battling the nagging fear that shes left it too late. Its impossible for her to leave her work aside; beyond that, she said, My personal life is personal.
Envoy Group Acquires Rights for Louis XIV Energy Drinks for Taiwan

VALENCIA, Calif., Jan. 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Envoy Group Corp (OTC:ENVV) is pleased to announce the company has signed an exclusive agreement with BVD Ltd for the exclusive distribution rights for the Louis XIV Energy Drinks within Taiwan.



Presently, the Louis XIVs unique line of energy drinks are only available in Europe. The sensational core line of Louis XIV products boasts four revolutionary, unique and vibrant energy drinks. Each Louis XIV product has an outstanding look and taste, which stands alone as a perfect refresher or as complementary mixer in a variety of cocktails.

Energy Drinks have seen tremendous growth in popularity and consumption by all age groups. According to BeverageDail.com the industry has now reached $50 Billion globally. The Asian energy drink beverage market is still growing in double digits and contains huge future growth potential.

Harp Sangha, Envoys CEO comments We are delighted to be bringing the premium Louis XIV Energy Drink line to Taiwan. Taiwan is a large market and like the rest of the world energy drinks have taken the country by storm. This new market presents an enormous opportunity for our entire line of drinks. The Energy drink market is poised for further growth and Taiwan is a high density exciting growth market for our product.

Harp further states, Two of the leading three energy drink companies are privately owned, thus we hope investors who want exposure to this lucrative beverage market will see Envoy as a key company to watch in 2016. We feel the superior taste, advanced formula and the sophisticated look of the Louis XIV brand has exceptional consumer appeal and will gain prominence in the multi-billion dollar energy drink market.

Envoys comprehensive marketing and distribution campaign is currently in the works and product roll out will commence as soon as regulatory measures are met.

Envoy Group website link http://envoygroupcorp.com/lxiv/

Louis XIV website link: http://www.louisxivenergy.com/en/

www.facebook.com/louisxivenergy/

Contact: SmallCapVoice.com

Stuart T. Smith: 1-512-267-2430 info@smallcapvoice.com

Harp Sangha Chairman/CEO

Email: hsangha@envoygroupcorp.com

Safe Harbor Statements

Certain information contained in this news release constitutes forward-looking statements as such term is used in applicable United States and Canadian laws. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as expects or does not expect, is expected, anticipates or does not anticipate, plans, estimates, intends or believes, or that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur, or be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Many of these factors are beyond the Companys ability to control or predict. Important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially and that could impact the Company and the statements contained in this news release can be found in the Companys filings with the SEC. Such risks and other factors include, among others, the ability to locate and acquire suitable interests in alternative medicine manufacturing operations on terms acceptable to the Company, the availability of financing on acceptable terms, accidents, labor disputes, acts of God and other risks of the alternative medicine industry including, without limitation, delays in obtaining governmental approvals or permits, title disputes or claims limitations on insurance coverage. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements included in this news release are reasonable; however, no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct, and such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. The Company assumes no obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Lightlake Therapeutics Inc.Announces Adapt Pharma Limited to Offer All U.S. High Schools a Free Narcan (Naloxone Hydrochloride) Nasal Spray and Fund School-Based Opioid Overdose Education

NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lightlake Therapeutics Inc. (Lightlake) (OTCQB:LLTP), a specialty pharmaceutical company developing pharmacological treatments for substance use, addiction, and eating disorders, announced today that Adapt Pharma Limited (Adapt), Lightlakes commercial partner for NARCAN Nasal Spray, has announced two national programs at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative Activation Summit to assist in efforts to address the growing risk of opioid overdose among American high school students.



Adapt will offer a free carton of NARCAN (naloxone hydrochloride) Nasal Spray to all high schools in the U.S. through the state departments of education. This program will collaborate with the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, as part of its work to scale naloxone access efforts nationally. In addition, Adapt has provided a grant to the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) to support their educational efforts concerning opioid overdose education materials.

Both programs build on Adapts recently announced initiative to facilitate affordable access to NARCAN Nasal Spray. Earlier this month, Adapt, in partnership with the National Association of Counties, National Governors Association, National League of Cities and United States Conference of Mayors, announced it will offer NARCAN Nasal Spray at a discounted public interest price through the U.S. Communities Purchasing Alliance and Premier, Inc. to over 62,000 state and local government agencies.

NARCAN Nasal Spray is the only U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved, ready-to-use, nasal spray version of naloxone hydrochloride, indicated for the emergency treatment of opioid overdose.

In December 2014, Lightlake announced a licensing deal with a subsidiary of Adapt. As per the terms of the deal, in exchange for licensing its opioid overdose reversal treatment, Lightlake could receive total potential milestone payments of more than $55 million, plus up to double-digit percentage royalties on net sales. The FDA approved NARCAN Nasal Spray on November 18, 2015 and Lightlake received a $2.0 milestone payment from Adapt that was triggered by the FDA approval of NARCAN Nasal Spray. Lightlake also expects to receive a $2.5 million milestone payment from Adapt after the prospective first commercial sale of NARCAN Nasal Spray in the U.S.

Lightlake plans to focus on developing products for substance abuse, addictions, and eating disorders. Over the next year, Lightlake plans to bring the next generation of products into clinical trials.

Relevant Links

Adapt Pharma Limited: http://www.adaptpharma.com/press-releases/

Indications and Important Safety Information: http://www.NarcanNasalSpray.com

About Lightlake Therapeutics Inc.

Lightlake Therapeutics Inc. is a specialty pharmaceutical company developing pharmacological treatments for substance use, addiction, and eating disorders. Lightlake has entered into a licensing deal with a subsidiary of Adapt Pharma Limited with respect to a treatment to reverse opioid overdoses, which have reached epidemic proportions in the United States. This treatment, NARCAN Nasal Spray, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November 2015. Lightlake also has collaborated on clinical trials with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, with respect to this treatment. In addition, Lightlake has completed a Phase II clinical trial to treat Binge Eating Disorder, and has announced a Cocaine Use Disorder study in collaboration with the National Institute on Drug Abuse. For more information please visit: www.lightlaketherapeutics.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or our future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our or our industrys actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed, implied or inferred by these forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as may, will, should, could, would, expects, plans, intends, anticipates, believes, estimates, predicts, projects, potential, or continue or the negative of such terms and other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Actual events or results may differ materially. In evaluating these statements, you should specifically consider various factors. These and other factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statement. We undertake no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release to conform those statements to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by applicable law.

Corporate Contact: Lightlake Therapeutics Inc. 445 Park Avenue, 9th Floor New York, NY 10022 Dr. Roger Crystal, CEO (212) 829-5546 investor.relations@lightlaketherapeutics.com
Indian Motorcycle and Jack Daniel's(R) Partner on Iconic Limited Edition Jack Daniel's-Branded Indian Chief Vintage

Two Legendary American Brands Join Forces in Handcrafting Collectible Masterpiece Unveiled at Barrett-Jackson Auction for the Benefit of U.S. Military Personnel and Their Families

Indian Motorcycle, America's first motorcycle company, today announced it has joined forces with the Jack Daniel Distillery to create the Limited Edition Jack Daniel's Indian Chief Vintage motorcycle. The partnership brings together two of America's most iconic brands that share a mutual commitment to independence, originality and American craftsmanship that dates back more than a century. The collaboration commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Jack Daniel Distillery, which was registered in 1866.

The 2016 Limited Edition Jack Daniel's Indian Chief Vintage will on display January 23-31 at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Collector Car Auction. It will also make an appearance at a series of events throughout 2016 including Daytona Bike Week, taking place March 4-13. Ultimately, this first-in-the-series display bike will be auctioned at the Barrett-Jackson Auction in Las Vegas, which takes place October 6-8. All monies raised from the charity auction will be donated to support "Operation Ride Home," a partnership between the Jack Daniel Distillery and the Armed Services YMCA that provides funding and travel assistance to help junior-enlisted military personnel spend time with their families during the holiday season.

"This one-of-a-kind motorcycle is the perfect pairing of these two classic American brands, and while they look great together, we've inscribed this unique collector's edition masterpiece with our 'Bottles and Throttles Don't Mix' mantra to remind all our friends that drinking and riding are meant to be enjoyed separately," said Dave Stang, Director of Events & Sponsorships for Jack Daniel's. "We'd like to thank our friends at Indian Motorcycle for their help on this project and their support for Operation Ride Home."

The Limited Edition Jack Daniel's Indian Chief Vintage will be produced in very limited quantities, taking the iconic Indian Chief Vintage platform to a whole new level with an array of genuine Indian Motorcycle accessories and custom accessories, as well as Jack Daniel's-inspired custom paint and logos, badging, leather saddle and saddlebags. The bike's fender is also inscribed with the names of the seven Master Distillers who have overseen the Jack Daniel's distilling process over its 150-year history. Final customization work was designed and completed by Brian Klock and his inspired team at Klock Werks in Mitchell, S.D. Additional details on the production schedule and ordering process will be released during Daytona Bike Week.

"It's a pleasure to partner again with our friends at Jack Daniel's on this project as a tribute to originality and American craftsmanship, and to do so for the benefit of our military personnel and their families," said Steve Menneto, President of Motorcycles for Polaris Industries. "Jack Daniel's and Indian Motorcycle proudly support our troops, military families and our veterans and we are honored to join forces again in 2016."

For more information about Operation Ride Home, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit: www.jdoperationridehome.com

Jack Daniel's press information can be found at the Jack Daniel's press room located at www.jdpressroom.com. Indian Motorcycle images are also available at the Indian Motorcycle press site at www.IMCPress.com.

ABOUT JACK DANIEL'S Officially registered by the U.S. Government in 1866 and based in Lynchburg, Tenn., the Jack Daniel Distillery, Lem Motlow, proprietor, is the oldest registered distillery in the United States and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Jack Daniel's is the maker of the world-famous Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey, Gentleman Jack Rare Tennessee Whiskey, Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Tennessee Whiskey, Jack Daniel's Tennessee Honey, Jack Daniel's Tennessee Fire, Jack Daniel's Sinatra Select and Jack Daniel's Country Cocktails. Jack Daniel's encourages its friends to drink responsibly and reminds bikers that Bottles and Throttles Don't Mix.

ABOUT THE ARMED SERVICES YMCA The Armed Services YMCA (ASYMCA) is a nonprofit organization which has been dedicated to making military life easier for more than 150 years. Impacting over 500,000 families annually, the ASYMCA offers low and no cost programs through 200 service centers at 32 branch and affiliate locations serving 45 of the largest military installations nationwide. Of the 1.2M active duty military stationed in the US, approximately 82 percent are located where the ASYMCA has a branch or affiliate nearby to help make military life easier. The ASYMCA does not receive government funding and does not charge dues or membership fees for their programs. Eighty-nine cents of every dollar donated goes directly to support programs. In 2013 the ASYMCA was designated as a top-rated charity by CharityWatch and for the 8th consecutive year received the highest (4-star) rating from Charity Navigator. Your tax deductible donation (Tax ID #36-3274346) to the ASYMCA will make a significant impact on the lives of junior enlisted service members and their families. Please visit asymca.org to learn more.

ABOUT INDIAN MOTORCYCLE Indian Motorcycle, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Polaris Industries Inc. (NYSE: PII), is America's first motorcycle company. Founded in 1901, Indian Motorcycle has won the hearts of motorcyclists around the world and earned distinction as one of America's most legendary and iconic brands through unrivaled racing dominance, engineering prowess and countless innovations and industry firsts. Today that heritage and passion is reignited under new brand stewardship. To learn more please visit www.indianmotorcycle.com.

ABOUT POLARIS INDUSTRIES Polaris Industries Inc. (NYSE: PII) is a global powersports leader with annual 2015 sales of $4.7 billion. Polaris fuels the passion of riders, workers and outdoor enthusiasts with our RANGER, RZR and POLARIS GENERAL side-by-side off-road vehicles; our SPORTSMAN and POLARIS ACE all-terrain off-road vehicles; VICTORY and INDIAN MOTORCYCLE midsize and heavyweight motorcycles; SLINGSHOT moto-roadsters; and Polaris RMK, INDY, SWITCHBACK and RUSH snowmobiles. Polaris enhances the riding experience with parts, garments and accessories sold under multiple recognizable brands, and has a growing presence in adjacent markets globally with products including military and commercial off-road vehicles, quadricycles, and electric vehicles. www.polaris.com
Gold Resource Corporation Declares January Monthly Dividend

Gold Resource Corporation (NYSE MKT: GORO) (the "Company") declares its monthly instituted dividend of 1/6 of a cent per common share for January 2016 payable on February 23, 2016 to shareholders of record as of February 11, 2016. Gold Resource Corporation is a gold and silver producer with operations in Oaxaca, Mexico and exploration in Nevada, USA.

The Company has returned over $108 million to shareholders in monthly dividends since commercial production commenced July 1, 2010, and offers shareholders the option to convert their cash dividends and take delivery in physical gold and silver. For more information on Gold Resource Corporation's physical dividend program, visit the Company website at http://goldresourcecorp.com/gold-silver-dividends.php.

Dividends may vary in amount and consistency or be discontinued at the Board of Directors' discretion depending on variables including but not limited to operational cash flows, Company development requirements and strategies, construction, spot gold and silver prices, taxation, general market conditions and other factors described in the Cautionary Statements below and the Company's public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

About GRC: Gold Resource Corporation is a mining company focused on production and pursuing development of gold and silver projects that feature low operating costs and produce high returns on capital. The Company has 100% interest in six potential high-grade gold and silver properties at its producing Oaxaca, Mexico Mining Unit and exploration properties at its Nevada, USA, Mining Unit. The Company has 54,266,706 shares outstanding, no warrants, no long term debt and has returned over $108 million back to shareholders since commercial production commenced July 1, 2010. Gold Resource Corporation offers shareholders the option to convert their cash dividends into physical gold and silver and take delivery. For more information, please visit GRC's website, located at www.Goldresourcecorp.com and read the Company's 10-K for an understanding of the risk factors involved.

Cautionary Statements: This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The statements contained in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the Exchange Act. When used in this press release, the words "plan", "target", "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "intend" and "expect" and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the statements regarding Gold Resource Corporation's strategy, future plans for production, future expenses and costs, future liquidity and capital resources, and estimates of mineralized material. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based upon information available to Gold Resource Corporation on the date of this press release, and the company assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Forward looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, and there can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those discussed in this press release. In particular, there can be no assurance that production will continue at any specific rate. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in the Company's 10-K filed with the SEC.
Esmeralda Minerals LLC, a Subsidiary of Pure Energy Minerals Ltd., Provides Update on Collaboration With SRI International

Esmeralda Minerals LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pure Energy Minerals Limited (TSX VENTURE: PE) (FRANKFURT: AHG1) (OTCQB: HMGLF) (the "Company" or "Pure Energy") is pleased to announce that, based on the progress to date, the Department of Energy (DOE) has released the remaining funding for its collaboration with SRI International, a research and innovation center, to develop novel cost-effective methods for lithium extraction from geothermal brines. Nitto Innovations Inc. (NII), a US subsidiary of the Japanese diversified materials manufacturer Nitto Denko Corporation, has also joined the project.

Jointly funded by the DOE and the partners, SRI has teamed with Esmeralda Minerals LLC and NII to develop, validate and commercialize a new generation of highly selective ion exchange resins to separate metals, including lithium, from geothermal fluids more efficiently and at lower cost than current processes. The research is being conducted using lithium-enriched brines collected from the Company's lithium brine project in Clayton Valley, Nevada and release of these funds allows expanded testing using Esmeralda's resources.

Robert Mintak, Pure Energy CEO, commented, "We are delighted with the positive announcement from the DOE to release the remaining funding. The addition of Nitto Innovations Inc. will help unlock the potential commercialization opportunities that may exist for this technology."

About Esmeralda Minerals LLC

Esmeralda Minerals LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pure Energy Minerals Ltd., an integrated lithium mining and processing developer with a focus on green 'cradle to cradle' lifecycle solutions for lithium supply in North America. Pure Energy is currently focused on the advancement of our prospective 9,324-acre Clayton Valley South Lithium Brine Project, located in the same basin as, and contiguous to, the only producing lithium operation in the United States, Albemarle's Silver Peak lithium brine mine. More information about Esmeralda Minerals LLC can be found here http://tinyurl.com/esmeraldaminerals

About SRI International

SRI International creates world-changing solutions to make people safer, healthier, and more productive. SRI, a world-renown research center headquartered in Menlo Park, California, works primarily in advanced technology and systems, biosciences, computing, and education. Working with government and industry partners, SRI brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, spin-off ventures and new product solutions.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Robert Mintak" Chief Executive Officer

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Manlai Baatar Damdinsuren with two of his adjutants. Damdinsuren was Mongolian patriot and nationalist who took part in revival of Mongolian...
Update: Hutchinson's speaking tour next includes Montana State University Bozeman and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Yuanbei Fan, a Butte Central foreign exchange student, did not stray far from Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ian Hutchinson on Monday.

A junior from China, Yuanbei was one of several Butte Central High students who asked thoughtful questions following Hutchinsons introduction to the entire student body of 145 Monday afternoon.

Not all science is science enough to explain religion, Yuanbei proposed to Hutchinson, who counts himself as an unrelenting scientist and a Christian. Hutchinson, a plasma physicist, teaches nuclear science and engineering.

That night, Yuanbei was up front and center in the Montana Tech library auditorium, where he was one of several in the jam-packed audience to ask questions following Hutchinsons lecture on how science and religion can peacefully co-exist.

Yuanbeis hope is to one day get into MIT, so he spent one-on-one time with Hutchinson in the Butte Central High auditorium sharing his thoughts on the deep debate between science and religion.

At his evening talk, Hutchinson gave a 20-minute Power Point lecture to the public at large, detailing his beliefs on the ages-old argument: can science and religion co-exist?

During the question-and-answer period, Yuanbei asked: Is the point of science just to be fun? Will we come to an end when we will know everything in science?

Hutchinson said science is fun, but it must be taken seriously. There will not be an end to science, he added.

Hutchinson, born in England, differentiated between science and scientism. He calls scientism a belief that science is all there is, completely separate from religion.

In a way, scientism is its own religion, Hutchinson said.

Rachel Christiaens, Butte Central science teacher, attended both events. She was impressed with her students grasp of the questions science truths versus religious beliefs spawned.

Butte Central students had earlier asked Hutchinson a serious of tough questions about the relationship between technology and religion, the ethics of stem-cell research and safety concerns of nuclear power.

I thought he (Hutchinson) did a great job tailoring the talk to Central when he was here and tailoring it to Tech when he was there, said Christiaens. I was really impressed with the questions.

Host Father Patrick Beretta said the night was a discussion connecting truth to our deepest beliefs.

Beretta thanked Montana gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte and his wife, Susan, sitting in the second row with Tech Chancellor Don Blackketter and his wife, Vicki Blackketter. They didnt ask questions.

Hutchinson participates in the Veritas Form at www.veritas.org, which Beretta told the crowd Gianforte recommended to him.

Evan Barrett, Highlands College director of Business and Community Outreach, moderated the discussion. He emphasized that even though the talk focused on Christianity, by no means were other religions meant to be disparaged.

At any rate, Butte Central students brushed shoulders with a well-regarded MIT scientist.

We probably have students in here who are very capable of going to MIT, Butte Central Superintendent Don Peoples told his assembled student body of 145 earlier in the day.

You just never know what questions will come out of students mouths, Peoples added. They were really engaged.

Hutchinson's speaking tour next includes Montana State University Bozeman and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
A Missionary Sister of St. Columban, Sister Theresa Malloy, 91, died on Friday, Jan. 22, 2016, at St. Columbans on the Lake Retirement Home in Silver Creek, New York.

Born on Aug. 28, 1924, to Irish immigrant parents, Joe and Maggie Malloy, in Anaconda, Montana, Theresa was the youngest of six children. She received her nursing degree at St. James Hospital in Butte, Montana, and worked as a nurse in Los Angeles and San Francisco hospitals before returning to Anaconda. She then served as a nurse to schoolchildren in the rural mountains of western Montana.

Throughout this time, however, Theresa heard Gods call to a vocation to the religious life. In answering this invitation, she joined the Missionary Sisters of St. Columban in Hyde Park, Massachusetts where she commenced her novitiate training. In 1958, she professed her religious vows. Having already completed her nursing education and training, Sister Theresa was ready for a mission assignment that took her to South Korea where she spent the next 30 years serving the poor and ill at the St. Columbans Clinics in the city of Chunchon and on the island of Cheju-do 70 miles off the south coast.

Sister Theresa returned to the United States and was assigned to Silver Creek, N.Y., in 1988, where she served as director of the Personal Care Department at St. Columbans on the Lake. In her own retirement, she continued to serve the elderly at the home, sharing her deep faith, her kindness and her tremendous sense of humor.

She is survived by three generations of nieces and nephews, her Sisters in the Columban congregation, and countless friends around the world. She was predeceased by her parents; her brothers, Matt, Tom (Red) and Joe; her sisters, Mary and Ann; a niece and two nephews.

Friends may call at the Chapel of St. Columbans on the Lake, on Tuesday, Jan. 26, from 2 to 5:45 p.m., when a prayer service will be held until 6 p.m. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 27, by the Rev. Peter Cronin, SSC, in the chapel.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her memory to the Missionary Sisters of St. Columban, at 2546 Lake Road, Silver Creek, N.Y., 14136.

Express condolences at www.mtstandard.com.
BURNS, Ore. (AP)  Federal and state law officers arrested the leaders of an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge, during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country that prompted gunfire and left one man dead.

Those arrests included Ryan Payne of Anaconda.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center late Tuesday afternoon in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made a total of eight arrests  including Ammon Bundy.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds, the agencies said. Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported (http://bit.ly/1nOammV) that Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her father's death to the paper, saying "he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for "patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."

Early Wednesday, the FBI and Oregon State Police established a series of checkpoints along key routes into and out refuge. The agencies said in a statement that the containment was to 'better ensure the safety of community members." They said the decision was made out of an abundance of caution. According to the statement, only Harney County ranchers who own property in specific areas will be required to show identification and be allowed to pass.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

Thornton called the arrests "a dirty trick" by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32 - apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Ammon Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement. " I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender."

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West. Conflicts over Western land use stretch back decades.

In the 1970s, Nevada and other states pushed for local control in what was known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. Supporters wanted more land for cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting.

___

Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
[Photo/IC]

China's outbound M&A volume increased for the sixth consecutive year to a record high of $111.9 billion in 2015, breaching the $100 billion mark for the first time ever, says a recent report from Dealogic, an international information provider on investment deals.

Europe was the top targeted region for Chinese aquisitions and accounted for almost one third of total outbound M&A, with $31.3 billion via 136 deals in 2015, the highest volume and activity level on record.

China National Chemical Corp's $9.0 billion acquisition of Pirelli & C SpA, completed in October 2015, is the largest China outbound M&A deal in 2015 and the third largest Chinese bid for a European target on record.

Technology was the top targeted sector for China outbound M&A, with a record high of $18.8 billion in 2015, up 87 percent from 2014 ($10.1 billion).

Baidu Inc, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, China's Internet trio collectively known as BAT, together have snatched up assets worth $34.9billion via 96 M&A deals in 2015, both at home and abroad.

US-listed Chinese companies have announced $33.5billion worth of private deals in 2015, more than all previous years on record combined.
Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that U.S. coal-fired power generation will continue to decline and be offset by an increase from renewable sources. Coal is projected to decrease from 34 percent of generation in 2015 to 33 percent in 2017.

Chinas economy is growing more slowly than at any time in the past two decades. More than 190 nations have agreed that public policy must limit carbon dioxide emissions in efforts to slow climate change. Much of the Western United States is in severe drought that forced California city dwellers to cut water use by 20 percent. Some rivers in the Northwest are running so low that wildlife managers have trucked fish to spawning areas.

Against this backdrop of changing energy markets, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., visited Billings this week to again condemn President Barack Obama for killing coal. As much as Daines and many other politicians enjoy bashing Obama (and he deserves some criticism), the president isnt the coal industrys biggest problem.

The market has changed. Neither Daines, nor Obama nor the legislatures of Montana and Wyoming control the market. Montana is an exporter of coal and coal-fired electricity. Those export customers in Washington state are plenty worried about the warmer, drier climate that is affecting their land, water and livelihoods. They want cleaner energy than Montana presently produces at Colstrip where units 1 and 2 are the oldest, most inefficient.

CHEAPER GAS VS COAL

The promise of Montana coal export markets is evaporating with the drop in global demand. As George Will writes elsewhere on this page, China is buying less coal and other commodities.

Take a look at how the market has changed the value of coal-fired power plants. Last month, the Associated Press reported that Talen Energy reduced the market value of its share of Colstrip plants by 87 percent in the past two years, cutting the value to $45 million. The former owner, PPL Corp., wrote down the value of its stake by more than $400 million in 2013.

What drove down the value of the Colstrip plant? Relatively cheap natural gas is a bigger factor than emission-reducing federal rules, according to a power sector analyst with UBS who told the AP: The prospects for coal versus natural gas have deteriorated.

Gatherings such as the event hosted Monday by the taxpayer-funded Big Sky Economic Development provide a great venue for venting and rallying. Unfortunately, trying to control the market isnt a viable option. Instead, Montana leaders must seize the opportunity to transition our energy industry to meet the demands of customers now and into the future.

WHAT CONSUMERS WANT

Montana must look forward. Its likely that the newer units 3 and 4 at Colstrip will continue to support jobs for many years to come. But demand for coal at the plant will be reduced as new, cleaner energy generation (gas, wind and solar) serve customers what they want.

We dont want anyone to lose jobs, but in a dynamic economy jobs are lost and new jobs are created. Any Montana workers who will be displaced by changes in the coal and electrical industries deserve training and support to land good, new jobs.

Our state has been creating jobs steadily. There will be new jobs, regardless of what happens to coal.

Montanas leaders in government and business should host summits on energy diversification. Lets figure out how to provide what energy customers want and how to best transition out of the energy they dont want.

-- The Billings Gazette
Health insurance is supposed to protect us from catastrophic medical costs. But sometimes it doesnt.

Some eye-popping air ambulance bills prompted the 2015 Montana Legislature to order a study. The Economic Affairs Interim Committee has heard from insured patients who were billed tens of thousands of dollars for medical flights provided by services that dont participate in insurance networks.

The air ambulances may be among the largest-dollar complaints, but surprise bills have been all too common in the U.S. health care system.

Nearly seven in 10 individuals with unaffordable out-of-network medical bills did not know the health care provider was out of their network when they received the care, according to a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Besides getting unexpected bills from a provider who doesnt contract with any insurance plans, patients also can get stuck with higher out-of-pocket costs when a doctor or other provider isnt in your particular insurers network. For example, the insurance policy might pay 80 percent of an in-network bill, but only 60 percent out of network. Even if a hospital is in your network, the anesthesiologist or surgeon might not be.

Its nothing short of devastating, Jesse Laslovich, chief counsel for the state insurance commissioner, said last week. We are totally at the mercy of out-of-network providers.

So it pays for patients to check these things out in advance. But what about emergencies? When patients and families dont have time to research who is in network and whos out?

Lets consider the private, for-profit corporation that provides ground ambulance services in Billings and Bozeman. American Medical Response participates in Medicare and its in networks for insurance companies, including Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana, the largest carrier in the state, according to Brian Hansen, operations in Billings. Those practices limit patients out-of-pocket costs. The state insurance commissioners office hasnt had any recent complaints on AMR.

In fact, the state regulators dont hear air ambulance bill complaints from Billings either. St. Vincent Healthcare operates a medical helicopter service that responds to accident scenes to transport seriously injured people, and also has fixed-wing aircraft that can transport patients from one hospital to another. Billings Clinic operates a fixed-wing air ambulance that transports patients between hospitals. Both Billings Clinic and St. Vincent participate in insurance networks, so they cant bill patients for more than what a policy will cover.

Most of the air ambulance bill complaints received from Montanans involved hospital-to-hospital flights, Laslovich said. Some hospitals failed to inform patients and families about the potential cost differences  and about the choices of providers available.

In Gazette and Montana Standard news stories, Holly Michels reported about cases in which patients werent informed that they had a provider choice. They were told about a for-profit air ambulance, but not that is was outside insurance networks. They werent told that hospital-based air ambulances in Great Falls and Billings are in insurance networks.

The first remedy is improved patient information.

In November, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which Montana insurance commissioner Monica Lindeen led last year, approved its Network Adequacy Model Act. One of its aims is to protect patients against surprise medical bills for emergency services and for planned services at in-network facilities when care is delivered by out-of-network providers. The model should be a guide for Montana and other states grappling with difficult issues of protecting consumers from surprise medical bills.

The very nature of the problem means that consumers will be hard pressed to take action to avoid surprise medical bill situations absent intervention by policy makers, Karen Pollitz concluded in her Kaiser report earlier this month.

A call list that provides patients, emergency medical professionals and physicians with information on which air ambulances are in what insurance networks is essential to protect patients. Hospitals should have to get informed consent to call an air ambulance that isnt in any insurance network. Insurance companies must make network provider information easily available to customers.

This is a complex issue and we commend lawmakers for taking it up for interim study. We call on the committee members to draft legislation for 2017 that will greatly reduce the incidence and amount of surprise air ambulance bills.

-- The Billings Gazette
When describing the kind of Montana governor he would be, Greg Gianforte often turns to anecdotes about how, without any outside capital, he and his wife grew a software startup out of his Bozeman basement into a company that sold for $1.8 billion in 2012.

To his supporters, it is evidence that the Republican, although a political newcomer, has the skills to grow Montanas economy and would act to get government out of the way of business.

We have prospered in Montana, said Gianforte, whose tax returns over 10 years show about $220 million total income. And thats the issue Montana has. We need more prosperity. Im an advocate for prosperity.

Democrats, however, target Gianfortes wealth as a reason for concern.

"Montana has not seen a candidate like Greg Gianforte since the days of copper kings, said Eric Hyers, campaign manager for Gov. Steve Bullock, the incumbent Democrat. "His taxes and donations raise all sorts of questions about his real agenda, and Montanans deserve answers.

It has been more than a century since rival copper industrialists William A. Clark, Marcus Daly and Augustus Heinze wielded their fortunes to control Montana newspapers and to shape elections, but the extent of their influence  marked by the copper patina of the state capitols dome  ultimately led Montanans to enact through initiative one of the nations first and strongest campaign finance laws.

The 2016 gubernatorial race  featuring Bullock and Republicans Gianforte and former secretary of state Brad Johnson  bears little resemblance to the decades-long feud between Clark, Daly and Heinze, who each spent the modern equivalent of billions to outmaneuver each other in politics and business. Yet, the influence of money in elections is again at the forefront of national political dialogue and is likely to be a persistent topic of debate as Bullock, Gianforte and Johnson campaign.

Last week, Gianforte announced he would not accept contributions from special-interest political action committees and wrote a letter to Bullock challenging him to take the same pledge.

Too often, the greater good is being ignored because the greater voice is given to the special interests in Helena and Washington, D.C., Gianforte wrote.

Political action committees, which raise money to influence elections, first formed in 1944 to collect voluntary donations from union members to get around federal rules banning contributions from union treasuries.

The U.S. Supreme Courts 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC removed limits on how much corporations and unions could spend in elections. And after another 2010 court ruling, a variation of the committees emerged, nicknamed Super PACs. They do not donate to campaigns and cannot coordinate with them, but can gather limit-free contributions to make independent expenditures, such as television advertising, that aid candidates or causes. All political action committees are subject to federal disclosure rules about who contributed and how much.

But theres a loophole. Many wealthy political influencers also have created one of two types of nonprofit foundations  501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6)  that do not have to disclose their donors, which then contribute nearly all of those collections to Super PACs so it is difficult or impossible to tell the original source of the dark money. Nonprofits of the most familiar kind, 501(c)(3), are not allowed to engage in partisan politics with funding or through endorsements.

This web of disclosure rules and the sometimes hidden flows of funding have already become part of Montanas gubernatorial bids.

While Gianforte supporters cheered at Thursday rallies when he announced his promise not to accept contributions from political action committees, analysts say losing such funding likely wont hurt his campaign.

It comes off as a gimmick, University of Montana political science professor Robert Saldin said. Hes trying to assert and take some moral high ground, but hes put absolutely nothing at risk. Because of his wealth, hes able to self-finance his campaign.

Hyers and leaders of the Montana Democratic Party said Bullock wouldnt dignify Gianfortes no-PAC pledge with consideration until he made a promise of real consequence, such as limiting personal support of his campaign to the maximum combined primary and general election contribution limit of $1,300 for all individual donors.

Responding to calls from Gianfortes campaign, Hyers said Bullock would be happy to release his taxes soon, presumably after he formalizes his campaign by filing with the secretary of state.

Gianforte said in a Friday interview with Lee Newspapers that he was disappointed the governor did not appear interested in accepting his no-PAC pledge.

Hes dependent on special-interest money, and I think Montanans are sick of it, he said.

According to two finance disclosure reports filed between July and the end of 2015, Bullocks campaign received $499,821 in total donations, including $22,847 from 27 PACs. Johnsons campaign reported $1,357 in contributions, all from individuals.

Over the same time period, disclosure forms from Gianfortes campaign reported $384,448 in contributions, none of which came from political action committees. Of that, $12,814 were in-kind contributions from Gianforte himself. Additionally, several members of his family have donated the maximum contributions of $650 each for the primary and $650 for the general election.

Gianforte defended the likelihood that he would additionally support his own campaign.

Were committing our time. Were also committing our reputation, and we will contribute resources, he said. We havent made a decision as to what that is, but were all in because we love Montana and we want to see better outcomes for it.

As proof of his interest in serving the state, Gianforte pointed to the $113.9 million he says he donated since 2005 to charitable causes, ranging from the Gallatin County YMCA and groups working with African orphans to conservative nonprofits like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation. About half of that amount was listed on tax returns he released to the press, saying he did not list the rest because it would not have resulted in additional tax benefits. He said it all went to the Gianforte Family Foundation, which is barred from making political contributions because it is a 501(c)(3).

Retired political science professor James Lopach said parallels might be drawn to the presidential bid of Donald Trump and the resulting retorts that wealthy candidates already share the sentiments of wealthy would-be donors even if they dont solicit their contributions.

Saldin said Gianfortes ability to fund his own campaign as needed frees him to do other kinds of election work: forming policies and meeting with voters.

Most candidates have to be constantly, obsessively raising money at this point in the process, he said. It can become a real distraction.

He likely will continue to collect individual contributions, at least because they often are used by political analysts to gauge whether the candidate has credible voter support.

Gianforte said Thursday that his no-PAC pledge was only a promise not to accept contributions and did not rule out the possibility the he would donate to committees this election cycle. That might include groups making independent expenditures against Bullock, but Campaign Spokesman Aaron Flint later clarified that if Gianforte did donate to political action committees, he would not directly benefit.

Lopach said the pledge nonetheless would help bolster campaign claims that Gianforte is not beholden to special interest groups.

Bullock has probably straight-armed this argument by being a highly visible opponent of the big money allowed by Citizens United, he said.

As attorney general, Bullock gained national attention for leading the fight against the implementation of the Citizens United decision, which unraveled parts of the states longstanding campaign finance law that banned corporate contributions. Last year, he championed a bill through the Legislature that required 501(c)(4) dark money groups to disclose their donors.

Democratic operatives have criticized Gianforte, noting that he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that opposed the bill, including the 501(c)(3) Montana Policy Institute. He also donated to the Montana Family Institute, the 501(c)(3) arm of the 501(c)(4) Montana Family Foundation that testified against the bill. The groups said the bill could have a chilling effect on free speech and worried it gave too much authority to the commissioner of political practices, a political appointee, to draft rules.

On Friday, Gianforte declined to say whether he supported the Disclose Act, noting he was not in a position where he had to make a decision.

When asked if he encouraged the groups he funded to oppose the bill, or if that had been part of his reason for donating to them, he twice said, I am in favor of transparent elections.
HELENA -- Before speaking in Helena Thursday, Greg Gianforte walked into the office of Gov. Steve Bullock, who he hopes to unseat in this falls election, and hand-delivered a folder that contained a letter to his opponent and a pledge to not accept any money from political action committees.

I refuse to accept any campaign contributions from special-interest PACs, state and federal, read the first line of the pledge, released by Gianfortes campaign just a day after the Bozeman businessman formally announcing that he would seek the Republican gubernatorial nomination and as he completed a two-day rally tour. I will tear up and/or return any special-interest PAC donations previously sent to my campaign. Montana voters deserve a clean campaign focused on the issues.

John Malia, who works in the Citizens Advocate office, was at the reception desk outside Bullocks office when Gianforte arrived, saying simply that he was dropping it off for the governor. Malia said he gave the folder to Tracy Stone-Manning, Bullocks chief of staff.

Meanwhile, Bullock was in Billings, talking with students at City College at Montana State University-Billings about workforce development, joined by John Cech, deputy commissioner for academic and student affairs for the Montana University System, and Department of Labor and Industry Commissioner Pam Bucy.

Its news to me, Bullock told a reporter there. Ill take a look  and respond at that point.

Later that evening, Bullock affirmed his commitment to election transparency in a press statement on the sixth anniversary of the disastrous Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which eliminated some restrictions on how corporations spend money in elections.

I will continue to fight for fair, transparent, and accessible elections because I, along with all Montanans, believe that our elections should be decided by we the people - not by a small number of wealthy people who seek to hide their money and motivations, he said in the statement.

The incumbent governors campaign manager, Eric Hyers, did not say whether Bullock would sign the pledge and described it as an empty gesture from Gianforte, who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that fought against a 2015 bill that expanded campaign disclosure requirements.

"Look, for Gianforte to be taken seriously, why doesn't he start by pledging he won't spend or funnel more than $1,300 of his own fortune into this campaign? Hyers said in a written statement. Here's a guy that's dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into groups who lobbied against Montana's DISCLOSE Act. And a guy that has a Koch brothers' PAC, Aegis PAC, soliciting funds on his behalf on this very day."

Aaron Flint, Gianfortes campaign spokesman, fired back.

"It's a pretty simple pledge for the governor to sign or not to sign," he said. "Particularly as the governor has been out there gallivanting all across the state using taxpayer dollars. It seems Bullock is trying to buy this race with taxpayer dollars because he's having a little trouble raising money."

Gianforte cofounded RightNow Technologies with his wife, Susan, and became a multimillionaire when Oracle purchased the company in 2012 for $1.8 million. He has previously said they controlled about a quarter of the stock at the time of the sale, worth more than $300 million.

Montana Democrats have shadowed Gianfortes campaign stops throughout the state this week with their own press conferences about the businessmans candidacy.

In Helena, Democratic Party Director Nancy Keenan downplayed Gianfortes pledge, one she said the multimillionaire was well-positioned to make.

"He's a self-funder, he can write the check," Keenan said. "So it's pretty easy for him to say 'oh, we're not going to take any money' when he can write the check for millions and millions of dollars."

In his letter to the governor, Gianforte took a congenial, serious tone, sending Bullock warm greetings and hopes for a positive, spirited race.

I am committed to rejecting any special interest PAC money, he wrote. I simply wont cash their checks. Any checks sent my direction have already been returned, or torn up.  Id ask that you join me in this effort.

Gianforte has not ruled out personally donating to outside political groups. If he did, Flint said Gianforte would "not directly" benefit from those contributions.

Campaign finance reports through the end of 2015 do not list any contributions to Gianforte from political action committees and all the refunds listed in his expenditures appear to be to individuals. He brought in $162,771 of contributions Aug. 17-Sept. 30 and another $221,677 through the end of 2015, according to his reports. Of that, $12,814 were in-kind contributions from Gianforte himself. Additionally, several members of his family have donated the maximum contribution of $650 each.

On Bullock's most recent campaign finance report covering Oct. 1-Dec. 31, he reported receiving $12,140 from 20 PACs and $216,042 in total donations during that time. On his prior filing covering July 1-Sept. 30, he reported receiving $9,806.26 from 18 PACs, and $283,779 total during that time.

Gianforte started the day in a warehouse of Hoven Equipment in Great Falls, where the lectern and 24 folding chairs were set up next to towering farm implements. Supporters talked over coffee and maple bars as they waited. When Gianforte did begin to speak, his remarks were interrupted by applause, cheers and, at mention of the familys old Ford Bronco, a quip from the audience that elicited a chuckle from the candidate.

To the supporters gathered in Great Falls, his remarks were fresh even though Gianforte had given largely the same speech in Billings, Sidney, Lewistown and Kalispell a day earlier.

He vowed to remove job-killing business regulations, eliminate the business equipment tax, support gun rights, develop the states natural resource industries and focus more on customer service than enforcement, in part, by placing someone from industry or business at the helms of state agencies such as the Department of Environmental Quality.

Im here to tell you very definitively, Montana can prosper again, he said to applause.

Gianforte declined to answer press questions Thursday, saying: "We're going to have time to sit down. Today, I'm here for my supporters."

Reporters James DeHaven and Holly Michels contributed to this story.
Civil #: 15-002753

Special Execution

Bank Of America, N.A.

VS.

Phienlay Chounlamany And Banthit Chounlamany; First National Bank Of Muscatine; Muscatine Adjustment Bureau;

As a result of the judgment rendered in the above referenced court case, an execution was issued by the court to the Sheriff of this county. The execution ordered the sale of defendant(s) Real Estate Described Below. To satisfy the judgment. The property to be sold is

Lot 4, of Simmering Subdivision Replat to the City of Muscatine, Iowa AKA Lot 4, of Simmering Subdivision Replat to the City of Muscatine, in Muscatine County, Iowa

Property Address: 1105 Fillmore St., Muscatine, IA 52761

The described property will be offered for sale at public auction for cash only as follows:

Sale Date: 03/08/2016

Sale Time: 9:30 am

Place of Sale: Muscatine County Jail Lobby, 400 Walnut Street, Muscatine

Homestead: Defendant is advised that if the described real estate includes the homestead (which must not exceed 1/2 Acre if within a city or town plat, or, if rural, must not exceed 40 Acres), defendant must file a homestead plat with the Sheriff within ten (10) days after service of this notice, or the Sheriff will have it platted and charge the costs to this case.

This sale not subject to redemption.

Property exemption: Certain money or property may be exempt. Contact your attorney promptly to review specific provisions of the law and file appropriate notice, if applicable.

Judgment Amount: $117,071.54

Costs: $50,096.09

Accruing Costs: Plus

Interest: $5,946.59

Sheriffs Fees: Pending

Date: 01/20/2016

Attorney:

Benjamin W. Hopkins

1350 NW 138th St.

Ste. 100

Clive, IA 50325

(515)222-9400

C.J. Ryan

Muscatine County Sheriff

Melissa Hurlbut

Civil Deputy
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina told a crowd in Muscatine on Wednesday morning that the United States needs a president who will lead.

During a campaign stop at Elly's Tea & Coffee, the GOP presidential hopeful called this is "a pivotal, perilous, important time for this nation."

"Citizens, it is time. We must take our country back," she said.

Her staff members handed out copies of Fiornia's "Blueprint to Take Our Country Back" which includes cutting the current tax code from 73,000 pages to three, pass zero-based budgeting, repeal the Affordable Care Act, stand for life and religious liberty, secure our borders and defeat ISIS.

She said the government picks winners and losers, making it difficult  if not impossible  for the average person to succeed.

"There's this thing about power. It is said that citizens have enormous power, and you do. But if you don't use it, we lose it. We are not using it. We haven't been using it for a long time," Fiorina said.

To get the citizenry involved, Fiorina said she would use technology asking the American public for their thoughts on various issues by telling them to get out their smart devices and press one for yes and two for no.

"I am going to use it to get these things done."

Calling herself the most qualified candidate, Fiorina said people have been discounting her all her life because she is female.

"I will go all the way. I will not falter," Fiorina told the packed house.

"Carly has gone toe-to-toe with men in the corporate world and history has proven that her decisions were correct," said Muscatine County Republican Party Chairman Fred Grunder in introducing Fiorina. "She has gone toe-to-toe with men in this Republican race."

Grunder predicted Fiorina will defeat any of the Democratic challengers.

"She will lead us back to the right direction. She will go toe-to-toe with the leader of any foreign nation she will demand and get respect that the office of the president deserves, that this country deserves," Grunder said.

The candidate saved some of her sharpest barbs for the other woman in the race, Hillary Clinton.

"Hillary Clinton is literally more qualified for the big house than the White House," Fiorina said. She also compared Clinton to the Mexican drug lord El Chapo.

"She has escaped prosecution more times than El Chapo," Fiorina quipped.

In asking for their support on caucus night Feb. 1, she reminded the crowd, the pundits don't decide the winner of the Iowa Caucus.

"You decide who comes out of here," Fiorina said.

She took questions from the audience on term limits and Social Security.

"I support term limits for sure," she said. "Term limits will help but its not the only thing we have to do."

On Social Security, Fiorina said there are ideas about how to financially secure the program for years to come but no one is willing to move on them.

Alma Bignall, of Bettendorf, asked the question about Social Security.

"She's placed Social Security in a secondary level rather than one of the primary things that needs to be done to help the people of this country," Bignall said.

Bignall said she is undecided on which candidate in which party she might caucus for Monday night. But she did say that Fiorina and GOP challenger Rick Santorum impressed her in recent appearances.

"I have not made a final decision," Bignall said.
Editor's note: This story has been updated. The web address to RSVP previously listed was incomplete.

MUSCATINE, Iowa  GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio will hold a town hall meeting in Muscatine Friday afternoon.

The event will begin at 12:30 p.m. at the Riverview Center, 100 Harbor Drive. The doors will open at noon.

According to the campaign's website, anyone planning to attend the event must RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/muscatine-town-hall-with-marco-rubio-tickets-21035915991.

Peggy Senzarino of the Muscatine Journal
WAPELLO, Iowa  Despite a last minute inquiry, it appears the momentum is increasing to demolish the former Louisa County Jail.

While meeting with department heads during the Louisa County Board of Supervisors regular meeting Tuesday, Board Chair Paula Buckman reminded the county staff that the supervisors were moving forward with the demolition of the nearly 100-year-old historic building.

According to previous discussions, the supervisors opted for demolition after failing to get anyone to commit to a formal offer on the building. The supervisors had priced the building at $35,000 and also wanted to obtain a right of first refusal on any future property sale.

After not receiving any formal offers, the supervisors began talking about keeping the property for future county needs and also began investigating using a newer addition to the building for future offices and other space needs.

On Tuesday however, at the same time Buckman mentioned the demolition to the staff, she also said another acquisition proposal had been presented to the board, although she did not provide any additional information at that time.

Following Tuesdays meeting, Buckman said local businessman Jim Mott had sent an email renewing his Aug. 25 offer for the building. Officials said Mott had indicated in the email he would not be able to attend Tuesdays meeting.

In his Aug. 25 proposal, Mott had outlined his plan to convert the old jail into a combination facility that would offer a fitness center, day care and business incubator opportunities. He had offered $25,000 for the building.

However, the supervisors suggested Tuesday that Mott had waited too long to renew his proposal.

Supervisor Randy Griffin pointed out the supervisors had already asked County Engineer Larry Roehl to develop bid documents for the demolition and contacts with demolition contractors had also been made.

Buckman and Supervisor Chris Ball agreed. Buckman pointed out there were other vacant buildings in Wapello that Mott could use for his project. During the department head meeting, Roehl reported he was getting calls from contractors interested in the jail demolition project. He also said he had talked with a consultant about helping to develop plans for the demolition and bidding process.

Roehl also reported $3 million in grant funding had now been awarded for the planned County Highway 99 bridge replacement at Wapello. He said $2 million had come from a county application and another $1 million from a city application to Iowas State-City Bridge Program.

Planning is continuing on the structure, with a public meeting planned for later this year.

Other reports from the conservation, maintenance, recorder, auditor, IT, emergency services, veterans affairs, mental health/community services and assessor/zoning offices were also presented.

Three of the countys four public library directors also met with the board to update the supervisors on library activities and renew their funding requests for fiscal year 2017.

Llewann Bryant, Keck Library, Wapello; Amanda Grimm, Columbus Junction Public Library; and Amie Herrick, Mellinger Memorial Library, Morning Sun; all provided statistics that showed continued strong library usage throughout the county.

The librarians proposed if the countys current $46,374 in funding was increased, the additional revenue would help maintain current hours, replacing old computers, keep collections current, provide staff training, maintain state accreditation and boost programming.

The supervisors also approved final plans for street overlay work in Letts, Columbus City and Fredonia.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  The Muscatine County Board of Supervisors will hear presentations from two realtors interested in helping the county sell two buildings it owns.

In December 2015, supervisors declared the properties at 3210 Harmony Lane and 3500 Harmony Court as surplus county property and decided to put the buildings up for sale.

The Muscatine County Department of Human Services is housed at 3210 Harmony Lane. The staff at the DHS office uses only 8,000 of the available 30,000-square-feet in the building. The Board of Supervisors is planning on moving the DHS staff into the Muscatine County Community Services building at 315 Iowa Ave.

Optimae LifeServices operates out of the building at 3500 Harmony Court. The site measures five acres.

The board put out a request for qualifications from real estate consulting firms. They received responses from Pearl City Iowa Realty and Ruhl & Ruhl's Muscatine office. Representatives from both firms will appear before the board at a future meeting.
AMES, Iowa  In September, when Donald Trump appeared before a giant rally in Dallas, a person in the Trump circle described the coming months of the campaign. Sure, a big event like Dallas got headlines, but Trump knew he couldn't do the same rally, rally, rally for the next several months and expect the public to remain interested. Even then, TrumpWorld was planning a varied (and secret) schedule of special events, bold policy rollouts and other attention-getting gestures to keep the voters' and the media's attention over the course of a long campaign.

A recent night in Ames was a prime example of Trump's timing and showmanship. Bringing Sarah Palin to Iowa grabbed all eyes in the Republican caucus race. And it seriously undercut the notion, growing in some political circles, that GOP rival Ted Cruz has nailed down the support of all of Iowa's conservatives.

Palin, whose last highly publicized visit to Iowa was a poorly received speech at Rep. Steve King's candidate summit in January 2015, was her most Palinesque self. Discussing who is and who is not a conservative, for example, she said, "How about the rest of us? Right-winging bitter clinging, proud clingers of our guns, our God, our religions and our Constitution ..." That's classic Sarah.

But Trump was happy to have Palin for more reasons than her ability to entertain a crowd. Even though she is much diminished from her heyday a few years ago, Palin still has influence among some conservatives. Trump now has that on his side, and just as important, Cruz doesn't.

At the rally I talked with Jamie Johnson, a veteran Iowa politico who supported Rick Santorum in 2012 and Rick Perry earlier in this race, but is now unaffiliated. Johnson saw the Palin move entirely in terms of persuading voters at the margins of the Trump vs. Cruz contest.

"I think the Palin endorsement is important for all of the tea partiers who were deciding which of the two they were going to vote for," Johnson said.

Does Palin still have clout in Iowa?

"To tea partiers, she does."

"How big a part of the electorate is that?"

"Probably 15 to 20 percent of the people who caucus. I'd say 15 to 20 percent would identify themselves as tea partiers more than anything else, such as born-again evangelicals."

"And you would expect that some of them are caught on the fence now between Trump and Cruz?"

"I know for a fact that they are," Johnson replied. "I've talked to several people in the last two months who have been on the fence between Trump and Cruz. So if they're on the fence, this might be just enough to push them over."

Indeed, at Trump and Cruz events in the last two weeks, I have met plenty of people who were for Trump, with Cruz as their second choice, or were for Cruz, with Trump as their second choice. For some of them, Palin's seal of approval might make some difference. Before she spoke, I asked several people at the Ames rally whether Palin had worn out her welcome; none thought she had.

"It's a valuable endorsement because people still view her as an anti-establishment outsider who they can also relate to," said Craig Robinson, a former Iowa state GOP political director who founded the Iowa Republican blog. "And if there is any strategy to the Trump campaign, it is to dominate the media coverage of the race, and Palin's endorsement will certainly help with that."

That's an understatement. Palin's appearance with Trump immediately captured nearly all the media's attention. In the hours and days that followed, it inspired impassioned debate, made talking heads explode, and caused fevered speculation across cable TV.

And for Cruz, there is one final, indirect effect of Palin's Trump endorsement. In the days ahead, the Cruz camp is left to wonder what Trump has coming up next.

"He has to have another couple of tricks up his sleeve before the caucuses," said one Cruz supporter recently. The problem is that Team Cruz doesn't know what those tricks are. They'll find out when Trump wants them to.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.
It's the kind of thing that will make you shake your head and wonder just what's going on in Iowa government these days.

It's bad enough every year when the Democrats and Republicans seem to go nowhere fast on the budget until finally reaching some sort of agreement that no one likes and each side blames the other for.

Then comes a double dose of head-scratching news like Iowans got in recent days. Two programs have been approved by state officials - one has been mandated by the Legislature - but as it turns out there is no money appropriated specifically for either. Both concern our kids and that makes things more puzzling. We would love for someone to tell us why this is happening and how it's going to be fixed, butt we're not confident.

One issue involves bullying, which has been a surprising point of contention in recent legislative sessions.

Democrats pushed long and hard for anti-bullying legislation but Republicans opposed it. Gov. Terry Branstad came to the rescue - or so it seemed - by using an executive order to create a bullying-prevention office through the Center for Violence Prevention at the University of Northern Iowa.

But the governor didn't direct any money in his budget toward the center, which requested $250,000.

Ben Hammes, the governor's spokesman, said Branstad expects the center - and thus the anti-bullying effort - to be funded under a proposed $8 million request for new money for the Board of Regents, which oversees UNI, Iowa State and the University of Iowa.

So far there's been a lot of "no comment" about the situation, including from UNI spokesman Scott Ketelsen, who directed questions to the Board of Regents.

That board has not released information about how it would use the $8 million, but spokesman Josh Lehman said the regents were not instructed by Branstad on how to do so. Hammes, meanwhile, said there's no guarantee of anything.

The closest thing to any semblance of hope is from Alan Heisterkamp, director of the Center for Violence Prevention. He refused to comment directly on Branstad's decision but said he plans to speak with lawmakers soon about trying to secure the funding.

"All I can say if the process is going to work itself out," he said.

That ought to make those concerned with bullying in the state feel pretty uncomfortable as a problem that continues to grow in Iowa continues to get kicked down the road, or so it seems to us.

Nate Monson, executive director of Iowa Safe Schools, a group that supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, nailed it in his criticism of Branstad.

"If the governor is serious about bullying prevention in the state, he needs to fully fund research-based solutions to this critical issue," Monson said.

Which brings us to an equally puzzling situation.

The Legislature, as part of a law passed in 2012, mandated that a summer reading program for struggling third-graders go into effect by 2017. The Iowa Department of Education had requested about $9 million for school districts to fund the program.

But Branstad's proposed budget doesn't include any money for the program. Instead, Hammes said, Branstad intends to secure the $9 million funding during the legislative session that begins in 2017 with a special request to lawmakers that it be provided by March of that year.

It's good that the governor thinks he has the issue covered. But we're not convinced that's enough time. And if it's required by law .

But wait. There's a loophole. Districts could get a one-time waiver in the law. Good for the districts and convenient for Branstad and lawmakers, but not good for kids struggling with reading and who could be held back a year for failing to attend the program. And the latest data shows more than 7,500 third-graders deficient in reading with 2,800 considered at risk.

That's why we agree with Sen. Herman Quirmbach, the Ames Democrat and chairman of the Senate Education Committee, who called the lack of funding "seriously negligent."

Again, we're at a loss to understand how things like these happens. And lawmakers and the governor shouldn't be surprised if taxpayers' trust in government continues to diminish when such things are brought to the public's attention.

Too much is at stake with the bullying and reading programs to hope "things will work out."

Lawmakers and Branstad should do Iowa's kids right by making these anti-bullying and remedial reading high-priority items this session.

The Mason City Globe Gazette
Violence in Iraq dropped during the second week of October. There were fewer incidents by the Islamic State. On the other hand, Sadrists and...
Important stuff you won't get from the liberal media! We do the surfing so you can be informed AND have a life!
At this place, I shall come face to face with my fears, demons, spirits, netherworld, nadir, and triumph's zenith! Supposing you wanted to read about the woman who gave birth to river Nile, or the fact that the Greeks borrowed fables and story-telling from their interactions with Africa or the fact that Africa has so much she can contribute to the world all and is draped in diversity! Come, let me take you to that journey please! What? You don't talk to strangers? Well, well.....
Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi []
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
is a wonderous "hot dish" of nature, places and people.
Netflix has exempted overseas US military bases from its geographic blocking systems, TorrentFreak reported.

News of the exemption comes amidst a crackdown by Netflix on VPN pirates.

If all of our content were globally available, there wouldnt be a reason for members to use proxies or unblockers to fool our systems, said David Fullagar, Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture at Netflix.

While Netflix is working on licensing content across the world, for the moment it will have to continue enforcing geographic content blocking.

To address this, we will employ similar measures other firms do, said Fullagar.

US bases exempt

Netflix told Stars and Stripes that US military bases around the world have always been exempt from geoblocking.

TorrentFreak said this was an interesting decision, as many overseas military bases are not considered US soil.

Soldiers who live off-base rely on VPNs and other methods to access the US Netflix catalogue, though.

My VPN hasnt been blocked. But if it does, I will be pissed. Netflix Bahrain is trash, said a soldier in Bahrain.

More on VPNs and Netflix

Netflix vs VPNs  the fight begins

Good news for UnoTellys Netflix users

Netflix under pressure to block VPN users: analyst

Why Netflix wont be able to block VPN users

Netflix cracking down on VPN and proxy users
The 2016-2017 season will be remembered as the driest recorded since 1904, and has placed tremendous pressure on South Africas economy.

This is according to Solidarity, which has documented the countrywide drought through a series of photos.

The photos will form part of a presentation by the trade union on the drought, and will be auctioned off to raise money for the Transvaal Agricultural Unions drought fund.

The ripple effect of the drought will affect every South African; hence we are appealing to everyone to make a contribution, for each contribution will be a drop towards breaking the drought, said Solidarity.

A selection of Solidaritys drought images are posted below

More general news

FlySafair flight FA103: Rapid descent, rapid descent, and then the lights went off

Cape Town tow-truck company owner bust with police hand radios
Pakistan is getting ready for a massive crackdown on Internet pornography, with its regulator ordering ISPs to block over 400,000 adult websites.

The Express Tribune reported that access to the domains from sites featuring pornography will be blocked at domain level.

The directive to block adult websites was issued by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.

The Independent reported that the instruction followed a recent order by the Supreme Court in Pakistan requiring the telecom sector to take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan.

More about online porn

Hundreds of porn sites used to infect visitors with malware

India reverses massive porn website ban

Here are the porn websites which India blocked
Federal and state law officers arrested the leaders of an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge, during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country that prompted gunfire and left one man dead.



The armed protest is stretching into its fourth week at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The group is protesting federal land policies.



Oregon protestor Robert Lavoy Finicum, 55, was quoted telling NBC news that he would rather die than be arrested, and Tuesday night, Finicum was killed.



Authorities arrested protest leader Ammon Bundy and several members of the armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.



Officials say it started with a traffic stop during which Finicum and Bundys brother, Ryan, refused to surrender.



The Bundy Ranch claimed on Facebook that Finicum had his hands up and was shot three times. Officials havent said much, only saying its not clear who fired first.



Ryan Bundy suffered minor injuries, and Finicum died at the scene. Hed been one of the most outspoken members of the armed group that took over the refuge earlier this month.



Ammon and Ryan Bundy were both arrested, along with three followers. Theyre all in federal custody on felony conspiracy charges. Three other activists were arrested separately.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Here's a really easy recipe from *Martha Stewart* for *White Chocolate Ghost Pops*! It's the perfect treat and activity for *Halloween*. The kids will lov...

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If there were a shadow to be cast on Calistogas sunny business future, it would be that with additional jobs and visitors on the horizon, transporting those people in and around the city poses a challenge, business owners learned at Tuesdays Chamber of Commerce meeting.

Calistoga has a projected 500 additional jobs coming over the next three years as two new resorts are being built, but current employers already have difficulty finding qualified workers, said Chris Canning, executive director of Calistogas Chamber of Commerce and mayor of the city.

With a low unemployment rate of 1.6 percent, Calistogas employers single biggest challenge is access to qualified employees, Canning said.

Hoping to expand the pool of qualified applicants, the Chamber is developing an Employee Shuttle Program that will begin this spring with service between Santa Rosa and Calistoga. Specific pickup and drop-off schedules and locations are still in the works, Canning said, but there will likely be two runs each in the morning and afternoon to accommodate multiple shifts. The largest employers in the city are helping to define the employees needs.

The projected shared cost is $72 per week for both employee and employer, but employers may choose to pay for a greater share of the cost, something Canning said could be an incentive to attract new employees or retain current employees.

The program may nullify the notion of some potential workers who dont have a drivers license or access to a vehicle, or who think Calistoga is too far to travel to for work. Additionally, there are tax benefits to employees and employers for using the shuttle.

The Employee Shuttle Program will be operated privately using an independent contractor separate from the shuttle operated by the Vine and the Napa Valley Transit Authority.

Of the approximate 2,600 passengers who ride the Vine shuttle every month, about 52 percent are locals, Canning said. Those riders pay $1 each way for the on-call service, which is free to hotel guests.

Canning pleaded with members to encourage overnight guests who stay in the hotels and inns to use the shuttle. It irritates him to know that this service isnt better utilized by visitors. Using the shuttle keeps cars off the roads reducing traffic and improving safety. Plus, he said, it should be used as a marketing tool.

Eden Umble, marketing and hospitality director for Brannan Cottage Inn, said she heard from a recent guest who called their trip a carless visit, meaning it was easy to get around town without having to get in the car.

Business is good

California continues to be the largest market for visitors to Calistoga, but people come from across the U.S. The Chamber recorded 1,014 California-residents as visitor interactions at the Welcome Center in 2015. Unsurprisingly, the next highest markets align with the wine industrys main markets, Canning said. There were 84 visitor interactions with people from New York, 80 from Washington, 77 from Texas, 75 from Florida, and 68 from Oregon. These numbers are not to be confused with the number of people who actually visit the city. These are strictly people who have had interaction with the Welcome Center, Canning said.

Internationally, the center continues to find people coming from everywhere in the world, from Australia to Tanzania, with the greatest numbers attributed to Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Welcome Center had more than 31,000 visitors in person, more than 15,000 phone calls and 181,000 unique visits on the website. Canning called those numbers pretty impressive.

The Chamber will continue to follow a focused effort in its marketing goals, going after 100 visitors who will spend $1,000 and not chase the 1,000 people who will spend $100, he said.

Since the recessionary drop in hotel tax revenue in 2009, Calistoga has enjoyed year-over-year increases, reaching $5.5 million in 2015, with 2016 and years beyond projected to be strong.

Interest in establishing a business in downtown is strong as well, Canning said.

We are solicited on a weekly basis with people looking for space to open a store in town, he said.

He highlighted a few new businesses in town  Goodmans, Catch and Allens  that moved to Calistoga from St. Helena. There is very little vacant space available, and one in particular nags at Canning, he said.

He asked members that if they know who the owner is of the old Alexs/Miguels Restaurant building at 1437 Lincoln Ave. to please give him the contact information so he can encourage the landlord to be committed and engaged and lease out the space.

The owner of Mount View Hotel, which recently saw the loss of Barolo and JoLe turn into a positive with a new lease for Johnnys  a new pub and restaurant to open this spring in the same space  shows the success gained by being committed and engaged.

Membership in the Chamber, too, is strong, boasting a 93.4 percent retention rate and 319 members.
Napa County is poised to continue banning the outdoor growing of medical marijuana in the unincorporated areas, though the proposed law allows indoor cultivation under certain conditions.

Several members of the Board of Supervisors said Tuesday they view the medical marijuana law as a work in progress. The Board could take up the issue of personal use outdoor medical marijuana cultivation again in a year.

If someone is sitting on five, 10, 20 acres in a corner of the county, to not allow them to do an outdoor grow seems a little silly, Supervisor Diane Dillon said. But I think we have to get there in steps.

The Board of Supervisors by unanimous vote said it intends to pass a local medical marijuana law that includes outdoor cultivation and dispensary bans. The proposed law will return to the board for a final vote that will most likely be a formality.

The proposed law allows people to grow medical marijuana covering up to 25 square feet in secured indoor structures  but not greenhouses, hoop houses or apartments  if they are qualified patients or caregivers living on the premises.

Napa County, as with jurisdictions throughout California, is passing its medical marijuana law in reaction to new state regulations. If jurisdictions fail to pass local medical marijuana cultivation laws by March 1, they will cede permitting authority to the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

Supervisor Keith Caldwell mentioned the problems of violent crimes that can be associated with outdoor marijuana cultivation.

I think, unfortunately, were not to that point yet where can do the outdoor grow, Caldwell said.

Supervisor Brad Wagenknecht agreed that the reason for banning outdoor growing of medical marijuana is security. He too wants to address this issue again at some future date.

Is there a way we can get there? Wagenknecht asked county staff.

Some areas have setbacks from adjoining properties and require security fencing that blocks the crop from public view, Planning, Building and Environmental Services Director David Morrison said.

A county report listed potential problems associated with outdoor medical marijuana cultivation. Among them is that the plants for about two months during the growing season produce a strong odor that many find offensive and that can travel far beyond property boundaries.

Napa resident James Hinton wanted the board to allow outdoor cultivation.

It seems that is a draconian ban, said Hinton, a candidate in the June election for the District 2 supervisor seat. It will be met with a referendum  we are not going to accept a kind of fascism where you tell me we cant cultivate medical marijuana under the sun, that it has to be under lock-and-key.

The proposed law also continues to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in the unincorporated county. Dillon and Supervisors Alfredo Pedroza supported having a medical marijuana dispensary in the county, but said it should be within a city.

We dont do commercial stores in the unincorporated areas, Dillon said.

Still, she asked that the proposed law delete a passage she said criticized dispensaries, in case the county ever decides to approve one.

The Board of Supervisors has no jurisdiction over land use in cities, only the unincorporated areas. Pedroza said the county must work with the cities on the dispensary issue.

I hear loud and clear that people want access to their medicine, he said.

Supervisors briefly discussed legal cases that could change a communitys power to regulate medical marijuana. But until the courts rule otherwise, county officials said, a county or city can ban cultivation and dispensaries.

The St. Helena City Council has endorsed a medical marijuana law allowing limited indoor medical marijuana cultivation, but no outdoor cultivation or dispensaries. American Canyon, Yountville and Calistoga favor bans on cultivation and dispensaries, with the city of Napa yet to act.
The indictment of anti-abortion activist David Daleiden is a stark reminder that the criminal law is a dangerous animal: Once its set free, theres no telling who will be its target.

Yet Daleiden is extremely unlikely to receive anything but symbolic jail time if convicted of the charge of making and using a false California drivers license in the course of his undercover attempt to discredit Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas. And despite what his supporters might say, the indictment doesnt pose a threat to First Amendment values or legitimate investigative journalism.

An unexpected turnabout put Daleiden in criminal jeopardy. From the start, his goal seems to have been not simply to make secret videos that would embarrass Planned Parenthood, but to show that certain abortion clinics were violating a Texas law that criminalizes the sale of fetal tissue. Its lawful for a clinic to donate the tissue, and to be reimbursed for its expenses in doing so. But Daleiden appears to have thought he could induce clinic representatives to sell tissue illegally.

Regardless of what Daleiden meant to show, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wanted to bring the criminal law to bear in the case. He publicly asked Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson to open a criminal investigation against Planned Parenthood in August. Anderson complied, and a grand-jury investigation ensued.

On Monday, the grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. But once it had evidence and, presumably, testimony before it, the grand jury had the power to indict Daleiden and an associate, Sandra Merritt, who participated in making fake IDs.

We dont know what happened in the sealed grand jury room. But there are basically two possibilities. One is that the grand jury went rogue, turning on the accusers of its own volition. A good district attorney could advise such a runaway grand jury not to indict people he or she considered not to have committed crimes. But technically, its the grand jury that indicts, not the prosecutor. The final decision lies with it.

The other possibility is that Anderson, the Republican district attorney, guided the grand jury to its indictments. Thats the more normal course, because typically the only lawyer in the room is the prosecutor. The old expression has it that prosecutors can persuade grand juries to indict a ham sandwich if they really want to. Thats an overstatement, but not by much.

If thats indeed what happened, Anderson mustve understood that shed come under fire from fellow Republicans. The best explanation is that, looking at the evidence, she genuinely thought Daleiden and Merritt should be charged with a crime. Prosecutors are like that: They want to punish criminals when the evidence of the crime is squarely presented.

So what will happen to the defendants? The felony of altering a government document is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. But its a safe bet that Texans who make fake IDs  say, so underage kids can buy alcohol  arent getting 20-year sentences under normal circumstances.

Its an unfortunate fact of modern criminal law that maximum sentences are set outrageously high. In theory, this allows judges to implement extreme punishment for an extreme case. In practice, it gives leverage to prosecutors to extract a plea bargain from defendants.

The upshot is that one would expect Daleiden and Merritt to plea-bargain in exchange for minimal or zero jail time. If they do go to trial as a matter of principle, they would still be unlikely to get long sentences. Their use of fake IDs wasnt narrowly self-interested. In their own misguided way, they were trying to do good in the world.

Theres also a misdemeanor charge against Daleiden in connection with the purchase of fetal tissue. Logically, this seems as though it should be a charge for attempted purchase, because a completed purchase would require a seller, and Planned Parenthood hasnt been indicted. The charge of the attempt, if thats what it is, raises an interesting question: Can you be charged with attempting a crime when what you were planning was a sting operation?

If Daleiden were a police officer, the answer would obviously be no. But hes not, and if he actually intended to go through with the purchase, then publicize it, theres a strong argument that he could be found guilty of the attempt. That said, the punishment for an attempted misdemeanor is likely to be small.

This leaves the question of whether the indictment will have a chilling effect on legitimate investigative journalists, as some critics have already begun to say.

The short answer is that it shouldnt. A genuine investigative journalist wouldnt have broken the law by making or using a fake drivers license. The sting-related charge is a more subtle question. Again, it seems unlikely that an investigative journalist wouldve sought to complete a crime in order to report on the criminal. If one did, it would be with full knowledge that the journalist could be prosecuted.

Daleidens amateur activism may or may not have crossed ethical lines. But if he crossed legal lines, he can legitimately be prosecuted. The criminal law is a dangerous thing.

Noah Feldman, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard.
I've enjoyed living in Saint Helena for the last 10 years but I had no idea how influential a domicile it was until last Saturday night in San Francisco.

I was casually making an illegal left turn from Powell onto Sutter street, whilst trying to snag an empty parking spot before a gig, when, alas, I saw the dreaded flashing blue and red lights come to life behind me.

I pulled over, quickly calculating the fine and how many oysters bingo at Cindys Backstreet Kitchen that might represent.

The policeman approached and asked if I knew what I had done. I pleaded ignorance. He asked for my license and while I was attempting to extricate it from my wallet he nonchalantly asked, Where are you from?

Saint Helena I replied.

He immediately became apologetic and said, Thats all right. You can go, and rushed back to his cruiser.

Who knew we had so much prestige amongst San Franciscos finest.

Mike Greensill

Saint Helena
As a school administrator, I always observe how rare it is for two students to learn in the same way. From kindergartners to high school students and every age in between, each child is able to excel when he or she finds the method of education that best fits his or her individualized needs. Education is truly not a one-size-fits-all model, which is why Im celebrating National School Choice Week this week.

After a decade as a teacher and administrator with a virtual public school, California Connections Academy, Ive become more and more thankful to live and work in a state that understands the need for quality education for children. Between traditional brick-and-mortar schools, homeschools, virtual options such as California Connections Academy, and blended learning programs, there are many opportunities for students to thrive.

Because I spent several years as a virtual school teacher before transitioning to an administrator at our North Bay school, I had the opportunity to see many families benefit from an individualized approach to education. The path to receiving a well-rounded education doesnt need to be consistent for each student, and oftentimes its dictated by circumstance.

For example, I had a student who came to our school in fourth grade who was two years behind in math. She was very discouraged, but by building her confidence through communication and working on the skills she previously missed, we were able to get her up to current grade level in math in two years. She covered so much ground that she found new motivation and excitement for learning. She has since gone on to enroll in our Honors courses and become a member of our National Honor Society.

In another instance, I had a student who needed the flexibility of our school because he was a working actor who needed to be on set at various times during the school day. That did not allow him to go to a traditional school; he would simply miss too much work.

I was able to work with him and his family at times that he was available to ensure that he understood the content, received the instructions and mastered his school work to the best of his ability.

We kept in constant communication as a team and allowed him to be successful both in school and outside of school.

Whether you are a parent, student, educator or active resident, I encourage you to learn more about the various types of quality education options available in your community by attending one of several National School Choice Week events  which can be found on SchoolChoiceWeek.com  or by scheduling a school visit. Please join me and California Connections Academy @ North Bay in celebrating National School Choice Week and the quality education options available to families throughout California.

Leslie Dombek

Site administrator

California Connections Academy @ North Bay
Robin Williams estate sold for $18.1 million

The Napa country estate of the late Robin Williams has been sold for $18.1 million to the winemaking family of Alfred and Melanie Tesseron, of Bordeaux, France, according to a news release.

Located on Wall Road, occupying space in both Napa and Sonoma counties, the 653-acre estate was built and owned by Williams for many years before he tried to sell it in 2012 for some $35 million.

Williams named his Napa Valley home Villa Sorriso. Its a particularly fitting name for the entertainer, considering that sorriso comes from an Italian word meaning to smile.

The comedian took his life in August 2014 at his home in Marin County. He was 63. The most recent asking price was $22 million, said co-listing agent Cyd Greer of Coldwell Banker Previews International.

Napa parents seek relief from immunization mandate

Californias new immunization law eliminating personal or religious exemptions generated the biggest public discussion at, and just outside, the school board meeting in Napa.

With the passage last year of Senate Bill 277, which requires that all children be immunized against contagious diseases before attending public or private school, the Napa Valley Unified School District has started to update its health policies to keep it compliant under state law.

As of Jan. 1, the state no longer allows parents to receive a waiver and avoid getting their children immunized solely for personal or religious reasons. The new law had allowed them to seek these types of exemptions until Dec. 31 of last year.

But many parents attending Thursdays board meeting said there was not enough time to receive the personal exemption by the end of 2015, and asked board members for help.

AmCan planning bigger holiday event at Christmas

The success of American Canyons Snow Day has parks and recreation officials thinking of combining the new event with long-standing holiday traditions to create a weekend signature event for the city.

At the same time, bad behavior at the annual Easter Egg Hunt  parents, not the kids  may prompt banning children 3 years and younger.

Such changes were just some of the many discussed by the Parks and Community Services Commission and the Open Space Advisory Committee, which jointly reviewed a laundry list of proposed changes for special events that a select committee devised during 2015.

At the top of the list was a recommendation to create a two-day holiday extravaganza that would include the citys annual tree-lighting ceremony, the Reindeer Run and Snow Day.

Lawsuit filed against hot air balloon company

A woman from El Paso, Texas, has filed a lawsuit in Napa County Superior Court against Balloons Above the Valley, claiming she was injured during a hard landing and dragged under the basket.

Melanie Rodriguez filed her suit on Jan. 8 against the Napa-based ballooning company. She continues to incur medical and hospital bills and suffers from lost income, the suit contends.

Due to bad weather over Napa Valley, passengers, including Rodriguez and her friend, took off from Winters in Yolo County on the morning of Feb. 15, 2014. The balloon was piloted by Robert Barbarick, the founder of Balloons Above the Valley, according to the suit.

VW emissions scandal triggers area lawsuit

A Sonoma County buyer has filed a lawsuit against Volkswagen Group of America and Hanlees Auto Group in Napa, citing Volkswagens admission that it rigged millions of cars with diesel engines to fool emission tests.

The suit in Napa County Superior Court is one of dozens of individual and class-action lawsuits popping up around the nation against Volkswagen since the company admitted in September to intentionally installing emissions test defeat devices in 500,000 so-called clean diesel vehicles in the U.S., and millions more worldwide.

Aaron Marroquin of Sonoma County, described as a renewable energy worker and environmentalist, bought one of the affected cars, a 2012 Passat, at Hanlees in Napa on March 11, 2012, according to the suit.

Skaters take on Napa park: Room for all ages, skills

The ceremonial ribbon has long since been cut and taken away. The scuff marks on concrete, and the bare metal showing on top of yellow-painted metal railings, are evidence of the breaking-in from thousands of skateboard, bicycle and scooter wheels.

But three months after its opening, the Napa Skatepark continues to draw the attention of enthusiasts. As a bright Sunday afternoon offered a break from two weeks of mostly soggy weather, a few hundred visitors converged on the collection of bowls, ramps, benches and steps at Kennedy Park, filling the air with the sounds of whirring wheels, of boards scraping around pool edges and down railings.

With room enough to separate novices from experts, grade-schoolers from teens and teens from adults, several skaters said the new parks ample space is helping to keep different groups happy  and the most skilled visitors challenged.

Theres a lot more to think about here, said Ravin Bush, 22, a regular at the new skate park since it opened Oct. 10. Here, its about finding out what you can do, and then doing it within your abilities. At the old place, the skilled skaters could get bored easily.

Yountville reaffirms marijuana sale, growing ban

Yountville is the latest Napa County town to pass a prohibition on selling or cultivating marijuana ahead of the states March deadline to keep regulation of the plant under local control.

The ordinance, which the Town Council approved on its first reading Tuesday night, reaffirms a growing ban passed last month as well as a 6-year-old ban on cannabis dispensaries in the Upvalley town.

Because ordinances normally require two votes of approval and a 30-day wait before taking effect, councilmembers also passed an identical copy of the law on an urgency basis, which state law allows in cases involving public safety or health. The emergency version of the marijuana ban takes effect immediately.
An early retirement deal accepted by some of St. Helenas longest-tenured and highest-paid teachers should save the school district about $1.2 million over the next five years.

Fourteen employees, most of them teachers, accepted the so-called golden handshake, which awards them an additional two years of service credit under the California State Teachers Retirement System, which calculates pensions based on a teachers salary and the number of years he or she has worked. All will retire at the end of this school year.

The golden handshake results in a net savings for the district because the retired teachers will be replaced by new teachers who are lower on the salary schedule, and because two of the positions will not be replaced at all.

Retiring staff members will be recognized at the May 14 school board meeting:

St. Helena Primary School: Donna Cazet, first- and second-grade teacher; Annette Smith, reading specialist; Joan Spitler, first- and second-grade teacher.

St. Helena Elementary School: Gwen Becker, third-grade teacher; Judi Campbell, fourth- and fifth-grade teacher; Cam Fraser, teacher on special assignment; Cindy Hemsley, fourth- and fifth-grade teacher; Colleen McKenna, third-grade teacher.

St. Helena High School: Dan Boyett, P.E. teacher; Leigh Paris, school counselor/Student Assistance Program.

District-wide: Cindy Toews, assistant superintendent; Ramah Commanday, school psychologist; Pam Nadeau, band teacher at the elementary and middle schools; Wanda Richardson, speech and language pathologist at the primary and elementary schools.
Measures to enhance transparency on military activities, the conflict in Ukraine and closer institutional links topped the agenda in talks between NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Gernot Erler, the Special Representative of Germany for the OSCE Chairmanship at NATO headquarters on Wednesday (27 January 2016).

I appreciate the efforts of Germanys OSCE Chairmanship to focus on renewing dialogue and strengthening the OSCEs instruments and discussion forums, the Secretary General said, describing the OSCE as a key player in many areas of particular interest to the Alliance.

Mr Stoltenberg stressed the need for stronger measures to create more transparency on military activities in Europe in view of Russias actions in Ukraine, as well as its frequent snap exercises. He welcomed the efforts within the OSCE to further strengthen mechanisms for transparency in order to avoid accidents and incidents. He stressed that Allies actively support OSCE efforts to update the regime of inspections and reporting of military exercises, including short-notice ones. The Secretary General and the Special Representative discussed opportunities to increase information sharing between the two organisations.

The Secretary General thanked the OSCE for its crucial role in monitoring the situation on the ground in Eastern Ukraine, and in the efforts to facilitate a diplomatic solution. He stressed that the full implementation of the Minsk agreements offers the best chance for peace in Ukraine.

Special Representative Erler and OSCE Secretary General Ambassador Lamberto Zannier separately addressed the Ambassadors of the North Atlantic Council about OSCE activities and the priorities of the German chairmanship.
A forum for solvers of cryptic crossword puzzles published in the National Post
YEREVAN. - Armenia and Canada can successfully run joint ventures in modern-day agriculture, Mr John R. Kur, Canadas Ambassador to Armenia (residence in Moscow) told reporters Tuesday at the celebration of Canadian cuisine in Yerevan.

Were delighted to be joined by a number of representatives from Armenian food and hospitality industry, and were happy to host a special dinner to feature Canadian food products, wines, and spirits. I hope this has been an opportunity for them to sample something new and creative from Canada. We have a wide range of products from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast to the Arctic coast, he said.

One of the highlights of the dinner was the Canadian wine, including trademark ice wines (made from grapes frozen while still on the vine).

The ambassador himself is not unfamiliar with Armenian food: Armenian apricots especially, in season, are one of his favorite treats, as well as wines and brandy. Armenian wines regularly make their way onto the shelves of Canadian stores, he said.

Organic agriculture is a priority for Canada, and new technologies developed in that country could be successfully employed in Armenia, setting a good pattern of cooperation, he added.
201 bodies are identified of Armenia soldiers who died as result of September military aggression by Azerbaijan

Iran FM to arrive in Armenia today

Turkey, Azerbaijan presidents officially open international airport in occupied Artsakh territory

Armenia PM on making EU observation mission permanent: I'm not sure about that

US State Dept.: Our ultimate goal is peaceful resolution between Armenia and Azerbaijan

Turkey president travels to Azerbaijan

Armenia has new customs attache at Upper Lars checkpoint on Russia-Georgia border

Armenia to get 33mn grant from EU for police, migration service, business development in Syunik Province

Lacote: OSCE observation mission deployment will contribute to respect of Armenia territorial integrity

World oil prices going up

Newspaper: Karabakh delegation to head for Moscow, meeting with Putin considered probable

Newspaper: Azerbaijan aggression on September 13 paralyzes Armenia public administration for some time

Azerbaijan army opens fire towards Armenia positions at midnight

Retired US Air Force general is offered consulting job in Azerbaijan at rate of $5,000 a day

White House is puzzling over how to avoid meeting between Putin and Biden at G-20 summit

Eduard Aghajanyan: Once again I remind that Armenia was deprived of opportunity to protect rights of people of Artsakh

U.S. says that limiting Russian oil prices is not aimed at OPEC

OSCE sends mission to Armenia to assess situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border

Jeff Bezos warns that U.S. economy may face recession

Kiev says nearly 40% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure has been damaged

Raisi: Iran will use all its capabilities and potential to end war in Ukraine

Qatar gets first pandas in Middle East

Armenian president delivers lecture at St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia

More than half of Britons think Liz Truss should resign

Bloomberg: Putin and Erdogan's cordial relationship arouses Western anger

Dutch government invests up to 3.5 billion in military procurement

Erdogan discusses latest developments in Ukraine with Zelenskyy

School in Paris expels student from class for denying Armenian Genocide

Germany would like to participate in EU observer mission to Armenia

U.S. is considering plan to co-produce weapons with Taiwan

Poland to buy K239 Chunmoo from South Korea

Air defense system repels several missile attacks by Ukrainian troops at Kakhovskaya HPP

Baku court does not definitively terminate criminal prosecution of Yunus spouses

Liz Truss has no plans to resign

CSTO countries agree on draft agreement on standardization of military equipment

EU countries agree to sanction eight people and organizations over Iranian drones

Congressman David Price meets with rector of Yerevan State University

Chairman of Amsterdam City Court visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex in Yerevan

ASPU supports process of unification of universities

Deputy Chief of Police on new draft law: 'Citizen of Azerbaijan' is extremely relative notion

Benny Gantz: Israel will not supply weapons to Ukraine

Saudi Arabia lifts ban on Turkish soap operas

Armenia lawyer arrested

Remains discovered during renovation of Ministry of Culture building in Tbilisi are transferred to Armenian Pantheon

Dollar goes up, euro falls in Armenia

IRGC special forces conduct helicopter operations on third day of exercises on border with Azerbaijan

MFA: France position on achieving Armenia-Azerbaijan peace is unchanged

Foreign Minister: Iran will not allow blocking its communications with Armenia

Kremlin: Russia does not intend to close borders amid introduction of martial law in four regions

EU mission delegation visits some border communities of Armenias Gegharkunik Province (PHOTOS)

Armenias Papikyan attends defense ministers assembly in India

Brusov university rector: Armenia education minister offered me a high position in new university, I declined

Putin imposes martial law in new territories of Russia

Yerevan to host Eurasian Intergovernmental Council meeting

Putin holds meeting of Security Council

Armenia MOD spox: Azerbaijan still preventing search operations

Iran announces retaliatory sanctions against EU

Russian Defense Ministry reports on strike on military facilities in Ukraine

Artsakh Foreign Minister receives Ruben Vardanyan

Israel calls Australia's refusal to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel 'pathetic decision'

Armenia to tighten penalties for overloading of trucks

Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey army elite units conduct demonstration military drills

Luxembourg parliament speaker: Azerbaijan aggression is direct attack on Armenia sovereignty

Russia Investigative Committee chief confirms theory of Crimean Bridge explosion accomplices

Uruguay vice president: We express our solidarity with Armenian people

GeoProMining's ZCMC has tripled tax payments to the state budget of Armenia

Yerevan judge to be arrested

Paul Krekorian unanimously elected as LA City Council President

ThePrint: Armenia eyes procuring Akash missiles, loitering munitions from India

Armenia MP to international colleagues: Azerbaijan intends to carry out new aggression

Ukraine military hits Energodar city hall

Armenia PM: We hope Azerbaijan will cooperate in clarifying destiny of our compatriots

Newspaper: Where is 1991 declaration by which Armenia, Azerbaijan once recognized each other's territorial integrity?

Azerbaijan fires at Armenia positions at midnight

PACE lawmakers call for Azerbaijan militarys immediate withdrawal from Armenia

Australia reverses decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel capital

Armenia MPs meet with European Parliament colleagues, reflect on recent Azerbaijan attack

Nouriel Roubini: In some sense, World War III has already started

EU considers paying Elon Musk to provide Starlink Internet to Ukraine

U.S. will continue to take practical, aggressive steps to make it difficult for Iran to sell drones to Russia

German Prosecutor's Office searches Deutsche Bank headquarters

Head of Germany's national cybersecurity agency fired amid reports of ties to Russia

Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies condemns Azerbaijan's invasion of Armenian territory

Spanish minister: EU is far from solution to energy crisis

Fake Azerbaijani names of Syunik province communities removed from Google Maps and Google Earth apps

Artsakh President presents details of meetings held in Yerevan to MPs

Lavrov: Russia sees no point in maintaining its previous presence in Western countries

UAE: OPEC+ decision has no political motive

Opposition to David Price: Right to self-determination is the right of people of Artsakh to survive

Iran is ready to negotiate with Ukraine to resolve ambiguities

Deputy Speaker of Armenian National Assembly: 47 PACE deputies made written statement condemning Baku's aggression

Lapid will discuss Kiev request for Israeli systems with Kuleba

Morawiecki: Poland is not afraid of losing EU funds

Armenian President meets with Sofia Mayor

Speaker of Armenian National Assembly to Norway FM: Withdrawal of Azerbaijani Armed Forces from Armenia is a priority

Nikol Pashinyan receives delegation headed by Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt

Iran responds to Borrell's garden and jungle statement: EU needs to accept realities or it will continue to wither

Pashinyan: No one can accuse Armenia of evading its obligations

Congressman: U.S. was not active in terms of security in Armenia, but now situation is changing

Indian defense company Solar group says it has received orders from Armenia for 'Pinaka' missiles
YEREVAN. - A solemn award-giving ceremony was held at the Armenian Presidential Palace today on occasion of the Armenian Army Day. During the event, a number of Armenian servicemen were awarded for dedication and courage during fulfillment of their service duties, as well as for significant services. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who is also the Commander-in-Chief of Armenia, conveyed a congratulatory message on occasion of the Army Day, also congratulating the awardees on the high awards and titles.

In the message, the President noted that the Armenian Armed Forces turned into the first stones on which state building was grounded.

Sargsyan also said that the tragic events in the Middle East and generally many areas close to Armenia are painfully familiar to the Armenian people and have been recurring periodically; Armenia has witnessed them over the last century and at least two millennia.

According to the President, when Armenia took the responsibility for its own fate 25 years ago, it realized that that was equivalent to entering a battlefield.

And we did enter. We entered for the sake of human and peoples rights, for the sake of liberty.

Addressing to the servicemen, Sargsyan noted that it is thanks to them and their fellow-servicemen that the Armenian Armed Forces are fulfilling their mission and solving the tasks set before them. You do this with honor and at high professional level, he added.
President Xi Jinping escorts US Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing on Wednesday. WU ZHIYI / CHINA DAILY

Top diplomats from Beijing and Washington found more common ground on Wednesday on key issues including the latest nuclear test by Pyongyang.

In a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry, President Xi Jinping said that China-US ties have been smooth and have advanced in the past year, and the two countries have had "timely communication" on topics including the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.

When China and the United States work together,they can make big things happen that are good for the world, Xi said.

Meeting the media with Kerry at the Foreign Ministry, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China will hold "comprehensive and in-depth deliberations with the United States and other parties" on an expected UN Security Council resolution on the recent nuclear test by Pyongyang.

China and the US have agreed on the broad goal of restarting negotiations on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, Wang said. Kerry said their meeting was constructive and the two countries had agreed to accelerate their efforts on the issue at the United Nations.

Kerry spoke highly of productive communication and coordination between the two countries, specifically men-tioning the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.

Responding to allegations by US media that China's self-defense facilities on some garrisoned islands and reefs in the South China Sea have "boosted militarization ",Wang said China has promised not to engage in militarization.

"International law has given all sovereign countries the right to self-protection and self-defense," Wang said.

Taiwan also featured in the talks between the top diplo-mats, with Wang saying, "Taiwan is a core issue affecting China-US ties".

He urged Washington to "take concrete action to support the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations". In response, Kerry reaffirmed the US commitment to the One-China policy.

Kerry arrived in China on Tuesday after stops in Laos and Cambodia. He also met with State Councilor Yang Jiechi onWednesday.
Posted by Mark Williams | January 27, 2016

Ford's Avon Lake, Ohio, assembly plant, which produces F-650 and F-750 commercial trucks, will get a significant upgrade in order to build aluminum-bodied 2017 F-350, F-450 and F-550 chassis-cab models.

The Ohio Assembly Plant has been operating since 1974, producing everything from E-Series vans to compact SUVs to minivans. Now it will be a dedicated commercial-vehicle production facility with both medium- and light-duty chassis cabs rolling off the line. This modification to the Ohio plant will free up the Kentucky Truck Plant to produce more personal-use F-250, F-350 and F-450 Super Duty models.

The all-new 2017 Ford Super Duty will be available this fall and will offer a stronger frame, bigger brakes and axles, and significant weight savings due to the switch to aluminum exterior body panels. Unlike the standard Super Duty models, chassis-cab models have a fully boxed frame only to the end of the cab, then a flat, open C-channel to make make it easier for aftermarket body builders to run hydraulics and additional electrical wiring for customers' specific work needs. All chassis-cab Super Dutys will have a choice of three engines:the 6.2-liter gas V-8, the 6.8-liter gas V-10 and 6.7-liter diesel V-8.

Manufacturer images
Students benefit from Counselors in Residence program

by Christi Mathis

CARBONDALE, Ill.  A program in Southern Illinois University Carbondale residence halls that offers private counseling and support to students when they need it most is proving beneficial.

The universitys Counselors in Residence program launched last fall to help students smoothly transition to living on campus and handle all that is involved in college life. Sometimes a student is a bit homesick, struggling to get along with a roommate, having relationship problems or suffering from test anxiety. Other times, students are coping with even larger issues. Regardless, the program offers help through a new satellite SIU Counseling and Psychological Services office located in Grinnell Hall.

The office, in a centralized location among the east campus residence halls, puts counselors where they are readily available to students during evening and weekend hours. The office is open from 12:30 to 9 p.m. daily, including Saturday and Sunday.

Magnolia Hood and Stephanie Duckworth, both Licensed Clinical Professional Counselors and SIU alumnae, staff the office. Duckworth and Hood hold masters degrees in educational psychology; Hoods features an emphasis on marriage and family therapy while Duckworths emphasis is in school counseling.

Jon Shaffer, director of University Housing, suggested the Counselors in Residence concept during campus conversations about how to better help students succeed, stay in school and complete their degrees. The program is a partnership between Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), a unit of SIUs Student Health Services, and University Housing.

Research demonstrates that student support services are highly underutilized when provided as passive resources, Shaffer said. The key for students to experience the optimal benefit of helping resources is to bring the services to the students. By hosting counselors within our largest population area on campus, and during the hours our residence halls are most active, we have brought this valuable resource right to the students door step. The usage rates from first semester validate that we have created the right opportunity for our students to get help when its needed.

Shaffer said the new Intrusive Academic Intervention Program, also initiated last fall in the residence halls, couples well with the CIR program as a proactive approach to helping students. Academic Peer Advocates (APA) actively seek out students who they have been advised by faculty, staff or others may be encountering academic issues of some kind. The APAs are specially trained to help figure out what issues may be causing unsatisfactory student performance and connect students with appropriate resources on campus to help.

Falling grades, an outburst in class or poor attendance are the kinds of clues that an intrusive intervention is needed and a peer advocate will reach out and contact the student where they live. Shaffer said there were 1,200 interventions  1,200 instances where SIU proved to students that the university and its faculty, staff and fellow students want them to succeed.

Staff members from the new CIR office address a wide variety of student concerns, difficulties and behaviors. They help with stress management, social skills development, managing depression or grief, building relationships and countless other problems. They also work with students who are potentially suicidal or self-harming as well as with those who have experienced trauma of one kind or another. Students can drop in the office, call, or even meet with a counselor in a residence hall directors office in the same building they live in.

We provide whatever interventions we can to help students. Weve had a really positive reaction from them, too, Jaime Clark, director of CAPS and associate director of Student Health Services, said. The CIR program began quietly part way through the semester but word of mouth helped it grow tremendously, she noted.

She said there are many benefits to having counselors so accessible to students. Although the satellite office is always staffed in case someone comes in, counselors also travel throughout the University Housing buildings, making themselves available to get acquainted with students on a casual basis so students are more comfortable talking to counselors as needed.

Clark also believes the program helps destigmatize counseling and mental health. She said many students are surprised to learn that at SIU, just as at other universities across the country, it is quite common for students to seek help with their problems and struggles.

Even before this program started, we were seeing one in 10 students at some time during the year. The numbers are even higher now with counselors being accessible during night and weekend hours, Clark said. It is really common for a student to come see us. It doesnt mean they have a major issue. It could just be a transition or adjustment issue. Its helpful for them to know their peers are seeing us and we are helping.

We can provide a lot more comprehensive support for students through this collaboration with University Housing, Clark added. By the third month of the program, we were already seeing four times the number of students we saw the first month and by the end of the semester we had seen 400 students through the CIR program.

Although some other universities have similar programs, CIR is designed specifically to meet the unique needs inherent to SIUs environment and student population. Most places offering counselors within university residence halls are smaller, private institutions, officials said. With an enrollment of about 18,000 SIU has a large student population but the somewhat rural setting means there are sometimes fewer resources and services in the region, Clark noted.

Before the program began, CAPS officials met with housing resident assistants and housing staff to conduct a needs assessment to help determine how best to create tools and programs to help students. They learned that many SIU students are first generation and that adjustment issues are common. They continue to meet with RAs and staff to adjust the program as needed and also to train them so they are also able to provide initial assistance to students.

Clark said Counselors in Residence uses a train the trainer model so everyone is involved and working together for the benefit of the students. CAPS has full-time senior staff members as well as six interns who are completing their counseling residency. There are also 20 practicum students who are majoring in clinical or counseling psychology or social work. All can assist students as needed.

That help may just involve between one and five counseling sessions. It may include group support, some sort of immediate crisis intervention or even a community referral for more specialized care. In addition, CIR also offers workshops and seminars covering a variety of topics relevant to students. These are open to all SIU students and the community.

The program will continue to evolve over time due to input from students and those who work with students, Clark said.

CAPS works both reactively and proactively with students and the Counselors in Residence program enables us to meet students needs more immediately, Shaffer said.

By working together, CAPS and University Housing are reaching more students and providing a comprehensive support system that we believe will lead to greater retention, and more importantly, greater student satisfaction, Clark said.
Stanford chemical engineering major wins Churchill Scholarship

The goal of the scholarships, established at the request of Sir Winston Churchill, a British statesman and former prime minister, is to advance science and technology on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to ensure future prosperity and security.

Courtesy of Kara Fong Kara Fong

Stanford senior Kara Fong, a chemical engineering major, has been awarded a Churchill Scholarship, which provides funding to American students for one year of master's study in science, mathematics and engineering at the University of Cambridge in England.

Fong is one of 15 students awarded scholarships by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States. The scholarships were established at the request of Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), a British statesman and former prime minister, to fulfill his vision of scientific exchange between the United States and the United Kingdom. The goal of the scholarships is to advance science and technology on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to ensure future prosperity and security.

As a Churchill Scholar, Fong plans to pursue a master's degree in materials science and metallurgy at Churchill College, which is part of the University of Cambridge. She will be performing research on polymer-based supercapacitors, an energy storage technology with potential applications in roll-up displays, wearable devices and other novel electronics.

"I am thrilled to go to Cambridge next year and make the most out of the incredible scientific and cultural opportunities provided by the Churchill Scholarship," Fong said.

"Immersing myself in new communities  in my lab, among the other Churchill Scholars, and in Cambridge as a whole  will not only improve my research skills but also help me develop new ways of viewing the world. I am very thankful for the support of my friends and mentors, who have been instrumental in helping me become who I am today."

In her application for the scholarship, Fong, of Highlands Ranch, Colo., wrote:

"When I first discovered the subject of chemistry, I was amazed to learn that the simple molecules depicted in my textbooks could be combined and manipulated in such powerful ways. Whether it be fueling our cars or charging our phones, chemical processes form the basis for a myriad of energy technologies that we use daily. Now, as I look towards graduate school and my ultimate goal of professorship, my aim is to use a fundamental understanding of these chemical systems to improve the ways in which we produce and store energy."

Currently, Fong is an undergraduate member of the Thomas F. Jaramillo Research Group at Stanford, where she is conducting an independent research project for her honor's thesis, which is titled Improving Electrochemically Active Surface Area Measurements for Fundamental Understanding of Solar Water Splitting Catalysts.

At Stanford, Fong is the co-chair of the peer-advising program of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society's California Gamma Chapter. In that role, she has organized and participated in mentorship and tutoring events for first- and second-year engineering students and has developed a new mentoring program to pair younger and older engineering students for advising.

In 2014, Fong was named a Goldwater Scholar in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program. In the summer of 2014, she worked as a research intern in the Electrochemical Process Engineering Division of the Julich Research Center, an interdisciplinary research institution in Julich, Germany, under a scholarship awarded through the German Academic Exchange Service Research Internships in Science and Engineering Program.

She has tutored Stanford undergraduate students in organic chemistry courses and served as a teaching assistant for "Introduction to Chemical Engineering" and "An Exploration of Art Materials: the Intersection of Art and Science," offered by Stanford Sophomore College.

Fong also has served as a one-on-one English tutor with Spanish-speaking members of Stanford's janitorial staff as a volunteer in Stanford Habla, a student organization.

If Stanford students are interested in overseas scholarships or if Stanford faculty are interested in nominating students for such awards, they may contact Diane Murk, manager of the Overseas Resource Center, at dmurk@stanford.edu, or John Pearson, director of the Bechtel International Center, at john.pearson@stanford.edu.




According to the Express Tribune, access to such sites will be restricted at the domain level and Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has asked (ISPs) across Pakistan to block over 400,000 'pornographic websites'.

The move comes following a recent order by the Supreme Court wherein the telecom sector's regulatory body had been asked to "take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan".

However, officials have said that blocking such websites at the domain level is a colossal and expensive exercise, since it would require changes in their systems and special equipment to block such a large number of websites - not to mention a significant amount of man hours needed for this purpose.

Nevertheless, they said that they had started work on the order since they were bound to abide by the law. (ANI)
Sheikh Hasina said that 'If the offender is a leader of my party, you will communicate with me' reports The Daily Star.

Hasina asked the district police bosses to remain careful on land grabbers particularly on those taking away the small land of poor section of people.

She added that the government has a plan to appoint several secretaries for smooth functioning of the Home ministry as its activities have increased manifold.(ANI)
ln his interaction with lndian and German interlocutors, Gurjit Singh expressed the desire for enhancing Indo-German relationship to fulfil the programmes established by leaders of both countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German chancellor Angela Merkel.

He called upon the lndian diaspora to engage more vigorously with lndia and drew attention to the lndian Corporate lnternship Programme. He also announced the lndia Fellow's Programme offered by OIFC in collaboration with the lndian School of Business. Gurjit Singh was previously Indian ambassador to Indonesia.

CII's new office in Frankfurt will serve as a reference point for lndian industry and the international business community, the ambassador-designate said.

--Indo-Asian News Service press release/tb/vm

( 160 Words)

2016-01-27-17:21:35 (IANS)
"No decision," she told reporters here in response to a query on the matter on the sidelines of a Confederation of Indian Industry meeting on the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) recent Nairobi conference.

Earlier this month she said India's steel imports were about 9 percent of what it consumed and not a huge element of the country's total steel consumption.

Teaotia said the country had considerable installed capacity, which is operating at about 80 percent, resulting in higher load factors than the rest of the world, which averages about 68-70 percent.

India's domestic steel industry has been repeatedly voicing its concern about cheap imports from China flooding local markets.

Earlier, the commerce secretary told the conference that her ministry is discussing with other ministries how to move ahead on the outcomes of the WTO's Nairobi ministerial meeting.

"We met all ministries related to trade. We have made presentation to the agriculture ministry," Teaotia said.

The Nairobi ministerial did not reaffirm the Doha Development Agenda, which was India's main demand before going for the talks.

In this connection, Teaotia said on Wednesday that India will not go ahead with new issues till the time the WTO's Doha Round issues are reaffirmed.

"Doha is still alive," she said.

--Indo-Asian News Service bc/tsb/bg

( 244 Words)

2016-01-27-20:11:34 (IANS)
"Incoming flight I5 1721 (REG VT-JRT) from Jaipur to Bengaluru received a specific bomb threat on arrival at Bengaluru after all passengers deplaned. Aircraft was taken to isolation bay, checked thoroughly by bomb detection and disposal squad and nothing was found," said a statement from AirAsia India.

The airline's CEO and MD Mittu Chandilya said in the statement: "Safety and Security of our guests, employees and overall operations is paramount in AirAsia India and at no stage would compromise in its core commitment of service ensuring safety and security."

Security checks by the bomb squad, Central Industrial Security Force and Kempegowda airport authorities resulted in the delay of the Bengaluru-Goa flight by four hours, the statement added.

--Indo-Asian News Service sth/pm/vm

( 155 Words)

2016-01-27-21:17:35 (IANS)
Direct flights between India and Indonesia are likely to begin this year to facilitate tourism, Indonesian ambassador Rizali W. Indrakesuma said on Wednesday. "The Indian government has already given permission; it is a matter of how Indonesia responds. We are hoping that direct flights between the two countries begin by this year or by next year at the latest," said Indrakesuma said. The first flights both governments plan to launch initially are between Delhi and Jakarta and Mumbai and Bali. Garuda Indonesia and Air India will operate flights between the two countries. The ambassador said a deal on the matter could be finalised in March when the transport minister of Indonesia will participate in an event organised by the civil aviation ministry in India. "This is an opportunity for our minister to engage with the Indian civil aviation minister (Ashok Gajapathi Raju Pusapati) at an event organised in Hyderabad in March," the ambassador said. "The consulate general of Indonesia in Mumbai will push the ministry of tourism to open direct flights for the first time between Delhi and Jakarta and Mumbai and Bali. Last year, 262,000 tourists from India visited Indonesia; we expect the figure to go up to 350,000 this year. First it'll be a government-to-government engagement and later we can engage private airlines," said Taufik Nurhidayat, deputy director, ministry of tourism, Republic of Indonesia. Indonesia attracts the highest number of tourists from Singapore, followed by Malaysia, Australia, China, Japan, Korea and India. --Indo-Asian News Service sid/tsb/vm ( 261 Words) 2016-01-27-22:01:34 (IANS)
With the Congress dubbing the President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh as 'murder of democracy' by the NDA-led Centre, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday hit back at the former asserting that the conditions have been created by the rebel leaders of the grand old party leaving them with no grounds to complain. "This is not the first time in India that President's rule has been imposed in a state. Congress has been a master in creating conditions. Here also in Arunachal, the conditions have been created by the rebel leaders of Congress and not by anyone else," BJP leader Siddharthnath Singh told ANI. "Congress has no basis to complain but yes, if want to make it a political issue; they are welcome to do that. But the Constitution needs to be respected," he added. Earlier, the grand old party said that the imposition of President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh was a 'murder of democracy' by the Centre. "Bharatiya Janata Party wants its government everywhere. You can't impose President's rule because people didn't favor you. We will fight in the court and also tell the people how the BJP misuses its power. It is very unfortunate and it is a murder of democracy," Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said. Echoing similar sentiments, Congress leader Randeep Surjewala tweeted, "Republic's founding principles of Democracy & Federalism gutted by Modiji on Republic Day! Will fight Central Rule in Arunachal tooth&nail." "Sun rises in India's east. BJP, however, eclipses Constitution's ethos by imposing Central rule in Arunachal. Federalism trampled by Modiji," he added. President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to imposition of central rule in Arunachal Pradesh. Two days back, Union Cabinet had recommended President's Rule following the political crisis in the state. In December last year, Arunachal Pradesh was rocked by a political crisis as 21 rebel Congress MLAs joined hands with 11 of BJP and two independents to impeach Assembly Speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue. The move was termed as illegal and unconstitutional by the Speaker. The rebel group MLAs congregated at a community hall after the state Assembly complex was allegedly sealed by the local administration, and impeached Mr. Rebia in an impromptu session chaired by Deputy Speaker. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will today hear Congress' plea challenging the Cabinet decision. (ANI)
In its petition, the Congress accused the Governor of working at the behest of the Centre to topple its government.

The Congress dubbed the President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh as 'murder of democracy' by the BJP-led Centre and accused it of misusing power.

However, the Centre slammed the opposition for challenging the President's decision saying that the government had done its job by saving the people of the state after the Congress Government failed to govern Arunachal Pradesh.

Despite the vehement opposition by the Congress, President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to imposition of central rule in Arunachal Pradesh.(ANI)
Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi today gave its approval for returning of approximately 478.307 hectares of land to the Madhya Pradesh government. The land comprises approximately 461.607 hectares private acquired land and 16.70 hectares Government land, valued at approximately Rs 740 crore of Auto Testing Track in Pithampur, Indore (NATRIX) in Madhya Pradesh of NATRIP Project. The land returned would be utilised by the State Government for allotment to the auto and related ancillary industries which will have a synergistic effect with the existing NATRAX project.UNI NY SV1253 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0099-559018.Xml
Backing veteran leader L.K. Advani's assertion that there was no question mark on the freedom of expression in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday said that everyone had the right to speak their mind as it was a 'constitutional' right but must not see the contradictory opinions in a negative light. "I completely agree with what Advani ji has said. The BJP as a party and the leadership in particular appreciates values and cherishes the importance of freedom of expression and speech. That has been something we have been true to, particularly with regard to people having a counter view point," BJP leader Nalin Kohli told ANI. Adding that expressing opinions were a regularity in society, he said the people need to understand that if one person has a view then the Constitution allows the other to have a contrary view point. "This is part of society and people need to look at it from that perspective," Kohli added. Advani had earlier strongly denied that were not freedome on expression in the nation. "I do not know who are the people saying that there is no freedom of expression in India. This right (freedom of expression) has always been there... Such a question does not arise today," Advani had said. However, the Congress has been alleging that there is an atmosphere of intolerance, intemperate behaviour, violence and communal polarisation in the nation for which the NDA-led Government is responsible. The grand old party has also accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of doing 'lasting damage' to the country's social fabric by 'selective targeting of the minority community' Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had earlier this month trained his guns on the Centre, saying there is a contradiction in pushing for start-ups and being 'intolerant'. "The ruling dispensation, particularly the RSS, has a clear idea on what the world should look like. They have a vision for India which in my opinion is a very rigid vision. This country requires flexibility, openness and movement of ideas. You will fail on the economy and start up front if you are intolerant. The BJP has categories: There's a Hindu for them, a Muslim for them, a woman for them. I don't categorise. That's the difference between us and them," Rahul said. President Pranab Mukherjee in his address to the nation of the eve of Republic Day said that the nation must guard itself against forces of intolerance and unreason. (ANI)
The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, today gave its ex-post facto approval for completion of the Afghan Parliament Building in Kabul at a revised cost of Rs 969 crore. The project provides for completion of a new Parliament Building for Afghanistan, keeping in view its traditions and values. It is part of Indias efforts in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan, an official release said. A symbol of Indias contribution to strengthen and rebuild democracy in Afghanistan, the construction of the Parliament building was completed in December, 2015, under India-Afghanistan development cooperation and minor touch-up works, including parts of sound system and furniture are now being undertaken. The Parliament building will be handed over the Afghan authorities by March 31.The project was inaugurated and dedicated jointly by Mr Modi and President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, on December 25, 2015.Addressing the Members of Meshrano Jirga (Upper House) and Wolesi Jirga (House of the People) on the occasion in the newly inaugurated premises, the Prime Minister complimented the people of Afghanistan and their elected representatives on consolidation of democracy in the country. UNI NY SV-RP1415 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0099-559123.Xml
The Pan ( betel) producers in Uttar Pradesh has appealed to the Centre to include Pan in the Prime Minister Crop Insurance programme to address the loss of their produce in the drought and unseasonal rains. National Paan Kisan Union has sent a memorandum of demand to the Centre to include the cultivation of betel under the scheme so that the farmers can get compensation of their loss. Union's patron and Rajya Sabha member P L Punia and its general secretary Chotelal Chourasia in their 10-point memorandum, a copy of which was also sent to Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, said the Centre of the NBRI should be set up in Mahoba district in Bundelkhand. The memorandum also demands subsidy on the interest on the loan given to the paan farmers besides the farmers should be given other facilities too.UNI MB SW RK1448 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-559208.Xml
With Maharashtra's Shani Shingnapur temple becoming the battle ground between the women activists and villagers, spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravishankar on Wednesday said the entry of the feminine gender can take place in the temple only after the misconception is cleared in the minds of the locals that no bad omen will take place in the village. Sri Sri Ravishankar said the entry of women inside the temple cannot happen with a force. "It should take place with understanding, clearing the misconception, giving them the assurance that no bad thing will happen to the village as 'shani' God will not be angry if women enter the temple," he told ANI. "People need to be educated that there is no discrimination against women in the Hindu religion. So, unlike many other faiths in the world where women are not given full rights, Hinduism gives them full right to perform 'pooja'," he added. The spiritual leader further said there is a fear in the minds of the people to change the tradition, which they have been following from the last thousand years. "They think that if they change, may be something bad will happen to them. This is the fear that is gripping Shani Shingnapur," he added. Meanwhile, the members of the board that runs the temple have said they are ready 'for a dialogue' after Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said the issue should be resolved through dialogue. "Indian culture and Hindu religion gives women the right to pray. A change in yesterday's traditions is our culture. Discrimination in praying is not in our culture. The temple authorities should resolve the issue through a dialogue," Fadnavis tweeted. The women, members and supporters of the Bhumata Brigade, arrived from Pune yesterday in six buses and wanted to enter the temple's sanctum where the idol of Lord Shani is placed on an open-air platform. However, the group led by women activist Trupti Desai was stopped from marching towards the temple by the police near Supa. They were also detained by the police for some time, but later released. After being stopped by the police, Trupti said that it was a black day for women as they were being stopped from exercising their rights. The temple drew attention in November 2015 after a woman had offered prayers at the popular shrine in 'breach' of the age-old practice of prohibiting entry of women, after which the temple committee had to suspend seven security men and the villagers to perform purification rituals. The temple attracts millions of tourists and devotees from across the country and abroad. (ANI)
Asserting that the 1975 emergency was the 'murder of democracy' and not the imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday asked the Congress to introspect its role rather than levelling allegations on decisions based on facts and not 'sentiments'. "There has been one clear documented case of murder of democracy and that is the imposition of emergency in 1975 by Indira Gandhi. The misuse of institution is equally well documented and the Congress would do well to introspect its role in that rather than level such allegations," BJP leader Nalin Kohli told ANI. With regard to the situation in Arunachal, he said that the requirement of the Constitution in terms of the session of the assembly to be 'not more than six months' apart was crucial. He added that when it came to law and order situation in Arunachal, the government's decision would be driven solely on facts and not sentiments. On the other hand, BJP leader and Union Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said it was ridiculous on the Congress' part to raise issues about constitutional rights. Maintaining that the Centre had taken such a step since it was their responsibility to take care of a 'constitutional crisis' in the state, he added that the Arunachal Pradesh Government was reeling with instability due to Congress which forced the BJP to take action. "We took such a step because the government there was unstable. In such situations, we want stability there as it is a border state which increases our responsibility. The Congress will not benefit from politicising this issue any further," Naqvi told ANI. Despite the vehement opposition by the Congress, President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to imposition of central rule in Arunachal Pradesh. The Congress dubbed the President's rule as 'murder of democracy' by the BJP-led Centre and accused it of misusing power. Meanwhile, in a big blow to the Centre, the Supreme Court today sought a report within 15 minutes from Arunachal Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa on the basis of which he recommended the President's rule. The apex court, which heard the Congress' plea challenging the Cabinet's decision to impose President's rule in Arunachal, also expressed its displeasure to Rajkhowa as to why it was not informed about the developments in the state. The apex court also issued a notice to the Centre in this regard and sought a reply by Friday. (ANI)
A lawyer and human rights defender, Tiphagne will be awarded the 8th Human Rights Award by Amnesty International Germany. The award comes with 10,000 euros.

The award, to be presented on April 25 at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, is in recognition of Tiphagnes "exceptional commitment to human rights", Amnesty said in a statement.

For many decades now, Tiphagne has been tirelessly and bravely standing up for human rights. His organizations invaluable work includes campaigning against discrimination and the use of torture in India, said Selmin aliskan, director of Amnesty International Germany.

Tiphagne is the founder of Peoples Watch, a human rights group in India which has been researching and documenting human rights violations as well as providing for over 20 years legal representation to those affected.

The Human Rights Award is presented by Amnesty Germany every two years in recognition of individuals or organizations campaigning for human rights under very difficult conditions.

--Indo-Asian News Service mr/rd

( 179 Words)

2016-01-27-15:57:35 (IANS)
: Karnataka Medical Education MinisterSharanaprakash Patil today said he would ensure faster developmentin the backward Hyderabad-Karnataka region, which had languished for decades. Speaking to UNI, the minister said he would be assuming charge as Chairman of the Hyderabad Karnataka Regional Development Board(HKRDB) on January 28 and will ensure a thorough change in thepriorities already drawn by the board earlier, but that had limitedsuccess so far. After a prolonged demand, the H-K region in Karnataka comprisingdistricts of Kalaburgi, Raichur, Koppal, Bidar, Ballari and Yadgirwere given special status through a Constitutional amendment bythe previous UPA Government, but the regions were yet to see a spurtin governments taking up developmental works under central funds. Dr Patil said he would ensure a revision on priorities, drawn up by the board, was taken up in right earnest. He said a sizeable amount of funds from the centre would beprovided for improving road connectivity in rural areas in all thesix districts under the HKRDB. ''Separate taluk-level reviews wouldbe done to identify areas that need immediate attention.'' The minister said Karnataka Government Chief Secretary would be asked tohold a meeting to review the utilisation of funds of HKRDB andreason for delay in the project implementation of Hyderabad-Karnataka Region and the process of project implementation will be simplified. The Minister said that the government is providing Rs 1,000 crorefunds of the region annually and this would be used for developmentof every taluk on priority basis. Dr Patil said the quality would be the hallmark of all workstaken up by the HKRDB and the monitoring mechanism and qualitycontrol would be further strengthened.UNI SD RS SKB KVV 1530 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0285-559247.Xml
Afghanistan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani met with his Chinese counterpart A Wang Yi and discussed ways to develop friendly relations and and expand bilateral cooperation in different sectors.

Rabbani while appreciating the active and constructive role played by China in the session of Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) expressed his hope for finalising the peace process in the future session, reports Dawn.

Rabbani and Wang also discussed and exchanged opinions on the cooperation of the two countries regarding the bilateral and multilateral struggle against terrorism.

Rabbani appreciated the valuable cooperation of China in different sectors and asked for China's support for Afghanistan's full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Wang welcomed the request of Afghanistan's full membership in the SCO and AIIB and promised serious cooperation in this regard. (ANI)
A division bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice R.K. Gauba commuted the death penalty, saying there was no eyewitness in the case but held that the imprisonment would be for entire life without remission.

"In the present case, there is no eyewitness and the prosecution has relied upon circumstantial evidence which, we have held, has been proved beyond reasonable doubt," the court said.

"We would convert the death sentence to life imprisonment (or) imprisonment for entire life without remission without affecting the power under articles 72 and 161 of the constitution. This would be appropriate and proportional sentence. We order accordingly."

Jha, from Madhepura in Bihar, was sentenced to death in 2013 in two cases and to life imprisonment in one.

Jha murdered Anil Mandal in 2006, 19-year-old Upender and another person referred to as Dalip, both in 2007.

According to police, in order to conceal the identity of his victims and to destroy evidence, Jha threw the heads and other body parts at various places in Delhi and dumped the bodies outside the Tihar Jail here.

The prosecution said he used to challenge the police to nab him by sending them letters threatening he would send "similar gifts" (bodies) after every 15 days.

Jha was caught on May 20, 2007, near Mianwali Nagar here.

--Indo-Asian News Service gt/tsb/mr

( 252 Words)

2016-01-27-16:05:50 (IANS)
"Trinamool leader Derek O'Brien had gone to Hyderabad to demand justice for the Dalit student. I want to ask him... in Nadia, a Trinamool leader had murdered three Dalits inside their home in May 2015... why didn't O'Brien visit their families?" Irani said.

"Because for him, vote bank 'tamasha' in Hyderabad is more important than securing justice in Nadia," she said at a public rally in Durgapur, around 165 km from Kolkata.

Widespread protests have rocked India following the death of Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide on January 17 after his suspension along with four other Dalit students from Hyderabad University over an alleged clash with a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

Last week a two-member Trinamool MP delegation, led by its leader in the Rajya Sabha Derek O'Brien, spent a long time at the Hyderabad University campus and addressed the students demanding justice for Vemula.

Irani also slammed the Mamata Banerjee-led government on recent incidences of violence in the state.

"In Malda, a police station was burnt. Police watched the tamasha and Mamata did not say a word. Nobody said anything when the constitutional laws were being torn apart," she said.

Irani also criticised the party on the sensational hit-and-run case in which an IAF corporal was mowed down in Kolkata. He was killed while supervising the Republic Day Parade rehearsals.

--Indo Asian News Service sgh/pku/vt

( 274 Words)

2016-01-27-16:15:35 (IANS)
Srivastava, who had come to hold discussions with the students, was forced to leave the university after the agitators raised slogans of 'go back'.

University's Vice Chancellor Appa Rao Podile, whose resignation is being sought by the protesting students, has gone on leave.

Some of the protesting students, who are on hunger strike, were earlier in the day shifted to heath centre of the university after their condition deteriorated. The protesting students had stated that the authorities should cater to the demands of the students and allow the university to function normally.

The impasse between the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the University of Hyderabad and the administration continued as the academic suspension entered its tenth day today.

Rohith Vemula, a Dalit research scholar, was found hanging at the Central University's hostel room on January 17.

He was among the five research scholars, suspended by the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) in August last year.

The HCU has already revoked suspension of the four students, following uproar over Vemula's suicide. (ANI)
Gandhi confirmed the news on his official Twitter account saying, "Will visit Bandlapalli, Anantpur on 2nd Feb to commemorate 10yrs of MNREGA."

"It was from this village that Prime Minister Manmohan Singhji and Congress President Sonia Gandhiji in 2006 had launched the historic MNREGA," he added.

All India Congress Committee (AICC) would be organising the 10th anniversary of the launch of MGNREGA at the same place so that people recognise that it was the UPA government which had launched the programme for the benefit of farm and daily wage labourers. (ANI)
Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Wednesday dismissed allegations of bribery in the solar scam levelled against him by Saritha Nair, one of the main accused in the case. His comments came after Nair deposed first before the judicial commission probing the case. She later told reporters at Kochi that she had given Rs.1.90 crore in two instalments which, she claimed, was part of the Rs.7 crore bribe demanded by Chandy through his then staff Jikumon. "Even a Rs.2 cheque she gave to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund had bounced and then they say they gave crores (of rupees) as bribe money. This is not tenable," Chandy told reporters. Chandy also questioned the benefits Nair's company allegedly got from the state government. "The state government has not given any benefits to their company, nor has this scam caused a single paisa loss to the exchequer," said Chandy. On Wednesday, Nair said: "I gave Rs.1.10 crore to Thomas Kuruvilla in Delhi and another Rs.80 lakh in the state capital. I was arrested 15 days after giving the second instalment." Nair also said that she had given Rs.40 lakh to State Power Minister Aryadan Mohammed. Nair and her live-in partner Biju Radhakrishnan were arrested in the solar scam in 2013. While Nair is out on bail, Radhakrishnan is still in custody after it came to light that he murdered his first wife. "I waited all this while expecting I will get back the money I gave, but now I feel it's time to open up," said Nair. CPI-M state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan demanded Chandy's resignation after Nair's disclosure. State Congress president V.M. Sudheeran backed Chandy and said this was the latest release in the series of canards and was timed with an eye to the upcoming assembly elections. "Kerala will take this disclosure with a pinch of salt and none will pay heed to what has been alleged," said Sudheeran. --Indo-Asian News Service sg/pr/dg ( 332 Words) 2016-01-27-16:51:33 (IANS)
The Pakistan India Peoples' Forum for Peace & Democracy (PIPFPD) India Chapter and National Fishworkers Forum (NFF) today urged the union government to take immediate steps ensuring the release of a large number of Indian and Pakistani fishermen languishing in jails of both India and Pakistan. In a joint letter to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, NFF chairperson M Ellango and PIPFPD secretary Jatin Desai said the issue of fish workers arrests between India and Pakistan by the Maritime Security Agency (MSA) of Pakistan and the Indian Coast Guard dates back to several decades. However the number of people arrested has currently been on the rise. They said as per the provisions of the Consular agreement, the lists of prisoners including civilian prisoners and fishermen has been exchanged on January 1, 2016 with a hope that immediate action will be taken by the minister in order to facilitate the release of Indian fishermen after the release of fishermen from Pakistan who are languishing in jails of India. Stating that there is an urgent need to take forward the demand for a No Arrest Policy which would be a significant Confidence Building Measure, they demanded unilateral and unconditional declaration No Arrest Policy of Pakistani fishermen and boats, so as to prompt a reciprocal action from Pakistan government on this issue. They also demanded that the interim recommendations of the India- Pakistan Judicial Committee on Prisoners, Lahore, April 30, 2013 be implemented, wherein it was recommended that fishermen be repatriated by sea along with their boats.The work done by the committee was highly appreciated by the governments of both countries but it is disappointing to see that there has been no implementation of the sameUNI PAB CJ SW 1709 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-559593.Xml
Over 1,000 schools across four Indian states '' Mizoram, Telangana, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh '' have agreed to participate in CLIx, allowing it to reach an estimated 165,000 students by 2018-19.

The programme will offer content in both English and in regional languages, starting with Hindi and Telugu, and will offer curriculum in English, science, mathematics, and professional values.

An additional major focus will be professional development for roughly 4,400 teachers in the four states.

Announcement of the launch of CLIx, in Mumbai, was attended by Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Trusts; MIT President L. Rafael Reif; S. Ramadorai, Chairperson of the Board and S. Parasuraman, Director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and representatives of the four Indian states and Ministry of Human Resource Development that will participate in CLIx.

Tata Trusts have initiated partnerships with the finest institutions globally to find innovative solutions to pressing social issues in India,

CLIx will align technology-integrated offerings with existing schoolcurricula.

In sync with Indias national goal of improving the quality of secondary education, the initiative intends to leverage new technologies; enhance professional development of teachers; and create an open ecosystem to foster collaboration for innovation.UNI JS NV SW GC1629

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0171-559412.Xml
Some policemen received brickbat injuries when a violent mob hurled missiles and stones at them during an operation to demolish an illegal construction at Ekbalpore in south Kolkata today. Reinforcement, aided by Rapid Action Force (RAF), brought the situation under control as they chased the violent mob away on Ekbalpore Road in Kidderpur area, police said. Trouble started when a Kolkata Municipal Coporation official, accompanied by a convoy of policemen from Ekbalpore police station, had gone to ward No 37 to demolish an illegal structure. The local people started throwing stones and missiles at them, injuring some cops. However, when reinforcement was deployed the situation was brought under control.UNI PC PL SW GC1625 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-559392.Xml
: To ensure smooth flow of traffic and safetyof the delegates and VVIPs participation in the 'Invest KarnatakaMeet' scheduled to be held at Palace Ground from February 3 to 5,the Commissioner of Police has restricted entry of Lorries into thecity from February One to Five from 6 am to 10 pm. However, Lorries coming to Yeshwanthpur RMC Yard from Tumkur Roadare exempted, a to a release here today. 'Invest Karnataka Meet 2016', aims to create a platform for thebest minds to meet, exchange ideas and drive forward the state'svision of prosperity for all - by employing technology, innovation,inclusiveness and sustainability as key factors for development. Various visionary leaders and global corporates participate andexplore opportunities in Karnataka. This event witnesses participants across the globe. In this event, Central and StateMinisters and many VVIPs are also expected to participate. Under the circumstances, in order to ensure smooth flow of traffic andsafety, the movement of lorries in Bengaluru city has been restricted, the release added.UNI MSP KVV ADB 1700 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0287-559472.Xml
Asserting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Government at the Centre was using Governors to control non-BJP ruled states, the Congress Party on Wednesday vowed to continue their fight against an 'autocratic' Prime Minister. "The autocratic politics of Prime Minister Modi is now exposed. He is using the Governors to control the States. This is a war on Democracy...From the streets to the Parliament, the Indian National Congress will fight the autocratic behaviour of the Narendra Modi Government," Congress leader Raj Babbar said at a press conference here. Babbar further alleged that Congress Government in Arunachal Pradesh was 'shamefully' removed despite getting 58 percent of the votes in state elections. Congress leader V Narayanaswamy squarely blamed the BJP for political crisis in Arunachal Pradesh, saying that it was done to topple the elected government in the state. "There is a crisis situation created in Arunachal Pradesh? Who created this crisis..Only RSS backed people are being appointed as Governors in NE. This shows the sinister designs of the Modi Govt to topple elected governments," he said. "BJP engineered defection in Congress and today they're telling we don't have majority," he added. Supreme Court earlier in the day issued notice to the Centre to file reply by January 29. The apex court has scheduled the next date of hearing for February 1. Hearing the plea filed by Arunachal Pradesh Assembly Speaker and the Congress Party, the apex court expressed its displeasure to Governor Rajkhowa as to why the Supreme Court was not informed about the developments in the state. President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to the Union Cabinet's recommendation for imposition of President's rule in Arunachal after being satisfied that the law and order in the border state was sensitive. The Congress, which is determined to stall the ratification of President's rule in the state, is mulling both legal and political options to fight the same. The decision in this regard was taken at a meeting yesterday. (ANI)
The Human Rights and Consumer Protection Council Members here today held a demonstration in front of the Education department to press their demands. They were demanding among other things, scrapping of the recognition of a private school at Kadirgamam here, where continued sexual harassment on students are arising and the closure of the school. It may be noted that police registered cases against correspondent of the K S P School run by a ruling N R Congress functionary K S P Ramesh for sexually assaulting a ninth standard student and is now on bail granted by the Madras High Court. Later ,an employee of the school abducted a plus two student of the school and police rescued her from Chennai and hence,the demand. Volunteers of 21 political parties and social service organisations, including BSP, Lok Jan Sakthi Party(LJP), Dravidar Kazhagam, Dravidar Viduthali Kazhagam,Viduthali Vengaigal participated in the agitation.UNI PAB KVV ADB 1720 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-559615.Xml
: The Madras High Court today ordered a freshautopsy on the body of Monisha, one of the three girls of SVS Medical college for Naturopathy and Yoga Science, who allegedlycommitted suicide on January 23, even as a functionary of a Dalitoutfit and works close with the college management, surrenderedbefore a Magistrate court here. When the petition filed by her father Tamilarasan came up forhearing, Judge Subbiah ordered that a second autopsy on the bodyshould be done. ''Since her father himself has suspected foul play in her death, a fresh autopsy should be done'', the Judge said. The Judge also said that a doctor of the petitioner's choicewould be present during the second post-mortem. Contending that autopsy on the body of his daughter was performed without his consent, Tamilarasan, father of Monisha, has moved the Madras High Court, seeking a second post-mortem at a Government Hospital in Chennai. In his petition, Tamilarasan, apart from fresh autopsy,had also prayed for a CB-CID probe into her girl's death. The Villuppuram police also filed a report in the court, stating that the probe was being done in an impartial manner. Meanwhile, a functionary of a fringe Dalit outfit, who allegedly had close links with the college management, today surrendered before Saidapet Metropolitan Magistrate Court inthe city. Police sources said Aadhi Dravaida Puratchigara Kazhagam, Chief Peru Venkatesan, who was being searched by the police, surrenderedbefore the Court here this afternoon.MORE UNI GV KVV ADB 1730 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-559676.Xml
A flight cleaning worker who found a chit in the flight which hadarrived here from Jaipur stating that 'Bomb kept in the flight'immediately informed the higherups.

Airport security swing into action and the flight No 1513 wasthroughouly checked by disembarking the passengers. However, since the search turned out the threat as hoax, green signal was given forthe flight to takeoff.UNI MSP KVV ADB1750

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0287-559731.Xml
Congress today decided to boycott the Khadoor Sahab by-election necessitated after the sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahib at Bargadi in Kotkpaura, due to which the party MLA Ramanjit Singh Sikki resigned in protest. Addressing a press conference here, Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh said, Since the basic issue of the sacrilege of the Holy Guru Granth Sahib, for which Sikki resigned, still remains unresolved, the Congress party decided there was no point in contesting the election. Capt Singh was accompanied by AICC Secretary Incharge Harish Chaudhary, senior leaders Laal Singh, Rana Gurjeet Singh, Hardayal Kambhoj and others. The PCC president reiterated that it was Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal who had first directed the sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahab in a bid at controlled destabilisation to divert the public attention from his failures and subsequently ordered the firing on peaceful protestors which left two people dead and about 40 injured. Not a single person has been identified, leave aside punishing them for the sacrilege nor has any action been taken against the guilty police officials responsible for firing and killing of peaceful protesters, he pointed out, adding, under these circumstances there was no point in seeking re-election. The former chief minister maintained that the matter must be probed by a judicial commission headed by a sitting judge of the High Court. He said, as Badal was unlikely to do that since he knows the buck will stop at him, the Congress after it forms the government will set up the commission headed by a sitting judge to probe the sacrilege and punish the guilty.More UNI NC SW CS1725 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-559567.Xml
Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai, who has launched a movement to secure women's entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple, today said their movement was successful as Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has supported their endeavour and assured to look into the matter. "The Chief Minister told us that he supports our mission and he was with us in our fight. The CM has assured them that he would make every effort to popularise their movement," said Desai while divulging details of her meeting with the Chief Minister. "We urged the Chief Minister to bring Shani Shingnapur temple under the jurisdiction of the Maharashtra Government and women should be allowed to enter the temple," she added. The Bhumata Brigade chief further said that they have requested the Chief Minister to ensure an arrangement so that both men and women could enter the Shani platform. "We urged the CM to set an example by joining the Bhumata Brigade activists in offering prayers at the temple," she added. Earlier today, Fadnavis met the women activists, who were detained during their protest yesterday. Women members and supporters of the Bhumata Brigade arrived from Pune on Tuesday in six buses with an aim to enter the temple's sanctum where the idol of Lord Shani is placed on an open-air platform. However, the group led by Desai was stopped from marching towards the temple by police near Supa. They were also detained by police for some time, but released later. After being stopped by police, Trupti said it was a "black day" for women as they were being stopped from exercising their rights. The temple drew attention in November 2015 after a woman had offered prayers at the popular shrine in "breach" of age-old practice that prohibits entry of women, after which the temple committee had to suspend seven security men and the villagers to perform purification rituals. The temple attracts millions of tourists and devotees from across the country and abroad. (ANI)
The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued notices to the central government and Arunachal Pradesh Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa on a plea challenging the imposition of President's Rule in the north-eastern state on January 26. An apex court constitution bench comprising Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Madan B. Lokur, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghosh and Justice N.V. Ramana also ordered the Centre to file its response by January 29 and directed further hearing in the matter on Monday (February 1). The court gave liberty to the petitioner, Congress chief whip in Arunachal Pradesh Rajesh Tacho, to amend the plea to include a challenge to the presidential proclamation. The court directed that Tacho be provided the date on which Rajkhowa sent a report recommending the imposition of President's Rule. At the outset of the hearing, senior counsel Fali S. Nariman told the apex court that ever since the last hearing on February 22, Arunachal Pradesh had been put under President's Rule and two advisors appointed to assist the governor in running the affairs of the state. Seeking the date on which the governor recommended the imposition of President's Rule, Nariman said senior counsel Harish Salve, who appeared for the governor, told the court on January 14 that nothing untoward would be done to precipitate the situation. Describing as "crucial" the date on which President's Rule recommendation was sent by Rajkhowa, senior counsel Kapil Sibal sought to know the grounds and material relied upon by the governor while making the recommendations. Opposing the plea, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said that the governor's report was confidential and could not be shared with petitioner Tacho. However, he said, it could be shared with the bench. Nariman contested Rohatgi's plea that the governor's report was confidential as he cited an earlier seven-judge bench judgment in former Karnataka chief minister late S.R. Bommai's case, wherein the court said that the governor's report was not confidential. Justice Lokur confronted the attorney general with the apex court judgment wherein the governor's report was reproduced. The presidential proclamation mentions "a" report by the governor, Justice Ramana pointed out as Rohatgi said there were a series of reports by Governor Rajkhowa. "Whatever is the worth of this petition (by Rajesh Tacho), you reply. You may accept it or you may not accept it," the court observed as the AG contested the maintainability of the plea challenging the cabinet decision to recommend President's Rule. Contending that the cabinet recommendation was immune from challenge, Rohatgi said that unless there is an order, decree or a crystallised situation, you can't challenge it. As the AG told the court that there was no challenge to the presidential proclamation in the matter before the court, Nariman said the Attorney General could not be technical in his approach. Rohatgi said it was not a question of his getting technical but every proceeding of the court is governed by rules and procedures. The Congress on January 25 moved the Supreme Court challenging the cabinet decision to impose President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh on the recommendation of Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa. The union cabinet on January 24 decided to impose President's Rule. --Indo-Asian News Service pk/tsb/bg ( 543 Words) 2016-01-27-19:13:37 (IANS)
Hardline Hurriyat Conference chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani today said any move to merge Gilgit and Baltistan in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir with Pakistan will have far reaching consequences on the Kashmir issue.Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and moderate HC have also challenged the move of Islamabad to merge Gilgit and Baltistan with Pakistan.In an open letter to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Mr Geelani said though he was not feeling well for the past some time, these new developments made him restless and forced him to write a few lines to clear the stand of the people of Kashmir on Gilgit and Baltistan. It is true that Pakistan-China economic corridor project though Gilgit and Baltistan will bring revolutionary changes, he said, adding that for this there was absolutely no need to merge these areas with Pakistan. There is nothing in the resolutions of the United Nations which prevent measures for the progress and development of the region, Mr Geelani stated.UNI BAS ASM RSA RP AS1843 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-559647.Xml
The request was placed after a three-member team of Air Force and Army Officials called Kolkata Police Commissioner Surajit Kar Purkayastha and State Chief Secretary for speedy investigation.

Defence sources here today said Air force had submitted a formal request to the Kolkata Police recently, the response to which was still kept awaited.

Apart from this, the Kolkata Police has been asked by the Air Force officials to submit the list of witnesses and all possible evidences that have been collected till date against the goons for the Internal Air Forces court of inquiry.

Three men, Sambia, Shanu and Jhonny are under Police custody for their involvement in the hit and run case where 21-year-old Air Force corporal Abhimanyu Gaud was run over by an Audi on January 13 , early morning at Red Road during Republic day rehearsals.

Sambias father Md Shorab,l who has been alleged to have helped the criminals is absconding till now.UNI BM KK RSA CS1930

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0212-559996.Xml
Himachal Pradesh has introduced Deemed Assessment System (DAS) on the demand of assesses to collect excise duty from traders, shopkeepers and small and marginal entrepreneurs. The new system would give reprieve to traders having a turnover of upto Rs one crore as it would save them from the arduous regular assessment procedure and frequent visits to the offices of Excise and Taxation Department. Besides, the assessment time limit, which was November 30 earlier, had also been enhanced till March 20. Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, who had portfolio of finance, said this while presiding a departmental meeting here today. It would benefit traders and they will have hassle-free transportation of goods, he said. The trucks having full on-line declaration of goods can enter the State without stopping at barriers as notification in this regard had been issued after registration of of trader under the DAS. Dealers would also get a common Log-in ID through which a dealer would be able to upload all his returns. The state has exempt dhabas, halwais, tea and chat shops owners from payment of VAT who have a turnover of less than Rs five lakh. There are about 47,000 small traders having a turnover of less than Rs 25 lakh, who are paying tax to the government.UNI ML RSA SW NS1855 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-559589.Xml
Punjab BJP president Kamal Sharma today said Congress is no more a player in Punjab politics as its days are numbered and it would be completely decimated. In a statement here after Congress officially announced that party would not be contesting the Khadoor Sahib By-Election, Mr Sharma said, By running away from the crucial poll, the Congress has accepted that party's days are numbered in Punjab and the day is not far away when the grand old party would be completely decimated in this border state. Launching a scathing attack on Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) President Capt Amarinder Singh, the BJP State Chief said, Today's development is an indicator that Amarinder has no control over the Punjab Congress. "Today, Congress dissident S Bhupinder Singh Bittu has filed his nomination papers, as an independent from Khadoor Sahib. This clearly reflects that Amarinder has zero command over Punjab Congress. Under his leadership, the Congress party would taste a big defeat, third in a row, in the Punjab Assembly elections slated to be held early next year. He further said earlier, during the parliamentary polls, many Congress stalwarts, including former Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, Manish Tewari, had opted out of polls on frivolous grounds. Now again, sensing a huge defeat, Congress has withdrawn from the election, necessitated after the resignation of former MLA S Ramanjit Singh Sikki. The development makes it amply clear the hollowness of Congress. "The decision taken by Congress has in itself given a big positive headstart to the SAD-BJP ahead of the 2017 assembly polls", asserted the BJP State president. UNI NC RSA CS1938 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-560030.Xml
Three MoUs have been signed on cooperation in Cyber Security.

An MoU between CERT-In and CyberSecurity, Malaysia, for cooperation in the area of Cyber Security was signed on November 23 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Malaysia.

Similarly, an MoU between CERT-In and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team (SingCERT), Cyber Security Agency (CSA) of Singapore for cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on November 24 in Singapore during Prime Minister's visit.

CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre (JPCERT/CC) concluded an MoU for cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on December7 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed MoU between the two parties completed by December 22.

The MoUs related to the Cyber Security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and respective country. (ANI)
The Congress Party on Wednesday slammed the BJP-led Government in Maharashtra over the mishandling of Shani Shingnapur temple issue and asked why Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had swung into action now, even as the protests have been going on for days. "The assurance has come a little too late. The Chief Minister is guilty of silence considering that these protests have been going on for days. It is due to sheer protests by the women activists that the Chief Minister has chosen to react. Why has he been silent for so long," Congress leader Priyanka Chaturvedi told ANI. "What happened yesterday was very condemnable. The Chief Minister also handles the Home Ministry profile, and the protests reached a stage where the girls were arrested," she added. Fadnavis today met Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai and other women activists, who have launched a movement to secure women's entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple. Desai said that Fadnavis supported their endeavour and assured to look into the matter. The Bhumata Brigade chief further said that they have requested the Chief Minister to ensure an arrangement so that both men and women could enter the Shani platform. Women members and supporters of the Bhumata Brigade arrived from Pune on Tuesday in six buses with an aim to enter the temple's sanctum where the idol of Lord Shani is placed on an open-air platform. However, the group led by Desai was stopped from marching towards the temple by police near Supa. They were also detained by police for some time, but released later. After being stopped by police, Trupti said it was a "black day" for women as they were being stopped from exercising their rights. The temple drew attention in November 2015 after a woman had offered prayers at the popular shrine in "breach" of age-old practice that prohibits entry of women, after which the temple committee had to suspend seven security men and the villagers to perform purification rituals. The temple attracts millions of tourists and devotees from across the country and abroad. (ANI)
Led by Jai Krishan Das of the Yamuna Rakshak Dal, the demonstrators raised slogans as they marched to the district magistrate's office. Some of them were on two-wheelers or in cars.

Many of the protesters were Hindu holy men.

A memorandum handed over to City Magistrate Vijay Kumar called for action to stop discharge of waste water and sewage from scores of big and small drains into the Yamuna.

"If the administration fails to meet our demand, we will raise a wall at Cheer Ghat in Vrindavan on February 1 to plug a drain opening into the river," Jai Krishna Das said.

--Indo-Asian News Service bk/mr

( 136 Words)

2016-01-27-20:51:33 (IANS)
The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued notice to the central government and Arunachal Pradesh Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa on a plea challenging the imposition of President's Rule in the north-eastern state on January 26. An apex court constitution bench of Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Madan B. Lokur, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghosh and Justice N.V. Ramana also ordered the centre to file its response, if any, by January 29 and directed further hearing in the matter on Monday (February 1). The court recorded that senior counsel Satya Pal Jain, appearing for Governor Rajkhowa, "undertakes to furnish a copy of the governor's report and other material recommending issuance of a proclamation under Article 356 of the Constitution of India, to the court in a sealed cover". The court directed that the "original record be kept available by the attorney general during the hearing". The court gave liberty to the petitioner, Congress chief whip in Arunachal Pradesh Rajesh Tacho, to amend the plea to "assail the report of the governor, and the consequential (presidential) proclamation". The court directed that Tacho be provided, during the course of the day, the date on which Rajkhowa sent a report recommending the imposition of President's Rule. At the outset of the hearing, senior counsel Fali S. Nariman told the apex court that ever since the last hearing on February 22, Arunachal Pradesh had been put under President's Rule and two advisors appointed to assist the governor in running the affairs of the state. Seeking the date on which the governor recommended the imposition of President's Rule, Nariman said senior counsel Harish Salve, who appeared for the governor, told the court on January 14 that nothing untoward would be done to precipitate the situation. Describing as "crucial" the date on which President's Rule recommendation was sent by Rajkhowa, senior counsel Kapil Sibal sought to know the grounds and material relied upon by the governor while making the recommendations. Opposing the plea, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said that the governor's report was confidential and could not be shared with petitioner Tacho. However, he said, it could be shared with the bench. Nariman contested Rohatgi's plea that the governor's report was confidential as he cited an earlier seven-judge bench judgment in former Karnataka chief minister late S.R. Bommai's case, wherein the court said that the governor's report was not confidential. Justice Lokur confronted the attorney general with the apex court judgment wherein the governor's report was reproduced. The presidential proclamation mentions "a" report by the governor, Justice Ramana pointed out as Rohatgi said there were a series of reports by Governor Rajkhowa. "Whatever is the worth of this petition (by Rajesh Tacho), you reply. You may accept it or you may not accept it," the court observed as the AG contested the maintainability of the plea challenging the cabinet decision to recommend President's Rule. Contending that the cabinet recommendation was immune from challenge, Rohatgi said that unless there is an order, decree or a crystallised situation, you can't challenge it. As the AG told the court that there was no challenge to the presidential proclamation in the matter before the court, Nariman said the attorney general could not be technical in his approach. Rohatgi said it was not a question of his getting technical but every proceeding of the court is governed by rules and procedures. The Congress on January 25 moved the Supreme Court challenging the cabinet decision to impose President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh on the recommendation of Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa. The union cabinet on January 24 decided to impose President's Rule.A --Indo-Asian News Service pk/tsb/vm ( 618 Words) 2016-01-27-21:03:34 (IANS)
In order to enhance the business relationship with Germany, Indian Ambassador to Germany, Gurjit Singh today said that the office of the Confederation of lndian lndustry (Cll) in Frankfurt will be opened soon, which will serve as a reference point for lndian industry and the international business community. ln his interaction with Indian and German interlocutors, he expressed the desire for enhancing lndo-German relationship to fulfil the programmes established by leaders of both countries'. He called upon the Indian diasporas to engage more vigorously with India and drew attention to the Indian Corporate internship programme, an official statement said. During Indias participation as partner country at Hannover Messe 2015, Cll had taken the decision to reopen its office in Germany to deepen its engagement with German industry. UNI ASH ABI 2030 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0388-560261.Xml
: Rahul Sehgal, Asia Director of Human Society International (HIS) today said that effective Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme coupled with mass vaccination against rabies disease will check the stray dog menace in the Union Territory Addressing a workshop on stray dog population management organised by the Animal Welfare Board of India here today. Mr.Sehgal pointed out to the nearly 25000 stray dog population in Puducherry and said the menace could be checked within a period of 15 to 18 months times, if its managed scientifically and properly. He said place like Jaipur had achieved zero dog bite after implementation of the scientific methods, involving ABC as well as vaccination from 1992 to 2002. Mr Sehgal said Chennai is another example, which the programme was successfully executed from 1996 and the city also achieved the desired results. He said the co-ordination of various implementing agencies, local administration, health and others are vital in the process for the sustainability. Pointing that dogs have been the humans companions and they give a sense of security, Mr Sehgal said it is better to manage the stray dog menace using scientific methods rather that eliminating them by killing. A type of hysteria created by humans themselves about the stray dog biting and the subsequent difficulties posed in the aftermath, he said. He said killing of dogs wont be permanent solution and it is illegal and this can lead to a host of other problems in form of spread of diseases. If the entire dogs in a particular area are killed, that wont put an end to problems in the area as nature will permit other species to occupy the space created by the killing, like it happened in the case of plague in Surat, he said. Calling for an attitudinal change of humans towards the dogs, he said the stray dog menace can be controlled through effective implementation of the Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme and the vaccination against rabies over a specific period with sustained efforts.Local Administration director, P T Rudra Goud, municiplaity commissioners, R Chandirasekaran, M S Ramesh, Veterinary medical officer, Dr K Coumarane other other officials were present. According to sources, the workshops are being conducted in 15 States and national level workshop is scheduled in February in Hissar.UNI PAB KVV ADB 2025 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-559899.Xml
Mr KTR while interacting with the IT Officials as part of GHMC election camapign here, asked IT professionals to elect leaders who would be providing them basic amenities like power, water, sewage disposal system, pollution-free environment, public transportation, parks, playgrounds.

Responding to a question from one IT professiionals, the Ministers claimed that his government had taken more measures for benefit of the people includes She Teams, all-women police stations, 33 quota for women in uniform jobs in response to a specific question on women security.

To another question on digital literacy in rural areas, the Minister mentioned the broadband connectivity to every household piggybacking on Telangana Water Grid.

When a participant asked about spreading IT industry to different parts of the city, the Minister replied in affirmative adding that Telangana Government will encourage it and do its best to make it remunerative for the Software companies that wish to move or expand to Tier-II cities.

Chevella MP , K. Vishveshwar Reddy, Telangana IT Association Honourary President, V. Prakash, TITA members were present at the event.UNI KNR KVV ADB 2048

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The Chief Minister has intervened in the controversy surrounding the entry of women in Shani Shingnapur temple, assuring quick resolution to the matter. The age-old tradition prohibits entry of women on the platform where the 'swayambhu' (on its own) idol of Shani Maharaj exists.

Mr Fadnavis met the protesting women of Bhumata Ranragini Brigade and paid heed to their demands.

The Chief Minister also promised Ms Desai full support from the government over the issue.

Talking with reporters following the meeting, Ms Desai claimed that their agitation has achieved success to an extent.

''Our movement has been successful as Chief Minister Fadnavis has extended his support and assured to look into it,'' she said.

Around 400 members of Bhumata Brigade stormed towards Shani Shingnapur temple yesterday to offer the worship in the temple, but they were detained by police at the Supa town, nearly 40 kilometres away from the temple.UNI SP SS RSA NS2100

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The prisoners would be allowed to use the ATM cards inside thejail premises, said additional director general (Prison) BhushanKumar Upadhyay.

He said that the cards were given under a pilot project whichis first of its kind in the State.

The jail administration has planned to extend the facility toall 800 prisoners. This facility would be made available to over10,000 prisoners lodged in the other nine prisons of the state, he informed.

While distributing the cards, Mr Upadhyaya said Nagpur waschosen for the pilot project.

The inmates can swipe the cards in the canteen to purchasedaily use items like soap, hair oil, eatables and others against thepayment they receive for doing work in the premises, ADG said.

The inmates can also use the cards once they are released afterserving their terms, informed Mr Upadhyaya, and said that thisinnovative project has been introduced to inculcate a habit ofsaving among them.

Any prisoner can spend up to Rs 2,500 per month, he said andstated their relatives can also deposit in their respective savingbank accounts up to Rs 2,500, which is the monthly upper limit for inmates.

Exhorting the jail inmates to practise yoga in jail premises tobe fit and healthy, Mr Upadhyay said that prisoners practising yogaare entitled for remission up to a maximum of three months.

Ace yoga guru Ramdev Baba will be invited to Nagpur CentralJail to teach yoga to inmates, he added.UNI RS SS RSA NS2224

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In a late development, police on Tuesday arrested Syrian national Mahmoud Qusay, 28, who was found overstaying in Goa for a year, after expiry of his visa. Police sources said that Qusay, who was picked up from a casino, late on Monday night, was remanded to seven days in police custody. "He has been arrested under relevant sections of the Foreigner's Act,a police said. Qusay, according to Inspector General of Police Sunil Garg, was picked up from the casino and was being questioned for several hours, about his illegal stay in Goa. "Our police team picked him up from an offshore casino last night after receiving information that he was overstaying in India after expiry of his visa. We have detained him and he is being questioned by police and agencies," Garg had said earlier on Tuesday. Qusay is the second Syrian national who has been arrested for overstaying in Goa, where the police are on high-alert for the last two weeks, after a post card with the letters ISIS, was received by the State Secretariat, which threatened Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi with dire consequences because of their alleged anti-beef policies. Less than a week ago, yet another Syrian national, Mussa Alareef, was quizzed by officials of the Porvorim police station for overstaying. --Indo-Asian News Service maya/ahm/ ( 232 Words) 2016-01-27-02:51:33 (IANS)
Earlier British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) published an article and video featuring US Department of Treasury (DoT) official Adam Szubin, who said that Putin was corrupt.

"We've seen him enriching his friends, his close allies, and marginalising those who he doesn't view as friends using state assets.

"Whether that's Russia's energy wealth, whether it's other state contracts, he directs those to whom he believes will serve him and excludes those who don't. To me, that is a picture of corruption," BBC quoted Szub, who "oversees US Treasury sanctions," as saying.

In response, accusing the BBC report as another media hoax, Peskov expressed great surprise that the "unfounded slander" was given by a US official.

"This makes the situation different, this is an official accusation," Peskov said, adding that "content of this BBC report is pure speculation and defamation."

"Proof is needed because the voicing of such accusations from a department like the US Treasury without any concrete facts casts doubt on the department itself," RIA Novosti news agency quoted Peskov as saying.

According to Peskov, the new comments were unlikely to negatively affect US-Russia relations as the bilateral ties are currently "not in their best shape."

"To the extent that such deceitful comments are unlikely to complicate the situation even more," Peskov said.

The US-Russia relations has serious deteriorated over the two-year-old Ukrainian crisis, while both sides also disagreed about various international key issues including Syrian crisis and anti-terrorism fight.

--Indo-Asian News Service ahm/

( 275 Words)

2016-01-27-03:27:34 (IANS)
Russia intends to build relationships with western countries on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, and it will no longer yield to external pressure, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said here. "Our western colleagues sometimes say that there will be no more 'business as usual' with Russia, and I am convinced that this is true," Lavrov said during his annual press conference broadcast online on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. "(Such statements by western countries) imply attempts to impose on us agreements that take into account primarily the interests of the European Union or the US, and to persuade us that they would not damage our interests. This story is over," the minister said. Lavrov said that Russia was implementing structural reforms and substituting imports in order not to be dependent on "zigzags" in western politics. Meanwhile, Moscow remains open and ready to cooperation with the West, but only on the basis of equality and all other principles of international law, he said. Mentioning NATO's eastward expansion close to the Russian border and the establishment of the US's global missile defence system in Europe and Northeast Asia, the Russia's top diplomat said such "unconstructive and dangerous" policies are "short-sighted and destabilising." Attempts to reverse this situation have been met with poor results, he added. The minister also noted that a unipolar ideology can no longer dominate international politics. "The world is leaving behind the epoch of the total domination of the West and is now in a long transition period to a more stable system, where there will be no single pole of domination," Lavrov said, adding that the emergence of a truly multi-polar world may take a "long and painful period as old customs take a long time to fade away." With regard to Russia's relations with China, he considered it a model of international cooperation. "It is in fact the best in the history of relations between our countries and our peoples ... There is no other country with which we have such an extensive network of cooperation mechanisms," Lavrov said, hailing the ties as "systemic" and having led to "impressive results". --Indo-Asian News Service ahm/ ( 365 Words) 2016-01-27-06:49:34 (IANS)
According to the Dawn, the EU had persuaded Pakistan in November to restore a suspended agreement to facilitate the return of illegal Pakistani immigrants without documentation.

"While discussions have been good and positive, we note that there are still difficulties with this readmission deal," European Commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud told a news briefing.

In December Pakistan sent had back at least 30 migrants that Greece was trying to repatriate, saying that they had failed to provide adequate proof that they were Pakistani. (ANI)
President Barack Obama will meet with Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at the White House today, the White House said. "The two will meet privately in the Oval Office and there will be no formal agenda," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. Sanders, a Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist, is challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the November presidential election. REUTERS MI DS AN0539 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-558794.Xml
The United States and China must find a way forward on the North Korea nuclear issue and the situation in the South China Sea, US Secretary of State John Kerry said today during a meeting with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi."Clearly we have several important issues that we need to find the way forward on," Kerry said, according to a pool media report on the meeting, calling North Korea's nuclear program "a major challenge to global security"."The second issue is of course concerns and activities in the South China Sea," Kerry said. REUTERS PY RAI0902 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0298-558827.Xml
A US news channel and a newspaper will host a debate for the Democratic presidential contenders in New Hampshire a few days before the state's primary election - but it remained unclear whether the party will relax its rule banning candidates from non-sanctioned debates. The news channel MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader will hold the debate on February 4 in New Hampshire, the second state in the nation to vote for parties' presidential nominees following the Iowa caucuses on Monday, the Union Leader said on its website yesterday. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been criticized by two of the three contenders, US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, for its relatively skimpy debate schedule. The DNC scheduled only six debates for its 2016 candidates, and, contrary to its practice in previous election years, forbade candidates from taking part in debates not sanctioned by the party. There were 25 Democratic primary debates in 2008 and 15 in 2004, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has dismissed criticisms from within her party that she organized relatively few debates and scheduled them at times when viewership might be lower than average in order to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's position as the long-standing front-runner for the nomination. Sanders has recently been drawing near or even, overtaking Clinton in some opinion polls as the first voting draws near. "We were always concerned that this would have been the first time in 32 years without a Democratic debate before the New Hampshire primary," Joseph W McQuaid, the Union Leader's publisher, said in an article on the paper's website, explaining the decision to add an unsanctioned debate. The paper did not say which candidates were invited or whether any of them had accepted ahead of the February 9 New Hampshire primary. Spokesmen for Sanders, Clinton and the DNC did not respond to a request for comment. John Bivona, O'Malley's campaign director in New Hampshire, said in an email to reporters that O'Malley looked forward to participating in the debate. REUTERS MI DS AN0406 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0387-558775.Xml
Eight Republican candidates have qualified for the prime-time Fox News/Google debate tomorrow, with Donald Trump winning the center-stage spot as the top-polling candidate, Fox News announced. But Trump said yesterday he likely will not attend the debate. This will be the last one before the Iowa caucuses on Monday marking the first contest in the nomination race for the November 8 presidential election. Trump has been engaged in a public spat with Fox News that began at a debate last August in which he said he was subject to unfair questioning by moderator Megyn Kelly. "Let's see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate," Trump told the news conference in Marshalltown, Iowa. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who failed to qualify for the main event in the last debate, made the cut this time. The other participants in the 9 pm EST debate will be Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Ohio Governor John Kasich. Former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore qualified for the 7 pm EST debate for low-polling candidates. After failing to qualify for a prime-time debate held earlier this month, Paul declined to participate in the so-called undercard debate.REUTERS MI DS AN0543 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0387-558793.Xml
Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou will travel to Itu Aba in the South China Sea tomorrow, his first visit to the outlying island that Taiwan claims as its own in the disputed maritime area. Ma, who steps down in May due to term limits, has requested that president-elect Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) send a representative as well to travel to the island, known in Taiwan as Taiping. Ma will visit Itu Aba if weather permits, the presidential office said in its statement. REUTERS MI DS AN0738 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0387-558805.Xml
US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump withdrew from a debate with party rivals this week out of anger at host Fox News , leaving the last encounter before Iowa's pivotal nominating contest without the front-runner. Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told reporters yeaterday after a combative news conference held by the candidate that Trump would definitely not be participating in the debate scheduled for tomorrow in Des Moines, Iowa, and co-hosted by Google. During the news conference before he addressed a large crowd in Marshalltown, Iowa, Trump expressed irritation that Fox News planned to leave in place as a moderator the anchor Megyn Kelly, whose questioning of Trump at a debate last August angered him. He also expressed displeasure at a Fox News statement on Monday night saying Trump would have to learn sooner or later that "he doesn't get to pick the journalists" and that "we're very surprised he's willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly." "I was all set to do the debate, I came here to do the debate. When they sent out the wise-guy press release done by some PR person along with (Fox News Chairman) Roger Ailes, I said: 'Bye bye, OK'" "Let's see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate," he added. The debate is scheduled for just days before Iowa's caucuses, the first nominating contest for the November 8 presidential election. In the Democratic contest, news channel MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper sketched out plans to host a debate in New Hampshire among front-runner Hillary Clinton and challengers Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, a few days before the state's primary election on February 9. But the Democratic National Committee raised doubts about whether it would proceed, saying in a statement it had no plans to sanction the debate. It left open the question of whether it would punish any participants by excluding them from the remaining two sanctioned ones. Spokesmen for Clinton, the former secretary of state who leads most polls, and O'Malley, a former Maryland governor, said their candidates would be happy to take part, at least in theory. The New York Times quoted the campaign manager for Sanders as saying the Vermont senator would sit out the unsanctioned debate. RATINGS BONANZA Trump's blunt-spoken candidacy has boosted ratings for the Republican presidential debates. The August debate on Fox News drew 24 million viewers, a record for a presidential primary debate and the highest non-sports telecast in cable TV history. His boycott will leave tomorrow's debate without the leader in the crowded Republican field not only in Iowa but nationally. Ahead of Iowa's caucuses next Monday, Trump leads in the polls over Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom Trump dismissed as a "nasty guy" who "nobody likes." A boycott could prove risky for Trump as Iowa Republicans seek to take one more look at who they want as their presidential candidate. Rivals like Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson could reap the benefits. But Trump, a billionaire businessman and former reality TV star said he would hold a competing event to raise money for US military veterans. "How many debates do you have to do?" Trump told reporters. "The Democrats are finished with their debates. ... The Republicans go on forever and ever and ever with debates. We have people on the stand who have zero (percentage points in the poll), who have one, who have nothing. So it's time that somebody plays grown up." Trump has been engaged in a public spat with Fox News since the network hosted the first debate and Kelly asked Trump about his treatment of woman, prompting a stream of insults from the candidate. At the news conference yesterday, Trump was introduced by Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has sought tougher measures against illegal immigrants. "Everything I believe in he's doing and he's going to do it as president," said Arpaio. Trump, pressed on his plans to build a wall along the US Mexican border and deport many illegal immigrants, defended his proposal and said he would be able to persuade the US Congress to go along with his plan. At his campaign event in Marshalltown, Trump expressed confidence in his position in the race, saying if he were to win Iowa, he could "run the table" and roll up subsequent victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond. "Iowa is very important. So you've got to get out, you've got to get out and caucus," he told his supporters.REUTERS MI DS AN0736 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0387-558806.Xml
Spanish police arrested nine people accused of being associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) today, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.The PKK, which is fighting for autonomy for Turkey's Kurds, is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. The decades-long conflict has cost more than 40,000 lives.The operation, which remains open, also searched 11 houses during dawn raids in Madrid, Valencia and Bilbao, the ministry said."The police operation was against the structure of education, training and integration in military apparatus of the terrorist organisation PKK-KCK, which operates in Turkey and Syria," the ministry saidREUTERS CJ RK1624 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-559466.Xml
A Russian lawmaker,Vadim Solovyov, has blamed the US for flu epidemic in Russia, urging the government and security services to take "serious" action in response."Americans have for a long time waged and continue to wage an active bacteriological war against Cuba.''They unleashed plague on Cuba from their base, and I don't deny that their technologies are very seriously developed," Russian news agencies reported, quoting Mr Solovyov, who is a Communist lawmaker of the State Duma. He said the current wave of flu in Russia has come from Ukraine, stressing the possibility that it was Americans who made a rush in this situation. Russia's consumer rights watchdog 'Rospotrebnadzor' yesterday declared that there was an epidemic of flu and acute respiratory viral infection in Moscow.The decree was issued by Moscow Chief Sanitary Inspector, Yelena Andreyeva. Twenty four people have died from the flu in Russia this week, Tass news reported.Medical institutions in Moscow have been instructed to provide all necessary outpatient care to those infected with the illness. Patients with unusual symptoms are to be immediately hospitalised. Last week, a flu epidemic broke out in St Petersburg, Russia's second largest city, and the city authorities have introduced a quarantine regime. UNI XC SHS-RP1830 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0329-559851.Xml
The United States, European Union and the United Nations have issued unusually stern criticism of Israel, provoking a sharp response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and raising Palestinians' hopes of steps against their neighbour.U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday described Israel's settlements as "provocative acts" that raised questions about its commitment to a two-state solution, nearly 50 years after occupying lands the Palestinians seek for a state.Ban also laid some of the blame for four months of stabbings and car rammings by Palestinians at Israel's door, saying "as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism".Netanyahu's response was quick and furious. Ban's remarks "give a tailwind to terrorism", he said, and ignore the fact "Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state"."The UN lost its neutrality and moral force a long time ago," he added, singling Ban out for personal criticism.While terse words between Israel and the United Nations are nothing new, Israel's closest allies, the United States and the European Union, have publicly expressed their own frustration with the policies of Netanyahu's right-wing government.Speaking at a security conference last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro questioned how equitably justice is applied in the occupied West Bank, saying: "At times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians."That, too, drew an angry response from Netanyahu. Shapiro later said he regretted the timing of his remarks, made on the day an Israeli mother of six, stabbed to death by a Palestinian in a West Bank settlement, was buried.The European Union's policy of labelling products made in Israeli settlements has provoked similar anger from officials, while Sweden's foreign minister was branded an anti-Semite after calling for an independent investigation into Israel's efforts to quell the current wave of violence.NOT SO RESOLVEDThe criticism, particularly about the settlements, where some 550,000 Jews live in around 250 communities scattered across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has raised Palestinian hopes that world powers might finally be minded to support a U.N. resolution condemning Israel's policy outright."We are continuing our contacts with the international community... and will go to the Security Council for a resolution against the colonial settlement enterprise," Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said last week.The last attempt at such a resolution failed in 2011 after the United States vetoed it, saying it harmed the chances for peace. The feeling among Palestinian diplomats now is that the United States may be less inclined to veto given the absence of peace talks and the depth of U.S. frustration with Israel.Israeli diplomats are also wary of that possibility."It's always a risk and we are extremely attentive to it," said Emmanuel Nahshon, the Foreign Ministry's spokesman."There has indeed been a lot of criticism of Israel recently, but I don't know whether that necessarily translates into a U.N. resolution."He said there had been "anti-Israeli resolutions" at the United Nations in the past, regardless of developments on the ground.The Palestinians hope France, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, might sponsor such a resolution, but it is unclear whether the French have the appetite for such a course."If the French want to play a useful and positive role in the Middle East, they can't stand behind an initiative that is against Israel and only antagonises us," said Nahshon.Even if a resolution were to be drafted, diplomats played down its prospects. While President Barack Obama may have a fractious relationship with Netanyahu, he is unlikely to want to isolate Israel in a US election year, with Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton keen to draw the Jewish vote."The logic might seem to be there, but when it comes to it, the United States isn't going to let such a resolution pass," said a European diplomat who has worked at the United Nations. REUTERS CJ CS1908 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-560006.Xml
Syrian PYD Kurds may take part in a later stage of Syrian peace talks in Geneva but have not been invited to the first round of discussions, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said today.United Nations special envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura told France's foreign minister earlier on Wednesday he would not be inviting the Syrian PYD Kurds, or Democratic Union Party, to the talks due to take place on January 29 and a Riyadh-backed opposition group would lead the negotiations."Invitations to the first stage of the Syria talks were not sent to the Democratic Union Party, but de Mistura has reserved them a place, he means to invite them at a later stage," Interfax news agency quoted Gatilov as saying.Russia has said it would be unfair to hold the talks without the Syria's powerful Kurdish faction which controls wide areas of northern Syria, as well as other individuals it believes represents Syrian society. REUTERS SHS NS2042 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-560277.Xml
Portugal's public sector workers refused today to cancel a strike set for Friday, demanding an immediate 35-hour work week in growing pressure on the minority Socialist government from its far-left allies.The public sector workers' union FNSTFP is part of CGTP umbrella union, Portugal's largest, that has close links to the Communist Party.The government, in power for just over two months, relies on the Communists and Left Bloc in parliament to approve bills after the three parties ousted the previous austerity-minded centre-right administration last November.Some analysts believe the government could be short-lived if the two far-left parties push for more radical policies and more spending, undermining the administration's plan for moderate budget consolidation and an easing of austerity measures.Political uncertainty and social strife could scare away investors, undermining a nascent recovery after a debt crisis."Public sector workers will go on strike on January 29 because nothing has changed for us to suspend it. Our central demand is immediate reinstatement of 35 hours," union leader Ana Avoila told a news briefing. There will still be a meeting with the finance minister tomorrow to try and find a solution.Two unions from Socialist-linked UGT labour group has earlier revoked its decision to take part in the strike.Avoila's ultimatum followed disagreements between the moderate Socialists and the far-left parties backing them in parliament over how soon the government, elected on promises to roll back austerity, can cut the 40-hour working week.The Socialists have agreed to implement the cut in July, while the unions and the far-left are pressing for it to come into effect as soon as possible.Portugal's previous centre-right government imposed the 40-hour week in the public sector in 2013 as part of its austerity drive under an international bailout that finished in 2014.Strikes and protests against steep tax hikes and deep wage cuts flared during the centre-right's 2011-2015 term. Portugal's last public sector strike was in March 2015.The Socialists came to power promising to end austerity but still cut the budget deficit to meet commitments to the European Union. The government has already lifted the minimum wage and started to restore to public sector workers some of the salary cuts suffered during the bailout programme. REUTERS SHS AS2139 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-560338.Xml
Tunisian police have broken up a cell recruiting fighters for Islamic State in Libya and Syria, authorities said today. Tunisia declared a state of emergency after a suicide bombing killed 12 presidential guards on a bus in the capital Tunis in November. That followed major gun attacks targeting foreign tourists at a Tunis museum and a beach hotel, both of which were claimed by Islamic State. "Our special forces counter-terrorism unit dismantled a cell which included nine extremists in Bizerte who were actively recruiting young people to send them into areas of trouble," the interior ministry said. It said those arrested had admitted recruiting for Islamic State in Libya and Syria. Tunisia, mostly a haven of stability since its 2011 revolt against autocrat Zine Abidine Ben Ali, is increasingly being challenged by Islamist militants, who have hit army patrols and checkpoints as well as carrying out major attacks. Several thousand Tunisians are fighting with Islamic State and other groups in Iraq and Syria. The gunmen in the Sousse and Bardo Museum attacks all trained at militant camps in Libya before returning to their home countryREUTERS CJ BD2018 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-560207.Xml
Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon appointed his daughter Ozoda the head of his administration today, strengthening his power in the Central Asian nation.Ozoda Rakhmon, 38, had been first deputy foreign minister. Her appointment, announced by the presidential office, followed a series of other steps consolidating her father's position.Late last year, the parliament passed a law giving him the official title of "Leader of the Nation".This month, lawmakers approved constitutional amendments which, if passed by a referendum, will allow both Rakhmon and his elder son Rustam Imomali to run for president when the current presidential term ends in 2020.Another amendment will ban political parties from being established on religious principles. Rakhmon's government outlawed the Islamic Renaissance Party, once the main opposition force, last year.It accused the party leadership of being linked to a failed coup led by senior defence official General Abdukhalim Nazarzoda, who was killed in clashes with government forces along with 37 of his supporters last September.Tajikistan, which borders on Afghanistan to the south, hosts a Russian military base. Its economy depends heavily on remittances from migrant workers, most of whom are in Russia. REUTERS SHS AS2242 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-560390.Xml
Ugandan opposition groups expressed outrage today after the country's police chief was quoted in a local newspaper telling a civilian anti-crime force to prepare for "war" after next month's presidential vote.The police denied the commanding officer had made the remarks.President Yoweri Museveni, a former guerrilla fighter who has led Uganda since 1986, is facing his most formidable contest in years ahead of the February 18 vote, which will see him face off against his former prime minister, Amama Mbabazi, and longtime opposition figure Kizza Besigye.Rights groups have long accused Museveni's government of using illegal arrests and beatings by security personnel to intimidate opposition supporters, while critics say he has rigged past elections.The government has steadfastly denied such charges.In a meeting with "crime preventers", a volunteer force recruited and managed by police and whose members have been accused of carrying out assaults against government critics, police chief Kale Kayihura said the group should be prepared to defend against election rigging by the opposition."We shall not hand over power to the opposition to destabilize the peace which we fought for," Kayihura told a group of crime preventers, according to The Observer newspaper."The constitution gives police powers to protect the nation in case there is war and I want you to get prepared for this," he said, according to the newspaper.EU SEEKS CLARITYPolice spokesman Fred Enanga told Reuters the newspaper's story "was manipulated and intended to provoke publicity and generate controversy", and denied Kayihura had made the remarks.On Twitter, Kristian Schmidt, head of the European Union's delegation in Uganda, wrote: General, I respectfully ask: Were you quoted correctly in today's Observer?"Earlier this month, the group Human Rights Watch called on Uganda to suspend the crime preventer program."Crime preventers should not be undisciplined and unaccountable recruits who become the eyes and muscle of the ruling party in every village," said senior researcher Maria Burnett.Mbabzazi, once a close Museveni ally, told Reuters the group was a ruling NRM party "militia... disguised as police."Newspaper columnist and political analyst, Nicholas Ssengoba, told Reuters Museveni was using the police chief to send out a message that opposing him would carry a heavy price."Museveni is promising through Kayihura that this time it wont be the usual intimidation, rigging, coercion...but that it will also be probably be fatal for anybody to oppose him," he said.REUTERS SHS NS2307 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-560410.Xml
Cedar Rapids (United States) (AFP) - The imam of Cedar Rapids, Iowa has long considered explaining Islam his mission. But when Republicans start ruminating over jihad and US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, Hassan Selim would rather turn to prayer.

"You come to a point where you get sick of explaining yourself," the 28-year-old cleric said in his small office in the city's Islamic Center, a large, modest structure built in 1971 and featuring a blue-roofed minaret.

Imam Selim was born in Egypt, where he studied at the prestigious Al-Azhar University before arriving in Iowa in 2012 to become the spiritual leader of one of America's oldest Muslim communities.

But instead of promoting his religion's virtues, he has found himself on the defensive in this heartland state, which on Monday kicks off the voting in America's months-long presidential nominations process.

"I want to practice my religion," he told AFP.

"I want to go to the people and explain what Islam is, not what Islam is not, because that's what we do all the time."

The center was bustling with children for Sunday school. Nine classes of Arabic, Koran and Islamic studies were taking place simultaneously.

Some of the youths were born into families who arrived here generations ago. Others are recent immigrants from Afghanistan, Morocco, Pakistan, South Africa and Syria.

Since last month's deadly attacks in San Bernardino, California, news cameras have become commonplace here.

The imam is gracious in hosting the media, as well as students, neighbors and public officials, with whom he maintains excellent relations.

But the pressure has worn on him.

When Trump, the brash billionaire atop the Republican candidate heap, proposed a ban on Muslims entering the United States, Imam Selim took it as a slap in the face.

The imam is American by marriage. His two daughters were born in the United States, and he said he wants them to grow up "feeling comfortable in their skin."

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He shows letters of support that he has received at the mosque. But for the first time, he now feels under watch when entering a restaurant.

- First US mosque -

The first Arabs arrived in Iowa in the 1880s, from what is now Syria and Lebanon, as Christian and Muslim farmers and peddlers.

In 1934, the community became the first in the nation to erect a mosque, although some places used for worship had existed earlier.

The "Mother mosque" still stands -- a small wooden white building, without a minaret, a crescent on the green dome -- in a residential area of Cedar Rapids.

Since 1971, the faithful have prayed in the larger Islamic Center, but the original mosque still serves as a kind of cultural and historical base, under the leadership of Imam Taha Tawil.

A photograph of the original building's inauguration shows about 100 men, women and children dressed to the nines.

"All of them were immigrants," explained Imam Taha.

It was the Great Depression, and whether they were Greek, Polish or Syrian, "everyone was worried about how to survive," the imam added.

The Muslim experience in America is different than Europe.

"In Europe there is a civil rights problem, there is ghetto, less services for the people there, and they classify the citizens," Imam Taha added.

"But in America, we don't feel we are second category citizens."

A Palestinian, the imam arrived in Iowa in 1983, and remains proud of the what the mosque has become.

He recalled recently finding 25 bikers outside. Unsure of what they wanted, he invited them in.

"They went back with a different understanding, saying, 'Oh we didn't know your faith, that you believe in Jesus,'" Imam Taha said.

He has even invited Trump, who recently campaigned in the area, to visit.

- Keeping quiet -

People always hesitate when they first meet Brittanie Shah. She is white, born in Indiana to a Baptist family, and has worn the hijab since her conversion.

She has had few problems with others in her community, but recently noticed a shift: "They say, 'I'm sorry for what's going on,' or 'It must be really tough,' as if I'm in mourning."

In the presence of her two children, the elementary school teacher now mutes the television when campaign commercials or programming address the issue of Muslim extremists.

Her son "has never heard radical or militant put with Islam" in the same sentence, she said.

Shah, who volunteers at the Islamic Center, said she knows why Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric resonates: ignorance and lack of education. She takes her own family as an example.

Shah will be supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton, whom she saw Sunday at a rally, but said she would appreciate more candidates in the race who share her values.

"But I can't find that when I'm watching these ads," she said.

"And this election has been the worst, because it's all Muslim, Muslim, Muslim."
Los Angeles (AFP) - Abe Vigoda, the sad-faced star of Francis Ford Coppola's classic film "The Godfather," died Tuesday at 94, his manager told AFP.

The actor died at the home of his daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs, in New Jersey.

"She went to get him something to drink and when she came back he was gone," said manager Sid Craig, who represented him for decades.

Vigoda apparently died of old age.

"He didn't seem particularly sick or tired. I don't think Abe was ever sick," Craig added.

Vigoda was born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. His father was a tailor.

The actor cut his teeth on Broadway. But arguably his greatest on-screen impact came when Vigoda played sunken-eyed mafioso Sal Tessio in "The Godfather."

He was also famous for playing detective Phil Fish on television's "Barney Miller." The character was so popular it was spun off into its own series, "Fish."

In his later years, the twice-married Vigoda was mistakenly reported to have died on several occasions, becoming a running social media joke.
By Jorge Nieto TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - The wealthy Texas youth known as the "affluenza" teen after he killed four people in a drunk driving incident in 2013 should be deported to the United States very soon after dropping a legal challenge in Mexico, his lawyer said on Tuesday. Ethan Couch, 18, and his mother, Tonya, were arrested in Mexico last month following a more than two-week-long manhunt. His mother was deported to the United States last month. Couch's return is "imminent" now that he has dropped the appeal, said Fernando Benitez, his lawyer in Mexico. "Basically, it was just Mr Couch's decision, he wants to go back to his home state and face whatever legal consequences result from whatever actions took place over the past few months," he said in the border city of Tijuana. "It could be a matter of one day, two days, three days," he added, saying Mexican authorities still had to make the necessary transport arrangements. Mexico has not yet announced a date for his deportation. Couch was sentenced to 10 years of drug-and-alcohol-free probation for intoxication manslaughter, a punishment condemned by critics as privilege rewarded with leniency. He now faces the prospect of U.S. charges for violating his probation. During the trial, a psychologist sparked outrage by saying in his defense that Couch was so wealthy and spoiled he could not tell the difference between right and wrong - hence, he was suffering from "affluenza." Tarrant County, Texas, prosecutors say Couch is responsible for his own absence by fleeing to Mexico. His mother was returned to Texas and faces a third-degree felony charge for helping her son to flee. If convicted, she could receive a 10-year prison sentence. Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson said he had not yet been notified when Couch would return. U.S. marshals are in Mexico waiting to bring him back, he added. Upon arrival, Couch will be placed in juvenile detention, Anderson said. If Couch is found to have violated his probation, he could be held in adult detention for about four months. He faces a detention hearing in Fort Worth on Feb. 19 to determine if his case will be transferred to the adult system. Tarrant County prosecutors are looking into whether he could face additional charges. Couch has been being held in a migrants' detention center in Mexico City, and though he would have liked a more comfortable place, he "never complained", his lawyer said. "The last time I saw him, he felt very optimistic about returning back home," Benitez said. (With reporting by Anahi Rama and Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City, Marice Richter and Jon Herskovitz in Texas; Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Clarence Fernandez)
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan has failed to remedy a series of chronic human rights abuses ranging from the torture of prisoners by security forces to brutal mistreatment of women, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Wednesday. The rights watchdog's 2016 annual report said reform efforts by President Ashraf Ghani's national unity government had been undermined by failure to contain internal differences and keep local strongmen and power brokers in check. "Afghanistan's national unity government squandered important opportunities to tackle serious human rights problems," Patricia Gossman, senior Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "As reforms have slipped, so have essential human rights protections for detainees, women, and the media." HRW said international donors, whose support is essential to the government of one of the world's poorest economies, had to work more closely with Afghan authorities to ensure that human rights gains made since 2001 were not lost. The section on Afghanistan, part of a 659-page report reviewing human rights practices in more than 90 countries, painted a bleak picture more than 14 years after U.S.-led forces drove the Taliban from power. The brutal murder of 27 year-old Farkhunda Malikzada after she was falsely accused of burning a copy of the Koran and the flawed trial which followed threw into stark relief the failure to advance women's rights, despite repeated government pledges, the report said. Hundreds of civilians were also killed in suicide and roadside bomb attacks last year. Islamist insurgents targeted judges, prosecutors and other government officials as well as journalists and Afghan and foreign aid workers. In addition, Taliban groups and others including Islamic State carried out kidnappings and "indiscriminate" attacks against civilians, the report said. Despite an action plan to eliminate torture by government forces and militias, documented cases of torture increased in 2015 but there were no reported investigations or prosecutions, it said. "Atrocities by the Taliban and other insurgents are no excuse for the government to deploy abusive militias or fail to hold the security forces accountable for violations," Gossman said. The report also pointed to the incident in the northern city of Kunduz in which a U.S. warplane attacked a hospital run by aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, killing at least 42 people. An investigation found "human, procedural and technical" errors were to blame but many questions about the incident remained unanswered, Human Rights Watch said. (Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Williamsburg (United States) (AFP) - "If this is political, please hang up." That is how Pauline McAreavy, a feisty if diminutive 82-year-old from Iowa, answers the phone these days, including when this French reporter who met her during the 2012 election race calls to find out if she has made up her mind this time around.

Pauline's phone rings off the hook during election season -- four times during dinner one recent evening -- because she has the misfortune of appearing in both Democratic and Republican voter databases, having cast votes for candidates of both parties in the past.

That is also why our AFP team has come calling on Pauline, one of the so-called swing voters at the center of the American political universe this week.

I first met her by chance in October 2012, as she swept her front stoop on a cul de sac in Williamsburg, a town of 3,175 people surrounded by farm fields.

It was just 10 days before the re-election of Barack Obama and Pauline vented her disappointment with the Democratic president, for whom she hosted volunteers in 2008, saying his promises of hope and change ultimately fell flat.

"I was fooled. I kick myself every day," she told me back then. She ended up casting her vote for the Republican Mitt Romney.

Four years later, we are among the hundreds of journalists pouring into Iowa to cover the February 1 caucus.

Part of what brings us here is a quest to understand why anti-establishment candidates like Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket, have become the rock stars of the primary season.

We are hoping Pauline can help set things straight.

- 'Anybody but Hillary' -

We agree to meet on Saturday morning. Pauline welcomes AFP's team into her spotless home. Outside, a pole is jabbed into the frozen ground, the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the top. Neighbors watch discretely. Muffins and coffee await in the kitchen.

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Pauline recently lost her husband, but not her wry sense of humor.

"That's the only good thing about his dying, he can't vote! Isn't that terrible to say?" She and her husband argued tirelessly about politics, she confides fondly.

Pauline doesn't fit neatly into a political mold. She was a Democrat, like her parents before her, until Bill Clinton infamously met White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Then, she turned Republican. She loves the Bush family, but Obama brought her back into the Democratic fold, before driving her away again in 2012.

This year, it's still unclear which way she will bend. Iowa law allows her to wait until the day of the caucus to register with one or other party to take part in its nomination vote.

"I probably shouldn't say this with a camera, (but) I like what Trump says," she admits.

"I'm not sure the American people will ever vote for him, so I'm torn."

Americans are supporting Trump in droves at the moment. But Pauline, like many analysts, is unsure if that support will translate into votes.

Then, a revelation:

"If I switch over at the caucus and become Democrat, I'll definitely caucus for Sanders," she says. "Anybody but Hillary."

"I'm tired of politicians," she adds dejectedly.

Sanders and Trump, "I think they speak the truth," or at least "they feel they're telling the truth."

Pauline assumes that Trump, billionaire that he is, would revive the economy.

But what ultimately matters most to her is a candidate's integrity: "I look at the person and see if they're honest. And I think Trump is honest. Goofy, honest. And I think Sanders is honest."

- Anti-establishment -

Extrapolating from a single case is unwise, even a case as compelling as Pauline McAreavy.

But much of the anecdotal evidence we collect on the campaign trail points to voters from across the political spectrum rejecting establishment figures in favor of either Trump or Sanders -- a central theme in this strange election year.

A volunteer from the Sanders campaign in Washington told us last week that out of about 15 phone conversations with likely voters, three or four told him they are torn between Trump and Sanders.

A Republican student at a Sanders rally Sunday in Cedar Falls, Iowa also mentioned both men, although he prefers Trump.

A New York Times analysis has confirmed the trend, showing that some of Trump's support is coming from Democrats in conservative states.

Many of the voters we speak to seem to have little grasp of the candidates' actual policies. Many have trouble recalling who they voted for in 2012.

But for the most part they sound less polarized than the candidates they will likely endorse.

On values, Pauline says she is traditional but not inflexible.

"Very, very Catholic" is how she describes herself. She is against abortion, but also believes it to be a personal decision -- except for late-term abortions.

She opposes gay marriage, but still believes same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual ones.

She watches Fox News, the preferred news channel of Republicans, but also MSNBC, its progressive equivalent. She doesn't like CNN.

"So now I guess I'm a Republican," she chuckles. "I don't know. But everybody thinks I'm a Republican!"
Artist and activist Ai Weiwei has long used his art to make a political statement, from Lego portraits of human rights activists to sculptures that highlight government corruption in China. Now the artist, who is working on a memorial on the Greek island of Lesbosa major point of entry for migrants attempting to enter the European Unionis using his art to challenge a controversial new regulation for asylum seekers in Denmark.

Ai Weiwei has decided to close his exhibition, Ruptures, at Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen, Denmark. This decision follows the Danish parliaments approval of the law proposal that allows seizing valuables and delaying family reunions for asylum seekers, the artist wrote in an Instagram post on Wednesday.

The law, which was passed on Tuesday, delays family reunification by three years and allows officials to confiscate valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner, or about $1,452, from migrants. Officials say that this money will be used to fund social programs that support refugees. Human rights activists have criticized this move, comparing it to the Nazi policy of taking jewelry from Jews during World War II. An 18-page report released earlier in January by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called the policy an affront to dignity.

Foundation owner Jens Faurschou supports Ais decision and is optimistic that the artist's protest will spark change.

He did that in China. People would say he has no influence, but when he focused on the scandal of the earthquake in 2008, today China is doing something about corruption, Faurschou told The Guardian. He has a voice and he uses it. I really admire him for that.

Ai was one of several activists to put pressure on the Chinese government to release the death toll of students killed in the Sichuan earthquake, and he is often credited with convincing the government to release an official figure in 2009.

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The Ruptures exhibit, which was set to run until mid-April, included one such piece, Straight, an installation made from steel from a collapsed school found in the ruins of the Sichuan earthquake.

Whether Ai will be able to sway political policies in Denmark remains to be seen, but with his large platform as an artist, Faurschou think hes helping start a conversation.

From Ai Weiweis side, the important thing is to get a debate and to use his voice, Faurschou told The Guardian. He is becoming a European; he is taking part in what goes on here. In January, Ai announced plans to build a memorial to refugees on Lesbos.

Related stories on TakePart:





 Refugee-Filled Trains Grind to a Halt in Denmark

 Ai Weiwei Claims Freedom of Speech Victory in Battle Over Legos

 Why Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor Might Be Walking Through a City Near You

Original article from TakePart
Ottawa (AFP) - The only person ever convicted over the 1985 Air India bombings that killed 331 people was released from a Canadian prison on Wednesday after serving two decades behind bars.

Inderjit Singh Reyat, a Sikh immigrant from India, served two-thirds of a nine-year sentence for perjury in one of the deadliest airline attacks in history, said a spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada, confirming his release.

Reyat -- convicted of lying in court to cover for his co-accused -- previously served more than 15 years in prison for making the bombs that were stuffed into two suitcases and planted on planes leaving Vancouver.

One bomb tore apart Air India Flight 182 as it neared the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard, including entire families. The second exploded at Japan's Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers as they transferred cargo to another Air India plane.

The near-simultaneous bombings on opposite sides of the world took place during an Indian crackdown on Sikhs fighting for an independent homeland, and those behind it were allegedly seeking revenge for the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Indian troops.

Reyat was working as a mechanic in westernmost Canada and had purchased the dynamite, batteries and detonators used to construct the bombs.

The person who later checked the baggage containing the explosive devices at the Vancouver airport never boarded the jetliners.

Bal Gupta, who lost his wife in the attacks, said he would never be able to forgive those responsible.

"We have learned to live our lives slowly, but a thing like this, the wounds are deep," he told public broadcaster CBC.

"It's not only me," he said, recounting the lives lost of 86 children under the age of 12 and the 29 families that were "completely wiped out."

"If I had to face him (Reyat), I would tell him that if you have any shred of humanity in you, come forward and tell the name of the conspirators that worked with you... and be honest so that the criminals can face their time and justice will be done," he said.

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- 'Unmitigated liar' -

In 2010, Reyat was convicted of lying while testifying in the mass murder trial of alleged co-conspirators Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, who were later acquitted for a lack of evidence.

He had avoided being tried alongside the pair by pleading guilty to lesser manslaughter charges, and was called to testify about the plot.

Prosecutors say the verdict in the trial of Malik and Bagri would have been different if Reyat had told the truth on the stand instead of protecting his alleged co-conspirators, while Judge Ian Josephson called him "an unmitigated liar."

His nine-year perjury sentence was the longest ever handed down by a Canadian court.

Reyat has been ordered to live at a halfway house until August 2018, when his perjury sentence will expire, and abide by several strict conditions set by the parole board, including having no contact with victims' families or alleged co-conspirators, and no political activities.

He must also have counseling to address violent tendencies, a lack of empathy and "cognitive distortions" -- or what one official described as his exaggerated beliefs.

A 2013 psychologist's report found that Reyat lacks "true empathy and remorse" for the bombing victims, and he has only recently accepted a small measure of responsibility for his crimes.

He also maintains his affiliation to a group of Sikh nationalists based in Canada, although the ties were "inactive" during his incarceration, according to the parole board.

"If at any time his parole officer feels there's a risk to the community he can return Mr. Reyat to prison," parole board spokesman Patrick Storey told AFP.

Canadian federal police continue to investigate the bombings, 30 years on.
PARIS (Reuters) - Airbus Chief Executive Fabrice Bregier said on Wednesday that he had held talks this month in Tehran with government and Iran Air officials that could lead to the rapid sale of aircraft. "The needs are great. We are discussing at the moment which could lead to a rapid delivery of Airbus aircrafts in the coming months," Bregier said at a business forum in Paris at the start of a visit by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. "We are at the disposal of our Iranian counterparts to help renew the fleet," Bregier added. (Reporting by Bate Felix; writing by Leigh Thomas; editing by Michel Rose)
By Philip Pullella ROME (Reuters) - In the 16th century, Daniele da Volterra was mocked by contemporary artists for agreeing to paint loincloths on Michelangelo's nudes in the Sistine Chapel. Italian protocol officials must now know how da Volterra felt. Italy's opposition leaders, commentators and media grew increasingly vocal in their criticism on Wednesday of ancient nude statues being covered by white boxes in Rome's city hall and museum complex for a visit by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani. Italian newspapers ran photographs of the boxes on their front pages and even the minister of culture called the decision "incomprehensible". He suggested a different venue could have been chosen to host Rouhani, who signed up to 17 billion euros (dollars) of business deals on his two-day trip. "Covering those nudes covered Italy in ridicule," was the front-page headline in Il Giornale, a leading opposition paper. Neither Culture Minister Dario Franceschini nor Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had been informed of the decision, Franceschini said. The Iranian embassy had asked for the statues to be covered and officials in Renzi's office had agreed without consulting their bosses, Italian media reported. Renzi's office said it had started an internal investigation into the matter. A spokesman said he had no information about whether Iran had asked for the statues to be covered. Asked about the clash of cultures at a news conference before leaving Italy, Rouhani said he knew nothing about it and thanked Italy for being "very hospitable". Francesco Rutelli, a former Rome mayor and culture minister, said covering the statues was "total idiocy and a cultural sacrilege". "You can't erase history. It would have been enough to have him go in another way," he said. Even mainstream newspapers usually sympathetic to the government weighed in, saying the decision was tantamount to denying the country's own culture. "Covering those nudes ... meant covering ourselves. Was it worth it, in order not to offend the Iranian president, to offend ourselves?" the left-leaning La Repubblica said. La Stampa criticized "those geniuses of protocol" who feared that Rouhani might have had a "hormonal shock" if he saw the statues and canceled contracts with Italian companies. More than four centuries ago, the Vatican commissioned da Volterra to paint veils and loincloths over some of Michelangelo's nudes in the Last Judgment, an 1,800-square-foot panel in the Sistine Chapel. One papal master of ceremonies at the time is said to have told the pope that the painting was "more fitting for a bathhouse or a tavern than a papal chapel". Da Volterra went down in art history with the nickname "breeches maker". (Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Louise Ireland)
By Hilary Russ (Reuters) - Kevin Lavin, appointed a year ago as the emergency manager for New Jersey's distressed gambling hub Atlantic City, is joining Ankura Consulting Group. Lavin, tapped by Governor Chris Christie in January 2015 to help turnaround the struggling city, will serve as co-president of Ankura and be on its board, according to a press release on Tuesday. During his tenure, Lavin and a team of professionals produced two reports that outlined the city's fiscal crisis and suggested ideas for long-term stability, costing state taxpayers at least $2.62 million in professional fees. On Tuesday, Christie, Senate President Steve Sweeney and Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian backed a revised rescue plan that would cede control to the state. "Kevin Lavin and his team of experts completed their task, and his contract expired Jan. 15," said Christie spokesman Brian Murray in an email. Lavin did not immediately reply to multiple requests for comment. (Reporting by Hilary Russ in New York; Editing by Bernard Orr)
Brussels (AFP) - Belgium carried out more than 2,000 mercy killings last year, the most since euthanasia was controversially legalised in 2002, the government said Wednesday.

"There were 2,021 cases in 2015," said a spokeswoman for the government's euthanasia commission which oversees the legislation to ensure it is correctly applied.

In 2014, there were 1,924 cases, according to official figures, with the numbers rising steadily since 2002, topping 1,000 for the first time in 2011 with 1,133.

Commission head Professor Wim Distelmans said the increase appeared to reflect more doctors registering euthanasia cases than before but there were perhaps more which were undeclared.

"Remember, there could be some euthanasia cases carried out but which are not declared so we cannot say for certain what the position is," Distelmans was quoted as saying by the Belga news agency.

Belgium extended the scope of its law in 2014 to allow euthanasia for minors of any age suffering from incurable diseases if they were capabale of making a rational decision about their fate.

Even more controversial than euthanasia's introduction in 2002, the move sparked fierce debate over whether a child had the ability to make such a decision.

The neighbouring Netherlands is the only other country in the world to allow euthanasia for minors but it has a minimum age of 12.

Distelmans said that the commission had not received any request for euthanasia for a minor.

After the Netherlands and Belgium in Europe, Luxembourg approved euthanasia but for adults only in 2009.

In Switzerland, doctors can assist a patient seeking to die but euthanasia itself is illegal.
The co-founder of Ben & Jerry's has released a limited edition ice cream flavor in support of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

A pet project of Ben Cohen which is not affiliated with the brand, "Bernie's Yearning" features a top disc of solid chocolate to represent the top one percent of American wealth-holders, while plain mint ice cream is meant to represent the rest of America, he explained.

As a longtime Vermont resident, Cohen said he is an avid supporter of the Vermont senator.

"Jerry and I have been constituents of Bernie Sanders for the last 30 years," says Cohen.

"We've seen him in action and we believe in him."

Produced out of Cohen's own kitchen, the pints will be signed and numbered and given away at random in an online draw at www.berniesyearning.com/.
You wouldnt know it from listening to his speeches, but Bernie Sanders is on the verge of making political history.

If the Vermont senator defeats Hillary Clinton in either Iowa or New Hampshire in the next two weeks, hell become the first Jewish candidate to win a nominating contest in either major party. The milestone is both significant and overlooked, in part because Sanders talks so little about his faith and, well, because theres that other candidate trying to break a glass ceiling in 2016.

In many ways, its the lack of attention to Sanderss Judaism that Jewish leaders find most exciting. Its the most wonderful anti-climax in American Jewish history, said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. You have a guy who is from New York with a Brooklyn accent named Bernie who is a viable presidential candidate and nobody is discussing it, which to me is just a remarkable statement of the success of the American Jewish community to be fully integrated and distinct at the same time.

The last serious Jewish presidential contender was Joe Lieberman in 2004, who sought the top job after serving as Al Gores running mate four years earlier. Lieberman never caught fire with Democratic primary voters and dropped out after failing to win a primary, a caucus, or even a single delegate. Yet Liebermans Judaism was a major part of his political identity. He was closely associated with Jewish causes and his staunch support of Israel, talked openly about his faith, and didnt campaign on the Sabbath.

I dont think that the leadership of the Jewish community views him as one of their own in the way that they viewed Lieberman or that Zionists might have viewed Brandeis.

The same is not true of Sanders. His Brooklyn growl evokes a cultural Jewish identity every bit as strong as that of Chuck Schumer or his Saturday Night Live doppleganger, Larry David. But he is more likely to talk about Pope Francis than any inspiration he draws from his own religion. For the most part, Sanders only discusses his Judaism if asked, such as last June, in the aftermath of an erroneous report mentioned by NPRs Diane Rehm that he held dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. Im proud to be Jewish, Sanders said at a breakfast event in Washington. He added that he was not particularly religious. When Jimmy Kimmel asked Sanders in October if he believed in God, he didnt answer directly. I am who I am, Sanders replied. What I believe in and what my spirituality is about is that were all in this together, that I think it is not a good thing to believe as human beings that we can turn our backs on other people.

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And this is not Judaism, he added. This is what Pope Francis is talking about.

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He struck a similar note a month earlier during his speech at Liberty University in Virginia, the evangelical school founded by Jerry Falwell where he linked himself to the pontiffs message of social justice but mentioned Judaism only in the context of the great religions, and not as his own. (He made his appearance at Liberty on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.)

He hardly could run away from iteveryone knows he looks like Larry David, said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and the chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. But at the same time, I dont think that the leadership of the Jewish community views him as one of their own in the way that they viewed Lieberman or that Zionists might have viewed Brandeis. Sarna noted that the Iowa caucusa potential history-making moment for Sanderswill come just a few days after the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilsons nomination of Louis Brandeis to be the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court. Perhaps whats important is that its a nonissue, just as its a nonissue that there are three Jewish Supreme Court justices, Sarna said. (The fact that the other six justices are all Catholic has actually drawn significantly more attention.)

Sanders has spoken more in recent months about his upbringing in Brooklyn, telling The New Yorker that growing up Jewish had an influence on him politically if not religiously. His father emigrated to the U.S. from Poland, and many of his relatives died in Europe during World War II. An election in 1932, he said, ended up killing 50 million people around the world. As a young man, Sanders briefly lived and worked on a kibbutz in Israel.

Recommended: The Republican Party Is Holding on to Too Many Nuts

Sanders wife Jane is not Jewish, and he is not known to be involved in the small Jewish community back home in Vermont. He just doesnt connect with organized Jewish religion, said Rabbi James Glazier, the spiritual leader of Temple Sinai, a reform congregation in South Burlington. Glazier said that while he had seen Sanders attend a prayer service after the death of the father of a longtime friend, he had not been receptive to efforts over the years to draw him into the community. This isnt his comfort zone, Glazier told me. The doors of the Jewish community are open, and he knows he can walk in, and he knows hell be accepted. But we stopped asking because it would be insulting to keep on asking.

He just doesnt connect with organized Jewish religion.

As Glazier noted, because Jews make up such a tiny portion of the population in Vermont, Sanders has never felt pressure either to embrace his heritage or to take strong stands on Israel and other issues important to Jewish voters. That is also the case in Iowa and New Hampshire, but the dynamic might change as the Democratic primary shifts to states like New York and Florida. And hes going up against a candidate in Clinton who has typically enjoyed strong support among Jews.

Will it matter to voters that Sanders is Jewish? Not likely, according to a Pew Research Center report released on Wednesday. Whether a candidate was Jewish mattered the least to people of any of a long list of traitseight in 10 said they didnt care. And while nearly 40 percent of respondents had the (apparently inaccurate) impression that Sanders was somewhat or very religious, that was a lower percentage than for any candidate except for Donald Trump.

Recommended: Hillary Clinton Goes Back to the Dunning School

If Sanders upsets Clinton and wins the nomination, he may face extra competition for the title of first Jewish president in the person of Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor reportedly considering a run for the third consecutive election. (Hes never actually pulled the trigger.) A Sanders victory in November, meanwhile, would be historic in several respects. Hed be the oldest person ever elected, not to mention the first president to embrace the label of socialist as part of his political identity. But with enough support to win delegates in Iowa, and a commanding lead in New Hampshire, Sanders might not have to wait that long to achieve a key cultural milestone: Hed be the most successful Jewish presidential candidate everwhether he wants to talk about it or not.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
It's safe to say America is "Feeling the Bern" right now. With the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary fast approaching, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has continued his rise in the polls for each state, and has narrowed the gap on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the national political spectrum. Most notably, the senator has rallied support among the liberal youth, and with it, an increased emphasis on online campaigning. Just as any presidential candidate would, he's employed a campaign logo, slogan and website detailing his platform.

Since announcing his candidacy back in April, Sanders has employed two slogans for his campaign. The first, at the beginning of his presidential bid, was "A political revolution is coming." When compared to other presidential campaign slogans in May, the Washington Post ranked it as the fourth-best among a group of eight.

"At a time when trust in institutions has reached historic lows, a promise to revolutionize our politics is exactly what millions of voters are looking for," Hunter Schwarz wrote for the Post. "Also, it's very on-brand for the only candidate in the race who's ever been elected as a Socialist."

However, as of December, Sanders has unveiled a new slogan with a more modest approach  "A future to believe in"  after he revealed it at a campaign rally at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, according to a release from Sanders' campaign page.

The slogan change was also one month after Sanders used the term in his first televised campaign ad:

Similarly, Sanders' logo has been critiqued by design experts, who have noted that its minimal approach has some drawbacks. "[The logo] is simple enough but lacks any real unique identity that would help it stand apart from the rest," brand designer Sky Hartman said, according to CNN. "The use of color is good, however." Additionally, NBC had Sagi Haviv  a design expert and instructor at the School of Visual Arts  to critique Sanders' logo as part of an ongoing series. He gave a similar review, though he added that its simplicity might be a fit for his platform.

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Broadly, Sanders' campaign rhetoric has been consistent throughout his presidential run  most notably, he aims to bridge the gap in income inequality. "The reality is that since the mid-1980s there has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country," according to Sanders' campaign page. "That is the Robin Hood principle in reverse. That is unacceptable and that has got to change."

Furthermore, Sanders is determined to change the perceptions of what makes a strong political campaign by emphasizing the need to adjust the way they are funded. In his view, Super PACs give the wealthy an unprecedented amount of power and influence with campaign contributions. "Our democracy cannot be truly representative unless elected officials hear from all of their constituents, not just the wealthy and the powerful," according to Sanders' campaign page.

Ultimately, if you still haven't and want to join Sanders  and "Feel the Bern"  it's readily available in the digital space.
Los Angeles (AFP) - The founder of Bikram yoga, the heated exercise and breathing routine that enjoys worldwide popularity, was ordered in the United States to pay more than $6 million in damages for harassment.

Bikram Choudhury, the man behind the Bikram yoga empire, was sued by a lawyer who worked for him, complaining that she suffered damaging consequences after she spoke out against his alleged sexual harassment of other women.

A jury in Los Angeles Superior Court deliberated for two hours before ordering the 69-year-old guru to pay a massive $6.47 million fine in punitive damages.

The jury had already awarded the plaintiff, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, nearly $1 million in compensation, after it decided that she was the subject of harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

Jafa-Bodden smiled after the verdict was announced while the famed yogi remained impassive. His lawyer, Robert Tafoya, gave no comment.

Jafa-Bodden's lawyer Mark Quigley said in his closing statement that Choudhury "thinks that he can do whatever he wants to do."

Participants in Bikram yoga go through a series of postures in a room heated to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).

Bikram yoga first came under an unwanted spotlight when Choudhury tried to copyright the routine. He said Tuesday he had earned little money in the last three years and was near bankruptcy.

Choudhury, originally from India, was said to have made a fortune after he moved to California.

During the trial, he said that even though he has a garage of 30 to 40 luxury cars, they contain old parts from other vehicles and he plans to give them to the state and charitable organizations.

His lawyers said Jafa-Bodden, who filed her lawsuit in 2013, was sacked by Choudhury because she was not licensed to practice law in California.
If there's one thing Maison Margiela specializes in, it's putting on a show, and the couture house didn't disappoint in Paris Wednesday.

Under the guidance of star designer John Galliano, the Spring 2016 collection was a riot of influences, each bolder and brighter than the last. Things started off conventionally enough, with asymmetric jackets featuring tinsel-like collars, but soon there were trench coats that fluted out into pleated skirts, leather capes with aquatic scenes printed on the front, and billowing trains of pink and orange attached to the back of a simple black blazer. The makeup, which included lipstick prints all over the face and neck and zig-zagged eye patches, seemed to be an homage to the late David Bowie, who would almost certainly have approved of the glittering gold boots and metallic trousers on show, and indeed the entire collection channeled the zany creativity that both the musician and Galliano have in common.

Franck Sorbier also put on a spectacle, albeit more of a ballet-inspired one, with a runway show featuring models dancing their way through the city's Asian art haven, the Musee Guimet. Amidst the site's ancient statues, they weaved their way down the runway in off-the shoulder dresses in earthy nudes or golden tapestries. There were also Grecian influences at play in the roped and knotted sundresses, while the male models in gold-splashed leggings played into the astral theme.

Lebanese talent Elie Saab, meanwhile, weaved a sublime fairytale via his enchanted collection of ethereal dresses that were heavy on the lace yet looked light as a feather. Jewel-encrusted bolero jackets, silken wide-legged trousers and floor-skimming hemlines were the order of the day, with beaded fringing and crystal piping applied liberally and across the board. Based on a romantic palette of soft lilacs, taupes, creams and blues, the pieces were paired with metallic silver biker boots for a jolt of modernity, while belt bags ensured that the look remained acutely current, but the vintage-style flower crown headpieces kept things decidedly dreamy.
BRASILIA/SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil's Federal Police on Wednesday launched the latest stage of a sweeping investigation into corruption at state-controlled firms, with six arrest and 15 search warrants issued in the states of Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina. The warrants in the so-called "Operation Carwash" probe involve the suspected use of offshore companies and real estate transactions to launder money from bribery, graft and other offenses, police said in a statement. According to TV Globo channel, raids were being conducted in Sao Bernardo do Campo, the political stronghold of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose Workers' Party is involved in the probe. Engineering firm Grupo OAS SA [OAEP.UL] and cooperative bank Bancoop were among the targets of Wednesday's raids, the channel said, without saying how it obtained the information. Dozens of executives and politicians have been arrested or are under investigation on suspicion of overcharging Petrobras and other state firms on contracts and using part of the proceeds to bribe members of President Dilma Rousseff's ruling coalition. Around 80 police were involved in the latest raids, codenamed "Triple X," according to the statement. They were collecting evidence of crimes including corruption, fraud, money-laundering and illegal foreign-currency market offenses. In addition to the six arrests, two people were to be taken to police headquarters in the southern city of Curitiba for questioning, the statement added. A news conference was scheduled for 10 a.m. local time (1200 GMT). (Reporting by Silvio Cascione and Guillermo Parra-Bernal; Additional reporting by Pedro Fonseca in Rio de Janeiro; Editing by Andrew Roche)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain could impose sanctions on Maldivian individuals if the Maldives' government fails to take action to free political prisoners, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Wednesday. Mohamed Nasheed, the Maldives' first democratically elected president, is serving a 13-year sentence on terrorism charges for the alleged abduction of a judge after a rapid trial last March which drew international criticism. Nasheed and his lawyer Amal Clooney met Cameron at Downing Street in London on Saturday after the former president won permission to travel to Britain for surgery. The Maldives gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. "We want to see a change in behavior from the Maldivian government to make sure that political prisoners are set free and yes we are prepared to consider targeted action against individuals if further progress isn't made," Cameron said in parliament. He was responding to a question by lawmaker John Glen on whether Britain would work to build an international consensus on targeted sanctions. On Saturday, Cameron's office said the prime minister and Nasheed had agreed that a Commonwealth meeting to be held in the Maldives next month would provide an opportunity to press the Maldivian government to engage in "open political dialogue and free all remaining political prisoners swiftly". (Reporting by William James; editing by Stephen Addison)
London (AFP) - The Guardian newspaper is to cut running costs by 20 percent over three years and may begin charging for some online content following a 25-percent plunge in print advertising, British media reported Tuesday.

The Times daily said Guardian staff were expecting 100 jobs to be cut, although The Daily Telegraph said any layoffs would be announced in March.

Executives from Guardian News and Media, the newspaper's publishers, told staff at a meeting on Monday that the group would be cutting around 54 million (71 million euros, $77 million) in costs.

Operating losses in the year to March 2015 were expected to be 53 million, the executives said, adding that the aim was to break even in three years.

Reserves in the investment fund which supports The Guardian dropped to 735 million from 838.3 million over the same 12-month period, they said.

"Growing the cost base more than revenue is simply not sustainable," chief executive David Pemsel was quoted as saying at the meeting.

Pemsel said that the newspaper could even consider moving out of its offices near King's Cross station in London although nothing had been decided.

"Are we moving from King's Cross? Nope. Are we looking at everything? Yes," he said.

The executives declined to comment on potential cuts to The Guardian's 1,960 staff. The Telegraph said that job losses were due to be revealed in March.

Pemsel ruled out introducing a paywall for The Guardian's hugely popular website and mobile apps but indicated that one option would be to make some content available for paying members only.
London (AFP) - British Prime Minister David Cameron defended the tax deal struck with US Internet giant Google as he came under fire in parliament on Wednesday.

Google is to pay 130 million ($185.4 million, 172 million euros) in back taxes to Britain following a government inquiry into its tax arrangements, a company spokeswoman said Friday.

Cameron was grilled on the deal in the House of Commons by opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The left-wing veteran claimed Google was paying an effective tax rate of three percent on its profits made in Britain. The 2015-2016 corporation tax rate is 20 percent.

"I do dispute the figures that you give," Cameron replied.

"But I am absolutely clear that no (British) government has done more than this one to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance."

Corbyn said workers filling in their tax returns "do not get the option of 25 meetings with 17 ministers to decide what their rate of tax is.

"Why is there one rule for big multinational companies and another for ordinary, small businesses and self-employed workers?"

Cameron said he was "genuinely angry about what happened to Google" under previous Labour governments.

The Conservative leader, who took office in 2010, said: "Google's taxes are going up under this government.

"We have put in place the diverted profits tax that means that this company and other companies will pay more tax in future.

"And more tax in future than they ever paid under Labour, where the tax rate for Google was zero percent.

"We have changed the tax laws so many times that we raised an extra 100 billion from business in the last parliament."

On its front page Wednesday, The Times newspaper said Italy was set to strike a far tougher deal with Google, equating to 15 percent of its profits there.

Britain's tax deal with Google follows a six-year probe by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs in response to controversy over low taxes paid by multinational corporations which operate in Britain but have headquarters and subsidiaries elsewhere.

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The diverted profits tax -- nicknamed the "Google tax" -- is intended to stop firms moving profits abroad.

Google is among several top technology firms under pressure over complex tax arrangements.

French Finance Minister Michel Sapin weighed in with Paris' viewpoint later Wednesday, saying Google should pay back taxes as a matter of "necessity."

"It is good that Google is dealing with these questions in Great Britain -- and it is a necessity that it does so in France," Sapin said as the OECD signed off on its own framework for cross-border fiscal cooperation via the automatic exchange of country-by-country reports from next year.

Sapin said Paris believed strongly that Google "pays what we think is necessary" as "it brings in large scale sales in France."

Media reports in France earlier said the French tax authorities had, following a search in 2011 of Google's Paris offices, decided as early as two years ago to demand the tech giant make good with a payment of as much as 500 million euros.

In Britain, Eva Joly, vice chairwoman of the Special European Parliamentary Committee on Tax Rulings, said it wanted to question Britain's finance minister George Osborne about the "very bad deal".

"We also want the head of Google to come and tell us, because this is not fair competition," she told BBC radio.

"This bad deal is very bad news for everybody because it shows that the UK prepares itself to become a kind of a tax haven to attract the multinationals."

She added: "You have to do a lot of calculation to know whether the deal that was struck with Google was a good or a bad deal. And I can tell you it is a very bad deal."
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron will hold talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels on Friday on his renegotiation of Britain's ties with the bloc, his spokeswoman said, ahead of a progress update expected next week. Cameron has said he hopes to reach a deal on his renegotiation at a Feb. 18-19 summit of EU leaders, paving the way for a British membership referendum as early as June. EU and British officials have said they expect European Council President Donald Tusk to circulate a letter to EU leaders early next week setting out what progress has been made so far and what needs to be done ahead of next month's meeting. Cameron had been due to travel to Sweden and Denmark on Friday to hold talks with their leaders on his renegotiation, but has now canceled that trip to meet Juncker. "The prime minister will travel to Brussels on Friday for a bilateral with president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to discuss the UK's renegotiation of its membership with the EU," the spokeswoman said in a statement. "He will therefore no longer be traveling to Sweden and Denmark." Cameron's office said he had no plans to meet Tusk on Friday but would likely do so ahead of the February summit. (Reporting by Kylie MacLellan, additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, editing by Elizabeth Piper)
By Randall Palmer and Leah Schnurr OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada announced new interim rules on Wednesday for environmental reviews that will impose major delays on two projects - TransCanada Corp's Energy East pipeline and Kinder Morgan Inc's expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline. The Liberal government issued the rules on the grounds that public trust needed to be restored in the process for assessing and approving big energy projects. Proponents say that after U.S. President Barack Obama's denial of the Keystone XL pipeline, the all-Canadian projects are needed so the country's oil can reach its east and west coasts and fetch higher prices abroad. "The principles we are announcing today will allow the government to make better evidence-based decisions on major projects," Environment Minister Catherine McKenna told a news conference to unveil the measures. The interim rules are designed to take greater account of environmental impacts and indigenous groups' points of view for the two pipelines, which are opposed by environmentalists and some communities but backed by industry. The government said no existing project would be required to go back to square one. But the rules will push back the deadline for the government to decide on the Trans Mountain Pipeline to December 2016 from August, signaling that the review by the National Energy Board regulator will still be done by May. Ottawa also extended the total period for the NEB review and subsequent government decision of the Energy East pipeline to 27 months from the currently mandated 18 months. The clock will begin ticking when the NEB starts the hearing process. The government also announced a set of interim rules, including assessing greenhouse gas emissions, for all major projects, including LNG terminals. The Liberal government, which came to power last year, has already effectively closed the door on one major pipeline project, Enbridge Inc's Northern Gateway, with plans for a moratorium on oil tanker traffic along the northern coast of British Columbia. Environmentalists oppose the pipelines on the grounds that they make it easier to send oil to market and thereby increase emissions of carbon dioxide. Political and business leaders in the energy-producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan counter that pipelines are safe and that resources are an important source of income for Canada. (Editing by G Crosse and Peter Cooney)
DENVER, CO / ACCESSWIRE / January 27, 2016 / Canna Security America (CSA) (OTCQB: CSAX), the leading comprehensive security solutions provider catering to businesses in the licensed cannabis industry, is pleased to announce that it's physical security division, The Cloverton Group, will be providing security teams for the premier X Games VIP party held each night from January 28th, through Sunday, January 31st, at the famed Tree House in Aspen, Colorado.

This 2016 Winter X Games events feature the world's most extreme athletes for four action-packed days with musical artists such as deadmau5, DJ Snake, Kygo, Nas, Run the Jewels and the Twenty One Pilots in attendance.

The X Games Tree House party events began in 2015 by one of Colorado's most recognized cannabis brands, Native Roots Apothecary, bringing some of the biggest names in the cannabis industry to Aspen.

A private, marijuana-fueled after party will keep the music pumping well past closing time for four consecutive nights during the X Games, with a recognizable guest list of athletes, celebs and cannabis industry elite. "This will absolutely be the stoniest X Games yet," said Rhett Jordan of Native Roots.

The Cloverton Group provides physical security services to a multitude of cannabis industry conventions, events, and conferences nationwide throughout the year, often at a discounted rate in order to show their appreciation and support of the cannabis industry.

Dan Williams, CEO of Canna Security America (CSA), commented, "This is an amazing fit for CSA. We are happy to represent CSA and our clients at the 2016 X Games in beautiful Aspen, Colorado. We are diversifying our physical security services and this venue is not only an excellent example of this, but should be a lot of fun for everyone involved."

About Canna Security America (CSA)

With over 500 permitted facilities having Canna Security America (CSA) security systems installed across multiple states, all achieving a 100% licensing approval rating, Canna Security America (CSA) is recognized as the gold-standard in security services and technology for the cannabis industry. As a national leading security firm, CSA knows where risk points exist for cannabis businesses, and how to tailor services to ensure maximum loss prevention and legal compliance. As security industry experts headquartered in Denver Colorado, CSA has expanded its operations to serve the increasing number of state licensed cannabis cultivators, processors, infused products manufacturers, and retailers in the United States. By assisting Colorado regulators in drafting the security requirements in 2009, CSA was also able to also seamlessly enter the Washington market and position itself as the first comprehensive national security solutions provider for the cannabis industry.

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For more information please visit HTTP://WWW.CANNASECURITY.COM.

The Cloverton Group: A division of CSA

In 2015, CSA announced the release of their new physical security solutions division, The Cloverton Group, offering armored transport, armed and unarmed guards, comprehensive background checks, and risk management services. The Cloverton Group's guards are fully licensed and insured, and have a law enforcement or military background. Their new fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vehicles have been up-armored with the latest bullet-resistant technology, are GPS tracked, and equipped with the a 4-point camera system that transmits live streaming footage to their command center. This guarantees total traceability from pickup to drop-off and has become the standard for high-level banking compliance within the cannabis industry.

Forward-Looking Statements

The statements in this press release constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. Such statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations and are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control. In addition, such forward-looking statements are subject to assumptions with respect to future business strategies and decisions that are subject to change. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, technical advances in the industry as well as political and economic conditions present within the industry. We do not take any obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or developments after a forward-looking statement was made.

Contact

Investor Relations:

Tom Siciliano

TOM@CANNASECURITY.COM

Visit us on Facebook: CANNA SECURITY AMERICA (CSA)

Follow us on Twitter: @CANNASECURITY

SOURCE: Canna Security America
Scientists in the United States said Tuesday they were developing a faster, more efficient way of gauging the toxicity of chemicals, which may reduce the need for animal testing.

Using human cells in Petri dishes in the lab, they tested about 10,000 different types of chemical compounds including pesticides, industrial chemicals, food additives and drugs.



The results were used to build models to "predict" whether the compounds, or combinations of them, may be harmful to humans or the environment when used in new drugs or environmental chemicals.



Toxicity is one of the main reasons that new drugs fail, and it is hoped this library of toxicity data may spot unsafe chemical compounds at a far earlier phase of research.



"Thousands of chemicals to which humans are exposed have inadequate data on which to predict their potential for toxicological effects," the study authors wrote in the journal Nature Communications.



Traditional toxicity tests using animals are expensive and species differences mean they do not always accurately predict a chemical's effect on humans.



They also raises ethical concerns about animal welfare.



The project, dubbed Tox21, is a joint effort involving three US federal agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).



"An important goal of the US Tox21 program is to use in vitro (Petri dish) data as surrogates for in vivo (live) toxicity to reduce animal testing," study co-author Ruili Huang of the NIH told AFP by email.



But to achieve this, cell tests have to be just as predictive, or more so, of human toxicity as animal tests.



After testing about 10,000 compounds, each in 15 different concentrations and on different cells, the team used their database to build predictive models for new chemical combinations.



They found that their models could predict toxicity for both humans and animals, and may be "a promising alternative to traditional animal toxicology studies."



Further work must be done to validate and improve the models, which Huang said may never completely replace animal testing.



It may, however, allow scientists to prioritise chemicals predicted to be most likely toxic for further tests using traditional methods, and so "significantly reduce the amount of animal tests required," he said.



Animal activists have welcomed the research.



"To understand more about human development and human diseases, the world's most forward-thinking scientists are developing and implementing methods that supersede the crude use of animals," Julia Baines, science policy advisor of the organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) told AFP.



"PETA welcomes the wealth of advanced non-animal research methodologies that are creating a brighter future for animals and human health."
By Fiona Ortiz

CHICAGO (Reuters) - If potential police force recruits in Chicago fail to ask about police shootings and race relations, recruiters bring it up anyway.

At a time of U.S.-wide protests over police shootings of black men, the 12,000-strong Chicago police force, which is 23 percent African-American and 52 percent white, is trying to hire new officers, especially minority officers.

On Tuesday, 16-year veteran officer Denise Gathings, an African-American, addressed 20 potential recruits, 19 of them black and one Hispanic.

Gathings acknowledged the tension in Chicago's black community over statistics that show in the last eight years, of roughly 400 people shot and injured or killed by the city's police, 75 percent were black.

Chicago is about one-third white, one-third black and one-third Hispanic.

You have the right to be angry, thats what were trying to change, Gathings told the recruit hopefuls. When these shootings happen, believe me, as police officers we are praying for the families just like you all.

The message seems to be getting through.

Despite widespread criticism of Chicago's police from minority communities, in the current recruitment round, of 7,500 people who so far applied and paid to take the police entrance exam, 70 percent are minorities, said Soo Choi, Chicago's human resources commissioner.

About 75 percent of people who take the exam pass, said Choi. Recruits must then take background checks and a physical fitness test. An obstacle for young black people in Chicago can be a criminal record that bars them from becoming a cop.

"I'm open to all opportunities," said Jabotni Mailey, 31, who attended the recruiting meeting but was told his felony conviction would disqualify him.

Acting Police Superintendent John Escalante told Reuters he wants new recruits to change the department from within.

"I hope people would look at the job as a challenge, not just to help improve things in the city and neighborhoods where they grew up, but to help us internally... to build some trust and credibility in communities where we're struggling right now," he said.

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Escalante was named after his predecessor stepped down in December due to protests over police shootings.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to change CPD culture after investigations showed police stuck with untrue narratives to make fatal shootings look justified. The U.S. Department of Justice is probing CPD's use of lethal force.

Despite outrage over high-profile shootings caught on video, Chicago police shootings last year dropped to 28 from an average of 49 a year over the previous seven years.

(Editing by Andrew Hay)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's statistics bureau said on Tuesday that there was no basis for yuan depreciation given China's solid economic fundamentals.

Wang Baoan, chief of the National Bureau of Statistics, told a briefing that stronger dollar and downward pressure in China's economy contributed to recent moves in yuan exchange rate.

A sustained depreciation of the yuan exchange rate could fuel capital outflows and affect the pace of yuan internationalization, Wang said.

Wang said he was confident on China's stock market while the impact from stock market volatility on real economy would be limited.

Chinese shares plunged more than 6 percent to 14-month lows on Tuesday after oil prices dropped again, reviving concerns about global growth and prompting a sell-off in the world's equity markets.

China's central bank has jolted global financial markets twice in six months by allowing sharp, sudden slides in the yuan, only to step in aggressively to stabilize it.

(Reporting By Kevin Yao; Editing by Kim Coghill)
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei said he would withdraw from two exhibitions in Denmark to protest against an asylum law passed by parliament that included rules on confiscating valuables from migrants to help pay for their stay. His decision is the latest in a cultural backlash against Denmark which on Tuesday passed the measures aimed at deterring refugees from seeking asylum. Cartoons in newspapers around the world lambasted the move, including one by Steve Bell in Britain's Guardian showing Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen wearing a Nazi-like uniform. Ai, known for his criticism of China's human rights record, said in an Instagram post on Wednesday he was shocked the Danish government had "decided to seize refugees' private property". "As a result of this regrettable decision, I must withdraw from your exhibition "A New Dynasty.Created In China" to express my protest of the Danish government's decision," Ai said, addressing exhibition organizers at art museum ARoS in Aarhus. Ai's work "Yu Yi", a 12-meter-long man made of bamboo, is part of the exhibition of Chinese contemporary art which ARoS has run since November. It was due to end in May. "We are now awaiting further developments," the museum said. Ai said he was also closing his exhibition "Ruptures" at the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen. The prime minister's office and the Culture Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Last year Ai accused Lego of censorship after the Danish toymaker initially declined to fulfill a bulk order for him due to his political activism. Lego later dropped restrictions. (Reporting by Teis Jensen; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
Copenhagen (AFP) - Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Wednesday closed down his exhibition in the Danish capital after lawmakers passed a controversial bill allowing authorities to seize valuables from asylum seekers.

"Ai Weiwei has decided to close his exhibition 'Ruptures' at Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen, Denmark. This decision follows the Danish parliament's approval of the law proposal that allows seizing valuables and delaying family reunions for asylum seekers," a post on his official Instagram and Facebook accounts read.

The exhibition opened in March 2015 and had been due to close in mid-April 2016.

"I support Ai Weiwei's decision, which is all about freedom and human rights. I think it's so very sad," Jens Faurschou, owner of the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen, told AFP.

Denmark's parliament on Tuesday adopted reforms aimed at dissuading migrants from seeking asylum by delaying family reunifications and allowing authorities to confiscate migrants' valuables.

The law has provoked international outrage, with many rights activists blasting the delay for family reunifications as a breach of international conventions.

"Denmark has decided that it wants to be in the forefront of the symbolic and inhuman politics of today's biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe and the Middle East. We both wish that Denmark had decided instead to be in the forefront of a respectful European solution to solve the acute humanitarian crisis," Faurschou said.

China's most prominent contemporary artist, Ai helped design the Bird's Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics and has been exhibited around the globe, but his works have often run afoul of China's authorities.

He was detained in 2011 for 81 days over his advocacy of democracy and human rights as well as other criticisms of the government in Beijing. Following the detention, he was placed under house arrest and his passport was taken away. The document was only returned last July, enabling him to travel overseas.

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Ai's show in Copenhagen included some of his most important work including Sunflower Seeds, made from 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds.

The show also featured several of the artist's sculptures made of wood from Buddhist temples torn down during China's Cultural Revolution.

Earlier this month, the 58-year-old announced plans to create a memorial to the plight of refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, after meeting some of the many migrants there who risked their lives to reach Europe.
Less than three months after Chipotle was hit with multiple lawsuits from customers alleging they contracted E. coli or norovirus from the food, the Mexican chain is facing another legal challengethis time from former employees.

On Monday, a trial began in Cincinnati for a gender-discrimination lawsuit filed by three former Chipotle general managers, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. The lawsuit alleges that the women were wrongfully terminated by a manager whom they say gave better treatment to men who were employed in the same role, despite that the women scored higher marks on performance evaluations.

The three women all worked at separate stores in the greater Cincinnati area but shared the same supervisor, Brian Mobbs, and team director, Brian Patterson. In court, Mobbs was described as commenting to at least one of his female hires that she was too emotional and that the women he worked with were overweight.

RELATED: Chipotle's Strategy to Win Back Customers: Free Burritos

Plaintiffs Stephanie Ochoa and Tina Reynolds both said they'd either been promoted or had earned high praise from their supervisors just months before being fired and replaced by a male employee. Tina Rodgers, the third plaintiff, alleges that she was fired in retaliation for taking maternity leave, in violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Under the act, eligible employees of insurance-covered companies are entitled to job protection while taking unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks during a year, including for the birth of a child.

A lawyer for Chipotle argued that Mobbs hired and fired employees regardless of their gender. She cited negative performance reviews when reasoning that Ochoa, Reynolds, and Rodgers were terminated because they didn't meet the standards of the restaurant management.

Gender-discrimination lawsuits against restaurants are not uncommon, and research suggests sexual harassment is pervasive in the industry. More than half of female restaurant workers surveyed last year by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United said they'd experienced sexual teasing, jokes, or comments from management. Male employees were not immune to these complaints: About 41 percent said they'd been sexually teased by a supervisor, according to the same survey.

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The Cincinnati lawsuit comes on the heels of a number of lawsuits filed against Chipotle relating to E. coli and norovirus outbreaks that sickened 53 people in nine states late last year, prompting a federal criminal investigation in early January. Also this month, a group of Chipotle investors filed a civil suit alleging that the restaurant deceived stockholders about its food-safety procedures.

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Rashad Robinson, the executive director of civil rights group Color of Change, applauds the recent changes made to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences's structure and voting regulations in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.

"It's a long time coming," Robinson tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I think it's an incredibly important step that fixes some of the structural challenges inside the Academy."

He says that it's crucial to focus on this as a "step forward," rather than the end of the conversation and says Hollywood should look inward rather than exclusively blame Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs for the lack of diversity in the Oscar nominees.

"I think to place all of the problems in Hollywood on Cheryl Boone Isaacs would be a mistake," says Robinson, adding it is also a mistake "to think all of the problems will be solved with this first step."

Color of Change is a civil rights group with more than one million members. The organization has run multiple campaigns related to Hollywood in the past including a 2013 call for more black women castmembers on Saturday Night Live, and a 2013 petition to cancel Cops.

This year the group is working on providing story consulting for writers, showrunners and producers with research and recommendations on minority character development as well as facilitating panels and events to increase conversation on relevant issues.

Robinson says that he hopes Hollywood looks at its diversity problems from a "360 degree perspective," referencing the lack of diversity in critics determining the movies that get Oscar buzz as well as discrimination in casting for films. He said that not only is award recognition important to allow for increased financial and creative opportunities for artists, but that a diverse Hollywood gives minorities the power to shape how they are perceived in society through realistic and positive depictions of their communities.

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"What I really appreciated seeing is a recognition that there has to be a turnover as the world and Hollywood become more diverse," said Robinson of the Academy's diversity plan. He elaborated by saying that in particular he liked that the new changes include a limited voting status for members for 10 years, subject to renewal depending on the member's involvement in motion pictures during the past decade.

Read More: Oscar Voter on Diversity Change: "Academy Insults All Its Members by Denying Their Elected Status"

One thing that the exec would like to see going forward is a "deeper accountability" of people seeing the movies they are voting on. "That is going to be important in disrupting the kind of cycle of people voting for what they are comfortable with," said Robinson. He also said he was disappointed, but not surprised, at the backlash from people who are against the Academy's diversity plan. "We see, in particular, many older white celebrities that are incredibly interested in the status quo," said Robinson. "We have a lot of work to do in this country."

"It will be important for Hollywood, if it wants to continue to stay relevant in a world where TV has become more diverse, internet streaming has become diverse, they are going to have to recognize the changes that are taking place and embrace them."

Lastly, Robinson said he expects Chris Rock to tackle these issues as this year's host of the Academy Awards.

"I think that Chris Rock has proven himself over the years to be an important cultural critic, and hilarious at the same time," said Robinson. "We absolutely expect him to use this platform to talk about what's going on, and we look forward to it."

Read More: Ava DuVernay, Al Sharpton Respond to Academy Diversity Changes
A swarm of locusts that covers the land and skies, devours crops, and leaves cattle without grass for grazing is a plague worthy of the Bible. In Argentina, where farmers have reported locust clouds four miles long and nearly two miles high, according to The New York Times, the threat is all too real.

The country is facing the worst infestation of locusts in 60 years, and most believe there is no stopping the swarm at this point, only a possibility of lessening its effects. Fumigators have been attempting to kill young locusts that are not yet able to fly. In a little more than a week, the locusts are expected to mature into voracious flying swarms in search of food, the Times wrote. The Rural Confederation of Argentina told La Nacion that 700,000 hectares of farmland have already been affected and could easily spread to millions if immediate action isnt taken. Farmers in the surrounding area grow sunflower and cotton, or manage grasslands for grazing livestock. But if the swarm takes to the air, theres no telling where it might land and what damage it could do.

While Argentina is facing a very clear and present danger, theres a looming threat of a swarm hitting other countries tooa threat that may be intensifying. Locust are becoming even more dangerous in the context of exceptional weather events associated to climate change, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which notes that the high incidence of drought in the 21st century has also worsened the impact of locusts in Africa. Drought may decrease locust numbers, but the FAO warns that higher temperatures could shorten the incubation and maturation periods and lead to a rise in the number of locust generations in a year. So not only will there be an increasing possibility of locust swarms, but the intensity of those swarms is likely to rise. Together, the FAO writes, a very small swarm consumes as much food as 35,000 people eat per day.

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Locusts, a type of grasshopper, are relatively innocuous, solitary insects most of the time. But extreme weather events, such as those caused by climate change and El Nino, have the potential to trigger swarms. There are a number of potential environmental changes that lead to swarming, but most often the behavior has been tied to a period of flooding in otherwise arid regions, leading to plant growth that provides a hospitable environment for the locust population to boom. When dry weather eventually returns, the habitat shrinks, and the inflated population of locusts is pushed closer together.

Rather than eating in the every-locust-for-himself approach that is the norm for the insect, the cramped conditions result in a chemical change that turns the solitary insects into gregarious team players. Young locusts cant fly. They develop wings as adults. Once they mature and tens of millions of locusts take to the air in unison, they form a giant black cloud that settles onto farmland and fields, eating everything in its path. Its not the appetite of the individual locusts so much as the targeted buffet-style approach the swarms implement that creates such an utter disaster for farmers. They also change color from dark brown or red to bright orange and pink before swarming (the exact switch depending on the species). Humans may get the winter blues, but climate and weather effects on locusts constitute a full metamorphosis.

The most worrisome variety is the desert locust, which can live and breed under various ecological and climatic regimes in vast areas covering 29 million square kilometers and covering parts of 60 different countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, according to the FAO. Their swarm area constitutes more than 20 percent of the worlds land surface. During plagues, the FAO added, the desert locust has the potential to damage the livelihood of a tenth of the worlds population.

Even though the desert locust is the heartiest species, all locust swarms can migrate quickly, covering hundreds of miles of land per day. This makes preventing swarms not just the responsibility of the nation where the swarm originated, but the international community too. The only way to combat locust swarms is through preventive measures such as monitoring and pesticides. But predictive models arent reliable where locusts are concerned.

Still, when its clear that young locust populations are growing, its important to reduce their numbers. But so far the international community has not been effective in its attempts. The best way to stop a plague is early spraying of juvenile locusts with small amounts of pesticides. But as locusts get closer to swarming, their numbers make this a more difficult and expensive proposition. Once the insects have taken to the air, aerial spraying is the only way to combat the plague.

The response to numerous swarms in Africa has succeeded only at enormous cost owing to initial underfunding and late implementation. A 20032005 outbreak would have cost only $3.3 million per year to prevent, according to the FAO. Instead, responding to the outbreak after the swarm had amounted to $570 million plus untold additional funds in crop damages and economic losses. In November, the FAO warned that recent weather in the northwest Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Yemen had created the perfect breeding ground for locusts and strongly suggested preventive measures be put in place. But the response has been slow yet again.

All signs point toward locust swarms becoming more prevalent, making it crucial that preventive measures become the norm.

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High school students left up to $2.7 billion worth of financial aid on the table last year by not filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms.

In 2014, 1.4 million high school students did not fill out the FAFSA forms, according to a NerdWallet analysis released Wednesday. The analysis includes all high school grads, even those who didnt attend college, in an attempt to show that those who didnt attend could have received federal aid.

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About half of students who didnt send in a FAFSA form would have been eligible for Pell grants, worth an average $1,861, according to NerdWallet.

The published cost of tuition and fees at a four-year, public college was $9,410 in 2015-2016, according to the College Board, but the average net price after grants and scholarships was quite a bit less at $5,410.

Getting the best aid package depends on a familys financial picture and savings strategy, the students academic profile, and proper completion of forms required by both schools and the government, including the FAFSA.

The deadlines to fill out the FAFSA range from early January through March, but getting yours in first or as early as possible can boost your chances of getting more aid, since some schools dole out aid based on the date the application is received.

In addition to federal grants, the FAFSA is used to determine qualification for both student and parent federal loans, and institutions sometimes require it for eligibility for merit aid.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
BERLIN (Reuters) - A man questioned by police in the German city of Cologne on suspicion of buying chemicals to make explosives said he only wanted to produce drugs, police said on Wednesday. Police launched a manhunt for a 45-50-year-old man of "Middle Eastern" appearance on Tuesday after he was recorded on a surveillance video buying chemicals in a DIY store in Pulheim, a town close to Cologne. The 44-year-old man then turned himself in to police on Tuesday evening after recognizing himself on the police photographs. The man, who wasn't named, told police he had bought the chemicals to manufacture drugs. Police found narcotics when they searched his flat. "Investigations into his person and his living environment do not give any indication that he acquired the chemicals for other purposes," police said in a statement. The man has now been released from custody. (Reporting by Caroline Copley Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)
Cairo (AFP) - An Egyptian court on Wednesday upheld two-year prison sentences for five secular opposition activists convicted of joining illegal demonstrations staged in memory of protests that were violently suppressed.

On November 19, 2011, protests were held near Cairo's Tahrir Square against the military junta that took over after the popular uprising that January and February which ended the rule of president Hosni Mubarak.

The 10 days of protests that followed claimed 42 lives in clashes between demonstrators and security forces.

A Cairo appeals court on Wednesday confirmed two-year jail terms for the five, among them a surgeon and an activist from a small leftist party.

According to a court official and a defence lawyer, they were accused of taking part in an event in November 2015 in memory of the violence four years earlier.

In December, they were convicted of attending gatherings, blocking roads and "demonstrating without a permit", the sources said.

They can still appeal to the Court of Cassation.

Wednesday's ruling coincides with the fifth anniversary of the uprising that erupted on January 25, 2011 and led to Mubarak's fall.

Defence lawyer Anas Sayyid told AFP that the five were arrested last November "in an arbitrary manner, in an area where there were not even any demonstrations".

Since the military removed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, again taking the reins of power it had controlled for decades before the 2011 uprising, the authorities have ruthlessly repressed any opposition.

Limited at first to Morsi supporters, the crackdown later spread to secular and leftist movements that took part in the revolt against Mubarak.

Rights group Amnesty International called Wednesday's verdict "yet another example of the unfair and arbitrary nature of Egypt's criminal justice system".

An Amnesty statement said at least two of those convicted "say they were tortured and ill-treated during interrogation".

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"Their case is one more appalling example of the relentless government campaign to crush independent and critical voices and activists in Egypt today," said the London-based rights organisation.

Meanwhile, the trial of four activists on charges of "incitement to strike", due to begin on Wednesday, has been postponed until next Monday, a judicial official said.

The defendants in that case include youth leader Amr Ali, coordinator of the now banned April 6 movement that spearheaded the 2011 revolt.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The leader of an influential Christian conservative lobbying group said on Tuesday he backs Senator Ted Cruz for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said on Fox News: "I believe the one who is best positioned, best prepared to lead this nation forward, pulling it out of the tailspin that this president has put us in, I believe is Ted Cruz." Cruz and billionaire businessman Donald Trump are locked in a tight Republican race in Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation nominating contest on Monday. Both Trump and Cruz have worked hard to pick up support from Christian conservatives. (Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Sandra Maler)
By Seyhmus Cakan DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Security forces killed 20 Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey while three Turkish soldiers died in a rebel attack, the military said on Wednesday, as authorities widened a curfew in the mainly Kurdish region's largest city, Diyarbakir. Hundreds of locals, including children and the elderly, fled curfew-bound areas of Diyarbakir's Sur district as gunfire and blasts resounded and police helicopters flew overhead, a Reuters witness said. Some people cried as they carried away possessions. Southeastern Turkey has endured its worst violence in two decades since a 2-1/2-year-old ceasefire between the state and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants collapsed in July, reviving a conflict that has killed 40,000 people since 1984. The army said 11 PKK members died in the town of Cizre, near the Syrian border, and nine more in Sur on Tuesday, bringing the militant death toll in the two towns to some 600 since security operations began there last month. It said three soldiers were killed in a militant attack in Sur, where security sources said militants opened fire with rifles and a rocket launcher. The ancient Sur district, enclosed by Roman city walls, has suffered extensive damage in the fighting and much of it has been under a round-the-clock curfew since Dec. 2. The district governor's office said the curfew was extended to five more districts so security forces could remove explosive devices and barricades and fill in ditches set up by militants. Turkey, the United States and the European Union all classify the PKK as a terrorist organization. The PKK says it is fighting for autonomy for Turkey's Kurdish minority. "URGENT SITUATION" Rights groups and locals have voiced growing concern about the civilian death toll in the security operations since last month. The pro-Kurdish HDP party puts the toll at nearly 120. Rights groups and the HDP have highlighted the plight of some 28 people sheltering in a Cizre cellar, where four have died and three are in a critical condition, according to information obtained by Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch. "Medical attention is not being provided to those in need. This is an urgent situation that the Turkish government needs to address imminently to prevent loss of life," she told a news conference in Istanbul. Rights groups, and a doctors' association have called for ambulances to be allowed to rescue the wounded. The HDP said three of its parliamentarians had gone on hunger strike and were staging a sit-in at the offices of the Interior Ministry to force authorities to send ambulances. The local governor's office said emergency services were unable to enter the area because of the PKK. "Our ambulances have been sent to the closest (safe) location and have asked for all the wounded, if any, to be brought to this location. But despite all our efforts, our call has been ignored," the Sirnak province governor's office said. (Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley and Humeyra Pamuk in Istanbul and Gulsen Solaker in Ankara; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by David Dolan and Gareth Jones)
Vatican City (AFP) - European dairy producers said Wednesday they had gained Pope Francis' support for efforts to shore up the price of milk in Europe, which has been badly hit by over-production.

Members of the European Milk Board (EMB), said Pope Francis, always keen to lend an ear to social problems, backed their efforts to persuade governments and the European Commission to act, according to I.Media, a news agency that specialises in the Vatican.

Some 140 EMB members from across Europe rallied on Wednesday to receive the pope's blessing in Saint Peter's Square, after which a small delegation offered the pontiff a basket of fair-trade produce and handed him letters urging him to back their ' cause.

"Our national and European decision-makers have liberalised markets, causing catastrophic over-production of milk. This policy only favours multinationals," Belgian producer Erwin Schoepges wrote in one of the missives.

"Producers are falling by the wayside as markets are overwhelmed. Prices are so low that they cannot feed their families."

Schoepges told I.Media the pope said: "I support you in this struggle. Don't stop, keep going."

The pontiff backs the producers and plans to meet with them at greater length "in the next six months," I.Media said.

The EMB is a Brussels-based lobby group, representing 100,000 milk producers in 15 European Union (EU) countries, according to its website.

It says prices have recently slumped by up to 40 percent in Europe, sliding in some countries to 25 euro cents ($0.30) per litre ($1.35 per gallon), well below production costs of some 40 cents per litre.
Paris (AFP) - A deal that will see French carmaker Peugeot return to the Iranian market will be signed Thursday as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits France, a French government source said.

Peugeot and its French partner Citroen will work with Iran's Khodro to produce 200,000 vehicles a year using parts manufactured in Iran.

The first vehicles will roll off the production line in 2017, the source said.

Peugeot pulled out of Iran in 2012 as Western sanctions imposed over the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme began to bite.

At the time, Iran was Peugeot's second-largest market after France.

With the lifting of the sanctions, Iran has signed a raft of commercial deals and Rouhani is also expected to tie up an agreement to buy passenger jets during his two-day visit to France.
Madrid (AFP) - Paris-Roubaix winner John Degenkolb has been released from hospital to continue his recovery from the severe injuries he suffered when he and five Giant-Alpecin teammates were mowed down by a car whilst training in Spain.

Degenkolb suffered a severed finger, as well as a fractured forearm and a deep cut on his leg when an elderly English driver, understood to be driving on the wrong side of the road, crashed into the group in Benigembla near Alicante, in south-east Spain, on Saturday.

The German rider has returned home where he will receive further hospital treatment.

"Johns left index finger was damaged in the accident and he will have additional surgery in Germany," said team physician Anko Boelens.

"As a professional athlete, he needs the functionality back in his finger, and the recovery time for that is extremely difficult to predict."

However, there was good news on American Chad Haga, who will not need surgery on an orbital fracture.

"Now the swelling has decreased and surgery wont be necessary," added Boelens.

"Chad will be able to leave the hospital and travel home to Girona, Spain, in the next few days."

Warren Barguil, Fredrik Ludvigsson and Ramon Sinkeldam have already returned home with Barguil and Sinkeldam expected to be sidelined for at least six weeks due to broken scaphoids.

Meanwhile, Max Walscheid will be out for months after undergoing successful surgeries on both his tibia and thumb in his native Germany.
Refugees fleeing war zones in Syria and other countries may soon find out war isn't the only manner of "theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

The government of Denmark has approved a plan to strip migrants arriving in the country of their valuables, the Guardian reported.

According to the paper, Danish police will be empowered to search any asylum seekers upon arrival and seize any objects "that have no sentimental value" worth more than 10,000 kroner (approximately $1,456). Proponents justified the plan as necessary to help fund the cost of caring for the refugees.

Switzerland and the German governments of Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg already have similar policies in place enabling authorities to take refugees' possessions, according to Politico.

The law also requires refugees to wait three years before they can apply to be reunified with their families, an increase from the previous status quo of one year, reported Al-Jazeera.

The BBC reported that Denmark is expected to receive 20,000 migrants in 2016, up from 15,000 in 2015. In 2015, more than 1 million migrants arrived in Europe seeking asylum, many from conflict-ridden nations like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

A family of Syrian refugees are escorted by Danish police after stricter measures at the DenmarkGermany border were put in place.

And given the destitute circumstances of many migrants, it's possible the assets seized may be some of the migrants' last remaining possessions. Refugees of the Syrian civil war are particularly vulnerable, noted the Washington Post, as many civilians fleeing war-ravaged regions had to sell most of their remaining valuables to afford extortionate black-market travel fees out of the country.

In September 2015, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees identified chronic poverty among the estimated 4 million Syrian refugees who have fled to neighboring countries as a key driver of migration to Europe.

"Refugees face horrible living conditions and restrictions in the legal regimes for refugees in the countries where they live," UNHCR Middle East and North Africa Bureau Director Amin Awad said in a statement. "When people don't have proper shelter and are living on 45 cents a day of course they want to move ... Syrians are checking out from the neighboring countries."

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"Refugees are having to adopt negative survival strategies  like child labor, dropping out of school, begging and survival sex," he added. "They need much more support."

Tensions over the refugee crisis have reached a boiling point in much of Europe, fueled in large part by popular resentment of resettlement plans.

On Monday, Reuters reported that European Union interior officials are threatening to Greece from the no-passport travel zone currently enjoyed by most E.U. member nations. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 80% of the refugees traveling to Europe enter through Greece.
Saint Petersburg (AFP) - An outbreak of swine flu has claimed some 22 lives in Russia's second city Saint Petersburg and combined with high rates of seasonal flu to force authorities to close schools and send residents flocking to pharmacies.

Saint Petersburg has recorded the highest number of swine flu deaths in an outbreak that has claimed some 80 victims nationwide since the start of the winter, according to AFP calculations based on statements by regional officials.

Authorities say there are treating some 12,000 people with flu symptoms every day and up to 80 percent of these cases could be swine flu, also known as the H1N1 virus.

To stop regular flu and the H1N1 virus from spreading, the city's primary schools will be closed for two weeks from February 1, and some parents have already taken action.

"I don't want to take any risks," said Lyubov Anikanova, who has refused to send her daughter to school over fears she could catch the flu.

"We are hearing that swine flu is very dangerous this year."

Russian officials have tried to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak with health minister Veronika Skvortsova saying Monday that the swine flu situation in the country was "completely under control."

The country's top doctor said on Tuesday that the recent uptick in flu figures was not out of the ordinary.

"The incidence of flu is above average in some regions," the country's top doctor, Anna Popova, told Interfax news agency. "But overall the number of cases does not exceed the average over many years."

- Rush at the drugstore -

Despite the assurance from officials the recent flu cases have seen residents of Petersburg head to drugstores to stock up on medication and masks, emptying the shelves of pharmacies across town.

Some chemists have now already run-out of prescription flu medication and other flu-season essentials.

"We haven't had many popular medications for a week now," said pharmacist Natalia Selezneva.

Health authorities have pledged to restock pharmacies with 100,000 masks and flu medication to face increasing demand.

"I would like to resist the panic," 67-year-old pensioner Maya Yakovleva told AFP. "But right now, the flu is everyone's favourite topic: where to buy (medicine), the number of people who have died. It seems this is all we talk about."
Kinshasa (AFP) - The United Nations warned Wednesday of a sharp rise in rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, holding government officials responsible for half of them as political tensions rise ahead of uncertain presidential elections.

Jose Maria Aranaz, the UN's rights chief in DR Congo, told a press conference his office had "reported a dramatic rise in human rights violations" in 2015, a 64 percent increase in cases compared to 2014.

"In total, we have registered 3,847 violations of human rights violations in the territory," he said as he presented his annual report, adding that the situation in the nation's Orientale, as well as North and South Kivu regions were the worst affected.

The UN believes government officials committed 49 percent of the reported violations, which included 294 extrajudicial killings.

Aranaz's office said 260 of the cases were linked to DR Congo's fraught electoral process, which has seen political tensions soar.

The opposition accuses President Joseph Kabila, in power since 2001, of trying to cling to power despite being banned under the constitution from running again after his mandate expires in December.

Last week some 5,000 people protested in the eastern city of Bukavu to demand the elections are held on schedule by the end of 2016. But as electoral registers are badly out of date, this appears increasingly unlikely.

Kabila, re-elected in 2011 after a vote marked by massive fraud, has proposed holding a "national dialogue" with a view to ensuring elections that would be peaceful, but delayed.

His opponents are split between those willing to take part in the process and those insisting the vote must be held on schedule, deriding the "national dialogue" as a stalling mechanism to keep Kabila in power.

The UN, rights groups and the opposition have repeatedly deplored political repression by Congolese authorities in recent months.

Aranaz said Wednesday that his office is concerned by a "reduction in the political space and the restriction of public freedoms" which he said "runs contrary to the spirit of credible elections".

Recent opposition protests in the capital Kinshasa and the southeastern city of Lubumbashi have been suppressed by police, including planned demonstrations to mark the death of dozens of people in anti-government riots a year ago.
It may come as a surprise that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is not already attached to a sportswear label in some capacity given his lengthy Hollywood resume, his impressive 40 million Instagram followers and those biceps. And triceps. And abs. (You get the idea.)

But on Monday, the WWE champion-turned-actor revealed a brand new deal with Under Armour, officially taking him off the sponsorship market. As part of this new global partnership with the Baltimore-based brand, Johnson will have a hand in the creation of a line of footwear, apparel and accessories for men, women and children. Additionally, the Ballers star will support Under Armour's Connected Fitness initiatives, which aim to bring the best in emerging fitness technology to athletes.

Read more Kerry Washington Goes for the Bob

Johnson will also play a part in the promotion and support of the brand's philanthropic initiative, the UA Freedom project, which supports members of the military, first responders and public safety officials.

"This deal's been years in the making," Johnson wrote on Instagram. "As you can now see it's a game-changer and never been done in Hollywood. And to me, the most motivating factor of this whole thing is it will always come down to me and all of you 'round the world, waking up every morning, punching that clock and putting in the hard work with our own two hands."

See more 20 Carol Burnett Style Moments We Adore

The 43-year-old also revealed that his Under Armour threads will make a cameo in his upcoming films, including next year's Baywatch (also starring Zac Efron and Priyanka Chopra) as well as Fast and Furious 8.

The first product from the partnership is a "Rock-inspired" duffel bag, which will hit stores and Under Armour's website within the next few weeks.

A photo posted by therock (@therock) on Jan 25, 2016 at 9:30am PST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Eight Republican candidates have qualified for the prime-time Fox News/Google debate on Thursday, with Donald Trump winning the center-stage spot as the top-polling candidate, Fox News announced on Tuesday. But Trump said on Tuesday he likely will not attend the debate. This will be the last one before the Iowa caucuses on Monday marking the first contest in the nomination race for the Nov. 8 presidential election. Trump has been engaged in a public spat with Fox News that began at a debate last August in which he said he was subject to unfair questioning by moderator Megyn Kelly. "Let's see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate," Trump told the news conference in Marshalltown, Iowa. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who failed to qualify for the main event in the last debate, made the cut this time. The other participants in the 9 p.m. EST debate will be Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Ohio Governor John Kasich. Former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore qualified for the 7 p.m. EST debate for low-polling candidates. After failing to qualify for a prime-time debate held earlier this month, Paul declined to participate in the so-called undercard debate. (Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Eric Walsh)
Jerusalem (AFP) - An elite Israeli soldier has been jailed and demoted after posting a video of himself shooting a camel from his car while driving on a desert road, the army said Wednesday.

"A military court sentenced the soldier who indecorously shot a camel to four months in military prison," the army said in a statement to AFP.

He was also demoted to the rank of private, it said.

A second soldier who filmed the event and can be heard laughing on the video was sentenced to two months in a military prison and also demoted.

In the video, which is only a few seconds long, the two men drive along a road in what appears to be the Israeli desert.

As they pass a camel, one of the men fires a single shot from a pistol straight at it.

The camel later died, according to Israeli media reports.

The video prompted widespread outrage on social media after it was posted online.

"The IDF decries the torture of animals, and this case was unfortunately even more extreme as IDF equipment was used for that purpose," the army said.

Israeli media reported the two were from the elite Duvdevan special operations unit of the military.
Sen. Ted Cruz, the maverick Texas Republican at or near the top of the crowded GOP presidential field, has a seemingly odd strategy for winning next weeks Iowa caucus. He is frontally attacking ethanol in a state where King Corn has for decades reigned and where national office-seekers have dutifully paid their obeisance to the corn-fed fuel.

Yet Cruzs strategy is not as crazy as it appears. Rather, it illustrates the dramatic shifts that have reshaped the worlds of both energy and politics in just a few short years. Ethanol is not as important to the nation or to Iowa as it once was, and Iowas kingmakers seem to be ceding their role as gatekeepers of the GOP nomination.

That makes it politically possible to attack ethanol, survive or even thrive in Iowa, and still be well positioned for the overall nomination. Most polls show Cruzs biggest rival, businessman Donald Trump, still leading in Iowa, but since their spat over government-backed ethanol broke out, the race has actually tightened. According to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, theyre now neck and neck, with Trump ahead 31 to 29 percent, but well within the margin of error. And Cruz has gained more ground in New Hampshire, which holds its primaries just over a week after the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus.

There should be no mandates, no subsidies whatsoever for any energy source, whether ethanol or oil and gas or anything else, Cruz said last week at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, according to Politico. Cruz said the ethanol mandate, which requires that 10 percent of gasoline sold at pumps nationwide be cut with ethanol, represents crony capitalism at its worst.

Trump quickly pounced. He trumpeted his love for ethanol and the government mandates that support it, and trotted out key establishment figures like Iowas senior senator, Chuck Grassley, to bolster his Hawkeye credentials. While not a formal endorsement, Grassleys appearance on the stump was widely seen as the Republican establishment warming to Trump. Sen. Grassley does support ethanol and recognizes its importance to Iowa and the countrys energy independence, Grassley spokeswoman Jill Gerber told Foreign Policy.

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Even Iowas Republican governor, Terry Branstad, broke with his long-standing tradition of steering clear of endorsing or attacking any particular candidate and leaped into the fray, lambasting Cruz for his attacks on ethanol. Branstad said he hoped that Cruzs anti-renewable fuel stand makes him lose the Iowa caucus.

That may be wishful thinking, with Iowas kingmakers losing some of their luster in a rapidly evolving political and media landscape. The last two GOP candidates who touted ethanol and won Iowa, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, went on to lose the nomination; Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney both lost Iowa but won the Republican nomination.

Cruzs views of ethanol are also more nuanced than critics like Branstad allege. The Texas senator says he is not opposed to ethanol as a fuel  just the government mandates that prop it up. Citing his conservative, free-market approach to economic policy, he says he wants to do away with government support for all kinds of energy, including oil and gas and renewables like wind and solar. Ethanol, he says, could and should have an even bigger role in the nations energy mix, because it makes gasoline more potent and cleaner.

Im not sure Id characterize [Cruz] as hostile to ethanol. Hes hostile to the Renewable Fuel Standard [RFS], but hes also noted that ethanol is a great fuel, said Bob Dinneen, the president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the industry trade group. But since the industrys No. 1 priority is the RFS, hes clearly not as good on the issue as 12 of the other 14 candidates.

Bucking ethanol was indeed a brave stance in the past. Every candidate from either party who has won the Iowa caucus since 1980 has been a supporter of the grainy fuel and the government programs that prop it up. George W. Bush, a former oil man from an oil state, kicked off his 2000 presidential run in Iowa with a paean to the fuel. Even Hillary Clinton, a tireless opponent of ethanol during her years in the Senate, had a road to Des Moines moment just in time for the 2008 campaign. This time around, she is again a vocal supporter of ethanol and other biofuels.

But Cruz believes he can go after ethanols special place and still score big with voters in Iowa. That might be because ethanol no longer appears to be a make-or-break issue there. Half the voters, according to one recent poll, dont care about the issue, and almost 60 percent dont even want to hear politicians talk about it. Only one-quarter of Iowans care more about ethanol and the government programs that support it than they did five or 10 years ago.

And that seems to reflect the fact that ethanols role in Iowas economy is relatively less important than it was in years past. Other industries have become hugely important for both job creation and GDP growth. Wind power, in particular, has become an economic motor in western Iowa, while the states embrace of renewable energy has helped it attract investment from technology titans like Microsoft and Facebook. Iowa is third behind only Texas and California in the amount of wind turbines it has installed, and thousands of wind-industry jobs pump money into blood-red districts across the state. Romney made an energy policy stumble in Iowa in 2012  but it wasnt about ethanol. It was his call to end wind power subsidies that even conservative Iowans have come to love.

When America turned to ethanol as an answer to its energy woes, during the oil shocks of the 1970s, it was seen as a way to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. That held true for decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations, with hefty subsidies and guaranteed markets meant to push farmers into growing more corn for fuel.

George W. Bush, while decrying the nations addiction to oil in 2006, touted the ability of ethanol and other biofuels to bolster the countrys energy independence. Barack Obama, himself hailing from a corn state, was an unabashed champion of ethanol and other biofuels during both his presidential runs.

Then came the U.S. energy boom, a gusher of new oil and natural gas production unleashed by hydraulic fracturing. The United States pumps about 4.5 million barrels more of oil every day than it did in 2008  essentially adding half the output of Saudi Arabia from those newly drilled wells in Texas and North Dakota. Crude oil imports have gone down dramatically and, with them, the perceived need to find an antidote to OPEC in the cornfields of the Midwest. Tellingly, Congress killed ethanols direct subsidies back in 2011.

And ethanol simply isnt a cheaper alternative to oil, either. Back in 2008 when oil prices broke records, hearty support for ethanol seemed a way to insulate the economy from another price shock. But today, a gallon of gasoline costs less than a gallon of corn ethanol. Ethanols use actually raises the price at the pump for consumers. (That could change if oil prices spike again.)

If ethanol isnt as crucial to Iowas or the nations energy health as it once was, it loses some of its political potency. Cruzs competitive bid for Iowa is based in part on the senators ability to tap into an anxiety-fueled, anti-establishment fervor among the states more staunch conservatives  and the public at large. Whether from terrorist attacks or seismic social change, plenty of people feel vulnerable. Hence the one-two punch of Cruzs call to allow only Christian refugees from the war in Syria to settle in the United States.

There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror, he said in November. Days later, Branstad moved to block them. A candidate having true conservative values has vaulted to the top of the list of voter concerns in Iowa, according to a Fox poll. Railing against big-government mandates like ethanol fits that bill nicely, while the political groundswell seems to be against longtime political institutions such as Branstad or Grassley, making it less imperative for candidates to grovel in hopes of an establishment endorsement.

The importance of the Iowa caucus itself has been diluted both by demographic and technological shifts. As the first opportunity for voters to weigh in on the election, Iowa still can have a dramatic impact on a campaigns momentum and a candidates name recognition. But its rarely predictive of who eventually becomes president. In the GOP race, the last two winners in Iowa went nowhere, while two candidates who lost in Iowa  McCain and Romney  secured the nomination. Turnout is chronically low, and the state looks increasingly less like the rest of the country; Iowa is roughly 87 percent white, whereas the nation as a whole is about 62 percent.

And in a 24-hour media cycle fueled by cable news and social media, even retail campaigning in snowy Iowa (or New Hampshire) has become national, meaning politicians are under less pressure to cater to the states special interest. Cruz took his biggest shots against ethanol while at a town hall in New Hampshire, for example. Despite his ethanol hug last week, most of Trumps Iowa campaign stops are laden with the exact same fare he offers around the country.

Its a new day in politics when a presidential hopeful can hope to win Iowa by taking aim at the very gravy train that has so enriched the local economy. America wants a leader who walks tall and stands up against the lobbyist thugs and the politicians they own, the Cruz-backing Courageous Conservatives PAC said in a new ad that started airing this week across the state. On Monday, well learn if that day has indeed come.

Photo credit: JOE RAEDLE/Getty Images
Brussels (AFP) - The EU on Wednesday pushed to take control of car regulation in Europe in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, unveiling proposals that would grant Brussels new powers to impose huge fines and recall vehicles.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation EU, said carmakers found cheating on pollution tests could face a fine of 30,000 euros ($32,600) per vehicle, with non-compliant cars wrongfully approved taken off European roads.

"The commission is proposing a major overhaul of the so-called EU type approval framework," the European Commission said in a statement, referring to the system to approve cars for use on European roads.

The commission would also win powers to police national regulators with random checks by Brussels-led teams, amid widespread criticism that regulation currently handled by member states is too cosy with the auto industry.

"With our proposals today we will raise the quality and independence of vehicle testing and improve the oversight of cars already in circulation," EU Industry Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska said.

Brussels further demanded that pollution testing in member states no longer be paid for by car companies, but instead through a government fund to avoid the risk of a conflict of interest in granting approvals.

VW practices "are not only shocking but underline the need for change. We must make sure it never happens again," commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen said at a news briefing.

But the proposals will take at least months and possibly years of negotiations among EU lawmakers and national governments before implementation, almost certainly including a furious fight from Germany's powerful car lobby.

"It boils down to giving away national sovereignty to Brussels," Bas Eickhout, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told Bloomberg.

ACEA, the powerful Brussels-based auto lobby, said it took note of the proposal "and will now analyse in detail its implications on the industry."

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- 'Incestuous bond' -

The EU has been particularly embarrassed by the VW scandal, in which Europe's biggest car maker was found to have fitted 11 million diesel engines worldwide -- including 8.5 million in Europe -- with devices aimed at cheating emissions tests.

Critics accuse the Commission of having turned a blind eye to years of clear evidence that Volkswagen was using software to cheat on emissions tests, with Brussels afraid to take on Germany's biggest industry and employer.

"This proposal clearly goes in the right direction as a first step towards breaking the incestuous bond between the auto industry and national authorities," said Karima Delli, a Greens MEP.

The system of approving car models in Europe -- known as type approval -- is currently based on "mutual trust", with a go-ahead by a national body carrying weight throughout the 28-country EU.

But the new measures fall short of replacing this system with a fully-fledged EU regulator, instead providing fixes to "current flaws in the system", the commission said.

The EU is also battling VW to compensate European customers in the same way as its US customers over the emissions test scandal, with Bienkowska pressing the company's CEO on the issue when she visited Brussels last week.

In the United States where Volkswagen is under investigation, the company has offered a "goodwill package" of $1,000 in vouchers to buyers of affected cars.

The same offer in Europe would cost VW in the region of $8.5 billion.

NGO Transport & Environment in a statement warned that in addition to Germany, major EU powers Italy, Britain, Spain and France would also fight the proposal, keen to protect their car industry.

"This good proposal addresses many flaws in the current car testing system but lacks teeth," said the group's director Greg Archer.
More evidence has been released this week about the possible harmful effects of smoking e-cigarettes, with a study published on Monday suggesting that e-cigarette vapor could be toxic to humans, increasing inflammation and boosting harmful bacteria in the body.

The results were found by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, who together looked at the effect of e-cigarette smoking, also known as vaping', on mice.

In the study the mice inhaled vapors from e-cigarettes over a four-week period, inhaling the vapors for one hour a day, five days a week. The team used e-cigarette vapor from seven different manufacturers to look at a variety of formulas and brands.

At the end of the four weeks the mice who had been exposed to the vapors showed 10% more signs of inflammation in their blood and airways than mice who hadn't been exposed, with the results consistent across the seven different vapors.

Senior author Laura E. Crotty Alexander commented on the findings saying, "This study shows that e-cigarette vapor is not benign -- at high doses it can directly kill lung cells, which is frightening. We already knew that inhaling heated chemicals, including the e-liquid ingredients nicotine and propylene glycol, couldn't possibly be good for you. This work confirms that inhalation of e-cigarette vapor daily leads to changes in the inflammatory milieu inside the airways."

Although the team do not currently know for certain what illnesses these inflammatory changes will lead to, but based on their findings and others they are confident that the toxins in e-cigarettes will ultimately lead to disease, with the team observing that "Some of the changes we have found in mice are also found in the airways and blood of conventional cigarette smokers, while others are found in humans with cancer or inflammatory lung diseases."

In addition the team also found that harmful bacteria flourished in the mice who were exposed to vapor, with Staphylococcus aureus, the strain of bacteria that is responsible for the development of MRSA, better able to invade human airway cells and more resistant to the body's defense mechanisms after exposure to e-cigarette vapor.

The study was published on Monday in the Journal of Molecular Medicine.
By Anastasia Moloney

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The number of countries and territories in the Americas reporting cases of the mosquito-borne Zika virus rose to 22 on Tuesday, more than double the number a month ago, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

An outbreak of the virus is affecting large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean and is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947 and was unknown in the Americas until 2014.

The disease is usually relatively mild but PAHO, the regional arm of the WHO, says it may be linked to cases of brain damage in newborn babies in Brazil.

Here are some facts about Zika:

* The Zika virus is spread to people through the bite of an infected mosquito, the same mosquito that transmits dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. There is no vaccine for Zika.

* The Zika virus is usually relatively mild, with symptoms such as skin rash, fever, muscle and joint pain, lasting up to seven days. It is uncommon for people infected with Zika to need hospital treatment.

* In the Americas, there is no evidence that the Zika virus can cause death, PAHO says, but sporadic cases have been reported of more serious complications in people with preexisting diseases or conditions, causing death.

* Researchers in Brazil and WHO say there is growing evidence that links Zika to microcephaly, a neurological disorder in which babies are born with smaller-than-normal heads and brains, but information about the possible transmission of Zika from infected mothers to babies during pregnancy or childbirth is "very limited", PAHO says.

* In northeast Brazil, there has been a marked increase in cases of newborn babies with microcephaly. Brazil's health ministry has said the number of suspected cases of microcephaly in newborns increased by about 360 in the 10 days to Jan. 16 to 3,893.

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* Brazil has the highest rate of infection, followed by Colombia. Zika outbreaks have also been reported in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Suriname and Venezuela, among others.

* Colombia's health ministry says Zika has already infected 13,500 people across the country and there could be as many as 700,000 cases this year.

* In Colombia, it is estimated that 500 babies will be born with microcephaly, according to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

* Colombia's health ministry has advised women to delay becoming pregnant for six to eight months to avoid possible risks related to the Zika virus.

* Jamaica has not reported any confirmed cases of Zika, but the health ministry has recommended women delay becoming pregnant for the next six to 12 months. El Salvador has advised women to avoid getting pregnant until 2018.

* Earlier this month, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention warned pregnant women to avoid travel to 14 countries and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean affected by the virus.

* One in four people infected with Zika develop symptoms and many cases of Zika go undetected, making it difficult to estimate the true scale of the outbreak in the Americas. PAHO says there are no reliable estimates of the number of cases in the region. Based on reports from affected countries, PAHO estimates there are at least 60,000 suspected cases of Zika, though the real figure is thought to be far higher.

(Sources: World Health Organization (WHO), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Centers for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC), Colombian Ministry of Health).

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and James Dalgleish; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
Stocks (^DJI, ^GSPC, ^IXIC) are in a holding pattern as investors await the release of the statement from the Federal Reserveit's first meeting since Janet Yellen and company raised interest rates for the first time in almost a decade. Keith Bliss of Cuttone & Co. joins us live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the markets.

To discuss some of the other stories that Yahoo Finance is keeping an eye on today, Alexis Christoforous is joined by Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer and Yahoo Finance's Nicole Sinclair.

Get the Latest Market Data and News with the Yahoo Finance App

Not the Apple of my eye

Apple (AAPL) shares are taking a pretty big hit after warning that sales this quarter will dropit's the first time that's happened in 13 years. Our own Aaron Pressman notes a big reason for worry at Apple is China. In his article today on Yahoo Finance, he writes that sales growth for the tech giant went from 99% to just 14% in one quarter.

Funds in a race toward zero-cost investing

You probably own them in your 401K, but don't notice them much. We're talking about mutual funds and ETFs, and they're getting cheaper as a result of a price war. The cost of investing is approaching zero, with some funds charging as little as 0.03% annually. How will hedge funds compete?



Cars are kickin' as Fiat Chrysler beats

And finally, congratulations, America! You've made it a winning quarter for Fiat Chrysler (FCAU). The maker of the popular Jeep is reporting better-than-expected profit thanks to strong U.S. sales. How long will the auto boom last on the back of cheap oil?




Bangui (Central African Republic) (AFP) - The final round of presidential elections in the Central African Republic, which had been scheduled for Sunday, has been postponed over organisational problems, the electoral authority said Wednesday.

"We can't hold the election on Sunday, it's impossible, we will soon announce a new date," said Julius Ngouade Baba, a senior official at the electoral authority (ANE).

Two former premiers, Anicet Georges Dologuele and Faustin Archange Touadera, are vying for the presidency of the strife-torn nation in the second round runoff vote.

Presidential and legislative elections had been seen as vital for restoring stability after the worst sectarian violence in the chronically volatile and dirt poor nation.

Dologuele won 23.74 percent of the vote in the first round on December 30, trailed by Touadera, who picked up 19.05 percent.

Dologuele, a 58-year-old former central banker, came to be known as "Mr Clean" after his attempts to bring transparency to murky public finances during his time as premier.

Touadera, also 58, is a former maths professor who served as prime minister under disgraced ousted president Francois Bozize.

He was considered an outsider among the 30 candidates running for the top job.

At a meeting in the capital Bangui, the government, ANE and international community representatives mulled postponing the second round to February 14, according to a participant in the meeting.

There has been no official confirmation of the date, however.

"We drafted a technical report, which was brought before various institutions for consideration. When everyone agrees, we will quickly announce the new date," the ANE's Ngouade Baba said.

The announcement comes after the country's top court on Monday annulled last month's first-round legislative vote over "irregularities", but said the second round of the presidential poll could go ahead.

There were more than 1,000 candidates in the legislative election.

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The new legislative elections should be held within 60 days of the last one according to law, but that is unlikely to happen in this poor country with abysmal infrastructure.

The latest violence in Central Africa set mainly Muslim rebels against vigilantes from the Christian majority, with civilians the main victims.

Nearly two million people were eligible to vote in the polls, seen as the way out of more than two years of sectarian bloodshed that has forced about one in 10 of the nation's 4.9 million people to flee their homes.

The vote was marred by logistical problems including delays in voting material reaching pollING centres.
By Letitia Stein

TAMPA, Fla. (Reuters) - A former Florida sheriff's deputy has been indicted by a federal grand jury for using excessive force during a 2014 arrest where five white law enforcement officers were involved in the beating of a black man, U.S. Justice officials said on Wednesday.

Former Marion County sheriff's deputy Jesse Terrell, 33, was indicted late on Tuesday on a charge of depriving the man, identified by sheriff's officials as Derrick Price, of his civil rights. The other officers previously pleaded guilty to that offense, court records show.

The officers have all either resigned or been terminated from the sheriff's department in central Florida, said a spokeswoman for the agency.

The prosecutions come at a time of heightened scrutiny of the use of force by U.S. law enforcement, particularly against minorities.

Four deputies, including Terrell, struck Price during the August 2014 incident, prosecutors said in court records, and it was captured on videotape. The fifth officer watched and did not try to stop them.

Price was left bloodied in a parking lot where he was apprehended, after fleeing when authorities initially came to execute a drug-related arrest warrant, sheriff's officials said.

The two-minute video, posted on the website of the Ocala Star-Banner, includes footage from security cameras and one officer's body camera. The video shows Price running into the lot, putting his hands into the air and lying facedown on the concrete before any officers reach him.

A few seconds later, one officer kneels beside him and pulls Price's arms behind his back as if to cuff him. Four other officers arrive and surround Price on the ground, including one officer who knees him in the ribs a dozen times and another who repeatedly punches Price in the head.

The beating lasts about 40 seconds before they pull him to his feet with his hands cuffed behind his back.

"The abusive and unprofessional actions they displayed shocked me to my core," Marion County Sheriff Chris Blair said in a statement. After seeing the video, he said, he requested the officers' termination with "absolutely no hesitation."

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Terrell's attorney expected that his case would go to trial, saying that his situation differed from the guilty officers.

Jesse is not guilty. He is not guilty of anything, said attorney Charles Holloman. He declined to elaborate on why Terrell's behavior differed from that of the other officers.

If convicted, Terrell faces up to 10 years in prison. The officers who pleaded guilty are awaiting sentencing.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by Bernard Orr, Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio)
Scientists in China have developed a flexible, rollable, foldable battery inspired by traditional Chinese calligraphy involving ink on paper.

Worldwide demand for flexible electronics is rapidly growing, because the technology could enable such things as video screens and solar panels to bend, roll and fold. These flexible electronics require batteries that are equally flexible to power them, but conventional batteries are too rigid and bulky to be used in flexible electronics.

Chinese scientists, however, have developed a flexible lithium-based battery that is based on Chinese brush painting. [5 Crazy Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech]

Lithium-ion batteries power most portable devices, from smartphones to tablet computers to laptops. However, so-called lithium-air batteries could, in principle, hold five to 10 times as much energy as a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. This means that lithium-air batteries could theoretically give electric cars the same range as gasoline ones.

Batteries usually contain two electrodes  the anode and the cathode. In a lithium-air battery, the anode is generally made of lithium metal, while the cathode is typically a porous carbon material that allows the surrounding air into the battery. As the lithium reacts with oxygen in the air, it discharges electricity. Recharging the device reverses the process.

The scientists noted that the main component of black painting ink is carbon, and that paper is porous, thin, flexible, light and cheap. They reasoned that ink drawn on paper could serve as a cathode for a lithium-air battery in a very simple manner.

"Due to the ultra-high theoretical energy density of lithium-oxygen batteries, they may be one of the most suitable candidates in the future for the development of flexible electronics," study senior author Xinbo Zhang, a materials scientist at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry in China, told Live Science.

The researchers constructed a battery from a sandwich of three layers  an ink-paper cathode, a sheet of lithium foil as the anode, and a sheet made of glass fibers between the anode and the cathode that permits electrically charged ions to flow between the cathode and anode.

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Zhang and his colleagues found their prototype batteries possessed energy-storage capacities comparable to commercial lithium-ion batteries, even after 1,000 cycles of flexing back and forth. They could also easily fold these sheets into battery packs.

In the future, Zhang said he and his colleagues will explore lightweight flexible coatings for these batteries to protect them from corrosion.

Zhang and his colleagues detailed their findings in the Dec. 22 issue of the journal Advanced Materials.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By Tatiana Jancarikova BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Slovakia should reject quotas to share migrants around the European Union and prevent any large Muslim minority from taking root in the country, the most likely junior partner in the country's next government says. Andrej Danko and his conservative Slovak National Party (SNS) stand a strong chance of joining the government if leftist Prime Minister Robert Fico needs a coalition partner after Slovakia's general election on March 5. The SNS governed with him a decade ago when its xenophobic views against Roma and Hungarian minorities raised concern among European Socialists. After the SNS won no seats in the 2012 election, Danko has raised its support to near 10 percent with a more moderate tone, tax cut plans for small businesses, criticism of privatizations and a strong stance against immigration. Fico has echoed that position on migrants in recent months. Attorney Danko, 41, told Reuters his party wanted the EU to better protect its borders against migrants, who he said were mostly young men fleeing problems rather trying to fix them. "They disrupt the EU's administrative system and pose a security threat. It does not matter they are unarmed, it is a mass incursion," he said in the interview on Monday. "There are 750,000 young men (in Europe) claiming to be persecuted at home (and) not thinking about how to liberate their mothers and wives," he said. More than 1 million migrants came to Europe last year, most heading to richer EU countries such as Germany. Slovakia received only 169 asylum requests last year but has been assigned 802 migrants under the EU scheme. The government has filed a lawsuit against the quotas and said it wanted to accept only Christian immigrants. The anti-immigration stance finds an echo with voters in this largely Catholic country of 5.4 million. There are some 5,000 Muslims living in Slovakia. Danko said the party wanted to raise the bar for a religion to receive state funding to 50,000 members from 20,000 now, which would disqualify the Muslims for the visible future. SNS's popularity was falling before Danko took it over three years ago and expelled its far-right leader Jan Slota. Its rhetoric now does not stand out in Slovak politics. "I don't want SNS to be a xenophobic, racist and nationalist party but a proud patriotic party, even a republican party that will ... attract voters without adopting extremist positions," Danko said. (Editing by Jason Hovet and Tom Heneghan)
(Reuters) - Four people who had returned from travel abroad have tested positive in New York state with infections with the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, local health officials said on Wednesday. Two tested positive in New York City, city health officials said. Neither had severe complications, they said. A person who resides in Nassau County had traveled to a country with documented transmission of the virus and developed symptoms in August, had a mild illness, was not hospitalized and has completely recovered, a county health department spokeswoman said. An Orange County resident who had traveled to South America tested positive, the county health commissioner's office said. The office did not provide information on the person's condition. (Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales; Editing by Will Dunham)
By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Patients who have a diagnosis of frailty before surgery are more likely to die in the following year, especially soon after joint replacement, according to a new study. This is important for people who are starting to slow down, not as sharp cognitively, and have complicated medical issues, said lead author Dr. Daniel I. McIsaac of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. Every patient goes through risks and benefits deliberations before surgery, and frailty should be part of that discussion, he told Reuters Health by phone. Researchers studied data on more than 200,000 patients age 65 or older who underwent a scheduled major noncardiac surgery between 2002 and 2012 in Ontario. The researchers used health records from the previous two years to define the patients as frail or not frail using a diagnostic instrument that takes into account 12 clusters of other conditions, like falls, low cognitive scores and poor global function. About 3 percent of the 200,000 patients who underwent surgery were frail, based on the diagnoses indicator. These patients were an average age of 77 while nonfrail patients were on average 74. Frail patients more often had high blood pressure and had been hospitalized in the previous year. Within a year of surgery, almost 14 percent of frail patients had died, compared to only about five percent of others. After accounting for sociodemographic differences and surgical details, frail patients were still more than twice as likely to die as those who were not frail before surgery. The increased risk of death was largest for younger patients, in the days directly following surgery and particularly for total joint replacement surgery, more so than for other surgeries like arterial bypass or liver resection, the authors reported in JAMA Surgery. There were significantly less frail patients undergoing operations compared to the population and these patients died very early after their operation within the first two to three days, said Dr. Jason M. Johanning of the Nebraska Western Iowa VA Medical Center in Omaha, who coauthored a commentary on the results. Frailty increases the risk of death, complications, longer hospital stay and discharge to a nursing facility, but does not exclude anyone from a particular operation, Johanning told Reuters Health by email. Rather it gives the operative team the ability to have an open and frank discussion with the patient about their goals of care and what to expect and how to proceed when complications occur postoperatively, he said. The American College of Surgeons in connection with the John A. Hartford Foundation is designing a program to address these system issues, he said. Before surgery, people should be identified as frail or not, McIsaac said. But in the real world, there is no consistent approach, and no one has identified which is the best tool to use before surgery to identify frailty, he said. In theory it could be diagnosed by a primary care provider, surgeon or anesthesiologist, he said. About 10 percent of people at age 65 are frail, which increases over time to half of people age 80 or 85. Its not a necessary part of aging, McIsaac said. Getting in front of the curve involves making choices earlier in life, and even after frailty has been diagnosed there are steps to decrease it, like exercise therapy, he said. Frail patients have their own unique set of complex medical needs and we need to start looking at what we can to improve their flow through the healthcare setting, he said. Having special wards in hospitals dedicated to these kinds of patients would lead to better long-term outcomes, he said. We can systematically tackle it now for the first time, he said. Studies like ours and those like it highlight the fact that theres a problem and (should motivate others) to address it and get better outcomes. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Qsl2Tj and http://bit.ly/1OWeckq JAMA Surgery, online January 20, 2016.
Love the article on Gaddaf

i

Samosa Iyoha



Hello from Johannesburg

I was amazed to find a website for Africans in Hungary .

Looks like you have quite a community there. Here in SA we have some three million Zimbabweans living in exile and not much sign of going home ... but in Hungary??? Hope to meet you on one of my trips to Europe; was in Steirmark Austria near the Hungarian border earlier this month. Every good wish for 2011. Geoff in Jo'burg



I'm impressed by

ANH

work but...



Interesting interview...



My comment to the interview with his excellency Mr. Adedotun Adenrele Adepoju CDA a.i--

B.Ayo Adams

click to read editor's mail

We must rise above tribalism & divide & rule of the colonialist who stole & looted our treasure & planted their puppets to lord it over us..they alone can decide on whosoever is performing & the one that is corrupt..but the most corrupt nations are the western countries that plunder the resources of other nations & make them poorer & aid the rulers to steal & keep such ill gotten wealth in their country..yemen,syria etc have killed more than gadhafi but its not A good investment for the west(this is laughable)because oil is not in these countries..when obasanjo annihilated the odi people in rivers state, they looked away because its in their favour & interest..one day!I think from what have been said, the Nigerian embassy here seem to be more concern about its nationals than we are for ourselves. Our complete disregard for the laws of Hungary isn't going to help Nigeria's image or going to promote what the Embassy is trying to showcase. So if the journalists could zoom-in more focus on Nigerians living, working and studying here in Hungary than scrutinizing the embassy and its every move, i think it would be of tremendous help to the embassy serving its nationals better and create more awareness about where we live . Taking the issues of illicit drugs and forged documents as typical examples.. there are so many cases of Nigerians been involved. But i am yet to read of it in e.news. So i think if only you and your journalists could write more about it and follow up on the stories i think it will make our nationals more aware of what to expect. I wouldn't say i am not impressed with your work but you need to be more of a two way street rather than a one way street . Keep up the good work... SylviaHe is an intelligent man. He spoke well on the issues! Thanks to Mr Hakeem Babalola for the interview it contains some expedient information..
France's Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences on Wednesday unveiled the nominees for this year's Cesar Awards  the country's equivalent to the Oscars  in a morning ceremony at the famed Fouquet's restaurant on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

Academy president Alain Terzian read the list of nominees for the 41st annual awards.

Read More: Michael Keaton Receives French Order of Arts and Letters Honor

The ceremony will be held on Feb. 26  two days before the Oscars  at Paris Chatelet Theatre.

At last year's Cesars, Aberrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu won seven trophies, including for best film, best director, best editing and best cinematography. Also, Kristen Stewart made history by winning a best supporting actress honor for her role in Sils Maria, becoming the first American to win an acting award from the French Academy. She expressed love for French film during her acceptance speech.

Among the best film nominees were Dheepan, Fatima, Measure of a Man, Margurite, Mon Roi, Mustang and Standing Tall,

Best actress nominees included Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, while best actor nominees included Gerard Depardieu. Among the best supporting actor nominees was Tahar Rahim. Among the best foreign film nominees were Birdman, Youth and Taxi.

Among the best animated film nominees was The Little Prince. Among the best cinematograpy nominees were Dheepan and foreign-language Oscar hopeful Mustang.

The first nominations category was that of best new actor.

Read More: France 2015 in Review: A Year Framed by Terror

More to come...refresh for updates
France's Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences president Alain Terzian was questioned about diversity in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in the U.S. following Wednesday morning's announcement of the Cesar Awards nominations.

"I have no opinion on what is happening there," he said about the Oscars debate.

He added, though, that he was "comfortable" addressing the Cesars and their diversity and cited several winners from recent years, including Omar Sy, Reda Kateb, Tahar Rahim, Leila Bekhti and Abdellatif Kechiche.

Terzian also mentioned Moroccan comedian Jammel Debbouze, who has hosted the ceremony in recent years. Sy had been asked to host this year, but was busy filming and could not attend, he said. That role will be filled by female comedian Florence Floresti, who follows Cecile de France.

"For me, the talent has to speak for itself," said Terzian. He added that the French Academy does not keep statistics on the racial makeup of its members. It is illegal in France to ask about race or ethnicity in data gathering.

Terzian also joked that as an ethnic Armenian, there should be a quota for Armenian films in France. "Armenians are very underrepresented," he quipped.

Read More: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Gerard Depardieu Among France's Cesar Awards Nominees
By Joseph Nasr BERLIN (Reuters) - The first thing that Leith Khdeir Abbas, a 27-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived in Germany four months ago, plans to do after he makes the return journey on Wednesday is to kneel down and kiss the soil that he calls home. "I fled to Germany to build my future. But I realized I can't build it on fake promises," he said at Berlin's Tegel airport where he and some 50 similarly disenchanted young Iraqi men were about to board an Iraqi Airways plane to Erbil in northern Iraq. A growing number of Iraqi refugees in Germany are choosing to return to their war-torn country, frustrated with a slow asylum process in a country overwhelmed by the influx of 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, most still living in shelters. "I feel homesick and humiliated," said Abbas, waving his arms in frustration as he recalled the poor conditions at a Berlin shelter with unhygienic toilets and bland food. The trip to Germany from his home city of Baghdad cost him $4,000, including a fee for smugglers who put him on a boat from Turkey to Greece, where he and hundreds of asylum seekers embarked on a weeks-long trek to Germany via the Balkans and Austria. German Interior Ministry data show that the number of Iraqis choosing to return home began rising in September, when 61 left, up from about 10 in each of the first seven months of the year. In December the number of Iraqi returnees topped 200. That is still a fraction of the almost 30,000 who applied for asylum in Germany last year, accounting for the fifth largest group after Syrians, Albanians, Kosovars and Afghans. But the trend highlights the harsh reality for asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. They come to Germany dreaming of a better future only to find out that a host country known for its efficient bureaucracy and wealth is struggling to accommodate a large number of newcomers. "It is sad to see so many young men going back to a war zone," said Andesha Karim, an Iraqi Airways representative at Tegel. The airline operates three weekly flights to Iraq from Berlin, Duesseldorf and Frankfurt. "EUROPE IS NOT NICE" The reasons for returning seem to have more to do with down-and-out conditions in Germany rather than the improving situation on the ground in Iraq, where government forces have made advances against Islamic State. Both Erbil - in northern Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region - and Baghdad are outside the territory under Islamic State control and have not seen heavy conflict, although militant bomb attacks occur regularly in the Iraqi capital. "Europe is not nice. They gave me no residency permit, no money. I will return to Kurdistan, to Iraq. I could join the Peshmerga and fight Daesh," said Hassan, 19, an Iraqi Kurd, referring to Western-backed militiamen fighting Islamic State. Most of the young men waiting to board the five-hour, $280 a seat flight to Erbil were traveling on one-way travel documents issued by the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin. Many had either lost their passports or destroyed them at the German-Austrian border, hoping this would make it harder to deport them if their asylum applications were rejected. The embassy has since the end of October issued 1,400 such documents, an almost tenfold rise from the 150 issued in the first 10 months of last year, the German Foreign Ministry said. Iraqi embassy officials could not be reached for comment. Those who cannot pay for the journey back can apply for financial assistance from the International Organization for Migration. Not everyone is keen to give up on Germany. Abdallah al-Alagi, another Iraqi, came to Tegel to bid farewell to his friend Abbas, and still hopes to be granted asylum soon. "I am staying. If there is no progress with my application I will leave for another European country. I don't have to stay in Germany," he said. Abbas tried to hold back tears as he bid farewell to al-Alagi and walked to the check-in desk. "Tell Mom to send me nice food," al-Alagi shouted, bringing a smile to Abbas's face. (Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Noah Barkin/Mark Heinrich)
The Hague (AFP) - Former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo denied charges of clinging to power "by all means" as his landmark trial opened five years after 3,000 died in post-poll violence in the west African nation.

Gbagbo became the first ex-head of state to stand in the dock at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, in a highly divisive case that will test the tribunal's avowed aim to deliver justice to the victims of the world's worst crimes.

Prosecutors accuse Gbagbo and his co-accused Charles Ble Goude of orchestrating a plan to ensure he stayed in power even before he was narrowly defeated by his bitter rival Alassane Ouattara in the November 2010 elections.

Both Gbagbo, 70, and former militia leader Ble Goude, 44, pleaded not guilty to four charges of crimes against humanity including murder, rape, and persecution in five months of bloodshed.

"Nothing would be allowed to defeat Mr Gbagbo, and if politics failed, violence was seen as politics by other means," chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told a three-judge bench, saying her office would prove the charges "beyond reasonable doubt".

Prosecutors have gathered a "vast body of evidence against the two accused", Bensouda said, including hours of video footage as well as forensic and ballistic evidence taken from various places in Abidjan including Gbagbo's bedroom.

Bensouda painted a vivid picture of the turmoil that swept Abidjan -- once one of Africa's most cosmopolitan cities -- in the aftermath of the polls, including charges of gang-rapes of women seen to be Ouattara supporters.

"The Ivory Coast descended into chaos and was the theatre of unspeakable violence," she said.

In one incident, 40 people were killed in the shelling of a market in the Abidjan suburb of Abobo in March 2011 by pro-Gbagbo supporters.

- Kisses to the gallery -

Looking relaxed in a dark suit with a light blue shirt, the one-time west African strongman blew kisses at supporters in the packed public gallery.

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At the end of the first day, his supporters, gathered by the large windows of the public gallery overlooking the courtroom, cheered and applauded him.

Gbagbo and Ble Goude deny they implemented an "organisational policy to launch a widespread and systematic attack against civilians perceived to support Alassane Ouattara".

"I plead not guilty, your honour," Gbagbo told the court, while Ble Goude said: "I do not recognise these charges and therefore I plead not guilty."

The trial continues Friday, opening with more statements from the prosecution. The defence is expected to begin next week, when the first witnesses are also likely to testify.

If convicted, the maximum penalty is usually up to 30 years in prison. Judges can impose a life sentence "when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime", according to the court's guiding statute.

Hundreds of Gbagbo supporters from the country's large diaspora rallied outside the new ICC building on the coast of The Hague, playing drums and chanting slogans in support of the former president.

One of the march's organisers, Abel Naki, told AFP that Gbagbo had been "kidnapped" and "deported" to the ICC.

"It reminds us of the years of slavery and colonisation," Naki said.

Gbagbo supporters say the French government plotted to oust him and that the ICC has failed to investigate Ouattara's camp for alleged abuses.

"My brother was killed by Ouattara's rebels, he's the real criminal. He's the one who should be on trial," said 20-year-old Edwige.

Rights groups highlight that crimes were committed by both sides, and that no charges have yet been brought against the Ouattara camp. He was elected to a second term as president in October.

Ivorian Foreign Minister Albert Toikeusse Mabri told AFP during a visit to Ethiopia that after "10 years of difficulties" the start of the trial was welcome.

"We work for national reconciliation, but all this must be founded on the basis of justice for all... the ICC have started a trial whose conclusions are eagerly awaited," he said.

Watching the trial from a cafe in Abidjan, Michel Gbagbo, son of the former president who was captured with his father in 2011 but released on bail two years later, questioned the impartiality of the court.

"The resignation of judges, that witnesses testify under anonymity, that the trial is secret... the fact that president Gbagbo has not been granted provisional release... all that raises questions," he said.
The Hague (AFP) - Judges at the world's only permanent war crimes court Wednesday gave prosecutors permission to launch their first investigation outside of Africa, approving a probe into alleged abuses during a brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.

It will be the first inquiry by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into accusations of abuses by Moscow, and was widely welcomed by human rights groups which said neither side had yet held to account those behind a wave of killing and looting.

The news comes amid tensions between Russia and other nations, fuelled by Moscow's support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.

Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda formally requested in October to be allowed to open a full investigation into the 2008 war in South Ossetia.

She told judges then that her preliminary findings had found evidence of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The three-strong panel agreed with her on Wednesday, concluding "that there is a reasonable basis to believe that crimes within the ICC's jurisdiction have been committed in the situation in Georgia."

They therefore "authorised the prosecutor to proceed with an investigation" into crimes said to have been "committed in and around South Ossetia, Georgia, between 1 July and 10 October 2008."

The allegations included "crimes against humanity, such as murder, forcible transfer of population and persecution, and war crimes, such as attacks against the civilian population, wilful killing."

The prosecutor's office has also launched another probe which targets Russia -- with a preliminary inquiry into possible war crimes committed since February 2014 in Ukraine during fighting in the east between Ukrainian forces and pro-Moscow separatist forces.

This preliminary probe would be to determine whether a fuller investigation -- as will now take place in South Ossetia -- is merited.

On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgia's then Western-backed president Mikheil Saakashvili launched an offensive to reclaim the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

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But he was caught by surprise when Moscow launched a swift counter-offensive with Russian forces sweeping into Georgia.

After winning the brief war, Russia officially recognised South Ossetia -- along with another breakaway Georgian region Abkhazia -- as independent states, tightening its grip on the two territories.

Together the two regions comprise some 20 percent of Georgian territory.

- Tens of thousands displaced -

According to estimates from the UN High Commissioner for refugees, hundreds of people died during the fighting.

And the ICC prosecutors believe that even though most people have since returned home in the intervening years, some 138,000 ethnic Georgians were displaced in South Ossetia.

"The ethnic Georgian population living in the conflict zone was reduced by at least 75 percent," prosecutors have said.

"An ICC investigation will restart justice efforts for victims," said Elizabeth Evenson, senior international counsel at Human Rights Watch.

"Its been more than seven years since the war ended, but neither Georgia nor Russia has held to account those responsible for unlawful civilian killings, looting, and torching of homes."

The decision comes at a busy time for the ICC, with the long-awaited trial of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo on charges of crimes against humanity due to open on Thursday.

It may also help mitigate criticism levelled against the ICC, set up in 2002 to try the world's worst crimes, that it has so far only targeted African nations.

Bensouda has repeatedly denied that accusation, telling AFP late last year that it was "a blanket criticism" which does not "match the reality."
BERLIN (Reuters) - German police on Wednesday arrested two people in raids against a far-right group suspected of using an Internet portal to incite violence against foreigners, spread Nazi propaganda and deny the Holocaust, the public prosecutor general said. About 60 policemen and investigators took part in the operation, which involved searching properties in four German states and one location in Spain, prosecutors said in a statement. They suspect Jutta V., 47, and Ralph Thomas K., 27, of being the leaders of a criminal organization that operated "Altermedia Deutschland", where Internet users can subscribe and take part in forum discussions that appear to focus on race. "The destiny of this earth lies in the race," one user who goes by the name of Patron and has a profile picture of a stamp featuring Hitler and the Nazi flag wrote in one post. Another user posted Internet links on "race purity". Three more suspects are part of the group, prosecutors said, giving no information on their possible whereabouts. "In addition to banned Nazi salutes and expressions, mass public incitement was also published," prosecutors said. "These ranged from calls for violence against foreigners living in Germany and members of other faiths and skin color to the denial of the Holocaust." The suspects will appear before a judge on Wednesday and Thursday. Germany received more than one million asylum seekers last year, prompting a sharp rise in attacks on shelters for migrants and calls for the government to stem the flow of refugees. (Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
By Tina Bellon BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany warned Russia on Wednesday not to make propaganda out of the alleged rape of a German-Russian girl here after Moscow's foreign minister accused Berlin authorities of "sweeping problems under the rug". The Berlin prosecutor's office is investigating the case of 13-year-old Lisa F., who has told police she was kidnapped about two weeks ago in an east Berlin neighborhood by migrants, who she says held her for 30 hours and raped her. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a Moscow news conference on Tuesday: "It is clear that the girl under no circumstances disappeared for 30 hours voluntarily." His German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier hit back sharply on Wednesday, saying there was no justification for exploiting the case "for political propaganda and to influence and fuel an already difficult domestic debate over migration." The case has sparked outrage among Berlin's Russian community and Russian media have reported extensively on it. About 700 people protested in front of Chancellor Angela Merkel's office on Saturday holding banners reading "Our children are in danger" and "Today my child, tomorrow yours". Alleged sex crimes by migrants have rocked Germany and piled pressure on the authorities after over 600 women reported sexual attacks on New Year's Eve, most blamed on asylum seekers. Germany took in a record 1.1 million migrants last year. Berlin prosecutor's office spokesman Martin Steltner said on Wednesday there was no evidence to support the rape and kidnapping claims made by Lisa F., whose full surname cannot be revealed due to German privacy law. The investigation found that she had had voluntary sexual contacts with two 20-year-old men before she disappeared, Steltner added, and they were not connected to her absence. The prosecutor's office is now investigating the men for suspected sexual abuse of a minor. German foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said on Wednesday there was not the slightest reason to doubt the results of the investigation. He also criticized Russian media, saying that responsible and enlightened citizens would be able to form their own view of the reports. "In the long run, lies have short legs," Schaefer added. (Additional reporting Reuters TV, Sabine Siebold and Matthias Sobolewski in Berlin and Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow; Editing by Paul Carrel and Tom Heneghan)
Berlin (AFP) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet Wednesday agreed to make it easier to expel foreigners who have committed crimes, in the wake of a spate of sex assaults on New Year's Eve blamed on migrants.

Police investigating the crime spree in the western city of Cologne have said the suspects were mostly asylum seekers and illegal migrants from North Africa.

The rampage shocked Germany and jolted Merkel into backing changes to the law, which are expected to be passed by parliament given her coalition government's strong majority.

On Wednesday, her cabinet backed changing the law to expel asylum seekers who have been sentenced to one year's jail or more, including suspended sentences.

Previously, refugee status could only be withdrawn in cases where applicants had ben sentenced to at least three-year terms.

The Cologne assaults ignited a heated debate in Germany over the country's ability to socially integrate the 1.1 million asylum seekers it took in last year.
Berlin (AFP) - Germany and Russia traded barbs over a murky case involving the alleged rape of a teenager, with Berlin warning Wednesday against "exploiting" the allegations after Moscow hinted at an official cover-up.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier accused Russia of trying to "inflame" Germany's already heated national debate on refugees over the claims by a 13-year-old German-Russian girl.

German police last week rejected the teenager's account that she was sexually assaulted by immigrants in Berlin.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday sought to lend credence to the girl's allegations and charged that her disappearance had been "hidden" by German authorities.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert on Wednesday hit back, saying "there is no reason, in fact it is unacceptable, for this incident to be politically exploited".

The teenager, identified by Russian media as "Liza", went missing on January 11, reportedly on her way to school.

She subsequently returned and filed a police report, with her parents telling investigators she was kidnapped by three apparently foreign men at a railway station in eastern Berlin and taken to a flat where they raped and beat her.

The case sparked outrage and allegations on far-right websites and Russian media outlets of an official attempt to bury the accusations.

However Berlin prosecutors said there was no evidence that the girl was forced to have sexual relations during that period and opened an investigation against at least one man on possible statutory rape charges.

Sex with anyone under the age of 14, even if consensual, is a crime in Germany and punishable by imprisonment.

Amid ongoing tensions between Russia and the West on a range of issues, Lavrov used the occasion of his annual press conference to draw attention to the case.

"We are now working with her lawyer. He is working with her family, with our embassy," Lavrov said.

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"It is clear that the girl -- absolutely, for sure not voluntarily -- disappeared for 30 hours."

- 'Clarity, objectivity, transparency' -

Lavrov said he regretted that news of Liza's disappearance had "been hidden for a very long time, for some reason".

He suggested that Europe's refugee crisis was prompting officials to sweep pressing issues "under the carpet".

"I truly hope that these migration problems will not lead to attempts to 'gloss over' reality for political motives - that would be just wrong," he said.

Steinmeier rejected the insinuation and said the Russian ambassador would be briefed on the established facts of the case.

"There is no reason and no justification... to use this case for political propaganda to inflame an already difficult debate on migration," he told reporters.

Steinmeier pledged a thorough investigation and said Russian officials would do better to base their conclusions on the German probe and not on "media reports".

Foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer earlier expressed surprise at the sudden high-level intervention from Moscow.

"We are pleased to see this strong engagement of the Russian government for clarity, objectivity and transparency in the criminal justice system," he said, with a touch of sarcasm.

"We hope that this interest endures, not only for the case in question... but for all other cases."

The incident came to light with Germany in an uproar over a spate of New Year's Eve assaults on women in Cologne allegedly carried out, for the most part, by Arab and North African men, that was initially met with silence from the police.

Last year, Germany took in nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, with Chancellor Angela Merkel under increasing pressure over her welcoming stance toward refugees fleeing war.

Tensions between Russia and the West plunged to a low point over the Ukraine crisis and Syria's civil war.

Germany has argued for maintaining EU sanctions against Russia, imposed for fuelling a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and regularly calls out deficiencies in Moscow's record on human rights and the rule of law.
Brussels (AFP) - The European Union blasted Athens for its handling of the migrant crisis, saying it had "seriously neglected" its duty to protect the bloc's frontiers, raising the prospect of border controls with the rest of the passport-free zone.

The criticism came ahead of a Swedish announcement that it intends to expel up to 80,000 migrants who arrived in 2015 and whose application for asylum has been rejected.

Flimsy boats packed with migrants are still arriving on Greek beaches every day, with the passengers -- mostly fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan -- undeterred by cold wintry conditions.

The bodies of twelve migrants, including eight children, were discovered off the Greek island of Samos Thursday after their boat capsized, the Greek coastguard said.

A search was underway for around 20 people listed as missing after the latest tragedy involving migrant boats crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece.

So far, ten survivors have been found.

Rescuers on Wednesday found the bodies of seven more drowned migrants, including two children, after their boat sank near the Greek island of Kos -- just five days after 45 people perished in the Aegean Sea.

The European Commission said Greece could face border controls with the rest of the EU's passport-free Schengen zone if it fails to act.

"The draft report concludes that Greece seriously neglected its obligations and that there are serious deficiencies in the carrying out of external border controls that must be overcome and dealt with by Greek authorities," Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a press conference.

The highly critical draft report found Greece was failing to properly register and fingerprint migrants, with security concerns still high after revelations that two jihadists behind November's Paris attacks slipped into Europe by posing as refugees.

Its findings pile further pressure on a country that has been fending off calls that it should face possible suspension from the 26-country Schengen zone, a cherished symbol of European unity.

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The report could pave the way for Brussels to authorise EU members to exceptionally extend border controls within the Schengen area -- including with Greece -- for up to two years, instead of the normal six months.

Greece blasted the report as "unconstructive", accusing its EU peers of trying to shift blame instead of coming up with a joint solution to the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II.

"This tactic of diverting responsibility is not an effective response to a problem of historic dimensions, which requires joint action," said government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili.

Greece "is doing everything it can to respect its obligations, and we expect everyone else to do the same," she added.

And Greek junior migration minister Yannis Mouzalas told AFP the situation had changed since the EU carried out its inspection for the report at the Turkish land border and on several Greek islands.

- Tragedy at sea -

The UN says more than 46,000 people have arrived in Greece so far this year, with more than 170 people killed making the dangerous crossing.

In Brussels, Dombrovskis said that if a majority of the 28 EU member states adopt the Commission's report, it will draw up a plan for shoring up Greece's borders, especially its sea frontier with Turkey.

"Greece will then have three months to implement remedial actions," Dombrovskis said. "If necessary remedial actions are not being taken there is a possibility... which would allow member states to temporarily close their borders."

In the last few months, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France and non-EU member Norway have all introduced six-month temporary controls in a bid to contain the influx.

Sweden, which accepted more than 160,000 asylum seekers last year, is one of the European Union countries that has taken in the largest number of refugees in relation to its population of 9.8 million.

Announcing the plan to deport up to 80,000 migrants, Interior Minister Anders Ygeman said the mass expulsions would have to be done using specially chartered aircraft and staggered over several years.

Swedish officials have called for greater security at overcrowded asylum centres after the fatal stabbing this week of an employee at a refugee centre for unaccompanied youths.

Her death has led to questions about overcrowded conditions inside some centres, with too few adults and employees to take care of children, many traumatised by war.

Greece is not the only country under fire over its handling of the migrant crisis, with Denmark facing criticism Wednesday after its lawmakers passed a bill allowing authorities to seize valuables from refugees.

Some likened the move to the Nazis' confiscation of gold from Jews during the Holocaust, with Human Rights Watch denouncing the bill as "despicable".
Berlin (AFP) - Holocaust survivor Ruth Klueger on Wednesday lauded Germany for keeping its doors open to thousands of war refugees, calling Chancellor Angela Merkel's "we can do it" slogan "heroic".

"This country, which was responsible for the worst crimes of the century, has won the applause of the world today," the 84-year-old scholar told the German parliament in an address as part of commemorations for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"I am one of the many outsiders who has gone from surprise to admiration," Klueger said, describing Merkel's rallying call of "We can do it" as a "simple but heroic slogan".

Merkel has repeated the mantra over recent months as she has resisted fierce opposition -- even from within her conservative camp -- to reverse her policy towards refugees.

Klueger, who now lives in the United States, said it was precisely Merkel's approach toward those fleeing war and misery that had moved her to accept the German parliament's invitation to speak on the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp.

Klueger is one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, and was first deported to the Auschwitz before being sent to the forced labour camp Christianstadt.

Germany has commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau every year for the past two decades.

Around 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, perished between 1940 and 1945 in the camp before it was liberated by Soviet forces.
By Parisa Hafezi ANKARA (Reuters) - The lifting of sanctions on Iran has given Mohammad Sadeghzadeh hope of saving his struggling textile factory -- as long as the impact of the changes is felt quickly. "The sanctions have ruined my business. In six months I will close down if it goes on like this. We need to see some tangible results," he said by telephone from the northern city of Rasht. Iranians are delighted the United States, United Nations and European Union agreed to lift nuclear-related sanctions on Jan. 16 in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear program. But many are frustrated not to have seen immediate changes now Iran's isolation is over and fear the benefits will not be felt for a long time as foreign banks, companies and governments tread carefully for fear of violating residual U.S. sanctions. "I hope by lifting the sanctions, I will be able to use banks like other civilized countries. My only hope is to be part of the global business community," said a businessman in the city of Tabriz who gave his name only as Heshmat. "But still we have a long way to go. I am afraid that if the current situation continues until March, I will have to close my business," said Heshmat, whose account in a French banks was blocked in early 2013. The Western sanctions cut off finance from abroad, pushed up the cost of borrowing in Iran and hit many businesses by banning foreign bank transfers. Heshmat got used to bringing in money in thick wads of $100 bills on flights from Turkey and elsewhere. CASH IN A HANDBAG Western banks quit Iran after the United States and European Union imposed sanctions on its financial and oil sectors in 2012, making it almost impossible for many middle-class Iranians to transfer money to their children studying abroad. Many Iranians were unable to open or hold accounts abroad and dual-national Iranians outside their homeland faced problems maintaining their accounts even if they have never transferred money to or from Iran. Maryam Sadeghian, a middle-class Iranian, said she had felt she would be "reconnected to the outside world" when the nuclear-related sanctions were lifted. "But my happiness did not last long. I contacted my bank in Munich, where I used to have an account for over a decade to open a new account," she said. "But the answer was negative. I was told that there was no change of policy." For Mohsen Dadpeynia, a former government employee, there has also been disappointment because he cannot yet transfer money easily to his daughter in Italy. "After my daughter moved to Italy in 2013, it was a nightmare to send her money. I had to find trustworthy black market dealers to transfer money," he said. Taraneh Moghaddam, an architect from the central Iranian city of Shiraz, also encountered practices under sanctions that she hopes will now end. She had to go to London in a hurry to retrieve $300,000 in cash in 2013 when her bank called to warn her it would close her account in a week "because you live in Iran." "I was desperate and had to carry the cash in my handbag to Iran," she said, adding that she was unable to open an account in any other Western bank even though she has joint Iranian-British nationality. A LONG WAY TO GO President Hassan Rouhani, who said during his 2013 election campaign that he would boost Iran's economy, hopes the lifting of sanctions will facilitate Iran's return to the global oil market and attract much-needed foreign investment. But expectations of a quick fix are slim, with even the lure of a resource-rich and well educated country of about 80 million people opening up overshadowed by legal uncertainties for many firms and banks. With many Western export credit agencies also having left Iran, Iranian executives still have problems opening letters of credit, which are vital for trade, with an Iranian address. "I am happy for my country because of the deal. But it will take months, if not years, until we feel the result," said a construction executive in the central city of Isfahan. "The economy cannot be fixed so easily. Years of isolation cannot be ended in a blink of an eye. Those foreign investors just care about their own interests. We should not put our country on sale." Some Iranians, however, see hope already in the number of foreign businesses that have made scouting trips to Iran. "Some foreign companies, seeking to open branches in Tehran, have started to look for offices as well as apartments for their foreign employees who will live in Tehran," said real estate agent Hamid Afshar in northern Tehran. "Many Iranians prefer foreign tenants because the rent will be in foreign currency." Fereshteh Bahrizadeh, 25, is also prepared to put up with the wait for the benefits after the end of Iran's isolation as he is excited about the prospect of travel abroad becoming easier for Iranians. "We are not a hostile country any more," he said. "We want to travel abroad freely and be respected overseas." (Editing by Timothy Heritage)
Ukrayinska Pravda

UKRAINSKA PRAVDA - WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2022, 18:57 Military personnel who were recruited for the war in Ukraine from Russian prisons are leaving their units with weapons in hand and trying to return to the Russian Federation.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The International Criminal Court's prosecutors have intensified their investigations into supporters of Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara, chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said on Wednesday. Speaking to reporters the day before the opening of the trial of Ouattara's predecessor Laurent Gbagbo, accused of unleashing civil war rather than leave office, Bensouda said she could give no details about ongoing confidential investigations. "The investigations into the conflict in Cote d'Ivoire will be on both sides of the conflict," she said, using the country's French name. "We started in 2015. We have intensified investigations into the pro-Ouattara camp, and it is ongoing." The court has so far brought charges against only three people in connection with the conflict that followed the 2010 elections: Gbagbo, his wife Simone and his ally Charles Ble Goude. (Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Alison Williams)
By Rina Chandran MUMBAI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Government officials in India's Maharashtra state have called for talks between protesters who tried to storm a Hindu temple that bars entry to women and temple officials, as a campaign for equal access to temples gathers momentum. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis met women activists on Wednesday, a day after hundreds of them tried to force their way into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar in western India, clashing with villagers. Police briefly detained the protesters. Fadnavis said state officials would facilitate talks between the activists and temple authorities, as #RightoPray trended on Twitter for a second day in India. "Indian culture and the Hindu religion have always given women the right to worship," Fadnavis said in a tweet late on Tuesday. "A change in tradition in accordance with the times is our culture. Discrimination in worshipping is not our culture." The temple, which has barred women for centuries from the inner sanctum that is dedicated to Shani, or Saturn, is one of a handful in India that bars women. The popular Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in southern Kerala state, which denies entry to women of reproductive age, is the subject of a petition in the Supreme Court, which has asked temple authorities to explain why they forbid women entry. Politicians and spiritual leaders have weighed in on the highly contentious issue, with the head of the lawyers' group that filed the Sabarimala temple petition saying they had received hundreds of death threats for their action. "There is discrimination against women across religions," said Flavia Agnes, a women's rights lawyer and co-founder of Majlis legal center in Mumbai. "It's high time we took this up as an issue about equality for women, and not just entry into a temple." (Reporting by Rina Chandran, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.)
(Reuters) - An Indianapolis school principal was killed on Tuesday, and two children were injured, when a school bus jumped a curb, officials said.

The incident occurred at about 2:45 p.m. (1945 GMT) outside Amy Beverland Elementary School in the city's northeast, said Richard Riddle, a spokesman for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police.

The woman bus driver told authorities she was not sure what caused the vehicle to accelerate and jump the curb, the Indianapolis Fire Department said in a statement.

She told investigators she saw the principal, Susan Jordan, push several students out of the way as the bus careened over the curb.

Jordan, who was outside the bus on the passenger side when hit, was pronounced dead at the scene, the fire department said, adding that two 10-year-old students suffered non-life threatening injuries.

Jordan worked at the school for 22 years, officials said.

It was unclear what caused the accident or if the driver could face criminal charges.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Scott Malone and Clarence Fernandez)
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Passengers on a Kathmandu-bound aircraft of India's Jet Airways were evacuated minutes before take-off from New Delhi on Wednesday due to a security alert, the second such incident this week on the same flight. The plane's doors were closed and it was ready for take-off when the alert was raised, according to a Jet Airways spokesman. All 122 passengers and seven crew members were asked to leave the plane and security agencies were investigating.

The incident comes two days after the same Jet Airways' Delhi-Kathmandu 9W 260 flight was delayed due to a security scare, but investigations later found nothing unusual.

"It is the same flight. This is something that doesn't happen normally," a company spokesman said. Police at Delhi's international airport were not immediately available for comment on what caused the security scare. Indian media said police received an anonymous call warning bombs were on two aircraft.

The other aircraft, operated by Air India [AIN.UL], was also headed to Nepal's capital Kathmandu. The plane was taken to a bay area and security personnel screened the baggage, the company said on its Twitter account.

In a separate incident, AirAsia India, part-owned by Malaysia's AirAsia Bhd, said late on Wednesday that it received a specific bomb threat after one of its aircraft landed in the southern city of Bengaluru from Jaipur in western India.

"In-flight cabin crew spotted the bomb threat in the aircraft after landing," AirAsia India said in a statement, adding that a search of the aircraft revealed nothing and the aircraft was allowed to resume normal operations.

Security was been beefed up across India this week because of Tuesday's Republic Day parade, at which French President Francois Hollande was the guest of honour.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Dominic Evans)
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian security forces on Wednesday evacuated hundreds of members of a group authorities have called a deviant religious organization to the capital, Jakarta, after sectarian violence drove them from their homes in West Kalimantan province. Indonesia has the world's largest population of Muslims, the majority of whom adhere to moderate Sunni beliefs, and it recognizes six religions including Hinduism, Catholicism and Buddhism, but minorities, even within Islam, have faced rising intolerance in recent years. Men, women and children associated with a group called Gafatar, which the country's highest Islamic council considers a deviant sect, were attacked last week by other West Kalimantan residents who oppose their beliefs. The attackers burned houses and cars, media reported, but there were no reports of any deaths. More than 700 people arrived on a navy vessel at Jakarta's main port. They will be housed in government shelters before being relocated, officials said. One of the evacuees, Ateng, 42, who arrived in the capital with his wife and six children, denounced the violence against them. "This is a violation of democracy," he told Reuters. "The law guarantees the right to assemble and organize." Authorities consider Gafatar's teachings "dangerous" and the group was outlawed last year. People associated with the group say it is social organization and not a religious one. Kalimantan, the resource-rich Indonesian part of Borneo island, has seen outbreaks of similar violence in the past. Several hundred migrants from Java and Madura islands were killed in attacks by indigenous Dayak people there in 2001. About 2,000 more people affiliated with Gafatar remained in West Kalimantan and would be relocated soon for their safety, officials said. (Reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa; Writing by Kanupriya Kapoor; Editing by Robert Birsel)
By Thomas Escritt AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - International Criminal Court judges ordered an investigation of alleged crimes committed during the 2008 Georgian-Russian over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia - the court's first investigation outside Africa. The five-day war saw Russia strengthen its grip over largely pro-Russian South Ossetia, which had effectively been beyond Tbilisi's control since 1990. Russian troops pushed through South Ossetia deep into Georgia before withdrawing. In a statement on Wednesday, judges said there was reason to believe crimes against humanity, including murder and the driving of Georgians from their homes, had been committed during the conflict, as well as war crimes including attacks on peacekeepers by Russian-backed South Ossetian and by Georgian forces. The ICC, which has handed down just two convictions, of little-known Congolese warlords, has been criticized for bringing investigations only in Africa since being set up 13 years ago. Last October, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked to open an investigation after finding that up to 113 ethnic Georgian civilians had been killed and 18,500 driven from their homes as part of a "forcible displacement campaign" run by the authorities in mainly Russian-speaking South Ossetia. Investigators will investigate allegations of crimes committed between July 1 and October 10, 2008, covering periods either side of the five-day August war. Opposing Georgian and South Ossetian forces appeared to have killed 12 peacekeepers, both Russian and Georgian, while Georgian forces had attacked a medical facility, Bensouda said. The investigation pits Russia, a non-member of the ICC, against a strongly European-backed court at a time when east-west tensions are running high following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria last year. The Hague-based ICC is already considering whether to open an investigation into crimes committed in Ukraine, another West-leaning former Soviet republic which is fighting Moscow-backed separatists in the east of the country. (Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
Marshalltown (United States) (AFP) - "Oh my goodness!" Hillary Clinton exclaimed when confronted by Lars Duursma, a selfie-seeking Dutch communications consultant.

Duursma, 33, and his colleague Victor Vlam, 31, had boldly asked the Democratic presidential candidate for a snapshot at the end of an event Sunday in the small town of North Liberty, Iowa.

"We came from the Netherlands!" Duursma explained.

He and Vlam are spending three weeks on the US campaign trail picking up new political techniques to use back home.

Iowa is prime stalking ground with 15 Republican and Democratic presidential contenders crisscrossing the state this week ahead of Monday's caucuses, the opening contest of the US primary season.

The race is attracting tourists, the curious, political junkies, and, apparently, communication consultants from other parts of the world.

Duursma, Vlam and their friend Bertine, who is on vacation, also turned up at a public meeting with Republican candidate Marco Rubio in Marshalltown two days later.

"The American elections is one of the things where I get my inspiration," said Duursma, founder and chief executive of Debatrix, a small company that helps Dutch business leaders and European officials prepare for debates and speeches. Their trip is being paid for by the firm.

He's noticed some differences in the way Americans do things.

Dutch politicians, he said, look mechanically from left to right at their audience when delivering speeches. Duursma observed that Clinton fixes her gaze on one person at a time, intensely.

He is impressed by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, who manages to remain humorous and almost good-natured while speaking, unlike Dutch populist Geert Wilders.

"Geert Wilders is always angry," he said.

"Then we saw Donald Trump. When it comes to content, he's quite similar to Geert Wilders. But Donald Trump was basically standing there like he was in a bar, laid back, relaxed, just sharing his stories, and that was a huge contrast."

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So far, the trio have snagged selfies with Clinton, Trump, Rubio, Ted Cruz and even Mike Huckabee, a marginal Republican candidate who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008.

Duursma's take on Hillary's performance: She seemed full of energy at her rally, he said, but sounded angrier when she delivered her speech at a Democratic forum.

"She seemed angry because she started shouting at the end of each sentence, and there is a very thin line between passionate and shouting," he added.

Next stop for the Dutch: New Hampshire, which votes February 9.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran's navy warned a U.S. warship on Wednesday to leave waters near the Strait of Hormuz where the Iranians were testing submarines, destroyers and missile launchers, news agencies reported. The commander of Iran's fleet, Rear-Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, told Tasnim news agency the U.S. ship was trying to collect information in the Sea of Oman - an area close to the Strait, a vital oil and gas shipping route - and said it left quickly after the alert. There was no immediate reaction from Washington which this month joined other world powers in lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic after Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program. In the days before that deal, Iran briefly detained 10 U.S. sailors after their boats entered its waters because of what they said was a navigational error. "It was predictable that the U.S. warship would approach the area to collect information on (our) military operations. So we warned them twice in the morning ... to keep their distance from the exercise area and keep clear of our missile range for their own safety," Sayyari was quoted as saying by Tasnim. He said Iran had acted in line with the international convention that a country should clear out all other military and trade ships from an area before starting any exercise. "The maneuver aims to show Iranian forces' strength both in ensuring security on the seas and in defending the country's sea borders in Hormuz Strait, Sea of Oman and north of the Indian Ocean," Sayyari was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA. Tasnim news agency reported on Wednesday that Iran had given warnings to other Western ships on Tuesday, and they had all left the area. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Andrew Roche)
Dublin (AFP) - An official inquiry into Ireland's 2008-10 banking crisis on Wednesday found that the European Central Bank's role in the aftermath left taxpayers shouldering an "inappropriate" share of the burden.

The 460-page report by a committee of Irish politicians found that before the collapse, Irish banks started taking a more aggressive approach to lending and that financial regulators failed to spot the risks.

After a bailout was announced, the inquiry said the ECB threatened the Irish government in March 2011 with the withdrawal of emergency support for banks if losses were imposed on senior bondholders, or top-level investors.

"The ECB position in November 2010 and March 2011 on imposing losses on senior bondholders contributed to the inappropriate placing of significant banking debts on the Irish citizen," the report said.

Ireland's economy, nicknamed the Celtic Tiger, crashed in 2008 after a decade of near double-digit growth fuelled by cheap credit and booming construction and property sectors.

This led to the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank in 2009 and Ireland receiving an 85 billion euro ($93 billion) European bailout in 2010.

After enduring deep austerity cuts, it emerged from the bailout in 2013.

Ireland's economy is now growing again at the fastest rate in the European Union. Officials predict the overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth figure for 2015 will be around seven percent.

The inquiry, set up in 2014, heard from 128 witnesses and concluded its public hearings in July last year.

An editorial in the Irish Times criticised legal restrictions which meant that some background documentation was not made public.

"The inquiry has helped us to understand a bit more -- the pity is that a proper public inquiry did not happen much sooner and under a legal framework which paid more than lip service to the public's right to know," it concluded.
Berlin (AFP) - Germany's domestic intelligence service warned Wednesday of a rise in the number of radical Islamists, as well as of far-right extremists furious over a mass influx of mostly Muslim refugees.

Around 790 Islamic extremists have now travelled from Germany to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, and of these about one third had returned, the service said in a report.

Of the total, about 130 were believed to have been killed in the conflict zone, according to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV.

The service said that most of Germany's jihadist "foreign fighters" are from the ultra-conservative Salafi movement, whose numbers it put at 8,350, up from 7,900 in September.

The service's chief, Hans-Georg Maassen, said that in about known 230 cases, Salafi groups had tried to make contact with asylum-seekers near refugee shelters.

Heated debate over last year's 1.1 million-strong migrant influx was strongly mobilising far-right xenophobic groups, he said.

"There is the threat of an emerging grey zone of far-right extremists, right-wing conservatives and citizen-protesters, with considerable potential for violence," said Maassen.

He said large-scale sexual assaults targeting women on New Year's Eve in the city of Cologne, blamed largely on North African men, had further "radicalised the anti-asylum-seeker agitation of far-right extremists".

Maassen also said that Germany remained on high alert after the Paris jihadist attacks in November, describing the security situation as "serious".
ROME (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Wednesday defeated the first of two no-confidence motions brought by the opposition in parliament which accused the government of having a conflict of interest during the rescue of four small banks last year. The Senate voted 178 to 101 to defeat the no-confidence motion that would have prompted the collapse of Renzi's government had he lost it. The second vote is underway. Both motions accuse Renzi's government of having a conflict of interest because his 35-year-old Reform Minister Maria Elena Boschi held shares in one of the saved banks, and her father was on the board. (Reporting by Steve Scherer, editing by Isla Binnie)
By Thomas Escritt THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo goes on trial at the International Criminal Court on Thursday, the most senior politician to do so since the global war crimes tribunal was set up 13 years ago. Accused of unleashing a civil war that killed 3,000 people after he refused to accept losing a re-election bid in 2010, Gbagbo remains an influential figure at home and his trial could rekindle tensions in the world's largest cocoa grower. It is also a test for the ICC, seen in much of Africa as a neo-colonial institution that does the bidding of its European financial backers. Its last attempt to try an African president, Kenya's Uhuru Kenyatta, failed amid diplomatic lobbying and allegations of witness intimidation. Gbagbo, 70, and his co-accused, youth leader Charles Ble Goude, 44, face four counts, including a campaign of rape and murder aimed at hanging onto power. Both men deny the charges, which carry maximum sentences of life imprisonment. Gbagbo's supporters say he is a victim of collusion between France and current Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara, who won the election and took office after a military intervention by the former colonial power ended the four-month civil war. Ouattara, who was re-elected last year, is accused by his opponents of using the ICC to silence opposition. Gbagbo and Ble Goude - known as the "general of the streets" - were handed over the to The Hague after the ICC issued arrest warrants. A lawyer representing victims of the violence, Habiba Toure, said the ICC risked "losing credibility" as it had failed to pursue anyone from the other side of the conflict. "No member of the pro-Ouattara forces suspected of grave crimes against humanity has been prosecuted," he said. During his four years in the ICC's jail in The Hague, Gbagbo worked with a French journalist, Francois Mattei, on a book published last year that depicts his prosecution as punishment for standing up to France. Gbagbo's wife Simone, also wanted by the ICC, was sentenced to 20 years' jail by an Ivory Coast court. The ICC has so far convicted just two little-known Congolese warlords. Gbagbo's trial will be closely watched for evidence that it can successfully tackle higher-profile cases. (Additional reporting by Joe Bavier in Abidjan; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Paris (AFP) - Flamboyant showman Jean Paul Gaultier showed he still knows how to party Wednesday with a fashion collection celebrating one of the French capital's mythic hang outs.

The 63-year-old designer's latest haute collection burst onto the catwalk with models sashaying through a replica of the swinging doors of Le Palace, the long defunct club that once gathered artists, musicians and the intelligentsia.

Big hair, skinny ties, swish, glamorous pyjamas and bell hop hats all conjured up the feel of the hotspot's late 1970s to early-1980s lifespan.

But the show didn't just wallow in nostalgia for a lost era of hedonism, it was also in memory of one of the club's late doyennes.

"It's an hommage to Edwige Belmore, the queen of the French punks and also Le Palace's bouncer from 1978-79 and 1983-84," Gaultier told reporters after the Paris Fashion Week show.

Belmore died last year aged 58 after a life in which she had been model, muse and friend to the stars from Gaultier and Bianca Jagger to Andy Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent.

"Edwige was an androgynous woman who could be masculine because of her height and tattoos," the designer said.

"But at the same time she was very feminine in black trousers, a Chanel jacket -- it was a fake -- with a bra beneath it," he added.

In the wake of the terror attacks that ravaged Paris in 2015, Gaultier also offered a reminder of the need to go on living.

"Paris is still a party," he said. "You have to go out, you must not stay stuck at home. That's the worst thing to do."

- Margiela's 'exquisite collage' -

Maison Margiela creative force John Galliano gave full rein to his famously over-the-top imagination in a collection that was a tale of two dresses.

One was short, white and sober. The other was a blaze of blue striped bankers' shirts that had been shredded, though the odd intact sleeve dangled here and there.

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In a collection described by the house as "an exquisite collage", colours sprinted from solid black and brown to orange and red, with printed patterns, plaid, beading and crushed metallic looks.

Make-up evoking a lightning-bolt shape and spikey hair paid homage to David Bowie.

The British designer, who did not take a bow after the show, made his comeback last year in London more than four years after being fired by Dior for drunken anti-Semitic comments at a Paris bar.

- Rumble in the jungle -

Over a soundtrack of rumbling drums and a howling beast, models at the Elie Saab show emerged from a patch of Indian jungle, complete with giant waxy leaves dangling from towering foliage.

Saab's collection of sparkly, floor-length dresses looked fit for a princess with the Lebanese designer's flowing looks showing off plenty of flesh.

Footwear was not exempt from the flashy theme either, with several models sporting silver thick-soled boots.
By Daniel Kelley ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (Reuters) - Atlantic City's local officials backed a revised plan proposed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Tuesday that called for the city to be rescued through additional layers of state oversight and new revenue sources. The plan, which Christie introduced with state Senate President Steve Sweeney and Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian by his side, combines elements of previous proposals to save the distressed gambling hub. The city council passed a resolution late on Tuesday to support the new proposal. The state already controls the city's budget, hiring and other finances, but previous legislation Sweeney introduced this month proposed a more complete takeover of operations. Christie's joint plan on Tuesday, which he said he wants to get cleared by the end of February, would allow the state to restructure city debt and terminate municipal contracts, including with labor unions. Control would last for five years instead of the previously proposed 15 years. It would allow the state to dissolve city departments, consolidate and privatize municipal services and sell city assets, which were all proposals included in a recent report by the city's emergency manager, Kevin Lavin, about how to turn around the failing city. The city's casino industry was hit hard by gambling competition in neighboring states, causing the property tax base to shrink dramatically. The newest proposal would also reintroduce some form of legislation that Christie previously vetoed, which was aimed at boosting cash flow and stabilizing its tax base with fixed payments in lieu of property taxes from casinos. Christie's veto last week prompted concerns that the city's cash flow would run dry by April. At the time, Guardian said he opposed a takeover and that bankruptcy was on the table, but on Tuesday he supported Christie's plan. Before the latest turnaround proposal, Guardian and the city council had called an emergency meeting on Tuesday to consider whether to file for municipal bankruptcy. At the meeting, the council introduced bankruptcy attorney Richard Trenk, who underscored that two-thirds of the city council would have to vote for a resolution requesting approval from the state's Local Finance Board, which oversees the city's budget, for a municipal bankruptcy filing. He noted that there is "no humanly way" the city can pay the $160 million of casino property tax appeals it owes to the Borgata Casino Hotel & Spa, which would be "impossible" to pay. Many in Atlantic City are angry about a takeover because, they say, the state has long enjoyed tax revenue generated by casinos but is not giving back enough now that the city needs help. "There's no excuse for Atlantic City to look the way it looks now," Linda Steele, president of the local NAACP chapter, told the council before the vote. (Reporting by Daniel Kelley in Atlantic City; Additional reporting Hilary Russ in New York; Editing by Bernard Orr and Sandra Maler)
The endangered North Atlantic right whale now has more room to roam.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday that the agency is expanding critical habitat for the whale by 550 percent, carving out more than 30,000 square miles of ocean off the East Coast of the United States where it will be harder for companies to drill for oil, build wind farms, and undertake other development that could harm the worlds rarest whale.

The expansion will take place in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, the main foraging area for the whales, and off the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, where mothers give birth to their calves.

The total critical habitat area will grow from its current size of about 4,500 nautical square miles. It will not include right whale migratory routes through the mid-Atlantic, however.

The expanded critical habitat, which will be established in 30 days, makes it harder to get federal permits for offshore projects, such as energy exploration, seismic testing, and dredging. It will not impact shipping or commercial fishing, as these activities do not affect habitat, although they are currently regulated in terms of their impact on the whales themselves.

We are putting other federal agencies on notice that they must consult with NOAA Fisheries if they intend to authorize, fund, or carry out an action that may affect the critical habitat of the species, David Gouveia, marine mammal and sea turtle program coordinator for NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Region, said during a conference call.

They must make sure they do not jeopardize the continued existence of the speciesor destroy or adversely modify the designated critical habitat, Gouveia said. In these situations, NOAA fisheries provides guidance on how actions can be carried out that minimize the impact on critical habitat.

The 40-ton baleen whale was nearly wiped out by commercial whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the federal government listed the right whale as endangered in 1970. Since then, the North Atlantic population has increased from fewer than 300 to about 475 today, although calving numbers have fallen in recent years.

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The new rule affects only critical habitat, because the whales themselves are already protected under the Endangered Species Act. Critical habitat is defined as specific areas occupied by the species that contain physical or biological features essential to the conservation of the species and that may require special management or consideration for protection, Gouveia said.

Species living in critical habitats are more than twice as likely to increase their populations than species without such protection, a 2005 study found.

Of greatest concern are municipal wastewater discharges, oil and gas development, and preservation of the zooplankton Calanus finmarchicus (the whales preferred food) in the northern foraging habitat, and ocean depth, temperature, and calmness in the southern calving habitat, according to the new rule.

Developers and government agencies must obtain a biological opinion from NOAA Fisheries to ensure they will not negatively affect the whales survival or their habitat. NOAA Fisheries then works with the permitting agency to mitigate or eliminate the impact. Gouveia said he expects the new critical habitat area to produce 188 more biological opinions over the next decade.

RELATED: Australian Fishing Trip Becomes a Right Whale Rescue

Animal welfare groups applauded the expansion.

Right whalesmore endangered than pandas, Siberian tigers, or black rhinosreceived a lifeline today from the federal government, Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement.

Sarah Uhlemann, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, noted that the new rule doesnt mean that anything is specifically banned. There will still be shipping, drilling, and potential oil and gas development.

Its hard to say how much harder it will be to do these things, but it will add procedural protection to make sure nothing slips through the cracks, she added.

Sharon Young, marine issues field director at The Humane Society, said the new rule wont affect activities already approved within the expanded habitat, but proposed projects will receive increased scrutiny.

Wind farm companies are seeking permits for ocean floor seismic surveys in two parts of the expanded southern habitat and two areas just outside the zone, Young said. Seismic blasting can disorient and even deafen marine animals.

We dont believe that intensive surveys at the bottom and construction of wind facilities should go forward unless we know they wont have negative impact, Young said.

Barb Zoodsma, the coordinator of the NOAA Fisheries Southeast U.S. right whale recovery program, said on the conference call that any wind farm development in the area would require the Army Corps of Engineers [to] consult with the agency on that permitting process and we would provide guidance on any issues they might have to consider.

Regarding seismic activity in the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank area, the U.S. has a moratorium on oil and natural gas development in U.S. waters in this area, Gouveia said in an email. That moratorium was set to expire in 2015, but the U.S. extended the moratorium until 2022.

Related stories on TakePart:





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 Australian Fishing Trip Becomes a Right Whale Rescue

Original article from TakePart
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's Nairobi Securities Exchange has signed up six lenders as clearing banks for its yet-to-be launched derivatives market, it said on Wednesday. The NSE, an entry point for foreign funds keen to tap robust growth in East African economies, has been planning to start offering derivatives trading since last year. The six banks are Barclays Kenya, Co-operative Bank of Kenya, CFC Stanbic, NIC Bank, Chase Bank and CBA Bank, the NSE said in a statement. Its plan to launch a derivatives market, based on underlying financial instruments such as currencies and equities, has already received approval from regulator Capital Markets Authority. The NSE did not state the exact date of launch for the derivatives market. (Reporting by Duncan Miriri; editing by Jason Neely)
PARIS (Reuters) - Syrian Kurdish officials will not be invited to peace talks in Geneva, where negotiations for the opposition will be led by a Saudi-backed opposition group, France's foreign minister said on Wednesday. Laurent Fabius said United Nations special envoy Staffan de Mistura told him the Kurdish PYD party would not attend the talks, which are expected to start on Friday. "The PYD group was causing the most problems, and Mr de Mistura told me he had not sent them an invitation letter," Laurent Fabius told France Culture radio. De Mistura, who sent invitations on Tuesday without confirming the names, planned to make a statement on invitees later on Wednesday or on Thursday and would not comment beforehand, a spokeswoman for the UN official said. International peace negotiations over Syria have been undermined by disputes over who should represent the opposition ever since the previous U.N. attempt to hold such talks in 2014, with Russia and Turkey both demanding different elements of the opposition are excluded. Russia was in favor of inviting the PYD, whose military branch controls large areas of northern Syria. Its Kurdish leader told Reuters on Tuesday he had not been invited, in contrast to other Russia-backed opponents. Fabius, who spoke to De Mistura on Tuesday, said the diplomat had also confirmed that a Riyadh-formed opposition group would lead negotiations though other opponents could also be present. France has been a key backer of moderate opposition forces battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has been advising them on how to prepare for the Geneva talks. "I spoke to Mr (Riad) Hijab (opposition coordinator)... he will respond to De Mistura and (UN Secretary General) Ban ki-Moon this morning," Fabius said. "If I understand their position, they say yes to negotiations." A senior French diplomat said that while the PYD and its allies would need to be part of a final political solution in Syria, including them now risked "exploding" the Saudi opposition platform. "We have a coherent Riyadh platform. It considers that the PYD is not part of the opposition against the regime...," the diplomat said. "The opposition has defined negotiating parameters and the first one is that Assad must go. From what I've seen that's not the position of the PYD." (Reporting by John Irish; Editing by James Regan and John Stonestreet)
As well as creating one of the world's most exclusive and luxurious off-roaders, Land Rover believes it has what it takes to curate equally exclusive holidays.

In partnership with Abercrombie & Kent, Land Rover has created a "once-in-a-lifetime" holiday that it is calling "the most luxurious road trip on Earth." It takes in five continents, eight countries, nine world-class hotels over three weeks and, of course, involves a Range Rover, the SVAutobiography to be exact.

"We set out to design a trip worthy of the ultimate luxury SUV and thanks to our partners at Abercrombie & Kent we have achieved just that. From Europe to Australia, this trip is all about the epitome of luxury but done so in a Land Rover way -- the unexpected, the off-the-beaten-track and the once-in-a-lifetime experiences. This itinerary represents the definitive drive adventure, achieved in the definitive vehicle," said Mark Cameron, Land Rover Experiential Marketing Director, at Jaguar Land Rover.

For 100,000 (about US$142,000) per person, based on two sharing, the three-week global adventure starts in Monaco with a drive along mountain passes into Italy and a stay on Lake Como at the Four Seasons Cap Ferrat, the Villa d'Este. This leg of the tour also involves a helicopter tour of the Alps and lunch at Joel Robuchon at the Metropole before flying out to Morocco where guests can get to grips with desert driving.

The tour then moves to Arizona and the Amangiri resort in Utah before guests spend three days in Chilie and pass the final leg of the journey in Australia before flying back to London once more.

Simon Lynch, Director of Business Development, Abercrombie & Kent, adds: "A&K are delighted to be partnering with Land Rover on offering this, the most ultimate of driving journeys. Our love of adventure, combined with exploration and luxury for over 50 years, gave us the inspiration for this expedition, which is packed full of unforgettable experiences. Our pioneering customers will explore landscapes, see wildlife and meet communities well and truly off the beaten track."

Even though the itinerary is comprehensive, there is huge scope for further personalization when making enquiries at Abercrombie & Kent's offices in London, Abu Dhabi or Monaco.
Bucharest (AFP) - Moldova's new Prime Minister Pavel Filip said Tuesday that his government faces a "last chance" to regain public trust as the country a battles deep political crisis, calling for calm from protesters demanding his resignation.

"The political class now has its last chance to restore Moldovans' and our international partners' trust," Filip said in an interview with BBC television.

On a visit to neighbouring Romania, Filip said the elite was responsible for a political crisis that has seen Moldova rocked by mass protests in recent weeks.

Some 40,000 people took to the streets last weekend to demand early elections just days after a new government was sworn in -- the third such administration to take office within a year.

Filip said he had no intention of resigning, telling the BBC that Moldova desperately needs stable government to avoid a "deep economic and social crisis".

He added that action would be taken against protesters who "cross a red line and become violent".

Moldova has been mired in crisis since April when the exposure of a $1-billion (910-million-euro) corruption scandal triggered huge protests and the arrest of former premier Vlad Filat.

The previous pro-EU government lost a vote of confidence in October and was dismissed, but since then, the parliament has been deadlocked over its replacement.

The country is torn between those who want it to join neighbouring Romania in the European Union and those who want closer relations with Moscow, its Soviet-era master.

The nomination on January 20 of a new government did little to calm the protests, with demonstrators trying to storm the parliament as the new administration was sworn in, prompting calls for calm from the EU.

Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos said during Filip's visit Tuesday that Bucharest would loan its neighbour 150 million euros ($163 million) on the condition that the government pushes through "real reforms".

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"Romania is ready to support Moldova on its European track provided it makes a clear commitment to carry out real reform, and not just on paper," Ciolos said.

Bucharest had pledged the loan in October, but froze it in the midst of the political crisis.

Wedged between Ukraine and Romania and with a population of just 3.5 million, Moldova is one of Europe's poorest countries.

Although Romania expects to release a first 60-million-euro tranche of the loan, this will depend on the outcome of an upcoming visit by IMF officials, Ciolos said.

Filip pledged to push through the reforms aimed at stabilising Moldova's economy and fighting corruption.

"We will show by our actions that we are determined to implement the promised reforms," he said.
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - LATAM Airlines on Wednesday became the latest carrier to offer refunds or the option of itinerary changes to pregnant women planning to travel to Latin American and Caribbean countries impacted by the Zika virus. Flight reservations have not been affected so far by worries about Zika, a spokeswoman for the airline said. But hotels and cruise operators who serve the region have said they are seeing growing concerns from travelers. An outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus, linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile, the World Health Organization (WHO) said this week. American Airlines Group Inc more than doubled its previous list of destinations for which it was offering refunds to pregnant travelers, adding Puerto Rico, Martinique and four countries to an initial list of five Central American airports. Chile-based LATAM Airlines, Latin America's largest carrier, said it would offer refunds or the opportunity to change destination to medically certified pregnant women and their traveling companions booked on international flights to Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and other affected Latin American and Caribbean countries. "For pregnant passengers that have already initiated their trips to the aforementioned destinations, they can return early, subject to seat availability, at no extra charge," the airline said in a statement. U.S. airline United Airlines also said this week it was allowing customers with reserved tickets for travel to impacted regions to postpone their trips or obtain refunds with no penalty. In a similar move, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd and rival Carnival Corp have said they would allow expectant mothers covered by the CDC advisories to reschedule cruises to a later date or switch to an itinerary outside the affected countries. LATAM Airlines, a group formed by Chile's LAN and Brazil's TAM, had not yet seen an impact on reservations due to concerns about the outbreak, a spokeswoman for the company said on Wednesday. Avianca, the region's second biggest airline, and smaller Brazilian carrier Gol made similar comments on Tuesday. However, the outbreak presents another potential headache for LATAM, which is already struggling with currency fluctuations, labor disputes and a fast declining Brazilian economy. The company is expected to post a net annual loss for the third year in a row when it reports 2015 results in March, according to Thomson Reuters estimates. (Reporting by Anthony Esposito, Rosalba O'Brien and Felipe Iturrieta in Santiago and Jeffrey Dastin in New York; Editing by Frances Kerry and Sandra Maler)
Donetsk (Ukraine) (AFP) - A Lenin statue escaped largely unharmed Wednesday after unidentified plotters tried to blow up the massive monument of the Soviet Union's founder in the de facto capital of rebel Ukraine.

Pro-Russian insurgency leaders quickly accused a "terrorist group" of trying to topple the symbol of communist power that has loomed large over the main square of the eastern industrial city of Donetsk for nearly 50 years.

A small part of the monument's foundation was damaged in the explosion while the bronze statute itself was left unscathed.

"According to our information, the explosives were planted by a terrorist group that had already committed similar crimes in Donetsk," rebel military spokesman Eduard Basurin told AFP.

No one claimed immediate responsibility and no arrests were made.

But the Donetsk insurgents' self-proclaimed interior ministry said it was treating the incident as a "terrorist act" and conducting a probe.

The blast follows a series of similar attempts to remove statues of Lenin -- of which many are planted in cities of the ex-Soviet Union -- from the war-shattered regions of the separatist provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Pro-Moscow forces have been waging a 21-month war against government troops that has claimed more than 9,000 lives.

Kiev has banned all Soviet symbols as well as the Communist Party in a bid to reaffirm its committment to joining the European Union and possibly even the NATO military bloc.

Ukraine's 2014 pro-EU revolution was marked in Kiev by the highly symbolic toppling of another enormous Lenin monument two months before the flight to Russia of the country's Moscow-backed president and his closest aides.

Russia, whose leadership consistently denies any involvement in the pro-Moscow revolt, accuses its western neighbour of violating international law by banning the Communist Party.
Vilnius (AFP) - Lithuania on Wednesday launched the trial of 65 former Soviet officials over a deadly 1991 crackdown by Moscow during he Baltic state's independence drive.

"All these people are accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes," prosecutor Daiva Lisauskiene told reporters.

Only two suspects, both Russian citizens, attended the hearing, a quarter century after the massacre in which 14 civilians died and 700 were injured.

Former tank officer Yuri Mel has been held in Lithuanian custody since being detained at a checkpoint on the border with Russia's exclave of Kaliningrad in 2014.

Another suspect is a Vilnius resident who is reportedly cooperating with justice authorities.

The remaining defendants -- citizens of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine -- were represented by their lawyers.

Lithuanian prosecutors also sought to question ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a witness, but Moscow refused to cooperate with the case.

Soviet troops entered the capital Vilnius to bring Lithuania to heel after its 1990 secession from the Soviet Union following five decades under Moscow's thumb as a republic of the USSR.

The troops stormed the city's television tower as tens of thousands of people formed human shields to block their progress.

The breakaway republic played a key role in the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once described the collapse of the USSR as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.

Lithuania has been seeking justice for the crackdown's victims ever since the Baltic state won recognition as an independent nation in September 1991.

Six Soviet-era Lithuanian officials were convicted and jailed in the 1990s for their role.

The war crimes probe gathered steam in 2010 thanks to a change in Lithuania's criminal code, allowing the trial of individuals in absentia when they are abroad and cannot be extradited.

President Dalia Grybauskaite on Wednesday hailed the move, but said it was belated.

"It's a partial step in the direction of achieving justice," independence icon Vytautas Landsbergis told AFP, explaining that even if the defendants are found guilty, Russia will never extradite them for sentencing.

Relations between Vilnius and Moscow have long been rocky, notably since Lithuania joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.
The Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness that can lead to brain defects in newborns, isn't likely to stay contained to the several Caribbean, Central and South American countries that have recently been dealing with outbreaks. Ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the World Health Organization has warned that the virus might continue to spread throughout North and South America.

How, you ask? Well, there's a possibility Zika can be spread via sexual contact. Sorry, everyone.

According to the New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there's not enough cause for concern to issue an official warning that Zika, which can cause fever, rashes, joint pain and bloodshot eyes, can be contracted during intercourse. But, though the Times notes that evidence of widespread sexual transmission is still "very slim," there have been instances of the virus being detected in semen, leading some scientists to warn that if you visit an affected region, you should probably use a condom when you have sex.

"If I was a man and I got Zika symptoms, I'd wait a couple of months before having unprotected sex," Scott Weaver, the director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, told the Times. "If my wife was of childbearing age, I'd want to use protection, certainly for a few weeks."

The warning is based on a reported instance of live Zika virus being found in the semen of an unidentified 44-year-old man, who was exposed to the virus in 2013. Doctors also found evidence of the virus in the man's urine, but they're unsure how long it actually stayed in his body.

Medical researchers have also found at least one instance in which Zika was likely passed from one partner to another. Biologist Brian D. Foy contracted Zika virus when he visited Senegal in 2008. A few weeks after his return to the United States, Foy's wife, who had not left the country, developed more intense Zika symptoms than her husband. Both partners provided blood samples that later tested positive for the virus.

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While neither Foy nor his wife passed the disease to their children, the couple did have sex shortly after he got back to the U.S., suggesting that the disease might have been sexually transmitted. That said, there's no need to panic just yet: As the CDC points out, Zika is primarily (aka almost exclusively) transferred by the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes.

Then again, who wants to risk it? Maybe just play it safe and use a condom.

h/t New York Times
Something's rotten in Denver, and it's not the pungent stench of burnt cannabis filling the air. As Colorado's legal weed party barrels full tilt into its third year, the laws governing the state's medical and recreational marijuana businesses still haven't reckoned with the ugly racial disparities at their core.

The way things are looking, they probably never will. Since Colorado Amendment 64 took effect in January 2014, legal cannabis has meant booming business for the Rocky Mountain State. By mid-June of that year, 292 people had filed notices saying they planned to apply for vendor licenses, according to the Denver Post, while the state government reported it was raking in $52.5 million in marijuana tax revenue by the end of 2014.

It's one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. But who's being kept out of this lucrative new market?

Grow house that supplies Simply Pure, a cannabis dispensary in Denver.

In Colorado, one of the requirements for getting a license to sell medical or recreational cannabis is that you don't have a controlled substance felony conviction on your record  including any involving marijuana. The irony here  that black people are far more likely to have such a conviction than any other racial group in the state  points to one of the biggest problems with legal weed trends sweeping the nation.

Legalizing recreational marijuana use has been lauded far and wide as a death knell for the war on drugs. The United States' incarcerated population has risen 500% since the 1970s, much of it fueled by arrests and convictions for nonviolent drug-related crimes. Only recently have politicians and the American people started to agree this is terrible policy and a new approach was necessary. Today, 20 U.S. states have either decriminalized or legalized marijuana.

Weed being smoked.

But the racial disparity in who gets punished for drug crimes remains as stark as it always has been. When then-President Richard M. Nixon called for a crackdown on drug use and distribution in 1971, it was widely understood as part of his larger "tough-on-crime" initiative  itself a thinly veiled appeal to whites who felt threatened by the gains of blacks during the civil rights movement. That intent has been reflected in the numbers: 37% of Americans arrested for drug crimes are black, despite whites using drugs at comparable rates, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

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And things were certainly no different in the states where marijuana is now legal. In Colorado specifically, black people were 3.1 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites from 2001 to constituting 10.5% of the state's marijuana arrestees over that period despite making up just 3.8% of the state population.

A dispensary employee in Denver

Even now, blacks are 2.5 times more likely to get arrested in Colorado for marijuana-related crimes, including public consumption and possession in excess of the legally sanctioned amount, according to the Guardian. But since voters moved to amend the state constitution to allow for legal marijuana use in 2012, a celebratory zeal has infused the move toward legalization that seems increasingly out of step with its failure to redress the devastation that criminalization left in black communities.

We cannot escape that history. Today, just one of Colorado's 424 certified legal marijuana dispensaries is confirmed to be owned by a black woman. (A black man named Dan Pettigrew owns an extract company called Viola Extracts  not technically a dispensary.) That woman's name is Wanda James. In the latest episode of Mic's web series The Movement, James takes aim at the inequality behind this new industry.

Wanda James, the only black woman who owns a marijuana dispensary in the state of Colorado.

"When you start to look at the number of white males making billions off of this plant, and black males still serving time because of this plant, it does not make sense that in America, your zip code determines whether you're a millionaire or a felon," James told Mic's Darnell Moore.

James' brother, Darrick "Rick" Barnes, is a prime example of these disparities. At 17, Barnes was arrested in Texas for marijuana possession and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now that the plant is legal in Colorado, he is effectively shut out of the state's cannabis economy, even though he's demonstrated an aptitude for growing the plant as a former employee at his sister Wanda's medical dispensary. "If it's something you like to do, or want to do, or can do, they won't accept you because of [that conviction]," Barnes told Moore. He is currently the manager of his sister's restaurant, Jezebel's, in Denver.

Darrick Barnes, brother to Wanda James and manager of Jezebel's, a restaurant in Denver.

As far as whether Colorado's government is making moves to counteract these disparities, that much remains unclear. The Colorado Department of Revenue's Marijuana Enforcement Division did not return Mic's request for comment. But as clemency and pardons are increasingly being handed out to incarcerated victims of the war on drugs  President Barack Obama has commuted the prison sentences of 184 mostly nonviolent drug offenders since spring 2014  it seems high time to implement reparative measures for those who've suffered the most.

Until then, white Coloradans will continue reaping the benefits of the state's booming cannabis economy, while disproportionately targeted black individuals convicted of drug crimes are left in the dust. With this in mind, perhaps the most insidious legacy of the war on drugs is the one that emerged after weed went legit.

Watch the latest episode of The Movement below where Darnell Moore talks to Wanda James:
By Rozanna Latiff and Praveen Menon KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's anti-graft agency had recommended that Prime Minister Najib Razak be charged with criminal misappropriation, a source said on Wednesday, amid growing outrage after the premier was cleared of any offences in a multi-million-dollar scandal. The attorney-general on Tuesday closed all investigations of Najib, after reviewing reports from the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) on a case that involved the transfer of $681 million into the prime minister's personal bank account. But a source at the MACC told Reuters that, when it handed its findings to the attorney-general last month, the agency had recommended Najib to be charged for criminal misappropriation. "It's a pretty straightforward case. We had made recommendations for charges to be filed that the attorney-general has instead chosen to reject," said the source, who declined to be identified or to elaborate on MACC's findings. The attorney-general's office was not immediately available for comment. MACC said in a statement it would seek a review of the decision and declined to make any further public comment on the attorney-general's findings. Najib has been buffeted for months by allegations of graft at the debt-laden state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) and by revelations of the mysterious transfer of funds, adding to a sense of crisis in a country under economic duress from slumping oil prices and a sliding currency. Attorney-General Mohamed Apandi Ali appeared to have drawn a line under the scandal on Tuesday, announcing that the money was a private gift from Saudi Arabia's royal family and that no further action needed to be taken on the matter. Najib has denied any wrongdoing and said he did not take any money for personal gain. However, popular opinion seems to be against Najib as he tries to rebuild support ahead of a 2018 general election, and on Wednesday commentators and critics denounced the attorney-general's ruling as a whitewash. "The court of public opinion will continue to try him," said veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of the state-linked New Strait Times newspaper, A Kadir Jasin. "As for all of us, we have to do some serious soul searching if we care for this country and its future." Influential former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Najib's fiercest critic, said in a blog that having that much money in his account was wrong in itself, and the attorney-general's role as both judge and prosecutor amounted to an injustice. RISING CORRUPTION Najib still enjoys the backing of most of the powerful division chiefs in the ruling United Malays National Organisation party, and most of his critics concede that he cannot be unseated. Moving to stamp out dissent last year, he sacked his deputy, replaced the former attorney-general and replaced him with Apandi and cracked down on opposition leaders and academics. Human Right Watch said in its World Report 2016 released on Wednesday that Malaysia's human rights situation had deteriorated sharply during 2015, as the government stepped up a campaign of harassment and repression. Separately, a report by global watchdog Transparency International showed Malaysia's ranking in corruption perception had tumbled four places last year to 54th among 168 countries. Its report is based on perceived level of corruption in the public sector. "The government must provide the leadership and strong political will to drive the message of zero tolerance for graft," said Akhbar Satar, president of Transparency International Malaysia, who said the 1MDB scandal was one of the factors behind the fall in the ranking. "The general public are expecting high ethical standards of both conduct and accountability from executive, judiciary and legislative branches." (Editing by John Chalmers, Robert Birsel)
Mom Cori Salchert and her husband, Mark, are doing something few people have the strength to handle: They are opening their home and their hearts by adopting babies with life-limiting or terminal illnesses.

As a registered nurse and former perinatal bereavement specialist, Cori is particularly suited to the difficult task of caring for these hospice babies, as she calls them. After raising eight children of her own, the Sheboygan, Wis., resident and her husband reached out to the Childrens Hospital of Wisconsins treatment foster care program, which pairs families with infants and kids who have significant to severe behavioral or medical challenges, according to Sheboygan Press.

STORY: Powerful Photo Shows Adopted Boy, Grandfather Bonding Over Disability

In August 2012, the program matched Cori and her husband with their first baby. We received a call asking if we would be willing to take in a 2-week-old baby girl who was nameless and had no one to care for her, Cori shared with Today Monday. The babys prognosis was grim, as she was born without the right or left hemisphere of her brain, and doctors said there was no hope for her. I was told that she was in a vegetative state  unable to see or hear, and only responding to painful stimuli.

Cori kissing one of her adopted infants. (Photo: Courtesy of Cori Salchert)

She and her husband took the baby home and named her Emmalynn. The baby lived for 50 days and was cuddled by every member of the Salchert family during her stay with them. Emmalynn died in Coris arms, while nestled into her robe for warmth and comfort. She didnt suffer, she wasnt in pain, and she most certainly wasnt alone, Cori told Today. It was painful initially. Gradually we were able to see the opportunity to hold her through this life and as she entered the next solely as a gift.



After Cori and her family began to heal from the loss, they considered taking in another infant in a similar situation. In October 2014, the family brought home Charlie. The 4-month-old infant suffered from a type of brain damage that babies typically dont survive past their second birthday. Charlie, who is still being cared for by the Salchert family, is on life support and has been resuscitated multiple times in the past year.



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STORY: Meet the Woman Who Guides Parents Through Their Darkest Days



The parents of both Emmalynn and Charlie were unable to deal with the situation after birth took place, Cori told Yahoo Parenting. There is no censure on my part. Were open and willing to step up if parents have to step away because its too much to bear. And we do work towards adoption if that is the option we have.

A touching moment between Coris husband, Mark, and one of their adopted babies. (Photo: Courtesy of Cori Salchert)

Having the support of her husband, Mark, and children has been essential to Cori. While Mark might not do all the hands-on medical care, we couldnt do this as a family without his 1,000 percent supportive actions and attitude, Cori tells Yahoo Parenting. Hed tell you this kind of deal isnt him being brave. [But] I think hes the bravest man ever!



A nurse at Childrens Hospital with three of Coris daughters, Johanna, Mary Elisabeth (who is holding Charlie), and Charity. (Photo: Courtesy of Cori Salchert)

The Salcherts hope that by sharing their story theyll raise awareness of how great it can be to foster and adopt children. If people are moved with compassion for kiddos like these and others in foster care, then please contact your own local foster care agency, step up, and be there for a child who needs you, she tells Yahoo Parenting.

The Salchert family. (Photo: Courtesy of Cori Salchert)

She adds: Not everyone is called to do special needs like we do, but they can do something very special for a child who might not be as medically needy but still desires a family and people to love them.

STORY: Being a Foster Dad Breaks My Heart  And Makes It Whole

Even though caring for  and in some cases, losing  these infants can be emotionally grueling, Cori considers it a gift to be part of their lives. We invest deeply, and we ache terribly when these kids die, she told Today. But our hearts are like stained-glass windows. Those windows are made of broken glass, which has been forged back together, and those windows are even stronger and more beautiful for having been broken.

(Top photo: Courtesy of Cori Salchert)



Please follow @YahooParenting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have an interesting story to share about your family? Email us at YParenting (at) Yahoo.com.
Finally, theres a Hilton hotel that millennials, families and budget-conscious travelers can actually afford. The recently unveiled Tru by Hilton, the hospitality giants newest hotel brand, will have rooms priced between $75 and $90 per night.

Designed to fill what Hilton describes as a massive void in the midscale [hotel] category in the U.S. and Canada, the first Tru hotels are expected to open in the United States by the end of this year. More than 100 new hotels are planned in cities including Chicago; Atlanta; Dallas; Houston; Denver; Portland, Oregon; Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio; and Nashville, Tennessee.

Hilton said Tru, the 13th hotel brand in its portfolio, will appeal to millions of consumers who will no longer be forced to compromise between price and a quality experience.

More than 40 percent of all U.S. hotel stays are within the midscale and economy sectors and Tru by Hilton addresses a gap in the marketplace by appealing to the youthful mindset demographic, pushing the industry to marry quality and value, Jim Holthouser, Hilton Worldwide executive vice president for global brands, said in a statement. Tru will be a hotel thats a place travelers will want to go to rather than just through, Holthouser added.

Watch the video of Meet Tru: Hiltons New Affordable Hotel Brand on MoneyTalksNews.com.

The Tru hotels will feature smaller, more efficiently designed guest rooms (no desks, closets or in-room coffee machines) with a 55-inch TV and lots of DirecTV channels, a pop-up desk and high-speed Wi-Fi, as well as huge lobbies that Hilton calls a first-floor experience, designed with areas for playing games, eating, lounging and working.

Travelers will also enjoy a free breakfast bar featuring Greek yogurt and more than 30 toppings (candy sprinkles, anyone?), oatmeal, bagels and doughnuts.

What do you think about Hiltons newest hotel brand? Share your comments below or on our Facebook page.

This article was originally published on MoneyTalksNews.com as 'Meet Tru: Hiltons New Affordable Hotel Brand'.

More from Money Talks News
FLINT, Mich.  On a cloudy April day in 2014, Flint City Council members and other elected officials gathered in the citys once-defunct water treatment plant to celebrate.

Dayne Walling, then the towns mayor, ceremoniously pushed a button to stop the flow of treated Lake Huron water from Detroit for the first time in nearly 50 years. Water from the nearby Flint River began gushing into Flints 700-mile-long pipe system instead. The politicians raised glasses of water and toasted the historic change.

Wantwaz Davis  the recently elected city councilman from Flints 5th Ward  did not join in on the toast.

I was in the corner like, Nah, Im not drinking that, Davis recalls.

The councilman has been one of the fiercest opponents of the decision to switch to the more polluted and corrosive Flint River, made before he was elected, while the city was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. His calls nearly two years ago for a federal investigation into the water crisis seemed like a long shot, but, then again, Davis entire political career has been improbable.

In 1991, when he was 17, Davis shot and killed Kenneth Morris, a man he suspected of sexually assaulting his mother. Davis said he didnt intend to shoot him until he saw Morris reach for his pocket. But a judge sentenced him to up to 50 years in prison for second-degree murder. He grew up behind bars, teaching himself to read and write so he could understand the letters sent to him from family and friends.

When he emerged a free man 19 years later, in 2010, he was blown away by Flints decline.

It was nothing that I remembered, Davis said. A lot of these homes were dilapidated. And crime was at the highest level that I ever imagined it to be in my city. And it just looked like a poor city.

He struggled to get a job, crying to his grandmother when he was turned away again and again after interviews that seemed to go well until his criminal record came up. He felt like he was being discriminated against and would never be able to succeed.

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Thats when Davis began showing up to City Council meetings and getting involved in local politics. He wanted to advocate for other felons in the city  by his estimate, 28 percent of the population  who were trying to move on from their past.

After my five minutes was up, they used to throw me off the mic and say, Your time is up, Mr. Davis, he recalls of the meetings. So I would say, OK. But I will run for City Council in the next election. They blew me off. They said, Yeah, youre a convicted murderer, whatever.

Davis campaigned vigorously, knocking on thousands of doors, and eventually beat out five opponents for a surprise victory. The local Flint newspaper had never reported on Davis felony prior to the election, prompting a public apology from their editor. But Davis says he told everybody while out campaigning his entire life story, and that the newspaper didnt write about his past because they didnt take him seriously enough as a candidate to write much about him at all.

In this April 25, 2014 photo, city employees and elected officials raise glasses of treated water from the Flint River during a toast in a ceremony stopping the intake of water from Detroit at the Flint Water Treatment Plant in Flint, Mich. (Photo: Samuel Wilson/The Flint Journal/AP)

I became the first person in the history of America to ever go to prison for murder and get elected in government, Davis said. (We attempted to verify this with several political historians, but no one knew for sure. Former President Andrew Jackson killed at least one man in a duel but was never convicted of a crime.)

Davis was a controversial figure from the start. He seems entirely free from the political urge to be diplomatic and deferential. He referred to Flints water problems as genocide to the media and in letters to the U.S. Justice Department, Gov. Rick Snyder and the United Nations, long before anyone was paying attention. People [were] texting me calling me a moron, Davis said of that episode.

The reason I used the word, it didnt stem from a racial standpoint. It was more about class. It was more about the low- [and] moderate-income people. The poor people  whites, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese  we are the ones who are ill affected by this water. Not the people with the money. The people with the money can leave and come back. Or move to outside counties.

Flints water issue is personal for Davis on several levels. His wife, Stephani, developed what looked like large black burns on her stomach last year. One expert told Davis the marks could have been caused by the high chlorine content in the Flint water, which was needed to kill the E. coli and other bacteria that popped up only a few months after the switch. Davis is also personally affected by Flints uniquely high water bills, a complaint I heard from nearly every resident I spoke to in the city. At one point, he owed $3,000 for water, which was placed as a lien on his house. Hes lowered the bill to $600 but worries for his poorer constituents who cant pay their bills.

SLIDESHOW: Water crisis in Flint, Mich. >>>

This is by design, Davis contends of the high cost of water. To run them out of here systemically.

Davis gut told him not to trust the river as a water source; as a resident he knew what this water has been through. At Flints height in the 70s, tens of thousands of people worked for auto companies along the river, and local residents worry that industrial contaminants remain in the water. The councilman watched, horrified, as problem after problem surfaced. First, E. coli was discovered just a few months after the switch. In September 2014, another boil-water advisory was issued because of high levels of coliform. Last January, the city announced that there were too many cancer-causing trihalomethanes (TTHMs) in the water and that boiling the water only intensified their effects.

It wasnt until last September that outside researchers said the corrosive Flint River water was causing the citys old pipes to leach lead and iron into the tap water. Lead can cause brain damage and is especially harmful to children. The county also noticed a spike in Legionnaires disease.

Davis sought outside help again and again. Starting in June 2014, he sent the exact same letter to the Justice Department, addressed to then-Attorney General Eric Holder, every Monday morning.

This letter is in deep regards of the atrocities the residents of the city of Flint, Michigan, have unconstitutionally and deliberately been placed under, Davis wrote. He said the city emergency manager law forced Flint to live under a dictatorship and begged the federal government to intervene.

He received a reply several months later, telling him to contact the state police.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced it will investigate how and why Flints water was poisoned for so long. Gov. Rick Snyder has apologized several times. Water bottles and filters are being delivered to every home. The world is paying attention.

Now theyre here. Now theyre doing a federal investigation. But nobody gives me credit, Davis said. I was fighting from day one.
New York (AFP) - Megyn Kelly, the American television journalist whom Donald Trump demanded Fox News dump from the Republican debate, is one of the most watched and powerful anchors in US cable news.

The billionaire's decision to skip the debate, days before Iowa becomes the first state to vote in the 2016 presidential election process, has jettisoned the 45-year-old blonde mother of three back into the headlines.

"I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!" the Republican frontrunner tweeted in a customary insult Wednesday.

"What (Trump's) not free to do and what no news organization would allow, would be for him to... dictate the terms of the debate," Kelly wrote to her more than 1.4 million followers.

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes stood firmly behind the woman whose prime time show "The Kelly File" is the second-most watched program in American cable TV news on the most-watched cable news channel.

"Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist," he told The Washington Post. "She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night."

A former corporate litigator, Kelly joined Fox in 2004 as a television reporter from Washington DC, rising rapidly through the ranks thanks to her good looks, fierce ambition and clear intelligence.

Lampooned by satirists in 2013 for telling children on air that Jesus and Santa Claus were white, she has nonetheless burnished the journalism credentials of a network best known for Republican partisanship.

She won accolades in 2014 for challenging former vice president Dick Cheney over the invasion of Iraq. "Time and time again history has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir," she said.

"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?" she asked strategist Karl Rove, who questioned whether Barack Obama had been re-elected on the night of the 2012 presidential election.

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In 2014 she was the only woman journalist listed on the TIME 100: The Most Influential People in the World list.

She has also won support across the political spectrum for taking guests to task over lack of support for maternity leave and defending the increase in female breadwinners.

But it was her run-in with Trump last August during the first Republican TV debate of the 2016 election that shot her to much wider fame.

She and two male colleagues moderated the debate, which pulled in a record 24 million viewers. When Trump took offense to her tough questions, he insinuated that she treated him unfairly because she was menstruating.

"You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever," Trump told CNN afterward.

But the furore only gilded her star. Fox said her first post-debate program pulled in nearly 11 million viewers -- its highest ever.
(Adds comments about tax burden)

MEXICO CITY, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Mexico's finance minister Luis Videgaray on Wednesday said the government is considering injecting more capital into state-owned oil company Pemex.

The government is also working with the firm to analyze specific cases where taxes may inhibit Pemex from making investments, Videgaray said in response to a question about whether Mexico could lower Pemex's tax burden.

Crude oil prices have fallen more than 70 percent since 2014, battering Pemex's balance sheet.

Deputy finance minister Miguel Messmacher said the government may let Pemex take on more debt, according to an interview with Bloomberg, without specifying a specific amount.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper; Editing by Bernard Orr)
joebelfiore-wp

Joe here  I wanted to comment because I think its useful for anyone working in tech.. or ASPIRING to work in tech.. to think about the trade-offs involved in what somehow appears as a dramatic decision! I suspect the significant majority of you will land on the same side of the issue that I have

My job for the last couple of years has been (1) to curate the PC experience for Windows PCs (including tablet devices) and (2) to curate the experience for Windows Phones. In both capacities, its very important for me to understand products like the iPhone and Android phones, which are heavily used by PC users around the world, and which represent the competition for Windows Phone. Consumers and business users expect their PCs and phones to work in concert so to satisfy our customers we need to consider the devices they use AS WELL AS the devices wed like them to use.

On a 9-month leave-of-absence, I have a HUGE AND UNUSUAL opportunity to get to know these products deeply. To understand the benefits and drawbacks of a full ecosystem like Windows, Android, iOS  you have to LIVE IN IT. You have to feel its strengths and weaknesses, be let down, be delighted. And you cant do that just playing around with a device for a couple of days. You have to learn the UI, upload your photos, use cross-device apps and tools all of it.

When we are developing a release of Windows, we MUST use it all the time, on all devices, in order to find the bugs, iterate the design. Theres really no choice or we cant build Windows as well as we should. On a leave-of-absence, there are tons of talented people doing that every day, which gives me the possibility of spending depth time on other devices, and using Windows very much like you Insiders do, without full knowledge of whats happening behind the curtain.

Furthermore, theres a lot of work happening at MS which integrates Windows PCs with iOS and Android devices like bringing Cortana to these phones so your intelligent assistant can help you whereever you are. I want to experience and understand all that work deeply too.

So  I think Vlad has it right when he says its OK. (Thank you, Vlad.) But, Id go farther and say itd be CRAZY not to! In fact, when I posted on FB that I was taking a leave, I did mention explicitly that I would do this and (horror of horrors) Ive followed through, spending a bunch of time using Google Maps, Spotify, Periscope, a MacBook, a Nexus phone, etc.

And.. in todays Microsoft, this practical, customer-focused attitude is well celebrated and supported. (and.. btw I love my Surface Book!)

Thats all from me. Back to quality time with my family, well, and thinking about the (still-obviously-so-entertaining) question of what I could do next with my hair
Moscow (AFP) - Russia's federal tourism agency on Wednesday issued a warning that Islamic State jihadists were planning to abduct Russian citizens in Turkey.

Turkish authorities have blamed IS for a suicide bombing in the heart of Istanbul's tourist district earlier this month that killed 10 Germans, one of a string of deadly attacks said to be the work of the jihadist group.

"According to the competent agencies, leaders of the IS terrorist group plan to take hostages from among Russian citizens in Turkey," the Russian agency said in a statement.

"Hostages can be transferred on to territories controlled by militants to hold public executions and to be used as human shields in combat with Syrian government and coalition forces," it added.

"Therefore we draw the attention of all independent tourists departing for Turkey to the necessity of taking all possible measures to ensure personal security."

Turkey had been Russia's number one foreign tourism destination for years but this came to an abrupt end following the shooting down of a Russian military plane by Turkish jets on the Syria-Turkey border in November.

The warning essentially targets all remaining Russian tourists in Turkey, as organised tours by travel agencies were banned by Moscow as part of a raft of retaliatory measures in the wake of the jet downing.

The incident sparked a crisis in relations between Moscow and Ankara, with the Kremlin accusing the Turkish leadership of essentially funding Islamic State jihadists.

Russia reintroduced entry visas for Turks and slapped sanctions on several Turkish products.

Russia has been conducting air strikes in Syria, its ally in the region since Soviet times, since September. Turkey meanwhile is part of a parallel US-led coalition targeting IS in the country.

The two countries have lately also clashed over the guest list for Syria peace talks set for later this week, with Moscow saying they would be pointless without Syrian Kurdish group the Democratic Union Party, which Ankara considers is linked to Kurdish rebels inside Turkey.
Diego Lunas third narrative feature directorial Mr. Pig is a road trip through Mexico, through the eyes of an American farmer. Danny Glover plays Ambrose, who on the edge of losing his farm, embarks on a road trip with his large prized pig to find him a new home south of the border. Maya Rudolph plays Ambroses daughter Eunice. Hes been evading her, and hasnt kept her in the fold on his health situation, which is deteriorating. For Glover, Mr. Pig was a connection to his past, while for Luna, Its a love letter to my father and at the same time to my country. Here the trio discuss their passion for the project. Theres one last screening left for Mr. Pig on Saturday at the Grand Theatre at 6:15PM.

Deadlines Sundance production team includes Leica Camera USA, Rotolight, Ben Turok and Sydney Cahoon as camera operators, John Kreidler as DP and Sal Castellanos as editor. Indignation screens Friday at the Redstone Cinema, Saturday at Perrys Egyptian Cinema and Sunday at The Grand Theatre.

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New York (AFP) - Just in case the US election isn't volatile enough, media mogul Rupert Murdoch on Wednesday goaded billionaire Michael Bloomberg into declaring a late White House run that would likely send TV ratings even higher.

"This is Bloomberg's last chance. You never know until your hat is in the ring! Events change everything, especially during elections," tweeted the 84-year-old Australian tycoon, newly engaged to Mick Jagger's ex, Jerry Hall.

It is not the first time that Murdoch has publicly encouraged the billionaire founder of the Bloomberg financial news agency to run for president.

"With Trump becoming very serious candidate, it's time for next billionaire candidate, Mike Bloomberg to step into ring. Greatest mayor," he wrote in one of two tweets on August 24 praising the former New York mayor.

His latest intervention comes as Bloomberg reportedly weighs whether to launch a late bid as an independent, appalled by the rise of Donald Trump on the extreme right-wing of the Republican party and troubled by Hillary Clinton's struggle to contain the left-leaning Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

On Thursday, Trump was locked in an all-out row with Murdoch's Fox News, snubbing the next Republican debate because the TV channel refused to pull anchor Megyn Kelly from the moderating team after the two clashed publicly in August.

Associates told The New York Times that Bloomberg has given himself until early March to make a decision, pending the outcome in Iowa and New Hampshire, which next month cast the first nomination votes in the 2016 presidential race.

Close to Wall Street, a hawk on security but heavily involved in the gun control campaign, favorable to immigration reform and socially liberal, Bloomberg is an unusual mix for an American seeking high office.

As mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013, he pushed through a strong health agenda, banning smoking in bars, restaurants and public spaces, and forcing restaurant chains to put calorie counts on menus.

Trump, the frontrunner among Republicans, reacted with glee at the prospect of going up against a fellow Manhattan tycoon. "I know Michael very well and would love to compete with him," he told CNN.
By Tori Richards

SANTA ANA, Calif. (Reuters) - A Southern California sheriff on Tuesday acknowledged lapses in security at the jail where three inmates escaped over the weekend, one of them a convicted killer wanted for the mutilation torture of a victim.

Their disappearance early Friday from a maximum-security wing of the Men's Central Jail in Santa Ana, about 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Los Angeles, went unnoticed for about 16 hours, following a late-night head count of inmates, the sheriff's chief spokesman, Lieutenant Jeff Hallock said.

"The sheriff is extremely troubled as to the length of the time that the inmates were unaccounted for," Hallock told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.

Authorities remained tight-lipped about details of the manhunt as the County Board of Supervisors increased the reward for information leading to the escapees' capture, to $200,000 from $50,000.

One of the escapees, Hossein Nayeri, 37, had been jailed in Orange County since he was extradited to California from Prague in 2013 after fleeing to Iran to avoid kidnapping and torture charges. In that case, the victim was burned with a blowtorch and his penis was cut off.

Nayeri escaped the jail four days ago with two other inmates, both reputed to be connected with Vietnamese-American street gangs: Jonathan Tieu, 20, who is charged with murder, and Bac Duong, 43, charged with attempted murder.

The Orange County Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail and is leading the manhunt, has said all three men should be considered extremely dangerous.

One prosecutor compared Nayeri to fictional psychopath Hannibal Lecter from the film "Silence of the Lambs."

"He is sophisticated, incredibly violent and cunning," senior deputy district attorney Heather Brown said in an interview in the Orange County Register.

District Attorney Tony Rackauckas later issued a public rebuke of Brown, calling her comments "inappropriate, uninformed and rash."

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Authorities said the men cut through steel grating inside the jail, climbed through a plumbing conduit and up to the roof of the building, then lowered themselves on bedsheets to the ground and vanished.

Hallock said inmate access to the rooftop remained "one of many design flaws" of the detention center.

Sheriff's officials appealed to the area's Vietnamese immigrant community on Monday for help in locating the inmates.

Hallock said the men could be armed but declined to disclose what mode of transportation they might be using. Authorities were investigating whether the prisoners had help inside or outside the detention center, he said.

(Reporting by Tori Richards; Writing and additional reporting Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham and Richard Chang)
In 1941, in the height of World War II, a Norwegian woman named Astrid was hit in the brain with shrapnel during a raid. Two years later she met with the neurologist Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn, who noticed right away that despite her fluent Norwegian, she had such a decided foreign accent that I took her for German or French, he wrote.

He wasnt the only one to make that mistake. The Germans had been occupying Norway since 1940, and though Astrid had never been out of the country, her accent made her seem like the opposition to her neighbors.

She complained bitterly of constantly being taken for a German in the shops, where consequently the assistants would sell her nothing, Monrad-Krohn wrote.

Astrid was not the first-ever recorded case of foreign-accent syndrome (that would be a Parisian man who developed an Alsatian accent after a stroke, a case first presented in 1907), but her case study was particularly detailed. Monrad-Krohn called her condition dysprosody, prosody being the elements of language other than the actual words being spoken (intonation, rhythm, stress, etc.). Astrid still had prosodythat is, her speech was not monotonousbut it was different than that of a typical Norwegian speaker.

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The term foreign-accent syndrome was coined in 1982 by the neurolinguist Harry Whitaker, and it is, admittedly, a lot clearer than dysprosody. Its a rare condition, but an interesting one, and there have been more than 100 case studies published. The most recent appeared in Case Reports in Psychiatry this year.

The patient was a 34-year-old African American U.S.-born single female, the report begins. She was brought to the psychiatry emergency room after assaulting her mothers landlady, who she believed had cursed her using voodoo. Her family had a history of schizophrenia, and she was diagnosed with the condition herself upon this visit. She also spoke with a British accent. She substituted th for f and w for wh as well as t for d and ai for ei, the researchers write. Unlike Astrid, though, she spoke in a bit of a monotone.

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She refused medication, continued to have homicidal ideations toward her mothers landlady, and eventually was transferred to long-term inpatient care. The researchers plan to follow up with the inpatient facility to see if it ever reverts back to American.

Astrid and this new patient represent the two different types of foreign-accent syndrome that have been reportedneurogenic and psychogenic. Neurogenic foreign-accent syndrome is more common, and comes after someones brain has been damaged, either through a stroke or from traumatic brain injury. Exactly how this leads to changed speech is unclear, but the damage is often located in the middle cerebral artery and brain regions associated with speech, especially in the left hemisphere.

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In psychogenic foreign-accent syndrome, there isnt any identifiable brain damage, but the person has some kind of psychiatric disorder, such as schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, or conversion disorder, as well as the accent. In the cases of psychosis, the new accent persists throughout the entire episode and may disappear after the psychotic episode subsides, the researchers write. The patient in their study had a history of losing the accent after a psychotic episode had passed, though they didnt observe that during her stay in the hospital. They also note that only recently has it been discovered that foreign accent syndrome can be psychogenic.

Theres also a mixed type of foreign-accent syndrome, which may have some neurogenic and some psychogenic characteristics.

Theres a ton of variability in how the syndrome presentspeople can have changes in various aspects of prosody. Different listeners may hear different accents when the same person speaks (recall that Monrad-Krohn thought at first that Astrid was speaking with a German or French accent), or they may detect hints of the persons original accent flickering under the new one. Patients may also have trouble putting sentences together, or may stress the wrong words or syllables.

Foreign-accent syndrome is similar to aphasia, a communication disorder that can cause a variety of speech problems, often after a stroke or brain injury. But that doesnt explain psychogenic foreign-accent syndrome. And, if patients speech is just impaired, why would that register as a different accent?

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In 2013, Lyndsey Nickels, a professor of cognitive science at Macquarie University, explained the phenomenon in The Conversation, using a highly-covered case in which an Australian woman named Leanne Rowe woke up sounding French after a car accident. Vowels are very susceptible, she wrote, to being distorted by slight differences in tongue, lip, or jaw placement. Different languages have different vowels, and within a language one of the main differences between accents is in the vowels. It may be that the speech changes brought on by brain injury, or by psychiatric problems, are just familiar enough to remind us of accents.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
NASA will honor the memories of its fallen astronauts during a series of special ceremonies Thursday (Jan. 28), the 30th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy.

The agency will pay tribute to Challenger's seven-member crew, as well as the three astronauts lost in 1967's Apollo 1 fire and the seven space flyers who died when the shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003. Ceremonies will occur during NASA's annual Day of Remembrance, on Thursday.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Deputy Administrator Dava Newman and other senior officials will participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery Thursday at 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT). Another wreath-laying ceremony will occur at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Visitor Complex in Florida; you can watch this latter ceremony live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV. [Fallen Heroes of Space Exploration: A Memorial (Gallery)]

Other NASA centers, including Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Johnson Space Center in Houston and Glenn Research Center in Ohio, will host their own events to mark the somber occasion.

The three NASA tragedies occurred just a few days apart on the calendar, over the span of 36 years. The Apollo 1 fire broke out in the command module of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on Jan. 27, 1967, while the three astronauts were participating in a launch pad test at Cape Kennedy (now known as Cape Canaveral) Air Force Station in Florida. All three men were killed.

Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launching from KSC on Jan. 28, 1986, killing mission commander Francis "Dick" Scobee; pilot Mike Smith; mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ron McNair and Ellison Onizuka; and payload specialists Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe (who had been chosen to fly via NASA's "Teacher in Space" program).

An investigation later determined that Challenger was doomed by a failure in an "O-ring" seal on the shuttle's right-hand solid rocket booster. Cold weather played a role in the failure, by hardening the usually flexible O-ring.

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Columbia was lost toward the very end of its mission, breaking apart upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. A piece of insulating foam had broken off Columbia's huge external fuel tank during the shuttle's launch two weeks earlier, and investigators later determined that the chunk damaged the orbiter's left wing, allowing hot atmospheric gases to enter the wing's interior.

All seven astronauts on board  mission commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; payload commander Michael Anderson; mission specialists David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark; and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, from the Israel Space Agency  were killed.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Copyright 2016 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Only days after falling foul of government censors in Kenya, streaming giant Netflix has been blocked in Indonesia. The great disrupter has been accused of not obtained necessary local permits and submitting content for censorship approval. Indonesias largest telco, Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom), which is majority owned by the Indonesian state, has blocked Netflix from all of its platforms. The move is a blow to Netflix given that Indonesia, with its population of 250 million, is the worlds most populous Muslim nation and the fourth most populous country in the world. Indonesia also reps a growing Asian market for content providers.

The move underscores the challenges Netflix will face in truly securing its ambition to be a global TV network, as chief Reed Hastings described it recently.

The Indonesian Censorship Agency (LSF) had previously recommended a ban on Netflix for not submitting its content for inspection, while Indonesias communications and information ministry had also called on Netflix to adhere to the countrys licensing requirements  namely owning a legal entity in the country, having an Indonesian partner, or applying to the ministry for a special license. Much of the problems stem from defining exactly what Netflix is: Authorities in Indonesia are seeking to classify the company as a traditional TV network, thereby obliging it to submit to local broadcasting regulations. Netflix execs, on the other hand, see it as an IPTV platform, thereby exempting them from those limits.

Indonesia

Netflix is an Internet television network, not a traditional broadcaster, said Netflix in a statement. Services delivered over the Internet present all sorts of novel questions for policymakers. To watch anything on Netflix, consumers have to subscribe. We empower consumers to make smart viewing choices by providing details on the titles on Netflix, including ratings and episode synopses. We also provide parental controls.

Only days ago, Netflix was blasted by Kenyas film classification board for showing shockingly explicit eroticism and accused of also operating without the necessary license. It will be against our mandate to allow our children to get ruined by inappropriate content in the name of profit, the Kenya Film Classification Board said in a statement. As a progressive country, we cannot afford to be passive recipient of foreign content that could corrupt the moral values of our children and compromise our national security.

Internet companies do not need to obtain a license in Kenya, while broadcasters do. As part of the Netflix Everywhere drive, Hastings said on January 6 that Netflix had expanded into 130 new countries including Russia, India and in the Middle East.

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NIAMEY (Reuters) - Niger has awarded a permit to GoviEx Niger Holdings Ltd., the Niger branch of GoviEx, to exploit uranium for investments worth $676 million at the 243-km Madaouela Project in the Agadez region, according to a government statement. The landlocked West African country is a major uranium producer and the ore is central to France's nuclear energy program. Niamey also granted four permits for uranium exploration to GoviEx Niger Holding Ltd. and two other companies, said the statement, which is read on public television. French state-owned nuclear company Areva also operates in the central Nigerien region. The relationship has been fraught; in April its workers launched a strike before a court declared it to be illegal. Niger is one of the world's poorest countries and is ranked 188 of 188 in the U.N. Human Development Index. (Reporting by Abdoulaye Massalaki; Writing by Makini Brice)
Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - At least 13 people were killed on Wednesday when three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok, where Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls.

The blasts happened at about midday (1100 GMT) as the remote town in Borno state was packed with traders from surrounding villages for the weekly market, Chibok elder Ayuba Chibok told AFP.

"Ten died on the spot and another one died on the way to hospital," said health worker Dazzban Buba, who volunteered to treat the injured at hospital.

"A woman and a child died as they were being admitted (to hospital), so now the death toll stands at 13. Thirty others were injured, 21 critically."

The blasts bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has repeatedly hit "soft" civilian targets such as markets, mosques and bus stations as well as military and civilian vigilante checkpoints.

Chibok came to prominence in April 2014 when Islamist fighters stormed a boarding school and kidnapped 276 girls, causing global outrage.

Fifty-seven girls managed to escape in the immediate aftermath but 219 are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video in May that year.

Chibok was briefly overrun by the Islamic State group-allied rebels in November 2014 but recaptured by the military after several days.

Ayuba Chibok and Buba both said Wednesday's blasts were suicide attacks and had prompted terrified residents to lock themselves inside their homes or flee in fear of repeat attacks.

Buba said the first explosion, at a checkpoint where people coming into the town were being searched, was thought to have been carried out by a young boy.

But identifying the attacker's age was difficult, as only his legs were recovered.

The second, at the market, and a third nearby were carried out by women, he added.

- Lull in attacks -

Buba said he rushed to help his brother who was injured in the first blast in the Bamzir Road area of the town.

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The second blast happened shortly afterwards, fitting a pattern of Boko Haram suicide attacks with multiple bombers setting off their devices almost simultaneously.

But Buba said it was still unclear whether the third bomber deliberately detonated her explosives or whether the device was triggered when troops opened fire as he fled.

The 30 injured were mostly suffering from burns and fractures, and that nine had been discharged, he added.

President Muhammadu Buhari, in Kenya on a three-day state visit, made no direct mention of the Chibok attack at a memorial service to commemorate Kenyan soldiers killed by Shebab militants.

But he told the congregation: "Terrorists should not have a place in our communities, villages, towns, cities and countries.

"We must all rise against the culture of intolerance, hatred and extremist ideologies, which drive terrorism."

Recent weeks have seen a lull in Boko Haram attacks, with only three recorded in Nigeria this month but those that have occurred underline the difficulty in protecting hard-to-reach rural areas.

The insurgents raided a village in Yobe state on Sunday, killing one man, while on January 11, another raid in the Adamawa state town of Madagali left seven dead.

Seven people were killed in a raid and suicide bomb attack in Izgeki village on January 5. Gunmen also looted food and burnt a large part of Nchiha village near Chibok earlier the same day.

On December 6, there was a similar attack in Takulashi village, also near Chibok, which again saw fighters raid food and steal more than 200 cattle.

Buhari on December 24 declared the rebels were "technically" defeated but at least 66 people were then killed in raids and suicide bombings in the days following.

According to an AFP tally, more than 1,650 people have been killed since Buhari came to power in May last year, vowing to crush the insurgency, which has left at least 17,000 dead since 2009.

On Monday, 32 people were killed when at least three suicide bombers blew themselves up at a market in Bodo village in northern Cameroon.
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea may be preparing to launch a long-range missile as soon as in a week, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported early on Thursday, citing an unnamed Japanese government official. The official cited signs of possible preparations for a missile launch based on analysis of satellite imagery of the North's Tongchang-ri missile test site on its west coast. The report comes amid discussions among U.N. Security Council members for fresh sanctions against the North after it conducted its fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6. The North is already under sanctions for its nuclear and missile programmes. North Korea last conducted a long-range rocket launch in late 2012, successfully putting an object into orbit in what is believed by experts to be part of its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The North is also seen to be working to miniaturise a nuclear warhead to mount on a missile, but many experts say it is still some time away from perfecting the technology. The Japanese government source said a missile launch could occur in about a week at the earliest, Kyodo reported. It gave no other details about the satellite imagery analyses. On Wednesday in Beijing, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed on the need for a significant new U.N. Security resolution against the North but there were few signs of concrete progress. North Korea said on Jan. 6 that it exploded a hydrogen bomb, although the United States and other governments and experts voiced scepticism that it had made such a technological advance. (Reporting by Ju-min Park and Jack Kim; Editing by Tony Munroe, Bernard Orr)
Oslo (AFP) - When times get tough, it never hurts to have 700 billion euros stashed away like Norway does in the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund to cushion the blow of plunging oil prices.

Oslo has prudently tucked away most of its oil money since the 1990s in order to be able to finance its generous welfare state indefinitely.

Invested in stocks, bonds and real estate, the fund is now worth around 6.96 trillion kroner (734 billion euros, $794 billion), equivalent to around six annual budgets or more than 137,000 euros for each of the country's 5.2 million inhabitants.

"We sold a lot of oil when the prices were high and saved a lot of the money we received," explained Ragnar Torvik, economics professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

"As a result, the Norwegian economy is well-equipped to withstand a drop in the oil price seeing as the latter has little impact on public finances," he added.

But it is strictly forbidden to touch the riches in what Norwegians call both the "oil fund" and the "pension fund" with governments only allowed to tap the returns, estimated at around 4.0 percent, and not the capital.

The sums at the authorities' disposal swell as the fund continues to grow, fuelled by new oil revenues and the return on investment. And it has even grown so fast the current rightwing government only intends to use 2.8 percent of its nest egg for 2016.

- 'Not a crisis fund' -

"It's not a crisis fund. It's a fund that is supposed to bring a regular contribution to the state budget," explained Handelsbanken economist Knut Anton Mork.

"This input... today finances about one-eighth of all public spending in Norway. It's a lot but it's independent of the oil price because it's the financial return that is behind that," he said.

The oil price has fallen from more than $110 a barrel in the summer of 2014 to around $30 today, but the only financial impact for Norway is that the fund's growth curve has slowed.

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"It's important because it determines the size that the fund will end up being. We thought it would continue to grow for a long time but if the oil price remains low for a long time, that won't be the case," Mork said.

While public finances have not been affected by the low oil price, it's a different story entirely for the real economy: oil investments have declined, growth is sluggish, and the unemployment rate, at 4.6 percent, is higher than it has been in more than a decade -- even though it remains the envy of many countries.

Since the start of 2014, almost 30,000 jobs have been cut in the oil sector, including at oil and gas giant Statoil. Stavanger, until recently Norway's thriving oil capital, is in the doldrums.

To kick-start business, the government has presented an expansionary budget and the central bank has slashed its key rate in half. Partly compensating for the decline in oil income, the Norwegian krone has weakened considerably, boosting competitiveness in other sectors.

- Black gold's hold -

"As a whole, the Norwegian economy is not in crisis," Finance Minister Siv Jensen said on Monday.

"But it's a crisis for the regions, the sectors, the companies and the families affected by the long-term structural transformation of the economy," she said.

Aware that its oil and gas reserves are on the decline and that the deposits that remain are often expensive -- even too expensive -- to exploit, the country has for several years said it intends to break its dependence on black gold.

As it hopes to convert its economy into one based on renewable energies, new technologies and fish farming, the drop in the oil price has only sped up thoughts in this direction.
On Tuesday, the Danish parliament overwhelmingly passed a bill seemingly designed to solidify Denmarks reputation as Western Europes least attractive country for refugeesa hard-earned title at a time when many of its neighbors are tightening border controls as people continue to flee conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. The law empowers Danish authorities to seize any assets exceeding $1,450 from asylum-seekers in order to help pay for the migrants subsistence in the country (items of sentimental value, such as wedding rings, are exempt). It also extends, from one year to three, the period that those who are resettled must wait to apply for family members to join them in Denmark.

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While Denmark has not traditionally been a magnet for immigration, it hasnt necessarily been an unwelcome place for migrants either. Over the course of the 20th century, the country of nearly 6 million became home to refugees and immigrants from the Soviet bloc, the Balkans, the Middle East, and beyond. Today, immigrants and their descendants account for 10 percent of the total population. Denmark has also been a prominent advocate for refugees and asylum-seekers. It was one of the first countries to become a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, and the Danish Refugee Councila humanitarian group partly funded by the Danish government and the Danish publicis actively involved in supporting refugees and internally displaced peoples around the world.

But the past year brought something different. In 2015, 21,000 people sought asylum in Denmarkup from 14,815 asylum applications in 2014 and 7,557 in 2013. (Denmark happens to be sandwiched between the two most popular European destinations for todays migrants and refugees: Germany and Sweden.) These are numbers that the Danish welfare statewhich guarantees free health care and education, among other benefits, to every citizenis struggling to handle.

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Danish officials have responded with a series of steps, many rather dramatic, that appear to be aimed at dissuading migrants from coming to Denmark in the first place. In August, the government cut social benefits to refugees and immigrants by 45 percent, in a move marketed as an integration benefit. To ensure the message was clearly received, the Danish government proceeded to advertise the benefit cut, as well as other government policies that asylum-seekers might find unappealing, in newspapers in Lebanon, which has a large refugee population. More recently, the government proposed moving refugees from urban housing to camps outside cities, an initiative that would shift the focus of government immigration policy to repatriation rather than integration, according to Reuters. A Danish city council mandated the placement of pork on municipal menus (observant Muslims dont eat pork), including at schools and daycare centers, while a Danish court fined a Danish man for driving five migrants through Denmark, from Germany to Sweden.

Why has the Danish government resorted to these rather passive-aggressive tactics, instead of simply sealing off its borders or issuing some blanket ban on granting asylum? As a member of the European Union and signatory to multiple UN conventions on the subject, Denmark has to offer ... an opportunity to somebody who is coming to their borders ... to be heard. If they make an asylum claim, the state has no choice but to adjudicate that claim, explained Demetrios Papademetriou, the president of the Migration Policy Institutes Europe center. The issue is whether youre offering them permanent protection  with all the benefits  or whether youre offering them temporary protection. And then, whether youre trying to sort of make it difficult and send messages back to would-be newcomers that this is not really a friendly place for you to come. (According to a UNHCR report, the legislation Denmark passed this week may still violate various UN conventions and EU law.)

This will open doors in other countries, perhaps not to go exactly where the Danes are going, but to go half of the way.

These moves bear the imprint, in part, of the right-wing, populist, anti-immigrant Danish Peoples Party (DPP), which has been Denmarks second-largest party since last years general election. While the DPP isnt a formal member of the ruling government, its support is essential for keeping the minority Liberal Party in power. But Papademetriou told me that stringent immigration policies and demands for newcomers to assimilate predate the DPPs rise, and have been present in Denmark for more than a decade. And these policies have considerable public support. One recent poll showed that 37 percent of voters opposed offering more residence permits to migrantsan increase of 17 percentage points since September. Another poll indicated that 70 percent of voters felt the refugee crisis constituted the most important issue on the political agenda.

Papademetriou distilled the general Danish attitude as such: I want to protect the fact that my country, a small country, is an extremely wealthy country; that it provides these exceptional benefits to its people; and I dont want to compromise my ability to receive those benefits simply because more and more people want to come in.

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But the people need to go somewhere. One upshot of the Danish governments recent actions is that they could encourage other European governments to adopt similarly restrictive measures. Some refugees in Switzerland have had to hand over assets valued at over 1,000 Swiss francs, and Germanys southern states have similar laws on the books. Papademetriou believes this will open doors in other countries  it gives them additional license, perhaps not to go exactly where the Danes are going, but to go half of the way, or three-quarters of the way towards it. Leaders in countries such as Austria, Germany, and Sweden, who are bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis, may note that Denmark executed its plan despite the critics, and that the critics then moved on.

Denmark, Papademetriou suggested, may not only be sending signals to would-be asylum-seekers: Its policies could convey a message that gradually will spread throughout the few countries that matter.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
The Obama Administration on Wednesday unveiled a new strategy for providing children from low-income families with greater access to subsidized meals during the summer months when the federal school lunch program is not available to many.

The plan includes issuing food stamp-style electronic benefit cards to young people to purchase meals over the summer to reduce hunger among the poor. At the same time, the Agriculture Department will launch a five-state demonstration project next fall that will for the first time use Medicaid data to locate and certify low-income students for free or reduced-price meals.

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The president intends to ask Congress next month for $12 billion to fund the program over the coming decade, but it is clear he will use whatever executive powers he has to move the project along. With time running out on his second term and few prospects left for bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, President Obama is stepping up his controversial use of executive orders to add to his domestic legacy.

On Monday, Obama announced he was unilaterally banning solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prison system. He asserted in a column he wrote for the Washington Post that the practice was overused and has the potential to lead to devastating, lasting psychological consequences.

He also outlined a series of other initiatives, including prohibiting federal corrections officials from punishing prisoners who commit low-level infractions with solitary confinement and expanding treatment for mentally ill inmates.

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This is not going to be a fertile period for legislation, thats for sure, William Galston, a government policy expert with the Brookings Institution, said on Wednesday in an interview.  So if he wants to maintain a sense of forward momentum, then hes going to have to use means other than traditional legislation to change what he thinks he can change.

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Congressional Republicans and conservative groups for years have denounced Obamas use of executive orders to break logjams or circumvent lawmakers  even while historically this president has made far less use of executive orders than many of his predecessors.

According to the American Presidency Project, Obama has signed 226 executive orders compared to 291 for Republican George W. Bush, 364 for Democrat Bill Clinton, 381 for Republican Ronald Reagan and 320 for Democrat Jimmy Carter, who only served four years in office.

Nonetheless, Republican congressional leaders, governors and presidential candidates have charged that the president has resorted to lawless, unconstitutional tactics to impose his will, and so far, the judiciaryincluding a federal appeals court  has agreed. The U.S. Appeals Court blocked one of Obamas actions on illegal immigration amnesty. The case will now go to the Supreme Court.

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Earlier this month, Obama announced measures to try to crack down on gun violence in the wake of the San Bernardino, California shootings and previous mass shootings at schools. Those include requiring dealers to conduct more background checks on perspective buyers and creating programs to address mental health problems. Those orders are being challenged in court by Freedom Watch and other gun-rights organizations.

Other unilateral executive actions related to implementation of the Affordable Care Act and a new Environmental Protection Agency crackdown on carbon emissions by coal-fired power plants will also be adjudicated in the courts.



Obama acknowledged in his final State of the Union address January 12 that he was running out of time to get anything more done, especially with the two parties vying for control of the White House and Congress.

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Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) told reporters this week that it was not essential that the Senate consider criminal justice reform this year, despite his keen interest in passing legislation. Cornyn appeared to be backing down in the face of resistance from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is locked in a tough race with billionaire Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.

If thats the case, Obama may resort to other executive actions to try to achieve his aims.

Roll Call reported this week that the administration has a number of additional executive orders up its sleeve, on everything from terrorist detention to campaign finance to environmental issues.

One possibility would be executive action creating a carbon cap and trade system to encourage industry to reduce carbon emissions contributing to global warming. Obama considered this approach early in his first term but then abandoned it after encountering strong congressional opposition.

Another even more controversial move would be to unilaterally close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, holding terror suspects dating back to the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. Obama has long vowed to close the facility, but he has encountered strong resistance over the years from conservative lawmakers and even his own Defense Department.

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Washington (AFP) - With a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons, Barack Obama is pushing to reform an overcrowded and expensive correctional system in a country that locks up more people per capita than any other nation.

In an op-ed piece published in Tuesday editions of The Washington Post, the US president -- who issued the ban via executive order -- confirmed he wanted to "rethink" the fate of some 100,000 prisoners who spend 23 of every 24 hours locked in a tiny cell.

He also announced executive actions barring corrections officials from dumping prisoners responsible for "low-level infractions" in solitary, where inmates are cut off from almost all human contact.

Obama's reforms are expected to affect about 10,000 inmates. He said he hoped they serve as a model for US states to rethink their rules about a practice which many say has devastating psychological effects.

"Solitary is profoundly mentally destructive, especially when administered to children and young adults," Fordham Law School professor John Pfaff told AFP.

Obama cited the "heartbreaking" case of New Yorker Kalief Browder, who spent nearly two years in solitary confinement at the city's huge, violent Rikers Island jail complex as a teenager. He was released without ever going on trial.

His alleged crime? He stole a backpack.

Browder, unable to recover, committed suicide when he was just 22.

- 'Second chances' -

Solitary confinement "is not going to make us safer," Obama said last year, as he started looking at prison reform.

"The social science shows that an environment like that is often more likely to make inmates more alienated, more hostile, potentially more violent."

This is why Obama is also seeking to cut the number of people incarcerated, curb the use of solitary confinement for the overall prison population and end mandatory minimum sentences.

Stressing that America is a nation of "redemption" and "second chances," he limited to 60 days the first solitary confinement period for a first-time offender.

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In addition to the huge financial burden it places on US taxpayers, the prison system also has an enormous population of some 2.2 million detainees. That accounts for about a quarter of the world's prison population.

The cells are filled with drug addicts and the mentally ill, who have almost no chances of returning to society if they spend time in solitary confinement.

For those detainees, Obama hopes to offer alternatives to solitary.

- 'Common humanity' -

But unveiling these plans just months before a presidential election, as Republicans seeking the White House have lashed out at Obama's weakness, is also a gamble for the president.

In large part, they go against the tide of what a large part of the American population believes about crime and punishment -- mainly, that keeping people in prison longer, and sometimes in isolation, reduces crime rates.

Most Americans -- 56 percent, according to a 2013 YouGov poll -- say that solitary confinement, a practice in place for two centuries in the US, is an appropriate punishment in some circumstances.

In the 1980s and 1990s, stiffer penalties were put in place for a variety of crimes, leading to even more crowded prisons. Today, the US prison system is at more than 100 percent capacity, according to various groups researching the issue.

In choosing to enact his reforms through executive actions, rather than going through the legislative process in a Republican-dominated Congress, Obama is exposing himself to accusations of abuse of power.

Obama has already resorted to such measures on hot-button issues like gun control and immigration, in order to bypass a hostile Congress.

But "criminal justice reform is actually one thing that seems to have political support on both sides of the political aisle," said Matthew Hale of Seton Hall University.

"So while the president should expect some attacks of 'overreach' on the far right, he is probably safer with this executive action than he was on immigration, for example," Hale told AFP.

And Obama's prison reform is also highly symbolic, its efforts likely to have little real impact, since just 26 of the 200,000 federal inmates are juveniles.

"The policy directive, then, is aimed more at trying to inspire states to reform their policies towards juveniles," Pfaff said.

"In that sense, I think it is driven by an interest in 'common humanity'," he added, referring back to Obama's op-ed piece.
Washington (AFP) - The Pentagon has pledged to release part of a trove of photographs related to the abuse of prisoners at US detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, a top US rights group said Wednesday.

The move would be the latest step in a legal saga between the US military and the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a freedom of information lawsuit in 2004 seeking the release of some 2,000 photographs showing detainee mistreatment.

In a statement, the ACLU said the Pentagon had promised to post 198 of these images online by Friday.

Though the administration of President Barack Obama had said it would release the photos back in 2009, Congress passed an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act allowing for the images to be withheld if the defense secretary deemed them to threaten national security.

The US government opposes publishing the images because it fears they could provoke a violent backlash and place US forces and personnel overseas at heightened risk of attack.

In March 2015, a US judge ordered the government to release the photos, but the Pentagon appealed that ruling.

However, in November last year, Pentagon chief Ashton Carter declined to recertify 198 images as posing a risk to national security. Those are the pictures due to be released.

The ACLU said it would continue to seek the release of the remaining 1,800 or so images.

"We're still pressing our case for the remaining secret photos," the group said.

US soldiers were implicated in the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison when the US military ran it in 2004, a scandal that first broke when photos showing soldiers abusing detainees were published in US media.

Between 2004 and 2006, 11 soldiers -- including Lynndie England, who was seen smiling beside naked prisoners being subjected to sexual abuse -- were convicted in court martials.
LIMA (Reuters) - Peru's electoral committee said on Wednesday that it might bar a leading candidate from the presidential race if a university in Spain finds that plagiarism allegations against him are true. Cesar Acuna, a wealthy former governor and businessman, declined to provide immediate comment. His representatives said he would deliver a statement at 5pm (2200 GMT). The Complutense University of Madrid is investigating whether Acuna committed fraud in his 2009 doctor's thesis on education after Twitter users accused him of plagiarism when they said that parts of the thesis match previously-published texts without attribution. "If they withdraw or invalidate his diploma or title, obviously that would mean falsehood...he would be removed (from the race) if it's falsehood," Francisco Tavara, the president of Peru's National Jury of Elections, told reporters. Acuna is the owner of three private universities and has made improving education a central campaign pledge. His elimination from the presidential race would boost the chances of front-running candidate Keiko Fujimori - who competes with him for support among poorer voters - and other candidates hoping to garner enough support to face Fujimori in a run-off. Fujimori, the daughter of jailed ex-president Alberto Fujimori, has been drawing about a third of voter intent for the April 10 election. At least 50 percent of votes are needed to avoid a second-round contest in June. Acuna had 13 percent of support in an Ipsos survey this month, tying established politician Pedro Pablo Kuczynski who is popular among investors but has been slipping in polls. Acuna has promised to invest 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product in education and jumpstart slow economic growth. (Reporting By Mitra Taj; Editing by Alistair Bell)
Kevin Aboschs portrait, Potato #345.

Thats a lot of dough for a photo of a potato!

Photographer Kevin Abosch, known for taking portraits of celebrities like Johnny Depp and Steven Spielberg, sold a photograph he took of an Irish spud for a cool $1.5 million, Londons Sunday Times reported.

The selling price of the portrait, titled Potato #345, is a little absurd, Abosch told the paper. He said the deal with an unnamed European businessman came about over a dinner at his house in Paris.

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We had two glasses of wine, and he said, I really like that. Two more glasses of wine, and he said, I really want that, Abosch told the paper.

The deal was struck two weeks later. Abosch says its the most hes been paid for a portrait that wasnt commissioned.

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So why did he decide to photograph this particular spud? Abosch told the Times that the potato arrived at his house in a batch of organic vegetables in 2010. He took photos of a number of potatoes and isnt sure of the variety of this particular one.

I see commonalities between humans and potatoes that speak to our relationship as individuals within a collective species. Generally, the life of a harvested potato is violent and taken for granted. I use the potato as a proxy for the ontological study of the human experience, Abosch told the Irish Times.

There are two other prints of the potato  one in Aboschs private collection and another that was donated to an art museum in Serbia.

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LISBON (Reuters) - Five people in Portugal have tested positive for the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus after recent trips to Brazil, but none required admission to hospital, the National Health Institute (NHI) said on Thursday. "As of today we have five confirmed cases, all imported from Brazil. These people have not been hospitalised and do not require further medical attention as these are mild cases," said a spokesman for the institute. The NHI is in charge of all epidemiology tests in Portugal. The Zika virus is spread by the same Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits dengue fever and yellow fever. There is no vaccine or treatment for the virus, a close cousin of dengue, which normally causes mild fever and rash. Zika has been linked to mental defects at birth in thousands of children in Brazil. An estimated 80 percent of people infected have no symptoms, making it difficult for pregnant women to know whether they have been infected. Continental Portugal has not had any cases of locally-contracted viruses from Aedes aegypti, but there was an indigenous dengue outbreak on its Atlantic island of Madeira in 2012, the first dengue epidemic in Europe since the 1920s. Cases of Zika have been detected in Denmark and Britain and health experts say such cases are to be expected in Europe, given the scale of the outbreak in South America and the frequency of international travel. (Reporting by Andrei Khalip; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
By Anya George Tharakan (Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc forecast current-quarter profit below analysts' expectations as demand weakens for its chips used in mobile devices in a slowing market. The company, whose customers include Apple Inc, said it expected its mobile chip shipments to fall by 16-25 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. Qualcomm also expects 3G and 4G device shipments to decline by 4-14 percent, hurting its licensing revenue. The chipmaker's weak outlook comes a day after Apple forecast its first quarterly revenue drop in 13 years and reported the slowest-ever rise in iPhone shipments as the critical Chinese market shows signs of weakness. Qualcomm shares fell 3 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. The company trimmed its estimates for "premium tier shipments" due to "slower than expected sell-through at a large" customer, it said on a post-earnings conference call. Qualcomm's mobile chip shipments fell 10 percent in the first quarter, pulling down its equipment and services revenue by 21.6 percent. Revenue from licensing declined 10.4 percent. "I think on licensing it's getting really fuzzy; they're not suggesting any upside to licensing, which I think is what people really wanted to see before getting excited in the stock again," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told Reuters. Qualcomm said in December it had decided not to split its slowing chipmaking business from its technology licensing business. WEAK OUTLOOK Qualcomm forecast an adjusted profit of 90 cents to $1.00 per share for the second quarter, below the average analyst estimate of $1.01, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Its revenue forecast of $4.9 billion-$5.7 billion was also largely below analysts' expectations of $5.68 billion. The net income attributable to Qualcomm fell 24 percent to $1.50 billion, or 99 cents per share, in the quarter ended Dec. 27. (http://1.usa.gov/1OQ64UT) Excluding items, the company earned 97 cents per share, topping the average analyst estimate of 90 cents, as it aggressively slashed costs. Revenue fell 18.7 percent to $5.78 billion. Qualcomm shares were trading at $47.07 after the bell. Up to Wednesday's close, the stock had lost a third of its value in the past 12 months. (Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey)
Most people are well aware that privacy on social media is precarious. One high-ranking official in Georgia's Department of Education, however, apparently never got the memo. Jeremy Spencer, the state's associate superintendent of virtual instruction, was fired Tuesday after other state officials formally complained about Spencer's use of Facebook to proliferate discriminatory, offensive beliefs, Mashable reported Wednesday.

Maureen Downey, an education writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, managed to screen shot and publish several examples on the newspaper's website. Downey noted that the full range of Spencer's offensive posts encompassed an impressive variety of topics, including "minorities, guns, deportation of immigrants, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump."

"If I read one more thing about the Finland educational system," Spencer wrote in one Jan. 1 post, presumably in response to reports of Finland's educational success. "Not everybody in the U.S. public schools are white!"

Spencer praised comedian Jeff Foxworthy's derogative comment about Muslims and also failed to remove an image of a lynched black man a friend published in response to one of his comments.

Even when not blatantly racist, some of the education official's claims were clearly rooted in willful ignorance.

"As the Black Lives movement gains in influence, what we need to be reminded of is this group is angry over failed leftist policies that have let them down, not the police," Spencer wrote, also on Jan. 1. "What they really want is smaller government in their lives."

Spencer's actions were not just offensive to his Facebook friends, many of whom are also state officials, but also violated the Georgia Professional Standards Commission's Code of Ethics, according to ABC. On Tuesday, Georgia Schools Superintendent Richard Woods officially deemed these actions unacceptable and facilitated Spencer's resignation.

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"Like most people, I was disheartened and disgusted to see the posts made by Mr. Spencer on his Facebook page," Woods said, according to Downey. "These posts in no way reflect my opinions, or those of the Department of Education."

As Bryan Long of the progressive watchdog group Better Georgia concluded to ABC, "

h/t Mashable
By Michelle Nichols UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A Saudi-led coalition fighting in neighbouring Yemen has targeted civilians with air strikes and some of the attacks could be a crimes against humanity, United Nations sanctions monitors said in an annual report to the Security Council. The report by the U.N. panel that monitors the conflict in Yemen for the Security Council, seen by Reuters on Wednesday, sparked calls by rights groups for the United States and Britain to halt sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia that could be used in such attacks. The panel of experts documented 119 coalition sorties "relating to violations of international humanitarian law" and said that "many attacks involved multiple air strikes on multiple civilian objects." The U.N. experts said all parties to the conflict in Yemen were violating international humanitarian law. They said that in certain cases the violations by the coalition were conducted in a "widespread and systemic manner" and therefore could qualify as crimes against humanity. The U.N. experts recommended the 15-member Security Council consider establishing a Commission of Inquiry to investigate violations of international law. The Saudi U.N. mission was not immediately available for comment. "The U.S. and UK governments should immediately halt the transfer of any arms to the Saudi-led coalition that might be used for such violations, and they should back an international investigation into abuses committed by all sides," said Philippe Bolopion of international rights group Human Rights Watch. The experts also said the Houthi rebels and their allies - forces loyal to former Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh - had conducted a systemic pattern of attacks against civilians, homes and hospitals and that these could be crimes against humanity. The coalition began a military campaign in March to prevent Houthi rebels, whom it sees as a proxy for Iran, from taking complete control of Yemen after seizing much of the north. The Houthis accuse the coalition of launching a war of aggression. Nearly 6,000 people have been killed since the coalition entered the conflict in March, almost half of them civilians. British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament on Wednesday that he would look at the U.N. report but that Britain followed "the strictest rules for arms exports of almost any country anywhere in the world." State Department spokesman Mark Toner, declined to comment on the substance of the U.N. report as it had not yet been publicly released, but he said the United States was also concerned about serious allegations of abuse. He called on all sides to abide by international humanitarian law, "including the obligation that they distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects, and to take all feasible actions to minimize harm to civilians." U.S. and Saudi officials are continuing to work on a $1.29 billion sale of U.S. precision munitions approved in November, which seeks in part to replenish bombs and missiles used by the Saudis in Yemen. It should be finalised in coming months. The U.N. experts are also investigating a potential transfer of anti-tank guided missiles to the Houthi and Saleh forces - in violation of a U.N. arms embargo - after a shipment was seized by U.S. and Australian warships off Oman on Sept. 25. They said the shipment originated from Iran and their inquiry continues. (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed and Kylie MacLellan; Editing by Sandra Maler)
THE HAGUE, Netherlands, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Shareholders of Royal Dutch Shell (Xetra: R6C1.DE - news) approved the company's $49 billion takeover of smaller rival BG Group (LSE: BG.L - news) at a special stakeholder meeting in The Hague on Wednesday.

As many as 83.08 percent of shareholders voted in favour of the deal, one of the largest in the energy sector in the past decade.

A total of 16.92 percent of shareholders opposed the deal. Shell (LSE: RDSB.L - news) needed a majority of positive shareholder votes to seal the deal. (Reporting by Karolin Schaps; editing by Jason Neely)
By Sai Sachin R and Sarah McBride (Reuters) - VMware Inc forecast 2016 revenue and profit below analysts' expectations, suggesting the software maker's strong growth in new businesses was not enough to compensate for weakness in its traditional server-virtualization software. The Palo Alto, California-based company also said it would cut about 800 jobs. At the same time, VMWare, whose parent, EMC Corp is being acquired by Dell Inc [DI.UL], appointed EMC Chief Financial Officer Zane Rowe as its finance chief, replacing Jonathan Chadwick. VMWare, like many technology providers, is struggling to keep pace with its customers' efforts to move key computing infrastructure to the cloud, meaning remote data centers. VMware shares fell 5 percent in extended trading on Tuesday, while EMC shares declined 1.4 percent. The company, whose flagship product helps customers cut costs by running multiple operating systems on a single server, has been hurt by slowing economic growth in markets outside the United States, which account for nearly half of its revenue. In particular, it cited weak bookings for its software in China, Russia, and Brazil. But the company noted some bright spots in newer businesses, such as NSX, which makes networking more efficient. That business is on track to generate $600 million annually, VMWare said, up from $200 million a year ago. Customers like NSX in part because it provides an additional sever-by-server layer of security, on top of precautions at the data center overall, said Martin Casado, general manager for networking and security at VMWare. "If someone gets over the wall, you still have a guard at every house," he said. "It can limit the ability of the breach to grow." The company forecast revenue of $6.79 billion-$6.94 billion and an adjusted profit of $4.07-$4.16 per share for 2016. Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $7.21 billion and earnings of $4.20 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. VMware, which had nearly 19,200 employees at the end of 2015, said it would take a charge of $55 million-$65 million in the first half of this year related to the job cuts. VMware's lackluster forecast overshadowed strong fourth-quarter results. The company's net income rose 14.4 percent to $373 million, or 88 cents per share, in the quarter ended Dec. 31, helped by a 12.6 percent jump in its services revenue. Revenue increased 9.7 percent to $1.87 billion, topping the average analyst estimate of $1.85 billion. Excluding items, VMware earned $1.26 per share, beating analysts' expectations by a cent. (Reporting by Sai Sachin R in Bengaluru and Sarah McBride in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey, Diane Craft)
Hunters heading to South Africa to notch the leopard category on Africas Big Five big-game scorecard will have to take 2016 off.

Thats because the countrys Department of Environmental Affairs announced Tuesday it will not issue permits to hunt the beautiful big cat this season, effectively banning hunting for the year.

The announcement follows a recommendation by the countrys Scientific Authority that found that trophy hunting and the illegal fur trade are the main threats to the leopards survival, whose population remains unknown.

The fact that [South Africa] is concerned about its leopard population enough to forgo the revenue those hunting permits would have generated in 2016 suggests they are serious about protecting their wildlife and ensuring its long-term survival, said Kathleen Garrigan, a spokesperson for the African Wildlife Foundation.

South Africa is allowed to issue up to 150 permits a year to foreign leopard hunters, as approved under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. But without a clear picture of the size and dispersal of South Africas leopard population, hunting puts the big cats at risk.

RELATED: Cecil the Lions Death Reveals Americans Big Role in Trophy Hunting

The fear is that trophy hunting may be putting undue pressure on the countrys leopards, Garrigan said. This would be in addition to other threats, such as habitat loss, conflict with humans, and demand for leopard skins.

The secretive, mainly nocturnal cats roam from the desert to the rainforest. That wide range and their reclusive habits make leopards difficult for researchers to track and study.

Government figures showed 124 leopards were legally killed by trophy hunters in 2009 and 2010, with an additional 78 leopards killed under the damage-causing animal permit, which allows South African landowners to shoot nuisance leopards preying on their livestock.

How long South Africa will keep the ban in place is unknown. Officials are expected to reevaluate it at the end of this year, once hunting operators have had a chance to draft new standards and methods to ensure CITES compliance.

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Zambia imposed a ban on lion and leopard hunting in 2013 but lifted it in 2015. Officials claim the country couldnt fund its wildlife programs after losing its share of the multimillion-dollar trophy hunting industry. Hunters will pay as much as $25,000 for a shot at a lion, and that revenue can benefit local communities and wildlife conservation efforts.

But the billions of dollars from nonlethal wildlife tourism dwarf the millions of dollars African countries can make off foreign hunters.

I don't want to devalue [legal sport hunting] because it brings dollars to the government, Jeff Flocken, North American regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told NPR in 2015. But it pales in comparison to all the people who go to Africa to responsibly view wildlife. Nature tourism generates 13 to 15 times more revenue than trophy hunting.

Related stories on TakePart:





 Zimbabwes Most Famous Lion Is Now a Hunting Trophy

 Delta Air Lines Bans Big Game Hunting Trophies

 The Hydro Dam Boom Could Devastate Tropical Wildlife

Original article from TakePart
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea said on Wednesday it suspected North Korea of attempting cyber attacks against targets in the South, following a nuclear test by the North this month that defied United Nations sanctions. South Korea has been on heightened military and cyber alert since the Jan. 6 test, which Pyongyang called a successful hydrogen bomb test, although U.S. officials and experts doubt that it managed such a technological advance. "At this point, we suspect it is an act by North Korea," Jeong Joon-hee, a spokesman of the South's Unification Ministry, told a news briefing, when asked about reports that the North might have attempted cyber attacks. Authorities were investigating, Jeong said, but did not provide further details. Last week, South Korean President Park Geun-hye said the scope of threats from North Korea was expanding to include cyber warfare and the use of drones to infiltrate the South. North Korea has been using balloons to drop propaganda leaflets in the South, amid heightened tension on the Korean peninsula since the nuclear test. Since the test, there have been unconfirmed news reports that the computer systems of some South Korean government agencies and companies had been infected with malicious codes that might have been sent by the North. Defectors from the North have previously said the country's spy agency, run by the military, operates a sophisticated cyber-warfare unit that attempts to hack, and sabotage, enemy targets. South Korea and the United States blamed North Korea for a 2014 cyber attack on Sony Pictures that crippled its systems and led to the leaks of unreleased films and employee data. At the time, the company was set to release the film, "The Interview", featuring a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea has denied the allegation. In 2013, cybersecurity researchers said they believed North Korea was behind a series of attacks against computers at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies. (Reporting by Ju-min Park and Jack Kim; Editing by Tony Munroe)
MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish police arrested nine people on Wednesday accused of belonging to and collaborating with a criminal and terrorist organization due to connections with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Interior Ministry said in a statement. The PKK, which is fighting for autonomy for Turkey's Kurds, is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. The decades-long conflict has cost more than 40,000 lives. Of those arrested, eight were from Spain and one from Turkey, according to the statement. The operation, which remains open, also searched 11 houses during dawn raids in Madrid, Valencia and Bilbao, the ministry said. "Those arrested, in collaboration with other residents in other European countries, supplied the necessary infrastructure to send people to join the ranks of the People's Protection Units (YPG) or the armed wing of the organization," the ministry said. Including the arrests on Wednesday, Spain has detained 19 people accused of belonging to the PKK since 2013, according to the ministry. (Reporting by Paul Day; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of U.S. states led by coal producer West Virginia and oil producer Texas on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put a hold on President Barack Obama's plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants to combat climate change. The 26 states filed a stay application with U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts after an appeals court in Washington declined last week to block Obama's Clean Power Plan while litigation over its lawfulness goes ahead. "If this court does not enter a stay, the plan will continue to unlawfully impose massive and irreparable harms upon the sovereign states, as well as irreversible changes in the energy markets," lawyers for the states said in the latest filing. There is no immediate deadline by which Roberts must act on the request. He is likely to ask the Obama administration to file a response. He can then act on the application by himself or circulate it among the eight other Supreme Court justices. The states and several major business groups in October launched legal challenges seeking to block the Obama administration's proposal to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Carbon dioxide is considered a so-called greenhouse gas that contributes to global climate change. The White House said the Clean Power Plan establishes the first-ever national standards to limit carbon pollution from power plants. The plan also mandates a shift to renewable energy from coal-fired electricity. More than a dozen other states and the National League of Cities, which represents more than 19,000 U.S. cities, back the Environmental Protection Agency's rule. The rule aims to lower carbon emissions from the country's power plants by 2030 to 32 percent below 2005 levels. It is the main tool for the United States to meet the emissions reduction target it pledged at U.N. climate talks in Paris in December. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is due to hear oral arguments in the case on June 2.
Perhaps your boss is an idiot, and maybe you've always known it. Or maybe he or she is a fair, enlightened despot. In any case, science says that if they're the top dog in work or life, they probably don't play well with others.

According to a recent study published in the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the everyday leaders who walk among us may be good at barking orders at subordinates, but suffer major deficiencies when working with other leaders as peers.

"Leaders or individuals who have lots of power tend to be effective individually leading teams," , a co-author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley told Mic. "So paradoxically  or worryingly  when you put a bunch of leaders into teams to work together, things fall apart and they struggle to make decisions and work effectively together."

Just another day in the Ukrainian parliament.

To measure the very qualitative data, control groups were created to address collaborative tasks. In one case executives from a healthcare company on a retreat were divided into several groups reflecting their varying degrees of authority within the company. When the executives were given a fictional task to complete, senior leadership proved the least adept.

"They struggle to focus on the actual task itself, they just want their voice to be heard," Hildreth said. "They also share less information with each other."

It wasn't all bad news for your boss, however. In tasks that required less collaboration, leaders proved more nimble, generating more creative ideas and staying on tough tasks for longer. According to Hildreth, the genesis for the study came from his own work in the private sector at financial consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"I worked with the CEO and the global leadership teams," he said. "Sitting in those meetings I observed leaders often struggle when they come together."

So is this a story of the triumph of the n00bs? The little guy over the man? Or is workplace anarchy destined to reign? And how does this revelation bode for the effectiveness of, oh, you know our government?

The truth is, we might already know.
Khartoum (AFP) - Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on Wednesday ordered the reopening of the country's contested borders with South Sudan, state media reported after a dispute that in 2012 led to armed conflict.

Relations between Juba and Khartoum had been tense since South Sudan's secession split in 2011 under a peace deal that ended a bloody 22-year civil war, with disputes over several areas along the border.

"Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir, president of the republic, issued a resolution today (Wednesday) opening the border with the state of South Sudan," the Sudanese state news agency SUNA's website said.

The brief statement also said Bashir had ordered the "competent authorities to take all measures for the implementation of this resolution on the ground", but gave no further details.

Juba and Khartoum had remained at odds since 2011 on several unresolved issues from the secession, including the frontier.

The two briefly battled for the Heglig oilfield in April 2012 on the frontier before Sudan took the area.

Bashir's move came days after media reports that South Sudanese President Salva Kiir ordered his troops to withdraw to five miles (eight kilometres) from the border with Sudan.

At independence, South Sudan took most of the formerly united country's oil resources with it, but agreed to pay transit fees to Khartoum for using its pipelines and facilities.

Last week Bashir agreed to review those fees following a request from Juba to lower them.

South Sudan descended into civil war in December 2013 when fighting erupted between forces loyal to Kiir and his then deputy Riek Machar, splitting the country along ethnic lines.

Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese have fled to neighbouring countries during the conflict, including to Sudan.
Park City (United States) (AFP) - Gun violence in America has taken center stage at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where four films focusing on the divisive issue and its impact are making their debut.

The films -- including "Newtown," a harrowing documentary on the aftermath of the 2012 massacre at a school in Connecticut in which 20 children died -- are sure to amplify the debate about gun control in the United States where mass shootings have become commonplace.

They are also being shown against the backdrop of a presidential race in which gun violence is a hot-topic issue.

"I wanted this to be an intimate portrait that would break through desensitisation," Kim Snyder, the director of "Newtown," told a panel discussion at the festival. "My main goal was to try and pierce through what I think is dangerously happening where none of us can take in these repeated incidents."

"Newtown" looks closely at a broken community as it tries to come to terms with a mass shooting that horrified the nation and was considered a watershed moment in the debate about gun violence.

Several parents who lost children in the massacre open their shattered lives to the camera in the film and speak of their determination to push for tougher gun laws to ensure others don't endure their suffering.

"We knew that this story had to be told," Mark Barden, who lost his youngest son Daniel in the massacre, told the audience after the film's premiere at Sundance.

"We felt that it was very important ... for the vast majority of the people who really care to see this window into what this is and how deep it goes," he added.

Another documentary, "Under the Gun," explores the battle between those who favor stricter gun control measures and those who portray the debate as a threat to the fundamental right to bear arms in America.

The film, narrated by veteran US journalist Katie Couric and directed by Stephanie Seochtig, begins with an ominous message -- "Before this film is over, 22 people will be shot, six will die" -- and explores the political power of the National Rifle Association, the pro-gun lobby group in the United States.

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- 'At a tipping point' -

It also follows families who have been impacted by gun violence, including former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived a gunshot wound to the head in 2011, and the parents of Jessica Ghawi, one of the victims of the 2012 massacre at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado.

Couric said she was inspired to make the documentary after the Newtown massacre as she could not understand the "disconnect" between public opinion, which favours stricter gun controls, and the political class.

"After Newtown, everyone thought it was going to be a watershed moment in this conversation and yet nothing happened," she told AFP.

Seochtig said the film shows that the raging debate about gun control in America is not clear-cut -- "you're with us or against us" -- and that there was a grassroots groundswell in favor of tougher gun laws.

"These five percent of gun owners have dominated the conversation up till now," she said. "But I think change is possible, I think we are coming up to a tipping point.

"People are really taking this issue head-on, including gun owners who have not been represented at all by the NRA."

Two other films that deal with gun violence -- "Speaking is Difficult," a short documentary, and "Dark Knight," a movie loosely inspired by the Aurora massacre -- are also premiering at the Sundance festival that runs through January 31

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are nearly 33,000 gun deaths in America each year, with 297 people shot on average each day.
Molly Shannon is proud to embrace both the drama and comedy of especially tragic times, as in Other People.

"Life can be so much that way, where there are really funny things that happen during very sad times," she told THR at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, praising writer-director Chris Kelly for the film's tonal balance.

From husband-and-wife producers Adam Scott and Naomi Scott (The Overnight), the Sundance-premiering title stars Jesse Plemons as a struggling comedy writer who returns to Sacramento to care for his dying mother (Shannon). He tries to convince everyone (including himself) hes "doing OK," despite being fresh off a breakup and feeling out-of-place while living with his conservative father (Bradley Whitford) in his childhood home.

Read More: 'Other People': Sundance Review

The cast also includes June Squibb, Madisen Beaty, John Early, Retta and Zach Woods. Kelly, a supervising writer on Saturday Night Live and consulting producer on Broad City, makes his feature directorial debut with the title.

Though they have a strong bond onscreen, that cast only "had one dinner, and then we jumped right into it," said Plemons, adding that they started production with one of the most serious scenes of the film.

See More: The Scene at Sundance Film Festival 2016 (Photos)

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The Orchard has acquired North American rights to Taika Waititi's comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople. The deal, pegged at nearly $2 million, includes a traditional theatrical release.

Based on Barry Crump's novel Wild Pork and Watercress, the story follows a national manhunt that is ordered when a rebellious kid and his foster uncle go missing in the wild New Zealand bush.

Wilderpeople stars Julian Dennison, Sam Neill, Rachel House, Rima Te Waita and Oscar Knightley.

Waititi, who directed and starred in 2015's What We Do in the Shadows, also wrote the film's screenplay. The director's stock has been on the rise ever since he landed the helming assignment for Marvel's next Thor movie.

Wilderpeople marks the second collaboration between Waititi and The Orchard, which also released What We Do.

Read More: 'Hunt for the Wilderpeople': Sundance Review

Wilderpeople was produced by Carthew Neal, Matt Noonan and Leanne Saunders. Charlie McClellan and James Wallace executive produced.

The Orchard acquired the film after its Jan. 22 premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

This film captures so much of what we love about Taika  its wildly funny, endearing, smart and deserves as big an audience as possible, said Paul Davidson, The Orchards senior vp film and television. We pursued this film for all of those reasons but also because we genuinely love being in business with Taika.

Added Waititi: We developed a really strong relationship with The Orchard on What We Do in the Shadows. They did such a great job on that release that I'm really pleased to be partnering with them again on Wilderpeople. I'm excited the film will be getting a theatrical release in North America. It was the main thing we wanted coming into Sundance, so were all going home happy."

Protagonist Pictures is handling international sales for the film, with CAA co-repping in North America. CAA negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers and Craig Sussman on behalf of The Orchard.

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See More: THR's Photo Lounge at Sundance: 'Birth of a Nation's' Nate Parker and More Stars of Park City

See More: The Scene at Sundance Film Festival 2016 (Photos)
London (AFP) - A Syria donors' conference in London next week will urge participating countries to double the amount of money they are giving to tackle the humanitarian crisis, Downing Street said Wednesday.

On a call between the leaders of Britain, Germany and Norway, they agreed "that all countries in attendance should look to at least double their 2015 financial contribution to the crisis," Prime Minister David Cameron's office said in a statement.

Britain, Germany and Norway are co-hosting the event on February 4 with the United Nations and Kuwait. Leaders from around the world are expected to attend.

They will discuss how to help 13.5 million people who are either vulnerable or displaced inside Syria, as well as 4.2 million people who have fled to neighbouring countries like Jordan and Lebanon.

Last year, UN agencies asked for $8.4 billion (7.7 billion euros) from governments worldwide to fund the Syrian aid effort but received only $3.3 billion.

The call between Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg also agreed that the conference would bid to "secure an ambitious package of measures to spur economic growth and enable thousands of Syrian refugees across the region to work, as well as helping host countries deal with the impact."

Cameron also spoke to Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who promised "high-level attendance" from his country at the talks, Downing Street said.

More than a million migrants and refugees, many from Syria, crossed into Europe last year.

This has caused the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II and prompted the European Union to consider allowing states in the passport-free Schengen zone to reintroduce border checks for up to two years.

The conflict in Syria erupted in 2011 as a pro-democracy uprising but has developed into a civil war, complicated by the rise of Islamic State jihadists.
By Cecile Mantovani LAUSANNE, Switzerland (Reuters) - The co-leader of the Syrian Democratic Council, Haytham Manna, on Wednesday he would not take part in peace talks in Geneva unless two Kurdish leaders, Saleh Muslim and Ilham Ahmed, were also invited to participate. "I'll go with my friends or not (at all). There is no compromise in this question," Manna told Reuters a day after the U.N. envoy to Syria, Staffan De Mistura, sent invitations to join the talks, without including the Kurdish leaders. "We have one day and tomorrow perhaps also to negotiate all of these things with the Russians, the Americans and De Mistura's staff. Well see if they accept our opinion, our view to have really a strong and representative delegation, we are ready to go. Deciding who among Syria's fractured opposition should attend the talks has become the main stumbling block to the first attempt at a peace negotiation in two years. There is no sign of an end to the war pitting a range of rebel groups against President Bashar al-Assad's government after almost five years and more than 250,000 deaths. Manna is not part of the main opposition delegation, which was formed at a meeting in Saudi Arabia and has yet to say if it will take part in the peace talks. Its leaders have said Syria must stop bombing civilian areas and allow humanitarian aid access before any peace negotiations can take place. But Russia, Assad's main backer, had demanded that the opposition representation was widened beyond the Saudi-backed group, some of whom it regards as terrorists. De Mistura invited Manna and other opposition leaders who had Moscow's blessing. But Muslim, co-leader of the Kurdish PYD party, told Reuters on Tuesday he had not been invited to the Geneva talks. The PYD is fighting Islamic State and has enjoyed military support from the United States but is regarded by Turkey as part of a terrorist movement. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said De Mistura had told him that Syrian Kurdish officials would not be invited,and negotiations for the opposition will be led by the Saudi-backed opposition group. Manna said that leaving out Muslim and Ahmed had left the invitees looking like "the Russian delegation". "And Im not ready to be a member of the Russian delegation. We have the right to have our own delegation, Manna said. (Reporting by Cecile Mantovani, Writing by Tom Miles,; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
By Yousra Elbagir KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Frantically serving up Syrian-style sandwiches and platters of chicken and meat, Shawermat Anas opens onto a busy street in Khartoum. Those from Damascus might recognise the name from the original restaurant back in the Syrian capital, 2,000 km away. All the young men that work with me have fled the war. I employ around 40 Syrians between two branches and house them all, said the owner, Anas Khalid, himself from Syria. Syrians fleeing the five-year-old civil war mostly head to neighbouring countries like Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan or make the dangerous journey to Europe by sea or on foot. But as some European countries close their doors and neighbours struggle to cope, an increasing number of Syrians are finding welcome refuge in an unlikely destination - Sudan. Battling with an economic crisis and rebellions in its own far-flung hinterlands, the African country has nevertheless opened its doors, offering Syrians safety and citizen status, with its allure of access to public healthcare and schools. A survey conducted by the Syrian Support Committee in July 2015 found more than 100,000 Syrians living in the country as a direct result of the war, a number that has since grown. Khalid arrived in Khartoum in 2007, long before the Syrian war, but opened his restaurant in 2014 to help provide jobs for an influx of Syrians fleeing the conflict that has so far claimed 250,000 lives and forced millions from their homes. Before the Syrians began migrating here in masses I worked at a Syrian restaurant and a factory. I started up the restaurant as a way of helping the young men coming in who I knew would struggle to find work and pay rent, said Khalid. Hes my relative and hes my relative, he said, pointing towards men carving a rotating slab of chicken and exchanging money with customers. I know most of them from back home and knew they were coming. Any man over the age of 18 has no choice but to leave or join the military and face certain death. A shared language and the promise of help from old friends and relatives already in Sudan has encouraged more Syrians to make a life there. The streets of Khartoum are now lined with Syrian restaurants. Every week, two flights arrive from Damascus. Syrian families effortlessly pass through passport control with no need for visas, in stark contrast to the strict border controls they face around the world. We began pushing to accommodate Syrian refugees just over a year ago," says Ahmed Gizouli, Commissioner of Refugees for Sudan. "Initially, there was a small number but this eventually increased, following the orders of the president to allow Syrian refugees entry without a visa. Sudan has distanced itself over the past year from its longtime ally Iran, a backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, it has developed warmer political ties with Saudi Arabia, which has supported rebels fighting to remove Assad from power and offered Khartoum much-needed economic aid. HARSH REALITIES While Syrians are thankful to escape dangers and psychological stress of the war back home, they face economic challenges in Khartoum. Housing shortages and foreign demand have driven up the price of land and rent, leaving newcomers with little time to get on their feet. Abdelkareem Abuzamar, a 28-year-old working in Khalid's kitchen, arrived in Sudan from Turkey in the summer of 2015 after struggling to find work in the saturated job market there. I got in touch with a Sudanese family on Facebook and told them about my plans to move to Sudan. They met me at the airport and welcomed me into their home, said Abuzamar. I stayed with them for a month before getting in touch with Anas, my neighbour back home in Syria, and started work with him. Though he works 12-hour shifts, Abuzamar still struggles to make ends meet. Im engaged to a Syrian girl I met here but my wages wont cover the cost of rent. Its stressful because the cost of living is going up and the wages are staying the same, he said. After losing cousins and friends to the war back home, all I want is to settle down. Despite the hardships, those who have made a new life in Sudan have been effusive in their gratitude. In July, an initiative called Shukran Sudan, Arabic for thank you Sudan, was launched by a group of Syrians who handed out sweets and water to passing cars. If Sudan closes its doors, Syrians have two options: Turkey or the sea," said Mazin Abu El-Kheir, founder of the Syrian Support Committee and a dual Syrian-Sudanese citizen from before the war. "And everyone has seen the tragedies that happen at sea. (Editing by Lin Noueihed and Andrew Heavens)
Taipei (AFP) - Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou will visit a disputed island in the South China Sea on Thursday, his first trip to the self-claimed territory amid rising tensions in the region.

The announcement comes just weeks after Taiwanese coastguards drove off a Vietnamese fishing boat near Taiping Island, a Taiwan-administered islet in the Spratly archipelago.

The chain is also claimed in part or whole by Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.

"The Taiping Island is an inherent part of the Republic of China's territory," Charles Chen, spokesman of the presidential office, said in a statement Wednesday, using the official name for Taiwan.

The purpose of the trip was to visit Taiwanese personnel stationed there ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, Chen said.

The only time a Taiwanese president has visited Taiping Island was in 2008, when former leader Chen Shui-bian went.

Ma, of the China-friendly ruling Kuomintang, has less than four months left of his term and will be succeeded by Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who won presidential elections in a landslide victory earlier this month.

The presidential office invited Tsai to join the trip, but the DPP said it did not plan to send any representative.

Taiwan has been boosting its presence in Taiping, the largest island in the Spratlys.

As part of efforts to strengthen defence capabilities, it inaugurated a solar-powered lighthouse, and expanded an airstrip and a pier on the island late last year.

Taiwanese officials have also flown to the island in recent years including interior and defence ministers.

China is seen by other Spratly claimants as the biggest threat in the South China Sea.

The Philippines and Vietnam have complained that China is becoming increasingly aggressive in the region.

China also sees Taiwan as part of its territory to be returned to its fold at some point, after the two split following a civil war on the mainland in 1949.

Separately, Taiwan conducted routine military drills Tuesday in Kinmen county, a group of islands off the coast of China's Fujian province.

There are fears that tensions between Taiwan and the mainland will escalate in the wake of Tsai being elected as president -- the DPP is traditionally a pro-independence party and relations with Beijing are likely to cool following a rapprochement under the KMT.
By David Shepardson and Bernie Woodall (Reuters) - U.S. auto safety regulators said Tuesday that air bag maker Takata Corp declared 5.1 million U.S. vehicles defective, as the company disclosed an 11th death could be linked to a faulty airbag. Most of the vehicles mentioned in numerous previous recalls involving Takata air bags have been older models, but the new recalls include some 2014 models. The Japanese company said newer vehicles remain under "investigation and could be subject to recall at a later date." The newly released documents show that regulators may prod automakers to recall recent models. That could greatly increase the total number of vehicles recalled, which in the United States now stands at about 24 million involving about 28 million Takata air bag inflators. Ford Motor Co on Tuesday became the first of several automakers involved to announce a recall. A 2006 Ford Ranger was involved in a Dec. 22 crash that killed the driver when a Takata air bag inflator caused the bag to rupture, sending shrapnel into the vehicle. A similar airbag inflator was involved in a fatal rupture of a Honda model in Malaysia in 2014, which prompted a worldwide recall by Honda Motor Co. Takata said in a document released on Tuesday that there was another rupture of a similar inflator in August in India in a 2007 Honda Civic, but it is not clear if the rupture caused the death of the driver. That could be the 11th death worldwide attributed to defective Takata inflators. Nine deaths related to Takata air bags have occurred in the United States. The death in the Ford Ranger is the first not to involve a car made by Honda. U.S. regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Friday that the expanded recall was imminent. The automakers involved in the new Takata inflator recalls include Honda, BMW AG, Volkswagen AG's Volkswagen and Audi brands, Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz and Sprinter van brands, Mazda Motor Corp, and Saab AB. Toyota Motor Corp is listed by Takata as part of the new recall, but the company said all of its vehicles involved were recalled in 2015. NHTSA did not make clear how many, and which automakers were involved with recalls for 2014 models. The Ford recall announced on Tuesday includes 391,354 2004-2006 Ford Rangers built in North America for driver-side air bags. The Rangers recalled were previously recalled for potentially defective passenger-side air bag inflators, Ford said. Honda has previously recalled about 6.28 million vehicles in the United States for air bag inflators, a Honda spokesman said. Honda worldwide has recalled vehicles with 23 million Takata air bag inflators since 2008 - not counting the latest recall. (Reporting by Arunima Banerjee in Bengaluru, Bernie Woodall in Detroit and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Bernard Orr, Jonathan Oatis and Andrew Hay)
As you know by now unless you have been living in an igloo without Wi-Fi, one of the biggest blizzards ever recorded on the East Coast pummeled the mid-Atlantic region last weekend. The storm, unofficially dubbed Winter Jonas, blanketed major metropolises in more than two feet of snow, brought highways and public transportation to a standstill, and claimed the lives of at least 45 people.

While most were able to hole up in the comfort of their own homes, those living on the streets had to find other ways to keep warm in the midst of the blizzard. Some huddled around steam grates for warmth, or slept in subway cars and train stations. Many homeless people were shuttled into shelters, hospitals, and drop-off centers as part of emergency protocols several cities have adopted for when extreme weather affects the safety of their citizens. Its estimated that nearly 580,000 people experience homelessness on any given night in the U.S. (fewer people live in the city of Atlanta).

RELATED: What if the Key to Ending Homelessness Is Just Thata Key?

Under the policy, known as Code Blue, anyone in need of a place to stay when temperatures fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit is given immediate accesswithout question or procedureto pre-designated spaces offering a safe haven. Outreach teams are on the streets 24/7, picking up some of their citys most vulnerable residents, and drop-in homeless shelters are required to take in as many homeless people as their building restrictions allow.

Though city governments were quick to make sure those living on the streets had access to shelters and safe locations during Winter Jonas, the protocol only seeks to help them in times of harsh weather conditions, rather than long-term.

"The city sees the temporary shelter and outreach work as an easy, quick solution, like that's enough, Patrick Byer, a 40-year-old homeless man from New York, told Vice. They pat themselves on the back, like they did something really big. But what happens after the storm? We just go back to the same situation.

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More on Breyer's ultimate point below, and heres how three East Coast cities handle their homeless populations over the winter months.

New York City

When the mercury drops below freezing, police departments and social services are required to relocate homeless people into shelters and other safe zones, whether or not they want to go. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order mandating the policy in early January for all the states rising homeless population.

When Winter Jonas hit, outreach workers in Manhattan rescued as many as 132 homeless people from the streets and brought them to shelters and hospital emergency rooms, where they stayed until the storm ended, according to Vice News. The teams started on Friday at 8 p.m. and didnt stop until Monday at 8 a.m. (Sam Tsemberis, who conceived of the homeless placement program Housing First thats been successful in many cities, came up with the idea while working homeless outreach in New York on cold winter nights.)

At Harlem Hospital, Byer told Vice, people slept on small metal benches or the floor.

"There should be specific places for situations like this," Byer said. "An emergency space with shelter and a meal, instead of a bed in an emergency room. Just somewhere people can rest their head safely at night."

Thousands of New Yorkers sleep on the streets, in subways, and other public areas each night.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia has already implemented what Byer describes. Its in a subway station under City Hall. When winter weather hits, the station offers the citys homeless a place to stay, a hot drink, and social and mental health services during their visit. The drop-in program, called Hub for Hope, is overseen by Philadelphia-based nonprofit Project Home and is open from early January through early April.

"This is a place where we try to lower barriers to care for the homeless," said Karen Orrick, coordinator for Hub of Hope told USA Today. "We try to focus on the long-term homeless, although we try to help and refer anyone to services."

Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the countryand is one of the most expensive cities for renters. On any given night, the city estimates, it has about 650 people sleeping on the streetsthis doesnt include those who sleep in shelters, cars, abandoned buildings, transportation centers, or other public spaces. Hub for Hope handles an average of 150 to 200 people a night. The rest are placed in available shelters and emergency housing throughout the city.

Washington D.C.

With about 1,000 families in its care, the city managed to run out of shelter space and available city motel rooms in time for Winter Jonas. With so many in need of shelter, city government started booking motel rooms outside the District limits. Some 211 families totaling 700 children and parents were placed in Maryland motels. Washington D.C. has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country, with 120 homeless people per 10,000 residents. (The national average is about 18.)

At the first sign of snowfall on Friday, city workers were sent out to deliver food and store gift cards to the hundreds of families staying in the motels.

Yes, they will be marooned, just like everybody in the city will be marooned, said Laura Green Zeilinger, Bowserss head of homeless services, told The Washington Post on Friday. Thats why were getting out to them in advance.

Zeigler said that recreation centers had also been opened for individuals seeking shelter during the storm, and couples were accepted in some circumstances.

But, as Byer pointed out, the shortcomings of homelessness outreach and housing isn't a function of the weather. Experts say that homelessness in the U.S. is increasingly a result of a lack of affordable housing. Though the national homeless rate fell from 2013 to 2014, some the most expensive cities for renters, including New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., have well over the national average rate of homelessness.

Now just imagine how winters might be for the homeless if these cities put stock into an affordable housing program, instead of dropping their homeless off in whatever place is available and convenient for the cold season.

Related stories on TakePart:





 What If the Key to Ending Homelessness Is Just Thata Key?

 22 Mayors Weigh In on Escalating Levels of Homelessness and Hunger

 Chance the Rapper Proves Hip-Hop Is Down to Help Chicagos Homeless

Original article from TakePart
By Miral Fahmy SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Chinese tourists can't seem to get enough of Thailand, with visitor numbers to the Southeast Asian kingdom surging over the past year at one of the fastest clips in the Asia-Pacific region. In a year that saw the Thai military government grapple with an outbreak of the deadly flu-like MERS virus as well as the bombing at a major shrine, Chinese tourists helped turn Bangkok into the region's most-visited destination in 2015, according to the first-ever MasterCard Asia Pacific Destinations Index published on Wednesday. All three Thai destinations in the 10 most-visited list - Phuket was ranked fifth, Pattaya eighth - recorded more than 10 percent year-on-year growth in international arrivals, outpacing other locations like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, which were at No.2 and No.4, respectively. In 2016, the Thai government expects Chinese visitors to make up a larger proportion of the record 32 million people forecast to visit. "What's ultimately driving Thailand is the Chinese," said Matthew Driver, MasterCard's Asia-Pacific group executive for products and solutions, told Reuters. The survey ranked 167 islands, towns and cities in 22 countries across the Asia-Pacific. Japanese destinations recorded the fastest growth in 2015, the index also showed, as the weaker yen continued to attract Chinese tourists in droves. Tokyo was the second-most visited city, with Osaka rounding off the top 10. (Editing by Ryan Woo)
(Reuters) - Deficient practices at a lab operated by blood-testing startup Theranos pose "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety," the U.S. government's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in a letter to the company released on Wednesday. Theranos, founded and led by Elizabeth Holmes, has been in the spotlight after reports in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the company's blood-testing devices were flawed and had problems with accuracy. The CMS, in a letter to the company dated Jan. 25, told Theranos it had 10 days to provide evidence that it had corrected the issues causing concern. (http://bit.ly/1nPLDP7) Theranos, which is based on Palo Alto, California, was not immediately available for comment. The lab in question is in Newark, California. (Reporting by Rosmi Shaji in Bengaluru; Editing by Ted Kerr)
Gary Johnson has a backup plan. If the Libertarian candidate for president doesnt win the White House in 2016, he hopes to profit handsomely from a timely investment in the marijuana business. In fact, he might enjoy that profit even if he does win the White House.

Johnson is the former governor of New Mexico (from 1995 to 2003) who ran for president as the Libertarian candidate in 2012. Hes also a successful businessman who built one of the largest construction firms in his state before running for governor. If he wins his partys nomination at a convention in May, hell mostly likely appear as a third-party presidential candidate in all 50 states.

But Johnson is no full-time candidate. In between the last presidential election and this one, he helped run a marijuana branding company called Cannabis Sativa, Inc. (CBDS), which hopes to sell pot products under its Hi brand. I do think the United States is going to legalize marijuana, Johnson says in the video above. In the future, its going to be a really big business.

Does Johnson inhale himself? I occasionally partake, he says. Weve got all sorts of politicians who use marijuana and dont admit to it. Im the only one whos going to say what I just said.

[Read the case for one more presidential candidate.]

Johnson thinks Californiathe first state to approve the use of medical marijuanawill approve a ballot measure legalizing pot for recreational use on Nov. 8, the same day Americans will select their next president. If that happens, California would join Alaska, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Oregon and Washington in allowing pot. Johnson thinks legalization in California would be a turning point, prompting another 20 states or so to follow.

Marijuana use is still a violation of federal law, which, of course, trumps state law. But the Obama administration has basically looked the other way, refusing to challenge the legalization of pot. That could change once a new sheriff moves into the White House next January, though the prospect of federal agents chasing potheads around would probably be so unpopular no president would dare.

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Legal pot is already a $3 billion business, and some analysts agree with Johnson that it could grow by multiples of that. If pot becomes big business, one thing will be missing: Branded products with the same quality everywhere, similar to Coca-Cola or Cheez-Its. Regulations in the weed-friendly states generally require the product to be grown and packaged in the state, by people who are residents. That might give local regulators control over the market and keep the economic benefits inside state borders, but it can also lead to inconsistent standards, opaque pricing and occasional customer confusion.

Cannabis Sativa (the company) plans to change that, by establishing the Hi brand of pot products. It opened its first branded dispensary in Portland, Ore., last fall, and hopes to expand by operating as a kind of franchiser that will help local producers ramp up business by following a corporate marketing plan, standardizing operating procedures and adopting recommended quality controls.

Other startups have the same idea, so Hi will hardly have the field to itself. High Times, for instance, hopes to transform itself from a weed magazine into the Consumer Reports of the legal marijuana industry. There are already legal pot trade shows, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are even jumping into the space. If legalization spreads, the market for commercial pot could be large -- 58% of Americans favor legalization, according to Gallup.

Johnson, who was CEO of Cannabis Sativa in 2014 and 2015, resigned to run for president. But he still owns about 515,0000 shares in the company, worth about $300,000. The company is hardly a Wall Street darling. The stock trades over the counter -- like many pot stocks -- in the range of 50 cents per share, and has plunged from a high of nearly $14 in early 2014. The 96% decline reflects a slew of competitors rushing into the business and investor skepticism of the legitimacy of small-fry firms.

Still, if Johnsons right about the future of the pot business, his company might be poised to rebound. And any exposure he gets as a candidate cant hurt. Who knows, given the widening acceptance of marijuana, his pro-pot views might even help boost his popularity as a politician.

Rick Newmans latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.
For most drivers, especially those in a city, moving violations and parking tickets are a frustrating -- and potentially costly -- fact of life.

National statistics on parking and traffic tickets are tough to find, but experts estimate that Americans pay billions of dollars in speeding tickets each year. The real cost of a speeding ticket and other moving violations isn't the ticket itself, but also the ancillary costs like increases to your auto insurance.

[READ: The Real Cost of a Traffic Ticket.]

Disputing a parking or traffic ticket can be a confusing process, so several smartphone apps and online tools now help you through it. Here's a look at three options, including how they work, what they cost and more.

GetDismissed.com

If you get a traffic ticket in California, you typically have the option to "request trial by written declaration" (where you submit a written statement by mail rather than appear in traffic court). For a flat fee of $99, GetDismissed helps you through that process for minor infractions such as running a stop sign or speeding (it cannot help with misdemeanors, including reckless driving, hit and run or driving without a license). "Basically, we're a self-help document facilitation service," says Steve Miller, founder and CEO of GetDismissed. "The system develops the documents you need to print out, sign and send to the court. We're sort of a LegalZoom for traffic tickets."

Since GetDismissed is a DIY tool, the company does not track its success rate. However, Miller says contesting a ticket in California (the only state the service currently operates) by mail is often more successful and efficient than going to court.

But is it still worth disputing a ticket when you know you ran a red light or exceeded the speed limit? Yes, according to Miller. "It does not hurt you to fight those," he explains. "The worst that could happen is you're right back where you started. Maybe the city didn't have the correct posted signs, maybe they issued that ticket past the number of days required to send you a ticket. There are ways to contest a ticket whether you are guilty or not."

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[READ: How Bad Behavior Affects Your Bottom Line.]

Fixed.com

For situations where you may need a lawyer to help you get a ticket and points dismissed, Fixed lets you upload the ticket and estimates the likelihood of that ticket being dismissed. If you decide to move forward, Fixed refers you to a traffic lawyer in the county you received the ticket. (Fixed used to handle parking tickets but no longer does so.) "We use our proprietary system to read that data and pass that to an attorney in a nice bundle," says Fixed co-founder David Hegarty. "They can reach out to the user and talk with the user either in person, over the phone or over email."

Currently, Fixed is available in every county of California. In counties with a high volume of Fixed users, the startup has negotiated a flat rate of $150 with attorneys. Rates can be higher in counties that have a lower volume of users and don't have volume discounts negotiated.

"[With] the attorneys we work with, about 90 percent of the time they'll succeed in getting the point dismissed [from your driving record]," Hegarty says. "The violation might be reduced to a nonmoving violation and the point removed. Sixty percent of the time they'll be successful at getting the full fine removed or reduced."

[READ: Decoding the Mysteries of High-Risk Car Insurance.]

AppWinIt.com

New York City is practically the nation's capital for parking tickets, according to Ouriel Lemmel, CEO and founder of WinIt, so that's where the iOS and Android app is focusing for now. "If you park [in New York City], and it's not legal, you will [almost] always get a parking ticket," he says. "It's very frustrating. We wanted to have a solution for that."

After launching last year, WinIt now processes between 150 and 200 tickets per day, and Lemmel hopes to up that volume before branching out into other violations such as speeding tickets. Of the 20,000 tickets WinIt has processed so far, the app has successfully dismissed around a third of them, Lemmel says.

Users take a photo of the ticket and upload it to the WinIt app. "We take it from there and keep the user informed of the status," Lemmel says. If WinIt's experts cannot get the ticket dismissed in a hearing, the user simply pays the ticket (which they can do directly through the app for a small processing fee) and pays nothing to WinIt. If WinIt gets your ticket dismissed, you'll pay half of the ticket's cost to the app and save the other half. The way penalties work in New York, disputing the ticket also gets you more time before you have to pay it. "The user will have another 30 days without any additional fee," Lemmel says. "Even if you do end up losing the case, we buy time."

Susan Johnston Taylor contributes to the money section of USNews.com. Her articles on business and personal finance have also appeared in or on The Boston Globe, Learnvest.com, Entrepreneur.com and FastCompany.com. You can find her on Twitter @UrbanMuseWriter.
Three of the nations leading trade associations have a message for their member corporations: Resist activists who demand you disclose more details about your politicking than the law requires.

The strategy of pressuring companies to voluntarily disclose the details of their spending on public policy engagement for the purpose of reducing that engagement is, in fact, their ultimate goal, wrote U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue, Business Roundtable President John Engler and National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons in a letter dated Oct. 13 and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

They added: As these activists continue efforts to silence the business communitys voice, we will continue to engage on your behalf.

The trade association leaders reserved particular criticism for the Center for Political Accountability and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School, which in early October published an annual index ranking large companies on their political disclosure practices and policies.

Companies earn points on more than two-dozen measures, such as revealing money spent to influence state-level ballot initiatives and voluntarily disclosing contributions to politically active trade associations and other nonprofit groups.

This story is part of Politics. Campaign donations, lobbying and influence in government and reports on the special interests that are funding elections and buying power. Click here to read more stories in this topic.

Don't miss another Politics investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email.

Such politically active nonprofit groups  including the U.S. Chamber itself  sometimes directly advocate for and against political candidates and may spend into the millions of dollars to do so.

Donohue, Engler and Timmons argued that the index is little more than a tool to be used to attack companies and name-and-shame them into either curtailing or eliminating their involvement in public policy debates altogether. They also warned that the index could be used by activist investors to justify proxy proposals aimed at forcing companies to publish details about their political efforts.

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The men sent a similar do-not-disclose letter to their members in 2013.

Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, scoffed at the groups criticism, which he says he expects.

The reason: it is leading to the broader disclosure of company payments to trade associations, and the U.S. Chamber in particular. The Chamber has a deep investment in secrecy, Freed said. As for the trade groups letter, Freed added that hasnt been effective in discrediting CPA or the Index. Companies continue to treat the index as a credible, serious benchmarking.

Officials at the U.S. Chamber, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers declined the Center for Public Integritys requests for comment.

The trade groups plea comes as the U.S. Chamber is preparing to play a major role in the 2016 congressional elections.

Consider that during the 2014 midterm elections, the U.S. Chamber spent about $35.5 million on messages naming federal political candidates, if not overtly advocating for their election or defeat, Federal Election Commission records indicate.

Of that, the U.S. Chamber spent about $6.8 million total to help elect Republicans Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Joni Ernst of Iowa to the U.S. Senate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

All the while, the U.S. Chamber could hide the names of people or corporations bankrolling what were primarily political attack ads: Trade groups, which are nonprofits organized under Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Service code, are not by law required to reveal their funders.

Thank the Supreme Courts Citizens United v. FEC decision for this. The 2010 ruling allowed corporations  including certain nonprofits and unions  to spend unlimited amounts of dark money to promote or attack political candidates.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation, for example, identified dozens of companies that in 2012 or 2013 gave money to the U.S. Chamber, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers.

Some contributions, which ranged from low five-figure amounts to well into the millions, specifically funded the trade groups government lobbying or political efforts. Companies with household names such as PepsiCo Inc., eBay Inc., Intel Corp. and AFLAC Inc. ranked among those who earmarked money for such purposes.

More recently, some companies that play key roles in one or more of the trade associations have, in practice, gone against the trade associations wishes as they pertain to political transparency.

Take Dow Chemical Co., whose executive vice president and general counsel, Charles Kalil, is also a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

Dow voluntarily disclosed that it contributed more than $2.91 million to the U.S. Chamber, $250,000 to the National Association of Manufacturers and about $92,000 to the Business Roundtable in 2014. It also revealed significant contributions it made to various ballot initiative campaigns and other politically active nonprofits.

Dow endeavors to participate actively in the leadership of its key trade associations, the company said. However, we may from time to time find ourselves in disagreement with the prevailing views of the majority of the association's membership.

So-called 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofits, like their trade association cousins, may also engage in direct politicking so long as this is not their primary purpose for existing.

The U.S. Chamber doesnt generally involve itself in presidential politics, but several nonprofits are already combining to pump millions of anonymous dollars into the 2016 presidential election. They include a group backing Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio.

More will almost assuredly become active later this year once the general election campaign begins in earnest. And they, too, may accept unlimited, anonymous contributions from corporations.

This story was co-published with Al Jazeera America and TIME.

Related story: U.S. Chamber doubling down on political juggernaut

This story is part of Politics. Campaign donations, lobbying and influence in government and reports on the special interests that are funding elections and buying power. Click here to read more stories in this topic.

Related stories

Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
By Dustin Volz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior U.S. Senate Republican took a swipe on Wednesday at an effort to forge a new deal on the movement of electronic data between the United States and Europe, such as Facebook user information, but it was unclear if he had jeopardized the unfinished pact. Seen as crucial to preserving the free flow of data across the Atlantic, an issue for thousands of companies, the Safe Harbor data-transfer agreement being negotiated in Brussels is days away from an important deadline. Amid growing concerns in Europe about spying by U.S. authorities on Internet data, a previous agreement was invalidated in October 2015 by an EU court. The new agreement would replace that pact. The U.S. Senate is debating related legislation, the Judicial Redress Act, and Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Reuters in an interview he would try to amend that legislation. "Im for doing whats in Americas best interests, not necessarily the interests of the European Union," said Cornyn, the Senate's No. 2 Republican. Im going to make sure ... that we dont just try to do something to help them out and we dont protect our interests. The Act would allow citizens of U.S. allies in Europe to sue over data privacy in the United States. It will be considered on Thursday in a Senate committee, an aide said. It not seen as crucial to securing a new Safe Harbor deal, but its passage would send a signal of good faith to negotiators in Brussels as they scramble to meet a deadline, European officials and technology trade groups said. That message could be upended by amendments from Cornyn and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. One would limit the ability to sue in U.S. courts to citizens of countries already in an international data deal with the United States, such as Safe Harbor, sources familiar with the language said. Another possible amendment would require the U.S. attorney general to certify that participating countries do not have policies that impede U.S. national security. Thousands of firms, such as Google and Microsoft, relied on the 15-year-old Safe Harbor for freely transferring trans-Atlantic data. EU data protection authorities gave negotiators until the end of January to strike a new deal before potentially moving forward with lawsuits. "Time is not on our side," Justin Antonipillai, a Commerce Department official, said at a conference in Washington this week. (Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Grant McCool)
By Ange Aboa ABIDJAN (Reuters) - A military tribunal in Ivory Coast began hearing testimony on Tuesday in the trial of nearly two dozen soldiers charged with the 2002 murder of a former junta leader turned president, Robert Guei. Ivory Coast, the current economic powerhouse of Francophone West Africa, has been attempting a reconciliation process after more than a decade of political turmoil in the formerly peaceful West African nation. Guei was a retired army general when he was named head of state after a coup d'etat in 1999 that marked the beginning of the crisis. He lost an election to Laurent Gbagbo a year later. He had been out of office for nearly two years when his bullet-riddled body was discovered on a roadside in the commercial capital, Abidjan, during a second attempted coup in 2002. A total of 22 soldiers, including senior officers close to Gbagbo, have been charged with his killing, though only 19 have so far appeared in court. Five soldiers testified on Tuesday, all of whom said they had participated in a search for Guei but denied they had assassinated him. Kouadio Kouadio, who is charged with being an accessory to the murder, said General Brunot Dogbo Ble, then a colonel close to Gbagbo, had ordered him to go to St. Paul's Cathedral in Abidjan to look for Guei. "We went and searched the basement and he was there, behind the cartons," testified Kouadio, who drove members of the elite Republican Guard to the cathedral. "We went to the general's home afterwards and his wife was there with her aide and guards. We took them to the colonel (Dogbo Ble)." Dogbo Ble, commander of the Republican Guard, and Captain Anselme Seka Yapo, an officer of the gendarmerie known as "Seka Seka", are accused of ordering and organising the murders of Guei, his wife and their employees. Dogbo Ble is already serving 15 years in prison for his 2012 conviction for complicity in violence including kidnapping, illegal detention and murder. Yapo was given a 20-year sentence last August after being found guilty of murder and assault. [nL5N10F3NR] Although the 2002 coup attempt failed, the non-commissioned officers behind the attempted power grab maintained their grip on the northern half of the world's top cocoa grower, eventually becoming the New Forces rebellion. The group helped bring to power the current president, Alassane Ouattara, after Gbagbo refused to accept his defeat in a 2010 run-off election, setting off a brief civil war. Gbagbo's trial before the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity committed during the conflict opens on Thursday in The Hague. (Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Joe Bavier, Larry King)
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Tropical Singapore, already battling potentially fatal dengue fever, will introduce measures to control the risk of mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, the government said on Wednesday. There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, a close cousin of dengue and chikungunya. The virus is transmitted by the same type of mosquitoes that spread dengue and Singapore has suffered a spike in dengue cases this month. Singapore is asking returning travelers from affected areas to seek medical attention if they develop symptoms such as fever and skin rashes. The government "will implement a set of control measures to reduce the risk of the Zika virus becoming entrenched in Singapore", including advisory posters at the airport for outbound travelers and hospitalizing all confirmed cases. (Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Des Moines (United States) (AFP) - Republicans scrambling to win the first contest in the US presidential nomination race geared for battle at Thursday's high-stakes debate in Iowa, but defiant frontrunner Donald Trump upended the campaign by refusing to attend.

Trump's gamble left the presidential race in uncharted waters days before Iowans vote February 1, but he insisted he will not back down in his feud with debate host Fox News.

The billionaire has doubled down, in a game of political chicken, hosting a rival event for military veterans at the same time as his own party showcases its candidates to Iowa voters.

All eyes are on the heartland state, where 12 Republican candidates and three Democratic hopefuls including Hillary Clinton are vying for both bragging rights and momentum as the primary race heads next to votes in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

"The 'debate' tonight will be a total disaster -- low ratings with advertisers and advertising rates dropping like a rock. I hate to see this," tweeted Trump, who has never held elected office.

"I hope @CNN has enough bandwidth tonight because not many will be watching @FoxNews."

Adding to the spectacle, rival Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who is languishing in polls and was attending an undercard event before the main debate, said he will join Trump at his counter-event for veterans.

"It's not an endorsement of Donald Trump's candidacy; I'm still running for president," Huckabee assured CNN.

Another low-poller, former senator Rick Santorum, will also attend Trump's event.

Some veterans have denounced the fundraiser.

"Vets don't need political stunts. We need candidates to present smart, specific plans on VA (Veterans Affairs) reform," said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

- Trump streaks ahead -

Trump has accused Fox News, and especially debate moderator Megyn Kelly, of bias against him.

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With Fox and the billionaire in all-out war, the Republican National Committee appeared eager to downplay the Trump snub.

"Every campaign is going to make the decision that they need to make" about debate participation, RNC chairman Reince Priebus told Fox News. "I think it's going to be a big night."

Analysts have been riveted by the unexpected drama and disruption of the typical Iowa political playbook. The last major candidate to skip a pre-Iowa caucus debate was Ronald Reagan, in 1980.

"Wow. What a chess game," Iowa State University political science professor Steffen Schmidt declared of the political theater.

But the longtime election watcher said he believed Iowa core conservatives were "furious" at Trump's flippant decision.

Trump has a genuine battle on his hands in Iowa with ultra-conservative senator Ted Cruz, his nearest GOP rival, who trails by about five percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of recent Iowa polls.

Cruz, who has earned endorsements from key evangelicals and anti-abortion figures who tout his conservative and religious values, insists the race is winnable.

His team claims its ground game is second to none in Iowa, with 12,000 volunteers and staff blanketing the state.

Little is known about Trump's grassroots efforts to generate caucus turnout in Iowa, and he has largely avoided the grueling face-to-face courtship of voters, opting instead to talk to them from a distant podium.

Nationally, however, Trump keeps soaring. A recent CNN/ORC poll of Republican voters has Trump at 41 percent to 19 percent for Cruz, with more than two-thirds of Republicans saying they believe the billionaire developer will be the party's presidential candidate.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio is third at eight percent, followed by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at six percent and Florida ex-governor Jeb Bush at five percent.

- Cruz at center stage -

With Trump absent, Cruz will take center stage alongside six other Republicans eager for the opportunity to shine in the absence of the man accused of sucking the oxygen out of the room.

Cruz told Fox it was "stunning" that Trump refused to debate, challenging him to a one-on-one showdown.

Rubio meanwhile has denounced the Trump-Cruz sideshow. His final ad before Iowa portrays him as the electable Republican.

"This election is about defeating Hillary Clinton, and about saving what makes America unique," he says in the television spot.

The Donald is seeking to draw in Americans who have not voted for years, with the help of supporters like Julian Raven, an artist driving his larger-than-life painting of Trump across Iowa on a rented truck.

"He has guts," said Raven. "God votes Trump."
By Megan Cassella, Susan Heavey and Dustin Volz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday escalated a fight with Fox News, using the word "bimbo" in a derogatory tweet about anchorwoman Megyn Kelly after pulling out of a debate only days before the first nominating contest of the 2016 campaign. Trump on Tuesday withdrew from the televised encounter, scheduled for Thursday night in Des Moines, Iowa, in irritation at host Fox News for allowing Kelly to moderate after her questioning angered him in a debate last year. The real estate magnate, who is the Republican front-runner to win the nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election, followed up with a thinly veiled insult on Wednesday. "I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct," he wrote on Twitter. "Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!" Trump will appear on Fox Newss The OReilly Factor at 8 p.m. Wednesday to discuss his exit from the debate with host Bill OReilly. Trump's Republican presidential rivals were quick to criticize the former reality TV star, with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas blistering him in a series of tweets and accusing him of "trembling at being questioned by Kelly." Another Republican hopeful, U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, told Fox News that he welcomed Trumps absence from the debate stage because it means "we dont have to put up with a lot of empty blather and boastfulness and calling people names. Trump's decision means the last televised debate before Monday's Iowa caucuses - which kick off the state-by-state nominating race to choose candidates for the presidential election - will not feature the man who has dominated the Republican race for months and leads many opinion polls. It was seen as a bold gamble. 'A RISKY MOVE' Trump has said that in lieu of his debate participation he will hold a fundraiser for veterans. It will be held at Drake University in Des Moines and begin at the same time Thursday as the Fox debate, according to an invitation his campaign circulated Wednesday evening. "It's a risky move, it's very high-profile," said Craig Robinson, a former Iowa state party official. "But I'm not sure it will really change anyone's mind about Trump." Trump has been feuding with Fox News since the network hosted the first Republican debate in August, in which Kelly asked Trump about his treatment of women, prompting a stream of insults from the candidate and complaints he was not being treated fairly. Cruz, Trump's main rival in Iowa, used the hashtag #DuckingDonald to make fun of Trump for ducking out of the debate and tweeted a mocked-up picture of Trump's head on Donald Duck's body sitting on a pile of money. Cruz, a conservative and a debating champion in college, challenged Trump to a one-on-one debate. He tweeted a link to "duckingdonald.com," which asked visitors to sign a petition in favor of Cruz and Trump having a side debate. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, another Republican presidential contender, described Trumps decision at such a crucial time as a big mistake that calls into question his ability to be president. Anytime you get a podium and a microphone and 15-20 million people watching in an election campaign, you should take it, Christie told Boston Herald Radio. Another Republican candidate, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said he wanted to focus on keeping the party united in order to beat Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, if she becomes the Democratic nominee. "These kinds of theatrics by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are an entertaining sideshow, but they have nothing to do with defeating Hillary Clinton," Rubio said. Not every candidate was convinced Trump would follow through on his pledge to stay away. "He apparently is not going to come to the debate, although Ive got a $20 bet hell show up, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said at a town hall meeting in response to a question. "Poor little Donald, being treated unfairly, he said. Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said Trump was not afraid to debate his rivals or take reporters' questions. He added that Trump would be happy to debate Cruz if the contest, in which 12 Republicans are vying for their party's nomination, narrows. "If it comes down to a two-person race, Donald Trump would be happy to debate him," Lewandowski told ABC's "Good Morning America" program. Fox News, in a statement on Tuesday, said it would not "give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees," but left the door open to Trump attending the debate. The event will be co-hosted by Google . "At the end of the day, Mr. Trump is going to have the last laugh," Lewandowski told MSNBC. (Additional reporting by Steve Holland in Iowa and Dustin Volz in Washington; Writing by John Whitesides and Alistair Bell; Editing by Bill Trott, Jeffrey Benkoe, Jonathan Oatis and Leslie Adler)
(Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump won the endorsement on Tuesday of Joe Arpaio, the provocative Arizona sheriff known for his tough stance on illegal immigration. Arpaio joined the real estate billionaire in Marshalltown, Iowa, to voice his support before the Iowa caucuses on Monday, the Trump campaign said in a statement. The caucuses are the first contest in the nomination race for the Nov. 8 presidential election. "I have great respect for Sheriff Arpaio. We must restore law and order on the border and respect the men and women of our police forces. I thank him for his support of my policies and candidacy for president, Trump said, according to the statement. Donald Trump is a leader. He produces results and is ready to get tough in order to protect American jobs and families," Arpaio was quoted as saying. "I have fought on the front lines to prevent illegal immigration. I know Donald Trump will stand with me and countless Americans to secure our border. I am proud to support him as the best candidate for president of the United States of America, Arpaio added. Arpaio, 83, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, since 1993, has been found guilty of racial profiling in a federal court, and been accused of abuse of power, misuse of funds and unlawful enforcement of immigration laws. He bills himself as "America's toughest sheriff." (Reporting by Eric Walsh in Washington; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Tunis (AFP) - Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid defended his government Wednesday before parliament, faced with unemployment and poverty at the root of the worst social unrest since the 2011 revolution.

"We have tried, as far as possible, to improve the situation," he told a special parliamentary session on last week's protests that led to clashes with security forces in which dozens of people were injured, mostly in disadvantaged central Tunisia.

"We could make people quieten down by telling them, 'We are going to create 1,000 jobs' ... but we want to tell the people the truth," he said.

"We've started to find solutions. We don't have solutions for everybody but we do have some solutions," the prime minister said, without giving specifics.

"The responsibility (to find solutions) lies not only with the government," said Essid, urging opposition parties and civil society to join forces with his administration to address people's demands.

But his appeal was spurned by critics in parliament who demanded "real solutions".

"We do not want a government that sells illusions and inspires despair," said Hassouna Nasfi, one of around two dozen lawmakers who recently quit President Beji Caid Essebsi's Nidaa Tounes party.

Others called for measures to tackle graft -- a major grievance of protesters.

"The revolution of dignity has become the revolution of corruption," said Hafedh Zouari of the Afek Tounes party.

A nationwide nightime curfew was imposed Friday after the protests, which started in the central town of Kasserine where an unemployed man died of electrocution during a January 16 protest over the lack of economic prospects in the region.

The unrest, the worst since the revolution five years ago that ousted longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, spread to several other towns and to Tunis where shops were burned and looted in one suburb.

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The demonstrations have ebbed in recent days although a few were held on Monday.

While Tunisia is considered a rare success story of the 2011 regional uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the authorities have failed to resolve the problems of social exclusion and regional inequalities.

The economy barely grew last year and unemployment is above 15 percent. For young graduates, it is twice as bad.

Essid stressed he understands the frustrations but "has no magic wand" to solve a situation he said was inherited by his government.

Apart from the economic damage wrought by political instability in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, two attacks by the Islamic State jihadist group last year targeting foreigners killed 60 people, battering Tunisia's vital tourism industry.

The group was also behind a suicide bombing in Tunis in November that killed 12 presidential guards and prompted the authorities to declare a nationwide state of emergency that remains in place.

The recent social unrest echoes the public anger that erupted after the death of young fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi in the central town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2011.

Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at unemployment and police harassment, sparking the uprising that toppled Ben Ali -- whose rule was tainted by graft accusations -- and inspiring the Arab Spring revolts.

Faced with growing public discontent, Essid earlier this month replaced his foreign and interior ministers in the first reshuffle since taking office in late 2014.
By David Brunnstrom and Megha Rajagopalan BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed on Wednesday on the need for a significant new U.N. Security resolution targeting North Korea after its Jan. 6 nuclear test, though there were few signs of concrete progress. Kerry, on a two-day visit to Beijing, had been expected to press China, North Korea's lone major backer, for more curbs on Pyongyang after it said it had successfully conducted a test of a miniaturized hydrogen nuclear device, though the United States has voiced scepticism as to whether it was that powerful. China has insisted it is already making great efforts to achieve decentralization on the "Korean peninsula" and Wang rejected any "groundless speculation" on its North Korea stance, following remarks from U.S. officials that China could do more. "We agreed that the U.N. Security Council needs to take further action and pass a new resolution," Wang told reporters at a joint briefing with Kerry. "In the meantime, we must point out that the new resolution should not provoke new tensions." Kerry said the two sides had agreed to an "accelerated effort" at the U.N. to reach a "strong resolution that introduces significant new measures" to curtail North Korea's ability to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. "It's not enough to agree on the goal. We believe we need to agree on the meaningful steps necessary to get the achievement of the goal," Kerry said. The exchange of goods and services between China and North Korea was one area where steps could be taken to pressure Pyongyang back to talks, he said. Kerry also said that shipping, aviation, trade of resources, including coal and fuel, and security at border customs, were key areas in the sanctions debate. North Korea is heavily reliant on China for oil, gasoline and trade. "All nations, particularly those that seek a global leadership role, share a fundamental responsibility to meet this challenge with a united front," Kerry said. He added that the U.S. would take "all necessary steps" to honor security commitments to allies, signaling that the U.S. was prepared to continue ramping up its military presence in the region, a move that would likely unsettle Beijing. "North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat, to the world, and it has stated its intention to develop a thermonuclear weapon," he said. "In addition, it has made clear its intent to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile with the capacity to carry a nuclear warhead." The 15-member U.N. Security Council said at the time of North Korea's test that it would begin working on significant new measures in response, a threat diplomats said could mean an expansion of sanctions. Since then, diplomats said Washington and Beijing have been primarily negotiating on a draft resolution, but when asked on Saturday if they were nearing agreement, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said no. After talks on Wednesday, which went hours past schedule, Kerry said details still had not been set. In a sign that Beijing could be reluctant to take a more hardline stance on North Korea, state news agency Xinhua said it was "unrealistic to rely merely on China to press the DPRK to abandon its nuclear program, as long as the U.S. continues an antagonistic approach wrought from a Cold War mentality". "Bear in mind that China-DPRK ties should not be understood as a top-down relationship where the latter follows every bit of advice offered by the former," Xinhua said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Xinhua commentaries are not official government pronouncements, but can be read as a reflection of official thinking. Wang added that sanctions should be seen as a path to negotiation, and not as a punitive end in themselves SOUTH CHINA SEA MILITARIZATION Kerry said that a need for the United States and China to find a way forward on easing tension in the South China Sea weighed heavily in talks. "I stressed the importance of finding common ground among the claimants and avoiding a destabilizing cycle of mistrust or escalation," Kerry said. "Foreign Minister Wang Yi accepted the idea that it would be worth exploring whether or not there was a way to reduce the tensions and solve some of the challenges through diplomacy." Wang said China's activities in the region, which have elicited unease from the U.S. and its allies, should not be construed as militarization. "China has given a commitment of not engaging in so-called militarization, and we will honor that commitment," Wang said. "We cannot accept the allegation that China's words are not being matched by action." His remarks came as Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou said he planned a trip to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba, known as Taiping Island in Taiwan, in the sea, a move a U.S. official called "extremely unhelpful" in resolving disputes over the waterway. China claims almost all the disputed waters in the potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea, parts of which are also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Kerry was in Cambodia on Tuesday after a visit to neighboring Laos as part of an effort to urge unity among leaders of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the sea issue before a summit with President Barack Obama next month. China insists any disputes should be handled bilaterally. (Additional reporting by Sui-Lee Wee in Singapore; Writing by Michael Martina in Beijing; Editing by Nick Macfie)
By Gary Robertson

RICHMOND, Va. (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court heard arguments on Wednesday over whether a high school in Virginia should be ordered to allow a transgendered student to use the boys bathroom, even though he was born a biological female.

The student, Gavin Grimm, a 16-year-old junior at Gloucester High School, is suing the Gloucester County School Board over its restroom policy. His lawyers want the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to issue an order letting him use the boys bathroom.

Joshua Block, the lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which brought the case, told the three-judge panel the policy violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection, and Title IX, the federal law that bars sexual discrimination.

But school board lawyer David Corrigan contended that "transgender is not a protected class under the Constitution.

The question is, what is the meaning of sex in 2016? senior Judge Andre Davis asked Corrigan in the packed courtroom.

Our position is that sex is what genitalia (someone) was born with, Corrigan said.

Thats all sex is, biology? Davis asked.

Corrigan said school policies, with boys using boys restrooms and girls using girls bathrooms and unisex restrooms that anyone can use, did not violate Title IX and equal protection guarantees.

The court did not indicate when it would rule.

Grimms school allowed him to use the boys bathroom starting in October 2014, drawing complaints primarily from parents. The school approved a policy in December 2014 requiring students to use single-stall unisex restrooms or restrooms associated with their physical sex.

Court documents say Grimm has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is a mismatch between gender identity and physical sex.

The ACLU filed suit in June on Grimms behalf. A federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia, denied the request for an injunction in September and dismissed the discrimination claims.

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After the hearing, a sometimes tearful Grimm told reporters that he felt humiliated by the school boards decisions.

I didnt set out to make waves. I set out to use the bathroom, he said.

The case has attracted widespread attention, with gay, transgender and womens rights advocates, school administrators and politicians filing friend-of-the-court briefs.

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Grimms behalf. States including South Carolina, Arizona and West Virginia and Republican Governors Paul LePage of Maine and Patrick McCrory of North Carolina have submitted briefs for the school board.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by David Gregorio)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lieutenant General John "Mick" Nicholson, the current head of NATO's Allied Land Command, has been chosen as the new commander of international forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Wednesday amid concerns about setbacks in the fight against the Taliban.

Nicholson, whose selection must be confirmed by the Senate, would replace General John Campbell, who has commanded U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan for the past 18 months and is expected to retire.

Nicholson is a veteran of multiple deployments in Afghanistan. He commanded the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment as well as the 82nd Airborne Division, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told a news briefing.

"He understands the importance and complexity of our mission in Afghanistan," Cook said, having served previously as chief of staff of operations for the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, and U.S. Forces Afghanistan.

The transition comes amid growing concern about the security situation in Afghanistan, where Taliban militants have caused large numbers of casualties among Afghan troops and Islamic State affiliates have made some inroads.

The Taliban seized the northern city of Kunduz last year before being driven out by the Army. They also seized districts in Helmand province and threatened the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, a spokesman for the international mission in Afghanistan, said last week that Afghan security forces had "mixed results" in their first year of carrying out the fight against the Taliban on their own.

"Whenever they conducted deliberate, planned operations, they actually did fairly well," he said. "Where they had trouble and they didn't do so well was in response to crisis situations."

The security situation prompted President Barack Obama to announce in October that the United States would maintain a force of about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016 instead of drawing down to an embassy-based presence by 2017.

(Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Tom Brown)
By Michelle Nichols UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The Syrian government in 2015 ignored most United Nations requests to deliver humanitarian aid to some of the 4.6 million people in hard-to-reach and besieged areas and only 620,000 received help, the U.N. aid chief said on Wednesday. Stephen O'Brien told the U.N. Security Council that last year the United Nations made 113 requests to the Syrian government for approval of inter-agency aid convoys, but only 10 percent were able to deliver assistance. Another 10 percent were approved in principle by the Syrian government, but could not proceed due to a lack of final approval, insecurity or no deal on safe passage, while the U.N. put 3 percent on hold due to insecurity. O'Brien said the remaining 75 percent of requests went unanswered. "Such inaction is simply unacceptable," he said. "The impact on the ground is tangible: in 2013, we reached some 2.9 million people through the inter-agency convoy mechanism, but only 620,000 (in 2015)." "More and more people are slipping out of our reach every day as the conflict intensifies and battle lines tighten," O'Brien said. In total, the U.N. said 13.5 million people in Syria need humanitarian aid, up from 1.3 million from 2014. "Even with the worsening situation and continued access challenges, humanitarian workers in Syria continue to stay and deliver aid often at great personal risk," O'Brien said. He said that in 2015 food was delivered to nearly 6 million people a month; health aid to almost 16 million people; water, sanitation and hygiene support to 6.7 million; and basic household items to 4.8 million. "Let me be clear: the continued suffering of the people in Syria cannot be blamed on humanitarian organizations and staff," O'Brien said. "It is the failure of both the parties and the international community that have allowed this conflict to continue for far too long." Syria U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura hopes to convene talks on Friday on ending the civil war, but those plans appeared in doubt after the opposition said it would not show up unless attacks on civilian areas stopped first. The civil war was sparked by a Syrian government crackdown on a pro-democracy movement in early 2011. Islamic State militants have used the chaos to seize territory in Syria and Iraq, and some 4.3 million Syrians have fled the country. The U.N. says at least 250,000 people have been killed. (Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Tom Brown)
KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudan's army said it defeated one of the main rebel groups in the Jebel Marra region of war-torn Darfur on Wednesday and now controls the area following two weeks of intense fighting. The army has opened main roads in the region after dealing heavy blows to the SPM Abdelwahed movement, local Darfur officials told Sudanese Media Centre, a website close to the country's security services. SPM Abdelwahed is one of the main rebel groups in Darfur. Its leader Abdelwahed Mohamed Nour was one of the instigators of the Darfur rebellion in 2003. The movement refuses to enter into dialogue with the government. The United Nations had earlier on Wednesday urged Sudan to allow more aid into the western region of Darfur, where fighting that broke out two weeks ago has displaced about 34,000 people. About 19,000 civilians have fled into North Darfur and up to 15,000 into Central Darfur, escaping fighting in the mountainous Jebel Marra region that straddles three of Darfur's five states, it said. "While it is encouraging that some humanitarian assistance is being provided, clearly much more is needed," Marta Ruedas, U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, said in a statement. "We are therefore advocating for safe and unfettered access to provide timely assistance to those in need." The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur and more than 2.5 million displaced in more than a decade of fighting. Although the killings have ebbed since the war began in 2003, the insurgency continues and Khartoum has escalated attacks on rebel groups in the past year. UNAMID, a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur, said the latest fighting broke out when an unidentified group attacked the village of Mouli on Jan. 9, displacing large numbers of residents to nearby El Geneina. There they held protests that led to the closure of local businesses and schools in the town. The force has long faced accusations of failing to do enough to protect Darfur's civilians. Sudan will hold a referendum in Darfur in April to decide whether or not the region should remain as five states or become one entity with a degree of autonomy. The division of Darfur was one of the grievances that initially fuelled the war there. Fighting began when mainly non-Arab tribes took up arms against the Arab-led government in Khartoum, accusing it of discrimination. (Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Lin Noueihed and Tom Heneghan)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Syrian opposition groups should seize the historic opportunity to attend peace talks in Geneva planned for Friday and go without preconditions, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday. "Factions of the opposition have an historic opportunity to go to Geneva and propose serious, practical ways to implement a ceasefire, humanitarian access and other confidence-building measures, and they should do so without preconditions," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. "We believe it should seize this opportunity to test the regime's willingness and intentions, and expose before the entire world which parties are serious about a potential peaceful political transfer in Syria, and which are not," he told a briefing. Opposition groups adjourned a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday saying they were waiting for a U.N. response to their demands. Preparations for the talks, already postponed from Monday to Friday, have been beset by problems, including a dispute over who should represent the opposition. "The Syrian people are looking to this process and they need signs of hope that they are not destined to live in conflict indefinitely," Toner said. He added: "There is an urgency to getting these talks started." (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Eric Walsh)
By Elias Biryabarema KAMPALA (Reuters) - The Ugandan shilling was steady on Wednesday as hard currency buyers continued to stay on the sidelines, possibly limiting economic activity ahead of the Feb. 18 presidential election. At 0919 GMT commercial banks quoted the shilling at 3,470/3,480, unchanged from Monday. Markets were closed in Uganda on Tuesday as it was a holiday. "We're not seeing any buying interest from the usual big clients. They are cautious, may be waiting to come in after the election," said Faisal Bukenya, head of market making at Barclays Bank. Traders say big importers, apprehensive about a possible disputed poll and unrest, could be holding off on placing new shipment orders, consequently cooling demand for dollars. President Yoweri Museveni is seeking to extend his three decades in power. (Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; editing by Edith Honan)
London (AFP) - British Prime Minister David Cameron came under fire in parliament on Wednesday for referring to "a bunch of migrants" in Calais, with opposition MPs condemning his words as "divisive" and "shocking".

Cameron was speaking about a visit last week by opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn to migrant camps in Dunkirk and Calais in northern France.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais. They said they could all come to Britain," he said.

Yvette Cooper, who chairs the Labour Party's refugee task force, said that Cameron's words, made during parliament's weekly Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) session, were inappropriate for a "complex and sensitive" issue.

"Cameron very wrong to talk of 'a bunch of migrants' in . Divisive, not statesmanlike," she tweeted.

Labour MP Imran Hussain said it was "shocking" and a senior Labour source said it was "entirely unacceptable to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep".

The quote was also quickly picked up on social media, with many commenters pointing out that Cameron used similarly pejorative language last year when he referred to migrants in Calais as a "swarm".

Many tweets also included poignant images of Europe's migrant crisis alongside Cameron's words and pointed out the irony of his earlier tribute to the victims of Nazi repressions on Holocaust Memorial Day.

"Today it struck an especially discordant note," columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian.

"One of the lessons of the Shoah... is that is all too easy to dehumanise other people, to turn them from human beings with lives and needs and hopes into a problem to be repelled," he said.

"To speak the way he did was beneath the office he holds -- and beneath him," he concluded.

Corbyn, a veteran left-wing campaigner before he became Labour party leader, visited two migrants camps saying he wanted to see the crisis for himself and calling on Britain to do more to address the problem.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday renewed his criticism of Israel's "stifling" occupation of Palestinian territories, a day after similar hard-hitting remarks by the UN Secretary-General angered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The UN chief made clear that he would not retreat from the broadside he directed at Israel over its expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

UN diplomats said privately that Ban had upped the pressure on Netanyahu in a final bid to revive hopes for peace before he steps down as secretary-general at the end of the year.

"After nearly 50 years of occupation -- after decades of waiting for the fulfilment of the Oslo promises -- Palestinians are losing hope," Ban told a UN committee on Palestinian rights.

"Young people especially are losing hope. They are angered by the stifling policies of the occupation."

Netanyahu on Tuesday accused Ban of "encouraging terror" after Ban said that it was "human nature to react to occupation."

Speaking to the UN committee, Ban reiterated that "nothing excuses terror," but added that a security clampdown will not succeed in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The UN chief called for a return to negotiations, saying it was the "one and only path to a just and lasting solution -- an end to the occupation that began in 1967" and a Palestinian state.

"You can count on me to continue to speak up and speak out -- to push and to prod -- to do all in my power to achieve long-overdue Israeli-Palestinian peace," he said.

Ban said Palestinians had heard "half a century of statements" condemning Israel's occupation, but that their lives had not improved.

"We issue statements. We express concern. We voice solidarity. But life hasnt changed. And some Palestinians wonder: Is this all meant to simply run out the clock?

"They ask: Are we meant to watch as the world endlessly debates how to divide land while it disappears before our very eyes?"

The UN chief's sharp criticism of Israel came amid ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence and recent Israeli decisions to build new Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The United Nations has branded Israeli settlement expansions illegal, arguing that they are an attempt to undermine plans for a Palestinian state by absorbing land earmarked for the new country.
Mexico City (AFP) - A US teenager known for using an "affluenza" defense in a deadly Texas drunk-driving accident could soon be deported from Mexico after dropping an appeal, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Ethan Couch, 18, has been held in a migration detention facility in Mexico City since he and his mother were caught in a Pacific resort town in late December.

Couch had been sought by US authorities after he missed a mandatory meeting with his probation officer.

His mother, Tonya Couch, was sent back to the United States on December 31 and was promptly arrested by US authorities to face charges of hindering his apprehension.

Her son, however, had lodged an appeal that could have delayed his deportation for several months.

But Ethan Couch's Mexican lawyer, Fernando Benitez, told AFP that the young man dropped his appeal on January 15 and a judge accepted the decision on Tuesday.

It is up to the National Migration Institute to decide when to fly Couch back to the United States, but he "should be sent back ASAP," Benitez said in an email.

In 2013, the teen crashed his pickup into a group of pedestrians in Texas and another vehicle, leaving four dead and several seriously injured.

Couch, who was 16 at the time, had a blood-alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit for an adult.

The son of millionaire parents made headlines during his trial when a psychologist testifying on his behalf claimed he suffered from "affluenza."

The term, coined from affluence and influenza, implied that financial privilege made him unable to understand the consequences of his actions.

Couch pleaded guilty to intoxication manslaughter. Prosecutors had sought a 20-year prison term, but the court handed him a surprise sentence of mental health treatment and a decade of probation.
By Martin Petty HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam's Communist Party re-elected Nguyen Phu Trong to its top post on Wednesday, an expected outcome that bolsters consensus rule but creates some uncertainty about the momentum of economic reform. Trong, 71, is seen by experts as a conservative apparatchik and a party loyalist unlikely to deviate from the party's economic and foreign policy agenda, at a time when China and the United States are vying aggressively for influence. The five-yearly congress, normally considered a dull affair, had stirred rare public excitement about politics due to the prospect of a leadership challenge from pro-business premier Nguyen Tan Dung, whom the politburo overlooked in its nominations for key posts. Despite speculation of a tense showdown, Dung chose not to contest. Trong was the politburo's sole candidate for party chief, clipping the wings of Dung, 66, who had garnered broad party support and cultivated an image as a progressive with his decisive running of a fast-growing economy. Analysts regard Trong as a party stalwart keen to uphold a collective rule that Dung's ambition and popularity among businessmen could have tested. Resentment still festers among Dung's party opponents over crises in the banking and state sectors under his two-term premiership, experts say. Political analyst Nguyen Quang A said Dung's politburo exit was due to personality clashes and the party's consensus rule may not be an impediment as private business booms and the country seeks to integrate globally. MODERN FORCES "There are forces outside of the Communist Party that will lead the progress of the country," he said. "Trong is no strongman, he won't overrule the collective decisions. We can see a lot of younger, Western-educated people now on the party's central committee." A source familiar with internal affairs of the secretive party confirmed to Reuters Trong's re-election. The congress is due to endorse him on Thursday and announce a new politburo. The party has not officially announced him retaining the post, although the congress website carried a photograph of Trong holding flowers and flanked by smiling officials, with a caption saying they were congratulating him on being re-elected. Some investors saw that as a win for the old guard that brings uncertainty about the trajectory of an economy that was spurred last year by a slew of new liberal regulations and Vietnam's accession to multilateral trade pacts. The re-election to the central committee of some key policymakers and ministers of Dung's government, however, could signal wholesale changes may not take place. (Reporting by Martin Petty; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
Part of an OZY series on the college years of 2016 U.S. presidential candidates.

College can be a transformative experience. It certainly was for Hillary Diane Rodham at Wellesley College in Massachusetts during the 1960s. And not just because the future secretary of state once swam illegally in the campus lake or vigorously protested the colleges curfew on male visitors. When she arrived at college, the Democratic presidential front-runner was bright-eyed and ambitious, not to mention a Young Republican and a Goldwater girl. What happened?

Video by Charlotte Buchen.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday declined to comment on the latest so-called tax-inversion deal by a major U.S. company, but said legislation was needed to close the loophole. Asked at a White House briefing about a $16.5 billion deal announced on Monday by Johnson Controls Inc , a U.S. maker of car batteries and heating and ventilation equipment, to acquire Ireland-based peer Tyco International Plc , spokesman Josh Earnest said he would not comment on specific deals. "Ultimately, we need legislation to address this loophole," he said. (Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Ayesha Rascoe; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by James Dalgleish)
CLICK IMAGE for slideshow: Evacuated people from the Naval Medical Center San Diego wait and listen at the west entrance to the hospital following a report of gunshots at a building on the campus of the complex, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in San Diego. (John Gastaldo/The San Diego Union-Tribune via AP)

The U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego advised occupants to run, hide or fight after a single witness reported an active shooter and three gunshots.

This advice came through a statement on the medical treatment facilitys Facebook page, warning all nonemergency response personnel to stay away from the compound in Balboa Park.

While run and hide seem like standard responses, the added directive to fight raised both questions and accolades in the comments section on the post.

An active shooter has just been  reported in building #26 at Naval Medical Center San Diego. All occupants are advised to run, hide or fight, the post reads.

Though the instruction to fight may have surprised some readers, run, hide or fight is the advised protocol for military personnel at the facility and the general public.

A Sheriff's SWAT vehicle enters the Naval Medical Center San Diego campus with Balboa Park's golf course in the background, following a report of gunshots at a building of the hospital and ambulatory complex, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in San Diego. (John Gastaldo/The San Diego Union-Tribune via AP)

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says that individuals must be prepared mentally and physically to deal with an active shooter situation because they are often over within 10 to 15 minutes before law enforcement can arrive on the scene.

SLIDESHOW  Active shooter reported at Naval Medical Center San Diego, California >>>

If there is an accessible escape route, you should try to evacuate the premises. If that is not possible, you should find a place to hide where the shooter would be less likely to find you. And if that is not possible, as a last resort (if your life is in imminent danger), you should try to disrupt or incapacitate the gunman.

The agency outlined the following bullet points as good practices:

 Be aware of your environment and any possible dangers.

 Take note of the two nearest exits in any facility you visit.

 If you are in an office, stay there and secure the door.

 If you are in a hallway, get into a room and secure the door.

 As a last resort, attempt to take the active shooter down. When the shooter is at close range and you cannot flee, your chance of survival is much greater if you try to incapacitate him/her.

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The agency defines an active shooter as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area; in most cases, active shooters use firearms(s) and there is no pattern or method to their selection of victims.

During a morning press conference, Capt. Curt Jones, the commanding officer of the naval base, said their men and women in uniform go through extensive training on the appropriate response to these situations.

The training that we go through is run, hide or fight, Jones told reporters. We train all the employees  both active duty and civil servants that are part of the Navy  to do those three things in that order.

The report of a possible shooter triggered a massive response by law enforcement, but authorities did not find any evidence to indicate that a shooting occurred, Jones said. There have been no reports of deaths or injuries.

Back in 2012, the city of Houston and the Department of Homeland Security produced a six-minute instructional video outlining this response called Run. Hide. Fight. Surviving an Active Shooter Event.

We talk about how police and first responders should react to an active shooter event. We got to thinking that theres nothing out there that tells the individual citizen who might find themselves in that situation about what they should do, Dennis J. Storemski, the director of the Houston Mayors Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security, said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Run, hide or fight, he said, was partly inspired by stop, drop and roll, the well-known fire safety technique.

Storemski said they wanted to create a common sense reaction that would be easy to remember. That video went viral following the mass shooting by James Holmes on July 20, 2012, at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. that killed 12 people.
By Suzannah Gonzales

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The widow of a northern Illinois policeman who committed suicide in September was indicted on Wednesday on charges related to his suspected embezzlement from a youth police explorer program he ran, officials said.

Melodie Gliniewicz, 51, was indicted on felony charges of disbursing charitable funds without authority and for personal benefit as well as money laundering, Lake County sheriff's and state's attorney officials said in a statement.

An investigation into Fox Lake Police Lieutenant Charles Gliniewicz's death found inconsistencies in financial documents and cash withdrawals from the account for the police explorer program he ran for more than 20 years, the statement said.

Money taken from the account for the explorer post over several years was used for a Hawaii trip, over 400 restaurant charges and other personal expenses, officials said.

Melodie Gliniewicz also held a fiduciary role as an adult adviser to the explorer post, officials said.

Attorneys for Melodie Gliniewicz said she had suffered greatly over the past few months and was devastated by the charges brought against her.

"Melodie is a victim of her husband's secret actions and looks forward to her day in Court to show the world her innocence," her attorneys said in a statement.

She turned herself in on Wednesday afternoon after a Lake County judge issued an arrest warrant and set bond at $50,000, authorities said.

Charles Gliniewicz, 52, was found fatally wounded in a remote area of Fox Lake, near the Wisconsin border about 55 miles north of Chicago. Authorities said in November he had killed himself in a carefully staged suicide as village officials began learning about his embezzlement.

Hundreds of local, state and federal officers searched for suspects in his killing for days and mourners packed a funeral for Gliniewicz, a 30-year veteran of the department who was known as "G.I. Joe" in the community.

"This entire matter has been a sad and tragic saga for the Village of Fox Lake," Lake County State's Attorney Michael Nerheim said in a statement.

(Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales; Editing by Peter Cooney)
By Ben Klayman

(Reuters) - The wife of Saeed Abedini, an American pastor freed this month from an Iranian prison as part of a prisoner swap, has filed for legal separation from her husband, according to an Idaho state judiciary website.

Naghmeh Abedini previously said in a message to supporters that became public last fall that her husband had been abusive and suffered from a pornography addiction. Reuters has not been able to independently confirm her allegations, and the husband could not be reached for comment through a spokesman.

Naghmeh Abedini said on Wednesday that her husband, freed earlier this month, had threatened the end of their marriage. He landed in Boise, Idaho on Tuesday after his release 10 days ago in Iran, and already had a "wonderful reunion" with their children Rebekka, 9 and Jacob, 7.

But on the same day she also filed for legal separation, according to a Idaho state judiciary website. She told Reuters she had not filed for divorce, but declined to elaborate and her attorney could not be reached to comment.

In a statement on Facebook, Naghmeh Abedini said on Wednesday that she had taken "temporary legal action to make sure our children will stay in Idaho" until the situation with her husband has been resolved.

Saeed Abedini, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was sentenced by an Iranian court in 2013 to eight years in prison for allegedly compromising Iran's national security by setting up home-based Christian churches there.

He was one of five Americans released as the United States and Iran swapped prisoners and Washington lifted sanctions on Tehran in return for the Islamic Republic abiding by an agreement to curb its nuclear ambitions.

The pastor's wife also said he demanded three months ago that she do certain things that she did not detail in order to promote him in the eyes of the public or he would end the marriage.

"I love my husband, but as some might understand, there are times when love must stop enabling something that has become a growing cancer," she wrote.

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Naghmeh Abedini on Facebook apologized to her followers for not disclosing the abuse sooner.

"I sincerely had hoped that this horrible situation Saeed has had to go through would bring about the spiritual change needed in both of us to bring healing to our marriage," she said. "Tragically, the opposite has occurred."

In an interview at her parents home in Boise last week, Naghmeh Abedini had told Reuters that rebuilding their marriage after her husband's imprisonment would take time.

(Reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit, editing by G Crosse; Editing by Alistair Bell)
When Sen. Lisa Murkowski arrived to work on Tuesday after the weekend's snowfall, she might have thought she arrived in a future bereft of glass ceilings. As Murkowski took stock of the Senate floor, the Republican senator from Alaska noticed that every single person who showed up to work was a .

"As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber and the presiding officer is female," Murkowski said, addressing the floor. "All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female."

It's only a matter of time before a men's rights activist pipes up with a, "Has feminism gone too far?" But this was no stunt.

"Now, this was not orchestrated in any way, shape or form," Murkowski noted. "We came in this morning and looked around and thought, 'Something is different this morning,'  different in a good way, I might add."

According to Roll Call, the congresswomen were assembled for a brief session ahead of Wednesday's discussion on Murkowski's proposed bipartisan bill, the "Energy Policy Modernization Act." She is slated to introduce the bill alongside Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).

Senators Maria Cantwell and Lisa Murkowski

Though there are still just 20 women in the U.S. Senate and 84 voting members in the House of Representatives  accounting for about 20% of each  women legislators have united before to take the lead in Congress. During the 2013 government shutdown, female senators were the loudest voices urging their colleagues to compromise. At the time, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who presided over Tuesday's Senate meeting, joined forces with Murkowski and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) to form a task force.

Women continue to make strides in the Senate, which can be measured by the amount of traffic in the Capitol's lady's room. Following the 2012 election, which elected a historic number of women to the Senate, women were greeted by epic gridlock in the two-stall restroom. Senators were still working on the plans for renovations to expand the bathroom in June. According to the Atlantic, the story is a favorite anecdote of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who said, "We're in a minority group and so we tend to stick together. You get power that way by sticking together across the aisle."

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Murkowski would surely agree. She said it's in her gender's DNA.

"Perhaps it just speaks to the hardiness of women," she said, speaking of their trek through the snow to work. "Put on your boots and put your hat on and get out, slog through the mess that is out there."



Jan. 27, 2016, 9:48 a.m. Eastern: This story has been updated.
FLINT, Mich.  Takeisha Major and her two sons moved into their home on Agree Avenue in East Flint, Mich., on Nov. 1, 2015. By Dec. 11, Major had already received two bills from the city of Flint for water and sewer fees totaling $655.64. She refuses to pay.

I will not pay to be poisoned, the 28-year-old Flint native said at her kitchen table Monday evening. Its not just me; my children have to live here. I will not pay for my kids to have lead in their blood.

Less than a month before Major and her boys, ages 2 and 9, moved to their new house, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder ordered Flint to rejoin the Detroit water system, where the city had long gotten its water from before it switched in April 2014 to the Flint River. For more than a year, Flint residents complained about the smell and color of the water, about skin rashes and hair loss.

Several water-boil advisories were issued following positive tests for coliform bacteria (indicating contamination from sewage) and trihalomethanes, which pose a cancer risk. Finally, after the release of two reports in September 2015 showing elevated lead levels in the blood of Flint residents, particularly children, Snyder acknowledged there was a problem with the water.

But by then the damage had been done. The improperly treated river water had corroded the citys lead pipes, likely leaching the toxic metal into any water that might now pass through them.

This month Snyder declared a state of emergency and activated Michigans National Guard to distribute bottles of water, filters and test kits to Flint residents. On Jan. 16, President Obama answered the governors call to do the same.

Despite all this, Flint residents continue to receive monthly water bills from the city.

And these arent your average water bills. Well before the water was contaminated, Flint residents had been paying some of the highest water rates in the country. The average family pays the city of Flint upward of $150 for water every month. It was a financial burden that, for many, had become too much to bear even for clean water. According to Flint attorney Val Washington, who successfully sued the city last August for illegally hiking the price of water 35 percent between Sept. 16, 2011, and Aug.17, 2015, the city placed 21,000 liens against residents homes for delinquent water bills.

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One of two class-action lawsuits filed last week seeks to prevent any future shutoffs by the city and demands forgiveness of all past and future bills for contaminated water. State Sen. Jim Ananich, a Democrat who lives in Flint, said he is working on putting together a bill-relief program in the Senate that would forgive water bill debts for the past 18 months and extend a credit to people who have been paying. People shouldnt have to pay for water that through no fault of their own has been filled with lead, he said.

At a press conference this week, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said, If you cant drink the bad water you shouldnt pay for it, and a spokesperson for Schuette told Yahoo News that he is strongly pursuing the water payment situation through his Consumer Protection Division.

In the meantime, Major is going to keep on not paying.

Like most parents in Flint these days, Major worries about what hazards her children might have been exposed to. She describes her 2-year-old, whod been consuming and bathing in the Flint River water since he was an infant, as hyperactive and angry all the time.

Her 9-year-old, who has autism, has come down with pneumonia three times in the past two years. Since late October, the typically mild-mannered Mekhi has been sent home from school six times for fighting with other kids.



Major doesnt want it to sound like all of a sudden shes blaming everything on the water, but with all the reports shes read lately on the long-term developmental effects of lead poisoning on children, she cant help but wonder.

I am scared for my children, she says, her tough exterior washing away in a well of tears. Its irritating because you never know  at any given time your child could be taken away from you by a source of water. Water!



SLIDESHOW  Water crisis in Flint, Michigan >>>

She said she uses about half a case of bottled water each day just to bathe her kids and brush their teeth. Once or twice a week theyll take quick showers, just to get clean, but she tries to avoid the water at all costs.

It makes us feel like were not Americans, she said.

Thats why Major isnt paying the water bill  and she doesnt think anyone else in Flint should either.

If we stand up and stick together, our voices will be heard, she said.

Dozens of Flint residents made their voices heard during a rally outside City Hall Monday afternoon. Carrying signs with messages like Arrest Snyder and Water is a human right, protesters enthusiastically tore up copies of their water bills and burned them in a small trash can.

But the gesture was mostly symbolic.

When asked, most of them said they are still paying their water bills out of fear of what might happen if they stopped.

If you dont pay it, theyll put it on your taxes for your house, said one woman. And if that dont get paid, then they put foreclosure on your house.

If I dont pay my water bill, then DHS will take my son away, said another, referring to the state Department of Human Services  recently renamed the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Her son listened intently at her side.

The latter is a frequent concern expressed by Flint parents who know that under Michigans Child Protection Law, a lack of running water is considered a sign of potential child abuse and neglect.

*****

Kiki Phillips sits outside her home in Flint, Mich., on Jan. 25, 2016. Phillips recently received notice that her house will be put into foreclosure due to her inability to pay her accumulating water bills. (Caitlin Dickson/Yahoo News)

It was precisely this fear that Kiki Phillips says drove her into foreclosure.

Phillips has lived since the early 1990s in the powder blue house with yellow shutters she shares with her disabled mother and 3-year-old daughter, and she recalls a time when the water bill was only $40. But for at least the past five years, Phillips said theyve been paying over $100 for water each month.

After a while the cost became too much and Phillips decided she had to prioritize her expenses. If nothing else, Phillips said, she would pay the bare minimum necessary to keep the water on because I got a 3-year-old and my neighbor thinks she works for DHS.

Eventually, in December 2014, her water balance reached $1,800, which was added onto her taxes. This week Phillips received a notice that her house was going into foreclosure.



Phillips said she doesnt know how, but shes determined to come up with the money.

We gotta rob Peter to pay Paul, she said. Its ours. I cant lose it.

A spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services suggested that Flint parents need not worry about the agency coming to remove their children if the water gets turned off. Rather, MDHHSs interest is in making sure children have access to clean water.

MDHHS has not assigned a single Childrens Protective Services complaint due to any issues related to Flint water, MDHHS Childrens Services Agency executive director Steve Yager said in a statement. MDHHS works proactively to assist families whose water is shut off and to ensure families have water filters and bottled water in Flint. When a family is without water, our goal is to help that family provide clean water for their children. That can be through assisting families in applying for State Emergency Relief, setting up plans for children to access safe water at a relatives home or providing bottled water. We do not petition the court to remove a child solely for the lack of water in a familys home.

On the citys website Monday, Flint spokesperson Kristin Moore wrote that no shutoff notices have been issued since the beginning of December 2015 and the City is currently reviewing its policy on shut off notices in light of the declared emergency.

Major received a shutoff notice on Dec. 15, but she had been waiting to open it.

Its due to be shut off [Jan.] 15, Major said, reading from the salmon pink paper after tearing open the envelope. Were past the 15th.

While she admitted shes afraid her water will eventually be cut off, Major said she believes the only way anyone will be held accountable for the water crisis is if she and the rest of the people of Flint demand it.

Theyre not just going to give up on the whole city. They only do that if you be quiet about it, if you dont take a stand, she said. As long as we are fighting against this, there is going to be a good outcome. Something is going to happen.
LUSAKA (Reuters) - Zambia has a maize deficit of 200,000 tonnes in the current 2015/2016 crop season after drought damaged the crop in many parts of the country, a government spokesman said on Wednesday. A prolonged drought threatens crops across the Southern African region where the United Nations has warned that 14 million people face hunger. Zambia is considering asking farmers to grow irrigated maize, buy up local stocks in remote parts of the country or import maize from South America to plug the deficit, Presidential spokesman Amos Chanda said. "Assuming that farmers are unable to grow irrigated maize to produce the 200,000 tonnes, then we may have to import the maize from South America," Chanda told journalists. "The good news is that the Millers Association of Zambia and the Zambia National Farmers Union think there is sufficient maize on the local market and we may just have to mop it up." Zambia's current 2015/2016 maize crop is expected to be a third lower than the previous year due to the severe drought in many parts of the country. Zambia's maize harvest dropped 21 percent to 2.6 million tonnes in the 2014/2015 season versus the previous season. Domestic maize prices in South Africa, the region's top producer of the staple grain, have scaled record peaks in recent days because of the drought. (Reporting by Chris Mfula; Editing by Ed Stoddard and David Evans)
Copenhagen (AFP) - Denmark and Switzerland on Wednesday joined a growing number of European countries to report Zika infections among travellers returning from Latin America, where the mosquito-borne virus has been blamed for a surge in birth defects.

"A Danish tourist who travelled to Central and South America was diagnosed on his return with the Zika virus," a hospital in eastern Denmark said in a statement late Tuesday.

The Danish patient was a young man who was expected to make a full recovery, the head of Aarhus hospital, Lars Ostergaard, told public broadcaster DR.

Two people returning to Switzerland from Haiti and Colombia were also diagnosed with the virus, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health said.

Neither was pregnant and neither required hospital care, the statement said.

Health watchdogs in a string of European countries meanwhile said they had recorded Zika cases dating back to as early as March 2015.

The Netherlands confirmed 10 cases and Britain five, all among people returning from South America.

In Italy, the Spallanzani National Institute of Infectious Disease said four cases were recorded in March 2015, while in Portugal, the health ministry said four Portuguese had been infected.

All eight had been travelling in Brazil.

A woman in the Swedish capital Stockholm was diagnosed with the virus in July 2015, the Swedish Public Health Agency confirmed Wednesday.

"The symptoms were treated and the woman recovered," said Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of microbiology at the health agency.

In Spain, two cases of Zika were detected in late 2015, authorities in the northwestern region of Catalonia confirmed on Friday.

Both were South American women -- aged 30 and 45 -- who had travelled to the continent over Christmas. Diagnosed on their return, they have since fully recovered. Neither was pregnant.

- No vaccine -

In Moscow, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said the Russia authorities had been "monitoring (Zika) since it appeared.

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"Now we are working on controlling it as soon as any strange strains appear ... to have domestic medication for prevention and treatment."

President Vladimir Putin added: "We need to pay attention to this ... work with transportation companies, airlines, understand the signs and react quickly."

"Of course mosquitoes cannot fly over the ocean, but infected people can and do."

There is no vaccine or specific treatment for Zika, a flu-like disease with a rash that goes unnoticed in 70 to 80 percent of cases.

Most patients treat the symptoms simply with painkillers and other medication.

The virus is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito after it takes a blood meal from an infected person. The insect can also carry dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Zika was first reported in Africa, Asia and the Pacific before leaping to the Americas, where it has been linked to a jump in the number of babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, particularly in Brazil.

The tally of cases of microcephaly in Brazil surged from 163 per year on average to 3,893 after the Zika outbreak began last year. Forty-nine of the babies have died.

Some 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries have been swept up in the outbreak which has extended as far north as Mexico.

Travellers have also brought it back to the US states of Florida, Hawaii and New York.

So far there has been no known cases of local transmission -- infections that are generated within a country -- in the US or Europe, although France said such cases had occurred in its departments and territories in the Caribbean basin.
Ecuador man denied bail on ATM charges

A charge alleged that last Wednesday, the accused was found at Arouca in possession of card-making equipment with intent to be used in the manufacture of counterfeit cards in contravention of Section 17 of the Electronic Transfer of Funds Crime Act 2000.

The penalty for this offence is imprisonment for five years and a $50,000 fine.

The second charge, read by the magistrate, alleged that on the same date, the man was found at Trincity Mall, Trincity, trafficking counterfeit cards in contravention of Section 16(2) of the Act. This offence also carries a penalty of five years prison and a $50,000 fine.

No tengo nadie, the accused said in court, pleading with the interpreter to tell the magistrate that he had nobody, no ties to Trinidad and Tobago and was afraid.

He says he is frightened because he did not think he did anything wrong, the interpreter said. The accused said he was a visitor and on Monday was supposed to board a flight out of Trinidad and Tobago.

It was a date he would not keep, instead appearing in the prisoners dock of the court, casually dressed in a blue t-shirt and jeans.

The court heard how the accused was staying at Deans Apartments at 52 Eastern Main Road in Arouca.

Charles asked whether Legal Aid provisions applied to foreigners. A lawyer at the Bar  Collin Partap (in court for another matter)  noted Legal Aid was governed by qualification criteria which made the accused unlikely to qualify.

Charles later denied bail, saying Marsical had no connections locally and is not a citizen. She advised him of his right to apply to a judge in chambers for bail. The cases were transferred to the Arima Magistrates Court where the accused is to return today. Prosecutors, who said an attempt was made to contact the Ecuadorian Consulate at Barbados last Wednesday, were directed to try to reach the consulate again.
Security shake-up

In a media release issued hours after Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley toured the NOC, the Office of the Prime Minister said it would now fall to Director of the SSA Colonel George Robinson to oversee the operations of the NOC, which has offices at Knowsley.

On his tour, Rowley was accompanied by the Minister of National Security Major General (retired) Edmund Dillon, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi, Minister of Foreign Affairs Denis Moses and Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General, Stuart Young.

The Prime Minister and his contingent were welcomed by Director of the Strategic Services Agency (SSA) Colonel George Robinson, under whose remit the NOC now falls, the Office of the Prime Minister said. It gave no further details.

A photograph from Rowleys visit with the NOC, issued by the Office of the Prime Minister, showed the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers alongside Robinson.

Absent from the photograph was retired Major Sarwan Boodram.

Up to last September, Boodram was still serving in the post as Director of the NOC.

Other top officials of the NOC were also present, and furnished the ministerial team with a presentation and, as well a tour of the facility, the OPM said in its media release.

Efforts to contact Dillon last evening were unsuccessful.
Helon Francis wows Young Kings

He sang about bandits with Ph.D. robbing ordinary people, while some of them, like so much weed. These and his other messages were fully understood by the audience who gave him the loudest and most sustained applause on the night. Lani K (Jalani Kojo) had his mother Twiggy (Ann-marie Parks-Kojo) and Calypso Queen of the World, Calypso Rose (McArtha Sandy-Lewis), graced the stage for his performance of Legacy.

The song was about advice given to him by deceased greats Ras Shorty I (Garfield Blackman) and Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts) to take the baton from living legends in calypso like the Mighty Sparrow (Dr Slinger Francisco), Black Stalin (Leroy Calliste) and Shadow (Winston Bailey). He was told to Jam Dem, and also turn on the soca pressure a la Maestro (Cecil Hume) and Merchant (Dennis Williams). It was a very entertaining performance, as was that of Snakey (Heaven Charles) with Mathematics.

He left the audience in stitches.

However surprising the audience with a voice strikingly similar to that of Baron (Timothy Watkins) was Shashie Gosine who delivered Face Reality with a conviction shared by the crowd.

He told the audience in song that the authorities ought to go after the big fish instead of licking up the small fries. Also, to get the country back on track they must also get rid of poverty and stamp out corruption.

He was roundly applauded at the end of his performance.

The crowd was also pleased with Dillon Thomas Dont Wake Me Up, a song where he chastises friends for sleeping through an emancipation parade.

Thomas told them when they fully understand what emancipation means and well as their ancestral history, only then can they wake him up.

On a lighter note, Dr.

Seales (Derrick Seales) and Third Bass (Adrian Hackshaw) got the audience in a dancing mood with their delivery of Dancing Like Stalin and Bum Bum (Stush in the Bush) respectively.

The latter performer had bush distributed to the crowd, bush on stage, and even had the real bush man Trevor Sayers come on stage to do his bush dance. The audience lapped it all up.

Hayden Franciss performance of Dont Forget Wey Yuh Come From saw a lot of action on stage with bele dancers, drummers and Dane Gulston on pan.
Parliament spent $3.2M on trips, subs

Former Speaker Wade Mark, who ran Parliament and went on at least eight foreign visits, on Tuesday told Newsday he must first see the CPA Report before commenting. Parliaments half-million dollars in subscriptions were $343,741 to CPA International; $128,000 to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU); $25,549 to ParlAmericas; $4,800 to the Society of Clerks of the Table; $3,205 to the CPA Caribbean, Americas and Atlantic Region (CAA-CPA) and $516 to Commonwealth Hansard Editors.

The $2,700,000 travel and hospitality bill comprised $580,000 for CPA activities (namely workshops, seminars and conferences); $780,000 on non-CPA activities; $670,000 on official visits abroad; and $735,000 to host foreign officials in TT. The break-down is as follows. For CPA events, the top bill was $162,345 for the Fifth Westminister Workshop on Public Accounts Committees (PACs) and financial oversight in Malta in June 2015. Attendance was cancelled by the then Cabinet, but this debt incurred as a late cancellation fee.

Next most costly CPA event was the $151,780 spent on the seven-day 40th Regional Conference of the CAA-CPA in British Virgin Islands in July, 2015.

Some $110,207 was paid to attend an International Parliamentary Conference From Magna Carta to Commonwealth Charter in London, in February 2015.

Other CPA events were $54,846 for a Commonwealth Serjeants-at-Arms Conference in London in July 2015; some $51,967 for CPA Association of PACs in London in January 2015; some $30,448 for the 12th CPA Canadian Parliamentary Seminary in Canada in May 2015; and $38,690 to attend the April 2015 funeral of Canada Senate Speaker, the late Pierre Claude Nolin.

The 12 Non-CPA events cost $780,000 in sum.

Attendance at a Commonwealth Conference of Speakers in Jersey, Channel Islands, in January 2015 cost $119,110.

Some $145,000 was spent on attending the 132nd IPU Assembly in Switzerland in March 2015. It cost $122,000 to attend an Inter Parliamentary Meeting at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April 2015. The Fourth World Conference of Speakers in New York in August 2015 cost $134,000 to attend. A United Nations meeting on the Arms Trade Treaty in Jamaica in June 2015 cost $25,319 to attend.

Officials visits aboard saw $120,647 to visit Cubas Parliament and $549,040 to visit Australias Parliament.

Places visited by Mark (in CPA, non-CPA and official visits) included Australia, Jersey, USA, Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Panama, Canada, and Cuba.

Five locally-hosted events in TT cost $735,000.

These were $218,024 for a visit by Bermudan MPs; $250,000 for a visiting UK delegation; $30,000 for the IPU heads visit; $200,000 for Canadian MPs visit; and $35,000 for a visit by the Montserrat Speaker. Parliament staff attended about seven training sessions in 2015  in the USA in May ($75,436); Cuba in May ($38,000), Barbados in June ($33,574), Grenada in August ($16,980), Jamaica in June ($44,299) and Canada in August ($58,000).
POLITICS F.B.I. Evidence Is Often Mishandled, an Internal Inquiry Finds By MATT APUZZO and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT DEC. 19, 2014 Photo The J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. building in Washington. Auditors have found many problems with how the bureau handles evidence. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share This Page Email Share Tweet Save More Continue reading the main story F.B.I. agents in every region of the country have mishandled, mislabeled and lost evidence, according to a highly critical internal investigation that discovered errors with nearly half the pieces of evidence it reviewed. The evidence collection and retention system is the backbone of the F.B.I. s investigative process, and the report said it is beset by problems. It also found that the F.B.I. was storing more weapons, less money and valuables, and two tons more drugs than its records had indicated. The report
Banquet Speech of President of India at the banquet hosted in honour of HE Mr. Francois Hollande

New Delhi, Wed, 27 Jan 2016 NI Wire

Banquet Speech of President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee at the banquet hosted in honour of HE Mr. Francois Hollande, the President of French Republic on January 25, 2016

Your Excellency President Francois Hollande, Distinguished members of the delegations of India and France,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

President Hollande, I am delighted to welcome you and the esteemed members of your delegation to India on this very special occasion, which is historic in many ways. Tomorrow, when you preside as the Chief Guest of Indias 67th Republic Day celebrations, France will make history as the only country to have been accorded this honour a fifth time. When your distinguished French Infantry troops march in step with Indian troops in the parade tomorrow, they will make history yet again by being the first-ever foreign contingent to do so. I recall with great pleasure, my meeting with you here, three years ago, and feel privileged to welcome you back in India once again  this time as the Chief Guest of our Republic Day celebration.

For me, this is not just history in the making  it is a testimony to the enduring bonds between our two civilisations and our two people; it is a tribute to our long-standing and strategic partnerships. It is emblematic of our two national mottos: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Satyameva Jayate, coming together, with the power to inspire the world to achieve the universal ideals of peace and justice.

Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The friendship between India and France is driven by a remarkable similarity in the ideals and aspirations of our people. Our civilizations have interacted with each other over the centuries, united by a shared vision of the world we want to live in - a world that is premised on individual liberty, freedom and equality; a world that respects pluralism and democracy; a world that seeks tolerance and peaceful co-existence. The deep bonds of our time-tested friendship are only set to strengthen in the years ahead, anchored as they are in this rich, unshakeable foundation.

Today, France is Indias leading partner in strategic sectors like defence, space and civil-nuclear cooperation. While our partnership in defence is several decades old; I am happy that our ties are being further strengthened with the robust participation of French private enterprises in Make in India initiative through joint ventures in defence production and manufacturing.

Our rich cooperation in the space sector is now five decades old and is increasingly contributing to the worlds understanding of our planetary resources, our ability to fight climate change and fathom the unexplored mysteries of space. France is also a key partner in our quest for harnessing nuclear energy to provide reliable and affordable energy for all.

While our cooperation in science and research, education, culture and health is growing, I am glad that the Government of France and the captains of French industry are actively partnering India in our ambitious developmental initiatives, infrastructure, smart cities, clean energy, railways and skill development.

Excellency, I am glad that you started your visit to India in Chandigarh, a city that is a monument to the genius of Le Corbusier. The unveiling yesterday of the historic findings of an Indo-French archaeological team dating back to 2.6 million years and the proposed Indo-French partnership in Mars exploration, juxtapose the incredible breadth of our partnership - from jointly plumbing the depths of history to joining hands to explore the stars and the skies.

Mr. President, Chandigarh is also the capital of Punjab and Haryana, a region from where more than a century ago, thousands of Indian soldiers fought Frances battle during the First World War and close to ten thousand of them today lie buried in scattered cemeteries in France, having made the supreme sacrifice for the freedom of France.

As we did then, so must our two countries fight resolutely now for freedom from the forces of intolerance, extremism and terrorism. The dastardly terror attacks in Paris and Pathankot have underlined the urgency for countries like ours to combat this existential threat to humanity and human civilisation.

We also need to combat the shared challenge of climate change. Excellency, we laud your leadership and commitment in forging the Paris Agreement on climate change which paves the way for our collective endeavour to safeguard our planet for future generations. We must now ensure that the world walks the path of sustainable development through sustainable lifestyles.

Excellency, we have begun the New Year with fresh hopes and dreams and a resolve to jointly overcome the challenges facing us. We live in difficult times characterized by violence, fundamentalism and inequality. But we also live in times of brilliant innovation, of great creativity, of unparalleled global interaction. I am confident that your visit heralds new beginnings in scaling new heights in our bilateral relationship and in our common quest for peace, stability and prosperity for all.

With these words, ladies and gentleman, may I raise a toast to the friendship that has always existed between the peoples of India and France and to ever closer cooperation between our two countries.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I invite you to please join me in raising a toast:

- to the good health of His Excellency President Francois Hollande;

- to the continued progress, prosperity and well-being of the friendly people of France; and

- to the lasting friendship between our two peoples and countries Vive La France and Jai Hind!

Source: PIB
Shri Arun Jaitley felicitates winners of Social Media Contest organized as part of 67th Republic Day celebrations

New Delhi, Wed, 27 Jan 2016 NI Wire

Shri Arun Jaitley, Minister of Finance, Corporate Affairs and Information & Broadcasting today felicitated the winners of the social media contest in various categories organized by New Media Cell of I&B Ministry as part of 67th Republic Day celebrations. Speaking on the occasion the Minister said that the innovative approach to crowdsource ideas from the people provided government an opportunity to understand the peoples perspective on major flagship programmes of the government. The minister also complimented the winners for providing fresh ideas through social media platforms. Minister of State for Information & Broadcasting, Col. Rajyavardhan Rathore and Secretary I&B, Shri Sunil Arora were also present during the occasion.

The contests were held on the Ministry of I&B Social Media platforms - Facebook (www.facebook.com/inbministry), Twitter (@MIB_India) and a specially designed webpage (http://www.graffiti.inbministry.in) where Graffiti were invited from participants on various flagship programmes of the Government. The competition was open for a fortnight from, 1st January to 14th January, 2016. The winners of the contest were provided a unique opportunity to witness the Republic Day Parade, 2016 at New Delhi. The travel and accommodation arrangements of all these winners were sponsored by Ministry of I&B.

For Graffiti wall, the themes were Start Up India, Stand Up India; Digital Empowerment; Entrepreneurs of Young India; Skilled India, Powerful India; Make In India; Financial Security to All and Housing For All. The response on graffiti was over-whelming with 419 entries across all themes. The First prize in the Graffiti contest was awarded to Shri Narendra Kumar Singh for his work captioned Housing for All". Shri Narendra Kumar Singh has beautifully captured the idea of Housing for All by using a metaphor of Weaver Birds nest. It shows independent and affordable housing for everybody across various income categories", the jury described. The second prize was awarded to Shri Narendra Vasantrao Borlepwars artwork Skill India which depicts "the fusion of Education and vocational training leading to recognisable improvement in the economic graph". The third prize was awarded to Shri Vimal Kumars artwork Make in India showing "ladders which visually double up as scaffolds on construction sites best captures the idea of 'making'."

For the Twitter contest, netizens responses were invited on Twitter on three hashtags; #VisionofTeamIndia, #MyIdeaofIndia and #RDayNotJustaHoliday. A total of 888 tweets were received by @MIB_India, the twitter handle of Ministry of I&B. The winners of the Tweet contests across three theme segments taken collectively were as follows in order of first, second and third places:

Shri Ganesh Joshi @Igjganesh #MyIdeaofIndia For evry Mouth there is Meal for evry girl there is life For evry head there is roof For evry foot there is road. The user has summed up in very simple terms that everybody in India should have the basic needs satisfied.

Shri Narayana Vinayak @vinumon2016 #VisionofTeamIndia centre and states working together in the great act of nation building in spirit of all for one and one for all. The user has drawn our attention to cooperative federalism.

Shri Neeraj Gupta @neerjanni2000 - #RDayNotJustaHoliday It is a moment2get inspiration 4rm freedom fighters & to taking up new initiatives4making India No1 country. The user has invoked the sacrifices and sufferings of freedom fighters for whom India became independent and a constitution was framed.

Regarding the Poster making contest on Facebook, participants were invited to send posters on three themes; Give It Up - LPG Subsidy, Per Drop More Crop and Save the Girl Child. 432 posters were received by Ministry of I&B. The jury awarded first prize to Shri Advait Chitnis for his artwork captioned Save the Girl Child where "the artist highlighted a graphical representation of a female gene which led to the noose, whereas a male foetus seldom faces this ordeal." The second best poster was designed by Shri Sudhir Komawar for his artwork captioned Per Drop More Crop which "brilliantly captured super imposed image of the leaves of crops inside huge drop of water reminding that how a universe of microscopic can subsist in a drop of water." The third place was awarded to Shri Anunay Mandal for his painting captioned There is no He without She" which captured "a brilliant truism that women are the substratum of mankind."

Source: PIB
A guest article by Joseph Friedlander

Nigel B. Cooks Glasstone.Blogspot Blog

Read the whole thing there (big page, may take some searching)



I have bolded particularly interesting details for the reader to notice below.

I should emphasize that below the line is all Nigels work or quoting others work which is lost to the casual reader deep in the above link.



The Bravo test story of the nine people trapped by fallout in the firing bunker at Enyu Island, south west Bikini Atoll, 1 March 1954:

http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/wetokian/trap1.htm

We Were Trapped by Radioactive Fallout

Saturday Evening Post, July 1957

by Dr. John C. Clark

as told to Robert Cahn

Here, revealed for the first time, is how nine scientists were caught 20 miles from ground zero when the biggest H-bomb of all time went off. (Note: This was written in 1957. Four years later the new biggest bomb was not 15 but 50 megatonsJF) This is their chilling story.

. . . by Dr. John C. Clark as told by Robert Cahn

When we locked open the main firing switch in the control room before leaving to arm the H-bomb that February day at Bikini in 1954, I had no feeling that this one would be any different from the more than forty other nuclear test shots in which I had participated. Since it was a thermonuclear bomb of a relatively large predicted yield which we were testing, we had tried to figure out in advance all the possibilities of danger and to make allowances for all eventualities. But this is not easy when one is concerned with a device which produces an explosive force roughly equivalent to 15,000,000 tons of TNT  1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb.

The energy released by the thermonuclear blast  which we call the yield  could not be pre-determined with absolute accuracy. Nor could we tell beforehand exactly how extensive the air-wave and tidal-wave effects would be or the precise amount and distribution of the fallout the radioactive particles from the nuclear cloud which drop back to earth. In the business of testing nuclear devices there are always a few unknowns.

The temperature was in the high eighties, the sky was clear and there was just a slight breeze blowing as we got into the helicopters for the flight to the shot island approximately twenty miles northwest, at the other end of Bikini atoll. It was a perfect day for the end of Februaryfar different from the weather at some places Stateside. All our extensive preparations for this first shot in Operation Castle had come off on schedule and we contemplated no trouble ahead. Little did we realize that within eighteen hours we would become unsolicited human guinea pigs during the strangest and most hazardous effects ever experienced from an American nuclear test.

After clearing the coconut palms through which our landing strip had been cut, I looked down at our sturdy control blockhouse. It certainly seemed out of place among the palms and pandanuses on our tiny tear-drop-shaped island. Coral sand covered most of the roofsand which the radiation experts said would help protect anybody inside the building from stray fallout radiation.

The structure had also been sealed to withstand up to at least a five-foot tidal wave and built of reinforced concrete to resist the overpressure and underpressure effects expected from the blast. It certainly looked secure enough even to satisfy those who had argued that we would be safer if the firing were controlled from a greater distance. But inasmuch as our control island, Enyu, was the most distant spot on the atoll from ground zero, to go farther would have necessitated firing from a ship. And we wanted to avoid the more complicated ship-controlled firing if at all possible.

It was now shortly after noon and as our Marine helicopter pilot headed north over the atoll, I could see the last few supply ships pulling away from Enyu. The operational plan called for all ships to be safely out to sea by the time we armed the gadget. We hoped to have the arming completed and be back at the control island in time for the helicopters to return to their mother ships before dark.

As we headed across the lagoon to the first of our instrument stations, the string of islands and reefs which comprise Bikini atoll looked like so many beads on a necklace. The largest islands are one to two miles long and at their widest are less than 800 yards across. Others are no more than reefs or sandspits. In a few minutes we dropped down onto one of the small islands. While Herb Grier, an electrical engineer from Boston, checked on some of the recording instruments, I locked open a part of the circuitry in a blast-proof bunker. The Commander of the firing party must lock open all the switches in the firing circuits with padlocks and keep the only key. Its not that we dont trust others. But in the business of arming a thermonuclear bomb, you must be absolutely certain that no circuits are closed at the time of arming.

About two oclock, after making a few more stops to check on instruments and to lock open switches, we arrived at the shot site. With me were Grier and Barney OKeefe, both of the Boston firm of Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier, electrical contractors to the Atomic Energy Commission. Already there, having flown up in another helicopter, was Dr. Gaelen Felt, one of the top young scientists from Los Alamos.

Felt, Grier and OKeefe had specific duties concerned with the numerous optical and electronic experiments which are always co-ordinated in the test of a nuclear device. My job was to check on everything at the shot site, and then, when all was in order, to arm the bomb.

We were almost finished with the checking when Gaelen discovered helium, used in optical experiments, leaking from one of the key setups. Some rapid calculations disclosed that by shot time the next morning there would not be sufficient pressure left in the tanks to carry out the experiment. I radioed the information to Dr. Alvin C. Graves, scientific deputy to the task-force commander, who was aboard the command ship. Without this experiment, the test would not be held.

We soon discovered that we could not fix the leaks in the short time left. But we came up with another solution to the problem. If we delayed the arming procedure for seven hours and opened the valves at the last possible moment, there would still be enough helium for the experiment. We did not desire to return after dark because our island landing mat had no lights. However, it was either set back the arming or postpone the test and Doctor Graves gave us the go-ahead for our emergency plan.

We sat around until dark taking it easy while the whirly-bird pilots went off to a nearby construction site and scrounged some food that had been left there by the workmen. The temperature, which varies less than ten degrees night and day, was still in the eighties. Shortly before eleven P.M. we opened the valves of the helium tanks. I then requested permission from the command ship to arm the bomb. Before the final connections are made, a check must be made to determine that no other personnel are in or near the shot island. We are pretty darn sure the bomb wont go off when we arm it, but with the complex circuitry involved there is always the one chance in a million that something might go wrong.

Barney and Herb accompanied me to the artificial sandpit which was ground zero, This island had been dredged up out of the coral sand so that it could be in the most advantageous position for the shot. As a safety precaution, we always have someone else along to check every action of the person arming the device just to make doubly certain that each step is done correctly. Much of the work in an atomic test can be done by automation, but for all the experimental bomb tests so far we have done the arming by hand.

All went according to plan, however, and I made the final connections which armed the bomb. We quickly got into the helicopters and headed back, retracing our path to close the switches I had locked open earlier in the day. The pilots could easily follow the white-coral shoreline and we got back to Enyu about midnight. The men who had been checking things at the control point took our places in the helicopters, which then scooted off to join their ships, already headed away from the shot site.

There were nine of us remaining in the blockhouse. In addition to Doctor Felt, OKeefe, Grier and myself, there were Dr. Harold Stewart, a scientist from the Naval Research Laboratory; Lt. Douglas Cochrane, a radio expert; John L. Sanderson, of Holmes & Narver, Los Angeles contractors who did the construction work and two radio technicians, Airman First Class Gerald Scarpino and Master Sergeant Alton Greene.

We made our last-minute checkouts of circuits and then waited for the final weather reports from the command ship. Around three A.M. zero hour was scheduled for shortly before daybreakthe scientific director radioed, We have just had the weather briefing and we agreed to continue. So go ahead and start the count-down.

Herb Grier, who was making the time announcements, waited for the tone from WWV, thc world-wide standard-time station. It is now minus two hours, announced Grier at the beep of the signal. Almost 100 miles away, on small islands in the atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik, technicians from an American military weather group checked their watches and recording devices. At other points on the ocean, personnel on ship instrumentation stations synchronized their time settings. And in the air, pilots and navigators coordinated with our announcement to make certain they would be at their correct position at shot time. Other aircraft had already completed search flights in the area and had seen no stray ships. Apparently, as we found out later, they somehow failed to spot the little Japanese trawler Fukuryu Maruthe Fortunate Dragonfishing about seventy miles off our shot island.

At minus one hour we started our final preparations. I told John Sanderson to button up the generators in a nearby concrete bunker and to secure the control building. After closing the doors to the structure housing the generators, Sanderson climbed a ladder outside our blockhouse to put metal plates and gaskets over the air-conditioning vents. He then entered the blockhouse and sealed the submarine hatch which had been installed as our only door and which was completely watertight and blastproof.

At H hour minus fifteen minutes I told Grier to push the button on the automatic sequence timer. Contrary to popular belief, we dont push a button to set off the bomb. Everything is done electrically by the sequence timer, although up until the last second I can pull a switch to stop the bomb from going off. Also there are no-go devices built into the circuitry which automatically prevent the detonation should any of the primary experiments not be ready to function properly. There are hundreds of experiments conducted during most nuclear detonations, but we usually limit those which can lock out a detonation to four or five. However, some of these four or five circuits are closed so late that even at the last second we are not sure that a no-go device wont halt the test.

Those last few seconds in the control room are always quite tense. We keep watching the control panel, where lights flash from red to green to show when experiments and circuits are ready to operate. Some remote-controlled cameras near the bomb are not turned on until between minus three quarters of a second and minus a half second. We would rather not have to rely on such delicate timing, but these ultra-high-speed cameras work at a rate of over l,000,000 frames a second and require split-second control.

The purpose of nuclear detonations is always to obtain experimental data, and it would be a waste of money and months of scientific effort if the bomb went off and the recording equipment was not in complete readiness.

After the sequence timer had been started, we all gathered in the control room for a final briefing. I requested that all who were not needed in the control room should stand in the hall. I told them that although we expected no difficulty, there would he a ground shock shortly after the bomb went off. This would be followed by the air shock wave, which, at twenty miles distance, would probably do no great damage. Finally, there was the possibility of a tidal wave sweeping over the building. If it came, it was due at about H plus seven minutes. I told them I had agreed with Doctor Graves that, inasmuch as we had no observation windows, we would wait until H plus fifteen minutes before unbuttoning the building, to make absolutely sure we were not under water.

At H minus ten minutes, Grier, OKeefe and Lieutenant Cochrane manned posts at the control panel. Hal Stewart was in a nearby room where he had his spectrographic instruments, and I stayed in the center of the control room.

At the next tone it will be H minus one minute, announced Grier a few minutes later.

Thirty seconds, announced Grier. Fifteen. All exccpt two of the lights were green. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven  six  five. All was absolutely quiet except for the soft whining of the sequence timer. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . Zero.

I looked at the panel; all the lights were green, we knew the bomb should have detonated.

How did it go Al? I called on the radio to Doctor Graves, forty miles away on the command ship.

Its a good one, he answered.

Inside our blockhouse we still had no physical evidence that anything had happened, but we braced ourselves against a possible sharp ground shock.

It camebut not as expected. Less than twenty seconds after Zero the entire building started slowly rocking in an indescribable way. I grabbed the side of the control panel for support. Some of the men just sat down on the floor. I had been in earthquakes before, but never anything like this. It lasted only a few seconds, but just as we were breathing easier, another ground shock hit us, with the same undulating motion. Then, a minute later, came the air blast. First the overpressure, then the sucking out by the underpressure. The concrete building creaked, but stayed firm. A few yards away, as we found out later, frame buildings had been blown down by the hurricane winds from the blast.





Immediately after the air blast. Felt noticed some water coming in through the conduits behind the control panel. And about the same time water in the lavatory started shooting up to the ceiling. I radioed the information to Doctor Graves who was as perplexed as we were. Water effects were not expected for six more minutes. We later found out that this water had been forced up from the lagoon by the overpressure created from the air blast, and had come in through pipes and conduits.

For the next few minutes nothing happened. We waited for any possible tidal wave effect.

H plus seven minutes went by. Nothing happened. H plus ten minutes. Finally, at H plus fourteen. I radioed Doctor Graves and told him we would open the door. Cautiously, Sanderson moved the steel plate to make sure we were not under water. When nothing happened, he opened the door. Everything was calm outside.

While I stayed inside to man the radio, the others went out to look at the mushroom. In a couple of minutes, Grier came back to relieve me at the radio and I went outside, taking along a Geiger counter. The shot cloud had spread out and was pure white. It was an awesome sight. I casually placed the radiation counter on top of a fence outside the door and turned away to talk to Gaelen Felt, who was pointing out that the blast had torn the doors open on his instrument trailers nearby. All of a sudden I noted that the radiation meter was already reading eight mill roentgen [per hour]. That meant we were receiving radiation at the rate of 8/1000 of a roentgen per hour, far less than would be received from an ordinary chest X ray.





While we watched, the counter went up to twenty mill roentgen [per hour], then to forty. While this was not yet a dangerous amount of radioactivity, there should not have been any radiation at the distance we were from the bomb blast. It could mean only one thing: we were already getting fallout. We could hardly believe it. The wind was supposed to take the fallout in almost an opposite direction. But our Geiger counters were registering radioactivity, and counters are usually accurate.





After the counter reached fifty mill roentgen [per hour], I had to turn the knob to change scales. The pointer kept climbing. I called for everyone to get inside. It still was far below dangerous radiation levels, but we had no idea how fast and how much it might increase. A dose of 75 to 125 roentgen received in a short interval may produce nausea and other symptoms of radiation sickness. About 450 roentgen might be fatal.

By the time we were back in the blockhouse, the reading near the door was one roentgen [ per hour], and in the control room it was about twenty mill roentgen [per hour]. I radioed Doctor Graves, who checked with the weather boys. No one could understand why we should be getting fallout, but were. Of course it was a known fact that winds at higher altitudes sometimes blow in opposite directions and could shear the bomb cloud as it passed through diferent levels. But no such opposing winds had been predicted.

A few minutes later I again called Doctor Graves on the radio.





The radiation is building up pretty fast, Al, I reported. Inside by the door it now reads ten r [per hour]. The level here in the Control room is fifty milli-r [per hour].

We then discussed the possibility of sending in helicopters to take us to the ships. But Doctor Graves rightly decided that much as he would like to get us off the island, at the rate the radiation was building up outside, it was too risky for all concerned to attempt a helicopter rescue.

We agreed it was safer now to be inside our sand-covered blockhouse than to be outside in the intense, direct radiation from the fallout even for the short time a rescue operation might take. Of course we had no idea how much the radiation might build up inside the blockhouse. But it became increasingly clear that we had no choice. We were trapped.

In a few minutes the radiation level in the control room reached 100 mill roentgen [per hour]. This was above a safe level in which to stay for any great length of time. At this point we did not know how long we would have to stay in the building, so we decided to see if there might be a safer place to which we could retreat.





Felt and OKeefe first checked Stewarts room near the door. They found the radiation level there many times higher than in the control room. They then went to the radio room across the hall from the control room. Here also the level was too high for safety. There were only three rooms left  a communications room, my small office and a data-processing room. I breathed a sigh of relief when Felt told me that the level in this data room was only ten mill roentgen [per hour]. Fortunately, considerably more sand had been piled on top of the part of the building covering the fifteen-by-twenty-foot data-processing room, and the sand was shielding us from the radiation.

I advised the command ship of our situation. I told them that we had found a room in the blockhouse which seemed perfectly safe unless the fallout level outside got much higher. At the rate of ten milliroentgen per hour we could remain for days without harmful effects. I did advise them, however, that we would man the radio in the control room only every fifteen minutes.

I told the men to make themselves as comfortable as they could in the data room. There were a few Army cots in the building and these were moved into this room. It was now about H plus one hour and I was most concerned as to what was happening to the radiation level outside. I took the radiation meter, opened the door and gingerly placed it outside at arms length for a quick reading. It read forty roentgen [per hour]. I quickly closed the door.





Shortly after we had gone into the data room, Hal Stewart asked permission to get his spectroscopic plates and film out of his room. If he did not get them at once, all his test results would be ruined. We figured out that he could stay for eight minutes without getting too much radiation, so I said go ahead. He rushed into the room, wrapped the plates and film in a black cloth, and got back in just under seven minutes.





We were not exactly a happy bunch as we sat around in that small back room. We had been forced to turn off the air conditioner because it brought in fallout particles from outside. The entire building soon got hot and sticky. Only a few yards away in the construction camp were steaks we had planned on having breakfast. Instead, we were munching C rations.

A little over an hour after shot time, Doctor Graves radioed that the command ship was also starting to pick up radiation. They would have to move farther away and we might lose radio contact. And about that time our generator began failing and the lights gradually went out, leaving us in darkness, and with only battery-powered radio equipment.

We kept checking the Geiger counter with our flashlights. After the first hour, it was still at ten mill roentgen [per hour]. If the wind didnt change and cause more fallout we probably were safe, because the radiation outside the blockhouse would decay with the passing of time. But we already had had one unpredicted wind shift. Now we really didnt know what to expect.

The minutes ticked on. We could hear the command ship, but they could not pick up our signal. However, about three in the afternoon they started coming back, and once again I contacted Doctor Graves. Our radiation level had not increased and we figured the best thing do was to remain inside until late in the afternoon to let the outside radiation level fall. We worked out a plan for a rescue operation to take place at about 5 30 P.M.

Late in the afternoon we checked the outside radiation and found it to be about twenty roentgen per hour. To keep the hot dust off our bodies, we wrapped ourselves completely in bed sheets, cutting holes only for our eyes. Three helicopters were sent from the command ship. As we heard them overhead we left the blockhouse, got into our jeeps and drove the half mile to the landing mat. The pilots hovered as we left the building and set down when we arrived at the mat, The whole operation took less than five minutes. As soon as we were in the helicopters we took off the sheets and a radiological safety officer checked us. Within twenty minutes we were back on ship, where we showered and were given a thorough radiation check. None of us had received any harmful amount of radiation.

The next day we found out how really fortunate we had been. It was estimated that fallout radiation outside our blockhouse was several hundred roentgen. Had we been forced to stay outside the entire day without protective cover, it would have been fatal to all of us.

The twenty-three Japanese fishermen in the Fortunate Dragon, which was seventy miles further away from the shot than we were, received burns. Twenty-eight American personnel manning weather stations, and 236 natives on Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik also received radiation during the unforeseen fallout.

However disconcerting it may have been to us at the moment, our experience proved to be a windfall for the Civil Defense people. They had long hoped for something more than theoretical data on what might happen under extreme radiation conditions if people had the proper safeguards. Now, for the first time, humans had been in an area of lethal radiation and had been unharmed because of adequate protective covering. Civil Defense had representatives at the test site during the operation and by making a study of our experience they were able more reliably to predict how Americans might protect themselves during a radiation disaster. It has now been figured, according to Civil Defense, that shelter in an old-fashioned cyclone cellar with a covering of earth three feet thick would reduce the radiation level to about 1/5000 of that outside.

When we finished measuring the yield of the bomb, it was found to have been almost twice that which had been predicted, a margin of error not incompatible with a totally new weapon and certainly welcome to the scientists. It had been so powerful that at one of the concrete bunkers one and a half miles from ground zero a twenty-ton door had been blown right through the building against the back wall fifteen feet away. And on our control island twenty miles away all the wooden buildings had been completely demolished.



Nigel B. Cooks comment on the above incident at the link above:

[For technical report on the damage to these structures, see Wayne J. Christensen, Blast Effects on Miscellaneous Structures, Operation Castle, Project 3.5, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, weapon test report WT-901, 1955. The two massive concrete instrument bunkers at 2500 yards survived 130 psi peak overpressure from the Bravo test but were damaged in detail. The door referred to is the shutter door on Station 1341 at Able (codename) Island, 7500 feet from ground zero for Bravo shot, hit by 130 psi peak overpressure. The report states that light wooden buildings severely damaged when hit by 1.4 psi peak overpressure and a total positive blast duration of 13.4 seconds, at 14.5 miles from ground zero of the Bravo detonation.]

Two days later when we returned to our control island, the radiation level was still much too high for personnel to remain any length of time. Bulldozers were brought in to scrape off the top soil containing most of the radiation and push it into the ocean. This reduced the radiation level around the blockhouse enough so that we could use it again for part of the test work. But for the remainder of the tests on that atoll we made a change in plansthe firing operations were conducted from the command ship. Being guinea pigs once was more than enough for us.

The End.

About the author:

Dr. John C. Clark is a scientist who has specialized in weapons of war since he directed research in detonation phenomena at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in World War II. In the past ten years he has often been Firing Party Commander and Test Director for nuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific. On two occasions when malfunctions in recording devices stopped tests at the last moment, Doctor Clark personally disarmed the bombs. He left the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory staff last March to join the Astronautics Division of General Dynamics Corporations Convair Plant in San Diego.





Nigel B. Cooks comment on the above incident at the link above:

There is another account of this incident by Bernard J. OKeefe in his 1983 book Nuclear Hostages (252 pages, Houghton Mifflin, Boston). OKeefe was also in the firing bunker at the time of the Bravo test, and recalls different figures for the fallout radiation buildup, from memory I believe he claimed it reached 65 R/hr outside the shelter door at 1 hour after burst. He also provides more details of the electrical failure, explaining that he analysed the electrical supply on an oscilloscope as it began to fail and one of the three AC phases was blown. This reduced the voltage available and as a result of overload the remaining phases broke down. Unlike Dr Clarkes 1957 account above, OKeefe gives details of the electromagnetic pulse at shot time on the control panel, blowing meters and indicator lights after travelling back to the bunker via underwater cables to the bomb about 20 miles away. The EMP current pulse from Bravo coupled from the explosion via the cable to Enyu Island probably resulted in the damage to the generator system.
Behind the Facades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions
If someone were to be asked about self-driving cars 20 years ago, they probably wouldnt be able to say much. Now, these cars are the prime example of what kind of cars are seen today. While self-driving cars are convenient, they arent the safest to use. Big car companies, such as Tesla and
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" ... How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public... "

[From George Washington's farewell address.]

Other Quotes:

"Don't worry about genius and don't worry about not being clever. Trust rather to hard work, perseverance and determination. The best motto for a long march is ' Don't grumble. Plug on.'....Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that the hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness." Sir Frederick Treves

"...To be clear, the Constitution of the United States of America is the United States of America. They are one and the same. Any individual or agency which seeks to subvert the Constitution and wage political and/or rhetorical war on it, are self-declared enemies of the United States of America, as they are subverting and waging war on the United States of America." - Pat Dollard

The truth to the matter is that Obama lies but he does it with such finess that the easily fooled are easily fooled. ~ Norman E. Hooben

"Going for the grandest illusion of all, [Obama] ... told the New York Times: 'We've actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles.' Excuse me while I pick my jaw off the ground. Everyone knows -- or should know -- that putting more and more of the government in charge of more and more of the economy is entirely inconsistent with free-market principles. This means that the president's statement to the contrary is what is known as a big lie." --columnist Diana West



When you trust a stranger more so than your friend, you become stranger than the stranger; Barrack Husein Obama is a stranger. - Norman E. Hooben

We the peopleWe the people now have a New World Order that we the people did not order. Norman E. Hooben

"We are now in a great civil war of words and you have the honor of participating as a true patriot. The battle has not been won but you will be there when we are victorious. The pen is mightier than the sword and you will inscribe your name in the book of freedomand that, my friend is an honor

"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves ." -

Winston Churchill

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

-

Ronald Reagan

Thomas Sowell

For those who promote a race they are called, "racists". For those that promote American they are called "American". For 'American' is a 'concept' and no racial tones are tolerated either in shades or sounds. -Norman E. Hooben

(In reference to Lourdes Galvan of San Antonio, Texas racial bigotry regarding American military heroes.)

Note to NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA (

Hola! I know you are watching):

Will Rogers never met Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. -

N. E. Hooben, July 2008

Harvard University was once an all boys school...today they have no balls at all. - N. E. Hooben

I will stand with the Constitution For The United States of America should the political winds shift in an ugly direction

Politicians are like vampires...

Whether its blood or money they want to suck it out of you till you die. ~ N. E. Hooben

(Norman E. Hooben in response to a writer who complained of not having the honor of serving in the U.S. Military)Back in the days of "The Lone Ranger" program, someone would ask, "Who is that masked man?" People need to start asking that question about Barack Obama. -N.E. HoobenThe Police State of Massachusetts is now imposing laws against nature. Massachusetts is by far the most un-Constitutional government of the State, by the State, and for the State than any among the the fifty that hold a star on the banner of freedom. It is run by Socialists and hypocritical so-called Christiansthe worst among them are the Catholics who go to Church on Sunday and forget what they Prayed for on Monday. - Norman E. Hooben - "A proud Catholic proud of my Faith. A proud Catholic NOT so proud of my Church!" - July 16th 2008 N. E. Hooben

When a people are satisfied with receiving gifts paid with their own taxes as a way of life Anarchy is sure to follow. - Fred Boutin 2008

From the first time I heard about the boogey-man as a child to the first time I got shot at in Vietnam, nothing in my entire lifetime, THAT'S NOTHING! has put more fear into me than this man Obama. - Norman E. Hooben - July 2008

We are here for only a mini-second in the sands of time. Then we become the dust that makes the sand; and the Hand of God molds us anew. Take care my friend and may God Bless... - Norman E. Hooben on the death of our dearly beloved pet dog, Stirling

The evidence is overwhelming!

In order to save America we must destroy the Socialst Marxist Party... - N. E. Hooben

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." -- Josef Stalin --

When it comes to lying, prudent people are guided by a Higher Authority driven by thou shall not written in stone. Whereas Bill Clinton has no Higher Authority to guide him, thou shall not has no conscious objections; for without a conscience there is no guilt. - Norman Hooben

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. - Adolph Hitler

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. - James Madison, the Federalists Papers

There was a Chemistry professor in a large college that had some Exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Prof noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back And stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked,'Do you know how to catch wild pigs?' The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke. 'You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly, the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity. The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America.

The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms- just a little at a time.

One should always remember 'There is no such thing as a free Lunch!' Also, 'You can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

You apparently don't share a sense of patriotism, Americanism, freedomism, or whatever kind of 'ism' that true Americans believe in... You do however, display a bit of socialism, communism, marxism or whatever kind of 'ism' that you make excuses for... ~ Norman E. Hooben (in response to an Obama supporter's views about the ACS census)

A nation that knows not from where it came, knows not where it is going! Today, Americans know too little about the foundations of our nation. The result is a nation now in chaos, its people unable to discern what is wrong with the transformation (paradigm shift) of our society and form of government that, if left unchecked, will destroy every facet of freedom, liberty and justice. The price of freedom is vigilance; the price of vigilance is knowledge. Many of America's founding documents are now available on the web. ~

Learn USA
Libyan Presidency Council Tuesday pledged to re-name a new cabinet after the Tobruk parliament rejected the first 32-member proposed government deemed too large.

We will respect the deadline of 10 days, unity government adviser, Fathi Ben Issa said.

Prime Minister-designate Faiez Serrajs first government proposal was turned down Monday after the lawmakers of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR) overwhelmingly rejected it saying it was too large.

Following the rejection, UN mediator Martin Kobler urged the Council and the HoR to quickly work together in order to unveil a new cabinet deemed necessary to tackle pressing issues which have traumatized the North African oil rich country since the fall and death of Col Gaddafi in 2011.

The UN has brokered a peace deal between rivals providing for the formation of a unity government known as Government of National Accord (GNA.) The deal was signed in Morocco on December 17, 2015 by fringes of rivals sides.

Even though the EU, the US and the international community have lent their support to the GNA, there still remains resistance to allow the unity government to take office in Tripoli as wished by the UN and the US.

The Tripoli-based administration and its affiliate congress (GNC) have opposed the UN-backed unity government and vowed to sabotage efforts seeking to bring it to Tripoli.

However, the GNA is increasingly gaining adherence. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani on a visit to Italy on Monday stood in support of the unity government adding that without it Libya will remain at the mercy of human traffickers and terrorist organizations.

As to the possibility of foreign military intervention to flash out terrorist organizations including IS, Rouhani said this could succeed only when all Libyans participate in the GNA.

Meanwhile, the EU is reportedly studying sanctions against hardliners making the peace process stumble. GNC president Nuri Abu Sahmain and GNC-appointed Prime Minister Khalifa Ghwell are reportedly targeted and could soon be banned from traveling and see their assets frozen.

Many sources said the EU is eager to see the political process go forward and would not hesitate to penalize those who want to obstruct it.
London-based human rights NGO Amnesty International Tuesday slammed Egyptian authorities for maintaining Mahmoud Hussein in prison for two years without trial and subjecting him to torture.

Mahmoud Hussein was 18 when he was arrested in 2013 for wearing a Nation Without Torture t-shirt and a scarf with the logo of 25 January Revolution.

He has not been tried and according to reports, a Cairo court has renewed this January his detention for further 45 days.

Amnesty International deems Hussein detention unprecedented and unacceptable and calls it an all-out violation of international law.

Mahmoud Husseins continuing detention for more than two years is an utter disgrace and an affront to justice. He should not be forced to spend a single day longer in prison, Amnestys Said Boumedouha said.

By continuing to detain Mahmoud Hussein, Egyptian authorities are flagrantly flouting Egyptian and international law and making a mockery of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisis claims that 2016 will be the year of the youth in Egypt, he added.

Boumedouha also demanded the immediate release of Hussein whom he said was forced to sign a confession by National Security Agency.

Husseins relatives have also condemned his unlawful detention by authorities who have launched blanket clampdown on anti-regime critics and Muslim Brothers followers.

Mahmoud is an example of how pre-trial detention is now the punishment, whereas many defendants in cases related to torture and corruption are being released pending trial, said Husseins brother Tareq.

Mahmoud will miss one more year of school due to his continued detention, Tareq added.

Hundreds of other Egyptians like Hussein have been jailed without trial for more than two years. The regimes iron hand control of the country has numbed youths vigor to continue fighting for freedom and justice. Only small numbers took to the street on Monday to mark the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian 2011 revolution which swept away President Hosni Mubarak.

Several activists and young revolutionaries explained that the current state control of the country is unprecedented and worse than during Mubaraks era.
UN Chief Tuesday condemned Israels continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories following Israeli Prime Ministers recent approval of construction of further 153 settlement houses in West Bank.

Ban Ki-Moon expressed his indignation over what he qualified as an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community.

Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process, Ban Ki-Moon said during a UN Security Council periodic Middle East debate.

As oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism, he added.

For the UN Chief and Korean diplomat, the Israeli unlawful activity explains the Palestinians choice for violence to voice their grievances.

Ban Ki-Moons comments came after Netanyahu Monday gave a go-head to construction projects of 153 settlement houses in occupied territories in West Bank, including the Ariel Carmel and Gush Etzion settlements.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was not long to hit back at the comments, saying the UN Chief was encouraging terror.

The comments of the UN Secretary General encourage terror, Netanyahu said in a statement.

The Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state, they want to destroy a state and they say it out loud, he added.

They want to murder Jews wherever they are and they say so out loud. They do not murder for peace and they do not murder for human rights.

The UN Security Council stood by the Palestinians in the wake of the new Israeli appalling projects which may further complicate peace efforts trying to ease tensions.

Chinese ambassador to the UN Liu Jieyi called on the UN Security Council to consider bringing international protection to Palestinians while he also invited Israel to play a leading role in bringing back calm.

US ambassador to the U.N, Samantha Power, on her part decried the Israeli settlement policy as contrary to peace.

Steps aimed at advancing the Israeli settlement program are fundamentally incompatible with the two-state solution and raise legitimate questions about Israels long-term intentions, she said.

The spike in violence between Palestinians and Israeli since last October has claimed lives of 149 Palestinians and 25 Israelis. Israel pins the blame on Palestinians.

More than 400, 000 Israelis live in occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank under the protection of the Israeli army.
Maroc Telecom, the partly state-owned telecommunications operator in Morocco, which is the third mobile operator in Cote dIvoire under its local branch Moov, announced it is increasing its investments in the West African country.

The announcement was made by the companys CEO Abdeslam Ahizoune at a meeting with Ivorian President during a visit to Abidjan.

Ahizoune renewed to the Ivorian President the groups commitment to increase its investments in the country and to continue participating in the development of the telecommunications sector in Cote dIvoire.

He told reporters after the meeting that his group won a global telecommunications license bid and paid to Cote dIvoire, a down-payment of 76.2 million (50 billion FCFA) out of a total amount estimated at 152 million. No details as to payment of the remaining amount were given.

The new licence dubbed global licence includes 3G and 4G high speed internet services. Ahizoune according to reports also indicated that the new acquirement will open an avenue for other investments, increase internet speed and invest on fibre optic networks.

Maroc Telecom acquired Moov in January 2015 when it bought branches of Emirati communication company Etisalat in Benin, Cote dIvoire, Gabon, Niger, Central African Republic and Togo.

With around 5 million customers (September 2015 figures) representing 20.24 per cent of the market share, Moov is the third largest network in the West African country behind leading Orange and MTN.

Last December, Orange and MTN had also paid respectively 76 million and around 80 million as a down-payment to acquire the 4G licence. Reports indicate that the companies promised to continue talks with the government to scale down the licence price deemed too high.

In January 2015, Maroc Telecom was ranked among the most powerful operators in the world by specialized Total Telecom magazine. The Magazine also nominated the groups chairman Ahizoune in the Top 5 CEOs of African telecom groups. At the African level, the Moroccan group is ranked second behind the South African MTN.
Morocco and Germany are about to settle the issue of the nearly 3,000 undocumented Moroccan migrants, some of whom claiming refugee status on groundless basis.

The issue was discussed on Wednesday during a phone conversation between King Mohammed VI and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

During their phone talk, the two leaders hailed the positive development of the two countries relations and expressed their shared resolve to endeavour to further expand their cooperation, a statement by the Kings Office said.

The statement said talks also covered the recent flow of illegal migrants, some of whom deceitfully claiming refugee status.

These flows followed what was meant to be a humanitarian move but whose goal was diverted and massively exploited by human trafficking networks, active on both shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the statement said.

In this context, the two leaders agreed that the German Minister of the Interior will visit Morocco the soonest possible to discuss with his Moroccan peer all aspects of this issue, examine the cases of the Moroccans illegally staying in Germany and repatriate them without delay.

Rabat and Berlin are bound by a repatriation agreement.

German media reported last week that Germany is readying to deport nearly 3,000 Moroccan and some 2,296 Algerian undocumented migrants to their countries of origin.

Hundreds of Maghrebans claimed to be from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan to enter Europe during the wave of migration last summer, hoping to get the right to asylum.

Germany hardened its asylum procedures after the violence against women in several German cities on New Years Eve. On 19 identified suspects, 14 were either Moroccan or Algerian.
Confira o preco do seguro para o Chevrolet Onix

Saiba quando voce gastaria com o seguro do carro mais vendido do Brasil
The familiar emergency alert system, the one where we in the U.S. occasionally hear a radio or television broadcast interruption that...
Here's a blast from the past: the former Syms store at 42 Trinity Placeonce described as "comically depressing"is being shopped around as a development site that could potentially birth the FXFOWLE-designed tower rendered above. But no matter what rises, it will be better than the fugly bunker that currently exists. It's been awhile since this beleaguered site, which includes 67-81 Greenwich Street, was in the news, so let's refresh.

Rumors of a development at the site first arose in 2008, when the clothing retailer had purchased air rights from a neighbor and was reportedly looking to build a tower. But Syms was kind of shady about the whole thing, and the company's investors accused Syms of trying to scam them by privatizing before cashing in on its real estate. Nevertheless, the company continued to buy up the surround properties, but things halted when the market tanked.

In 2011, Syms filed for bankruptcy, then 10 months later, the company emerged as Trinity Place Holdings with the goal of maximizing "the value of its commercial real estate." And in Manhattan, there's no better way to maximize profits than by selling to a condo developer. The site can hold a 300,000-square-foot mixed-use building as of right, and it could look something like this:

 Action heating up on Midtown South buildings [NYP]

 Syms Corp. Emerges from Chapter 11 as Trinity Place Holdings Inc. [BW]

 All 42 Trinity Place coverage [Curbed]
Just because real estate in New York City is astronomically expensive these days, that doesn't mean the city's landlords are sitting pretty. For a landlord, turning a considerable profit on a rental can actually be quite hard (which, as with most great lessons, we learned from a game.) Some of the city's priciest neighborhoodsthe ones that seem like great places to invest in real estate with the intention of bringing in some cash floware actually some of the last places smart small-time investors should lay their money precisely because they're already so expensive. NeighborhoodX looked at rental return for $1 million investments in neighborhoods across the city, and the neighborhoods they discovered that returned the most in rent weighed against the purchase investment are some of the last most people would expect.

NeighborhoodX's analysis of where landlords received the most rent versus their investment in the property include a few parameters: they only looked at one- and two-bedroom co-ops rather than condos or new development. The analysis assumes the $1 million purchase is being made in cash (read: without a mortgage) and also doesn't include real estate taxes, co-op fees, and commissions, which skew figures. So, where in the city is the best place to invest $1 million in existing real estate with the intention of making money on rent? Check out the graph below, and don't forget to hold onto your jaw.

According to the analysis, Brownsville, Brooklyn is the New York City neighborhood that returns the highest gross rental income against a $1 million investment. In Brownsville, with a price per square foot of $201, and an average annual rent per square foot of $25, a landlord could generate $124,378 in gross rent for the year. That figure's helped along by the value of Brownsville property, where $1 million buys 4,975 square feet. Following Brownsville as the best neighborhoods for landlords is St. George, Ridgewood, and Morningside Heights. For an interactive version of the map, head on over to NeighborhoodX's website.

 Landlording! [Neighborhood X]

 Here Now, NYC's Best Neighborhoods For First-Time Buyers [Curbed]

 Which NYC Neighborhoods Can You Afford To Live InAlone? [Curbed]

 Cool Graph Things archives [Curbed]
Ammon Bundy speaks at a news conference on January 8, 2016. Photo: Rick Bowmer/Corbis

Eight members of the armed militant group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, including leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are in custody following a confrontation with authorities on Tuesday.

Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum, who acted as the groups spokesperson, was killed in the confrontation, and Ryan Bundy suffered a minor gunshot wound in the arm.

Earlier this month Finicum told NBC News he would rather die than be taken into custody. There are things more important than your life, and freedom is one of them, he said.

On Wednesday afternoon, local law enforcement held a press conference on the incident. This cant happen anymore, Harney County Sheriff David Ward told reporters, This cant happen in America and it cant happen in Harney County.

But this has been tearing our community apart, he added earlier, when stressing that the authorities had hoped the occupation would have a peaceful resolution. Its time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on. There doesnt have to be bloodshed in our community.

Few details were provided on the circumstances that led to Finicums death; the situation is currently being investigated.

At around 4:25 p.m. local time Tuesday night  25 days into the occupation of the refuge  the FBI and Oregon State Police began an enforcement action along U.S. 395. Shots were fired, but no law-enforcement personnel were injured. The militants have been allowed to travel freely between the compound and the town of Burns, which is about 30 miles away, since taking over the federal building on January 2. Those arrested were heading to a community meeting in the town of John Day on Tuesday evening.

According to The Oregonian, those remaining at the refuge have been told by the FBI that they are free to leave. A few have complied with the request, perhaps a bit spooked by the shooting. One militia member, a new acquisition to the cause from California, told a reporter that The rest have decided theyre going to hold their ground.

Georgian Jason Patrick is the new de facto leader of the activists, per The Oregonian. He says the remaining members are unwilling to leave as long as those two local ranchers convicted of arson on public lands remain in prison.

Police have completely blocked off all roads leading to the refuge, setting up checkpoints that will only allow lawful landowning locals through  and making sure those inside cant get out, unless theyre leaving for good. Those trying to get inside the refuge and join the cause will be arrested.

Authorities have only said that the suspect who was killed was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest. Ammon Bundy told his still-at-the-compound wife, Lisa, who then spoke to Nevada state assemblywoman Michele Fiore, that the militants were cooperative. Fiore told the L.A. Times that Bundy reported Finicum was shot three times while he hand his hands in the air. Its very unfortunate. The only saving grace is theres six witnesses to it, said Fiore, a Bundy family supporter. My perspective is our government has acted lawless and we have got to stop it.

My priority is the safety of all Oregonians & communities. I ask for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift & peaceful resolution  Kate Brown (@OregonGovBrown) January 27, 2016

Mark McConnell, who was with the Bundys at the time of their arrest and later released, disputed this account in a video on Facebook. He said that Finicum charged at law enforcement and ended up getting shot  and that the stuff about Finicum being shot while his hands were up was nonsense.

Emotionally thinking, McConnell said, its not always the best.

The Washington Post reports that an official familiar with the encounter said Finicum refused to surrender.

The L.A. Times also spoke with Cliven Bundy, the infamous Nevada rancher and father to Ammon and Ryan. We believe that those federal people shouldnt even be there in that state, and be in that county and have anything to do with this issue, he said. I have some sons and other people there trying to protect our rights and liberties and freedoms, and now weve got one killed, and all I can say is, hes sacrificed for a good purpose.

Authorities have yet to release details on the confrontation, but they have named the militants in custody. Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox, and Ryan Waylen Payne were arrested with the Bundy brothers. A short time later, Joseph OShaughnessy and online radio-host Pete Santilli, who supported the occupation, were arrested separately in Burns. And Jon Eric Ritzheimer, who was featured in one of the groups most memorable online videos, turned himself in in Peoria, Arizona.

BREAKING: Booking photos of Ammon Bundy, 7 others after arrest near Burns. https://t.co/AcqRyP4pd5 #KOIN6News pic.twitter.com/un82wepf95  Brent Weisberg (@BrentKOIN) January 27, 2016

Finicum, a Mormon with 11 children and 19 grandchildren who lived on a ranch in northern Arizona, had said earlier in the occupation of the refuge that he wished the revolution would happen quickly so he could return to his cows. One of his daughters told NBC News that the militia hadnt been interested in pulling out guns unless they were being fired on.

I think hes in a better place and he died defending what he believed in with his whole heart, another daughter, Arianna Brown, told The Oregonian. I hope my dad didnt die for nothing. I hope my dads death is the only death that has to happen, but I also hope that justice is put back in its right order.  I hope they dont give up when it gets hard. Thats how freedoms are taken away.

All eight people taken into custody were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, which is a felony.

Some of the militias allies are apparently worried about what those trapped at the refuge might do next. The Pacific Patriots Network, Oath Keepers, and the Idaho III% sent out a statement, according to Reuters, saying that cooler heads must prevail. We do not wish to inflame the current situation and will engage in open dialogue until all of the facts have been gathered.

Representative Greg Walden added in a statement, Once again, I urge those who remain at the refuge to go home before anyone else gets hurt. And when this is done and the cameras glare turns away from rural Oregon, the healing process will be a long one. Widespread frustration will continue until people in rural America feel like they are being heard and meaningful changes are made to federal land management policy.

The warning may be necessary; another anti-government activist told Reuters, Its all I can do to keep people from going and shooting feds right now. Gawker heard on a livestream one of the militia members inside the refuge say, If they stop you from getting here, kill them!

This post has been updated throughout.
Rubio needs weightier endorsements than that of George Pataki. Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Former presidential candidate and New York governor George Pataki announced on Tuesday that hes throwing his support, as ABC News put it, to Marco Rubio. I bet it was like catching a feather.

But it was characteristic of how the great-on-paper Rubio campaign has progressed. With the invisible primary coming to an end, its time for Rubio, everybodys early smart-money candidate for the GOP nomination, to start piling up the kind of support that suggests a big, clanking political machine. Instead hes winning over George Pataki.

Back at the beginning of December I wrote a piece that didnt deny Rubios superior positioning and potential rock-star status, but did express some puzzlement over exactly where and when hed start winning primaries. The puzzle has only gotten deeper.

Despite constant talk of some Rubio surge in Iowa, he remains mired in third place there, far behind Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. In New Hampshire, supposedly the breakthrough state for any Establishment favorite, hes stuck in the low teens, about 20 points behind Trump, and also behind (in the Real Clear Politics polling averages) Cruz and John Kasich. South Carolina? A very similar story: polling in the low teens, down more than 20 points to Trump, and well behind Cruz. Even in Nevada, where his early life as a Las Vegas Mormon was thought to give him a good chance at an early state upset, the one recent poll shows him at about a three-to-one disadvantage to Trump and a two-to-one deficit to Cruz. And then on March 15, after what does not look to be a very promising SEC Primary two weeks earlier, comes the potential grim reaper: Rubios home state of Florida, a winner-take-all primary he cannot afford to lose no matter how he looks nationally. There he is again mired in third place, far behind Trump, and with Jeb Bush, who cannot afford to lose there either, crouched right behind him with whatevers left of his shock-and-awe war chest, and with no choice but to spend it on destroying Rubio.

Speaking of Jeb!: Despite the moribund condition of Bushs campaign, Rubio still hasnt caught him in the FiveThirtyEight tabulation of endorsements, which is beginning to seem strange for someone supposedly running as the last great hope of the party Establishment. And even the mythology of Rubio as the Chosen One is growing thinner, given all the talk of party Establishment types deciding to embrace Donald Trump (albeit at a distance, with fire tongs) in order to stop that other Cuban-American senator.

With voting about to begin, things will start happening very rapidly, so the idea that Rubios waiting in the weeds for a late-breaking win is becoming less credible each day. And today, and every day from here on out, hell need more support thrown his way than George Pataki can provide.
Wait a minute, Bernie! Thats not Iowa! Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

So as the intensity of the close Democratic race in Iowa grows almost unbearable, Bernie Sanders decided to ratchet it up another notch by flying to D.C. for a no-photo, no-statement hangout session with Barack Obama. Afterward, Sanders was able to tell the press the meeting was productive, and focused on foreign policy, not generally considered Bernies area of strength.

But the politics were pretty clear: Sanders had to do something to counter the impression that Hillary Clinton has been avidly promoting  most overtly in the NBC News debate in South Carolina on January 17  that she was the best-equipped candidate to protect and build on Barack Obamas legacy. This impression was undoubtedly buttressed by media interpretations of the interview Obama gave to Politicos Glenn Thrush in which the 44th president praised his secretary of State while indirectly pouring cold water on the political revolution Sanders is purporting to lead. So todays White House meeting, even if Sanders cannot say much about it, was intended to reestablish presidential neutrality. Thats a big deal in Iowa, where (according to the last Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Iowa poll) Hillary Clinton has been running even with Sanders among people who caucused for Obama in 2008. And its a bigger deal down the road where African-Americans begin to play a far more dominant role in Democratic primary electorates.

Maybe Sanders has some blockbuster events on tap between now and caucus night, but you get the sense hes put his organization into motion and is now working on optics. Aside from the White House meeting, hes beginning to manage expectations for Iowa, which were beginning to become so robust that a narrow defeat there might be perceived as devastating. First he expressed doubt that turnout would be anything like 2008s or that he could match Obamas margin. But, more important, hes making it clear that he does not regard an actual win in the state as necessary for his nomination.

That may be all he can do for now, though I doubt very seriously that, once he returns to Iowa, hes going to set foot anywhere else until the votes are counted and somebody tries not to scream.
Bernie Sanders. Photo: Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images

At the recent Democratic town hall, moderator Chris Cuomo presented Bernie Sanders with what has been a common complaint about his presidential campaign: Sanderss relentless focus on income inequality, in this campaign and through his career, raises the question of whether he is prepared to address the full spectrum of issues faced by a president. But there is a deeper problem with Sanderss vision of American politics. It is not just that he has trouble talking about issues other than the redistribution of income; its that he has trouble conceptualizing those issues in any other terms. His rigidly economistic frame of mind prevents Sanders from seeing the world as it is.

The phrase Sanders invokes constantly, and which distinguishes him from Hillary Clinton and other Democrats not merely in degree but also in kind, is political revolution. The political revolution is the secret sauce. When presented with any concrete obstacles that would stand between him and his desired policy outcomes, Sanders brings up the revolution, which will transform the world he inhabits into the one he desires. One questioner at the town hall asked how Sanders proposes to pass his left-wing economic program, given the likelihood that Republicans will win control over at least one house of Congress. This poses a massive obstacle, given the twin facts of a map that requires Democrats to win Republican-leaning districts in order to gain a majority and polarization so deep that almost all voters now choose the same party up and down the ballot. How to get around these obstacles? Sanders again brought up (this time, without using the term) the revolution:

In my view, you have a Congress today that is much more worried about protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful and making sure they get campaign contributions from the wealthy and the powerful. If we are serious about rebuilding the American middle class, if we are serious about providing paid family and medical leave to all of our people, if we are serious about ending the disgrace of having so many of our children live in poverty, the real way to do it is to have millions of Americans finally stand up and say, enough is enough, for people to get engaged in the political process, to finally demand that Washington represent all of us, not just a handful of very wealthy people.

Note that Sanders, asked about Republican opposition to his proposals, defined that opposition as protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful. It is certainly true that fealty to the interests of the rich heavily colors Republican policy. But Sanders is not merely presenting corruption as one factor. It is the entirety of it. Likewise, Sanders has difficulty imagining any reason other than corruption to explain disagreements by fellow Democrats, which he relentlessly attributes to the nefarious influence of corporate wealth. One does not have to dismiss the political power of massed wealth to acknowledge that other things influence the conclusions drawn by Americans who dont share Sanderss full diagnosis.

In reality, people have organic reasons to vote Republican. Some of them care more about social issues or foreign policy than economics. Sanders would embrace many concepts  socialism, big government in the abstract, and middle-class tax increases  that register badly with the public. People are very reluctant to give up their health insurance, even if it is true that Sanders could give them something better.

Whats more, the interests of the wealthy do not cut as cleanly as Sanders indicates. Its true that business and the rich tend to oppose parts of his program like higher taxes on the rich, more generous social insurance, and tougher regulation of finance. But the Obama administrations stimulus encountered intense Republican opposition even though it did not pose a threat to any business interests. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce even endorsed the stimulus, which profited business both directly (by pumping billions into contracts for projects like infrastructure) and indirectly (by goosing public demand for its members products). That did not stop 100 percent of House Republicans from opposing it. Nor did the unified opposition of the business lobby dissuade Republicans from holding the debt ceiling hostage in 2011, or persuade them to pass immigration reform in 2013. Sanders currently proposes a massive infrastructure program, which would make lots of money for the construction industry. Clearly, subservience to big business only goes so far in explaining Republican behavior.

The depiction of conservatism as a mere cover for greed is a habit Sanders indulges over and over. Donald Trumps appeal, in Sanderss telling, has nothing to do with xenophobia or nationalism: Theyre angry because theyre working longer hours for lower wages, theyre angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, theyre angry because they cant afford to send their kids to college so they cant retire with dignity. Sanders does not explain why this economic security has manifested itself almost entirely among white voters when minorities are suffering the same conditions. He simply assumes Trump has converted economic frustration into a series of pseudo-concerns, and rather than deal with those beliefs, Sanders proposes instead to convert them back into their original form: I think for his working-class and middle-class supporters, I think we can make the case that if we really want to address the issues that people are concerned about  we need policies that bring us together that take on the greed of Wall Street, the greed of corporate America, and create a middle class that works for all of us rather than an economy that works just for a few.

It is not only Republican voters whose ideas Sanders refuses to grapple with. Here he is in the previous debate explaining Republican climate-science denial: It is amazing to me, and I think well have agreement on this up here, that we have a major party, called the Republican Party, that is so owned by the fossil-fuel industry and their campaign contributions that they dont even have the courage, the decency to listen to the scientists. It is surely true that fossil-fuel contributions have encouraged the spread of climate-science denial. But the doctrine also appeals philosophically to conservatives. It expresses their disdain for liberal elites, and, more important, it justifies opposition to government action. Psychologists and social scientists have poured years of study into identifying the causes of climate-science denial. One does not need to harbor even the slightest whiff of sympathy for climate-science denial to grasp that its causes run deeper than a cash transaction with Big Oil. Figures like George Will and Charles Krauthammer dismiss climate science because it is a way to maintain order within their mental world. Many other conservatives have social or professional reasons to believe, or at least to say, that Will and Krauthammer are serious intellectuals rather than loons spouting transparently preposterous conspiracy theories. There are deep tribal influences at work that cannot be reduced to economic self-interest.

Sanderss story provides a comforting fable for his party. Not only are Democrats not hemmed in by the Republican hold on Congress, but they dont even need to do the laborious work of persuading the political center to come to their side. They need only to rise up and break the grip of moneyed interests on the political system.

There are many reasons to doubt Sanderss promise that he can transform American politics. Perhaps the most fundamental is that he does not actually understand how it works.
See something, say something. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

One less thing to worry about on the subway: hoverboards. The MTA has officially included the Segway knockoffs on its list of banned items on subways, buses, and commuter rails. Technically, they were sort of already prohibited  according to the MTA, people arent allowed to use scooters or skateboards at stations. Its also against the rules to bring hazardous substances onto platforms and trains, and hoverboard batteries have a history of bursting into flames. So now the transit authority is really just explicitly telling you not to drag your exploding motorized scooter onto the subway.

But more important than the actual ban itself is the welcome addition of another bubble-person campaign into the mix. Transit officials will be unrolling a new Hoverboards Not Allowed ad, shaming them alongside manspreaders and subway dancers. Which is to say, sure, these hoverboards ads will work.

Right now hoverboards are banned in New York State. Theyre classified as motorized vehicles, but since they arent registered with the DMV, theyre actually illegal. State legislators in Albany were debating a bill last month to legalize them for recreational purchases. The NYPD has already come down against hoverboards and announced last year that street riders would be subject to a $200 fine. Other states are also considering rules for hoverboards, and the machines have been banned on forms of public transportation in some cities. Amtrak rails and many airlines wont allow them onboard, either  even if youre Russell Crowe.
Oh jeez. Photo: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Barack Obama is the latest person whos started to worry about the Zika virus. On Tuesday, the president called for a rush order of tests, vaccines, and treatments after a study by the World Health Organization suggested that the mosquito-borne virus would soon spread through most of the Americas, including areas that are home to 60 percent of the U.S. population. Some doctors have warned that a vaccine may be ten years away.

The virus jumped from Africa to the New World in 2015, first appearing in Brazil last May, and its spread to 24 countries, most recently in the Caribbean. As of Wednesday, five people have tested Zika positive in New York State, including two in New York City. The virus causes no symptoms in 80 percent of the people it infects, and most of the remaining 20 percent experience mild symptoms, but its extremely dangerous to the unborn, causing microcephaly (shrinking of the head and brain) in infants. Zika cant be spread by people directly  youd have to be bitten by a mosquito that had already bitten an infected person. Nonetheless, theres an understandable reluctance for travelers to go to South America right now, and several major airlines have begun offering refunds to people who have booked flights to Zika-affected countries. Brazil has launched a ground attack of more than 200,000 soldiers to battle mosquitoes, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday.




Theres an assumption about women in power that you may have heard: that women who lead tend to be more diplomatic than their male counterparts, resulting in a more peaceful world. Psychologist Steven Pinker, for instance, wrote in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be a pacifying force. But how much of that is true?

After sifting through historical data on queenly reigns across six centuries, two political scientists have found that its more complicated than that. In a recent working paper, New York University scholars Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish analyzed 28 European queenly reigns from 1480 to 1913 and found a 27 percent increase in wars when a queen was in power, as compared to the reign of a king. People have this preconceived idea that states that are led by women engage in less conflict, Dube told Pacific Standard, but her analysis of the data on European queens suggests another story.

Interestingly, Dube and Harish think the reason why queens were able to take part in more military policy can be explained by the division of labor that tended to happen when a queen  particularly a married queen  ruled. Queens managed foreign policy and war policies, which were often important to bring in cash, while their husbands managed the state (think taxes, crime, judicial issues, etc.). As the authors theorize, greater division of labor under queenly reigns could have enabled queens to pursue more aggressive war policies. Kings, on the other hand, didnt tend to engage in division of labor like ruling queens  or, more specifically, they may have shared military and state duties with some close adviser, but not with the queen. And, Dube and Harish argue, it may be this asymmetry in how queens relied on male spouses and kings relied on female spouses [that] strengthened the relative capacity of queenly reigns, facilitating their greater participation in warfare.

Heres Dube and Harish with more on that:

Female reigns may have had higher capacity to carry out war since queens often put their spouses in charge of official state matters. This division of labor would then have freed up time and resources for queens to pursue more aggressive war policies. In contrast, kings typically were less inclined to put their spouses in official positions through which they could aid in managing the polity. This asymmetry in spousal division of labor emerged in several realms. Since women didnt serve as heads of militaries, queens would often appoint their husbands to this role, though kings of course, did not do the same with their wives.. As an example, when Queen Dona Maria II of Portugal married Prince Augustus Francis Anthony in 1836, their marriage contract stated that he would serve as commander in chief of the army.

And when husbands of queens managed state affairs, the success of the country was strong. The authors point to Francis Stephen, who revamped the Austrian economic system while his wife, Queen Maria Theresa, used that cash to bolster the army. Spousal support, in other words, was a win-win for these royal couples, allowing queens to not only be more invested but also more successful than their peers who acted alone. (Modern couples, take note.) That doesnt mean that queens and kings always agreed  qualitative data suggests that, in fact, queens and kings often disagreed, and virulently, with some queens marching onto the battlefield without their spouses approval. And a few kings werent too happy with being king-consort, bickering with their wives over the title.

The queens marital status made a difference here; as the authors write, among married monarchs, queens were more likely to participate as attackers than kings. If a queen were single  which was the case with 13 of those they studied  she was more likely to be attacked compared to the times when a king was in power, perhaps because her country was seen in the outside world as being more vulnerable and thus easier to attack.

But the authors emphasize that the increase in wars on a queens watch is not likely explained by an attempt by the female leaders to signal their strength. Were that true, youd expect a spike in war participation earlier in the queens careers, and that wasnt the case according to the data analyzed here. Dube and Harish also argue that the queens were not actively seeking to fight more wars. But here are a few more relevant commonalities of queenly reigns: Queens didnt tend to use war ministers as much as kings, they relegated other tasks to their husbands, and they often threw themselves into the policy-making machine wholeheartedly.

Its just a working paper, which means that Dube and Harish may uncover more as they continue to research this subject. But so far their findings have already begun to poke a few holes in some commonly held assumptions.
Kenneth Zucker. Photo: Courtesy of Kenneth Zucker

Update: Two days after this article was published, The Globe and Mail reported that CAMH had acknowledged the hairy little vermin accusation was false, and had taken down the External Review from its website. What was the link to the Review now points to a PDF of a summary of that review instead.



Back on December 15, the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the largest addiction and mental-health-research hospital in Canada, announced it would be winding down its 40-year-old Child, Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic, with the goal of reopening it with community input later on. The clinic, GIC for short, served children and adolescents with gender dysphoria, as well as their parents, and was headed by Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a leading psychological researcher in the field of gender-identity development and dysphoria. For years, transgender activists had accused Zucker and his clinic of practicing what they claimed was reparative or conversion therapy  they said that one of the clinics primary goals was, in effect, to fix young trans people by turning them cisgender, and that the GIC clinicians effort to do so inflicted shame and trauma on the clinics young clients. Zucker and his colleagues at the GIC, as well as his supporters in the broader academic sex-research community, have consistently denied these charges, saying that they stem from a misunderstanding of what the clinic does and what its goals are.

The immediate pretext for the wind-down was the publication of an external review that the hospital had commissioned back in February of 2015, which was posted on the hospitals website the same day the announcement was made (Zucker was also fired that morning). While the document leveled an array of serious, mostly un-sourced allegations against the clinic pertaining to its general practices, the most incendiary charge concerned Zucker himself: that he had asked an adolescent trans man to take off his shirt, laughed at him, and then called him a hairy little vermin, causing the client great distress. The authors of the report, Dr. Suzanne Zinck and Dr. Antonio Pignatiello, relayed this accusation in the written submissions section of the document, attributing it to a former client.

Science of Us can report that this claim appears to be false. During a conversation with Adam, the accuser, he provided the full names of two staffers he said he interacted with at Zuckers clinic, and also said that the clinic asked him for so-called proof of real-life experience that he had been living as a man as a prerequisite for a sex-reassignment surgery referral. But follow-up reporting revealed that the staffers he named never worked at Zuckers clinic, and that the clinic never would have asked for proof of real-life experience anyway, since it worked with a child and adolescent population that it never referred directly for surgery. When Science of Us brought all of this to Adams attention, he said he believed it wasnt Zucker but actually another clinician at another clinic who made the offensive comment.

We have a longer, in-depth feature in the works about the closing of the GIC and the explosive political and scientific controversy that led to it that will provide further details, but at the moment the key fact is that Adam is now on the record saying Zucker wasnt the perpetrator (he also confirmed via email that he plans to send CAMH a note saying that he was mistaken). As will be explained in the longer article, theres fairly solid evidence that neither CAMH nor the authors of the review made any effort to verify that Adam was actually a patient before posting his claim on the hospital website, leading to its widespread dissemination in news accounts of the closing. (Neither CAMH administrators nor the review authors responded to questions about the fact-checking process I sent late last week.)

We have many more details to share about this controversy. And while Ive already spoken with a sizable handful of former GIC clinicians, CAMH employees unaffiliated with the GIC, former parents of patients, and one former patient (down from the two I thought I had spoken to at first), Id love to speak with more. Please get in touch.
This is a zine dedicated to black metal written by a practitioner of the black arts , This zine has been around in a different format for a while and I have decided to make an edition for www.blogger.com, for more information email occultblackmetalzine@yahoo.com, IF YOU ASK FOR AN ALBUM REVIEW OR INTERVIEW, DO NOT ASK FOR ME TO TAKE IT DOWN ONCE IT IS POSTED, ASKING WILL BE A WASTE OF TIME, https://www.patreon.com/OccultBlackMetalZIne no more facebook due to excessive bans so contact email
what are the best digimon games jw? on whatever console

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Digimon World 1 and 3, Digital Card Battle, and Rumble Arena for the PS1! Digimon World DS is also good, but it's very hard to find an authentic copy of.



Digimon World 3 is my personal favorite. It has a certain charm to it that I love. 

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thanks! i tried to emulate digimon world one time and it was buggy, i'm gonna see if i can get an actual copy of the game

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Personally, I really enjoyed Digimon World: Dawn and Digimon World: Dusk for the DS.

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Digimon World 1, always and forever

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I've only played Digimon World (on the original PS) but it was hard as fuck. I remember getting it in middle school because I was obsessed with the show but did not expect it to be as challenging as it was lol

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I LIVED for Digimon theme when I was a child

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what y'all's team gonna be? Patamon is going to be on mine, of course. Maybe I'll add a few of my Digimon World 3 monsters if they're in the game. I don't think Kotemon is :(









Edited at 2016-01-27 01:22 am (UTC) what y'all's team gonna be? Patamon is going to be on mine, of course. Maybe I'll add a few of my Digimon World 3 monsters if they're in the game. I don't think Kotemon is :(

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I just want to be able to get a damn Piedmon, because naturally I couldn't get one in Dawn version (aka the one I had smh)

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i still didn't watch digimon tri, i'm such a fake stan :(



i might buy this, if it's cheap enough and i see some gameplay footage first





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it was pretty basic but digimon tri made me rewatch all of adventure in original japanese and now i need moooore

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that's mainly why i'm waiting on watching tri, i wanna watch the first season subbed cuz i only ever watched the dubbed version. everyone says the subbed version is way better so i need to see what i'm missing out on!

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You can get the PS4 version on Amazon Prime for $47.99.

I'm not sure what the price is for the Vita, but I'm guessing $39.99.



Here is some gameplay btw!







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I can buy a game for my Vita? Sign me up!



I seriously love Digimon, but I haven't played any of the games, I guess I should pick this up? Kind of a bummer it's being released so close to Fire Emblem Fates though.

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The games actually have some charm to them. I absolutely love Digimon World 1 and 3. Tbh I love all of them, but those are my fave.



I'm sooo excited for this game. I wish I had the (Aqua Blue) Vita because I'd buy both versions. I bought a PS TV for vita games tbh.



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Hey, now that I have a Vita I can actually play this! Digimon World Dawn/Dusk were pretty fun, so I might give this a shot. It's confirmed to be good?

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Jealoussss. I want a Vita



This is confirmed to be good! It was very well received and sold well in Japan.

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I bought it solely for one game (Dangan Ronpa) but I've loved a lot of the others I've played! It's a great console, tbh, even for someone who has always been Nintendo-only when it comes to the handhelds.



And ty! I know the Digimon games tend to be a bit hit-and-miss but if this one did well in Japan I'm sold tbh

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Man I need to get a PS4 or Vita already. I really enjoyed the old Digimon games. I'm still bitter I have yet to play Digimon Rumble Arena 2. I love the first one.

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Rumble Arena is a fucking classic and no-one can tell me otherwise



(the second one is really great too!)

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I'm so excited for this. I legit only bought the Vita to import this game when it came out in Japan but was so stoked to find out it was being ported to the US!!! And on the PS4 too.



I can't wait.

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I have to get this!

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This game looks really fun, I'll prob get it. There are so many games I want to play tho. Tomb Raider comes out on PC tomorrow, Gravity Rush Remastered on feb 2, darkest dungeon and the witness just came out, i've been playing a bit of blade & soul, and i still haven't played too much of the pc release of dragon's dogma.. altho that one i might just drop all together bc i'm having a hard time with no real fast travel and not knowing what exactly to do in all these quests.

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Quirky

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As three Michigan gas stations aggressively battled for customers last week in an all-out price war, sending gas prices down to 47 cents per gallonjust pennies above the federal and state excise taxespolice had to step in to direct traffic, and Americans demonstrated just how serious they are about filling up for next to nothing.

The pricing war was instigated in Michigans resort town, Houghton Lake, by B&B Market, which has long had an MO of undercutting the competition by a penny, and a Valero station, which had reopened under new ownership the week prior and made its debut by meeting the competitions cuts penny by penny. Related: Oil Crash Only The Tip Of The Iceberg

The penny cut price war continued on 17 January until cars were lined up in 45-minute waits and police had to be brought in to deal with the congestion.

A nearby Citgo station also took a shot at joining the price war, but managed to hold fast at 95 cents per gallona figure that was still significantly lower than the average price for that area.

As cooler heads prevailed, prices climbed Sunday evening, eventually reaching a more sensible $1.48 per gallon. Related: Saudi Aramco Chairman Talks Oil Down

On that day, the consumers were the only winnerskind of. What with the average car holding only 14 gallons of gas and consumers spending about 45 minutes idling in line, they wasted about three-quarters of a gallon of gas and 45 minutes of their time to save, at most, $14.00. We would be hard pressed to consider that much of a win.

The gas stations were the biggest loser. Privately owned gas stations typically have the narrowest profit margins in the business, and the average gas station only keeps about 7 to 10 cents of each gallon of gasat normal prices. And thats not profitthats without payroll, lease, and other operating expenses. So when gas stations drop prices to less than 50 percent of the average, it is clearly unsustainable. Its safe to say that on that day, all three stations were operating at lossand probably a big one.

Its no surprise that the war was short lived, and price wars of this magnitude are unlikely to be the rule of the day. This was a marketing gimmickone that got a bit out of hand if you were to ask the police. Related: How Soon Could A Sustained Oil Price Rally Occur?

Will it resonate? Perhaps, for a short while; but Americans are notorious for finding out where gas is cheapest. They even use new GPS navigation systems for live gas pricing while driving.

But even without cut-throat price wars, Michigan residents should revel in the fact that gas prices in the state are the fifth lowest in the nation, with prices dropping 13 cents per gallon two weeks in a row, according to AAA, to an average of $1.60 per gallon, and the lowest Michigan gas prices in the capitol city area, where they hover around $1.47 per gallon.

By Julianne Geiger of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Greece, once a leading European customer of Iranian oil before the imposition of Western sanctions in 2012, will be the first European country to resume buying Iranian crude now that the sanctions have been lifted.

The countrys biggest oil refiner, Hellenic Petroleum (HELPE), will resume purchases of crude from the National Iranian Oil Co. (NIOC). The deal was announced after a meeting Friday between Amir Hossein Zamaninia, Irans deputy oil minister for international affairs, and Greeces deputy oil minister, Panos Skourletis, in Athens.

Deliveries will begin immediately under a long-term agreement, HELPE said in a statement, though it didnt say how long that term would be. The refiner was one of Irans significant buyers of crude before the sanctions regime began in 2011, importing about 20 percent of its oil needs from the Islamic Republic. It owns three of Greeces four oil refineries.



Related: OPECs Trillion Dollar Mistake

Shana, the news service of Irans Ministry of Petroleum, said Greece also will settle debt to Iran in unpaid imports it ran up before the sanctions were imposed, forbidding it to pay arrears to Iran. That amounts to between $550 million and $600 million, although Platts estimates the debt at more like $755 million.

The sanctions were imposed as an incentive to help persuade Iran to strictly limit its nuclear program, which many in the West believed was aimed at developing a nuclear weapon. Iran said the program was meant for peaceful uses.



Related: Did The Supreme Court Just Put The Nail In The Coffin For Utilities?

Tehran negotiated with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council  Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States  plus Germany and reached a deal on July 14 in Vienna. The sanctions were lifted on Jan. 16 once the U.N.s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Tehran had met the terms of the deal.

After Fridays meeting with Zamininia, Skourletis said the deal could begin Tehrans return to the European oil market. Iran once sold up to 800,000 barrels of crude per day to refiners in Greece, Italy and Spain before the sanctions were imposed. At the time, Greece imported an average of 122,300 barrels of Iranian oil per day.



Related: Weak Global Economic Growth Linked To Oil Price Collapse

[Iranian oil officials] are positively disposed towards Greece and think that Greece can be the European conduit for them to re-enter the market, Skourletis told Reuters. They said that the debt [settlement] can open the way so that our cooperation is boosted.

He added that relations between Greece and Iran were close before the sanctions were imposed, and that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras plans to visit Iran early next month to help restore those cordial ties.

For months Iran has said it plans to increase its oil output to 500,000 barrels per day as soon as the sanctions were lifted, and that it plans to sell 200,000 barrels of oil to Europe each day. Still, several member nations of the EU arent reciprocating, for now at least, because of legal questions about how soon they can resume doing business with Iran even though the sanctions regime has ended.

By Andy Tully of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
With the world paralyzed about the fear of international terrorism, like the Islamic State or the Taliban, two parallel situations are occurring within the US. In Harney County, Oregon a group of radical libertarians are holding the US government hostage, because they happen to have a point of view about land owner's rights, even though the "land" they're disputing isn't owned by any of the protesters. In Flint, Michigan, the state government polluted an entire city population by allowing lead tainted water to be used by the citizens after it was determined that a new river-water transport system hadn't been corrosion protected. In both situations, our own citizens caused danger to the public. Yet, because the people who perpetrated the domestic dangers are embroiled in politics, the issues are more complicated than they, otherwise, should be. In other words, if terrorists like radical "Islamic State" occupiers had taken over the Oregon public lands to protest against the US government, the situation would be an international incident. Likewise, if a terrorist group had poured lead into public drinking water, the entire nation would be revolting and heads would roll.

Nevertheless, because the Oregon "occupiers" were right wing extremists, who take pride in defying the US government, they're given the benefit of extraordinary patience. To do otherwise, for example, to create another "Waco Texas siege" nightmare, has the devastating risk of creating boomerang situations, like what happened in Oklahoma City with Timothy McVeigh. Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, was another horrifying experience where right wing libertarians created inflated paranoia about government and, as a result, caused domestic carnage. If the perpetrators of these crimes were right wing "Islamic State" fighters or the Taliban, the public urgency to rid ourselves of them as soon as possible would be overwhelming. Instead, these weirdos have domestic sympathizers.





Now, CNN reports, at least 7 of the right wing Oregon "occupiers" were arrested and one killed, in a police traffic stop. This situation is, frankly, likely to create more weird sympathy for the criminal acts caused by these people, than public relief that they've been stopped.

Flint Michigan residents continue to receive water bills to pay for lead polluted water. It seems like the least Governor Snyder could do would be to call for a moratorium on sending water bills.

Similarly, in Flint, Michigan, the water contamination was the result of cost cutting by the municipal officials who decided to change the city's public water source without taking precautions against lead poisoning. As a result, citizens of Flint have been exposed to lead in their drinking water for about two years, while the state "investigated" the matter. Now, irreversible health damage has been done to all the children who have high blood levels. While cutting costs to save money on water transport, the state of Michigan is now strapped with many years of lawsuits and the overwhelming cost of trying to figure out how to fix the problem created by "cutting costs" in the first place.





If a Democratic governor were in charge of Michigan, the Republicans would be screeching about the water contamination issue, using it as an example of "government is the problem, not the solution" argument. Instead, Governor Rick Snyder is a Republican, who is a darling in the future of the "Grand Old Party- GOP". Therefore, the outcry against his leadership is muted byhis apologies. Of course, his apology is two years too late and the "fix" hasn't even begun. In fact, Michigan plumbers and contractors are waiting for call to begin to fix the Flint water, but they're like proverbial "Maytag repairmen"- waiting with no call.





In fact, Michigan's government isn't doing anything substantial to fix Flint's "lead pollution", except to support bottled water distribution programs and advise people not to use the lead infected water. It's even been reported that the federal money sent to Michigan to help with the problem may not be applied to the fix. Even worse, Flint residents are still sent water bills!





Meanwhile, more children are at risk for being exposed to the damaging effect of the lead. As one mother said during a television report, "Governor Snyder's children are not exposed to this water so why are we having to deal with this?" Complicating the already emotional and public health problems are the socio-economic situations in Flint. Yes, the people who live there middle class and many are African-American. As a result, Michigan's governor is being accused of environmental discrimination by allowing the lead problem to go on for so long when the problem would've probably never happened in an affluent community. Nevertheless, if an international terrorist group had infected a city's water supply with contaminants, the public outcry would be overwhelming and many political heads would roll. Instead, Governor Snyder is still in office, defending his situation while doing next to nothing to resolve the problem.





In the absence of any action, the Detroit News reports that the United Nations "Committee for Social Development" has even taken the extraordinary step of investigating the Flint Michigan water health danger. Of course, Americans would expect to feel international outrage, if the Flint water problem were caused by radical terrorism!





So, Americans continue to become victims of right wing extremism. Land rights libertarian groups are terrorists who believe they know more than the government and they're ready to die to prove their points. Furthermore, Republicans have been reticent about criticizing Governor Snyder, even though, unquestionably, they'd be livid, on right wing FoxNews, screeching, if he were a Democrat rather than a political "conservative darling".





In fact, Republicans and their right wing extremists who "wag the party", are hypocrites. They don't seem to care about the common good so long as they're getting attention. Although Governor Snyder apologized for the Flint water contamination, he's done nothing to offer reparations or to fix it....a shallow apology.





As an American, I demand accountability from Republicans. They must hold their own party to the same standards as they expect from Democrats. Our nation was built on lofty concepts for creating a new world order, but Republicans are dismantling many progressive achievements, not the least of which is political integrity.









Labels: Ammon Bundy, Flint Water Crises, Governor Rick Snyder, United Nations
Selecting a US president shouldn't be like watching a "Punch and Judy Show" or a "professional" (haha!) wrestling match.





Republican politics is like watching a "Punch and Judy Show", especially when the skit is a "marriage a trois", played out between Donald "Trump the Chump", with diva Megyn Kelly and Senator "Cruz to loose"

None this posturing and power playing has anything to do with selecting America's next president or building confidence in who is qualified to be a Republican "commander in chief". It's a joke, except it's really not funny (even when it is).





Many Republicans are likely to stay home from the polls as a protest vote in November, rather than be asked to vote for a "Punch and Judy Show" candidate like Donald Trump or his bookend "Elmer Gantry" stand in, Senator "Cruz to loose".





Here's the skit - "Trump the Chump" wants all the attention. He's like the McDonald's new Breakfast menu. Of course, Trumponian hair-dos notwithstanding, he can't compete with Megyn Kelly for looks on made for TV political drama. Therefore, Trump-it-y Trump must "create the news" he wants to read.





Megyn Kelly, on the other hand, was going to take "Trumpy" down for the count when she could launch her "punditry" club on him during a FoxNews television debate, where she'llbe the diva moderator. (We've seen this opera before....the diva always wins...)





Except, not so fast.....now, we have the forlorn candidate, Senator "Cruz to loose", who was unexpectedly just launched into "punching range", because the McDonald's breakfast menu decided not to show up for the Diva Debate, and the upstaged "drama diva" has nobody to strangle hold on her debate mat.





"Punch and Judy" drama can create an entertaining puppet show, but it's not what our nation needs when trying to make an informed decision about electing qualified leadership.





Perhaps Donald "Trump"( the "McDonald's breakfast menu candidate") can be given a broken clock award for his justifiable anger against Megyn Kelly.





Indeed, Diva Kelly is out to get Trump. But, so what? Trumpy dealt with her the first time she moderated the debate. He's disdained the women who adore Kelly's "diva-ness", along with denegrating Senator John McCain, stereotyping immigrants, mocking disabled people, throwing protesters into the cold without coats....so, gee, what's another "Punch and Judy Show" bout with Megyn Kelly, anyway?





It's probably true that FOXNews will woe the decision to have Diva Kelly moderate the Trumponian breakfast menu. Meanwhile, "Cruz to loose" is sadly doing his soliloquy on center stage, all alone, ....while nobody cares to listen and FOXNews slowly fades into viewer ratings irrelevance.

Labels: FoxNews, McDonald's, Megyn Kelly, Punch and Judy, Senatpr John McCain
It was at an explosive 1973 Arena show that Milwaukee got its first glimpse of ZZ Top as they walked on stage to the announcement of just a "lil ol band from Texas."

The local newspapers described that sweltering June evening as a tense, sometimes violent situation as 12,000 people pushed, shoved and shouldered their way to the front of the stage for a better look at headliners Deep Purple, one of the biggest acts on the planet at the time. But before Deep Purple appeared, guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard delivered a fast-paced 45-minute set of loud, blues-based rock and roll with material from their third album, "Tres Hombres," along with a few numbers like "Francine" and "Just Got Paid" from the earlier LPs.

Milwaukee Journal writer Damien Jacques said, "The star of the group is Billy Gibbons, who with cowboy hat and boots looked like he belonged to a country music act. A freakier cowpoke has not been seen this side of the Rio Grande. One doesnt see too many cowboy rock bands, especially ones that are as much fun to listen to and watch as ZZ Top."

Once "Tres Hombres" hit the record stores, ZZ Tops days on the undercard were over. The band began headlining large venues all over the country and released the popular "Fandango," "Tejas," "Deguello," "Eliminator" and "Afterburner" albums during the next decade. An iconic song and a cameo appearance in the film "Back to the Future III" only added to the bands popularity.

Although ZZ Top is still going strong, Gibbons recently chose to step outside the confines of his band to work with the BFGs and record an album called "Perfectamundo." The band will appear at The Pabst Theater this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. In a recent interview, Gibbons talked about the new album, the future of ZZ Top and several other fun topics.

OnMilwaukee: Im guessing youve got a great reason to want to break away from ZZ Tops trademark sound and try something completely different.

Billy Gibbons: "Perfectamundo" was inspired by an unexpected invitation to perform at the Havana Jazz Festival in Cuba. We certainly wanted to fit in which immediately prompted searching sonic ways to develop a sound true to the many Afro-Cuban examples in blues, rock, jazz as well as pop tunes in contemporary settings. The extremes of percussive beats on conga drums, bongos, timbales became the thread which propelled some simple blues lines well into the feel of that which comes across from the Straits of Florida. Those rhythmic Mambo things. They're fierce. The BFGs have put the rhythm up front, which is a reversal of ZZ Top's approach. Having twin B3 organists, a percussion stylist and two drummers provides a rhythm backing way different than ZZ Top. We do, however, share a guitar player.

OnMilwaukee: How the live shows have been going?

Gibbons: The showcase dates are going great. Weve been gathering momentum, and now this "baby band" is getting it in high gear as a singular cohesive unit.

OnMilwaukee: Would that June 1973 show opening for Deep Purple have been ZZ Tops first Milwaukee appearance?

Gibbons: Thats a pretty great review from a really great night. And I believe that was indeed our first excursion into the fine city of Milwaukee. "Tres Hombres" came out about a month or so after that, followed by the single "LaGrange." Kinda love the idea of being called a "freakier cowpoke."

OnMilwaukee: Can you talk about how exposure through MTV and "Back to the Future III" affected the band, and if new generations of fans were created in the process?

Gibbons: Who would have thought that three guys who look like us would make a splash on screen? The fact is we kind of kept to the background in those early videos seen on MTV because we thought that by being bystanders in our own videos we wouldnt wear out our welcome. Obviously, folks liked what was seen and, more importantly, what was heard, which was a definite boost.

Being in "BTTFIII" was totally off-the-cuff, and weve been hearing about it ever since. We wrote the song "Doubleback" for the film which was kind of prophetic as everybody seems to be going back to the BTTF trilogy. Were still mystified to have played a part in it.

OnMilwaukee: Part of ZZ Tops trademark sound is the snarling, squealing guitar lines. Is that caused forcing the sound back through the amps, or is it achieved by a combination of pick against strings and fretwork?

Gibbons: It's become a favored technique amongst most modern players achieving the effect in several varying ways. Jeff Beck uses the sound of harmonics at will delivering long lines of a solo and twisting the pitch on every string! The effect is certainly worth the time it might take to master it.

OnMilwaukee: A 2011 Rolling Stone poll rated you as the 32nd best guitarist of all time. Sometimes those polls are beauty contests and might turn out differently if only musicians could vote. First, do you think thats a fair assessment, you being in the top third? And secondly, who are some guitar players that you admire?

Gibbons: Whatever list there might be, except the "MOST WANTED BY THE FBI," Im glad to be on. Not sure how the rankings are determined, but its all good. No dispute that Jimi Hendix is number one on the list, and we were gratified to be slotted in there between Prince and Ry Cooder. Who wouldnt want those guys for neighbors?

I have a long list of guitarists I admire and, like this one, its topped by Jimi Hendrix. He made an electric guitar do things its inventors never had in mind. A genius of the highest order! Keith Richards single stringing tone is immediate, and our buddy Jeff Beck has an approach that is truly singular  nobody like him. Gotta salute Hubert Sumlin whose recording work with both Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters truly broke new blues ground. Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants!

OnMilwaukee: Are most of your songs autobiographical? Im sure "Pearl Necklace" is! But how about stuff like "Heard It On The X," "Mexican Blackbird" and even "La Grange"?

Gibbons: In a way, it's all autobiographical, a reflection of real experiences. We did hear great rock n roll, R&B and blues on XERF; we did meet a beautiful darkly complected senorita in Mexico; and as far as "La Grange" is concerned, lets just say, again, they got a lotta nice girls there!

OnMilwaukee: ZZ Top is a fixture at events like Milwaukees Harley-Davidson festivals, so theres no question youll be fronting the trio again soon. But is there anything else that youd like to try, either as an extension of "Perfectamundo" or something else thats entirely different?

Gibbons: Yes, theres no question at all. ZZ Top dates rev up in March, so check zztop.com to see where well be. The "Perfectamundo" experience has become a very positive one and underscores the importance of keeping an open mind, which means there could very well be another project in the offing along these lines. But, again, ZZ Top is the main man!

OnMilwaukee: Final question. Are you ever going to retire, or are you going to follow in the footsteps of Muddy, John Lee, the Wolf and B.B. King, and just play and play and play until you drop?

Gibbons: Final answer: Well, no question that those guys are our inspiration and we, too, are in for the long haul. Its always a good time!
Reprinted from Sputnik

Yet there will be. And the stage is already set for it. Selected Persian Gulf traders, and that includes Westerners working in the Gulf confirm that Saudi Arabia is unloading at least $1 trillion in securities and crashing global markets under orders from the Masters of the Universe -- those above the lame presidency of Barack Obama.

The World Economic Forum in Davos is submerged by a tsunami of denials, and even non-denial denials, stating there won't be a follow-up to the Crash of 2008.Those were the days when the House of Saud would as much as flirt with such an idea to have all their assets frozen. Yet now they are acting under orders. And more is to come; according to crack Persian Gulf traders Saudi Western security investments may amount to as much as $8 trillion, and Abu Dhabi's as $4 trillion.

In Abu Dhabi everything was broken into compartments, so no one could figure it out, except brokers and traders who would know each supervisor of a compartment of investments. And for the House of Saud, predictably, denial is an iron rule.

This massive securities dump has been occasionally corporate media, but the figures are grossly underestimated. The full information simply won't filter because the Masters of the Universe have vetoed it.

There has been a huge increase in the Saudi and Abu Dhabi dump since the start of 2016. A Persian Gulf source says the Saudi strategy "will demolish the markets." Another referred to a case of "maggots eating the carcass in the dark"; one just had to look at the rout in Wall Street, across Europe and in Hong Kong and Tokyo on Wednesday.

So it's already happening. And a crucial subplot may be, in the short to medium term, no less than the collapse of the eurozone.

The Crash of 2016?

So a case could be made of a panicked House of Saud being instrumentalized to crash a great deal of the global economy. Cui bono?

Still, Iranian oil about to reach the market will be around an extra 500,000 barrels a day by mid-year, plus a surplus stored in tankers in the Persian Gulf. This oil can and will be absorbed, as demand is rising (in the US, for instance, by 1.9 million barrels a day in 2015) while supply is falling.

Surging demand and falling production will reverse the oil crash by July. Moreover, China's oil imports recently surged 9.3% at 7.85 million barrels a day, discrediting the hegemonic narrative of a collapse of China's economy -- or of China being responsible for the current market blues.

So, as I outlined here, oil should turn around soon. Goldman Sachs concurs. That gives the Masters of the Universe a short window of opportunity enabling the Saudis to dump massive amounts of securities in the markets.

The House of Saud may need the money badly, considering their budget on red alert. But dumping their securities is also clearly self-destructive. They simply cannot sell $8 trillion. The House of Saud is actually destroying the balance of their wealth. As much as Western hagiography tries to paint Riyadh as a responsible player, the fact is scores of Saudi princes are horrified at the destruction of the wealth of the kingdom through this slow motion harakiri.

Would there be a Plan B? Yes. Warrior prince Mohammed bin Sultan -- who's actually running the show in Riyadh -- should be on the first flight to Moscow to engineer a common strategy. Yet that won't happen.

And as far as China -- Saudi Arabia's top oil importer -- is concerned, Xi Jinping has just been to Riyadh; Aramco and Sinopec signed a strategic partnership; but the strategic partnership that really matters, considering the future of One Belt, One Road, is actually Beijing-Tehran.

The massive Saudi dumping of securities ties in with the Saudi oil price war. In the current, extremely volatile situation oil is down, stocks are down and oil stocks are down. Still the House of Saud has not understood that the Masters of the Universe are getting them to destroy themselves many times over, including flooding the oil market with their shut-in capacity. And all that to fatally wound Russia, Iran and... Saudi Arabia itself.
Reprinted from Mondoweiss

The latest surprise in a presidential race full of surprises is the news that Michael Bloomberg is considering a third-party run if it appears that non-establishment candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders might actually capture his respective party's nomination. Bloomberg could become America's first Jewish president, Haaretz says; and the news has got people wondering, what is Michael Bloomberg's record on Israel?

The 73-year-old former mayor has been extremely supportive of Israel with what seems like a generational Jewish attachment. He has funded buildings in his parents' names there and he flew to Israel a year and a half ago to declare that it was within its rights to bomb Gaza to smithereens (a judgement against international law). He has adopted neoconservative positions on foreign policy and aided Islamophobic efforts in New York city. Yet in a couple of instances, Bloomberg has disappointed the Israel lobby.

Here are highlights of his record on Israel and related questions:

Bloomberg was an early and vocal supporter of the Iraq War, though apparently he cooled off on it later.

On Bloomberg's watch, the NY Police Department instituted a surveillance program targeting Muslims in New York that was modeled on Israeli policies in the West Bank. Bloomberg also undermined Debbie Almontaser when her Arabic-language academy in Brooklyn came under attack by Israel supporters. In the end he helped force her resignation.

Last August, Bloomberg bridled at White House efforts to pressure Democrats to support the Iran deal, saying that the deal was very flawed. I don't see where Bloomberg came down in the end on the deal, though he expressed support for Senator Chuck Schumer's opposition to the deal.

As mayor, Bloomberg led the effort to create a technology campus on Roosevelt Island in New York as a joint endeavor of Cornell and the Technion, an Israeli university. When ground was broken, he had left office, and contributed $100 million to the project.

In 2009 Bloomberg flew to Israel to express solidarity in its attack on Gaza and he did so again in July 2014. At that time he expressed opposition to the FAA's decision to suspend flights to Israel by domestic carriers because Israel's main airport was in reach of rockets from Gaza. He wrote then:

"During my brief time in Israel, I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. I thanked them for standing with us after the Sept. 11 attacks and offered my strong support for their actions in response to the attacks by Hamas. Every country has a right to defend its borders from enemies, and Israel was entirely justified in crossing into Gaza to destroy the tunnels and rockets that threaten its sovereignty. I know what I would want my government to do if the U.S. was attacked by a rocket from above or via a tunnel from below; I think most Americans do, too. "Israel has no stronger ally than the U.S."

The next month he said that Israel did not have to limit itself to a "proportional" response to Gaza attacks.

On the plus side, in June 2006, Bloomberg delivered a speech at the University of Chicago's convocation ceremony that gave credit to John Mearsheimer for the paper on the Israel lobby that he and Stephen Walt had lately published in the London Review of Books, causing a storm of criticism:

"At Chicago, you have all been fortunate to be part of an institution that's long practiced independent thinking and discovery. And I'm not just talking about t-shirts. "From the University's defense against accusations of communist teaching 70 years ago to its support of Professor Mearsheimer's right to criticize the Israel lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy, this has been a place where open debate is encouraged and cherished."

In 2013 Bloomberg did a good thing by helping to end the furor over the fact that Brooklyn College was about to hold a panel on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) featuring two supporters of the campaign, Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti. While stating that he "couldn't disagree more violently" with the aims of BDS, Bloomberg came out against several politicians, including supposedly liberal Democrats, who had opposed the school's holding of the panel, and said those who objected ought to go to school in North Korea.
"the Bernie Sanders campaign - that campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement that will use the election as a kind of an incentive and then go on, and unfortunately it's not. When the election's over, the movement is going to die.

The only thing that's going to ever bring about any meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don't pay attention to the election cycle. It's an extravaganza every four years"

(Sanders) is basically Eisenhower" -- Noam Chomsky. [1]

So Chomsky wants a popular movement, but not a political movement.

The last time he was happy with a popular movement was in 2011. Even then, I wondered why. The Occupy movement looked like a joke to me. The hippie-type movement had no teeth. It never said what it was for, only what it was against - vaguely - the status quo? (whatever that means).

In the end, all the Occupiers seemed to do was annoy a few people, hang up some hand-painted banners advertising themselves (but not their goals)" and then they went away.

Where are Chomsky's heroes now? One has a feeling that most of them, having "grown up," have gotten "serious." That most of them, recovering neoliberals, won't even bother to vote.

They accomplished nothing. Despite their "efforts," we have drifted further to the extreme right than at any time in our history. Wall St. has moved from lobbying the government to ruling it.

Occupy failed because it did not have a political leader, or even a spokesperson. Without a leader, it went in all directions, ultimately feeding on itself like Ouroboros, the mythological snake that eats its own tail.

So much for Professor Chomsky's popular movement.

Professor Chomsky compares Sanders to Eisenhower (which is not a compliment).

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The constant nightmare among both Democratic Party leaders and Hillary Clinton campaign boosters is that a significant number of Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders' backers will sleep in on Election Day. A recent CBS/New York Times poll didn't do much to dry the nervous sweat over this prospect. It found that fourteen percent of Democrats flatly said that they would not vote for Hillary, period. Another 27 percent said they'd hold their nose and vote for her. These are voters who no one would bet the bank on in Las Vegas to keep their promise. They've voiced the reasons for their Clinton disdain so often that they can be etched on a stone tablet. She's a Wall Street beholden, corporate pandering, Washington establishment, untrustworthy, fervent war hawk. To them, she'll say, act, and do anything to get elected and then once in be no different than Trump, Cruz or any other GOP would be president.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/19/democrats-fear-bernie-sanders-supporters-wont-back/

The conventional political wisdom is that all of this relentless anti-Clinton bluster will dissipate quickly because the prospect of Trump or Cruz bagging the nomination and the White House is too hideous for any Democrat to contemplate. That Sanders' is still the consummate loyalist Democrat and will implore his supporters to back Clinton. And that the Democratic vote bulge over the Republicans is so massive that any fall off in Democratic votes for Hillary would be little more than an annoyance and wouldn't derail her candidacy.

Unfortunately, the only one of these three rooted in cement notions is true. Sanders, undoubtedly, will endorse and work hard for Clinton's election. The other two notions rest precariously on shifting sands. The so-called Democratic vote bulge over the GOP and the supposed changing voter demographics is problematic. The changing voter demographics are that African-American, Hispanics, Asians, mid-income, upwardly mobile white women, and youth are lock down for the Democrats. The majority of them are. But Hillary is not Obama. There is no crusade like passion to storm the polls for her. It was this passion that fueled Obama's win in 2008 and to an extent in 2012. These voters wanted to be part of history by helping to elect the first African-American president. That historic urgency is totally missing this go round.

The real numbers of just how many Democratic versus GOP voters there really are tell a far different story than what is commonly believed. The raw numbers do show that Democrats on paper outnumber Republicans by 20 million votes. But that's on paper. The numbers that count are those that actually trek to the polls, and make that trek consistently. Obama did not win the popular vote in 2012 by tens of millions of votes. He got just short of 5 million more votes than GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. Toss in the overall vote total for the two mid-term elections in 2010 and 2014, and the scorecard reads 103 million votes for Democrats to 98 million votes for Republicans. Again this was a Democratic net of only 5 million over the GOP. Even this is misleading.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/01/05/the_myth_of_democrats_20-million-vote_majority_125145.html

Legions of registered or GOP leaning voters took a long stroll on Election Day in 2008 and 2012 and never got to the polls. These were ultra-conservatives, conservative white Christian evangelicals, and tea party acolytes. Romney simply had no appeal to them. They repeatedly made that known, and ultimately stayed home. This won't happen if Cruz gets the presidential nominee nod. It also may not happen with Trump. He'll pitch hard for their support based on their dread of the prospect of a Clinton White House that will carry on and extend Obama's policies. He'll also stoke their anti-Washington, bureaucratic establishment disgust, and inject a big dose of racial tinged, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim pandering. This will be more than enough to fire up untold millions of hard core conservatives and fearful white blue collar workers to rush to the polls this Election Day.

This frightening scenario probably wouldn't be enough to upend a Clinton White House drive. However, the soundings from those who say Bernie or bust are too ominous to completely write off as so much hot air. The 2016 election will be a numbers game. This means getting the maximum Democratic voter turnout in the handful of swing states that will decide the election. The majority of them such as Ohio and Pennsylvania the last two presidential elections went Democratic. If any part of the nearly 40 percent of Bernie backers who say they either won't vote for Clinton or will do it under extreme duress don't show up on Election Day in any of those states it could translate out to tens of thousands of Democratic voters lost in the final count, which just ramps up the GOP total. This would make the race a close run up. And that would indeed make the nightmarish fear of Democrats about MIA Bernie supporters not a nightmare, but a reality.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is Trump and the GOP: Race Baiting to the White House (Amazon Kindle) He is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network
I've spent much of my life chronicling the ongoing tragedies stemming from global warming: the floods and droughts and storms, the failed harvests and forced migrations. But no single item on the list seems any more horrible than the emerging news from South America about the newly prominent Zika disease.

Spread by mosquitoes whose range inexorably expands as the climate warms, Zika causes mild flu-like symptoms. But pregnant women bitten by the wrong mosquito are liable to give birth to babies with shrunken heads. Brazil last year recorded 4,000 cases of this "microcephaly." As of today, authorities in Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador and Venezuela were urging women to avoid getting pregnant.

Think about that. Women should avoid the most essential and beautiful of human tasks. It is unthinkable. Or rather, it is something out of a science fiction story, the absolute core of a dystopian future. "It is recommended that women postpone -- to the extent possible -- the decision to become pregnant until the country can move out of the epidemic phase of the Zika virus," the Colombian health authorities said, adding that those living in low altitude areas should move higher if possible, out of the easy range of mosquitoes.

Now think about the women who are already pregnant, and who will spend the next months in a quiet panic about whether their lives will be turned upside down. Try to imagine what that feels like -- the anger, the guilt, the pervasive anxiety at the moment when you most want to be calm and serene.

And now think about the larger, less intimate consequences: this is one more step in the division of the world into relative safe and dangerous zones, an emerging epidemiological apartheid. The CDC has already told those Americans thinking of becoming pregnant to avoid travel to 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Eventually, of course, the disease will reach these shores -- at least 10 Americans have come back from overseas with the infection, and one microcephalic baby has already been born in Hawaii to a mother exposed in Brazil early in her pregnancy. But America is rich enough to avoid the worst of the mess its fossil fuel habits have helped create.

As usual, it's the most poor and most vulnerable who bear the brunt. In Brazil army troops are going door to door draining puddles and flowerpots of stagnant water where mosquitoes might breed; in Jamaica the minister of health said plaintively "I'm going to be very frank, we don't have enough fogging machines to fog every single community in Jamaica" with the pesticides that might help control the outbreak.

And so the residents of the rich world will, inevitably, travel less frequently to the places just beginning to emerge from poverty. The links that speed development will start to wither; even the Olympics, theoretically our showcase of international solidarity, is likely to be a fearful fortnight in Rio this August.

Zika's not the only force tending in that direction, of course. It's hard to imagine who's going to visit Burkina Faso or Mali any time soon, after al-Qaida and Isis have blown up the major western hotels. Expats are starting to desert Beijing and New Delhi because who wants to raise their kids in smog so bad that a facemask is a fashion accessory.
What stands in between Big Pharma's desire for blockbuster drug sales and drug safety? In addition to the FDA, it is often medical journal editors who see, evaluate and publish early research. But a quick look at drugs or drug uses which later turned out to be risky shows a disturbing trail of undisclosed "bought" science in major medical journals.

Vioxx

Awareness of "bought" science crystalized after Vioxx, a pain drug advertised by Dorothy Hamill, the former Bruce Jenner and other celebrities eventually linked to more than 27,000 heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths. The drug was pulled from the market in 2004. Much of Vioxx's perceived safety stemmed from an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2001 that downplayed its actual heart risks. When the enormity of the dupe became apparent, Jeffrey Drazen, then the NEJM editor, said the authors of the article, who included Merck employees, had deliberately buried data. Why would paid employees of a for-profit drug company do that? "This was an episode where it was clear people had taken data and not reported it fully," said Drazen.

SSRI Antidepressants

Soon after the Vioxx revelation, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) began to have its own scandals. Doctor authors who had defended the use of antidepressants during pregnancy in a 2006 JAMA article had ties to antidepressant manufacturers. Oops. Lee Cohen, lead author of the antidepressants study, declared in a follow-up letter to JAMA that "We did not view those associations as relevant to this study," and listed 76 other financial relationships the nine physician authors had with Pharma.

Three years later another JAMA author was found to have undisclosed financial links to SSRI makers. Robert Robinson, who wrote about the drug Lexapro, had failed to report lecture fees he had received from its manufacturer.

The SSRI Paxil also benefitted from Pharma money. Martin Keller, former Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Brown and lead author of a now discredited Paxil study, admitted that GSK had given him tens of thousands of dollars during and after the study.

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Wall Writings Film of the Week The KKK involvement in local politics through intimidation and threats of violence, was strong in 1951. It is less prominent today. Be aware, however, that this film is a dramatic and at times tense look, at the American racist mind-set. Saturday, June 20, 2020The KKK involvement in local politics through intimidation and threats of violence, was strong in 1951. It is less prominent today. Be aware, however, that this film is a dramatic and at times tense look, at the American racist mind-set.

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Israel Creates A New Political Normal Benjamin Netanyahu has served as Israel's prime minister for 13 years and 64 days as of May 16, 2019. He has just been reelected to a new term, which means that two months from now, July 17, he will become the longest serving Prime Minister in Israel's history. Friday, May 17, 2019Benjamin Netanyahu has served as Israel's prime minister for 13 years and 64 days as of May 16, 2019. He has just been reelected to a new term, which means that two months from now, July 17, he will become the longest serving Prime Minister in Israel's history.

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Oregon Senate Republicans

Urge Democrat Leaders to Respect Voter Intent for February Session and Reject Partisan Policymaking

Salem, Ore.  Monday, Senate Republicans released their agenda for the February 2016 short legislative session focused on the top priorities for Oregonians: creating jobs and strengthening education. The agenda includes only four items addressing pressing challenges in Oregon, respecting the will of voters who intended the short session be used only for the most pressing legislative emergencies, not sweeping changes to Oregons government.

This reasonable, consensus agenda proposes practical solutions to the two biggest issues concerning Oregonians today: our crumbling education system and abysmal graduation rate and an economy that does not foster small business success and the growth of family-wage jobs, explained Senate Republican Leader Ted Ferrioli (R-John Day). These proposals address the immediate needs of Oregonians without feeding the highly partisan tone weve come to expect in the February short session.

The four proposals included in the agenda will equip workers for family-wage jobs, provide incentives for small businesses, prioritize education spending and protect parental involvement in their childrens education.

Voters did not intend for legislators to cram the short session with partisan policymaking, said Senator Herman Baertschiger (R-Grants Pass). 35 days is not long enough to thoughtfully consider major changes to the way Oregonians live and work. We must use the February session to make budget adjustments and address the immediate needs of Oregonian, including more family wage jobs now.

To see the full 2016 Senate Republican agenda, click here.
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Significance of Resolving Saudi-Iran Conflict

27 January, 2016

By Zaheerul Hassan

History of strained relationship between two oil producing countries Kingdome of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Iran is too old. The major causes of continuous deteriorating relationship are based on sectarianism, differences in ideology, variation in economic, political, military interests, controlling Gulf and unannounced desires of attaining regional domination.



Proxy war between Iran and KSA has spread all over the region from Syria to Yemen and Pakistan. Somehow, United States and Israel were remained the key players behind the said tension. For example United States preferred better relationship with Raza Shah Pelwi government over Saudi kingship till Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, coup. From then onwards Washington preferred better relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Khaleeji countries and Used to openly demand the rolling back of Iranian nuclear programme. Saudi Arab has also declared Iran as one of the most dangerous country for its security.



Recently, Iran has shown her frustration when Saudi Arabia announced the formation of 34 Islamic States Block in December 2015. Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Malaysia and some of African states are the members of the Islamic group. In this regard, Pakistan has also supported the aims Islamic group. Apparently, the objectives of establishing of the group were to collectively fight against terrorism and Daesh. But somehow Iran took the emergence of this group against her political and economic interests in the region. She started opposing the formation of Islamic group However, leadership of Islamic group primarily dominated by Arab countries overruled the Iranian distrusts and refused to accommodate Tehran. Resultantly, anti-Islamic lobbies got an excellent chance of cashing the adverse relationship and promoted sectarianism in Islamic countries.



The trust deficit between two Islamic countries has further widened when Shia Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimrits along with 47 terrorists were beheaded in Saudi Arabia. In response, on 2 January 2016, Iranian extremists attacking Saudi Arabian embassy located at Tehran ultimately became the immediate cause of termination of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh.



Surprisingly, White House silence and showing cold shoulders to KSA during penurious hours was too much dubious. U.S. despite knowing fully well that Iran was going to conduct the test trial of Arrow-3 Medium Range Ballistic Missile System has accepted



the buttoning up of her nuclear prorgramme and also removed the economic sanctions. Astonishingly, Israel has also not shown much concern over the launching of Missile by Iran. Therefore, change in American policies with anxiety has been viewed by Saudi Arabia and other gulf states.



As a result of changing US polices, cold war between Iran and KSA has engulfed the complete region. Terrorism instead of routing out has started fomenting globally because invisible hands provided protection to the militants. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq are the countries undergoing terrible kind of militancy since globally notorious intelligence agencies like CIA, Mossad, RAW and Afghan National Security Agency is supporting terrorists organizations. Some analyst and security experts are connecting prevailing militancy wave in Pakistan with KSA and Iran conflict. In this connection one of Taliban group found involve in Charsadda University attack. It has been confessed in their radio conversation that let Pakistani ruling elite to divert their attentions for putting right their own house (Pakistan) so that their efforts of resolving KSA and Iran conflict could be distorted.



Anyhow, Pakistan presented herself as a mediator and took the responsibility of defusing the increasing tension between Iran and KSA. In this regard, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif along with senior high officials visited Saudi and Iranian capitals from 18 January to 19 January 2016. The visit was aiming to neutralize the tautness and force the two Islamic states to resolve the issue through peaceful negotiations. According to the reports, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif asked Iranian and Saudi governments to nominate some focal persons for future negotiations. He was hopeful for the success of his visit. Aftermath of Pakistani PM and COAS positive development has been noticed when on 6 January 2016. In this regards 100 culprits were arrested and the Islamic republics supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene has condemned the attack on the embassy.



Initially, similar nature of gesture has also been shown by Saudi Arabia by stopping their negative statements over the issue. However, on 24 January 2016, according to Gulf News Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir has denied the existence of a Pakistani mediation between his country and Iran. Minister in response to a question ruled out any mediation with Iran. But he admitted that some e countries had offered to mediate and to convey thoughts and ideas between Riyadh and Tehran, he said, but added that



Indeed, Pakistani leadership during their visit to both the capital emphasized that issues need to be resolved bilaterally. Nevertheless, any increase in prevailing tension may lead to regional conflict and can become one of the causes of splitting Islamic countries on the bases of sectarianism. Therefore, all Islamic countries should try to defuse the situation and move forward to defeat the conspiracy against Islam. Pakistan and



Indonesia should take the responsibility of reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Iran should also be invited to become the member of 34 Islamic Group.



Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) should play its role in resolving issues between Islamic countries particular amongst Iran and Saudi Arabia since both have to work together in elimination of global terrorism. OIC should also call a conference of heads of the states for forcing the members to fight jointly against terrorism and the enemies of Islam.



The writer can be approach through zameer36@gmail.com
EU facing difficulties in deporting migrants to Pakistan

BRUSSELS: The European Union complained on Tuesday about difficulties in deporting migrants to Pakistan, warning it could take steps against Islamabad if it fails to comply with a deal on repatriations.



Struggling with its biggest flow of refugees since World War II, the EU persuaded Pakistan in November to restore a suspended agreement to facilitate the return of illegal Pakistani immigrants without documentation.



Pakistan was one of the top five countries of origin among the one million migrants who arrived in Europe last year, although most are considered economic migrants rather than refugees from conflict.



While discussions have been good and positive, we note that there are still difficulties with this readmission deal, European Commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud told a news briefing.



The Commission is currently examining possible incentives  positive and negative  so that this accord is applied properly. In December Pakistan sent back at least 30 undocumented migrants that Greece was trying to repatriate after saying Greece had failed to provide adequate proof that they were Pakistani, a claim later disputed by the EU.



Last year Islamabad temporarily suspended the repatriation agreement, citing its blatant misuse and saying member countries were not adequately checking the nationality of the deportees.



The deal was restored in November following a meeting between Pakistani officials and EU Migration Chief Dimitris Avramopoulos.
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World Peace Ambassador, Dr. Clyde Rivers - Peace and Humanity International Blog is created to help protect the image of God in people and create peace as we help humanity solve problems. We strive to bring recognition to the top peacemakers and humanitarians in the world. It is very important to acknowledge those that are working to keep peace in the world.
JFAC chair faces a new challenge  and vocal opposition

Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, is co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. The north Idaho Republican is the target of an anonymous website retireshawnkeough.com and will face a challenger this fall. (Courtesy photo|Idaho Education News)

By Kevin Richert | Idaho Education News



BOISE  In Shawn Keoughs 20th year in the Legislature, shes also something of a newcomer.



This is her first session co-chairing the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, the powerful House-Senate panel that writes the states budget bills.



The Sandpoint Republican will have a leading role in deciding where Idaho spends some $3.3 billion in 2016-17. The discussions on teacher pay, school district funding and other K-12 line items will start in Keoughs committee.



Keoughs promotion reflects her legislative experience  she was honored earlier this year as the longest serving female senator in state history  and reflects the respect she has earned from Senate leadership. But in her North Idaho legislative district  where Keough faces another contested GOP primary in May  her critics view the assignment differently. To them, it provides further proof that Keough is no conservative, but instead a lawmaker who has been in the Statehouse for too long.







Education Week awaits



Monday begins JFACs Education Week, as the 20 lawmakers hear budget presentations for public schools and the college and university system. State superintendent Sherri Ybarra will present her budget request Jan. 28.



The numbers arent new to Keough, or to JFACs colleagues. Ybarras K-12 budget request was released in September; Gov. Butch Otter countered with his statewide budget on Jan. 11. The bottom line difference comes to less than $5 million. Otter is seeking a 7.9 percent increase for K-12, while Ybarra requested a 7.5 percent increase.



JFACs job is to take these two requests and come up with its own number. As the legislative branchs budget-writers, JFAC members have considerable latitude to go their own way. In 2015, JFAC sided with Otter; the current $1.47 billion K-12 budget, a 7.4 percent increase from 2013-14, mirrored the governors request.



The first job for JFAC is to sort through the differences in the budget requests. Differences can be chalked up to perspective, Keough said. Otter has based his budget request on the far-reaching recommendations from his education task force, which met in 2013. Ybarra, elected more than a year later, has based her request on her own discussions with local school officials.



Either way, Keough is optimistic about the prospects for 2016. She expects her colleagues to have questions about the career ladder  the five-year plan to boost teacher salaries  but she believes her fellow senators are committed to continued funding.







A lengthy legislative resume



The wife of a retired school teacher, Keough brings an extensive political background to this years K-12 funding discussion:



After the state launched the Idaho Education Network project, Keough was named to an oversight committee of lawmakers and school leaders. She doesnt mince words about this assignment. She believes the IEN Program Resource Advisory Council amounted to mere window dressing, since state officials misled the committee about the depth of problems plaguing the statewide broadband system. The state shut down the network last year, after a district judge voided the $60 million broadband contract.



During the 2015 legislative off-season, Keough served on a committee assigned to pick up the pieces from the Idaho Education Network collapse. The committee recommended the state stay the course  supporting local school districts as they cut their own deals on broadband.



Keough spent the 2015 session on the Senate Education Committee. It turned out to be a one-year assignment, due to time constraints. Since JFAC holds hearings every morning, informal meetings with staff and agency heads get pushed back into the afternoon  conflicting with Senate Educations daily 3 p.m. sessions.



And then theres Keoughs JFAC experience. Keough joined the committee in 2001. Four years later, she was named a JFAC vice chairwoman.



JFAC chairs and vice chairs have long worked as a quartet, says Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, the committees longtime House co-chairwoman. That means Keough has had a direct role in crafting education budgets for years.



But as vice chairwoman, Keough was in something of a holding pattern. Rupert Republican Dean Cameron was entrenched as Senate chairman.



I guess I kind of thought Sen. Cameron would be here forever, Keough said. I didnt necessarily pine for the job.



Circumstances changed in late May. Otter tapped Cameron, a 27-year Senate veteran, to head the states Department of Insurance.



Keough was next in line for the chairs spot  and with Camerons resignation, she became the senior member of the Senate. However, she wasnt assured of the promotion. It wasnt until August when Senate President Pro Tem Brent Hill made the assignment official.



Keough downplays the wait. Senate Commerce and Human Resources Committee Chairman John Tippets also resigned in July to head the state Department of Environmental Quality, leaving Hill with two vacancies to fill.



It wasnt unusual to me at all, she said. He has 35 of us he has to corral.







A contentious campaign season



Keough represents Idahos northernmost and perhaps most remote legislative district, bordered by Washington to the west, Montana to the east and British Columbia to the north.



And in legislative District 1  Bonner and Boundary counties  the political terrain could be changing.



Keough has faced GOP primary opponents every year since 2008. In 2014, Keough defeated a conservative challenger, Danielle Ahrens, but captured only 54 percent of the vote. Ahrens had briefly planned to run again this year, but stepped aside earlier this month to clear the path for another challenger, Glenn Rohrer of Priest River.



Rohrer opposes Otters budget and wants Keough to fight for tax cuts. On his Facebook page, Rohrer tries to use Keoughs new legislative assignment against her.



In these trying economic times it is more critical than ever to elect a fiscal conservative, Rohrer wrote last week. My opponent has a long record of being a tax-and-spend liberal. Now that she chairs the Senate budget committee, no ones wallet is safe.



An anonymous website labels Keough a Republican in Name Only, and prominently features a stock photo of a wooden rocking chair. The name of the website is hardly subtle: retireshawnkeough.com.



The rhetoric concerns Bell. Serving her 28th year in the Legislature, she is the Houses senior member, and she refers to herself and Keough as the two old babes. It alarms her to hear Keoughs constituents lampoon her Statehouse experience, and dismiss her work on JFAC as a liability.



It doesnt help her, because frankly they have no respect for any of the process, Bell said. She is serving this session under considerably more duress than I wish she were.



District 1s political dynamics are complicated. The districts first-term House members, Heather Scott and Sage Dixon, are aligned with the Legislatures conservative wing.



Scott led the opposition to a bill to bring Idahos child support law into compliance with an international treaty; in May, Otter reconvened a one-day special session to pass the child support bill. (Keough supported the bill during the 2015 regular session, and in the special session.) Earlier this month, Scott and Dixon made headlines and took heat for touring Oregons Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the site of an ongoing armed standoff.



Scott and Dixon told Idaho Education News they will not endorse in Keoughs primary. Two years earlier, Keough had endorsed in the House races, backing Stephen Snedden, who lost to Scott, and George Eskridge, a longtime House member and JFAC colleague, who lost to Dixon.



Keough says the three lawmakers work together on constituent issues, and she says she doesnt view herself as an outlier. I think we just represent different parts of our community.



More answers will come in four months, when voters in Idahos closed Republican primary head to the polls. Keough says shes unsure how the electorate will view her resume, and her position on JFAC.



Ill let you know on May 18.








Lawmaker seeks to ease ban on church school funding

BOISE  An Eastern Idaho lawmaker wants to amend Idahos Constitution to ease prohibitions on using state funds for religious schools.



The proposal from Rep. Ron Nate, R-Rexburg, involves the Constitutions so-called Blaine Amendment. This amendment prohibits the Legislature and local governments from using public funding to pay for any school, university, college or educational institution controlled by any church.



At least one Idaho legislator thinks its a bad idea.



Rep. Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, asked whether Nates amendment would lead the way to a voucher system, which would allow the use of taxpayer funds to cover tuition at parochial schools.



Nate said he was concerned with protecting scholarship recipients.



According to Nates proposal, nothing in the Idaho Constitution would prohibit the Legislature, any local government or any school district from making payments, grants or donations of public funds or moneys for the purpose of providing grants, scholarships, loans or other assistance to students or parents of students for educational purposes.



I think this is deeply ill-advised, Rubel told Nate.








This blog started by posting research threads for my doctorate in philosophy at the European Graduate School, "Trauma and Event" (2012). Now, I am focusing on the crisis in psychiatry which is the subject of a forthcoming volume co-written with fellow psychiatrist and philosopher Drozdstoj Stoyanov - "Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Science, the Humanities, and Neuroscience" to be published by Springer Medical in 2020.
Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter flies during its test flight at an air station in Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. The restored plane took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. (Hiroko Harima/Kyodo News via AP)

One of Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter planes took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II.

The restored plane made a brief flight to and from a naval base in southern Japan. Decorated former U.S. Air Force pilot Skip Holm flew the aircraft.

Zero fighters were considered one of the most capable long-range fighter planes in World War II, rivaling the British Spitfire. Only a few are still in operating condition.

This particular plane was found decaying in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. It was owned by an American until Japanese businessman Masahiro Ishizuka purchased it and brought it to Japan last September.

"I wanted for the people of Japan and especially young people to know about this Zero airplane, as well as those who are old who remember the past," Ishizuka said. "Each of them should have different thoughts and perspectives on this, but I just want people to know how Japan has developed its technology."

Japanese see the aircraft both as a symbol of their country's technological advance and a reminder of the harrowing history of the war. In the last phase of the fighting, they were used for "kamikaze" attacks.

Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter flies during its test flight in Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. The restored plane took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. (Ryosuke Uematsu/Kyodo News via AP)

Kamikaze pilots took off from the same airfield as Wednesday's flight, Kanoya Naval Air Base on the island of Kyushu.

Under its previous American owner, the plane made an appearance in the Hollywood movie "Pearl Harbor" and at various events in the United States.

Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighters is prepared for a test flight at an air station in Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. The restored plane took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. (Hiroko Harima/Kyodo News via AP)

Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter is prepared for a test flight at an air station in Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. The restored plane took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. (Hiroko Harima/Kyodo News via AP)

Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter takes off for a test flight at an air station in Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. The restored plane took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. (Hiroko Harima/Kyodo News via AP)

Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter flies during its test flight in Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. The restored plane took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. (Ryosuke Uematsu/Kyodo News via AP)

Explore further Rare images reveal details of US Navy seaplane lost in Pearl Harbor attack 74 years ago

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
A new analysis found that some subspecies of the western rattlesnake actually may be separate species. Credit: Bryan Safrantowich

Using head shape and genetic analyses, new research challenges the formerly designated subspecies within the western rattlesnake species. These findings have important implications for ecological conservation efforts across the United States and could provide the basis for new species designations.

The results are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The western rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis) is found across a significant portion of the United States, from Mexico to Canada and from the Missouri River to the West Coast. Most work classifying rattlesnake species and subspecies was conducted in the mid-20th century. Since then, scientific methods have advanced to allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the path of rattlesnake evolution.

Mark Davis, a research scientist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois, collected data from nearly 3,000 western rattlesnakes for this study. He gathered data from preserved samples of this group available at natural history museums across the western United States.

"We are able to see that these different subspecies, which have different habits, live in different areas and have other different characteristics, have heads that have been shaped differently over evolutionary time," Davis said.

For western rattlesnakes, the head is the primary organ for conducting daily life. It is especially important for feeding and reproductive rituals. Head shape has evolved to better accommodate these critical behaviors, Davis said. The shape can vary drastically between different species of snakes. Given the importance of this feature, Davis and his colleagues used geometric morphometrics, a relatively novel method that allows researchers to quantify head shape without any influence of head size.

To complement the shape analyses, Davis and his team analyzed genetic data from the snakes. Combining head shape and genetic information created a comprehensive perspective, Davis said. Together, these data confirm that several groups of snakes previously labeled as subspecies have substantial enough differences to qualify for a separate species designation.

One of the greatest challenges to ecological conservation is identifying what species actually exist. For legal protections - including the Endangered Species Act - to be effective, scientists must specifically identify the units of biodiversity that may be in need of protection.

"It's important to me to try to work with conservation practitioners to develop strategies for preserving biodiversity," Davis said.

With this study, Davis and his colleagues recommend officially elevating to the level of full species several groups of snakes previously believed to be subspecies. Davis expects that the national and international organizations responsible for naming various species will adopt the recommendations proposed in the study.

Explore further Virgin births may be common among snakes

More information: Deconstructing a Species-Complex: Geometric Morphometric and Molecular Analyses Define Species in the Western Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis), Journal information: PLoS ONE Deconstructing a Species-Complex: Geometric Morphometric and Molecular Analyses Define Species in the Western Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis), dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146166
For the first time, a global community of marine scientists is asking you to make space in your heart for the oceans this Valentine's week. On February 12, members of The Society for Conservation Biology Marine Section (SCB Marine Section) will share their love of the oceans with the public on the inaugural Heart the Oceans Day. By attending locally organized events like film-screenings and by following the hashtag #HeartTheOceans on social media, the Society's members hope you will join them in a mass outpouring of affection for the ocean.

In addition to events SCB Marine Section members are organizing, they are inviting you, as a conservation-minded institution, retailer, or individual to celebrate Heart the Oceans Day by organizing your own local event to promote ocean awareness. You can find details of events already organized, and post details of your own event, by using the #HeartTheOceans tag on Facebook and Twitter. Suggested events include social activities such as a beach cleanup, a visit to a local aquarium or marine research facility, presentations to school children or local youth groups, or having a romantic responsibly sourced seafood dinner with your significant other. The SCB Marine Section hopes that fun, engaging events will inspire an even greater love of the oceans in the general public that will support marine conservation efforts.

"It is imperative that people care about protecting and conserving our oceans," said event organizer, Matt Tietbohl. "Although oceans are out of site for many people, they should never be out of mind." Oceans play a vital role in all societies, coastal and inland. They help to regulate Earth's climate, and many marine species are commercially and medically valuable.

Heart the Oceans Day is an opportunity for those who understand the value of the oceans to remind us all of marine importance. Australian marine conservationist, Toni Mizerek plans to honor the day with art. She has asked friends, family, and social media contacts to produce an ocean-themed work of art on February 12th. She downloaded pictures for children and adults to color and has garnered interest from a wide range of participants. "It doesn't matter where you are geographically," Mizerek said, "art is everywhere. This is an easy way to reach out to many people and particularly those who may not be thinking about the oceans often."

The SCB Marine Section hopes that 'I Heart the Oceans' events will empower individuals to share and discuss why they love the oceans, and will promote awareness of marine conservation issues. "We want to begin a conversation," said Tietbohl, "and keep the oceans in the mind of citizens throughout the world."

While awareness is the main focus of Heart the Ocean Day, the SCB Marine Section hopes that through wide-spread participation in developed countries, some events will raise funds to support important ocean conservation research in developing countries and small island states.

The SCB Marine Section encourages event organizers, where appropriate, to raise funds to support marine research in developing countries. This could be done by charging $2 for access to a movie screening or for a tour of marine facilities. 100 percent of the funds raised will go toward supporting conservation initiatives associated with developing countries administered by the Society for Conservation Biology Marine Section. Fundraising is voluntary and at the discretion of each event host.

Overall, the SCB Marine Section wants to get the public engaged in caring about the oceans this Valentine's season. "The more people that get involved and are aware of the oceans," Mizerek said, "even by something as simple as a drawing or coloring, the more we are reminded about what we cherish and why."

'Heart the Oceans' organizers couldn't agree more. "People tend only to act if they feel some kind of emotion," said Tietbohl. "Love is a strong emotion, and intense feeling is one way to get people excited and interested in marine conservation. By bringing citizens together with scientists, or other ocean users (and lovers), we hope to show and share this passion with people."

Explore further Acidification affects the ability of bacteria to clean our oceans
A diademed sifaka lemur perches on a tree trunk with her infant in Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, Madagascar. Researchers are using RNA sequencing to identify emerging infectious diseases in lemurs that standard diagnostic tests cannot detect. The technique could pave the way for earlier, more accurate detection of diseases that move between animals and people. Credit: David Haring, Duke Lemur Center

Advances in genetic sequencing are uncovering emerging diseases in wildlife that other diagnostic tests can't detect.

In a study led by Duke University, researchers used a technique called whole-transcriptome sequencing to screen for blood-borne diseases in wild lemurs, distant primate cousins to humans.

The animals were found to carry several strains or species of parasites similar to those that cause Lyme disease and other infections in humans.

This is the first time these parasites have been reported in lemurs or in Madagascar, the only place on Earth where lemurs live in the wild outside of zoos and sanctuaries, the researchers report in the Jan. 27, 2016 issue of Biology Letters.

The approach could pave the way for earlier, more accurate detection of future outbreaks of zoonotic diseases that move between animals and people.

"We can detect pathogens we might not expect and be better prepared to deal with them," said co-author Anne Yoder, director of the Duke Lemur Center.

In 2012, Duke Lemur Center veterinarian Cathy Williams and colleagues started performing physical exams on lemurs in the rainforests surrounding a mine site in eastern Madagascar to help monitor the impacts of such activities on lemur health.

An indri lemur lounges in a tree in Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, Madagascar. Thanks to next-generation sequencing methods capable of uncovering emerging diseases in wildlife that other diagnostic tests cannot detect, indri lemurs have been found to carry several new parasites never before reported in lemurs or their native Madagascar. Credit: Cathy Williams, Duke Lemur Center

"Lemur populations are becoming increasingly small and fragmented because of human activities like mining, logging and clearing forests to make way for cattle grazing and rice paddies," Williams said. "If an infectious disease wipes out a lemur population it could be a huge blow to the species."

Researchers took small amounts of blood and tested them for evidence of exposure to known viruses and pathogens, but nothing turned up.

The problem is that standard diagnostic tests tend to target known pathogens, Williams said. You can check for antibodies to certain viruses, or look for specific snippets of genetic material in an animal's blood, "but you have to know what you're looking for."

The end result is that new or exotic diseases often go undetected.

And with hundreds of thousands of viral and bacterial species that lemurs and other mammals harbor still awaiting discovery, "we could be looking for anything," Williams said.

To cast a wider net they tried a new approach.

Lead author Peter Larsen, senior research scientist at Duke, analyzed blood samples from six lemurs in two species, the indri and the diademed sifaka, both of which are considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

With advances in high-throughput sequencing, the ability to read genetic code rapidly, Larsen was able to look at all the gene readouts, or RNA transcripts, that were present in each animalan alphabet soup containing billions of nucleotide bases.

The team found more than just lemur RNA in the animals' blood. Using computer algorithms that compared the genetic material to sequences already catalogued in existing databases, they discovered several new types of parasites that had never been reported in lemurs.

These included a new form of the protozoa responsible for babesiosis, a disease spread by bites from infected ticks, and a new kind of Borrelia closely related to the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. They also found the first known case in Madagascar of a bacterium called Candidatus Neoehrlichia, which can be deadly in humans.

Further analyses revealed that the new types of Babesia and Borrelia they found didn't begin in lemurs, but were likely introduced to Madagascar in infected pets and livestock such as cattle and then spilled over to lemurs.

The researchers don't yet know if the new parasites are actually dangerous to lemurs. But they caution that what is infecting lemurs could potentially infect people, too. Human health officials and veterinarians in Madagascar may want to consider screening their patients to see if any test positive for the same parasites, the researchers say.

The majority of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans, including recent outbreaks of SARS, Ebola and bird flu, are zoonoticthey can spread among wildlife, domestic animals and humans.

"Next-generation sequencing will be an important tool to identify emerging pathogens, particularly vector-borne diseases," said Barbara Qurollo, a research assistant professor at the N.C. State College of Veterinary Medicine who was not affiliated with the study.

"A clinician cannot treat an infection that he or she does not know exists," said veterinarian and infectious diseases researcher Edward Breitschwerdt, also of the N.C. State College of Veterinary Medicine. "The kindest form of therapy is an accurate diagnosis."

Explore further Genome sequences show how lemurs fight infection

More information: Blood transcriptomes reveal novel parasitic zoonoses circulating in Madagascar's lemurs, Biology Letters, rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.or  .1098/rsbl.2015.0829 Journal information: Biology Letters Blood transcriptomes reveal novel parasitic zoonoses circulating in Madagascar's lemurs,
Juno in front of Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL

From the mystery of methane on Mars to how Jupiter formed and whether there is microbial life on Saturn's moon Enceladus, there are many questions about our solar system waiting to be answered this year.

For planetary scientists, 2016 is a year of grand finales, anniversaries and planning major new missions. Let's take a look at some of the most exciting possibilities.

Mars

In July 1976, NASA's Viking Landers were the first probes to successfully reach the Martian surface. An immensely successful series of Mars landers followed.

NASA's Curiosity Rover is the latest. In 2016, Curiosity will pick its way through its current position in the Bagnold dunes  a band along the north-western flank of a 5.5km high mountain inside Gale Crater called Mount Sharp  and continue its drive up the mountain to reach iron-oxide layers (rust is a kind of iron oxide) and a clay-rich horizon  both believed to have formed from the reaction between water and Mars' crust. We know that lakes filled the Gale Crater around 3.8 billion years ago. Curiosity will photograph, drill and analyse to find out more about Mars' past warm and wet environment.

Europe is also aiming for Mars. ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will launch on a Russian rocket in March and get there in October. It will follow up Curiosity's discovery of traces of methane in Mars' atmosphere, which could be a result of cosmic dust, geological processes or even past microbial life. ExoMars will test for current geological processes that might be releasing the methane.

The ExoMars 2016 Trace Gas Orbiter being moved. Credit: TsENKI/ESA

It will also drop a simple, small lander to the surface. If it performs as planned then it is likely that a more ambitious ExoMars Rover  a two-metre drill on wheels with science instrumentation designed to test for traces of ancient life  will launch between 2018 and 2020. If ExoMars goes ahead as planned then the 150m or so needed to complete it could lead to postponements of other possible projects such as a mission to return material from Mars' moon Phobos.

Moon

The moon also has a landmark anniversary: it is 50 years since the first successful robotic landing on its surface by the Soviet Union's Luna 9. The Russians have always maintained a keen interest in the moon. Meanwhile, ESA has offered European countries a plan to collaborate with RosCosmos, the Russian Space Agency, to start a new lunar exploration programme  with an initial focus on sampling the previously unstudied South Pole Aitken region. But budgets are limited. A decision at the European Council of Ministers in November about space priorities will be difficult, with projects targeting the moon, Mars' moon Phobos and Mars all competing for funds.

Meanwhile, US company Astrobotic Technology hopes to be the first private lunar lander and rover mission in 2016.

Outer solar system

The Juno NASA spacecraft will reach Jupiter in July. Juno will orbit Jupiter 32 times for a year helping us to answer questions about how the planet formed, how much water exists inside its atmosphere and how its mighty magnetosphere works.

Meanwhile, the Cassini mission will begin a gradual grand finale in September, orbiting between Saturn and its outermost ring while flying past the moons Titan and Enceladus before crashing into Saturn in 2017. This will provide a last opportunity to analyse the water-rich geysers on Enceladus. In 2015, researchers even suggested that certain chemical reactions inside its internal ocean may provide enough energy to feed microbial life. The study predicted that these would create molecular hydrogen that should be detectable in the plumes.

An even more exciting candidate for life in our solar system is Jupiter's moon Europa, which has a fractured crust of ice thought to overly an ocean which might harbour life. It would be nice if Europe got involved in exploring this, perhaps by contributing a "penetrator", a light probe designed to bury itself on a body's surface, to a planned NASA fly by mission.

A tiny member of the outer solar system is comet 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In 2015, the Rosetta mission achieved a remarkable feat by landing on the 4km-wide cometary nucleus. Rosetta will be crashed into the comet in September  look out for some spectacular close-up images.

A NASA mission called Osiris Rex to sample a carbonaceous asteroid called Bennu will be launched in September on a seven-year round trip. The mission could help us better understand the materials that make up our planets. Fittingly it comes on the tenth anniversary of the Stardust mission which returned samples from Jupiter Family Comet 81P/Wild2 and changed our view of what comets are made of.

So there's a lot to look forward to. But aside from European, Russian and US missions, let's not forget that China will steadily continue to build a space station and plans to go on to Mars and the far side of the Moon. India hopes to launch its first astronauts into orbit, and the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission will continue its journey to return samples from an asteroid.

It is impossible to determine what the greatest highlight of space science will be in 2016. But it might not even come from the glamour of space missions. Each year, 50,000 tonnes of cosmic dust and material from bodies in the solar system comes to planet Earth  and that can lead to unexpectedly great discoveries.

Explore further Video: Preparing the ExoMars spacecraft for 2016 launch

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.


University of Utah biology professor Neil Vickers with an adult male H. Virescens. Credit: Paul Gabrielsen, University of Utah.

Moths sniff out others of their own species using specific pheromone blends. So if you transplant an antennathe nose, essentiallyfrom one species to another, which blend of pheromones does the moth respond to? The donor species', or the recipients'? The answer is neither.

Moths with transplanted antennae responded instead to a similar yet novel pheromone blend not naturally produced by either species, according to University of Utah research published online Jan. 27, 2016 in PLOS ONE. The result, says biology professor Neil Vickers, reveals how the brain depends on the senses to construct an impression of reality, and how changing the sensory hardware can cause the moths' brains to be fooled.

What moths smell

Moths' sense of smell drives most of their behaviors. Male moths find females through pheromones, and females locate the ideal place to lay their eggs by following plant odors. "What moths do," Vickers says, "is predicated on odors."

When the moths' eggs hatch, the larvae can inflict devastating damage to crops. Farmers looking to prevent moth damage may choose from a range of pest control measures beyond traditional pesticides. "Often those technologies involve odors," Vickers says.

Moth species develop their own highly specialized sensitivities to odorants and pheromone blends. For example, males of one species, Heliothis subflexa, may interpret the combination of odorants A, B and C as a signal that a female is nearby. Another species, Heliothis virescens, may get the same message from odorants A and E but would be repelled by odorant D, which is produced by H. subflexa. Each species develops receptors to pick up only the odorants that they're interested in, preventing the costly mistakes of misidentifying females.

An extracted larval antenna, with the imaginal disc (white) at bottom. Credit: J. Ogrodnick and K. Poole, Cornell University.

Trading noses

Vickers and postdoctoral scholar Seong-Gyu Lee (now a researcher at Shin-Hwa ED Tech Co. Ltd. in Ulsan, South Korea) along with colleagues at Cornell University, devised an experiment with funding from the National Science Foundation to see how moths' odor perception might change if the moth's antennae were detecting different odorants. While the moths were still in the caterpillar stage, the researchers extracted the imaginal discs, clusters of cells that would later grow into antennae, from more than 350 H. virescens caterpillars and transplanted them into H. subflexa. The method had been used in previous studies to transplant female antenna of the Manduca sexta moth onto male moths and, in Vickers' lab, to study antennae transplanted from another moth species onto H. virescens. Once the moths had metamorphosed, they were placed in a wind chamber at Cornell, where researchers wafted various pheromone blends toward the moths to see which blends the moths responded to.

The most attractive blend was neither the recipient species' A, B and C nor the donor species' A and E. Nearly 75 percent of the transplanted moths that responded to pheromones were attracted to either a blend of A, E and C or A, E, and D. The transplanted moths were "reading" the presence of a female from a pheromone blend not seen in nature.

H. virescens caterpillars. Credit: Paul Gabrielsen, University of Utah

The moths were then shipped to the University of Utah, where Vickers and Lee probed the neurological basis for the moths' behavior. They focused on the antennal lobe of the brain, where axons from the antennae, conveying detection of odorants, connect to globular odor processing structures called glomeruli. In a normal H. subflexa moth, the antennal receptors for each odorant connect to their own distinct glomerulus.

In exploring the neural wiring between receptors, glomeruli and downstream connections to higher brain centers, Vickers and Lee found that the transplanted odorant receptors still connected to distinct glomeruli, although not in the same locations as in normal moths. And even though the transplanted antennae were sensitive to different odorants than normal antennae, activation of three glomeruli was enough to make the moths think a female was nearby.

Integrating parts into a whole

The results demonstrate how the brain depends on the organism's sensory inputs to make sense of the world. "The brain is a prisoner," Vickers says. Bereft of its own connections to the outside environment, the brain can only integrate the information provided by the senses.

The integration, Vickers says, is similar to the way a wine expert identifies a particular vintage. The expert's nose detects compounds given off by the wine, disassembles the olfactory signal into its chemical components and passes the analysis on to the brain. Then the brain reintegrates those components into an identification of, say, a 1995 Bordeaux. "The brain," he says, "has to reassemble the signal into some version of reality."

How does such integration happen? How do signals from a moth's antennal lobe translate into the impetus to fly toward a pheromone? That, Vickers says, is the next unanswered questionand his next step.

Explore further Entomologists focus on moth pheromones to explain high proportion of hybrid moths in nature
The ConsulateGeneral, Brazilian Embassy Nigeria, Her Excellency, Maria Figueiredo has declared that Brazil has a lot to offer Nigerians in the cultural tourism sector but regrettably, not much of the opportunities are being accessed by the sector players.





Figueiredo disclosed this interview with the TTM in Ile-Ife where she called on Nigerians to avail themselves of these opportunities .for the symbiotic benefits of the nation.





She pointed out that though Brazil and Nigeria have a long standing relationship on culture and trade but It is not as geometric scale as expected.





Figueiredo revealed Not that Nigerians are not scrambling for Brazilian visa or visit, but there is a dearth of genuine business-minded Nigerians particularly in the culturaltourism and educational sector. There are many opportunities waiting to be explored in Brazil in commerce, culture, transportation and particularly education.





She disclosed I am particularly interested in an increased level of culturaltourism relationship and exchange between our great countries. There are many things we share and many things that are unique. An increase in the level of our relationship will allow a comparative peer group benefits which will be good for our citizens, the nations and the world





Figueiredo said that the federal authority in charge of tourism and culture should establish close rapport with the Brazilian authority because of the wealth of experience and know-how in the tourism sector, adding that Most of the tourists from Nigeria are either invited by the universities, government or bodies, but I want a situation where there will be tourists in and out of the two countries.





She revealed majority of those who claim to be heading for Brazil under the cover of tourism are majorly migrants who constitute illegality in the country. This is not what I am saying. For there are lot of sites, cultural, historical, religious, ecotourism and wonderful sites in Brazil.





Our door is ajar for the consummate and business-oriented Nigerian who is ready to within the confine of legality explore any areas of business, development and growth. Brazil is home of the Africans. For you to know, African contribute descents 70 per cent of the population. Almost every one of us has the African blood running in our veins. So, I expect a better relationship between the citizen of the two countries.





She called on parents in Nigeria to seek information about the educational opportunities in Brazil Nigerians should obtain information about the educational system in Brazil which is not only qualitative, but free. Brazil offer free tuition in their universities and education institutions. I want Nigerians to avail themselves this information and make use of the opportunities.





The ambassador who is in Nigeria for a second time posting disclosed Nigeria is making steady progress and advancement in development and growth which the country should build on. This is my second time of working in Nigeria. I was here some years ago and now back, I can tell say Nigeria, I mean Lagos is now better than my first experience here. The country is great with great people.





She described IleIfe as a historical town of note which majority of the African descents in Brazil see as their root. It may interest you that I have been found to be from Osun State and an Osun adherent. This is typical of any Brazilian. IleIfe is important and significant to a typical African descent fellow in Brazil.





Talking about Nigeria cuisine, Figueiredo said that Nigeria like Brazil has a lot of delicious meals. But for me, I am in love with akara, kilishi and dodo Ikire.





The Ambassador who said that she tasted Dodo Ikire for the first time, a day preceding this interview pointed out that it is not only tasty, but delicious. It is pure and tasteful. I love dodo Ikire and I will buy a lot whenever I am going to Brazil for my friends . I am sure they will love it.





She described her experience at the Ooni Palace as a wonderful and spectacular packaging of cultural display by wonderful people in a wonderful manner which will remain evergreen in my memory.





Figueiredo disclosed We are going to open a new vista of relationship with the palace. The Ooni is a man of prodigious cultural consciousness and is bubbling with ideas of how to employ culture and tourism in empowering his people, the Brazilian Embassy will be ready to help in germination of the ideas and linking the palace with interested investors in Brazil. Also, you know, the Embassy will be ever ready to help in procurement and issuing of visas to team from the palace to Brazil.





She called on Nigerians wishing to travel to Brazil our job here is to ensure that as many genuine Nigerians gained access to Brazil. We are here serving your interest. There is no need going through a third person or an agent. The Embassy is opened for you to seek information and get details of your interest in Brazil. We are here to protect the interest of Brazilians and establish good relationship with Nigerians in Nigeria and Nigerians going to Brazil. For I wish Nigeria what I wish my country.




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Democratic congressional challenger Mike Derrick and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, agree on at least one thing: the caliber of Rockhill Bakehouse bread baked by Green Party candidate Matt Funiciello, who political activist Ralph Nader dubbed "Democracy's Baker."

Matt bakes the best bread bread north of New York City. Ive taken to stopping and picking it up on my way through and chatting with Matt," Derrick said Tuesday in a meeting with The Post-Star editorial board. "Having lived around the world and eaten French bread and Italian bread and German bread, I know what a good piece of bread looks like. Its hard to find in this country.
FORT EDWARD | A Saratoga Springs man who attacked and assaulted a woman in violation of an order of protection has pleaded guilty to two felonies and faces up to 6 years in state prison.

Joseph L. Still, 48, pleaded guilty to two charges of aggravated family offense in connection with an incident last Sept. 15 in the village of Fort Edward.

He was accused of choking and assaulting a woman who has an order of protection against him. He was on parole at the time for a 2011 felony strangulation conviction in Saratoga County, and was released from prison in that case last May 6.

Still is expected to receive a 3- to 6-year prison term when sentenced Feb. 19 by Washington County Judge Kelly McKeighan. He is being held in Washington County Jail, pending sentencing.
GLENS FALLS  The Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce has named George Ferone as interim president while the organization conducts a nationwide search for a permanent leader.

Ferone, who retired last year after 44 years with Tribune Media Co., served 14 years on the chambers board of directors, including two terms as chairman, according to a prepared statement announcing his appointment.

The position became vacant on Jan. 13, when Peter Aust resigned abruptly from the post during the first meeting of the chambers new board of directors. Aust has not returned calls seeking comment on his departure.

Georges experience as an executive and his deep ties to the Adirondack region and the ARCC will ensure a smooth leadership transition at the chamber, said Thomas Albrecht, in a prepared statement. Albrecht is chairman of the chamber board, as of this month.

Albrecht and other chamber officials have refused to discuss Austs exit, other than to say he left to pursue other career opportunities.

The chamber has named a committee to recruit a new president and CEO.

Ferone also serves on the board of governors of Glens Falls Hospital, the board of directors of the Adirondack Civic Center Coalition and is a member of the Queensbury Planning Board.

He has previously served on the boards of the Tri-County United Way, United Way of New York State and the Prospect Child and Family Center, according to a prepared statement announcing his appointment.

This is an exciting time for the chamber and our regions business community, as ARCC searches for its next leader, Ferone said, in a prepared statement. Our programs and services will continue uninterrupted. And with the legislative session in Albany underway, we are moving ahead with our advocacy efforts, focusing on the issues that will affect our local business community and quality of life.
FORT EDWARD | International companies are now studying Fort Edward.

The General Electric dewatering site, which will become an industrial park when GE finishes cleaning the site this summer, is already on the market.

Its getting lots of interest, said marketer John Davidson.

By the end of the year, one or more companies will have moved in, he said.

We have some people that are ready, he said, but declined to name the companies until they sign contracts with the landowners, WCC LLC.

The owners cant lease out land until GE finishes its work and departs, so announcements might not come until fall.

The companies that are interested are mostly commodity-related, perhaps shipping in material by rail or truck, processing it and then shipping it out, he said.

He had no details on job numbers.

Some processing potential, some manufacturing potential, he said. We envision multiple industries.

Companies are eagerly studying the specs and aerial photographs because of the rail line, he said. The site has five miles of railroad sidings.

The site also has a wharf, which he said has generated some interest.

Weve talked to some who are interested in barging materials in and out, he said. Its a class-A wharf. But the rail is the primary asset. Its a very unique and premier site in the Northeast. Were getting area industries, to international site selectors, so its been running the gamut.

Hes confident that companies will sign leases when the time comes.

Its going to happen, he said. Theres going to be development on that site.

One issue must be resolved first: ownership of the two-mile road leading to the site.

The road crosses through Kingsbury and Fort Edward, and parts of it are owned by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Canal Corp., General Electric and WCC.

Fort Edward Supervisor Mitch Suprenant proposed having the county take over the entire road, but supervisors didnt welcome that idea at a committee meeting Tuesday.

Because it runs through two towns, we feel it would be best for the county to have it, Suprenant said.

The road includes a temporary bridge, which cant be easily replaced with a permanent one. The bridge goes over the canal, and the State Historic Preservation Office ruled that the footings in the canal are historic and should not be disturbed. To avoid that, the temporary bridge was installed eight years ago.

It has been inspected every 18 months and will be inspected again soon, said county Administrator Chris DeBolt.

He expects the bridge to last another 20 years.

DOT said theyve actually started to use those bridges as almost permanent structures, he said.

But Hebron Supervisor and Budget Officer Brian Campbell asked what the county would do when the bridge needs to be fixed. Worst-case scenarios could call for the county to fund the complete replacement of the bridge.

These are future costs were looking at now, Campbell said. Taking over the road is easy. But what do we do when the bridge needs fixing?

The second sticking point is a short, one-lane portion of the road. It includes a stop sign, so vehicles can take turns on that section, but supervisors worried they would have to find a way to widen the road if the industrial park is successful and brings in many more vehicles.

Wetlands make it difficult to widen the road at that point.

If that one lane needed work, how do you work on it without all the businesses closing down? Campbell asked. That would be a serious problem. And some of the businesses would work at night, too. That could be a very serious problem.

Hartford Supervisor Dana Haff scoffed at the worries, noting the narrow section hasnt impeded heavy truck traffic at the site for the past eight years.

I think youre making a mountain out of a molehill, he said. This is not the Aviation Mall youre building.

The committee decided to send Highway Superintendent Steve Haskins to inspect the road and report back to the Finance Committee.

Davidson urged them to make a decision soon so the board could vote to take over the road at its meeting next month. He said someone has to accept ownership of the road soon to keep the project on schedule.

If we dont have a road, might as well turn it back into farmland, he said. Theres going to be development on that site  as long as we can get to the site.
GLENS FALLS  Democratic congressional candidate Mike Derrick said he holds many common views with Matt Funiciello, who received more than 19,000 votes in the 2014 21st Congressional District election.

Integrity of the food supply is very important to Matt, and its also very important to me, Derrick said Tuesday in a meeting with The Post-Star editorial board. Protecting our environment is very important to Matt. Its also very important to me.

Funiciello, who placed third in 2014, is laying groundwork to run again in November, against Derrick and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro.

Derrick, a first-time candidate, said in order to win, he will need to attract some of those who voted on the Green Party line in 2014 and also get the votes of a bunch of Republicans and independents.

Im not a practiced analyst in politics, but I can only imagine it (Funiciellos candidacy) will hurt, he said. That just means I just have to run up the score even higher. I think we can do that.

Derrick, a retired Army colonel from Peru, in Clinton County, said he will accomplish that by emphasizing his leadership background.

I have led Americas sons and daughters into battle, he said.

Derrick, who said he is a fiscal conservative, had received endorsements from 10 of the 12 county Democratic committees in the 21st District as of Tuesday afternoon.

He said he has traveled the 12 counties, meeting with voters, business owners and community leaders, since he announced his candidacy in July.

Stefanik, who formally announced her re-election bid last week, said she will be touting achievements such as passing legislation to eliminate the automatic enrollment provision in President Barack Obamas health care reform plan and getting a two-year suspension of the excise tax on medical devices, and she will emphasize her support for Fort Drum near Watertown.

Im going to continue working hard on behalf of the district, she said in an interview Thursday. Im only halfway through my term, lets remember. So I have another year to go, and I am confident from the feedback I have been hearing that I am going to be rehired for this job.

Derrick said he admires Stefaniks tenacity, but is leery of Stefaniks voting record on the environment and of her constant championing to repeal Obamas health care reform law.

Derrick said he has unique perspective as a retired military colonel who is a husband and father of four.

We know about what makes families tick because we are one, he said.

I dont talk about the VA as some sort of disembodied government agency. I talk to the VA on a monthly basis because I am one of them, he said, referring to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

After retiring from the Army, Derrick worked for a time as a U.S. State Department adviser on missile defense.

So when it comes to asking tough questions of the people who develop the field of equipment, I think I understand that pretty well, he said.

Derrick said he is prepared for a spirited campaign.

Its (politics) a hostile environment in some cases, and I operate well in hostile environments, he said.
Saratoga & North Creek Railway plans to dramatically boost its dining car offerings this year after finding plenty of interest in meals on rails in recent years.

The railroad plans to bring new dining and lounge cars to its line to try to increase ridership on the tourist train.

The company will offer dinner, brunch and lunch train trips, with much of the food and beverages offered on the trips to be provided by local suppliers.

SNCRR will offer 94 dining trips between Saratoga Springs and Thurman Station starting June 4 and running through Oct. 28, an increase over the 15 offered last year.

The trips will be run on new equipment that includes a bigger, 48-passenger dining car with a full kitchen, and a luxurious lounge car with couches and a bar, said Justin Gonyo, SNCRRs general manager. The trips have been dubbed The Pullman Table.

Gonyo said the company had seen that dining car trips were selling out in previous years, with all but one of 28 over the last three years being booked solid.

This is a very exciting business franchise, Gonyo said.

The kitchen can turn out up to 300 meals per trip, he said. Wine will be provided by Greenfield winemaker The Fossil Stone Vineyards, and local farmers and food suppliers will provide ingredients for meals.

Menus posted online listed standard breakfast offerings, with entrees like prime rib, grilled salmon and Adirondack casserole and the D & H Deluxe Burger for later meals.

SNCRRs parent company, Iowa Pacific Holdings LLC, offers the same service on its other affiliated railroads in Oregon, Texas, Illinois and Louisiana.

The company has been dogged by lower-than-anticipated ridership numbers, though the Polar Express holiday trips have done well. SNCRR canceled snow train trips for skiers this winter between Saratoga Springs and North Creek.

The railroads five-year contract with the county expires in June, but county Administrator Paul Dusek told county supervisors Monday that negotiations for a new deal are progressing.

It looks like its going to be a go for another five years, Dusek said.
SOUTH GLENS FALLS  A bidder on South Glens Falls furnace has hired a lawyer to argue that he should have gotten the job.

Jack Hall Plumbing and Heating was one of three companies that responded to the villages emergency request for proposals to fix or replace the broken furnace at Village Hall.

Jack Hall was technically the lowest bidder, at $11,748 for a new furnace.

But the furnace would not fit in the space used by the old furnace on the roof of the building. The village would have had to pay for modifications to the roof.

So the Village Board chose the proposal from Simons, at $12,750, for a furnace that was the same brand as the previous one and would fit on the roof without modifications.

The board also liked the idea of sticking with the brand  Lenox  that had kept the building warm for so many years.

Its a win-win. Were going to be able to get a decent price, plus a Lenox that lasts 30 years, and less modification, said Mayor Joe Orlow.

All the furnace proposals also required modifications in the building itself, to match up ductwork and new thermostats. The Village Board decided to postpone that work until the next fiscal year.

But Ty Hall of Jack Hall said he offered a different brand because village officials said they were looking for the cheapest solution possible.

They were crying about price, he said. If theyd said they wanted that furnace, I wouldve offered that furnace.

His lawyer sent a letter to the village Tuesday, warning that Jack Hall would take legal action to get the project.

Please be advised that Jack Hall Plumbing & Heating, Inc. fully intends to enforce its position as the lowest responsible bidder on this work, and intends to take any steps necessary to protect its rights to this contract, wrote attorney Jeffrey R. Meyer, Esq.

In his letter, he acknowledged that there are circumstances in which the board could choose a higher bidder. But he suggested that was not the case in this situation.

Awarding of contracts to higher bidders without following the due process requirements established in law will result in negating the contract as void, he wrote.

Orlow said the towns attorney confirmed the Village Board was in the right.

Legally, we can, he said of the decision. Its a circumstance based strictly on the best fit.

Since the Lenox fit on the roof, even though the base price was $1,000 more, it was the right choice, he said.
If committing crimes were part of the regular duties of New York state elected officials, then it would make sense to argue, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo has, that they should be allowed to use campaign funds to pay defense lawyers.

From the behavior of many state legislators and state officials  Sheldon Silver, Dean Skelos, Thomas Libous, John Sampson, Malcolm Smith, Pedro Espada, Alan Hevesi (we could go on much longer)  you would think the law does require New York legislators and other state leaders to commit crimes, but it doesnt.

They arent supposed to be corrupt, they just are, and allowing them to defend themselves with money contributed to their campaigns encourages their criminal behavior.

Campaign contributions are made by people who support candidates political positions and want to help them get elected. Presumably, for many campaign donors, those feelings of support change when their candidates get indicted.

In a just world, elected officials charged with crimes would have to put all of their campaign cash in escrow, to be returned to donors if and when they are convicted.

Politicians who have betrayed their supporters should not be able to keep their cash or use it to pay defense lawyers.

Sheldon Silver, the former Assembly speaker, spent $2.9 million in campaign funds on defense lawyers but was convicted in November of corruption charges.

Dean Skelos, the former Senate majority leader, used $760,000 in campaign funds to pay defense lawyers but was convicted in December of corruption charges.

A bill introduced by a Democratic senator from Manhattan, Brad Hoylman, would ban the use of campaign funds to cover lawyers fees for defending against any civil or criminal lawsuit or federal or state criminal investigation. An exception would be made for civil Election Law cases.

We support the bill as one step of the many needed to clean up politics in New York. It is possible the thought of having to use their own money to defend themselves will make some state politicians hesitate when tempted to act improperly and illegally.

Unfortunately, Gov. Cuomo, who has pretended an interest in cleaning up New Yorks politics, opposes this common-sense bill.

Cuomo himself spent $400,000 in campaign funds on lawyers who defended him during the federal investigation of his shutdown in 2014 of the Moreland Commission, which he had convened to investigate political corruption. (Cuomo wasnt cleared, exactly  the investigation found insufficient evidence he had committed a crime).

Its bad enough the people of New York have to endure the consequences of having the most corrupt politics in the country. At least those politicians who get caught should be required, like everyone else, to pay their own legal bills.

Local editorials represent the opinion of The Post-Star editorial board, which consists of Publisher Terry Coomes, Editor Ken Tingley, Projects Editor Will Doolittle, Controller/Operations Director Brian Corcoran and citizen representative George Nelson.
Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for nearly 50 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care

In 1970, we ran a two part series on gay liberation.

i

n 1965 we called for the end of the draft.

In the 1960s we proposed community policing
Barbara Jean Ruther, former corporate speaker for Trans World Airlines (TWA), will be at Page One Books 3pm Sunday, February 21, to talk about and sign her new book of poetry, Dirt Roads: Poetry and Memoirs.

The book touches on life, love and memories.

Ruther was a corporate speaker and writer for Trans World Airlines. She wrote destination travel programs, and gave presentations and seminars to travel groups. She is a poet and has been published in small press publications. She also has written a novel, Saving Snowflakes in My Pocket. Barbara was born in New Mexico, has lived in New York and Chicago, and is now back home, living in Santa Fe.

Page One Books is located at 5850 Eubank Blvd NE, Suite B-41, in Albuquerque's Mountain Run Shopping Center (southeast corner of Eubank and Juan Tabo). The Ruther event is free and open to the public. For more information, please call 294-2026 or visit www.page1book.com.

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"Saving Snowflakes" book



Poem in Santa Fe New Mexican
This is my "line and wash" drawing of Switzerland. I drew this sketch because this past week the world's elite met in Switzerland to discuss the world. The one topic they did not discuss is how to end the premeditated slaughter of millions of tiny humans world-wide. So, I am posting this sketch here now to hopefully persuade them to include that on the next annual meetings' agenda. I painted this on 25th Jan 2016 and signed it, photographed it, uploaded it then but posted it today 26th Jan 2016. A "line and wash drawing" means the drawing is first drawn and then watercolor of thin acrylic washes are laid on top of the lines. I photographed this on my portable drawing board and it is merely a sketch on 8 x 11 paper painted with watercolor over an ink drawing that I drew of The Alps near the village of Davos Switzerland. Copyrighted.

Also, my thanks to my viewers around the world. I am grateful when you take the time to view my art I made and read my words.

Creating this blog and also other blogs to inform the public of the prolife news and events, and the references they can use to educate themselves on the issues, and the public debates, and the #prolife activists known around the world, is my way of opening my mouth for all those in the womb appointed to destruction.

You can see other blogs of mine and some include medical photos I photographed to digitize them, and read my words as Registered Nurse on these other blogs of mine:

https://prolife-nurse.blogspot.com

https://save-the-baby-humans.blogspot.com

https://real-women-have-babies.blogspot.com

https://sites.google.com/site/wordslife

https://sites.google.com/site/wordslife2

https://news-for-life.blogspot.com

https://tapestry-of-life-LLP.blogspot.com

https://words-that-work-LLP.blogspot.com

https://twitter.com/ProlifeNurse

https://twitter.com/personhood1

https://salvation-is-free.blogspot.com

https://sites.google.com/site/gloriapooleRN

https://sites.google.com/site/OptimumHealthIsAchievable

https://gloriapoole-RN-artist.blogspot.com

https://sites.google.com/site/publishinglife includes article how the fetus develops written by me Gloria Poole,RN

and other sites and blogs of mine, including primarily for displaying #art I make, or words I write. I incorporate all sites and blogs of mine into this blog by reference.

You can follow me on twitter on these accounts of mine: @gloriapoole; @gloria_poole; @ProlifeNurse; @Tartan_Bliss; @tweetie0817; & @personhood1.

Also, all telephones on this account//blog/profile AND ON ANY ACCOUNT/BLOG OR PROFILE OF MINE are my personal phones and are physically located in Missouri and some are wired landline phones and some are cell phones and some are Google voice numbers. I have other phones not listed on this account for my safety sake. I have several phones on different carriers precisely because four attempts were made on my life by my 2nd exhusband in Colorado with intials DBP, during years 2003-2006, and because he made many threats to "track me down like an animal and cut my throat--kill me". He is not going to get the chance to do that, GOD willing, so I use different phones at different times.

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP AND COPYRIGHT:

This is my 2016 logo for the time being. I signed it in paint and painted in that little brush. Copyrighted.

My copyright notice I made for this blog and all content on it. Read statement below.

This is one of my Christian crosses to remind all that I am raised Southern Baptist and am believer in THE LIVING LORD JESUS.That is my hand in that photo that I photographed in recent months this year. To read what I believe please read https://salvation-is-free.blogspot.com.

This is the symbol of my alma materwhere I graduated; and took state boards in Georgia to become a Registered Nurse years ago.I have a Registered Nurse license in Missouri.

This is the display I made of the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business where I got a second education and graduated with a business degree.

This is my selfie [Gloria Poole,RN, artist] in spring 2014 but I look the same except that I am thinner and my hair is longer but I still put it in lop-sided pony tail when I walk about or create art to prevent hair from blowing into my eyes or into paint.That is also me that you see in the "about me" box on right side of this blog and I am wearing a dark grey winter wool hat because that photo was taken of me in state of Georgia in Jan 2010 and my family in Georgia saw me wearing that hat and so did other people. So I am leaving that photo also on this blog for that reason.

This is one of my photos of the U S flag I photographed on walkabout to remind all I am a U S citizen with all civil liberties including freedom of Press, freedom to worship THE LORD GOD, and freedom to associate with whomever I want or not to associate with those GOD labels "abomination" and freedom to protest governments.

Copyright notice:I, Gloria Poole, own all rights to all content on this blog. Usually I sign the art I create as simply Gloria since that is my first name, that I was born with; but on pencil and or ink drawings I sometimes also sign my born with surname of Poole which is my legal name again because I removed the Pappas name from my name at time of final divorce decree in Oct 2007 from male DBP, and I resumed my full maiden name including my born with surname of Poole, by Court order at the same time. I am also known on the web and in real life as Gloria; Gloria Poole; Gloria J Poole; Gloria Poole, RN, artist; and on the web as : gloriapoole; gloria-poole; gloria.poole; Ms Gloria Poole; gloriapoole.RN; gloriapoole_RN; gloriapooleRN at yahoo; gloria0817; gpoole817; artist-gloriapoole; gloriapoole-paintings; artist-gloria; Poole,Gloria; gloriapoole1749; and other variations of my real, born with, and legal name of Gloria Poole. For the record, I am a white, single-again, twice divorced, Southern Baptist, born again, Christian, woman and the mother of only two children who are grown daughters who are named Jennifer and Leigh. I am also a prolife activist, blogger, artist in all mediums; photographer for my own purposes, Registered Nurse with a license in Missouri but before that for most of my life in the state of Georgia, U.S. citizen born in the state of Georgia; University of Georgia alum, Georgia Baptist College of Nursing alum, writer, illustrator, author, personhood promoter. This blog may not be downloaded, nor copied individually or collectively as a whole; nor have domains forwarded to it that do not belong to me, nor may the photos or art on it be reproduced or saved to disk by anyone . I create all content on this blog and I, Gloria Poole, own all rights to this blog collectively and individually as single posts. All telephones listed on this account and any account of mine on the web belong to me personally and are in my apartment in Missouri or in my possession at all times. Some of my numbers are wired, landline telephones and some are mobile phones. I have phones other than the ones listed on this account for my safety sake. This blog and all blogs that I create and that contain my words I wrote and or art I made and signed and or photos that I photographed belong exclusively to me Gloria Poole, of Missouri and Georgia. Copyright. Gloria Poole / Gloria / gloriapoole /gloria-poole /gloria.poole/ Ms Gloria Poole/ Poole Gloria / G-L-O-R-I-A / gloriapoole1749 /gloria0817 /gpoole817 / gloriapooleRN at yahoo / gloriapoole.RN / artist-gloriapoole /Gloria Poole,RN,artist /cartooning-by-gloriapoole / photo-by-gloriapoole, and other variations of my real name with or without my professional status as Registered Nurse and with or without numbers after my name, at my own private apt in Missouri which is not shared with anyone and neither is my equipment nor phones shared with anyone, and neither is my isp account shared with anyone which means no one is authorized to log into any account of mine anywhere but me. /signed/ Gloria Poole, RN, artist; at my apt in Missouri on 26th Jan 2016 at 5:27pm. Gloria Poole / Gloria / gloriapoole / [Ms ] Gloria Poole,RN,artist of / in Missouri, USA .
The consortium members include Bayer, GrowAfrica, the International Finance Corporation, Rabobank, Syngenta, the World Food Programme and Yara International.

In a blogpost, AGRA said its participation in the partnership is part of its "broader effort to harness the power of private sector ventures to become a force for social change for Africas smallholder farmers."

"The Patient Procurement Platform complements and helps expand AGRAs existing work with African governments and organizations, including small-to-medium sized enterprises and farmers organizations."

"It facilitates access to fair harvest contracts before planting begins, helps farmers obtain the agricultural inputs they need to increase yields, and offers other support, including trainings from consortium members and other providers."

AGRA also said the partnership provides great opportunities for farmers to increase their income and boost food security through planting and harvesting.

We are excited to be part of this new partnership with the World Food Program because we are committed to making markets and financial systems work for the benefit of African farmers, said AGRA President Dr. Agnes Kalibata.

The initiative is attractive to us because its trying to build an inclusive business model that places the welfare and success of Africas smallholder farmers at the center.
With the right tools and training, young innovators in Africa have the opportunity to skip the second industrial revolution  traditional mass production  and leapfrog straight to digital manufacturing.

This, in turn, can provide them with a path out of poverty.

Africa has shown an incredible ability to leapfrog older forms of technology in favor of adopting the latest. It skipped traditional landlines  as well as dial-up Internet access  and moved straight to mobile broadband. Digital manufacturing and 3D printing will revolutionise Africas manufacturing industry in the same way that smart phones and mobile broadband are transforming the service, trade and agricultural industries.

Next-Shoring, the `Next Frontier

The lack of an established manufacturing sector means that most Africans rely on importing items like machine parts, consumables, household goods, tools and building materials. As 3D printing becomes more versatile, African nations can digitally manufacture such objects domestically and reduce dependency on costly imports. It will create an environmentally friendly ecosystem that doesnt require factories, machinery, labor or capital. The savings, both direct and indirect, will afford many people the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

Although growth in the manufacturing sector has long been considered crucial for economic development, it usually represents a small part of African economies. In Nigeria, for example, manufacturing is still at an infant stage, accounting less than 7 percent of GDP, and the local industry depends on imports of raw materials and parts.

3D printing has the capacity to transform the supply chain. By 2025, two-thirds of global demand will come from emerging markets, according to McKinsey & Co. As that happens, a new trend of next-shoring is expected to move manufacturing areas close to where the raw materials or customers are, cutting down on distribution time and reducing costs. Next-shoring transcends geography and focuses on physical proximity to emerging markets, talent and customers.

Take the auto industry in Nigeria, with Fords decision to establish a presence and produce roughly 10 units a day for the market. Since Nigeria is a priority market in Sub-Saharan Africa, many companies are looking at how a base there can service the entire region. Reliance on highly specialised suppliers for complex parts can be reduced with 3D printing, and so can the number of suppliers involved across the supply chain.

Developing Skills for the Future

As we enter the 4th Industrial Revolution, one area of concern is how prepared Africas students are to become innovators in tomorrows economy. Countries will need to ensure that people have the skills they need to compete globally by investing in education and school-to-work transitions.

There are two primary entry points into the world of 3D printing. The first is the education sector. Priority should be given to getting the culture of 3D printing into schools so that youth can become conversant with the technology and increase their interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Weve seen first-hand the benefits of such programs, with Youth for Technology Foundationpartnering with several secondary schools and universities across Nigeria to train several hundred students in human-centered design and 3D Printing. At the Federal Government Girls College in Owerri, 15-year-old Treasure developed a passion for 3D modeling and has been designing and printing rings, phone cases and other small consumables. She is now starting to think about how to market these products to others in her community and sell them in online marketplaces.

But employers cannot wait for the right applicants to show up at their doorsteps. They should work with education providers, especially at the tertiary level, to design curricula that fit business needs. They should also take the workplace to the classroom, by lending out members of their own staff to act as instructors and increasing the availability of work-placements programs and other opportunities for practical learning.

The second point of entry involves adding knowledge of 3D printing technology to Africas innovation corridors. For example, YTF partnered with the GE Garages Lagos program to expose entrepreneurs to the latest in advanced manufacturing technologies, while teaching them to drive innovation through rapid prototyping.

YTF supported one of the entrepreneurs from GE Garages, Tochukwu, who designed a reading stand device. The 3D Africa team helped to refine the 3D-printed parts for his product, which was a finalist in the Social Innovation Contest organised by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Tochukwu was recently able to establish a replica 3D printing hub in Lagos.

Moreover, as the GE Global Innovation Barometer noted, theres a strong sense among entrepreneurs that government should be more of an enabler and steward of innovation. Though opportunities abound for those interested in 3D printing and other innovative technologies, there are still many risks  including high levels of initial investment and marginal cost, lack of support from the government and a disregard for intellectual property issues.

However, the opportunities to unlock innovation and create employment opportunities through entrepreneurship are endless, and the youth of Africa stand to benefit from all of them.
" I have heard people say it is because there's no cocoa bean. That's not true."

Clarifying the situation to Pulse Business Mr. Rhule maintained that the closure of the chocolate and confectionery producer, had nothing to do with supply of beans.

" We have had to shut down two of our cocoa plants for routine maintanance. In December we were supposed to go for our routine maintenance but we had some contracts that needed us to process some cocoa butter which should have concluded by the 31st of December, but we couldn't not finish so we had to continue".

According to him, this is the reason why the planned maintenance was postponed to now.

He added that no employee of the Cocoa Processing Company had been laid off.

Mr. Ekow Rhule again revealed that the maintenance that will not last more than one will not result in any lay- offs.

" Again, that's a misconception. No worker has been laid- off. What we have done is to excuse them until when the maintenance is over. We will not entertain leaves and things like that when we start, so we have asked those who are due for leave to take it at once."

There have also been speculations about a possible shortage in the supply of chocolate from the company, something Mr. Rhule refutes as well.
In a landmark ceremony, four cohorts of the senior class of Wesley Girls High School, Cape Coast, pledged "to be a check on one another in all matters of good conduct and not be deterred by their peers or some significant others; to not be frightened by the challenges or demands that the realization of their goals will make on their time, being and intellect."

In so doing, these students pledged to demand a culture of integrity by holding one another responsible for doing the right thing, including writing internal examinations without invigilation.

"During a staff development program in Kumasi, chaired by Dr. Awuah, he shared some of the things Ashesi is doing, including the honour code. That's where I caught hold of it, said Mrs. Betty Djokoto, Headmistress of Wesley Girls High School.

"It was difficult for people to believe it; they didnt think the average young Ghanaian can be responsible and honest. At Wesley Girls though, we set the bar very high, and believe in ethics and strong core values; therefore, if there is any activity or any kind of concept that helps us to achieve the status of excellence, we will buy into it. So it fell in the grain of the school. It is the idea of daring to be different. Even among the best you have to dare to be different, in the positive sense. We want to tell the whole world that we buy into the honour code, so this is making formal what we have been doing all along."

Similar to Ashesi, the decision to be on the honour code is left to the students. At Wesley Girls, to be inducted into code, every member of the cohort is required to agree on the decision, effectively making them custodians of the code.

As part of the ceremony, the students and form masters or mistresses on the honour code were presented with badges of honour to serve as as a reminder of their commitment, and also to encourage the rest of the community to follow suit.

"When peer pressure is positive, it is more potent than the adult always giving instruction, added Mrs. Djokoto.

"Its going to influence and impart the others. It is a bold thing; they wont disturb during silent hours, they will be honest and they will do independent work when they are supposed to. It is not about intelligence nor is it about wonderful academic performance, its about conduct. And as they live according to such lofty ideals of honesty, determination, hard work, sense of responsibility and punctuality, it will show. Its about character."

Ashesis honour code is a fundamental cornerstone of our mission to educate a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders in Africa. While we continue to strengthen the code within our own community, the impact is catching on with other institutions. Wesley Girls High School joins Village of Hope in the growing list of senior high schools in Ghana that have adopted an honour code.
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Whilst the Public Relations Manager of the processing company said the shutdown was for planned maintenance, the workers have alleged that it is due to the poor financial conditions of the company.

According to one of the workers who spoke to on condition of anonymity, the company is struggling to come up with money to purchase cocoa beans.

"The truth of the matter is that there are cocoa beans as we speak. The company has not bought any beans. Also, the company cannot make profit for the pensioners who have shares in the company. "

This position has been reiterated by the Chairman of the CPC Workers Union, Kingsley Owusu:

"CPC is cash-strapped and needs money to survive since their competitors are providing ready cash for cocoa beans." he said.He said pensioners, who had invested hugely in the company, were unhappy because the company had failed to pay dividend to them.

Meanwhile, Isaac Osei, former Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Cocoa Board, the management body of Cocoa Processing Company, has said the processing company has been suffering revenue challenges for quite some time.

" The problem is the ratio of confectionery and butter production. The money is in the production of confectionery but I don't know if they have the required funding to run the confectionery productions", he said in an interview with Joy News.

The former CEO of COCOBOD, however agrees with a decision to engage a strategic partner to provide the needed funding to turn the company to profitability.

Reports from the Ghana Stock Exchange show the company has not been able to pay dividends to its shareholders for years.

This notwithstanding, the Cocoa Processing Company maintains the shutdown is routine and a normal development.
A law is a law and nobody, except parliament, can amend it, he said.

The GRA on Wednesday 13 January directed the suspension of 1% withholding tax on interest earned by individuals in a press statement.

The suspension was in response to government's proposals to parliament to repel the law following public backlash after banks sent out text messages to customers informing them about the new law.

The tax imposition on interests is part of provisions in the new Income Tax Act, 2015 (Act 896) which came into force on January 1, 2016.

Anthony Akoto explained that when parliament pass a law, and portions of it need to be amended like in the case of the 1% withholding tax, proposals must be sent to parliament to that effect.

He declared GRA's action as being in contempt of parliament.

"As I speak, nobody has brought anything for us to amend, so, in essence, the GRA is in contempt of Parliament another issue we are going to raise more than likely. I have made it known to the ministers that it should not happen," he said.

The GRA has to come and explain why they want to break the law and if they do not have any good reasons, then there will be appropriate sanctions," he added.

Anthony Akoto also revealed that he's spoken to the Speaker on the matter, and other MPs who dont't find it right.
Patients are currently receiving treatment at health facilities in the region.

In an interview with Accra-based Joy FM, the Krachi District Health Director, Hilarous Abio said the first case recorded in the Krachi-West hospital is being monitored by health officials.

He added that "There is no real place for quarantining individuals who have shown symptoms so the best under the circumstances is to be able to put them all on alert so that with the onset of any symptoms they can quickly report to the thirty districts in the Ashanti region."

The outbreak of the disease which began in December 2015 in the Tain District of the Brong Ahafo Region has claimed several lives.

The disease later spread to Wenchi, Techiman, Bruohan, Kintampo, and Sene districts all in the Brong Ahafo Region.
The brutalities took place on Thursday 17th December 2015 when Nana Amponsah, owner and manager of Okobeng Mining Company Limited and who claims to have the full backing of the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, attempted to drive out the small scale miners from a prospecting licensed concession belonging to West Star Mining Company Limited.

Whilst many of the licensed small scale miners were beaten, large quantities of gold and money was extorted and fuel reserves running into millions of Ghana cedis were impounded and taken away.

According to statistics provided by the Prestea/Huni-Valley Branch of the Ghana National Association of Small Scale Miners, the operations of the licensed small scale miners on the concession have reduced unemployment rate in Prestea and its environs drastically.

Two of the affected miners, Mustapha Nuhu and Isaac Thompson, are licensed with the Ghana Minerals Commission and have consistently filed their Small Scale Mining License Monthly Returns Form to the commission.

The form legitimizes the operations of the small scale miner by providing information to the Minerals Commission about the quantity of gold produced in a month, the type of equipment used in operation, the reclamation method adopted by the miner and the number of labourers employed.

In what appears to confirm the criminality of this raid the District Chief Executive of the Nzema East Municipal Assembly, the District Chief Executive of the Prestea Huni Valley District and the Western Regional Police Commander said they are unaware and did not authorize the raid.

In a petition to the Chief of Staff at the Presidency, the National Security Coordinator and the Inspector General of Police, the traumatized miners are calling for a thorough investigation into what they describe as a cruel act.

The licensed small scale miners say they are operating legally with the full permission of the Ghana Minerals Commission and are therefore calling on the authorities of the state to ensure that the perpetrators of this dastardly act are made to compensate them.

Meanwhile, a copy of a report on reconnaissance conducted by the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Ghana Armed Forces signed by Lieutenant Colonel J.K Kumado in the possession of this reporter has identified aNana Amponsah as one of three individuals spear heading illegal mining activities in the area.
A labour consultant, Austin Gamey congratulated the leadership of Organized Labour saying, "Let me congratulate them in advance for they have done exceptionally well."

A breakdown in negotiation is what sent Ghanaian public sector workers to the streets but the current turn of events seem to suggest that an agreement will be reached soon.

In an interview on Radio Ghana on Tuesday, the labour consultant said if the leadership of Organized Labour continue to exhibit this commendable level of maturity, "a solution will be in sight."

He said he doubts the assertions that the issue is being handled from a political point of view, insisting that "this is purely economics, it's purely shared solutions in the supreme interest of Ghana."

Mr. Gammeh was very confident that the meetings with government will yield the needed results.

He noted that the leadership of Organized Labour are fully aware of the dire consequences of not reaching an agreement in the interest of the Ghanaian worker and therefore, workers should trust that the outcome will be favourable.
The German Ambassador to Ghana, John Rudiger, announced this in Kumasi when he paid a courtesy call on the Vice Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Prof. William Otoo-Ellis, last Thursday.

The meeting was to develop new partnership agreements in the areas of science and technology.

Mr Rudiger did not however give details of the assistance to Ghana but said it would help reshape the energy sector and promote agriculture.

The ambassador used the opportunity to take stock of projects that had been undertaken by the German government.

He mentioned the establishment of solar energy demonstration centres at the Accra Polytechnic to help students to understand solar energy issues.

Prof. Otoo-Ellis recounted the good relationship between Germany and KNUST which had significantly benefited the country in diverse ways.

He commended the German government for its unflinching support towards the training of many Ghanaians which had impacted positively on the nations development.

The Director of the Energy Centre at the KNUST, Dr Gabriel Tachie hinted that the university was collaborating with Germany to research into diverse projects such as biogas generation and solar energy, among others.

One of such projects, he said, is the West Africa Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adopted Land Use (WASCAL), a large-scale research-focused programme funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
A statement from the office of Nana Akufo-Addo says the publication that Nana Addo murdered his first wife is "nothing but a vile, repugnant and tasteless fabrication."

"The attention of the Office of Nana Akufo-Addo has been drawn, once again, to a false and defamatory publication in the Daily Post newspaper of Wednesday, January 27, 2015.

"The story, whose headline has been written under the guise of a question and allegedly sourced from a non-existent newspaper called the New Patriot, states emphatically that Nana Akufo-Addo murdered his first wife, Obaa Yaa Nkansah Dwamena, on 17th August, 1993.

"It is tragic that our politics should sink to such levels that there appears to be nothing sacred, nor any respect for our cultural values in our society; and people would want to use the death of a loved one to defame a political opponent." The statement from Nana Addo's office says.
Media reports suggested that the EC had issued licence to newly formed political party, All People's Party (APC) which belongs to the defeated presidential candidate of the People's National Convention (PNC), Hassan Ayariga.

Mr Ayariga after suffering a defeat to his predecessor, Dr. Edward Mahama in the PNC presidential race formed the All Peoples Congress (APC) because he was unfairly treated during their national congress, hence, his decision to contest the November polls on the ticket of his own party.

But the EC in a statement said "persons who apply for registration of political parties have several requirements which must be met under the Political Parties Act 2000 (Act 574). Until these requirements have been met and a party has been issued with a final registration certificate, the party seeking registration cannot conduct its activities as a political party."

Below is the full statement:

The Commission further wishes to clarify that persons who apply for registration of political parties have several requirements which must be met under the Political Parties Act 2000 (Act 574).

Until these requirements have been met and a party has been issued with a final registration certificate, the party seeking registration cannot conduct its activities as a political party.

The Commission is accordingly advising and reminding applicants that it is against the provisions of Act 574 to canvass for votes until the party has been issued with a final registration certificate.

See related: What EC plans to do ahead of 2016 Elections
This concern was shared by the opposition, the activities of which were under constant surveillance by the national security agencies, and by the ruling PNDC, under pressure to present a clear, firm timetable and program for a return to constitutional government.

The transition process had unsavory features that many Ghanaians believed could lead to an outbreak of violence. Intense mutual suspicion and antipathy existed between the PNDC leadership and the opposition going back to the June 4, 1979, uprising and the draconian measures taken by the AFRC.

On one side, Rawlings and the PNDC saw the opposition leaders not as individuals genuinely interested in real democracy but as elitist, corrupt, and selfseeking "big men" who had vowed to fight to the bitter end to reverse the gains of the revolution and to restore the old system of corruption and exploitation.

Ghana has a multi-party system, However, there are two dominant political parties (the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party), with extreme difficulty for anybody to achieve electoral success under the banner of any other party.

There are 25 registered political parties on the list of the Electoral Commission of Ghana under the Fourth Republic.

These are the National Democratic Congress (NDC), New Patriotic Party (NPP), Convention People's Party (CPP), People's National Convention (PNC), Democratic People's Party (DPP), National Democratic Party (NDP), EGLE party, Great Consolidated Popular party (GCPP), United Movement Ghana (UMG), Ghana Democratic Republican Party (GDRP), Democratic Freedom Party (DFP), Reformed Patriotic Democrats (RPD).

Others are National Reform Party (NRP), United Renaissance Party (URP), New Vision Party (NVP), United Love Party (ULP), United Development System Party (UDSP), Independent People's Party (IPP), Progressive People's Party (PPP), Ghana Freedom Party (GFP), Yes People's Party (YPP), United Front Party (URP), United People's Party (UPP), Transformation Party, Popular Change Party (PCP) and All People's Congress (APC).

The Constitution stipulates that all political parties must have at least offices in two-thirds in all 216 districts in the country.

The EC said it will embark on a nationwide inspection of offices of political parties and establish whether they meet that constitutional requirement.

The EC will use the outcome to determine qualification of parties to contest in the 2016 election.

The NDP and other smaller parties have been fingered for possible refusal to contest the Presidential and Parliamentary elections this year.

The parties are: United Ghana Movement (UGM), Democratic People's Party (DPP), National Reform Party (NRP) and the Ghana Democratic Republican Party (GDRP).

The offices of the NPP, NDC, CPP and the PNC, however, are bubbling with political and administrative activities.

Political parties are required to have functional office in accordance with Article 55 and 56 of the 1992 Constitution and the Political Parties Law, Act 574, which provide the main legal framework for the formation and operation of parties in the country.

The Law require all political parties to operate functional national and regional offices as well as be politically active in at least two-thirds of the existing 216 districts.

"Without prejudice to any other penalty prescribed by the Act or any other enactment, where a political party refuses or neglects to comply with the provision or submits a declaration that is false in any material, the Electoral Commission may cancel its registration."

These are constitutional and statutory provisions that the parties are required to make available to the Commission for verification.

It is clear that some of these parties only surface when it is time for election and this shows how useless they are when elections are over.

The EC has indicated it would withdraw the licenses of political parties that did not meet the requirement of having offices in two-thirds of the districts in Ghana.

Even in the name of democracy, should we allow the 25 and more presidential and parliamentary candidates on the ballot paper in the November polls? This to me is incredible because some of the political parties doesn't match to the standard of forming a (kitchen) cabinet in their own party not to talk about governing over 27 million Ghanaians.

This bold step of the EC is commendable.

I am extremely happy that the EC is beginning to work as the regulator of political parties; a function it has abandoned since the fourth republic.
He is being sued for over $20 million by Parlux Fragrances, the company who created his scent Gold Jay Z.

According to the company, the rapper had failed to live up to the agreement concerning the deal, which has led to a loss.

The perfume company was expected to earn a sum of $50 million over a period of two years if the rapper had honoured agreement.

According to the Daily News, Jay was meant to make at least six promotional appearances including an appearance on Good Morning America, an exclusive interview with Women's Wear Daily and an in-store appearance at Macy's.

This never happened.

Parlux wants compensation to the tune of $18 million as compensation for the breach in contract.
The 44-year-old posted a video on her Facebook page on Monday, January 18 expressing her disappointment with the lack of diversity with the nominations of the 88th Academy Awards. She later took to Twitter to explain even further:

While Jada has already garnered so much support from many other actors and actresses on the diversity at Oscar issue, most of our readers also think Will Smith's wife has every right to boycott the event.

In a poll we conducted last week, up to 64.3% of our readers agree with Jada's call for a boycott by most people with color. 28.6% claim the actress just wants a 'Black Oscar Awards' while only 7.1% say she's just an angry Black actress.
Guardian News reports that the money is part of the World Bank, EU and Delta-sponsored State Employment and Expenditure for Results (SEEFOR) project.

According to the report, the World Banks Task Team Leader, Mr. Ismaila Sessay, made this known during a visit to the State Commissioner for Economic Planning, Dr. Kingsley Emu, in Asaba on Monday.

Sessay named the four states benefiting from the grant as Bayelsa, Edo, Delta and Rivers. The five-year program which reportedly started in 2013 is a $200 million fund backed by the World Bank.
Idris, in a statement issued in Lagos, said, "The case was confirmed as Lassa fever on Jan. 26.

According to him, a 27-year-old lady travelled to Edo on Dec. 24, 2015 and returned to Lagos on Jan. 2.

''She became ill on Jan. 14, and received care in one private hospital and three churches before she was referred on Jan. 23 to Ijede General Hospital with fever, vomiting, diarrhoea and body weakness.

''The patient died within a few hours of admission.

''The remains of the patient have been kept in the morgue in leak-proof body bag.

"She is to be buried after due consultation with her family.

''Ninety people have been line-listed as contacts of the last confirmed case as at Jan. 26 and contact tracing is ongoing," the commissioner said.

He said that Lagos had recorded 20 suspected cases of Lassa fever as at Jan. 26 since its outbreak in Nigeria in November, 2015.

Idris said in the statement that of the 20 suspected cases, 14 tested negative, four were confirmed positive of Lassa fever while results of two suspected cases were still pending.

He said that one case was confirmed on Jan.15, two cases on Jan.18, while another case was confirmed on Jan. 26.

The commissioner said that the ministry had line-listed 537 contacts of the confirmed cases, adding that 534 (99 per cent) of the contacts were currently being monitored.

He, however, urged residents to observe basic environmental sanitation, including proper disposal of refuse, personal hygiene, adequate nutrition while avoiding open defecation and spitting.

The commissioner urged the public to report suspected cases to the nearest public health facility or notify the ministry through the available lines.

''The state government will continue to provide quality, affordable and accessible healthcare to the good people of the state toward achieving universal healthcare, he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the first case of Lassa fever was diagnosed at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH),Idi-Araba, on Jan. 15.

It was a case of a 25-year-old student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, (names withheld) who had contracted the virus before coming to visit his parents at Ifako-Ijaiye area of Lagos.

Prof. Christopher Bode, Chief Medical Director (CMD) of LUTH, had said:

"He was admitted in a private hospital at Ifako-Ijaiye on Jan. 9 and was transferred to LUTH on Jan. 15 on account of developing symptoms of fever, sore throat and body ache.
She made the call at the 44 Nigerian Army Reference Hospital in Kaduna on Wednesday where soldiers who sustained injuries while fighting insurgents were being treated.

"The families of the gallant soldiers who lost their lives in the course of fighting insurgency in the North-East must be promptly paid because they are national heroes.''

"I am appealing to the Chief Army Staff to ensure such payments; their families need such support for school fees of children.

"I pray God to bless the families they left behind, she said.

She commended the staff and management of the hospital for giving the soldiers the needed care.

"I learnt that some of them are being taken to India and other countries for proper treatment. I thank you for being there for the country."

She said the country was winning the war against insurgency, adding the menace would soon come to an end.

The president's wife said that peace had started returning to the region, and declared that government was on top of the situation.

Mrs Buhari offered gifts to the patients, and pregnant and nursing women in the Accident/Emergency and Obstetrics/Gynaecology Wards.

Lt.-Col. Ogbe Omoruyi, Plastic Surgeon in the hospital, said 97 soldiers were receiving in the hospital.

He commended Mrs. Buhari for coming to see and care for the patients, saying that the visit would enhance their healing process.

The President, Nigerian Army Officers Wives Association (NAOWA), Mrs Ummal-Khalsum Buratai, commended President Muhammadu Buhari for the effort to end insurgency, and thanked Mrs Buhari for the visit
According to Punch, Tom condemned the act, referring to it as economic sabotage.

The ex-militant leader, who spoke through his media aide, Mr. Ifeanyi Ogbonna said Nobody has right to take the law into his or her hands for whatever reason to cause destruction of government property. The oil installations you destroy today has dire consequences on your tomorrow.

Poverty is not a guarantee to commit crime. So, hardship is not an excuse to commit crime.

He also said This country belongs to all of us and we should not destroy it. We should join hands with the current administration to build a better Nigeria of our dream.

Another ex-militant leader, Tompolo also denied knowledge of recent bombings, saying people destroying the oil pipelines are trying to implicate him.
Also, Senator Representing Kaduna Central Senatorial District in the National Assembly, Comrade Shehu Sani, has expressed sadness over the inferno and promised that he would ensure that government support the traders.

But El-Rufai, who paid a visit to the traders at the popular Station Market, Kachia road said plans were underway for the building of a state of the art neighborhood market centre behind the rail lines for the traders.

It is most unfortunate that we continue to have this incident. What is sad for me, is not just the loss of property in this case, but the fact that the fire fighting equipments could not get in and reduce the losses because of the way and manner the market itself was designed," El-Rufai said.

While commiserating with the victims of the fire disaster, Shehu Sani said it was unfortunate that the traders had to undergo such agony.
According to their accounts, the soldiers, who are manning the borders shared by Cameroon and Nigeria, started shooting recklessly in the name of Chasing terrorists believed to have ran into Nigeria.

I still have my family, including my eldest son, there in Gwadale. But those that called me yesterday using the Cameroonian mobile network said most of the corpses are still left unattended, Muhammad Abba, a former ward secretary of Ashigashiya village, whose family is still trapped in the border area said.

He continued: One of my brothers who survived the shootout said the Cameroonian soldiers arrived Gwadale in early hours of Monday, and began to shoot sporadically. Most of our people who ran out of their houses in fear were killed by bullets; up till now, as they said, corpses still litter the grounds with no one attending to them, because those remaining in the village are aged men and women.

I have not heard from my eldest son since the attack; and those that called said they had ran into Ashigashiya, he said.

Also confirming the shootings, the spokesman of the Vigilante Group of Nigeria and a native of Gwoza local government area said; our people are being killed by Boko Haram and Cameroonian soldiers, yet our government is watching.
Obasanjo, in the letter dated January 13, 2016, criticized the legislators for being insensitive to the economic situation in the country, The Cable reports.

The recent issue of cars for legislators would fall into the same category. Whatever name it is disguised as, it is unnecessary and insensitive. A pool of a few cars for each Chamber will suffice for any Committee Chairman or members for any specific duty, the former president wrote.

The waste that has gone into cars, furniture, housing renovation in the past was mind-boggling and these were veritable sources of waste and corruption. That was why they were abolished. Bringing them back is inimical to the interest of Nigeria and Nigerians, he added.
He said This is my first official visit to any APC state in Nigeria. I am not in Osogbo to ask Aregbesola to help me beg as being speculated in some quarters. We are all Yoruba, politics is like water, it can flow anywhere.

I was moved by the historic visit of the Ooni of Ife to the Alaafin of Oyo and I am of the opinion that the Yoruba leaders must unite.

The Governor also said The Yoruba nation must not be rubbished. Our leaders must not be rubbished irrespective of the political they belong to.

I believe in the Yoruba race, the race comes first before the office of the governor. The race is eternal while that of governor is momentary. We must watch today to be guided by tomorrow. I am here for the unity of Yoruba as it affect the Oodua, the progenitor, Fayose said.
The governor made the call when the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatude Fashola, paid him a courtesy visit in Lafia. Al-makura said the state was neglected in the area of infrastructure development in the last dispensation and required urgent attention of the government because of its proximity to the Federal Capital Territory.

According to him, Lafia is the only the state capital among the 36 states of the federation that is left with 33 KV line, "and it is most disheartening and a big paradox in our life as a state."

We have 330 KV line passing through Lafia to Jos, Makurdi and Enugu but because we have been the orphan state that has been so abandoned, so neglected because we did not belong in those past four years, there was no effort to drop the 330 KV lines which is just on top of Government House.

According to him, power which is one of the most critical facilities for any nation to grow was so neglected in the state that the capital was left with only 33 KV line that comes from Akwanga and which is also used to supply other towns."

He said each time the state requested for improvement, it was one complaint or the other; either the budget was not earmarked for that or many other things.

"We were left to our fate and I am sure the present leadership will put smiles in the face of the people of the state.''

Al-makura also appealed to the minister to construct more roads and houses in the state, considering its proximity to the seat of government.

He said 60 per cent of work force from Abuja was residing in Karu and other neighboring towns. Earlier, Fashola said he was in the state to inspect the ministry's projects, either ongoing or abandoned, to enable government to plan properly.

My mission here is quite simple; we are on a nationwide and geo-political zonal tour of projects that the ministry is involved in, either executing, about to execute and so on and so forth, he said.
The court on Wednesday, January, 27, said Wike won the April 11, 2015 governorship election in the State, overriding the judgement of the state's Election Petition Tribunal and the Appeal court, which declared that he should vacate his seat.

Wike, who was the People's Democratic Party's (PDP) candidate in the poll, headed to the apex court after the Appeal Court on December 16, 2015, upheld the decision of the tribunal which nullified his victory.

A seven-man panel led by Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun unanimous arrived at the decision.
Gulak, who arrived at the PDP national headquarters, Abuja, at about 1.45 p.m. immediately addressed a news conference and announced that he had assumed the position of the party's national Chairman.

He said that his assumption of office was to complete the tenure of Dr Adamu Muazu, from the North East, who resigned his position as the national Chairman of the party on May 20, 2015.

Gulak had late 2015 approached the court to order the party to appoint somebody from the North East to complete Muazu's tenure.

He also urged the court to stop Prince Uche Secondus, from parading himself as the acting National Chairman of the party.

Gulak said that the court had on Wednesday struck out the motion for stay of executives filed by the defendants/applicants.

"The court order on Dec. 16, 2015 was that within 14 days, my humble self or any other person from the North East zone be appointed to replace Dr Adamu Muazu who resigned his position as the national Chairman of our party on May 20, 2015.

"At the expiration of the 14 days the defendants failed, refused or neglected to obey the court orders by appointing me or any other person from the North East zone.

"By operations of the law and the court order, I now assume duty as the National Chairman of our great party, especially as the court has today struck out the motion for stay of execution.

"Base on our sincere commitment and loyalty to our party, we cannot continue to leave our party headless," Gulak said.

He said failure to assume duty as the national chairman would leave the party's National Working Committee, the National Executive Council (NEC) and the National Caucus improperly constituted.

He said that his assumption of office was to prepare the ground for the NEC of the party to take the most appropriate decisions.

Gulak said that his leadership was willing to partner with all relevant stakeholders on efforts towards the tasks ahead.

"I crave the indulgence of the other NWC members to partner positively with me in our efforts to pick up the pieces and rebuild our party."

Some of the party's loyalists who accompanied Gulak to the party Secretariat include Dr Doyin Okupe, the former Special Assistant to Jonathan on Public Affairs and Mr Moshoud Adegoke a former member of the House of Representatives from Lagos State.

Reacting to the development, the PDP National Legal Adviser, Mr Victor Kwon, condemned the action of Gulak.

Kwon said that what the court order was for the party to appoint someone from the North East to complete Alhaji Mu'azu's tenure and not specifically Gulak.

He added that the party was not aware of any ruling by the court on its application for a stay of execution of the earlier judgment.

Kwon added as a law abiding party, PDP would respect the orders of the court and the right of the North East to complete its tenure.

"From what happened, today, it means that Gulak is a fifth columnist recruited to tear the party and he will not succeed.

"Consultations are going on to arrive at an agreeable for person from the North East.

"NEC will be convened soon and new National Chairman appointed. So I advice Gulak, if he is interested to be National Chairman to lobby," he added.

Kwon blamed the delay in appointing someone from the North East to serve out Mu'azu's tenure on series of events that followed after the 2015 general elections.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Jan. 26, by his media aide, Sunday Are, he said the campaign was tagged Destroy the reputation of Tinubu and his relationship with Buhari.

Tinubu alleged that some of the PDP members who have refused to recover from the 2015 election defeat would stop at nothing to bring him down. He said some of them are facing corruption probe and planning to implicate in the controversy to garner public sympathy.

He said, The individuals behind the plot are mostly scared PDP elements made frightened by the Buhari anti-corruption campaign. They direct this falsehood at Tinubu in the futile mission of trying to drive a wedge between the President and Tinubu to disrupt the progress being made against corruption and to destabilise the APC.

But their PDP is already something by-gone, buried under the mass of its corruption and wrongdoing. They fight for a cause that has no cause. They are mercenaries of all the ills and defects that the people want excised from our body politic. Thus, we must do the people a public service.

The revered politician denied granting any interview, where he talked about Buhari's 2019 re-election plan; and also distanced himself from the $2.1bn arms scandal.

He stated, In the last six weeks, the Tinubu Media Office has monitored the stream of false, distorted media accounts written against Bola Ahmed Tinubu. We have learned that there is a concerted, wilful campaign tagged, Destroy the reputation of Tinubu and his relationship with Buhari.

As part of this ugly plot to cultivate the worst of lies against the national leader of the APC, several blogs and online sites recruited to launch this smear campaign have manufactured stories to advance this sinister plan to taint the public mind with gross lies disguised as news reports and interviews.

Fallacious headlines such as Reasons why I collected N9m-Tinubu and I will not return N9m-Tinubu. I am afraid PDP will stop Buhari in 2019  Tinubu, are being paraded. Try as hard as they can the creators of these false tales and misleading headlines will fail miserably.

Their stories cannot stand up to the slightest scrutiny. They are patently false and we condemn in the strongest terms those involved in this anti-Tinubu racket.

Tinubu said some of plotters have cloned the letter head of his media office, vowing that everyone behind the campaign would be brought to justice.

He added, While these fellows may think themselves cunning, they might have outwitted their very selves. In writing these stories, they have committed clear libel. In abusing the media office letterhead and name, their misrepresentations amount to forgery.

They laugh now but walk on thin ice. Soon, that ice will break and they shall have nothing but the weight of their wrongdoing to blame for their predicament that will soon come.

After identifying the bloggers and paid hatchet writers perpetrating these wrongs, the Tinubu Media Office is taking the step to alert the public to beware and be weary of hatchet writers, false prophets and paid bloggers.
So far, 85 exhibitors from Austria, China, France, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Poland, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, more have registered.

Mr. Darryl Pawsey, the Regional Industry Director of ITE Build & Interiors Divison, has spoken on the purpose of the event.

It is incredibly exciting that for a launch event we have secured such a high number and diverse selection of international brands, which indicates a positive outlook for the future of the show. More than 85 exhibitors from 14 countries will display all the materials and equipment at the show.

There is a multitude of reasons behind this vibrant and exciting growth. Nigeria, its Gross Domestic Product, GDP, hit $569 billion in 2014, is Africas largest economy and it is particularly robust. The West African State enjoys healthy growth to the tune of 5 to 6 per cent annually, and this looks set to continue in the near future."
The National Amirah of Al-Muminaat Organisation, Hajia Nimatullah Abdullateef, expressed to the press that Muslim women, within and outside the conflict zones are being treated unfairly by the Nigerian army when they are seen wearing Hijab.

She reiterated that wearing hijab is a symbol of the Muslim womans faith and adherence to Allahs injunction

She also mentioned that the situation has gotten worse since President Mohammadu Buhari announced that the government might consider a ban on hijab if terrorists continue to use it as a way of hiding bombs.

The amirah (womens leader) said the soldiers attitude remained a festering sore in our heart, while we note with suppressed anguish the harassment of Muslim women in hijab by officers and men of the Nigerian Army within and without military installations in different cities all over Nigeria.

She added: Other government agencies are trying to rob the Muslim of the hijab as her right to freedom of religious expression, by demanding that she expose her ears during image capturing. These are: the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) and the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC). We call on the leadership of these agencies to call their men to order.

We wish to remind the Nigerian security institutions that Boko Haram is the enemy and not Muslim hijabis (women in hijab). Indeed, Boko Haram has used several ingenious garbs and artefacts to camouflage its members and carry out its dastardly and evil attacks, including fruits, vegetables, motor vehicles and even fake army and police uniforms

The discrimination against Muslims is also on the increase around the world. US Presidential candidate recently caused a stir when he called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
Saad stated this in Lafia, during the closing of the National Qur'anic Recitation Competition that there was no plan by the government to ban the use of the hijab.

There is no such plan. The government will not deny Muslim sisters the use of the hijab. But Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu said people have given different meanings to what President Muhammadu said on the issue of hijab during the last media chat.
This was confirmed on Tuesday, January 27 when the Vice Chancellor of the university, Prof. Ibrahim Garba spoke to the press in Zaria.

"This is a prototype refinery that runs on one barrel a day. It is a very long term project, we started it then Raw Materials Development Council came in to support.

The project being built in stages, so far we can produce petrol (PMS) and diesel. We need more support from potential supporters and investors to take it to the next level, said the vice chancellor.

According to him, the university had signed an agreement with Kaduna Refinery and Petrol Chemical Company (KRPC) on supply of crude oil but they were yet to fulfil their obligation.
According to him, the government has been paying the fees for 45,000 yearly, but sadly, only about 20 percent of them got five credits and above.

Masari urged the exam body to work towards ways to assist students so that more people can pass the questions.

The management of NECO should come up with suggestions, ways and methods that will make students pass their exams legitimately.

The governor said that as an examination body, NECO should do everything possible to add value to their certificate.
MTN has filed a suit against the fine which was imposed on the company for failing to deactivate unregistered phone SIM cards.

"Our lawyers communicated to us that indeed MTN is resorting to a settlement out of court," Umar Garba Danbatta, NCC's executive vice chairman told reporters. "They (MTN) are trying to get this settled amicably."

MTN Nigeria had been fined $5.2 billion in October by the NCC for failing to deactivate about 5.1 million unregistered SIMs.
In a mail sent to Konga staff, Shagaya said the development came following a visit to the companys investors in Amsterdam.

For now, Shola Adekoya, Chief Operating Officer at Konga, will take over as the interim CEO, till the board appoints completes its search and appoints a new CEO.

In his new rolle, Shagaya will become less involved in the day-to-day running of the company and focus more on the long term vision and strategy of the company, product development guidance (with emphasis on KongaPay), mentoring senior management, shaping the culture of the company, and interfacing with key stakeholders including investors and the government.

According to mail, Shagaya said the decision to take up the Chairmanship position at the company is to better effect the companys long term goals and vision.
The DISRUPT AFRICA AFRICAN TECH STARTUPS FUNDING REPORT 2015 reveals that 125 tech startups raised funding in 2015 around the African continent, to the tune of $185,785,500.

Favored destinations for investors include South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya; with 36 percent of the startups that raised funding based in South Africa, 24 percent in Nigeria, and Kenya in third place with 14.4 percent of deals.

The top three highest amounts of funding also went to these three companies. South Arican startups raised about $54 million throughout the year; Nigerian startups received over $49 million; and Kenyan startups brought home over $47 million.

2015 was an exciting year for African tech startups. Our data shows the increasing vibrancy of our ecosystem, with more quality tech startups, and more investor activity than ever before. Were very pleased to make our data available in the Disrupt Africa African Tech Startups Funding Report 2015, and trust it will contribute to understanding and growing the ecosystem, said Gabriella Mulligan, co-founder of Disrupt Africa, according to a report by Asoko Insights.
Speed accounts for greater part of the causes of crashes. We are on course with the stakeholders on this and there is no going back on Mr Presidents directive of April 1.We have already created a portal and will impound as many vehicles that flaunt this. I have enough provision, nationwide, to impound and prosecute them.

We have a portal that we can use to verify whether the calibration has been done or installed and we have to sustain this. We need to bring down the level of crisis in the country. It is too worrisome to me and the only way is to compel all the commercial vehicles to install the speed limiting device or the alternative for the big trucks to calibrate them."
The former French colony has a reputation for stability in an otherwise turbulent region, having never suffered a major attack, despite sharing a border with Mali where al Qaeda-linked fighters have been active in desert areas for years.

But two high-profile attacks targeting foreigners in the capitals of Mali and Burkina Faso since November have added to signs that an Islamist insurgency is spreading, prompting Senegal to boost security.

"Nearly 900 people were called in for questioning in the context of the security campaign led by national police amid the terrorist threat," said police spokesman Henry Boumy Ciss, referring to a weekend campaign in the capital Dakar and the nearby city of Thies.

A second security source confirmed the information, adding that 925 people had been questioned. Ciss said those interrogated were not targeted because they were terrorism suspects, but as part of a general vigilance campaign.

Most were subsequently released but some were held and charged with a range of crimes not related to militant activity, such as drunkenness and traffic offences, he added.

Seydi Gassama, executive director for Amnesty International in Senegal, said that police were authorised to conduct such operations provided there were government instructions.

However, the group will closely watch for any potential rights abuses in the heightened security context, given a history of police excesses, he said.

Diplomats have denied rumours of a specific threat to capitals of Dakar and Abidjan, both major hubs for Westerners working in the aid, diplomacy and financial sectors.

"... We want to avoid an unnecessary psychosis among both Americans and Ivorians," said the U.S. embassy in Abidjan on Sunday, urging citizens to remain prudent.

But everywhere there are signs of heightened security.
As the refugee crisis has spread across Europe, numbers at Calais have swelled to around 4,000 migrants, and another camp has sprung up near Dunkirk. Both ports are ferry or train rides away from Britain.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel wrote a letter to French counterpart Manuel Valls urging France to find a solution for the camps, a Belgian official said.

The two prime ministers will meet in Brussels on Monday.

France has tightened security around the makeshift camp at Calais and Belgian officials say that as a result, migrants are increasingly trying to reach Britain via neighbouring Belgium.

Since December, Belgian police have intercepted hundreds of migrants around the cargo port of Zeebrugge, which had previously not been affected.

"We want a concrete proposal by France on how to deal with the situation in Calais," a Belgian official told Reuters.

In August, Britain said it would contribute 10 million euros ($11 million) to increased French humanitarian assistance and a fast-track asylum process for the migrants at the camp.
Both Taiwan and China claim most of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei have competing claims.

"If he goes it will raise tensions in the area," said Tran Duy Hai, representative of the Vietnam Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei, the defacto embassy for Vietnam in the absence of official diplomatic ties.

Vietnam's opposition to the trip comes after the United States, a major ally of Taiwan, said the trip was "extremely unhelpful" and would not do anything to resolve disputes over the waterway.
As the Democratic competition for the second largest congressional district in Nevada intensifies, candidates in the race reach out for support to many corners of the district even where they are dominated by Republicans.

The four Democratic contenders who want to unseat incumbent freshman lawmaker Rep. Cresent Hardy, the Republican currently holding the 4th Congressional District seat in the upcoming election converged on Bob Ruud Community Center in Pahrump on Thursday night.

Former Assemblywoman Lucy Flores, state Sen. Ruben Kihuen, former Assembly Speaker John Oceguera and Las Vegas community activist Susie Lee compete in the primary election June 14, with the winner facing Hardy on Nov. 8.

The four congressional hopefuls took turns answering questions, telling their personal tales and taking occasional jabs at Hardy.

Ruben Kihuen, a Nevada state senator currently serving in the 10th district, who campaigns on increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, equal pay and equal work for women and college affordability, said he was running for the office to protect the American dream.

This story, my story, its an unlikely story, but its a story thats only possible in the United States of America, said Kihuen, who immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of eight. It is only possible here. That if you come here, you work hard, you sacrifice, you play by the rules, that you can become a state senator and someday run for the United States Congress, he said.

For Kihuen, who was first elected to the state Assembly in 2006 before running for the Nevada Senate in 2010, this will be the fifth election.

Former Assemblywoman Lucy Flores is expected to challenge Kihuen in the Democrat-leaning district. Flores told the Pahrump crowd about her personal struggles and path to success in her early life and statewide experience as a state lawmaker later on.

Because of my background and because of all of the challenges that I had and because of the fact that other people cared about me too that I was able to have the opportunity to even be here, as a lawyer, as a former elected official, I had those opportunities because people spent some time helping me and so I think its really, really critical to get back and to be able to do the same for others, Flores said.

The Flores-Kihuen matchup is expected to be one of the main highlights of the race, as the two will be competing for the considerable Hispanic vote in the district.

Flores emphasized the need of investing in young people and paying attention to their issues.

I think that one of the most important things that we can do as elected officials, as (state) representatives, is just be out there, she said. I talk to high schoolers, I talk to college students, I talk to young people all the time. And its important to talk to them about the issues that matter to them, they are tired of hearing talking points. They want someone whos just real and who understands the issues that they are facing.

While the conversation veered from immigration and minimum wage to gun control, crumbling infrastructure and domestic violence where candidates sometimes had a difference of opinion, all four unanimously criticized Hardys politics.

I think one thing is clear: That any of us are much more qualified than Congressman Hardy to be in Congress, Kihuen said.

Hardy took over the district in 2014 after defeating former incumbent Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas. No Republican contenders have expressed interest in challenging Hardy.

Cliff Arnold, chair of the Nye County Democratic Party Central Committee, who hosted the event said in future years they hope to bring Nye County candidates into the race.

We are in Republican country and we know that. And they have their candidates up and thats what its about. We are going to get ours up there too. Competition is healthy, Arnold said.

District 4 stretches across northern Clark County, all of Nye, Lincoln, Esmeralda, Mineral counties and southern Lyon County.

Susie Lee, a longtime community leader from Las Vegas and president of the board for the nonprofit Communities in Schools of Nevada, is the only political novice in the race. Lee named job growth, economic development, education and taking care of seniors and veterans among her top priorities.

I think the future of this country is dependent on restoring our middle class and economic prosperity for all and I think that was reflected here. People are frustrated that whats going on in Washington is not equating to better conditions and better future for our middle class and our working families back home and we need congress people who are going to fight for that, she said.

So far, Lee was able to raise more money than the four other candidates. As of Oct. 2015, the most recent data available, she had almost $573,000 cash on hand, followed by Ruben Kihuen with $299,216. John Oceguera and Lucy Flores raised $145,541 and $73,543.

Former Assembly Speaker John Oceguera pointed to his status as a fourth-generation Nevadan and spoke about his track record of community service in the Assembly and as a firefighter.

This is a very diverse district. And if you want to be effective as a leader, as a congressman in this district, you are going to have to talk to a lot of different people, he said, following the event. You cant get elected and do things that you want to do without coming out here and listening to people in this area the same as you are going to listen to them everywhere.

Contact reporter Daria Sokolova at dsokolova@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @dariasokolova77
Fire crews had to travel just a few hundred yards from Station One as they responded to a report of a vehicle fire on Thursday.

Fire Chief Scott Lewis said his department was dispatched to a stretch of North Highway 160, mere seconds from the scene at Boot Hill Drive, just after 6 a.m.

Upon arrival we had a fully-involved fire in the engine compartment, he said. There were other vehicles starting to come into that parking lot, thats normally used by commuters working at the test site. They quickly extinguished that fire with no further extensions and there were no injuries.

On Friday, fire crews responded to East Mesquite Avenue after a motorist struck a horse just after 2:30 a.m.

It was just west of the Southern Nevada Detention Center, Lewis said. Upon arrival, we in fact, found significant damage to the vehicle. There was no entrapment or injuries to the occupant, however the horse sustained serious extremity injuries and eventually it was put down by the Nye County Sheriffs Office on the scene. It was deemed to be a BLM wild horse. The fire department remained on location and assisted the sheriffs office with the eventual cleanup.

On Monday, fire crews were dispatched to the 3600 block of West China Street for an unknown type fire, according to Lewis.

Upon arrival, we found a rubbish fire with numerous exposures, including structures, he said. The rubbish fire was quickly controlled with no further extensions and there were no injuries. The fire is under investigation.

Contact reporter Selwyn Harris at sharris@pvtimes.com
The closeness of Nevada was demonstrated at Saturdays Lincoln Day Dinner that brought local and state dignitaries to Pahrump ahead of the Nevada Republican caucus.

The annual Lincoln Day Dinner is typically held in February or March, but this year Pahrump Valley Republican Women put on the event earlier in an effort to get across the message about the upcoming caucus that will take place on Feb. 23.

Weve always been really fortunate, said Pahrump Valley Republican Women President Renae Goedhart. The state of Nevada for being very large land-wise is a very close state. Ive never lived in a state where you had a dinner and you got so many state officials to come to your dinner and interact with people and just talk and chat and be able to ask questions.

A score of local and state dignitaries took to the stage to encourage those in the audience to vote in the state and general elections. Several presidential campaigns were also represented at the dinner.

Its really important because thats our primary here in the state of Nevada, Goedhart said. If you want to vote in the primary for the president, you have to be at this caucus and put in a ballot, she said.

Many at the event wore light purple ribbons in memory of the Pahrump Valley Republican Womens second vice president Dorothy Oriondo, who passed away in November 2015.

The event was kicked off by a short welcome followed by an invocation that was done by Fifth Judicial District Court Judge Robert Lane, presentation of colors by the JROTC from Pahrump Valley High School, pledge of allegiance and the national anthem.

Ryan Hamilton, staffer for Ted Cruz, said their statewide campaign will go to all of the Lincoln Day dinners in the state.

We came out to Pahrump because there are a lot of folks out here who really agree with Senator Cruzs vision, they have a lot in common with him ideologically. And we think folks out here are more likely to vote than they are in other places, so we want to make sure they have a clear picture of his vision going into the Feb. 23 caucuses, Hamilton said.

Ben Carsons Nevada campaign spokesman Mark Newman campaigned for the retired neurosurgeon at the event. Amy Tarkanian spoke on behalf of Carly Fiorina.

Among officials present were State Representative Cresent Hardy, State Senator Dean Heller, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, State Controller Ron Knecht, State Treasurer Dan Schwartz, State Assemblyman James Oscarson, Nye County District Attorney Angela Bello, Fifth Judicial District Court Judge Robert Lane, Nye County Commissioners Dan Schinhofen and Dana Cox, National GOP Committeeman Lee Hoffman and Nye County GOP Chair Bill Carns.

Goedhart, who hosted the event, said it had grown over the years.

It got a lot bigger, it started off just as a small potluck for everybody to kind of get together and do a fundraiser and kind of have the county people get together, invite state officials and things to Pahrump. And its kind of grown over the years to mostly sellout crowds and lots, lots of attendees, she said.

State Sen. Dean Heller briefed the audience on the situation in Washington, D.C. lauding the $165 billion in taxes that were cut by the Republican majority, passing the five-year highway bill and education bill.

These are Republican principles and things that we stand on back in Washington, D.C. as well as we stand on those issues here in Pahrump, he said.

Heller endorsed State Rep. Joe Heck, who will run for U.S. Senate in hopes of taking the outgoing Harry Reids seat. Heck addressed the crowd in a video message.

State Representative Cresent Hardy said he enjoys visiting Pahrump, one of the largest towns in his predominantly rural district. In November, Hardy will face off against four democratic candidates who had announced their bids last year.

This is in my district. This is one of my biggest rural communities in District No.4. Its also one of the places I enjoy. I think there are a lot of like-minded people around here in these areas, he said.

Assembly candidates for District 36 Tina Trenner and Rusty Stanberry also spoke to the crowd, each talking about their agendas in the upcoming Assembly election.

The proceeds from the fundraiser will go toward campaigns and political functions.

Contact reporter Daria Sokolova at dsokolova@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @dariasokolova77
The recent motion filed by the state of Nevada to formally end the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository project has sparked both support and outrage among Nevadans. Yucca Mountain has been a subject of national controversy for more than 40 years since the projects environmental review process began.
Pleasant Valley High School junior Harrison Qu presented a paper about genetically modified organisms and food security at the Global Youth Institute.

Qu, 16, the son of Xin Liu, Bettendorf, was among about 200 high-school students from the United States and other countries selected to participate in the three-day Global Youth Institute hosted by the World Food Prize Foundation.

You write a paper about a country and topic and give a solution, said Qu, who focused on Kenya and its drought-stricken climate. (The droughts) keep getting worse and more frequent, so how can we help fight that?

Qus solution is to consider genetically modified organisms that use water more efficiently. I explained how it would work, how it could lead Kenya out of poverty, Qu said.

He wrote that Kenyans could use genetically modified flood-resistant or drought-resistant seeds. Although GMOs are controversial, and many people are fearful that they are not safe, the use of them will benefit the well-being of everyone in Kenya, Qu wrote. The benefits that GMOs will provide to Kenya and eventually the world outweigh the diminutive risks that the genetically modified organisms pose. GMOs are beneficial because they can be tailored to a specific environment, they are not geographically limited, they greatly increase crop yield, and they provide a more efficient as well as direct solution."

He said writing the paper was challenging. As you keep researching you keep getting more and more information. You learn a lot about the culture and the country itself  not only Kenya, but other countries.

Student delegates discussed their findings with international experts and their peers in round table discussions. Each discussion group of seven to nine students was led by three distinguished global leaders in science, industry and policy.

At the three-day conference in October in Des Moines, Qu had a chance to hear and speak with Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates about food-security and agricultural issues.

Every day, he heard lectures from all these people of such high stature, said Qu, who met a United Nations representative and talked with people from all over the world.

One of his favorite experiences was packing meals to send to Tanzania as part of the Kids Care International Outreach training program. Student delegates packaged food aid for vulnerable and food-insecure populations abroad and in the United States.

We packaged over 250,000 meals, Qu said. What made it even cooler, he said, was the arrival of Joyce Benda, the former president of Malawi. She talked about how grateful she was  that we are the future generation. She was really inspiring, Qu said.

Now Qu plans to apply for a World Food Prize internship. If he is selected, he can choose the country he will visit. You can do lab work, field work, whatever you want, he said. You present at the World Food Prize Global institute next year. You can go as a group leader. Last year you were in their shoes.

As for his not-so-distant future, I want to do something with science. Something that will help others  Im not really sure how or what, Qu said.
A Davenport man on parole, who later wrote to a Scott County District Judge saying the thought of prison is terrifying and that he wanted to
MUSCATINE  Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina told an audience here on Wednesday morning that the United States needs a president who will lead.

During a campaign stop at Elly's Tea & Coffee, the GOP presidential hopeful called this is "a pivotal, perilous, important time for this nation."

"Citizens, it is time. We must take our country back," she said.

Her staff members handed out copies of Fiornia's "Blueprint to Take Our Country Back" which includes cutting the current tax code from 73,000 pages to three, passing zero-based budgeting, repealing the Affordable Care Act, stand for life and religious liberty, securing U.S. borders and defeating ISIS.

She said the government picks winners and losers, making it difficult  if not impossible  for the average person to succeed.

"There's this thing about power. It is said that citizens have enormous power, and you do. But if you don't use it, we lose it. We are not using it. We haven't been using it for a long time," Fiorina said.

To get citizens involved, Fiorina said she would use technology to ask the American public for their thoughts on various issues by telling them to use their smartdevices and press one for "yes" and two for "no."

"I am going to use it to get these things done."

Calling herself the most qualified candidate, Fiorina said people have been discounting her all her life because she is female.

"I will go all the way. I will not falter," she told the packed house.

"Carly has gone toe-to-toe with men in the corporate world and history has proven that her decisions were correct," said Muscatine County Republican Party chairman Fred Grunder in introducing Fiorina. "She has gone toe-to-toe with men in this Republican race."

Grunder predicted Fiorina will defeat any of the Democratic challengers.

"She will lead us back to the right direction. She will go toe-to-toe with the leader of any foreign nation she will demand and get respect that the office of the president deserves, that this country deserves," Grunder said.

The candidate saved some of her sharpest barbs for the other woman in the race, Hillary Clinton.

"Hillary Clinton is literally more qualified for the big house than the White House," Fiorina said. She also compared Clinton to the Mexican drug lord El Chapo.

"She has escaped prosecution more times than El Chapo," Fiorina quipped.

In asking for their support on caucus night Feb. 1, she reminded the crowd, the pundits don't decide the winner of the Iowa Caucus.

"You decide who comes out of here," Fiorina said.

She took questions from the audience on term limits and Social Security.

"I support term limits for sure," she said. "Term limits will help but its not the only thing we have to do."

On Social Security, Fiorina said there are ideas about how to financially secure the program for years to come but no one is willing to move on them.

Alma Bignall, of Bettendorf, asked the question about Social Security.

"She's placed Social Security in a secondary level rather than one of the primary things that needs to be done to help the people of this country," Bignall said.

Bignall said she is undecided on which candidate in which party she might caucus for Monday night. But she did say that Fiorina and GOP challenger Rick Santorum impressed her in recent appearances.
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the Cedar Valley on Tuesday night she wants to help Americans whove been knocked down to get up again.

Throughout the event, six days before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, Clinton also made clear shes ready to get to work doing just that.

I want you to know that Im not just shouting slogans. Im not just engaging in rhetoric. Ive thought this through. I have a plan, Clinton told a crowd of more than 500 people at Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center at the University of Northern Iowa. I dont think you can get what we need done in this election, or in the presidency, unless you level with people.

Clinton, the former Secretary of State, said shes leveled with the American people in offering up detailed plans on her website, explaining how much her proposals will cost and making clear she will not raise taxes on Americans.

If people have better ideas about how to actually create more good jobs and raise incomes, Im open to hearing them, but based on the evidence and what Ive seen work in the last 35 years, I think I have a plan that together we can get to work to implement, Clinton said.

Throughout a nearly 40-minute speech, Clinton touched on a multitude of topics, jumping from Wall Street reform to health care issues to dealing with the threat of the Islamic State. And as she did so, she drew a contrast with both her closest Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders and her potential Republican rivals.

She argued Sanders rallying cry to tear down the big banks is possible through the already-enacted Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, adding her plans go further in tackling the shadow banking sector.

Its important to look at what the potential next problem is. Dont just fight the last war. Weve got the authority to do something about that, Clinton said. Join me to make sure we stop the next problem from ever occurring so that we never go through anything like we did back in 07, 08.

Clinton also argued against both Republicans and Sanders on health care. She said Republicans want to repeal the federal health care reform law without replacing it, and Sanders would make the country start over to gain universal coverage rather than working from the current 90 percent covered.

On the threat of the Islamic State, she noted the new phrase being used by the Republican campaigns in calling it the Obama-Clinton foreign policy in its criticisms. Clinton said in response she sent them her book Hard Choices to explain what she did during her tenure as secretary of state under Democratic President Barack Obama.

Clinton also charged wealthy Republican donors with spending money to advertise for Sanders in order to help him win the nomination, rather than her.

They know I say what I mean. I mean what I say, and I will go after them. I will not permit the right-wing billionaires to do what they want to do to our country ever again, and they do are doing everything they can to make sure they dont have to run against me, Clinton said. I find it perversely flattering.

With so little time until the caucuses, several audience members raised their hands to say theyre committed to caucus and supporting Clinton as their choice Monday night.

Tyrone Scott of Waterloo said hes supporting Clinton because hes a public sector union member and shes really, really with the unions and because health care is an important issue to him. Though hes not a regular caucus-goer, Scott said he is going this year.

Weve got to get her in there, Scott said.

Judy Stiers and Judy Benson, both of Cedar Falls, said theyre caucusing this year for Clinton as well.

At age 70, revolution has passed me by, Benson said. I think more important than electability, I think she can govern, and Bernie cannot.

Stiers added, I think she can work with everyone, across the aisle, and I dont think Bernie has that.

Morgan Meseke, a graduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, said shes not sure about the ins and outs of caucusing, but she is a Clinton supporter. She said she was won over by Clinton after she kept her composure during an 11-hour hearing on her role and experiences with a terrorist incident in Benghazi in 2012.

When Bernie speaks, hes just, like,  he sounds so angry every time he speaks, Meseke said. Shes more likeable.
After meeting for an hour and a half before the public on Tuesday, Davenport's 10 aldermen reached the same conclusion the city council had reached a year ago.

They dig broadband technology.

More specifically, they dig it so much they want to wire every Davenport home and business into a city-wide and city-owned fiber optic network. They are willing to take the risk even if the technology becomes obsolete in 10, 20 or 40 years.

They are even willing to fork over some of the estimated $90 million cost to install the infrastructure. That million-dollar question  how much it will ultimately cost Davenport taxpayers  was not answered Tuesday during the council's inaugural, open-to-the-public work session that Mayor Frank Klipsch promises more of.

Klipsch said the meeting in City Hall was for the benefit of new members of the city council, to get them "caught up to speed" on high-speed Internet service.

It was also a chance to reset that effort as a steering committee headed by Aldermen Bill Boom and Jason Gordon has learned a few new things on the hunt for information they say could save the city in terms of both risk and money.

But for at least one of the council's veteran members, the meeting seemed like deja vu.

"We have been briefed on this for well over a year," Alderman Mike Matson, 7th Ward, said. "I thought we were moving forward today."

Matson also thought that last year the city council had given the green light to a company to begin work on a public-private partnership with the city.

In June the council directed city staff to work with London-based SiFi Networks on a due diligence phase. Gordon said the due diligence produced alternatives that are now causing the city to "take a step back" to re-evaluate which direction it wants to go in. He did not disclose the specifics of those alternatives.

A few aldermen and the city's chief information officer, Robert Henry, said there is a chance the city may not continue moving forward with SiFi.

One of the council's new faces, 5th Ward Alderwoman Rita Rawson, said the city is acting with "professionalism" by "not rushing ahead with one company."

Alderwoman Maria Dickmann, 2nd Ward, also a new member, believes the city is not moving fast enough. "I'm frustrated that we are not yet at the point of discussing a model," she said. "We need to be at the point where we hash out as a council the A, B, C steps and when we can get this going."

"I think it's a great idea to take a step back and negotiate the best deal for Davenport," 4th Ward Alderman Ray Ambrose, the council's longest serving member, said. "This thing is too big and too costly to jump into anything."

No decisions were made Tuesday. Klipsch and the aldermen agreed to meet again in an open session to compare models from different companies.
A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items of interest for Wednesday:

EDUCATION FUNDING IMPASSE: The Iowa Senate on Wednesday refused to concur with House changes to an education funding bill, returning it to the House where majority Republicans were expected to send Senate File 174 and Senate File 175 to conference committee. Majority Senate Democrats want to boost state aid to K-12 schools by 4 percent next school year, which would increase state cost per pupil from $6,446 to $6,704 (or $258). House GOP representatives favor a 2 percent raise in state aid, which would increase the state cost per pupil $6,446 to $6,575 (or $129). Senators refused to concur with the House amendments to S.F. 174 by voice vote, but a roll call vote was requested on the S.F. 175 categorical funding to school which resulted in a 23-27 outcome with Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa, joining 26 Democrats in refusing to concur with the House changes. On a related note, a Senate Education subcommittee was slated Thursday to take up K-12 funding bills seeking a 4 percent boost in state aid for fiscal 2018 in an effort to meet the 30-day deadline for action until the states forward-funding law.

MANAGED MEDICAID OMBUDSMAN: Deanna Clingan-Fischer, the states long-term care ombudsman, told a Senate panel her office has received more than 400 calls in the past two weeks about the states plan to shift management of its Medicaid program to three private health-care companies. Clingan-Fischer discussed a report from the Health Consumer Ombudsman Alliance that said, among other things, that based on best practices the state should have one ombudsman for every 3,500 Medicaid members, which would mean an additional 160 ombudsman positions.

SLOW LEFT-LANE DRIVERS: Legislators shelved a bill that would have provided penalties for drivers who move slowly in left-hand lanes on four-lane highways. Rep. Gary Carlson, R-Muscatine, said the rule would have been too difficult to enforce given the myriad reasons drivers move into left-hand lanes. Carlson also said the state Department of Transportation said it would explore ways to educate drivers on proper multi-lane driving practices.

CONDITION OF THE GUARD: In his annual condition of the guard address, Maj. Gen. Timothy Orr, Adjutant General of the Iowa U.S. Army National Guard, said the guard is working within fiscal constraints yet is more accessible, responsive, and capable than ever before. Orr touted Iowas first-ever females in combat positions, the result of a change in federal military policy. We couldnt be prouder of these groundbreaking young women and the example they set for all Iowans, Orr said. He also noted a continued downward trend in deployments; he said the guard has some of the lowest deployment numbers since the start of the Iraq war. Orr said in this downtime, the guard has focused on training.

OVERSIGHT PANEL TALKS LGBTQ CONFERENCE: The Republican-led House Government Oversight Committee presented findings on multiple investigations, including into a state conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Some have charged the 2015 conference contained material that was inappropriate for high school students. The oversight committee on Wednesday presented testimony from a West Des Moines teacher who found some of the conferences material objectionable. Nate Monson, director of the organization that puts on the conference each year, called the investigation a political stunt. Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, R-Wilton, chairman of the oversight committee, said he plans to provide an opportunity for Monson to address the panel.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Lets put it out in the open and make it legal and let it go. I think it should be legal.  Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids, commenting Wednesday on legislation that would legalize consumer fireworks in Iowa.
DES MOINES  Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Wednesday warned Iowans narrowing their final choice in next week's first-in-the-nation caucuses that giving Donald Trump the 2016 GOP nomination would be disastrous for the conservative cause.

"My case against Trump is a case to protect the conservative cause because I've lived it, I love it, and I believe in it," Bush said in response to a question about why the New York billionaire would not be right for America as president. He was speaking at a forum at the Nationwide insurance company's Des Moines headquarters.

Bush said Trump's positions have "evolved" during the 2016 campaign from more liberal-leaning statements of his past and his candidacy has featured many "over the top," politically incorrect comments that have offended women, Hispanics and Muslims, among others.

"We need a consistent conservative to win the nomination. You don't win by insulting your way to the presidency," the former Florida governor told about 350 company employees during a forum that also was live-streamed to about 4,000 employees in Iowa and 33,000 elsewhere.

"This goes beyond the campaign," Bush said in making his closing arguments to possible caucus-goers. "I just think this is not the right approach to our country. It will lead to an electoral disaster for the Republican cause. In my mind, given the problems we face, we need a conservative to be president of the United States that has a servant's heart, not someone who's all about him."

Bush has been mired in single-digit poll numbers in Iowa throughout the caucus season, trailing far behind Trump and U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. On Wednesday, Bush touted his 2016 policy positions, his executive experience and conservative record as governor of Florida for eight years, but he lamented "this campaign isn't one that's been policy laden."

Bush said he's got a $20 bet that Trump will show up for the Republican presidential debate in Des Monies on Thursday night after threatening not to attend over a dispute with Fox News, one of the sponsoring organizations.

Bush said his focus as president would be to reduce tax and regulatory burdens to help jump start the economy, which in turn would help reduce the $19 trillion national debt. He said he has plans to reform government entitlement programs, repeal and revamp Obamacare into a workable health care system, rebuild the military and restore America's role as a strong superpower, return functions to states that the federal government has usurped and work to end Washington gridlock.

"We need someone who will try to find consensus and common ground," he said.

"I hope you caucus for me, and I won't let you down," he concluded.
Ron Ford may not be wearing a white hat, but the chief executive officer of Help At Home Inc., Chicago, has come to the aid of InTouch Adult Day Services, Moline.

Last week, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois announced that because of the Illinois budget impasse, it would close programs and cut staffs. The list included InTouch Adult Day Care, 4011 Avenue of the Cities, Moline, and InTouch Home Care, Moline.

The staff at Help at Home saw the announcement and took immediate action, according to Ford, the company's CEO.

"We met with them and said, given an opportunity, we'd offer jobs to all employees, administrative and direct care staff," Ford said.

Workers will be asked to join the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, Ford said. But wages will increase to at least $10 an hour, and there will be health insurance benefits, as well as other benefits enjoyed by union members. In addition, each worker rehired will get a $200 bonus, Ford said.

"They love the work, but they need a paycheck," he said. "This way they can do the same work and earn more. It's all good."

A spokesperson for Lutheran Social Services of Illinois said the agency's state contract requires that case files for home care patients be turned over to the Western Illinois Area Agency on Aging, Rock Island. After each case is reviewed and discussed with the client, it may be redirected to another agency, according to Barb Hailey, a media representative for Lutheran Social Services, the largest social services provider in Illinois.

"We won't tell anyone they have to go with Help at Home," Sharon Patten, director of the InTouch program, said.

She added that staff members are being encouraged to apply for jobs with Help at Home. Logically, many clients will go where their home health care workers are employed.

"We hope to make all this as seamless as possible," Hailey said.

Last week, Lutheran Social Services president and CEO Mark Stutrud announced the programs would close. The agency had carried the programs financially based on a bank line of credit and resources from the organization's foundation.

After seven months, Lutheran Social Services officials decided on the cuts in order to continue the viability of the 149-year-old faith-based nonprofit headquartered in Des Plaines, Ill.

Ford describes Help at Home as the largest provider of Medicaid home services in Illinois and in several other states. Eventually, he plans to expand services into Davenport.

Patten said the change is coming at a "pivotal moment."

"Services need to be rendered," she said, "but because of Help at Home, we have help now."
Rock Island County Administrator Dave Ross says he has always loved being challenged in his work. He quickly found that challenge in the job he took eight months ago  righting the county's precarious financial situation.

Ross was hired in May to get a handle on Rock Island County's finances and guide the 25-member board in its decisions, financial and otherwise.

Before Ross became the county's top executive, he had taken only a cursory look at the countys books.

I knew it was bad, Ross said. But I didnt know it was this bad.

Frankly, the cliff is here.

Before taking the Rock Island County job, Ross was village administrator in Mount Horeb, Wis. He previously was city administrator in Wellman, Iowa, and spent 18 years in law enforcement.

Ross, who is paid $135,000 a year, said his challenge is to get the county on good financial footing, and to instill good business practices.

Board member Drue Mielke, of Coal Valley, said he is happy with Ross work.

He gives us the best advice possible, Mielke said. Thats what we pay him to do. We make our decisions based on our districts, but hes doing everything we hired him to do.

Before Ross, Mielke said that sometimes the board would vote on an item that had not been fully disclosed or explained. That ended when Dave showed up."

When preparing for the fiscal year 2016 budget, which went into effect Dec. 1, Ross said the general fund was about $4.6 million in the hole. We ended with a $2.8 million deficit, meaning we cut $2 million out of the general fund one way or another.

Some of that $2 million was realized through increased revenue, such as raising some fees, while some was accomplished through reduced expenditures. The rest was realized in cuts and cost savings.

We really are at minimum staffing for whats necessary," he said. "It makes it very challenging."

One situation that needed immediate attention, he said, was to make current the county's contributions to the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund and Social Security, obligations the county had not met in 18 years.

To remedy that, the county board voted to hike property taxes by 16.83 percent for 2016.

The increase comes to $38.62 a year on a home valued at $100,000.

So even after everything was done, we still had to go and have that increase, which is not what anybody wants, Ross said.

But the number one thing that I think is important is the county continues to work on reforms, and work on financial management, and that were looking out for the long-term good," he said.

Board member Richard Brunk, of Moline, who is chair of the finance committee, said that getting the 2016 budget in place was a chore. But Ross got the county's elected officials and department heads together and got everyone working on what needed to be done.

"I've been impressed with how he came in and really started evaluating everything, all county operations, and looked for ways to save money and be more efficient," Brunk said.

"He looks long-term with the understanding it's not just about this year, but next year and the year after that."

Ross has a five-year plan for budgeting, Brunk said. "It's not exact as there are too many variables. For instance, we don't know what the state is going to do. But it gives you an idea on where we're headed.

"We're not always going to agree. Ultimately, the board has the final responsibility for the budget. But Dave is giving us the information we need to make well-informed decisions."

In the spring, Ross will present the county board three budget options in preparation for fiscal year 2017.

One option will show the result if nothing is done differently, he said. In that case, he said, In five years, our general fund will have a $20 million negative balance."

The second option will be a balanced budget, but it will be balanced with no new revenue-generating mechanisms for the general fund and will not provide for capital needs. That will mean mass layoffs," he said.

The third option will include a voter-approved revenue stream that will provide for a balanced budget and pay for capital needs.

What that funding mechanism will be, I dont know, Ross said. Well know more by the spring. But that budget will have everything needed for our minimum staffing. Deferred maintenance will be taken care of, and our fund balances will be addressed to get them to minimum levels so we dont have to keep borrowing to pay the bills.

Borrowing will kill us over the years, he said. "Youre throwing money away, taxpayer money. We dont want to do that.

Mielke said that while Ross was the best person for the job, getting the countys finances in line will be a daunting task.

However, when it comes to the 2017 budget, Mielke said, Im not voting to raise any more property taxes.

Mielke said he wants to first look at reducing expenses.

Board member Ron Oelke, of Andalusia, said hes happy with Ross as well. But, he added, I wont support any property tax hike, I will say that right now."

Oelke said people and business already are fleeing the state to escape high taxes.

When we as a board see what the options are, thats when it will get interesting, he said.

Ross said that while meeting the county's financial challenges will be difficult, knowing when he has succeeded will be simple.

What we want to do is make sure that Rock Island County is well-positioned financially to provide the minimum level of services that we statutorily have to provide, and to support those operations in the most cost-effective manner," he said.
Less than two weeks after state officials inspected a medical marijuana dispensary in Milan, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation issued its owners an official license on Monday.

Nature's Treatment of Illinois, located off the Rock Island-Milan Parkway at 973 Tech Drive, became the 25th licensed retail shop in the state.

Quad-City businessman Matt Stern, who won one of the states 56 licenses to sell cannabis nearly a year ago, will run the only dispensary in Illinois State Police District 7, which includes Rock Island, Henry, Mercer and Knox counties.

Stern, who co-owns Stern Beverage, a Budweiser distribution facility located next to his dispensary, said he will hire up to 15 employees, including armed security guards, who will be screened by the state.

Once the state signs off on his staff, Stern, who also plans to arm himself, can order his first shipment of product, which will include canisters containing the plant's harvested buds and marijuana-infused edibles. He hopes to open on Feb. 8.

According to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, Sterns license will expire on Jan. 25, 2017.

As of Jan. 6, a total of 4,000 Illinois residents, including 26 under the age of 18, had been approved for medical marijuana use, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Meanwhile, Stern said he's not concerned about a potential shortage of patients.

Not with the way the phones have been ringing off the hook," he said. "From what Ive heard from people, Im not worried at all.
The Iowa House's stodgy politics too often belong in the Dark Ages. And, with combatants in the War on Drugs in full retreat, it's time to stop making criminals our of Iowa's citizens.

The Democrat-dominated state Senate voted in April to legalize medical marijuana. The bill died in the Republican-controlled House. Further, Iowa is among just 16 states that don't permit widespread access to naloxone, a lifesaving antidote for opiate overdose.

Welcome to the 21st century, representatives. We'd be happy to have you.

Pot is an effective treatment for a slew of ailments, from post-traumatic stress to chemotherapy-induced nausea, studies have shown. And, yet, Republicans are quick to strike it down. Comically, now-unenforced federal law is the excuse. Apparently, the states' rights party is only on patrol when it befits them.

Meanwhile, states throughout the country are adopting common sense medical marijuana laws. Illinois's burgeoning program is just now getting off the ground. State medical officials continuously review what conditions should qualify for marijuana access. Growers and physicians are under strict oversight. It's a highly regulated program designed to ease Illinoisan's pain.

Iowans, on the contrary, are faced with a court date.

It's especially troubling because Iowa's pot ban effectively makes a criminal of anyone who crosses the Mississippi River looking for treatment. Sure, they can get a prescription from a doctor. They can even buy it. But enter the state and face a charge.

Slashing the cost of the criminal justice system is one of Gov. Terry Branstad's focuses this legislative session, remember. Here's an idea: Back off on prosecuting marijuana users.

Naloxone is in the same GOP-directed holding pattern as medical marijuana. Again, the Senate passed legislation to make the drug available to addicts' families. The House refused to act. All the while, the heroin epidemic continues to sweep throughout rural and urban communities.

Heroin knows no economic privilege. It doesn't see color. It feeds off of anyone looking for an escape. It thrives on the human condition.

Illinois Democrats overrode Gov. Bruce Rauner's veto this past year, making naloxone more available. And, even in that case, Rauner's dissent was more about funding the treatment than issuing the drug. Clearly, Illinois's Republican governor understands the importance of quick action when an opiate user takes too much.

For years, the U.S. has pumped Americans full of pain killers. Drugs, such as Oxycodone, pervade society. And slinging the highly addictive pain killers on the black market is big business.

It's a society-wide problem that can't be fixed with punitive measures alone. Treatment, not jail, is the key. But a user has to live long enough to get help. That's where naloxone comes in.

Iowa House Republicans spent last year clinging to punitive, draconian policy, while Illinois came to its senses. Iowa House Republicans preferred a "just say no" fantasyland, instead of facing the harsh realities of the human condition.

They should rejoin reality in 2016.
I am 71 years-old, a Ph.D. in sociology who subscribes to the ideas Bernie Sanders is running on for his presidential campaign. Yet, I know he can't win.

How? In 1972, I avidly supported Sen. George McGovern, a leftist-candidate. He won one state only, Massachusetts. Bernie will win Massachusetts too, but probably no more. Bernie is much more left than McGovern; America is in no way ready to elect him. As with McGovern, early encouraging polls will not hold up.

I support former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a centrist. Our role in Iowa is to punch three tickets forward. We need to send him on to New Hampshire with a chance to be heard. To foreclose options this early, is to pretend we can predict the future when the future of politics is always unpredictable. I will caucus for O'Malley. Please support O'Malley. He is the only Democrat who can win in November.

Gary Heath

Clinton
Amid all the hubbub surrounding state Rep. Lee Schoenbeck's legislative attempt to rein in the South Dakota Board on Geographic Names, there seems to be a basic lack of understanding about the effect that the legislation could have on renaming proposals.

Schoenbeck's bill would allow the state board to act only on names deemed offensive by the Legislature. The bill's supporters seem to believe that the bill would effectively ward off campaigns like the ongoing one by Native Americans to rename Harney Peak.

But that's an incomplete view of the way geographic places names are determined. The truth about the legislation is that, rather than heading off renaming proposals, it could simply transfer more authority for the renaming process to the federal government.

Currently, the state board makes recommendations to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which makes all final determinations (and is still mulling the Harney Peak proposal). The U.S. board's staff members have told me many times that the U.S. board, in making its determinations, relies heavily on the state board's recommendations.

So, in that regard, it's odd that Schoenbeck wants to limit the state board's authority. In doing so, he could hand more authority over state affairs to a federal board, and give the federal board permission to pay less attention to what the state wants.

If the legislation is adopted, future renaming proposals for names that have not been deemed offensive by the Legislature would presumably bypass the South Dakota Board on Geographic Names and go straight to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Staffers for the U.S. board have told me that in the absence of a state board's recommendation, they seek written opinions from county commissions and tribes affected by the name change proposal, and from the governor. And then the board's members, typically numbering 16 or so and pulled from various federal departments, review their guidelines for name changes and vote their conscience.

There would be no public meetings across South Dakota like there were for the Harney Peak proposal. The state board would not take into account thousands of written and oral comments as it did with the Harney Peak proposal. The state board would not make a recommendation to the federal board, as happened with the Harney Peak proposal. Instead, the process could apparently be fast-tracked and handed over to the feds.

Giving the federal government more power seems like it's exactly the opposite of what a Republican like Schoenbeck would want to do, and yet it seems to be what he's asking for, wittingly or otherwise, with his legislation.

And here's one more oddity to consider: Schoenbeck is taking us all down this road immediately after the state Board on Geographic Names did exactly what he wanted it to do last spring, which was recommend no change in the name of Harney Peak. Granted, the board flirted with recommending a change, but ultimately it went with what seemed like statewide majority sentiment against such a move. In other words, the process produced exactly the result that Schoenbeck wanted, and he has reacted by trying to blow up the process (meanwhile, some have claimed that racism is the real motivation for the bill).

If Schoenbeck wants to make changes to the laws governing the state board, so be it, but I hope those changes will be made with a full understanding of the unintended consequences that could arise.
PIERRE | A coalition of Democratic and Republican members in the state House of Representatives has blocked an attempt at more government secrecy.

Thirty-six representatives on Monday voted for the amendment from Rep. Julie Bartling, D-Gregory.

Her change stopped the state Division of Banking from publishing public notices for new trust applicants only on the divisions Internet site.

The notices had been published in local newspapers. That practice now could continue. The division could still publish them on its website too if desired.

The goal was to protect transparency, Bartling said Tuesday.

We didnt know how far it would go, she said about the amendment.

The legislation, HB 1039, is the annual update of South Dakotas trust laws. South Dakota positioned itself the past 20-plus years as a leading state for attracting private trusts.

South Dakota Newspapers Association lobbyist David Bordewyk spoke against that notice-publication piece of the legislation during its hearing Friday by the House State Affairs Committee.

The committee endorsed the bill unchanged 12-0. Its main proponent is Rep. G. Mark Mickelson, R-Sioux Falls, who last year chaired the trust task force.

Bordewyk contacted newspaper editors and publishers who in turn contacted the House members from their areas.

Bartling meanwhile drew her amendment.

When she offered it Monday, the bills supporters called for a roll call vote, rather than a voice vote that is standard for most amendments.

That meant every representative present for the vote now would be on the record.

The roll call helped us, House Democratic leader Spencer Hawley, of Brookings, said.

The tally was 36-29 in favor of the amendment. Three representatives who had voted for the bill in committee  Bartling and Republicans Jim Bolin, of Canton and Roger Solum, of Watertown  voted for the amendment, as did Hawley, a committee member who wasnt present when the committee vote was taken.

With the newspaper publication exemption removed, the 28-page bill won the full support of the House 65-0. It now awaits Senate consideration.
Gary Wood says he always likes a challenge, and he's always found himself coming to projects that need attention.

He now hopes to bring that same passion and work ethic to the Belle Fourche Chamber of Commerce as the new executive director.

"I'm a people person," Wood said last week after being named director. "I'm not an introvert. I'm very interested in helping the business community and attracting people to come Belle Fourche."

Wood was raised in Montana before he attended school in Canada where he met his wife, Louise. Since then he has served as a pastor in North Dakota and Montana.

Most recently, he has served as the president for New Hope Uganda Ministries, which aids orphaned children in Uganda in East Africa.

That experience will benefit him the most, Wood said, after gaining experience organizing campaigns, working with federal employees, working with boards in the United States, Canada and Uganda, and writing grants.

"I've had a lot of international and travel experience," Wood said of his 18 years working within administration. "I really enjoyed that."

Wood has lived in Belle Fourche for eight years. It's the place he feels invested in and where he hopes to finish out is career.

It's also a community he knows has a good relationship outside of the surrounding area.

"In 2007 we said we were moving here and would be building a house here, and everyone talked about how nice it was," Wood said. "I want (this job) because we want to stay here. We don't want to move."

Wood and his wife have children in this area and belong to a church in town.

Beyond that, Wood added that he hasn't interviewed for a job in 18 years, but that when he left the chamber interview "I was excited about what my 18 years with New Hope had given me and what I could bring and offer them."

At 61 years old, Wood holds tight to the idea of trying something never done before.

"You have to be innovative, especially in the business atmosphere," he said. "Young people know a lot of that stuff and want action and change. There is so much to learn from people.

"I want to learn from the residents and business people of Belle Fourche  both long time and new. We're all in this ship together, and if we don't work at it, we'll sink it."

Wood added that he has been encouraged by the chamber board, which he believes is progressive and positive.

"The community should be excited about the board," he said. "We're hoping to build on a new foundation, and I'm very grateful for this positive board."
Friends, family and colleagues gathered Friday to wish outgoing Sturgis Police Chief Jim Bush well in the next chapter of his life.

And many had kind words to say about the man who served for 37 years on the Sturgis Police force, 25 of them as chief.

Rapid City Mayor and former police chief Steve Allender said the next Sturgis Police Chief will have big shoes to fill.

My advice would not be to try to follow that. Pick your own path and be as great as Jim Bush, but be your own man, he said.

Allender said Bush is an icon in law enforcement.

Everyone relates his name to the Sturgis rally. Hes been at a few dozen of them, Allender joked. We will all miss him. Hes a steady, reliable guy who gets the job done and has a lot of admirers.

Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom said he had the privilege of working 26 rallies with Bush.

I got to see his influence many times in high-emotion situations and crimes that occurred, he said. He was always the voice of reason and always very calm. He provided a calming influence for everyone whether it was with other law enforcement, gangs or the public in general.

South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley was just a youngster when Bush joined the Sturgis police force.

Ive appreciated a lot of things Chief Bush did and one is not arresting me, although maybe he should have, Jackley joked.

Jackley grew up in Sturgis during the Chief Bush era.

Its fair to say that all of us that grew up with Chief Bush had a great appreciation for him as a police officer. He was very reasonable, very open in the community, Jackley said. He was somebody that was easy for you to grow up and respect.

Jackley believes those attributes served Bush well in overseeing law enforcement at the Sturgis motorcycle rally for so many years.

He has an excellent temperment to take on many of the challenges that the rally presents, Jackley said. We look at Chief Bush as South Dakotas chief during that two weeks in August when our town grows from 6,500 to over 500,000. Hes been that calming effect that his community and the law enforcement community look to during that time.

The turnout at Bushs retirement party Friday is an indicator of how well respected the man is, Jackley said.

Its his friends, colleagues and the people he has worked with saying, Job well done, he said.

Rapid City Police Chief Karl Jegeris said Bush has been a great friend to the Rapid City Department through the years.

Chief Hennies, Chief Tieszen, Chief Allender and myself all have had just really good relationship with him, he said. I would consider him to be one of the friendliest police chiefs around. That is how I believe he has survived for 37 years.

Jegeris said Bush mastered the art of overseeing the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally.

He always had a good plan for the rally and has kept so many people safe for such a long time, he said.

Jegeris points to positive public relations and bringing in additional law enforcement that made the rallies safe.

There was an increased presence, but the presences wasnt always authoritarian, it was more that the officers that were here were enjoying the interaction with the visitors, he said.

Craig Tieszen says he was amazed that Bush could serve 25 years and didnt get flustered.

The key to his success is that he always seemed to be prepared and never got rattled, he said.

Tieszen also added that Bushs longevity will be tough to beat.
It is January and that means the start of the second semester, more sunlight, the beginning of the budget process for the coming school year, and the 2016 South Dakota legislative session.

Gov. Daugaard gave his state-of-the-state message to the legislature which included a bold funding package for K-12 education. I am very supportive of his proposal and will work hard to get it passed.

There are many moving parts to the proposal so I encourage you to stop in my office if you have questions on how the proposal will work. Integral to his proposal is a half penny increase in the state sales tax. I know that no one wants to pay more taxes, but I also know that we are facing a serious shortage of teachers in the state and that we anticipate the shortage to get worse before it gets better.

It is too early to say what the final funding legislation will look like, but I will tell you that we will use all available additional dollars to increase teacher salaries. We need your support and I encourage you to visit with your legislators and encourage them to support the Governors proposal.

This is the time of year that we formulate and finalize our budget for capital projects. The project requests typically exceed project revenues, so the school board prioritizes the requests in order to approve a balanced budget.

We are currently working on renovating the second floor of the Williams Administrative Building in anticipation of moving the Sturgis Elementary fifth-graders to the building. The projections show that we should be all right for the 2016-17 school year but that we will be out of space at Sturgis Elementary for the 2017-18 school year. We are excited about the increased numbers of students but that increase also brings challenges.

One of the projects under consideration by the board is changing the main entrance at Sturgis Brown High School to provide a more secure and safe building. A final proposal will be presented to the school board at its Feb. 8 meeting. We then hope to call for bids in March, review and possibly award bids in April and begin the project at the end of school year with a completion date of early August. An architectural design of the proposal can be found on the school district website at http://www.meade.k12.sd.us/index.php/communications/.

Last year the school board contracted with Architecture Incorporated of Rapid City to review the district property at Stagebarn and to design a building at that location. The architectural firm is currently working on a design and we hope to have it ready for your review later this spring. The school board has not made a decision if or when a new facility will be built at Stagebarn. That decision will be made at a later date and will be based on enrollment and projections for future growth in the Piedmont Summerset area.

If you have not had an opportunity to visit one of our schools or attend school activities, I encourage you to do so. A complete list of activities and events is on the district website and Facebook page.
Tucked away in a corner of Jesse Kaufmans basement is a makeshift workshop where world-class art comes to life.

In an era when technology exists to use computers and lasers to engrave intricate designs on gun barrels, Kaufman is turning out hand embellished creations that last year caught the eye of decision makers at Americas oldest gunmaker -- Remington.

They were in search of someone to translate their ideas to paper, or in this case metal, for a set of firearms commemorating their bicentennial year.

Kaufmans Black Hills Gunstocks & Engraving was chosen by the company to engrave 12, first-tier guns -- three sets of four guns each. Some of the creations will go into museums and private collections, but others will go on the auction block to raise money for charities, he said.

I owe so much to Remington. After so many years working in the gun business, this job is going to put me on the No. 1 charts for years to come. This is a huge catalyst for this little shop and me, he said on a recent snowy morning in Sturgis.

Kaufmans coming out party was last week at the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas. One of each of the guns he finished for Remington in October was at the heart of the companys display at the show.

Since May, Kaufman has painstakingly transformed the cold steel into vibrant eye-pleasing works using his innate artistic abilities and primitive tools.

Ward Dobler, general manager of Dakota Arms in Sturgis, initially asked Kaufman if he would be interested in doing the work for Remington.

I said, yeah, absolutely, he said.

A bevy of what Kaufman called vice presidents from Remington stopped by his basement shop a week or so later to formally ask him to do the bicentennial work.

Hand engraving goes back centuries and was traditionally used to embellish many household items from guns to pewter tankards to jewelry for the middle class and well-to-do.

The three classic firearms serving as Kaufmans canvas are the Remington Model 700 Bolt Action Rifle, the Model R1 1911 Semi-Automatic Handgun and the Model 870 Pump Shotgun.

Up until three years ago, Kaufman was known more for his gun stockmaking than his engraving. He worked for several years for Dakota Arms in Sturgis before striking out on his own.

I had been to the SHOT show many times as a stockmaker, but this was the first time as an engraver, he said. Engraving has become my true calling and passion.

Kaufman will be the first to admit that engraving is difficult.

Theres hundreds of thousands of different combinations of artwork you can plug into a space, but what are you going to choose? Over the years, you develop a style and rhythm of your own, but sometimes you get stuck, he said.

Kaufman also will showcase his work for three days at the Black Hills Stock Show in Rapid City this weekend.

His tiny workshop has stations for checking stocks at one end, a library of sorts in the middle and Kaufmans engraving table at the far end. On occasion when he looks up from the magnifying glasses he wears to do the engraving, he can see wildlife just outside the window.

This farm kid from Delmont, in east central South Dakota, grew up hunting and had a love for guns.

He began his path as a stockmaker at the age of 25 when his dad bought a small duplicator and a lathe to fill his spare time as he retired. Together, Kaufman and his dad stocked his first shotgun, an 870 Wingmaster, into a trap configuration stock. They then bought hand checkering tools and checkered his first stock.

I remember thinking at the time, hey, this is pretty cool. It was pretty rudimentary stuff, but we loved it.

But Kaufmans life took an interesting turn after that initial foray into working with guns.

I was a musician for 14 years, he said. It was a good educating experience to what I really didnt want to do. It can be kind of a shaky life.

Kaufman served as drummer for the band Two Lane Highway and later with Briar Hill.

Over the next several years he spent lots of time figuring out how to finish wood, checkering, inletting and duplicating.

Checkering is something very few people do anymore. Its an absolutely insane vocation, he said.

Kaufman says checkering is a necessity on a rifle -- its what gives the stock grip.

He honed his skills and perfected the wood to metal fit as a stockmaker at Dakota Arms. In his 11 years with the Sturgis company, he stocked more than 1,600 rifles.

Its only been in the last three years that Kaufman took up the art of engraving by studying with master engravers Ray Cover in the US and Hendrik Fruhauf in Germany.

By the grace of God, my work calendar is packed almost a year and a half out, he said. Whod of thought I could get that much work in my little shop, here in Sturgis, in my basement.

Kaufmans work process begins by designing the detailed artwork on paper which can sometimes take an entire work day.

Engraving is all about perspective, he said. I love detail and I love giving things light.

The art for the Remington project took Kaufman about six weeks to complete.

He then takes a micron marker and traces the drawing. The permanent marker has a needle tip for working with minute details and wont bleed like other permanent markers, he said.

The artwork is scanned and saved as a Photoshop document.

You make it sharper and cleaner in Photoshop, he said.

He then enlarges the drawing, creates a mirror image, prints it and transfers it onto the metal.

The better your transfer, the better you are going to be able to cut the transfer, he said.

He uses a product called Pictorico paper with an ink jet printer to transfer the artwork onto the metal to be etched.

He places the metal into a vice grip then uses tiny chisels to bring the work to life under a microscope.

Some of my smallest chisels are 8 to 10 thousandths which are about three or four of your hairs, he said.

Making the Remington project unique is the addition of gold inlay Kaufman must incorporate into each gun.

It takes me about 35 days to get one gun completed with all that gold in there. You have to cut the trough which is about 15 thousandths wide, maybe 20. The wire is about 22 thousandths in diameter which is small, he said.

The trough has to be smaller than the gold wire, so it doesnt just fall into the groove.

Once the trough is cut in, you have to go back in and under cut it so that the gold mechanically locks in. That is where the time comes in. That takes me a couple weeks or more just to put the gold in on each one, he said.

Kaufman said much of his success is due to the support of his wife, Stephanie, a high school government teacher at Sturgis Brown High School.

Shes so supportive. Im more of a successful man because of her, he said.

The couple has two children, Josie, 12, and Audrey, 9. Both are blessed with artistic talent also and on occasion have spent time as apprentices with their dad.

Ive been so blessed to learn this trade, he said. Engraving to me is highly personalized. It is sharing a part of who I am in each project.
PIEDMONT | While two-thirds of the communities in the Black Hills have gained residents in the 2010-2014 period, the skeleton-key-shaped town of Piedmont has blown away its neighbors by nearly quadrupling its population.

According to the U.S. Census completed in 2010, Piedmont had 222 residents. Now according to recently released census statistics, the tiny hamlet hugging Interstate 90 just 14 miles north of Rapid City has ballooned to 878 residents, primarily through voluntary annexation of several small housing developments.

Its kind of like what people used to say about the Missouri River: 'A mile wide and 3 inches deep, said three-term Piedmont Mayor Phil Anderson. Piedmont is now 3 miles long and a quarter-mile wide.

Piedmont, which takes its name from a French word meaning the foot of the mountain, was founded in 1890, but remained unincorporated for nearly 117 years. It officially became a city Aug. 16, 2007, and Anderson has served as mayor since.

Piedmonts incorporation was the result of its neighbor to the south, Summerset, establishing itself as a city in June 2005, said Anderson, who has called Piedmont home since 1955 and whose great-grandparents are buried in the local cemetery.

It was the fear factor back then, he recalled. We were more the older town, and they were the upscale. So many said we would lose our identity if wed didnt incorporate.

In the years since its incorporation, residents of such small housing developments on Piedmonts perimeter as Indian Hills, Stagebarn, Midland Heights and Cooper subdivisions, attracted by low tax levies and a sound infrastructure, petitioned to be voluntarily annexed into Piedmont, Anderson explained.

With increased population have come major improvement projects, including establishment of a tax-increment financing district, expansion of the towns water and sewer system, enactment of more comprehensive zoning regulations, and a $700,000 reconstruction of Main Street that city leaders hope is completed before its next July Fourth parade.

But ask the mayor whats changed in Piedmont since it became a city, and he prefers to talk about the opposite.

The thing that has stayed the same over the years has been the community spirit of our residents, Anderson said. The volunteer spirit is still alive and well here. Thats what we really like about it. Were neighborly. People move in and people move out, but basically you know most of the people in town.

Phyllis Stevens, a secretary at the towns Grace United Methodist Church, agreed with Anderson and said she and her husband, residents since 1972, asked to be annexed into Piedmont, and the town's Board of Trustees obliged.

Piedmont is without question, a small town atmosphere, Stevens said. Were a small town with a rural feel. And, we care about each other.

Stevens said life in Piedmont had not changed significantly, even with the surge in population. She said she was proud the town supported its variety of faiths, even while a seventh church was being built.

I guess any time something grows, change can be difficult, she said. But we have wonderful cooperation between towns and between churches. We even have some ecumenical services together. According to Census Bureau estimates, Rapid City gained nearly 4,000 residents in the last four years, while Summerset gained 426, Spearfish added 342, and Hill City was up 223. Meanwhile, four Black Hills towns lost residents in the past four years, including Hot Springs (-146); Black Hawk (-138); Deadwood (-117); and Lead (-27), the Census Bureau reported.
PIERRE | An accusation that the South Dakota House is practicing racism didn't stop state representatives on Tuesday from deciding that the Legislature, rather than five state government employees, should decide whether names of places in South Dakota are offensive or insulting and need to be changed.

Along mostly partisan lines, house members voted 54-15 for a bill sponsored by Rep. Lee Schoenbeck, R-Watertown, placing tight restrictions on the state Board on Geographic Names, whose members are five state employees.

Under HB 1060 the board may only act on a name change for a geographic place name that has been identified by state law as being offensive or insulting. The board may not act on any other proposed name change.

The next step is that the Senate will consider the bill, which carries with it the bitter denunciations by state Rep. Shawn Bordeaux, D-Mission, which is on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

Schoenbeck said the Legislature must officially designate any sites with names that should be replaced or sites that should be named for the first time.

He said state law was used in the past, but the five board members ventured into territory by choice when considering proposals to rename Harney Peak, the highest point in South Dakota. Some of the proposed replacement names were either in Native American language or of Native American historical figures.

This is the forum for the debate, Schoenbeck said about the Legislature.

Bordeaux opposed the measure, saying it looks like racism is still alive in South Dakota.

Lets just say if there was Honky Hill in South Dakota, wed not be having this conversation, Bordeaux said.

The two other Republicans voting "no" were Reps. Scott Craig, of Rapid City, and Kyle Schoenfish, of Scotland.

Rep. Elizabeth May of Kyle, which is on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, was one of three Republicans to join the 12 House Democrats in voting against the bill. She said her vote was based on where she lives.

Despite her vote against the bill, May emphasized that bringing offensive names to the Legislature would provide a much larger forum than that of the state board.

The argument needs to be made here," she said. "These are the peoples representatives.

Rep. Karen Soli, D-Sioux Falls, said the bill is about who gets to decide whats offensive and whats a controversy.

The Harney Peak proposals considered by the board caused quite a bit of consternation among his constituents, said Rep. Lance Russell, R-Hot Springs, and created an enormous controversy.
Lynn DiSanto's arguments favoring mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients are empty and lacking in research.

DiSanto is a state representative from Rapid City who's the prime sponsor of House Bill 1076 that would require "drug testing for certain assistance applicants." The mandatory drug test would apply to those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and/or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps).

The bill's requirement that the tested individual "shall pay the cost of the drug test" seems a bit weird. These folks are already strapped for cash and these tests can cost up to $42 . Will they get reimbursed if they pass the test? Doesn't look like it.

It's also unclear from the bill if the applicants are supposed to pay for the administrative costs of the tests. If it's the taxpayers who are picking that up, then we need to know how much it will add to South Dakota's budget  a fact that I haven't seen mentioned in any of the discussion on this issue.

At some point a cost-benefit analysis needs to be applied to this bill before it gets consideration. About a year ago, Forbes investigated this and concluded that the entire process is a "sham" that amounts to "political pandering."

You can find a ream of similar conclusions by googling around, an exercise that doesn't seem likely to find a single supportive analysis of the subject. The most common beef is that it doesn't save money and adds much in the way of legal costs where it has been challenged. Time magazine calls it a "waste of taxpayer money." Do we really need this here? It would be nice if DiSanto could explain why she thinks South Dakota's experience will differ from what's happened in other states.

In the meantime, I'd like to know why others who receive public assistance aren't being required by this bill to be tested for drugs. Is there something sacred about, say, a proposed business getting public money from the Governor's Office of Economic Development that exempts the principals of that business from drug testing?

There's an inherent odor of discrimination against people in this bill. DiSanto claims to have some insight into the process because she once was on public assistance  which doesn't make much sense to me because she herself is an example of how welfare is an economically and socially positive enterprise.

I was among the poorest of the poor when my family arrived at Ellis Island in 1950 along with a boatload of other postwar European refugees. We received assistance from social welfare agencies and our home church (Greek Orthodox) for a few years until we got on our feet and became living exponents of the American dream.

Visualizing my parents being forced to provide urine samples before getting our assistance is demeaning and obnoxious. We have a presumption of innocence in this country, which implicitly extends to a presumption of good faith.

We can do better than suspecting the worst about those who need some help.
A front-page headline on Feb. 9, 2012, read Prices at the pump could jump past $5, analyst says.

With gasoline hovering around $1.50 per gallon today in Iowa, that crystal ball has long since imploded. In fact, concerns now exist that the price of oil is dropping so far so quickly, it is having an adverse impact on the global economy.

The outlook four years ago, though, was quite different. Gas had hit a record high of $4.02 per gallon in May 2011 during the unrest of the Arab Spring, then dropped to $3.37 when the article ran.

Today, though, oil from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries  the consortium that consists primarily of Arab and North African nations as well as Venezuela, Ecuador and Indonesia  has fallen below $26 per barrel.

In Canada  the leading exporter of oil to the United States  it is less than $15 per barrel.

So what happened?

The slumping economy in China, the leading importer of oil, is one reason. Meanwhile, production has increased thanks to the shale oil boom  oil extracted from shale formations using hydraulic fracturing or fracking  most notably in the United States, Canada and Russia.

Saudi Arabia, which supplies 10 percent of the worlds oil, decided to attack more expensive shale oil production by increasing its output. U.S. production of shale oil  primarily in North Dakota and Texas, which account for half of the U.S. shale supply  has declined. However, no shale oil collapse is imminent, and overall U.S. oil production is up.

Factor in another 500,000 of barrels per day of crude oil from Iran now that sanctions against its nuclear program have been lifted and the world is awash in petroleum.

Prices have dropped in Iowa, great for consumers but not investors, with major indices plummeting in the new year.

The big three issues in the market right now are oil, oil and oil, Mike Mayo, a banking analyst with CLSA research, told USA Today.

Big banks investing heavily in the oil boom are taking it on the chin. Last week, JPMorgan announced its fourth-quarter expenses linked to energy loans increased by 49 percent. It estimated reserves to cover its bad oil and gas loans could total $750 million if oil plateaus at $30 per barrel for 18 months.

Other big losers include:

Russia, which depends on oil and gas for nearly 70 percent of its exports. It loses $2 billion whenever oil drops by $1 per barrel. It needs oil at $105 to balance its budget.

Many OPEC members, such as Iran, Algeria and Nigeria, which need oil between $123 and $131 per barrel to balance their budgets. The Saudis have large reserves to withstand the hit.

ISIS. According to the Atlantic magazine, analyst Torbjorn Soltvedt estimates ISISs revenue from oil has dropped to $300,000 per day, down from between $1 million and $2 million a day in 2014.

Tar sands. The Keystone Pipeline would have carried tar sands from western Canada to U.S. refineries but was rejected by President Obama on environmental grounds. Producers are now selling at a loss, and new projects and expansions have been canceled.

So what headlines await four years hence? With possible technological breakthroughs by 2020, perhaps inexpensive fuel-cell technology will usher in a revolution in transportation and in the home, further lessening dependence on oil  and all the politics surrounding it.

 Waterloo-Cedar Falls (Iowa) Courier
744

CSC Elevator Maintenance Service RFP

Chadron State College is soliciting specific proposals from qualified vendors to provide Elevator Maintenance Services that will adequately meet the needs of the College while promoting the greatest extent of competition that is practicable. Prices quoted should include all taxes and fees, hourly rate, and travel costs. Pricing quotation should include full service maintenance for the traction elevator and quarterly maintenance service for the hydraulic elevators.

All inquiries for information or requests for a Proposal Offering Form should be directed to:

Chadron State College

Dale Grant, Vice President for Administration and Finance

1000 Main Street

Chadron, NE 69337

Chadron State College reserves the right to reject any or all proposals or parts thereof, and to waive any irregularities of any RFP. The College also reserves the right to negotiate on any proposal and accept whatever proposal will be in the best interest of the College and the State of Nebraska.

Publish Jan. 13, 20 and 27, 2016

761

Kent Hall Fire Sprinkler System Renovation

Sealed proposals will be received by Chadron State College at the office of Mr. Dale Grant, V.P. for Administration and Finance, Room 224, Sparks Hall, Chadron State College, 1000 Main, Chadron, Nebraska, on Thursday, February 11, 2016 until 2:00 p.m. local MT. All bids must be submitted on unaltered copies of the Bid Forms that are included in the project manual and shall be clearly identified on the outside of the sealed envelope as Kent Hall Fire Sprinkler System Renovation.

A Pre-Bid Conference will be held on the site at 1:30 PM Mountain Time on February 4, 2016. All interested bidding contractors and sub-contractors are encouraged to attend. The purpose of this conference is to answer any administrative or technical questions which prospective bidders may have and take a tour of Kent Hall.

A plan and specifications for the work may be obtained from the office of the Architect, LeeDavies Architecture, 2120 Birchwood Road, North Platte, Nebraska 69101 (308-530-9138) by submitting a plan deposit of $30.00, or by contacting Chadron State College, Mr. Blair Brennan at 308-432-6044, Sparks Hall 026. The deposit will be returned upon return of plans and specifications in good condition within 30 days after the bid opening date. Plans may also be examined at the Construction Industry Center in Rapid City, South Dakota.

At the time of filing their bids, all bidders will be required to furnish:

a certified check, cashiers check or bid bond for an amount equal to five percent (5%) of their proposal.

a performance and payment bond in a sum equal to 100% of the contract price.

proof of all builders risk insurance coverage naming Chadron State College as an additional insured including off-site and transit coverage to cover the value of the materials, equipment and/or machinery involved in the project.

evidence of adequate workers compensation, general liability and automobile liability insurance coverage, with limits and insurer acceptable to Chadron State College.

Proposals received after 2:00 p.m. will not be considered and will be returned unopened. Chadron State College reserves the right to reject any or all proposals or parts thereof, and to waive any irregularities of any proposal. The College also reserves the right to negotiate on any proposal and accept whatever proposal will be in the best interest of the College and the State of Nebraska.

Publish Jan. 27, Feb. 6 an 13, 2016

766

NOTICE TO DEALERS

The City of Chadron, Nebraska, invites the submission of sealed quotes for Municipal Equipment at the office of the City Clerk until 2:00 oclock P.M., February 8, 2016 at which hour the City Manager or his designee and the City Clerk of Chadron, Nebraska, will proceed to open, in the presence of all other dealers, and consider the quotes received for the furnishing of said equipment.

New 2016 72 Commercial Rotary Mower

Quotes shall be submitted on a proposal form furnished by the City Clerk. Specification booklets for the equipment can be examined at the office of the City Clerk, Chadron, Nebraska.

The City of Chadron reserves the right to reject any or all quotes and to waive any informalities in the quotes received.

CITY OF CHADRON, NEBRASKA

/s/ Donna J. Rust, MMC

City Clerk

Publish Jan. 27 and Feb. 3, 2016
Sakhalin ex-governor Khoroshavin suspected of taking $337k in bribes  report

MOSCOW, January 27 (RAPSI)  The Investigative Committee of Russia suspects former governor of Sakhalin, Alexander Khoroshavin, of taking 27 million rubles ($337,000) in bribes from candidates for the positions in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk City Duma in 2014, Kommersant newspaper reported on Wednesday.

There are six witnesses in the case, attorney Ivan Mironov said. Four of them were elected in the citys Duma, two were candidates for the position.

According to information available to the newspaper, former mayor of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Andrei Lobkin, his deputy Alexei Leskin and deputy of the head of governors secretariat Anatoliy Makarov were allegedly responsible for taking money from the citys Duma candidates. After that money was allegedly transferred to head of governors secretariat Vyacheslav Gorbachev who then transferred it to Khoroshavin himself.

According to Kommersant, Khoroshavin allegedly used his position to influence elections and make sure that some candidates would pass and some would not.

This is a third criminal case against Koroshavin.

Investigators announced in March 2015 that Khoroshavin and several other officials were arrested for allegedly taking a $5.6 million bribe to secure a contract to build a power unit for the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk thermal plant.

Khoroshavin asked earlier either to place him under house arrest or to release him on 5-million-ruble bail, but the motion was dismissed.

Last April, Khoroshavin was charged in another criminal case with taking a bribe of at least 15 million rubles ($230,000) for providing credits on advantageous terms to one of the local businessmen. He pleaded not guilty.
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Ex-head of Russian penitentiary service to stay in jail until late March

MOSCOW, January 27 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) - The Presnensky District Court in Moscow has extended until March 31 the detention of head of Russias Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) Alexander Reimer who stands charged with embezzling 3 billion rubles (about $45.4 million) allocated for the purchase of electronic monitoring bracelets, RAPSI reported from the court on Wednesday.

The investigation into this case has been extended until August 28.

In May, the court seized 15 million rubles ($183,300) in assets belonging to Reimer.

The probe into the case was opened after two employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) were detained on suspicion of extorting $2.6 million from a businessman in connection with the purchase of ankle bracelets.

Charges have been brought against Reimer, his former deputy Nikolai Krivolapov, director of FSINs Information and Technical Support Center Viktor Opredelyonov, and the director of a private company, Nikolai Martynov.

After Reimer resigned from FSIN in 2012, a 10 billion ruble ($122 mln) fraud was uncovered at the service. Reimer has denied his guilt.

Reimer also has been charged with abuse of office.

Alexander Reimer, 57, was chief of the Interior Ministry Department in the Samara Region from April 2006 to 2009. In August 2009, he was appointed FSIN director and in 2010 promoted to the rank of Colonel-General of the Interior. He was dismissed from FSIN on June 26, 2012.
Conference on Russian arbitration reform to be held in Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad will host a conference Arbitration Reform: Next Steps? on February 19 under the aegis of the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum.

An array of laws on the arbitration reform in Russia was adopted in December 2015. The draft legislation was presented as a result of almost three-year preparatory work by the Ministry of Justice in cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, the Supreme Court, and representatives of business and legal communities.

All entities that were involved in this work had a common goal of solving a number of serious problems the Russian arbitration faced in the past twenty years, such as improper practices in the course of arbitration, use of arbitration for dishonest purposes and, as a consequence, a constant decline in demand for arbitration.

The laws are aimed at introducing a new scheme of organization of arbitration institutions, upgrading interaction between arbitration institutions and state courts, expanding arbitrability of disputes, clarifying of arbitration rules.

The laws become effective September 1, 2016. By that time a series of legislative acts necessary for the implementation of the laws should be adopted.

The conference of the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum Arbitration Reform: Next Steps? in Kaliningrad will feature authors of the adopted laws, legal practitioners and eminent members of international arbitration community.

The conference will concentrate on comprehensive discussion of the forthcoming reform of arbitration proceedings, further steps of its implementation, development of international commercial arbitration.

The following panel discussions will be held during the course of the conference:

 New rules of establishment and functioning of arbitration institutions;

 Procedural novelties in arbitration.

Conference participants include representatives of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, members of the scientific community and practicing lawyers from Russia, Baltic states, Scandinavia, Poland and Germany.

To register, please fill out the form here or send an e-mail to Kaliningrad@spblegalforum.com.
An Anaconda attorney who stole more than $527,000 from his clients and a professional attorney association was sentenced Thursday to 42 months in federal prison.

David Michael McLean, 75, pleaded guilty in August in Missoula federal court to two counts of wire fraud and one count of identity theft.

U.S. District Judge Robert H. Whaley sentenced McLean to 18 months on each count of wire fraud and an additional 24 months on the charge of aggravated identity theft, for a total of 42 months. The wire fraud counts will run concurrently.

McLean stole $62,325 from the American Board of Trial Advocates from 2009 to 2014, when he served as the local chapter's secretary and treasurer. He wrote checks from ABOTA's account to himself, signing his own name and forging another member's signature.

McLean also embezzled $465,614 from his clients by settling cases without their knowledge and pocketing the funds. He also forged clients' names on official documents relating to the settlements and lied to them about the status of their cases.

"This is an unacceptable breach of trust between attorneys and their clients," Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Hornbein said in a telephone interview.

She said McLean had been practicing law in Montana for decades and was disbarred by the Montana Supreme Court in 2015 after reporting his fraudulent behavior to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel.

Following his incarceration, McLean will spend three years on supervised release. His restitution amount has yet to be determined.

McLean is the father-in-law of Lt. Gov. Angela McLean, who announced her resignation Monday to take a position as the director of American Indian and minority achievement and K-12 partnerships with the Office of Higher Education.

She will remain in her current position until a replacement is appointed.
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Longtime journalist Perry Backus has been promoted to the role of associate editor at the Ravalli Republic newspaper.

When announcing the promotion to staff, Matt Bunk, editor of both the Ravalli Republic and the Missoulian, said Backus will play a vital role in the newsroom and as a liaison to the community.

Perry is uniquely suited for the position, Bunk noted. His stories are a true reflection of the communities he covers. His photos are a constant reminder of the beauty of the Bitterroot Valley. His dedication to the news industry is unquestioned. And he has a keen understanding of what it takes to develop an audience of loyal readers in print and online. In truth, he has done it all before.

Backus has worked at the Ravalli Republic since March 2008. Before that, he worked at the Missoulian and various other papers in Montana.

Im looking forward to continuing to serve the people of Ravalli County with the same fair and accurate reporting that they have come to expect from the Ravalli Republic, Backus said.

Backus can be seen in every corner of the Bitterroot Valley with his camera and notepad, whether hes waist deep in water in the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge or questioning government officials in the county courthouse.

Community journalism has been important to me since I first started my career in weekly newspapers in Forsyth and Dillon 30 years ago, Backus said. Even with all the different sources of media available to people today, newspapers continue to provide the most comprehensive reporting available to a community.

Bunk said he is excited about the opportunities that Backus promotion will create. It means the Ravalli Republics newsroom will have additional leadership at the local level, as Backus will be involved in daily story planning, newspaper layout and online initiatives, Bunk said.

While I will continue to direct the Ravalli Republic as editor, Perrys boots on the ground will allow me to focus more energy on the overall direction of the paper and its associated publications, he said. This is an investment in the future and a win for everyone  the readers of the Ravalli Republic, in particular.

Mark Heintzelman, publisher of the Missoulian and Ravalli Republic, said newspapers continue to provide the most comprehensive reporting available to a community, even with all the different sources of media available to people today.

The Ravalli Republic relies on local reporting and does not carry any Associated Press, Heintzelman said. It is truly a local product, and that would not be possible without Perrys dedication to our communities. Im excited to see what Perry and his exceptional team have in store.

Last year, Backus won seven awards in the Montana Newspaper Associations Better Newspaper contest, including three first place awards for Best News Story, Best Lifestyle Coverage and Best Lifestyle Photo. He has been voted the Bitterroots Best Reporter for the past three years.

Backus lives in the Stevensville area with his wife.
Darren Newsom came back from the annual Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show with an unexpected souvenir and a newfound passion for politics.

The longtime Bitterroot Valley ammunition manufacturer was one on several people attending the largest outdoor industry tradeshow in the country to be invited for a private audience with presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, last Thursday.

Trump was accompanied by two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

They contacted me a couple of weeks ago for this private meetingI was part of a select group from the outdoors and shooting industry who were pegged to meet him, Newsom said. He wanted to hear what our views were.

In the time offered to talk individually with the trio, Newsom attention focused on Donald Jr.

Don is a very avid hunter, Newsom said. I consider myself an avid hunter and hes every bit as avid as me. He does have more resources than me.

While Trumps talk with the group initially focused on concerns over gun control and Second Amendment issues, Newsom said the presidential hopeful did spend a good deal of time addressing public lands issues.

Trump told the group that he was opposed to selling off federal lands.

In an interview with an editor from Field and Stream at the trade show, Trump also said he didnt like the idea of divesting federal lands to the state either.

I dont like the idea because I want to keep the lands great, and you dont know what the state is going to do, Trump told Field and Stream. I mean, are they going to sell if they into a little bit of trouble? And I dont think thats something that should be sold.

Newsom said Trump also said that more needs to be done to maintain federal lands in order to retain access for the public.

They had done their research, Newsom said. They said they knew there were places where the BLM and others had not maintained the land and used that as a reason to put a gate across the road to keep people out.

Access to public lands has been an issue for Newsom too.

Its huge to me, he said. I have places that Ive been going for years where I am driving on a road one year and the next its closed due to erosion. I know that theyre never going to fix it.

Newsom said Trump also offered a common sense answer about wolves.

He said if the wolves are killing all your elk and the farmers livestock, then we probably need to be looking at killing some wolves, Newsom said. He said if something is causing that much problem, then something needs to be done.

With the Iowa caucuses just around the corner, Newsom said he was surprised to see the Trumps in Las Vegas last week.

He had an agenda, Newsom said. He wants the vote of hunters and shooters. No one else did that. No one else came. He knew that this was the one time that he could get with all of these people and get their attention.

That was huge for me, Newsom said. I dont care who it was. He made the effort to come to us. Im telling everyone what Donald (Trump) told us.

As a group, hunters arent known as a group that gets out and votes, Newsom said. I dont know if its because theyre out hunting or what it is, but hunters arent known as a group to be voters.

Newsom had about a 30 second conversation directly with Trump.

I told him that I was in the ammunition business in Montana, Newsom said. His words to me: They are trying to take the bullets away too. I wanted to tell him it is ammunition, not bullets, but I didnt.

He said to me: I will not let that happen, Newsom said. He told me that. If he becomes president, then Ill take his word for that. Hes not going to let anyone hurt my business. I would like to hear that from Hillary, but shes never going to say it.

He was at the largest show of our industry, he said. He was the only candidate there. He was willing to sit down and talk about the issues. Thats huge considering that all the rest are still worried about Iowa.

When the meeting ended, Trump presented all of the attendants a camouflage hat imprinted with words: Make America Great.

In the middle of February, Newsom will see Donald Trump Jr. again at the hunting expo his company hosts in Utah. Trump has agreed to come and speak.

Newsom is the founder of the Bitterroot Valleys Armscor Cartridge Inc. and owner of the Ammo and More Store in Stevensville.
A Victor man was arrested on a felony charge of criminal endangerment after allegedly firing a pistol into the ground at a trailer court following an argument with his girlfriend.

Charles Walter Felice, 35, appeared Monday before Ravalli County Justice Jennifer Ray on the felony count and misdemeanor charges of partner/family member assault and resisting arrest.

According to an affidavit, sheriffs deputies were dispatched to River Bank Trail in Victor for a report of shots being fired.

Upon arrival, the deputies spoke to one of Felices neighbors. The man said he watched Felice walk out the front door of his trailer and fire several shots from a semi-automatic handgun into the ground. The neighbor said Felice appeared to be intoxicated and was having a hard time walking, the affidavit said.

The man said he then saw Felices girlfriend exit through the back door of the trailer and run to a nearby neighbors trailer.

When Felice went back inside, he was soon followed by his girlfriend and another woman.

When the deputies arrived at Felices trailer, they could hear yelling coming from inside. Through an open front door, they allegedly saw Felice yelling at the woman who had accompanied his girlfriend back to the trailer.

The affidavit said he was yelling that if she wanted him to calm down, she was going to have to shoot him.

After entering the trailer, the deputies told Felice to place his hands behind his back, but he twice refused the order.

The deputies eventually grabbed his arms and attempted to force them behind his back. During the ensuing struggle, one of the deputies deployed his taser in an effort to get Felice to comply.

After landing on the couch, Felice continued to struggle and he was tased a second time.

The affidavit said Felice appeared to be extremely intoxicated and was unable to give a statement.

Felices girlfriend told deputies there had been a fight and Felice had exited the trailer and fired a pistol into the ground. The woman said she fled because she was afraid due to the fact Felice had consumed a half bottle of whiskey and was extremely intoxicated.

The deputies observed several bullet marks in the ground and recovered four .40 S&W shell casings and some bullet fragments from the ground. They also found a handgun in a junked vehicle on the property.

Felice allegedly told them it was the handgun he had used and gave them permission to go inside the vehicle to retrieve it. The Glock pistol held seven unused .40 cartridges.

Ray set bail at $2,500.
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MSF: aggression on Yemen requires independent int'l inquiry





GENEVA, Jan. 26 (Saba) - Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has affirmed that the Saudi-led coalition against Yemen required an independent international inquiry.



Following the latest attack on one of its health facilities, the MSF underlined that the conflict in Yemen is being waged with total disregard for the rules of war.



"The way war is being waged in Yemen shows that the warring parties do not recognize or respect the protected status of hospitals and medical facilities," said Raquel Ayora, MSF director of operations in a statement issued on Monday. "It is causing enormous suffering for people trapped in conflict zones. Public places are being bombed and shelled on a massive scale. Not even hospitals are being spared, even though medical facilities are explicitly protected by international humanitarian law."



Ayora censured the British Foreign Secretary's attempt to minimize the Saudi aggression's attacks on medical facilities to be as 'mistakes'.



"Just last week the British Foreign Secretary claimed that there have been no deliberate breaches of international humanitarian law in Yemen by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This implies that mistakenly bombing a protected hospital would be tolerable. This logic is offensive and irresponsible," the MSF official said.



MSF's medical activities in Yemen have been bombed four times in less than three months. The organization is seeking guarantees from the warring parties that medical activities will be protected according to international humanitarian law.



The first attack took place on October 26, when airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition repeatedly hit an MSF-supported hospital in Haydan District in Saada Governorate.



An MSF mobile clinic was then hit by an airstrike on December 2 in Taiz's Al Houban District, killing one person and wounding eight people, including two MSF staff members.



On January 10, the MSF-supported Shiara Hospital in Sa'ada Province was bombed, killing six people and injuring at least seven, most of whom were medical staff and patients.



On January 21, a series of airstrikes in Sa'ada Governorate wounded dozens of people and killed at least six, including the driver of an ambulance from the MSF-supported Al Gomhoury Hospital.



In Yemen, MSF is working in Aden, Dhale, Taiz, Sa'ada, Amran, Hajjah, Ibb and Sana'a governorates. Since March 2015, MSF teams have treated more than 20,000 war-wounded patients in Yemen. More than 790 tons of medical supplies have been sent by MSF so far.



MSF is managing 11 hospitals and health centers and supporting 18 health centers. With the health care system barely functioning, MSF is also providing non-emergency health services.



HA/AF

Saba

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[26/January/2016]
Army snipers kill five Saudi soldiers in Jizan





JIZAN, Jan. 27 (Saba)  Five Saudi soldier were shot dead by snipers of the army and popular committees in Jizan province, a military official said on Tuesday.



Three of the Saudi soldiers were killed in al-Doud military sites and two others in al-Shabaka site, the official explained.



The army and committees targeted a gathering of the Saudi military vehicles and troops in Nahoqa military site, and launched a number of rockets towards the military boarder centers in Najran, the official added.



BA

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[27/January/2016]
Hello all!

Sorry posts have been few and far between- we have been very busy!

We took a trip up to Galway last weekend, on the way stopping at the Cliffs of Moher and an area called The Burren.





A camera really cannot do it justice.

It really is a cliff!

The Burren, meaning "the great rock," is true to its name- for miles rocks can be seen poking out of the ground and make running for the bus in a sudden and torrential rain shower quite difficult for foreigners... of course Sean Pol made it to the bus mostly dry while the rest of us were scrambling and soaked!

The gang :)

Galway was fun and exciting, with time spent shopping and exploring. The Galway Cathedral was magnificent! The stain glass windows were breathtaking and the marble made even whispers bounce around the columns and pews.

Our trip back to our Dingle-home was much faster and we were forced to return to the reality of school.

So far, though, classes have been pretty interesting and engaging. For us nursing majors, Health Assessment and Pathophysiology take up most of our study time- we can be found around our kitchen tables listening to Patho voiceover Power Points and collaborating to make study guides from the reading material.

Last week, we met our music professor, who enlightened us with that fact that we will each learn a bit of Irish step dancing and how to play the Irish tin whistle (similar to the recorder). Our religion professor has been lecturing on the ancient Celts (of whom we have little historical information to go on because they did not record their own history or religious practices). Costal Ecology classes will be held at the Dingle Aquarium and students may have the opportunity to feed the penguins and/or rescue any stranded sea creatures should they get stuck in Dingle Bay.

I hope to post more frequently from now on, so please stay tuned.

Over and out!

Rebecca








Caravan Magazine

In Two Districts of Bastar, Adivasi Women Report Sexual Assaults by Security Forces During Military Operations; Police Delay and Resist Filing FIRs

by Chitrangada Choudhury | 24 January 2016

For over ten days, authorities in the Bijapur and Sukma districts of South Chhattisgarh delayed or have simply refused to file First Information Reports (FIR) in two separate cases of sexual assault. These include the alleged gang rapes of 13 adivasi women who are subsistence farmers by security forces earlier this month. The sexual violence and assaults are reported to have taken place when security forces conducted anti-Maoist military operations in Bijapuras Nendra village between 11 and 14 January, and in Sukmaas Kunna village on 12 January. The police reluctance is despite a Supreme Court ruling and a 2013 amendment to Indiaas anti-rape laws, which makes it mandatory for the police to file a case as soon as a complaint of sexual violence is brought to them.

In Bijapur, the police finally relented and filed an FIR late on the night of 21 January, over a week after the alleged violence in Nendra village took place. By then, a group of womenas activists who had first brought attention to these instances had been urging the police to take action for three days. In Sukma, villagers reported the violence to a senior official in the administration on 15 January, but the police has not filed an FIR yet. The two heavily militarised districts are at the epicentre of the deadly, decade-long, state-Maoist military conflict, which has claimed close to 7,000 people already, a third of whom are civilians.

See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/bastar

o o o

Tehelka

The unexorcised ghost of Salwa Judum

There is no end to sexual violence and brutality on Adivasis in the Bastar region. Has nothing changed since the Supreme Court banned Salwa Judum?

by Asad Ashraf (6 Feb 2016)

How does urban India look at the strife-torn regions of Chhattisgarh? Many of us know of a aMaoist menacea. Physically far removed from the violence, we often see reports of the Maoist guerrillas in the state blowing up police vehicles and killing soldiers. And we form our opinions on the violence based on the news we consume. Some also know that the Maoists claim to fight for the people a the oppressed Adivasi population in south Chhattisgarh. However, in all, the part of the state where the country seems to be at war with itself constitutes the dark recesses of Indiaas consciousness. And it has its own demons that the State chooses not to confront. Therefore, we back ahomea did not get to hear of any reports of the alleged rape and molestation of nine tribal women during 11-13 January.

Soni Sori, Adivasi activist, Aam Aadmi Party member and alleged victim of torture in police custody (a charge levelled against the security forces repetitively in cases of arrests of Maoist asympathisersa), went to village Bellam Lendra in Bijapur district as part of a fact finding team to probe the matter. The women of the village gave a first hand account to Sori: aPolice forces had come to carry out a search operation in the village, because of which the men of the village went into hiding, fearing torture and arrests. In the absence of men, the police forced themselves upon at least nine women from the village.a They went on to describe the horror in graphic detail. aWhile some men from the forces tightly held the legs and hands of these women, others took their turns upon them, one by one.a The men also humiliated the women by sucking their breasts to see if they were lactating. This was done allegedly on account of the assumption of the police that those women who do not lactate are possible Naxals, as it apparently shows that they are not married.

Apart from the sexual abuse, the security forces are said to have destroyed property and livestock in order to make survival difficult for the victims. They have also been accused of repeatedly threatening the locals of burning down their houses with their children inside. The women have also alleged that the armed personnel were asurrendered extremistsa, a reference to the State sponsored militia Salwa Judum, which also comprised of some ex-extremists (Maoists).

However, as far as the media is concerned, the traumatic account amounts to a ghost story, one of the many that make it to the consciousness of the local population in the Maoist belt, but not to a newspaper. The recent incidents found it difficult to even make it to the police records. Initially, the police refused to lodge an FIR citing the Superintendent of Policeas absence from Bijapur as the reason. aWe were told that a case could only be filed when the SP came back to Bijapur,a says Sori. The aggrieved women from Bellam Lendra, along with some human rights activists, had reached Bijapur on 18 January. But, it took them four excruciating days to finally pressurise the police to file an fir. Only after this, did some national dailies carry news of the violence.

A team of the National Commission of Women (NCW), which happened to be in Bijapur at the time, also met the victims. However, prior to their meeting, an interesting turn of events took place: A mob claiming to be avictimsa of Maoist violence, entered the scene in what appeared to be police vehicles. They demanded that the women, who were waiting for the FIR, leave Bijapur immediately in a threatening tone. The group allegedly comprised of ex-Salwa Judum members.

This recent incident of violence echoes a similar one that took place in October in Peddagellur village not far from Bellam Lendra. Between 20-24 October 2015, another acombing operationa by the security forces turned into another incident of large scale violence. About 15-20 police and security personnel entered Peddagellur and neighbouring villages and looted houses and molested several women, raping two, one of whom is a 14-year-old. KL Dhruv, SP Bijapur, admits that despite FIRs being registered, no arrests have been made in the case so far.

A Tehelka team went to Peddagellur and the neighbouring villages to meet the victims who continue to hopelessly wait for justice. Peddagellur is about 50 km from Bijapur. The region is not cold like Delhi. An early January dawn is without smog. People can be seen walking in T-shirts and shorts, others sipping tea at the roadside stalls in the small town of Bijapur surrounded by jungles and the Indravati river.

[. . .] see more at: http://www.tehelka.com/2016/01/the-unexorcised-ghost-of-salwa-judum/?singlepage=1

see also:

DAjA vu: Chhattisgarhs security forces accused of large-scale sexual violence yet again http://scroll.in/article/802330/deja-vu-chhattisgarhs-security-forces-accused-of-large-scale-sexual-violence-yet-again
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Jan-26-2016 23:12 TweetFollow @OregonNews Turkish Interests Impact Kyrgyzstan's Future Through Education The Turks have long-term goals in Kyrgyzstan and the effects of their influence will show, not now but over time.

Followers of Fethullah Gulen in Egypt.

Photo courtesy: hizmetmovement.blogspot.com



(SALEM, Ore.) - Turkish interests are penetrating different countries like Kyrgyzstan through religious educational institutions in order to train for a generation of Turkish-wing officials. The main penetrating branches of Turkish government in Kyrgyzstan are the institutes of Service, followers of Fethullah Gulen, Noor Jyar, Turkish followers of Saeed Norsi and Suleiman Chylar. The Turkish school system which is founded by Fethullah Gulen, is very popular among the people of Kyrgyzstan. Religious syllabus is not taught in these schools but it is obvious that students have some sort of religious education. The teachers, who are mostly Kyrgyz citizens, teach the students Islam with their personal behavior and consider Turkey to be a model and ideally suited and perfect example for Kyrgyzstan, because the main focus of this model is on teaching a particular, secular religion. The followers of Noor Jyar have meetings and classes where they learn about the Quran with Saeen Norsis commentary in specific houses. Followers of "Suleiman Chylar" educate students about the Qur'an and Hadith and they read the Qur'an in Arabic. The Turks have long-term goals in Kyrgyzstan and the effects of their influence will show, not now but over time and after the graduates of Turkish schools and universities grow up. A design of Turkish officials, the graduates, over time, will be placed in sensitive government posts in pro-Turkish and Islamic parties, which is exactly what happened in Turkey, and brought Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought into power. Based on "Religious Security in Kyrgyzstan" by Emile Nasreddinev _________________________________________

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Judge denies conspiracy-laden effort to stop Kansas ballot drop boxes

A federal judge in Kansas Wednesday denied a conspiracy-laden effort to stop the use of ballot drop boxes and electronic voting machines.
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January 27, 2016

Florida trial judge refuses to allow capital case to proceed in wake of SCOTUS Hurst ruling

A helpful reader altered me to this notable local article reporting on a notable local ruling concerning the administration of the death penalty in Florida in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in Hurst earlier this month. Here are the basic details:

Days after the Supreme Court struck down the way Florida sentences people to die, a Pinellas County circuit judge has ruled that the death penalty cannot be pursued in a first-degree murder case scheduled for trial next month. In an order filed Friday, judge Michael Andrews rejected prosecutors' notice that they intend to seek the death penalty in the case of a Pinellas Park father, Steven Dykes, accused of fatally shaking and striking his 3-month-old daughter in February of last year. "This court concludes that there currently exists no death penalty in the State of Florida in that there is no procedure in place," Andrews wrote. The order is the first of its kind in the state following the Hurst vs. Florida decision on Jan. 12, said Pinellas-Pasco public defender Bob Dillinger. In an 8-1 opinion, the Supreme Court found Florida's death penalty procedures unconstitutional because juries play only an advisory role in recommending life or death. Judges make the ultimate decision after giving "great weight" to jurors' recommendations.... Dillinger, whose office is representing Dykes, said he agreed with Andrews' ruling. "What the judge has done is absolutely correct," Dillinger said, adding Andrews is "right on point." Prosecutors could file an appeal in the case. Another hearing is scheduled on Feb. 16, court records show, with the trial slated to begin Feb. 29. Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett said his office "respectfully" disagrees with judge Andrews, adding that the Hurst decision is not final yet. That will happen after the state asks for a rehearing. Bartlett also said the Legislature still has to create new sentencing guidelines in response to the court's decision. "They issue an opinion and they don't issue any guidelines on how to fix it, and what to do next," Bartlett said of the Hurst opinion. "It's just a dilemma that faces us because the question is how exactly do you fix it? And they didn't really lay out how they thought it should be fixed, so it kind of lends you to, you know, potentially all kinds of challenges." Lawmakers have previously said that they are making fixes to the death penalty sentencing system a priority this session. "It's not the Supreme Court's job to lay out the procedural guidelines," said Charles Rose, a Stetson University law professor and the director of the Center for Excellence in Advocacy. "That's an issue for every legislature in every state to deal with independently." The fate of other murder cases remains in flux until new sentencing guidelines are signed into law, said St. Petersburg criminal defense lawyer Marc Pelletier. "Until the Legislature does its part," he said, "we're still going to be in a situation where everything's unclear."... [L]aw experts across the state agreed with Andrews' order. "The judge has it absolutely right," said Teresa Reid, a University of Florida Levin College of Law professor and assistant director of the Criminal Justice Center. "You need to have a statute in place regarding sentencing, and we don't have that right now." She said that the judge's responsibility is to make sure the trial is fair and is conducted under law. "It seems to me the appropriate thing to do is wait," she said. "We can't proceed when we don't have the procedure in place." Rose, the Stetson law professor, said the decision "makes perfect sense." "Judge Andrews should be commended for doing what the law requires," he said. "It's not only sound, it's courageous because he's the first to step out on the ledge on this issue." Rose predicted that judges across the state would and should follow suit. "My expectation is that there won't be any new death penalty cases tried," he said.

Prior related posts on Hurst and its aftermath:

January 27, 2016 at 01:40 PM | Permalink

Comments

This is what happens when the Supreme Court, in its arrogance, doesn't take into consideration the fact that it declared the system constitutional. Really, what should have happened--is that they just change the process.

The lack of justice here is the fault of the Court.

Posted by: federalist | Jan 27, 2016 5:05:38 PM

I think they knew they were declaring it unconstitutional. They aren't supposed to change the system. That's up to the legislators. Of course, they did rewrite a statute to save the sentencing guidelines, so there is some precedent for your idea that they could have "fixed" it. How hard can it be for Florida to rewrite their laws to conform?

Posted by: USPO | Jan 27, 2016 5:32:21 PM

"How hard can it be for Florida to rewrite their laws to conform?"

How hard is it for the Supreme Court, which only has nine members, not to mess up like this. And unconstitutional laws are modified by courts all the time. The Florida Legislature, relying on SCOTUS precedent, passed a law. It was in place forever, and now the courts want to cheat justice--ok, whatever.

Posted by: federalist | Jan 27, 2016 5:47:59 PM

If Mr. Bartlett wants to know how to fix it, all he has to do is to read part III of Justice Scalia's opinion in Sattazahan, and Scalia's concurring opinion in Ring. It is all there, including Scalia's statement that the finding of one aggravating factor that convicts the def of capital murder "logically belongs in phase one."

Scalia then says once the jury convicts the def of capital murder by finding the def committed "murder simpliciter plus an aggravating factor", the Sixth 'amendment limitations are satisfied and then, as Scalia again says, the state can provide for the determination of the ultimate question of life or death to be made by either a judge or a jury. As long as folks think Ring/Hurst are about jury sentencing, they are not going to understand.

Federalist, I am surprised at your displeasure. As I wrote in a law review article on Ring v Arizona, all this is not a "brave new world" but rather a "reversion to the old world in existence at the founding."

bruce

Posted by: bruce cunningham | Jan 27, 2016 9:17:49 PM

The fix is easy. Either move the finding of the statutory aggravator to guilt phase or require separate verdicts in the penalty phase -- one binding on the statutory aggravator and one advisory on death (unless you fear that the next decision will make advisory sentencing verdicts invalid too, in which case you simply make the verdict binding).

The question is whether the fix is one that requires a legislative solution (i.e. the whole death penalty statute is unconstitutional) or one that simply requires a judicial procedural fix (i.e. the statute is generally constitutional and the only part that is invalid is the part modifying the instructions and verdict to comply with Hurst). My own quick read of the relevant statutes (921.141 and 921.142) is that nothing in those statutes would prevent the Florida courts from having the jury specify in its "advisory" verdict which statutory aggravators were found by the jury. Hurst merely bars the trial court from rendering its final sentencing decision based upon a statutory aggravator not specifically found by the jury.

Posted by: tmm | Jan 28, 2016 10:02:23 AM

I agree with TMM, which is why many death-row inmates who see Hurst as a panacea may be out of luck on harmless error grounds if the jury found the required aggravators and recommended death. Why should they get a windfall remedy just because the statute was applied unconstitutionally adn harmfully to other inmates (e.g., those whose juries did not find the aggravators or whose recommendation against death was overridden by the Judge)?

Posted by: Da Man | Jan 28, 2016 1:58:47 PM

Just as an aside - from someone who does not know anything about the death penalty, I wonder if Hurst will have any impact on the judicial override. As the statute is written now, if the jury comes back recommending death, the trial court can override the verdict and sentence the defendant to life - though it probably rarely happens. The question is - could the Florida legislature thumb its nose at SCOTUS, ax the judicial override altogether, and have the death verdict treated like any other jury sentencing enhancement - mandatory?

Posted by: J_T | Jan 28, 2016 7:19:36 PM

Yes, sort of. But I don't see how that would be thumbing nose at SCOTUS. It would be complying with Hurst. which says only a jury can convict someone of capital murder and then it is completely up to the states who decides life or death.

Posted by: bruce cunningham | Jan 29, 2016 5:53:13 PM

"Federalist, I am surprised at your displeasure. As I wrote in a law review article on Ring v Arizona, all this is not a "brave new world" but rather a 'reversion to the old world in existence at the founding.'"

No, because all this is built on the edifice of the Supreme Court's silly Eighth Amendment "jurisprudence" that snookered states. Scalia brought that up at the Ring OA. And I don't particularly care for rugs getting yanked out from under victims' families either when the process had been blessed by the Court years earlier. The Supreme Court created this mess and then issued a snide opinion that has some sloppiness in it.

And yes, I am a full-throated supporter of Apprendi.

Posted by: federalist | Jan 29, 2016 7:44:25 PM

The legislature would be thumbing its nose because SCOTUS took away the prosecutor-friendly judicial override in favor of death. It would be a tit-for-tat for the legislature to take away the defense-friendly judicial override in favor of life.

Death row inmates won't see any relief from Hurst. FSC already held that Ring is not retroactive in Johnson. Hurst relies so much on Ring/Sixth Amendment that it would be stretch for FSC to find Hurst retroactive.

Posted by: J_T | Jan 29, 2016 7:59:31 PM

Scalia chided Justice Breyer in Ring for thinking the Eighth Amendment had anything to do with the case. And the rug pulling metaphor was created by the Florida Supreme Court for stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the clear line of Sixth Amendment cases from 2002.

However, I am glad to hear your complete support of Apprendi. And that is why I don't understand your position on Hurst. Apprendi was simply Marbury v Madison applied to the criminal context.

Thanks for the comments

Bruce

Posted by: bruce cunningham | Jan 30, 2016 11:30:52 AM

the comment I forgot to make is that the "blessing" of Florida's death penalty system occurred pre Ring.

Posted by: bruce cunningham | Jan 30, 2016 11:32:47 AM

Bruce--if you look at the OA, Scalia was positing that the states' response to the 8th Amendment decisions was to create complex procedures to narrow the class of murderers and that maybe (he ultimately didn't buy this) Arizona's scheme should be saved on that basis. My vote on that would have been yes for Arizona in Ring--unless the Court were to guarantee that no federal court would touch a sentence under pre-Ring law. My beef is not necessarily with Hurst itself (other than the obnoxiousness with which it was written), but with its effect on sentences that were kosher under pre-existing law. Now Florida has to expend resources to hold on to richly deserved judgments.

Alito's dissent is worth considering as well.

And no, SCOFLA shouldn't be blamed either--remember, a lot of those older sentences have been carried out. Supreme Court said yes to Florida's scheme--it wasn't the place of SCOFLA to override SCOTUS precedent.

The Supreme Court has created a mess with its capital punishment jurisprudence. It is sickening to behold. The polity has every right to impose capital punishment, and the Court has imposed a bunch of utter silliness. And it tolerates lawless federal court meddling. It should disgust ANYONE who cares about the rule of law that the Court tolerated the Third Circuit's determination that Pennsylvania wasn't allowed to impose its fugitive disentitlement law. It should bother anyone who cares about the rule of law that the Court allowed S & C lawyers to change horses on appeal. It should bother anyone who cares about the rule of law that Sotomayor yapped about the 6.5 hours at the Pinholster OA (she had to have known better). That's what's so tiresome about "oh gee, Hurst is just Marbury v. Madison"--I get all that--I would just like to see those who incant that stuff practice what they preach when their ox is gored.

Posted by: federalist | Jan 31, 2016 12:51:31 PM

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 "Congressionally Mandated Task Force Calls for Bold Transformation of Federal Corrections System" | Main | What should we expect after Montgomery from states that had resisted Miller retroactivity? 

January 27, 2016

Maine Gov calls for return of death penalty to state for drug dealers and others

This notable recent local article, headlined "Maine should have death penalty for drug dealers, LePage says," reports on some notable recent comments by the chief executive in the Pine Tree state. Here is how the piece starts:

Gov. Paul LePage came out Tuesday in support of reinstating capital punishment in Maine. After starting his day with an apparent joking reference to using the guillotine to stage public executions of drug traffickers, he ended it by saying he believes in the death penalty for drug traffickers, criminals who invade homes and sexually assault the residents, and people convicted of murder. What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back, LePage said during a morning interview on WVOM radio in Bangor. We could have public executions. The Governors Office said the remark was just a joke to illustrate his support for tougher penalties for drug crimes. On Tuesday night, LePage was asked whether he supported the death penalty, specifically using the guillotine, during a town hall meeting at Husson University in Bangor broadcast by WVII-TV. I talk about people dying (from drug overdoses) every day, but no one wants to hear that, LePage told the audience. When I talk about the death penalty everyone wants to protect the drug traffickers. I want to protect the people of Maine. The death penalty was abolished in Maine by the Legislature in 1887. His comments about the guillotine, made just a few weeks after he made national headlines with a remark about drug traffickers coming to Maine and impregnating a young white girl before they leave the state, were picked up by several national media outlets, including CNN and The Washington Post. The only time Maine makes the national news is when the governor says something crazy like this, said Democratic House Majority Leader Jeff McCabe of Skowhegan. McCabe said such remarks produce a spectacle, but do little to solve the issue of ending the drug epidemic.

January 27, 2016 at 09:30 AM | Permalink

Comments

Sorry, but his pushing the idea of using a guillotine tells me he is not actually serious. Even if it could somehow get passed the courts (a proposition I am extremely dubious about) exposure to that much blood is simply a very poor idea. It introduces all sorts of unnecessary risks to the executioner.

That in addition to pushing execution for crimes that the courts simply would not accept (even though I firmly believe the courts wrong on this point).

Posted by: Soronel Haetir | Jan 27, 2016 11:58:53 AM

Technically, the Supreme Court left open major drug trafficking (the idea being it's a crime against the state), but I doubt it's politically palatable and I also doubt the Supreme Court would affirm such a statute if presented with that case.

Posted by: Erik M | Jan 27, 2016 1:17:17 PM

Yes, Kennedy v. LA noted: "We do not address, for example, crimes defining and punishing treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State." An addendum also separated civilian punishments from "military sphere" concerns.

Nonetheless, the comment speaks of "drug traffickers" which is an open-ended term. I would note though that "drug kingpin activity" doesn't quite fit imho with "espionage" and "terrorism" as a "crime against the state." Anyway, Maine abolished the death penalty in 1887. There are likely other scenarios, such as murder of police officers than some open-ended crime against drugs if they brought it back.



Posted by: Joe | Jan 27, 2016 4:03:31 PM

Yeah, I'm not sure drug kingpin activity rises to the same level. On the other hand, I think there's an argument that none of the other charges are at the same level as treason, which has much stronger Due Process protections than any other offense in law.

Posted by: Erik M | Jan 28, 2016 7:08:24 AM

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 "Legislation to clarify intent requirements is long overdue brake on prosecutorial excess" | Main | Florida trial judge refuses to allow capital case to proceed in wake of SCOTUS Hurst ruling 

Today's New York Times includes this notable editorial about the Obama Administration's recent clemency efforts and the need to revamp the entire way in which federal clemency has been approached in modern times. Here is how it begins:

The sudden resignation of the federal pardon attorney, Deborah Leff, an Obama appointee, is the latest evidence that until the clemency process is pried from the grip of the Justice Department, it will remain broken.

The pardon attorneys office, which operates out of the Justice Department, is responsible for reviewing thousands of petitions for pardons and sentence commutations and for making recommendations for clemency to the president. The presidents power to grant mercy in these cases is nearly unlimited, but for most of his time in office, Mr. Obama, like his recent predecessors, has exercised this power only rarely.

Since 2014, Mr. Obama has focused more attention on this issue. To overhaul the notoriously backlogged pardon office, he announced new standards encouraging tens of thousands of federal prisoners to request reductions of their inordinately long drug sentences. And he hired Ms. Leff to replace Ronald Rodgers, whose incompetent tenure included a finding by the Justice Departments inspector general that in 2008 he hid information from President George W. Bush in recommending the denial of a clemency petition.

Ms. Leffs appointment was a promising sign that the dysfunctional pardon process would be repaired. But her tenure didnt last long. On Jan. 15, barely one year after she was formally appointed, she abruptly announced she would step down at the end of this month, saying only that the work of the office should move ahead expeditiously and expand.

As she leaves, more than 10,000 clemency petitions are waiting for review. While the pardon office, which has 10 lawyers, has remained virtually the same size it was 20 years ago, the number of petitions has increased almost sevenfold. The department recently announced plans to hire 16 new lawyers, but this would still be far below the number needed to process the backlog.

The lack of resources is only part of a deeper problem, which is that the pardon office is caught in an incurable institutional conflict. The deputy attorney general has authority to review the pardon attorneys clemency recommendations, and federal prosecutors generally have little interest in revisiting or undoing the departments convictions. As one former pardon attorney put it, the prosecutors are determinedly and irreconcilably hostile to clemency.
 Maine Gov calls for return of death penalty to state for drug dealers and others | Main | "Legislation to clarify intent requirements is long overdue brake on prosecutorial excess" 

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this extended and effective Intercept article headlined "Supreme Court Gives New Hope to Juvenile Lifers, But Will States Deliver?". Here are excerpts:

[I]t took three-and-a-half years and much litigation for the Supreme Court to force the states to apply Miller retroactively. Even now, the Montgomery ruling is no guarantee for release. Todays decision simply provides an opportunity for review, Mark Plaisance, the Louisiana attorney who argued the case before the Court last fall, reminded reporters on Monday. The ruling is just the first step in a long process for Mr. Montgomery.

At 69, Henry Montgomery does not have the luxury of time. Yet he is among the lucky ones  at least he has representation. For other prisoners, finding a lawyer to challenge their continued incarceration is the first in a daunting series of hurdles. According to [Sister Alison] McCrary, word at Angola is that local attorneys will soon be visiting the prison to instruct offender counsel substitutes  jailhouse lawyers  on how to begin filing petitions on behalf of fellow inmates. But juvenile lifers must also wait for the state to decide on the legal venue for such a challenge. Then, ultimately, they must convince the states chosen decision-makers that they are worthy of early release.

From state to state, the question of who will make these decisions is still up in the air. After Miller, several states simply abolished juvenile life without parole, restoring parole eligibility or imposing lesser determinate sentences on those already imprisoned. Other states opted for resentencing hearings, putting individual prisoners fates in the hands of a judge. For those recalcitrant states that refused to do either, Justice Kennedy sought to provide reassurance in Montgomery that the 6-3 ruling does not require States to relitigate sentences, let alone convictions, in every case where a juvenile offender received mandatory life without parole. Instead, he suggested, writing for the majority, states can give a chance for such prisoners to be considered for parole.

In New Orleans, the Louisiana Center for Childrens Rights was quick to embrace this suggestion. The state has a choice to make, the legal nonprofit explained on its website following Mondays ruling. It can offer prisoners costly, lengthy, substantive hearings to the tune of $3 million to fund the first year of defense attorneys alone, according to an estimate by the Louisiana Public Defender Board. Or it can grant juvenile lifers some shot at release by allowing them to go before a parole board  an option the groups director argues saves money, preserves public safety (by ensuring that nobody is released without review), and is fairer for victims, because it will mean that they do not have to go through the difficulties of a new court hearing....

Still, as in most states, winning parole in Louisiana is exceedingly difficult. Last summer, following a thorough review of the state of parole across the country, the Marshall Project found parole boards nationwide to be secretive, driven by politics, and vested with almost unlimited discretion to make decisions on almost any basis. Hearsay, rumor and instinct are all fair game....

As lawyers and scholars continue to parse the ruling in Montgomery, the broader implications are yet to be seen. For now, although it continues to chip away at the harshest sentences for youth, with Montgomery, the Supreme Court has decided once more to preserve the option of juvenile life without parole, meaning that defendants will continue to be sent to die behind bars for crimes they committed as children. There is good reason to think such sentences will be rare  existing data after Miller shows a large drop in new sentences of life without parole for juvenile crimes across the country. And some legal experts have interpreted Montgomery to mean that a prosecutor pursuing such a punishment will now have to somehow prove to a judge that a particular youth is beyond saving as a reformed person  a dubious proposition that should be burdensome in theory.

Yet, it is not hard to imagine that in such cases, the nature of the crime will continue to have the final say. After all, even as it seeks to narrow life without parole sentences for youth offenders, Montgomery keeps intact the same assumption that set the stage for them in the first place. Miller drew a line between children whose crimes reflect transient immaturity and those rare children whose crimes reflect irreparable corruption, Kennedy wrote in Montgomery. It remains possible that a court might encounter the rare juvenile offender who exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible and life without parole is justified.

It was this image of irredeemably bad youth  applied along starkly racist lines  that created the superpredator myth, fueling the very sentences states are now being forced to reconsider. After all, while it may be easy to accept that, as an old man, Henry Montgomery is not the same person he was in 1963, it is difficult to imagine such sober perspective governing the fate of a 17-year-old who today committed the same crime  the fatal shooting of a police officer. These are the very crimes for which mandatory sentencing was invented  and for which parole will be routinely denied.

It is this enduring idea  that a crime tells us everything we need to know about the person who committed it  that must be overcome, by parole boards, by judges, and by the legions of people who now claim the broader mantle of criminal justice reform. The Supreme Court has taken another important step in recognizing that people in prison can change. It is up to the states to give juvenile lifers a meaningful chance to go home  before prison becomes the only home they know.
As Beer Week continues, keep in mind the plentiful other activities going on  from art and theater to the reopening of Dolores Park. You know, some of this stuff would actually go pretty well with beer.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26



GEEK GIRL READING: The Secret Loves of Geek Girls is an anthology of prose, comics, and nonfiction stories from self-identified geek girls, and lo and behold, several are from the Bay Area. Hear editor and publisher Hope Nicholson at the Booksmith, where she's joined by local contributors Mariko Tamaki, Trina Robbins, and Jen Aprahamian. The Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street, 7:30 p.m., Free



MORRISSEY TRAGEDY: Morrissey won't exactly be coming to San Francisco anytime soon, seeing as he thinks our TSA agents are "worse than ISIS" for allegedly groping him. But you can still get a taste of the whiniest musician ever, the "Sultan of Sad" they're calling him, thanks to San Francisco Theater Pub. They're doing four plays about him on the bar stage over at PianoFight in the Tenderloin. PianoFight ,144 Taylor Street, 8 p.m., $10 suggested donation

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27

DOLORES PARK REOPENING: As we mentioned last week, the delayed reopening of the southern half of Dolores Park is finally here. The occasion is definitely one to celebrate, and the plan is to do so with a bunch of lights/glowing shit. Obviously the crowds will get there after work, but it starts before sunset. Dolores Park, 19th and Dolores Streets, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Free

EMO & PUNK MIXTAPE PARTY: The Knockout becomes a temple to nostalgia with "Make Mee a Mixtape." DJs spin the likes of Mineral, The Promise Ring, The Get Up Kids, Thursday, Alkaline Trio, and Saves The Day, all on vinyl. The Knockout, 3223 Mission Street, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., Free

THURSDAY, JANUARY 28

ONE-MAN SHOW: Satchmo at the Waldorf, which SFist reviewed here, stars Louis Armstrong backstage after a near-final performance. It's a standout performance without seeming like a VH1 documentary. A.C.T, 405 Geary Street, 8 p.m., $25 to $120

BAY LIGHTS ARTIST SOLO SHOW: Leo Villareal's work doesn't get much bigger than the Bay Lights, an installation of LEDs on the Bay Bridge that flickers back to life on the 30th. But did you know he's also got a solo show? Spacetime showcases" domestic-scale light sculptures by the artist and has been on display for the last few days. fused space, 1401 16th Street, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 29

DAN DEACON: Somehow the ever-popular, no-hype-necessary Dan Deacon hasn't sold out the ever-regal Fillmore. So yeah, buy tickets soon if you're so inclined. The Fillmore, 1805 Geary Boulevard, 8 p.m. doors 9 p.m. show, $20

DOUBLE DJ SET: A major player on the international DJ circuit, Scarlett Etienne graces Audio with a intimate set. But wait  Audio has teamed up with Boudooir to give you another headliner, and Etienne is complemented by London-born Silky. Audio SF, 316 11th St, 9 p.m., $10

SATURDAY, JANUARY 30



PORN FESTIVAL: Dan Savage, known sex advice giver and smut peddler, brings his yearly home-grown porn festival  Hump  to the Victoria in San Francisco. It's all amateurs in all genres making movies they like and feel cool about you seeing. And in the spirit of seeing risque films, go to the late show (the others have sold out). Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th Street, 11 p.m., $25



TODD FRANCIS ART SHOW: It's the last day for the first solo show at FFDG from Todd Francis titled Thanks A Lot. Tour new studio work comprising five charcoal drawings each nearly six feet tall as well as four large water colors. Todd Francis makes skateboard art that doesnt suck," says Vice magazine. "He is responsible for the eagle and pigeon logos that have become synonymous with Anti-Hero, as well as a wealth of fucked up, edgy, and awesome graphics for more brands than I care to count. FFDG, 2277 Mission Street, 1 to 6 p.m., free

SUNDAY, JANUARY 31

UNICORN ART: The Legion of Honor is currently displaying a unicorn worth more than the rest of them put together: a work by Raphael, Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn. You can read more about it here on SFist. Legion of Honor, 100 34th Avenue, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., $10 adult admission

TENDERLOIN DOCUMENTARY: It's nearly impossible to catch Robert Zagones Drugs in the Tenderloin, a documentary shot guerilla-style in 1966. But after playing to rapt audiences at the Tenderloin Museum, it's now headed to the Roxie Theater. Get tickets quick because the first showing, a Q &A on Thursday, already sold out  this and a few other screenings were added to accommodate demand. Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, 4:30 p.m., $12
In these Troubled San Francisco Times, there is a lot of talk about who was here when, and what that does (or doesn't) mean. In an effort to both assist newcomers and take long-time residents down memory lane, we present to you Ask a San Francisco Native, a column penned by SF native and longtime SFist contributor Rain Jokinen, which is inspired by a similar one on our sister site Gothamist, and is intended to put to rest all those questions only a native of this city can answer. Send yours here!



Dear Rain,

Was it really as scary as it sounded in Season of the Witch when the Zebra killers were around? Or worse?!

Yours,

Having Nightmares Just Thinking About It

Dear HNJTA,

First, how old do you think I am?! Everything I know about the Zebra Killers I learned, perhaps like you, from reading David Talbot's book Season of the Witch. Anyone who has any interest in the somewhat recent history of San Francisco (late 1960s to early 1980s) owes it to themselves to read that book. (You don't even have to buy it if you don't want to! The library has over 700 copies of it since It was the selection for the SFPL's One City One Book "book club" last year.

I won't go into the details of the Zebra Killings  Beth Spotswood wrote a good summation for SFist a few years back, and Wikipedia is always a good source when it it comes to true crime  but the key facts to know are: the crimes happened in 1973-74; the killers were racially motivated; the killings were REALLY brutal, with 23 known victims; and future mayor Art Agnos was almost one of those victims, as he was shot by one of the killers, but survived.

Here's the section from Talbot's book that freaked me out the most:

Pumped up by the bloodthirsty rhetoric, the Zebra killers cruised San Francisco in search of white victims, riding in a Black Self-Help Moving van and a black Cadillac borrowed from Manney. The bloodshed began one balmy evening in October 1973 following a meeting in the loft, when Green, Cooks, and Anthony Harris, another ex-con recently released from San Quentin, began prowling the streets of the Excelsior, a drab neighborhood of stucco bungalows and lowered expectations. They were on the lookout for white children, because killing women and kids was the quickest way to become a Death Angel. Cooks, who as a boy had tried to smother his dozing mother with a pillow, had particularly savage fantasies about white kids, telling his Muslim brothers that he wanted to pick them up by their feet and smash their brains out against a wall. On Francis Street, Cooks and Green pulled a gun on two young girls and a teenage boy and tried to hustle them into their van, but the kids broke away and saved their lives by dashing down the street.

After I read that, I knew I had to ask my dad about the Zebra Killings since I had, in fact, been a little white kid possibly roaming some of the same streets they had been targeting. (Although, being that I was only three, it's unlikely there was much wandering going on).

But here's where it gets disappointing: My dad really didn't remember being that freaked out about it, at all. He says he knew it was going on, but it was just something that he might hear on the local news, or read in a newspaper a couple times a week; it wasn't something he was very concerned about in day-to-day life. He admits he and my mother might have been a little caught up in their own little world to notice, but also points out that since there was no such thing as a 24-hour news cycle, it was easier to remain slightly oblivious to the horrors happening in the city.

So, I'd love to turn it over to any other natives or long-term residents who might have more vivid memories of those dark days and the Zebra Killers' horrible crimes. Please share your stories in the comments. And keep your questions coming!

Check out previous Ask A San Francisco Native columns here

Rain Jokinen was born and raised in San Francisco and, miraculously, still calls the city home. Her future plans include becoming a millionaire, buying a condo complex, and then tearing it down to replace it with a dive bar. You can ask this native San Franciscan your questions here.


The open-air drug market that is UN Plaza just got a bit less druggy after a joint task force consisting of the SFPD, Alameda County Narcotics Task Force, and the DEA made 48 arrests in connection with a Honduran-led drug ring. So if you were headed there for your Oxy today, you might be out of luck.

As ABC 7 exclusively reports, many of the men were living together in 11 homes, primarily in the East Bay, and traveling by BART to Civic Center to sell their wares each day.

From anecdotal knowledge of the area (I lived a half block away for over six years), I can tell you that where the CVS now is at 7th and Market, near that BART entrance, was always a pill corner, and harder drugs could be found across the street, around Carl's Jr. The police report shows seizures of quantities of methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, OxyContin, and benzos, along with $75,000 in cash, and some handguns.

Police responded to increasing complaints from residents and workers in the area, according to ABC 7, although, again, from personal experience, the fact of drug dealing in the area dates back a couple decades. The volume and frequency of the deals had, allegedly, gotten worse recently.

One area "regular" told the station that he'd gotten used to seeing a lot of drug dealers loitering around the top of the BART station escalator, and suddenly they disappeared.

Apparently the arrests have been ongoing over the last three weeks, and took place largely out of sight, at these East Bay residences  complete with reports that "people were literally jumping out the windows" when authorities descended. The ring is said to have been being led by illegal immigrants from Honduras. Police say more arrests are still to come.

The investigation involved surveilling men who were conducting deals in the area, which has become known for open drug dealing with impunity for a very long time.

But, perhaps more importantly, among the 48 arrests were two men suspected of murder, as well.


Listen up, burger fans: If you haven't plunked down the $24 for the Bourbon Steak burger, available only on the bar menu, you may want to get over there in the next two months. Because come late March, the restaurant is shutting its doors at the Westin St. Francis, as Eater reports.

The issue is the restaurant's lease, and likely some high demands, money-wise, from Westin  Eater notes that newly hired chef Thomas Griese, who recently moved here from another Michael Mina property in Miami, likely was not privy to the lease negotiation drama.

Mina has announced that March 31 will be Bourbon Steak's last day in the space that once housed his eponymous restaurant  barring some last-minute negotiating because, of course, publicizing all this could end up being a negotiating tactic! According to Inside Scoop, though, Mina says the decision was mutual between him and the hotel, and the parting is "amicable." The Bourbon Steak at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara is unaffected.

Restaurant Michael Mina spent part of the last decade in the storied, columned space off the Westin's historic lobby, which was earlier home to Compass Rose, and before that the Patent Leather Bar, designed by famed architect Timothy Pflueger.

Mina says he still wants to have a Bourbon Steak location somewhere in San Francisco, so the burger may not be gone forever. Currently, it comes topped with tomato relish, roasted garlic aioli, house pickles, and quadrello di bufala cheese, but it's always been the house-ground meat mixture that makes this thing awesome, and worthy of a special treat with some red wine.

Related: The 25 Best Burgers In SF And Oakland
On New Year's Day, 2016, Riptide co-owner Les James and general manager Alisha Liscinsky took a plunge into the icy Pacific just blocks from their bar. They and their many Sunset neighborhood patrons have started each year this way for some time  the Chronicle informs us that the original plan for what they call "the Plunge" was hatched, surprise surprise, over drinks at the bar.

But this year, something was missing. There was no traditional apres-swim cocktail by the well-loved fireside at the Riptide to be had, as the bar has been undergoing heavy reconstruction following a fire that did an estimated $600,000 of damage in August.

Nonetheless, Liscinsky is thankful. I cant believe how amazing people have been to us, she said from the beach. Theyve given us temporary jobs, theyve held benefits, plus all the calls and texts. That's not to mention a wildly successful gofundme.com campaign to rebuild the Riptide.

Now all the hard work and support appears to be paying off. By next year's plunge  in fact as early as sometime this spring  the Riptide will return. According to San Francisco magazine, James and co-owner David Quinby have finally installed a new roof, but other elements of the Riptide, like the antiques and ephimera for which it was known, have been harder to replace.

"We lost all the original Barbary Coast pieces, and we're trying to find more of those," Quinby told the magazine. Though "the slate is wiped clean," he says they'd like "to open as the same musical chapel we were before."

One casualty of the fire was Boo, a 150-year-old taxidermy caribou head that watched over the bar as a kind of mascot. "I love mountain goats," says Quinby, who is looking for a suitable substitute for Boo. "And Les found a walrus head, so who knows what we'll end up with."

In the end, it's the demeanor of the animal they're seeking that counts. "We're looking for an animal with as peaceful an expression as Boo had," Quinby says. "She seemed to approve of the musicians who were playingwhatever was going on."

Previously: Torn Apart By Fire, The Riptide Is Fundraising To Support Employees

[Updated] Fire In Outer Sunset Closes Riptide Bar, Disrupts Muni Service


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When you think that you are right, you could be wrong...When you think that you are wrong, you could be right...Things are never what they at first appear to be. Acts 17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
Todays top picks from our online calendar. Find more events at siouxcityjournal.com/calendar.

Waffles for Warriors: Veterans are invited to enjoy a free waffle meal 9-11 a.m. with their immediate family members at Support Siouxland Soldiers, 1551 Indian Hills Dr. Please provide proof of service, first come, first served. Visit www.supportsiouxlandsoldiers.com for more information.

Million Dollar Quartet: Musical inspired by the electrifying true story of the famed recording session that brought together rock 'n' roll icons Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins for the first and only time. Show at 7:30 p.m. at Orpheum Theater, 528 Pierce St. Individual tickets on sale through www.OrpheumLive.com or by calling 800-514-ETIX.

Michael Thorne: Michael will take you on a wild and hysterical tour of the minefield that is his life 8-11:30 p.m. at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Sioux City, 111 3rd St. Must be 21 or older to attend. Tickets, $16.05-$26.75, are available at www.hardrockcasinosiouxcity.com or by calling 844-222-7625.
SIOUX CITY | Donald Trump is bringing his Republican presidential campaign back to Sioux City just a day before the Iowa caucuses.

A Trump rally is scheduled for 6 p.m. Sunday at the Orpheum Theatre, according to the Eventbrite website, where are advance tickets are available.

Trump, the national GOP frontrunner, is locked in a tight race with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in Iowa, site of Monday's caucuses, the first test of the presidential nominating season.

This is Trump's second visit to Northwest Iowa in a week. On Saturday, he spoke to more than 2,000 people at Dordt College in Sioux Center. The billionaire business developer and reality TV star last appeared in Sioux City in October, when he drew more than 2,300 people to the West High School gym.

Trump will be in downtown Sioux City Sunday around the same time and place as Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The former Secretary of State is scheduled to speak at a 5:15 p.m. rally at the Sioux City Convention Center, just blocks from the Orpheum.
SIOUX CITY | Siouxlanders tired of gray, dreary days likely welcomed the sight of the rising sun Wednesday morning.

Fog in some areas shrouded the sky, but it should dissipate early in the morning, said Kyle Weisser, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls.

High clouds will keep the sky from being completely clear Wednesday, but they won't stop a warm-up that's expected to last into the weekend.

Weisser said temperatures Wednesday and Thursday are expected to hit 35-40 degrees. Those highs could rise to 45 degrees by Friday and Saturday.

There's a slight chance for some light rain or snow Saturday night, otherwise conditions will be dry until next Tuesday, Weisser said. A developing system is expected to move into the area with the potential to bring snow, followed by below-normal temperatures.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa | The Iowa Republican caucus race is going down to the wire with a pair of polls released Tuesday delivering a split decision on whether its Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the lead.

A Quinnipiac University Poll found Trump is maintaining a 2 percentage point lead over Cruz among likely Iowa GOP caucusgoers, 31 percent to 29 percent, The poll found the same results when it polled at the beginning of January.

An Iowa State University/WHO-HD poll, however, found the top spots reversed with 25.8 percent backing Cruz and 18.9 percent favoring Trump.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson are jockeying for third in the race that will be decided Feb. 1 when Republicans gather at more than 1,600 precinct caucuses around the state. Quinnipiac had Rubio in third at 15 percent and Carson at 6 percent. The ISU/WHO-HD results were much closer with Carson at 13.4 percent and Rubio at 12.3 percent.

Rounding out the GOP field in the Q-Poll, Jeb Bush polled 4 percent, Carson 6, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie 3, former CEO Carly Fiorina 1, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee 2, Ohio Gov. John Kasich 1, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul 5, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum with zero.

ISU/WHO-HD results showed: Rand Paul 6.9 percent; Bush 3.8; Huckabee 3.7; Fiorina 1.1; and Santorum, Chris Christie and John Kasich at less than 1 percent.

These polls follow those last week by Monmouth College and Loras College in Dubuque. Monmouth found Cruz leading Trump 27 percent to 25 percent. Carson was third at 11 percent and Rubio polled 9 percent.

However, pollsters say the race for the proverbial three tickets out of Iowa is not settled.

Between now and caucus night, any number of events and candidate developments can affect the outcome, said Mack Shelley, chairman of the ISU political science department. Watch for any issues that catch fire just before the caucuses, and pay particular attention to any statements candidates make on important issues and last-minute campaign advertising designed to sway undecided voters.

Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, noted that with Sarah Palins endorsement of Trump and Gov. Terry Branstads criticism of Cruz, and despite  or because of  Sen. Cruzs 'New York values comments (about Trump), the race is too close to call.

That suggests it all comes down to turnout, he said.

One week before the caucuses, the question is which candidate has the best field organization, Brown said. If the events of the last two weeks havent moved the needle, one wonders what would change it in the next six days.

One thing Brown is more certain of is that it is increasingly evident, the conservative wing of the Republican Party, at least in Iowa, is carrying the day.

Cruz is taking the lions share of the right wing among Iowa likely Republican caucusgoers, with Trump taking a good chunk and only a few scraps for the rest of the pack.

Quinnipiac found Cruz leads Trump:

-- 50 to 34 percent among self-professed Tea Party members

-- 39 to 27 percent among white, born-again Evangelical Christians

-- 49 to 29 percent among voters describing themselves as very conservative.

Trump leads Cruz:

-- 29 to 21 percent among self-identified somewhat conservative voters

-- 37 to 6 percent among voters claiming to be moderate or liberal.

The economy and jobs are the most important issues in deciding their vote 27 percent of likely GOP caucusgoers, according to Quinnipiac. Eighteen percent listed terrorism as their No. 1 issue.

ISU/WHO-HD found terrorism has replaced the economy as voters top concern. In light of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, thats no surprise to James McCormick, ISU political science professor.

To be successful, presidential candidates will increasingly need to reassure Iowans  and Americans  that their policies will keep the country safe, McCormick said. Although economic concerns usually dominate the agenda in presidential elections, national security concerns are likely to be equally important for many voters throughout this election cycle.

With less than a week until the Iowa precinct caucuses, Hillary Clinton has a slight lead over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the ISU/WHO-HD poll.

Clinton leads Sanders 47.4 percent to 45 percent. Thats a significant jump for Sanders from the poll done in November that showed Clinton leading 49.5 percent to 27.8 percent. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malleys support has fallen to less than 1 percent in the new poll.
Early signs for strengthening the fight against bullying in Iowa this year do not, frankly, appear promising.

It's time for anti-bullying champions, including Gov. Terry Branstad, to redouble their efforts.

Anti-bullying bills were discussed, but fell short of passage in each of the last three legislative sessions. Last year's bill, which we supported and advocate for again this year, passed the Senate but didn't get a vote on the floor of the House. The bill would have allowed a school to investigate alleged bullying incidents occurring away from school property; provided training for school districts in properly investigating bullying claims; and established a student mentoring program to promote student engagement in prevention of bullying. We believe the bill would have addressed the pervasive problem of cyberbullying in effective fashion.

We commended Branstad in September when he issued an executive order through which he established the Governor's Office for Bullying Prevention at the University of Northern Iowa. Through the office, Branstad sought to meet some provisions of failed anti-bullying legislation, including training for school personnel and establishment of a student mentoring program. Also, the office was created to promote YourLifeIowa.org, an existing 24-hour hotline for students who feel bullied at school, work with the Department of Education to develop guidelines for responding to bullying and work with the Education Department and schools across the state to provide more consistency in reporting of bullying.

"We're not waiting for the Legislauture," Branstad said in September. "Bullying is not acceptable, and we're going to do everything we can to stop it, to stamp it out in Iowa."

However, we were disappointed to learn Branstad didn't direct funds to the office in his budget recommendation for the next fiscal year. In a Jan. 19 Associated Press story, a Branstad spokesman said the governor hopes the bullying office will be funded under a proposed $8 million request of new money for the Board of Regents. Whether the Regents will fund the office remains unclear.

In our view, a direct recommendation for funding would have delivered a stronger message from Branstad about the importance of the office and the importance of bullying prevention.

The same Associated Press story reported new House Speaker Linda Upmeyer, R-Clear Lake, said she doesn't expect House Republicans will take up anti-bullying legislation this year due to creation of the new (but so far unfunded for next year) Governor's Office for Bullying Prevention. Upmeyer, who was House majority leader last year, and Kraig Paulsen, who was speaker last year, were the biggest reasons an anti-bullying bill didn't land on Branstad's desk for signature in 2015 because they wouldn't give the bill a vote on the House floor.

Creation of the governor's office strikes us as a valuable contribution to this discussion, but we believe strengthening state law remains the most effective way to protect Iowa children from bullying.

What do we want to see happen on the bullying front this year? Our hope is the Regents fund the new governor's office and lawmakers do what's right and pass a bill.

Simply put, bullying is wrong. It's past time for this state to say so in unequivocal language.
I am surprised that the Democratic Party establishment is not having their next presidential debate at 5 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday. This way they could protect their self-anointed standard bearer, Hillary Clinton, from being overtaken by Bernie Sanders.

With the revelation that 125 FBI agents are looking into Clintons email server and what in my opinion are her subsequent dishonest statements concerning this server, it appears that the Democratic electorate is turning in Bernies direction.

Having that private in-home server was careless and selfish and could have put our country at great risk from hacking it. What state secrets were discovered by our enemies? Now with 125 FBI agents diverted in this direction, these 125 FBI agents cannot focus on the more important task of keeping our country safe and prosecuting other citizens who break the rules (which you and I abide by), Hillary has further put our country at great risk.

As much as I disagree with Bernie Sanders and his socialistic/European viewpoints, I respect him because he is true to his values, authentic, and trustworthy, which are the character flaws dragging Clinton down in the polls.

Feel the Bern," Hillary, you deserve what you are going to get - you did it to yourself. - Bill Young, Le Mars, Iowa
DES MOINES | If Iowa young people are mirroring their parents opinions, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders might expect to have a good night Monday at the states first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses kicking off the 2016 presidential selection process.

More than 50,000 students participated in the statewide 2016 Iowa Youth Presidential Straw Poll on Tuesday -- the largest turnout for the balloting organized and tabulated by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate.

Participating students in more than 280 schools in over 80 counties across Iowa were allowed to vote in both the Republican and the Democratic straw polls, and when the statewide results were tabulated Trump was the top vote-getter on the Republican side and Sanders was the overwhelming choice on the Democratic side.

In the Republican contest, Trump garnered 25 percent of the vote in preliminary results, while the Secretary of States office said that as of Tuesday evening, Marco Rubio was in second place with 18.4 percent and Dr. Ben Carson a close third with 18.0 percent.

Ted Cruz was in fourth place at 15 percent, but Pate noted that more schools were expected to turn in results on Wednesday. Other Republicans receiving votes were Jeb Bush at 6.8 percent, Carly Fiorina at 3.4 percent, Rand Paul at 3.3 percent, Chris Christie at 1.7 percent, Mike Huckabee with 1.6 percent, John Kasich with 1.1 percent and Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmore with less than 1 percent. Other choices or write-in candidates totaled 4.8 percent in unofficial results, according to the Secretary of States Web site.

On the Democratic side, Sanders tabulated 53 percent of the Youth Straw Poll ballots, followed by Hillary Clinton with 30 percent and Martin OMalley at 10 percent.

I think its important that young peoples voices are heard and that we give them an early opportunity to participate in our elections, said Pate, who offered the straw poll as part of the Caucus 101 curriculum developed by his office for Iowa schools.

Students participating in the Straw Poll included grades kindergarten through 12 with varied age groups and grades depending on the school.
Iran's navy warned a U.S. warship on Wednesday to leave waters near the Strait of Hormuz where the Iranians were testing submarines, destroyers and missile launchers, news agencies reported.

The commander of Iran's fleet, Rear-Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, told Tasnim news agency the U.S. ship was trying to collect information in the Sea of Oman - an area close to the Strait, a vital oil and gas shipping route - and said it left quickly after the alert.

There was no immediate reaction from Washington which this month joined other world powers in lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic after Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program.

THIS BETTER NOT BE FUCKING TRUE!The piss ant Iranian Navy "warns" the US Navy and they turn tail and flee? Jesus, I'm working on another day of bad attitude if this is true.What makes me suspect that this report is true? No immediate reaction. Just plain wow.
There are many fitness goals out there that we desire. Some of us want to be leaner and others wish to put on muscle mass. The thing is, for you to achieve your fitness goals, you need to
The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.
Netherlands' EU commissioner claims more than half of those flocking to Europe were not fleeing from war

The European Union is committing 'ritual suicide' with its migration policy , according to the Slovak prime minister.





Robert Fico urged the 28-member bloc to stop the inflow of migrants and called the EU's proposed quota system for distributing migrants a 'complete fiasco'.





His warning came as the Netherlands' EU commissioner Frans Timmermans claimed 60 per cent of those flocking to Europe were economic migrants and not fleeing from war.

+3 +3 Robert Fico urged the 28-member bloc to stop the inflow of 'illegal migrants' and called the EU's proposed quata system for distributing migrants a 'complete fiasco'



The 51-year-old Slovak leader, a left-winger known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, told Czech newspaper Pravo: 'I feel that we in the EU are now committing ritual suicide and we're just looking on.'





Fico, whose party is expected to win a general election in March, said the EU should first of all stop the influx of 'illegal migrants'.

'If it takes until late 2016 or 2017 for Europe to set up its planned border and coastguard force, the EU will have killed itself,' Fico said, adding that Slovakia had 300 police officers ready to deploy at the external borders of the passport-free Schengen area.





'We often stew in our own juices, tackling quotas which are nonsense... and in the meantime several thousand migrants arrive in Europe every day,' the premier said.

Slovakia, a eurozone member of 5.4 million people, has filed a lawsuit against the EU-proposed quota system for distributing migrants across the continent, just like neighbouring Hungary.





Fico said the system had turned out 'a complete fiasco' and that thousands of migrants distributed according to quotas were impossible to integrate in Slovakia.

+3 +3 Slovakia, a eurozone member of 5.4 million people, has filed a lawsuit against the EU-proposed quota system for distributing migrants across the continent, just like neighbouring Hungary. Migrants are pictured walking across the Macedonian border into Serbia



'If, based on temporary or permanent quotas, someone forces us to import 50,000 people with completely different habits and religions - and these are mostly young men - I can't imagine how we could integrate them. We can't,' he said.





'They would end up in a space with its own life and its own rules, and this is why I'm saying this idea is wrong and unfeasible.'





Holland's EU commissioner Frans Timmermans claimed more than half of those coming to Europe as asylum seekers are not fleeing conflict.





He told Nos : 'More than half of the people now coming to Europe come from countries where you can assume they have no reason whatsoever to ask for refugee status. More than half, 60%.





He said he based his claim on figures from European border agency Frontex - statistics that are yet to be made public.





Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has invited fellow EU members Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to a special summit on migration next month as the bloc grapples with the record migrant crisis, the Czech prime minister said on Tuesday.

+3 +3 More than one million people reached Europe in 2015, most of them refugees fleeing war and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, according to the United Nations refugee agency.



'The Czech Republic will call an extraordinary summit of the Visegrad-four countries for February 15,' Premier Bohuslav Sobotka said, specifying that the migrant crisis would top the agenda.





His spokesman was not immediately available to give details.

The Czech Republic holds the rotating presidency of the so-called Visegrad group, which brings together four central European ex-communist countries.

All four have rejected the EU's plan for quotas to distribute migrants across the continent.





They have instead insisted on tighter border control for the 26-member passport-free Schengen zone and other steps that would reduce the influx of refugees and migrants into Europe.





More than one million people reached Europe in 2015, most of them refugees fleeing war and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, according to the United Nations refugee agency.




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Caricature by Donkey Hotey with Flickr Creative Commons License.

Data curated by InsideGov

Data curated by InsideGov

What a strange and unpredictable presidential campaign were having. When Donald Trump first entered the race, the big story was that Jon Stewart, having announced his retirement from the Daily Show, would be missing out on the opportunity to take advantage of the endless material that Trump would be providing. For several months, pundits pointed to each most recent outrageous statement as foreshadowing the end of his front-runner status.Now, as we move close to actual voting in Iowa and New Hampshire, its not at all clear that any other Republican candidate is going to be able to stop the Donalds momentum. Stranger still, stories are starting to appear citing high-level Republican insiders who would rather take their chances with Trump as their nominee than the widely despised junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.These two candidates set off alarm bells on both ends of the political spectrum. Establishment Republicans fear that having either of them as the Partys presidential candidate will have dire consequences for candidates up and down the ticket. Democrats hope for that outcome but fear the impact on cherished programs to say nothing of future Supreme Court appointees if either Trump or Cruz should manage to win the presidency.Commentators keep engaging in wishful thinking that one of the more mainstream contendersJeb Bush, Chris Christie, or John Kasichis starting to surge in the polls, but theres little support for that hope. At this point, Trump still looks like the most likely bet.The Democratic side of the equation, widely expected to be wrapped up for Hillary Clinton by now, is more unsettled than most observers had predicted. Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is drawing big crowds, has identified some of Clintons vulnerabilities, and is doing well in the polls.What makes the Democratic establishment nervous is the possibility that a Sanders nomination might mean a Democratic loss in the fall even if the opponent is Donald Trump. Actually, the various poll match ups dont mean much at this point regardless of who wins either of the nominations, but all the possibilities underscore what an unusual year it is.You might even look at Sanders strong showing at this point as opening a path to victory for Martin OMalley. Not likely, youre saying, but a lot of not likely things have happened already in this campaign.OMalleys record of accomplishment as governor of Maryland should have made him a strong contender for progressive support in the Democratic contest, but he has shown no signs of traction, momentum or anything else to encourage him thus far. Assume for a minute that Clinton falters and Sanders looks to be the new frontrunner.In the same way that some Republicans might panic at the prospect of a Trump or Cruz nominationat the same time as others would be delightedSanders as a possible nominee might drive some Democrats to OMalley as a safer candidate for the fall.More likely is that OMalley will not outperform his polling in either Iowa or New Hampshire and will be hard pressed to continue after those two contests. Even if he drops out of the race, however, OMalley has shown himself to be a credible and knowledgeable candidate who will have other elections in the future to consider.Speculating about the November General Election based on campaigns in which no one has voted is hazardous at best. As odd as things have been so far, they may look very different by spring. Id still bet that Clinton will slog her way through a competitive process and win the nomination. Not a certainty, but the most likely outcomeThe Republican field still has too many candidates to make the calculations easy or straightforward. If Trump or Cruz does end up winning the nomination, either would face the prospect of significant defections in the general election, perhaps not to the Democratic candidate but instead to staying home.A third party candidate is not impossible though it seemed highly unlikely until former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg started exploring his options. The legal, organizational and financial obstacles are considerable and might only be overcome by a well-known, self-financing candidate like Bloomberg. Of course, a person who also fits that description is Donald Trump, but thats getting way ahead of where we are today. Could we really have two very New York billionaires running against a New York transplant (Clinton)?The key, both in the nominating process and in the general election, will be turnout, both how many and who. Primaries dont draw large crowds, but do attract those on the left and the right rather than the middle.If an outlier like Cruz were the nominee, would he encourage or discourage turnout? The same question can be asked about all the candidates, but the answers are neither easy to predict nor the same for all of them.The twists and turns are far from over in this campaign will little or no precedent to guide our understanding. Hang on.
WASHINGTON

(Jan. 27, 2016)Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Kensington, joined a group of Democratic senators Wednesday to announce legislation to repeal a 10-year-old law that shields the gun industry and gun sellers from civil lawsuits when their product is used in violent crimes."This legislation is about getting rid of a green light for negligence, it's about having the gun industry play by the same rules as everybody else," Van Hollena Democrat who is running for the Senatesaid in a press conference at the United States Capitol.Van Hollen is working alongside Senators Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., to seek the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act . The PLCAA was enacted in October 2005 after a series of lawsuits against the gun industry by a number of cities and counties. The law doesn't shield manufacturers for damages resulting from defective products. The PLCAA is codified at 15 U.S.C.  7901-7903."Where we require and expect of every other industry, whether car makers or drug companies, to act with reasonable care for the safety of the public, (current law) means the gun industry can act with near total impunity," Schiff said. The law gives the manufacturers, sellers and their trade groups unprecedented immunity from liability in the state and federal court system, he said.Van Hollen and the senators have the support of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun safety group."Instead of justice, victims of gun violence are treated like second class citizens just because their loved one happened to be killed by a gun instead of any other object. Think about how absurd that is." said Dan Gross, the president of the Brady CenterThe National Rifle Association and a Maryland-based gun manufacturer, LWRC International, did not return calls by publication time requesting comment on the Democrats' bill.Last week, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin and a group of fellow Democratic senators called for immediate funding of a gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."When you have an epidemic, you look for ways to treat and cure the disease," Cardin said. "Gun violence is an epidemic affecting too many of our communities and inaction by Congress is not an option."Hector Adames, the uncle of a 13-year-old boy, Josh, who was shot and killed in Chicago in 2001, was also in attendance at the Wednesday press conference.Josh Adames' friend pointed what he thought was an unloaded gun at Josh and fired."Because the gun manufacturer hadn't installed an inexpensive and effective safety mechanism, the boy had no way of knowing the gun still had a bullet in the chamber," Hector Adames said.Adames' family sued the gun manufacturer but their case was dismissed on appeal."For too long Congress has shielded the gun industry for too long Congress has enabled Congress to put profits ahead of people," Hector Adames said.
SOS Aloha Book Reviews and More - Welcome to Paradise!
JACL endorsed marriage equality in 1994

For more than 50 years, the LGBT people have had an unlikely ally: the Japanese American community.

The Japanese American Citizens League has participated in protests, parades, amicus briefs, and celebrations for LGBT equality, including marriage equality, for years.

Its addressed in the meeting minutes, said Priscilla Ouchida, executive director of JACL. Going way back to the 50s and 60s, theyre talking about rights of, as they called them back then, homosexuals.

This was unheard of -- the LGBT civil rights movement didnt even start until 1969 with the Stonewall riots in New York City, so what was it that struck Japanese Americans to protect LGBT people?

Ouchida says it sits in their own history of oppression in America -- both Chinese and Japanese people started arriving in the mid 1800s and were met with welcome arms for them to work, but not to be a part of the country. The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended the rights of African Americans to be citizens -- but not for Asian Americans. They would forever be considered permanent aliens, and not be allowed to vote, as well as facing discrimination in laws that applied to people of color.

With multiple Japanese American groups formed in the U.S., they joined forces in 1929 to create the Japanese American Citizens League. Things got even worse for them when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, sending the U.S. into World War II. Anti-Japanese sentiments were rampant, and out of fear, the government rounded up Japanese Americans into internment camps for the remainder of the war. In all, about 110,000 Japanese Americans were kept in war relocation centers -- including all of Ouchidas grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, and older cousins.

Its this experience of discrimination and imprisonment that leads Ouchida to believe thats why the early board members of JACL were so in favor of standing up for the rights of others, including LGBT people.

No one spoke up on our behalf, she said. We realized we needed to help others.

In 1946, JACL created a campaign against anti-alien land laws, followed by helping pass the Soldier Brides Act to protect the foreign wives of soldiers and their children. This continued into the 50s with JACL co-signing amicus briefs for Brown vs. Board of Education, repealing Idahos anti-miscegenation laws, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963, calling for economic sanctions against South Africa when it was in the throes of apartheid, and much more.

Finally in 1993, JACL wrote a resolution in support of ending discrimination of LGBT members of the Armed Forces, and in any other workplace. The next year, they approved a resolution supporting equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Twenty-one years before marriage equality was the law of the land.

I know we were ahead of the curb, Ouchida said. I always ask myself that question, why us? Why do we stand up for others so early?

Also, the board has ties to the LGBT community  Ouchidas daughter is a lesbian, and other board members have LGBT children, leaving them especially invested to make the world a better place for their children.

Many Japanese identify as Buddhist, which does not consider being gay or transgender to be a taboo -- another reason Ouchida thinks they were so on board with protecting LGBT people so early in the fight.

They talk about this as a civil rights issue, she explained, not a religious one.

This year, JACL wrote a resolution in support of transgender people and recognizing their struggles. Theyre also active in speaking out against bills that would prevent Syrian refugees from coming to the U.S., a situation all too familiar to Japanese Americans.

The rhetoric keeps on coming up again, Ouchida said. We have to remind people.
The Campbell Foundation, based in Fort Lauderdale, recently awarded a grant to yet another worthy cause to research HIV/AIDS.

The foundation awarded $48,900 to Dr. Sahera Dirajlal-Fargo for her research on young patients with HIV, namely the inflammation of the lining of their blood vessels. She is a physician at the in the University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.

According to the CDC, in 2009, there were 10,834 people with HIV/AIDS younger than 13 years old in the United States. Thankfully, while the number of women with HIV giving birth has increased, with proper diagnosis and treatment, the number of babies contracting the virus from their mothers has decreased.

Unfortunately, the numbers for HIV positive children is much higher around the world -- the majority live in Sub Saharan Africa. According to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, more than 600 children are newly infected with the disease every single day. Ninety percent of them contract it from their mothers during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding. Without treatment, most of them wont live to turn 5.

However, as they live longer, theyll be spending decades taking drugs that can do damage to their bodies.

Theyre going to have to be on these drugs a lot longer than their adult counterparts, Ken Rapkin, program officer at the Campbell Foundation, said of pediatric patients. While the drugs are making people live longer, theyre getting these comorbidities and a lot of it is cardiovascular.

With children growing into adulthood with the disease, Dr. Dirajlal-Fargo wants to better understand the impact of the medications they are taking for such a long time. Inflammation in the blood vessels has been a major issue. With the grant money, she hopes to determine whether markers of inflammation in young HIV-positive patients is linked to markers of cardiovascular risk and insulin resistance.

It is imperative that we evaluate children and adolescents risk of developing these diseases, Dr. Dirajlal-Fargo said in a press release.

While the doctor has looked at 10 cases, for better research she requires a larger sample. She will be following 50 HIV positive children, matched in age and gender to HIV negative children to compare changes over time.

We know all this stuff about adults, but what about children? Theyre not just little adults, Rapkin said.

As per the requirements of the grant, Dr. Dirajlal-Fargo will report back to the Campbell Foundation with her findings and also provide updates on her study.

Since The Campbell Foundations inception in 1995 it has given more than $10 million in funding with $1 million given to direct service organizations. The foundations mission is to support nonprofit organizations conducting clinical, laboratory-based research into the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, and related conditions and illnesses.

In addition to the above grant the foundation recently announced its end of year giving to 10 local organizations including Broward House, Care Resource, FoundCare (formerly CAP), Latinos Salud, Poverello Center, and Tuesday's Angels. Each organization will receive $5,000.

Visit CampbellFoundation.net for more information about their work.
California resident Tom Sosnick, 13, always knew he was born in the wrong body.

"I didn't know what the word transgender meant so I had no way to tie this to reality," the teenager told SFGN. "I struggled a lot because I could not figure out or explain how I felt. I felt at one point that it would be easier to live as a girl--I had the body for it."

Tom's questions about his gender identity had begun fairly early. "I was open with my parents about how I was feeling," he said. "In the 5th grade I had a 'realization moment.' I had this moment in the shower when I looked down and realized that my whole life was a trick. I was never a girl. I didn't feel like a girl."

In 2014, 17-year-old transgender girl Leelah Alcorn committed suicide in Ohio. Raised in a conservative Christian family who refused to accept her transition, Alcorn's violent death  she walked into oncoming traffic on a freeway  attracted international attention. Alcorn had left behind a suicide note in which she asked that gender identity issues be discussed in schools. Alcorn's tragic fate reached Sosnick, who was inspired to come out.

"It really made me want to make the most of what I have and give a voice to those who have been silenced," Sosnick said. "Though I can never speak to everyone, it was something I had to do."

Tom came out to his classmates at the Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito, a San Francisco suburb. In a stirring speech that has gone viral on YouTube, he told his teachers and friends what they already knew.

"For some of you this may come as a shock," Tom said in the video. "For others, well, you knew or thought that I was transgender. I am no longer Mia. I never really was. And now I stand before you in my true and authentic gender identity as Tom. I stand before you as a 13 year old boy."

Tom said that his family was supportive and loving, and that they remain proud of him. He also got support from Rabbi Tsipi Gabai, principal of Tehiya Day School. The Rabbi also spoke to SFGN. She declined to reveal her age, whether or not she was straight, or whether she identified with the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist sects of Judaism.

"A person should be judged by their actions, not by their labels," Rabbi Gabai said. She did acknowledge that many Jews still do not accept women as Rabbis  her own father is a Rabbi.

"My family had difficulties accepting me as a Rabbi," she recalled. "They had issues, but they didn't cut me off." She maintains a close and loving relationship with her family, who is aware of her support for Tom.

"My brother said you stretched things a bit, but you didn't cross the line," the Rabbi said. She added that she wasn't sure what crossing the line might entail. Like Tom's parents, she's very proud of the young man.

"We embraced him so he feels comfortable with his gender identity," the Rabbi said. "By doing religious rituals we show that we accept him  this is the message we want to send. Acceptance of differences is a Jewish value. The Torah was given to all of us, men and women."

Rabbi Gabai pointed out that many things which are "forbidden" in Judaism do not come from the Torah, but from man.

The Rabbi said that she led Tom through a naming ceremony, establishing his new, male name as his Hebrew name.

"It takes compassion and understanding," she said. "We have to be gutsy and get out of our comfort zones."

Tom, who said that he's interested in theater, playing guitar and also enjoys rock climbing, hopes to balance activism with his everyday life. That life includes school and hanging out with friends. "I'm torn," he admitted. "It's hard to add another responsibility. As proud as I am I don't want this to define me--I want to be successful in the fields I'm trying to do. I think there is a responsibility to share knowledge."

Tom added his thoughts about people who don't accept others for who they are. "If they don't accept you they're irrelevant," he said. "Keep the people who are supportive very close to you and let the others seep out of your life."
Lets face it, going out for dinner is a crap shoot. Even if a place is great, the day you decide to check it out might happen to be the day that the head chef calls in sick, your server is hung-over, the busboy is pre-occupied about a fight with his boyfriend, the bartenders cat died or three staff members didnt show up for their shifts. Or, maybe all of the above. Good luck having a great dining experience then. Or, you may hit the place on the one night when everything clicks and you have an incredible experience.

If you find a professional reviewer whose opinion and experience seems to align with yours, it can be an invaluable aid in choosing a restaurant. If you havent, or a place youre considering hasnt been covered by your favorite reviewer, you need to rely on opinions from a restaurant review web site. But, how reliable are these sites?

Unfortunately some of those reviews are by people who are just plain stupid. I actually read a Yelp review where someone complained about the lack of meat on a vegetarian menu. That may be an extreme example, but youll see people complain that; the food is too spicy in review of a Thai restaurant or the fish was undercooked at a sushi place. Similarly, there are people who praise a place just because they dont know any better. If you usually dine at Dennys, the service at a top level restaurant is going to blow you away, even if it is sub-par by industry standards. When you read a review on a web site, be aware of date of the review. An older review may not be valid if the restaurant is under new management.

Your best bets for information on Wilton Manors are Yelp and Trip Advisor. Both indicate how many times the places have been reviewed, offer maps and directions, allow reviewers to post pictures and have links to the restaurants web sites.

Yelp uses a 1-5 star rating system, lists an average rating and indicates the date of review. Trip Advisor also uses a 1-5 star rating system, and lists not only an average rating, but also breaks the rating down into four categories; food, service, value and atmosphere. While it doesnt give exact dates for listings, it does indicate how many weeks/months ago the review was posted.

So given all that info, how do five new spots on the Drive fare in on-line reviews? For these restaurants, Ive compared the Yelp and Trip Advisor reviews to my experiences.

What the Pho

2033 N. Wilton Dr., Wilton Manors

754-779-7769

Yelp: average rating of 4.5 stars based on 66 reviews.

Trip Advisor: average rating of 4 stars based on 26 reviews.

SFGN: both sites reviews are significantly better than my initial review of What the Pho. However, a majority of the positive reviews werent from people familiar with Vietnamese cuisine. Additionally, many echoed my major concerns about What the Phos service and price point.

Thirteen

2390 Wilton Dr., Wilton Manors

954-566-5950

WebsiteThirteenWilton.com

Yelp: average rating of 4.5 stars based on 66 reviews.

Trip Advisor: average rating of 4 stars based on 29 reviews.

SFGN: I dont know how I could have not have reviewed Thirteen, but it turns out I havent, even though Ive dined there numerous times. The listings on both sites do echo my feelings about Thirteen, that the food is tasty and its obvious that the owners have a hands-on approach when it comes to quality control.

Dolce Pizza

2406 Wilton Dr., Wilton Manors

954-463-7677

Dolce-Salato.net

Yelp: average rating of 5 stars based on 62 reviews.

Trip Advisor: average rating of 5 stars based on 74 reviews

SFGN: I couldnt agree more. I think the pizza is the best in all of South Florida and the gelato (handmade daily) is to die for. The Italian couple who owns Dolce Salato, Leonardo and Sylvia, are warm and friendly and really care about the product they put out. A couple of on-line reviews echoed my feelings about their son; Their handsome son is real eye candy.-Yelp

Novel Tea

2043 Wilton Dr., Wilton Manors

754-206-4321

NovelTeaFL.com

Yelp: average rating of 5 stars based on 26 reviews.

Trip Advisor: average rating of 4 stars based on 74 reviews

SFGN: The newest place in this list. Novel Tea has only been open for a few months. Ive found the owners, who both happened to be there when I stopped in, to be friendly and knowledgeable. The tea tends to be a bit pricey, but then top quality merchandise often is. At the time of my visit, they were just putting together their wine and beer menu. Its a nice change of pace from the bars as a place to meet.

When you cross the border into Fort Lauderdale, youll find more reviews from some of the other web sites, but Yelp and Trip Advisor still offer the most listings. I reviewed two new spots in Fort Lauderdale last year.

Louis Bossi

1032 E Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale

954-356-6699

LouieBossi.com

Yelp: average rating of 3.5 stars based on 182 reviews.

Trip Advisor: average rating of 4 stars based on 150 reviews

SFGN: Like a lot of Italians I know, its big and loud and inviting. Its a bit crowded and frenetic, as I said about the place in my review all the hub-bub, would be a waste of time if the food werent good, and its not good, its great. While I experienced attentive service, that wasnt the case for many folks reviewing Louis Bossi. There were numerous complaints about rude hostesses and on-going problems with service and the timing of dishes coming from the kitchen. When you see the same complaints over and over, thats a red flag.

Flash Fire Pizza

2949 N. Federal, Fort Lauderdale

954-440-2426

Message the business

FlashFirePizza.com

Yelp: average rating of 4.5 stars based on 78 reviews.

Trip Advisor: average rating of 4.5 stars based on 17 reviews

SFGN: I said, Flash Fire Pizza may be fast, but its not fast food, its artisanal pizza done fast and fresh. The on-line reviews agree and the friendly and attentive service was praised often.
Update : Yesterday, Florida Atlantic University miraculously found a new place for South Florida Gay News to distribute. All it took was the threat of topless women strolling around campus, handing out copies of a gay newspaper.

(Original Story) FAU had insisted it would take 16 months  until May 2017  to renovate the single metal rack where SFGN offered free copies of its weekly issues. FAU has built parking garages quicker than that.

Now SFGN will have two campus locations: one outside the library, the other outside the student union. After a month of ignoring his efforts at compromise, SFGN editor Jason Parsley says FAU promised him those racks would be installed within the next 2-3 weeks.

Im happy we were able to resolve this issue so quickly, Parsley says. But in the future, I would advise FAU to respond to people in a timely fashion, in order to avoid a situation like this spiraling out of control.

Yesterday, FAUs student newspaper offered to help. Editor Emily Bloch says SFGN can borrow some University Press racks until SFGNs racks are ready.

Parsley is pleased, and he has no regrets

This was just one distribution point out of hundreds that we have here at SFGN. I could have just as easily said it wasnt worth my time. While Im sure FAU sees this differently, I saw it as First Amendment issue. And its important to remember the First Amendment is non-negotiable. Our freedom of speech and the press are two civil rights that nobody can take away.

So alls well that started stupidly. Alas, the topless distribution protest has been called off.

Too bad, because I was really looking forward to FAU frat boys eagerly accepting newspapers from topless women, only to read them and realize, Hey, this is gay!

This post originally appeared online at College Media Watchdog.



FAU Suspends SFGNs On Campus Distribution

On Wednesday, topless women will distribute a gay newspaper at a public university in South Florida.

Why? To defend a free press.

South Florida Gay News is the Southeast U.S.s largest weekly gay newspaper, but Florida Atlantic University only allows SFGN to distribute in a single spot on campus.

Its a metal rack FAU built, which sounds generous until you learn the school banned SFGN from having its own racks. The school says its trying to beautify the campus by getting rid of ugly newspaper boxes.

Thats fine as far as it goes  those things are ugly  but earlier this month, FAU sent this poorly written email to SFGN editor Jason Parsley.

The newspaper racks that was assigned for placing the South Florida Gay News publication were removed from the breezeway for renovation project. At this time we do not have an alternate location. Please suspend the delivery of the magazine until further notice.

Parsley inquired, Do you have a timeframe on when the project will be complete?

This is the full text of FAUs reply: The project is expected to be finished in May of 2017.

Thats a long time to renovate a metal box. Its also illegal, as well see in a moment.

Parsley didnt give up: Are there other locations on campus where publications display their products?

FAU didnt give in: Unfortunately the breezeway was the only location. I will let you know if we will identify other locations in the meantime.

Parsley tried again, but FAU is no longer responding. On his own, he learned FAU also booted a couple other free publications. But they dont cover news  theyre glorified shoppers  and they didnt object.

So whats going on here? I have a theory: FAU is banning several small publications to get to SFGN, and it has nothing to do with being gay.

Two weeks before FAU ousted Parsleys newspaper, he wrote a column criticizing his alma mater for violating Floridas open-meetings law. (Parsley was editor of FAUs student newspaper in 2007.)

Is FAU retaliating against SFGN? If not, this sure is a coincidence. Which isnt lost on Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Washington, DC.

A public university cant single out certain disfavored publications based on editorial content and give them inferior distribution locations  or none at all  to penalize or restrain unwanted messages, LoMonte says.

LoMonte says the law is murky about public universities being required to distribute off-campus publications.

But

Once a college in fact has made the decision to allow news racks on campus walkways, then there must be some reasonable justification for deviating from that policy unrelated to the publications content, and the speaker must be provided with some reasonable alternative way of reaching the audience.

If FAU is effectively banning the publication from campus, it would have the burden of showing that the decision is both unrelated to the publications content and that no alternative location exists, which would be awfully hard to do.

Thats awfully hard because only 16 days separate Parsleys critical column and FAUs ungrammatical emails. Plus, two daily newspapers arent being booted for renovations. LoMonte calls this circumstantial evidence of a cause-and-effect  and he says its quite strong.

So SFGN could sue FAU. And it might. SFGNs publisher is an attorney who has gone to court over First Amendment issues before  and won. If a lawsuit happens, SMACK (Student Media Aid Cash and Know-How) will help him apply to SPJs Legal Defense Fund.

But that could take months. We have a better, quicker idea.

If FAU doesnt back down, SMACK will take off the gloves  and the tops. On Wednesday, volunteers will walk around campus handing out SFGNs latest issue.

You can see the cover above. Its about the Go Topless Movement, which seeks equal treatment under the law: If men can walk around bare-chested, why cant women?

So it only makes sense that topless women will hand out the paper. Luckily, the forecast is sunny and 74 degrees. (This plan wouldnt work at the University of Vermont.)

Well notify local media, and our volunteers will even hand-deliver copies to the office of FAU President John Kelly.

If campus cops arrest our volunteers, SMACK will throw their bail. And if everyone has a good time, we just might do this for every weekly issue of SFGN.

Or FAU can finally reply to Parsley and come up with a solution that wont take 16 months. But now that weve organized all of this, I kind of hope they dont.
A new bill making its way through the Florida legislature has been described by one public records expert as undoubtedly the worst bill I've seen in all my 25 plus years.

Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, further criticized HB 1021 and SB 1220 as an attempt to severely weaken Floridas public records laws.

The two bills passed unanimously in their respective subcommittees.

According to the Florida Sunshine Coalition the bill would make the award of attorneys fees discretionary even when a judge has made a finding that a public agency has wrongfully withheld public records from inspection.

Currently if a government agency is found to be at fault that agency will be on the hook for the plaintiffs attorneys fees.

The attorney fee provision creates a level playing field for someone who can afford to pay for an attorney and those who cannot, FSC said in a press release.

FSC believes that without a guaranteed penalty there is no incentive for the government to be transparent while also decreasing the number of challenges brought by citizens.

Rather than reforming the public records law  a specious claim by the Florida League of Cities  these bills will essentially gut our right to access to government records, FSC wrote.



SFGN reached out to Wilton Manors Mayor Gary Resnick, a member of the League of Cities, and openly gay Rep. David Richardson for comments. Neither responded to SFGNs emails.



Rand Hoch, founder of the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council, said his organization has filed almost 100 public records requests over the years.



And we have had to file dozens to find out why action was not being taken on our requests for law and policy changes, he said. Requiring someone seeking public records to go to court to seek payment of attorneys fees further weakens the public records law, and may actually deter people from taking steps to learn what public entities are doing. We are fortunate that the Florida Sunshine Coalition and the First Amendment Foundation are being proactive in their opposition to this legislation.



The Florida Society of News Editors also came out against HB 1021 sending a letter to Rep. Greg Steube, the bills author.

There are good reasons to object to public money being spent on legal fees in lawsuits over public records. It is a mistake, however, to think it is cheaper or better public policy to weaken the law that provides successful plaintiffs with the ability to hold bureaucrats accountable, wrote Douglas Ray, president of FSNE. On behalf of journalists in small towns and big cities across Florida, I hope you will see that the urgent risk is not to shield bureaucrats who break the law but to protect citizens who successfully fight for its enforcement.
History buffs, travel enthusiasts and opera lovers can all find something to adore at the Israeli Opera productions that are performed at Masada. Against a desolate but magnificent scenery, the Israeli Opera delivered open air performances this past summer that brought history and passion to life in a region that has not changed in many epochs.

Located in the modestly populated Judean desert, Masada is a site that remained untouched for more than thirteen centuries. The structures and remains of human inhabitants gradually collapsed and were superimposed until the 1960s. Limited restorations have been executed as Masada is now a National Park and Unesco World Heritage Site.

The Israeli Opera at Masada is an event where history and visual representation meets art and the representation of sound. It is a beautiful mixture of pictures and words that come together at the site of an ancient fortress where the Jewish people had heroically fought off 5,000 Roman Soldiers. It is a symbol of the defense of liberty and taking a stance against oppression.

This past summer, the Israeli Opera held performances of Tosca and Carmina Burana at Masada during the week of Tel Aviv Gay Pride. The Carmina Burana is a manuscript of 254 poems from the 11th and 12th centuries. In 1936 Carl Orff composed music based on twenty four of the poems from Carmina Burana. This became a classical musical sensation with themes ranging from spiritual pieces to songs about morals and virtue, to love songs.

Armando Olmedo, who serves on the Board of Directors for the Florida Grand Opera, was present for the Carmina Burana performance at Masada. When asked what he thought about the production he witnessed, Mr. Olmedo said It was by far one of the best outdoor productions I have ever seen, especially under arid conditions, both technically and performance wise. To put that quality of a production on outdoors in the desert is very impressive.

Olmedo elaborated more on the visual piece of the production and explained that a procession of white horses were incorporated into the show. He described the scene as an Indiana Jones like version of the story sprinkled with Lord of the Rings.

David Treitel, Executive Committee Member of the Florida Grand Opera Board of Directors, was present at the performance as well and had this to add the setting and the lighting was an incredible backdrop. He added that the production encouraged artists to be challenged musically to perform in another type of setting and that the musical direction was first rate.

Both Olmedo and Treitel discussed how the Florida Grand Opera is exploring areas for future cooperation with the Israeli Opera. One such idea is to create a package for South Florida opera lovers and patrons to travel to Israel and witness these types of performances. The Israeli Opera is planning a performance of Rigoletto in Jerusalem in June 2016 after Tel Aviv Gay Pride concludes, and will continue its performances at Masada with the production of Samson and Delilah in September 2016. The production promises to be larger than life and will be sung in French as the tale of the valiant Samson faces betrayal by the temptress Delilah is enacted. It sounds like a wonderful theme from a film noir genre that will manifest as opera noir, as it were, before audiences.

Treital added that Israel is a magical place to visit. There are historical and religious landmarks as well as beautiful beaches, and cultural activities. With regard to the historical landmarks present in Israel that Treital pointed out, it is commendable and important that the Israeli Opera is honoring these historical stories and preventing history from being lost by having these types of performances.

What is most relevant to the important connection between the songs of Carmina Burana and the history that the Israeli Opera is preserving through its performances at Masada is how these performances tell stories about the human condition and the struggles in life that humanity faces just like the story of Masadas history. One of the most notable songs of Carmina Burana, O Fortuna, contains the following words:

O Fortune,

like the moon

you are changeable,

ever waxing

and waning;

hateful life

first oppresses

and then soothes

as fancy takes it;

poverty

and power

it melts them like ice.

The state of being fortunate is symbolically compared to the moon, as a changing force and a fact of life that has no guarantee. As the moon is used as metaphor for change containing both darkness and light in O Fortuna, we can also think of the moon as a metaphor that hovered over the mountainous backdrop of Masada during the First Jewish-Roman War during 70 CE. The desert moon witnessed the darkness of tyranny and repression but also saw the light of valor, courage and faith.

In terms of history and the magnitude of what Masada means for modern times, the wind that blows against the Dead Sea whispers the memories and history of the Jewish people in the silence of the Judean Desert, but mankind must be able to hear its whisper. It is important to be aware of history and honor it through preservation efforts. You can see magnificent performances and help preserve history by attending the Israeli Opera performances at Masada. Their website address is: Opera-Masada.com/en/. If you live in South Florida or anywhere in the U.S., you can also contact the Florida Grand Opera about their travel packages to Israel for opera lovers. Their website address is: FGO.org.
Star Cluster NASA

Among the most striking objects in the universe are glittering, dense swarms of stars known as globular clusters.

Astronomers had long thought globular clusters formed their millions of stars in bulk at around the same time, with each clusters stars having very similar ages, much like twin brothers and sisters. Yet recent discoveries of young stars in old globular clusters have scrambled this tidy picture.

Instead of having all their stellar progeny at once, globular clusters can somehow bear second or even third sets of thousands of sibling stars. Now a new study led by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University, and including astronomers at Northwestern University, the Adler Planetarium and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), might explain these puzzling, successive stellar generations.

Using observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, the research team has for the first time found young populations of stars within globular clusters that have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside of the clusters themselves. This method stands in contrast to the conventional idea of the clusters initial stars shedding gas as they age in order to spark future rounds of star birth.

The study will be published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Nature.

This study offers new insight on the problem of multiple stellar populations in star clusters, said study lead author Chengyuan Li, an astronomer at KIAA and NAOC who also is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences Purple Mountain Observatory. Our study suggests the gaseous fuel for these new stellar populations has an origin that is external to the cluster, rather than internal.

In a manner of speaking, globular clusters appear capable of adopting baby stars  or at least the material with which to form new stars  rather than creating more biological children as parents in a human family might choose to do.

Our explanation that secondary stellar populations originate from gas accreted from the clusters environments is the strongest alternative idea put forward to date, said Richard de Grijs, also an astronomer at KIAA and Chengyuans Ph.D. advisor. Globular clusters have turned out to be much more complex than we once thought.

Globular clusters are spherical, densely packed groups of stars orbiting the outskirts of galaxies. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts several hundred. Most of these local, massive clusters are quite old, however, so the KIAA-led research team turned their attention to young and intermediate-aged clusters found in two nearby dwarf galaxies, collectively called the Magellanic Clouds.

Specifically, the researchers used Hubble observations of the globular clusters NGC 1783 and NGC 1696 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, along with NGC 411 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Scientists routinely infer the ages of stars by looking at their colors and brightnesses. Within NGC 1783, for example, Li, de Grijs and colleagues identified an initial population of stars aged 1.4 billion years, along with two newer populations that formed 890 million and 450 million years ago.

What is the most straightforward explanation for these unexpectedly differing stellar ages? Some globular clusters might retain enough gas and dust to crank out multiple generations of stars, but this seems unlikely, said study co-author Aaron M. Geller of Northwestern University and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Once the most massive stars form, they are like ticking time bombs, with only about 10 million years until they explode in powerful supernovae and clear out any remaining gas and dust, Geller said. Afterwards, the lower-mass stars, which live longer and die in less violent ways, may allow the cluster to build up gas and dust once again.

The KIAA-led research team proposes that globular clusters can sweep up stray gas and dust they encounter while moving about their respective host galaxies. The theory of newborn stars arising in clusters as they adopt interstellar gases actually dates back to a 1952 paper. More than a half-century later, this once speculative idea suddenly has key evidence to support it.

In the study, the KIAA researchers analyzed Hubble observations of these star clusters, and then Geller and his Northwestern colleague Claude-Andr Faucher-Gigure carried out calculations that show this theoretical explanation is possible in the globular clusters this team studied.

We have now finally shown that this idea of clusters forming new stars with accreted gas might actually work, de Grijs said, and not just for the three clusters we observed for this study, but possibly for a whole slew of them.

Future studies will aim to extend the findings to other Magellanic Cloud as well as Milky Way globular clusters.

Reference: Formation of New Stellar Populations from Gas Accreted by Massive Young Star Clusters, Chengyuan Li et al., 2016 Jan. 28, Nature [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature16493.html].

In addition to Li, de Grijs, Geller and Faucher-Gigure, other authors of the paper include Licai Deng, Yu Xin and Yi Hu, all from the Chinese Academy of Sciences National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.

The research is funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

Geller, an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, and Faucher-Gigure, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, are in Northwesterns Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and are members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Geller also is currently at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and previously was with the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago at the time of the study.
Orion NASA

NASAs Orion spacecraft is another step closer to launching on its first mission to deep space atop the agencys Space Launch System rocket.

On Jan. 13, technicians at Michoud Assembly Facility finished welding together the primary structure of the Orion spacecraft destined for deep space, marking another important step on the journey to Mars.

Welding Orions seven large aluminum pieces, which began in September 2015, involved a meticulous process. Engineers prepared and outfitted each element with strain gauges and wiring to monitor the metal during the process. The pieces were joined using a state-of-the-art process called friction-stir welding, which produces incredibly strong bonds by transforming metals from a solid into a plastic-like state, and then using a rotating pin tool to soften, stir and forge a bond between two metal components to form a uniform welded joint, a vital requirement of next-generation space hardware.

Image Credit: NASA larger image
After a 2015 filled with cooperation between the United States and Slovakia on many fronts, we are excited this year to build further on this strong foundation to bring our countries even closer together.

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We believe 2016 can be the year of implementation of key efforts that are important to both out nations.

For example, Slovakia has been diligently preparing for its first Presidency of the Council of the European Union. This is an opportunity for Slovakia to lead negotiations among EU member states and EU institutions to tackle issues such as the energy union and energy security, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), employment and competitiveness, and a single digital market. At around the same time that Slovakia assumes the EU Presidency, it will also join its NATO Allies and partners in Warsaw for the NATO Summit, where together we will reaffirm our commitment to collective defense and ensure NATO remains ready to defend all Allies against any threat from any direction. Slovakia will also establish a NATO Force Integration Unit (NFIU) this year, and we look forward to the new avenues of cooperation this planning centre will create. Slovakias implementation of these foreign policy priorities will help us achieve our goal of a Europe whole, free, and at peace.

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In 2016, both of our countries will also hold important elections, and candidates in both countries are already campaigning. As these campaigns progress, we must all remember the democratic values on which both our countries were founded and avoid engaging in irresponsible messaging, which can create space for intolerance and hatred. As President Obama said, it is the responsibility of all of us to reject discrimination, as divisiveness betrays our values and plays into the hands of extremists.

We are also looking forward to seeing real progress in the fight against corruption. Last year Slovakia adopted an anti-corruption action plan, formulated in reaction to the business communitys Rule of Law Initiative, as well as a second National Action plan under the Open Government Partnership (OGP) to promote transparency and good governance. We also welcome the recent decision by the Judicial Council to adopt a new Judicial Code of Conduct, which now must be adequately implemented and enforced. These were important steps, but implementation of these plans remains key. If 2016 can become the year of implementation for these initiatives, the result will be stronger democratic institutions and an improved business climate that attracts additional international investors to build a more prosperous Slovakia.

As we enter this new year, we feel privileged to have such a capable partner with whom to tackle the important issues that we and the world face today. In 2015, our cooperation resulted in big ideas, increased prosperity, and creative plans to address shared challenges. Lets make 2016 the year of even better implementation, and even stronger partnership between our countries.

By Liam Wasley, Charge d'Affaires at the US Embassy in Slovakia
THERE have been no cases involving alleged intimidation of teachers vis-a-vis the current strike by management of their schools, the Education Ministry says.

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The ministrys press department responded to an Initiative of Slovak Teachers (ISU) statement earlier on January 27 that teachers are facing intimidation at schools due to the current strike. The organisation bemoans what it calls the violation of fundamental human rights and specifies concrete cases of intimidation that some teachers are facing. Some of them are allegedly being told by headmasters that they may lose their job, face a ban from speaking to media or from meeting President Andrej Kiska during his visits to schools, the TASR newswire reported.

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The ministry noted that headmasters are obliged according to a nation-wide directive to report any interruptions in the education process and any special day off granted at their schools.

So, the fact that the number of schools closed due to the strike was reported cant be considered as intimidation, the ministry stated, as quoted by TASR.

As for protection of teachers rights, the ministry pointed out that it has put an end to the practice present at many schools of sacking teachers before the two-month summer holidays only to hire them again at the beginning of the next school year in a quest to save on their salaries. Also, a handbook for teachers outlining their rights has been drawn up, apart from setting up a Department for Protection of Rights in Regional Education.

Read also:

Read also: Some schools end strike, others join Read more

Education Minister Juraj Draxler again thanked teachers from schools that have not joined the strike.

I want to thank teachers from the 98 percent of schools that continue in normal education, said Draxler.

The teachers, however, have a letter describing the cases of intimidation and say they will send it to Ombudswoman Jana Dubovcova, Education Ombudsman Martin Matak, the European Court of Human Rights, and also the Slovak National Centre for Human Rights, TASR wrote.

ISU claims to have several reports from teachers who are afraid. The situation is serious, according to Viktor Kriz of ISU.

We are convinced that if there was no intimidation at schools, up to 20,000-40,000 teachers would attend the strike, Kriz told the Sme daily.

The Initiative of Slovak Teachers plans to continue with protest actions. There is one planned to take place in Levice (Nitra Region) on January 27, and teachers will meet on January 28 in Kosice and Nove Zamky (Nitra Region). They also plan to go in front of the Government Office on January 28 to tidy up the environment, as reported by Sme.
THE EUROPEAN Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) called on Slovak authorities to take immediate action in response to the deaths of children in Roma settlements.

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In the first week of 2016 two small Romani children died in Kosice, Slovakia. Both the 6- and 4-month-old boys died in a segregated neighbourhood. Three more minors died last weekend in a Roma settlement in Lomnicka village. ERRC considers these deaths utterly preventable, according to its press release.

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Roma in Slovakia are often forced to live in unsafe, hazardous and unhealthy housing conditions. On January 1 and 3, 2016 one child burned to death and another froze to death in Maslickovo, a Roma settlement on the outskirts of the eastern-Slovakian city of Kosice. The series of tragedies continued in late January when three minors died after a wooden shack caught fire in a Roma settlement in Lomnicka (Presov Region), according to media reports.

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has affirmed that domestic authorities must do all that could reasonably be expected of them to avoid a real and immediate risk to life of which they had or ought to have had knowledge, as reported in the press release.

The ECHR has also stated that in circumstances where children are at risk because of the economic and social conditions of the families, the appropriate response is for states to provide support to allow the families to stay together and the children to be safe. The facts surrounding the death of these Roma children in Slovakia strongly suggest to us that authorities in Slovakia have violated their obligations.

The authorities knew or ought to have known that lives were at risk and that they had a legal obligation to take action, said ERRC Network and Research Director Dorde Javanovic, as quoted in the press release. These small children are the fatal casualties of more than two decades of discriminatory neglect in housing policies for marginalised Roma communities.

The ERRC has published a letter of concern in which we call on the municipal, regional, and national authorities to work together as a matter of urgency to develop a sustainable solution.

We demand that authorities take immediate action to ensure that Slovakias most vulnerable citizens have adequate shelter and safe living conditions to prevent further fatalities this winter, ERRC claimed.

Furthermore, ERRC calls upon the authorities to allocate resources and adhere to a fixed time frame to ensure that residents of Lunik IX in Kosice, the surrounding settlements and all Roma living in segregated housing conditions have access to adequate and safe housing. It also urges the authorities to use European Regional Development Fund resources to implement integrated housing solutions for Roma.

The letter of concern has been sent to Kosice Mayor Richard Rasi, Government Proxy for the Roma Communities Peter Pollak, Ombudswoman Jana Dubovcova, Kosice Self-Governing Regions Governor Zdenko Trebula, Mayor of Lunik IX Marcel Sana, and Prime Minister Robert Fico.
THE MONITORING of air quality in Slovakia has improved, with the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (SHMU) having restored 35 monitoring stations and employed new mobile monitoring vehicles, along with unifying data transmission to a central database.

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The project has cost more than 4.3 million, of which more than 3 million came from the European Unions funds and the rest provided by the Slovak state budget and SHMU, the TASR newswire reported.

Air quality has been measured in Slovakia since 1969.

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We have hundreds of monitoring points across the country, said Martin Benko, general director of SHMU, as quoted by TASR.

These monitoring points are constantly exposed to weather, operating day and night, and so theyve grown old, with the operating cost also increasing considerably, Benko added.

The original stations had already been pretty outdated and prone to failures, Benko said, as quoted by TASR. Im happy that by purchasing these new monitoring devices we can further improve the quality of SHMUs output.

Environment Minister Peter Ziga said that they want to make sure that the public is able to get information on air quality in their neighbourhoods and on how substances that may threaten their lives and health get into the atmosphere.

By modernising this equipment, well be able to receive detailed data on a top level in global terms, Ziga added, as quoted by TASR.

The system works online, and people can access all relevant data on SHMUs website.
EDUCATION Minister Juraj Draxler compares two different methods when calculating teachers salaries, according to analysts from the Institute for Financial Policy (IFP).

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The analysts of the institute, which runs under the Finance Ministry, referred to Draxlers previous statement that the average teacher makes 997 per month, more than the average salary in most of Slovakias regions. According to them, if he compared the statistics formulated with the same method, he would find out that teachers actually earn much less than the Slovak average, as reported by the Sme daily.

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Draxler compared the data of average salaries of teachers working full-time with the average wage in Slovakia, which was not calculated only from full-time workers. If he used the data from the Statistics Office, the result would be that their salaries are about 100 lower than the average wage in the national economy, according to IFP.

The IFP however rejected the interpretation of Sme and provided further context for its claims to the media on January 27.

Unlike the Institute of Education Policy (IVP), the IFP does not maintain a detailed database of the wages paid at individual schools, therefore it used data provided by the Trexima company. According to them, the average wage of teaching employees is even higher than the data provided by the Education Ministry. Thus it is not true that the IFP posting shows that the ministry published exaggerated data, as was reported by the media.

The story published by Sme misinterpreted the posting, according to the institute.

The wages of people working in education do not represent only the wages of teachers, and the IFP never claimed that they do, IFP analyst Martin Filko stated.

Read also:

Read also: Education Ministry refuses intimidation at schools Read more

Meanwhile, teachers continue the all-out strike. According to the strike organiser, the Initiative of Slovak Teachers (ISU), altogether 11,180 teachers from 819 schools are still registered. The Education Ministry informs that the number of protesting schools keeps decreasing. While on January 26 151 schools were closed, on January 27 it was only 137 facilities, or 2.04 percent of the total number of schools.

The highest drop was reported in Bratislava Region, where the number of closed schools fell from 52 to 34. On the other hand, more schools are joined in the protest in Trencin Region where 15 facilities are closed, according to the ministry data.

When responding to the ongoing strike, Prime Minister Robert Fico said that his government is looking teachers straight in the eye. In years 2012-2016, they saw their salaries increase by 22 percent, which represents the highest growth in public administration.

No other public administration profession had their salaries raised in the period as much as the teachers, Fico said, as quoted by the TASR newswire. If we add another 26 percent under the government of 2006-1010, our two governments together increased teacher salaries almost by 50 percent. During the government of Iveta Radicova, there were zero hikes. The trustworthiness rests unequivocally with us.

He also asked teachers for their understanding, noting that there are other people in Slovakia with requests and claims as well and other projects, to which the state must allocate resources. He pledged that if Smer forms part of another government following the March 2016 general election, the plan is to continue with teacher salary hikes.

Fico underlined that his government has always respected and will respect the right to strike.

Weve undertaken no legal action against the strike, contrary to the way the current opposition did against the strike of railway workers while in power, Fico said, as quoted by TASR. This strike calls into question a great deal of legal, political and social dialogue issues. But we accept it as a fact and respect it.
THE WORLD remembers the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on January 27.

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On the same day in 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated six million Jews, two million Gypsies, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

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Among the victims of the Holocaust were also about 70,000 Jews from Slovakia who either died in death camps or during the so-called death marches, when the camps were forcibly evacuated shortly before the end of World War II.

Remembering the tragedy of the Holocaust is inevitable as a warning against prejudices, intolerance and racism which degrade the principles of humanity and observing of human rights, Slovakias Foreign Affairs Ministry said, as quoted by the SITA newswire.

One of the most important moments in this respect is the opening of the Museum of Holocaust in Sered (Trnava Region) on January 26. It is located on the premises of the former labour camp established in 1941, where about 16,000 Jews were imprisoned during WWII. According to historians, the living conditions in the camp were hard, the prisoners were beaten and raped, as reported by SITA.

The importance of remembering the Holocaust victims is important also according to Zuzana Stevulova, head of the Human Rights League, in order not to forget about what happened in Europe before WWII and during it. It is also important to recall that everything started with public incitement of racial, ethic and religious hatred, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

We should not forget about this and it should be a warning also for present-day politicians who with their reckless statements support prejudices and intolerance towards religious or other forms of otherness, Stevulova told SITA.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated also by the civic association In Minorita which plans to present the book New facts about Roma Holocaust in Slovakia written by Zuzana Kumanova and Arne B. Manna.
THE QUALITY of health care in Slovakia has been declining since 2013.

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This stems from an analysis of the Health Consumer Powerhouse (HCP) organisation, which surveyed 35 countries in Europe. It analyses national health care on 48 indicators, looking into areas such as patient rights and information, access to care, treatment outcomes, range and reach of services, prevention and use of pharmaceuticals.

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Slovakia placed 24th, receiving only 653 of 1,000 points. With such a result, the country appeared in the red group of countries, which represents the worst results. Aside from Slovakia, also Poland and Hungary as well as many other eastern European countries are placed there, the Sme daily reported.

The low evaluation is surprising since according to Eurostat data, Slovakia contributes the most public resources to health care, up to 18.3 percent, Sme wrote.

The HCP analysis slams Slovakia for several deficiencies, with one of them being the years people lose due to insufficient health care. This means that the study calculates by how many years life expectancy in the country would be if there was better health treatment. In Slovakia the number of lost years per 100,000 inhabitants amounts to 8,000, which means that an average Slovak loses more than 12 years of life expectancy, according to Sme.

The high number of lost years is caused, among other things, by Slovakias inability to reduce the deaths caused by some serious illnesses. This includes cardiovascular diseases, strokes and also high blood pressure. Moreover, many hospitalised patients are exposed to hospital infections, like Staphylococcus aureus bacteria.

The occurrence of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in Slovak hospitals belong to the highest, similarly as in most of countries of the former Eastern Block, but also some other southeastern countries, Lenka Skalicka, spokesperson for the Public Health Authority, told Sme.

On the other hand, Slovakia was praised for health care quality rankings published by health insurers, or various organisations which focus their activities on health care. It was also praised for accessibility to doctors providing primary health treatment and specialists, Sme wrote.

Dusan Zachar, analyst with INEKO think tank, however, objects to the latter, saying that the system changed in 2013 when the Health Ministry introduced the so-called exchange tickets which every patients needs to have when visiting a specialist.

The report also praises the low number of abortions in Slovakia and the high vaccination rate.

Zachar, however, says that the analysis reveals that the world escapes from us. Slovakia not only dropped by four positions, but it also, as one of the few countries, saw its score to drop for the second year in row, he told Sme.
DESPITE the low impact they are likely to have on the results, Slovaks living elsewhere are following the politics of their homeland.

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We still consider Slovakia our home, says 27-year-old Lucia Hrnciarova from Liptovsky Mikulas, who currently lives with her boyfriend in Auckland, New Zealand. Moreover, we want to return to Slovakia so we want to participate in deciding on its future.

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Similar opinions were voiced also by other people addressed by The Slovak Spectator, who registered for the March 5 elections.

Every vote is important because we will not achieve the real change otherwise than by voting, Matus Misik, who currently works at the Department of Political Sciences at University of Alberta in Canada, told The Slovak Spectator.

Vojtech Celko, a 70-year-old living in Prague, will attend the parliamentary elections for third time. He could not do so earlier as, after Czechoslovakia separated, he lost his Slovak citizenship. After the laws changed and people like him were allowed to reclaim it, he did. For Celko, the elections represent a certain bond to home.

Low impact on results

The Interior Ministry estimates there are about 200,000-300,000 Slovaks with voting rights living abroad. Some 21,000 of them registered for a mail in vote by January 15.

The most applications came from the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. The ministry also registered people living in New Zealand, Kenya, South Africa, Bahrain, China, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and Barbados, according to the information provided to The Slovak Spectator.

Their impact on the election results however, is minimal, according to Martin Slosiarik of Focus polling agency. Only about 7,051 Slovaks voted by mail in 2012 parliamentary elections, while in 2010 it was only 5,861.

One of the reasons for low interest of Slovaks living abroad in attending parliamentary elections may be that with their departure they expressed their reluctance to impact public affairs in Slovakia.

An important obstacle, however, can be administratively difficult election process or the administrative steps they have to take before the elections, Slosiarik told The Slovak Spectator.

The election laws stipulate that Slovaks living abroad must register for the election 60 days before election day, January 15 this year. Voters send a letter or an email application to the municipal authority (if they have a permanent residence in Slovakia) or to the Interior Ministry (in case they do not have a permanent residence in Slovakia).

Jan Krajcovic, 33-year-old IT manager living in Luxembourg, considers the registration process chaotic. According to him, this may be done with the intention to distract people from abroad with other opinions.

Moreover, not many Slovaks living in the Czech Republic asked for returning their Slovak citizenship after the laws changed, said Celko.

Thus dozens of thousands of Slovaks in the Czech Republic were lost, since they did not feel the need to say they are Slovaks, Celko told The Slovak Spectator, adding that many people maybe do not even know it is possible.

Foreign Slovaks still have a say

Some Slovaks, however, say that only people living in Slovakia and paying taxes there should vote, said Jan Varso, head of the Office for Slovaks Living Abroad, referring to the opinions of some expats in the United States and Canada.

They think that Slovaks living abroad achieved their mission for their homeland when they contributed to achieving our democratic statehood, Varso told The Slovak Spectator.

Misik, however, says that though Slovakia is a stable democracy, this may change as it has in Hungary and Poland. The only way to protect democracy is to vote, he stressed.

Though the change in a direction, which I as a voter hope for, will not happen immediately, voting is the best information for ruling elites so that they remain sensitive to changes and do not drift towards anti-democratic tendencies, Misik added.

Since the view from abroad can be clearer, and the number of Slovaks abroad is big, such people could contribute to significant changes, according to Misik.

Jan Ferencik, a 36-year-old cultural event coordinator living in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, says that you become less biased and more critical when you live in a place where everything works as it should. You have a country which you can compare with Slovakia and learn about things that should be changed.

Though you know it is like fighting windmills, you want to express your opinion, to vote, even though your homeland will progress only very slightly, Ferencik told The Slovak Spectator.

Registration process simplified

Most people addressed by The Slovak Spectator say that they used the Volby.digital website to register for the vote. Developed by a group of people from the Slovensko.digital initiative, the application shortened the whole process to three minutes, 20 words and eight clicks, Ludovit Scholtz, one of the programmers, told the TASR newswire.

The application helped to triple the number of applications compared to the 2012 elections, Slosiarik said.

One of those users was Miroslava Prugna Piatrik, 36, who lives in Ponsacco, Italy. She says she could not vote for 11 years, but when she saw the possibility to register via Volby.digital, she did not hesitate.

The application was also open to those who will not be in Slovakia on the election day. Alexandra Smalova, a 29-year-old teacher currently living in Bratislava, says she regularly votes. When she found out that this year she will be in the United States on March 5, she and her boyfriend searched the internet to learn about possibilities to vote. They found Volby.Digital and registered for the vote.

It would be good to give more promotion to this [project] because I was not aware that people can quickly register online until a few weeks ago, Lenka Zrubakova, 27, from Banska Bystrica told The Slovak Spectator.

Some people however admit some problems. Krajcovic, for example, did not receive any confirmation about accepting his application. Thus he called to the municipal authority to which he sent it, and found they received it, but did not know what to with it next. Some of his friends do not know even today whether their application was delivered and whether they will be allowed to vote.

Attracting more foreign Slovaks

Alexandra Demetrianova, a 29-year-old journalist currently living in Thailand, tells a different story. She tried to fill in the form via her phone, but could not download the application which she was to send by email. Since it did not work, she missed the deadline and cannot vote.

Though she admits that it was partly her fault, Demetrianova dislikes that she learned about the possibilities and the deadline only from social networks and her friends.

I have the feeling that despite the number of Slovaks living abroad, the authorities and the government in Slovakia make only minimum effort to attract people outside to vote, Demetrianova told The Slovak Spectator.

She points at weak and non-effective marketing and awareness, as well as ineffective ways to register. Demetrianova criticises mail-in voting system and says that it would be better if the voters could cast ballots at embassies.

Ferencik also criticises the process, saying that the communication via classic mail rather than email remains pointlessly and deliberately complicated.

Nobody is talking about voters from abroad in public discussions, like they do not even exist, he said.

Slosiarik says that higher interest of Slovaks living abroad would increase their impact on election results. One way to do so is with electronic voting, but it would be discriminatory as only people from abroad could cast the ballots this way. Thus a comprehensive change to rules is needed, he said.

There is, however, a question whether the internet vote does not degrade the election act to a click of mouse and whether the spirit of an important social event then disappears, Slosiarik added.
TEACHERS currently on strike risk more than doctors who have done so in the past, as they are easier to replace.

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On the other hand, they have the advantage that most people do not consider them greedy for seeking higher salaries, say organisers of past strikes approached by the Sme daily. They also opined, though, that many Slovaks still show little solidarity with workers from another line of work.

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Abroad, I witnessed a joint strike of nurses and energy workers, and this is something that is still missing in our society, said Maria Levyova who until 2013 was the president of Slovak Chamber of Nurses and Midwives.

Teachers made a mistake in that they timed the strike for a period after budget had already been approved, Levyova said. But they could at least achieve an agreement that would guarantee some of their requirements in the future, she added.

You can hardly expect someone to give them 400 million now, so that they can have higher salaries, she explained. But they should have in their pocket at least something which they can bring with a clean slate and insist on it being fulfilled.

The timing of a strike before the election is legitimate, as politicians are most inclined to listen to people before elections, said Medical Trade Unions Association (LOZ) Chairman Peter Visolajsky. During the first two years after an election it is always in vain. The last two years are best as politicians tend to listen to you.

The timing for a strike is never ideal, Doctors Chamber head Marian Kollar noted.

There is always someone who says the timing is bad: after an election, it is poorly timed, as government has no time to handle these issues, in mid-term, negotiations are held, and the last year is always perceived as the time before election, he added.

Public support needed

In 2012, researchers at the Academy of Sciences together with the Methodical-Pedagogical Centre surveyed Slovaks on they perceive teacher demands for increased pay. About 33.9 percent agreed their salaries were too low.

Today, these numbers would be probably different, as the support for teachers by public is not unequivocal, but definitely stronger than in the past, according to Branislav Pupala, a researcher of the Institute for Research of Social Communication at the Slovak Academy of Sciences who participated in the survey.

People have become more sensitive to the problems of striking teachers, Pupala said. And a younger generation of teachers, who are more trustworthy for the public than a typical communist-era teacher, is more attractive for them.

The crucial aspect for organising a protest is not just to demand something but also to offer solutions, Visolajsky stressed. Thus, teachers should also push for systemic changes. Doctors and nurses agree that the hardest thing in a protest is to persevere and protest organisers should try to be constantly in contact with teachers.

The hardest work for me during doctors protests was to keep the resignation notices intact, Visolajsky said. Every day, I received many calls, and each time my mobile-phone rang, I feared someone might withdraw his or hers.

Teachers have already won

One cannot say whether the strike will fall apart in a few days, or not; but teachers are already successful, as public is debating their problem, Kollar said. The joint interest of government and public should be to seek and find compromise  be it before or after an election, he continued.

From now on, everyone will have to accept the fact that when teachers get angry they can stand up for their cause, Pupala added.
IN THE Corruption Perception Index 2015, released recently by the Transparency International watchdog, Slovakia worsened against last year, by one to two places (as several countries have the same ranking).

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The country placed equal 50th (with 51 points), along with Bahrain, Croatia and Hungary. The chart assesses a total of 168 countries.

Based on expert opinion, the Corruption Perceptions Index measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption worldwide, the TI website states, adding that the scale of the issue is huge. Sixty-eight per cent of countries worldwide have a serious corruption problem. Half of the G20 are among them.

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Overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries on the 2015 index scored below 50 points, on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived to be very clean).

According to the corruption index, the least corrupt state in the world is again Denmark, which scored 91 out of 100 points, followed up by Finland (90 points) and Sweden (89 points). The Czech Republic ended up 37th on 56 points, two places and four points behind Slovenia. Of the Visegrad Four members (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), the best ranking went to Poland, which wound up 30th on 62 points.

Some countries have improved in recent years  Greece, Senegal and the UK are among those that have seen a significant increase in scores since 2012.

Others, including Australia, Brazil, Libya, Spain and Turkey, have deteriorated, the website states.

Although Slovakia has seen some improvement in its ranking on the corruption chart, the government is far from satisfied because whats important is to respond to the sentiments and needs of the people, Prime Minister Robert Fico reacted to the placement of his country on January 27, as quoted by the TASR newswire. He remains aware that the steps taken to date by his government do not represent quantum leaps forward but rather small steps. Fico also pointed out that many supervisory bodies are under the auspices of the opposition.

The perception of corruption is still very high in Slovakia, according to TI's Slovak branch, Transparency International Slovensko (TIS). This is the fifth worst placement among EU member states, with only Greece, Romania, Italy and Bulgaria scoring worse.

Under the current government, Slovakia improved slightly in the chart from 55th-56th place in 2012. The last four years have, however, mostly been a missed opportunity, according to TIS. Neglecting reforms in health care has led to wastage and thefts, the TIS report states, as cited by the SITA newswire. The police and prosecutors office have not become well-functioning bodies in the fight against corruption with the same criteria for everyone. The gap between Slovakia and the Czech Republic continued to increase. While in 2012, the Czech Republic was seven places better, it currently stands 13 places ahead of Slovakia.

In relation to governmental measures, TIS perceives as positive the adoption of the law on the protection of corruption whistleblowers, as well as tougher rules governing financing for political parties which now include also local and regional elections. Increasing the rate of competition in state orders - by one third, to 3.6 bidders per tender last year  is also good news. The transparency of the business sector has also improved, as a result of publishing accounting balancing online or publishing data from cadastres through applications.

The main negative point is the continuing impunity of the elites who commit crimes of corruption. No top political official has been sentenced in past four years, TIS noted. Moreover, 95 percent of those sentenced for corruption have only received conditional or financial sentences. A mere 12 people have been sentenced for dishonesty concerning tenders, TIS states, as quoted by SITA. The nomination of people for top positions  mostly in judiciary and health care  has also reflected the dominance of the political interests of the ruling Smer party over the public interest.

Cronyism, too, has persisted in several state subsidy schemes, from the construction of sporting grounds, through the prime ministers reserve, to the allocation of fire engines by the premier. The government has also failed, according to TIS, to improve access to information, to enable better public control. The fight against shell companies was seen as only superficial.
SEVERAL hundred people including teachers, parents of pupils and the general public gathered in Levice on January 27 to support the ongoing teachers' strike.

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Teachers from the Slovak Teachers Initiative (ISU) and representatives of parents, who took the floor in turns, urged increased funding for the education sector and the adoption of systemic measures to bolster the sectors quality.

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We realise that education and health care are the two most neglected areas, ISUs head Vladimir Crmoman said, as quoted by the TASR newswire. If we dont make investments in the education and health care sectors, well be sick and dumb. Our results in PISA testing [OECDs Programme for International Student Assessment - ed. note] are some of the worst, our life expectancy is among the lowest. These are critical indicators that Government representatives should take into consideration.

He then recalled that teachers went on strike in 2015. which was followed by a relay strike, and that although they (the teachers) keep sending petitions and appeals, very little has been achieved. The money is there, but theres reluctance to change things, so we have to force the politicians to change that, said Crmoman.

The rally in Levice (Nitra region) is only one in a series of events that teachers have planned following a demonstration in Bratislava on January 25, acccording to Crmoman. A march in Topolcany (Nitra region) was also held on January 27. Another rally is scheduled to take place in Nove Zamky (Nitra region) on January 28, and gatherings involving teachers and parents are also planned in Kosice and Banska Bystrica.

The teachers are ready to stand firm for as long as necessary, he said, adding that 11,800 teachers and over 800 schools have signed up for the strike, based on the latest figures.
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MOSCOW (Sputnik)Russias aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, has sent Egyptian aviation authorities its recommendations on air safety but additional time will be needed for them to be realized, Rosaviatisia said in a statement Wednesday.

Russian aviation authorities earlier inspected measures taken by Egypt in its airports in order to improve the countrys air safety level.

"After our work, the Russian side formulated and sent additional recommendations to the Egyptian aviation authorities on measures for aviation safety. According to information from the Egyptian side, the realization of these recommendations will need additional resources and time," Rosaviatsia said.
"The Syrian Kurds make-up 10 percent of the population of Syria and should be included," University of Oklahoma Center for Middle East Studies Director Joshua Landis told Sputnik on Tuesday. "Claiming that they are terrorists is not an excuse for excluding them."

Landis added that considering members of the Syrian opposition and Syrian President Bashar Assads government have exchanged terrorist allegations to no effect, and there should not be an exception when it comes to the Kurds.

"Russia and Assad argued that Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamic Army are terrorists and no one cares. The Syrian opposition argued that Assad and the Syrian Army are terrorists and they are represented," Landis explained. "Why shouldn't the Kurds be represented?"

US author, radio show host and political activist Stephen Lendman told Sputnik that Turkey itself has been involved in backing extremists groups.

"ISIS, al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra and various other terrorist groups. We know about Turkeys involvement supporting them," Lendman stated.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, who scheduled the much-anticipated talks between Syrian government and opposition delegates to be held on Friday in Geneva, began issuing official invitations on Tuesday.

Qadri Jamil, one of the leaders of the Syrian Popular Front for Change and Liberation coalition, told Sputnik that PYD chair Saleh Muslim was included in the list of moderate opposition members, but could not confirm whether he had received de Misturas invitation.
"OPEC producers are probably unlikely to cut [production quotas], because on a variable cost basis they still make money They all need cash. So lets say if you cover your fixed costs working in basins, like the North Sea, Angola or Kazakhstan where the variable cost is 10 to 15 dollars, and the price is just 30 dollars, you still make 15 to 20 dollars cash contribution (recovery of fixed costs)  so why should they cut production?" Doshi wondered.

According to the analyst, only an explicit agreement among the OPEC members can prompt the cartel to reduce production, but it is hard to achieve in an organization that brings together such geopolitical adversaries as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

OIL PRICES GROWTH PROJECTIONS

Another oil market analyst, Dominic Haywood of Energy Aspects, predicts that such situation with oil prices will remain in place at least for the next few months, "but should pick up into the second half of 2016."

The reasons for the recovery at the end of 2016 will be "declines in non-OPEC production and continued strong light ends [the more volatile products of petroleum refining] demand," Haywood said.

Nevertheless, there have been signs recently of OPECs intentions to take some real steps.

On January 21, news of a possible OPEC extraordinary meeting in March emerged after remarks by Nigerian Petroleum Resources Minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The organization had previously agreed to hold a meeting in case prices fell below the $35 per barrel, according to the minister.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Plummeting oil and gas prices have pushed the US distress ratio, an indicator of economic recovery, to the level last seen during the Great Recession in 2009, Standard & Poor's Rating Services said in a report.

"The US distress ratio has started the year at 29.6 percent in January, a level last surpassed in July 2009, during the recession, when the ratio fluctuated from 14.6 percent to a staggering 70 percent," the report, issued on Tuesday, stated.

The raising distress ratio points to a growing need for capital and usually signals an increase in defaults during a serious market disruption, according to the report.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)Iran is actively seeking new opportunities for the production and exports of natural gas, including the development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities to commence shipments to Europe in two years, the managing director of the National Iranian Gas Export Company said.

"[Exports to] Europe definitely could be considered," Alireza Kameli said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, published on Tuesday.

According to the top Iranian official, Tehran has been in talks on the construction of floating LNG facilities with several European companies, including the Golar LNG international operator of LNG carriers. The project is due to be implemented in less than two years, Kameli added.
Its Washington that keeps positioning its troops closer and closer to Moscow and not vice versa, Polish MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke pointed out.

He also criticized the actions of the Polish Law and Justice (PiS), Polands ruling political party, which actively promotes establishing a NATO military presence in the country. According to Korwin-Mikke, the Polish governments policies remind him of those of pre-WWII Poland, which, as it became apparent in September 1939, ultimately proved to be rather reckless and dangerous.

He argued that while the EU seeks to assume a neutral stance towards Russia, the Polish leadership continues to stubbornly advocate anti-Russian policies.
Denmark's Ministry of Justice denied access to many of the documents sought by Denfri.dk, and heavily redacted much of the information.

However, Denfri.dk was able to confirm that the US was granted permission to fly over and land on Danish territory by aircraft N877GA.

The documents also confirmed that the aircraft used Danish airspace and landed at Copenhagen airport.

Danmark, endnu en gang som USAs savlende lakaj: https://t.co/AzIeNjgTNN  Poul-Henning Kamp (@bsdphk) 27  2016

'US sends aircraft to Denmark to catch Snowden,' Denfri reported.

Denfri.dk decided to investigate after the Norwegian media published a letter, dated June 27 2013, from the US Department of Justice to authorities in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, asking their police to arrest Snowden if he boarded a flight from Moscow to one of their countries.

On June 23 Snowden boarded a flight to Moscow after having spent several weeks in Hong Kong, during which US prosecutors charged him with theft and two counts of violating the Espionage Act because he had leaked information about numerous global surveillance programs by US and UK intelligence agencies.

Snowden was eventually granted temporary asylum in Russia on August 1, 2013 after spending several weeks stranded in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.
MOSCOW (Sputnik), Alexander Mosesov  Frances view on lifting the Western sanctions against Russia falls entirely into line with the US position on the issue outlined by the US secretary of state, Frances National Front (FN) partys vice-president and member of the European Parliament told Sputnik Wednesday.

On January 22, John Kerry said the sanctions against Russia over the Ukrainian crisis might be lifted within the next few months if the Minsk agreements were fulfilled. Two days later, French Minister of Economy, Finance and Industry Emmanuel Macron expressed hope that the anti-Russia sanctions would be lifted this summer.

"In fact, this statement is not surprising since French diplomacy for nearly 10 years, systematically follows that of the United States and that the US Secretary of State John Kerry announced the same measures, almost word in word," Marie-Christine Arnautu stated.
"I understand the remarks by the President of the European Council to mean that he is monitoring the effectiveness of the agreement between Turkey and the EU," said Fico.

Fico said that stopping migrants from entering the EU from Turkey would be the most effective way to stop their flow into Europe, but that the agreement was still not functioning correctly.

He urged Europe to protect Schengen by more effectively patrolling its borders, including with the Coast Guard, rather than wasting time trying to impose unnecessary migrant quotas.

"Our philosophy is to stop the influx of illegal migrants, then we can deal with what happens inside Europe," said Fico, who condemned European politicians who try "to solve the problem of quotas, which have proved to be unreasonable and unworkable, and in the meantime thousands of migrants are entering Europe every day."

"Fewer are coming now not because there are some protective measures, but simply because it is cold. I am afraid that if the EU doesn't reach a solution until late 2016 or 2017, Europe will complete the aforementioned ritual suicide."
The precursor to Daesh, the so-called 'Islamic State of Iraq', which emerged in the mid-2000s, was also a creature of al-Qaeda  morphing into the 'Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant' in April 2013, when militants advanced into eastern Syria. It was the Syrian war, experts suggest, which caused the split between the former allies, with al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri rejecting Daesh's attempts to present themselves as al-Qaeda's representatives in Syria.

Asked to comment on the report by the independent Russian newspaper Svobodnaya Pressa, Sergei Balmasov, a senior analyst at the Center for the Study of the Crisis of Society, suggested that really, the distinction between Daesh and al-Nusra Front is relative.

"When Daesh took control of Raqqa in 2013, it handed over half of its loot to al-Qaeda, and not to the Syrian branch, but to AQIM  al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, led by Abdelmalek Droukdel. This is just one episode demonstrating the groups' active cooperation with one another. Moreover, there have been many cases of fighters from al-Nusra going over to Daesh, and vice-versa."

Furthermore, pointing to the think tanks' connections to the Pentagon, and hawkish planners' push to expand US military operations in Syria, Balmasov warned that what's important now is to pay close attention "to see how the report will be received by the military and political leadership in Washington."

"After all, al-Nusra comes into contact with Syrian government forces much more often than Daesh does. Al-Nusra Front units are fighting in the suburbs of Damascus, in the center and south of the country. In other words, if Washington joins the fight against the terror group, US bombs would begin falling on much more of Syria's territory" than presently.
On Wednesday Seyed Hadi Afghahi, Iranian diplomat and expert in Middle Eastern affairs, told Sputnik that it is time for Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan to make good on his promise to resign, since Israel has now also shown itself to have proof of the government's collaboration with the terrorist group.

"Today we see that it is time for Erdogan to resign, because the defense minister of one of Turkey's closest partners and traditional allies in the region, who has access to classified military information with all the details about the situation in Syria, says that Israel has proof of Turkey's cooperation with Daesh, including that Ankara buys stolen oil from them."

Afghahi highlighted two factors why Israel has decided to take a strong position on Turkey's assistance to terrorists.

"Firstly, Tel Aviv clearly understands that today Turkey is in deep crisis, both economically and politically, especially after Russia imposed sanctions against Turkey and the reputation of President Erdogan was seriously damaged."

By speaking out, Israel is probably seeking to put pressure on Turkey to give it more intelligence information with which it can counter Daesh and similar Islamic terrorist groups, Afghahi said.

"It is advantageous and necessary for Israel to have close mutual relations with Turkey in order to get important information."

"Secondly, economically, Turkey on the contrary needs Israel, as a trading partner and market for agricultural products that it used to sell on the Russian market," Afghahi said.
The US-led coalition is determined to capture Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the US Defense Secretary stressed. During the event at Davos, Carter pointed out that Washington's allies in the region have not been doing enough to defeat Daesh and added that there will be "boots on the ground" in Iraq and Syria.

According to Van Buren, however, more air attack sorties and fighting are unlikely to halt the Daesh advance. Firstly, he said, Washington should cut off Daesh's sources of funding.

"As long as the US insists on flying air attack sorties (and your candidate may unfortunately need to do so to cover his/her right flank), direct them far more intensely than at present against one of ISIS's [Daesh's] main sources of cash: oil exports. Blow up trucks moving oil. Blow up wellheads in ISIS-dominated areas. Finding targets is not hard," the former US State Department official writes.
The People's Front, according to the paper, has effectively torpedoed the president's proposals, promising that they would not vote for them. Subsequently, the other forces dominating the country's post-Maidan political space, including former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party and Oleh Lyashko's Radical Party, have stepped out in support of Yatsenyuk's proposal, with the Radical Party even putting for a date for the referendum  March.

The Petro Poroshenko Bloc, complaining under its breath that constitutional amendments are a function of the parliament, says that "everything else is mere populism." For his part, Poroshenko Bloc Rada Chairman Volodymyr Groysman suggested that a referendum would mean that the Donbass would not receive the autonomy so vital for the Minsk peace plan, adding that the referendum's question would surely be 'subject to manipulation'.

Speaking to Vesti, Ukrainian political scientist Ruslan Bortnik explained that at the moment, "Yatsenyuk, Avakov and his entire government hang within a hair's breadth of dismissal." Subsequently, the analyst noted, "the prime minister's announcement is a form of blackmail: the president is being told thathe will not be able to count on the People's Front's support any longer."

Ultimately, the newspaper suggests, all this testifies to the fact that the country's pro-EU, pro-Washington coalition may be on the verge of collapse.

"The coalition is de-facto collapsing. But before the parliament's dissolution, the president has other tools: a 'reformatting' of the government (expected in the spring), and a 'reformatting' of the ruling coalition."
"At a time of heavy US dependence on foreign oil, a little compromise in America's principles might have seemed in order," the analyst, a former special advisor to the president during the Reagan administration, slyly noted.

However, "even then, of course, the KSA could not control the international oil market and the royals could not long survive if they did not sell their oil. They needed buyers as much, if not more than, buyers needed them."

"Today, however, its hard to make a case that petroleum warrants Washingtons 'special relationship' with Saudi Arabia. The global energy market is expanding; Iran has begun selling more oil; new sources such as tight oil have come on line; US crude oil production is the highest it has been in decades. Most important, the royal regime cannot survive without oil revenues and has continued to pump even as prices have collapsed."

From the geostrategic tack, Bandow recalled that Washington has used Riyadh in recent years "as an integral component of a containment system against Iran. Of course, much of the 'Tehran problem' was made in America: overthrowing Iranian democracy and empowering the Shah, a corrupt, repressive modernizer, led to his ouster and the creation of an Islamist state. Washington's subsequent support for Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his aggressive war against Iran only intensified the Islamist regime's antagonism."

"Fears multiplied as Tehran confronted its Sunni neighbors along with Israel and continued the Shah's nuclear program. Overwrought nightmares of Islamic revolution throughout the region encouraged Americas fulsome embrace of the KSA and allied regimes, such as Bahrain, where a Shia majority is held captive by a Sunni monarch backed by the Saudi military."

Held captive by such strategic considerations, "in Riyadh, Secretary Kerry [thus] declared America's undiminished support for the world's leading feudal kleptocracy."

However, as with oil, the case for Washington's need to support Riyadh due to geopolitics has also "become quite threadbare. The regime opposes Iran for its own reasons, not to aid America. And Saudi Arabia is well able to do so. In 2014, the country came in at world number four with $81 billion in military expenditures, a multiple of Iran's total," which was only about $15 billion in the same year.
Does it mean the Western powers will give up their intervention plans? Unlikely so, Mattia Toaldo, a Policy Fellow of European Council of Foreign Relations, deems.

"The more you have attacks like this by ISIL [Daesh], the less the West will be inclined to wait for an invitation from the government," Toaldo underscored, as cited by the British journalist.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have clearly demonstrated their willingness to open a third front in the war against Daesh in Libya.

On January 22, US Department of Defense's media service DoD News reported that the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. and his French counterpart Gen. Pierre de Villiers discussed a potential joint military operation against Daesh in Libya.

"It's fair to say we're looking to take decisive military action against ISIL [Daesh] [in Libya] in conjunction with a legitimate political process," Gen. Dunford said.

"[The Obama] administration officials say the campaign in Libya could begin in a matter of weeks. They anticipate it would be conducted with the help of a handful of European allies, including Britain, France and Italy," The New York Times reports, expressing concerns that the new military intervention is being planned without a meaningful debate in the US Congress.
"As we have stated earlier, we are not going to participate if armed groups are present at the negotiating table," Ibrahim stressed.

A representative of PYD in France told Sputnik earlier in the day the Kurdish party has not been invited for intra-Syrian talks on Friday, citing pressure from Turkey.

Russia has maintained that the intra-Syrian dialogue would suffer with the exclusion of Kurdish representatives.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu upheld Kurdish participation in the negotiations, but reaffirmed Ankara's official stance equating PYD with the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), both groups classified there as terrorist organizations.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier this week, Finnish Interior Minister Petteri Orpo announced that Helsinki was concerned about changes taking place on the eastern border with Russia, as Russian border guards were said to be allowing refugees without the necessary documents to enter Finland. Foreign Minister Timo Soini has previously called for urgent measures to protect the Finnish border from the arrival of asylum seekers through Russia.

"We noted the Finnish statementsover entry of nationals of third countries to this country from the Russian territory with an aim of receiving asylum. The Russian side, understanding the concerns of the Finnish side over the migration crisis, is continuously ready to discuss all issues constructively and with mutual respect," the ministerial statement read.

The ministry stressed that the Russian border and migration authorities were not interested in the increase of migrant flows, and were working toward limiting them within the framework of the Russian constitution.
STRASBOURG (Sputnik), Daria Chernyshova  On Tuesday, PACE adopted a resolution named "Introduction of sanctions against parliamentarians." The document criticizes the practice of states imposing sanctions against other countries' lawmakers. It also calls for a legal framework to be established that would provide national parliamentarians with "adequate safeguards" to perform their duties abroad. Ukrainian lawmaker George Logvinsky later said that the resolution introduced responsibility for lawmakers visiting Crimea and Donbass.

"I cant see where they see the victory. In fact this resolution is good news for those who are under sanctions, and after the paragraph 11 [of the resolution], my friends [speaker of the lower house of Russian parliament Sergei] Naryshkin and [deputy head of the Russian PACE delegation Leonid] Slutsky can have the right to be [defended] and say it is not possible to apply the sanctions immediately," Mariani said.

Naryshkin and Slutsky have been included in the EU sanctions list for allegedly undermining the territorial integrity of Ukraine, rendering them unable to travel to the European Union.
On today's episode of Loud & Clear, host Brian Becker is joined by Iranian-American author and activist Mazda Majidi to talk about the historic visit of Iran's President Hassan Rouhani to Italy and France. As Rouhani arrives in Paris today for talks with President Francois Hollande that had originally been planned for last November, we analyze how the ending of sanctions against Iran is affecting the country's growing influence abroad.

In the second segment, Becker discusses what's behind today's visit of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to China, where he is meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Eric Draitser, author, activist and founder of StopImperialism.org, joins Becker to talk about the dynamics of Kerry's visit. They discuss the recent announcement of North Korea that they conducted a hydrogen bomb test, as well as whether the United States is using the Trans-Pacific Partnership to stifle China's global influence.

Finally, Becker is joined by historian and author and professor Dr. Gerald Horne, Chair of History and African-American Studies at the University of Houston to talk about a range of issues, including the role of white supremacy in the sudden rise of Donald Trump, Obama's strategy in thawing relations with Cuba, and the historic connection of racism to US domestic and foreign policies.
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"The United Nations has sent a team to visit black communities in the United States  investigating the terrible human rights situation for black people and this reign of police terror," he says.

"I expect great things from these investigations."

Horne also discusses the relationship between Cuba and the United States, which is also bound up in American slavery and the Jim Crow South. Fidel Castros rise in Cuba correlated with the Civil Rights Movement, and its impossible to completely separate the two.

"I think that you need to recognize that the socialist project became an ally of the black liberation movement in the United States of America," he says. "That is to say that historically black people in the United States have needed allies, particularly internationally, because the domestic situation has been so foreboding and so forbidding."

The recent thaw in relations between the two countries has less to do with progress, and more to do with the beginnings of a new Cold War, in which Washington fears a rising China.

"Now, by improving relations with Havana, the United States feels that it has removed the possibility, or eroded the possibility, of China playing the role in the 21st century that the Soviet Union played with Cuba in the 20th century."


MOSCOW (Sputnik)Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has authorized an investigation for the crimes within the ICC jurisdiction, allegedly committed in and around South Ossetia between July 1 and October 10, 2008, according to an ICC statement issued on Wednesday.

"On 13 October 2015, the ICC Prosecutor submitted her "Request for authorization of an investigation pursuant to article 15" of the Rome Statute, asking for authorization from Pre-Trial Chamber I to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Georgia, for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in and around South Ossetia in 2008," the statement says.

According to the ICC, the Chamber received the representations by or on behalf of 6,335 victims on this matter.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)The Munich Security Report for 2016, issued on Wednesday, warns of the start of global instability, with high risk of military confrontation.

"In 2016, we are likely to witness a period of growing risks, including of military confrontation, of uncertainty, and of fundamental transformation  the beginning of a more unstable international era," the report, issued ahead of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) on February 12-14, reads.

The report urges world leaders to build more "resilient regional and global orders" in order not to abandon the idea of a rule-based international society.
On Wednesday, January 27, members of the Senate Regulated Industries panel in the State of Georgia approved a constitutional amendment and piece of legislation that could potentially lead to the legalization of pari-mutuel wagering on horse racing.

News of the decision comes courtesy of an article on washingtontimes.com. The piece explains that the bill was the subject of some changes before the committee passed it. The changes had to do with dedicated funding for gambling addiction programs and revenue for need-based college programs.

The article has cited the legislations Republican sponsor as saying that state Democrats will have to get on board if the bill is to make its way out of the Senate.

(With files from washingtontimes.com)

Related Stories

 Coalition Unveils Georgia Racetrack Plan
The Delaware Legislature paid tribute to 2015 U.S. Standardbred Horse of the Year Wiggle It Jiggleit Tuesday afternoon (January 26) with ceremonies in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Wiggle It Jiggleits owner, George Teague Jr., of Harrington, and trainer Clyde Francis, of Houston, were joined by the geldings driver, Montrell Teague, of Harrington, and groom, Mike Taylor, of Harrington. The festivities started on a capacity-filled Senate floor where legislators and visitors watched a replay of the 2015 Little Brown Jug from Delaware, Ohio  which is widely recognized as one of the most memorable races of all-time  that resulted in a victory for the ages. Many of the legislators were awe-stricken by the remarkable race and vocalized their congratulations and pride in having a Delaware horse gain national acclaim and subsequent attention and exposure across North America.

A tribute was read and presented by Senators Gary Simpson and Patricia Blevins, noting the many accomplishments of Wiggle It Jiggleit, that included 22 victories and more than $2 million earned in a historic season.

The Teague crew then immediately went to the House chamber and was introduced by Representative Bobby Outten and Dan Short, who honoured the connections of Wiggle It Jiggleit. Owner George Teague Jr. expressed his gratitude at the podium on the House floor.

This is truly an honour, said Teague, who also trained the 2004 U.S. Horse of the Year, Rainbow Blue. We got extremely lucky to have a horse like this and its been a fun ride. We appreciate the recognition.

Teague and crew then visited the Honorable Governor Jack Markells office and were met with congratulations by the Governor.

Wiggle It Jiggleit is expected to return to racing in the spring of 2016 and will receive his U.S. Horse of the Year honours at the United States Harness Writers Associations Dan Patch Awards Banquet on March 6 in Orlando, Fl. Delaware will be well represented, as there will be four awards given to residents of The First State. In addition to the Horse of the Year feat, owner George Teague Jr. was voted 2015 Owner of the Year, driver Montrell Teague was named Rising Star, and Jo Ann Looney-King, of Harrington will receive the William Haughton Memorial Good Guy Award.

(Harrington Raceway)
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One incumbent is running in the five-candidate race for two open seats.
Blakley retires from Air Force

Air Force Air National Guard Tech Sgt. David L. Blakley has retired from the Air Force Air National Guard after serving honorably for 25 years.

He last served as the noncommissioned officer in charge of cyber systems operations with the 216th Space Control Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

Blakley is the nephew of Nadine Bradbury of Kelso; the stepson of Margaret Blakley of Crestview Fla.; the brother of Sam Blythe of Highland, Kan.; and the cousin of Brad Haggard of St. Joseph, Mo.

A 1978 graduate of Highland High School in Highland, Blakley received an associates degree in 2002 from Vatterott College in St. Joseph, Mo.

 The Daily News
As a teenager, Janet Lynn Rubert said she wouldnt be caught dead in downtown Longview without her 3-inch patent leather shoes, hat and white gloves.

Like many girls in the 1950s and 1960s, Rubert, now 71, would dress to the nines to shop at Commerce Avenue department stores, which included Sears and Myklebusts. Rubert still loves the history and natural beauty of the town, but she says Longview is not the same city it was in 1960.

The town of Longview isnt anywhere near the town that we grew up in, Rubert said.

It seemed like a booming place to live, and there were all these mill jobs and people seemed to be thriving economically. But it seems like a real struggling place now.

In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that she now lives in Idaho, Rubert remains a member of the 23 Club in part because of her familys 19th century roots in the area and in part because of her own fond memories of the place.

It was 1852 when Ruberts ancestors traveled to the area in covered wagons from Arkansas, settling in the Delameter Valley and starting a sawmill near Arkansas Creek near Castle Rock. Another side of her family, the Washburns, arrived from Indiana in the late 1800s after fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Ruberts father, Don Bray, the son of a dairy farmer, is listed in the first Longview census in 1923.

Rubert and her husband, Don, went on to raise her son and daughter in Longview. She worked in childbirth education at Monticello Medical Center (later absorbed by PeaceHealth) in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, she helped develop a childbirth education program for low-income pregnant women at the Cowlitz County Health Department. Rubert was an active member in the county and state Democratic party, a volunteer for the Longview Community Church and a soloist and participant in chloral groups.

Rubert said she thinks Longview would still be a good place to raise a family, but only in certain areas.

I think theres a lot of decaying areas that have brought in a lot of drugs and crime, she said. Rubert said she even noticed an uptick in crime near her former home in Willow Grove.

Rubert links the decline to the shuttering of the Reynolds Metals Co. aluminum plant and the downsizing of pulp and paper mills. New industry, the Port of Longview and Lower Columbia College all will be key to revamping the economy and attracting more young people here, she said. Rupert said she was pleased downtown is making a comeback, but she prefers fewer secondhand shops and more of a theme similar to the revitalized Castle Rock downtown core.

The shop keepers (in Castle Rock) have really pulled together and made it kind of fun place to go ... they just spruced it up so much, she said.

Rubert still loves to visit Lake Sacajawea, the Longview Community Church and Civic Circle when she travels back to see family.

Its just a beautiful place ... and the history is part of our lives.
Environmental groups are raising more concerns about the background of people proposing a $1.25 billion oil refinery and a propane terminal at the Port of Longview.

Columbia Riverkeeper recently released state and federal documents detailing the ill-fated history of an Odessa, Wash., company, TransMessis Columbia Plateau, which was run by the same people involved in Waterside Energy, the company proposing the Longview refinery and propane terminal.

In November 2013, TransMessis took over the $4.3 million biodiesel plant which is owned by the Odessa Public Development Authority but had been vacant for more than year. After cleaning up the facility, TransMessis starting producing biodiesel there in January 2014, but shut down the plant five months later when falling oil prices undercut the renewable energy market. TransMessis fell $200,000 behind on its rent, abruptly laid off 28 employees in June 2014 and left behind a legacy of chemical waste, according to the OPDA and documents presented by Riverkeeper.

It was a monetary and environmental fiasco, Linda Horst of Kelso said at Tuesdays Port of Longview meeting. We cannot let these people ruin our town the way they did in Odessa, and I urge you to send them packing, she told port commissioners.

What happened in Odessa could easily happen here, said Sandra Davis, who also commented at the port meeting.

An inspection of the Odessa plant last March found that TransMessis left behind a 15,000 gallon methanol tank; a 7,000 gallon glycerin tank; several leaking tanks and totes; unsecured/open chemical containers; and incompatible chemicals stored next to one another, according U.S Environmental Protection Agency. EPA estimates that the final cleanup costs will be about $580,000.

The company also left behind considerable debt, including $200,000 in unpaid rent to the OPDA, $8,809 in unpaid rent to a private fire suppression company and $6,544 in unpaid state taxes. A seed company also is suing TransMessis for nonpayment of $1.6 million in canola seed.

Damon Pistulka was CEO of TransMesisis and now is a project manager for Waterside Energy. In addition to Pistulka, Lou Soumas and Chris Efird were directors for TransMessis parent company. Soumas is now the CEO of Waterside and Efird is Watersides executive chairman.

Pistulka said by phone Tuesday he was never made aware of any the EPAs findings and that the company has never received any citation or violation notice from the agency.

When we left the facility it was in better shape than it ever had been from a cleanliness standpoint and from an operations standpoint, he said. TransMessis spent hundreds of thousands of dollars cleaning up the mess from the plants former tenant, Pistulka said.

He added that TransMessis had nothing to do with the plant after July 2014, and the inspection didnt occur until several months after the company already had left.

People make it sound like we were out hunting for a deal to take advantage of these people, Pistulka said. That couldnt be further from the truth.

Columbia Riverkeeper attorney Miles Johnson lamented TransMessis willingness ... to walk away and leave these hazardous chemicals without proper containment in a place where people could get hurt. ... The inability of these people to run a very small, uncomplicated operation bodes poorly for their ability to run a much larger, more complicated facility in Longview.

Soumas said environmental groups are trying to spin the Odessa experience to bolster their opposition to the Longview project. He added that Waterside is working with the Port of Longview to vet the project.

Port Commissioners had little to say about the documents presented in advance to them by Riverkeeper. Commissioners Doug Averett and Jeff Wilson declined to comment. Commissioner Bob Bagaason said the documents were given to the port staff working on the Waterside refinery and terminal projects.

Documents like these always bring up questions in your mind, Bagaason said,declining to elaborate.
In past editorials, weve been critical of Gov. Jay Inslee and how the entire issue of prisoners being let out of jail early has been handled. Now it seems maybe we havent been tough enough.

In a story written by Seattle Times reporters Lewis Kamb and Justin Mayo, we learned the state Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to disclose information about the early prisoner release problem in a timely and complete manner.

While this doesnt really surprise anyone, it certainly is both frustrating and ridiculous.

Or maddening as the governor says.

At Inslees press conference about the early prisoner release issue, he said, I have a lot of questions about how and why this happened, and I understand that members of the public will have those same questions. Further, Inslee said, I expect the external investigation will bring the transparency and accountability we need to make sure this issue is resolved.

The governor led us to believe the external investigation, which is ongoing, would bring transparency. What about transparency while the investigation is still underway? Does the DOC think withholding information or not fulfilling public records requests in a timely fashion will make this issue go away?

The governors press release states, The governor ordered DOC to halt all releases of impacted offenders from prison until a hand calculation is done to ensure the offender is being released on the correct date. A broader software fix is expected to be in place by Jan. 7, 2016.

Is the broader software fix in place?

If you visit www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/news-media, you will link to press releases from the governors office. Youd think Inslee would want the public to know his administration followed through on the software fix as promised, but we cant find any mention of it.

After completely botching the prisoner release problem from a system standpoint, the governor hasnt done a very good job managing the public relations aspect either.

Department of Corrections spokesperson Jeremy Barclay said this about the failure to provide requested information: Its not intentional; its more unintentional.

What does that mean? Not intentional, but more unintentional?

How well would an answer like that work at your job?

As of this writing, the DOC has failed to update the status of more than 1,000 prisoners released early deemed to have complied with post-release conditions.

In a department that has over 8,000 employees statewide, taxpayers expect more.

Some readers have commented that the TDN editorial board wants to see government privatized. Thats just not true. What the TDN editorial board would like to see is a state government thats responsive, efficient, open and frugal.

What we tend to see is problems like the early prisoner release issue being handled poorly, a lack of adequate state staffing to deal with foster children and a poor record helping mentally challenged folks get help when in the state system.

We know there are many great people who work for the state, some are our good friends.

But time and time again we see ineptitude which negatively impacts peoples lives.

We all deserve better.
"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844
Between January 2003 and September 2006, out of 138 letters to the editor that I sent to the Financial Times before I placed them on this blog they published these 15 . Not bad! Thank you FT!Unfortunately, since then and until the very last day of the decade, out of some 1.000 letters that you can find here, FT published none, zero, zilch. Of course FT is under no obligation whatsoever to publish any of my letters and of course one should not exclude the possibilities that my letters might have quite dramatically gone from bad to worse yet one wonders.My usual suspects are:1. Someone in FT with a delicate ego feels his or her importance diminished by giving voice to a lowly non PhD from a developing country daring to opine on many issues of developed countries.2. That FT has some sort of conflict of interest with the credit rating agencies that makes it hard for them to give too much relevance to someone who considers they have been given too much powers.3. The FT establishment had perhaps decided there were only macro economic problems and not any financial regulation problems, and wanted to hear no monothematic contradictions on that.4. That FT feels slightly embarrassed when someone repeatedly asks the emperor-is-naked type question of what is the purpose of the banks and realizing this was something FT should have itself asked a long time ago.5. It is way too much oversight for FT to handle.6. Or am I just supposed to be a living example of one half of the Financial Times motto, namely that of "without favour"Which one do you believe is closest to the truth?
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Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has signed agreement with its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan, an official statement said.

The agreements related to cyber security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and the respective country, the cabinet statement said.

The CERT-In and its Malaysian counterpart signed an agreement on November 23, 2015, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Malaysia.

The agreement between CERT-In and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team, Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, was signed on November 24, 2015.

The agreement between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center was signed on December 7 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed agreements between the two parties completed by December 22, 2015.

Cyber security is a booming market around the world and will impact India greatly in the near future. Earlier this year, there were reports of Israel, the leader in that sector, trying to tap into that opportunity. Business Standard reported that organizations such as CyberSpark from Israel have started holding preliminary talks with Indian companies including Reliance and Tata groups, educations institutions like IIM-Ahmedabad, IIT-Mumbai and even start-up incubators to start collaboration between the two countries.
tech2 News Staff

Lenovo will launch the Vibe X3 smartphone in India today. The Lenovo Vibe X3 launch will also be streamed live on YouTube and is expected to begin at 1PM. The smartphone is said to be the last premium offer by the company.

In terms of specifications, the device sport a 5.5-inch display with a 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution. It is powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, paired with 3GB RAM. On the storage front, the Vibe X3 is offered in a 32GB built in storage variant and can be expanded up to 128GB via microSD.

The Lenovo Vibe X3 runs the companys Vibe UI based on Android 5.1 Lollipop, which has been tweaked to look similar to stock Android. The Vibe X3 smartphone also packs in a 21MP rear camera with the Sony IMX230 sensor and LED flash and an 8MP front-facing camera. It includes a 3600mAh battery and offers a fingerprint sensor at the rear panel along with a hybrid dual-SIM slots along with 4G LTE support.

Another unique feature of the phone is the audio, via Dolby Atmos dual front speakers, as well as on the headphones. The company claims it has used the best DACs in the phone to offer lossless playback.
tech2 News Staff

Opera has released its first update in 2016 for its Opera Mini browser on the Android platform and the highlight feature is added support for 13 Indian languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

The other major updates include support for more than 90 languages (including 13 Indian languages), an improved download manager and a new QR-code reader and generator.

According to a study by Boston Consulting Group, more than 70% of the Indian population does not use English as its primary language. Opera thinks that adding 13 Indian languages will help it reduce barriers for people to come online.

Unlike the old Opera Mini, where the UI language was set according to the language of the Android OS, the new update lets users choose from the list of 90 installed languages. Users will also be prompted to select a language, the first time they use the updated version of the browser.

We are continuing our efforts to bring the internet to as many people as possible, not only by making it possible to access the internet on low-bandwidth networks with our compression technology, but also by making sure that our browser is easy for anyone to use and understand. The improved language support is an important part of our efforts, says Christian Uribe, Product Manager for Opera Mini.

More products and services use QR codes as an easy way to give users access to web content. Weve also included a QR code generator, so if you want to share a link with a friend nearby, you can create a QR code to any page yourself, says Christian Uribe.

Opera Mini has also added an improved download manager to improve the stability and speed of downloads, according to Uribe.
Nash David

2016 witnessed a new entrant in the Indian smartphone market. LeTV, now known as LeEco, entered India with the launch of its Le 1s and Le Max smartphones on 20 January in Gurgaon.

In an already crowded smartphone market, what did get our attention was the approach it took to foray into the Indian market. Unlike Xiaomi, which despite having a wide portfolio of devices in China, has focussed its attention on the smartphone range  Mi and Redmi  with a couple of accessories such as LED lights, headphones and battery banks.

LeTV on the other hand began with smartphones, but looks forward to launching all products under its portfolio in India, according to key personnel at LeEco. In addition to smartphones, LeEco manufactures smart televisions, and also smart bicycles and has interests in smart cars.

LeEco could also be referred to as the Netflix of China, which interests from content streaming to film production in China. Now that LeEco has launched in India, the company has already announced 555 service centres to answer the concerns consumers have around any new device manufacturer looking to set up shop in India.

During the launch of the LeEco smartphones in India, Atul Jain, COO of Smart Electronic Business, LeEco revealed that the companys plan was to be among the top 3 mobile smartphone players in India. That effectively means in terms of device shipments, it looks forward to rubbing shoulders with companies of the likes of Samsung, Micromax and Intex.

In addition, LeEco is contemplating Make in India plans. Jain said, We have been thinking about these plans, and in the direction of Make in India, but it would be too early to discuss at this point in time. Since the Indian market has a deep interest in movie content, Jain added that if the Indian market has a great affinity for Hollywood, LeEco would work towards getting more Hollywood titles in its content pool.

Among the other prominent announcements made by LeEco was setting up of a 1000-member strong R&D centre in Bangalore. A lot of the technology used in LeEco devices would be produced by the R&D team from Bangalore. On being asked about software updates for the devices it has launched in India, Jain added that the Le 1s and Le Max should get updated to Marshmallow by March or April 2016.
tech2 News Staff

After recently announcing that it will be free for life, Facebook owned messaging app has a new feature coming up its sleeve. According to developer Javier Santos' latest Google Plus post, WhatsApp will now give users the option to get notifications which tells them that the messages they are exchanging are encrypted end-to-end.

According to WhatsApp Android version 2.12.413, the messaging apps shows plans to allows users to link their WhatsApp account to their respective Facebook account. Apart from this, WhatsApp has plans to add features such as video calling, information sharing with Facebook and document sharing on WhatsApp as well.

You can share your WhatsApp data with Facebook from the Account settings tab. According to the leaks, this is so far an optional features.

This move may give Facebook a good idea as to which contact you spend more time talking with. This enables it to populate your timeline with relevant posts thereby letting you spend more time on Facebook.

Founded by Ukrainian immigrants to America Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009, WhatsApp got acquired by social media giant Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.

Both Koum and Acton were former employees of technology company Yahoo.
hidden

As red-hot sales in China show signs of cooling, Apple Inc executives are touting India's growing appetite for iPhones.

In an earnings call in which the company reported meager iPhone growth and forecast its first revenue drop in 13 years, the Indian market stood out as a rare bright spot for Apple.

Sales of the company's flagship smartphone climbed 76 percent in the country from the year-ago quarter, Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said on the call.

And Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested more growth is on the horizon, noting the median age in India is just 27.

"I see the demographics there also being incredibly great for a consumer brand, and for people that really want the best product," Cook said. "We have been putting increasingly more energy in India."

Growth in India is a tantalizing prospect as Apple grapples with the economic downturn in China, its second largest market. While revenue in Greater China rose 14 percent in the last quarter, Apple is beginning to see a shift in the economy, particularly in Hong Kong, Maestri told Reuters in an interview.

India cannot immediately offset Apple's woes in China, said analyst Neil Shah of Counterpoint Technology Market Research. The company averaged only about 450,000 smartphone shipments per quarter in India in 2015, compared with more than 15 million per quarter in China, Shah said.

What's more, nearly 70 percent of smartphones sell for less than $150, leaving just a sliver of the market for Apple's high-end phones. The company's smartphone market share stands at less than 2 percent, Shah said.

But the Indian market seems to be turning in Apple's favor. With 4G coverage spreading, Indian consumers will likely be more open to investing in smartphones, Shah said.

Young consumers are already willing to spend heavily on the device at the center of their digital lives. As in China, Apple products are coveted status symbols.

"The love for the iPhone is there," said Carolina Milanesi, chief of research and head of U.S. business at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, a consumer research firm.

Apple's next task is expanding distribution in India, where its products are sold through third-party resellers. The company has filed an application with the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion to open its own stores, an Indian official told Reuters earlier this month.

Reuters
A blog containing opinion and analysis in a wide array of areas including the economy, health care, broadband and international relations.
UN chief slams Israeli settlements as `provocative acts`

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon addresses a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Middle East at UN headquarters in New York on Tuesday.

Reuters, United Nations :UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday slammed Israel's settlement activities as "provocative acts" that raise questions about the nation's commitment to a two-state solution amid growing Palestinian frustration over nearly 50 years of occupation.The Palestinians want an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in a 1967 war. The last round of peace talks broke down in April 2014, and Israeli-Palestinian violence has surged in recent months.Israel confirmed on Thursday that it would appropriate a large tract of fertile land in the occupied West Bank. The land is near Jordan in an area where Israel already has many settlement farms built on land Palestinians seek for a state.Ban said he was "deeply troubled" by reports that the Israeli government had approved plans for more than 150 new homes in "illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.""These provocative acts are bound to increase the growth of settler populations, further heighten tensions and undermine any prospects for a political road ahead," Ban told a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Middle East. "Continued settlement activities are an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community," he said. "They rightly raise fundamental questions about Israel's commitment to a two-state solution."He said frustration was growing among Palestinians.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Ban's remarks, saying they only "bolster terrorism.""The Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state; they declare publicly that they want to destroy a state," Netanyahu said in a statement. "The U.N. has long ago lost its neutrality and its moral powers."U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said Washington strongly opposed settlement activity. "Steps aimed at advancing the Israeli settlement program ... are fundamentally incompatible with the two-state solution and raise legitimate questions about Israel's long-term intentions," Power told the council.About 550,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Israeli government and think-tank statistics. About 350,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem and 2.7 million in West Bank.
Sumaiya Shimu in new serial

Sheikh Arif Bulbon :Popular TV actress Sumaiya Shimu tied the nuptial knot with Nijhum in last August. Later despite working in several single episode and faction plays she didnt act in any drama serial. After marriage, Shimu was engaged to maintain her conjugal life and in the meantime she worked in relaxed mood. This time Shimu is going to work in a new drama serial titled Shunnota. She will take part in shooting of the serial from the middle of February. Amlan Biswas will give direction of the serial under the story written by Pantho Shahriar. Shimu will work in the central role in the serial.While sharing her feelings about new work Sumaiya Shimu told this correspondent, Actors always rely on the scripts written by Pantho Shahriar because he writes well. After reading the story I was really impressed. For this reason, I agreed to work in the serial Shunnota. I believe it will be a nice work.Meanwhile, after marriage Shimu along with husband went to Switzerland, Australia and Singapore for honeymoon. Now Shimus acting two serials - Fazlur Rahmans Jiboner Oligoli and Nazrul Islam Rajus Lake Drive Lane - are being aired on ATN Bangla and NTV respectively now. On last day of 2015 Shimu submitted her PhD thesis paper. Within very short time her viva-voce is scheduled to be held. She expects within short days she will obtain her PhD degree. However, though Shimu earlier acted in Mostafa Sarwar Farookis Bachelor she later did not work in any other movie. In the beginning of her career, Shimu performed as a model in several TV commercials. Now-a-days, she is fully out of modelling because she always feels comfortable acting in the small screen, Shimu said.
Govt to provide IT training for unsuccessful BCS candidates



The government is mulling to provide global standard IT training to the candidates who have been unsuccessful in Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) examinations for ensuring their better access to the job markets.

Unsuccessful BCS candidates, whose age limit have crossed 30 years, will be included in training programmes under Leveraging ICT Growth, Employment and Governance (LICT) project, said State Minister for ICT Division Zunaid Ahmed Palak at a view exchange meeting here on Wednesday.

ICT Secretary Shyam Sundar Sikder, Executive Director of Bangladesh Computer Council SM Ashraful Islam, senior officials of the LICT project and IT experts, among others, attended the meeting.

Palak directed the officials concerned of the LICT project to introduce special batch, if necessary, on IT training for the students, who failed to get jobs after qualifying in BSC examination.

Ernst and Young (EY), a UK-based leading global professional services company, have been assigned to provide world-class IT training to 30,000 Bangladeshi youths to meet the demand of skilled-manpower of IT industry, he added.

Of the 30,000, EY will give Top UP IT (specialized) training to 10,000 IT and Science graduates and foundation training to 20,000 youths of Higher Secondary level within three years. They have already given training to several thousand students at university and college level, Palak added.
Install ETP or face music

Rivers water around city turn into pitch black

Untreated chemical wastes being dumped by the factories near the DND project that links River Sitalakkhya creating pollution threat. This photo was taken from near Kanchpur area on Wednesday.

SM Mizanur Rahman :

The government on Wednesday directed the industrialists to install 'effluent treatment plants' (ETP) in their respective industries immediately or face the music. "The industries with inactive ETP will also be shutdown," Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan told it to journalists at his secretariat office in city yesterday. An inter-ministerial meeting was held at the shipping ministry to discuss how to protect the major rivers surrounding the capital Dhaka. Shajahan Khan chaired meeting.

Environment and Forest Minister Anwar Hossain Manju, Housing Minister Mosharraf Hossain, Land Minister Shamsur Rahman Sherif, Dhaka South City Corporation Mayor Sayeed Khokon and Dhaka North City Corporation Mayor Annisul Huq attended the meeting.

According to the Environment Conservation Rule, 1997, every industry should have in-house ETP. Otherwise, they would not get environmental clearance from the department of environment (D0E), which is mandatory to obtain power and gas connections.

As the industry-generated liquid and solid waste and most of the human excreta directly go down the rivers through underground pipeline, pollution has polluted the Buriganga, the Shitalakkhya, the Turag and the Balu rivers and made it almost impossible to treat the water. Earlier on several occasions setting the deadlines, the government directed industrialists to install ETP, but most of them have defied the directive and the government also did not take action against any of the violators.

Shajahan Khan said, they have taken various initiatives including charging fine to industry owners to compel them to operate ETP.

"But all of our efforts went in vain. Many industries have ETB but these have remained inoperative. We have fined many industries for not operating or installing ETP. But they didn't pay heed to the authority concerned instruction," he said.

The Shipping Minister said the DoE penalised fined many industries and realised Tk 118 crore from the owners in the last few years.

"If the industries do not install the ETP within the given time, they will be fined first," he said, cautioning if the fine does not initiate the implementation, they will be shut down.

He said the department of environment (DoE), has been asked to shutdown the industries, which ETP remain suspended.

"Over 60 per cent waters of the rivers are being polluted due to industries wastage," he said.

When asked about the shifting of tannery from Hazaribagh to Savar, Shajahan Khan said the process is on but the tannery owners are not showing interest.

The Minister said tannery in city's Hazaribagh area is pouring thousands of litres of untreated and highly toxic liquid waste into the Buriganga river every day, posing a serious risk to human and animal health.

"Installation of ETP at Savar is at final stage. It is expected that installation of ETP at Savar will be completed within a month," he said.

He said the tannery has not been shifted yet. So, it is not possible to examine whether the ETP installed there are operative or inoperative.

"Many industrialists are constructing their business establishments at Savar, but they are not playing any role in shifting the tannery there," he said.

On January 10, Industries Minister Amir Hossain Amu asked the tannery owners to shift their establishments within 72 hours from Hazaribagh to the Leather Industrial City at Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka.

As the government remained silent for years, the industrialists continued to pollute the rivers, canals and wetlands in and around the city to such an extent that surface water turned pitch black in several spots.
Bodies exhumed in Madaripur

Staff Reporter :

The bodies of the two school girls were exhumed from separate graves in Madaripur district on Wednesday morning for postmortem o the second time.

The bodies were sent to the Faridpur Medical College and Hospital morgue for an autopsy.

The bodies have been exhumed in the presence of the district Executive Magistrate Badruddoja Shuvo.

On January 13, Justice M Enayetur Rahim and Justice M Amir Hossain of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court passed the order after a hearing on a petition for re-postmortem by the family members of the dead victims.

Earlier, a gang of local miscreants abducted the two girls when they were returning from their school in Mostafapur of the sadar upazila on August 13 of the last year. They killed them after raping for nightlong and threw bodies in the roadside ditch.

The victims were identified as Sumaiya Akter, 14, and Happy Akter, 14, both were the students of class V111 of a local school.

Happy's mother Mukta Begum filed a case with the district Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunal on August 13 and Sumaiya's father Belal Shikder filed another case with the Madaripur Sadar Police Station on August 14, accusing eight persons. The cases were handed over to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the district police. The CID also failed to submit the charge sheet even after passing of about five months.

On the other hand, the complaints expressed their dissatisfaction at the postmortem report of Madaripur Sadar Hospital recently and filed petition to the High Court for permission to do post mortem again in a separate hospital.


Rampant commercialisation of city's residential areas Minister blames Rajuk

Staff Reporter :

Housing and Public Works Minister Engr Mosharraf Hossain said on Wednesday that Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk) could't avoid its responsibility of unbridled commercialisation of the residential areas.

"Now it has become quite impossible to differentiate between residential and commercial areas in Dhaka and Rajuk cannot evade its responsibility of such rampant commercialisation," Mosharraf Hossain came up with the observation at a public hearing held in the Osmani Memorial Auditorium in the capital.

The hearing was organised by Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC).

The Minister said, "A rapid commerciasation was going on in places like Gulshan, Banani and Baridhara. But Rajuk did not stop these unauthorised activities. On the other hand, the owners were equally responsible for it as they gained illegal benefits from such constructions".

"Even, the building plans approved by Rajuk are not implemented properly," he said.

The Minister urged citizens to take the responsibility to monitor proper implementation of a building plan while carrying out any construction as Rajuk has manpower shortage. "It is not possible for Rajuk to be present at all

construction sites with measurement tapes to enforce the building plan as Rajuk lacks adequate manpower," he said.

Mosharraf Hossain also said that a section of Rajuk officials were involved in replacing plots, but they are not able to do so after he took charge as minister.

"Many MPs and ministers came to me for their suitable plots instead of what were allocated to them. But I clearly said that I can't do it," he said.

The Minister also said that Rajuk would build flats on unused land of the government to accommodate public officials so that grabbers cannot occupy the land.

ACC Chairman M Badiuzzaman officially inaugurated the public hearing on services provided by the capital's development authority.

ACC Commissioners M Shahabuddin and Dr M Nasir Uddin Ahmed, its Secretary Abu M Mustafa Kamal and Rajuk Chairman GM Jainal Abedin Bhuiya, among others, spoke at the public hearing.

The city dwellers having bitter experiences in availing Rajuk services took part in the hearing and raised allegation against Rajuk officials for their sufferings.

Senior Rajuk officials answered to the allegations raised against Rajuk officials.

The public hearing was arranged as part of the commission's graft prevention activities being carried out following the Anti Corruption Commission Act 2004 and the National Integrity Strategy.
No way to divert Metro Rail route

Surveys around DU campus now complete

Staff Reporter :Metro Rail Project Director (PD) Md Mofazzal Hossain said on Wednesday, cancellation of the proposed metro rail route passing through the Dhaka University is not possible now. "There's no way to divert the route as it was planned after discussions with the Dhaka University (DU) authorities," said the PD in a press briefing at Dhaka Mass Rapid Transit Project (DMRTP) office in the city.He said, "We have conducted a number of surveys in and around the DU campus. Therefore, it is not possible to change the entire plan again."Referring to the claim that the route will hamper historical sculptures and educational atmosphere on the campus, he said: "Noise pollution cannot be the source of menace as we will use special technology to check it. "Moreover, we will be careful about protecting the beauty of any historical signs and important establishment."DU students have been protesting against the proposed route claiming it would deface of the campus and disrupt their studies.According to project officials, the metro rails would transport some 60,000 passengers in an hour and that it would take less than 40 minutes to reach to Motijheel from Uttara.Last week, Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader claimed that the project would benefit the university. "The trains will have a stoppage at the university. A grand inaugural ceremony will be held for construction of main structure of metro rail from October 2017. Metro rail will reduce the travel cost and save time of commuters. There will be no more sting of traffic jam, as 24 pairs of train will deliver service. Computerized passes will be provided to the commuters instead of manual tickets. The passengers will punch cards against the gate to enter the stations. The air-conditioned train will take them to their desired stations in due time. According to the project plan, the initial work has started from Uttara to Agargaon, which is expected to end by 2019. In the next step, the route will come to Motijheel. Length of the metro rail route will be 20.10-kilometer with 16 stations.A sum of Tk 21,985 crore has been estimated for the construction of this project. Of it, Tk 16,594 crore is foreign fund, while the government will bear the rest amount.Project Director Mofazzal Hossain also said "Preparation to start construction of metro rail in March is at final stage. So far various studies and soil testing have already been completed. The city dwellers will witness the main phase of construction from March".The 16 are Uttara (North), Uttara (Center), Uttara (South), Pallabi, Mirpur 11, Mirpur 10, Kazipara, Taltola, Agargaon, Bijoy Sarani, Farmgate, Hotel Sonargaon, National Museum, Doyel Chattar, and National Stadium and Motijheel.
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[Editor's Note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Cox Communications.]

Yet another Lafayette television station could disappear from the tube for thousands of viewers, this time Cox subscribers. Nexstar, the company that owns KADN Fox 15, KLAF NBC and My Network Acadiana says its been unable to reach an agreement with Cox. The dispute involves negotiations over a new distribution agreement. This is industry-speak for, A) Cox low-balling Nexstar over how much Cox pays the media company to carry its channels or, B) Nexstar asking way more than Cox thinks is reasonable  depending on which side of the negotiation one finds ones self.

For over five months, Nexstar has been negotiating in good faith to establish a mutually agreeable contract with Cox, the press release says. Nexstar regrets that Cox Communications is willing to hold its paying subscribers hostage because it wont agree to fair and reasonable terms for viewers favorite network, local news and community-focused programming, as well as other critical information and emergency service updates we provide that is relevant to local community viewers.

Cox, naturally, disputes Nexstar's take on the dispute:

We recently signed a deal with White Knight, a company that Nexstar manages, after a two-week dispute," writes Patricia Parks Thompson, Cox's public affairs manager in Lafayette, in an email. "Now Nexstar is threatening to withhold KADN, KLAF and My Network from Acadiana Cox subscribers in a second dispute. They are asking for even more money than they accepted during our White Night negotiations only two weeks ago. They are trying to alarm our customers by running text crawls across programming and running TV ads. Theyre putting our customers in the middle and theyre attempting to pressure us to agree to their unreasonable demands. Our goal is simple: We want to offer our customers access to their favorite stations and television shows at a reasonable price.

If the two sides can'T reach amicable terms, the three local channels will go black on Cox at midnight Friday. Gone will be such popular shows at Law & Order: SVU and American Idol. If the impasse lingers, which is unlikely  somebody's got to blink  it will affect the 2016 Summer Olympics. The dispute does not affect subscribers to the markets other television providers.

Readers will recall the annual posturing between Cordillera Communications and the markets two satellite providers in January of this and last year. Cordilleras local ABC affiliate, KATC TV3, went dark for a short time last year on DirecTV and again this year for a short time on Dish Network.

Nexstar is taking its battle against Cox to the Twittersphere with the memorable hashtag #RestoreKADNKLAFMYNET.
Monet rahapelien ystavat ovat viime vuosina loytaneet netticasinot ja olleet ihmeissaan. Verrattuna kotimaisen Veikkauksen kivijalkarahapeleihin puhutaan aivan eri tason palautusprosenteista ja lisaksi pelaaminen on aarimmaisen helppoa ja turvallista. Netticasinoiden maara on tana paivana todella suuri ja niita loytyy jokaiseen lahtoon, suurin ongelma aloittelevalla pelaajalla onkin tehda valinta siita, minka netticasinon valitsee. Kaikkien netticasinoiden mainospuheet naet lupaavat kauniita asioita ja niiden lapinakeminen on tietysti tarkeaa. Nyrkkisaantona voidaan kuitenkin jo kattelyssa todeta, etta jos valitsemasi netticasino on lisensoitu ETA-alueella, sen kanssa ei tule olemaan ongelmia, ellei niita itse jarjesta. Kay tutustumassa parhaisiin netticasinoihin osoitteessa www.ilmaiskierroksia.info!

Ensimmainen nyrkkisaanto on siis varmistaa, etta valitsemallasi netticasinolla on ETA-alueen lisenssi. Suurimmassa osassa tapauksista se on Maltan eli MGA:n lisenssi. Myos Viron, Englannin ja Gibraltarin lisensseja nakyy ja naissa valvonta on jopa Maltaa tiukempaa. Lopputulema on kuitenkin se, etta ETA-alueen lisenssi takaa suomalaisille verovapaat voitot seka sen, etta niita valvotaan kontrolloidusti. Maailmalla on iso nippu Curacaon lisenssilla toimivia netticasinoita ja niistakin suurin osa on laadukkaita. Ne eivat kuitenkaan ole suomalaisille asiakkaille verovapaita, joten emme suosittele niita.

Tana paivana markkinoille on ilmaantunut paljon ETA-alueella toimiva netticasinoita ilman rekisteroitymista. Jos tarkoitus on vain pelata yksittaisia pelikertoja, on varsin helppo suositella naita. Netticasinot ilman rekisteroitymista tarjoavat palvelun tunnistautumisen verkkopankin avainlukulistan avulla ja saman palvelun kautta tapahtuvat talletukset ja mahdolliset voittojen nostot silmanrapayksessa. Normaaleihin netticasinoihin pitaa asiakkaan rekisteroitya, tehda talletukset ja tunnistautua dokumenttien avulla. Tama on lisenssiehtojen mukainen kaytanto, eika kovinkaan monimutkainen, mutta silti monet asiakkaat haluavat yksinkertaista ja nopeaa palvelua. Toki normaalit netticasinot tarjoavat usein asiakkailleen laadukkaita talletusbonuksia ja erilaisia kampanjoita, joten kannattaa tarkkaan punnita, kumman ratkaisun valitsee. Kannattaa myos muistaa, etta tunnistautuminen tehdaan vain kerran, joten mikaan jatkuva riippakivi se ei ole.

Suomalaiset asiakkaat ovat netticasinoille tarkeita, joten kaikilla vahankin laadukkailla netticasinoilla on suomenkieliset sivut seka suomenkielinen asiakaspalvelu  suomenkielisyys kannattaakin ottaa netticasinoa valittaessa nyrkkisaannoksi. Vaikka tana paivana englanninkielisyys on harvoille ongelma, on suomenkielisten netticasinoiden maara niin valtava, etta suosittelemme niiden kayttoa. Rahansiirrot ovat tana paivana niin hyvassa mallissa, etta niiden kanssa tuskin tulee mitaan ongelmia. Kolme tarkeinta segmenttia: Suomalaiset verkkopankit, luottokortit (Visa, Mastercard) seka nettilompakot (Skrill, Neteller) loytyvat jokaisesta laadukkaasta netticasinosta. Viime vuosien trendiksi noussut verkkokauppa on kehittanyt rahansiirrot niin laadukkaiksi ja nopeiksi, etta niiden suhteen ei ole enaa vuosiin ollut ongelmia. Luonnollisesti netticasinot kayttavat naita samoja palveluita ja hyotyvat kehityksesta.

Naiden isojen linjojen jalkeen netticasinon valintaan vaikuttavat luonnollisesti tarjottavat tervetuliaisbonukset  uudet asiakkaat saavat tana paivana kovan kilpailun myota merkittavia etuja netticasinoilta ja niita kannattaa luonnollisesti vertailla. Erilaiset talletusbonukset, ilmaiskierrokset seka ilmaiset pelirahat tuovat suuriakin rahanarvoisia etuja ja niiden vertailu on ehdottomasti kannattavaa. Myoskaan useampien tilien avaaminen ja tervetuliaistarjousten kayttaminen ei missaan nimessa ole huono idea.

Kun edella mainitut asiat ovat mieleisia ja vaihtoehtoja on vielakin jaljella, mennaan jo nyansseihin. Toki pelivalikoima on yksi kriteeri, mutta taman paivan netticasinoissa tamakin asia on paasaantoisesti varsin samanlainen. Toki useamman samantasoisen netticasinon vertailussa kannattaa yleensa valita se, jossa on eniten peleja tarjolla. Vaikka omat suosikit loytyisivatkin useammasta, voi tulevaisuudessa mielenkiinto nousta joihinkin muihin peleihin ja silloin on tietysti mukavampaa, etta ne loytyvat valikoimista. Viimeisena voidaan nostaa esiin kaytettavyys  joidenkin netticasinoiden sivut ovat vilkkuvia, valkkyvia ja epakaytannollisia. Omaan silmaan ja kaytettavyyteen sopiva sivusto on luonnollisesti aina se paras valinta. Tarjonta netticasinoissa on tana paivana valtava ja jokaiselle loytyy varmasti se oma netticasino  onnea matkaan!
The S.P.D. Murder of John T. Williams

On a sunny, warm Seattle August day in 2010, Native American wood carver John T. Williams was murdered by the Seattle Police Department as he walked down the crowded downtown streets while on his normal daily routine of carving small totem poles with a small pen knife, then selling them to the tourists that flock by the Seattle Public Market.

Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk noticed Mr. Williams walking down the city streets and deemed him a threat, do in major part I believe - simply because he was Native American. Williams was one of many homeless Native Americans who roam downtown Seattle. These people are usually dismissed and overlooked by Seattles daily bustle of businessmen, the working class, and tourists.



When the officer approached Williams from behind, and then ordered him to freeze and drop his small carving knife and a stick of carving wood he was carrying, Williams was hard of hearing in one ear, and failed to hear the police officer over the traffic and pedestrians, thus did not immediately comply; officer Birk then instantly felt that this gave him the right to use lethal force against John T. Williams.

No threat was ever given by the homeless woodcarver. Officer Ian Birk coldly gunned down John T. Williams from behind, murdering him in the streets of Seattle, Wash, right in front of many horrified citizens who later professed that they felt no threat from the homeless Native American man whatsoever.



The officer was fired  thats it, and was allowed to live his life somewhere else, work a steady job, live in a nice house, somewhere out of media sight, and out of the publics mind; smug in the fact that he got away with legal murder with just a slap on the wrist. We must all remember that this type of legal homicide happens every day all over this nation of ours, by those sworn to Serve and Protect us. And that this violent tragedy can happen to anyone, or anybodys family members, especially if they are citizens of color. This makes it everybodys problem who believes in justice, personal safety from unwarranted persecution, and true American freedom in the society they live in. Let us still remember John T Williams, and never forget the fact that he was ruthlessly murdered by the S.P.D.






















































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The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now.

Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market.

In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender.

India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex.

Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted.

But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted?

Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner.

If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems.

I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now.

I want more variation in masturbation

I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own.

If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end.

What is sex toys for Indian?

Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation.

It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms.

They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable.

Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner.

The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner.

It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past.

In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping.

Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order.

In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing.

Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome.

Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own.

But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance.

More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around.

Sextoy situation in India

Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years.

In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India.

Mumbai

Kolkata

Bangalore

Delhi

Chennai

Hyderabad

These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India.

In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well.

If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too.

If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it.

What are Sextoys for beginner?

Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms.

Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy.

I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion.

I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy.

If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma.

Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it.

Advantages of using sextoy for Indians

There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians

You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways.

Can have stimulating sex

Can develop new sexual zones

If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern.

However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways.

You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation.

Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever.

There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure.

This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it.

When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems.

It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms).

For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles

[Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou...

Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India.

Sextoy for beginner men in India

So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners.

For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men!

The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men

Masturbator

Cock rings

Love Doll

Sex Lubricants

Toys for the prostate

Lets check each one in detail.

Masturbator

The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products.

It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands.

Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands.

They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.)

Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much.

Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! !

Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa   SEXToys India PR  (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018

Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood.

If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here

Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ...

[For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien...

Cock Ring

A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis.

It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow.

It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber.

In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection.

Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction.

It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it.

Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time.

Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function.

Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy.

You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect.

[Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat...

Love Doll

Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex.

There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women.

Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price.

The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true.

You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste.

There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice.

You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls.

If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here

Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to...

Sex lubricants

Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules.

It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution.

Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse.

There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent.

Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent.

If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here.

What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many...

Toys for the Prostate

Another sextoy for men is prostate toys.

The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line.

Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men.

Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men.

What is the prostate?

The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm.

You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus.

By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms.

Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.)

The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation.

Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure.

sextoy for beinner women in India

The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy.

The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy.

Vibrator.

Dildo

Electric Masserger

Lets check out what each one is in detail.

If you want to check out womens toys, click here.

[BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm...

Vibrators

A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator.

Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy.

It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy.

Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women.

For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators.

Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex.

Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself.

This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual.

Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men.

When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons.

Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most...

Dildo

A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis.

It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass.

A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it.

They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well.

It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device.

A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo.

Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands.

For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis.

This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one.

To learn more about dildo, please click here.

What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th...

Electric Masserger

A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores.

It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low.

Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels.

Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation.

It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure.

For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm.

It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out.

If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager?

To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here.

What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th...

How to choose a sextoy for Indian

Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one.

Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points:  Does the size fit you (the partner)?

Does the size fit you (your partner)?

Is the environment able to produce sound without problems?

Price range

First of all, the choice of size is quite important.

Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women.

For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage.

Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems.

Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise.

If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level.

Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it.

Finally, there is the price range.

The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest.

Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy.

Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy?

I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance.

For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics.

If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out.

How to buy sextoys in India

The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping.

For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below.

Sextoy is one of them.

Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping.

SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India.

They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry.

Of course, the latest security is in place, so your information will not be taken out when you use your credit card.

To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy.

ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal.

Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on.

Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture.

Cautions for Indians using sextoy

When using sextoy, keep the following three things in mind

Keep sex toys clean

Watch out for electrical leakage

Beware of the heat generated by the body while using a sex toy

As I mentioned earlier, many sextoy products are used for the delicate zone.

Therefore, it is most important to keep the sextoy itself clean. It is very important to keep the sextoy itself clean, because if a slight scratch is created by friction, bacteria can enter and breed there.

It is safe to wear a condom when using the masturbator, just in case.

In addition, many sextoy devices are powered by a power source, so if they are not waterproof, there is a possibility of electric shock or malfunction due to wetness.

Some may even develop heat during continuous use. If the fever becomes too much, you may get burned, so be careful.

If you get a fever during use, stop driving the sextoy immediately and refrain from using it.

You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly.

Summary

What did you think?

In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India.

The sextoy market is growing rapidly in India and it will continue to grow steadily in the future.

As India is a rather closed-minded country, it can be difficult to be open about ones sexual habits and values.

However, being faithful to ones desires by properly dissolving ones sexual desire is very effective for ones physical and mental health.

If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try?

Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women.

I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it.
MARION  For a newcomer with no political experience, James T. Marter is confident he can win the Republican U.S. Senate primary in six weeks, with the long-term goal of heading to the nation's capitol to return government to "American citizen taxpayers."

The self-employed software consultant from Oswego made those comments as part of an introductory meeting hosted by the Williamson County Republican Women at the Kokopelli Country Club in Marion. Also addressing the group was Harrisburg Mayor Dale Fowler, who told the group that now is a perfect time in his life to run for state senate. He will challenge Gary Forby, D-Benton.

Marter is challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk for the congressional seat in the March 15 Republican primary. Kirk was first elected to office in 2010.

Who are Southern Illinois Hispanics voting for in the 2016 election? HERRIN  John Steve is not sure which candidate, or even which political party, will get his

He introduced himself to the gathering of about 50, telling them he was "pro-life" and that he's "unapologetic about it" and against ObamaCare, preferring instead a portable insurance that could be transported from employer to employee and across state lines; against duplication of government services, such as state and federal departments of education; against the "Common Core" educational standards; and against illegal immigration.

"I'm for enforcing the law," he said later. "We need to stop the influx of illegal immigrants by enforcing the law and standing up for the rule of law."

Another type of immigration that he's seen in his work as a software consultant is the use of the H-1B visas by companies bringing skilled workers into this country to work for their companies. He said it is not uncommon for companies to say they can't find the type of skilled labor among this country's workforce that they need for their businesses.

"(The U.S. is extending) H-1B visas to the detriment of our own citizens," he said. "I think we need to get to a fair and equitable level of immigration. It's not an elimination, but it's certainly a very significant scaling back of H-1Bs. I'ts been going on for a long time. We need to put our priorities first for us  that what our national (leaders) should be doing, what our government should be doing."

Congress has set a cap of 65,000 for fiscal year 2016 for these visas.

On the issues of immigration, he noted that his opponent, Sen. Kirk, voted to "preserve sanctuary cities," municipalities that prevent police from working with immigration police to capture and deport people who are in this country illegally.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, Champaign County, Cook County and Chicago support sanctuary policies.

He also told the group that he had traveled to the nation's capital to meet with some representatives there and heard from them that they had discounted Illinois because they felt the incumbent would lose his seat to someone of another party.

1 of Sen. Kirk's GOP primary opponents doesn't make ballot CHICAGO  One of the candidates who filed to run against U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk in the Republic

On Jan. 19, U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona, endorsed Marter's candidacy.

"I can tell you, they already wrote it off," he said. "That's what they told me. They basically said we've written off this race."

He was recently endorsed by the Lake County Sheriff, the Lake County Pro-Life PAC and the Marshall County Republican Central Committee.
SPRINGFIELD  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner used his State of the State address Wednesday to make another case for changes he says would make Illinois more competitive, even as he acknowledged that huge opposition from Democrats has prompted a record budget stalemate and crippled social services and other programs.

Rauner touched on many of the same agenda items he's pushed unsuccessfully for the past year: imposing term limits on lawmakers, freezing property taxes and allowing local governments to strip unions' collective bargaining rights.

He also attempted to show he's taking a more bipartisan approach to 2016, saying again that he will back Democratic Senate President John Cullerton's plan to overhaul Illinois' worst-in-the-nation pension system and referencing Cullerton's call for school funding reform in saying he wants to direct more money to classrooms.

"All of us in this chamber had a difficult year together in 2015 as we debated a budget with structural reform," Rauner said. "But it is not too late for this General Assembly to make historic progress for the people of Illinois."

But his roughly 40-minute speech made clear that the battle lines over a budget impasse about to enter its eighth month haven't changed. And Democrats  almost all of whom refrained from joining Republicans in applauding the governor  were quick to criticize.

"Until I see substantive progress, my patience with this charade of cooperation has all but dissolved," said Senate Assistant Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat from Maywood.

Rauner and Democrats who control the Legislature have been unable to agree on a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.

Democrats want the governor to approve a tax increase to help close a roughly $5 billion deficit. Rauner says he won't sign off on a tax hike until Democrats give him some of his "structural reforms." Democrats have refused, saying those changes will hurt working families and drive down wages while helping Illinois' highest earners get richer.

"In terms of finding new revenue, I've said consistently that I'm prepared to negotiate with the governor," said Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan. "But I do believe that as part of a revenue package that we ought to have increased taxes on the wealthy of Illinois."

Republicans applauded the governor's speech, saying it struck a conciliatory tone. They blamed Democrats for the budget deadlock, which began after the majority party in May passed an out-of-balance budget, which Rauner vetoed. Democrats insist the governor could've vetoed only parts of it to reduce spending instead of dismissing it entirely.

"The fact is they gotta stop playing the victim," said Republican House Leader Jim Durkin. "They put us in this position. They sent that ridiculous budget to the governor and I applaud the governor for vetoing it."

Without a budget, social service agencies have had to close and thousands of college students aren't receiving state grants to help pay for tuition.

Last week, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois announced that it would close 30 safety-net programs and lay off 750 employees because of $6 million in overdue bills from the state. The programs impacted include services for the homeless, mentally ill and seniors who need home care. Chicago State University has said that come March, it won't be able to make payroll.

The governor also touted his efforts to "transform" state government, from overhauling health and human services to reducing the state prison population by 25 percent over the next decade by focusing more on rehabilitation rather than imprisonment.

He said he will use an executive order to create a private, non-profit office to recruit businesses and jobs to Illinois, after Democrats last year shot down his plan to turn the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity into a private-public partnership.

Rauner also called for holding schools more accountable through testing and offering low-income students more "quality school choice options."

Illinois Federation of Teachers President Dan Montgomery ripped Rauner's plan as "so-called education reforms" that won't improve teaching or student success and said the governor has failed on his top responsibility  the budget.

"His calls for bipartisanship are difficult to take seriously, especially given his identical words last year and his unwillingness or inability to lead since," Montgomery said.

Cullerton said he looks forward to working on a plan to address Illinois' $111 billion pension debt, but said there are still "many disagreements" about other pieces of Rauner's agenda.

"We've got to find ways to work together to solve problems, and we need to start now because Governor Rauner's first year in office didn't work for anyone," he said.

Rauner noted that other places, including left-leaning states such as Massachusetts, have passed similar reforms and said he stands ready to work for a deal.

"To achieve a grand compromise, we must cast partisanship and ideology aside," Rauner said. "We must break from the politics of the past and do what is right for the long term future of our state."
CARTERVILLE  Even with millions in internal budget cuts and inter-fund loans, in the absence of state funding, John A. Logan Colleges coffers will be empty come January 2017.

Asked what befalls the college after January, spokesman Steve OKeefe said, I hope we never find out, but affirmed that the Carterville-based colleges doors will remain open, somehow.

During a regularly scheduled board of trustees meeting Tuesday night, Brad McCormick, vice president for business services and college facilities, presented a downward trending graph that dipped into the red in the New Year. McCormick said his staffers assumed no state funding for fiscal year 2016, which many in higher education see as an inevitability, and a 25 percent reduction in state funding for fiscal year 2017.

State of state is crisis, organizations say Social service agencies, union members, college students and others came to the capital city

The trend line took into account $4 million in internal cuts along with additional 1 percent cuts monthly. Administrators would have to move nearly $3 million from other accounts to stay afloat until January.

McCormick said college administrators are already tightening belts  recalling staff credit cards, requiring justifications for expenses and reducing travel expenses.

We all know the dire straits were in, and we know where the problem is  its in Springfield, said Don Brewer, the boards president.

Trustees said they are continuing to advocate for state funding in Springfield, where budget gridlock has resulted in nearly seven months without state support for Illinoiss public colleges and universities.

The stalemate has led a handful of colleges and universities to lay off employees and warn of impending closure.

Early enrollment numbers

Illinois Senate president pushes school funding formula CHICAGO  A top Democrat says inequity in Illinois's school funding formula is the "defining

Also at the meeting, administrators presented early enrollment numbers for spring 2016.

Enrollment declined from 5,825 during spring semester 2015 to 5,041 this semester. Official 10-day numbers will be released Thursday.

Larry Peterson, vice president of administration, said trustees should be proud of employees retention efforts during the spring enrollment period. Through more hands-on advisement, employees encouraged students who had a balance going into the new semester to pay on time, thereby ensuring they remained enrolled.

Their efforts, administrators said, led to one of the biggest revenue days in the colleges history, Jan. 4, when the bursars office took in about $400,000 in tuition payments.
CARBONDALE  Whether one is looking to start a new business, or needs expertise and advice about an existing business, the SIU Small Business Development Center at SIU offers a wealth of resources.

Greg Bouhl, the centers director, said experts are available for business owners and prospective business owners to offer guidance on such topics as understanding state and federal legal requirements, securing financing, reviewing financial statements and creating operational plans, human resources, marketing and doing business internationally.

A class for newcomers called Starting a Business in Illinois costs $15, and after that, ongoing one-on-one advising is available at no cost. The business center is financed by a mix of state and federal dollars, and supported in part by the universitys general operating funds.

10 Steps to Starting a Business The following information is provided by the U.S. Small Business Administration.10 Steps to 

The depth of knowledge our advisors have is very outstanding and hard pressed to get paid consultants for that, Bouhl said.

The definition of a small business is one with under 500 employees, Bouhl said. The center has worked with businesses of a variety of sizes, from one- or two-person shops to those with more than 100 employees.

Bouhl said he thinks some people wrongly believe the center is only for startup businesses  and there are many services for people just jumping in  but he said a multitude of services also are available for existing companies that, for example, might need to retool their business model in the face of changing economies, technologies and consumer habits, or are looking to expand locally or internationally.

The center, in its 32nd year, helps roughly 600 clients annually, Bouhl said.

LouAnn Elwell, of Cobden, owner of Southpass Beads & Fibers, is one of those clients who has leveraged the resources of the center in order to parlay a hobby, which began when she couldnt find a pair of dangly earrings she wanted, into a money-making venture. Elwell has been in business since 2002, selling jewelry-making supplies online out of her home. She started on eBay and has since transitioned to Etsy for the bulk of her online business.

Being The Boss: Pryor Jordan, Saluki Screen Repair Q: What was your first job and what did you learn from it?

At that time, Elwell said she attended the class on how to start a business because she wanted to make sure she did everything correctly. Elwell said instructors taught her in the class things such as how to secure a business tax identification number and other legal requirements.

About five years ago, she decided to open a store in her home. Jewelry-making enthusiasts from across Southern Illinois, as well as tourists visiting the wineries, visit her home in Cobden, where the front of the house has been turned into the business, she said. Elwell also offers classes, which take place around the dining table in her home. While she hopes to expand in the future, Elwell said part of the charm is the homey feel of the store and classes, with the feel of visiting a friends home as opposed to a sterile storefront. Presently, she said, center experts are helping her with development of a website.

Bouhl said the small business center also works closely with SIUs Small Business Incubator program that strives to help researchers take new discoveries and technologies from the lab to the marketplace. Incubator office space is located beside the small business center so that the two can work hand-in-hand, Bouhl said. Researchers are experts in their craft, Bouhl said, but they dont always have the specific set of skills necessary to turn an idea into a profit.

Hurley Myers, a co-owner of DxR Development Group, based in Carbondale, said thats exactly why he sought out the help of the incubator and small business center. Myers is a professor emeritus with the SIU School of Medicine who holds a doctoral degree in cardiovascular physiology.

The business that Myers runs with his partners sells software that uses virtual patients to teach and assess the diagnostic and clinical reasoning of medical students, providing real-time feedback to students and their professors while also tracking progress. Myers got his start inside SIUs incubator in 1992.

I knew nothing about business, Myers said. When you asked, Did they help? I would say absolutely. Myers said as his business has continued to evolve and change over the past 25 years, Myers said he continues to touch base with the business center with meetings every six months or year.

Nothing requires that a business owner take all of the advice the experts give, Myers said, but the conversations help him to brainstorm, see things from other perspectives, and formalize his plans knowing hes thought everything through. As the company began selling internationally, Myers said the center helped his business navigate all applicable laws.
CARTERVILLE  Farmers are exploring new distribution models in order to compete with global food companies to get more fresh, local food onto store shelves, restaurant menus and dinner tables.

Food and farm advocates are challenging "brick and mortar" notions about what it takes to deliver local food successfully. Small farm aggregators, sometimes referred to as food hubs, help farmers meet the demands for locally grown and processed food.

Join the Southern Illinois Farming Alliance at 5:30 p.m. today at a webinar and discussion featuring Michael Gehman and his experience with Double Star Farms, a farmer-owned distribution company aggregating produce from small growers for large customers in the St. Louis area. Gehman said a group of small growers formed Double Star to respond to the growing demand for locally grown vegetables.

This is the second in a series of four National Good Food Network webinars and discussions exploring food hub models. It will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Building H on the John A Logan Community College campus. Each session will include a 90 minute webinar with discussion to follow. Additional webinars will be Feb. 10 and 24.

Registration is required. Cost is $10 or free for Farming Alliance members. Visit www.fwsoil.org/webinar for more information about the series and to register online.

Remaining webinars will include:

Feb. 10: 5:30 p.m., Talk is Cheap ... and Efficient! Facilitating value chain development without costly new infrastructure.

Feb. 24: 5:30 p.m., The Million Dollar Question: What is break-even and viability for different food hub models?

For more information about the event or Food Works, call Kathleen Logan Smith or Reanna Putnam at 618-370-3287 or email kathleen@eatsouthernillinois.org.
AUSTIN, Texas  Two anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos about Planned Parenthood are accused of using fake driver's licenses to infiltrate the group, indictments made public Tuesday show.

David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt allegedly used California driver's licenses they knew were false "with the intent to defraud and harm another," the documents indicate.

The videos that surfaced last year accused Planned Parenthood of illegally selling fetal tissue to researchers for profit. The footage provoked outrage among Republican leaders nationwide and prompted investigations by Republican-led committees in Congress and by GOP-led state governments.

House OKs GOP bill blocking Planned Parenthood funds WASHINGTON  A divided House voted Friday to block Planned Parenthood's federal funds for a 

Planned Parenthood officials said the videos were misleading. And the Houston grand jury that indicted the activists also investigated Planned Parenthood and concluded that the nation's largest abortion provider committed no wrongdoing.

Both of the activists face a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Daleiden was also indicted on a misdemeanor count related to purchasing human organs. The indictment on that count was not immediately available Tuesday.

The activists, who live in California, plan to come to Houston's Harris County Jail, where they will be processed and allowed to post bond, said Murphy Klasing, an attorney for Daleiden.

Klasing said he did not know when that will happen. Bond for Daleiden and Merritt was set at $11,000 and $10,000, respectively.

Daleiden plans to plead not guilty to the charges, Klasing said. He declined to discuss the specific nature of the charges.

The video footage showed people pretending to be from a company called BioMax that procures fetal tissue for research. Planned Parenthood has said that the fake company sent an agreement offering to pay the "astronomical amount" of $1,600 for organs from a fetus. The Houston Planned Parenthood clinic said it never entered into the agreement and ceased contact with BioMax because it was "disturbed" by the overtures.

"As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us," said Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson, an elected Republican.

Daleiden issued a statement saying his group "uses the same undercover techniques" as investigative journalists and follows all applicable laws.

Most professional news organizations discourage or explicitly forbid reporters from posing as someone else or otherwise misrepresenting themselves.

"We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well," he said.

Planned Parenthood has said a few clinics in two states used to accept legally allowed reimbursement for the costs of providing tissue donated by some of its abortion clients. In October, Planned Parenthood announced that it would no longer accept reimbursement and would cover the costs itself.

House chairman subpoenas uncut Planned Parenthood videos WASHINGTON (AP)  A House committee chairman issued a subpoena Tuesday for an anti-abortion 

The group called Monday's indictments the latest in a string of victories since the videos were released, saying 11 state investigations have cleared Planned Parenthood of claims that it profited from fetal tissue donation.

"This is absolutely great news because it is a demonstration of what Planned Parenthood has said from the very beginning: We follow every law and regulation, and these anti-abortion activists broke multiple laws to try and spread lies," said spokeswoman Rochelle Tafolla of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast.

The Texas video was the fifth released by the Center for Medical Progress, which Daleiden founded.

Despite the center's lofty name, public filings suggest only a small number of people are affiliated with the nonprofit, none of whom are scientists or physicians engaged in advancing medical treatments. The people named as its top officers are longtime anti-abortion activists with a history of generating headlines.

Group behind anti-abortion videos is something of a mystery SACRAMENTO, Calif.  It calls itself the Center for Medical Progress, and its name has been 

Earlier this month, Planned Parenthood sued the center in a California federal court, alleging extensive criminal misconduct. The lawsuit says the center's videos were the result of numerous illegalities, including making recordings without consent, registering false identities with state agencies and violating nondisclosure agreements.

After the lawsuit was filed, Daleiden told The Associated Press he looked forward to confronting Planned Parenthood in court.

___

Associated Press writers Juan A. Lozano in Houston, Will Weissert in Austin and David Crary in New York contributed to this report.
"I am not a member of any organized political party," Will Rogers quipped in the last century, "I'm a Democrat."

If today's Republican Party were organized, if its storied "establishment" were even a shadow of the leviathan its detractors claim, the world would look very different. Republican Party leaders would long since have organized an advertising campaign in the early caucus and primary states to show voters that Donald Trump is: 1) nothing resembling a conservative, 2) not a friend of the working class, 3) not a particularly successful businessman (despite inheriting a vast fortune, he's managed to clock four bankruptcies) and 4) temperamentally unfit to be president.

Instead, as FiveThirtyEight reports, the amount of money the big super PACs have spent on television ads against Donald Trump in the past month was zero. By contrast, the biggest target of super PAC negative ads was Marco Rubio. Of 47 filings in the past month, 35 were anti-Rubio.

This looks less like a political party than like the Hemlock Society.

The favorite target of conservative ire is the left-leaning news media. Yet for the past six months, conservative outlets have joined with liberal ones to offer Donald Trump all the free publicity he could ask for. They've strewn his path with roses as he flayed one genuine conservative (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker) after another, withholding their bouquets only when Trump reared finally (as he was bound to do) on Ted Cruz. Cruz's strategy to praise Trump until Trump attacked him may have been good politics, but it fits Winston Churchill's definition of an appeaser as one who "feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last."

Charen: What '13 Hours' teaches A new movie that touches upon the election prospects of one female candidate for president h

I understand, or think I understand, why liberal media types have been so cordial to Trump. He's ratings gold and they suspect that he would be the least-viable Republican nominee. As Nate Silver noted, Trump has the highest unfavorable ratings of any candidate of either party. Though his approval has improved among Republicans since last June, it has declined among independents and Democrats, leaving him still the candidate least likely to win a general election.

Polls this far from an election are not dispositive by any means, but they tell us something. So what explains the behavior of conservative radio and television hosts? I'm open to suggestions.

Marco Rubio, arguably the most electable Republican candidate, has been hammered by Jeb Bush's super PAC for months. What's the gravamen? Rubio missed some votes in the Senate because he's running for president. Bush is firing a slingshot. He cannot go after Rubio's one weakness, his immigration stance, because Bush shares it.

Rubio is the most articulate, thoughtful, inspiring and consistently conservative of any Republican running. His message that "America owes me nothing but I owe America a debt I can never repay" is in the best tradition of this land of opportunity. He has the highest favorability ratings among all voters of any Republican (except Ben Carson). Rubio has backed off his support for the kind of immigration reform embodied in the Gang of Eight bill. So, should this be his Achilles heel?

Trump, insofar as he has positions and not mere blurts, was an immigration dove as recently as 2013, and Ted Cruz unambiguously endorsed increasing (that's right) the number of legal immigrants (because, he explained, permitting high-skilled immigration is pro-growth) as well as providing a path to legalization for those already here. He told Princeton's professor Robert George in 2013 that his amendment "would mean the 11 million who are here illegally would all come out of the shadows and be legalized."

Cruz now says that his amendments were "poison pills" designed to reveal the Democrats' insincerity. But listen to his own language at the time: "I want to see common sense immigration reform pass. But the only way to do so is to find a middle ground, and right now they're unwilling to do so, and I think many of the Hispanic advocacy groups in particular are being played. They're being played by partisans who want the deal to fail, because they want to use it as a campaign issue rather than to pass it. And I hope that strategy doesn't work."

He opposed offering citizenship, which Rubio supported, but he now adamantly denies that he favored legalization at all. That's borderline Clintonian. Of all the Republican candidates, only Rick Santorum seems to have maintained a consistent hard line about immigration.

Cruz has shown integrity on other issues (like ethanol subsidies) and deserves fair consideration from conservatives. But Rubio is being unfairly tarred for his only lapse, and one in which he was hardly alone. Meanwhile, the vulgarian unguided missile atop the polls gets a pass from everyone about everything.

Mona Charen is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College ended fiscal year 2015 with almost $650,000 of income above expenses and received a clean bill of health on its accounting practices.

The extra funding was placed in the college plant fund to be used for various capital projects, etc.

Ray Williamson from the Brittingham Group L.L.P. reported to commissioners at the January meeting that the institution received an unmodified opinion for the year.

The unmodified opinion is the highest level of reporting assurance that you can get, he said. Representatives from the Brittingham Group had the full and excellent cooperation of everyone that we worked with here at the college, Williamson said.

Like all other entities supported by the state, OCtech was required this year by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board Statement 68 to report its share of the states unfunded pension debt on financial statements.

As of June 30, 2015, OCtechs part of the liability was $19.7 million. The states liability, including the regular State Retirement Fund and the Police Officer Retirement System, comes to about $19 billion.

Kim Huff, OCtech vice president of business affairs, said following the meeting that this liability is not a bill the college has to pay now. Its on the financial statement of every agency participating in the state retirement system.

The shortfall in the retirement system will be paid in future years with increased contribution rates from employees and employers, according to Huff. Or it can be paid by better investments of the funds, he said.

Huff reported that a decline in enrollment in both the fall and spring semesters will cause a revenue loss of about $500,000 for the year.

However, the shortfall should be made up by the colleges contingency funds and savings in salaries and benefits because some employees retired or left the college and have not been replaced, he said.

The budget seems to be getting tighter and tighter with each semester, and OCtech is not alone, Huff said, noting a lot of other colleges are struggling as well.

Following the meeting, Huff said he thinks improvement in the economy has caused a dip in enrollment.

It has been our experience that as the economy improves and jobs become available, our students tend to seek those employment opportunities, he said.

Also during the meeting, Huff reported the architect hired for re-roofing 10 buildings on campus is in the process of estimating the final cost of the project. The original estimate was $2.1 million, but the architect said the cost could go as high as $2.5 million, Huff noted.

OCtech President Dr. Walter Tobin reported the college is in the process of hiring an architect for the health, sciences and nursing building.

Area commissioners approved in November 2014 moving forward with the pre-design phase of a facility that was expected to cost $11 million. To date, the institution has received nearly $4 million toward construction of the facility.

In September 2015, the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Administration gave the college a $2 million grant. In addition, the school received $1 million from the state, $500,000 from Orangeburg County, $35,000 from Calhoun County and other funds from the OCtech Foundation,

Huff told commissioners that once the two architects give the college final estimates for the two projects, hed return to them for final approval. The projects will then go to several state agencies for approval before OCtech can take bids for the construction.

In other business, Tobin reported the certified nursing assistant program had a 97 percent pass rate.

He also announced OCtech will hold a college-wide planning retreat on Feb. 5. In addition, the college will make its budget presentation for 2016-17 to the House Ways & Means Higher Education subcommittee on Feb. 2, Tobin said.
WASHINGTON -- I love poetic justice. This wild and wacky Republican presidential campaign deserved Sarah Palin, and now it's got her.

Palin's endorsement of front-runner Donald Trump at an Iowa rally this past week was a master class in surrealist poetry. Geniuses of the Dada movement would have been humbled by her deconstruction of the language and her obliteration of the bourgeois concept we call logic.

The GOP candidates have been competing to see who can spew the most nonsense, but they'll never top Palin. Not when she offers gems such as this: "Believe me on this. And the proof of this? Look what's happening today. Our own GOP machine, the establishment, they who would assemble the political landscape, they're attacking their own front-runner. ... They are so busted, the way that this thing works."

Or this further excoriation of the party leadership: "And now, some of them even whispering, they're ready to throw in for Hillary [Clinton] over Trump because they can't afford to see the status quo go. Otherwise, they won't be able to be slurping off the gravy train that's been feeding them all these years."

Or this elaboration of the same theme: "How 'bout the rest of us? Right wingin', bitter, clingin', proud clingers of our guns, our God and our religions and our Constitution. Tell us that we're not red enough? Yeah, coming from the establishment. Right."

Or this exercise in random word choice: "Well, and then, funny, ha ha, not funny. But now, what they're doing is wailing, 'Well, Trump and his, uh, uh, uh, Trumpeters, they're not conservative enough.'"

Actually, I think the wailing from Republican grandees is more of a wordless primal scream. Palin claimed that "media heads are spinning" at her decision to campaign for Trump, but it would be more accurate to say that "media feet are dancing" at having such a rich source of new material.

I could quote Palin all day, but there are two substantive points about her dazzling intervention that I feel duty-bound to make. The first is political: Someday we might look back and say she was the one who pushed Trump over the top to win the nomination.

That's not a promise, just a possibility. But Trump's campaign draws strength from its own momentum. If he can somehow manage to sweep the early primary states, "outsider" support may coalesce behind him -- and the establishment candidates may be too shell-shocked to effectively respond.

Polls show Trump holding big leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But first comes Iowa, where he's running neck-and-neck with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Given his overall strength, Trump could finish second in the Iowa caucuses and still capture the nomination. A win there, however, could boost his support in the subsequent contests and make it much harder for anyone to stop him.

Enter Palin. Republicans whom she appalls or embarrasses are not likely to vote for Trump anyway. But some tea party supporters who are leaning toward Cruz might be swayed by a clarion call from their movement's Evita. All Trump needs to do is shave a few points off Cruz's vote to win a narrow victory, which could be enough to propel the populist billionaire to triumph in New Hampshire and beyond.

Here I must insert my standard disclaimer: Do not take as gospel anyone's predictions this year, including mine.

The other substantive point I have to make about Palin has to do with a campaign speech she gave in Oklahoma for Trump the day after her endorsement. She was talking about the arrest of her son, Track, on domestic abuse charges after he allegedly fought with his girlfriend and threatened suicide by holding an assault rifle to his head.

"My son, a combat veteran ... was fighting for you all, America, in the war zone," Palin said. "My son, like so many others, came back a bit different, they come back hardened."

Palin said not enough was done to treat the "woundedness" of returning veterans and charged that this failing "comes from our own President [Obama]."

Never mind that Track Palin served in Iraq and came home while George W. Bush was president. His mother was speaking for the large segment of the GOP base that brays against high taxes and big government, yet demands more services and opposes cuts in entitlements -- which doesn't add up.

I've said it before: With years of foolish rhetoric, the Republican establishment got itself into this mess. There may be no way out.
DENMARK -- The Department of Student Support Services at Voorhees College in Denmark will serve as host to a Pre-Black History Month program featuring Pastor Tiffany Knowlin of Columbia.

The program will begin at 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 28, in Massachusetts Hall on the Voorhees campus.

Knowlin earned a bachelors degree in chemistry from Columbia College, a masters degree in divinity from Emory University and a masters degree in urban policy from Georgia State University.

After her studies, Knowlin went on to become pastor of College Place United Methodist Church in Columbia, where she was the first African-American and the first female to serve the congregation.

She is a former adjunct professor at Columbia College, where she taught The African-American Religious Experience to undergraduate students. Knowlin is currently the first female pastor at historic Wesley United Methodist Church in downtown Columbia.

In addition, she is a member of the South Carolina Christian Action Council, the South Carolina United Methodist Church Board of Ordained Ministry, Eau Claire/North Columbia Rotary Club and the Midlands Habitat for Humanity.

Thursday's program is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Megan Freeman, director of communications, at 803-780-1191 or at mfreeman@voorhees.edu.
It was 12:45 p.m. I was at my computer and heard a loud BOOM followed by the entire apartment complex vibrating and the windows rattling, Goose Creek resident Linda MacBay said Tuesday afternoon.

It was so loud I thought someone had hit the building with a car," she said.

Within moments, MacBay discovered she wasnt the only one who experienced the phenomenon.

Several residents of the apartment complex stepped outside to look around, too, she said.

We thought maybe it was at the Naval Weapons Station, which is nearby. Then we questioned if it had been an earthquake," McBay said.

We thought it might have been a jet crash, but there were no plumes of smoke to be seen, either, she said. "Thats when we were starting to assume it had been a 'quake.

Blaming an earthquake for rattling the Charleston area isnt far-fetched. Residents in Summerville feel minor earthquakes from time to time.

The largest quake to shake Charleston and surrounding areas was at 9:51 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 31, 1886. Sixty people were killed in the 7.3 magnitude earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Dr. Erin Beutel, an associate professor at the College of Charleston and director of the S.C. Earthquake Education and Preparedness Program, said the loud boom and the rattling experienced by Lowcountry residents on Tuesday wasnt an earthquake this time.

Beutel said that barometric readings showed a spike, indicating the phenomenon was a sonic boom.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines a sonic boom as the thunder-like noise a person on the ground hears when an aircraft or other type of aerospace vehicle flies overhead faster than the speed of sound, or supersonic. Air reacts like fluid to supersonic objects. As objects travel through the air, the air molecules are pushed aside with great force, forming a shockwave much like a boat creates a bow wave. The bigger and heavier the aircraft, the more air it displaces.

Just over an hour after Lowcountry residents experienced the sonic boom sensation, a power outage occurred in Cordova, causing some local residents to wonder if the Charleston area "boom" had anything to do with the outage.

Department of Public Utilities spokesman Randy Etters, however, said the culprit was a piece of equipment that failed at an electrical substation.

DPU crews rerouted the power and it was quickly restored, he said.

Etters said the power outage did not have any correlation to the sonic boom heard in the Lowcountry.
With a week to go until the Iowa caucuses produce the first votes to be counted in the 2016 presidential race, all the talk on the Republican side is of the battle between Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. Will anyone else in the crowded field emerge as an alternative?

With neither Trump nor Cruz and their extreme positions having as yet received an official vote, its quite premature to call the battle for the nomination a two-man race. After Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina will have a substantial say in how the race unfolds.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is among those painted as an alternative candidate to Trump and Cruz. In a year when anything establishment seems a negative on the GOP (and Democratic) side, he may not want to trumpet that he has received the endorsement of newspapers in Iowa, including the Des Moines Register and the Sioux City Journal this past weekend.

Newspaper endorsements are by no means harbingers of success. In many instances, they can do harm to a candidate who becomes associated with a publications reputation and position on issues. In Iowa, look for Trump and Cruz to paint the newspapers opinions as another reason to support their candidacies.

If Rubio, however, can get beyond the headlines about the endorsements and echo what the newspapers are saying about him, the impact could be felt beyond Iowa.

The Des Moines Register states:

Republicans have the opportunity to define their partys future in this election. They could choose anger, pessimism and fear. Or they could take a different path. 

Sen. Marco Rubio has the potential to chart a new direction for the party, and perhaps the nation, with his message of restoring the American dream. We endorse him because he represents his partys best hope.

That hope rests partly in the electoral calculus of the country. Republicans should have learned from 2012 that they cannot win with Republicans alone. Recent polling shows Rubio has higher favorability ratings among independents than all candidates but Ben Carson, as well as positive ratings among Latinos.

Rubio promises specific answers for the issues in these voters lives. 

Our hope, however, does not rest solely on his ability to welcome new people to the party. We believe Rubio can inspire the base with his ideas on improving the economy, education system and social programs.

In two meetings with the editorial board, the whip-smart senator displayed an impressive grasp of public policy detail, reeling off four-point plans on foreign policy and other issues. He proposes overhauling higher education and promoting vocational training, helping workers threatened by automation acquire skills rewarded by a new economy.

Rubio would prime that new economy by embracing innovation. He would auction off portions of the wireless spectrum controlled by government, allowing freer flow of online traffic. Hed remove barriers to enable the next Uber to take off. Hed require a cost-benefit analysis of federal regulations. 

At his best, Rubio offers an uplifting message of a new American century. He shares his compelling story and calls for a referendum on the nations identity.

And the Sioux City Journal states:

In our view, the 44-year-old Rubio represents one of the brightest lights within today's Republican Party.

Articulate, informed and personable, Rubio delivers winning performances on the campaign trail and in GOP candidate debates. For us, his rise from humble roots inspires and his optimistic, positive message resonates. 

From life to the Second Amendment to smaller government and less government spending to Obamacare to border security to national security, Rubio meets the conservative test. 

As a U.S. senator and multiple-term member of the Florida Legislature where he served as speaker, majority leader and majority whip, Rubio appreciates and practices the need to, on occasion, work with the other side of the political aisle. In a time of intransigence and paralysis in Washington, an ability to bridge political divides appeals to us.

Finally, we believe Rubio is positioned better than any GOP candidate in the 2016 field to expand the Republican base and draw a diversity of voters from across the political spectrum.

Rubio may not do well in Iowa. He may not be able to score big in New Hampshire. But he does have a shot at doing well in South Carolina and beyond. A sizable number of S.C. Republicans, we believe, are looking for alternatives to Trump and Cruz.

South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, formerly a GOP presidential candidate, says Jeb Bush is the best choice. S.C. Congressman Trey Gowdy supports Rubio. Other key players, such as Gov. Nikki Haley, have not weighed in.

South Carolinians are independent and will make up their own minds, but the words of Iowas newspapers are worthy of note in voters determining whether Rubio will get a big boost here come Feb. 20.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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If the shoe fits, wear it: "... in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell



"There's no firewall for stupidity." -- Mike Hamilton



"I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said." -- William F. Buckley, Jr.



"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true." -- Sren Kierkegaard
Four years ago I posted A Short History of Business Plans including my experience plus data from a Google search of usage of phrases in books. The search is interesting because it transcends the web and online data by digging into books.

Usage in Books

I tried a similar search yesterday and was disappointed to discover that it hasnt been updated past 2008, which was the same most recent date available in 2011. It turns out the Google book search I used then still runs only through 2008, as it did then. Bummer. Thats disappointing. So heres that data:

I find it kind of cool  obviously meaningless, but still cool  how neatly that blue line parallels my personal experience with business planning. I first heard about it in the middle 1970s, started to really like it  and do a consulting business around it  in the middle 1980s, and then developed Palo Alto Software and business planning software for business plans in the middle 1990s. No wonder it seemed important to me. Look at the blue line.

However, still curious about how usage has fared since 2008, I decided to turn to web searches for a better update. So I did a a Google Trends search for business plan and entrepreneurship. The conclusion is that the searches for business plan and for entrepreneurship are stable, and seem to correlate very closely.

Im not sure what to make of that visual correlation, and much less what to make of the appearance of both of these lines turning flat over the last four years. What do you think?
As a result of determined steps taken by the head of state a new economic strategy forms in Azerbaijan, said Elman Rustamov, chairman of the country`s Central Bank.

Global oil prices have fallen four times in just more than a year. Given that oil accounts for the largest part of Azerbaijans exports the current situation necessitates some corrections. The main aim is to take adequate steps to tackle the situation and find a way out.

He said the main task set by the head of state is to reduce the country`s dependence on the energy sector, improve the non-oil sector and diversify economy.

Rustamov noted that today Azerbaijans overall import is 9 billion manats, while non-oil sector export equals to 1-1.5 billion manats. There is a big gap as evidenced by the figures. Today more than 80,000 people are employed in Azerbaijans oil sector. However, the countrys eligible workforce is 4.8 million people. This means that one of the main tasks ahead is to diversify the countrys economy, increase its non-oil sector and industrial potential, Rustamov added.

/By AzerTac/
/By AzerNews/

By Amina Nazarli

The trilateral meeting of the economy ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia will be held in the Turkish province of Kayseri on February 19.

The event with the participation of 500 businessmen from the three countries is also planned, as part of the meeting.

The State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan said the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey amounted to almost $1.5 billion, including $1.1 billion of imports from Turkey in 2015.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Georgia amounted to $434 million last year, including $366 million of exports to Georgia.

The trilateral business forums among Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia were previously held in the cities of Tbilisi, Kars and Gabala.
UK International Tubulars FZE company, rendering services in the supply of equipment for drilling operations, has been registered in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Taxes Ministrys Vergiler newspaper wrote Jan. 27.

The legal representative of the new company is John Block. The company was registered in the Azerbaijani Taxes Ministry on December 23.

The company has been registered at the following address: 6, A. Bakikhanov prospect, Nasimi district, Baku.

The company is headquartered in the city of Aberdeen.

/By Trend/
A new mural by street artist Banksy has appeared opposite the French Embassy in London , criticizing authorities' alleged use of teargas in a refugee camp in Calais , France .

The image, which recreates a poster from the French musical Les Miserables, shows a young girl enveloped by CS gas, crying.

A QR code painted near to the mural links viewers to a seven-minute online video of reputed police raids on the "Jungle" refugee camp in Calais on 5 January. It is the first time the artist has created a digitally interactive mural.

The YouTube video appears to show riot police using teargas and rubber bullets against refugees. But a police spokesperson for the local prefect in Calais , denied that teargas was used in the camp, saying last week: "We do not use teargas without a good reason and use of teargas has to be authorized and it is only authorized when it is necessary."

Authorities have cleared a 100m buffer zone along the edge of the camp by a main road, citing security reasons.

The mural is the artist's latest attack on the European response to the continuing refugee crisis. In December 2015, a mural depicting Apple founder Steve Jobs appeared in the refugee camp, accompanied by commentary on the artist's website that made reference to the entrepreneur's biological father, a Syrian migrant who settled in 1950's Wisconsin .

A second mural by the artist in Calais adapted French painter Theodore Gericault's famed image "The Raft of the Medusa," but showed refugees attempting to flag down a luxury yacht. A third mural nearby showed a child looking towards Britain through a telescope, while a vulture stands beside her.

"Dismaland", a large-scale installation created by the enigmatic British artist last August, included a work depicting drowned refugees in boats. Materials used to construct the "bemusement park", a satire of the commercial theme park experience, in Weston-Super-Mare , UK have since been shipped to the Calais camp to build shelters.

The image of Jobs has reportedly been defaced repeatedly since its arrival in the camp. A protective glass plate was placed in front of it by local authorities, but this was torn down last week.

/By CNN/
/By AzerNews/

By Nigar Orujova

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a report on inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan who are deliberately deprived of water at its Winter Session in Strasbourg on January 26.

PACE cannot ignore the problems of Nagorno-Karabakh and the sufferings of the ordinary people who are facing the shortage of water from the reservoir controlled by Armenia, said MP Milica Markovic from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who prepared the report.

The matter rests in the population of the Council of Europe and the OSCE member-state and the humanitarian and social problems concerning us directly, she said.

The problem of providing the Azerbaijani population with drinking water is very important, she said. Despite the Azerbaijani authorities all efforts to provide the population with drinking water, it is not enough for irrigation.

She said that the Armenian side has refused from cooperation on the issue.

Sarsang reservoir was built during the USSR in 1976 to provide residents of the border areas with water and irrigate agriculture.

However, Armenia captured Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions from Azerbaijan in a war that followed the Soviet breakup in 1991. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and nearly 1 million were displaced as a result of the war.

After the occupation of these lands, Armenia uses this reservoir as a tool of humanitarian and ecological terror. In winter months, the Armenian side intentionally opens the floodgates and creates conditions for overflooding the surrounding areas.

In summer months, Armenia does not allow to use the reservoir. As a result, there are serious problems in providing people with water, irrigating agriculture and preserving biodiversity.

Markovic noted that the use of water, according to the international conventions, is an integral part of human rights.

The session also discussed the report on Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan prepared by MP Robert Walter (UK).

However, the PACE that prefers to stand neutral in this conflict, did not adopt the second report. Sixty-six parliamentarians voted for the report, while 70 were against and 45 abstained.

Armenia is an occupant: Azerbaijans representative to PACE

Armenia is an occupant, sell black for white, and attempts to deny the facts, which are described in the reports of PACE co-rapporteurs Markovic and Walter, Azerbaijani parliamentary representative to PACE Rafael Huseynov said during the hearing of the reports on Azerbaijan at the session.

Armenias actions make the Azerbaijani population of the region suffer. The rapporteurs are impartial and are trying to help both countries, but Armenia does not want to see the truth, he stressed.

Armenia has lost a sense of reality, although it would be useful to read both reports calmly and draw the necessary conclusions, Huseynov said.

Adoption of resolution is the success of Azerbaijani diplomacy: analyst

Adoption of one of the two reports on the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh region at such a forum as the PACE, in spite of the significant presence of pro-Armenian forces, in favor of Baku is the success of Azerbaijani diplomacy, Azerbaijani political scientist Fikret Sadikhov told Trend.

This document states that the people in these regions are faced with environmental and humanitarian problems.

Speaking about the second report, Sadikhov said although it was not finally adopted, it is not completely rejected and blocked at all.

Some concerns still exist between those who abstained. I think that this is not the last attempt to address the problem at the PACE session and the attempts will continue, he added.

International recognition of sovereign rights

The fact that the PACE adopted the resolution can have a positive impact on the peace process over Nagorno-Karabakh, French senator Nathalie Goulet told Trend.

This clearly shows who the aggressor is. Armenia obviously takes a wrong position from a historical point of view and from the point of view of international law, said Goulet.

Adoption of the resolution in favor of Azerbaijan is crucial, she stressed adding that this is a step towards international recognition of the historical and legal rights of Azerbaijan on the occupied territories.

Europe's unresolved conflicts problem

New president of the organization Pedro Agramunt noted that Europe still has a problem of unresolved conflicts.

He called the unresolved conflicts one of the challenges for the PACE. Such conflicts as Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria, the conflict in the east of Ukraine and Georgia, have not yet been settled, the president stressed.

The regular session of the PACE started in Strasbourg on January 25 and will end on January 29.

During the first day of session, Anne Brasseur, Former President of the PACE said, it is necessary to find a solution over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Brasseur stressed that it is necessary to find a solution in order to advance in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, because it has been going on for so many years and there is no step forward.

Brasseur further noted that the debates during the session will contribute to the settlement of the conflict, adding that the PACE does not take anyone's side in this conflict.

It is necessary to find a solution to the conflict and ensure the rights of both sides. The solution will not be found as long as mutual accusations are made, she said, adding that casualties on both sides are also unacceptable.
An OSCE monitoring was held Jan. 26 along the contact line between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.

The Azerbaijani defense ministry has said the monitoring, held in line with the mandate of personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office, passed without any incident.

OSCEs monitoring took place near the village of Alibayli in the Tovuz district of Azerbaijan.

On the Azerbaijani side of the contact line, the monitoring was held by field assistants of the personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office, Yevgeny Sharov and Peter Svedberg.

On the Armenian side, the monitoring was conducted by field assistants of the personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office, Irzhi Aberle, Simon Tiller and Hristo Hristov.



The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.



The two countries signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia, France and the US are currently holding peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented the UN Security Council's four resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

/By Trend/
Associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper has hailed multiculturalism and tolerance traditions in Azerbaijan as he met with the country`s Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov.

He praised the level of religious tolerance in Azerbaijan as excellent, particularly conditions created for Jews.

Mammadyarov said Jews have lived peacefully along with representatives of other religious confessions in Azerbaijan for centuries.

They also exchanged views over global and regional issues.

/By AzerTac/
President Hassan Rouhanis visit to Italy will trigger the expansion of bilateral ties between Italy and Iran, the country's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif believes.

"Opening a new chapter in close cooperation with Italy- both in economy and trade, and in combating extremism, Zarif tweeted Jan. 27.

President Rouhani heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation arrived in Italy on 25 Jan on the first leg of his four-day Euro tour.

During the visit, Iran and Italy signed a number of contracts worth at $18.4 billion covering various sectors including health and transportation.

Rouhani who is the first Iranian president who pays an official visit to the EU over the past 10 years will leave Italy for France today.

Rouhani is expected to discuss the securing of a number of significant trade deals with French officials and companies including aircraft manufacturer Airbus.

It was earlier announced that the Iranian president would discuss purchasing 100 aircraft from Airbus during his visit to France.
/By AzerNews/

By Laman Sadigova

Armenias foreign trade turnover decreased by 20.6 percent in January-December, 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.

The Armenian National Statistics Service reported that export volume for the reporting period amounted to $1.5 million, decreasing by 3.9 percent compared to the same period in 2014.

The negative trade balance has an important place in the overall number of characteristics of a sick economy, such as lack of a competitive business environment, development of big business at the expense of small and medium-sized business, a once-and-for-all established monopoly setup, and a reduction of the volume of transfers from Russia, so important for Armenia.

The statistics prove worsening of the economic crisis in Armenia, which pose definite threats for all fields of life. Unstable situation in the world hits Armenia even stronger than experts predicted due to the fact that this post-Soviet country lacks any economic scenario for crisis.

Armenia is one of the few countries where imports exceed exports by 3 times. The government once again failed to keep its promise in 2015 to substantially increase exports and to develop import substitution.

Resolution of this problem could strengthen both the national currency and reduce the growing unemployment. However, nothing is done to improve the situation and Armenia is on the way to the abyss.

Armenia's foreign trade turnover with the CIS member states declined by 17.3 percent to $1.149.8 billion (29.5 percent of the total trade), while trade with Russia fell by 14.8 percent to $989.7 million.

When entering the EEU, the Armenian government promised that the volume of foreign trade turnover will increase. However, the countrys economy shows the opposite trend and all the promises made by the Armenian officials, once again turned into a lie.

Yerevans aggressive foreign policy does not allow the country to improve its economy and join huge regional projects. Armenians are mainly surviving thanks to the international transfers, which reduced by several times, especially from Russia  by 30 percent.

Meanwhile Armenia's external debt exceeded $5 billion, an enormous number that is threatening to completely destroy this small South Caucasus country.

This once again shows a huge gap between the statements made by the government about the stable situation in the countrys economy and the real situation in the country.
/By AzerNews/

By Laman Sadigova

The EU has voiced its concerns over increasing corruption risks in Armenia, calling for fighting this disaster in the post Soviet country.

"In a country where both the parliament and the government have a number of businesses, it is impossible to avoid conflicts of interest and corruption risks," news.am quoted head of the EU delegation Piotr Switalski as saying on January 25.

He was addressing the international conference on "National and international efforts in the field of applied ethics", which was organized by the Ethics Commission of senior officials, supported by the Germany Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well by the Organization of International Cooperation.

Germany's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Bernhard Matthias Kessler, in his turn, continued observations after the EU, and stressed the importance of the fight against corruption existing in Armenia.

Corruption exists in both public and private sectors. I hear about the lack of confidence of citizens in relation to the management system and the authorities, he said.

Civil society must be more involved in the work of independent regulatory authorities, and, finally, politicians do not have to be engaged in business," Kessler added.

Armenian and foreign investors have shunned expanding their business activities in Armenia after realizing that their potential competitors can become ministers, members of parliament, the prime minister, or any other former official.

Complaints about corruption in Armenia, the South Caucasus poorest country, are nothing new. The Anti-Corruption Council, created in 2015, is led by Armenian Prime Minister, Hovik Abrahamyan, what calls into question the very idea of this Council.

Armenian authorities created a comfortable system for enriching themselves, forcing people to be silent. Corrupted government is frequently accused of different scandals, but, somehow avoids reckoning.

Civil rights activist Artur Sakunts, believes the funds will be just wasted. Unfortunately, this is another theatre that leads nowhere unless there is a political will and an independent body to fight corruption, Sakunts said.

Corrupted and criminal regime in this poor post-Soviet country has a big and strong potential as it owns the entire stolen money of the country and surpasses every effort of free speech. And even the tense situation in the country and the crisis, shaking Armenia, cannot convince the government to stop.

Numerous surveys, conducted in Armenia, show that the countrys population have no trust in the authorities. In the situation, when every third lives below the poverty line but the government continues to steal from its own nation, migration is the only way to survive.

However, now even this step will hardly save anyone  Russia, the country which welcomed the majority of Armenian migrants, is infected by the economic crisis and does not need even cheap labor force.
The report entitled "Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and other occupied territories of Azerbaijan" was not adopted under the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmens pressure, Emil Huseynli, the head of the 'Support for youth development  Dushunce' public association told Trend Jan. 27.

This once again proves that the OSCE Minsk Group takes an unfair position, he said.

He said that it is time to change the staff of the OSCE Minsk Groups co-chairing countries.

"I think that Turkey and Germany must be included in the composition of the OSCE Minsk Group, he said. If the composition of the co-chairmen is not supplemented, their monopoly will only grow and they will become prisoners of the Armenian lobby."

Huseynli thinks that by the recent action the co-chairmen have once again demonstrated that they are monopolists and take an unfair position.

Why must Azerbaijan turn a blind eye to the activity of the co-chairmen, conducting discussions at one table with the representatives of the separatist regime of Nagorno-Karabakh?," Huseynli asked.

He considers that the unadopted resolutions of PACE on the Azerbaijans occupied territories showed that foreign states, international organizations follow their own interests, but not the principle of justice.

The chairman of the NGO welcomed the resolution titled "Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water" adopted by PACE and added that this document shows that Armenia is a country-aggressor.

Thus, yet another international document recognized Armenia as a country-aggressor, said Huseynli.

The resolution titled Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water was adopted Jan. 26 at a PACE winter session.

The resolution titled Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan", prepared by MP Robert Walter (UK), was not accepted.

Earlier, OSCE Minsk Groups co-chairs James Warlick (USA), Igor Popov (Russia) and Pierre Andrieu (France) spread an appeal about discussions of these resolutions, which was condemned by the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.
The US territory of Puerto Rico has 19 cases of the mosquito-born Zika virus, which is believed to cause serious birth defects if contracted by pregnant women, the Puerto Rico Health Department confirmed on Tuesday,

reported.

"[Puerto Rico] today confirmed 19 cases of Zika virus in Puerto Rico, chiefly in the southeastern zone," Health Department Secretary Ana Riu was quoted as saying by El Vocero.

The US Centers for Disease Control has stated there are serious birth defects of the brain called microcephaly as well as other poor pregnancy outcomes in babies of mothers who were infected with the Zika virus. The Zika virus can be spread from pregnant women to unborn babies.

Puerto Rico epidemiologist Brenda Rivera said the majority of cases are in the island's southeast region, according to a separate report on Fox News. None of the victims were pregnant and that many of were elderly, Rivera added.

The mosquito-borne disease has raged in South America and other regions for several months. Twenty one countries and territories of the Americas have reported cases of the virus since May 2015, the World Health Organizations (WHO) regional office for the Americas said in a statement on Tuesday.

The WHO added that the disease is expected to spread to all but two nations in the Americas  Chile and Canada.




/By AzerNews/

By Amina Nazarli

Azerbaijans crime rates continue to decline, while number of the solved criminal cases increased in 2015.

Azerbaijans Interior Minister Ramil Usubov announced about this at the ministerial meeting on January 26.

He said the number of crimes related to premeditated murder dropped by 7.3 percent, crimes of intentional damage to health decreased by 6.7 percent, bullying by 4.5 percent and car theft by 26.6 percent.

The number of crimes committed by juveniles reduced by 2.4 percent in 2015. The minister added that the number of road accidents drop by 15.7 percent, deaths rate in the road accidents by 20.5 and injured by 15.4 percent.

The number of solved crimes also grew as a result of the investigative and operational activities. The number of targeted killings, for example, rose by 9 percent, and targeted killings attempts by 7.5 percent.



The minister added that a total of 344 crimes were revealed as a result of collaboration with prosecutors.

National Bureau of Interpol also included 74 people in the internationally wanted list last year, Usubov noted.

Azerbaijan's average number of crimes per 100.000 people was 231 during the past ten years, which is one of the lowest rates compared with other countries. This makes Azerbaijan one of the most stable countries, where people's safety is ensured at a high level.

The law enforcement agencies have taken many decisive measures in the fight against crime to protect public order.
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Bank Dhofar, the second-largest lender in the sultanate by assets, has proposed paying a dividend of 15 per cent cash plus 10 per cent bonus shares for 2015.



The dividend is subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, the lender said in a statement on Wednesday.



For 2014, the bank proposed a cash dividend of 5 per cent, plus a bonus share issue of 15 per cent.



Bank Dhofar earlier this month posted a 32 per cent rise in fourth-quarter net profit of RO13.4 million ($34.84 million), according to Reuters calculations.-Reuters
Saudi home finance company Bidaya has launched operations in the kingdom with a capital of SR900 million ($240 million) in bid to boost home ownership across the kingdom.

It is a joint venture between the finance ministrys Public Investment Fund and Jeddah-based Islamic Corporate for the Development of the Private Sector, which is a unit of the Islamic Development Bank.



Licensed under the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (Sama), Bidaya will be offering professional Sharia-compliant financial solutions to both customers and partners in the kingdom.



The company had won the mortgage finance licence in December last year.



Announcing the launch, chairman Khaled bin Mohamed Al Aboodi said: "Bidaya was established with the primary purpose of enabling home ownership. Our role as a facilitator will aim to address the economic and social issue by increasing access to finance for middle-income home buyers, and thereby significantly contributing towards the sustainability of the housing sector in the kingdom."



The company is the first newly established real estate finance company to get such a licence, and the Sama approval entitles it to carry out its operations and receive customers wishing to obtain a real estate finance compliant with Sharia.



Al Aboodi said Bidaya's vision of enabling home ownership for all was demonstrated in its customer-centric approach and the wide range of home finance solutions offered.



Bidayas business model is based on forging strong alliances with real estate developers and professional service providers, while keeping in mind the aspirational needs of customers, he added.



CEO Mazin bin Ahmed Al Ghunaim said: "We at Bidaya are committed to playing our part by streamlining mortgage finance end-to-end processing, short turnaround times, using innovative mortgage technologies, and an engineered approach to evaluate customer creditworthiness which we truly believe lies at the core of further developing Saudi mortgage market."



According to him, the companys short-term goal is to open service hubs in capital Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam.



"Bidaya is also set to launch its digital presence with an interactive website before the end of 2016," he noted.



"Our long-term strategy, in the changing landscape of Saudi Arabia, is to enable and empower aspiring home owners by simplifying the lengthy and tedious mortgage process to fulfil their dreams, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
InSinkErator, the inventor and largest manufacturer of food waste disposers for home and commercial use, has been awarded by the UAE Ministry of Energy for the second year running, for its contribution to the UAE State of Energy Report.



The award was presented during the release of the third edition of the report by Suhail Mohamed Faraj Al Mazrouei, UAE Minister of Energy, on the sidelines of the World Future Energy Summit held recently in Abu Dhabi, UAE, said a statement from InSinkErator, a business unit of Emerson.



On receiving the award, Mohamed Karam, senior business development manager, InSinkErator, Middle East and Africa, said: This recognition is a testament of our innovation that directly contributes to targets set by the UAE Government of diverting waste from landfills by 75 per cent by 2021.



However, the UAE continues to have one of the largest rates of food wastage per capita. If we manage to reduce the amount of food wastage, we can reduce the waste reaching landfills, he said.



Food waste compounds release rather large quantities of methane gas that lead to an increase in greenhouse emissions. This waste can safely be converted to clean energy using the right technology and processes, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
The upcoming Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture (GFIA) in Abu Dhabi, UAE aims to harness global efforts to provide enough safe, nutritious food to an expanding population.



Taking place at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) on February 16 to 17, the exhibition and conference will feature more than 300 next-generation agricultural solutions that could shape the future of sustainable farming around the world.



Ali Yousef Al Saad, acting director of Communication and Community Service at Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority said: Our support for this important forum comes within the framework of ADFCAs goals of achieving its objectives of sustainable development by supporting all initiatives that seek to tackle the current and future water challenges in Abu Dhabi and enhancing the concept of sustainable water resources.



On the second day of the forum, a collection of experts will come together to specifically tackle Water for Food Security: from scarcity to sustainability through collective innovation. The session will ask what collective action must be taken to ensure that agriculture adapts its method in response to water scarcity.



It is estimated that two-thirds of the worlds population could be under serious conditions of water stress by 2025 and climate change is expected to further exacerbate the problem. Water scarcity poses a real threat to food production as agriculture consumes approximately 70 per cent of the world water supplies.



The golden triangle of government bodies, the scientific world, and the private sector working together is the only way to combat the crisis of water scarcity and its threat to food production, said Leo den Hartog, director of Research and Development at Nutreco (Trouw Nutrition) and Professor of Wageningen University.



Science should work on new technologies in this field, the private sector should take initiatives to get it realised and the government should support financially, by creating the platforms and by adjusting legislation when needed, he said.



The second day of the forum will feature a session by Rajesh Solomon Paul, Director of Excel Geomatics Pvt, entitled, Satellite based crop monitoring.



Land capability mapping, land sustainability studies, appropriate crop identification for cultivation, water budgeting, rain-water harvesting, the development of crop varieties that can thrive on minimum water requirements and lining of canals are a few of the areas government, private sector and scientists can work together to reduce water scarcity issues, said Paul.



Educating farmers about the importance of the efficient use of water and the problems associated to over-drafting water could also help significantly.



Together, GFIA and VIV MEA are expected to host more than 500 exhibitors of innovative technology, making Abu Dhabi home to the largest agricultural event in the region. The organisers also expect to build upon last years 4,550 visitors from 85 countries.  TradeArabia News Service
Japan's JGC Corp has signed a $355-million deal with Bahrain's Banagas to build the expansion of a gas-processing plant in kingdom, Bahrain's state news agency reported on Wednesday.



The plant is expected to process 350 million cu ft of additional associated gas from the Bahrain oilfield, the agency reported.

A signing ceremony was held today under the patronage of Bahrain's Minister of Energy Dr Abdul Hussain bin Ali Mirza.



The agreement includes the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of the Banagas Expansion Project.



The agreement was signed by Shaikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, the chief executive of the Bahrain National Gas Company (Banagas), on behalf of Bahrain and Yoshihiro Shigehisa, the chairman emeritus of JGC Group, at a ceremony held at Four Seasons Bahrain Hotel, said the BNA report.



Dr Mirza said the agreement was a significant milestone for Banagas' expansion and added to the achievements of the energy sector in Bahrain. The project is among the many other National Oil and Gas Authority (Noga) strategic projects aimed at securing continued economic growth in the country, he said.



Dr Mirza said that setting up of the gas project by JGC further enhanced the historical relations between the company and the oil companies in Bahrain.



Three international companies had participated in the tendering process at the design and construction phase of the gas plant, a design which had to accommodate 350 million cu ft of associated gas from the Bahrain Oil Field and produce liquefied petroleum gas and naphtha, utilising re-injection pressure and excess gas. The plant will be equipped to process dry gas.



The project is expected to take 32 months to be ready for a trial run and start actual operations in September 2018. It is one of the largest projects implemented by the company in terms of capital, energy utilisation and providing job opportunities to Bahrainis. - TradeArabia News Service and Reuters
A one-of-its kind bejeweled dragon-themed pen that wont leave you with much change from a million dollars will be up for sale at an upcoming luxury expo in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Italian luxury brand Montegrappa, which is owned by the Aquila family, will showcase its Ultimate Centennial Dragon pen at the American Express World Luxury Expo, which runs from March 30 to April 1 at the Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh.

The Ultimate Centennial Dragon pen is one of its kind. In 2012, Montegrappa celebrated its 100 years since inception and to mark the date, produced the Centennial Dragon series, limited to 100 units only  33 units in rose gold, 33 in yellow gold, 33 in white gold and one unique piece called the Ultimate Centennial Dragon.

The design of the pen draws inspiration from the Nine Dragon Wall at the Forbidden City in Beijing. The dragon has since ancient times been a symbol of power and prosperity in China, and the wall at this historical palace was built in 1773 during the reign of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Montegrappas Ultimate Centennial Dragon pen is made of 300 gm of solid gold, studded with flawless diamonds, rubies and a pearl.

It will only be available for private viewing in the American Express Salon Prive.

The buyer of the bejeweled wonder will be offered a VIP factory tour by a member of the Aquila family to view the manufacturing of the pen followed by lunch or dinner with members of the board including Formula One racing driver Jean Alesi.

Montegrappa has not revealed how much the pen will cost, but you will need deep pockets to buy this trinket for your loved one: the Robb Report put its price at $850,000 when it was first unveiled three years ago.

However, Montegrappa has said that the price for the instrument will also cover a first class air fare!

Montegrappa has been manufacturing exclusive writing instruments since 1912, in the same historic building in Bassano Del Grappa, north-east Italy. The brand is also famous for making the worlds most expensive pen which was sold at an auction in Hong Kong for $8.5 million.

Now in its fourth edition, the World Luxury Expo will showcase carefully selected luxury brands and services, from an impressive range of luxury categories, appealing to a highly discerning guest list.

The event is strictly by invitation and VIP guests can expect to see subtle improvements as the organisers continue to refine the overall visitor experience and hospitality, both hallmarks of the American Express World Luxury Expo.

American Express has extended its sponsorship of the World Luxury Expo, Riyadh for an additional three years.

Those looking to attend the expo can request an invitation and pre-register online at www.wlgreg.com

Following the event in Riyadh, World Luxury Expo will continue to Seoul in South Korea in September 2016, continuing an on-going annual signature series of events.

World Luxury Group is the corporate head office for the executive production team of the World Luxury Expo series of events in the Middle East and Asia.

Following the event in Riyadh, the expo will move to Seoul, South Korea, in September, continuing an on-going annual signature series of events.
Canada confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that it plans to lift its sanctions on Tehran and said that if Airbus is allowed to sell to Iran, then its aircraft maker Bombardier Inc should be allowed to export there as well.



"If Airbus is able to do it, why (will) Bombardier not be able to do it? In which way (is it) helping Canada, or the Iranian people, or Israel, or anyone, that Canada is hurting its own industry?" Dion said in an exchange with reporters.



Asked specifically if Bombardier would be allowed to do business with Iran as soon as sanctions are lifted, Dion said: "Legitimate business, certainly."



Iran announced plans at the weekend to buy more than 160 European planes, mainly from Airbus, and Dion said reluctance to lift sanctions on the part of Canada's Conservative opposition had helped Airbus and not Bombardier.



The United States, the European Union and other major nations have already lifted some of their own punitive measures.



"Canada will lift its sanctions but what Canada will maintain is our suspicion of a regime ... that must not return to (trying to obtain) nuclear weapons," Dion told the House of Commons moments before meeting journalists.



Dion also said Iran had a poor human rights record and was not a friend of Canadian allies such as Israel.



Dion said any lifting of sanctions would be done carefully in conjunction with allies, seeking to ensure nuclear and other military activity is prevented.



Bombardier spokeswoman Marianella de la Barrera called Dion's comments a positive step but said that the company was still respecting the Canadian sanctions.



"We're monitoring it very closely," she said. "Nothing official has been communicated to us."



She said sanctions had not prevented Bombardier from speaking with Iran about its aviation needs: "It doesn't preclude us from engaging in strategic discussions, which we are doing."



Montreal has the third-largest aerospace hub in terms of employment, following Toulouse and Seattle.



Suzanne Benoit, president of Aero Montreal, which represents the aerospace sector there, said it would be excellent news for the industry if the embargo is lifted.



"Right now we are not in a fair competition with Airbus because Airbus can sell to Iran."



Iran is looking to upgrade its aging fleet partly with aircraft with the same range and seats as Bombardier's 100- to 150-seat CSeries.  Reuters
Dhiaffa, formerly the National Omani Hospitality Company, has unveiled new Arabic hotel websites for all properties, dedicated to communicating with Omani and GCC audiences.

The websites feature not only images and descriptions of each hotel, but also booking engines for instant online reservations and confirmations and information about the location and activities.

Dhiaffa specialises in the business of hospitality and manages some of Omans most exclusive properties in select locales in the Arabian Peninsula, unique hotels that deliver the very essence of local ingredients, talents and culture.

Presently, Dhiaffa manages two hotels under the brand name Atana  Oman's first home-grown hotel chain. Both Atana Khasab and Atana Musandam are striking properties, which have become increasingly popular in the sultanate as well as the region, not only owing to their stunning environs, but for the refreshing authentic Omani experience Atana delivers.

Dhiaffa also manages the Ras Al Jinz Turtle Reserve, a scientific reserve and hotel dedicated to the preservation of the world-renowned nesting site of the endangered green turtle (Chelonia Mydas); Masira Island Resort  a well-kept secret in Oman, known for its wildlife and miles of isolated sandy beaches, also a popular destination for windsurfing and kite boarding, thanks to the favourable wind and sea conditions; and City Hotel Duqm located in one of Omans most rapidly developing regions.  TradeArabia News Service
DURANGO, Colo.  A researcher with the Colorado Water Conservation Board says cloud seeding in southwestern Colorado is helping to squeeze more water out of passing snowstorms, using heaters that vaporize silver iodide to form artificial ice.

In southwest Colorado, workers light generators that look like large propane tanks, sending flames into pans that send vaporized silver iodide up to the base of clouds. There the silver iodide forms an artificial ice crystal that draws in more water, forming larger snowflakes.

Then they fall to the ground.

When theres lots of liquid water coming through, then you have a storm to work. ... The seeding response is better. You get more bang for your buck, said Joe Busto, a researcher with the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Its meant to add just a little bit more per storm.

Researchers say a study in Wyoming conducted from 2005 to 2014 found cloud seeding can add 5 to 15 percent more precipitation.

Eric Hjermstad, co-owner and director of field operations for Western Weather Consultants, which does cloud seeding, said every bit of water helps the parched Southwest.

Hjermstad said seeding helps build snowpack to replenish aquifers and helps fill reservoirs such as Lake Powell for other Western states struggling to find water.

Regional water agencies and ski resorts paid $237,900 this season to help with the seeding, according to the Southwestern Water Conservation District. Western Weather operates about 36 generators from Pagosa Springs to Telluride.

The Southwest Basin Roundtable is providing about $55,600 to hire a consultant to help select equipment and find the right areas to place it.

A statewide strategic plan to upgrade equipment will likely take two years because there are 12 agencies and companies involved.

The Durango City Council is not participating because of doubts over the benefits of cloud seeding.

Councilor Dick White said if they do work, the projects may be taking water from other areas that need it, including the Navajo Nation.

If youre making more water fall in one place, its not falling someplace else, he said.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP)  Shooting clubs that use BB guns and other air guns could hold practices and competitions in schools under a Kansas bill.

Unless schools closed their grounds to all outside clubs, they wouldn't be allowed to refuse a shooting club from using their facilities, The Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/20r9QcD ) reported.

Rep. Blake Carpenter, a Derby Republican, introduced the bill in response to a controversy in the Derby school district. After operating at the south-central Kansas district's Oaklawn Elementary for 30 years, district leaders forced the Derby BB Club off campus last year.

Club founder Larry Richardson said the organization has never had an incident. He said students in the club have participated in national competitions and two earned college scholarships.

"We just want to be treated like everybody else," Richardson said during a Tuesday hearing before the House Committee on Federal and State Affairs.

Under the bill, schools could still restrict students from bringing air guns to school independently of their involvement in an extracurricular club and prohibit their use during the school day.

The bill also would require shooting club participants to sign a liability waiver and obtain parental permission. But Mark Tallman, the lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said that wouldn't protect schools if nonparticipants were harmed or school property was damaged. The bill also says that schools could not require organizations to purchase liability insurance.

Rep. Dick Jones, R-Topeka, suggested amending the bill to include language that ensured that the guns being allowed on campus didn't fire pellets or BBs at a fast enough velocity to break the skin as a way to address safety concerns.

Emma Klausmeyer, a junior at Kapuan Mount Carmel Catholic High School in Wichita, talked to the committee about participating in the Sedgwick County 4-H Shooting Club and competing last year in 4-H Nationals in the air rifle competition.

"I can understand why schools don't want a gun in their building," she said. "But at the same time it's like we've had no injuries as long as I've been there."

___

Information from: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, http://www.kansas.com
TAOS, N.M.  A cult leader convicted of sex crimes in 2008 may be closer to being released early from a New Mexico prison for treatment of skin cancer.

A hearing was held Tuesday in state district court in Taos for 74-year-old Wayne Bent, who has been in prison for nearly seven years.

A judge told lawyers for both sides to get together with the state Department of Corrections and try to agree on conditions of release for Bent within 15 days.

If both sides can't agree on a release date and guidelines, another hearing will be scheduled. If they do agree, the judge will sign off on Bent's release.

Bent's attorney, John McCall, said there's a chance a revised order for release can be worked out in time for a parole board meeting next week.

Bent was sentenced to a decade in prison after being found guilty of inappropriate sexual behavior with two teenage girls at his northern New Mexico compound. He also was convicted of second-degree criminal sexual contact with a minor and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

McCall said his client needs to be out of prison by March, when Bent is scheduled to have surgery for the cancer.

A district judge previously had ordered Bent's release by the end of last year, but state corrections officials said the conditions of his probation were never clarified.

State officials said issues that need to be worked out include whether there is cellphone service at the Union County property of Bent's church where he will return after his release. Bent will be required to wear a GPS monitor that needs cellular reception.
As with many terrific ideas, the motivation to create the Los Angeles-based, internationally-recognized dance company Bodytraffic sprang from frustration. That was how founders Tina Finkelman Berkett and Lillian Rose Barbeito felt in 2007 when they met casually at a LA ballet class.

Back when we started the company, there just wasnt enough work here for quality dancers and choreographers, said Berkett, calling from her car on the 405 freeway. We definitely are having an impact now.

The contemporary dance company made its New York debut in 2012, which led to substantial financial support from The Joyce Theater Foundation, which dubbed Bodytraffic the dance company of the future.

Then came recognition from Dance Magazine as one of 25 to Watch in 2013, being named Best of Culture by the Los Angeles Times and getting selected last December to represent the United States in a month-long cultural tour of Jordan and Israel.

Friday, Jan. 29, UA Presents brings Bodytraffic to Centennial Hall, presenting three of the companys most recognized works: Dust, And at midnight, the green bride floated through the village square and O2Joy.

Making our debut in the Gotham Dance Festival at The Joyce in 2012 was a major turning point for us, said Berkett.

Also making that debut with the troupe was founding company member Miguel Perez, a graduate of the University of Arizonas dance school.

We see a lot of dancers coming out of that program, the cheerful Berkett added.

Since then the busy companys itinerary has included the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, New Yorks Fall for Dance, the American Dance Festival in North Carolina, the Chutzpah Festival in Vancouver, the Laguna Dance Festival and concerts in Atlanta, San Francisco and Palm Beach.

Bodytraffic was selected by DanceMotion USA for a month-long tour of Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories at the end of 2015. Berkett said it changed the whole company in very positive ways.

For one thing, you forget how difficult some lives can be. While we were in Israel, over 40 stabbings occurred. The journalists there kept asking if we wanted to go back home.

We said No! We wanted to stand up for freedom. We felt very proud to be cultural ambassadors for the United States. Because of this experience, I think we are better dancers now.

Freedom fighter is a phrase that adds nuance to performances that have inspired such adjectives as wonderfully precise dancers (New York Times), fierce technique (Los Angeles Times), sheer animal magnetism (San Francisco Weekly), invention, attitude, and urban edge (Boston Globe).

Or as New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas said in summing up the Bodytraffic oeuvre, Variety counts for much and a dose of sex never hurts.

All of our repertory is commissioned work, Berkett affirmed. We look for choreography with very distinct qualities. That is our mission.

Tucsons audience will see the full gamut of what is happening in contemporary dance today.
A now four-year investigation into a prostitution ring that resulted in the terminations or resignations of seven Tucson police employees remains an active case, according to county prosecutors.

The investigation came to light in the months following searches on Jan. 27, 2015, where police seized cash, vehicles and hundreds of items associated with the prostitution ring, but no arrests were made.

However, more than 10 employees of the Tucson Police Department were caught in the fallout, with investigators saying they knew about the illegal massage parlors or were customers.

Seven of those employees no longer work for Tucson police: officers Nathaniel Luttrell, Oscar Ramos, Daniel Santa-Cruz and Martin Walker, and crime-scene technician Enrique Wilkins were all terminated. Sgt. Michael McGuire and Officer Jesus Maldonado resigned before the investigation was complete. Two officers were cleared of any departmental wrongdoing and another officer who was initially fired has since gotten his job back.

Although the Pima County Attorneys Office sent a letter to the department in May declining to file criminal charges against the police employees, no decision has been made as to the fate of the alleged operators.

Clarissa Lopez, Ulises Ruiz and Stephanie Garcia were identified by police as the operators of two illegal massage parlor businesses, By Spanish and Daisys Delights, that were operating out of numerous locations, police records show.

However, more than six months after Tucson police turned the investigation into Ruiz, Lopez and Garcia over to the county attorneys office, the case is still under review, said Amelia Cramer, chief deputy county attorney.

There is a lot of information to be reviewed in this matter, and our prosecutors had to await the conclusion of the Tucson Police Departments investigation before they were able to receive some of the information, Cramer wrote in an email.

She explained that while prosecutors are directed to act as quickly as possible to complete the charging process, time frames can vary greatly depending on the evidence. Some cases can take minutes to review, but others, such as the 1996 bombing case of Tucson businessman Gary Triano, can take years to complete, she said.

$15,000 fed into ATM

In December 2014, Ruiz was arrested and charged with felony aggravated assault, after allegedly striking a neighbor with a small bat while she was attempting to photograph vehicles parked at his north-side Tucson home, that police believe was being used for prostitution, records show.

Ruiz eventually accepted a plea for disorderly conduct and is on probation.

The $15,000 cash that Ruizs girlfriend and business partner, Lopez, fed into an ATM in the jails lobby to pay his bail, was found to be obtained through illegal means, and forfeited by the state, along with two vehicles, a house and hundreds of items seized in the raids, including leather paddles and eleven pairs of womens underwear, documents show.

Taking their $40 cut

In November of 2011, Tucson police began receiving tips regarding an illegal massage parlor called By Spanish operating out of several locations in Tucson. Police learned the operators were using a pet store and a salon to launder money for the prostitution ring.

Court documents say Lopez and Ruiz took a piece of the money paid for every sexual act, or happy ending  usually $40  and in exchange provided employees with advertising services, scheduling services, a location to work out of, supplies to perform their work and cleanup services.

Based on that $40 cut, Lopez and Ruiz had the potential to make more than $250,000 per year, according to court documents.

During the course of the investigation, it came to light that a former massage employee started her own business, Daisys Delights.

Officer reinstated

In addition to police officers, it was also discovered that government employees, area firefighters, Border Patrol agents and Air Force personnel were customers of the massage parlors. In June, Tucson police released 14 names of men they interviewed, but none was charged with a crime.

Last fall, four of the terminated Tucson police employees reached agreements with the city, changing their personnel records to reflect they resigned in lieu of termination. In exchange, they withdrew the appeals of their firings.

Walker went through with his appeal, which was rejected by the citys Civil Service Commission.

Officer Vincent Valenzuela, who was fired last summer for an unrelated personal relationship with one of the operators, did not withdraw his appeal.

In a closed hearing last month, the commission overturned the departments decision and reinstated Valenzuela.
The death of a male student whose body was found in the stairwell of a University of Arizona building Tuesday morning is being investigated as a suicide, police said Tuesday afternoon.

Investigators spent the day at the Koffler Building near East Fourth Street and North Highland Avenue. Late Tuesday afternoon the department said there was no sign of foul play and that the death will likely be a suicide.

The name of the student was not released.

Police said counselors are available for friends and classmates of the student through UA Counseling and Psychological Services. It can be reached at 621-3334. The phone line is open 24 hours a day.
The man shot by a Border Patrol agent Monday is in stable condition at a Tucson hospital, the agency said.

Tucson Sector agents tracked a vehicle they suspected of smuggling narcotics across the border from Mexico, the Border Patrol said in a statement Tuesday. Agents found a truck loaded with about 2,340 pounds of marijuana stuck in the mud near Rodeo, New Mexico.

Two suspects fled the scene and ran into mountainous terrain near the Arizona state line east of Apache. An agent caught one of the suspects and during the ensuing struggle the suspect assaulted the agent, the Border Patrol said. The agent shot the suspect with his service-issued firearm.

Agents contacted emergency medical personnel. The agent was treated for minor injuries and the suspect was flown to a Tucson hospital, the Border Patrol said.
Improving student performance is the top priority for Sunnyside Unified School District, its superintendent said.

"All of our efforts have to be in service to that goal," Steve Holmes said. "Thats the core of our business."

In a State of the District speech Tuesday night to a crowd of district employees and community members, Holmes emphasized the importance of restoring trust in the district among community members and district staff, ensuring financial stability and boosting academic performance.

The district spent the first half of the school year identifying what works and what doesn't, working as a team and defining goals for the future, he said.

During that process, the district learned some good and bad things about itself, Holmes said. Among the findings were low morale among staff, communication issues, declining enrollment, shortage in teachers, low student performance and poor student attendance.

This school year, the district lost between 400 and 600 students, he said. Enrollment decline was especially an issue at the kindergarten level.

"Every student we lose, we lose money," he told the crowd.

The superintendent also acknowledged that Sunnyside is one of the lowest performing school districts in Pima County. "That's not acceptable," he said.

In his proposals for solutions to the challenges that the district is facing, Holmes said it would focus on data-driven practices that ensure that money is being spent on things that are proven to work.

"Weve got to be much more driven by metrics that actually define what success is," he said. For example, if the district is spending money on resources for a reading program, students' reading scores should be improving.

But the added accountability isn't meant to be punitive, he said. It's intended to inform the district so that it can make better decisions.

"Its not a hammer," he said. "It really is a tool to support improvement."

Holmes also discussed improving communication channels by creating sub-groups within schools and district offices that meet more frequently, developing a districtwide web dashboard to support the strategic plan and involving the people who would be impacted in the decision-making process.

Another point of emphasis for Holmes is to establish financial stability. Every superintendent in Arizona knows of schools' financial struggles, he said. "Not being able to do it all is reality," he said.

But the district must find ways to do better with less money and live "within our means," he said. Sunnyside has done a budget prioritization process, including reviewing programs for their effectiveness to better align resources.

One way the district hopes to save money is to utilize open source education content, as opposed to subscription-based content, he said.

"Subscription-based stuff is going to have to boil down to a few that we know were going to use," he said. "Its the right thing to do."

Despite all the challenges, Holmes said the district has the capacity for great success.

"Theres no doubt that we can have the success that we desire and that we know we can make happen for our schools," he said, pointing out that the district has a community and staff members who are committed and passionate.

His vision is to always put students first and believe that every student is capable of learning at high level, he said. He wants to raise the bar of expectation for every student and provide the resources necessary.

Eddie Islas, principal of Santa Clara Elementary School, said he sees vision in Holmes' words. "Listening to him, there's hope," he said.

On the increasing accountability measures, he said, "Accountability has had a negative connotation because there were maybe negative things tied to it, like sanctions or taking over schools."

"If you want to know how well youre doing, you have to have some way of measuring it," he added.

There may still be some residue of mistrust for the district in the community and even among staff, he said. It was made evident when the maintenance and operations budget override failed last November.

But the district has come a long way with the leadership change  first with Eugenia Favela, who took over as interim superintendent when Manuel Isquierdo left the district and now with Holmes, Islas said.

"Theres a lot more to be done, but its doable," he said.
For Cuban artist Sandra Ramos, art can be leveraged as an act of resistance and a form of free expression in places where the state controls the press and access to information.

For me it has been important to my art to communicate those things that usually you cannot see in the official press or in the official information in Cuba, she said.

This is a feeling shared by many Cuban artists, Ramos said. We feel in connection with the society and we feel that its part of our role as artists to show the spaces and things that are disguised and that you cannot see represented on the television or in the news.

Ramos, a well-known contemporary artist from Havana, will discuss her work and her influences over the past two decades during a lecture at the Tucson Museum of Art at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28.

Ramos is in Arizona as part of an art residency supported by Tucsonans I. Michael and Beth Kasser.

Her latest exhibit, Watertight, is at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe through May 28. The exhibit revolves around eight animated videos Ramos produced in Cuba from 2008-2013 and five art books from her studio in Miami, produced from 2014-2015.

The Tucson Museum of Art is thrilled to have Ramos visiting, said Julie Sasse, chief curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum. She is one of the most important artists in Cuba today, so it is an honor to have her in our presence.

Political and social issues in Cuba are a major theme in much of Ramos work.

Growing up in Cuba, Ramos began studying art at 12 and earned a degree from the Instituto Superior de Arte in 1993, during the special period in Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed.

During that time, she saw the poverty, scarcity and social problems that came as a result of losing economic support and trade with Russia, she said.

Many of the subjects that are in my work are connected to that time and how Cuban society has evolved from that to now, she said.

While much of Ramos work is inspired by Cuban politics, history and society, her art touches on issues that anyone can relate to, she said, such as immigration, social justice and borders  themes relevant to a Tucson audience.

Ramos moved to Miami two years ago to be with her partner and so her daughter could attend school in the United States. The experience changed her perspective on life outside of Cuba and influenced her art.

Im very lucky to have this opportunity to travel in both directions and have the experience of these cities that have been so important to Cuban history and culture for more than 50 years, she said.

Even as she sees things changing in Cuba, there are still problems, she said, and her art reflects that. Artists should be concerned with whats happening in the world around them, Ramos said.

Everyone should have concern about society and how to make the world in which we live better.
PHOENIX  Hoping to avoid another court hearing  and potentially another loss  Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wants federal judges to delay deciding whether to permanently give drivers licenses to dreamers, or undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

In a letter to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Assistant Attorney General Dominic Draye points out that the U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a challenge to the authority of President Obama to allow some illegal immigrants to remain in the United States. That relates to a program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, aimed at the parents of children who are in this country legally.

The justices said they want to hear arguments over whether DAPA violates the constitutional requirement that the president ensure the laws be faithfully executed.

What Draye contends on Brnovichs behalf is that if the justices conclude that Obama had no authority to enact DAPA, then the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program also disappears. And if there is no DACA program, there are no dreamers  and no one to contend they are legally entitled to drive in Arizona.

But Jennifer Chang Newell, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said theres no basis for a delay.

She pointed out that challengers already have convinced a federal judge in Phoenix to permanently enjoin Arizona from denying licenses to dreamers. It is that ruling that Draye and Brnovich have previously asked the 9th Circuit to overturn  and now want the judges to delay.

But Newell is confident the 9th Circuit, which already upheld a preliminary injunction, will reach a similar conclusion again.

She also dismissed Drayes claim that a Supreme Court ruling against Obama in the DAPA case, expected by June, would automatically affect the rights of dreamers to drive in Arizona.

Newell said the issues in the Arizona case are different than those before the Supreme Court. In fact, she argues that Arizona would continue to have to issue licenses to dreamers even if the high court declared the DAPA program illegal.

We have a different program with a different record, Newell said.

Hanging in the balance are licenses that already have been issued to 17,344 DACA recipients in Arizona.

Obama unveiled DACA in 2012. It says that individuals brought to this country illegally as children would be allowed to remain if they met certain other conditions. Those who qualify also would be issued permits to work legally.

But just days before the Department of Homeland Security began taking applications, then-Gov. Jan Brewer issued an executive order directing the Department of Transportation not to issue licenses to DACA recipients.

She cited a 1996 Arizona law that says licenses are available only to those whose presence in this country is authorized by federal law. Brewer argued the federal agency has no legal authority to permit them to remain or work, meaning they were not authorized to be here.

U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell rejected those arguments, pointing out that Arizona has historically given licenses to thousands of other illegal residents who were given similar administrative permission to stay. That, he said, makes denying the DACA recipients is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The court is not saying that the Constitution requires the state of Arizona to grant drivers licenses to all noncitizens, Campbell wrote. But if the state chooses to confer licenses on some individuals who have been temporarily authorized to stay by the federal government, it may not deny them to similarly situated individuals without a rational basis for the distinction.

It is that ruling the state at first appealed and now wants delayed.

Newell said theres no basis to postpone the appeal.

She said Campbells ruling never touched on the question of whether DACA is within the presidents power. Instead, it relies on whether Arizona can pick and choose who it determines is authorized to be in the state.

Newell said, though, there is no immediate danger to DACA recipients if Brnovich gets the delay he wants. Thats because the state will continue to be required to issue licenses to applicants who otherwise qualify unless and until the 9th Circuit weighs in.

At last count more than 28,000 Arizona residents had qualified for DACA.
As the midterm elections come ever closer, it can feel as if were stewing in a cauldron of tribalism, of our side vs. their side with no middle ground and little agreement on much of anything. That makes it a good time to take a breath and realize the consensus weve reached on some issues that were incredibly contentious not long ago. It gives us hope in the angry days ahead.
The University of Arizonas department of chemistry and biochemistry has long been a research powerhouse and is now a leading producer of intellectual property.

Before the creation of Tech Launch Arizona in 2012, the College of Science disclosed about two dozen inventions annually.

Last year, the 45 faculty members in the department of chemistry and biochemistry produced 35 of the 213 disclosures Tech Launch Arizona received, of which 28 became or are related to full-fledged patent applications  and theyre spinning out one startup company per year.

Its the mindset of the entrepreneurial faculty member that moves things toward commercialization, says Roger Miesfeld, head of the department.

The departments faculty have historically participated in commercialization, and a number of the departments inventions have had significant impact.

Companies such as Selectide (predecessor to the Sanofi unit in Oro Valley) and GlycoSurf are prime examples of companies created from department research.

Tech Launch Arizona provides resources to protect inventions by seeking patent protection.

That intellectual property is then licensed to existing companies or startups, and the inventors, their laboratories and other UA units receive a small percentage of product sales (royalties) in exchange for the benefits derived from the patent.

Tech Launch Arizona has streamlined the whole process, and now that natural entrepreneurial spirit of chemists and biochemists can be manifested at the University of Arizona, Miesfeld says.

Miesfeld decided to try the process himself. We had a compound that when put into female mosquitoes diverted blood into her crop (where nectar is usually stored) instead of her stomach and she died, We said, Thats a really weird drug, and it does something weve never seen before.
About the dean

Joaquin Ruiz is vice president of innovation and strategy; executive dean, Colleges of Letters, Arts and Science; dean, College of Science; and professor of Geosciences.

One of the largest colleges at the UA, the College of Science has more than 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Its 21 academic departments and schools encompass the range of physical, mathematical, environmental, cognitive and life sciences.

Ruiz was honored in 2010 by Mexicos president as an outstanding Mexican researcher, one of the first Mexican scholars living abroad to be so recognized.

He is also a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Ruiz was president of the Geological Society of America for 2010-11. Ruiz joined the geosciences department in 1983, was named department head in 1995, dean of the College of Science in 2000, executive dean in 2008 and vice president of innovation and strategy in 2013.

Ruizs lab discovered in 2002 than more than 40 percent of the worlds gold is 3 billion years old.
PHOENIX  Cities and counties statewide could lose their ability to put photo radar on some roads simply to satisfy a Peoria lawmakers efforts to keep her constituents from being ticketed for speeding.

On a 5-1 vote Tuesday, the Senate Transportation Committee approved SB 1241 that would bar local governments from operating speed and red light cameras on any state highway. That includes not just freeways but any numbered road maintained by the state, even if it is a city street.

But Sen. Debbie Lesko, R-Peoria, conceded she has only one location in her sights: cameras operated by the city of El Mirage on Grand Avenue  officially U.S. 60  at Primrose Street. And she is undisturbed by the fact that SB 1241 would kill speed cameras already operated by Star Valley on Arizona 260 and preclude future cameras on any other state roads.

What it all comes down to, said Lesko, is protecting her voters.

Its what my constituents have been asking me to do for a few years now, she told Capitol Media Services, turning off those specific cameras.

There are people in Sun City that are getting signatures, Lesko said, asking that the cameras be removed.

And one her constituents, Teresa Sommers, turned out Tuesday to testify in favor of the bill.

Sommers said she has been ticketed for traveling with the flow, something she said she does to ensure she does not get rear-ended. Sommers told lawmakers she feels persecuted.

Lesko has been trying for years to force removal of the camera.

In 2013 Lesko crafted legislation that allows photo speed radar and red light cameras on state highways only if they first prove to the Department of Transportation that it is necessary for the public safety of the state. The same law requires communities that already have such cameras to show through engineering studies that they have had a positive impact on safety.

Since then most of the cameras have come down, with two notable exceptions: several along Arizona 260 through Star Valley and the ones on Grand Avenue.
Intolerance is rampant at every level and in all age groups of the society, but it is more visible amongst the younger generation as our youth can be seen losing their altitude of patience over petty issues. We seriously need to think over it as what we are going to inculcate in them, which may help them seek success in future. Will it be tolerance or intolerance?
Help India!

By IndScribe,

First, there were fatwas against terrorism and ISIS.

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Now, Indian Muslims have taken to the streets, to raise their voice against the outfit.

The photograph on the left, shows Muslim girls raising slogans against self-styled Islamic State.

This is not a lone protest. It is part of a campaign. The reason is that many Muslims now increasingly feel that just condemning ISIS is not enough, but there is need to go to the street and say it, strongly, so that the message goes out.









Specially, in the wake of arrests of Muslim youths on suspicion of links with extremist groups, the Muslim community has decided to come out strongly and raise their voice.

Muslims in general are disgusted by the acts of groups like Islamic State, which is also known as Daaesh, ISIS or ISIL. Also, with media reports continuously giving wide coverage to inhuman acts of ISIS, community is deeply concerned.

The complexities of the situation in Syria and other countries of Middle East arent clear to everyone.

However, the manner in which ISIS has been executing people and using Islamic symbols, distorting the message of the religion, has disturbed Muslims.

Earlier, over 1,000 Muslim religious heads, clerics and scholars had issued a joint fatwa, denouncing ISIS.









It termed the activities of the militia is inhuman and against the teachings of Islam. A copy of the text was sent to United Nations (UNO) too.

Now, a big campaign has been launched. It will mostly focus in Western part of India, where there are reports of many Muslim youths getting indoctrinated and affected by ISIS propaganda.

Mumbai-based Sahas Foundation and Urdu Markaz are jointly organising the campaign. The aim is that parents also take care that the children dont get astray. A report about this campaign is published in The Times of India.

IndScribe is an Indian journalist. He blogs at : anIndianMuslim.com
Help India!

By TCN News

London: Representatives of rights groups, Indian Diaspora and Dalit organisations marked Indias Republic Day eve by holding a candlelit vigil outside the Indian High Commission in London.

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A press release issued by the South Asia Solidarity Group described the vigil as a display of solidarity with the hunger-striking students of the University of Hyderabad and other places across India against the institutional murder of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula by university authorities and Indian cabinet ministers.

Holding banners, portraits of Rohith Vemula and Dr Ambedkar and candles in their hands and raising placards participants braved windy and cold weather and stood in a sombre silence in front of the High Commission from 4 pm to 7 pm.

Captions on the placards read, Manusmriti to Smriti Irani Hindutva Tyranny Continues; Justice for Rohith!; Dalit Lives Matter; No More Institutional Casteist Killings!; Modis Ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya Must Be Dismissed! and Bring Casteist VC Appa Rao Podile to Justice!

A letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and signed by the representatives of participating organisations was also handed to the High Commission demanding the dismissal of HRD Minister Smriti Irani and Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya who, it said, instituted a witch hunt against Dalit students at the University of Hyderabad and whose actions and interventions pushed Rohith Vemula to despair and suicide.; dismissal of and action against Hyderabad University Vice Chancellor Appa Rao Podille. Demand has also been made for urgent and effective measures to end the institutional discrimination against Dalits in Indian institutions of higher education.


Imagine your delight as you board the double-decker ahead of a whistle-stop tour around Londons historic sights, as you are welcomed aboard by none other than Sir Ian McKellen. That possibility has become a very strong probability for a limited number of fortunate visitors, thanks to the British Film Institutes Shakespeare on Film programme that was launched this week by the distinguished actor.

Spot of moonlighting for McKellen

The noted thespian  better known as Gandalf to millions of Lord of the Rings fans  seems set to take time away from his stage and screen commitments for a spot of moonlighting.

However, its all in a good cause as he seeks to incorporate his own distinctive enthusiasm for the Bard into the tour of some of the locations utilised whilst filming the 1995 adaptation of Richard III.

McKellen  who played the title role  will provide the narrative for the tour of several historic sites featured in the film itself. With such diverse locations as the Tate Modern, St Pancras station and even the gas holders of east London to choose from, there should be something for everyone.

Marking Shakespeares death

The BFIs initiative is part of an ambitious wider programme planned this year to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares death in 1616.

Enthusiasm towards the concept

McKellans keenness to be the tour leader is no doubt sparked by the fact that the idea was his own.

He told the assembled reporters that he thought that it might be fun to take a bus tour around the sites of Richard III, allowing those on board to watch a scene from the film and then arrive at the actual location.

The head curator for the BFI, Robin Baker, also enthused about the novel concept. Although he was unable to confirm how many appearances Sir Ian would be able to fit in to his busy workload, he commented that it was a special event and that those who enjoyed the experience would be pretty lucky people.

Star-studded adaptation

The 1995 film featured a galaxy of stars in an imaginative updating of the original play.

Set in 1930s Britain with a fictional fascist state in place, McKellen shared the limelight with American actors Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr. A host of major British stars including Dame Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent and Kristin Scott Thomas completed the stellar cast, with Richard Loncraine adding his talents as the films director.

It was notable for the rather unorthodox usage of famous British landmarks in the action, invoking special effects to transport them to alternative locations. St Pancras railway station, for example, became the seat of government for King Edward IV at Westminster.
Venerable Mao Kun, the head monk in Vihear Thom pagoda, Prey Veng province

 UNICEF Cambodia/2015/Kanha Chan

Accommodation at Vihear Thom pagoda, Prey Veng province

 UNICEF Cambodia/2015/Kanha Chan





Since 2008, under the regional Buddhist Leadership Initiative, UNICEF Cambodia has cooperated with the Ministry of Cults and Religions to implement a four-year project promoting the role of Buddhist monks in supporting orphans, children affected by or vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, and their families. The project finished in 2012, but it was so successful that cooperation continued. The project aims to involve religious leaders as advocates to raise the voices of children and challenge social norms that allow violence against children to continue. It also promotes family-based care. The Ministry of Cults and Religions has played an important part in coordinating religious leaders and promoting their role in protecting children from violence, abuse and unnecessary family separation.Venerable Mao Kun, the head of the monks in Vihear Thom pagoda, was part of this cooperation. In his role as a religious leader, he has helped children who experienced violence and abuse and has worked to prevent unnecessary family separation. Vihear Thom pagoda is in Rong Damrey village, Cheoung Phnom commune, Ba Phnom district, Prey Veng province. Among many children, Kun has supported Pheap*, Dara*, and Sokly*. These three siblings, the eldest who is a teenager and the youngest of primary school-age, are survivors of violence committed by their own parents.Kun recalled that five years ago, the parents of these children were fighting nearly every day. Due to this ongoing conflict they could not continue to live together, so they sold their house and separated. After separating, their father married a woman he met when he worked at a construction site in Phnom Penh. Their mother remarried a man in Kampong Cham province. The three children were abandoned, and with no other options, were sent to live with their aunt. But they were abused again and did not receive any care or attention from her. The children found it hard to survive and went to the pagoda to look for any food the monks had left over.Kun noticed that the oldest child often came to the pagoda to look for food. He followed her home where he found her and two siblings living in dire conditions. He decided to support the children by giving them food, materials and accommodation, and helped identify a place for them with a foster family.The children now live under the care of their foster mother, a widow living with her 12-year-old granddaughter. Their foster mother is happy to have the children and committed to taking good care of them. The children love her very much and consider her to be their grandmother. I feel she is my real grandmother, said Pheap.To further support the children, Kun mobilized resources from both local and overseas Buddhist followers to buy a small plot of land for US$400. The plot is next to the foster family and he arranged to build a wooden house for them, costing around US$2,800. The monk is now looking for vocational skills training for the oldest sibling, while the youngest is studying in the pagoda primary school.Kun understands the importance of family-based care. He said two people had approached him and asked to take the children to be their housemaids, but he refused. We try to keep children in the community as much as we can, he said. If there are no other options, the pagoda can be a temporary shelter for children, but it is not sustainable and is not a long-term place for children to grow.Currently, Kun is building 20 rooms to provide short-term and temporary accommodation to vulnerable children. He is also providing pagoda-based education at Grade 1 and 2, moral teaching, computer and English classes.* Names changed to protect identities
Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.
To explore the impact of urgency urinary incontinence (UUI) on well-being in non-institutionalized patients with overactive bladder (OAB) in a community sample.

A cross-sectional web-based study was conducted in the general population, including males and females, >18 years of age.

Patients with probable OAB were identified using a validated algorithm together with a score 8 on the OAB-V8 scale. Presence of coping behavior was considered determinant for the clinical diagnosis of OAB. Individual well-being was determined through a battery of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measurements including assessment of health-related quality of life (EQ-5D), sleep disturbances (MOS Sleep), and life satisfaction (LISAT-8). Patients were grouped according to the number of daily UUI episodes (UUI severity): 0 (dry OAB),1, 2-3, or 4. Multivariate analysis to evaluate factors independently affecting quality of life was undertaken.

A total of 396 patients (52. 5% women, mean age: 55. 3 [11. 1] years, OAB-V8 mean score: 14. 5 [7. 9]) out of 2035 subjects participating from the general population met the criteria for OAB: 203 (51. 3%) with 0episodes, 119 (30. 1%) with 1, 52 (13. 1%) with 2 or 3, and 22 (5. 6%) with 4 episodes. A statistically significant linear adjusted association was found between number of UUI episodes and PRO scores. Participants with more episodes had poorer health profiles and self-evaluated quality of life, worse life satisfaction, and more sleep disturbances and fewer hours of sleep per night. Number of incontinence episodes was independent factor to affect quality of life using both LISAT-8 and MOS questionnaires.

Severity of UUI was significantly associated with poorer individual well-being in subjects with OAB in a community sample in Spain.

Actas urologicas espanolas. 2016 Jan 19 [Epub ahead of print]

J C Angulo, F J Brenes, I Lizarraga, J Rejas, S Trillo, D Ochayta, D Arumi

Servicio de Urologia, Hospital Universitario de Getafe, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Laureate International Universities, Getafe, Madrid, Espana. Centro de Atencion Primaria, Llefia, Badalona, Espana. , Unidad Medica, Pfizer S. L. U. , Alcobendas, Madrid, Espana. , Departamento de Investigacion en Resultados y Economia de la Salud, Pfizer S. L. U. , Alcobendas, Madrid, Espana. , Unidad Medica, Pfizer S. L. U. , Alcobendas, Madrid, Espana. , oYs Integra, Madrid, Espana. , Unidad Medica, Pfizer Europe, Alcobendas, Madrid, Espana.

PubMed
China to increase agricultural investment Updated: 2016-01-27 20:28 (Xinhua)

BEIJING -- China plans increased spending on agriculture to boost rural development, it was announced Wednesday.

"The agricultural sector will be a key area for fixed-asset investment, " said a policy document released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council.

The government will channel more funds to poor farmers, construction of irrigation programs, industrial convergence in rural areas, and wholesale produce markets.

The central authorities pledged financial aid to key areas including farmland protection and the increase of grain production, according to the document.

The government will also encourage financial institutions to make more loans to agriculture businesses.
Washington urged to 'play constructive role' on DPRK Updated: 2016-01-27 08:21 By Li Xiaokun(China Daily USA)

With US Secretary of State John Kerry set to arrive in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a news briefing in the capital on Tuesday that US officials must "play a constructive role ... instead of pointing fingers at others".

Hua was responding to a question about recent remarks United States officials made on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.

"Many of these remarks were obviously irresponsible," she said.

Kerry, who was scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Tuesday after visiting Laos and Cambodia, was expected to press China to bear down on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Insiders have said he added China to his itinerary after the DPRK announced it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb on Jan 6.

Washington has long refused to talk with Pyongyang about a peace treaty, which is believed by some observers to be a major reason behind the nuclear test.

Fan Jishe, a US studies researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "The US has pressured the DPRK harshly for years, but that did not stop Pyongyang from pushing its nuclear program forward."

"Apparently, China does not believe increasing pressure would work. Actually, it could lead to regional turbulence, which would work against the interests of China, the Republic of Korea and also the US."

Xinhua contributed to this story.

lixiaokun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 01/27/2016 page1)
Beijing to boost anti-terror work with Kabul Updated: 2016-01-27 08:21 By Wang Qingyun(China Daily USA)

China has agreed to strengthen anti-terrorism work with Afghanistan, a war-torn country whose stability is linked to that of western China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi made the announcement at a news conference with his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani on Tuesday.

The development comes shortly after the second meeting of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group on Afghan Peace and Reconciliation was held in Kabul on Jan 18. The group comprises China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani meet reporters after a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. Feng Yongbin / China Daily

China and Afghanistan have also agreed to discuss and expand the China, US and Afghanistan trilateral cooperation.

US Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Tuesday.

Wang said China and Afghanistan have agreed to strengthen bilateral and multilateral cooperation on anti-terrorism efforts to maintain the security and stability of both countries and the region.

"China supports all initiatives and measures that help reconciliation and the resumption of peace talks, as they are totally in line with China's security interest," Wang said.

The Afghan government and various political factions should work for an attractive and reasonable reconciliation plan, and China hopes the Taliban will respond positively, he said.

Fu Xiaoqiang, a security and arms control researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said there is the possibility of talks on the Afghan issue being held at foreign minister level between China, Afghanistan and the US.

They have a common interest in "preventing Afghanistan from becoming a source of terrorism," he said.

Fu said Afghanistan is a "very important" factor for the security of Xinjiang.

Rabbani said a third round of the quadrilateral talks will open on Feb 6 to finalize the road map for peace and reconciliation. He added that the Afghan government has called for "all members of Taliban groups" to come to negotiate.

wangqingyun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 01/27/2016 page3)
Special envoy's trips to boost neighborly ties Updated: 2016-01-27 08:21 By Zhang Yunbi(China Daily USA)

Xi's representative to meet with the leaders of ruling political parties in Laos, Vietnam

Plans for party-to-party visit from Beijing to Laos and to Vietnam attracted great attention on Tuesday before their start as some experts say they reinforce an expected continuing stability for China's ties with the neighbors after their political reshuffles.

A new chief of Laos' ruling party was elected last week while the political reshuffling of Communist Party of Vietnam is underway.

Song Tao, a senior diplomat and has been sent as special envoy of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Xi Jinping to visit Laos and Vietnam from Tuesday to Saturday.

Song, a former vice-foreign minister, is head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, which is in charge of party-to-party exchanges.

In the Laotian capital of Vientiane, the 10th National Congress of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party ended on Friday afternoon after the election of the party leader.

Xi sent his congratulations on Friday to Bounnhang Vorachit, the new party secretary-general.

In Hanoi, around 1,510 delegates are gathered at the 12th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam, which opened on Jan 21 and will convene till Thursday. The congress will name a new Politburo and Secretariat of the CPV Central Committee, Xinhua News Agency said.

Xu Liping, a senior research fellow on Southeast Asia studies at Chinese Academy of social sciences, noted party-to-party diplomacy is something unique when it comes to the two neighbors, and "it is of great significance as it often serve as a stabilizer of the two-way ties".

"The envoy trip is not just for expanding party to party exchanges, but also for dovetailing strategies of both sides and paving the way for long-term planning," Xu said.

Pan Jin'e, an expert on Vietnam studies at CASS, said that China-Vietnam relations at the party and national levels "will be further reinforced" after the political reshuffle in Hanoi.

"Despite some thorny issues, such as those regarding the South China Sea, the top leaders of both countries have been boosting bilateral cooperation," Pan said.

zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 01/27/2016 page3)
Around China Updated: 2016-01-27 08:22 (China Daily USA)

Fujian

Baby survives birth at 24 weeks

The survival of a premature baby born after just 24 weeks of gestation and weighing only 710 grams is being cited as a breakthrough for neonatal medicine in China. The girl born on Oct 14 in Xiamen was dubbed "palm baby" because she was the same size as an adult hand. In a critical condition for the first three months, the baby now has stabilized.

Haixi Morning News

Stone Buddha statue stolen

A stone statue of Buddha that weighs nearly 100 kilograms was stolen from a Nanjing county village on the night of Jan 16. A video camera recorded two men taking the statue, which was believed to have been made during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and was worshipped at the village's sacrificial hall. Police are investigating.

Xiamen Daily

Man celebrates 100th birthday

A rural farming couple in Anxi county have been together for 80 years, long enough for a rare "oak" anniversary. And on Sunday, husband Wang Shijiu celebrated his 100th birthday with wife Wu Yan, 97. The pair have 156 offspring, including great-great-grandchildren.

Southeast Morning News

Hebei

Driver found sleeping after crash

A driver involved in crash with another vehicle could not be roused from sleep after the accident at a traffic light at a Shijiazhuang crossroads on Jan 20. Police said the driver was drunk and sleeping so soundly that they had to break the Mercedes-Benz's window. The drunken driver was punished according to traffic laws.

Sjztong@wechat

Library introduces seat system

A seat management system was introduced recently at the library at Hebei Normal University to better allocate chairs, especially during the exam season at the end of the school term. The university found too many seats were being occupied by books or school bags, so now students must use a machine to request a chair.

Hebnews.cn

Anhui

Blazing truck driven to fire station

A trucker drove his burning lumber truck directly into the yard of a fire station in Hefei. The driver said he discovered the fire on the way to a client, but could not put it out on his own. He saw the fire station up the road and drove it there. Firefighters put out the blaze in 15 minutes.

Marketing Star

Jiangsu

Stinky feet give thief away

Stinky feet helped police catch a thief who left the scent behind during break-ins of residential houses and cars in Nanjing early this month. A 21-year-old man, surnamed Fu, was detained on Jan 18 and confessed to the thefts, police said. Officers said they had to wrap Fu's feet during an interrogation because they smelled so bad.

Yangtze Evening News

Tianjin

Man punished for colleague pickup

A man in Tianjin who picked up three colleagues from a train station after a business trip was fined 8,000 yuan ($1,216) for running an illegal taxi service. The driver, surnamed Liu, was stopped by staff of the local transportation administration on Jan 14. Liu explained that he received no payment from his co-workers. Lawyers recommended he appeal the decision.

Beijing Times

Guangdong

Father seeks custody over Buddhism

A woman's ex-husband is seeking custody of the child she gave birth to after their divorce, arguing that her belief in Buddhism would harm the boy. The couple divorced in July 2011 and the woman gave birth to a son in February 2012. A court in Zhongshan recently refused the man's request, but allowed him to visit the boy once a week.

New Express

Shandong

Cheat-free students get hongbao

A counselor at China University of Petroleum in Qingdao sent 999 hongbao, gifts of money in red envelopes, to reward students who did not cheat during their exams. Zhou Hui promised to send hongbao for three days if none of his students cheated. Starting on Jan 9, Zhou began sending the electronic red envelopes with sums of less than 200 yuan to his students through the popular social app WeChat. He said he wanted to reward their honesty.

China Youth Daily

Jiangxi

Man makes threat over second child

A man climbed to the top of a 40-meter high-voltage tower in Hengfeng county on Sunday and threatened to jump because his wife did not want to have a second child. Firefighters rescued him without injury 16 hours later.

Jxnews.com.cn

(China Daily USA 01/27/2016 page6)
Mother Cellar initiative celebrates 15th birthday Updated: 2016-01-27 14:52 By Du Juan(China Daily USA)

Thousands of clean-water projects launched, with plans to expand overseas

A national charity program called Mother Cellar is celebrating, after spending 900 million yuan ($137 million) on improving water and sanitation in some of western China's most remote areas.

Toasting its 15th anniversary at a conference held in Beijing last month, officials said it had helped build 139,400 rainwater collection cellars, for instance, and 1,700 centralized water supply projects in 25 provinces and autonomous regions.

Qin Guoying, vice-president of China Women's Development Foundation, the project organizer, said thanks to its work, 2.9 million more people are now able to drink safe and clean water, including students and teachers in 534 rural schools.

Xylem Inc, a US-based water technology provider, has been involved in Mother Cellar for nine years, and during the Beijing event, was awarded Loyal Partner status by organizers in recognition of its support.

Lyu Shuping, president of Xylem China, said in that time it had spent $2.13 million at 82 schools in areas including the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, and Guizhou and Anhui provinces.

"Not having safe, clean water is a long-term threat and a burden to rural areas."

"Women often have to carry water home from a long way away, and children do not have enough sanitation knowledge for safe water use," she said.

"We not only donate equipment for water purification, but also spend time with people to educate them on how to drink water safely."

In November, Xylem attended the 11th China Excellent Corporate Citizen Annual Meeting authorized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Xylem won the Excellent Corporate Citizen Charity Project Award for constantly devoting to corporate social responsibility area for five years and developing Xylem Watermark program in China. Recently, Xylem received the notice from China Charity Festival, which indicated that Xylem has been awarded with 2015 China Charity Award-Corporate Award as well as Project Award. Established in 2011, this festival is one of the most influential charity events in China.

Wang Guifen, a primary school teacher from a school in Inner Mongolia, said the water-related equipment supplied by Xylem has been invaluable.

"The company did a good job answering all our questions, as well as maintaining the equipment after it was installed in 2012 in our village," Wang said.

"Its volunteer staff also gave sanitation lessons to the students, and since then everyone has been making sure they wash their hands before meals.

"I hope the program will go to more schools and benefit more people."

Officials said they expect to expand Mother Cellar's reach and its scope of work outside of China, by bringing new technology and ideas to underdeveloped countries in Africa, in cooperation with international partners.

Its new directions are likely to include water sourcing, and the ongoing protection of supplies.

According to the United Nations Environment Program, 80 percent of human diseases are related to water problems.

dujuan@chinadaily.com.cn

Students from a primary school in Inner Mongolia autonomous region wash their hands with the newly installed waterpurification equipment. Provided To China Daily

(China Daily USA 01/27/2016 page15)
Encouraging filial care for aged Updated: 2016-01-26 07:40 (China Daily)

Volunteers and empty-nest seniors make Yuan Xiao, a typical food for Lantern Festival, in Handan, Hebei province, March 3, 2015. [Photo/IC]

Besides concerns over whether decision-makers can resolve the widening gap between the country's pension account and its ageing population, people are also worried about whether the government can provide adequate public care facilities for the elderly.

With China's rapidly aging population, care for the elderly is a problem decision-makers can no longer um and ah over.

It is traditional in China for senior members of a family to be cared for by younger members. But it is now a brutal fact that many couples have no time to look after their elderly parents as both the husband and wife are working. This means they either have to pay someone to look after their parents or rely on public care facilities for the elderly.

However, by the end of 2015, China had more than 6.6 million nursing beds for the elderly, around 30 beds for every 1,000 elderly.

The lack of public facilities and understaffing make it necessary to explore a new model of care services provision for the country's growing elderly population.

Policymakers in Beijing are pushing for a home-based care model for the aged. At a session of Beijing's people's congress on Sunday, the municipal authorities said they are studying the feasibility of paying children to provide care for their elderly parents and pushing for the establishment of a home-based care service model. Such a policy, if adopted and implemented as announced, may prove a useful reference for other regions.

Offering financial compensation to those caring for their elderly relatives will help reduce the economic burden on families and make such care more feasible.

Family care for the elderly will probably also be more welcome to most elderly as it will allow them to feel the affection of their children and grandchildren and thus help them enjoy a happier time in their remaining years.
Tough love can nurture development of green cars Updated: 2016-01-26 07:40 (China Daily)

A new electric car is on show in Beijing. The future looks bright for electric cars in China amid rapidly fluctuating gasoline prices and huge investments by the government to promote use of clean energy.[Provided to China Daily]

The warning that China's finance minister recently made against subsidy-related fraud may sound harsh to domestic new-energy vehicle producers who have relied heavily on such government funds to kick-start a domestic boom of green cars.

But it does not mean the Chinese government is any less committed to making the country a champion of green cars.

Instead, such a precaution against the possible misuse of subsidies for new energy cars has highlighted the very high hopes Chinese policymakers are pinning on such cars for a low-carbon future.

Production and sales of new energy cars significantly accelerated last year in China. The country's output of new energy vehicles quadrupled to 379,000, while the number sold more than tripled year-on-year to 331,100 in 2015, thanks to favorable policies and big subsidies to encourage their use, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

New energy cars accounted for less than 2 percent of China's total vehicle sales of a record 24.6 million units sold last year. This remarkable growth momentum has given rise to confidence that China, the world's largest car market, may also become the world's greenest one.

However, while recognizing the huge impetus that government subsidies have created for the accelerated development of green cars, Chinese policymakers have also noticed that some enterprises are merely making the most of the subsides and favorable policies instead of making real technological breakthroughs.

To end the dependence on subsidies, the government has announced its plan to cut such subsidies by 20 percent between 2017 and 2018 from 2016 levels, and by 40 percent between 2019 and 2020.

And the Finance Ministry plans to conduct special checks on the use of the subsidies and has vowed to severely punish those involved in subsidy-related fraud.

On the one hand, the government has heeded the bitter lessons from the rapid growth of the photovoltaic industry in China on the back of hefty subsidies and the huge losses the sector suffered as a result of oversupply. On the other hand, domestic producers' heavy dependence on subsidies also calls for early actions to reduce government aid for those focusing on low-technology cars.

If China's green car producers are to survive market competition, they must focus on making technological breakthroughs to sharpen the competitive edge of their cars. And the government has an obligation to ensure the subsidies go to these enterprises to make a better use of public funds.

Last year's boom in green cars has only made this task more urgent than ever.
ROK should say no to missile defense system Updated: 2016-01-26 08:16 By Wang Junsheng(China Daily)

People at a railroad station in Seoul watch a news report on Wednesday after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea announced that it had conducted its first hydrogen bomb test. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP

Republic of Korea President Park Geun-hye announced recently that her government will consider the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, an advanced US anti-ballistic missile defense system, in the ROK.

Park's comment came after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea early this month carried out its fourth nuclear test since 2006, giving rise to speculation about the THAAD missile defense system's deployment, which has the potential to readjust the regional strategic structure and trigger an arms race in East Asia.

Unlike the ROK's previous ambiguous "Three Nos" policy - No Request, No Consultation, No Decision - Seoul's more favorable stance toward the US defense system is becoming clear, so too is Washington's strategic ambition.

The THAAD system, if deployed in the ROK, will obviously have a negative impact on regional security. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei has reiterated Beijing's stance that a country should consider other countries' safety and interests as well as the peace and stability of the whole region when seeking its own safety.

Strategically, the possible deployment of the THAAD system in the ROK would further worsen the peninsula situation, fueling the arms race between the ROK and the DPRK and leaving less room for China's neighborhood policy.

As Japan also showed interest in introducing the THAAD system last month, the ROK, and Japan could witness substantial progress in their military alliance with the US, which might even incubate a sort of "Asian NATO", if both Tokyo and Seoul decided to deploy the US system on their soil.
Reducing waste can boost food security Updated: 2016-01-26 08:16 By Cecilia Tortajada, Matthew J. Kastner and Asit K. Biswas(China Daily)

During the period of its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), China intends to pursue a new development mode that will be "higher in quality, more efficient, fairer and more sustainable". Agriculture will be fundamental to this, given its significance to both food and environmental security.

China produces about three-fourths of the combined total value of production of all Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries. Globally, it is the largest producer of products such as potatoes, wheat, tomatoes, rice and apples. Its own agricultural products are supplemented by imports of agro-food products from all over the world to ensure food security.

But food security not only means enough food is available, but also the food that is available is not over-consumed or wasted. At present, industrialized Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) contributes 28 percent of the total food wasted in the world, which is estimated at 1.3 billion tons per year.

For industrialized Asia, three stages of the supply chain need special attention: postharvest handling and storage, distribution and consumption. The handling and storage stage of the supply chain accounts for 20 percent of the food wasted in the region, another 14 percent of food is lost at the distribution stage, while some 31 percent is wasted during the consumption stage, which is the third highest globally.

That vegetable losses in industrialized Asia account for about 11 percent of global food losses is of special concern, as this region accounts for more than 50 percent of global production and consumption.
Justice demanded for two slain boys Updated: 2016-01-27 11:23 By Lia Zhu in San Francisco(China Daily USA)

As more information is reported surrounding a Chinese man held in Hong Kong for allegedly killing his two nephews in Los Angeles, the local Chinese community expressed outrage and wants swift justice.

Shi Deyun, 44, is accused of killing two of his nephews in their home in Arcadia, California, on Jan 22 before boarding a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong the next day. He was arrested by Hong Kong police at the airport.

Shi made his first appearance at a Hong Kong court on Tuesday, where he denied the allegations against him and said he wanted to "go back (to the US) as soon as possible", according to the South China Morning Post. He also requested to be set free on bail, which was denied.

Students and teachers at Arcadia High School California pay respects to William and Anthony Lin at a candlelight vigil held Monday night at the school. The Lin brothers were killed on Jan 22 at their home, allegedly by their uncle, who is being held in Hong Kong after leaving the US on Friday. Qiu Chen / For China Daily

"How shameless he (Shi) is to request bail after slaying two boys!" said an Internet user named "Morning Sunlight" in a comment to an article posted Tuesday at a US-based Chinese news website. The article has been viewed more than 16,000 times.

"Such a crime will be punished by death for sure in China. But in the US, the suspect may get away with a life sentence. Even if he ends up with a death sentence, it would take years' time, and it means a waste of taxpayers' money," said another Internet user under the name "wd01702".

Many members of the Chinese community agreed that Shi should be brought to justice on the Chinese mainland.

"As the old saying has it: A murderer must pay with his life; a debtor must pay his debt. It's reasonable enough," said a Chinese mother living in the Bay Area, who asked to be identified only by her last name Wang. "Since he is a Chinese national, he should stand trial in China, where the court system moves faster than in the US."

Among those demanding a death sentence is the two slain brothers' father. He told World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper, that it was a premeditated murder and he hoped Shi could be sentenced to death, whether in China or in the US.

He said he saw Shi's car, without a license plate, parked near their home in the small hours of Jan 22 and that Shi had transferred all his money to China before he committed the crime.

The victims, Anthony Lin and William Lin, were both students at Arcadia High School. Their funeral is scheduled for Jan 30.

The brothers' father is the brother of Shi's wife, Lin Yujing. The couple, with their two children, ages 15 and 8, arrived in the US in 2014 on a business visa and lived in La Caada Flintridge, according to the unnamed father.

Lin filed a temporary restraining order against Shi on Dec 31 last year. On Jan 21, Shi learned of Lin's divorce plan at a court hearing in Pasadena. An angry Shi attacked his wife in their home on Jan 21 and killed the brothers in their Arcadia home the next day.

The victim's father also confirmed with media that Shi, a former resident of Shenzhen, China, moved to California in 2014 to avoid arrest for bribery allegations.

According to Chinese media reports, Shi had been under investigation by the Shenzhen municipal discipline inspection commission since May 2013, in the alleged bribing of government officials and school principals in exchange for the awarding of contracts.

Shi told the court in Hong Kong that the school-supplies company jointly owned by him and his wife in the US was worth $20 million to $30 million, in an attempt to convince the judge that he could post a high amount of bail money and justify his assertion that he didn't flee the US but came to handle business matters in Shenzhen.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com
Chinese-led 'Craigslist' gets funded Updated: 2016-01-27 11:23 By Paul Welitzkin in New York(China Daily USA)

A Chinese-developed challenger to Craigslist and Wallapop has secured $30 million in new funding as it celebrates its first year in business this month.

5miles is a Dallas- and Beijing-based mobile-app startup that has more than 5 million users, averaging 30,000 downloads a day. Its goal is to become a major factor in local classified advertising, an area dominated by Craigslist.

"5miles is a community and not just a marketplace," Liang (Lucas) Lu, founder and president, said in an interview Tuesday. "We will use this funding to expand to other US cities."

5miles currently serves Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio in Texas and also Miami, Florida, and Oakland, California.

Lu is a native of Luoyang, Henan province. After attending college on the mainland, he moved to the US, where he got a graduate degree in 2005 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

He then worked at a series of technology- and e-commerce-focused positions with BlogDrive.com, LightInTheBox and Alibaba Group.

"At Alibaba, I was exposed to mobile and e-commerce applications," Lu said. In 2014, he noticed that mobile penetration was growing rapidly in the US and Europe. "I studied Craigslist and decided to do a similar business," he said.

Craigslist features free online merchandise listings but charges a fee for job listings, apartment-rental offerings and automobile ads in certain cities. Many observers believe Craigslist played a big part in making the classified advertising sections of US newspapers obsolete.

Lu said 5miles is different from Craigslist in that it is mobile-based and offers a more service-oriented product. "We enable you to take advantage of your smartphone and communicate with pictures, words, GPS and social media and instant messaging instead of relying on e-mail," he said.

"We verify users with a valid e-mail, phone number and Facebook account," Lu said. Clients will also be able to access reviews on a user.

Buyers will not be allowed to sell pets, weapons or pharmaceuticals on 5miles, said Lu. 5miles does not charge buyers or sellers a fee and earns revenue from online advertising, he added.

"Right now we will use the latest funding to focus on US expansion," said Lu. "If that goes well, we will then look at Europe and maybe Brazil. We are letting Alibaba work on a China application."

5miles has 15 employees in Dallas for marketing and administration. The Beijing office has 30 employees who work on engineering and product development.

The latest financing brings total investment in 5miles to more than $50 million. In its first year, 5miles gained 4 million users and generated $1 billion in gross merchandise volume.

paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com
China, US in regular contact on major issues Updated: 2016-01-27 19:53 By Li Xiaokun(chinadaily.com.cn)

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 27, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

Beijing and Washington have kept up communication on the Korean nuclear issue, President Xi Jinping told US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday.

"Generally speaking, the China-US relationship has been smooth and on the way up in the past year," Xi told Kerry at the start of their meeting at the Great Hall of the People.

"Our two countries have been in timely communication on international and regional issues, such as the Iranian nuclear issue, the Korean nuclear issue, Afghanistan and so on," Xi said.

"When China and the United States work together, we can make good things happen with win-win results for both sides and that contribute to peace, prosperity and stability in the world."

Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, with the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula top on his agenda.

His three-stop Asia trip earlier took him to Laos and Cambodia.
I've been following Leigh Jenco's work in comparative philosophy for some time now and was most happy to see her new book come out late last year: Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West. It speaks, at least on a theoretical level, to an issue I am currently working on: how systems of thought can meaningfully move from one cultural context to another. I'm focusing now on the conditions under which "Confucianism" might gain more traction in contemporary America. Jenco's explication of Chinese debates from about 1860-1920 on how "Western Learning" might be imported into China and made meaningful there offers several key points that relate to my project.

Herewith some very rough initial notes and thoughts on this theoretically rich and thoughtful volume.

1) Meaningful cultural (or we might say philosophical) importation is possible. This might seem a self-evident statement but, as Jenco relates, it is contested. Some theorists (e.g. Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre) have argued that knowledge is "particularlistic," embedded in specific social and historical contexts, and that embeddedness produces a kind of incommensurability between distinct knowledge communities. The Chinese experience, however, suggests this assertion is empirically false. Chinese thinkers not only learned "Western knowledge" but they came to understand and debate the theoretical preconditions that enabled such learning. "Western Learning" ultimately came to be indigenized, transforming "Chinese" culture and experience. A key problem with particularistic thinking is that it embraces a static and singular notion of "culture." To the contrary, Jenco holds that "culture" is dynamic and plural, in both time and space. Thus, where particularists assume that "the association of particular individuals with particular [cultural] traditions is therefore both automatic and authentic...." (46), Jenco views culture as an acquired achievement, the product of self-conscious learning:



If cultural practices or characteristics are cultivated rather than given, then certain cultural practices or institutions can be adopted in other times and places, though often not immediately and not by one individual, or within the time horizon of a single generation. (65)

It should be noted that Jenco's argument is not a type of universalism. Rather, building on the "culturalist" interpretation of Chinese practice and identity, she recognizes the social and historical conditioning of knowledge but does not see this as an insurmountable barrier to cultural movement and intermixing and change. By these lights, under certain conditions, it is possible for a system of thought like "Confucianism" to have meaning in a cultural context, like that of contemporary America, radically different from its Chinese origins.

2) Jenco holds that not only can systems of thought move and be meaningful between cultural contexts, but she also believes that they can be transformative in their new context. This is obviously the case in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Jenco's argument is pitched at a sufficiently high level of generalization that it can apply to American now as well. This is not simply a matter of "us" (if by "us" we mean an immutable and singular cultural identity) becoming like "them," but, rather, a continuous process of cultural change and reinterpretation, which happens within a particular place across time as much as it does between different places. These lines spring out to me:

Just as (what we take to be) our own past heritage of thought fundamentally constitutes, rather than merely influences, our present production of knowledge, so too will situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our past be able to reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry.... This internalization of foreign thought effectively explodes the foreign/indigenous dichotomies that were its original motivation. (88)

How we might situate foreign thought into our past is an interesting question. The answer has to do with how we understand how the past relates to the present. If we, as Jenco, understand the past as interpretable in light of the social and political dynamics of the present, then we can imagine various discursive possibilities for including "foreign" pasts into our own. This could be as simple as revealing parallel lines of inquiry in ancient Chinese and Greek texts, as has become more common in academic philosophy in the past decade or so.



3) Cultural transformation born of the transposition of "foreign" systems of thought cannot be reduced to "use" versus "essence." This is the famous ti/yong - /  - debate that took various forms over the course of several decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in China. The conservative version of this formulation, that some sort of "Chinese" essence (which implies a kind of historical cultural continuity) can be preserved by only importing "useful" Western knowledge, is obviously untenable. More interesting is Jenco's explication (published previously) of Tan Sitong's revision of the terms of this debate to dao/qi -  / . Qi is something more than yong. It might be translated as "vessel," and suggests something specific and concrete. But it also here implies not just a kind of de-contextualized technology but recognizes that "the actual material objects supplied by the Westerners" are inseparably fused with "the faculties or capacities - intellectual, social, institutional, economic - that produce these objects." (130-131). When an idea - let's say for building a train - comes into a new cultural context, it brings with it a whole host of social and economic and political and cultural preconditions and implications. Dao, therefore, is something both more general and more specific than ti. We might say there is an "ancient Chinese Dao," but also that there is a "Dao of railroads." But, ultimately, dao is unstable and changing as a result of the proliferation of many, many specific qis. Jenco notes that Tan: "...follows Wang [Fuzhi] by departing from typical neo-Confucian readings that held dao to be the foundation of qi... Wang reversed the relationship, holding that it was in fact "vessels" that held the "Way," or in other words, the particular and concrete that predicated the general and abstract." (128-129). She quotes Tan:



"Once qi has changed, can dao alone remain unchanged? Change is precisely doing qi, and qi cannot leave dao. People cannot abandon qi; how then can they abandon dao?" (129)

There is much that could be said here, many questions raised. For now, suffice it to note that this way of thinking recognizes that "culture" - one implication of dao - changes from the bottom up, from variations in particular, practical activities. This is not simply a spatial dynamic, the importation of new ways of doing things from other places, but also temporal. For instance, a "Confucian Dao," is determined by the practice of a variety of particular qi. As particular practices change over time in China, the "Confucian Dao" changed as well. Whatever historical continuity might be possible is not ideational but practical.

Another point here is: if lived experience - an agglomeration of many actually existing qi - changes dramatically from the past, let's say through a multifarious process of "modernization," then the basis of something like a "Confucian Dao" could be destroyed. For "Confucianism" to persist in modernity, it is not enough for isolated intellectuals to think like Confucians, but, rather, there must be collectivities enacting qi that under-gird a "Confucian Dao."

4) The production of meaning, drawing from both indigenous and foreign sources, is a collective enterprise. Jenco emphasizes this throughout the book. This was very much the understanding and experience of Chinese intellectuals, and their collective effort was no less than to change "China." That happened. We cannot reduce that momentous historical transformation to only the work of intellectuals but the fact of that extensive change demonstrates Jenco's point here. The "foreign" can be made the "indigenous" through self-conscious social enactment. This is not simply a matter of the hybridized experience of individuals, but can only come about through social interaction within and between groups: qun - . For there to be a Confucianism in America it must be based upon a social infrastructure.



In her last chapter she turns toward our own time. Since such change was possible in China, why not in Europe and America? That is, to some extent, happening, but Jenco's work gives us various conceptual resources to theorize how, for instance, Confucianism might take hold in America.

These comments do not do justice to this excellent volume. I will likely have more to say about later. In the meantime, I highly recommend the book.




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Violent monk threatening the judiciary

Buddhist monks are supposed to be peaceful, compassionate and tranquil persons.But a section of Sri Lankan Buddhist monks are completely different.One such section is led by a robed man called Galagod Aththe Gnanasara.He leads an organization called Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) which means to be a force of Buddhist people. Although this organization is not officially armed, it is extremely violent and uses mobs to instigate violence against their targets.They often target Muslims and evidently triggered anti-Muslim violence in Aluthgama and Dharga Town in June 2014 which resulted in loss ofAt least four people were killed, 80 injured, houses, shops, factories, mosques and a nursery was burnt and 10,000 people (8,000 Muslims and 2,000 Sinhalese) were displaced by the riots.Then government led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa did not conduct the probe properly and no action was initiated against the perpetrators.In the most recent incident, Glalgoda Aththe Gnanasara forcibly entered Homagama court and verbally abused the judge, the lawyers and a witness of the prosecution of an abduction case. He disrupted court proceedings and left scot-free challenging the entire judiciary system and law enforcement authorities.The case was against a group of military personnel who are accused of abducting and assassinating a journalist called Prageeth Ekneligoda who remains disappeared since January 26th of 2010.Rajapaksa regime prevented the probes on the disappearance properly done but the enhanced investigations made a breakthrough after the new government elected in January 2015. The group of military personnel were arrested accordingly.Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara wants the military officers released and case dropped. He says the abducted journalist is a Tamil Tiger rebel although he is a Sinhalese and no evidence has been found to link him to the presently defunct Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam.The violent monk threatened Prageeth's wife Sandhya Ekneligoda in the court who struggled fearlessly to seek justice to her husband.The judge did not issue arrest orders at that moment but lately ordered the monk arrested. Gnanasara came to the court with a violent group of monks and surrendered to court. The monks behaved extremely violently threatening to people, disrupting court proceedings and damaging property.They did not let the prison authorities to take away the remanded criminal suspect Gnansara.The Buddhist monks who rampaged the court are yet to be arrested.Share this article
About Me Wambi Michael Kampala, Uganda IWambi Michael is an award-winning Ugandan journalist; His colleagues at home jokingly refer to him as a globetrotting journalist, which is kind of a rare thing these days. He has worked in both Radio and Print with focus on development, Climate Change, Gender and Environment. He worked has been award at National and International levels. He has written for publications as varied as the Inter Press Service, The East African Newspaper, Mail and Guardian. He was previously associated with PANOS London, as features producer on environment, Climate Change. I attribute my success to his time at International Institute of Journalism IIJB where I started my professional journey. View my complete profile
What do we do to keep the lights on?, asks Andrews Daniel Andrews at a press conference on Thursday asked "what do we do to keep the lights on?" once coal fired power stations close before insisting his government had a plan to address the question.

Were on our own: Flood levee divides Victorian town Residents on the wrong side of Echuca's "great wall" have voiced their frustrations about being left "on our own" as the Victorian town braces for rising flood levels.

Palaszczuk responds to review into Australias COVID-19 response Speaking at the Housing Summit in Brisbane on Thursday, Ms Palaszczuk was asked to weigh in on the independent review into Australias COVID-19 response.

Went too far: Dutton takes aim at Andrews in response to damning COVID-19 report The Opposition Leader has defended the former government's actions in Australia's coronavirus pandemic response while taking aim at Victoria for its lockdowns, which led to Melbourne being the longest locked down city in the world.
Cleveland fires 6 cops after barrage

CLEVELAND (AP)  Cleveland officials said Tuesday theyre firing six police officers involved in a 137-shot barrage that killed two unarmed people after a high-speed chase.

That includes Michael Brelo, a patrolman acquitted of manslaughter charges in May for having fired the last 15 shots of the barrage in East Cleveland on Nov. 29, 2012. The chase began when officers standing outside police headquarters mistook the sound of a beat-up Chevrolet Malibu backfiring as a gunshot.

Six more officers who fired during the barrage face suspensions ranging from 21 to 30 days. A total of 13 officers faced administrative discipline, and one has retired.

Pope meets with Iranian president

VATICAN CITY (AP)  Pope Francis held talks with Irans president at the Vatican on Tuesday, calling on Tehran to play a key role in stopping the spread of terrorism as Iran tries to improve its image in the global arena following an agreement on its nuclear program.

The pontiff warmly clasped the hand of President Hassan Rouhani in the first official call paid on a pontiff by an Iranian president since 1999. They held 40 minutes of private talks before Rouhani met with other top Vatican officials,

New Potter story to be published

LONDON (WP)  Do your kids miss Peter Rabbit? Or would they like to know he grew up into a chubby, big black cat who leads a double life?

No problem. A lost story by famed British childrens author Beatrix Potter  the Tale of Kitty-in-Boots  has been discovered among her memorabilia and will be published this year more than a century after she wrote it.

Jo Hanks, a publisher with Penguin Random House who made the discovery at Londons Victoria & Albert museum in 2013, called the story the biggest Potter discovery in generations and almost certainly the last, the London Times reported Tuesday.

Fearing shootings, man commits one

SEATTLE (WP)  Dane Gallion was so worried about public shootings that police say he committed one.

On Thursday, Gallion popped a Xanax, ate a pizza and downed a 22-ounce beer. Then the 29-year-old headed to a showing of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi in the Seattle suburb of Renton, Wash.

But not without his handgun.

Gallion sneaked his piece into the theater. He told police he was concerned about recent mass shootings in public places.

Fifteen minutes into the film, Gallions gun somehow went off, striking the woman sitting in front of him. He fled. But when his retired Air Force colonel father learned of the shooting 90 minutes later and called 911, Gallion turned himself in.

2 presumed dead after bridge jump

LOS ANGELES (TNS)  Two BASE jumpers are presumed to have drowned after leaping off the iconic Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, Calif., last week, sheriffs officials said Tuesday.

The bodies of Mary Katherine Connell of Ventura, Calif., and an unidentified man from Finland remain missing, according to the Monterey County Sheriffs Office.

The pair are believed to have been overpowered by tumultuous surf shortly after landing on a small beach below the Pacific Coast Highway last Wednesday.

Authorities recovered a parachute and helmet camera on the beach, and then watched the recording.
CEDAR FALLS  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told Cedar Valley supporters Tuesday night she wants to help Americans whove been knocked down to get up again.

Six days before Iowas first-in-the-nation caucuses, Clinton made clear shes ready to get to work doing just that.

I want you to know that Im not just shouting slogans. Im not just engaging in rhetoric. Ive thought this through. I have a plan, Clinton told a crowd of more than 500 people at Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center. I dont think you can get what we need done in this election, or in the presidency, unless you level with people.

The former secretary of state said shes leveled with the American people, offering detailed plans on her website, explaining the costs and making clear she will not raise taxes.

If people have better ideas about how to actually create more good jobs and raise incomes, Im open to hearing them, but based on the evidence and what Ive seen work in the last 35 years, I think I have a plan that together we can get to work to implement, Clinton said.

Throughout a nearly 40-minute speech, Clinton touched on a multitude of topics, jumping from Wall Street reform to health care issues to dealing with the threat of the Islamic State. She drew a contrast with both Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders and potential Republican rivals.

She argued Sanders rallying cry to tear down the big banks is possible through the already-enacted Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act, adding her plans go further in tackling the shadow banking sector.

Its important to look at what the potential next problem is. Dont just fight the last war. Weve got the authority to do something about that, Clinton said.

She said Republicans want to repeal the federal health care reform law without replacing it, and Sanders would make the country start over to gain universal coverage rather than working from the current 90 percent covered.

On the threat of the Islamic State, she noted Republicans are criticizing the Obama-Clinton foreign policy. Clinton said in response she sent them her book Hard Choices to explain what she did during her tenure as secretary of state under Democratic President Barack Obama.

Clinton also charged wealthy Republican donors are spending money on advertising to help Sanders win the nomination.

They know I say what I mean. I mean what I say, and I will go after them. I will not permit the right-wing billionaires to do what they want to do to our country ever again, and they are doing everything they can to make sure they dont have to run against me, Clinton said. I find it perversely flattering.

Several audience members raised their hands to say they will support Clinton at the caucuses Monday night.

Tyrone Scott of Waterloo said he supports Clinton because hes a public sector union member and shes really, really with the unions and because health care is important to him. Though not a regular caucusgoer, Scott said he is going this year.

Weve got to get her in there, Scott said.

Judy Stiers and Judy Benson, both of Cedar Falls, said theyre caucusing for Clinton as well.

At age 70, revolution has passed me by, Benson said. I think more important than electability, I think she can govern, and Bernie cannot.

Morgan Meseke, a graduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, said she was won over by Clinton after she kept her composure during an 11-hour hearing on her role in the Benghazi affair.

When Bernie speaks  he sounds so angry every time he speaks, Meseke said. Shes more likeable.
HOPKINTON | Managers of an ethanol company have been indicted for allegedly failing to pay employment withholdings to the federal government.

A grand jury handed up the indictment against Randy Less and Darrell Smith on Jan. 21 in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids. The case was unsealed Tuesday as IRS agents arrested Smith.

Less is charged with 11 counts of failure to account for any pay over employment taxes, and Smith is charged with six counts.

Court records state Less was the majority owner and general manager of Permeate Refining Inc. of Hopkinton, which produced ethanol. Smith operated Algae Energae, which bought 49 percent interest in Permeate in 2009.

According to court records, Permeate collected withholding for income tax, Social Security and Medicare taxes from employee paychecks. But the company allegedly failed to fully pass along the funds to the IRS. The company failed to account for and pay over about $423,975 between 2009 and 2012, court records allege.
CEDAR FALLS  Volunteering to take a test on the U.S. Constitution may not be many students idea of fun.

But Peet Junior High School freshman Jenis Jusufovic jumped at the chance. His social studies teacher announced to the class in October they could take a 50-question multiple choice test on the topic and write an essay.

He estimates spending about 15 hours over several weekends in November completing the assignments, mostly on writing the essay.

The extra work did have a silver lining. Participants in the Know Your Constitution project could win an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for a five-day education seminar sponsored by the Close-Up Foundation. The competition is offered annually to students in grades nine to 12 through the Iowa State Bar Associations young lawyers division.

I thought it would be exciting to just take it and have the opportunity to go to D.C., said Jusufovic, who has never visited the nations capital. It was pretty fun, he added, of completing the test and essay.

More fun is in store for him. Jusufovic was one of five students from across the state chosen to go on the trip Feb. 14 to 19. Sarah Carlson, his teacher, will accompany him to Washington, where she will attend a separate Close-Up program for educators.

Students had until Dec. 1 to turn in the test and could use sources to look up the answers, but Jusufovic chose not to. He did make use of the Student Nondiscrimination Act of 2015 to write the essay. It asked students to analyze constitutional arguments that could be used by two plaintiffs in a hypothetical university admissions lawsuit.

Having the opportunity to win one of the trips first meant being chosen as one of 100 finalists out of more than 1,000 students to enter. Finalists were chosen based on who had the best quiz score and essay in each of Iowas 100 House of Representatives districts.

Originally, I didnt think Id get into the top 100 when I submitted it, he said. And, when Jusufovic was, it seemed unlikely that he would be one of the few chosen for the trip in a random drawing.

He had some competition from six other Cedar Falls Community Schools students, who also attended a Jan. 8 luncheon honoring finalists at the West Des Moines Marriott Hotel. They included Astoria Chao, Jamie Knox and Amber Weber from Holmes Junior High School and Michael Flanscha, Linda Peng and Nathan Tesfa from Cedar Falls High School. Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins was the keynote speaker. Flanscha and Chao were recognized for their outstanding essays.

Jusufovic didnt know hed be going on the trip until the very end of the drawing.

I happened to be the fifth name, he said. I was surprised, but I could also tell it was me. I could see (the announcer) mumbling, trying to pronounce my name so he didnt mess it up too bad.

It wasnt hard for Jusufovic to envision reasons for building his knowledge of the constitution.

After high school, Id like to major in law, he said, hopefully at Harvard University. But Jusufovic doesnt see that as the end of his career trajectory.

My all-around goal is to run for president, he said. Its something hes been interested in since about second grade.

At this point, he hasnt mapped out a pathway from earning a law degree to a presidential run. But the time in Washington will put him at the heart of the nations political system.

Carlson noted students from the state will get to meet with Iowa delegates  discuss policy with them, lobbyists. They spend a whole day on Capitol Hill, she said. They will visit the U.S. Senate, House and various congressional committees.

Jusufovic is excited to participate in the five-day event. Carlson appreciates he was enthusiastic about the process even before being chosen for the trip.

I just think its really neat that students are willing to take an opportunity like the Know Your Constitution test, said Carlson, noting the extra time it takes outside of school. That just excites me.
DES MOINES  Majority Senate Democrats will push for a 4 percent increase in state aid to K-12 schools next year and in fiscal 2018.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said Tuesday his 26-member caucus will reject a 2 percent raise in school spending the GOP-led House approved on Monday  likely sending to issue to a House-Senate conference committee.

Also Tuesday, Senate Democrats released fiscal 2017 budget targets that were $4 million below Gov. Terry Branstads $7.412 billion spending plan but allocated resources differently in education and human services. The Senate plan would be lowered to $7.398 billion if the governor and legislative Republicans go along with a proposal to offer state employees early retirement incentives that would save $10.62 million.

Our target comes in under the governor, said Sen. Bob Dvorsky, D-Coralville, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, but I think were still able to meet a number of the priorities that we have in our caucus, and we want to get this going and start moving the state forward.

The Senate spending targets call for spending 98.9 percent of the available state revenues, $4.7 million below the statutory 99 percent spending limit. Specific allocations will be decided by the various subcommittees, Dvorsky said.

Top Democrats said their budget paves the way for another tuition freeze at state universities in fiscal 2017, and would increase funding for Medicaid while scrapping the privatization plan being pushed by the governor.

Weve been very skeptical that there were ever savings there, Gronstal said of the governors Medicaid modernization concept. Its kind of the incredible shrinking savings in that it keeps getting lower and lower, he said.

Gronstal said the Senates spending targets assume a 4 percent increase in state aid to K-12 schools heading into negotiations to meet the laws 30-day deadline for setting school spendings. Senate Democrats also propose boosting state aid by 4 percent for the 2017-18 school year.

One day earlier, the House voted 55-43 to halve the Senate-passed 4 percent school aid increase. House Republicans say a 2 percent boost is more in line with state revenue and still gives education the largest chunk of the $153 million in new money they have calculated to be available to spend in fiscal 2017.

The Senate has the opportunity to provide certainty to our local schools by sending this bill to the governor for his signature, House Speaker Linda Upmeyer, R-Clear Lake, said after Mondays House vote. Schools need to begin setting their budgets for next school year and are relying on the Legislature to set an amount that they can depend on.

Gronstal said House Republicans skimp on education spending while at the same time advocating significant tax cuts.

The House says we cant afford it, but the House does say we can afford nearly $200 million in various tax cuts. Thats just the ones I know about so far, Gronstal said.
DES MOINES  State lawmakers launched a new effort Wednesday to legalize consumer fireworks in Iowa.

The revised bill that cleared a Senate subcommittee would allow the possession, sale, transfer, purchase and use of fireworks with a provision that would allow cities and counties to issue bans within their jurisdictions.

Its my belief that the current law is silly on its face, said Sen. Jeff Danielson, D-Waterloo, chairman of the Senate State Government Committee. He noted that Iowans currently bring in fireworks from bordering states but cant legally shoot them off.

He said Iowa has taken a head-in-the sand approach to the issue for too many years in advocating adding more than a dozen consumer fireworks to the list of legal products, which currently includes only sparklers and other small novelties.

Lets put it out in the open and make it legal and let it go. I think it should be legal, said Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids. I think as we move forward, we need things like this. It makes Iowa level with other states that have tried this and done it.

However, representatives of firefighters, emergency medical response technicians, health-care providers and other groups spoke against the measure, saying it would lead to more injuries or deaths  especially among young people  fires, property damage and disruptions and noise issues near nursing homes, daycares and schools.

Our concerns are public safety with additional fires and additional injuries across the state, said John Pederson, a lobbyist representing the Iowa Firefighters Association. We will expect to have more calls.

Other opponents said they would prefer that local jurisdictions would have to opt-in by adopting legalized fireworks ordinances rather than having to vote in prohibitions.

However, proponents noted the bill includes limitations for exploding fireworks only between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., with longer hours for certain holidays like Memorial Day, Labor Day, the Fourth of July and New Years Eve. They argued that legalized fireworks would generate a minimum of $18 million in annual sales that currently are being transacted in other states and would benefit Iowa retailers.

We can balance economic freedom with public safety, said Danielson, who is a career firefighter with the city of Cedar Falls.

Sen. Jake Chapman, R-Adel, who is a licensed EMT, said the issue of legalizing fireworks has been around for a number of years and its time to modernize Iowas law and give Iowans more freedom to engage in an activity they already are doing under lax enforcement.

I didnt know fireworks were illegal until I came to the Legislature, said Sen. Rick Bertrand, R-Sioux City. Its fairly common in western Iowa.

A fireworks legalization bill passed the Iowa House last session, but stalled in the Iowa Senate.
CEDAR FALLS  Cedar Falls police used high-tech surveillance to battle a rash of bike thefts that spiked in the fall.

Two people have been arrested in connection with the investigation over the weekend. Levi Colin Dull, 36, and Melissa Marie Greenway, 33, both of 224 Park View Blvd., Waterloo, were arrested Sunday on warrants for misdemeanor theft. They have since been released from jail.

Cedar Falls police said they cut a lock to steal a bike valued at more than $200 from a bike rack at the Hillcrest Park Apartments at 9614 University Ave. at 6 a.m. Dec. 26.

Unknown to the alleged thieves, the bicycle was part of a police sting operation and was equipped with GPS device and monitored by hidden cameras. Later that day, police recovered the bike from Dulls truck, which was parked in the Wal-Mart lot, police said. Dulls vehicle also was seized.

Dull is a suspect in other bike theft cases, Cedar Falls police said.

One dead in Tama crash

TAMA  A Malcom man is dead following a single-vehicle accident Monday night south of Tama.

David Ashburn, 52, was traveling on snow- and ice-covered roads in the 1800 block of 390th Street near U.S. Highway 63 about 7:55 p.m. His pickup left the roadway and struck a cement culvert, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Ashburn was pinned inside the truck, and crews with Tama Ambulance and the Tama Fire Department removed him for transport to Grinnell Hospital. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

One dead in Clermont crash

CLERMONT  Fayette County sheriffs deputies continue to investigate a Sunday evening accident that claimed the life of a Clermont man.

Deputies said it appears alcohol may have been a factor in the crash.

Authorities were called to Resale Therapy at about 5:38 p.m. Sunday after a 2002 Buick Century crashed into the business. Deputies said the driver, 38-year-old James Allen Tackett, apparently lost control while driving.

A 5-year-old girl was in the cars back seat, and crews with Clermont Fire Rescue took the girl to Palmer Hospital in West Union. Tackett was pronounced dead at the scene.

During the investigation, deputies determined Tackett was a convicted sex offender who had failed to register with authorities. Deputies allege the childs mother, who was Tacketts girlfriend, knew about his status and allowed him to have control of the child.

The mother, Hilary Marie Upton, 27, of Clermont, was charged with misdemeanor child endangerment Monday.

The sheriffs office also notified the Iowa Department of Human Services about the case.

Fuel company official indicted

HOPKINTON  Managers of an ethanol company have been indicted for allegedly failing to pay employment withholdings to the federal government.

A grand jury handed up the indictment against Randy Less and Darrell Smith on Jan. 21 in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids. The case was unsealed Tuesday as IRS agents arrested Smith.

Less is charged with 11 counts of failure to account for any pay over employment taxes, and Smith is charged with six counts.

Court records state Less was the majority owner and general manager of Permeate Refining Inc. of Hopkinton, which produced ethanol. Smith operated Algae Energae, which bought 49 percent interest in Permeate in 2009.

According to court records, Permeate collected withholding for income tax, Social Security and Medicare taxes from employee paychecks. But the company allegedly failed to fully pass along the funds to the IRS. The company failed to account for and pay over about $423,975 between 2009 and 2012, court records allege.
Waterloo bond vote

GEOF AND VICKI GRIMES

WATERLOO  A few weeks ago, we watched a 60 Minutes segment with the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, explaining why most of its products are made in China. Cook responded the Chinese educational system places a huge emphasis on teaching vocational skills, and U.S. education has gotten away from it.

The Waterloo Schools is asking our citizens to help reverse that trend, investing in vocational skills for many of its students. Vocational programs will provide high level skills for students which, in our estimation, will have a positive impact on Waterloos workforce. With the ability of students to build on those skills with advanced training opportunities at Hawkeye Community College, our workforce can become one of the best in the nation. If more companies are attracted to Waterloo due to an available, highly-skilled workforce, it will benefit everyone in this city with higher paying jobs, increased tax base and lower taxes.

This bond referendum is an investment in our future, carefully structured with an income surtax so people are paying based on their income levels. We commend the thoughtful and forward-thinking investigation that led to this proposal, and we strongly urge the people of Waterloo to vote yes.

Go Republican

MARCELLA GRUVER WATERLOO  You and I have a very important duty to perform  the selecting of the next U.S. president. The two most important criteria in choosing this person is will he or she protect the U.S. Constitution and protect our country by destroying ISIS.

Hillary Clinton supports the U.S.-Iranian Nuclear Treaty. To make a treaty with Iran and not demand the release of four American hostages is evil. Along with Benghazi, these two events should have never happened. Hillary, whose side are you on? Bernie Sanders calls himself a Democratic Socialist  Democratic means the voice of the people. Socialist means the voice of government with a dictator. Freedom and socialism cannot exist together  they are impossible  Sen. Jim DeMint.

Or you can vote Republican with their Restore America platform wherein they will preserve both the U.S. Constitution and our country by killing ISIS. Without a Republican-restored America, you will have absolutely nothing  no Social Security, no health care and no U.S. Constitution. On Feb. 1, vote Republican to preserve the future of our country.

Study candidates

VIRGINIA PERIGO

WATERLOO  Its caucus time. Look very hard at their qualifications and choose your candidate wisely.

Jack Higgins, an author, wrote, As Lenin once said, the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. Its the only way a small country can hope to take on a great nation. He could have been writing about Iran and the United States. We must make the right choice for president to maintain our great nation as a strong world leader.

It starts with your vote.
10. Massive Chalice

In their short-lived console history, Microsoft have already managed to etch out a chunk of some future history book under "Worst Industry Mistake Ever", thanks to the monumental gaff that was the original Xbox One's reveal. I'll not go on about it (you can read more over here ), except to say it put them on the back foot so suddenly and meaningfully, Sony were able to come in and immediately wipe the floor with sales figures across the board. The PS4 has now sold upwards of 38 million units as of the close of 2015, and with Microsoft community legend Phil Spencer being realistic and stating they simply may never catch up, you could be mistaken for thinking the Xbox One was out of the running for good. But oh, how wrong you'd be. Powered entirely by the memories of how they were once at the top of the pile when the 360 was dominating the last generation, 2015 saw the Xbox actually release a far better first-party lineup than Sony. Some of the best games of the year were Xbox One exclusives, and outside of the third-party domination that made up the charts overall, going into 2016 it's clear Microsoft are not only playing to win, but in terms of first-party titles you can pick up right now, they've got Sony beat hands-down.One of the things you'll immediately notice about Microsoft's lineup is the sheer variety on display. They've certainly got shooters and action-heavy titles sewn up as always, but then there are awesome little gems like Massive Chalice; Double Fine's first foray into top-down isometric strategy. If you've played anything like XCOM, Fire Emblem or Invisible Inc. you'll know the order of the day is moving your troops around the battlefield, trading alternating blows with - in this case - the evil Cadence. However, the hook here is that the conflict takes place across 300 years, meaning your best warriors will inevitably perish. This forces you to think farther ahead than any other game in the genre as you nurture bloodlines, retire warriors to foster kin and pass on their best attributes, the war against the Cadence paling in comparison to the fight against time itself. Massive Chalice dares to shake up the foundations of the genre by taking away your most formidable fighters no matter what, and despite some slight graphical shortcomings, is one hell of a time-sink once you get drawn in.
WikipediaRock 'n' roll is a funny game. Those of us not fortunate enough to be paid bucket-loads of cash to travel around the world and play songs to adoring fans are left to simply try and appreciate said rock 'n' rollers, but it's not always that easy. If a band is just comprised of just a few of your average 'blokes' (The Enemy, Ocean Colour Scene, Kings of Leon), then they tend to be frightfully boring and rather square, and who wants to go and watch a bunch of squares? But on the flip-side, if the band is full of hell-raising, anti-establishment prima donnas (remember Towers of London?), most people will think of them as idiots anyway. It's a fine line between humdrum and douchebagery, and unfortunately some have a hard job recognising that, resulting in some pretty childish and petulant behaviour at times. Remember when Liam Gallagher skipped Oasis' MTV Unplugged gig in 1996, only to sit up in the rafters whilst heckling his own bandmates? Or when Billie Joe Armstrong complained about his own show running over its allotted time in 2012? Whether it's turning up late, foul-mouthed rants, preaching religion, drug-addled unreliability, egotistical arrogance, or just the sheer act of being rubbish, there are some pretty poor frontmen out there, and they unfortunately tend to ruin it for the rest of their bandmates (the guys who nobody remembers as it is). Here are ten of the finest idiots in rock today.
21. Yeah, You Tell Those Idiats!

Being able to fluently communicate with other people is one of the big things that distinguishes ourselves as human. Because of this, having good grammar is of the utmost importance. As said by French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, "the greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar." It's probably a bit of an over exaggeration, but there can be dire consequences when it comes to easily avoidable miscommunication. For example, the Vasa warship of 1628 sank only a half-mile into her maiden voyage. For years, people puzzled over how it could have happened, until archaeologists discovered that one side was thicker than other. One group of builders had been using Swedish feet, while the others had been using Amsterdam feet, to disastrous consequences. The entries on this list didn't lead to anything quite as dire as sinking a warship, but they were probably the cause of some very red faces. From mislabelled food products, to educational institutions that struggle with their signs, here are twenty-one spelling mistakes that happened at the absolute worst time possible.
"He writes with sensitivity, passion, intelligence and with an eye to the common good."

"[He is] clearly one of those silly people who believes in 'civilization,' probably along with the Tooth Fairy and justice."

"He lives in a magical fantasy world."

"Powerfully spoken."

"A balanced and sensible view concerning the crazy ideas that often prevail regarding war and freedom."

"You do good work."



"Our political differences are vast and irreconcilable but he earnestly believes what he wants is best for the country; hes firmly committed to it, makes no apologies for it and wont settle for less."

"God bless you!"



"SHUT THE FUCK UP."
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Youve got a decent hand. Youre sure of it, but you dont want to bet everything on it because you know the game and know that youll lose. What do you do? That depends in part upon how strong your hand is (or isnt). For example, if you have an ace low flush, you might be tempted to fold, knowing you probably wont make money betting with it. On the other hand, if you hold a pocket pair, you may have enough confidence in the strength of your hand to bet all-in, hoping for a full house or better. In order to get the most from your hand, you need to understand what the odds are against each possible outcome. Heres how you can figure out whether or not you should push your luck with a particular hand.

The decision of the player to do the okbet login will provide him good return in the future. This is the platform that is considered as the reliable option. It provides the players with the high stake of the winning. Even a representative is there who will work to serve the people.

The Value of A Pair

Lets assume weve just dealt two cards and one player has three suited cards and another has four. If the first player bets, then hes going to win about half the time (assuming everyone else folds), so his expected return is 50 percent. The second player has a much tougher time. Hell have a good chance of winning only when he gets three of a kind, which happens 1/4th of the time. So he has a 25 percent chance of winning. When he makes the call, the third player has a 55 percent chance of winning. His expected return is 45 percent. Of course, if the first player loses, then the chances of the third player winning go way up  about 80 percent. All of these percentages are based on the assumption that all players will fold.

The value of the hand is calculated by taking the probability of winning times the amount you would win if you did win. This gives us a number between zero and 100. Well use $5 as our basic unit for calculating the value of the hands. If you had 10 chips and could choose any five, what would you pick? Well, wed obviously take the top hand, which is worth $50. The second best hand is a little bit worse  $45  since youre giving up some equity for the opportunity to win more. So now lets calculate the value of the remaining hands.

If the second player chooses a third card, his expected gain is $25, which represents the difference between the two hands. A fourth card increases the expectation to $30, while adding a fifth card drops it back down to $20. Since there are no sixth cards, the value of the hand is equal to the average of the five cards, which is $24.60.

The value of a suit

We can also figure out the value of a suit by looking at the value of each individual card within that suit. Lets say were dealing a standard deck of 52 cards. One person holds a KQ; the next person has a 7D; and the third has a 2S. Each person has a 20% chance of winning. What is the expected return of having this group of cards? Well, the KQ has a 5% chance of winning, the 7D has a 4% chance, and the 2S has a 3% chance. So the total expected return is 25%. The same logic applies to the other suits, where the probability of winning goes up as the value of the card decreases. For instance, the Aces have a 9% chance of winning, Kings have 8%, Queens have 7%, Jacks have 6%, and Tens have 5%. So the expected returns add up to 36%.

Now lets add all of these numbers together to get an estimate of the value of a hand. Assuming that each hand was equally likely to come up, our total would be 60 percent. But we know thats wrong! Not every hand is created equal. It turns out that a royal flush beats the rest of the pack pretty consistently. So were going to adjust our calculations to reflect this fact.

Royal Flushes

So far, weve assumed that all of the cards were equally likely to come up. Actually, most poker players believe that Royal Flushes are extremely unlikely. In fact, many experts estimate their frequency at less than 0.1 percent. To account for this, lets increase the probability of winning for each card in a Royal Flush by 10 percent. Now when we calculate the value of a Royal Flush, well find that its actually worth 62.5 percent of what it used to be. The value of the cards in each rank will still add up to 100, but theyre now weighted differently.

So what does this mean for you? Well, if you hold a Royal Flush, youre probably going to win about 75 percent of the time. And if you hold a hand like QJT, youll win about 75 percent of the time too. And if you hold a straight, youll win nearly 70 percent of the time. In short, the bigger your hand, the more likely you are to win. Of course, even though youre getting a higher hit rate, youll also tend to lose more often. So if you hold a straight, youre almost guaranteed to lose. But if you hold a Royal Flush, youre going to win about one-quarter of the time, and youll win about twice as much money. So youre almost certain to profit from such a hand, but youll also take a lot of losses.

Now, I mentioned that youll lose money on any hand. In fact, youll lose money roughly half the time. So if you hold a straight, youll lose about 25 percent of the time. If you hold a flush, youll lose about 40 percent of the time. And if you hold a pair, youll lose 35 percent of the time. In addition, if you hold a set  one of the two highest ranks  youll lose 35 percent of the time. Finally, if you hold a high card in the lowest rank, youll lose 30 percent of the time.

But the interesting thing is that youll lose less money on those losing hands than you do on winning hands. Why is that? Well, suppose you hold a straight. Theres a 65 percent chance youll win. But suppose you hold a pair instead. Theres a 65 percent chance youll win. But you lost on your last hand. So theres now a 75 percent chance that youll lose again. On the other hand, if you hold a straight and lose, theres still a 65 percent chance youll win again. So youre only losing about 15 percent of the time.

This means that you can minimize your losses by playing only hands that are reasonably likely to win. So if you hold a straight, youll probably lose around 25 percent of the time. But if you hold a flush, youll probably lose around 40 percent of the time. And if you hold a pair, youll probably lose around 35 percent of the time. And if you hold a set, youll probably lose around 35 percent of the time. But if you hold a high card in the lowest rank, youll probably lose around 30 percent of the time.

In summary, the higher the probability that youll win, the lower your loss percentage will be. And the lower the probability youll win, the higher your loss percentage will be. So the optimal strategy is to play only hands whose probability of winning exceeds your expected return. If you hold a straight, theres a 65 percent chance of winning, so youll lose around 25 percent of the time. If you hold a flush, theres a 65 percent chance of winning, so youll lose around 40 percent of the time. And if you hold a pair, theres a 65 percent chance of winning, so youll lose around 35 percent of the time. But if you hold a set, theres a 65 percent chance of winning, so youll lose around 35 percent of the time. And if you hold a high card in the lowest rank, theres a 65 percent chance of winning, so youll lose around 30 percent of the time.

Of course, you shouldnt ignore your opponents actions entirely. You should always give them credit for being smart, making decisions, and doing whatever it takes to beat you. But just remember that youre being punished for having a decent hand.
Sustainability consulting firms Quantis and BSD Consulting announce the release of the report Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Switzerland. The report is based on a study mandated by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) to research the status of Swiss companies indirect Greenhouse Gas Emission (GHG) measurement and reporting activities. The research was launched to gain a clear understanding of whether or not Swiss companies were reporting GHG emissions and if so, how they were reporting this environmental impact indicator. The report also delivered concrete recommendations to the FOEN so the agency can better support Swiss companies measurement and reporting initiatives.





Pioneers from Publicly Traded Companies



The number of companies measuring indirect GHG emissions from their value chain activities has increased in recent years. This evolution has been witnessed both globally and in Switzerland. Previously, most companies reported solely on the GHG emissions originating from within their premises (often referred to as Scope 1) and from their electricity and district heat consumption (Scope 2). The move to include indirect emissions (Scope 3), those that originate from the entire value chain has increased companies understanding of its impacts - both upstream and downstream.



"Companies that measure indirect GHG emissions have the advantage of getting the full picture of their value chain and a clear, hot-spot understanding of where their true impacts lie, whether that be from an organization or from a product perspective", Quantis Zurich Managing Director Rainer Zah explains. "This, in turn, helps firms make fact-based and informed decision about how to efficiently allocate resources and engage their supply chain to reduce climate impacts."



The FOEN study delivered a clear understanding of the current status and possible gaps in the reporting of indirect emissions throughout the value chain of Swiss companies. The study identified 126 companies for which Scope 3 reporting is likely. From this sample, 72 companies (57%) calculated Scope 3 indirect emissions. Most reported in accordance with the internationally recognized standard for the assessment of indirect emissions, the GHG Protocol, which suggests 15 Scope 3 categories.



The pioneers of Scope 3 reporting are especially large, publicly traded firms  primarily from the financial and chemical sectors; however, the sectors are disproportionately represented.





Recommendations for pragmatic support to Swiss companies



The study shows that indirect GHG emissions in many sectors are so significant that they should systematically be included in climate-protection measures; therefore, Quantis and BSD put forth recommendations to the FOEN to further engage Swiss companies to measure and report Scope 3 emissions.



"For Scope 3 reporting to become common practice, efforts have to be made on different levels", BSD Consulting Managing Director Peter Teuscher explains. "While incentives and requirements from public policy certainly could boost reporting practice, methodological support for reporting companies is also needed."



Improved measurement and reporting efforts calls for more comprehensive and reliable data. The standardisation of reporting and calculation methods will also help companies. While the GHG Protocol has become established as the internationally recognized methodical reference, there are still major differences in the implementation of the calculation methodology of the GHG Protocol.



Recommendations to the FOEN also include: increasing incentives and awareness of reporting, communicate on business cases from the private sector to motivate companies to report on GHG emissions, and support tools for systematic reporting such as guides and calculation tools.



The Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Switzerland executive summary (in English, French & German) as well as the full report (in German) are both publicly accessible on the FOEN website here : http://www.bafu.admin.ch/klima





About Quantis



Quantis is a global leader in sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) expertise, services, consulting and tools. Quantis is specialized in supporting companies as they measure, understand and manage the environmental impacts of their products, services and operations. Fuelled by its close ties with the scientific community and its strong track record with clients, Quantis has proven experience in supporting clients as they transform LCA results into business strategies and operational action plans.



Quantis counts some of the worlds sustainability leaders as its clients: Danone, Nestle, Bayer, Unilever, Kraft, LOreal, Total, Michelin, Pfizer and the European Commission, for example.



Quantis has offices in Switzerland, Germany, France, the US, and counts some internationally renowned LCA and sustainability experts among its team members.



To learn more about Quantis, visit www.quantis-intl.com





About BSD Consulting



BSD Consulting is a leading consulting firm for sustainable business development. Since 1998, BSD Consulting has supported a wide range of organizations in evolving their strategies and operations. BSD Consultings headquarters are in Zurich, Switzerland, and offices in Berlin, Barcelona, Lisbon, Sao Paulo, Santiago de Chile, Lima, Quito, Bogota, Mexico DF, Miami und Shenzhen. We have over 70 employees worldwide.



BSD Consulting focuses on multiple capital value creation by integrating sustainability in strategy, processes and company culture. The core skills of BSD are in the areas of strategy, communication, stakeholder engagement, non-financial reporting and sustainable supply chain management. BSD provides capacity building offers and fosters close links to research institutes, NGOs and public institutions.



For further information : www.bsdconsulting.com


Jan 26, 2016 | By Benedict

Everyone is talking about whether The Revenant can scoop Best Picture at the Oscars next month, but UK-based Precision Casting Centre has just bagged a similarly coveted prizewithin its own field. The Component of the Year flagship award, handed out by the British Cast Metals Federation (CMF), is something like the Best Picture of the UKs cast metal industry, reserved for the most remarkable feats of metal engineering. With the help of 3D printing, Precision Casting Centre foundry and its partner voxeljet wowed the jury with their aluminum wheel upright, made using 3D printed cast parts.

According to Precision Casting Centre and voxeljet, the secret to the knockout wheel upright was a thorough topology optimization process, in which designers were able to sketch a concept part five times stiffer than existing models, but with no additional weight. This topology optimization was supplemented with a thorough life cycle analysis and a precise casting simulation prior to production, so the companies knew exactly what kind of component they would be manufacturing.

The goal of the project was to significantly increase the rigidity of the metal component without changing its weight or the materials used. To achieve this goal, Precision Casting Centre, a foundry from the south-coast English city of Portsmouth, had to radically optimize the structure of the wheel upright, a task made simpler thanks to cutting-edge simulation tools and voxeljets 3D printing technology. The award-winning wheel upright started with a 3D printed model of the component, made from PMMA, a transparent thermoplastic. This 3D printed model was then surrounded by metal to form a mold, before L169 aluminum alloy was used to create the final component.

"The design freedom of additive manufacturing processes, combined with simulation, allows us to come up with a new generation of designs that overcome the earlier conventional design limitations, explained Kevin Smith, Sales Director at voxeljet UK, whose 3D printing process made it possible to implement incredibly complex cast part geometries. "Because of this, the CMF jurors had a hard time at first believing that this complex Wheel Upright was an aluminum investment-cast part.

In the end, the seamless combination of 3D printing techniques and investment casting turned out to be a major factor in the CMF judges decision to award the glistening Component of the Year statuette to the Portsmouth-based foundry. The jury saw a spark of revolution in the aluminum wheel uprighta revolution in cast part design which could offer benefits to manufacturers and customers alike.

The Cast Metals Industry Awards are an opportunity for us to recognize the many remarkable developments that are happening throughout our industry, and to show the world the imagination, problem solving and innovation that is happening in foundries every day of the year, said Pam Murrell, Chief Executive of the Cast Metals Federation during the awards ceremony. I am delighted by both the number of entries and the quality in all categories.

Precision Casting Centres wheel upright required the services of Altair, Click2Cast and HBM nCode, as well as voxeljet. voxeljet has been particularly busy with its UK projects of late, with the company recently launching an on-demand service center for industrial 3D printing applications in the UK. "Our 3D printing systems are the biggest and fastest available today for investment casting, said James Reeves, Managing Director of voxeljet UK. They enable us to respond quickly, implement short processing times and still remain cost-efficient."

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

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Portsmouth foundry wrote at 12/20/2016 11:38:26 AM:This is a great step in engineering. To win this award over the hundreds of other upstanding companies is amazing. But it is with sadness that I say, this foundry is now to close leaving employees who have worked there for 25 years plus, redundant. We have shown what we can do. We just need someone with the know how to send us in the right direction.




Jan 27, 2016 | By Kira

The central technology development hub of General Electric (GE), one of the worlds largest users of metal 3D printing technologies, has just joined the 3MF Consortium at the Founding Membership level, and will use its coveted leadership and experience in 3D printing technology to help develop and promote 3MFs new 3D printing file format and 3D printing innovation as a whole.

The 3MF Consortium is an industry association formed in May 2015 to develop a new full-fidelity file format for 3D printing, overcoming the limitations associated with existing, outdated 3D file formats including .STL and .OBJ. Seven 3D printing industry leaders formed the original 3MF Consortium, including 3D systems, Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, FIT AG, Shapeways, HP, Materialise and Microsoft. In December 2015, Ultimaker also joined as a 3MF Founding Member. Now, GE Global Research has committed its advanced 3D printing services and expertise to the cause.

GE has been pioneering uses for industrial and metal 3D printing technology for years and is currently considered the largest user of additive technologies with metals in the world. Scientists at the GE Additive Manufacturing Lab in Alabama have manufactured advanced, functional 3D printed parts using metals, plastics and ceramics, including 3D printed jet engine components and 3D printed steam turbines. GE has also invested $32 million in a brand new Additive Manufacturing Research Center, set to open in Pennsylvania in early 2016, which will work closely with Carnegie Mellon University, Penn State and the University of Pittsburg to train new designers and engineers in the latest 3D printing techniques.

Given this wide range of 3D printing experience and expertise, GE Global Research is well positioned to join the ranks of the 3MF Consortiums founding members.

With the successful integration of 3D printed metal parts in two different jet engine platforms and the construction of GE Aviation's $50 million state-of-the-art high-volume additive production plant in Auburn, Alabama, we achieved major milestones with our additive program in 2015," said Prabhjot Singh, Manager of the Additive Manufacturing Lab at GE Global Research. "But we have only scratched the surface on additive's potential. With even better design tools, machines and new materials, we can dramatically expand the additive industry's footprint in manufacturing. That future will arrive faster through the strong ecosystem that 3MF is building to bring the right stakeholders together to accelerate new innovations and breakthroughs in this space."

"GE Global Research is a recognized leader with real-world experience using 3D printing and additive manufacturing to drive innovation," said Adrian Lannin, 3MF Consortium executive director. "We look forward to working with GE Global Research to enrich the 3MF standard and create new opportunities for both 3D printing and the additive manufacturing ecosystem."

The first version of the 3MF specification is already available for download at no charge, and with an ever-growing number of influential 3D printing leaders on its side, it will be interesting to see how quickly the 3MF Consortium will develop throughout 2016, and what impact its new 3D printing format will have on the industry at large.

Posted in 3D Printer Company

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Hartleys Limited Initiates Research Coverage

Perth, Jan 27, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Goldphyre Resources Limited ( ASX:GPH ) (the Company) is pleased to advise that leading Australian broking and corporate advisory firm, Hartleys Limited, has initiated research coverage on the Company.



A full copy of the research note is available here:

http://media.abnnewswire.net/media/en/docs/82084-ASX-GPH-20160127.pdf





About Australian Potash Ltd





Australian Potash Limited (ASX:APC) is an ASX-listed Sulphate of Potash (SOP) developer. The Company holds a 100% interest in the Lake Wells Potash Project located approximately 500kms northeast of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia's Eastern Goldfields.

Following the release of a Scoping Study in 2017, APC has been conducting a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) into the development of the Lake Wells Potash Project. The Company is aiming to release the findings of the DFS in H2 2019.

The Lake Wells Potash Project is a palaeochannel brine hosted sulphate of potash project. Palaeochannel bore fields supply large volumes of brine to many existing mining operations throughout Western Australia, and this technique is a well understood and proven method for extracting brine. APC will use this technically low-risk and commonly used brine extraction model to further develop a bore-field into the palaeochannel hosting the Lake Wells SOP resource.

A Scoping Study on the Lake Wells Potash Project was completed and released on 23 March 2017. The Scoping Study exceeded expectations and confirmed that the Project's economic and technical aspects are all exceptionally strong, and highlights APC's potential to become a significant long-life, low capital and high margin sulphate of potash (SOP) producer.


Binding Agreement with NLC and NMDC secured

Melbourne, Jan 27, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Environmental Clean Technologies Limited ( ASX:ESI ) (ECT or Company) is pleased to announce it has secured a binding agreement to proceed with project development initiatives for its Coldry and Matmor technologies with India's national lignite authority, Neyveli Lignite Corporation (NLC) and India's largest iron ore miner, NMDC Ltd.



Key Points:



- Australian technology development firm strikes world-first collaboration agreement with two Indian resource majors, underpinning joint R&D efforts



- Innovative Coldry and Matmor technology suite poised to upgrade low grade coal and iron ore resources, reduce emissions intensity



- Capital management planning positions Company for next phase of project development activity



Binding Agreement Reached



The agreement, which paves the way for the development and joint financing of an integrated Coldry Demonstration Plant and Matmor Pilot Plant at India's largest lignite mine, was signed on Tuesday 19 January 2016.



ECT's Managing Director Ashley Moore stated "This is a significant step forward for our business. We have been working toward this outcome for some time now. To bring India's leading lignite and iron ore players together under a tripartite arrangement, to jointly pursue the development of innovative solutions to help tackle some of India's strategic economic and environmental challenges, is a first for the parties and, to the best of our knowledge, a first for an Australian company."



NLC's Chairman and Managing Director, Mr S. K. Acharya delivered a forward looking speech during the signing ceremony, outlining his company's vision for moving its lignite resource up the value chain and mitigating emissions. He commented specifically that, as the process is suitable for purifying iron from the low grade iron ore, using easily available lignite, the exchange of technical know-how between India and Australia will benefit the companies as well as the countries.



NMDC welcomed the agreement, highlighting their previously stated drive to develop alternatives to metallurgical coal which is in short supply, and to ultimately reduce dependency on imported coking coal.



India has an abundant above-ground iron ore resource in its mine tailings, however the fine size of the tailings means they are unsuitable for blast furnace use, effectively 'stranding' this resource and creating a growing environmental challenge. The problem to date is there have been no metallurgical applications that can cost-effectively upgrade such tailings. Matmor has the potential to deliver an innovative solution to this problem as well as improving India's self-sufficiency through less reliance on coking coal.



Mr Sean Kelly, Australia's Consul-General for South India kindly attended the signing ceremony, supporting the Company's efforts in India and highlighting the opportunities for all parties.



He noted in a subsequent media release: "An Australian company has forged an important new partnership under Indian Prime Minister Modi's 'Make in India' initiative to deliver unique Australian technologies which enable India's abundant lignite coal to be used for electricity and steel production, while at the same time minimising CO2 emissions."



"This exciting Australian innovation further reinforces Australia's position as India's pre-eminent energy partner," Mr Kelly said, "while at the same time helping India reduce the carbon intensity of its rapidly growing steel industry that depends on coal."



"It is also a tangible example of the scope for Australians to bring their world-class technological innovations to India, adapting the technology to suit local requirements and working alongside Indian partners, resonating with [the] Indian Government's 'Make in India' initiative" Mr Kelly said.



Link: Media Release, Australian Consulate-General, Chennai, India

http://chennai.consulate.gov.au/cnai/Media.html



Market Context



1) Economic trends: India has overtaken China as the fastest growing economy and is predicted to maintain this momentum through the next decade. Its 'open for business' mantra, vision for sustainable growth and reputation for frugal innovation are gaining widespread traction, attracting companies like ECT.

2) Keeping it clever: The Australian Government has launched its 'National Innovation and Science Agenda', promoting innovation at home and abroad. ECT seeks to innovate across the energy and resources industries, where the desire for economic growth and the need for sustainability often come into conflict. Both NLC and NMDC are focused on developing alternative processes in their respective fields.



3) Climate security: The recent Paris Climate Conference delivered outcomes intent on achieving meaningful emissions reductions generally, with India specifically committing to significant reductions in emissions intensity. Coldry, as a zero net emissions technology for quality improvement for low rank coals, and Matmor's capacity to significantly reduce CO2 emissions during the production of crude steel provide significant contributions to this effort.



"This backdrop is highly supportive of such a collaborative approach to innovation, starting in India and expanding the offerings to other geographies reliant on emissions-exposed industries," said Mr. Moore, adding "We look forward to working with such highly regarded and capable companies as NLC and NMDC to deliver solutions focused on the upgrading of their domestic resources in India's national interest."



ECT Chairman, Mr Glenn Fozard added, "We must also acknowledge our in-country business adviser YES BANK. Doing business in India is challenging and their support has been instrumental in navigating the complexities." "Thanks must also be extended to the Australian High Commission and Austrade for their assistance with engaging India's National Government over the past 12 months."



This agreement validates the company's strategy with regard to selecting India as the launch pad for its technologies and is arguably the single most important milestone delivered for shareholders in the Company's history. It is the fulfilment of a crucial step in the Company's previously announced India strategy which has been built on a confluence of factors. These include India's reputation for frugal innovation, its abundant lignite resources, energy challenges, limited domestic coking coal, concerns around national resource and energy security and the political and business impetus to tackle these challenges in sustainable and innovative ways which have created supportive market conditions.



The Company will provide further updates as activities progress.



Next Steps



This agreement forms the basis for the forthcoming project planning and execution activities and leads into the substantive project phase, aiming to commercialise both Coldry and Matmor in the India market ahead of potential broader global deployment.



The project development activities will proceed immediately with the assistance of world class engineering partners Thermax and MN Dastur supporting Coldry and Matmor initiatives, respectively.



The next major deliverable will be the techno-economic feasibility study projections for an integrated commercial plant, targeted for delivery mid-year, will provide sufficient refinement of the capital estimates and commercial projections upon which the parties will rely to finalise the funding mix and financial and commercial commitments.



In relation to the immediate next steps, Mr Moore commented "We have a busy time ahead of us as we execute and deliver on the plans set forth in the agreement, including key elements such as the pre-construction works for Coldry, together with the Matmor-Coldry integration aspects, as well as the scale up of Matmor from its current Test Plant size to Pilot stage.



"In relation to Coldry, these next steps will include the conversion of existing engineering drawings to suit local requirements, construction codes and available 'steel sections', as well as vendor development for supply of certain technology-specific equipment items. In fact, preparatory work has been underway with Thermax on this particular activity, with formal kick-off expected soon on the end-to-end works program."



In relation to Matmor, Mr Moore added "We look forward to commencing the work with MN Dastur in coming weeks. This work program will involve significant activity to bring Matmor's readiness in line with Coldry."



Agreement Overview



The Tripartite Agreement is binding and establishes the collaborative framework to deliver an integrated Coldry and Matmor facility, providing high-level milestones and pivotal decision points along the development pathway.



The framework provides agreed pathways for key activities, broadly including:



1) Detailed Integrated Techno-Economic Feasibility Study (parallel activity to 2 & 3)



2) Coldry Demonstration Plant development



3) Matmor Pilot Plant development



Successful progression through the activities will lead to a series of subsequent steps under the framework:



1) Commercial structure agreements



2) Financial Close



3) Project construction



a. Coldry

b. Matmor



4) Commissioning



5) Validation & optimisation activities



6) Operations



7) Expansion



The Company will continue to own its Coldry and Matmor intellectual property, which will be licensed into the India project.



Capital Management



The Company has recently undertaken a complete review of its financing plans in support of business initiatives for 2016.



These initiatives, detailed at the recent AGM, include preparation and budgeting for:



- The Indian project's next major deliverable



- The upgrade of the Bacchus Marsh pilot plant to a higher volume test facility



- The next 6 months of working capital



To this end, in recent days investors in the existing 'FAST Finance' facility took up the option to convert the debt obligation of ~$1.5M into fully paid ordinary shares, which along with the recently received ATO refund of $1.1M, now places the company in a significantly improved net asset position, leaving only $300,000 of secured debt, which expires in late April 2016.



The Company is also finalising the negotiations for a debt facility with an SEC registered US debt fund to finance future R&D expenditure where the Company's accrued R&D refund can be used as the security. This facility will become particularly important to the financing mix of the Indian project in the event the Company receives an Overseas Ruling for the project (i.e. a finding that R&D activities conducted overseas are eligible under the Australian Government's R&D Tax Incentive).



Lastly, the Company has also reactivated its options exercise program to assist with the conversion of "deep in-the-money" listed options with a financing cashflow available to the company in excess of AU$23M. Realisation of this cashflow in an orderly and regular fashion over the intervening period between now and the expiry of these options in mid 2017 will assist greatly in supporting both share price stability, working capital and project financing.



The Company intends to continue developing more flexible alternatives for financing and broader relationships with institutional investors and brokers. This will become particularly important as we reach the heights of our growth aspirations across 2016.



The activities above were drivers for the recent trading halt (19 Jan 2016) and request for voluntary suspension (21 Jan 2016).



The Company requests reinstatement to quotation, effective immediately.



About NLC



Neyveli Lignite Corporation Limited is a Government of India 'Navratna status' Enterprise established in 1956, under the administrative control of the Ministry of Coal. A pioneer among the public sector undertakings in the energy sector, NLC operates:



- Three opencast lignite mines of total capacity of 28.5 million tonnes per annum at Neyveli and one open cast lignite mine of capacity 2.1 million tonnes per annum at Barsingsar, Rajasthan.



- Three Thermal Power Stations with a total installed capacity of 2490 MW at Neyveli and one thermal power station at Barsingsar, Rajasthan with an installed capacity of 250 MW.



NLC have plans to expand their thermal power capacity, with several projects totalling ~3500MW, in addition to supporting increases in mining capacity. Further power generation initiatives include a 51MW wind farm and a 10MW solar installation.



About NMDC



Incorporated in 1958 as a Government of India fully owned public enterprise. NMDC is a 'Navratna status' Enterprise under the administrative control of the Ministry of Steel, Government of India.



Since inception NMDC has been involved in the exploration of a wide range of minerals including iron ore, copper, rock phosphate, lime stone, dolomite, gypsum, bentonite, magnesite, diamond, tin, tungsten, graphite, beach sands etc.



NMDC is India's single largest iron ore producer, presently producing about 30 million tonnes of iron ore per annum from 3 fully mechanised mines.



Future plans include strategic positioning of the company to minimise short term fluctuations in commodity markets and business cycles through the vertical and horizontal growth of assets domestically and internationally across mining and value added production. This includes increasing mining of iron ore to over 75 million tonnes per annum, and expanding iron and steel making capacity.



To view all figures and photographs, please visit:

http://media.abnnewswire.net/media/en/docs/ASX-ESI-437390.pdf





About Environmental Clean Technologies Ltd





Environmental Clean Technologies Limited (ASX:ECT) is in the business of commercialising leading-edge coal and iron making technologies, which are capable of delivering financial and environmental benefits.

We are focused on advancing a portfolio of technologies, which have significant market potential globally.

ECT's business plan is to pragmatically commercialise these technologies and secure sustainable, profitable income streams through licencing and other commercial mechanisms.


Quarterly Activities Report

Sydney, Jan 27, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Thomson Resources Ltd (TMZ:AU) announce the Quarterly Activities Report for the period ending 31 December 2015.



Highlights



- New petrology and geophysics at Bygoo North Tin prospect firm up drill targets



- Petrology shows coarse cassiterite in clean host rock, potentially ideal for low cost processing to produce high quality concentrate



- Successful trial of Ultra Deep Ground Penetrating Radar survey to assist in Bygoo tin drill targeting



- Follow up drilling planned for February



BYGOO NORTH TIN PROSPECT



Thomson completed petrological research of samples from its successful drilling at Bygoo North (as reported in September 2015 quarterly). Rock chip samples from the drilling (BNRC11 at 70m downhole) were ground to paper-thin slices ("thin section") and viewed through a microscope (Figure 1 in link below).



Minerals identified included quartz (75%), topaz (10-15%) and cassiterite (tin, 5-8%), with trace amounts of tourmaline, fluorite and wolframite (contains tungsten). Overall the rock, including the cassiterite, was coarsely crystalline with quartz crystals up to 2mm long observed. The assemblage is typical of a granite greisen.



Both the heavy minerals cassiterite and wolframite are oxide minerals: no sulphide minerals were observed. The absence of sulphide minerals such as pyrite, pyrrhotite, chalcopyrite, arsenopyrite or galena is a strong contrast to the nearby Ardlethan Tin Mine, where these minerals are abundant and associated with the tin mineralisation.



The Ardlethan mineralisation has been described as "porphyry style cassiterite-sulfide deposits". In contrast, the Bygoo North mineralisation appears to be of a vein or fracture-controlled greisen style.



The mineralogical study, with the coarse mineralogy and absence of sulphides, indicates that the mineralisation is likely to be amenable to low cost processing during mining, and could produce a clean, high quality concentrate with minimal deleterious elements.



In terms of geophysical properties, the absence of sulphidic or magnetic minerals in the greisen means that conventional methods may be of limited use in tracing individual mineralised horizons.



Thomson therefore trialed a new generation geophysical method - Ultra deep penetrating ground radar (UDGPR), originally developed by the Russian aerospace industry for their Mars lander. This method sends extremely short (1-3 nanoseconds), very high-amplitude pulses of electromagnetic (EM) radiation vertically into the ground, with any reflected energy measured to produce subsurface images.



Similar to seismic, the principal features displayed are usually reflections at rock boundaries, with the system sensitive to:



- Soil composition and stratification.



- Rock crystallinity, composition and pore space (and thus density).



- Conductivity of pore fluids and bulk rock.



- Conductive media like wet clays and salt water that inhibit the signal.



- Groundwater.



- Mineralogy.



The trial at Bygoo North was successful, with a strong apparent fault detected and associated with the mineralisation. This fault was traceable over 4 lines (100m) and separates the previously modelled Greisens A and B (Figure 2 in link below).



The success of the trial firms up the drill targets chosen by Thomson for the next drilling round. Six holes for 800m are planned (one of the proposed holes is shown on Figure 2 in link below), to confirm the greisen model and to extend the known mineralisation to the east. The drilling program is expected to take place in February 2016.



Mullagalah aeromagnetic survey



During the quarter Thomson commissioned modelling of aeromagnetic survey data over the Mullagalah project on EL 8102. The survey comprised 1,194 km at a line spacing of 50m, providing high resolution magnetic and radiometric data to detail the prominent anomaly.



The Mullagalah anomaly has previously been explored by YTC Resources Ltd in 2010, which drilled two deep diamond holes near the western edge of the anomaly (Figure 3 in link below). Both holes intersected anomalous copper and gold with accompanying mineral alteration of the types often found in intrusion-related mineralisation.



The modelling emphasised a deep low in the 800m area between the two YTC holes, ruling out any continuity of the copper-gold anomalism seen in them.



The modelling and other data is being reviewed to assess the prospectivity and generate drill targets if warranted.



Tenement Holdings

Thomson holds a 100% interest in 779 square kilometres over nine granted titles, after the Mt Paynter EL was granted during the quarter.



During the quarter the Havilah EL 7891 was joint ventured to Silver Mines Ltd. Under the agreement Silver Mines will spend $300,000 to earn an 80% interest over three years, with a minimum of 1,000m of exploration drilling to be undertaken. Once Silver Mines has earned its interest, Thomson's 20% will be free-carried until a decision to mine.



Several other tenements have previously been joint ventured: four titles covering 404 square kilometres in the Kidman joint venture; and one title covering 59 sq. km in the Mullagalah joint venture.



Corporate



Exploration expenditure incurred during the quarter totalled $131,677. Cash at the end of the quarter was $341,316.



Thomson raised $145,000 from private investors as well as $192,500 from a Share Purchase Plan offered to all shareholders.



Thomson has no debt and had 95,303,306 shares on issue at the end of the quarter.



To view the all figures, please visit:

http://media.abnnewswire.net/media/en/docs/ASX-TMZ-903120.pdf





About Thomson Resources Ltd





Thomson Resources Ltd (ASX:TMZ) is an NSW active mineral explorer. Thomson has several tin projects (including an advanced project near Ardlethan), as well as gold, copper and zinc targets in a range of settings. Thomson has a good record of discovery, with multiple new Intrusion-Related Gold (gold with copper, lead, zinc, molybdenum, tungsten) systems discovered in the Thomson Fold Belt in the NW of the state.
Accounting students from Montana State Universitys Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship are offering free help preparing tax returns for MSU students and individuals who made less than $58,000 last year, the University announced on Wednesday.

The 2016 help sessions will be held on the MSU campus, in Jabs Hall 215, on the following Tuesdays and Saturdays: Feb. 2, 9, 16, 23; March 1, 5, 8, 22, 29; and April 2. Tuesday sessions will be held from 5:30-7 p.m., and Saturday sessions will be held from 9:30-11 a.m. No appointment is necessary. Sign-up sheets will be posted at 5 p.m. before each Tuesday session and at 9 a.m. before each Saturday session. Additionally, tax assistance for international students and employees begins Tuesday, Feb. 16.

Upper-division accounting students will be available at all sessions to prepare federal and state income tax returns and answer tax questions. Free electronic filing will be available for most 1040 forms.

Individuals who are interested in free tax preparation assistance are asked to bring their 2015 W-2 forms, Forms 1095-A, B or C (Affordable Care statements), other tax documents, a picture ID, social security cards and copies of their 2014 tax returns. International students/employees should also bring their passports and visas.

The student accounting volunteers are part of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, established by the IRS to assist people who may have trouble paying for tax preparation services. The program also gives accounting students hand-on, practical experience.

Each volunteer student has passed an IRS tax prep exam, completed at least one comprehensive tax course, received specific training related to common tax issues and has access to a variety of federal and state reference materials. The sessions are sponsored by the MSU Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship and Beta Alpha Psi, an honorary organization for financial information students and professionals.

For more on the Jake Jabs College of Business, head to their site here.
The American Institute of CPAs is encouraging firms to modernize the way they conduct audits by using data analytics technology and working to improve the way employee benefit plan audits are conducted in response to a critical Labor Department report.

During a speech Tuesday in New York at a meeting of the Accountants Club of America, AICPA president and CEO Barry Melancon discussed the findings of the report, along with other topics (see AICPA Takes on IRS and Expands Internationally and Labor Department Finds Problems with CPA Audits of Employee Benefit Plans). The U.S. Department of Labors Employee Benefits Security Administration found serious deficiencies in 39 percent of the audits of employee benefit plans that it examined.

Melancon admitted the report pointed to very bad results for employee plan audits. He said the AICPA put together a six-point action plan to address the issues in the report.

Congress reacted very favorably to that, and ultimately the DOL, said Melancon. The DOL wanted to see even more regulation put forward, but in the end, Congress said, No, we trust the profession to work on these things they have been targeting from that standpoint. And we are doing that.

Part of the plan involves improving the peer review process, and the AICPA has been working with the state CPA societies on that initiative. We need to make some specific changes in peer review as it relates to firms that take on new types of engagements that are very specialized, said Melancon. The reputation of the profession is based on the fact that we do quality work, and we have to focus on where there are particular deficiencies in that area. We also have a plan that we are working on that would materially change peer review as it relates to a technology-based approach. Were actually piloting that beginning in the fall of 2016 with different-sized firms that volunteered for that. Theyll work in 2016 and 2017 on that concept. Instead of reporting out, its going to be used internally at first so we can learn from that and see how it works. What we envision is really a connection with the technology and the software that firms use to manage their engagements, with audit indicators on quality and being able to spin off earlier indications of problems before a firm even issues a report.

Instead of looking at the results afterward, as is standard with the current peer review process, the concept is to use technology to affect the results before they go out the door. Then we would be delivering the quality that is expected of the profession, said Melancon. The negative of that is people will feel it is a bit intrusive, so weve got to find the right balance.

The AICPA is making changes in both auditing and assurance services. The Service Organizations Task Force of the AICPAs Auditing Standards Board has developed an illustrative dual opinion service auditors report. The new report is for use when a service auditor is reporting on a description of a service organizations system and the suitability of the design and operating effectiveness of controls (type 2 report) under both AT section 801, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization (AICPA, Professional Standards), and International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) 3402, Assurance Reports on Controls at a Service Organization. The illustrative report is intended for reports dated on or after Dec. 15, 2015.

Cybersecurity Assurance

In addition, the AICPA is working on developing new assurance and attestation services in areas such as cybersecurity. We now have a whole family of standards called SOC [Service Organization Control] reporting, or statements on controls, that are about attestations to third parties about how businesses are doing in a variety of different ways in their technology operations and things of that nature, not just their financial results, said Melancon. This is an explosive area where people want these types of reports. There are firms that in 2015 whose numbers show 400 percent increases in the number of reports that were issued under the SOC standards. This is not because theyre being mandated by the government. These are actually market forces that users, vendors, etc., are saying they want these types of assurances that companies are operating in the best light and doing certain things. That leads us to a very explosive and emerging area that this profession is going to have a role in, which is cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is on the agenda of every board and every single management team in America, and it is a very complex and difficult process.

He sees significant demand from companies that want attestation on whether or not they have done what they should to minimize the risk of a cyberattack.

The CEOs of the eight largest firms, working with the Institute, have said we have to have a rational professional answer to this, said Melancon. Were not going to build a firm X answer and have the early adopter advantage in the marketplace. Thats not the way to go, just like we didnt do that when we built auditing in the 1930s. This is a new wave of that occurring.

Even firms that dont service public companies could play a role in providing such services for private companies. Last fall, the AICPA met with the chief information officers of a group of major manufacturing and financial services companies to discuss the need for including provisions for such services in the contracts they sign with other companies, similar to uptime provisions for technology suppliers that can be audited by a CPA.

What the CIOs of these large enterprises said to us is we have those things in our contracts, but there is no way we have the resources to go in and do that in our vendors, said Melancon. They want the ability to require a SOC report from a CPA firm for their vendor or customer. Its a cascading down of market forces, not regulation. The market is saying, We need to be responsible corporate citizens. It will cascade down to smaller businesses.

Big Data Analytics for Audits

Melancon foresees smaller firms beginning to use the type of sophisticated data analytics technology that the largest audit firms are already embracing.

Audit is evolving, he said. The notion of tests is pretty much gone. One of the major concerns I have is how do we take the technology and the thinking thats being applied at the largest firms and find a way to bring it down to the smallest firms? Its a business model change that is pretty dramatic. Its change management, and a major concern I have is whether or not the entirety of the profession moves on that as quickly as its moved. Were looking at audit software capabilities that are taking big data concepts into an audit environment, even of a small company, totally changing the type of work that needs to be done in an audit environment.

He noted there are 44,000 firms in the U.S., and 16,000 of them do audits in some fashion. How do we take what is being deployed, predominantly in about six or seven firms, and bring it down to 16,000 firms? Its a real daunting challenge.

Melancon believes many firms will need to re-engineer their audit and business processes for this new environment. He sees more small firms using cloud computing technology to deal with their small business clients, including clients that dont need auditing services. In some ways cloud computing is breaking down some of the traditional barriers between company management and accounting firms.

Weve changed our standards to create a new kind of SSARS [Statements on Standards for Accounting and Review Services] standard, SSARS 21, that allows you to be in the preparation notion without a reporting responsibility through using cloud computing, said Melancon. So its you touching the clients data and the client touching the data at the same time, and a financial statement comes out of that, but a financial statement without any level of assurance from you. Thats an example of our standards changing as it relates to a new world.

The AICPA is also working on a research project in conjunction with the six largest audit firms and Rutgers University in New Jersey to drive further change in auditing standards. The purpose is to take their big data approaches and to do about an 18-month study of how their approach is actually driving quality in the audit process, Melancon explained. Then that result can be used to argue for changes in the auditing standards to support this changing business approach. We can change the auditing standards as it relates to private companies, but we cant as it relates to public companies. The PCAOB sets that. But if we have the research that shows how this has in fact affected the quality and approach to audit, we can do it.
(Bloomberg) President Barack Obama will propose allowing small businesses to more easily pool 401(k) plans, in the hope that more Americans will adopt a crucial tool to save for retirement.

The proposal, to be included in his 2017 budget, represents Obamas latest attempt to leverage an issue with some Republican support to both tick off an item on his agendalongstanding concerns about Americans retirement securityand influence the campaign to succeed him.

Obama also will propose making it easier for job-hopping workers to track multiple retirement accounts and combine them, and hell ask Congress to provide $100 million to test new, more portable accounts. His budget will be released on Feb. 9.

Workers without a retirement plan at work rarely save, Jeff Zients, Obamas National Economic Council director, told reporters on a conference call on Monday. We know that economic security in retirement is a kitchen table issue.

Wage Stagnation

The stagnation of wages for middle-income workers, which has made saving for retirement more difficult, has been a blot on Obamas economic record even as unemployment has been cut in half since the peak of the recession. Its become a point of attack for the Republicans running to succeed him while the Democratic contenders, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have made income inequality a central theme of their economic policies.

Approaching the end of his term, Obama has said that he hopes to work with Republicans on a few legislative priorities where they agree, such as an overhaul of U.S. sentencing rules to reduce prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses and trade. Improving the administration and adoption of retirement savings accounts has the support of some Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who introduced legislation in 2013 that would have allowed small employers to more easily offer pooled 401(k) plans.

Financial Services

BlackRock Inc., the worlds largest asset manager and a provider of investments to retirement plans, supports the proposal, said Barbara Novick, a vice chairman at the company. Small employers would be able to offer workers a 401(k) at lower cost, Novick said in an e-mail.

"They can pool resources and reduce costs, which creates a positive incentive to adopt plans," she said.

Financial services companies that run and sell investments to the plans as well as workers who dont have retirement accounts would benefit if its done correctly, said Michael Kreps, an attorney at the Groom Law Group in Washington, which represents employers, pension plans and financial services companies.

"They are recognizing that theres bipartisan support for this and its something that could get done in 2016," Kreps, a former Democratic staff member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said of the White House proposal.

Talking to Lawmakers

Obama met Tuesday at the White House with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid, to talk about his 2016 legislative agenda. On Thursday hell talk with Democratic lawmakers at a retreat in Baltimore. The White House also is trying to arrange a face-to- face meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican. Those plans were temporarily disrupted by the snow storm that has shut down most of official Washington.

Retirement savings may be one area where Obama and congressional leaders of both parties find some agreement this year. Another is an overhaul of the federal prison system: Obama and some Republicans including Ryan agree that judges should be able to break from tough mandatory-minimum sentencing guidelines to show leniency toward people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.

Obama published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Tuesday announcing that he would ban solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons and allow adults in solitary more time outside of their cells. The move "is just one part of a broader bipartisan push for criminal justice reform," the president wrote.

Wider Pools

Current law allows limited combinations of employers 401(k) plans. Companies that band together must have commonalityfor example, a group of car dealerships, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said on the call.

What were saying in this proposal is you shouldnt have to be just auto dealers coming together to be able to benefit from this, he said.

The White House says that allowing businesses to join together will reduce administrative expenses and make it cheaper to provide the accounts to workers. Obama wont reveal what the changes will cost or how he plans to pay for them until he releases his budget.

Many people even a decade away from retirement havent saved enough, presenting a looming crisis that Obama is right to address, said Jared Bernstein, a researcher at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington and a former member of Obamas economics team.

Its important because an increasing number of people are ill-prepared for the economic challenges theyll face in retirement, Bernstein said in an interview. The administration, I can tell you as someone who used to work there, has long been aware of the problem.

Last year, Obama created a retirement account called a myRA for people without 401(k) plans. The program doesnt offer matching contributions from employers and doesnt allow for investing in the stock market, but it also guarantees that participants wont lose their savings. Savers through the program can invest only in a U.S. Treasury security guaranteed never to lose value.

His administration is expected to finish a regulation in the first quarter of the year that would require investment advisers to put their clients best interests first, called a fiduciary rule. Its opposed by banks such as Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co., as well as mutual fund companies, independent brokers and insurers.
By John Vibes

As the water crisis in Flint deepens, it is becoming apparent that the effects of the lead-infested water are not just a health hazard, but the situation has the potential of ruining many more lives outside of the poison issue. There is no denying that the water in Flint is undrinkable and that it is contaminated with lead and other substances, and it is clear that the government of Flint is responsible for the problem.

However, the citys government continues to charge people for the poison water and then threatening to foreclose their home or take their children if they refuse to pay. Michigan law states that parents are neglectful if they do not have running water in their home, and if they chose not to pay for water they cant drink anyway, then they could be guilty of child endangerment. Activists in Flint say that some residents have already received similar threats from the government if they refuse to pay their bills.





Flint residents have recently filed two class action lawsuits calling for all water bills since April of 2014 to be considered null and void because of the fact that the water was poisonous.

We are seeking for the court to declare that all the bills that have been issued for usage of water invalid because the water has not been fit for its intended purpose, said Trachelle Young, one of the attorneys bringing the lawsuit said in court.

Essentially, the residents have been getting billed for water that they cannot use. Because of that, we do not feel that is a fair way to treat the residents, Young added.

Recent estimates have indicated that it could take up to 15 years and over $60 million to fix the problem, and the residents will be essentially forced to live there until the problem is solved. Despite the fact that the issue is obviously the governments responsibility, they have made it illegal for people to sell their homes because of the fact that they are known to carry contaminated water. Meanwhile, residents are still left to purchase bottled water on their own, in addition to paying their water bill.

Although this problem is finally getting national media attention in Flint, they arent the only city with contaminated water supplies. In fact, a recent report published by The Guardian showed that public water supplies across the country were experiencing similar issues.

This crisis highlights the many dangers of allowing the government to maintain a monopoly on the water supply and calls attention to the fact that decentralized solutions to water distribution should be a goal that we start working towards.

Also Read:

Leaked Emails: Govt Officials Mocked Flint Residents Who Complained About Water

John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can purchase his books, or get your own book published at his website www.JohnVibes.com.
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KC-46A Pegasus conducts 1st in-flight refueling demonstration

The KC-46A Pegasus successfully transferred fuel through its boom to an F-16C Fighting Falcon Jan. 24 to demonstrate aerial refueling operations in advance of its first production decision later this spring.



The KC-46A passed 1,600 pounds of fuel to an F-16C piloted by Lt. Col. Daniel Alix of the 416st Flight Test Squadron, 412th Test Wing out of Edwards AFB, California, who characterized the mission as a complete success.



Officials said it was a big step forward for the program and for the tanker capability that will serve as the backbone of Air Force global operations over the coming decades.



"I'm extremely proud of the entire industry and government program team that made today happen, said Brig. Gen. Duke Z. Richardson, the Air Force program executive officer for tankers, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. This aerial refueling marks the first of many, and represents years of hard work beginning to pay dividends.



The tanker has a robust in-flight refueling demonstration schedule over the coming weeks. The test with the F-16C fulfilled the requirement to connect to a light/fast receiver. The remaining tests with the boom will use an A-10 Thunderbolt II as the light/slow receiver and a C-17 Globemaster III as the heavy receiver.



Flight tests employing the centerline drogue system and wing aerial refueling pods will use an F-18 Hornet as the light/fast receiver and an AV-8B Harrier as a light/slow receiver. The KC-46A will also have to demonstrate its receiver capability by taking fuel from a KC-10 Extender.



These refueling demonstrations represent the significant remaining test hurdles before proceeding to a Milestone C low rate initial production decision. Program officials anticipate awarding the first production contract shortly thereafter.



"These are exciting times for the KC-46A program, said Col. Chris Coombs, the KC-46 system program manager, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. We have had plans on paper and data from simulation labs, but this in-flight demonstration shows we are truly making progress on bringing this capability of the next generation of tankers to the warfighter supporting our global missions for years to come."



Master Sgt. Lindsay Moon, a 13-year veteran boom operator, operated the boom controls passing fuel for the mission.



"This mission was a significant event towards certifying this new tanker, said Moon, who is assigned to the 418th Flight Test Squadron Detachment 1 in Seattle, Washington. Controlling the boom from the Air Refueling Operator Station is night and day different from laying on your belly in a KC-135. The system advances being rolled into the KC-46 will give the operator great awareness."



Lt. Col. Donevan Rein, also with Detachment 1 in Seattle, Washington, was the Air Force pilot onboard the KC-46A during the test sortie.



The Air Force contracted with Boeing in February 2011 to acquire 179 KC-46A tankers to begin recapitalizing the aging tanker fleet. The program is currently working to meet the required assets available date, a milestone requiring 18 KC-46A aircraft and all necessary support equipment to be on the ramp, ready to support warfighter needs, by August 2017.


Three Indian-origin persons have been awarded Australias highest civilian honour for their contribution in the fields of physics, engineering and medicine.

Chennupati Jagadish, an eminent professor at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Jay Chandra, an eye doctor in New South Wales, and Sajeev Koshy, a dentist in Melbourne, received Order of Australia medal for the year 2016 announced on the Australia Day.

Jagadish was conferred with the award for his eminent service to physics and engineering, particularly in the field of nanotechnology, to education as a leading academic, researcher, author and mentor, and through executive roles with national and international scientific advisory institutions.

Jagadish was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to physics and engineering, particularly in the field of nanotechnology, to education as a leading academic, researcher, author and mentor, and through executive roles with national and international scientific advisory institutions.

This is a wonderful recognition for 25 plus years of work with my research group at the ANU, Jagadish, who works on semiconductor optoelectronics and nanotechnology.

Chandra, an eye doctor who has been the head of vitreoretinal surgery at Westmead Hospital since the unit opened in 1985, also received the award for his significant service to medicine in the field of ophthalmology as a clinician, and to the international community through eye care programs.

Im not a showy person but I was glad to be recognised, he was quoted as saying in a report The field I specialise in is one of the most difficult in eye surgery. God has given me these skills and a good life in Australia, he said.
The Madras High Court on Wednesday ordered a fresh autopsy on one of the girls who had allegedly committed suicide in Villupuram in Tamil Nadu.

The High Court gave the go-ahead for fresh autopsy as it agreed to a plea by the parents of one of the girls, Monisha, seeking a fresh autopsy to be conducted in Chennai.

The father of one of the girls, Tamilarasan, moved a petition on Monday in the Madras High Court, seeking a CB-CID inquiry and post-mortem in a state-run hospital in Chennai. He had also requested that a doctor of his choice be present during autopsy.

Allowing the petition, Justice R. Subbiah directed that a doctor of the petitioners choice shall be included in the team conducting the postmortem examination.

When the petition came up for hearing, petitioners counsel Sankara Subbu contended that the autopsy has been conducted without the consent of the girls parents. He also sought the court to direct the authorities to conduct the examination in any government hospital in Chennai, claiming that the petitioner had lost faith in the district administration.

Nineteen-year-old Monisha and two other students had allegedly committed suicide near their college in Villupuram over the weekend. In an alleged suicide note, the girls blamed their college of extortion and harassment.

The alleged suicide note left behind by students Priyanka, Saranya and Monisha accuses the SVS college management of charging excess fees and torture.

The head of their college on Monday surrendered in a court in Chennai and was arrested along with two others, including its principal, days after the girls committed suicide.

Vasuki Subramanian, head of the Kallakurichi-based naturopathy and yoga college, surrendered before a court here and was remanded to judicial custody, police said. After questioning, we have arrested Kalanidhi (college principal) and Suvagur Varma, (adminstrator and son of Vasuki Subramanian) and they were produced before a court which remanded them to judicial custody, a senior police official said. He said the probe was still on and they were on the look out for some more persons in connection with the case.
The government has not yet decided on fixing the minimum import price for steel, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia said on Wednesday.

No decision, she told reporters here in response to a query on the matter on the sidelines of a Confederation of Indian Industry meeting on the World Trade Organisations (WTO) recent Nairobi conference.

Earlier this month she said Indias steel imports were about 9 percent of what it consumed and not a huge element of the countrys total steel consumption.

Teaotia said the country had considerable installed capacity, which is operating at about 80 percent, resulting in higher load factors than the rest of the world, which averages about 68-70 percent.

Indias domestic steel industry has been repeatedly voicing its concern about cheap imports from China flooding local markets.

Earlier, the commerce secretary told the conference that her ministry is discussing with other ministries how to move ahead on the outcomes of the WTOs Nairobi ministerial meeting.

We met all ministries related to trade. We have made presentation to the agriculture ministry, Teaotia said.

The Nairobi ministerial did not reaffirm the Doha Development Agenda, which was Indias main demand before going for the talks.

In this connection, Teaotia said on Wednesday that India will not go ahead with new issues till the time the WTOs Doha Round issues are reaffirmed.

Doha is still alive, she said.
Twelve terror suspects have been sent to the NIA custody till February 5 for further interrogation by a special NIA court.

The arrested ISIS sympathisers have made shocking revelations to the National Investi-gation Agency (NIA) officials about their plan to topple the Indian government and impose Sharia law across the nation. According to them, only Sharia law could impose stringent punishment for offenders as Indian police were unable to control crimes in the country. Their main objective is to spread terror across the country. The NIA along with state police officials had earlier arrested 14 ISIS sympathisers across the country. According to the agency these suspects were under surveillance for some time.

The ISIS has ambitious plans to spread its network through online medium. For achieving this objective, the terror outfit is hiring Indian hackers who can pass sensitive information about Indian government to them. They are actively using social media to lure youth towards terrorism. The terror group is willing to shell out as much as $60,000 for every government information which is passed on to them.

Kislay Choudhary, a cyber crime expert, said, There are various underground communities online where hackers interact regularly. The handlers make lucrative offers for stealing government data. ISIS is making such offers to spread its reach in the country.

Choudhary further added that stealing government data is part of Islamic States exercise to formulate their strategy against India. He said that ISIS has contacted over 30,000 young techies from India so far and some may have already grabbed the opportunity.

They have plans to obtain huge amount of weapons to carry out terror activities across the country. The sym-pathisers were communicating with the ISIS group through social media. The police too were keeping a watch on the online behaviour of these youth. After the arrest of Shaikh Mudabbir from Mumbra police have got vital information about the modus operandi adopted by the group to spread terror. Twelve terror suspects have been sent to the NIA custody till February 5 for further interrogation by a special NIA court.

The Home Ministry has decided to seek information and aid from Ameri-can, German, Australian and Israeli investigative agencies regarding the suspects. It is suspected that the terror network in India may be larger.

The terror group Janood-ul-Khalifa-e-Hind or the Army of Caliph in India has emerged as a new threat. It is said to be a well-funded network of ISIS-inspired group and has recruits across the country.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2016  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and EPA need to tighten their standards for ammonium nitrate, the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) said in its report on the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, which obliterated the facility, killed 15 people and caused widespread damage to more than 150 buildings nearby.

CSB released its report ahead of a public meeting in Waco, Texas, on Thursday to discuss its findings. The April 17, 2013, fire at the West Fertilizer Company (WFC) plant detonated between 40 and 60 tons of fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN), not counting additional FGAN not yet offloaded from a railcar, CSB said. Twelve emergency responders and three members of the public were killed.

OSHA efforts to oversee facilities that store and handle FGAN fell short at the time of the incident, the CSB said

First, OSHAs Explosives and Blasting Agents standard was not very well known among those in the fertilizer industry, likely due in part to the fact that application of the section was unclear and (it) had rarely been used previously to cite fertilizer facilities, the report said.

In addition, OSHA left ammonium nitrate off the list of highly hazardous chemicals whose handling triggers the Process Safety Management standard, even though AN possesses reactive characteristics that would have triggered its inclusion, CSB said.

The Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA) released a statement saying it was pleased the CSB recommended that OSHA either implement Process Safety Management on FGAN or update its storage and handling standards.

ARA has ardently advocated for the latter, the group said. Applying PSM to retail facilities is inappropriate, inefficient and unnecessarily burdensome.

Language in a congressional report has resulted in getting OSHA to delay enforcement of PSM for most agricultural retailers who handle anhydrous ammonia until October, but ARA and The Fertilizer Institute are continuing to seek relief from the requirements, or, at the least, a notice-and-comment rulemaking.

The CSB report points out that West Fertilizer was not a manufacturing facility and that the anhydrous ammonia tanks did not suffer a catastrophic failure; to the contrary, they performed as intended and were able to withstand the blast, ARA said. Applying PSM  a regulation designed for manufacturing  to retail fertilizer facilities will cost the industry upwards of $100 million and will not enhance workplace or community safety.

CSB said the WFC facility was covered under EPAs Risk Management Program rule for its anhydrous ammonia tanks, but not for its FGAN. WFC employees and emergency responders demonstrated a greater awareness of the hazards associated with onsite storage of anhydrous ammonia than those associated with FGAN, the report said.

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If EPA had included FGAN under the Risk Management Program rule, the WFC would have been required to apply it for its storage of FGAN and perhaps could have reduced the risk of catastrophic accidents like the one that occurred at the WFC, CSB said.

ARA said it opposes subjecting FGAN to Risk Management Program requirements: RMP is a Clean Air Act program to manage and mitigate airborne releases of hazardous chemicals. Because it is a pressurized liquid, it is appropriate to regulate anhydrous ammonia under RMP and agricultural retailers are already under the CAA. On the other hand, FGAN is a dry product and it should not be regulated under RMP.

The report detailed a wide swath of destruction. More than half of the structures damaged during the explosion were demolished to make way for reconstruction, the report said. The demolished buildings include an intermediate school (552 feet southwest of the facility), a high school (1,263 feet southeast), a two-story apartment complex with 22 units (450 feet west) where two members of the public were fatally injured, and a 145-bed nursing home (500 feet west) where many of the seriously injured civilians resided. A middle school (2,000 feet southwest) also sustained serious but reparable damage.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26, 2016 - U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman took to the telephone on Tuesday afternoon to tout the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as summarized in a recent report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). Later, Froman announced a deal that will reduce red tape on beef exports to Colombia.





Froman noted that the model used in the PIIE report assumed the TPP would have no effect on either overall employment rates or the trade balance. But what the agreement would do is help move workers into higher paying jobs, he said.





Froman cited the reports estimate that by 2030, almost 800,000 jobs will be added to U.S. exporting activities.





According to the report, the TPP will raise real incomes in the United States by $131 billion in 2030 and a similar amount in subsequent years. To be sure, the TPP will also generate adjustment costs; some workers may face difficult transitions as less productive jobs are lost and more productive jobs are created.





U.S. exports will increase substantially in durable and nondurable manufacturing industries and in traded services, the report says. Export gains are smaller in primary (agricultural and mining) products because this sector is small in the first place and because its products are often exported in processed form as food, beverages, chemicals, and other raw-materials based products.





Froman was joined on the call by Kevin Kester, policy division chair for the National Cattlemens Beef Association, and Tampa, Florida Mayor Bob Buckhorn.





NCBA strongly supports all your efforts, Kester said, and echoed his own comments on the benefits of reduced tariffs on beef exports to Japan. Like Froman and Buckhorn, he urged approval of the agreement as soon as possible, but acknowledged theres still a lot of work to get done in Congress to gain support for TPP.





He said that in discussions with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Nobody is saying no to TPP. Everybody is doing their due diligence and their homework and going through the documents. Thats going to take time and its my impression that we will have some sort of action later in the year.





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Froman stressed the need to move quickly, saying that a year without the agreement in place would cost each U.S. household the equivalent of $600. But he also noted that the groundwork for approval needs to be laid first.





Asked when the administration might send implementing legislation to the Hill, Froman said USTR is consulting with Congress on the precise timing. Meanwhile, USTR is producing its own reports on the agreement. He also pointed to the U.S. International Trade Commission hearings and investigation on the TPPs economic effects, which will result in a report in May.





The conference call came shortly before Froman and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. had reached an agreement with Colombia to reduce burdensome certification requirements for U.S. beef and beef products for human consumption entering Colombia, which is not a TPP country.





According to a USTR press release, The agreement is expected to facilitate increased exports of U.S. beef and beef products, which have grown substantially since the May 2012 entry into force of the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement.
Stockholm (AINA) -- A coalition of Assyrian organizations in Europe has issued a statement calling on Turkey to stop bombing Assyrian villages in Iraq. Under the pretext of fighting against Kurdish PKK forces, Turkey has bombed Assyrian villages in Iraq which it suspects harbor PKK fighters (AINA 2016-01-18). Some Assyrian villages have been forcefully occupied by PKK fighters, as well as Muslim villages, but Turkey has only bombed Assyrian villages to date (AINA 2015-12-03).

Here is the statement by the Assyrian Confederation of Europe:

This latest attack is part of an intensi?ed campaign of bombardment, ongoing since late August 2015, waged by the Republic of Turkey against PKK militants who often hide in and around Assyrian villages in Nohadra. These attacks have led to the displacement of Assyrians from their homes and lands. In Sharanish, the bombings have led to widespread damage to homes and the destruction of a local water tank and other infrastructure essential to life in the village, making the prospect of Assyrians returning to their village far more dif?cult. More broadly, Turkish bombardment in and around Assyrian villages has led to a constant sense of fear and further exodus.

The Assyrian Confederation of Europe is distressed and outraged that innocent Assyrians are again paying the price for murderous regional rivalries and those between Kurdish parties that have nothing to do with Assyrians.

We call upon the Republic of Turkey to cease its bombardments of the Assyrian territory of Nohadra, most of whose Assyrian population has already been forced out due to decades of harassment, violence and land grabbing.

We also call upon PKK militants to cease occupying Assyrian land and coercing Assyrians into providing them with support and shelter, thereby forcing Assyrians to pay the price for the PKK's own political project as they did in the 80s and 90s in Tur Abdin, leading to the mass exodus of Assyrians from another crucible of Assyrian continuity.

In the Middle East today, borders have proved entirely porous when political and imperial interests emerge across them. The Turkish bombings in Nohadra have once again exposed the illusion of Iraqi and KRG sovereignty. Assyrians are not a mere adjunct to Kurdish and Turkish power struggles. Their suffering is not a by-product of these affairs. They are the indigenous people of occupied Assyria. Today, this land is subject to vicious games of political and military competition without Assyrians having any say over its future. These events have only made even clearer the need for direct international support if Assyrians are to survive in their ancestral homelands.

Signatories:
Qatar Airways Cargo will launch A330F freighter routes to Budapest, Prague and Ho Chi Minh in March, filling a definite gap in the market and increasing the Middle East airlines freighter destinations in Europe to 14 and in Asia/Pacific to six.

An Airbus freighter will fly twice a week from Qatar Airways Doha hub to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam on Thursdays and Saturdays, providing a combined total of 120 tonnes of cargo capacity to and from the city per week, in addition to the 72 tonnes weekly belly hold capacity on the daily passenger flights.

The new DohaBudapestPrague service will depart from Doha on Thursdays and Sundays. The 120 tonnes of weekly cargo capacity on the A330F will be allocated evenly between the two markets in Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The new European route will provide a major new gateway into Eastern Europe from Asia for electronics and automotive parts, as well as textiles, pharmaceuticals and biotech products. The service to Ho Chi Minh will support Vietnams growing influence as a major exporter of garments, footwear and handicrafts to the US and Europe.

Ulrich Ogiermann, Qatar Airways chief officer cargo, said: We have identified a definite gap in the market in these regions and we look forward to supporting local businesses in the areas with a more robust service connecting them to our wider global network.

Budapests Ferenc Liszt International Airport is promoted as a convenient location for distributing high-value products flown in from the Arabian Gulf, South-East Asia and the Pacific region, with 20 European countries within a 1,000 km trucking distance.

We are delighted to welcome Qatar Cargo to Budapest Airport as a regular customer, said Rene Droese, property director, Budapest Airport, in charge of cargo development.

He added: This new cargo route will present yet another strong business opportunity for our Hungarian customers in the automotive, digital, electronic, and pharmaceutical industries. I am sure that this new twice-weekly flight will increase the cargo performance of Budapest Airport substantially.

Qatar Airways Cargos network expansion for 2016 began in January with the launch of a freighter destination to Dallas/Fort Worth, taking the airlines number of freight destinations in the US to 13. In addition, a fourth-weekly freighter began serving Los Angeles, complementing the new passenger service to the US west coast hub.

The carrier added that further network growth is planned for later this year as more aircraft join the expanding fleet.

A new A330F and a new B747F nose loader were received by the airline in December 2015, and a further A330F is scheduled to arrive in the first quarter of the year followed by three new Boeing 777Fs by the end of 2016.

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Volga-Dnepr Airlines has announced the appointment of three global directors to push its expansion in the aerospace, humanitarian, and oil & gas sectors.

Axel Kaldschmidt has been appointed global director, aerospace Industry.

Aerospace customers account for 30% of Volga-Dneprs annual business and since its launch, the airline has operated over 5,250 flights for customers in the industry, delivering nearly 175,000 tonnes of cargo such as satellites, helicopters, aircraft and parts.

Faycal Boumerkhoufa is the newly-appointed global director, oil & gas industry, a sector that produces some 13% of the groups annual business and has so far seen Volga-Dnepr has transport 90,000 tonnes of cargo for oil & gas customers onboard 1,135 flights.

The types of cargoes carried include drilling equipment, pumps, power houses, blowout preventers and christmas trees (oil equipment components), tube bundles, pipeline valves, vents and pipe layers, compressors, heat exchangers, stabilisers, and control units.

Colon Miller has been appointed global director of humanitarian, government & defence programmes.

He will work closely with customers to ensure the timely and secure delivery of cargoes that include mobile hospitals and other medical equipment, instruments and medicines, water purification equipment, laboratory containers, generators, telecom equipment, heavy trucks, cranes and other vehicles, helicopters, boats, food supplies, clothes and other general cargo.

To date, Volga-Dnepr has delivered over 75,000 tonnes of cargo to people in need in 93 countries.

All three global directors will be based in Volga-Dneprs US office in Houston.

Dennis Gliznoutsa, vice President, sales at Volga-Dnepr Airlines, said: We have seen sustained growth in these three sectors over many years and have developed strong working partnerships with leading companies and organisations, who value our transport and logistics expertise.

Axel, Faycal and Colon are already well-known and highly respected in their respective sectors. These appointments will enable them to focus their energies and share their knowledge and expertise in a way that continues to add the greatest value for our customers.

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January 26, 2016

Several regional states geopolitically situated between Tehran and Riyadh, including Pakistan and Oman, have expressed an interest in helping patch up the broken Iranian-Saudi relationship. However, Iraq is perhaps the most suited among the prospective mediators, for several reasons.

First, discourse on the Iranian-Saudi rivalry conveys that much of it is directly related to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which upturned the regional power balance. Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif confirmed this perspective on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, arguing that the regional instability is caused by a panic in Saudi Arabia that believes there is a disequilibrium in our region after the fall of Saddam Hussein and after the Arab Spring. Iraq  or at least past Iraq-related developments  has also been featured in Iranian calls for engagement. Senior Iranian officials, including Zarif, have repeatedly made reference to UN Security Council Resolution 598, which ended the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and its provisions relating to the establishment of regional dialogue forums.

Second  despite being the scene of intense competition between Iran and regional powers, and also Iran and the United States  Iraq has over the past decade repeatedly served as a platform for dialogue. Indeed, the first direct, overt engagement between Iran and the United States after their 1980 cut in diplomatic relations was not related to the Iranian nuclear program, but to Iraq. Following Iraqi efforts, Iranian and US officials met in Baghdad in 2007. While tangible output was thin, the main achievement was the re-breaking of the taboo of Iranian-US engagement, which  following successful 2001 covert cooperation on Afghanistan  had reappeared after George W. Bushs inclusion of Iran in the Axis of Evil. Indeed, just two years after the meetings in Baghdad, the first direct Iran-US discussion on the nuclear issue took place in Switzerland. Of further note, upon Irans request, Iraq was also host to nuclear negotiations between Iran and the six world powers in May 2012.

Third, the Iraqi government has a strong interest in avoiding becoming a more intense battleground for regional influence. On an international level, bringing Iran and Saudi Arabia together could provide Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi with a boost in the grueling fight against the Islamic State (IS), and also much-needed credit in Riyadh, Tehran, Ankara and Washington. On a domestic level, facing a formidable constellation of forces opposed to Iraqi-Saudi engagement including from his own party, Abadi could score big if he manages to help jumpstart regional dialogue. Indeed, the Iraqi government has carried out a balancing act in regard to the Jan. 2 attacks on Saudi diplomatic facilities in Iran, which ruptured relations between Riyadh and Tehran. Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari stated, It is unjust to equate these criminals and the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose security personnel were injured while defending the Saudi Embassy and consulate, while urging Iran to assume its legal responsibility to prosecute the perpetrators of the attack on the Saudi Embassy and bring them to justice.

Fourth, for Saudi Arabia, engagement with Iran via Baghdad  where it has finally restored diplomatic representation  would provide it with a unique opportunity to undermine Abadis fiercely anti-Saudi Shiite rivals. As former senior Saudi diplomat Abdullah al-Shammari told Al-Monitor, If Saudi Arabia were to choose a country to be a mediator, it would choose Iraq not because it believes that the Iraqi government is neutral, but [because] Saudi Arabia is trying to find support for Dr. al-Abadis government to make it closer to the Gulf and Arab countries. Shammari added, Saudi Arabia was the first country that congratulated Prime Minister al-Abadi on Aug. 13, 2014  to give Iraq a priority and send the new Saudi ambassador to Baghdad to show its keenness to push bilateral relations forward.

With Saudi Arabia having failed to win over any Middle Eastern state in its campaign to fully diplomatically isolate Iran, except in the case of Bahrain, one would believe that it would be a Saudi objective to secure a prize such as the empowerment of the most prominent Iraqi Shiite politician balancing against Iran. However, it appears that Riyadh is either not recognizing this opportunity or actively deciding not to pursue it.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, who met with Jaafari on the sidelines of the Jan. 24 ministerial meeting of the Arab-India Cooperation Forum in Bahrain, said, There will be no mediation as long as Iran does not respond positively, insisting that Iran must stick to non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries.

In addition to not taking Iraq up on its mediation offer, Saudi officials have effectively undermined potential Iraqi Shiite partners, including Abadi. On Jan. 23, Saudi Ambassador to Iraq Thamer al-Sabhan said the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units should step aside in the fight against IS in favor of the Iraqi army. He further argued that the Popular Mobilization Units are not desired in Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions, since they are not accepted by the sons of Iraqi society. Predictably, the Saudi ambassador was summoned by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, while some Shiite politicians called for his expulsion. Oddly, in his Jan. 24 meeting with Jaafari, Jubeir appears to have suggested that Riyadhs ambassador doesnt represent Riyadh. In a statement, Baghdad said Jubeir had indicated to Jaafari that Sabhans comments do not reflect the official position of the Saudi government toward Iraq.

Ultimately, Saudi Arabias failure to utilize Iraq as a platform for dialogue, thereby losing an opportunity to empower potential Shiite friends in Baghdad, may be clouded by its broader view of Iran. Shammari told Al-Monitor, Even if Riyadh gives Iraq this chance [to act as a mediator], the Iraqi government has nothing to do here because the dilemma of Saudi-Iranian relations is that Riyadh believes that the [Iranian] president and foreign minister might be sincere about having good relations with Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi file is not in their hands. If Saudi policy truly is based on this perception, Riyadh would be wise to consider the possibility of its prophecies about Iran becoming self-fulfilling.
January 26, 2016

RAMALLAH, West Bank  Israel is continuing to annex Christian church endowments in Palestine, both covertly and blatantly.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon recently approved the annexation of the Beit al-Baraka church compound to the Gush Etzion settlements established on Palestinian territories south of the West Bank, according to a Jan. 6 Haaretz report.

Reportedly, Yaalon was responding to pressure by Israeli settlers who are constantly breaking into the church compound under the protection of the Israel Defense Forces. These settlers claim that they bought the compound, where a fence and security cameras have been installed and the IDF prohibits anyone from entering. Meanwhile, Palestinians are organizing marches in Beit al-Baraka to protest the settlers control over the church.

According to Palestinian officials and Christian citizens who spoke to Al-Monitor, there are eight buildings on the 10-acre church grounds, including a hospital providing medical care and services to Palestinians. The compound is owned and supervised by the Presbyterian Church in Palestine, which in turn is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the United States, they said.

The US Presbyterian Church had control over the Palestinian Presbyterian Churchs endowments from 1940 to 2008, when the US organization sold Beit al-Baraka church to a Swedish shell company without consulting the churchs branch in Palestine. That company then transferred ownership of the church to an association controlled by Jewish tycoon Irving Moskowitz, one of the main funders of Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. Moskowitz then transferred the lands to the settlers, who now claim they bought the compound.

The Presbyterian Church in Palestine condemned the sale in an official statement issued June 17, and denied any involvement in the suspicious deal that challenges the Presbyterian Churchs fight for the support of the Palestinian people and their national rights," saying, "The Presbyterian mission in the US does not have the authority to sell this property, and anyone who contributed to secretly selling Beit al-Baraka to settlers should be punished.

This issue has focused attention on the Israeli government's and the settlers' confiscation or long-term leasing of land and church endowment buildings in Palestine, Jerusalem, the West Bank and the 1948 territories.

Hanna Omeira, head of the Presidential Higher Committee of Church Affairs, told Al-Monitor Israel has seized numerous church endowment properties. "Some were seized from the heart of Jerusalem, like the land on which the Knesset center and the Israeli Cabinets headquarters were built. Moreover, wide land areas were rented, but there are no accurate statistics [for] them.

Regarding the Palestinian Authority's (PA) efforts to deal with the diversion of Beit al-Baraka, Omeira said, A complicated fraud operation occurred to take over Beit al-Baraka. We wrote to the mother church in the US, but it refused to cooperate. The Swedish government does not have answers about the bogus company that bought the endowments and diverted them to Israel.

He added that the PA and the Higher Presidential Committee of Church Affairs in Palestine are investigating political and legal recourse in the case. The committee has promised to follow up on Beit al-Barakas case with the Swedish government and will prepare a legal case to annul the deal. In the meantime, however, Israel continues these practices.

The Beit al-Baraka case is of particular concern because of the church's location.

This is a strategic and important area, as it is located on Highway 60," which links Israeli settlements to Palestinian communities between Jerusalem and Hebron, according to Khalil Tafakji, director of the maps and survey department of the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem. "It will be annexed to the Gush Etzion cluster of Jewish settlements, and the noose will be tightened on the Palestinian Arroub refugee camp in a way that separates the southern West Bank from its center, he told Al-Monitor.

In the same vein, there is a movement concerning the Greek Orthodox Church in Palestine and Jordan. A group calling itself Arab Orthodox Youth in Jordan and Palestine is speaking out against Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem. The movement's organizers, who held sit-ins and marches Jan. 6, consider the patriarch unworthy due to actions they deem racist against Arabs and wasteful with properties and endowments of the church that are being diverted to Israel.

Those actions include the patriarchs leasing to an Israeli company of almost 18 acres of land belonging to the Saint Elias Monastery south of Jerusalem. The Orthodox community believes the deal will leave the village of Beit Safafa surrounded by Israelis and allow them to expand their settlements in Jabal Abu Ghneim and Gilo.

Jalal Barham, a member of the Follow-up Committee of the Arab Orthodox High Council and head of the Arab Orthodox Cultural Club, told Al-Monitor, The area of the Orthodox patriarchates endowment properties is estimated at 20% of most religious endowments in Palestine. Nobody knows how many properties and lands were rented or diverted to Israel.

Barham continued, We are following up on the patriarchates endowments that are being taken over, through the Israeli media" and institutions like the Jerusalem Municipality and its planning and land departments. "This contradicts Patriarch Theophilos promise on Aug. 22, 2005, before his election, to regain the lands, stop deals and conduct an engineering survey for all the churchs properties and endowments.

Barham said the takeovers of the Beit al-Baraka and Arab Orthodox endowments are part of "a systematic policy [by] the patriarchs advisers."

Alif Sabbagh, a member of the Central Orthodox Council in the 1948 territories, told Al-Monitor, The patriarchate considers the Arab members of the Orthodox sect enemies, rather than partners in the endowments management, and forbids them from accessing any information related to these endowments.

One radical solution to the diversions, according to Sabbagh, would be to Arabize the spiritual leadership of all churches by appointing Arab clergy to senior church positions instead of Greek figures, and allowing them to manage [the churchs] affairs and make their own decisions.

He said the PA "should make a strict decision stating that every Christian endowment should be under the PAs authority, and no spiritual leader, whatever their sect, can use any property without the approval of the PA and in compliance with the interest of the Palestinian Arab members of the sect and church.

But the PA opposes the "Arabization" of the church and sees it an issue tied to national independence. The PA believes Israels classification of Palestinian land as disputed territories would encourage it to seize more church lands if Arabs were appointed to replace Greek clergy.

The PA does, however, advocate the appointment of Arab members to high ranks in the church. Omeira said, The PA objects to any schism within the Orthodox patriarchate and is working on opening dialogue channels between the church and its opponents to reach a solution amenable to all.

Hanna Issa, a professor of international law and the head of the Islamic-Christian Committee, told Al-Monitor, Confiscating church endowments in Palestine is illegal, as per international laws that forbid land confiscation in occupied territories like Palestine. But Israel is disregarding these laws and continues to take over lands and displace Christians and Muslims.

Issa added, These lands are Palestines, and they should not be sold without the approval of the PA.
January 26, 2016

The liberal pro-Israel group J Street aims to put $3 million behind 2016 congressional candidates who supported the nuclear deal with Iran.

J Street argues that it's crucial during this electoral cycle to demonstrate that voting in favor of diplomacy with America's foes doesn't have to be a career killer for politicians. While the debate centers on preserving the Iran deal, the group readily admits that its ulterior goal is the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

This effort is absolutely part and parcel of efforts to change the conversation around two-state diplomacy, J Street Political Director Ben Shnider told Al-Monitor. This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for us to broadcast the political incentives for taking a pro-diplomacy stance. If we can prove that it's costly politically to get in the way of effective Middle East diplomacy  we can open up space on the two-state issue as well.

Everything J Street does, Shnider said, is undergirded by a consideration about how it will impact the conversation around two states.

Some Democrats in Congress share a similar view.

Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., is the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's Frontline program to protect vulnerable incumbents. He told J Street supporters in a Jan. 26 conference call that political fear of diplomacy was self-defeating for candidates, and that Democrats should instead come up with ambitious but clear-eyed plans to address tensions in the Middle East.

Especially when we talk about a two-state outcome, I think there's this truism that candidates can't talk about these issues without getting backed into trouble, Kildee said. I think it's time for us to lay our strong aspirations for the region. And point to the Iran nuclear agreement, for example, as a very thorny set of questions that most thought we could not resolve through negotiations.

Kildee went on to highlight the multilateral aspect of the Iran talks  they included France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China  as a possible template for future Middle East initiatives.

The successful negotiation of the Iran deal does lead to the logical conclusion that we are stronger when we engage globally in the P5+1 structure, Kildee said on the call. The fact that we had broad international support made a big difference, because it validates I think the importance of this sort of diplomatic approach and it obfuscates what looks like domestic political differences manifesting in our foreign policy.

Peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians collapsed in 2014, with the Obama administration heaping much of the blame on Israel's continued settlement expansion in areas that the Palestinians want for a future state. Relations between Israel and the United States further soured last year as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied Congress to kill the Iran deal, to no avail.

Simultaneously, the Obama administration has shown a desire to work in tandem with the European Union in applying pressure on Israel over its settlement construction in the West Bank. The administration has refused to denounce EU labeling policies for settlement products despite vocal opposition from Congress, and US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro angered Israelis Jan. 18 with criticism of settlement policies that mirrors that of many European nations.

J Street has identified some 110 candidates that it supports, although a few are running against one another. Its top goal is to defeat Republican Sens. Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson in Illinois and Wisconsin, respectively, both of whom are staunch opponents of the Iran deal.

The liberal group is not taking on any Democratic incumbents, but it is backing the primary opponent to a defeated lawmaker who is hoping to make a comeback. In Illinois, J Street is supporting Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering against Brad Schneider, an Iran deal opponent who lost re-election in 2014 to Republican Bob Dold after just one term.

As a pro-Israel, pro-peace supporter, Nancy believes that the US should work with Israelis and Palestinians to arrive at a two-state solution, the J Street Political Action Committee says on its website. She has vocally voiced her support for the Iran Deal, while her primary opponent Brad Schneider authored an op-ed against it. Most importantly, Nancy feels that Americas relationship with Israel cannot be driven by partisan politics, but rather as a partnership among allies in democracy.

The $3 million that J Street hopes to raise is $600,000 more than its 2014 haul and almost twice the $1.8 million it raised for the 2012 presidential cycle. It pales in comparison with pro-Israel groups on its right, however: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee raised some $20 million for its campaign against the Iran deal, while pro-Israel donors on the right spend millions every election cycle to elect lawmakers.
January 26, 2016

The head of the Palestinian intelligence service, Maj. Gen. Majid Faraj, is often seen traveling alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. In fact, Faraj has been considered by local and international analysts as one of the possible successors of the Palestinian leader.

Faraj rarely talks to the media, but in one of his first interviews, which was part of an article published Jan. 18 by the New York-based Defense News website, he seems to have gotten in big trouble with his own people. The attacks against Faraj, who was born in Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, focus on what people see as his justification of the Palestinian security coordination with Israel.

The article titled Keeping ISIS out of Palestine talks about two possible contenders to take Abbas leadership position: Faraj, and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. In the 3,000-word piece, author Barbara Opall-Rome veers away from the danger of radicalism in Palestine and deals with Palestinian-Israeli relations. She writes about Faraj, He insists that since October, PA intelligence and security forces have prevented 200 attacks against Israelis, confiscated weapons and arrested about 100 Palestinians  claims that were not rejected out of hand, but could not be confirmed by the Israeli military.

The claims about preventing nearly 200 attacks by Palestinian youth against Israelis caught many off-guard and drew strong and harsh criticism from Palestinians of all walks of life. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were especially harsh in their criticism; they issued harsh joint statements condemning the Palestinian security chief.

One Hamas legislator, Yeihiya Abadaseh, on Jan. 22 called on he Palestinian military tribunal to initiate proceedings against Faraj for grand treason.

Farajs problems were not limited to those opposed to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA); some of the criticism came from within the mainstream Fatah leadership.

Maj. Gen. Tawfiq Tiwari, the former head of the Palestinian intelligence, told Al-Monitor that the head of the intelligence service should have stayed quiet. Tirawi conceded that he, too, is against having Palestinian children be sacrificed and killed by what he called Israeli summary executions.

He said, But we are with the resistance to the occupation and in fact not all those stopped by the Palestinian security were children. Tirawi was referring to the harsh Israeli response to all acts against Israelis that have often led to the death of the Palestinian attackers.

A more nuanced attack came from Ahmed Yousef, former political adviser to former Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh. Yousef appears to understand the motive behind the statement although he opposes it being made public.

The aim [of Faraj] was to explain to the West and the United States that the PA is fully carrying out its security duties in accordance with the Oslo Accord, but that the Israelis are not [abiding by it], he said in a statement Jan. 25.

Yousef concludes that Faraj should have made that statement in private. But now that his statement has been made public and has provoked an angry public response, Yousef asserts, Faraj needs to apologize to the Palestinian people or resign.

Faraj, however, was not without defenders. President Abbas quickly came to the rescue of his chief of intelligence. In a meeting with a selected group of Palestinian journalists Jan. 25 at his Ramallah headquarters, Abbas expressed full support for Faraj and insisted that the Palestinian leadership supports popular resistance, but we will not be drawn into a battle we dont want.

Support for the embattled Palestinian security chief also came from within the Dheisheh refugee camp. A statement by the Fatah movement in Dheisheh issued Jan. 23 reiterated the security leaders national credential that he was a stubborn opponent to the occupation during his years in jail and in his constant battles with the occupiers.

It is worth nothing that Faraj had spent six years, on and off, in Israeli prisons before the Oslo Accord was reached.

The Palestinian security official also drew support from an unusual source. On Jan. 24, the Medical Association of Jerusalem  which is the official syndicate of Palestinian doctors  praised Faraj calling for the need to protect our children and youth.

Nitham Najeeb, the head of the association, said that Faraj has protected the lives of 200 children, and thus prevented 200 mothers from seeing their loved ones dead.

The statement of the Palestinian security chief, made primarily to the Western security website Defense News, cannot be divorced from the ongoing discussion about the leadership succession in Palestine. If the head of the Palestinian intelligence is interested in the senior Palestinian position, his abrupt entry to politics has caused him to burn his fingers and certainly hurt his own political ambitions. While the lessons learned from this experience might help him sharpen his public pronouncements, he is unlikely to get much help from colleagues within the Fatah movement, many of whom are hoping to get that top position themselves. Faraj is hopefully not apathetic to local public opinion, thinking that his political future is only in the hands of Israel and the West.

However, Faraj made the statements solely as part of his job and to protect his superior. While letting the Israelis and the rest of the world know where the Palestinian security services stand, these statements will quickly be forgotten as the battle of succession will continue.

The choice is Farajs; if he does have political ambitions, he needs to quickly remedy the dent he has caused to his own image and has to work much more carefully on his personal profile and public pronouncements. Otherwise, he should just wait for the storm to settle.
January 26, 2016

Knesset member Shelly Yachimovich headed the Labor Party from 2011 to 2013. During those two years, she led the party to a general election while eschewing the diplomatic platform of the most senior party in the Israeli peace camp and burying it deep in the closet.

Riding on the coattails of the 2011 social justice protest, Yachimovich went full throttle with a strategic approach that underscored the Labor Partys social democratic banner de rigueur, while addressing the diplomatic issue as little as necessary. Thinking that if she focused only on social and economic issues while dimming her partys character as the standard-bearer of a diplomatic compromise, she had hoped to garner support from right-wing voters who were not die-hard.

Acting much like Yesh Atid's Chairman Yair Lapid, she, too, tried to curry favor with the settlers. In his case, during the January 2013 elections, Lapid won 19 seats out of 120. In Yachimovichs case, this approach collapsed, awarding her only 15 seats, having lost voters to the Meretz Party and Tzipi Livnis now-defunct Hatnua Party.

Even back then, Yachimovich was slow to understand her colossal mistake. It was only in May 2013, 20 months after having been elected as chairwoman of the party and after realizing that a party primary was in the offing, that she found it appropriate to schedule a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I have just met with Mahmoud Abbas for a tete-a-tete. Those who want to get an update should contact me, she texted her bewildered faction members. Her text was sent in tandem with a press release she had issued right after leaving Ramallah. In talks with activists back in those days, she admitted to having been wrong not to give the diplomatic issue its proper weight.

But the forced meeting with Abbas and eating humble pie did not help her much. In November of that year, she was defeated by Isaac Herzog in the partys primary.

This introduction is important to understanding the high-profile spat that has erupted this week between those two figures. In a vitriolic and derisive comment on her Facebook page Jan. 24, Yachimovich lambasted Herzogs separation plan. What she was referring to was a meeting between Herzog and French President Francois Hollande on Jan. 22, in which the former argued that a diplomatic arrangement at this time could not be reached and which is why temporary alternatives had to be found. At no point did Herzog renege on his commitment to the two-state solution. Instead, he presented a diplomatic analysis to the effect that Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were trapped in an impossible political environment. Both of them are weak and refuse to engage in dialogue.

Its possible that some right-wingers are applauding Buji [Herzog] right now. To be honest, I dont think so. This whole thing looks so unbelievable  to outflank Bibi [Netanyahu] from the right.  Just like that, in one fell swoop, you overturn a fundamental ethos that underlies our worldview? she took a jab at him. Throughout her long-winded text, she made sure to call Herzog by his nickname in what appears to be an attempt to dwarf and ridicule him.

She continued, I dont agree with Buji and I disagree with his view that now is not the right time for negotiations. On the contrary. Mahmoud Abbas is not a lover of Zion but he could certainly be the last secular and pragmatic leader in the Palestinian Authority. To do away with the two-state vision and the pragmatic efforts to implement it in issuing a press release is such a radical and confusing step.

In her post, Yachimovich failed to address the damage she herself had caused to the diplomatic discourse. My diplomatic worldview has always been sharp and clear: Two states for two peoples. Palestinian neighborhoods are not  and will not be  part of Jerusalem and [we need] to implement the Saudi Initiative to the maximum extent possible, she said, casually dismissing the charges leveled at her for currying favor with the settlers.

If Yachimovichs diplomatic worldview is indeed so clear and dear to her heart, why didnt she do anything to act on those ideas when she was the partys leader? As chairwoman of the opposition with 15 seats, she could have done much more than just hold a belated meeting with Abbas, which had no follow-up. In 2003, toward the end of the second intifada and with just 5 seats to his name, Yossi Beilin  then a Knesset member and the leader of the Meretz Party  was able to provoke a keen debate in Israel concerning the Geneva Initiative. Even former Prime Minister Ariel Sharons adviser Dov Weissglass once admitted that the Geneva Initiative was one of the triggers of the 2005 disengagement plan, following which Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip. Beilin had enough conviction and creativity to bring about a change despite having little political clout. To this day, the Geneva Initiative is an important milestone on the continuum of diplomatic plans, to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

What Herzog has been doing over the past week is precisely a Beilinesque move  in the good sense of the word, trying to forge an avenue to bypass the diplomatic vacuum. He does not make do with hackneyed mantras such as the two-state solution. Rather, he is trying to push the envelope of the diplomatic discourse.

Herzogs plan closely corresponds with the spirit of the Labor Party during the era of late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. On the one hand, Herzog is presenting an uncompromising commitment to security during this time of a third intifada, while, on the other hand, he is proposing to manage the conflict until the dialogue can be resumed. As a temporary measure, he has proposed to separate from East Jerusalems neighborhoods in terms of security. This is certainly not a wink at the right or a capitulation to the likes of right-wing HaBayit HaYehudi Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich. Yet it does sound like an awakening and a pragmatic move, which might not be politically feasible because the right is in power, but one which could defy Netanyahu and his right-wing ministers should this plan succeed in eliciting public pressure.

The spat among the Labor Partys top echelons proves that Herzogs move might have succeeded. It has put his plan on the international agenda and he has no intention of letting up. Moreover, he distinguishes himself both politically and diplomatically from Netanyahu, reinstating the Zionist Camps relevance that was lost amid Lapids frenzied activity.

Seeming to brace herself for a showdown against Herzog in the Labor Partys future primary (Labor is the main partner in the Zionist Camp), Yachimovich looks and sounds to be under some stress. Herzog was right to counter with the same derisive tone: Do you think that if you tell the Palestinians tomorrow: Hi, this is Shelly, lets make peace, they will lay down their knives?

This week, Herzog returned from a successful trip to Paris during which he met with Frances diplomatic elites who proposed to host a regional peace conference. Contrary to Yachimovich, Herzog cannot be blamed for having forsaken his commitment to the diplomatic process. Rather, he could be identified as the person who charted a new course and who realized he has to act against Netanyahus diplomatic vacuum  as he himself observed in an interview with Al-Monitor. 
January 26, 2016

The Channel 2 network recently received an unusual complaint: A viewer of the reality show "Big Brother" claimed that her feelings were hurt when a participant was shown putting on tefillin, small boxes containing Torah verses worn by observant Jews during weekday prayer. For the viewer, the problem was that this participant, Michael Elroy, is transgender  a man who was born a woman and changed his gender. Even though Judaism does not forbid women from putting on tefillin, most of the Orthodox public holds that this deed is reserved for men only. And so, according to the complainant, Channel 2 enabled a woman to ridicule Jewish values and the holy books.

The station's franchisee, Keshet, which broadcasts the program, fully backed Elroy. He was born female but in the course of his life made a sex change and today hes a man, the company stated to the network in response to the complaint. Therefore, how he relates to himself is how we relate to him, and how we expect society to relate to him.

Openness and liberalism allowed the media to cast a transgender person on one of the most watched television shows in Israel and to bravely stand behind the decision (even if it might also involve a measure of commercial cynicism). On the other hand, for some viewers, a line was crossed.

A sex change has no legal validity, determined a rabbi on the Yeshiva website in response to a commenter who wondered about Judaisms view of transgender people.

An incident like this naturally sparks public debate. More importantly, it exposes the phenomenon of sex change to those who may be going through the same thing but remain closeted out of fear or shame, especially young people.

Public awareness of the topic is growing thanks to celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner or prime-time shows like 'Orange is the New Black' or 'Transparent,'" said Dr. Asaf Oren, a pediatric endocrinologist and the director of the clinic for transgender youth at Tel Aviv Medical Center  a facility that is unusual in Israel and rather unique worldwide.

The clinic, established three years ago, seeks to provide treatment for those 18 or younger who are on whats called the transgender spectrum  that is, who experience some degree of incompatibility between their gender self-definition and their genitalia.

There was a clinic here for adults, Oren told Al-Monitor, and youth started to come, to ask questions and request treatment. We know from the literature that the moment such a clinic exists, more and more people seek it out. The numbers attest to its necessity. It started in dribs and drabs of one or two patients every six months. In the last year, about 10 patients arrive every six months. Its not that there are more youth like this, its that theyre less afraid of coming out of the closet.

On paper, the treatment of transgendered people in Israel is progressive: The state pays for sex-change operations and hormone treatments. Dr. Ilana Berger, a psychologist and the director of the Israeli Center for Human Sexuality and Sexual Identity, told Al-Monitor, Schools know how to handle the issue and accept transgender youth. The Israel Defense Forces also accepts transgendered people for service, and theres even a transgendered officer.

Elisha Alexander, the director of Maavarim, which advocates for the transgender community, is less enthusiastic. According to him, the organization hears from 60 people a month, and its true that there are some positive trends, and the state does a lot, and theres no violence on the scale that exists in other places. But there is a lot more work to be done.

For instance, Alexander calls the committee that approves sex-change operations at the Ministry of Health "the seventh circle of hell." Because of this, he argued, most patients choose to fund the operation themselves. He also sees the task of changing ones gender on the Israeli identification card a nightmare. The government procedure requires a person to have undergone a sex-change operation in order to change the gender designation on the ID card. Incompatibility between the gender designation on official documents and the persons appearance makes the trans person vulnerable to violence, Alexander emphasized. Its hard this way to rent an apartment, find work, travel abroad. Banks think youre falsifying documents.

The Clalit HMO, with the participation of the Center for Mental Health in Ness Ziona, conducted a survey on the topic. The results found that half of transgender people in Israel have suffered physical violence, and 70% have suffered verbal violence. The survey revealed that 30% of transgender people are unemployed, significantly higher than the general unemployment rate. Of those who are employed, 57% earn minimum wage.

According to Berger, the clinic is a "ray of light" for transgender youth. She described their experience as a double life that includes anxiety, depression, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts  especially during puberty, when the body ultimately betrays their internal gender.

The clinic and Maavarim sometimes see parents with 3- or 4-year-old children who already express some kind of gender incompatibility with the sex they were born with. Gender is something that forms at this age, said Alexander, but at this age, nothing should be decided.

While the clinic can't offer treatment at such young ages, it can provide support. The clinics involvement doesnt start before age 11-12, the start of puberty. Most youth come to the clinic at age 13-14 or older; younger ages are the minority, said Oren. In order to start treatment, we need the authorization of a mental health professional and the agreement of the youth and both parents.

At first, the clinic gives a treatment that delays puberty. Its reversible and has virtually no side effects. This treatment gives the young patient more time to decide. At an older age, they start with hormonal therapy, which is irreversible.

Berger and Oren stressed that Israel is committed to international standards of treatment for transgendered people. But conservative elements consider the clinic and the liberal spirit it reflects as cultivators of the transgender phenomenon that reinforce gender confusion, which they see as a correctable part of one's sexual development.

''We have not increased the frequency, but enabled self-expression to people who were embarrassed or scared to admit it and stayed in the closet. This only increases distress and psychiatric illness. You cannot 'fix' a child; such attempts are useless. If a child's gender behavior is not accepted, this could lead to greater distress," said Oren.

We enable self-expression for those who in the past had been ashamed or afraid and stayed in the closet, which causes heightened despair and mental illness, he concluded.

Alexanders assessment is sharper: "Instead of transgender youth staying in the closet for 30 years, 41% of whom will try to commit suicide, they act as they see themselves and not as society expects them to. I doubt that this would cause someone who isnt transgender to become so  being transgender is no picnic.
January 27, 2016

The girl tried to stab a security officer at the entrance to the Anatot settlement in Binyamin, but he dodged the knife and shot her. That was the laconic police announcement concerning the attempted stabbing that took place Jan. 23 in the Anatot settlement. A short time later, video from security cameras at the settlement entrance was released to the media. The settlement administrator claimed that the footage demonstrates that the guard was in mortal danger and did everything else he could until he was forced to shoot the girl.

Despite the poor quality of the video, however, it clearly shows the great distance between the knife-wielding girl and the guard who pulled his gun on her. The guard, threatened by a knife in the hands of a 13-year-old girl, could have acted according to the rules of engagement for opening fire, which begins with warning shots fired into the air and progresses to firing at the attackers limbs. Only after all possible steps have failed to defuse the situation and the guard is in real danger is he supposed to shoot to kill. Instead, the Anatot guard's very first action was to shoot to kill.

When the girls father arrived at the scene, her identity and motives became clear. Abu Eid had fought with her family and then fled their home in Anata village, armed with a knife. She evidently wanted to accomplish two things: become a shahid (martyr) and take revenge on her family, knowing that their home would likely be demolished by the Israelis as punishment for her actions.

The episode in Anatot is another example of the failure of the working hypothesis of the Israeli security apparatus in regard to deterrence. It turns out that neither killing attackers nor destroying their family homes serves to deter young Palestinians from committing acts of terror. Potential assailants may not be concerned about what will happen to them or their family members if they carry out their intentions. In the case of Abu Eid, as well as others before and after her, deterrence did not work. On the contrary, Abu Eid wanted to die and take revenge on her family, according to the Shai Unit of the police after interrogating her father.

The Palestinian and Israeli security apparatuses have attempted to profile these lone wolf attackers to understand what motivates them to get up one day and, without instruction or backing, give up their lives on behalf of what the Palestinians are calling the supreme goal  liberation from Israeli occupation. Israelis tend to shrug their shoulders and simplistically attribute the terror to incitement by the Palestinian Authority. The reality, however, is more complicated. In fact, there is a tremendous gap between Israelis and Palestinians in the way they perceive the acts of these attackers, whether male or female.

Israelis, for example, view Morad Bader Abdullah Adais, the 15-year-old who murdered Dafna Meir in Otniel Jan. 17, as a monster who slayed a mother in front of her children. By contrast, many Palestinians, even those who dissociate themselves from this brutal murder, view the boy as the victim of an impossible situation. They see Adais as a victim of the occupation and as someone who was willing to sacrifice his life for the supreme goal shared by the entire Palestinian population.

Palestinian security members have paid visits to the homes of all those who have carried out attacks to create a general profile of these "lone wolves." Palestinian intelligence has collected data from the families of all the attackers, learning about their residential situations, hobbies, friends, social and familial issues and what they did in their spare time. They collected any and all scraps of information that might help them understand what is driving young Palestinians to carry out attacks even when they know that they are unlikely to survive. The data collected on dozens of assailants throughout the West Bank surprised even the security agents.

More than a third of the assailants have been aged 13 to 20. Almost all of them suffered from personal, familial and social problems. It seems they felt that the only way to escape their misery was by perpetrating an attack in Israel or against Israelis, thus becoming an admired and esteemed shahid. In Palestinian society, shahids bring honor to the family for dedicating themselves to the Palestinian struggle and being willing to give their lives on its behalf.

This glorification of shahids closely resembles the national-social code that emerged during the second intifada (2000-2005). At that time, tahidiya (self-sacrifice) came to be viewed as a cherished value in Palestinian society. In a society under occupation and suffering from hardship, it was almost the only way to achieve social mobility. Only those who brought honor to their family by sacrificing their lives for the peoples liberation, could improve their familys situation by raising their status to a high and noble one in their community, with the family also receiving financial compensation for their sacrifice.

Most members of Fatahs military arm, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades who took part in the second intifada, had opted for a career change. They went from being members in terrifying criminal gangs that sowed fear in their communities through what was called fawdda (chaos and anarchy) to being fighters against the occupation. When the intifada erupted and Palestinian society entered into a state of emergency, the criminals, hooligans, car thieves and drug dealers found that the only way to shed their criminal status was to participate in the uprising and perpetrate terror attacks against Israel. Only then did their social status rise (along with their families'). They even received funding from various organizations, including the PA, then headed by Yasser Arafat.

The current intifada is different, and tactics to combat it are quite limited. What the Israel Defense Forces viewed as an effective solution in the second intifada is no longer relevant. Today, there is no organizational infrastructure, and therefore, there is also no operational military deterrence.

The most efficacious and perhaps only solution for Israel is to draw conclusions from the past and change its approach. The killing of terrorists does not create deterrence and neither does the destruction of their family homes. All these steps have not halted the current wave of attacks.

A member of the Palestinian security forces told Al-Monitor that Israels mistake is that it does not realize that deterrence will only be achieved once it prevents young Palestinian assailants from becoming shahids  that is, once it stops killing them. In this way, youths will believe that martyrdom is not the answer. The fewer shahids there are, he argued, the fewer youths who will follow in their path and attempt to emulate them.

The Palestinian security officer also said that fewer funerals, pictures and videos of dead people and blood would benefit the Israeli side much more than any other path of action. He says that in security coordination meetings, the Israelis have been given a clear message: Every young Palestinian corpse produces numerous copycats willing to follow in the deceased's footsteps.

What are the chances that Israel will act on this advice? Since the current intifada began, it seems that instructions for opening fire have not been clarified. Conclusions have not been reached that would bring about changes in the assumption underlying responses to the terror attacks. Instead, Israel continues to act based on outdated concepts.
A new Hoover business aims to teach you how to paint. And if art makes you nervous? Let a little wine take the edge off.

Painting with a Twist will open at 701 Doug Baker Blvd. Thursday in the Village at Lee Branch next to the Carmike Theatre. The concept offers classes for up to 36 people at a time, and guests can bring wine, beer or other beverages.

Hemen Patel, a Homewood High School and UAB graduate, decided to open the franchise after a business partner told him about visiting a location with his wife.

"I am proud to introduce Painting with a Twist to Alabama for the first time," said Patel. "I want to provide guests with a fun night out and a chance to escape reality, all while creating memorable pieces of artwork."

Painting with a Twist was founded in 2007 and is based in Mandeville, Louisiana. The company has more than 250 locations in 32 states, but this is Alabama's first location.
If you're searching for a tasty king cake for your Mardi Gras party, look no further than Edgar's Bakery in Birmingham.

In fact, Edgar's -- which has five locations in metro Birmingham and one in Tuscaloosa -- makes one of the best king cakes in America, according to USA Today.

The USA Today Travel website puts the Edgar's king cake in same league as those from such Louisiana favorites as Tiger Deaux-nuts in Baton Rouge, Sophie P. Cakes in Lafayette and Cochon Butcher, Willa Jean and District: Donut Sliders Brew in New Orleans.

Here's what USA Today says about the Edgar's king cake:

"Founded in 1998 by Terry and Dottie Smith, Edgar's Bakery is known for their stunning sweets made from natural ingredients. During Mardi Gras season, the store ships king cakes around the country. Here, the made-from-scratch cakes are baked daily and start with a cinnamon roll dough that's braided and topped with a colorful sugar glaze. There are four different flavors, which include traditional, pecan praline, cream cheese and Edgar's signature strawberry."

A traditional king cake with no filling is $30 and the pecan praline, cream cheese and strawberry cakes are $35. A mini-cake with no filling sells for $10.

The cakes are available through the Mardi Gras season at the following Edgar's Bakery locations:

The Shops of the Colonnade. 3407 Colonnade Parkway. 205-968-4031. Open 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

Patton Creek. 180 West Main St. 205-444-1220. Open 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

Cadence Place -- Greystone. 6801 Cahaba Valley Road. 205-408-0897. Open 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

Financial Center - Birmingham. 505 20th St. North. 205-488-9393. Open 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays.

Pelham. 499 Southgate Drive. 205-987-0790. Open 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

Galleria of Tuscaloosa. 1653 McFarland Blvd. North. 205-345-6031. Open 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

For a full menu and more information, go here.
The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus returns to Birmingham this week for the LEGENDS show - the last featuring elephant acts.

The six elephants featured in LEGENDS - along with five others in a show that tours simultaneously - will retire permanently in May to the Center for Elephant Conservation. The 200-acre property in central Florida already houses North America's largest herd of Asian elephants.

"This is the last time Alabama will be able to see the world's most talented, famous elephants," Ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson said. "It's their last hurrah."

The Ringling Bros. show is in Birmingham from Wednesday, Jan. 27, through Sunday, Jan. 31, at Legacy Arena at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex.

Iverson said Ringling Bros. has come to Birmingham too many times to count in its 146-year history.

He said the Greatest Show On Earth continues to draw longtime fans and attract new ones because of its iconic status in American culture and the dedication and talent of the cast and crew. It's not like Hollywood, where performers are supplemented with computer effects and stunt doubles.

"It's in a class by itself," he said. "That's what keeps it going. It's the most diverse, international show there is."

Iverson recalls a family in Florida - two children dressed as a ringmaster and a clown - who were having so much fun that he decided he just had to meet them.

"They suffocated me with hugs," he said. "The woman said her son is autistic and he didn't speak his first words until he came to his first circus."

He said the most fulfilling experience is seeing how people in the audience are affected by their shows.

"There's something for everybody," he said. "I can't say what each person will get out of it individually, but I do know that you're going to have the time of your life."

The show, billed as epic family fun, features circus artists from around the globe performing "awe-inspiring feats of daring, spectacles of strength and thrills of wonder to summon the mythical and the mysterious visions that have only existed in your imagination until now: the Unicorn, Pegasus and Woolly the Mammoth."

LEGENDS features talented people like Alexander Lacey, who was raised in the Himalayas among big cats. His family has raised eleven generations of lions and nine generations of tigers.

Ringling Bros. makes sure everyone - from the ringmaster to clowns to acrobats - take the time to go out into the communities where they perform. With more than 300 cast and crew members, "we're a city without a ZIP code pleasantly invading a city," Iverson said.

They eat food from local restaurants, shop at local grocery stores and buy food and supplies for the animals locally. They visit hospitals and community centers, and they deliver anti-bullying lectures.

"That's the heart of this gig," Iverson said. "That's our Oscar, our Grammy, when we put smiles on faces and affect lives. You never know what it might mean to people."

During this visit to Birmingham, they donated $10,000 to the Child Life Program at Children's of Alabama to support pediatric patients. To many patients' delight, they gave a taste of their antics, with clowns jumping rope, a dance troupe performing a short number and everyone posing for photos.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey is all about giving back to the community, said DJ, a Minnesota native who is performing as a clown for LEGENDS and visited Children's Wednesday.

"We only have a few days, so we want to leave biggest impact," he said. "It means the world to us to be able to bring circus magic into the places that need it the most."

"Seeing the slightest smile on the face of a kid who may not have had a reason to smile recently makes me know I did my job," he said.

The Wednesday night performance features local meteorologist James Spann. It will honor local Marines for their work on Toys for Tots, as well as Children's of Alabama and 100 hospital guests.

Performances are Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday and Friday at 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m.; Saturday at 10:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.; and Sunday at 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Tickets, with prices starting at $15, are available through Ticketmaster or by calling 1-800-745-3000. All seats are reserved. For group rates and information, call 256-533-1953. For more information, visit ringling.com.

Updated at 5:43 p.m. to fix typos
Step inside the artist-in-residence cottages at Serenbe. Tour the two spaces, connected by a wooden deck. And ponder: Could you construct one of these adorable, efficient homes for $20,000?

OK, these exact structures? Not precisely. But that's the challenge Serenbe, a nature-focused community outside Atlanta, is helping Auburn University School of Architecture's Rural Studio examine.

Design-and-build program Rural Studio has a decade of experience creating 20K houses. They're named to indicate the smallest loan a person on Social Security could afford through the Section 502 rural housing loan program, a feature of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Newbern-based program's students have developed 18 prototypes, including one- and two-bedroom homes, and constructed them for clients in Alabama's Hale County. The $20,000 figure is an estimate for labor and materials; the plans could be altered, and cost is subject to the price of land and other variables.

Now Rural Studio is in the process of bringing to market plans that anyone could use to build these homes. Serenbe is the first organization to test the plans.

"They always said they wanted to be in the room but not at the table," says Brandon Hinman, who's the Serenbe artist-in-residence program director and served as project manager. "We gave them full access to any numbers, any city code issues, any snags and questions we would get from licensed general contractors."

That uncovered a number of challenges to address before the plans are market ready, and Rural Studio's Rusty Smith says that's as he expected. Outside consultants examined the three one-bedroom home plans, dissecting them to consider architectural, environmental and structural concerns. The next phase was putting the plans into action--and learning as problems arose.

"One of the fundamental problems we're trying to deal with through the 20K house is really designing a house that is both affordable and dignified, that anybody in the world would want," says Smith, Rural Studio's associate director. "A product doesn't really exist, but (there are) also a lot of other cross threaded, systematic issues that stand in the way of small-home ownership. They're everything from zoning issues to code issues to mortgage issues to insurability issues. There are issues with how the for-profit contracting business works."

In Hale County, Rural Studio serves as its own contractor. That creates hands-on experience for students. But in order for the plans to be useful for outside entities, they must be understood by zoning officials, contractors, home owners and other stake holders. That can't be studied within academia.

And those challenges arose in the Serenbe project: Off the bat, the cottages' permit was denied. Smith says the group then worked to educate the code officials on the buildings' construction. They were ultimately approved without problem. Then, it was on to the next step.

Profit margins must be considered; a contractor or a lender is a business and must benefit for these homes to be sustainable. Neighborhoods have size regulations often meant to outlaw trailer parks. These homes are fewer than 500 square feet but don't depreciate the way a mobile home does.

These challenges are common in the tiny house movement, in which people seek to downsize to smaller structures. Rural Studio's mission is to create dignified housing at an affordable price so it's available to anyone--including organizations like Serenbe.

Few modifications were necessary for the cottages: They are connected by a deck to function as a single unit, meeting the neighborhood's size requirements. Serenbe added a small air-conditioning system; Rural Studio's 20K house rely on passive cooling through design.

"The way they've designed them, it makes them these efficient machines. To the naked eye, you don't see the difference," says Serenbe Marketing Director Monica Olsen.

Atlanta-area designers and vendors contributed to the finished cottages' interior design, whereas Rural Studio's clients are individuals who fill the home with their own possessions.

Any interested party could modify as needed, and of course those factors would affect the project's total cost. The bigger question is, how can Rural Studio fine tune the plans in continued pursuit of making them available to all?

The end result may be akin to an instruction set rather than traditional construction plans. Education is important. Rural Studio continues to collaborate with outside partners, such as Regions, in answering those questions. It typically costs lenders $2,300 to create a mortgage, and so the profit margin is significantly different for a $20,000 mortgage than a $200,000 mortgage. The bank has long worked alongside the studio to explore solutions.

"That sort of knowledge has to be clearly understood by all the stakeholders in the project, from the people who finance the house to the people who insure the house to the people who review the house for safety to the people who build the house to the people who live in the house," Smith says.

Hinman says, "It can't just be from the ivory tower. It can't just be this progressive design-build program that does this wonderful partnership. Those things coming together, yes, that makes the world go round. But it's people like the man building these cottages, it's got to make sense for him too."

Serenbe will offer feedback as artists stay in the cottages; because the Hale County homes are occupied full-time, observation over time is more difficult.

Work continues on Rural Studio's part, as well. The 18 prototype plans include two-bedroom homes, but the three vetted 20K plans are one-bedroom structures. They are partly but not fully accessible. The studio will work with consultants to prepare two-bedroom and accessible plans for replication. And in future plans, space for a dedicated cooling system could be included; passive cooling works for Rural Studio's Hale County clients, Smith says, but he acknowledges that it won't meet everyone's expectations.

And of course, construction goes on. Rural Studio's primary mission is training architects. They'll leave the Newbern headquarters with understanding of the profession and its implications on people's lives. How graduates share it with the world is up to them.

Edited 4:22 p.m. Jan. 27 to correct the cost to a bank of a mortgage.
As Ottawa prepares to lift sanctions against Tehran, analysts say political barriers may slow return of diplomatic ties.

Toronto, Canada  Canadas new government has said it will lift some United Nations-imposed sanctions against Iran, but experts and activists say further changes in relations with Tehran face legal and political barriers.

Speaking in parliament in Ottawa, Stephane Dion, the foreign affairs minister, said on Tuesday that Canada was prepared to lift sanctions imposed in response to UN Security Council resolutions on Irans nuclear programme.

The UN announced last week that Tehran was complying with the terms of a multilateral deal curbing its nuclear programme and that member states were free to lift sanctions.

Canada will join the United States, the United Kingdom and others in easing restrictions on business and trade with Iran.





But there are other, more sweeping sanctions imposed for different reasons, some by the previous government, led by Conservative former prime minister Stephen Harper.

Harpers administration cut diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2012 and listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to reopen state-to-state relations with Tehran during his successful election campaign last year.

According to Thomas Juneau, a University of Ottawa professor, Iran expert and former official at Canadas Department of National Defence, legislation introduced by the Harper government amounted to booby-traps that could trip up the new governments plans.

That is a problem, he said, as European countries and even the US are looking at how the nuclear deal allows them to resume doing business with Iran in a number of potentially lucrative areas, from aviation to oil.

These laws make it more difficult for Canada to follow suit, and that is worrisome because we are [already] out of sync with our partners, Juneau said.

There are two separate challenges for Ottawa in restoring ties with Iran, Juneau believes; one is political, the other legal.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Who will pay as Canada cuts ties with Iran?

Designating a country a state sponsor of terrorism is not something that can simply be undone; it may even require new legislation.

For example, Iran is still close to Hamas and Hezbollah, both groups that Canada lists as having links to terrorism, Juneau said.

Those ties will remain a problem for us, whatever happens with Iran.

A political strategy involves explaining Canadas position, justifying it to the public and interest groups and creating consensus around the perceived need to restore diplomatic and business links.

We need to look at how to prepare the ground [for better ties], because we are falling behind on many fronts, even while remaining cautious, he said.





Analyst Navid Hassibi, from the Ottawa-based Council on International Policy, agrees.

All our G7 partners are re-engaging and we are not, he said. Britain has restored diplomatic relations. Italy is already signing deals. We should be moving quickly.

Improving human rights in Iran is part of this agenda, Hassibi added.

We cant talk to Iran about human rights if were not on speaking terms, he said. If we can be friends with Saudi Arabia, with whom we do business and have these issues, why not Iran?

The recent prisoner exchange with Washington that saw Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and others being freed in exchange for Iranians held in the US showed what was possible, he said.

Two Iranians with Canadian permanent resident status  Saeed Malekpour and Mostafa Azaia  are currently serving time in Iranian jails.

But some in Canadas Iranian diaspora vigorously oppose moves towards normal relations.

Samira Mohyeddin, a Toronto restaurant-owner and activist, cites the case of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photo-journalist who was arrested, tortured and killed while in custody in Tehran in 2003.

That case has never been settled, and Mohyeddin says its perpetrators are still powerful at senior levels in the Iranian regime.

This is a vicious theocracy, she said. Its not all about money, its also about basic human rights which are denied in Iran.

If they reopen an embassy in Ottawa, we will be protesting in front of it, just as we did for 30 years before 2012.

Canadas Conservative opposition agrees.

Peter Kent, the partys foreign affairs critic, said Canadian diplomats might face real risks if they returned to Iran.

There is no doubt that the current government is aware of both the pitfalls and the opportunities in pursuing changes in ties with Tehran.

As Foreign Minister Dion said on Tuesday: Canada will lift its sanctions but what Canada will maintain is our suspicion of [the] regime. We will take this step by step.
Amsterdam, the Netherlands  Greeces migration minister dismissed a Belgian proposal to build a camp for almost half a million migrants in Greece as dangerous nonsense.

Talking to Al Jazeera after a two-day summit of European Union interior ministers in Amsterdam, Yannis Mouzalas said his Belgian counterpart, Jan Jambon, floated the idea of expelling Greece from the Schengen open borders area, because of its inability to stanch the flow of refugees from Turkey.

He introduced the subject with some dangerous nonsense about building a concentration camp for 400,000 people in Greece, and we all moved on. It simply wasnt put forward, said Mouzalas.





Greece has fiercely resisted the idea of becoming a concentration camp for migrants. Last September it was forced to agree to create temporary space for 50,000 people  half the mandated capacity of the entire EU.

Now a chorus of immigration hardliners in the EU wants Greeces northern border crossing with former Yugoslav Macedonia to be sealed.

Sealing Greek borders

Greece is in danger of becoming a black box [for refugees] if these flows dont decrease, Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, told the Financial Times in December. He repeated that fear at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Slovenia gave new impetus to this idea on the eve of the Amsterdam summit, suggesting that the EU concentrate on strengthening the former Yugoslav Macedonian border with Greece as a more defensible one than the Greek-Turkish maritime border.

That could turn Greece into a vast screening area for hundreds of thousands of arrivals. Those qualifying for asylum could in theory be relocated elsewhere in the EU.

Many EU members, however, including Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, have resisted the idea of relocation.

Last September, the EU agreed to relocate 160,000 refugees out of Greece and Italy, who currently receive almost all of the irregular migration into the EU. Greece was to be relieved of 66,000 refugees under this quota.

Instead we have relocated 900 people in Europe, said Mouzalas.

We have another 930 people ready for relocation and 248 of these have been approved. I believe only 13 states have offered places [out of 28 members of the EU]. Instead of relocation, we are closing borders, building concentration camps and removing peoples valuables, smartphones and jewellery, he said in reference to a decision by the Danish government to strip asylum-seekers of their valuables to help pay for their stay.

These things are not representative of Europe. They are not European decisions.

Idomeni

The port of Piraeus near Athens this week had a taste of the unrest Greece might expect if EU hardliners get their way.





Police prevented hundreds of migrants from boarding buses to the border, which is their main gateway to the rest of the EU. Migrants sat on the asphalt of the highway that runs around the port and protested for half an hour, bringing traffic to a standstill.

When we asked police why they wouldnt let people on the buses, they said because there are 5,000 people already waiting at the border,' said Sotiris Alexopoulos, who cofounded a volunteer force called Piraeus Solidarity.

In the end the buses returned and the people were able to continue. We cooked them some soup and gave them clothes and shoes, Alexopoulos said.

Authorities have allowed Piraeus Solidarity to use a passenger terminal as a storage area for food and clothing. More than a hundred refugees lingered there well after the protest, resting and allowing their children to play.

A Syrian boy and girl pushed a supermarket trolley across its vast concrete expanse, shrieking with delight.

I think they will stay here overnight and move on to the border tomorrow, said Simone, a Dutch volunteer with Refugee Boat Foundation.

Piraeus Solidarity has become a focal point for volunteers and donations from Greece and across Europe. This spirit of co-operation stands in stark contrast to the impasse among governments.

If the borders close, everything changes. We havent considered what that means, said Sotiris.

Volunteers tell Al Jazeera that the Greek border crossing at Idomeni is currently opened every half hour for about 50 people, and sometimes it is kept closed for up to two hours.

I think it is criminal for this to be happening before relocation is set up, said Mouzalas, because right now this humanitarian corridor that starts in Idomeni is the only legal route for migration. It allows us to know how many cross each day and who they are 

If this is abolished, the borders are thousands of kilommetres long. Illegal entry and smugglers and traffickers will be reinforced, and it will of course be a very convenient passage for terrorists.

A Greek proposal

Greek officials have focused on ways to protect the sensitive eastern border with Turkey, which is the main entry point for refugees and migrants into Europe. Some of them resent the money being offered to Turkey.

Why should we pay Turkey to enforce its own laws? asked Spyros Galinos, the mayor of Lesbos, which receives more than half the migrants smuggled across the Aegean.

I suggest that instead of chartering ferry boats to bring refugees from Lesbos to Athens, the government should send them directly to Turkey to bring them here for sorting. At least that way we wont see people drowning, and well cut the smugglers out of their business, Galianos said.

The EU last year offered Turkey 3.2bn euros ($3.48bn) to do a better job of policing smugglers on its shores, but that seems to have done little.

A European Commission report last month said that Turkey was not doing enough to police its borders. Turkey needs to take concrete steps in order to improve the capacity of the agencies in charge of border management. Recourse to conscripts for border surveillance is a matter of concern, the report said.

As many as 3,000 people continue to arrive in Greece daily, despite high winds and low temperatures. Forty-three people drowned last Friday when two boats capsized in Greek waters, most of them women and children.

Ministers at Amsterdam discussed a version of Galianos proposal. Greece has suggested that police intercept boats as they alight on Greek shores, and escort migrants to camps for identification. Refugees would be separated from economic migrants.

Frontex, the European external borders agency, would then sail the economic migrants back to Turkey the next day according to Mouzalas.

The problem is that for the plan to work, large numbers of patrol boats and a much heavier police presence would be required. Most boats are currently intercepted by volunteers, because police are overwhelmed with the job of identification. Greece would need reinforcement from EU members, whose track record in providing such help is poor.

READ MORE: Greek anarchists organise for refugees as state fails

We have asked for 26 patrol boats. We have received eight, said Mouzalas. We asked for 1,800 officers and received 800. We have asked for 47 ambulances and have received none.

Short of resettling refugees directly from camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, however, there seems to be no other ideas for stopping their flow once they reach the Aegean. And the increasingly xenophobic mood among European countries does not appear conducive to reaching agreement on more open immigration policies, even if they are more effective.
It is essential that Cameron supports Muslims rather than keep the community under pressure and continuous scrutiny.

While prejudiced comments on Muslims by the United States Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sickeningly help his popularity within the US political right, Britains overwhelming rejection of his comments sends a clear message that discrimination and bigotry are not acceptable in our robust democracy.

In many ways, Britain surpasses others when dealing with minority and disadvantaged people. Successive Race Relations Acts since 1965 and the inclusion of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006  guarded by the robustness of our judiciary and watchful citizens  have contributed to our current standing.

Regrettably, however, many Muslims are now gripped with nervousness for fear of facing further scrutiny because of the political short-termism of the government led by David Cameron. His rigid policy on anti-radicalisation, in other words Prevent agenda, has effectively pigeon-holed activist Muslims into the category of non-violent extremists with all the negative connotations that label brings.

Prevent has already proved counter-productive. There have been high-profile cases of schoolchildren being picked up for questioning  one for saying the term eco-terrorism and another for wrongly spelling terrorist (terraced) house in the class; there is a huge disquiet in the community.

Unsubstantiated claims



Camerons announcement to the Conservative Party conference last autumn on supplementary schools increased the anxiety. His comment that Ofsted was to inspect religious educational institutions, such as madrasas, which will be shut down if they are suspected of filling childrens heads and hearts with hate sent a chilling message to Muslims across the country.

His assertion that some of these supplementary schools were helping to incubate divisions within society was challenged as not being based on evidence. The countrys main umbrella Muslim organisation, the Muslim Council of Britain, expressed concernand asked the prime minister to substantiate these serious allegations.

Al-Qaeda or ISIL-inspired terrorism is real and serious, but its main victims are Muslims themselves. by

Since then the education watchdog Ofsted has stepped up its rhetoric on madrasas. The Department for Education initiated a consultation on November 26, 2015, and called for evidence on out-of-school education settings. Some mosque leaders have decided not to cooperate with the government on the grounds that mosques should remain independent and free to teach Islam in a lawful manner, as they currently are.

Examples chosen by the prime minister in his conference speech were only about madrasas, and the message the media and ordinary people heard was a clear shot at the Muslim community. When the Ofsted chief recently suggested Sunday schools could be inspected under counter-extremism measures, this caused consternation among some Conservative MPs.

Under serious pressure from them, Cameron pledged to stop Ofsted inspectors raiding Sunday schools. This double standard not only flies in the face of equality, but also raises a fundamental issue of fairness and British values in a pluralist democracy. Alas, there was no such voice in favour of madrasas!

OPINION: Trump is a symptom not the disease

According to 2011 IPPR research, there are about 2,000 Muslim supplementary schools across the country that cater for around 250,000 children. Such schools are mostly very small in the local community. The report states that those madrasas have the potential to positively influence Muslim childrens development, allow pupils to explore and understand their own identity and strengthen community cohesion.

As most of them are embedded within mosques, they are much valued by parents. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a think-tank focusing on collaboration and exchange of ideas, found that the sector currently faces a complex set of challenges and may require some stability funding from the government. Instead, the prime ministers step is causing instability.

More efforts needed

Madrasas teach young children Arabic to recite the Quran and essential religious rituals, in a non-political, traditional pedagogic way. Some madrasas are ill-equipped and have limited resources; there are issues such as a shortage of quality teachers, limited funding and inadequate physical infrastructure.

Due to all these issues, the curriculum in some is not as broad, and quality assurance is not as comprehensive as other educational establishments. However, there are good models of successful partnership between some madrasas and the statutory and voluntary bodies. This has improved the quality of education and contributes to bridging gaps in many places.

OPINION: Pornotopia  from ISIL to Donald Trump

There is no evidence to suggest that madrasas present a risk of radicalisation or extremism. What most of them need is funding and collaboration from local governments and business to perform better. If this is done with understanding and mutual respect, madrasas can be an asset for producing better citizens. Some local authorities are indeed helping mosques in child protection and other issues.

Cameron has, in recent times, taken some constructive steps by recognising Islamophobia and asking the police forces in England and Wales to record anti-Muslim hate crimes separately and treat them as seriously as anti-Semitic attacks. He and his ministers are now referring to ISIL as Daesh.

But these positive gestures are often overshadowed by his irresponsible swipes at Muslims, such as the one he recently made on Muslim women needing to learn English to stop extremism. This created unnecessary headlines in the media and anguish in the community.

Crime is not a Muslim monopoly. Others have their share, such as those churches that have faced high-profile historic child abuse cases recently. Al-Qaeda or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-inspired terrorism is real and serious, but its main victims are Muslims themselves.

It is absolutely essential that Cameron and his government support Muslims too, rather than keep the community under pressure and continuous scrutiny.

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari is an educationalist, author and parenting consultant.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Beijing is no longer content with lurking on the sidelines and is willing to have a say in the Middle East.

Where the enemy advances, we retreat. Where the enemy retreats, we pursue, Mao Zedong, Chinas founding father, once famously said. As the Middle East enters a new brave world, marked by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and an emerging detente between Iran and the West, China has begun to recalibrate its regional policy.

Beijing, which is no longer content with simply lurking on the sidelines, is intent on shaping the Middle East in accordance to its own interests. President Xi Jinpings high-profile visit to the Middle East, the first by a Chinese leader since 2009, couldnt be timelier. It came shortly after the full implementation of the Iranian nuclear accord.

Crucially, it also came after a dangerous flare-up in Saudi-Iranian tensions in light of the execution of prominent Shia scholar, Nimr al-Nimr earlier this year.

By choosing to visit the regions three most powerful countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran), Xi signalled the beginning of a broader and more pro-active Chinese engagement with the Middle East. It was Xis visit to Iran, however, that marked the highlight of his regional tour.

Unshackled by the removal of most punitive Western sanctions, Iran is (once-again) poised to become the fulcrum of the Middle East, presenting both new opportunities and challenges for external powers such as China.

ALSO READ: The Chinese are beating the West at its own game

Beijing is intent on making sure that it will retain a robust strategic and economic foothold in post-sanctions Iran, which has been rapidly normalising relations with Europe and welcoming hordes of Western companies on its shore.

Marching West strategy

For centuries, the Middle East has been at the centre of Western imperial machinations. And more recently, it has been at the receiving end of US military interventions, which ended the reign of a few despotic regimes, but set the whole region on fire.

The Chinese leader underlined millennium-old relations between China and Iran, calling on his Persian hosts 'to seize the momentum and further elevate our relationship' as the two ancient friends 'usher in a new chapter' in their relations. by

Viewing the Middle East as the graveyard of imperial ambitions, and intent on constraining Chinas rising ambitions, the Obama administration has sought to recalibrate American grand strategy by launching the Pivot to Asia policy.

But as Washington struggled to disentangle itself from regional quagmires, China gradually stepped up its strategic presence throughout the continental Islamic sphere, stretching from Central Asia to North Africa, under the  Marching West strategy.

For Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, this strategy allows China to hit multiple birds with a single stone. On the one hand, China needs to secure stable and affordable energy supply for its industrialising economy. On the other, a power vacuum in the Middle East and Central Asia would also strengthen transnational terror networks, which could directly hurt China in its western flank, specifically in places such as Xinjiang.

By playing a more pro-active role in managing the conflicts in the region, China would gain leverage over Western powers, which are desperate for Chinas assistance in stabilising the region. No wonder then, that China tried to help resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis as well as, more recently, mediate Saudi-Iranian tensions, which have come to a head in recent weeks.

Courting the Middle East

During his visit in Cairo, Xi sought to court the Arab League by declaring his countrys support for an independent Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. He declared Chinas concern for the legitimate aspirations of Palestine to integrate into the international community as a state. In effect, he dispensed with Chinas long-standing policy of neutrality and non-intervention in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

To charm his Egyptian hosts, the Arab worlds most powerful military state, Xi offered $1bn in economic assistance. In Saudi Arabia, Chinas leading source of crude oil, Xi signed a comprehensive bilateral strategic partnership, offered to build a nuclear power plant, and sealed a $1.5bn energy deal.

ALSO READ: Chinas vision of the Middle East

The Chinese leaders visit to Iran, however, was of key importance. It was the first visit by a Chinese head of state in 14 years. In Tehran, Xi met all key players in the Iranian political system, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who told his guest how Iran will never forget Chinas cooperation during the time of sanctions,

Quite dramatically, the Chinese leader underlined millennium-old relations between China and Iran, calling on his Persian hosts to seize the momentum and further elevate our relationship as the two long-standing friends usher in a new chapter in their relations.

The Persian prize

Meeting his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, Xi talked about a new season in Sino-Iranian relations. The two countries signed 17 accords, focusing on infrastructure, energy, and revival of the ancient Silk Road, with Rouhani envisioning bilateral trade (currently at $50bn) reaching a whopping $600bn in the next 10 years.

They also discussed ways to coordinate their efforts in resolving the crisis in Syria and fighting against extremist groups. Beneath the veneer of what seems like a solid alliance, however, Beijing is worried that a post-sanctions Iran is intent on ending its economic dependence on China  which supplanted Europe as Irans top trading partner during Tehrans isolation in the past decade  in favour of re-engaging in the world on its own terms.

After all, like never before, European companies and governments have been courting Iran, hoping to tap into the countrys pent-up demand for advanced technology, capital, and goods, as well as explore the prospects of a strategic partnership with the Middle Eastern powerhouse.

As Iran begins to host a growing number of Western leaders and businesses, China is beginning to realise that its special relationship, forged during Tehrans years of isolation, will soon become not so special.

Amid Irans expected economic boom, China will most probably have to settle for a smaller share of a growing Persian pie as it competes with the West for every major project.

Richard Javad Heydarian is a specialist in Asian geopolitical/economic affairs and author of Asias New Battlefield: US, China, and the Struggle for Western Pacific.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Chinese artist protests at controversial Danish legislation, which allows valuables and cash to be seized from refugees.

Renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has closed an exhibition in Copenhagen in protest against the Danish parliaments approval of laws to deter asylum seekers from entering the country.

Weiwei announced the closure of his Ruptures exhibition on Wednesday in a decision that was backed by the Faurschou Foundation art institute in the Danish capital, where the exhibition was showing.

This decision follows the Danish parliaments approval of the law proposal that allows seizing valuables and delaying family reunions for asylum seekers, Ai wrote on his Instagram page.

The 58-year-old activist has been sharing pictures and videos on his personal Instagram account, drawing attention to the plight of the thousands of refugees risking stormy waters to escape war and hardship.

READ MORE: Ai Weiweis photos from Lesbos capture refugee life

The raft of anti-immigration measures passed by Denmark on Tuesday include extending the reunification time period after which family members outside can rejoin refugees in the country from one year to three years.

It also allows the confiscation of refugees cash exceeding 10,000 kroner ($1,450), prompting comparisons to Nazi Germany, which confiscated the goods of Jews during World War II.

The law will also allow for asylum seekers belongings to be searched.

Cash and proceeds from the sale of valuables belonging to refugees will be used to pay for their stay in Denmark.

The Danish legislation has been criticised by a raft of human rights organisations. The Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, said the law violates fundamental property rights.
Network registers complaint at World Bank arbitration court accusing Egypt of targeting its journalists and offices.

Al Jazeera Media Network has lodged a claim for damages against the Egyptian government, accusing it of harassing journalists and damaging its office and equipment during repeated police raids in the country.

A claim was filed with the World Banks arbitration body  the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)  last week but formally announced by Al Jazeeras lawyers on Wednesday.

Egypt is accused by Al Jazeera of systematically and deliberately targeting the network in the aftermath of the January 25 uprising in 2011, which brought down former President Hosni Mubarak.

The case centres on the networks claim that Egypt violated a 1999 Qatar-Egypt bilateral investment treaty, which requires that investors be afforded fair and equitable treatment by the governments of both countries.

The treaty also ensures treatment of Al Jazeeras staff in a manner consistent with international human rights laws, and respect for their right to freedom of expression.

Three Al Jazeera English journalists were arrested in late 2013. Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste were convicted of spreading false news and being members of a terrorist organisation. All three spent more than 400 days in an Egyptian prison.

Al Jazeera first issued a notice of its intent to file a case to Egyptian authorities in April 2014, from which the two sides had six months to resolve the issue according to the treaty.

Speaking on Wednesday, Saad Djebbar  an international litigation lawyer familiar with the case  said Al Jazeera delayed pursuing the case in order to avoid jeopardising the fate of its journalists put on trial by Egyptian authorities.

The organisation had chosen an arbitration process because of the politicised nature of Egypts judiciary, Djebbar said, adding that the complaint was filed to highlight treatment of its journalists by the countrys military rulers.

When you look at the claim, youll see that most of it focuses on the treatment of the journalists and freedom of press  This is a vehicle to highlight the detention of journalists and the attacks on Al Jazeera buildings and equipment, Djebbar said.

An Al Jazeera spokesman on Wednesday said the decision to pursue the case had been taken after continuing attacks upon the network and its staff.

Network lawyer Lawrence Northmore-Ball, from law firm Carter-Ruck, said any decision by the World Banks arbitration body would be binding.

Any award rendered by an ICSID tribunal is final and binding on the parties  and cannot be challenged or reviewed in any national court, Northmore-Ball said.

Egyptian authorities have not formally responded to the case, and no deadline has been set for the country to file its defence against the claim.

Repeated calls to Egypts foreign office seeking comment went unanswered on Wednesday.

Al Jazeera has been the subject of a number of raids, arrests, and arson attacks in Egypt.

Egyptian authorities also detained Al Jazeera Arabic journalists Abdullah Elshamy and Mohamed Badr in 2013. Both were eventually released after being imprisoned for months.

The networks Al Jazeera Mubasher Masr channel was the subject of police raids in 2013, and some of its staff were briefly detained. The channel was eventually forced to shut down operations inside Egypt in September 2013.

In November 2012, a studio operated by the network overlooking Cairos Tahrir Square was set alight by unidentified attackers who also damaged equipment.
Wednesdays 3 percent falls take 2016 losses to nearly 25 percent, or $2 trillion.

Chinese shares fell sharply again on Wednesday after plunging in the previous session, taking losses in 2016 to nearly 25 percent, or $2 trillion.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index was down 3 percent in afternoon trading, having tumbled 6.4 percent on Tuesday to its lowest close since December 1, 2014.





Chinese markets began the year with a series of precipitous falls and a sharp depreciation in the yuan currency, and selling pressure has persisted as economic data confirmed slowing growth and deteriorating business conditions, hammering investors confidence in stocks.

Gu Yongtai, analyst at Cinda Securities, said the prospect of investors having to sell stocks they bought with borrowed money in order to cover margin calls has also hurt sentiment.

Theres fear that stock price falls would trigger margin calls, which then adds further pressure on prices, although the actual amount of forced liquidation is not as big as people would imagine, Gu said.

Four listed companies suspended trading in their shares on Wednesday, saying that their major shareholders, who have pledged shares as collateral, face margin calls and would seek ways to avoid forced liquidation.

If the market continues to fall, equity pledging-related selling pressure could increase significantly, putting further pressure on the stock market, said Gao Ting, head of China strategy with UBS Securities.

Inside Story: Is the global economy headed for another crash?

Trading volumes have thinned, making price moves even more volatile, as many investors have given up on Chinese stocks since last summer, when shares crashed 40 percent.

Beijing then intervened to stem the rout and orchestrate a recovery of sorts, but those that bought back in would again be nursing losses.

Chinas woes have also damaged risk appetite in global markets, which have also been hit by tumbling oil prices.
Politicians unite in condemnation after Milos Zeman suggests using a Kalashnikov to get rid of Bohuslav Sobotka.

The Czech Republics President Milos Zeman has caused outrage in the country after joking about using a Kalashnikov assault rifle to get rid of his prime minister and adversary.

Opposition parties and government politicians alike have united in condemnation at the presidents comments about Bohuslav Sobotka.

Zeman made the comment while at a public debate in the town of Tisnov after a member of the audience asked what do to about the prime minister, known for his more moderate stance on the refugee crisis.

If you want to get rid of any politician, including the president, there is only one democratic way and that is a free election, which will take place in a year, Zeman said.

And then there is an undemocratic path that is called Kalashnikov, he said with a smile, the Reuters news agency reported.

Hardliner

Zeman has been previously criticised for his hardline stance on refugees and has called the flow of people fleeing wars in the Middle East and Asia, an organised invasion.

Sobotka, who leads the ruling Social Democrat (CSSD) government, has condemned the presidents comments.

We are with the highest probability the only country in a civilised world where the president publicly calls for killing the prime minister, news agency CTK quoted him as saying.

A joint statement by the speakers of both the upper and lower houses of the Czech parliament said Zemans comments were unacceptable, local news outlet Ceske Noviny reported.

We are convinced that similar statements by constitutional officials, no matter if they may have been meant as an exaggeration, are completely unacceptable and inappropriate, said Milan Stech and Jan Hamacek, both from Sobotkas CSSD, in a statement.

Opposition Communist party chairman Vojtech Filip also called Zemans words disgusting.

Zeman, who has little executive power, has spoken out frequently against Islam and Muslim migration into Europe.
Christiane Taubira had criticised a proposal to strip nationality from dual citizens convicted of terrorism.

Frances Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has resigned after objecting to President Francois Hollandes push to revoke citizenship from convicted terrorists with dual nationality.

President Hollandes office announced on Wednesday that Taubira, who was often at odds with her government on policy, had resigned.

Her resignation came before a parliamentary debate on the bill that would allow people convicted of terrorism to be stripped of French citizenship in certain circumstances.

Last month Taubira labelled the measure a fundamental problem in terms of national rights by birthplace, in an interview with an Algerian radio station.

Parfois resister c'est rester, parfois resister c'est partir. Par fidelite a soi, a nous. Pour le dernier mot a l'ethique et au droit.

ChT  Christiane Taubira (@ChTaubira) January 27, 2016

A devoted leftist, best known for championing the legalisation of gay marriage, Taubira tweeted on Wednesday that sometimes, to resist is to remain, sometimes to resist is to leave.

The government statement said her resignation had been accepted and that Jean-Jacques Urvoas, widely known as a strong advocate of the government line on such reforms, would replace her.

The citizenship bill, prompted by the Paris attacks on November 13, is popular among conservatives and the far right but has divided the governing Socialist Party.
At least 55 Iraqi soldiers and pro-government tribal fighters have been killed in two attacks attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in the countrys western region, near the city of Ramadi.

The first attack took place in the early hours of Tuesday when several suicide car bombers attacked the headquarters of the tenth Iraqi army division in northern Ramadi, killing 30 soldiers and pro-government fighters.

Previously held by ISIL, Anbars provincial capital was recaptured by Iraqi forces three weeks ago, though ISIL remains strong in some pockets, particularly in the citys eastern district and in the al-Sijariya neighbourhood.





Iraqi security forces have meanwhile stopped escalating their offensive in the eastern parts of Ramadi, in an effort to minimise civilian casualties. They accuse ISIL of using families there as human shields during ongoing military operations.

Separately, at noon on Tuesday, a dozen ISIL suicide car bombers tried to breach the Iraqi army barracks on the border of al-Baghdadi city, west of Ramadi, killing 25 Iraqi soldiers and tribal fighters in the process.

The ISIL fighters were prevented from entering al-Baghdadi after heavy fighting with Iraqi soldiers and air strikes by the US-led coalition.

Mass grave in Ramadi

The attacks come a day after Iraqi forces uncovered more than 40 bodies, including those of women and children, in a mass grave in Ramadi.

Interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan said the grave in central Ramadi contained the bodies of civilians as well as police, the Associated Press reported.

OPINION: How Iraq recaptured Ramadi and why it matters

Video footage from the site shows local security forces and a small forensics team wearing face masks and digging with shovels.

Similar mass graves have been found in other areas recaptured by Iraqi forces from ISIL in Syria and Iraq.
Muslims and refugees are being scapegoated and alienated as attacks claimed by ISIL rise, Human Rights Watch says.

Huge refugee flows to Europe coupled with broadening attacks on Western civilians in the name of ISIL have led to growing fear-mongering and Islamophobia, a new report said on Wednesday.

Attacks and the massive exodus of refugees as a result of the Syrian conflict were causing governments to curtail rights in misguided efforts to protect their security, Human Rights Watch said in its 659-page World Report 2016.





As rights are rolled back amid the politics of fear, authorities are alienating populations crucial to counterterrorism efforts, executive director Kenneth Roth said in the report.

These backward steps threaten the rights of all without any demonstrated effectiveness in protecting ordinary people, he said.

More than one million refugees, many of them Muslims, have fled to Europe by sea in the past year.

Since deadly attacks on civilians in Paris in November and the US city of San Bernardino in December, tensions have escalated.

Roth said public discourse has been filled with voices of hatred and fear of Muslims, for whom the refugees are surrogates.

These messages need to be countered foremost because they are wrong. In the modern world of easy air travel and rapidly shifting populations, Muslims are part of almost every vibrant community. Like everyone, they should not face discrimination, he said.

The report also described Europes preoccupation with new refugees as a possible threat as a dangerous distraction from its own home-grown violent extremism, given that the Paris attackers were predominantly Belgian or French citizens.

The roots of radicalisation are complex but relate in part to the social exclusion of immigrant communities  the persistent discrimination, hopelessness and despair that pervade neighbourhoods on the outskirts of some European cities, and particularly the disjuncture between expectations and prospects among subsequent generations, Roth said.
SS colonel hanged in 1962 said he was a mere instrument in the killing of six million Jews during WWII.

Israel made public on Wednesday a handwritten request for clemency by Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Holocaust, who was executed by Israel in 1962 following a war crimes trial.

In his letter to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eichmann said that he was a mere instrument of leaders responsible for the killing of six million Jews in World War II.

His plea for his death sentence to be commuted was dated two days before he was hanged. Release of the letter, written in ballpoint pen, coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A spokesman for Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said that although the plea for clemency had been public knowledge since Eichmanns trial in Jerusalem, the actual letter had only recently been found when documents were being scanned for digital archiving.

It was released to the media and Rivlin said during a ceremony at his official residence to mark the remembrance day that he would like the document to be put on display at Israels Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

The handwritten letter has not been seen since it was filed away in the [presidential] archives, a spokesman for Rivlin said.

Eichmann was one of the architects of the Nazis Final Solution, and he oversaw the rounding up and deportation of Jews to death camps such as Auschwitz.

In the letter, Eichmann wrote: I was not a responsible leader, and as such, do not feel myself guilty.

He asked Ben-Zvi to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.

In 1960, Israels Mossad intelligence agency abducted Eichmann from Argentina, where he was living under an assumed identity.

He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people. He is the only person to have been executed by Israel since its founding in 1948.
US authorities tighten security and urge occupiers to leave after militiaman was killed during FBI operation.

State and federal authorities have urged a group of armed men still occupying a US wildlife refuge in Oregon to abandon the protest over land rights, a day after their leader and seven other people were arrested and one man was killed.

Law enforcement tightened security around the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday after occupation leader Ammon Bundy and his group were taken into custody at a traffic stop on Highway 395 in northeast Oregon.

One member of Bundys group was killed during that confrontation, identified by activists as Robert LaVoy Finicum, a rancher who acted as a spokesman for the occupiers. Bundys brother, Ryan, was wounded.





The police set up a series of checkpoints along key routes in and out of the refuge. Only ranchers who own property in the area were allowed in and anyone coming out of the refuge had to show identity and have their vehicle searched.

At a news conference in Burns, Oregon on Wednesday morning Greg Bretzing, FBI special agent in charge of the agencys Portland office, said that the remaining occupiers were free to leave the refuge, saying they would be identified at checkpoints manned by law enforcement.

Let me be clear: It is the actions and choices of the armed occupiers of the refuge that have led us to where we are today, Bretzing said.

Earlier, groups sympathetic to the occupiers called for calm.

The Pacific Patriots Network, Oath Keepers and the Idaho III%  all self-styled militia groups sympathetic to the occupiers  said in a joint statement that they were issuing an immediate stand by order to followers.

We have confirmed that all women and children are off the refuge at this time. It is confirmed that the authorities have the refuge surrounded and have made no attempts to ambush. We have inside sources telling us that they have been in contact with the authorities trying to work out a peaceful resolution, the statement said.

Al Jazeeras Tom Ackerman, reporting from Washington DC, said approximately 40 people, including women and children, remained inside the compound.

READ MORE: Deadly shooting during arrest of US militiamen

One of the remaining occupiers at the reserve, Jason Patrick, told the Reuters news agency by phone that they would stay until the redress of grievances.

Ive heard peaceful resolution for weeks now and now theres a cowboy who is my friend who is dead  so prepare for the peaceful resolution, Patrick said.

On Wednesday morning an occupier posted what appeared to be a live feed from the refuge on a YouTube page called DefendYourBase. In it, a few occupiers, some dressed in camouflage, were seen in front of what appeared to be a heavy-duty 320D excavator, at least two of them carrying firearms.

At one point, a man spoke on a phone with a person he identified as his mother and offered her reassurance.

If I die, I died for my country, I died a free man, he said. Thats how I want to die.

The man added that his group had food and everything for the long haul.

The Malheur takeover, which started on January 2 with at least a dozen armed men, was a flare-up in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a decades-old conflict over the federal control of millions of acres in the West. Protesters say they are defending the Constitution.

Bundys father, Cliven, was a key figure in a 2014 armed standoff with federal officials over unpaid grazing fees in Nevada.
Unless the political progress in Tunisia is matched by economic advances, social tensions will continue to boil over.

According to academic Lamine Bouazizi, Tunisias transition process has faced two crucial moments: the first when two opposition figures were assassinated in 2013, and the second on January 22, when violent protests broke out in Kasserine over a lack of economic opportunities.

Provinces such as Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and Gafsa are a social time bomb, said Bouazizi, 47, who has done extensive research on the labour movement in Tunisia and documented the root causes of the countrys revolution.These cities were the first to rise up against Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, and the January 22 protests were the latest culmination of a citizenry asserting its rights.

Unemployment in the olive and fruit-farming region bordering Algeria is almost double the national average. The latest wave of protests suggests that unless the political progress in Tunisia is matched by economic advances, social tensions will continue to boil over.

Al Jazeera spoke with Bouazizi about the events in Kasserine and what this means for Tunisias transition process.

READ MORE: Extinguishing the flames of the Arab Spring

Al Jazeera: Why did protests break out in Kasserine?

Lamine Bouazizi: We need to understand the recent history of Kasserine. It is the first city that has embraced the protest movement that broke out in Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, and transformed it into a nationwide revolution.

At the time, the Ben Ali regime struggled to contain the uprising within the borders of Sidi Bouzid province, as he did with the uprising in Gafsas mining basin, in southwestern Tunisia. In 2008, residents of the mining basin rose in rebellion, demanding their rights to employment, development and equitable distribution of wealth.

But the regime managed to contain this movement and abort it. Ben Ali wanted to repeat that same scenario in Sidi Bouzid in 2010. However, it was thanks to Kasserine that the protest movement expanded from Sidi Bouzid to other places and injected life into the veins of the revolution.

While political progress is being made slowly, however, what the political elite failed to understand, deliberately or not, is that this political progress was made at the expense of the social question of the revolution. When people rebelled against the status quo, their slogans, which remain inscribed on the walls of Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine to this day, testify to the original demands of the revolution. In Kasserine, they raise the famous slogan: Jobs are our right, you gang of thieves. This clearly indicates that none of the popular demands that people protested for have been achieved.

This was a cry in the face of the unjust development patterns adopted by the state. In some provinces, it feels like living in a past century  no services, no infrastructure or work opportunities  as if time has frozen at a certain moment in the past. Secondly, the percentage of unemployed youth doubled due to the privatisation programme of the public sector in the 90s.

Towns like Gafsa, Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid, or what we call the basin of revolution, have a record history of rebelling against rulers in different historic periods. Therefore, what is going on in Kasserine serves as a grim reminder that any new political structure that comes at the expense of peoples needs and sacrifices and does not respond to their demands is destined to fail. This explains what is going today in Kasserine.

Al Jazeera: But could such a violent wave of protest undermine the transition process and slow political progress?

Bouazizi: There are of course fears that the counter-revolutionary forces might capitalise on this legitimate social struggle, as they did before, to abort the revolution. This was clear when state buildings and institutions were vandalised and damaged. The logic of the revolution is taking over the institutions, not setting them ablaze. There is a big question about the identity of the culprits and whether its meant to distract the protesters from addressing the real issues at the heart of their struggle.

Therefore, we fear that out of those legitimate social struggles, we might be faced with an Egypt scenario, when some Bonaparte [an allusion to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi] would rear his head and try to capitalise on peoples legitimate demands by infiltrating the ranks of the protesters and diverting them from the real social question.

I wrote an article warning protesters against falling into the trap of what I call the Sisi/Bonaparte scenario, which aims to profit from legitimate popular demands, as Sisi did in Egypt in July 2013, and sabotage the small political victories that have been achieved during the transition process so far. And in the absence of leadership, organisation and vigilance, the protest movement might be used to sabotage the political process.

Al Jazeera: Is this a possible scenario in Tunisia?

Bouazizi: I hope not. The worst that such counter-revolutionary forces did was in the aftermath of the assassination of Mohamed Brahmi in 2013 that  ironically  coincided with the military coup in Egypt in July 2013. That was the most extreme attempt to counter the revolution, because in Tunisia the army doctrine is not preoccupied with taking over the state, as is the case in Egypt.

Al Jazeera: What are the components of the protest movement in Kasserine?

Bouazizi: The social struggle that is taking place in Kasserine and the surrounding areas in terms of structure, organisation and the list of demands appears in many ways similar to what happened on December 17, 2010. It is a horizontal uprising, and at the heart of it is the social question, where people demand job opportunities because it is a burning issue  especially among the young educated Tunisians who are aware of the political situation.

Al Jazeera: Tunisia is the only country where the Arab Spring did not end in disaster; do such protests reflect a failure of sorts?

Bouazizi: On a strategic level, victory has been achieved for the revolution. But on a day-to-day level and regarding peoples demands, there is simmering discontent. The average citizen is questioning the whole political scene. Its true that we have political parties, TV channels and newspapers, but if we, as ordinary citizens, do not own them and if they do not represent our interests, what is the point? People say: We are poor, we want work.





Al Jazeera: Does this mean that socioeconomic rather than political factors are the root cause of the problem?

Bouazizi: The social is political; we cannot separate the two. The essence of politics is the social question. What is the value of political action if it does not represent and reflect peoples interests? The social question, in my view, is at the heart of politics. People have entered the public sphere and became political. The revolution moment represented a conflict between the authority and the marginalised people muscling their way on to the political stage and taking over the public sphere. And this is the essence of being citizens.

I always believe that if the political progress is not reflected socially, this progress will remain fragile because only popular legitimacy can protect it. We might have a vibrant political scene of elections, freedom of speech and so on, but in the eyes of the people, it does not have legitimacy  and it becomes legitimate only when ordinary people can relate to it and have their rights reflected.

Al Jazeera: Is the Kasserine uprising likely to happen in other places in Tunisia?

Bouazizi: Yes, but it is wrong to assume that the rebellion has stopped in Kasserine during the past few years. There were multiple rebellions, but it only got media attention now. It is only normal that this social anger explodes. What is not normal is for it not to happen, because the political structure that everyone is praising came at the expense of peoples needs.

The people who have made the revolution will not accept being the victims in this unjust game of power-sharing. What happened was that the political arrangement was not accompanied by social arrangement, and people feel deceived. People feel they have made the success that is Tunisia today, so why then have they not benefited from it? That is the big question.
The peoples demand for regime change was met, but the country has since been torn apart by war with thousands killed.

It has been five years since protesters took to the streets of Yemens capital Sanaa to demand regime change.

The uprising succeeded, but the events that followed have resulted in an even more fractured country torn by war.

The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of Yemens population requires humanitarian assistance  that is more than 21 million people.

Five years ago on Wednesday, Sanaa echoed with thousands of people calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down.

Inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, protests continued for months.

Saleh had ruled Yemen for more than 32 years, and during that time few people shared the countrys modest oil wealth.

Daniel Martin Varisco, president of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, said Yemenis from different parts of society united against Saleh, citing rampant corruption in his administration.

The time was ripe. Something had to change. There was an interest in change, Varisco told Al Jazeera.

It took more than a year, but Saleh finally stepped down on February 2012 and fled to Saudi Arabia, a longtime ally, to plot his eventual return.

Salehs powerful family members retained many key positions in government as well as in the armed forces.

The new President, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, a former deputy of Saleh, faced bitter political divisions, and his government struggled to bring security and address sectarian tensions.

In addition to al-Qaedas threat in the southeast of the country, Hadis government also had to contend with Houthi rebels in the north.

Emboldened by the political infighting, the Houthis took control of the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014.

Initially the rebels demanded an end to corruption and inflation but eventually they forced out the elected government.

In the meantime, Saleh returned to Yemen and formed an alliance with the Houthis.





The Houthis arrested and later released Hadi and his government members, and Hadi was forced in 2015 to reconvene his government in Saudi Arabia.

That is where an international coalition was formed to counter the Houthis and, as Saudi Arabia put it,  to counter the Iran-backed Shia fighters in Yemen.

That was ten months ago, and now nearly 6,000 people have been killed.

Much of the infrastructure including the international airport in the capital has been reduced to rubble.

A blockade to cut Houthis weapon supplies has also caused an acute shortage of fuel and medicine.

As the country enters the sixth year since its citizens began to demand their rights, it has now come down to a battle for survival.

So far diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been unsuccessful.

Varisco, however, said that Yemenis are still hopeful of a peaceful resolution to the war.

Most of the people want an end to this catastrophic conflict. I think if the Yemenis are allowed to sort it out for themselves, they stand a better chance.
Experts detail human rights law breaches against Yemeni civilians, including use of starvation as a method of warfare.

A United Nations panel of experts says that the UN Security Council should consider establishing an international commission of inquiry to investigate a range of alleged human rights abuses that have occurred during the war in Yemen.

In a report to the Security Council, obtained by Al Jazeera on Wednesday, the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen says civilians are the major victims of the war.

The report cites tactics used by both Houthi rebels and their opponents, the Saudi-led Arab coalition and its allied forces on the ground in Yemen.

Beyond the widespread and systematic use of indiscriminate air strikes and shelling, and an increase in child recruitment, the blockade of commercial goods entering the country and the siege of Taiz have limited not only the ability of hospitals and humanitarian actors to operate and respond to the situation, but also the ability of people to be able to sustain themselves, the report says.





The panel says that while the Houthis and their allied forces are responsible for the vast majority of cases of recruiting minors for combat, resistance fighters also recruit child soldiers

Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, the coalition spokesman, told Al Jazeera from Riyadh that he would not comment on specific allegations made in the report as it has not been officially published by the UN.

The Houthi rebels took over the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, a move which was followed by military intervention in March 2015 by a Saudi-led Arab coalition.

The fighting has destroyed Yemen, displacing more than two million from their homes. It has created a devastating humanitarian crisis, with more than 22 million people, about 80 percent of the countrys population, facing severe food shortages.

More than 5,800 people have been killed so far in the conflict.

The panels report condemns delegations of all warring sides who participated in the UN-brokered peace talks in December, saying that they bore responsibility for obstructing the cessation of hostilities and the resumption of the political process.

RELATED: Analysis  How can war-torn Yemen find peace?

The authors of the document also say that they documented 119 coalition sorties relating to violations of international humanitarian law with many involving multiple air strikes on civilian objects.

The panel also documented three alleged cases of civilians fleeing residential bombings and being chased and shot at by helicopters, the report says.

The coalition spokesman said that to avoid civilian casualties, the allied forces were not conducting operations in densely populated areas.





Thats why the operation took this long, 10 months, because we avoid conducting operations inside the cities. We use very precise weapons, which costs a lot of money, to avoid any collateral damage, Asseri said.

Commenting further on the suffering of civilians, the report says that the security situation in the impoverished nation has created significant obstacles to the delivery and distribution of humanitarian assistance, attributable to widespread violations of international humanitarian law.

Among the tactics highlighted by the panel is the use of starvation as a form of warfare.

The panel has noted that civilians are disproportionately affected by the conduct of hostilities owing to the widespread and systematic use of tactics that practicably, and in certain cases directly, constitute the prohibited use of starvation as a method of warfare, the report says.

An air and naval blockade has been imposed by the coalition to prevent supplies from reaching the Houthis.

But Asseri said the coalition was not preventing ships from delivering food and humanitarian aid to Yemen, as on average 25 ships are going to al-Hudeida port, which is under Houthi control, a day.

Today we do not have a problem with arrival of food and medicine in Yemen. We have the problem of distribution because NGOs, United Nations are not on the ground. They just ship the shipment but they dont distribute inside Yemen, he said.

The panel experts say they are also concerned about the destabilising accumulation of arms in Yemen.

They are investigating the potential transfer of anti-tank guided missiles to the Houthis after the seizure of an arms shipment in September off the coast of Oman.

The Panel inspected the missiles, currently in United States custody, and noted that they originated from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The decline of Akincilar seen through the eyes of three Turkish Cypriot residents of different generations.

Akincilar is a small village on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

It has lived through the turbulent, modern history of Cyprus, including the islands civil war in the 1960s and its division in the 1970s when Turkish Cypriots moved north, and Greek Cypriots moved south.

The politics of Cyprus remains complex and contentious.

Akincilar, like many rural communities the world over, has experienced the outflow of young people seeking opportunities in big cities.

But Akincilars decline from a bustling town of 5,000 to a village of 350, almost frozen in time, has more to do with its geographical location, the division of Cyprus, and the islands complex history.

Our people struggled and fought for our village and then deserted it. Its painful. by Sultan Barbaros, mayor of Akincilar

This film explores Akincilars past and present through the eyes of three residents.

Mustafa Garip, born in 1935, fought in the conflict between the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s. The farmer loves his land and vows never to leave it.

Sultan Barbaros, the mayor of Akincilar, was born in 1958 when the village was called Luricina and was only a child during the conflict. Now, as Akincilars mayor, she is committed to helping its elderly residents and is organising a music event to bring the community together and brighten up our village.

And then there is Serife Vural, a student who was born in 1995 when people had already left the village. Vural is eager to leave her place of birth and aspires to study law in the UK.

Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960 and the Greek Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios was elected president. The constitution enabled the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot communities to share power. Three years later, however, Makarios proposed constitutional changes, which threatened the power-sharing agreement and violence erupted between the two sides.

Many Turkish Cypriots in the southern part of the island felt insecure and moved northwards in numbers. They sought refuge in the area around Akincilar, whose residents offered them help and places to stay.

Barbaros, whose recollections from this period come from her mother, says Luricina became known as Akincilar, taking its name, she says, from the Turkish word for raiders as they were brave and swift.

Garip, the farmer, took up arms in 1963 and headed for the hills. Lefka, Limassol and Catoz all fell. Only our village, Luricina, remained, he says. Our old men were tough. It wasnt easy to stand up to a Luricinian 60 years ago.

In the 1960s and 1970s Turkish Cypriots from nine villages sought refuge in Akincilar. The influx of people enlivened the village.

Civil servants, workers and craftsmen; youd find everything in the village, recalls Garip. Back then, the villages two cinemas, eight restaurants and public gardens were always filled with people, says Barbaros.

In 1974, the military government ruling Greece decided to overthrow Makarios in Cyprus. He escaped; but five days later, Turkish troops arrived in the north and Greek Cypriots fled to the south. Later that year, the island was divided between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot territory, separated by a buffer zone, a green line.

That was the year that life stopped in Akincilar, says Barbaros. The connection with the south was cut. The road to the Turkish Cypriot side was not developed. Villagers began to leave here, over time.

Today, only Turkey recognises the Turkish Cypriot area of northern Cyprus as a separate country.

The Village Thats Dying tells the story of the village of Akincilar and the feelings about its decline from three residents born in different eras.
Danish MPs pass a controversial law allowing the seizure of assets from refugees.

Danish MPs have passed a controversial law allowing the seizure of assets from refugees.

The Nordic state is not the first European country to tighten controls on refugees.

But the new Danish immigration law may be a sign of the darkening mood towards refugee arrivals.

The law allows the seizure of refugees assets to help pay for their stay. Among other things, it also prevents families being reunited for three years.

Danish politicians say the law is being misunderstood. They argue that, in a welfare state, everyone has to use up their own resources first before claiming benefits.

READ MORE: Ai Weiwei closes Denmark exhibition over refugee law

Critics say the law, and similar measures being taken in other countries, are designed to deter new arrivals  and could heighten tension and xenophobia in some communities.

So is this the new reality for migrants and refugees trying to settle in Europe?

And with governments hardening their positions, who will care for those most in need?

Presenter: Peter Dobbie

Guests:

Ramazan Salman  Director of the help group Migrants for Migrants

Nando Sigona  Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham and specialist on the refugee and migration crisis

Irene Zugasti  Co-author of the Politheor report: Civil Society Responses to the Refugee Crisis
A former U.S. diplomat told students and community members Americas relations with Cuba could improve.

John Caulfield, the former chief of mission of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Cuba, spoke about the new trade relations between the U.S. and Cuba on Tuesday night. His speech, given to about 100 people at Pugh Hall, addressed economic reform, travel sanctions and the changing attitudes of both countries citizens. Caulfield was not paid for his speech.

Caulfield, who has spent three years living in Cuba, said relations between the two governments are still strained, despite the Obama administrations renewed diplomacy with the communist country.

This is not like your normal international relationship, Caulfield said. The U.S.-Cuban relationship was about divorce. Both sides  those Cubans that left, those Cubans that stayed  felt betrayed by each other.

He said there have been recent changes in both countries policies. Americans are allowed to visit and send money to relatives in Cuba more easily, and Cubans now have the right to sell some private properties, such as cars and houses.

Despite these changes, Caulfield said drastic reform will not be possible until Cubas current president, Raul Castro, is out of office.

As long as Raul is living, healthy, Im sure things will remain exactly as he wants them, he said. When hes gone, all bets are off.

He said he thinks Cubans living in the country want a change in government.

I dont necessarily think this is going to be a smooth process, Caulfield said. The only thing I predict is its going to be different.

Lauren Amos, a UF history junior, said she attended Caulfields speech so she could hear about Cuba from someone whos been to the country.

I feel like weve only ever heard about it from our point of view, the 21-year-old said. Like theyre the communists; theyre the bad guys.

She said she would like to visit Cuba and is excited U.S. relations with the country are improving.

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I feel like it was just permanent, she said. And its all changing so fast, its just hard to process.

Contact Kaitlyn Newberg at knewberg@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @k_newberg.

John Caulfield, former Chief of U.S Interests Section in Cuba, discusses relations between the U.S. and Cuba on Jan. 26, 2016 in the Pugh Hall Ocora. "This is not your normal international relationship," he said, comparing it to a bad divorce.
After slightly more than a week, people have captured dozens of invasive pythons in Florida as part of the second Python Challenge.

The challenge, which started Jan. 16 and ends Feb. 14, was organized by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. It promotes the conservation of the Everglades and encourages the removal of invasive species, FWC spokeswoman Lisa Thompson wrote in an email.

During the commissions first challenge, which took place in 2013, people removed 68 pythons in and around the Everglades. As of press time, 61 pythons have been turned in to drop-off locations for the 2016 challenge. In 2012, UF researchers curated a python from Everglades National Park that was more than 17 feet long and weighed almost 165 pounds, according to a press release.

Steve Johnson, an associate professor in UFs Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, said the issue of invasive species in Florida is partly caused by the pet trade.

Sometimes animals are released on purpose by unscrupulous people in hopes of establishing a population that they can pull from to sell, he said.

Johnson said invasive species are growing throughout Florida and, although Burmese pythons have spread throughout the state, their populations are primarily found in South Florida. There have been many cases of people purchasing exotic pets and releasing them into the wild, he said.

Its not just pythons that is an important part of this issue, Johnson said. They are one of many introduced species that are causing major problems for us.
Members of UFs Agricultural Economics Club will wait another week for approved funding from Student Government.

During Tuesday nights SG Senate meeting, Allocations Chairman Austin Champoux (Impact, District A) said the allocations committee approved other social clubs requesting funding. However, the Agricultural Economics Club was delayed for funding from the committee, he said, and will be recommended for funding from the Board of College Councils, which funds academic clubs.

At the end of the day, we made the executive decision to move them to the (Board of College Councils), Champoux said.

During the meeting, Majority Senate Leader Haley Smith (Impact, District A) asked to approve committee and replacement seats, which included executive nominations from Student Body President Joselin Padron-Rasines, by unanimous consent.

Smith also asked to approve Roshelle Twymon as a member of the Information and Communication committee by unanimous consent, which Senate confirmed. Twelve seats remain open in Senate.

Approved by unanimous consent:

$330 for Gator Chess Club

$623.49 for Innovation Academy Lead

$258 for Quiz Bowl

$100 for Gator Billiards

Maristela Soberano as replacement senator for District D

Hannah Gardiner as replacement senator for Graduate

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David McKibbin as replacement senator for College of Fine Arts

August Jellie as replacement senator for College of Architecture

Contact Melissa Gomez at mgomez@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @MelissaGomez004.
On the final day of interviews, 355 students walked through the doors of the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom and interviewed with political parties in Student Government.

Erica Baker, the UF supervisor of elections, wrote in an email Tuesday afternoon that 61 students interviewed with Access Party and 289 students interviewed with Impact Party. Five students listed as independents or without party affiliation.

A total of 560 students interviewed with parties during the past three days, 460 with Impact and 100 with Access. Spring 2015 elections saw a record turnout of more than 800 students signing up for interviews.

Max Stein, 25, interviewed for a graduate seat with Access.

The UF second-year mechanical engineering graduate student said he used to be a senator for the College of Engineering, but after his one-year term, he decided to take a break from SG.

He said he came back to run for Senate to help represent graduate students.

Id really like to raise awareness about Student Government in general, he said. People should know where their money is going.

Brendan Barany said he chose to interview for a sophomore seat with Impact because he believes in the goals of the party.

The 18-year-old UF finance freshman said a lot of his friends are involved with Impact.

I know the caliber of people that they are, and those are the type of people that I would like to be around, he said.

Blake Murphy, the campaign manager for Impact, said they saw exactly what they wanted.

Im excited to get the results of all of our work from the past three days and start to create our slate of candidates, he said.

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Praveen Varanasi, Access president, said he was proud of students who interviewed with Access.

It was a good experience talking to (students), getting to know why they wanted to be a part of Student Government, he said.

Contact Melissa Gomez at mgomez@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @MelissaGomez004.
Future Innovation Academy students looking to run for Student Government executive office may not be eligible.

According to SGs constitution, UF students running for Student Body President, Student Body Vice President or Student Body Treasurer must have completed three semesters at UF before being allowed to run. Only Fall and Spring semesters count toward eligibility requirements. Summer terms do not qualify.

Students enrolled in IA take classes at UF in the Spring and Summer, using Fall semesters for jobs or internships. IA students have the option to take online classes in the Fall, or can petition to take classes on campus if they are behind in critical tracking, said Katherine Glickman, the assistant director for the IA cabinet in SG.

Because of this, IA students may not meet the three-semester requirement until their junior year. Glickman said she didnt know if IA students could use petitioned courses during Fall to meet requirements.

This upcoming election, this should be addressed, said Glickman, a UF biology sophomore, Its unfair.

The constitution can only be changed during Fall elections, wrote Erica Baker, the SG supervisor of elections, in an email. The constitution has not been altered since Feb. 24, 2010. IA started at UF in 2012.

We are bound by the constitution in how elections (work), so that is currently the way that it stands, she said.

Glickman said if IA students have taken online classes during the Fall semester, then she thinks they should be eligible to run for office.

The constitution needs to be specified, the 20-year-old said. Not everything is black and white.

IA students must be enrolled in classes during each semester they wish to participate in SG, wrote Jeff Citty, the director of IA, in an email. He said there are several students in IA who are currently running for office.

Since IA (students) can enroll in online (courses) in the Fall, and some experiential courses, they can be a part of student government, he said.

Andrea Rodriguez, a UF marketing sophomore, said she is in her third semester of IA. She said online classes taken during Fall should count toward eligibility.

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I dont see what the difference is between the Summer semester and a Spring or Fall semester, the 19-year-old said.

She said IA students in SG should work to change the rule.

I think that we all should be equal, she said. Hopefully they do make some sort of change for IA students in the future.

Contact Kaitlyn Newberg at knewberg@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @k_newberg.
Last Friday, the Alligator published a column titled, Dont be rude about BDS movement, in which the author defended the movement that seeks to boycott and sanction the State of Israel. The column contained multiple misconceptions and inaccuracies.

The author describes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement as a political movement that calls for businesses and consumers to boycott products manufactured in territory illegally occupied by Israel. If the author read the official BDS movement charter, he would discover this is false. The movement calls for the complete boycott of all Israeli goods, whether they are produced or live in occupied territories. It simply works to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state, rejecting any Zionist views. The BDS movement seeks only to end the Jewish state. The movements co-founder, Omar Barghouti, hopes for an Arab majority state that would outnumber the Jewish population and eliminate its character.

Next, the author argues, the Israeli military has transferred Israeli civilians from Israel into suburb-style settlements built on land that has belonged to Palestinians for centuries, displacing residents and destroying farmland and villages in the process. This is another misconception, because Israeli settlements are mostly built on state land, meaning the majority of settlements are built on territory no previous Arab population inhabited. Most settlements are also built in areas near the pre-1967 border. Israel, being a modern democratic country, respects the rule of law. Therefore, if anyone builds on another persons property, the owner of the property can appeal to courts. Likewise, compensation is provided to the owners in case of expropriations.

Furthermore, the future of the settlements is supposed to be the result of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians following the Oslo agreements. Israel has offered various concessions throughout the years: At Camp David in 2000 Israel offered 90 percent of the West Bank with land swaps to compensate for certain settlements in the area. Israel also accepted the Clinton Parameters offered that year, which proposed withdrawal from 96 percent of the West Bank.

The Palestinians rejected all of these proposals. Instead, they have pursued unilateral international declarations, using the United Nations hostility toward Israel as a weapon while avoiding direct negotiations with Israel on a final status agreement.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and dismantled its settlements from the strip. Instead of getting recognition for the move, Israel was bombed from Gaza by the radical extremist organization Hamas and other Palestinian guerrilla groups. These attacks intensified after Hamas took Gaza by force, forcing Israel to defend itself.

Lastly, the author justifies the BDS movement by claiming Israel exploits Palestinian laborers. He states, Palestinian laborers in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military law without any civil rights and that, workers in the illegally occupied territories have no right to sue or even bargain with their employers.

This is also untrue. Orders issued by Israels military commander made Israels Minimum Wages Law applicable to Palestinian workers in the settlements. International law states that an occupying country is supposed to apply the law that the local population followed before occupation. Thus, Israel maintained Jordanian labor laws on the Palestinian population. However, the High Court of Justice issued a 2007 ruling stating Palestinians who lived in the West Bank but worked for Israelis were entitled to the same work conditions as those provided to Israelis by the states domestic Minimum Wages Law, including pay and vacation days. Palestinians can therefore use this High Court ruling to demand equal conditions  and indeed they have.

The BDS movement claims to be motivated by justice and human rights. In reality, it is a vicious propaganda campaign that threatens the existence of Israel by promoting misinformation and defamation that serves only hatred, not progress.

However, I do agree with the author that we should stop being rude to BDS supporters: Instead, we should deconstruct their arguments to show what the movement truly represents.

Julian Fleischman is a UF telecommunication and political science junior.

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An agreement signed by Ethiopias State Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Taye Atske-selassie and INTERPOL Secretary General Jurgen Stock has paved the way for the world police body to open a Special Representative office at the African Union. With Africa facing a wide range of crime issues including terrorism, child labour, fake medicines, cybercrime, drug []http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Appa-sourceTheAfric...
The UN Security Council must act immediately on the recommendations of its own Panel of Experts and enforce a comprehensive arms embargo to halt the flow of weapons into South Sudan, said Amnesty International today. Following the outbreak of the conflict in December 2013, Amnesty International has been lobbying for an arms embargo to help []http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Appa-sourceTheAfric...




AR's Editor Joe Shea Talks About Elections On Iranian TV Bear Stearns Saved By Fed As Lehman Bros. Falters; Major Bank

Failure Looms Over Wall Street, Sends Markets Into 200-Pt. Dive Lie Upon Lie Five Years Into the Iraq War

The Administration Still Churns Out Lies by Randolph Holhut A Small Tragedy Even at 90, As Friends Turn Cool

She Knows the Show Must Go On by Joyce Marcel I'll Take Me Imagine John Wayne or Arnold

In Heels, Silk and a Girdle by Elizabeth Andrews Sen. Nelson Calls For New Fla. Primary; Gov Crist Backs 'Do-Over' Who'll Win? Ask Spock Spock.com Engine Predicts Winners

By Site Searches; It Can be Wrong by Jay Bhatti Chatting Up The Cat God Gave Me Dominion Over Him

But I Think He's a Non-Believer by Constance Daley Death of a Thug The Life and Horrors of Suharto by Andreas Harsono ___________________________ This Just In Sierra Club: McCain Ducked All 15 Key Votes On Green Laws (AR) A Work By AR's T.S. Kerrigan Is Chosen As 'Best Poem' By Wordpress Site Murder At Mile 63

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AFTER 5 YEARS, WE'RE STILL LIED TO ABOUT IRAQ by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Next week is the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And it is likely that sometime in the next couple of weeks, the 4,000th American soldier will die in Iraq. [MORE] Momentum

OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - It's 1931, and a 14-year-old girl is standing alone on a stage. She's small and lively with dark curly hair, widespread hazel eyes, slender wrists and an open, eager face filled with the wonder of performing. Her name is Rose, and one day she will be my mother. But now she is performing an Eugene O'Neill monologue called "Before Breakfast" for a ladies' club in a wealthy suburb of Long Island. [MORE] One Woman's World

COMFORTABLE WITH MYSELF by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- I'm not sure but I think I may be socially incorrect. [MORE] On Native Ground

ENOUGH FOR A WAR, NOT FOR A PEOPLE by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week, the National Governors Assn. met in Washington, D.C. One of the tasks the NGA had on its agenda was to ask President Bush to increase federal spending on roads, bridges and other public works projects as a way to stimulate the economy. He rejected their pleas out of hand, claiming that infrastructure projects wouldn't offer any short-term economic boost. [MORE] Brasch Words

BEWARE THE SELF-REVERENTIAL PRESS by Walter Brasch BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Shortly before the primary votes this past week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter called Sen. Barack Obama's surge to the Democratic nomination "inevitable." It also called for Hillary Clinton to "start her campaign for Senate majority leader." [MORE] Constance

A CONVERSATION WITH MY CAT Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Normally, when the cat starts his evening rant of meowing continuously until he makes his point, I just take it as long as I can, pick him up, and put him in the garage for the night. He doesn't want to go, but the meowing stops and I don't care if he likes it or not. [MORE] Momentum

OUT OF STRUGGLE, ART by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Here we are again at the crossroads of art and social change, having the opportunity to watch good and great films about the lives of women in support of the Women's Crisis Center. [MORE] Campaign 2008

HOW TO PREDICT SUPER TUESDAY II WINNERS? ONLINE SEARCH by Jay Bhatti NEW YORK, March 4, 2008, 7:00PM ET -- With the outcomes of the Texas, Vermont, Ohio and Rhode Island primaries to be decided tonight, how possible is it that online searching can predict who will win tonight's primaries? [MORE] One Woman's World

DON'T VOTE; IT ENCOURAGES THEM by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Call me angry and disgusted but don't call me un-American because I won't be voting come November. [MORE] On Native Ground

BUSH AND THE KEYBOARD COMMANDOS by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the days tick down toward the eventual departure of President George W. Bush from the White House, it's a hopeful sign that most Americans are no longer moved by his Administration's constant exploitation of terrorism for political gain. [MORE] Momentum

WHICH AMERICA DO YOU LIVE IN? by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a little confusing. [MORE] Make My Dat

THE LAWYER THAT ATE NEW YORK by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to know a guy who, quite literally, didn't get hyperbole. He didn't understand exaggeration. As a result, he missed most jokes that came his way. [MORE] On Native Ground

FIDEL RETIRES: NOW THE COLD WAR IS REALLY OVER by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Maybe now, we can finally say the Cold War is over. [MORE] Make My Dat

THE LAWYER THAT ATE NEW YORK by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to know a guy who, quite literally, didn't get hyperbole. He didn't understand exaggeration. As a result, he missed most jokes that came his way. [MORE] One Woman's World

POLITICS IS NO PARTY by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Are you having a hard time focusing your eyes? Do you have faint red spots all over your body? Is there a ringing in your ears and do you see wavy lines when you look at your television set? Do your hands shake when you try to hold a cup of coffee? And have you recently been forgetting what day of the week it is - or what year? [MORE] Make My Day

FOR BETTER OR WORSE ... A LOT WORSE by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Marriage: It's Only Going to Get Worse." [MORE] Constance

YOU CALL THESE RIGHTS? by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- When you express an opinion you hope to persuade others to your point of view. It doesn't always happen but still, opinion writers try. [MORE] Momentum

THE BRIDGE WOMAN by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Out there in America - yes, still - is a generation of women who were born in the 1940s, raised in the 1950s, and who came to radical consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am one of them. Hillary Clinton is one of them. [MORE] On Native Ground

OBAMA AND MY GENERATION by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I originally planned on voting for Dennis Kucinich in the Vermont Primary on March 4. [MORE] The Willies:

WARNING: THIS MEDICATION MAY MURDER YOUR FRIENDS by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla. -- You've heard the warnings, haven't you? Stop Prozac and you may take a shotgun, an Uzi or an AK-47 and mow down your family and friends, or even a whole classroom full of your fellow students. You didn't? Well, that warning is not on the bottle, but like countless mass-murder incidents before it, Friday's shootings at Northern Illinois University, as well as the Virginia Tech shootings that killed 32 last year, was probably precipitated by the effect of stopping medications that suppress anger and other powerful emotions but do not relieve the underlying cause. Isn't it time we started warning people - or stopped prescribing these medicines? [MORE] One Woman's World

DON'T KNOCK ON MY DOOR by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- I wish I could feel delight in my poet's mansion being like Grand Central Station all the time, but I can't. And I wish my place was such a place that someone would one day write: "Her door was always open and she always made you feel all fuzzy and warm in her presence. She could make a cup of coffee seem like a banquet." [MORE] Reporting: Panama

PANAMA'S VIOLENT LABOR UNREST INTENSIFIES Mark Scheinbaum PANAMA CITY, Panama, Feb, 15, 2008 -- After just one day of relative calm, wildcat construction strikes by some members of Panama's largest union flared up again Friday morning, four days after a police sniper shot one worker. More than 140 demonstrators have been injured and at least 500 arrested, authorities say. [MORE] Brasch Words

TO STIMULATE ECONOMY, BUY A CHINESE-MADE U.S. FLAG by Walter Brasch BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Walking down Main Street, pushing a grocery cart loaded with clothes, toys, and appliances was Marshbaum. Fastened to the right front corner of the cart was an American flag tied onto a three-foot ruler. [MORE] Make My Day

THE TOOTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- To commemorate the death of noted shark exploder Roy Scheider, and the "Jaws" movies that resulted in Erik never setting foot in the ocean again, we are reprinting this column from 2003. Shark Experts 0, Sharks 1 [MORE] Momentum

THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - As I write this, it's raining ice. Maybe a half a foot of snow and ice has already landed up here in the woods of Dummerston. Our cars are encased in it, and the door to the house is blocked. The satellite dish that brings in our Internet service quit about 20 minutes ago - frozen solid. [MORE] The Willies

AMERICA TO HILLARY: GET OUT! by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 13, 2008 -- Sen. Hillary Clinton has adopted the Rudy Giuliani strategy, and it's working - for Sen. Barack Obama. It turns out to be the strategy all Democrats are seeking - an exit strategy. But it's not for Iraq. It's for her exit from the race for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. [MORE] Constance

CONFESSIONS OF A DISAPPOINTED VOTER by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- A week ago at just about this time, I completed an article and was about to submit it as scheduled to The American Reporter. I was feeling rather elated, ready to show up on Super Tuesday morning, firmly touch the X next to Rudy Giuliani's name and get on with my day. He was my choice; he would get my vote. [MORE] Reporting: Florida

SIERRA CLUB SET TO SUSPEND FLA. CHAPTER by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 10, 2008 -- The national Sierra Club is set to suspend its Florida chapter after years of divisive infighting, the president of the national club told Florida members in a letter delivered to some this weekend. It is the first time in its 116-year history that such a step has been considered by the club, according to news reports. [MORE] One Woman's World

PLANT A NEW WORLD THIS SPRING by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- For a little while, the men will just have to toss and turn in their fear-free-women beds. For a small space of time Hillary Clinton will just have to trudge on toward the White House without my faint applause in the background. [MORE] On Native Ground

VERMONT AND THE 5 STAGES OF CONSERVATIVE GRIEF by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- First, Vermont tried to convince the nation to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney. [MORE] Make My Day

REBEL WITHOUT A TONGUE by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Kids' brains work in amazing ways. At times, they can grasp complex concepts and make impressive discoveries. Other times, you have to wonder how we ever survived as a species. [MORE] The Willies

FOR DEMOCRATS, NOW IT'S ABOUT RACE, INCOME AND GENDER by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Feb. 6, 2008 -- It's not a good time to be a Democrat. As the Super Tuesday results demonstrated, the presidential race between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has divided the partly along clear racial, income and gender lines - the very distinctions the party has sought to erase in principle but has emphasized in its pursuit of diversity. [MORE] Momentum

SUPER TUESDAY BLUES by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Super Tuesday has come and gone and I still can't get excited about the upcoming presidential elections. [MORE] The Willies

ON THE BRINK OF HISTORY, YOUR PUSH IS NEEDED by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 5. 2008 -- I'm expecting a sea change tonight. I believe that for the first time in this nation's history we will once and forever banish racism as the deciding factor in the destiny of African-Americans, and indeed adopt diversity as our path to the future. [MORE] Campaign 2008

AT 88, EVERY VOTE REALLY COUNTS by Ted Manna DENVER, Feb. 5, 2008 -- Pearl Turner will caucus for Mitt Romney tonight in Denver. [MORE] One Woman's World

STAND BY YOUR WOMAN by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- The black vote. The gay vote. The fundamentalist vote. The Hispanic vote. [MORE] An AR Special

SUSPECTS IN BENAZIR ASSASSINATION HAVE TIES TO MUSHARRAF by Ahmar Mustikhan WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When Gordon Brown this past Monday feted coup-leader-turned-President Pervez Musharraf at 10 Downing Street, Britain's new prime minister probably didn't ask the Pakistani dictator a question that is now on many minds: Did you order the murder of Benazir Bhutto? [MORE] Momentum

TO THE VERMONT DELEGATION: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR US LATELY? by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt.  Back when President George W. Bush and Dick Vice President Dick Cheney were building up to their loathsome war in Iraq, very few people were brave enough to call the bullies' bluff. [MORE] On Native Ground

IF BUSH HAS HIS WAY, WE'LL NEVER LEAVE IRAQ by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. - In his final State of the Union address on Jan. 28, President Bush cautioned against accelerating U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq, saying that it would endanger the process that has been made over the past year. [MORE] Campaign 2008

CLASH OF COMMENTS AND PROTESTORS AT CLINTON, OBAMA RALLIES IN DENVER by Ted Manna DENVER, Feb. 1, 2008 -- At least four presidential campaigns of both partiers rolled into in Denver this week ahead of the Feb. 5 "Super Tuesday" primaries in 22 states, but it was the Democratic presidential contenders who drew the big crowds and duked it out Wednesday. If sheer numbers are any indication, Sen. Barack Obama - preceded by a buoyant and beautiful Caroline Kennedy - won the round handily. He is the overwhelming favorite to win the Colorado primary next Tuesday. [MORE] The Willies

WHY THE FLORIDA PRIMARY STINKS by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 30, 2008 -- I was with my wife and daughter driving the back way from Miami home to Bradenton when we stopped at a McDonald's in Clewiston, the only big town along the vast shore of Lake Okeechobee, the state's precious freshwater reservoir. The McDonald's had three televisions at a central seating area, each tuned to a different network, and our table was in front of CNN as the very first election results started to pour in around 7:30PM. With them, almost as counterpoint, suddenly came such an overwhelming odor of cow plop that my wife started to throw up as we all ran to the parking lot. [MORE] Passings: Suharto

DEATH OF A KEMUSU THUG by Andreas Harsono JAKARTA - A few minutes after hearing that former president Suharto had died in his hospital bed, Marco, a militia leader in downtown Jakarta, raced to Suhartos house, wearing his jungle camouflage and began guarding the Suhartos residence on Cendana Street. [MORE] Constance

I REMEMBER YOU by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga.. -- It seems to be more often lately that the sentiment is spoken but it's always been out there: "You never get over the death of your child." This is true. But the heartfelt expressions come from some who cannot fathom the notion of losing a child; their own child is who is in their mind, not another mother's child. [MORE]
Global yoga guru Bikram Choudhury sexually harassed his former legal adviser, a California jury found this week  and on Tuesday it awarded her $6.4 million in punitive damages.

The founder of the hot-yoga empire that bears his name, Choudhury on Monday was also ordered to pay attorney Minakshi Jafa-Bodden almost $1 million in compensatory damages. The lawyers lawsuit  Minakshi Jafa-Bodden v. Bikram Choudhury  is one of several to allege sexual harassment and abuse.

Jafa-Bodden began working for Choudhury, 69, in the Spring of 2011 and filed her suit against him in June 2013, a few months after her employment was terminated. Her complaint alleged discrimination, severe, ongoing, pervasive and offensive conduct, and retaliation for investigating a former trainees allegations that the yoga guru harassed her. She also alleged that she hadnt been paid the agreed upon $125,000-a-year salary.

Bikram created a hyper-sexualized and degrading environment for women, who were requested to brush his hair and give him massages, the suit alleged. The yogi is alleged to have referred to women, including his employees, as fucking bitches, fat bitches and stupid bitches.

One witness, Sharon Clerkin, is said to have testified that Choudhury once announced at a packed training session, the majority of whose participants are usually women, that I should rape more girls, it's good for business.

He is also alleged to have said that AIDS is caused by gaysbut these fucking asshole guys love me.  He was also accused of saying that if Hitler was more efficient, all these fucking Jews would be finished.

Before her dismissal, Jafa-Bodden had been subpoenaed to testify in a sex discrimination case brought by Pandhora Williams, a former Birkam trainee. Jafa-Bodden wasn't going to perjure herself for this guy, he knew that, said Jafa-Boddens lawyer Carla Minnard. He didn't like her poking her nose into these claims, and he fired her for it.

Williams is one of at least six women who have sued Choudhury for assault, harassment or worse.

Although his headquarters in Los Angeles did not respond to a query by Al Jazeera in time for publication, Bikram has consistently denied the allegations.

In a recent blow, the yoga teacher also lost his legal fight to copyright his poses.

Millions of people practice Bikrams style of yoga  26 poses in a 90-minute class in a heated room  and the global community of Bikram teachers appears divided on how to respond to the findings against him.

Some like Florida-based teacher Joe Cuccaro said they separated the man from the yoga years ago. The yoga series, not the man, changed my life. I will continue to teach the series exactly as I was taught, he said. This yoga will continue to change lives. Sallie Thurman, another former teacher, said Bikram was now a taint to his own name.

Nicole Stuckey, the owner of a studio in Staten Island, New York, went so far as to rename her business losing the Bikram brand. I felt the time is right for the change, she wrote to Al Jazeera. I couldnt bear the thought of one person feeling uncomfortable about stepping inside this studio because of the allegations.

During closing arguments, Minnard said that Choudhury was worse than a monster. Monsters arent real, Minnard said. Hes a real person, with real power over people who are trying to earn money to put a roof over their head. Prospective teachers pay thousands to attend his weeks-long training certification programs, which are required to teach at any Bikram studio.

(Disclosure: This reporter has attended Bikram trainings and was a licensed Bikram teacher who taught in London.)
A federal appeals court on Wednesday will start hearing arguments in a transgender students lawsuit against a Virginia school district that had barred him from using the boys bathroom.

The case could have national implications by determining how public schools address sex discrimination in the wake of so-called bathroom bully bills that ban trans students from using the restrooms that match their gender identities.

Gavin Grimm, a trans male student at Gloucester County High School in Virginia, sued the Gloucester School District in June 2015 for sex discrimination based on the schools bathroom policy, which had forced him to use a restroom that is separate from the other students.

But last September, a federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia rejected Grimms request for the district to halt its policy. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Grimm, appealed the ruling to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will decide whether banning Grimm from the boys bathroom is a violation of federal law.

In the appeal, the ACLU argues that the Gloucester School District is violating Title IX, a federal education law banning sex discrimination in publicly funded schools. Excluding [Grimm] from the same restrooms used by all other students further denies [Grimm] equal educational opportunity by publicly shaming him and physically isolating him from the rest of his peers, the ACLU said.

Grimm was designated female at birth, but he had always felt uncomfortable wearing girls clothes, and eventually refused to wear them. At the age of 12, he came out to his family and friends about his transgender male identity and soon began living as a boy under the advisement of a psychologist, according to court documents.

Grimms high school was supportive when, before the beginning of his sophomore year of high school, he and his mother disclosed that he was transgender and would be presenting as male. Grimm used the boys bathroom at school without any trouble. However, after a few weeks, according to court documents, parents began complaining to the school board, culminating in a confrontational school board meeting in November 2014. Parents referred to Grimm as young lady and freak and raised concerns that allowing him to use the boys bathroom could lead to sexual assaults, similar to the arguments raised by opponents to Houstons Equal Rights Ordinance.

The board approved a new policy that sex-segregated bathrooms could only be used by students of the corresponding biological genders, and that students such as Grimm who had gender identity issues could use a separate facility.

Since then, Grimm has taken to holding his urine for as long as he can during the school day, which has resulted in multiple urinary tract infections, according to court documents.

I feel humiliated and dysphoric every time Im forced to use a separate facility, Grimm told reporters in a conference call.

The Gloucester School District has argued that it did its best to make accommodations for Grimm, and that separating students by sex based on biological and anatomical characteristics for restroom and locker room use does not violate the Equal Protection Clause or Title IX.

The federal government, for its part, has filed a statement of interest in support (PDF) of Grimms case, writing that there is a public interest in ensuring that all students, including transgender students, have the opportunity to learn in an environment free of sex discrimination.

Several advocacy groups have also filed briefs in support of Grimm and the ACLU, including the National Womens Law Center, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

The [district] courts decision to prohibit Gavin from using the boys restroom is out of step with model school district policies which state that students should have access to facilities that correspond to their gender identity, Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said in a statement. It is a threat to Gavins health and well-being, and we hope it is swiftly overturned on appeal.

Lawmakers in Nevada, Minnesota, Florida and Texas introduced bills in 2015 that would ban transgender children from using the bathrooms that match their gender identities, but none of them have been passed into law.

Two previous lawsuits filed by transgender students against their schools have upheld access to bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities. In 2013, the family of Coy Mathis, a transgender first grader, won a lawsuit against their Colorado school district that resulted in her being allowed her to use the girls bathroom. And in 2014, Maine's highest court ruled in favor of transgender student Nicole Maines after she sued when her high school required her to use a separate restroom for staff.
The takeover at Malheur that started Jan. 2 was a flare-up in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a decades-old conflict over the U.S. government's control of millions of acres of territory in the west. Protesters say they are defending the Constitution.

Patrick told Reuters by phone they would stay until a redress of grievances.

I've heard peaceful resolution for weeks now and now theres a cowboy who is my friend who is dead  so prepare for the peaceful resolution, Patrick said.

The FBI said gunshots rang out after officers stopped a car carrying protest leader Ammon Bundy and others near the refuge. Activists said Robert LaVoy Finicum, an Arizona rancher who acted as a spokesman for the occupiers, was killed.

Federal officials said they had probable cause to arrest Finicum, who told NBC News earlier this month that he would rather die than be detained.

In a statement posted on Facebook on Wednesday, the Finicum family appeared to forgive officials for LaVoys death, but urged the occupiers to press forward.

"This fight against tyranny is not over. Press forward, the statement said. Forgiveness is what we can extend and understanding is what we want. Christ was and is LaVoys exemplar. Though there are evil and conspiring men at work, Christ still forgave the executioners for they knew not what they did."

Protest leader Ammon Bundy and four other senior members were taken into custody following the confrontation along Highway 395, near the reserve in northeast Oregon around 4:25 p.m. local time, the FBI said.

A sixth person was arrested by Oregon State Police in Burns, Oregon, about 90 minutes later. The FBI said a seventh person was later arrested, 50-year-old Peter Santilli, a journalist who livestreamed events at the refuge.

The FBI said they also arrested an eighth person in Peoria, Arizona, in relation to the occupation. The man, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32, was arrested without incident when he surrendered himself to police.

All of those arrested face federal charges of conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to impede federal officers from discharging their duties, the FBI said.
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, a staunch opponent of abortion, made at least $83,000 serving on the board of directors of Merck & Co. at a time when the pharmaceutical company was producing vaccines using fetal stem cell lines derived from aborted fetuses, according to corporate documents reviewed by Al Jazeera America. The program Inside Story with Ray Suarez also obtained documents indicating that during Fiorinas tenure on the board, anti-abortion groups had asked Merck to stop producing such vaccines, and that the company had refused.

Fiorina has been openly supportive of vaccines derived from fetal stem cells at least since her California Senate run in 2010. According to the Los Angeles Times, Fiorina clarified that, It is when embryos are produced for the purposes of destruction, for the purposes of stem cell research that I have a great deal of difficulty.

She served on Mercks board from April of 1999 through December of 2000, according to Mercks SEC filings from the time.

The Fiorina campaign did not respond to Al Jazeeras requests for comment. Merck confirmed Fiorinas tenure on the board, but said it does not retain the relevant compensation records from that time.

In addition to the $83,000 Fiorina received over her two years on the board, the companys SEC filings indicate she was to receive an additional $1,200 for each board meeting she attended.

Fiorinas tough anti-abortion stance briefly sent her soaring in the polls, after a Republican candidates debate in which she dared President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to watch what she said was a video in which Planned Parenthood medical personnel harvested tissue from an aborted fetus, the heart of which was still beating.
French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira quit Wednesday, apparently in protest at government efforts to strip convicted French-born terrorists of their citizenship if they have a second nationality.

Taubira, popular among the ruling Socialists of President Francois Hollande but a target of criticism from right-wing politicians, tweeted: "Sometimes to resist means staying, sometimes resisting means leaving."

The outspoken 63-year-old, who is from French Guiana, became France's most senior black politician when she was named to the justice ministry post in 2012.

She has often been at the center of controversy, whether as the victim of racial slurs or as she forged the country's same-sex marriage bill despite fierce opposition from conservatives in the country.

Her latest battle saw her unable to see eye-to-eye with members of her own party over the controversial "loss of nationality" measure.

Hollande called for the measure to be written into the constitution in the aftermath of the November attacks in Paris which left 130 people dead.

It is part of a string of reforms meant to boost security as hundreds of French citizens  many holding dual nationality  leave to fight alongside Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and in the case of the attackers, return to wreak devastation in France.

"Removing French nationality from those who blindly kill other French in the name of an ideology of terror is a strong symbolic act against those who have excluded themselves from the national community," Prime Minister Manuel Valls said after the measure was announced.

But many in the Socialist party see the proposal as an act of ideological treason that discriminates against one part of the population.

Just a day before the reforms were presented, Taubira announced the measure would be dropped, only to be overruled at the last minute by Hollande.

The reforms also aim to inscribe the right to declare a state of emergency into the constitution, including powers to raid homes and place people under house arrest without judicial oversight.

Valls will present the revised constitution to parliament Wednesday, and the debate starts in early February.

Hollande named Jean-Jacques Urvoas, the current president of the parliamentary laws commission, as Taubira's successor to "carry out ... the constitutional reform," according to a statement from the presidency.

One of the main criticisms of the nationality clause is that it will drive a wedge between those who are only French, and those who hold a second nationality.

A law already exists that allows for naturalized citizens to be stripped of their nationality.

But political scientist Patrick Weil told Agence-France Presse in December that France would become "the first democracy in the world" to enshrine in its constitution the principle of unequal treatment of dual nationals.

Parliamentary sources said Wednesday that the phrase "dual citizen" would not feature in the reforms to avoid this discrimination.

But it was not clear if this would allow purely French citizens to be stripped of their nationality, creating stateless citizens, which has been another debate in the country.

The measures have been praised by right-wing politicians.

Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen said Taubira's resignation was "good news for France".

Taubira, who tweeted that she was "proud" of her time in office, has previously admitted it was "very hard" at times as she was repeatedly called or depicted as a monkey by far-right politicians and magazines.

Agence France-Presse
Protesters gathered recently in front of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, to demand the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Now only eight Afghans remain out of a population that was once by far the largest in the controversial prison. Some 200 prisoners from the prison have been repatriated to Afghanistan. The most recent men  four low-level detainees  to return home were transferred in December 2014. Afghans going back find their country still riven by conflict and threatened by collapse. Their fates are often unclear, and their experiences can be highly divergent. Some take up arms with the resurgent Taliban, while others seek to rebuild their lives. Some succeed; others are killed. Several of the higher-profile prisoners have reintegrated well into life in Afghanistan. Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil is one such man. He took part in the 2002 emergency loya jirga and voted for President Hamid Karzai before being rendered to Guantanamo. [Wakil] is an honorable man," Karzai's chief of staff, Omar Daudzai, told McClatchy newspapers. And then there is Hajji Naim Kochi. He is a tribal elder of the Kochi tribe, the same tribe as current President Ashraf Ghani. Kochi has worked on national peace and reconciliation efforts. Former Taliban official Rahmatullah Wahidyar also promoted unity as a member of the High Peace Council after his release from the internationally condemned U.S. prison. There are plenty, however, who made other choices.

Current leaders and fighters

Abdul Qayyum Zakir returned home Dec. 12, 2007, became the chief military commander for the Afghan Taliban from 2010 to 2014 and was an opponent of peace talks with the government in Kabul. He stepped down from his post and lives on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He remains part of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban leadership council, but he has not attended any meetings for two years, according to Sami Yousafzai, a reporter in Afghanistan and Pakistan who communicates regularly with the Taliban. The Talibans No. 2 in Wardak province, Mullah Abdullah Sarhadi, was reportedly held in Guantanamo for six years. After his release, he was taken by Pakistani intelligence and held for about four years, according to Yousafzai. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who has written several books in Pashto, was transferred from Guantanamo in April 2005 and is an Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) leader in Afghanistan. The Talibans former ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, is no longer with the group. He spends his time now between Doha, Qatar and Kabul, where he co-directs a school. Two educated Afghan brothers, Badr Zaman Badr and Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, were repatriated in 2005. After their release from Guantanamo, they chose different paths: Badr lives peacefully with his family; his brother was rearrested in 2006 by Pakistani intelligence and was freed in a prisoner swap in 2010, Yousafzai reports. An interesting example is Hajji Ghalib, who become a U.S. ally on the battlefield. Freed from Guantanamo in 2007, he is now fighting ISIL and the Taliban. Everything has been fighting and killing, he told The New York Times, which noted that he was now pitted against some of his former fellow inmates. Taliban and regional expert Ahmed Rashid believes the U.S. and Afghan governments could have made a better effort to reintegrate former Guantanamo prisoners. The men should have been held for some period in a deradicalization holding house and introduced to businesspeople, students and women to see how the country was changing, he said. The Taliban they knew and ruled was a total economic zero. There was nothing. The prisoners should have been released into an environment where they were exposed to new things, he said.

Dead returnees

Forgotten Gitmo Afghans

Perhaps the most unexpected fate for Afghans held in Guantanamo was for the five Afghan Taliban members sent to Qatar in a prisoner exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. There is no doubt that they are very important people, particularly because the Taliban have lost of a lot of their leaders, said Yousafzai. The five remain subject to very tight restrictions, and they are not in a position to do much, said Yousafzai, who met with Taliban members in Qatar's capital, Doha. There are many former Afghan prisoners about whom there appears to be no public information, like Haji Mohammed Khan Achezkai and Mirwais Hasan, both transferred on March 14, 2004. At least a half-dozen former prisoners are now in their 60s or older, with the oldest probably Haji Nasrat Khan, who is about 80  that is, unless Mohammed Sadiq, who would now be 102 or 103 years old, is still alive. Ethnic Uzbek Abdul Razeq, likely the first Gitmo detainee released to Afghanistan, is mentally unstable, according to Yousafzai, who said Razeq told him, Guantanamo was a beautiful place near the big sea. There are a number of Afghans who were minors when they were captured or transferred to Guantanamo. The youngest was Asadullah Rahman, who spent 17 months imprisoned at Camp Iguana starting when he was just 10 years old. We were children and suffered psychologically, he told Al Jazeera. In Afghanistan he is now struggling to survive and reconcile with his past. He was on a Taliban hit list when he refused to sign up with the group. I saw no point in fighting. Its just shooting at one another, he said. Eventually you get killed and leave your family behind. Sami Yousafzai contributed to this report.

Taj Mohammad, 28, from Kunar, is pictured on February 6, 2009 in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. According to his testimony, he was taken at midnight in November 2001 and was incarcerated for almost 5 years, and released in 2006. Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
In early 2015, Afghan courts found the brothers guilty of visa-type violations, which could be punishable by up to three years in prison. By then, the brothers had been incarcerated much longer than that and could be out for time served, Foster said.

In 2010 the U.S. said the brothers could be transferred out of the prison, according to Foster. Al Jazeeras queries to the State Department regarding the prisoners past have not been answered. However, a media representative said that under the Bilateral Security Agreement, which went into force on Jan. 1, 2015, the Afghan government is now responsible for all detention facilities in Afghanistan.

Jamaluddin was 17 years old when he was taken by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2008. He and his brother were staying at a friends house when it was raided. Jamaluddin had been hoping to make it to Mashhad, Iran, to study, and his older brother was accompanying him. According to Foster, the U.S. found no evidence of wrongdoing at the site of their arrest but the two were still taken to the Parwan prison and interrogated.

The two Tajik brothers, Said Jamaluddin and Abdul Fatah, spoke to Foster for the first time recently. Unlike the prisoners held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the men in Bagram had no right to judicial review or access to their lawyers.

All three have been cleared of any wrongdoing by Afghan courts , according to their lawyer Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network.

The men  two brothers from Tajikistan and an Uzbek national  were among a handful of prisoners passed from the U.S. to Afghanistan when the Americans turned over control of the Parwan Detention Facility near the Bagram air base in December 2014.

Three men once held by the U.S. government at a military prison in Afghanistan have been on a hunger strike since Jan. 18 in protest against their ongoing detention despite never being charged with any crime linked to violence.

Of the hundreds of detainees sent back home, some stay peaceful, while many take up arms and are killed on battlefield

Jamaluddin and Fatah fear torture or death if they are repatriated to their country of origin. A Tajikistani intelligence officer who visited the men in Bagram told the brothers, If you come to Tajikistan, we will kill you, Jamaluddin reported to his lawyer.

None of three men were ever charged with or found guilty of terror-related crimes. At one point, the U.S. said the men had various affiliations with Al Qaeda or like-minded groups, but the U.S. declined Al Jazeeras previous request to specify what those connections were or what the men may have allegedly done.

Musa Akhmadjanov, the Uzbek national, also fears the worst if he is sent home. Akhmadjanov was arrested by Afghan forces in Nimruz province and turned over to Coalition Forces before they then handed him off to the Americans, Al Jazeera understands. In his case, the Afghan courts found that he committed no crimes. Thus in June 2015, Akhmadjanov was told he was entitled to release. However, a few months after the decision he was brutally beaten without provocation by Afghan guards, according to Foster, who has confirmed the account with two separate individuals.

While the three now-cleared prisoners have not reported being tortured by Afghans, they have said the conditions at the jail are dire. There is a lack of proper medical care and the food is "dirty and makes them sick, Foster reported. The brothers also told their lawyer they are freezing in the prison, The Afghans dont have money to put the heat on, Jamaluddin is said to have joked with Foster.

While cleared, the former U.S. prisoners appear to have no immediate options for release. They would go anywhere that would take them where they would be safe, Foster told Al Jazeera.

The men could potentially be sent to the U.S., as the Guantanamo anti-transfer provisions would not apply to them. Jamaluddin has learned to speak perfect English while detained.

Once at a U.S. detainee review board, Jamaluddin  who was frustrated with his less-than-adequate interpreter  spoke to his audience in English, an American officer reported to Foster. The officer sent Foster an email saying that it was kind of cool and that if I ever make a movie about all this, that will be in one of the scenes. I think Id cast Leo DiCaprio as Said [Jamaluddin]; he could pull it off.

To stay in Afghanistan, the three prisoners feel they would need some support to help them get on their feet, Foster said.

If the men were intent on remaining in Afghanistan, they could follow Afghan procedures to do so, according to Omar Samad, a Senior Adviser to Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. While not familiar with the men specifically, Samad said that there have been many cases in the past of former prisoners or foreign nationals being granted stay in Afghanistan.

However, the procedure does take time. Separately Samad said that there is precedence for foreign nationals  even former prisoners  to go to their home country or through the auspice of another government or humanitarian agency to find a country that will take them. Again, this takes time, Samad said.

These men have been a totally forgotten causality of Americas war on terror, Foster said.

The U.S. government has responsibility for us, Jamaluddin told Foster. Do they want to find some solution, or leave us behind to die here?
CHISINAU, Moldova  Chiril Gaburici pledged to be a new kind of leader for Moldova, an impoverished country pulled between Russia and the West, and now rocked by protests over rampant corruption and the unsolved theft of $1 billion from its banks.

Young, multilingual, and a former CEO of two big telecoms firms, Gaburici became Moldovas prime minister last February and vowed to run the country like an efficient business, eschewing political intrigue, fighting graft and reviving its push to join the European Union.

But four months later, Gaburici was finished  just days after urging prosecutors to step down for failing to crack the case of the missing billion, they launched an investigation into forgery of his academic record, and he resigned.

Gaburici is not blameless  he admits irregularities in his diplomas, which he attributes to the vagaries of Moldovas 1990s education system  but his guilt pales beside those who have dragged Europes poorest nation toward bankruptcy and made skulduggery the political norm, while avoiding prosecution.

Now that nobody is afraid of me or interested in stopping me the diploma case has been closed, said 39-year-old Gaburici, adding that as premier he swiftly realized that the system will do everything possible to get rid of any threats to its interests.

Now Moldovas rulers face a major threat, in the shape of a protest movement that has united erstwhile enemies from pro-EU and pro-Russian camps, and brought thousands onto the streets to demand that the government resign and call elections.

The spark for the latest wave of protests was parliaments unexpected approval of a new government in a matter of minutes last Wednesday, and a swearing-in ceremony held in secret at around midnight the same day.

Critics from across the political spectrum say those events deeply undermined Moldovas already fragile democracy, and installed a government of dubious legitimacy that will be controlled from the shadows by the countrys richest oligarch, Vladimir Plahotniuc.

Addressing more than 15,000 demonstrators in the capital Chisinau last Sunday, opposition leaders told the government to step down and call elections by Thursday, or face bigger protests that could block key roads, rail lines and the citys airport.

Perhaps our biggest achievement so far is that, whereas before Moldovans were divided, now we are together, said student activist Dinu Plingau, a member of the pro-EU Dignity and Truth group that is protesting alongside pro-Russian parties.

This isnt about different political parties or leaders  its about democratic values, said Plingau, who last January called on social media for street protests and helped set up a tent camp that still stands outside government headquarters.

The tents are guarded by unarmed Moldovan veterans of the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan, and a 1992 conflict that saw Russian-backed separatists in the Transdniestria region break away from newly independent Moldova.

No one has been held to account over the missing billion, and thats just the tip of the iceberg  so much more has been stolen that we dont know about, said Nicolae Bratushak, a burly 55-year-old veteran who kept watch one freezing night this week.

Now we have this government that we know nothing about, and politicians doing secret deals with each other as usual. Its not correct, and we have to stand up for our rights. We will be here to the end, whatever happens  we want to change things peacefully, but well fight if thats what they want.

Away from the snowy, potholed streets of Chisinau, where people eke out a living on an average monthly wage of around $200, a government that is already widely loathed by the public has rejected the protesters demands and is starting work.

Andrian Candu, speaker of parliament and a leading figure in the ruling coalition, said there was nothing illegal in how the new cabinet took power, and that speed and guile were needed to stop opposition parties sabotaging the process.

If no government had been appointed by Jan. 29, he explained, snap elections would have been triggered  probably handing power to pro-Russian parties.

There are political powers which would really like to have early elections because of the general mood in society of disappointment, Candu said.

They would probably get a majority in parliament, and maybe elect the president afterwards [in a vote due in March]. Some of them openly declare that maybe EU integration is not the way that Moldova should be developed.

The implied message to Washington and EU capitals is clear  if Moldovas new government falls, Russia could again become the dominant force in a country wedged between NATO and EU member Romania and a still unstable Ukraine.

The EU is watching what will happen in the next month or two.  Everyone has questions marks over the government, and whether it is pro-EU and how it will act, Candu said.

I believe the United States will take a position based on results and actions. If the government can be professional and efficient, the U.S. will applaud.

For many Moldovans however, the idea of integration with the West would only be further discredited by US and EU support for a government, which Candu admitted was largely a product of behind-the-scenes deal-making by the oligarch Plahotniuc  who happens to be his godfather.

Its naive to think this guy is pro-European and would not turn to Russia if it was convenient for him, said Maia Sandu, a former education minister who studied at Harvard, and is one of Moldovas most popular  and scandal-free  politicians.

During a recent visit to Washington, Sandu says she told representatives of the State Department and Congress that giving up on democracy for the sake of short-term stability doesnt help  because in the end you lose both.

The costs are going to be much higher in the future, if they underestimate the damage that can be done by keeping and supporting a regime that is undermining the Moldovan state.

Sandu wants an election this year, but the ruling coalition says that could only happen if parliament failed to vote for a new national president in the spring, or if its work was somehow blocked for three months.

Candu, the parliamentary speaker, insisted there was no more time to waste on political squabbling.

He urged Moldovans and the West to give the government a chance, to show it was ready to restart crucial talks with the International Monetary Fund and other lenders, and serious about fighting corruption and finding the missing billion.

He also expressed confidence that much of the money could be traced and the guilty prosecuted, despite the absence of obvious grounds for optimism.

An initial report by U.S. investigative firm Kroll said a key figure in the theft was Ilan Shor, a 28-year-old Moldovan businessmen famed for his wealth and Russian pop star wife.

Shor was placed under house arrest last May, but that did not prevent him from running  successfully  for mayor of his hometown north of Chisinau. He denies any involvement in the disappearance of a sum equivalent to about one-eighth of Moldovas entire gross domestic product.

Protesters are expected to march through Chisinau again this weekend and, with no sign of compromise from either side, Moldovans fear the potential for violence, after several people were hurt last Wednesday when radical demonstrators briefly forced their way through police lines and into parliament.

With the U.S. and EU determined to keep Moldova on a pro-Western track, and a Kremlin-backed separatist region that hosts more than 1,000 Russian troops just 30 miles from Chisinau, any escalation could quickly take on a geopolitical dimension.

Gaburici now observes his countrys Byzantine politics from a business office high above Chisinau.

Im happy to have left politics  and Im sad we got to this situation, he said.

Moldova will change, I am sure of that, but it will happen more slowly than I wanted. This system must change  there is no alternative.
Denmark and Switzerland on Wednesday joined a growing number of European countries to report Zika infections among travelers returning from Latin America, where the mosquito-borne virus has been blamed for a surge in birth defects. The fresh cases in Europe came as President Barack Obama called for the rapid development of tests, vaccines and treatments to fight the virus amid fears of a spread to the United States.

"A Danish tourist who traveled to Central and South America was diagnosed on his return with the Zika virus," a hospital in eastern Denmark said in a statement late Tuesday.

The Danish patient was a young man who was expected to make a full recovery, the head of Aarhus hospital, Lars Ostergaard, told public broadcaster DR.

Two people returning to Switzerland from Haiti and Colombia were also diagnosed with the virus, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health said.

Neither was pregnant and neither required hospital care, the statement said.

Health watchdogs in a string of European countries meanwhile said they had recorded Zika cases dating back to as early as March 2015. The Netherlands confirmed 10 cases and Britain five, all among people returning from South America.

In Italy, the Spallanzani National Institute of Infectious Disease said four cases were recorded in March 2015, while in Portugal, the health ministry said four of its citizens had been infected.

All eight had been traveling in Brazil.

A woman in the Swedish capital Stockholm was diagnosed with the virus in July 2015, the Swedish Public Health Agency confirmed Wednesday.

"The symptoms were treated and the woman recovered," said Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of microbiology at the health agency. In Moscow, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said the Russia authorities had been "monitoring (Zika) since it appeared.

"Now we are working on controlling it as soon as any strange strains appear ... to have domestic medication for prevention and treatment."

President Vladimir Putin said: "We need to pay attention to this ... work with transportation companies, airlines, understand the signs and react quickly," adding "of course mosquitoes cannot fly over the ocean, but infected people can and do."

There is no vaccine or specific treatment for Zika, a flu-like disease with a rash that goes unnoticed in 70 to 80 percent of cases.

Meanwhile, President Obama was briefed on the potential spread of the virus by his top health and national security officials on Tuesday.

"The president emphasized the need to accelerate research efforts to make available better diagnostic tests, to develop vaccines and therapeutics, and to ensure that all Americans have information about the Zika virus and steps they can take to better protect themselves from infection," the White House said in a statement.

Most patients treat the symptoms simply with painkillers and other medication.

The virus is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito after it takes a blood meal from an infected person. The insect can also carry dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Zika was first reported in Africa, Asia and the Pacific before leaping to the Americas, where it has been linked to a jump in the number of babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, particularly in Brazil.

The tally of cases of microcephaly in Brazil surged from 163 per year on average to 3,893 after the Zika outbreak began last year. Forty-nine of the babies have died.

Some 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries have been swept up in the outbreak, which has extended as far north as Mexico. Travelers have also brought it back to the US states of Florida, Hawaii and New York.

So far there have been no known cases of local transmission  infections that are generated within a country  in the U.S. or Europe, although France said such cases had occurred in its departments and territories in the Caribbean basin.

Wire services
The water troubles in Sebring, a small town about 60 miles northeast of Cleveland, follow a separate case of lead poisoning in Flint, Mich.  a city of 100,000 where drinking water was contaminated from April 2014 until residents were issued a lead warning by the city in September 2015. Michigan officials ignored residents complaints for months, and the EPA knew there was a problem with Flint's water as early as April 2015 but didn't act for months.

Ohios EPA said it had headed off the same type of disaster Flint was experiencing by revoking the license of the water treatment operator in Sebring, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

Critics say that, as in Flint, officials in Ohio acted too late. Sebring residents were told of the problem on Jan. 21, but the Ohio EPA and city officials have known of the issue at least since September 2015, when seven of 20 homes tested in the town showed elevated levels of lead in the water. The Ohio EPA said the water system manager that supplied Sebring failed to notify the public within the required 60 days.

Sebring Village Manager Richard Giroux said Tuesday he didnt know about the problem until last week, but the Ohio EPA released correspondence showing he was informed in December.

Giroux and the Ohio EPA did not respond to Al Jazeeras request for comment.

Sebring residents expressed anger and frustration at a packed council meeting on Monday night, local media reported.

A lot of us have kids at home, were extremely afraid, and we need a mayor to stand up and be honest with us, hold people accountable and fix this problem, one resident said at the meeting, according to Cleveland Fox 8.

Residents have been forced to use bottled water for their daily needs since learning of the lead contamination.

Im supposed to heat up bottled water to wash our clothes and our laundry and bathe them  I mean whos got time for that? another resident told Fox 8.

The water restrictions have already been taking a toll on local businesses, residents said.

At Sebrings Royal Star Diner, owner Mark Hughes and his wife Shirleen told The Review, a local newspaper, that business had decreased about 30 to 40 percent since the announcement about the water.

There are also concerns about the long-term effects on children who were exposed to the contaminated water. In Flint, tests showed that children under five years old had blood lead levels that had doubled, and in some cases tripled, since the poisoning began.

Lead levels in Flint and Sebring respectively were 27 and 21 parts per billion, while the acceptable level under federal standards is 15 parts per billion. No safe blood lead level in children has been identified, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on its website. Even low levels can affect IQ, and its effects are irreversible.

The poisoning of Flint has spurred critics to call for Mich. Gov. Rick Snyders resignation, while others have called for his arrest.

With wire services
Terrorist attacks, the threat of Islamic State in Iran and the Levant (ISIL) and the large scale movement of people fleeing conflict and repression have prompted governments to adopt a politics of fear that threatens human rights and civil liberties across the world, according to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2016, released Wednesday. Fear stood behind many of the big human rights developments of the past year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) Executive Director Kenneth Roth says in the report. Fear of being killed or tortured in conflict, fear of asylum seekers, fear of terrorist attacks, fear of dissent has led Western and autocratic governments alike to curtail rights and civil liberties in the name of security. The 659-page report documents the human rights record of more than 90 countries. Among them, the report points to crackdowns in Russia and China, where the intensity of repression of civic groups, rights lawyers and activists has not been seen in decades, according to the report. Egypt is a country that is still in crisis, according to the report. According to the report, the government of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi has imprisoned tens of thousands of people and sentenced hundreds to death. In July, the Interior Minister reported that roughly 12,000 people had been arrested on terrorism charges in 2015 alone. Sisi has also introduced sweeping counterterrorism laws and continues to suppress freedom of expression and association. In Ethiopia, journalists, opposition politicians and protestors suffered harassment and arbitrary arrest. Detainees were tortured and ill-treated, according to the report, including U.K. citizen Andargachew Tsige, who remains in prison. Authorities in Sudan have also clamped down on the media and the activities of civil society groups and violent campaigns and abuses by government forces continue in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile states.

'Xenophobic' policies

European countries and the United States also come under scrutiny. Fear of terrorist attacks and mass refugee flows are driving many Western governments to roll back human rights protections, Roth said in a press release. These backward steps threaten the rights of all without any demonstrated effectiveness in protecting ordinary people. Elena Crespi, western Europe Program Officer with the International Federation for Human Rights in Belgium says the events of the past year have lead to xenophobic and nationalistic rhetoric and also sometimes to the adoption of laws and measures even in blatant disregard for international human rights. Crespi points to Hungarys construction of a fence along its border with Serbia to prevent refugees crossing the border into the country. She told AL Jazeera America the move prevents them from exercising their right to asylum under international law and the Geneva Convention. According to HRW, Hungary also implemented an accelerated asylum procedure, affecting due process rights, and a three-day limit for judicial review, also at odds with the rights of refugees. EU member states have responded to the refugee crisis with a policy of closure, says Crespi. We saw the adoption of a series of measures and policies that confirmed a security-centered approach to migration that was already there in Europe.

Security v. rights
With an aesthetic that evokes paranoiac thrillers from the 1970s  its interviews are dimly lit and interspersed with images of reel-to-reel tape recorders playing illicit audio in dark locations  the films style is immediately gripping. Directed by Robert Cannan and Ross Adam, The Lovers and the Despot is built largely around a single long interview with Choi, along with copious remarkable archival footage, including scenes of North Korean society and clips from the films she and Shin made during their South Korean heyday and in North Korean captivity. The movie works as an international thriller and a love story, with a fair amount of humor and irony; although Shin wasnt pleased to be in captivity in North Korea, he made much of his best work for Kim, who lavished Shin with resources he was never able to access when working in the capitalist production systems of South Korea and the U.S. They escaped North Korea in 1986. He continued his career in Hollywood and is best-known in the U.S. for producing the Little Ninja series in the 1990s.

Perhaps the most viscerally affecting film in the competition is Plaza de la Soledad, a portrait of the sisterhood among a set of Mexico City prostitutes, many of whom would be collecting Social Security checks if only they lived 400 miles to the north. Carmen, 68, the linchpin of the group, prays to God that the women wont be attacked by johns or the police. Dramatic accounts of violence  such as one womans description of how she became a prostitute shortly after being raped as an 8-year-old  are often staged like confessions and are interspersed throughout an otherwise warm and easygoing verite film, in which director Maya Goded treats her subjects with great dignity. While she never portrays the women in the midst of their trade, she also never lets us forget real and present dangers that the prostitutes face, including disease and abusive johns who stalk La Merced, a district of Mexico City that is a tolerance zone for prostitution. There, cops look the other way, both from the trade and from the danger that workers face.

Goded zeros in on five women, ranging in age from late 40s to early 80s: Carmen, still very alluring in her late 60s, looks after many of the younger prostitutes, including Lupe, who suffers from the double whammy of being newly homeless and having a child to raise. Lety has a boyfriend in his 80s who helps support her daughter as she battles cancer. Esther and Angeles, in a clandestine relationship for 14 years, share a love that they keep mostly private, guarding it from their sex work. Raquel, the oldest and frailest of them, yearns for someone to love in life, both in and out of her bed.

Plaza de la Soledad softens the blow of their harrowing stories with humor, leavening what can feel like series of grim tales of woe. Goded doesnt provide false hope, and most of her subjects dont seem to want it; they know their lot in life and have gained expertise from plying their trade on La Merced. The level of intimate access and candor exhibited in the documentary reflects the remarkable amount of trust between the director and her subjects. Goded, who was a photographer of much acclaim before she made the leap into cinema, has been focusing on La Merceds forgotten citizens for 23 years, and many of the women in the film have appeared in her photography. The frankness with which the women speak about the sex trade  in one unnerving, oddly humorous discussion, a prostitute talks about controlling her orgasms only to allow herself release at the end of a long workday with someone she is really attracted to  are clearly the result of their relationships with Goded over a long time.
Taiwan held small-scale military drills on the Kinmen island it controls just off the Chinese coast Tuesday, in a renewed signal of its determination to defend itself from Chinese threats.

The head of Kinmen's defense command said the beach landing exercise and simulated attack by the navy's elite "frogman" commandos were to show the ability of the armed forces to provide security in the Taiwan Strait ahead of next month's Lunar New Year holiday.

The drills follow live-fire exercises held by China in the area just days after Taiwanese voters elected independence-leaning Tsai Ing-wen as president on Jan. 16. The unit involved in those exercises, the 31st Group Army, is charged with responding to contingencies involving Taiwan and is based in the city of Xiamen, directly across a narrow waterway from Kinmen.

China claims Taiwan as its own territory and threatens to use force to bring the island under its control.

Although Tsai has pledged to maintain the status quo with Beijing, relations are widely expected to cool as the DPP is traditionally a pro-independence party. It does not recognize that Taiwan is part of "one China"  a principle insisted upon by Beijing.

The Kinmen commander, Hau Yi-he, said no unusual Chinese military movements had been detected since the election and Taiwan's forces would continue with routine drills.

"We have been monitoring their (China's) military movements. So far, it has remained normal," Hau told The Associated Press during a visit to the island organized by Taiwan's Defense Ministry.

Taiwan retained Kinmen and the Matsu island group to the north as frontline defense outposts for Nationalist forces that retreated to Taiwan following the Communists' 1949 sweep to power in China's civil war.

Reporters were later flown to an air base in the southern county of Chiayi that is home to some of the air force's F-16A/B fighter jets, along with an air rescue group. Taiwan has sought to purchase the more advanced F-16C/D version of the plane from the U.S., a bid that, if successful, would be sure to elicit a furious response from Beijing.

While China in recent years has promoted the concept of peaceful unification rather than outright invasion, it has refused to drop its military threat and passed a law in 2005 laying out the conditions under which it would attack. While not setting a timetable, Chinese President Xi Jinping has told visitors he doesn't wish the issue of independence to be put off for future generations.

Writing Monday in the Communist Party newspaper Global Times, commentator and retired general Luo Yuan said China would never bend in its determination to realize unification, regardless of developments on Taiwan.

"As long as 'peace' has not died, we will give 100 percent," wrote Luo, whose views reflect a popular strain of thinking among nationalist Chinese. "But if the 'Taiwan independence' elements force us into a corner, then we have no other choice but 'unification by force.'"

Meanwhile, the U.S. has voiced criticism over outgoing Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's planned trip to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba in the disputed South China Sea, with one U.S. official calling it "extremely unhelpful."

Ma's office earlier announced that the president, who steps down in May, would fly to Itu Aba on Thursday to offer Chinese New Year wishes to residents on the island, mainly Taiwanese coastguard personnel and environmental scholars.

But Ma's one-day visit to Itu Aba, known as Taiping in Taiwan, comes amid growing international concern over rising tensions in the waterway and quickly drew the ire of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.

"We are disappointed that President Ma Ying-jeou plans to travel to Taiping Island," AIT spokeswoman Sonia Urbom said in an email to Reuters. "Such an action is extremely unhelpful and does not contribute to the peaceful resolution of disputes in the South China Sea."

Wire services
Texas on Wednesday night executed James Freeman, who led game wardens on a high-speed chase in 2007 before getting into a gunbattle with them and fatally shooting one of the officers.

The execution was the second in Texas this year and the 533rd in the state since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. In that time, 37 percent of U.S. executions have taken place in Texas.

Freeman was asked by the warden if he had a final statement. "No, I do not," he replied.

He was pronounced dead at 6:30 p.m., 16 minutes after Texas prison officials began a lethal dose of pentobarbital. As the pentobarbital began taking effect, he snored about five times and coughed slightly once.

The lethal injection was the second in as many weeks in Texas, which carries out capital punishment more than any other state. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case earlier this month, and no new appeals were filed the courts to try to block the punishment.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday declined a clemency petition from Freeman.

Freeman was convicted of killing game warden Justin Hurst, who turned 34 on the day Freeman killed him. On the night of the incident, in Wharton County, about 130 miles southeast of Austin, Freeman drank heavily, got into his pickup truck and shot at animals from the roadside, prosecutors said.

After hearing shots, game wardens approached his vehicle, and he drove off, leading officers on a 90-minute high-speed chase, they said. After officers flattened the truck's tires with road spikes, he got out and fired 11 shots from his pistol at the wardens.

He then retrieved an AK-47, used his pickup truck for cover and fired about 30 more rounds at the officers, who were firing back, they said. Freeman was shot four times and survived. Hurst was airlifted to a hospital in Houston and pronounced dead from gunshot wounds.

Wire services
Three of the nations leading trade associations have a message for their member corporations: Resist activists who demand you disclose more details about your politicking than the law requires.

The strategy of pressuring companies to voluntarily disclose the details of their spending on public policy engagement for the purpose of reducing that engagement is, in fact, their ultimate goal, wrote U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue, Business Roundtable President John Engler and National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons in a letter dated Oct. 13 and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

They added, As these activists continue efforts to silence the business communitys voice, we will continue to engage on your behalf.

The trade association leaders reserved particular criticism for the Center for Political Accountability and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School, which in early October published an annual index ranking large companies on their political disclosure practices and policies.

Companies earn points on more than two dozen measures, such as revealing money spent to influence state-level ballot initiatives and voluntarily disclosing contributions to politically active trade associations and other nonprofit groups.

Such politically active nonprofit groups  including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce  sometimes directly advocate for and against political candidates and may spend into the millions of dollars doing so.

Donohue, Engler and Timmons argued that the index is little more than a tool to be used to attack companies and name and shame them into either curtailing or eliminating their involvement in public policy debates altogether. The three warned that the index could be used by activist investors to justify proxy proposals aimed at forcing companies to publish details about their political efforts.

The men sent a similar do-not-disclose letter to their members in 2013.

Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability, scoffed at the groups criticism, which he says he expected. The reason: It is leading to the broader disclosure of company payments to trade associations and the U.S. Chamber in particular. The Chamber has a deep investment in secrecy, he said. As for the trade groups letter, he said it hasnt been effective in discrediting CPA or the index. Companies continue to treat the index as a credible, serious benchmarking.

Officials at the U.S. Chamber, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers declined the Center for Public Integritys requests for comment.

The trade groups plea comes as the U.S. Chamber is preparing to play a major role in the 2016 congressional elections. Consider that during the 2014 midterm elections, the U.S. Chamber spent about $35.5 million on messages naming federal political candidates, if not overtly advocating for their election or defeat, Federal Election Commission records indicate.

Of that, the U.S. Chamber spent about $6.8 million to help elect Republicans Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Joni Ernst of Iowa to the Senate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

All the while, the U.S. Chamber could hide the names of people or corporations bankrolling what were primarily political attack ads: Trade groups, which are nonprofits organized under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Service code, are not required by law to reveal their funders.

Thank the Supreme Courts Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010 for this. The ruling allowed corporations  including certain nonprofits and unions  to spend unlimited amounts of dark money to promote or attack political candidates.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation, for example, identified dozens of companies that in 2012 or 2013 gave money to the U.S. Chamber, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers.

Some contributions, which ranged from the low five figures to well into the millions, specifically funded the trade groups government lobbying or political efforts. Companies with household names such as PepsiCo, eBay, Intel and AFLAC earmarked money for such purposes.

More recently, some companies that play key roles in one or more of the trade associations have gone against the trade associations wishes regarding political transparency.

Take Dow Chemical, whose executive vice president and general counsel, Charles Kalil, is a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board of directors. Dow voluntarily disclosed that it contributed more than $2.91 million to the U.S. Chamber, $250,000 to the National Association of Manufacturers and about $92,000 to the Business Roundtable in 2014. It also revealed significant contributions it made to various ballot initiative campaigns and other politically active nonprofits.

Dow endeavors to participate actively in the leadership of its key trade associations, the company said. However, we may from time to time find ourselves in disagreement with the prevailing views of the majority of the associations membership.

Social welfare, or 501(c)(4), nonprofits, like their trade association cousins, may also engage in direct politicking as long as that is not their primary purpose for existing.

The U.S. Chamber doesnt generally involve itself in presidential politics, but several nonprofits are already combining to pump millions of anonymous dollars into the 2016 presidential election. They include a group backing Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio.

More will almost assuredly become active later this year after the general election campaign begins in earnest. And they, too, may accept unlimited, anonymous contributions from corporations.

This story is from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative media organization in Washington, D.C. Read more of its investigations on the influence of money in politics or follow it on Twitter.
This week marks a year since Syriza, the radical left coalition led by the charismatic Alexis Tsipras, took power in Greece after elections on Jan. 25, 2015. They took office heralded as saviors, and then were branded amateurs, radicals, revisionists, traitors and finally just more of the same. The Greek electorate pinned on Syriza its hope that the vicious circle of austerity and depression could break, setting a new paradigm for a Europe that is stagnating in a climate of suspicion and animosity. To say that Syriza has simply failed to deliver would be an injustice both to their initial efforts and to the plight of those suffering under renewed austerity. Syriza, for all intents and purposes, has killed off the idea of mass movement parliamentary politics for at least a generation. In the process, under pressure from European institutions, theyre also criminalizing the kind of solidarity they promised to protect.

The end of party politics

After the bitter experience of the past year, voters are abandoning parties in droves. A recent poll found that support for all major political parties is plummeting. But a year ago, I was part of a crowd of thousands that stood outside the gates of the old University of Athens, as Tsipras took the stage to announce that his party had emerged victorious and that they would be forming a coalition government with the populist right Independent Greeks. These crowds would turn up again and again in support of the government during the negotiations, lighting candles and singing left-wing anthems in front of the Parliament in Syntagma Square. But after a massive display on the night of July 6, when Greek voters resoundingly voted no in a referendum to a deal that would bring more austerity and misery, these crowds dissipated, never to be seen again. Syriza, under pressure from European creditors, was forced to ignore the result of the referendum. Activists and leftists not only in Greece, but the world over, cried betrayal and expressed their anger online with the hashtag #ThisIsACoup. After signing up for more austerity in a marginally improved deal, Syriza won another round of elections in September. A sense of powerlessness drove many Greeks away from politics all together. But this withdrawal from party politics hasnt meant resignation. In the streets, Greek civil society is more active than ever. Antifascist networks, anarchists and others have worked to fill in the gaps left behind by a broke and demoralized state, and they have built something that looks significantly more sturdy.

Promises forgotten

Solidarity networks have been set up to deal with poverty in creative ways. These arent just soup kitchens; theyre addressing problems such as lack of access to education and healthcare. Theyve also taken up causes like gay marriage, bringing transparency to the often nefarious workings of the state, and citizenship for second-generation migrants.

A year after Greece was promised radical politics, they have materialized in spite of Syriza, not because of it.
The prophecy is more than seeing into the future. For the prophecy sees without the element of time. For the prophecy sees things as they were, as they are, and as they always shall be.
As'ad's Bio

As'ad AbuKhalil, born March 16, 1960. From Tyre, Lebanon, grew up in Beirut. Received his BA and MA from American University of Beirut in pol sc. Came to US in 1983 and received his PhD in comparative government from Georgetown University. Taught at Tufts University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Colorado College, and Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Served as a Scholar-in-Residence at Middle East Institute in Washington DC. He served as free-lance Middle East consultant for NBC News and ABC News, an experience that only served to increase his disdain for maintream US media. He is now professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. His favorite food is fried eggplants.
Welcome

Welcome to the Antique Prints Blog, a blog about original prints from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, with a primary focus on historical prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a blog for anyone interested in this topic. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.


This series of images shows how to take two square pieces of card stock (or thick paper), and cut and fold them into two halves of a b...
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. The rival violated the ceasefire regime for over 60 times in the line of contact of the Karabakh-Azerbaijani opposing armies on January 26 and during the night of January 27. More than 1000 shots were fired towards Armenian frontier troops from weapons of different caliber during the abovementioned period.

Azerbaijani armed forces also used 82mm mortars (3missiles) and RPG-7 grenade launchers (1missile) in the northern direction of the contact line.

The Press Service of the Defense Ministry of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic informed Armenpress that the frontier troops of the Defense Army generally remained committed to ceasefire regime confidently carrying out their military duty.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. The failure of the anti-Armenian resolution at PACE confirmed that the Armenian party also had done manifold activities. Such working style must be of permanent nature. Only in that case, it will be possible to develop the achievements and refrain as much as possible from undesirable resolutions. Political scientists Tigran Abrahamyan talked about the discussion of the two anti-Armenian resolutions and voting results when being interviewed by Armenpress.

Mr. Abrahamyan, were the voting results of the anti-Armenian reports at PACE expected? Did the condemning statement made by the OSCE MG Co-chairs have any influence?

The OSCE MG Co-chairs had expressed a rather clear position on the resolutions circulating within PACE. This could not but impact the further developments. The statement of the Co-chairs was important as it will not become irrelevant even in the future. This must be taken into account by all the institutions where an attempt will be made to start initiatives contradicting the logic of the negotiations. Simultaneously, it was notable that the Armenian party had done manifold activities. This must be of permanent nature, as only in that case, it will be possible to develop the achievements and refrain as much as possible from undesirable resolutions.

It was being spoken before the discussion of the reports that in case they were voted in favour, they could disrupt the negotiations process. Now that we have the voting results, can we say that the danger has been neutralized?

We can state that the factors disrupting the negotiation process have in some regard been neutralized. Certainly, those resolutions are of consulting nature, but if we consider the European structures importance and promotional value of the resolutions, their adoption was not desirable.

The second report which includes a humanitarian issue connected with the use of water resources was adopted. Which are the results this may lead to?

Well, the international community, namely the MG Co-chairs, urged PACE some days ago not to take steps that might harm OSCE MGs mandate or would complicate the negotiation process. This was followed by the reaction on the part of Azerbaijan, stating that the OSCE MG has no monopoly in the settlement process of the conflict.

This statement was made in case when it was obvious that the international community had handed the mandate for the conflict settlement to the OSCE MG. It was obvious that the Co-chairs statement shocked Azerbaijan. In this sense, it is needless to speak about the serious impact of the resolution on the negotiation process. By the statement the MG has already showed its attitude both towards Azerbaijans behavior and the resolutions of the like adopted in PACE.

By Anna Gziryan
Winter Storm Jonas effectively brought all congressional activity to a halt this week. The House canceled all votes and the Senate is not expected to reconvene until Wednesday. This is a fitting development if you are a faithful watcher, as I am, of lawmakers' inability to do anything meaningful regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Much like the effects of the blizzard, Congress has let other outside events overtake the prospects of housing finance reform.

Despite the urgency of needing to overhaul Fannie and Freddie, the chances of any legislative progress in 2016 are next to zero. In all likelihood, the government-sponsored enterprises will be handed to the next administration still in conservatorship with no exit plan. As no candidate, of any party, is devoting serious attention to the GSEs, it is also fair to assume that the next administration will not devote considerable energy in 2017 to resolving the situation.

This means the future of the GSEs  and any credible prospect of reducing their risk to the taxpayer  lie almost exclusively in the hands of their regulator: the Federal Housing Finance Agency. While the focus in the GSE debate has mostly been on Congress, the FHFA does have viable de-risking tools at its disposal. The agency should not delay in using them. The Obama administration has generally missed every opportunity to put Fannie and Freddie on better footing. But if the FHFA is truly committed to improving the situation  and protecting the taxpayer  the only solution is a combination of risk reduction and transfer.

But before focusing any further on the future, it is worth recalling what should have been. The law creating FHFA in 2008, just months before the federal takeover of Fannie and Freddie, instituted not just the new agency's conservator powers but also its ability to put the GSEs into receivership.

Having the government act as receiver for the two mortgage giants  instead of conservator  would have had many important benefits. It would have restructured the GSEs without any taxpayer support, while allowing them to continue to support the mortgage market. Just as importantly, receivership would have transformed Fannie and Freddie into "clean" companies, ready to be released back into the private market.

We are where we are today due to the failures of both FHFA and the Treasury Department to pursue this strategy. The most pressing problem resulting from the government's poor decisions is the lack of significant capital. Compared to the current situation, the massive leverage of the GSEs going into the crisis almost looks responsible.

And if there is a repeat of 2008, the GSEs' current condition would make it likely that losses are transferred straight to the taxpayer. There will be another housing downturn, make no mistake. That is because we have not addressed the volatile effects of inelastic housing supply on pricing. When the next downturn comes, any government rescue may well look small in comparison.

So the FHFA needs to get serious about de-risking the GSEs. FHFA has made some modest progress in the area of risk transfer. Mortgage insurers have been subjected to greater scrutiny while also taking a larger piece of GSE credit risk. Regardless of their troubles during the crisis, mortgage insurers are less likely to be rescued by the taxpayer, offering some potential for market discipline. More can and should be done here. There is little reason MIs cannot take, say, a 50% first loss piece of credit risk  up from the current coverage cap of 35%. Substituting MI capital for a lack of GSE capital might not be the best approach, but it may well be the only approach readily available.

While greater MI coverage can transfer risk at the loan level, there also needs to be a greater transfer of risk to outside investors. One way to do that is by creating a mechanism whereby the market's belief that investors will be on the hook is more credible. Lately, the GSEs, with support from FHFA, have engaged in structured securitizations that can transfer risk to private market participants. But those deals run the risk of the market not believing that investors will actually suffer losses. Recall that both GSEs issued subordinated debt before the crisis, yet despite its subordinated nature such debt was protected.

For the recent risk-transfer securitizations to actually work, simply repeating "there's no guarantee" will be about as believable as it was before the crisis. To make such statements more credible, the FHFA could back the creations of GSE "living wills," or an independent bankruptcy-remote trust, to legally bind beforehand the order of priorities in the event of insolvency. Such structures existed in the crisis for private-label investors in mortgage-backed securities, allowing the MBS pool to continue on as a separate legal entity even when the issuer failed.

The FHFA is to be commended for modest attempts thus far to transfer risk out of the GSEs. But it has completely failed in protecting the system from the risk of faulty mortgages. Mortgages with a 3% down-payment, for instance, only make it more likely that borrowers will be underwater in any future downturn. There are also concerns about the concentration of Fannie and Freddie's geographic footprint. Their presence in the mortgage market in California, for example, is bigger than it was prior to 2008. As we approach the next housing peak, FHFA would be wise to improve the credit quality of GSEs mortgages while also taking steps to reduce geographic concentration.

I do not mean to shift focus away from the failure of Congress to pass GSE reform. Maybe the weather kept them away this week, but lawmakers cannot blame the historic snowfall for their failure to fix housing finance. Yet the FHFA still has the potential to succeed on many fronts where Capitol Hill has largely punted.

Mark Calabria is the director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute and a former senior staff member on the Senate Banking Committee. Follow him on Twitter@MarkCalabria.
A common trope these days is for banks to describe themselves as tech companies that specialize in the movement of money.

At tech conferences, they talk up their mobile strategy and tout their innovation labs in Silicon Valley or in Chennai, India. At economic conferences like Davos, they talk about their fintech partnerships and the future of banking.

But in the conference calls they host quarterly with financial analysts  who influence how investors value the banks  tech talk is reduced to a few sound bites, taking a backseat to the more tangible metrics: loan growth, efficiency ratios and net interest margins.

What drives the divide? Dollars and cents, it seems.

"What will wake up Wall Street to technology at banks?" said Fred Cannon, director of research at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. "When it starts showing up in the numbers. So far, it hasn't."

For the most part, it seems like bankers are mostly just playing to their audience. They may sprinkle a few tech nuggets in their prepared remarks  JPMorgan Chase has made reporting the numbers of people using its mobile-banking platform a tradition, for instance  but analysts don't ask much about it during the question-and-answer portion where the juiciest parts of the quarter often come to light.

For instance, during the conference calls to discuss the fourth-quarter earnings at six of the largest banks, the words "expenses," "revenue" and "energy"  a hot topic this earnings season  were ubiquitous. Words like "technology" or "innovation" were mentioned far more sparingly.

To the analysts, technology is part alchemy, part table stakes; it could prove to be a differentiator, but it can also just be a fad. So, for now, they would rather dwell on more tangible matters.

"Analysts are skeptical about pie-in-the-sky futurism  we've heard about new technology changing the face of banking for years," Cannon said. "There is always something new  the supermarket branches in the '90s or [Washington Mutual's] branch of the future, for instance."

Given their focus on predicting future earnings, technology and its effects are hard to value other than as expense items, said Mark Fitzgibbon, director of research at Sandler O'Neill.

"It is really hard to discern how much profit came from having a new technology," Fitzgibbon said. "You can't perfectly triangulate it."

There could come a day when a clear line can be drawn between stronger loan growth and the adoption of a small-business lending platform, or a drop in deposits following a disastrous tech rollout. Technology could become a bigger part of how bankers discuss their quarterly results as it takes a bigger role in the way people interact with their bank.

For their part, bankers seem to want to share their tech stories with analysts, and by extension investors. At least the ones that have made it a priority.

Richard Davis, the chief executive of U.S. Bancorp, said in his company's fourth-quarter conference call earlier this month that the company would begin "bringing more visibility to our innovation budget and the kind of money we're spending to be at the front end of some of those new ideas."

Tech is also a broad and somewhat amorphous term, so it is perhaps hard to boil it down to a point on a brief call. Many banks instead include tech updates as part of investor days, Fitzgibbon said.

Indeed, technology is expected to be a major theme at JPMorgan's investor day next month, with several executives detailing how technology is shaping different business lines.

"When you discuss technology, it can incorporate so much  from making things more efficient and giving customers better services to partnering with startups and building tech hubs," said Joe Evangelisti, head of communications for the company. "So we have to think about it in a coordinated way."

Analysts' interest in technology could change dramatically in the next 12 to 18 months, said Brett King, chief executive of the neobank Moven and host of the "Breaking Banks" radio show.

Executives at a bank in Europe recently told him the branch network has stopped generating revenue. As he sees it, this is a harbinger of things to come, specifically for the regional and community banks that do not have the resources of the largest banks to invest in digital channels.

"At this stage, many of them only have revenue at the branch level. They don't sell any products online and this is going to be a complete shift," King said. "Smart analysts are going to be looking at these banks, with their big branch networks, and say, 'We are going to discount you, we are going to be bearish on your stock because you have no plans for a digital-revenue strategy.'"

Legacy core-banking systems could also force analysts to care. Archaic systems that were not designed to process the volume of data that mobile banking is producing may lead to major problems or major expenses should banks decide to fix them, observers from the fintech world said.

"If banks want to change their tech stack, they've got to spend a lot of money to modernize legacy systems that are old and clunky," said David Klein, chief executive of CommonBond, a marketplace lender. "That's hard to do in a world where many shareholders would rather see quarterly cost reduction than necessary long-term investment."

But, in the case of an outage because of a core system, "those are brand-ending situations," King said.


YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Senior Foreign Affairs Committee Member (D-CA) Brad Sherman and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff (D-CA) urged USA Secretary Kerry to weigh in against failed European anti-Karabakh resolution. Armenpress was informed by the Armenian National Committee of America.

In a letter to Secretary of State Kerry, Rep. Schiff urged the State Department to make clear at the highest levels its view that the resolution is one-sided, inaccurate, and counterproductive to the cause of peace and stability. Noting that Azerbaijan has taken numerous provocative actions on the Line of Contact resulting in the death and injury of civilians and military personnel, Rep. Schiff expressed concern that the resolution fails to mention that President Aliyev continues to reject the installation of technologies along the Line of Contact to monitor the use of snipers and artillery. Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh have agreed to the placement of such monitoring measures, which were advanced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) and Eliot Engel (D-NY) and over 80 U.S. House Members in November, 2015.

Rep. Sherman, in his letter to Secretary Kerry, urged that the U.S. take immediate action to defeat the measure which sought to undermine the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Groups leadership role in the Nagorno Karabakh peace negotiations. Doing away with the Minsk Group is not only bad policy but an insult to the American people and to the hard working and dedicated diplomats at the State Department, explained Rep. Sherman.

On January 26 PACE refused to adopt draft resolution on Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan by rapporteur Robert Walter (no longer a PACE member). 66 MPs voted for, 70  against the report.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted rapporteur Milica Markovics (Bosnia and Herzegovina) draft resolution on Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water making some changes and revisions to the draft. 98 MPs voted for, 71  against. 40 MPs abstained.
Last Thursday, at the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Secretary of State John Kerry said, "I think that some of it (the money from the Iranian nuclear deal), will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists, adding, "You know, to some degree, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented. But I can tell you this, right now, we are not seeing the early delivery of funds going to that kind of endeavor at this point in time."

Now that the money has already been released, Kerry casually acknowledges an inevitability that we, who have been in opposition of the Iranian nuclear deal, have been arguing all along.

Last May, White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked by a reporter whether or not when the sanctions are dismissed, there will be an increase in Irans destabilizing operations in the region and funding of Hezballah and other groups, he responded, I think, most importantly its the hope of the Iranian people that the influx of resources will be devoted to meeting the needs of the population there.

This is yet another example of the triumph of hope in Obamas foreign policy over realism. We have all known that since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has chosen to use most of its GNP for guns and not butter.

Those of us who were against the deal, were not simply opposed to it because Iran will legally be allowed to have access to nuclear weapons in a mere 10 years -- and that is assuming that they will not cheat. (One might do well to ask: What is ten years in the life of a nation?) It was because we knew that an enormous cash influx will go to the worlds largest state sponsor of terrorism, which will be used to further carry out more dastardly acts against civilians. We knew it would go to further destabilize the region with its proxy wars, and would only contribute to a feeling of growing triumphalism and empowerment against its Sunni Arab rivals, what it regards as the minor Satan, Israel, and the great Satan, the United States.

In 2012, when Iran was under its most stringent sanctions, the Islamic Republic contributed $2 billion to Hezb'allah alone, and about $6 billion to the forces of Bashir Assad in Syria. How could anyone with a brain is his head not conceive of the possibility that Iran will use some of this money to carry out further acts of terrorism and to use it to foment more instability and chaos in the most explosive region of the world, and beyond.

The cavalier tone the Secretary had injected into his Davos comment further enrages anyone who appreciates the menacing nature of the Iranian regime. It has long been known that Iran is the worlds leading state sponsor of terrorism, and that billions of Iranian rials have found their way to the coffers of Hamas, Hizballah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Sana, Yemen, the forces around Bashir Assad in Syria, and fueling the threatening flames of the fourteen-century internecine fissure between Shia and Sunni Islam that portends to further destabilize the entire region, as each side is vowing for Islamic hegemony.

Since Implementation Day, January 16th, Iran has access to the SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication banking system, which now enables Iran to easily move money around to its various terrorist proxies. As a result of the sanctions, SWIFT had disconnected 15 Iranian banks from this global financial network, but as of Implementation Day Iran now has access to over 10,800 financial institutions worldwide.

It gives little comfort to know that Secretary of State Kerry says that the opponents of the deal inflated the amount that Iran will now have access to, that after settling their debts the more accurate sum will not be the $100 to $150 billion dollars, but would more likely be about 55 billion dollars.

Yes. A mere $55 billion, and that is assuming you buy into the secretarys generous calculations on Irans behalf.

Then the Secretary of State resumed the role of attorney for Iran, with the baffling statement that The Saudis alone spend $80 billion a year on defense. The entire Gulf state community spends $130 billion a year on defense, he said. Iran spends $15 billion a year on its military activities. So its incredibly disproportionate.

First of all, that was before this enormous sum, (whether it be $50 billion or $150 billion, it is still enormous), was released. Further, does that mean we have got to fill these coffers to the worlds leading sponsor of terrorism, just to even the score?

President Obama has made similar statements, right after the JCPOA was agreed to, flippantly saying on July 15th, We know that Iran just wont spend it on daycare centers and roads and paying down the debt.

The cavalier nature of these statements demonstrate that these individuals have never spent any time talking to some of the American victims of Iranian terrorism.

I have spent much time over the last few decades meeting with people who have lost loved ones to Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorism. You can see the enormous pain etched upon each one of their faces.

When a loved one is murdered by a terrorist, it is an irreparable loss, as though a chamber has been ripped out of ones heart. There is always loss when a loved one dies, but the pain of having a son or a daughter, or loved one, ripped out of ones life by something so earth-shattering and unpredictable as terrorism, is almost too much to bear.

When I was in Israel two weeks ago, I met with Arnold Roth, Malki Roths father. Malki was a beautiful 15-year-old girl who played the violin exquisitely and wanted to be a special education teacher. She was one of two Americans who was blown up the Sbarro Pizza Restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem in August 9, 2001. The other American was Judith Greenblum, 31, who was pregnant at the time. There were 15 people, all told, who were killed at that event.

Malki is one of at least 62 Americans that I know of who have been killed by Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorism since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Each one of their stories is more difficult to listen to than the last.

I would like to ask President Obama or Secretary Kerry to spend an hour or two with Arnold Roth, or with the families of the other Americans who have lost loved ones at the hands of Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorists, and then to discuss the possibility that some of this money will end up in the hands of terrorists. And I wonder if their tone would then be quite so dismissive.

When the pursuit of a personal legacy becomes the driving force of a foreign policy, to the extent that one can be so cavalier about the fact that some of this money will go to fuel terrorism, we, as a nation, have lost an important part of our moral fiber.

Sarah N. Stern is Founder and President of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, EMET, an unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-American think tank and policy institute in Washington, DC.
Ever since Donald Trumps rise to 2016-contender prominence, the rap on him, and perhaps part of his broad appeal, has been that hes not a conservative. And hes not -- hes a nationalistic populist. Yet theres another way to understand The Donalds professed politics: as that of the first prominent European-conservative American presidential candidate. Hes not so much Americas next Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, but her first Marine Le Pen.

A prerequisite for grasping this is first understanding the true natures of liberalism and conservatism. While many have their own definitions of the latter -- and will stubbornly insist theyre correct -- the truth is that both political terms are provisional, meaning different things in different times and places. The term conservative in the 1970s referred to a communist in the USSR and someone staunchly anti-communist in the US; and a European conservative today, such as Britains David Cameron, is well to the left of our conservatives. Many other examples could be provided, but the point is this: liberalism and conservatism are not ideologies as much as processes. Liberalism is the process of inexorably trying to change the status quo; conservatism is the process of trying to preserve the status quo. Thus, what the terms represent will vary depending on the status quo in question.

And when analyzing the Trump phenomenon, its clear that its roughly the same one evident in much of the West, the one fueling the fortunes of Le Pen in France, the Netherlands Geert Wilders (who has endorsed Trump), Britains Nigel Farage and Swedens Jimmie Akesson. He also bears much in common with those figures.

Consider the qualities these European politicians share: theyre socially quite liberal. Their views on abortion range from indifference to tolerance to mild skepticism, on faux marriage they range from mild opposition to acceptance. In general, they say as little about these matters as they can and are willing to play to their audience. But then theres their real passion, about which they generally seem sincere: nationalism, limiting immigration, fighting Muslim terrorism and stopping Islamization. Sound at all familiar?

Its also common (though not universal) among such figures to talk about preserving their nations Christian heritage. Now, its unimaginable that Le Pen and Wilders spend much time at an altar rail, and were Christian piety the order of the day in Western Europe, it would be easy to see them taking up the cudgels for secularism. But with already sclerotic Christian culture further threatened by a confluence of secularization and Islamization -- and with Muslim chauvinists providing stark reminders of a very unappealing alternative -- theyre inspired to become Crusaders protecting their nations Christian veneer.

Likewise, Trump cannot be mistaken for a desert mystic; he stated last summer that he never sought forgiveness from God (doing so is a Christian tenet), and hasnt demonstrated much acquaintance with the faith. Yet he has also said hes proud to be a Presbyterian, sometimes attends church and has bemoaned how Christianity is under attack in America. And whether you believe this is piety or posturing, for certain is this: its no surprise coming from an apparent nationalist. For being so means defending your nations culture, as it is, which in the West includes superficial Christianity. It means wanting to see church steeples and not minarets, crosses and not the star and crescent, and to hear church bells and not the Adhan -- even if you talk more about the Easter Bunny than Jesus.

So what accounts for the popularity in the U.S. of a European conservative? The same things accounting for it in across the pond. First, like Western Europe, were beset by a political establishment that encourages a culture-rending invasion by unassimilable peoples. And its just as with a hot invasion: all other problems are put on the back burner when barbarians are at the gate. Have you ever seen a guy wringing his hands about his daughters sleazy boyfriend while home invaders are busting down his door?

This helps explain why Trump is attracting support from groups most wouldnt expect, such as evangelicals. Some find it inexplicable, but I think these believers attitude was reflected well by a devout Catholic man I know -- a truly faithful fellow -- who said some years back that he considered immigration an even bigger issue than abortion. His point was that all else is for naught if youre subjected to demographic genocide and lose your nation.

Then theres the second reason a European conservative would play well today: the US is becoming more like Europe. A not widely understood phenomenon is that the positions we generally associate with traditional American conservatism correlate with Christian belief. This is why church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting habits. Consider: in socialistic Western Europe, more than 50 percent of the population identifies as irreligious. Not surprisingly, this reaches a Richard Dawkins Award high in whats perhaps the worlds most liberal country, Sweden, where 76 percent of the citizenry identifies as not religious or atheist (and how many of the rest are Muslim?). And in once-Marxist, now-fascist China, 90 percent thus label themselves.

The US isnt yet that far gone, but were on the same road. According to Pew Research Center, Americans identifying as Christian declined from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent of the population in just 7 years (2007 to 2014), and the religiously unaffiliated now account for almost a quarter of our nation. This just reflects the increasingly secular nature of succeeding generations: Among those born 1928 through 1945, 85 percent identify as Christian. But there is a steady degeneration of the generations, with only 56 percent of Younger Millennials (born 90 through 96) labeling themselves so.

Yet even this paints too optimistic a picture. As this must-read Barna Group research company study found in 2002 already, only 22 percent of adults believed in Absolute Moral Truth while 64 percent said matters were always relative to the person and their [sic] situation. And they were practically the wise elders: 83 percent of the teenagers subscribed to relativism -- which is the antithesis of Christian belief -- and only 6 percent believed in Truth.

And as Barna head George Barna put it,

[T]he alarmingly fast decline of moral foundations among our young people has culminated in a one-word worldview: 'whatever.' The result is a mentality that esteems pluralism, relativism, tolerance, and diversity without critical reflection of the implications of particular views and actions."

Put simply and as Ive explained many times, the notion that there is no Truth means that, in essence, there are no moral rules governing man. It is then that everything boils down to occultist Aleister Crowleys maxim, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Thus does lacking the yardstick of Truth lead to, as Barna also found, people making decisions based on what feels right. And now we see the rise of relativistic moderns to whom nationalism and their own culture feel right, which is certainly preferable to the dominance of relativistic moderns to whom internationalism and multiculturalism feel right. Absent acquaintance with and adherence to Truth, however, a civilization will always descend into some kind of lie. So the most we can perhaps hope for is that, to quote Yogi Berra, we wont one day have to say, I think I made the wrong mistake.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
It seems you dont have to shoot the messenger any more, just get a Texas grand jury to forget about that ham sandwich and indict the messenger, in this case David Daleiden, director of the Center for Medical Progress, and another pro-life activist, Sandra S. Merritt, for their videos exposing Planned Parenthoods booming business of selling the body parts of aborted babies for cash. As the New York Times reported:

Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress -- an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue -- had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.

The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California drivers licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

What used to be called investigative journalism has been criminalized. Planned Parenthood was not indicted for selling baby body parts but in the parallel universe of this grand jury the filmmakers were indicted for engaging in an alleged criminal conspiracy to buy them. How can you buy something the other party is not selling? If Planned Parenthood was not in fact selling body parts, then why the extended negotiations? Why didnt Planned Parenthood tell the filmmakers to get lost instead of inviting them to lunch and negotiating prices over a salad and cocktails?

Interestingly, and strictly coincidentally, of course, a prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorneys office is a Planned Parenthood board member. As LifeNews.com reports:

Lauren Reeder is a prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorneys criminal family law division. She apparently notified District Attorney Devon Anderson of her role with Planned Parenthood last week. Reeder is listed as a non-compensated Director on the 990 Tax Form for 2014 filed by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast.

Planned Parenthood and its supporters got caught with their forceps down, so anything they can do to cloud the issue and cast doubt on the integrity of their accusers is in their interest and in the interest of the presidential candidate who applauds their efforts, one Hillary Clinton, well-known for blaming things like Benghazi on inflammatory videos.

Planned Parenthood has already tried to discredit the videos by saying they were carefully edited and that the admissions of Planned Parenthood officials of conducting a for-profit baby body part flea market was taken out of context. It is hard to imagine in what context the discussion of the price of a fetal head versus the price of a new Lamborghini is okay. As LifeNews.com comments:

The video of the Houston Planned Parenthood makes it appear the Planned Parenthood abortion business may be selling the fully intact bodies of unborn babies purposefully born alive and left to die. The video shows the Director of Research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Melissa Farrell, advertising the Texas Planned Parenthood branchs track record of fetal tissue sales, including its ability to deliver fully intact aborted babies.

Planned Parenthood could be breaking the federal law known as the Born Alive Infants Protection Act that requires abortion clinics, hospitals and other places that do abortions to provide appropriate medical care for a baby born alive after a failed abortion or purposefully birthed to let die. That would be one of the potential ways Planned Parenthood could produce a fully intact baby to sell to StemExpress for research. Most crunchy abortion methods would do damage to the babys body.

But it is not Farrell or her associates that have been indicted. If Kermit Gosnell and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had a love child, it might be Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthoods Senior Director of Medical Services, who, in one of the undercover videos, appears to be calmly brokering the sale of body parts as if she were negotiating over lawn furniture at a garage sale.

In one disturbing video and its appalling transcript, made by the non-profit group Center for Medical Progress, which describes itself as dedicated to monitoring and reporting on medical ethics and advances, it is made clear that the alleged noble crusade against unwanted children is a fraud, and that Planned Parenthoods interest in abortion is a financial one and that human life is just a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market.

The video shows Nucatola negotiating with two actors posing as agents of a fetal tissue procurement company and discussing the body parts of aborted babies as if shw was a butcher at the local meat market, as Breitbart.com reports:

Weve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so Im not gonna crush that part, Nucatola coldly explains. Im gonna basically crush [the unborn child] below, Im gonna crush above, and Im gonna see if I can get it all intact.  And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so theyll know where theyre putting their forceps.

Nucatola also goes into great detail to explain how Planned Parenthood is able to use its loose affiliates as a way to protect the parent company from potential legal fallout.

The video goes a long way to explain Planned Parenthoods eternal devotion to legalizing late-term and partial-birth abortion.

Nucatola explains to the undercover reporters that the butchered body parts (hearts, livers, lower extremities -- probably for the muscle) sell for $30 to $100 apiece.

Moreover, the more fully-formed the baby body parts, the more valuable those parts are.

It is hard to see how this was taken out of context or that exposing this criminal activity is itself a crime. Yet this is the fundamentally transformed America we live in, one in which babies can be sliced and diced for profit but it is those that document this activity are guilty of the greater sin.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investors Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Donald Trump's policy position on the US military has not received much attention during the primary season, but to my knowledge the other candidates positions havent been highlighted either. Most of the candidates plans are seem to be reasonable, but do not address the critical problem, and that is a huge contractor warfighting capability has enabled US executive action to fight our wars divorced from both a sound national strategy and a connection to the American people. If Trumps plan outlined below is correct,* it shows that Trump has the right approach to return America's military strength to a traditional element of our national strategy to serve the interests of Americans.

Warning: This is not an old Cold War debate of bombers vs. day care centers, rather it gets to heart of how we fight our wars: (via Conservative Treehouse):

Trump believes the collaborative private/government sector military partnership should be limited to the modernization of equipment and material (research and development), and never the deployment of soldiers or U.S. fighting forces. (snip) ... our soldiers should never be deployed through the use of private contractors who operate within a grey area, and whose objectives can become detached and end up serving their own best interests.

This is both a Republican and Democrat problem, but interestingly finds its origin with the American left during Bill Clinton's first administration. And ironically, it has come full circle to implicate Hillary in a little examined tidbit revealed in her informal intel network scandal. More about that later.

Contractors working for the military have been around since the US was founded, but the modern incarnation was started in a big way in the wake of the drawdown in the early 90s. Bill Clinton made a decision to reduce the strength of the armed forces below the floor established by CJS Colin Powell and the service chiefs. The two main issues for Clinton were first, a potential political disaster of jobless veterans by handing out far more ink slips than planned; and second, a greatly reduced military operational capability.

These shortfalls were addressed by hiring former military via contracting firms to perform support services, and in particular to support the fielding of new digitized systems. Large numbers of experienced veterans and uniformed counterparts forged the new automated command and control empire. From the point of view of the Pentagon's managerial class, it was valuable in two ways. The program addressed employment of vets, and it was hoped, the systems would rationalize the too-severe drawdown by showing how fewer troops were needed in combat. In retrospect, it was a flawed effort.

In 2003, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMasters, then a Lt. Col., thoroughly eviserated the theory of information dominance and also called attention to a troubling trend. That is, former military working for contractors who were essentially advocating for new warfighting doctrines which could only be achieved by purchasing the company's equipment. He notes:

While those charged with the development and testing of concepts clearly have the best intentions, many are contracted from large defense manufacturing companies such as Lockheed Martin, TRW, and General Dynamics. In addition to the incentive to develop sound concepts for future war, other influences such as the renewal of the consulting contract or the benefits to the parent company of developing concepts that demand that companys weaponry or communications equipment have potential to cloud judgment.

During the 90s, this trend continued with contractors acting as Clinton's shadow force by advising Croatian forces in their successful operations to separate from the former Yugoslavia, and by providing training and assistance to fledgling Bosniak and Bosnian Croat forces. Once US forces entered Bosnia proper, contractors accompanied the first echelon to provide needed transportation and logistic support. Contractors were evolving from building military equipment and weapons stateside to becoming an operational necessity on the battlefield.

The success of former military in accomplishing these missions, along with the ever larger revenue stream it generated, meant private military companies had a place at the policy decision table. Instead of acknowledging the shortfalls of uniformed strength and resident expertise, the President and the Congress were content to be the sponsors of a new type of federal jobs program while the corporate leadership of Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics, et al dictated operational requirements rather than the other way around.

A few years later during the Bush '43 administration, the entrenched civilian and military functionaries continued with the privatizing of military power. In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, Americans were lining up in droves at recruitment stations and at intel agencies to join the war effort. Never before in the history of the US have so many been turned away by so few in the face of a clear threat to the country. What should have been a windfall for the armed forces was blocked by the beltway elite for a simple reason. It would reveal that manpower and operational readiness was so woeful that to acknowledge it by recruiting large numbers of people would be tantamount to admitting the military readiness posture was horribly fudged in the 90s. The only way to salvage the beltway's reputation and the functionaries jobs, was to "go with the Army we had" and keep a captive audience in the equation by contracting out to fill the gaps.

(As an aside, the post mortem on the 2003 ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company perfectly illustrates this line of thinking. It was clear Jessica Lynch's outfit was totally unprepared for combat operations, and could not even provide its own convoy security. This is a task service support troops trained on routinely prior to the Gulf War. The reaction to this tragic deficiency was typical: hire former military as contractors to train active duty units to properly perform convoy duties.)

During and after the Iraq surge, the numbers of contractors as warfighters increased. Companies like Blackwater took a huge chunk of security business from the government. (An unexamined aspect was that Blackwater was hired by the State Department, not DoD. Apparently, DoS confidence in the military to maintain security was pretty low.) It got to the point that at most large base camps, contract third country nationals (TCNs) manned the walls protecting an army of contract intelligence civilians and former special operators. The administration and Congress seemed perfectly happy with the expenditure of tax dollars to pay former military several times more than a GI, especially when the job requirement seemed never ending. That is, winning the war was against the cronies' interest and padded the jobs-for-veterans resume for the politicos back home.

Stuck at a base camp in Iraq or Afghanistan with little or nothing concrete to show for the years of training and risks, naive young GIs looked forward to working for the "private sector," which in reality was no more private enterprise than working for any government agency. Employment was always at the whim of elected officials and the largesse of the federal bureaucracy. The difference was the CEOs could leverage a vast array of capabilities and experience which were allowed to atrophy in the uniformed military. (Back to Blackwater: Just last year, the companys founder, Erik Prince stated that Blackwater could have successfully taken on ISIS. He was probably right.)

In the age of Obama, crony capitalism has became an art form both in and outside of DoD. As the champion of the US withdrawal from Iraq, the stage was set for President Obama to deal first hand with the consequences of his cut and run strategy. Obama's epic failure in Syria, and the rise of ISIS was belatedly tackled by using the same Clinton era strategy of relying on pinprick airstrikes as in the Balkans, and a dubious contractor-run rebel train and equip program.

And in North Africa, the latest revelations concerning Hillary Clinton's email scandal show how the pay for play scheme works in the Obama designed chaos of Muslim Brotherhood brutality. The US lost four courageous contractors and a US Ambassador the night the so-called Arab Spring movement went south in Libya. From Sid Blumenthal's informal intel channel to Hillary, we find out he was conducting business development for the Osprey Group to get a contract for work to take advantage of the aforementioned chaos directly caused by Hillary and her boss. Hillary and Blumenthal's sales job was of course designed to enrich DC power brokers and defense contractors. But given the brutality of those 13 hours, it is beyond the standards of human decency to view the situation as a mundane business opportunity. We can only hope Osprey Group and others like it think twice before dealing with the likes of Hillary and Blumenthal.

Since the end of the First Gulf War, we have developed a fighting force for neither a republic nor a dictatorship, but rather for a Rollerball world. The reality is not a long war, but a perpetual war where our country's level of involvement and criteria for victory (or not) is decided in the board room and by the government managerial class. They can flex American combat power and intelligence operations with a wink and a nod to a bloated and rudderless political and military leadership and rake in profits all the while remaining unaccountable for the outcome to the American people.

Related to this, the always excellent Richard Fernandez describes in detail Obama's secret army composed of special operators and contractor support, which has in essence decoupled any meaningful national strategy from a warfighting capability. It is a global version of what was routine in Iraq. That is, a distracted America sat on the sidelines while special operators conducted SWAT raids on steroids to gather more intel for more operations ad infinitum. This indecisive do-loop certainly kept contract analysts and operators employed, but ultimately resulted in a stalemate -- and that's being generous. The sad part is that not only has strategy been separated from our warfighting capability, but most of our citizens are numb to the perpetual war on terror unless they are family members of soldiers and/or contractors.

It has been said that Donald Trump is the candidate of Main Street, while his opponents are the candidates of Wall Street. It will be a tough fight, but if Trump can deliver on his plans for the military, he will return the US to a formidable military power needed for peace and freedom in a chaotic world, and hopefully bring the citizens' passions and political power of Main Street back into the fight, because to continue to blindly follow the political and managerial class is to court disaster.

*The Conservative Treehouse statement on Trump's position on the military has no source links. Also, as of this writing, there is no specific position on the military on the Trump for President website. I am accepting the Treehouse statement at face value for purposes of discussing an important topic in the national interest.

John Smith is the pen name of a former American intelligence officer.
Hillary, as we all know, is in trouble. Recent and damning accounts of her problem private-brew email server "Top Secret" and "SAP" emails make her vulnerable to Justice Department calls for indictment and worse.

In her own defense, Hillary uses a strange locution. Says Mrs. Clinton, This is just another example of a leak

The word leak may have one meaning to a potential criminal, and another for newsreaders without major crimes hanging over their dyed-blonde helmets of soi disant invincibility.

Average news consumers regard a leak as something that oozes out of elite official circles that is unintended to be known to the public at large; this leak is usually true accounts of some event, happening, or peccadillo the fifth estate would rather not be acknowledging, or for some reason cannot acknowledge.

But in the cautionary mouth of the Democratic sometime frontrunner, "leak" seems to take on a different coloration. To Mrs. C, leak here seems to mean a fictional bit of gimcrackery that has somehow been invented and come to the publics attention, without underlying merit or independent truth. Empirically baseless, therefore dismissible.

Clinton is parsing words in a way she wants to color them. Looking back, one can observe this language parsing to suit is a Clintonian hallmark.

Even using the term "leak" indicates a peculiar harkening back to her husbands seminal locution, It depends on what the meaning of is is, in Bill Clintons impeachment proceedings and the leadup to it.

No matter what a word might mean for millennia, Mrs. Clinton twists it -- perhaps by force of her own habit of turning all events into indictments of others and deflections from any personal responsibility of her own (What difference, at this point, does it make? she asked of the deaths of four American citizens in Benghazi due directly to her personal failure of any intervention or support, at a national inquest into her part in the lethal episode.)

This can be explained partially as the fallacy of equivocation, which a fact sheet from the Texas state university philosophy department defines as when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.

Clinton uses leak in this way -- she wants to retrofit the meaning of the word generally understood as a fact-based info nugget unfortunately let out of the self-imposed noose of journalists or governments holding, a stray hair falling out of a shellacked hairdo, to a self-serving and unsupported meaning of lie set loose deliberately for some [nefarious] reason unaligned with truth in any sense.

Catherine Herridge, Fox News senior political reporter, said that on Meet the Press, HRC invokes the famous words of stylist/writer Gertrude Stein when she comments:

On Sunday, when asked about her email practices while secretary of state, Clinton insisted to CBS News "Face The Nation," "there is no there, there."

She invokes conspiracy by any and all opponents, primarily her primary enemies, as she so colorfully noted in answer to one national debate question, Republicans. In addition to spectacular failures in conducting her job as secretary of state, her serpentine lies on any number of occasions over decades, and her simmering Clinton Foundation fiduciary scandals, Clinton is guilty of more than lying, covering up malfeasance on an Olympian scale, and wearing unflattering pantsuits to public for emphasizing her unfortunate addiction to carbs and adult beverages. Ms. Hillary is guilty, too, of language misappropriation.

Shes a leaky bloat.
Local, state, and federal authorities engaged in a shootout on a remote Oregon road with Ammon and Ryan Bundy, along with several of their followers, who are occupying a wildlife refiuge in a remote area of the state.

Washington Post:

After an exchange of gunfire that left one man dead and another injured, the two brothers who orchestrated the armed occupation of a remote central Oregon wildlife refuge were taken into custody along with six of their followers Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Oregonian reported that police had set up roadblocks around the occupied refuge and were urging those inside to leave. It appeared that few took up the offer, the Oregon paper reported: as of midnight Pacific Time, the lights were still on and several people remained inside. The Oregonian said that a convoy of police rigs, passenger cars and armored vehicles was seen driving south on Oregon 205, past the turn-off for the refuge. Other convoys were also reported in the area. The Tuesday encounter with police on a frozen stretch of highway north of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where a small cast of gun-toting, cowboy hat and camouflage-wearing anti-government activists had been camped out for weeks, was a dramatic break in the the tense, three-week standoff with local and federal authorities  at least, for leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy. Other participants in the siege remained at the refuge, even as they received word that their de facto spokesperson, LaVoy Finicum, had been killed in the confrontation with police and that eight other occupiers were either arrested or turned themselves in. Authorities did not release the names of man killed or the person wounded, reported by the Oregonian to be Ryan Bundy. Gary Hunt, a board member of a militia network known as Operation Mutual Defense who arrived Sunday from California to support the occupiers, toldthe Oregonian that those still in the compound have decided theyre going to hold their ground. But there is some confusion about who is leading the occupation now that Ammon Bundy is under arrest, he added. The standoff in Oregon has aroused passion and controversy across the country, in part because the government took little action to stop it, reportedly fearing a repeat of the heavy loss of life when federal agents broke up a siege at a Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., in 1993, resulting in the deaths of four federal officers and 82 civilians.

A man is dead because the feds decided it was time to throw their weight around and the "occupiers" decided to shoot it out rather than surrender peacefully. Idiocy all around and entirely predictable.

The actions taken by authorities was wide ranging and apparently part of a carefully planned operation.

The initial arrests, around 4:25 local time, seemed to set off a chain reaction. About an hour and a half after the first encounter, Oregon State Police apprehended Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, a 45-year-old occupier from Cottonwood, Ariz. known as Captain, during a separate event in Burns. Soon after that, Peter Santilli  a 50-year-old from Cincinnati known for his live streams of refuge events  was also arrested in Burns, which is the Harney County seat. Meanwhile in Peoria, Ariz., Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32, turned himself into the local police department. Ritzheimer, an outspoken participant in the takeover, was also wanted on a federal conspiracy charge.

Why now? Just like the massacre at the Branch Davidian compound, the feds proved to be impatient, incompetent, and poorly led. The confrontation on the highway was guaranteed to erupt into violence. Perhaps that's what the feds wanted; an opporunity to take down the leaders of the occupation.

As for the Bundys, what possessed these clowns to believe they could come and go from the refuge with impunity? You're either occupying a government building or you're not. The Bundys, who were going to be arrested when the seige ended anyway, may have been trying to provoke the feds into a free for all by traveling to a town 100 miles away to give a speech at a community meeting.

There was absolutely no reason to force a showdown at this time. All it has done is put steel in the spine of those left occupying the refuge, making a peaceful ending to this incident even less likely.
It has been speculated that Jerry Falwell, Jr. endorsing Trump is the result of Trump probably making a generous contribution to Liberty U. I do not think Falwell's endorsement is about money. I saw another prominent Christian leader on Fox endorsing Trump. I believe, in essence, that these Christian leaders are saying they are fed up with the GOP and the direction our country is going. They also believe we have lost the country to liberalism and that the media has so tainted Cruz that he is unelectable.

I suspect that the rational of these Christian leaders is, let's punt social issues. Let's just throw in our chips for Trump and hope for the best if he is elected. At least he is better than Hillary. Personally, I think punting social issues is a grave mistake by disciples of Christ.

In a two-man race, Christian leaders are rejecting the candidate they know will stand up for religious liberty; fight the murder of innocent life, and push back against America's anti-Christian cultural rot. It appears these leaders are functioning out of fear rather than faith.

Oh, we hear you, Lloyd, but Cruz can't win!

While it does not apply directly, Ben Franklin's quote comes to mind. "He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security."

When Moses came down from the mountain, he said, "Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me." Folks, I am standing on the Lord's side.
According to an internal military document, the Swedish army is preparing for war. Per a Breitbart report, the chief of the Swedish army General Anders Brannstrom told men under his command they could expect to be fighting a war in Europe against skilled opponents within a few years.

The 28-page document was directed to soldiers, civil servants, politicians, and guests who will be attending next weeks military demonstrations that will focus on the armys ability to fight and survive a winter war.

the General said the deteriorating security picture in Europe was the main factor behind his warning, indicating the Islamic State conducting military campaigns in Europe and spreading instability from the Ukraine could lead to conflict. Sensationally, he suggested a Third World War was just round the corner. He told the paper: One can draw parallels with the 1930s. A great uncertainty and [political] dynamics which then led to a great war. That time we managed to keep out. But it is not at all certain we could succeed this time. (snip) It is unusual for a serving senior military figure, much less the professional head of an Army to speak out on such political matters in Europe. Yet these comments are not just the Generals opinion, he added, remarking his senior colleagues all held the same thoughts. He said: this is a serious position shared by most. This is a completely different situation to the one we had ten years ago. There is now a much stronger focus on national defence it is about preparing for the worst.

If the Swedish military is anything like the Swedish police, the battle may be over quickly (if it isnt over already). Tommy Robinson, ex-leader and founder of the English Defense League, reports that ten Swedish police officers fled a refugee center after being surrounded by a mob of violent migrants. The police had been called in after the staff at the center failed to safely transfer to another facility a 10-year-old boy who was being repeatedly raped. The staffs inability to transfer him was due to a hostile attitude from the refugees when they made the attempt.

So not only did the asylum center fail to complete a seemingly simple task (in a normal world), but so did the police. One officer on the scene stated: Even more people appeared behind us. I was mentally prepared to fight for my life. We were 10 officers in a narrow corridor. And I hear someone yell that there is an emergency exit.

News of the debacle was made public after keeping a lid on it for nearly a week, at which time the Prime Minister said the incident underscored the need for more police officers in light of the wave of refugees coming into the country.

Heres an idea: Stop bringing in 7th century barbarians who hate the West and (1) you wont need more police, and (2) you wont need to go to war.

Who would have thought?

(Of note, Swedish police werent the only members of law enforcement recently seen fleeing Muslim mobs. Last week a mass of violent Muslims, socialists, and anarchists, broke through police lines at the port of Calais and boarded a ferry bound for the UK as terrified-looking officers retreated. And not to go too far off topic, but there is enormous power in mobs and Muslims are taking full advantage of it. The fact that European citizens, and oftentimes the police, are unarmed all but assures chaos and Islamic supremacy reigns supreme.)

But back to Sweden.

The county, as we know, is in very deep trouble. How, or whether, Sweden will be able to extricate itself from the grip of Islamic supremacism remains to be seen. So far there is little evidence to suggest Swedes grasp the nature of that which afflicts them, which in my view began with a complete collapse of national pride  a feeling now replaced with shame. Dhimmitude is as rampant as the savages who wreak havoc. Sweden has allowed itself to be held hostage by the drive to be multicultural at all cost, including the death of the nation.

The West is ripe for the picking. And Islam is grabbing up bunches and bunches of it with each passing day.

War within a few years?

It is already war now. Would that the West would realize it and fight.

Hat tip: Atlas Shrugs, Gateway Pundit
It looks like there has been a coordinated effort to demean Trump supporters, but the only evidence we have is in disparaging epithets published over the past several months. We may never know who sent out the trash Trump supporters talking point, but we do know various media outlets on the right, and their pundits, have been on the same page that, if you vote for Trump, youre a loser. The loudest anti-Trump/supporter voices are conservatives within the elite media complex including National Review, Townhall.com, RedState, and Glenn Becks The Blaze. Think tanks like American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute, both funded by the Kochs have also weighed in.

Just yesterday National Review, fresh off facing enormous backlash over their Gang of 22 "Against Trump" article from last week, decided to go after Trump voters. Expanding on the "low-info" label, NR's Kevin Williamson stated, "But his enthusiasts, devoid as they are of a literate politics capable of thinking about all three sides of a triangle at the same time, take a kind of homeopathic view of Trump."

Its one thing for conservatives to go against liberals and call their followers zombies and Kool-Aid drinkers,' but high profile media groups on the right are calling hundreds of thousands of Americans attending Trump rallies "embarrassing," "low-information," and "cult-followers." How is eating your own going to win an election?

Here are some examples of the vitriol against Trump supporters:

 Headline Cato Institute : Does Donald Trump Really Do Best Among Less Educated Voters?

 The real problem are his supporters...I am angry at these people. They know better than this. They are better than this. And it pains me that these reckless, bored people are coming, presumably, from the conservative ranks. American Thinker

 And Donald Trumps voters are what they call low-information voters David Brooks, PBS

 Arthur Brooks , American Enterprise Instituteaccused the Trump supporters of being low information voters.

 Headline Before Its News : Is Donald Trump a Cult Leader for Racially Resentful, Low Information, Right-wing, White Voters?

 Headline The Blaze : To Trump Disciples: Youre Embarrassing Conservatism and Yourselves

Last May, a month before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, Breitbart's editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro bemoaned the Republican establishment's "big tent party collapse":

Just look at the Republican field today: an agglomeration of random humans appealing to small segments of the population. The Republican Party has now fragmented into Tea Party Republicans who oppose Establishment Republicans, Socially Conservative Republicans who oppose Libertarian Republicans. None of these candidates are running for the nomination; all of them are running for approximately 25 percent of the vote in a primary. Winning one quarter of primary voters in the early states could win the nomination.

Seven months later, the Republicans have a candidate who cuts across all lines, bringing in evangelicals, Latinos, Catholics, blue collar workers, Democrats, Independents, moderate Republicans, blacks, millennials and middle-class voters. Shapiro and his colleagues should be thrilled--but not so much.

For the self-appointed arbiters of conservatism, Trump just doesn't have the right stuff and his followers dont either.
A man who makes deals for a living does his deals in the world as he finds it. He accepts the world as it is, and tries to make the best deal possible. He doesn't try to change the world; he deals with it.

Leaders, on the other hand, such as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan, do not accept dealing with the status quo. Reagan didn't want to deal with the Soviet Union. He wanted to destroy it. Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, believed in detente, in building relationships and making deals. He scoffed at Reagan and his inordinate fear of communism. In 1980, we wisely chose a leader, not a dealer.

A President Trump would make a lot of deals, or try to. But you don't make America great again by making deals. American greatness rests on American principles, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Trump seems unfamiliar with these principles. He's more of a technician, and the fundamental law of this country is of little interest. What's that got to do with making good deals?

Trump would fit right in with the Washington deal-makers who are so contemptuous of Ted Cruz. Sen. Mitch McConnell knows how to make deals as well as Trump, and he knows how Washington works  you make deals. Like Senate majority leaders Trent Lott and Bob Dole before him, McConnell sees in Trump a man he can deal with.

In October of 2013, Cruz didn't want to deal with President Obama. He wanted to stand for the principle that only Congress has the power of the purse, and if the Congress chose not to fund Obamacare, it would not be funded, and it would die. The American people had put the Republicans back in control of the House of Representatives in 2010 in reaction to the passage of Obamacare, with the expectation that they would oppose it. Since all revenue measures must originate in the House, its refusal to fund would kill the program. Though he'd only been in the Senate for nine months, Ted Cruz was the leader of this attempt by the House to assert its constitutional authority.

Obama not only wanted Obamacare funded, but wanted a "clean" debt ceiling increase, one that did not require any spending cuts. He wound up getting everything he wanted, though there were some extraneous items added to the debt increase legislation. One in particular stood out: almost $3 billion for a dam. In Kentucky, of all places. We didn't get spending cuts; we got pork. Like Trump, Mitch McConnell knows how to deal. He had a re-election coming up in 2014 and needed to show his voters he still knew how to bring home the bacon. That's what dealers do.

It's really not hard to understand Trump's appeal. If Obama represented the "coalition of the ascendant," unmarried women, youth, and minorities, Trump represents those who seem to be descending  older, married, and white. The white working class in particular have been consciously abandoned by the Democratic Party and are well aware of it. They ask if anyone speaks for them, represents their interests, will fight on their behalf. Because Trump is so fearlessly politically incorrect, they see in him a champion.

What they want is another Reagan, and Ronald Reagan never bragged of his ability to make deals. He was a leader. The first and best example of his leadership on the domestic front was the tax cut package that was the foundation of his economic policy. Tip O'Neill ran the House with a 243-member majority. To get his bill, Reagan needed at least 25 Democrats. While he made some accommodations, he won his great victory not by making deals, but by appealing for support directly to the American people. He showed leadership, and the public responded overwhelmingly. O'Neill never knew what hit him. Reagan didnt deal. He led.

Trump says Cruz can't make deals because nobody likes him. But Ted Cruz doesn't have to make deals if he leads. For instance, there would be no "deal" on Obamacare. It's going to be repealed. And any appropriation that contains a nickel of funding for it will be vetoed. And if the funding is in the budget and causes a government shutdown, so be it. You win by standing firm, not making deals. Mitch McConnell may never like Ted Cruz. If you think that means he'll refuse to cooperate with him as president, you have absolutely no idea of how the mind of Mitch McConnell works. Ask Kentucky's Gov. Matt Bevin about McConnell holding grudges.

Here's the deal Cruz wants with the Democrats. It's the deal Reagan wanted with the Soviet Union. We win. You lose.

Fritz Pettyjohn was chairman of Reagan for President, Alaska, in 1979-1980; is a co-founder of the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force; and blogs daily at ReaganProject.com.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjrn Jagland criticized Azerbaijan for violations of the requirements of European agreement on human rights.

As Armenpress reports, citing EC official website, in the annual report on his activities, which was sent to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on January 26, Jagland strictly criticized Azerbaijan parallel with a number of other countries focusing on gross violations of human rights in that country.

According to him European convention is under threatWhen some countries ignore their obligations or choose which rules to follow or not to follow, it pulls out elements from the convention. And when it begins to "crumble", the process will be difficult to stop, Jagland said.

Detailing the human rights situation in Azerbaijan, EC Secretary General strongly condemned activist Ilgar Mammadovs stay under arrest contrary to the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights.

He is the only person in Europe who is still in prison despite the fact that continent's highest legal force Strasbourg Court, based on the rarely used Article 18, concluded that Azerbaijani courts and prosecutors office abuse their power during the examination of the case against him. In other words, politically motivated evidences were used against him, he mentioned.

According to Jagland, in such a situation he is entitled to take extraordinary measures, according to Article 52 of the Convention, which he is invoking, for the first time since he became Secretary General, in order to send a special mission directly into Azerbaijan to pursue Mr Mammadovs release.
Azerbaijan, located within the South Caspian Sea basin, is among the world's oldest oil producers. The petroleum industry in Azerbaijan produces about 800,000 barrels of oil per day and 1 billion cubic meters of gas per year. There is so much oil and natural gas reserve under the Absheron Peninsula that the ground practically leaks all over.

Throughout Azerbaijan, numerous fires have been burning since antiquity and these were reported on by historical writers such as Marco Polo in the 13th century, and later by the famed writer Alexandre Dumas, who described a Zoroastrian fire temples built around a natural fire. This phenomenon of spontaneous fire caused by gas seepage have given Azerbaijan the moniker "Land of Fire." It also created a cult of fire worshippers  the Zoroastrians, which first appeared in this region over 2,000 years ago before the Islamic rule came into effect. Numerous references to fire can also be found in Azerbaijans folklore and culture.

There are at least three places where one can observe Azerbaijans famous fires.

Yanar Dag, the burning mountain, in Azerbaijan. Photo credit

Yanar Dag

Yanar Dag, which literally translates to "burning mountain", is a natural gas fire which blazes continuously on a hillside near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Flames jet out into the air 3 meters from a thin, porous sandstone layer. Around this open fireplace the atmosphere is filled with the smell of gas. The naturally occurring fire burns in colorful flames most impressively at dusk, when both tourists and locals can view it from nearby teashops.

Photo credit

Photo credit

Ateshgah of Baku

The Ateshgah of Baku near Baku, off the Greater Caucasus, is another famous site of Azerbaijans eternal fires. Ateshgah means temple of fire. This pentagonal complex, which has a courtyard surrounded by cells for monks and a tetrapillar-altar in the middle, was built during the 17th and 18th centuries. The fire was once fed by a vent from a subterranean natural gas field located directly beneath the complex, but heavy exploitation of the natural gas reserves in the area during Soviet rule ended the flow of natural gas to the temple and extinguished the holy fire in 1969.

The temple was converted into a museum soon after the fire went out. Today, the fire that can seen here is fed by mains gas piped from Baku city.

Photo credit

Photo credit

Yanar Bulag

Yanar Bulag or the "burning spring" is located to the city of Astara in southern Azerbaijan. It consist of a metal stand pipe inside a small pavilion through which water comes gurgling out. It looks nothing unusual, but when you light a match and touch the water, the water itself is set ablaze. This occurs due to the waters high methane content.

The locals believe the water from the spring has remedial properties, and would often take a drink while the flame is alit. There are always people at the spring who stop by to fill their bottles and carry on their journeys.

Photo credit

Photo credit

Also see: The Flaming Rocks of Chimaera

Sources: Wikipedia / Atlas Obscura
Deep in the heart of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, along the banks of the Rio Jequitinhonha, rural miners explore the massive open pit mines left behind by giant mining companies in search of diamonds. They try out their luck with artisanal techniques used a hundred years ago such as wooden knives, metal pans, and large water pumps. Its a difficult process that takes weeks to accomplish with no guarantee of results. Working in groups of ten or less, these miners first excavates the soil down to a layer of gravel of up to 50 meters deep. Rocks are extracted with the help of small pumps powered by old truck engines. The miners then use their hands to go through the small rocks. If they're lucky, they'll find some diamonds.

Hundreds of people across the region dig for diamonds in this devastated area known as Areinha. They live in wooden huts without electricity and bathe with water in buckets, barely surviving without a stable income but on rare occasions enjoy a windfall of tens of thousands of dollars.

Diamonds were discovered in Minas Gerais by gold miners around 1725. For more than a hundred years, the country was the worlds most important diamond source, until the discovery of South African diamond mines. Today, Brazil is only a minor producer in the diamond market. Many mines were abandoned because of lack of profits, attracting large number of illegal miners like vultures to a corpse.

These pictures were captured by Associated Press photographer Felipe Dana as a work project for the 2015 World Press Photo Latin America masterclass held in Mexico City in December.

Also see: Keep What You Find at The Crater of Diamonds

via Associated Press
Back in June 2012 at Apples WWDC event in San Francisco, the company announced Siri, which debuted on the iPhone 4S that year. It marked the beginning of the personal assistants, and iOS users fell in love with Siri. However, Siri was far from perfect and its feature-set was pretty narrow. As the following year at Google I/O along with the announcement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google would announce Google Now. When it was announced, Google Now appeared to be a bit to personal. As Google Now would read your Gmail to give you information before you search for it. This includes flight information, upcoming due dates for bills and much more. Since its launch, Google has continued to improve Google Now little by little. Microsoft came out in 2014 with Cortana, their own personal assistant. Ironically Cortana is available on more platforms than Siri or Google Now. Cortana works with Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, iOS and Android. While each of these personal assistants are different, there is one thing they all have in common, and that is their ability to assist you.

Personal assistants, primarily Siri and Google Now, began as ways to ask questions and get a response. For example, asking Google Now what the weather is like today. Or asking it how old Barack Obama is. Now, we are able to do things like turn off the lights in our home with Google Now or Siri, and even change the temperature in our home thanks to the integration of Nest and other smart thermostats. Personal assistants havent always been perfect, and they still arent, many would argue. But they are getting much more helpful after having companies like Google and Apple continuing to improve their personal assistants (as well as acquiring companies to help improve their functionality). Theres still quite a bit left to be done with both Siri and Google Now.

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In 2015, Google enhanced Google Now a bit more and introduced Google Now on Tap. Essentially what Google Now on Tap does is brings Google Now everywhere. For instance, if you are on a webpage and have never heard of a particular company before, you can long-press the home button and bring up Google Now on Tap which will give you all sorts of information for that company. Including their social media profiles, phone number and so much more. In fact, with their phone number being displayed there in Now on Tap, you can tap on the phone icon and immediately call them. Making it pretty convenient if youre looking to call customer service. Google Now on Tap is currently only available for devices with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and as of January 2016 only about 0.7% of Android devices are running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow or higher. So many users havent had the chance to use Google Now on Tap. While many that have used Now on Tap love it, its tough to say if that will be the popular opinion once more users get the chance to use Now on Tap.

Google Now has always been pretty darn good. Being able to give me updated information on my flights when Im at the airport. Or when Im in a foreign country and it telling me how to say different phrases in the local language, or showing the exchange rate for that countrys currency. Google Now is super helpful. And with Google Now on Tap its gotten even better. Being able to get information without leaving the web page or app that you are in is definitely useful. Just as Google Now has evolved, so will Google Now on Tap, to be more feature packed and include even more information right there overlaying on the display.

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Could Google Now on Tap be improved? Sure. Things like Now on Tap always have room for improvement, and Id expect to see it improved with each iteration of Android, or even as quickly as whenever the Google app is updated  since Google Now is part of the search app that is in the Google Play Store. In fact, an improvement that Google added to Now on Tap with an app update was the ability to take a screenshot from Now on Tap and immediately be able to share it anywhere on the interwebs. Simply enter Google Now on Tap and then tap the share icon and youll see it take a screenshot and open the share menu. Pretty simple. It would be great to see Google Now on Tap get a bit faster when scanning the page. Even if it could scan the page in the background  although that could be overkill and also affect the performance of your device  so that when you open up Now on Tap you can quickly get the information youre looking for.

One thing that would be nice to be added to a Google Now on Tap search would be the ability to see the sites social media profiles there. For example, when I open a page on Android Headlines, I get all types of information about companies like Sprint, T-Mobile, OnePlus and many others. It includes their social media profiles  as mentioned above  but nothing about Android Headlines. It would be great to have a section talking about Android Headlines as well as ways to contact Android Headlines. Would definitely be helpful for anyone looking to learn more about a website, whether that be Android Headlines or any other.

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Personal assistants like Google Now on Tap, Siri, Cortana and others arent going away anytime soon. As companies believe that personal assistants are something that everyone needs, and not just wants. With them getting better at various tasks, we could have our home screens overtaken by these personal assistants. So instead of unlocking your smartphone and seeing a bunch of apps or widgets on your home screen, youll see Google Now. Showing you the most used apps, as well as different cards for products you ordered that are shipping, flight information and so much more. Especially with Google Now knowing what well want to use before we attempt to open the app we want. Its a big reason that Google is collecting so much data about us. Weve said before that Google Now could be our home screen in a few years if not sooner, and with Now on Tap, thats truer than ever before.

While Google does collect a ton of our data, not just in Gmail, but also from searches and many of their other products, it has helped to make Google Now on Tap as useful as it is today. Additionally, collecting this information has helped improve Google Now. Including telling you when there is an accident on your route to work. Also telling you when you need to leave for the airport so you dont miss your flight. Always important, especially since we dont know how bad traffic can be on the way to the airport and actually at the airport. Dont be surprised if you start seeing ads showing up in Google Now on Tap. Considering Google is still an ad company  roughly 95% of their revenue comes from ads  well see them appearing in Google Now at some point in the future. Just as we did with Gmail for Android, while it did take about 5 years, the ads did come into the app. Google Now on Tap is a fantastic feature on Android, and if you arent already using it  and are on Android 6.0.x Marshmallow  you should definitely be giving it a go.
HTC hasnt yet sent out invites or announced a date for their Mobile World Congress press conference  in fact we arent even sure they are having one. Many reports have said that HTC will not be releasing their flagship One M10 at the event in Barcelona next month. While some reports have said that the One M10 will have a design pretty similar to the One A9 announced last fall. Now, thanks to a known-leaker  no not Evleaks  it looks like HTCs invite for the One M10 may have just leaked out.

This same leaker, who goes by the Twitter handle @Ricciolo1, leaked out an image of Samsung Unpacked for Barcelona back in November. And said that there would be no early announcement, so far hes been spot on. This invite, however does not have any dates on it, or times. But if the picture is anything to read into, we might be having an event in London this time around. HTC isnt a company that typically announces flagships in London. This means that we have no clue as to what date this event will take place on. But we should be getting invites to the event as we get closer to it, if its actually happening. However, @Ricciolo1 did also mention that this event will be in multiple cities. And that it will have a flagship as well as a surprise. HTC hasnt done a flagship launch in multiple cities for quite some time, dating back to the One M8 actually. Where they held an event in London and New York City simultaneously.

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The Taiwanese company, HTC, had a pretty rough 2015. Seeing sales decline even more with each quarter. While HTC has been focusing on other businesses like Virtual Reality, smartphones and mobile is still their bread and butter. And something that they will continue to work on. HTC is hoping that the One M10 will start a comeback for them, after the mediocre response they got from the One M9 last year at Mobile World Congress. As mentioned above, HTC hasnt made their MWC plans public yet. So we could be looking at a press conference in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, or it could be a separate event that is not around the end of February.
Letv has recently re-branded to LeEco, and managed to surprise quite a few people. Before that happened, however, the company has introduced their Le Max Pro handset during CES in Las Vegas. This phablet is the first handset powered by the Snapdragon 820 SoC, and even though it has been announced, it is still not available for purchase. That being said, LeEco has introduced 5 devices thus far, and it seems like the 6th one is one the way, read on.

Back in April, this company has rolled out their first three smartphones, the Le 1, Le 1 Pro and Le Max. All of these devices sported really compelling specs, but the Le Max was the highest-end one out of the bunch. Well, the Le Max Pro has been announced, and by the looks of it, Le 2 might be right around the corner as well. The newest rumor from China claims that the company is currently developing the Le 2 handset which will be powered by the Helio X20 64-bit deca-core processor. This will, allegedly, going to be the first LeEco-branded Helio X20-powered smartphone to reach the market, and even though this rumor doesnt mention it, the Le 2 Pro might also ship with this processor. On the other hand, it is possible that LeEco plans to include the Snapdragon 820 in the Le 2 Pro, just like they did in the Le Max Pro. These are only our assumptions at the moment, but were sure that plenty more info will surface in the coming weeks, especially if LeEco intends to launch this handset sometime soon. If the company plans to stick to their release cycle, we might have to wait until April to see either of these devices.

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As far as the Le 2 specs go, well, we dont have any info at the moment, aside the fact that it might feature MediaTeks Helio X20 processor. If we had to guess, though, wed say that this handset will ship with 4GB of RAM, and quite probably a fullHD display. The 21-megapixel camera might be located on the back of this phone, and you can expect it to be made out of metal, at least partially. Either way, well report back as soon as additional information surfaces, so stay tuned for that.
Qualcomm has been coming under increasing pressure of late due to what was considered to be not a great 2015 for the company. This was partly due to two clear reasons. The first was the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, which at the time was destined to be the go-to processor. However, as the processor neared its release, criticisms and claims of overheating greatly seemed to affect its level of adoption. Which is thought to be one of the reason as to why Samsung opted to go with their own Exynos processor instead. A move which in itself was bound to have a knock-on effect with Qualcomms profits, as Samsung are largely understood to be one of Qualcomms biggest mobile chip buyers.

The second reason Qualcomm did not have the best 2015 is due to the increase and influx of processors from other chip manufacturers and primarily those emerging from China and Taiwan. These lower cost (to smartphone manufacturers), but high performing chips have seen their level of adoption over the last twelve months increase greatly. A move which again seems to have also affected Qualcomm. In fact, towards the end of the last calendar year, Qualcomm had been considering splitting their chip and licensing businesses, although, this was a move which quickly became clear was unlikely to happen.

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It is now being reported today that the increase in adoption and therefore, increase of competition from these Asian chip manufacturers has resulted in Qualcomms quarterly revenue falling by as much as 18.7-percent for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, which came to a close end of December. Early reports now emerging are stating that this fall is a direct result of a decrease in demand for Qualcomms mobile chip sales. As a result, Qualcomms revenue is said to have fallen to $5.78 billion which is down from the previous $7.10 billion. A fall which is below what had been anticipated by analysts. Further to this, it now seems Qualcomm is adjusting its forecast for the second quarter of the fiscal year, with a revised expectation of revenues to be in the region of $4.9 billion, down from $5.7 billion.
Weve all been there. Made a long-distance call (we mean to another country), then got hit with a huge roaming bill from our wireless carrier. Many apps that are available for our smartphones, have implemented their own international calling capability. Many of which are either free or very low cost. However they all need a data connection of some sort. Whether that be WiFi or a mobile data connection. On Wednesday, Rebtel announced Rebel Calling. What this feature allows you to do is do unlimited calls  and free calls from app-to-app  to anywhere in the world without the need of an internet connection. Yes, you read that correctly, you can make calls without an internet connection. As the company states, this is the first step in breaking down the high fees and borders that define international calling rates. Rebtel already has over 25 million users around the world. They cover around 50 countries which make up about 25% of the worlds population.

Rebtels CEO Magnus Larsson says that his company is looking to redefine the way users make phone calls. And references the way that Whatsapp changed the way we message others. Larsson says they are taking back the phone lines from the corporations and putting it in the hands of the consumers. This is something that T-Mobile has tried to do, at least a little bit with adding in Canada and Mexico. However with T-Mobiles roaming you still need a data connection. Thats something Rebtel will have over the carriers. The Rebtel app also includes Rebtel Unlimited calling. This allows users to make unlimited calls to any phone anywhere in the world for as low as $5/month. Speaking of pricing, Rebel Calling is going to be $1/month for unlimited calling. However it is free for all of 2016 to celebrate the launch. The app also includes Travel Mode, which allows you to call any phone in the world using WiFi when you are traveling abroad.

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With the launch of Rebel Calling, Rebtel is also looking to rebrand itself. Their logo is being rebranded thanks to the creative team behind VICE. Rebtels CMO, Fredrik Wrahme stated that the companys mission is to turn the telecommunications business on its head which is why Rebtels new logo is now upside down. The new logo is pretty simple, red background with white lettering, but its upside down to drive home the fact that their plan is to do the same to the wireless business. Especially when it comes to roaming fees on phone calls.

The Rebtel app is available in the Google Play Store. The update should be available shortly.
As was reported yesterday, T-Mobile has launched their BOGO event today which allows those on a family plan to upgrade one phone and get the second one at half off. According to a survey that T-Mobile cites in their press release, many that are on family plans wont upgrade everyone at once. Mostly due to the different times that upgrades are available, as well as the costs and fees of upgrading four family members at the same time. T-Mobile is looking to change that, at least a little bit. So starting today, January 27th, you can get a LG V10 at regular price, and get the second one at $12.50 per month. That would net a customer around $300 in savings over the 24-month period. Thats a pretty good deal.

However, not every smartphone that T-Mobile carries is part of this deal. According to their website, the Samsung Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge+, Galaxy Note 5, LG G4 and LG V10 are all eligible for the BOGO pricing. All of which would save you around $300 over the course of the Equipment Installment Plan, which is for 24 months. These prices are available in store and over the phone. Unfortunately, T-Mobile is not doing this sale online. So you will have to actually make your way to a T-Mobile store to get this BOGO deal. A bit of a downer, but its always nice to have a look at the smartphone youre buying, in person before buying it.

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This sale includes both new and existing T-Mobile customers. Many sales and deals like this are to entice new customers over to a carrier, but T-Mobile is going the Uncarrier route and opening it up to existing customers as well. As a plea to get them to upgrade. Those that are switching over to T-Mobile, would also get things like Music Freedom which allows you to stream unlimited music from select services for free without it hitting your data cap. Theres also Binge On, which optimizes your data so you can get more video out of your data bucket. A great idea there. Theres also the ability to roam in hundreds of countries without any roaming fees. Not to mention you can head over to Canada or Mexico and use your phone like you would at home.

T-Mobile didnt mention how long this BOGO sale would last, only stating that its a limited time sale. So if youre looking to upgrade, youd better do it quickly.
Sony introduced its latest flagship smartphone range back at the IFA trade show in Berlin last year. As part of the lineup, the Japanese consumer electronics giant unveiled not one, but three handsets dubbed the Xperia Z5, the Xperia Z5 Compact and of course, the Xperia Z5 Premium phablet with a 5.5-inch 4K display. While the phones were introduced months back, it is only now that the company is looking to bring them to the US, and while leaks and rumors had already revealed a lot of info regarding Sonys plans for the upcoming devices in the US, it is only recently that the Tokyo-based consumer electronics company has started to make some of that info official. The latest report about Sonys current flagship lineup now seems to suggest that the US-bound unlocked Xperia Z5 will come with model number E6603.

The revelation comes by way of a listing for the device on the website of online retailer B&H Photo/Video, which is currently listing the 32 GB version of the smartphone at a price of $599.99. The E6603 model is specifically meant for the US market, and comes with support for an extensive array of LTE bands, including band 1 (2100 MHz), 2 (1900 MHz), 3 (1800 MHz), 4 (1700/2100 MHz), 5 (850 MHz), 7 (2600 MHz), 8 (900 MHz), 12 (700 MHz), 17 (700 MHz), 20 (800 MHz), 28 (700 MHz), 38 (2600 MHz) and 40 (2300 MHz). What this means is that the handset will support all the LTE bands currently in use by AT&T and T-Mobile, making the device fully compatible with both the carriers.

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While the device is scheduled to hit store shelves in the country officially on the seventh of the next month, many have been taken aback by the recent revelation that the US-bound model will lack the side-mounted fingerprint scanner, which was one of the major points of attraction of the upcoming handset. With disappointed fans venting their ire at the company, Sony confirmed the reports, but refused to give a proper explanation for the missing fingerprint scanner, saying, it is a business decision to leave out the biometric sensor. With even entry-level devices starting to come with fingerprint scanners of late, many are openly questioning the logic behind Sonys decision, and wondering if the glaring omission on Sonys flagship handset will hurt its sales vis- -vis offerings from Samsung, LG and Apple.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. The optimization of the Government of Armenia is in the spotlight of the PM, Republic of Armenia Vice Prime Minister, Minister of International Economic Integration and Reforms Vache Gabrielyan told journalists.

The issue is in the PMs spotlight and he will speak on that, Gabrielyan stated.

In reply to the question, as what changes are expected, the Republic of Armenia Vice Prime Minister responded: It will become clear in the future what changes there will be. I cannot say anything for now.

The Republic of Armenia PM Hovik Abrahamyan spoke about the Government optimization at the end of 2015. He announced that there will be taken some steps towards optimization.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Republics government expects progress in Armenian-Iranian economic ties in the near future, Vice Prime Minister, Armenian Minister of International Economic Integration and Reforms Vache Gabrielyan said during the interview with journalists. You know that last year Armenia's economy minister traveled to Iran and numerous businessmen also travelled with him who had different meetings there and outlined ways of further cooperation, Gabrielyan emphasized as Armenpress reports.

He added that certain activity is noticed over Armenian-Iranian economic cooperation. During this time, Armenian businessmen travelled to Iran and Iranian businessmen arrived in Armenia. The process is still ongoing, and we expect a new growth in the Armenian-Iranian economic ties, Armenian Vice Prime Minister concluded.

On January 16, The Islamic Republic of Iran was released from the major part of the sanctions imposed by the international community.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Germany, assuming the OSCE chairmanship in 2016, will continue to support the efforts of the Minsk Group in Karabakh conflict peaceful settlement, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Republic of Armenia Bernhard Matthias Kiesler said during the meeting with journalists on January 27, as Armenpress reports. We are concerned about the deteriorating situation on the contact line, especially about consequences on the use of heavy weapons that lead to the death of civilians, the ambassador said adding that it is significant for the sides to refrain from aggressive rhetoric.

He emphasized that they completely support the initiative of Minsk Group co-chairs according to which a mechanism investigating ceasefire violations is needed to be formed and operated. We ask the sides to examine these proposals by positive feedback, Matthias Kiesler added.

In this regard, one of the reporters asked whether Germany intends to take targeted measures against Azerbaijan as the latter denies the introduction of investigative mechanisms. We are aware of the 2 sides positions but we stress the significance of the mechanism in terms of 2 sides agreement. We want the two sides agree to the introduction of investigative mechanisms, German ambassador added.

56 states are members of OSCE. Armenia is a member of this organization since January 30, 1992.
Liverpool lose and Stoke remain in the mix for League Cup final, say papers

Last night Liverpool FC reached the League Cup final after a penalty shoot-out with Stoke. Lets see which newspapers went to print before the match finished.

Stoke are in the mix. Stoke shaking it up. So reports the Daily Express and Daily Mail. In other news: Stoke lost.

Anorak

Posted: 27th, January 2016 | In: Back pages, Liverpool, Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
(ANSA) - Rome, January 26 - Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland on Tuesday encouraged Italy to pass a civil unions bill guaranteeing rights for gay couples.

"I encourage #Italy to ensure legal recognition for same sex couples as per @ECHR & as in majority of @CoE states," he tweeted. A civil unions bill that would extend rights enjoyed by straight married couples to committed gay couples - such as the right of one spouse to inherit the other's property or pension, or to make decisions in their stead should one partner be incapacitated - is now before parliament.

Italy is the only western European country not to have either legalised gay marriage or recognised civil unions between same-sex couples. The European Court of Human Rights in July 2015 condemned Italy for failing to give gay couples legal "recognition and protection", and said the State must change its laws to remedy that.

"The legal protection currently available in Italy to same-sex couples...not only failed to provide for the core needs relevant to a couple in a stable and committed relationship, but it was also not sufficiently reliable," the human rights court said in its ruling.

The court also ordered the State to pay damages of 5,000 euros to each of the three gay couples who brought the case against Italy to Strasbourg, and awarded another 14,000 euros to cover legal costs.

Premier Matteo Renzi has said his government would introduce laws on same-sex unions this year.

Neither same-sex marriage nor civil unions between same-sex partners are legally recognized in Italy but some cities, including Rome, have a civil union register.

Catholics across the political spectrum, including some in Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party (PD), object to a measure in the bill allowing gay spouses to adopt their partner's biological children.

The PD Senate caucus on Tuesday approved the framework of the bill. The PD has granted freedom of conscience on some provisions including stepchild adoption, but divisions remain within the party.

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Tuesday that he had "already accounted" for the possibility of staging a referendum to scrap the bill if it is passed into law. "I think that, when faced with such a difficult parliamentary decision, it could be a rational decision to let the people decide, if the law were perceived as an excess, in one direction or another," Alfano, the leader of the small New Centre Right (NCD) party, a minority partner in Renzi's governing coalition, told Radio Capital. Meanwhile, Gaetano Quagliariello, the leader of a small IDEA group of Catholic lawmakers, said that he was hopeful of obtaining secret ballots for Senate votes on the bill. "We are ready to ask for secret votes," said Quagliariello. "We'll see what amendments it's possible to have them on and we'll do it. "In the GAL (umbrella group that IDEA belongs to) alone we can count on around 10 Senators," he said, adding that the quota of 20 Senators needed to obtain a secret vote was "easily achievable".

Experts see the bill as more likely to encounter trouble in secret votes. PD Senate caucus leader Luigi Zanda said PD Senators "have no interest" in a secret vote on the civil unions bill. "Our position is very clear, we've expressed it in our assemblies, they are transparent positions," Zanda said.


(ANSA) - Rome, January 27 - The president of Italy's anti-corruption authority (ANAC) Raffaele Cantone on Wednesday said that corruption in Italy is experiencing an "inversion", based on results from Transparency International's updated Corruption Perceptions Index, in which Italy came in 61st in 2015, an improvement of eight positions from 69th place in 2014.

"Eight positions in the ranking isn't a really high number, but it isn't insignificant, either, especially in a year in which there were large corruption scandals such as Mafia Capitale," Cantone said, referring to an investigation that revealed local mafia infiltration in Rome's city government.

"There's an inversion, a step ahead that's registering for the first time, which I believe must be read also as a recognition of the work done to combat corruption".

"Today's data, which refers to perceived corruption, is comforting. This year corruption was talked about a lot in Italy. There are signs of discontinuity that shouldn't be underestimated".

Cantone cited as examples the fact that ANCE, the association that represents builders, was favorable in hearings before the Lower House on new laws governing tenders; and that recent finance police figures show irregularities in tenders have decreased from 39% to 30%.


(ANSA) - Bergamo, January 27 - Three hooded men broke into the home of an Italian man living in Spain and stabbed him to death, sources said Wednesday.

The incident took place early on Monday at the home of victim Claudio Lanfranchi, 49, near the Spanish port city of Alicante where he had been living for about a year.

Lanfranchi's Romanian girlfriend was tied up with tape and gagged while the killers ripped the mattresses and turned the house inside out, apparently searching for something.

They spoke with a Neapolitan accent, she told Spanish police investigators.

They made off with 3,000 euros in cash and some bottles of liquor.

The victim, a native of the Lombard village of Ardesio, had a criminal record for drugs.


(ANSA) - Rome, January 27 - Italy came joint 61st in Transparency International's updated Corruption Perceptions Index on Wednesday with a score of just 44 points out of 100 for 2015. Italy shared 61st place with Lesotho, Senegal, South Africa and Montenegro. The only European Union country to do worse in the ranking was Bulgaria, which came 69th with 41 points. Nevertheless, Italy did better than in 2014, when it came 69th out of the 168 countries considered with 43 points. The Corruption Perceptions Index measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption. A long series of corruption scandals have hit parties on all sides of Italy's political spectrum and have been seen as contributing to the rise of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S), which is now the country's second political force. Raffaele Cantone, the president of Italy's anti-corruption authority (ANAC) which on Wednesday signed a deal to improve monitoring with Transparency International, said the results offered encouragement.

"(A rise of) eight positions in the ranking isn't a really big number, but it isn't insignificant either, especially in a year in which there were large corruption scandals such as Mafia Capitale case," Cantone said, referring to an investigation into allegations a mafia organisation muscled in on city of Rome contracts worth millions.

"There's an reversal, a step forward that's been registered for the first time and which I believe must be seen as a recognition of the work being done to combat corruption.

"Today's data, which refers to perceived corruption, is comforting. "This year corruption was talked about a lot in Italy.

"There are signs of discontinuity that shouldn't be underestimated". Cantone cited as examples the fact that ANCE, the association that represents builders, was favorable in hearings before the Lower House on new laws governing tenders; and that recent finance police figures show irregularities in tenders have decreased from 39% to 30%.

But Italy's biggest trade union confederation, the leftwing CGIL, did not agree with Cantone's analysis.

"The data on corruption is disconcerting," said Luciano Silvestri of the CGIL.

"There are many causes but the government's actions, key legislative vacuums and the reduction of rights do not help prevention.

"It's necessary for the healthy forces of civil society to unite to defeat this plague for democracy".


(ANSA) - Rome, January 27 - Italy reached a deal with the European Commission late on Wednesday for a mechanism to manage over 200 billion euros in bad loans that are weighting on the balance sheets of Italian banks.

"An agreement has been found with the EU about a guarantee mechanism for non-performing loans," Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said after five hours of talks with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

"This completes the Italian tool box for managing bad loans". The mechanism will help lenders offload bad loans with the help of guarantees given at market prices that the EU does not consider State aid.

Rome and Brussels had been in talks about the possibility of setting up a bad bank to put the NPLs into, but this ran into problems due to European rules against State aid.

Vestager said she was "very satisfied" at a "very good" agreement.


(by Catherine Hornby).

(ANSA) - Rome, January 27 - President Sergio Mattarella warned on International Holocaust Remembrance Day Wednesday that the Auschwitz extermination camp showed what men are capable of and that aberrant theories are still causing innocent deaths.

The camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945. At least 1.1 million prisoners are estimated to have died there, including many Italians.

Ceremonies were held across the country on Wednesday to keep the memory of the mass murder alive.

"Auschwitz, with its barbed wire, gas chambers, huts and ovens does not leave us," Mattarella said during a commemorative event at the Quirinal presidential palace.

"On the contrary...it forces us every time to return to the edge of the abyss and stare down into it, with our eyes and minds full of pain and moral revulsion." He stressed the importance of realising that even today, 71 years after the camp's liberation, aberrant theories, hatred and fanaticism kill innocent people around the world, and he warned against the dangers of "other deadly types of racism, discrimination and intolerance".

He said nationalism generates mistrust, sows rivalry and hostility, and risks tarnishing the European integration project.

Mattarella also recalled that Italy has not been immune from the "virus" of racism and that the "shame of Fascist racial laws" should be remembered.

Also on Wednesday, Premier Matteo Renzi tweeted his memory of visiting Auschwitz with Holocaust survivor Nedo Fiano, adding the words "never again".

Florence on Wednesday awarded honorary citizenship to Tatiana and Andra Bucci, two Auschwitz survivors who have been accompanying Italian students on trips to see the camp in recent years.

Education Minister Stefania Giannini said the memory of Auschwitz needs to be nurtured in younger generations, and schools have a duty to ensure this.

Italian Jewish Communities Union President Renzo Gattegna said the remembrance day was a chance to honour victims and to shun any theory of inequality among peoples that can lead to oppression and slavery.


(ANSA) - Rome, January 26 - Visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani asked Pope Francis to pray for him on Tuesday.

In a 40-minute audience with the leader of the Catholic Church, the Iranian chief gave the pope a hand-made carpet from Iran's holy city of Qom, and an illuminated book. Francis reciprocated with a medal of St. Martin symbolizing brotherhood, and a copy of his ecological encyclical Laudato Si' (Praised Be) in English and Arabic, there being no Farsi edition. The two leaders then talked about the recent accord on Iran's nuclear programme and its role in helping solve conflicts in the Middle East, the Vatican press office said.

"Thank you for your visit and I hope for peace", Francis said.

Taking his leave, Rouhani asked the pope to pray for him.

He said the meeting "pleased me greatly", adding "I wish you well in your work," according to some of those present. Tuesday was Rouhani's first visit to a pontiff, on the first trip to Europe by an Iranian president in 16 years. Earlier on Tuesday, Rouhani addressed an Italy-Iran Business Forum.

"We must engage in a win-win economic collaboration," he told participants on what was his second day in the nation's capital. "Iran is currently the safest and most stable country in the entire (Middle Eastern) region" and is now open to foreign investors after years of sanctions, Rouhani said. "Iranians know Italy and your work - they trust Italians," he said. The leader added that Islam's Koran, or holy book, teaches interfaith tolerance between Christians, Jews and Muslims. "The church, the synagogue and the mosque sit side by side," Rouhani said. "We must first preserve the church, then the synagogue, then the mosque - this is the culture of tolerance the Koran teaches us". Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni hailed renewed relations with Iran - and the oil, raw material, transportation and other business deals being signed between the two nations - as a sign that the late Enrico Mattei's dream of dialogue and economic collaboration "has become reality". Mattei (1906-1962) organized Italy's Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) state-owned fuel company after World War II, and negotiated oil deals with Iran and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "When we began our activities in Iran, we were dreamers," Gentiloni said, quoting Mattei.

The Iranian chief arrived for his three-day visit Monday, when he met Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Matteo Renzi. He will visit the Colosseum Wednesday morning before flying on to Paris.


Gen. Portolano meets with high-ranking Beirut officials To mediate talks between Lebanon and Israel

(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, JANUARY 27 - Italy's Major-General Luciano Portolano, who commands 10,000 UNIFIL troops, on Wednesday concluded two days of meetings with the country's highest-ranking institutional and military officials. He met with Prime Minister Tammam Salam, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk, Defense Minister Samir Moqbel and the commander of the country's armed forces, General Jean Kahwagi.



Portolano reaffirmed the UN peacekeeping troops' commitment along the Israeli border to maintain a ''stable and peaceful'' Lebanon. The meetings enabled the voicing of different assessments on the development of the internal and external security framework in light of the December 20 and January 4 violations of Resolution 1701, when the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah and the Israeli army attacked each other, threatening to undo the progress that has been made in the southern part of the country.



The meetings came on the eve of the first three-way talks of the year, in which Lebanon and Israel - which do not have any sort of diplomatic relations between them - will come face to face with mediation by the UNIFIL commander. (ANSAmed).




YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. The issue of providing water from Sarsang reservoir resourses to the residents of border villages of Azerbaijan must be an issue of negotiation exclusively between Nagorno Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan. As Armenpress reports, Gagik Minasyan, the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Financial-Credit and Budgetary Affairs of the National Assembly of the Republic expressed such view during the meeting with journalists. According to him, such resolutions have no binding force, but they also cannot be ignored. We need to thoroughly examine the situation and do what we always tried to do in fact. The Armenian side, in particular, the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, which is the sole owner of the mentioned water resources, must present its principled position to the international community. Any problem can be solved only in bilateral negotiations. If Azerbaijan wants to use its water resources for the desired period of time, NKR will not go against the discussion o that issue. If those discussions have taken place between the two countries - Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, I believe a solution will be chosen which will be beneficial for the peoples of 2 countries in such case, Gagik Minasyan said.

But if Azerbaijan does not agree to this step only because it does not recognize the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh that means Azerbaijan refuses the report which it highlighted itself.

On January 26, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted reporter Milica Markovics (Bosnia and Herzegovina) draft resolution on Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water making some changes and revisions to the draft. 98 MPs voted for, 71  against. 40 MPs abstained.
Taxi drivers siege of French cities continues for second day Airports inaccesible in Paris, Toulouse, Marseille

(ANSAmed) - PARIS, JANUARY 27 - Striking taxi drivers resumed their siege of major French cities for a second day Wednesday, many of them after sleeping in their cabs blocking access roads to Paris, Toulouse and Marseille.



Other taxi drivers resumed their agitation at 5 a.m.



regardless of a government promise to name a mediator in the dispute.



In Paris cabbies continued to block the headquarters of the Economy Ministry at Bercy which taxi drivers blame for deregulating the cab market and favouring private chauffeur-driven cars and Uber, as well as besieging the Porte Maillot and capital's airports.



Charles de Gaulle Airport remained inaccessible to cars Wednesday morning.



Tuesday saw a rash of incidents with 24 taxi drivers held by police and one person injured in the Ile-de-France region, one person arrested in Lille and scuffles in many places that were expected to be repeated.



At Orly Airport one striker was arrested after a violent row with a colleague not adhering to the stoppage.



Reinforcements consisting of hundreds of taxi drivers were heading to the capital from Nice, Bordeaux and other cities to join the strikers.



In Toulouse taxis also blocked access to the railway station and prevented people boarding trams while checkpoints were set up to control cars trying to reach the local airport.



There was similar chaos in Marseille where cars were unable to reach the port city's Marignane airport. (ANSAmed).




(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, JANUARY 27 - Following lengthy debate, EU commissioners on Wednesday approved a report on its external borders in Greece, where it found ''serious deficiencies''. The announcement was made by EU Commission vice president Valdis Dombrovskis. The approval is the first of four steps in a procedure moving towards a possible activation of Article 26 of the Schengen Code, which foresees the extension of internal border control for one or more countries for up to two years.



Over the coming days, the document will go to the Schengen assessment committee for final approval, after which the European Commission will put forward an action plan with recommendations to resolve the deficiencies. If after three months Athens has not yet brought in the required corrections, the Commission will ask the EU Council to activate Article 26, which calls for the extension of internal border controls for one or more countries for up o two years. The assessment was made on the basis of unscheduled visits by experts sent to Greece by the Commission in November. Dombrovskis acknowledged that Greece had ''started undertaking efforts towards rectifying and complying with the Schengen rules'' since the report was undertaken in November, but said that ''substantial improvements'' were needed.



The report found failures to register, check and fingerprint migrants arriving in November in line with the Schengen Information System (SIS), as well as problems with the migrant reception standards and deportation. (ANSAmed).
Turkish prosecutor asks life term for Cumhuriyet editors Editor-in-chief, news editor in jail for arms export story

(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, JANUARY 27 - The Istanbul prosecutor has demanded life prison sentences be handed down to Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, the jailed editor in chief and news editor of the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper, on charges of espionage and "terrorist propaganda" for publishing an investigative report on presumed trafficking of weapons from Turkey to Syria.



The court has to approve the prosecutor's request before the trial of the two journalists begins. After the publication of the report on the eve of June elections the journalists were denounced by the Turkish secret services and by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who threatened that they would pay "a heavy price" for their reporting.



The case has fuelled protests internationally, rekindling alarm over the worsening press freedom situation in Turkey.



Dundar and Gul were arrested November 26. They then were held in solitary confinement for 40 days before being put in the same cell in Istanbul's Silivri prison.




An attempt to win the Catalan elections. This is the outstanding aspiration of the political space led by Barcelona mayoress Ada Colau. She inspired the En Comu Podem (Together We Can) coalition, which became the most voted slate on December 20 in Catalonia. She did not take an interest in the Catalan elections of September 27 but now she realises, more than ever, that her project needs to gain influence in the Catalan parliament, if it is to succeed at all.

That is why Colau announced on Monday that Barcelona en Comu (Together for Barcelona) will start a debate to consolidate a space where the various flavours of Catalonias left can meet. And she wishes to do this well in advance, without the pressure of a new poll around the corner. As a matter of fact, her group was already discussing the urgent need to decide whether they would run in a fresh election in Catalonia before the eleventh hour agreement between the CUP and Junts pel Si (Together for Yes), the two pro-independence slates. Now that a snap election is out of the picture, she has plenty of time to put together a solid, more stable project.

Therefore, Colau is taking on a new challenge after a year when she has gone from success to success. Escorted by her most loyal inner circle including Xavier Domenech, the En Comu Podem candidate on Monday Colau reviewed her partys achievements and announced the start of an internal debate to initiate the constituent assembly of a new political space which she believes is necessary. The mayoress refused to refer to it as a coalition and was reluctant to call it a political party, even though, to all effects and purposes, it will act as one. This is not about party names, she argued. For this reason she chose to speak about a broad-base movement on the left that would make it a priority to fight for social rights as well as the right to decide in its broadest possible sense. This is an ambitious project that will aim to bring together as many allies as possible. Colau appealed to the more pro-Catalan sector of the socialist party, which she claimed feels neglected by the PSC in its support to self-determination, as well as to the CUP.

Still, it was Colaus coalition partners (ICV, Podemos, EUiA and Equo) that she mostly referred to. In the coming months all of them are expected to renew their leadership, review their achievements thus far and debate the merger process. For now, though, Colaus call is much too recent and it is far too early to say whether this new political actor will prompt others to drop their own brand name. Yet one thing is certain: their respective decision-making bodies would need to shrink in order to ensure that the new project acts as one and in a more simple manner. Colau, who is used to speculation about her future political career, made it clear that she neither hopes for a position in the new party nor she will quit as Barcelona mayor. She also mentioned the formula of Barcelona en Comu at local level as the example to follow.

Colaus partners were enthusiastic about her proposal. ICV spokesperson Marta Ribas acknowledged that there is a need to create a stable space on the left and that, in fact, this will be one of the debate that ICVs party conference will address in April, when current leaders Joan Herrera and Dolors Camats are expected to step down. The main point of contention is how to go about creating the new political subject. We are not contemplating dissolution, say leadership sources. They feel that the narrative strikes a chord with us but its embodiment is yet to be resolved: some in ICV are reluctant to disappear as such.

The dilemma of ones brand name

Podemos Catalan chapter claims that ICV is showing the least flexibility when faced with this new process. We do not know if we will have to drop our name, its never been a priority, but we do know that ICV will struggle. We are more liquid, said a Podemos leadership source. One thing is certain, as far as they are concerned, though: the goal must be to create a single demos of party members. Podemos will debate the issue in a citizens assembly in spring, when a new council and leadership will be elected and the local chapters will voice their views on the creation of the new space.

EUiA is also due to hold a conference to renew its leadership. Secretary General Joan Josep Nuet said he is convinced that all the actors in this process will be wise enough, politically speaking to find a middle point about the how, the when and the who. Still, it will not be easy for EUiA, after having joined the coalition just in time for the December 20 polls. It is all about dropping their own personality in favour of a process that is inevitably reminiscent of the PSUCs (1).

Colau does not expect party names to be dropped

During a radio interview on Catalunya Radio, Colau stated that her proposal for a new political organisation does not require any political parties to renounce their own identity and history. Furthermore, she added that she would not expect the participating parties to dissolve in order to create the new one. If they wish to join this new space while keeping their own outside the new group, thats fine by me, she remarked.

She went on to explain that the new party, which has no name yet, is not a mere coalition or the sum of several party names, but a shared space that must be as broad as possible, stretching across the board so that it reaches beyond the realm of traditional parties. The aim of the new space is to represent the political sensitivities expressed in the Barcelona city council victory by En Comu in the local elections of May 24 and En Comu Podem in the recent Spanish polls.

____________

(1) N.T. Catalonias Communist Party (PSUC) merged with other forces on the left to form a new coalition (ICV) in the 1980s and stopped running in elections as a separate slate under its own brand, which was painful for some old-time members.
This will increase the airlines freighter destinations in Europe to 14 and in Asia/Pacific to six. The airline now flies its fleet of 16 freighters to 52 dedicated-cargo destinations and flies belly hold cargo on passenger aircraft to more than 150 destinations across its global network.

An A330F will fly twice a week from Doha to Ho Chi Minh on Thursdays and Saturdays, and will provide 120 tonnes of cargo capacity to and from the city per week, in addition to the 72 tonnes weekly belly hold capacity on the daily passenger flights to Ho Chi Minh. Qatar Airways Cargos new service to Ho Chi Minh will support Vietnams growing influence as a major exporter of garments, footwear and handicrafts to the US and Europe.

The new Doha  Budapest  Prague service will depart from Doha on Thursdays and Sundays. The 120 tonnes of weekly cargo capacity on the A330F, which will fly to the two new Eastern European cities, will be allocated evenly between the two markets. This new route will provide a major new gateway into Eastern Europe from Asia for electronics and automotive parts, as well as textiles, pharmaceuticals and biotech products.

We are delighted to announce our network expansion in Asia/Pacific and Eastern Europe, said Ulrich Ogiermann, Qatar Airways chief officer cargo. We have identified a definite gap in the market in these regions and we look forward to supporting local businesses in the areas with a more robust service connecting them to our wider global network.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. European top politicians realize very well that the Minsk Group is the only and exceptional format mediating Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Armenia, Vice President of the Republican Party of Armenia Armen Ashotyan told the journalists about this, referring to the developments at the Parliamentary Assembly of CoE.

We watched the discussions live streaming. I was sad that immediately after the end of the discussions people started to comment on the foreign policy in line with their domestic taste. That issue must not be observed in tune with the psychology of daily news line. What we saw was the tip of the iceberg. It is obvious that work in multiple directions had been conducted. It is also obvious that the Armenian side worked very well, and I do not mean only the delegation. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and political parties are engaged in this work. We have results which, on the one hand, can be considered as satisfactory, because if we consider from the viewpoint of lesser of two evils principle, Walters report was a greater evil, Armenpress reports, Armen Ashotyan noted.

In the words of the Minister, the European top political elite, the real elite, realizes very well that the Minsk Group is the only and exceptional format mediating Nagorno Karabakh conflict. It is obvious that the Parliamentary Assembly of the CoE, being comprised of MPs representing national parliaments, is , to some extent, subject to some kind of influences. This is also a challenge to the political system of Europe, because this means that pan-European institutions have little influence over national politics, Armen Ashotyan mentioned.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Armenia will host the World Congress on Information Technology in 2019, Director of Union of Information Technology Enterprises Karen Vardanyan noted the aforementioned during the press conference at Armenpress news agency. As he emphasized, this is an unprecedented event in the sector of information technologies in Armenia.

We must organize the event at the highest level. For this purpose, this year and during the coming years we will send a delegation to the countries where the World Congress on Information Technology will be held, namely, to Brazil, Taiwan, India. Our aim is to understand as much as possible the possibilities so that we are able to organize it effectively in Armenia. Top managers of IT sector usually participate in the Congress, about 2 thousand people. This means that 2019 can become a turning point for Armenia; ensuring opportunities for growth, Vardanyan said.

We are hopeful that till 2019 we can become one of the unique countries that have engineering laboratories. Thus engineering education in General education sector will be at the highest level, Karen Vardanyan said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Yerevan State University ranks first in the national rating of higher educational institutions. Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Armenia Armen Ashotyan told about this, summing the results of 2015 national rating of higher educational institutions.

Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) University ranks second, Yerevan State Medical University after Mkhitar Heratsi ranks third. The next comes the American University of Armenia, National Polytechnic University of Armenia is the fifth. French University in Armenia, National University of Architecture and Construction of Armenia, Armenian State Pedagogical University after Khachatur Abovian, Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences and Armenian State University of Economics respectively rank 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th, Armenpress reports, Armen Ashotyan mentioned.

In the words of the Minister the aim of the rating is to provide the public with objective information.

The aim is also to give applicants opportunity to make appropriate selection of specialization based on this or other indexes. The third aim is to foster competitiveness, as well as the key principle of transparency, the Minister stated, adding that there exists no rating that can satisfy everyone.
The Air Force is taking the future of airpower to international audiences in England this summer.The 56th Fighter Wing from Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, will send F-35A Lightning IIs to fly in a heritage flight and to be on public display at the Royal International Air Tattoo at Royal Air Force Fairford, England. They will also be on public display at the Farnborough International Airshow. This will be the first time the Air Force sends an F-35 to an overseas airshow."We're very excited about demonstrating this capability to the world," said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III. "The F-35 represents a new way of thinking about data integration, weapons and tactics. We're thrilled to highlight the program and the amazing Airmen who support this cutting-edge fighter."The Air Force Heritage Flight program features modern Air Force fighter aircraft flying alongside World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War-era aircraft in a dynamic display of our nation's airpower history."Being a part of these heritage flights allows the world to learn more about the F-35 and at the same time see just how far airpower has come over the years," said Brig. Gen. Scott Pleus, the 56th Fighter Wing commander. "The F-35 will be the backbone of the Air Force fighter fleet and represent the future for the U.S., our partners and allies. This will be a great opportunity for everyone to see how amazing the F-35 is."The Royal International Air Tattoo is scheduled for July 7 through 9, and the Farnborough International Airshow will be July 11 through 17. For information on the Royal International Air Tattoo, click here , and for more information on the Farnborough International Airshow, click here
ARPC is currently booking Spread the Word visits to units for the FY16 cycle. Consider having ARPC provide briefings and training at your conference, Consolidated Training Assembly, or Unit Training Assembly drill weekend, for ANG/AFRC members. Personnel are available to provide presentations and training on the following subjects: "Hot Topics" which includes Legislative Updates, Evaluations and the GI Bill, Entitlements which consists of RCSBP, SGLI,TRICARE, VA Benefits, USERRA, SSRA, Reserve/Guard and AGR Retirements, Officer Career Progression/Development, and Enlisted Development.The ARPC Briefing Team provides interactive presentations and one-on-one question sessions with guardsmen, reservists and/or individual mobilization augmentees.To request ARPC briefing support, please complete the checklist located on our website at http://www.arpc.afrc.af.mil/Portals/4/Documents/ARPC-BriefingRequestForm.pdf or e-mail us at arpc.presentations1@us.af.mil //signed//SAMUEL C. MAHANEY, Brig. Gen., USAFCommander, HQ Air Reserve Personnel Center
For some reason I cannot fathom, Ive been receiving many press releases lately about museum acquisitions, by gift or purchase, and in one case, about a wonderful gift to make acquisitions. I hope they keep coming!

Lets look at them in reverse chronological order:

This morning came news that the Art Institute of Chicago received more than $35 million designated to the purchase of new works in its Prints and Drawings and Asian Art departments. It came from a long-time benefactor named Dorothy Braude Edinburg who, in 2013, made a landmark gift of more than 1000 works of art and established the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection in her parents honor. The collection consisted of European prints and drawings, Chinese and Korean stonewares and porcelains, and Japanese printed books. More details here.

Yesterday, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it had purchased its first work by Frida Kahlonot the most representative of her work but important because it was the first painting she ever sold. Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) was painted in 1928 and portrays two maids that Kahlo knew, set against tropical foliage. More details here.

The Getty Museum also landed a treasure (at left), announcing that it had acquired a rare Flemish manuscript. It requires a quoted description:

Livre des fais de Jacques de Lalaing (Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing), a highly important illuminated manuscript comprising text by Jean Lefevre de Saint-Remy and a frontispiece by Simon Bening, the leading Flemish manuscript painter of the period. The manuscript also contains 17 lively miniatures attributed to an anonymous painter in the circle of the Master of Charles V. The Livre des fais de Jacques de Lalaing is considered one of the greatest secular manuscripts produced during the last flowering of Flemish illumination in the second quarter of the 16th century. The vivid illuminations, rendered with remarkable detail and vibrant colors, extol the ideals symbolizing the age of chivalry.

Nicely, the piece was bought in honor of recently retired Thomas Kren, the senior curator of the Department of Manuscripts there from 1984  2010 and then Associate Director of Collections. More details here.

In mid-January, the very lucky Getty also acquiredpart purchase, part gift31 pieces of 18th century French decorative arts from the collection of Horace Brock. More details here.

In Pittsburgh, the Mattress Factory announced a dandy gift: James Turrell has donated a Skyspace with an estimated worth of more than $1 million. The museum did not announce the size and shape of the piece, probably because Turrell must yet design it and, maybe more important, the Mattress Factory has to raise funds to pay for the works installation. More details here.

Yesterday, the Huntington announced several acquisitions by its Collectors Council, including some art works (the library took in two large archives): collection of 19th-century images that trace the history of photographic practice in the American West, a rare, annotated Latin manuscript about the Three Magi, written on parchment and produced in England between 1400 and 1450. More details here.

Earlier this month, the Cincinnati Art Museum said it had acquired The Wilderness, an 1861 landscape by Sanford Robinson Gifford, and a life-size glass sculpture, Seated Dress with Impression of Drapery, created in 2005 by Karen LaMonte (at right). More details here.

Thats a pretty great list, going back just two weeks. And I probably some as not every museum sends me such announcements.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty (top) and the Cincinnati Art Museum (bottom)
Attorney General clears Najib Razak from bribery charges. For the former, the issue is between him and the Saudi royal family. For Malaysian source, This would not be the first time the Saudis gave money this way to someone in Malaysia. For Saudi source, the donation was designed to help Najib win the 2013 election.

Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews)  Malaysia's attorney general cleared Prime Minister Najib Razak of corruption and embezzlement charges involving US$ 681 million, allegedly from state investment fund 1MDB, after ruling that the money was a donation from the Saudi royal family.

In July 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that millions had found their way into the personal bank accounts of Malaysias prime minister. Attorney General Mohamed Apandi Ali said he was satisfied that the funds in Najib's account were "not a form of graft or bribery" and that "no criminal offence" had been committed in relation to the funds. There was no reason given as to why the donation was made to PM Najib, that is between him and the Saudi family," he added.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) had already determined that the US$ 681 million had come from an unknown source in the Middle East. A Malaysian politician told AsiaNews that "it is plausible that the Saudis gave the money to the Prime Minister, although we do not know if and how he spent them. In the coming days, as the probe goes on, we will know more.

"In addition, the source noted, "this would not be the first time the Saudis gave money this way to someone in Malaysia.

Another Saudi source told the BBC that the Saudis gave Najib US$ 681 million so that his United Malays National Organisation, which has ruled the country since independence (1957), could win the 2013 election.

According to the source, Saudi Arabia feared the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Pan-Malaysian Islamic Part. For the Saudis, the Brotherhood are terrorists.

"There is nothing unusual about this donation to Malaysia," he said. "It is very similar to how the Saudis operate in a number of countries."

In fact, Jordan has been the beneficiary of more than US$ 1 billion in Saudi development funding. Likewise, Riyadh has deposited more than US$ 1 billion in Sudan's central bank and signed deals to finance dams on the Nile. Morocco too has been provided with oil, financing, investments and jobs in recent years.

And, as Fr Samir Khalil Samir said on AsiaNews, Saudi money is the harbinger of Wahhabi doctrines, of which Saudi Arabia is both the guardian and the agent.
Police in Maharashtra stopped a peaceful protest by about a thousand women demanding the right to enter the Hindu Shani Shingnapur temple. Because they are "impure" according to Hindu tradition, they cannot enter places of worship. Social media back women. In Kerala, a guru calls for a machine to detect womens fertility.

Mumbai (AsiaNews/Agencies)  More than a thousand women have been detained by police in the Indian state of Maharashtra when they tried to walk to the Shani Shingnapur Ahmadnagar temple.

Claiming the "right to pray" at the site, protesters rallied against the Hindu tradition that bans their presence from the temple. However, the authorities stopped them some 70 kilometres from the city.

Reports say about 600 police were deployed in the area. The women were also denied permission to use a helicopter.

The Bhumata Ranragini Brigade (Women warriors of Mother Earth) organised the protest. "We are determined to end the distasteful practice on Republic Day," the groups Trupti Desai told one Indian newspaper.

Hindu women are not allowed in Hindu temples because they are considered "impure". In recent weeks, their campaign has gathered traction in Indian media and on social media, with many people using the hashtags #RightToWorship and #RightToPray to express support for the women. One wrote, Impurities comes from mind God accept every one Religious tradition are invented by humans (sic).

The Shani Shingnapur temple is not only one to ban women. For several months, women in Kerala have been protesting against the ban in place at the Sabarimala Ayyappa temple. In this case, as the issue escalated, the Supreme Court of the State intervened.

For the temple's chief priest Thazhamon Madom Kandararu Rajeevaru, "The chief deity in the temple is a celibate. So allowing women to worship in the shrine is a sin".

"The Board will implead in the case to protect the interests of the devotees," said Prayar Gopalakrishnan, president of the temple's board. "The divinity of the shrine comes from this custom. That will be protected at any cost."

The priest drew criticism when he suggested using a machine to investigate womens purity. Otherwise, every potentially fertile female aged between 10 and 50 years would be banned.

Social media responded swiftly with users calling for respect for womens right to worship.

The dispute has taken a dangerous turn when Naushad Ahmed Khan, the lawyer pleading the case for women in the Sabarimala temple before the Supreme Court, said more than 700 threatening calls telling him to drop the case.
During the general audience, Francis said that "The Lords mercy renders man precious, as a personal richness that belongs to Him, which He guards and with which He is pleased. What is more, in this Year of Mercy, we can also do the work of being mediators of mercy with works of mercy to come close, to give relief, to create unity. So many good things can be done.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  As he continues to highlight aspects of the theme he chose for the Holy Year, Pope Francis spoke again about Gods mercy in his catechesis during this mornings General Audience in St Peters Square.

Mercy, the pontiff said, cannot remain indifferent in the face of the suffering of the oppressed, of the cry of the one subjected to violence, reduced to slavery, condemned to death, because The Lords mercy renders man precious, as a personal richness that belongs to Him, which He guards and with which He is pleased.

At the end, a group of circus artists and workers livened the meeting. Francis greeted them, saying you are champions of beauty, you make beauty and beauty does good to the soul. Beauty brings us close to God, but behind this show of beauty, how many hours of training there are!

Earlier, he told the 15,000 gathered in St Peters Square that Gods mercy is present throughout the history of the people of Israel. The Lord accompanies, with His mercy, the path of the Patriarchs; He gives them children despite the condition of sterility, He leads them by ways of grace and reconciliation, as the story of Joseph and his brothers shows. And I think of how many brothers who have estranged themselves from their family and do not speak to one another. But this Year of Mercy is a good occasion to meet again, to embrace and forgive one another and to forget the bad things. However, as we know, life in Egypt became hard for the people. And it was in fact when the Israelites were about to succumb that the Lord intervened and brought about salvation.

In the Book of Exodus, one reads, In the course of those many days the king of Egypt died. And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition.

Mercy cannot remain indifferent in face of the suffering of the oppressed, of the cry of one subjected to violence, reduced to slavery, condemned to death. It is a painful reality that afflicts every age, including our own, and which often makes us feel impotent, tempted to harden our heart and think of something else. God, instead, is not indifferent, He never looks away from human pain. The God of mercy responds and takes care of the poor, of those who cry their desperation. God listens and intervenes to save, inspiring men capable of hearing the groan of suffering and of working in favor of the oppressed.

This is how the story of Moses begins, as mediator of liberation for the people. He confronts the Pharaoh to persuade him to let Israel leave; and then he guides the people, through the Red Sea and the desert, to freedom. Moses, whom Divine Mercy saved from death in the waters of the Nile when he was newly born, becomes the mediator of that same mercy, enabling the people to be born to freedom, saved from the waters of the Red Sea. And in this Year of Mercy, we can also do the work of being mediators of mercy with works of mercy to come close, to give relief, to create unity. So many good things can be done.

Gods mercy acts always to save. It is the opposite of the work of those who always act to kill: for instance, those who make wars. Through his servant Moses, the Lord guided Israel in the desert as if it were a child; He educated it to faith and made covenant with it, creating a very strong bond of love, as that of a father with a son and of a husband with a wife.

Divine mercy reaches that much. God proposes a particular, exclusive and privileged relation of love. When He gives Moses instructions regarding the covenant, He says: 'Now, therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all the peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation'."

God certainly already possesses the whole earth, as He created it, but the people become for Him a different, special possession: His personal reserve of gold and silver, as that which King David affirmed he gave for the construction of the Temple.

Well, we become so for God by receiving His covenant and letting ourselves be saved by Him. The Lords mercy renders man precious, as a personal richness that belongs to Him, which He guards and with which He is pleased.

These are the wonders of Divine Mercy, which reaches fulfilment in the Lord Jesus, in that new and eternal covenant consummated in His Blood, which with forgiveness destroys our sin and renders us definitively children of God, precious jewels in in the hands of the good and merciful Father. And if we are children of God and have the possibility of having this inheritance  that of goodness and mercy  in our dealings with others, let us ask the Lord that in this Year of Mercy we also do things of mercy; open our heart to reach everyone with works of mercy. The merciful inheritance that God the Father has given us.
by Mathias Hariyadi

Army and Navy Special Forces have joined the police to hunt for suspected mastermind, Bahrum Naim, and Santoso, the countrys Most Wanted, who is hiding in the jungle near Poso among friends.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  At least 200 Indonesians have joined the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria in recent days, this according to Police Chief General Badrotin Haiti, who spoke before the Third Commission (Legal affairs and laws, human rights and security) of Indonesias lower house (People's Representative Council).

The estimate comes from the intelligence services, who followed suspects and their attempt to promote the caliphate in Indonesia. This is a sign that IS has been already operating in the country for some time.

Bahrum Naim, a terrorist who wants to prevail over other South-east Asian terrorist groups, has been blamed for the attacks on 14 January in Jakarta.

Security forces have launched a manhunt to capture him as well as Indonesias Most Wanted, Santoso, also known as Abu Wardah. The latter is hiding in Poso, Central Sulawesi.

Army and Navy Special Forces have joined the police in the hunt for Santoso. However, the area where he is hiding is hard to reach because it is mountainous and tropical nature.

Complicating matters, General Badrotin Haiti noted that much of the local population is sympathetic to the group, which makes operations harder to conduct.

Poso has seen conflict before pitting radical Muslims against Protestants in 1999-2001. The authorities convicted and quickly executed three Christian men on false murder charges. Muslim extremists also attacked and beheaded three young female students.

Indonesian authorities estimate that IS has about a thousand active supporters, a very small number considering that the country it is the most populous Islamic nation in the world with 250 million people (87 per cent Muslim).

So far, some 600 Indonesians have reportedly gone to Syria to join the caliphate. Fifty are said to have died.
by Melani Manel Perera

A well-known trade unionist and head of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, Saeed Baloch was arrested in Karachi, and is currently being held at a secret location. No formal charges have been laid against him, but under Pakistani law, anyone suspected of terrorist activity can be locked up for up to three months without charges being laid. Currently, three fisherfolk activists are languishing in Pakistani jails.

Colombo (AsiaNews)  About 50 people, all activists and members of Sri Lankan NGOs, gathered yesterday afternoon in front of Pakistans High Commission in Colombo to protest the arrest and detention of Saeed Baloch, general secretary of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF).

Pakistani Special Forces arrested Mr Baloch on 16 January in Karachi and since then he has been held without being charged formally.

"Saheed Baloch is a prominent social activist and PFF secretary, Herman Kumara, special envoy of the World Forum of Fisher People (WFFP), told AsiaNews.

The PFF is an organisation committed to strengthening the social, economic and political rights of fishermen and local indigenous communities in Pakistan."

Baloch, who is a member of the Fishermen Cooperative Society, is detained at an undisclosed location, Kumara noted. "Under the Anti-Terrorism Act, rangers are allowed to detain a person for up to three months even without charge, if the accused is suspected in connection with terrorism."

National Fisheries Solidarity movement organised yesterdays peaceful protest, bringing together various other groups. Activists also signed a petition that was handed over to an official at the Pakistani High Commission.

The appeal calls on Pakistans prime minister to take immediate steps for the release of Saeed Baloch". The official said that he would bring the petition to the attention of the competent authorities.

The arrest of the Pakistani activist is the latest in a series of detentions that involve other fisherfolk activists. In June 2015, Pakistani forces arrested the directors of the Fishermen Cooperative Society  Qamar Sultan Siddiqui, Muhammad Khan Chachar and Rana Shahid  on charges of extortion, murder, corruption and criminal association.
By Sherman Chan,

Special to The Post

My search for the best Szechuan Water-Boiled Fish brought me out to Legend House in Coquitlam.

Some dark soy would've made the Shanghai Rice Cakes appearance and flavour more appealing. It was greasy. The rice cake slices were chewy while the cabbage, crunchy. The Beef Pancake Roll was flaky, fatty and crisp; it was as good as it appeared.

We ordered a Szechuan Beef Noodle, but instead we got just a Beef Noodle with some hot sauce and mustard greens - a quasi-Taiwanese beef noodle dish. The big chunks of stewed beef were tender and moist while the hand-pulled noodles were chewy. The light broth had little meat flavour. There were barely any veggies in the Seafood & Snow Pea Stir-Fry dish. It was mostly basa, squid and prawns.

We tried the Szechuan Broth Braised Fish. It had a good amount of tender and flaky slices of basa in a balanced broth atop crunchy sprouts. The spice level was conservative, even with the noticeable amount of Szechuan peppercorns. It was actually quite good. The Xiao Long Bao had a semi-thin skin that held in the considerable amount of soup. There wasn't any xiao shing wine flavour.

Lastly, we had the Pan Fried Buns. It had hand-chopped meat and green onions as a filling which was savoury with a tender meatiness , atypical of Dim Sum.

Our dishes at Legend had certain creative liberties taken. However, they do have some pretty good XLBs and a solid Beef Roll. So if you order wisely, your meal might be decent at Legend House.

Sherman Chan is the #1 ranked food blogger on the Vancouver portal of Urbanspoon.com. Read more of his reviews at www.shermansfoodadventures.com.

Legend House

140-1169 Pacific Street, Coquitlam, BC

The Good:

 Pretty decent XLBs

 On point Beef Roll

 Free covered parking

The Bad:

 Hit and miss overall
YEREVAN, JUNE 27, ARMENPRESS. President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan received the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Herbert Salber on January 27. As Armenpress was informed from the Department of Public Relations and Mass Media of the Republic of Armenia Presidents Staff, the President greeted the guest, congratulated him on the prolongation of his mandate and hoped that Herbert Salber will do his best to establish trust between the conflicting parties of the region, which will foster the efforts aimed at the peaceful conflict settlement. Serzh Sargsyan highlighted the preservation of EUs balanced position on Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement and the implementation of the commitment to establish favorable atmosphere for the comprehensive solution of the problem.

EU Special Representative assured that the Union is interested in immediate and peaceful settlement of the conflict and wishes to contribute in it within the framework of its opportunities, supporting the efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group states in that regard, which is the only acceptable and approved format.

During the meeting the sides touched upon the recent developments of the negotiation process over the peaceful settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict, existing situation and opportunities to record progress in the process. The Armenian President introduced the approaches of the Armenian side. Serzh Sargsyan and Herbert Salber exchanged ideas over possible ways of EUs support for the peaceful settlement of the conflict.

The interlocutors once again stated that Nagorno Karabakh problem has no military solution and it can be settled only based on principles satisfying the interests of the conflicting sides and mutual concessions acceptable for both of them.
The Danish parliament has passed controversial laws overnight, meaning asylum seekers in Denmark will be forced to hand over cash and valuables worth more than $2,000.



According to a report by the ABC, the reforms are aimed at dissuading refugees and migrants from seeking asylum. Three-year delays in family unification will also be a part of the measures to dissuade asylum seekers from heading to Denmark, a move Amnesty International described as cruel and said could have a devastating impact on families.



The laws have been heavily criticised worldwide as reminiscent of the Nazi-era police of taking valuables from Jews.



It's wrong to take away from people who have already lost so much and suffered so much the few belongings that they have managed to rescue, and also to discriminate against them by not allowing them to be reunited with their families, said United Nations Refugee Agency spokesperson William Spindler in response to the new laws.



But the government insists its a necessary move to stem the flow of asylum seekers, and defended the move by saying that Danes applying for social benefits may also have to sell their valuables.



The bill was presented by the right-wing minority government and was approved by 81 of the 109 MPs present. Members of the opposition Social Democrats backed the laws, the ABC reported.



There's no simple answer for a single country, but until the world comes together on a joint solution [to the migrant crisis], Denmark needs to act, MP Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of Rasmussen's Venstre party said during the debate.



Sweden has taken five times the number of asylum seekers that Denmark has over the past year.



To those saying what we are doing is wrong, my question is: What is your alternative?, said Social Democrat MP Dan Jorgensen.



The alternative is that we continue to be [one of] the most attractive countries in Europe to come to, and then we end up like Sweden.




The Legal Services Commission of South Australia has hit a major milestone with their free online chat service, launched back in October last year.



Australian first, Legal Chat, has now reached its 1,000th user.



Offering real time contact with lawyers, free of charge, the service has now advised 600 members of the public on civil matters, relating to matters like fencing disputes, landlord and tenancy disagreements and wills and estates. Two-hundred matters have been advised upon by the service in relation to family law issues and 200 enquiries relating to criminal law matters, mainly traffic offences.



The service follows a huge interest in the Commissions phone advisory service and a growing need for people in rural areas to access legal services quickly and easily.



We did expect it to be quite popular because we have been seeing growing levels of demand for information about legal matters, Gabrielle Canny, the Commissions director told Australasian Lawyer.



For instance, our telephone advice service handled more than 80,000 calls last year.



People in country locations often have fewer options when it comes to seeking legal assistance and information.



Legal Chat goes some way to rectifying that, and we understand it is becoming increasingly popular among people in country areas. At this stage, however, we don't have a breakdown available to us about the geographic locations of the first 1,000 users.



Canny said that around 79 per cent of Legal Chat users preferred to get assistance online rather than by phone, in many cases this is because they are working in open plan offices and dont want to be overheard by colleagues.



The service is expanding rapidly, and is currently taking 100 calls a week.



We are training growing numbers of our lawyers to work on the Legal Chat service, Canny said.


Australia's Department of Immigration and Border Protection has been criticised for having a weak compliance process and failing to locate visa holders who overstay, work illegally or commit crimes.A report from the Australian National Audit Office has found faults in almost all aspects of the DIBP's visa compliance processes and says that while over the last 10 years it has tried to improve its performance there is little evidence of success. "The department does not currently have an effective risk and intelligence function supporting visa compliance. These weaknesses undermine the department's capacity to effectively manage the risk of visa holders not complying with their visa conditions from simple overstaying through illegal working to committing serious crimes," the report states.It also points out that the challenges facing the DIBP should not be underestimated when it processes millions of visas every year yet an oversight of data has been lacking for many years and its most recent attempt to improve data quality was abandoned a few months after it was launched."The department's capability to capture data and provide reports on most aspects of the administration of migration and visa programmes is flawed, with key reports on compliance typically including caveats as to the accuracy of the data," the report says.It also points out that problems with electronic record management system have been identified for many years, but not addressed. "The system now represents a risk to the department as records are difficult to locate or cannot be found," it adds.It makes a number of key recommendations including improving data collection and analysis activities, to gain an overarching perspective on the extent and nature of non-compliance with visa conditions.It also says efforts should be made to make sure that more calls to its phone lines should be answered and there should be better quality assurance, guidance materials, training, performance reporting and record keeping.A DIBP spokesman said that considerable work was being done to improve a new operating environment and it has agreed to the recommendations from the ANAO.eThe department is reviewing a number of administrative functions related to managing visa compliance, including a review into allegation assessments and compliance processes, intelligence capacity and information management systems,i he added.
MPV

The upcoming sedan model is set to become BMWs smallest sedan ever and will share a platform called the UKL, already available in the current MINI and BMW lineups on models such as the Cooper hatchback, 2 Series Active Tourer, and the new X1.This time, the prototype of the upcoming 1 Series Sedan features less camouflage, as the carmaker finishes the final touches before green-lighting it for production.We notice a few cues that remind us of the BMW Concept Compact Sedan . A quick look reveals some trim elements that are reminiscent of other recently launched BMW models, along with the signature Hofmeister kink, a design feature that defines retro and contemporary BMWs alike.On a technical level, the next BMW 1 Series Sedan will feature powertrains borrowed from its hatchback siblings.The smallest sedan in BMWs lineup will have a front wheel drive configuration and will be offered in six-speed manual transmissions, along with eight-speed automatic gearboxes.The engine range will include three-cylinder units and four-cylinder powerplants, all with direct injection, turbocharging and Start-Stop systems.The upcoming 1 Series Sedan will be joined in the range by a hatchback version. Naturally, the third generation of the BMW 1 Series will also have a front-wheel drive configuration as standard, with xDrive all-wheel-drive as optional.While BMWs decision to go front-wheel drive for the 1 Series may have been criticized by some, surveys made by the German company revealed that customers didnt mind the change.The first ever production BMW with a front-wheel-drive configuration was the 2 Series Active Tourer, the companys first. As road tests revealed, the car demonstrated adequate handling in spite of the new configuration for the German brand known for its love of rear-wheel-drive.
If youve ever been caught behind a convoy of plows, youll know how annoying it is to drive at their speed without the possibility of overtaking them, but thats not the biggest problem. Its the substances used to melt ice.The problems caused by these chemicals are endless, and this sometimes makes you wonder if the benefits are actually worth it. Maybe the Swedes do know what theyre doing when they dont clear their roads of snow.We do, however, and we also spray them with a substance that corrodes the concrete, generates potholes, is a nightmare for the cars paintwork, and its a pain to get off your shoes. But what if there was an alternative?An engineering professor at the University of Nebraska is currently testing out a new method of keeping the concrete clean during the winter. Chris Tuan took the heated driveway principle one step forward, and instead of placing heated wires or pipes under the concrete, he put them in it. Kind of.The idea seems simple now, but that doesnt change the fact that hes the first one to come up with it. Chris Tuan mixed steel shavings and carbon particles into the usual concrete recipe and came up with something that can conduct electricity and generate heat as a result.Will it zap me if I walk over it while its in action? Glad you asked. Wouldn't that be funny? The answer, though, is no.The Phys website reports that, currently, theres only a test patch of 200-square-feet (apart from a patio in the inventors backyard), but the next phase of the project will see the system get implemented in a US airport, under the FAAs supervision. Unlike what youd think, its not the runways that are being targeted, but the tarmac around the gated areas - clearing that up would speed things considerably during bad weather.Its hard to imagine this thing on a very large scale. It would require tearing up the existing concrete and replacing all of it with Tuans mixture, which would cost nothing short of a fortune. But in key areas - bridges, for example, which tend to freeze a lot quicker and are also corroded by the salt normally used - thats where his invention could make a lot more sense.That means that for the other 99.9 percent of the roads, the snow plow is here to stay.
The Italian-American company now has access to funds that were previously restricted from being transferred outside the American unit of the corporation. Thanks to those funds, which amount to some $13 billion, the groups CEO can now borrow less money and use the liquidity to expand the two merged companies.According to analyst estimates obtained by Bloomberg, the corporation led by Sergio Marchionne could save up to one billion euros ($1.09 billion) on financing in 2018. The estimate provided by three analysts to Bloomberg is an average of the values presented by the specialists.Chrysler has gathered the estimated $13 billion after buying back bonds, but the FCA could not access the funds as it set up its headquarters in Europe.Sergio Marchionne will update the corporations financial forecast this week, and financial analysts expect the net income of Fiat to be a direct beneficiary of the newly accessible funds.At the beginning of this year, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles made Ferrari a separate financial entity. The move led to a drop in FCA shares, but Marchionne expects the company to recover after his investment and restructuring plan.Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is the worlds seventh-largest automaker. The company was formed in 2014 from the merger of Fiat and Chrysler into a new holding company. The FCA holding was incorporated in the Netherlands and headquartered in London, for financial reasons.The move didnt go lightly with several voices in the United States of America, who were concerned about the fact that the carmakers financial headquarters were being moved to Europe after the bailout of 2009 using the United Auto Workers pension fund and US government aid. Fiat paid $4.9 billion to acquire Chrysler, along with a $5.5 billion pension liability.Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is operated through two subsidiaries, FCA Italy and FCA US. The company plans to reach a revenue of 132 billion euros by the year 2018.
Ford found that out the hard way and on January 26 announced that it was officially withdrawing from the Japanse car market by the end of the year. We don't quite understand if they need to pull out by December or by March, which is when the 2016 fiscal year ends. But the general tone seems to be the sooner the better.Japan seems to be a feature-dense, comfort-oriented market. That's why the vast majority of European automakers offer only one or two engines per model with standard automatic gearboxes.So by the end of 2016, you won't be able to buy a new Ford in Japan, but should you even care? The American brand's current lineup in the land of the Civic consists of the Fiesta, Focus, Mustang, Ecosport, Kuga and Explorer. Of these, only the smaller hatchbacks have witnessed reasonable demand.After Reuters was handed an internal email sent by Ford Asia-Pacific President Dave Schoch to all employees last week, the company needed to come clean and make the following announcement: Japan is the most closed, developed auto economy in the world, with all imported brands accounting for less than 6% of Japans annual new car market.While that is mostly true (if you exclude kei cars, the number is 10%), demand for import cars has been growing. In addition, China is much worse, with only 4% of the total cars sold there coming from overseas. That doesn't stop Mercedes from bringing its exotic and overtaxed AMGs.Japan is very competitive, being home to some of the biggest names in the business, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda. But over 300,000 cars were imported into the country in 2015, most of which came from Europe. Clearly, things are changing and a little attention to detail counts for something. Only a few years ago, Ford was still importing cars from America to Britain and Japan with the steering wheel on the wrong side.
YEREVAN, 27 JANUARY, ARMENPRESS. No cases of suspected diseases causing emergency situation of international significance have been recorded at the check-points of the state border of the Republic of Armenia. Armenian Health Ministry informed Armenpress about this in answer to a question referring to the expansion of H1N1 virus in the RF and other countries. According to data of the Ministry, only few cases of visitors crossing the Armenian border with high temperature have been registered since December 1, 2015. Discovering people with disease symptoms, the policlinics of the place of residence are immediately informed about it and the latter organizes the medical service.

37 Russian regions have crossed the threshold of epidemy of acute respiratory infections. Acute respiratory infection has been registered for every second Moscow resident. H1N1 virus has been diagnosed for 298 people out of 306 flu cases registered in Rostov region.
Police had to intervene as the angry drivers blocked an eight-lane road from Frances capital city, and they were pushed back by the law enforcement officers using tear gas. More than 20 taxi drivers were arrested for violence, carrying weapons and starting a fire. According to some reports, two people were injured at Orly airport when a shuttle bus tried to force its way past a blockade of taxi drivers.Rachid Boudjema stated that Uber drivers vandalize professionals who are paying taxes, who respect the rules.Joining them were millions of teachers, health workers and air traffic controllers, who protested against work reforms, and around 5.6 million people went on strike over wages, working conditions, the cost of living and job losses. The BBC reports that one in five flights was canceled at Paris airports.The tension between Uber and taxi drivers is not something new, and sometimes the two parties tend to get physical. In early December 2015, a cab driver from Toronto with 22 years of experience attacked an UberX vehicle with a passenger inside. The UberX driver panicked and stepped on the gas and dragged the taxi driver for about 40 feet.Not long after this violent incident, a Canadian company launched an app called The Ride that gives the cabbies access to the same technology that Uber has. In summary, thanks to this app, users can enter a pickup location and destination, and watch on a map how far away their driver is. The only thing The Ride doesnt have is the automatic payment of fares.Recently, many Uber drivers joined a class-action lawsuit in an effort to be recognized as full employees entitled to benefits, so if this happens, maybe this flaming conflict between traditional and modern taxi drivers will be over.
Photo of 2016 Cadillac CT6 courtesy of GM.

Cadillac's 2016 CT6 luxury sedan will arrive as a lighter weight option to German competitors that's shorter than full-size and significantly longer than mid-size options.

Johan de Nysschen, Cadillac's president, gave a presentation about the CT6 to journalists on Jan. 26 about the vehicle, and the brand has released full specifications.

The CT6 will arrive with an overall length of 204 inches, a 122.4-inch wheel base, and a curb weight of less than 3,700 pounds. The Mercedes-Benz 2016 S-550 measures 206.5 inches in length with a 124.6-inch wheel base and 4,630-pound curb weight.

Cadillac has reduced weight by incorporating high-strength aluminum among the 13 different materials in the sedan to save nearly 200 pounds of weight in a move to improve fuel efficiency. It will offer a base model turbocharged 2.0L four-cylinder, 3.6L V-6 with all-wheel drive, and 3.0L twin-turbo V-6.

The CT6 will offer features such as active rear steer with a snow/ice mode that enhances stability, rear seat connectivity such as a screen integrated into the seat back and high-resolution 10.1-inch infotainment screen, a night vision system for pedestrian and animal detection, a rear camera mirror, and triggered video recording that Cadillac claims is an industry first.

The CT6 retails for $54,490 and will arrive at dealer lots in March.
Photo courtesy of NHTSA.

In the wake of another death linked to an exploding Takata air bag inflator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced on its website that more safety recalls affecting an estimated 5.1 million vehicles are on the way.

The driver death, which occurred Dec. 22 in a 2006 model-year Ford Ranger in South Carolina, is the ninth fatality in the U.S. tied to defective air bag inflators manufactured by Takata Corp.

Another fatality occurred in Malaysia in 2014. An exploding air bag inflator in an August fatal crash in India is also under investigation.

The future recalls in the U.S. will involve two different types of air bag inflators: SDI model inflators for driver-side frontal air bag modules installed in certain Audi, Ford, Mazda, Sprinter and Volkswagen vehicles; and PSDI-5 model inflators for air bag modules installed in certain Audi, BMW, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Saab, Toyota and Volkswagen vehicles, according to NHTSA.

The Takata SDI driver-side air bag inflators at issue were manufactured from Jan. 1, 2002, through the end of the production cycle for 2014 model-year vehicles, NHTSA reported. Air bags with these inflators were installed as original or replacement equipment in an estimated 1.2 million vehicles in the U.S.

The Takata PSDI-5 air bag inflators were manufactured from Jan. 1, 2003, through the end of the production cycle for 2014-MY vehicles. Air bags with these inflators were installed as original or replacement equipment in 3.9 million vehicles. Toyota has already launched a recall campaign to address these defective inflators. Additionally, inflators installed as part of a previous recall arent affected, NHTSA reported.

To facilitate the upcoming recalls, Takata Corp. has declared both of these types of air bag inflators defective.

Takata will be working with vehicle manufacturers to identify into which vehicles the affected inflators were installed either as original or replacement equipment during service, NHTSA said. As this work progresses, numerous vehicle recalls will likely be announced by the impacted vehicle manufacturers. NHTSA will supply this information as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. has already expanded its recall of Takata-made air bag inflators in response to the reported death in the 2006 Ford Ranger. The automaker is recalling an additional 361,692 2004-2006 Ford Ranger trucks in the U.S. so the defective SDI driver-side air bag inflators can be replaced at no cost to affected vehicle owners.

Previous Takata air bag inflator recalls in the U.S. have affected about 19 million vehicles made by 12 different vehicle manufacturers, according to NHTSA. During air bag deployment, the defective inflators have the potential to explode and disperse shrapnel inside the vehicle.
Sioux Falls City Council passed the first reading of a proposed $3 per day rental car tax at the Sioux Falls Regional Airport, according to a report by Keloland.

The Sioux Falls Development Foundation wants to add a $3 per day tax on rental cars to help fund the development of a business park. The Development Foundation estimates the new tax would bring in close to $1 million a year, a majority paid by visitors to the city, says the report.

Dan Letellier, Sioux Falls Regional Airports director, told Keloland that the airport has considered a similar fee to fund upgrades to the car rental area. "If there's already a $3 fee imposed, plus our fee, $6 per day is going to impact people's decision-making," Letellier said.

Sioux Falls car rental companies call the tax discriminatory and regressive, according to the report.

A second reading of the proposed tax will be presented to the city council on Feb. 1. If that passes, Sioux Falls residents would vote on it in April, says the report.

Click here for the full Keloland report.
Los Angeles International Airport. Photo via Wikimedia/Florencio Briones



Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), the agency that operates Los Angeles International Airport, will hold a meeting for potential bidders for its Landside Access Modernization Program, according to a report by the Daily Breeze.



This program includes the construction of a 2.25-mile people mover, a consolidated rental car facility, transit hubs and roadway improvements at Los Angeles International Airport, says the report.

Scheduled for Feb. 4, the networking meeting will be a precursor to LAWA distributing invitations for businesses to bid for construction contracts, says the report.

Click here for the full Daily Breeze report.
The Copperstate Fly-In, which has moved to several airports around Arizona over more than 40 years, will be held at a new site this October, organizers have announced. The event will be held at Falcon Field, in Mesa, Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28 and 29. The facilities available at Falcon Field will help the fly-in to expand its offerings, organizers said. Were optimistic well have more people through the gate and more exhibitors, fly-in president Steve Bass told the local East Valley Tribune. The site is also convenient to the major metropolitan Phoenix area, which is the main source of visitors to the fly-in. The event usually attracts about 500 aircraft and up to 7,000 visitors.

The fly-in will feature aircraft displays, including ultralights, gyrocopters, homebuilts, antiques and warbirds. Also planned are aircraft awards, aviation business information booths, educational workshops for pilots and youth activities. This is a mutually beneficial partnership, local city council member David Luna said of the move to Mesa. It will help increase regional and national awareness about what Falcon Field has to offer, while helping the Copperstate Fly-in expand its offerings to pilots and aviation enthusiasts. A portion of event proceeds will fund scholarships for youth aviation programs.
Matthew 16:23 - "But he turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.'"





Isaiah 41:10 - "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."

1 Peter 5:10 - "And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast."





1 Thessalonians 4:13 - "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope."
27 January 2016 13:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Sadigova

Armenias foreign trade turnover decreased by 20.6 percent in January-December, 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.

The Armenian National Statistics Service reported that export volume for the reporting period amounted to $1.5 million, decreasing by 3.9 percent compared to the same period in 2014.

The negative trade balance has an important place in the overall number of characteristics of a sick economy, such as lack of a competitive business environment, development of big business at the expense of small and medium-sized business, a once-and-for-all established monopoly setup, and a reduction of the volume of transfers from Russia, so important for Armenia.

The statistics prove worsening of the economic crisis in Armenia, which pose definite threats for all fields of life. Unstable situation in the world hits Armenia even stronger than experts predicted due to the fact that this post-Soviet country lacks any economic scenario for crisis.

Armenia is one of the few countries where imports exceed exports by 3 times. The government once again failed to keep its promise in 2015 to substantially increase exports and to develop import substitution.

Resolution of this problem could strengthen both the national currency and reduce the growing unemployment. However, nothing is done to improve the situation and Armenia is on the way to the abyss.

Armenia's foreign trade turnover with the CIS member states declined by 17.3 percent to $1.149.8 billion (29.5 percent of the total trade), while trade with Russia fell by 14.8 percent to $989.7 million.

When entering the EEU, the Armenian government promised that the volume of foreign trade turnover will increase. However, the countrys economy shows the opposite trend and all the promises made by the Armenian officials, once again turned into a lie.

Yerevans aggressive foreign policy does not allow the country to improve its economy and join huge regional projects. Armenians are mainly surviving thanks to the international transfers, which reduced by several times, especially from Russia  by 30 percent.

Meanwhile Armenia's external debt exceeded $5 billion, an enormous number that is threatening to completely destroy this small South Caucasus country.

This once again shows a huge gap between the statements made by the government about the stable situation in the countrys economy and the real situation in the country.

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Follow Laman Sadigova on Twitter: @s_laman93

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. On the occasion of Army day, a group of servicemen received high state awards and military distinction for their dedication, courage and outstanding service rendered in the course of their military duty. The award ceremony took place today at the Presidential Palace. The President of Armenia, Commander-in-Chief Serzh Sargsyan sent a congratulatory message on the occasion of Army Day and congratulated the awardees on receiving Motherlands high awards and military ranks.



As Armenpress was informed from the Department of Public Relations and Mass Media of Republic of Armenia Presidents Staff, congratulatory remarks by President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Army Day read as follows,

Dear Compatriots,

I cordially congratulate you on the occasion of Army Day.

This year, we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of independence of the Republic of Armenia. Its been a quarter of a century that we have a free and independent statehood. Throughout this time, we never doubted that our twenty-five year long journey would be possible without the Army which we created.

The Armed Forces of Armenia became the cornerstone which was laid in the foundation of our statehood. It was the dictate of the time and the region we live in. We knew all too well who we are and where we live. We are Armenians, and as one of the ancient nations of the Middle East and Western Asia, we had the millennia long experience.

Tragic events which are taking place today in the Middle East and in the areas which generally are very close to us, are painfully familiar to us and have been repeated regularly. We were the witnesses, contemporaries and chroniclers of similar events. They occurred right before our eyes in last centuries and during two millennia. Twenty-five years ago, when we assumed the responsibility for our own destiny, we were well aware that it was tantamount to entering a battlefield.

And we did. We entered the battlefield for the human and peoples rights, for freedom. We had already seen the smoke rising from the Armenian Church in Baku, and it was the last and most convincing sign for those who still had doubts. Later, in our days, the smoke rising from the burnt and blown up religious sites shuddered and astonished the world.

We shuddered in 1988, and the spontaneously formed self-defense units were our first steps in the struggle for survival. We also knew that the Fidayi movement would be doomed to failure, unless it became a regular army. The Armenian regular Army, our victorious Army, withstood the test of war because in those days Artsakh and Armenia, the entire Armenian nation became what a historian called the Askanazian nation, while the Holy Book calls it the Askanizian regiment, which represents the country, the nation and the armed forces.

Dear Soldiers and Officers of the Armenian Army, distinguished Veterans,

This glorious holiday is certainly a state and national holiday, but first of all it is your holiday. We trust in your dedication, in your professional skills, in your high combat spirit. We wish that from now no soldier is killed on the border. To you and our entire nation, I wish peace for our countrys freedom, for diligent work, which is a prerequisite for any progress.

Dear Awardees,

I congratulate you on the occasion of Army Day and on receiving Motherlands high awards and distinctions.

It is thanks to you and your comrades-in-arms that the Armed Forces of Armenia are carrying out their mission, and fulfill the tasks set before them. You are doing it with honor and you are doing on a high professional level.

You are the worthy followers of those who in the fires of the heroic Artsakh war laid the foundation of our future Army. Many of them died, giving us life and freedom. Today, on this sacred day, we bow to their blessed memory. You are their worthy followers who are true to the behest of the martyrs and to the values they entrusted.

God bless the Armenian Land!

Long live the Armenian Nation and it warrior sons!
27 January 2016 15:03 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Sadigova

The EU has voiced its concerns over increasing corruption risks in Armenia, calling for fighting this disaster in the post Soviet country.

"In a country where both the parliament and the government have a number of businesses, it is impossible to avoid conflicts of interest and corruption risks," news.am quoted head of the EU delegation Piotr Switalski as saying on January 25.

He was addressing the international conference on "National and international efforts in the field of applied ethics", which was organized by the Ethics Commission of senior officials, supported by the Germany Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well by the Organization of International Cooperation.

Germany's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Bernhard Matthias Kessler, in his turn, continued observations after the EU, and stressed the importance of the fight against corruption existing in Armenia.

Corruption exists in both public and private sectors. I hear about the lack of confidence of citizens in relation to the management system and the authorities, he said.

Civil society must be more involved in the work of independent regulatory authorities, and, finally, politicians do not have to be engaged in business," Kessler added.

Armenian and foreign investors have shunned expanding their business activities in Armenia after realizing that their potential competitors can become ministers, members of parliament, the prime minister, or any other former official.

Complaints about corruption in Armenia, the South Caucasus poorest country, are nothing new. The Anti-Corruption Council, created in 2015, is led by Armenian Prime Minister, Hovik Abrahamyan, what calls into question the very idea of this Council.

Armenian authorities created a comfortable system for enriching themselves, forcing people to be silent. Corrupted government is frequently accused of different scandals, but, somehow avoids reckoning.

Civil rights activist Artur Sakunts, believes the funds will be just wasted. Unfortunately, this is another theatre that leads nowhere unless there is a political will and an independent body to fight corruption, Sakunts said.

Corrupted and criminal regime in this poor post-Soviet country has a big and strong potential as it owns the entire stolen money of the country and surpasses every effort of free speech. And even the tense situation in the country and the crisis, shaking Armenia, cannot convince the government to stop.

Numerous surveys, conducted in Armenia, show that the countrys population have no trust in the authorities. In the situation, when every third lives below the poverty line but the government continues to steal from its own nation, migration is the only way to survive.

However, now even this step will hardly save anyone  Russia, the country which welcomed the majority of Armenian migrants, is infected by the economic crisis and does not need even cheap labor force.

---

Follow Laman Sadigova on Twitter: @s_laman93

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
27 January 2016 11:27 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Azerbaijan, which has set the social welfare of population as a priority of its social policy, keeps the employment issue in focus.

Salim Muslimov, Minister for Labor and Social Protection of Population, said the government is planning to create up to 300 jobs in each region of the country.

This can be achieved by attracting people to labor work based on six-month contracts, he told journalists on January 26.

The ministry has been collecting information about the available number of employees, employment and number of the unemployed in different regions of the country.

"Currently, this process is nearing completion, he said. One of the main issues on the agenda is to attract employees to the economic life in the different regions of the country.

The government is able to deal with creating new jobs, according to him.

"Initially, this can be done by involving the unemployed in public work on the basis of six-month and one-year contracts and filling of vacancies in various public enterprises financed from the state budget, as well as state-owned large companies, Muslimov noted.

The ministry also plans to hold broad meetings with representatives of Azerbaijan's state energy company SOCAR and Azerigaz Production Association, as well as with other state agencies to fill vacancies.

"We will be able to reveal the number of additional jobs in different regions and announce their openings, the minister stated.

Muslimov went on to add that the number of families appealing for the targeted social assistance in various regions of Azerbaijan has reached 22,000 as of January 26.

The decree signed by President Ilham Aliyev on January 25 on allocation of 20 million manats ($12.5 million) for financing the targeted social assistance will allow strengthening the social protection of low-income families.

"Currently, the percentage of families receiving the targeted social assistance is 5.1 percent. After the allocation of additional 20 million manats ($12.5 million), this figure will be increased up to 6 percent," he stated.

The ministry has sent its specialists to the country's regions to study the appeals of the families.

"Some 1,183 families have appealed for the targeted social assistance only in the Yardimli region. This region stands at the first place for the number of families receiving the targeted social assistance. This is related to the lack of production facilities in the region, and there are several such regions. The most important issue in this regard is to increase transparency, which will be achieved through the introduction of an electronic system of appeals for the targeted social assistance," Muslimov added.

As of December 30, 2015, some 114,000 families or approximately 500,000 people were reported to receive the targeted social assistance. The government provides assistance to each family in the amount of 153 manats ($95.6).

Some 47.5 percent of citizens (231,179 people) receiving the targeted social assistance is under the age of 18. Some 5,561 of them are children under one year who monthly receive additional social assistance in the amount of 45 manats ($28.1). Also, some 28.2 percent, or 31,727 families receiving targeted social assistance, have three or more children.

--

Aynur Karimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Aynur_Karimova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
27 January 2016 11:17 (UTC+04:00)

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the most serious problem in the region, Dennis Sammut, the British expert, the director of the LINKS research center in London said.

Sammut made this statement during a lecture at ADA University in Baku.

The conflict is not frozen, he said. The situation is becoming more dangerous every year.

The expert said that it is necessary to raise the conflict settlement to a new level.

He said that the two sides must focus on the things necessary for people.

"The civil society is a concrete element, forming the society, rather than an ephemeral concept, he said. It is necessary to create more contacts between people."

"People and civil society should be involved in the conflict settlement, he said. The international community must be more creative. One must not settle down by the fact that it was possible to organize another meeting at the highest level."

The EU must play a more active role in the conflict settlement because the South Caucasus is part of Europe, a neighbor of the EU, he said.

As for the activity of the OSCE Minsk Group, Sammut said that the work of the Minsk Group must be discussed and considered at all levels.

"The work of the OSCE Minsk Group must be discussed at the level of analytical centers as part of the PACE, he said. The EU institutions are not only entitled but obliged to speak about this problem.

I think the OSCE Minsk Groups recent statement on the discussion of two resolutions about Azerbaijan within the PACE winter session is misunderstanding of what the role of PACE is, he said. I think in the future we will see more institutions interested in resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and contributing in its solution."

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.



The two countries signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia, France and the US are currently holding peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented the UN Security Council's four resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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27 January 2016 10:31 (UTC+04:00)

Associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper has hailed multiculturalism and tolerance traditions in Azerbaijan as he met with the country`s Foreign Minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.

He praised the level of religious tolerance in Azerbaijan as excellent, particularly conditions created for Jews.

Mammadyarov said Jews have lived peacefully along with representatives of other religious confessions in Azerbaijan for centuries.

They also exchanged views over global and regional issues, AzerTac state news agency reported.

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27 January 2016 14:05 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Azerbaijans crime rates continue to decline, while number of the solved criminal cases increased in 2015.

Azerbaijans Interior Minister Ramil Usubov announced about this at the ministerial meeting on January 26.

He said the number of crimes related to premeditated murder dropped by 7.3 percent, crimes of intentional damage to health decreased by 6.7 percent, bullying by 4.5 percent and car theft by 26.6 percent.

The number of crimes committed by juveniles reduced by 2.4 percent in 2015. The minister added that the number of road accidents drop by 15.7 percent, deaths rate in the road accidents by 20.5 and injured by 15.4 percent.

The number of solved crimes also grew as a result of the investigative and operational activities. The number of targeted killings, for example, rose by 9 percent, and targeted killings attempts by 7.5 percent.



The minister added that a total of 344 crimes were revealed as a result of collaboration with prosecutors.

National Bureau of Interpol also included 74 people in the internationally wanted list last year, Usubov noted.

Azerbaijan's average number of crimes per 100.000 people was 231 during the past ten years, which is one of the lowest rates compared with other countries. This makes Azerbaijan one of the most stable countries, where people's safety is ensured at a high level.

The law enforcement agencies have taken many decisive measures in the fight against crime to protect public order.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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27 January 2016 13:32 (UTC+04:00)

The EU is ready to support the diversification of the Azerbaijani economy,.

Azerbaijan's exports to the EU consist mainly of mineral fuels (98.9 percent) and the drop of oil prices might primarily affect Azerbaijan's export revenues, the EU officein Brussels told Trend on January 27.

A way to mitigate potential negative impacts on trade revenues would be the diversification of the economy, for which the EU is ready to support.

Regulatory approximation of Azerbaijan's trade-related legislation and procedures with international standards and increased competition as promoted by the WTO would be effective tools to support the potential of Azerbaijan's trade and of EU-Azerbaijan trade relations, the statement said. It is also clear that WTO membership would create a more stable investment environment which is key for diversification of the economy of Azerbaijan and would probably attract EU and international investments in a wide range of sectors of the economy.

The EU is the main trade partner of Azerbaijan. According to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, the share of European countries in Azerbaijan's foreign trade amounted to 46.8 percent in January-October 2015. Some 30.51 percent and 59.23 percent of Azerbaijani import and export account for the share of the EU countries respectively.

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27 January 2016 18:43 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Sadigova

Tehran has come out with an offer to mediate in the settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hussein Jaber Ansari said that Iran is ready to mediate between Yerevan and Baku in the long-lasting Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Iran, which shares land borders with Azerbaijan and Armenia, and the occupied lands as well, stands by activating the peace process over the Karabakh conflict.

The current format of negotiations, being held in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group involving Russia, France and USA for more than 20 years, did not bring any step towards peace. The rising tension on the contact line of the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops and human fatalities are another proof of failure.

The MG co-chairs are jokingly called "tourists" in Baku, and media as well as various experts have repeatedly suggested that the lack of interests in resolving the conflict.

Regular monitoring of contact line under the auspices of the OSCE are more symbolic and do not reflect the real situation. The zeal, recently manifested by the OSCE MG to prevent the PACE to adopt reports accusing Yerevans aggressive policy, did not remain unnoticed in Baku.

Against this background, the proposal of Tehran to mediate in the conflict is quite timely as Baku seeks to see the real steps to solve the conflict and no doubt, to welcome this initiative with great interest.

Azerbaijani political scientist and Professor of Western University Fikret Sadikhov told AzerNews that this is not the first time when Iran expresses a desire to participate in negotiations on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

This initiative indeed can be very perspective. However, the main obstacle is that Iran has tight relations with Armenia  economic, strategic and cultural, and all this casts doubt on the objectivity of Iran. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan and Iran also enjoy good neighboring relations but it is not a reason to attract the Islamic Republic to this question. 

The OSCE Minsk Group members have frozen the conflict, and Azerbaijan, for sure, is interested in attracting more sides to solve it, said Sadikhov. It seems like the Minsk Group tries to diminish the efforts of Azerbaijan, which can return the occupied lands back based on its strong army.

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27 January 2016 18:33 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Sadigova

PACE has urged Armenia to recall its armed forces from occupeid lands of Azerbaijan in the resolution entitled "Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water prepared by Milica Markovic.

Hikmat Hajiyev, the spokesperson of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said that the PACE resolution condemns the humanitarian and environmental problems created for Azerbaijani citizens living in the region as a result of Armenia's occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories.

The Parliamentary Assembly once more reminded all its member states that the right to water is essential, in accordance with the Helsinki Rules of 1966 and the Berlin Rules of 2004 on water resources, and thus constitutes a prior condition for the enjoyment of other human rights.

The Assembly considers that the deliberate creation of the artificial environmental crisis should be regarded as an act of hostility of one state against another with the aim of creating ecological aggression and ecological disaster zones, the spokesperson said.

The Assembly urges that the creation of an artificial environmental crisis must be attributed to an environmental aggression and must be seen as a hostile act aimed at creating environmental disaster and making normal life impossible for the population.

The Sarsang reservoir was built to provide its residents with water and irrigate agriculture in the surrounding border areas. However, after Armenia occupied these lands, it has been using this reservoir as a tool of humanitarian and ecological terror.

In winter months, the Armenian side intentionally opens the floodgates and creates conditions for overflooding the surrounding areas. In summer months, Armenia doesnt allow to use the reservoir. As a result, there are serious problems in provision of people with water, irrigating agriculture and preserving biodiversity.

The document also underlines the fact that the lack of regular maintenance work for over 20 years on the Sarsang reservoir, located in one of the areas of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenia, poses a danger to the whole border region. The resolution calls on the Armenian government to stop using water resources as a tool of political influence or pressure and in view of the acute humanitarian problems urge immediate withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the region, Hajiyev added.

Hajiyev also said that the resolution sharply condemns the fact that Armenian parliamentary delegation and Armenian government did not cooperate with the Assembly during the period when the report was being prepared.

Such behavior of Armenia does not comply with the obligations undertaken as a full member of the Council of Europe, he added.

The spokesperson said that unfortunately, the report "Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan", as well as a draft resolution on the basis of it prepared by Robert Walter was not adopted. Some 66 PACE members voted for the resolution, 70 voted against it, while 45 abstained.

Hajiyev noted that due to the absence of any progress in resolving the conflict, Azerbaijan supports any initiatives of other international institutions which can positively contribute to the elimination of the consequences of Armenia's aggression. Azerbaijan will continue its efforts in keeping this issue on the agenda of international organizations and protect the country's fair stance in this regard.

Hajiyev said Azerbaijan will further continue efforts to protect its fair stance.

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27 January 2016 22:53 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Orujova

The European Union has been a long-term partner of Azerbaijan in many areas; it has a long-time cooperation with the country and wants to be a part of the modernization of Azerbaijan in the future.

EU Baku office head Malena Mard made the remarks while speaking at the event dedicated to implementation of the project to improve the national statistics system in line with European standards in Baku on January 27.

Mard said statistics will remain a very important area for the EU cooperation with Azerbaijan.

The ambassador went on to say that for a long time Europe has been the largest trade partner for Azerbaijan in many areas.

We are also the main investor, we want to develop cooperation, see more tourists from Azerbaijan in Europe and vice versa, she said. We hope to be the strongest investment partner in the future as well.

Deputy Economy Minister Sahil Babayev, for his part, said the EU allocated about 563 million euros to Azerbaijan from 1992 until today.

Twinning projects are the most successful among those, realization of which were possible through these funds, he said.

Twinning projects bring together public sector expertise from EU Member States and beneficiary countries with the aim of achieving concrete mandatory operational results through peer to peer activities.

24 such projects have successfully been implemented in Azerbaijan; nine projects are in progress and 10 projects are in preparation stage, he added.

He further added that relations between the EU and Azerbaijan cover a wide range of areas.

The EU is one of the main trade partners of Azerbaijan. Almost half of Azerbaijans trade turnover accounts for the EU countries. Furthermore, over 45 percent of investments, which were invested in Azerbaijans economy over 10 years, also accounts for the EU countries, the deputy minister added.

EU allocates 1.2M euros to Azerbaijani statistics system

The EU allocated 1.2 million euros to improve the Azerbaijani national statistics system, said Tahir Budagov, Chairman of the Azerbaijani State Statistics Committee.

The two-year project includes five components, namely, improvement of statistics data governance and dissemination of statistics information through the geographic information system, as well as statistics data on the populations income and living conditions, disability and tourism, he explained.

He said the Committee employees intend to visit a number of EU countries to learn from the European experience in the statistics data preparation.

The main partners of the project are the Federal Statistical Office of Germany and the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria. Moreover, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Croatia will support the project.

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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews staff journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

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27 January 2016 18:02 (UTC+04:00)

The Romanian embassy, in its capacity of NATO Contact Point Embassy in Azerbaijan, hosted a roundtable on Current situation and perspectives of NATO-Azerbaijan cooperation on January 27.

Addressing the event, Romanian ambassador Daniel Cristian Ciobanu highlighted the strategic importance of development of NATO-Azerbaijan partnership.

Ciobanu underlined that Azerbaijan is a valuable partner of NATO. Maintaining sustained political contacts at various levels will contribute to the enhancement of relations between NATO and Azerbaijan.

Romania will continue to actively support Azerbaijan to develop further its dialogue and cooperation with NATO, he said.

Head of NATO Liaison Office for South Caucasus, William Lahue, had an in-depth presentation about NATO priorities regarding Azerbaijan in 2016.

ambassadors, defense attaches and senior diplomats from embassies of NATO countries in Baku and NATO Liaison Office for South Caucasus attended the event. Participants in the roundtable exchanged views on different aspects of joint interest regarding NATO-Azerbaijan cooperation.

Last year Romanian diplomatic mission organized in cooperation with local partners a large number of public diplomacy activities including conferences, roundtables, workshops and seminars in Baku, Nakhcivan, Shamakhi, Mingachevir, Barda, Quba and Sheki with the goal of increasing public awareness, especially among the Azerbaijani young generation, regarding North Atlantic Alliance and the benefits of NATO-Azerbaijan cooperation.

This month the embassy organized a NATO presentation stand at Global Village festival in Baku on January 8. Furthermore, Romanian ambassador delivered a speech at NATO International School of Azerbaijan winter session on January 11-15 and took part in a political talk show on a local TV channel on January 15.

During 2016, the Romanian embassy will focus on disseminating information regarding NATO Summit in Warsaw on July 8-9, which will be a landmark event. From a Romanian perspective, substantive decisions should be taken at Warsaw Summit, in view of the Alliance's long-term adaptation process to security challenges.

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YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. The revised strategy of the US army command in Europe is perplexing. Armenpress reports, citing TASS, Alexander Grushko, Russias Permanent Representative to NATO, told about this in an interview with the Rossiya 24 television news channel on January 27.

"What the United States is doing is an attempt to push the world and Europe into a confrontational war, which should remain in the past," the Russian diplomat said.






27 January 2016 10:57 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Silk Way West Airlines has launched direct cargo flights between Baku and the Japanese city of Komatsu.

The first flight from the Heydar Aliyev International Airport to the Komatsu airport carried aboard some 34 tons of commercial cargo.

SWWA regular flights via this route will be operated twice a week on one of the most modern cargo planes - Boeing 747-8F Freighter.

The airline has started operating since June 19, 2012. Currently its fleet consists of three Boeing 747-8F and two planes Boeing 747-400F.

In Q2 and Q3 of 2016 the Company expects to receipt two more planes B747-8F, and then its fleet will grow up to seven. The delivery of two new aircrafts will enable the airline to widen more broadly the geography of flights.

SWWA operates regular flights to various regions of the world  Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, using the Heydar Aliyev airport as a transit hub, connecting the continents with one another.

The inauguration was organized at Komatsu airport upon the arrival of the aircraft. Azerbaijani Ambassador to Japan Gursel Ismailzadeh attended the ceremony.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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27 January 2016 12:40 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Orujova

Development of the regions in focus of the government of Azerbaijan, as the state is promoting non-oil sector now. About 4 billion manats were allocated for the development of Azerbaijans regions in 2015.

Roughly 3.6 billion manats were directed to the development of regions, Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev said at the conference on the results of the second year of the state program of socio-economic development of regions in 2014-2018 on January 26.

In 2015, more than 400 kilometers of roads of national and local importance were built and repaired as well as 12 new bridges and crossings, and more than 590 kilometers of roads in rural areas were laid, connecting 245 settlements, the minister said.

Two power plants were put into operation in 2015, 1,289 transformers and 20 substations were installed and repaired, more than 8,200 km of power lines and almost 12,500 km of gas pipelines were built, he said. Moreover, 430 settlements in 43 regions were provided with gas, and the level of gasification in the country has reached 90 percent and 80 percent in the regions.

Mustafayev went on to add that water projects were completed in four cities with a population of 175,000 people and more than 750 kilometers of water pipelines as well as 391 km of sewer lines were laid.

Speaking about the development of industry, Mustafayev said that up to 270 industrial enterprises, including plants for the production of technical equipment, large-sized transformers and metal structures, were opened in 2015.

The minister reminded that construction of the industrial park has started in Mingachevir in 2015.

Entrepreneurs of the Neftchala industrial park have invested more than 20 million manats in three months to create enterprises in seven projects that will open up 380 new jobs, he stressed.

The efforts made to develop the non-oil industry in the regions opened new opportunities for the population both living in regions and those who came to work in Baku. Earlier, most of the enterprises were located in capital Baku and two largest cities of the country  Ganja and Sumgayit.

The government is planning to create up to 300 jobs in each region of the country, Salim Muslimov, Labor and Social Protection Minister told journalists on January 26.

This can be achieved by attracting people to labor work based on six-month contracts, he said.

The government is able to deal with creating new jobs. Initially, this can be done by involving the unemployed in public work on the basis of six-month and one-year contracts and filling of vacancies in various public enterprises financed from the state budget, as well as state-owned large companies, Muslimov noted.

The ministry also plans to hold broad meetings with representatives of Azerbaijan's state energy company SOCAR and Azerigaz Production Association, as well as with other state agencies to fill vacancies.

We will be able to find out the number of additional jobs in different regions of the country and announce their openings, the minister stated.

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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews staff journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

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27 January 2016 14:53 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Tax revenues collected in the regions of Azerbaijan hit roughly 622 million manats ($387.7 million) in 2015.

This was announced by Taxes Minister Fazil Mammadov at a panel session on the tax sector as part of a conference dedicated to the results of the second year implementation of "The State Program on socio-economic development of the regions of Azerbaijan in 2014-2018".

A total of 86.6 million manats ($54 million) was collected in tax revenues in the regions in 2006. So we have a 7.2-fold increase.

Over the past 10 years, the budget revenues transferred from the Taxes Ministry increased by 2.6 times, including from the non-oil sector - by 4.9 times.

Mammadov highlighted the work done under the state program. He hailed the positive changes taking place in the regions over the past 10 years, underlining the establishment of new enterprises, creation of jobs and state-of-the-art infrastructure.

As a result of the work done in this field, the budget revenues have increased by 4.4 times, complex reforms have been carried out in the tax system, favorable business environment has been created for entrepreneurs and businessmen, he added.

Mammadov also urged the heads of local executive authorities and entrepreneurs to work together with the relevant tax authorities to carry out a great job.

"Everyone knows that enough funds are allocated from the state budget to ensure continued and sustainable growth of the regions. But one should take into account the fact that these funds are formed mainly from tax revenues and transfers of the State Oil Fund. We should increase the revenue part of the budget to provide the sustainability of this process. But today's reality is that oil prices have dropped by four times for a year, and as this process can not be predicted, the revenues of the budget should be formed mainly from the tax revenues, and partly from the incomes from customs in the future," he added.

In 2015, the Taxes Ministry ensured the execution of the tax revenue collection forecast at 100.1 percent. Some 7.118 billion manats ($4.436 billion) was transferred to the state budget or by 4.5 million manats ($2.8 million) or 0.1 percent more than in 2014.

Under the law "On state budget for 2016", which was approved by President Ilham Aliyev in December last year, the budget revenues for the next year are projected at 14.566 billion manats ($9.08 billion), including centralized revenues - around 13.8 billion manats ($8.6 billion), local revenues - around 766.346 million manats ($477.62 million).

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27 January 2016 16:07 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Azerbaijan is keen on applying energy efficiency experience of leading countries in its own energy system.

In this regard, the country has expressed readiness to cooperate with Japanese companies and apply their experience in the energy efficiency field.

This was stated by Deputy Energy Minister Natig Abbasov at a meeting with Seiichi Nobuhara, the President of Japanese consulting firm IBT in Baku on January 26.

Nobuhara said he arrived in Baku on the initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan with an aim to discuss issues of cooperation between the two countries in the field of energy and infrastructure

The company's president also noted that IBT implements important projects of state bodies, as well as makes recommendations on the use of energy resources, ICT, infrastructure development, investment making and on other issues.

Abbasov, in turn, hailed the high level of cooperation between Azerbaijan and Japan. He said currently, one of the priorities of the Azerbaijani government is to achieve energy efficiency through decreasing losses in production and sale of energy resources.

"Energy efficiency is related to the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the old power distribution network, which will increase the reliability of electricity supply and reduce losses in the network. It is necessary to cooperate with Japanese companies in this direction and apply their experiences," the deputy minister added.

Azerbaijan and Japan enjoy fruitful cooperation in various fields and their mutual relations are developing both in the political, economic and cultural fields.

After the establishment of the diplomatic relations in 1992, Japan was one of the first countries to support Azerbaijan's forward-looking oil strategy.

Today Itochu and Impex - the two major Japanese companies - are involved in the Contract of the Century.

Also, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Marubeni, and Sojits - the leaders of the Japanese business - are involved in the energy and infrastructure projects in the country.

Azerbaijan is keen on further deepening cooperation with Japan in the field of high technology, particularly in the field of manufacture of innovative production, with their further entering the regional markets.

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27 January 2016 17:57 (UTC+04:00)

Automax device has been produced at Barama Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center of Azercell

The presentation of Automax developed by Sumaks company, which operates at Barama Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center of Azercell Telecom LLC was held on January 27.

Imran Baghirov, head of Strategic Partnership and Customer Channels Department of Azercell, stated at the event that the development of smartphones, Machine to Machine (M2M) and high-speed internet technologies have changed standards of our lives and the process is going on even faster. These devices have turned to become daily assistants of people in all their activities rather than devices used just for communication. Smartphones used in many fields also act as a major tool in Internet of Things (IoT)  Smart home concept. Mr. Baghirov also noted that Azercell introduced its Smart home project of Sumaks as a product of Barama Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center back in 2013. And now the company is proud to present Automax device prepared as a continuation of this concept.

Detailed information on the device was provided at the event. It was stressed that Automax, the first device of its kind in Azerbaijan, is mainly designed to ensure safety and control of the vehicle. The device stores main information about the vehicle and the driver in the memory. Such information includes model, year of manufacture, technical condition and necessary identification data of the driver.

Automax constantly transfers information on the vehicle to the owner. It allows following up the time of stop, distance driven as well as the location during the day. The program also sends relevant alert about the expiration of insurance or oil change period.

Automax is also helpful for Baku drivers in other issues of current importance. Thus, it immediately notifies the owner in case of evacuation or act of robbery. It is also possible to control the distance, speed limit, petrol consumption and defined radius.

Javid Mammadov, Director of Sumaks, stated at the event that new project has a strong competitive capacity in Azerbaijani market, given that Automax is a local product and therefore its price is substantially different than similar devices imported from other countries. Besides, Automax has a greater functionality. In general, the major scope of activity of Sumaks is to develop first local safety, comfort and management systems. The company initially started with the development of Smart home technology. Now it continues its activity with Automax device designed for vehicle safety. Sumaks produces local devices in Azerbaijan by applying high technologies used in international practice.

At the end Javid Mammadov expressed his deep gratitude to Bank BTB, State Fund for IT development, Satellite Factory of the Ministry of Defense Industry and Azercell Telecom for their contribution in the realization of the project. He stressed out that Sumaks will continue its useful activities in the development of non-oil sector and local production, which is of great importance for our country.

For more information, please contact [email protected]:

Azercell Telecom LLC was founded in 1996 and since the first years sustains a leading position in the market. Azercell introduced number of technological innovations in Azerbaijan: GSM technology, advance payment mobile services, M2M,MobilBank, GPRS/EDGE (mobile internet), 24/7 Customer Care, full-time operating Azercell Express offices, mobile e-service ASAN imza (ASAN signature) and others. With 48,2% share of Azerbaijans mobile market Azercells network covers 99,8% of the countrys population. In 2013, the number of Azercells subscribers reached 4,5 million people. In 2011 Azercell deployed 3G and in 2012 the fourth generation network  LTE in Azerbaijan. The Company is the leader of Azerbaijans mobile communication industry and the biggest investor in the non-oil sector. Azercell is a part of TeliaSonera Group of Companies serving 186 million subscribers in 17 countries worldwide with 27,000 employees.

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27 January 2016 18:09 (UTC+04:00)

At a time when the African continent is witnessing fast growth globally in foreign direct investments (FDIs), a high-level delegation from the Annual Investment Meeting 2016 has conducted a pan African road show to strengthen the African participation in the forthcoming edition of the event.

The delegation stopped in many African countries in the north and south of Africa, and met a number of decision-makers in the government sector, as well as representatives from the private sector companies. The companies expressed their interest to participate and attend AIM 2016 being the worlds leading emerging markets FDI platform.

The African road show followed successful meetings in a wide range of countries in Latin America, as part of promoting the event to international participants. These road shows come at a time Africa is making rapid strides in the FDI sector. According to Afrikaarrangement.com, Africa is the fastest growing FDI market in the world, as it witnessed 19-fold increase between 1990s and 2013, from USD 3 billion to USD 57 billion.

During the roadshow, AIM partnered with the South African Business Council (SABCO). Mr. Dawood Al Shezawi, CEO of AIM signed a memorandum of understanding with Mr. Aaron Darcy, Chairman, SABCO to enhance trade between the two countries and explore opportunities available for investment in both countries. Specifically, they discussed how AIM could facilitate and provide an opportunity for further communications between business and government institutions.

According to EYs attractiveness survey - Africa 2015 - Making choices, capital investment into the continent surged to US$128b, up 136%. FDI created 188,400 new African jobs, a 68% increase. Spurred by a handful of megadeals, the average investment increased to US$174.5m per project, from US$67.8m in 2013. Africas share of global capital investment and job creation hit an all-time high in 2014.

FDI in Africa is one of the main effects of globalisation in the past twenty years, which had its impact on strengthening the competitiveness of the national companies from 1990 to 2013, said H.E. Abdulla Al Saleh, Undersecretary, UAE Ministry of Economy, Foreign Trade Sector, Chairman of AIM's Higher Organising Committee. We targeted the African market in our global road shows because it has big experience in this area, and the presence of African participants at AIM 2016 will further the magnitude of our global event, he added.

AIM 2016 will be held between 11  13 April, 2016 at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre under the patronage of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai,

We understand the importance of the African market in this sector, as we were briefed on the FDI success in Africa in bridging many gaps in investments, not to mention its contribution in technology transfer, added Al Saleh.

There are two trends defining Africas future growth path including rising urbanization and a growing consumer class. In line with these trends, FDI data reveals strong inflows into real estate, hospitality and construction (RHC) in 2014. Three consumer-facing sectors  technology, media and telecommunications (TMT); financial services; and consumer products and retail (CPR) again attracted the largest share of investor activity. Respondents to a survey were excited about prospects in the relatively underexploited agricultural sector. EY believes that Africa now has the potential to bring about a future that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. But to realize this potential, African leaders will have to drive the structural transformation necessary to achieve the goals of inclusive and sustainable growth.

The continent, which becomes the worlds second-largest destination for FDI capital inflows, will see a US$16b plan by French oil major Total to develop the Kaombo offshore oil project in Angola, in a joint venture (JV). This project is expected to produce 230,000 barrels per day from reserves estimated at 650m barrels. Also, announcement by Greece-based Mac Optic to invest US$10b in Egypt, including US$4.8b to construct a new refinery with a production capacity of 250,000 barrels per day and US$5.2b to construct a petrochemical plant.

Both projects will be situated in the Gulf of Suez. Similarly, an agreement with the Nigerian Government worth US$5b signed by SkyPower FAS Energy, a JV between SkyPower Global and FAS Energy, to build 3,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic (PV) projects in the country. Another key initiative is Power Africa, intended to add more than 30,000 megawatts of electricity generating capacity across the continent and double the number of people in Sub-Saharan Africa who have access to power.

According to EY report, Africa attracted more FDI funding than North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe, which historically draws significantly higher FDI flows than Africa. AIM 2016 is set to display very promising opportunities from Africa. Decision-makers will attend the event to meet with investors to discuss mutual cooperation, said Dawood Al Shezawi, CEO of AIM's Higher Organising Committee.

Nigeria, now Africas largest economy after rebasing its GDP last year, attracted 49 FDI projects in 2014. Egypt and Morocco, the regions dominant economies, are benefiting most from the rebound in investor appetite. Aided by a return to stable government, Egypt reclaimed its ranking as the second-most attractive FDI destination in Africa during 2014, attracting 71 projects, an increase of 61.4% on 2013. Also, Morocco became the third-largest recipient of foreign investment in Africa in 2014, with 67 FDI projects, up 52.3%. French companies outpaced Spanish rivals to become Moroccos leading external direct investors in 2014. Mozambique garnered 50 FDI projects in 2014, moving up two places to become the fifth-largest recipient of FDI projects in Africa. In 2014, Ethiopia emerged as the 8th-largest recipient of FDI projects in Africa, up from 14th position in 2013. FDI in Ethiopia is typical: Although the 32 projects launched there last year accounted for only 4.4% of the African total, and involved relatively small sums, they provided an astonishing 18.5% of FDI jobs in Africa.

The US becomes the largest investor in Africa, while the UAE, France, China and Portugal expand presence in the continent. US investors accounted for 13.8% of total FDI projects in Africa, an increase from a 9.8% share in 2013. The UAE became the fourth-largest source of FDI projects in Africa in 2014, moving up a place. UAE companies now invest more money in Africa than those of any other nation, and create the most jobs, said Al Shezawi quoting EY report.

Indicative of a major investment are the moves by UAE retailers to invest US$2.3b in Egypt over the next four to five years. Moreover, 24 Gulf investors played a key role in the re-emergence of North Africa as a leading FDI destination in 2014. Companies from the Middle East have historically enjoyed close cultural and business ties with North Africa, particularly Egypt and Morocco. Companies from the oil-rich Gulf States increased their share of African FDI projects to 9.1% in 2014. Saudi Arabian companies took on a bigger role, launching 11 FDI projects in Africa last year, up from just 3 in 2013. Middle Eastern investors were especially strong in RHC (26.9% of their projects), financial services (20.9%) and CPR (19.4%).

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 2015 report pointed out that FDI to Africa remained stable, reaching to USD 54 billion in 2014 for the continent as a whole, with Egypt accounted for 14%, reaching to USD 4.8 billion, and Morocco accounted for 9% worth USD 3.6 billion.

The same report also revealed an increase in FDI in the gas sector in Tanzania, and Ethiopia became the center of a multinational producing clothing and textile companies. The Central African region received investments worth USD 12 billion in 2014, up by 33% compared to 2013, and almost doubled in Congo amounting to USD 5.5 billion, making its market the second in Africa to receive FDI despite lower commodity. As for South African region, it has received investments worth USD 10.8 billion in 2014, securing its forefront position in the African market in this domain. The country of South Africa received investments worth USD 5.7 billion in 2014, while Mozambique got investments worth USD 4.9 billion to secure its position in third place thanks to the possibility to be one of the largest liquefied natural gas exporter in the world.

The roadshow included Accra in Ghana, the Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, in addition to the Abidjan in Ivory Coast. The delegation discussed with decision-makers the key features of the next edition of AIM and the FDI opportunities in African countries.

During the visit, the delegation met with members of the Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa (UMOEA), who confirmed attendance at the event this year.

Also, Mr. Walid Farghal, Director General of the Annual Investment Meeting Higher Organising Committee highlighted the advantages of participating at AIM. Farghal also discussed with Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina, President of the African Development Bank the possibility of establishing an Arab-African Fund dedicated for energy and infrastructure investments in the African continent.

During the three-day trip to Burkina Faso, AIM delegation met with members of West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). In the meeting wherein AIM conference program and activities were discussed, Farghal emphasized: AIM is a meeting where investors and project sponsors discuss and explore new business opportunities that generate tangible and fruitful results. Project leaders have the opportunity to talk directly with investors and to build partnerships for the implementation of their projects.

In addition to B2B meetings, exhibition of projects and services, a debate of world leaders, visit to UAE companies, participants can anticipate a conference that will address, among other things, trends and new forms of FDI, investment strategies of new global players, investment policies and strategies of sovereign wealth funds.

In view of the planned activities, Farghal said that AIM 2016 will be very advantageous for FDI project leaders. "In the event, there is a good opportunity to find investors to implement proposed projects. This will help create jobs and reduce youth unemployment, one of the big problems in Africa. He further explained: To participate, they must register online on the portal of AIM. This will give them access to a platform which lists all projects and investors. Thus, each party can choose what interests them pending the meeting during the AIM.

The series of meetings proved to be fruitful as participants reiterated their commitment to attend the event. API-BF, Honore K. Kietyeta welcomed the visit of Farghal in Burkina Faso despite the condition in the country. "It comforts us that despite everything, Burkina Faso remains to be an attractive country. Given the importance and impact of AIM, as well as the quality of its participants, we will promote the event and encourage project leaders to seize this great opportunity to realize their projects," he said. He also revealed that several projects including the international airport of Donsin-Ouagadougou have attracted interest from several investors at the 5th edition of AIM last April, and thus they are looking forward to the upcoming edition happening on April 2016.

All markets of the world, regardless of its development scale, target FDIs due to its high returns on the host countries. For example, UAE FDI flow is set to witness strong growth during the next five years of between 20 to 25% per annum, as an analytical study issued by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI), with expectation to amount to AED 48 billion (USD 13.1 billion), said Al Saleh.

Real estate, infrastructure and consumer sectors attract the major number of FDIs to Africa. EY report continues that fixing Africas infrastructure deficit and rising demand from its growing population offers ample opportunities for foreign investors in infrastructure development. Poor roads, ports, rail links and connections slow economic growth and hamper business productivity. International hotel chains are also striving to meet burgeoning demand in Africa, where supply of hotels in all categories is often inadequate. Also, financial services is the second-largest sector by project numbers, and increasingly driven by intra-African investment. Last year, about 40% of cross-border financial services projects were launched by African companies. Foreign investors launched 103 consumer products and retail projects in 2014, making it the third-favorite sector for FDI. In addition, almost a fifth of African investment projects in 2014 were in technology, media and telecommunications. Lastly, agriculture is seen as a future growth sector in the continent, as they believe agriculture is the most promising growth opportunity in Africa, ahead of mining and metals. Almost a third of business decision-makers identified agriculture as a vital driver of future growth. EY report said that Africa has nearly a quarter of the worlds arable land, but produces only 10% of global agricultural output, said Al Shezawi.

Africa is witnessing increasing mergers and acquisitions across borders, as investors are keen to benefit from the growing consumer markets in the emerging continent. Being the most awaited FDI event in the region, AIM will throw light on the developments in this sector internationally, so it was essential to explore many opportunities in a vital market like Africa. We expect to see wide range of investment opportunities in Africa during AIM 2016, as we have already confirmed many of them, added Al Shezawi.

A joint study by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), estimates that external financial flows to Africa have quadrupled since 2000.

External capital inflows are vital to the well-being of African economies. In 2015, they are forecast to equal 7.2% of the continents GDP. Not only have these flows grown rapidly overall, but their sources have changed fundamentally, concluded Al Shezawi.

The Annual Investment Meeting is the first of its kind in terms of presenting investment opportunities under one roof and strengthens its role as a catalyst for investment in emerging markets and the fast-growing economies. This edition will focus on FDI and exchange practices and international experience in various investment areas. AIM will also provide an opportunity for decision-makers to explore the prospects for the economies of emerging countries in light of the rapid changes taking place in the world.

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27 January 2016 18:32 (UTC+04:00)

European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic is planning an official visit to Baku around February 24-25, 2016, the EC told Trend on January 27.

During the visit, the vice-president is expected to hold a number of meetings in Baku with high ranking officials of the country.

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. It envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian Sea region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey.

At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijans Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.

As part of the Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.
27 January 2016 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Peter Tase

Numerous archeological monuments of the early Iron Age in Nakhchivan, a province of the Republic of Azerbaijan, have an indispensable contribution towards shedding more light on the cultural, archeological and agricultural developments that have taken place throughout various centuries before and after Christ, in the outskirts of Europe.

Archeological assents and sites located within the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, require a highly detailed attention by international scholars who dedicate much of their time to the study of archeological artifacts, trends of ancient architecture and analyze valuable objects throughout Europe and Asia. Archeological sites such as Ilikligaya, Ilikligaya Monument, Irinchoy Ancient Site and the Sanctuary of Iydali Piri in Kangarli region, are unique archeological sites that ought to receive a greater attention by international scholars who dedicate most of their research to the study of pre-historic archeology, ancient European history and conduct expanded global research focused on the discovery of new clues that pertain to European civilization as well as to one of the worlds ancient tribes that were indigenous to the territories of Azerbaijan and have been living for centuries in the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan.

Ilikligaya Necropolis is an archeological monument located in the South East part of Tivi Village in Ordubad Region. Over many years during the harvesting season the landscape of this ancient Necropolis has been destroyed, however local scientists have found an immense collection of archeological items that were used during the last Bronze and early Iron ages. The ceramic artifacts speak volumes about the importance that Ilikligaya has played in the regions ancient trade and agricultural inventions. Some of the items discovered are: pitcher, cup, tea pots, dishes, differently shaped vases; agricultural tools, remnants of horse caravans, pieces of vases and clay dishes that were perfectly burned in grey color. Based on the discoveries over the last two decades, the items found take this settlement back to the end of II and beginning of I Millennium BC.

Another ancient monument is the Irinchoy settlement, an archeological site that covers two high hills, including their slopes, in the South East parts of Shahbulag Village, in the region of Sharur. It has a territory that spans over 1,500 square meters, Irinchoy is home to many archeological materials and sources that make Sharur (one of the regions of Nakhchivan) a location with enormous significance in the study of late Middle Ages at a global scale. The brick structures that were explored recently with a stone foundation maintain special characteristics for the region and they require a more detailed investigation that could help expand on the importance that Irinchoy embodies. This settlement was built by large stone walls. Within the ruins local archeologists have found unique ceramic items that were burned in pink color and consist of clay plates and other shapes. According to local sources the structures of the settlement are built by big stones and preserve a distinguished style of architecture. The discovered ceramic products burnt in pink color consist of tableware pieces that are irregularly shaped. The ceramic products found in the area are a characteristic of the Late Middle Ages.

Babek region is another significant location where International Scholars could find significant responses to many unanswered questions. Babek is host of the Ishiglar Settlement which has been built in the Middle Ages, at the North East side of Jahri Village, with a territory that spans over 46,000 square meters. The Khartanli Spring is located In the center of this settlement. Jahri village still has the remnants of creeks called aryks that come from Janichay; their water was used earlier for agriculture and farming purposes. The thickness of its cultural layer is visible and has been a point of attraction to many international scholars who study the archeological parks of Eurasian landmass.

In some places the thickness of the walls in this monument is three to five meters. On other sections the walls have square shaped holes and remnants of old architecture can be appreciated until today. A large part of this settlement (about 16,000 cubic meters) has been covered by ash layers. Pottery and clay artifacts are discovered over the ash layers. Ishiglar has been included in the Nahajir Middle Age settlement. Based on the current observations the ash layers (heaps) have been caused by the pottery activity in the area.

According to the archeological sources, Ishiglar Settlement has taken shape during the III-XVII centuries.

The artifacts discovered in this settlement could be separated into two periods. Discoveries of the first period consist of pieces and platters burnt in grey, black and pink colors. They belong to the Early Middle ages. The cultural materials that can still be observed today belong to a later period of the Middle Ages. Such objects were mostly baked in pink color and designed with renowned geometric and natural ornaments. During the designing process such items (plates and other artifacts) were covered with limpid and non-limpid glaze. The necropolis of this settlement is located on a lower hill that is located south of the center. Due to atmospheric intrusion, most of the Muslim graves have been destroyed. Moreover, the name of this settlement has been linked to an old Turkish tribe.

Shakhtakhti Village, in the region of Kangarli, has a noteworthy sanctuary named Iydali Piri, a strategic location of the Middle Ages. This sanctuary is situated in the natural hollow of a rock (cave). rock pieces in a square shape were built around it. In some places the height of the walls reaches 50-60 cm. and in other sections there exist remnants of rocky structures that have been repaired over time. Iydali Piri is a very popular place, constantly visited by locals and has deep roots in the religious history of Nakhchivan. Visitors will find a water spring around the sanctuary. Additionally there are traces of the walls around the sanctuary. Over the years, Ceramic artifacts have been found; they date back in the Classical and Middle Ages. Iydali Piri embodies the deeply rooted significance of water and fire, mythological beliefs of the Azerbaijani People.

This sanctuary is thought to have been built approximately on the II-I Centuries BC.

Nakhchivan is a treasure of world archeology, its cultural monuments, religious sites and ancient archeological riches have transformed the birthplace of Heydar Aliyev into a highly valued location that carries a special contribution in the worlds ancient and medieval history.

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27 January 2016 15:47 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Romes Museum of Contemporary Art will host a solo exhibition of Azerbaijans talented artist Faig Ahmed from February 9 till March 29.



The exhibition Points of perception is the first event that will feature works of the 33-year-old artist at this the museum.

The event will display a number of works and installations, including carpets occupying a special place in Faigs creativity. All the exhibits have been created especially for this exhibition.

Known in Italy for his participation in the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2013, Faig Ahmed has exhibited his works in several prestigious art capitals including London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Dubai, Moscow and Hong Kong.

After graduating Sculpture faculty at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in Baku in 2014, Faig has been working with various media, including painting, video and installation.

Currently, he is studying the artistic qualities of Azerbaijani traditional rugs. He takes the national rug designs and distorts and reinterprets them as contemporary pieces of art. A slight change in form dramatically alters its structure, and in the process, pulls it into the 21st century.

The artist turns to Sufi asceticism for interpretation of the reality in its most specific aspects.

"The carpet is an icon of Eastern tradition," Faig emphasizes. "It is canonical and has visual boundaries - my art is directed towards transforming these boundaries beyond any recognition. These carpets were more than simply visual patterns; they held a certain language and told stories. This tradition has fallen by the wayside, and in deconstructing and reconstructing them, in a way, I am creating new stories."

Faig Ahmed was one of 10 artists from the Islamic world nominated for the Jameel Prize and his works were included in an international touring exhibition. He was also among 12 artists chosen to represent Azerbaijan when the country made its first appearance at the Venice Biennial in 2007.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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27 January 2016 13:57 (UTC+04:00)

The Iranian gas industry will require massive investments to meet European and global demand, Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Atlantic Councils Global Energy Center and Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center Ariel Cohen said in his report obtained by Trend.

Only 160 billion cubic meters of gas are produced annually [in Iran], due to technological and financial constraints caused by domestic mismanagement, a lack of expertise, and the Western sanctions that now appear to be lifted Currently, Iran supplies less than 1 percent of global natural gas exports, Cohen said.

Meanwhile Cohen, who also the Director of the Center for Energy, Natural Resources, and Geopolitics at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and founding principal of International Market Analysis believes that Irans natural gas deposits, which hit approximately 34 trillion cubic meters in early 2015, according BPs statistics review, could contribute to European energy security, given the recent shift in relations between Iran and the EU.

He noted that the existing Iran-Turkey pipeline, with its 14 billion cubic meters per year capacity would be the first line of supply of Iranian gas to Europe, capable of providing up to 7 cubic meters per year.

This could begin to happen in two to three years, Cohen believes. Beyond that, there are plans to build a Persian Pipeline with a capacity of up to 40 billion cubic meters per year to transfer Iranian gas to Europe, he said.

Cohen also noted that building LNG export terminals would be an enormous prize for ensuring Iranian gas supplies to Europe, and one that the Iranian leadership is likely to reach for in the years to come.

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YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. Saudi Arabia came forward with the initiative to discuss a possible reduction of oil production, planned in the framework of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the near future. Armenpress reports, citing TASS, Transneft President Nikolay Tokarev told about this on January 27.

"Saudi Arabia came forward with the initiative to have a discussion that would include the members of OPEC," he said after the meeting of oil companies executives and the Ministry of Energy.






27 January 2016 12:18 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

The Turkmen Oil and Gas Ministry has revealed the gas production figures for its giant Galkynysh field.

The ministry reported on January 26 that the three stages of development of the Galkynysh field envisages the extraction of up to 95 billion cubic meters of gas a year.

The Galkynysh field provides great prospects for increasing the volumes of production, processing and transportation of fossil fuels. This is due to the huge gas reserves at the field, which, according to the latest estimates stand at 27.4 trillion cubic meters.

The Galkynysh field stands apart from the more than 180 deposits of hydrocarbon resources discovered in Turkmenistan.

International experts say the huge gas resources at the Galkynysh field are sufficient to ensure a long-term supply of fuel both through all the existing export routes and via the pipelines that are planned to be laid under the state strategy on diversification of routes for Turkmen gas supply to global markets.

Turkmengaz State Concern plans to drill and complete the construction of nine new exploitation wells at the Galkynysh field in 2016.

It is expected that the exploitation of these wells will ensure further growth of extraction of natural gas as part of the first stage of the Galkynysh field development.

Some eight ZJ-70DBS drilling equipments produced in China are involved in the drilling works.

"As part of the first stage of development of the Galkynysh field, Turkmengaz plans to construct 40 wells," the concern reported.

Turkmenistan, which has the fourth largest proven gas reserves in the world, is actively implementing an energy strategy aimed at increasing exports of the blue fuel and diversifying its supply routes to the largest global markets, where the demand for energy resources is growing.

Being one of the key players in the gas market of the Caspian Sea region and Central Asia, Turkmenistan produces about 70-80 billion cubic meters of gas a year. It possesses some 17 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, with some estimates placing that figure upwards of 25 or 26 trillion cubic meters.

Currently, Turkmenistan exports its natural gas to China, Iran, and Russia.

There are also discussions on gas supply to Europe through the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

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Aynur Karimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Aynur_Karimova

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27 January 2016 13:08 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

The visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Italy is expected to trigger the expansion of bilateral relations between Italy and Iran.

"Hassan Rouhani's visit: opening a new chapter in close cooperation with Italy-both in economy and trade, and in combating extremism, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted on January 27.

After the U.S. and the European countries removed sanctions on Iran, the country's President Hassan Rouhani started a four-day European tour on January 25, the first destination of which was Italy.

It has been more than a decade since an Iranian president has visited any European Union nation.

This visit showed that both Iran and Italy are interested in reviving bilateral relations and boosting trade ties following the implementation of a nuclear agreement reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.

The main achievement of this visit was signing of contracts worth up to 17 billion ($18.4 billion) covering various sectors, including health, transportation, agriculture and energy.

Iranian officials believe that the relations with Italy go beyond bilateral significance and can contribute to security and stability in the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa regions.

At the same time, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni has stated that Rome will support Tehran's role in the settlement of tensions in the Middle East, including the humanitarian crisis in Syria

He made the remarks in a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Rome on January 26, IRNA reported.

Further development of bilateral relations between the two countries is expected to be high on the agenda of a visit of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to Tehran.

Italian PM Matteo Renzi will travel to Iran in the coming months to boost economic ties, President Hassan Rouhani twitted on January 26.

--

Aynur Karimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Aynur_Karimova

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27 January 2016 17:47 (UTC+04:00)

Iran seeks to expand cooperation with South Korea to develop its nuclear industry including the construction of small reactors as well as power plants, atomic chief said.



At a meeting with Kim Seung-Ho, the South Korean ambassador to Iran on Jan. 27, Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi said there are proper opportunities for cooperation in Irans nuclear industry, IRNA news agency reported.



Saying that South Korea has gained valuable experience in nuclear sector, Salehi further called on Seoul to work together with Tehran for developing the nuclear medicine equipment.



In turn, Kim Seung-Ho also called for the expansion of bilateral ties and cooperation on nuclear program saying the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has opened a new chapter for mutual cooperation with Iran.



In a joint statement on Jan. 16, the EU High Representative Federica Mogherini and Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announced the implementation of Irans nuclear deal with the P5+1, and the removal of economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic.



The statement said the EU confirms that the legal framework, providing for lifting of its nuclear-related economic and financial sanctions, is effective.



Following the removal of international sanctions, Iranian atomic officials have held several meetings with foreign states including China and Spain to develop the countrys nuclear industry.



Earlier Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesperson of the AEOI, announced that Iran and China are in discussions to build two nuclear power plants in the Islamic Republics southern coastal area of Makran. The Islamic Republic expects the facilities to generate 1000 megawatt of power.



AEOI has stated intention to build a number of 100 megawatt small reactors to produce power.

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27 January 2016 17:18 (UTC+04:00)

The Indian embassy in Baku has arranged an official reception to mark the country's Republic Day.

Prior to the ceremony, the national anthems of the two countries were played.

Indian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Sanjay Rana highlighted his country's achievements in a number of fields, as well as bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and India, Azertac state news agency reported.

He noted that India was one of the first countries which Azerbaijan established diplomatic relations after restoring independence, adding Azerbaijani-Indian relations would continue to develop.

On behalf of the Azerbaijani government, Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov congratulated the people of India on the occasion of the Republic Day.

He said that relations between the two countries were developing for the welfare of the two countries` peoples.

Stressing that Azerbaijan was interested in developing ties with India, Khalafov noted that the expansion of the cooperation in various fields between the two countries was of great importance.

The official reception was attended by state and government officials, MPs, representatives of diplomatic corps accredited in Azerbaijan and representatives of the general public.

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British Baker profiles Cornwall-based Warrens Bakery and takes at look at the key areas where it excels.

HERITAGE:

Established in 1860, Warrens Bakery is the oldest bakery in Cornwall, the oldest Cornish pasty producer in the world and claims to be one of the original artisan bakers in the UK.

NEW LOOK:

Since 2013 the bakery chain has embarked on an ambitious refurbishment programme to give its estate of stores a new look. New chairman Mark Sullivan says the look is contemporary heritage and the aim of the company is to offer affordable luxuries. The chain experiences a huge uplift in sales (circa 30%) when it revamps a store.

NEW PRODUCTS:

Famous for its pasties, Warrens Bakery is not afraid of innovation, however, and is ably assisted in this by Jason Jobling, director and chief operating officer at the company. He recently developed a limited-edition mincemeat pasty for Christmas. The cocktail-sized pasties were filled with mincemeat and custard before being hand-crimped and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. The product was a huge success, with retailer interest and attention from as far away as Australia.

BRAND CORNWALL:

Quietly, the company has gone about building a portfolio of Cornish-related products thanks to Sullivan. It has links to the Cornish Sea Salt Company and, last year, Simply Cornish, the trade arm of Warrens, acquired the Cornish Crisp Company. A new launch of the crisps is due later this year and, together, the brands have a compelling Cornish provenance brand story.

INSPIRATION:

You can hear the chairman of Warrens Bakery talk about the journey of the brand in recent years  from store revamps to product development  at an upcoming British Baker online event. Sullivan is the keynote speaker on Insights from the Bakery Market Report. The event is being held on 4 March at 2pm. The event also includes a presentation by Amy Price, team co-ordinator, news and features, at Mintel on the bread and baked goods market.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Communist Tyrant and mass murderer Josef Stalin

"The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." Adolf Hitler



"Socialism needs two legs on which to stand; a right and a left. While appearing to be in complete opposition to one another,

hey both march in the same direction."

-- Paul Proctor

Barack Obama is 'light skinned' with 'no Negro dialect'

Harry Ried

If there were no God, there would be no atheists. --G.K. Chesterton



Political correctness is the enemy of personal respect --Rabbi Dr. Gerald Meister

Remember this, a politician never tells the truth

James

New World Order starts with Open Border - James

Liberalism is a mental disease Micheal Savage



Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God G K Chesterton

Why on earth are we letting people who are anti-religion, such as atheists and the ACLU, dictate or attempt to dictate what our national values should be? Thats what they are, arent they? That is, people who are anti-religion? And, who made them the politically-correct police, anyway?



Harris Sherline

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

Mark Twain

The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see.

Benjamin Franklin



Only Governments who try to enslave people push for Ban on Guns - James



Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

G. K. Chesterton



Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams

Liberty is always freedom from Government

Ludwig Von Mises



My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

Thomas Jefferson



Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

George Washington



May the mind of Christ, my Savior, live in me from day to day. By His love and power controlling all I do and say. May the word of God dwell richly in my heart from hour to hour. So that all may see I triumph only through His pow'r. May the peace of God my Father rule my life in ev'rything. That I may be calm to comfort, sick and sorrowing.

Kate B. Wilkinson (1859-1928



Nothing created everything. Atheist

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

Rita Mae Brown

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. - Winston Churchill

British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observes:

The American elite, I am afraid to say, is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay.

Evolution is the foundation of Communism, Nazism and Humanism - The founders belief
REUTERS: Airlines, hotels and cruise operators serving Latin America and the Caribbean are facing growing concern among travelers who had planned to visit countries potentially affected by Zika after the World Health Organization warned the virus is likely to spread to most of the Americas.

The outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus, which has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, comes as a record percentage of Americans plan a vacation in coming months and a near-record proportion of them look to travel abroad with a strong U.S. dollar making overseas destinations more affordable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (@CDCgov), which has used Twitter as a platform to discuss the virus, warned travelers to "consider postponing travel to areas w/ ongoing Zika transmission."

Canada and Chile are the only countries in the Americas the virus is not expected to reach, the WHO said on Monday.

United Airlines said it was allowing customers who had reserved tickets for travel to Zika-impacted regions to postpone their trips or obtain refunds with no penalty.

Norwegian Cruise Lines and rival Carnival Corp said they would allow expectant mothers covered by the CDC advisories to reschedule cruises to a later date or switch to an itinerary outside the affected countries.

But some Twitter users lamented their ruined vacations and their inability to get a refund from tourism operators.

Stu Privett, an HR systems specialist for the Royal College of Nursing in London, tweeted about cancelling a trip to Barbados with his wife, who is in her first trimester. Privett said he was unable to get a refund from Virgin Holidays.

"They basically said it was our choice not to go on the holiday," Privett told Reuters. "Basically (it's) a case of 'we just lose all the money we've spent.'"

A Virgin Holidays spokesperson said the company would look into the claim.

Another Twitter user, Mitch Svor (@AzSvor), also asked American Airlines about a possible refund: "@AmericanAir My wife is pregnant and we are advised by doctor not to fly to areas with the Zika Virus. Will you be able to refund our fare?"

American Airlines replied, "We're currently refunding tickets for flights to SAL/SAP/TGU/PTY/GUA. If that's your destination, please DM for further details."

Many airlines and tourist authorities said they had seen minimal impact.

"There is no reason tourists can't walk around in bikinis," Cancun tourist association president Carlos Gosselin said.

Hotel chain Hilton Worldwide said in a statement it was working closely with local health authorities throughout the region to follow CDC prevention recommendations.

Still, one U.S. travel agent said tourists with short-term travel plans to Latin America were rethinking them.

"It's the people who are going to travel in the next few weeks who are starting to ask more questions and rethink their plans," said Jennifer Michels, a spokeswoman for the American Society of Travel Agents, in Alexandria, Virginia.

Data released Tuesday from the U.S. Conference Board as part of its monthly Consumer Confidence Index showed a record 54.4 percent of Americans plan a vacation in the next six months.

Some 11.2 percent said they plan to travel overseas, down slightly from the 11.5 percent in October, but still one of the highest readings in the survey's history dating back to 1978.

(Reporting by Melissa Fares and Amy Tennery, additional reporting by Eleanor Whalley, Paulo Prada in Rio de Janeiro, Isela Serrano in Cancun, Jeffrey Dastin and Malathi Nayak in New York and Abhijif G in Bangalore; Editing by Andrew Hay and Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: Travel industry faces growing concern over Zika virus
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County commissioners have voted unanimously to form an independent expressway authority to advocate for a new toll road in Polk County.



The toll road could connect to the Polk Parkway near Winter Haven, continue to the east side of Highway 27 and then north to Interstate 4. Supporters of the road said it would relieve traffic congestion and open up new parts of east Polk to development.

The road is currently known as the Central Polk Parkway. The Florida Department of Transportation has dropped plans for the project because of concerns it wouldnt have enough traffic to pay for itself.

Haines City resident Dave Carter is a booster of the project. He argues that at least some segments of the road could be built.

If the projected traffic is not there, the segments would not be feasible and those sections of the road would simply not be built," he said.



Polk resident Sharon Boozer Garrett is opposed to the road. She said the proposed route of the road might cut through rural land owned by her family for generations. She also doesnt believe the road would result in a better economy for her part of the county, maybe just higher taxes.

"Ive been told we need growth for this that and the other," she said. " 'Your taxes will go down.' I have yet to see my taxes go down."

The new expressway authority would include members appointed by Polk commissioners and the governor. It would likely have to come up with bond funds to pay for the project, which could cost $1.5 billion.


With the Gasparilla parade just days away, first responders are preparing to deal with any emergencies that come their way.

On Tuesday, they unveiled a new bike program that will help Tampa Fire Rescue reach patients "F.A.S.T." during the parade.

It's called the First Assessment Stabilization Team.

Medics with Tampa Fire Rescue will ride side-by-side with police on bikes during Saturday's parade.

Each bike will be equipped with about 40 pounds of medical equipment.

The goal is to reach people with limited access.

"The biggest problem we've always had with the parade is accessing that opposite side," Tampa Fire Rescue Lt. Ken Newman said. "That water side of the parade route  there's very limited access, very limited crossing throughout the parade."

Tampa Police came up with the idea after riding their police bikes at the Gasparilla parade last year.

"A large number of the calls that we responded to  especially during Gasparilla on the bikes  they were medical, so we would go there and think, Hey we need fire rescue. Can fire rescue get here? and the common response was, We're having trouble getting to you, " TPD Sergeant of Bike Operations Colin McCoy said.

Tampa police donated eight RNC bikes to Tampa Fire Rescue for the new program. Sixteen riders have been trained.

Tampa Fire Rescue said the bikes have already been very useful.

Last weekend, they used a bike to quickly reach a young patient who had an allergic reaction during the children's parade.


This week marks a somber period in NASA history: Seventeen men and women who had devoted their lives to space exploration made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country.

Each year, NASA honors the fallen astronauts, as well as test pilots before them and their families, in a ceremony in front of the Space Mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex as the Day of Remembrance, this year on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016.

Apollo 1

Nearly a half century ago, tragedy struck NASAs astronaut program for the first time.

On Jan. 27, 1967, Three astronauts lost their lives in a fire during a test for the Apollo 1 mission.

On the Space Coast, their memory and legacy remains strong to this day.



On Wednesday, 49 years after the Apollo 1 tragedy, people gathered before a large video screen, inside this year due to rough weather outside, and remembered the victims.

Being so close to the sacred ground, no matter inside or out, means so much to the families of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee.

"It's important that we pause today to remember the crew that paved our way to the exploration of space," Kennedy Space Center Director Robert Cabana told the crowd of 100.

The fire broke out during a rehearsal for the mission at Launch Complex 34 on Jan. 27, 1967.

Grissom, White and Chaffee were killed.



Flights were suspended for nearly two years while the investigation took place. In the end, it was deemed an electrical fire ignited in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the cabin.

Several members of Grissom's family lined the front row, including wife, Betty, who has made it back to the ceremony year after year.

Chaffee's widow, Martha, says it was her husband's and fellow crew mates' sacrifice that propelled the United States to the moon just two years later.

"I think they stood on their shoulders, and got to the moon, Martha Chaffee said.

"They did set it up to go to the moon, and beyond," echoed Grissom's granddaughter-in-law Geri Grissom.

A candle was lit in the astronauts' memory. Mini flashlights were held in recognition of their sacrifice.

The ceremony ended at 6:31 p.m., the moment the fire struck nearly half a century ago.

Challenger

On Jan. 28, 1986  30 years ago  the seven crew members of space shuttle Challenger were killed when the orbiter exploded soon after takeoff. On that clear, cold morning, a seal on one of the solid rocket boosters failed during liftoff. The booster detached, and the external tank broke apart, destroying the shuttle 73 seconds into flight.

A special Day of Remembrance ceremony took place under the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's space shuttle Atlantis on a rainy Thursday morning, where a permanent memorial is installed, dedicated to the shuttle astronauts who have died in the name of space exploration.

Families and loved ones of the lost astronauts laid a wreath at the foot of the Space Mirror Memorial and placed flowers on the railing. The names of the fallen were read aloud in front of a crowd of some 500 family members, guests and patrons at the complex.



"The Challenger crew were wonderful, wonderful people. Wonderful human beings. Much like all of you here today," said Barbara Morgan, who was teacher Christa McAuliffe's backup. McAuliffe was the first educator selected to go into orbit.



The Forever Remembered memorial has personal items from the seven killed in the Challenger tragedy, and even includes the recovered left side body panel from the orbiter.

"It was so difficult to just think of that beloved crew and how they died, without reflecting on how they lived and to share their story," said June Scobee Rogers, widow of Challenger commander Dick Scobee.

"Even though the accidents were very public, our grief was very private," daughter Kathie Scobee said.

Jon McBride was set to command the next shuttle mission and watched from the Kennedy Space Center as Challenger took off.

"We were kind of standing there, waiting for this liftoff," McBride said. "When it lifted off, we were just as happy as everybody else in the world. And all of a sudden, a minute and 11 seconds later, your whole life changes.

"You could have heard a pin drop there in that mission control center as we tried to recover from that horrible, horrible thing."

Along with McAuliffe, astronauts Ellison S. Onizuka, Greg Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Scobee and Ron McNair also died in the Challenger disaster. The cold weather was determined to be a factor in the failure of the seal.

I join all Americans in honoring the legacy of the Challenger crew members who gave their lives for the greater good of our nation," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said in a statement Tuesday. "The Challenger Seven were eager to explore the universe and discover the unknown in an act of service to all Americans. They were courageous individuals who inspired us and led by example as they carried America toward the future. To this day, the Challenger crew reminds us that we Americans are a resilient people who have always risen above tragedy by uniting and forging ahead.

As Florida continues to play a role in 21st century space exploration, the sacrifices made on January 28, 1986 will never be forgotten.

Columbia

Tragedy struck the shuttle program 17 years later, when Columbia's crew of seven died during re-entry, just 16 minutes from landing at KSC. The orbiter disintegrated Feb. 1, 2003, over Texas. Investigators discovered that a piece of foam that struck the external tank during liftoff had opened a hole in one of the orbiter's wings, allowing hot gases to burn and break up the shuttle.

David M. Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, William McCool and Ilan Ramon were killed.

"Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand," said President George W. Bush, addressing the nation after the Columbia disaster. "Our journey into space will go on."


A national election is coming around next year and some people in the media have commented that 2017 just might be the year we rise above the myriad socio-economic challenges to chart a definitive course for our nation.

Do they see him as a cunning and conniving schemer who is running PNG into debts amounting to millions of kina?

But what do Peter ONeills own PangiaIalibu people think about their man?

Hes hell bent on achieving lofty ambitions and constantly throws his weight around when dealing with mega- buck affairs in the resources development sector.

Others are more pessimistic and believe our country is sinking deeper into the abyss of corruption and political malevolence.

The pessimists say Papua New Guineans are too ignorant to collectively usher in positive change for the country. Not surprisingly, Peter ONeill is not among them. Hes an optimist. But some people believe hes is optimistic for all the wrong reasons. He is a romantic masquerading behind the facade of civility.

One things Mr ONeill is optimistic about is that he will be returned to the national parliament after the 2017elections. He made a public assertion to that effect last year.

So how could Mr he know with such certainty that he is going to retain his Ialibu-Pangia seat? I believe he was making that assertion to give his ego a boost. On the other hand, he could wanted to dull the hopes of any Pangia-Ialibu rivals.

Does will Peter ONeill really feature at the top of his Ialibu-Pangia peoples choice of leader? Most people he will. They say something like: Why, Pirra ONeill is the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, a first for Pangia- Ialibu. The people want to vote for him. Tell them otherwise and they will look at you with scepticism.

The eight million people of PNG do have the power to influence and shape policy decisions by the government. They do need to understand that they can change the destiny of this country by the choices they make in electing their national leaders.

But, with the next election just 17 months away, will they?

The politics of PNG can be enigmatic and unnerving.
Science, Beer and a New Octopus on Central Oregon Coast

Published 01/26/2016 at 4:51 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Newport, Oregon)  Two big science events are coming in association with Newport's Hatfield Marine Science Center  one that includes beer. Meanwhile, the Hatfield is welcoming a new octopus. (Photo above: Montgomery, the latest octopus at the central Oregon coast attraction).

It's time to meet Montgomery, the new resident giant Pacific octopus at the Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center in Newport. The latest eight-legged icon for the central Oregon coast attraction arrived late last year, with little fanfare and only a small announcement in December.

The Hatfield said he is proving to be a gregarious, active animal  especially at feeding times (Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 1 pm.). You can also keep an eye on him 24 hours with the Octo Cam. The Hatfield is open from 10 am to 4 pm daily. Admission is free with a suggested donation. Hatfield Marine Science Center is at 2030 SE Marine Science Drive. (541) 867-0226. http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/

The OSU Hatfield Marine Science Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists will host a reception and panel discussion on the environmental and economic impacts of ocean acidification on our coastal communities. The event is from 5-7 pm this Thursday, January 28 in the HMSC Visitor Centers Hennings Auditorium.

Expert panelists will discuss the science of ocean acidification, local impacts and potential solutions with community members and elected officials. The aspects most relevant to the Oregon coast include how it affects oyster growers, shellfish, how it interacts with hypoxia (ocean dead zones) and more.

Panelists include: Dr. George Waldbusser, Assistant Professor, OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science; Alan Barton, Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery; Dr. Francis Chan, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher, OSU College of Science; Emily Heffling, Western States Outreach Coordinator, Union of Concerned Scientists.

The event, hosted by HMSC Director Bob Cowen and State Representative David Gomberg, is family-friendly, free and open to the public. RSVP requested  [email protected] or 510-809-1584.

The public is also invited to Science on Tap, featuring wetland scientist Laura Brophy on Thursday, February 4, 2016 at 6 pm in Newport. It's held just down the street from the Hatfield, in the beer-friendly environment of Rogue Ales & Spirits (2320 SE Marine Science Dr).

The analysis of sea level rise impacts to Oregons tidal wetlands will build from the new, more accurate maps of the extent of tidal wetlands that were created in 2014 by Oregons Department of Land Conservation and Development and ETG. The new tidal wetland maps were generated using remotely-sensed land surface elevation data (LIDAR) and long-term water level models. ETGs sea level rise project will use the same methods to understand where these crucial habitats may be in the future, under predicted sea level rise scenarios. Brophy will describe early draft results and how they can be used, and will seek the audiences feedback and questions.

Brophy is a certified Professional Wetland Scientist with over 25 years of field experience in habitats ranging from the Pacific NW coastal forests and estuaries to tropical rainforests and high deserts. She is the director of the Estuary Technical Group (ETG) at the Institute for Applied Ecology and a faculty member at Oregon State University. Newport Hotels for these events - Where to eat - Map and Virtual Tour

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As the price of oil continues its downward drip, Al Salazar, chief executive of Jefferson Energy Companies, said the oil terminal business is in a strong position because crude demand at refineries remains high.

"It's like riding between two semis on the highway and you're protected from radar," Salazar told the Port of Beaumont commissioners on Monday.

"Refineries are having a heyday," he said. "Some are running at 105 percent or 110 percent" of stated capacity. Producers still have to get crude to the refinery. We're sitting in the middle."

While there is space for more terminals along the Gulf Coast that have water and rail access, Jefferson Energy Companies, which began receiving its first shipments by way of rail in January 2014, is in position to expand and has recently completed a bond subscription valued at $230 million.

About $100 million will be used to refinance debt, but more than $100 million is available for expansion at its Orange County terminal.

The company has seven storage tanks at its terminal on the Neches River with a capacity of 770,000 barrels, most of which comes from Canada or from Texas.

After new construction, Jefferson Energies will have capacity for 2 million barrels. By the time Jefferson Energies reaches 3.5 million barrels, it will have reached likely capacity at the Orange County terminal.

As conditions now stand, the oil sits at the terminal for just three or four days before it goes downriver by barge or ship to refineries.

Jefferson has received and moved 7 million barrels since it began operations two years ago.

DWallach@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/dwallach
A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy.

***

If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value?

***

If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic?

***

Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.
Jessica Colker, a physician assistant in anesthesiology, was killed in the Caribbean, according to a CNN report.

Here are five notes:

1. According to the Royal Grenada Police Force, Ms. Colker and her husband were attacked by a man with a machete while walking along the beach on Sunday afternoon.

2. The autopsy results show that she died from "extensive skull fracture and asphyxia."

3. Her husband was unharmed, noted police officials.

4. A suspect in connection with the attack is being held by the police, however, no charges gave been brought forward at this time.

5. Ms. Colker worked as a PA in anesthesiology at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.
Here are 10 key trends from Deloitte's "2016 Health Care Providers Industry Outlook" based on an interview with Mitchell Morris, MD, the vice chairman and US/Global Health Care Providers leader at Deloitte Consulting.

1. Healthcare spending is upwards of 18 percent of the gross domestic product. Analyses show the United States consistently underperforms compared with other countries on most performance dimensions, including efficiency, access, equity and outcomes.

2. There is an estimated 34 million people in the United States who continue to live without health insurance and access to care outside of emergency departments. But the ACA eased the situation by driving market changes to encourage new ways of delivering and reimbursing care.

3. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 and Cadillac Tax could impact the healthcare ecosystem going forward. MACRA sets updates under the Medicare physician fee schedule, beginning at 0.5 percent from 2015 to 2018, then payment rates will flatten through 2025.

4. Congress delayed the Cadillac Tax on high-cost, employer-sponsored health coverage to Jan. 1, 2019, but employers and health plans continue to consider the impact on offerings; as a result there will be more high deductible plans and private exchange growth with a direct impact on providers.

5. MACRA and the Cadillac Tax are also expected to accelerate consolidation among providers as well as value-based payment system adoption. Value-based payments include accountable care organizations and bundled payments.

6. There is a move toward preventing emergency room visits and hospital stays to reduce costs and improve care quality. More providers are moving away from hospitals into more accessible and less costly settings, according to the report.

7. Technology adoption plays a key role in the future, with mobile phone use, web conferencing and patient portals taking off. Digital technology is shaping the healthcare landscape to empower consumers and connect with providers.

8. Fee-for-service continues to exist and current risk-bearing models usually provide one party more leverage over another. Providers are embracing new partnerships and competitive strategies to align with health plans.

9. Value-based care could go from voluntary to mandatory in the near future, requiring providers to report quality measures and build a foundation for a pay-for-value system.

10. Mergers and acquisitions are expected to grow in the coming year, as providers are looking to achieve scale, manage costs and build value-based capabilities in the face of narrow networks and other market factors.
Nasima N. Jaffery, MD, is suing Chesapeake Surgery Center in Salisbury, Md., for failing to properly maintain a device, according to a Delmarva Now report.

Here are six things to know:

1. Dr. Jaffery, an interventional pain management specialist, was performing a pain injection procedure, when the C-shaped arm of a fluoroscope began to fall toward her patient.

2. She allegedly dove in between the fluoroscope and the patient, taking the blow.

3. She claims to have injured her neck, right shoulder and right wrist.

4. Dr. Jaffery and her husband have filed a lawsuit in the Wicomico County Circuit Court alleging that the ASC did not properly maintain the device and seeking damages for "substantial medical bills."

5. However, the defendants  which include Surgical Center Associates of Delmarva and Peninsula Health Group both located in Salisbury  claim that the "alleged injuries, if any, were caused by person or persons or entities over whom these defendants had no control or right of control."

6. Both sides will come to court in August if a settlement cannot be reached.
The healthcare industry doesn't fit a uniform mold across the nation. California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Texas certainly stand out among the pack. Here are some differences in healthcare depending on the region.

California

Corporate Practice of Medicine

The Corporate Practice of Medicine requires physicians make decisions independently. The law is intended to prohibit corporations from influencing clinical decisions. Because corporations are not licensed medical providers, they could negatively affect healthcare and sway physicians based on commercial purposes.

The Medical Board of California cites the following decisions as illegal if made by unlicensed personnel:

Deciding appropriate diagnostic tests

Deciding appropriate referrals to other physicians

Overseeing overall care of patient

Deciding the number of patients physicians must see

Deciding coding and billing procedures for patient care services

Hiring or firing physicians

The above represent only a few examples of decisions that physicians must make autonomously. California is often cited as the strictest follower of the CPOM.

This law presents some challenges for physician business ventures when physicians engage in work with unlicensed-owned businesses, according to law firm Nelson Hardiman. California offers the option of a contractual relationship, and outlines legal rights of professional medical corporations and management services organizations.

Massachusetts

Healthcare reform

By the time President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into effect in March 2010, Massachusetts had already experienced four years of healthcare reform, according to The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. In fact, the ACA was modeled after the healthcare reforms Massachusetts passed in 2006.

Massachusetts legislators sought to offer health insurance coverage to all residents, hinting at a universal-type coverage plan. The state established the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, a health insurance exchange website. Another reform affected the private insurance market, which prohibited payers from denying plans to eligible applicants because of health status. Massachusetts expanded its Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program and required employers with at least 11 employees to pay toward health insurance coverage. Lastly, the state fined any residents failing to buy health insurance.

Within the year of enactment, Massachusetts saw a staggering decrease in the amount of uninsured residents. Compared to the national average of 18.4 percent uninsured in 2010, Massachusetts had only 6.3 percent uninsured.

Residents in the state also take advantage of more preventive care services and underserved communities receive better healthcare access, compared to before the reform.

With all the reform however, Massachusetts' health spending clocked in at 15 percent higher than the national average in 2012. After ACA implementation, Massachusetts had to adapt its reform polices to adhere to the federal legislation. Still, the state serves as an existing example of successfully implementing a model of shared responsibility.

Massachusetts boasted the lowest rate of uninsured residents in the country, at 3.28 percent in 2014, according to WalletHub.

New Jersey

Out-of-network fees

New Jersey legislators proposed the Out-of-Network Consumer Protection, Transparency, Cost Containment and Accountability Act to protect consumers from excessive medical costs for out-of-network visits, according to NorthJersey.com. The bill was introduced to address the issue of consumers unintentionally seeing physicians out-of-network and consequently receiving surprise medical costs.

Payers and medical providers take issue with the legislation as it calls for payer-physician negotiation over disputed payments. The legislation fell flat in December 2015, when it didn't receive enough support.

The Codey Law

Passed in 1991, the Codey Law mirrored the federal Stark Law and focused on physician self-referral. The law prohibited physician referrals of patients for which the physician possessed a beneficial interest. Although initial exceptions protected ambulatory surgery centers, two court cases, Garcia v. Health Net of New Jersey, Inc. in 2007 and Endo Surgi Center, P.C. v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company sparked concern about the exemptions of ASCs from the Codey Law.

The fallout of the Codey Law amendments in 2009 allowed exceptions for some physician referrals to their own ASCs. The amendments barred the creation of new physician-owned ASCs, with some exceptions. Hospitals and medical schools could still create new ASCs with physicians. The new law also required all ASCs to receive accreditation. New Jersey ASCs face more restrictions than in other states.

Texas

Tort reform

On Sept. 1, 2003, Texas enacted a law that caps the monetary damages plaintiffs may receive for medical malpractice cases. Although other states also enacted limits on damages available to medical malpractice plaintiffs, most cap only non-economic damages. As a result of this legislation, many physicians decided to set up shop in Texas as it protects them from lawsuits in which patients seek a preposterous amount of money for minor complications.

The legislation has caused much controversy, with supporters arguing the law eases physicians' concerns about being sued and lowers malpractice insurance premiums, according to Insurance Journal. Opponents argue the law prohibits worthy plaintiffs from receiving fair compensation for serious injuries or deaths, as many attorneys stray away from the cases.

The number of medical malpractice suits and payouts have significantly decreased since enacting the law, according to Insurance Journal.

Texas Medical Liability Trust

The Texas legislature established the Texas Medical Liability Trust in 1979. The TMLT provides medical liability coverage, or medical malpractice insurance, to physician policyholders. The trust insures more than 14,500 physicians, according to Texas Medical Association. Trusts are unregulated by state insurance departments.

Regional healthcare statistics

Active physicians in 2014

The following are a sampling of states' licensed physician concentrations, according to "A Census of Actively Licensed Physicians in the United States, 2014."

United States

Licensed physicians  916,264

Physicians per 100,000 population  287

California

Licensed physicians  143,427

Physicians per 100,000 population  370

Illinois

Licensed physicians  43,835

Physicians per 100,000 population  340

Florida

Licensed physicians  71,024

Physicians per 100,000 population  357

Massachusetts

Licensed physicians  33,965

Physicians per 100,000 population  504

New Jersey

Licensed physicians  35,842

Physicians per 100,000 population  401

New York

Licensed physicians  91,744

Physicians per 100,000 population  465

Texas

Licensed physicians  72,601

Physicians per 100,000 population  269

Vermont

Licensed physicians  3,171

Physicians per 100,000 population  506

Wyoming

Licensed physicians  3,360

Physicians per 100,000 population  575

Physician pay

The following lists the highest-earning and lowest-earning states for physician pay, according to Medscape's Physician Compensation Report 2015.

5 top-earning states

North Dakota  $330,000

Alaska  $330,000

Wyoming  $312,000

Wisconsin  $309,000

Oklahoma  $304,000

5 lowest-earning states

Washington, D.C.  $186,000

Rhode Island  $217,000

Maryland  $237,000

New Mexico  $243,000

Massachusetts  $248,000

Recent articles:

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Without the boost hospitals in many other states got from expanded Medicaid programs, many hospitals in Georgia are facing financial troubles.

Here are five things to know about the financial struggles of many Georgia hospitals, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

1. A review of the 2014 financial reports for hospitals across Georgia showed "dozens are operating in the red," according to AJC.

2. Georgia's decision to opt out of Medicaid expansion has taken a toll on many hospitals in the state, especially those in rural areas.

3. Augusta, Ga.-based University Health Care System Chief Administrative Officer Ed Burr told AJC many rural hospitals are struggling to attract enough patients to stay viable. "I think the reality is that a lot of them probably are going to have to close," he said.

4. Distressed rural hospitals can achieve financial stability by partnering with a larger health system. However, that is a difficult task, as many rural hospitals are not desirable acquisition targets for larger organizations.

5. Six Georgia hospitals have closed since 2013, with one reopening with limited services. Last week, North Georgia Medical Center in Ellijay said it plans to no longer offer inpatient services and lease its emergency room and medical offices to Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare. Washington County Regional Medical Center, a 56-bed hospital in Sandersville, Ga., is also faced with the prospect of closure.

More articles on healthcare finance:

8 latest CFO moves in hospitals, health systems

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Georgia hospital faces closure, former CEO blamed for troubles
A rural 56-bed hospital in Georgia could close, causing community members to second-guess the motives of the local Ford dealer who also happens to be the hospital's former CEO, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

After serving as an unpaid, full-time CEO of Washington County Regional Medical Center in Sandersville, Ga., Jimmy Childre was offered a paid CEO position in 2009. Mr. Childre resigned from his position a year ago, and his compensation has become a hot topic of conversation since then.

Mr. Childre earned consulting fees of $480,000 a year, paid directly to his car dealership, according to an audit that was made public in December. The audit also revealed Mr. Childre was paid as a contractor at a rate of $40,000 a month. Those payments were also made directly to his car dealership with no taxes deducted. Mr. Childre's compensation was significantly higher than the previous chief executive's annual salary, which ranged from $124,850 to $162,414, according to the report.

However, Mr. Childre claims his compensation wasn't unreasonable. In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mr. Childre said he was only paid $289,000 a year when all of the months he served as CEO without being paid are factored in.

Mr. Childre is also receiving negative attention for a partnership agreement that he negotiated with University Hospital in Augusta, Ga., that fell through. Without the partnership deal, Washington County Regional Medical Center is struggling to keep its doors open.

Mr. Childre told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he's the "scapegoat" who is being blamed for the county walking away from the partnership after he stepped down from his position.

More articles on healthcare finance:

5 hospital CFOs in the headlines

Georgia hospital to cease inpatient services as Piedmont expands

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A proposal to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour is a top priority for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York Farm Bureau, but they're on different sides of the issue.

The farm bureau unveiled its 2016 priorities Wednesday. At the top of the list: Opposing Cuomo's $15 minimum wage proposal.

Dean Norton, president of the New York Farm Bureau, said the organization is "all-in" on opposing the plan and will hold state legislators accountable for their votes on the issue.

The American Farm Bureau Federation's economists determined that if the $15 minimum wage is approved and fully phased in, it would amount to a $500 million tax increase on New York's farms.

"If we end up at a $15 minimum wage, the goods that we produce here in New York become very uncompetitive when we're having to compete against states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Connecticut, whose minimum wages already less than New York's," Norton said.

According to Norton, the average wage for an agricultural worker in New York is already above $12 an hour  more than $3 an hour more than the state's current $9 minimum wage. That's not including certain benefits, including housing and transportation.

Cuomo's $15 minimum wage plan has been lauded by unions and left-leaning groups. But business organizations, including the Business Council of New York State and the National Federation of Independent Business, oppose the wage hike.

The farm bureau counts itself among the business groups advocating for the proposal's rejection.

"We will continue to fight this," Norton said.

Along with the minimum wage, the farm bureau has six priorities for the 2016 season. The organization supports Cuomo's plan to provide $300 million for the state's Environmental Protection Fund. That's an increase of $123 million over last year's levels.

Increasing agriculture education in schools also makes the list. Norton said the farm bureau wants to work with Future Farmers of America organizations to help boost their efforts or get new groups established.

Infrastructure is also a concern. Norton said the condition of some of the state's bridges poses a challenge to agricultural vehicles. With weight limits being reduced and the size of agricultural equipment, farmers must find alternative routes.

"Many of the bridges that cross (the Erie Canal) are no longer accessible to agricultural equipment and agricultural vehicles because of the weight limits and restrictions," he said. "We need to work on our infrastructure in upstate New York."

Jeff Williams, the farm bureau's public policy director, outlined two other priorities. He said they will follow the governor's renewable energy push to determine what changes will be made to existing programs, how it will remove obstacles to installing new technology and what new programs will be available to farmers.

And the organization proposed shifting the administration of an agricultural assessment program from the state Department of Tax and Finance to the state Department of Agriculture and Markets.

Williams compared having the Department of Tax and Finance manage the program to fitting a square peg in a round hole. They believe that Agriculture and Markets would be better suited to administer the program.
Kevin Manemann has been named CEO of St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare, one of the largest physician practice management organizations in California.

Here are six things to know about Mr. Manemann.

1. He will succeed C.R. Burke, who retired Dec. 31.

2. He has more than 15 years of ambulatory and acute operational experience, as well as having worked in healthcare IT.

3. Most recently, he was COO of Heritage's Southern California region. In that role, he became known for aligning operations around patient needs, improving access to data for providers and patients, developing trusting provider partnerships and expanding services for patients who are vulnerable.

4. Prior to joining Heritage, Mr. Manemann was vice president of operations at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif.

5. In addition to physician practice operations, he currently leads the population health division for Irvine, Calif.-based St. Joseph Hoag Health.

6. Mr. Manemann played a key role in the creation and implementation of Irvine-based St. Joseph Health's accountable care organization with Blue Shield.

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Brazosport Regional Health System in Lake Jackson, Texas, has signed an affiliation agreement to become part of Houston-based CHI St. Luke's Health.

"In addition to having similar missions and values, our systems share a common vision for clinical and operational excellence and a firm commitment to lead the way in a new healthcare environment that focuses on value-driven, quality care," said Michael H. Covert, president and CEO of CHI St. Luke's.

Mr. Covert said Al Guevara Jr., will continue to lead Brazosport Regional after it joins CHI St. Luke's.

"We are very pleased to be able to join forces with CHI St. Luke's Health," said Mr. Guevara. "We look forward to this new relationship with CHI St. Lukes Health  a partnership that will enable us to strengthen our existing services, while also giving us the opportunity to enhance our quality, effectiveness, safety and efficiency."

The two health systems signed the affiiation agreement Jan. 25 with an effective date of Feb. 1.

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A U.S. district court judge found Baltimore-based JohnsHopkinsHospital violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act when officials rescinded a job offer to a deaf nurse following her request for a sign language interpreter, reports The Baltimore Sun.

Hopkins officials called nurse Lauren Searls', RN, employment both a financial and safety concern in its response to the lawsuit, according to Ms. Searls' lawyer Joseph Espo.

After graduating from Hopkins' School of Nursing in 2012, Ms. Searls said she was encouraged to apply for a job on a unit where she had done a clinical rotation, and received a job offer the next day.

The hospital later rescinded its job offer following Ms. Searls' request for an interpreter, citing financial concerns in an official letter. The hospital estimated the additional services could cost $120,000 annually, twice a nurse's starting salary, according to the lawsuit.

During litigation, Mr. Espo said the judge found Hopkins wrongly compared the cost of the interpreter with the nursing salary when it should have compared the cost to its own budget. The hospital unit in question has an annual budget of $3.4 million.

"Johns Hopkins Health System is an equal opportunity employer and believes strongly in diversity and inclusion," Hopkins spokeswoman Jania Matthews told The Baltimore Sun. "We make every effort to honor reasonable requests for accommodation in the workplace and will continue to do so."

A trial to determine damages has not yet been scheduled.

Ms. Searls currently works as a nurse at Rochester (N.Y.) MedicalCenter's StrongMemorialHospital, where she is supplied with an interpreter.
A Louisiana federal judge has ruled part of a controversial 2014 state law  one requiring abortion clinic physicians to have admitting privileges to a hospital with obstetrical and gynecological services within 30 miles of the clinic where the abortion is performed  as unconstitutional, according to The Advocate.

Here are seven things to know about the ruling.

1. The ruling was made by U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who presided over a June trial of a lawsuit challenging the admitting privilege requirement.

2. In his ruling, Judge deGravelles said the requirement in Act 620 violates the constitutional right of Louisiana women seeking abortions, according to the report.

"The severely restricted access to abortion care by a large fraction of Louisiana women caused by Act 620, and the resulting unreasonable and dangerous delays in scheduling abortion procedures, constitute irreparable harm for Louisiana women seeking abortions," Judge deGravelles wrote, according to The Advocate.

3. The judge also noted in his ruling that clinic shutdowns due to the state's admitting privilege requirement would force some women to travel far from home to get an abortion, or try to perform the abortion themselves, according to the report.

"These burdens include the risks from delays in treatment including the increased risk of self-performed, unlicensed and unsafe abortions," he stated, according to The Advocate.

4. Additionally, Judge deGravelles preliminarily blocked enforcement of the admitting privilege requirement and scheduled a status conference later this month to consider, among other matters, "what other proceedings must still take place and whether this court should convert the preliminary injunction  to a permanent one," according to The Advocate.

5. The Center for Reproductive Rights applauded the judge's ruling, saying the state's admitting privilege requirement would have shuttered all but one abortion provider in the state.

6. On the other hand, Louisiana's newly elected attorney general, Jeff Landry, was not as pleased with the judge's ruling and pledged to appeal it "for the betterment of our state and its citizens," according to The Advocate.

7. The decision in Louisiana comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a case that challenges a Texas abortion law that could close nine of the state's 19 remaining abortion clinics, according to The Wall Street Journal. The law, signed by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2013, requires physicians providing abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles and requires clinics to be up to ambulatory surgery center building standards, according to the report.

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Banio Koroma, MD, a physician at now-shuttered Mobile Doctors in Chicago, has been convicted on federal fraud charges, according to the Department of Justice.

Dr. Koroma was convicted after a four-day trial. Evidence at trial showed Dr. Koroma falsely certified patients as homebound while working for Mobile Doctors  a company that contracted with physicians to arrange in home visits for patients in several states and closed in 2013.

One of the patients who Dr. Koroma provided a false certification for testified she was able to leave her home. The false certifications for that patient cost Medicare $45,000, according to the DOJ.

A federal jury found Dr. Koroma guilty of two counts of healthcare fraud and two counts of making false statements related to healthcare matters. Dr. Koroma's sentencing is scheduled for June 2.

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Two anti-abortion activists and leaders of the Center for Medical Progress who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood were indicted by a grand jury in Houston on felony and misdemeanor charges, according to The New York Times.

Here are 10 things to know about the case.

1. David Daleiden, director of the CMP, was indicted on a felony charge for tampering with a governmental record and a misdemeanor charge for attempting to purchase human organs, according to the report. Mr. Daleiden is 27 years old. He posed as a biotechnology representative using a fake driver's license to secretly record Planned Parenthood affiliates as he attempted to purchase fetal tissue.

2. Another CMP employee, 62-year-old Sandra Merritt, was indicted on a felony charge for tampering with a governmental record by making fake IDs, according to the report.

3. The group released videos in July that made it seem as if Planned Parenthood was illegally selling fetal tissue. A statement from Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson said grand jurors cleared Planned Parenthood's name, according to the report. Investigations in multiple states have not found evidence of wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

4. A CMP statement from Mr. Daleiden says the group used journalistic techniques to obtain the video footage: "The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see."

5. Specifically, Mr. Daleiden and others from CMP set up a fake company called Biomax Procurement Services, a provider of fetal tissue to researchers. Under this company, Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt went to Planned Parenthood to discuss fetal tissue transfer, according to The New York Times.

6. Planned Parenthood maintains the fees discussed were legal, according to the report. They were to cover costs, not profit.

7. Mr. Dalieden and Ms. Merritt used their photos to create fake California IDs. Mr. Daleiden posed as Robert Sarkis and Ms. Merritt went by Susan Sarah Tennenbaum, according to the report. For this charge, warrants were issued for both Mr. Dalieden and Ms. Merritt's arrest with bonds of $10,000, according to the report.

8. Mr. Daleiden sent an email in June to Planned Parenthood with an offer to buy fetal tissue. The offering price was $1,600 per sample, according to the report. Josh Schaffer, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, told The New York Times this is likely the source of the misdemeanor charge. Planned Parenthood did not reply to the email, according to the report.

9. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) released a statement ensuring the state's Health and Human Service Commission's Inspector General and the Attorney General still have an open and ongoing investigation into Planned Parenthood. "Nothing about today's announcement in Harris County impacts the state's ongoing investigation. The State of Texas will continue to protect life, and I will continue to support legislation prohibiting the sale or transfer of fetal tissue."

10. Planned Parenthood said in a statement the videos were an attempt to advance the CMP agenda. "As the dust settles and the truth comes out, it's become totally clear that the only people who engaged in wrongdoing are the criminals behind this fraud, and we're glad they're being held accountable," the statement reads. The group filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month.

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Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina said it has reinstated insurance policies for thousands of customers who experienced a disruption in coverage due to a technology glitch earlier this month. However, the state's largest health insurer is not disclosing how many enrollees are still without proper coverage or refunds, and officials cannot predict when the crisis will be resolved, reports The Charlotte Observer.

As of Jan. 22, BCBS of NC told the state Attorney General's office the insurer has refunded nearly $2 million to 4,637 customers whose bank accounts had been overdrafted. The average overdraft was around $420 per customer.

Most applications have been retroactively enrolled for January, Blue Cross CEO Brad Wilson told employees in a company-wide email. The company is now processing a backlog of February enrollments.

The insurer is still receiving more than 100 calls a day concerning enrollment issues. Customer service representatives have been logging overtime and weekend hours to field customer calls, reports The Charlotte Observer.

Both the North Carolina Department of Insurance and the North Carolina Attorney General plan to review the enrollment debacle to determine if any laws were broken and to ensure Blue Cross has established safety measures to prevent a similar crisis in the future.

"We are making progress," said Blue Cross COO Alan Hughes in an email to employees. "However, a return to 'normal' isn't within the next week, or even the week after. We are on a longer path to recovery."
Last year, Granite Health, a joint venture of five New Hampshire health systems, and Watertown, Mass.-based Tufts Health Plan teamed up to form a new health insurance company headquartered in New Hampshire called Tufts Health Freedom Plan.

With only a few carriers offering health insurance in our state, this is great news for New Hampshire families and businesses looking for more competition in health insurance options.

Tufts Health Freedom Plan offers an innovative approach to care that makes sense. The announcement was widely covered, but it may still be unclear what our new partnership means.

First, Tufts Health Freedom Plan is founded in New Hampshire and jointly owned by Tufts Health Plan and the New Hampshire providers that make up Concord-based Granite Health. This arrangement is unique to New Hampshire and benefits individuals and businesses who are seeking an insurance product that provides greater coordination of their care. Built on New Hampshire's greatest strength of coming together to create innovative solutions, we have combined the clinical expertise from five of the premier value-based health care systems in the state with administrative efficiencies and product development expertise from one of the top-ranked health plans in the country. We recognize it is local providers that understand the needs of New Hampshire families and are best equipped to determine the most effective way to address healthcare needs in our communities.

Second, Tufts Health Freedom Plan is structurally woven at the center by Granite Health. Catholic Medical Center, Concord Hospital, LRGHealthcare, Southern New Hampshire Health and Wentworth-Douglass Hospital bring deep clinical expertise to the company and serve over a third of the state's population with physicians representing over 70 specialties. In addition to our shared expertise, Tufts Health Freedom Plan has contracted with all 26 New Hampshire Hospitals to offer a statewide network to its members and access to a broad Massachusetts network, including Partners HealthCare.

By working together, Granite Health member health systems are able to elevate care to the highest standards. Just recently, over 75 clinicians from around New Hampshire discussed how physicians, nurses, pharmacists and social workers can work together to achieve better outcomes, lower mortality rates and shorter hospital stays. Furthermore, by adopting a shared data driven population health management program that establishes common standards and best practices across our network, Granite Health has been able to improve the health of our communities, outperforming national and regional benchmarks for many process and outcome measures.

Finally, Granite Health has teamed up with one of the top-ranked health insurance companies in the country, Tufts Health Plan, which brings paramount experience in administrative efficiencies and product development, ultimately helping to better serve New Hampshire communities. Likewise, by partnering to form Tufts Health Freedom Plan, we are able to offer an array of wellness-focused health plans which provide members with the resources they need to be healthy. All this subsequently creates better quality of care, greater access to providers, and an opportunity for us to do more for you.

Tufts Health Freedom Plan differs from anything previously offered in New Hampshire because your provider and insurer now have a unique relationship to better serve you. Quality care is not simply rhetorical jargon for us, it is the cornerstone of our partnership. We formed this team because as health care continues to evolve, together we can achieve more for our members and patients than any one of us could achieve individually.

Brian Wells is from Concord, N.H., and is the president of Tufts Health Freedom Plan.

Rachel Rowe is the president and CEO of Granite Health, which includes Catholic Medical Center, Concord Hospital, LRGHealthcare, Southern New Hampshire Health and Wentworth-Douglass Hospital.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Becker's Hospital Review/Becker's Healthcare. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.
Social Security beneficiaries won't receive a cost-of-living adjustment this year, but U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer wants to change that.

Schumer, D-N.Y., is supporting legislation sponsored by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren that would provide Social Security recipients with a one-time average payment of $580.

The cost of providing the payments would be covered by ending a tax deduction corporations have used to write off bonuses paid to executives. The remaining revenue collected will be used to support Social Security's trust fund, Schumer said.

The legislation, the SAVE Benefits Act, has more than 20 cosponsors in the Senate and 45 in the House of Representatives. So far, no Republicans support the measure.

"This is the right thing to do," Schumer said. "It's the humane thing to do. It's the appropriate thing to do."

Without the bill or some other legislative fix, there won't be a COLA for Social Security recipients. It's only the third time since 1975 that beneficiaries haven't received an increase in their Social Security benefits.

One reason why there's no COLA this year is the drop in gas prices. Schumer said the federal government uses a formula that factors in certain costs, including the price of gas.

If gasoline wasn't included in the formula, benefits would increase above 2 percent, he said.

Schumer recalled efforts in 2009 to provide a COLA after the recession hit. He said Congress intervened and provided beneficiaries with a one-time $250 benefit.

"This year, we need to do something similar of even better," he said.

As of 2014, there were 1.7 million Social Security beneficiaries living in upstate New York, including 1.2 million seniors. In Central New York, there were 226,00 Social Security beneficiaries.
Sir Michael Caine and Sir Michael Gambon have differing views on the EU referendum

Sir Michael Gambon said it would be "wrong" for Britain to vote to leave the EU.

The veteran actor is the latest star to lend his voice to the referendum debate, which has seen Sir Michael Caine also speak out in the past week.

Speaking at the premiere of his new film Dad's Army, Gambon said: "I hope we don't. I don't think we should leave the EU, it would be wrong. I don't think it's right."

He did not go into the reason behind his response, unlike Sir Michael Caine who backed an exit and said Europe was run by "thousands of faceless civil servants".

Asked which camp he would back in the in/out referendum, he said: "I don't know what to vote for. Both are scary. To me, you've now got in Europe a sort of government-by-proxy of everybody, who has now got carried away. Unless there is some extremely significant changes, we should get out."

Pressed by Radio 4's Today host Nick Robinson, he said: "I sort of feel certain we should come out."

Sir Michael Gambon's comments come on the same day as the ballot paper for the EU referendum was released.

It asks voters to cross a box to either remain or leave the EU.

It is clear how both Sir Michaels will be voting.
Arlene Arkinson vanished after a night-out at a disco across the Irish border in Co Donegal in 1994

A former top detective could be compelled to appear at the inquest for missing teenager Arlene Arkinson, a coroner has said.

Eric Anderson, a retired detective superintendent, may still have documents relating to the investigation into the schoolgirl's disappearance more than 20 years ago, it has been claimed.

The ex-Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer has cited ill health as a reason for non-attendance at other high-profile inquests.

The start of the Arkinson inquest has been delayed for two weeks to complete legal matters.

By February 29, coroners will have the power to compel witnesses to attend or impose fines for non-appearances.

Henry Toner QC said: "Mr Anderson I understand is not in attendance today.

"That is something which has to be nailed earlier rather than later."

Coroner Brian Sherrard, at a preliminary hearing in Belfast, said from February 29 the legislation would change giving the power to compel witnesses with threats of fines or contempt of court proceedings.

"It may be that we find ourselves in a better position as opposed to a worse position later in the month."

The coroner had demanded that Mr Anderson bring any relevant information to today's preliminary hearing.

Arlene, 15, from Castlederg, Co Tyrone, vanished after a night out at a disco across the Irish border in Co Donegal in 1994.

She was last seen with convicted child killer Robert Howard, who died in prison last year.

Howard was acquitted of the teenager's murder by a jury that was unaware of his previous conviction for murdering a schoolgirl in south London.

The 71-year-old was always the police's primary suspect in Arlene's disappearance and had been set to give evidence before the inquest, now due to start on February 15.

In eight years of preliminary proceedings, a number of start dates were missed because of police delays in disclosing documents and issues around security vetting.

The inquest is being heard without a jury and could last for several months - with proceedings streamed to Omagh court house to facilitate the missing teenager's family.
The security alert in Henryville Manor area of Ballyclare has ended after a suspicious object was declared to be 'nothing untoward'.

Residents have returned to their homes.

Earlier houses in the area were evacuated and residents took shelter in a local leisure centre.
A security alert near Londonderry's City Cemetery is continuing after police discovered a weapon at the scene.

It is understood visitors earlier were told to leave as the cemetery in Lone Moor Road was closed and a police cordon put in place.

A PSNI spokesperson said the alert is on-going.

Inspector Johnny Hunter said: "Searches in the area are continuing following the discovery of a weapon at the scene.

"Police will endeavour to bring the operation to a close as soon as we can, however, we will not take chances with the safety of the local community and we will continue in our work here until we are sure that the area is safe. "

Inspector Hunter added: "I would ask anyone who has noticed any suspicious activity in the area recently to contact police at Strand Road on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. "

There are no further details at this stage.

This is a developing story and will be updated
Fresh off the convictions of two former state legislative leaders, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara will make an appearance in New York's state capital.

Bharara will headline an event sponsored by WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and four good government groups  Citizens Union, Common Cause New York, the League of Women Voters and the New York Public Interest Research Group.

The live conversation is scheduled for 4 p.m. Monday, Feb. 8 at The Linda, WAMC's Performing Arts Studio in Albany.

Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, will deliver remarks before an interview with WAMC President and CEO Dr. Alan Chartock.

Doors open at 3 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. (Update: The event is sold out.)

"We are delighted and highly honored that the U.S. attorney has chosen WAMC to be the venue for this speech," Chartock said. "Preet Bharara is a personal hero for me. He has done more to clean up Albany than all the other actors combined. When he says he'll do something, he does it. We know this will be a packed house and anyone who wants to go should let us know  and fast."

Bharara, who was appointed U.S. attorney in 2009, has earned praise for his work to combat corruption in Albany. He has prosecuted several legislators, including ex-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos.

Silver was convicted in late November. A jury found Skelos and his son, Adam, guilty at the end of their trial in December.
The fire service has spent more than 2m rescuing animals in the past three years

The fire service has spent more than 2m rescuing animals in the past three years.

Crews responded to incidents involving livestock, pets, ducklings, a monkey and more.

Firefighters carried out 653 rescues between 2013 and 2015 - an average of four a week - at a cost of 2,086,555.

In some cases, they were called out to incidents where the animal managed to free themselves.

Earlier this month, concerns were raised about staffing levels at fire stations.

SDLP MLA John Dallat warned the high number of animal rescues were adding to the fire service's workload.

"Firefighters have been demonstrating about cuts to their budget, and this kind of expenditure needs to be looked at again," he said.

"There may be alternatives, and it may be that animal rescue is the responsibility of someone else."

Details of the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service's (NIFRS) animal rescues were disclosed following a Freedom of Information request.

Firefighters responded to 187 incidents up to November 25 2015, costing 632,362.

A further 224 rescues were carried out in 2014 at a cost of 712,508. And in 2013 some 741,685 was spent responding to 242 incidents.

In some cases the animals managed to free themselves after crews were dispatched at huge expense.

Almost 3,000 was spent sending firefighters to an incident in Londonderry where a cat was stuck on a roof. However, when crews arrived the cat ran away.

A report of a second incident in Derry, which cost 5,025, describes how the cat "self-rescued".

Five ducklings stuck in a grille in Belfast also managed to free themselves despite fire crews attending the scene.

Sometimes it just took a little persuasion. Firefighters responding to an incident in Ballymena coaxed a cat out of a cavity wall using cat food.

Earlier this month, Ukip councillor Noel Jordan, a retained firefighter, claimed Carrickfergus was left without sufficient firefighter cover because of under-staffing.

And Mr Dallat, who sits on the Assembly's Public Accounts Committee, said he was aware of an incident where eight appliances were sent from various stations to rescue an animal in distress.

"If the fire service has to make choices, the first priority has to be human life," he said.

"That is not to suggest animals should not be rescued, but there are insurance companies and other options.

"There is, of course, an onus on farmers and owners to make sure their animals are protected and don't get into situations where they need rescued."

Cats and dogs accounted for the majority of rescues.

However, other more unusual incidents involved starlings, guinea pigs and hamsters.

A squirrel was rescued in Magherafelt, and crews released a seagull that was trapped in a cable in Portrush.

The NIFRS said it did not recover any costs for crews attending animal rescues.

A spokesman added: "Although animal rescues represent a very small proportion of all the emergency incidents we attend, as an emergency service we take this role very seriously.

"Animals, especially large animals in distress, can pose a serious risk to the public or anyone attempting to rescue them.

"For NIFRS, public safety and protecting the community is our number one priority."

The fire service has two specialised animal rescue teams which attend incidents involving large animals.

These are based in Omagh and Newcastle but work across Northern Ireland.

They respond to incidents involving large animal rescues, such as cows or horses, and have been equipped with specialist skills and rescue equipment for such rescues.

The NIFRS spokesman added: "When a rescue of a large animal is required, fire crews never underestimate the unpredictable behaviour of the extremely heavy and strong animals enduring a stressful situation.

"Firefighters who are highly trained in large animal rescue techniques can help reduce the likelihood of injuries and deaths to farmers and their families and anyone else who may attempt to carry out a rescue themselves.

"It is strongly advised to never attempt to rescue any livestock yourself, as such action would compromise safety."
A new appeal for information has been made about the disappearance and murder of an undercover soldier almost 40 years ago.

Captain Robert Nairac, an SAS-trained officer, was killed in a forest in Co Louth in 1977 after being abducted from a bar in at Dromintee, south Armagh.

The body of the 29-year-old Grenadier Guardsman has never been discovered. He is one of four Disappeared whose bodies have yet to be found.

His murder came back under the spotlight after the publication of a book, Betrayal: The Murder Of Robert Nairac GC, in November.

Yesterday the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) issued a fresh appeal for information.

Chief investigator Geoff Knupfer said: "The remains of 12 of the 16 Disappeared have been restored to their families for Christian burial. Of the four remaining cases Robert Nairac is the one on which we have least information.

"The Disappeared came from a range of backgrounds, but what they all have in common is that they have grieving families who had to bear the additional terrible burden of years of not knowing where their loved one was buried.

"In the past year or so, we have recovered the remains of three of the Disappeared, two of whom had been missing for over 40 years.

"We were able to do that because we were given the information necessary to put us in the right place. We need that information to help find Robert Nairac."

Mr Knupfer emphasised that all information given to the ICLVR was confidential and would be shared with no State agency.

"If the publication of this new book helps bring the case to public attention again, I hope those who know anything that can help us will contact us," he added.

"The only interest of the ICLVR is humanitarian: to help end the suffering of a family by finding the remains."

The kidnap and murder of Captain Nairac is one of the most mysterious Troubles cases.

He grew up in Gloucestershire and operated as an undercover intelligence officer.

On the night he disappeared in 1977 he was working undercover without back-up in the republican heartland of south Armagh, trying to gather intelligence on the IRA.

Reports have claimed he was in a bar singing Irish rebel songs in a fake local accent.

The soldier was seized during a struggle in the pub's car park and taken across the border to a field at Ravensdale and was later shot dead.

He was posthumously awarded the George Cross, with the citation praising his resistance to his abductors and his bravery under "a succession of exceptionally savage assaults".

Three men have previously been convicted of murdering Captain Nairac.

In 2011 a south Armagh man was cleared of involvement in the murder and four other charges, including kidnapping and false imprisonment.
A member of the public takes a walk along the North Bull Wall in Dublin as huge swathes of the UK are braced for a deluge of rain

The extreme weather conditions could pour more misery on communities still reeling from flooding after Christmas

Warnings are in place across Wales, Scotland, Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Devon and Cornwall, many of which were saturated during the wettest December on record

The sun sets over the Watch House at Tynemouth, Tyne and Wear, as a fresh deluge of rain is threatening to swamp parts of the UK still waterlogged from the floods that swept across the north of the country over Christmas

A lorry blown over by high winds on the A628 Woodhead Pass in South Yorkshire

A fresh deluge of rain is threatening to swamp parts of the UK still waterlogged from the floods that swept across the north of the country over Christmas.

The Environment Agency (EA) has issued a number of red warnings across parts of Cumbria as the remnants of Storm Jonas, which blanketed the US in snow over the weekend, hit the UK on Tuesday morning with heavy rain and strong gales.

The Met Office warned that up to 100mm (3.9in) of rain is expected to fall over northern parts of the country by the evening, on ground still saturated by the floods that brought destruction to homes and roads last month.

As well as the red warnings, which come with the advice: "Flooding is expected. Immediate action required," the EA has issued a further 96 amber warnings to advise communities in the north, west and south of England, Wales and Scotland to expect flooding.

The Met Office has forecast similar warnings for Wednesday and Friday as rainfall is set to continue overnight.

A spokeswoman said: "Further north, across Scotland and northern England, the remnants of the US storm are likely to cause severe gales - of up to 70mph in Scotland - and bring 20-40mm (0.8-1.6in) of rainwater by Tuesday afternoon, with up to 60mm (2.4in) in exposed areas.

"In Wales, Yorkshire and south-west England, rain will reach around 30-50mm (1.2-2in) and up to 80-100mm (3.2-3.9in) in higher areas, mainly Wales. Locations along the Irish Sea coast can also expect some severe gales."

Pictures and videos posted on social media by Cumbria residents on Tuesday afternoon show heavy rain and blocked roads. Local police forces have urged drivers and people walking near the coast to take care, and the county council has warned of school closures.

Lindsay Mears, of the Met Office, said the impact of the rainfall in the county would be made "more severe" because land is still "saturated" by the three bouts of heavy flooding over recent weeks.

Following an emergency Cobra meeting organised by the Environment Secretary on Monday night, the EA has deployed a number of temporary defences and pumps.

The measures include carrying out work on the wider Ullswater valley in Cumbria, as well as in Appleby, Keswick, Cockermouth and Glenridding.

It has also put teams, including military personnel, on the ground across Yorkshire to inspect and repair defences.

Neil Davies, EA's national flood duty manager, said: "With heavy rain this week, people in the North and South West need to be prepared for the risk of flooding.

"EA teams have been helping communities recover from the severe floods over Christmas. We are now preparing for further flooding as rain is expected to fall on ground left saturated after the wettest month on record.

"There will be high tides on the coast of Cumbria and Lancashire which is expected to cause large waves and spray. We urge people to take care near coastal paths and promenades."

In Scotland, pupils and staff at a primary school were evacuated by boat after the building was cut off by flooding.

Danny Gibson, Stirling Council's environment convener, said: "Due to flooding on Lochard Road, Aberfoyle Primary School was closed and evacuated.

"Twenty-two pupils and staff, including 12 children, were evacuated with the help of fire and rescue service crews, who used a boat and two rescue sleds.

"We'll be working closely with our partner agencies to monitor the situation overnight."
Ombudsman is examining claims of police misconduct in relation to four murders between 2000 and 2010 blamed on the Shankill Road UVF

A watchdog investigation into allegations police shielded the loyalists responsible for four post-ceasefire murders has been stymied due to a lack of resources, a court has heard.

The Police Ombudsman's probe into alleged police criminality could take years if the State fails to stump up the cash required to set up a dedicated unit to probe the killings, Lord Justice Weir was told.

The funding problem is the latest in a series of resourcing issues raised during a review exercise conducted by judge Weir of 56 stalled legacy inquests in Northern Ireland.

It was revealed in Laganside courts hours after Northern Ireland's Police Chief George Hamilton expressed his own concerns about the on-going failure to find an agreed way to deal with outstanding conflict-related cases.

The Ombudsman is examining claims of police misconduct in relation to four murders between 2000 and 2010 blamed on the Shankill Road UVF.

The victims were loyalists Jackie Coulter and Bobby Mahood, who were shot dead on the Crumlin Road in August 2000; Craig McCausland, who was shot in his home in Woodvale in July 2005; and former loyalist prisoner Bobby Moffett, who was gunned down on the Shankill Road in May 2010.

Seamus McIlroy, representing the Police Ombudsman, said the watchdog had yet to receive a response from Stormont's Justice Department to a business case request to fund a team to investigate the allegations of police involvement.

"This isn't a matter that's going to take months, but years, if we don't get the extra resources," he said.

"We have identified a number of issues that concern us and we have gone to the department to say 'please give us the money to let us properly deal with these matters'."

Solicitor Padraig O Muirigh, who represents the families of all four murder victims, told judge Weir he was "gravely concerned" that the Ombudsman's team had not yet been funded.

"These are very grave allegations into the handling and protection of alleged informants within the UVF on the Shankill," he said.

"It is very disappointing that the Ombudsman has been stymied due to a lack of resources."

On the eighth day of Judge Weir's review a case linked to a controversial Army unit alleged to have carried out random killings during the Troubles was also examined.

Daniel Rooney, 18, was shot dead by soldiers in the St James Crescent area of west Belfast in September 1972.

The judge was told that an inquest would not be able to proceed until an investigation into the secretive Military Reaction Force (MRF) was conducted by the PSNI's Legacy Investigation Branch (LIB).

Questioning whether the LIB was sufficiently resourced, Lord Justice Weir stressed that the ultimate responsibility for ensuring human rights compliant investigations were carried out was the Government.

"The State has the obligation to make available the necessary resources," he said.

Judge Weir also assessed the state of readiness of an inquest into the death of a teenager shot dead in Belfast in June 1972.

The death of Marian Brown, 17, was initially blamed on paramilitaries but a review of the case by the police's now-defunct Historical Enquiries Team (HET) suggested the shot may actually have been fired by a soldier.

During the hearing, the judge expressed frustration when a lawyer representing the MoD was unable to confirm whether two soldiers involved in the incident were now dead.

He said the episode highlighted the need for parties involved in the legacy cases to collaborate better. "There is a need to work a bit smarter in some of these cases," he said.

The PSNI has repeatedly raised concerns it does not have sufficient resources to handle the volume of legacy cases still stuck in the legal system.

Police have been criticised for the time they take to disclose classified files to the courts, but commanders insist they are not equipped to deal with so many different tasks.

During an event at Queen's University in Belfast on Tuesday evening, Mr Hamilton questioned whether justice could be delivered under the current system.

He said: "When you get a tsunami of requests coming in from the courts through judicial reviews, the coronial system and other challenges - and every single one of those is a compelling case and it's got legal weight behind it and judicial authority - for us to do this, actually, the whole organisation is going to grind to a halt and that is the mess that we are in."

During Wednesday's review hearings, Judge Weir acknowledged that it did not appear possible to process all the cases at the same speed.

"It has resulted in a state of paralysis among those whose job it is to do things - and nothing is done," he said.
Sharon Massey with her daughter Jordan and the remains of the hoverboard

Photo issued by West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service of the damage caused at a house in Wyke, Bradford, when a charging hoverboard burst into flames. [File photo]

Sharon Massey and children pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com

Sharon Massey's pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com

Sharon Massey pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com

A grandmother has told how her family had to run for their lives after a Christmas present exploded in their home.

Sharon Massey, her two daughters and her nine-month-old grand-daughter were left homeless after the hoverboard burst into flames.

They were sitting together watching TV around 6.50pm on Monday when the gift, which was charging in the corner of the room, suddenly exploded.

"We heard this almighty bang and it burst into flames," Sharon said. It sounded like a bomb.

Expand Close Sharon Massey and her children pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com Matt Mackey - Presseye.com / Facebook

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Whatsapp Sharon Massey and her children pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com

"The curtains caught fire, then the TV. Within seconds the whole room was alight.

"I had my baby grand-daughter sitting on my knee. I grabbed her and ran out of the door.

"My wee girl was on the phone to the fire brigade crying and saying, 'My house is on fire, everything is destroyed'.

"We haven't slept a wink since - we are traumatised. You never think something like this will happen to you. We have lost everything. We are devastated."

Sharon said that when her family fled their home in east Belfast, many of their neighbours were in the street after having heard the commotion but were unable to help.

"There was nothing I could do but watch my home burn," she added.

Expand Close Sharon Massey pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com Matt Mackey - Presseye.com / Facebook

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Whatsapp Sharon Massey pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com

Two fire appliances attended the scene and firefighters with breathing apparatus fought the blaze, which was brought under control around 7.44pm.

The hoverboard had been bought from an online retailer as a Christmas gift for Sharon's 12-year-old daughter.

The family have been left staying with friends since the fire broke out, but Sharon hopes to be able to move back into her housing association home.

Expand Close Sharon Massey's pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com Matt Mackey - Presseye.com / Facebook

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Whatsapp Sharon Massey's pictured at home, on Ardgowan Street in east Belfast after a hoverboard she bought her daughter for Christmas apparently caught fire while charging. Picture credit  Matt Mackey - Presseye.com

They are also being helped by a community activist group called Unheard Voices.

A fundraising campaign has been set up online, the aim being to gather 5,000 to help the family replace some of their belongings. As of last night, almost 200 had been raised.

"This family live in an area already vulnerable to flooding during heavy rainfall," a spokeswoman for Unheard Voices said.

"They have lost everything, including children's toys which they only got at Christmas.

"We are working with the family to help replace items and support them in any way we can.

"Unfortunately, other items such as family photographs and items which they treasure simply cannot be replaced."

"We as group will explore every avenue to make sure that this family is re-housed in a house that is suitable for them and have the basic items in life in order to survive and get life back to normal for them as soon as possible," the spokeswoman added.

A Belfast City Council spokeswoman said the council had received a number of calls about hoverboards and as such advised against buying them.

"We have been advising consumers against purchasing these boards as there is uncertainty around the product safety, and this is in line with advice already in the public domain," she said.

"In light of the safety concerns, many retailers that were selling these goods voluntarily withdrew them from sale, or the supplier withdrew the stock at source.

"Anyone who has bought one of these items and is concerned about their child using it can seek a refund from the supplier/manufacturer. Our consumer advice staff can offer guidance on this. We will also investigate any complaints from members of the public about these items being sold in the Belfast area."

The Fire Service is treating the blaze as accidental.

There have been a number of incidents across the world in which hoverboards have caught fire while charging. Just earlier this month, a family's home on the outskirts of Melbourne in Australia was destroyed after a hoverboard caught fire in similar circumstances.

And in California, two pet dogs died and a family's home was ruined in another incident.

Trading Standards officers have previously warned there is a risk of the devices overheating.
A 90-year-old woman has spoken of the terrifying moment she came face-to-face with three men ransacking her home.

Iris Boyle, who lives alone, thought she was going to die after the gang broke into her house on Belfast's Skegoneill Avenue on Monday. It was the second time the property - where the grandmother has lived for 50 years - had been targeted.

The burglars are believed to have left empty-handed after using a screwdriver to unlock the back door and searching the sitting room, where Mrs Boyle was watching TV. The raid has left the pensioner too frightened to get a proper night's sleep.

"I could hear loud noises but I thought it was people out the front of my house, because I have bad hearing and the sitting room door was closed," she said.

"But then it went on and on and I went out to see what it was. When I went to get up, this figure came in. At first I thought it was my son, but he never spoke to me.

"He started lifting things in the room and looked all around. Then another one came in. He was slim, and I think he had a jumper on. Their faces were partially covered.

"When I saw the first big man come in, I thought I was in for it. My nerves were a wreck. I thought I was going to die - I thought that was the end. My heart was going and I was shaking. I was so afraid."

After ransacking the home one of the gang members helped Mrs Boyle into her seat. "Before they left, the thin one took my elbow and helped me into my seat and then away they went," she said.

"They didn't speak to me or harm me - I was so glad they didn't. I was a bundle of nerves. I couldn't speak to them. All I could do was watch them."

After contacting the police Mrs Boyle stood at her front door and attempted to flag down passing traffic, but no one stopped.

She eventually managed to contact a neighbour who came to her aid.

"My neighbour came into my house and rang the police again for me because I had been waiting for so long," Mrs Boyle added.

"We went up the stairs to check on the rooms and found that they had the front bedroom wrecked. There was stuff lying everywhere.

"I don't know what they wanted, but I think they might have been after drugs.

"I was lucky that they didn't harm me. I couldn't understand that, though, because you always hear about elderly people getting attacked.

"I haven't slept right since it happened and I'm so nervous being in the house now."

Detectives are appealing for information over the burglary and have urged anyone with information to contact them.
Stormont's Justice Minister is to appeal against a landmark High Court ruling on Northern Ireland's restrictive abortion laws amid concerns it has inadvertently paved the way for terminations on demand.

David Ford said there was a need to clarify Mr Justice Horner's judgment, which declared elements of the region's current law incompatible with human rights legislation.

The ruling focused on ending the ban on women accessing abortion in cases of sexual crime or after a diagnosis of fatal foetal abnormality (FFA).

However, Mr Ford warned that the judge's words could be interpreted as advocating a near blanket relaxation of abortion legislation.

Northern Ireland's Attorney General John Larkin is also appealing against the judgment, but on different grounds. Mr Larkin is appealing against the entirety of the ruling but Mr Ford, whose department supports a law change in cases of FFA, is challenging specific elements.

While Northern Ireland's laws on terminations are much more restrictive than Great Britain's, the minister claims the judgment had the potential to turn that on its head - leaving the region with the UK's most liberal abortion laws.

"The judgment from the High Court does not fully clarify the law and potentially leaves open the possibility there could be abortion on demand in Northern Ireland on an even wider basis than is the case in the rest of the United Kingdom," said Mr Ford.

The minister said his departmental lawyers became aware of the issue during detailed scrutiny of the judgment.

He said it focused on a section of the ruling where Justice Horner stated that an unborn child's right to life under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) does not apply until the foetus could viably survive outside the womb.

The minister said this could be interpreted as giving an expectant mother a free rein to abort before the point of viability, which is usually estimated at around 22 to 24 weeks. While there is a similar legal limit for abortions elsewhere in the UK - namely 24 weeks - the DoJ contends that some restrictions that apply in GB would not necessarily apply under Justice Horner's ruling.

Mr Ford said he did not think that was the judge's intent.

"My concern is, and obviously this will have to be tested in the Court of Appeal, is the way the judgment has been laid out potentially means we could have no rights for a foetus before its point of viability and therefore the potential that could lead to women seeking an abortion on demand," he said.

"I don't think that was the judge's intention, I don't think that's what the people of Northern Ireland want and that's why I am taking the appeal - to make sure we get clarity around matters like that."

The minister is also challenging the judge's ruling on sexual crimes, arguing that it is very difficult to define those crimes - particularly in a court of law - before pregnancy has reached full term.

The judge's declaration of incompatibility did not immediately change Northern Ireland's abortion laws but had placed an onus on the Stormont Assembly to legislate on the contentious issue.

Mr Ford is currently in the process of trying to gain Stormont Executive approval for legislation that would relax the ban on cases involving fatal foetal abnormalities.

Judge Horner made the ruling in a case taken by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission against the Department of Justice.

Amnesty International has pledged to resist any attempt to overturn the judge's ruling.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty's Northern Ireland programme director, said: "It is clear that Northern Ireland's legal framework on abortion is in breach of international human rights standards. Accordingly, Amnesty International will resist any attempt to overturn the High Court decision.

"We note that the minister remains committed to limited reform to the law on abortion in Northern Ireland, and that his appeal is based on the need for 'clarity' on some aspects of the High Court's judgment.

"What is very clear is that the legislation in force in Northern Ireland rides roughshod over the rights of women and girls.

"Rather than endless litigation, we now need legislation from the Northern Ireland Assembly to bring our law into line with international standards.

"According to opinion polls, seven in 10 people in Northern Ireland want to see the law reformed to allow for terminations in cases of rape, incest, or fatal foetal abnormality. That public support must now be translated into political action on behalf of women who are otherwise forced to take the plane to England."
UNION SPRINGS | A.J. Smith Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Janet Murphy is getting out of town this summer. Way, way out. She's getting 5,237 miles away from the quiet village nestled along Cayuga Lake's shores, to be exact.

That might as well be Siberia, right? Well, it is Siberia.

At the suggestion of Karen Burcroff, the principal at A.J. Smith, Murphy applied to be one of seven regional K-12 educators accompanying local college students and faculty on five-week educational tour of the Russian region's Altai area.

Murphy is joining a group of educators and students heading on the cultural exchange thanks to a $95,865 grant from the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad and the U.S. Department of Education that was awarded to the Russian studies program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Murphy didn't think she stood a chance to be selected to participate.

"I thought, 'nothing venture, nothing gained,'" she said.

Her three kids are adults, but for the youngest, a 19-year-old daughter. Being an empty-nester, Murphy said, allows her time and mental space for the excursion.

"I have a lot of room in my head right now," she said. "It's a foreign concept to me to put my feet up and say, 'I'm done.'"

The application process was rigorous, she said, and the thought of her family members being left to their own devices to look after themselves caused her momentary unease.

But only momentary.

"They can step up and take responsibility  likewise the husband," she joked.

Murphy begins the five-week trip June 25, shortly after classes end, and returns to the states Aug. 5.

Earlier this week, she began orientation at Hobart, where she was introduced to the other participants. Together, they received insight on what they'll encounter on the "perspective-broadening" excursion.

"Before leaving, I'll basically be getting lessons in survival Russian," she said of the anticipated language training.

Murphy's undergraduate training as an American studies major at Wells College, along with her penchant for teaching social studies, prompts her to do her own due diligence and study up on the Altai region, the small republic in southern Siberia where she will center her travel.

There, amid the Altai Mountains and the Katun and Biya rivers that join to form the Ob River, one of Siberia's longest northward flowing tributaries toward the Arctic Ocean, Murphy will immerse herself in another culture.

Upon her return, a condition of the scholarship is that she write a curriculum for her students based on what she sees, hears and learns.

"This can really be a reflective process for me," she said. "How am I not going to improve? I just know it's going to make me a better teacher."

While she knows only beginning Russian, Murphy knows she will hike the hills and nearby glaciers, live in a yurt, ride horses, dine with locals and travel the countryside.

Neighbored by Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, the region is also home to Lake Teletskoye, a 50-mile long, 3-mile-wide water body that's more than 1,000 feet deep.

"I hope that this experience impacts not just me personally," she said. "It's good to get perspective. I've been living my life with very little change for a long time. That tends to close your perspective; small things become bigger than they should. I think taking this trip will alleviate that."

Murphy is the sort of teacher who is up on her feet moving around most of the day in her large, colorful classroom. She peppers her warm, conversational teaching style with words that may be new to her fourth-graders. Words such as "cognizant" or "explicit" enter her dialogue, deliberately introducing upper-level vocabulary to her students.

"I don't dumb down any vocabulary," she said. "It becomes a part of their working language."

The question, "How does where you live impact how you live?" starts off the social studies unit she teaches. She and her students focus on New York state history and the resources and traditions of the central part of the state as they progress through their coursework.

"So, with that lens, I am going to Siberia, and it should be fascinating," she said. "I'm just up for a challenge, and I know I will come back with a keen appreciation for everything that is good in my life."
Northern Ireland has the highest number of adults over 50 in the UK who do not know what the healthy recommended drink limits are, a new survey has revealed

Northern Ireland has the highest number of adults over 50 in the UK who do not know what the healthy recommended drink limits are, a new survey has revealed.

A Drink Wise, Age Well report surveyed 16,700 people in 10 parts of the UK - including the Western Health Trust and South Eastern Health Trust areas here.

The two study areas in Northern Ireland were found to have the highest percentage of adults over 50 who were unable to correctly identify recommended drink limits (77%) and who did not feel fully confident in calculating alcohol units (62%).

A further breakdown of the figures showed 63% of older adults had been involved in binge drinking in the last 12 months.

Worryingly, 14% of older adults had driven within an hour of drinking alcohol in the last year.

Recent research warned of the hidden toll of alcoholism among elderly middle class women, partly fuelled by the growth of online shopping delivery services.

Previous research also indicated daily drinking among older people with 18% of men and 14% of women aged 60-75 years old drinking almost every day in Northern Ireland.

The latest government guidelines published earlier this year recommend not regularly drinking more than 14 units per week. But one major issue is the lack of understanding of what that actually means. But the new report says that elderly drinkers here are in a worse position with nearly a quarter, 23%, not confident they could calculate units and only half were confident or very confident.

A panel of experts yesterday discussed the findings of the report at an event held at Queen's University.

One panellist, Addiction NI CEO Thelma Abernethy, described the problem as "a growing concern which requires a collective response". She has said the problem was often hidden because older people tended to drink at home rather than in pubs and clubs.

With at least 20% of over 50s in the UK exceeding recommended alcohol units, and alcohol related harms significantly increasing in this age group, Drink Wise, Age Well now aims to create a healthier relationship with alcohol for the overs 50s population through a preventative approach.

In 2013 alone, 236 people in Northern Ireland were registered as dying from an alcohol-related death - 172 men and 64 women.

However Northern Ireland was praised for having Older Focus Service. As part of Addiction NI it is the first specialist alcohol treatment service for the over 50s.

For support contact Addiction NI on 028 90664434 or visit www.addictionni.com
The damaged car after it was set alight in the Ebor Street area of Belfast on Tuesday Morning, The Fire service attended the scene. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

Daniel Cirpaci looks at the damage cause to his car after it was set alight in the Ebor Street area of Belfast on Tuesday Morning, The Fire service attended the scene. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

A Romanian family living in south Belfast have said they no longer feel safe in their home after their car was burnt out in a racist attack.

The car was extensively damaged and police are treating the arson attack as a hate crime.

The attack which happened at around 2am on Tuesday follows other reports of racist intimidation in the area in recent weeks.

Daniel Cirpaci (25) is originally from Romania and lives with his wife and two children on Ebor Street, beside Tates Avenue.

He told the Belfast Telegraph he came home from work to find his car in flames.

"I'm working last night, coming home about three in the morning," he said. "About 1.40am somebody put my car on fire. I don't know why this happened."

"I've lived (on this street) for two months with no problems. Here everybody is OK, this is the first problem."

Mr Cirpaci said this is the first incident of intimidation he has had to deal with after two years of living in Northern Ireland. He added his parents had been due to visit for a holiday but he no longer wants to stay in the area as he fears for his family's safety.

This is the second attack on Ebor Street in two weeks after a Chinese woman and her baby fled the area after a failed petrol bomb attack on their home on January 12.

In a similar incident on January 11, two ground floor windows and one upstairs window were smashed at a house a few streets away on Monarch Parade. Graffiti reading 'Scum out locals only' was daubed on the door.

An Ebor Street resident, Charmaine, said she was aware of other racist attacks.

"I don't know where the people who are doing it are coming from," she said. "It shouldn't be happening. I have a five-year-old son, he has friends of different religions and colours."

South Belfast MLA Emma Pengelly condemned the attack.

"Racist attacks are a blight on our city and have no place anywhere in our society," she said.
The devastation on the Shankill Road in the aftermath of the 1993 IRA bombing of Frizzells fish shop

The Chief Constable has denied claims the RUC could have prevented the Shankill bomb after it emerged that the IRAs north Belfast commander at the time was a double agent.

George Hamilton last night said the force had no advance knowledge of the attack.

Speaking at an event in Queens University in Belfast, he added: I am 100% convinced that the police service at the time had no knowledge of the Shankill bombing that would have prevented it from happening.

That statement will be tested, investigated and found to be right or otherwise by the Police Ombudsman.

Ten people, including two children and one of the IRA bombers, died in the 1993 atrocity in Belfasts loyalist heartland on a busy Saturday afternoon.

Earlier this week the Irish News reported that IRAs north Belfast commander at the time of the attack was an agent codenamed AA. The claim was based on decrypted files stolen by the terror group during a break-in at Castlereagh police station on St Patricks Day in 2002.

The IRA is believed to have identified up to two-dozen informers in its ranks, including its former leader in Ardoyne  a taxi driver in his mid-50s who was jailed in the H-Blocks.

It was alleged that he passed information to his Special Branch handlers that potentially could have prevented the bombing at Frizzells fish shop.

The Police Ombudsman is formally assessing a complaint from a relative of one of the victims of the bombing asking for AA and his relationship with the security forces to be investigated.

The watchdog has said it is focused on whether the RUC had information which would have allowed them to prevent it.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Shankill bomb atrocity Desmond Frizzell was killed in the Shankill Road bombing Shankill bomb atrocity Thomas Begley, the IRA bomber who blew himself up in the Shankill bomb in 1993. Shankill bomb atrocity Rescuers at the Shankill bombing The devastation on the Shankill Road in the aftermath of the 1993 IRA bombing of Frizzells fish shop / Facebook

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They are also examining whether the subsequent investigation was compromised.

Yesterday, the Belfast Telegraph revealed the IRA had identified many more informers.

The group tasked four of its members with decoding the heavily redacted documents snatched during the 2002 raid.

Two of those appointed to the investigation team were former prisoners from Belfast.

They worked at separate locations in the Republic and operated with stringent security measures in place to prevent the documents falling into the hands of the Garda.
SAS soldiers who shot dead eight IRA men and a bystander as they attacked a police station, acted excessively, a lawyer for the bereaved claimed.

Solicitor Peter Corrigan claimed the targets could have been arrested as they entered the Co Armagh village of Loughgall in May 1987, avoiding the bloodshed which followed.

Mr Corrigan called for reopened inquests into their deaths to be held speedily.

He said: "The reason for the promptness and expedition is so that there is no perception in the public that the state are colluding or acquiescing in an unlawful act."

The SAS intercepted the IRA unit as it launched an attack on a police station in the village.

Anthony Hughes (36) was killed after being caught up in the gunfire. Mr Corrigan added: "The state authorities had prior knowledge and did not effect arrests when they entered Loughgall - they acted disproportionately and excessively."

He said the case should be among the most urgently dealt with by a coroner's system in Northern Ireland which is under great pressure with a backlog of dozens of legacy inquests.

The lawyer said: "It flies in the face of expedition and promptness that we still don't have a date set for an inquest ... so that the public can have confidence that the state are properly investigating controversial murders like this case."

Lord Justice Weir is reviewing all the inquests to determine when they can be held, or if the coroner's system is not capable of dealing with some of them.

Controversy has long surrounded the Loughgall ambush with claims the SAS team continued to fire on a number of the IRA men with heavy machine guns as they lay wounded on the ground.

The IRA members killed were: Jim Lynagh (32), Padraig McKearney (32), Gerard O'Callaghan, (29), Tony Gormley (25), Eugene Kelly, (25), Patrick Kelly (32), Seamus Donnelly (19) and Declan Arthurs (21).

The UK's Advocate General ordered the new inquest after considering issues of national security.
Views of rail tracks.PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 17, 2015. See PA story . Photo credit should read: Lynne Cameron/PA Wire

Passenger safety was not put at risk by door faults on the Enterprise train, Translink said.

A safety licence was suspended in the Republic of Ireland after the doors opened unexpectedly while the train was moving. A notice was served by the Railway Safety Commission in Dublin.

Two separate incidents have occurred in the last two months on the service operated jointly by Translink and Irish Rail.

Translink chief executive Chris Conway told Stormont's regional development committee: "Passenger safety was never put at risk."

In one instance this month, no passengers were near the door when it partially opened as staff made arrangements to load a catering trolley in Newry.

In another case last month, a train official heard air coming through the door and it was later discovered that a bolt was faulty.

Translink carried out a detailed technical investigation and review of the door mechanisms.

It has introduced a significant Enterprise train refurbishment programme which it said will ultimately provide a much enhanced quality of service to passengers travelling on this important cross-border route.

The redesign includes new livery, replacement of the passenger information system, a new electronic reservation system, security cameras and redesigned interiors.

In 2013/14, almost 840,000 people travelled to Dublin on the Enterprise.

Union Unite has blamed public transport company Translink for "mismanagement" in overhauling the Belfast to Dublin flagship service after claiming the refurbishment was delayed by six weeks.
Police have seized an estimated 1m worth of cannabis from two cars near Belfast's docks

Police have seized an estimated 1m worth of cannabis from two cars near Belfast's docks.

Two men, aged 36 and 24, were arrested on the Dargan Road near Belfast's port following a stop and search yesterday.

They were charged with possession of a Class C controlled drug with intent to supply.

The two cars where the drugs were discovered have been taken for further examination.

It follows another seizure yesterday morning in Glenavy of cannabis plants estimated to be worth up to 90,000.

Two suspects, aged 29 and 31, were also arrested on suspicion of a number of drugs offences.

They were last night in custody assisting police with their enquiries. Detective Inspector Keith Gawley said the seizure and investigation "were at a very early stage".

However, he praised the "proactive policing operation which stopped a huge amount of drugs from entering communities throughout Northern Ireland".

The drugs were found in a planned house search in the Crew Park area, the PSNI said.

"This seizure highlights our continued determination to tackle the scourge of illegal drugs in the local community and I would appeal to anyone who has concerns about illegal drugs to contact police," a spokesperson said.

"We will look into any report that we receive as we work with the community to reduce the harm caused by illegal drugs."

The two seizures are the latest in a string of operations targeting cannabis production and smuggling.

Last Thursday, the PSNI uncovered a cannabis factory following a search of a property in the Deramore Heights area of Magherafelt.

Cannabis plants with an estimated street value of 115,000 were recovered.

The following day a 23-year-old man was arrested and charged following the search of a house in Londonderry.

Officers seized around 3,700 worth of suspected cannabis.
Former mayor of Ballymoney Mollie Holmes celebrates her 100th birthday last year

A remarkable retired mayor, who was still actively involved in community life despite passing the milestone century mark, has died at the age of 101.

Mollie Holmes OBE, who was one of Co Antrim's best known citizens and often referred to as "the first lady of Ballymoney", passed away yesterday.

Mrs Holmes was the first Freeman of Ballymoney Borough, a former councillor and mayor, and charity activist. She was honoured by the Queen in 1978.

She entered local government in May 1955 as the first female member of Ballymoney Urban District Council.

She remained an elected independent member until May 1985, where after 30 years' service she stepped down from the office of mayor, which she had held for eight years in a row.

In a newspaper interview last spring Mrs Holmes revealed that as she approached her 101st birthday last August she still devoted herself to public service and was delighted to be called upon to perform an official opening of a shop in the town.

Many political representatives paid tribute, including deputy mayor of Causeway Coast and Glens Council Darryl Wilson.

"Mrs Holmes made an invaluable contribution to Ballymoney and the surrounding area by dedicating over 30 years to public service," he said.

"Mrs Holmes also filled the position of chief citizen faithfully and honourably for a period of eight successive years, which is an achievement in itself.

"The legacy left by Mrs Holmes has inspired me and will continue to inspire others for generations to come."

She was born in 1914, and in 1978 met the monarch when she was awarded an OBE.

Speaking last year, Mrs Holmes said: "I met the Queen and some of the others, Princess Anne, over the years.

"The Queen gave me the OBE in 1978, and she came to Ballymoney when I was in charge of Girls' Brigade cadets in 1953, and we had to stand at Ballymoney Train Station when she came out."

When interviewed on her 100th birthday in 2014, Mrs Holmes said: "I've had plenty of life and have enjoyed life and all that belongs to it.

"I've no regrets. I've had a wonderful life.

"If I've been able to bring pleasure to someone less fortunate then me, I can retire happily."

Among other tributes was one from Finance Minister Mervyn Storey, an MLA for North Antrim.

He said Mollie was a "much-loved part of life" in the town for over 60 years.

"She was the absolute embodiment of public service, having devoted nearly her entire life to the betterment of the community and the people of Ballymoney," he said.

"I count it a privilege to have known Mollie and to have helped celebrate some of the major milestones in her life over the last few years."

DUP MP Ian Paisley said: "Mollie was a wonderful and inspirational lady who played a key part in the life of the town and district. I met her on many occasions. Mollie was an institution and will be irreplaceable as a character of the district.

"I know many will hold their happy memories of her company and presence. I wish to extend my sympathy."
Senior DUP figures have gone on the offensive against Taoiseach Enda Kenny following his warning that the UK leaving the EU would create "serious difficulties" for Northern Ireland.

First Minister Arlene Foster told Mr Kenny to wait for the judgment from the voters in Northern Ireland.

DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said Mr Kenny's remarks were "disrespectful" and could prove counter-productive.

MP Sammy Wilson said it showed a "degree of desperation" and panic in the ranks of campaigners to keep Britain in the EU.

In a major intervention in the issue - with the referendum on withdrawal now being planned for as early as June - Mr Kenny also warned of the potential impact on the wider British-Irish relationship.

"I think it would be catastrophic if Britain were to leave the European Union," he said.

Britain could lose out on free trade deals the EU may strike with India, Japan, Singapore, Canada and, particularly, the United States.

"I genuinely believe while it will take some time to do this, the consequence of doing a deal between Europe and the United States would be phenomenal in terms of all economies and has the potential to rise them by 2% on average," Mr Kenny said.

As he discussed the issue with Prime Minister David Cameron, the Taoiseach warned that a Brexit could damage trade in Northern Ireland and inflame political tensions if it led to more border controls.

"From our perspective, it would create serious difficulties for Northern Ireland and I don't want that happening," he said.

DUP leader Arlene Foster responded, however: "The Taoiseach knows that this is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland and the people of the United Kingdom to decide, and not a matter for the Republic of Ireland voters, so really he should wait for their judgment in respect of this matter.

"As a party we are Eurosceptic and indeed, if there was a vote today, we would vote to leave the EU.

"However, we will wait to see what the outcome of the discussions are between the Prime Minister and the European Council in February.

"He has said that he hopes to bring it to a conclusion there and then. We will have to see when the referendum is called."

Mr Dodds also said it was counterproductive to "lecture us as to what is best for Northern Ireland". "I trust that Enda Kenny will keep this in mind when making future comments about the EU referendum," he added.

And Mr Wilson said: "The degree of desperation in the pro-EU camp is coming to the fore.

"David Cameron knows he is losing the argument for staying in the EU in England and is now banking on persuading the Scots and the people of Northern Ireland to rescue his floundering campaign.

"We always knew that the issue would be reduced to one of scare tactics.

"In the absence of positive arguments for staying in, fear is the default position. No doubt Enda Kenny's ludicrous and totally inappropriate invasion of our affairs after his meeting with the PM is part of the scare campaign."

But Fianna Fail spokesman on foreign affairs, Brendan Smith TD, said that political representatives in the Republic were entitled to offer their view on the Brexit debate.

Mr Smith added: "Whether Nigel Dodds likes it or not, the issue of Brexit is one that involves and affects all the people of this island.

"Cross-border trade, not to mention key industries like agriculture and tourism, relies hugely on the fact that both jurisdictions on the island are members of the European Union.

"The prospect of the North being withdrawn from that union is a huge strategic issue for the entire island and it is one that people in the Republic of Ireland will have strong views on.

"Nigel Dodds' contribution to the debate is regrettable, representing as it does a throwback to a time of cross-border insults and groundless suspicion."
AUBURN | Anyone accused of a crime has the constitutional right to an attorney, but New York state has put a significant portion of that responsibility on its counties. For Cayuga County taxpayers, that responsibility amounted to about $730,000 in 2015.

The county Legislature passed a motion Tuesday night calling on the state to develop a 100 percent state-funded indigent legal defense system.

Chairman of Judicial and Public Safety Committee Patrick Mahunik said that the total costs for indigent defense was $900,000 and the state reimbursed the county with $170,000.

The right to legal counsel stems from the United States Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, where the court ruled it is the state's responsibility to provide counsel to someone who couldn't afford it. But in 1965, New York state put the responsibility on its counties.

The passed resolution supports an act proposed by state Sen. John DeFrancisco filed on Jan. 6, calling for the state to "fulfill its constitutional obligation to provide indigent legal services." It also says the state "shall pay counties the full amount necessary to ensure the delivery of quality legal services for indigent criminal defendants in a consistent manner throughout the State."

Legislator Mark Farrell said the move would go a long way in helping balance the county budget.

"This is the only way that counties are going to be able to stay within the tax cap or anywhere near a tax cap, is for the state to recognize their financial obligations to the counties, and start funding these mandates that are put on our shoulders," Farrell said.

The motion's vote passed unanimously, with Legislators Paul Pinckney and Frank Reginelli absent.

"I'm glad to see no one opposed this," said Chairman Keith Batman.
At least 35 lives were saved by lifeboat crews as they rescued more than 1,200 people in Irish waters last year.

Howth in Co Dublin was the busiest RNLI station, with 60 launches and 58 people taken to safety, followed by the volunteers in Clifden, Co Galway, who put to sea 49 times and took 20 people to shore.

The busiest crew in Northern Ireland was on Lough Erne, where the team in Enniskillen answered 74 calls and rescued 89 people from its two bases on the upper and lower loughs.

In total the RNLI said crews launched 1,098 times, taking 1,244 people to safety, and filed reports that 35 people would have died without their work.

Sean O'Farrell, coxswain of Courtmacsherry lifeboat, recalled one incident last August where four adults and a young girl where taken from a sinking speedboat after going out on a fishing trip.

"They had changed the engine and as we discovered afterwards they neglected to plug the holes left from the old engine," he said.

"They had difficulty stating their position and we missed them the first time, but when we arrived on scene one guy was lying on his stomach with his fingers plugging the holes."

The party of five eastern Europeans had three buoyancy aids between them and were about a mile from shore.

It was feared the boat would have sunk within half an hour if the RNLI crew had not found them.

Mr O'Farrell added: "It shows the need to be prepared. Be aware of your surroundings. A lot of people come to the sea and are not fully aware of the the power of the water and the weather and end up in trouble very quickly."

Among the more unusual call-outs were the rescue a herd of cows from the sea near Kinsale, Co Cork, including one animal which was stuck in a cave, and the discovery of the ocean rowing boat Happy Socks off Mizen Head three months after being abandoned by its owner in the middle of the Atlantic.

With 10 RNLI stations recording calls to help animals and pets in distress, experts warned over risks to people's lives if they enter water themselves in an attempted rescue and get into difficulty.

Mr O'Farrell said: "Dogs are better able to swim in the sea than most people."

Other figures from the RNLI revealed Lough Ree in Athlone had the highest number of rescues after the inshore lifeboat was launched 47 times and 130 people were taken to shore.

The benefit of having well-equipped stations was demonstrated on Lough Swilly in Donegal when the crew of a new Shannon class lifeboat rescued three fishermen on the boat's first call-out.

The most common type of incident was mechanical failure on boats but 66 launches were in response to someone at risk of drowning.
A youth club worker at an evangelical church who indecently assaulted a teenage girl every day has been jailed for two years.

Richard Blackburn (57), a landrover mechanic from Carnone, Raphoe, Co Donegal, pleaded guilty to three specimen charges relating to a series of sexual assaults on the girl between 2000 and 2002.

Most of the attacks took place in the back of a converted Mercedes van which he used to take children to and from a youth club run in Raphoe by the Congregational Church.

The victim, Rachel McAuley, now 29, wrote to the court from abroad where she now lives to waive her right to anonymity so her attacker could be named.

In her powerful victim impact statement, read to the court by investigating officer Det Sgt Ciaran Brolly, she told how she was now afraid to return home to Ireland for fear of meeting Blackburn.

Her life, she said, had been destroyed and simple things for most people like going to the shop were now nerve-wrecking experiences.

It is like my teenage years didnt exist at all, said the victim.

What happened to me was life-altering, dark and very scary. Richard Blackburn was a trusted family friend. My mother was a bridesmaid at his wedding.

He knew me from birth and therefore he knew my age. I was abused daily. For years he convinced me it was all my fault but I now know it wasn't my fault.

When I go home to Ireland I am afraid to meet him in the street. I wanted to spend time there when my granny was unwell and she died recently. I didnt get to spend that special time with her.

Ms McAuley, now a school teacher, said she doesnt sleep at night and constantly feels nervous.

She plucked up the courage to report Blackburn at a UK police station in 2010 and travelled to Ballybofey six months later to give gardai an extensive statement about the attacks.

DS Brolly told the court that Blackburn used his adapted van to ferry children to and from a youth club set up in church hall.

But when he was alone with Rachel he would sexually assault her.

Rachel, he said, had a strict religious upbringing. Blackburn had known her from birth, was a friend and parishioner along with her parents and her grandmother.

Most of the incidents happened when Blackburn was leaving Rachel home to her grannys house in Convoy

One one occasion he had taken her to Kilkenny on a trip, stopped at the isolated Barnesmore Gap outside Ballybofey on the way home and sexually assaulted her.

Whilst the assault took place, a passing patrol car stopped to check on the vehicle.

Blackburn had jumped back into the front of the van and told gardai he had stopped to rest.

Gardai didnt see Rachel in the sofa-bed in the back because the windows were obscured by curtains.

Rachel told gardai that Blackburn had said to her after the incident: That was close.

Judge John OHagan said Blackburn had breached the trust of an impressionable young girl in her formative years.

The age difference of 28 years was absolutely mind-boggling.

Blackburn, said the judge, had put his victim through an absolutely traumatic experience which had left deep scars on her life.

He sentenced Blackburn to three two-year prison sentences to run concurrently, with the last year suspended.

He also placed the mechanic on the sex offenders register for 10 years.

Irish Independent
Europe's banking chiefs blocked Ireland from saving as much as 9.1 billion euro on crippling bank debts, the banking inquiry has revealed.

The marathon investigation found the Central Bank and Financial Regulator gave the country's six main banks a clean bill of health when they were guaranteed in September 2008 - a move which ultimately cost citizens about 30 billion euro.

But the hardline stance of finance chiefs in Frankfurt made for some of the most damning findings.

The Oireachtas banking inquiry found the European Central Bank put the Fianna Fail-led coalition under undue pressure to accept tens of billions in bailout loans, but it also blocked burden sharing among international money lenders.

The inquiry repeated evidence that Jean Claude Trichet, the ECB chief in March 2011, told Finance Minister Michael Noonan that a "bomb would go off in Dublin" if senior bondholders - the first in line to have loans repaid - did not get their investments back.were burned.

It revealed advice from the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) that 9.1 billion euro might have been saved if the top lenders were forced to take a share of the losses.

During hearings former International Monetary Fund chief Ajai Chopra put the figure at about eight billion euro while Fianna Fail's Michael McGrath said the savings in reality could have been about 3.7 billion euro.

It was the second time the ECB warned Ireland not to pass banks' losses on to their paymasters, t he inquiry found, with a November 2010 letter from Mr Trichet carrying a threat to switch off billions in emergency cash which was keeping the Irish banks alive.

The inquiry said it was an "explicit threat" and that the ECB interventions were "critical".

"These were all actions for which the Irish people ultimately paid and are still paying a heavy price," the parliamentary inquiry found.

The committee accused the ECB of undermining its work by refusing to allow Mr Trichet to give evidence in Leinster House and it said there is a serious democratic deficit when it comes to the bank's accountability.

After 18 months of work and 413 hours of hearings, the cross-party report found:

:: A culture of excessive executive pay and bonuses for bankers.

:: No one single event or decision led to banking collapse - it was the cumulation of events and decisions over a number of years.

:: Property or land valuations were not routinely carried out as the boom heightened, even for some large developments, and desktop and drive-by valuations were used without agents seeing inside the home.

There was a lmost universal acceptance until 2008 that the property bubble would end with a "soft landing", which the inquiry called a "fatally-flawed" theory that was never substantially tested or challenged by government, the Central Bank or the Department of Finance.

The inquiry said the infamous September 2008 "n ight of the guarantee" was a "myth".

The idea to protect the six main banks in a 440 billion euro blanket security was tabled as early as January that year, the inquiry found, and ultimately the "decision -makers" on the night based their plan on inaccurate information about the health of the banks.

The lack of an i ndependent, in-depth, deep-dive investigation into the state of the banks before that night was also criticised.

The committee published its report after Sinn Fein's Pearse Doherty and Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins refused to give their support to the findings and recommendations.

Mr Doherty said: " While the banking report touches upon of the relationship between bankers, developers and politicians, what it fails to do is examine those relationships. This is another fundamental failure of the report."

Mr Higgins said banks had undue influence over government and while he praised the public hearings he said the inquiry ultimately failed to get to "the root cause and source of the infection".

Chairman Ciaran Lynch defended the 6.5 million euro inquiry, which never had the power to blame individuals.

"The report was never from the outset about finding a specific smoking gun," he said.

Mr Lynch rejected the idea that Ireland was bounced into a bailout, insisting that it had been inevitable, and also said a myth of t he bank guarantee night had been debunked.

"There is no certain formula to avoid another crisis but constant vigilance and early preventative action is critical," he said.

Among the r ecommendations are for a new commercial property price register and for consumer champions to review how a perceived lack of competition in banking impacts customers.

The inquiry reserved some of its harshest criticism for the watchdogs of the time.

It said the Financial Regulator, headed then by Patrick Neary, had sufficient powers to crack down on the banking sector by imposing conditions or revoking licences or by suspending business or imposing fines for exceeding lending limits.

It said both the Central Bank and the regulator could have ordered banks to keep more cash to cover potential losses in the event of a crash.

The inquiry revealed that the Central Bank and the regulator knew in 2003 that Irish banks were relying too much on loans for property.

"Neither intervened decisively at the time or in the years prior to the crisis," the report said.

The inquiry criticised light touch regulation, it called for bankers to be constantly retrained and for their contracts to include clawback clauses if they miss medium term performance targets.

It found the crisis in the banks was directly caused by decisions of their boards, managers and advisers to pursue risky business practices and that they moved far away from p rudent lending on property.

In response the Central Bank said it has seen fundam ental institutional reform since the crash, including assertive risk-based approach to oversight, a credible threat of enforcement and restricting mortgage lending.
Critics often accuse Gerry Adams of having a double identity.

Unveiling a new waxwork of himself at Ireland's National Wax Museum, the Sinn Fein leader said some have also been calling him a bit of a dummy for years.

"Who knows?" he said, asked if this was his only other identity.

The likeness was unveiled as part of a permanent exhibition apparently marking the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Until now the republican leader who played a prominent role in the historic accord had been left out.

Others, who played no part at all, were included, noted Mr Adams at the launch.

Sculptures of the former Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley, SDLP founder and Nobel peace laureate John Hume, ex-Irish premiers Bertie Ahern and John Bruton as well former prime minister John Major make up the display.

It is housed in the vault of a former bank off Dublin's Dame Street next to the museum's Chamber of Horrors dungeon.

"Ian Paisley, of course, famously wasn't part of the Good Friday Agreement, neither was John Bruton," said the Sinn Fein leader.

"John Major was handed a peace process on a plate, and he broke the plate."

He also pointed out the absence of Nobel laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble as well as the Women's Coalition.

Asked he liked the waxwork of himself, Mr Adams praised the painstaking work of the sculptor PJ Heraty.

"I think he has improved me, and of course I'm in need of much improvement," he said.
The closures are likely to lead to hundreds of jobs losses in Sligo

Several hundred jobs have been lost with the closure of Xtra-vision and a pharmaceutical plant in Sligo.

Some 83 movie rental stores on both sides of the border pulled the shutters down for the last time with about 580 full and part-time staff losing their jobs.

Two-and-a-half years after UK investors Hilco Capital tried to secure a new future for the chain, the High Court agreed to appoint Grant Thornton to oversee liquidation of the business.

"Our first priority is to meet and brief employees at all 83 locations and process their entitlements for redundancy," the accountancy firm said in a statement.

"Over the coming days we will be in contact with all creditors of the company. However, it is important to note that any Xtra-vision gift vouchers will be honoured by HMV which is not affected by this liquidation."

Eleven of the Xtra-vision stories are in Northern Ireland, where 60 staff were employed in Limavady, Larne, Magherafelt, Omagh, Cookstown, Dungannon, Lurgan, Armagh, Banbridge, Newcastle and Warrenpoint.

The remaining 500-plus employees worked in 72 stores around the Republic, where sales and rentals on both sides of the border have been shattered in recent years with the availability of online and on-demand services.

Up until it went into receivership, Xtra-vision had 152 stores, a database of more than 400,000 customers and 1,023 staff.

Meanwhile, Elanco, a subsidiary of the Eli Lilly which focuses on animal health and food products, is shutting down its plant in Sligo with the loss of 100 jobs.

Alongside the closure of a facility in Dundee, Scotland, the management said there had been an in-depth evaluation of global manufacturing and cost-reduction initiatives at Sligo, including a restructuring last year, but they were not sufficient to make it competitive.

Most staff will be made redundant before the middle of the year and a small number will be retained during the wind-down into next year.

"The decision to close the Sligo facility is difficult, and we are very aware of the impact this has on our employees, their families, and the local region," said site manager Grace McArdle.

"Over the next few weeks, our priority will be communicating with our employees and providing support at this difficult time."
The inquiry studied the reasons for the banking crisis

Regrets, we had a few.

Ireland's banking crash inquiry threw up some apologies and the odd sorry too.

Some opted to front-load the pain, get the hardest word out of the way at the start. Others had to have the sorrow leveraged from them.

The most powerful people in the country as the economy careered into a devastating tailspin took turns at what became a well-worn routine over 49 days of public hearings.

Say sorry. Well, sort of. More regret really. Regret at being forced to do as they did. Then spread the blame.

Star witness Bertie Ahern, who led the country towards catastrophe, took some persuasion.

"I did make mistakes, I admit that. But so does everyone who governs," he said.

The ex-taoiseach went on to qualify his act of contrition: "Of course, I apologise for my mistakes but I'm also pleased that I did get a lot of things right."

His successor Brian Cowen blamed banks, regulators, the global crisis, the opposition, a lack of power and a lack of choices for the chaos he presided over - but never once blamed himself or his Fianna Fail party.

"I am sorry that the policies we felt necessary to put in place in responding to the financial crisis brought with it hardship and distress to many people," he offered.

Former tanaiste Mary Harney said she "deeply regretted" her mistakes as second most powerful person in the country. Mostly she regretted not asking "harder questions" of those who were presumably responsible.

Charlie McCreevy, finance minister for years leading to the bust, bluntly stated he would only apologise if he had made any mistakes. "I don't believe that I did," he added.

Then the Greens sang the blues.

Former coalition partner and Environment Minister John Gormley absolved his Green Party from any wrongdoing in a mess, he lamented, was not of their making.

"I regret we were forced to make these decisions," he said.

Ireland's top government official during the boom upped the ante in the reparation rhetoric.

Dermot McCarthy, chief adviser to Mr Ahern and Mr Cowen, opened up about being "burdened". But, alas, his regrets too were soothed by his belief that he did his best.

"Like others, I'm challenged by the question as to whether I could have done more to avert the damaging outcomes from the crisis," he said.

"My regret is tempered only by the belief that I performed my duties to the best of my ability.''

Former bank regulator Patrick Neary admitted the incompetence of the watchdog he headed up.

"The supervisory measures taken by the authority were not sufficient to meet challenges posed by the crisis and the recession that emerged. I am deeply sorry about that," he said.

Eugene Sheehy, paid more than seven million euro (5 million) as boss of Allied Irish Banks, said he was "very sorry" for his role in leading the lender into a 21 billion euro (15.2 billion) citizen-funded bailout.

"That I failed in that responsibility for me is a matter of eternal regret and sorrow," he told the inquiry.

His predecessor Michael Buckley added: "I deeply regret what happened and the damage it inflicted on the lives of so many."

Michael Fingleton, ex-chief executive of Irish Nationwide who retired with a 30 million euro (22 million) pension, claimed he is personally paying the price of the financial collapse.

"I regret very much, I have and I am continuing to pay the price personally as a result," he said.

"In particular, I regret it for the society's employees, shareholders and borrowers who all became casualties of the crisis, and I regret it for the taxpayer and the State who have to fund the deficit."

One of Ireland's top economists John FitzGerald said he will regret until the day he dies giving an upbeat forecast on the country's fortunes as it edged over the cliff.

"I'm sorry about it. I regret it. I will regret it till the day I die," the ex-chief at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) admitted.

"I feel I did a reasonable job on many others things but on that I did a bad job.''
The Government should be embarrassed by its failure to bring in new anti-corruption laws four years after proposals were announced, a watchdog has said.

Transparency International Ireland criticised the Director of Public Prosecutions for delayed decisions on charges following the Moriarty tribunal's findings on payments to politicians.

It also warned that the Garda and Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo) have been starved of the necessary specialist staff and financial resources to investigate corruption.

TI Ireland chief executive John Devitt called on political leaders to commit to reforms and dedicate adequate resources to stop corruption after the election.

"The apparent lack of action and political ambivalence towards Judge Moriarty's findings sends the public the message that different rules apply to those in positions of power and influence," he said.

"The impact this has on public attitudes will be deeply corrosive of trust in democratic government and our criminal justice system."

TI criticised the Government for not prioritising the c riminal justice legislation which would have dealt with corruption on the back of the findings of the Mahon tribunal into payments to politicians and planning matters.

One key reform would have barred a politician from standing for election for a number of years if found guilty of corruption.

Separately, amid speculation on whether Independent TD Michael Lowry could be asked to support a coalition despite Moriarty findings against him over the award of a mobile phone licence, Mr Devitt said the political view of such a tie-up was detached from voters' thinking.

"I think the government parties would consider going into coalition with Mr Lowry if they thought they could get away with it," he said.

"But there's a sizeable proportion of the electorate that would find the prospect of that unacceptable."

Ireland has slipped one place on TI's perceptions index for 2015, from 17 to 18 out of 168 countries.

It insisted the Republic is considered to be one of the countries least affected by systemic public-sector corruption but it is perceived to be far less clean than many of the world's advanced democracies.

Mr Devitt praised the Government for bringing in whistleblower laws under the protected disclosure legislation and the new lobbying regulations.

"However, the failure to publish new anti-corruption legislation, four years after it was announced, is hugely disappointing and should be a source of embarrassment for the Government," he said.

"Unfortunately, too many members of the Oireachtas don't seem to realise how big a problem corruption is. If they do know and they're not prepared to push for, then the only conclusion we can draw is that they don't care."

According to the TI international perceptions index, Denmark is the least corrupt country and North Korea and Somalia are the worst.

It highlights some key characteristics of countries' high scores on the anti-corruption chart such as high levels of press freedom; access to budget information so the public knows where money comes from and how it is spent; high levels of integrity among people in power; and judiciaries that are independent of government and do not differentiate between rich and poor.

Countries which saw the biggest drops included Libya, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Turkey and those making improvements included Greece, Senegal and the UK, TI said.
Fewer motorists were tested for drink-driving in December but the proportion testing positive was higher than a year earlier

Hundreds of people have been caught drug-driving in the space of a month.

During December, 1,888 motorists across the UK were stopped and screened for drug use, with 931 testing positive.

A change in the law last spring meant it was the first time that police officers could carry out roadside screening for illegal substances or some legal medications over the festive period.

Nationally, fewer motorists were actually tested for drink-driving - 110,226 in December 2015 compared with 133,996 in 2014.

But the proportion who tested positive for drink-driving, refused to take the test or failed to give enough breath rose - it was 5% in 2015, up from 4.39% the previous year.

National Police Chiefs' Council lead for roads policing Chief Constable Suzette Davenport said: "These results show that new legislation and detection devices have helped us to keep the roads safe.

"Officers across the country, using their local knowledge and intelligence to focus on high-risk locations, are better equipped than ever to catch drivers who are under the influence of drink or drugs, even at very small amounts.

"Over the last Christmas, we detected and prosecuted more people than ever who have taken the very dangerous risk of driving after taking drugs."

RAC chief engineer David Bizley said it was "worrying" that so many drivers had been caught breaking the law, and claimed there may be more than figures suggest.

He said: " If a police officer suspects that a motorist is driving under the influence of both drink and drugs, they will normally test for alcohol only because this is far cheaper and simpler than testing for illegal drugs and the penalties are similar for both offences.

"The figures published by the police for positive drug tests are therefore likely to understate the number of motorists caught when driving under the influence of drugs."

Police in Wales said 498 drivers had tested positive, refused or failed during the same month, and a total of 99 motorists were arrested for drugs offences during the crackdown.

:: North Wales Police tested 8,894 people, with 82 positive, refused or failed. 35 drug arrests.

:: South Wales tested 4,409 with 205 positive, refused or failed. 26 drug arrests.

:: Gwent tested 1,130 with 47 positive, refused or failed. 21 drug arrests.

:: Dyfed-Powys tested 8,378 with 164 positive, refused or failed. 17 drug arrests.
SYRACUSE | Cornell Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County will partner with the Finger Lakes Land Trust, Central New York Land Trust and Cornell University to offer two hemlock woolly adelgid awareness and monitoring hikes.

Citizens who appreciate hemlock trees and forests can help by learning how to identify hemlock woolly adelgid and report possible infestations during one of two winter hikes. Winter is the ideal time to see the insect.

At 10 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, families are invited to join Cornell Cooperative Extension and Jason Gorman from the Finger Lakes Land Trust to explore High Vista Nature Preserve and learn how to identify hemlock trees and look for signs of hemlock woolly adelgid.

Snowshoes or cross-country skis may be needed in case of deep snow. Snowshoes may be available to borrow. To register or for more information, visit cceonondaga.org or call (315) 424-9485, ext. 233.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, March 19, hemlock lovers, property owners, volunteers and stewards are invited to join the Central New York Land Trust, Mark Whitmore of Cornell University, and Cornell Cooperative Extension to learn more about hemlock woolly adelgid, visit the Bahar Nature Preserve to see it firsthand and then monitor hemlock stands at the Elbridge Swamp Preserve.

This full-day event will start at the Skaneateles Library to hear more about hemlock woolly adelgid from Whitmore and how to monitor and report hemlock woolly adelgid from Jessi Lyons, environmental educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension.

After a break for lunch, the group will carpool to Bahar Nature Preserve and then Elbridge Swamp Preserve. To register, visit cnylandtrust.org/march-19-hemlock-woolly-adelgid/.

Hemlock woolly adelgid is a very small aphid-like insect that can kill hemlock trees within 4 to 12 years. Hemlock trees are found in glens and gorges throughout the Finger Lakes and are a popular landscape tree.

Hemlock trees provide shelter for wildlife year-round, stabilize steep slopes, and cool streams and lakes, which helps maintain water quality and support local fisheries.

Hemlock woolly adelgid was discovered along Skaneateles Lake in 2014 and has been found spreading across the western shoreline and southern portions of Skaneateles Lake. It has also been confirmed across the Finger Lakes region in recent years and poses a threat to all hemlock trees in the region.

Support for these hikes comes from the city of Syracuse, the Central New York Land Trust, the Finger Lakes Land Trust and Cornell University.
Marina Litvinenko will hold discussions with the Home Secretary

The widow of poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko will meet Theresa May on Thursday.

Marina Litvinenko will have private talks with the Home Secretary a week after an official inquiry into her husband's death concluded that his killing was " probably approved" by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Following the publication of the inquiry report, which sparked a diplomatic row and calls for the UK to impose sanctions against Moscow, Mrs May said the findings were "deeply disturbing".

Ahead of Thursday's meeting, a Home Office spokeswoman said: "The Home Secretary made clear that she would meet with Mrs Litvinenko and listen very carefully to what she has to say.

"We are not going to confirm details or timings of what is a private meeting."

Mrs Litvinenko called on Prime Minister David Cameron to impose "targeted economic sanctions and travel bans" against individuals, including Mr Putin.

Moscow has dismissed the findings, describing the inquiry as a political "whitewash".

Earlier this week Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned it would "certainly worsen" relations between London and Moscow and even suggested that British officials could be sued for slander.

The Government has announced financial sanctions against Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, who allegedly carried out the killing. Both deny involvement.

Mr Litvinenko died aged 43 in November 2006, three weeks after he drank tea laced with polonium 210 at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, central London.
Barney went missing after his owner was killed in a road accident (Devon and Cornwall Police/PA)

A dog whose disappearance went viral on social media has been found.

Barney, a three-year-old cockapoo, ran off after Jennifer Lowden, 72, died in a road accident on the A374 on the outskirts of Torpoint, south-east Cornwall on January 25.

Devon and Cornwall Police launched a social media campaign to find Barney and his tragic story captured the hearts of the public online.

The appeal by Torpoint Police was viewed more than 70,000 times and the hashtag #findbarney trended on Twitter.

Estate agent Tean Gardiner found the dog near Home Farm in Wilcove.

Pc Jonny Williams, of Torpoint Police, said Barney was "bedraggled but alive" and had been reunited with his family.

"Awesome news and so many people should be proud. The family are so pleased," he added.
The Court of Appeal judges will rule on the case

A victim of domestic violence and the family of a severely disabled teenager have won a ruling that the so-called ''bedroom tax'' discriminates against them.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas and two other Court of Appeal judges declared the discrimination had not been "justified" by the Government.

Prime Minister David Cameron said he would study the judgment after Labour called for the "bedroom tax" to be abolished.

The judges declared that a woman referred to as "A", who lives in a council house fitted with a secure panic room to protect her from a violent ex-partner, and Paul and Sue Rutherford, who look after 15-year-old grandson Warren, had " suffered discrimination" contrary to Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said it had been granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, adding: " We fundamentally disagree with the court's ruling on the ECHR, which directly contradicts the High Court."

Mr Rutherford, from Pembrokeshire, said: "I'm a bit lost for words. I could almost cry with happiness. Other people are going to benefit from this decision as well. That was partly why we did it."

At the Court of Appeal it was argued that there was unlawful discrimination against victims of domestic violence and children in the situation of the Rutherfords' grandson.

Lord Thomas, Lord Justice Tomlinson and Lord Justice Vos allowed the appeals in both cases on the ground that the "admitted discrimination in each case" had "not been justified by the Secretary of State".

One of the cases was brought by single mother A and concerned the effect of the policy on women living in Sanctuary Scheme homes which have been specially adapted because of risks to the women and children who live in them.

The other, brought by the Rutherfords, involved its impact on seriously disabled children who need overnight care.

The Government rejects the term ''bedroom tax'' and says the regulations remove what is in fact a ''spare room subsidy'', with the aim of encouraging people to move to smaller properties and save millions of pounds from the housing benefit bill.

Lord Thomas said the effect of the 2012 housing benefit regulations - which came into force on April 1 2013 - was to reduce housing benefit "if the accommodation in which a person lived exceeded the number of bedrooms deemed to be required as defined by a formula".

That formula was varied under Regulation B13 "which provided that an additional bedroom would be allowed for defined classes of persons".

Both A and the Rutherfords argued that they should be part of that defined class, and that their omission was unlawful discrimination under Article 14.

Lord Thomas said both cases had proceeded on the "accepted basis" that Regulation B13 "constitutes prima facie discrimination" on the grounds of sex in the case of A and disability in the Rutherford action.

He said the primary question for the court was "whether the Secretary of State was able to show that there was objective and reasonable justification for that discrimination which was not manifestly without reasonable foundation".

In A's case the Secretary of State had placed "particular reliance on the fact that A and those in her position were receiving and would receive DHPs (Discretionary Housing Payments) that meant they always had the full amount that would otherwise have been payable as housing benefit".

In the Rutherford case it was contended, said Lord Thomas, that there was "proper justification for treating the accommodation needed for carers of disabled adults and disabled children differently and in any event DHPs would be made in all appropriate cases", as had happened in Warren's case.

Judges have heard that A's former partner has raped, assaulted and threatened to kill her, but she nevertheless faced losing 11.65 a week from her benefits.

This was because her panic room was regarded as a spare room under the regulations and A was deemed to be ''under-occupying'' her home.

The DWP argued that her challenge lacked credibility because funds in the form of discretionary housing payments (DHPs) were available through local councils to people facing exceptional circumstances.

T he Rutherfords care for Warren, who has a rare genetic disorder which means he is unable to walk, talk or feed himself and is doubly incontinent.

The family live in a three-bedroom bungalow adapted for his needs, with the couple in one room, Warren in another, and the third needed for carers staying overnight and to store equipment.

They launched a judicial review over the regulations, which allow for an additional bedroom if the claimant or their partner require overnight care but make no provision for children who need an overnight carer.

During Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron said that " our fundamental position is that it's unfair to subsidise spare rooms in the social sector if you don't subsidise them in the private sector where people are paying housing benefit. That is a basic issue of fairness".

Shadow work and pensions secretary Owen Smith said: "This victory in the Court of Appeal is a massive blow to the Tories' bedroom tax. Surely the time has now come for the Tories to discover a conscience, listen to the courts as well as the public, and scrap the hated bedroom tax."
Lego has produced its first disabled minifigure, to the delight of a campaigning parent upset that millions of children were not represented in some of the world's most popular toys.

Pictures of the plastic figure of a young man using a wheelchair and apparently accompanied by an assistance dog were spotted at the Nuremberg toy fair in Germany and shared on websites devoted to the world's largest toy firm's products.

Lego confirmed that the wheelchair would form part of a set which would go on sale in June.

Rebecca Atkinson, who sparked a global campaign when she posted pictures of toys she had adapted with different disabilities on the internet, said it was a massive step towards ending "cultural marginalisation".

The journalist from London, a mother of two who is partially deaf and has tunnel vision due to genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa, established the #toylikeme movement to secure better representation of the 770,000 disabled children in the UK and 150 million across the globe.

It quickly gained tens of thousands of supporters on social media and resulted in her working as a creative disability consultant with Playmobil to work on adding characters to its range - with more than 20,000 people signing a petition urging Lego to follow suit.

The Danish firm had been criticised by the campaign for "pandering to disability stereotypes" because its only previous wheelchair-using character was an elderly man.

An online campaign via a Lego website for the creation of a Lego wheelchair skatepark was rejected on the basis that submissions with a "political agenda" would not be accepted.

"We are beyond happy right now," Ms Atkinson said.

"Lego have just rocked our brick-built world and made 150 million disabled kids, their mums, dads, pet dogs and hamsters very very happy.

"We're all conga-ing up and down the street chucking coloured bricks like confetti.

"But on a serious note, this move by Lego is massive in terms of ending cultural marginalisation, it will speak volumes to children, disabled or otherwise, the world over."

Ms Atkinson is now seeking investment via a crowdfunding website to grow the organisation and create an online hub to help parents find products which represent disability, and has raised 3,638 of a 16,000 target within just a few days.

"ToyLikeMe has received no funding to date," explains Atkinson.

"We've called in hundreds of favours since establishing, but if we are going to carry on we need to pull our heads out of the toy box and get some real funding to build on what we have already achieved and change the toy box for disabled children today, and those yet to be born."

A photograph of the figure - by the Promobricks blog - was featured on the BrickFans website which paid tribute to the campaign.

"For a number of months a social media campaign called Toys Like Me has called upon toy makers including Lego to start featuring more characters and toys that reflect real life a little more," it said.

"I'm sure you'll agree this is a great step in the right direction by The Lego Group. With Lego being the number one toy brand in the world right now, their products are greatly influential for its younger fan base.

"Providing an able bodied person with the notion that a disability isn't something to be frowned upon while also offering a young disabled person with a positive representation for them to project themselves onto during play, is an achievement which should be saluted."

Pasca Lane, head of PR at disability charity Scope, said: "Everything is awesome!

"This is great news for disabled children and their families.

"One in 14 children in the UK are disabled. Yet they rarely see their lives reflected in toys, and characters in books and films.

"Many parents tell us it is important for their children to have toys which they can identify with because it builds their confidence, self-esteem and the feeling of being included in society.

"It is great that Lego has responded to this demand and will go on sale in June. We hope this move will help build a better future and improve attitudes towards disabled children and their families.

"But too many toy manufacturers are still missing a trick by not making toys with impairments widely available. After all, the spending power of disabled consumers is worth over 200 billion."
Some ex-pupils have said Damian Lewis, pictured, is the wrong choice to launch Acland Burghley School's 50th anniversary celebrations because of his Eton education

Critics who slammed Eton-educated Damian Lewis for opening the anniversary celebrations of a local comprehensive school had missed the point, he said at the event.

The Homeland and Wolf Hall actor instead heaped praise on the "creativity" and "diversity" of Acland Burghley School in Camden, north London which opened its 50th anniversary celebrations on Wednesday.

Former students started a petition against his role as guest of honour after claiming he represented "privilege and inequality" and was no appropriate given the school's "long and proud tradition in comprehensive education".

Standing next to headteacher Nicholas John and Lucy Amis, the daughter of the school's architect Stanley Amis, Lewis joked that he was the "best available" and apologised to those hoping to see the notable former students, Eddy Grant, Ms Dynamite or Madness saxophonist Lee Thompson.

He said: "For those people out there who suggested by kindly writing into the newspapers this morning that perhaps I shouldn't be here at all because I wasn't at the school, what I would say to them is I think they are missing the point slightly because it seems to me that this evening is about more than that.

"It seems to me that this evening is about a celebration of our community here in Tufnell Park and he role the school has played here in Tufnell Park in the last 50 years."

Lewis, whose wife Helen McCrory stood in the audience as he addressed a crowd of approximately 450 before starting a countdown to a laser show, said he had lived in the area for 10 years.

He said: "It strikes me every time I walk down the street that there is more creativity, independence and support in this neighbourhood than any other neighbourhood I have lived in in London.

"That is of course exactly the qualities they teach the students here at Acland Burghley.

"It's central to its ethos, and why it has been such a success and why it has been recognised as special status in performing arts and creative studies."

He added that he was lucky to benefit from a "thriving creative community" at Eton and that schools were more successful if they excelled in the arts.

Speaking from notes he concluded: "I share with you the hope that Acland Burghley can continue to grow and be a beacon of curiosity, independence, creativity and diversity right here in the heart of Tufnell Park."

While many parents and students celebrated his appearance as an "inspiration" - including 13-year-old Louie Cooper who jumped into a picture with the actor, some disagreed.

Rachel Cohen, 44, attended the school between 1982 and 1989 and started the petition which had garnered 100 signatures before the event.

She said: "It's really just about how do you celebrate the anniversary of a really good comprehensive school that has always taken a very radical and socially progressive attitude towards education and been very committed to inclusive education within the community and arts being very central to that."

But she insisted it was not a personal protest against Lewis and she hoped he would become more involved in the school in the future.

Headeacher Mr John, who joined the school in September, is hoping the start of the celebrations will help him to raise money to improve some of the half-century old buildings.

He said he wanted to the school to focus on improving its academic standards and continue excelling in the arts and engagement with the community.

"The fact that he is an actor involved in the community is great," he said about Lewis.

"It's about community and creativity."
David Cameron has been condemned over his response to the refugee crisis in Europe after describing people in a camp in Calais as a "bunch of migrants".

The Refugee Council said Mr Cameron's comments were "disappointing" and called on him to show political leadership in response to the "desperate" situation.

Opposition MPs also lined up to criticise the Prime Minister, who made the "inflammatory" comments during a Commons clash with Jeremy Corbyn.

Lisa Doyle, the Refugee Council's head of advocacy said: "When we are facing the greatest refugee crisis of our time, it is disappointing the Prime Minister is using flippant remarks to score political points.

"We have all seen the pictures of the desperate conditions people are living in across Europe, including just miles from the UK's border. The Prime Minister should be showing political leadership and work with other European countries to ensure that people can live in safety and dignity."

Former shadow cabinet minister Chuka Umunna said the comment was "shameful" and criticised the language as "inflammatory and unbecoming of his office".

Yvette Cooper, who is leading Labour's refugee task force, suggested the PM should use "much more statesmanship-like" language on such a "complex and sensitive" issue.

There was also criticism of the timing of the comment, as the country marked Holocaust Memorial Day.

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: " On Holocaust Memorial Day, the Prime Minister chose to refer to desperate refugees fleeing from war as a 'bunch of migrants', a statement which diminishes his office and our country.

"Whether Mr Cameron planned to use this phrase in advance or whether it was an off the cuff throw away remark it shows his true attitude towards those most in need."

Comedian David Baddiel also expressed concern, writing: "Not the right day #HolocaustMemorialDay for the bunch of migrants thing."

Mr Cameron made the comment at Prime Minister's Questions, in an attack on the actions of the Labour leadership.

He said: "They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain."

After the Commons showdown a senior Labour source said: "The people we saw at Calais and Dunkirk over the weekend were families, kids, babies... to consider those people we saw as a 'bunch of migrants' demonstrates an attitude that is entirely unacceptable to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep."

Business minister Anna Soubry said she would "not necessarily" have used the term "bunch of migrants", and she was "sure" the PM meant to say "group".

"I think what everybody forgets is that in the heat of things one says things that you might say in a conversation, by way of example, but you wouldn't necessarily say when it was analysed and picked apart," she told BBC Radio 4's World At One.

"On the one hand people say, 'Oh God, all politicians they sound the same, they sound like they've been schooled and they are trotting out the lines'.

"But actually when they don't, and actually use the language of ordinary people they get slammed and criticised.

"I will not criticise the PM on this one because I know that when you're standing at the despatch box ... and you have all the noise and the row around you it is very easy to use a word which on reflection may not be the best way.

"I am sure he meant to say a group, but we all use slang."

She added: "I would be amazed if that was a scripted line. I don't believe that for one moment. If anybody says that they are being silly and playing cheap politics."

Asked whether Mr Cameron thought his choice of words was acceptable, a senior Downing Street source said: "The Prime Minister thinks that the key thing here is to get the policies right, and I think that's what the people of Britain are concerned about.

"The policy we are proceeding with is to give nearly 1.2 billion to support people who have been forced from their homes by the Syrian conflict with shelter and food, and also to take refugees from the region rather than providing an incentive for people to make that dangerous journey."

Alex Salmond said he believes the Prime Minister deliberately made the comment to deflect attention away from other issues.

The former SNP leader and first minister gave his views on his new LBC radio show in response to a question from a caller.

Mr Salmond, who now speaks for his party on foreign affairs, said: "Cameron's got form on this. Previously he described people as a 'swarm'. I don't know if a 'bunch' is an improvement.

"A lot of people, including myself, have got a bit of a theory that Cameron does this when he's trying to deflect attention from other things, because he was in trouble on the Google tax deal today. So all of a sudden he comes out with this phrase.

"Now most stuff at Prime Minister's Questions is rehearsed, so my charge against David Cameron is not just he's describing people in pretty disgusting terms, but he's doing it deliberately.

"This isn't something off the cuff .... I think this is calculated and I think that makes it much worse."

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Corbyn condemned what he described as Mr Cameron's "inflammatory language" in the House.

"I have to say I found it shameful that you referred to the people in those camps as 'a bunch of migrants', escalating the tensions on such a serious issue," he wrote.

"It is clear that many are fleeing conflict and human rights abuses that you and I cannot begin to imagine.

"Such dismissive language and tone demeans people's suffering and demeans the office of Prime Minister."
David Cameron has insisted he has done more than any other prime minister to crack down on aggressive tax avoidance amid controversy over Google's 130 million tax deal.

Mr Cameron blamed Labour for failures in collecting taxes from large multinationals after Jeremy Corbyn pressed him on Google's settlement wiht HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

Mr Corbyn said the internet giant made 6 billion profits in the UK between 2005 and 2015, the period covered by the deal, claiming it was paying an effective tax rate of 3%.

Mr Cameron replied: "Let's be clear what we're talking about here, we're talking about a tax that should have been collected under a Labour government, raised by a Conservative Government, that's what we're talking about.

"I do dispute the figures that you give, it's quite right this is done independently by HMRC.

"But I am absolutely clear that no government has done more than this one to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance.

"No government, and certainly not the last Labour government."

Mr Corbyn highlighted the mixed messages from the top of the Tory Party over the deal, with Chancellor George Osborne initially describing it as a "major success" before No 10 rowed back, calling it a "step forward", while Boris Johnson labelled it "derisory".

During Prime Minister's Questions, the Labour leader added: "What exactly is the Government's position on this 3% rate of taxation?"

Mr Cameron then went on to explain the measures the Government has put in place to tackle tax avoidance and evasion before claiming the tax rate for Google under Labour was "0%".

The PM said: "We have put in place the diverted profits tax that means that this company and other companies will pay more tax in future.

"And more tax in future than they ever paid under Labour, where the tax rate for Google was 0%, that is what we face.

"Let me tell you what we have done - we have changed the tax laws so many times that we raised an extra 100 billion from business in the last parliament.

"When I came to power banks didn't pay tax on all their profits - allowed under Labour, stopped under the Tories.

"Investment companies could cut their tax bill by flipping the currency their accounts were in - allowed under Labour, stopped under the Tories.

"Companies could fiddle accounting rules to make losses appear out of thin air - allowed under Labour, stopped under the Tories.

"We've done more on tax evasion and tax avoidance than Labour ever did.

"The truth is you are running to catch up but you haven't got a leg to stand on."

In a week when people are filling in their tax returns, they will be thinking there is one rule for big multinationals and one rule for small businesses and self-employed workers, Mr Corbyn insisted.

The Opposition leader also pointed to a series of meetings Google has had with Government ministers.

"Millions of people are this week filling in their tax returns to get them in by the 31st," he said.

"They have to send the form back, they do not get the option of 25 meetings with 17 ministers to decide what their rate of tax is.

"Many people going to their HMRC offices or returning them online this week will say this - 'Why is there one rule for big multinational companies and another for ordinary, small businesses and self-employed workers?'"

Mr Cameron brushed off the criticism, claiming Mr Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell do not stand up to anyone and that they had "met a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could all come to Britain".

Mr Corbyn this week described the conditions in refugee camps in northern France as "disgraceful" after visiting Dunkirk.

Mr Cameron told him: "All those people filling in their tax returns are going to be paying lower taxes under this Government, that is what's happening.

"And I have to say to you, you can if you want criticise HMRC but HMRC's work is investigated by the National Audit Office and when they did that they found that the settlements that they have reached with companies are fair, that is how it works.

"The shadow chancellor's pointing - the idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable.

"Look at the record over the last week - they met with the unions and they gave them flying pickets.

"They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falkland Islands.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain.

"The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working taxpayers."

Earlier, Mr Corbyn asked his customary question from a member of the public, saying a working 30-something called Jeff had asked whether he could pay the same tax rate as Google and other large corporations.

"What do you say to Jeff?" he asked.

But Mr Cameron criticised the last Labour government, highlighting the lucrative corporate links former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown now enjoy alongside former chancellor Alistair Darling.

He said: "What I say to Jeff is that his taxes are coming down under this Government and Google's taxes are going up under this Government."

Mr Cameron went on: "If like me, you are genuinely angry about what happened to Google under Labour, can I tell you a few people you could call?

"Maybe you should start by calling Tony Blair - you can get him at JP Morgan.

"Call Gordon Brown - apparently you can get him at a Californian bond dealer called PIMCO.

"You can call Alistair Darling - I think he's at Morgan Stanley but it's hard to keep up.

"Those are the people to blame for Google not paying their taxes, we're the ones who got them to pay."
The Prime Minister was taken to task for his comments by Yvette Cooper

David Cameron has come under fire for referring to a "bunch of migrants" when describing Europe's refugee crisis.

Former Labour leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper asked the Prime Minister to withdraw his comments, which were made in response to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's visit to the makeshift Calais camp known as the Jungle.

Ms Cooper, who is chairing Labour's refugee task force, suggested the PM should use "much more statesmanship-like" language on such a "complex and sensitive" issue, particularly given ongoing commemorations of Holocaust victims.

Speaking during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron brushed off criticism of the Government's tax agreement with Google by claiming Mr Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell do not stand up to anyone.

He added they had "met a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could all come to Britain".

Speaking outside the chamber, a senior Labour source said: "The people we saw at Calais and Dunkirk over the weekend were families, kids, babies... to consider those people we saw as a 'bunch of migrants' demonstrates an attitude that is entirely unacceptable to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep."

Commons Speaker John Bercow ruled Mr Cameron's comments were not "disorderly" nor "unparliamentary", adding people will "make their own assessments" of the issue.

Several Labour MPs objected to the comments on Twitter, describing them as "shameful" and the PM as "odious".

Comedian David Baddiel also expressed concern, writing: "Not the right day #HolocaustMemorialDay for the bunch of migrants thing."

Raising a point of order in the Commons, Ms Cooper told Mr Bercow: "The House will have heard many tributes made to Holocaust Memorial Day today and the Holocaust Educational Trust campaign doesn't stand by.

"In that light and in that spirit, don't you think that it was inappropriate for the Prime Minister to use language referring to the refugee crisis in Europe and talk about 'a bunch of migrants'?"

Other Labour MPs could be heard saying "disgraceful" as Ms Cooper repeated the PM's comment.

Ms Cooper went on to the Speaker: "Do you think it'd be appropriate for the House to ask the Prime Minister to withdraw that language, to use much more statesmanship-like language about the need to build a cross-party consensus on such a complex and sensitive issue?"

Mr Bercow replied: "You speak with enormous experience in this House and I respect what you say.

"I completely identify and empathise with your observations about Holocaust Memorial Day, which you and I on other occasions have marked at events together - so I take what you say extremely seriously.

"I do have to say to you and the House that the observation in question was not disorderly, it was not unparliamentary.

"Everybody must take responsibility for the remarks he or she makes in this House and it is very clear that you would not have used that term.

"It is open to the Prime Minister to comment on it if he wishes but I am not entitled to try to oblige him to say anything on the matter.

"But you have made your point very clearly and it's on the record and people will make their own assessments of this matter."

Earlier, Mr Cameron had told Mr Corbyn: "All those people filling in their tax returns are going to be paying lower taxes under this Government, that is what's happening.

"And I have to say to you, you can if you want criticise HMRC but HMRC's work is investigated by the National Audit Office and when they did that they found that the settlements that they have reached with companies are fair, that is how it works.

"The shadow chancellor's pointing - the idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable.

"Look at the record over the last week - they met with the unions and they gave them flying pickets.

"They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falkland Islands.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain.

"The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working taxpayers."

A senior Downing Street source later said the Prime Minister had been "referring to the fact that the Labour approach of effectively opening the doors and allowing people to flow in would just provide an incentive for more people to come to Calais and wouldn't deal with the issue but would actually make the issue much worse".

Asked whether Mr Cameron thought his choice of words was acceptable, the source said: "The Prime Minister thinks that the key thing here is to get the policies right, and I think that's what the people of Britain are concerned about.

"The policy we are proceeding with is to give nearly 1.2 billion to support people who have been forced from their homes by the Syrian conflict with shelter and food, and also to take refugees from the region rather than providing an incentive for people to make that dangerous journey."

A Labour source rejected the suggestion that the party would "open the doors" to migrants, pointing out that Mr Corbyn had said priority should be given to refugees - particularly children - with links to Britain and that applications should be processed more quickly.

Labour MP Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) told BBC2's Daily Politics: "I was shocked when I heard the Prime Minister say it. It was offensive, it was hurtful and it was divisive.

"It is not the first time we have heard David Cameron slip up in this way."

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey told the same programme: "We always talk about language, people will have their views.

"The Prime Minister was making the point that he does not agree with Jeremy Corbyn that the people camped in Calais should come to this country and be given a free pass."

Speaking later outside the chamber, Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said: " On Holocaust Memorial Day, the Prime Minister chose to refer to desperate refugees fleeing from war as a 'bunch of migrants', a statement which diminishes his office and our country.

"Whether Mr Cameron planned to use this phrase in advance or whether it was an off-the-cuff throwaway remark it shows his true attitude towards those most in need. I call on him again to offer safe haven to 3,000 young children who desperately need our help."
Sir Bernard Ingham says the EU is largely useless when it comes to international action

The European Union is useless, corrupt and riddled with fraud, Sir Bernard Ingham has said.

In a withering attack, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary asked: "Why should the UK throw another 12 billion a year down these mafia and assorted criminal drains?"

Writing in the Yorkshire Post, Sir Bernard said that in his renegotiations, David Cameron was asking for too little and would get less.

"Europhiles might usefully address themselves not to the question why we should stay in the EU, but why we should ever want to be a member of it at all when the institution is corrupt and so riddled with fraud that the auditors have felt unable to sign off its accounts for nigh on 20 years.

"It is dedicated to exactly what we do not want - ever closer union. It has already wrecked much of Europe's economy, though not the UK's, with its single currency, and has generated politically dangerous levels of unemployment in its southern states."

He said the EU was amassing powers at the expense of the member states, and had substantially usurped the authority of those parliaments, with potentially damaging consequences for Western democracy.

Sir Bernard also said the EU was largely useless when it came to international action, even though it pretended to have a foreign service.

"The present EU model is a discredited mess and everyone knows we cannot go on like this.

"What is so frightening about standing on our own two feet in a developing world, trading with whom we like? What are our tycoons afraid of? What is so alarming about the British Government, monitored by the Westminster Parliament, recovering its power to govern the British people?"
A former Labour MP has been appointed chief executive of the trade body for the civil nuclear industry.

Tom Greatrex, ex-MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, will take up the post at the Nuclear Industry Association next week, succeeding Keith Parker.

Mr Greatrex, an opposition spokesman on energy until he lost his seat in the general election, said : "I am delighted to be joining the Nuclear Industry Association at such an exciting time. Nuclear power is an integral part of a secure low carbon energy mix and, as the COP21 negotiations in Paris demonstrated, will have a key part to play in reducing global carbon emissions in the future.

"Providing thousands of high quality, skilled jobs in all parts of the country and with internationally recognised industrial and academic expertise, there are significant opportunities for our civil nuclear industry in the UK and around the world."

Lord Hutton, Nuclear Industry Association chairman, said: "Through a rigorous appointments process we know Tom will bring a detailed knowledge of the industry and strong leadership to the nuclear sector at a pivotal time in the UK. We look forward to working with him."
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The five men were cleared of conspiracy to defraud at Southwark Crown Court

Five brokers accused of trying to fix the Libor rates have been cleared, with one who had been nicknamed Lord Libor branding the case against them as "a complete shambles".

Prosecutors had alleged the men conspired with a currency trader to fix Libor rates in exchange for offers of treats like takeaway curries and drinks.

But after an almost four-month trial, a jury at London's Southwark Crown Court cleared five of the six men.

Noel Cryan, 49, of Chislehurst, Kent; Danny Wilkinson, 48, of Hornchurch, Essex; Colin Goodman, 53, of Epsom, Surrey; James Gilmour, 50 of Benfleet, Essex; and Terry Farr, 44, of Southend-on-Sea in Essex - have all been cleared of conspiracy to defraud by trying to manipulate the Libor rate linked to the Yen.

Darrell Read, 50, of Wellington, New Zealand was cleared of one count but the jury has been asked to continue deliberations on Thursday morning in relation to another count.

The men had been accused of helping trader Tom Hayes manipulate the Libor rate over a period of four years.

Hayes, who was convicted of conspiracy to defraud earlier this year, repeatedly asked them via instant messages and emails for help getting the Libor rates set in his favour, the court had heard.

A statement released by solicitors acting for Mr Goodman, who the trial heard had been known as Lord Libor, said: " We can only reiterate what his counsel told the jury, that the SFO case was a complete shambles and should never have been brought."

Matthew Frankland, the solicitor for Mr Wilkinson, said the evidence of one witness "was likened to consulting a clairvoyant", and said most of those prosecuted in Libor cases "are relatively junior within the different organisations, with more senior people not being held to account".

Mr Farr's legal representative Katie Wheatley, said he was relieved to have been acquitted after "years of gruelling proceedings".

But the director of the SFO, David Green, defended bringing the case.

He said: "The key issue in this trial was whether these defendants were party to a dishonest agreement with Tom Hayes. By their verdicts the jury have said that they could not be sure that this was the case.

"Nobody could sensibly suggest that these charges should not have been brought and considered by a jury."

The brokerage firms that employed four of the men declined to comment on the verdict.

A spokesperson for Tullett Prebon, who employed Mr Cryan, said: "We note the jury's findings that Mr Cryan is not guilty of conspiracy to defraud in connection with the manipulation of Libor and have nothing further to add."

Icap, who employed Mr Read, Mr Goodman and Mr Wilkinson, refused to comment as they have done throughout the trial.

Libor is the term for benchmark rates which underpin hundreds of trillions of pounds of contracts, from mortgages to corporate lending.
Labour MPs will choose a new member of the party's ruling National Executive Committee after kicking out Steve Rotheram (pictured), an aide to Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour MPs will choose a new member of the party's ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) today after kicking out an aide to Jeremy Corbyn.

Steve Rotheram was forced to step down after the parliamentary party voted overwhelmingly to bar Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPS) from acting as the backbench representative on the body.

The MP for Liverpool Walton was already on the NEC when he was appointed as the leader's PPS in September.

A secret ballot is being held to fill the vacancy, with Shabana Mahmood - who quit the Labour frontbench when Mr Corbyn took charge - competing against George Howarth - who defied the leader to back bombing Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

An effort to get Mr Rotheram reinstated had been expected at Tuesday's NEC, where Mr Corbyn's allies have a slender majority.

However, the bid was apparently abandoned following legal advice that the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) was entitled to change its own standing orders.

A showdown over a controversial move to expand the NEC's terms of reference, potentially giving it more power over policy-making than the shadow cabinet, has also seemingly been delayed.
A father who was left for dead by a speeding hit-and-run driver in a suspected stolen car is slowly on the mend, his wife said.

Andy Payne, 53, is recovering at home after being flung into the air by a Fiat 500 which smashed into him as he crossed the road.

Shocking footage of the hit-and-run in Montague Place in the Kemptown area of Brighton has been viewed by almost three million people, Sussex Police said.

At the family home in Hove, East Sussex, Mr Payne's wife Lisa spoke briefly and said: "He's getting better slowly. He's not too bad."

She declined to comment further as police continued to question a man arrested on Tuesday night over the crash which happened at 3.40pm on January 14.

The 31-year-old suspect from Brighton was detained after trying to hide on a roof in Donald Hall Road. He was held on suspicion of dangerous driving causing serious injury, attempting to pervert the course of justice and aggravated vehicle taking.

A 56-year-old woman, also from Brighton, who was arrested on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice has been bailed until April 3.

In the footage released by police, a witness can be seen holding their hand to their mouth in shock at the impact.

Mr Payne is seen sprawled motionless in the middle of the road as passers-by stand around in disbelief.

Sergeant Dan Pitcher said: "We know the CCTV was very shocking but almost three million people watched it, we had 16,000 comments and more than 6,000 liked it on Facebook alone.

"More than 300 people retweeted our appeal on Twitter. We have passed on all the well-wishes from people on social media to the victim who is grateful of the support.

"He is continuing to recover well at home." Meanwhile, police have traced the drivers of four vehicles they were looking to speak to, he added.

Officers are appealing for witnesses, and anyone with information is asked to call Sussex Police on 101, quoting Operation Northdown.
Downing Street says the 130 million settlement with Google covering the last 10 years is a 'good deal'

David Cameron has said he is "genuinely angry" about Google's tax treatment - but insisted his Government is making up for lax rules under Labour.

The Prime Minister said he "disputed" claims that a 130 million back-tax settlement by the internet giant meant it was paying a rate of just 3%.

He said those upset about the firm's tax should blame Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who allowed it to pay "zero percent".

The comments, in angry clashes with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions, came with ministers under fresh pressure to justify the deal struck by HM Revenue & Customs.

Italy is said to be about to seal an agreement which will see Google pay a higher proportion of its profits, while Mr Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and other senior figures are under close scrutiny over their links to the internet giant.

French MEP Eva Joly, vice chairwoman of the Special European Parliamentary Committee on Tax Rulings, said it wanted Mr Osborne to answer questions about the "very bad deal".

"This bad deal is very bad news for everybody because it shows that the UK prepares itself to become a kind of a tax haven to attract the multinationals," she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

In the Commons, Mr Corbyn asked the premier whether it was correct that Google's settlement meant it had an effective 3% tax rate.

Mr Cameron replied: "We're talking about tax that should have been collected under a Labour government, raised by a Conservative government.

"I do dispute the figures that he gives. It's quite right this is done independently by HMRC, but I'm absolutely clear that no government has done more than this one to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. No government and certainly not the last Labour government."

Mr Corbyn, who pointed out that the inquiries into Google had started under Labour, said ordinary taxpayers would be angry that such firms were getting special treatment.

But Mr Cameron said the new Diverted Profit Tax would mean companies would "pay more tax in future".

He said the coalition had raised 100 billion extra from business in the last parliament by closing loopholes.

Mr Cameron insisted he was "genuinely angry" about the situation with Google, which he said had been allowed to pay "zero percent" under Labour.

"Maybe he should start by calling Tony Blair - you can get him at JP Morgan. Call Gordon Brown - apparently you can get him at a Californian bond dealer called Pimco. Call Alistair Darling - I think he is at Morgan Stanley, but it is hard to keep up," he told MPs.

"Those are the people to blame for Google not paying their taxes."

Speaking outside the chamber, a senior Downing Street source insisted the agreement with Google was "a decision for HM Revenue and Customs" rather than ministers.

"The Prime Minister's view is that it is HMRC's role to ensure that companies are paying tax owed," said the source. "We had a situation under Labour where these companies were paying no tax."

Asked about reports that other European countries were taking a tougher line with the internet search giant, the source said: "My understanding is that the French and Italians have said how much tax they would like Google to pay. Let's see what is actually paid. I'm not sure if any tax has been paid in those countries.

"The situation here is that HMRC has actually been paid, and this is money that should have been paid under a Labour government."

The source described Labour's complaints as "breathtaking hypocrisy", as the Government had closed more than 40 tax loopholes which had been exploited by companies under the previous administration.

But a Labour source said: "The Government is responsible for Revenue and Customs, there's ministerial sign-off. Osborne has to take responsibility for what's going on. He didn't even turn up in the House yesterday to take questions about it.

"We're calling for a proper deal for everyone, including global corporations, and also transparency."

Business minister Anna Soubry said the Google settlement was a "huge step forward", and warned it was "dangerous" to second-guess the HMRC officials who struck the deal.

But she admitted it did not appear to be an "awful lot of money".

"Of course everybody is going to look at it and say it doesn't seem like an awful lot of money," she told BBC Radio 4's World At One.

"These companies that operate in this way, it is hugely complicated, and there are little gaps and holes that they can get through, and we are plugging them."

Ms Soubry added: "It doesn't sound like an awful lot of money, of course it doesn't. It would be silly to say otherwise. But if it is within the rules ... "

Asked why ministers including Mr Cameron had met Google executives on a number of occasions in recent years, the PM's official spokeswoman said: "There are a number of important policy issues where the Prime Minister might be engaging with companies such as Google."

The spokeswoman added: "I think protecting our children online and the safety of our country and the risks online are more than enough reason to justify meetings."

Asked whether Mr Cameron would support changes to require companies to publish their tax returns, the spokeswoman said: "There is a long-standing issue of taxpayer confidentiality. That's something that's reflected in many countries around the world.

"So as you look at how to increase transparency, you need to think how you are driving an international, global approach, so that other countries are taking similar action to you. That's what the Prime Minister did during the course of the last Parliament when he put this issue front and centre of the G8 agenda."

Shadow Treasury chief secretary Seema Malhotra released a letter to National Audit Office (NAO) head Sir Amyas Morse calling on the public spending watchdog to investigate the deal - after the PM told MPs it was responsible for scrutinising HMRC's work.

"Tax revenue not collected is revenue foregone - this has important implications for the funding of public services," she told him.

She also urged the NAO to investigate "whether the level of cuts that HMRC has been subject to since 2010, and the numbers of specialist staff, has impacted on its ability to negotiate fair tax settlements with multinational corporations such as Google".
The Ocean Reunion team celebrates after completing the gruelling 3,000-mile race in 37 days nine hours and 12 minutes (Ben Duffy/PA)

Four school friends have sailed into the history books after tackling the world's toughest rowing race in record time.

Angus Collins, Gus Barton, Joe Barnett and Jack Mayhew defied tropical storms, hallucinations and agonising pressure sores during the 3,000-mile journey to the finish line in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.

The team, Ocean Reunion, was greeted with a heroes' welcome when they docked at English Harbour in Antigua after 37 days and nine hours at sea, where they were met by family and friends from the UK.

Sporting beards and all-over tans, the quartet - who are hoping to raise 100,000 to be split between the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and the Teenage Cancer Trust - celebrated with local beer and chocolate after tentatively taking their first few steps on dry land in more than a month.

The keen athletes, who met at Uppingham School in the East Midlands, were among 26 teams to have left La Gomera in the Canary Islands on December 20.

Collins, the 26-year-old team skipper and former Oxford Brookes anthropology student from Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, said: "We did a lot of planning, we spent a long time on the water, so for this to all come together is amazing."

Former Exeter University sport science student Barton, 25 from Diss, Norfolk, said he would compete in the annual race again - but only if he was asked by one of his Ocean Reunion crew mates.

He added: "I don't think words can describe the feeling as we pulled into the harbour. It completely blew us away. We came around the corner and all of us just got goosebumps all over."

Mayhew, 26, from Uppingham, who studied business at Newcastle University with Barnett, said: "It is cheesy to say but there hasn't been a cross word in 37 days of us rowing. To do that is a pretty good achievement in itself.

"We've just been so close. If there is just a little bit of tension it can just turn horrendous in a small environment like that, so we just lived harmoniously all the way across."

Barnett, 25, from Colchester, Essex, said the race went better than planned. "Before you leave you have all that irrational fear of sharks and stuff, whereas when you're out there you have more rational fears about the water," he said.

The team rowed in pairs in two-hour shifts to beat the previous race record by four days.

Race organiser Carsten Heron Olsen said: "We're delighted for Ocean Reunion and their record-breaking win of the concept class in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.

"The team showed determination from day one, battling huge tropical storms, sleep deprivation, seasickness, 40ft waves and excruciating body sores.

"The people of Antigua have given them an unforgettable welcome and we're all looking forward to hearing their tales from the ocean."

Talisker brand manager Sarah Fleming said: "Only one week ago the fleet faced a tropical storm, which developed into Hurricane Alex.

"The Ocean Reunion team has shown determination to win from day one of the race and it has certainly paid off with this highly commendable record breaking victory."

Helen Bearfield-Swift, from the Teenage Cancer Trust, said: "Ocean Reunion have been utterly incredible from start to end.

"Winning the world's toughest row is a fantastic accolade to their determination, passion and strength and we're so grateful they chose us to fund-raise for."

Claire Phillips, from the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, said: "This is a fantastic achievement for Ocean Reunion, but they have certainly put a great deal of effort into reaching this point.

"We are incredibly grateful to Jack, Angus, Joe and Gus for the phenomenal fund-raising they have been doing for us in the months leading up to the challenge and for what they have endured over the past month or so at sea."

Female foursome Row Like A Girl, featuring Collins' sister Bella, are currently in second place.

To track the teams, visit taliskerwhiskyatlanticchallenge.com.
RBS said it was also pumping another 4.2 billion pounds into its pension scheme.

Royal Bank of Scotland has confirmed it will post a loss for 2015 after taking a 2.5 billion hit including more mammoth charges for mis-selling scandals.

Bosses at the bank said the latest "clean-up" charges are set to see it remain in the red when it posts full-year results next month - its eighth year running of annual losses.

RBS is setting aside another 500 million for payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling claims, as well as 1.5 billion to cover US legal action on toxic mortgage-backed bonds sold before the financial crisis .

It also also revealed a 498 million write-down on the value of its troubled private bank, Coutts, while it said it was pumping another 4.2 billion into its pension scheme.

While the pension payment will largely come from reserves, the remaining 2.5 billion in provisions and write-downs will directly hit its bottom line.

Shares in RBS sank 3% to a new three-year low.

RBS chief executive Ross McEwan said: "I am determined to put the issues of the past behind us."

He added: "We've always been open about the scale of past issues facing RBS and, although there is clearly much more to do, this announcement is a further step towards addressing legacy issues."

The additional provision for US mortgage legal action takes its total to 3.8 billion, but further hefty charges are expected as the bank nears a settlement with authorities in America.

RBS stressed the latest provision only covers civil claims and does not relate to ongoing investigations by the Department of Justice or US attorneys.

It is the last of the major banks to settle with US authorities, with more than a dozen lenders already having agreed settlements.

The bank's PPI provision sees its total bill for the scandal reach 4.3 billion and Mr McEwan said it was a "lesson to the entire banking industry of the importance of treating customers fairly".

Rival high street bank Santander also counted the cost of the mis-selling saga as the Spanish-owned lender posted a 4% drop in profits for 2015 to 1.3 billion after it took another 450 million charge for PPI.

RBS , which is still 73% owned by the Government, will reveal the scale of its losses when it posts full-year results on February 26.

It posted 3.5 billion in annual losses last year, taking the running total to nearly 50 billion since it was bailed out in 2008.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: "It's another bitter pill, but putting legacy issues behind it is essential if Chancellor George Osborne is going to off-load the Government's stake during this parliament."

But banking analyst Gary Greenwood, at Shore Capital, said that, while "disappointing", the latest financial charges are not unexpected.

RBS said the extra PPI payment should draw a line under its financial toll for the scandal, covering mis-selling compensation up to the proposed two-year deadline being set by regulators for claims.

Its pension payment comes after the group revised its accounting policy for the defined benefit scheme.

The fund was closed to new members 10 years ago, but still has around 220,000 members.
Details of the offences cannot be reported until the Supreme Court makes its decision

A convicted murderer sent to a psychiatric hospital has won his Supreme Court battle to keep his identity secret.

The double killer, in his 40s, who can only be referred to as "C", succeeded in his challenge to a refusal of the Court of Appeal to grant him anonymity in legal proceedings.

C, who has had mental health problems for much of his life, was released from a secure psychiatric unit last October, just days before the Supreme Court began considering his case.

The court was told the Parole Board had agreed to his release on licence, and he was in the process of changing his name to start a new life.

Lady Hale, the court's deputy president, ruled that an anonymity order was "necessary in the interests of this particular patient".

The judge described C's crime as "horrendous" and said it had caused "incalculable distress to the families of the victims".

But without anonymity there was "a very real risk that the progress he has made during his long years of treatment in hospital would be put in jeopardy and his reintegration in the community, which was an important purpose of his transfer to hospital, will not succeed".

The anonymity issue arose after C applied for a High Court judicial review of the Home Secretary's decision - made well before C eventually won parole - refusing him unescorted leave in the community.

Stephen Knafler QC, appearing for C, accepted that his crimes - the killing of an ex-girlfriend and her new companion - were "high up on the scale of horrific".

But Mr Knafler argued legal challenges involving mental health patients should be held in private - or at least with the individual's identity protected.

The case raised a point of general public importance - whether mental health patients are entitled to anonymity when involved in legal proceedings connected with their detention, care or treatment under the 1983 Mental Health Act, said the QC.

A High Court judge and three appeal court judges rejected the pleas for anonymity.

But five Supreme Court judges - Lady Hale sitting with Lord Clarke, Lord Wilson, Lord Carnwath and Lord Hughes - unanimously allowed C's last-ditch challenge to the highest court in the land.

Lady Hale said: "There is a long-standing practice that certain classes of people, principally children and mental patients, should not be named in proceedings about their care, treatment and property."

It would be wrong to presume an order should be made "in every case", and a balance had to be struck, said the judge.

The public had a right to know what was going on in the courts, particularly in cases involving notorious criminals, and needed to be reassured sensible decisions were being made.

But that "right to know" had to be balanced against the potential harm the disclosure of a patient's identity could cause to the patient "and perhaps also the hospital, those treating him and other patients".

The purpose of detention in a psychiatric hospital for treatment was "to make the patient better, so that he is no longer a risk either to himself or to others".

"That whole therapeutic exercise may be put in jeopardy if confidential information is disclosed in a way which enables the public to identify the patient."

The judge said victims of crime had certain rights under the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004.

"These rights, though limited, should enable the providers (of probation services) to reassure the victims' families in this case that the arrangements made for the discharge of the patient will not put them at risk in any way."

Referring to C's change of name after his case received a high level of media attention, the judge said: "He is much more likely to be able to lead a successful life in the community if his identity is not generally known.

"The risk of 'jigsaw' identification, of people putting two and two together, will remain despite the change of name.

"Putting all the factors into the balance, I conclude that an anonymity order is necessary in the interests of this particular patient."
The couple's project, Save China's Tigers, acquired land in South Africa with the aim of ''re-wilding' South China tigers

A couple who launched a project aimed at saving endangered Chinese tigers, then got involved in a divorce cash battle, have been warned by a senior judge that all the money they are fighting over could go to lawyers.

Lady Justice King - who sits in the Court of Appeal - issued the warning after urging former banker Stuart Bray and conservationist Li Quan to negotiate and settle their differences.

The judge says the couple, who launched the Save China's Tigers project more than a decade ago, have already run up legal bills of more than 2 million - a nd she says there is a "real possibility" that the "funds at the centre of the dispute" will be "wholly dissipated in costs".

Ms Li has won the latest round of the fight.

Two appeal judges - Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs - decided in December that a judge's ruling in favour of Mr Bray following a High Court trial should be reviewed at a full Court of Appeal hearing.

And on Wednesday the two judges dismissed a bid by Mr Bray to halt that appeal hearing.

But Lady Justice King warned Ms Li that the price of her latest win might be too great.

"In the event that the wife succeeds in her appeal, it may well be a Pyrrhic victory for her, leading to re-trial at vast further expense and a real possibility that the funds at the centre of the dispute will have been wholly dissipated in costs," said Lady Justice King, in a written ruling dismissing Mr Bray's application to stop the hearing in the appeal court.

"It is for that reason that the court (has) urged the parties to negotiate."

The couple initially fought at a hearing in the High Court in London and Ms Li had complained about a ruling by judge Sir Paul Coleridge.

She argued that money put into the Save China's Tigers charity was used to fund the couple's ''personal lives'', but Mr Bray disagreed.

Sir Paul had ruled in Mr Bray's favour b ut Ms Li complained that there was a ''lack of detail'' in Sir Paul's ruling and called for a review.

Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs concluded in December that Sir Paul's ruling should be reviewed at a full Court of Appeal hearing.

Mr Bray then complained about their decision.

He said lawyers representing Ms Li had "grievously misled" Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs.

And he said Ms Li's request for permission to appeal against Sir Paul's ruling should be re-argued at a fresh hearing.

Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs disagreed and dismissed his application.

Judges have heard that Save China's Tigers had acquired land in South Africa with the aim of ''re-wilding'' South China tigers.
Coles and Lion milk recall in WA

Coles and Lion have issued recalls for milk a number of milk products sold in Western Australia after discovering a microbial coliforms contamination.

The two Coles branded milks are Coles Brand Western Australian fresh hilo milk 98% fat free carton 1L and Coles Brand Western Australian fresh full cream milk carton 1 litre. Coles is only recalling milks with the use-by date of 6 February 2016. Lion is the producer of these products.

Lions other milks which have been recalled in WA include:

Pura Hi-Lo 600ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Pura Hi-Lo 1L with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Strawberry 300ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Strawberry 600ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Strawberry 1L with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Double Shot iced Coffee 600ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Mocha 600ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Mocha 1L with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Coffee Light 600ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

Masters Chocolate 300ml with the use by date of 6 February 2016

Masters Chocolate 600ml with the use by date of 6 February 2016

Farmers Union Iced Coffee 600ml with the use by date of 7 February 2016

The contamination was discovered by Lion through routine internal testing, although there had been no consumer complaints to date.

Importantly, Lion has undertaken additional testing on all retention samples for these batches, and, to date, testing has found no evidence of any contaminant know to cause illness, Lion said in a statement.

Lion believes that the contamination is an isolated incident only impacting one manufacturing line on the 23 January 2016 at its Bentley dairy site which is located in Perth.

Both the Australian government agency Food Standards Australia New Zealand and Lion say consumers concerned about their health should seek immediate medical advice.

If the Coles milk is returned to its point of purchase consumers will receive a full refund. Lion is advising its customers to dispose of its other milks and contact its Customer Enquires Centre for a refund.
Campaign group Migration Watch UK claims Britain could slash net migration by more than 100,000 a year if it leaves the EU.

David Cameron has scrapped a planned visit to Scandinavia so he can travel to Brussels for talks with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker as his planned renegotiation of Britain's EU membership enters a crucial period.

The Prime Minister cancelled meetings with his counterparts in Sweden and Denmark to meet Mr Juncker on Friday for talks, weeks before European Union leaders consider his demands for reforms.

Downing Street denied that the PM's hastily rearranged plans were a sign of panic over whether he will be able to secure a deal on his reform agenda at a European Council summit in the Belgian capital on February 18-19, and pave the way for the in/out referendum he has promised by the end of 2017.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Tuesday that it will be "much more difficult" to stage the referendum before the summer if no agreement is reached in February, and "impossible" if there is no deal at a later summit in March.

Mr Hammond acknowledged that Britain's demands were "not number one on the European agenda" for its EU partners.

European Council president Donald Tusk has said he will produce a paper ahead of the summit, outlining "concrete proposals" on Britain's concerns about sovereignty, migration, competitiveness and protections for non-eurozone states.

A senior Number 10 source declined to say whether Mr Cameron or Mr Juncker had requested Friday's meeting, saying only: "As you would expect, as we get closer to the February Council, there are meetings to be held with some of the people most closely involved in the process, such as President Juncker.

"The opportunity for a meeting on Friday has come up, so we are taking that opportunity."

The source insisted the last-minute addition of a meeting with the EC president was "absolutely" a positive development.

Asked whether it reflected concern that the timetable for agreement may be slipping, the PM's official spokeswoman said: " Across Europe, we are seeing leaders - whether in the institutions or other countries - clear that they want to see a deal secured in February.

"The ambition is there. There's clearly more work to do. The PM has said many times that what matters most is that we get the substance right and fix the problems and concerns of the British people."

Meanwhile, a senior Brussels official insisted that the European Commission would not publish propaganda about the benefits of EU membership in the run-up to the vote but would "continue to inform citizens" about its work.

Jonathan Faull, who is leading the commission's work on Mr Cameron's demands for a new deal, came under pressure about the role the Brussels bureaucracy will play - and the taxpayers' money it will spend - in promoting the benefits of EU membership ahead of the in/out vote.

He insisted the commission will "continue to inform citizens" but will not "participate actively" or finance campaigns in the referendum.

Ukip MEP Roger Helmer said: "It is an affront to democracy for foreign institutions to spend taxpayers' money in Britain seeking to influence the outcome of a British referendum," and added he did not believe Mr Faull's assurance that the commission would not produce propaganda.

Ukip leader Nigel Farage tweeted: "I anticipate a wall of European Commission money flooding UK masquerading as 'information', as happened in Ireland."

Mr Faull told a meeting of MEPs from the EFDD (Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy) group, which includes Ukip: "T he commission will not spend a penny on propaganda in the referendum campaign.

"We do not intend to indulge in propaganda at all - I don't think we ever do, by the way - and ... we have no intention of participating directly in any referendum campaign.

"We never do, and the United Kingdom will not be different from previous ones."

But he added: "Of course, the normal business of the European Union will continue and of course the United Kingdom remains a member state of the European Union throughout this period - and I hope for a very long period thereafter."
Experts in Recife, Brazil, try to destroy Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit the Zika virus (AP)

An investigation into the Zika virus has found fewer confirmed cases of a rare brain defect than first feared, new figures from Brazil's Health Ministry show.

So far, only 270 of 4,180 suspected cases have been confirmed as microcephaly, with the brain damage associated with the defect ruled out in 462 cases. Researchers are still studying 3,448 of the cases, which were recorded from October 22

Brazilian officials still say they believe there's a sharp increase in cases of microcephaly and strongly suspect the Zika virus, which appeared in the country last year, is to blame.

Pregnant women have been warned to reconsider visits to areas where Zika is present.

The rare birth defect, which can also be caused by factors such as infections, malnutrition or drugs, means babies have unusually small heads, 32 centimetres or less in circumference, and it can cause lasting developmental problems.

The cases reported to the Health Ministry include delivered infants, stillborn and miscarried babies, and foetuses shown to have unusually small heads by ultrasound or other diagnostic tests, the ministry said. It then tests to see if neurological imaging shows the brain has been affected.

Officials said babies found to be microcephalic and their mothers are given additional tests to see if they had the Zika virus - often a difficult process. Six of the 270 confirmed microcephaly cases were found to have the virus. Two were stillborn and four were live births, three of whom later died, the ministry said.

Brazilian health officials estimate they had 150 cases of microcephaly in all of 2014.

The Health Ministry said Brazilian states were not required to report microcephaly cases before November. That could mean the 2014 list didn't fully account for all cases, though the ministry dismissed the idea there might have been a large number of unreported cases.

On Tuesday, Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro announced that 220,000 military personnel were being deployed to bolster efforts to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Castro said the government also would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm as the virus' symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. Then late last year, Brazilian researchers reported they suspected Zika was linked to the dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly.

The World Health Organisation has stressed that a link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei said he no longer wanted to have his works on display at the Aros museum in Aarhus and the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is withdrawing his works from two museums in Denmark to protest against a new law that allows Danish authorities to seize valuables from migrants.

"Basically it's an insult to human dignity to have that kind of policy," Ai told the Associated Press from Lesbos, the Greek island where many migrants enter Europe from Turkey.

The Danish parliament on Tuesday approved a government proposal requiring migrants to hand over valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner (1,000) to help cover their housing and food costs while their cases are being processed.

Human rights activists have denounced the move as degrading and inhumane. The Danish government says it is simply applying the same rules to migrants as to Danes who receive social benefits.

Ai announced on social media that he was withdrawing his works from exhibitions at the Aros museum in the city of Aarhus and the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen. He said he also called curators at both museums to explain his decision.

Ai told the AP it made him "angry and surprised" to hear about the Danish law after seeing people from Syria and other places arrive on the shores of Lesbos.

He said he has been working there since Christmas, setting up a studio to document the migrant crisis.

"They are shaking, they are wet and they are just trying to escape from war," he said. "But they don't have to be penniless. They are not beggars. This is about their dignity."

Jens Faurschou, who owns the Faurschou Foundation, confirmed he spoke to Ai and that he supported his decision.

"He told me he spent all night reading the news about Denmark," Mr Faurschou said. "He was very sad about it."

Besides the rules on valuables, the new law also extends from one year to three the period that family members must wait before they can join a refugee in Denmark.

Erlend Hoeyersten, the director of the Aros museum, said in a statement that he has "great respect" for Ai's criticism of Danish immigration policies, "but I also find it unreasonable that an entire people is punished for the government's policies".

Ai, whose work is often critical of Chinese authorities, said he was not trying to punish anyone.

"As an artist this is the only thing I can do," he said. "If he feels punished that's too bad."
In the wake of the VW scandal 'it is essential to restore a level playing field and fair competition in the market', an EU commissioner said

The European Union's executive has proposed wholesale changes to tests for new car models to crack down on excessive emissions and avoid scandals like the one that hit Volkswagen and the sector last year.

Emissions from cars on the road in the EU have been found to be four to five times above the official limits.

That is largely because the current tests are done in labs, where car-makers are able to cut corners to pass. The back seats might be pulled out to reduce weight, for example, or the doors taped over to reduce air drag.

Under the new rules, the member states and the EU Commission would be allowed to carry out spot tests on cars that have already been released on to the market.

The EU also wants to do away with a system whereby car companies can pay technical services to carry out the testing and thereby cut any possible financial links between the industry and the testers.

Vehicle testing, which is currently carried out in individual states, would come under greater centralised European oversight under the new rules.

EU commissioner Jyrki Katainen said that in the wake of the VW scandal "it is essential to restore a level playing field and fair competition in the market".

The proposals now go to the EU member states and the European Parliament for further debate before they can become law.

"To regain customers' trust in this important industry, we need to tighten the rules but also ensure they are effectively observed," Mr Katainen said.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and Italian premier Matteo Renzi at the Campidoglio, Capitol Hill, in Rome (AP)

Italy's culture minister has criticised as "incomprehensible" the decision to cover up naked statues at a Rome museum where Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was visiting.

Dario Franceschini said that neither he nor premier Matteo Renzi were informed about the decision, which was apparently taken by lower-ranking officials in a bid to avoid offending the visiting leader.

The cover-up involved the placement of several wooden panels to shield nude statues at Rome's Capitoline Museums, where Mr Rouhani and Mr Renzi held a joint press conference on Monday.

The measures made headlines across Italy and prompted some politicians to accuse the government of caving in to "cultural submission".

"I think there easily would have been other ways to not offend an important foreign guest without this incomprehensible choice of covering up the statues," Mr Franceschini said.

He spoke to reporters at the Colosseum, where he gave Mr Rouhani a guided tour before the Iranian delegation left for France.

Mr Rouhani, for his part, said the Iranians had not requested any such measures by saying "there were no contacts about this". But he seemed to appreciate the gesture.

"I know that Italians are a very hospitable people, a people who try to do the most to put their guests at ease and I thank you for this," he told reporters when asked about the cover-up.

Mr Rouhani's visit was aimed at pushing Iran into a more prominent role on the world stage after the nuclear deal with Western powers ended most European economic sanctions on Tehran.
Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed Oregon group, has been arrested (AP)

The leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks have been arrested by the FBI and police in a traffic stop that sparked gunfire - and one death - along a highway through Oregon's frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting in John Day, a town in Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address residents to discuss their views on government management of public lands.

The Oregonian newspaper said several hundred people gathered at the John Day Senior Centre and were told the "guest speakers" would not be appearing.

The FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests: Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on US Highway 395.

Authorities said two others - Joseph O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50 - were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

Police said troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting, though neither agency released details about what started it. One of those arrested, described only as a man, had non-life-threatening wounds and was treated in hospital, the agencies said.

Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death until he was identified by the medical examiner.

Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

Officers converged on the refuge after the arrests. It was unclear how many people, if any, remained in the buildings.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously took a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody stand-offs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathise with his criticism of federal management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover, fearing violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy had recently begun travelling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon senator Jeff Merkley said.

"The leaders of this group are now in custody and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender so this community can begin to heal the deep wounds that this illegal activity has created over the last month."

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 stand-off with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Deschutes County Major Incident Team and the Harney County District Attorney's Office.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous national land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two ranchers convicted of starting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The US government controls about half of all land in the West.
(FILES) This file photo taken on January 07, 2016 shows LaVoy Finicum speaking to news agencies at the occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters on the sixth day of the occupation of the federal building in Burns, Oregon on January 7, 2016. AFP/Getty Images

One of the armed anti-government protesters occupying a remote federal facility in eastern Oregon has been killed in a shootout with the authorities, while the groups leader Ammon Bundy and four other men, including his brother, were arrested.

Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, 55, was killed in the incident, after the FBI and state police stopped the mens vehicles on a highway around 50 miles north of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, which the group has occupied since early January.

The authorities did not publicly identify the dead man last night, but Mr Finicums family confirmed that he had been killed during the confrontation, which took place at around 4.30pm local time.

"My dad was such a good, good man, through and through," 26-year-old Arianna Finicum Brown, one of his 11 children, told The Oregonian. "He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

Nevada rancher Ammon Bundy, thought to be the leader of the militant group, was arrested with five others including his brother, 43-year-old Ryan Bundy, who suffered a minor gunshot wound but was treated and later released from hospital into FBI custody.

No police were hurt in the incident, and those arrested were charged with conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.

The men, who were on their way to a community meeting in the town of John Day at the time of the arrests, had begun the occupation after two local ranchers were ordered to return to prison to see out their terms for arson.

Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven, 46, were convicted of setting fires that spread on to federal land in 2001 and 2006. A judge ruled in October that their original 12-month sentences did not satisfy the federal minimum of five years, and sent them back to prison.

The militants seized the headquarters of the federal wildlife refuge on 2 January, making vague, anti-government demands  including the freeing of the Hammonds  and calling on fellow "patriots" to join their protest.

Speaking to reporters while concealed by a tarpaulin early on in the occupation, Mr Finicum said: "There are things more important than your life, and freedom is one of them... Im prepared to defend freedom."

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close In this composite with handout images provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspects (Top L) Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Ryan Waylen Payne, Brian Cavalier, (Bottom L) Peter Santilli, Joseph Donald OShaughnessy , and Shawna Cox pose for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshalls January 26, 2016 in Oregon. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images) Getty Images UNSPECIFIED LOCATION - JANUARY 26: (EDITORS NOTE: Best quality available) In this handout provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspect Ryan Waylen Payne poses for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshalls January 26, 2016 in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and seven others were arrested in a traffic stop along Highway 395 outside Burns, Oregon. One person was killed in the confrontation. Bundy led a group of armed followers, adopting the name Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images) Getty Images This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ryan Bundy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Bundy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP) AP This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ammon Bundy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Bundy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP) AP This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Brian Cavalier, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Cavalier and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP) AP UNSPECIFIED LOCATION - JANUARY 26: (EDITORS NOTE: Best quality available) In this handout provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspect Shawna Cox poses for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshalls January 26, 2016 in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and seven others were arrested in a traffic stop along Highway 395 outside Burns, Oregon. One person was killed in the confrontation. Bundy led a group of armed followers, adopting the name Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images) Getty Images UNSPECIFIED LOCATION - JANUARY 26: (EDITORS NOTE: Best quality available) In this handout provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspect Peter Santilli poses for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshalls January 26, 2016 in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and seven others were arrested in a traffic stop along Highway 395 outside Burns, Oregon. One person was killed in the confrontation. Bundy led a group of armed followers, adopting the name Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images) Getty Images UNSPECIFIED LOCATION - JANUARY 26: (EDITORS NOTE: Best quality available) In this handout provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspect Joseph Donald OShaughnessy poses for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshalls January 26, 2016 in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and seven others were arrested in a traffic stop along Highway 395 outside Burns, Oregon. One person was killed in the confrontation. Bundy led a group of armed followers, adopting the name Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images) Getty Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp In this composite with handout images provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspects (Top L) Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Ryan Waylen Payne, Brian Cavalier, (Bottom L) Peter Santilli, Joseph Donald OShaughnessy , and Shawna Cox pose for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshalls January 26, 2016 in Oregon. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images)

During the three weeks of the occupation, the protesters had been allowed to move back and forth between the refuge and the nearby town of Burns unhindered by police. But yesterday two more of the militia-affiliated protesters, Joseph O Shaugnessy and Peter Santilli, were arrested in Burns, while Jon Ritzheimer, another prominent member of the far-right group, turned himself into police in Arizona, where he had been visiting his family. All three were arrested on the same conspiracy charge as their compatriots.

The eight people arrested at the scene on Highway 395 were Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32.

Dozens of other occupiers reportedly remained at the remote refuge buildings as of late last night. On its website, the militia collective Operation Mutual Defense called on supporters to rally to the location in support of the arrested men. "You have an obligation to proceed to the [Malheur Refuge] immediately," the message said. "If you fail to arrive, you will demonstrate by your own actions that your previous statements to defend life, liberty, and property were false."

Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close (FILES) This file photo taken on January 5, 2016 shows Ammon Bundy, leader of an armed anti-government militia, speaking at a news conference at the entrance to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters near Burns, Oregon. AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images (FILES) This file photo taken on January 6, 2016 shows Ammon Bundy making his way from the entrance of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters in Burns, Oregon. One person died in an armed clash with police as they arrested the leaders of a group laying siege to an American wildlife refuge, the FBI said on January 26. Ammon Bundy, who has led the revolt in rural Oregon, was one of seven people arrested after a stand-off pitting an anti-government militia against the US authorities. AFP PHOTO / FILES / ROB KERRROB KERR/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images An AirLife medical transport helicopter lifts-off from St. Charles Medical Center in Bend,Oregon on January 26, 2016 en route to Burns, Oregon. One person was killed and several others arrested in the US state of Oregon in a Tuesday shootout between police and anti-government gunmen that had been occupying a federal wildlife refuge.The FBI said that Ammon Bundy, the rancher who led the January 2 occupation in the northwestern state, was among five people arrested when federal agents and state troopers stopped vehicles carrying the activists on a remote ice-covered highway. / AFP / Rob KerrROB KERR/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp (FILES) This file photo taken on January 5, 2016 shows Ammon Bundy, leader of an armed anti-government militia, speaking at a news conference at the entrance to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters near Burns, Oregon. AFP/Getty Images
A European Union investigation has found major flaws in Greece's management of its borders, which could pave the way for its EU partners to introduce long-term ID checks to restrict the entry of migrants further into the continent.

Backing up the suspicions of several EU nations, surprise inspections by expert teams in Greece, including on Aegean islands near the coast of Turkey, found that Greek authorities were failing to properly register and fingerprint people or correctly check their travel papers.

The EU's top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said that its "report shows that there are serious deficiencies in the management of the external border in Greece".

More than 850,000 people are thought to have entered Greece last year seeking sanctuary or jobs in Europe. Greece only has shelter for about 10,000 people. The Greek coast guard is simply overwhelmed, and thousands of migrants have moved north, hoping to find a home in wealthy EU countries such as Germany or Sweden.

The report is important because Germany has temporarily reintroduced border controls in its part of the passport-free Schengen area until May 13 after around one million people applied for asylum in Germany last year. Beyond that date, Berlin has no legal means of maintaining ID checks.

But if the EU's executive commission rules that Greece has demonstrated "serious deficiencies in carrying out external border control", countries such as Germany, Austria and Sweden could possibly keep their border controls on for up to two years.

The report's wording of "serious deficiencies" is a sign that this will happen in the near future. EU nations would have to vote in favour of the move by around a two-thirds majority, but Greece alone could not stop them.

In response to Europe's worst immigration emergency since the Second World War, nations have erected razor-wire fences, deployed troops and tightened border controls. So far, most steps have respected the letter, if not the spirit, of the Schengen rule book.

But any failure in the next few weeks to come up with a new mechanism allowing controls could see the Schengen border code unravel.

Greek migration minister Ioannis Mouzalas said: "I am uneasy because there is an effort to create an atmosphere against Greece."

But he conceded "it's a bad report for us and it documents something that is true".

Mr Mouzalas, speaking to private Skai television, said things have already improved since the inspections late last year.

"Our commitment now is to be ready by mid-to-late February," he said.
Global beer and alcohol brands in musical chairs in giant takeover game

Singapore food and beverage company Fraser and Neave has expressed interest in acquiring South Africas SABMillers Peroni and Grolsch beer brands in Europe.

The expression of interest is occurring whilst beverage giant Anheuser-Busch InBev is in the process of acquiring SABMiller. Anheuser-Busch InBev was formed in 2008 as an amalgamation between Interbrew from Belgium, AmBev from Brazil, and Anheuser-Busch from the United States.

Since 2011 SABMiller has owned Carlton United Breweries (CUB) brands including Carlton Draught, Crown Larger, Victoria Bitter, Pure Blonde, Blummers Cider and Strongbow Cider after acquiring the Fosters Group.

In a statement Fraser and Neave said as of the 26 January 2016 emphasised no deal had been made yet.

The Company constantly evaluates and looks out for strategic opportunities to grow its business, and in this respect, it has expressed an interest to acquire the Peroni and Grolsch beer brands, Fraser and Neave said.

However, the Company would like to emphasise that there is no certainty of any transaction materialising and it will make appropriate announcements if and when there are any material developments in this matter, Fraser and Neave stated.

Sign of the times

This expression of interest is just a sign of the times as major global brewers and beverage marketers are caught up in a merry-go-round chase for market share a very competitive and mature beer and spirits market. There are also pressures brought to bear by government regulators to force divestiture by an acquirer of a competing brand in the same product category. The move is to prevent market share aggregation.

SABMiller owned the sparkling apple juice product Appletiser until it sold the brand to Coca-Cola in December 2014. SABMiller is a producer of Coca-Cola products. In Australia however, Coca-Cola Amatil bottles Coke-branded beverages, whilst Coke subsidiary division Coca-Cola South Pacific still owns the brands.

Another example impacting the Australian market is Japans Asahi Premium Beverages who acquired Schweppes Australia in 2011 taking responsibility for brands including Pepsi, Cottees Cordial, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Solo and Sunkist.

It aacquired Charlies juice which originates from New Zealand and P&N Beverages in 2011.
Nigeria's new government is violating rights on many fronts in its fight against Boko Haram, a Human Rights Watch report says

Five female suicide bombers targeted the Chibok home town of Nigeria's kidnapped schoolgirls, killing nine civilians and wounding 32, witnesses said.

Soldiers are searching the north-eastern town for two other women seen with the bombers and also suspected to be strapped with explosives, according to teacher Emmanuel Cosmos.

One of three wounded soldiers died in hospital later, according to a nurse.

A man at the scene said the blasts with shrapnel zapping through the air began when soldiers stopped a young woman wearing a hijab for a routine search at the entrance to an open-air, roadside vegetable market in the north east Nigerian town. She blew herself up.

Then three women already inside the market exploded in quick succession.

Another blast occurred at a military checkpoint at the entrance to Chibok, according to witnesses and community leader Tsambo Hosea Abana. He said relatives called him in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, to tell him that his niece and uncle are among the wounded.

Residents blamed Boko Haram, the Islamic extremist group that kidnapped nearly 300 Chibok schoolgirls in April 2014. Dozens escaped but 219 remain missing. Chibok is a Christian enclave in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north.

The plight of the girls brought Boko Haram international attention. The failure to rescue the schoolgirls contributed to the election defeat last year of former president Goodluck Jonathan.

The militants have said some of the girls have converted to Islam and threatened to sell them into slavery. It also said some have been married to its fighters.

There has been no further news of the girls, though there are reports some were carried across Nigeria's borders.

President Muhammadu Buhari has said he is willing to negotiate their release in exchange for detained militants but that his government has been unable to identify a credible leader for such talks.

Boko Haram's increasing use of girls and young women as suicide bombers has raised fears the militants are using captives as weapons.
The UK has risen to 10th place, its best ever ranking, in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index

Public-sector corruption is still a major problem around the world but more countries are improving and the United States and the UK have reached their best ever rankings, a report has said.

Denmark remained at the top of Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, a closely-watched world barometer, for the second consecutive year as the country perceived as least corrupt. It scored 91 points out of a possible 100 while North Korea and Somalia remained at the bottom with unchanged scores of eight.

The index is based on expert opinions of public sector corruption, looking at a range of factors like whether governmental leaders are held to account or go unpunished for corruption, the perceived prevalence of bribery, and whether public institutions respond to people's needs.

The US rose one spot this year to 16th place with a score of 76, tying with Austria. The UK rose three places to 10th, with a score of 81 that tied it with Germany and Luxembourg. The other top spots, from second to ninth, were occupied by Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore and Canada.

Despite so many countries in the top 10, Transparency said there was still a lot of room for improvement in Europe and central Asia, which it grouped as one region, saying: "In low-scorers Hungary, Poland and Turkey, politicians and their cronies are increasingly hijacking state institutions to shore up power."

"It's even grimmer further down the index," the organisation added. "In Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and others, governments are restricting, if not totally stifling, civil society and free media."

Russia sat in 119th place, tied with Azerbaijan, Guyana and Sierra Leone, although its score improved from 27 in 2014 to 29 in 2015, bringing its ranking on the list up from 136th place.

Brazil, in the midst of a massive corruption scandal at the state-owned oil company Petrobras, posted the biggest decline, falling five points to a score of 38 and dropping seven positions to 76.

Transparency noted that in places like Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Ghana, citizen activists have "worked hard to drive out the corrupt".

"The 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index clearly shows that corruption remains a blight around the world," said Transparency head Jose Ugaz.

"But 2015 was also a year when people again took to the streets to protest corruption - people across the globe sent a strong signal to those in power: it is time to tackle grand corruption."

Overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries studied scored below 50 and the global average was 43.

Still, Transparency said it was a good sign that 64 countries improved their score while only 53 declined. The rest were unchanged.
Larvae of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes which transmit the Zika virus (AP)

A Danish tourist has been infected by the Zika virus after visiting southern and central America, Danish hospital officials said.

But authorities said on Wednesday that it was not the first case in Europe.

Aarhus University Hospital said the patient ran a fever, had a headache and muscle aches and was found to have the virus on Tuesday.

The hospital released no further details about the patient but said there is little risk of it spreading in Denmark because the mosquito carrying the virus is not found in the country.

Romit Jain, from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm, Sweden, said there have been confirmed cases of imported Zika virus infections in Germany and Britain.

A Zika virus case was also confirmed in Sweden last summer, said Sara Rorbecker of the Swedish Public Health Agency. She said the patient contracted the virus while travelling, adding that there was nothing "dramatic" about the case.

Zika virus is not a notifiable disease in the European Union, meaning that EU countries are not required to report cases to the ECDC. Therefore, there is wide variation on reporting by member states.
Terrorism has been described as an act of advertising, although in the context of north Armagh it seems to be more akin to a cry for attention.

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who has observed dissident republicanism over the last few years that, on a purely military front, the various armed factions opposed to the peace process are having a hard time.

The police on both sides of the border, but most notably the Garda, have scored countless successes against the New IRA, CIRA and Oglaigh na hEireann, with attacks thwarted, weapons seized and activists arrested and charged.

While it is always dangerous to tempt fate, it is indicative of the state of play within the secret war between the dissidents and the security forces that the hardline paramilitary groups have failed to land a lethal blow on police or troops in the north in the past 18 months.

Indeed, the majority of their victims in terms of shootings have been individual members of the nationalist community who have transgressed against these organisations.

Of course, the old saying comes to mind about only having to be lucky once when it comes to terror attacks. One successful sortie out of dozens of compromised bombings and shootings can capture world headlines and catapult the small but determined array of dissident groupings into global consciousness again.

In part this is what last Sunday's petrol bombs, other missiles and a single shot in Lurgan was about - a reminder that they are still among us.

Aside from the heavily-armoured police officers and the unfortunate residents living around the Lake Street area, the other casualties in these disorder-to-remember tactics are the long-suffering passengers on the Belfast-Dublin rail link.

The disruption to their journeys brings back dark memories of even darker times, when the Provisional IRA repeatedly placed bombs and hoaxes on the inter-city, cross-border rail line in the 1980s and early-1990s.

This, of course, prompted popular movement the Peace Train Organisation - an alliance of trade unionists, political parties, writers, artists, peace groups and concerned individuals - to oppose the attacks on one of the networks that connected our island together.

Back in the Peace Train days it was pointed out that, during the unionist-dominated Stormont regime pre-1969, some hardline ministers had considered severing the line to Dublin in order to physically bolster partition on the island.

The irony of bombing the same rail link in the name of a united Ireland appeared lost on the Provisionals at the time, so it seems the irony of that cheap terror tactic is also lost on their recalcitrant descendants in their mini-strongholds like north Armagh.

Aside from the immorality and tactical stupidity of endlessly disrupting a train bringing together the people of north and south on a daily basis, whether in terms of business or tourism, there is also a calculated cynicism about the hoaxes on the rail track.

They are, of course, designed as a come-on to lure police and bomb disposal personnel into a trap. The tracks have to be checked to ensure that no actual real device has been placed less it threaten the lives of Enterprise and NIR regional passengers travelling along it.

This means that the security forces must be deployed in the area and, in turn, risk being sitting ducks for the dissidents and the ranks of the young that follow them.

On one level the incidents at Lurgan reflect a degree of nihilism within these organisations - a sense of simply lashing out to remind the world they still exist and can cause trouble.

However, this is not to suggest there is no political thinking or debate going on inside these groups or among those political allies orbiting around the dissident republican world.

There is undoubtedly debate going on about the efficacy of 'armed struggle', albeit mainly from Left-republican voices who have long seen violence as counter-productive and completely played-out as a strategy.

With the emergence of forces like the 1916 Societies, there have been small but significant signs that some dissident republicans might be channelling their energies in a purely political direction.

The societies have in certain areas, such as republican heartlands like east Tyrone, been enjoying some traction and gaining ground, although it is far too early to tell if this movement will translate into a conventional political force capable of diverting dissidents away from the armed struggle cul de sac.

However, the greatest problem facing those both inside the fractious republican family and those outside in constitutional nationalism remains the issue of continuity itself.

It was no accident that those dissidents who first broke away from the Provisionals in 1986, aligning themselves politically with Republican Sinn Fein, chose to use that word as a kind of adjective for their version of the IRA.

The message was clear - the struggle goes on because of the unfinished business of 1916, and they are part of the unbroken connection, the continuity of armed struggle that flows back to Easter Week 100 years ago.

Of course, all republican generations throughout the decades have transformed - or at least a majority of them have - from purely militaristic movements into fully fledged political parties.

At present, though, given the scenes of destruction and disorder in a corner of north Armagh, it appears on the surface at least that such an evolution is light years away.

But, as recent revelations show about that seminal year of 1993, when Northern Ireland teetered on the brink of outright civil war following the Shankill and Greysteel massacres, there may be more going on underneath that gloomy surface than first seems obvious.

The tactic of targeting a transport connection that has helped unite the two Irelands since both States came into being failed in the past, is failing in the present, and will fail in the future.

In a real sense, the repetition of that tired old tactic is a manifestation of weakness rather than strength - a cry for attention to a world that has given up listening to the soundtrack of bombs and bullets.
Communications service providers will be required to retain internet connection records for up to 12 months under the draft investigatory powers bill

The data watchdog has issued a stark warning about Home Secretary Theresa May's plans for internet firms to store records relating to people's web and social media use for up to a year

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said the proposals would create a "huge haystack of potential problems" given the threat of cyber attack on telecoms firms.

Communications service providers (CSPs) will be required to retain internet connection records (ICRs) for up to 12 months under the draft investigatory powers bill.

These will detail services a device connects to but not users' full browsing history or the content of a communication.

Mr Graham, who was giving evidence to a cross-party committee investigating the TalkTalk hack, said the regime would have to be "very carefully managed" and MPs would have to be "very convinced it was necessary".

Culture, Media and Sport select committee chairman Jesse Norman suggested that Mr Graham "must be very concerned" about the plan because "it is going to create these enormous pools of data" and firms may not have the required levels of cyber security.

Mr Graham told the committee: "It creates a huge haystack of potential problems and would have to be very carefully managed a nd Parliament would have to be very convinced that it is necessary, given the risk that is created."

Ministers have said the legislation is necessary to update the rules in order to give the security services and police the powers they need in the "digital age".
PHOENIX  Hoping to avoid another court hearing  and potentially another loss  Attorney General Mark Brnovichs office asked federal judges to delay deciding whether to permanently give drivers licenses to Dreamers.

In a letter to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, assistant AG Dominic Draye points out that the U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a challenge to President Barack Obamas authority to allow some illegal immigrants to remain in the United States. That relates to a program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, aimed at the parents of children who are in this country legally.

The justices said they want to hear arguments over whether DAPA violates the constitutional requirement that the president ensure that "the laws be faithfully executed.''

What Draye contends on Brnovich's behalf is if the justices conclude that Obama had no authority to enact DAPA, then the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program also disappears. And if there is no DACA program, there are no Dreamers  and no one to contend they are legally entitled to drive in Arizona.

But Jennifer Chang Newell, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said there's no reason for a delay.

She pointed out that challengers already have convinced a federal judge in Phoenix to permanently enjoin Arizona from denying licenses to Dreamers. It is that ruling that Draye and Brnovich have previously asked the 9th Circuit to overturn and now want the judges to delay.

But Newell is confident that the 9th Circuit, which already upheld a preliminary injunction, will reach a similar conclusion again.

More to the point, she also dismissed Draye's claim that a Supreme Court ruling against Obama in the DAPA case, expected by June, would automatically affect the rights of dreamers to drive in Arizona.

Newll said the issues in the Arizona case are different than those before the Supreme Court. In fact, she argues that Arizona would continue to have to issuing licenses to Dreamers even if the high court declares the DAPA program illegal.

"We have a different program with a different record,'' Newell said.

Hanging in the balance are licenses that already have been issued to 17,344 DACA recipients in Arizona.

The Obama administration unveiled DACA in 2012. It says individuals brought to this country illegally as children are allowed to remain if they met certain other conditions. Those who qualify also can receive permits to work legally.

But just days before the Department Homeland Security began taking applications, then-Gov. Jan Brewer issued an executive order directing the Department of Transportation not to issue licenses to DACA recipients.

She cited a 1996 Arizona law that says licenses are available only to those whose presence in this country is "authorized by federal law.'' Brewer argued the federal agency had no legal authority to permit them to remain or work in the United States, meaning they were not "authorized'' to be here.

U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell rejected those arguments, pointing out that Arizona has historically given licenses to thousands of other illegal residents who were given similar administrative permission to stay. That, he said, made denying them to DACA recipients a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"The court is not saying that the Constitution requires the state of Arizona to grant driver's licenses to all noncitizens,'' Campbell wrote. "But if the state chooses to confer licenses on some individuals who have been temporarily authorized to stay by the federal government, it may not deny them to similarly situated individuals without a rational basis for the distinction.''

It is that ruling the state at first appealed and now wants delayed.

Newell said there's no basis for postponing the appeal.

She said Campbell's ruling never touched on the question of whether DACA is within the president's power. Instead, it relies on whether Arizona can pick and choose who it determines is "authorized'' to be in the state.

Newell said, though, there is no immediate danger to DACA recipients if Brnovich gets the delay he wants. That's because the state will continue to be required to issue licenses to applicants who otherwise qualify unless and until the 9th Circuit weighs in.

At last count more than 28,000 Arizona residents had qualified for DACA.
Sex offender notification

The Coconino County Sheriffs Office would like to make the following Level 2 (intermediate risk to the community) sex offender notification:

 Herb Babbitt, 73, is living at 3510 Kachina Trail in Kachina Village, just south of Flagstaff. Babbitt was convicted in 1990 of child molestation. He was also convicted in 2013 of failing to register as a sex offender. Babbitt is not wanted by police at this time.

Notification that Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders are living in the community is required by Arizona law. Resident abuse of this information to threaten, intimidate or harass sex offenders will not be tolerated by the Coconino County Sheriffs Office.

If residents have information about current criminal activity by any offender, contact the sheriffs office at (928) 774-4523 or visit www.coconino.az.gov/sheriff.

For more information on sex offenders in the Flagstaff area, visit the Arizona Department of Public Safety sex offender website at www.azsexoffender.com.

City and county residents who want to report a crime but wish to remain anonymous may call Silent Witness at 774-6111 or (877) 29-CRIME, submit a tip online at www.coconinosilentwitness.org, or text the word Flagtip along with your information to 274637 (CRIMES). Rewards of up to $2,000 are given for information that leads to an arrest.
This image taken from a video filmed by the Abu Sayyaf Group and released by the Islamic State extremist group shows militants huddling after they swore allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at a ceremony in Basilan, Sulu Archipelago, Philippines.

The war against violent extremism cannot be won without also getting into the minds of young people who could be lured into radicalism, said speakers who appeared at the end of an international conference in Kuala Lumpur on deradicalization.

It is without a doubt that this is a battle on all fronts  in cyberspace, on the ground and in the mind, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said Tuesday in closing the two-day conference attended by senior officials from 19 countries, including all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

We must ensure the effectiveness of our rehabilitation programs, we must include all relevant parties. There is a very real need to engage and re-engage our youth, he added.

It is crucial that countries battling the ideology and influence of radical groups like the Islamic State (IS) work together, Zahid said, to tap into and harness what he described as a passionate commitment shown by people who join such groups.

[T]his is a passion arising from a deep-rooted adherence and a total but myopic loyalty to a mission, a mission that, often, most of them do not fully comprehend but yet, are devoted and committed [to] 100 percent, said Zahid, who is also Malaysias home minister.

After his speech Zahid held a press conference where he announced that Malaysia would open a regional digital center on May 1, whose mission will be to counter IS online propaganda.

The 200 million ringgit (U.S. $46.8 million) project is being built through a bilateral deal signed with the United States in October. Once up and running, the center will be the first of its kind in Southeast Asia, officials said.

Imperative

Zahid's comments about the importance of the psychological dimension echoed earlier statements by terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, who participated in the conferences last session of presentations.

Malaysias success in its program to rehabilitate people who have been radicalized could be applied to all ASEAN countries, said Gunaratna, a BenarNews columnist who heads the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

This would take more work and diligence, but it is imperative as to diminish and end extremism, not only at the level that can be seen by the naked eye, but also the unseen, in the minds, especially among the youth, Gunaratna said.

Community-reaching programs, online campaigns, and others should be increased and wide-spread, carrying messages that IS is merely a misinterpretation and misrepresentation of Islam , he added.

Gunaratna later told BenarNews that it is in Malaysias national security interest to cooperate with the Philippine government in preventing IS from expanding into the Malaysian state of Sabah from the nearby southern Philippines.

Local militant groups in the southern Philippines recently pledged their allegiance to IS and its self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as Gunaratna wrote in a column for BenarNews earlier this month.

Malaysia should be very concerned because it will directly grow into the borders of Borneo, with the nations Sabah state taken along , Gunaratna said.

Modern-day paradox

He had just made a presentation along with Zaini Othman, who directs the Security and Strategic Research Center (SASSREC) at the University of Malaysia  Sabah.

In his presentation, Zaini spoke about a global paradox and tension that exists between modern-day progress and a parallel rise in extremist ideology as digital technology helps spread it.

Since the issue of radicalism and extremism has gone beyond nations borders, therefore so must the solution, Zaini said.

Unintended consequences, such as the loss of autonomy, authority and legitimacy, must be contained carefully without unnecessary conflict arising by transparent, noble cooperation with systematic means intertwining layers of multiple nations organizations, Zaini said.

Suhana Osman contributed to this report.
A woman holds a placard reading Terrorism Enemy of all Beliefs during a vigil at the scene of a terrorist attack the day before that left eight people dead in downtown Jakarta, Jan. 15, 2016.

Top officials from Asia, the United States and Europe wrapped up two days of counterterrorism talks on Tuesday with a better understanding of the terrorism threat and acknowledging a need to make their deradicalization programs more comprehensive, according to a top official from host Malaysia.

Experts participating with the officials at the International Conference on Deradicalization and Countering Violent Extremism 2016 in Kuala Lumpur had called for a review of the programs to deradicalize potential attackers and jailed terrorists, saying they were not effective enough.

Some experts said the programs were not based on thorough research and lacked participation from local communities. Others called for a review of rehabilitation of convicted terrorists or detained terror suspects awaiting trial in prisons.

"We have developed a deeper understanding of this [terrorism] threat and a greater sense of mission," Malaysia's deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said in his closing address on Tuesday, emphasizing greater international cooperation to deal with what is the world's number one security problem.

"We have come closer to identifying its many motivations and misconceived objectives, and a new appreciation of how, in so many ways, we can work together to deal with its varied casual factors and consequential devastating effects," he said.

Zahid said countries fighting the terror threat "must ensure the effectiveness" of their rehabilitation programs by including "all parties," citing particularly "a very real need to engage and reengage our youth."

Weaknesses

The Kuala Lumpur meeting came less than two weeks after an attack by the Islamic State (IS) militant group in the Indonesian capital Jakarta which left four civilians and four attackers dead. The incident followed IS attacks in Paris in November, which killed 130 people.

Ministers and officials from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the 10-member blocs strategic partners  the United States, France, Australia, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, China and Italy  attended the meeting

Sidney Jones, a senior international conflict analyst, told the conference that "the biggest weakness of most deradicalization programs is that they have not emerged from a thorough study of where and how radicalization takes place."

Jones, who heads the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), said research is not a guarantee that programs would be successful, but those not based on concrete data are almost guaranteed to fail.

She said that the emergence of IS had helped focus attention of deradicalization with a particular interest in counter-narratives on social media but not many new ideas have been put forward, even as more Indonesians, including some teenagers, leave to join the group in fighting in Syria.

Among those killed in fighting in the city of Ramadi last month was a 15-year-old Indonesian from East Java.

At least two of the attackers in the Jakarta bombings were former prison inmates who had served their sentences and been released, indicating possible weakness in the prison rehabilitation process.

A clash of ideas

Delegates called for greater attention to rehabilitation of convicted terrorists and terror suspects awaiting trial in prisons.

In Thailand, for example, the number of terrorism suspects in overcrowded prisons in the country is growing, affecting the management and rehabilitation of inmates, an official from a government-funded institute said.

Most of the suspects are believed held in Thailand's insurgency-torn south, where rebels in Muslim-majority provinces bordering Malaysia have launched bomb attacks and shootings since 2004, targeting mostly troops or police but also civilians.

The overcrowding in correctional facilities has a major impact on the available space and limited resources to provide them with the proper treatment programs and activities, said Thailands Institute of Justice (TIJ) Deputy Executive Director Nathee Chitsawang.

Although more than 50 percent of prisoners in Thailand are drugs-related offenders, the situation seems to be getting worse when the number of terrorists in prison has continued growing, he said.

Nathee said most prisons were not designed to hold terror suspects, adding that the correctional settings have to be specially designed and planned for terrorist inmates.

Nathee also called for harmonization in the deradicalization programs inside and outside Thai prisons.

He said the majority of prisoners in southern Thai provinces are held together with terror suspects.

The segregation of treatment can help to prevent them from recruiting more members among the prisoners, he said.

Mohamed Ali, the vice-chairman of the Religious Rehabilitation Group in Singapore, said it was important for governments and Muslim communities to recognize that defeating terrorist and extreme groups require an "ideological weapon."

"It is not a war against Islam, but a war against any misinterpretation and misunderstanding of Islam," he said. "It is not a clash of civilization but a clash of ideas that has divided the world into peace and war."
Some Muslim women serving with the military in Thailands troubled Deep South say they plan to seek the governments approval to allow them to wear the hijab while in uniform.

A group of female soldiers serving in non-combat roles in the countrys predominantly Muslim southern border region is planning to write to the prime minister to request a change to the militarys dress code.

They want to wear the headscarf in order to abide by Islams tenets as well as counter propaganda from insurgents. Such a move would also allow women serving in the military and paramilitary forces in the Deep South to blend in better with the local population, said a member of the group who asked not to be named.

Villagers have told this soldier that separatist insurgents have exploited the Thai militarys prohibition on wearing the hijab in justifying attacks because female personnel were not respecting the religious rule.

They (insurgents) told villagers that we who work for the government sector must follow its rules and we even expose our face, despite knowing it is sinful and we may go to hell, she told BenarNews.

We heard them say that for quite some time, and we asked our commanders to allow us to wear hijab when going to the field, but the bosses didnt allow [this], she said.

Since 2004, more than 6,500 people have been killed in the separatist conflict in the Malay-speaking far southern region, which is made up of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala provinces and parts of Songkhla province.

During visits to villages, the soldier said, residents treated her and her colleagues coldly because they did not wear the traditional headscarf donned by Muslim women.

Villagers didnt seem to be friendly to us because they wore hijab but we didnt. We were different from them and this put us and villagers at odds. Our task is to make them sense mutual friendship and that they feel we are on the same side, she added.

Out of 60,000 to 80,000 military personnel deployed in the Deep South, nine platoons, or about 360 members, are female rangers with full combat capabilities.

Letter drafted

The solider said that she and other female Muslim personnel have banded together to draft a letter to Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, which they hope to send soon.

The letter seeks his consideration to allow female Muslim personnel who perform non-combat duties such as clerical jobs and psychological operations to wear the hijab.

We think Prime Minister General Prayuth understands the feeling of fellow soldiers, and we believe that he is aware of the obstacle we would have when villagers see us as being on the other side, she said.

Col. Pramote Prom-in, spokesman for the forward office of Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) Region 4, told BenarNews said he wasnt aware of the local campaign by some women in the military to lobby for a change to the dress code.

Currently, the way military personnel dress in uniform, is in line with the codes of the Ministry of Defense, he told BenarNews by phone.

The officer-in-charge could consider the issue if a request is submitted, he said.

Hijab allowed elsewhere

In contrast, Thailands Ministry of Public health has been allowing its medical personnel to wear the hijab since 2000.

A police operations center in Yala last year allowed non-combat female staff to wear the Muslim headscarf.

However, Tuan Sai Ni, a local Muslim, said she wanted to apply for a job at the center but refrained from doing so because she was not allowed to wear hijab when she sat for the exam last year.

I was not a police officer, yet on the day of exam they didnt allow me to wear hijab. What if I became an officer? Im afraid they may change the rules [again], Tuan told BenarNews.
The forest across Observatory Mesa is looking much more open these days. That's because this fall, the city of Flagstaff finished thinning and pile burning on nearly 700 acres on the mesa just west of downtown.

The work was part of the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project, the taxpayer-funded initiative to reduce the threat of wildfire and post-fire flooding around the citys watersheds.

The biggest project on the mesa was a 475-acre mechanical thinning zone where operators removed 60 percent to 70 percent of the trees, many of them small-diameter, to get the forest closer to its historical lower density and structure, said Paul Summerfelt, wildland fire management officer for the city of Flagstaff.

The project also contained several lessons for future forest thinning and restoration projects in the region, Summerfelt said.

The first had to do with the process the city used to direct the logging contractors work. Instead of marking the trees to be cut or those to be left, which is a strategy commonly used by the Forest Service in timber sales and stewardship contracts in the area, the city decided to take a different tack. It opted for a designation by prescription process in which the contractor on the job, Perkins Timber Harvesting, was given a description of the types of trees to be taken, those to be left and what the forest should look like when the work was complete. Perkins has about a decade of experience with that type of logging contract, owner James Perkins said.

To help provide direction, Mark Brehl, former FWPP field operations specialist who was working on the project, used smartphone mapping applications to pinpoint areas where openings should be made, or where groups of trees should be left, which were relayed to the operators cell phone.

While the designation by description route puts more responsibility in the hands of the logging company, doing so saved about $60,000 in marking paint, staff time, vehicle expenses and other costs, Summerfelt wrote in a brief to city council last month. It also sped up the pace of the thinning, with the contractor able to cut 15 to 20 acres of trees per day, he said.

The project was an attempt to see if such a strategy would work and result in a successful final product, and in the end it did, Summerfelt said in an interview.

Were really pleased with what occurred in there, he said.

Looking back on the project, the city came up with a substantial list of lessons learned that can apply to similar work in the future. When it comes to the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, for example, where hundreds of thousands of acres need to be thinned, designating thinning by description instead of marking could result in immense cost savings, Summerfelt said.

The way costs broke down on the Observatory Mesa project also was instructive, Summerfelt said. Cost-per-acre came in at $781, half of which was covered with grant funding and half of which was paid for with money from the $10 million FWPP bond that voters approved in 2012. More than half that project budget  $450 per acre  was dedicated to chipping the slash from thinning and hauling it off site. That hefty expense raises important questions about how to accomplish biomass removal in a much bigger project like 4FRI, Summerfelt said.

Its a good eye-opener when you think about 4FRI. What are you going to do with that stuff? he said.

For the citys part, it decided to chip instead of pile and burn the slash to avoid producing smoke that would likely affect a substantial part of the city.

The Observatory Mesa work also serves as a good introduction to the type of mechanical thinning that this region will see more of in the coming years, said Brehl, who is now an assistant fire management officer with the Arizona State Forestry Division.

The regions forests have already seen an immense amount of work over the past two decades, but were moving into a time where we have to do more, Brehl said. The use of big machines and the removal of larger volumes of trees is needed to get the ponderosa pine forests back into a healthy, resilient state, he said.

Its more intensive, we're going to see more mechanical operations in the woods but its nothing to be scared of, its something we should be excited for and proud of, Brehl said. We want people to understand that this is an industrial operation in the woods but it is the precise tool that's needed right now.

Over the next two years, the city will continue FWPP-related thinning work on another 1,500 acres it owns in the Observatory Mesa area. It will also be doing prescribed burning on the acreage already thinned. After that, FWPP thinning work will transition nearly exclusively to Forest Service land in Dry Lake Hills, Mount Elden and Mormon Mountain areas, Summerfelt said.

Meanwhile, mechanical thinning on about 700 acres of Forest Service land at the base of Mount Elden, from the top of Fourth Street to Schultz Pass Road, is expected to begin this summer, Summerfelt said.
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The Black Hawk helicopter is flying above Kabul, Germany's highest-ranking NATO-general Hans-Lothar Domrose (63, 4 stars) looks anxiously out of the window. In BILD he says, what is going wrong in Afghanistan  and warns of the total disintegration of the country.

BILD: The Taliban are currently controlling as much territory as they used to in 2001. Have we withdrawn from Afghanistan too early?

Hans-Lothar Domrose: The Afghan security forces, i.e. the military and the police, are indeed not operating on the level that we were hoping for at this point. They need to be more determined. They are lacking in vigor, cleverness, agility, and determination. Ever since the Alliance has finished its combat mission, we do not have enough hightech. Most of all, we need more reconnaissance, transport machinery, and air support. The army is not sufficiently equipped.

Is the lack of equipment the only problem?

Domrose: Civil war situations make things particularly difficult. You are fighting against an enemy within, you are always facing fellow countrymen  sometimes as targets of your weapon. Handling this kind of situation is demanding and difficult. The Talibans advance in Kunduz and Helmand has shown that the security situation is not yet stable in some parts of the country.

Auch interessant

What are the consequences?

Domrose: Our support was too weak in 2015. The Afghans are not ready yet to defend the country on their own. This year, we have to change this. That is why we are currently working on new strategies for 2016. We have to keep supporting the Afghans for a certain period of time. Otherwise they are, at best, on a par with the Taliban, but they have to become the superior force in the country.

What kinds of strategies are these?

Domrose: We have to adapt our train, assist, advise mission so that there is a stronger emphasis on assistance. We have to expand our training missions. So far, NATO is only training the Afghans in their barracks. Thats not good enough. They need to get out of the lecture theatre and into the field. We have to accompany them on their missions in order to train them and improve their capacities.

Back to combat missions?

Domrose: We do not want any combat missions led by NATO  the Afghans themselves have to do this.

Are there any further plans?

Domrose: We have to develop a new, flexible system of operations, in cooperation with the Afghans. The hitherto existing checkpoint policy with 50 stationary policemen per checkpoint has not proven to be successful. If you stand still, you will die first. You have to keep moving. We need more flexibility. If the ground forces are facing a crisis, they need air support. The Afghans do not have an air force, except for a few old Soviet planes. As long as the Afghan air force is not sufficiently developed, we have to fill this vacuum  but only by providing support.

Can Afghanistan be stabilized within a years time by these strategies?

Domrose: No.

Lesen Sie auch

Afghan soldiers are complaining that the Taliban are well-equipped and tactically trained  better than they have been for a long time.

Domrose: Thats right. For decades now, Afghanistan has been in a state resembling civil war. The Taliban have improved. Also, weapons are available everywhere.

Allegedly, morale is bad within the Afghan forces. Many soldiers are rumored to be deserting

Domrose: More than 150 soldiers and policemen are killed every month. That is more than five per day. Of course this is not good for morale.

The Afghan military leadership is also facing criticism.

Domrose: Leadership is a matter of attitude and actions  and of passion. The military commanders have to be the first people to get up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night. The Afghans do not do this, they still have the attitudes of rulers. When the Taliban attacked Kunduz, the commanders were not even there. They left their troops alone.

Is the police in sufficiently good shape?

Domrose: We need more and better-qualified policemen. Currently, only about 30 percent receive intensive training. The police has to take stronger action against drug-trafficking, corruption, and the new phenomenon of human trafficking. But the police needs appropriate resources for these tasks.

What do you know about human trafficking in Afghanistan?

Domrose: We have observed that busses are driving to Pakistan more and more often. Whole busloads are transported over the border. We suspect human trafficking here. We have to monitor and control this more closely in the future.

What else needs to be improved?

Domrose: We need more helpers to assist with developing the countrys administration. How do you prepare a budget? How do you secure energy supply? How do you organize waste disposal, healthcare and the school system? These questions need to be answered. We must not limit our focus to the security forces.

What do the presence of ISIS and the power struggle between ISIS and the Taliban mean for Afghanistan?

Domrose: There seems to be an insane contest in this country: everyone wants to belong to the most barbaric organization. From the bad guys perspective, ISIS seems to be very attractive. So there are self-proclaimed fighters for ISIS in Afghanistan and people who change sides. We do not yet observe international funding for ISIS in Afghanistan, but we cannot exclude this possibility. A competition between the Taliban and ISIS for power and territories would indeed be very dangerous.

What do you think about a dialogue with terrorists such as the Taliban?

Domrose: There is no alternative to it. This is the only way of finding an agreement. We know from a thousand years history of war that people have to talk to each other at some point. People cannot keep fighting forever. The Afghans have to make peace with their brothers. No one can help with this, except Pakistan.

Can you really talk to criminals like the Taliban?

Domrose: Not everyone with a beard is a criminal. Not all Taliban are the same. We have to make distinctions here. There are very serious Taliban who commit terrible crimes. We have nothing in common with them and cannot negotiate with them. But there are also more moderate Taliban.

What could a peace agreement with the Taliban look like?

Domrose: The main point is that the Taliban want their share of the power. The Afghans have to listen to the Taliban and see whether their claims are justified. Initial talks have already taken place. The Taliban seem to have become more flexible in many contested areas, such as womens rights. They have also dropped their demand that all foreign troops have to leave the country prior to any peace negotiations.

Afghans currently constitute the second-largest group of refugees coming to Germany. Can we send them back?

Domrose: There are large regions in Afghanistan that are entirely peaceful, but in some districts of several provinces, shootings take place almost every day.

How do you feel when you see the stream of refugees fleeing Afghanistan?

Domrose: It shows how important it is to find a peaceful solution soon, so that people can stay in Afghanistan. The people who are fleeing are often young and well-educated  i.e., they are the people who could develop the country. This is why we need a breakthrough in 2016. Its now or never.

You have been responsible for Afghanistan since 2008. What have you learned after eight years?

Domrose: Initially I thought we would be successful sooner. Now I know it cannot be done any faster. We will have to keep providing assistance for a long time. We must not cease in our efforts. The situation is unsteady. But we still have the chance to find peace and to provide 30 million Afghans with a perspective. I am dreaming of an Afghanistan where the parties involved in the conflict will shake hands one day and end the war.

Do you dare to make a prognosis?

Domrose: I am very careful concerning time limits. We have been in Kosovo since 1999. If peace will eventually be reached, our continued engagement in Afghanistan is worthwhile. The many dead and the suffering families deserve our perseverance. We must not leave our Afghan brothers alone. For we know: if we leave, Afghanistan will collapse.
PHOENIX -- Arizona youngsters from kindergarten through high school would be taught sex education unless their parents specifically object under the terms of proposed legislation.

Rep. Juan Mendez, D-Tempe, said too many youngsters grow up with misinformation or no information at all about. The result, he said, is a health crisis of both disease and unwanted pregnancy.

Separately, Sen. Martin Quezada, D-Phoenix, is pushing to repeal a law that requires Arizona schools to portray homosexuality as anything but positive in their sex education courses.

But Josh Kredit, attorney for the Center for Arizona Policy, dismissed both measures as "dangerous."

"These are extreme proposals that are trying to mandate sex education for 5-year-olds," he said.

And Kredit, whose organization insists that homosexuality is simply a behavior that can be "modified or even stopped," said there's no reason to remove the restrictions on teachings on the subject.

"I think that the policies we have in this state are good policies," he said.

"They've been vetted and been around for a number of years," Kredit continued. "And I think the proper protections are in place right now that parents appreciate them."

With Democrat sponsors, both bills face uncertain futures in the Republican-controlled Legislature. But if they get hearings they are bound to provoke spirited debate.

Mendez said the message that is now being pushed on children is one of abstinence as the acceptable method of preventing pregnancy and disease.

"But we have to prepare the other ones who are not going to listen to that message with age-appropriate, accurate information given to them by trained instructors," he said.

"We're leaving them to the risk of HIV, we're leaving them to the risk of pregnancy," Mendez said. "And it's our fault for not preparing them appropriately."

HB 2410 spells out what kinds of things must be included in sex-ed classes.

It does require teaching the benefits of delaying sexual activity. But it also says classes must "stress the importance of effectively using contraceptives and barrier methods to prevent unintended pregnancy and to protect against sexually transmitted infections."

Students also have to be taught about developing relationships based on mutual respect and "free from violence, coercion and intimidation." And it encourages students to communicate with the parents, other adults and health care professionals about their sexuality and intimate relations.

Kredit, however, focused on the fact that current law makes sex education optional for schools. More to the point, it is an "opt in" system requiring parents to affirmatively put their children into these classes.

"This is mandating 5-year-olds start having sex education," he said. "They're trying to pull a fast one on parents that may not even know what their child is learning about."
Jem's Birding & Ringing Exploits in the Eastern Province and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia
The federal government has disowned the out of court settlement offer by telecoms firm MTN over the $3.4bn fine slammed on it in December last year.

MTN was fined $5.2bn by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in October for regulatory infractions, but later reduced it to $3.4bn but MTN later went to court to challenge the fine.

The company on Friday issued a statement, saying it would now settle the case with the government out of court.

But the minister of communications Barrister Adebayo on Tuesday in Abuja said the federal government was not aware of any out of court settlement over the fine.

"We are not aware of any out of court settlement on the issue. We will not accept out of court settlement until MTN willingly discontinue the case", Adebayo said at a press conference where he unveiled the new ICT road map for 2016-2020.

He said MTN wanted to buy time by taking the federal government to court instead of paying the fine.

The government would slug it out with the company to the final point, he said.
Change is scary, every human knows that. But for me, the most frightening experience was the transition from "student to employee". Gone were the six-hour days (maximum of six hours out of exam seasons), and hello to the "9am - 5pm" environment.

Jodene Louw

What made this experience an even greater challenge, was that in my third and final year of university, as with most public relations (PR) students, I had to find an internship. All I remember thinking was "who on earth would hire me? I have no experience in the PR industry... Being a legal clerk, and a primary school receptionist won't come in handy".

To my delight and surprise, the very first interview I went for at Printacom/OKI South Africa was my first, and last. Then the next challenge crept in, I lived 90kms from my job, but I would not let that derail my path to success. My first day on the job happened to be on 3 February 2014, I wore an olive green blouse with a pair of black slacks, paired with olive green pumps (matching was in back then). However, consider that I lived 90kms away from work, and it was pouring on that day, and I happened to be taking a bus to work. Needless to say, I was an hour late on my first day, and with no umbrella, I walked in there as if I had just completed 10 laps at the nearest swimming pool.

So now, I had to march up to my boss and apologise in person for being late, with water dripping from everywhere, and all he said was "it's okay!" (with no smile). After having met the OKI SA team, my desk and I bonded, as I awaited tasks. Being so fearful of saying something stupid, I just sat there and waited... until I was assigned with my first task which happened to be writing test. At the risk of sounding somewhat narcissistic, I'm generally a very good writer. But on that day, I lost my composure, and doubted myself like never before. See previously, I knew the reading and writing preferences of all my lecturers. Now, here's this new guy, who just so happens to be my new boss - what are his preferences?

Nevertheless, I wrote an amazing, (this is my opinion), piece on the one of the OKI products. By this time, the lunch hour had come and gone, and my nerves had me in a twist, so I had even forgotten to eat my lunch because he had still not commented on my writing, and the end of the day rolled in, just as spring usually sets in after winter. And still, no word from him.

My journey home that day was interesting to say the least. I had a detailed conversation with myself in the bus. I said "Self, tomorrow morning, you'll walk in, greet everyone by name, and own your day!" I had this conversation with myself every day for three weeks, in the hope that somewhere along the line I would start believing it. For me, in all honesty, this was not an easy transition! There was a day I missed a deadline and felt so disappointed, because before this day, never in my life had I ever missed a deadline. But there was a lesson in it! Time management.

Three weeks into my new position as the "public relations and marketing assist" I was due for a performance review. I cannot tell you how nervous I was. I had to have completed one PR plan/campaign (right from the conception of this plan, to the post analysis), a dozen blog pieces, a social media strategy, as well as press releases on some of the products. However, I walked into that review with four PR plan/campaigns, 19 blog pieces, two angles for the social media strategy, and 12 press releases, because remember in my mind I was the new kid, and I had to impress my boss. My boss was floored, and at that moment, I realised he was human.

As a student, what most employees fail to understand is that the greater majority of us actually have no idea what this public relations thing entails. What you, as a student are taught in university and the practical application of the profession are day and night. This, in all honesty, made me doubt what I had been doing. But on that Friday (22 February 2014), my faith in my profession had been restored like never before. Just seeing the faith that my boss had in me, that allowed my self-confidence to soar again.

Allow me to fast forward to the June of that year (when my contract had been due to expire), my boss had sent me an email, two weeks before what was supposed to be my last day saying:

"Hi Jodene,

So, I know that you are due to complete your internship with us at the end of the month.

I was thinking, if you would like to, you could stay on till November, because our team would not be the same without you. Let me know if you're interested so that we can renew your contract."

Regards."

I remember thinking "If I would like to?" Of course I would like to, and that same day, my contract was renewed. Never in my life have I felt as proud of myself as I did at that very moment. This meant that I was learning, and more importantly I was growing as a public relations practitioner (PRP).

There are however a few things I would change. People who really know me, know me as the talkative loud mouth. OKI SA however, knew me as the reserved, introverted little big girl. I would have stood up to voice my thoughts and opinions from day one. I would have been the chick who presented her own ideas verbally, instead of via email. I would have been the chick who stood for what I believed in, instead of succumbing due to the fear of being the new girl "fresh from school". I would have been true to me from day one. My reason for this is simple, because even now, two years later, I find myself still shying away from situations I know I can own holistically, because of the fear I brought upon myself back then!

I would have read, read & read more on the various roles and dynamics of PR and how they all tie together. I would have gone out during my holidays and found a PR job to get a head start, irrespective of whether or not they paid me. I would have figured it out. I would have shone before I knew I was a star... Do not allow your learning process to stop after lectures. Read various publications: online newspapers, consumer magazines, newspapers, read books. This will help you determine which content goes to which media, and the writing tone to use for the various media.

Visit radio stations, (obviously make arrangements, do not tell them "oh but Jodene said I should). Visit the SABC or ANN7 or eNCA. Read at least five newspapers a week, with two magazines a week. Read the articles on Bizcommunity. Put yourself out there. Always remember that in your industry your social media platforms are a reflection of the life you live, so be very careful what you share! Always remember, that even after hours, you still represent your organisation, as well as the clients you service. Do not be afraid to own brainstorms, do not hold back - no idea is stupid. Lastly, if you are quiet in a meeting, you might as well not even be there... So be there. Be bold. Do you to the best of your abilities!

So dear first, second and third year PR student, this is for you. Shine brighter than Rihanna's diamond. Find you, and do you!!

Yours faithfully,

Public relations student turned public relation practitioner
New Zealand has almost everything anyone would want from a country. Every year a large number of overseas aspirants apply for New Zealand immigration.

Their Story: The Van Wyk Family

Like most South African emigres, Andries and Michelle van Wyk left their home country in search of a 'safe haven' - they found it in New Zealand.

Andries and Michelle Van Wyk didn't think it was possible for them to leave South Africa. Just the thought of the immigration process was daunting enough. But on 12 June 2014, after a fateful job interview via Skype with a New Zealand employer, Andries and Michelle realised that their dream of living in a safer country was in actual fact, about to come true.

"Two days later [after the job interview] we were told that Andries got the job, and that the employer wanted him to start work in three weeks," says Michelle.

"We were so excited and scared at the same time, but we got all our paperwork together and decided to sell everything in our house. The interview was on 12 June and Andries got on the plane on 12 July. Everything happens so fast. There wasn't time to think about anything twice. We just grabbed the opportunity."

Michelle and the children remained in South Africa to tie up loose ends, while Andries began his employment in the beautiful coastal town of Gisborne in New Zealand's northern east coast.

In early September, Michelle and the children boarded a plane to New Zealand to join Andries, and begin their new life, which came with a few challenges. "We found ourselves in a new country, in a new culture. We had to start from scratch, the kids had to learn how to speak English. Our three year old couldn't speak a word of English." says Michelle.

"Our daughter was going to intermediate, and although she spoke English, she was at a difficult age."

Towards the end of October, Andries and Michelle found out that they were to expect a new addition to their family. Michelle's pregnancy came as a surprise, and presented a new set of worries for Michelle and Andries.

"We applied for our residency in early January and just prayed that it would be approved before baby arrived. There were times we thought of going back to South Africa, and perhaps have the baby over there," says Michelle.

The family's residence visa application was approved on 28 May 2015, two weeks before the birth of Michelle and Andries' baby girl (who was born a citizen of New Zealand). It has been almost one year since the Van Wyk Family arrived in New Zealand. Despite the initial challenges, the family has settled into their new surroundings well. "We are very happy, the kids have settled in nicely - they have made friends and adapted to all the new things," says Michelle. "Silver Fern Immigration assisted us with all our questions, and helped us through the entire process. There were good days and bad days but through it all they supported us and helped us stay positive."

Let us help you to start a new life, by completing this FREE assessment form.




Youth Dynamix (YDx), the specialist youth and family research agency in Johannesburg, has revealed a new awakening in the youth market that will change the landscape for brands Africa into and beyond 2016.

This new movement will have an explosive impact on South African business. Much greater than any of the trends that have shaped the youth market in the past. Much more powerful than the mass-transition to SnapChat, the unbending power of music and the development of content marketing as the centre-pieces of all successful youth campaigns.

The new awakening has begun...

I'm talking about the newly awakened youth activism we've only just had a glimpse of recently when university students practically brought the country to a standstill and the government to its knees, abolishing fee hikes at campuses nationwide for 2016.

[FEATURE] We look back the #FeesMustFall campaign which dominated headlines in 2015 https://t.co/etcN5wxbgB pic.twitter.com/5CnuVlfAT0 - Eyewitness News (@ewnupdates) December 9, 2015

This movement has been brewing for some time with students protesting against the slow transformation process at universities, the lack of transport to campuses, accommodation and tuition fees. But these demonstrations have been largely isolated to individual campuses and have resulted in relatively small gains.

This all changed in October of 2015 when the youth realised just how powerful they can be when they unite. A new and unstoppable sense of awakening and purpose was born within this segment of the population.

The youth have a newly-found voice that will amplify beyond belief!

Since the school riots of the seventies and eighties, the youth has largely been a 'dormant volcano'. But as Andrea Kraushaar, Research Director at YDx explains, it's certainly not because they haven't had any major gripes...

YDx's YouthTrax research has exposed a powerful monster ferociously growing in the undercurrents of the youth market over the recent years:

70% of the youth market are disillusioned about finding employment in SA,

55% believe the standard of education in South Africa is inferior to other countries,

74% say the government isn't living up to its promises,

49% are not confident about their future in South Africa, and

50% have considered leaving the country.

This research has also revealed an extreme lack of confidence and self-esteem in young people... Possibly being the very reason we haven't always seen the same level of passion we saw recently across the country in the 'Free Education' movement.

But now that the youth have discovered what they're really capable of, there's no turning back. This new awakening has armed them with the very arsenal they've been yearning for, for years... a voice.

Youth marketers, beware!

Jane Lyne-Kritzinger, MD of YDx, explains that powerful activism movements like the one we witnessed in October 2015 will become the new trend into 2016 and beyond.

The youth will easily unify to create a force to be reckoned with, not just on campuses around the country, but first and foremost through social media - the digital platform they have grown up with, and are now able to claim as their own.

Across Africa, social media has increasingly become far greater than just a way to connect with friends or getting news about the world. It doesn't only provide the youth with a platform to share their stories and get their opinions out there; but also gives them an extremely powerful voice and sense of solidarity and unity - even across borders.

Word-of-mouth has never been this crucial as this young generation gains momentum as catalysts in their families, communities and society at large. With this newly discovered confidence and sense of purpose, the youth will quickly expose brands that step out of line.

With over 50% of Africans currently under the age of 20 and Africa being the fastest growing continent in terms of smart-phone use, you can imagine the explosive magnitude of this voice.

If you're not 100% au fait with the dynamics of the youth market in Africa, you could fall into a pitfall that could take your brand a lifetime to resurrect.
Consumers are becoming smarter than ever. Instant research and information can be retrieved using their smartphone, table or computer. Heck, the entire shopping cycle is increasingly being completed completely from a screen. Brick and mortars are getting creative to win the war on retail, and big data is critical to that fight. How can you get in on the battle and monetize big data

Cross-promoting in the retail space

For retail brands of all shapes and sizes, a virtually bottomless treasure-trove of information is available on customers. With simple cross-referencing between payment portals and retail inventory, it isn't difficult to find out what products are selling well together. Or, more specifically, what kinds of customers are filling the demographics that are showing up and making purchases.

Armed with customer and transaction data, retailers are able to generate sophisticated marketing strategies to help bundle products together. This can be seen in how grocery stores are using coupon machines at checkout to spit out coupons after a customer makes a purchase. These coupons are not random. They are based off the data from a client's past purchase history, as well as the types of items that are often sold with the products rung up in the preceding transaction.

Inspiring creativity in branding

To reach customers and gain the opportunity for conversion, a brand has to be able to connect with potential clients. Companies like zeolearn are leading the Hadoop developer training the charge in bringing big data tools to the startup realm. By collecting trendy domains and other branding elements, and then matching them with the target audience of a fledgling startup, they've managed to provide scalable branding resources to startups as they launch new products and services.

The data they have access to empowers them to identify the branding elements that will appeal to a consumer. "Love at first site" is a real thing in the world of marketing. Companies that have the tools available to them to understand their potential client's desires have a much better chance at winning in a hyper-competitive market.

Understanding trends to meet demands

You don't need to hire an actuary to look into the future of your market. Simply access the data that is freely available on search engine trends and social media indicators. This article from Business Insider illustrates just a few of the trending items that have taken the twitterverse by storm. Is your brand focusing on what matters to your audience? Are you gaining maximum traction via your social media campaigns?

Rebooting customer loyalty programs

Companies in a variety of sectors are sitting up and paying attention to the data rolling in from customer loyalty programs. Simple purchases, when taken in the context of an overall shopping pattern, can signal emerging trends and customer preferences. Polishing a brand and product line to meet those trends allows for companies to maximize basket sizes and improve customer loyalty.

Provide a "free" service

We've all seen the proliferation of "free" services that offer to make our lives simpler, if only we sign up for a free account. The reality is that these "free" services (looking at you Facebook and Twitter!) are only free from a direct monetary perspective. In reality, you're paying for these services by providing an incredible amount of data and information. Is your loss of privacy really worth that new social media app? Will logging in with your social media account on that third-party site really be worth it when they pull all your data from your various data feeds?

Remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch. For companies looking to maximize profits, the process of gathering big data is becoming increasingly important. How will you leverage big data to generate big profits?
Got a question or tip? Contact us at bizmojoidaho@gmail.com.
Images of bison dont pop into mind when we think of Grand Canyon National Park, but the Arizona Game and Fish Departments bison-cattle hybrid herd, introduced to the Kaibab Plateau in the early 1900s, has rapidly become a major headache to park management.

Buffalo Jones introduced bison to the plateau in 1905 as an experiment to cross them with cattle and produce a manageable herd. The hybrids quickly migrated to lower elevation grasslands in House Rock Valley. Jones abandoned the idea and sold animals he could not capture to a rancher, who eventually sold them to the State of Arizona.

The State signed an agreement with the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and local stockmen to keep the buffalo confined to their designated range on the Kaibab National Forest. For nearly 50 years, the State kept them within the 50,000 acres and allowed hunting to maintain herd size. In the late 1990s, poor range conditions and a lack of fence maintenance influenced movement of the herd onto the Kaibab Plateau and into Grand Canyon National Park. The Park Service made several attempts to thwart the bison-hybrid herd from becoming residents. Rather than acknowledge a developing problem, the State established hunting regulations that caused hunting pressure on the bison-hybrids, moving them farther into the park. The population has now grown significantly to more than 600 animals.

Bison-hybrids in Grand Canyon National Park create a ticklish management issue for an agency designated to preserve landscapes and cultural values in their natural or original state. The States goals are quite different: maintaining the herd for hunting and deriving a revenue stream from hunting fees. No one disputes that these introduced animals are negatively impacting the natural and cultural resources of Grand Canyon National Park. Meadows now appear as overused ranchland rather than the pristine meadows beaming with colorful and unique species of wildflowers of just two decades ago. Fragile water sources have become E. coli-laced mud bogs or dried up completely, threatening a potential loss of species and clean drinking water for park wildlife and visitors. Heavy bison hooves have trampled ancient cultural sites.

It is clear that in order to continue their task of conserving park resources, National Park Service officials need to remove the bison-hybrids. Wholesale killing is not humanely acceptable. However, in 2014, park and state officials were extremely successful with corralling and transporting 18 bison-hybrids off the plateau using well-proven bison ranching techniques. The bison were taken to the States House Rock Wildlife Area to see if, with proper management, they would remain. This portion of the experiment failed when State staff prematurely released the animals without infrastructure to keep them. The small herd immediately returned to the park.

Why is it that the State sits back and continues to allow such degradation of resources in a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Grand Canyon State? Based on the success of the transporting experiment, why not start immediately implementing this technique? Instead, deals are being cut with congressional representatives and bills are being promoted to allow Arizona hunters (only) to slaughter the animals within the national park and keep their remains.

It would be in the best interest of all if the State stepped up, accepted responsibility, and took action now to remove the bison from the plateau, reduce the numbers through hunts at Raymond Ranch or House Rock Wildlife Area or via translocation, manage projected populations and, at a minimum, confine herds to the House Rock Wildlife Area in accordance with its agreements and the Forest Management Plan.

Alicyn Gitlin, Grand Canyon Program Manager

Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter

Kelly Burke, Executive Director

Grand Canyon Wildlands Council
The buffalo isnt happy.

She is eyeing me warily from perhaps a dozen feet away, with only a rickety wooden and wire fence separating the two of us. Shes shaggy but gorgeous, this iconic symbol of the Great Plains, and as I raise my camera to snap a photo, her eyes lock with mine. Suddenly miffed by my intrusion, or maybe my red sweater, she takes a couple of steps backward, snorts mightily, and then charges full speed ahead, with only the fence stopping her from chasing me down.

There is possibly nothing more highly amusing than to see a big ol plump blond woman run as fast as the wind blowing across the Nebraska prairie.

The tango between the bison and me is at the High Plains Homestead close to Crawford, in the far northwest corner of Nebraska near its intersection with South Dakota and Wyoming. The Homestead, reached by threading a number of well-maintained dirt roads, is reminiscent of an Old West cowboy town, reconstructed with all the trimmings of a sheriffs office and jail, a school, a saloon with swinging doors so authentic that you expect a rootin, tootin Yosemite Sam to come crashing through at any moment, and the critters, a menagerie of horses, chickens and buffalo, one in particular that doesnt care for my presence in the least.

While my traveling companions and I  there are four friends, all ladies, in our rented van  had visited only to partake of the Homesteads delectable ribs that are slow-cooked on an outdoor grill, you can stay here for a spell, bed-and-breakfast style, in the rooms decorated to honor Nebraskas cowboys, cowgirls and caballeros. At heart Im a nature traveler, and always before going to a place Ive never been before, I have preconceived notions and expectations about what the landscape will look like. Western Nebraska is like that. I expected it to be an inland ocean of flat, open prairies, endless grasslands, and gently rising sand hills.

That is all here, of course, but what I didnt expect to find is a land, an almost prehistoric land, of high plains striated by mesas, buttes, and the strangest of rock formations and then cut with ribbons of silent mountains, deep valleys and fertile river beds.

All of this unexpected natural beauty caught me off-guard. I can blame the journey to Western Nebraska not only on nature, but also on wonderful Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtrys beloved and prize-winning novel and later CBS miniseries that depicted a cattle drive from Texas to Montana and which takes the motley crew of cowboys through Nebraska. When the cowboy character of Augustus Gus McCrae, played to absolute perfection by Robert Duvall, tells Diane Lanes character of lady-of-the-evening Lorena hes bound for Ogallala, honey, on the cattle drive to see a woman named Clara, a long-lost love, my interest was piqued. I picked up a map and found that Ogallala actually exists not only in fiction but reality, too.

And thats how I found myself in Nebrasky in Gus-speak. For a few days this past summer, we drove hundreds of miles across the western fringes of Nebrasky, from Sidney and Ogallala in the south to Alliance, Scottsbluff and Gering in its middle, to Crawford and Fort Robinson State Park in the north. In between the roads are gloriously empty, with no such thing as rush hour, unless you count the herds of deer and antelope playing in the open fields. Cue music here of Home on the Range.

As a rural Southerner, I live among the thickest woods of hardwood and pine. Probably because of that, I am addicted to the natural beauty of wide open places, only in that they are something that I am not used to seeing amid the verdant forests of the South.

Western Nebraska does not disappoint in that regard, and it is here that the heartland meets the wild, wild West under clouds floating like flower petals in the big bright cerulean skies.

On the drive to Ogallala from Sidney, where we had first overnighted, my mind conjures images of the great herds of cattle driven up from Texas as they feasted on the sweet prairie grass. Ogallala is a small town of fewer than 5,000 where its cowboy roots are still strong with plenty of cattle ranchers and farmers. In Ogallala proper, we visit the Petrified Wood Gallery with its collection of petrified wood art, then take time to climb the steps to Boot Hill, a flower-strewn cemetery that was quite literally the end of the trail for cowboys and pioneers who first settled the town where the fictional Clara lived.

The South Platte River, framed by willowy cottonwoods, meanders through Ogallala from Colorado and Wyoming eastward toward the Missouri River. Not far from Ogallala, we pass a jigsaw puzzle of low green knolls, stopping at Windlass Hill at Ash Hollow State Historical Park, notched in part by fragrant valleys smothered with wild roses, currants and chokeberries. The Oregon Trail crosses here, the deep trenches of wagon ruts of long ago still visible. Looking westward toward the Rockies and across the seemingly endless landscape, I thought how brave those early pioneers were to cross these beautiful valleys toward an uncertain future.

While the primary goal of our journey was really to bask in the beauty of Nebraskas great outdoors, our road trip revealed a plethora of historic and natural treasures that we had never heard of until we started driving. One of those places is Chimney Rock Historic Site near Bayard. The process of erosion through wind, rain and snow has sculpted myriad natural gifts and is a humbling reminder that natures force is not to be reckoned with lightly.

Chimney Rock, one of those extraordinary stories of sandstone erosion, is one of the landmarks along the Oregon Trail and could have been plucked from the old 60s movie One Million Years B.C. I can best describe it as an amalgamation of towering chimney, obelisk and pyramid thats visible for miles on end. Courthouse and Jail Rocks near Bridgeport are also some of the more well-known erosion-created rock formations and resemble, well, a courthouse and jail. No shortage of roadside wonders exists in this part of Nebrasky.

Moving on, our all-girl van putters across the Great Plains, which are essentially the remnants of ancient oceans that once covered this part of Nebraska. We stop at Scotts Bluff National Monument, sometimes called Nebraskas Rock of Gibraltar. At the visitors center at the base of the bluff, we learn Scotts Bluff is yet another landmark on the Oregon Trail and was once a stop for the Pony Express.
Donations can be sent to BNC at Max Obuszewski, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212 . Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast [dot] net.
He said: We will not forcefully shift them.

At present more than 200 displaced villagers are staying at Buddhist monasteries in the villages of Kyiyar Byin, Wrama Byint and Zaydi Daung.

On 18 January U Mra Aung visited the villages of Kyiyar Byin and Zaydi Daung to check on the displaced people.

He said: When I visited those places [the monasteries], the monks argued that the villagers should not stay there any longer, but the displaced families prefer not to go back home immediately. The district administration office earlier permitted the families to live with their relatives for a while.

Speaking to Narinjara News, U Mra Aung said that the government was looking for an alternative arrangements for the refugees.

Earlier a social worker from Kyiyar Byin alleged that district officials were asking the refugees to go stay with relatives, which was causing them to be worried about their future.

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
In Mon State, Township-level celebrations are being planned in Mudon, Ye, Paung, Moulmein, Chaungzone, and Thanbyuzayat Townships, and township-level preparations have also begun in the Karen State townships of Hpa-an, Kawkereik, and Kyarinnseikkyi.

Township-level festivities for Ye will be held in Duya Village and Kawkareik Townships event is planned for Kawpain Village.

Billboards for the annual celebration have been put up in Chaungzone, Moulmein, Paung, and Mudon Townships.

Nai Mon Yarzar, a member of the 69th Mon National Day Central Committee said: Compared to last year, we founded our committees for the 69th Mon National Day a bit late. This is because we also established the [events] central committee late. It seems like we have not had much time for setting up the committees yet.

He added that the planning committees for township-level celebrations across the different communities would ensure that the chairmen give similar welcome speeches and offer similar events, such as talks on Mon literature, as well as using a standard billboard poster, all of which will create some uniformity for those attending the events.

Meanwhile, a campaign to make Mon National Day an official public holiday has been spearheaded by the events organising committees and members of the Mon Sangha, or community of monks.

Dr. Min Soe Linn, a Mon National Party member and a newly elected Mon State Hluttaw (Parliament) representative said: We have been interested in the recognition of Mon National Day as a public holiday for a long time. But this is a new approach thats never been tried before.

The campaign will include the release of public statements, campaign songs, and the distribution of promotional materials like stickers and headbands, according to Moulmein Townships 69th Mon National Day Committee.

In addition to festivities in Mon and Karen states and Tenasserim Division, Mon National Day is celebrated in locations across the area administered by the New Mon State Party (NMSP) and in Rangoon and Mandalay.

Ethnic Mon communities living abroad also frequently organize celebrations in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, and the United States.

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
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Misery loves company and Joe Arpaio is one miserable son of a bitch.

Infamous sheriff and leader of the birther posse Joe Arpaio has made the trek to Iowa where he will join GOP presidential frontrunner and fellow birther Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

Arpaio praised Trump as a "leader" who "produces results and is ready to get tough in order to protect American jobs and families." "I have fought on the front lines to prevent illegal immigration and I know Donald Trump will stand with me, and countless Americans, to secure our border. I am proud to support him as the best candidate for President of the United States of America," he added.

Arpaio's reputation speaks for itself. He's been the target of a federal civil rights investigation and he's just this side of Orly Taitz in the birther hierarchy.

In 2008 John McCain won 31 percent of the Latino vote, down from the 44 percent who voted for George W. Bush. Mitt Romney lowered the bar once again with 27 percent support.

I don't want to engage in thinking that is a bit too wishful, but I can see Donald Trump walking away with 10 percent or less of the Latino vote in November.

Needless to say that would be a disaster for the GOP.
More than perhaps any other single person, GOP presidential candidate and disgraced CEO Carly Fiorina has promoted the idea that Planned Parenthood operates a black market for fetuses.

Fiorina told an audience of millions of people during a Republican primary debate that she watched a video of a "fully formed fetus on the table, it's heart beating, it's legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain."

Fiorina also recently hijacked a pre-school field trip and used 4-year-olds as campaign props for a speech about Planned Parenthood's side business of selling body parts.

Now that the progenitors of the anti-Planned Parenthood videos that kicked off the entire campaign against the organization have been indicted in Texas, Fiorina says you can't trust our justice system because Hillary Clinton hasn't been indicted.

Wait, what?

Fiorina was asked on Fox News' "Happening Now" about Monday's indictment of the two anti-abortion activists who made heavily-doctored sting videos alleging that Planned Parenthood sold fetal tissue for profit. [...] "It doesn't change the facts," Fiorina said. "You know, look, Hillary Clinton hasn't been indicted either so what does that say about our justice system."

Harris County, Texas District Attorney Devon Anderson made it very clear when the indictment was announced that his office and the grand jury went 'where the evidence led them.'

The evidence. The facts.

I suppose Fiorina is correct in saying the facts haven't changed, but the facts are not what she claims they are.

It's easier for me now more than than ever to understand how a CEO can be responsible for ruining the lives of tens of thousands of people and still deny it. Carly Fiorina is a lying sociopath and I suspect many of her ilk are as well.
Terrible person of record, Maine Governor Paul LePage, told radio station WVOM that he would like to publicly execute drug dealers for whom longer prison sentences just aren't harsh enough.

I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers, LePage said. We should give them an injection of the stuff they sell. [...] What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back, he said, interrupting the hosts. We could have public executions and we could even have which hole it falls in.

As I'm sure you recall, it was just a few weeks ago when Governor LePage went on a tirade about drug dealers named 'D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty' who travel to Maine from New York where they 'impregnate young white girls.'

These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty  these types of guys  they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home, LePage told a large crowd. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.

Taken together, we can infer that LePage's lust for public execution of drug traffickers is directly related to his malice for the fictional characters D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty.

No word yet on whether David Duke approves of LePage's latest thoughts.
(Cartoonist - Pat Bagley)

In other news, a Texas grand jury has indicted Center for Medical Progress CEO David Daleiden and activist Sandra Merritt for producing the anti-Planned parenthood smear videos. Among other things, they face charges of tampering with government records. I'd sure like to know the details on that.

Meanwhile, the Ted Cruz campaign is distributing water in Flint, Michigan but only to people who visit fraudulent crisis pregnancy centers. How pro-life of him.

And finally, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. has endorsed Donald Trump for president because Evangelical leaders don't care about morality even 1/10th as much as they care about power.
As you may recall, Kentucky state official ultimately decided not to subsidize the Noahs Ark theme park located in Northern Kentucky just south of Cincinnati because doing so might violate the state constitution.

The creationist theme park gave lawmakers pause after it was revealed that they would refuse to hire anyone who isn't a creationist, but Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove ruled that it doesn't matter.

He roots this decision largely in a non-sequitur about what AiGs obligations would be if they were sued by an employee alleging discrimination. As the judge notes, federal law exempts a religious corporation, association, educational institution, or society from the federal ban on employment discrimination with respect to the employment of individuals of a particular religion to perform work connected with the carrying on by such corporation, association, educational institution, or society of its activities. Thus, a religious group like AiG typically has the right to hire only members of a particular faith without having to face a federal lawsuit. But the fact that federal law provides a particular exemption does not necessarily mean that Kentucky must also offer the same exemption. And it certainly does not mean that Kentucky must also provide tax subsidies to groups that engage in discrimination.

It's not clear what course of action state officials and lawmakers will take next, but it seems to me the judge's ruling doesn't actually apply to this case.

Answers in Genesis (AiG), the owner of the Dinosaur Jesus park, may be exempt from charges of discrimination under federal law, but that hardly compels the state to subsidize the company.

If the state were still under the control of Democrats, I'd guess they would either appeal or maybe even ignore the ruling given that it doesn't seem to apply, but the state is under the control of Matt Bevin (R) now.

Kentucky taxpayers may end up subsidizing this embarrassing project after all.
The community of Lewiston and its local school were asked to give. They delivered.

A sixth grader, three fifth graders and a teacher of Lewiston Consolidated Schools organized a recent fundraising effort for the Childrens Hospital and Medical Center in Omaha that resulted in 600 donated clothing items and $245 spent on activities for the patients.

This was completely their idea, said Debbie Goossen, the school librarian and instructor of the four high ability learners.

The fifth and sixth graders were told only to think of a project to benefit others.

In a group interview, the children said the idea was a group effort. Student Ean Rule said he suggested donating to a hospital.

My aunts friend donated to the childrens hospital, so I thought of that, Persefenie Woutzke said.

Carleigh Weyers thought of the clothing drive and Kienen Creek thought of the coin drive, they said.

At first, we had a totally different idea, Carleigh said. We were going to bring hot chocolate and cookies to people in town who are lonely. But we thought this would be better.

The students said they thought the fundraiser would be more helpful.

Ive been to a hospital  not a childrens hospital  but Ive been to a hospital, and theyre not fun. Not usually, Ean said.

Plus, the parents might not have money to spend on toys and games, Persefenie said. Theyre spending it on medicine, Carleigh said. Hopefully it will make the child patients happy, Ean said.

It will take their minds off being in the hospital and being hurt or injured, Carleigh said. It will make them feel better.

The students spread the word about the fundraiser through fliers, posters and a Christmas-themed play that they wrote and performed for Lewiston kindergartners through sixth graders. The four students played Santa Clause, the narrator, an elf and a boy in the hospital. At the end, they told the audience how they could donate.

Within two days, $120 in coins was donated. The fundraiser was extended by a week and another $100 came in. Wal-Mart donated a $25 gift card. On Tuesday, Goossen and the children used all of the money to buy art supplies, games, movies and other items they thought juvenile patients would enjoy. Theyll deliver the items and tour the hospital on Thursday.

The most challenging part of the project, the kids said, was counting the donations. In the end, they said they learned about responsibility, how to count money and shop on a budget, and a lesson in being kind to others.

The one who gives receives more in the end, Ean said. I came up with that (quote). Thats what I think of it as, because usually its true.

After purchasing the activities and before dropping them off, the four students said they felt happy.

I feel like a good person, Carleigh said. Its been an inspiration.

Kienen said he felt like a great person and he enjoyed counting the money and lugging it to the bank.

Im happy to help people in need, Persefenie said.

Im happy to know that others are receiving what they potentially did not already have, Ean said. Im pretty sure that if you were in a childrens hospital, you would like if someone else did that for you.

Lewiston is located 20 miles southeast of Beatrice, in the southeast corner of Nebraska. The population of the town is about 66 and 220 preschoolers through 12th graders attend the school.
COLUMBUS  Nebraska Public Power District is warning Nebraska customers to be wary of a phone scammers contacting businesses and residents across the state.

The scammers falsely threatens the customers electricity will be shut off if they do not pay their electric bill immediately with a prepaid cards, according to a press release from NPPD.

Individuals posings as representatives of the local power company tell customers they are overdue on their electric bill and must pay within 20 minutes or have their power disconnected. They are then instructed to purchase prepaid cards to make immediate payment, the press release states.

Businesses in Kearney, Ogallala and Norfolk, as well as communities served by rural public power districts, have been contacted by phone, with calls demanding payment often coming at busy times of a companys operation.

NPPD does not to business this way, said NPPDs Customer Care Business Manager Robyn Tweedy. If a customer is overdue on their electric bill and subject to disconnection, it will be printed on their monthly bill with instructions on what they can do to settle the account. They should call the number printed on the bill, not the phone number of the individual making the phone request.

Customers who receive such a call should not attempt to make any payment. Instead contact local law enforcement and NPPDs Centralized Customer Care Center at 1-877-ASK-NPPD (877-275-6773) to report the request and provide the call-back number. If an individual or business not served by NPPD receives a call demanding payment on their electric bill, they are encouraged to contact their local electric provider to check on their account before making any attempt to pay.


A display of BRAHMOS missile during the 67th Republic Day parade at Rajpath in New Delhi on Tuesday. Photo: PTI.

NEW DELHI (PTI): India's military prowess and multi-hued images of the country's rich cultural diversity and achievements in various fields were on display at the majestic Rajpath on Tuesday during 67th Republic Day parade which was graced by French President Francois Hollande as the chief guest.



Thousands of people on both sides of the imposing Rajpath, India's ceremonial boulevard facing the seat of power Raisina Hills, braved the winter chill and cheered loudly as the marching contingents and tableux went past them.



The national capital, particularly the Central and New Delhi areas, were brought under unprecedented security blanket as thousands of personnel kept a hawk-eye vigil to thwart any untoward incident. There were intelligence inputs that terror groups may target some important installations in the city.



Hollande was seated between President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi who wore a marigold coloured 'safa'(turban). Modi was seen explaining things to Hollande on several occasions during the one-and-a-half-hour-long event.



This year the duration of the parade has been curtailed from more than two hours to 90 minutes.



A French military contingent also marched down the Rajpath, a first by any foreign armed force. In 2009, an Indian contingent had also participated in France's annual Bastille Day parade.



Apart from India's missile firing capability T-90 'Bhishma' tank, Infantry Combat Vehicle BMP II (Sarath), Mobile Autonomous Launcher of the BRAHMOS Missile System, Akash Weapon System, Smerch Launcher Vehicles, the highlights of the parade also included a canine squad.



The synchronised military and police contingents led by General Officer Commanding (Delhi), Lt General Rajan Ravindran marched proudly to the lilting tunes of the bands through Rajpath where Mukherjee, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, took the salute from a specially erected dais.



Earlier, Hollande, who is on a three-day state visit, arrived with Mukherjee and was received by Modi who introduced him to the three services chief -- Army, Air Force and Navy.



Alongside Hollande, the fifth French President to attend the celebrations, the parade was watched by Vice-President Hamid Ansari, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP president Amit Shah and the country's top political and military brass, besides the diplomatic community.



Minutes before the parade began, Modi, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and the three service chiefs laid wreaths at 'Amar Jawan Jyoti', the war memorial at the India Gate where an eternal flame burns in memory of those who laid down their lives defending the frontiers of the nation.



Before the start of the ceremonial parade, Mukherjee presented the Ashok Chakra (Posthumous), highest peacetime gallentry award, to Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami of 9 Para (Special Force) for his bravery in fighting with terrorists on the intervening night of September 2/3 last year in Haphruda forest at Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir. The award was received by his wife Bhavna Goswami.



A massive ground-to-air security apparatus was put in place in the national capital. Commandos with light machine guns were deployed at 10 strategic locations and anti-aircraft guns remained positioned at vantage points in the capital.



The entire region of Central and New Delhi had nearly 50,000 security personnel drawn from Delhi Police and central security forces guarding every nook and corner.



The unfurling of the tricolour by the President and playing of the national anthem were followed by a customary 21-gun salute.



After a gap of 26 years, an Army dog squad drawn from the Remount Veterinary Corps (RVC) took part in the parade, along with their handlers, adding a special charm to the occasion.



Another attraction was the colourful BSF Camel Regiment consisting of 56 camels. For the first time the parade saw an ex-servicemen tableau, displaying the role of veterans in nation building.



An Indian Air Force tableau with the theme 'Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Operations' showcased the IAF's rescue and relief operations during floods in Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir, besides its role in evacuating people in Nepal when that country was hit by a devastating earthquake in April last year.



This year the Indian Navy's tableau had the theme 'Empowering India through Maritime security and Indigenisation.'



The tableau displayed flight deck operations on the new aircraft carrier 'Vikrant' under construction at the Kochi Shipyard Ltd and the indigenously constructed submarine 'Kalvari' having a 'Made in India' tag on them.



The marching contingents of Army included horse-mounted columns of the 61st Cavalry, the Parachute Regiment, the Corps of Signals, the Rajput Regiment, the Garhwal Rifles, the Assam Regiment and 11 Gorkha Rifles.



The marching contingents of paramilitary and other auxiliary civil forces included those from the Border Security Force, Assam Rifles, Indian Coast Guard, an all women contingent of Central Reserve Police Force, Railway Protection Force, Delhi Police, National Cadet Corps and National Service Scheme.



Tableaux from 17 States and six Central Ministries and Departments, featuring varied historical, architectural and cultural heritage of the country, were among the major attractions at the parade.



Similarly floats of Ministry of Communication and IT based on 'Digital India', the Ministry of Panchayat Raj float on 'Empowered Women and empowered Panchayat Raj and Society' and float of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation on 'Swachh Bharat Mission' showcased some of the flagship programmes of the Government.



Twenty three of 25 children selected for the National Bravery Award 2015 also participated in the parade. Two children have got the award posthumously.



In the children's pageant section, about 500 boys and girls drawn from five schools in Delhi and a group of school children from South Central Zone Cultural Centre performed colourful dances on Rajpath.



'Dare Devils'- the motorcycle display team of Corps of Signals was a major attraction of the parade.



They performed different stunts like 'Salute to President', 'Signal Rocket', 'Signal Fighter', 'Abhimanyu', 'Shradhanjali' and 'Human Pyramid', etc. on moving motor cycles.



The grand finale of the parade was a spectacular flypast by the IAF. It started with the 'Chakra' formation, comprising three Mi-35 helicopters in 'Vic' formation, followed by the 'Hercules' formation comprising three C-130J Super Hercules aircraft.



Trailing them was the 'Globe formation' comprising one C-17 Globemaster flanked by two Su-30s. Next, five Jaguars flew in Arrowhead formation. Then the breath-taking 'Trishul' formation comprised three Su-30 MKI.



The flypast concluded with another Su-30 MKI carrying out a 'Vertical Charlie' manoeuvre over the saluting dais.



Modi and Hollande also stood up from their seats when Param Vir Chakra and Ashok Chakra awardees moved past the ceremonial dais during the course of the parade.



The French Army contingent followed the gallantry award winners and the two leaders continued to remain standing till it also passed by.


Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/01/2016 (2458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Police say they are now investigating a homicide after a two-month-old baby girl from Sioux Valley Dakota Nation died on the weekend.

Haelin Taliyah Taylor had been in critical condition in a Winnipeg hospital after being seriously injured Jan. 4 at a residence in Sioux Valley, according to RCMP.

The Manitoba RCMP Serious Crimes Unit had been leading the investigation since being notified of the injury that day, with the assistance of the Dakota Ojibway Police Service.

This is the saddest of tragedies for the community and all Manitobans, Sgt. Bert Paquet of the Manitoba RCMP said Tuesday.

Based on our investigation to date, we can say that other children are not at risk. While we understand that a lot of questions are being asked about this case, our focus remains on the investigation in order to bring answers to the community.

The babys grandmother said yesterday that the family has suffered a tremendous loss.

We are hurt, we are lost, we are angry from the accusations from the RCMP, Child and Family Services and the media, Pamela Bunn said. So we prefer to stay out of the media at this time to mourn the loss of my granddaughter.

On Jan. 5, the day after the reported injury, police had cordoned off a Sioux Valley bungalow as part of the investigation.

A woman who identified herself as the mothers sister told The Brandon Sun the incident had been blown out of proportion.

Nothings happening, theyre just doing it as a precaution, the woman said. They thought something happened to the baby and its nothing  its bacteria in the blood, but it just like got all blown out of proportion.

She said the baby stopped breathing sometime that Monday, so an ambulance was called and the child taken to Brandon and then Winnipeg.

The initial medical report by Brandon Regional Health Centre says Haelin had woken up on Jan. 4 with a gurgle and had gone unresponsive. The infant was admitted with respiratory arrest and was diagnosed with gastroenteritis  her reported symptoms from the previous day included vomiting and diarrhea. Haelin underwent a blood transfusion at the hospital due to a low hemoglobin count.

No physical injuries were noted by ambulance staff.

The mothers sister said doctors didnt know what was wrong with the girl and contacted Child and Family Services, who in turn notified police.

A funeral service for Haelin will be held at the Sioux Valley Veterans Hall on Thursday. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that donations be made in Haelins memory to the Childrens Hospital Foundation of Manitoba PICU Department.

 The Brandon Sun
Join Nebraska Master Naturalists in an outdoor adventure at Homestead National Monument of America on Saturday, Jan. 30 at 1 p.m. Meet at the Education Center and dress to for the weather. Activities will take place both indoors and outdoors. Children attending this event can earn a special wooden centennial Junior Ranger badge.

The hike will give participants the opportunity to learn about mammals of the tallgrass prairie with hands-on activities that are both educational and fun. The Master Naturalists are state certified and will lead youth in an investigation of mammal habits and tracks.

The Centennial of the National Park Service is here and during this year there will be opportunities to engage in unique activities. This Junior Ranger event is one of those, Homestead Superintendent Mark Engler said in a press release.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/01/2016 (2458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Canadian Forces captain with a passion for classical music is in the running for the title of Piano Hero  a national competition looking to find Canadas favourite amateur pianist.

Capt. Victor Pak, a physiotherapist currently posted at CFB Shilo, is one of more than 150 entries in the contest, presented by CBC Music and ICI Musique.

Its been an interesting experience. Its good to tickle the ivories again for sure, Pak said. I just hope whoever listens to my playing enjoys it. I think thats the main thing.

Submitted Capt. Victor Pak, currently posted at CFB Shilo, is competing for the title of Piano Hero, a nationwide contest through CBC Music and ICI Musique. Online voting at piano2016.strutta.com ends Thursday at 2 p.m.

Pak was born and raised in Toronto, and started playing piano at the age of five. He joined the military at 18, and piano was put on the back burner. It was in 2010  the year he and his wife My-Linh Nguyen welcomed their first child  when Pak started playing piano again.

Theres value in some type of performing art enrichment, especially with kids  you want to play for them, said Pak, now 36. Thats how I got back into it, but essentially there was a lull of almost 10 to 15 years. There was no practice.

Pak now has three children, aged five, four and three. He says its nice to have piano back in his life, with a different perspective.

Now that youre older, you see the value in it. I think thats the key, he said.

It was his spouse who encouraged Pak to submit a video to the Piano Hero contest.

I prefer to just stay low-key, but she said  your mom invested so much money into your education, and you should do it so you have something to show for it, he said.

The winner will receive an upright piano courtesy of Steinway Piano Galleries of Canada plus a trip for two to Montreal to make a professional music video, have a private piano lesson with David Jalbert and attend a concert by lOrchestre Metropolitain, including the opportunity to perform a pre-concert solo.

Ten finalists will be determined through online voting. Paks entry is a video of him performing Sergei Rachmaninoffs Prelude in G-sharp Minor, Op. 32, No.12. The contest can be found on CBC Musics website at piano2016.strutta.com.

Its not really to get the votes, or to win, as long as people get to enjoy it, Pak said.

People can cast a vote once per day until Thursday at 2 p.m. local time. A jury comprising Angela Cheng, Jan Lisiecki and Yannick Nezet-Seguin will select the winner.

View and vote for his performance here: http://piano2016.strutta.com/entry/9972173

 jaustin@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @jillianaustin
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/01/2016 (2458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just as it is too soon to endorse the (Trans-Pacific Partnership), it is also too soon to close the door. Signing does not equal ratifying. Signing is simply a technical step in the process, allowing the TPP text to be tabled in Parliament for consideration and debate before any final decision is made.

 Federal International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland

So a Liberal government comes into power after the previous Tory administration has completed negotiations on a sweeping free trade agreement that now only awaits ratification from the federal government before it can be implemented.

The newly installed Liberal prime minister, through his top advisers, tell the United States that while they have reservations over the agreement, Canada is generally on side.

Sound familiar? It should. Thats generally what happened with former Liberal Party leader Jean Chretien came to power in 1993. Chretien and his party had been elected to office, partly on a promise that it would seek to renegotiate key parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement made with the U.S. and Mexico before ratifying it.

Though separate side deals were struck with the U.S., ultimately NAFTA went through and became law in 1994.

Funny how history repeats itself. Just this week, Freeland announced that Ottawa intends to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive agreement encompassing 12 countries that edge on the Pacific ocean, and 40 per cent of the worlds economy.

While signing the agreement does not commit Canada to accepting the agreement  Freeland said its a technical step in the process that will allow the TPP text to be tabled in Parliament for consideration and debate before any final decision is made  NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said the Liberal position is nothing but flim flam and that the majority government intends to ram it through Parliament, no matter what.

Mulcair has a right to be concerned about the deal, all things considered. The changes that could be wrought on Canadian industry, commerce, agriculture, manufacturing and intellectual property are huge in their implications. Where NAFTA was a footstep, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a leap by comparison.

The effect of NAFTA on Canada has been both negative and positive since it came into effect  and much depends on whose doing the talking. Even at the time it was originally negotiated, free trade was not a popular idea in Canada. Yet cross-border trade between Canada and the U.S. had been increasing for years, even before NAFTA and the original Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that preceded it.

As noted in an April 2015 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, Canadian advocates for free trade believed the FTA and NAFTA would alleviate the long-term labour productivity gap between the United States and Canada. Open competition between neighbouring countries was supposed to force Canadian industry to be more productive.

There were some net benefits to Canada out of free trade. American investment in automotive production increased. Canadian oil exports increased to the United States  although at the moment, thats small comfort to Canadas ailing oil industry. Canadas exports of agricultural products like beef and pork increased, though there were significant trade disputes over things like Country of Origin Labelling rules that have for the most part been resolved through successive complaints to the World Trade Organization.

If you listen to groups such as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives or the Canadian labour union Unifor, NAFTA was an unmitigated disaster, especially on the manufacturing sector.

The agreement has destroyed more jobs than it has created, depressed wages, worsened poverty and inequality, eroded social programs, undermined democracy, enfeebled governments and greatly increased the rights and power of corporations, investors, and property holders, read a damning report by the CCPA entitled Lessons from NAFTA.

Since NAFTA, Canada has negotiated several other, albeit smaller, trade pacts with countries around the world, and Canadians have hardly blinked. But the TPP is a different animal, one that Canada had very little choice but to try to elbow its way into. Even as it stands now, Canada could bow out and the 11 other potential signatories, including the U.S. and Japan, could still form a massive trading block. And essentially Canada would be left out.

Considering the stakes in play, wed be very surprised if this Liberal government failed to ratify the TPP, no matter what they say about openness and public consultation.
LINCOLN  Three Cuban-born Texas men have been indicted in Nebraska for a scheme to print fake credit cards that scammed real card holders, some of them Nebraskans, out of nearly $30,000.

It happened in Lincoln, Crete, Omaha, Bellevue, La Vista and Council Bluffs, Iowa, over the span of two weeks, said Jan Sharp, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Nebraska.

Jasiel Gonzalez Rodriguez, Jose Carlos Terra Izquierdo and Miguel Alfonso Rodriguez face 11 counts including conspiracy to defraud through the use of unauthorized access devices, multiple counts of possession of unauthorized access devices and use of unauthorized access device and possession of device-making equipment.

Sharp said the men are believed to be from Cuba but had been living in Amarillo, Texas.

In court records, the grand jury alleged that the object of the conspiracy was to use stolen credit and debit card account numbers to get away with merchandise and gift cards from retailers in Nebraska and elsewhere.

Between July 23 and Aug. 6 in Nebraska and elsewhere, the men are accused of conspiring with one another and others to use 251 counterfeit credit cards or gift cards, according to the indictment.

They allegedly obtained credit and debit account numbers of legitimate account holders, then re-encoded the information onto fake cards.

The grand jury alleged they used the re-encoded cards to buy and redeem gift cards.

They stand accused of using them to obtain merchandise and gift cards that added up to $28,958.79, and attempting to obtain another $34,771.48, over the two-week period last summer.

The three men ultimately were caught with a card encoder on Aug. 6, the grand jury said.

Its not clear in the indictment how or where they were caught, and Sharp said Tuesday he wasnt able to provide additional details of the plot.

The men are set to make their initial court appearances on the indictment in U.S. District Court in Lincoln on Feb. 2.
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/01/2016 (2458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Where does the money go?

Regarding parking at Brandon University. I agree with the person about the parking. Your two-hour parking is a laugh, or do you know some classes are three hours? The multi-level parking lot is a wonderful idea. That is where the funding should go. What are you doing with the money you make out of these students? You must be desperate to charge for plastic spoons. One more complaint  why do the professors not have to have a sub? When they cannot be there to teach, does the paycheque get docked?

Something does not smell right here

Regarding the Jan. 23 Sound Off, City Should Be Made To Pay. A good and valid observation on Winnipegs pollution. Several years ago, it was all about a valve being stuck. This time, we are informed that they lacked the tools to detect the spill situation. Is that a joke? In the meantime Lake Winnipeg continues to be used as a toilet. Its time for the Winnipeg mayor and councillors to have a reconciliation with Lake Winnipeg.

I will make my own decisions

As a Manitoba school teacher, I would like to ask that our union stop throwing NDP propaganda at us. As one who is educated, I would like to make my own choices as I cannot afford to vote for an NDP government again that is throwing money at everything. We cannot afford them. I will be voting for somebody new.

Where do you think this money is coming from?

The man known as The Pallister promises to put an influx of a billion dollars into the Manitoba infrastructure. The question is where is The Pallister going to get that money? Oh, perhaps he is going to plan on selling Manitoba Hydro! Think about it, people!

What is going on with water rate increases?

I want to thank Westman Cable for showing the citys application for water rate increase for the board. I thought Maple Leaf Foods, Keystone, Co-op and other others gave a great presentation on what a water rate increase would do to the bottom line. However, crumbling Maple Leaf compared Lethbridge, Winnipeg and Brandon  the 44 per cent rate increase would make Brandon the highest water rates of all of them. Mayor Chrest stated one form of accounting would be 200 million plus surplus. Another form they could use would be minus 200 plus million for expenses. We need to ask council what is really causing the increased rates. I would have thought that labour and chemical cost would cause the rates to go up, which I think the Brandon people would accept  but this accounting thing makes you wonder. Maybe the Brandon Sun could look into this and find out what is really going on here.

Pallister will leave the dirty work to others

Opposition Leader Brian Pallister has stated that he will not lay off any teachers if his Tories get elected. He will leave that up to the school boards to do after his government makes cuts to some education funding.
A big bualadh bos is in order for the third class students of Sundays Well Boys National School and their teacher Michael O' Connor after they epically recreated the 1916 Easter Rising using Lego.

In what must have been a painstaking process, the boys and their teacher from the Cork city school released a stop frame video entitled Lego 1916 The Movie on YouTube yesterday - and we must say its a fantastic effort!
Nine-year-old Ava Lovley from Maine was in the car when her mother Kim surprised her with the news that they were on the way to meet one of her heroes.

Donald Trump.

Yup, the nine-year-old was taken to see the controversial Trump at his rally in New Hampshire on Monday and the news was a little bit too much for Ava.

Kim filmed her emotional reaction and posted it to Facebook, where it has, inevitably, gone viral.

We don't know about you (and not to get political) but if you told us we were going to have to meet Donald Trump, we'd cry for a different reason.

Kim Lovley told the Washington Post that although the family are Republican they're "not political people at all"

But Ava has taken to Trump in a big way. Her mother told the Washington Post that "she said she loved his hair and that he speaks his mind," just like Ava.

And judging from the video of the rally, he more than lived up to the nine-year-old's expectations. She even got to meet him (briefly).

Kim posted to Facebook that after attending the rally, "Ava has convinced her Momma!" and she is now a Trump convert.

Yay.
If you slipped on the ice leaving home Monday morning  and most of Lincoln did judging from the 911 calls  you might wish Chris Tuan had poured your driveway.

In the early 2000s, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln civil engineering professor and his colleagues developed a patented process that uses electrical current to melt snow and ice by adding steel shavings and carbon particles into concrete.

Now, a small patch of their special concrete  200 square feet near the Peter Kiewit Institute on the University of Nebraska at Omaha campus  is being studied to test its feasibility for use on airport tarmacs.

The FAA is funding the study, which concludes at the end of March.

A bigger plot developed by Tuans team has proven its ice-melting abilities for 15 years in southern Lancaster County, where the 150-foot Roca Spur bridge became the worlds first bridge to use conductive concrete.

The tarmac project is a bit more complex because the cement is in contact with the ground, instead of elevated, Tuan said. And you have to insulate all the potential ground current.

But both projects work the same way: Before the concrete is cast, steel rods are put in place and connected to an external electrical power source. The steel and carbon create millions of minute paths through the slab, Tuan said.

The entire concrete becomes a heating element.

This spring, he and his colleagues will find out whether the FAA will approve a second phase of the project  using the patented process on a tarmac in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

And, hopefully someday, at airports everywhere, preventing bottlenecks that occur when mechanics, fuel teams and luggage loaders cant get their work done because of slick conditions.

The possibilities for airports and roadways are huge, Tuan said.

This technology potentially saves time, saves money, saves lives.

The professor knows people are interested in his heated concrete on a small scale, too, although it costs more than twice as much as regular concrete and requires a high level of expertise to pour.

He used the mixture to pour his own patio, and in 2010 for a driveway in the Regency area of Omaha.

I get requests all the time, Tuan joked. Take a number and get in line.
The Environment Minister, Alan Kelly, has again reiterated his position saying the Labour party will have nothing to do with Michael Lowry.

It follows days of speculation that the Independent Tipperary TD was one of a group of independents that Fine Gael may approach after the election to give them a majority.
The PSNI's chief constable has dismissed claims that its predecessor, the RUC, had advanced warning of the Shankill bombing.

It follows an Irish News report that the IRA leader who planned the 1993 Shankill bomb was working as a police informer.
An investigation into the Zika virus has found fewer confirmed cases of a rare brain defect than first feared, new figures from Brazils Health Ministry show.

So far, only 270 of 4,180 suspected cases have been confirmed as microcephaly, with the brain damage associated with the defect ruled out in 462 cases.

Researchers are still studying 3,448 of the cases, which were recorded from October 22

Brazilian officials still say they believe theres a sharp increase in cases of microcephaly and strongly suspect the Zika virus, which appeared in the country last year, is to blame.

Pregnant women have been warned to reconsider visits to areas where Zika is present.

The rare birth defect, which can also be caused by factors such as infections, malnutrition or drugs, means babies have unusually small heads, 32 centimetres or less in circumference, and it can cause lasting developmental problems.

The cases reported to the Health Ministry include delivered infants, stillborn and miscarried babies, and foetuses shown to have unusually small heads by ultrasound or other diagnostic tests, the ministry said. It then tests to see if neurological imaging shows the brain has been affected.

Officials said babies found to be microcephalic and their mothers are given additional tests to see if they had the Zika virus  often a difficult process.

Six of the 270 confirmed microcephaly cases were found to have the virus.

Two were stillborn and four were live births, three of whom later died, the ministry said.

Brazilian health officials estimate they had 150 cases of microcephaly in all of 2014.

The Health Ministry said Brazilian states were not required to report microcephaly cases before November.

Brazil's Health Ministry says 270 of 4,120 suspected microcephaly cases confirmed: https://t.co/shegBGo9XI  The Associated Press (@AP) January 27, 2016

That could mean the 2014 list didnt fully account for all cases, though the ministry dismissed the idea there might have been a large number of unreported cases.

On Tuesday, Brazils health minister Marcelo Castro announced that 220,000 military personnel were being deployed to bolster efforts to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Castro said the government also would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm as the virus symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue.

Then late last year, Brazilian researchers reported they suspected Zika was linked to the dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly.

The World Health Organisation has stressed that a link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.
A Danish tourist has been infected by the Zika virus after visiting southern and central America, Danish hospital officials said.

But authorities said on Wednesday that it was not the first case in Europe.

Aarhus University Hospital said the patient ran a fever, had a headache and muscle aches and was found to have the virus on Tuesday.

The hospital released no further details about the patient but said there is little risk of it spreading in Denmark because the mosquito carrying the virus is not found in the country.

Brazilzika_large.jpg[/timg

Romit Jain, from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm, Sweden, said there have been confirmed cases of imported Zika virus infections in Germany and Britain.

A Zika virus case was also confirmed in Sweden last summer, said Sara Rorbecker of the Swedish Public Health Agency. She said the patient contracted the virus while travelling, adding that there was nothing dramatic about the case.

In other countries such as El Salvador women are advised not to get pregnant for two years.

The advisory comes after thousands of Brazilian children have been born with underdeveloped heads and brains, a condition called microcephaly.

Zika virus is not a notifiable disease in the European Union, meaning that EU countries are not required to report cases to the ECDC. Therefore, there is wide variation on reporting by member states.
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Wake County Public Schools are growing at a slower rate than expected, and the reasons for this trend illuminate the growing gap between what the traditional public schools offer and what many parents want for their children.Local news reports say that, despite adding about 3,900 students over the last two years, Wake County school enrollment has actually been about 1,000 students less than projected in each of the last two years. Yet new students have been flocking to charter, private and home schools in increasing numbers.So what do the changes mean? At the very least, they should prompt us to cast a more skeptical eye on WCPSS enrollment estimates. The fact is that enrollment estimates have been consistently too high for the last couple of years. Because the numbers drive operating costs and influence capital budgets, there are consequences to getting the enrollment estimates wrong. School planners recently reported that North Carolina's largest school system will grow by 2,000 students for the next few years - instead of more than 3,000 children annually, as was projected with earlier estimates.While the overall numbers are important, a closer look shows more fundamental changes such as growing public support for school choice. In the past three years, charter school enrollment in Wake County has increased 54 percent. News reports say the number of new students in charter schools (2,022) surpassed the number of new students in the traditional public schools (1,884) last year. (The county opened four new charter schools in that time.)In addition, over the past three years, the number of new homeschoolers is up more than 2,800 students. There are now more than 10,400 homeschoolers in Wake County.The steady migration toward charter and home school alternatives demonstrates that the public has embraced these educational alternatives. Our statewide polls bear this out. In November, the Civitas monthly poll asked likely North Carolina voters: If you could select any type of school to obtain the best education for your child, what type of school would you select? Sixty-two percent of respondents choose charter, private, magnet, virtual or home school options. Thirty-two percent of respondents chose traditional public schools.Lest you think these responses are outliers, in recent years we asked virtually the same question in other polls. The percentages opting for traditional public schools ranged between 32 and 41 percent, while the combined percentages of parents opting for charter, private, home school, virtual or magnet school ranged from 47 percent to 63 percent, with the last three polls producing even higher numbers: 53 percent (March 2013), 59 percent (July 2015) and 63 percent (November 2015).The numbers identify a disconnect between the educational options currently available to parents and the options parents want for their children. These options are indicative of an ongoing discussion about the definition of public education in North Carolina and elsewhere. To better understand what's going on, in Part 2 of this series we will take a closer look at the ideas underlying American education, then and now.
The previous poll on Eastern NC NOW showcased what are many of OUR Constitutional Republic's certain obstacles to remain viable, where the top encumbrance to that continuance as a functioning Republic was the Biden /Harris Wide Open Southern Border. Understanding this overwhelming concern to real America citizens: Do you believe it important to challenge the veracity of those legislated concerns of Democratic Socialists by transporting Illegal Migrants to their Sanctuary cities, counties and states for their direct care?

Yes; test the depth of their sense of well being by giving Democratic Socialists an opportunity to enact all Sanctuary provisions in their communities to test how much they truly do care.

No; the Biden /Harris Wide Open Southern Border Project is designed to only inundate "Red States" to begin their Demographic Upheaval for the benefit of we Democratic Socialists, our politics.
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Press Release:

The Honorable Barack Obama

President of the United States

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

U.S. military advisors. To bolster the Iraqi Security Forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and Sunni tribal forces, we should embed U.S. military advisors to serve alongside them in combat units down to the battalion level, including those on the front lines. We must work more closely with our local ground partners. Without effective ground forces, ISIS cannot be dislodged from the territory it now holds in Syria and Iraq.

To bolster the Iraqi Security Forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and Sunni tribal forces, we should embed U.S. military advisors to serve alongside them in combat units down to the battalion level, including those on the front lines. We must work more closely with our local ground partners. Without effective ground forces, ISIS cannot be dislodged from the territory it now holds in Syria and Iraq. Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs). We should deploy and embed additional U.S. troops to serve as JTACs, embedded with our local ground partners, in order to make our airstrikes against ISIS more precise and more lethal.

We should deploy and embed additional U.S. troops to serve as JTACs, embedded with our local ground partners, in order to make our airstrikes against ISIS more precise and more lethal. Close air support. We should deploy and utilize additional close air support platforms, including Apache attack helicopters, to provide more effective support to our ground partners who are in close contact with ISIS, in coordination with the embedded JTACs.

We should deploy and utilize additional close air support platforms, including Apache attack helicopters, to provide more effective support to our ground partners who are in close contact with ISIS, in coordination with the embedded JTACs. Airstrike approval process. We should review the current approval process for coalition airstrikes, which we understand is unwieldy, and consider removing barriers that inhibit our pilots from attacking ISIS targets that are both timely and strategically significant.

Safe zones. We should establish one or more safe zones inside Syria, primarily for the protection of Syrian refugees. Creating and maintaining these so-called no-fly and no-drive zones would be a substantial military and humanitarian undertaking, but in so doing we would help safeguard innocent men, women, and children not just from Bashar al-Assad's aircraft and barrel bombs, but also from ground attacks by Assad's forces and ISIS. We would also help avert the mass exodus of Syrian refugees fleeing their own homeland for other countries in the region and in Europe.

We should establish one or more safe zones inside Syria, primarily for the protection of Syrian refugees. Creating and maintaining these so-called no-fly and no-drive zones would be a substantial military and humanitarian undertaking, but in so doing we would help safeguard innocent men, women, and children not just from Bashar al-Assad's aircraft and barrel bombs, but also from ground attacks by Assad's forces and ISIS. We would also help avert the mass exodus of Syrian refugees fleeing their own homeland for other countries in the region and in Europe. NATO role. In light of the continuing threat posed to multiple member-nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), we should consider pursuing a robust and central NATO role in combating ISIS, as recently proposed by former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Admiral (Ret.) James Stavridis. Leading the planning, implementation, and command-and-control of a mission to establish safe zones in Syria may be an appropriate mission for NATO.

Dear President Obama:In the wake of the recent wave of devastating terrorist attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Paris, Beirut, and the Russian airliner flying over Egypt, as well as last week's attack in San Bernardino that appears to have been inspired by ISIS, we write today to both express support for your stated objective to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS and to urge you to employ more effective means to accomplish that worthy goal.ISIS poses a direct threat to our country, and the magnitude of that threat is growing as a result of this terrorist army's expanded operational reach. The recent attacks prove that ISIS now has the ability to carry out mass-casualty terrorist attacks well beyond its self-proclaimed "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency recently warned that ISIS likely has additional attacks planned, and the group has publicly declared its intention to strike the mainland United States. We also know that ISIS is aggressively pursuing a more robust chemical weapons capability and, to that end, has recruited scientists and other technical experts.The American people are understandably concerned in the aftermath of the horrific attack in San Bernardino and increasingly apprehensive about the prospect of another terrorist attack on American soil. Over the past couple of years, as ISIS has murdered and raped its way across the Syrian and Iraqi countryside, it has also succeeded in reenergizing the global jihadi movement, driven by its evil ideology and fueled by its hateful propaganda. The King of Jordan has described the struggle against ISIS in stark terms, calling it a "third world war against humanity." Likewise, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter testified recently that "We're at war" against ISIS. The group's ranks in Syria and Iraq have swelled to as many as 30,000 jihadists, due in part to its leveraging of social media platforms and dark corners of the Internet to recruit from all over the world. Even more alarming is the threat that ISIS and its adherents now pose to us here at home, in the form of a jihadist already living on U.S. soil and planning the next deadly attack.As a nation, we have a clear and vital interest at stake in Syria and Iraq  preventing terrorist attacks against America and our allies  and that obligates us to intensify the effort to destroy ISIS. That vital interest can only be safeguarded through the elimination of the sanctuary that ISIS has carved out for itself in Iraq and Syria. We believe we are at a strategic inflection point in the fight against ISIS and that, without a well-informed strategy change to arrest this group's momentum, the task of defeating it will multiply in its difficulty and complexity. We listened carefully to your Oval Office address on Sunday but were disappointed to learn that the same ineffective approach will continue to be implemented.In September, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, characterized the fight against ISIS as "tactically stalemated," an assessment that we believe still holds true. To break this stalemate, we ask you to formulate a comprehensive military strategy against ISIS and bring to bear additional military means. In the near term, our principal strategic goal must be to shatter the ISIS narrative of invincibility, in order to stem this group's ability to recruit or inspire additional jihadists, both those who would physically travel to Syria or Iraq to join ISIS and those who would remain outside its sanctuary and conduct attacks on their home nations or neighboring ones, including the United States.In order to effectively undermine the ISIS narrative, the coalition must inflict upon it highly visible territorial losses, starting with Iraq, including the recapture of Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul. To that end, we recommend that you pursue, at a minimum, several additional military options:In addition, we ask you to consider two more far-reaching courses of action:This list of potential courses of action is not an exhaustive one, but we believe that pursuing even some of these would represent a needed boost in the fight against ISIS. Further, a number of these options or related ones have been proposed by two of your former Secretaries of Defense, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, and we agree that they are worthy of serious consideration. A more robust U.S. military effort is also likely to attract greater contributions from both NATO allies and, more importantly, regional partners.We recognize that credible military action is necessarily only one element of any sound strategy to defeat ISIS. In addition, we know that the effort to dislodge ISIS from the territory it currently holds must be undergirded by a political framework that will sustain a lasting rejection of ISIS's bankrupt ideology, which will itself require significant Sunni participation in Iraqi national governance. We also recognize that the threat of ISIS cannot be divorced from the overall conflict in Syria, which continues to rage, fueled further by Russian and Iranian interference. To safeguard our own national security, we must step up the military fight against ISIS as soon as possible, but it will require sustained, long-term American engagement to resolve the deeper problems that have allowed ISIS to incubate and gather strength in Syria and Iraq.Success will not come easily or cheaply, but we urge you as our commander-in-chief to do whatever it takes to defeat ISIS and keep the American citizenry safe from harm.
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Retiring senator says raising zero tax bracket, expanding tax base possible

RALEIGH North Carolina residents could receive a larger personal income tax exemption if the General Assembly's 2016 short session follows the lead of state Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, who has led the Senate's tax reform efforts since Republicans took control of that body."During the short session one of my goals would be to increase the zero bracket, which is the standard deduction, and that could be from $15,500 to $17,500," said Rucho, who has announced he will retire at the end of the current session. "That is treating every income level the same in the sense that that same $17,500 would be state tax-free, but it is extremely beneficial to the middle class."The General Assembly raised the exemption for 2016 from $15,000 to $15,500 for a married couple filing jointly, and from $7,500 to $7,750 for single taxpayers.Allowing workers to keep more of their earnings by increasing the standard deduction "would be very beneficial" for the middle class, and blunt the "unfounded criticisms of the liberals telling us we're doing this just for the rich," Rucho said.Rucho is optimistic that North Carolina will continue moving away from taxing income and toward a consumption-based tax system.As part of that shift, the General Assembly approved new sales taxes on a variety of repair and installation services that will take effect March 1, and the personal income tax rate is scheduled to drop from 5.75 percent to 5.499 percent in 2017."It's a slow process moving from an income tax-based revenue stream to a consumption-based sales tax on goods and services," Rucho said.The income tax is "detrimental to investment, savings, and entrepreneurship, and economic growth overall," he said.A consumption tax is "fairest because you only pay tax on what you spend," Rucho said. "Any type of spending you do is your choice, not [the] government's choice." With an income tax, the government decides how much money it will take in taxes, Rucho said."Consumption taxes make much more sense for economic growth" than income taxes, said Roy Cordato, vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation. "There's a different way to go to accomplish the same goal" Rucho seeks.Cordato was instrumental in developing a consumption-based system known as the Unlimited Savings Account Tax plan, or USA Tax.That plan would maintain the framework of the income tax system, but remove from the tax base all savings, investment, and capital gains, so that only purchases, or consumption, would be taxed. Cordato said that model avoids sales tax pitfalls."A purely sales-tax-based system will require high rates, which will encourage people to buy items both from out of state and online," Cordato said.There are "lots of political problems associated with expanding the sales tax base to professionals like doctors, accountants, lawyers, and so on," Cordato said. "They've got 1,000 special interest battles to fight if they keep" adding more taxpayers to the sales tax base.Business-to-business sales would have to be removed from the sales tax base or else a consumption system based on sales tax would be "riddled with problems of double taxation," Cordato said.Still, Rucho said tax reforms implemented under Republican leadership since 2013 are paying off. The state had a $445 million surplus at the end of the 2014-15 budget year, and was $70 million ahead of tax revenue projections from July through October of the 2015-16 budget year."That is good and bad," Rucho said. "The fact that the economy is doing what we expected it to do is good. The fact that there are members of the General Assembly that believe that every dollar should be spent, that's something that's going to be a battle."Achieving budget surpluses and continuing to move toward a consumption-based tax system "is going to require fiscal discipline," Rucho said.While some lawmakers may chafe at voting to expand sales taxes on services, Rucho said there would be "a commensurate reduction" of the personal income tax, "so it's not like there's a tax increase despite the critics who will say that.""We have gotten good, ongoing dialogue with the General Assembly about tax policy in general, and with Sen. Rucho's office in particular," said State Budget Director Lee Roberts. "But it would be premature to talk about any particular proposal."While he praised Rucho for being "as knowledgeable and thoughtful about tax policy as anyone in the General Assembly," Roberts said raising the standard deduction is not as simple as it might sound."You can't opine on one aspect of tax reform without understanding how it fits into the broader whole," Roberts said. "There are a lot of merits to raising the standard deduction, but there's a process associated with that too. So we need to look at tax reform in the short session as a whole, and see what makes sense."He said the McCrory administration supports decreasing dependence on income taxes, "and you're seen significant progress in that regard already." It makes sense to move away from income taxes because they are more volatile, and more likely to be affected by ups and downs in the economy, he said.Senate Minority Leader Dan Blue, D-Wake, and House Minority Leader Larry Hall, D-Durham, did not respond to requests for comment."There are a lot of economists that believe a consumption-based system is far better for economic growth. There's some political downside to taking that approach, but overall I think it's something that the state ought to explore," said Brandon Arnold, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union."It's difficult sometimes to raise sales taxes, which is often the way people go about it, but I think it's a plausible way of increasing growth," Arnold said.House Rules Committee Chairman David Lewis, R-Harnett, said "we're absolutely moving in that direction."He said the one area of caution "is to make sure that we do not disproportionately hurt the lower-income earners." The way to do that is by expanding the standard deduction, and ensuring that those who earn less than certain incomes would pay no taxes."We believe that what someone truly consumes is what should be taxed," Lewis said.Savings, investments, education expenses, and charitable giving would not be taxed in his preferred version of a consumption tax, which he called "a logical step" as the economy becomes more reliant on a service-based society."I just believe it's the will of the Senate and the House Republican caucuses to get to the point where hard work, and advancing yourself in life is not penalized" by taking taxes on earned income, Lewis said.Savings and investment are "an important part of building a strong society," Lewis said. Consumption "is the true way to tax to least inhibit people from wanting to advance up on the income spectrum."
Evidence from Silicon Valley Grant Halverson of bank consultant and venture capital veteran McLean Roche is just back from visiting the US. He sees the contraction as a confirmation of anecdotal evidence from his many Silicon Valley contacts who are convinced the bubble is deflating fast. "I have been tracking this for the past nine months and on my way back from Europe in November I came via the US and caught up with many of my contacts," he said. "Some had come to a similar conclusion I had  that the VC and fintech hype had morphed into a bubble  and this bubble has started to burst." The party even seems to be subsiding for some more well-known outfits.

Jack Dorsey's payments company Square, for instance, had to cut its float offer price in November to $US9 from $US11-to-$US13. It is only trading just above its offer price now after peaking at $US13.09 on December 31. Similarly, giant card processor First Data, listed by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, had to reduce its US$18 to US$20 range to US$16 in October. It was trading at around $US13.85 on Tuesday. The stock of SME lender OnDeck and P2P lender Lending Club have plummeted since listing just over a year ago. OnDeck floated at $US20 and is now languishing at $US7.80. Lending Club listed at $US24 but is now under $US8. The global sharemarket rout during January would have weighed on these stocks, but Halverson says broader concerns about equity markets will dilute the animal spirits further. Toby Heap, the co-founder of H2 Ventures  a dedicated fintech fund that has financed nine local start-ups including Stockspot, Equitise and Simply Wall Street and is about to fund another six  says many start-ups late last year began reducing their spending in anticipation of tougher times ahead. "With the markets the way they are, there is a bit of nervousness about what that is going to mean for VC [venture capital] and start-ups," he said. "Start-ups are starting to cut back their cash burn rates to have a better ability to weather any storm."

Pain for late-stage start-ups He thinks most of the pain will be felt in "late stage" start-ups that need to prove they can be profitable and are looking to list, or get bought. As there are few Australian start-ups ready to float, that protects the burgeoning sector, he says. One company that may prove to be the exception, however, is Bitcoin Group, a so-called bitcoin miner. It has pushed back its proposed float after so far raising from investors just $367,902 of a $20 million target at the close of its bookbuild on Monday. However, the company said it expects the bulk of the money to come from as yet un-processed subscriptions directly sent to the Computershare register from cheque postal applications, and those processed by the company. But overall, as long as the slowing of capital is a steady decline, Heap thinks a cooling of the hot money flowing into fintech is a healthy development. "It is just not as hot or overvalued as it was [in the dot-com era]," he says. "Now at least the values are based on some logic."

For earlier-stage companies there is plenty of money raised by local funds in the past 18 months that is looking for a home. Australian VC funds raised a record $367 million in 2015  up 193 per cent on 2014. "I think we are going to have a good couple of years. I think the local VC and start-up space is in a better position than I have ever seen it in. We have had as much raised in funds last year as we were raising five years ago when half of it was government money." But Tyro chief Jost Stollmann worries that the local venture market on its own is not sufficient; he is far more worried about the slowdown in funding from the US than some of his rivals. "It matters a lot," he says. "We need the continuous and growing interest by sophisticated US investors that provide urgently needed growth funding at reasonable terms and that exercise pressure on the local VC industry to raise their game." John Shipman, PwC's Asia fintech leader, is much more bullish on the sector.
Metcash shares are trading at 12 month highs as investors buy into the improved outlook for its grocery business and talk it will bid for Woolworth's Home Timber and Hardware business.

Persistent rumours Metcash is keen to bolt on the Danks-supplied operation got a big boost from Woolworth's decision to quit home improvement and draw a line under losses from its Masters chain.

Metcash CEO Ian Morrice. Metcash' shares are trading at 12 month highs. Credit:Louie Douvis

CLSA analyst David Thomas said the potential tie-up of Home Timber and Hardware and the Mitre 10 businesses and the potential of the emergence of a "number two" player in home improvement was driving the optimism.

CLSA upgraded its recommendation on Metcash to a buy in mid June and it has a $2 price target on the stock.
Former Carrum MP Donna Bauer and Dandenong businessman Peter Angelico are the frontrunners in the Liberal preselection battle for the federal seat of Dunkley in Melbourne's south-east.

Eight hopefuls have nominated for the seat, to be vacated by popular former small business minister Bruce Billson, including ex-Kingston mayor Paul Peulich, son of controversial state opposition multicultural spokeswoman Inga Peulich.

Donna Bauer is well regarded at Liberal Party headquarters. Credit:Joe Armao

Other starters in a field notable for its lack of big names include barrister Kathryn Cochrane and Matt Berry, a former staff member of controversial former Frankston MP Geoff Shaw.

Chris Crewther, the unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the rural seat of Mallee at the 2013 election is a contender, as are Nathan Hersey, a member of Mr Billson's staff, and Phillip Starkins, a general manager at the Australian Marine Oil Spill Centre.
Jerusalem: Israel made public on Wednesday a handwritten request for clemency by Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Holocaust who was executed by Israel in 1962 following a war crimes trial.

In his letter to then-president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eichmann said he was a "mere instrument" of leaders responsible for the killing of 6 million Jews in World War II.

Adolf Eichmann in the dock at his trial in Jerusalem. Credit: File

His plea for his death sentence to be commuted was dated two days prior to his hanging. Release of the letter, written in ballpoint pen, coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Malaysia's anti-graft commission says it wants a review of the attorney-general's decision to clear prime minister Najib Razak of criminal charges over a multi-million dollar scandal.

The commission's decision scuttled a call by Mr Najib to end the controversy despite his failure to explain why almost $US700 million ($990 million) was transferred into his personal bank accounts in 2013.

Malaysian PM Najib Razak in Kuala Lumpur in January. Credit:AP

Attorney-General Mohamed Apandi Ali's order to shutdown the commission's investigation into the mysterious money transfers has provoked outrage and derision in the country Mr Najib has led for seven years.
ANZ Banking Group's new chief executive Shayne Elliott will retreat from the expansion through Asia pursued by his predecessor Mike Smith and play catch-up by using digital technology to try to increase retail banking market share in Australia and New Zealand.

Drawing a line in the sand between Mr Smith, whose dogged pursuit of growth in Asia antagonised some of the bank's investors, Mr Elliott said his focus would be on squeezing higher profits from the Asian network by selling more products to customers of the struggling institutional bank.

(Left to right) Former ANZ chief executive Mike Smith with his successor Shayne Elliott and chairman David Gonski. Credit:Josh Robenstone

In a revealing management reshuffle on Wednesday, Mr Elliott spun responsibility for ANZ's retail operations in Asia to its chief executive in New Zealand, a move he said would "liberate" the new group executive for institutional banking, Mark Whelan, to focus on lifting returns.

Mr Elliott told Fairfax Media that rather than focusing on targets for the contribution of Asian earnings, he would favour a "back to basics" approach, which would involve ANZ focusing on "intermediating trade and capital flow in the region" by creating "a more focused, better connected international network".
Long-suffering shareholders in National Australia Bank voted overwhelmingly for the spin-off of its British bank Clydesdale, but they are not inclined to forgive and forget past mistakes surrounding the bank's disastrous foray into offshore markets that destroyed billions of dollars in value.

At the outset of a NAB shareholder meeting in Melbourne on Wednesday to decide on the final scheme of arrangement before the Clydesdale float next week, proxy votes indicated the deal was a fait accompli. It was passed with 98 per cent in favour.

NAB shareholder William "Bill" Johnson pictured at home in Deer Park said the bank's exit of Clydesdale is a "vote of no confidence" in past directors. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

"What other choice was there?" said Kaz Kazim, an NAB shareholder since 1986, who flew in from Sydney for the meeting.

He had hoped to receive more explanation about accountability for past decisions.
A period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science, even as its in-house scientists were outlining the potential consequences  and uncertainties  to company executives.

Attorneys general for other states could join in Mr. Schneiderman's efforts, bringing far greater investigative and legal resources to bear on the issue. Some experts see the potential for a legal assault on fossil fuel companies similar to the lawsuits against tobacco companies in recent decades, which cost those companies tens of billions of dollars in penalties.

Federal and state constitutional law traditionally left government no power to demand testimony, papers, or other information, except under the authority of a judge or a legislative committee....



The only opportunity for the executive to demand information was thus through the judiciary. Nor was this an accident. As recognized in the 18th century disputes over warrants, executive demands for papers might be useful, but they were too dangerous to be tolerated. Over the past century, however, the law has changed. Now, a government administrator or even an attorney general can simply demandinformation by issuing a subpoena under his own signature....



Judges are the traditional guardians of the subpoena power, and allowing prosecutors to displace them is like asking the fox to guard the hen house.

Attorneys general use settlements to regulate in ways that the legislature did not. Dissatisfied with enacted regulations, attorneys general employ their subpoenas to impose restrictions in settlement that failed to pass muster in the political process. The unlawful intrusion into private papers thus evades the constitutional paths for both adjudication and lawmaking.

An attorney general is apt to demand information only when the target violates what a majority in his state considers the boundaries of law or justice. But that is a central part of the constitutional danger. The discretionary executive power to extract private information will tend to be used only when it is apt to satisfy the demos.



Of course Exxon is not Socrates, and its empirical research is a far cry from his elenctic inquiry. Nonetheless, there are parallels, for the prosecutorial subpoena to Exxon appeals to populist anxieties. In refusing to join the crowd  in refusing to accept its climate beliefs  Exxon has questioned the gods of the city, and for this it now is being forced to answer.

The scientific method is not about establishing truth, but about testing hypotheses to discern error. This mode of inquiry  an essential foundation of modern life  will be eroded if institutions face denunciation, even prosecution, for failing to declare their allegiance to populist interpretations of complex research.



The attorney general's understanding of the climate may be true, but for purposes of science, what is far more important than truth is the freedom to dispute it, and if his subpoena persuades corporations to diminish their attempts to test and question the truth, he will have chilled scientific and political dissent and instituted a sort of Lysenkoism.

As I have previously reported, last May US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I) proposed subjecting people who make politically incorrect statements about climate change to criminal investigation, and in September a group of respected academics went on the record endorsing that outrageous idea. When it comes to using the law to punish unpopular speech, however, it turns out that NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was way ahead of them. According to the New York Times , Scheiderman has been investigating Exxon Mobil's statements about climate change for more than a year, and recently he took the extraordinary step of issuing a subpoena requiring the company to turn over financial records, emails, and other documents regarding:Climate activists will no doubt be pleased by this development, and so will lawyers and state attorneys general with fond memories of the tobacco litigation bonanza of the 1990s. As the Times notes:For those who care about due process, freedom of speech, and other civil liberties, on the other hand, these developments are very worrying. Constitutional scholar, Philip Hamburger, for example, lists four major concerns , two related to the separation of powers and two related to freedom of speech.Regarding the separation of powers, Hamburger notes that, because it gives the Attorney General broad power to demand testimony, papers, and other information whenever he or she deems it relevant to an investigation of corporate misconduct, a statute like New York's Martin Act poses a serious threat to due process:Moreover, by violating the separation of powers such statutes also tend to circumvent the democratic process:Turning to the implications for "for freedom of speech and political dissent," Hamburger says:Allowing the mob to determine what may or may not be said, notes Hamburger, not only suppresses unpopular political opinion, it inhibits scientific progress:
National Australia Bank chair Ken Henry has warned big investors not to expect a bargain when it floats its poorly-performing Clydesdale Bank in the UK, saying the bank could still defer part of the float if it can't get a high enough price for its shareholders.

But Mr Henry insists it is the right time to sell Clydesdale Bank and on Wednesday NAB shareholders voted emphatically in favour of plans to spin off the business, clearing the way for the float next week.

NAB chairman Ken Henry, left, and CEO Andrew Thorburn are architects of the Clydesdale demerger. Credit:AAP

The long-awaited exit from the UK comes as Mr Henry has also defended bank's dividend policy against scepticism among some market analysts, who believe NAB will struggle to sustain its current payments to shareholders.

At an investor meeting in Melbourne 98 per cent of NAB investors backed the bank's plan to demerge Clydesdale, a Scotland-based bank NAB bought in 1987.
After my column last week there was some debate on Twitter about whether I could be forcibly repatriated to Aotearoa, New Zealand, for being stupid and unAustralian.

It wasn't the ugliest convo to come my way (Twitter is an ugly medium). And the answer, in case you're wondering, is no, I cannot be refouled, even if stupidity were unAustralian. Indeed - I reflect by way of riposte - if stupidity led to exile, the Aussie population would be small indeed.

But the underlying assumption interests me. Why would like-mindedness be necessary or even desirable in that catch-all we call a nation? Monocultures, we know, are feeble things, sickly and disease-prone. From farming to city form, diversity gives us strength and resilience. Disagreement is our muscle. Yet increasingly there are things we cannot discuss.

Every Australia Day brings a hubbub of identity behaviours. Out from the attic, like boxes of faded Christmas decorations, come the flags and the honours, the picnics and the flagellations, republics, referenda, beer, guilt, triumph and, always, the mighty prawn.
ASHRAF PAHLAVI 19192016 Princess Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran was compared with Imelda Marcos and Madame Chiang Kai-shek  a Persian Marie Antoinette  for her acquisitiveness and love of luxury, a diminutive but dazzling envoy and a glamorous presence on the world's stage. Stalin called her "a true patriot" and said if he had 10 like her, he would have no worries. And yet she also championed the equality of women, but the greatest, enduring crusade of her long life was the reputation of her twin brother, Mohammed Reza, the last Shah of Iran. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi in 1980, being interviewed on television. Pahlavi was as sharp and combative as her brother was mild and self-questioning, and the French press dubbed her "the Black Panther" (which she rather liked). She was instrumental in dismissing prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and continued to fiercely defend her brother's reign after his flight into exile in 1979 and his death in 1980. As she put it: "I would marry more than once. I would have children of my own. I would work for my country in ways unheard of for a woman of my generation. But always the centre of my existence was, and is, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Some people worship God. I worship my brother." She was born October 26, 1919, a few hours after her brother, to a major's son, Reza Pahlavi, a military commander, and the tiny but fierce Tadj ol-Molouk, the fourth of his six wives. In 1925 she became Her Imperial Highness, Princess Ashraf, on the accession of her father as Shah after he vanquished the Qajar dynasty which had ruled the country since 1789. While her brother was educated at Le Rosey in Switzerland, Ashraf and her elder sister, Shams, were taught at the Zoroastrian School.

She was denied a tertiary education, although her father, modelling himself on Turkey's Ataturk, sought to free his kingdom from feudalism and encouraged his wife and daughters to shed the mediaeval chador and dress as westerners. Yet he was also a dynast and, like many a princess before her, Ashraf was, at 17, forced into marriage with the son of an ally. His name was Mirza Khan Ghavam. Ashraf claimed she needed a tranquilliser to share her husband's bed. In 1941, Reza Khan was exiled by the Allies and Ashraf's beloved brother became Shah. She was key to the impeachment of the Qawan administration but as he grew in confidence, the Shah relied less on his sister's frequent advice and so she turned to other causes. In 1965 Ashraf became chairwoman of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Two years later she was the Iranian delegate to the UN Economic and Social Council and its Commission on Human Rights and in 1970 she became the commission's chair. In 1975 she was a member of the Consultative Committee of International Women's Year Conference. While the princess' campaign for literacy was conscientiously fought, she appeared detached from the plight of some 4000 of her "sisters" who were political prisoners under the increasingly oppressive regime of her brother. By the 1970s, with oil at unparalleled prices, the kingdom's elite had never been richer and the princess appeared to enjoy a life of extraordinary opulence. In exile, the princess described her financial position as "comfortable". In New York she had two townhouses in Beakman Place and a triplex on Park Avenue; in Paris she had an apartment in Avenue Montaigne; and her seaside villa on the Riviera. She attributed her comfort to the sale of land left to her by her father (if so, this was land that he had seized).
For students embarking on their HSC studies, or those grappling with the disappointment of missing out on their preferred degree in the first round of university offers, these are stressful and confusing times.

Surveying the published Australia Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) for university courses, many would be dismayed at how high they are in their chosen field and re-assess their options as a result, perhaps setting their sights lower.

It has become far too difficult for students and their families to access information on the entry requirements of courses at different universities. Credit:Glenn Hunt

Worse still, they may become so despondent and discouraged, it will negatively impact on their study and mental health.

However, an ATAR score is no longer a meaningful measure of the HSC result needed to get into most degrees. Far from it.
The truth is out there  it'll have been out there for a week by the time we see the new X-Files in Australia on Sunday night.

Mulder and Scully are back together for a six-episode revival of The X-Files  the premiere screened Sunday night on Fox in the US, but Ten has decided to hold over the first episode for a week in Australia. Ten says it's lining up a "super Sunday of programming" for this weekend, which seems to be TV-speak for "we're holding The X-Files back as our secret weapon against Seven's Australian Open final on Sunday night".

The truth is already out there, but there's no point in looking to Network Ten for answers with The X-Files delayed for a week.

We're actually two episodes behind on The X-Files, as the second episode screened in the US on Monday night. Ten is screening the second episode next Monday night but it isn't planning a double episode to get us back in sync with the US, so the entire season will run a week behind the US (actually it's more like six days once you allow for the time difference, as Sunday night in the US is Monday morning here).

All the talk of fast-tracking US shows in order to appease Australian audiences and combat piracy clearly goes out the window as soon as it suits the networks to screw us over. High-quality copies of the first two episodes are already floating around on the internet and it's child's play to download them. Australia's laughable piracy crackdown will do very little to change this.
De Niro plays Dick Kelly, a widower in his twilight years determined to kick up his heels one last time. Heading to Florida in time for spring break, he transforms into a sex-crazed party animal, to the horror of his grandson Jason (Zac Efron), a straight-arrow corporate lawyer.

Robert de Niro's recent supporting turns in Joy and The Intern seemed to herald a new, unexpected feminist phase of his career  a phase which Dirty Grandpa threatens to bring to a swift close.

This is unapologetic lowbrow smut, directed with little finesse by former Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator Dan Mazer, whose idea of visual wit consists of occasionally throwing the action into mock-heroic slow-motion. The script, credited to newcomer John Phillips, is heavy on pop culture references, strained punning, and homophobia: a reference to "Cirque du So Gay" handily combines all three.

Young gun: Zac Efron and Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa. Credit:Bob Mahoney

Dirty Grandpa cannot be described as good or even halfway competent, but as raunchy Hollywood comedies go it's more intriguingly kinky than most. Dick is certainly dirty, but he's not the usual kind of bawdy old coot. A Vietnam veteran with combat skills to rival Liam Neeson in Taken, he's consistently glamorised and even eroticised, viewed as a paragon of old-school masculinity in contrast to his feeble grandson, trapped under the thumb of his "bridezilla" fiancee Meredith (Julianne Hough).

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Gradually, it becomes clear that Dick's real goal is to pry Jason out of Meredith's clutches and encourage him to reconnect with his authentic desires, whatever these might be. In other words, this is a "bromance" of a wildly inappropriate kind, providing Mazer with frequent opportunities to test the limits of bad taste: the most discomforting moments include a gag that has Jason mistaken for a child molester, as well as the inevitable scene where grandpa and grandson wind up sharing a bed.
Staffing ratios, other rules are arbitrary, Camp Bow Wow owner say

CJ Photo by Barry Smith

A pet owner picks up her two dogs from the Camp Bow Wow boarding center near Charlotte. Dog day camp owners say arbitrary state regulations make it difficult for them to operate.

RALEIGH Heidi Ganahl, owner of the Camp Bow Wow boarding centers and day camps for dogs in several states, says North Carolina's regulations on pet boarding facilities aren't consistent with those elsewhere and often appear to be arbitrary and not aligned with any demonstrated need to protect the safety of animals or staff.North Carolina isn't the only state with vague or unusual regulations, Ganahl said. But the Tar Heel State's are particularly arbitrary. One of most common variances between states is the staffing ratio required at Camp Bow Wow camps. Ganahl was the keynote speaker at Wednesday's annual leadership luncheon hosted by the N.C. Free Enterprise Foundation.Nationally, Camp Bow Wow maintains a ratio of one employee for every 25 dogs at their facilities, Ganahl said. But some states, including North Carolina, require a much lower ratio."Colorado is 1:15; North Carolina is 1:10," Ganahl said. She said in some states, regulators don't have studies showing why certain regulations are required. They just say they have "a feeling" what the right ratio is.Dr. Patricia Norris, a veterinarian who heads the Animal Welfare Section in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, said the ratio is not arbitrary."The reason behind this, dogs are pack animals," Norris said. If a large number of dogs are together in one place and two of them start to scuffle, many of the remaining dogs may want to join the fray, she said."If the staff can intervene effectively, then no animals are harmed and no staff is harmed," Norris said, adding that a minor scuffle doesn't become a major fight.Norris said that the 1:10 ratio at boarding facilities applies only in common areas where more than four dogs are together and can interact. The ratio does not apply to boarding areas where dogs are kept separately and can't interact with others."I'm a veterinarian, and the thought of 25 animals loose with only one person, that would make me extremely uncomfortable," Norris said.The rule says, "If more than four dogs are housed in a common area or enclosure, then there must be at least one person supervising each 10 dogs housed within each enclosure or common area."James Daniel, who owns two Camp Bow Wow franchises in the Charlotte area, said the state's rules are vague and should be revised."We have dogs that are there for day care and we have dogs that are there for boarding," Daniel said.He said terms in the rules, such as "enclosure," aren't adequately defined."I think the rules themselves are a little bit ambiguous," Daniel said. "I think that's a problem we run into based upon different inspectors who apply the rules differently."Daniel said that Camp Bow Wow has procedures in place to identify dogs that play well with others, and those that don't. He also said the camp's staff is trained to handle problems that might crop up.When owners bring dogs for an initial visit, the canines are evaluated for temperament - whether they'll fit in well in an open environment or whether they have aggressive tendencies, Daniel said."We train our employees to try to monitor the dogs," Daniel said. "The last thing we want the employees to do is put their hands in the middle of a dog fight."Daniel said the camp can operate safely with a lower ratio than 1:10. He hopes the rule will be changed so that North Carolina will come in line with the rest of the country, he said.Staff ratios aren't the only regulations that businesses such as Camp Bow Wow have to worry about.Ganahl said that in New Jersey, regulators have qualms with camps that place artificial grass such as Astroturf in some of the pet exercise areas. Ganahl said that regulators weren't sure if workers could clean the surface properly or thoroughly.Ganahl said her camps use a specific product to clean the turf that's safe for the dogs and environmentally friendly."This isn't based on any research or good data," Ganahl said of the regulators' objections. "Why they care so much about Astroturf in doggie day care facilities, I don't know."
Australia's most prominent Indigenous leader and activist, Noel Pearson, has said not entering politics is his greatest regret and called for a new centrist political force to fix a political system failing Indigenous affairs, which is in "deep crisis".

Mr Pearson, founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership and a member of the government's Referendum Council, also expressed remorse at former prime minister Tony Abbott's political demise.

"It's my greatest regret," he said of his decision to work on reform outside Parliament rather than running for election himself.

"Fifteen years ago I began our reform journey in Cape York...I was 35 years old and I made the wrong turn.
A Los Angeles County jury has ordered Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga, to pay roughly $US6.4 million ($9.1 million) in punitive damages to a lawyer who alleged Choudury sexually harassed her when she worked for him and that she was fired after she began investigating claims that he had raped a yoga student.

The award comes a day after the same jury ordered Choudhury, 69, to pay more than $US924,500 in compensatory damages to the attorney, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, who said in her lawsuit that she suffered gender discrimination, wrongful termination and sexual harassment during her time working for Choudhury.

There are several civil lawsuits hanging over Bikram Choudhury, who built a yoga empire and millions of followers through his style of yoga, which consists of exercising in a room heated to 40 degrees. Credit:New York Times

"I feel vindicated, I'm elated," Jafa-Bodden said after the verdict, describing Choudhury as "a dangerous, dangerous predator."

She said she was "gobsmacked" by the size of the punitive damages. One of her attorneys, Carla Minnard, called Choudhury's actions "despicable, inappropriate and illegal."
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales has called for an end to the ATAR university admissions system as it currently stands, after a Fairfax Media investigation revealed that the practice of admitting students with low marks was rampant across the sector.

UNSW's Vice-Chancellor Ian Jacobs said NSW should move away from the ATAR as the only measurement of academic success as quickly as possible.

"We need a set of criteria that identifies the most talented students from all backgrounds, not ATAR alone," he said.
But outside court, his lawyer Michael Bosscher said the 21-year-old would make a fresh bid for freedom in the Supreme Court within the next two to three weeks.

Cole Miller was killed in an alleged one punch attack early in January. His accused killers have been denied bail. Credit:Facebook

Daniel Maxwell will remain behind bars, charged with unlawful striking causing death, after Brisbane magistrate Wendy Cull refused his application for release on Wednesday.

The man who allegedly started the fight that led to the death of young Brisbane athlete Cole Miller has been refused bail.

After more than a week of careful consideration, Ms Cull ruled that there was sufficient evidence to prove that both Mr Maxwell and his co-accused, Armstrong Renata, who is accused of delivering the single fatal blow, were equally culpable in Mr Miller's death.

Daniel Maxwell's mother attends her son's bail hearing. Credit:Robert Shakespeare

The court heard that Mr Maxwell, a New Zealand native, had been ejected from a Fortitude Valley nightclub and had picked fights with three other men before turning his attention to Cole and his friend Nick Pace as they walked through Chinatown Mall in the early hours of January 3.

Mr Miller and Mr Pace were walking to a taxi rank when Mr Maxwell allegedly turned to the group he was with and said to them, "do you want to see something funny?"

He is then alleged to have picked a fight with the pair, punching each of them once to the chest with a clenched fist.
The devastated father of a 16-year-old Goodna boy who drowned in a water-filled quarry on Monday described his only son as his "best mate" and said he would not leave the site until his body had been found.

"It's horrible, he's been in there two nights, you can't imagine what it feels like to have your son in the water for that long," Ryan Wilmott said on Wednesday, as divers continued to search for the body of his son Duncan.

"I'm not leaving here until they find him."

Duncan Wilmott was due to start his final school year at Ipswich State High School on Wednesday.
Queensland firefighters will fly to Tasmania for the first time on Wednesday to assist local authorities battling major blazes in the state's north-west.

Emergency Services Minister Bill Byrne said the 16-strong deployment would include staff and volunteers from both Queensland Fire and Emergency Services and the Rural Fire Service Queensland.

Queensland crews are on their way to Tasmania as fires burn out of control in the state's north-west.

"Our QFES personnel will be assisting fire authorities in Tasmania who are battling more than 70 bushfires, including around 50 that are uncontained," he said.

"Every state and territory in Australia is expected to be involved in the deployment and we are proud to be doing our bit to support our Tasmanian counterparts in their time of need.
Dogs being left in hot cars and trapped in sunny backyards is something that is on the rise, with thirty reports called into RSPCA Queensland within the past week.

RSPCA Queensland spokesman Michael Beatty said people "didn't seem to be learning" when it came to stopping dogs from being left in cars and hot backyards, with the recent spate of calls coming just 10 days after a dog died from being trapped in a car in Cairns.

RSPCA Queensland said it only took six minutes for a dog to get heat stress, which can result in death. Credit:Adam McLean

"There has been so many warnings about it, you think people would have just learned by now, it is very frustrating they have not," Mr Beatty said.

"It just shows people don't seem to be learning. Despite all the warnings people continue to forget or just ignore them."
A Melbourne startup which offers a "freemium" ad supported phone plan has signed a deal with Boost Mobile in the United States which it expects to be worth over $100 million in revenue.

Unlockd's mobile platform is now available to more than 9 million customers in the United States after the startup, which only launched in October 2015, secured a deal with Boost Mobile, a Sprint Telecom company.

Chief executive and co-founder of Unlockd Matt Berriman in New York. Credit:Adam Lerner

Boost Mobile customers can reduce their phone bills by $5 per month by displaying targeted ads, offers and content from brands and media companies including Starbucks, Levi's and Lyft at various times when they unlock their handset.

The deal follows Unlockd's partnership with Vodafone 3G network reseller Lebara Mobile in Australia where users are shown targeted ads or special offers when they unlock their phones in exchange for a bonus monthly 2GB of data.
An armed robber whose remains were believed to be have been found in Thomastown last week was named in court as the man who fired the fatal shot at underworld figure Graham "the Munster" Kinniburgh.

Career criminal Terrence Blewitt was connected to the killing of Kinniburgh, the Melbourne Magistrates Court heard on Wednesday.

Career criminal Terrence Blewitt fired fatal shot that killed underworld figure Graham Kinniburgh, a court has heard.

Stephen Asling, 55, is accused of murdering Kinniburgh at his Kew home in December 2003.

Investigators have not yet confirmed the identity of the skeletal remains found at a property in Thomastown last Thursday, however, it is believed they belong to Blewitt.
Perth's Chinese community are raiding supermarket and pharmacy shelves to meet a growing demand from family and friends in China who believe Western products are better quality and more trustworthy.

An unofficial network of Chinese shoppers known as "daigou", a term that broadly translates to "buying on behalf of", are buying up tonnes of supplies for friends and family back home across Australia.

Personal shoppers are buying up local products to satisfy demand in China. Credit:Darren Pateman

And, some Perth-based shoppers, including 25-year-old Sara from Canning Vale, are spending several hours a week filling and freighting orders for parents, siblings, cousins and extended family and friend networks.
Paris: Paris police have fired tear gas at taxi drivers trying to march onto a major highway, amid nationwide French strikes and protests over working conditions and competition from non-traditional services such as Uber.

Hundreds of French taxis, joined by a few from Belgium and Spain, blocked a massive intersection leading into western Paris, causing traffic chaos. Police said that about 2000 taxis had blocked or delayed traffic around Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports. Some taxi drivers set fire to tyres and tried to block the highway that circles the French capital, but the police pushed the demonstrators back with tear gas.

Separately air traffic controllers went on strike, disrupting flights at several airports.

The strikes were part of a wider day of protests in the public sector, including hospitals and schools, to call attention to staff reductions, low salaries and education overhauls. More than 100 demonstrations were planned around the country, and CGT, one of the unions that organised the strike, said that 130,000 to 150,000 people participated nationwide.
Latest News Australian Mortgage Awards 2022 broker winners reflect on big night Best of the best celebrate achievements

Household Capital enters strategic partnership with Genworth The insurer now has a 22% share of the firm

Deteriorating economic conditions and tighter regulations could result in a fall in the amount of Chinese money directed at Australian real estate.According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, those selling real estate in Australia could be the ones to pay the price for the recent poor performance of the Chinese share market and efforts by the Chinese government to halt the underground flow of capital from the Asian super-power.Richard Yuan, head Australia China Entrepreneurs Club told the AFR demand for Australian real estate remains, but investors may no longer have the means to go through with purchases.The desire to buy is there but they now have less disposable income, Yuan told the AFR.KPMG Asia Business Group leader Doug Ferguson told the AFR conditions in China could hurt real estate in Australia, particularly the unit market; however, the fact that there are so many potential investors in China means the effects could be mitigated."There could be a short-term problem, especially with the purchase of apartments. Still, we have to bear in mind China has a large number of buyers that could sustain demand despite the tightening, Ferguson told the AFR.While Ferguson and others told the AFR that the economic woes in China may have only a minimal effect on real estate here, there have already been a number of predictions that 2016 may be a down year for Chinese investment in the market.Credit Suisse analysts Damien Boey and Hasan Tevfik last year predicted Chinese demand for global real estate could fall by 30%.The underlying issue is weakness in the Chinese economy, they said in November."Capital flight is tightening credit conditions, which in turn is dampening income growth, wealth and the purchasing power of Chinese residents."All things considered, the likelihood is that Chinese flows into the Australian property market have flattened out in 2015.John McGrath, chief executive officer of McGrath Real Estate, said decreased interest in Australian real estate by Chinese investors was already visible last year.[They] are still there, but it is probably back 10 or 15% from where they were a year ago, McGrath told Bloomberg News in November.I think there is a whole combination of things there. The Chinese stock market and so forth, he said.
Latest News Australian Mortgage Awards 2022 broker winners reflect on big night Best of the best celebrate achievements

Household Capital enters strategic partnership with Genworth The insurer now has a 22% share of the firm

Non-major lender Bank of Queensland (BOQ) has announced the appointment of a new general manager of third party distribution.Effective today, former Commonwealth Bank general manager Adrienne Smith has been appointed to the newly created role at the challenger bank.BOQs group executive for retail banking Matt Baxby says the new role reflects the strategic importance of brokers to the bank, including the introduction of Virgin Money mortgages through the broker channel in the coming months.This newly created senior leadership role reflects the significant role that brokers will continue to play in the future of BOQs distribution, he said.Adrienne will be responsible for continuing to grow and mature our offering through the broker channel.She brings deep retail banking experience, particularly third-party distribution, from across a range of institutions.Smith says she is looking forward to the opportunities that come with developing a business in the early years.As a relatively new entrant to the broker market, BOQ has appetite to continue to build out its broker presence and theres still a lot of room for growth, she said.Weve got a flat, accessible structure that creates opportunities to be more nimble and responsive than our competitors, and well continue to invest in improving our service offering for brokers and their customers throughout the year.Prior to BOQ, Smith was Commonwealth Banks state manager for third party distribution business for New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory, and general manager for sales and service for South Australia and Northern Territory.
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62nd Precinct

BensonhurstBath Beach

Bad fare

Four crooks robbed a taxi driver at knifepoint on 65th Street on Jan. 25, taking $400.

The victim told police that he picked up the four goons on Kings Highway at 1:30 pm, before taking the group to their destination near W. Fourth Street. Thats when the knave sitting behind him put a knife to his throat, and growled give us everything, according to police.

The knife mans pals busied themselves ransacking the victims car, shouting threats the whole time, before they spotted his cash and fled, cops said.

Driveway duel

Some whacko beat a 71-year-old man after the old fella confronted the assailant for parking his car in front of his 81st Street driveway on Jan. 21.

The victim told police he walked outside his home between 19th and 20th avenues at 1 am to give the bruiser a hard time for parking in front of his driveway.

But the fiend wasnt one for words, and instead of arguing, just started swinging, and clocked the old man in the face a few times, cops said.

Mole man

A brazen thief looted a W. Sixth Street bodega on Jan. 22  after cutting his way through the wall.

The crook utilized some kind of power tool to shear his way into the deli between Highlawn Avenue and Avenue S at 12:15 am, cops said. He positioned himself for the job after sneaking into an abandoned building adjacent to the bodega, and started cutting, according to police. Its unclear what property was taken.

Designer deviant

A burglar ransacked a womans 83rd Street home of jewelry and designer handbags on Jan. 22.

The victim told police that someone entered her home between Bay Parkway and 23rd Avenue at 11 am, through a window left unlocked in the rear of the house.

Once inside, the thief nabbed a watch, some cash, a silver bracelet, and a Louis Vuitton handbag and wallet, cops said.

The junker job

A thief drove off with a womans 1997 Nissan Altima shed left parked on 64th Street on Jan. 19.

The victim told police that she left her old junker between 19th and 20th avenues at 7 pm, and returned the next day to find an empty spot.

 Colin Mixson
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They really are the Second City.

Hundreds of Brooklyn public schools took part in an online coding workshop last month, helping Borough President Adams win a bet he made with Chicago educators over which town could rally the most educational institutions into participating.

Eighty percent of borough schools participated in the Hour of Code  an hour-long crash-course in creating computer programs  crushing the Midwestern fly-over town, which only managed to mobilize a scant 60 percent of its schools, according to the Beep.

Brooklyn students won in the Hour of Code challenge, and they will continue winning as they further their coding education, said Adams.

Pupils participating in the December coding challenge spent 60 minutes working their way through online tutorials to build video games and solve puzzles, with the help of teachers and volunteer computer whizzes.

The newly computer-savvy students say they emerged with a newfound appreciation for the magic of technology.

I like it a lot, said Brandon Giang, a fourth-grader at Williamsburgs PS 86. When we get home, I race my sister up the stairs to use the computer.

Adams designated nearly $14 million of his capital funding for tech stuff in schools in 2015 and says he will assign an even larger slice of the pie in the next fiscal year, when he aims to get every single public school in Kings County participating in the Hour of Code.

Under the terms of the bet with the Windy City, the deep-dish-pizza-eating school district is now obliged to film a video of students singing a song about Brooklyn in an admission of defeat.

Chicago Public Schools did not return request for comment.
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88th Precinct

Fort GreeneClinton Hill

Move in for the drill

A thief drilled a hole through the passenger-side door of a car on Vanderbilt Avenue on Jan. 20  and made off with a new computer.

A woman told police she was near Lafayette Avenue at 10:15 pm when she spotted a punk boring through a parked cars door. After he gained access to the interior, he removed a bag containing a laptop from the vehicle and fled, according to a report.

Gold digger

A goon stole a guys necklace and phone as he was exiting the Fulton Street subway station on Jan. 17.

The victim told police he was coming up the stairs from the subway stop near Lafayette Street at 2:30 pm with a friend when a guy followed them onto the sidewalk.

Once the trio was above ground, the nogoodnik asked, What do you have for me? and grabbed one of the victims by his coat, forcing him to sit on a bench. The thief snatched his gold necklace off his neck and dug into his pocket, taking his phone. The crook tried to steal his boots, too, but got scared and fled, according to reports.

Unsafe

A weasel stole the safe from a Carlton Avenue diner overnight on Jan. 19.

The restaurateur said the bandit popped the lock on the haunt near Myrtle Avenue between midnight and 4 am. He then went down to the basement and lifted the safe, which was not bolted to the floor, cops said.

Bumping bandit

A sneak lifted a womans phone as she was boarding the Coney Island-bound Q train at the Atlantic Street station on Jan. 19.

The baffled victim told police she was stepping onto the subway at 6:27 pm when she felt a bump from behind. She continued on the train, not suspecting a thing, but when she arrived at the Prospect Park station, she noticed her phone  which contained her credit cards and debit cards in the case  had vanished from her jacket pocket.

 Lauren Gill
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94th Precinct

GreenpointNorthside

Teamwork

Two violent villains, who may or may not know each other, teamed up to beat down a couple entering a Greenpoint Avenue subway station on Jan. 17.

The victims told cops they left a bar near Franklin Street and were walking down Greenpoint Avenue towards Manhattan Avenue at around 4 am when they noticed some goon complaining loudly about losing his phone. He then began following them, police said. Another scoundrel then stepped in front of them and blocked their path to the train, while he exchanged words with the other troublemaker, then let the couple walk away, police said.

The victims went down the stairs into the subway, but as they reached the bottom step the second scamp crept up behind the guy and smashed a glass bottle over his head, then punched the girl and shoved her to the ground, authorities said. Suddenly, the original troublemaker popped up and joined in the scuffle, punching and kicking the man on the ground, cops said. Both perps then fled back up onto the street and ran in an unknown direction, according to a police report.

Peaceful thievery

A rascal peacefully removed a former friends money from his pocket on Division Place on the afternoon of Jan. 22.

The victim told cops he was near Morgan Avenue at 2:15 pm when the rapscallion, an ex-friend, approached him and said he owed him money, before reaching into the guys pocket and pulling out a wad of cash.

The victim allowed the perp to take the money, and the thief applied no physical force, police said.

Bike break-out

A thief snatched a guys pricey bicycle while it was locked up on Guernsey Street near McCarren Park sometime between Jan. 16 and 18.

The cyclist left his bike locked to a bike rack near Nassau Avenue at around 5:30 on Jan. 16, police said. The guy returned at 2:50 pm on Jan. 18 to find the bike missing, with no broken chain or lock on the scene, cops said.

 Allegra Hobbs
Last September, Cryptic Corporation Vice President Homer Flynn announced the sale of the first Ultimate Box Set to a man named Tripmonster from Bloomington, Ind. In a video press release, Flynn also said the delivery would be shot as part of a documentary called, "Theory of Obscurity," about the 40+ year history of The Residents.

Acting as the managers for The Residents, The Cryptic Corporation has handled all press, business dealings and public interactions during the majority of the group's career, providing the members of The Residents with an impressive level of anonymity.

"For The Residents, the delivery of their Ultimate Box Set was both a profound and satisfying experience," Flynn said. "The expression of joy on the face of Tripmonster, as he held Mr. Green, the eyeball mask from his UBS, was worth every minute of their 40-year existence."...
Gogol Bordello played a bunch of shows last year celebrating the tenth anniversary of fan-favorite Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, including NYC on New Year's Eve. Now they've announced more dates doing the same for this year. They won't play NYC again, but they'll be nearby on March 30 at Starland Ballroom in NJ. Tickets for the whole tour are on artist presale now, and the general on-sale for NJ starts Friday (1/29) at noon.
Montreal's Land of Talk are officially back this year. They recently announced some shows, including NYC on May 14 at Baby's All Right. That sold out, but now a second larger NYC show has been added for Bowery Ballroom (5/15) the next night. Tickets for the new show go on sale Friday (1/29) at noon with an AmEx presale starting Wednesday (1/27) at noon.
by Bill Pearis

Some of you may remember Welsh band Race Horses who put out two albums of idiosyncratic pop in the early part of this decade. The band split a couple years back, and now frontman Meilyr Jones is set to release his solo debut, titled 2013, on March 18 via Moshi Moshi. Working in a baroque, pastoral style with a flair for drama, comparisons to Morrissey, The Divine Comedy and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci (or a mash of them all) are not off base. His new single is "Featured Artist," and Jones tells us a little about it:

It's told from the perspective of an old man, kind of like Jacques Brel or Orson Welles. You can imagine someone like that falling out of favor, then being rediscovered towards the end of their life, and people saying 'We're going to get you a new audience, and we're going to get a stylist in and make you wear a cravat.'

There are no cravats in the video for "Featured Artist," though the neckwear wouldn't be out of place in its cabaret/one-man-show setting, shot in black and white by director Ryan Eddleston. It premieres in this post and you can watch it below.

While he's made no plans to visit North America yet, Jones does have a UK tour coming up and those dates are listed, along with the video, album art/tracklist, and streams/videos of a couple other songs, below.



---

Meilyr Jones - 2013 tracklist

How To Recognise A Work of Art

Don Juan

Passionate Friend

Refugees

Rome

Rain In Rome

Strange Emotional

Return to Life

Love

Olivia

Featured Artist

Be Soft
UK doomers Conan are touring the US this year behind the release of their new album Reveangance , which is being released this week (1/29) on Napalm Records, and can now be streamed in full.

Revengeance is an absolute crusher. Conan go at you more directly than on past albums -- there's less buildup, more front-loaded attack here, with the band spitting out riff after glorious riff. They utilize unusually dynamic vocals here, with screaming in both high and low registers either trading off or coexisting in a way that suggest a unique kind of anger. You can stream the album below (via Noisey), and see if you can keep your head from bobbing.
Click image to expand.

PANTEGO, NC The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the Pamlico Albemarle Wildlife Conservationists (PAWC) cut the ribbon on a new handicap-accessible wildlife blind on Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). The blind is located on DeHoog Rd. in the main part of refuge south of Lake Phelps. The blind offers opportunities for people with limited mobility to hunt or photograph whitetail deer and other wildlife. All NC hunting laws and regulations specific to Pocosin Lakes NWR apply.The idea for the blind came from PAWC member Doris Morris, whose brother, Edward Phelps, has used a wheelchair since 1971 due to a vehicle accident. At the time, Pocosin Lakes NWR lacked facilities for disabled hunters. The group thought the project would be a great way to bring more people onto the expansive refuge, located between Pantego and Columbia, as well as offering expanded opportunities for disabled hunters in the region. The NC Wildlife Federation (NCWF), of which PAWC is a chapter, agreed to fund the project. "PAWC knows that the only way to win conservation victories is to get people out into the wild. People protect the places they love," said Attila Nemecz, president of PAWC. "We want to see people who have traditionally not had access to the outdoors enjoy the opportunities others have taken for granted." PAWC members contributed 400 volunteer hours to build the structure."Pocosin Lakes NWR is grateful to [PAWC] for their donation of a ready-to-use, disabled-accessible hunting blind," said refuge manager Howard Phillips. We're excited about the opportunity to provide disabled hunters with another high-quality recreational opportunity. Hunting is one of the "big six" priority public uses on national wildlife refuges along with fishing, wildlife observation, wildlife photography, environmental education, and interpretation. All six of these uses are compatible with the Refuge's purposes and are allowed to the extent we can properly manage them. This blind will greatly enhance the hunting program at Pocosin Lakes."Since forming earlier in 2015 as a new chapter of the NCWF, the Pamlico Albemarle Wildlife Conservationists have engaged with the public and public officials to help conserve the wildlife and wild places of the region. PAWC has pushed for conservation of the VOA site, supported the fight to save Blounts Creek, and supported the Red Wolf Recovery Program.Pocosin Lakes NWR is located in Hyde, Tyrell, and Washington Counties and headquartered in Columbia, NC. The 110,000-acre refuge is managed by the USFWS to protect migratory waterfowl, including tens of thousands of tundra swans and snow geese, as well as wood ducks, pintails and teals who winter there. The refuge is home to the only wild population of red wolves, the most critically endangered wolf in the world, and the densest population of black bears.Attila Nemecz, PresidentPamlico Albemarle Wildlife ConservationistsPO Box 211  Washington, NC 27889
The Waco Brothers, the raucous alt-country band fronted by John Langford of Mekons, will release Going Down in History, on February 26 via Bloodshot. It's their first new album of original material in 10 years, and you can check out first single "Had Enough" below.

The band are on tour as well, including a stay at SXSW and two NYC-area shows: Brooklyn's Union Hall on April 13, which is a pretty intimate show, and Jersey City's WFMU Monty Hall on April 16. Tickets for both of those shows are on sale now. All dates are listed below.



---

Waco Brothers - Going Down in Style tracklist

DIYBYOB

We Know It

Receiver

Building Our Own Prison

All or Nothing

Had Enough

Lucky Fool

Going Down in History

Devil's Day

Orphan Song
Aria has always been the one to lift her finger to her mouth at the end of the title sequence, but Pretty Little Liars has changed their opening credits in the second half of season 6. Each week, a new girl gets the role of being the shusher. Almost like foreshadowing, the shusher seems to play a pivotal role in their respective episode. In this episode, that part goes to Spencer Hastings.

Ill just say, this episode may be titled The Gloves are On, but pants are definitely coming off.

Pretty Little Liars: Why Alison is the Suspect Were Overlooking >>>





Emily Wants a Summer of Answers

Ashley Marin has set up a spa day for Emily, Spencer and Hanna. The trio is lying head-to-head in bathrobes with cucumbers covering their eyes. The camera is shooting them overhead. The framing is eerily reminiscent of when they woke up in the dollhouse on the morgue table. Theyre talking about Aria leaving the hotel with Ezra the night of Charlottes murder. Hanna tells them they dont have anything to worry about because she got rid of the surveillance tape.

This is news to Spencer and Emily. They jump up from the tables and say they have to leave. Emily goes back for her keys. She notices someone in the adjacent room. She walks to the door and its everyones favorite Rosewood resident, Sara Harvey. Emily is immediately annoyed. How much of the conversation did Sara hear? Why is she following Emily? Sara isnt offering up any information. I dont feel bad for Emily; we waited five years before we were given answers.

The Missing Surveillance Footage

Lorenzo and his team are at The Radley looking over surveillance video from the night of Charlottes murder. He questions Ms. Marin about a 12-hour gap in the tape. She says she doesnt know anything about that. Lorenzo lets her know that he has his IT Specialist on the case to see if the video was erased. Ashley asks Hanna if she and the girls tampered with the video. Of course, Hanna denies any involvement.

Hanna goes to Lucas apartment. At first, I thought she was going to ask him to hack into the police departments system to do something about the missing surveillance footage, but instead she asks if he can be her alibi for the night of the murder. He agrees because he is still absolutely in love with Hanna. He doesnt care if shes being paid off to dance with him or not; he is going to stand by her side no matter what.

Hanna is later questioned by the police. Shes telling a pretty believable story about eating cheese sticks and staying up all night talking to Lucas the night Charlotte was thrown from the bell tower. Lorenzo asks if he can bring someone in with them. He brings in Lucas. Lucas does a good job of corroborating the story Hanna has told, but he gets tripped up in the details. He makes a mistake and says he left the room to get ice for his ice water. Theree a problem, though; there isnt an ice machine on the third floor.

Rock the Vote But Dont Rock the Boat

Melissa is back in town. She and Spencer are going to Hollis to recruit kids to register to vote. While there, Spencer is being interviewed by Damian, a reporter for the school paper. The questions seem pretty innocent at first, but it quickly becomes evident this kid has a hidden agenda. His questions shift to asking her why she and her friends are still in town. He wants to know if the police have asked them to stay because of the murder investigation. Spencer doesnt have time for amateur hour and leaves.

It turns out Melissa is interviewed by Damian too. She catches a peek at his notes and sees the words source, tape and cover-up. She freaks out, thinking he knows about the tape she sent to Spencer confessing to burying Bethany. Spencer storms down to the newsroom to confront him. She finds out hes been talking to Mona, who is working for the opposition. Mona tried to get a job working with Veronica Hastings but was turned down. Spencer had no idea. Could this be motive for Mona to kill Charlotte?

Pretty Little Liars Theory: 3 Reasons Ezra is Guilty of Killing Charlotte >>>

The Truth About Emily

Pam opens up a letter from Pepperdine addressed to Emily. She tracks Emily down to confront her about it. She starts yelling at her louder than a cashier at a drugstore. Emily sees Sara sitting on a bench nearby and asks if they can just not talk about this right now.

Later, Emily and Hanna are at Arias house. Aria gets a FaceTime request from Liam. He says Jillian wants to see pages from Ezras book on her desk by tomorrow. Emily gets an alert on her phone and says she needs to leave to go meet with her mom.

Hanna is walking downstairs and sees Emily injecting herself in the bathroom. She tells Emily she saw her and asks whats going on. Emily says that she isnt sick; shes poor. She dropped out of school and blew through her entire inheritance left by her dad. The only way she think she can make money is to donate her eggs. At least she isnt dying of cancer.

Aria is a Ghostwriter

Ezras story is tragic and is one that needs to be told. For some reason, Aria thinks Ezras novel about Nicole is the greatest thing on Earth. Everyone else thinks its just really gross. None of the girls trust him, and hes definitely lying about what happened that night  even Arias publisher, Jillian, thinks hes a fraud. The liars go over to his apartment and start Steven Averying the shit out of him. He reaches his breaking point and hulks out, screaming at them to leave. Aria tells him he needs to finish his book  the world needs to know who he is. She doesnt even know who he is. She tells him hes compassionate, sensitive and kind. These are three words I would definitely not use to describe Ezra Fitz.

Ezra is in too deep of a depression to finish his book, so Aria starts writing it for him without him knowing! Liam calls to let her know that Jillian loved the pages.

Spaleb Wasnt a Thing But Now It Is

Hanna questions Spencer over whether she has feelings for Caleb. Her silence is a loud yes! She asks if they hooked up in Madrid. Spencer adamantly denies it, saying she would never to do that to Hanna without talking to her first. Hanna encourages her to explore her feelings about Caleb to see if he feels the same way.

Spencer comes home to the barn to find Caleb waiting up for her. Theyre talking over a few beers and things get very heated very fast. The most epic handholding session happens, while a killer rendition of Ring of Fire starts playing. Spaleb happens, right there on the couch! This scene is hot. I wasnt sure if I was a fan of Spencer and Caleb together, but these two have some chemistry.

Meanwhile, Aria gets a text that says, I know who did it, and Im going to make you talk. Its signed by a red devil emoji. Nick Jonas is Uber A, you guys! Just kidding; thats a different show.

Also, a new tidbit of information is revealed: Sara Harvey electrocuted herself after Emily punched her last season. Thats why she wears gloves and cant sign her own name.

What did you guys think of the episode? Whos the red devil? Sound off in the comments.

Pretty Little Liars airs Tuesdays at 8pm on Freeform.

(Image courtesy of Freeform)
U.S. News ranks UBs education, nursing online programs among best

This program is designed to build upon the knowledge and experiences of registered nurses while offering a course of study that is innovative and relevant, and that provides an opportunity for professional growth.

BUFFALO, N.Y.  Online degree programs offered by the University at Buffalos Graduate School of Education and School of Nursing were named among the best online programs by U.S. News & World Report.

The Graduate School of Educations seven online programs collectively ranked 41st in the prestigious national ranking, their third consecutive year among the top 50 online graduate education programs.

The School of Nursings online bachelors degree program (RN-BS), which admitted its first class in 2012-13, climbed 50 spots to rank 86th among hundreds of online bachelors programs, its first year in the top 100.

The national magazine, which issues annual rankings of colleges and programs, rated online programs based on student engagement, student services and technology, faculty credentials and training, and peer reputation. The rankings for best online graduate education degrees included admissions selectivity as an additional factor.

We are proud of this continued national recognition and continue to work toward improving educational access and innovation through high-quality online programs, says Jaekyung Lee, dean of the Graduate School of Education.

This was the third consecutive year UBs Graduate School of Education finished among the top 50 online graduate education programs in the magazines study, he says.

Those four U.S. News-surveyed programs include Science and the Public (EdM), School Librarianship (MS), English Education (EdM) and Music Education (EdM), Lee says. GSE currently has a comprehensive array of fully online programs across four departments, including eight advanced certificate programs, seven masters degree programs and one doctoral program, that prepare students for professional careers in counseling, teaching, leadership and information fields.

UBs Graduate School of Education tied with two other universities for No. 41: Purdue University and fellow State University of New York institution, Stony Brook University.

UBs online RN-BS program, which can be completed in a one-year or two-year sequence, is designed for nurses who already have successfully completed an associates degree or hospital-based nursing program, and allows practicing nurses to attend school while maintaining employment.

Susan Grinslade, assistant dean for undergraduate programs in the School of Nursing, says the ranking affirms the intent of the program to help prepare more nurses at the baccalaureate level.

The future demands on the nursing workforce will increase as health care becomes more complex and the population ages, is sicker and grows frailer, says Grinslade, also a clinical professor of nursing.

The baccalaureate-prepared nurse has a broader range of competencies, as well as an understanding of the regulatory, political and health care systems that influence the delivery of safe and quality health care.

The RN-BS program tied with programs from five other universities for No. 86: Colorado State University, St. Johns University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of North Texas.

We are honored that U.S. News and World Report recognizes UB School of Nursings online RN to BS program as among the best, says Marsha Lewis, dean of the School of Nursing. This program is designed to build upon the knowledge and experiences of registered nurses while offering a course of study that is innovative and relevant, and that provides an opportunity for professional growth.

For the full rankings of online programs, visit the U.S. News website: http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education.
Staff at building supplies company Kent Blaxill have filled 30 backpacks with tins of food for a charity that helps hungry children.

Marys Meals provides a daily meal in school to meet the immediate needs of hungry children and encourage them to gain an education that can help them out of poverty. The charity is currently feeding over one million children.

Monica Hartley, the collection organiser at Kent Blaxill said: There is a real sense of achievement at being able to arrange something relatively simply that will make such a massive difference to children living in poverty. So many colleagues helped by finding the right items for the backpacks.

The backpacks will now leave the companys headquarters in Colchester and go to one of 12 countries where Marys Meals operate. Its biggest operation is in Malawi where it provides meals to over 25% of all primary schools across the country.
Bordentown exhibit showcases items belonging to Joseph Bonaparte

The Bordentown Historical society is gaining international attention for its Joseph Bonaparte exhibit, former King of Spain and brother of Napoleon.
January 27, 2016: American carmaker Ford will be launching its iconic brand Mustang in India on Thursday. The vehicle will make its official debut at the Auto Expo next month. Ford will be launching the coupe version of the car in India. It will feature two engine options  a 2.3-litre EcoBoost petrol engine and the 5.0-litre V8 EcoBoost engine. While the former generates maximum power of 315PS and 434Nm of peak torque, the latter produces 421PS of power and 524 Nm of torque power. The engines will be mated to a six-speed manual gearbox. Other key features of the Ford Mustang coupe include a protruding nose, projector headlamps and a sporty bumper. The new vehicle is expected to be priced around Rs50 lakhs. The Ford Mustang was a popular car among Bollywood celebrities in the 1960s and 1970s and was featured in several Hindi films.

Source : BS Motoring
January 27, 2016: Japanese auto majors Toyota Motors and Suzuki Motors have denied a newspaper report that they were discussing the possibility of a partnership including a cross-shareholding deal.

But Toyota confirmed that it is considering buying out the remaining 49 per cent stake in Daihatsu in which it has majority control. We are constantly considering a number of possibilities relating to Daihatsu, such as partnerships or business restructuring, including making the company a fully owned subsidiary, said Toyota. Both leading automakers, who have a strong presence in India, denied reports published by Japanese daily Nikkei that they had entered into negotiations. If the two were to combine, they could emerge as the most powerful automobile entity in India. The newspaper said the two were considering various options to capitalise on the huge demand for compact cars in India and other emerging economies.

Daihatsu Motor Co is a rival to Suzuki and specialises in small cars, demand for which is huge in India. Maruti Suzuki India is the largest automaker in India and has ambitious expansion plans. Analysts say that if the two Japanese giants were to collaborate, they would be able to dominate the Indian automobile sector across various segments. About five years ago, Suzuki had entered into a tie-up with Germanys Volkswagen, but the association soon soured and ended up in an arbitration court. The dispute was finally resolved last year.

Source : BS Motoring
After exiting from Viom Networks, Kolkata-based Srei group is looking to enter the telecom tower business once again outside India in geographies such as East Europe, Russia, West Asia and Africa through Quippo.

Quippo, a Srei Initiative, is currently in the business of equipment rental, operating in the verticals of construction, oil & gas, energy , valuation and auctioning of old equipment. In 2009, Quippo Telecom Infrastructure had entered into a partnership with Tata Teleservices to create Viom Networks.

"We have built expertise in the tower business, and we see there are good opportunities in other countries... Our tower business will be a completely independent venture under Quippo," said Sunil Kanoria, vice-chairman, Srei Infrastructure Finance.

In October 2015, Srei Infrastructure Finance announced selling its 18.26 per cent stake (jointly held by Srei and the Kanoria block) in Viom Networks to American Tower Corporation (ATC) for Rs 2,952 crore. Srei's consideration, including the non-compete fee, in the sale is Rs 1,790 crore; its investment in Viom was Rs 1,598 crore. Under the non-compete agreement with ATC, Srei cannot enter tower business in India.

In December 2015, Srei announced that BNP Paribas Lease Group, a 100 per cent subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group, had decided to sell its 50 per cent stake in Srei Equipment Finance to Srei Infrastructure Finance. In exchange, BNP Paribas acquired a five per cent in Srei Infrastructure Finance, which will now be the parent company of Srei Equipment Finance.

Srei had assets under management of Rs 36,233 crore in the first half of 2015-16. In September 2015, the company's strategic investment pool was Rs 1,969 crore, which included investments in telecom, communication, transportation, rural infotech and energy. After the Viom deal is closed, the portfolio will be substantially reduced, which will help Srei improve its debt-equity and capital-adequacy ratios.

"Our focus will be on infrastructure growth. We expect 15-16 per cent growth in our core business next financial year," said Kanoria.
Even as it reported its slowest growth in iPhone sales since the devices launch in 2007, technology giant Apple is betting big on India to drive future growth. Globally, iPhone sales grew by just 0.4 per cent, whereas sales of its flagship device grew by 76 per cent in India during the October to December quarter.



On Wednesday, Apple reported its highest-ever quarterly profit of $18.4 billion on a revenue of $75.9 billion during the period (Q1 for Apple), but investor sentiment was at best low. Save for India, growth in other regions such as the US and China has plateaued. In the ongoing quarter (January-March 2016), the company expects iPhone sales to fall for the first time.



CEO Tim Cook lauded the Indian government for being very interested in economic reforms, pointing to the countrys potential to offer a conducive business environment in the future, during a call with investors to review Apples financial results.



Indias growth, as you know, is very good. Its quickly becoming the fastest-growing BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) country. Its the third-largest smartphone market in the world after China and the United States, said Cook. He added that Apples revenues in India grew by 38 per cent during the quarter in reported currency while in constant currency the growth was 48 per cent.





In India, Apple launched the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus in October, priced at a premium of nearly Rs 10,000 when compared to the previous generation devices. Sales growth in India is expected to have come from increasing sales of the iPhone 6 and 5s models that received hefty price cuts following the launch of newer devices.Apple, on an average, shipped almost half a million iPhones per quarter (in 2015) with just two per cent volume market share though almost 10 per cent revenue share. However, in comparison, the growth in Apples bigger markets such as the US or China has peaked, and India which is the next big market in volumes is a significant opportunity for Apple, said Niel Shah, director at CounterPoint Research.India, which has nearly a billion mobile subscribers, is all set to become the second largest smartphone market in the world this year, overtaking the US.Unlike the US, nearly 70 per cent of smartphones sold in the country cost less than $150, meaning Apples premium iPhone portfolio has limited scope.India is a mobile-first country with more than half of the population being young. There is a higher chance that as these consumers become mature smartphone users, Apple will be able to rope them in with its robust and attractive ecosystem, and its portfolio, which has become a coveted status symbol, added Shah.In order to maximise this growth, Apple has already expanded its network from just one to five distributors in the country in the last 15 months. The company recently sent a proposal to the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion for permission to set up a wholly-owned wholesale subsidiary in India.Recently, Apples country manager for India, Maneesh Dhir, who had been in the role since 2010, put in his papers. His departure follows Sharad Mehrotra, enterprise mobility head of Apple India, who stepped down to launch Hyve Mobility, a company that aims to build smartphones based on the Android operating system. Mehrotra was with Apple India since 2007.Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his visit to Silicon Valley last year had met Cook, discussing the possibility of setting up a manufacturing unit in the country. Foxconn, the largest manufacturer of iPhones for Apple, already has a significant presence in the country. But it does not make Apple devices in India yet.
The Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL), a public sector undertaking under the ministry of power, plans to save around Rs 6,000 crore over the next three-five years by replacing around 7 million gird-connected pump-sets across the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan. In an interview with Sanjeeb Mukherjee, RAJNEESH RANA, head of Agriculture-demand supply management at EESL, explains the viable business model for all three: Farmers, discoms and EESL. Edited excerpts:



How do you plan to monetise the energy saved so that it can work out into a viable business model for all three stake holders, that is discoms, farmers and EESL?

For this first we need to understand the model that we are working one. There are around 20 million grid-connected pump-sets in India and another 10 million diesel-run ones. EESL plans to replace these grind-connected pumps in the first phase as because of highly subsidised tariffs, farmers opt for energy inefficient pumps over the star-rated ones. There is no incentive in saving electricity. What we plan to do along with the discoms is to replace all the energy inefficient pumps with the efficient ones, which we would purchase through competitive bidding.

But what is the business model involved?

EESL replaces the old pumps with new energy-efficient ones free of cost and also undertake their repair and maintenance during project duration. The discoms save some energy, which is then multiplied with the prevailing power rates to monetise the same. This is then shared between discoms and EESL.

But then how would you measure how much energy is being saved because one cannot go to individual fields to measure the saving?

All pumps which are being replaced will be monitored for energy used in an interval of one year, which would give us the saving. This difference would then be multiplied with the average tariff to get a financial value of the saving. Our pilots in Hubli and Mysuru have shown that against an estimation of 30 per cent energy saving, we ended up saving around 37 per cent electricity.

So in times of drought, when power consumption usually goes up, power saving will go down, which means that your return on investment also suffers?

Not, exactly, though we do carry the risk in times of drought because when rain falters, the water table goes down and farmers run their pumps longer, but we do factor in all these before we enter into a formal agreement. Also, studies have shown that in times of drought, the water table falls by maximum 10-15 feet.

Our main expenditure is procuring huge quantities of energy efficient pumps, which we manage to bring down by making bulk purchases.

Where do you plan to start your experiment first?

We have targeted to replace around 7 million grid-connected pumps in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan in the next two years. The total energy saved, assuming that most of them are five-horsepower pumps, is around 25 per cent. The total energy consumed in these four states through pumps is 60 billion units and if 25 per cent is saved around 15 billion is saved. This when multiplied with average power rate of Rs 4.5 per unit, would ensure that we get paid back in three-four years.

And how much investment would you make?

Ans: We provide an electric panel along with the pump-set free of cost to the farmers, which in total costs around Rs 30,000 per unit. To replace 7 million pumps, we invest around Rs 20,000-23,000 crore and the return through monetising power saving is around Rs 6,000 crore per year, which means we recover our expenditure in three-four years.

What about the around 10 million diesel operated pump-sets? Do you have any plan to make them energy efficient?

We are working on various technologies like using solar panels, but cost is a problem here; solar-powered pump-sets costs around Rs 3 lakh per unit for 3 HP set, which is prohibitive.
Indian naval ship (INS) Vikrant, the first aircraft carrier, which played a pivotal role in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, has made its way into a commuter bike to be launched by Bajaj Auto next month.

The Pune-based, Indias most valued two- and three-wheeler maker, will launch a 150-cc motorcycle on February 1 christened V which is built from metal used in the countrys most celebrated aircraft carrier.

This will be the eight product by Bajaj Auto this financial year and the first in 2016. V is a new brand by the company complementing five of its predecessors in production.

This new bike, which has a slight retro look as seen in the sneak preview aired today by Bajaj, is expected to be positioned between the Pulsar and Discover. However, further details including its price would be known at the time of its launch. The bike will sport a special logo to commemorate the aircraft carrier.

Eric Vas, President (Motorcycle Business), Bajaj Auto, said, For decades, the INS Vikrant has been celebrated as the pride of our country and is synonymous with Indian military capabilities and power projection. We are proud that Bajaj Auto is playing a role in keeping the legacy of Indias first aircraft carrier alive.



INS Vikrant was commissioned as the first aircraft carrier of Indian Navy in 1961. After years of distinguished service, she was decommissioned in January 1997 and served as a museum till 2012. In late 2014, Vikrant was dismantled and sold as scrap metal.

Bajaj Auto purchased the Vikrant metal and processed it to be a part of its new brand. The new bike will therefore preserve a significant piece of Indian military history, added a Bajaj Auto statement.

For the warship, the name Vikrant was taken from the Sanskrit word Vikranta meaning stepping beyond, i.e. courageous or "bold". These qualities also form the essence of our new brand. We are confident that the bike will carry the spirit and legacy of INS Vikrant forward and become one of the most path-breaking motorcycles that customers will witness this year, added Vas.

In 1957 Indian purchased HMS Hercules, an incomplete aircraft carrier from the British Royal Navy and commissioned it in 1961.

The carrier saw two wars with Pakistan, 1965 and 1971 where it played a crucial role in isolating Pakistan Naval Ships during the war of independence of Bangladesh.

Vikrant is also the name of Indias first indigenous aircraft carrier being built at the Cochin Shipyard for the Indian Navy at the cost of nearly Rs 20,000 crore.
All major central trade unions, except the Bharatiya Janata Party-backed Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), have decided to go on strike on March 29, which would hit Coal Indias production by at least five million tonnes (mt).

The strike threat comes as Coal Minister Piyush Goyal sticks to the governments decision to offload an additional 10 per cent stake in Coal India, thereby bringing down the governments share in the state-owned miner from 79.65 per cent.

The INTUC, CITU, AITUC and HMS  representing about 90 per cent of the miners workforce of 0.33 million  have consented to a series of action plan to protest the disinvestment move and force the government to address key issues related to contractual workers.

The BMS has differed over the strike call. The government is already negotiating with the workers, P K Dutta, general secretary of the BMS-supported Akhil Bharatiya Khadan Majdoor Sangh, told Business Standard.

According to the BJP-backed trade union, Coal India itself can buy 10 per cent of the stake and thus prevent this share falling into private hands. There are provisions by which this can happen, he added.

The other trade unions, however, were of the view that BMS was yielding to political pressures which is reflecting on its conduct in labour mobilisation.

The strike, if it materialises, will be the third such incident by coal workers in a financial year after the Nardendra Modi-led government came to power.

In early-January, all the five trade unions had jointly opposed a disinvestment decision, which brought Coal India Rs 22,557 crore by diluting 10 per cent of its stake on January 31, 2015. However, while other issues related to labour and industrial relations escalated and all these five trade unions joined hands to call a strike on September 2 (under the purview of the general industrial strike), the BMS ditched its peers in Coal India at the last moment.

We called off our support during the September strike as assurances were given by the government over our demands, Dutta said.

During the recently concluded Nagpur session of the five major trade unions where strike-call was proposed, BMS had sent junior leaders and had refrained from its commitment to support the strike.

We (Congress, Left and socialist-backed trade unions) have decided to move ahead with the strike proposal and the action plan we had finalised without BMS supporting it, S Q Zama, secretary general of INTUC-led National Mine Workers' Federation, told this business daily.

These trade unions are confident that the spirit of the solidarity between workers will not be dampened despite BMS not supporting the popular voice of workers.

BMS reportedly commands 18-20 per cent of the workforce while INTUC  the largest trade union  has a base of 40-45 per cent. CITU, AITUC and HMS together is estimated to have a membership between 15-22 per cent.
Despite a debacle of its previous premium made-ups brand Rosebys, home textiles player GHCL is now planning to foray into retail again with its own brand.While work on the private retail brand for home decor and lifestyle products is still on drawing board, plans are afoot to launch it by early to mid next fiscal.

"We have plans in place to gradually build our own brands in the domestic market; thereby creating a niche place for GHCL products," said R S Jalan, managing director of GHCL.

Company sources said while the plan is still on the drawing board, GHCL has already begun market feasibility study for the same even as it plans to launch the brand by early to mid next fiscal.

For now, the company already has a tie-up with Perry Ellis International, Inc. for the brand Laundry by Shellie Seigal for bedding products which include flat sheets, sheet sets, duvet covers and coordinating shams for customers in USA and Canada under the Laundry by Shelli Segal brand.

However, the private brand by GHCL will be targeted at domestic market and is likely to be pitched against other home textiles brands like Bombay Dyeing and Welspun.

Earlier, GHCL had acquired the UK brand Rosebys in 2006 for $40 million but had to later shut down the venture.

Through Rosebys, GHCL had attempted at targeting the organised home textiles retail, which it now intends to do through its own brand.

The total turnover of GHCL for 2014-15 was around Rs 2,400 crore, which it anticipates to peg at around Rs 2,500 crore for 2015-16. Of the total turnover of GHCL, its chemical business forms 60% while the textile segment contributes around 40%.
Havells Indias net profit rose 8% in December quarter, FY2016, to Rs 171.2 crore from Rs 159.1 crore on a year-on-year basis. During the period, the electronic firms net revenue went up to Rs 1,334.5 crore from Rs 1,247.4 crore a year ago  8% higher.

Slowdown in global demand impacted the companys revenue growth as exports fell 36% compared to an 11% increase in domestic sales. Sharp currency devaluation in Africa impacted growth of export in those countries. Efforts are in place to become more competitive and to look out for newer geographies as alternative markets, the company told BSE in a filing.

In the quarter, Havells earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) margins fell to 13.5% from 14.3% during the year-ago period due to surge in employee costs and advertisement and promotional expenses  rose 21.3% and 75%, respectively.

While, its light-emitting diode (LED) lighting division sales doubled, industrial cables and domestic cables grew by 29% and 9%, respectively.

Havells share fell 0.61% at the end of the day to Rs 300 in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) while the 30-index Sensex grew marginally (by 0.03%) to end at 24,492.39.
Private sector lender IDFC Bank, which on Wednesday announced its first quarterly earnings after listing on the bourses, has reported a net profit of Rs 242.2 crore in the October-December quarter.

Net interest income, the difference between interest earned and interest expended, for the quarter stood at Rs 404.2 crore. Other income for the quarter ended December stood at Rs 200 crore. Rajiv Lall, executive vice-chairman and managing director, said the lender would be focusing on growing its other income.

During the third quarter of this financial year, gross non-performing assets (NPAs) of the bank was 3.1 per cent while the net NPAs was one per cent at the end of the quarter. In absolute terms, gross NPA was Rs 1,462.25 crore while net NPA was Rs 453.41 crore.

The NPAs had come on the books of the banks after its demerger with parent IDFC. After the demerger, net assets of Rs 6,234.56 crore were transferred from IDFC Ltd to the newly formed entity on October 1. In order to account for the stressed assets, which account for almost 15 per cent of the total assets, the bank has provided for Rs 4,500 crore at the time of the formation of the bank.

Asset quality has been stable and it hasnt grown. The provisions that we had made at the start of the quarter has been adequate and we dont require to make any more provisions at the moment. In absolute terms, the gross NPL (non-performing loan) is bound to increase in the next 6-12 months but it will not affect earnings or balance sheet or require us to increase provisioning, Lall said.

The banks net interest margin stood at two per cent. The management explained that the overall margins have been under pressure because of large investments made by the bank, specifically in the treasury division.

Going ahead, the bank is looking at building its retail book by launching a mortgage financing product in the next two quarters. The retail banking vertical of the bank has been launched form the January quarter. The book size of Bharat Banking, the rural business, stood at Rs 54 crore at the end of the December quarter and the lender is looking to scale this up in the coming quarters.

However, wholesale banking continues to and would remain the largest revenue generator for the bank even in the coming months, the management said. Within this vertical, the lender had been trying to focus on other sectors apart from infrastructure which forms a majority share of the balance sheet. The management said the non-infra business had started but it was yet to occupy a meaningful share in the balance sheet.

One big challenge that remained for the lender was meeting priority sector lending (PSL) norms. According to Reserve Bank of India guidelines, banks are required to extend 40 per cent of their loans for the priority sector. Given our large balance sheet size, the task of meeting PSL norms is tough. However, we are trying to achieve it via lending organically through our Bharat Banking. The mortgage financing that we are looking at introducing will also play a role. We all lend to small and medium businesses but all of this put together will be able to make only 15-20 per cent of the total requirement. Rest will have to be bought out, said Sunil Kakkar, chief financial officer, IDFC Bank.
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs has sent a notice to United Spirits Ltd, now majority owned by British liquor firm Diageo, asking why action should not be taken against the company, its former directors and officers, which include its chairman Vijay Mallya.

The Ministry's notice to USL came on January 11 after it investigated the books of USL, which was under cloud for diversion of funds to group firms including the defunct Kingfisher Airlines, USL informed the Bombay Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

USL has reported that financial irregularities and fund diversion when Mallya ran the company has cost USL over Rs 7,200 crore. The USL board has recommended to Diageo to evict Mallya from the company, after it lost confidence in him due to the fraud.

USL also said the promoter director of USL, without naming Mallya, has assured the spirits company board that he would ensure the operations of the company would not be impacted due to the wilful defaulter notice by banks on him. Mallya is also the chairman of United Breweries, United Breweries Holdings Ltd and the defunct Kingfisher Airlines.

"The Reserve Bank of India's Master Circular on wilful defaulters along with certain covenants in the loan agreements sanctioned by the company's bankers raise an uncertainty on the impact of this development on the availability of credit facilities of the company," said USL.

Mallya has been declared wilful defaulter by State Bank of India and Union Bank of India for not repaying the loans, but got a stay from the Calcutta High Court on the status on technical grounds.

USL got shareholder approvals on January 22 to inform the board of industrial and financial restructuring (BIFR) that accumulated losses as on March 31, 2015 was Rs 5,045.45 crore, nearly 86% of its net worth of the previous financial years. Besides, the firm had made provision of Rs 2,082 crore due to losses and doubtful debts during last fiscal. USL also said that the firm is on path to recovery with its net worth improving to Rs 1,667 crore as on September and would not declare itself sick.

Mallya, who has said that his priority is to settle Kingfisher dues has 3.76% shares in United Spirits, of which almost 2.21% is pledged with banks.

USL Q3 net drops 45%



United Spirits, the Diageo controlled liquor firm reported 45% drop in third quarter profits to Rs 40.95 crore, while it showed 22% growth in revenue to Rs 2650.58 crore on higher sales of premium products from the British liquor firm stable in the Indian market



USL had reported profits of Rs 74.93 crore on revenues of Rs 2177.22 crore in the October to December period last year.
In a development that further queered the pitch for the Centre on its decision to impose Presidents Rule in Arunachal Pradesh, the Supreme Court on Wednesday asked Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa to submit his report recommending Central rule in the border state.

The apex court asked the home ministry and the governor to file responses by Friday on petitions by Congress leaders, including a plea by chief whip of Congress Legislature Party in the Arunachal Pradesh Assembly Rajesh Tacho.

The five-member Bench, headed by judge J S Khehar, remarked it is too serious a matter. This was after Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi put forth a preliminary objection that the fresh plea by Tacho didnt challenge the Presidential notification that promulgated Central rule in the state. It asked the Attorney General not to raise technical objections.

In a hurriedly called meeting on Sunday, the Union Cabinet had recommended Presidents rule in the state that has seen a month-long political impasse. President Pranab Mukherjee had asked Home Minister Rajnath Singh to explain the reasons behind the decision in person. The President gave his assent to the Cabinet recommendation on Tuesday.

The Assembly is currently under suspended animation. The Congress feared and the Bharatiya Janata Party sources exuded confidence, that the petition might become redundant in the days to come if another government gets sworn in and manages to prove its majority.

This will also mean that the government at the Centre would not have to get the approval of the two Houses of Parliament when the Budget session convenes by February 23. The government is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha and it is nearly certain it will lose the motion in that House.

In the court, the Bench allowed the petitioners to amend their plea by Friday. Additional Solicitor General Satpal Jain, appearing for the governor, sought to maintain secrecy of the report that recommended President's rule. The Bench sought the report in a sealed cover.

Unless we get the grounds for recommending the President's rule, we cannot proceed. If grounds are not the same in the proclamation, then it is totally a different ball game, the Bench, also including judges Dipak Misra, M B Lokur, P C Ghose and N V Ramana, said during the hearing.

A battery of senior lawyers including Fali S Nariman, Kapil Sibal, Rajeev Dhawan and Vivek Tankha opposed the plea of the governor. But, Jain argued the report included photographs to suggest the governor was under threat as slaughtering of animals, burning of tyres and posters took place outside the Raj Bhawan.

On Rohatgis argument that there were more than one report on which the President acted, the Bench said: You (Attorney General) have been saying there have been a series of recommendations. Look at the President's proclamation. It only speaks about one report and information, it said.

Senior lawyer Kapil Sibal, appearing for the petitioners, said the court should look into the legality of the actions taken by the Centre even if there is a new chief minister, who will have to prove his majority before February 23. Sibal said if no government is formed, then there is no option but to dissolve the House and go for fresh elections.

The Bench is examining the Constitutional provisions on the scope of discretionary powers of the governor in recommending Presidents rule after Nabam Tuki-led Congress government failed to meet the constitutional provision of even once convening an Assembly session in six months.

Congress 21 legislators had rebelled against Tuki and joined hands with 11 of BJP and two independents to 'impeach' the then Assembly speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue, a move branded as illegal and unconstitutional by the speaker. But, 27 MLAs in 60-member Assembly, including Tuki and his ministerial colleagues, boycotted the proceedings. The rebels later elected another dissident Congressman Kalikho Pul as the new chief minister of the state. The Centre has also appointed former Delhi Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal and retired IAS officer G S Patnaik as advisors to the governor.
Electronic hardware products like microchips, mobile phones, and semi-conductors, which have contributed to India's burgeoning import bill, may in the near future contribute to the widening trade deficit even more than oil imports.

The issue came up for discussion at a business session aimed at disseminating India's policy at the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial in Nairobi and attended by commerce secretary Rita Teaotia and top commerce ministry officials.

On the sidelines of the event hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Centre for WTO Studies, a senior commerce ministry official said the initial decision in 1997 to allow duty-free import of 217 items is now widely seen as a historical blunder.

India is a signatory to the Information Technology Agreement (ITA 1) as a member of WTO. Under the agreement, member countries should allow duty-free import of products falling under eight categories covering telecommunications, computers, and semiconductors, like mobile phones and electronic chips.

While ITA allowed import of finished product duty-free, domestic manufacturers paid taxes on import of components used for making a complete unit. This made local production of electronic products expensive and wiped out almost entire hardware production in India.

Official trade figures by the commerce ministry support this: In December 2015, the import of electronic goods increased by more than 21 per cent to $3.81 billion, whereas petroleum and crude oil imports fell by more than 33 per cent. While the figures represent a massive fall in global crude oil prices, experts point to the high growth in electronic goods import even though overall imports showed declining trends. In other matters, commerce secretary Rita Teaotia said her ministry is holding consultations with other ministries with regard to implementing and moving forward on the outcomes of WTO ministerial in Nairobi.

Teaotia said all ministries related to trade were part of the consultation process and the commerce minister has chaired these meetings. "The implementation and implication of the Nairobi package as well as the way forward has been discussed in detail with all the ministries," she said.

A senior ministry official said a presentation had been made to the agriculture ministry that has been asked to raise red flags on trade policy for agricultural commodities.

The WTO has recognised developing countries' rights to seek recourse to Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) for agricultural products. But the recognition does not guarantee an SSM, which helps countries raise tariffs in case of surge in imports or dip in global commodity prices.

Creation of SSM is still subject to future negotiations.

On the critical issue of public stockholding for food security purposes, the deadlock has not been broken with developed countries led by the United States actively opposing the move.
These cities will get funding from the Centre during the current financial year. People tracking the project said Vizag, Navi Mumbai, Surat, Pimpri Chinchwad (part of Pune Metropolitan City), Jaipur, Chandigarh, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, and Coimbatore were some names that could be on the list.Karuna Gopal, an advisor on smart cities, told Business Standard that Pune stands a good chance because of high citizen interest and a proactive commissioner; Vizag because of readiness; and cities like Ahmedabad are historically better performers. She added from down south, Coimbatore could be a good choice for the first list.According to the original timeline, the first 20 of 100 cities would get the first tranche of central funding this year. But officials had said if the proposals did not match quality yardsticks, the first lot might have less than 20 cities.

Urban Development Minister Vankaiah Naidu said on Wednesday the first batch of winners of the Smart City Challenge Competition would be made public on Thursday. He did not mention the number of cities. Earlier, January 26 was the target date for announcing the first list of smart cities, a project that could mean a long-term opportunity of an estimated $50 billion in India. Of the 100 cities (98 have been shortlisted till now), 20 were scheduled to get funding in 2015-16. The Centre would spend Rs 500 crore on each city in phases, while the remaining amount was to come from the states, urban bodies and private partners. A few months ago, the Cabinet had cleared Rs 50,000 crore for the project and another Rs 48,000 crore for the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (Amrut)  both schemes were part of the election plank of the National Democratic Alliance last year. Estimates suggested building a new smart city with one million population would cost Rs 20,000 crore a year for the next 10-15 years. Developing cities would be cheaper, depending on the nature of retrofitting work required.

The 98 probable cities were picked up through a 'City Challenge'. But, the names will change as the competition moves from one round to another.
To promote local manufacturing under the Make in India drive, the government on Wednesday announced a 10 per cent purchase preference for local content in all petroleum sector contracts. The tweak in the existing tender guidelines would aid increasing the share of domestically manufactured components in projects awarded by firms such as Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and GAIL.

Under the new scheme, separate thresholds for local content would be pre-defined across the range of equipment and services and the lowest bidders would have to match that requirement for a particular tender. If the lowest bidder fails to commit to the mandatory local content share, the second-lowest bidder willing to match the local content requirement would be awarded the contract provided his quoted price falls within the 10 per cent price range of the lowest bidder.

Our ministry has estimated oil companies annual capital expenditure of around Rs 90,000 crore. The award of these contracts should increase local manufacturing. Based on discussions within an internal steering committee on the matter, companies and other stakeholders, we have decided there should be 10 per cent purchase preference in tenders, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said while briefing media on the new policy measure.

Pradhan added the move - aimed at boosting the local industry without compromising on the international competitiveness of tenders - would not require a separate approval from the Union Cabinet. He said the oil ministry would soon upload a concept paper on the proposal on the ministrys website calling for stakeholder consultation. These consultations are expected to be over by February 19. Rolling out the new proposal would go into the next financial year.



The policy does not differentiate between domestic and foreign companies as long as they meet the minimum cut-off of locally manufactured content in a tender. The ministry has already started the process of seeking information from oil public sector undertakings on the kind of contracts that can attract local content.

Under the new policy, contracts for most streams of equipment and services  including drilling pipes, rigs and oilfield services  can attract mandatory local content share of 10-50 per cent. Based on our estimate, up to 20 per cent local content can come in service and supply related contracts, while 30 per cent locally manufactured content can come in engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracts, said Pradhan.

Experts gave a thumbs-up to the new initiative arguing it might be a good way to develop the local industry. In the current low oil price scenario, the price of oilfield services contracts has already fallen 30-40 per cent. Therefore, the new policy will not discourage foreign firms, even if they have to set up manufacturing facilities locally, as they try to bag the limited number of contracts being floated in the market, said a senior analyst from an accounting and consultancy firm.

The oil ministry had in October 2014 withdrawn an earlier policy that made 10 per cent price preference available to domestic companies against their foreign counterparts. That policy was applicable to tenders seeking services and equipment for oil sector contracts, but did not cover raw material purchases.
With a slight tweak of the rate at which companies pay advance tax, the finance ministry hopes to make a huge improvement in its fiscal position in FY17.

The proposal is smart and so likely to go through, even as the government wrestles with the more difficult one of cutting the rate of corporate tax, or corporation tax in a difficult fiscal environment.

Instead of permitting companies to pay their tax liability for the year where they back load most of their tax dues near the end of the year, the finance ministry has been provided an option to make the dues equal. It would also align the Indian plan in line with what obtains globally. The US, for instance, asks companies to pay their tax in similar four instalments as India does, but the instalments are equal. In Canada, the advance tax dues have to be paid on the last day of each month, same as in Malaysia nearer home or even in Chile, Brazil and Australia.

Under section 211(1) of the Indian Income Tax Act, companies can pay their annual tax dues in four instalments of 15 per cent by June 15, at least another 30 per cent by September 15, another 30 per cent by December and the remainder by March 15.

Raising the rates to something like the US plan would loosen the fiscal straitjacket the government finds itself in every year in the first few months. Basically under the current tax instalment format, the finance ministry now makes do with only 45 per cent of the tax flow estimated for the year for eight months of the financial year. The asking rate gets stiffer because the non-corporate assesses too pay only 30 per cent of their advance tax dues till mid-September. Money starts gushing into the Consolidated Fund of India only from the second week of December. Since there is less money coming to the government in the period between April and September, it ends up borrowing disproportionately more from the markets to cover the difference. In the current fiscal for instance it will raise Rs 6 lakh crore from the domestic and foreign investors (approx $92.3 billion). Of this 60 per cent or Rs 3.6 lakh crore ($55.4 billion) has been raised in the April to September period.

The advantage of the new equated monthly instalments is that it can be rung in even if finance minister Arun Jaitley has to stick to his promise of reducing the rate of corporate tax a bit in the General Budget this time. The government has promised to bring down the headline rate to 25 per cent in a four year time frame from the current 30 per cent, net of surcharge and cess. The changes would also sit well with the repeated promise of the finance minister to simplify the tax administration but without costing the exchequer. Some of the changes already made towards simplifying the tax administration include stripping the departments of direct and indirect taxes of their financial independence. They will now operate under a single financial authority, that of the department of revenue.

The orders were issued in December after top level consultations within the government. The finance minister gave the go ahead for the step which will be seen as a major reform of India's tax sector to investors, domestic and foreign.

Former advisor to finance ministry, Parthasarathi Shome in his first report of the Tax Administration Reforms Commission had also asked for abolition of the differences between the two boards.
The world saw India embrace resource nationalism when, by way of slapping a very high export duty on iron ore, irrespective of whether it is lump or fine form and its iron content, it ensured major fall in the exports of the steel ingredient.

Not only did exports slide from a high of 127 million tonnes (mt) in 2011-12 to less than 5 mt in 2015 (January-December), ore production during this period went down from 227 mt to 128.90 mt.

This, however, does not provide any scope to rejoice at having attained the objective of conservation of a resource to be needed in growing quantities in the future by a rapidly expanding domestic steel industry.

As a 30 per cent duty smothered exports by outpricing Indian ore in a rapidly falling market, the court ordered stoppage of mining on a large scale because of the absence of environment and forest clearances. This has caused dislocation to the extent that the country last year became a net importer of the mineral: India's iron ore imports of 15 mt in 2015 exceeded exports by over 10 mt.

In a move which amounted to going back on its earlier commitment to allow duty-free export of iron ore pellets to encourage local agglomeration of fines not much in use in the country, the government put a 5 per cent levy on pellet exports on January 27, 2014.

The duty, described as "irrational" by industry officials, led capacity use to drop to as low as 30 per cent and closure of a number of export-oriented units. The virtual collapse of the industry finally led the government earlier this month to remove the duty on pellet exports.

Similarly, in order to ensure some presence in the world market, New Delhi in a belated move is charging a duty of 10 per cent on export of ore with iron content of up to 58 per cent. Ores richer in iron will continue to be charged 30 per cent duty.

But why should exports channelled through a public sector trading house invite a flat duty of 10 per cent in a blatant discrimination against private parties?



The world's leading producers of the mineral must be gloating over India's near disappearance as an exporter. Unfazed by the collapse of iron ore prices to a ten-year low of around $40 a tonne in the midst of the prolonged supply glut, Vale of Brazil and Anglo-Australian miners Rio Tinto and BHP are all doubling down on capacity expansion and increasing sea-borne ore supply.

As Vale is to complete expansion of the world's largest iron ore complex at Lajaras in Brazil later this year, both Rio and BHP are investing heavily to expand their network of mines and infrastructure in Australia's Pilbara region.

Not only are supplies rising from the big three, Hancock Prospecting, of which Australia's richest person Gina Rinehart is the chairperson, has begun shipments of iron ore from its 55-mt Roy Hill project, claiming an investment of $11 billion.

All these groups have their mines designed for highly cost efficient production, which will facilitate their riding out the commodity slump. For example, Rio, the industry's lowest cost producer, incurred cash costs of $16.20 a tonne in the first half of 2015. Therefore, even if the bearish forecast of Citigroup that ore prices could fall below $30 a tonne materialises, industry leaders would still remain in profits but with their margins squeezed.

Falling prices have forced closure of high cost mines in China and elsewhere. Otherwise, why should China lift imports of iron ore by 2.2 per cent to a record 952.72 mt in 2015 when its crude steel production was down 2.3 per cent to 803.83 mt?



If growing efficiency levels of leading miners are considered, then for them to consider production cuts would require ore prices to fall further. Investment banker Goldman Sachs agrees.

Less competitive

What do the recent developments in the global ore market mean for India, which earlier vacated space for over 120 mt of ore to miners in Australia and Brazil?



Local industry officials are worried that as a large number of mines, particularly in Odisha, remain shut following the Supreme Court order of May 16, 2014 and reopened mines in other parts of the country are only limping back to normal production, steel mills in the south will have reasons to strengthen their import dependence for security of ore supply.

Railway iron ore freight from east coast to the south being Rs 3,131.42 a tonne, imported ore is working out cheaper for steelmakers in Karnataka. In the comity of steel producing countries, India remains an exception where steel production and demand continue to rise at healthy rates. This makes India a natural target for global mining leaders who now have the benefit of low dry cargo shipping freight.

Mining groups here are minnows compared to the likes of Rio which lifted production of ore by 11 per cent to 327.6 mt in 2015. It will further raise output by about 7 per cent this year to 350 mt. In contrast, India's production last year was down 23.53 mt to 128.90 mt.

While the big foreign miners enjoy significant cost advantage because of their colossal operations and highly efficient logistics management, their Indian counterparts find their iron ore costs escalated by a host of levies such as royalty (at 15 per cent of average sale price) on ad valorem basis, and contribution to the District Mining Foundation (30 per cent of royalty) and the National Mineral Exploration Trust (2 per cent of royalty).

Therefore, the longer the large number of mines in Odisha, which has the biggest share of the country's iron ore production, remain in limbo the more foreign mineral will meet the growing demand.

Hopefully then, those non-functioning Odisha mines which have received all the statutory clearances will be allowed to resume production without further loss of time.

WAXING AND WANING

WHAT HAMPERS EXPORTS

n 30 per cent export duty on iron ore

n 5 per cent levy on pellet exports (removed last month)

WHAT HAMPERS PRODUCTION

n Closure of mining activity on the Supreme Court's order

n High royalty payouts by miners


Business sentiment in India rose for the first time in three months to the highest since October 2015, as domestic orders strengthened at the start of the year, showed a survey by MNI Indicators. But, only 17 per cent of the respondents said their business performance was better under the new government, a possible indication that these companies expected faster reforms from the government.

The MNI India Business Sentiment Indicator, a gauge of current sentiment among BSE-listed companies, rose to 61.8 points in January from 60.7 in December. Sentiment rose in manufacturing and service sectors but declined among construction sector companies.

A reading above 50 indicates expansion while one below that shows contraction.

The January 2016 reading was 3.7 per cent below the January 2015 reading, showed the MNI survey.

On the impact of the Narendra Modi government on businesses, 17 per cent of the respondents said their business performance was better under the new government. Many said quicker clearance and implementation of business proposals were benefitting the business environment.

While companies were more confident about the current business environment, their expectations for the next three months lacked spark. In January, the Expectations Indicator eased to 71.6 from 74.3 in December, 5.9 per cent down on the year.

Firms were also less bullish about production, employment and availability of credit over the coming quarter. One change from the previous months was that firms were more optimistic about demand. The Expectations Indicator for New Orders was up 2.6 per cent on the month. This is a tentative sign that the prolonged deterioration in domestic demand conditions may be coming to an end.

Commenting on the latest survey, Philip Uglow, chief economist of MNI Indicators, said, On the whole the January survey was a little more positive, although not unanimously so. On the brighter side, the overall sentiment was up, supported by the first increase in new orders since last June. Against this production continued to trend lower and Export Orders Indicator weakened.



He said while just under one-fifth of the panel thought the Modi government has had a positive impact on their business, over 50 per cent said that they had not seen any impact. To change this perception, the government should quicken its steps at reforming the economy, Uglow said.

MNI Indicators, part of Deutsche Borse Group, offers macroeconomic data and insight to businesses and the investment community.
A ministry of defence (MoD) task force, under the leadership of former Defence R&D Organisation (DRDO) chief, V K Aatre has recommended stiff guidelines for selecting private sector companies as "strategic partners" for building high-technology, complex systems for the military.

The report was submitted to the MoD last week, but has not yet been publicly released. The Business Standard has reviewed a copy of the report



The Aatre Task Force (hereafter, Task Force) has laid down two sets of eligibility criteria for evaluating prospective strategic partners. A "financial gate" will ensure a company has deep pockets to support its equipment for the duration of its service life, which is often decades long; and a "technical gate", which requires applicants to be capable of building systems with multiple technologies.

The financial gate will exclude all but very large companies. A strategic partner must have a consolidated turnover of at least Rs 4,000 crore for each of the last three financial years; and capital assets of Rs 2,000 crore. The company should have grown at minimum 5 per cent for at least three of the preceding five years. Finally, its credit rating must be equivalent to at least CRISIL/ICRA "A" (stable).

The Task Force was set up after a MoD expert committee, under Dhirendra Singh, recommended that one be constituted to lay down criteria for selecting one private "strategic partner" for each of six "strategic segments". These were: aircraft/helicopters, warships/submarines, armoured vehicles, missiles, command & control systems, and critical materials.

However, the Task Force has rearranged these into two groups. Group I has seven segments that include aircraft; helicopters; aero engines; submarines; warships; guns and artillery; and armoured vehicles. The Task Force recommends that just one strategic partner be chosen for each segment.

For the three segments in Group II - metallic material and alloys; non-metallic materials; and ammunition, including smart munitions - the Task Force recommends two strategic partners for each.

The financial requirements for Group II are less stringent than for Group I, since integration of systems is not needed for developing materials and ammunition. The Task Force stipulates that strategic partners must be "an engineering and/or a process technology company". The financial gate is Rs 500 crore turnover for each of the last three financial years; and capital assets worth Rs 100 crore.

In addition, strategic partners in both Group I and II are required to have "robust good governance". They should not have defaulted on loans, or have loans they have taken classified as non-performing assets. They should not be under Corporate Debt Restructuring Mechanism (CDR) or Strategic Debt Restructuring Scheme.

In rearranging the "strategic segments", the Task Force has recommended that separate strategic partners be appointed for aircraft and helicopters, since these are "essentially different segments and require different technologies."



It also recommends that a separate strategic partner be appointed to develop aero engines since "these are critical for any aircraft project and India does not have adequate expertise in this field." The report cites the global environment, where aero engine makers like Pratt & Whitney, General Electric, Rolls-Royce are separate from aircraft developers like Boeing, Airbus, etc.

The Task Force recommends that "C4IRS networks" - which govern the realms of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance - should not be developed through a strategic partner. Instead, it recommends the model of "Development Partners", presumably referring to the "Make" procedure, under which two network systems are being developed - the Tactical Control System and the Battlefield Management System.

The Task Force has recommended a gradual implementation. In the first phase, it recommends that strategic partners be identified for just five segments: Aircraft, helicopters, submarines, armoured vehicles and ammunition.

Norms have been laid down to ensure that only an Indian companies can be a strategic partner. Applicants cannot have a composite foreign direct investment (FDI) of over 49 per cent, including all types of investments. The chief executive must be a resident Indian.

In extreme situations, like war, the government "would have the right to acquire control over the intellectual property used and facilities developed pursuant to the Strategic Partnership."



The Task Force has also recommended the establishment of an independent regulator for Strategic Partnerships, which would allow "orderly development and regulation."



The "Report on the Task Force for Selection of Strategic Partners", was handed in last week to the MoD. It is authored by former DRDO chief, V K Aatre; former HAL chairman, NR Mohanty; legal expert, Shardul Shroff; heavy industries executive Ishan Shankar, banker, VP Shetty; ICRA chief, Naresh Takkar, accountant, Asish Bhattacharyya; former army procurement chief, Lieutenant General AV Subramanian; and others.

The report notes that the chosen strategic partners must function as systems integrators, building a large eco-system of specialized vendors and suppliers, including from the MSMEs sector.

Defence industry experts say the notion of strategic partners is no different from that of "Raksha Udyog Ratnas", or RuRs, that the Kelkar Committee had mooted in 2005. That, however, was put on the back burner by then defence minister, AK Antony, following strong resistance from the trade unions of defence public sector undertakings, who had apprehensions about the entry of the private sector into defence.

Perhaps to allay these fears, the Task Force notes: "Strategic Partners shall co-exist with the Defence Public Sector Undertakings ('DPSUs'), Ordnance Factories ('OFs') and Defence Research and Development Organisation ('DRDO') and the MoD (defence ministry) shall be at a liberty (sic) to utilise all these entities for its needs."



LOWDOWN

Seven segments: Aircraft, helicopters, aero engines, submarines, warships, artillery and armoured vehicles

One private company to be chosen for each segment

Must have Rs 4,000 crore turnover for last three years

Capital assets of Rs 2,000 cr

Should have grown at least 5% in three of last five years

Credit rating at least CRISIL/ICRA "A"

No default on loans, or declared non-performing assets
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has recommended auction of 700 MHz spectrum for the first time, at a reserve price of Rs 11,485 crore per MHz.

This is the highest reserve price fixed for a band ever since the process for spectrum auction started nearly five years ago.

700 MHz is considered a good band for offering mobile broadband services / 4G. It is a much sought-after band for long-term evolution (LTE) deployment around the world due to its efficiency and higher penetration inside buildings. Due to lower frequency, it provides wider coverage, which reduces the number of towers required for setting up the LTE network and significantly cuts down capital expenditure involved in making the network live.

However, Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Mukesh Ambanis Reliance Jio in their submissions to Trai had opposed the auction of the new band 700 MHz till a device ecosystem was in place. The cost of delivering mobile services in the 700 MHz band is approximately 70 per cent cheaper than that in 2,100 MHz.

According to experts, the reserve price of the 700 MHz Band, for which the ecosystem is yet to be ready, has been fixed at a premium level. Operators might not be able to bid aggressively in this new band as the benefits will trickle only in the longer run.

In 2015, the government had earned revenues of Rs 1.1 lakh crore from the spectrum auction. According to experts, the government could rake in Rs 5.5-6 lakh crore this year from the sale of spectrum.

For 1,800 MHz and 2,500 MHz, the reserve price has been fixed at Rs 2,873 crore and Rs 809 crore, respectively. The 2,500 MHz band would be auctioned for the first time.

The recommended price of 1,800 MHz band is 31 per cent higher than the base price fixed by the government in the March 2015 auction. The government had fixed Rs 2,191 crore pan-India (excluding Maharashtra and West Bengal) price for 1,800 MHz band in previous auction held in March 2015.

The regulator also suggested base price for 2,300 MHz and 2,500 Mhz bands. It recommended Rs 817 crore per MHz for spectrum in both 2,300 MHz and 2,500 MHz frequencies, 33 per cent higher than base price fixed for their last auction held in 2010.

At present, Reliance Jio is the only player to have 2,300 Mhz spectrum across India.

For 2,100 MHz, Trai has recommended Rs 3,746 per MHz pan-India against Rs 3,705 crore fixed by government in the March 2015 auction. The 800 MHz band, which is being used for 4G services, has been fixed at a base price of Rs 5,829 per MHz. The new price is about 60 per cent higher from base price of Rs 3,646 crore fixed in the last auctions. It has suggested auction of 800 MHz in 19 out of 22 telecom circles.

The 900 MHz will be put up for auction only in six circles. Trai has also recommended auction of spectrum in 900 MHz in six service areas  Gujarat at base price of Rs 673 crore per MHz, Karnataka for Rs 558 per MHz, Haryana for Rs 151 per MHz, UP East for Rs 776 per MHz, UP West for Rs 739 MHz and Bihar for Rs 444 per MHz.

Earlier, the government had fixed the highest base price at Rs 3,980 per MHz for 900 spectrum band in the last auction.

Overall, 37.5 MHz will be put up for auction in the 800 MHz band, 9.8 MHz in the 900 MHz band, 21 MHz in 1,800 MHz, and 345 MHz (out of which 330 MHz to be released by the defence ministry) in the 2,100 MHz band.

In the 2,300 MHz (first auctioned in 2010), 320 MHz will be put up for sale and in 2,500 MHz, 600 MHz will be put up for sale.

Trai has taken 80 per cent (50 per cent for Jammu & Kashmir and northeast) of the average valuation of spectrum band in the licensed service area or the price realised in the March 2015/February 2014 auction, whichever is higher as the base price for spectrum.

According to Hemant Joshi, partner, Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP, says operators ability to pay for spectrum will be constrained as the balance sheets are already over-stretched. The timing of auction should be carefully considered so that all players can effectively participate. Currently, operators are busy rolling out services for the spectrum acquired in recent auctions and grappling with challenges of servicing debt and maintaining healthy profitability and cash flows.



On 700 MHz, Trai said 12 commercial networks have already been launched and 13 countries have auctioned this band. A total of 35 MHz would be put up for auction in this frequency.

The regulator has recommended taking back 1,800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Aircel in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh; Tata Teleservices (TTSL) in Himachal Pradesh; and 800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Tata in West Bengal and Quadrant (Videocon) in Punjab, and auctioning these frequencies.

In April 2013, TTSL had surrendered the CDMA spectrum 800 MHz held by it beyond 2.5+2.5 MHz in all circles except in Delhi and Mumbai. However, the spectrum has not been put to auction by the department of telecommunications because the matter is sub-judice. According to Trai, DoT should not keep spectrum surrendered by TTSL as idle and take appropriate legal remedies to put it in the upcoming auction.

The entire available spectrum in the 2,100 MHz band, including spectrum taken back from STel, should be put to auction, Trai said. Although the Supreme Court had cancelled STels 2G permits, the companys holding in 3G band in Bihar, Odisha and Himachal Pradesh remained unaffected by the order. The company later closed its operations in India and the regulator said its 3G spectrum could be put for auction.

According to Trai, the audit for all allocated spectrum should be done by an independent agency. The recommendations will now be considered by the Telecom Commission, the highest policy making body of DoT and then will go for the Cabinets final approval. However, it is unlikely that the spectrum auction will happen in the current financial year as envisaged by the government earlier.
Cabinet approves raising of 17 Indian Reserve Battalions by J&K and LWE States . .

The Union Cabinet under the Chairmanship of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has approved the raising of 17 India Reserve Battalions (IR Bns) by Jammu & Kashmir and Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected States. It includes five IR Bns in the state of J&K, four IR Bns in Chhattisgarh, three IR Bns in Jharkhand, three IR Bns in Odisha and two IR Bns in Maharashtra. .

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The major thrust in raising these 17 Bns. is as follows: .

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Local youths will be recruited. To achieve this, the States will relax the age and educational criteria, if required. .

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In respect of the 05 IR Bns to be raised by J&K, 60% of the vacancies will be filled from the border districts of J&K for the posts of constables and class IV. .

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For LWE states, 75% of the vacancies of constables will be filled up from 27 core districts under Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Scheme. .

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The Government of India introduced the scheme of Indian Reserve Battalions in 1971. The Government of India has so far, sanctioned 153 IR Bns to various States, out of which 144 IR Bns have been raised and one IR Bn in Jharkhand has been converted into Specialized Indian Reserve Battalion (SIRB) having two engineering companies and five security companies. .

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Central Institute of Buddhist Studies (CIBS) shall be a deemed-to-be-university, provisionally for a period of five years, under the de novo category . .

The Central Government, on the advice of the UGC, has declared that Central Institute of Buddhist Studies (CIBS), Choglamsar, Leh (Ladakh), Jammu & Kashmir, shall be a deemed-to-be-university for the purpose of the UGC Act,1956, provisionally, for a period of five years under the de novo category, from the date CIBS disaffiliates itself for its courses / programmes from Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, Varanasi and Tibetan Medicines and Astrology Department, Dharamsala. .

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The declaration of CIBS as deemed-to-be-university shall be confirmed after five years on the basis of five successive annual performance reports of UGC Expert Committee(s). This has been notified on 15th January 2016 for publication in Gazette of India Part-1, Section-1. .

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The declaration made shall be subject to following conditions: .

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I. UGC Regulations (Institutions Deemed to be University) 2010 amended in the year 2014 and 2015 and any further amendments, and guidelines of UGC issued from time to time with respect to Deemed to be University shall be binding on the CIBS. .

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II. Notwithstanding anything in (I) above, the declaration is further subject to the following conditions: .

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a) The CIBS shall amend / update its Memorandum of Association (MoA)/Rules, as and when necessary, in consultation & concurrence with the UGC/Government of India. The Central Institute of Buddhist Studies (CIBS) shall also carry out amendments / improvements, if any, suggested by the Government of India or the UGC, in its MoA/Rules. .

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b) The CIBS shall not offer any distance education programmes. .

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c) The CIBS shall not open or operate any off campus(s)/off shore campus(es) / new Department(s) without prior approval of the UGC and the Government of India. .

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d) CIBS is also not permitted to affiliate any college(s) / institution(s). .

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e) CIBS shall not undertake franchising of higher education which is not permissible under any circumstances. .

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f) The academic programmes offered or to be offered by CIBS will conform to the norms and standards prescribed by the relevant Statutory Councils. .

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g) The CIBS shall not offer / award, as the case may be, any degrees that are not specified by the UGC. It shall also ensure that the nomenclatures of the degrees, etc. to be awarded by it are specified by the UGC under Section 22 of the UGC Act, 1956. .

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h) All the prescribed norms and procedures of the relevant Statutory Councils and other authorities concerned in the matter of admission of students, intake capacity of students, starting of new courses/ programmes, renewal of approval to the courses, etc. will continue to be in force, and shall be adhered to by the CIBS. .

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i) The CIBS shall take all necessary steps to comply with the observations and suggestions, if any, of the Expert Committee of the UGC as made out in its relevant Inspection Report; .

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India Investment Summit would be held on 4th and 5th February, 2016 in the national capital; Long term investors including Sovereign Wealth Funds and Pension Funds across the globe are expected to participate in the two day Summit; Special focus would be on investment opportunities in the sectors of road transport, highways, ports, urban infrastructure, railways, power and renewable energy, besides State level projects . .

Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India in partnership with SBI Caps is organizing an India Investment Summit on 4th and 5th February, 2016, in national capital. A large Number of long term investors including Sovereign Wealth Funds and Pension Funds across the globe are expected to participate in the two day Summit. Apart from the infrastructure related Central Ministries/Departments, many State Governments will also take part in the Summit. For the two days, special focus would be on investment opportunities in the sectors of road transport, highways, ports, urban infrastructure, railways, power and renewable energy, besides State Level projects. The concerned Ministers, Senior Officials and Regulators will be present for interaction/discussions with the investors. .

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The Summit would showcase and discuss the huge long term infrastructure investment opportunities in India. The Government of India has already established National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) as a Category II Alternate Investment Fund (AIF) under the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Regulations. NIIF is to be financed with Governments own contribution along with equity participation from both foreign and domestic strategic anchor partners with Governments share being 49%. The objective of NIIF is to maximise economic impact mainly through infrastructure development in commercially viable projects, both greenfield and brownfield, including stalled projects and other nationally important projects. .

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Shri Arun Jaitley, Minister of Finance, Corporate Affairs and Information & Broadcasting, Government of India would be the Chief Guest and will address the Summit on February 4, 2016. .

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A booklet containing the list of possible infrastructure projects for funding will also be released during the Summit. .

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To facilitate detailed discussions on specific State Government projects and other projects, the entire day of 5th February, 2016 is going to see focused meetings with investors in various formats. .

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Disclaimer

I just wanted to state clearly here on my blog that the books I review are provided to me in exchange for my opinion and thoughts. I am a member of two blog alliances and I work directly with publicists and publishers at their request to review a variety of Christian fiction and non-fiction books. I receive no compensation other than free copies of the books to read, and when a give away is offered, that copy of the book is also provided by the publisher for that exact purpose.



I give my opinions both positively and negatively and will continue to do so as time permits and as I am able. I do this because I love to read and I love to share my thoughts with others who love good books and Christian stories.


Signing of Memorandum of Understandings betweenIndian Computer Emergency Response Team with (i) CyberSecurity, Malaysia; (ii) Cyber Security Agency of the Republic of Singapore; and (iii) Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center on Cooperation in Cyber Security . .

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi was today apprised of the Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs)signed between Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) with its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan. .

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Three MoUs have been signed on cooperation in Cyber Security and the details are follows:- .

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(i) MoU between CERT-In of the Republic of India and CyberSecurity, Malaysia for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 23rd November, 2015 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Ministers visit to Malaysia. .

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(ii) MoU between CERT-In of the Republic of India and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team (SingCERT), Cyber Security Agency (CSA) of the Republic of Singapore for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 24th November, 2015 in Singapore during Prime Ministers visit to Singapore. .

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(iii) MoU between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 7th December, 2015 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed MoU between the two partiescompleted by 22na December, 2015. .

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The MoUs related to Cyber Security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and respective country. .

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Some of US Attorney Preet Bharara's biggest catches in a seven-year insider-trading sweep are clinging to one more hope of clearing their names. The US Supreme Court is set to define more clearly what constitutes insider trading after agreeing to hear a California case and ending a judicial split between appeals courts in San Francisco and New York. In a case called Salman, the San Francisco court said people could be convicted of insider trading if information was passed to a trading relative or a friend as a gift. The New York appeals court, in a case called Newman, set the bar ...
Toyota Motor is considering a buyout offer for its Daihatsu Motor unit, which would give the world's biggest automaker full control over a company that excels in minicars and emerging markets. Toyota holds a 51 per cent stake in Daihatsu and is constantly considering a number of possibilities including making it a fully owned subsidiary, the company said in a statement. Daihatsu said it's cooperating with Toyota and that the buyout is an option. Shares of Daihatsu rose 16 per cent, their biggest gain since November 1999, at the close in Tokyo. At Daihatsu's current market ...
Toyota Motor Corp stayed the world's top-selling automaker for the fourth straight year and only company to deliver more than 10 million vehicles as Volkswagen (VW) fell back amid its emissions scandal. Global sales for Toyota, including its Hino Motors Ltd and Daihatsu Motor Co units, fell 0.8 per cent to 10.15 million vehicles last year, according to a company statement. Volkswagen earlier this month reported a two per cent drop to 9.9 million, while General Motors Co's deliveries rose 0.2 per cent to 9.8 million. Toyota's result caps a year in which Volkswagen led its ...
With over 119 recruiters and 370 offers, the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K) announced completion of its final placements for its 2014-16 post graduate programme batch in record seven days.

While average salaries rose by 12 per cent as compared to last year, final placements at IIM-K saw consulting as the leading sector with the likes of Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Accenture Consulting, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers recruiting in good numbers.

Highest domestic package at IIM-K stood at Rs 37 lakh per annum whereas average salaries rose by 12 per cent to stand at Rs 17.1 lakh per annum, the institute stated.

Of the total 370 offers, the consulting sector alone made a total of 99 offers including the likes of Accenture Consulting, Avalon Consulting, BCG, CBC, Deloitte, EY, Frost and Sullivan, KPMG, McKinsey, PwC sharing a total of 99 offers being made to over 28 per cent of the total batch. The domain grew by over 16.5 per cent in terms of number of offers over last year, IIM-K stated.

According to A F Mathew, Chairperson Placements at IIM-K, the institute was able to give diverse opportunities to all students by bringing many branded companies in every cluster.

"The students have far exceeded the expectations of the recruiters which resulted in a large number of new recruiters visiting campus. This has led to IIM Kozhikode setting a benchmark in the industry for years to come," Mathew said.

The premier also saw some of the first time recruiters such as 3M, Bank of America, Boston Consulting Group, Brand Accelerator, Capita, Caratlane, Credit Suisse, Ernst & Young, Frost and Sullivan, McKinsey, Mondelez, Paytm, Schneider and Shell among others.

In all, first time recruiters together made offers up to 100.

In terms of financial roles, first time recruiters like Credit Suisse and Bank of America made a total of 13 offers. Add to that, with major companies like American Express, Axis Bank, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Edelweiss, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Nomura, Yes Bank also making offers to the candidates, the combined on-campus and pre-placement offers (PPOs) made in the sector grew to 21 per cent.

While major brands like 3M, Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP), Arvind Lifestyle, Godrej, Heinz, HUL, Idea, Infineon, ITC, Kellogg's, Marico, Maruti, Nestle, Philips, Schneider, Snapdeal and Vodafone made offers for sales and marketing roles, those in the Leadership Programmes/Strategy domain were offered by Aditya Birla Group, Airtel, Madura, Mahindra, Reliance, RPG, TAS and Tata Communications, among others including many first-time recruiters like Brand Accelerator, LAVA, Mytrah, and Paytm.

Offers for operations roles were made by Amazon, Capita, EXL, HCCB, Ola Cabs, Raymond, Shell, Tata Steel and TVS, whereas offers made by companies in the IT/ ITES and analytics profile included Asian Paints, Capgemini, Google, HCL GEM, HUL, Kirusa, Microsoft, Mindtree, Mondelez, Syntel, ZS Associates and the likes.

Meanwhile, regular recruiters included the likes of Cognizant Business Consulting, IBM, Infosys, TCS and Wipro who continued to recruit from the campus for their IT, analytics and consultancy roles.

Commenting on the placements, Kulbhushan Balooni, Director (In-Charge) of IIM Kozhikode said: "IIM Kozhikode has continued to live up to its name in the industry over the years. This had led to many first-time recruiters willing to make offers on campus. The regular recruiters have continued to lay their faith in the capabilities of the students."
Built like an SUV but priced like a compact car, Mahindra & Mahindra's (M&M) newly launched KUV100 is blurring the lines in the Indian auto market. As the big car that does not leave too big a hole in the consumer's pocket, it is hoping to cash in on the aspiration among young urban professionals for a large car. (The standard KUV100, priced at sub Rs 5 lakh is a 5-seater, a 6-seater option costs more) And at the same time as the small big car, not as big as an SUV and yet bigger than the compact car, it is positioning itself firmly across both categories.

Vivek Nayer, chief officer, M&M said, "We had done a survey according to which there were many young buyers who were interested in buying a compact SUV but were instead settling for hatchbacks because there was no SUV in that segment". And so M&M decided to step in.

Today, three in every five passenger vehicles sold in the country are in the compact and super compact segment, a category that has seen phenomenal growth in the past few years. Brands in lead roles in this category are Swift Dzire, Swift, Hyundai Grand i10 - all priced within the Rs 4.5-6 lakh band. Although these are not entry-level cars their buyers are mostly first time car owners. Growing disposable incomes and the aspiration to own a better looking and bigger car are pushing sales of compact cars over cheaper alternatives that were once staple entry level rides - namely the Maruti Alto, Hyundai Eon and the Datsun Go. The KUV (Kool Utility Vehicle) 100, which took M&M four years to develop and an investment of Rs 1,200 crore, is hoping to push up the aspiration levels among young buyers a notch higher by offering them an SUV within the same budget.

However there are big challenges to look out for. For one, consumer behaviour in the auto market is notoriously unpredictable. The KUV100 has to steer clear of the perception trap and appeal to the buyer's desire for a bigger car and not just a cheap version of a big car. Also with the KUV100, M&M has for the first time offered petrol engines for the domestic market. These engines have been developed internally as have, for the first time, sub-2-litre diesel engines. The size of the diesel engine on the KUV1OO is nearly half that on bigger M&M vehicles such as Bolero, Scorpio and XUV5OO. "Our research and development team took six months to get me convinced that it makes more sense for M&M to build its own petrol engines rather than buy them from outside", added Pawan Goenka, executive director, M&M. These engines will have to stand the test on Indian roads.

M&M however is convinced that the KUV100 will hit the right spot because it offers a comfortable ride at the right price. SUVs offer high seating stance, spacious interiors and strong road presence. But they come at a price, all SUVs cost more than Rs 7 lakh (ex-showroom). M&M has tried to fill this white space with the KUV1OO, with prices starting at Rs 4.42 lakh (ex-showroom, Pune) for the petrol version. Though it is smaller as compared to the hot-selling Swift (KUV's length is 3,675 mm while that of Swift stands at 3,850 mm) M&M has armed the mini SUV with several bells and whistles which it feels would excite a young buyer.

M&M is definitely excited by the promise shown by the sector. According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), Swift clocks average monthly sales of around 16,000 units, Swift Dzire around 18,000 units and Grand i10, 9,000 units. M&M's confidence is further buoyed by vehicle demand data that is skewed towards utility vehicles (UV), especially in the compact vehicle space. UV volumes have grown 51 per cent during the period 2011-12 to 2014-15. Their penetration into the overall passenger vehicle market currently stands at 23 per cent, up from 15 per cent over the same period.

Within the UV space, compact UVs commanded a share of 40 per cent by end of 2014-15. By end of last month the share was up to 45 per cent, according to data shared by M&M. According to an internal survey done by M&M, about 51 per cent of aspirational buyers preferred to be seen driving an SUV while only 16 per cent preferred a hatchback and 33 per cent a sedan.

M&M has packed the KUV with features that would appeal to young drivers - cubbyholes that can hold small things like bottles, cans, shoes, magazines and spectacles, twin driving modes (Eco and Power) are some examples. In addition, for the first time, the company has provided the safety feature of an airbag right from the base variant while the anti-lock braking system is standard across all the variants.

Though there is no immediate competition to the KUV100 as rivals would like to wait and watch just like they did for the Tata Nano, some auto companies are building SUVs that are priced slightly above the KUV100. Companies like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors, Renault, Datsun and General Motors are understood to be developing compact SUVs with prices expected to start from Rs 6 lakh. The options for the compact-SUV-KUV buyer are set to get wider.
Nifty Outlook



Spike at the lower end of the Wedge pattern augurs well for the termination of the down move. Positive divergence on the RSI compliments the reversal & a move above Rs 7,500 could amplify the up move. Traders could reduce their protection once above Rs 7,500 & build additional longs to participate the up move.

AXIS BANK: BUY

Last Close: Rs 421

Target : Rs 500

Stop Loss: Rs 395



'Bullish Engulfing' pattern re-confirms the medium term support near Rs 360 to remain intact. Positive sector outlook & the proximity towards the medium term support provide a good opportunity to create portfolio longs. Traders could participate the current momentum with a stop loss at Rs 395 & expect an extension upto Rs 500.

PETRONET LNG: BUY

Last Close: Rs 251

Target : Rs 280



Positive sector outlook with a 'Rising Three' pattern on the weekly scale augur well for the secular uptrend to remain intact. Petronet LNG could also be traded with a stop at Rs 240 & an initial target upto Rs 280 could be expected soon.

UNITED SPIRITS (MCDOWELL-N): BUY

Last Close: Rs 2700

Target : Rs 3100



'Piercing Line' at the lower extreme of the oscillation is in conjunction with the retracement support of the previous upmove. The setup provides a healthy reward to risk opportunity to create fresh longs with a stop loss at Rs 2610 & an immediate target upto Rs 3100 (Upper End of Oscillation).



Disclaimer: Motilal Oswal Securities ( MOSL ) is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India ("SEBI") and is licensed to carry on the business of broking, depository services and related activities.Motilal Oswal Securities Limited is registered under SEBI (Research Analysts) Regulation 2014 SEBI Registration No :-INH000000412.MOSL, the spokesperson or his relatives, do not have financial interest in the securities mentioned above. MOSL or its associate might be involved in market making for the subject company or have potential conflict of interest.

Shubham Agarwal is a head of Quantitative Research, Motilal Oswal Securities


Shareholders in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) have sought a meeting with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) about their opposition to NSE's restructuring plan. This follows a letter opposing the plan, sent by a group of nine investors to the exchange's chairman on January 13.

The shareholders want Sebi to direct the exchange to drop its restructuring plan, which, they say, could delay the exchanges Initial Public Offering (IPO) of shares and lead to significant tax liabilities. The regulator has agreed to schedule a meeting with the shareholders to discuss the issue, say people in the know. We are hoping that Sebi takes up the matter with the exchange and directs it to drop its restructuring plan, said a shareholder, on the condition of anonymity.

According to a legal expert, the exchange is well within its rights to seek restructuring, which needs market regulator Sebis nod. In all probability, Sebi will do an independent evaluation of the proposal and may not be swayed by the recent complaints by the shareholders, he said. However, he pointed out that a regulatory nod does not guarantee that the proposal will go through, as it may be blocked by the shareholders at the special resolution stage. Technically, shareholders constituting more than 25 per cent paid-up equity capital of the company can block the proposal, he said. (Paid-up capital is the amount of a company's capital funded by shareholders. Paid-up capital can be less than a company's total capital because a company may not issue all of the shares it has been authorised to sell.)



Accounting for SBIs opposition, at least 35 per cent of shareholders at present are not in favour of the restructuring. State Bank of India and subsidiary SBI Capital together hold around 15 per cent in NSE. It could take at least a month for Sebi to evaluate the merits of the restructuring plan, said experts.

In the January 13 letter, the nine investors  mostly foreign private-equity players which together hold about 20 per cent stake in NSE  had pointed out that the merits of undertaking the restructuring had not been satisfactorily demonstrated by NSE and its management to the shareholders. The investors had requested the exchange not to go ahead with its restructuring plan and not to seek Sebis approval for the same.

The letter requested the exchange to file an in-principle approval application for listing with Sebi within the next 30 days and start the groundwork for listing.

In an email response last week, an NSE spokesperson said the restructuring plan was for ring-fencing the core regulatory function of the exchange after listing.

Since Sebi's in-principal consent at least is required, it is only logical that the exchange explored regulatory feasibility for the process. Besides, during the past few months, NSE did have formal meetings with shareholders where the same was discussed, he said.

The demand for listing has grown stronger in recent weeks after the market regulator relaxed its fit and proper norms. Besides private-equity players, domestic entities like IFCI, SBI, and IDBI Bank have now expressed disapproval over the delays in getting the exchange listed.

The new rules allow shareholders in an exchange to certify if they are fit and proper to hold a stake in an exchange. Sebi has said that shareholders will need to seek Sebis approval within 15 days of acquisition, for purchasing more than two per cent shares in a listed exchange, while those wanting to acquire beyond five per cent will have to seek prior approval.
Saudi Arabia has lifted a seven-month-old ban on import of green chilli from India. The Arab nation had imported 3,045 tonnes of Indian green chilli, valued at $2.33 million, in In 2013-14. Thereafter, the volume of shipments began declining.

The phytosanitary authority of Saudi Arabia had imposed a temporary ban on import of green chilli in May 2015 over sub-standard quality of goods shipped by Indian exporters. Saudi Arabia's phytosanitary authority had set quality specification of European standard for allowing import of green chilli from India.

"Saudi Arabia authorities have lifted the temporary ban imposed on import of green chilli from India. Exporters are hereby advised to follow the strict guidelines set by Saudi Arabia to start exports of green chilli," said Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (Apeda) in a statement.

Data collated by Apeda showed a 31 per cent decline in exports of green chilli from India in the financial year 2014-15, at 32,138.19 tonnes, as compared to 46,540.15 tonnes in the previous year.

Despite such a steep decline in volume terms, shipments in value term recorded only a marginal decline at $22.23 million in 2014-15 as against $22.96 million in the previous year. In 2012-13, however, India's green chilli exports were recorded at 35,991.97 tonnes worth $16.82 million.

With 1,266.69 tonnes worth $0.85 million, Saudi Arabia slipped to the fourth position in terms of green chilli exports from India in 2014-15 only after United Arab Emirates (19,561.56 tonnes worth $13.73 million), United Kingdom (2,244.02 tonnes, $2.63 million) and Qatar (2,344.89 tonnes worth $1.57 million).

In 2013-14, however, Saudi Arabia was the third largest destination of Indian green chilli with 3,045.87 tonnes worth $2.33 million.

"Opening up of Saudi Arabian market is the result of our extreme efforts and continuous dialogues with the authority there. We assured them that Indian exporters would adhere to the quality specification set by the Saudi Arabian phytosanitary authority," said R Ravindra, Deputy General Manager (in charge of green chilli), Apeda.

Apeda has advised interested Indian exporters to take utmost care with respect to quality and adhere to Saudi Arabian import norms. The procedure for export of vegetables is an attempt to facilitate adhering to the quality requirements. Therefore, Apeda suggested exporters to take all necessary precautions and care before exports.

"More than opening up of its market, there used to strengthen backward linkages to have full control, monitoring and supervision of specified quality," said Ravindra.
Afghanistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked China to grant it full membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Afghanistan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani met with his Chinese counterpart A Wang Yi and discussed ways to develop friendly relations and and expand bilateral cooperation in different sectors.

Rabbani while appreciating the active and constructive role played by China in the session of Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) expressed his hope for finalising the peace process in the future session, reports Dawn.

Rabbani and Wang also discussed and exchanged opinions on the cooperation of the two countries regarding the bilateral and multilateral struggle against terrorism.

Rabbani appreciated the valuable cooperation of China in different sectors and asked for China's support for Afghanistan's full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Wang welcomed the request of Afghanistan's full membership in the SCO and AIIB and promised serious cooperation in this regard.
Ive been gone a while from the blogging scene. Some of my more regular readers no doubt noticed but did not hassle me about it. Thank you for that. Sinc...

6 years ago
The Government Railway Police in Pathankot on Wednesday arrested an armed youth on charges of suspicious activity at the city railway station here.

A country made pistol and cartridges were also recovered from the youth.

The police will produce him before court and seek orders for his remand after which a thorough investigation will be conducted.

After the initial round of questioning, the youth revealed that he was from Madhya Pradesh and that he was travelling to Jammu and Kashmir.

Yesterday, an abandoned bag sparked a scare at the Pathankot railway station. An alert was sounded after the police found the bag following which the railway station was evacuated immediately.

However, no explosives were found in the bag after it was cleared by the bomb squad.

Pathankot has been on high alert since the deadly terrorist attack on its Indian Air Force Base last month, killing seven defence personnel.
Asserting that the NDA Government at the Centre was using Governors to control non-BJP ruled states, the Congress Party on Wednesday vowed to continue their fight against an 'autocratic' Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"The autocratic politics of Prime Minister Modi is now exposed. He is using the Governors to control the States. This is a war on Democracy...From the streets to the Parliament, the Indian Congress will fight the autocratic behaviour of the Narendra Modi Government," Congress leader Raj Babbar said at a press conference here.

Babbar further alleged that Congress Government in Arunachal Pradesh was 'shamefully' removed despite getting 58 percent of the votes in state elections.

Congress leader V Narayanaswamy squarely blamed the BJP for political crisis in Arunachal Pradesh, saying that it was done to topple the elected government in the state.

"There is a crisis situation created in Arunachal Pradesh? Who created this crisis..Only RSS backed people are being appointed as Governors in NE. This shows the sinister designs of the Modi Govt to topple elected governments," he said.

"BJP engineered defection in Congress and today they're telling we don't have majority," he added.

The Supreme Court earlier in the day issued notice to the Centre to file reply over the imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh by Friday.

The apex court has scheduled the next date of hearing for February 1.

Hearing the plea filed by Arunachal Pradesh Assembly Speaker and the Congress Party, the apex court expressed its displeasure to Governor Rajkhowa as to why the Supreme Court was not informed about the developments in the state.

President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to the Union Cabinet's recommendation for imposition of President's rule in Arunachal after being satisfied that the law and order in the border state was sensitive.

The Congress, which is determined to stall the ratification of President's rule in the state, is mulling both legal and political options to fight the same. The decision in this regard was taken at a meeting yesterday.
The Assam government has asked the Centre for 600 companies from the Armed Forces to be deployed during the upcoming assembly polls in the state.

Assam Inspector General of Police (Law and Order) SN Singh said that the Election Commission will take a final call on whether to deploy central forces or state police or both during the polls.

He added that about 24 thousand 800 polling booths will be set up across the state to conduct polls.

Operations to seize illegal arms have been intensified by security forces ahead of the elections.
In a bizarre fitness test conducted by the Uttarakhand Police, the overweight constables were asked to carry seniors on their backs.

Last Sunday, the overweight policemen in Uddham Singh Nagar District were summoned to the police lines in Rudrapur. They were made to go through some physical tests in the presence of the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP).

After that, an overweight constable was ordered to take a round of the ground with a senior official on his back. With the images and video of the incident making it to the social media, Uttarakhand DGP B.S. Sidhu has ordered a probe in the case.

"We have started a probe in this case. We have the visuals of the incident as it was done in the presence of the media. Therefore, appropriate action would be taken in this regard," he said.
The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, today gave its approval for returning of approximately 478.307 hectares of land to the Madhya Pradesh Government.

The land comprises approximately 461.607 hectares private acquired land and 16.70 hectares Government land, valued at approximately Rs.740 crore of Auto Testing Track in Pithampur, Indore (NATRIX) in Madhya Pradesh of NATRIP Project.

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The land returned would be utilized by the State Government for allotment to the auto and related ancillary industries which will have a synergistic effect with the existing NATRAX project.
The Congress Party on Wednesday held the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) responsible for the death of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula.

"A principal of the law college had told the Vice Chancellor to take action as this was a very serious issue, but the Vice Chancellor said the problem can be solved only by Ramchander Rao, who is an MLC from the BJP. He is a RSS man," Congress leader Hanumantha Rao told ANI.

"That means the RSS is ruling this Central University. In what way Ramchander Rao could have solved this problem? This means the Vice Chancellor is not running the University?" he added.

The Congress leader, who took up a vow of silence as a protest at University of Hyderabad, urged Chief Minister K.C. Rao and Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan to visit the varsity in wake of the latest developments.

"I would request the Chief Minister and the Governor of the state to visit the University and seek justice from the NDA Government over the death the Dalit scholar," he added.

"More than 24 days are over since Vemula's suicide, but the NDA Government has not taken any serious action. Why any action has not been taken against the Vice Chancellor?" he asked.

"I want the Vice Chancellor to be suspended and the family of Rohith Vemula should be adequately compensated for the loss," he said.

Meanwhile, the SC /ST Teachers Forum of the University of Hyderabad have decided to go on a hunger strike, demanding the resignation of Vice Chancellor Appa Rao.

They demand incumbent Vice Chancellor Vipin Srivastava to resume administration.

However, the SC/ST Faculty Forum and SC/ST Officers Forum had earlier expressed "shock" over the decision to appoint Srivastava as officiating Vice-Chancellor and alleged that he headed the Executive Council Sub-Committee 'which has been responsible for the death of Rohith'. They also alleged that Srivastava was one of the 'accused' in the suicide of another Dalit student Senthil in 2008.

Earlier, 15 faculty members of the university had resigned from their administrative posts protesting against the interim Vice Chancellor.
The SC /ST Teachers Forum of the University of Hyderabad have decided to go on a hunger strike, demanding the resignation of Vice Chancellor Appa Rao.

They demand incumbent Vice Chancellor Vipin Srivastava to resume administration.

However, the SC/ST Faculty Forum and SC/ST Officers Forum had earlier expressed "shock" over the decision to appoint Srivastava as officiating Vice-Chancellor and alleged that he headed the Executive Council Sub-Committee 'which has been responsible for the death of Rohith'. They also alleged that Srivastava was one of the 'accused' in the suicide of another Dalit student Senthil in 2008.

Earlier, 15 faculty members of the university had resigned from their administrative posts protesting against the interim Vice Chancellor.

The teachers had earlier alleged that baseless and misleading statements by Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani were bringing down the morale of the Dalits holding administrative positions in the university.

Meanwhile, Osmania University's Joint Action Committee has called for 'Chalo CM Camp office' on January 29 to protest against the suicide.
A protocol to amend the existing Double Taxation Avoidance Convention was signed by the governments of India and Armenia here on Wednesday.

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The protocol amends the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention between India and Armenia that has been in existence since September 9, 2004. The protocol amends the Article on Exchange of Information for tax purposes to bring it in line with the updated provisions in the OECD Model.

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The protocol will enable the two countries to exchange information related to financial and banking transactions under the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention, and thereby facilitate them in addressing tax evasion.

It is also expected to further strengthen the efforts of Government of India in curbing generation of black money.

The amending protocol was signed by Arun Kumar Jain, Chairman, Central Board of Direct Taxes, on behalf of Government of India and by Armen Martirosyan, the Ambassador of Armenia to India, on behalf of the Government of Armenia.
In a bizarre incident, a Pakistani diehard fan of star batsman Virat Kohli was arrested for hoisting the Indian flag on the top of his house in Okara district of Punjab province.

According to the Dawn, police arrested Umar Draz after conducting a raid on his home and registered a case under the Maintenance of Public Order.

The detained man revealed that he was fan of India's Test captain Kohli and that he had photographs of the swashbuckling batsman pasted on the walls of his house.

Draz also said that he had no idea that he had committed a blunder by hoisting the Indian flag.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) workers staged a protest in front of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence here on Wednesday over non-payment of salaries.

Over 1.5 lakh employees of the three MCDs have decided to go on three-day strike from today. They have decided to go on an indefinite strike if their demands are not fulfilled.

The cash-strapped North and East Delhi civic bodies have been unable to pay salaries to the workers for three to four months now.

Sanitation workers, doctors, teachers, engineers and office staff of the corporations are going on a strike from today and hold a protest at the Jantar Mantar - like they did on January 14.
The United States Presidential campaign has been jolted because a report said that the former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was actively considering entering the race as an independent candidate.

The 73 year old billionaire is prepared to spend up to1billion dollars of his own money to fund a campaign, reports Independent.

Bloomberg has instructed advisors to draw up plans for an independent run and will make a decision by early March.

In December, he commissioned a poll to see how he would compete with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, but the poll's result has not been disclosed.

No official word has been given by the former Mayor but the report suggests that it was possible for him to enter the race in the coming weeks to qualify to appear as an independent candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
Two flights, one each of Air India and Jet Airways, were grounded on Wednesday just before their departure for Kathamandu from here following a bomb scare.



Airport sources said that the two flights were halted after the Jet Airways security office at Indira Gandhi International Airport here received an anonymous call saying there was a "bomb threat" to Air India flight AI-215 and Jet Airways flight 9W 260.



The two flights were scheduled to take off for the Nepalese capital at 0115 hour and 0130 hours, respectively.



This is the second such incident of grounding of an aircraft due to a bomb scare as on Saturday the same flight of Jet Airways was delayed by six hours due to the grounding of the plane after a bomb threat call, which turned out to be a hoax.



While 121 passengers were booked on the Air India flight, Jet Airways said it had 122 passengers and seven crew on board its flight 9W 260.



The two aircraft have been taken to the isolation bay, where security personnel from Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS) are carrying out an extensive search of the baggage and check-in luggage of the passengers, the sources said.



"Jet Airways flight 9W 260, scheduled to depart from Delhi for Kathmandu at 1325 hrs, has been delayed due to a security alert. All 122 guests and 7 crew have been taken to the departures waiting area at the airport," Jet Airways said in a statement.



carrier Air India also said that the flight has been delayed due the same reason.
Multiple bomb scares in Delhi-Kathmandu bound flights halted the operation of Jet Airways and Air India flights on Wednesday.

Jet Airways flight 9W260 Delhi to Kathmandu has been delayed following a security alert. All 122 guests and seven crew members of this flight have been taken to the waiting area.

The Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Airports had received a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) threat call.

Both flights are being checked by bomb disposal squads in Delhi.

Further details are awaited.
The Water Resource Committee, Government of Nagaland, with support from the Climate Change Adaptation-North Eastern Region (CCA-NER) project of the German Development Co-operation (GIZ), has brought out a draft Nagaland Water Policy.

This was informed by Agriculture Production Commissioner and Convenor Water Resource Committee, T. Imkonglemba Ao (IAS) in an official press statement here.

The committee has sought feedback for making the policy document a meaningful one from all concerned NGOs/CBOs and academicians in the state to make the draft Nagaland Water Policy document beneficial to the people of Nagaland.
Pakistan on Tuesday summoned Afghanistan's envoy Syed Abdul Nasir Yousafi at the Foreign Office, to protest against the use of Afghan soil by Bacha Khan University attackers.

"He [the Afghan Charge d'Affaires] was told investigations have revealed that handlers of the terrorist act were operating from Afghan territory and used Afghan telecommunication network for planning and executing this attack," said a statement issued by the Foreign Office.

The Afghan government was urged to take action against the perpetrators of the act of terrorism, and to extend cooperation to Pakistani authorities to bring them to justice, the statement added.

On January 20, terrorists armed with ammunition and bombs targeted Bacha Khan University in Charsadda killing at least 22 people.

Pakistan Army has said that the attack was controlled by Taliban commanders in Afghanistan.

However, Afghan authorities have reportedly rejected Pakistan's statements.
Facebook messages posted by Jack Letts' a 20-year-old Briton dubbed 'Jihadi Jack' appear to mock people who mourned the Paris terror attacks as 'bloody fools'.

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Messages posted from Jack Letts'account revealed that his friends in the Middle East have killed soldiers, references to beheading was also cited, reports The Independent.

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Letts had used recent Facebook posts to deny being an ISIS fighter and claimed that other 'extreme' people had used his account to post inflammatory messages.

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It is not clear whether the disturbing views expressed in a new cache of Facebook were written by Letts himself or by others with access to his account.

Jack's family reiterated that he went to the Middle East country to help refugees.

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But the former Oxfordshire schoolboy remains under investigation by counter terror police amid fears that he has become the first white British man to go there to fight for ISIS.
RSS ideologue MG Vaidya on Wednesday said it was not right on part of the women activists to stage a protest for not being allowed to enter the Shani Shingnapur temple and added that one should ponder over taking the legal course in pursuit of justice.

"I personally feel that the women should be allowed in the temple, but still there would be some rules and regulations of the temple which needs to be obeyed," Vaidya told ANI.

"If someone feels that the decision curtails the fundamental rights provided by the Constitution then one can proceed to court and demand justice, but staging a protest is not the correct approach," he added.

Vaidya further said that the entry in temples should be left to the concerned administration.

Meanwhile, the members of the board that runs the temple have said they are ready 'for a dialogue' after Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said the issue should be resolved through dialogue.

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"Indian culture and Hindu religion gives women the right to pray. A change in yesterday's traditions is our culture. Discrimination in praying is not in our culture. The temple authorities should resolve the issue through a dialogue," Fadnavis tweeted.

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The women, members and supporters of the Bhumata Brigade, arrived from Pune yesterday in six buses and wanted to enter the temple's sanctum where the idol of Lord Shani is placed on an open-air platform.

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However, the group led by women activist Trupti Desai was stopped from marching towards the temple by the police near Supa.

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They were also detained by the police for some time, but later released.

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After being stopped by the police, Trupti said that it was a black day for women as they were being stopped from exercising their rights.

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The temple drew attention in November 2015 after a woman had offered prayers at the popular shrine in 'breach' of the age-old practice of prohibiting entry of women, after which the temple committee had to suspend seven security men and the villagers to perform purification rituals.

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The temple attracts millions of tourists and devotees from across the country and abroad.
The Congress who branded the President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh as a 'murder of democracy' will challenge the Centre's decision in Supreme Court on Wednesday.

In its petition, the Congress accused the Governor of working at the behest of the Centre to topple its government.

However, the Centre slammed the opposition for challenging the President's decision saying that the government had done its job by saving the people of the state after the Congress Government failed to govern Arunachal Pradesh.

"This is not the first time that the President's rule has been imposed in a state, the Congress had imposed President's rule more than 100 times in independent India. If the Congress challenges President's rule in Arunachal then it amounts to challenging the decision of the President of India. President has applied his wisdom to give assent to Cabinet's recommendation," Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said.

The Congress dubbed the President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh as 'murder of democracy' by the BJP-led Centre and accused it of misusing power.

"Bharatiya Janata Party wants its government everywhere. You can't impose President's rule because people didn't favor you. We will fight in the court and also tell the people how the BJP misuses its power. It is very unfortunate and it is a murder of democracy," Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said.

Despite the vehement opposition by the Congress, President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to imposition of central rule in Arunachal Pradesh.

Three days back, Union Cabinet had recommended President's Rule following the political crisis in the state.

In December last year, Arunachal Pradesh was rocked by a political crisis as 21 rebel Congress MLAs joined hands with 11 of BJP and two independents to impeach Assembly Speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue.

The move was termed as illegal and unconstitutional by the Speaker. The rebel group MLAs congregated at a community hall after the state Assembly complex was allegedly sealed by the local administration, and impeached Rebia in an impromptu session chaired by Deputy Speaker.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday dodged a question on potential terror threat in wake of the recently-unearthed links of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) in the country, saying the security forces and agencies are doing a commendable job.

"Security forces and agencies are doing their job successfully. The Republic Day celebrations were peaceful, as they worked brilliantly," said Rijiju.

In a massive terror crackdown ahead of the Republic Day celebrations, the Investigation Agency (NIA) on Saturday arrested eight more suspects from 12 locations in six different cities.

The NIA made the fresh arrests following information revealed in the interrogation of the five terror suspects, who had been detained on Friday.

Besides, two al-Qaeda suspects Ahmed Masood Akram Sheikh alias Masood alias Monu from Dhatkidih and Nasim Akhtar alias Raju were arrested in Jharkhand's Jamshedpur city on Monday following leads and intelligence about their whereabouts.

According to reports, the duo is associated with another suspect Abdul Sami, who was recently arrested in Jamshedpur.
The students staged a protest here on Wednesday highlighting 'privatisation' in education in Tamil Nadu and demanded the resignations of Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani and Minister of State for Labour Bandaru Dattatreya over the suicide by Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula.

The protesting students, who were later detained by the police, alleged that Vemula's suicide was a 'murder'.

"We are staging a protest regarding Rohith Vemula's murder and the murder of three medical students. It is murder. The government is saying it is a suicide attempt. The suicide has been done due to brahmanical forces," said one of the protestors.

The students also demanded answers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa over the suicide by three medical students in Viluppuram.

"The medical students committed suicide as there is privatisation in education. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Jayalalithaa's governments are responsible for this. They have to answer to the people of Tamil Nadu and the students," he said.

Vemula was found hanging in a hostel room at the Hyderabad Central University 10 days ago.

The students alleged that pressure from Irani and Dattatreya resulted in Vemula's suspension, which eventually was the cause of suicide.

In a separate incident, three medical student allegedly committed suicide by jumping into a well, blaming their college for charging them exorbitant fees.
HARLOWTON  Robert C. Lewis Jr., 69, of Harlowton, passed away early Monday morning, Jan. 25, 2016 at his home of natural causes. He was born Dec. 10, 1946 to Robert C. and Marvis J. (Hazel) Lewis in Rolette, N.D. As a young child, Bob grew up in the Fromberg area, living a couple of years in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, where he had many fond memories of trapping and hunting with his dog, Charlie. He also helped take care of his younger brother Harold and sister Linda. Bob returned back to the Fromberg area until age 15 when he left with his dad to travel around Montana and Wyoming shearing sheep. Bob had many special memories and adventures during this time with his Uncle Neil Hazel, a lifelong friend. Bob enlisted in the Army in 1965 and was stationed in Korea before being deployed to Vietnam as a motor maintenance Sergeant for the 47th Transportation Company. Bob received the Bronze Star while serving in Vietnam. After the war he returned to the States and was stationed in various places including Germany. Bob excelled in the military, rapidly moving through the ranks. In the summer of 1969 he met Becky Breck in Big Timber and they were united in marriage on Jan. 10, 1970 in Big Timber. They had two children, Stacy Dian Schock and Robert Clifford Lewis III. He served his time as an instructor and finished his career in Research and Development. He received an Honorable Medical Discharge as a Sergeant First Class in April of 1977. Bob loved serving in the Army and for his country even though it took his health. He never regretted serving his country and always said he would do it again.
The Taliban has hit back by cutting off imported power from Uzbekistan to Kabul after the intensification of military operations by Government forces against the insurgent group in the Baghlan province.

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The Taliban had blown up a major electricity pylon in Dand-e-Shahabuddin area near Baghlan-Kunduz highway, reports Tolo News.

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The incident occured after the local officials in northern Baghlan province informed that a large scale military operation was launched in three parts of Dand-e-Ghori area in Pul-e-Khumri city in order to clear the areas of militants.

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Local officials said that more than 2,000 Afghan security force members are taking part in the operation.
The debate over the safety of e-cigarettes has taken another turn after a new study has revealed that vaping boosts superbugs and dampens the immune system.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System report data suggesting that e-cigarettes are toxic to human airway cells, suppress immune defenses and alter inflammation, while at the same time boosting bacterial virulence.

The mouse study shows that e-cigarette vapor is not benign at high doses it can directly kill lung cells, which is frightening, said senior author Laura E. Crotty Alexander, adding that this work confirms that inhalation of e-cigarette vapor daily leads to changes in the inflammatory milieu inside the airways.

E-cigarette vapor extract-exposed bacteria were also more virulent in a mouse model of pneumonia. All mice infected with normal methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant "superbug," survived. Meanwhile, 25 percent of mice infected with MRSA pre-exposed to e-cigarette vapor died.

The results were consistent with e-liquids from seven different manufacturers, demonstrating that the findings are not limited to one formula or brand.

Crotty Alexander and team also recently reported that MRSA bacteria exposed to conventional cigarette smoke are more resistant to killing by the immune system than unexposed bacteria.

The study is published by the Journal of Molecular Medicine.
Following the imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh, Former Delhi Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal and retired IAS officer G S Patnaik have been appointed as advisors to the state Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa.

Dadwal is a 1974-batch IPS officer who retired in 2011 from paramilitary SSB and Patnaik is a 1980-batch IAS officer who retired after serving in the Delhi government in various capacities.

Meanwhile, the Congress who branded the President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh as a 'murder of democracy' will challenge the Centre's decision in Supreme Court today.

"Bharatiya Janata Party wants its government everywhere. You can't impose President's rule because people didn't favor you. We will fight in the court and also tell the people how the BJP misuses its power. It is very unfortunate and it is a murder of democracy," Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge told ANI.

However, the Centre slammed the opposition for challenging the President's decision saying that the government had done its job by saving the people of the state after the Congress Government failed to govern Arunachal Pradesh.

"This is not the first time that the President's rule has been imposed in a state, the Congress had imposed President's rule more than 100 times in independent India. If the Congress challenges President's rule in Arunachal then it amounts to challenging the decision of the President of India. President has applied his wisdom to give assent to Cabinet's recommendation," Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju told ANI.

Despite the vehement opposition by the Congress, President Pranab Mukherjee yesterday gave his assent to imposition of central rule in Arunachal Pradesh.

Three days back, Union Cabinet had recommended President's Rule following the political crisis in the state.
On 26 January 2016

Bengal Tea & Fabrics announced that a fire broke out in the Cotton Godown of the Textile unit of the Company located at Asarwa Mills, Ahmedabad on 26 January 2016 at about 17.25 IST. The stocks are adequately insured and the loss/extent of damage is being assessed. However, the production and normal operations have not been affected at the unit.

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Bharat Electronics rose 3.17% to Rs 1,246.25 at 14:17 IST on BSE after net profit rose 8.79% to Rs 295.70 crore on 4.01% decline in total income to Rs 1652.70 crore in Q3 December 2015 over Q3 December 2014.

The result was announced during trading hours today, 27 January 2016.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 40.17 points, or 0.16%, to 24,526.12.

On BSE, so far 94,000 shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average volume of 29,444 shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 1,309.70 and a low of Rs 1,216 so far during the day. The stock hit a record high of Rs 1,416.70 on 4 January 2016. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 974.03 on 28 April 2015. The stock had underperformed the market over the past one month till 25 January 2016, falling 8.27% compared with 5.24% decline in the Sensex. The scrip had, however, outperformed the market in past one quarter, sliding 0.72% as against Sensex's 10.87% fall.

The large-cap company has an equity capital of Rs 240 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Bharat Electronics was established at Bangalore, India, by the Government of India under the Ministry of Defence in 1954 to meet the specialised electronic needs of the Indian defence services. Over the years, it has grown into a multi-product, multi-technology, multi-unit company servicing the needs of customers in diverse fields in India and abroad.

The Government of India held 75.02% stake in Bharat Electronics (as per the shareholding pattern as on 31 December 2015).

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At meeting held on 27 January 2016

Pricol announced that the Board of Directors of the Company at its meeting held on 27 January 2016 has approved the proposal of the amalgamation of Pricol with its wholly owned subsidiary company, Pricol Pune, an auto component company with effect from 01 April 2015 (appointed date). The Board of Pricol Pune also approved the said scheme of amalgamation in their Board meeting held on 27 January 2016. Shareholders of Pricol shall be issue one equity share of face value of Re 1 each of Pricol Pune for evey one equity share of Re 1 each held in Pricol.

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Proposes MoUs with Malaysia, Singapore and Japan

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi was today apprised of the Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs)signed between Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) with its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan.

Three MoUs have been signed on cooperation in Cyber Security and the details are follows:-

(i) MoU between CERT-In of the Republic of India and CyberSecurity, Malaysia for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 23 November 2015 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Minister's visit to Malaysia.

(ii) MoU between CERT-In of the Republic of India and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team (SingCERT), Cyber Security Agency (CSA) of the Republic of Singapore for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 24th November 2015 in Singapore during Prime Minister's visit to Singapore.

(iii) MoU between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 7 December 2015 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed MoU between the two parties completed by 22 December 2015.

The MoUs related to Cyber Security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and respective country.

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Receives High Court order on 27 January 2016

Hester Biosciences announced that the Scheme of Arrangement in the nature of Amalgamation of Diavetra Lifesciences, Gujarat Agrofarm and Hester Biosciences (Mauritius) with Hester Biosciences and De-merger and Transfer of Trading undertaking of Innoves Animal Health into Hester Biosciences filed under Section 391 - 394 and other applicable provisions, if any, of the Companies Act 1956, the Companies Act 2013 and Mauritius Companies Act, 2001 has been sanctioned by the Hon'ble High Court of Gujarat.

The certified copy of the said order is received by the Company on 27 January 2016 and pursuant to the aforesaid order, the Company is in the process of making the requisite filing with the Registrar of Companies, Gujarat at Ahmedabad. Further, the Company shall also be complying with document filing requirements in accordance with the SEBI guidelines.

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Hinduja Foundries rose 4.95% to Rs 35 at 10:28 IST on BSE after the company said it has decided to raise up to Rs 400 crore by issuing Global depository receipts to promoters.

The announcement was made after market hours on Monday, 25 January 2016. The stock market was shut on Tuesday, 26 January 2016, for Republic Day Holiday.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 19.80 points, or 0.08%, to 24,505.75.

On BSE, so far 400 shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average volume of 2,244 shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 35 and a low of Rs 34.10 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 41.95 on 3 February 2015. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 26.55 on 4 September 2015. The stock had underperformed the market over the past one month till 25 January 2016, sliding 6.45% compared with 5.24% decline in the Sensex. The scrip had, however, outperformed the market in past one quarter, falling 0.45% as against Sensex's 10.87% fall.

The small-cap company has an equity capital of Rs 72.65 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

The board of directors of Hinduja Foundries has approved a proposal to issue Global depository receipts (GDRs) to promoters, promoter group, group companies and any other entity, which is a subsidiary, associate of its parent, group companies or any other entity eligible to invest in GDR for an amount up to Rs 400 crore.

Hinduja Foundries reported a net loss of Rs 95.72 crore in Q2 September 2015 as against net loss of Rs 58.46 crore in Q2 September 2014. Net sales declined 15.61% to Rs 156.31 crore in Q2 September 2015 over Q2 September 2014.

Hinduja Foundries is India's largest foundry group with the capacity to produce cylinder block and head ranging from 25 kilograms (kgs) to 500 kgs. From castings for automobiles and tractors to industrial engines, construction equipment and power generation equipment, Hinduja Foundries meets the stringent requirement of diverse segments. It even caters to the exceptionally high standards of defence applications.

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Maruti Suzuki India rose 1.25% to Rs 4,136.90 at 10:47 IST on BSE on media reports that the company's Japanese parent Suzuki Motor Corporation is considering a wide-ranging partnership with Toyota Motor Corporation.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 2.55 points or 0.01% at 24,488.50.

On BSE, so far 15,000 shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 51,000 shares in the past two weeks. The stock was volatile. The stock rose as much as 2.17% at the day's high of Rs 4,174.45 so far during the day. The stock rose 0.66% at the day's low of Rs 4,113 so far during the day. The stock had hit a record high of Rs 4,789 on 23 November 2015. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 3,362 on 10 February 2015. The stock had underperformed the market over the past one month till 25 January 2016, sliding 11.07% compared with Sensex's 5.24% fall. The scrip had, however, outperformed the market in past one quarter, declining 6.75% as against Sensex's 10.87% fall.

The large-cap company has equity capital of Rs 151.04 crore. Face value per share is Rs 5.

According to reports, Toyota Motor Corporation and Suzuki Motor Corporation are considering a wide-ranging partnership to meet growing demand for compact cars in emerging markets such as India. Media reports suggested that Suzuki Motor Corp and Toyota Motor Corp were discussing a possible partnership from a variety of angles including a cross-shareholding deal. However, media reports also added that Toyota Motor Corp and Suzuki Motor Corp denied the reports of talks for a potential partnership.

Maruti Suzuki India's net profit rose 42.1% to Rs 1225.56 crore on 13.2% growth in net sales to Rs 13574.81 crore in Q2 September 2015 over Q2 September 2014. The company is scheduled to announce its Q3 December 2015 results on 28 January 2016. The company is scheduled to announce its Q3 December 2015 results tomorrow, 28 January 2016.

Japanese parent Suzuki Motor Corporation held 56.21% stake in Maruti Suzuki India (as per the shareholding pattern as on 30 September 2015).

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Shares allotted to anchor investors at the top end of the price band for the IPO

Precision Camshafts has raised Rs 123.05 crore by selling 66.15 lakh shares to anchor investors ahead of the opening of the company's initial public offer (IPO). The shares were allotted to the anchor investors at Rs 186 per share, the top end of the Rs 180 to Rs 186 per share price band for the IPO.

The IPO of Precision Camshafts opens for bidding through the book building route today, 27 January 2016. The bidding for the IPO concludes on Friday, 29 January 2016. Precision Camshafts, promoted by first generation entrepreneurs Yatin Shah and Suhasini Shah, is one of the world's leading manufacturers of camshafts, a critical engine component in passenger vehicles.

Among anchor investors, SBI Mutual Fund was allotted 17.74 lakh shares, IDFC Mutual Fund was allotted 17.74 lakh shares, ICICI Prudential Growth Fund was allotted 13.44 lakh shares, HDFC Trustee Company was allotted 8.06 lakh shares, Birla Sunlife Trustee Company was allotted 2.71 lakh shares and Canara Robeco Mutual Fund was allotted 6.45 lakh shares.

The IPO is a combination of fresh issue of shares aggregating up to Rs 240 crore and offer for sale by promoters and one of the directors. The proceeds of the fresh issue will be used for expansion. The two promoters Yatin and Suhasini Shah are selling a total of 25.86 lakh shares. Promoter group company Cams Technology has put on block 35.63 lakh shares and Jayant Aradhye, a non-executive director, is selling 30 lakh shares through the IPO.

The company proposes to utilize Rs 200 crore from the net proceeds of the IPO for establishment of a new machine shop for ductile iron camshafts at its existing export oriented unit (EOU) situated at Solapur in Maharashtra. The company currently has two state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities - an EOU unit and a domestic unit - both situated at Solapur, Maharashtra. The company supplies over 150 varieties of camshafts for passenger vehicles, tractors, light commercial vehicles and locomotive engine applications. A majority of the company's revenue comes from export of camshafts to various OEMs directly and indirectly. The company has long term relationships with OEMs, including General Motors, Ford Motors, Hyundai, Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Mahindra and Mahindra.

On consolidated basis, the company reported net profit of Rs 34.10 crore on net turnover of Rs 253.37 crore for six months ended 30 September 2015. Net profit stood at Rs 62.36 crore on net turnover of Rs 532.42 crore for the year ended 31 March 2015.

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Two PSU OMCs and Engineers India rose 1.24% to 1.91% at 13:02 IST on BSE after Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan was quoted as saying that these companies will invest Rs 1.5 lakh crore in setting India's biggest refinery in Maharashtra.

Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) (up 1.91% at Rs 402.75), HPCL (up 1.56% at Rs 802.40) and Engineers India (up 1.24% at Rs 212.10) edged higher. BPCL (down 0.05% at Rs 877.25) edged lower.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 99.46 points or 0.41% at 24,585.41.

Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan was quoted as saying that IOCL will build a 60-million tonne a year oil refinery in Maharashtra along with BPCL, HPCL and Engineers India on the West coast. The refinery will produce petrol, diesel, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), aviation turbine fuel (ATF) and feedstock for petrochemical plants in plastic, chemical and textile industries in Maharashtra, Pradhan reportedly said. The Maharashtra state government and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas will closely work for early identification of land for refinery and finalisation of details of project, Pradhan reportedly said.

Meanwhile, Brent for March settlement was currently down 59 cents at $31.21 a barrel. The contract had risen $1.30 a barrel or 4.26% to settle at $31.80 a barrel during the previous trading session.

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The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi today gave its approval for returning of approximately 478.307 hectares of land to the State Government of Madhya Pradesh.

The land comprises approximately 461.607 hectares private acquired land and 16.70 hectares Government land, valued at approximately Rs.740 crore of Auto Testing Track in Pithampur, Indore (NATRIX) in Madhya Pradesh of NATRIP Project.

The land returned would be utilized by the State Government for allotment to the auto and related ancillary industries which will have a synergistic effect with the existing NATRAX project.

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The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi today gave its ex-post facto approval for completion of the Afghan Parliament Building in Kabul by 31st December, 2015 at a revised project cost of Rs.969 crore.

The project provides for completion of a new Parliament Building for Afghanistan, keeping in view the traditions and values of Afghanistan. It is part of India's efforts in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan. The project is a visible symbol of India's contribution to strengthening and rebuilding democracy in Afghanistan.

The construction of Afghan Parliament Building has been completed in December, 2015 under India-Afghanistan development cooperation and minor touch-up works, including parts of sound system and furniture are now being undertaken. The Parliament building will be handed over the Afghan authorities by 31st March, 2016.

Background:

The project was inaugurated and dedicated jointly by Prime Minister of India and President of Afghanistan on 25th December 2015. Addressing the Members of Meshrano Jirga (Upper House) and Wolesi Jirga (House of the People) on the occasion in the newly inaugurated premises, the Prime Minister complimented the people of Afghanistan and their elected representatives on consolidation of democracy in the country.

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The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi was today apprised of the Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) signed between Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) with its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan.

Three MoUs have been signed on cooperation in Cyber Security and the details are follows:- (i) MoU between CERT-In of the Republic of India and CyberSecurity, Malaysia for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 23rd November, 2015 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Minister's visit to Malaysia. (ii) MoU between CERT-In of the Republic of India and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team (SingCERT), Cyber Security Agency (CSA) of the Republic of Singapore for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 24th November, 2015 in Singapore during Prime Minister's visit to Singapore. (iii) MoU between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) for Cooperation in the area of Cyber Security signed on 7th December, 2015 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed MoU between the two parties completed by 22na December, 2015.

The MoUs related to Cyber Security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and respective country.

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IPO price band fixed at Rs 785 to Rs 850 per share

The initial public offer (IPO) of staffing firm TeamLease Services opens for bidding on 2 February 2016. The IPO is a combination of fresh issue of shares aggregating up to Rs 150 crore and offer for sale by a promoter group entity and a total of four investor shareholders. The price band for the IPO has been fixed at Rs 785 to Rs 850 per share. The IPO closes on 4 February 2016.

Promoter group firm HR Offshoring Ventures is selling up to 1.53 lakh shares through the IPO. Among the four investors in the company, Gaja Capital India Fund-I is selling up to 2.75 lakh shares, Gaja Advisors Private Limited is selling up to 76,660 shares, GPE (India) Ltd. is selling up to 11.80 lakh shares and India Advantage Fund S3 I is selling up to 15.33 lakh shares.

TeamLease Services is one of India's leading providers of human resource services in the organized segment delivering a broad range of human resource services to various industries. The company has earmarked Rs 80 crore of the net proceeds of the IPO for meeting existing and incremental working capital requirements, Rs 25 crore for acquisitions and other strategic initiatives and Rs 15 crore for upgradation of the existing IT infrastructure. The balance amount will be used for general corporate purposes.

On consolidated basis, TeamLease Services reported net profit of Rs 10.97 crore on total revenue of Rs 1215.79 crore for six months ended 30 September 2015. Net profit stood at Rs 29.69 crore on total revenue of Rs 2018.46 crore in the year ended 31 March 2015.

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The Pakistani maritime security agency has arrested 45 Indian fishermen for fishing in the country's waters, an official said.

The Indian fishermen were arrested while fishing in Pakistani limits of the Arabian sea on Tuesday, Dawn online quoted a police official as saying.

A total of five boats were also seized. "We were later given their custody and they would be produced in court on Wednesday," the official said.

Cases have been registered against the detained Indian fishermen under Sections 3/4 of the Foreigners' Act and 3/9 of the Fisheries Act.
Inderjit Singh Reyat, the lone person convicted for the 1985 Air India Kanishka airliner bombing, will soon be released from prison in British Columbia.

Air India Kanishka's Flight 182 from Montreal to Delhi was blown off mid-air near the Irish coast on June 23, 1985, killing all 329 people and crew on board.

Within an hour, another bomb meant for another Air India flight from Tokyo to Mumbai went off during luggage transfer at the Tokyo airport, killing two baggage handlers.

Both the bombs were hidden in suitcases and checked in at Vancouver airport. Vancouver-based Khalistani extremists had planned the bombing to avenge the 1984 army action at the Golden Temple in Amritsar to flush militants.

Reyat -- an electrical mechanic -- had assembled and tested the bomb that went off at Tokyo airport for which he was given 10 years in jail in 1991. After this, he was given another five years in jail for his role also in the Air India Kanishka bombing.

After his release, Reyat was charged in 2010 with lying under oath during the trial of the two main Air India bombing accused -- Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri -- in 2003 when he was brought from jail to testify.

Both Malik and Bagri were eventually found not guilty and freed in March 2005.

After his perjury trial, Reyat was jailed for another nine years in January 2011. After getting credit for the time already served, he was to serve seven years and seven months in jail.

Since under the Canadian laws convicts can be released from jail after two-thirds of their sentence to serve the remainder of the term in the community, Reyat will get an automatic release from jail.

Under terms of release by Parole Board of Canada, Reyat will be regularly monitored after his release.

He is forbidden from propagating extremist views or associating with those who hold extremist views. He is also not allowed to possess anything for building explosive devices.

Reyat will be forbidden from contacting the families of Air India victims.
Australian endurance runner and former parliamentarian Pat Farmer, who began a run across India from Kanyakumari on Tuesday, was warmly received by people in Kerala on Wednesday.

With his run "Spirit of India", Farmer hopes to raise 100,000 Australian dollars (about Rs.48 lakh).

His run for charity from Kanyakumari to Kashmir aims to raise funds for the education of girls, cementing relations between India and Australia, encouraging tourism and personal relationships and creating awareness about India as a tourism destination.

Kerala officials was present at the state's border to receive the 53-year-old Farmer, who later interacted with students and locals.

Farmer will travel a distance of 4,600 km and aims to reach Srinagar, the finishing point, on March 30. He plans to cover around 76 km a day.

The first leg will see him run across Kerala before crossing over into Karwar in Karnataka.

He will then run along the western coastline through Goa, Maharashtra, Gujarat and beyond.

"I feel very privileged to be here in this beautiful state. I love the palm trees, I love the fact that it's close to the ocean because my home in Sydney is close to the ocean as well," said Farmer.

During the run, he will visit schools and other educational institutions to talk about the importance of education and health.

"It's important that people, especially young people, are inspired and come to understand that problems can be tackled by ordinary people putting one foot in front of the other," Farmer said.

"My driving force, what keeps me going, is being able to make a difference. I care about supporting people, about helping people," he added.

He has completed similar runs in the Middle East -- a 20-day campaign spreading the message of peace over a 1,500 km stretch from Lebanon to Jerusalem, as well as in Vietnam.

He also holds the record for the longest continuous run around Australia.

He is also known for his astonishing year-long 20,000 km slog across 14 countries between the Earth's two poles in 2011.

His runs have also gone the distance in terms of raising funds for their intended charities.

The five-stage polar crossing -- described as "The Greatest Run in History" -- raised $100 million for the International Red Cross in aid of its relief programmes in the developing world.
The union cabinet on Wednesday gave its approval to return 478.307 hectares of an auto testing track to the Madhya Pradesh government for setting up auto and ancillary units.

"The land comprises approximately 461.607 hectares of private acquired land and 16.70 hectares government land, valued at approximately Rs.740 crore of Auto Testing Track in Pithampur, Indore, in Madhya Pradesh...," an official release said after the cabinet meet.

The meeting was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"The land returned would be utilised by the state government for allotment to the auto and related ancillary industries which will have a synergistic effect with the existing project," the release added.
Calling land exchanges a purely discretional act, the Bureau of Land Management has decided once again not to pursue a land exchange with two of Montanas largest private landowners, billionaire brothers Dan and Farris Wilks.

It just isnt prudent for me to commit staff and time without knowing we could see it through to the end, said Mark Albers, manager of BLMs Central Montana District in Lewistown.

Albers announced his decision to the districts Resource Advisory Council during a meeting Tuesday in Great Falls. In a phone interview with The Gazette, Albers said he decided against pursuing the deal when he considered all of the priorities facing his office.

What Id like to do is take a step back and look at all of the available options, he said.

Helena consultant Darryl James, who has been representing the Wilkses on the land exchange proposal, said he was displeased with the decision.

Im shocked at the way BLM has treated the Wilkses in this whole deal, he said. The lack of respectful communication is stunning to me.

Inflammatory history

When the idea of a possible land exchange first came to light in the spring of 2014 it was instantly controversial. The Wilkses were proposing to exchange the Anchor Ranch they had purchased north of the Missouri River in Blaine County, along with other lands, for a landlocked parcel of BLM property known as the Durfee Hills in Fergus County.

Some conservationists hailed the proposal since it would offer a road into 50,000 acres of BLM land along the Missouri River. But Lewistown hunters and others quickly rallied to oppose the measure, saying the quality of the Durfee Hills, especially for elk hunters who can only access the property by flying in by helicopter or light plane, far surpassed other lands the Wilkses were offering.

The proposed exchange was a bad land deal that would have harmed the public financial interest and reduced elk hunting opportunity, said Doug Krings, of the Central Montana Outdoors group, in an email.

We felt it was not a good deal, it was not a fair trade at all, said Bill Geer, chairman of the access committee for the Montana Wildlife Federation. Durfee Hills is far and away of much greater value.

Geer also said the exchange would have set a dangerous precedent for future land exchanges.

Mike Penfold, a retired BLM official living in Billings, had advocated in favor of the exchange.

I believe theres an opportunity being missed, he said. The property and the access (at Anchor Ranch) presented a real opportunity.

Penfold said he had hoped that BLM could one day consolidate its land in that region of the state to open up more opportunities for managing the acreage.

Access options

Albers said the BLM will continue to investigate other routes into its Missouri River property from the north. Hikers and hunters can already reach the property on foot and from the Missouri River to the south. But the Anchor Ranch provides a key road into the property. When BLM explored other options for roads last year engineers concluded building a new road would be expensive and at the risk of failing because of the erosive soils.

Im not interested in cutting a road into there, Albers said. Well look at all opportunities and define what access means  trails for foot access, ATV trails  to decide what kind of experience folks want.

Krings praised the decision.

Now the way is clear for some sensible resolution of the public access issues in the Bullwhacker watershed given time and collaborative engagement, Krings said.

As a show of good faith in the land exchange negotiations, the Wilkses had provided access across the Anchor Ranch this hunting season. James said well over 800 people signed in at the Fish, Wildlife and Parks registration box, adding up to about 1,200 hunter days for those pursuing elk, deer, and bighorn sheep and those hiking.

They were thrilled with that, James said.

In comparison, he said by his count the Durfee Hills played host to an average of about 30 to 60 predominantly trophy bull elk hunters a year.

James did not know if the brothers would choose to keep the Anchor Ranch road open now that the exchange has been dismissed.

Fences

Opposition to the exchange accelerated in the fall of 2014 after the Wilkses had a contractor build a new fence around the Durfee Hills public land. The contractor bulldozed down trees and, according to watchdog accounts, trespassed onto BLM property and felled trees. After first denying the fence infringed on BLM land, the agency launched a survey and filed a report with its law enforcement staff, which it has still not made public.

Albers said BLM gave a copy of its report to the Wilkses a couple of weeks ago and is waiting for a response.

James said the Wilkses are willing to re-vegetate bulldozed routes and take measures to halt erosion, but there were questions about what had been agreed to during a tour of the site and the final language the BLM used in its documentation.

Theres no issue from the Wilkses on what needs to be done, James said.
The union cabinet on Wednesday gave post facto approval for the construction of Afghanistan's parliament building in Kabul, built by India at a revised cost of Rs.969 crore.

The project was inaugurated and dedicated jointly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani on December 25, 2015.

The building will be handed over to the Afghan authorities by March 31, an official statement issued here said.

"It is part of India's efforts in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan. The project is a visible symbol of India's contribution to strengthening and rebuilding democracy in Afghanistan," it said.

The construction of the new parliament building was completed in December 2015 under the India-Afghanistan development cooperation whereas minor touch-up work, including part of sound system and furniture, are being undertaken, the statement said.
China on Wednesday said it wanted the United Nations Security Council to take further actions and pass a new resolution on North Korea following its nuclear test earlier in January.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made the remarks after meeting US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is on a two-day visit to China, Xinhua reported.

"The new resolution should aim to bring the Korean peninsula nuclear issue back to the negotiating table, rather than stirring up tension or causing chaos on the peninsula," Wang said.

China is willing to maintain all-round and profound consultations with all the parties in a responsible way, including the US, Wang said.

Pyongyang's latest nuclear test violated the UN Security Council resolution and threatened the international nuclear non-proliferation system. Therefore, China has voiced its opposition against the move, he said.
The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notices to the central and the Delhi governments, and all three civic bodies here on a petition seeking release of salaries of municipal workers.

The order came after the workers decided to go on a three-day strike over non-payment of dues.

A division bench of Chief Justice G. Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath also directed the Delhi Police to ensure that sanitation workers do not face any difficulty in their job.

The court sought the response of the Delhi government, NDMC, SDMC, EDMC and DDA by the next date of hearing on February 2.

Sanitation workers also staged a demonstration at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence on Wednesday.

During the hearing, the city government's standing counsel Rahul Mehra told the bench that the government has released 100 percent funds to the civic agencies.

Mehra asked the court to order the workers of the MCDs to call off the strike. In June and October 2015, the sanitation workers of various bodies of MCDs -- East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC), North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC), South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) -- went on strike which resulted in the accumulation of garbage in different places across the capital.

The petition filed by Rahul Birla said: "It deteriorated the sanitary condition of the capital to such an extent that it created an imminent threat of outbreak of various diseases."

It further added that after the trifurcation of MCD into three municipal bodies, the financial health of the civic bodies deteriorated on account of revenue deficit.
A court, hearing a case relating to the rape of a Danish woman, here on Wednesday allowed Delhi Police's application for taking on record his medical and potency test report of accused Shyam Lal and recalling of three more witnesses.

Additional Sessions Judge Kaveri Baweja after allowing the plea listed the matter for recording of statement of prosecution witnesses on Thursday.

The prosecution last week moved an application to urge the court to take on record the medical and potency test report of accused Shyam Lal and recall three doctors as prosecution witnesses.

Last week, the court also allowed another plea for recalling of two police officials as witnesses in the case. The police officials' statement will be recorded on Thursday.

Arjun, Raju alias Chhakka, Mohammad Raja, Mahendra alias Ganja, Raju alias Bajji and Shyam Lal have been charged with robbing and raping a Danish woman at knife-point near New Delhi Railway Station in January 2014 after she sought directions to her hotel in Paharganj.

Besides, three minors -- allegedly also involved in the case -- are facing an inquiry before the Juvenile Justice Board.

Police said all the accused were vagabonds who took the woman to an isolated spot near the Divisional Railway Officers' Club close to the railway station, took away her belongings and then raped her.
The municipal workers here on Wednesday staged a protest outside Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's official residence demanding timely payment of their salaries.

"Our arrears are pending for several months... We are not being paid on time," one of the protestors said.

"We are being cheated by the government as we were assured that our demands will be fulfilled soon," another added.

Earlier, in October the workers had gone for a strike against the government for the payment of their salaries and regularisation of daily-wagers who had been working for over a decade.
Direct flights between India and Indonesia are likely to begin this year to facilitate tourism, Indonesian ambassador Rizali W. Indrakesuma said on Wednesday.

"The Indian government has already given permission; it is a matter of how Indonesia responds. We are hoping that direct flights between the two countries begin by this year or by next year at the latest," said Indrakesuma said.

The first flights both governments plan to launch initially are between Delhi and Jakarta and Mumbai and Bali. Garuda Indonesia and Air India will operate flights between the two countries.

The ambassador said a deal on the matter could be finalised in March when the transport minister of Indonesia will participate in an event organised by the civil aviation ministry in India.

"This is an opportunity for our minister to engage with the Indian civil aviation minister (Ashok Gajapathi Raju Pusapati) at an event organised in Hyderabad in March," the ambassador said.

"The consulate general of Indonesia in Mumbai will push the ministry of tourism to open direct flights for the first time between Delhi and Jakarta and Mumbai and Bali. Last year, 262,000 tourists from India visited Indonesia; we expect the figure to go up to 350,000 this year. First it'll be a government-to-government engagement and later we can engage private airlines," said Taufik Nurhidayat, deputy director, ministry of tourism, Republic of Indonesia.

Indonesia attracts the highest number of tourists from Singapore, followed by Malaysia, Australia, China, Japan, Korea and India.
Cairo, Jan 27 (IANS/AKI) An Egyptian court has sentenced secular writer Fatima Naoot to three years in prison and a fine of $2,550 after being found guilty of insulting Islam, daily Al-Ahram reported.

Naoot, a former parliament candidate, is the second public figure to receive a jail term in less than a month for charges related to blasphemy, the paper said.

The jail sentence is effective immediately, although Naoot will be able to lodge an appeal from behind bars.

In October, she described in a post on her Facebook account Eid Al-Adha's tradition of slaughtering sheep as the "greatest massacre committed by human beings".

Naoot also wrote in an article in Egyptian daily El-Masry El-Youm criticizing the traditional slaughter of sheep during Eid, the Islamic festival of sacrifice and one of the main Muslim religious holidays worldwide.

During questioning, Naoot admitted writing the Facebook post but denied that her aim was to insult Islam, Al-Ahram said.

Naoot argued that humans justified their lust for killing and enjoying the smell of cooking game by attempting to bestow a divine meaning to their actions.

Egyptian authorities put TV host Islam Behery in prison in December after a court reduced to one year an earlier five-year sentence against him for "contempt of religion" over comments he made questioning the credibility of some sayings of the Prophet Mohammed on his now-suspended TV programme.

El-Beheiry is appealing against his prison sentence. His trial sparked public controversy and he got the support of many journalists, writers, scholars and human rights activists.

El-Beheiry and Naoot's convictions come amid public debate over freedom of speech in Egypt.

The nascent Egyptian Secularist Party launched a campaign in November calling for the repeal of an Egyptian law punishing contempt of religion with up to five years in prison, Daily News Egypt reported.

--IANS/AKI

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Akshay Kumar is overwhelmed with the response to his latest film "Airlift", which revolves around the evacuation of Indians from Kuwait during the 1990 Iraq-Kuwait war. The actor says such type of films come "almost once in an actor's lifetime".

"My Twitter feed has been flooded with #Airlift, so much positivity and love... I couldn't have asked for more and for sure wasn't expecting this much hence feeling very overwhelmed," Akshay tweeted on Wednesday.

"While most of you have written I should do more films like 'Airlift'... I wish I could but honestly films like these come very rarely, almost once in an actor's lifetime and I am extremely fortunate to be a part of it. Thank you all for everything," he added.

Directed by Raja Krishna Menon, "Airlift", which also stars "The Lunchbox" actress Nimrat Kaur, tells how the Indian government evacuated 1,70,000 people of Indian origin and also of other nationalities through 488 flights during the Iraq-Kuwait war.

According to trade analyst Taran Adarsh, "Airlift", which released on January 22, has collected Rs.72.50 crore till now.

"#Airlift is sensational on Tuesday. Crosses Rs.70 crore. Should easily surpass Akshay's highest *Week 1* biz - #RowdyRathore Rs.79.52 crore," Adarsh posted on Twitter on Wednesday.

"#Airlift Friday Rs.12.35 crore, Saturday Rs.14.60 crore, Sunday Rs.17.35 crore, Monday Rs.10.40 crore, Tuesday Rs.17.80 crore. Total: Rs.72.50 crore. India biz. Speeding towards Rs.100 crore. Fab," Adarsh added.

Many Bollywood celebrities like Rishi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Hrithik Roshan, Abhishek Bachchan, Hansal Mehta, Karan Johar, Riteish Deshmukh and Pulkit Samrat have given a thumbs up to the film while sharing their reviews on the micro-blogging site.
Freedom of expression came under severe attack in Bangladesh in 2015, Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2016.

While extremist groups targeted secular bloggers and foreign aid workers, the government cracked down on media and civil society activists, launched contempt of court proceedings or prosecuted them under vague and overbroad laws, it said in a 659-page report.

Several commuters were killed or injured during violence that erupted during some Bangladeshi opposition blockades of transport routes, the US-based rights body said.

The government, led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, became increasingly authoritarian, with security forces arresting key opposition leaders, often on trumped up charges, and state authorities refusing to prosecute security forces for serious violations, including torture, killings, and enforced disappearances.

In 2015, five bloggers with atheist sympathies were hacked to death by extremist groups. Other bloggers, writers and publishers, whose names were published on a hit-list, went into hiding, concerned that government protection was either absent or at best inadequate.

A Shia procession and a Hindu temple faced serious attacks, with many wounded.

Members of the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) said they feared arbitrary arrest or extrajudicial killings, the report said.

Civil society and media faced harsh conditions. Forty-nine people were prosecuted for expressing public support for another journalist's right to publish fair criticism of war crimes trials.

Media critical of the government continued to face closure, as editors and journalists faced charges and arrest. Two men were prosecuted for social media posts criticizing the government.

In a positive development, efforts to shore up support for labour rights in the country's garment industry seemed to be having an impact, with a rise in the number of labour unions registered, although concerns remain about the capacity of workers to form and participate freely in labour unions, Human Rights Watch said.
French President Francois Hollande has accepted the resignation of Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, the presidential office said on Wednesday.

Taubira's resignation came ahead of a parliamentary debate slated later on Wednesday over a constitutional reform that would allow people convicted of terrorism to be stripped of their French citizenship under certain circumstances, Xinhua reported.

Hollande expressed his appreciation to Taubira for her work, the Elysee said in a press release.

On her Twitter account, Taubira, who has been against the deprivation of nationality proposed by the government as a measure to prevent French bi-nationals from engaging in terrorism, wrote minutes after her resignation that "sometimes, to resist is to stay, and other times, to resist is to leave".

The French president appointed Jean-Jacques Urvoas as the new minister of justice.
BOZEMAN  Thanks to humans, bat deaths are climbing worldwide because of collisions with wind turbines and the outbreak of white-nose syndrome.

Those facts are found in a newly released study co-authored by Raina Plowright, assistant professor in Montana State Universitys Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

White-nose syndrome is a fungal disease that infects the skin of hibernating bats. It has led to the mass death of infected bats since 2000.

The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by United States Geological Survey scientists, was published recently in the journal "Mammal Review."

Plowright was one of five scientists who combed through more than 200 years of scientific literature dating back to 1790 in search of reports of mass mortality events of bats. The researchers found 1,180 such incidents worldwide, more than half caused by humans.

Bats are long-lived, slow-breeding mammals that play vital roles in most of Earths ecosystems. Bats are important pollinators and seed dispersers in tropical regions, and they serve as the main predators of night-flying insects in most parts of the world. Insect-eating bats are estimated to save farmers billions of dollars each year by providing natural pest control.

But the causes of bat mortality have not been reviewed since 1970. And because bats are well-adapted to survive in their natural habitat, human-caused mortalities can be more devastating than naturally occurring ones.

Many of the 1,300 species of bats are already considered threatened or declining, said Tom OShea, a USGS emeritus research scientist and the studys lead author. The new trends in human-related mortality may not be sustainable.

Researchers found that prior to the year 2000, intentional killing by humans caused the greatest proportion of bat mortality events globally. The reasons varied with region, but bats were hunted for human consumption, killed as pests, to control vampire bats, and to protect fruit crops. Although the proportion of intentional killing reports declined in recent times, such acts continue in some parts of the world.

Since 2000, however, collisions with wind turbines worldwide and white-nose syndrome in North America are the primary reported causes of mass mortality in bats. In additions, storms, floods, drought and other weather-related factors also historically caused mass mortality and could increase in the future due to climate change.

Surprisingly, the authors did not find convincing evidence that bats regularly die in large proportion due to infectious diseases caused by viruses or bacteria. This finding comes at a time when increasing evidence points to bats as natural reservoirs of several viruses that cause disease in humans. Despite often being more social than other animals, bats may somehow avoid deaths from diseases that sweep through dense populations, the researchers said.

Plowright, who hails from Australia, is concerned about the future health of the worlds bat populations.

Bats cannot easily rebound from mass mortality events, and climate change may create additional stressors on bat populations, she said.

The researchers conclude that bats could benefit from policy, education and conservation actions targeting human-caused mortality.

In addition to Plowright and OShea, co-authors of the study were Paul M. Cryan with USGS, David T.S. Hayman with Massey University in New Zealand and Daniel G. Streicker with University of Glasgow in Scotland.
After ordering celebrity yoga guru Bikram Choudhury to pay $924,500 in compensatory damages in a lawsuit for sexually harassing and firing a female employee, a US court has told Choudhury to pay $6.47 million in punitive damages.

Plaintiff Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, Choudhury's former legal adviser, said in the lawsuit that he inappropriately touched her and wrongfully fired her in 2013 after she began probing sexual abuse claims from other women.

"I feel elated and vindicated," Jafa-Bodden told the New York Daily News after the Tuesday verdict that was handed down by a Los Angeles jury consisting of six women and three men.

Meanwhile, 69-year-old Choudhury, Kolkata-born founder of Bikram Yoga - a form of hot yoga - testified that he is "almost bankrupt".

Choudhury told jurors he had no income at all last year and his collection of more than 30 luxury cars has been promised to California Governor Jerry Brown for a children's school dedicated to automotive engineering.

Jafa-Bodden filed her lawsuit in 2013 claiming Choudhury sexually harassed her with a barrage of misogynistic comments and threatened her and her daughter's lives when she raised questions about sexual abuse claims brought by numerous women.

Jafa-Bodden testified earlier in the trial that Choudhury made her life a living hell after she moved to the US from India to act as his personal lawyer.

In one dramatic account, she said Choudhury ran his finger across his throat when she asked about accusations he sexually assaulted a teacher during a training programme in Acapulco.

In his closing argument on Tuesday, one of Jafa-Bodden's lawyers, Mark Quigley, called Choudhury's treatment of women "shocking".

He highlighted trial testimony from the former White House lawyer who worked for Choudhury after Jafa-Bodden and filed her own wrongful termination lawsuit in August.

The lawyer, Petra Starke, told jurors earlier this month that Choudhury presided over a "crazy" work environment with a "sexually charged atmosphere", Quigley was quoted as saying.

Choudhury gained fame by popularising his sweat lodge-style yoga system which uses a 26-pose routine in a room heated to nearly 38 degree Celsius or more.

Starke testified that she instituted strict sexual harassment policies and training when she took over as CEO and was shocked when she later witnessed Choudhury receiving oral sex from a teaching student in a limo, Quigley said.

The yoga guru also is facing lawsuits by several other women who claim he sexually assaulted or raped them.

Choudhury's lawyers, however, say their client is innocent and that prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges in connection with the women's claims.
In the fight against black money stashed abroad, India on Wednesday signed a protocol with Armenia, to make changes to the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention (DTAC) between the two countries.

"The protocol will enable the two countries to exchange information related to financial and banking transactions under the Double Taxation Avoidance Convention, and thereby facilitate them in addressing tax evasion," the union finance ministry said in a release here.

"It is also expected to further strengthen the efforts of the government of India in curbing generation of black money," it said.

The protocol amends the article on exchange of information for tax purposes in the bilateral DTAC of 2004, to bring it in line with the updations in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) model, the statement added.

The confidentiality, or secrecy, clause in such treaties forbids sharing of details obtained under these with other law enforcement and investigation agencies.

India has double-tax avoidance treaties with over 95 countries and plans also to sign with others. The major countries with which it has signed these agreements are the US, Britain, the UAE, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand and Mauritius.
India has called for united action against extremist and radicalised organisations operating in northern Iraq and Syria in order to stop the "dangerous trends" endangering peace and stability in the West Asia and Gulf regions. It also called for a "comprehensive political resolution" of the conflict, bringing all parties to the negotiating table, but said it should be a "Syrian-led process".

Speaking at a Security Council debate on Tuesday on the West Asia, India's permanent representative Syed Akbaruddin expressed India's "deep concern with the activities of proscribed outfits, radicalised and extremist groups in the West Asia and Gulf region especially in northern parts of Iraq and Syria." They "are critically impacting on peace and stability in the region," he said. "Efforts must be taken by all parties and stakeholders in the region to curb these dangerous trends."

Although he refrained from naming the groups, it was a reference to the the principal operator in the region, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and others like the al-Nusra Front.

Opposition to these organisations, which control parts of Syria and Iraq and draw supporters from as far away as the United States, is fragmented. The US, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are ranged on one side and Syria, Russia and Iran on the other.

"We believe the consolidation of political processes and solutions while building durable state institutions will be the effective way of addressing such extremism and radicalism in the region," Akbaruddin said.

"India has consistently called for a comprehensive political resolution of the conflict, bringing all parties to the negotiating table," he added in a nuanced statement. "It has to be a Syrian-led process, taking into account the legitimate aspirations."

He expressed support for the UN-sponsored Syrian peace conference that was to have started Monday but was postponed because of questions over who should represent the opposition to al-Assad.

"We remain hopeful that the UN's mediation efforts will yield results," he said. "We urge all parties to demonstrate the requisite political will, exercise restraint, and commit to seeking common ground in accommodating their differences."

Akbaruddin said India had donated $4 million in humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees and would contribute more at the Syrian Donors Conference for refugee assistance next month (Februrary) in London.

Turning to the other regional hotspot, Yemen, Akbaruddin said, "We have been urging all concerned parties in Yemen to amicably resolve their differences and hope the UN-mediation efforts would assist the people of Yemen in finding a consensus-based solution."

Speaking about the long-running Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Akbaruddin said, "India remains firmly convinced that dialogue remains the only viable option that can effectively address the issue."

Straddling a middle path between traditional friend, the Palestinians, and Israel, with which India has developed closer ties more recently, he said, "The imperative need is for restraint, to avoid provocation and unilateral actions and to return to the peace process. We remain hopeful and urge both sides to resume the peace process soon, for a comprehensive, just and lasting resolution of the Palestinian issue."

He added, "India supports a negotiated solution resulting in a sovereign, independent, viable and united State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side at peace with Israel."

Reiterating India's support for the Palestinian cause, Akbaruddin said, "India has always played a proactive role in garnering support for the Palesfinian cause in multilateral fora."

He referred to visits by President Pranab Mukherjee and and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and said, "These visits and interactions reinforce and renew our political and diplomatic support to the State of Palestine in its endeavours to realise an independent and sovereign State of Palestine."

During those journeys, they both also visited Israel.
India's rise has caught the attention of controversial Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump who thinks the world's largest democracy is doing great, but nobody is talking about it.

"India is doing great. Nobody talks about it," the brash real estate mogul, who has ruffled many feathers with his anti-immigration rhetoric, a call to ban all Muslims and accusing several countries, particularly China, of taking advantage of the US, said in an interview with CNN on Monday.

Trump's first comments about India on the campaign trail came in response to a question about the change in his views expressed in a September 24, 2007 CNN interview when he had talked about America's decline and the rise of China and India.

He had then said: "Just look at this country (the US). We have gone from this tremendous power that was respected all over the world to somewhat of a laughing stock.

"All of a sudden, people are talking about China and India and other places, even from an economic standpoint. America has come down a long way, a long way. The US has come down a long way, and it's very, very sad. We're not respected."

In his response on Monday to the statement made almost nine years ago, Trump explained: "That was the beginning of China. That was the beginning of India, when India, by the way, India is doing great. Nobody talks about it. And I have big jobs going up in India. But India is doing great."

However, in a little noticed statement as recently as November 2015, Trump had actually accused India too of "taking advantage of the US".

"If you look at the way China and India and almost everybody takes advantage of the United States - China in particular, because they're so good," he was quoted as saying.

Trump's statement about India came a day before a new poll found him hitting a new high in the race for the Republican nomination with 41 percent Republican voters nationwide backing him.

Significantly, more than two-thirds of Republicans said he is the candidate most likely to capture their party's presidential nomination, according to a new CNN/ORC Poll.

Trump was also widely seen as the candidate best able to win the November election with 63 percent of Republicans saying so.

The 69-year-old billionaire has been trying for years to capitalise on his brand in India, which according to the latest International Monetary Fund projections has overtaken China to emerge as the fastest growing economy in the world with a 7.5 percent growth rate.

In 2014, he announced the launch of Trump Tower Mumbai, an 800-foot skyscraper with 75 stories to be erected in Mumbai by an Indian developer Lodha Group.

Before that, in August 2012, developer Panchshil Realty announced another luxury residential property with the Trump name, in Pune, a city about 145 km from Mumbai.

The Trump Towers Pune feature two towers with 23 stories each. The project is still under construction.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
India has been ranked at 76th position in public sector corruption out of 168 countries in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2015, improving its slot from 85 in 2014 and 94 in 2013.

Although corruption is still rife globally, many countries improved their scores in the 2015 edition of the corruption index, a Trasparency International statement said on Wednesday.

Overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries on the 2015 index scored below 50 points on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived to be very clean).

Despite an improvement in the overall ranking, India's corruption perception score remains the same as last year at 38/100, which is seen as insufficient improvement. Brazil, Burkina Faso, Thailand, Tunisia and Zambia are the other countries that shares the same ranking as India. China fared worse than India and Brazil at rank 83 with a score of 37.

On the other hand, Pakistan is the only country among the SAARC countries, to have improved its score this year, though its rank remains poor at 117

"The 2015 corruption perceptions index clearly shows that corruption remains a blight around the world. But 2015 was also a year when people again took to the streets to protest corruption," Jose Ugaz, chair of Transparency International, was quoted as saying.

"People across the globe sent a strong signal to those in power: it is time to tackle grand corruption," Ugaz said.

Denmark took the top spot scoring 91 points, while North Korea and Somalia were the worst performers, scoring just eight points each.

Top performers share key characteristics including high levels of press freedom, access to budget information, high levels of integrity among people in power, and judiciaries that don't differentiate between rich and poor.

Brazil was the biggest decliner in the index, falling five points and dropping seven positions to a rank of 76.

The big decliners in the past four years include Libya, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Turkey. The big improvers include Greece, Senegal and Britain.

The corruption perceptions index is based on expert opinions of public sector corruption.
The Indian community in the Polish capital celebrated the country's Republic Day in great spirit despite a biting cold and rains.

Indians on Tuesday assembled at the newly built Indian embassy in great numbers, many coming from other cities such as Krakow and Gdansk.

Indian ambassador to Poland Ajay Bisaria unfurled the tricolour and read out President Pranab Mukherjee's speech.

Bisaria told the assembly that a Polish delegation led by the deputy prime minister will attend the 'Make In India' festival in Mumbai in February and that trade between the two countries will touch $5 billion by the end of 2017.
The Amnesty International Human Rights Award 2016 has gone to Indian activist Henri Tiphagne.

A lawyer and human rights defender, Tiphagne will be awarded the 8th Human Rights Award by Amnesty International Germany. The award comes with 10,000 euros.

The award, to be presented on April 25 at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, is in recognition of Tiphagne's "exceptional commitment to human rights", Amnesty said in a statement.

"For many decades now, Tiphagne has been tirelessly and bravely standing up for human rights. His organization's invaluable work includes campaigning against discrimination and the use of torture in India," said Selmin Caliskan, director of Amnesty International Germany.

Tiphagne is the founder of People's Watch, a human rights group in India which has been researching and documenting human rights violations as well as providing for over 20 years legal representation to those affected.

The Human Rights Award is presented by Amnesty Germany every two years in recognition of individuals or organizations campaigning for human rights under very difficult conditions.
Rome, Jan 27 (IANS/AKI) Iran does not intend to attack, invade or interfere in the affairs of any country, its president Hassan Rouhani has said, asserting that his country was a bedrock in the conflict-wracked Middle East.

"Iran is the safest most stable country in the whole region, a country that doesn't intend to attack, invade or meddle in the affairs of any state," Rouhani told a business forum in Rome.

Iran would defend itself forcefully but with "reliable rules" and would never breach its international commitments, he said.

Rouhani is on a five-day visit to Italy and France. During the landmark trip, he is looking to rebuild Iran's economic and political ties with the West after crippling economic sanctions and to promote his country as a pillar of strength and stability in an increasingly fraught and fragmented region.

Rouhani has signed deals with Italian firms worth $20 billion and is expected to seal multi-billion dollar accords with French companies.

--IANS/AKI

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Iran kicked off massive naval drills in its southern waters on Wednesday, the Iranian navy commander said.

The exercises, codenamed "Velayat 94", stretch over an area of around three million square km from east of the strategic Strait of Hormuz to the northern parts of the Indian Ocean, Xinhua reported.

On the first day of the drills, various homegrown vessels including speedboats and Tareq-class heavy submarine, as well as airborne units, were stationed in the zone to prevent the hypothetical enemy from entering the country's territorial waters.

Also deployed were coast-to-sea missile launchers, coast-based artillery and electronic warfare systems.

The drills are aimed at evaluating the capabilities and testing the military equipment of the Iranian navy forces, the navy's deputy commander, Rear Admiral Gholamreza Khadem Bigham, had said earlier.

"Iran's presence in international waters and high seas and holding various navy drills indicate the Islamic republic's high level of preparedness and power," and this is an important deterrent strategy, Bigham added.

In the past, Iran carried out a number of navy drills in the Strait of Hormuz, the Sea of Oman, the north of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

Iran used to test different kinds of missiles, reconnaissance and combat drones, as well as torpedoes.
Rome, Jan 27 (IANS/AKI) Italy's Culture Minister on Wednesday said a decision to cover up nude statues during a visit to Rome's Capitoline Museums by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani was "incomprehensible".

"Choosing to cover up the statues is incomprehensible. There are many other ways of respecting the sensitivities of an important foreign visitor," tweeted Franceschini.

Later, after accompanying Rouhani on a visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum monument, Franceschini said that neither he nor Italy's Premier Matteo Renzi had been informed about the decision to cover up the nudes.

Rouhani dismissed the controversy over the move to cover up the nude statues with wooden cartons during his visit to the Capitoline Museums on Monday.

"There were no talks about this," he told a press conference on Wednesday.

But Rouhani said he had appreciate the gesture.

"All I can say is that Italian people are very hospitable. They try to do everything to put you at ease and I thank you for this," he told journalists.

The nude cover-up made world headlines worldwide and prompted astonishment and ridicule within Italy.

It outraged some rightwing lawmakers, who portrayed it as a grovelling nod to the Islamic Republic that undermined the nation's cultural identity.

Conservative senator Maurizio Gasparri said on Wednesday he would question Renzi in parliament over the cover-up, which Rome's archaeological superintendency has denied authorising.

"This measure was not approved by us but was organised by the prime minister's office," the archaeological superintendency stated on Wednesday as a blame game appeared to get underway.

Renzi and Rouhani made speeches at the Capitoline Museum on Monday after a signing ceremony that saw Italian companies seal some 20 billion dollars worth of deals with Iran.

Rouhani is on a landmark visit to Italy and France this week as he seeks to rebuild Iran's economic and political ties with the West after the ending of international sanctions against the Islamic Republic last week.

--IANS/AKI

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Warrants have been issued in Minnesota for a Billings man and his wife who prosecutors said financed their lifestyles by exploiting the man's elderly mother for more than $42,000 while overseeing her estate.

Court documents show Michael Scott Christie and Martina Annette Christie failed to show up to court in Chippewa County, Minn., last week for their first appearances. Both are charged with 12 felonies each, including conspiracy to commit financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult.

The Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the Minnesota Attorney Generals Office said Michael Scott Christie and wife Martina Annette Christie, both of Billings, exploited Michaels mother and used the estate money for their own gain.

Michael Christie became the conservator for his mother's estate in 2012.

Minnesota investigators allege the couple spent thousands of Michael Christie's mother's savings, including over $7,000 on clothing alone and nearly $2,000 at teen retailer The Buckle.

Michael Christie also allegedly sold his wife two pieces of his mother's land valued at more than $300,000 for less than $500 and failed to pay expenses for his mother's nursing home.

Michael Christies mother received care at the Clarkfield Care Center in Clarkfield, Minn., from late October 2013 until she was evicted for non-payment in late 2014, and accumulated over $72,000 in expenses. The complaint says Michael and Martina Christie paid the western Minnesota care center only $200 during that period, while they spent over $6,000 on clothing for themselves and wrote themselves $6,000 worth of checks.

Michael Christies mother died in February 2015.

In December, Chippewa County District Court ordered a hearing to determine whether Michael Christie had failed to abide by his duties as conservator. The court listed $50,000 worth of expenses that it had found to be either fraudulent or questionable.
The union cabinet on Wednesday approved the raising of 17 India Reserve Battalions (IR Bns) by Jammu and Kashmir and Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected states.

"Five IR battalions will be increased by Jammu and Kashmir, four by Chhattisgrah, three by Jharkhand, three by Odisha and two by Maharashtra," an official release said.

According to the statement, local youth would be recruited with relaxation in the age and educational qualification criteria.

In Jammu and Kashmir, 60 percent of the recruits for the posts of constables and class IV employees would be from the border districts.

For Left Wing Extremism states, 75 percent of the recruits would be from the 27 core affected districts under the Security Related Expenditure (SRE) scheme.
Messaging in the dark affects sleep, health and performance in school, says a study.

Students who text for longer duration in the dark sleep only for a few hours and thus remain sleepier during the day than those who stopped messaging when they went to bed, the researchers from Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, said.

Texting before lights out did not affect academic performance, the study showed.

Although females reported more messaging overall and more daytime sleepiness, they had better academic performance than males. The researchers attributed this to the fact that the girls texted primarily before turning off the light.

"We need to be aware that teenagers are using electronic devices excessively and have a unique physiology," said Xue Ming, a professor at the Rutgers University.

Adolescents should be getting eight and a half hours of sleep during a night, the researchers said, adding that deficiency in sleep can affect their Rapid Eye Movement (REM) -- the period during sleep most important to learning, memory consolidation and social adjustment in adolescents.

When falling asleep is delayed but rising time is not, REM sleep will be cut short, which can affect learning and memory, the researchers explained.

The effects of "blue light" emitted from smartphones and tablets are intensified when viewed in a dark room.

This short wavelength light can have a strong impact on daytime sleepiness symptoms since it can delay melatonin release -- a hormone that helps control sleep, making it more difficult to fall asleep - even when seen through closed eyelids, the researchers noted in the study published in the Journal of Child Neurology.

To conduct her study, Ming distributed surveys to three New Jersey high schools - a suburban and an urban public school and a private school - and evaluated the 1,537 responses contrasting grades, sexes, messaging duration and whether the texting occurred before or after lights out.
The entry of Lloyd's of UK will be better for Indian insurance brokers as the reinsurance business could be placed with Lloyd's in India, a top official of Mahindra Insurance Brokers Ltd. said on Wednesday.

"Lloyd's is like a market place where various syndicate operate like an insurance company underwriting reinsurance business. The entry of Lloyd's will be better for players like us," Jaideep Devare, managing director of Mahindra Insurance Brokers, told reporters here.

He said reinsurance business could be placed with Lloyd's within India itself than going to Britain.

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) is framing the guidelines for allowing Lloyd's to set up branch office in India.

Speaking about the Rs.126 crore-revenue Mahindra Insurance Brokers, Devare said the company was confident of crossing last year's business figures and will soon be going online in addition to its existing brick-and-mortar model.

"We are now planning to go online and necessary investments are being made. All these years, we have been following the brick-and-mortar model," Devare said.

Queried about any stake-increase proposal by Inclusion Resources Pte Ltd, a subsidiary of LeapFrog Investments, Devare answered in the negative.

Inclusion Resources took 15 percent equity in Mahindra Insurance in 2012 and remaining 85 percent is held by Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd.

According to Devare, the company has placed business worth around Rs.819 crore this fiscal -- higher by 24 percent over last year's corresponding period.

He said the company would cross last year's business placement figure of around Rs.1,003 crore that fetched a brokerage of around Rs.126 crore and a net profit of around Rs.43 crore.

Declining to share the company's class-wise business break-up, Devare said bulk of the business placed by it are motor insurance followed by health and life.

He said the captive group business will be around 30 percent of the company's total business and is within the regulatory limits.

Questioned about client-retention ratio, Devare said the ratio is good in the case of corporate clients while a lot of churning happens in the motor insurance sector.

On reinsurance, he said the company has placed different kinds of risks -- factories, liability and others -- with reinsurers.
The Madras High Court on Wednesday allowed a second autopsy on the body of T. Monisha, one of the three girl students who according to the police committed suicide, said an advocate.

"Hearing the petition filed by Monisha's father Tamilarasan the court permitted the conduct of a second post mortem at the government hospital here," R. Sankarasubbu, the counsel for Tamilarasan and father of Monisha, told IANS.

The court on Monday (January 25) had ordered preservation of the body till Wednesday.

Sankarasubbu added that the court said as the father (Tamilarasan) himself has asked for it, the second autopsy is allowed.

Sankarasubbu said the girl's body, now in Villupuram, has to be brought here for autopsy.

The bodies of the three girl students -- Monisha, A. Saranya and V.Priyanka -- were taken out of a well in a farm near the SVS Naturopathy and Yoga College on January 23 evening. Villupuram is around 170 km from here.

While police registered a case of suicide, the parents of the girls have alleged the daughters were murdered for protesting against the lack of basic facilities in the college.

The police arrested Vasuki, Sukhi Verma and two others -- top officials of SVS Naturopathy and Yoga College in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district -- while the Villupuram district administration sealed the college.

"Without Tamilarasan's consent and despite his demand for a post-mortem in a hospital in Chennai, the police conducted the autopsy in Villupuram," his counsel Sankarasubbu had told IANS earlier.

Sankarasubbu said Tamilarasan has petitioned the court to transfer investigations from the Villupuram police to the CB-CID wing of Tamil Nadu Police and a second autopsy in a Chennai hospital.

"Our contention is that the district administration is helping the college management in the case," Sankarasubbu alleged.

Police said the three girl students ended their lives after the management demanded higher fees even though the college lacked basic facilities.

Nearly four months ago, a few students of the college had allegedly attempted suicide in front of the Villupuram collectorate.
An hour of full body massage - Swedish or Ayurvedic - a hot water bath and signing off with sumptuous food beside a water body - all this is offered at the new InterContinental Chennai Mahabalipuram Resort near here.

Walking leisurely - more like floating - from the spa towards the restaurant one will note that the resort's architecture is largely drawn from the imposing south Indian temple architecture - cuboid design, long corridors, pillars and temple-pond-like swimming pool where the steps go into the water.

The restaurant Melting Pot: The Market Cafe' offers the option of dining inside or al fresco where one can enjoy the gentle breeze beside the large expanse of the water body.

The beach resort is the first luxury resort property in India for the global hotel chain InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG).

Owned by Adyar Gate Hotels, the property was under ITC management till its pre-opening stage.

"The restaurant's philosophy has not changed with the management change, but the menu has slightly changed in line with IHG's standard, like having a minimum number of items under different heads," executive chef Ashis Rout told IANS, serving hot masala chicken chunks cooked in a bamboo stem.

The proof of Rout's claim that he would serve what the guest wants provided he is given sufficient notice is true. The bamboo chicken was outside the menu and was specially requested.

Masala-marinated chicken is stuffed inside the bamboo stem, both the ends are closed and it is heated over charcoal. The result: the chicken was soft, juicy and spicy.

"I am game for having country chicken in our menu, including the Kadaknath chicken - the meat is also black in colour. Recently we set a dining table for a young couple near the sea. The table was set in such a way that the waves would touch their feet and go. The idea is to give the guests an unforgettable experience," Rout said.

According to him, some star hotels do offer guests a choice of dishes which are not in the menu card.

"But chefs do not cook anything that is not in the menu card in overseas hotel restaurants," Rout pointed out.

"Two more restaurants - Chinese and a sea-side grill - will go on stream soon," Rout said, offering taster's portions of pan-seared scallops which rolled down the throat smoothly.

Similarly, the sea bass rubbed with coconut lemon curry with raw mango sauce also tasted good.

"Working in a running hotel is easy as one can go with the flow. But pre-opening hotels are different as one has to arrange for everything, including finding a vendor, hiring and training staff, finalising the menu and managing last minute hiccups," Rout said.

"Normally 70 percent of the staff who were in the pre-opening stage would quit the hotel around two months after its formal opening," he said.

Despite several days of trial runs, operations at new restaurants would collapse due to reasons like insufficient food, among others.

"Trial runs are made with the hotel staff and their feedback is received later. But in a restaurant that is open to public, the guest reacts instantaneously. It takes some time for the staff to get used to this," Rout said.

Coming to the main course, the vegetarians can go for iddyappam with kathrikai ketti kara kuzhumbu (brinjal cooked in tamarind and tomato gravy) or bendekaya masala pulusu (okra in masala gravy).

Rout suggested NH 203 lamb curry that goes well with Indian breads, veechu paratha, steamed rice or iddyappam.

The rustic and relatively thin lamb curry was inspired by the lamb curry sold on the highway along Bhubaneswar to Puri in Odisha.

Similarly, the Sivakasi chicken kozhambu was also good with steamed rice and left the flavour of gingelly oil and masala in the mouth for some time.

"It is the masala - shallots, garlic, fenugreek, mustard seeds, curry leaves slightly mixed in gingelly oil and dried in sun - that gives the unique taste to the fish kuzhambu," chef N.Lokheeshwaran told IANS.

Children (and adults who are not counting calories) would love the continental menu - particularly the artisan pappardella pasta, lasagna, and the four- cheese- flavoured risotto.

It was time for the tasty cheese cake with berries and mishti doi. Queried about his management style Rout said he is open to suggestions and criticism.

"It is more important for me to create leaders than followers. There is a whole lot of difference between a human being and being human," he added.

Well, that is really food for thought that Rout served direct.

FAQs:

Where: On the East Coast Road after Crocodile Park, some 30 km from Chennai

Timings: Breakfast 7-11 a.m, Lunch 12.30-3.30 p.m. Dinner: 7-11 p.m.

Cost of Lunch/Dinner for two: Around Rs.2,000 (without alcohol)

(Venkatachari Jagannathan visited the InterContinental Chennai Resort at its invitation. He can be contacted at v.jagannathan@ians.in)
Gurjit Singh, the new Indian ambassador to Germany, has announced a more vigorous partnership between the two countries and intensified business ties with the re-opening of the office of the Confederation of lndian lndustry (Cll) in Frankfurt.

ln his interaction with lndian and German interlocutors, Gurjit Singh expressed the desire for enhancing Indo-German relationship to fulfil the programmes established by leaders of both countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German chancellor Angela Merkel.

He called upon the lndian diaspora to engage more vigorously with lndia and drew attention to the lndian Corporate lnternship Programme. He also announced the lndia Fellow's Programme offered by OIFC in collaboration with the lndian School of Business. Gurjit Singh was previously Indian ambassador to Indonesia.

CII's new office in Frankfurt will serve as a reference point for lndian industry and the business community, the ambassador-designate said.
The government has not yet decided on fixing the minimum import price for steel, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia said on Wednesday.

"No decision," she told reporters here in response to a query on the matter on the sidelines of a Confederation of Indian Industry meeting on the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) recent Nairobi conference.

Earlier this month she said India's steel imports were about 9 percent of what it consumed and not a huge element of the country's total steel consumption.

Teaotia said the country had considerable installed capacity, which is operating at about 80 percent, resulting in higher load factors than the rest of the world, which averages about 68-70 percent.

India's domestic steel industry has been repeatedly voicing its concern about cheap imports from China flooding local markets.

Earlier, the commerce secretary told the conference that her ministry is discussing with other ministries how to move ahead on the outcomes of the WTO's Nairobi ministerial meeting.

"We met all ministries related to trade. We have made presentation to the agriculture ministry," Teaotia said.

The Nairobi ministerial did not reaffirm the Doha Development Agenda, which was India's main demand before going for the talks.

In this connection, Teaotia said on Wednesday that India will not go ahead with new issues till the time the WTO's Doha Round issues are reaffirmed.

"Doha is still alive," she said.
Oil prices continued to rise on Wednesday although US supplies added last week.

US crude supplies of last week gained 8.4 million barrels to 494.9 million barrels, up 88.2 million barrels from one year before, according to the weekly report published by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) on Wednesday.

US crude production lost 14,000 barrels to 9.221 million barrels a day last week, according to the EIA's report.

Abdalla El-Badri, the head of Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, called on oil producers outside the group to help in reducing the global oversupply.

"It is crucial that all major producers sit down to come up with a solution to this," El-Badri said Monday at a conference in London.

There were news reports saying that the head of Russian oil company Lukoil suggested Russia should jointly work with OPEC to cut supply.

The West Texas Intermediate for March delivery moved up 85 cents to settle at 32.3 dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Brent crude for March delivery increased 1.3 dollars to close at 33.1 dollars a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, just before leaving for New Delhi on a 10-day trade mission, joined the Indo-Canadian community in celebrating India's 67th Republic Day at the Indian mission here.

During her trade mission to India starting from January 27, the premier of Ontario -- biggest and most powerful province of Canada and home to over half a million Indo-Canadian community -- will visit New Delhi, Chandigarh, Hyderabad and Mumbai.

The provincial premier in Canada is equal to the state chief minister in India.

Greeting India and the Indo-Canadian community on Republic Day, Wynne said during her trade mission she is expected to sign major bilateral agreements in the areas of clean technology and infrastructure.

"During my trade mission, I will travel to New Delhi, Chandigarh, Hyderabad and Mumbai where I will meet with government officials, business leaders and investors and promote Ontario's innovative infrastructure and clean tech sectors," Wynne said.

"This is my first trade mission to India, and I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to taking in some of India's rich cultural history and growing Ontario's partnership with India," the Ontario premier said.

She credited the huge Indo-Canadian community with fostering Canada's strong relationship with India.

"Ontario boasts the largest Indo-Canadian population in all of Canada, and it's because of these strong ties -- the personal connections we have -- that in 1987 we were the first subnational government to open a trade office in India."

"In those 29 years, we have grown our partnerships with both the government and business, creating jobs and growth on both sides of the Pacific, and we have unlocked new opportunities."

Waynne said her trip to India will be "a turning point -- a chance to build on the foundation, and create an even stronger relationship between Ontario and India -- where our expertise and our goods can support India's growth."

"...I want to thank everyone here today (Tuesday) -- for being part of the dynamic Indo-Canadian community for establishing those irreplaceable person-to-person connections between India and Ontario, and for building a province where we find strength in our diversity."

She said even though Canada has become one of the most multicultural and diverse countries in the world, the country and the world have a lot to learn from India about diversity.

Waynne quoted Gandhi, "Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization."

She said: "We are building a province that reaches for this unity by embracing our diversity and finding strength in the many communities that make up one Ontario. And it's in this same vein of unity and fairness that we celebrate India's Republic Day today (Tuesday)."

Waynne said: "Sixty-six years ago today (January 26) the Constitution of India came into force -- signalling a new era for the entire country. It was a moment of great triumph and celebration for India, and our annual recognition serves as reminder to strive for Gandhi's message of unity through diversity and thriving together in harmony."

"I will carry this powerful message with me when I visit the Rajghat close to the anniversary of Gandhi's death."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday took strong exception at complaints and grievances from people related to the customs and excise sector and asked for strict action against concerned officials.

Modi, who chaired his ninth interaction through PRAGATI - Pro-Active Governance And Timely Implementation - urged all secretaries whose departments have extensive public dealing, to set up a system for top-level monitoring of grievances immediately.

Later in the day, Modi held a meeting of his council of ministers to review progress on schemes related to some ministries and laid thrust on faster delivery of government initiatives.

According to the sources, the meeting reviewed schemes and government initiatives related to ministries such as agriculture, chemical and fertilizer and water resources.

Such meetings were likely to be held every month, added the sources.

The meeting with to review implementation of schemes came a day after the government completed 20 months in office.

The coming year was crucial for the government as it will be completing half of its term.

The opposition has accused the government of being high on promises and low on delivery.

It has also slammed the government over rise in prices of some food items such as pulses.

BJP leaders have dismissed the allegations of the opposition and said that the slew of initiatives government were already showing impact and will show greater results in the coming days.

In his interaction through PRAGATI, Modi reviewed the progress of vital infrastructure projects in road, railway, coal, power and renewable energy sectors spread over several states including Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan.

An official release concerning the PRAGATI said that among the projects reviewed were the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Jal Marg Vikas Project from Allahabad to Haldia.

Modi also reviewed the progress of the Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY).

He reviewed implementation of the National Old Age Pension Scheme and emphasized the need to ensure that beneficiaries receive the payment on time.
I spend a lot of time in The Gazette photo archives, searching for pictures that might be interesting to readers and fans of Billings and Montana history. Though much of what I find might interest only a small number of readers, every so often I come across a photo or set of photos with an interesting backstory that I think might appeal to a wider audience.

I was recently scanning some photos that our chief photographer, Larry Mayer, took during a visit to the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge in October 1985. I figured we could use the photos if we ever had a story about the history of the prison.

I knew there was some special feature story or package that these photographs accompanied in the paper, because it has always been rare for The Gazette to send photographers so far away for a story (Deer Lodge is 260 miles from Billings). But while I was looking at a photo from an envelope labeled, "Death Row Inmates," Mayer saw one and came over to my desk to see what I was working on.

"That's a great photo," Mayer said. He's a humble guy, so I knew he wasn't just praising his own work. What he meant was that the photo had historical significance.

The photo, which shows three men in prison clothes walking through a narrow corridor enclosed by chain link fence, does, indeed, have an interesting backstory. Or, rather, three of them.

The men in the photo, captured through the chain link fence, are Bernard Fitzpatrick, Dewey Coleman and Duncan McKenzie. All three were convicted in separate murder cases and sentenced to death.

At the time, Montana had not executed any prisoners since the 1943 hanging of Philip J. Coleman. It would be nearly a decade before the next execution.

The one who escaped from the jail

Bernard James Fitzpatrick was on death row for the kidnapping, robbery and murder of 18-year-old Monte Dyckman, a Hardin grocery store clerk, on April 5, 1975.

Fitzpatrick and his accomplices, Gary Radi, Travis Holliday, Paul Bad Horse Jr. and Edwin Bushman, were tried together. Radi, like Fitzpatrick, received a death sentence, and Holliday and Bad Horse were given 40-year sentences. Bushman was granted immunity in exchange for testimony against the other four.

In July 1977, nearly two years after the trial ended, the Montana Supreme Court determined that the state had erred in trying all five defendants together. The convictions were reversed, and the men were tried separately. Fitzpatrick, who was determined to have shot Dyckman, was the only one to receive a death sentence on retrial. Radi was acquitted in his second trial.

Fitzpatrick previously had spent a number of years in prison for various incidents. As a teenager, he was arrested in 1960 for the killing of a Pasco, Wash. man in Oregon. Fitzpatrick initially admitted to the charges before refusing to enter a plea. He was later acquitted.

Fitzpatrick was later charged with shooting his then-wife's ex-husband outside a Billings bar, and for shooting another man in the cheek outside the Western Cafe in 1971. He was also implicated in a burglary at a Billings pharmacy the same year, and was a suspect in several other killings and crimes in the area in the 1960s and 1970s.

During his prison stint in Montana, Fitzpatrick was charged with killing a fellow inmate, which added years to his existing sentence for the earlier shooting. However, the Montana Supreme Court vacated the sentence for the killing after determining that Fitzpatrick was wrongfully convicted. Fitzpatrick was released from prison shortly thereafter.

During his time in the Montana State Prison, guards claimed Fitzpatrick essentially ran the prison from the inside, exerting power over much of the inmate population. At one point, a handgun was found inside his cell.

While incarcerated, Fitzpatrick read a Gazette story about a Billings teenager who was in need of a kidney transplant. He offered to provide one of his kidneys, and suggested that officials transfer him to the Yellowstone County Jail, then located in an upper floor of the county courthouse, to carry out the procedure. The offer was declined.

After a number of appeals, Fitzpatrick had his death sentence commuted in 1989. He pleaded guilty to killing Monte Dyckman during his third trial for the crime. A death sentence was prohibited.

In March, 1990, Fitzpatrick was being temporarily held in the then-new Yellowstone County Detention Facility during his retrial, before he was scheduled to be transferred to a federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan. On March 30, 1990, he and six other inmates escaped from the jail by cutting a hole in the chain link fence of the jail's recreation yard.

Fitzpatrick and another escapee broke into Billings Senior High School and stole clothing and other items. The two were captured the following morning next to a house on O'Malley Drive. All of the other inmates were eventually captured.

Following the escape, Fitzpatrick was handed sentences for the escape and burglary, and an additional 200 years as a persistent felony offender.

It was not the first time Fitzpatrick escaped from a jail in Billings. While being held at the old Yellowstone County Jail on an assault conviction in August 1963, he walked away from the jail after he was entrusted with taking out the trash.

Fitzpatrick currently is held in a federal correctional institution in Sheridan, Ore.

The one who escaped from the gallows

On July 4, 1974, 21-year-old Peggy Lee Harstad went missing. Her car was found the next day, abandoned just a few miles from her home in Rosebud. Her purse was found in a culvert a few more miles away.

Harstad was driving between Rosebud and Harlowton when she offered a ride to two hitchhikers, later identified as Dewey Eugene Coleman and Robert Dennis Nank. Her body was discovered in late August on the north bank of the Yellowstone River near Forsyth.

Nank and Coleman were arrested in October 1974 in Boise. Nank confessed that he and Coleman had raped, beaten and drowned Harstad, while Coleman denied that he was involved. Both were charged with deliberate homicide, aggravated kidnapping and rape.

At the time, a conviction of aggravated kidnapping had a mandatory death sentence attached, but that law was repealed in 1977.

Nank entered a plea agreement, allowing him to have the kidnapping charges dropped, avoiding the death penalty, in exchange for testifying against Coleman. Coleman was convicted on all three counts, and was sentenced to 100 years for the homicide and 40 years for the rape charge. For the kidnapping, he received the mandatory death sentence.

Nank later escaped from the Nevada prison in which he was being held in 1981, along with three other convicted murderers. He had been transferred to the prison from Deer Lodge out of fear of retribution for testifying against Coleman.

Coleman appealed the sentence, and the Montana Supreme Court determined the mandatory death sentence to be unconstitutional. Coleman was again sentenced to death in 1978 under a new statute.

The execution was scheduled for late November of 1981. Though no executions had been carried out in Montana for more than 39 years, the primary means of execution was still hanging. However, Montana State Prison Warden Hank Risley had the prison's gallows removed, stating that he didn't want his institution to carry out executions.

Yellowstone County Sheriff Richard Shaffer took matters into his own hands, secretly constructing a gallows over a stairwell on the ninth floor of the Yellowstone County Courthouse.

Just days before the hanging was to take place, Coleman was granted a stay of execution. The gallows were dismantled. Shaffer is said to have taken the gallows when he left office, and they haven't been seen since.

Coleman later argued that his death sentence was handed down because he was black, and that Nank was given preferential treatment because he was white.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Coleman in 1988, commuting his death sentence to life imprisonment in 1989.

Coleman is eligible for parole this year, though his previous hearing with the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole in 2011 did not go in his favor. His inmate profile on the Montana Department of Corrections' Correctional Offender Network Search says that he is currently held at the Department of Corrections' Lewistown Infirmary.

The one who couldn't escape

The third man in the photo, Duncan Peder McKenzie Jr., was not as lucky as the other two in his attempts to avoid capital punishment.

McKenzie was convicted of the January 21, 1974, kidnapping, rape and strangling death of Conrad teacher Lana Harding. He received the same mandatory death sentence for aggravated kidnapping that Fitzpatrick and Coleman did. Just like those two men, Duncan McKenzie hoped to use the unconstitutional death sentence statute to argue that his sentence should be repealed.

Eight stays of execution were granted to McKenzie, which drew his time on death row out to more than two decades. Ironically, McKenzie argued for a ninth stay of execution by saying that his lengthy stay on death row had constituted cruel and unusual punishment on the part of the state.

The ninth stay was denied, and on May 10, 1995, McKenzie became the first inmate to be executed in Montana in nearly 52 years. He also was the first in Montana to be executed by lethal injection, and the first in U.S. history to spend more than 20 years on death row and not be exonerated, pardoned or have his sentence commuted.

Stories about the execution noted that one of McKenzie's last requests, which was granted, was to be allowed to listen to a Marty Robbins album while he received his injection. His last meal consisted of a steak, French fries, a salad, orange sherbet and a glass of milk.

More about the photo

According to Mayer, the photo was not planned. He and the reporter assigned to write the 1985 story that the photos were to accompany were on their way out of the prison when they saw the three men coming out of the maximum security area together.

The story was part of a Sunday Magazine package titled "Inside the Montana State Prison," which ran on Nov. 17, 1985.

Duncan McKenzie saw the article and wrote a letter to Mayer requesting three prints of the photo  one for each man. Mayer obliged.
A Manipur Police head constable who confessed he killed an unarmed former insurgent on the orders of a senior officer seems to have gone missing, informed sources said on Wednesday.

Thounaojam Herojit flew from Delhi on Wednesday afternoon. But he never came out of the airport, disappointing journalists waiting for him outside the main exit.

Officials confirmed that Herojit was on the plane but could not say where he had gone.

The development comes shortly after Home Minister Rajnath Singh promised action on Herojit's claim over the killing of the ex-insurgent, Chungkham Sanjit.

A former insurgent, Sanjit had given up militancy. He was allegedly trapped inside a chemist's shop on B.T. Road in Imphal, and a few minutes later his body was dragged out by security personnel.

Police told the media that he was killed in an exchange of fire. The CBI, which probed the case after public outcry, however accused Head Constable Herojit of killing Sanjit.

Herojit later said he committed the killing on the orders of a senior officer.

According to rights activists, there are 1,528 known cases of 'fake encounters' in Manipur since the beginning of the insurgency in the late 1970s.

The Supreme Court is looking into the alleged 'fake encounters'.

If cases of "missing persons" are taken into account, the number will be more, the activists say.
Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty received nominations in two categories at Motion Picture Sound Editors' 63rd annual Golden Reel Awards for the films Unfreedom and India's Daughter, both of which are banned in India.

Pookutty took to Twitter to acknowledge the nominations.

"Two nominations at #MPSE is a rare feat! I thank my crew and my fraternity for allowing me to grow and standing as the greatest support system," Pookutty tweeted.

He also dedicated his nominations to the victim of the brutal gangrape that took place in the moving bus in Delhi on December 16, 2012.

"I dedicate my nominations at the 63rd Golden Reel Award to the soul of Jyoti of Nirbhaya case, truly the #India'sDaughter," he wrote on Twitter.

Unfreedom, a film on homosexuality, was nominated in Feature Film - Foreign Film (Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue & ADR) categorgy. Directed by Raj Amit Kumar, the film was banned in India due to its bold scenes.

Leslee Udwin's controversial BBC documentary India's Daughter, which is also banned in India, received nomination in the Television - Short Form, Documentary category.

Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant and Star Wars: The Force Awakens lead the way on the film side with three nominations apiece. HBO's hit show Game of Thrones came out on top in the TV categories with a trio of mentions as well.

Winners will be announced on February 27.
Carving a niche for itself in the Connected India-2020 project, Railtel Corporation's broadband will reach 500,000 households through its Railwire network, providing a host of services at the block level in the next two years, a top railway official has said.

The Broadband Highway will involve a three-layer network -- state capitals to district headquarters, district to sub-divisional and then to gram panchayats -- which will be joined to the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN), executive director (East) of Railtel Corporation of India, told at a Global Communication Conclave here.

The Conclave, tenth in the series organised by the Public Relations Council of India (PRCI), conducted a knowledge forum with the theme "Digital Now -- What Next".

Pradeep Kumar said Railwire network architecture provides the answer for "What Next" as it will empower the people at village level with knowledge, skill development and core competencies. "This will lead to good governance and transparent, corruption-free governments."

Railtel's pan-India optic fibre network covers 4,400-plus railway stations across 44,300 km.

Railwire has also begun to tap the local cable operators, focussing on pure-play broadband and virtual private network services, content and application-driven network. "Our aim is to become a hub of local information and tool for rendering communication, infotainment, education, health and community services to the masses," Pradeep Kumar said.

In Eastern India, Railtel seeks to cover 36,000 gram panchayats and the broadband services include emails, online newspapers, online passport application, tele-medicine, examination results and net surfing for students with a minimum 2 Mbps speed.

The company's pilot projects at Panisagar and Girania in Tripura have aroused a lot of interest and enthusiasm, Pradeep Kumar said.

For the Railways itself, Railtel provides mission-critical services such as computerised passenger reservation and ticketing system.

West Bengal Women's Welfare and Child Development Minister Sashi Panja, who inaugurated the two-day conclave, focussed on communicators' role in ensuring the safety of women and children. In this context, she appreciated PRCI for setting up an internal compliance cell as the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act makes it mandatory for all organisations to have such cells.

Explaining the significance of the conclave theme, PRCI national president and veteran media professional B N Kumar said it was important for communication professionals to keep themselves updated with the latest technology trends to be able to meet ever-increasing challenges.

PRCI also focuses on skill development for communication professionals by expanding its operations and network not only across India but globally as well, he said.

PRCI chairman emeritus and chief mentor M B Jayaram said it was high time that the public relations (PR) professionals thought big, embraced emerging challenges and converted them into opportunities and moved towards a digital-first approach. The organisation will soon initiate collaborative programmes with various business and technology forums to help the professionals upgrade their skills.

PRCI, on the occasion, felicitated national achievers from among communication professionals with its coveted Chanakya awards, inducted senior practitioners into PR Hall of fame and presented a host of collateral awards at the conclave.

Ujjivan Financial Services won the Corporate Citizen award, while Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals was given the innovative leadership award. Dainik Bhaskar, Bhopal, was given the excellence in social leadership award while Business World fortnightly was adjudged the Magazine of the Year.
Actress Arthana Binu says her co-star Raj Tarun made working on forthcoming Telugu film "Seethamma Andalu Ramayya Sitralu", which releases in cinemas on Friday, an experience to remember for a long time.

"Working with Raj was so much fun. Even with three back-to-back hits, he stays grounded and is a pleasure to work with. He's extremely supportive and made the whole working experience memorable," Arthana told IANS.

Two best things to have happened to the debutante on this project are Raj Tarun and her role.

"I found a great friend in Raj, because rarely do you find genuinely good people in this line of work. Besides Raj, the best thing to have happened on this film would be my role," she said.

Calling the film a "sweet love story", she said she plays a character that'll appeal to audiences and critics alike.

"It's story that focuses on the importance of friendship and true love. It's a clean romantic entertainer with some family values," she said.

A Malayali by descent, Arthana was chosen for the project after a casting agent found her pictures on Facebook.

"Although I had my own reservations about debuting in an alien industry, I'm glad things worked out in my favour. I completed the film without any hassles. I thoroughly enjoyed working in this project. The people were so warm and very helpful," she said.

While offers continue to pour in for Arthana, she's not in a hurry to sign more films.

"I'm currently doing my final year of B.A. Journalism in Mass Communication and Video Production. My final semester exams are due in February. I don't want to sign any new projects until I'm through with my exams," she added.

Arthana also has a Malayalam project in her kitty.
Rome, Jan 27 (IANS/AKI) Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi will visit Iran in the next few months to strengthen bilateral economic relations, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said.

Rouhani made the remarks during a visit to Rome that has yielded billions of dollars in business deals.

"Italian PM @matteorenzi will travel to Iran in the coming months to boost economic ties," Rouhani said in a tweet.

Rouhani is on a four-day visit to Italy and France, where he looks to rebuild Iran's ties with the West after crippling economic sanctions and promote his country as a pillar of strength and stability in an increasingly fraught and fragmented region.

Meeting Rouhani on Monday at Rome's town hall, Renzi said: "The best is yet to come."

Some $20 billion of accords covering industries from natural gas to high-speed rail were signed after talks between Renzi and Rouhani.

Rouhani said Italy used to be Iran's biggest European trading partner, and "we are sure that a good collaboration between our two countries will happen again."

Renzi said Italy's small and medium-sized companies will also benefit from a new relationship that will extend beyond the oil and gas industries.

As much as $50 billion a year may flow into Iran following the landmark nuclear deal that ended international economic sanctions, Iran's central bank governor Valiollah Seif said last week.

Under last July's deal with world powers, Iran agreed to scale back its sensitive nuclear work.

--IANS/AKI

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Russia intends to build relationships with western countries on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, and it will no longer yield to external pressure, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said here.

"Our western colleagues sometimes say that there will be no more 'business as usual' with Russia, and I am convinced that this is true," Lavrov said during his annual press conference broadcast online on Tuesday, Xinhua reported.

"(Such statements by western countries) imply attempts to impose on us agreements that take into account primarily the interests of the European Union or the US, and to persuade us that they would not damage our interests. This story is over," the minister said.

Lavrov said that Russia was implementing structural reforms and substituting imports in order not to be dependent on "zigzags" in western politics.

Meanwhile, Moscow remains open and ready to cooperation with the West, but only on the basis of equality and all other principles of international law, he said.

Mentioning NATO's eastward expansion close to the Russian border and the establishment of the US's global missile defence system in Europe and Northeast Asia, the Russia's top diplomat said such "unconstructive and dangerous" policies are "short-sighted and destabilising."

Attempts to reverse this situation have been met with poor results, he added.

The minister also noted that a unipolar ideology can no longer dominate international politics.

"The world is leaving behind the epoch of the total domination of the West and is now in a long transition period to a more stable system, where there will be no single pole of domination," Lavrov said, adding that the emergence of a truly multi-polar world may take a "long and painful period as old customs take a long time to fade away."

With regard to Russia's relations with China, he considered it a model of international cooperation.

"It is in fact the best in the history of relations between our countries and our peoples ... There is no other country with which we have such an extensive network of cooperation mechanisms," Lavrov said, hailing the ties as "systemic" and having led to "impressive results".
The Supreme Court can exercise its power of convening an assembly session when the house is kept under suspended animation, former Rajya Sabha secretary general Yogendra Narain said on Wednesday.

Narian was reacting to the union cabinet's recommendation to imposed president's rule in Arunachal Pradesh, that President Pranab Mukherjee approved on Tuesday.

"The Supreme Court has the power to convene the assembly session which is kept in suspended animation. It has been done earlier in the case of Kalyan Singh and Jagdambika Pal in Uttar Pradesh," Narian told journalists on the sidelines of his lecture on "Participatory Democracy".

"In this case too (Arunachal Pradesh), I am hoping that the Supreme Court will fix the date for convening of the assembly and would not leave to the governor to decide on convening of assembly session since the Centre did not dissolve the assembly but kept it in suspended animation," he said.

On President's rule in the frontier state bordering China, Narian said: "The Arunachal Pradesh government had violated the constitutional provision for not holding an assembly session within six months as mandated in the Constitution. Therefore, the only way was President's Rule but the case is now before the Supreme Court."

Reacting to the impeachment of assembly Speaker Nabam Rebia outside the assembly by voice vote and signed consent of 33 members, including 20 of the Congress, 11 of the BJP and two Independents, he said: "There are two issues -- first, whether the speaker was right in dismissing the 14 Congress legislators and second, whether the sitting presided over by the deputy speaker in the Community Hall was valid or not.

"Once the Supreme Court decides on these two issues, the convening of the assembly session will be automatic."

"If the Supreme Court upholds that the speaker was rightly removed, then the deputy speaker (T. Norbu Thongdok) will preside over the session.

"If the Supreme Court decides that his (Rebia's) removal was illegal, then the speaker will preside. Let us wait for the Supreme Court decision on the dismissal of the speaker," he said.
The Delhi High Court on Wednesday commuted to life term the death sentence handed down to serial killer Chandrakant Jha.

A division bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice R.K. Gauba commuted the death penalty, saying there was no eyewitness in the case but held that the imprisonment would be for entire life without remission.

"In the present case, there is no eyewitness and the prosecution has relied upon circumstantial evidence which, we have held, has been proved beyond reasonable doubt," the court said.

"We would convert the death sentence to life imprisonment (or) imprisonment for entire life without remission without affecting the power under articles 72 and 161 of the constitution. This would be appropriate and proportional sentence. We order accordingly."

Jha, from Madhepura in Bihar, was sentenced to death in 2013 in two cases and to life imprisonment in one.

Jha murdered Anil Mandal in 2006, 19-year-old Upender and another person referred to as Dalip, both in 2007.

According to police, in order to conceal the identity of his victims and to destroy evidence, Jha threw the heads and other body parts at various places in Delhi and dumped the bodies outside the Tihar Jail here.

The prosecution said he used to challenge the police to nab him by sending them letters threatening he would send "similar gifts" (bodies) after every 15 days.

Jha was caught on May 20, 2007, near Mianwali Nagar here.
At least six people drowned on Wednesday off the shores of Kos island when a boat transferring refugees and migrants from Turkey to Greece sank in a choppy sea, the Greek Coast Guard said.

Greek authorities were alerted by a survivor who made it to the island's shore in the Aegean Sea. He said there were at least ten people aboard the small boat, Xinhua reported.

The bodies of three men, two women and a toddler, were recovered so far while a rescue operation was underway to locate more survivors.

It was the second tragedy in the Aegean Sea in less than a week after 45 bodies were found on Friday.

Over 45,000 refugees and migrants have crossed over from Turkey to the Greek islands since the start of 2016, according to the International Migration Organisation (IMO). More than 60 refugees and migrants have perished in the Greek waters so far.

The statistics confirm the desperation by many to flee war and risk their lives to reach Europe regardless of newly built fences, border controls and rough seas.

In 2015 over 800,000 refugees and migrants landed on the Greek islands in old boats provided by smugglers on the other side of the Aegean. More than 3,500 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea the same year.
A section of students of Jadavpur University boycotted classes here on Wednesday in protest against the suicide of Hyderabad Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula.

The protesting students said they have also expressed solidarity with Deborshi Chakraborty, a research scholar and a former student of Presidency University who began a hunger strike on Friday, demanding the resignation of union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya in connection with the suicide.

Chakraborty has been sitting in protest at a make-shift shelter outside the Jadavpur campus.

"We are supporting his protest," a student said.

On Tuesday, a rally in the city by the ultra-left United Students' Democratic Front (USDF) protesting over Vemula's suicide turned violent.

Widespread protests have rocked India following the death of Vemula, who committed suicide on January 17 following his suspension along with four other Dalit students over an alleged clash with a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

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When describing the kind of Montana governor he would be, Greg Gianforte often turns to anecdotes about how, without any outside capital, he and his wife grew a software startup out of his Bozeman basement into a company that sold for $1.8 billion in 2012.

To supporters, it shows that the Republican, although a political newcomer, has the skills to boost Montanas economy and would act to get government out of the way of business.

We have prospered in Montana, said Gianforte, whose tax returns over 10 years show about $220 million total income. And thats the issue Montana has. We need more prosperity. Im an advocate for prosperity.

Democrats, however, target Gianfortes wealth as a reason for concern.

"Montana has not seen a candidate like Greg Gianforte since the days of copper kings, said Eric Hyers, campaign manager for Gov. Steve Bullock, the incumbent Democrat. His taxes and donations raise all sorts of questions about his real agenda, and Montanans deserve answers.

It has been more than a century since rival copper industrialists Williams Clark, Marcus Daly and Augustus Heinze wielded their fortunes to control Montana newspapers and to shape elections, but the extent of their influence  marked by the copper patina of the state Capitols dome  ultimately led Montanans to enact through initiative one of the nations first and strongest campaign finance laws.

Money race

The 2016 gubernatorial race  featuring Bullock and Republicans Gianforte and former secretary of state Brad Johnson  bears little resemblance to the decadeslong feud between Clark, Daly and Heinze, who each spent the modern equivalent of billions to outmaneuver each other in politics and business. Yet the influence of money in elections is again at the forefront of national political dialogue and is likely to be a persistent topic of debate as Bullock, Gianforte and Johnson campaign.

Last week, Gianforte said he would not accept contributions from special-interest political action committees and wrote a letter to Bullock challenging him to take the same pledge.

Political action committees first formed in 1944 to collect voluntary donations from union members to get around federal rules banning contributions from union treasuries.

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Courts ruling in Citizens United removed limits on how much corporations and unions could spend in elections. And after another 2010 court ruling, a variation of the committees emerged, nicknamed Super PACs. They do not donate to campaigns and cannot coordinate with them, but can gather unlimited contributions to make independent expenditures to aid candidates or causes. All political action committees are subject to federal disclosure rules about who contributed and how much.

Out of the light

But theres a loophole.

Many wealthy political influencers also have created one of two types of nonprofit foundations  501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6)  that do not have to disclose their donors, which then contribute nearly all of those collections to Super PACs so it is difficult or impossible to tell the original source of the dark money.

Nonprofits of the most familiar kind, 501(c)(3), are not allowed to engage in partisan politics with funding or through endorsements.

This web of disclosure rules and the sometimes hidden flows of funding have already become part of Montanas gubernatorial bids.

Not in the market for PAC money

While Gianforte supporters cheered when he announced his promise not to accept contributions from political action committees, analysts say that likely wont hurt his campaign.

It comes off as a gimmick, said University of Montana political science professor Robert Saldin. Hes trying to assert and take some moral high ground, but hes put absolutely nothing at risk. Because of his wealth, hes able to self-finance his campaign.

Hyers and leaders of the Montana Democratic Party said Bullock wouldnt dignify Gianfortes no-PAC pledge with consideration until he made a promise of real consequence, such as limiting personal support of his campaign to the maximum combined primary and general election contribution limit of $1,300 for all individual donors.

Gianforte said in a Friday interview with the Gazette State Bureau that he was disappointed the governor did not appear interested in accepting his no-PAC pledge.

Hes dependent on special-interest money, and I think Montanans are sick of it, he said.

According to two finance disclosure reports filed between July and the end of 2015, Bullocks campaign received $499,821 in donations, including $22,847 from 27 PACs. Johnsons campaign reported $1,357 in contributions, all from individuals.

Over the same time period, disclosure forms from Gianfortes campaign reported $384,448 in contributions, none from political action committees. Of that, $12,814 were in-kind contributions from Gianforte himself.

Gianforte defended the likelihood that he would additionally support his own campaign.

Were committing our time. Were also committing our reputation and we will contribute resources, he said. We havent made a decision as to what that is, but were all in because we love Montana and we want to see better outcomes for it.

As proof of his interest in serving the state, Gianforte pointed to the $113.9 million he said the Gianforte Family Foundation has donated since 2005 to charitable causes.

The biggest recipients listed on the Foundation's 2013 tax filing, the most recent available, were the Rafiki Foundation of Eustis, Fla., $1,633,994; ACE Scholarships of Denver, $1,588,878; Petra Academy of Bozeman, $570,602; and Grace Bible Church of Bozeman, $231,400.

Donations from the foundation that year totaled $6,014,234 to a total of 81 organizations. Donations as small as $100 went to Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., and Ronald McDonald House Charities in Oak Brook, Ill., among others.

Retired political science professor James Lopach said parallels might be drawn to the presidential bid of Donald Trump and the resulting retorts that wealthy candidates already share the sentiments of wealthy would-be donors even if they dont solicit their contributions.

Saldin said Gianforte likely will continue to collect individual contributions, at least because they often are used by political analysts to gauge whether the candidate has credible voter support.

Citizens United foe

As attorney general, Bullock gained national attention for leading the fight against the implementation of the Citizens United decision, which unraveled parts of the states longstanding campaign finance law that banned corporate contributions. Last year, he championed a bill through the Legislature that required 501(c)(4) dark money groups to disclose their donors.

Democratic operatives have criticized Gianforte, noting that he has donated to groups that opposed the bill, including the 501(c)(3) Montana Policy Institute ($10,000 in 2013). He also donated to the Montana Family Institute, ($155,000 in 2013), the 501(c)(3) arm of the Montana Family Foundation, which testified against the bill.

The groups said the bill could have a chilling effect on free speech and worried it gave too much authority to the commissioner of political practices, a political appointee, to draft rules.

On Friday, Gianforte declined to say whether he supported the Disclose Act, noting he was not in a position where he had to make a decision.

When asked if he encouraged the groups he funded to oppose the bill, or if that had been part of his reason for donating to them, he twice said, I am in favor of transparent elections.
Tension prevailed in Bihar's Hajipur town on Wednesday, a day after police demolished a temple as part of an anti-encroachment drive on the order of the Patna High Court.

At least ten police officials were injured and a few vehicles torched in the protest by people, police said.

Additional security forces have been deployed in the town, about 30 km from here, in view of tension following violent protests by the locals.

According to police officials, the locals attacked a police team and pelted stones at them during the demolition.
Security forces on Wednesday shot dead three Maoists who carried rewards for their capture in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district.

A 12-member team of security personnel was sent to check the presence of Maoists after a tip off, Bastar's Inspector General of Police S.R.P. Kalluri told IANS.

But the team was ambushed between Lakhapal and Tarempara villages. The security forces retaliated. Later, bodies of the three "hardcore Maoists" were found. The other rebels fled.

Police seized a huge amount of explosives and ammunition from the site. One of the Maoists was identified as Bal Singh.
Tibet welcomed a record 20 million tourists in 2015, according to sources at the region's "two sessions", the meetings of the local legislature and political advisory body running from Tuesday to Sunday.

This generated 28 billion yuan ($4.26 billion) in tourism revenue, nearly three times the figure in 2010, Xinhua reported.

Tibet held a number of festivals targeting tourists in 2015 and marketed new themed travel packages.

Regional capital Lhasa saw its tourism revenue more than triple over the past five years to an estimated 15.49 billion yuan in 2015.

The number of tourists visiting the city rose by a yearly average of 23.32 percent in the period to 11.79 million in 2015.
Union minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday accused West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress of indulging in vote bank politics over the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad and flayed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for remaining a "silent spectator" to atrocities on women.

"Trinamool leader Derek O'Brien had gone to Hyderabad to demand justice for the Dalit student. I want to ask him... in Nadia, a Trinamool leader had murdered three Dalits inside their home in May 2015... why didn't O'Brien visit their families?" said the minister for human resource development.

"Because for him, vote bank 'tamasha' in Hyderabad is more important than securing justice in Nadia," she said at a public rally organised by the BJP in Burdwan district's Durgapur, around 165 km from Kolkata.

Widespread protests have rocked India following the death of Vemula, who committed suicide on January 17 after his suspension along with four other Dalit students from Hyderabad University over an alleged clash with a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

Last week, a two-member Trinamool parliamentary delegation, led by its leader in the Rajya Sabha O'Brien, spent a long time at the university campus and addressed the students demanding justice for Vemula.

Irani also slammed the Mamata Banerjee government on recent incidents of violence in the state.

"In Malda, a police station was burnt. Police watched the tamasha and Mamata did not say a word. Nobody said anything when the constitutional laws were being torn apart," she said, and also mentioned the sensational hit-and-run case in which an Indian Air Force corporal was mowed down in Kolkata.

Launching a scathing attack on the state government, she raised the issue of crimes against women.

"This assembly poll is not just a political fight but a fight for every brother who has seen his sister being sacrificed in the face of Trinamool's bad conduct. This is a fight for every sister when her modesty was outraged, the Trinamool was silently watching the show," she said, referring to the killing of 16-year-old student Rajib Das in Bengal's Barasat while trying to protect his sister from getting molested by drunken goons four years ago.

Mocking Banerjee's pet slogan of 'Maa, Maati, Manush' (Mother, Land and People), Irani said: "Nor did it (Trinamool) respect Maa, nor did it make the 'maati' productive nor did it manage to save its people."

On the chief minister announcing compensation to victims of violence against women, Irani pulled up the Trinamool supremo for "watching in silence as women's modesty was outraged".

"When a sister is molested, Trinamool puts a price on her modesty... Rs.20,000 to Rs.30,000 ki baat karte hain."

"Ask a woman that if the Bengal government puts a price on you, then is it not your insult?"

Irani also questioned the Trinamool's promise of 'parivartan' (change in English).

"I want to ask how many daughters will the Trinamool government sacrifice and how much blood will it shed on the land (maati) on which it vowed to bring about a change.

She charged Trinamool with preventing an immersion in Bengal's Nadia district during the Durga puja for "appeasement", and exhorted her party workers in the district to "teach them a lesson".

Amid assertions that "Trinamool has no right to come to power again", Irani also dredged up the issue of illegal sand mining in Durgapur.

"If I ask anyone in Durgapur what is their biggest problem? They say illegal mining, mafia but the state government hasn't done anything. You are encouraging the mafia instead of stopping it," she alleged.
Two students were killed and six others injured on Wednesday in Gonda in Uttar Pradesh when their school bus overturned, police said.

The injured were being treated at a local medical facility, and the condition of three is said to be serious, a police official said.

"The bus driver has been arrested for rash-driving and overspeeding and we have informed the families and school management," the official said.

The bodies have been sent for post-mortem examination.
US forces executed an airdrop operation on Tuesday in Iraq's province of Salahudin against Islamic State militants, security sources told Xinhua.

The pre-dawn operation involved a number of US helicopters dropping troops by a building in a village in Tikrit, where forces then captured several IS militants after an hour of sporadic combat, said a source from the provincial operations command on condition of anonymity.

The source said that both the provincial command and military units stationed in the Speicher major airbase, 5 km east of the targeted village, were briefed by Iraq's military command about the operation to avoid potential misguided action.

It is not yet known whether the US troops carried out the operation independently or they were aided by the Iraqis, the source said.

The source has no further information regarding any human casualties.

Another source from the Speicher airbase confirmed to Xinhua that they were briefed about the airdrop operation, and said the operation occurred as IS militants attacked Iraqi security forces' posts from the north to the south of Tikrit.

Earlier, Iraqi and Kurdish sources claimed that in recent weeks US and Iraqi troops jointly conducted several attacks behind IS lines in and around the town of Hawija, however both militaries denied the claim.

Iraq's security status has deteriorated drastically since June 2014, when bloody clashes erupted between security forces and IS militants.
A team of US researchers has documented for the first time the disease trajectory of Zika virus that started with nine positive patients and has now spread to more than 13,000 infected individuals in Colombia.

In October last year, a team at University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and Universidad de Sucre in Colombia ran the first tests confirming the presence of Zika virus transmission in the South American country.

"Colombia is now only second to Brazil in the number of known Zika infections," said study lead author Matthew Aliota, research scientist in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM).

His research on Zika virus shows that the virus has split into two distinct lineages -- African and Asian. The Colombia strain of the virus can be tracked to Brazil, which can be traced to a strain that originated in French Polynesia.

"There is certainly something different about these viruses that have allowed or facilitated this geographic expansion," Aliota added in a paper published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Zika virus, which spreads among humans via mosquitoes, causes illness characterised like many other viral infections by fever, rash and joint pain.

Officials estimate that four out of five people who contract the virus do not get sick and the virus is rarely fatal.

However, pregnant women in Brazil infected with Zika have given birth to babies with small heads and underdeveloped brains, a condition called microcephaly.

"If you are pregnant or planning on being pregnant, absolutely, cancel your vacation," Aliota added, echoing the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning that pregnant women not travel to the more than 20 countries now known to have active Zika transmission, like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and in the Caribbean.

In these countries, mosquitoes are spreading the virus to people.

The symptoms of Zika virus are "really nonspecific and it overlaps with a lot of things, especially with dengue virus and chikungunya", Aliota noted.

"It's hard when someone comes in with a fever and a rash to narrow it down," he added.

Zika virus was first found in Uganda in 1947 but remained limited to Africa and Southeast Asia for decades. But in 2007, an outbreak occurred in the Pacific Islands and recently the virus began to spread in the Western Hemisphere.

The team is now looking for ways to control it. As members of the "Eliminate Dengue" programme, an international effort managed by Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, they have explored how a bacterium that infects 60 percent of insects around the world may be used as a tool to combat the spread of dengue and similar mosquito-borne viruses.

Zika, dengue and chikungunya (which are also found in Colombia) are RNA viruses, which refers to how they encode their genetic material, and each is transmitted by a specific mosquito called Aedes aegypti.

The mosquito is common in Colombia and other countries where Zika has become prevalent.
United States Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday reaffirmed the three Sino-US joint communiques and one-China policy during his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The US reaffirms the three communiques as the foundation of our policy, maintains the one-China policy and encourages cross-strait dialogue, Xinhua cited Kerry as saying.

The three communiques, signed in 1972, 1978 and 1982, laid down the basic principles for the two countries' relations. In them, the US government promised to support the one-China principle and not to support "Taiwan independence".

Taiwan is the core issue in China-US relations and the US should abide by the one-China policy, Wang Yi said.

"No matter what changes occur in Taiwan, the basic fact that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China is unchanged and will not change," Wang said.

Sticking to the 1992 Consensus and opposing "Taiwan independence" is an important prerequisite and political basis for peaceful development of cross-Strait relations, Wang said.

He urged the US to support the peaceful development of cross-Strait ties with concrete actions.

Kerry is on a two-day visit to Beijing from Tuesday to Wednesday at Wang's invitation.
China has urged the US to uphold the One China policy and handle the Taiwan issue carefully, an official said on Wednesday.

Ma Xiaogaung, a spokesperson for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office (SCTAO), reiterated the points made by SCTAO head Zhang Zhijun during a meeting with visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 21, Xinhua reported.

Zhang told Blinken that cross-strait peace and stability is facing challenges and uncertainties due to the current changes on the island, according to Ma.

The US should stick to the one China policy and the principles laid out in the three Sino-US joint communiques, respect the major concerns of the country and properly handle issues relating to Taiwan, Ma quoted Zhang as saying.

Zhang also told Blinken that the Taiwan policy has been consistent and clear and will not be changed by the result of the election on the island.

Tsai Ing-wen, chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was elected the island's leader on January 16.

Zhang said peaceful development of cross-Strait relations, that the two sides have achieved by adhering to the 1992 Consensus and opposition to Taiwan independence over the years, should be cherished.

"We will continue to stick to 1992 Consensus, oppose Taiwan independence activities in any form and firmly safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Ma also said the supporters of Taiwan independence will find no room across the world.

It is not realistic for Taiwan to sever economic cooperation with the mainland to expand its so-called "international cooperation space" and "such a thinking goes against the international community observing One China policy," said Ma.
Resul Pookutty has scored two nominations at the Motion Picture Sound Editors' 63rd annual Golden Reel Awards this year for "Unfreedom" and "India's Daughter" - films which have been banned in India. The Oscar-winning sound designer says the recognition outside India tells that "we have to keep our mind open as artists".

"Unfreedom", a film on homosexuality, was nominated in Feature Film - Foreign Film (Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR) category. Directed by Raj Amit Kumar, the film was banned in India due to its bold scenes.

Leslee Udwin's controversial BBC documentary "India's Daughter" received the nomination in the Television - Short Form, Documentary category. The documentary was about the gang-rape of 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist Jyoti, who was brutally assaulted on December 16, 2012 in a moving bus in Delhi.

Having won an Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire" in 2009, Pookutty feels that "Work that spoke through the heart, is being recognised by the people."

"The recognition outside India simply tells us that we have to keep our mind open as artists. I am getting messages from all over the world that we have not seen this work in India but its being recognised outside. That is something that our policy makers need to think about," Pookutty told IANS over the phone from Mumbai.

Dedicating his nomination to Jyoti, Pookutty said that her parents have behaved more wisely than the most educated people in the country.

"For me, to be able to work in a film that depicts her (Jyoti) story was a responsibility. Today that work has been recognised at the world's highest platform. I definitely want to dedicate it to her (Jyoti) and her parents. I think they have behaved far more wisely than the most educated in this country," said the 44-year-old.

Sharing his sentiments over the nominations, Pookutty, who has also worked on films like "Black" and "Everybody Says I'm Fine!", said that he hopes to win at least one award and that will give a huge boost to Indian sound professionals.

"I am surely hoping to win at least one. It will be a huge boost for Indian sound professionals because this is not a small nomination... It is judged by some of the top professionals in the world after all. The nomination itself is very huge that we be nominated to this level, itself is a huge recognition. So winning will be a bonus," he concluded.

Winners of Motion Picture Sound Editors' 63rd annual Golden Reel Awards will be announced on February 27.
The School District 2 redistricting committee narrowed new high school boundary proposals Tuesday, striking the sole remaining option that would have allowed Lockwood students to choose between Senior and Skyview high schools.

Recommendations will be delivered to SD2 trustees, who have final approval for any new boundaries. The trustees can change or reject plans.

The option has been a major point of contention throughout the redistricting process and sparked several heated exchanges. But other issues emerged, including an open meetings controversy, and public comment yielded more diverse input.

Residents advocated for areas in Blue Creek, near the planned Ben Steele Middle School, in North Park neighborhoods and for Native American students, as well as Lockwood. More than 50 people attended the meeting, in addition to the 28-person redistricting committee.

SD2 hired a consulting firm led by Matt Cropper to create the recommendations.

The committee decided that keeping the Lockwood option ultimately created too many ripple effects for other areas, but Lockwood advocates argued that most students were unfairly assigned to Skyview in the remaining plans.

This should have been an SD2 board decision, not a board or a committee that they can hide behind, said committee member Jen Wagner, a Lockwood resident who has pushed for keeping the two-school option.

She also criticized committee members for having backs turned during public comment at meetings. Public seating is located behind forward-facing committee members at the Lincoln Center Boardroom.

Its clear tonight that certain people had their mind made up before the meeting, she said.

Several members protested, including Andy Wildenberg, who has stayed late after several meetings to discuss map options with community members.

Im very sorry that anybody from Lockwood felt that Im not paying attention to them, he said, adding that he took personal offense to the notion that he doesnt care about Lockwood students or made predetermined decisions.

Others maintained that if most Lockwood students attended Senior, it would force other neighborhoods that were much closer to Senior to attend Skyview. Russ Hall said that remaining plans could mean that his children attend different high schools at the same time.

That will suck, he said. I will support that if thats what we need to do. This isnt about the Hall family.

Eileen Johnson Middle School Principal Gordon Klasna abruptly decided to join the public comment as several people argued that their children should be able to attend Senior instead of Skyview. So far, hes offered little comment throughout the process. He also represents Lockwood as an SD2 high school district trustee.

Im taking that hat off, he said, launching into a passionate defense of Skyview and Principal Deb Black, who attended the meeting.

I have never ever heard any bad things about Skyview, he said. What I hear is just (transportation) accessibility.

Typically, about 75 percent of Lockwood students attend Senior and 25 percent attend Skyview.

The comment period was emotional; residents advocating for several areas shed tears. It was also contentious.

After Cropper announced that public comment would be limited to three minutes, Lockwood Trustee Don Reed prefaced comments by saying, Im going to take all the time I want, and fired back at protests from other crowd members who said it interfered with their ability to comment.

In criticizing state funding and arguing that more facilities would ease redistricting issues, he described tension between Lockwood and SD2 as two cats in a gunny sack. The real problem  is the S.O.B. that put them there.

Public meetings

Committee member Connie Wardell took issue with an exercise to poll committee members about which map option they felt was weakest. People would tally their votes on the backside of a wheeled white board, shielded from public view. Because the process wasnt publicly visible, Wardell said it violated Montana open meetings law.

The committee consists of volunteers who were selected by Cropper, who was hired by SD2. Montana open meetings law requires committees who were appointed by a public body to obey open meetings laws. Initially, Cropper said the shielded vote was legal, and feisty debate ensued.

SD2 officials contacted Jeff Weldon, the districts attorney, who said that the committee is subject to open meetings laws because they were assembled by the school board. Before contacting Weldon, officials were in favor of allowing the exercise to remain shielded. Several committee members elected not to record tallies once the exercise was made visible.

The committee conducted a similar exercise at a previous meeting before narrowing options from eight to four. From the crowd, Lockwood Superintendent Tobin Novasio protested that the committee should have to put those eight options back on the table. After the meeting, he said the Lockwood school district wasnt likely to bring a legal challenge to the process, but said that he felt like parents had the legal standing to do so.

The remaining two

The committee reviewed results of an online public survey taken by 368 people asking if respondents approved, liked, felt neutral, disliked or opposed a plan option.

Option A, which the committee kept, was most popular. It splits West High and Senior boundaries along a mostly east-west divide, while most Lockwood students attend Skyview.

Option D, which maintained Lockwoods school choice, received the second-most support. Option B, also kept by the committee, received the third-most support. Option C, the most unpopular, was also thrown out.

Much of the opposition to option B was generated by respondents angry that about 9 percent of projected Ben Steele students would have attended Senior, while the rest of the school would go to West. The committee recommended that Cropper amend the map to include all Ben Steele students and move Blue Creek students into Seniors boundaries. Cropper noted that he would still have to juggle a remaining 30 students.

You start chasing your tail on some of this stuff, he said. Everythings a trade-off.

The committee meets again on Feb. 9 to finalize its recommendation, then presents it to school trustees at the boards March 21 meeting.
In my earlier columns ("The Travails of 'Europe'", June and July 2015), I had argued that "Europe" - the idea of a United States of Europe - was in trouble because of the tensions created by its absorbing the east European countries of the former Soviet Union and the design defaults of the euro. These troubles have multiplied with the opening of European borders by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to refugees from war-torn Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa.
A highlight of French President Francois Hollande's India visit was the signing of a government-to-government agreement on the purchase of two squadrons of the Rafale multi-role fighter aircraft. But continuing price negotiations, already protracted, stand in the way of a formal contract. It bears recalling that the Rafale offer from Dassault was chosen over rival bids exactly four years ago, in January 2012. That was to have been a contract for 126 aircraft, of which the first 18 were to have been handed over by 2015, with the rest being assembled or made locally. Instead, the rapidly rising cost of the aircraft (deliberately under-stated by Dassault) forced the government last year to cancel the deal as unaffordable, and to decide on buying just two squadrons, without any condition for local assembly or manufacture. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that the new, restricted deal would be concluded in about three months; but negotiations continue even after nine months. The cost, meanwhile, has ballooned to an astronomical $250 million per plane (about Rs 1,700 crore). That is equivalent to the cost of perhaps three or four heavier Su-MK30 planes from Russia, and about 10 of the home-made Tejas light combat aircraft (quoted price: Rs 162 crore). In truth, therefore, the Rafale continues to be unaffordable. The implication of buying a very expensive aircraft is that it will eat up a good chunk of the defence acquisition budget, leaving less money for other badly-needed equipment-for all the forces.
In India, few good things can survive a decade of explosive growth. Restaurants lose focus, columnists begin to repeat themselves, companies stop innovating. But, to one's continual surprise, the Jaipur Literature Festival seems to be an exception to this otherwise firm rule. Early every January, people murmur to each other that this will be the year that Diggi Palace is finally swamped; and, every year, the JLF's organisers and their army of bright-eyed young volunteers somehow manage to fit ever more readers, writers, selfie-takers and chai-drinkers within the antique haveli's colourful, frescoed walls. Every fall, people read the programme and say-well, the next JLF doesn't look quite as exciting, does it? Nothing stands out, right? And, every winter, they return from the festival saying that, as it turns out, the panels and programming worked even better than before.
With veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan roped in as brand ambassador for Incredible India, officials at Gujarat's tourism ministry are in a flap. The general feeling is that it would be impossible to find another actor of the stature of Bachchan to be the face of that state. So the ministry will continue with the 73-year-old actor's Khushbhoo Gujarat ki campaign for some more time. "We have shot new promotional films with Mr Bachchan at new tourist spots. Those films will be released soon," said a ministry official. In any case, there is no major conflict, believe some: "Not like being an ambassador for both Coke and Pepsi," as an industry insider put it.
Toyota Motor could make a handy tune-up with a buyout of Daihatsu Motor. The world's biggest carmaker is considering taking out minority shareholders in its $5.4-billion subsidiary, in what amounts to a sensible bit of house-keeping. A bolder follow-up would be to take control of affiliate Subaru.

Responding to a report in Japan's Nikkei newspaper, Toyota says it constantly ponders its relationship with Daihatsu, of which it owns slightly more than half. That includes thinking about partnerships or a restructuring leading to whole ownership.

A full buyout would be a long way from transformational for Toyota, whose own market value exceeds $190 billion. However, it would still eliminate inefficiencies. While Daihatsu's focus on mini-vehicles caps profitability, greater purchasing power and cutting overlaps would help Toyota lift the unit's nine per cent EBITDA margins closer to the group's 15-per -cent-odd level. Plus small cars, vital to any push deeper into emerging markets, are something of a weak spot at Toyota.

A deal would also eliminate one of the troublesome "parent-child" relationships between listed parent and majority-owned subsidiary that are too prevalent in Japan. Investors in the parent tend to worry they don't get all they might out of ownership; investors in the subsidiary fret that they can be short-changed in dealings between the two sides. Bringing the two together should in theory create value on both sides.

Moreover, a share swap would be a good way to soak up some of Toyota's huge store of treasury stock, which as of end-September was equivalent to nearly nine per cent of its outstanding shares.

Further out, Toyota could try some bolder dealmaking. On January 27 both it and Suzuki Motor roundly denied reports of a tie-up - no surprise given the fiercely independent Suzuki has just extricated itself from a failed alliance with Volkswagen, and competes head-on with Daihatsu in Japan's small "kei" car market.

A better option could be to buy Subaru from Fuji Heavy Industries. Toyota already owns 16.5 percent of Subaru, which has transformed itself into something approaching the Japanese Volvo: making rugged SUVs that sell well in North America. Not something you can say of Daihatsu's tiddlers.
With his government having completed 20 months in office on Wednesday, which is a third of its five-year tenure, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi told his council of ministers that he will hold a meeting with them on the last Wednesday of every month to take stock of the impact of government policies on the ground.

The PM met his entire 64-member council of ministers. The focus at Wednesdays meeting were ministries of agriculture, rural development, consumer affairs, food and public distribution, chemical and fertiliser and water resources. With a slew of Assembly elections on the anvil, particularly the crucial Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls in early 2017, and the Budget session of Parliament scheduled for end-February, the government is said to be keen to showcase its initiatives in the farm sector.

The PM expressed concern over the soaring prices of pulses. Modi spoke about long-term measures to increase production of pulses and proposal to create ample buffer stock of pulses through price support scheme and price-stabilisation fund. He also talked about the need to take measures against hoarding. The PM asked all ministers to do their homework on the government's schemes and policies so they are better able to communicate these to the public.

The focus on the farm sector could also help the Bharatiya Janata Party counter opposition propaganda that the Modi government is anti-farmer, particularly as it prepares for state polls in Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Assam by April 2016, and to Punjab and Uttar Pradesh polls by early 2017.

On Namami Gange, the PM said there was need for taking on board 'out of box' ideas to increase people's participation. He also reveiewed Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana and production subsidy to sugar mills and soft loans to sugar mills. Sources said the agrarian crisis in Bundelkhand was also discussed.

The dinner meeting came on the heels of meetings with senior bureaucrats, including one in the morning where Modi took strong exception to people's complaints and grievances related to the Customs and excise sector and directed strict action against the officials responsible.

The PMs holding end-of-the-month meetings will both be to bridge gaps in governments policies and programme implementation and remove delays due to inter-ministerial overlap. The meetings will also help the PM get feedback from his ministers about the obstacles they might be facing and whether the Prime Ministers Office could intervene to ease these. The ministries and departments would be encouraged to give presentations about their work.

The evening meeting with the ministers also took stock of the progress made on revival of three fertiliser plants  Sindri, Barauni, and Gorakhpuar  and setting up of an agriculture university in Bihar. Financial restructuring of Brahmaputra Valley Fertilizer Corporation Limited (BVFCL) and setting up of an ammonia urea complex on the premises of BVFCL Namrup were also discussed, along with fixation of nutrient-based subsidy rates for phosphatic and potassic fertilisers for 2015-16. Officials said some other issues that cropped up were corporatisation of Delhi Milk Scheme and state of Krishi Vigyan Kendras.

"The prime minister also gave a pep talk to secretaries and ministers on maintaining timeline for implementation of the cabinet decisions," sources said. According to sources, the PM emphasised there should not be any delay in moving fresh proposals for Cabinet approval and the timeline should be maintained for implementation after the nod.

Earlier in the day, the PM chaired the ninth meeting of Pragati (Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation), an information technology-based multi-modal platform under which he interacts with top officials of central departments and state governments via video conferencing. There he asked all secretaries to the government, whose departments have extensive public dealing, to set up a system for top-level monitoring of grievances immediately, a statement from the Prime Ministers Office said.

The PM reviewed the progress of vital infrastructure projects in the road, railway, coal, power and renewable energy sectors, spread over several states, including Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, the statement said.

Among the significant projects reviewed were the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Jal Marg Vikas Project from Allahabad to Haldia, it said. The Prime Minister also reviewed the progress of the Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY). He also took stock of the implementation of the National Old Age Pension Scheme and emphasised the need to ensure that beneficiaries receive the payment on time.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday restored the Congress' rule in and quashed all the orders given by the state's governor last year.





The apex court was hearing a petition on dealing with discretionary powers of the Governor to summon or advance Assembly sessions in the state. Governor JP Rajkhowa had in December advanced the Winter Session of the Assembly without consulting the then chief minister, Nabam Tuki.

Eventually, President Pranab Mukherjee gave his assent to the Union Cabinets recommendation to impose Presidents Rule in . The recommendation, made by the Cabinet after its January 24 meeting, was given the Presidents assent through a Proclamation under article 356(1) of the Constitution.

The sequence of events:

1) An October 4, 2015, report, published in a national daily, claimed that 37 Congress legislators, including six ministers, had joined hands to try and topple then Chief Minister Nabam Tuki. According to the report, the dissident group was believed to be headed by the states former finance minister Kalikho Pul, who was dropped as the states health minister and expelled from the Congress for six years in April last year amid allegations of financial mismanagement. The Congress Committee had dismissed the report.

2) Last November, troubles mounted for the Congress in Arunachal Pradesh as 21 MLAs, who were opposed to the leadership of Tuki, decided to skip a Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting to resolve the crisis in the state unit. Striking a blow to Tuki's legitimacy as the CLP leader, the 21 MLAs had said that "any meeting called under his leadership does not carry any substance and holds no water".

3) In December, Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa advanced the Assembly session from January 14, 2016, to December 16, 2015. Rajkhowa took the decision without consulting Tuki. The governor had also directed the House to consider a motion to replace the Speaker. Speaking on the matter, Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said, "It is a matter of regret that unconstitutional actions are being taken by the Arunachal Pradesh governor on the directions of the central government."

4) On December 16, 20 dissident MLAs from the Congress, along with 11 from the BJP and two Independents, impeached Speaker, Nabam Rebia.

5) On December 17, a no-confidence motion was brought by BJP legislators against the Tuki-led government and the motion was adopted. Kalikho Pul was elected the leader of the legislative party. The impeachment of the Speaker and the no-confidence motion took place on makeshift premises after the government, sensing trouble, had locked the gates of the Assembly.

6) The Gauhati High Court provided the government a breather and stayed all actions of the Assembly till February 2, 2016, and passed strictures against the governor.

7) The Gauhati High Court upheld the directives of Governor Rajkhowa on January 13, 2016. According to The Asian Age, Justice B K Sharma observed, If in the kind of situation that was prevailing in the Arunachal Pradesh, as highlighted in the petition, the governor took the impugned action, it cannot be said to be unconstitutional so as to warrant interference by the existing power of judicial review under Article 226 of the Constitution of India.

8) The Supreme Court, on January 14, referred to a constitution Bench a number of petitions arising out of certain orders passed by the Gauhati High Court in the matter.





ALSO READ: SC to hear Congress' plea challenging President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh

9) Taking cognisance of the turmoil in the state, the Union Cabinet, in its meeting held on January 24, recommended to the President of India that Presidents Rule be imposed in the state.





10) The Congress rebel leader Kalikho Pul was sworn in as chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh with the support of 20 rebel legislators of the Congress and 11 of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in February 2016.

Implications of Presidents Rule:

1) All functions of the Arunachal Pradesh government and all powers vested in the governor under the Constitution or under any law in force in the state, which have been assumed by the President by virtue of the Proclamation of Presidents Rule, shall, subject to the superintendence, direction and control of the President, also be exercisable by the governor of Arunachal Pradesh.

2) The state Assembly will cease to function and be put in suspended animation. The powers of the Assembly are exercised by Parliament or under its authority.

3) The imposition of Presidents Rule has to be ratified by Parliament within two months. The proclamation is valid for a period of six months, unless Parliament decides to extend it.
At least 13 people were killed today when three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok, where Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls.

The blasts happened at about midday (1100 GMT) as the remote town in Borno state was packed with traders from surrounding villages for the weekly market, Chibok elder Ayuba Chibok told AFP.

"Ten died on the spot and another one died on the way to hospital," said health worker Dazzban Buba, who volunteered to treat the injured at hospital.

"A woman and a child died as they were being admitted (to hospital), so now the death toll stands at 13. Thirty others were injured, 21 critically."



The blasts bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has repeatedly hit "soft" civilian targets such as markets, mosques and bus stations as well as military and civilian vigilante checkpoints.

Chibok came to prominence in April 2014 when Islamist fighters stormed a boarding school and kidnapped 276 girls, causing global outrage.

Fifty-seven girls managed to escape in the immediate aftermath but 219 are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video in May that year.

Chibok was briefly overrun by the Islamic State group-allied rebels in November 2014 but recaptured by the military after several days.

Ayuba Chibok and Buba both said Wednesday's blasts were suicide attacks and had prompted terrified residents to lock themselves inside their homes or flee in fear of repeat attacks.

"The first bomber set off his explosives at the checkpoint where people coming into the town were being searched," said the town elder.

"A second bomber managed to get into the market and blew himself up. A third bomber was identified and residents pursued him.

"When he realised he was about to be apprehended he detonated his explosives in an area not far from the market."



Buba said he rushed to help his brother who was injured in the first blast in the Bamzir Road area of the town.

The second blast happened shortly afterwards, fitting a pattern of Boko Haram suicide attacks with multiple bombers setting off their devices almost simultaneously.

But Buba said it was still unclear whether the third bomber deliberately detonated his explosives or whether the device was triggered when troops opened fire as he fled.

Buba said the 30 injured were mostly suffering from burns and fractures, and that nine had been discharged, he added.
Government today cleared the creation of over a dozen special police battalions which will provide jobs to about 17,000 youth in Jammu and Kashmir and Naxal-violence-hit Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand.

The decision to create 17 new Indian Reserve Battalions (IRBs) was cleared at a meeting of the Union Cabinet held here under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

While a maximum of 5 IRBs will be raised in J and K, four will be formed in Left Wing Extremism (LWE)-hit states of Chhattisgarh, three each in Jharkhand and Odisha and two in Maharashtra.

In an attempt to create employment and provide jobs to the local youth, a Cabinet statement said, in Jammu and Kashmir sixty per cent of vacancies in the new IRBs will be filled from border districts of the state for recruitment in the ranks of constables and class IV employees in their establishment.

In the LWE affected states, 75 per cent of vacancies of constables in the new IRBs will be filled from 27 core districts identified under the Security Related Expenditure (SRE) scheme which categories the worst Naxal violence- affected regions in the country as flagged by the Union Home Ministry.

The IRBs were first created in 1971 by the central government and till now 144 such units have been raised out of a total sanctioned 153.

An IRB is a special auxiliary unit of trained police personnel created to assist and aid regular police units in rendering special tasks of law and order upkeep or to undertake anti-Naxal or counter-insurgency operations like central paramilitary forces.

An IRB has an estimated operational strength of 1,000 personnel.
A Syrian aid group today denounced the incessant bombing of medical facilities in the war-wracked country, where 177 hospitals have been destroyed and nearly 700 health workers killed.

"Since 2012, health infrastructure has been continuously targeted by bombings," said Oubaida al-Mufti, president of the Union of Rescue and Medical Care (UOSSM).

The UOSSM organises doctors from the Syrian diaspora and works in areas controlled by the armed opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, supporting local health workers on the frontline.

Between August 2012 and December 2015, 330 medical sites, including 177 hospitals, were destroyed by armed attacks, Mufti told a conference in Paris.

"Just in 2015, we counted 112 targeted attacks," he added.

"During the same period, 697 doctors, pharmacists, dentists, nurses and other health personnel lost their lives in these targeted attacks."



He said 29 hospitals had been destroyed since Russia began air strikes in support of Assad's regime in September.

The bombings have made the situation in these zones "unbearable, unliveable", Mufti said, adding that there would be "disastrous consequences" as health workers were abandoning the region in droves.

"These attacks are committed in total violation of humanitarian law and international conventions," he said.

Since September, the bombings have become more intense and precise, added Monzer Khalil, a doctor from Idlib in northwest Syria.

"While before the hospitals were generally not very affected, they are now entirely destroyed by these attacks," he told the conference.

The Syrian war has killed almost 250,000 people.
It took the Billings City Council 6 hours to make its way through Mondays agenda, but by 1 a.m. Tuesday they were done.

The Council voted 8-2 to approve the location of a beer and wine license with gaming at a proposed new Town Pump at 450 Main St., the site of the current Reiters Marina.

Some residents argued against the proposal, concerned about increasing traffic on what is already Montanas busiest street. Several council members said they were frustrated that a traffic study was not required before the special review process.

Councilmembers Mike Yakawich and Brent Cromley opposed the proposal. Chris Friedel abstained from the vote.

The City Council also unanimously approved a 9,170-square-foot addition to Saint Thomas the Apostle Church at 2055 Woody Drive, and a zone change to facilitate the remodel of an existing home to include professional office space at 2512 Shiloh Road.

In its final piece of business, the City Council voted 9-2 to ratify a $175,000 settlement over the abatement, demolition and disposal of the old Parmly Billings Library. Council members Angela Cimmino and Larry Brewster opposed the settlement, which was more than $550,000 less than city claims of $727,558.

Last year, library officials participated in two rounds of mediation with architects, contractors and asbestos abatement firms. According to Library Director Bill Cochran, the dispute over who pays the increased demolition costs resulted from the Montana Department of Environmental Qualitys disapproval of the original demolition plan. That plan relied on on-site disposal, and the DEQs determination that debris piles on site contained regulated asbestos-containing materials, which required special handling and disposal of all debris.

Councilman Chris Friedel said Tuesday he voted for the settlement to get it off the books, because if wed gone forward (with litigation), it would have cost the taxpayers even more.

Friedel reiterated calls he made during the lengthy meeting to hold the citys administrators  including the citys legal staff  accountable for what he called administrative failures that cost taxpayers in this settlement.

I want to make sure citizens know that we are not going to tolerate this kind of failure, he said. This council is not going to be a pushover. We are going to hold people accountable. We were elected to office to be the voice of the citizens of Billings. This is citizens money, and we are going to be good stewards of it.

Corners were cut during the abatement, demolition and disposal process, he said, and we got caught in the stink.

As part of its consent agenda, the City Council approved a $25,000 pledge from Jim and Lin Roscoe for the Yellowstone Kelly Interpretive Site project. The pledge will be paid in stages.

According to the Billings Chamber of Commerce, the Yellowstone Kelly Interpretive Site Steering Committee hopes to secure the approximately $240,000 needed by the end of 2016, with groundbreaking planned for early 2017.

The proposed interpretive site takes you immediately back in time, Jim Roscoe said in the news release, and provokes thoughtfulness and nostalgia about those who were here before western expansion, those who later came West and how we all got here.

Early in Mondays meeting, Aviation and Transit Director Kevin Ploehn introduced James Perez, who is succeeding Ron Wenger as transit manager.

A news release states that Perez was selected from a field of more than 25 candidates during a national search.

Perez has worked in public transportation for 28 years. His most recent position was chief executive officer of Central Maryland Regional Transit.

He will oversee day-to-day operations of Billings fixed-route bus and paratransit systems, coordinate operating and capital grants with the Federal Transit Administration and the Montana Department of Transportation, make long-range plans for METs service routes and provide financial oversight of the operation.

Perez earned an undergraduate degree in business management and a masters degree in business administration management with an emphasis in human resources.
The hunt for the Malaysian airliner in the Indian Ocean has been set back with two of the three search ships sustaining damage to vital equipment in recent days, officials said today.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, coordinating the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, said on Wednesday that a piece of underwater communications equipment fitted to the Havila Harmony had become tangled in fishing net and had been bent.

The damage was discovered by divers last week during a maintenance visit to the Australian west coast city of Perth. The equipment is scheduled to be replaced by Thursday when the Havila Harmony will leave Perth to return to the southern Indian Ocean, the bureau said.

The Havila Harmony carries an underwater drone, fitted with cameras and high-resolution sonar equipment, needed to scour difficult terrain.

The bureau revealed on Monday that the search of 120 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) of seabed, where the Boeing 777 is thought to have crashed two years ago, had been disrupted when another search ship lost its sonar equipment.

The Fugro Discovery towed its side-scan sonar unit on Sunday into a mud volcano that rose 2,200 meters (7,200 feet) above the sea floor, the bureau said.

The ship lost the sonar unit plus 4.5 kilometers (14,800 feet) of cable. The ship was now making a six-day journey to the Australian port of Fremantle to collect new cable and will continue the search with spare sonar equipment, it said.

A third ship, the Fugro Equator, will continue its sonar search until February 4, when it begins its return journey to Fremantle to be resupplied, the bureau said.

More than 85,000 square kilometers (32,800 square miles) of the search area has been scoured since late 2014.

Flight 370 vanished with 239 people aboard on March 8, 2014, after mysteriously flying far-off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing. A wing flap, found in July on the other side of the Indian Ocean when it washed up on Reunion Island is the only debris recovered.
Three Indian-origin persons have been awarded Australia's highest civilian honour for their contribution in the fields of physics, engineering and medicine.

Chennupati Jagadish, an eminentprofessor atAustralian National University (ANU)in Canberra, Jay Chandra,an eye doctor inNew South Wales, and Sajeev Koshy,adentist in Melbourne, receivedOrder of Australia medal for the year 2016 announced on theAustralia Day.

Jagadishwas conferred with the award for hiseminent service to physics and engineering, particularly in the field of nanotechnology, to education as a leading academic, researcher, author and mentor, and through executive roles with national and international scientific advisoryinstitutions.

Jagadish was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to physics and engineering,particularly in the fieldof nanotechnology, to education as a leading academic, researcher, author and mentor, and through executive roles with national and international scientific advisoryinstitutions.

"This is a wonderful recognition for 25 plus years of work with my research group at the ANU," Jagadish, who works on semiconductor optoelectronics and nanotechnology.

Chandra, aneye doctor whohas been the head of vitreoretinal surgery at Westmead Hospital since the unit opened in 1985,also received the award for hissignificant service to medicine in the field of ophthalmology as a clinician, and to the international community through eye care programs.

"I'm not a showy person but I was glad to be recognised," he was quoted as saying in a report



"The field I specialise in is one of the most difficult in eye surgery. God has given me these skills and a good life in Australia," he said.

Koshy, who lives in Melbourne, was awarded the medal for hisservice to dentistry in the state.

This year's Australia Day honours list included over600 peoplewhose remarkableachievements range from high-profile humanitarian missions to humble work at the grassroots level of society's most needy.

"They are a source of courage, support and inspiration, and we are a stronger, safer and more caring nation because of them," Governor-General Peter Cosgrove said in announcing the awards.
About 40 activists of the Revolutionary Students and Youth Front (RYSF) were detained today for trying to picket the Raj Bhavan over the suicides of a Dalit scholar in Hyderabad and three students of a private college in Villupuram last week.

The protesting students were detained at Saidapet before they could proceed to the Raj Bhavan, police said.

The protesters demanded a proper probe into the deaths of Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula of Hyderabad Central University and that of three girls - V Priyanka, T Monisha and E Saranya, all students of a Yoga and Naturopathy college at Chinna Salem in Villupuram district, and sought action against those involved in these cases.
Five youths including two minors allegedly tore the national flag which was unfurled in a government school on Republic Day in Bichoon town, nearly 50 kms from here, police said today.

"Three of the accused, identified as Mustaq Ali (20), Akbar Ali (18) and Firoz Ali (18), were most likely taking some drug and used the fabric of the National Flag after taking it down last evening," SP Jaipur (Rural) Rameshwar Singh, who interrogated the boys, said today.

Two minors, aged 13 and 14 years, who were wandering there, also picked up some portion of the flag and damaged it, he said.

Acting on information by locals, a case was registered against them under the relevant sections of the Prevention of Insult to National Honour Act 1971 with Phulera police, Additional SP Dudu Sanjay Gupta said.

The accused youths were arrested last night, the ASP said, adding the minors were also detained.
A day after four suspected terrorists, claiming to be natives of Iraq, went missing, Odisha police today verified the purpose of visit of three Iranians at Bargarh, police said.

The three Iranians having tourist visa were found repairing their car bearing Delhi registration number (DL 3AA 2506) at a garage in Bargarh, headquarters of Bargarh district, when police picked them up for verification.

Bargarh Superintendent of Police Asish Kumar Singh interrogated them and verified the documents of the three whose visit was 'suspicious', police said adding that they were travelling from Sambapur to Bargarh.

SP Singh has been trying to check whether they were actually the three of those four persons who disappeared from the the state capital after they were asked to produce identity proof in a hotel on the night of January 25.

While the four suspected terrorists had used a big car, the Iranians' car was small, police said.

The four had gone to the hotel in a car with a Delhi registration number which turned out to be fake.

The three Iranians were at Bargarh police station till late in the evening, they said.

Meanwhile, the police seized another car bearing Delhi registration number in Bhubaneswar. Police were yet to ascertain the owner of the vehicle.
A day after naming a candidate, Congress today did a volte face by declaring that it will "boycott" the February 13 bypoll for Khadoor Sahib assembly constituency in Punjab because the issue of sacrilege remains unresolved.

"It's a boycott, it is not opting out (of the electoral fight)," PCC President and former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh said at a press conference here.

The party had yesterday announced the re-nomination of Ramanjit Singh Sikki who represented the Khadoor sahib constituency before quitting over the sacrilege issue few months back. The nomination had been approved by Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

The seat had fallen vacant because of Sikki's resignation.

"He (Sikki) wrote to me that I resigned on that (desecration) issue and further mentioned unless the party orders him to fight, his conscience does not permit to fight.

"I agreed with him, endorsed what he said and I sent his letter to Congress President, she has, of course, approved his candidature but left it to me and the PCC to decide whether he should fight or not," Amarinder Singh said.

AAP has already decided not to field its candidate, saying it is concentrating on next year's Assembly polls in the state, making it now a cakewalk for ruling Shiromani Akali Dal candidate Ravinder Singh Bramhapura from the seat.

The last day of filing nominations ended today.

The decision evoked sharp reactions from senior party leader Jagmeet Singh Brar who felt it was a "blunder" not to contest and accused Amarinder of "backstabbing".

In a series of tweets, he said, "My heart bleeds to write, we surrendered before Badal and Akalis. We have given up. I and the Congress worker fought for 35 years. Feel bad."



Attacking Amarinder, he tweeted, "Khadoor Sahib Sonia Gandhi approves Congress candidate, we run away from contest. Humongous fraud, betrayal, Amarinder backstabs again."



He also tweeted, "Khadoor sahib justification for running away boycotting, desecration of Guru Granth Sahib and behbal kalan, Wah!" and said, "We have digged our own grave. No body to blame.
Inderjit Singh Reyat, the lone person convicted for the 1985 Air India Kanishka bombing that killed all 329 people on board, was today released from prison in Canada after serving two decades behind bars.

Reyat was convicted of perjury in 2010 for lying to the court in 2003 during the trial of Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, who were acquitted in the terrorist attack.

The flight was operating on the Montreal, Canada-London, UK-Delhi, India route.

A spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada confirmed Reyat's statutory release after serving two-thirds of a nine-year sentence for his involvement in one of the deadliest airline attacks in history.

A mechanic who migrated from Punjab, Reyat bought the dynamite, detonators and batteries that took the lives of 329 passengers on Air India's Flight 182, which exploded over the coast of Ireland on its way to Heathrow Airport in London.

The second exploded at Japan's Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers as they transferred cargo.

In 1991, Reyat was convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of two baggage handlers. He served 10 years for that crime. He also got five years for another manslaughter charge in the Air India bombing.

Reyat got nine years for perjury, the longest such sentence ever given in Canada, although he was given credit for time served awaiting trial. His sentence began on January 7, 2011.

Patrick Storey, Pacific regional manager of the Parole Board of Canada, said Reyat has reached his statutory release date.

"A statutory release is not a discretionary release. It's an automatic release mandated by law," The Globe and Mail quoted Storey as saying.

"So his statutory release date is Janaury 27, 2016, and he reaches the end of his sentence on August 6, 2018....[Wednesday] is the two-thirds mark in his sentence."



Storey said the parole board had no option but to allow the release and a hearing was not held.

Reyat has been ordered to abide by several conditions set by the parole board, including having no contact with victims' families or alleged former co-conspirators, and no political activities.

Storey said the board imposed eight conditions, including one that is seldom used, restricting where Reyat can live.

"He's required to reside at a community correctional centre or a community residential facility, or other residential facility approved by the Correctional Service of Canada," he said.

"So in other words he can't go home, he has to go to a halfway house."



Reyat also cannot associate with anyone involved in criminal activity, or who has extremist or political views.

Storey said the conditions will apply until the end of Reyat's sentence in 2018.
Seeking a speedy probe in the hit-and-run case of an airman, the air force has requested Kolkata Police for a joint investigation.

In a letter written to Police Commissioner Surajit Kar Purkayastha recently by Air Vice Marshal K P U K Nair, Air Officer Commanding of Advance Headquarters in Eastern Air Command, a formal request for a joint investigation was made so that the process of probe and trial could be expedited.

A defence official said IAF is yet to receive a response from the police.

"We have also requested the police for a list of witnesses and all other evidences collected by them to help complete our own Court of Inquiry. These witnesses will later be required to depose before the Court of Inquiry," the official said.

The air force was also conducting its own departmental investigation into the January 13 incident at Red Road when 21-year-old corporal Abhimanyu Gaud was killed by a speeding Audi car during the Republic Day rehearsal.

Since then the police have arrested Sambia Sohrab, the main accused and son of state Trinamool Congress member Mohammed Sohrab, his friends Sonu and Johnnie.

In the meantime, the father of the late airman called up Air Vice Marshal Nair yesterday and referred to the situation in the aftermath of the period of custody of the accused coming to end.

"He also expressed his desire to meet Nair in person as he was of the view that the case may get prolonged and there may not be an early end in sight. He was assured by the Air Officer Commanding of all possible support in ensuring speedy delivery of justice," the official added.
An Albanian Muslim cleric has been put on trial in absentia in Tirana on terrorism charges for allegedly joining the extremist Islamic State group in Syria with his wife and two children.

Prosecutors say Almir Daci, 31, a former imam in an eastern Albanian village, left the country in 2013 with his family, and fought with the group.

His father, Xhevahir Daci, denied his son had joined the group, saying he left Albania to seek a job abroad. The trial opened today.

Separately, another nine Albanian Muslims, including two preachers, are on trial accused of allegedly of recruiting more than 70 men to fight with rebels in Syria.

About two-thirds of Albania's 3.2 million inhabitants are Muslims. Mainstream religious leaders have asked believers not to join rebel groups in Syria.
Fears are growing that Alzheimer's may be passed from person to person after researchers reported a second case suggesting the disease could be transmitted by 'medical accidents'.

Swiss doctors found signs of Alzheimer's in the brains of people who died of the rare, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater, the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord, from human bodies.

These grafts were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD.

In addition to the damage caused by the prions, five of the brains displayed some of the pathological signs that are associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Plaques formed from amyloid-beta protein were discovered in the grey matter and blood vessels.

The individuals, aged between 28 and 63, were unusually young to have developed such plaques.

Researchers writing in Swiss Medical Weekly suggest the transplanted dura mater was contaminated with small 'seeds' of amyloid-beta protein - which some scientists think could be a trigger for Alzheimer's.

The researchers from Austria and Switzerland said the find was "highly unusual and suggests a causal relationship to the dural grafts".

They added "further studies" would be needed and called for a "critical re-evaluation" of how surgical instruments were cleaned.

In September , Professor John Collinge, director of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit at University College London, first discovered evidence the amyloid beta proteins could potentially be transferred from one person to another during some medical procedures.

Speaking of the latest study he said we "need to rethink our view of Alzheimer's and evaluate the risk of it being transmitted inadvertently to patients".

He told Nature : "Our results are all consistent. He fact that the new study shows the same pathology emerging after a completely different procedure increases our concern."



But Britain's top doctor, Prof Dame Sally Davies, was quick to reassure the public after the controversial findings were published in medical journal Nature.
A number of scientists will attend a two-day national conference on chemistry organised here by Sant Gadgebaba Amravati University on January 29.

Eminent scientists from across the country, including Padmashree awardee P D Yadav, will share their knowledge on issues like green chemistry, drug design, global warming, science in 21st Century, solar energy utilisation, bio-catalytic transformation, etc.

The event is organised by the PG Department of Chemistry to mark its silver jubilee.

The meet will be inaugurated by MM Salunkhe, Vice Chancellor of Nashik-based Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University.

More than 300 scientists have registered their participation for the meet.
Net profits jumped 73 per cent at Novartis last year to USD 17.7 billion thanks to asset sales, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant said Wednesday, but without the disposals its performance flagged.

Excluding asset sales net profits at the world's largest pharmaceutical company by sales fell by 5 per cent to USD 12 billion, missing expectations of analysts polled by the Swiss financial agency AWP of an average of USD 12.1 billion.

Last year, the company finalised a series of transactions with GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lily and CSL to offload its vaccine, animal health and consumer health products businesses.

Net sales also slid 5 percent to USD 49.4 billion but when currency changes were stripped out that represents a 5 per cent gain, the company said.

Currency swings had a -10 per cent effect on sales and a -15 per cent effect on core operating income last year, it added.

"In 2015, we completed our portfolio transformation, delivered solid financial results and improved core margin despite a very strong currency impact," chief executive Joseph Jimenez said in a statement.

Core operating income margin climbed 1.3 percentage points in constant currency terms.
Chinese researchers have successfully induced human autism in monkeys in a bid to develop treatment for the rare syndrome that impairs social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication.

Neuroscientist Zilong Qiu of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences said his team has generated more than a dozen monkeys with a genetic error that in human children causes a rare syndrome whose symptoms include mental retardation and autistic features, such as repetitive speech and restricted interests.

Autism refers to any of a spectrum of intellectual and behavioral disorders whose genetic underpinnings are starting to be unraveled.

The altered monkeys displayed shared psychiatric symptoms, including pacing in circles and interacting less with other monkeys. They became stressed more easily when researchers stared them in the eyes.

The abnormal monkeys would "grunt, coo, and scream" more often if challenged in this way, according to Qiu's team, and two became "severely sick" in ways that "echoed" the problems human children with the gene defect.

"The monkeys show very similar behavior human autism patients," Qiu was quoted as saying by Nature.

"Years of studies with mice suffering from autism-like disorders have provided disappointingly few leads on how to solve the problem in people. But mice have very different brains from our own," he said.

He says scientists would now be able to study what brain networks had been disrupted, as well as try out treatments, such as deep-brain stimulation.

Qiu says his group would also attempt to reverse the symptoms it created by erasing the genetic error in live animals. That could be done using new genome-editing technologies, he said.

Genetically altered monkeys have been reported previously, including at least one animal in China with a defect in an autism gene. However, Qiu's report appears to be the first time that researchers have generated enough animals to observe stereotypical behavioral changes, says Afonso Silva, a scientist who works with transgenic monkeys at the National Institutes of Health.

Some scientists questioned whether the model developed in China was close enough to autism to really shed any light on human disease.

"I think we need to be cautious calling this a model...It does not quite accomplish that," said Huda Zoghbi, whose lab at the Baylor College of Medicine discovered in 1999 that damage to the MECP2 gene causes Rett syndrome, a form of autism affecting girls.

Although the monkeys exhibited common behaviors, like repetitive circling in their cages, Zoghbi says these are not the same as those displayed in human children. More typical symptoms like seizures were absent, she said, while the monkeys' circling doesn't have an analog in humans.
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today sought modifications in the recently launched Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna (PMFBY) to make it more farmer-friendly and result oriented.

"The PMFBY falls short of the farmers' expectations," the Chief Minister said in separate letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh.

The scheme provides insurance cover and financial support to farmers in the event of failure of any of the notified crops as a result of natural calamities, pests and diseases.

"The scheme is a step forward as it has greatly improved insurance product as compared to earlier schemes, but still falls short of the farmers' expectations," he said, saying the situation in Punjab was totally different from rest of the country.

He said an indemnity level of 90 per cent for cereal crops would be completely "unsuitable" for Punjab.

The Chief Minister advocated higher level of indemnity for Punjab because of its special and different position in agriculture.

He said even if it was kept at 90 per cent, it should be based on last year's yield of the insured and affected farmers.

"Such a step will help cover more farmers on voluntary basis, minimising State's contribution in providing calamity relief which otherwise is likely to continue unabated" added Badal.

Dwelling on another issue, the Chief Minister said the scheme provides for insurance cover for losses suffered due to drought, but Punjab has never declared drought.

Badal said in case of drought like situation as a result of deficit rains, the cost of cultivation of farmer increases due to increase in cost of irrigation and labour but the new insurance scheme does not provide for compensation for such increases and situations.

"Further the scheme also does not provide for losses due to unseasonal rains in Rabi crops. I feel that such increased costs and losses should be covered," said Badal.

Post harvest losses covered in the scheme were for crops kept in "cut and spread" condition in the field whereas the harvesting of cereal crop in the state was fully mechanized and the crop was immediately taken to market but losses due to natural calamities during marketing in the mandis were not covered.

Such losses should also be covered if the crop remains unsold in the mandi at the peril of farmers.

He said given present the agrarian crisis and financial stress on farmers, insurance cover should be provided to them as a measure to save them from natural calamities and climate variability.

It may be appropriate to cap the farmers' contribution to the premium at Rs 100 an acre to begin with, and to share the balance cost of insurance in the ratio of 60:40 between Centre and State as done in most other schemes of agriculture development, said Badal.
Bearded men are more hygenic than clean-shaven ones as they are three times less likely to harbour infection-causing and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a new study has claimed.

According to the study, published in the Journal of Hospital Infection, men without beards are more than three times as likely to be carrying a meticillin-resistant form of coagulase-negative staphylococci on their cheeks than those with beards.

The study also found that clean-shaven men were 10 per cent more likely to have common bacterium Staphylococcus aureus present on their faces, a bacterium which causes respiratory and skin infections.

The study examined the faces of 408 healthcare workers, with and without facial hair.

While the results were overwhelmingly similar for bearded and non-bearded healthcare workers (bacteria colonisation was, on the whole, low), where there was a difference between the two groups, the bacteria species were more likely to be found in men without facial hair.

Researchers from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, who conducted the study, suggested that the difference between clean-shaven men and their bearded peers could be attributed to the micro-abrasions caused by shaving.

According to the researchers, those tiny cuts in the skin "may support bacterial colonisation and proliferation".

In a separate study, British researcher Dr Adam Roberts is exploring how bacteria found in beards could be used to develop a new stock of antibiotics, as the current stock becomes increasingly ineffective.

By growing more than 100 different bacteria from beard swab samples, Dr Roberts was able to isolate a microbe which kills other bacteria, successfully testing it against a form of E coli that causes urinary tract infections.

The new findings are a far cry from the results of a study last year, which found that beards are as dirty as toilets.
The AAP today blamed the Centre and the BJP-controlled MCD for not disbursing salaries to sanitation workers and said it was a "moral and constitutional obligation" of the civic agencies to keep Delhi clean.

Thousands of municipal sanitation workers today struck work to press their demand for regular payment of salaries and clearing of arrears and held protests at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence and also at Jantar Mantar here.

Dilip Pandey, AAP's Delhi unit secretary claimed the city government had already paid the civic bodies to ensure that the employees get their salaries on time. He alleged that the BJP was "misleading" the people of Delhi and the employees of the three corporations over the issue.

The erstwhile unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) was trifurcated into -- North, South and East corporations (NDMC, SDMC and EDMC) in 2012.

"When the AAP government has made it clear in the Delhi High Court that money required for the paying salaries to MCD workers has been already given to the civic agencies then why are they not saying this. Where did the money go? The matter needs to be probed," Pandey said.

"The BJP-led corporations have functionally and financially collapsed and corruption is the main reason behind this. The BJP is trying to create a confusion among people that the Kejriwal government has some role to play in it. But they forget that the municipal corporations are bound to perform constitutional function irrespective of whether they get money or not," Pandey claimed.

Demanding an "immediate" release of funds for payment of their salaries and arrears, the workers threatened to go on an "indefinite" strike if their demands were not met.

Senior AAP leader Ashutosh said it was important to answer the question as to why did civic agencies hit such a financial crisis.

"The Centre should help the the corporations, but it is not ready to help them. They are not ready to give the outstanding amount to the civic bodies, but the BJP has been targeting the AAP government over the issue every time and trying to mislead people.

"The Delhi government has paid all the money so that the employees don't have to face any kind of problem. We have given 80 per cent of the amount and we will give the remaining 20 per cent at the earliest," Ashutosh claimed.
At least four military personnel, including a colonel, were killed and 12 others injured today when a roadside bomb hit their armoured vehicle in Egypt's restive North Sinai.

The four men were killed in the blast south of Al-Arish city, security and health officials said.

The 12 injured, some of whom were in critical condition, were transferred to hospital for treatment.

Security forces have cordoned the area and were searching for attackers, officials said.

Egypt's North Sinai has witnessed many violent attacks by militants since the January 2011 revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

The attacks targeting police and military increased after the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by military following massive protests against his rule.

More than 700 security personnel have been killed since then.

The military has launched security campaigns in the area, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
At least five police officers died in a roadside bomb attack in eastern Kenya, police and reports said today, as troops inside Somalia pulled out of some bases after Islamist attacks.

Kenyan police chief Joseph Boinnet confirmed "there was an incident where a police lorry hit an improvised explosive device" yesterday, but gave no casualty toll.

One senior police officer, who asked not to be named, said five officers were killed in the blast as the truck drove towards Mpeketoni, in the coastal Lamu region.

Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper also reported five police were killed, while The Standard reported six, and The Star said seven died.

Officials have been reluctant to give numbers of those killed in attacks after Shebab militants stormed a Kenyan army base at El-Adde in southwest Somalia, in the latest incident of an African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) base being overrun by the Al Qaeda-linked group.

A Shebab statement said more than 100 Kenyan soldiers were killed and others captured. Kenya has so far refused to say how many of its soldiers were killed, injured or remain missing.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a statement that the Shebab would "have no time to breathe" and vowed revenge.

He is due to attend a memorial service on Wednesday, alongside visiting Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

The blast targeting police came as Kenyan soldiers inside Somalia pulled out of some of its bases in southern Somalia.

The army however said it was not leaving Somalia and remained committed to the fight.

"There is a reason that took us to Somalia, which is to liberate and pacify those areas, and the mission is still on," army spokesman David Obonyo said.

Kenyan soldiers vacated at least two military bases in El-Adde and Badhaadhe, witnesses said, adding that Shebab fighters occupied the bases after the withdrawal.

"Shebab fighters took control of El-Adde after the Kenyan soldiers pulled out," said Abdulahi Mohamud, a traditional elder.

"Shebab fighters entered without fighting and have started addressing the people. Both the Kenyan and the Somali troops emptied their positions," said Ahmed Gure, another elder.
A primary school student was found dead in the toilet of a private school at nearby Tirupur today, police said.

Shivaram, aged six, had gone to to the toilet after coming to school. His classmates found him on the floor with bleeding head injuries and informed the teachers and principal, police said.

The boy's parents rushed to a private hospital where he was admitted, but doctors there had declared him brought dead.

Authorities declared a holiday for the school, even as adequate number of police were deployed in the area as a precautionary measure as tension prevailed for some time.

Police said investigations were on to know the exact cause of death of the boy.
Bradley Cooper's look-alike has been attending star-studded parties at the Sundance film festival by using actor's name.

For two nights in a row, doppelganger of the 41-year-old actor, crashed events, including, the official Morris from America after party at Bar 53 at Rock & Reilly's, and 50 Bleu Lounge, reported People magazine.

The man used a picture from Cooper's 2009 film "The Hangover" as identification and said, "You're done for!" when approached by security.

The actor is not even attending the cinematic event at the Park City, Utah.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called for Latin America to launch a region-wide fight against the Zika virus, blamed for a surge in brain-damaged babies, as alarm rose over the world's latest health scare.

Brazil has been the country hardest hit by the outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus, which is blamed for a sharp rise in infants born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads.

The outbreak is particularly concerning officials as the country prepares to host the Olympics, which will bring hundreds of thousands of travellers from around the world to Rio de Janeiro in August.

But Brazil is far from alone: Zika has spread to some 20 countries in Latin America and the World Health Organisation (WHO) warns it is expected to spread to every country in the Americas except Canada and Chile.

Nicaragua confirmed its first two cases yesterday.

Denmark and Switzerland meanwhile joined a growing number of European countries to report Zika infections among travellers returning from Latin America.

The returning travellers in those two countries were not pregnant and the disease has not been transmitted within Europe or the United States.

US President Barack Obama called for faster research on the quick-moving virus, urging better diagnostic tests and the development of vaccines and treatments.

There is currently no specific treatment for Zika and no way to prevent it other than avoiding mosquito bites.

Rousseff said yesterday she had asked a summit of the 33-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to launch "cooperative action in the fight against the Zika virus."



Zika originated in Africa and also exists in Asia and the Pacific, but has not been associated with microcephaly there.

The virus first came to prominence in Brazil in October.

In Brazil, cases of microcephaly -- which can cause brain damage or death in babies -- have surged from 163 a year on average to more than 3,718 suspected cases since the outbreak, according to new figures from the health ministry.
The government was developing water ways to ease the traffic on road, Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said today.

The country was registering an increase of 10 to 12 per cent in number of vehicles per annum, the minister said after laying the foundation of 72-km long Mahulia-Baharagora National highway, built at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore.

The function was held in the copper township of Moubhandar, about 40 km from Jamshedpur, under Ghatsila sub-division of East Singhbhum district.

The Centre had plans to expand the water network as the country was utilising only 3.5 per cent of waterways compared to China's 47 per cent and South Korea and Japan's 43 and 44 per cent respectively, he said.

The minister said five water ways would be developed on rivers including Ganga, Bramhaputra, Mahanadi, backwater of Kerala while two multi-model water ports would be established on Ganga in Sahebgunj of Jharkhand and Varanasi (UP).

The port in Sahebgunj would be developed at a cost of Rs 500 crore, he said announcing that the government would pour in Rs 50,000 crore on various road projects including highways and ports by December.

"We will release the fund for the purpose as soon as the state government submits its Detailed Project Report of the proposed projects," he said.

Regarding the highway projects, Gadkari said the government has earmarked 95 lakh tonnes of cement for the purpose.

On the issue of rise in cement prices, he had convened a meeting of cement producers and finalised the prices, which would cost Rs 120-140 per bag, Gadkari said.

Out of the ten cement plants in the country, seven are producing cement totalling about 60 million tonnes, he said.

(REOPENS CES26)



Gadkari said the proposed port in the Sahebgunj would help link various parts of the country including Halidia in West Bengal and Gujarat and improve transportation.

"It (port) would enhance our export potential and we have already signed an agreement with Bangladesh in this regard," he said.

Stating that money and technology would not only be needed to achieve development but vision and will power, Gadkari said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was working to protect economy and environment to achieve the desired result with focus to alleviate poverty and generate employment.

Hailing the Raghubar Das-headed government in Jharkhand, the minister said the state government has given a direction to the state and marching on the path of development.

Jharkhand will emerge as third developed state of the country under the leadership of Das, he said.

The state would attract investment if infrastructure was improved, he predicted adding that investment would generate employment opportunities as well.

Gadkari appealed to Das to procure oil slags from the steel company in Jamshedpur, sand and waste plastic and supply it to his ministry, so that it could be utilized in quality road construction at low cost.

Gadkari, who was accompanied by the Das, said he would be laying the foundation of three road projects in the state worth total Rs 6,000 crore.

"I have sanctioned all the demands made by the state government with regard to national highways and promised to sanction if any other demand remained unfulfilled as I will be staying in state till tomorrow," Gadkari assured.

The government was striving to generate employment opportunities for the poor tribals by utilising the minerals properly, he said.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have signed three pacts for cooperation in cyber security.

The pacts aim at promoting exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and these countries, said the Ministry of Communications and IT.

The Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was today apprised of the MoUs (Memorandums of Understanding), said the ministry in a statement.

An agreement between CERT-In and CyberSecurity, Malaysia was signed on November 23, 2015, in Kuala Lumpur during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Malaysia.

Another MoU between CERT-In and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team (SingCERT), Cyber Security Agency (CSA) was signed on November 24, 2015, in Singapore during Prime Minister's visit to Singapore.

The third pact between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) was signed on December 7, 2015, through diplomatic exchange. The exchange of the signed MoU between the two parties was completed by December 22, 2015, it added.




China is planning to build a floating nuclear power station as it seeks to double its atomic capacity by 2020, a senior official said today.

Authorities are making plans for a "marine floating power station", which will go through "strict and scientific demonstration", said Xu Dazhe, chairman of China Atomic Energy Authority.

"China is devoted to building itself into a maritime power and so, we will definitely make full use of ocean resources," he told a press conference.

The use of nuclear power at sea is not unknown -- aircraft carriers and missile submarines are often nuclear-powered -- but doing so for civilian purposes appears to be unprecedented, although a Russian project is reportedly already under construction.

Beijing included the development of two marine nuclear power plants, to be built by China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) and China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), respectively, in its 13th Five-Year Plan for 2016-2020, the two companies announced earlier this month.

The CNNC plant is expected to start operation in 2019 and CGN's the following year, according to their statements.

They could provide power for offshore oil and gas drilling platforms, island development and remote areas, both firms said.

Beijing is at loggerheads with neighbours, including Japan and the Philippines, over territorial rows in the East and South China Seas, and has alarmed rivals with its massive reclamation and construction of facilities on disputed reefs.

China currently has 30 nuclear reactors in operation, with a capacity of 28.3 gigawatts, Xu said. Another 24 reactors capable of generating 26.7 gigawatts are under construction, Xu added.

Beijing has said it aims to increase its installed atomic power capacity to 58 gigawatts by 2020, when another 30 gigawatts are scheduled to be under construction.

China suspended approvals of new plants following the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant after a tsunami struck in March 2011.

But, it resumed approvals in 2012, despite a warning the same year from the environmental ministry that the country's nuclear safety situation was "not optimistic".

Xu said authorities last year gave eight new reactors the green light and that the country was "on course" to achieve its 2020 target.
Tamil programmes broadcast by China Radio International are becoming increasingly popular among Tamils around the world, an official of the division said here today.

On a visit to the All India Radio's local station, Kalaimagal, who heads China Radio's Tamil wing, said the division that started in 1963 has been catering to listeners in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and several other countries.

The website of the Tamil division, launched in 1997, was also becoming more popular, Kalaimagal added.

Fifteen persons of Chinese origin and three Tamils are working in the Tamil section, Kalaimagal, accompanied by her colleague Vanmathi, said.
The Commerce Ministry has begun an inter-ministerial exercise to assess implications of the decisions taken at the WTO's Nairobi meeting and find out the extent to which India can liberalise tariff regime, especially with regard to the farm sector.

The ministry is holding a series of discussions with the ministries concerned, Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia said here at a CII function.

The discussions covered "the consequence of any decision that has been taken at Nairobi Ministerial for them (the ministries) and in what manner do we structure our domestic policies to utilise the freedom provided under the multilateral framework to support our industry".

These also included "the kind of support that is not possible or will not be possible in years ahead and how we respond to that".

The two-day inter-ministerial consultation concluded last week.

The secretary said the ministry has discussed subsidies and duty caps on several farm items with the Agriculture Ministry and briefed it on the outcome of the Nairobi meeting.

Additional Secretary of the Department of Commerce Arvind Mehta said the Agriculture Ministry has been asked about "their red lines so that we know as negotiators what your real red lines are going to be" as the world is going to demand zero duty on 100 per cent of tariff lines or products.

In the consultation process, he said the Agriculture Ministry wants to have a higher degree of protection and "they do not wish to see liberalisation happen very fast".

The ministry has also sought views of the Department of Revenue on the problem of inverted duty structure.

"If you want to tackle this, you tell us from your side which are the products that will be the ones where you do not wish to see the inverted duty structure and any kind of zero (duty)," he added.

At the WTO's Nairobi meet in December 2015, the members committed to giving developing nations a right to take recourse to special safeguard mechanism to protect their farmers from a sudden surge in imports or drop in global prices.

The WTO's declaration also provides for a ministerial affirmation that till such time a permanent solution on public stock holding is found, the peace clause shall continue to be in place.

Further, Teaotia said that in WTO's Nairobi meet, it was



clearly articulated that the issues that had been flagged for the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) would continue.

India has expressed disappointment over non-reaffirmation of the long-stalled Doha Round in that meeting. The WTO declaration too mentioned about the differences among the members on the matter.

The Doha Round of negotiations, launched in 2001, remained stalled due to differences between the rich and developing nations, mainly on the level of protection for farmers in developing countries.

Talking about the issues which may come up going ahead, she said India expects to see some movement and efforts in bringing new issues on the WTO table.

"However, our clear position is that first let us deal with the outstanding issues of the DDA, those issues have been very clearly articulated and those need to addressed," she said.

She said that introduction of new issues in the WTO must happen after full consensus of all members.

Developed countries, including the US, want WTO members to discuss new issues such as investments and e-commerce and not the pending agenda of the DDA.

"The concern here is that the issue of special and differential treatment provisions, which are inherent part of the DDA. There is an effort to say that India is one of the fastest growing countries in the world, therefore you cannot be treated as a developing country...This is a very smug kind of argument for the country which has largest number of poor in the globe," Teaotia said.

Also, a new trend is emerging in the WTO which India has to be alert about and that is movement away from a consensus based decision making, she said.

Citing the example of the second Information Technology Agreement (ITA), she said if one goes by consensus, the ITA-II would not exist. India was part of the first such pact.

"ITA-II eliminates tariff on 201 IT products...We are quite clear that over the years, electronic products have become one of the largest components of our import basket and to a great extent our ratification of ITA-I has hampered the growth of the Indian electronics sector and now we cannot afford to take either this time or near future," she said.

On the discussion on why India is pushing for special



safeguard mechanism (SSM) in the WTO as it has enough headroom to increase duties on several agri products, the secretary said there are certain critical agri products (including poultry, dairy and apples) in which "we have already reached our bound rates and that is going to be an area of concern in the years ahead."



"It's a principle that this right must accrue to the country (India) and whatever (gap) we have between our applied and bound rates, as we come closer, we should have an option to be able to exercise SSMs. It is positive for us," she said.

She also said that in the years to come, WTO members should recognise the fact about taking a permanent decision on the issue of generic medicines and intellectual property rights.

In the Nairobi meeting, TRIPS agreement, which provides for a temporary restraint on bringing non-violation complaints regarding violation of patents, has been extended.

Further when asked about increasing import of electronic products and the second Information Technology Agreements in the WTO, Mehta said the Department of Electronics and Information Technology has raised a red flag.

They have stated that "look at the imports that are happening and do not rush into ITAs because of the earlier experiences...The department feels that we should now be little bit cautious on ITA products," Mehta said.

On ITA-I, the Commerce Secretary said: "We did huge harm to ourselves...It is necessary for us to stand back, recalibrate, work on our manufacturing and than take decisions on how to go forward."



Indian IT hardware industry has welcomed India's decision of not becoming part of ITA-II.
Congress today targeted BJP and AAP over municipal sanitation workers' strike, saying "apathetic" attitude of the two parties has "worsened" the crisis, and pressed for implementing the Fourth Delhi Finance Commission recommendations to resolve the problem.

"BJP-ruled corporations, the Centre and AAP government in Delhi should be blamed for the chaotic situation.

"It is the AAP government's apathetic attitude that has worsened financial crisis in the civic bodies," Delhi Congress spokesperson Sharmistha Mukherjee told reporters here.

Claiming that repeated protests by the staffers has turned the city into a "strike capital", Mukherjee demanded to release Rs 3,000 crore for the civic bodies in line with the Third Delhi Finance Commission and as ordered by Delhi High Court.

"And it should also implement recommendations of the Fourth Delhi Finance Commission. Governments led by AAP and BJP have money to run their respective promotional campaigns, but do not have funds to pay salaries of workers," she alleged.

She also blamed the municipal bodies led by BJP for not generating revenue through collection of various civic taxes.

"The civic bodies have made no effort to bring more households under the tax net. This would have increased tax revenue. There is also deliberate delay for over a year in coming out with a new toll tax tender," Mukherjee claimed.

South Delhi Municipal Corporation opposition leader Farhad Suri and senior Delhi unit leader Chhattar Singh also attended the briefing.

Scores of civic sanitation workers went on strike today seeking timely payment of salaries and clearing of arrears.

At the AICC briefing, party General Secretary V Narainsamy and party spokesman Raj Babbar attacked both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for the strike.

"After having shed crocodile's tears over the suicide of Dalit students..., Modi and Kejriwal have once again blatantly displayed their anti-Dalit, anti-poor agenda by refusing to pay municipal employees (mostly safai karamcharis) in the national capital", they alleged in a joint media brriefing.

Babbar lamented that a city that just about two years ago was a claimant as the best cities of the world, is yet again on the verge of becoming a garbage dump, the second time in the last seven months.
Local police today appealed to a woman naxal to turn herself in and promised to pay her Rs 5 lakh, the amount of reward announced for her capture.

"If Nerella Jyothi, a deputy commander of a naxal dalam active in Chattisgarh's North Bastar, surrenders before police, she will be given Rs 5 lakh which she is carrying as reward on her head. She will also be provided a bank loan and site for house," said district SP D.Joel Davis.

Jyothi had joined the Maoists while she was doing her intermediate, the officer said.

Her parents today called upon Additional Superintendent of Police (Operations) L.Subbarayadu to ensure her return to mainstream.

According to the SP, Jyothi is not keeping good health.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today laid thrust on quicker delivery of the government's developmental agenda as he embarked on a comprehensive review of the ongoing schemes in a first of its kind meeting of the Council of Ministers.

Modi is also learnt to have expressed concern over the soaring price of pulses in the over three-hour-long meeting during which the status of projects of some ministries were reviewed.

It was also decided to hold such meetings every fourth Wednesday of each month during which similar review of other ministries would be carried out, sources said.

Reviewing the progress of schemes of ministries including Agriculture, Rural Development, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Chemical and Fertilizer and Water Resources, Modi emphasised the need to take the government's initiatives to people.

He also asked ministers to be well-versed in all subjects so that they can highlight the government's achievements effectively when they communicate in public.

Noting that the schemes launched so far for cleaning of river Ganga have failed to bring effective results, he called for out of box ideas to ensure greater participation participation of people for the success of his pet Namami Gange project, the sources said.

Modi also sought suggestions for improving various schemes and their effective implementation.

A key highlight of the meeting was the Prime Minister's focus on how to increase the production of pulses in the country. The issue of soaring pulse price had been used by the Opposition to corner the government repeatedly including during the Bihar Assembly polls.

The discussion on pulses saw Modi talking about long term measures required to be taken to increase their production and to create sufficient buffer stock. He also stressed on the need to take measures against hoarding.

All these ministries are related to day to day needs of the people, especially farmers.

The meeting also saw a discussion on rural jog flagship scheme MNREGA. The issue of direct release of wages to workers for its better implementation and empowerment of the states also came up for discussion.

(Reopens DEL 63)



The exercise that comes after BJP's debacle in Delhi and Bihar assembly polls, saw the Prime Minister repeatedly emphasising the need to reach out to people aggressively on the measures being taken by the government.

Modi also wanted to know why certain schemes could not gain pace and how the bottlenecks can be removed.

He particularly focussed on issues related to agriculture and food as he reviewed the status of implementation of the several key Cabinet and CCEA decisions taken in the last 18 months.

At the meeting, schemes such as National Rural Livelihood mission, which aims to organise and support the poor to come out of poverty, were also discussed. The modifications made in the framework for their implementation were also discussed briefly.

The status of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Rurban Mission and recently launched Neeranchal watershed management project with the help of World Bank were also discussed.

The review meeting also took stock of the progress made on revival of three fertiliser plants, setting up of a agriculture university in Bihar and soft loans to cash-starved sugar mills as he reviewed progress made on decisions by Cabinet.
An Egyptian court today upheld two-year prison sentences for five secular opposition activists convicted of joining illegal demonstrations staged in memory of protests that were violently suppressed.

On November 19, 2011, protests were held near Cairo's Tahrir Square against the military junta that took over after the popular uprising that January and February which ended the rule of president Hosni Mubarak.

The 10 days of protests that followed claimed 42 lives in clashes between demonstrators and security forces.

A Cairo appeals court today confirmed two-year jail terms for the five, among them a surgeon and an activist from a small leftist party.

According to a court official and a defence lawyer, they were accused of taking part in an event in November 2015 in memory of the violence four years earlier.

In December, they were convicted of attending gatherings, blocking roads and "demonstrating without a permit", the sources said.

They can still appeal to the Court of Cassation.

Today's ruling coincides with the fifth anniversary of the uprising that erupted on January 25, 2011 and led to Mubarak's fall.

Defence lawyer Anas Sayyid told AFP that the five were arrested last November "in an arbitrary manner, in an area where there were not even any demonstrations".

Since the military removed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, again taking the reins of power it had controlled for decades before the 2011 uprising, the authorities have ruthlessly repressed any opposition.

Limited at first to Morsi supporters, the crackdown later spread to secular and leftist movements that took part in the revolt against Mubarak.

Rights group Amnesty International called today's verdict "yet another example of the unfair and arbitrary nature of Egypt's criminal justice system".

An Amnesty statement said at least two of those convicted "say they were tortured and ill-treated during interrogation".

"Their case is one more appalling example of the relentless government campaign to crush independent and critical voices and activists in Egypt today," said the London-based rights organisation.

Meanwhile, the trial of four activists on charges of "incitement to strike", due to begin today, has been postponed until next Monday, a judicial official said.

The defendants in that case include youth leader Amr Ali, coordinator of the now banned April 6 movement that spearheaded the 2011 revolt.
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Expressing serious concern over the plight of jail inmates, CPI(M) today demanded immediate reform of prisons in Jammu and Kashmir so that they become correctional homes.

"We express serious concern over the plight of jail inmates. We call for immediate jail reforms in the state and making them correctional homes instead of treating them as security-centric centres," CPI(M) MLA Mohammad YousufTarigami said.

"The condition of the jails in the state is very miserable, unhygienic and they are devoid of health care facilities. There is imminent need to address these serious issues and create a humane environment for inmates," he said.

Tarigami said the jail administration was following the old and outdated Prison Acts and Jail Manuals.

Tarigami said a legislation was needed to amend the Prison Act for augmenting the facilities in the jails.

"Amnesty International, National Human Rights Commission and various committees constituted from time to time have highlightedthe unhygienic and inhuman environment of the jails and suggested for massive jail reforms", He said.

"Unfortunately these suggestions have not been acknowledged and implemented by the successive governments at the centre as well as in the state of J&K," he added.

He said de-addiction centres, skill development centres and libraries should be established in jails.

He said advocated for opening of Legal Aid Clinics.
Six of the seven students of the Hyderabad Central University (HCU), on hunger strike to protest the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, have been shifted to a health centre even as the agitators today took out a march to the residence of the interim head of the institution.

The students, who had given a nationwide university strike call, marched to the residence of the interim head of the institution and then went outside the campus and burnt the effigy of the Vice-chancellor, whose ouster they have been seeking.

"Six (students) were shifted (to the health centre) yesterday", Ravindra Kumar, chief medical officer said.

One student is continuing with the hunger strike, which resumed three days back after the first batch of his colleagues who went on fast were moved to the health centre.

The students first marched to the residence of the officiating Vice-Chancellor Vipin Srivastava in the staff quarters.

Srivastava was given the charge of the institution after VC Aappa Rao went on leave amid escalation of protests last week.

But selection of Srivastava as interim head of the institution was stiffly objected to by the students and SC/ST staff forums alleging he headed the Executive Council sub-committee whose decisions were "responsible for the death of Rohith" and was one of the accused in the death of another dalit student in 2008.

Srivastava had yesterday made a fresh appeal to students to help restore normalcy on the campus.

Rohith was found hanging in a hostel room on the HCU campus on January 17, sparking strong reactions on the campus and across the country.

Rohith and four other students, all from the dalit community, were suspended last year by the varsity for allegedly attacking an ABVP leader.

The suspension of the four students were revoked last week after the issue snowballed into a major political row with the agitation drawing support from parties other than the BJP.
"The X Files" actor David Duchovny has been honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Duchovny thanked his "The X-Files" creator Chris Carter as he received his star on January 25, reported Female First.

The 55-year-old actor rose to prominence as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder during the sci-fi TV series' initial run from 1993 to 2002.

Carter was also in attendance.

Speaking to fans who had gathered to watch him receive the accolade, the actor said, "I wouldn't have a career without Chris and his show 'The X Files'. That really made everything happen for me as an actor."



Duchovny admitted he had always dreamt of getting some sort of plaque with his name on to recognise his talents, and he is delighted to be honoured with a star in Hollywood.

"It's tangible and something that feels like it'll last a while. That's something special and something to reflect upon I think. I grew up on 11th Street and Second Avenue in New York and the Second Avenue Deli was [a block away].

"They had their own Walk of Fame in front of the deli with stars of David on the street. I thought maybe I'd get one of those one day, but this is even better.
Asam Sahitya Sabha (ASS) today termed the recent demand made by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha to declare Bodo as the official language in the Bodoland Territorial Area districts as "unconstitutional".

"The recent demand by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha to declare Bodo the first language in five districts under the Bodo Territorial Council (BTC) is not acceptable as it will lead to a divide between the Bodos and non-Bodos residing in these areas," Sabha President Dhrubajyoti Bora told reporters here.

Moreover, according to official data available, there are more children studying in Assamese medium schools from primary to Class 8 and imposing Bodo as first language and medium of instruction is "arbitrary and against the interest of other indigenous communities of the state," he said.

"Asam Sahitya Sabha has always supported development of all languages and is against the hegemony of any particular language over others," Bora said.

The Sabha maintained that the first language of any individual should always be the mother tongue and it is their constitutional right to receive education in their resepctive mother tongue, he said.

The Bodo Sahitya Sabha's demand to delegate Assamese as the third language in BTAD is just "not acceptable to us and we condemn it strongly. We will approach both the Central and state government and, if necessary, take legal recourse in this regard," he said.

The Asam Sahitya Sabha will also keep a strict vigil on how the approach of the local administration towards Assamese medium schools, particularly in the case of infrastructure development and appointment of teachers, the Sabha President added.
In an unusual appeal, a primary school in the UK has asked parents to wash in the morning and stop dropping their children off in their pyjamas.

Kate Chisholm, the Head Teacher of Skerne Park Academy, Darlington, Durham, made the appeal after she noticed more and more adults wearing pyjamas at the school gates as well as at meetings and assemblies.

She said her aim was to help set a good example for pupils.

Chisholm said the final straw came when parents wore pyjamas to the Christmas show and to recent parents' evenings.

"It just got to the point when I thought 'enough's enough'," she was quoted as saying by BBC.

"I'm not trying to tell people what to do with their lives, but I just think having a really good role model first thing in the morning, getting yourself up, getting yourself dressed, ready for business, out to school is a really good example to set," she said.

"I'm afraid wearing pyjamas, going to school, maybe doesn't reinforce that somehow," she added.

In her letter, Chisholm wrote: "If we're to raise standards it's not too much to ask parents to have a wash and get dressed. I have had loads of support from the community and people saying it's about time something was done. I have had far more positive responses than negative."



Parent Phil Naylor said wearing nightwear to school was "disgraceful".

Naylor said Chisholm had his support, "It's disgraceful, we should be guiding our children not giving them bad habits."



Skerne Park Academy is not the first school to have problems with dishevelled parents. In 2011, 11 schools across Middlesbrough wrote to parents, asking them to dress appropriately for the school run.
A vehicle of the Deputy Superintendent of Police was set on fire and at least eight policemen and fire brigade officials were injured in a violent attack by people who were trying to foil the district administration's attempt to demolish a roadside temple here in Bihar's Vaishali district last night, police today said.

Following an order of the Patna High Court two days back, a police team along with bulldozers had reached Vagmali locality to demolish the temple on encroached land, when people attacked them, Superintendent of Police Rakesh Kumar said.

DSP, Headquarters, Siya Ram Prasad Gupta was supervising the operation when the mob attacked his vehicle and set it on fire.

The DSP was not in his vehicle during the incident. The driver fled after protesters pelted stones before setting it ablaze.

At least eight policemen and fire brigade officials were injured in the mob fury.

Besides the DSP's vehicle, the mob also torched two tractor trolleys.

The injured have been admitted to the Sadar hospital.

Inspector Shankar Jha of town police station has been put under suspension following the incident.

The District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police have gone to Patna High Court to inform it about the incident.

(REOPENS CES9)



Principal Secretary, Home, Amir Subhani appeared before a bench of Acting Chief Justice of Patna High Court Iqbal Ahmad Ansari and Justice Chakradhari Singh today and said the state government was trying to peacefully resolve the matter related to boundary wall of a temple encroaching government land in Hajipur.

The court has fixed February 29 for next hearing.

(REOPENS CES10)



Meanwhile, police have detained town RJD president Subhash Nirala in connection with the violence.

A group of people later assembled at the town police station where Nirala, who is also a ward councillor, was kept and demanded his release.

Nirala has been held for preventing government officials from discharging their duty, Superintendent of Police Rakesh Kumar said.

The protesters left the police station after persuasion by the police, the SP added.

Eyewitnesses said that the protesters blocked road at Gandhi Chowk while returning from town police station for some time to press for Nirala's release.
More than 14.2 million people visited Dubai in 2015, up 7.5 per cent from the previous year, with Indians, Saudis and Britons topping the list.

The rise came despite slowing economic growth in many markets and a strong exchange rate of the Gulf state's dollar-pegged dirham against the euro and other currencies, Dubai Tourism authority said.

"2015 was volatile for travel globally, as we have all witnessed a range of disruptive factors, ranging from slackening economic growth in Asian and European markets to currency fluctuations across the world," said Dubai Tourism chief Saeed Almarri in a statement.

The Gulf city-state, one of seven sheikhdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, attracted more than 13 million visitors in 2014. It aims to attract 20 million visitors annually in five years.

Visitors from Gulf countries represented the largest regional group at 3.3 million, up 12.8 per cent, with Saudis alone numbering 1.54 million.

Turmoil in most of the traditional tourism destinations across the Middle East appears to have helped Dubai capitalise on its reputation as a safe haven for tourists and businesses.

The number of Indian visitors came at the top for the first time after surging by 26 per cent to 1.6 million, while Britons rose 11 percent to 1.2 million.

"Western Europe remained the second highest regional contributor to visitor volumes, bringing in nearly three million tourists, reflecting a solid 6.1 percent growth in numbers," Dubai Tourism said.

Growth in several markets "helped offset negative trends" from Russia and eastern Europe, which saw a 22.5 per cent decline in travellers to Dubai.
A BTech student and her uncle were today arrested a day after they allegedly assaulted a traffic police home guard at Nagaram area here after he clicked their photo of driving their two-wheeler down a one-way lane, police said.

Harshita and her uncle Sai Kishore were booked under section 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty) of IPC and under relevant sections of Prevention of Damage to Public Property (PDPP) Act, police said.

They were today arrested and remanded to judicial custody, Keesara police station inspector P Guruva Reddy told PTI.

TV channels flashed the footage showing the duo allegedly engaged in argument with the traffic home guard Venkatesh Yadav and pushing him yesterday after he clicked them driving the two-wheeler on a wrong direction (one-way).

The girl and her uncle argued with the traffic cop and allegedly assaulted him, police earlier said .
Police have arrested two persons involved in stealing motorcycles from the city and seized 18 bikes worth around Rs 13 lakh from them.

The accused, identified as Imran Ansari (34) from Byculla and Khajar Saiyyad (24) from Meera Road, used to steal bikes and then sell them to people after replacing their registration numbers with those of scrapped motorcycles,police said.

"Recently the duo had stolen a Honda Activa from Grant Road in the wee hours on January 10, following which its owner lodged a complaint with us stating that he had put his mobile in the dicky of the motorcycle," Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Rajendra Chavan said.

"Since the SIM card of the mobile was active, we succeeded in tracing the location of his bike, which was found parked in Agripada area in south Mumbai, he said.

Thereafter, two teams were formed to keep a close watch on who comes to take the bike, he said.

"On January 20, when the duo came to take away the bike, we grabbed them and took them into our custody," Chavan said adding that after questioning, they admitted their crime and were later arrested.

"Whenever Imran and Khajar stole a motorcycle, they used to replace its registration number plate with that of a scrapped bike, that were auctioned by LIC or other loan-providing companies," the officer said.

According to Chavan, police have contacted RTO to get details of the auctioned vehicles.

The accused would be produced in the court tomorrow, he said.
The Delhi High Court today asked the city Police chief to ensure there is no hindrance to lifting of garbage in coordination with the civic bodies here, in view of the indefinite strike by sanitation workers.

"Commissioner of Police (B S Bassi) to ensure that the garbage are removed from the roads in coordination with the Municipal Corporations," a bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath said.

It said the civic bodies' functioning should not be obstructed in any manner.

The court also issued notice to the Ministry of Urban Development, Delhi Government and three Municipal Corporations of Delhi (MCD) seeking their stand on petitioner Rahul Birla's claim that the concerned authorities were not paying salaries and arrears since 2003 to the workers of the MCD.

The court sought Delhi Development Authority (DDA's) reply on the issue raised in the plea that it owed "a huge amount of money to MCD and are not paying the said sum".

The court issued notice on a plea filed through advocate Vishal Mittal, who sought the court's direction to the authorities to make immediate payment of salaries and arrears to the municipal workers.

Senior Standing Counsel Rahul Mehra, appearing for Delhi government, opposed the plea saying they have released 100 per cent funds to the civic bodies. He said the workers had gone on strike despite the Delhi government discharging its duty.

The court asked Delhi government and other respondents to file affidavits with regard to the issues raised in the petition before February 2.

The workers of three municipal corporations have decided to go on indefinite strike from today, claiming the civic bodies have failed in meeting their demands, including regularisation of salary.

The petitioner said workers of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation and East Delhi Municipal Corporation -- had gone on strike last year also, which had led to "accumulation of garbage for number of days at different places, which made the lives of people pathetic and miserable". It said if the court does not intervene, it will spark major health crisis in the capital.

In January, petitioner Rahul Birla had moved the court



when safai karamcharis had gone on strike, claiming that the authorities were not paying salaries and arrears to the MCD workers.

He had said workers of North, South and East Delhi Municipal Corporations had gone on strike in 2015 too leading to "accumulation of garbage for number of days at different places".

Another petitioner Birender Sangwan had sought lifting of garbage littered on the city streets due to strike by safai karamcharis' in January, and that the strike be called off as it was causing hardship to public.

The employees had later called off the strike after their salaries till January were paid.
The 2017 Legislature ought to make the absentee ballot list permanent. That change in Montana election law would simplify life for voters and save counties money.

In Yellowstone County alone, the biennial purging and relisting will require 53,000 voters to renew their absentee ballot requests. Notifying all those folks and putting them back on the list will cost Yellowstone County taxpayers about $40,000, according to elections administrator Bret Rutherford.

At first glance, this renewal looks like an unnecessary requirement. After studying the details, its clearly a ridiculously unnecessary burden.

Montana voters can get on the absentee ballot list for a two-year election cycle by requesting to receive all their ballots by mail. Many people figure that means they will receive all ballots by mail, until they tell the elections office to stop mailing them. But thats wrong.

53,000 names erased

Montana law requires that the absentee list be deleted on Feb. 1 of even-numbered years. So at the end of next week, all county absentee requests will be erased.

To get on the new list, voters must again make a request to their county elections office.

Yellowstone County is notifying all its listed voters with letters going out later this week. Voters can get on the new list by responding to the letter by U.S. mail or by going online as explained in the letter.

The provision for re-listing online was authorized by a law enacted last year. It means voters can save a stamp, but it doesnt save the county elections staff much time, Rutherford said. A county worker still has to manually add each voter to the new list. Its not an efficient electronic system.

The argument against a permanent list is that it wouldnt be updated. Rutherford disagrees. Security is already built into the system, he said.

Updating the list

Mailed ballots cannot be forwarded, so if a person on the absentee list no longer lives at the listed address, the ballot is returned to the elections office, which then sends a card (that can be forwarded) to notify the individuals of their options for getting a ballot.

Yellowstone County actually is mailing 51,372 election letters this week. Using up-to-date address information from the U.S. Postal Service, Rutherfords staff already has determined that 1,738 people on the list no longer live at their listed addresses. Letters will go out to those folks next week, explaining what they would need to do to register to vote, and get back on the absentee list.

Yellowstone County has more voters on the absentee list than any other county. Legislators representing our county should be mindful that the majority of their constituents have chosen to vote by mail from the convenience of their home. They have said they want this option for early voting.

I would like to see it go to a permanent list, Rutherford said. We vote for permanence, too.

The Yellowstone County delegation (and candidates who want to be part of that 2017 delegation) ought to make their constituents wishes known in Helena. Yellowstone County should lead the way in making this change.

A permanent absentee voter list wont be the biggest issue of 2017. But it would directly affect the majority of Yellowstone County voters. A permanent absentee list would save postage, paper and labor while giving voters what theyve already said they want.

Quelling confusion

A permanent absentee list also would eliminate the confusion between local elections that are conducted by all-mail ballots and the state/federal elections that still require biennial requests for absentee ballots. For example, the May school elections in most Yellowstone County districts will be conducted by all-mail ballots, no request needed. But polls will be open for the June primary when candidates for federal and state offices will run. Only voters who request absentee ballots this year will get primary election mail ballots. Same deal for the November general election: Only voters who requested absentee ballots this year will have a November ballot mailed to them.
UN envoy Martin Kobler expressed concerns today that Libya's political process is slower than the Islamic State group's expansion, after the country's internationally recognised authorities rejected a national unity government.

World powers have urged Libya's warring factions to endorse the unity government agreed last week under a UN-brokered deal aimed at ending political paralysis that has fuelled the rise of jihadists.

Libya has been in chaos since the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi. It now has two governments and parliaments, with the recognised authorities based in the east and a militia-backed authority in Tripoli.

In mid-December, a minority of lawmakers from both sides signed a deal to unify the government.

A national unity government headed by businessman Fayez al-Sarraj and comprising 32 ministers was formed last week, but it was rejected by the recognised parliament on Monday.

"I am working on the basis that the glass is now half full," Kobler told a conference in the capital of neighbouring Tunisia.

The German diplomat applauded lawmakers who had been boycotting the recognised parliament in the eastern city of Tobruk for attending the assembly, describing this as "a very courageous decision".

But Kobler said that he was "impatient" like members of the international community who were frustrated at the slow process caused by "certain personalities".

"Sometimes I think that the political process is slower than the military process, and the political process must be faster than the military expansion of Daesh," he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

He warned that while political forces discuss the agreement, "Daesh and other terrorist organisations... Just act and they steal the territories from the Libyan people".

In recent weeks, IS jihadists launched attacks from their stronghold in the city of Sirte on facilities in the "oil crescent" along the coast.

Fears they are establishing a new bastion on Europe's doorstep have added urgency to diplomatic efforts to bring together Libya's warring factions.

European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini earlier this month pledged to give Libya 100 million euros (USD 108 million) to battle IS as soon as the unity government came to power.

Sarraj pledged on Monday to propose a new unity government within 10 days, but the task is fraught with difficulties.

One is a dispute over the fate of General Khalifa Haftar, who has established himself as the commander of the armed forces of the internationally recognised authorities.

His removal is one of the conditions set by the parliament in Tripoli.
Facebook is growing at an exceptional pace as it enters adolescence, propelling it into a better position to challenge Google as the Internet's most powerful company.

Facebook's fourth-quarter report released yesterday provided the latest gauge of the company's impressive strides.

It marked the first time that Facebook's quarterly revenue has surpassed $5 billion more than fading Internet star Yahoo now generates in an entire year. Facebook's earnings also more than doubled to $1.56 billion, even as the Menlo Park, California, company invests heavily in virtual reality, Internet access in remote parts of the world and a mobile ad network for services other its own.

The performance lifted Facebook's stock by $6.78, or 7%, to $101.23 in extended trading after the report came out.

Although Google remains three times larger by revenue, Facebook has been steadily closing the gap as it sells more mobile advertising on its addictive social-networking app. And it's just beginning to mine revenue from its trendy Instagram service and a rapidly expanding video library.

This spring's debut of the Oculus Rift headset, part of the virtual-reality technology that Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, could open another lucrative market. Google is now hiring more virtual reality specialists, a sign that is trying to catch up with Facebook in a still-nascent field that could transform computing.

Social networking remains Facebook's foundation. The service picked up another 46 million users during the final three months of last year to expand its worldwide audience to 1.59 billion users.

Google, now a part of the recently created Alphabet Inc, is thriving, too, with more than 1 billion users on its search engine as well as its YouTube video site and its Android software for mobile devices. That makes it unlikely that Facebook will topple Google anytime soon.

Powered by the world's dominant Internet search engine, Google still sells the most digital advertising by a wide margin. Just how much more will be disclosed Monday, when Alphabet is scheduled to announced its fourth-quarter earnings. Alphabet is expected to post fourth-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion, after subtracting ad commissions, nearly tripling what Facebook generated during the same three-month period.

But consider this: Facebook will be turning 12 years old next week and it just posted revenue of $5.8 billion in its latest quarter. At the same stage of its existence in September 2010, Google's net revenue stood at $5.5 billion.
"Fast and Furious 8" crew has reportedly planned to film a scene involving the "largest explosion" ever in Iceland.

Director F Gary Gray will partly film "Fast and Furious 8" in Arkanes, Iceland. The town mayor, Regina Asvaldsdottir, confirmed the report and said that Vin Diesel and the film crew members would arrive in April, reported Aceshowbiz.

As Universal Pictures stated earlier, the studio "is currently in the process seeking approval from the United States and Cuban governments to explore shooting a portion of the next installment of the 'Fast & Furious' series in Cuba."



The majority of filming, however, will take place in New York and Atlanta.

In "Fast 8", Diesel will reprise his role as Dominic Toretto. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jason Statham and Kurt Russell also star in the movie.

The street-racing movie will be released in North America on April 14, 2017.
Fresh protests by students broke out today in Hyderabad, Delhi and Chennai over the alleged "delay in justice" to the Hyderabad university dalit scholar who committed suicide, as they remained unrelenting in the demand for resignations of Union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya.

Lending further support to the stir over Rohith Vemula's suicide, SC and ST teachers of the Hyderabad Central University(HCU) announced a hunger strike from tomorrow seeking resignation of Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao, who has gone on leave, and interim VC Vipin Srivastava for resumption of academic and administrative work. Several members of the Forum have already given up their administrative responsibilities.

Stepping up their campaign, the university students in Hyderabad held a demonstration outside the residence of Srivastava when he was in a meeting with non-teaching staff.

They then marched outside the campus and burnt effigy of the Vice-Chancellor whose ouster they have sought.

Srivastava later visited the protest site to initiate a dialogue but faced the ire of the students who raised slogans against him, asking him to "go back".

Students in most universities in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana boycotted classes in solidarity with agitators seeking "justice" for Rohith who was found hanging in a hostel room on January 17. The HCU students had given a nationwide university strike call today in support for their stir.

Six of the seven students of the HCU on hunger strike protesting the suicide of Rohith, meanwhile, have been shifted to the health centre.

In Delhi, scores of students from varsities across the capital once again marched to the Human Resources Development Ministry where 60 of them were detained by Delhi police.

According to police, due to security concerns, around 60 students were detained from outside Shastri Bhawan and taken to Parliament Street police station.

"Every time we try to go to the Ministry and raise our demands with HRD Minister Smriti Irani, we are held back and detained by police. Protesting is a basic right. We can't be denied that at a time when the government is trying to cover up 'institutional murder'," JNU Students Union vice president Shehla Rashid Shora said.

Members of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) and Left-backed All India Students Association (AISA) were also part of the protesters, who demanded the removal of Irani and Dattatreya.

"We are protesting against the delay in justice to the student who had to end his life due to the harassment by the institution. Who will be held accountable for similar such suicides in varsities across country which go unreported?" Sucheta De from AISA, asked.

In Chennai, about 40 activists of the Revolutionary Students and Youth Front were detained for trying to picket the Raj Bhavan over the suicide of Rohith besides three students of a private college in Villupuram last week.

The protesting members were detained at Saidapet before they could proceed to the Raj Bhavan, police said.
Donald Trump will not participate in the Fox News debate tomorrow ahead of the key Iowa Caucus, his campaign manager has said as the Republican presidential front-runner accused the TV network of "playing games".

"Most likely I would not be doing the debate. Let's see how much money Fox is making without me," Trump told reporters in Iowa.

Trump made the remarks at a news conference soon after Fox announced the lineup for its GOP debate tomorrow -- the last one before the crucial Iowa Caucus on February 1. He also accused Fox News of "playing games".

Trump, 69, who is leading all polls, would have taken the centre stage during the debate. In his absence this would be taken up by his distant rival Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Later, Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told reporters, "He will not be participating in the Fox News debate on Thursday" and that "it's not under negotiation".

Trump's campaign manager said that it is pretty "irrevocable" that he will skip the event, which takes place days before the crucial Iowa Caucus.

One of the main reasons that Trump decided against participating in the debate -- which is unheard of in the American presidential election -- was the Fox insistence on having its anchor Megan Kelly as one of the moderator.

"The drama capped an increasingly heated war of words involving Mr Trump, Mrs Kelly and Fox News as the debate neared and as Mr Trump found himself facing the prospect of being questioned by her again before a national audience," The New York Times said.

Instead, the real estate tycoon said he would be holding another event in Iowa which would raise funds for veterans. The Republican presidential front-runner said that he took the decision in this regard after press statements from Fox News.

One such statement had said, "We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah (Khomeini) and (Vladimir) Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president. A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings."



Fox News said it would go ahead with the debate as scheduled.

"The Fox News/Google debate is set for this Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. It would mark the first GOP presidential primary debate that Trump has not attended," it said on its website.

Cruz his main GOP rival criticised Trump for his decision and challenged him for a one-o-one debate.

"If Donald is afraid of Megyn Kelly, I would like to invite him on your show to participate in a one-on-one debate between me and Donald, mano y mano," Cruz said.

"And the fact that Donald is now afraid to appear on the debate stage, that he doesn't want his record questioned, I think that reflects a lack of respect for the men and women of Iowa, that he's unwilling to go to Des Moines and be questioned," he said.
International Master and Grand Master-in- waiting, Shardul Gagare of Maharashtra, is the top seed in the IIFL Wealth 1st Mumbai International Open and Juniors (Under 13) Chess Tournament starting here tomorrow.

GM Sriram Jha of Delhi, GM-elect Swapnil Dhopade, of Maharashtra and IM G A Stany of Karnataka, among others, are also in the fray in the Rs 15-lakh prize money event, out of which the Open winner would get Rs 7.5 lakh, a media release said today.

A separate prize fund of Rs 7.5 lakh is on offer in the under 13 section, making it the highest prize money junior tournament in the world, said the organisers.

Starting as the top seed is FIDE Master Mohammad Fahad Rahman of Bangladesh, while the Indian challenge would be led by Sadhwani Raunak, Aditya Mittal, Sankalp Gupta, D Gukesh, and Leon Luke Mendonca.

The junior event has attracted participants from four foreign countries -- Bangladesh, England, Nepal and USA.

The tournament would be held over nine rounds under Swiss System.
Germany today warned Russia against "exploiting" a murky case involving the alleged rape of a German-Russian teenager in Berlin after Moscow hinted at an official cover-up.

Berlin police last week rejected the 13-year-old's account that she was sexually assaulted by "foreigners", but Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday lent credence to the girl's allegations and charged that her disappearance had been "hidden".

Government spokesman Steffen Seibert today hit back, saying "there is no reason, in fact it is unacceptable, for this incident to be politically exploited."



The teenager, identified by Russian media as "Liza", went missing on January 11, reportedly on her way to school.

She subsequently returned and filed a police report, with her parents telling investigators she was kidnapped by three "foreign" men at a railway station in eastern Berlin and taken to a flat where they raped and beat her.

The case sparked outrage and allegations on far-right websites and Russian media outlets of an official cover-up.

But Berlin's prosecutors said there was no evidence that the girl was forced to have sexual relations during that period.

Martin Steltner, a spokesman for Berlin's prosecutor's office, said that it had opened an investigation against a man on possible statutory rape charges.

Sex with anyone under the age of 14, even if consensual, is a crime in Germany which is punishable by imprisonment.

Amid ongoing tensions between Russia and the West on a range of issues, Lavrov used the occasion of his annual press conference to draw attention to the case and said Moscow was directly involved.

"We are now working with her lawyer. He is working with her family, with our embassy," Lavrov said.

"It is clear that the girl -- absolutely for sure not voluntarily -- disappeared for 30 hours."



Lavrov said he regretted the of Liza's disappearance had "been hidden for a very long time, for some reason."



Seibert declined to comment directly on the case.

"What I can fundamentally say is that in Germany we have a state based on the rule of law," he said.

"We have an independent judiciary that every citizen can trust and this justiciary must be able to pursue its investigation without outside influence.
Providing relief to all 191 victims of alleged police atrocities in a clash between Dalits and caste Hindus on October 2 2008, the Madras High Court today ordered that they be given final compensation as per government order already issued and the interim amount already paid not be deducted.

Justices V Ramasubramanian and N Kirubakaran gave the direction while disposing a contempt petition moved by the All India Democratic Women Association (AIDWA).

The Court said government should not deduct interim compensation already paid as AIDWA was willing to give up the calculation of the enhanced compensation as per the central government notification.

The Judges also directed the government to take action against the officials for omission and commission on their part and said government had the right to recover the amount from those officials through appropriate proceedings.

On the claim of eight persons who had been left out, the judges directed that they also be paid Rs 60,000.

As for the amount already sanctioned, the money should be paid within a week. For the balance amount, the government should pass the orders within four weeks.

On January 25, government had informed the court it had issued an order to pay a total compensation of Rs 1,14,60,000 to 191 Dalit families who fell victim to alleged police atrocities during the clash over painting of a temple wall.

Additional Advocate General K Chellapandian submitted a copy of the Government Order today to the court.

The contempt petition was moved againstthe Madurai Collector for not having paid the compensation despite specific orders passed by the Bench on April 8, 2013.

The G.O. Said each of the 191 families is eligible for Rs 60,000 as per a notification by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment on December 23, 2011.

Hence they shall be paid the amount after deducting the amount of interim compensation already paid to them in September 2009 as per interim orders passed by the High Court, it said.
The Goa government is mulling to ban consumption of liquor in public places to curb the problem of nuisance caused by people in inebriated state, a senior official said here today.

"There are complaints from common people about consumption of liquor in public places, which leads to littering and other nuisance. The existing excise law needs to be amended for the same," Goa's Excise Commissioner Menino D'Souza told PTI.

"The state excise department would amend the Goa, Daman and Diu Excise Act, 1964, which would give powers to the department's inspectors to punish the offenders," he said.

The department has already formed a committee, headed by former excise commissioner Ashok Desai, to review the existing excise law, D'Souza said.

According to government records, there are 332 wholesale liquor shops in Goa, besides 9,445 bars and restaurants serving alcohol.

D'Souza said the state tourism department has already amended the Goa Tourist Places (Protection and Maintenance) Act to check the nuisance of drunken people at tourist places.

"The tourist places are defined as beaches and other spots, and India Reserve Battalion (IRB) of Goa Police have been asked to take action against those found drinking at these places. It is working as a deterrent," he said.

The tourism department took the step after groups of errant tourists were found drinking and breaking glass bottles on the beaches, resulting in several injuries, he said.

However, D'Souza said, the ban needs to be introduced in a balanced way. "There are many families who go on picnics where they drink in open spaces. They don't create nuisance. The ban should not affect such kind of picnics," he said.

The department is also considering to ban liquor consumption in public places during certain hours.

"We can even restrict the timings so that there is a control (on the problem)," he said.

Shops selling cheap liquor on wholesale basis have mushroomed in the state and this has heightened the problem of nuisance caused by drunken people.
Gold rods and plates worth over Rs 71 lakh have been seized by Customs officials from a passenger at the international airport here.

The gold, weighing 2,717.800 gm with market value of Rs 71,96,734 was seized from the passenger hailing from Palakkad, who arrived here from Dubai yesterday, a release by the Customs department said.

An eight-member team of Air Intelligence Unit under the Customs department at the Kochi International Airport, Nedumbassery, effected the seizure of the 24-carat gold under the provisions of Customs Act, 1962, it said.

Last week, these officials had also seized 200 gm gold concealed in a mobile phone and another 248 gm gold mixed in moisturiser and facial scrub.
CASPER, Wyo.  A man involved in an alleged drug deal that turned into a shooting last month pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Natrona County District Court.

Mason C. Fletcher is charged with attempted delivery of marijuana and possession of marijuana with the intent to deliver.

Fletcher was allegedly planning to sell drugs to two men Dec. 4 in a garage on Landmark Drive, according to a police report. However, the two men, James Haga and Steven Spearman, were planning to rob Fletcher of his drug supply, the report states.

Haga was acting as lookout, while Spearman was going to steal the drugs. However, Haga walked into the garage at the wrong time and Fletcher shot him, according to the report. Spearman took Haga to Wyoming Medical center, where he was treated and released.

Fletcher is not facing charges for the shooting. He has bonded out of jail pending a trial in the case.

Spearman is charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, concealing a deadly weapon, possession of diazepam and possession of marijuana.

Police previously said they may charge Haga for his involvement in the alleged robbery, but as of Thursday, no charged had been filed against him.

Another man allegedly involved in the robbery plan, Taylor J. Whiting, faces charges of conspiracy to commit robbery and possession of marijuana.
The government today approved returning over 478 hectares of excess land that was acquired in Madhya Pradesh to build an automotive testing track.

The central government had acquired the land as part of its plans to build an automotive testing track at Pithampur in Indore under the National Automotive Testing and R&D Infra Project (NATRIP) project.

"The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi today gave its approval for returning of approximately 478.307 hectares of land to the state government of Madhya Pradesh," an official statement said.

The deal comprises about 461.607 hectares of private land and 16.70 hectares government land, valued at around Rs 740 crore, for auto testing track at Pithampur in Indore, said the statement by the Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises.

The land land returned would be utilised by the state Government for allotment to the auto and related ancillary industries which will have a synergistic effect with the existing NATRAX project.

The National Automotive Test Tracks (NATRAX-Indore) is being set up on 4,140 acres land for comprehensive testing and evaluation of all type of vehicles.

The facility will have all types of surface type to test vehicles against varying terrains and stringency.
After proclamation of President's Rule, Arunachal Pradesh Governor Jyoti Prashad Rajkhowa has assured MLAs that they will be provided security which they are entitled to.

The Governor convened a meeting of senior officers of the state and advised them to ensure that there was no law and order problem in the state.

Laws must be enforced in letter and spirit for safeguarding the interest of the common people, the governor told the officials including Chief Secretary Ramesh Negi in the meeting last evening, a Raj Bhawan release said here today.

Stressing on security coverage for former chief minister and ministers, Rajkhowa said that nobody should have any problem in this regard and all the members of the state Assembly would get security cover as per entitlement.

Rebellion in Congress had precipitated a political crisis in Arunachal Pradesh after its 21 MLAs, up in arms against the then Chief Minister Nabam Tuki, joined hands with 11 of BJP and two independents to 'impeach' the then Assembly Speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue, a move branded as "illegal and unconstitutional" by the Speaker.

27 MLAs in 60-member Assembly, including Tuki and his ministerial colleagues, boycotted the proceedings. The rebels later "elected" another dissident Congressman Kalikho Pul as the new "chief minister" of the state.

Union Cabinet had recommended imposition of President's Rule on Sunday in Congress-ruled Arunachal Pradesh, and the President gave his assent yesterday. The Centre has also appointed former Delhi Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal and retired IAS officer G S Patnaik as advisors to the Governor.

Rajkhowa instructed the chief secretary to issue a circular to all departments and offices to maintain transparency in decision making and execution of various works and take firm action against corruption.

On financial matters, the governor advised the officers to give priority on payment of salaries, allowances and pensions as well as establishment expenses and underscored that the development process must not suffer, but should be expedited.

The governor also assured the officers that any financial issue or other subject pending with the central government will be soon taken up to expedite the process of development in the state.

Putting road communication as one of the top priorities, the governor asked the PWD Commissioner to complete the road repair works in the twin cities of Intanagar-Naharlagun and also important roads to Doimukh, Chimpu, Poma-Jotte and Nirjuli besides those in other districts and sub-divisions immediately.

He also asked the commissioners and secretaries for furnishing replies to all pending queries sent from Raj Bhavan on matters of public interest at the earliest, the release said.

He appealed to the people of the state "to carry on normal duties and in case of any difficulty, they might refer the matter to the Governor Secretariat".

He also appealed to the people for cooperation in expediting the developmental works and to maintain communal harmony.
The 'Hacker Girls' team finished top in the three-day technology camp- 'The Hackathon to Combat Gender Based Violence', winning USD 5,000 as the prize money today.

The team, Nidhiya V Raj and Surya Remanan, won the first prize for its idea of a 'Suraksha Band' that would help authorities to monitor unsafe migration and human trafficking, a press release from the US Consulate said.

The 'Nanhe Kadam' team ended runners-up in the competition, which began on Monday, it said adding the two teams were incorporated into the six-month "Accelerator Programme" run by US-based 'Geeks Without Bounds (GWB).'



The teams were judged on the basis of usability, sustainability, innovation and presentation skills, it said.

The event, organised by the US Consulate in partnership with GWB and Bangalore-based 'The Bachchao Project', was designed to develop solutions to existing gender-based violence and trafficking issues through technological interventions, the release said.

Led by women tech experts from the US, the event brought together domain and technology specialists, civil society activists and young coders from all over the country, it said.

Mentors and local activists worked with the teams sharing best practices, making best use of available technology and finding innovative solutions to existing challenges.

Some of the solutions included data collection from



newspapers, anonymous discussion forums, web portals connecting victims to services, online FIR registration against child abuse, migrant worker job portals and building community support systems for survivors of domestic violence.

US Consul General, Craig Hall, met participants to discuss some of the innovative ideas they proposed and encouraged their efforts on the first day of the event, the release said.

Greg Pardo, Assistant Public Affairs Officer of US Consulate, Kolkata, said, "technology can be a powerful force that opens exciting opportunities. I hope that solutions from this Hackathon will help civil society and non-profit organisations better achieve their missions and collaborate with other stakeholders."



Lisha Sterling, Executive Director of GWB, said "This Hackathon has been extremely successful on a number of levels. I am very impressed about how the participants have engaged with the issues, worked through difficult technical problems around privacy and consent and developed prototypes for solid tools to support existing work in gender based violence prevention.
The Delhi High Court today commuted to life capital punishment awarded to serial killer Chandrakant Jha in two identical cases of murder and upheld imprisonment of life till death awarded to him in a third similar case by a trial court here.

A bench of justices Sanjiv Khanna and R K Gauba upheld Jha's conviction in all the three cases but modified the death sentence awarded to him in two of the cases to life imprisonment till death.

"We uphold the conviction in all the three cases. He is sentenced to life term without remission for rest of his life," the bench said.

While commuting death to life term in two cases, the court said, "there was no eye witnesses" to these incidents.

In one of the three cases of murder, the trial court on February 4, 2013 had awarded life term till death to Jha for decapitating his victim and dumping the body near the Tihar Jail daring the police to nab him.

Jha, a native of Madhepura in Bihar, was sentenced to life term till death in a case relating to killing of one Dilip, whose headless body was dumped near Tihar Jail in 2007.

On February 5, 2013, Jha was sentenced to death in the second case of identical crime by the same trial court, saying his offence fell under the "rarest of rare case" as the brutality committed by him showed he "cannot be reformed".

The court awarded death sentence to Jha for taking away the life of 19-year-old Upender and dumping his headless body also near Tihar jail in 2007.

On February 6, 2013, Jha was awarded death penalty in yet another crime of beheading and chopping the body parts of a victim by the trial court which said he committed the murder in an "extremely brutal, diabolical and revolting manner".

In this case, Jha had murdered one Anil Mandal in 2006 and dumped his body outside the jail after chopping off the head and limbs.

Jha was arrested by the Delhi Police in May 25, 2007 in Mianwali Nagar here. He was earlier arrested in 1998 in a murder case but was acquitted for want of evidence.

In December 2007, a Delhi court had acquitted him in a case after the police failed to file charge sheet against him in another murder case.

After committing the murders, Jha had even dared the police by writing several letters to them to nab him, saying he would send similar "gifts" after every 15 days.
Serial killer Chandrakant Jha was today spared of the gallows by Delhi High Court which commuted death sentence to imprisonment for "remainder of his natural life" without remission, saying he must be "emphatically and adequately punished" for his "heinous" crime.

A bench of justices Sanjiv Khanna and R K Gauba upheld Jha's conviction in three identical cases of murder and upheld life imprisonment in one case, while commuting the capital punishment to life term awarded to him by a trial court in two other cases in February 2013.

"In light of the aforesaid factum and balancing out of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, we feel that the present case would fall in the category wherein the extreme sentence of death by capital punishment would not be justified and at the same time possibility of award of remission and release of Jha on completion of sentence of 14 years or even thereafter, would be inadequate and parlous.

"The heinous and outrageous crime, involving inhumane behaviour and torture, must be emphatically and adequately punished. This case falls in the third category, beyond application of remission," the court said.

"In light of the above, whilst not confirming the death sentence proposed by the trial court, we award punishment of life imprisonment with a direction that Jha would not be released on remission for remainder of his natural life.

"This direction would not affect the power under Articles 72 (power of President to grant pardon) and 161 (power of the governor of state to grant pardon, remission of punishment) of the Constitution. This we feel would be appropriate and the proportionate sentence in the present case," the court added.

While commuting death to life term in two cases, the court said, "there was no eye witnesses" to these incidents.

In one of the three cases of murder, the trial court on February 4, 2013 had awarded life term till death to Jha for decapitating his victim and dumping the body near the Tihar Jail daring the police to nab him.

Jha, a native of Madhepura in Bihar, was sentenced to life term till death in a case relating to killing of one Dilip, whose headless body was dumped near Tihar Jail in 2007.

On February 5, 2013, Jha was sentenced to death in the second case of identical crime by the same trial court, saying his offence fell under the "rarest of rare case" as the brutality committed by him showed he "cannot be reformed".

The court awarded death sentence to Jha for killing 19- year-old Upender and dumping his headless body also near Tihar jail in 2007.

On February 6, 2013, Jha was awarded death penalty in yet



another crime of beheading and chopping the body parts of one Anil Mandal in 2006, with the trial court saying he committed the murder in an "extremely brutal, diabolical and revolting manner". This body was also dumped outside the jail.

Jha was arrested by the Delhi Police in May 25, 2007 in Mianwali Nagar here. He was earlier arrested in 1998 in a murder case but was acquitted for want of evidence.

In December 2007, a Delhi court had acquitted him in a case after the police failed to file charge sheet against him in another murder case.

After committing the murders, Jha had even dared the police by writing several letters to them to nab him, saying he would send similar "gifts" after every 15 days.

Concurring with the findings of the trial court, the high court noted in its 89-page order that "we would now like to crystallize and recapitulate our findings that Jha is the perpetrator and the culprit, who had committed the murder and had left the decapitated torso and body parts outside Tihar Jail and Tis Hazari Court Complex."



It further observed that it "accepts that there was brutality and diabolicism in the crime for the victim's head was decapitated. The motive and reason for the crime had nothing to do with the personal conduct or provocation by the victim, but as professed, was directed against the police, who were challenged.

"The language and expressions used in the letters and the manner in which the crime was committed reflects a sense of deride, conceited arrogance and illusions of glory of a person who considered himself to be above the law and who had committed the crimes, to make the police quiver and fret.

"The perpetrator projected himself and the crimes grandiosely, proclaiming that he would continue to commit murders without being identified and caught...," it added.
Under attack over Rohith Vemula's death in Hyderabad University, the HRD Ministry has asked JNU authorities to promptly look into "genuine" grievances of a Dalit scholar who wrote to its Vice-Chancellor threatening to commit suicide if his research grant is not extended.

Officials said the ministry took cognizance of reports in the media after which it directed the Registrar of the University to resolve the matter promptly and said "genuine grievances should be looked into".

It is learnt that the JNU authorities have already got in touch with the student, an official said.

The HRD Ministry has drawn flak over the suicide of Rohith, a Dalit scholar at Hyderabad Central University.

Officials said that after Rohith's suicide, the HRD Ministry is taking steps to ensure that University administrations are sensitised and take prompt action in resolving such matters.

Close on the heels of the controversy, the Dalit student of JNU had reportedly sent two letters to the Vice Chancellor threatening to end his life if his research grant is not extended next year.

Alleging that he has been "discriminated and harassed" by his department which is trying to "block his PhD", the Dalit researcher demanded resumption of his fellowship in a week's time or he would commit suicide.

In a separate letter, he contended that he was absent from the university for a certain period due to death of four members of his family, including his father and brother, and now that he has resumed his studies, he wants his fellowship to continue.

JNU authorities had assured that the matter would be resolved at the earliest.
Delhi government today charged that "huge corruption" in the BJP-led municipal corporations was the reason why they are not able to release the salaries of sanitation workers.

Accusing BJP of doing "dirty politics" over the issue, Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra also claimed there is a "conspiracy" to make Delhiites reside in the middle of garbage.

Even as a section of sanitation workers today went on a strike seeking "immediate" release of funds for payment of their salaries and arrears, the minister said that all dues have been cleared by Delhi government to the municipal bodies.

"There has been corruption of crores of rupees in the municipal corporations. That is why they are not able to even release the salaries of their staff despite receiving all their dues from the government and taxes from people," Mishra said at a press conference here.

Scores of municipality sanitation workers today staged a protest outside Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence over their demands.

Saying that on January 15, the commissioners of all three corporations had in a written submission admitted that all dues had been released to them by the government, the minister sought to know "where the money given to the MCDs is going?"



"When the government has given the entire amount for the current financial year meant to be spent on the salaries of employees, why has it not reached them?" he asked.

Mishra charged that a "conspiracy is being hatched to defame Delhi before the entire country and the whole world".

"The senior leadership of BJP has hatched a conspiracy to make the people of Delhi reside in the middle of a garbage heap. BJP is doing dirty politics on this issue," he claimed.
India has expressed concern over the downward trend in the Middle east peace process including Yemen, Syria and has called for a resumption of a comprehensive peace process that brings a lasting solution to the Palestinian issue.

"We are concerned that since last attempts for serious direct talks broke in April 2014, there has been a downward trend in the peace process despite efforts for serious negotiations between the parties which remained inconclusive," India's new permanent representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin told the Security Council yesterday.

Instead there has been an unfortunate escalation in Gaza, Akbaruddin said while participating in an open debate on the situation in the Middle East.

Unilateral actions by the parties unfortunately are moving them further apart, he said adding that India remains firmly convinced that dialogue remains the only viable option that can effectively address the issue.

"The imperative need is for restraint, to avoid provocation and unilateral actions and to return to the peace process. We remain hopeful and urge both sides to resume the peace process soon, for a comprehensive, just and lasting resolution of the Palestinian issue," Akbaruddin said.

Voicing concern over the political and security situation in Yemen, he asked all concerned parties there to amicably resolve their differences.

"We hope that the UN-mediation efforts would assist the people of Yemen in finding a consensus-based solution," he said.

Akbaruddin also expressed concern with the activities of proscribed outfits, radicalised and extremist groups in the West Asia and Gulf region especially in northern parts of Iraq and Syria which are critically impacting on peace and stability in the region.

"Efforts must be taken by all parties and stakeholders in the region to curb these dangerous trends. We believe the consolidation of political processes and solutions while building durable state institutions will be the effective way of addressing such extremism and radicalism in the region," he said.

He said New Delhi's position on the Middle East Peace Process has been consistent and clear.

"India supports a negotiated solution resulting in a sovereign, independent, viable and united State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side at peace with Israel as endorsed in the Quartet Roadmap and relevant UNSC Resolutions," he said.

"India has always played a proactive role in garnering support for the Palestinian cause in multilateral fora. We supported the recent vote in the General Assembly on raising the flags of non-member observer states," Akbaruddin said.
India has expressed concern over the downward trend in the Middle East peace process including in Yemen and Syria while calling for a lasting solution to the Palestinian issue.

"We are concerned that since last attempts for serious direct talks broke in April 2014, there has been a downward trend in the peace process despite efforts for serious negotiations between the parties which remained inconclusive," India's new permanent representative to the UN Syed Akbaruddin told the Security Council yesterday.

Instead, there has been an unfortunate escalation in Gaza, Akbaruddin said while participating in an open debate on the situation in the Middle East.

Unilateral actions by the parties unfortunately are moving them further apart, he said adding that India remains firmly convinced that dialogue remains the only viable option that can effectively address the issue.

"The imperative need is for restraint, to avoid provocation and unilateral actions and to return to the peace process. We remain hopeful and urge both sides to resume the peace process soon, for a comprehensive, just and lasting resolution of the Palestinian issue," Akbaruddin said.

Voicing concern over the political and security situation in Yemen, he asked all concerned parties there to amicably resolve their differences.

"We hope that the UN-mediation efforts would assist the people of Yemen in finding a consensus-based solution," he said.

Akbaruddin also expressed concern with the activities of proscribed outfits, radicalised and extremist groups in the West Asia and Gulf region especially in northern parts of Iraq and Syria which are critically impacting on peace and stability in the region.

"Efforts must be taken by all parties and stakeholders in the region to curb these dangerous trends. We believe the consolidation of political processes and solutions while building durable state institutions will be the effective way of addressing such extremism and radicalism in the region," he said.

He said New Delhi's position on the Middle East Peace Process has been consistent and clear.

"India supports a negotiated solution resulting in a sovereign, independent, viable and united State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side at peace with Israel as endorsed in the Quartet Roadmap and relevant UNSC Resolutions," he said.

"India has always played a proactive role in garnering support for the Palestinian cause in multilateral fora. We supported the recent vote in the General Assembly on raising the flags of non-member observer states," Akbaruddin said.
India's energy demand is likely to almost double in next 25 years as the economy is estimated to expand to $9 trillion by 2040, US oil major ExxonMobil said in its Energy Outlook 2040.

"Through 2040, we see China, India and other non-OECD countries  home to seven-eighth of the world's population  needing much more energy to fuel economic development and rising living standards.

"On the other hand, the US, Europe and other OECD nations will see declines in overall energy demand and emissions, even as their economic output continues to grow," ExxonMobil said.

India's energy demand is likely to rise from 34 quadrillion British thermal units (BTU) to 47 quadrillion BTUs in 2025 and 63 quadrillion BTUs in 2040.

During this period, the world energy demand is projected to rise by 26 per cent to 703 quadrillion BTUs, with India's share in world energy demand rising from 6 per cent in 2014 to 9 per cent in 2040.

"We anticipate some developed economies to see net declines in overall energy demand through 2040," it said adding by 2040, India will have passed China as the world's most populous nation, with 1.6 billion people.

China and India will also lead the developing world in raising standards of living and achieving technology improvements. Together, China and India will account for almost half the projected growth in global energy demand to 2040.

ExxonMobil also projected the country's GDP to rise from $2 trillion in 2014 to $9 trillion in 2040.

China will rise to almost 20 per cent of the world GDP, close to the US while India exceeds 5 per cent.

India's electricity usage is expected to soar, rising 185 per cent during 2014-2040. Its coal-fired electricity use may more than double during this period.

"While developed economies still enjoy the world's highest standards of living, we expect that China, India and many other nations will see strong growth in GDP and living standards to 2040. Not coincidentally, developing nations also are expected to lead the world in energy demand growth," it said.

ExxonMobil said a relatively large working-age group is an important factor supporting future economic growth in India and other developing nations.

On the other hand, ageing populations will continue to pose a challenge to economic growth in the OECD.

"Ageing will also impact China's potential growth. By 2040, more than 20 per cent of China's population will be age 65 or older, up from just 9 per cent today," it said.

It expected strongest per capita GDP rise in the non-OECD, particularly China and India.

"By 2040, per capita income in China and India is expected to be more than three times today's level," ExxonMobil said.

Carbon emissions will continue to rise in India and other developing countries through 2040, but around 2030, the downward trends in the OECD and China are expected to more than offset those increases, it added.
Mussolini biography





Italian political leader who established the fascist regime in Italy (1922-1943). After the First World War (1914-1918), the crisis of liberal democracies, aggravated by the economic crash of 1929, favored a phenomenon that characterize interwar Europe: the rise of totalitarianism. His first demonstration was fascism, a name that comes from the Fasci di combattimento created in 1919 by Benito Mussolini, who seized power in 1922 and imposed a one-party dictatorship. The Italian fascist regime became the main ally of Adolf Hitler in World War II (1939-1945), and ran the same fate after the defeat.



Son of a humble family (his father was a blacksmith and his mother a teacher of school), Benito Mussolini studied teaching, after which he taught for too long periods ever since the teaching combined with continuous trips. He soon had problems with the authorities was expelled from Switzerland and Austria, where he had initiated contacts with the irredentist movement coming sectors.



In his first political affiliation, however, Mussolini approached the Italian Socialist Party, attracted by its more radical wing. Socialism, rather than its reform principles, caught at the revolutionary side. In 1910 he was appointed secretary of the provincial federation of Forli and soon became editor of the weekly La Lotta di Classe (Class struggle). The victory of the radical reformist wing of the Socialist Congress of Reggio Emilia, held in 1912, gave him greater role within the political party, which used to take charge of the Milanese newspaper Avanti, official organ of the party. Still, their views on the fighting of the "Red Week" of 1914 motivated certain restlessness between their companions of rows, frightened by their radicalism.





The division between Mussolini and the Socialists increased with the proclamation of neutrality which launched the match against Italy's entry into World War I in August 1914. Mussolini, who had been one of the most radical opponents of the war in Libya and Italy's participation in the Great War, suddenly changed his mind and openly advocated a hawkish stance, which earned him expulsion from the Socialist Party. In November of the same year he founded the newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, of ultranationalist tendency. On the hesitations of the Italian Parliament concerning the entry into the war, he even wrote that "it would have been necessary to shoot a half dozen deputies" to give a "healthy" example to others. In September 1915 he joined voluntarily, and served in the army until he was wounded in combat in February 1917.









The March on Rome



After the war, Benito Mussolini wanted to capitalize on the feeling of dissatisfaction that gripped the Italian company calling to combat left-wing parties, which pointed out as guilty of the defeat of Italy in the war. In 1919 he created the Fasci di combattimento, brackets agitation or armed groups acting with virtual impunity against leftist militants and were the germ of future National Fascist Party, founded by Mussolini himself in November 1921.



In a context marked by the collective frustration after useless sacrifices of the Great War, by the general discrediting of parliamentary government by the economic crisis and high social conflict (the increasing development of the workers 'and peasants' movement, with factory occupations and land , worried to, fearful of social revolution) upper classes, fascists raised their voices against democracy and the class struggle, which in his opinion weakened and divided the nation. Frontally opposed liberalism and Marxism, advocated national solidarity and collective action around the figure of a charismatic leader, and presented themselves as defenders of the homeland values, law and order, violently confronting the Italian left .





Mussolini got curry favor large landowners and being elected deputy in the elections of May 1921, but his party won only thirty-five of the five hundred seats that made the camera. The impotence of the government to remedy the situation in the country and the dissolution of Parliament paved the way for the so-called March on Rome, which began on October 22, 1922. The October 28, 1922, in a coordinated action, forty fascist thousand converged on the capital from different parts of Italy. Prime Minister Luigi Facta said the stadium site to deal with the threat that hung over the capital, and the refusal of King Victor Emmanuel III to sign the decree, resigned.





On 29 October, pressured by events, the king had signed the appointment of Benito Mussolini as prime minister. The fascist leader, who for some time had resigned his fierce Republicanism, recognizing the role of the monarchy, formed a coalition government on October 30, the same day the black shirts, as they were called fascists by color his uniform, made his triumphal entry into Rome. Relying on a calculated image of moderation, Mussolini got the support of a weak parliamentary chamber on November 25 awarded, provisionally emergency powers in order to restore order, getting in return the commitment of Mussolini pretended to respect the parliamentary system.





Mussolini in power



Fascism came to power with the support of conservative environments, principally agricultural landlordism, and thanks to its ability to present itself as the core of a block of conservative order, capable of defending the national bourgeoisie was strengthened democratic dangers represented mainly by the Socialists, with their communist faction. With the meeting for the first time in December 1922, the Grand Council of Fascism, strengthening the party, which soon would leave behind its extreme anticlericalism with overtures towards Catholicism and the Holy See, at the same time increasing repression began policy.





The new government found in the "squadristi" (the Voluntary Militia for National Security) a force imposed by violence and terrorism their positions in the campaign for the elections of April 1924, in which the National Fascist Party won 69 percent of the votes cast. From that moment, political violence was increasing, and gradually (although with greater impetus after the murder of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924) Benito Mussolini emerged as one power, annihilated any form of opposition and eventually transform its government in a dictatorship; in 1925 after being outlawed all political parties except the National Fascist Party, the rise of fascism State laws culminated in November 1926 Defense.



A lack of a coherent ideology, fascism developed a rhetoric that stressed a number of reasons: nationalism and the cult of power, hierarchy and the personality of the Duce ('Leader' or 'Boss', title adopted by Mussolini in 1924); militarism and colonial expansionism (with more than a century late); xenophobia and exaltation of a glorious past traced to the Roman Empire and the Roman world as a civilizing idea.





Abolished the right to strike and trade unions and employers, employers and workers they had to join the corporate organizations created by the government. The regime imposed a social structure of corporations annulling individual rights and gave the state complete control; work, economic life and leisure activities were regulated by the government, which paramilitarization of society, mass propaganda acts, control of the media and the education of children under a fascist creed joined. But even in the productive substantive changes they were given; economic power remained in the hands of those who already owned before World War I, and corporatism was reduced to an ideology facade.



Supported by a broad sector of the population and with the trump card in his favor that effective propaganda apparatus, the fascist regime invested heavily in infrastructure. But overall fascism, nuanced economically by a strong state intervention and a tendency to autarky which intensified after the crash of '29, was unable to provide throughout the 1920s and 1930s the intended and proclaimed progress material for the sake of which the Italians demanded the sacrifice of individual freedom.





Did know, however, replaced by widespread psychological euphoria, in which the Italian people was imbued with the conviction that his country was experiencing a new national revival. In support of that sentiment, and trying to make sensational successes in foreign policy with which magnetize the Italians, Benito Mussolini regained old expansionist projects, such as the conquest of Abyssinia (1935-1936) and the annexation of Albania (1939). Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) was considered by Il Duce as a natural area of expansion and logical connection between the Italian colony of Eritrea and Somalia; passivity of France and England before the invasion created a bad precedent.



Second world war



After coming to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Mussolini was approaching Nazism; in fact, the Nazi leader was inspired by his ideas, and both leaders admired each other. After a first friendship treaty in 1936, the alliance between Rome and Berlin was firmly established in the Pact of Steel (1939). Hitler and Mussolini openly gave military support to General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a prelude to the world war. The aggressive expansionist policy of Hitler finally provoked the reaction of French and British, who declared war on Germany after the occupation of Poland.





And the Second World War broke out (1939-1945), and after the first German victories, who judged definitive, validated his pact with Mussolini and Hitler declared war on the Allies (June 1940). However, the failure of the Italian Army unprepared in Greece, Libya and East Africa as well as the advance of Allied troops (which had already begun an unstoppable landing on the island of Sicily, from which invade Italy), led the Great Fascist Council to depose Mussolini (25 July 1943). The next day Victor Emmanuel III ordered their arrest and detention. Two months after the new Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies.





Released by German paratroopers (September 12, 1943), yet Mussolini created a fascist republic controlled by Germany in northern Italy (the Republic of Salo, named after the city in which the government was headquartered) territories. In trials of Verona, Mussolini did convicting and executing those members of the Grand Council of Fascism that had promoted his dismissal, including his own son, Galeazzo Ciano. But the allied advance forced him to flee to Switzerland. He tried to cross the border disguised as a German officer, but was discovered in Dongo by members of the Resistance (27 April 1945), and the next day he was shot with his partner Clara Petacci; their bodies were exposed to public ridicule in the Loreto square of Milan.





Extracted from biografiasyvidas

for educational
A group of Indian-Americans today said it has formed a committee to campaign for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, describing him the best hope for the country.

'Indian-Americans for Trump 2016' - which was registered as a political action committee (PAC) on January 21 with the federal election commission - aims at garnering support of Indian-Americans to have Donald J Trump become the next President of the USA.

In a media release, the PAC said A D Amar, a business professor with Seton Hall University in New Jersey has been elected as its president; while New York-based attorney Anand Ahuja as its vice president.

Eminent Indian-American and Padma Shree awardee Sudhir Parikh of New Jersey has been appointed the chair of fundraising and advisory Committee of Indian-Americans for Trump 2016.

Devendra 'Dave' Makkar, a business owner and community activist of New Jersey has been elected as its treasurer.

The Trump Campaign, which so far has been vocal against PAC culture in the country and has said that he is self- funding the election, did not comment immediately on the formation of the 'Indian American for Donald Trump 2016'.

"This is only the first step. We are on the side of Trump for this election," Amar told PTI in an interview, soon after the announcement was made.

"We believe that Trump would be the nominee of the Republican party and he would be the president on the United States," he said.

Amar, who supported New Jersey Governor Chris Christies, who is also a Republican presidential candidate earlier during his State-level run, said at this moment Trump is the best for the United States and Indian-Americans.

He cited Trump's policies on illegal immigration and economy in particular as the main reasons for the Indian Americans to support him.

"Indian Americans would benefit the most from his policies," Amar said.

"On realising that the agenda of Donald J Trump for President 2016 is focused on reviving the American economy, rightly bringing America on the world stage, defeating terrorism and establishing peace through strength; many Indian-Americans believe that he is the best hope for America and the right candidate to be the next president of the United States," the political action committee said in a statement.

"The officers of the Indian-Americans for Trump 2016 urge all Americans to join in the effort and support Donald Trump in his endeavour to make America great again by electing him the next President of the USA," said Indian-Americans for Trump.
An Indian-American businessman has been sentenced to 21 months in prison by a US court after being found guilty of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.

The court has also ordered 43-year-old Sawan "Sunny" Shah, who owned, operated and managed several money transmitting companies in the Columbus area in Atlanta, Georgia, to forfeit USD 1,357,476.18.

According to court documents, Shah offered cheque cashing services to the public, including cashing of cheques that exceeded USD 1,000.

He knew that he and his companies were required to be registered with Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and with the State of Georgia.

Neither Shah nor any of the businesses he controlled were registered with FinCEN or the State of Georgia as a money transmitting business or as a cheque cashier, the Justice Department said.

As part of his plea, Shah admitted that several individuals approached him about cashing tax refund cheques that were issued in the names of other individuals.

He agreed to do so and did not require proof of identification for the individuals listed on the cheques.

Shah charged fees of between 10 and 30 per cent of the value of the cheque, due to his knowledge that the cheques were involved in tax fraud, prosecuting authorities alleged.

In 2013 and 2014, Shah cashed approximately 567 federal tax refund cheques that totalled USD 1,357,476.18.

Shah admitted in plea documents that those cheques were the result of fraudulent claims for income tax refunds submitted in the names of stolen identities, the Justice Department said.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said today he hoped his country could reconcile with fellow Middle Eastern powerhouse Saudi Arabia, but refused to apologise for an attack on a Saudi embassy.

"We did everything we had to, we condemned" the attack, Rouhani said of the torching of the embassy earlier this month by demonstrators protesting the execution of a prominent cleric from Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority.

"We arrested the culprits, it was right to do so and we did," he said, insisting the ball was now in Saudi Arabia's court.

"Why should we apologise? Because (cleric) Nimr al-Nimr was executed? We are the ones to apologise because they are killing the people of Yemen? Apologise to them because they are helping terrorists?" he asked.

"We do not want tensions with Saudi Arabia to continue," he said, but insisted there was "no justification" for what he described as Riyadh's "aggressive" policies in the region.

"They are the ones who should apologise to Muslim people, hundreds of times," he said.

The Gulf kingdom and some of its allies severed diplomatic relations with Iran over the January 2 embassy attack.

Iran previously said it had arrested 40 people over the incident in Tehran, and another four after Riyadh's consulate in Mashhad was set alight.
Iran's navy warned a US warship to leave an area where Iran has been conducting a naval drill near the narrow Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the semi-official Fars agency reported today.

The US Navy denied that its operations in the region were affected.

The Iranian navy chief, Adm Habibollah Sayyari, was quoted as saying that the US warship received two warnings before leaving the region.

"They were warned once by maritime patrol aircraft and once again by the Alborz destroyer," he said. "The US warship left the region immediately after receiving the warning," he added, saying he believed that the Americans had approached the area to "learn our tactics."



Iran said the naval drill got underway today over an area of 3 million square kilometers, including part of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world oil supply passes, as well as the Gulf of Oman and neighboring parts of the Indian Ocean.

It is the first Iranian naval exercise since 10 US sailors were briefly captured by Iran earlier this month after drifting into Iranian territorial waters.

Cmdr Kevin Stephens, a spokesman for the US Navy's 5th Fleet, offered a different version of events.

Stephens said the US is aware of the Iranian exercise and that it has not altered US naval operations in any way. Iran had announced plans to close off certain areas for the drill, but he said this is "common practice for any navy conducting such training at sea," he said.

"Our forces similarly announce closure areas for our training events. We do not consider such announcements to be 'orders,'" Stephens said.

Iran conducts similar exercises annually and the US does not see this year's as a change in Iranian behavior, Stephens added.

He said the exercise may increase the chances of US forces interacting with Iranian warships, but added that US Navy vessels are routinely approached by Iranian warships as they operate in the region.

Most of those encounters are conducted "in a safe and professional manner, recent events notwithstanding," he said.

The 5th Fleet is the US Navy's regional counterweight to Iran and is based across the Gulf from Iran in the island kingdom of Bahrain.

Yesterday, Sayyari said many types of missiles and torpedoes will be launched during the maneuvers.

Iran occasionally holds military maneuvers to ensure the preparedness of its forces and to demonstrate its military capabilities in the region. The county has more than 2,000 kilometers of shoreline facing the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will today agree a host of commercial deals during a visit to France that offers the clearest demonstration yet of the Islamic Republic's post-sanctions buying power.

Rouhani was formally welcomed to Paris by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius with military honours and national anthems, for the first visit to France by an Iranian president for 17 years.

It is the second leg of a trip signalling Tehran's rapprochement with Europe following the lifting of the punishing sanctions imposed over its nuclear programme.

The real business of the visit will come when Rouhani officially signals Iran's intention to buy 114 passenger planes from European aircraft maker Airbus.

Rouhani will also rubber-stamp a deal paving the way for the return of French carmaker Peugeot to Iran, according to a French government source.

Although the red carpet is being rolled out for Rouhani, the Iranian opposition will hold a human rights demonstration and Jewish groups also intend to protest in Paris.

Rouhani is to hold talks with President Francois Hollande which are expected to include Iran's role in Syria, where it is backing President Bashar al-Assad in a war that has killed 260,000 people.

Talks are due to begin Friday in Geneva to take tentative steps towards ending the conflict.

After arriving from Italy, where he sealed deals for steel and pipelines worth between 15 and 17 billion euros ($ 18.5 billion), Rouhani began his Paris visit yesterday by meeting top French business leaders.

France's economy minister Emmanuel Macron said Rouhani had unveiled a new scheme to guarantee investment by French firms in Iran.

A source involved in the deal to buy Airbus planes said that only letters of intention will be signed at this stage, because some sanctions are still in place.

However, Iran is said to be keen to bring its ageing fleet of mid- and long-haul aircraft up to date, so the deal is widely expected to go ahead soon, giving a boost to the European aviation industry.

Under the Peugeot deal, it will produce 200,000 vehicles a year in Iran from 2017, in partnership with Iranian manufacturer Khodro. The French carmaker pulled out of the country in 2012 as sanctions began to bite.

In another potential bonanza, French oil giant Total is said to be interested in buying Iranian crude.

Rouhani's meeting with Hollande is also expected to touch on Iran's bitter feud with regional rival Saudi Arabia.

At a press conference rounding off his Rome visit, Rouhani was defiant when asked whether Iran would apologise to Saudi Arabia for an attack on its embassy by demonstrators furious over Riyadh's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr.
The dreaded Islamic State terror group is exploiting the refugee crisis to smuggle its members into Europe to create sleeper cells, British intelligence agencies have warned.

The suspected terrorists are mainly travelling on fake Syrian or Iraqi passports which are now so sophisticated that it is almost impossible to distinguish between genuine refugees and terror suspects, the Telegraph reported.

Citing security officials, the paper said it also means suspects who were under watch by the intelligence agencies suddenly vanish.

"Islamic State is skilfully exploiting the migrant crisis to smuggle terror cells from Syria into major European countries such as the UK," a top intelligence official said.

"Jihadists travel to Raqqa (Syria) to meet up with ISIL commanders, where they receive training and new passports. They then make their way back to Europe posing as migrants with new identities, making it virtually impossible for security officials to detect potential terrorists among those fleeing persecution," the British official said.

The House of Commons home affairs select committee (HASC) is examining the issue of fake passports being used by suspected terrorists to gain entry into the UK.

"It is deeply concerning that the migration crisis may be being used as cover for terrorists seeking to commit violent acts in Europe," Indian-origin MP and chair of the committee Keith Vaz said.

"The HASC has heard evidence from the Greek ambassador, who made it clear that Greece does not have the required technology to identify fake Syrian passports.

"It is vital for our national security that the UK, and EU as a whole, provides resources to secure the external border to prevent future atrocities like the attacks in Paris last year, and ensure international databases are up to date.

"The external border of the UK is now the front line in the fight against terrorism," Vaz added.

The European Union police agency Europol had earlier warned that ISIS is plotting "Mumbai-style" terrorist attacks directed at soft targets such as public places in Europe.

The Europol warning came as the ISIS released a strongly defiant new beheading video, showing the nine 'Paris attackers' and threatening an attack on the UK.

The latest disclosures will intensify pressure on the UK government ahead of the EU referendum,expected later this yearto decide whether Britain should withdraw from the EU.

Eurosceptics are of the view that the only way of ensuring that terrorists are not able to travel to the UK would be by withdrawing from the EU and imposing much stricter border regulations.

At least two of the terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris last November had entered Europe on fake Syrian passports. It was also feared their ringleader, Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was able to return from Syria hiding among the thousands of refugees.
The Indian Women's Press Corps today expressed "shock and strong objection" to Union Minister and former army chief Gen V K Singh's use of the term "presstitutes" for linking him to the video of a man touching the feet of BJP president Amit Shah.

Irresponsible statements by elected representatives set a "very bad precedent" as they have the effect of creating perceptions among the public, IWPC President T K Rajalakshmi and General Secretary Ravinder Bawa said in a statement.

"Whatever may be the compelling circumstances, it is a matter of dismay that the former army chief, a recipient of several honors and who is also a minister of state, should use derogatory and sexist terms to describe media-persons," the organisation said.

The video, showing the man touching the feet of Shah while felicitating him after he was re-elected as BJP President on Sunday was doing the rounds on social media.

Singh, a Minister of State in the Modi government, had yesterday said the said video is of Vijay Pal Tomar and not him as being linked, requesting people to counter the "mischief".

"Video of Shri Vijay Pal Tomar during felicitation of Shri Amit Shah has been floated to say it is me. A case of mischief by prestitutes !!!!" he had tweeted.

Singh had earlier too used a word "presstitutes" to label the media, IWPC noted. It had triggered a massive outrage in April last year.

The controversy began when Singh said that visiting the Pakistan High Commission was "more exciting" than evacuating Indians from Yemen.

Singh seemingly took offence to the outrage in the media, labelling the media "presstitutes" in a tweet.

Later, he tried to downplay the controversy, saying "presstitute" word was meant for a biased section of media.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Road Minister Nitin Gadkari will meet tomorrow road developers bankers to sort out key issues to put back on track 20 stalled highway projects of worth Rs 20,000 crore.

The meeting assumes significance as the government after a series of meetings with bankers and developers had resolved issues pertaining to 58 projects but 20 projects worth over Rs 20,000 crore are still stuck.

Running out of patience for stalemate over these 20 projects, the government has warned non-serious developers and bankers of terminating these contracts.

The projects relate to key national highways in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

The stuck projects belong to players like Larsen & Toubro, HCC, Gammon, Madhucon, Soma and Essel Ifra, among others, while the list of lenders includes top names like State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank and Bank of India.

A top official last month had said that the government was "reaching a stage of impatience" over the stalled projects.

"The concessionaires and bankers are not realising that we are reaching a stage of impatience, and people who are users of these roads are not going to be waiting any more," the then Road Transport and Highways Secretary Vijay Chhibber had said.

"If developers and bankers fail to mend their ways and initiate correctives to roll out projects by January-end, the government will start terminating contracts in PPP mode and repackage them," he had said before his retirement.

The government recently "offered a full package", which among other steps extends the concession period of projects where delays are not attributable to developers.
Japanese Emperor Akihito bowed his head in sorrow during a sombre ceremony at the Philippines' biggest war cemetery today as he vowed never to forget the many Filipinos killed during World War II.

Akihito, 82, and his wife Empress Michiko are in the Philippines to celebrate 60 years of diplomatic ties, while also honouring those who died during Japan's brutal occupation of the Philippines.

"During this war, fierce battles between Japan and the United States took place on Philippine soil, resulting in the loss of many Filipino lives and leaving many Filipinos injured," he said.

"This is something we Japanese must never forget and we intend to keep this engraved in our hearts throughout our visit," he said at a banquet hosted by President Benigno Aquino.

Aquino in turn, praised Akihito's role in reconciliation, saying: "I am held in awe, recognising the burdens you have borne, as you have had to live with the weight of the decisions made by others during the dark episodes in the history of our nations."



Akihito's visit is the first by a Japanese emperor to the Philippines and comes as the two countries strengthen economic and defence ties, partly to counter China's increasingly assertive actions in disputed regional waters.

The official events of his five-day trip began today morning with a red-carpet welcome at the presidential palace hosted by Aquino.

In the afternoon he visited the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes' Cemetery) in Manila, which was built in 1947 to honour Filipino soldiers who died during World War II.

During the Japanese WWII occupation, tens of thousands of soldiers died marching to Japanese concentration camps or during confinement.

An estimated 100,000 Filipinos also died during the month-long campaign to liberate Manila in 1945, which saw aerial bombings and artillery flatten the city.

Akihito has made honouring Japanese and non-Japanese who died in World War II a touchstone of his near three-decade reign -- known as Heisei, or "achieving peace" -- and now in its twilight.

He has previously journeyed to other Pacific battle sites where Japanese troops and civilians made desperate last stands in the name of his father Hirohito.
Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar today called on Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh to discuss the issues related to genetically modified (GM) crops including mustard seed.

In the meeting, sources said Javadekar discussed how field trials of many of the transgenic varieties of the food crops have got stuck despite biotechnology regulator GEAC giving nod for the same.

The Minister mentioned that GM foods like cornflakes are being consumed in the country, but many states have denied approval for the scientific field testing of GM crops because of strong opposition from many anti-GM groups.

The two ministers are believed to have discussed ways to build consensus around the issue, sources added.

Sources further said that Singh informed the Environment Minister that his ministry would promote those GM crops approved by the biotechnology regulator GEAC.

The field trials of GM crops and their commercialisation has become a contentious issue in the country. The goverment has allowed commercial cultivation of Bt cotton and put moratorium on Bt brinjal.
The group weblog of the Texas A&M University Germany Biosciences Semester Study Abroad Program
A jewellery exporters' delegation today met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in New Delhi and discussed a number of critical issues facing the gems and jewellery industry and gave suggestions to improve them.

Some of the issues were related to taxation, chairman of Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), Praveenshankar Pandya, said.

"We asked the Finance Minister to take measures that create certainty regarding tax provisions and reduce the quantum of tax-related litigation," he added.

GJEPC chairman pointed out that uncertainty regarding tax laws in the country led to increased litigation and ultimately reduced ease of doing business here. "As a result, FDI flows to other competing countries," he said.

The delegation also requested introduction of Special Turnover Tax regime for the diamond industry with 0.75 per cent tax on sales turnover (calculating the net income as 2.5 per cent of the turnover).

"This will be along the lines of the tax regimes prevalent in other diamond-trading nations like Belgium and Israel," Pandya said adding that such approach will be tax neutral and encourage companies in Belgium and Dubai, especially those run by NRIs to shift their manufacturing units to India, which is currently in China.

"By attracting international manufacturing business to India (from Belgium, Israel and Dubai), we can tap additional market share of approximately around USD 20 billion (in FY 2018-19) thereby helping the government garner more tax collection in the long run," Pandya said.

He said this would help create jobs for 1.56 million Indians (by 2018-19) in the gems and jewellery sector while preserving skill and talent of our labour force.

This will also help in tackling trade deficit and current account deficit through higher exports, he added.

The GJEPC chairman also urged the government to permit the sale of rough diamonds at the SNZ in Mumbai by implementing a 0.25 per cent tax on sales turnover achieved at SNZ by foreign mining companies.

This, he pointed out, would generate a new area of tax collection by shifting such sales from Belgium, Israel and Dubai.
Veteran actor Kamal Haasan celebrated Republic Day in a unique way by joining micro-blogging site Twitter.

The 61-year-old actor's first tweet was a video of the rendition of the National Anthem in his voice.

"India's freedom struggle remains unique even today. Respecting it is the only way to keep it and set new world standards," he tweeted.

His handle iKamalhaasan is a verified one and has so far got 35.3 K followers. His elder daughter actress Shruti Haasan welcomed him.

"One of the happiest moments ever on Twitter! Welcome my most favourite person @ikamalhaasan to twitter!!! Love you appa," she wrote.

The Padma Shri awardee is currently busy with the post-production of his controversial spy thriller "Vishwaroopam II".
A Lenin statue escaped largely unharmed today after unidentified plotters tried to blow up the massive monument of the Soviet Union's founder in the de facto capital of rebel Ukraine.

Pro-Russian insurgency leaders quickly accused a "terrorist group" of trying to topple the symbol of communist power that has loomed large over the main square of the eastern industrial city of Donetsk for nearly 50 years.

A small part of the monument's foundation was damaged in the explosion while the bronze statute itself was left unscathed.

"According to our information, the explosives were planted by a terrorist group that had already committed similar crimes in Donetsk," rebel military spokesman Eduard Basurin told AFP.

No one claimed immediate responsibility and no arrests were made.

But the Donetsk insurgents' self-proclaimed interior ministry said it was treating the incident as a "terrorist act" and conducting a probe.

The blast follows a series of similar attempts to remove statues of Lenin -- of which many are planted in cities of the ex-Soviet Union -- from the war-shattered regions of the separatist provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Pro-Moscow forces have been waging a 21-month war against government troops that has claimed more than 9,000 lives.

Kiev has banned all Soviet symbols as well as the Communist Party in a bid to reaffirm its commitment to joining the European Union and possibly even the NATO military bloc.

Ukraine's 2014 pro-EU revolution was marked in Kiev by the highly symbolic toppling of another enormous Lenin monument two months before the flight to Russia of the country's Moscow-backed president and his closest aides.

Russia, whose leadership consistently denies any involvement in the pro-Moscow revolt, accuses its western neighbour of violating international law by banning the Communist Party.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has thanked India's first-ever all-woman UN peacekeeping unit that was deployed in the war-torn African nation as it prepares to depart the country after a nine-year tour of duty.

The Indian Formed Police Unit (FPU) which is also the first-ever all-woman police unit in UN peacekeeping history, has served the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) since 2007.

It will depart the country on February 14, as Liberia gets ready to assume full responsibility for national security amid the ongoing UNMIL drawdown.

"The contribution you have made in inspiring Liberian women, imparting in them the spirit of professionalism and encouraging them to join operations that protect the nation; for that we will always be grateful," Sirleaf said.

"Our security service now has 17 per cent women - we owe all that to you, because it was not even one per cent a few years ago. And these women want to emulate you in the way you've served this country," she said.

Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General Farid Zarif said the Indian unit leaves behind a legacy of true and dedicated service in support of Liberia and the Liberia National Police and in service to the Liberian people.

"You should be proud that by your presence, you have made tremendous contribution by bringing greater stability, confidence and assisting in the strengthening of the capacities of the Liberia National Police," Zarif said, at a farewell programme held in honour of the contingent by UNMIL at the Headquarters of the Indian Formed Police Unit in Congo Town, outside Monrovia.

"If I had my will, I would have recommended for another unit of the United Nations Mission in Liberia to leave, so that the Indian Formed Police Unit would continue its stay in the country for the time being," Sirleaf told the contingent.

The Indian contingent's service to the country was vital in restoring peace and serves as an encouragement to Liberian women who are now contributing 17 per cent to the security sector of their own country, she noted.

She said, though members of the Indian Formed Police Unit have been in Liberia since 2007, she said time has moved fast.

Sirleaf noted that it became shocking to many Liberians after they learned that members of the female Indian Police Unit was finally leaving for home, although many Liberians thought that they would stay a bit longer.

She said during their stay in Liberia, they demonstrated courage, commitment, discipline and professionalism, which were the hallmark of their service to Liberians, during their nine-year tour of duty in Liberia.

Sirleaf said she was impressed by the alertness of the Indian Formed Police Unit on many occasions especially during late working hours when they were seen performing their duties.
The Bihar government today released a list of people holding constitutional post, public office and officials entitled to different colours of beacon light on their official vehicles.

As per the list released by Commissioner Patna Anand Kishore a total of 15 categories of people are entitled to use red beacon light with flasher.

They include Governor, Chief Minister, former Governor, Chairperson of Legislative Council, Speaker of Legislative Assembly, Chief Justice of Patna High Court and Lokayukta.

The same facility is also extended to cabinet level ministers, Vice Chairperson of state Planning Council, Former CMs, former ministers, Leader of Opposition of Council, leader of opposition in state Assembly, Judges of the Patna High Court and five vehicles of Finance departments used for transportation of high officials, it said.

Fifteen other categories of persons could use red beacon light on their vehicle but without flasher.

They included Deputy Chairperson of Legislative Council, Deputy Speaker of Assembly, state minister, deputy minister, Chairman of SC Commission, Chairperson of ST Commission, Chairman of Extreme Backward Castes Commission and head of Dalit Commission.

Similar facility would also be available for State Election Commissioner, Member of state Planning Council, Chief Secretary, Advocate General, Chairman of state Minority Commission and heads of Upper castes and backward castes, Head of Bihar Public Service Commission and Principal Additional Advocate General.

Red light could also be used on vehicle of persons formally designated by CM to the Transport department.

Except for those named in the list, others using red light on vehicle is illegal and liable to penalty, the Commissioner said.

It directed officials checking vehicles, to inform the Transport officials about vehicles found illegally using red light for cancellation of their registration.

A separate list issued by the Commissioner, named 18



categories of officials who could use blue beacon light on their vehicles.

They include Director General of Police, Additional Director General of Police, Secretaries of departments, Registrar of the Patna High Court, Inspector General of Police, DIG, Transport Commissioner, district judge, district magistrate and Superintendent of Police.

The same is also available to Additional District Judge, Deputy Development Commissioner, Additional District Judge, Chief Judicial Magistrate, Sub Divisional Officer and Deputy Superintendent of Police.

It said that it has been found that blue beacon light was used in the vehicle of Managing Director, Special Secretary, Additional Secretary, Joint Secretary and Director among others which is unauthorised and liable to fine.

"It has also been seen that some officials use blue light on their private vehicles is illegal and against laid down rules," the Commissioner said.

The order released directed that during vehicle checking drive, original papers should be properly verified and penalty should be collected on violation of rules.
A 45-year-old local party leader was shot dead by bike-borne assailants here, police said today.

Pawan Yadav, a leader of Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, was shot by the youths last night when he was going somewhere from his party office, they said.

Yadav was rushed to a hospital where he died during treatment.

A probe is underway, police added.
The financial assistance provided by the chief minister's relief fund for medical treatment of the needy has been increased with the aid extended to cover more surgeries.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis made this announcement at Sahyadri state guest house after interacting with people on the occasion of 67th Republic Day on Tuesday, an official from the chief minister's office said today.

"Now onwards, financial assistance will be provided for liver transplant, bone marrow transplant, heart transplant, implanting prosthetic organs and for costs arising out of keeping infants in intensive care units (ICU)," he said.

"Until now, the maximum assistance that was provided for the needy from the CM's relief fund, for their medical expenses, was Rs 2 lakh. This has now been increased to Rs 3 lakh," the official added.

According to him, if the cost for liver, bone marrow and heart transplant is more than Rs 10 lakh, the government will chip in Rs 3 lakh for the purpose.

"For implanting artificial limbs, the government will bear 50% of the cost or Rs 1 lakh, whichever is lower. Similar will be the case for costs arising out of keeping a newborn in an ICU," he said.

The official said, initially Rs 5,000 aid was provided for medical costs amounting to Rs 20,000 and the assistance was increased to Rs 10,000 in December 2014.

For medical costs ranging between Rs 20,000-40,000, Rs 7,500 was initially given as an aid, later increased to Rs 15,000.

If the treatment costs was between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10,000 was provided as government aid and this was further increased to Rs 20,000.

"Now, after revision, it has been decided that for treatment costs ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh, Rs 50,000 aid will be provided, or 50% of the cost will be borne by the government, whichever is lesser," he added.
Malaysia's anti-graft body today said it is "most likely" toappeal the decision absolving Prime Minister Najib Razak of criminal wrongdoing in the channelling of nearly USD 700 million donation from Saudi Arabia's royal family into his private accounts.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC)special operations director Bahri Mohd Zin saidit is "most likely" that the Commission would consider appealing to the Attorney-General to reconsider his decision in the "straightforward case".

Attorney-General Mohamed Apandi Ali in a press conference yesterday had said that the probe by the anti-corruption agency found no evidence to show that the USD 681 million donation was "an inducement or reward for doing or forbearing to do anything in relation to his capacity as Prime Minister".

On the SRC International case, Apandi said there was no evidence that Najib had abused his position during a Cabinet meeting that approved a government guarantee on the loan from Retirement Fund Inc, a pension fund.

Bahri was one of the MACC directors that was transferred to the Prime Minister's Department on August 7, 2015.

He was later reinstated to his original post three days later.

Apandi had yesterday said that documents showed that the USD 681 million (RM 2.08 billion) was transferred to Najib's personal accounts between March 22 and April 10, 2013 from the Saudi royal family.

He said Najib returned USD 620 million to the Saudi royal family in August 2013 as the money was not utilised. He, however, did not say what happened to the remaining USD 61 million.

The Attorney-General did not say why the Saudi royal family donated RM 2.08 billion to the Prime Minister, after giving his reasons for closing the investigation.

"It is between the (Saudi royal) family and the Prime Minister," he said.

The Attorney-General's decision came as a major relief for the beleaguered premier who has been under intense pressure to resign over the financial scandal.
Malaysia's anti-graft agency today said it will appeal against the attorney-general's decision of giving a clean chit to Prime Minister Najib Razak of any criminal wrongdoing in a financial scandal involving nearly USD 700 million.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) will seek a review of the decision with an independent government panel, it said in a statement but did not specify if it recommended charges against 62-year-old Najib.

Yesterday, Attorney-General Mohamed Apandi Ali cleared Razak of any criminal wrongdoing in the nearly USD 700 million donation from Saudi Arabia's royal family channelled into his private accounts, in a major relief for the beleaguered premier who has been under intense pressure to resign over the financial scandal.

The graft case has been the biggest political crisis in Razak's seven-year premiership.

The Attorney-General said in a press conference that the probe by the anti-corruption agency found no evidence to show that the USD 681 million donation was "an inducement or reward for doing or forbearing to do anything in relation to his capacity as Prime Minister".

Earlier, the MACC's special operations director Bahri Mohd Zin said it is "most likely" that the Commission would consider appealing to the Attorney-General to reconsider his decision in the "straightforward case".

Bahri was one of the MACC directors that was transferred to the Prime Minister's Department on August 7, 2015. He was later reinstated to his original post three days later.

Apandi had yesterday said that documents showed that USD 681 million were transferred to Najib's personal accounts between March 22 and April 10, 2013 from the Saudi royal family.

He said Najib returned USD 620 million to the Saudi royal family in August 2013 as the money was not utilised. He, however, did not say what happened to the remaining USD 61 million.

The Attorney-General did not say why the Saudi royal family donated the amount to the Prime Minister, after giving his reasons for closing the investigation.

"It is between the (Saudi royal) family and the Prime Minister," he said.
In a bid to blunt propaganda by terror groups like the Islamic State, Malaysia has announced that it is set to launch a regional centre to counter-terrorism digitally on the lines of the ones used by the US and the UAE to fight terrorism.

"We want to play a role in the stage by sharing our experiences fighting against the Communist insurgency and the more recent terror threats such as from Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and Al-Maunah," Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said here.

The regional digital counter-terrorism messaging centre is expected to open in May.

Malaysia has been witnessing several cases of its citizens swayed by the Islamic State propaganda and has increased its vigilance to stem this trend.

Hamidi noted that the terror groups might come and go but their styles and objectives remained similar.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the Conference on Deradicalisation and Countering Violent Extremism, he said the government had allocated 46 million dollars worth of seed capital for the centre.

The centre will adopt the existing template that is used by the United States and United Arab Emirates, Hamidi said.

Commenting on a study conducted by the Pew research centre which showed that 11% of Malaysians supported the Islamic State (ISIS), Zahid said the findings should be viewed critically.

"I do not intend to question the research methodology (of the study) but what is more important is the government's commitment to stop violent extremism."
Border town gets new barbecue cafe

Robert Jay Coleman left his home in Nashville in 2010 to seek his fortune in North Dakotas oil fields.

I liked working in the oil field, Coleman said. But it didnt last long enough. I liked the area here and wanted to continue making North Dakota my home.

Now hes the proud operator of Smoky Bonz, a barbecue-style cafe and saloon in the border town of Portal.

Coleman is no stranger to restaurant business.

I worked in several eating establishments and enjoyed it, he said. When this opportunity came up, I knew it was for me.

Coleman worked in Nashville for a local celebrity chef and was fascinated by the many tips and different ways to prepare and make the world of food exciting.

He chose the name Smoky Bonz because he wanted to give it a barbecue theme, although the business has many other dishes available.

-- Burke County Tribune

Affordable housing project gets support

The Ray City Commission has voted to spend $500,000 to build water and sewer, curb and street improvements to facilitate an affordable housing project.

Diane Weick, president of SW Design Build, requested approval of the infrastructure.

The development is being funded in part through the states Housing Incentive Fund, which allows individuals and companies to direct income taxes into a fund for affordable housing. The same company has done similar developments in Crosby and Minot.

We believe it would be a good addition to the city of Ray, Weick said.

The project is the remainder of what started as a much larger development that included more than 90 apartment units, a restaurant and a hotel.

For a variety of reasons, including the recent downturn in the oil industry, the project was scaled back last summer to 48 apartments and most recently, to two 12-plexes.

-- Tioga Tribune

New city hall under consideration

Ray is considering the construction of a new city hall.

Last year, the city hired its first police officer as it faced increased demand for law enforcement services due to the oil boom. Previously, the city relied upon the Williams County Sheriffs Office.

The current city hall doesnt have a separate, secure room for storing evidence and suspects have to be brought in through the public-access door.

This creates a number of safety issues for police and the public, according to Commissioner Travis Rettig.

Rettig presented very preliminary proposals to address these issues. One plan would build additions onto the existing city hall, and the second plan would build a new facility at First Avenue and Score Street.

He said the city can apply for the funding to support the project through the Williams County emergency services tax, which is a 1 percent sales tax voters approved in November 2014.

-- The Tioga Tribune

Divide school addition vote nears

There are times when teachers and students at Divide County Elementary School say they can't hear themselves think.

Some days, we can hear boom whackers and recorders  that is like the worst day ever, said Kaylee Zorc, whose classroom has the dubious distinction of being next door to the music room.

Students hear the same songs over and over and Zorc said theres no doubt it has an effect on her class.

You can tell the kids are more hyper, depending on what theyre playing, she said.

The remedy, as laid out in a $9.9 million school addition and renovation plan set for a bond vote on Feb. 9, is to add four classrooms at the elementary school and three to five at the high school.

That may not sound like a great deal of extra space, but its enough, said Superintendent Sherlock Hirning, to allow for many changes within the existing footprint of each building, all aimed at better serving the needs of todays students.

-- The Journal, Crosby

(Bakken briefs are compiled by Steve Andrist, executive director of the North Dakota Newspaper Association. Andrist can be reached at 701-595-7314.)
A 22-year-old man from Madhya Pradesh was arrested at the railway station here after a country-made pistol was recovered from him, Government Railway Police (GRP) said today.

The accused, identified as Rinku Sharma, a resident of Chenta village, was arrested yesterday, GRP SHO, Davinder Singh Randhawa said.

"We have recovered a country-made pistol and two live cartridges from his possession," he said.

A case under Arms Act has been registered against him and he will be produced before a local court today, the SHO said, adding investigation is underway.

Punjab is on high alert after the terror attack at Pathankot air base on January 2 in which seven security personnel were killed.
The Uttarakhand police today arrested a 30-year-old man who allegedly duped people by posing as the personal secretary of Chief Minister Harish Rawat.

The accused, Saurabh Vats, used to introduce himself as the CM's personal secretary and duped the people of money on the pretext of getting their works done, police said.

He was arrested from his home in Patel Nagar area of the city, they said.

Police said the action was taken following complaints of some people who Vats had allegedly cheated.

He is being interrogated, they added.
Mass media coverage, including television, radio, newspapers, billboards and booklets about an epidemic can be a powerful tool to help slow the spread of the disease, a new study has found.

Researchers from from Shaanxi Normal University in China and York University in Canada suggest that to maximise this effect, media reports should focus on changing people's behaviour in an epidemic.

During a disease outbreak, like the A/H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, reports kept people updated on the disease - how it is spreading and how many people are affected. However, scientists have also shown that mass media coverage can have an effect on people's behaviour.

Researchers studied the effect of mass media coverage on the H1N1 epidemic in the city of Xian in China. They compared the number of hospital visits with the number and duration of reports about the epidemic.

Their results show that more reports resulted in fewer hospital visits and vice versa. This shows that media coverage is a powerful tool to help halt the spread of disease during an epidemic, researchers said.

Researchers collected media coverage that contained the key word 'A/H1N1' in the title from eight major news websites between 3 September and 16 November 2009.

They also obtained the number of newly reported cases from the province's dedicated influenza hospital.

They found that the average number of daily news items was linked to the number of newly reported cases, with a time lag of about four days.

At some stages of the epidemic the number of reported cases had an effect on news coverage, while at others the news coverage had an effect on the number of cases.

They then developed a mathematical model to help them study the dynamics of the media coverage - news items, coverage duration and the response of media to the number of cases.

The model confirmed that when there is an increase in news items, there is a decrease in newly reported cases. This is likely due to a change in people's behaviour - they avoid contact with others, so fewer people are infected.

The model also showed that the duration of coverage matters. When the coverage lasts longer, there are more news items and a bigger impact on the public awareness of the epidemic, resulting in further behaviour changes and fewer new infections.

"In order to help reduce the accumulated number of new notifications, the media should have been more persistent in their reporting of number of infections, hospitalisations and deaths," said Sanyi Tang from Shaanxi Normal University.

"In addition, news reports needed to be timely and continue for longer periods," Tang said.

The findings were published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
A seven-year-old boy was



killed allegedly by two unidentified persons in Mehnagar police station area here today.

The deceased identified as Krishna Yadav, a Class I student of Ram Kunwar Public School here had gone with his classmate to relieve himself, in an open space behind the school campus, SP Dayanand Misra said.

The suspects attacked the boy and slit his neck leaving him dead on the spot, the SP said adding that all angles including possible rivalry in the village are being looked into.

Meanwhile, the students and locals blocked a road outside the school protesting the incident.

However, forces were deployed and the situation was brought under control.
Russia's federal tourism agency today issued a warning that Islamic State jihadists were planning to abduct Russian citizens in Turkey.

"According to the competent agencies, leaders of the IS terrorist group plan to take hostages from among Russian citizens in Turkey," it said in a statement.

"Hostages can be transferred on to territories controlled by militants to hold public executions and to be used as human shields in combat with Syrian government and coalition forces," it added.

"Therefore we draw the attention of all independent tourists departing for Turkey to the necessity of taking all possible measures to ensure personal security."



Turkey had been Russia's number one foreign tourism destination for years but this came to an abrupt end following the shooting down of a Russian military plane by Turkish jets on the Syria-Turkey border in November.

The warning essentially targets all remaining Russian tourists in Turkey, as organised tours by travel agencies were banned by Moscow as part of a raft of retaliatory measures in the wake of the jet downing.

The incident sparked a crisis in relations between Moscow and Ankara, with the Kremlin accusing the Turkish leadership of essentially funding Islamic State jihadists.

Russia reintroduced entry visas for Turks and slapped sanctions on several Turkish products.

Russia has been conducting air strikes in Syria, its ally in the region since Soviet times, since September. Turkey meanwhile is part of a parallel US-led coalition targeting IS in the country.

The two countries have lately also clashed over the guest list for Syria peace talks set for later this week, with Moscow saying they would be pointless without Syrian Kurdish group the Democratic Union Party, which Ankara considers is linked to Kurdish rebels inside Turkey.

Turkish authorities have blamed IS for a suicide bombing in the heart of Istanbul's tourist district earlier this month that killed 10 Germans, one of a string of deadly attacks said to be the work of the jihadist group.
The Supreme Court today refused to interfere with a Bombay High Court order staying till January 29 the proposed hike in fares of the Versova-Ghatkopar Metro rail corridor.

A bench comprising justices M Y Eqbal and Arun Mishra asked the metro operator Mumbai Metro One Pvt Ltd (MMOPL), a subsidiary of Reliance Energy, to approach the high court itself.

The court made it clear that it is not going to hear the plea filed against the interim order and rather requested the high court to hear the matter as early as possible.

The high court had on December 17 lasy year stayed till January 29 the proposed hike in fares of the Versova-Ghatkopar Metro rail corridor, saying the hike should not be implemented until the final hearing of the petition, filed by Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA).

Sanjay Nirupam, head of Congress in Mumbai, had also filed an intervention application challenging the hike. His plea has been taken up for hearing along with the petition filed by MMRDA.

MMOPL, which is operating the Versova-Ghatkopar corridor, had earlier announced that it will increase the fares by Rs 5 from December 1, 2015.

Instead of the earlier slabs of Rs 10, 20, 30 and 40, the proposed new structure will have five slabs of Rs 10, 20, 25, 35 and 45.

However, MMRDA, which had commissioned the Mumbai Metro, challenged the hike.

It was alleged that central government was facilitating private profiteering by allowing multiple fare hikes. Nirupam demanded that there should be a fare hike every four years, as per the agreement, and not frequently.
Mustard production in the country may rise by 10 per cent to 5.5 million tonnes this year on account of favorable weather conditions in last few days.

The cold weather conditions have picked up in the northern and central India, which is good for standing mustard crop.

Some winter showers have also given a breather to the farmers, as a drop in temperature benefits the standing crops.

Currently, the mustard crop is at flowering stage and the flowering in mustard is higher by 10-15 per cent as compared to last year, Puri Oil Mills Managing Director Vivek Puri said.

"The development of crop and output would be better if the chillness in winters continues and conditions remain favorable," he added.

Last year, rain and hailstorm affected the mustard crop output by 10-20 per cent. This year, in spite of lesser mustard sowing, the crop output may be a little more as compared to last year if the conditions and circumstances are favorable, he added.

"Last year, the production was around 5 million tonnes, this year it could reach 5.5 million tonnes due to favorable weather conditions in last few days," industry body Solvent Extractors Association's Executive Director B V Mehta told PTI.

Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana are the few main mustard producing states, wherein Rajasthan alone contributes to the 50 per cent production of mustard crop.

Puri also said that mustard oil has the potential to reduce edible oil imports, if mustard is declared a national crop by the Indian government, on the lines of what the Malaysian government has done for palm oil.
Nuclear-armed North Korea poses an "overt threat, a declared threat to the world", US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Beijing today after talks with his Chinese counterpart following Pyongyang's fourth nuclear test earlier this month.

"The United States will do what is necessary to protect our country and our friends and allies in the world," Kerry added at a joint press conference with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.

A US official said earlier the issue would be at the top of Kerry's agenda in his talks with Wang, adding: "The Secretary has made no secret... Of his conviction that there is much more that China can do by way of applying leverage (on Pyongyang)."



China is North Korea's chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor, but those ties have become strained in recent years as Beijing's patience wears thin with Pyongyang's unwillingness to rein in its nuclear weapons ambitions.

After the latest test on January 6 - which Pyongyang said was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, a claim largely dismissed by experts - China said it "firmly opposes" the North's actions and summoned its diplomats for "solemn representations".

Nevertheless, the Asian power has proven reluctant to follow Washington's lead on the issue and no substantive actions towards the North have been announced.

Kerry said the two powers - both of them permanent members of the UN Security Council - had agreed to mount an "accelerated effort" to reach agreement on a new United Nations resolution on the issue.

But Beijing's ties with Pyongyang were forged in the blood of the Korean War and analysts say its leverage is mitigated by its overriding fear of a North Korean collapse and the prospect of a reunified, US-allied Korea directly on its border.

Earlier, as the two diplomats met, Wang welcomed the fact that Kerry's trip had taken in a number of Asian countries, saying visiting them could help him understand the continent. "It can help you listen to voices more objectively," he added.

As Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, the state-run China Daily ran an article headlined: "Experts have low hopes for Kerry's China trip."



Before today's meeting, the official news agency Xinhua issued a commentary blaming the US's "uncompromising hostility" and "Cold War mentality" for the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Washington's actions, such as flying a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber close to the inter-Korean boder, were heightening the North's "sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship", it added.
Nuclear-armed North Korea poses an "overt threat, a declared threat to the world", US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Beijing today following Pyongyang's fourth nuclear test earlier this month.

Washington is pushing for a strong United Nations response to the North's latest atomic blast -- which Pyongyang said was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, a claim largely dismissed by experts -- with enhanced sanctions.

But China, North Korea's chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor, is reluctant, despite the pair's ties becoming strained in recent years as Beijing's patience wears thin with its neighbour's ambitions for nuclear weapons.

The two powers -- both permanent members of the UN Security Council -- had agreed to mount an "accelerated effort" to try to resolve their differences on a new resolution, Kerry told a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.

But he acknowledged that they had not agreed on the "parameters of exactly what it would do or say".

"The United States will do what is necessary to protect the people of our country and our friends and allies in the world," Kerry added.

Wang said that China also backed a new Security Council motion, but added that it "should not provoke new tension in the situation".

Beijing's ties with Pyongyang were forged in the blood of the Korean War and analysts say its leverage is mitigated by its overriding fear of a North Korean collapse and the prospect of a reunified, US-allied Korea directly on its border.

China has a "particular ability... To be able to help us significantly to resolve this threat", Kerry said, noting that as the North's main provider of trade and aid it could apply pressure through "movements of ships" and "various resource exchanges".

Wang said he rejected "all groundless speculation or distortion of China's position", re-iterating that Beijing was committed to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

China regularly calls for calm in the region, and for the resumption of the long-stalled six-party talks, which bring together the two Koreas, China, the US, Russia and Japan.

"The goal is to take the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula back to the right track of negotiation", Wang said.

"Sanctions are not an end in themselves."



As Kerry arrived in Beijing yesterday, the state-run China Daily ran an article headlined: "Experts have low hopes for Kerry's China trip."



Before today's meeting, the official agency Xinhua issued a commentary blaming the US's "uncompromising hostility" and "Cold War mentality" for the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Washington's actions, such as flying a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber close to the inter-Korean boder, were heightening the North's "sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship", it added.

Wang and Kerry's discussions -- which lasted for nearly five hours -- also addressed the strategically vital South China Sea, where Beijing has built up artificial islands capable of hosting military facilities in disputed waters.

China asserts ownership over virtually the entire area, putting it at odds with regional neighbours the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.
Officials of Nagpur Metro Rail (NMRL) have overcome hurdle on a key route of the transport system by deciding to construct a ramp to connect the line to an upcoming flyover near the railway station here.

NMRL will construct East-West corridor passing over Nagpur railway station and crossing the flyover near the station.

The company will undertake construction of about 200 metres of ramp connecting the fly over and in turn charge the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) the necessary project costs, officials said.

Since the alignment and integration of metro is equally important -- seven pillars of maximum height of 16 metres are required -- NMRL will lay the pillars for the corridor and also construct the ramp.

This innovative and creative feat of engineering will produce an elegant piece of infrastructure at that location, NMRL Managing Director Brajesh Dixit said today.

Both metro rail and flyover (road over bridge) work will be completed within their respective deadlines, he told a press conference.

A high-level meeting chaired by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis resolved the issue and an MoU was signed between Metro Rail and MSRDC in Mumbai recently.

Dixit said the metro rail construction is ahead of schedule at present. On North-South corridor, the civil work from Mihan to Sitabuldi was going on at brisk pace and extension of this route will commence in March.

Design of nine stations on North-South corridor has started, he said.

Meanwhile, Mahesh Kumar, a senior Railway officer, has joined NMRL as Director (Projects) and will look after the civil engineering work, Dixit said.

The 1982-batch Indian railway Service engineer has previously worked in Benguluru and Kochi metro projects and also in Southern Railway in various capacities.
Republican Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem's campaign announced Tuesday that he's secured the endorsements of more than three-quarters of the party's elected state lawmakers.

In a press release Tuesday the Stenehjem campaign announced it has the endorsements of 52 North Dakota House Republicans and 29 state Senators.

The GOP has a 71-23 majority in the House and a 32-15 majority in the Senate.

It is my honor to earn the trust and respect of such a large majority of state legislators representing districts in all corners of the state," Stenehjem said in his release. "As governor, I look forward to working with these lawmakers to face our current challenges head-on by championing a smart, responsible budget and improving tax and regulatory policies that encourage growth and investment.

Stenehjem is in a three-way race for the GOP nomination for governor with Bismarck Rep. Rick Becker and Fargo businessman Doug Burgum.

Becker has five lawmakers supporting him as part of his campaign leadership team so far and has the endorsement of former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

No Democratic-NPL Party candidates have announced yet although former Agriculture Commissioner Sarah Vogel has formed an exploratory committee and has held multiple fundraisers in recent weeks.
Suspected Naxals today set on fire three vehicles, including two tipper trucks engaged in sand mining, in Chhattisgarh's insurgency-hit Bijapur district, police said.

The vehicles were deployed for extracting sand from Indravati river at Magarnar village under Bhairamgarh police station limits, superintendent of police K L Dhruv told PTI.

The vehicles belonged to a local person.

No official complaint have been lodged yet, but security personnel were sent to the spot, he said.
Nepal may have some differences with India but can never show enmity towards the country, Deputy Prime Minister C P Mainali said today, in a climbdown from his earlier hardline stance.

"There may be some differences with India and the relations may pass through ups and downs, but it can be resolved through mutual dialogue and understanding," he said at a symposium organised by Nepal-India Friendship Society to mark India's 67th Republic Day here.

His remarks come amid an ongoing political crisis in Nepal involving Madhesis, largely of Indian-origin, who have led a violent protest demanding more representation and are opposed to a seven provincial structure in the new Constitution that divides their ancestral homeland.

Nepal will pursue good neighbourly relations with both India and China, Mainali said as he extended best wishes to the people and government of India on the occasion.

His statements today are in stark contrast to his stance reflected in November last year when Mainali had accused India of trying to disintegrate the country and annex the Terai region.

He had also referred to the blockade of key border trade points with India by Madhesis, saying it was part of Indian conspiracy to annex the Terai by disintegrating it from the rest of the country.

Echoing similar sentiments over a robust bond, Indian Ambassador to Nepal Ranjit Rae said that no one can shake the strong foundation of Nepal-India relations, though there may be some misunderstanding from time to time, which can be cleared through dialogue.

India wants peace, stability and development in Nepal, he said, adding that the internal problems of Nepal can be resolved through peaceful negotiations.

Nepal and India should pursue the agenda of development as both the countries have abundent human and natural resources, he said.

Speaking at the same function, former Prime Minister and coordinator of Naya Shakti Nepal Baburam Bhattarai underlined the need for youths of both the countries to collaborate and cooperate for their mutual benefit and prosperity.

He advised the leaders of both Nepal and India to change their perception and realise their past mistakes in view of the current stalemate, adding "there is a need to give new a perspective to the bilateral relations in the present changing situation".

"India should come out of its Cold War-era security perception and Nepal should free itself from the mentality of feeling insecured from its 'big neighbour' while dealing with each other.

"Development, rather than security should be the top agenda in the relations between the two neighbouring countries," Bhattarai said, adding that Nepal should try to benefit from its two economic powers India and China.
Police rushed into a military hospital in San Diego after reports of gunfire, but an initial sweep of the sprawling facility found no sign of a shooting.

A single witness reported hearing three shots in the basement of one of several buildings in the Naval Medical Center complex in southern California yesterday, prompting a massive response from authorities.

Local police, assisted by Navy dogs and California Highway Patrol officers, scoured the building after the call came in around 8:00 a.m (local time) but there was no sign of a shooting or any reports of casualties, officials said.

"They did an initial sweep and they didn't find anything so they are doing a more thorough sweep," Navy spokesman Jon Nylander said.

"They have not located any evidence of a shooting having taken place."



Authorities placed the hospital and surrounding buildings on lockdown and local news footage showed patients and workers in hospital garb -- as well as service members in military dress -- filing out of the facility with their hands raised as police stood by with assault weapons at the ready.

US law enforcement officers routinely train for "active shooter" scenarios in which an armed person goes on a rampage.

Such events have become all too common in America, still shaken after last month's mass shooting in San Bernardino, also in southern California.

In that case, a married couple inspired by Islamic State jihadists slaughtered 14 people in the city east of Los Angeles.

The Naval Medical Center was quick to get word out of a possible shooting, posting a warning on Facebook.

"An active shooter has just been reported in building #26 at Naval Medical Center San Diego. All occupants are advised to run, hide or fight," the hospital posted on its official Facebook page.

San Diego, the southernmost city on the California coast, has a sprawling military infrastructure and is a major port for the US Navy.

The hospital is located in the city's Balboa Park, close to San Diego's famous zoo.

The United States has seen several deadly shootings at military installations in recent years.

In November 2009, US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at his Texas military base, Fort Hood. He killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 more, before being overpowered by police.

In September 2013, Aaron Alexis killed 12 people and wounded eight at the Washington Navy Yard, just two miles (three kilometres) from the US Capitol building, before he was shot dead by officers.
There is no provision in rules for advertising vacancies of Lokayukta and Deputy Lokayukta, Madhya Pradesh government has said.

Lokayukta Justice (retired) P P Naolekar is on one-year extension till June this year, and the post of Deputy Lokayukta is vacant for over two years. Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta is a statutory body mandated to enquire into corruption cases.

The Lokayukta has exclusive jurisdiction to enquire into complaints against the Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister, Minister, Minister of State, Deputy Minister, Leader of Opposition and officers of the rank of Secretary, Additional Secretary and above. The Deputy or Up-Lokayukta is empowered to enquire into all other cases except those in which powers vest exclusively with the Lokayukta.

As per an official notesheet received in response to an RTI query filed by activist Ajay Dubey, as per Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta and UpLokayukta Rules, 1981, has no mention of publishing advertisement to fill these vacancies.

As per the rules, the Governor has been vested with power to appoint the Lokayukta in consultation with Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court and with approval from Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Assembly. For the appointment of Deputy Lokayukta, Lokayukta needs to be consulted, the notesheet says.

The move comes after Dubey wrote to government seeking a transparent procedure for appointment of Lokayukta and Deputy Lokayukta in the state.

"The state government has rejected any scope for further transparency in functioning of Lokayukta by declining to advertise these posts. The persons appointed to these two key posts will continue to function under the government's control if an open and more transparent system is not adopted. Already, there are lot of allegations of corruption against certain government employees and public servants," he claimed.

As per rules, only such person can be appointed as a Lokayukta who has been a Judge of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice or Judge of any High Court in India.

Besides, there can be one or more Deputy Lokayukta, who can be a Judge of any High Court in the country or a person who has held any post under the central or state government carrying the scale of the pay, which is not less than that of an Additional Secretary to government of India. The tenure of both these functionaries is six years and reappointment is barred.
US President Barack Obama welcomed Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders' to the Oval Office today for a private meeting during which the two discussed foreign, domestic issues and "occasionally a little bit of politics".

Sanders, the Vermont Senator, met Obama at the White House for about 45 minutes.

In a brief interaction with reporters after the meeting, sanders said he and Obama had a "productive and constructive meeting about a number of issues" including foreign, domestic and "occasionally a little bit of politics"



"We're feeling really good about where we are" but not saying he can repeat Obama in 2008. If there is a large turnout I think we win, if not I think we're going to be struggling," Sanders said, adding that he did not ask the President for his endorsement.

The meeting comes after Obama heaped praise on other Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and dismissed comparisons between Sanders rise in the early state polls and Obama's groundbreaking 2008 campaign against Clinton.

"The President and I discussed this morning a number of issues, foreign policy issues, domestic issues. Occasionally, a little bit of politics. But I enjoyed the meeting, and I thought it was a very positive and constructive meeting," Sanders said.

"The President was certainly expecting to spend some time talking in the meeting about how they could work together to advance Democratic priorities and values. That's work that they've obviously done in the past, and that's work that the president hopes they can do together in the future," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

"I would anticipate there was an opportunity for the president to reminisce a little bit about his own experience campaigning for President -- both in terms of drawing big crowds, but also spending some time talking to people in -- in more out-of-the-way places, where the crowds are not as large, but the interactions do allow for a more personal, private conversation," he said.

Sanders-Obama meeting took place only days ahead of the crucial Iowa Caucus.

"I think what the Iowa campaign ends up being about is one word, and that is turnout. We're feeling really good about where we are, and if there is a large voter turnout...Think we win. If not, I think we're going to be struggling," he noted.

"No, of course not," Sanders said when asked if he asked for Obama's endorsement.

"What the President has tried to do, what Vice President Biden has tried to do, is to be as even-handed as they can be. I think he and the vice president tried to be fair and even-handed in the process, and I expect they will continue to be that way," he said.

Responding to a question, Sanders appeared to be supporting Obama's policy against the ISIS.

"I think what the President is trying to do is the right thing, and what he is trying to do is keep our young men and women in the military out of a perpetual war in the quagmire of the Middle East," he said.
US President Barack Obama has called for faster research on the quick-moving Zika virus, which is spread by mosquitoes and has been linked to a rise in birth defects in Brazil.

Obama yesterday urged better diagnostic tests and the development of vaccines and treatments against the virus, which the World Health Organization has said is likely to spread throughout the Americas.

As of now, there is no vaccine or medicine to treat Zika virus, and no way to prevent it other than by trying to avoid mosquito bites.

Obama was briefed on the situation by top science experts in the US government, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health, according to a White House statement.

Yesterday, the CDC expanded its travel warning for pregnant women and those considering becoming pregnant to avoid 24 areas in Latin America and the Caribbean that have seen cases of Zika virus.

Now, travelers are advised to postpone visits to the US Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic, along with Puerto Rico, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Saint Martin, Samoa, Suriname and Venezuela.

There have not yet been any cases of local transmission of Zika virus within the United States, although infected travelers have returned to the country after visiting other areas.

Zika virus is spread to people primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito, according to the CDC.

Symptoms are usually mild and may include fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis.

However, the virus can pass from a pregnant women to her fetus, and global health authorities are concerned by an apparent link between Zika virus and nearly 4,000 cases of babies born with unusually small heads -- a condition known as microcephaly -- in Brazil.
One person died in an armed clash with police as they arrested the leaders of a group laying siege to an American wildlife refuge, the FBI said.

Ammon Bundy, who has led the revolt in rural Oregon, was one of seven people arrested after a stand-off pitting an anti-government militia against the US authorities.

Bundy has said protesters acted at the request of a rancher who wanted to graze his 600 cattle on federal property, but was prevented from doing so when the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) installed a fence last year.

Bundy, 40, was arrested along with six others who face "a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats," the FBI said.

"During (the) arrest, there were shots fired," the FBI statement said of an operation along a highway involving FBI agents and Oregon state police.

Authorities did not immediately identify the person who was killed.

"One individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased," and another person was injured and receiving medical treatment, the FBI statement added.

The activist group which took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was protesting the jailing of two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were convicted of arson.

They were calling for the government to turn over federal land in the area to the people.

Both ranchers distanced themselves from the movement and voluntarily began their scheduled prison sentences after the occupation began.

Some neighbors and members of the local community, notably the Oregon Cattlemen's Association, rejected the takeover, even if they support the Hammonds' plight.
Over 50% children under five years of age are anaemic in West Bengal, according to the latest National Family Survey (NFHS-4 for 2015-16) data.

"In West Bengal, though the number of children under five years of age suffering from anaemia decreased by seven percentage points over the last decade (from 61% in 2005-06 to 54.2% in 2015-16), one in every two children is still anaemic," Atindra Nath Das, regional director (East), Child Rights and You told PTI while quoting from the report.

Mothers do not fare any better than children in this regard either, as more than 60% of all women and 53.2% of pregnant women were found anaemic in the state, the survey revealed.

"The nutritional status of children in West Bengal is found to have improved only marginally, in comparison to that of the previous NFHS data, published almost a decade ago," Das said.

The much-awaited survey on India's indicators was released by the ministry recently. While the report indicates an improvement in the overall health of children, the rate of progression on annual basis was alarming.

Besides child malnutrition, quality of ante-natal and delivery care for expecting mothers also showed worrying trends negatively impacting child-health in the state, as findings of the recent survey suggested.

However, overall findings of the first phase of the NFHS-4 show marginal improvement in the maternal and child health and nutrition across 13 states and two Union Territories.

Even though West Bengal has done fairly well in several child health and nutrition indicators like immunisation and treatment of critical childhood diseases, the progression rate of critical indicators like child nutrition, which has direct linkage with children's overall growth and development, remained far below than expectation, Das said.

"The NFHS is not just a reflection of the state of health and nutritional wellbeing of children but, it also provides a direction for corrective measures in state policies and programmes," he added.

According to the report, the data for West Bengal reinforced the need for the state to address nutritional security of children and expecting mothers as an emergency. "In the context of malnutrition, strengthening of anganwadi centres and a robust system of growth monitoring, becomes imperative," Das said.

NFHS findings give three sets of data as child malnutrition indicators -- stunting (low height for age), wasting (low weight for height) and underweight (low weight for age).

While the percentage of stunted children in West Bengal has decreased by only 12% over the last decade (from 44.6% in 2005-06 to 32.5% in 2015-16), percentage of wasted and severely wasted children increased by almost 4% (from 16.9% to 20.3%) and 3% (from 4.5% to 6.5%) over the same period of time.

"More worrying is the fact that of all children in West Bengal, one in every three (31.5) is still underweight. This percentage was 38.7 in 2005-06," the report said.

According to the NFHS findings, anaemia in children was found to have decreased marginally across most of the states, but still remained worryingly widespread.

The poor status of consumption of iron and folic acid supplements and lack of proper ante-natal care for expecting mothers were also areas of concern, the report said.

"Only 28.1% of mothers consumed iron-folic during pregnancy and only 21.8% of them had full ante-natal care. These data suggest that in West Bengal, quality maternity care is still a distant cry," Das said.

Also the average out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) per delivery in public health facilities stood at Rs 7,782 in West Bengal, remarkably high in comparison to that of other states.

Data also revealed that nine of 11 states have not been able to reduce the infant mortality rate even by two percentage points annually.

According to the analysis of critical child health indicators of NFHS-4 done by CRY, the only two states to sustain a pace of annual reduction in IMR by two points were West Bengal and Tripura.

Currently in India, 40 out of 1,000 infants don't celebrate their first birthday.

The status of nutrition for children under five years of age shows marginal improvement, the report said.

Mission Indradhanush, the national initiative aimed at achieving cent per cent immunisation, seemed to be a distant dream in light of the status of immunisation revealed by NFHS, Das said.

In eight of 11 states (Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Tripura, Karnataka, Goa, MP and Sikkim) of the country, one out of three children do not receive full immunisation.

Further analysis showed that these states have failed to increase their immunisation coverage even by 2% per year.

The first phase of the survey included Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Goa, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, West Bengal and two Union Territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry.
In a fresh setback to the Mumbai attack trial, a Pakistani court has dismissed the government's petition seeking voices samples of 26/11 mastermind Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects in the case.

The prosecution had filed an application in the Islamabad High Court seeking voice samples of the suspects to compare it with the communication intercepted by Indian intelligence and then present it before the anti-terrorism court (ATC) as evidence against the seven suspects in the Mumbai attack case.

The Islamabad High Court on Monday dismissed the petition.

In 2011 and 2015, the issue of obtaining voice samples of Lakhvi had been dismissed by the trial court on the grounds that "no such law exists that allows obtaining of voice sample of an accused".

The prosecution's petition said the Indian intelligence agencies had intercepted communication between the suspects and the terrorists in connection with the Mumbai attack in 2008.

In the recorded intercepts, the suspects are alleged to be instructing the terrorists.

The prosecution lawyers had argued that the samples were essential for concluding the investigation of this high profile case.

The trial court had also rejected another petition of the prosecution requesting the court to declare Ajmal Kasab and Faheem Ansari absconders in order to meet legal formalities.

The prosecution had told the court that unless it declared the two men absconders, the trial against them would remain "inconclusive" as both have been cited as accused in the Mumbai attack case by Indian authorities and that they were also wanted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that was probing the 26/11 case.

Pakistani authorities arrested seven Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) members involved in the planning of the attacks including the terrorist group's operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the mastermind of the Mumbai attack.

Six accused -- Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum -- have been in Adiala Jail for more than six years in connection with planning and executing the Mumbai attack in November, 2008, that left 166 people killed.

Lakhvi, 56, secured bail in December, 2014, and was subsequently released from Adiala Jail on April 10, 2015, after the Lahore High Court set aside the government's order to detain him under a public security act.

A trial is underway against them at the ATC since 2009.
A Palestinian has stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli man in the West Bank, police said, the latest in a a relentless outburst of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the attack took place yesterday near a gas station in the West Bank settlement of Givat Zeev. She said a 50-year-old man was stabbed and that he was evacuated to hospital.

She said the 18-year-old attacker, whose identity was not immediately known, was apprehended.

The attack is the latest in more than four months of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Some 26 Israelis and one American student have been killed in Palestinian attacks. At least 149 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, 104 of whom are said by Israel to have been attackers. The remainder have been killed in clashes with Israeli troops.

Earlier yesterday, the Islamic militant group Hamas said a group of militants has gone missing inside a tunnel built to attack Israel that collapsed due to heavy rainfall.

Hamas confirmed the incident in a statement yesterday, a day after Palestinian social media activists publicised the matter.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has built a sophisticated network of tunnels that it has used to hide weapons, fire rockets into Israel and penetrate Israel to carry out attacks. Israel destroyed dozens of tunnels in its 2014 war with Hamas in Gaza.

Palestinian activists say the tunnel was in northern Gaza and that at least seven militants were inside when it collapsed Tuesday. Hamas says it is searching for the missing.

Three Hamas militants were killed in other tunnel collapses in Gaza this month.
Laura Anne Kvale Jacobson, 80, New Market, Ala., passed away at home on Dec. 25, 2015. She was born Oct. 10, 1935, in Gate Township, to Erling and Vera Kvale. She attended Dakota Lutheran High School, Concordia College and North Dakota State College of Science.

Upon graduation, she began a journalism career as the youngest female newspaper editor in North Dakota. She then accepted a position as the Womans Editor of the North Dakota Rural Electric and Telephone magazine. She married Paul Jacobson in 1958. Throughout the 1960s, their growing family relocated to five states, eventually settling in 1971 in Summit, N.J.

With five children in school, Laura was very active as a volunteer. This led to a very rewarding 20-year career in the Summit School System. She retired in 1998 as the office manager and secretary to the principal of Summit High School.

Affectionately known as Mr. and Mrs. J by many, Laura and Paul were heavily involved with Summit youth activities for over 35 years. Along with being a mother to her five children, she was Mom to many more.

In 2006, Laura and Paul left their beloved Summit relocating to New Market, Ala., joining two sons and once again supporting youth activities, this time through three of their grandchildren.

Laura was preceded in death by her parents; and her brother, Erling Jr.

She is survived by Paul, her husband of 57 years; her children, Kerry (Danisha), New Market, Ala., Rick, New Market, Ala., Kris, Horsham, Pa., KC (Monica), San Diego, Calif., and Patrick (Lynnette), Evans, Colo.; nine grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

The family will meet in North Dakota in the spring to celebrate Lauras life.

Memorials may be made to Hospice of North Alabama, 3311 Bob Wallace Ave., Suite 101, Huntsville, AL 35805. (Hazel Green Funeral Home, Hazel Green, Ala.)
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today asked officials to complete the construction of hostels made for Dalit and tribal students by March 31.

Patnaik issued such direction while reviewing progress of welfare schemes under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Development, Minorities and Backward Classes Welfare department.

While expressing displeasure over non-completion of hostel construction, Patnaik asked the department Secretary to submit the status report in the first week of April along with the names of officers who have failed to achieve the target date.

Out of a total of 2,850 hostels sanctioned by the state government to provide boarding facilities to the students, only 2,020 have been completed so far.

The Project Administrator ITDAs and District Welfare Officers (DWOs) of Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Rayagada, Sundergarh, Nuapada and Nabarangpur districts have not conformed to the timeline for completion of the remaining hostels, the Secretary informed Pathnaik.

Referring to the new scheme 'Anwesha' launched by the state on December 21 last year to provide quality education to ST&SC students during the current academic session, the Chief minister asked the department to give specific targets to each district and monitor its implementation regularly.

On the safety and security of student boarders in the hostels especially the girls, Patnaik said the state government has sanctioned 3,000 posts of matrons and 336 posts of ANMs for these schools.

He asked the department officials to fill up these posts within a specific time-frame.

While reviewing the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), the Chief minister observed that there is a need to dispose of all the pending claims in a time-bound manner.

The districts like Mayurbhanj, Sundergarh, Rayagada, Nuapada and Koraput need to improve their performance as large number of claims are pending for disposal in these districts, he pointed out.

Patnaik said the state government is committed to provide 100 per cent coverage of pension, housing and other social security schemes for welfare of the PVTG households.
Stating that the police in West Bengal has done a commendable job in maintaining the security of the state, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today said people should be grateful rather than criticising them.

"We criticise them throughout the year.. But we do not see their efforts. They will continue to work when we will enjoy the festival seasons... Give me one single incident that has happened in West Bengal and still you will say that there is misrule in the state," Banerjee said at the Investiture Ceremony of the Kolkata Police at the Red Road here today.

"We need to see whether action at an incident has been taken quickly or not. We have produced the chargesheet within 72 hours of a rape incident," Banerjee said without specifying the incident.

Describing Kolkata Police as one of the best, Banerjee said that police officers have been doing hard work for which they have received distinguished awards.

"You will not get such a good police system anywhere..In fact, Bengal Police also has improved a lot," Banerjee said, adding that in four year's time around 90 new police stations have been set up.

Banerjee today inaugurated four police stations run by women personnel at Watgaunge, Tollygunge, Amherst Street and Patuli.

She stated that recruitments for the Police, which was ceased for a long time during the Left Front government, was started by her government.

"Huge task has been done. Youths from Jangalmahal have been recruited in the force, for green police, civic police... Our administration has done a commendable job and the state have surged ahead because of their efforts," she said.

"But people who cannot see this are only one per cent... Let them do it...,"Banerjee said.
A deal that will see French carmaker Peugeot return to the Iranian market will be signed tomorrow as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits France, a French government source said.

Peugeot and its French partner Citroen will work with Iran's Khodro to produce 200,000 vehicles a year using parts manufactured in Iran.

The first vehicles will roll off the production line in 2017, the source said.

Peugeot pulled out of Iran in 2012 as Western sanctions imposed over the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme began to bite.

At the time, Iran was Peugeot's second-largest market after France.

With the lifting of the sanctions, Iran has signed a raft of commercial deals and Rouhani is also expected to tie up an agreement to buy passenger jets during his two-day visit to France.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today took strong exception to people's complaints and grievances related to the customs and excise sector and directed strict action against the officials responsible.

He also asked all Secretaries, whose departments have extensive public dealing, to set up a system for top-level monitoring of grievances immediately, a PMO statement said.

His directions came while chairing the 9th meeting of PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation), an IT-based multi-modal platform under which he interacts with top officials of various central departments and state governments via video conferencing.

During the meeting, Modi reviewed the progress of vital infrastructure projects in the road, railway, coal, power and renewable energy sectors, spread over several states, including Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, the statement said.

Among the significant projects reviewed were the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Jal Marg Vikas Project from Allahabad to Haldia, it said.

The Prime Minister also reviewed the progress of the Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY).

He also took stock of the implementation of the Old Age Pension Scheme and emphasised the need to ensure that beneficiaries receive the payment on time.
The Calcutta High Court today observed that police were not sincere in their attempt to arrest Kaizar Ahmed, a South 24 Parganas district zilla parishad member of Trinamool Congress, in connection with a case of alleged extortion.

Noting that Ahmed has been regularly attending meetings of the zilla parishad, Justice Dipankar Dutta said that attempts made by the investigating officer in the case did not appear to be sincere.

Justice Dutta said in his interim order that he hoped and trusted that in near future the investigating officer would move the magistrate court for an appropriate order if he was unable to secure the arrest.

A petition alleging police inaction claimed that Ahmed, a TMC leader of Bhangar area of South 24 Parganas district, had demanded Rs 25 lakh from the owner of a company.

Construction work for the company's new facility was on at Boirampur in Bhangar, about 20 km from the metropolis, the petitioner stated.

A complaint was filed at the local police station on June 15, 2015, along with voice records of alleged telephone call demanding the amount.

Ahmed was suspended from TMC following a clash between two factions of the party in October, 2014. His suspension was revoked a few days ago by the party.
The People's Welfare Front (PWF) has emerged as a "strong alternative" to the two major Dravidian parties DMK and AIADMK, which "deserve punishment for corruption," CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury has said.

"The Dravidian parties, which were ruling Tamil Nadu in turns for more than four decades, deserve punishment for their political blunders and corruption. People were unhappy with the large scale corruption of both the parties and its leaders were facing criminal cases," he said.

Yechury late last night here inaugurated the state conference of the PWF, which comprises of the left parties, MDMK and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi.

"People think they have suffered enough but were wondering what is the alternative. That alternative has emerged now," Yechury said at the well-attended conference.

On bringing total prohibition on liquor in the state, he said, "It is possible if the tax concessions to the tune of Rs 5 lakh crore being given to the big industrial houses are withdrawn" to compensate for the revenue loss."



"We can implement total prohibition not only in Tamil Nadu but in the entire country," he said.

CPI General Secretary S Sudhakar Reddy said that he expected more parties to join the Front accepting its Common Minimum Programme (CMP), which include closing of liquor shops.

CPI National Secretary D Raja said, "We have formed this alliance because we thought differently and wanted a different path to solve the problems of the people in the state."



VCK leader Thirumavalavan said that DMK had emerged as a force in the state in 1967 as people were not satisfied with the Congress regime then.

"The very same frustration about the Dravidian parties exist now. People are angry with the corrupt DMK and AIADMK. They are looking for a change and that is our strength. We will capture power," Thirumavalavan said.

MDMK leader Vaiko alleged that "murders, robberies, violence against women and children in the state during DMK and AIADMK regimes crossed several thousands."



DMK had promised to bring total prohibition in Tamil Nadu in 1996 but did not do it in the 10 years they ruled the state. "Now they were making the same promise. How credible is it," he said.

The PWF leader said their CMP included providing honest governance, protection for people and social justice, establishing Lokayukta, writing off farm loans, retrieval of Katchativu from Sri Lanka and seizure of properties earned by people by corrupt means.
A doctors body at AIIMS has urged Health Minister J P Nadda to reinstate two faculties of the institution, who were removed for allegedly misbehaving with and manhandling a patient in 2015.

In a letter to the minister, the Faculty Association of AIIMS (FAAIIMS) said that if the ministry fails to reinstate the two doctors than the members of FAIIMS will go on an indefinite strike against the institution's administration.

FAAIIMS also questioned the basis on which the inquiry committee was formed and expressed serious concern against the conflict of interest of several members of the inquiry committee.

The AIIMS administration on January 10 terminated two doctors of the medicine department for allegedly misbehaving and manhandling a patient in September last year.

A committee was set up after the incident under department head S K Sharma which earlier this month took the decision to terminate the doctors.
Indian Ambassador to the US Arun K Singh led India's 67th Republic Day celebrations across the country, unfurling the tricolour at the Indian Embassy in the American capital.

A large number of eminent Indian Americans gathered at the embassy here yesterday even as the city and its surrounding areas are yet to recover from a major blizzard over the weekend that dumped 20-30 inches of snow.

Before unfurling the national flag, Singh paid floral tributes to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in front of the embassy.

He also addressed the Indian American community and read out the speech of President Pranab Mukherjee delivered on the eve of Republic Day.

Similar Republic Day celebrations were held at other Indian diplomatic missions in New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta and San Francisco and the Permanent Mission of India to the UN.

The Federation of Indian Associations (FIA) hosted the Republic Day celebrations over the weekend in Chicago on January 24.

"While different organisations representing Indian-Americans may separately celebrate different events under their respective banners, all of them should come forward to join hands to have one single united celebration for two events of great national importance - Independence Day and Republic Day," said Ausaf Sayeed, Consul General of India in Chicago, who was the chief guest.

Indian Americans in Greater Washington Area plan to celebrate the Republic Day on January 30, a release said.

Indian Americans also observed Republic Day with great fanfare and patriotic fervour in Houston yesterday where the Consulate General of India observed the occasion with a flag hoisting ceremony at the home of Consul General Parvatheneni Harish who unfurled the tricolour.

The Consul General and his wife welcomed Indian-Americans, and friends of India to their home for a flag-hoisting ceremony. Despite a chilly morning and a working day a large number of guests attended the republic day.

"It is indeed a great honour to be raising the Indian flag," said Harish while saluting the flag in Houston.

The Indian national anthem was rendered by young students, who were later joined by everyone in the gathering.

Harish read out the President's speech on the occasion and extended his greetings, "On this joyous occasion of Republic Day, my best wishes to all for peace, progress and prosperity".
South Korea today rejected allegations -- levelled in a video "confession" by a detainee in North Korea -- that Seoul was supporting an anti-Pyongyang campaign through missionaries based in China.

"We express strong regret that the truth is being distorted, while our national is being detained for a long period," Seoul's Unification Ministry said.

Kim Kuk-Gi, one of three South Koreans currently held in the North, was sentenced in June 2015 to life imprisonment with hard labour on charges of spying for South Korea's intelligence service.

A 15-minute video released yesterday on North Korea's propaganda website, Uriminzokkiri, showed Kim delivering what appeared to be a scripted confession.

Kim admitted to "monstrous crimes" -- committed under the orders of South Korea's National Intelligency Service (NIS) -- including distributing forged video clips of torture by the North Korean government and luring defectors to cross the Chinese border.

Kim said a handful of South Korean Christian groups were actively involved in this "smear campaign" orchestrated by the NIS.

"The leaders of South Korean Christianity should hold a meeting or choose a representative to send a letter of official apology," he added.

Foreigners detained in North Korea are regularly required to provide taped or written confessions, which they generally retract after their release.

Kim's arrest was announced in March last year, along with the accusation that he had been spreading "religious propaganda" from an underground church he allegedly ran in the Chinese border city of Dandong.

Pyongyang views foreign missionaries as seditious elements intent on fomenting unrest and those who are caught engaging in any unauthorised activities in the North are subject to immediate arrest.
Thousands municipal corporation sanitation workers today went on strike to press their demands for regular salaries and payment of arrears and held protests at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence and also at Jantar Mantar here.

"We are now on an indefinite strike as both the Delhi government and the municipal corporations have failed to meet our demands of payment of regular salaries and arrears among others. A memorandum of our demands was handed over to an official during protest at Kejriwal's residence," said Sanjay Gehlot, president of Swatantra Mazdoor Vikas Sanyukt Morcha.

"The strike is supported by 27 employees unions representing not only sanitation workers but also other class IV and III employees as well as nurses and teachers who are participating in it," Gehlot claimed.

As the city appeared to be staring at a garbage crisis like last year after a similar stir, the Delhi High Court today asked the Delhi Police commissioner to ensure that there is no hindrance to lifting of garbage in coordination with the civic bodies, in view of the indefinite strike by sanitation workers.

"Commissioner of Police (B S Bassi) to ensure that the garbage are removed from the roads in coordination with the Municipal Corporations," a bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath said.

Another group of sanitation workers led by United Front of MCD Employees leaders staged protest at Jantar Mantar raising their demands of payment of salaries and arrears as well as unification of three municipal corporations in Delhi.

"We have decided to be on three-day strike till January 29 following which we will review whether to continue it or not. Sanitation workers as well as employees of other departments are also participating in the strike," said Rajendra Mewati, general secretary of the United Front.

The three municipal corporations-SDMC, EDMC and NDMC- have a total of around 1.25 lakh employees including about 60,000 sanitation workers, municipal officials said.

Most of them are on strike as salaries are delayed by up to three months while arrears have not been paid from many years. They also have raised demands for regularisation of contract workers, health cards and other service related benefits.

The cash-strapped North Delhi MunicipalCorporation and East Delhi Municipal Corporation have claimed that Delhi Government is responsible for the financial woes but the latter has maintained that "it does not owe" any dues.

The strike is likely to cause problems for residents including in disposing of garbage and suspension of other services.

The sanitation workers and other employees of South



Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) have also joined the strike in support of their colleagues in other two corporations, claimed the leaders of striking employees.

The salary and pension dues of NDMC are around Rs 248 crore while while EDMC owes dues of around Rs 146 crore to its employees and pensioners. The SDMC is paying salary and pensions in time, leaders of BJP ruled municipal corporations said.

The municipal corporations facing financial crisis have accused Delhi government of withholding their funds totaling Rs 2,971 crore under recommendations of 3rd Delhi Finance Commission (DFC) and not implementing 4th DFC worsening their condition and creating problems in paying salaries and pensions.

On the other hand, Delhi government has claimed that it has given 100 percent funds to the three civic bodies.
University of Mary and St. Marys Central High School students and staff returning from Washington, D.C., got a reminder about the dangers of winter storms. They became stranded for 20 hours on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after trucks couldnt navigate the snowy and icy hills, jackknifed and created a huge bottleneck.

Fortunately, none of the North Dakota travelers were injured and they came through in good spirits. The St. Marys students were welcomed home Monday by cheering classmates and families. The U-Mary students returned Sunday.

The students from St. Marys and the University of Mary had gone to Washington to take part in the March for Life, which they accomplished. Knowing a blizzard was forecast, they left D.C. earlier than planned to beat the storm. Then the problem with the trucks put a halt to their journey.

North Dakotans are pretty savvy when it comes to winter weather. We pack survival kits, extra blankets and shovels. We know when we are stuck, were stuck, and we stay with our vehicles. We also pay attention to forecasts and try to leave early to avoid the storms. Sometimes freak events like the ones on the turnpike can ruin the best plans. Thats what makes weather tricky, and dangerous, the unforeseen little things that can disrupt travel.

There are two things the students will probably never forget.

Being part of the than 100,000 people marching down the National Mall was a remarkable experience. The march is held to mark the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in the United States. The one disappointment for the students was learning the U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal of a North Dakota law banning abortion after six weeks.

The other big memory will be the time stranded on the buses.

"I've never seen anything like it," Monsignor James Shea, the U-Mary president who who was with the students, told reporter Amy R. Sisk. "These young women and men are so cheerful," as they sang, read, played cards and prayed. The St. Marys buses were a little ahead of the University of Mary and the students passed the time in a similar fashion. The students also helped dig out about 20 vehicles.

The students represented themselves, their schools and the state well as reporters covering the event described their activities.

Everyones home safe, we have a reminder about winter weather and the students accomplished their mission.

Well done.
A Saudi soldier has been killed in shelling from across the border in Yemen, the interior ministry announced today.

He died yesterday in a strike on a border guards' observation post in the Harth district of Jazan in the kingdom's south, the ministry said.

Around 90 civilians and soldiers have been killed in shelling and skirmishes in Saudi border regions since March when a Saudi-led military coalition began air and ground action in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels.

The coalition is supporting local forces against the Huthi rebels who seized territory, including the capital Sanaa, from the internationally recognised government.

More than 5,800 people have been killed in Yemen since March, about half of them civilians, according to the UN.
Alleging "delay in justice" to Hyderabad University research scholar, 150 protesting students from varsities across Delhi who were detained earlier today decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike at Parliament Street police station here.

According to police, due to security concerns, around 150 students were detained from outside Shastri Bhawan and taken to Parliament Street police station.

"Every time we try to go to the Ministry and raise our demands with HRD Minister Smriti Irani, we are held back and detained by police. Protesting is a basic right. We can't be denied that at a time when the government is trying to cover up an 'institutional murder'," JNU Students Union vice president Shehla Rashid Shora said.

Members of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) and Left-backed All India Students Association (AISA) were among the protesters.

Sucheta De, national president, AISA said, "We will not budge from the premises of the Parliament Street police station now and sit on an indefinite hunger strike here till our demands are met."



"We are protesting the delay in justice to the student who had to end his life due to the harassment by the institution," she said and asked "who will be held accountable for similar such suicides in varsities across country which go unreported?



The protests over the issue have been rocking the national capital since last week with three JNU students sitting on an indefinite hunger strike since Sunday.
Officials say the Obama administration has chosen a seasoned veteran of the Afghanistan war to succeed Gen John F Campbell as the top American commander in Kabul.

The selection of Lt Gen John W "Mick" Nicholson Jr. Is expected to be announced by the Pentagon today. It comes amid growing concern about battlefield setbacks in Afghanistan and gains by the Taliban. Three US officials disclosed the selection on condition of anonymity ahead of the public announcement.

Nicholson is a 1982 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and is currently commander of NATO's Allied Land Command in Turkey. His nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.

Campbell has been in command in Afghanistan since August 2014. He is expected to retire.
Government has set up a 13-member Empowered Committee of Secretaries (CoS) headed by Cabinet Secretary for processing recommendations of the 7th Central Pay Commission, which has bearing on remuneration of 47 lakh central government employees and 52 lakh pensioners.

"The Empowered Committee will function as a screening committee to screen the recommendations of the Commission after taking into account the views of the concerned stakeholders... So as to firm up the final conclusion for approval of the Cabinet," said an office memorandum of the Finance Ministry.

The implementation of the new pay scales is estimated to put an additional burden of Rs 1.02 lakh crore on the exchequer in 2016-17. Subject to acceptance by the government, they will take effect from January 1, 2016.

The final recommendations of the committee will be submitted for approval of the Cabinet.

On January 13, the Cabinet had approved setting up of the panel.

The committee has secretaries from ministries of Home Affairs and Defence. It has secretaries from department of personnel and training, pension and PW, revenue, expenditure, posts, health, and science and technology. Chairman of Railway Board, Deputy CAG and Secretary (Security) in the Cabinet Secretariat are also on the panel.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had earlier said that he was not worried about fiscal deficit and government would be able to meet its target despite additional outgo on account of higher pay.

He had however admitted that the impact of implementing the recommendations, which will result in an additional annual burden of Rs 1.02 lakh crore on exchequer, would last for two to three years.
Diversified group Shapoorji Pallonji has forayed into the affrodable housing segment by launching a separate vertical under the brand 'Joyville', which will build low-cost residential units across the country.

The company has joined hands with Standard Chartered Private Equity, International Finance Corporation (IFC) -- an arm of the World Bank -- and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for investing in the segment.

The partnership will invest about USD 250 million, which will be used primarily for buying land, to meet project approval and initial infrastructure expenses.

"We have been present in the luxury segment as well as creating middle income group housing stock.

"But with the government focusing on creating affordable housing, we think this is the right time to get into the market in a big way," Jai Mavani, Executive Director, Shapoorji Pallonji told reporters here today.

Besides, the company is likely to raise up to USD 500 million through debt.

Standard Chartered Private Equity, IFC and the Asian Development Bank will together hold 70 per cent stake in the joint venture, while the rest will be with Shapoorji Pallonji Group, Mavani said.

The company has around 9 million square feet of land available and will acquire another 20 million square feet in the next one-and-a-half years, Joyville Shapoorji Business Head Venkatesh Gopalkrishnan told PTI.

To start with, the company will launch its first project in Howrah, Kolkata on Friday. In March, it will launch its second project on the outskirts of Mumbai in Virar.

"Our intent is to first enter major metros. After Kolkata and Mumbai Metropolitan Region, we will launch a project in Pune followed by Chennai, Noida and Bengaluru.

"In the next phase of development, we are looking at tier-II cities like Durgapur, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Coimbatore among others," Gopalkrishnan said.

In the first phase, the company plans to create 20,000 affordable residential housing units in 6-7 years, which will be priced between Rs 20-30 lakh for 2-3 BHK apartments, depending on the locations, he said.

The real estate division of the company is engaged in the development of luxury and middle income housing. "We are eyeing nearly 50 per cent of revenue from the affordable housing segment in the next 4-5 years," Gopalkrishnan added.
NCP chief Sharad Pawar, who was hospitalised on Sunday following a "minor kidney problem" and "water retention", was discharged this morning, hospital authorities said.

The 75-year-old former Union Minister was admitted to city-based Ruby Hall Clinic.

"He is absolutely fine and after keeping him under observation for over two days, we have now given him discharge from the hospital this morning," said Dr Sanjay Pathare, Assistant Director, Medical Services, Ruby Hall Clinic.

"After discharge from the hospital, Pawar left for Mumbai by a helicopter", NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said.

"After landing at the Mahalaxmi helipad, the NCP chief will proceed to his home in South Mumbai," he added.

Yesterday, NCP's Maharashtra unit president Sunil Tatkare had said that Pawar had to be hospitalised after he suffered a reaction to a medicine that he was taking.

Earlier, Dr Parvez Grant, Managing Trustee and Chief Cardiologist of Ruby Hall clinic, had said that Pawar was suffering from a 'minor kidney problem' and 'water retention'.
The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire and one death along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 110 kilometers (70 miles) north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests: Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50 were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said.

Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported that Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her father's death to the paper, saying "he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."



Ammon Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

Law enforcement officers went to the wildlife refuge after the arrests and were expected to remain at the site throughout the night; it was unclear how many people remained in the buildings.
Singapore today said that all travellers entering the country by land, air or sea will have their fingerprints taken from June as part of plans to step up border security in the wake of rising terror threat.

The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority will be taking the fingerprints of anyone who enters Singapore at its air, land and sea checkpoints, senior minister of state for home affairs Desmond Lee told Parliament today.

The fingerprint scans will allow the immigration authorities to verify the traveller's identity before he is allowed entry into Singapore and will facilitate automated self-clearance during his departure, Lee said.

The additional biometric screening across the city state's checkpoints comes in the wake of heightened terror threat to ensure that Singapore does not fall prey to terrorist attacks, the Straits Times reported.

More than half a million people pass through Singapore's checkpoints every day, with the Woodlands checkpoint, linking to peninsular Malaysia at the southern tip, being the busiest land checkpoint in the world, Lee said.

"Attackers can gather and plan just outside Singapore before coming into Singapore to carry out the attack," Lee was quoted as saying by the daily.

"Border control is therefore our first line of defence to prevent an attack from taking place in Singapore," he added.

At least three countries scan the fingerprints of visitors. The United States started doing so in 2004 after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan also introduced fingerprint scans in 2007.

The prosperous city state is also a major transit point for Asia, where a number of countries have recently reported increasing threats from Islamic State and related terror groups.
Six US police officers who fired 137 bullets into a car carrying two unarmed African Americans lost their jobs, three years after the deadly car chase in Cleveland, Ohio.

City officials said yesterday they hoped the disciplinary actions would bring "closure" to a city struggling to rebuild community trust following a series of high-profile police shootings.

Cleveland police also faced criticism after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy carrying a toy gun, was fatally shot by a white officer at a playground in 2014. A grand jury declined last month to issue charges in that case.

Cleveland pledged to overhaul its police force and aspire to "bias-free" law enforcement under an agreement reached with the US Justice Department in May.

The "consent decree" was announced two days after protesters filled Cleveland streets following the acquittal of a white police officer charged in the deadly 2012 chase.

Patrolman Michael Brelo, 31, was one of 13 officers involved in the 22-mile (35 kilometre) high-speed chase that ended in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

The couple's car had backfired as it drove past Cleveland police headquarters, and police thought the sound was a gunshot.

A total of 137 rounds were fired at the car, including 49 by Brelo. He shot the final 15 from the hood of Russell's Chevrolet Malibu.

Six of the other officers involved in the chase were suspended and one has retired.

"The politics in this city is absolutely appalling, and those fired will get their jobs back," police union president Steve Loomis told reporters.

"How many people have to tell us this was a justified shooting? It's tragic that it went down this way, but at the end of the day, two people high on crack cocaine, high on marijuana, one of them intoxicated, made the decisions that they made and we responded."



City officials said the officers crossed the line and endangered their fellow officers when they unleashed 137 bullets in just 20 seconds.

Mayor Frank Jackson defended the amount of time it took to discipline the officers.

"What we've talked about from the beginning is conducting a process that has due-process at its core and is fair," he told reporters.
A Sri Lankan court today ordered the arrest of 22 policemen including two senior officers following an outcry over alleged police brutality on revellers at a party during which a man was pushed to death from a building.

The magistrate at Embilipitiya in the south western region ordered Investigations Department (CID) to arrest the former Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), the Headquarters Inspector (HQI) of Embilipitiya and 20 others policemen allegedly involved in the incident.

A CCTV footage which has been widely circulated on social media, showed a group of policemen dragging out youngters from a mid night house party to the streets and then beating them with batons on January 5.

In the incident, a 31-year-old man died after an assistant superintendent allegedly pushed him from the top floor of a building, the victim's wife alleged.

Police had claimed that the man had attacked them when they visited the party to stop loudspeakers after midnight as it was causing disturbance to the residents.

But after several witnesses came out and the CCTV footage emerged, police chief N K Illangakoon ordered an investigation into the incident which found that police had fabricated evidence to cover up their alleged brutality.
You all remember when Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan and Rep. Earl Pomeroy lost touch with the North Dakota voters? All three voted for Obama care against the wishes of North Dakota voters. The two senators saw the handwriting on the wall and dropped out. Pomeroy ran and ran directly into his demise.

Republican and Democrat senators co-sponsored a bill to "Audit the Fed." The bill required 60 votes to pass. It went down 53 to 47? The Fed has a $4,000,000,000,000 balance. Or estimated to have because no one has audited their books! Can you imagine running a business without an audit? Audits do turn up all kinds of bizarre and illegal activities.

Those that voted against it used as one of their excuses Congress should not get involved in "monetary policy." You have got to be kidding me  They tax. They spend. Yet they will not audit the Fed? I maintain those that voted against it have lost touch with their voters. And senators who voted against it should be voted out of office. The Jan. 12 Business News reported that Sen. Heidi Heitkamp voted against it. She has lost touch with the voters of North Dakota. That $4,000,000,000,000 is our money and we should know how it is spent, period.

Here is an excellent example of why over 75 percent of voters think our country is going in the wrong direction! And our elected officials east of the Potomac wonder why we voice our feelings so loudly?
"Modern Family" actress Sofia Vergara has filed a USD 15 million lawsuit in LA Superior Court against a beauty company alleging unlawful use of her image.

In court documents obtained, Vergara, 43, claims Venus Concept used her name and likeness without her permission in advertising and promotional services for the company's Legacy skin tightening massage treatment, which the actress used in August 2014 in preparation for the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards, reported People magazine.

"Vergara tried the Legacy treatment, but ultimately did not like it, finding that it was a waste of time and money with little in the way of any results," according to the lawsuit.

In August 2014, the mother of one shared a selfie showing that she had made use of the Legacy massage.

"What is so funny Marilyn?? Legacy massage at @drlancerrx," she captioned a post on her WhoSay account.

In latest court papers, it states that "[Vergara] would not use it again, and certainly would not endorse it nor agree to appear in an international advertisement campaign to promote it," and in conclusion, she "does not recommend the Venus Legacy product or services."



The actress claims this is not her first time taking legal action to stop Venus Concepts from using her name and likeness, stating that she has made "repeated demands."



This month, Venus Concepts has used Vergara's face and name on the internet as well as at exhibition booths and trade shows.
Still in the dark over the whereabouts of four suspected terrorists who fled from a city hotel after being asked to produce identity proofs on Republic Day eve, Odisha Police has alerted its Andhra Pradesh counterpart suspecting they might have sneaked into the state.

"The CCTV footage indicates that the car used by the four suspected terrorists has crossed the check gate at Girisola bordering Andhra Pradesh. The vehicle bearing the same Delhi registration number crossed the check gate on the night of January 25, about seven hours after being sighted here," a senior police officer involved in the investigation said.

Andhra Pradesh Police has been alerted, the officer said.

The Special Task Force, which is probing the incident with the central intelligence wing, has also contacted the police in Delhi, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh, he said.

Meanwhile, the city police has interrogated several persons, including one from Iran and another from Russia in connection with the case.

"Yes we have spoken to many people, but no information on the suspected four persons so far," deputy commissioner of police Satyabrat Bhoi said, adding cars bearing Delhi registration numbers are being tracked in different places.

Inspector General Arun Botha, who is heading the STF team, said steps are being taken to locate the four persons who fled from the city.

The state government had yesterday sounded high alert after the four men, presenting themselves as Iraqi nationals, disappeared when asked to produce their identity proof at a hotel here on Monday night.

The police have released CCTV grabs of the vehicle and one of the four suspected persons last evening and sought public help to nab them.

Director General of Police B K Singh had yesterday said the four were suspected to be terrorists.

The four men had estimated height of 6.5 feet and spoke in Hindi and English. They came to the hotel in a car with a Delhi registration number which turned out to be fake, police said.

"In the wake of the incident, the security of the chief minister's carcade has been beefed up. We don't want to take any chances and have heightened security and frisking," police commissioner R P Sharma said.
A key Syrian opposition coalition today postponed a decision on whether to join peace talks in Geneva while it awaits more information from the United Nations, a spokesman said.

Salem al-Meslet said the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee, meeting for a second day at a luxury Riyadh hotel, adjourned until tomorrow a session convened to decide whether to attend the peace talks opening in Geneva the next day.
The Saudi-backed Syrian opposition met today to decide whether to attend UN peace talks, as wrangling over who will go threatens to derail the biggest push yet to resolve the country's war.

Members of the so-called High Negotiations Committee - formed in Riyadh last month in an effort to unite Syria's fractious opposition - met in the Saudi capital for a second day on whether to accept a UN invitation to the talks due to start Friday.

The Committee insists it must be the sole opposition delegation at the talks in Geneva and is asking for "clarifications" after the UN issued invitations to other regime opponents.

The negotiations were already delayed from Monday over the issue of who will represent the myriad forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's nearly five-year civil war.

Committee spokesman Monzer Makhous told AFP the talks had resumed and could last all day but refused to comment further.

Diplomats, including US Secretary of State John Kerry who met with Committee members at the weekend, have piled pressure on the opposition to attend.

The talks are part of a UN-backed plan agreed by top diplomats last year in Vienna that envisages negotiations, followed by the creation of a transitional government, a new constitution and elections within 18 months.

The roadmap is the most ambitious plan yet to end the conflict which has left more than 260,000 dead and forced millions from their homes.

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura's office yesterday said it had issued invitations to the talks, but refused to say who had been invited.

The Committee, which earlier this month named Mohammed Alloush of the Islamist rebel group Army of Islam as its chief negotiator, confirmed it had received an invitation but so did several other opposition figures who do not belong to the body.

It was not clear whether the other figures had been invited as official delegates or simply observers to the talks.

The Committee has also called for the lifting of regime sieges on rebel-held areas and aid deliveries to civilians as conditions for attending the talks.

The row over who will attend the talks reflects not only internal divisions but also the interests of the various diplomatic powers embroiled in the Syria conflict.

Russia, a key ally of Assad, has pushed for a broader range of opposition at the talks, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying yesterday that negotiations "will not achieve results" if Syria's Kurds are not represented.
Taiwan carried out military drills today with naval chiefs assuring residents the island is safe, as concerns grow that tensions will escalate with China after recent presidential elections.

The drills were the first since Tsai Ing-wen of the China-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) swept to victory in the elections earlier this month.

She ousted the ruling Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), bringing to an end eight years of unprecedented rapprochement with China.

On Wednesday, the Taiwanese navy displayed eight warships and fired flares from a missile corvette during an exercise in waters off Tsoying in southern Taiwan, home to the island's naval headquarters.

It was the second and final day of the drills which saw a group of elite "frogmen" land on a beach in motorboats Tuesday on the island of Kinmen -- a Taiwan-controlled outpost island near China's southeastern Xiamen city.

A fleet of F-16 fighter jets were also scrambled in another exercise Tuesday at the southern Chiayi airbase.

"With the Lunar New Year approaching, our citizens can feel at ease we are able to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait," Vice Admiral Tsai Hung-tu, head of the navy's political warfare office, told AFP.

Military exercises are routinely carried out by Taiwan before the Lunar New Year holidays which fall in February this year.

Although Tsai has pledged to maintain the status quo with Beijing, relations are widely expected to cool as the DPP is traditionally a pro-independence party.

It does not recognise that Taiwan is part of "one China" -- a principle insisted upon by Beijing.

Taiwan is self-ruling after splitting from China in 1949 following a civil war, but has never formally declared independence. Beijing still sees it as part of its territory to be reunified.

China's state-controlled CCTV last week released footage it claimed depicted a drill carried out by Chinese forces after the elections, off the southeast coast of the mainland, near Taiwan.

Taiwan's defence ministry dismissed the footage, saying the images were collated from past manoeuvres.

A Taiwanese defence ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity told AFP that the move was part of Beijing's "psychological warfare" against Taiwan.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu today exhorted students and faculty members of higher educational institutions to think out of the box and come up with innovations for rapid progress.

Inaugurating the first 'Andhra Pradesh Science Congress (APSC)' here at the SV University, he said students and teachers should think and act differently to get innovative ideas.

Naidu also asked the Vice-Chancellors of universities to see that at least one incubation centre was set up immediately in their respective institutions and play a pro-active role for startup facilities in villages also.

"Integrate technology and best practices and also ensure collaboration with the best universities in the country and also abroad to impart the best education to enable the students seize the latest technologies and methods to keep them abreast," he said.

Pointing that field study formed 40 per cent of curriculum in foreign universities, he asked the students in the country not to confine themselves to classrooms but focus on field studies.

Naidu urged the universities to include leading members of industries and eminent personalities in decision-making bodies for university-industry collaboration.

The Chief Minister also said that in line with the Centre's Digital India programme, his government would provide net connectivity with a bandwidth of 20 MBPS to every home in villages in the state by July, 2016 at an outlay of Rs 320 crore.

This would be increased to 50 MBPS later for the meaningful implementation of e-governance.

He directed all the universities in the state to provide Wi Fi facilities in their campuses within a month.

Becoming nostalgic, he recalled his student days in the SV University and said "I have learnt all political lessons here.

"It gave me my political birth while Lord Balaji (of the famous hill shrine in Tirumala) gave me a new lease of life by saving me from the accident (bomb attack by Naxal at Alipiri near here in 2003)," he said.

It was from the universities, leaders of corporate, industries, social field, science and technology and politics emerged, he said citing many eminent personalities.

Clarifying the position, the spokesperson for CERN said,



"This video is a work of fiction showing a contrived scene. CERN and its on-site accommodation fills up with scientists from across the world coming to CERN as part of their work. Work at CERN can take place 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with shift work and data analysis. Persons that are authorised to access the CERN site sometimes let their sense of humour go too far, and that is what has happened on this occasion. The video was filmed from an office building; strict safety systems are in place to prevent any unauthorised access to technical and experimental facilities. CERN does not condone this kind of spoof, which breaches CERN's professional guidelines, and is currently carrying out an internal investigation."



Jokes apart, work at CERN conjures up many horrifying images, in 2008 when the world's largest atom smasher was being started up there was an uncalled for global scare that the Large Hadron Collider would generate black holes that could gobble up the earth.

It was a global scare but in India it peaked when a 16 year old girl from Madhya Pradesh got so scarred that she allegedly committed seeing the reports. Obviously, the world did not die but reason did since CERN at that time failed to communicate effectively that its experimentation would not end in a doomsday scenario.

Later CERN did make an attempt to bust such myths, but today social media is ablaze with hyped accounts of non-scientific happenings inside the 27-km circular tunnel embedded deep inside the earth and straddling both Switzerland and France which houses the world's human largest experiment.

It was here that the so called 'God Particle' or the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2013. The mere nick naming of the particle as 'God Particle' makes people believe CERN is trying to prove that god exists.

Even though CERN asserts "that it exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind." That India did not erupt on what could be termed as a 'desecration' of venerated iconic Indian god gifted with love by Indian people and placed on an alien soil, only showed that rationality prevailed among the vast Indian masses so prone to being swayed by emotions of religion.

Indian atomic scientists involved with the gifting of the giant Chola Bronze statue were flabbergasted that such indiscretion and insensitivity could have happened within the highly secure premises where entry and exit is both highly controlled. It seems irrationality knowns no national boundaries.
Regulator Trai today suggested Rs 11,485 crore per Mhz pan-India base price for premium 700 Mhz spectrum -- the highest rate for any telecom frequency band -- for the next round of auction even as leading operators have sought holding back sale of the radiowaves in this band.

The telecom regulator for the first time has suggested the base price for 700 MHz which is considered as the most efficient frequencies for high-end mobile services.

The regulator in its recommendations on spectrum price for seven bands, including 700 Mhz and 800 Mhz, released today suggested a base price of Rs 2,873 crore per MHz for pan-India 1800 MHz frequency band - widely known as 2G spectrum.

The suggested price of 1800 MHz band is about 31 per cent higher than the base price fixed by the government in March 2015 auction.

The next round of auction is expected to be held in May-June this year.

As per Trai's paper, the cost of delivering mobile services in 700 Mhz band is approximately 70 per cent lower than 2100 Mhz band, which is widely used for 3G services.

Leading operators had requested the regulator to defer sale of 700 MHz spectrum, saying that ecosystem for providing services in this band was not developed and sale would lead to underutilisation of the spectrum for several years and block industry's crucial fund.

The telecom regulator, which had mooted an idea of removing band-wise spectrum holding limits in its draft paper, however, suggested no change in existing rules.

The regulator also recommended auction of all 3G spectrum available with the government at a marginally high rate of Rs 3,746 per Mhz pan-India against Rs 3,705 crore per MHz fixed by government for the same in March 2015 auction.

It also recommended auction of 800 Mhz band, widely in demand for 4G services, at a base price of Rs 5,829 per Mhz. The new price is about 60 per cent higher from base price of Rs 3646 crore fixed in last auctions. Trai has suggested auction of 800 Mhz in 19 out of 22 telecom cirlces.

Earlier, the government had fixed the highest base price at Rs 3,980 per MHz for 900 spectrum band in last auction.

(REOPEN DEL38)



The government had fixed Rs 2,191 crore pan-India



(excluding Maharashtra and West Bengal) price for 1800 MHz band in previous auction held in March 2015.

As per the recommendation paper, airwaves in 1800 band were available only in seven out of 22 telecom circles. Of the seven circles, it recommended government not to auction spectrum in Bihar, Rajasthan and North-East due to partial availability of airwaves.

Trai also recommended auction of spectrum in 900 Mhz in six service area - Gujarat at base price of Rs 673 crore per Mhz, Karnataka for Rs 558 per Mhz, Haryana for Rs 151 per Mhz, UP East for Rs 776 per Mhz, UP West for Rs 739 Mhz and Bihar for Rs 444 per Mhz.

The regulator has recommended to take back 1800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Aircel in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh and Tata Teleservices in Himachal Pradesh as well as 800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Tata in West Bengal and Quadrant (Videocon) in Punjab and put these frequencies on auction.

The regulator also suggested base price for 2300 Mhz and 2500 Mhz band. It recommended Rs 817 crore per Mhz for spectrum in both 2300 Mhz and 2500 Mhz band, about 33 per cent higher than base price fixed for their last auction held in 2010. Reliance Jio in the only player to have 2300 Mhz spectrum across India at present.

The regulator in the consultation paper showed that right to use spectrum of state-run MTNL is also expiring in 2016 but the Department of Telecom later informed it that it will expire in 2019. Hence, it did not recommend auction of spectrum held by MTNL.

Trai also did not recommend price of 800 Mhz in Assam, North East and Jammu and Kashmir service area.

Though Trai had mooted removing band-wise spectrum limit in draft paper, it stuck to existing rules.

"The Authority recommends that existing provision of a cap of 25 per cent of the 'total spectrum assigned' in 700/800/900/1800/ 2100/2300/2500 MHz bands and 50 per cent within a given band in each of the access service area shall apply for total spectrum holding by each telecom service provider," the regulator said.
Telecom regulator Trai today recommended spectrum pricing for seven bands, including the premium 700 Mhz frequency at record base price of Rs 11,485 crore per Mhz, for the next round of auction which could fetch the government a staggering Rs 5.36 lakh crore.

Of the Rs 5.36 lakh crore windfall, the premium 700 Mhz band spectrum could alone contribute over Rs 4 lakh crore if all frequencies are sold at pan-India base price of Rs 11,485 crore per Mhz - which is the highest price for any telecom radiowave.

However, the total potential revenue from the spectrum sale, expected to be held during May-June this year, is more than double of gross revenue of telecom services industry. Telecom service providers had gross revenue of Rs 2.54 lakh crore in 2014-15 financial year.

The last auction held in March 2015 fetched the government record bids of over Rs 1.1 lakh crore.

Trai for the first time has suggested a base price for 700 MHz band which is considered as the most efficient frequencies for high-end mobile services.

However, leading operators had requested the regulator to defer sale of 700 MHz spectrum, saying that ecosystem for providing services in this band was not developed and sale would lead to underutilisation of the spectrum for several years and block industry's crucial fund.

The regulator in its spectrum pricing recommendations for seven bands, including 700 Mhz and 800 Mhz, suggested a base price of Rs 2,873 crore per MHz for pan-India 1800 MHz frequency band - widely known as 2G spectrum. The new price is about 31 per cent higher than the base price fixed by the government in March 2015 auction.

However, it can fetch bids worth about Rs 2,492 crore as just 21 Mhz quantum of spectrum is available for auction.

For 3G spectrum in 2100 band, Trai suggested pan-India base price of Rs 3,746 crore, which could be the second largest contributor attracting bids of about Rs 63,000 crore.

On spectrum held by the Defence, Trai said that if Defence shifts to the designated Defence Band and its assignment in all the circle is restricted to maximum 20 MHz, around 201 MHz additional spectrum can be made available for commercial purpose in 1800 Mhz band.

The Ministries of Telecom and Defence are currently working to harmonise spectrum which will free huge chunk of airwaves for commercial use.

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After 3G spectrum, auction of all airwaves in 2500 Mhz band can garner bids of Rs 30,800 crore at Trai recommended pan-India base price of Rs 817 crore as sufficient airwaves are available for commercial use.

Similarly, 2300 Mhz band at a base price of 817 crore per Mhz can fetch bids worth Rs 15,000 crore, while 800 Mhz at suggested price of Rs 5,829 crore per Mhz can get about Rs 17,700 crore. 900 Mhz band could yield Rs 5,555 crore bids.

"The ability of the operators to pay for spectrum will be constrained as realised rate for voice and data are not growing, in fact declining for last few quarters and the balance sheets are already overstretched and there is not adequate appetite for equity in the market," Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP Partner Hemant Joshi said.

He said that the timing of auction should be carefully considered so that all players can effectively participate.

As per the regulator, the 800 Mhz band can be auctioned only 10 circles. Trai has suggested about 60 per cent higher base price for this band compared to Rs 3,646 crore fixed in the last auction.

The Department of Telecom has indicated to Trai that only 37.5 MHz may be put to auction from the total available spectrum of 76.25 MHz in 800 Mhz band, which is also very high in demand for 4G services.

There is only 9.8 Mhz available for sale in 900 Mhz range. Spectrum in this band, ideal for voice and data services, had attracted bids worth Rs 75,165 crore in last auction.

To increase supply of spectrum, the regulator has recommended to take back 1800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Aircel in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh and Tata Teleservices in Himachal Pradesh as well as 800 MHz band spectrum assigned to Tata in West Bengal and Quadrant (Videocon) in Punjab and put these frequencies on auction.

The regulator has recommended that the entire available spectrum in 2100 MHz band, including spectrum taken back from STel should be auctioned.

STel 2G permits were cancelled in 2012 by the Supreme Court but its holding in 3G band, in Bihar, Orissa and Himachal Pradesh, remained unaffected by the order. The company later closed its operations in India and the regulator said that its 3G spectrum can now be put for auction.

The regulator in the consultation paper showed that right to use spectrum of state-run MTNL is also expiring in 2016 but the Department of Telecom later informed it that it will expire in 2019. Hence, it did not recommend auction of spectrum held by MTNL.

Trai had mooted removing band-wise spectrum limit in the consultation paper but it has suggested status quo in its recommendations.

"The Authority recommends that existing provision of a cap of 25 per cent of the 'total spectrum assigned' in 700/800/900/1800/ 2100/2300/2500 MHz bands and 50 per cent within a given band in each of the access service area shall apply for total spectrum holding by each telecom service provider," the regulator said.

Any company interested in buying 700 Mhz spectrum will



need to buy minimum of 5 Mhz which at proposed price would amount to Rs 57,425 on pan-India basis. However, the price of the spectrum varies from circle to circle, with the highest being in Delhi at Rs 1,595 per Mhz and the lowest in North East at Rs 44 crore per MHz.

Successful winner of 700 Mhz band will have to roll out service within five years of getting spectrum across all towns and villages having population of 15,000 or more but less than 50,000.

All villages having population of 10,000 or more but less than 15,000 to be covered within seven years of effective date of allocation of 700 Mhz band spectrum, Trai said.

Similarly, Trai has suggested minimum bidding of 1.25 Mhz quantum in 800 Mhz band, 0.2 Mhz in 900 Mhz band and 1800 Mhz each, 5 Mhz in 3G band, 10 Mhz each in 2300 Mhz and 2500 Mhz band.

A new entrant in the telecom mobile services segment will need to bid the highest chunk of spectrum available in 800 Mhz with maximum of 5 Mhz and in slot of 1.25 Mhz each. Similarly in 900 Mhz, the new entrant will require to bid for 5 MHz if at least one chunk of contiguous block of 5MHz is available.

The 900 Mhz and 1800 Mhz were earlier used for 2G services. Now some telecom operators have deployed 3G service in 900 Mhz and 4G in 1800 Mhz band.

The regulator has suggested network roll out condition for 900 and 1800 MHz bands should be treated as separate bands if a licensee deploys different technologies in these bands. This would be applicable for the existing licensees also who have acquired spectrum through auction of 2012 and onwards.

The regulator has recommended 5 year services roll out period for winner of 2300 Mhz and 2500 Mhz for new bidder but no additional roll-out obligations should be imposed on companies already holding spectrum in these bands and acquire additional block in upcoming auction.
The UN Secretary-General today challenged investors around the world to at least double their investments in clean energy by 2020, saying that "we must begin the shift away from fossil fuels immediately."



Ban Ki-moon told an investor summit on climate risk that increasing investment in clean energy is critical in following up on the landmark agreement to tackle climate change reached in Paris last year.

Ban said about $330 billion was invested in clean energy last year, but that is far from what he calls the "clean trillion" needed per year in the decades to come.

The UN Chief also said he has invited all of the world's heads of states and government to attend an April 22 signing ceremony for the climate agreement, and that 55 countries' signatures are needed to put the agreement into effect.

The UN and some world leaders have been reaching out to the business community since the Paris agreement, urgently seeking financial support for efforts to slow rising global temperatures.

"Sustainable, clean energy is growing, but not nearly fast enough to meet energy demand," Ban said today. But last week, the head of the Energy Agency, which advises oil-importing countries, told global leaders and business executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the plunge in oil prices is a growing threat to the world's goal to reduce emissions through the increase in renewable energies.

Fatih Birol said energy efficiency has been driven largely not so much by environmental concerns but an interest in saving money, which is disappearing as fossil fuels become cheaper.

And the head of the Chamber of Commerce, John Danilovich, told the Associated Press in Davos that adapting investment to meet the lower-emissions goals in the Paris agreement will be among several struggles for global businesses this year.
A US man who plotted to attack a Masonic temple and "annihilate" everyone inside was arrested on gun charges, officials said.

Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 23, had been under investigation by the FBI since September after an informant tipped them off to his plans to attack Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.

Hamzeh who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin "abandoned these plans for family, financial and logistic reasons" and then "refocused his plans on an attack in the United States," charging papers said.

"It is difficult to calculate the injury and loss of life that was prevented by concerned citizens coming forward and by the tireless efforts of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force," US Attorney Gregory Haanstad said in a statement.

"Samy Mohamed Hamzeh devised a detailed plan to commit a mass shooting intended to kill dozens of people. He also said that he wanted this mass shooting to be 'known the world over' and to 'ignite' broader clashes."



Two informants worked with the FBI to record his plans. They went to a firing range with him on January 19 and then took a guided tour of the Masonic temple.

After they left, Hamzeh spoke of how he hoped to kill at least 30 people in order to "terrify the world."



"I am telling you, if this hit is executed, it will be known all over the world," he allegedly said in a conversation translated from Arabic.

"Sure, all over the world, all the mujahedeen will be talking and they will be proud of us," he allegedly said, referring to fighters engaged in jihad, or holy war.

"Such operations will increase in America, when they hear about it. The people will be scared and the operations will increase, and there will be problems all over.

"This way we will be igniting it. I mean, we are marching at the front of the war."



Hamzeh said they would need three machine guns with silencers to carry out the attack and that the man who stood at the door has a "bigger responsibility" and has to "annihilate everyone."



He had planned to escape by killing everyone quickly and quietly and by hiding their faces with cold-weather gear.

Hamzeh was arrested Monday after buying two automatic weapons and silencers from undercover agents.

"At no time was the public's safety placed in jeopardy," said Robert Shields, the FBI's special agent in charge of the Milwaukee region.
The US state of Nevada will open a new tourism office in New Delhi to promote its travel and tourism sector in India, an official said.

Nevada Lt Governor Thomas Hutchinson before embarking on an India trip for its launch said: "Opening an office in India will provide Nevada with greater opportunities to promote international travel and tourism to our state".

He said the state has 6.5% share of the Indian travel market and the research indicates that the top reasons for travel from India is to visit family living the US, an area where we actively market the state.

"We currently enjoy 6.5% of the India travel market share here in Nevada. With a new office in New Delhi, I am confident that our increased presence will encourage even more tourists from India to visit the Silver State," Hutchinson said.

He said the maximum annual budget for an international travel to an Indian is $5,451 and they prefer staying in mid-priced hotels and want to experience duty-free shipping.
Andhra Pradesh Police today intercepted a vehicle with Delhi registration number and nabbed five persons, including two women, in Visakhapatnam district and is trying to ascertain whether they are the same suspected terrorists who had fled from neighbouring Odisha.

"On suspicion, a vehicle with a Delhi registration number has been intercepted in Visakhapatnam district. Five people including two women travelling in the vehicle are being questioned," a senior Intelligence officer told PTI tonight.

Asked if those intercepted persons are the same four persons who had fled from Odisha, a senior police officer from Visakhapatnam said, "We are in the process of verifying... We don't have more details at this point of time.

"We are still verifying... There is some communication problem... We are getting in touch with our people."



The Odisha police had alerted its Andhra counterpart after the CCTV footage indicated that the car used by the four suspected terrorists has crossed the check gate at Girisola bordering Andhra Pradesh.

The four men, presenting themselves as Iraqi nationals, fled when asked to produce their identity proof at the hotel in Bhubaneshwar on the eve of Republic Day.

When asked whether the persons being questioned by Andhra Pradesh Police are the same who went missing from Bhubaneshwar, Andhra Pradesh DGP J V Ramudu said, "We have no confirmation yet."



Odisha Police had released CCTV grabs of the vehicle and one of the four suspected persons last evening.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh today asked the police to bridge the existing "trust deficit" between them and local communities as it will help enhance the efficacy of policing in the country.

"It is very important for the police to bridge the trust deficit that exists between the police and local communities. I always believe that the efficacy of any police force lies in its relationship and engagement with the local community," he said addressing a conclave on community policing in the Kerala capital.

Singh also pitched for a nationwide action plan for community policing, saying there is an urgent need to come up with a technical architecture connecting local police stations with the local community.

The Home Minister said the initiative should be the guiding principle for police forces to go about in the future and assured his Ministry will take "positive steps" in this regard.

"While community policing should be the guiding principle of our police forces, I must say that building relationships should be our prime focus. I am of the firm opinion that community policing should be institutionalised in our policing system.

"There is an urgent need to come up with a technical architecture connecting the local police stations with the local community. A nationwide action plan for community policing and community contact needs to be formulated," he said.

Singh said challenges before the police were multifarious and changing because of increasing diversity and complexity of crimes on one hand and rising public expectations on the other.

"Besides the law and order issues, terrorism is also a cause of grave concern to us. Apart from global terrorism, the social changes brought about by the internet and social media have posed huge policing challenges and have completely changed the way in which policing is done," he said.

Singh said while on the one hand newer technologies have enabled law enforcement agencies to handle new age crimes and criminals, on the other, it has "hugely empowered" the criminals as well.

"Today, anyone sitting anywhere in the world can commit a crime anywhere in the world with impunity and anonymity. So, the question arises in the present day technology-driven world, what role community policing can play," he said.

During the event, he also lauded police force across states for doing their duty with sincerity.

"Let me place on record my deep appreciation of the professional commitment and the bravery of our police forces. People want a policing system that is responsive and responsible to the social context and local environment.

"The people of India today want a 'SMART', efficient and people-friendly police," the Minister said.

He praised the community policing initiative of Kerala government and its 'Janmaithri' project, adding formidable tasks before the police cannot be accomplished without the cooperation of the society.
The VHP today demanded amendment of the Foreign Citizen Act so that death sentence to illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh can be awarded and also to check infiltration and deport them.

Addressing a press conference, VHP President Pravin Togadia said it has adopted a resolution to take time-bound action plan against illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh and immediately deport them from the country to make "Hindus more prosperous, protected and honoured".

He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should undertake time bound action to deport the illegally migrated Bangladeshis.

He further said that if minorities from Bangladesh and Pakistan enter India, they should be declared as refugees and immediately given citizenship.
One of Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighters has taken to the skies over Japan for the first time since World War II.

The restored plane took off today for a brief flight from a naval base in southern Japan. A decorated former US Air Force pilot flew the aircraft.

Zero fighters were considered one of the most capable long-range fighter planes in World War II.

Only a handful are still in operating condition. This particular plane was found decaying in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. It was owned by an American until a Japanese businessman purchased it and brought it to Japan last year.
Denmark and Switzerland today joined a growing number of European countries to report Zika infections in tourists returning from Latin America, where the mosquito-borne virus has been blamed for a surge in birth defects.

"A Danish tourist who travelled to Central and South America was diagnosed on his return with the Zika virus," a hospital in eastern Denmark said in a statement late yesterday.

The Danish patient was a young man who was expected to make a full recovery, the head of Aarhus hospital, Lars Ostergaard, told public broadcaster DR.

Two people returning from Haiti and Colombia to Switzerland were also diagnosed with the virus, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health said. Neither was pregnant and neither required hospital care, the statement said.

A woman in the Swedish capital Stockholm was diagnosed with the virus in July 2015, the Swedish Public Health Agency confirmed today.

"The symptoms were treated and the woman recovered," said Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of microbiology at the health agency.

There is no vaccine or specific treatment for Zika, a flu-like disease with a rash that goes unnoticed in 70 to 80 per cent of cases. Most patients treat the symptoms simply with painkillers and other medication.

Britain has reported five cases in travellers returning from South America since last year while the Netherlands has confirmed 10 cases, also in people returning from the region.

The virus was first reported in Africa, Asia and the Pacific before leaping to the Americas, where it has been linked to a jump in the number of babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, particularly in Brazil.

The number of cases of the deformity in Brazil surged from 163 per year on average to 3,893 after the Zika outbreak began last year. Forty-nine of the babies have died.

Some 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries have been swept up in the outbreak which has extended as far north as Mexico.

Travelers have also brought it back to the US states of Florida, Hawaii and New York.

The virus is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also carries dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

So far there has been no known cases of local transmission in the US or Europe.
A Danish tourist returning from Latin America has been diagnosed with the Zika virus, which has been blamed for a surge in birth defects in the region, triggering a major health scare.

"A Danish tourist who travelled to Central and South America was diagnosed on his return with the Zika virus," Aarhus hospital in eastern Denmark said in a statement yesterday.

Britain has also reported a handful of cases in travellers returning from South America while the Netherlands has confirmed 10 cases of infection, also in travellers returning from the region.

The Zika virus, a flu-like disease that is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, has been linked to a jump in the number of babies born in Latin America, particularly Brazil, with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads.

There is no cure or vaccine.

The Danish patient was a young man who was expected to make a full recovery, the head of Aarhus hospital, Lars Ostergaard told public broadcaster DR.
By Alex Lawler and Rania El Gamal

LONDON/DUBAI (Reuters) - OPEC is renewing efforts among members and producers from outside the group for a deal to fix an oil glut and boost prices, but it is too early to say whether the attempt will work, OPEC sources said on Wednesday.

Such a deal has been mooted and dismissed for over a year and the lack of any supply restraint by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and rivals such as Russia has helped send prices to a 12-year low close to $27 a barrel.

Hopes were raised on Tuesday when Iraq's oil minister said top OPEC producer Saudi Arabia and Russia were showing new signs of flexibility about agreeing to tackle the oversupply in the market. [nL8N15A2UT]

And Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced on Tuesday that the country's oil minister would tour OPEC and non-OPEC countries in a bid to drum up support for joint action.

OPEC delegates, including those from Gulf countries, speaking after Iraq's comments, said Venezuela's attempt to get everyone around the table for a deal faced challenges.

"Something is cooking but it might not be done fast. There is communication within OPEC trying to get all sides together," one OPEC source said. "But the main challenge is Iran and Russia."

Moscow, seen as key to any agreement, has so far refused to cooperate. OPEC member Iran is pressing ahead with plans to boost its oil supply after international sanctions against it were lifted earlier this month.

A second OPEC source said he did not know whether Venezuela's latest initiative would succeed, but he hoped for an agreement to lift prices.

"I have no idea. I am looking for something to have a fair price, which will last," the source said.

OPEC MEETING?

Venezuela has also requested an emergency OPEC meeting and the current OPEC president, Qatar's Energy Minister Mohammed al-Sada, is seeking feedback from members on whether to hold one.

"The president is still awaiting answers," the second OPEC source said.

On Monday, senior officials from OPEC and Russia stepped up vague talk of possible action. But Moscow said on Wednesday that while Russia talks regularly to various countries about the oil market, it was too early to speak of joint action.

"At the moment one cannot speak of coordinating actions in a practical sense," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

A third OPEC delegate said he doubted OPEC would be able to reach an agreement with outside producers, citing the failure of previous attempts. In 2001, Russia pledged to join supply cuts with OPEC but later reneged.

"I still don't think that any real joint action between OPEC and non-OPEC is going to happen because of old trust issues," the delegate said.

(Editing by Dale Hudson)
(Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc's quarterly revenue fell 18.7 percent as demand for its chips for mobile devices declined amid stiff competition from Chinese and Taiwanese rivals.

The net income attributable to Qualcomm fell to $1.50 billion, or 99 cents per share, in the first quarter ended Dec. 27 from $1.97 billion, or $1.17 per share, a year earlier.

Qualcomm, which decided against splitting its slowing chips unit from its fast-growing technology licensing business in December, said total revenue fell to $5.78 billion from $7.10 billion.

(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey)
The Palo Alto, California-based company also said it would cut about 800 jobs. At the same time, VMWare, whose parent, EMC Corp is being acquired by Dell Inc [DI.UL], appointed EMC Chief Financial Officer Zane Rowe as its finance chief, replacing Jonathan Chadwick.

VMWare, like many technology providers, is struggling to keep pace with its customers' efforts to move key computing infrastructure to the cloud, meaning remote data centers.

VMware shares fell 5 percent in extended trading on Tuesday, while EMC shares declined 1.4 percent. The company, whose flagship product helps customers cut costs by running multiple operating systems on a single server, has been hurt by slowing economic growth in markets outside the United States, which account for nearly half of its revenue. In particular, it cited weak bookings for its software in China, Russia, and Brazil.

But the company noted some bright spots in newer businesses, such as NSX, which makes networking more efficient. That business is on track to generate $600 million annually, VMWare said, up from $200 million a year ago.

Customers like NSX in part because it provides an additional sever-by-server layer of security, on top of precautions at the data centre overall, said Martin Casado, general manager for networking and security at VMWare.

"If someone gets over the wall, you still have a guard at every house," he said. "It can limit the ability of the breach to grow."

The company forecast revenue of $6.79 billion-$6.94 billion and an adjusted profit of $4.07-$4.16 per share for 2016.

Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $7.21 billion and earnings of $4.20 per share, according to Thomson I/B/E/S.

VMware, which had nearly 19,200 employees at the end of 2015, said it would take a charge of $55 million-$65 million in the first half of this year related to the job cuts.

VMware's lackluster forecast overshadowed strong fourth-quarter results.

The company's net income rose 14.4 percent to $373 million, or 88 cents per share, in the quarter ended Dec. 31, helped by a 12.6 percent jump in its services revenue.

Revenue increased 9.7 percent to $1.87 billion, topping the average analyst estimate of $1.85 billion.

Excluding items, VMware earned $1.26 per share, beating analysts' expectations by a cent.

(Reporting by Sai Sachin R in Bengaluru and Sarah McBride in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey, Diane Craft)
TOKYO (Reuters) - Suzuki Motor Corp <7269.T> said on Wednesday it was not discussing a tie-up with Toyota Motor Corp <7203.T>, denying a Nikkei business daily report that the Japanese automakers were exploring a partnership that may include a cross-shareholding.

"It is not true that we have entered negotiations over a tie-up with Toyota," Japan's fourth-largest automaker said in a statement.

Shares in Suzuki opened 13 percent higher in early trade, compared with a 2.2 percent rise in the benchmark Nikkei average.

(Reporting by Chang-Ran Kim and Maki Shiraki; Editing by Stephen Coates)
By Naomi Tajitsu

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp said it was considering buying out the rest of minivehicle maker Daihatsu Motor Co, a $3.1 billion deal at current market prices, but denied a report that it was in partnership talks with Daihatsu rival Suzuki Motor Corp.

Shares in Daihatsu soared 16 percent after being overwhelmed by buy orders for most of the day. Shares in Suzuki jumped 11 percent despite denials from both Toyota and Suzuki. Toyota rose 3.8 percent.

Full control of Daihatsu could help Toyota leverage the lower-cost brand better and cut procurement costs for Daihatsu, while capital ties with Suzuki would help the world's largest automaker make inroads into India where Suzuki commands around half the passenger car market.

"We are constantly considering a number of possibilities relating to Daihatsu, such as partnerships or business restructuring, including making the company a fully owned subsidiary," Toyota said in a statement, but added that no decisions had been made.

Toyota owns 51.2 percent of Daihatsu, which like Suzuki, specialises in 660cc minivehicles, a segment particular to Japan, as well as compact cars.

Last year, Daihatsu was the weakest link in the Toyota group, which also includes the Toyota and Lexus brands and truck maker Hino Motors.

Global sales for Daihatsu slid 13.3 percent in 2015, data on Wednesday showed. That pushed total Toyota group sales 0.8 percent lower to 10.15 million, although the group retained the title of the world's biggest automaker, beating Volkswagen's sales of 9.93 million.

The Nikkei business daily said that Toyota and Suzuki were discussing ties from a variety of angles, including the possibility of cross-shareholdings as they look to capitalise on demand for compact cars in India and other emerging economies.

Some analysts noted that greater control of Daihatsu could be at odds with potential cooperation with Suzuki given that the two minivehicle makers are fierce competitors for the same customers.

"I can easily see the Daihatsu brand used in the same way that VW uses Skoda or Renault uses Dacia or Nissan uses Datsun as a low-cost, sub-premium brand to the core brand," CLSA senior research analyst Christopher Richter said.

"That could be a very effective weapon against Suzuki in places like India ... if I were Suzuki that would sound like a risk to doing business with Toyota."

Still, others noted that a potential Toyota-Suzuki partnership could benefit both automakers.

Suzuki, through its control of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, has a vast distribution network in India that Toyota could greatly benefit from.

"Suzuki would meanwhile be getting a stable shareholder in Toyota as well as access to Toyota's HEV/FCV and other next-generation environmental technologies geared toward future vehicle electrification," JPMorgan analysts said in a note.

Suzuki is expected, however, to tread carefully with any new tie-ups. It formed a capital alliance with Volkswagen AG in early 2010 but relations soon soured, leading to a years-long dispute in an arbitration court that ended last year with the unwinding of their cross-shareholdings.

($1 = 118.1000 yen)

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu; Additional reporting by Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
Apollo Hospitals sells 23% stake in Apollo Munich to German partner

The deal, worth Rs 163.5 crore, will strengthen the presence of Germany's Munich Re in India which is one of the key markets for the company

The deal, worth Rs 163.5 crore, will strengthen the presence of Germany's Munich Re in India which is one of the key markets for the company

Apollo Energy Company Ltd, an Apollo Hospitals Group Company, has divested its 23.3 percent stake in Apollo Munich Health Insurance Company Ltd to its joint venture partner, Munich Re of Germany, for Rs 163.5 crore. The proposed transaction values Apollo Munich at Rs 703 crore.



Completion of the proposed transaction is subject to applicable regulatory approvals and execution of customary agreements, which is expected to be completed at the end of the first quarter of 2016. Post consummation of the transaction, Apollo Hospitals Groups shareholding in Apollo Munich will be reduced from 74.4 percent to 51.1 percent. Correspondingly, Munich Res shareholding in Apollo Munich will move to 48.7 percent, with 0.2 percent being held by employees.



Dr Prathap C Reddy, chairman, Apollo Munich, and Chairman, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd, said, Insurance is a key element for making quality healthcare facilities accessible to the masses. The show of confidence from our JV partner will go a long way in helping the Group achieve its vision of Healthcare for all.



The opportunity for Munich Re to increase its shareholdings was provided through the decision of the Indian Government in March 2015 to increase the foreign direct investment cap in the insurance sector from 26 percent to 49 percent. With the increase in shareholding, Munich Re strengthens its presence in India which is one of the key markets for the company.



Doris Hopke, the member of the Munich Re Board of Management responsible for Munich Health, said, Indias population structure, increased life expectancy and positive economic development will usher in a steep rise in medium-term healthcare spending. Since its start in 2007, Apollo Munich Health Insurance has shown exceptional, often above-market growth rates. With the increased stakeholding, we are strengthening our position for sustainable and profitable growth in this region.

BS B2B Bureau
Microsofts Surface Pro 4 is a fine piece of hardware. It is technically a tablet with a Pen (stylus) that can transform itself into a powerful laptop when a keyboard is docked. The 12.3-inch display of the Surface Pro 4 with 2,736 x 1,824 pixel resolution makes everything appear super crisp. Microsoft calls this PixelSense - something that makes everything appear super sharp. It is barely 8.4 mm thick and weights 771 gm. The power key and volume controls sit at the top. The 3.5 mm jack for connecting a headphone is placed on the left, while a single USB 3.0 port and a Mini DisplayPort is fitted on the right panel. The pen accompanied with the tablet sticks magnetically to either side and the type cover to the bottom edge. A multi-position kickstand conveniently holds the tablet at almost any angle.

The overseas models are either powered by Core M, Core i5 or Core i7, but only two models (Core i5 and Core i7) are available in India. My review unit was the entry-model with Core i5 processor paired with a 4 GB RAM. It came with 128 GB internal storage and supported a memory card. Powered by Windows 10, it had the tile-based interface, a start menu, Edge browser, multiple desktops, Cortana and others. Setting up the machine took a few minutes. Windows Hello - the new built-in biometric security system from Microsoft - uses the front camera for face recognition to unlock the device. While it worked smoothly on most occasions, there were times when I had to key in the password manually as it refused to recognise my face. It asked for a Microsoft account. The tablet configured the Pen on its own. The much talked about Cortana, Microsofts personal assistant software, understands Indian English, and responded quickly and correctly to queries. The Surface Pro 4 has been designed to handle heavy graphics and data-intensive tasks. For instance, apps such as Stuff Pad worked smoothly on this machine. But it does not come preloaded with any software or app which need to be purchased separately. It supports 4k video playback and has also powerful speakers. The 8 MP rear camera is pretty efficient for a tablet. It captured good images when there was enough light, but struggled under low lighting. Microsoft has added a lightweight and compact adapter. On full charge, the Surface Pro lasted for a day with ease, despite heavy usage, including hours of video playback on Youtube.

Surface Pen: Microsoft has designed a Surface Pen, or stylus, which can be used for writing, scribbling or sketching on the tablet. The tablet has 1,024 pressure points to recognise Pen input that pairs over Bluetooth. Once configured, it works seamlessly with the tablet. Clicking the top button once launches OneNote. Double click helps in capturing screen shots that can be pasted on OneNote and long-pressing the top button wakes up the voice assistant Cortana. To erase, the pen has to be flipped. It is powered by a cell that lasts for almost a year and can be replaced at the service centre. Using the Pen replicates the experience of scribbling with a pencil and comes handy while taking quick notes.

Type Cover: To convert it to the hybrid mode, the Surface Pro 4 has to be attached to its Type cover. This sleek cover with full keyboard has a magnetic surface. This is a mechanical keyboard that takes power from the tablet and doesn't need any charging. The keys are comfortable to type on and the trackpad is responsive. When flipped back, the keys are disabled. This cover also protects the screen when the machine is not in use. It, however, isn't a part of the box and needs to be purchased separately for Rs 12,490.

Alternatives: It is a hybrid that takes care of computing needs and competes against the iPad Pro, which is retailing for Rs 99,990 (128 GB). The Pencil for iPad Pro must also be purchased separately.


Amidst fears of prices of pigeon peas (tur) escalating further in 2016, the government has issued a tender for import of another 5,000 tonnes of the same to control sky-rocketing prices.

The state-owned MMTC has floated the tender for the import of tur. In Feburary-March a tender of similar quantity was floated. The government directed the import of pulses to build upon the supply of tur as the domestic output has shown little improvement.

The prices of pulses are already ruling high at around Rs 180 per kg. As per the tender document, MMTC has invited global bids for import of 5,000 tonnes of pigeon peas of the latest crop from Myanmar, Malawi, Mozambique or any other origin. Both technical and price bids should be submitted by February 10 and tenders will remain valid till February 16. MMTC said bids should be for a minimum quantity of 2,500 tonnes and the shipment should reach Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and Chennai port by April 15.

The trading firm had last year imported 5,000 tonnes of tur dal to check prices. It however did not get response for an import tender for urad. Expecting low production for a second year in a row, Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan had recently asked the Commerce Ministry to direct trading firms to speed up the process of imports in order to overcome any output shortfall.

Pulses production in 2015-16 crop year (July-June) is expected to be much below the earlier estimate of around 18 million tonnes because of poor sowing of rabi crops. Production in 2014-15 was at 17.38 million tonnes.
Small, highly-globalised countries such as Ireland are inherently more volatile than larger economies, Central Bank governor Philip Lane, has advised the Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform.



While we can expect the economy to grow strongly for extended periods, Ireland remains especially vulnerable to negative shocks, Mr Lane warned.



For this reason, it is essential that the Central Bank is pro-active in the deployment of macroprudential policies that can improve resilience and mitigate the procyclical dynamics associated with excessive leverage.



In relation to financial regulation and supervision, the banking sector is in the middle of a multi-year transition to higher capital requirements, reduced leverage and increased balance sheet liquidity, he said.



The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) has been in place in the euro area for just over a year: the SSM represents the first pillar of Banking Union by implementing a common area-wide approach to banking supervision, with centralised responsibility for the supervision of the circa 130 largest banking groups - including the main Irish retail banks.



The second pillar consists of the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM), which came into effect on January 1st. By ensuring that financial institutions can be resolved in an orderly manner, the SRM should significantly reduce the adverse impact of an institutions failure on the wider financial system and the taxpayer. The third pillar is the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS) - this is still under negotiation at a European level.

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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Food and Drink Industry Ireland (FDII) Director Paul Kelly has called for the urgent publication of long-delayed Irish grocery regulations, following findings in Britain that a major retailer has seriously breached the UK's legally-binding Groceries Supply Code of Practice.

The Irish food industry has been campaigning for the introduction of legislation here to protect suppliers from the very practices that the UK Groceries Code Adjudicator highlighted as key concerns.

These include unilateral deductions from suppliers and payment delays. The UK Adjudicator found that breaches of the Code were of a serious nature, due to the varying and wide-spread nature of the payment delays.

"The UK ruling highlights the very real and unfair practices that suppliers can face when dealing with large, powerful retailers, Mr Kelly said.

Reform and new regulations have been promised, but have not yet been delivered. Ireland is now lagging far behind the UK, which introduced the Grocery Code in 2010 and the Grocery Code Adjudicator in 2013. The Minister for Enterprise should now publish long delayed regulations and ensure a fairer trading environment throughout the grocery supply chain.

The regulations are currently being finalised and it is hoped to sign them into law in the coming weeks, a spokesperson for the Department said.

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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Leading global financial institutions, policy makers, entrepreneurs and innovators will participate today in the inaugural European Financial Forum in Dublin Castle.

The Forum, to be opened by the Taoiseach Enda Kenny T.D., will provide an opportunity for key international and Irish decision-makers to debate a range of key challenges and issues facing the European and global financial services sector.

It will also serve to showcase Ireland's role in the global financial services industry with international delegates from Australia, Japan, Singapore, US and Europe in attendance.

An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny TD said: This forum will build on Ireland's reputation as a leading location for international financial services by allowing senior executives from the international financial services market to hear about why Ireland is a great place to locate their business.

"The IFS Ireland brand will also help build on the very strong job creation achieved in the sector in 2015 as part of our long term economic plan to keep the recovery going."

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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The Central Bank has appointed its director of credit institutions, Sharon Donnery, as a new deputy governor - the first woman to be appointed to the role.

Donnery, who has been with the central bank for 20 years, will be one of new governor Philip Lane's two deputies and will be responsible for central banking functions, including economics, financial operations and resolution.

In her new role, Donnery will also stand in for Lane if he is unable to attend a meeting of the European Central Bank's governing council, of which he is a member. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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In honor of the sixth annual National School Choice Week, here are some facts you should know about school choice in America.

What does school choice mean?

The term school choice refers to programs that give parents the power and opportunity to choose the schools their children attend, whether public, private, parochial, or homeschool.

Why is school choice necessary?

While there are some excellent public schools in America, many students are trapped in schools with inadequate facilities, substandard curriculum, and incompetent teachers. Most parents, however, cannot afford to pay for education twiceonce in taxes and again in private school tuition. School choice programs empower parents by letting them use public funds set aside for education on programs that will best serve their children. As Bill Cosby, a comedian who holds a doctorate in education, says, We have a moral and societal obligation to give our children the opportunity to succeed in school, at work, and in life. We cannot meet that obligation unless parents are empowered to select the best schools of their children.

What types of school choice programs exist for students and families?



From School Choice Explained:

Open enrollment  refers to educational policies which allow residents of a state to enroll their children in any public school, provided the school has not reached its maximum capacity number for students, regardless of the school district in which a family resides.

Vouchers  a certificate issued by the government, which parents can apply toward tuition at a private school (or, by extension, to reimburse home schooling expenses), rather than at the state school to which their child is assigned.

Tuition tax credits and deductions  Parents can receive a tax credit or tax deduction from state income taxes for approved educational expenses. This usually includes private school tuition as well as books, supplies, computers, tutors, and transportation.

Tax-credit scholarships  Individuals and/or corporations receive a tax credit from state taxes for making donations to nonprofit organizations, which use the donated money to fund private school scholarships for students.

Education Savings Accounts  Parents are allowed to withdraw their child from a public district or charter school, and receive a payment into a government-authorized savings account with restricted, but multiple uses. Parents then can use these funds to pay for private school tuition, virtual education programs, private tutoring, or save for future college expenses.

Charter schools  Charter schools are independent public schools that are exempt from many state and local rules and regulations in exchange for increased financial and academic accountability.

Online schools  Online schools can be run publicly or privately, allowing students to work with their curriculum and teachers over the internetin combination with, or in place of, traditional classroom learning.

Homeschooling  An alternative form of education for children outside of public or private schools, typically within their own homes.

Which states allow homeschooling?

In the U.S., homeschooling is legal in all 50 states.

Which states have school choice programs?

The states that currently offer some form of school choice are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Washington, D.C. also has a school choice program.

Are charter schools constitutional?

While interpretations may vary, courts have consistently ruled that wherever a state legislature is tasked with the authority to establish and fund public education, it may create systems for the establishment of other public schools without violating the Constitution. Charter schools constitutionality has been upheld by courts in more than a dozen states, including California, Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio.

How does school choice affect educational outcomes?

In a review of all the gold standard evaluations of school choice programs in the U.S., researchers found that nine of the 10 studies revealed positive, albeit generally modest, academic improvement for school choice students.
Social Innovation Fund Ireland, a non-profit organisation catalysed by the Government in order to establish a fund of significant size and impact to aid the development of social innovation in Ireland, has been officially launched by An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny in Dublin.

The organisation aims to provide growth capital and support to the best social innovations in Ireland and in doing so to enable those groups to maximise their impact.

In December 2015, Social Innovation Fund Ireland opened the inaugural Animate Programme, Irelands first non-profit accelerator. The Animate Programme supports early stage innovations, projects and organisations to get to the next stage of their development.

The award consists of a package of financial and non-financial supports that target growth. A grant of up to 10,000 supplements the non-financial support includes: growth planning supports from a business consultant; a mentor; technical supports; and access to Social Innovation Fund Irelands networks. Since launching, the programme has received over 55 high quality applications.

Speaking at the official launch,Enda Kenny said: Social innovation also has an important role to play in shaping the future of Ireland to be a country that is not only economically prosperous but that is a more inclusive and fairer society to live in. It is a vehicle for creating solutions for critical social issues.

"This Government is determined to get Ireland back working and has been behind this organisation since its foundation in 2013. Through the growth and development of Social Innovation Fund Ireland there is a potential for transformative impact on critical social issues, such as unemployment, poverty and health which currently face Ireland.

"I wish to congratulate all the winners of the inaugural Animate Awards, the high standard and quality of entrants highlights the dedication and commitment the Irish people have for social innovation and funding.

Deirdre Mortell, Social Innovation Fund Ireland CEO, said: The Governments challenge fund of 5 million to Social Innovation Fund Ireland means that for every Euro of funds donated, we can match it with a Euro from Government, enabling us to double the impact of our donations. These four projects illustrate the power and impact of philanthropy when it partners with Government, creating 80 jobs while meeting local social needs.

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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A compilation of an up-to-date economic assessment of the greyhound industry should be considered in order to more accurately reflect the current state of the business in Ireland, an Oireachtas report launched today recommends.

The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine report puts forward recommendations for legislative change that address some of the issues that the industry faces.

Specifically, areas that have been examined include the economic and social background to the industry, the governance and administration of the industry, the funding of Bord na gCon, and the current situation regarding regulation, welfare and the breeding of greyhounds.

The report also recommends that Bord na gCon should provide a detailed update on its progress toward achieving the financial targets which underpin its Strategic Business Plan (2003-2017).

The establishment of a formal Consultative Forum either independently or as a committee of Born na gCon is also recommended.The report puts forward 8 specific recommendations around enhancing greyhound welfare with the aim of protecting the reputation and the financial viability of the industry while achieving the highest international standards of regulation.

Committee Chair, Andrew Doyle, TD, said: The Indecon Report, commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in 2014, brought to the fore many issues that surround the greyhound industry in Ireland.

"As the parliamentary committee, whose remit includes the industry, we felt it was necessary that we conduct our own review and, as legislators, put forward recommendations for legislative change.

We believe that this detailed report, which we commend to Minister of State Tom Hayes T.D., can provide a roadmap for change. A roadmap that not only addresses current issues but also sets out a strategic direction which will enhance and grow the industry for all those involved in the medium to long term.

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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China's smartphone boom may be over, as even Apple Inc grapples with a slowing economy and investor darling Xiaomi Inc struggles to stand out amid intense competition in low-margin handsets.

On Tuesday, Apple reported the slowest-ever increase in iPhone shipments as the Chinese market weakened. That slowdown in the world's second-largest economy is threatening to hamstring consumption across the country.

Xiaomi, China's most valuable start-up with a $45 billion pricetag, is under threat, after it missed targets for $1 billion in Internet service revenue and also handsets sales in 2015.

As China's economy grows at its slowest pace in a quarter of a century, the country's once booming smartphone market has become saturated. For vendors whose products have become commoditised and make little to no profit, that doesn't just mean the years of easy growth are in the past, but that it could be a struggle to keep their heads above water.

"The large growth rates that we saw in years past are definitely much different now," said Bryan Ma, analyst at IDC, which predicted China's smartphone market will grow at 1-2 percent this year. "In theory it could slip below zero this year, but either way, it's relatively flat."

Last year, IDC estimated it grew 2 percent. From 2011 to 2013, the market on average more than doubled in size each year.

Xiaomi's Internet services revenue surged 150 percent to 3.71 billion yuan ($563.94 million) from 1.48 billion yuan a year earlier, an internal document reviewed by Reuters showed.

A spokeswoman for Xiaomi declined to comment on revenue for 2015.

Like peers such as Apple, Beijing-based Xiaomi is trying to sidestep a slowdown in the world's largest handset market by coaxing smartphone buyers to also purchase Internet services and opening stores in China's less wealthy cities.

The firm has grown rapidly since it started in 2010. But Xiaomi's valuation has been questioned recently as the firm has struggled to maintain its early growth surge.

Xiaomi missed its global shipment target by 12 percent, selling 70 million handsets last year, when domestic rivals such as Lenovo Group Ltd and top player Huawei Technologies Co Ltd countered at home with similar Internet-only device sales campaigns.

"Given that Xiaomi's valuation has always been based on the company being more than a commodity handset manufacturer, missing their services revenue goal by such a significant margin is even more concerning than missing their handset target," said Ben Thompson, a tech analyst at Stratechery.

Now it's a question of whether Xiaomi can grow that revenue fast enough to prove its critics wrong, Thompson said.

The company encapsulates the risks of a vendor like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in recent years, who can't build a moat for their business.

"The only way to win with an undifferentiated product is having a superior cost structure and scale," said Thompson. "Samsung did it, and now Huawei is doing it. 'Win' is all relative though, if you're making a couple of bucks in profit per phone." (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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With firewalls no longer seen as enough of a defence against security breaches, companies are looking at new tools to foil hackers trying to enter a computer network.

U.S. and Israeli startups are leading the way, with new approaches such as "honeytraps" that lure a hacker to fake data or "polymorphic" technology that constantly changes the structure of applications running on a computer.

Some of the technology is still in the early stages and it remains to be seen whether it will be good enough to outfox the hackers.

But with corporate giants such as Sony and Twitter Inc facing high-profile hacks in recent years, companies are desperate for new ideas to make sure financial, personal and corporate data stays safe.

"We view this (deception technologies) as a $3 billion market over the next three years, with Israel and Silicon Valley being the epicentre of this innovation wave," said Daniel Ives, a senior technology analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

TopSpin Security, Illusive Networks, Cymmetria and GuardiCore in Israel, California-based TrapX and Attivo Networks are among a handful of start-ups forging ahead with deception technology. Israel's Morphisec and U.S. Shape Security are developing "polymorphic" systems.

Many of those companies use techniques partly developed in the U.S. and Israeli military that were taken to startups by veterans such as Gadi Evron, the head of Cymmetria and of Israel's Computer Emergency Response Team.

TrapX Security offers DeceptionGrid, a technology using fake information that triggers a security alert.

TrapX clients include Israel's central bank, U.S. hospital chain HCA, Bezeq, Israel's largest telecoms group, and Union Bank of Israel, according to Asaf Aviram, sales director for Israel and emergent markets at TrapX.

TopSpin Chief Executive Doron Kolton said his clients include one of Israel's top five banks, a large U.S. hospital and a mobility technology company. The product is resold by Optiv Security in the United States and Benefit in Israel.

While still a fraction of the overall cybersecurity market, Gartner, a leading technology consultancy, sees 10 percent of businesses using deception tactics by 2018.

But Gartner analyst Laurence Pingree noted that they "have so far had only nascent adoption" as many of the companies don't yet understand the technology.

"Educating security buyers on its usefulness will be crucial," he said.

Some in the industry note that several companies including FireEye and CrowdStrike tried to launch similar products three or four years ago before pulling back although analysts say the technologies have improved greatly in the past two years.

"A lot of companies are looking at it but it's still early days," said a security executive with a Fortune 500 company.

He said deployments were quite limited, with most trials where business test the product on a limited basis at no cost.

Others said hackers may quickly be able to detect the traps.

"They will be challenged by the fact that (some) hackers are so sophisticated they might detect decoy servers or fake data," said Ziv Mador, head of research at Chicago-based cybersecurity firm Trustwave.

The technology could offer a second layer of defence to firewalls, which cannot always block malicious attempts, he said, and did not rule out Trustwave offering deception tools in the future.

TopSpin's Kolton also noted that deception would be "part of a bigger solution" and to "be combined with other things". (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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European Union regulators fined Japan's Mitsubishi Electric and Hitachi Ltd 137.8 million euros on Wednesday for fixing prices of car parts.

For the past six years, antitrust regulators worldwide have cracked down on a long-time business model in which parts makers keep prices relatively high for new components they supply to car makers and then charge even more for the same components supplied as replacements to dealers and repair shops.

The European Commission said the cartel for alternators and starters operated between September 2004 and February 2010, when Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi and Denso coordinated responses to tenders issued by car makers and also shared price details.

Mitsubishi Electric was fined 110.9 million euros while Hitachi's sanction was 26.9 million euros. The firms admitted wrongdoing in return for a 10 percent cut in their fines.

World No. 2 car parts maker Denso avoided a fine as it alerted the European Commission to the existence of the cartel.

"Today's decision sanctions three car part producers whose collusion affected component costs for a number of car manufacturers selling cars in Europe, and ultimately European consumers buying them," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

The EU watchdog is investigating possible cartels in car thermal systems, car lighting, seat belts and steering wheels, car exhaust systems and electrolytic capacitors, among others. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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Toyota Motor Corp said it was considering buying out the rest of minivehicle maker Daihatsu Motor Co, a $3.1 billion deal at current market prices, but denied a report that it was in partnership talks with Daihatsu rival Suzuki Motor Corp.

Shares in Daihatsu soared 16 percent after being overwhelmed by buy orders for most of the day. Shares in Suzuki jumped 11 percent despite denials from both Toyota and Suzuki. Toyota rose 3.8 percent.

Full control of Daihatsu could help Toyota leverage the lower-cost brand better and cut procurement costs for Daihatsu, while capital ties with Suzuki would help the world's largest automaker make inroads into India where Suzuki commands around half the passenger car market.

"We are constantly considering a number of possibilities relating to Daihatsu, such as partnerships or business restructuring, including making the company a fully owned subsidiary," Toyota said in a statement, but added that no decisions had been made.

Toyota owns 51.2 percent of Daihatsu, which like Suzuki, specialises in 660cc minivehicles, a segment particular to Japan, as well as compact cars.

Last year, Daihatsu was the weakest link in the Toyota group, which also includes the Toyota and Lexus brands and truck maker Hino Motors.

Global sales for Daihatsu slid 13.3 percent in 2015, data on Wednesday showed. That pushed total Toyota group sales 0.8 percent lower to 10.15 million, although the group retained the title of the world's biggest automaker, beating Volkswagen's sales of 9.93 million.

The Nikkei business daily said that Toyota and Suzuki were discussing ties from a variety of angles, including the possibility of cross-shareholdings as they look to capitalise on demand for compact cars in India and other emerging economies.

Some analysts noted that greater control of Daihatsu could be at odds with potential cooperation with Suzuki given that the two minivehicle makers are fierce competitors for the same customers.

"I can easily see the Daihatsu brand used in the same way that VW uses Skoda or Renault uses Dacia or Nissan uses Datsun as a low-cost, sub-premium brand to the core brand," CLSA senior research analyst Christopher Richter said.

"That could be a very effective weapon against Suzuki in places like India ... if I were Suzuki that would sound like a risk to doing business with Toyota."

Still, others noted that a potential Toyota-Suzuki partnership could benefit both automakers.

Suzuki, through its control of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd , has a vast distribution network in India that Toyota could greatly benefit from.

"Suzuki would meanwhile be getting a stable shareholder in Toyota as well as access to Toyota's HEV/FCV and other next-generation environmental technologies geared toward future vehicle electrification," JPMorgan analysts said in a note.

Suzuki is expected, however, to tread carefully with any new tie-ups. It formed a capital alliance with Volkswagen AG in early 2010 but relations soon soured, leading to a years-long dispute in an arbitration court that ended last year with the unwinding of their cross-shareholdings. (Reuters)

Source:www.businessworld.ie

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Ammon Bundy, one of the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, smiles as he arrives for a news conference at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge after meeting with Harney County Sheriff David Ward Thursday, Jan. 7, 2016, near Burns, Ore. Ward and two other Oregon sheriffs met Thursday with Bundy, the leader of an armed group occupying a federal wildlife refuge and asked them to leave, after residents made it clear they wanted them to go home. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The FBI on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for the past three weeks, conducting a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

The Oregonian newspaper reported several hundred people had gathered at the John Day Senior Center on Tuesday evening and were told the guest speakers would not be appearing.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made six arrests: Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said another person, Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, was arrested in Burns.

One of those arrested suffered non-life-threatening wounds after shots were fired and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said. Another individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

Ammon Bundys group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings Tuesday night.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The FBI said the people arrested Tuesday face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats. No indictments or federal charging documents had been made public.

Federal law enforcement officers converged on the wildlife refuge after the arrests and were expected to remain at the site throughout the night. It was unclear how many members of the armed group, if any, were at the refuge when the law enforcement officers arrived.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West.

___

Associated Press reporters Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle; Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho; and Terrence Petty in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.
This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ryan Bundy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Bundy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

BURNS, Ore. (AP)  Federal and state law officers arrested the leaders of an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge, during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregons frozen high country that prompted gunfire and left one man dead.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center late Tuesday afternoon in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made a total of eight arrests  including Ammon Bundy.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds, the agencies said. Another man who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported (http://bit.ly/1nOammV) that Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum was the person killed, citing the mans daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her fathers death to the paper, saying he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution.

Early Wednesday, the FBI and Oregon State Police established a series of checkpoints along key routes into and out refuge. The agencies said in a statement that the containment was to better ensure the safety of community members. They said the decision was made out of an abundance of caution. According to the statement, only Harney County ranchers who own property in specific areas will be required to show identification and be allowed to pass.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundys supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasnt sure what those remaining would do.

The entire leadership is gone, he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. I wouldnt blame any of them for leaving.

Thornton called the arrests a dirty trick by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32  apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Ammon Bundys group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.  I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West. Conflicts over Western land use stretch back decades.

In the 1970s, Nevada and other states pushed for local control in what was known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. Supporters wanted more land for cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting.

___

Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.
 How is the Outsized Financial Aid to Palestinians Used? | Main | Before Huge Diaa Hadid Correction, Signs of Bias 

January 26, 2016

Where's the Coverage? Israeli Women Being Murdered by Terrorists

While most of the mainstream media has been preoccupied covering the horserace in the presidential primaries, precious little attention has been paid to a series of violent attacks on Israeli women by knife-wielding Palestinian terrorists. Twenty-three year-old Shlomit Krigman is the most recent victim to succumb to her wounds. She was buried a week shy of her 24th birthday.

Ms. Krigman and another woman, Adina Cohen, were stabbed by two attackers outside a market in Beit Horon, near Jerusalem. The murderers also tried to bomb the market but the devices failed to explode. The carnage could have been much greater had a quick-thinking store clerk not used a grocery cart to keep the terrorists from entering the market. The killers were eventually shot by a Druze security guard.

Watch security video of the attack in this report:

Virtually only the Israeli, Jewish, and some specialty media like CBN, above, reported on this event.

The New York Times did cover the story prior to Ms. Krigmans death, but headlined the article with the death of the Palestinian assailants. The newspaper has since reported Ms. Krigmans death, but only in the tenth paragraph of a story about an exchange between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

CAMERA has noted that leading U.S. newspapers downplay and ignore the multiple recent stabbings of Israeli women. Sadly, that pattern continues. Wheres the coverage?



Posted by SC at January 26, 2016 05:57 PM

In the Stock Market of Hatred, Israel Always has Buyers, and they have all the Media.

I want to invite you to join to the Israels Defense in the Media.

Please Comment and Use Your Voice Everywhere.

Shalom and thanks a lot.

?  

Posted by: Dov at January 28, 2016 05:33 PM

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France: Nobody wins after Justice Minister's resignation

Published on January 27, 2016

Story by Anatoli Scholz

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The French Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira has resigned, in part in opposition to the controversial decheance de nationalite citizenship bill, which would see dual citizens found guilty of terrorist acts stripped of their French nationality. Though a welcomed message for some, her departure is an open wound for the politically left flank in France.

"For once, I did not ask her to resign," Jean-Francois Cope wrote on Twitter. The Republicain politician and one time rival of former President Nicolas Sarkozy refers to the multiple times he personally went after Christiane Taubira in the French lower house, the Assemble Nationale.

Taubira has held the position of Minister of Justice under President Francois Hollande's cabinet since 2012. An outsider since the early days of her public service, Taubira's resignation is a continuing signal of her ideological character.

Taubira was not only controversial to the far-right, many centrist and even socialist politicians disagreed with her on topics such as same sex marriage, immigration and the rights of citizenship. Her decision to resign arose from a disagreement surrounding a new bill that would allow the stripping of French nationality from terror suspects and associates. She wrote on Twitter: "Sometimes resisting means staying, and sometimes resisting means leaving."

Taubira was often the strongest supporter of Hollandes left-leaning policies, as much as she was often the last left defending them. Her loss will likely lead to a substantial shift in the political structure of his cabinet, as well as French parliament.

Emblematic of the French left, Taubira remained a personal target for far-right groups and politicians. One such episode of verbal violence involved her being called "une guenon" (a female monkey) by an ex-Front Nationale candidate, who received jail time following the use of the racist insult. There have also been multiple casse-toi Taubira (Taubira get out) rallies and graffiti tags around Paris. Yet the minister always kept up her strict discourse, cementing her infamy in the history of French politics.

The French daily newspaper Le Monde reported that Manuel Valls, currently French Prime Minister, called Taubira a "cautionary reminder from the left" on the morning of her announcement. It remains unclear what his ministers will do without this occasional reminder. The paper also speculates as to whether her resignation will open up the road for another player to take over from Francois Hollande as the Parti Socialiste candidate at the 2017 presidential elections. Yet, there are doubts that an otherwise rather uncharismatic cabinet will be able to display the same larger-than-life character that Taubira portrayed in their place.

Her departure will also impact the nature of the blame-game being played within parliament, the brunt of which had until recently been directed towards Taubira. Often opposing Valls and other members of her own party, Taubira represented the antagonistic left for anyone from Sarkozy to Marine Le Pen.

The instrumentalisation of Taubira as both ideologically "good" and "evil" has now come to an abrupt political end. Her career is far from over, but the immediate future of French parliament will be affected by her actions. The question of whether the left will be able to fill the void she leaves in their ministry  and of who will become the right's new nemesis  is going to be an important development in French politics.

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This article was amended post publication.

Story by Anatoli Scholz
In pictures: Italy campaigns to legalise same-sex unions

Published on January 27, 2016

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On Saturday the 23rd of January, across more than 100 Italian cities, voices cried out for the country to wake up from its civil rights slumber. The #Svegliatitalia (Wake up Italy) initiative  launched by Arcigay as well as other civil associations  saw thousands of people take to the streets in support same-sex civil unions. The law is currently being debated in Italian parliament.

Milan

In Milan, participants in a flash mob "won" the battle of the piazza della Scala, using dancing, music and song. Thousand of supporters of varying age, gender and social standing were present. They drowned out the actions of the Pirellone, a skyscraper hosting the offices of the Lombardy regional council (led by the socially conservative Northern League), which displayed a different message on Friday evening. The windows were illuminated with the words "Family Day", in support of Catholic protests defending the image of a "traditional" family. The unwise action was met with criticism, along with humour, with the hashtag #ScriviloSulPirellone and photos labelled #JustFamilies. An online tool for making your own illuminated message was also created.

Firenze

Video by Elena Mannocci. Florence, 23rd of January.

Naples

In Naples, people were also chanting #SvegliatItalia in the streets. A procession assembled thousands of people, among them Mayor De Magistris, as well as representatives from the regions most influential LGBT organisations. The crowd chanted, danced and cheered in a joyful celebration of colour, from the via Toledo to the piazza del Plebiscito, where the columns of the Basilica San Francesco di Paola shone with the colours of the rainbow.

Palermo

The colonnades of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo were equally dressed up in rainbow colours. Piazza Verdi hosted a thousand supporters hoping to wake up the island capital, who last year tried to open the road to civil rights with the first law in Italy against the discrimination of the LGBT community. Colourful balloons, white banners emblazoned with drawings of red alarm clocks and slogans chanted to the citys representation helped set off this particular alarm, which sounded at 6pm, a little later than the 100 other cities. Nevertheless, their message was strong and clear: Wake up Italy! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

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Photos and testimonies gathered by local teams at cafebabel Milano, Napoli and Palermo.

Translated from Suona la sveglia per le unioni civili: l'Italia si desta
Refugee crisis: Greece under growing pressure

Published on January 27, 2016

Story by euro topics Translation by: euro topics

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A growing number of EU countries are threatening to push Greece out of the Schengen zone if the country doesn't take steps to stop the influx of refugees. Commentators argue that Athens can't be given all the responsibility.

The EU can't just duck out now - Ethnos, Greece

The EU partners should take themselves to task when it comes to the failed refugee policy, writes the liberal daily Ethnos: In particular those EU partners who claim that this problem only concerns us, and that we have failed to deal with it. The problem concerns everyone in the EU, and only concerted action and cooperation can lead to a solution. Certainly we must be more consistent in performing a number of our duties. But the EU too must become more effective as regards planning and implementation.  If these conditions had been ensured in time, many problems could have been avoided. Since the EU has failed to get Turkey to fulfil its obligations we must now start looking for the culprits in Brussels. Or in Berlin. (26/01/2016)

Ankara, not Athens holds key to solving refugee crisis - Dennik N, Slovakia

The four Visegrad states of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have criticised Greece's alleged incompetence as regards sending back refugees. The liberal daily Dennik N defends Athens and argues that Turkey should play the key role instead: Greece can't stop the refugees, however that's not the result of incompetence but because its border is a sea border. Athens could simply sink the refugee boats and gather the dead bodies from the beach. No matter how strong the Greek navy is its main task can only be to save refugees. But without Turkey's approval it can't even deliver them back to the Asian coast. Turkey, for its part, has no interest in cooperating. It too simply wants to get rid of the refugees. (27/01/2016)

EU core states pressuring peripheral members again - Daily Telegraph, UK

The pressure countries like France, Germany and Belgium are putting on Greece regarding border controls is typical of the attitude taken by the EU core countries, and the British should take careful note of it, the conservative paper The Daily Telegraph comments: This is not the first time in recent years that the imperial nature of the EU has been revealed. During the financial crisis, weaker peripheral members such as Greece and Portugal were punished for breaking rules ... which nations such as France and Germany flouted with impunity.  The domineering tendency of the EUs core leadership is troubling enough to anyone who values democracy. Yet it is being demonstrated just as Britain considers its future relationship with the EU. For that relationship to be sustainable and acceptable to the British people, British sovereignty must be preserved and respected. The EU response to its migrant crisis does not bode well for that condition being met in future. (26/01/2016)

Greece can't do the job all on its own - Deutschlandfunk, Germany

Simply upping the pressure on Greece won't be enough to stem the influx of refugees, the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk argues: Greece is now receiving help, but it must also do more to get its homework done on its own. At the moment Athens has no great interest in stopping asylum seekers on their uncontrolled, unregistered way north. The increasingly unsubtle hints from a number of EU countries that if Greece acts too slowly or not at all it could find itself outside the Schengen Area increase the pressure on the country. .. But even a perfectly functioning Greek external border can only fulfill its purpose if two conditions are met: Turkey must not just let anyone who feels like it travel to Europe and must take back those ineligible for asylum. And those with a right to asylum must be fairly distributed throughout Europe. (26/01/2016)

Athens gets all the blame - Delo, Slovenia

The EU is blaming its own failures on defenceless Greece, comments the centre-left daily Delo angrily: It looks as if Greece has become the scapegoat for the entire EU's incompetence in the refugee crisis that is determining so many people's fates. Schengen is about to collapse because relatively small Greece can't manage to stop the historical flood of refugees. The fact that Europe is facing the loss of one of its greatest achievements of the post-war era is down to the EU, which is not prepared to implement a comprehensive solution that includes action in the countries of origin. A solution that provides help for the refugees in the Middle East and foresees a distribution of the burden among the EU countries. (26/01/2016)

How to stop boats full of refugees? - Corriere della Sera, Italy

Demands for the sea borders to be closed off are not just inhumane but also absurd, the liberal conservative daily Corriere della Sera argues: The memory of the lifeless body of little Alan Kurdi which was found on the Bodrum beach in September has faded. The wave of sympathy has subsided, and with it the willingness to generously take in an unlimited number of Syrian refugees, as announced by Angela Merkel. The chancellor has had to bow to the pressure even though dozens of migrant children are dying in the Aegean Sea today. However, the chosen path is not just a fatal blow for Schengen but also seems unfair to Italy and Greece. Germany and Austria can police the land routes with border controls if they want to. But what are Italy and Greece supposed to do when faced with a boatful of refugees that threatens to sink in the attempt to reach their coast? Shout 'stop!' because Schengen has been suspended elsewhere, and let everyone on board drown? (26/01/2016)

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30 Countries, 300 Media Outlets, 1 Press Review. The euro|topics press review presents the issues affecting Europe and reflects the continent's diverse opinions, ideas and moods.

Story by euro topics

Translated from Fluchtlingskrise: Schwarzer Peter fur Athen
Lupe Garcia, an early voting clerk for Nueces County, stuffs a vote-by-mail ballot before it is sealed to be mailed.

I got a call from Julian Castro last week. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is a busy guy what with campaigning for Hillary Clinton and being mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate. So it must have been an important call that he would take time out of his busy schedule, right?

Did he call me because he thinks I will be a big political donor? Did he call me because he thinks I have a lot of influence? Did he call me because he wants to know my thoughts on Syria, the Fed and tax reform?

No, he called me because I'm old.

This was an automated call, of course. Castro's recorded voice wanted to alert me that a mail-in ballot request was on its way. And if I didn't get it, I should immediately call him (or one of Julian's helpers) to get one.

Sure enough, this week the mail-in ballot request came in the mail just as thousands of other such pieces of mail, both from the state Democratic Party and the state Republican Party, are dropping in the mailboxes of other Texans 65 years and older.

Mail-in ballots are rapidly becoming the new/old way to cast a ballot. In a digitized world, "snail mail" has taken on a new importance in get-out-the-vote strategies for the Republicans and Democrats.

What the Texas Secretary of State calls "early voting by mail" has always been one of the ways to cast a ballot for the disabled, the homebound and those 65 years and older. But two changes in the law have made the mail-in ballot of more interest to both parties.

Mail-in ballot requests are now annualized. If you request the primary ballot, you won't have to file another request in November. The elderly voter who already has a ballot arriving in the mail in November without jumping additional hoops is much more likely to cast a ballot. I gather that's why Secretary Castro is so interested that I get that ballot now, even for the primary; he's thinking November.

Mail-in ballots require no presentation of photo IDs as does voting by appearance. It's an irony that Texas Republicans went to great lengths to pass the voter ID law that requires voters to present one of five kinds of photo identification at the voting station, but only a voter card is required to cast a ballot by mail.

Is it because voter ID laws mostly affect minorities and the poor, a group that tends to vote Democratic? Nah, that can't be it. The mail-in ballot is much more open to fraud. Theoretically, I could have a neighbor come over and fill out my mail-in ballot for me. Who would be the wiser?

Yet Republicans didn't restrict the mail-vote requirements; in fact, they liberalized them. Is it because white, older voters tend to vote Republican? Nah, that can't be it.

Democrats are just now catching up to the beauty of the mail-in ballot. But is this growing the number of voters? Not likely. Joseph Ramirez, chairman of the Nueces County Democrats, said the mail-in ballot campaign isn't aimed at new voters, but at voters who have a proven record of voting Democratic and of voting by mail.

The only thing with mail-in balloting is that there aren't more avenues for voting. Why only use the U.S. Postal Service to cast a ballot? What would be the effect if everyone who had a smartphone could cast a ballot just with a swipe of the thumb?

If the kind of voters who cast a ballot influences the issues that will be addressed by candidates  older voters look closely at Social Security and Medicare  then what might be the effect if the smartphone electorate were heard? I imagine that college loan debt, the minimum wage and revamping drug laws would move higher up on the list of political issues.

If I can deposit a check on my smartphone, casting a ballot  by scanning my iris?  can't be too far away.

It's good to liberalize the mail-in voting laws. Make voting as convenient as possible. But why limit that convenience to older voters? Make the path to the ballot easier for every citizen.

Nick Jimenez has worked as a reporter, city editor and editorial page editor for more than 40 years in Corpus Christi. He is currently the editorial page editor emeritus for the Caller-Times. His commentary column appears on Wednesdays and Sundays.
City Hall

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By Matt Woolbright of the Caller-Times

Corpus Christi residents who have been clamoring for city officials to address the decades-old streets problem are getting their wish this year.

City officials intend to revamp the Street Preventative Maintenance Program officially next week at City Council, and then, if the council approves, ask local contractors to pick up more than 300 street maintenance projects around the city.

The proposal comes on the heels of the program's second year, which saw just 47 percent of the more-expensive overlay projects get completed on time and less than 1 percent of the seal coats be completed on time. This plan would require all projects from years two and three be completed by the end of 2016, Valerie Gray, the city's executive director of public works, explained.

"There's no question of the unprecedented construction work underway on our streets," Mayor Nelda Martinez said during a presentation about the 2016 work plan Tuesday. "This is the most bullish we've ever been on streets, and I know we're going to get better  there's always room for improvement  but I can't tell you how proud I am."

Gray outlined the proposed changes during Tuesday's City Council meeting, but the governing body took no action on the recommendations. A vote on the issue is expected at next week's meeting.

The recommendation also included changing the definition of a work year from a calendar year to the fiscal year, so year four of the seven-year program (originally slated to begin in early 2017) would instead be presented to contractors to bid on projects this fall and start work in October, Gray said.

She said the change correlates with regional weather patterns and allows contractors to develop project timelines to complete the seal coat projects in particular in a more efficient manner.

If the council approves, the city would immediately request bids for the 2015 and 2016 work from local contractors with the first projects getting underway in April, Gray said. The city would then not issue the remaining work orders to Bay Ltd., which held the contract for 2015's seal coat projects, and the work offered would be packaged in smaller sections to encourage more contractors to submit bids, Gray added.

The proposed changes represent some of the first tangible returns for the city from the residential streets committee, which first proposed smaller work orders, changing the project years to match fiscal years and striving to involve more contractors in the program.

"It's clear they liked what they heard, because they decided to implement it before we even made a formal recommendation," said Andy Taubman, the committee's chairman. "We're working very cooperatively to try and improve the program and how streets are addressed citywide, and today's actions show those efforts are paying off for the citizens."

City Councilman Chad Magill, who championed the streets committee initially and attends all its meetings, praised the proposals and said the changes will streamline the street user fee-funded program.

"I'm more confident in our seal coat process today than I ever have been," Magill said after the presentation. "There are a lot of improvements that will come from recommendations from the street committee."

Twitter: @reportermatt

In other business

City Council ...

... Discussed a partnership with the Texas Department of Transportation for utility work connected to the Harbor Bridge project. The council is expected to vote on the plan next month, which includes the city spending about $9 million for utility adjustments. The first $1.1 million would be paid next month.

... Moved forward with a plan to purchase at least 18 more trucks for city departments over the next several years. The total cost of those purchases is about $643,000.

... Amended a Bond 2012 project at Tuloso Road to not include a continuous left turn lane or curb and gutter after the necessity of those items in that area was called into question. The project will be bid for both asphalt and concrete street designs.
How PACs add to spending in the Texas governor's race

Organizations that are independent of the candidates they support can be more pointed in their criticism of opponents, says one political expert.
Natalia Contreras/Caller-Times Incarnate Word Academy students, parents, teachers and staff gathered for a Mass at the schools gymnasium Wednesday as part of the National Catholic Schools Week celebration.

SHARE Natalia Contreras/Caller-Times Incarnate Word Academy middle school level students receive communion during a Mass on Wednesday. The school has been celebrating National Catholic School weeks for several years. Other events planned for this week include a career day and high school field trip Thursday to visit the convent where the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament live.

By Natalia Contreras of the Caller-Times

The 770 Incarnate Word Academy students who filled the school's gymnasium during a Thursday Mass bowed their heads as they prayed for guidance.

The Mass was part of a series of events in celebration of National Catholic Schools Week, during which students, parents, teachers and staff were reminded of the values they have gained through Catholic education and were encouraged to spread those values to others in the community.

The Mass was led by Monsignor Roger Smith. It followed other events in celebration of Catholic Schools Week, including a Monday prayer service where middle school students presented a donation to the Good Samaritan Rescue Mission and a lunch with parents Tuesday.

"It makes us proud to see everyone together because we not only gather here but see them doing service for the community also," Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction Darla Montano said. "This isn't only about academics but everything else they are taught through their religious classes. In every class, teachers are reinforcing respect, generosity and service values."

The school has been celebrating National Catholic School Week for several years and it will continue this week with a high school field trip Thursday to the convent where Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament live. Also on Thursday, high school students theater arts class will take a donation to the Mother Teresa Shelter. On Friday, students in the elementary level will participate in a career day.

Brett Anthony joined his wife Jeanene during the mass and attentively watched their three children as they participated in the Mass. Anthony said he was happy to see a sense of community the students' embrace.

"It is very moving to see the community that has been formed here, from the high school students to the little ones," Anthony said. "It's a great community built of friendship and faith."

Elementary Assistant Principal Stephanie Bottom has been both a parent and a teacher at IWA. She said she is grateful to have had the opportunity to instill values in the students and to see them grow and take those out to the community.

"I look up at the juniors and seniors and I know them. When you attend IWA or Catholic schools in general, you really become part of a community," Bottom said. "Catholic education really is about love and the community. By praying before class and before meetings it helps us and the students to focus on what's most important," she said.
GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Dr. Marc Lamont Hill speaks during the 4th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2016, at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in Corpus Christi.

SHARE GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Dariyan Green performs during the 4th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2016, at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in Corpus Christi. GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Members of BLESSED perform a dance interpretation during the 4th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2016, at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in Corpus Christi. GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Rev. Quincy D. Mosley performs during the 4th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2016, at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in Corpus Christi. Related Photos Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration

By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times

As Quincy Mosley sang the popular gospel song "By and By," the entire audience clapped along.

Mosley, accompanied by pianist Dariyan Green, left the stage with the crowd on their feet. Even the keynote speaker, Marc Lamont Hill, took notice.

"It make you feel good, don't it," Hill told the crowd as soon as he stood up to speak.

The night paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr., as Del Mar College and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi teamed up to host the 4th annual community celebration Tuesday night in the Performing Arts Center.

Hill is a black journalist who hosts HuffPost Live and BET News. He is also a professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Hill's experience as a professor made him an obvious choice to host this year's celebration, A&M-CC Associate Dean of Students Angela Walker said.

"The millennial generation is really energetic," Walker said. "He empowers people to be change agents not only in their homes but in their communities."

Hill did encourage the audience to enact change by looking at the past.

"It was only 20 years ago that (King) had a national holiday," Hill said. "(King's) birthday and the celebrations that come after are an outgrowth of political struggle. People had to struggle and fight to get this."

Electing Barack Obama as the nation's first black president shows progress, Hill said, but there was still work to be done to bring about "the world that is not yet."

"It's a world that imagines freedom even thicker than it is now, democracy even broader than it is now, justice even more expansive than it is now," Hill said.

Walker said the goal for Tuesday night was to finish out the struggles of the civil rights movement.

"That legacy that Martin Luther King Jr. left still needs to be fulfilled," she said.
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By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times

Aransas Pass city staff is monitoring the effects of a wastewater spill that occurred Tuesday in Redfish Bay.

According to a news release from the city of Aransas Pass, an estimated 800,000 gallons of treated sludge wastewater spilled out of the treatment plant and into the bay. The main pump to the clarifier failed, causing the spill.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was immediately contacted after the spill occurred, according to the release.

Anyone located within half a mile of the affected area should use boiled water if their water comes from private wells.

Water purchased from Aransas Pass is still safe to drink, the release stated.

Residents who have questions are encouraged to contact the public works utility supervisor by calling 758-3111.
Dustin Amy

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By Natalia Contreras of the Caller-Times

Gregory Volunteer Fire Department named Dustin Amy as chief.

Amy succeeds Steven Saldana who took a job in Houston. Amy served as assistant chief and has about 26 years of experience, officials said.

Amy, who moved to the Coastal Bend from Central Texas in 2011 said he plans to establish an emergency service district in Gregory.

"They will help us fund the department and it will allow more training and better equipment," Amy said. "I am hoping to get this on the November election ballot."

Officials said Amy has started to work with Gregory city leaders to acclimate the influx of new employees due to new industrial centers currently under construction in the area. He said his goal to ensure that the department will be ready to provide the fire protection the community needs.

"We want to continue to grow the relationship we have with other agencies in Ingleside and Portland. It is important that we work together," Amy said. "If we can't work well with each other the community suffers. If we work together and there's an incident it can be handled in one seamless motion and that only benefits the community."

Amy is commissioned through the Texas Commission on Fire Protection and is a Nationally Registered Emergency Medical Technician, officials said.

Juan Jimenez will serve with Amy as assistant chief.

Twitter: @CallerNatalia
SHARE Mayor Nelda Martinez

By Matt Woolbright of the Caller-Times

Corpus Christi Mayor Nelda Martinez has joined forces with a slew of current and former elected leaders, including former-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to promote infrastructure development across the country.

The mayor's office announced Martinez was joining the Building America's Future Educational Fund as a member Monday.

"Corpus Christi citizens have approved more than $467 million in bonds to improve infrastructure since 2000 and are committed to redeveloping Corpus Christi from the ground up," Martinez said in a statement.

The organization's website states its focus is on promoting comprehensive infrastructure development policy "grounded in the need for environmental sustainability, lower carbon emissions, and reduced U.S. dependence on foreign oil."
In a briefing with members of the media, Ashwin Puri, Facebooks head of APAC publisher sales (Audience Network & LiveRail) said that the move was the next step in enabling publishers to better capture monetisation opportunities.

Mobile ad spend in Asia Pacific is estimated to pass US$8.4 billion in 2016, he added. Thats 20 percent of all digital spend, and publishers are looking for ways to capitalise on this growth.

In the last quarter of 2015, the company reached a US$1 billion annual run rate for advertising spend through the FAN. Facebook claims that the bulk of this is being passed to publishers, with the remainder being recorded as net revenue for the company.

In 2015, mobile ad revenue accounted for 78 percent of Facebook's total advertising revenue of US$4.3 billion and 74 percent of total revenue.

Mobile web debut

The company has been working with 10 publishers in closed beta to test out its mobile web expansion. In Asia the list includes Indonesias Kaskus and Vuclip, recently acquired by Hong Kongs PCCW Media.

Industry commentators have long noted that a showdown between Facebook and Google for advertising dollars is an eventuality.

Todays announcement of the company's venture into mobile web inventory puts it one step closer to directly challenging Googles AdSense platform and its current dominance as a broker of publishers ad inventory.

The move exposes FAN to a new and larger group of publisher partners, not to mention a larger adspend pie.

According to eMarketer, the global mobile advertising market will hit two significant milestones in 2016, surpassing US$100 billion in spending and accounting for more than 50 percent of all digital ad expenditure for the first time.

When asked how this new offering fits in with Facebooks other publisher offerings, such as Instant Articles, Puri said that it expands the venues via which publishers can choose to monetise their content.



Ashwin Pury

With Instant Articles, publishers can offer a rich native experience within Facebook, he added. But where are users accessing content from? Its a variety of channels which includes the mobile browser and we are helping publishers better monetise with all the ways people interact with their content.

While it remains early days for the mobile web expansion, and no real data points to share at this time, Puri said that the company expects the number of publishers to come onboard to be substantial, especially in Asia.

Native ads leading success on mobile

Since its launch in late 2014, FAN has expanded its capabilities, introducing tools for native ads in May 2015 and continuing the push around the value proposition of people-based targeting.

According to statistics released by Facebook, apps that use FAN account for 6 percent of all time spent in mobile apps, with 80 percent of impressions on ad served belonging to native ads.

Puri shared that for the Asia-Pacific region, the last half of 2015 saw a 150 percent increase in the number of apps on FAN, with a 155 percent increase in apps that have adopted native ad formats. He was unable to disclose absolute figures for the growth.

Globally the platform lays claim to more than 2.5 million advertisers active on its network, while partner apps in the FAN include organisations such as Baidu, Cheetah Mobile, Holaverse and Sumally.

With our people-based targeting approach, advertisers are able to maximise performance, said Puri. Weve also made the user experience to deploy native ads seamless, all advertisers need to do is just check a box to extend their ads to FAN with native formats enabled. There is no need for new creatives to be inputted as the images are auto-translated.

The company also claims that publishers seeing 7 times higher CPMs for native ads when compared to standard banners.
Starting today, he will lead the business alongside chief executive Neil Munn. He replaces Alexandre Gama, who has stepped down from the role to focus on his Brazilian agency Neogama.

Sir John Hegarty, the co-founder of BBH, said: "Personally, Im absolutely delighted that Pelle is now stepping forward to lead BBH creatively. BBH has always been driven by outstanding creativity.

"Celebrating that and ensuring it continues in a world of expanding needs and opportunities, requires us to not only hire the best creative people possible, but also to be led by the best. That's why I'm excited by the appointment of Pelle Sjoenell as our new worldwide chief creative officer."

Sjoenell joined Bartle Bogle Hegarty in 2007 and spent three years at BBH New York before opening the BBH LA office in 2010, where he remains executive creative director.

In New York, Sjoenell was behind award-winning work including "Oasis  dig out your soul in the streets", which won a Titanium Lion at Cannes; "clean your balls" for Axe  the most talked about campaign in social media in the year that it launched; and "Dear Sophie" for Google, which was named Time's best ad of the year.

In 2014, he set up The Creative Studio, a joint venture with Scooter Braun's SB Projects. The studio creates content for clients including music videos, ads, B-roll and promotional videos.

Sjoenell said: "I fell in love with advertising because of a Levis ad that BBH created when I was a teenager. Im delighted and extremely honoured to be taking the creative helm of this great agency. Only white sheep can be herded. To lead black ones, you have to be one."

Gama stepped down from the role earlier this month after the end of his earn-out from the 2012 Publicis Groupe deal, when he sold his company shares alongside BBH founders. He turned down the chairman role because he wanted to focus on expanding and developing the Publicisowned Neogama business in Brazil.
| BY Ricki Green |

Cummins&Partners has been appointed by Simplot Australia as agency of record for the John West brand.

The win comes following a competitive pitch late last year, and means that Cummins&Partners will have responsibility for all communications for the iconic seafood brand effective immediately.

Says Tom Ward, managing director of C&P Melbourne: Were delighted to welcome Simplot Australia to the family here at C&P, and to be working on a brand as famous and beloved as John West  were looking forward to doing great work together in 2016.
Mr Le's dying wish was to say goodbye to his mother, who he had not seen since boarding the wooden boat bound for Australia six years before. Mr Le put up an heroic struggle to survive two months while immigration officials rushed to put through the visa request - amazing the nursing staff who were caring for him at the then Woden Valley Hospital.
"Over time, as we've obtained better data we're able to tell a better story and provide more useful information. In the early years, the report mostly provided a baseline picture but as we've obtained better data and as time has progressed we can now provide a much clearer picture on what's going well and what's not going so well," Mr James says.
OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- A man wanted in connection with last Thursday's burglary of a Papa John's restaurant in Ocean Springs was captured Tuesday in Meridian.

According to Ocean Springs Police Capt. Chuck Jackson, investigators received a tip from Crime Stoppers that the fugitive -- Chad Brewster -- was possibly in Meridian attempting to board a bus for Kalamazoo, Mich.

Ocean Springs police contacted their Meridian counterparts and the Meridian patrol division apprehended Brewster near a Greyhound bus terminal. Brewster is currently in the Lauderdale County jail awaiting his return to Ocean Springs to face a charge of commercial burglary.

Police were initially notified of the Papa John's burglary last Thursday by employees. Surveillance footage showed a white male entering the business with a key and gaining access to the safe with the combination.

In viewing the video, police identified Brewster from "prior dealings" with him, according to Jackson.

Additional investigation revealed that Brewster was known to associate with 20-year-old Bradley Paul Randle Cherry, a former Papa John's employee who had been terminated earlier this month.

Cherry was located staying a the Studio 6 motel on U.S. 90 and taken into custody. Under questioning, he admitted he and Brewster had planned burglarizing Papa John's.

Cherry was arrested and charged with commercial burglary and is currently in the Ocean Springs Municipal Jail under a $20,000 bond set by Judge Matthew Mestayer.
Jackson Avenue tree 005.jpg

Property owners want this 100-year-old cedar tree removed to make way for a driveway they want to construct with their new home.

(Warren Kulo/Gulflive.com)

OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- Still awaiting a decision by aldermen on the fate of a live oak tree on Lovers Lane which impedes emergency vehicle access, Ocean Springs officials find themselves now wrestling with what to do about a 100-year-old cedar tree on Jackson Avenue.

Property owners there want to have the tree removed to make room for a driveway for the new home they plan to construct there, but some residents on the street and other tree lovers object, putting the City once again in the middle.

Mayor Connie Moran said Tuesday City Engineer James Foster was going to the site to determine if the entire tree was on the city right-of-way or partially on the owners' property.

In either event, a report by a certified arborist will have to be completed. If the tree is on the city right-of-way, the City will have to hire the arborist. If on private property, the report will have to be paid for by the owners.

"If it's on their property, they will have to submit a site plan, as well as an arborist's report," Moran said. "They'll have to demonstrate the tree is causing them a hardship in building their home."

Donnie McClain of McClain's Tree Service was contacted by the property owners, who have not been identified, and asked to look at the tree. McClain said he believes the southwest side of the tree is suffering from "root rot" and is hollow on that side.

"You can take a brick or large rock and hit the tree on that side and hear the thud sound which indicates the tree is hollow," McClain said, adding that the tree sits directly under a power line and next to a power pole.

McClain said the property owners are "good people" who are looking to move to Ocean Springs to make their home.

Moran said the City is awaiting all information on the tree before making a decision. According to City ordinance, property owners wishing to remove a protected tree must go before the tree committee, which will either grant or deny the application.

If the property owners disagree with the decision, they can appeal to the board of aldermen.

Moran made it clear that if the tree is healthy, she will oppose any attempt to cut it down.

"If an arborist's report says the tree can support a canopy, I will veto any motion to remove it," she said.

McClain said it's "unfortunate" that the tree needs to come down, but believes the property owners are within their rights to do so.

"I've lived my whole life here," he said. "I want to protect the trees, too. It's not always about the money for me. I've seen this town lose a lot of trees over the years -- hurricanes, tropical storms, building construction, home construction.

"But in my opinion this tree could prove dangerous to the homeowners, who have children," McClain added. "If we get a major storm or any storm with strong winds, it could come down."

McClain also said the property owners are in the process of putting a site plan together to submit to the City.

"People have a right to develop a piece of property," he said.

Moran said she believes there are other possible configurations of the property which would allow for a driveway without necessitating removal of the tree.

"I've not yet met the owners," she said. "We're hoping they will work with us to save the tree."
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Modified On Jan 27, 2016 11:25 AM By Nabeel for Jaguar F-TYPE 2013-2020

Jaguar will be soon launching a special edition of its F-Type sportscar. This car will be christened as F-Type SVR while the SV stands for Special Vehicle Operations. As the name suggests, the vehicle has been developed with the assistance of Jaguar Land Rover's Special Vehicle Operations department. This is for the first time a Jaguar is being introduced with the SV badge. Last year, Range Rover Sport was bestowed with the SVR name.

The car borrows its engine tune from the Project 7 edition. A leaked brochure shows that the car will be powered by a 5.0 litre V8 which will come mated to an eight-speed automatic gearbox. All this results in increased performance numbers of 567bhp with 700Nm of torque from the earlier 542bhp with 680Nm. A lot of work has gone into keeping the car light like the carbon-ceramic brakes, which are 21kgs lighter and a lightweight titanium exhaust which saves additional 12kgs. All this results in a 0 to 100 kph time of 3.7 seconds, which is 0.4 seconds quicker than the AWD F-Type R. Also, the top speed is clocked at 321.86kph.

Changes in the body include a wider set of tyers which provide better cornering grip and high speed stability. The car also gets a bigger rear diffuser, rear wing, bigger front spoiler, larger air intakes and forged aluminium alloys. The car will make its debut at the Geneva Motor Show which will be held in March. "The new F-TYPE SVR is the first series production Jaguar to be developed by Special Vehicle Operations and benefits from everything we know about precision engineering, performance and design. The result is a 200mph, all-weather supercar that you can drive every day - we even made a Convertible version so that enthusiasts can revel in the sound from the new titanium exhaust system." - John Edwards, Managing Director, Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations.

The car will be priced somewhere around 100,000, which oughly sums upto Rs. 97 lac. If introduced in India, the cost will fall somewhere around Rs. 2.5 - 3 Cr.

Also Read: Jaguar Launches British Design Edition for F-TYPE

Read More on : F Type
Modified On May 13, 2016 02:56 PM By Manish for Toyota Innova

Update: After the success of the popular MPV Innova, Toyota has unveiled the next-gen Innova dubbed as Innova Crysta. The vehicle has already been launched in Indonesia and will come as a refreshing change in the Indian market after the decade long run of the original one. The new gen Innova Crysta comes with a lot of cosmetic changes including a large hexagonal front grille, projector head-lights with LED running lamps and more premium interiors inside. The engine has been refreshed as well with the presence of new 2.4 litre 2GD FTV four-cylinder diesel engine. Check out the complete Auto Expo coverage of Toyota Innova Crysta

Worlds largest automaker has teased its upcoming and highly anticipated MPV, Innova, on its dedicated Auto Expo page. The Japanese automaker has started a contest called The Heritage of Innova, which exclusively caters to the existing Toyota customers. This particular teaser also cemented the possibility that the substantially revered MPV might be showcased at the upcoming Auto Expo, which will be held from 5th to 9th of February 2016.

The next-generation Toyota Innova is a brand new product from ground up and features all new exteriors and interiors. The MPV finds its foundation in the same bulletproof Toyota Hilux platform that also caters to the next-generation Fortuner SUV. In all probability, Innova will incorporate the 2.4-litre GD diesel engine under the hood, which will come mated to a standard 5-speed manual transmission and a 6-speed automatic transmission option.

The diesel mill is capable of delivering a power output of 147bhp and a peak torque of 380Nm. Other mechanical updates also include the standardisation of ABS and dual-front airbags.

The updates also continue on the inside as the Toyota Innova Crysta is substantially more luxurious than its previous incarnation. The occupants will be pampered with creature comforts like touchscreen infotainment system, ambient lighting, digital MID, tiltable steering wheel and others.

The next generation Toyota Innova will hit the Indian streets sometime later this year, however, for those of you out there who are waiting for the King of SUVs to arrive, the wait might not end anytime soon.

Watch Showcase Video of 2016 Toyota Innova Crysta

Also Read: India-bound Next-generation Toyota Fortuner launched in Indonesia

Read More on : Innova price
Three college students who first met while attending a Catholic high school in Florida have launched a scholarship fund to help others experience faithful Catholic education at a Newman Guide college. As we went off to different colleges, we kept in touch and found time to catch up whenever we returned []
collage.jpg

Missing/runaway Jackson County teen Hunter Gage Delmas.

(Courtesy JCSO)

JACKSON COUNTY, Mississippi -- The Jackson County Sheriff's Department is seeking the public's help in locating a 15-year old boy classified as either missing or a runaway.

According to Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell, Hunter Gage Delmas was last seen on the night of Jan. 26. He was last seen wearing a white cowboy hat, jeans, brown boots and a camouflage jacket and was carrying a Mossy Oak bag.

He is described as a white male, with blue eyes and short blonde hair.

Anyone with information on his location is asked to call Lt. Randy Muffley at 228-769-3152 or 228-769-3063.
Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing.

You are our people. You Care. We Care2.
Geneva, January 27, 2016: The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) has called for $2.8 billion in 2016 to assist 43 million children in humanitarian emergencies across the world.

At least 25 percent of this appeal will be used in child education in emergencies, with plans to increase the number of children living in crises and receiving education from 4.9 million at the beginning of 2015 to 8.2 million this year, Xinhua reported.

"By educating the minds of children and young people we are building hope so they can envisage a better future for themselves, their families and their societies and help break the cycle of chronic crisis," said Unicef's director of emergency programmes Afshan Khan.

"Basically, if a child doesn't go to school for five years, you lost a generation," she added, with particular reference to the plight of children in war-torn Syria. Five million Syrian children will access to education both inside the country and neighbouring states as part of Unicef's 2016 appeal, which has doubled since this time three years ago.

Current estimates reveal that one in nine of the world's children now live in conflict zones, with children living in countries affected by conflict twice as likely as those in other countries to die of mostly preventable diseases before they reach the age of five.

"Across the world, millions of children have been forced to flee their homes due to violence and conflict. The global refugee crisis is also a protection crisis for children on the move, who are at increased risk of abuse, exploitation and trafficking," Khan said.

IANS

UNICEF: UN aims to focus on quality education for children
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A classic muscle car that goes for the same money as a classic Italian supercar? Yes it happens.



However, this isnt just any ordinary American muscle car, but a Plymouth Hemi Cuda Convertible built in 1970 in just five examples with the codeE74 V8, connected to the A833 4-speed gearbox.

Equipped to get anywhere in a hurry, as the auctioneer likes to refer to it, the car has the A34 Super Track Pak, an option that includes bulletproof Dana 60 differential, 26-inch heavy-duty radiator, 7-blade fan and front disc brakes.

Inside, the list of features includes the A62 Rallye instrument cluster, N85 factory tachometer, front bucket seats, woodgrain-finish center console, black vinyl, Music Master AM radio and auxiliary interior lighting.

On the outside, the classic model rides on 157-inch steel wheels and it has N42 chrome exhaust tip, body sill and rear deck moldings, J45 lanyard-tethered hood pins, N96 Shaker fresh-air hood, argent-hued Shaker scoop and FY1 Lemon Twist paint.

The car was originally constructed for export in Canada, and it left the plant for British Columbia, with a man who bought it as a graduation present for his daughter. In 1999, the vehicle came to America with collector Harold Sullivan and four years later, it was featured on the Mopar Restoration Products Program, only to win Best in Class at the Ault Park Concours dElegance in Ohio, in 2006.

Throughout its existence, the 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda Convertible was driven for less than 27,500 miles (44,250km) and it was sold on Friday, January 22, at Mecum auctions, for $2,675,000.

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The United States is about to get something that it hasnt had in many years: a world-class international animation festival. GLAS Animation Festival, set to take place March 3-6, 2016 in Berkeley, California, will offer a full slate of competition programs, retrospectives, installations, and international guests.

This morning, the festival announced its international jury, comprised of a dozen artists, filmmakers, curators, and industry professionals. The majority of the jury members will also be presenting programs of work at the festival.

The jury includes a high-profile group of independent filmmakers, including Jeremy Clapin (Skhizein), Hisko Hulsing (Junkyard, Cobain: Montage of Heck), Kirsten Lepore (Move Mountain), and Tom Brown (Teeth). Theyll be joined by other prominent figures such as Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, PBS senior director of childrens programming Linda Simensky, and Holland Animation Film Festival director Gerben Schermer. The full list of jury members is below:
Photo: Contributed - care.org

Refugees are on the way, now all they need is a place to live.

One Syrian family has already arrived in Kamloops and several more families are expected over the next few months, so an appeal is being issued to Kamloops property owners to assist in providing affordable accommodation that will be within supports provided by the federal government.

An ad-hoc community refugee committee comprised of federal, provincial and municipal leaders along with community agencies and Interior Health met this week to identify supports needed to assist incoming families.

A family of five or six will be provided with about $800 per month for housing, including utilities, which is difficult to find in our community, said Paul Lagace, executive director of the Kamloops Cariboo Regional Immigrants Society.

I know there are generous Kamloops property owners who would like to help with this extraordinary need, said Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Terry Lake. We hope they will contact us so we can connect them to families upon arrival.

The ad-hoc committee also includes the Kamloops Thompson School District, United Way, RAFT (Refugees and Friends Together) and the Kamloops Islamist Association.

Anyone who can assist with affordable accommodation is asked to call the Kamloops Cariboo Regional Immigrants Society at 778-470-6101, or Lake at 250-554-5413.
Photo: CTV

Kamloops RCMP are investigating a suspicious death at a Valleyview motel.

About 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, police were called to the 1700 block of Trans Canada Highway East.

Cpl. Cheryl Bush said a 49-year-old man is dead, and the RCMP Serious Crime Unit and B.C. Coroners Service are investigating.

The investigation is in the very preliminary stages, as such there is no further information to release at this time, said Bush.

Last week, Kamloops RCMP were called to a fatal stabbing at Hatsuki Sushi on the city's north shore.

On Jan. 22, Police received a 911 call at 4:47 p.m. about a 30-year-old male who had suffered serious injuries after being attacked by another man near the 400 Block of Tranquille Road.

The victim was transported to Royal Inland Hospital by ambulance. However, he died later that night, said Staff Sgt. Edward Preto.
In response to a previous letter, Dear BCSC about U-Go Brands, dated January 22, 2016 to Castanet, I would like to share my experience with the BCSC and the Alberta Securities Commission, their overreaching power that involve each and every working/investing Canadian and how these unelected securities commissions mandate through antiquated laws that are never repealed and that hobble the free enterprise system and limits all future generations in this supposed land of opportunity. My experience with these quasi governmental organizations are now to bring out these excessive and oppressive regulators whom have been nothing more than some government sanctioned rogue administrators that have created numerous rules and laws that inhibited and hobbled a level playing field in the investment market.



When Canada was becoming a country, Sir John A. McDonald was doing all he could to bring the western part of the country into Confederation, so he promised to build a railroad that would reach right out to British Columbia. While blasting dynamite to clear rocky wilderness through northern Ontario, the blasting uncovered what appeared to be copper ore at a place called Sudbury. To date that mineral discovery has produced over 1.3 billion tonnes of various mineralization and one of the fathers of Confederation, Sir Charles Tupper, and two others individuals, Lord Mount-Stephen and Sir William Van Horne, helped build the Canadian Pacific Railroad to Western Canada.



Our experience relates to 3,000 shareholders and myself that live on both sides of the 49th parallel who are investors of a company named Flag Resources (1985) Limited. We have invested millions of dollars into a 63 year old (1953) Canadian Heritage Mining Company that, in 2003, held over 70,000 acres of prolific mineral properties within the Sudbury, Ontario which has been litigated into obscurity by the these very sanctioned organizations that were supposed to be protectors' of the investing public. To date, all the Flag Shareholders, Canadian Taxpayers and Workers, hold considerably less mineral properties due to the relentless and constant bombardment of this large litigation family that holds a monopoly in all levels of our decision making power grid such as the Federal, Provincial, Judicial, Regulatory Commissions, Corporate, Board and Company member subsidiaries that eliminates and casts a net over the whole free market system and the future of our economic prosperity of all parties concerned. Some of these accusers are none other than members of the Westar Group Limited, who issued British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation shares that offered 5 shares to all British Columbians that went the way of the Doe Doe Bird and are now in charge of many of these regulatory decisions within the BCSC and elsewhere in the system.



My name, Rodney J. Snider of Kelowna, and my supposed misdeeds, have been published and broadcasted repeatedly on the BCSC/ASC websites, CBC radio, Vancouver Sun Newspaper business section and elsewhere. These trumped up frivolous allegations are questionable due to the fact that Flags out of house accountant was found guilty 13 counts of unprofessional conduct and fined $57,000 in 2012, yet both the BCSC/ASC commissions looked the other way for convenience sake. Their unrelenting power of the public purse has more precedence to these people than using morality and common sense on making a right decision. Flag Resources wealth hangs by a thread today and Canadas next storehouse of mineral wealth maybe beyond our mental comprehension if not researched and studied up to 2016 standards. These coordinated attacks by overzealous litigators that use their power, influence and positions against the Canadian People, need to be addressed immediately or our future and our children's future will be stole away from us.

Rodney J. Snider
As the executive director of the Central Okanagan Heritage Society (COHS), and past chair, and current board member of Heritage BC, my life is deeply impacted by all things heritage.

In December I had the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with Andy Schwab, the current owner of the Fintry Queen. I found Andy to be a sincere and caring man. He is deeply committed to the Fintry Queen, and to its future. He has experience running the boat, and has worked tirelessly over the past several years, working through a myriad of issues. The business plan that I saw, showed a boat operating as a tourist attraction, taking locals and tourists alike up and down our beautiful lake. An inexpensive, environmentally sensitive and family friendly way to enjoy what Lake Okanagan has to offer. His tenacity is the reason why we still have a shot at having the Fintry Queen back as a contributing member of our community.

In an article in the Daily Courier, January 19th, 2016 reads that Kelownas Mayor Colin Basran wants to let citizens know the old boat is not a heritage asset. Its a former car ferry converted to a paddle-wheeler said the mayor. I dont see the value in it.

Water transportation played a significant role in the history of the Okanagan Valley. The national theme for Heritage Week 2014 was Heritage Afloat. A local committee made up of over a dozen groups celebrated the history of the lake and its impact on our communities. The Fintry Queen has been visible and working in our community for a good portion of the last 65 years. In heritage it is the community who determine if something has heritage value. COHS has had the opportunity to talk to many other heritage groups from up and down the valley, local citizens and our own members, who feel strongly that the Fintry Queen has indeed got heritage value.

When a historic building or structure has a new function, we call it adaptive re-use. We have many examples of adaptive re-use in all of the Central Okanagan communities. Examples would include; the Laurel Packing House  which now is a banquet and meeting space; portions of Kelownas Memorial Arena - used as the Military Museum; churches now being used as museums or meeting space, and the Westbank Museum the former RCMP station in West Kelowna.

The fact that the Fintry Queen was a car ferry that was converted to a passenger paddle-wheeler does not diminish its value, but adds another layer to its history.

Kelowna City Council may have other reasons for not working with Andy Schwab and his plans for the Fintry Queen, but saying that the boat has no heritage value is only his opinion.



For those who want to hear more about plans for the Fintry Queen, Andy Schwab will be speaking at the Kelowna Downtown Library February 17th during this years heritage week. Watch local media for further details.

Janice Henry
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

WestJet will be reducing service from Penticton to Calgary as of Feb. 15.

On a weekly basis, service will decrease from twice daily flights to three days of twice daily flights per week.

WS3280 from Penticton to Calgary and WS3281 from Calgary to Penticton will operate daily.

WS3132 from Penticton to Calgary will operate on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday and flight WS3276 from Calgary to Penticton will operate on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

"We base our service in part on supply and demand and review our schedule and network on a regular basis to ensure we are meeting guests' needs while maintaining profitable flying on behalf of our shareholders," said Lauren Stewart, in media relations.

"With the downturn in the economy we are seeing less demand for travel to and from energy markets into areas across Canada, including Penticton."

Stewart added that in the past, they have adjusted service as part of their capacity deployment strategy where many routes are updated to provide the most effective and efficient schedule that meets the needs of guests.

"The changes we have made still ensure that our guests have the ability to conveniently connect to the WestJet network," she said. "We appreciate and recognize that this is unfortunate news for the communities affected and we will continue to evaluate the situation and make changes as necessary."

Penticton Mayor Andrew Jakubeit said the city recognizes WestJet is a business adjusting to market conditions and that it is still three more flights per week, going east and abroad.


Soon. Yes, soon. That's the word of the day when it comes to Fallout 4 mods, at least as reported via Twitter. Bethesda 's got some plans to talk about Fallout 4 mods, and they're planning to spill the beans on this one soon, which is good news for those who've been in something of a drought of Bethesda word for a while now.Fallout 4 is still impressing a lot of people, and little things are coming to light. The big points, however, like when console mods will finally arrive and when the DLC will start up in earnest, are a little less clear. But word from the Fallout Twitter account assures new details will be arriving soon, though just which details were slated to arrive was as yet unclear.This isn't bad news, really; we all knew the news had to be coming soon so that Bethesda could clear the decks and get ready for not only the Fallout 4 DLC, but also for the next round of Elder Scrolls . That's a development that's going to be plain old amazing. And as we've seen before, Bethesda loves playing things close to the vest; if it's planning to start talking, talk it shall, in short order, too. Remember that Fallout 4 itself went from announcement to release in around five months, so if Bethesda's planning to talk, that means release dates will likely be forthcoming.What we'll see in all this remains to be seen, but judging by what we know so far, we're likely in for some very good news.
Photo: Contributed - Google Street View

Kamloops RCMP are investigating the city's second murder of 2016.

Police have now confirmed foul play was involved in the death of a 49-year-old man discovered at a motel in the 1700 block of East Trans Canada Highway yesterday.

The man's body was discovered at 11:30 Tuesday morning.

Kamloops RCMP are also investigating a homicide that occurred on the evening of Friday, Jan. 22 on Tranquille Road.

In that instance, a 30-year-old man had been assaulted and stabbed outside a sushi restaurant. He succumbed to his injuries later that evening.

There have been no arrests made in either of these investigations but police can confirm these are isolated incidents, and there is nothing to indicate linkages at this time.

Both investigations are active, ongoing, and are progressing.

"Our efforts are to support a judicial process and to release further details could jeopardize this. We are not in a position to provide specifics or details, but when we can confirm information we will do so," said Cpl. Cheryl Bush.

Investigators ask anyone with information on these incidents to call Kamloops RCMP at (250) 828-3000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
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Sir Stephen Bubb is globally recognised as a leading voice in philanthropy, charity governance and leadership and corporate social responsibility. He has provided strategic advice to governments and businesses, usually at Prime Minister, Minister, Mayor and Chairman level.

Sir Stephen has taken part in numerous national and global events speaking on civil society, business and government relations, including at the British Cabinet, G7/G8 summits, Seoul Governance Conference and international investment forums. He was formerly Chief Executive of ACEVO (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) for 15 years, and Secretary General of the European Third Sector Leaders Network, which was founded through his passion and drive. He was the Chair of Britain's largest social investment organisation for a decade and oversaw investments of 400m.

He is now CEO of Charity Futures, which promotes NGOs governance and leadership. Stephen has received accolades for his work and leadership from former UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron. He was knighted in 2011.
If the polls are right, only two Democratic presidential candidates stand a shot at winning the Iowa caucuses next week: former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

A self-described socialist, Sanders is largely seen as the scrappy, lefty foil to the pragmatic Clinton. Hes put out a sweeping college access proposal and been skeptical of standardized testing and competitive

grants, especially Race to the Top.

Heres what you need to know about him:

1. Sanders voted against the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, but supported the Senate version of what became its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, and an amendment to bolster accountability.

Sanders voted against NCLB in 2001 because of its emphasis on standardized testing. And in 2012, Sanders was slated to meet with Occupy the DOE protestors about the opt-out movement. (So he was supportive of opt-out before opt-out was cool.)

But over the past year, as a presidential candidate, Sanders seems to have taken a slightly different tack when it becomes to testing and accountability. Along with just about every other Democrat in the Senate, he supported an amendment by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., that would have beefed-up accountability in the Senate version of what became ESSA. And he got some blowback for that position from teachers union members across the country who support him. (The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have endorsed Clinton.)

2. Sanders is making some very big promises when it comes to college access.

Its no secret that college access has been a bigger deal in the Democratic primary than just about any other

education issue. All three contendersSanders, Clinton, and long-shot candidate former Maryland Gov. Martin OMalleyhave put out proposals on this issue. Sanders is arguably the most far-reaching. He wants to make public college free for everyone , and pay for it by taxing Wall Street. (Clinton has pointed out that this would benefit Republican contender Donald Trumps kids.)

3. Sanders has been skeptical of alternative routes into the teaching profession.

When the Senate education committee considered an (ultimately unsuccessful) rewrite of NCLB in 2011, Sanders introduced an amendment that would have made it harder for alternative-route teachers (like Teach for America teachers) to be considered highly qualified.

4. When it came to marquee competitive grants, President Barack Obama did not have a friend in Bernie.

Even when Race to the Top was popular, at least among Democrats, Sanders had serious concerns about the program. The cumbersome application process, he argued, seriously shortchanged rural states like Vermont.

5. Sanders has made educational equity a K-12 campaign theme.

Sanders doesnt have the long-standing relationship with minority voters that his chief rival, Clinton, is said to have, but hes trying to take on issues that are important to those communities on the campaign trail. For instance, on his campaign website, he addresses opportunity gaps in K-12 education , noting that Black students are far more likely to be suspended, or taught by a first- year teacher than their white peers.

And hes pitched moving away from property taxes to a more equal system of funding education. (More in this Vox piece , plus this comment from Eduwonks Andy Rotherham, who worked on education for President Bill Clinton.)

Plus, Sanders has talked about the power of education to combat crime. It makes eminently more sense to invest in jobs and education than jails and incarceration, he said at a campaign rally in Springfield, Mass., last year. Hes also said that government jobs could help dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

BONUS: NEA and AFT top brass may have endorsed Clinton, but many of their members definitely seem to be Feelin the Bern, at least on Twitter.

Doesnt matter who the AFT endorsed because teachers are voting for Bernie Sanders! #WeAreBernie  BernieSanders2016 (@TeacherWarrior) January 23, 2016

Well tell you what you need to know about Clinton later this week. Meanwhile, check out our post on Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the three Republicans leading the polls in Iowa. And look for our upcoming edu-rundowns on GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Billionaire Developer Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican contest.
CDC adds 2 destinations to interim travel guidance related to Zika virus

Media Statement For Immediate Release: Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Contact: Media Relations,

(404) 639-3286

CDC is working with other public health officials to monitor for ongoing Zika virus transmission. Today, CDC added the following destinations to the Zika virus travel alerts: United States Virgin Islands and Dominican Republic. Previously, CDC issued a travel alert (Level 2-Practice Enhanced Precautions) for people traveling to regions and certain countries where Zika virus transmission is ongoing: the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory; Barbados; Bolivia; Brazil; Cape Verde; Colombia; Ecuador; El Salvador; French Guiana; Guadeloupe; Guatemala; Guyana; Haiti; Honduras; Martinique; Mexico; Panama; Paraguay; Saint Martin; Samoa; Suriname; and Venezuela. Specific areas where Zika virus transmission is ongoing are often difficult to determine and are likely to continue to change over time.

As more information becomes available, CDC travel alerts will be updated. Travelers to areas where cases of Zika virus infection have been recently confirmed are at risk of being infected with the Zika virus. Mosquitoes that spread Zika are aggressive daytime biters, prefer to bite people, and live indoors and outdoors near people. There is no vaccine or medicine available for Zika virus. The best way to avoid Zika virus infection is to prevent mosquito bites.

Some travelers to areas with ongoing Zika virus transmission will become infected while traveling but will not become sick until they return home. Some people who are infected do not have any symptoms. Symptoms include fever, rash, joint pain, and red eyes. Other commonly reported symptoms include muscle pain and headache. The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting from several days to a week. Severe disease requiring hospitalization is uncommon and case fatality is low. Travelers to these areas should monitor for symptoms or illness upon return. If they become ill, they should tell their healthcare professional where they have traveled and when.

Until more is known, CDC continues to recommend that pregnant women and women trying to become pregnant take the following precautions:

Pregnant women should consider postponing travel to the areas where Zika virus transmission is ongoing. Pregnant women who must travel to one of these areas should talk to their doctor or other healthcare professional first and strictly follow steps to avoid mosquito bites during the trip.

should consider postponing travel to the areas where Zika virus transmission is ongoing. Pregnant women who must travel to one of these areas should talk to their doctor or other healthcare professional first and strictly follow steps to avoid mosquito bites during the trip. Women trying to become pregnant should consult with their healthcare professional before traveling to these areas and strictly follow steps to prevent mosquito bites during the trip.

Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) has been reported in patients with probable Zika virus infection in French Polynesia and Brazil. Research efforts will also examine the link between Zika and GBS.

###

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICESexternal icon
South Africa: domestic cementitious volumes up 7.8% YoY

27 January 2016

Domestic cementitious volumes in South Africa increased by 7.8 per cent YoY to 3.6523Mt in the third quarter of 2015, according to an update posted on PPCs website. Total year-to-date volumes were recorded at 9.602Mt.



Meanwhile, PPC yesterday said cement sales over the first quarter (October-December 2015) of the current trading year in its South African business were down by 1.6 per cent, while the international businesses recorded an eight per cent drop including low-margin cement exports to other African countries.



Despite the tough South African operating environment, it noted that coastal regions achieved positive volume growth. However, this was more than offset by declines recorded in the increasingly-competitive Gauteng and inland regions. For the same period, average selling prices decreased by four per cent.



With effect from 18 December 2015, final anti-dumping duties were imposed on Portland cement originating in or imported from Pakistan. These duties will remain in place for the next five years.

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States are increasingly making their academic tests tougher to pass, and the Common Core State Standards are the key force driving those higher expectations, according to a study released Wednesday.

The study, published in the journal Education Next , finds that since 2011, 45 states have raised the levels at which students are considered proficient on state tests. Thirty-six of the 45 did so within just the last two years.

The report is the seventh in a series that examines states proficiency rates over the past decade. Each study compares the proportion of students that scored proficient on states tests in math and English/language arts to the proportion that scored proficient in those subjects on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.

The new analysis, conducted by researchers from Harvard Universitys Program on Education Policy and Governance, compares states test scores from 2014-15 with the 2015 NAEP in grades 4 and 8. It assigns each state a letter grade to reflect how closely its proficiency rates mirror those on NAEP, which is widely considered the gold standard in academic assessment.

Higher Grades

Twenty-four states earned As overall for closely reflecting NAEPs definition of proficiency in 2015. In a 2011 version of the EdNext study, only three states earned As. In the 2005 version, only six states did. Eighteen states ratings jumped by two letter grades or more since 2013.

In short, writes researcher Paul E. Peterson, with co-authors Samuel Barrows and Thomas Gift, standards have suddenly skyrocketed.

It is a hopeful sign that proficiency standards have moved in the right direction, they write. If student performance shifts upward in tandem, it will signal a long-awaited enhancement in the quality of American schools.

Heres how the authors charted the change in states grades for NAEP-like proficiency standards:

Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia got particularly low marksCs and Ds in 4th and 8th grade reading and mathfor continuing to produce high proficiency rates on their tests, in contrast to NAEPs findings. Sixteen states got As in both subjects and at both grade levels.

Achieve and the Collaborative for Student Success on Thursday are expected to release their own report on states proficiency levelsan update to their initial report last May .

Georgia is a state that has drawn praise for raising its proficiency standards. In 2014-15, it switched to new tests that required students to explain their thinking rather than answer only multiple-choice questions. When those results came in, Georgia saw proficiency rates drop from the 90s into the 30s and 40s, close to its NAEP proficiency rates.

The old tests were sugary sweet candy that made us feel good, but didnt give us any nutrition, said Georgias assessment chief, Melissa Fincher.

She believes the new tests are pegged more closely to the skills students need to be competitive in work and school in the future. Theyre also more valuable instructionally, since the students explanatory answers can produce deeper, more insightful information that will help teachers tailor their teaching to students needs. Fincher said.

Education Weeks Test-Score Database

Education Week has built a warehouse of all the states 2014-15 test scores , and it mirrors what EdNext is reporting (and what Achieve will report on Thursday): Proficiency rates on state tests are down. Way down. It isnt uncommon to see states that adopted more difficult tests, to reflect the new standards, plummet from proficiency rates in the 70s and 80s to rates in the 30s and 40s. Check out our 2014-15 test-score database and map, a project led by my colleague Andrew Ujifusa, with a little help from me.

Why did we do this? And why are other organizations, like EdNext and Achieve, tracking this? (The National Center for Education Statistics has done mapping studies for years, too, showing the gap between states proficiency rates and their performance on NAEP.)

Its because everyone knew that 2014-15 was going to be a banner year for the use of new assessments aligned to the common core, or to other rigorous, college-ready standards. State leaders were worried; They knew that students wouldnt perform as well on tougher tests. Fearing a public relations disaster, state officials had been warning that results might not be pretty. In coordinated public-relations campaigns, theyve been trying to calm jittery policymakers, educators, and parents by telling them that lower scores in the first year of a new, more difficult test, were to be expected.

To some activists, higher numbers of students failing to make the proficient mark is just a sign that tests are holding too much power in education. To others, its a sign of a more honest approach to telling the public how well students are learning.

For years, Achieve and others lamented the gap between what state tests say and what NAEP reported about student achievement. The newest round of proficiency rates, many of them in the 20s and 30s, are a more accurate reflection of how well our schools are doing, these activists argue.
Efforts to revive CCI unit underway, India

27 January 2016

The state government of Hyderabad on Monday appointed a consultancy firm to prepare a draft DPR (Detailed Project Report) in an effort to revive the Cement Corporation of India's (CCI) factory in Adilabad district.

The DPR will explore the funds required, available assets and the condition of equipment at the plant which has been closed since 1998.



The government is said to be committed to the revival of the factory, according to Minister Jogu Ramanna. Following a recent meeting between industry officials and the CCI, another official meeting has been convened for the second week of February to further discuss the issue.

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An Indianapolis principal who died after she was struck by a school bus that had jumped the curb had pushed students out of the way before being hit, the bus driver told police.

Susan Jordan, a 22-year principal, was hailed by the Lawrence Township superintendent as a legend and a great educator, according to the Indianapolis Star.

Quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about a legend, Shawn A. Smith said of Jordan at a press conference.

The incident occurred during school dismissal around 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday, outside of the Amy Beverland Elementary School in Indianapolis. The bus apparently lurched forward, jumped the curb, and struck Jordan and two 10-year-old children, the Associated Press reported.

The bus driver told police that Jordan had pushed several students out of the way before she was hit, according to the AP.

Jordan died at the scene. The children were taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

 Susan was an amazing educator, the district said in a statement posted on its website . She had a remarkable way of making everyone she came in contact with feel valued and important. She had a passion for children that is unmatched. The entire Lawrence Township Community mourns her loss and extends our sympathy to the Amy Beverland Community the multitudes of people whose lives she touched.

Smith, the superintendent, also reflected those sentiments at the press conference.

This is a great example of an educational leader in our state and our city. ... Just a phenomenal individual that truly cared about children. This is a tragic situation that we have. This loss is going to ripple across our district of 15,000 students, Smith said, according to AP.

Classes have been cancelled for Wednesday, and the district has set up locations to provide emotional support to students and staff in the wake of the tragedy.

The bus driver will be tested for alcohol, the police told the AP.

Photo of Susan Jordan courtesy Lawrence Township Public Schools.
Software that helps automate and standardise business processes offers companies alternatives to traditional outsourcing, a global market long dominated by providers in India and China, according to research by global management consultants A.T. Kearney.

Robotic process automation, or RPA, requires licensing a software robot that handles rules-based, repetitive tasks requiring no human judgement. Examples of such tasks, according to global professional services consultants at Accenture, are value-added tax reporting, cost accounting, and purchase orders in highly regulated financial services organisations such as banks, insurers, and pension funds.

RPA can reduce the cost of back-office processes by up to 50%, because the licence costs a fraction of an onshore or an offshore employee and eliminates employee training and management, the A.T. Kearney report tracking outsourcing activities worldwide suggested.

In addition to RPA, which uses customer-specific processes, companies also have business-process-as-a-service software available. BPaaS is cloud-based and uses a standardised interface and process that can be applied to multiple customers. Economies of scale makes BPaaS about 10% less costly than traditional outsourcing of business processes.

While some companies might look at the technology as an avenue toward greater operational savings, others might see it as an opportunity to free up finance staff for more strategic functions.

Both technologies are fledgling, said David Cieslak, CPA/CITP, CGMA, principal and co-founder of Arxis Technology, a mid-market enterprise resource planning reseller. But BPaaS, especially, is starting to pick up steam.

BPaaS makes business process outsourcing available to smaller and midsize companies, because the cost is usually based on usage rather than RPAs licensing fee or the per-employee cost in traditional outsourcing. In 2014, the global BPaaS market billed $18 billion, about 11% of the $160 billion global business process outsource market, A.T. Kearney reported.

A.T. Kearney suggested that combining RPAs automation with BPaaSs standardisation has the potential to change the traditional outsourcing model. The cloud is an opportunity to not just lift and shift, but also to reimagine how it is done, Cieslak said.

Increased acceptance of the new technology, especially by small and midsize companies, will challenge providers of traditional outsourcing services, which rely on a large labour force in emerging economies, A.T. Kearney suggested.

To counter this challenge, traditional outsourcing hotspots will need a labour force equipped to perform higher-level tasks that machines cannot replace. India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, and South Africa are likely to meet the challenge, according to A.T. Kearney. Cities with cutting-edge innovation hubs, such as Seoul, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and San Francisco, also will be likely winners.

To determine whether RPA and BPaaS outsourcing alternatives are right for them, Cieslak suggested companies take these three basic steps:

Take an inventory of back-office processes.

Understand the financial impact of outsourcing.

Prioritise processes that should be outsourced and come up with a plan.

Sabine Vollmer (svollmer@aicpa.org) is a CGMA Magazine senior editor.
As the fallout from the Flint, Mich., contaminated drinking water crisis continues, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder will seek permission from the federal government to allow people under the age of 21 to receive publicly funded health care for lead exposure.

Were focused on protecting the health and welfare of Flint residents, especially children and young adults who might have been exposed to lead , Snyder said in a statement. We want to make sure comprehensive medical care services are available, and we hope the federal government will partner in our efforts.

It was discovered several months ago that children in the financially strapped city have high levels of lead in their blood , in part because of the states decision to switch Flints water supply. Doctors and public health officials estimate that thousands of children under the age of 6 years living in Flint may have been exposed, the Detroit Free Press reports.

By expanding Medicaid coverage to Flint residents from birth to age 21, Snyders proposal would offer comprehensive benefits to all children and young adults who may have come into contact with lead in the water. It is unclear how many young people may receive new or expanded services as a result of the governors request, the Free Press reported.

Research has tied high levels of lead in blood to learning disabilities, poor classroom performance, impaired growth, and even hearing loss.

Numerous studies detail the significant negative effects of lead toxicity on learning and educational attainment, and the associated costs, including the rise in special education services for developmentally delayed students.

The state also plans to seek additional resources to bolster community-based services to address behavioral issues arising from lead exposure.

This month, a group of community members and medical professionals created the Flint Child Health & Development Fund, established at the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, that will help pay for critical public health, medical, and community-based services to mitigate the short- and long-term challenges the citys children may face.

State officials also said they are unsure of the total cost of Snyders proposal, which would require state money in addition to federal funds. The governor will submit the proposal to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Snyder has faced intense public criticism and scrutiny for the water crisis. He has publicly apologized, acknowledging that he and members of his administration made mistakes in not preventing and halting the crisis after warning signs indicated that a problem existed.
Last week Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker proposed an increase of $83.5 million for career and technical education (CTE or VETvocational education and trainingas it is called in most other countries around the world) in his state. In Oregon where I live, Governor Kate Brown authorized $35 million last year to improve CTE programs. These are just two examples of how policymakers, at the urging of business and industry, are turning to CTE to fill the skills gap and improve our economy.

South Korea once had a strong vocational education systemso powerful it rebuilt its shattered economy. But today that is no longer the case. As we work to improve our CTE system in the United States, it behooves us to look at why VET lost favor in South Korea and examine the innovative solutions that are being implemented to improve education, training, and career options there.

From High Demand to Low Demand

After the Korean War, the economy of the newly divided Korean peninsula was devastated. However, you would never know it when you look at South Korea today. Gleaming skyscrapers dominate the Seoul skyline, internationally famous songs invoke the high life, and high-tech industry proliferates throughout the country.

It was no easy path to get this far in such a short period of time. It took comprehensive reforms that were anchored in education, and more specifically, vocational education and training.

In the 1970s and 1980s, vocational education in South Korea was more than socially acceptable, it was the primary way to succeed in obtaining a steady job with a decent income. Forty-five percent of students were enrolled in VET programs* compared to 11.4 percent in universities. With the shift to a more knowledge-based rather than industrial economy (known as the tiger years), the university degree grew in prominence to employers and, therefore, parents.

Current Situation

Today, the perception of VET has quickly fallen, and in 2013, only 18 percent of students were enrolled in VET programs.* Part of this is due to the prestige of universityaffluent families can afford the tutoring that is now required for students to pass the entrance exam and be able to attend college. Students from families who cannot afford these tutors simply have fewer options in higher education.

VET students are labeled as underachievers, and, in a society where traffic literally stops for the college entrance exam and top jobs at companies such as Samsung often depend on a prestigious college degree, often are looked down upon. In response, the government increased the number of spots in universitiesin 2015 the rate of university enrollment was 68.2 percent, an increase of 15 percent over 2014.

Despite the focus on a college education, Koreas youth unemployment rate hit a 15-year high in 2015: 11 percent for those between the ages of 15 to 29the highest since 1999. However, this statistic doesnt do justice to the actual situation: more than 58 percent of Koreans in this age group are without employment many having given up on their job search and therefore arent part of the official unemployment rate. The Korea Employment Information Service has analyzed the current situation and found that a skills mismatch is largely to blame for unemployment. In other words, the desire of students (and parents) to obtain a university degree is leading to a lack of employable people with the skills needed by industry. Therefore, there is a renewed effort by the government to re-establish VET programs and bring back the prestige they once enjoyed.

Education System

After completing nine years of compulsory education, students choose a high school pathway (see diagram). For those interested in VET, there are two options: attend a vocational high school or go to a specialized Meister High School.

Meister High Schools

Meister High Schools are based on the German educational model of creating top craftsmen. Students must score very well to gain entrance to these prestigious schools. There are currently 43 Meister schools across South Korea, each with a specific industry focus. Each school has industry partners and students are guaranteed not only employment upon graduation, but also, for males, a delay into military service. When they do enter military service, which is required for all males, they are likely to serve in a field related to what they studied. Students do not pay any tuition or fees, have top-notch facilities, and can even access free room and board if needed.

Meister schools are allowed to develop their own materialsa level of autonomy that other schools do not have. Many work directly with industry officials to develop a curriculum responsive to current needs. These materials are then added to a national database so other schools can choose to use them.

These programs are proving to be very much in demand. The Sudo High School, a Meister school specializing in energy that I had the opportunity to visit, has many more applications than available seats. Many employers court the students heavily, hoping they will come work for them upon graduation. In fact, Sudo High School has partnerships with 180 different companiesso many that they had to hire a department to manage these relationships.

When I asked one of the administrators at the Sudo High School about the biggest challenge he is facing, he didnt hesitate to say it was the lack of organization. They are being pulled in many directions by industry and the Ministry of Education. Many demands are made upon them without any central organization or assistance. In response, the Meister schools have organized themselves and have quarterly meetings to share best practices.

Vocational High Schools



The other option for those who want to pursue VET but are unable to obtain a place in a Meister school is to attend a vocational high school. Students graduate as technicians, rather than the master craftsmen Meister schools are producing. Admission requirements are at a medium-to-low level and, as such, these schools still do not fill all the available seats they have. Unsurprising, there is a range of quality across these schools. I visited one of the top vocational schools, Seoul Technical High School, where, to boost attendance, they are encouraging younger students to visit and see the programs. The school is outfitted with the latest equipment and teachers are encouraged to spend time working in industry during school vacations so they are up-to-date on current industry practices.

Challenges and Potential Solutions

Industry Involvement

There seems to be a lack of involvement by industry in the VET system overall. In Seoul, there is a committee made up of VET teachers, administrators, and businesses, which makes recommendations to the Seoul Ministry of Education, but it is unclear how influential they are. Beyond the Meister schools, industry has little say in curriculum development, leading to the skills mismatc h so prevalent across the country.

One attempt to overcome this mismatch is being made by the Ministry of Employment, Labor and Human Resources Development Service of Korea, and industry boards. They are creating National Competency Standards (NCS) and a National Qualification Framework (NQF) aimed at renovating the curriculum and training programs of VET. These have 21st century skills integrated throughout. For instance, the standards and framework for a waste management technician includes skills such as communication, problem solving, analysis, and cultural competency.

Apprenticeships

As is happening in the United States, apprenticeships are being used as a mechanism to promote industry involvement in education in the hope of closing the skills gap. In early 2015, the Korean President Park Geun-Hye traveled to Switzerland to study the apprenticeship system there. By summer, the Korean government mandated that all students in vocational high schools must also have an opportunity to be an apprentice. This employment first, university later policy aims to encourage VET graduators to work in industry and put off higher education until later.

This is a great opportunity to steer the entire education system toward a market-driven solution by providing training in those industries that need workers the most. If the government sincerely wants to establish a highly functioning apprenticeship system, they must engage industry as a true partnermeaning a surrender some of the control they currently hold over the system.*

Employer involvement leads to more satisfied employers who have more faith in the system and are willing to hire the products of it. This also leads to more demand from students to enter into VETknowing that they will have job opportunities upon completion. Therefore, industry must work with educators to design the curriculum of the apprenticeship programs and the government must help foster this collaboration.

And it must be done in a centralized way, which is not what is happening now. Currently, each company is designing their own program with no outside assistance. For instance, I visited with Roche , a Swiss company with a large presence in Seoul. They have started an apprenticeship program, but receive no central government support: Roche must create its own curriculum, severely limiting their capacitythey accept only three apprentices at a time.

Perception

Perception continues to be the largest challenge in Korea. Meister schools are proving to be a good influence in changing the opinion of VEThowever, only 15,213 (5 percent) of high school students are enrolled in Meister schools. There just arent enough places to meet the demand. And while there is a 100 percent employment rate for graduating Meister students, some are using these schools as an alternative path to gain entrance into university; if a student works in industry for three years after graduating from a Meister, they are exempt from the extremely difficult university entrance exam.

Vocational jobs are known in Korea as 3D": dirty, dangerous, and difficultnot a sentiment that improves overall perception. The person I spoke with at Roche said that when they first announced the apprenticeship program, no parents wanted their children to interview because it was an alternative, less desirable pathway. But now, after two years, word has gotten out that participating students are working in adult jobs and learning real skills that are highly valued in the current marketplace. In fact, now parents are calling and demanding interviews for their children to apprentice there.

Meanwhile, internally at Roche, the perception is also changing. At first, the apprentices were looked down upon and not respected by adult employees who thought they had little to offer. But upon seeing the hard work and the innovative ideas that youth can bring to the table, not only are the apprentices more respected, there has been a culture shift with younger full-time employees also more highly regarded and looked to for new and innovative ideas.

Another way to help with the perception challenge is to highlight the successes of VET programs; not just the Meister school successes, but also of the vocational high school students who go on to good jobs, apprenticeship programs, or who succeed at the World Skills competitions (Korea competitors often take top place and return to great acclaimand a car proclaiming their victoryin Korea). But a more substantial marketing program, like the ones Switzerland and Singapore have conducted, may be required to achieve a wider mindset change.

VET in Korea has a long way to go to return to its former starring role as an economic driver. But with high unemployment rates and unrest among the young peoplenot to mention a growing unease with the university entrance exam systemit is a challenge that can no longer be ignored.

This blog is presented as part of our ongoing partnership with NASDCTEcs Learning that Works! blog (National Association of State Directors of CTE Consortium).

Connect with Heather , Asia Society , and NASDCTEc on Twitter.

*Citation for these statistics: Presentations made during the ETH-KOF Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems (CEMETS) Summer Institute , July 2015.

Image of Seoul Technical High School engineering student courtesy of the author.
Planned Parenthood Plot Mastermind Faces Prison for Fake ID Use

When Texas prosecutors began investigating Planned Parenthood last year after anti-abortion activists released videos implicating the organization in fetal tissue sales for profit, it seemed likely that criminal charges would soon follow. But the scandalous plot took a surprise twist, and now the anti-abortion activists are on the spot.

Harris County, Texas, grand jurors indicted the schemers instead of the targeted organization. Now, David Daleiden, the mastermind behind the scheme, faces two criminal counts. He is charged with a misdemeanor tied to the prohibition on peddling human organs and a felony for use of a fake i.d. to deceive and harm Planned Parenthood. The young man, 27, faces decades in prison if convicted, reports Time.

Consequences of Faking

Daleiden could spend 20 years in prison under Texas law for the felony charge. But it is important to note that not every kid in Texas who flashes a fake identification at the liquor store on a Friday night is subject to such severe consequences. It is the nature of Daleiden's use that made his tampering with a governmental record, or reliance on a fake i.d., such a serious crime in Texas.

Use of a fake government identification with intent to defraud or harm another is a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison under Texas law. Daleiden used a false identification when he visited with Planned Parenthood last April with the intent to film and frame the organization.

Harris County grand jurors -- who many expected to come down hard on Planned Parenthood -- never even ended up voting on charging the organization. Instead, Daleiden (who really did manage to get the country riled up with his campaign claiming Planned Parenthood sells fetuses for profit) got caught in his own trap. A partner in the plot, Sandra Merritt, was also indicted.

Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson told reporters, "As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us. All the evidence uncovered in the course of this investigation was presented to the grand jury. I respect their decision on this difficult case."

Consult With Counsel

As this story shows, criminal investigations are unpredictable. If you or someone you know has been charged with a crime, do not delay. Speak to a criminal defense attorney today. Many lawyers consult for free or no fee.

Related Resources:
Abortion Laws by State

Last week marked the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. And while that ruling made abortion legal nationwide, it also allowed states to regulate abortion, to a certain extent. Since Roe was decided in 1973, states have passed their own abortion laws, some of which require parental notification for minors, mandate waiting periods or counseling prior to the procedure, and restrict late term abortions.

And, as recent cases have shown, not only do these laws vary greatly by state, but they are almost constantly in flux. In fact, the Court will be hearing arguments on Texas's restrictive abortion laws this March. So where do these laws stand now, and are they likely to change?

Waiting Periods

Almost half the states have some waiting period before a woman can receive an abortion, most being 24 hours. Indiana and South Carolina have waiting periods of less than 24 hours, but Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah have 72-hour waiting periods. California, Florida, and New York have no waiting period at all.

Mandatory Counseling

While every state requires a woman giver her informed consent to an abortion, but the definition of "informed" can differ from state to state. 38 states require some form of counseling before an abortion is performed, and five of them (Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah, and Wisconsin) require the counseling to be done in person.

Much of the counseling has to do with the procedure itself, but some states require notice about fetal development and the gestational age of the fetus. Twelve states require information on the ability of the fetus to feel pain, and Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and North and South Dakota require a woman to be told that personhood begins at conception.

Parental Notice and Consent

For women under the age of 18 seeking an abortion, 38 states require parental involvement in some fashion. Some of those states only require that one parent be notified of the procedure, though Minnesota requires prior notification for both parents. Twenty-one states require consent from one parent, and Kansas, Mississippi, and North Dakota require both parents to consent. And Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming require parental notification and consent prior to an abortion.

However, states may not give absolute veto power to parents, so they must provide an alternate procedure for minors to obtain court approval for an abortion without parental notice or consent. In some states, judges must take into account the minor's intelligence, emotional development and stability, and her understanding of the procedure and possible consequences before waiving parental involvement requirements. Although, these requirements can also be waived if the minor is a victim of abuse or neglect.

Ultrasounds

Many states have begun requiring women to undergo pre-abortion ultrasounds, and in some cases, must view the ultrasound as well. Louisiana, Texas, and Wisconsin mandate that abortion providers show and describe the image of the ultrasound to each woman seeking an abortion, while ten other states require providers to offer a woman the opportunity to view the ultrasound image.

There is a current split on the legality of ultrasound laws. While the Fourth Circuit recently invalidated a North Carolina law requiring physicians conducting ultrasounds to describe the fetus in detail, including its dimensions and the presence of external members and internal organs. Meanwhile, the Fifth and Eighth Circuits have allowed similar laws to stand. The Supreme Court passed on reviewing the Fourth Circuit decision, meaning that ultrasound laws will continue to differ from state to state.

Gestational Limits

Perhaps the most hotly contested issue with abortions has been when it's too late to get one. Roe v. Wade determined that the state's interest in protecting a fetus begins at "viability," and 21 states prohibit abortions at fetal viability. Viability is defined as when the fetus can survive outside of the womb, but determining an exact date of viability has proven difficult, if not impossible. Viability is treated as a medical concept, and although medical advances have shifted and could continue to shift this determination, it is typically held to be the 24th or 25th week of pregnancy.

Other states tie prohibitions to a specific date. Iowa, South Carolina, and Virginia ban abortions during the third trimester of pregnancy. And 19 states base their prohibitions on the week of pregnancy: 10 ban abortions after 20 weeks post fertilization, two after 22 weeks, and seven after 24 weeks.

Other prohibitions have been attempted based on gestational benchmarks like the fetus's ability to feel pain, or when a fetal heartbeat can first be detected. But a recent Arkansas ban on abortions after 12 weeks based on a detectable heartbeat was recently ruled unconstitutional.

Doctor and Hospital Requirements

Another recent point of contention has been state requirements for physician licensing and admitting privileges at hospitals in order to perform abortions. For instance, Mississippi requires the clinician to be either a board-certified OBGYN or eligible for certification in order to perform the procedure.

14 states mandate that abortion providers must have some affiliation with a local hospital, and Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin require that providers have admitting privileges in a local hospital. Hospitals have in turned denied admitting privileges to doctors who perform abortions, severely restriction access to abortions in some states. Texas's law has been challenged, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the case this March.

Not all states regulate abortions in the same way, and certain laws are subject to change. If you'd like to know the law in your state, or are having trouble accessing abortion services, you can contact an experienced family law attorney near you.

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Transylvania's Salina Turda themepark is housed in an ancient salt mine with millennia of history. Visitors use its vertical shafts to access vast underground salt caverns and lakes dotted with a concert hall, mini-golf courses, bowling alleys, and rowboats.

The mine was a source of titanic wealth in the 13th century, its precious salt enriching the Hungarian kings who ruled it, and later the Habsburg emperors. It has also served as a WWII shelter and a cheese-storage facility. The themepark phase began in 1992.

The site is also marketed to people with lung troubles, its moist, salty air touted as a balm.

Photographer Richard John Seymour shot a stunning series of photos in the site, revealing its broody, massive grandeur.

'I am often drawn to contradiction in my work, where the heroic, idealistic, or epic meets mundane reality. Salina Turda embodies this idea particularly well. It is an undeniably beautiful historic monument of engineering and human endeavour, but it is now used as a theme park with ping pong tables, bowling, and boat rides.' 'This juxtaposition raises questions about the value of architecture and space today, in relation to its historic value.'

Take a spin around Transylvania's subterranean theme park

[Catarina De Almeida Brito/The Spaces]





(Image: Richard John Seymour)
An honest essay has numerous characteristics: original thinking, a good structure, balanced arguments, and plenty more.

But one aspect often overlooked is that an honest essay should be interesting. It should spark the readers curiosity, keep them absorbed, make them want to stay reading and learn more. An uneventful article risks losing the readers attention; whether or not the points you create are excellent, a flat style, or poor handling of a dry subject material can undermine the positive aspects of the essay. The matter is that a lot of students think that essays should be like this: they believe that a flat, dry style is suited to the needs of educational writing and dont even consider that the teacher reading their essay wants to search out the essay interesting. You might want to have online essay editor service to boost your confidence in writing with an error-free output. Academic writing doesnt need to be  and shouldnt be  bland. The excellent news is that there is much stuff you can do to create your essay more attractive, while youll be able only to do such a lot while remaining within the formal confines of educational writing. Lets study what theyre.

Have an interest in what youre writing about

Dont go overboard, but youll be able to let your passion for your subject show.

If theres one thing bound to inject interest into your writing, its being fascinated by what youre writing about. Passion for a subject matter comes across naturally in your essay, typically making it more lively and fascinating and infusing an infectious enthusiasm into your words  within the same way that its easy to talk knowledgeably to someone about something you discover fascinating.

Include fascinating details

Another factor that may make an essay boring maybe a dry material. Some topic areas are naturally dry, and it falls to you to form the article more interesting through your written style and by trying to seek out fascinating snippets of knowledge to incorporate, which will liven it up a small amount and make the data easier to relate to. A way of doing this with a dry subject is to create what youre talking about that seems relevant to the critical world, as this is often easier for the reader to relate to.

Emulate the fashion of writers you discover interesting

When you read lots, you subconsciously start emulating the fashion of the writers you have read. Reading benefits you a lot, as this exposes you to a spread of designs, and youll start to require the characteristics of these you discover interesting to read.

Borrow some creative writing techniques

Theres a limit to the quantity of actual story-telling youll do when youre writing an essay; in the end, essays should be objective, factual and balanced, which doesnt, initially glance, feel considerably like story-telling. However, youll apply a number of the principles of story-telling to create your writing more interesting.

consider your own opinion

Take the time to figure out what its that you think instead of regurgitating the opinions of others.

Cut the waffle

Rambling on and on is dull and almost bound to lose the interest of your reader. Youre in danger of waffling if youre not completely clear about what you wish to mention or havent thought carefully about how youre visiting structure your argument. Doing all your research correctly and writing an essay plan before you begin will help prevent this problem.

Editing is a vital part of the essay-writing process, so edit the waffle once youve done a primary draft. Read through your essay objectively and eliminate the bits that arent relevant to the argument or labor the purpose.

employing a thesaurus isnt always a decent thing

Avoid using unfamiliar words in an essay; theres too great a likelihood that youre misusing them.

You may think that employing a thesaurus to seek out more complicated words will make your writing more exciting or sound more academic, but using overly high-brow language can have the incorrect effect.

Avoid repetitive phrasing

Please avoid using the identical phrase structure again and again: its a recipe for dullness! Instead, use a variety of syntax that demonstrates your writing capabilities and makes your writing more interesting. Mix simple, compound, and complicated sentences to avoid your paper becoming predictable.

Use some figurative language

Using analogies with nature can often make concepts more accessible for readers to know.

As weve already seen, its easy to finish up rambling when youre explaining complex concepts  mainly after you dont know it yourself. One way of forcing yourself to think about a couple of pictures, present it more simply and engagingly is to form figurative language. This implies explaining something by comparing it with something else, as in an analogy.

Employ rhetorical questions

Anticipate the questions your reader might ask.

One of the ways ancient orators held the eye of their audiences and increased the dramatic effect of their speeches was by using the statement. A decent place to use a statement is at the top of a paragraph, to steer into the following one, or at the start of a replacement section to introduce a brand new area for exploration.

Proofread

Finally, you may write the top interesting essay an instructor has ever read. Still, youll undermine your good work if its plagued by errors, which distract the reader from the particular content and can probably annoy them.
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The House Democratic Caucus on Tuesday called for an independent ethics investigation into the handling of the sexual harassment allegations involving Rep. Jeremy Durham (R. Franklin) "following an investigation by the Tennessean newspaper which revealed three different women who said they received inappropriate text messages from the Franklin lawmaker."

The report prompted Rep. Durham to resign his leadership position with the House Republicans.



Democrats asked for the appointment of a special bi-partisan investigative committee with the power to subpoena witnesses and documents to fully investigate the charges.

Caucus Chairman Mike Stewart said, "Before we meaningfully review our existing policy, we have to know where the breakdown occurred in this case.

Democrats rejected Republican proposals as "too little too late."

Chairman Stewart said, There is nobody less qualified than the House Republicans to address this issue. We need a bi-partisan body that can obtain witness testimony, review texts and other documents and figure out where the system failed. Only then can we move forward.

Sherry Jones said Republican leaders statement that Legislative interns should not share phone numbers with legislators "amounts to blaming the victims."

She said, We dont know if interns were involved, but regardless the problem is not with interns, but with the House Republican leadership.
A collaboration of scientists from the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Osaka University, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, and the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute have published research clarifying the role of magnetism in a new type of high-temperature superconductor. The research gives us a better understanding of the atomic-scale behavior of these materials. Physicists hope that, by understanding how these materials superconduct at relatively high temperature, they can eventually learn enough to make materials that superconduct close to room temperature.

It is known that the phenomenon of superconductivity -- where materials conduct electricity without resistance -- arises when pairs of electrons become coupled together or "paired". With traditional superconductors, this pairing arises due to vibrations of the ions in the structure. But this is not always the case: there are other types of materials, such as cuprate superconductors and a relatively new class of superconductor iron-pnictide superconductors, that was discovered by a group led by Hideo Hosono at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where magnetism may be the paring mechanism.

According to Alfred Baron, the leader of the Materials Dynamics Lab at RIKEN SPring-8 Center, "The question we addressed was how the atomic vibrations in the iron pnictides are affected by magnetism. This was especially interesting because atomic vibrations are understood to be driving force of the older type of low-temperature superconductors, while magnetism is considered to be the probable driving mechanism of the new, high-temperature, superconductivity. Thus, it was in some sense, an overlap of the old with the new."

Using a technique called inelastic x-ray scattering on two beamlines of the powerful SPring-8 synchrotron facility in Harima, Japan, the group was able to measure the dynamics in specially prepared single-domain samples. Comparing their measurements to calculations then suggested that magnetic fluctuations play an important role in the atomic vibrations. Naoki Murai, the graduate student spearheading the measurement explains, "By very gently pressing the material in the correct direction we were able to observe effects due to the onset of magnetic order". Says Baron, "One of the nice things about this work is that it provides a basis for describing atomic vibrations in this whole class of materials--do calculations with magnetism and then add fluctuations".

Baron says the collaboration will continue to investigate the properties of these fascinating materials, and also, more generally, the interaction of magnetism and atomic vibrations.
Parade steps off Audio Article For the first time since 2019, marching bands, classic cars, dance troupes, scouts and politicians made their way along Midlothian Turnpike for the annual Midlothian Day Parade on Saturday, Oct....
Chicago may be known for its towering skyscrapers and Fortune 500 companies, but it's also home to some of the nation's best small businesses, according to Forbes.

The magazine said four Chicago-area business are among the nation's best 25 small companies, a total matched only by the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Retailer Abt Electronics, toy manufacturer Radio Flyer, caterers Tasty Catering and consultants Integrated Project Management were all recognized on the list published in the Feb. 8 issue of Forbes.

To be eligible, firms had to have had a healthy business model for the last 10 years, be privately owned and be small enough that frontline employees get the chance to interact with company leaders. That ruled out many of the Silicon Valley tech startups that often dominate small-employer rankings.

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Each of those selected is known within its industry for outstanding performance and has rejected the chance to grow faster in favor of "being great," according to Forbes, which said each firm also had "mojo, the business equivalent of charisma."

Abt was recognized for bucking the trend away from family-owned, single-location electronics and appliance retailers with its 70,000-square-foot store in Glenview by delivering "great customer service."

West Side-based Radio Flyer got the nod for introducing new lines of scooters, tricycles and other toys that mean the company's wagons now account for just one-third of its sales.

Burr Ridge's Integrated Project Management was included for "implementing state-of-the-art management disciplines, such as an annual planning process in which all 145 full-time employees are actively involved."

And Elk Grove Village-based Tasty Catering  the smallest of the firms on the list, with just 90 employees and estimated revenue of $10 million  was honored, in part, because it has a 2 percent staff turnover rate in an industry in which a 50 percent turnover rate is the norm.

CEO Tom Walter describes himself as his firm's "chief culture officer" and said he hangs on to staff by paying more than lip service to the firm's values of quality and respect to build a "psychologically healthy workplace." The company's core values are read aloud at the start of any meeting of five or more employees, and "people are held accountable if they don't live up to those values," Walter said.

He said he revamped the firm a decade ago after his son Tim Walter and another employee, Jamie Pritscher, said they would leave unless there were changes.

Tasty Catering has invested in or partnered with a dozen companies Tim Walter and Pritscher have started since then, Tom Walter said.

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kjanssen@tribpub.com

Twitter @kimjnews
A sign reading "No! To poverty wages at Loyola" was brought to a union organization committee meeting at the Berger Park Cultural Center on Jan. 14, 2016, in Chicago. Loyola instructors voted voted 142-82 to join SEIU Local 73 on Jan. 27. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

A group of Loyola University Chicago's adjunct and nontenured instructors has voted to form a union, the latest in a string of successful organizing efforts among faculties at private colleges concerned about low pay and insecure working conditions.

The instructors voted 142-82 to be represented by the Service Employees International Union Local 73, the union said after a count of mail-in ballots Wednesday at the National Labor Relations Board's Chicago regional office. Twelve votes were challenged.

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SEIU 73 will represent 326 part-time and nontenured full-time instructors at Loyola's College of Arts and Sciences.

The successful union drive comes a month after 169 part-time and nontenured full-time instructors voted to unionize at the University of Chicago, also under SEIU 73. A group of 34 Harper-Schmidt fellows at the school who teach the core courses in humanities, social sciences and Western civilization, voted to unionize shortly afterward.

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"Our victory today represents a win for our students, faculty and the entire Loyola University community," Alyson Paige Warren, an adjunct instructor of writing and literature at Loyola, said in a news release. "Now all faculty will have a say in our working conditions and I'm encouraged (by) the gains at other schools across the country."

In a message to the Loyola community, Thomas M. Kelly, senior vice president for administrative services, said, "We are disappointed that under the NLRB rules, 44 percent of the voting group determined the outcome for so many others." The result is determined by a majority of votes returned.

He added: "We greatly value the contributions of our full-time non-tenure-track and part-time faculty, who are vital to fulfilling our academic mission, and we remain committed to providing a rewarding and positive work environment. As we have to date, we will continue to work through the NLRB processes and procedures in bargaining a contract with SEIU. We thank those who participated in the vote and for their careful consideration of this important issue."

Meanwhile, Loyola has received a new petition from the NLRB on behalf of SEIU Local 73 to represent 12 instructors within the English Language Learning Program, Kelly said.

The wave of unionization efforts is in response to a fundamental shift in the tenure structure of universities over the past several decades that has put much of the nation's teaching in the hands of a low-paid, unstable workforce whose members struggle to make a living from academia despite years and money invested in advanced degrees. The UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education published a study last year that found 25 percent of part-time college faculty or their families are enrolled in one of four public assistance programs it analyzed.

Warren, who earns $4,500 per course per semester at Loyola, has said she cobbles together a living by commuting among various schools in the city to teach courses, some of which pay $2,000 to $3,000 a semester, and has seen courses assigned or canceled within three days of their scheduled start.

Seventy percent of faculty appointments in 2011 were for contingent faculty, which includes part-time adjuncts and full-time nontenure-track instructions, up from 43 percent in 1975.

Loyola, a Jesuit school, had objected to the election petition on religious grounds, saying it has the right to "govern our institution in accordance with our values and beliefs, free from government entanglement," and also questioned whether part-time and full-time nontenured faculty should be included in the same bargaining unit because they work under different terms and conditions.

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In several letters to faculty arguing against unionizing, the administration cautioned that bringing a third party into the fold would interfere with direct working relationships between faculty members and those who lead their academic units, and that Local 73 has no experience with the needs of higher education faculty.

University spokesman Steven Christensen had previously said that Loyola might appeal the religious part of the decision, but as of Wednesday afternoon no appeal had been filed, according to the NLRB.

Though university faculties have been unionizing for decades, there has been a surge at private schools over the past two years as the SEIU, better known for its support of fast-food workers in their Fight for $15 campaign, has set its sights on higher ed. Since launching its Faculty Forward campaign in 2013, it has been behind 41 union votes, 38 of which have been successful.

In the Chicago area, DePaul University, Concordia University, the School of the Art Institute and the Illinois Institute of Technology are in the process of organizing, SEIU 73 spokesman Adam Rosen said. The union says there are more than 6,500 nontenured, contingent faculty members teaching in private, nonprofit universities and colleges in the area.

aelejalderuiz@tribpub.com

Twitter @alexiaer
Since 2006 - when the Securities and Exchange Commission began requiring companies to disclose more detail about executive compensation - the perks of top managers have been under attack. Under pressure from investors and the fear of embarrassing optics for companies, many have quietly vanished. Country club memberships have all but gone the way of the three-martini lunch. Allowances for company cars? So very 2005.

But one perk with staying power, say executive compensation consultants, is the executive physical. The often deluxe checkup allows busy top managers to see a variety of doctors and get a battery of tests performed at one time, whether in top-notch medical centers like the Mayo Clinic or luxurious digs such as Canyon Ranch.

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In 2008, roughly 22 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 said they paid for the perk, consulting firm Willis Towers Watson reported. By 2013, 32 percent of companies offered it.

"When you look at executive perquisites, companies really pared back," said Rob Mustich, a managing director at Willis Towers Watson. "But the executive physical is one perk that remains common."

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Why has this perk held strong? After all, with median pay for chief executive officers reaching $13.6 million in 2015, according to some estimates, $5,000 for a VIP medical visit is pocket change for many top executives. And it's not as though boards are getting an inside look at the CEO's health in return.

"The board or the company would have no right to the employee's protected health information under HIPAA and other privacy rules," said Robin Schachter, a partner in the executive compensation group of Akin Gump.

The most obvious reason they remain is that a chief executive's health is a risk factor. Consider what happened when, just one month after taking the top job at United Airlines, Oscar Munoz suffered a heart attack. It came in the wake of a corruption probe at the airline that caused his predecessor to resign, and the stock fell 3 percent before recovering.

An interim leader was installed, and then in January the company announced Munoz had heart transplant surgery, and the stock slipped again. He is expected to return to the job early in the second quarter, the company has said.

An efficient, comprehensive, A-to-Z checkup could mean it's less likely something will be missed.

"It's the difference between a pop quiz and a take-home exam," said David Wise, U.S. market leader for the human resources consulting firm Hay Group. "They pick up things you wouldn't always expect." (United's 2015 proxy, released before Munoz became CEO, shows the company paid for executive physicals; a spokesperson would not disclose whether Munoz had one.)

Disclosing the cost of the physical in company proxies telegraphs to investors that they're prioritizing the CEO's health. "What they're really buying is shareholder confidence," Wise said.

Anadarko Petroleum chief executive R.A. Walker was reimbursed $15,868 for his executive physical in 2014, its proxy states. A spokesperson said the physical was "intended to be thorough, relatively low-cost and preventive actions to help ensure early detection and protect the interests of our shareholders."

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"CEOs' health is material," said Charles Elson of the University of Delaware. And in the grand scheme of executive compensation, "it's just not very much money. More important, it's totally relevant."

Providers of executive physicals report mixed results on their business. Canyon Ranch global sales director Molly Anderson said that inquiries from corporations are up. But they've also seen a shift in their business, with more interest in a shorter, two-night program (price: $4,355 plus the cost of accommodations).

James Tuck, manager of the Scripps Executive Health program in San Diego, said his unit has seen more reluctance and caution from potential customers.

"Companies are watching how they spend their benefits dollars," Tuck said. The standard program at Scripps involves a day-long visit that includes visits with an internal medicine doctor, a skin cancer screening with a dermatologist, a range of heart tests, and counseling for nutrition, stress and exercise. It runs $3,070 for men and $3,700 for women.

What data do boards get about CEOs' health? Incoming executives may be asked about it. Employment agreements often refer to the appointed CEO acknowledging a clean health history.

One certainty: The globetrotting nature of any high-level manager's job, the 24/7 hours and the intensity of the work are bound to tax a person. As former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano told The Washington Post last year, his doctor saw real improvements in his health after he left the top ranks.

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"You don't realize it at the time, because you just do it," he said. "You grind away. Everyone wants the organization to be successful, so you work hard. But you forget how much of that you internalize and how much stress it puts into you, and the effects it has on your health over time."
Mrs. Green's, a New York-based natural grocer that failed in its first attempt to crack the Chicago market two years ago, is looking for a fresh start.

The chain, which closed its first Chicago entry in Lincoln Park last summer, relaunched Wednesday with a "neighborhood market" in Winnetka, hoping that a new downsized store  think mini-Whole Foods  will resonate with upscale suburbanites.

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The concept is organic and locally sourced offerings, prepared foods, gluten-free this, non-GMO that, a coffee and juice bar, all crammed into a cozy 12,000-square-foot market.

"We're the anti-Mariano's," said Pat Brown, 56, who took the helm of Mrs. Green's in 2014, after its initial Chicago launch. "Mariano's are great stores. But sometimes you want convenience, you want to get to know the people you are buying your products from."

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"It's very difficult to get a second chance. But we're going to get one here, and we've got to make sure that we do it right."  Pat Brown, Mrs. Green's CEO

Owned by Natural Markets Food Group, a privately held Irvington, N.Y.-based chain with 15 stores, Mrs. Green's is looking to open six stores in the Chicago area, mostly along the North Shore.

In November 2013, Mrs. Green's opened an upscale 20,000-square-foot supermarket in Lincoln Park, with ambitions to become a Chicago player and fill some of the void left by the demise of the Dominick's chain. At the time, executives said Mrs. Green's wanted at least six locations in the city and suburbs but never got past the first.

Plans to replace a shuttered Fox & Obel grocery store in Streeterville fell through in 2014, and the chain's stand-alone Chicago location struggled to gain traction in the increasingly competitive post-Dominick's market.

Fresh fish in the seafood area at Mrs. Green's in Winnetka on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

The company invested $4 million to build out the Lincoln Park store in a former hospital garage, losing as much as $20,000 per week from the outset, sources said. The opening last February of a nearby Whole Foods dealt the floundering Mrs. Green's store a major blow.

In July, Brown decided to close the company's sole Midwest outpost. Only a small corner coffee shop remains open, with a very, very large back room.

"We blew it there," Brown said, noting that the store was too big and opened too soon. He pointed to newspaper ads for the store featuring items only available in New York as among the many mistakes that won't be repeated this time.

Mrs. Green's spent about $2.5 million renovating the new store in Winnetka's Hubbard Woods shopping district, in a historic building that was initially a Packard auto dealership in the 1920s  the name of the long-defunct brand is etched in stone at the ornate roofline  and more recently served as a Gap clothing store.

The grand opening of Mrs. Green's in Winnetka on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Mrs. Green's will continue to focus on natural and organic products, but with more of a local flavor than its first run in Chicago. Brown said the new store has about 785 local items, from Two Brothers coffee to Two Fat Guys barbecue sauce.

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"It's almost hyperlocal  we've got people that live in the neighborhood that might sell at a farmer's market," Brown said. "They're not big enough to sell to Whole Foods. We're able to create partnerships to give people that first opportunity to break into retail."

Nearby competitors include North Shore staple The Grand, Whole Foods and a recently opened Mariano's.

Jim Hertel, senior vice president of Chicago-based grocery consulting firm Willard Bishop, said Mrs. Green's is an "appealing proposition" on the North Shore but it will take more than local and fresh offerings to succeed against entrenched competitors.

"The real question is going to be: Are they going to be able to establish the customer service and customer intimacy link The Grand has in a relatively quick period of time," Hertel said.

Hertel said outsiders have come to Chicago before with high hopes, only to see them dashed by local competition and provincial tastes. One notable flameout was Minneapolis-based Byerly's, an upscale chain that opened large stores in Highland Park and Schaumburg in 1996, with plans to expand to 10 locations. One year later, Byerly's closed the two stores and left Chicago.

Brown said Mrs. Green's needs to expand quickly to achieve critical mass and is already working on opening its second store. Locked into a 20-year lease in Lincoln Park, the company plans to reopen a downsized 16,000-square-foot store with the new concept as early as May, Brown said.

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The Chicago market has evolved rapidly since Mrs. Green's first failed launch. Mariano's, which gobbled up a number of former Dominick's locations, grew to an upscale 34-store chain and was purchased in December by supermarket giant Kroger. Jewel and Whole Foods have also grown here, while new players like Heinen's have established a foothold.

Brown believes the window of opportunity remains open for Mrs. Green's in Chicago, an opportunity he doesn't plan to squander this time.

"It's very difficult to get a second chance," Brown said. "But we're going to get one here, and we've got to make sure that we do it right."

rchannick@tribpub.com

Twitter @RobertChannick
Barrel-aged cocktails are moving from bars and restaurants to people's homes. Small oak barrels (1 to 5 liters, usually) can be filled with a drink then allowed to rest, picking up flavor notes from the wood. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

There's no cocktail like an old cocktail. Old as in aged, barrel-aged.

Ever since Jeffrey Morgenthaler, bar manager of Clyde Common and Pepe le Moko in Portland, Ore., asked the question, "What happens when you barrel-age a cocktail?" (answer: amazing things), barrel-aging cocktails has slowly grown as a practice in craft-cocktail focused bars  the National Restaurant Association's 2016 "What's Hot" survey calls it a rising trend  and is being taken up at home.

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"Barrel-aging is just kind of fun," says Morgenthaler, who first tried it 15 years ago. "It's a different way to express a cocktail and can bring another level of flavor."

You can thank a series of chemical reactions from the sugar chains as well as lignins in the wood for creating an "activated-carbon filter" for this flavor, says Han Shan, Hudson Whiskey ambassador at Tuthilltown Distillery in Gardiner, N.Y. The process helps absorb sulfur from the distilled spirit while adding notes like oak, vanilla and caramel.

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While bars aging cocktails generally use large barrels for volume, the availability of mini barrels from producers like Tuthilltown Distillery (www.tuthilltown.com) and Baby Barrels (www.babybarrels.com) offers an economical way to barrel-age at home. Shan recommends starting with 1- to 2-liter barrels, which will average $50 to $70 depending on the supplier. Look for oak barrels that are charred, and prime them with water before use to prevent leaking.

Classics such as a Manhattan, Negroni or Boulevardier are great home starters. Morgenthaler also recommends white spirits like gin and tequila as easy bases and adds that wine-based spirits like vermouth and sherry better interact with air and add an earthy quality. Adapting a standard 4-ounce cocktail recipe into a barrel will take a little math, but the standard 2:1:1, liquor to bitter to sweet ratio that bartenders use, may help. Once a batch has been deemed done, strain it and store in glass bottles to stop the aging. Not all things can be barrel-aged, however: Ingredients like fresh juices and dairy should be left out of the mix.

Barrel size will help determine aging time, but the smaller the barrel the less aging needed. Shan suggests two weeks for 1-liter barrels, a month for a 3-liter and six weeks for a 5-liter, but also says there are no hard and fast rules; the drink is ready when your palate says.

Sounds too much for you? Glass bottling with spiral cut oak staves available on the market offer a cheaper and easier alternative to barreling. Andrew Friedman, longtime barrel-ager and owner of Liberty Bar in Seattle, began aging cocktails in barrels but now stave-ages in glass after finding it provided more consistent results. "The unique cut of the spiral gives it just as much surface area and is able to contribute the same elements of flavor. Plus, you can see the effect of the process over time."

Time in a bottle, or barrel. Once you've had your favorite cocktail with some age on it, you may not go back.

Brandy Gonsoulin is a freelance writer.

Barrel-aged Manhattan

Prep: 10 minutes

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Age: 1 month or more

Makes: about 10 drinks

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Recipe from Han Shan of Hudson Whiskey, who uses Hudson Baby Bourbon. Before using your barrel, prime it according to the maker's instructions. Generally, before using it for the first time, fill it with water and let it sit until the staves expand and no more water continues to leak through the joints, two to five days.

1 bottle (750 millilters) bourbon

6 to 10 ounces sweet vermouth, to taste

15-25 dashes Angostura aromatic bitters, to taste.

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1 Mix all ingredients in a larger container, starting with the lower quantities of vermouth and bitters.

2 Funnel the mixture into a primed oak barrel (at least 2 liter capacity), making sure the bung is firmly sealed and spigot is turned off. (Set aside any extra to compare the before and after.) Allow cocktail to rest, 2-4 weeks depending on barrel size. Periodically sample the batch until notes of charred oak tannins, smoky vanilla and hints of rich caramel are detected. When ready, strain through a mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth and pour into sealable bottles.

3 To serve, stir 3 ounces over ice until chilled and slightly diluted then strain into a cocktail glass. Squeeze a generous swath of orange peel over drink to express the oils onto the surface. Serve as-is or garnish with a cocktail cherry.
When the future of Spider-Man's next feature-film identity seemed still up for debate, a group of Washington-area filmmakers took notice and waited.

Some rumors suggested Marvel Studios, having recently acquired rights from Sony to share the character between the studios, was considering using Miles Morales as the Spider-Man who would team with the Avengers. But that ended up not happening. Tom Holland was cast to play Peter Parker, and is set to make his first appearance as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the upcoming "Captain America: Civil War" movie.

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Not lost in that casting news, however, was the Sony email leak that pointed to a mandate that any Spider-Man with Sony's name on it be a Spider-Man of a certain type. More or less, no one who could ever be mistaken for the biracial Miles Morales.

In the wake of Holland's casting and that Sony leak, Washington, D.C.-area filmmakers Chad Horn and Ivan Kander decided that if Miles didn't have a chance to make it into a Sony/Marvel movie, that they'd just make a film themselves.

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"Every year, we know that our summer is going to get a little slow, and we try to fill it up with some fun project that we can do," said Horn, who runs Bard Tales Productions in Falls Church, Virginia. Kander "was kind of following the (news) about Miles Morales not being included in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and we said this might be an opportunity for us."

That first meant having to discover their own Miles, so last spring, Horn and Kander cast their Spidey net for an actor.

"When we put out a casting call, it was probably March or April," Horn said. "We were sent a bunch of headshots and a bunch of resumes, and we filtered through that. I rented a studio in downtown (Washington), and we invited people out to an audition."

It was at their Washington casting call that the production team members met their future Miles Morales: 24-year-old actor Demetrius Stephens.

Stephens was a "cold audition," Horn said. No one in the production crew had met him.

Soon, Horn had one of his stunt coordinators "fake-punch" Stephens in the stomach a few times, to see whether the performer could act -- and roll -- with the punch. Then Stephens was asked to read an early scene, in which Miles looks up at a Peter Parker memorial, unsure whether he can live up to the Spider-Man legacy. Next, Stephens had to deliver some laugh lines, to see whether he could encompass the character.

When the audition was done, Stephens moved to the top of their list.

"Demetrius has an incredible amount of charisma," Horn said. "He's a local actor, and I think eventually you'll see him other places (on screen) because I think he's got a terrific presence. He's serious when he needs to be, and lighthearted when he needs to be."

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Shortly after his audition, Stephens was home playing video games when he received the call. He'd won the part. A chance to be the first person to portray Miles Morales in any live-action form -- even for a short film -- gave the actor reason to celebrate.

"I knew a little about Miles Morales, but I didn't know too much," Stephens said. "I figured it would be an awesome opportunity."

Stephens, an Augusta, Georgia, native who has lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, for the past decade, headed to the closest comic-book shop he could find and dove into Miles Morales' mythology.

"As an actor, you want to try to embody someone as much as you can," Stephens said. "I watched this video about his origin story. That's where I learned about Peter Parker dying" in Marvel's Ultimate universe.

One aspect of the character that particularly intrigued Stephens was how Miles acts in moments of doubt.

"I loved how he struggled with wanting to be Spider-Man," Stephens said. "I think Peter Parker is a great character, but I feel like you can relate to Miles more. A lot of us struggle with decisions every day like that. Who do we want to be? What do we want to be? I'm in my 20s now, and I struggle with that."

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The star of "Spider-Man Lives" was ready to suit up. The film cast and crew of nearly 50 people -- most of whom worked for free (minus the union actors who had to be paid) -- were hired. The next step was securing a filming location. A film office in Frederick, Maryland would serve as part of the project's "New York."

"Hopefully, we did a somewhat convincing job of pulling that off," Kander, the film's director, said. "The Frederick film office was very generous. They gave us a lot of really awesome locations, which probably wouldn't have been possible in New York because it would have been more difficult to achieve permits. (Frederick) can look like a small little town, and then look like a big city."

With less than 10 minutes of screen time to work with, producers had to decide how those precious seconds would be divided. Beyond the action, the audience naturally would need to get a sense of who Miles is, and where he comes from. To do that, the movie opens with Peter Parker's death announced on the news. Miles hears his parents debate whether Spider-Man's presence in New York was a good thing.

"I think if you just jump into an action scene without any form of framework, it doesn't really work," Kander said. "Especially because of Miles being a different character, and I don't know how familiar the general population is with him as a different character. So I wanted to introduce him as a person before he jumped into any sort of action."

Kander had a hand, too, in the film's limited special effects. He acknowledged that he was grateful that Miles Morales doesn't have organic web-shooters -- as Hollywood's Spider-Man did in his first movies under Sony.

"We wrote in these specific things that we thought we could pull off. From a character standpoint, he doesn't have organic web-shooters. He can't swing from things," Kander said. "That was a huge favor for us, because making convincing web-work would have been really difficult. That's something that I intentionally avoided."

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Stephens's favorite scene was when he got to do some wall-crawling, despite the difficulty that came with making it look real.

"They only showed it for a second, but with acting, you do the take over and over again -- and I remember they put this harness under my clothes and they hold you up," Stephens said. "It was a little uncomfortable, but at the same time it was fun. I remember hanging and you see all these people on set and you say to yourself, 'Wow I'm really doing this.' "

Stephens also appreciates to play a biracial comic character, ascribing significance to the role, not matter how small the movie. "We look up to superheroes," Stephens said. "So to play a character that represents more than one group, it's a great thing."

So how did this small movie play to the larger world?

"Spider-Man Lives: A Miles Morales Story" debuted on YouTube about two months ago, and has now been viewed nearly 450,000 times. Horn said that a company in Russia contacted him to ask for a version of the film without dialogue, so they could overdub it in Russian. And the filmmakers said that unauthorized copies have popped up in Brazil -- a twist that flattered them. Horn said that no one made money off the production of the film, so if someone wants to go to the effort to pirate it, he's not upset.

Amid social-media reaction from as far away and China and Mexico, Stephens said the best compliment he has received was when someone asked whether the movie could turn into a series.

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And the best comment Stephens received, he said, came from his mother. After Stephens admitted to being a little down that Marvel Studios had decided not to put Miles Morales on the big screen, his mother told him to look at it another way. She said to her son: "Well, you know, when people type in Miles Morales, (now) they're going to see you."
The story is far more familiar in the part of the country where "The Finest Hours" takes place, and where nor'easters will someday earn their own trading-card line. In February 1952 not one but two oil tankers off the coast of Cape Cod were creamed by the same winter storm. The ships broke in half, or halves, and while more than one rescue mission took place that day and night, the film version of "The Finest Hours" focuses on the four-man Coast Guard team, braving the storm in a motorized 36-foot lifeboat, heading into what appeared to be certain death to save the men of the tanker Pendleton.
Chase Crown, 5, looks at an exhibit at the DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

At two of the area's major children's museums, visitors will find what may come as a surprise, even a shock: little kids using real hammers, real nails and real saws to build things.

The DuPage Children's Museum and Chicago Children's Museum both believe their workshop zones teach valuable lessons in safety, creativity and responsibility and that the occasional bruised thumb can be a more powerful instructor than some sign on a wall.

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Still, it's a far cry from the image many may have of children's museums as glorified playpens or baby-sitting writ large. These are active locations, encouraging kids to explore their worlds with gusto (even as their caretakers may want to visit these noisy, sometimes chaotic places with Advil).

The museums are also much more than fun spots to host your kid's birthday party, although they are certainly willing to rent you a room to do so.

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While the Chicago area has just one major natural history museum and one major aquarium, its territory is well covered by children's museums big and small, testament both to the eagerness parents have to enrich their young ones' lives and to the sometimes desperate struggle to find something worthwhile to do with a toddler.

Of the three major ones, out west, in a converted lumber business in Naperville, there's DuPage Children's Museum, reimagined after a 2015 burst pipe forced it to open temporarily in an Aurora mall. Back in the main building since September, its credo is age-appropriate explorations of math, science and art, and it comes off as more focused in its approach than the other two.

Downtown, amid the tourist throngs on Navy Pier, there's Chicago Children's Museum, a multilevel fun zone and the largest of the three in square footage.

And to the north, on a campus in Glenview, Kohl Children's Museum offers its version of a place for kids of elementary-school age to engage in water play, reading activities and art projects. In addition to being the oldest of the three, Kohl is the only one that includes outdoor space, the 2-acre Habitat Park just outside the building.

Between them, they draw more than 1 million annual visits, 300,000-plus at the two suburban museums and more than 400,000 at the Chicago institution, which says it is the second most visited children's museum in the country. Add in the region's bevy of smaller children's museums, found in Oak Lawn, Oak Park and many other communities, and you might think there's never a need to park a pre-schooler in front of the TV.

Walk through the DuPage museum's 20,000 square feet of exhibit space on a weekday morning and you'll see kids taking on one innovative activity after another: build-your-own Rube Goldberg machines, room-sized light screens, Habitrail-like wind tunnel contraptions.

"This isn't the type of children's museum where you have the little grocery store," says Katie Edinger, senior public programs manager.

Edinger tells of seeing a child walking around with a basic step stool and thinking it had been liberated from an exhibit. Nope, she realized, the kid had built it in the construction area and was too proud to even put it down.

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An elaborate new water-play table is coming later this year, she says. For now, a series of smaller ones satisfy the desire to dampen. The museum began in 1987 in a van, founded by two educators from Hinsdale. Now kids at DuPage can immerse themselves in a giant bubble, freeze their shadows against a projection wall, or try to stand their ground while an airplane-motor-sized fan blows at them.

Like Chicago Children's Museum, it will work with corporate sponsors but will not let them plaster their logos about, to be imprinted on impressionable minds.

Begun by the Junior League of Chicago in 1982 in two hallways at the Chicago Cultural Center (then the main library building), the Chicago museum opened on Navy Pier in 1995. At 57,000 square feet, it more than doubles the size of the other two.

All that space can feel a little disorganized at first, spread over multiple levels. Use the climbing schooner, a three-level simulated ship's rigging of wooden walkways and rope ladders, as an orientation point.

As at the other museums, separate areas for the youngest children are walled off from the general run of the building. One even has its own mini-water-play table. (And, yes, there is a simulated grocery store, and, yes, it is very popular.)

Also popular is the great hall, with kid activities such as foam bowling on the perimeter and couches in the middle. "Frankly, the parents make really good use of the sofas," says marketing vice president Twania Brewster.

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Kohl, too, has its own faux supermarket (sponsored, not bashfully, by Whole Foods). That museum, with 21,000 square feet of exhibition space in its 2005 building, lets children be doctors or patients in a pretend nursery, TV weatherfolk against a green screen, or engineers in a room that explores energy sources.

Outside, they can address what an executive calls "nature deficit disorder." Founded in 1985, Kohl has as its animating principle, "providing environments where it's inviting children to play," says public relations director Dave Judy.

And in the Chicago area, children have no shortage of invitations to play.

Chicago Children's Museum, 700 E. Grand Ave. at Navy Pier; admission $13-$14, 312-527-1000 and chicagochildrensmuseum.org

DuPage Children's Museum, 301 N. Washington St., Naperville; admission $10-$12 at 630-637-8000 and dupagechildrensmuseum.org

Kohl Children's Museum, 2100 Patriot Blvd., Glenview; admission $10-$11 at 847-832-6600 or kohlchildrensmuseum.org

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sajohnson@tribune.com

Twitter @StevenKJohnson
Black Sabbath may have bid farewell to Chicago at a concert last Friday, but a timely and convincing evidence of the band's influence on contemporary music arrived at Thalia Hall on Tuesday in the form of Sleep. The San Jose, Calif.-based trio, Sabbath's closest sonic descendants, hypnotized a sold-out crowd at the first of a two-night stand by playing heavier than its legendary predecessors likely ever thought possible. Each song was an epic adventure, an excuse to venture into far-out imaginary realms and flee the mundane.

The group harbored the same intentions when it formed in the early 1990s. Its slow, low-tuned, groove-based metal attracted an underground following and became emblematic of so-called "stoner rock"  a style perfected on the 1996 album "Dopesmoker," comprised of a lone 63-minute-plus track. After the band's record label refused to release it, Sleep broke up, cementing a cult-favorite status that reached peak heights after the members reunited in 2009.

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Save for guitarist Matt Pike's recent sobriety and ascendance as the leader of High on Fire, not much has changed in the years since  particularly not the seismic waves of sound or decibel levels that caused bones to vibrate. Throughout the 95-minute set, Sleep utilized extreme volume not as an embellishment but as an additional instrument. Projected by a wall of amplifiers and sustained by distortion, single chords took on the form of an orchestra of guitars roaring in unison. It was often impossible to tell when one sequence of notes ended and another began. The technique allowed the group to build layers of repetition and rewarded the patience demanded by such steady heft.

Incredibly disciplined, Sleep approached its journeys with weed priests, flying reptiles and magic caravans with spiritual devotion. Bassist and vocalist Al Cisneros served as the narrator, who chanted more than he sang. While the words frequently bordered on unintelligible, Sleep's mystical tales of escaping oceans ("Aquarian"), staring into the rays of a rising sun ("Holy Mountain") and crossing sun-baked deserts ("Dopesmoker")  usually all pursuant to the goal of smoking pot  harmonized with its lumbering momentum and stormy sensuality.

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Tasked with developing a relentless series of riffs, the shirtless Pike reveled in the seemingly incompatible mix of structure and freedom afforded by the songs. He exercised restraint during unhurried tempo changes that gave fare such as "From Beyond" its cavernous openness and bottom-up architecture. Yet he also injected psychedelic solos that came on like meteor showers streaking across the band's darkened outer-space landscapes. In Sleep's universe, even people fleeing the human race and riding dragons to Mars ("Dragonaut") need a guiding light.

Bob Gendron is a freelance critic.

ctc-arts@tribpub.com

Twitter @chitribent
Iceland: A tourist was badly burned during a visit to popular Geysir, or The Big Geysir, in the southwestern region of the country when he accidentally stepped into one of the site's hot springs. Visitors are advised to stay on the clearly marked paths in the area and to take added precaution if visiting the hot springs on windy days, as the scalding water can be blown across the paths and cause serious burns.

Mexico: Travelers flying into and out of the General Mariano Escobedo International Airport in Monterrey should be aware that Uber drivers are not allowed to legally transport passengers to and from the airport. Instead, travelers are required to use authorized taxis and will be asked to leave any vehicle operated by Uber. Unauthorized fee-based vehicles are subject to fines and may have the vehicle impounded.

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Asia: The Lunar New Year falls on Feb. 8 and kicks off the Year of the Monkey with festivities taking place in many Asian countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises all tourists to prepare accordingly when traveling to take part in these celebrations. Preparations may include reviewing road and water safety guidelines, avoiding mosquito bites, bringing a supply of medication, and avoiding contact with birds, pigs or other animals, when relevant. Because of the influx of travelers during this busy time of year, tourists should also prepare for transit delays and crowded tourist sites.

Morocco: Islamic State militants have called for attacks at tourist sites, citing the lack of security forces in the country, including Tunisia, where 38 were killed during an attack in June 2015. Tourists are advised to have plans in place for personal safety and emergencies and to be aware of their surroundings at all times while traveling, particularly in busy tourist destinations.

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United Kingdom: Tourists hoping to take a bus to the charming village of Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds will no longer have the option once a new restriction begins. Residents of the village have banned tourist buses as of Feb. 1, citing noise and exhaust fumes as cause for the restriction. The "Venice of the Cotswolds" sees roughly 300,000 visitors each year who arrive for day trips on some 3,000 buses. The ban will certainly hurt business owners who rely on tourist spending for much of their income. The upside for travelers hiring private cars is that the Cotswolds will be less crowded after the ban.

Compiled from news services and travel sources. For updates, check with the State Department at 888-407-4747, www.travel.state.gov.

Larry Habegger and Dani Burlison are freelance reporters.
Most tourists are lured to Umbria by the region's well-preserved medieval hill towns  rich in art, architecture, and spiritual and archaeological treasures  or its picturesque countryside with dense mountains and rolling valleys. But for those who travel in search of their next great meal, Umbria proffers a hidden gem: its unpretentious, often unheralded, cuisine.

Located in central Italy about 90 minutes from Rome, Umbria sits due east  or you might say in the shadow of  neighboring Tuscany, a region almost three times its size, whose food, wines and lifestyle have been romanticized in novels and feature films. Yet, many Umbrian recipes overlap with those of both Lazio (with its capital city of Rome) and Tuscany. Thus, visitors to Umbria are often surprised to find high-quality foods and wines that are far more moderately priced than in neighboring regions.

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Our first stop was in Orvieto, a town (in the province of Terni) whose name is synonymous with the wine associated with the area for more than 2,500 years. We signed up for a cooking class with Chef Lorenzo Polegri, owner of Zeppelin, a restaurant in the town's historic center. After washing up and donning aprons, we found ourselves working side-by-side in the kitchen with the latest crop of culinary student interns from the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Our experience, part hands-on and part didactic, took place while we tasted, sipped and conversed with the chef and his disciples.

Snail-shaped lumachelle, traditional rolls stuffed with pancetta and pecorino cheese, are lined up ready to be baked. (Jerome Levine)

We learned to knead dough to make tasty lumachelle, snail-shaped rolls baked with diced pancetta (ham) and pecorino (cheese) inside. The chef explained that Etruscans baked this same bread in communal ovens. Flour, yeast and water are the main ingredients along with DOP extra virgin olive oil, called the "green gold" of the region. The hills of Umbria are covered with more than seven million trees yielding five varieties of olives. The oil is used to finish almost every dish and as a dip for bread. Focaccialike lumachelle pair perfectly with Orvieto Classico, the most popular of the thirteen DOC wines in the region.

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No matter where you dine in Orvieto, umbricelli (also called ombricelli) pasta is likely to be on the menu, as it was for our lunch  the name derived from the Italian word for earthworm (lombrico). Made with only flour and water (no eggs), it looks like fat strands of spaghetti, a perfect vehicle for the region's hearty sauces.

Chef Lorenzo described five classic sauces, all relatively inexpensive and easy to prepare: pomodoro (classical tomato sauce); spicy arrabbiata (made with chili peppers); puttanesca (made with olives); carbonara (made with eggs, bacon and cheese), and amatriciana, made with tomato, guanciale (cured pork cheek) and pecorino. For our lunch, we enjoyed umbricelli alla amatriciana paired with a full-bodied Montefalco Rosso DOC wine.

The next morning, we met Marco Bellanca of ToursByLocals.com (a company that pairs travelers with local guides) for a wine and culinary tour of the countryside. Our meeting point was a parking lot at the modern EMI supermarket in Todi (a town in Perugia) about an hour from Orvieto. In our rental car, we followed him along the scenic wine trails of Montefalco and Bevagna.

A classic, rustic bruschetta is served at the family-owned Cantina Dionigi, elevated with brilliant red tomatoes. (Jerome Levine)

Arriving in Montefalco (known as the "Balcony of Umbria," due to its commanding valley views), we met Emanuela Brizzi, who welcomed us to her small-batch olive oil factory, family-owned and operated for four generations. She explained how heavy millstones are still used to cold-press the oil.

Truffles are another regional specialty that draws food enthusiasts from around the world. Both aromatic black and summer black truffles grow wild in the forests of the Apennine forests (near oak, hornbeam and hazelnut trees) and prized white truffles are found in the valleys of Gubbio, Citta di Castello and Fabro. The last hosts a national truffle fair every November.

Marco then took us to a butcher shop in the ancient town of Bevagna, a virtual museum of meat owned by Marco Biagetti and Rosita Cariani. The couple joked that the third-generation butcher married his wife, a fourth-generation butcher, to eliminate competition. We feasted on slices of mouth-watering salumi (cured meats), porchetta (moist pork roast stuffed with herbs traditionally cooked over wood), and Prosciutto di Norcia (ham with a distinctive flavor derived from pigs that feed on acorns and chestnuts). The town of Norcia, one hour to the east, is considered the birthplace of modern charcuterie and pork butchering techniques.

We ended our day at a family-owned winery, Cantina Dionigi, where we met its fourth-generation winemaker, Roberto Dionigi. We sampled local dishes prepared by his wife and paired with the family's wines: bruschetta with fresh tomatoes (with Grechetto white wine); crunchy, cold farro salad with cheese, tomato, basil and pine nuts (with Montefalco Rosso); porchetta (with Montefalco Sagrantino); and tozzetti biscotti (with Montefalco Sagrantino Passito), an exquisite sweet red that is one of the region's two DOCG wines (the highest classification for Italian wines).

A plate of cured meats is offered for tasting at the butcher shop in Bevagna, Italy. (Jerome Levine)

The age-old but delectable recipes of the region, many of which date back to Etruscan times, are often characterized as "cucina povera" or peasant cooking. Ironically, this same style of cooking and eating, one that avoids waste and makes do with whatever is available (e.g., all the parts of the animal) has become new again, inspiring chefs across the globe.

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With people as humble and welcoming as its cuisine, this "taste" of Umbria left us eager to return to explore more of its lively markets, specialty food shops, rustic restaurants and seasonal festivals.

Irene S. Levine is a freelance writer.

If you go

Umbria Tourism

www.umbriatourismo.net

Orvieto Tourism

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www.inorvieto.it/en/

Cooking classes with Chef Lorenzo Polegri

www.ristorantezeppelin.it/eng/courses.html

ToursByLocals.com

www.toursbylocals.com
Telemarketer Safety Publications Inc., in the 5900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, allegedly pocketed the vast majority of donations it collected for charities. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

A for-profit Chicago telemarketer misled the public as it raised millions of dollars for charities and should no longer be allowed to solicit for Illinois nonprofits, state Attorney General Lisa Madigan said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court.

Madigan's court complaint came in response to an August 2015 Tribune investigation that found clients of Safety Publications Inc. got well under 20 percent of the money it collected and that Safety failed to disclose the felony conviction of a top officer, among other problems.

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The attorney general's lawsuit accuses Safety of "misleading the public by false statements and/or material omissions" in its fundraising pitches and asks the court to permanently enjoin Safety and co-founders Adam Herdman and Arthur Olivera from fundraising for any Illinois charity.

Madigan also seeks the $1.4 million Safety took in fees since 2010 from the Rockford veterans' charity called VietNow National Headquarters, saying her office would distribute that money to "bona fide registered Illinois charities that actually assist veterans returning home from war."

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"These fundraisers are brazen con artists who refuse to follow the law and continue to fundraise illegally in spite of a previous court order," Madigan said in a statement Wednesday. "I am filing this lawsuit to put an end to their serial fraud. When people donate their money to a worthy cause, their money should be used to further the mission of the charity."

Herdman, Olivera and Safety did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The attorney general also is reviewing VietNow's finances, the Tribune has learned. Madigan's office has gathered financial records, meeting minutes and copies of contracts with telemarketers and fundraisers, according to VietNow and a government official familiar with the inquiry. VietNow turned over about 8,000 pages of records, the official said.

"We've been very open and forthcoming with the attorney general's commands," VietNow President Joe Lewis said Wednesday. "We showed cooperation with the state."

Lewis said he was unaware of Wednesday's court action against Safety and said VietNow still uses the telemarketing firm to make calls and raise funds outside Illinois. The charity pledges to help war veterans overcome joblessness and post-traumatic stress disorder. It also feeds hundreds of homeless people every week.

Safety is one of 35 telemarketers that VietNow used to raise more than $20 million between 2003 and 2014, charity records show. The telemarketers collectively kept more than 80 percent of the donations as their fees, the Tribune found.

Lewis said he began a top-to-bottom review of VietNow's telemarketing contracts after the Tribune published its articles in August. "We're in the process of talking with all our fundraisers to try to negotiate a better percentage," he said Wednesday. "We haven't really heard back from any proposals. It's something we've just started."

This is the third time since 2002 that Madigan's office has sued Herdman and Olivera over alleged breaches of Illinois law on charitable solicitations. The two men and their companies agreed to pay a total of $60,000 to resolve the first two consumer protection lawsuits, without admitting wrongdoing, and signed agreements stating they would uphold Illinois charity laws in the future.

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Madigan's latest court complaint repeats the language she used in her second, 2007 case: The alleged breaches by Herdman and Olivera "are rendered more egregious and knowing by the fact that they have previously been sued by the Illinois Attorney General and have previously consented to a permanent injunction," her lawyers wrote.

Herdman and Olivera launched Safety and several linked companies in the mid-1990s, establishing call centers in a building at 5944 N. Milwaukee Ave. and several suburban satellite offices. They reported raising $4.9 million for an array of U.S. charities from 2008 through 2014, the Tribune found.

Earning barely above the minimum wage, former workers told the Tribune they used computerized phones that automatically dialed potential donors in Illinois and across the country. They recalled that most of the donors were elderly.

Despite Illinois' prohibition against using felons to raise charity money, the Tribune found Safety and a linked charity telemarketer had employed at least 10 callers who served prison terms for bank robbery, forgery, child rape and other felonies since 2007. The law is designed to ensure the trustworthiness of nonprofit solicitors.

An official from Madigan's office, who discussed the ongoing court case on condition of anonymity, said investigators were unable to prove that those felons solicited donors who lived in Illinois, as opposed to other states. The state law applies only to calls made in Illinois.

But the state was able to confirm a Tribune finding that Olivera had failed to disclose on state filings that he had a 1983 felony arson conviction in Cook County, according to the official and Madigan's court complaint. In Safety's state registrations since 2007, Olivera had checked a box stating that no officers or shareholders had felony convictions.

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Several of the other alleged violations mirror factual details published by the Tribune in August. Among them:

 Safety did not always provide the attorney general with required annual disclosure reports, undermining efforts by authorities and the public to determine how much money the firm raised and where those dollars ended up. Madigan said "the exact amounts and the uses" of the funds Safety raised for VietNow are still unknown.

 VietNow's own tax reports state that Safety raised $1.6 million for VietNow from 2010 through 2015, but Safety "failed to report any of the charitable fundraising activity" for VietNow, Madigan's office wrote. Safety kept $1.4 million of those donations and gave the charity $166,000, or 10 percent, according to VietNow.

 Safety callers "falsely represented to prospective donors that they were 'official representatives' of (VietNow)," the attorney general alleged, citing callers' scripts. Callers also "erroneously told prospective donors" that Safety's annual reports were on file with the state  "even though the Defendants had never reported and/or accounted for any of their fundraising activities on behalf of (VietNow)," Madigan's office wrote.

The Tribune had quoted former workers who felt their pitches to donors were misleading.

Madigan's lawsuit seeks civil penalties of $5,000 for each violation, as well as $2,000 for each violation of Herdman and Olivera's previous consent decrees.

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The complaint says Safety, Herdman and Olivera should be forced to divulge detailed financial records and "fully account for any and all charitable fundraising campaigns they conducted," whether or not those campaigns were successful.

The attorney general also asks the court to stop the defendants from "transferring, expending or liquidating any funds" or selling assets or property until the case is resolved.

And Madigan wants Safety, Herdman and Olivera to "pay the costs incurred in the investigation and prosecution of this case."

Numerous veterans charities earn high marks from watchdogs such as CharityWatch, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and Charity Navigator. Though the top-ranked organizations sometimes use telemarketers, they also raise money through special events, advertising, direct mail appeals and corporate sponsorships. They also spend a high percentage of donations on service programs, and little on fundraising and overhead.

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Lights are seen from the Narrows roadblock near Burns, Ore., as FBI agents have surrounded the remaining four occupiers at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016. The four are the last remnants of an armed group that seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 to oppose federal land-use policies. (Thomas Boyd / The Oregonian)

BURNS, Ore.  Federal and state officials were restricting access to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested.

The group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2. They want federal lands turned over to local authorities.

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The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge.

Details of the fatal encounter were sparse. It happened as Bundy and his followers were heading to a community meeting late Tuesday afternoon in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns.

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Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed that her father, Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, was the man killed, the Oregonian reported. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Brown told the paper, "he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

LaVoy Finicum speaks to the media as he and others occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 15, 2016, near Burns, Ore. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

The FBI and Oregon State Police would only say the man killed in the police shooting was wanted by federal authorities, and said no more information would be released pending identification by the medical examiner.

Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the occupation, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that five or six group members remain inside the refuge.

The FBI and Oregon State Police said they were setting up checkpoints in the refuge Wednesday. According to the statement, only ranchers who own property in specific areas will be allowed to pass.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

Ammon Bundy at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon on Jan. 22, 2016. (Keith Ridler / AP)

Thornton called the arrests "a dirty trick" by law enforcement.

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In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32 - apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

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Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

Law enforcement previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies but opposed the refuge takeover.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

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The group, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

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House Speaker Michael Madigan, left, and Senate President John Cullerton, both Democrats, shake hands with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner after Rauner delivered his second State of the State speech at the Illinois Capitol on Jan. 27, 2016, in Springfield. (Anthony Souffle / Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner sought to use his second State of the State address to brush past a seven-month budget stalemate, urging the parties to work together on school funding while giving no ground on the pro-business, union-weakening wish list he's been unable to pass.

But the light-on-details education proposal was quickly met with skepticism by ruling Democrats who feared efforts to give more state money to poor and rural schools would be undermined by Rauner's desire to give districts the right to limit what is covered in collective bargaining with teachers unions.

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Absent was the name-calling Rauner unleashed last week against House Speaker Michael Madigan and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, as the governor acknowledged the "difficult year" he and lawmakers have shared.

"If each of us commits to serious negotiations based on mutual respect for our co-equal branches of government, there's not a doubt in my mind we can come together to pass a balanced budget alongside reforms," Rauner said. "If we work together, Illinois can be both compassionate and competitive."

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The half-hour or so speech was delivered against an election-year backdrop in which Rauner has vowed to use his personal wealth to erode the Democratic majority controlled by Madigan, who also serves as the Democratic Party's state chairman.

Rep. Lou Lang, a top Madigan deputy, said "only time will tell whether (Rauner) is sincere or not."

"When you have a governor who is of one party and a General Assembly strongly controlled by another party, people have to have conversation. But if every discussion starts with the governor saying 'I need my agenda or there won't be a budget,' then there won't be a budget," said Lang, D-Skokie.

As protesters shouted "budget first" outside the House chamber doors, Rauner highlighted a tenuous agreement with Democratic Senate President John Cullerton on a plan to cut costs in the state's employee pension system, which is $110 billion short. The governor also piggybacked on Cullerton's recent call to revamp school funding, though Rauner's 10-point education plan also contained many ideas Democrats have long opposed, including limits on collective bargaining and "school choice"  typically code for vouchers.

Rauner also called for spending more on early childhood education, setting "rigorous benchmarks" to track teacher performance and rewarding universities that cut administrative costs by increasing state funding.

Education funding has long been a big issue at the Capitol, but little has been done to adjust state aid to schools. The decades-old complaint is that spending is unequal  more affluent towns heavily rely on property taxes to prop up their bottom line, meaning some districts spend more than $20,000 per student while some low-income and rural districts spend less than $7,000.

Efforts to level funding statewide wade into tricky political territory. There's a limited pot of state dollars to go around, and well-to-do districts don't want to have their often already small share cut as lawmakers search for ways to boost funding for poorer schools, a concept known as being held harmless.

House Speaker Mike Madigan answers questions from the media following a press conference in reaction to Gov. Bruce Rauner's second State of the State speech Jan. 27, 2016, at the Illinois State Capitol House Chambers in Springfield. (Anthony Souffle, Chicago Tribune)

In his speech, Rauner said he wants to boost state funding for poor and rural districts "significantly" without taking away from other districts. But Rauner aides did not explain where the money would come from, other than a general argument that cutting administrative costs throughout the system would free up more money to be spent in the classroom.

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Democrats remain leery of the union-weakening parts of Rauner's agenda.

"I would just urge the governor to be disciplined in his approach to this issue," said Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill, a chief education funding negotiator. "We need to focus on equity and resources; bringing other things into that conversation would only doom that effort."

For Rauner, getting suburban Republicans to back him on a school funding plan that does little for their districts could prove difficult. In addition, all House seats and two-thirds of the Senate seats are on the November ballot, meaning the appetite for taking tough votes on difficult issues might not be there among either party.

Others questioned Rauner's focus on K-12 education while some universities face a possible shutdown this spring because they have yet to receive state money due to the lack of a full budget.

"It's a little bit schizophrenic. It's one thing to say education's such a high priority and another to have these higher education institutions talk about closing their doors and laying off so many people," said Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago.

Rauner spent the early part of his speech noting the alliance among organized labor, civil liability attorneys and Democrats. "If we don't offer a competitive environment for businesses, pretty soon the unions won't have any more jobs to unionize and the trial lawyers won't have any more businesses to sue."

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The Republican governor continued to publicly court Cullerton, a way for Rauner to try to turn up the pressure on the person he's long blamed for the state's problems: Madigan.

That's been a theme for the past year, but Rauner's approach Wednesday was less overt. Rather than blast the speaker, Rauner made no mention of him after taking heat in recent days for a combative strategy that some have questioned as counterproductive.

Madigan warned that Democrats would not be so easily divided.

"I don't think he's having any success," Madigan said. "I am not focused on personalities. I am not focused on divide and conquer. I am focused on these issues."

Rauner's attempt to align himself with Cullerton also comes with risks. Cullerton has acknowledged that his pension plan faces likely union opposition, and Democrats are closely aligned with unions that are providing millions of dollars in campaign cash and ground troops for legislative races. There also are questions about whether the Cullerton-Rauner pension plan would pass legal muster.

The governor wasn't all sunshine in his speech. He dug in on his dispute with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, labeling the union's leaders as "out of touch with reality." Rauner contended the union was "undeterred and unashamed" in its demands for higher pay in contract negotiations, and said state workers have been manipulating the system to boost their pay.

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"We need to install common sense into our union contracts," he said.

AFSCME Council 31 executive director Roberta Lynch countered that Rauner had "falsely attacked public-service workers in state government and mischaracterized our union contract negotiations."

Even as he was calling for compromise, Rauner's actions told a different story.

Tucked into the speech was news that Rauner had formed a private not-for-profit organization to take on some functions of the state's economic development agency.

The idea to create such an organization had been an early point of potential compromise between Rauner and Madigan last year. The two appeared to have brokered a deal to allow the governor to privatize a portion of the state's economic development efforts while giving the speaker his wish of a stand-alone agency to oversee the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, but talks broke down.

The concept would have allowed a not-for-profit entity to dole out state grants and negotiate tax incentives for private businesses on behalf of the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

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On Wednesday, Rauner shifted gears, declaring plans to sign an executive order "to formally establish our collaboration" with a not-for-profit corporation that Rauner said had been formed earlier that day.

That move is likely to stir controversy because privatization of state functions typically raises concerns about transparency and accountability. It also sent a signal to Madigan and his Democratic allies that Rauner is willing to work around the legislature to get things done.

"I'm sure he would love to have the compromise and the bill from last year," said Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine. "But he still has to act where he can to get things done because people expect him to produce results. So he's got to take every bit of his power within his authority in the executive branch to produce outcomes because that's what people elected him to do."

The not-for-profit would be funded initially through private donations and would not replace DCEO, the administration said. Rauner's team said governance of the not-for-profit was still being worked out and that "there are not yet any private funding commitments."

The new organization "will assist the department in negotiating grant and incentive agreements, subject to approval by the Department of Commerce, but has no authority to bind DCEO to any grant agreement or tax incentive," Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly said.

Meanwhile, the day did reveal a weakness within Democratic ranks that, while known at the statehouse, is often lost on casual observers of Illinois' political scene.

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Asked after the speech why Democrats have been unwilling to budge on Rauner's legislative agenda, Cullerton noted that his party controls supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly and "you can't suggest Democrats to be voting like radical Republicans in the legislature."

Still, Cullerton said, Democrats aren't able to corral their ranks in large enough numbers to enact a tax increase without help from Rauner's Republicans.

"We can't do it on our own," Cullerton said during an appearance on public television's "Illinois Lawmakers." "If we're going to have any tax increase, it's only going to be because Bruce Rauner wants a tax increase. And the amount will be determined by Bruce Rauner."

Madigan said it more plainly: "We don't have a working supermajority."

That's because House Democrats in particular have several members who can't always be counted on to vote with the speaker, including Chicago Rep. Ken Dunkin, who Rauner successfully recruited as a holdout on a few legislative fights last year.

That tension within the Democratic party was on display Wednesday when Dunkin seized on the media spotlight of Rauner's speech to stage an anti-Madigan news conference where he called on fellow Democrats to camp out in the speaker's office until he works out a deal with Rauner.

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"I don't work for the governor, I don't work for Mike Madigan," said Dunkin, who brought a backpack, sleeping bag and other supplies as props. "I work for the citizens of the state of Illinois."

Tribune reporter Rick Pearson contributed from Chicago.

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Gov. Bruce Rauner's second State of the State speech Wednesday will focus on making state government more efficient, according to talking points released Tuesday. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  Gov. Bruce Rauner is set to give his second State of the State speech Wednesday, one that aides say will focus on reshaping state government, even as distrust runs rampant at the Capitol following a week of campaign-style attacks the Republican launched against ruling Democrats.

The administration late Tuesday released a list of talking points short on specifics that indicated Rauner will talk about making state government more efficient, including how taxpayer-subsidized health care is delivered and how the state buys goods and services. He'll also seek to clarify his support for Democratic Senate President John Cullerton's proposal to rework the state's employee pension program and unveil a revised plan to privatize the state's economic development agency.

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The first-term governor also will call for further reforms to the state's criminal justice system  a rare area of agreement for Rauner and Democrats, who have spent the last year locked in an ideological battle that's fueled a record-breaking budget stalemate marked by skyrocketing debt and a loss in services for some of Illinois' most vulnerable.

Lawmakers will be looking for details, particularly given the governor's track record of inserting union-weakening provisions in many of his legislative proposals.

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Last week, for instance, Rauner claimed he and Cullerton were in agreement on pensions but said he wanted the legislation altered to exempt employee raises from collective bargaining rights. Cullerton countered that there was no agreement, saying Rauner's pension proposal was "not my plan, not the plan we discussed." Cullerton has since said the back-and-forth was a misunderstanding, and they are working to draft legislation palatable to both sides.

Still, the situation underscores the deep mistrust between Rauner and Democrats who control the General Assembly and demonstrates the tough road ahead for the governor as he builds on the agenda he spent much of his first year pushing unsuccessfully.

Rauner is shrugging off critics who say he's in no position to chart a path forward when his chief responsibility of putting in place a complete budget is left undone.

"Change takes time. Nothing important, nothing transformative comes quickly or easily," Rauner told reporters this week. "And I don't want to take the fact that this has taken a long time as anything other than to demonstrate how important it is, how broken our current system is.

"I am elected to do a job," Rauner continued. "And that is deliver a high-quality government that drives value for the taxpayers, it increases the quality of life for everyone here. That means a government that creates an opportunity for rising family incomes, a lower cost of living, a booming, strong, healthy economy and the best schools in America."

But Democrats and their allies in organized labor contend Rauner's tenure has so far had the opposite effect, and they lined up by the dozens Tuesday to air their grievances ahead of the speech.

They pointed to layoffs at social service agencies owed millions of dollars by the state for providing services such as drug treatment and meal delivery for the elderly, low-income students worried about how they will pay for college as state-funded scholarships have been put on hold, and a growing pile of bills that could hit $10 billion by July 1 and sink the state's worst-in-the-nation credit rating even lower.

"What he's chosen to do is take the most vulnerable among us, take us to the town square, hold a gun to their head and say, 'If I don't get my reforms, which most have zero budgetary impact, the most vulnerable will get it,'" said Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor.

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The state has been operating without a full budget since July 1, after Rauner vetoed a spending plan Democrats sent to him that was around $3 billion short. While both sides agree it'll take a combination of cuts and a tax increase to begin to right the state's sinking finances, ideological and political differences are blocking the way.

Rauner has tied an overarching budget deal to his sweeping agenda to limit the rights of union workers, toughen standards for employees seeking compensation for injuries on the job, limit expensive payouts in civil lawsuits and freeze local property taxes. Democrats have objected, saying the budget shouldn't be held hostage to measures that would weaken the middle class at the benefit of corporate bosses.

Meanwhile, many social service agencies and colleges and universities are struggling to get by while they are caught in the middle.

House Democrats introduced a new bill Tuesday that would free up more than $730 million to fund higher education, including more than $370 million to fund the scholarships for low-income students. The move prompted a letter from Rauner's office to lawmakers arguing that releasing money for higher education would "exacerbate our state's current cash flow problems" and could delay payments to elementary schools and social service programs.

More than just laying out a personal agenda as governor, Rauner's address becomes a political template for Republican lawmakers and legislative candidates in a critical election year.

Democrats control supermajorities in the General Assembly and all 118 House seats and 40 of 59 Senate seats are up for election. Rauner has vowed to give cash to supportive lawmakers and candidates as well as warning he will call out suburban and Downstate Democrats who back House Speaker Michael Madigan.

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Rauner said this week he is "not going to give in" on his agenda.

"Anyone who will work with us on those goals, I will be their best ally and their best friend," he said. "Anyone who opposes us or blocks us, you know what, I will fight hard against."

Emily Miller, director of policy and advocacy at Voices for Illinois Children, said Rauner needs to focus on getting a budget, not pushing a political agenda.

"How many people have to stand in front of a microphone and say that their lives are being ruined before the governor decides to make passing a budget his number one priority?" Miller said.

Chicago Tribune's Celeste Bott contributed.

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Gov. Bruce Rauner, who will give his State of the State speech Wednesday, takes questions Jan. 21, 2016, on a pension reform plan. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Welcome to Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield.

Topspin

It's Wednesday, Jan. 27, and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner will deliver his second State of the State speech at noon from the House chambers in the Capitol.

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We're likely to be doing some live tweeting here.

Last year, Rauner gave his first State of the State on Feb. 4, declaring it "make or break time" for Illinois. He laid out much of what he calls his "Turnaround Agenda" and called on lawmakers to approve his to-do list in total rather than piecemeal.

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In our story on the speech, we wrote: "Just how much of Rauner's broad agenda will become reality is questionable, particularly the efforts to curtail unions. The legislature is controlled by large Democratic majorities, and organized labor has been a traditional Democratic ally."

Flash forward nearly a year, and that's what happened. State government is at an impasse and Illinois has gone nearly seven months without a full budget, and the governor faces the likelihood of proposing his second budget on Feb. 17 before passing his first one. The governor vetoed much of the budget Democrats sent him but signed a school spending bill. And a series of court orders and state laws have kept about 90 percent of state funds flowing.

Last week, Rauner spent some time back in campaign mode, lashing out at Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan, calling Mayor Rahm Emanuel a failure and botching the rollout of an alleged pension reform agreement with Senate President John Cullerton.

Early, partial speech excerpts the Rauner administration released late Tuesday indicated the governor will talk at least a little about common ground and strike a theme of "government transformation."

Political Illinois, however, will have to wait until Rauner is giving the speech to see what else he has in store.

What's on tap

*Mayor Emanuel talked CTA crime stats at 6 a.m. at the Cermark-McCormick Place Green Line stop. He wasn't scheduled to take reporters' questions.

*Gov. Rauner will give his State of the State speech at noon (see "Topspin" above).

*Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Andrea Zopp will address the City Club of Chicago. The speechifying is likely to start just after noon and can be streamed here.

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*Cook County state's attorney candidate Donna More will talk gun violence protection in a noon speech at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. Sign up with U. of C. here.

*A citizens' group protesting noise around O'Hare International Airport gets its long-awaited meeting with Mayor Emanuel this morning. It's behind closed doors, but expect the group to talk to reporters afterward.

What we're writing

*Bills guilty on all counts in red light camera bribery trial. Read the stories that started it all.

*Rauner to talk reshaping state government in second State of the State.

*8th Congressional Democrats make case on resumes, championing middle class.

*Under scrutiny, Emanuel releases texts for first time. Read the texts here.

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*Ethics report "raises serious questions" about ex-Chicago State president.

*Durbin writes HUD on children and lead policy.

What we're reading

*$35 million buys a lot of art.

*Call for depression screening during, after pregnancy.

*You can yell "Float On" along the lake this summer.

*We didn't buy an Apple watch either.

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From the notebook

*Speaker Ryan raising money in Chicago: Republican U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan of Janesville will be in Chicago on Wednesday evening for a major fundraising dinner to support GOP congressmen.

The event at the Ivy Room at Tree Studios in River North has ticket prices ranging from $1,000 to attend a general reception to $50,000 to become a member of "Team Ryan's Speaker's Council." The big ticket includes two passes to the private dinner and photos with Ryan.

Already listed as members of the "speaker's council" are industrialist Craig Duchossois, Todd Ricketts of the Cubs ownership family, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and investment managers David Herro and Muneer Satter. (Rick Pearson)

*Progressive split in House race: Chicago's self-described progressive aldermen are divided on who should represent the 40th Illinois House District on the Northwest Side.

On Tuesday, three members of the Progressive Reform Caucus endorsed incumbent Jaime Andrade, who rose out of the 33rd Ward Democratic organization headed up by former Ald. Dick Mell. Backing Andrade are Aldermen John Arena, 45th, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, and Nick Sposato, 38th.

That endorsement comes after Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd, chairman of the Progressive Reform Caucus, endorsed community organizer Harish Patel. Also backing Patel is Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, a member of the Paul Douglas Alliance  another coalition of progressive aldermen who aren't as quick to criticize Mayor Emanuel. (Hal Dardick)

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*No show in IL-8: The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board is doing candidate endorsement interviews ahead of the March 15 primary elections. Reporters often attend to look for news. On Tuesday, the Democrats running for the nomination to try to succeed U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Hoffman Estates were scheduled to appear.

Businessman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg and Villa Park Village President Deb Bullwinkel took their seats at the table, but state Sen. Michael Noland of Elgin didn't attend. His campaign said it thought the gathering was later in the day.

"A campaign staffer misplaced the time of the meeting on the senator's calendar and that staffer takes full responsibility for his mistake," Noland campaign manager Nick Daggers said in a statement.

*New Senate Dem chief: Senate President John Cullerton has picked his longtime budget director to serve as his new chief of staff.

The Chicago Democrat announced Tuesday that Kristin Richards, who has served as Cullerton's budget and policy director since he was elected president in 2009, will take on the post beginning Feb. 1.

Richards, originally from Downstate Belleville, replaces David Gross, who announced this month that he was leaving state government to become a lobbyist.

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"There is no one in this operation whose insights I trust more than Kristin's. She's been invaluable to my office and to the Senate Democratic Caucus from Day One. She'll provide the leadership we need going forward," Cullerton said in a statement.

Richards' annual salary will remain at $144,000. (Celeste Bott)

Follow the money

*Track campaign contribution reports in real time with this Tribune Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ILCampaignCash

Beyond Chicago

*Presidential race, Republican side: WaPo national poll has Trump electability improved, but he won't debate.

*Presidential race, Democratic side: How Sanders would pay for college plan.

*Christie pitches state takeover of Atlantic City government. Whither Nucky Thompson?

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*FBI arrests Milwaukee man said to be planning temple attack.

*Arrests, one dead in Oregon Bundy standoff.
Presidential candiate Sen. Bernie Sanders met with President Barack Obama in what the candidate called a 'positive and constructive' meeting where the two discused foreign policy and the current campaign trail. Jan. 27, 2016. (AP) (Associated Press)

President Barack Obama and his aides have said a lot of nice things about Bernie Sanders, but not this one: He's ready to be president.

The key omission was particularly noticeable Wednesday as Obama and Sanders met for their first one-on-one since Sanders jolted the Democratic campaign and locked Hillary Clinton in an unexpectedly tight race.

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The long-discussed meeting between Obama and his sometime critic was a moment for the president to display his public neutrality in the heated primary race to replace him  rebutting suggestions that he's in the tank for Clinton. For Sanders, it was a chance to show he's got some sway with a president who's still popular among Democrats.

"By and large, over the last seven years on major issue after major issue, I have stood by his side where he has taken on unprecedented Republican obstructionism and has tried to do the right thing for the American people," Sanders said after the meeting.

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But neither the White House nor Sanders is suggesting the men are kindred spirits, or even close political allies. White House officials say the men lack much of a personal relationship and have markedly different approaches to politics. The president this week declared bluntly he doesn't see Sanders' upstart campaign as a reboot of his own battle against Clinton in 2008. Obama allies bristle at comparisons between Sanders and the president.

It's a reminder that even as Obama watches the nomination battle from a distance, he is personally tied to the outcome. He remains focused on ensuring a Democrat wins the White House and on protecting his legacy. Increasingly, it appears, he sees Clinton as his best hope.

Sanders emerged from the 45-minute meeting with gracious things to say about his host.

He said he believes Obama has been "even handed" in his dealing with the candidates. The president has campaigned for him in the past, Sanders noted, harking back a decade to an appearance then-Sen. Obama made in Vermont. And he has campaigned for Obama, he said, delivering a pointed rebuke to Clinton, who has suggested Sanders has been disloyal to the president.

The White House had kind words for Sanders' contribution to Democrats enthusiasm, although not his leadership.

"That ability to engage Democrats and excite them and inspire them will be critical to the success of Democrats up and down the ballot," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. "Whether Senator Sanders is the nominee or not."

The caveat was a marked contrast to remarks Obama recently made about Clinton. In an interview with Politico, the president described his former secretary of state as "more experienced than any non-vice president has ever been who aspires to this office." Sanders has "great authenticity, great passion and is fearless," Obama said, but he added the senator is untested.

White House officials say the Obama interview was a reflection of his close, working relationship with Clinton and his focus on wanting Democrats to win, not his discomfort with Sanders.

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Although Sanders and Obama overlapped in the Senate, they have few personal ties. Sanders, an independent who tends to vote with Democrats, is an unabashed liberal willing to hold the line. Obama has shown far more interest in pragmatism than ideological purity.

The president respects the role Sanders has played in the Senate, a White House official said. Indeed, a younger Obama once cheered that effort.

"It seems like power is always trumping principle," Obama said as he campaigned for Sanders in 2006. "Things can change, that we can overcome that cynicism."

But as president, Obama has not relied on Sanders for advice or legislative heft. The senator hasn't been a regular at the White House. He last met privately with Obama in December 2014 to alert the president of his plans to run for his job, Earnest said.

While in Washington, Sanders stopped by the Senate after his White House visit, then headed back to Iowa for yet one more evening event.

Obama allies have dismissed suggestions that Sanders' campaign is following a path Obama charted eight years ago. Despite both men attracting youthful crowds, promising change and running against Clinton, the comparison is thin, they say.

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Sanders rails against the gap between the nation's wealthy and poor, which has grown during Obama's presidency, and slams the role of Wall Street and big corporations in the economy.

He also blasts the proliferation of big money in politics. In 2012, Obama blessed the creation of a Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA Action, to support his re-election bid.

Like Clinton, Sanders opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a key part of Obama's trade agenda. He also opposes the president in advocating transforming Obama's health care law into what he describes as a universal "Medicare for all" system.

These issues weren't the focus of the meeting, Sanders said, downplaying the differences as he stood in the driveway of the White House to talk to reporters. Photographers were not allowed to shoot the president and Sanders together in the Oval Office.

Associated Press
John Thorpe consulted on the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright homes across the country. ( Matt Soria / Frank Lloyd Wright Trust)

Oak Park architect John Thorpe led the award-winning effort that restored Frank Lloyd Wright's Home and Studio and made it an international attraction.

Thorpe, 71, died Monday of congestive heart failure at his home, said his twin brother, Tom, who is also an architect.

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Each year, about 90,000 people from all 50 states and more than 30 countries visit the Wright-designed house and architect's office at 951 Chicago Ave. in Oak Park, according to Celeste Adams, president of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Trust.

Thorpe in 1974 led negotiations that allowed the trust, then known as the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation, to buy the shingle-sheathed complex, which Wright had used as a laboratory to test ideas that ultimately flowered into his Prairie Style.

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By the 1970s, the house had been split into seven apartments. In the studio, the two-story room where draftsmen once worked had been cut in half horizontally.

According to the trust, Thorpe lived on the property from 1974 to 1981 as he and other volunteers carefully peeled back walls, floors and ceilings.

Their painstaking attention to detail led to clues that enabled them to bring the Home and Studio back to the way it looked in 1909, the last year Wright lived and worked there.

"You see the whole progression of his thinking up to 1909 in this building," Eric Lloyd Wright, grandson of the pioneering architect, told the Tribune in 1987.

Though the restoration was drawn out, lasting 13 years and costing $2.1 million, it made the Home and Studio a global destination. The trust, which runs the landmark, offers recorded tours in eight languages, including Chinese and Japanese. In 1987, the project won a national design award from the American Institute of Architects.

The institute praised the project as a "restoration that honors not only Wright but also the architects and craftspersons who brought this important part of American architectural history back to life."

Thorpe was born in Evanston and grew up in Chicago and north suburban Glenview. He received a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master's degree in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.

He worked for the big architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill before opening his Oak Park practice in 1984. He consulted on the restoration of Wright buildings around the country, including such masterpieces as the Robie House in Chicago. Yet the heart of his practice was restoring homes by Wright and other Prairie Style architects in Oak Park.

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The Home and Studio's transformation became "a beacon, a model for homeowners, who would be inspired to restore their own homes and see the value and meaning in restoration," said Adams, the trust's president.

Thorpe was one of the founders of the trust, which was established in 1974 to preserve the Home and Studio and now works to educate the public about the architect's designs. The organization changed its name in 2000.

Thorpe also served as the group's fourth president and frequently was a spokesman for the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, whose mission is to save Wright buildings. He was a longtime board member of both the trust and the conservancy.

He leaves no other direct survivors.

A memorial gathering is being planned.

bkamin@tribpub.com

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Twitter@BlairKamin
The fact that it was Trump who raised the issue made it deeply suspect. But though it's unlikely that anything coming out of Trump's mouth is true, it's not impossible. And his claim that this is an unresolved question that could end up throwing the election into doubt happens to be correct.
Maybe this makes me a traitor to my sex, but I support the tampon tax.

Mostly because it's not actually a tampon tax.

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For those unaware, "tampon tax" is shorthand for the fact that menstrual products are subject to sales taxes in most states, even though other products considered necessities (such as food and medicine) are often exempted.

In recent months, this has spawned a legion of articles suggesting that squeamish, old, predominantly male politicians are punishing half of humanity for the crime of having a period. Some offer stories about poor women who say "tampon taxes" are cutting into money they desperately need for groceries or other bills.

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The issue has gained steam on the left, partly because it fits neatly into both the "war on women" and "war on the poor" narratives. Protests have erupted across the United States and abroad; bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country, and a change.org petition gathered more than 40,000 signatures. Activists have already logged wins in Canada and France.

Last week, even President Barack Obama got drawn into the battle.

His interviewer, YouTube celebrity Ingrid Nilsen, posited that "pads, tampons and other menstrual products are taxed as luxury goods in 40 states." She asked the president why.

A seemingly surprised Obama responded, "I have to tell you, I have no idea why states would tax these as luxury items. I suspect it's because men were making the laws when those taxes were passed."

But the premise of this question, and of the broader "tampon tax" debate, is wrongheaded.

First of all, it's highly misleading to call the taxes that tampons are subject to "tampon taxes." To my knowledge, no jurisdiction has a tampon-specific tax, as it might an alcohol or yacht tax.

Politicians didn't one day decide that periods were gross and therefore ought to be made more expensive. Instead, when states and cities needed revenue, they passed general sales taxes  which happened to fall upon tampons along with countless other goods.

Then, every interest group on Earth came out of the woodwork demanding a carve-out on the grounds that their product or service was a "necessity," just as anti-"tampon tax" activists have recently done.

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But what is a "necessity," exactly?

It's a pretty squishy term. Almost any product can be called necessary in modern times. And almost every product has.

In California, the state where a "tampon tax" repeal bill has gotten the most press, such tax-favored purchases include candy and bottled water, school yearbooks, certain commemorative lapel pins, hot prepared foods sold to airlines, farm equipment, garment alterations and racehorse breeding stock.

The more things you exempt from sales taxes, of course, the higher the tax rates on other products have to rise to make up the lost revenue. That in turn increases the incentive for other interest groups to lobby for yet more exemptions, or find ways to disguise and recategorize their products to dodge taxes. (Is cold pizza a grocery item, and therefore a "necessity," or a prepared food, and a luxury?) Which leads to more carve-outs for more "necessities." Which leads to ever-higher tax rates.

This vicious cycle is one reason tax experts generally caution against creating product-specific exemptions to consumption taxes. Very low tax rates, over a broad base of items, cause fewer distortions, in both what people buy and how many resources get devoted to repackaging and marketing existing products.

Another reason to be skeptical about such exemptions is that they're poorly targeted.

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The most common rationale for exempting "necessities"  whether they be milk, Advil or, yes, tampons  is that such taxes especially hurt the poor. Low-income people, after all, spend a higher share of their incomes overall, and particularly more on "necessities," however they're construed.

But when you strip taxes from tampons or groceries, you relieve not just poor students and families from paying them. You're also giving a break to billionaires.

A better way to address the regressivity of sales taxes is to just increase cash transfers to the poor  or to whichever group you think needs money the most. Maybe that's women, since they are more likely than men to buy menstrual products, though I'm skeptical of the idea that government is obligated to address every difference in every demographic group's consumption bundle.

Maybe it seems unfair that in so many states Twizzlers don't get taxed while tampons do. The solution isn't to dole out yet more tax breaks, but to end the ones we have and direct more public money to people who actually need assistance.

Washington Post Writers Group

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

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crampell@washpost.com

Twitter @crampell
A patient from Palos Heights leaves after purchasing marijuana products at the Windy City Cannabis dispensary in Homewood on Monday, Jan. 5, 2016. This is the first south suburban medical marijuana dispensary. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)

The first medical marijuana dispensaries opened in Illinois in November. What do we know so far about this alternative treatment of illness? We hear many patients are grateful and that there's a strain called Pre-98 Bubba Kush that is one fast ticket to euphoria. On the business side, though, there's surprisingly little buzz.

About 4,000 patients have registered statewide. That's a slow start, well below early estimates. So if you were picturing long lines at the counter, no. And if you were picturing a Chicago neighborhood or two turning noticeably mellower, definitely not. Illinois isn't Colorado. We're a long way from legalizing recreational pot use and officially celebrating cannabis culture.

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The highly regulated system in Illinois is designed to provide people suffering from specific diseases and conditions some relief from their symptoms. There are about 40 such illnesses on the list, including cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease and Parkinson's.

What's not on the list  and should be added, according to a state panel led by medical experts  are several more conditions, including two broad categories of suffering: chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. The decision is up to Gov. Bruce Rauner. We think he should accept the panel's recommendation.

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Robert McCarthy, 30, leaves after purchasing marijuana products at the Windy City Cannabis dispensary in Homewood on Monday, Jan. 5, 2016. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)

Illinois is about halfway through a four-year pilot program approved by the legislature and signed by then-Gov. Pat Quinn after several years of debate. The state has been rightly cautious on this issue. California, no surprise, was first to allow medical use, passing a ballot initiative in 1996. That's now legal in 23 states. Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska have also legalized the recreational use of pot.

To their credit, Quinn and Rauner were very deliberate in the process of approving licenses to grow and sell medical marijuana.

It shouldn't be easy to buy or sell medical marijuana, and it isn't. There are strict rules for the growers and dispensers. Patients need a permit, which requires submitting to fingerprinting, plus a doctor's diagnosis of an approved illness. If there are only a few thousand customers so far, investors had to know this new and unusual industry wouldn't, um, blossom overnight.

Separate from the business side is the question of adding to the potential patient base by expanding the approved illness list. The state put in place a system for considering the health of patients, which, after all, is the purpose of legalizing medical marijuana. There's a set calendar for accepting patient petitions and forwarding them to the state Medical Cannabis Advisory Board for consideration.

In October, the board, which consists of doctors, nurses, patients and advocates, recommended adding eight medical conditions to the list of approved diseases and conditions: autism, chronic pain due to trauma, chronic pain syndrome, chronic postoperative pain, irritable bowel syndrome, intractable pain, osteoarthritis and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Leslie Mendoza Temple, a Chicago-area physician and chair of the advisory board, said the group scrutinized scientific research and listened to patients. The board has rejected requests to add anxiety as a condition because it is too broad, she said. But the eight conditions the board approved would give doctors the ability to prescribe relief to patients with specific maladies or long-term pain. A significant bonus, she said, is providing safer alternatives to powerful painkillers that can be highly addictive or even kill.

"The dispensaries have only been open six to eight weeks, and the feedback I've gotten so far from my patients and other patients is: They are glowing," Temple told us. "They are happy. They are dropping their pain medications. They are sleeping. I'm hearing nothing but gratitude at this point."

Most states that allow medical marijuana permit its use to address pain. There are many people in Illinois, including veterans with PTSD, who struggle to get through their days  and nights. When properly prescribed by a doctor, cannabis can be an enormous relief.

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In September, the governor rejected the board's recommendation to add 11 conditions. That was before the dispensaries were open. There should be a higher confidence level now that the system can work without being abused. More patients should have the opportunity. And with that, Illinois will have a more complete track record when it comes time to consider whether the medical marijuana law should be continued.
Gov. Bruce Rauner delivers his second State of the State speech at the Illinois State Capitol House Chambers in Springfield on Jan. 27, 2016. (Anthony Souffle, Chicago Tribune)

His theme wasn't sexy and it only hinted at Springfield's ongoing war for the future of Illinois. But in his annual State of the State address Wednesday, Gov. Bruce Rauner pounded on the crisis this state must fix if it's to fulfill its ambitions  to educate its young people, to improve its infrastructure, to provide crucial services for its needy citizens.

One by one, Rauner ticked off metrics that attest to this state's weakened economy, wimpy job creation, outmigration of workers, and failure to recover from a Great Recession that ended in June 2009. He cited the loss in recent years of 300,000 manufacturing jobs; the anti-employer policies Springfield has imposed; the bifurcated status quo in which white-collar communities within 90 minutes of O'Hare International Airport thrive while poor communities  Harvey, Blue Island, Rockford, Decatur and many others  can't compete for jobs with locales in more business-friendly states such as Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin.

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Rauner then confronted the assembled legislators and state officials with the greatest challenge facing Illinois: "We are losing the race for good paying jobs. And as jobs have moved to other states, we have a smaller tax base and less money to invest in education, infrastructure and quality of life here."

Take that as his unequivocal answer to those who ask why Illinois has a budget impasse seven months into its fiscal year. Who ask why Rauner keeps pushing for structural reforms before he'll agree to higher taxes. Who ask why he doesn't just capitulate to the Democratic leaders who presided over the creation of this desperate situation. You can boil Wednesday's speech down to a nine-word answer from Rauner:

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Because Illinois has to grow more taxpayers. That's why.

Until Illinois does that, every institution or person relying on state dollars is at risk. Rauner was telling lawmakers to fix Illinois so it can afford to meet its needs not just for a month, but for decades to come.

Rauner's sworn foes don't have an explanation for why Illinois should delay structural reforms until some tomorrow that, in reality, never arrives. So they retort with litanies of places, programs and people that aren't being fully funded.

After Rauner spoke, House Speaker Michael Madigan held a news conference with a number of social service providers who spoke to the financial pressure they face. We hope they listened to what Madigan said after they spoke. Rather, to what Madigan didn't say. He didn't offer one idea on how to grow the revenue Illinois needs to pay for their services.

Nor did the interest groups that roasted Rauner as soon as he concluded his address. Example: The Illinois Federation of Teachers blast-emailed a 333-word news release blaming him for not delivering a plan for new revenue (read: taxes).

(Scott Stantis)

We won't be startled if new revenue is part of the solution for Illinois. But the IFT, which helped elect the Democrats who've run Springfield, might have urged those pols to join Rauner in fixing Illinois' lousy climate for jobs. Money for schools doesn't fall from heaven. It comes from taxpayers, who are in short supply.

The gesture wasn't intentional, but Chicago Public Schools added its own telling drama on Wednesday to one of Rauner's messages: If Illinois governments can't tame their high overhead costs, their prospects are bleak. Even as Rauner spoke, word spread that the financially devastated district had unexpectedly delayed a planned $875 million borrowing deal that will soak Chicago taxpayers for high interest costs: Bloomberg News reported that the bonds would give investors as much as 7.75 percent  about 5 percentage points more than top-rated tax-exempt bonds now yield.

The news evoked the mad dash in many Illinois governments as officials try to stay a step ahead of insolvency. In a hastily arranged news conference, Chicago Chief Financial Officer Carole Brown and CPS senior vice president of finance Ron DeNard insisted the bond deal would go forward in the next few days. But they wouldn't say when. And they wouldn't say if CPS will be able to borrow the full amount it seeks for infrastructure projects and to pay off earlier borrowing.

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As more citizens understand how Illinois' miserable jobs climate limits its tax base and suppresses government revenues, expect the governor's message to resonate. The people now paying taxes here can't, by themselves, cover the costs and debts their politicians have created.

Rauner has spent one year trying to overcome some four decades of mismanagement in Springfield. If you're surprised he hasn't yet succeeded, you're not realistic. He's an existential threat to politicians now fighting his every reform.

But while the obstructionists pretend that newcomer Rauner is the problem, Illinoisans are voting with their feet. U.S. Census Bureau numbers show that in the most recent period measured  July 2014 to July 2015  Illinois lost more people to outmigration than did any other state. That period marks the second year in a row that Illinois lost population. Demographers already are speculating that Illinois will lose yet another seat in the U.S. House.

How much longer until the remaining citizens of Illinois demand that their legislators change course and revive their state?

Illinois has to draw more jobs, create more taxpayers, create more wealth for those taxpayers. It's the only way this state will have a fighting chance.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
Not much ambiguity in this verdict: Before Earth finished even one rotation on its axis, federal jurors found former City Hall official John Bills guilty of all 20 counts  mail fraud, wire fraud, extortion, bribery, conspiracy, tax evasion  in his trial for public corruption. Jurors accepted prosecutors' accusation that Bills had accepted up to $2 million in bribes to help an Arizona company land tens of millions of dollars in red light camera contracts. Bills' maximum combined sentence when he stands before U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall at 10 a.m. May 5: some 304 years in prison.

We aren't so inured to seeing public officials convicted of ripping off citizens that we take for granted the painstaking work of the jurors, investigators, prosecutors and judges who shepherd these cases. Nor are we so modest that we minimize the role of Tribune journalists who just as painstakingly unearthed this scandal and prompted the feds to pursue it.

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We will, though, cop to being mystified: What was it about the air John Bills breathed in City Hall? What behavior by other public workers, some of whom had preceded him to prison, led him to think he should cheat the Chicagoans who employed him? What blinded him  not momentarily but year after year  to the obvious: By accepting illicit money, he was betraying friends and loved ones who trusted him to put Chicago's interests ahead of his own greedy grab for loot?

(Scott Stantis)

Thirteen years have passed since Mayor Richard M. Daley in December 2002 urged contractors to submit proposals for a then-novel idea: Automated cameras would photograph red light violators, who then would receive tickets by mail. So far, so good: Follow the law, Chicago drivers, and you won't get pinched.

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But the scam sped almost as fast as you can say "Where's mine?" By May 2003, Bills had helped Redflex Traffic Systems win Chicago's business. And by November 2003, the first camera was monitoring drivers at 55th Street and Western Avenue. Redflex allegedly paid a cash bribe of $1,500 to $2,000 for each of Chicago's 384 red light cameras. And the cams have brought City Hall more than $600 million in fines.

The feds laid out cause (bribes) and effect (contracts). But the trial leaves unanswered a question Bills' attorney exploited: Did Bills have government accomplices? As we wrote in May 2014: "Bills' attorney told reporters Wednesday that the feds are pressuring his client to name others. That leads to the question that inevitably follows the fingerprinting in a case like this: Who's next?"

As of now the answer is, nobody. Prosecutors did present evidence that Bills was a champion schmoozer: He met with Daley and House Speaker Michael Madigan in his efforts to help Redflex. They also presented evidence that Bills counseled Redflex execs on which lobbyists and political consultants they should hire to court favor with Daley and Madigan. But prosecutors didn't call any of those individuals to testify. Nor have they implicated any elected officials in Bills' scheme. Which suggests we should ignore the closing argument of Bills' lawyer as sound and fury signifying nothing. U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon dismissed as "malarkey" attorney Nishay Sanan's claim that some Redflex money went to lobbyists who funneled it to officials more powerful than Bills. If Sanan wanted to showcase evidence of that, what better stage than a two-week federal trial?

U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon, who led the prosecution in the bribery case against former city official John Bills, speaks to the media after Bills was found guilty on all 20 counts of mail and wire fraud, bribery, extortion, conspiracy and tax evasion charges on Jan. 26, 2016, at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Fardon correctly noted after the jurors' verdict that it's no cause for celebration; it is, instead, further proof that no matter how many officials the feds frog-march to prison, other opportunists think they can get away with cheating taxpayers.

We're proud that reporter David Kidwell and other Tribune journalists exposed the Redflex scheme in 2012, as noted by the only juror who spoke to reporters after the verdict. A passage from the Tribune's online news story Tuesday afternoon: "Nationally, we see a lot of the corruption exposed by reporters, and in this case it was the Chicago Tribune," Michael Woerner, 63, a former Hinsdale village president who lives in Burr Ridge, said when he was asked the big takeaway from the trial. "And at the same time you see all these cuts at newspapers, and you wonder after they are all gone who will be left to look for it?"

We're grateful, Mr. Woerner. Not because we expect to go anywhere, but because we take seriously our role as stewards of Tribune traditions nearly 169 years in the making. Among the busiest of those traditions: confronting public corruption. John Bills isn't the last crooked official we'll see convicted. And this isn't the last editorial wishing that someone, someday, is.

Which brings us back to the air Bills breathed at City Hall. A verdict of guilt can loosen tongues. We note this because, according to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. attorney's office, a former Redflex official cooperating with the feds said Bills told him about a City Hall supervisor who had been paid by an engineering firm involved with a different contract. If Bills does have knowledge about Chicago's endemic corruption, he has 14 weeks to share it with prosecutors before Judge Kendall sentences him.

As Kendall mulls his fate, we hope she recalls what Ruben Castillo, now chief judge of U.S. District Court here, wrote in his ruling on a Cicero case 10 years ago this week: "The only way to protect the public from the ongoing problem of public corruption, and to promote respect for the rule of law, is to impose strict penalties on all defendants who engage in such conduct. ... It is this court's opinion that these persons who commit crimes in the halls of government should be subject to the same consequences as those that commit crimes on the streets."

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Amen. Judge Kendall, whatever noxious fumes John Bills breathed, we hope you'll help drive them from Chicago.
The budget in Illinois is a classic "class warfare" battle for power and money. Gov. Bruce Rauner's goal is to eliminate public unions and make Illinois a "right to work" state. House Speaker Michael Madigan and Democrats want to maintain the status quo so they can maintain power and get the campaign contributions from unions. Both parties are to blame, as Republicans governors ran Illinois for 26 years, from 1977 to 2003, and participated in the corrupt practices.

What is the solution? Compromise.

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Rauner and Madigan need to work together to change the Illinois Constitution to adjust pensions for public workers. It is not fair to taxpayers that pensions cannot be changed to adapt to today's economic challenges. A change to the constitution will allow politicians to cap pensions and reign in cost-of-living increases for pension recipients.

In addition, new sources of revenue must be found. Creating a 5-percent tax on income over $1 million, legalizing marijuana and allowing Casino gambling in Chicago would generate some revenue to help pay down the debt. This way the debt gets paid down with shared sacrifice from the middle class and the wealthy. Compromise is not a dirty word!

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 Mark Prieto, Orland Park
I couldn't agree more with Gov. Bruce Rauner's remarkable statement regarding the reductions in services and jobs by Lutheran Social Services of Illinois. As he very correctly said: "There is really no good excuse for the tragic loss of those kinds of services. It's inexcusable for us not to have a budget right now. We could have and should have done this many months ago."

Either side could have said this, with fingers pointed at each other as to whether the executive or legislature is at fault. Conceivably, both may be right, with more than enough blame to go around. What matters most to most Illinois citizens, especially for those directly impacted, is not blame but resolution. Not excuses (for it is "inexcusable"), but recognizing and acting upon their shared responsibility for our common good.

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I am president of the Friedman Place board of directors, the only Chicagoland residential community for blind and visually impaired adults. As with most, if not all, Illinois social service nonprofits, this budget stalemate diverts energy, focus and resources from the critical missions of our agencies. Coincidentally, my wife and I were licensed foster/adoptive parents of LSSI, currently relying upon a patchwork of nonprofit social services for the safety and well-being of our at-risk, now adult, son.

My career as an attorney started with a litigation firm, but I quickly sought alternatives, obtaining training in dispute resolution to mediate community conflicts, restorative justice for juveniles and family/divorce issues. All seem applicable here.

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Accordingly, I humbly volunteer to mediate this conflict destined to grow worse with every day of inexcusable delay. Alternatively, better qualified professional mediators could be contacted to help get this done, perhaps also as citizen-volunteers.

I won't hold my breath for Springfield's call, but the millions of Illinois taxpayers and those in need of social services are holding our collective breath that an inexcusably bad situation is not about to keep getting inexcusably worse.

 Barry Newman, Schaumburg
A brawl broke out in the parking lot next to La Quinta de los Reyes restaurant early Saturday morning. (Sarah Freishtat, The Beacon-News)

An Aurora restaurant has been temporarily shut down by the city after a West Aurora High School graduate was killed and a second man injured during a brawl in the parking lot.

La Quinta de los Reyes, a downtown restaurant known for involvement with the community, will remain closed at least through Friday, when a hearing is scheduled to take place, Aurora city spokesman Dan Ferrelli said in an email.

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Restaurant owner Jesus Sanchez said the city attempted to notify the restaurant to cancel an '80s- and '90s-themed party organized by a promoter January 22  after which the brawl broke out  but the restaurant never received the city's letter.

"We have to be more careful now," Sanchez said Tuesday.

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About 100 people were shouting and fighting in the parking lot when police arrived early Saturday, according to police. Sanchez said it was closing time, and patrons were leaving the party.

Marcus Holland, 36, was shot more than once and died at the scene, according to police. A 22-year-old Batavia man was stabbed and treated for injuries not believed to be life-threatening, an incident police think was gang-related, according to Ferrelli. He said police have several theories about the shooting, and are still investigating.

Holland, a West Aurora High School graduate, had lived in Aurora for decades, said his mother, Mary Holland. He had a 15-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, she said.

Holland was between jobs and preparing for truck-driving school, she said.

"He wanted to drive a truck like his dad," she said.

He lived with Mary Holland, and was always respectful toward her, she said. He loved his family and spending time with his nieces and nephews, she said.

"When they took my son, they took a piece of my heart," she said. "They took a piece of my heart. I don't wish any mother, any father to have to go through what we're going through now."

Sanchez said the party Friday night was designed to draw different people to the restaurant. He estimated between 110 and 120 people were at the party when it was in full swing, a crowd he said was typical for a weekend event. Many were younger, in their 30s, he said.

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He described La Quinta de los Reyes, which opened downtown more than 10 years ago, as "a family restaurant." It often uses promoters for events, he said, and will be more careful in the future about who it uses.

"Unfortunately, we don't know what kind of people they're bringing in," he said.

Sanchez annually sponsors holiday and community events and events for children, and regularly opens his restaurant to a group of women in business, said Lourdes Martinez, president of the Aurora Regional Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The restaurant is one of the sponsors of the chamber.

"He's very involved in the community, especially with the kids," she said.

Martinez said she was surprised to hear about the brawl, because the restaurant offered a traditional, family environment.

But Ferrelli said in an email "there have been other incidents of concern" at La Quinta de los Reyes. He declined to elaborate because of the upcoming hearing.

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He said the number of people at the scene of the brawl has made the investigation a challenge, but police think most of the people in the parking lot had been at the party inside.

Many people captured the moments before, during and after both incidents on video, he said in the email. He asked anyone with a video to share it with police, and anyone with information should call police detectives or Crime Stoppers.

Police previously identified a person believed responsible for the stabbing as a black man in his early 20s, standing 5-foot-10 and weighing 150 to 170 pounds.

"Anytime a violent crime occurs in Aurora it is a concern," Ferrelli said via email. "In this particular instance, the fact that it happened in the central business district is out of the ordinary, because the downtown has been one of the safest areas in the city, especially in recent years."

Mary Holland said she has had no appetite since she found out her youngest son was shot. The family is still trying to find out what happened and why, she said.

"I just want to let the young man (who shot Holland) know, or whoever," she said. "I forgive him."

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sfreishtat@tribpub.com

Twitter: @srfreish
Former District 308 Superintendent of Schools Matthew Wendt and State Representative Stephanie A. Kifowit attend a Illinois School Board meeting at Oswego East High School in Oswego, IL in 2015. (Sean King, The Beacon-News)

Community Unit School District 308 Superintendent Matthew Wendt could begin working this summer as superintendent of Fayetteville, Ark., public schools.

In a letter to parents and staff, Wendt said his interest in the job is based on Fayetteville's proximity to family, former colleagues, friends and the University of Arkansas, where he received a doctorate degree.

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"I love being your superintendent and I enjoy a wonderful job," he wrote in the letter. "But, quality of life and location to family now supersede all other aspects of my career."

Wendt said he has verbally accepted the position in the smaller, northwest Arkansas school district, but the decision is pending contract negotiations. Wendt also has not officially resigned from Oswego-based District 308, board President Matt Bauman said.

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If the offer is finalized, Wendt would begin in July in Fayetteville Public Schools, after the current superintendent retires.

Wendt's contract in District 308, which runs through 2019, does not include a severance package, but entitles him to a payout of some unused vacation days. Bauman said the board is under "no obligation" to offer him compensation.

Bauman said last week Wendt notified the school board of his interview Jan. 18 in Fayetteville, but Bauman characterized the interview as "a courtesy to a mentor of his, to a friend of his."

Wednesday, Bauman said the board had an understanding with Wendt that he would notify the board if he were to become a finalist in Fayetteville. The Fayetteville school board, however, did not name a group of finalists before selecting Wendt.

Wendt has served as District 308 superintendent since 2012. He came to Oswego from a district near Des Moines, Iowa, amid accusations that he negotiated his separation from that district in bad faith. Wendt denied the allegations, and he and the school district settled a lawsuit that had been filed against him.

Wendt received a new contract in 2014, a decision the school board president at the time said was designed to bring stability and consistency to the district as it prepared to implement a new five-year strategic plan.

Under the terms of his contract, Wendt is earning $250,000 this school year, plus a travel allowance and other benefits.

Fayetteville schools spokesman Alan Wilbourn said he did not have information about the salary offered to Wendt, but he said the current superintendent earns $200,000 annually.

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Fayetteville Public Schools is smaller than District 308, with more than 9,600 students in 14 schools, according to the district. District 308 serves more than 17,900 students.

Wendt said in his letter he has visited Fayetteville "numerous" times every year for the past decade.

"It is time for us to return to an area that allows for closer and more frequent family contact, while having an extraordinary chance to serve a highly respected public school district," he wrote. "I am very happy that my strengths as a leader and their needs as a school district align extremely well."

The District 308 board will decide whether to look internally for a replacement for Wendt or to search outside the district, Bauman said. The first opportunity to discuss the next steps will be at a February board meeting, he said.

Typically, Bauman said, John Sparlin, associate superintendent for administrative services, would fill in if the superintendent was not able to serve, though he said Sparlin would not necessarily replace Wendt.

The board will continue to work with administrators to move in its current direction, Bauman said, focusing on areas such as reviewing curriculum and offering dual credit, online learning and other flexible learning options to students.

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"We wish (Wendt) luck, wish him the best," Bauman said. "We're going to continue on with the board initiatives and priorities we set forth. The board is the one who gives the direction, so we'll continue with those tasks that we're currently working."

In Fayetteville, Wendt was selected from among 30 applicants for the position, according to the district.

"The board is confident that in Dr. Wendt we have found a leader who will embrace the district's strategic plan that is being developed and build on our strengths to take Fayetteville Public Schools to national prominence," Fayetteville school board President Tim Hudson said in a statement.

A contract could be ready by the Fayetteville school board's regularly scheduled meeting Thursday, Wilbourn said. If not, it will be voted upon at a later meeting.

Wendt and his wife are scheduled to visit Fayetteville next week, according to the district.

sfreishtat@tribpub.com

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Workers examine the site of a gas leak at a Mobil station in Barrington on Monday. (Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune)

Officials on Monday closed the Mobil station at East Main Street and Route 14 in Barrington after discovering an underground gasoline leak.

At least one nearby resident had complained of smelling gas since Jan. 6, and hired three contractors to inspect her home. A village inspector came on Monday, and he immediately went to the gas station.

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On Jan. 22, a village engineering project manager visited two homes on East Main Street, said Greg Summers, director of development services for Barrington.

"He did smell a light odor in the homes, and light odor in the sanitary sewer on Main Street, but he could not see any petroleum product in the water," Summers said.

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On Monday, the inspector went to the gas station, which was closed from noon until 9 a.m. Tuesday, village officials said. No injuries were reported.

Barrington Village Manager Jeff Lawler said a pressure line leaked in a gasoline pump, which caused gas to travel underground to a sanitary sewer in the station's parking lot.

A village worker responded to the scene, opened a manhole cover on East Main Street smelled an odor and saw a stream of fluid moving entering the manhole. The station was closed and Barrington Public Works employees were called to plug the leaking line. No roads were closed.

Lawler said the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and Illinois Fire Marshall also responded.

"The IEPA approved our methodology of flushing out the fluid with water that goes into the sanitary system," Lawler said.

At least two homes reported smelling gasoline, but no homes were evacuated, Lawler said. The Barrington Fire Department checked the area with air "sniffer equipment" and did not detect any levels of concentration.

Susan Myers said she first noticed a gas smell in her home, down the street from the gas station, on Jan. 6.

"I noticed an unusual smell throughout my house and through the heat duct. It was very prevalent in the basement," Myers explained.

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The 74-year-old said a furnace contractor visited the home on Jan. 6, but did not detect carbon monoxide or natural gas. She said the contractor did report a "metallic taste in his mouth."

"Our house is wired with smoke and gas detectors," Myers said.

Myers also asked a septic contractor to clean out a grease trap Jan. 15 in the basement.

"It made no difference," said Bob Myers, 79, Susan's husband.

Susan Myers said a plumber later smelled fuel in the basement. On Monday, a village inspector entered the home and also smelled a gas odor, she said.

"He immediately went to the Mobil station, which was closed within an hour," Susan Myers said.

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"It has impacted the whole neighborhood. I've had headaches, smarting of the eyes and difficulty breathing when I sleep," Bob Myers said.

The Myers' daughter, Barrington resident Jenny Morales, said her parents were still keeping the windows open.

"Where has the fuel been going? They paid a lot of money getting their problem figured out. The smell is still intense there," Morales said.

Kim Biggs, spokeswoman for the IEPA, said an investigation was continuing, and the village water treatment plant would remove any gasoline products from the sanitary sewers.

"We will work with the village to determine the extent of contamination from the valve leak," Biggs said.

The station's owner, Ramesh Thakkar, said it was a "small leak" but was not willing to answer further questions about the incident.

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tshields@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter: @tshields19
Breaking his silence about the "Superdog" training center and other controversies roiling Lincoln-Way High School District 210, School Board President Kevin Molloy criticized the former superintendent's actions and blasted some of his critics as "animals."

In a wide-ranging interview Tuesday evening, Molloy said it concerns him that the school board didn't know about "Superdog," an obedience dog training center built without board approval for nearly $45,000 at Lincoln-Way North.

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"It does make you wonder, did (former Superintendent Lawrence Wyllie) know in 2007 that we shouldn't have put the shovel in the ground to have a Lincoln-Way West?" Molloy said. "When you have something of that magnitude, you have to wonder what else didn't we know."

The remarks come at a time of continued financial uncertainty for District 210, which in 2015 landed on the state's financial watch list. Last summer, the school board voted to close Lincoln-Way North as a cost-cutting measure, inflaming many parents in the community and drawing scrutiny of the district's financial management in the past decade.

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Much of the district's financial crisis can be traced back to officials' decision in the mid-2000s to expand from two high schools to four. Officials cited projected population growth in support of constructing two new campuses but some parents criticized the logic at the time and said the district should wait and see whether a fourth school becomes necessary.

While the population growth never materialized, two companies involved with funding the campaign pushing for two schools  Henry Bros. Co. of Hickory Hills and Dahlquist and Lutzow Architects  made more than $41 million combined as part of the project, the Daily Southtown reported last summer.

Molloy said this week he hadn't heard of "Superdog" until March 2015, when the teachers union held a question and answer session and one of the participants stood up to ask about a "dog-training facility."

"I had to say to the guy, 'I have to be honest, I don't know what you're talking about,'" Molloy recalled. "And if there was a dog-training facility I guess as a board member I have to own the fact that there was one and I have to apologize for the fact I didn't know it existed."

Molloy said "the guy" looked at him "sort of cock-eyed, like 'you've got to be kidding me,' so the next day I called (superintendent Scott Tingley) and I said 'what in the hell is that about?'"

Lincoln-Way School Board President Kevin Molloy, left, School District Superintendent Dr. Scott Tingley, center, and board member Christopher Kosel, right, listen as residents ask questions about the district's financial woeson July 1, 2015. (Allen Cunningham / Daily Southtown)

Later, Molloy said he learned that Wyllie directed former building and grounds director Paul Gonzalez to modify a pole barn on North's campus into the dog- training facility, echoing what Gonzalez previously told the Southtown.

"When Dr. Wyllie said something, you did it," said Molloy, adding that it "plain and simple was done with the marching orders of the superintendent who put this together."

But Molloy also defended himself from the argument that he should have known about Superdog, saying he "does more volunteer work than anybody in the community," works 60 hours a week and also serves on the Lincoln-Way school board.

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"On top of that, am I supposed to be driving around the grounds?" Molloy said.

In December, a community group called Lincoln-Way Area Taxpayers Unite filed a lawsuit asking a judge to prevent North's closure and alleging financial mismanagement by 210 officials. They cited Superdog as an example.

At the time, Molloy declined comment due to the lawsuit.

At one point during Tuesday's interview, Molloy volunteered criticism of an arrangement between District 210 and the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra originally engineered by Wyllie, who led the district from 1989 to 2013 and is currently listed as a board member on the IPO's website. He said District 210 recently asked the IPO to begin paying rent.

"I had found out within the last 12 months that there wasn't a penny (of) revenue generated from that, so what else?" Molloy said.

IPO Executive Director Eska Koester confirmed Wednesday that her organization and Lincoln-Way are discussing rent. Koester said she doesn't expect paying rent to cause the IPO to leave the district.

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"We've established key relationships with the district and we value that partnership so we will work with the district on an agreement," Koester said. "I understand that the district is going through some financial challenges."

While acknowledging that the IPO did not pay rent, both Koester and Tingley said the district has benefited from its arrangement with the IPO. Students receive free tickets to shows, they said, and world-class musicians with the IPO have come to classes and worked with students.

"There is a value to our students with our involvement with this program," Tingley said.

Both Koester and Tingley said the IPO began paying the district for tech support services this year, too.

Molloy's most controversial remarks came when he began discussing how the uproar over North's closure has affected his life.

People he called "these animals" have been contacting his bosses and harassing him in public, Molloy said.

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Asked if "these animals" referred to parents protesting North's closure, Molloy said he doesn't know for sure because many of them don't have "the guts to say who they are." But he said some people contacted his corporate office at State Farm, causing bosses to come up and meet with him.

That's what I've been dealing with for the past four or five months so you want me to call them anything other than animals? No, I refuse ... I refuse to call them human beings.  Kevin Molloy

"Why they came across is because this group of animals set up a letter-writing campaign," Molloy said.

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Molloy said he and his wife have also been harassed in public and said he's received nasty emails.

"That's what I've been dealing with for the past four or five months so you want me to call them anything other than animals?" Molloy said. "No, I refuse ... I refuse to call them human beings."

Molloy also said, "It's not everybody."

In response to a question about a day care program run at Lincoln-Way schools, Molloy said critics should be ashamed of themselves for "go(ing) after" the school's foundation and also the day care. Both have been the subject of web postings by parents and critics of District 210.

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"These vile individuals want to go ahead and start picking on that," Molloy said. "What's next?"

gpratt@tribpub.com

Twitter @royalpratt
After receiving negative comments and threats on social media, the board of trustees at Beverly Unitarian Church decided to post this message instead of "Black Lives Matter." (Steve Metsch/Daily Southtown) (Steve Metsch / Pioneer Press)

So rare are days without murder in Chicago that when one occurred in 2012, the news made national headlines. Now, a coalition of Chicago-area ministers, educators and parishioners wants to repeat that day.

The Thou Shalt Not Murder coalition is calling for a murder moratorium in Chicago on Easter Sunday, March 27 as part of an effort to curb gun violence.

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Expressing outrage over the 488 homicides and 2,986 shootings in Chicago last year, the group assembled for a three-hour meeting Jan. 16 in the basement of St. Barnabas Catholic Church in Chicago's South Side Beverly neighborhood. Organizers of the "Thou Shalt Not Murder" campaign included ministers from Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood neighborhoods.

Amid heartfelt prayers, songs and impassioned speeches, the Rev. Michael Hayes, a Pentecostal minister and chaplain for Loyola University Medical Center, described the heartbreak from families torn by gun violence. He also suggested "this campaign be the spark, the mobilization of volunteerism to make the space between what elected officials are giving us and what we need, close altogether."

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"We're not talking about the sale or use of swords, knives, bows and arrows or slingshots! We're talking about the ubiquitous firearm.the weapon of choice in Chicago. As a hospital chaplain, I have seen gun violence  the blood spilled on the hospital sheets, the mothers crying," Hayes said.

The Rev. Karen Mooney, a minister at Beverly Unitarian Church on the South Side, said: "Our purpose is to get Chicagoans to understand this problem and to ask, what is murder? What can we do to stop it?"

Last summer, Beverly Unitarian Church received anonymous threats for posting the words "Black Lives Matter" as an electronic message on its outdoor sign. "That incident is what brought us together for this movement," said the Rev. Dennis Langdon, pastor of nearby Morgan Park Methodist Church.

Though Langdon and other presenters referred to police shootings protested by the Black Lives Matter movement, their focus was more on quelling overall gun violence and murder among Chicago residents.

Langdon urged attendees to encourage their contacts, friends and family members to sign an online petition on the website www.thoushaltnotmurder.com and to view The Chicago Tribune's online crime map, which tracks Chicago homicides and shootings. In addition to monthly totals, the website lists names of homicide victims and links to related news stories.

Kelly Harris, an assistant professor and coordinator of African American Studies at Chicago State University, offered a history lesson with backstories about lesser known players in the civil rights movement who organized in church basements.

"My church has a long history of community involvement," said Shirley Butler, a member of Morgan Park United Methodist. "I came to support the process of making us a beloved church in the community."

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"I think it's good that we're doing this and that we should all be pulling together," said Rosemary Sheils, a parishioner at St. Barnabas. "I'm tired of watching CNN and always seeing Chicago in the news."

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"I came here to try and understand why we are killing each other, what's going on," said Cielo Medina, an Oak Forest resident and member of the Chicago Archdiocese Vicariate V Youth Ministry.

Others attendees with similar views included Sheila Murphy, a retired judge, and Bill Langle, a Morgan Park resident and Chicago Police officer. .

"A lot of movements that change the face of American culture begin in church basements," said Jim White, a chaplain at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park.

The next meeting of the Thou Shalt Not Murder coalition is scheduled 6 to 8 p.m. Feb. 17 at St. Barnabas Church, 10134 S. Longwood Dr. For more information, visit www.thoushaltnotmurder.com.

Susan DeGrane is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.

Editor's note: DeGrane is a member of Beverly Unitarian Church.
Six School District U46 students were lauded for their musical talents at the school board meeting Monday night.

The students were named all-state musicians by the Illinois Music Educators Association.

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The designation represents the highest musical achievement for Illinois high school musicians, according to the district.

"(The Association) is a special venue for our students to showcase, compete and stand proudly among the best in the state of Illinois," U46 fine arts coordinator Alicia Kopec said in a statement announcing the awards. "It's a true reflection on the students' passion to learn and the passion of dedicated staff that are willing to share their love of music."

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Students granted the awards Monday night include Elgin High's Walker Demel, a junior and all-state choir member, and senior trumpet player Brandon Berg of Larkin High, all-state band.

From South Elgin High, senior Alisha Jury received the distinction in the all-state musical category, while seniors Connor Murray and Abby Wheatley took home awards for choir, as did junior Kailie Ryan.

Students took part in a competitive audition process last fall to earn the all-state honor, according to the district.

Selected students will perform at the association's music education conference Wednesday through Saturday in Peoria.

"Success of this level rarely happens without a massive quantity of practice and study," Larkin High band director Brendyn Dobbeck said in the district's release announcing the awards. "Having a student qualify for this festival is a testament to their hard work and dedication of music."

The nonprofit Illinois Music Educators Association is one of the largest of the 52 affiliates comprising the National Association for Music Education, representing all levels of music education, according to the group's website.

Presenting the awards Monday night, board President Donna Smith called the distinctions "phenomenal."

"Congratulations on your accomplishment," she said.

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District CEO Tony Sanders also thanked the parents of instrument players who endured the seemingly endless hours of practice along the way.

geoffz@tribpub.com

Twitter @JournoGeoffZ
Those speaking at the 108th annual Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon Tuesday painted an optimistic picture for the local economy.

In prepared remarks, Fox Valley Broadcasting owner Rick Jakle said, "The positive signs of change are there. We have all seen them: More and more small businesses opening their doors in our community, existing companies expanding while other companies move their operations to make Elgin their new home. People are returning to work, returning to school, buying homes, starting families, shopping in our stores, dining out in our restaurants, enjoying our quality of life amenities  these are all reasons for tremendous optimism for Elgin's economic outlook."

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During a video presentation with a "Back to the Future" theme Chamber marketing and special events director Jason Pawlowski told the audience that the Chamber now has 580 member businesses employing more than 20,100 people, with 88 of those members joining in 2014.

Jakle also noted that Elgin continues to be a leader in the number of new homes being built in Illinois, with 281 housing starts in 2015, which placed the city just behind Naperville, Elgin neighbor Pingree Grove and Chicago. Elgin also had 1,245 sales of existing detached single-family homes in 2015, which was just behind Aurora's 1,712 sales, which was tops among Fox Valley communities.

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"This represented a 1.5 percent increase from last year. Median sale prices of detached single-family homes for the year increased 15.5 percent over last year. All of these facts bode well for Elgin's future as an attractive place to invest and put down roots," Jakle said.

Jakle, who has emceed the luncheon for 35 years, also noted Elgin's latest unemployment rates available were at 5.7 percent for October and at 6.7 percent for November. Both numbers were better than those during the same months last year.

Jakle mentioned that the total number of people employed in Elgin grew from 51,048 in January 2015 to 53,962 at the end of November  the most in the history of the city. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Elgin's population has never been bigger, either, with the city now home to more than 111,000 residents.

Manufacturing jobs continue to fuel the Elgin economy, Jakle said, with jobs paying an average living wage of $77,000 annually making it possible for people to buy and build homes.

With more than 1.1 million square feet in space built on spec for businesses in recent years, Jakle noted that amounted to about 26 acres or "bigger than the biggest Costco."

Jakle also noted that in 2015 the work of the Economic Development Group helped draw Zilber Property Group, Motorola and the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association to bring facilities to Elgin for 2016. The group is the arm of the Chamber contracted by the city for economic development work.

Hoffer Plastics Director of Human Resources Eric Smith told the diners about the group's Workforce Development Committee. Smith that to interest young people in manufacturing careers, the committee hosted once again the "Manufacturing Your Future" exhibit at Gail Borden Public Library in 2015. The committee also arranged school field trips to local businesses, promoted a manufacturing career internship program and is involved in other youth-oriented efforts.

And among its latest efforts, Jakle said that the Chamber recently hosted the first session of its Small Business Academy. The classes for entrepreneurs will be meeting once a month, and the first class has 21 people enrolled, Jakle said.

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"The Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce is the place where business belongs," Jakle concluded.

After the presentation, Economic Development Group Director Tony Lucenko said that along with drawing new employers to Elgin, the group also has been working to draw more retail to the city. To that end, Lucenko said that the group now has a retail marketing analysis that identifies nine retail corridors in Elgin. The document can be distributed to retailers looking for new sites, Lucenko said, and was given out to people at a recent International Council of Shopping Centers gathering in Chicago.

About 125 people attended the luncheon, which was held at the Grand Victoria Casino.

MDanahey@tribpub.com
Elgin hopes to widen the pool of applicants it has to do firefighting work for the city -- such as controlling this bonfire last fall set as part of a rally in support of the Chicago Cubs and the team's playoff run. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

In a move intended to help eventually create a fire department that more closely reflects Elgin's demographics, the City Council Wednesday night will discuss moving along Board of Fire and Police Commissioners recommendations for changes to firefighter hiring eligibility requirements.

Fire Chief John Fahy said the suggested changes are part of short- and long-term plans that could help change the makeup of the department.

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"Ultimately we have to get it into kids' heads that these are good jobs," Fahy said.

Currently, of its 133 sworn Elgin Fire Department members, two are Hispanic males, three are white females and the rest are white males, Fahy said.

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According to information provided by the city, the fire department's last recruitment cycle was in February 2014, and 318 people applied, including 269 white males, four black males, 25 Hispanic males, and two Native American males.

The top 60 candidates were interviewed by the board, and the final eligibility list it established had 52 candidates that passed the interview process, with 51 of them white males and one an Hispanic male.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Elgin has more than 111,000 residents, with 43.6 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, 7.4 percent identified as black, and 5.4 percent Asian. Slightly more than half of the city's residents are female.

With the department starting its own fire cadet academy in 2014, the recommendations include awarding five points for completion of a minimum of two years in that program. The fire department's program and the police department's Explorers group are drawing a diverse group of youths, Fahy said, and the hope is some of them will want to enter those career paths.

To make the fire department list, another five points would be given for living in Elgin for at least a year prior to the points being awarded, Fahy noted.

Elgin's diversity consultant, Phil Reed, said giving city residents an advantage theoretically could add diversity to the talent pool.

"And having people who live in Elgin work for Elgin has advantages for the city, including the money they would spend in town," Reed said.

By law, a maximum of 20 preference points may be awarded to any person during the appointment process, Fahy noted, and by law, a candidate can receive preference points for military experience, paramedic certifications and levels of firefighter certifications.

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The board also is recommending more flexibility in the prerequisites for being allowed to take the hiring exam.

If adopted, one those requirements would be having Emergency Medical Technician Basic Certification, which Fahy said is one introductory course. Those hired in Elgin don't have to be paramedics, but have 18 months from their hire dates to become ones. On the last hire list, Fahy said, the top 25 candidates all were paramedics.

Elgin is looking at moves it can make to widen the pool of applicants for the city's fire department. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

Past that, the applicant/exam-takers could have at least 60 credit hours from an accredited college; or at least three years of active duty military experience; or at least three years of service as a full-time employee and current employment with the city of Elgin; or be 19 or older and have not less than three years participation in the Elgin Fire Cadet Academy or Elgin Police Explorer Program and 100 hours of volunteer time in the Academy or Explorer program. Such applicants could be placed on the eligibility list, but could not be hired until they reached the age of 21.

"Such options past college would make more people eligible to take the test and could widen the pool," Fahy said.

Past the hiring/testing changes, Fahy mentioned that the department is working with School District U46 so the district eventually has paramedic courses similar to ones already in place in Community Unit School District 303 in St. Charles.

Along with its youth program, the department also visits schools to talk about the profession. Such stops included a career day this school year at Ronald D. O'Neal Elementary School, Fahy said.

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Elgin Human Resources Senior Advisor Tim Bennett said that in general Elgin tries to cast as wide a net as possible when recruiting works for city jobs.

To do that, Elgin staff heads to universities to recruit and to ones known for specific fields when looking for certain hires, Bennett said. Staff sometimes will head to or contact schools known to have larger minority populations.

Elgin also recruits at job fairs, including ones that target people from various backgrounds such as those for veterans or those for minorities, Bennett said.

Mayor Dave Kaptain noted the lack of diversity in those seeking city employment is not unique to Elgin. He mentioned he recently discussed the matter with members of Lao American Organization of Elgin and is seeking their input into how to get more Lao youth to apply for city jobs.

Councilwoman Tish Powell noted that with overtime a good many firefighters make $100,000 or more a year. According to the city's website, the starting salary posted for the firefighter/paramedic jobs in 2014 was $60,863 to $81,120.

"I don't think the general public is aware of that," Powell said.

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Powell said she's had conversations with a variety of people as to why minorities might not be applying for firefighting and other careers with the city. She also is doing her own research into what towns might be having success in recruiting a diverse workforce.

As for the lack of minority applicants, Powell posited two possible reasons.

"When kids don't see people who look like them doing a job, they might not think it's a job they can do," Powell said.

Elgin Fire Chief John Fahy and the City Council will be discussing proposed changes in eligibility requirements for those who want to take the test to become firefighters for the city. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

"While it's not the case today, fire departments have a history of exclusion," Powell said. "In most places these were jobs that were passed down from family member to family member. And certain groups, such as the Irish, made up a good part of departments."

While the goal remains to have the best people for the jobs, consultant Reed noted reaching and advertising to minority communities poses challenges. In the case of becoming a firefighter those include that many might not understand the process and the requirements for applying, such as having to take paramedic courses.

"There might also be a fear of fighting fires," Reed said.

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"It's a matter of reaching out, letting people know what it takes to become a firefighter, where to go and what to do to meet the requirements, and letting them know these are good, well-paying jobs," Reed said.

MDanahey@tribpub.com
Student workers at Curt's Cafe on Central Street Wednesday go about their duties on Wednesday after the death of one of their co-workers, Bejamin "Bo" Bradford-Mandujano. (Bob Seidenberg / Pioneer Press)

Evanston police are looking into the possibility that 20-year-old Bejamin "Bo" Mandujano-Bradford was involved in an "illicit arrangement" when he was shot to death Jan. 19 on the 1300 block of Darrow Avenue, the city's police chief said Tuesday.

Working with investigators from the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force, Evanston detectives are pursuing leads that the victim was "in the midst of an illicit arrangement to take delivery of something and things went poorly," Evanston police Chief Richard Eddington said.

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Police declined to give further details on the "illicit arrangement."

The shooting jolted the tight knit community around Curt's Cafe, a unique nonprofit program in Evanston which gives at-risk youth and young ex-offenders like Mandujano-Bradford a chance to learn food service skills in one of its two cafes.

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Madujano-Bradford had just passed his food service examination the day of the shooting. He had made inquiries about a job that would allow him to mentor other young people on lessons he had learned. The day after his death, a notice went out confirming that he had been accepted into a culinary skills program at Oakton Community College, said Q. Ibraheem, the corporate executive chef in the Curt's program.

Q. Ibraheem, corporate executive chef at Curt's Cafe, embraces a student who turned out at an emotional ceremony at the cafe on Sunday. (Bob Seidenberg / Pioneer Press)

Three cafe workers expressed interest in becoming mentors after news of his death spread, said Susan Trieschmann, Curt's executive director. Trieschmann addressed a gathering of staff, volunteers and community members at a tribute for Mandujano-Bradford at Curt's Cafe North on Sunday.

"In honor of the legacy of your son," said Trieschmann, addressing the victim's mother, Debra Hicks-Caluya, who also attended the gathering, "Curt's is committed to make sure his legacy is held in respect and love as he did for all of us."

"We're going to make sure that each and every young man that comes through the program knows about Mr. Bradford and his goals, and we're going to hold his legacy in our heart," she said.

Hicks-Caluya said she wanted to serve as a mentor working at Curt's and carrying out her son's dream.

"My son had all this energy," she said Sunday. "Energy is love."

On the night of the shooting, Evanston police officers received a 911 call around 9 p.m. reporting shots fired on the 1300 block of Darrow Avenue, located just around the corner from Curt's Cafe South, authorities said.

They found Mandujano-Bradford a short distance down the block from the house where he lived with his mother, police said. He had been shot in the head and torso, according to authorities.

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He was taken to Evanston NorthShore University Hospital, where he died about two hours later, police said.

Community members gathered at a candlelight vigil outside shooting victim Bejamin "Bo" Madujano's home on Darrow Avenue in Evanston on Saturday night. (Bob Seidenberg / Pioneer Press)

With the shooting occurring on a winter night with little street traffic, police are seeking witnesses and were set to flier the neighborhood Tuesday, hoping people will come forward, Eddington said.

Eddington stressed that investigators looking into a possible "illicit transaction" as a motive should not diminish the rebuilding process Mandujano-Bradford or people in his situation go through, nor Curt's Cafe's commitment to the work.

Students are referred to Curt's Cafe by Evanston probation officers, the Youth Job Center of Evanston, social service agencies and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, the group says on its website.

The three-month food service certification program was formed in response to a high recidivism rate among previously incarcerated or proven-risk youth who, without job skills, showed a high rate of being back in the criminal justice system within a year of release, according to the restaurant's website.

Records at the Skokie courthouse show that Mandujano-Bradford was fined and received a two-year probationary sentence related to a March 2015 residential burglary conviction on Nov. 5, about the time he started in Curt's three-month food certification program.

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Court records also show he had been charged in connection with several other incidents, including two aggravated unlawful use of weapons cases in 2014.

At first, "reserved and quiet," said Lori Dube, a member of Curt's nonprofit board., Mandujano-Bradford approached his tasks with verve. His personality came out as he became more comfortable in the program, she said.

Bejamin "Bo" Mandujano-Bradford, shortly before his death, is flanked by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson (on this right) and Laurie Kaplan, director of development at Curt's Cafe on Monday. (Curt's Cafe / Handout)

Over time, he became "a big hugger and had a really big smile," she said. "He was a leader and showed tremendous maturity, and tried to (help) other youths here in making some of the same life changes he was making."

Kevin Kreuser, another Curt's Cafe board member who works in the juvenile courts system, said some young people take to the program, but others fail to adjust and "are out the door after a couple of weeks."

To be accepted in the Curt's Cafe program, applicants are put through an interview process to see how willing they are to make positive changes, Dube said.

Dube said Mandujano-Bradford, an Evanston Township High School graduate, started as other trainees do, on sink duty, washing dishes, then moved up to food preparation, where he did "everything from making sandwiches to putting together catering orders." He eventually moved into customer service and learning barista skills, she said.

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Lizzie Brimhall, who said she joined Curt's after she was laid off from her job, said she trained under Mandujano-Bradford, learning to make coffee drinks.

Brimhall has since found work in a Wilmette coffee house, using some of the skills she learned under him, she said.

Mandujano-Bradford was very low-key, encouraging, telling her "this is going to be easy, you're going to be great," she said.

Rick Marsh, a corporate executive who volunteers on the men's mentoring team at Curt's, said Sunday that Mandujano-Bradford was struggling.

Marsh said he recalled a conversation with Mandujano-Bradford about "fast money" versus "slow money."

"He was trying to reconcile all that, put his life in place," Marsh said.

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bseidenberg@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter: @evanstonscribe
Two children enrolled at Evanston's Unity Preschool tested positive for pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, last week, a city official confirmed.

Director of Evanston's Health and Human Services Department, Evonda Thomas-Smith, said the cases are suspected and not considered confirmed by the department standards. She said that although both children tested positive for the highly contagious bacterial infection, neither have demonstrated any clinical symptoms associated with pertussis.

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The disease is spread through coughing, sneezing and close contact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Officials at the nonprofit preschool told the city health department that they had suspended activities Thursday and Friday and sanitized the building, Thomas-Smith said. She said officials at the school chose to take those actions of their own volition and were not asked to do so by the health department.

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Officials at Unity Preschool could not immediately be reached for comment.

"Everyone has (since) returned to school as normal" including the students who tested positive for the illness, Thomas-Smith said.

If a case of pertussis is confirmed -- meaning a student presents with symptoms of the illness in addition to a positive test result -- she said the child's family would be instructed to isolate the child until they had received a full course of the antibiotics used to treat the illness.

Symptoms of pertussis, Thomas-Smith said, include fever, fatigue and a dry cough with a whooping sound. She said neither child, whose ages she declined to provide, showed symptoms of the disease.

But Larry Kociolek, an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, says a lack of symptoms doesn't always mean a lack of pertussis.

"Kids don't whoop. That's a pretty well-known fact in pediatrics," he said.

Kociolek said preschool aged children do not have the respiratory strength required to produce a whooping sound even during advanced stages of the illness.

"The problem is preschool age children may have younger siblings at home and they are at a very high risk of spreading the disease to infants," Kociolek said.

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Of all the diseases children are required to be vaccinated against, he said pertussis "is the disease we see most frequently."

Two cases of pertussis were reported earlier this month at Glenbrook North High School, in Northbrook, and at Warren Township High School in Lake County.

No other suspected or confirmed cases of pertussis have been reported to the city's health department, according Thomas-Smith.

"We are in close contact with (Unity Preschool), but at this point, I don't want to create any unwarranted anxiety," she said.

Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Health events, support, screenings and more across Lake County.

EVENTS

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ENROLLMENT: Since November, Enroll Lake County! has reported helping over 873 Lake County residents enroll in a health insurance plan through the Health Insurance Marketplace or Medicaid, and open enrollment ends Sunday. A project of the Lake County Health Department and Community Health Center in partnership with the Waukegan Public Library, Enroll Lake County! is in its third year. Trained and certified navigators are in place at various sites throughout the county to enroll or re-enroll residents in health insurance plans by the deadline. Residents who enrolled in a health insurance plan through the Marketplace last year must re-enroll this year or be automatically re-enrolled in their current plan. Appointments are available in English and Spanish by calling 847-775-2582.

MOBILE HEALTH: The Community Care Connection, a mobile health unit from Rosalind Franklin University, will offer free health screenings for blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, body mass index and more. Screenings will be offered Feb. 2 at Park Place Senior Center, 414 S. Lewis Ave., Waukegan; Feb. 3 at Holy Family Food Pantry, 914 8th St., Waukegan; and Feb. 4 at Warren-Newport Public Library, 224 N. O'Plaine Road, Gurnee. All will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Details, 847-578-8670.

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SUPPORT

ALS: A group meets at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2, at Marytown Retreat and Conference Center, 1600 W. Park Ave., Libertyville. Details, 847-367-780

ALZHEIMER'S: Support group meets at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 4 at Westmoreland Nursing Center, 660 N. Westmoreland Road, Lake Forest. Details, 847-535-6764.

BILINGUAL GRIEF SUPPORT AFTER THE LOSS OF A CHILD: Northern Lake County Illinois Compassionate Friends Chapter meets 7 p.m. Feb. 4 at Holy Family Church, 450 Keller St., Waukegan. The mission is to assist families by providing support following the death of a child of any age. Details, 847-249-4776.

CANCER: A Christian Cancer Survivors group meets 7 p.m. Monday at Advocate Condell Medical Center's Chapel, 801 S. Milwaukee Ave., Libertyville. Details, 847-990-5295.

CAREGIVER: Support group meets 2 p.m. Feb. 4 at Antioch Senior Center, 817 Holbek Drive. Details, 847-903-5604.

FIBROMYALGIA, CHRONIC FATIGUE, LUPUS, CHRONIC PAIN: Group meets 10 a.m. Feb. 6 at 884 Main St., Antioch. The meetings are free and participants are welcome to bring spouses, friends and family members. Details, 847-362-7807.

GRIEF: A support group for anyone experiencing a loss meets 6 p.m. Feb. 5 at Park Place Senior Center in Waukegan. Details, 847-244-9242.

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LYME SUPPORT: Come Walk in My Shoes group meets at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 3 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Ingleside. Details, 847-833-5962.

NATIONAL ALLIANCE ON MENTAL ILLNESS OF LAKE COUNTY: General education meeting at 7 p.m. Feb 3 at Hinkston Park Field House, 800 Baldwin Ave. in Waukegan. Julie Palumbo and Robert Arvidson of Catholic Charities, Holbrook Counseling, will discuss "Implementing Self Care." The mission is to provide support, education, advocacy and resources to those who suffer from neurobiological brain disorders. Family members also welcome. The Healthy Living Group meets 11 a.m. Wednesdays at Lake County Health Department, 3002 Grand Ave., Waukegan. NAMI Connections Peer Support Group meets at 5:30 p.m. Thursdays at Zion Drop In Center, 1022 27th St. Details, www.namilake-il.org or call 847-689-0509.

Twitter @newssun
The widow of Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was charged Wednesday with felony money laundering and misuse of charitable funds in an indictment tying her to her husband's alleged thefts from the youth program he ran.

The charges represent the latest fallout from his death Sept. 1, in which authorities first cast his fatal shooting as a murder, prompting a widespread manhunt. Authorities in November then announced that Gliniewicz killed himself and staged his death to look like a murder as it became clear his alleged crimes would come to light.

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On Wednesday, a grand jury charged his wife, Melodie Gliniewicz, 51, with being an accomplice to those alleged crimes. She surrendered to Lake County authorities in Waukegan on Wednesday afternoon and was released after posting $5,000 bail.

Previewing a potential defense to the charges, her lawyers contended in a statement that she was "a victim of her husband's secret actions."

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Authorities said they believe more than $10,000 was misspent from accounts that were supposed to support the now-defunct Police Explorers chapter Lt. Gliniewicz led in the generally peaceful village near the Wisconsin border. Detectives determined funds intended for the Explorer program  designed to give aspiring youths police experience in the field  were used by the couple to pay for a vacation in Hawaii and trips to Fox Lake Theatre, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, authorities said. Explorer funds were used for more than 400 restaurant charges, authorities said.

If convicted, Melodie Gliniewicz could receive as many as seven years in prison or probation, officials said.

As she was walked through the Lake County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday afternoon to turn herself in, Gliniewicz cast her eyes down and did not comment. Her attorneys released a statement saying she was "devastated."

"Melodie has suffered greatly over the past few months and continues to move her family forward after the emotionally traumatizing events of September 1, 2015," the statement said. "Considering Melodie's cooperation with law enforcement, she is devastated by the decision to bring charges against her. Melodie is a victim of her husband's secret actions and looks forward to her day in Court to show the world her innocence."

The indictment comes as another hit to the already-battered reputation of the lieutenant and his family. Melodie Gliniewicz, along with the couple's four sons, gained nationwide attention and sympathy in the days after the lieutenant's shooting, when he was lionized as a selfless mentor to the village's youth cut down in his career's twilight.

Melodie Gliniewicz tearfully spoke at a lakeside vigil held the night after Lt. Gliniewicz died, and images of her standing before her husband's coffin at his massive, elaborate Labor Day funeral became emblematic of the community's grief over a fallen officer.

"We all lost somebody yesterday," she told the crowd at the vigil. "A husband, a father, a son, a brother, a mentor, a leader, a role model and a friend. And of course, a brother in blue.

Melodie Gliniewicz, 51, of Antioch, leaves Lake County Jail after making bail following her indictment Jan. 27, 2016. She is the widow of Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, who staged his suicide to look like a homicide in September 2015. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

"Joe was my best friend, my world ... the love of my life for the last 26 and a half years," she continued, reading from a yellow sheet of paper and surrounded by her sons. "He was my rock as much as I was his rock. Every night, he came home to me."

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Weeks later, after some media began reporting the possibility that he'd committed suicide, his widow agreed to a TV interview in which she strongly disputed that possibility and said she was angered that it had been considered.

His death made way for investigators to probe his actions toward the end of his life. On Nov. 4, the commander of the Lake County Major Crime Task Force announced officials' conclusion that Lt. Gliniewicz took his own life, and at least two people were under investigation in connection with years of alleged thefts.

On Wednesday, task force spokesman Christopher Covelli said the financial investigation is complete and no related additional charges in Lake County are expected. All charges were related to funds intended for the Explorers program, according to the indictment. The program  disbanded in the wake of Gliniewicz's death  was funded by donations, village money, participant fees and revenues earned through services such as parking duty, officials said.

In a news release announcing the indictment, authorities said they found "inconsistencies in financial documents" as they investigated Lt. Gliniewicz's death.

"Specifically, it appeared non-business-related monies had been withdrawn and money laundering had occurred involving the finances of the Fox Lake Police Explorer Post," the release said, adding that Melodie Gliniewicz "was also found to hold a fiduciary role as an adult advisor" of the program.

In November, her attorneys put records from the investigation into the public eye as they sought to overturn a court order freezing several family bank accounts. In the records, an investigator for the prosecutor's office said the couple had "exerted unauthorized control" over funds intended for the Explorer program.

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One of the largest withdrawals from an Explorer account allegedly tapped for personal expenses, $7,000, was taken out in March 2014, according to court documents. One day later, the records show a $7,000 deposit was made to an account in Melodie Gliniewicz's name.

"The transferring of funds via cash may be indicative of an effort to conceal the activity," the investigator for the state's attorney's office said in an affidavit.

Melodie Gliniewicz's attorneys argued investigators failed to show probable cause that any crime was committed, saying the timing of the transactions wasn't enough to prove wrongdoing. They also said investigators left out information that would have presented transactions in a different light, including that some deposits into the Explorer account came from Lt. Gliniewicz's salary and retirement plan.

In a selection of deleted text messages recovered from Lt. Gliniewicz's phone and released by the task force, the officer appeared to discuss repayments as a strategy to explain away problems with the Explorers' finances.

On June 26, he urged a person he said he'd lent money, identified only as "Individual #2," to begin paying "at min $100 a month."

The message continued, "So if called on the carpet I can say, 'we give our explorers and advisors loans from time to time if it is needed, and this is proof it is being paid back' you get whwre I'm comong (sic) from?"

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The day before, Lt. Gliniewicz sent the same person a message saying he or she must repay money borrowed from "that 'other' account" ... "or you will be visiting me in JAIL!!" according to texts released by the task force.

While some accounts remained frozen as the investigation continued, prosecutors did agree to release some money to Melodie Gliniewicz, including about $33,500 that Lake County Assistant State's Attorney Ken LaRue said came from a paycheck and donations received after Lt. Gliniewicz's death.

The village of Fox Lake issued a statement in response to Melodie Gliniewicz's indictment, saying in part: "The allegation that she participated in an embezzlement scheme that victimized a youth organization, its members and, in effect, the entire Fox Lake community, is extremely disappointing."

Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim said in a news release: "This entire matter has been a sad and tragic saga for the Village of Fox Lake. My hope is that we will be able to close this unfortunate chapter and move forward with ensuring a professional and transparent police department dedicated to the citizens of Fox Lake."

Melodie Gliniewicz. (Lake County Sheriff's Office)

In a little less than a month, the lieutenant and his wife would have celebrated their 27th wedding anniversary, according to his obituary.

Melodie Gliniewicz has no previous record of criminal charges in Lake County, court records show.

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The Gliniewicz family was deeply involved in Fox Lake's now-defunct Explorer program, which focused more heavily than most similar groups on weaponry and aggressive tactical exercises. In a video of a fake SWAT raid on a houseboat in 2011, Melodie Gliniewicz can be seen in the background, laughing as her husband directs his charges.

Lauren Zumbach is a News-Sun reporter, and Dan Hinkel is a Chicago Tribune reporter. The News-Sun's Jim Newton and the Tribune's Stacey Wescott contributed.

lzumbach@tribpub.com

dhinkel@tribpub.com
This willingness to take on a difficult issue, when there is risk for taking the stance, is the sign of a leader. To take that risk and have the decision pay off is the sign of a good leader. That is just one example of how Rotering has acted as mayor. Some of what she's done has upset people, including me, on some issues. However, judging her on an individual issue is unfair. Instead, it's important to look at her overall her ability to roll-up her sleeves and bring people together to work on difficult problems. On issues large and small, Rotering has done just that.
Students from the Brittany Springs multifamily subdivision, north of U.S. 34 and east of Illinois 59 in Naperville, could be reassigned farther east to Owen Elementary to help ease overcrowding at Watts Elementary in Naperville. (Suzanne Baker / Naperville Sun)

Two crowded elementary schools in Aurora and Naperville could get some relief from proposed boundary changes in Indian Prairie School District 204.

Administrators Monday presented the school board with plans to realign boundaries to ease conditions at Watts Elementary in Naperville and Brooks Elementary in Aurora. A final vote on the matter won't occur until at least Feb. 16 to allow board members to digest information of the changes and neighborhood assignments for subdivisions under construction.

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Laura Devine Johnston, assistant superintendent for elementary teaching and learning, said both Watts and Brooks schools are at more than 95 percent capacity.

"That's really when a school community feels the crowdedness," Johnston said.

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District schools at 90 percent capacity often must use the art and music rooms for core classrooms, she said.

"We really need to give Brooks and Watts some relief," Superintendent Karen Sullivan said.

The proposal calls for approximately 180 students who live in Ashton Pointe, Brittany Springs and Carrolwood to be reassigned.

Students in the Brittany Springs and Carrollwood multifamily subdivisions in Naperville would switch from Watts Elementary to Owen Elementary. The change is projected to drop enrollment at Watts to 636 students next year from the current 739 students.

Owen's projected enrollment would increase from the current 478 students to 552 in 2016-17. Located just northeast of 79th Street and Modaff Road in Naperville, Owen is one of four district elementary schools at between 42 percent and 57 percent capacity, district figures show.

In Aurora, 75 students who live in the Ashton Pointe subdivision near the southeast corner of Eola and North Aurora roads would be reassigned from Brooks Elementary to Young Elementary, Johnston said.

The shift would drop enrollment at Brooks from 816 to 693 students.

As has been done with boundary changes in the past, the district would allow fifth-graders the option to remain at their current school to finish out their final year at the same elementary school if their parents are able to provide transportation, Johnston said.

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While school board members didn't have specific concerns Monday about the shift of existing students, they did raise questions about administrative suggestions for new subdivision assignments.

For instance, Young Elementary would become the home school for the projected 66 elementary students coming from the Union Square and Metro 59 multifamily subdivisions under construction west of Route 59 in Aurora.

The realignment plan also calls for the projected 92 elementary students who will live in the new Station Boulevard apartments in Aurora to attend Kendall Elementary in far south Naperville, another school with plenty of space. Johnston estimated the bus ride for Station Boulevard students would be about 20 minutes.

Although Kendall is a feeder school to Crone Middle School in Naperville, Station Boulevard would be assigned to Granger Middle School and Metea Valley High School, both in Aurora.

School board member Mark Rising said he was concerned the new housing going up in the north end of the district will cause numbers to skyrocket at Granger and Metea Valley.

Jay Strang, chief school business official, said the proposed changes are only temporary. He said the district will have to address long-term solutions when the district gets a better handle on growth.

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The economic downturn that stalled construction within the district has swung the other way, and Strang said housing projects are returning in the northern and southern ends of the district.

How quickly the apartments, townhouses and homes go up is anybody's guess, Strang said.

Board member Michael Raczak said a long-term plan might be needed sooner than later. "We need to figure out what's our tipping point," he said.

Board President Lori Price suggested the board schedule a special workshop session to discuss the boundary issues, as well as at least look at other solutions studied by administrators as potential fixes, such as modular units, additions to existing schools, and repurposing Indian Plains in Aurora or Wheatland School in Naperville. Price said the workshop should be held sometime before the Feb. 16 meeting so school officials have time to get out the word before kindergarten registration begins. No date was set for the workshop.

The last time boundary changes were made was in January 2013, when attendance adjustments were made to ease crowding at Cowlishaw, Longwood and Young elementary schools. In February 2008, boundaries also were adjusted for Builta, Clow, Cowlishaw, Longwood, McCarty, Peterson and Young elementary schools when high school boundaries were redrawn to accommodate Metea Valley High School.

Strang said the District 204 will continue track elementary schools like Brookdale, Longwood, Welch and White Eagle, where capacity levels are at between 87 percent and 93 percent.

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Elementary schools with a capacity of between 59 percent and 86 percent include Clow, Fry, Georgetown, Cowlishaw, McCarty, Patterson, Peterson, Gombert, Spring Brook, Steck and Young.

Besides Owen and Kendall, elementary schools with the least enrollment are Builta and Graham on the far south end of the district.

subaker@tribpub.com

Twitter @SBakerSun1
A proposal by Ranquist Development Group calls for a five-story, 28-condominium development to be built at the site of the former Tasty Dog restaurant at 708 Lake St. (Ranquist Development Group)

After reviewing proposals for the former Tasty Dog location, the Oak Park village chose to rebuild rather than reuse the current building.

Following Tasty Dog's closure in September 2015, the village authorized the Oak Park Economic Development Corporation to seek proposals for the land at 708 Lake St.

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According to Economic Development Corporation Executive Director John Lynch, nine proposals were received, with seven of them calling for reuse of the current building.

In the end, the Economic Development Corporation recommended the redevelopment of the site as a way to attract more residents and tax dollars to that vibrant section of Oak Park.

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"We really felt like this was the most exciting opportunity which was to redevelop the site," Lynch said. "Redevelopment by adding some density provides the village to reap tremendously higher property tax from the site. The site can support more density from an urban-design standpoint."

The village is now negotiating with Ranquist Development, who proposes a five-story, 28-condominium development on the land. The building would include approximately 4,500 square feet of first-floor retail space.

Trustees unanimously authorized village staff to enter into negotiations for the property at the Jan. 19 Village Board meeting. Trustees Adam Salzman and Andrea Ott were absent.

"We will work with the developer to negotiate a redevelopment agreement that will set up certain timeframes under which they will have to go through the planned-development process," development customer services director Tammie Grossman said. "There is also a referral to the plan commission for a hearing on the application."

Among the responders who proposed reusing the building were Dunkin Donuts, Meatheads, Jimmy John's, La Parrillita Mexican Grill, Burrito Parilla Mexicana and Starbucks, which would have left its space across Lake Street to move into the larger building.

"We realize a lot of people in the community have said it would be great to maintain this building and keep a retail presence here," Lynch said. "It bears noting the mixed-use concept proposed would actually provide more retail space than what's currently there now. We think providing that kind of activity in addition to a number of new businesses will benefit all businesses on Lake Street."

Property Markets Group also proposed a redevelopment of the location and brought a 10-story, 84-unit residential building to the table that was ultimately rejected.

"I think one of the things that took [Ranquist] over the top was they not only had a great idea and a great plan, but they already talked about how it would be marketed and would be sold," Trustee Peter Barber said. "It gave us more confidence that this particular project can go up and be sold and be moved."

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According to Lynch, the $17.1 million development will feature a modern architectural style, which trustees appeared to favor.

"I think the concept of more urban design in Oak Park is really exciting," Trustee Colette Lueck said. "You see that in downtown Chicago. I'm really excited to see that happening here. It will be a first step toward hopefully more of that."

sschering@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter: @steveschering
The Gary West Side Leadership Academy is enjoying an academic resurrection, making good on a promise from its principal over a year ago.

West Side's improvement from an F to a C was reflected in grades released Tuesday, culminating a much maligned ISTEP testing debacle season, bailed out by a state legislative reprieve.

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Those results, which weren't returned to schools for nine months, showed a statewide 20-point decline. The drop came as Indiana upgraded its standards, switching from Common Core to newly developed Indiana Standards with little preparation time for schools. Educators assailed the process, calling it unfair and unjust to evaluate teachers based on a test they called flawed.

In the end, Republicans who control the General Assembly agreed, passing a bill blunting the grade impact for the 2014-15 school year.

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"Finally, they did the right thing by holding school districts harmless, giving us a chance to prepare for new ISTEP testing," said Portage Township Superintendent Richard Weigel. "At least it allows a period of time to adjust. Like all the schools around the state, our new test scores dropped considerably."

Using the previous year scores, 10 of 11 Portage schools received A's.

Like Portage, most Hoosier schools' grades didn't change from the previous year because Pence signed the bill last week holding schools harmless if they received a lower grade. The grade could go up, however, if it increased.

West Side pulled off the increase. Struggling with five straight years of F grades, West Side's C grade allowed it to escape the state intervention cross hairs.

Principal Terrance Little predicted in late 2014 the school was turning around. Little and five other Gary principals offered remedies at a state-required hearing after their schools posted failing grades.

"It was really listening to our students," Little said Tuesday. He said teachers learned how to fill in academic gaps by paying attention to students.

"You learn that from getting to know your students and once you get to know them, you start assessing them."

West Side also changed its discipline strategy, moving to a program of restorative justice, which involves school resource officers and other students.

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"Last year, West Side had a significant decrease in the number of student altercations and suspensions," said Superintendent Cheryl Pruitt. Little estimated the decrease at about 20 percent to 30 percent.

Pruitt said the school used a new software data program that collected real time information about student progress. "Everything from social and/or emotional challenges to academic data is documented. Based on a student's unique needs, they're assigned to appropriate support staff as needed," she said.

"We're hoping that with our grade, parents start to realize we are the Northwest Indiana school of choice," said Little whose school has about 800 high school students.

The school now offers eight Advanced Placement classes and dual credit courses at area colleges.

Gary still has its share of troubled schools. Four received F's  Beveridge, Jefferson, and Marquette elementaries and New Tech.

It marked Beveridge's fifth straight F, bringing it in line for a state intervention.

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In East Chicago, Block and West Side middle schools received failing grades.

Also in Lake County, the Gary Roosevelt College and Career Academy, a state turnaround school run by EdisonLearning Inc. received an F, along with the Charter School of the Dunes, also in Gary.

Meanwhile, all 10 Crown Point schools and all five Munster schools received A's. In Valparaiso, eight of 11 schools got A's. All the Hobart schools also received A's, except one.

Since the change in standards began, state school chief Glenda Ritz, a Democrat, advocated that schools be held harmless. She said Tuesday she was pleased the grades don't penalize schools and communities during the transition.

"Indiana should move away from labeling Hoosier schools, and in turn Hoosier students, based on the results of a lengthy, pass/fail, high-stakes assessment," Ritz said. She supports reforms that replace the ISTEP pass/fail format with a more streamlined test that focuses on student growth.

ccarlson@post-trib.com

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Twitter: @ccwriterPT
The United Steelworkers (USW) union members, retirees and supporters will rally for a contract at ArcelorMittal's North American headquarters in Chicago, January 27, 2016. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Northwest Indiana union steelworkers employed at ArcelorMittal mills were able to take their message that they want a new contract to the top of the corporate ladder Wednesday.

A delegation of five United Steelworker members from Northwest Indiana was invited to have coffee and a brief discussion of the issues with the steel giant's chairman and chief executive officer, Lakshmi Mittal, and the outgoing CEO of ArcelorMittal Americas, Lou Schorsch.

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Mittal arrived at the company's North American headquarters in Chicago just as a rally that was attended by about 100 USW members, retirees and supporters, most of whom were from Northwest Indiana, was getting ready to end.

He met with the delegation for about an hour.

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"A lot was discussed in that time, from global economic issues to the dumping of foreign steel," said Sarah Smith, a communications action team coordinator with USW Local 6787 in Burns Harbor and one of the delegation who met with Mittal and Schorsch.

"Obviously, there were some differences of opinion on what we need to do, but we left on cordial terms," she said.

She said it was hard to tell if the meeting would make a difference at the bargaining table, where representatives for the USW and ArcelorMittal continue to meet to work out a new contract. The union workers' last contract expired Sept. 1.

Bill Steers, general manager, communications & corporate responsibility for ArcelorMittal, said Mittal approached the USW members upon arriving at the corporate office and invited members to join him and Schorsch for a conversation about the challenges and opportunities facing ArcelorMittal in the U.S.

"It is important to note that there was no discussion of contract proposals or details of actual negotiations. Rather, the conversation centered around many of the same challenges that we have discussed in public communications leading up to the negotiations," Steers sais.

These include the need to be more cost competitive relative to other domestic steel producers and material products, the impact of steel import pressures on the U.S. market, and how contract negotiations serve as an opportunity to align the company's cost structure with the current realities facing the industry, among other issues.

"Mr. Mittal also stressed that the USW is and will continue to be a valued partner moving forward. The meeting was cordial, respectful and, frankly, Mr. Mittal's willingness to approach the demonstrators and invite them in for coffee serves as an example of the transparent and honest dialogue the company is trying to have around the issues impacting our business and industry," Steers added.

Smith said Mittal seemed adamant about reducing retiree health care benefits, one of the key issues for the union workers.

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Outside at the rally, Raymond Lopez and Dave Harder said they were fighting for about 17,000 retired steel workers and some widows in their union local alone.

Harder, a trustee with Steelworkers Organization for Active Retirees for Local 1010 in East Chicago, said under ArcelorMittal's proposal, some surviving widows would have to pay the steel giant out of their pockets each month for insurance.

He said some widows are only receiving about $100 a month from the company after various deductions are taken out of their pension check while their insurance costs could triple under Mittal's proposal. The checks are reduced after the retired worker dies.

"We're fighting to keep what we now get," said Lopez, president of SOAR for Local 1010.

"With the union, we had a golden retirement. Now Mittal wants to make it a lead retirement," Lopez said.

The rally was organized by Locals 1010 and 1011 in Northwest Indiana. It was one of several rallies held in Chicago and at various locations in Northwest Indiana since the summer.

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Don Seifert, with USW Local 1010, brought signs to represent the locals that couldn't make the Wednesday morning rally. He arrived with about 30 other members, some of whom held two signs as they marched in front of the high-rise office.

Also joining in were members of UniteHere, which represents some workers at some of the local casinos, and members of the Chicago Teachers Union, who are engaged in their own battle.

"We've both been working without a contract since summer. We have the same struggles, the same fight," said CTU member Carol Hayse.

ArcelorMittal spokeswoman Mary Beth Holdford

cited several factors, including an overcapacity in the global steel industry, record high import levels from nonmarket economies and a strong U.S. dollar, for creating an unsustainable environment in the steel industry.

"As a result of this challenging environment, our U.S. operations have implemented a number of cost-savings initiatives including reduced purchasing, supplier and operating costs and a revised health care plan for our salaried employees. We have also been working tirelessly to achieve stronger trade enforcement to battle the flood of unfairly traded imports and to improve our performance through asset optimization planning," she said.

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"The company's labor negotiations with United Steelworkers provides an additional opportunity to align our cost structure with the economic realities of the industry," Holdford said.

She said asset optimization could affect Indiana Harbor, the company's largest integrated facility in the U.S.

Seifert said the company is looking to idle the 84-inch finishing mill at Indiana Harbor. He said there would be no layoffs as a result.

"It's part of the negotiations," Seifert said.

Karen Caffarini is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
A fire early Tuesday at 7127 Indianapolis Blvd., damaged the Women's Care Center and the law office of Randy Godshalk in Hammond's Woodmar section. (Michelle Quinn / Post-Tribune)

A Hammond attorney whose office was torched by arson early Tuesday wants people to know he's still in business.

Randy Godshalk said Tuesday all he needs is "a table and phone set up" in which to do his work. So he and his employees did exactly that and will temporarily work from an office two doors away while his office, 7127 Indianapolis Blvd. in the city's Woodmar section, is being rebuilt.

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"The phone number transferred, and we're two doors down (at Cantrell and Fontanez Law Offices) until we get everything cleaned up," Godshalk said. "You can't keep me down. I'm still taking calls and showing up in court."

The Hammond Fire Department received a call about the fire in the building around 12:10 a.m. Tuesday, Hammond Fire Chief Inspector Mike Opinker said. The fire, Opinker said, "was obviously an arson" and caused a considerable amount of damage.

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A second business, the Women's Care Center, endured extensive smoke damage but remained intact, Opinker said. It was closed Tuesday.

"The guys stayed out there for a couple hours to make sure (the fire) was out, and they did a great job in saving the building itself," Opinker said. "But there's considerable fire damage to the law office."

Godshalk said fire officials told him whoever started the fire emptied his filing cabinets, put the files in a pile and ignited them. Nothing else was done.

"They stole nothing  they left computers, TVs, money that was there. They just ransacked the office and set the files on fire," he said.

While Godshalk has "no idea" who could've done it, he's hoping recently installed security cameras on businesses in the area will provide police with good images. Seeing who did it won't necessarily take away the hurt, however.

"I've been in that office since 2000, so it's upsetting. There was a lot of personal property destroyed, including several art pieces people created for me," Godshalk said. "Still, it's just a little setback, a blip."

No injuries were reported during the fire, Opinker said. Anyone with information on the arson should contact the Hammond Police Department at 219-853-6544.

Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Nick Popovich, president of Sage-Popovich aviation services in Valparaiso, with his daughter, Sarah Kotys, after the Living Legends of Aviation ceremony in Los Angeles on Jan. 22. (Handout / HANDOUT)

Harrison Ford was there. John Travolta, too.

As official Living Legends of Aviation, the high-flying celebrities served as award presenter and emcee, respectively, for the organization's 13th annual tribute and induction ceremony Jan. 22 at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.

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The Living Legends of Aviation consists of only 91 pillars of aviation from around the world  record breakers, astronauts, pilots, industry leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators.

Each of them has contributed a "remarkable accomplishment" to the industry, from the likes of such notable names as Buzz Aldrin, Gary native Frank Borman, Richard Branson, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, Morgan Freeman, Lynn Tilton, Sean Tucker and Bob Hoover.

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The newest name on that list is Nick Popovich of Valparaiso, who was nominated by Tucker and Hoover, and who was voted in by the other members.

Popovich attended the black-tie ceremony with family and friends, feeling profoundly overwhelmed and genuinely undeserving of the honor. This attitude was reflected in the photos of him at the star-studded event, capturing an "I'm not worthy" temperament, in sharp contrast to his usual cigar-smoking swagger.

"I honestly don't know how I fit in to this very select group of astronauts, aviation innovators and celebrities who love the field," Popovich told me after returning home from Los Angeles. "It's a huge responsibility."

There is something about such honored accomplishments that simultaneously compel us and repel us. We privately appreciate the honor. We publicly depreciate our worthiness for it. Popovich, who I've known for years, is no different.

For months, he knew about last weekend's high-profile ceremony at the Golden Globes Ballroom in Beverly Hills, which he has attended in previous years as a guest. He said nothing, though, about his special role in this year's event, joining only one other nominee. Popovich kept the news quiet for as long as possible, and it almost worked.

It was only after a family member posted something about his nomination on social media, with photos from the event, when Popovich came forward with an acceptance speech, of sorts.

"I am humbled beyond comprehension by this honor," he posted on his Facebook page. "To be associated with, and to be invited as a member, of this remarkable group of astonishing aviators only serves to make me want to do so much better going forward, and to give more back to an industry that I care so much about."

Popovich is president of Sage-Popovich Inc., which began performing repossessions of commercial aircraft in 1979. The firm, based in Valparaiso, is now one of the world's largest specialists in the recovery of aviation-related equipment. His company also expanded its operations to provide asset management, monitored project-oriented contractual obligations and expertise in all phases of airline and charter operations.

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His reputation soared higher a few years ago with the Discovery Channel reality show "Airplane Repo," which chronicled his exploits as a "super repo man." But his distinction within the aviation community took off with his many charitable donations, efforts and projects, including using his planes to transport wounded warriors where they need to go.

For years, Popovich has offered his expertise at least 20 times a year at different aviation colleges across the country. He also performs a lot of covert flights for charitable reasons, some to other countries. His fingerprints are all over the cockpit of his firm's humanitarian efforts though he tries to routinely wipe them off.

When I first contacted Popovich several years ago for a story on his intriguing and lucrative firm (his net worth alone is valued at more than $2 million), he wanted nothing to do with me. Or what I do for a living. It took a couple of face-to-face meetings at his firm's compound and his hangar at the Gary Jet Center to break down those walls of distrust with a journalist.

Since then, he's been nothing but gracious despite the altitude of his social status being obviously higher than mine and, most likely, yours.

"The aviation community is a very tightknit group," he told me Tuesday.

At the Living Legends of Aviation event, hosted by the Kiddie Hawk Air Academy, Travolta guided award presentations to industry giants, and Harrison Ford personally saluted Bob Hoover, who nominated Popovich.

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From the audience, Popovich watched the two remaining "Doolittle Tokyo Raiders," David Thatcher, 94, and Dick Cole, 100, get honored for their part of the historic mission on April 18, 1942.

They were among a group of 80 volunteers for a very dangerous mission involving 16 B-25 bombers that took off from the deck of the USS Hornet, led by Col. Jimmy Doolittle. Their mission was to fly over Japan, drop their bombs and fly to safety in China, on a stretch of land that was still free at that time.

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Popovich also watched the nonprofit organization honor 95-year-old Air Force Col. Gail Halvorsen, nicknamed the "Candy Bomber" for his innumerable missions during the Berlin Airlift. He used his C-54 cargo aircraft to airdrop candy and sweet treats to German kids living in the Soviet-controlled sector of that country during the Cold War.

He improvised tiny parachutes from handkerchiefs so the candy would safely float down into the kids' hands. To signal to the kids that his candy-drop was coming, he would first wiggle his plane's wings, earning him the nickname "Uncle Wiggly Wings."

"He's a true living legend and I got to talk with him that night," said Popovich, who wore a silver nominee medallion around his neck during the event. "Just to be in the same room with so many accomplished, brave and notable people was electric. It was a very emotionally moving night."

For a man who drives a Bentley around Northwest Indiana, travels the world on his own planes, and hobnobs with true aviation heroes, I've never heard him sound so humbled.

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This is the true power of being publicly honored  to find humility amid hyperbole.

jdavich@post-trib.com

Twitter @jdavich
By Chet Scheltema and Vivian Mao

Dezan Shira & Associates, Shanghai

General VAT Taxpayer Status

China is completing its transition to a value-added tax (VAT) system. Chinas VAT is an indirect tax on business transactions imposing a rate of three percent to 17 percent of the transaction amount. As is readily obvious, this can translate into a sizeable tax burden if one does not properly manage value-added taxation.

The key to managing the VAT system for some companies may lie in becoming a general VAT taxpayer and obtaining the right and ability to use input VAT credits to offset output VAT, thereby potentially reducing the VAT burden by a substantial amount. Although general VAT taxpayer status can theoretically be obtained at any point in a WFOEs life, it may be easiest and most advantageous to obtain it upon incorporation, otherwise one may need to wait until the annual turnover reaches a certain threshold. Because investors cannot always be sure when such annual turnover thresholds will be reached, they may seek to obtain such general VAT taxpayer status immediately upon incorporation of the WFOE.

RELATED: Strategic Considerations when Establishing a WFOE in China, Part 2

The question of whether or not to immediately seek general VAT taxpayer status will depend upon the business activities of the WFOE and its business goals. This is the beginning of tax planning for any WFOE established in China, so experienced Chinese tax professionals should be consulted. To give an example of where general VAT taxpayer status may be critical and where it may be disadvantageous, consider the following. If a WFOE does not anticipate ever generating revenue from its activities in China (Eg, it is functioning as a cost center for its foreign headquarters or it is a not-for-profit), then it may be tax efficient to maintain its status as a small-scale VAT taxpayer, because the output VAT rate for such a taxpayer is only three percent. Any consulting arrangement with its foreign shareholder for purposes of funding the WFOE would in theory only be subject to three percent as opposed to six percent for a general VAT taxpayer. However, if the WFOE is a trading WFOE and will begin to import and sell expensive equipment to the domestic Chinese market, then the applicable VAT rate will likely be 17 percent both upon import and upon sale to the domestic market. It is therefore critically important for such a trading WFOE to promptly obtain general VAT taxpayer status in order to use its payments for import VAT to offset against (deduct against) its output VAT payments made upon sale to the domestic market.

What many an investor may not initially be aware of is that the application process for general VAT taxpayer status may include an inspection and evaluation of the office space of the WFOE to assess the legitimacy of the WFOEs operations. Abuse of the VAT system and fraudulent activity are rife in China, and authorities are traditionally strict about which new WFOEs are granted general VAT taxpayer status, although this appears to be changing and the practice may vary from city to city.

Because of the possibility of undergoing such an inspection, it is important to keep in mind the tax bureaus criteria for assessing a general VAT taxpayer applicant when initially selecting a registered address and an office space. Previous clients registering a WFOE with a virtual address have scrambled to replace the virtual address with a real and more credible office space and registered address when they realized the potential consequences to their general VAT taxpayer application. For more on this subject, read the China Briefing article, General VAT Taxpayer Status: Why Its So Critical and How to Secure It.

Corporate Governance

Designing effective corporate governance for your WFOE should focus on at least the following two strategic decisions.

First, seek to avoid concentrating too much authority and operational control in the hands of a few individuals whose interests are closely aligned, could potentially grow adverse to those of the investors, and who are beyond effective accountability. For example, an investor should seek to avoid selecting a general manager that is also the Legal Representative (or where the position of Legal Representative is held by a close friend or relative). Also be aware of who holds and controls the WFOEs chops. Is it the same person holding other critical positions in the company, or whose friends and family hold such positions? Also pay attention to who are the registrants of the bank account, and who selects and supervises the WFOEs accounting and audit firms. Although such a structure may seem attractive because it streamlines the decision-making process in China, it is fraught with risks. The author continues to see instances where a WFOE has effectively been hijacked by disgruntled employees, because too much authority had been concentrated in too few hands, and when the shareholders sought to restructure the organization, the concentration of authority allowed such employees to disrupt the shareholders plans for change. For more information, read the China Briefing article, Anatomy of a Corporate Hijacking: How Your Chinese Company Can Be Hijacked and How to Prevent It.

RELATED: Corporate Establishment Services from Dezan Shira & Associates

Second, take special care to select an appropriate Legal Representative. The position of Legal Representative in a WFOE (or any Chinese company) is a critically important and powerful position effectively imbued with full authority (and responsibility) to legally bind the WFOE. To replace the Legal Representative is a tedious, lengthy process where the original business license and electronic records of the relevant Chinese supervisory agencies of the WFOE must be amended. This can require several months to complete. Meanwhile, the currently registered Legal Representative would be able to act with all the apparent authority of the WFOE.

Assuming the Legal Representative is fully trustworthy and is subject to healthy accountability, another consideration comes to the fore. Since the Legal Representative legally holds full authority to bind the corporation, he/she is also typically regarded as being fully responsible for the acts of the WFOE, even if not specifically authorized. Legal Representatives can in theory be held personally responsible for the debts of the WFOE. There have been incidents recently in China where the Legal Representative (and sometimes other senior officers) have been detained and denied the right to leave China until commercial disputes are resolved, or the Legal Representative could be blacklisted in China and refused the right to become a senior manager in a Chinese enterprise and potentially be exposed to other recriminations. For these reasons, WFOE investors may consider appointing a Legal Representative that does not reside in China, since his/her signature is typically only required two to three times a year, and thereby attempt to shelter the individual from adverse recriminations. Please note that the Legal Representative may be required to visit China during the incorporation process, such as when the bank account is opened.

Conclusion

Establishing a Chinese WFOE for the purpose of doing business in China presents a foreign investor with tremendous opportunity. Chinas regulatory environment is not particularly difficult to understand, but it can be tricky to manage and decisions once made can prove difficult and costly to unwind. It is therefore important to think deliberately, to act strategically and to consult with experienced and knowledgeable China practitioners.



About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email china@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight. 

An Introduction to Doing Business in China 2015

Doing Business in China 2015 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in China. Compiled by the professionals at Dezan Shira & Associates, this comprehensive guide is ideal not only for businesses looking to enter the Chinese market, but also for companies that already have a presence here and want to keep up-to-date with the most recent and relevant policy changes.

How to Restructure an Underperforming Business in China

In this issue of China Briefing magazine, we explore the options that are available to foreign firms looking to restructure or close their operations in China. We begin with an overview of what restructuring an unprofitable business in China might entail, and then take an in-depth look at the way in which a foreign company can go about the restructuring process. Finally, we highlight some of the key HR concerns associated with restructuring a China business.

Adapting Your China WFOE to Service Chinas Consumers

In this issue of China Briefing Magazine, we look at the challenges posed to manufacturers amidst Chinas rising labor costs and stricter environmental regulations. Manufacturing WFOEs in China should adapt by expanding their business scope to include distribution and determine suitable supply chain solutions. In this regard, we will take a look at the opportunities in Chinas domestic consumer market and forecast the sectors that are set to boom in the coming years.
China has no intention of exercising its veto power over the newly established 57-member Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, according to the lender's president.

Jin Liqun,president of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. [Photo/China Daily]

This is despite the fact that the country has this right because of its economic size, Jin Liqun said.

"There are still many countries on the waiting list, and when the new members join, China's voting power will be reduced. Such de facto veto power will be lost gradually," Jin said.

He was speaking to China Daily at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.

Members of the AIIB, which has been set up after two years of negotiations, have agreed on a crucial decision-making process by introducing a "fixed" special majority, comprising two-thirds of the number of members and representing three-quarters of the voting power.

China, the largest AIIB shareholder, now holds 26.6 percent of the voting power, Jin said. "We will not increase the special majority to keep China's veto power in the future," he said.

Jin said this is a major contrast to older institutions such as the World Bank, in which the United States has maintained its veto power by amending the articles of agreement. This increased the special majority when its voting power was reduced after new members joined.

Jin said that when China put forward the idea of setting up the AIIB, many doubts and concerns were expressed, but the bank has now become accepted by many countries.

"This is the process of China gaining credibility and building up mutual trust by collective consultation and making decisions on democratic approaches," he said.

But he said that the bank's inauguration is just the first leg of a long journey and that the most important thing is to recruit staff members to make his words become a reality by meeting the infrastructural demands of countries in need.

He said the bank has not started to recruit new staff members, but he aims to seek between 100 and 150 professionals worldwide this year.

"There is no rush to expand and we need to look for qualified talent and experts carefully," Jin said. The bank currently has a staff of 50.

Unlike the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which have sometimes set up offices in different countries, the AIIB will call on the experience of the private sector and assign experts and staff members in each business field, Jin said.

"When there are projects in a country, we will send our staff there, and when the projects are completed, we will leave," he said.

When the number of projects increases in a country or region, Jin said the bank will probably set up a regional hub or liaison office.

"But we will avoid duplication between headquarters and regional hubs in decision-making," he said.
The number of mainland tourists visiting Taiwan is estimated to hit 3.4 million, a record high, in 2015, the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday.

Spokesperson Ma Xiaoguang told a press conference that the mainland remains the biggest contributor of tourists to Taiwan.

About 9.86 million people made cross-Strait trips in total, an expansion of 4.7 percent from the year before. Taiwan residents made 5.5 million visits to the mainland while mainland residents made about 4.36 million visits to the island, an increase of 2.47 percent and 7.73 percent respectively from the previous year, he said.

The growth was largely attributable to the mainland's removal of entry permit requirements for Taiwan residents and an increase in cross-Strait passenger flights to 890 per week.

In addition to increased people-to-people exchange, Ma also briefed on the political and economic progress in cross-Strait relations last year.

The meeting between Xi Jinping and Taiwan's Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore in November was the first between the leaders of the two sides since 1949.

In addition to launching a hotline between the chiefs of cross-Strait affairs from the mainland and Taiwan, the two sides also strengthened communication and coordination on jointly fighting crimes and handling disputes involving interests of enterprises from both sides.

Ma Xiaoguang said the achievements made in the year demonstrate that peaceful development of cross-Strait relations will lead to mutual benefit.

He stressed that the mainland will continue to adhere to the 1992 Consensus and oppose secessionist activity in any form.
 Flash

U.S. forces executed an airdrop operation Tuesday in Iraq's province of Salahudin against Islamic State (IS) militants, security sources told Xinhua.

The pre-dawn operation involved a number of U.S. helicopters dropping troops by a building in a village in Tikrit, where forces then captured several IS militants after an hour of sporadic combat, said a source from the provincial operations command on condition of anonymity.

The source said that both the provincial command and military units stationed in the Speicher major airbase, five km east of the targeted village, were briefed by Iraq's military command about the operation to avoid potential misguided action.

It is not yet known whether the U.S. troops carried out the operation independently or they were aided by the Iraqis, the source said.

The source has no further information regarding any human casualties.

Another source from the Speicher airbase confirmed to Xinhua that they were briefed about the airdrop operation, and said the operation occurred as IS militants attacked Iraqi security forces' posts from the north to the south of Tikrit.

Earlier, Iraqi and Kurdish sources claimed that in recent weeks U.S. and Iraqi troops jointly conducted several attacks behind IS lines in and around the town of Hawija, however both militaries denied the claim.

Iraq's security status has deteriorated drastically since June 2014, when bloody clashes erupted between security forces and IS militants.
Last modified on Sunday 24 January 2016 21.59 EST

Sunday 24 January 2016 21.22 EST

 They must be torturing her, says Zhaos mother as she desperately searches for the daughter who vanished seven months ago

But Zhao was unmoved. I am here to change society, not to get used to it, she replied.

As Zhao entered her final year  and a biting political chill set in with Xis elevation to commander-in-chief  Zheng cautioned her daughter against becoming too involved in activism. I told her, You are very young still.

She threw herself into social work and campaigned on issues including LGBT rights and HIV awareness. She saw so much inequality in society, her mother remembers. She wanted to help the vulnerable.

That idealism initially drew Zhao towards a career in reporting. In 2009, aged 18, she left home to study journalism at Jiangxi Normal University in the eastern city of Nanchang.

Growing up, Weiwei was a vivacious and outgoing tomboy who expressed a desire to help the less fortunate, her mother says. She is someone who hates injustice like poison. Even as a child she was like this.

Born in 1991, the second of two children, Zhao was raised in a middle-class home in Jiyuan, a small city about 740km southwest of Beijing, in Henan, one of Chinas most deprived regions.

Now, Zhao Wei  a fan of slushy Korean soap operas and online chat groups, whose gentle manner earned her the nickname Koala  has found herself in the crosshairs.

Since he became the Communist partys general secretary , in November 2012, Xis dragnet has sucked in activists, bloggers, journalists, lawyers and liberal academics.

But at the ground level, the story is not one of political ideology or the corridors of power but of empty bedrooms and broken homes created by Xis intensifying assault on anyone his regime deems a threat.

The story of Chinas dramatic lurch back towards repressive dictatorship under Xi is often told on the macro-level: the tale of an unexpectedly authoritarian leaders do-or-die struggle to preserve the Communist partys near seven-decade reign by stifling any and all dissent.

Every day I cry, says Zheng, 61, sobbing as she reflects on the misfortune president Xis rise to power has unleashed on her family. I just lie on this bed and I cry.

And each day her grief-stricken mother sinks into her daughters unmade bed, her hands trembling and tears streaking her face as she leafs through family photo albums chronicling happier times.

Zhao Wei  who relatives and friends describe as a bubbly and kind-hearted young woman  is behind bars facing trial on political subversion charges that could see her jailed for the rest of her life.

Seven months later the would-be lawyers dreams are in tatters.

She looked well, her tearful mother, Zheng Ruixia, recalls of their final moments together, in May last year. She was so happy when she got on that train.

From there Zhao caught a bullet train to the Chinese capital where she planned to sit the national bar exam she hoped would pave the way for her to become a top human rights lawyer.

She left her small-town home in central China and headed east to the train station past a Communist party propaganda poster in which president Xi Jinping posed beside the slogan: If the people have faith  the country will be strong.

It was a warm summers day when Zhao Wei, a 23-year-old legal assistant, kissed her parents goodbye and set out in search of her dreams.

At the same time she was showing a growing interest in the work of Chinas weiquan or rights defense attorneys  a community of outspoken activist-lawyers famed for daring to take on politically sensitive cases that often brought them into conflict with the government.

She decided she would try to join their ranks.

Zhao Wei, who is facing political subversion charges in China

after falling victim to president Xi Jinpings crackdown on

dissent

In August 2014, having graduated from university and spent a year working for a website in south-east China, Zhao moved to Beijing and quickly found work withLi Heping, a respected Christian lawyer known for defending dissidents, persecuted religious groups and environmental activists.

At the time Zhao could not have known it but when, on 8 October 2014, she started work at Lis Beijing law practice, she placed herself at the eye of a rapidly intensifying storm that would soon pulverise her ambitions to follow in her employers illustrious footsteps.

The perverse genius of terror is what we are witnessing

Terry Halliday

Just over nine months later, on 10 July 2015, as an unprecedented government crackdown was launched against Li and his fellow human rights lawyers and dozens were hauled off into custody, 10 unidentified men would appear at Zhaos front door in Beijing.

After ransacking her home, they spirited the young legal assistant off into secret detention. Zhao has not been seen since.

Beijing has used state media to defend its roundup of the supposedly rabble-rousing human rights lawyers as well as the decision to hold Zhao Wei.

In a recent editorial the party-controlled Global Times argued: [T]here is no logic that this young lady  definitely has not committed actions that harm national security. A few people are trying to instigate public opinion by stressing her innocence.

Some of those in custody had received special attention from overseas forces, the newspaper alleged.

But the ferocity with which Xis Communist party has decided to pursue and punish those at the centre of its crackdown has shocked activists, diplomats and veteran observers of China.

Many say they are surprised at the pace at which Xis China now appears to be sliding back towards a far more unforgiving form of authoritarianism than has been seen in recent years.

The perverse genius of terror is what we are witnessing, says Terry Halliday, an American Bar Foundation scholar who studies Chinas human rights lawyer community and knows several of those detained, including Zhao Weis boss, Li Heping.

Essentially, the party hierarchy has just taken off the gloves. It is no longer exercising power through velvet gloves. It has now got knuckledusters on.

Word that Zhao had fallen victim to what activists call Xis war on law reached her mother by way of a telephone call from a friend at about 11pm on 10 July.

Earlier that day Zhao had failed to reply to a video her mother had sent her over WeChat, the social messaging service, showing her four-year-old niece dancing on a bed. Zheng assumed she had been busy swotting up for her exam and thought little of it.

In fact the plainclothes officers had already knocked on Zhaos door and she was in secret detention. When her two flatmates returned to the property they found it had been turned upside down. Papers, documents and clothes were strewn all over the floor.

For the next six months, Zhaos parents heard nothing. A group of human rights lawyers set off on a fruitless quest for information, visiting detention centres and police stations in northern China where they believed the missing lawyers  and Zhao  might be being held.

By 19 October, the day before her daughters 24th birthday, Zheng was so desperate for news that she boarded a train for Tianjin, a city to the east of Beijing, where the lawyers suspected Zhao was in custody.

With her she took a bag of winter clothes and the faint hope that she would be allowed to spend just a few brief moments with her daughter.

But police officers turned her away. I felt so cold, Zheng wrote of the experience in open letter that was published on the internet in an attempt to draw attention to her daughters case. I cried so much.

Deprived of answers, Zheng now has nightmares about her daughters plight.

Zheng Ruixia on her daughters bed where she spends most

of her days, at her home in Jiyuan, China.

Photograph: Adam Dean for the Guardian

I think they must be torturing her, she says, clenching a wad of tissues in her fist as she battles to hold back the tears. Why wont they let me see her? They must be torturing her. I suspect she is badly injured. That is why they dont want me to see her. Otherwise what possible reason could they have for forbidding us from seeing her for six months?

The government has broken the law. I feel helplessZheng Ruixia

With the arrival of the new year, Zheng felt renewed optimism that her daughter might soon be freed, following an initial six-month period of detention after which prisoners must be released or charged.

But on 11 January at 5.30pm those hopes were crushed when a postman arrived at the door of the family home in Jiyuan bearing an official arrest notice from public security authorities.

My heart was pounding when I saw it, Zheng remembers. I was hoping for and expecting good news. But when I opened the letter 

Inside the envelope was a terse, boilerplate statement from authorities addressed to Zhaos 61-year-old father, Zhao Yonghong.

With the approval of the Number Two Branch of the Tianjin Municipal Peoples Procuratorate, our bureau arrested Zhao Wei at 6pm on 8 January on suspicion of the subversion of state power, it read. She is now being held in custody at the Tianjin No.1 detention centre.

Zheng says she has hidden the severity of that charge  which potentially carries a life sentence  from her husband who was left badly debilitated by a series of strokes before his daughters detention and speaks with a slur.

So as not to weep in front of him, Zheng now sleeps in her daughters empty bedroom beneath a black-and-white portrait of their absent child. Im afraid that if he knows all the details he will get worse, she explains.

Zhao Wei, who is facing political

subversion charges in China after falling

victim to president Xi Jinpings

crackdown on dissent.

Zhao was a firm believer in ideas such as democracy, freedom and justice, her mother says, but she rejects the implication that her daughter had been conspiring to destabilise the government.

She did not do it for sure. Zhao Wei loved this country, she says, adding: The government has broken the law. I feel helpless.

Halliday said he believed the Communist partys decision to target not only prominent human rights lawyers but also their young staff was designed to induce fear in anyone considering opposing its rule.

That it was destroying a young womans life and dreams in the process, is not, of course, lost on the regime, Halliday added. I am sure it is part of the calculus of terror.

That calculus has taken a devastating toll on Zhao Weis family.

The past week has been so hard. I cant sleep. I cant eat, her mother sobs, as she sits alone in the familys dimly lit sitting room. We want to appeal but I dont know who to appeal to.

The Communist party is in charge. Whether you have committed a crime or not all depends on what the Communist party decides, she says.

Even if you didnt commit a crime, if [the party] says you did, then you did. End of story.

Additional reporting by Christy Yao




BEIJING -- The profits of China's major industrial firms in 2015 fell year on year for the first time in over a decade, official data showed on Wednesday, fuelling concern for the world's second-largest economy.

Industrial companies with annual revenues of more than 20 million yuan ($3.1 million) recorded total profits of 816.7 billion yuan last month, down 4.7 percent from December 2014 and accelerating from November's 1.4-percent drop, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

The firms' profits in the whole of 2015 fell 2.3 percent from 2014 to around 6.4 trillion yuan.

He Ping, an official with the NBS Department of Industry, attributed the annual drop to weak demand both at home and abroad, falling prices of industrial products and rising production costs.

Revenues from the firms' primary business inched up 0.8 percent last year, compared with a 7-percent rise posted in 2014.

The profits decline was most alarming in mining and raw material industries like oil and natural gas exploitation. Coal miners' profits tumbled 65 percent from a year earlier while that of oil and natural gas exploration firms slumped 74.5 percent on an annual basis.

Although the overall situation is grim, He said there were favorable signs from industrial restructuring. The high-tech industry, equipment manufacturing enterprises and consumer goods producers posted profit gains of 8.9 percent, 4 percent and 7 percent, respectively.

Facing lingering downward pressures, China's policy makers are striving to ensure short-term growth while steering the economy away from an export-driven and credit-fueled growth model to one based on stronger consumer spending, innovation and the service sector.

GDP growth slowed to 6.9 percent in 2015, the lowest level in 25 years.
Following the launch of its first branch in Brussels, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) marked a new stage of its expansion in Belgium on Jan 26th with the establishment of ICBC Antwerp Branch, its second branch in Belgium and the first Chinese bank in Flanders. Jiang Jianqing, Chairman of ICBC ltd is delivering a speech on the opening ceremony. [Photo/Gao Shuang]

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) officially launched its second branch in Belgium on Tuesday, 26th January in Antwerp.

In early 2011, ICBC set up Brussels branch in Belgium. After 5 years of development, ICBC has built up a trustworthy reputation in Belgium with total asset of 1.2 billion US Dollars as a provider of various specific financial services, such as oversea loans against domestic guarantee, ship financing, cross-border RMB business, and UCITS SICAV, among others.

Since the first European branch ever was established in London in 1995, ICBC's business has been expanded in 19 cities of 12 major countries in Europe, including UK, Germany, Luxemburg, Holland, France, Italy and Belgium, building a complete financial service network across Europe.

"Antwerp is the financial and cultural capital of Belgium, as well as one of the biggest ports in the world. Apart from that, it also plays an essential role in China'sOne Belt One Road' initiative,"said Jiang Jianqing, Chairman of ICBC ltd.

He said that the trade between China and Belgium has been growing steadily ever since the two countries established their diplomatic relationship in 1971. Belgium remains an important trade partner within EU for China and China has become the biggest Asian invest partner of Belgium.

"This year marks the 45th anniversary of China-Belgium diplomatic relationship. The establishment of Antwerp branch is hence of huge significance. It indicates that ICBC is determined to invest more in Belgium, and to deepen our financial cooperation. Besides, it is also a strategic move to promote One Belt One Road' initiative," added him.

Ambassador Yang Yanyi, head of the Mission of China to the EU, said that ICBC has not been only serving the wellbeing of Chinese and Europeans respectively, but has also been forging stronger economic, trade and investment relations between China and EU.

She said that giving the background of China's new concept of development and EU's integrating process, China and EU are joining hands to strengthen their comprehensive strategic partnership to promote, peace, growth, reform and civilization.

"We are fully confident that the ICBC Antwerp Branch will go all out to offer the best possible financial services and contribute to the enhancement of mutually beneficial and mutually reinforcing partnership between China and the EU and China and Belgium" stressed Yang.

Jiang also said that the visit of King Philippe to China last June put extra accent on the determination of promoting China-Belgium economic tie from both sides.

On June 23, 2015, witnessed by President Xi Jinping and King Philippe of Belgium, ICBC signed an export buyer's credit agreement with Exmar. ICBC also signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with KBC Bank and a financial lease agreement with the Seatrade Group, which was witnessed by the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and the Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.

To contact the reporter: fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
[Photo/IC]

Mergers and acquisitions hit a record high level in China last year, rising 37 percent year-on-year, a new report has revealed.

Global auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers said 9,420 deals were completed during 2015, worth $733.7 billion, which marked an 84 percent increase in value.

George Lu, PwC China's transaction services partner, said the firm also expects M&A activity this year again to be brisk, growing at similar double-digit pace.

The company's latest figures show the number of domestic strategic M&As grew strongly, driven by the ongoing economic transformation, sector consolidation, restructuring and bold inorganic growth strategies.

Technology and financial services were particularly attractive sectors, he said, mainly due to higher growth expectations for the technology sector, as well as some industry consolidation.

The levels of capital being raised, and the significant pace of development by financial services and online payments operations in China also contributed.

Outbound activity also grew 40 percent by volume and 21 percent by value, both new highs.

The private sector led the charge, but financial buyers and private equity investors were also very active, as State-owned enterprises remained largely subdued.

"In 2015 we saw a continuation of the outbound trend, with strategic buyers pursuing inorganic growth strategies and seeking technologies and brands to bring back to the China market, as well as significant participation from PEs and financial buyers acquiring overseas assets with a China angle," said Lu.

"There were 40 percent more outbound deals in 2015, and I believe we will see this kind of rate of growth for the next few years as Chinese-led multinational corporations start to emerge on the global stage."

The report also showed private equity and financial investor deals increasing 79 percent by deal volume and 169 percent by deal value.

Domestic investors were especially active, although the focus on domestic A-Share markets as an exit route made it a tougher environment for foreign PEs.

Leon Qian, PwC' transaction services northern China leader, said M&A investors were seeking high-growth opportunities as the general economy slowed and consequently, the VC industry remained active, also reaching record high levels.

"M&A activity in China will continue to grow in 2016 at a double-digit pace, led by domestic strategic and outbound activity, as well as robust financial-buyer activity," said Qian.

The report predicted continued high levels of activity in the technology and financial service sectors.

It said domestic banks will maintain their expansion to support China's overseas infrastructure and the increasingly global activities of domestic customers.

The report highlighted insurers and financial technology companies, as likely to look to acquire new capabilities and brands. Domestic payment companies are stepping up their international expansion to capture business arising from inbound and outbound cashflows, the report said.
A worker fills up a car with fuel at a gas station in Lianyungang city, East China's Jiangsu province, Feb 9, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

The country's reliance on imported oil soared to over 60 percent last year, amid tumbling oil prices and steadily-growing domestic energy demand, a new report said on Tuesday.

China imported 328 million tons of oil, up 6.4 percent, accounting for 60.6 percent of China's total oil consumption in 2015. Oil consumption rose 4.4 percent to 534 million tons during the same period, said a report released by the Economics & Technology Research Institute of China National Petroleum Corporation.

According to the report, reliance on foreign crude will increase to 62 percent this year with total imports estimated at about 357 million tons. Crude demand will rise by 4.3 percent to 566 million tons during the same period.

"The increase is partly a reflection of the slow-but-growing domestic demand for energy," said Gao Jian, senior researcher at domestic commodities consultancy Sublime China Information Co Ltd.

He said that the deepening dependency is also a result of falling oil prices, as crude importers will buy more when the prices are low.

Benchmark Brent crude dropped to a 12-year low of below $30 a barrel this month.

Importing more than 50 percent is a globally recognized energy security alert level, some experts said, adding that the expanding oil imports pose risks to the country's energy security.

China, the world's largest energy consumer, should speed up its efforts to shift to clean energy, said Lin Boqiang, director of the research center of China energy economics at Xiamen University.

"Changing the energy mix is the only way to reduce the reliance on imports," he said. "Also, government should encourage more electric vehicles on roads, as automobiles are major energy users."

Analysts believe that by 2020, nearly 65 percent of the oil consumed in China will have to be imported. China's oil dependency reached 45 percent in 2006 and grew at 2 percent every year after that. The country first became a net importer of crude oil in 1993.

China's storage capacity of commercial and strategic petroleum reserves was 315 million barrels in 2015, the report said.

The level of China's strategic oil reserves declined to 0.7 percent by the end of last year, and refined oil reserves rose by 5.3 percent, according to another report by China Oil, Gas and Petrochemicals run by Xinhua News Agency, without revealing details on extract figures.

China is not only the world's largest oil buyer and consumer, but also a seller of refined oil. The research institute estimated exports of China refined oil will increase 31 percent to 25 million tons this year.

The country's demand for other fuels is also increasing. The country's natural gas consumption is expected to rise 7.3 percent to 205 billion cubic meters in 2016. Its gas import will increase 10. 6 percent to 69 billion cu m, the report said.
Chinese stocks plunged to their lowest level in 13 months on Tuesday.

The Shanghai Composite Index fell by 6.42 percent, its biggest loss since the first week of January, to close at 2,749.79 points. The ChiNext startup index in Shenzhen tumbled by 7.63 percent.

The sell-off triggered a market stampede as more than 1,000 stocks fell by the 10 percent daily trading limit.

Li Xunlei, chief economist at Haitong Securities, said, "It was panic selling amid a reduced risk preference from investors." But Li said the sell-off did not necessarily suggest any further deterioration of the economy.

The sell-off intensified during the afternoon despite the People's Bank of China pumping 440 billion yuan ($66.9 billion) into the market to ease liquidity pressure ahead of Spring Festival. It was the most in market funding for a single day in nearly three years.

Investors' shrinking appetite for the volatile market was highlighted by the continued reduction of shareholdings by margin traders who borrowed money to buy stocks.

Hong Hao, chief strategist at investment bank BOCOM International in Hong Kong, said the bearish trend is not over despite the monetary authority's intervention to calm fluctuations in the renminbi exchange rate.

The Shanghai index has slumped by 22 percent this year.

Analysts have attributed the decline to various factors, including concerns about a slower economy, slumping oil prices as well as unsettled global markets.

The market volatility has also triggered investors' concerns over the health of the Chinese banking sector.

Global rating agency Moody's Investors Service said in a report, "Chinese commercial banks show little direct holdings of listed stocks, except for associated companies, so their direct exposure to recent stock price volatility is low."

But it warned that some banks that are more involved in extending stock loans, distributing stock-related wealth management products and providing custody services to stock funds could see pressure on their asset quality and profitability if market weakness persists.
Wang Bao'an, director of the National Bureau of Statistics [Photo/IC]

BEIJING -- Wang Baoan, head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is being investigated for "severe disciplinary violation," according to the top anti-graft body of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Wang, 52, is also the secretary of the leading Party group of NBS, said a statement released late Tuesday by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

Wang was appointed the current posts in April last year, after serving as vice minister of finance, according to his resume at the NBS official website.
Shares in related companies see sharp fluctuations after reports about ongoing restructuring proposal

State-owned China National Materials Group Corp is holding restructuring negotiations with China National Building Materials Group Corp, another State-owned firm, according to a regulatory filing.

Ningxia Building Materials Group, a listed company owned by China National Materials Group said in a statement that the reorganization proposal is yet to be finalized and the plan still needs to be approved by relevant authorities. It did not provide any further details about the proposal in its statement.

Reports of the restructuring, however, pushed up Ningxia Building shares by 7.56 percent to 10.24 yuan ($1.56) on Tuesday. The rise came despite a 6.42 percent fall in the benchmark index which sent the prices of several shares tumbling.

China National Materials Group also owns Sinoma Energy Conservation Ltd, whose shares surged by the maximum daily 9.99 percent limit on Tuesday. Besides, China National Building Materials Group owns other building material companies like China Jushi Co Ltd and Ruitai Technology. Their shares dropped on Tuesday at close, but still lesser than most of their peers.

Ningxia Building Materials Group said the reorganization plan will not impact the company's major asset restructuring and not have any significant impact on daily operations and business activities.

According to data provided by Wind Information, a market consultancy, about 150 public companies in China incurred losses last year, with State-owned companies bearing the brunt.

"The State-owned companies that experienced a loss were actually very competitive when they initially went public. The main reason for their losses is the changes in the economic environment and a slowing economy. This indirectly reflects the importance and urgent need for restructuring State-owned firms," said economist Song Qinghui, according to Beijing-based caixin.com.cn.

"In the wake of the merger between CSR Corp and CNR Corp, the two State-owned train makers, mergers and reorganizations of State-owned enterprises have become a hot topic," he said.

Founded in 1984, China National Building Materials Group is China's largest national building materials company. Its businesses include scientific research, manufacturing, circulation, logistics and trade.

China National Materials Group was founded in 1983, and is the second-largest domestic building materials enterprise.
Railway workers in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, brave a snowstorm on their way to work on Jan 21, 2016. [Photo / China Daily]

As extreme cold weather swept across China last week, bringing the lowest temperatures recorded in decades, it also brought a boost to the "frozen economy", the Beijing Morning Post reported on Wednesday.

Due to the cold wave, 53.4 percent of participants purchased new warm clothing, with nearly 40 percent of people spending over 500 yuan ($75.95), the newspaper said, citing a survey published on Suishouji finance BBS.

The survey found 19 percent of respondents spent 500-1,000 yuan, 9 percent 1,000-2,000 yuan, 6.2 percent 2,000-5,000 yuan, 2.4 percent 5,000-10,000 yuan, and 0.4 percent even spending over 10,000 yuan.

The cold weather affecting many areas of China forced people to scurry out to buy new warm clothing and brought a surge in demand for warm underwear and down jackets.

The latest data from Taobao, China's largest online shopping platform, showed that between Jan 17 to 23, online searches for down jackets rose by 50 percent, while sales increased by 60 percent.

A top-selling Taobao store sold almost 500 "Ultraman down jackets" which are very popular on the Internet, during the week when the temperature reached record lows in many places.

Besides down jackets, heaters, electric blankets and heating pads were also on the bestseller lists.
BEIJING - China is considering construction of offshore nuclear power plants, but only under completely safe conditions, a senior nuclear official confirmed Wednesday.

The country will conduct a "careful and scientific" feasibility review before it makes the decision, said Xu Dazhe, director of the China Atomic Energy Authority, at a press conference.

As a developing country, China has a large need of energy but is under environmental stress, he said, adding that the country must fully exploit its maritime resources.

Xu stressed that China will stick to the safe and peaceful use of nuclear power and that the development of maritime resources in its waters will benefit people in the area.

Currently China has 30 nuclear power generating units with a capacity of 28 million gw and another 24 units are under construction, all of which are on land.
QUITO - A Chinese-owned consortium has signed two contracts with the Ecuadorian government to explore two oil blocks in the southern province of Pastaza.

The contracts with Andes Petroleum marked the start of oil exploration in Ecuador's southeastern region and showed foreign investors' trust in the Ecuadorian government, Ecuadoran Minister of Hydrocarbons Carlos Pareja said on Tuesday.

"It sends a message that our country is building up confidence and that companies want to come and invest here despite the low international oil prices," said Pareja.

Andes Petroleum was set up in 2006 with shareholder capital from China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SINOPEC).

Zhao Xinjun, president of Andes Petroleum Ecuador, said the consortium has invested around $3.5 billion in the South American country to date, with cutting-edge technologies and full respect for the country's environmental regulations.

With oil as its main export, Ecuador currently produces around 540,000 barrels of oil per day.
BEIJING - China is dedicated to promoting an international nuclear safety emergency system and sharing achievements in peaceful use of nuclear energy with other countries, said a white paper issued on Wednesday.

China has reached bilateral agreements on nuclear energy cooperation with 30 countries since it joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1984, including Brazil, Argentina, Britain, the United States, the Republic of Korea, Russia and France, said the white paper on China's Nuclear Emergency Preparedness released by the State Council Information Office.

China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN) and Electricite de France (EDF) have signed an agreement to build a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point C in Britain. China's third-generation nuclear reactor design, known as "Hualong One," is expected to be used in the project.

"China, France and Britain are all leading powers in peaceful use of nuclear energy, and we should be full of confidence in this multilateral cooperation," said Xu Dazhe, director of the China Atomic Energy Authority, at a press conference.

China has also acceded a number of international conventions, including the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.

Moreover, China has actively fulfilled international obligations regarding nuclear emergency preparedness, the document said.

Chinese delegates have attended all conferences on nuclear emergency preparedness and nuclear safety convention obligation compliance organized by the IAEA, and submitted national reports on nuclear emergency preparedness and compliance with nuclear safety obligations, it said.
A ministry-level nationwide investigation is set to be launched into fraudulent subsidies of new energy vehicle manufacturers, the Ministry of Finance said on Monday.

The investigation will target new energy vehicle manufacturers that received subsidies from the government in 2013 and 2014, and those who applied for the subsidies in 2015. The probe will be jointly conducted by the ministries of industry and information technology, finance, and science and technology, and the National Development and Reform Commission.

The high subsidies and lack of supervision of new energy vehicles have given rise to fraudulent behavior, according to an investigative report released earlier this month by The Economic Observer, a Beijing-based newspaper.

A conventional vehicle, once installed with new energy batteries, can get up to 100,000 yuan ($15,200) in subsidies, which is much higher than its actual cost, The Economic Observer quoted employees working for new energy vehicle companies in Jiangsu province as saying.

According to the report, some companies would produce poor-quality electric cars, and then secretly set up a car rental agency that buys all the cars in exchange for millions of yuan in subsidies. These cars will eventually end up being dumped in a warehouse. In December 2015, sales of new energy commercial vehicles reached 63,525 units, around double the figure on a year-on-year basis.

But this incredibly rapid growth has sounded alarm bells with the authorities.

Xu Changming, director of the resources development department of the State Information Center, said that total sales of new energy vehicles in the first 10 months of 2015 nearly doubled the number of these vehicles that received license plates.

He suspected that the swindlers might have used electric batteries from sold vehicles and installed them in new ones in order to boost the sales volume.

According to the government's policies, new energy vehicle manufacturers are entitled to subsidies in research and development as well as sales. Each vehicle can be eligible for subsidies from the central government and the same amount of subsidies from local governments. One electric car, once sold, can generate subsidies of up to 120,000 yuan.

Jia Xinguang, a senior analyst with the China Automobile Dealers Association, said that most new energy vehicle manufacturers are law abiding, and the general business environment is sound and healthy.

"The reason for the swindles is a lack of regulation and supervision. One possible solution is to collect the data on one platform, including data on the battery, engine and millage. Investment in research and development is very high in the new energy vehicle industry. The easy and large profits made by dishonest people, if not checked, are going to have a very destructive effect on honest manufacturers," said Jia.
A taxi driver is reflected in a side mirror as he uses a Didi car-hailing application in Beijing.[Photo/Agencies]

Lender to provide loans, payment plans to qualified drivers

China Merchants Bank Co Ltd has teamed up with ride-hailing major Didi Kuaidi to provide automobile financing and expand its reach in China's booming mobile payment industry.

The two have inked a comprehensive partnership, which includes a strategic investment by the former in the latter. Under the partnership, CMB will become the first bricks-and-mortar bank that can offer in-app credit card payments to Didi users. At present, users of Didi can only choose third-party payment solutions like WeChat Payment and Alipay to pay cab fares.

Zhao Ju, vice-president of CMB, said the cooperation with Didi is an important step in its mobile Internet finance strategy. "CMB's mobile payment is going to enter a new chapter by leveraging Didi Kuaidi's vast user base," he said.

Jean Liu, president of Didi, speaks at the strategic partnersip ceremony co-organized by CMB and Didi, Jan 26, 2015.[Zhang Wei/Asianewsphoto]

According to a report by China Internet Network Information Center earlier this month, Didi holds 87.2 percent of China's private car hailing market.

The company said it has received 1.43 billion car-hailing requests on its platforms in 2015, which means 1.43 billion payments were made via smartphones.

CMB is expected to use Didi to reach the core users of China's mobile payment market.

Jean Liu, president of Didi, said many of the expats prefer payment by credit card rather than Alipay or WeChat. "The new partnership will help improve service quality and customer loyalty," she said.

The investment makes CMB part of Didi's existing investors, including Tencent Holdings Ltd, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and China Investment Corporation. Both of the companies declined to reveal the actual amount of the investment.

Liu, who showed up on Tuesday for the first time in public after her treatment for breast cancer, said the cooperation with CMB is for the long run and "the capital investment is only part of it".

Under the partnership, CMB and Didi will cooperate on a wide range of initiatives on financial services and online-to-offline cooperation.

Apart from the in-app credit card payments, the two companies are going to launch joint credit cards in late February and automobile financing services for Didi's car owners. CMB's branches across China are expected to help Didi recruit more drivers.

"There is a lot of room for imagination in our partnership," Li said, adding in future people may use their CMB credit card reward points to pay for the ride on Didi.

Li Chao, an analyst with iResearch Consulting Group, said the partnership may not significantly boost CMB's mobile payment business. "Didi has educated the market for three years and its customers have formed the habit of paying by WeChat or Alipay. So I think CMB can only turn a very smart proportion of Didi users into its payment customer," he said.

"But the move shows that China's traditional banking industry is finally thinking out of the box and looking for outside partners in Internet finance competition," he said.

Statistics from Big-Data Research showed that more than 90 percent of China's 9.3 trillion yuan ($1.41 trillion) worth of third party mobile payment market is donated by Alibaba and Tencent.
A camera-equipped "Inspire 1" unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, of DJI Technology Co hovers during a test in Shanghai, China, Jan 10, 2015. [Photo/IC]

Lufthansa has signed a deal with drone manufacturer DJI as part of fledging plans to exploit the growing market for commercial drones for tasks such as inspecting aircraft surfaces and monitoring wind farms.

The German airline said it plans to offer those interested in using drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), in this way a "one-stop UAV-shop" from aircraft operation to data analysis, insurance and even pilot training.

Lufthansa Aerial Services (LAS), part of the company's consulting division, said on Tuesday it will use China-based DJI's aerial platforms and develop applications and technology for potential customers.

For example, it sees potential in operating drones equipped with thermal-imaging systems that can be used to inspect infrastructure such as solar farms, railroad lines, crops and construction sites.

Lufthansa said it had already carried out a pilot project with a wind turbine manufacturer to inspect wind turbine blades using drones, while sister company Lufthansa Technik has used drones to inspect the outer surfaces of aircraft for defects.

EasyJet has also used drones to inspect its aircraft, while LAS has also teamed up with airport operator Fraport and German air traffic controllers to test the possibility of using drones to check runways.

Lufthansa runs maintenance and catering divisions alongside its traditional airline business. It said last year it wanted to use its experience in pilot training, flying and maintenance to enter the field of commercial drones.

It will make a decision on whether to fully commit to drone services by the end of the year, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
A new law in Anhui province aims to prevent adult children from relying on their unwilling parents for endless financial support.

In China, children who rely on their parents' savings to enjoy carefree and comfortable lifestyles are known as kenlaozu, a word that translates as "people who devour the elderly".

The Anhui regulation, introduced by the provincial people's congress, will take effect in March.

"Adults who are able to live on their own should not ask for financial support from their parents if the latter are not willing to give it," the regulation states.

It also bars people from asking the elderly to do physical tasks that they are unable to perform or that are bad for their health.

Officials in the province expect the new regulation to improve seniors' lives, but experts and residents fear it will be difficult to enforce.

Farmer Zhu Zhengwei, 77, said he and his wife cannot rely on a law to safeguard their interests, even when their son asks too much of them.

In 2002, Zhu's youngest son, then 26, was about to get married and insisted that his parents give him 90,000 yuan (then worth $10,840) to buy a city apartment.

Zhu, who farmed for decades in Changfeng county, Hefei, had saved little and needed to borrow the money from relatives and friends. It took him more than five years to repay the loans.

Tang Jun, a social policy expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the kenlaozu issue concerns ethics more than the law, as under current regulations people can dispose of their cash and property as they wish.
Cities in the Yangtze River Delta link up to provide convenience to foreign visitors

Two visa applicants wait at the Bureau of Exit and Entry Administration in Beijing in this Oct 12, 2012 file photo. [Photo/CFP]

The country's first cross-region visa-free transit policy will take effect on Jan 30 in the Yangtze River Delta region, according to a statement by the Ministry of Public Security on Tuesday.

The policy gives 144 hourssix dayswith no visa requirement to foreign tourists or businesspeople from 51 countries who pass through Jiangsu province, Zhejiang province or Shanghai.

To qualify, a passenger must hold valid international travel documents and booked tickets with confirmed dates and destinations.

Since 2013, Shanghai, Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang, and Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu, have had a 72-hour visa-free policy to enable tourists to stop and stay without a visa, but only if they entered one of the cities via an airport. Now the entry points have been expanded to include ports and railway stations.

Speaking of Shanghai, Lu Hanlong, a professor at the Institute of Sociology under the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said, "This measure aims to transform the city into a regional leader with global influence, which will attract more foreigners to stop in those places and understand local cultures better."

In addition, cities in the Yangtze River Delta region have created a system of public transportation that allows tourists to travel conveniently between attractions.

Also, high-speed trains in the region enable travelers to get from Nanjing to Shanghai in only an hour and to Hangzhou in just two hours.

"I am excited to hear about the extended visa-free transit policy, as it was quite convenient when I tried the 72-hour one previously, entering Shanghai before heading to Chengdu in Sichuan province. I would like to try it later when I travel to China again," said Jennifer Hammond, a public relations officer from the United States.

"It will definitely attract more foreign people who take business trips to China to apply this method to spend a few more days traveling around as a bonus."
Actor Liu Ye met his French wife in 2006 and they got married in 2009. They had their first baby boy in 2010, and a girl later in 2012. [Photo/People's Daily Online]

Foreign family members of Chinese citizens will be eligible for a two-year residency permit in Beijing based on a family visit visa, according to the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau.

The bureau announced a new policy on Tuesday that extends by one year the time allowed under the previous policy. The two-year permits are renewable.

Family members of a Chinese citizenincluding spouses, parents, spouse's parents or children, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren and spouses of the childrenare now allowed to live in Beijing for two years. Formerly they had to go to the Department of Entry and Exit for an annual renewal.

The policy affects only people whose residency permits are based on a family visit visa. It does not change the time for foreigners living and working in Beijing under a work visa.

Under the new policy, anyone applying for renewal of a residency permit will not be required to hand in certain papers, such as a marriage certificate, to prove a relationship with a Chinese citizen.

The policy is one of a dozen newly adopted measures to streamline procedures relating to foreigners living in Beijing.

Foreign applicants for a residence permit under a work visa are exempt from submitting a copy of a business license of the place they work.

Lin Song, a police officer at the Department of Entry and Exit in Beijing, said foreign applicants need to apply for renewal of their residency in China no more than 30 days before the residency permit expires.

He underscored that foreigners who live somewhere other than a hotel have 24 hours after arrival to register with the local police. The person who accommodates them can also handle the registration.

To assist Chinese nationals traveling outside the mainland, an additional 25 police stations in the city were authorized to receive applications for passports and other certificates for Chinese citizens to enter and exit the country, bringing the number to 47 in its nine districts.

In 2015, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau answered more than 510,000 phone inquiries about issues related to entry-and-exit services, according to statistics.

The bureau said that this year it will work with major Internet companies to publish policies regarding entry and exit.
Passengers wait in line to catch trains home at the Beijing West Railway Station on Tuesday. Zhu Xingxin / China Daily

As Christmas is to Westerners, Chinese New Year - the first day of the first lunar month - is regarded as the most important festival in China.

It will prompt hundreds of millions of people to flock home to celebrate the Year of the Monkey, which begins on Feb 8.

Big data released by search engine Baidu reveals people flowing from big cities to smaller cities, and from the coast inland.

The busiest route is from Guangdong province's Shenzhen to the Southwest municipality of Chongqing. Beijing and Shanghai have the largest number of people leaving during this period.

"It is the only time of year I can spend quality time with my family," said Ding Ding, a 31-year-old civil servant in Beijing who goes back to her hometown in Hebei province every year for Spring Festival.

Ceremonies like the dragon dance and lion dance are becoming less popular, but big New Year's Eve dinners are still the most important part of the celebration.

"I once told my mother she doesn't have to prepare so many dishes," Ding said. "But she said it is not about the dinner, it is about having it with you."

Li Bo, a 26-year-old hairdresser in Beijing, said that his customers and co-workers all call him by his English name, Steven, which was given to him by his boss, who thinks having an English name is essential when working in the fashion industry.

"Nobody calls me Steven in my home village in Anhui province. They call me Li Bo or Bobo, my nickname. The seven-day holiday during the festival is the only time I am Li Bo, not Steven," he said.

"There's nothing wrong with being Steven. I like to be called Steven. But I am also Li Bo. I have to dress well and make a lot of money to live in Beijing, to be Steven, but I am always Li Bo."

"Sometimes I am ashamed about my village background, but I don't want to lose it. My home village is the only place that accepts me as I am. I can always go back."

Li said going back home during the festival is the only connection between him and his past. He is worried that his village is changing too fast and that he will eventually lose contact with his memories.

"That's why I cherish the time at home," he said.
Capital targets 5 percent reduction in average PM2.5 level in 2016

The city of Beijing will cut the level of PM2.5 in the air by 5 percent this year, and will allocate more funds for projects to reduce emissions, an environmental official said.

To achieve the goal, the capital will inject 16.5 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) into projects to reduce air pollution in 2016, up from 5.9 billion yuan in 2015, said Yu Jianhua, chief engineer of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.

The money will subsidize projects including cutting coal consumption in rural areas, phasing out old vehicles with high emissions and shutting down 300 polluting companies, he said during a news conference at a session of the Beijing's People's Congress on Tuesday.

The average concentration of PM2.5 - particles smaller than 2.5 microns that can damage the lungs - reached 80.6 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing last year, according to the bureau.

The State Council set targets in 2013 for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to improve air quality, saying the capital will cut the average PM2.5 reading to 60 micrograms per cubic meter by 2017.

Annual coal consumption in the capital has been cut from 23 million metric tons in 2012 to 12 million in 2015, which will be further lowered to 10 million by 2017, the bureau said. By then it should account for less than 10 percent of the energy consumption mix.

The capital's cluster of neighboring cities, which are frequently hit by severe smog, have also strengthened their funding of pollution control efforts, especially in reducing coal consumption.

Provinces like Hebei, Henan and Shandong plan to direct more funding to upgrade facilities and technologies, and shut down outdated companies.

Henan province will allocate 1 billion yuan to improve technology in large power plants so they will discharge almost zero pollutants in 2016, said Governor Xie Fuzhan.

Henan failed to reach national air quality standards on half of the days in 2015, and Zhengzhou, its capital, was listed in the top 10 cities with poor air quality in December.

Hebei, the province with the heaviest smog, has faced more financial pressure in lowering coal consumption to 40 million tons by 2017, which would require about 266 billion yuan, said Yin Guangping, deputy head of the provincial environmental protection bureau.

Of that, 63.6 billion yuan will come from the provincial government, which would add huge pressure to the province, he said.

Zhang Yu in Shijiazhuang and Qi Xin in Zhengzhou contributed to this story.


A newborn baby receives care in a hospital in Shanghai in August. The city's birthrate has remained quite low over the past two years even though the country has relaxed its family planning rule. Provided to China Daily

Shanghai's legislators and political advisers are pushing for more incentives to better implement China's new universal two-child policy and encourage women to become mothers for a second time.

Ideas put forward by lawmakers at their ongoing annual gathering include imposing taxes on families rather than individuals, financially subsidizing couples who have two children, extending maternity and childcare leave for both parents and providing more nurseries - especially for children under the age of 3.

These proposals are aimed at helping remove some of the major obstacles that prevent couples from planning for a second child.

China's government decided to adopt a universal two-child policy in October in a bid to address the issues posed by the country's rapidly aging population.

The move, which came into effect on Jan 1, is particularly significant for Shanghai where seniors make up nearly 30 percent of the permanent residents - forecast to increase to 35 percent by 2020.

The city's birthrate is also "among the world's lowest" with an average of 0.7 births per resident couple over the past two years, according to Yang Xiong, a political adviser and director of the Institute of Sociology under the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Statistics from the Shanghai Commission of Health and Family Planning show that less than 5 percent of eligible couples had applied to have a second child in 2015.

A survey conducted by the Shanghai Women's Federation and Fudan University found that most couples opted out of having more children due to the inherent economic burden of raising offspring, concerns over the possible negative effects it would have on the woman's career and the absence of anyone else to help care for the child.

In a bid to relieve the financial pressure felt by couples wishing to have more than one child, Yang introduced the proposal to impose taxes on families instead of individuals.

"Moreover, multi-tier financial subsidies should be offered to couples with children. Those who have two children should be given more help," he said.

Chen Lei, another political adviser and head of the China Welfare Institute Nursery in Shanghai, identified a general lack of nurseries in the city as another reason why many couples opt out of having more children.

"Around 250,000 babies are born in Shanghai each year but there are only 40 or so nurseries with a capacity to care for 6,000 toddlers aged between 18 and 36 months old," she said.

Officials from the Shanghai Commission of Health and Family Planning said they were soliciting opinions about the ideal length for maternity and paternity leaves so that mothers and fathers could share the burden of childcare.
A chic fashion photo of Ding Bingcai taken by his grandson, a photographer. Photos provided to China Daily.

Ding Bingcai wears his everyday clothing. Photos provided to China Daily.

A 30-year-old professional photographer with an interest in fashion recently found an unlikely yet dapper muse: his 85-year-old grandfather.

Ding Guoliang typically uses models in their 20s for his chic fashion photos. But it was images posted online of his gracefully aging grandfather in stylish suits and accessories that brought Ding the most attention.

Three-piece suits, fedoras, half-rimmed glasses worn elegantly by Ding Bingcai reminded viewers of snapshots of stylish men of a similar age on streets abroad.

"He looks amazing in the pictures. Not everybody looks good in suits. But he's got class," Ding Guoliang said.

"My grandfather never showed timidity during the photo shoot. At his age, he has become quite calm about many things. He just enjoyed my company."

Unlike the fashion icons found on the pages of magazines and newspapers, Ding's grandfather is a farmer who spent most of his life in a village in Fujian province. He moved out to live with his children in Xiamen a few years ago.

But he easily exchanged his plain rural garb for higher fashion and projected the air of a graceful and fashionable gentleman. "He had never worn suits before," said Ding, who took the pictures in September during a visit by his grandfather. "It was normal, even if there were holes in the clothes."

For the fashion shoot, his grandfather received a total makeover. A friend of Ding's lent him the clothes and other props for the project, which used scenes of cozy cafes and streets wet with rain as a backdrop.

Guoliang said he likes to see the "very calm and very serious old man" smile. "He doesn't like to smile too much. I feel so happy when he smiles at me through the lens. It feels so warm."

The photographs provide a fond memory of the time the two spent together, and Ding said he hopes the pictures will encourage other family members, including his cousins, to spend more time with his grandfather.

The grandfather has five children living in different cities, and they have taken turns caring for him since Ding's grandmother died in 2014.

"Taking care of him is not just about offering food and clothing. It means ... making him happy, making him feel that he exists and gratifying him mentally," Ding said. "I kept talking to him while taking these pictures, and I made him smile."

Ding, who was in Beijing on Saturday to appear as a guest on China Central Television's Voice, said he would like to stay in the city for a few days and see the sights. "I promised my grandfather I would take him to Beijing and visit Tian'anmen," Guoliang said. "Maybe we will go there if it gets a little warmer."

The show will be aired on Feb 13.

Yang Jie in Fuzhou contributed to the story.
A train loaded with motorcycles of migrant workers departs from a railway station of Foshan, South China's Guangdong province, Jan 26. [Photo/CFP]

A cargo train carrying close to 200 motorcycles left Foshan, South China's Guangdong province, Tuesday for neighboring Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, reported Chinanews.com. This is the country's first special train for motorcycles, and these motorcycles belong to migrant workers working in Guangdong and are going back to their hometown in Guangxi for the Spring Festival.

Every year, more than half a million migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta, an economic hub in South China, travel home by motorcycle to neighboring provinces and regions during the Spring Festival rush to keep their costs down as well as due to a shortage of train tickets. They have to endure the long, uncomfortable journeys full of perils.

To ensure a safe journey for the motorcyclists, this special train for motorcycles was arranged by Guangzhou Railway Group.

Those who apply for motorcycle delivery get priority to buy tickets for special high-speed trains, which will run from Jan 31 to Feb 5, one train per day. They are expected to take 3,600 migrant workers and their families home from Guangzhou to Nanning in Guangxi.

The journeys for both the motorcycles and their owners are funded by companies and Guangxi government.

The Guangzhou Railway Corp opened special trains from Guangzhou to Nanning for migrant workers for the first time during the Spring Festival travel rush last year, and this year it added motorcycle delivery service because motorcycles are important vehicles for migrant workers to visit relatives and friends during Spring Festival holidays.

In addition to free train rides, 218 gas stations in Guangdong and Hunan provinces and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region will provide free petrol to 10,000 motorcyclists heading home for family reunions.

This year's Spring Festival travel rush lasts 40 days from Jan 24 to March 33. It is estimated that 2.9 billion trips will be made during the period, with the majority of people traveling by rail and road.
The Black Cat Detective. [Photo from Sina Weibo]

Shanghai's two home-grown cartoons - the hero of Black Cat Detective, an animation, and the logo of the White Rabbit creamy candies - were suggested as symbols for the city by a local legislator.

"The black cat stands for justice and rules, and the white rabbit indicates intelligence and flexibility. These two characters once accompanied the growth of several generations in Shanghai and carry warm memories for the locals," Li Qi, a deputy to Shanghai People's Congress, the city's legislative body, said at the ongoing annual session on Tuesday.

Black Cat Detective was produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio and aired in China in the 1980s, gaining wide popularity.

The candies were first manufactured in 1943 and soon became famous and a popular gift for people all over the country. In 1972, then premier Zhou Enlai gave White Rabbit candies to then US President Richard Nixon during the latter's visit to China. The candies became popular overseas as well.

"These two cartoon images have powerful public appeal and may lead to great strides in their related industries," said Li, who is also deputy director of the publicity department of Shanghai municipal Party committee.
The forbidden city is on the central axis of the city. [Photo/CFP]

Wetlands for birds and ancient heritage need greater protection in a fast-developing and cosmopolitan city such as Beijing.

Local political advisors discussed how to improve the ecological environment at a panel in the capital.

Guo Geng, a professor at a research center for biodiversity protection in Beijing, said people need to learn more about birds' habitats.

He used the example that some people think a wetland is a wasteland and suggest renovating the land into a lawn or greenbelt or planting trees.

"There are uncountable lives - various birds and animals - using the wetland as their habitat and we cannot take that away from them," said Guo.

He stressed that it helps Beijing to have a diversity of wildlife. He also pointed out people cannot solve problems without thinking about their connections to wildlife.

Reed marshes are common in Olympic Forest Park where much wildlife can be found but Guo had found most reeds had been cut off, leaving only very short roots. Staff at the park told him they cut the reeds to avoid fire hazards.

"It's a very thoughtless act," Guo said,"We should find other ways to prevent fire risks rather than simply ruining the home of the wildlife."

Cui Tiening, a professor at Beijing University of Technology, agreed saying: "We should know our ecological environment better to serve our city."

Cultural relics were another issue discussed during two sessions of the panel.

Beijing is planning to better protect cultural heritage and traditional culture in downtown Beijing, according to local officials.

Huang Yan, director of Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning, said the Dongcheng and Xicheng districts are the core areas of Beijing and that there will be systematic measures to relocate people to safeguard historic treasures.

Wang Shanfeng, head of Xicheng district government, said the district has 182 cultural relics with many dating back to the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties.

"Each community is required to report the status of its cultural heritage and any action to damage it will be punished," Wang said.

Meanwhile, the districts have been attaching great importance to protecting the hutong (Beijing alleyways).

Kong Fanzhi, former chief of Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage, said the city needs to find a balance between protection of relics and urban city development.

"But now is a great opportunity to focus on protection as Beijing is relocating part of the population from downtown areas to suburban areas that could lessen pressure on this old town," said Kong.

Kong highlighted three things Beijing needs to do to bring out the city's historical charm.

"First, Beijing needs to rebuild some gate towers and city walls that have been torn-down to re-draw the outline of the city; second, we should remove illegal constructions that damage the central axis of the city, which is a unique and beautiful city landscape; last but not least, we need to protect the historical streets and Siheyuan (courtyard house) that are the city's treasure," Kong said.

The central axis or main artery of Beijing was originally a 7.8 km long street along which the city, including the Palace Museum, or Forbidden City, was built to realize an ideal vision in line with traditional Chinese design concepts dating back to the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911).

Kong believes Siheyuan is the essence of Beijing as an ancient imperial city with a long history: "When those old courtyards are gone, Beijing will be gone as a historical town."
Qin Xiaohui (R) plays with the other children in his village on July 5, 2012. Qin Xiaohui, then 6, lives in Banlie Village of Bansheng Township in Dahua Yao Autonomous County, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. [Photo/Xinhua] Their care and safety is mutual responsibility of families, government and society as a whole

The central government intends to improve care systems for children left-behind in rural areas by migrant worker parents, a high-level government meeting pledged on Wednesday.

A system will be set up to serve such children by reporting on them, intervening and offering assistance as needed, all to keep them from falling prey to criminal activity.

The decisions were made at an executive meeting of the State Council presided over by Premier Li Keqiang.

The meeting also discussed measures to reduce the number of left-behind children by encouraging migrant workers to permanently move to cities or work near their rural homes.

A statement issued after the meeting said that "caring for and protecting millions of children left behind in rural areas, and allowing them to grow safely and in good health is the mutual responsibility of families, government and the society as a whole".

Each party, it said, including the local government, village committee and school, must carry out its duties. Charity and social organizations were encouraged to participate to improve the system.

China has about 60 million left-behind children.

In recent years, a number of tragedies have called attention to their plight.

Last year in Bijie, Guizhou province, four children of absent migrant workers committed suicide at home. They were aged 5 to 13.

Also in Bijie last year, a 15-year-old girl and her 13-year-old brother were killed at home. Police found that the girl had been sexually assaulted before she was murdered. Their parents were migrant workers away from home.

In 2014, 10 villagers were imprisoned for repeatedly raping and sexually assaulting a left-behind 13-year-old girl in Guangxi province.
A new agency has been set up by the Ministry of Public Security to handle fugitives who have fled overseas.

The Department of Overseas Fugitives Affairs will help China to bring fugitives hiding overseas to justice and to retrieve stolen funds, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

It added that the "Fox Hunt" campaign, launched last year to hunt such fugitives, will continue this year.

The ministry said 857 fugitives were brought to China from 66 countries and regions between April and the end of December.

Law enforcement authorities launched the "Fox Hunt" campaign in April as part of the "Skynet" operation targeting suspected economic criminals.

Of the 857 suspects, 366 turned themselves in to Chinese police, 477 were caught by local law enforcement officers and 14 were prosecuted in local courts.

A total of 212 suspects allegedly embezzled or took bribes of up to 10 million yuan, according to the statement.

Fifty-eight of these suspects were allegedly linked with cases involving more than 100 million yuan ($15.2 million).

The statement said 39 of the suspects had been living overseas for more than 10 years, with one of them being at large for 21 years.

The ministry said 122 fugitives were linked with vocational crimes, a term usually used by Chinese authorities to refer to corruption.

The ministry and regional police sent more than 50 teams to overseas countries and regions to work with local law enforcement bodies and Chinese diplomatic missions to track and seize the fugitives.

Two suspects were sent back from the United States and a total of six were returned from Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Spain and Hungary.

Another 283 fugitives were captured in Southeast Asian countries including Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (C back) presides over a symposium to solicit opinions on the draft of the annual government work report and the country's 13th Five-Year Plan from leaders of non-Communist political parties, officials of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and prominent figures without party affiliation in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 25, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING -- Premier Li Keqiang on Monday held a symposium to solicit opinion from experts and entrepreneurs on the draft of the annual government work report and the country's 13th Five-Year Plan.

"It takes new perspective to observe the Chinese economy, as it has achieved growth with higher quality in terms of new growth drivers, people's income, energy saving and emission-reduction," participants at the symposium said.

China should continue promote innovation-driven growth through encouraging mass entrepreneurship and innovation, according to Gu Shengzu, a member of the Financial and Economic Committee of the National People's Congress, and Liu Shijin, an economist with the Development and Research Center under the State Council.

Hua Sheng, a professor at Southeast University, said that China should stick to reform and opening up and give priority to institutional and mechanism building.

Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at JP Morgan, made suggestions on digesting excess capacity and promoting "new-type" urbanization.

Guan Qing, chair of China State Construction Engineering Corp. said China should improve its industry standards and sharp the image of "built by China."

Lu Guanqiu, board chairman of China's leading auto-part maker Wanxiang Group, said the government should press ahead with streamlining administration to mobilize the enthusiasm of private enterprises and capital.

Cao Guowei, CEO of news portal Sina, suggested that Internet platforms might play a role in upgrading traditional industries.

Li exchanged opinions with the experts and entrepreneurs, and said that reform and opening up remains the "magic weapon" for achieving growth.

"The most important thing at present is making the economy rely less on natural resources than on talent," he said.

He reiterated that the government should take good care of laid-off workers from industries with overcapacity, especially the coal and steel sectors.

Li will deliver the final work report at the annual session of the National People's Congress in March.
Through the joint effort of the government and companies of Anxi county in Fujian province, the trademark for Anxi Tieguanyin, a premium oolong tea in China, is undergoing a major overseas registration campaign.

Since the beginning of last year, the trademark has been registered in 46 countries and regions, including the United States, Japan, Russia, South Korea and France, to protect the renowned Anxi brand.

Wang Wenli, head of the Anxi Tieguanyin Tea Association, said the tea brand must develop internationally to strengthen its influence.

"Growth in the domestic tea market is slowing down because of the nation's current macro economic situation, so we need to explore new markets," Wang said. "Registering the trademark internationally is a necessary move."

Five member companies in the association formed an alliance at the end of 2012 to establish a sales center for Anxi Tieguanyin in Paris. Over the next three years, the center opened branches in several European countries including Germany and Switzerland.

So far, 65 tea companies in the county have opened subsidiaries, offices or sales centers overseas.

Many of them have also worked out new ways to promote the brand. Xingxi Tea Co launched a partnership with a French chateau to cross-promote their products. Empereur Tea held a tea culture exhibition tour in Europe.

Sanhe Group launched a commemorative tea in 2014 to honor the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between France and China.

The group also cooperated with luxury brand Bulgari to make high-end tea gifts.

"It is a good time for international deployment right now," said Wu Rongshan, founder and general manager of Sanhe Group. "The cost of opening an overseas division is low because economies and consumption, for developed regions and emerging economies, are in a downturn."

Wu said tea companies in Anxi should not be content with their domestic success, but have "a higher orientation and global vision".He advised the county's companies to actively take part in global cooperation and competitions to make Anxi Tieguanyin a world-class brand.

The government of Anxi has been supporting the companies' overseas development by issuing policies and guidelines encouraging the acquisition of green food certificates and the opening of divisions abroad.

To promote Chinese tea brands around the world, companies should not only focus on product quality, but the tea culture as well, said Lu Chengyin, a researcher at the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

"The unique skills to make tea represent the crystallization of people's wisdom, a collective intellectual property," Lu said.

Two women perform a tea ceremony in Anxi county, Fujian province.

(China Daily 01/27/2016 page17)
[File photo]

Local officials in Beijing vowed to further renovate and protect the city's cultural heritage, in particular the narrow streets or alleys known as hutong, in the downtown area.

In the old districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng, which cover 62 square kilometers, some people will be asked to move from one-story hutong houses to avoid further damage to ancient architecture, said Huang Yan, director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning.

Hutong are commonly found in the cities of North China, but they are at risk. Beijing is currently believed to have fewer than 1,000 hutong, most of which are located near the Forbidden City. Only 60 years ago, the number was 3,250.

Huang said the two districts represent the core area of Beijing, and measures will be imposed to safeguard the historic treasure.

"Dongcheng and Xicheng are where the offices of the country's top leadership are located. Meanwhile, there are plenty of world heritage sites such as the Forbidden City. The importance of protecting all that is self-evident," she said.

"On average more than 100,000 people visit the Forbidden City during the National Day holidays. The visits put pressure on the protection of cultural relics," Huang said, adding that hutong should be renovated and protected from human damage.

Beijing's legislators have scrutinized the enforcement of the regulation on cultural heritage protection, Du Deyin, chairman of the Beijing People's Congress Standing Committee, said in his annual report on Monday.

"The Congress focused on the implementation of protection plans and how the management of cultural heritages worked," Du told deputies.

Wang Shaofeng, head of the Xicheng district government, said the area has 182 cultural relics, many of which were built as far back as the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

Hutong are key for local authorities to safeguard, Wang said.

The densely populated district of Xicheng has 1.28 million residents in its 57 square kilometers of land. "The most efficient way is to decrease the local population to reduce the possibility of causing harm to the heritage," Wang said.

"Each community has been required to report the status of its cultural heritage, especially hutong, and any actions to damage the heritage will be punished," Wang said.
A Malaysian postal service employee holds a seal featuring a monkey on Jan 26, 2016. The countrys postal service launched a set of stamps featuring monkeys in celebration of the upcoming Year of the Monkey. [Photo/Xinhua]

Malaysia's post company has launched a set of stamps featuring monkeys in celebration of the upcoming "Year of the Monkey."

Many philatelic fans lined up early at the post headquarters in Kuala Lumpur on Jan 26, the first day of sale, to get a hand on the stamps and related philatelic items.

The collection features illustrations of four primate species which could be found in the Malaysian forest, namely the silvered leaf monkey, macaque, white-handed gibbon, and agile gibbon.

Post Malaysia's chief executive Shukrie Mohd Salleh said the Year of the Monkey "signifies wisdom, loyalty, innovation and leadership quality."

Chinese around the globe will celebrate the Spring Festival in February, which heralds the Year of the Monkey.
Chinese pianist Lang Lang (L) is named image ambassador of the China-Latin America Culture Year during a press conference of the event in Beijing, capital of China, Jan 26, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

March marks the start of the China-Latin America Culture Year, a program that will boost cultural exchanges between China and nearly 30 Latin American countries, the Ministry of Culture announced Tuesday.

The event will include hundreds of activities, such as performances, exhibitions, movie screenings, tourism promotions and literary events, according to ministry official Zhu Qi, who was promoting the event at a press conference Tuesday

Countries including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Cuba and some that have no formal diplomatic ties with China will be involved, the official said.

Lang Lang, the Chinese pianist, has been named image ambassador of the event, and he will tour Chile, Argentina and other countries in the region in August.

Exchanges between academic institutions, universities and artists, as well as seminars, translation contests are also on the agenda.

The ministry will launch a translation project to promote the literature of China and Latin America.

The event was proposed by President Xi Jinping in July 2014 during his Latin America trip.

Related:

Year of Culture Exchange to boost China-Latin America ties
Donna Seduta by Fernando Botero. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Nine bronze sculptures by Colombian artist Fernando Botero stand on the square in front of the China Art Museum Shanghai, in their debut exhibition in China.

One of the most important Latin artists of the time, Botero recently had a successful exhibition in Beijing, at National Museum of China, which concluded on Jan 2. The Shanghai leg of his first China tour opened on Jan 21 and continues through May 8.

Besides the 96 paintings on show in Beijing, and the nine sculptures presented outdoors, the Shanghai show also includes three new paintings as well as 30 sketches, presenting a panoramic show of the artist's career.

Botero, 83, is famous for his signature style known as "Boterismo", which depicts human and other subjects in exaggerated large volume. His women with big round bodies and chubby limbs are widely printed and published.

He has created a magnificent world of the fat, in which contained "graceful satire of the reality", says Li Lei, deputy director of China Art Museum Shanghai.

Botero started to work on sculptures in the 1960s, and his paintings are often narrative. The sculptures better reflected his artistic ideas and the volume, which is the key part of "Boterismo", Li says.

The exhibition marks the beginning of the year of Latin culture in China, when a series of master artists from the region will be showcased in China, according to Yin Peng, a

If you go

Botero in China

Tue-Sun, 10 am-6 pm, through May 8

Exhibition Hall No.17, China Art Museum Shanghai, 205 Shangnan Road, Pudong, Shanghai.

Related:

Creating a world of well-rounded folks
[Photo/Xinhua]

The Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) has called for a greater variety of senior care facilities, with more small care homes serving local communities.

China has over 13,000 private care homes, but more are needed because "many senior citizens and their children prefer small, neighborly institutions, which are quite rare now," said Zhen Bingliang, an official with the MCA's Social Welfare Center, on Monday.

Zhen said a network of local facilities would be more convenient for families and more cost-effective than large institutions, many of which have lots of empty beds because their owners overestimated demand.

The government highlighted the need to build a more diverse senior healthcare sector in its 13th Five-year Plan, covering 2016-2020. It also promised more subsidies for senior citizens.
Wu Guanghua has spent 14 years compiling a Chinese-English dictionary, which will be released by Shanghai Translation Publishing House later this year.[Photo provided to China Daily]

People behind dictionaries attracted rare media attention in 2013 after The Great Passage, a Japanese film, competed for the Academy Awards that year as a contestant in the best foreign-language film category.

In China, Wu Guanghua's world is somewhat similar to that of the movie's main characters. The 75-year-old compiler has spent the past 14 years working on a dictionary.

As a result the largest Chinese-English dictionary by scale has been created.

The two-volume A Century Chinese-English Dictionary is expected to be released by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House later this year.

"I skipped holidays and festivals, and didn't notice seasonal changes so as to complete the dictionary's 36 million words," Wu, who lives in Northeast China's port city of Dalian, Liaoning province, tells China Daily by phone.

To the publishers, it was an "opportunity of a lifetime" to work with compilers such as Wu.

Zhu Yajun, an editor at the publishing house, says it was difficult to find one's way in Wu's house through the piles of reference material when he was working on the dictionary.

"We saw him working with his desk buried in papers," Zhu says.

Born in the eastern province of Jiangsu, Wu has been working as a lexicography professor at Dalian Jiaotong University since 1965.

He has published 20 dictionaries, including the award-winning The Chinese-English Dictionary, since the 1980s.

For his latest compiling work, Wu usually started at 8 am and called it a day around 10 pm.

Even with the help of some 100 researchers and dictionary writers, he still felt time ticking away and couldn't afford to spend even a few hours to apply for extra grants for the project.

The dictionary is comprehensive and updated, says Zhang Yihua, a professor with Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in South China's Guangzhou city.

It contains more than 860,000 entries, covering about 200 areas. About 360,000 entries are related to science and technology.

The entries are listed under 40,000 individual Chinese characters, according to Wu. The authoritative Kangxi Dictionary, one of the major Chinese-language reference books compiled in the early 18th century under Emperor Kangxi's decree, has about 47,000 characters, he says.

"We've turned all the 40,000 characters into English," Wu says.
During his recent visits to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran, President Xi Jinping proposed building a stable energy community. In an article for the Saudi media, Xi pointed out that China and Saudi Arabia should expand the scale of bilateral trade, and build a long-term and stable "energy cooperation community".

Such an energy cooperation community not only shows the core goal of Xi's visit, but also makes clear China's national energy strategy during the period of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020).

With China's rapid economic development and the United States reducing its dependency on Middle East oil, China has gradually replaced the US as the biggest consumer of oil from the region. Thus Middle East countries are paying greater attention to building strategic partnerships with China. Establishing a stable energy cooperation community is of great significance not only to China and the Middle East, but also to the global energy order.
US Secretary of State John Kerry says goodbye as he boards his plane in Vientiane, Laos, Jan 25, 2016, before leaving for Phnom Penh, Cambodia. [Photo/Agencies]

US Secretary of State John Kerry began a two-day visit to China on Tuesday. His visit comes at an important juncture as both Beijing and Washington need to shore up greater political will to properly handle their differences and ensure the current stable picture of their bilateral interaction remains intact.

During Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the United States last year, the two countries charted the course for their relations, vowing to jointly build a new type of major-country relationship. This reflects their shared resolve to avoid the Thucydides's trapthe likelihood of conflict between a rising power and an existing one.

Following through on this consensus will not only guarantee the right direction for the future development of bilateral ties but also contribute to world peace and stability, as international efforts to tackle global issues now increasingly hinge on cooperation between the world's two largest economies.

Although there is no denying the fact that Beijing and Washington cannot see eye to eye with each other on a number of issues, including some global and regional ones. Past experience indicates they can steer bilateral ties on the right track as long as they improve their risk management and do not let their differences overshadow their cooperation on their common interests.

At present, the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula are proving headaches for the two countries.

The US should understand its leadership in the region, as pleaded for by some claimants in the South China Sea territorial disputes, can only be maintained if it does more to promote peace instead of stirring up trouble in the sensitive waters.

Meanwhile, after Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test in a decade on Jan 6, denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula looks a more daunting challenge than ever. At this critical stage, it is crucial that all the parties concerned shoulder their due responsibilities and make efforts to defuse the situation.

Finger pointing and unreasonable accusations do not help cultivate the proper atmosphere for peacefully defusing the impasse, while resorting to provocative moves will only risk pushing the situation out of the controlthat would serve the interests of no one.

China has repeatedly called for the parties concerned to come back to the right track of dialogue and negotiation. The denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula needs constructive efforts from all parties involved, not just China.
China's natinal political advisers applaud at the closing meeting of the annual session of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top political advisory body, on March 13, 2015. [Photo by Wei Xiaohao/chinadaily.com.cn]

MEMBERS OF the Guangdong provincial committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the province's main political advisory body, reportedly used props, including scarves and banners with images of popular television figures, to seek a chance to improvise a short speech during a recent routine meeting. Beijing News spoke highly of these political advisors' enthusiasm for participating in local public affairs and urged the relevant authorities to respond to their concerns and improve the advisory channels:

In comparison to those so-called celebrity members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference who never attend local political events or have nothing to offer during the annual sessions, the zealous Guangdong political advisors not only realized their public responsibility but also sought to fulfill it.

It is praiseworthy that they volunteered to make comments and proposals on certain issues on behalf of residents, instead of seeing their CPPCC membership as a privilege or burden. True, they did resort to making a fuss to get the presiding officer's attention, but it is what they proposed in the interests of local residents that matters most.

Their antics were not aimed at gaining popularity, but in utilizing the media attention to speak for the public. As an increasing number of reporters choose to cover the annual political event, local political advisors are working harder on their speeches, some of which turn out to be even more influential than pages of proposals.

Of course, the annual CPPCC sessions at all levels are the first choice for political advisors who want to make their proposals heard by the relevant authorities. That many CPPCC members pay more attention to media interviews and enhance their social media presence is a natural trend of the times.

Local governments should expand the channels through which political advisors can make proposals, promote improvised speeches in other political events, and broadcast them via online platforms.
Police cadets display their skills during the passing out parade of 6th Batch Balochistan police training in southwest Pakistan's Quetta on Jan 6, 2016. About 100 police cadets completed their commando training on Wednesday to combat terrorism at Pakistan Police in Quetta. [Photo/Xinhua]

A number of countries have fallen victim to terrorist attacks recently, pointing to the cruelty of extremists and the importance of maintaining high vigilance against terrorism worldwide.

On Jan 20, a terrorist attack on a university campus in northwest Pakistan killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens more. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

This is not the first time that schools in the South Asian country have been targeted by the Taliban. Just over a year ago, Pakistan experienced one of the deadliest school attacks in its history near Peshawar. More than 150 people were killed, mostly children.

Also on Jan 20, a Taliban suicide car bomber targeted a minibus in Kabul that was carrying journalists working for a private Afghan television channel, killing seven.

Prior to these, an attack on a hotel in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou on Jan 15, carried out by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, left at least 29 people dead and 30 others injured.

The day before, explosions and gunfire rocked downtown Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, killing seven people and injuring 20 others. Indonesian police said the Islamic State terrorist group was responsible.

That so many countries have been targeted by terrorist groups within such a short period of time shows the rampancy of terrorism and extremism worldwide. The perpetrators may belong to different terrorist groups and be entrenched in different parts of the world, but they all employ similar methods to harm innocent people and produce as much fear and social panic as possible.

The global cancer of terrorism and extremism has not sprung up over night. It has its roots in countries and regions which have long been mired in economic stagnation, domestic social unrest and acute sectarian rifts or ethnic tensions.

In such places, social backwardness and lasting poverty have resulted in a lack of education and high unemployment among young people who are thus easily influenced by extremist ideology.
Harbin's Ice and Snow Amusement World draws crowds with hundreds of ice and snow sculptures.[Photo by Tian Weitao/ China Daily]

A record number of Chinese will spend the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday overseas, while both snow bunnies and snowbirds are flocking to domestic destinations to ring in the Year of the Monkey.

This Spring Festival will be Hao Hai's first one spent overseas.

The 37-year-old Beijinger will spend eight days with his family in Tokyo and Hakone.

"Many of my friends will travel over the weeklong holiday and advised I try it, too," he says.

He got his visa two weeks after he submitted documents to a middleman on China's biggest e-commerce website, Taobao.

"That's why I decided to go," he says.

Outbound surge

Hao will join the Chinese expected to make a record 6 million visits outside the mainland during the festival, which starts on Feb 7, online travel giant Ctrip reports. There were 5.2 million travelers who left the mainland during the holiday last year, a jump of 10 percent over 2014, the China National Tourism Administration says.

Chinese will visit more than 100 countries and regionseven Antarcticaduring this year's holiday, Ctrip says.

Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries remain popular destinations. Many families have booked trips to Singapore through Ctrip to enjoy the city-state's warm weather and its large theme parks, such as Universal Studios.

Based on Ctrip's bookings as of mid-January, the 10 most-popular destinations outside the mainland were: Thailand; Japan; South Korea; Taiwan; Singapore; Hong Kong; the United States; Indonesia; Malaysia and Australia.

Bookings have increased for countries that have simplified visa procedures, including the US, Singapore, Thailand, Japan and Vietnam, Ctrip's publicity manager Yan Xin says.

Over 10,000 Chinese booked trips to Thailand through Ctrip.

But the second case of Middle East respiratory syndrome contracted by a tourist in the country announced on Tuesday may curb the number of Chinese visitors.

(The patient is from Oman.)

The Chinese embassy in Thailand has advised tourists to purchase travel insurance.

Cruise bookings have more than doubled, Ctrip reports. Over 90 percent sail to Japan and Korea.

"Most Chinese aboard hope to relish the cherry blossoms of Okinawa and Kagoshima," Yan explains.

Cruises enable visa-free visits to certain Japanese ports and to Korea's Jeju Island.

Ctrip forecasts average per-capita spending will surpass 10,000 yuan ($1,520).

Antarctic visitors may spend up to 300,000 yuan.

Japan, Thailand and South Korea are expected to be leaders in inbound-Chinese tourism revenue.

Over 450,000 Chinese splashed out nearly 6 billion yuan in Japan last Spring Festival, Japanese media report. Shopping is a major activity, and Chinese will pack duty-free shops and outlets.
Tourists take wedding pictures during a trip to Antarctica. Luxury travel packages are popular with rich Chinese, and a report says Antarctica, the Maldives, Australia, Dubai and France are top luxury destinations.[Photo provided to China Daily]

As more Chinese names make it onto the global rich list, luxury tourism packages are proving more popular.

The number of Chinese billionaires swelled to 596 in 2015, which saw the country overtake the United States for the first time, according to Hurun Report, a market-intelligence company.

"Despite the economic slowdown, China's richest people created more wealth in a single year than any country has ever done before," says Rupert Hoogewerf, the chairman of Hurun, who has tipped China to become the world's top luxury-tourism market.

How to tap that potential is the question now being asked by those in the industry.

In early 2014, Beijing Utour International Travel Service launched Magic Travel to cater to the expanding ranks of wealthy Chinese.

"Compared with years ago, the market is much more mature," says Li Mengran, Utour's publicity manager.

"Today, there's more to luxury travel than just being ostentatious."

A Hurun/International Luxury Travel Market Asia report released in May says half of all superrich travelers flew business class in 2014, compared to one-third the previous year.

Chinese luxury travelers have grown more accustomed to good service and well-planned itineraries, says Steve Spivak, vice-president of global sales for Tauck, the US-based tour organizer.

"Itineraries that offer rich, exotic experiences are now popular with superrich travelers, such as our Amazon River cruise or an expedition to a Kenyan national park."

Li adds that tours to the Arctic and Antarctica led by scientists and accompanied by professional photographers are also best-sellers.

The Hurun/International Luxury Travel Market Asia report says Antarctica was the most popular destination among China's high net-worth individuals in 2014, especially during the Spring Festival break. Other top luxury destinations were the Maldives, Australia, Dubai and France.

The report says the United Kingdom and Italy have seen significant increases in their popularity and forecasts that Europe will rank first in terms of luxury leisure travel over the next three years.

"Leisure and global travel are set to be the themes for the next three years, and next is polar exploration," the report says.

"Superrich travelers, while hoping for novel and extreme experiences, also crave physical and spiritual relaxation during their travels and vacations."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei is seen at a daily news briefing on Monday, Jan 11, 2016. [Photo/fmprc.gov.cn]

China is playing a more active role in hot regional issues, as the first round of four-party talks on Afghanistan was held in Islamabad on Monday.

The meeting came one day after Vice-Foreign Minister Zhang Ming returned from a Middle East mediation trip following the abrupt breaking of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a daily news briefing on Monday that Zhang had told the two countries to "stay calm and restrained" and ease the tension.

He said the first meeting of the Quadrilateral Coordination Committee to solve the Afghan issue sought to "create favorable conditions to push forward an Afghan reconciliation process" led by the Afghan people.

"China is willing to continue playing a constructive role" in the process based on respect for Afghanistan's sovereignty and the will of various parties."

Chinese special envoy for Afghanistan Deng Xijun is leading the Chinese delegation in the talks, also attended by senior officials from Afghanistan, the United States and Pakistan.

Niu Xinchun, director of the Institute of Middle East Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said China seems to be playing a bigger role in hot regional issues as its overseas interests increase and responsibilities as a global power grow.

Pakistan's Senate Defence Committee Chairman Mushahid Hussain Sayed said China's presence at the four-party talks is critical and that Beijing is playing a unique role.

Dong Manyuan, vice-president of the China Institute of International Studies, said, "Afghanistan is an important neighbor of China, and Beijing expects to see a peaceful and stable Afghanistan."

The talks are intended to explore options to revive the stalled dialogue between Kabul and the Taliban, according to diplomatic sources.

The first peace talks between Kabul and the Taliban, which the US and China attended as observers, were held in Pakistan in July but became deadlocked after the death of former Taliban leader Mullah Omar was confirmed.
Two policemen stand guard outside the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, California, the United States, Jan 26, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

SAN DIEGO - No evidence or signs of casualties were found after sweeps of a building at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego where an active gunshot was reported Tuesday morning, said a Navy commanding officer.

"A DoD (Department of Defense) employee reported the gun shot... the initial report was not through phone call, it was made in person," Capt. Curt Jones, commanding officer of Naval Base San Diego, said at a press conference in the afternoon.

"We are now clearing the building for couple of times... moving people out of the building, and we (have) not found anything which substantiates the earlier report," Jones said.

An active shooter was reported around 8 am local time on Tuesday morning in the southern California border city of San Diego. Local police officer confirmed a single witness reporting three gunshots fired in the basement of Building 26 of the center.

"An active shooter has just been been reported in building #26 at Naval Medical Center San Diego. All occupants are advised to run, hide or fight," the Center posted on its Facebook page.

"We don't take any of these calls as a joke, we take them very seriously," San Diego Police Department Chief Shelley Zimmerman told Xinhua.

"If somebody thinks they saw something that could potentially be very dangerous, be it an active shooter or something else, if they hear something, if they know something, we want everybody to say something," she said.

The medical center has more than 6,500 staff, including military, civilians, contractors and volunteers, according to its website. It spans 1.2 million square feet in the city's Balboa Park. On an average day there are thousands of patients visiting for medical or dental treatment.

San Diego is a border city with Mexico, and the Naval Medical Center in San Diego is the largest and most comprehensive military healthcare system in western United States. It has eight clinics for active duty personnel and nine primary care sites for their family members.
UK adventurer Henry Worsley has died while trying to make history by crossing Antarctica alone on a trip supported by members of the British royal family.

Former army officer Worsley, 55, was just 48 kilometers from the end of his journey when he called for help and was airlifted to a hospital in Chile on Friday suffering from exhaustion and dehydration.

"It is with heartbroken sadness that I let you know that my husband, Henry Worsley, has died following complete organ failure," his wife Joanna said in a statement on Monday.

In his final statement from the expedition, Worsley expressed his dismay at having to pull out so close to the end after covering almost 1,500 km on foot, dragging his equipment on a sledge.

"My journey is at an end. I have run out of time, physical endurance and (have) a simple sheer inability to slide one ski in front of the other," he said in an audio message, sounding exhausted but not afraid.

"Many mountaineers battle away and fail to reach the summit. My summit is just out of reach," he added.

His wife said Worsley had raised $143,000 for the Endeavour Fund, a charity to help wounded military veterans that is backed by Prince William, his wife Kate and brother Prince Harry.

William said he and his brother had lost a friend. "We are incredibly proud to be associated with him," he said.

A father of two from London, Worsley had hoped to become the first man to cross Antarctica solo and without assistance.

That feat was left unfinished a century ago by explorer Ernest Shackleton, whom Worsley described as his hero.

Worsley was 71 days into his attempt when he called for help. Another British explorer, Ranulph Fiennes, dropped out of a similar charity trek in 2013.

AFP - AP

(China Daily 01/27/2016 page1)
Police has roped of a large area near the shopping mall 'Moodgallerian' and a car tunnel, after an explosion, in central Stockholm, Sweden, January 26, 2016. Police were investigating an explosion outside an up-market shopping center in central Stockholm on Tuesday, although there were no immediate reports of injuries. [Photo/Agencies]

STOCKHOLM - Police were investigating an explosion outside an up-market shopping center in central Stockholm on Tuesday, although there were no immediate reports of injuries.

Police said they were called to the Mood shopping center around 1730 GMT after witnesses described hearing a loud blast and seeing a white flash.

"We have a damaged facade and a ruptured car window but we are not aware of any injuries to people. Obviously something has exploded but it doesn't appear to be major damage," said police spokeswoman Carina Skagerlind.

Sweden's security police raised the threat level to the second-highest level after the Paris attacks last year.

Before Christmas 2010 two bombs exploded in central Stockholm on busy shopping streets.
UNITED NATIONS - With no let-up to the war in Syria, the United Nations, humanitarian and development agencies in Iraq on Tuesday appealed for 298 million US dollars to back ongoing assistance for nearly 250,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq, a UN spokesman told reporters here.

"That appeal was made at the launch of the Iraq chapter of the Syria Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan in Erbil today," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.

"The response plan for Iraq is committed to continue providing continued protection and assistance to Syrian refugees, to meet their basic needs," Dujarric said. "It also recognizes the need to increase the resilience of refugees as well as host communities and calls for a greater investment in education and increased opportunities for vocational training and livelihoods."

According to the UN refugee agency, there are currently some 400,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq.

Also on Tuesday, the UN under-secretary-general for field support, Atul Khare, wrapped up a three-day trip to Iraq.

Khare visited the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, as well as Erbil, where he discussed key support issues with members of the host government, the spokesman said, adding that the under-secretary-general also met with senior management and held a town hall meeting with the UN Mission in Iraq.
WASHINGTON - The United States on Tuesday announced new amendments to its sanctions on Cuba, easing restrictions on export financing and facilitating authorized travel.

The amendments, which will take effect on Wednesday, "will remove existing restrictions on payment and financing terms for authorized exports and reexports to Cuba of items other than agricultural items or commodities," the US Treasury and Commerce Departments said in a statement.

The amendments, which came about six months after Washington and Havana resumed diplomatic ties, will further facilitate travel to Cuba for authorized purposes by allowing blocked space, code-sharing, and leasing arrangements with Cuban airlines, it said.

The changes will also authorize additional transactions related to professional meetings, disaster preparedness and response projects, and information and informational materials.

The amendments "send a clear message to the world: the United States is committed to empowering and enabling economic advancements for the Cuban people," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said.

"We have been working to enable the free flow of information between Cubans and Americans and will continue to take the steps necessary to help the Cuban people achieve the political and economic freedom that they deserve," Lew added.

The United States and Cuba resumed diplomatic relations in July 2015, ending more than five decades of enmity. U.S. President Barack Obama called the move "a historic step in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people."

In mid-September 2015, the US announced amendments to sanctions on Cuba, easing travel and business restrictions on the island country.
South Korean rescue boats work in waters about 85 km northeast of the Gagedo island in North Jeolla province, South Korea, Jan 27, 2016. A Chinese fishing boat capsized off an island in southwest South Korea, with four rescued among 10 on board the vessel, Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday. [Photo/Xinhua]

SEOUL - A Chinese fishing boat capsized off an island in southwest South Korea, with four rescued among 10 on board the vessel, Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday.

The boat turned over Wednesday morning in waters about 85 km northeast of the Gagedo island in North Jeolla province, according to the region's coast guard.

Among 10 people on board the vessel, four have been rescued by Chinese fishing boats sailing near the site.

Six other people have been reportedly trapped inside the capsized vessel, into which South Korean rescuers are trying to enter.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) shakes hands with visiting United States Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing Jan 27, 2016.[Photo by Feng Yongbin/chinadaily.com.cn]

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China "cannot accept the allegations" that China's words are not being matched by actions in the South China Sea as it has promised not to engage in militarization.

Wang made the comments when addressing a joint press conference with visiting United States Secretary of State John Kerry following their prolonged talks starting in the morning.

"China has already committed to not engage in the so-called militarization, and we will honor our commitment. We cannot accept the allegations that China's words are not being matched by actions," Wang said.

The press conference was delayed for around three hours, and Wang said they had a "positive, candid and constructive meeting".

On the islands and reefs stationed by China in the South China Sea, Wang said China has built up quite a few civil facilities that are able to provide public services, and in addition to that, there are some necessary facilities for self-defense.

"But international law has given all sovereign countries the rights of self-protection and self-defense," Wang said.

"If one equate such rights to militarization, then the South China Sea may have been militarized long ago, and China may not be the first party to start the militarization," Wang added.

On the South China Sea issue, Wang said he told Kerry that the South China Sea islands have been Chinese territory, and China has the right to protect its own territorial sovereignty and lawful and legitimate maritime rights and interests.

"At the same time, China is ready to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea, be committed to managing differences through dialogue and seeking a peaceful settlement of the disputes through negotiations and consultations," Wang said.

It is important that the "two sides manage these sensitive issues in a constructive way so that they (the issues) will not detract from the overall interests of China-US cooperation," Wang said.
With US Secretary of State John Kerry set to arrive in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a news briefing in the capital on Tuesday that US officials must "play a constructive role ... instead of pointing fingers at others".

Hua was responding to a question about recent remarks United States officials made on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.

"Many of these remarks were obviously irresponsible," she said.

Kerry, who was scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Tuesday after visiting Laos and Cambodia, was expected to press China to bear down on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Insiders have said he added China to his itinerary after the DPRK announced it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb on Jan 6.

Washington has long refused to talk with Pyongyang about a peace treaty, which is believed by some observers to be a major reason behind the nuclear test.

Fan Jishe, a US studies researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "The US has pressured the DPRK harshly for years, but that did not stop Pyongyang from pushing its nuclear program forward."

"Apparently, China does not believe increasing pressure would work. Actually, it could lead to regional turbulence, which would work against the interests of China, the Republic of Korea and also the US."

Xinhua contributed to this story.

lixiaokun@chinadaily.com.cn
A joint news briefing by Foreign Minister Wang Yi and visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry was delayed for about three hours before finally beginning on Wednesday afternoon.

Initially, the long-awaited meeting in Beijing of the two top diplomats was tentatively scheduled to begin at 9:30 am and last two hours. After that the two would meet the media. But the talks were prolonged as the two diplomatic teams continued their discussion through a working lunch.

Upon arriving at the news briefing venue, Wang first apologized to reporters for keeping them waiting, as he and his counterpart had a "positive, candid and constructive meeting".

The two top diplomats elaborated on three key topics of common concern  the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, the South China Sea situation and Taiwan.

Both expressed their goodwill to the other side and, given the limited chances for questions, addressed top media concerns first.

Kerry fended off a US reporter's request that he outline potential punitive measures for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's nuclear test and whether he thought China's words matched its actions in the South China Sea.

"I don't want to go into all the specific options" Kerry said, offering that he wanted to keep "space" for them to negotiate further. "I think that's important," he said.

When a Xinhua News Agency reporter asked about the strategic significance and roles of cooperation between the two major countries in this year, Wang said: "This is a very good question, but I guess many of your colleagues are not interested in this question."

Many reporters smiled. "And to satisfy your needs, I'd like to talk more about the South China Sea issue and the DPRK nuclear issue," Wang said.

Contact the writer at zhang yunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) shakes hands with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing, capital of China, Jan 27, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING -- China agrees the United Nations Security Council should take further actions and pass a new resolution on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) following its nuclear test earlier this month, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Wednesday.

Wang made the remarks at a press briefing after meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is on a two-day visit to China.

"The new resolution should aim to bring the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue back to the negotiating table, rather than stirring up tension or causing chaos on the peninsula," Wang said.

The latest nuclear test by the DPRK violated the UN Security Council resolution and threatened the international nuclear non-proliferation system. Therefore, China has voiced its opposition against the move, he said.

China is willing to maintain all-round and profound consultations with all parties in a responsible way, including the US, Wang said, describing his talks with Kerry as "adequate, profound and conducive to mutual understanding."

"We reached a consensus that the Security Council could react to the DPRK nuclear test and pass a new resolution," he said. "We agreed that sanctions are not an end in themselves and it is vital to restart dialogue and negotiation."

Wang said China's stance on the Korean peninsula nuclear issue is clear, consistent and responsible, and will not be changed by any single incident or affected by sentiment.

China is committed to the denuclearization of the peninsula, maintaining its peace and stability, and resolving the issue through dialog and consultation, Wang said.

"China refuses all groundless speculations and misinterpretations on its stance," he said.

"China adheres to above-mentioned position and has made tremendous efforts over the years and fulfilled its responsibilities and obligations," Wang said.

China has called for the resumption of the six-party talks. The talks were launched in 2003 but stalled in December 2008. The DPRK quit the talks in April 2009. The six-party talks involve China, the DPRK, the Republic of Korea, the United States, Russia and Japan.
(Photo : GETTY IMAGES) The photoshoot was occurred on Sunday, January 17.

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Citizens of a Taiwanese city are enraged after a renowned local heritage site was used as the background of a semi-nude photoshoot.



Online photography club BQ Photographer's Connection reportedly rented the Agricultural Research Facility Apartments in Tainan City. It is a wooden building built during the Japanese colonial-era. It housed the staff of the research facility who studied seed development.



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The Tayovuan Association, a non-government organization that endorses reading and education for underprivileged children, uses one of the rooms in the building as a reading room. The organization's president, Huang Cheng-kung, said that they use another room as an office, but occasionally rent it to outside groups as an event venue.



While admitting to renting the place out to BQ Photographer's Connection, Huang said that they were not aware of the nature of the photoshoot.



BQ Photographer's Connection uploaded photos on Facebook of models wearing only their bikinis inside the building. Some were only wearing thongs or bras and striking seductive poses.



The photos have been deleted following the public outrage, but screenshots are still available on the internet.



The photoshoot was occurred on Sunday, January 17.



According to the Tainan Cultural Affairs Bureau, the site was operated under a build-operate-transfer (BOT) deal by the Tayovuan Association, but the latter reportedly "pulled out of the contract after the photographs were published."



"The photographers applied to use the office building early last year, but we declined because we were still finalizing the details of the BOT agreement with the city," Huang said.



It was revealed that the photoshoot on January 17 was the third held in the building. Huang said that the photographers had rented it twice before for NT$1,000 ($30) per session and that he was with them during those two shoots which went fine.



"They might have figured out that we had no surveillance cameras in the building, and decided to do the semi-nude shoot on Jan. 17, which was an insult to the heritage site and our association," he said.



Upon close examination, the Tainan Cultural Affairs Bureau said that the BQ Photographer's Connection violated Article 5-2 of the heritage site's terms of use which specifically bans anything that is "morally offensive" within the vicinity.



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TagsTainan City, nude photos, heritage site, Agricultural Research Facility Apartments, BQ Photographer's Connection
(Photo : Getty Images) The Shanghai Composite Index plunged 6.4 percent to end at 2,749.79 on Tuesday, its lowest closing since December 2014.

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The relentless freefall in China's stock market continued on Tuesday, as The Shanghai Composite Index plunged 6.4 percent to end at 2,749.79, its lowest closing since December 2014. On other hand, the Shenzhen Component Index sank 7% to close at 9,483.55.



Both stock markets witnessed frenzy selling especially during closing hours, leading to sharp decline during remaining few hours of trading day.



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Tuesday's stock market crash happened even after China's Central Bank injected $15 Billion into the financial market.



Stock market analysts have noted that recent news of fraud in one of China's premium banks may have added to market woes, while some analysts argue that heavy capital outflow is very common before Chinese New Year holidays.



The prominent Chinese bank that was in the news for fraud recently is the Agricultural Bank of China. Two employees of the company are reported to be under investigation for breaching regulations and taking away 3.9 billion Yuan from the bank.



Meanwhile, elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng and Tokyo's Nikkei posted losses of around 2.5%, while India's BSE was closed due to a public holiday.



American stock markets too ended in red on Monday. The S&P 500 dipped 1.6%, while the Dow plunged 1.3%.



Most analysts blame the sliding prices of crude oil and China's struggling economy for the increasing volatility across stock markets in the world.



Some observers, however, insist that China's injection of $15 billion dollars into its financial market may have positive trickling effect in coming weeks and could eventually ease volatility across stock markets in the world.



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Tagsshanghai stock market, Chinese Stock Market
(Photo : GETTY IMAGES) Snow is seen in rural Pinglin during a snowfall on January 25, 2016 in Taiwan.

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Taiwan's record-breaking cold spell has not only affected people's health but also their livelihood. The Council of Agriculture (COA) has revealed that since January 22, the agriculture sector has lost NT$226 million ($6.76 million) as of Tuesday morning.



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Data showed that 954 hectares of crops have been damaged, amounting to NT$62.74 million ($1.8 million). Ironically, strawberries were the worst affected, followed by ginger, oranges, bell fruit, and pear flower-bud wood.



Meanwhile, the fisheries subsector lost NT$163 million ($4.9 million) because milk fish, groupers, common oriental clams, and tilapia have been dying in fish farms.



Southern Taiwan, especially Tainan, suffered the biggest losses, costing them NT$190 million ($5.7 million). The counties of Yunlin and Miaoli in Western Taiwan also had substantial losses.



Prices will most likely rise due to lack of supply, especially with the upcoming Spring Festival. Tai Yu-Yen, COA's secretary general, urged consumers to refrain from panic buying.



"Although the cold wave damaged some farming products leading to a moderate rise in vegetable prices in domestic markets, I anticipate that this will be a short-term phenomenon," Tai said.



"With the temperatures climbing, green crops will grow fast. Although some fruits were damaged during the cold spell over the past few days, there are other fruits like sugar apples and guava, whose outputs can meet demand," she added.



According to COA, the cold spell is expected to last until February 4. Tai urged the affected farmers to apply for "cash assistance" and "low-interest loans" to their local governments. The process usually takes seven days, but Tai said that she has asked the parliament to accelerate the process.



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TagsTaiwan cold weather, cold spell, Taiwan agriculture, Council of Agriculture
(Photo : GETTY IMAGES) The Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI) debuted Lumi Long, a glowing fiber, after seven years of research, experiments, and hard work. It can be used for clothing and accessories, including hats, scarves, underwears, and shoes.

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A new glow-in-the-dark textile technology was recently introduced to the public in Taiwan.



The Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI) debuted Lumi Long, a glowing fiber, after seven years of research, experiments, and hard work. It can be used for clothing and accessories, including hats, scarves, underwears, and shoes.



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"The fiber was named 'Lumi Long' because it could glow for long periods of time. Its main fluorescent material is enveloped in thin fibers, and it is safe on the human skin," said TTRI President Bai Chi-Chung.



The textile is washable and its light can last for up to six hours. It absorbs the surrounding light for the first 10 minutes without the need for heat or electricity. Although very high-technology, it does not emit harmful radiation and is not poisonous to the skin.



"Ever since the beginning of time, people have been afraid of darkness. This made the appearance of light particularly moving and surprising. Perhaps it was the fall of darkness that had prompted light, and created moments of wonder," TTRI said of the product.



"Taiwan's textile industry used to be a global leader, a main driver pushing the country into its economic heights. Though economic crises had dealt heavy blows to the sector, the industry is now evolving and moving towards a greater focus on innovation and high-quality products," Bai said.



TTRI is currently in the process of commercializing Lumi Long and integrating it to the distribution chains, introducing the next generation of Taiwanese textile.



Taiwan's textile industry has slowed down recently. TTRI official Bai Zhi Zhong said that the former export-oriented industry has shifted to a more consumer driven one. Industry players now focus more on research and development.



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TagsBai Zhi Zhong, Taiwan Textile Research Institute, Taiwan textile industry, glow in the dark fabric, Lumi Long
(Photo : Getty Images) While the industry is expanding and magnetizing investors, analysts believe that in two to three years time the industry will suffer from deflation, forcing low-capacity producing drone makers to pull out from the market.

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Despite the boom that the drone industry seems to be enjoying at the moment, drone makers in China may soon face a market crisis, according to analysts.



over 3,600 spectators from more than 150 countries around the world, Chinese drone makers took advantage of the recent Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas and displayed their latest inventions.



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FLYPRO Aerospace Tech Co Ltd. unveiled its XEagle drone that cater people with high interest in sports. This drone has a voice-control feature and can be connected to a smartwatch. According to the company's chief executive officer Lin Hai, smart sporting devices that connect with intelligent drones have a big opportunity as people have become more health conscious and are interested on physical activities.



Another Chinese company that was present at the CES is DJI. The comsumer-level drone manufacturer, who has 70 percent of the local market, launched its Phantom 3-4K, the successor of Phantom 3 series. Its new product is capable of shooting 4K video.



Another drone that captured the attention of many is Ehang's first-of-a-kind passenger drone. The Guangzhou-based drone maker created the prime battery-powered, auto-pilot drone that could carry one passenger. The destination of the onboard passenger can be pre-set via a mobile app.



Other than these cutting-edge drones, hundreds of companies in the country are also creating drones for civilian purposes such as fast food delivery, land surveys, traffic management and police surveillance among others.



According to Analysys International, a big data analysis and rating firm, the market for civil drones in China is anticipated to grow by more than 180 percent. In a June 2015 report, the firm revealed that in 2 years time, the market will grow from 3.95 billion yuan ($600.4 million) to 11.09 billion yuan.



A majority of this growth is expected to be accounted for by consumer-level drones, according to Jean Xiao, IDC research manager. But even if there is a boost in the shipment of consumer-level drones, Xiao revealed that industrial drones will still top in market value.



Experts claim that while the industry's expansion is bringing in large capital and attracting more investors, in two to three years time, the industry might experience deflation, forcing several drone makers to pull out.



Gui Xiaoyan, Skye Intelligence founder, revealed that currently most drone makers are already in the stage B of financing and funds are becoming tough. He further revealed that if emerging companies fail to sport an advantage or uniqueness in their products, "they may soon be weeded out."



Nevertheless, according to Xiao, market analysts are not so concerned, saying that it is too early to tackle an industry adjustment and there are still only a handful of drone makers in the market. This view is supported by Wu Xiuqian, a researcher at Qianzhan Industry Research Unit, who explained that a period of adjustment in the short term is unlikely.



While the industry is growing rapidly, there are still other matters that need to be attended to before it can boast of substantial development. One of these issues is the capacity of drone makers to engage in mass production. Xiao claims that the supply chain is still at in an early phase. "Factories are still making efforts to boost the rate of production of qualified products," he explained.



Aside from that, a lack of firm regulatory system is also of a concern, according to Wu, as there is currently no existing government policies in the drone industry.



Last year, the Civil Aviation Administration of China proposed a regulation for civil drones running under the general aviation business. The legislation, which requires civil drones to obtain operational approval before entering the general aviation business, was opened for public scrutiny on Jan. 8 and will be implemented next month.



Some do not agree with the proposed law and have signed a petition against its implementation. Despite sparking a heated debate, Xiao sees this as a positive effort of the government to regulate the industry. Under the new legislation, those manufacturers who fail to meet the standards can be potentially pulled out from the market.



With the industry becoming more coordinated, experts believe that technological developments will decide the fate of the drone industry. "Adjustment and knock-out are the natural laws in any industry... only those with core technologies and a precise positioning can survive," Shenzhen Art-Tech R/C Hobby Co Ltd. president Lin Weidong said.



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Tagsdrone, china, aviation industry, XEagle, EHang
(Photo : Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) US Secretary of State John Kerry has failed to get the nod of Cambodian leaders to go against China's territorial pursuit in the South China Sea.

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US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Cambodian leaders on Tuesday but failed to make them commit to join forces with Southeast Asian nations and stand up to China's territorial pursuits in the South China Sea.



Kerry was in Cambodia after a visit to neighboring Laos, where he met with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and Foreign Minister Hor Namhong.



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Although the US Secretary described the meeting as 'candid and constructive,' he, however, did not get the nod of the Cambodian leaders to interfere in the dispute between South China Sea claimant countries and China.



ASEAN not a party to the dispute



Namhong said Cambodia's stance on the issue of the disputed international waterway remains unchanged, pointing out that the row should be settled among the claimant countries themselves without the need to drag the 10-member ASEAN into the conflict.



Cambodia re-echoed China's position on the South China Sea that ASEAN is not a party to the territorial dispute, so whatever problems the claimant countries have against China must be resolved bilaterally.



"We want it open to negotiations in the future between countries who made claims in the South China Sea," Hor Namhong said.



2012 ASEAN Chair



In 2012, Cambodia, then the chair of the ASEAN, was accused of blocking a consensus that would have stood up to China's brazen island-grabbing in the South China Sea.



"Cambodia was not a court that could judge that this island belongs to this or that country," Namhong said.



Kerry not an ASEAN representative



Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying has said that Kerry is not an ASEAN representative for him to urge the organization to unite against China.



"I hope the United States can play a constructive role for peace and stability in Asia Pacific region and not sow discord," she said.



China is laying claim to almost the entire South China Sea, which is believed to have huge deposits of oil and gas.



Competing claims



The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan have competing claims in the international waterway.



Beijing has built structures on its artificial islands, including a seaport, airport, and other facilities.



A total of $5 trillion in maritime trade passes the waterway yearly.



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TagsCambodia, ASEAN, china, John Kerry
(Photo : Getty Image) The Ministry of Public Security announced on Tuesday that the Chinese government has extended its visa-free policy to tourists and businessmen from 3 to 6 days.

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The Ministry of Public Security on Tuesday announced that starting on Jan. 30, China will implement its first cross-region visa-free transit policy in the Yangtze River Delta region.



The new legislation will give foreign tourists and businessmen from 51 countries up to 6 days (or 144 hours) of no visa requirements, granting they travel via Jiangsu province, Zhejiang province and Shanghai. However, of note, travellers must possess a valid international travel document as well as booked tickets with confirmed dates and destinations.



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Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing have been offering a 72-hour visa-free policy since 2013, so that tourists can stop over and tour even without a visa. Before, the point of entry inspection was only limited on airports. This year, authorities have expanded and included ports and railway stations.



According to Lu Hanlong, a professor at the Institute of Sociology of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the initiative aims "to transform the city into a regional leader with global influence." Implementing a visa-free policy is not only attracting foreign tourists to stop over, but also allowing them get a better grasp of the local culture.



To accommodate the potential influx of tourists, the local government offices along the cities of the Yangtze River Delta region have implemented a public transportation system that enables tourists to hop from one attraction to another.



Additionally, high-speed trains allow tourists to get from one city to another in just a matter of an hour (Nanjing to Shanghai) or two (to Hangzhou).



In a statement, Jennifer Hammond, a public relations officer from the United States, explained that the extended policy "will definitely attract more foreign people who take business trips to China to apply this method to spend a few more days traveling around as a bonus."



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Tagschina, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, 6-day visa-free policy
(Photo : GETTY IMAGES) Taiwan's exports concluded an 11-month consecutive year-on-year decline in December 2015 as it fell by a staggering 13.86 percent.

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Taiwan's economy has been slapped with another depressing growth forecast as the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) cut their projections by 0.27 percent on Monday. This is the gloomiest forecast for 2016.



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TIER cited unstable international financial markets, mainland China's stock market dips, low demand for most of Taiwan's export goods, and the transition from the old to the new government which endangered government investments.



"Taiwan's weather is not the only one experiencing the cold, our economy is chilly as well. The main international forecasters are synchronized this year with their lower estimates," said Sun Mingde, director of TIER's economic forecasting center.



All numbers down in December



Taiwan's exports concluded an 11-month consecutive year-on-year decline in December 2015 as it fell by a staggering 13.86 percent. Its exports to China, ASEAN 6, the European Union, and the United States also decreased. Meanwhile, exports throughout January to December last year declined by 10.59 percent.



"Taiwan's first-quarter exports are unlikely to be promising as there is low demand for energy, metals, and electronic products, which account for 60 percent of Taiwan's total exports," Sun said.



Imports also suffered a 15.59 percent drop year-on-year, with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) posting a 0.14 percent year-on-year increase.



"Although global crude oil price plunge would drag down the price level, hiking vegetable and fruit prices due to recent climate change and heavy precipitations offset the effect of dropping oil prices," TIER reported.



The unemployment rate also decreased by 0.04 percent from November, which is now at 3.87 percent.



"The annual hike in nominal salary stood at 1.64% in November; the increase in real salary stood at 0.67% on average. The bad news is the increase in real salary is still so limited."



However, TIER estimated the economy to grow by 0.29 percent in Q1, 1.42 percent in Q2, 2.13 percent in Q3, and 2.37 percent in Q4.



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Tagstaiwan economy, Taiwan exports, Taiwan economic growth 2016 forecasts
(Photo : Getty Images) The head of China's Statistics Bureau Wang Baoan briefing a press conference last week. China's anti-graft body said on Tuesday that Wang is being investigated for disciplinary violations.

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The Chief of China's Statistics Bureau Wang Baoan is being investigated for charges of corruption, China's anti graft body said on Tuesday.



"Wang is suspected of severe disciplinary violations and he is currently under investigation", the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced on its official website.



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Although nowhere is the word 'corruption' used in the statement, in China phrases like "disciplinary violations" and "violations of party discipline" are usually a reference to corruption and graft activities.



No official statement has been issued by any official from the Chinese government on this development. News from highly reliable sources say that as of now there is no pressure on Wang to resign from his post.



The investigation against Wang comes at a time when China's growth figures and data's have come under scrutiny by the international community. However, Wang recently voiced confidence that China's GDP and growth figures are very much reliable.



Wang's graft charges have also coincided with news of corruption in Agricultural Bank of China, where two employees are being investigated for financial wrongdoings. The news of corruption in the Agricultural Bank of China had adverse impact on China's stock market on Tuesday.



China has been showing zero tolerance towards corruption since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013. Experts, however, are of the opinion that recent news of corruption in important organizations may have an adverse impact on Chinese economy, which is already going through a tough phase.



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TagsWang Baoan, china
(Photo : Reuters) Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi (L) and US state secretary John Kerry (R) met recently to discuss pressing issues concerning North Korea and Beijing's simmering territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Kerry has said the two countries must find "a way forward" in their efforts to find a solution to both problems.

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China and the United States have failed to reach an agreement on pressing issues concerning North Korea and Beijing's simmering territorial disputes in the South China Sea.



Speaking from Beijing, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that the two countries must find "a way forward" in their efforts to find a solution to both problems.



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Kerry flew to China late Tuesday to meet with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi and other senior officials in an effort to press the Chinese government for tougher sanctions against North Korea and discuss an agreement over China's activities in the South China Sea.



Beijing, Pyongyang's sole major ally, had earlier criticized remarks made by an unnamed US official who said China should do more to curb North Korea's nuclear program.



The Chinese capital was the last stop on a three-day trip across Asia for the US state secretary, who had earlier said he hoped that his discussions with officials in Beijing would be "constructive."



Crux and Origin



A senior state department official told reporters earlier this week that the most pressing item on Kerry's agenda was to find out the extent of China's willingness to punish North Korea for its insistence on continuing its banned nuclear weapons program.



"The secretary has made no secret either to the Chinese or to you, the media, of his conviction that there is much more that China can do by way of applying leverage," the official said.



China has maintained that previous US sanctions against North Korea have hardened Pyongyang's determination to proceed with its nuclear weapons program, and tougher sanctions would only serve to destabilize the impoverished country -- a situation China's President Xi Jinping wants to avoid.



"The origin and crux of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula has never been China," Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said earlier this month. "The key to solving the problem is not China."



Bilateral Issue



Speaking about his meeting with Chinese officials, Kerry said that -- while China and the US had made good progress together on issues ranging from climate change and the fight against terrorism -- the two countries must work to find common ground on "several important issues."



Kerry told Wang that the two countries need to arrive at an agreement over China's "concerns and activities" in contested areas of the South China Sea, says a Reuters report.



China is laying claim to almost all of the South China Sea, where an estimated $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes through each year. Beijing is consequently trying to manage separate disputes with the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan, each of which has overlapping claims on the resource-rich waters.



The US is currently encouraging unity among the 10 nations that comprise the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the face of China's increasingly muscular assertions over the contested territory. Kerry had earlier this week met with officials in Laos and Cambodia to build support for the ASEAN effort.



The leaders of the ASEAN are scheduled to meet with US President Barrack Obama in Sunnydale, California, next month, and analysts say the South China Sea issue will likely be among the key items on the agenda.



China has meanwhile stood firmly by its position that any disputes over the South China Sea should be addressed bilaterally.



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Tagschina, US, north kores, South China Sea Dispute
BREAKING: Saeed Abedini reunited with wife and children in Idaho Editorial Staff | 27 January, 2016 by Joni B. Hannigan

BOISE, Idaho (Christian Examiner)  Saeed Abedini, the 35-year-old pastor who was imprisoned for three-and-a half years in Iran, returned home to Boise, his wife, Naghmeh Abedini, told local news outlets Tuesday afternoon.

"Saeed is here in Boise," Naghmeh said, according to KTVB Channel 7. "He had a great reunion with the kids ... We are taking personal time to work on very serious personal issues."

Naghmeh had told reporters last week plans were for her and the children to fly to the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, N.C., to reunite with Abedini, but apparently plans changed.

"He landed. Saw the kids," Naghmeh reportedly texted the Statesman, a local paper, Tuesday evening. "We are asking for privacy to work through personal stuff."

News Station KBOI-TV, Channel 2, reported Abedini arrived in Boise on a private plane at 4:40 p.m. Tuesday after spending five days with his parents and sisters at Billy Graham's Cove in North Carolina.

Abedini was one of five prisoners released as part of a prisoner swap with Iran earlier this month. He was released Jan. 16, along with Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, and language student Matt Trevithick, 30.

Mark DeMoss, a spokesperson for Franklin Graham, said the well-known Christian leader and head of Samaritan's Purse, begin to advocate for Saeed after Naghmeh appealed to him in 2013.

"Franklin has just tried to be a good friend and offer support, draw attention to the case, encourage people to pray for Saeed while he was in prison and praying for his family," DeMoss said. "He's offered to stay connected and be helpful in any way that he could. It's become a good friendship."

While he was at the Cove, Saeed talked to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren about his confinement in Iran. He said he was denied some basic necessities like clothing and medical care, even after being brutally beaten by other prisoners and tortured.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on Friday to determine whether states can provide grant money to religious institutions as they do to secular organizations.

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., applied for state funds to resurface its preschool playground. Though the churchs application was ranked highly, it was rejected from the Playground Scrap Tire Surface Material Grant Program.

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources said in a letter that a state constitutional provision prohibits state money from going to support religious institutions.

The provision states that no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.

The church challenged the application of the provision and two lower federal courts upheld the decision of the state.

The Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian nonprofit organization, is representing Trinity and filed a brief to the Supreme Court.

No state can define religious neutrality as treating religious organizations worse than everyone else, said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman in a statement on the organizations website. That isnt neutrality; its a hostility to religion that violates the First Amendment. Thats the primary issue that the Supreme Court will address. In this case, the state should not have excluded this preschool from the recycled tire program simply because a church operates the school.

The Supreme Court took the case on Friday and is expected to be heard by March and decided by July.
A large segment of evangelicals look at Donald Trump and his followers and want to run in the opposite direction. The problem is that a lot of Trumps followers are their brothers and sisters in Christ. Politico reported yesterday on an NBC News/Survey Monkey poll that 37 percent of white evangelical Republicans support his candidacy. Yesterday, Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, endorsed Trump, and Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress spoke highly of him; this following Franklin Grahams endorsement of Trumps immigration views in December. Such evangelical support makes that first group of evangelicals really nervous.

Thats understandable given many things Trump says and supports. Like banning all Muslims from coming to America. Like shooting the families of terrorists. Like suggesting that if he himself shot someone, his fans would still rise up and rally around him.

Donald Trump sometimes acts like hes a messiahTed Cruz calls it his messiah complex. But Trump is only a demagogue. This is not meant as a critique as much as a fact: A demagogue is a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument. Trump does in fact appeal to popular desires, some of which are prejudices, and he tends to scorn rational argument, even eschewing debates now.

But in large measure, Trumps detractors are eschewing rational argument as well. Instead of presenting an argument why banning all Muslims is bad policy (why it doesnt make demographic sense, why it will likely make terrorism worse, and so on), most just exclaim, Unbelievable! and thats Hitleresque. ...

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Several faith leaders were asked to write brief comments about the future of Roe. I was glad to see that I was not the only person asked who sees life as beginning at conception and who is ready to see Roe overturned.
In Marrakesh, hundreds of Muslim leaders release modern update to Muhammads Charter of Medina.

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Image: Martin Varsavsky / Flickr

For years, Texas megachurch pastor Bob Roberts has been building relationships with Muslims. Last year, after Franklin Graham argued that the US government should ban Muslims from immigrating to America, the NorthWood Church leader joined Muslim leaders in denouncing the comments. In October, he and imam Muhammad Magid hosted the Spreading the Peace Convocation, which was attended by nearly 200 imams and evangelical pastors.

This week, Roberts traveled to Marrakesh, Morocco, alongside more than 250 Muslim religious leaders, heads of state, and scholars, for a groundbreaking summit. On Wednesday, the Muslim leaders released the Marrakesh Declaration: a 750-word document calling for religious freedom for non-Muslims in majority-Muslim countries [full text below].

Im blown away, Roberts told CT from Morocco. This is a Muslim conference put together by the top sheiks, ministers of religion, the grand muftis of the top Muslim majority nations, and they came up with a declaration, literally using the language of religious freedom to declare that violence cannot be done in the name of Islam.

Led by 80-year-old United Arab Emirates sheik Abdallah Bin Bayyah, who leads the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, and sponsored by the government of Morocco, the summit looked to Muhammads Charter of Medina when drafting the declaration. From the seventh century, the document gives instructions for governing a religious pluralistic state, and was issued shortly after Muhammad arrived in Medina.

In particular, the declaration references the charters principles of constitutional contractual citizenship and freedom of movement, property ownership, mutual solidarity ...
Update (Jan. 29): A new survey of Protestant pastors found that evangelical pastors prefer Ted Cruz (18%), Ben Carson (8%), and Marco Rubio (8%) for president. Donald Trump was only favored by 5 percent of Republican pastors, LifeWay Research found. Nearly half of all pastors remain undecided.

-----

How does Jerry Falwell Jr. explain his controversial endorsement of Donald Trump for president? In part, hes taking his cue from his Moral Majority-founding father, who supported Ronald Reagan over Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter.

When [Jerry Falwell Sr.] walked into the voting booth, he wasnt electing a Sunday school teacher or a pastor or even a president who shared his theological beliefs; he was electing the president of the United States with the talents, abilities and experience required to lead a nation, said the Liberty University president during his glowing introduction of Trump at a school convocation. After all, Jimmy Carter was a great Sunday school ...

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Fact Check: Is Trump for or Against Family Values?

Most people don't know that Donald Trump enjoys homosexual 'weddings,' and wants to make it a federal crime for not hiring homosexuals and transsexuals



Contact: SaveAmerica.com, 916-265-5650



SACRAMENTO, Calif., Jan. 26, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- A nonprofit, nonpartisan report card comparing the two leading Republican presidential candidates' public records to 9 family values and moral standards is questioning Donald Trump's claim that he is a conservative. (Posted at www.SaveAmerica.com)



The 2016 Report Card on the Natural Family analyses Trump and closest rival Ted Cruz on how much they will protect marriage for a man and a woman, protect people's rights of conscience, and protect children with good role models.



Trump's record is:

He wants a new federal law punishing private business owners who won't hire homosexuals or transsexuals



He is for open homosexuality and transsexuality in the U.S. military



He supports pro-"LGBT" "hate crime" laws



He opposes a constitutional amendment protecting marriage for only a man and a woman



He supports making every state perform homosexual "weddings"



He enjoyed attending a same-sex "marriage" ceremony.

In contrast, Cruz disagrees or likely disagrees with Trump on these issues of vital concern to pro-family voters. See the 2016 Report Card on the Natural Family at SaveAmerica.com.



"Talk is cheap and campaign promises are a little better," said SaveAmerica.com President Randy Thomasson, a longtime West Coast pro-family leader and a registered independent. "But what you've done in the past is the most reliable indicator of what you'll do in the future. The leading Republican presidential candidates both say they support family values, but the actual records of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz reveal whether this is true or false."



See the positions of Trump and Cruz on 9 issues of concern to pro-family voters at SaveAmerica.com.



SaveAmerica.com is the national arm of SaveCalifornia.com, a leading West Coast nonprofit, nonpartisan organization representing children and families since 1999. We stand for marriage and family, parental rights, the sanctity of human life, religious freedom, financial freedom, and back-to-basics education. SaveAmerica.com and SaveCalifornia.com provides this information solely for educational purposes and does not support or oppose candidates for public office.
Missouri Pro-Life Groups Petition State to Appeal Planned Parenthood Ruling, Revoke Abortion License Contact: Troy Newman, President, 316-841-1700; Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Vice President, 316-516-3034; both with Operation Rescue, info.operationrescue@gmail.com



JEFFERSON CITY, Mo., Jan. 27, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Why would a Federal Court involve itself in the regulatory matters of a Midwestern state health agency? It's because the matter of abortion is involved.



"We call it the 'Abortion Distortion,'" said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. "Whenever abortion is involved, you can expect nothing to be business as usual - except for the business of killing babies."



Now, the people of Missouri are working to restore the rule of law in their state.



Pro-life groups have banded together with the #MOSaysNO petition effort demanding that Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster appeal the December 28, 2015, Federal Court ruling that is subverting Missouri law and creating conditions where Planned Parenthood could continue abortions in Columbia even though it cannot meet legal requirements to do so.



Continue reading for action item and how you can help even if you don't live in Missouri!



About Operation Rescue

Operation Rescue is one of the leading pro-life Christian activist organizations in the nation and has become a strong voice for the pro-life movement in America. Click here to support Operation Rescue.

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Chief Rabbi of Moscow: We are in a religious war with radical Islam

It is crucial to admit we are in a religious war against radical Islam, the President of the Conference of European Rabbis said today.

Writing in the Telegraph, Chief Rabbi of Moscow Pinchas Goldschmidt insisted that "the 21st century has seen a return to the religious wars of the Middle Ages."

We must not "divorce terrorism from religion," he said, while admitting that this idea "goes against the tolerant, inclusive society that has developed in the Western World".

Rather than divorcing ISIS from Islam, the Rabbi described the terrorist group as a "fascist offshoot" of the religion, and emphasised that it must be considered "a strain of Islam."

Pinchas described the strand of Islam present in ISIS as "medieval", having yet to learn to integrate into society, and likening it to Christianity in premodern times.

He denounced the idea of fearing all Muslims because of this extremist element of Islam, instead suggesting it is vital to "clearly define what is and what isn't radical Islam."

This, he claimed, will lead to success in tracking those who "pose a threat to Western values, isolate them and ensure that the threat does not escalate."

The rabbi also recommended that mosques known to be attended by radicals should be closed, "preventing their imams from preaching hate and stopping their access to the internet and social media." The key, he said, was "cutting them off from fellow radicals."

He urged the West to work with the Muslim communities to recognise radical Islam  which he said is "easy to identify"  and to "denounce these acts and loudly and proudly declare 'not in our name'."
'Creflo Dollar Highway': Prosperity preacher might get Atlanta road named after him

US prosperity preacher Creflo Dollar, who won notoriety after asking his followers for $65 million for a new top-of-the-range private jet, might get a major Atlanta road named after him.

Georgia State Senator Donzella James has proposed that Dollar be honoured with a portion of the Old National Highway in South Fulton County being renamed as "Creflo Dollar Highway".

"Reverend Creflo Dollar has demonstrated his commitment to teaching the Gospel, witnessing Christ through word and deed, and addressing the physical, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual needs of others," James' resolution says.

"Recognized for his cutting-edge revelation and humorous, pragmatic approach, Reverend Dollar enables thousands to experience grace, restoration, and healing as a result of applying simple biblical principles to their lives."

Dollar's World Changers Church International is located within Senator James' district, and has purpotedly brought economic progress in an area which has struggled with high crime rates.

James told WBSTV that Dollar does not deserve the poor reputation he has among much of the Christian community. Dollar has been widely criticised for his prosperity message, and has been accused of repeatedly refusing to open up about his own finances.

He once tweeted: "Jesus bled and died for us so that we can lay claim to the promise of financial prosperity. #ProsperityInChrist #WealthyLiving #AbundantLife".

Though the tweet was later deleted, the same statement is made on the Creflo Dollar Ministries website as part of a longer justification for his theological position.

James said that Dollar's church "is a church that's doing things in the community to make things better."

"I would love to see a Creflo Dollar Highway," she added.

The suggested renaming of the highway has not been met with unanimous support, and has been challenged by Congressman John Lewis and Civil Rights advocate C.T. Vivian, who is a minister and was a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr during the American civil rights movement.

The matter is now in the hands of the Georgia Senate Transportation Committee.
Donald Trump brags that he wouldn't lose votes even if he shoots someone in middle of crowded street

He has been campaigning for months, but Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump seems not to be running out of ways to attract controversy.

Boasting about his alleged solid support base, Trump said during a recent campaign rally in Sioux Centre in Iowa that his supporters would still vote for him even if he shot a stranger in the middle of a crowded street.

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," Trump said, as quoted by CNN.

The business tycoon, who has been dominating pre-election popularity polls, was asked to explain his statements after the event, but he declined to do so.

This was not the first time that Trump joked about the possibility of using violence in case he wins the race to the White House.

Last month, the Republican presidential aspirant appeared to have indicated willingness to consider killing journalists, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of doing.

"I would never do that," Trump said before a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when asked about the possibility of targeting members of the media.

Moments later, however, Trump appeared to have reconsidered: "Uh, let's see, uh? No, I would never do that."

The controversial businessman made these remarks at the height of growing debate on gun violence and gun control in the United States.

The U.S. witnessed several public shootings during the past months, including the terror attack in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14 people.

The attackers were reportedly inspired by the Islamic State (ISIS), which recently claimed responsibility for the brazen public attacks.

Trump has consistently criticised U.S. President Barack Obama for his stance on gun control.

Obama recently issued executive orders for stricter guidelines on purchasing guns.

Trump, in contrast, has been pushing for fewer gun restrictions and a harder stance on terrorism, including the possibility of banning Muslim migrants in the U.S.
Donald Trump is popular with Republicans even though not widely regarded as religious, survey finds

Donald Trump is seen as a potentially "good" or "great" president by Republican voters even though he is not widely regarded as religious, according to a new survey.

The conventional wisdom in American politics has long been that someone who is not religious cannot be elected president of the United States. Most Americans have consistently said that it is important to them that the president have strong religious beliefs, Pew Research says today.

Being an atheist remains one of the biggest liabilities that a presidential candidate can have, the latest Pew survey reports.

Half of American adults would be less likely to vote for a candidate who does not believe in God, while just six per cent say they would be more likely to vote for a non-believer. However at the same time, the proportion who would oppose an atheist candidate has been consistently falling.

Pew Research reports: "Moreover, one of the candidates who is widely viewed by Republicans as a potentially 'good' or 'great' president, Donald Trump, is not widely viewed as a religious person, even by those in his own party."

And on the Democratic side, the share of Americans who say Hillary Clinton is not a religious person now stands at 43 per cent, significantly higher compared with 2007, when she first sought the nomination.

Overall, five per cent of Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party say Trump is a "very religious" person and 39 per cent believe him to be "somewhat religious" person. Almost half (47 per cent) say he is "not too religious" or "not at all religious". Eight-in-ten GOP voters think Ben Carson is a religious person, three-quarters view Ted Cruz as a religious person, and seven-in-ten say the same about Marco Rubio.

Pew Research surveyed more than 2,000 adults by telephone earlier this month.

"White House contenders need not be seen as very religious to be broadly acceptable to the voting public," Pew Research says. However, the new survey also confirms that being an atheist continues to be one of the biggest perceived shortcomings a candidate can have, with 51 per cent of adults saying they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who does not believe in God.

Indeed, in the eyes of the public, being a nonbeliever remains a bigger drawback than having had an extramarital affair. Just 37 per cent say they would be less likely to support a candidate who had been unfaithful. One-in-four would be less likely to support a former pot-smoker.

More than half of US adults said it was "very important" or "somewhat important" to have someone in the White House who shares their religious perspective. This view is particularly common among Republicans.

In addition, four-in-ten Americans said they would be less likely to support a candidate for president who is Muslim, though this has fallen since the question was first asked in 2007. Republicans and white evangelical Protestants held particularly negative views of potential Muslim candidates. Roughly six-in-ten or more in each group say they would be less likely to support a Muslim candidate.
Education charity demands end to cap on faith-based school places

Barriers restricting faith schools must be abolished, a leading education charity has said.

The New Schools Network (NSN), which helps establish free schools, has said the cap on places allocated by religion should be relaxed to release "significant untapped potential" among faith schools.

Under current rules, faith groups setting up free schools can only give priority on the grounds of religion to 50 per cent of its places.

However NSN director, Nick Timothy, said the limits prevented "high-calibre school providers creating the much needed places that parents want".

The charity, which is partially funded by the Department for Education (DfE), said faith-based schools were "more popular with parents" and have a "proven track record of delivering high-quality education".

However there are disproportionately fewer faith-based free schools than other schools nationally with a faith ethos because of the cap, the charity said.

Timothy, who is a former chief of staff to Theresa May, is a long-standing advocate of the government's free school expansion programme. As well as pointing to the quality of education, he said free schools were "more likely to be ethnically diverse" in a bid to pursuade the government to lift the restrictions.

Paul Barber, director of the Catholic Education Service, explained the cap meant Catholic churches were unable to engage fully with opening free schools.

"The cap prevents the Church meeting demands from Catholic parents for Catholic places and could cause schools to turn Catholic families away on the grounds that they are Catholics," he said.

"To do so contravenes not only Canon Law but also common sense."

Christine Blower, leader of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), disagreed with NSN's proposal and said the cap "ensures at least half of the free schools' intake is not restricted to a particular faith".

"Free schools are paid for by all taxpayers. It would be wrong to exclude children local to the school where their parents wish them to attend irrespective of their faith," she said.

A DfE spokesman also defended the cap. "The requirement for all oversubscribed faith free schools to make at least 50 per cent of their places available to those of another or no faith helps to tackle segregation and ensures young people will experience the diversity of religious beliefs that make up modern Britain," he said.
Kuwait MPs block church building because it 'contradicts Sharia law'

Plans to build churches in Kuwait have been rejected by MPs because they "contradict Islamic Sharia law".

The Gulf country's government, which is unelected and seperate from the elected MPs in parliament, initially accepted the church building proposals and allocated a number of sites for construction.

However it was rejected by MPs in the legislature. Islamist MP Ahmad al-Azemi said he and other MPs would reject the plans because they "contradict Islamic Sharia law".

He said his rejection is based on constitutional and religious grounds since Islam is the official religion of Kuwait and the main source of legislation. He added that Islamic scholars are unanimous in banning the building of non-Muslim places of worship in the Arabian Peninsula.

News that the government had approved sites for church building was reported to local press by Ahmad al-Manfoohi, general director of the municipality. It was met with extensive public criticism and al-Azemi urged the government against taking decisions that weren't in line with the view of Kuwait's conservative religious society.

Kuwait's citizens are majority Muslim with an estimated 60-70 per cent Sunni and 30-40 per cent Shia, although there are no official figures.

However the Gulf state, which is a US ally, also has a significant Christian expatriate population although the number of Kuwaiti Christians is very low.

Despite its conservative society, Kuwait stands out from other Gulf monarchies for having the most open political system. Women have the right to vote and stand in elections, although one ruling family holds most of the key posts.

The parliament, made up of ruling MPs, has the most power of any elected body in the Gulf but the ruling family make up the municipality, or government, which has final say over key decisions.
Lutherans shouldn't have received Holy Communion at Vatican, says Catholic spokesman

The Lutheran bishop who received Communion from a Catholic priest in the Vatican ought not to have been offered it and should have refused, according to a spokesman for the Catholic diocese of Helsinki.

The Lutherans from Finland, led by Bishop Samuel Salmi of Oulu, were part of a delegation in Rome for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. They indicated by crossing their right arms over their chests that they should not be offered the sacrament at Mass in the Basilica, but the priests went ahead and gave it to them regardless.

Bishop Salmi said the Catholic priests had known who the Lutherans were, so they had not been invited to partake by mistake.

"Catholics shared the Eucharist. I also got to be part of it," he said. For Bishop Salmi, the move was part of a greater openness toward intercommunion, signalled by Pope Francis' advice to a Lutheran woman married to a Roman Catholic that she should "talk to the Lord" about whether to join him at Mass.

However, the diocese of Helsinki has issued a robust denial of his interpretation of the event and said that Catholic teaching had not changed.

"Only members of the Catholic Church in the state of grace may receive the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion," according to Marko Tervaportti, director of the diocese's Catholic Information Centre.

He said that the priest may not have known the identity of the Lutherans, as crossing the right arm to the left shoulder as a sign of seeking a blessing rather than Communion was not a universal practice. He added that "if communion is offered, it is because of the ignorance of the minister of the Eucharist and it can still be politely refused".

According to Tervaportti, "The doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church with regard for whom it is possible to receive Holy Communion has not changed in recent years and decades. If it does change, it will not happen 'in the field', but through an alteration of Church law and additions to teachings regarding the sacraments of the Catholic Church."

He urged the necessity of theological engagement, saying that attempting to create communion "on one's own authority" hindered "the true efforts of the churches to draw closer".

While Lutherans and Catholics have seen a significant rapprochement during the last few years, traditionalist Catholics have been angered by what they see as too many concessions to the Lutheran tradition.

Pope Francis' words to the Lutheran woman who asked him about taking Communion in a Catholic church have been explained by theologians as an expression of sympathy rather than of approval.
No, Muslims don't fit into wider British society. And neither do Christians

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is never shy of expressing unpopular views. His latest is to claim that Muslim communities are "unlike others in Britain" and "will not integrate in the same way".

He told the Policy Exchange think tank, "it was disrespectful to suppose that Muslim communities would change" and that "Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect."

Muslims, he said, "see the world differently from the rest of us" and part of the integration process is for "the rest of us to grasp that people aren't going to change their views simply because we are constantly telling them that basically they should be like us".

He has been roundly abused on social media, accused of being divisive, simplistic and generally wrong. The Independent quotes Fiyaz Mughal, head of the Tell Mama charity which campaigns against Muslim hate crimes, as saying that Phillips' claims "assume Muslims have views that are inherently different to other communities".

He added: "There are Muslims fully integrated into our society that have a 'world view' that is no different to others and the only difference is that they pray five times a day."

So religious people are just like everyone else. That's nice, but I don't buy it.

To be clear, I think Phillips is wrong if he's implying that all Muslims are the same. They aren't; there are naturally degrees of religiosity and wide variations in the cultures of different Muslim communities. But in general, I really, really hope he's right, and that Muslims don't fit into British society at all well.

Because people of faith need to be able to stand to one side and critique the society they're part of. When we become too integrated, we lose what makes us unique. We lose the ability to be prophetic; we lose our edginess.

There are things about our British society I really like  even, at the risk of sounding patriotic in a most un-British way, that I'm quite proud of. I like the fact that we don't take ourselves seriously. I like the fact that we try, generally speaking, to do the right thing. I like the fact that we can say pretty much what we want. I like the Queen.

But if I felt the only difference between me anyone else was that I pray and go to church, I'd really worry. Because British society is not the Kingdom of God. We like (some of us) to trumpet British Values. Fair enough, but the impartial observer would take these to include cynicism, sexual licence, child neglect and Kate Hopkins. As well as all the loveliness, there's a lot wrong with us  and we need to stand out and reject that.

So yes, Phillips was right to say that Muslims  by which I think he meant faithful Muslims who take their religion seriously  aren't going to conform. They will live by different rules, according to a different rhythm. They'll reject what much of our society accepts.

His point, though, was that to demand that they conform in order to be accepted as thoroughly British is patronising cultural imperialism. Rather than arguing that Muslims should change and become somehow less Muslim, we need to expand the definition of being British to encompass them too.

And that's the sort of society Christians should want: one that doesn't enforce a secularist conformity on its members, but allows them the freedom to be themselves, as far as they possibly can be. Yes, there'll be points at which society cannot budge and where religious rights have to give way to wider concerns. We should be immoveable on freedom of speech and the liberty of the individual. Rights sometimes compete; sometimes religion will win, sometimes not. But imposing a monochromatic system of values and beliefs on British citizens is fundamentally un-British. Muslims should be allowed to be real Muslims, even at the cost of some inconvenience to the majority non-Muslim population.

And Christians should be allowed to be real Christians. This is where the challenge really comes. Because most Christians are part of the majority culture. We don't stand out because of our dress, or our habit of praying five times a day, (most of us struggle enough with once). Our values are comfortably Enlightenment, and generally not much different from most other people's.

All the more reason, then, to make the differences count; to be salt and light in the world, a city set on a hill. All the more reason not to integrate too well.

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Norwegian Christian couple lost their children over 'spanking', not religion, says activist

The five children of a Pentecostal couple in Norway were taken from their family because their parents spanked them, not because of their religious faith, according to a lawyer close to the case.

Ruth and Marius Bodnariu lost their children to Norway's Barnevernet or children's services last November in a case that has attracted world-wide attention. It was reported that the couple's religious faith had raised concerns at the children's school and their case was taken up by religious liberty campaigners. The case also fitted others where the children of immigrant or mixed-ethnicity families had been removed; Marius Bodnariu is from Romania.

US-based Peter Costea, president of the Alliance for Romania's Families, told the Christian Post that court documents showed that the children were removed because they told investigators their parents spanked them as a disciplinary measure, not for religious reasons. Corporal punishment of children is illegal in Norway and schools are obliged to report it.

The Christian Post cites a letter to Norway's ambassador to Romania, Tove Bruvik Westberg, in which Costea described the authorities' behaviour as "totalitarian extremism".

He wrote that Norway has violated the Bodnariu's parenting rights and added that the "punishment doesn't fit the crime."

"The Bodnariu family has been accused of spanking its children. Yet, the authorities translated this accusation into child abuse, which is farthest from the truth," Costea wrote. "Biological parents have the inherent right to reasonably discipline their children. The fact that Norway has banned corporal punishment of children does not mean that Norway is right in this matter and the rest of the world wrong."

He said the authorities had been "irrational and extreme".

Costea told the Christian Post that testimony from neighbours and the school principal about the good health and wellbeing of the children had been disregarded by the Barnevernet.

At least 10 members of the Romanian parliament travelled to Oslo last week to intercede with the Norwegian authorities.

A decision about whether to put the children up for adoption will be taken in March.

A petition in support of the family has reached more than 57,000 signatures. The Barnevernet, which has refused to comment on the case citing privacy issues, has been the target of intense criticism not just from Romania but from many other countries for its policies.
Rise in Syrian children abducted and sent into battle, Unicef warns

Increasing numbers of Syrian children are being abducted and forced into combat, according to Unicef's regional director for the Middle East.

"Children increasingly are being killed on the battlefield as combatants," Dr Peter Salama said, according to the Guardian. "This is one of the most insidious trends in Syria".

Although children over 16 have been involved in the military in the past, their involvement has previously been restricted to non-combat roles, Salama added.

"We are seeing a very different pattern today.

"The majority of those children are now under the age of 15, which is a very different pattern to previously. The majority are forced to join, often abducted. They are being used as uninformed, armed checkpoints, and sometimes as forced labour."

Several hundred children have been conscripted and around four hundred have been killed, some of them in combat, he said, adding that these numbers "represent the tip of the iceberg."

Unicef has identified more than 4,000 assaults on schools since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, 47 of which took place last year.

According to Salama, "We are seeing children killed and maimed in schools and playgrounds by all parties".

Before the civil war, more than 90 per cent of Syrian children attended school, but "nearly a fifth of children going to school [now] have to cross a front line to get to school to do their exams," he said.

"We now have 2.8 million children out of school in Syria and surrounding countries. For many children, they have never been in school in the past five years and so for many primary school children, they have never seen inside a school room."

"The despair felt by a generation of children who see their hopes and futures shattered" is having a destructive impact on the country, Salama warned.

"Urgent concerted efforts and resources are needed to save this generation of children  and it can start at next week's conference in London. It's a race against time," he said, referring to an upcoming conference on the Syrian humanitarian crisis to be held in early February.

The UN agency has launched a campaign to raise 806 million to fund humanitarian aid in Syria and the surrounding areas.
South Korea, Japan reach agreement on wartime 'comfort women'

South Korea and Japan have reached a landmark agreement to resolve the issue of "comfort women", as those who were forced to work in Japan's wartime brothels were euphemistically known, which has long plagued ties between the neighbours.

The Japanese government feels "deep responsibility" over the comfort women issue and will contribute to a fund to help the women, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told a news conference after a meeting with South Korea's Yun Byung-se.

"Prime Minister Abe, as the prime minister of Japan, once again expresses his feeling of heartfelt apology and remorse to all those who, as 'comfort women', experienced much suffering and incurred incurable psychological and physical wounds," Kishida said.

Yun said South Korea will consider the matter resolved "finally and irreversibly" if the steps pledged by Japan are fully carried out.
Texas Presbyterian pastor draws rebuke for claiming that Jesus did not really rise from the dead

A pastor from Texas has drawn rebuke for making an outrageous claim on social media that Jesus Christ did not actually rise from the dead.

Jim Rigby, pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, made a satirical post describing himself as a Presbyterian minister bound for hell, according to Charisma News Senior Editor Jennifer LeClaire.

"Apparently, because I don't believe in a literal resurrection, I'm not really a Christian," Rigby wrote. "This unfortunately also means I won't be going to heaven with many of you," adding that while his family is enjoying a heavenly banquet, "I will be screaming in unending torment along with Jews and Democrats and the evil college professors who teach evolution."

"My accusers explained to me that I had it all wrong," Rigby went on. "They said I did not understand the gospel. You see, the earth was once a paradise. The dinosaurs were actually gentle and friendly. But then Adam and Eve stole a piece of fruit. God got very angry. So God invented cancer and hemorrhoids to punish human beings for our treachery."

Rigby questioned why God has decided to "barbecue us eternally for the mistakes of our ancestors." He also wondered why it became "good news" when God allowed His son Jesus to be crucified in our place.

"We don't have to be loving or kind like Jesus to be saved from God's wrath. In fact we don't have to do a single thing Jesus commanded us to do," Rigby wrote. "All that matters is that we admit that we are worthless trash, but that Jesus likes us anyway. Oh, and we have to LITERALLY believe Jesus' corpse got up. If you believe all the above you will get to be with God in heaven," the pastor said.

Commenting on Rigby's remarks, LeClaire said it would appear that the Scripture is being fulfilled since Peter the apostle warned about false prophets among believers and false teachers who would "secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who brought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves" (2 Pet. 2:1).

LeClaire said the words spoken by Rigby were definitely the marks of a false teacher. She rejected Rigby's blasphemous claim that Jesus did not resurrect, saying if this were true, there would be no victory over death.

"Unfortunately, Rigby is deceived and being deceivedand deceiving others," LeClaire said.

She cited the next verse: "And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed" (2 Pet. 2:2, MEV).

LeClaire urged Christians to "pray for Rigby, his followersand ourselves because no one is above falling prey to the strong delusion that's rising in this hour of history."
A moment of passion: Francis Bacon, George Dyer and Two Figures (1975)

Francis Bacons Two Figures is a tribute to George Dyer, the great love of his life. In this video and in the interview below, Bacons biographer, Michael Peppiatt, discusses his long friendship with the artist, Bacon's relationship with Dyer and a work that has hung in his home for over 40 years, with Christie's Head of Evening Auction Katharine Arnold

Dr. Michael Peppiatt is an internationally renowned art historian, scholar, and curator. He was a close friend to Francis Bacon for over 30 years and is the author of over 20 books, including the definitive biography of Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma. His latest, critically acclaimed book, Francis Bacon in Your Blood , was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.

In the Post-war and Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 11 February in London, Christies will offer Two Figures, a self-portrait conjoined with the figure of George Dyer that stands as a tribute to Bacons great muse and lover. Dyers tragic death in 1971 gave rise to some of Bacons most powerful work, including the four acclaimed Black Triptychs. Michael Peppiatt, who acquired Two Figures directly from Bacon, spoke with Stephen Jones in New York.

Stephen Jones: You first met Francis Bacon as a 20-year-old. You were a student at Cambridge University who had decided to shake things up on one of the student magazines by interviewing a modern artist. What can you tell us a about that meeting?

Michael Peppiatt: This might give you some idea of how innocent and ill-prepared I was: a friend said, If you want to do an issue of this magazine  which was called Cambridge Opinion  on modern art in Britain, youd better go and talk to Francis Bacon. I said, Dont be ridiculous. Thats an Elizabethan statesman.

It was 1963 and Bacon had just had his first exhibition at the Tate Gallery. This friend of mine knew somebody who was close to Bacon, who was a bit of a terrifying figure. I have to say, in retrospect, if Id seen his paintings before going to meet him, I probably wouldnt have gone. But I did and turned up in a pub in Soho to try and meet this photographer friend of Bacons called John Deakin. Suddenly, I saw a small man was sitting just behind me, on a stool by the bar. He was talking in an exaggeratedly posh, camp voice, and waving his cigarette holder about.

Michael Peppiatt (left) and Stephen Jones in conversation at Christies New York alongside Two Figures, 1975, which is offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Christies London on 11 February

What were your first impressions of him?

I was a bit overawed. He was very, very charming. He knew how to talk to young people, and he was very seductive. He made out that he and I were talking at the same level. He never, ever talked down to people, unless he disliked somebody, and then he could talk down to them very, very effectively. Basically, if he liked you, he drew you out and drew you in.

He was an extraordinarily charged kind of person. When you were with him, the atmosphere tended to go up. He had such a sense of life, and such vitality. He was clearly very intelligent, but also he had this resilience  he was able to drink all day and all night, have a couple of hours sleep, and then be up the next morning, painting.

What was your reaction when you first saw his art?

I was horrified, totally horrified! I couldnt square these images, which seemed to be of horror, of pain, of guilt and of every sort of negative emotion, with this charming, chuckling boulevardier who just seemed to walk through walls from one place to another, from one bar into another.

Francis Bacon and George Dyer, Soho, 1950s (gelatin silver print), Deakin, John (1912-1972) / Private Collection / Photo  Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images

When you saw the paintings, did you like them? Did you understand them?

No, I didnt like them at all. But because I was studying art history at Cambridge, I knew some of his sources, and he was illuminating when he talked about his work. I came to realise that he was talking about a venerable tradition and literally giving it a twist to make it relevant to his own time.

At what point did this friendship become something more long lasting?

To begin with, it was chaotic. The interview I was doing just went on and on. I kept turning up, and then we kept going out and drinking far too much. We used to meet at midday, and then it would go on until about four or five in the morning. The conversation went on, really, for 30 years.

We talked often, just the two of us, late into the night. I was very moved by a lot of this, because I saw the extraordinary freedom that he lived his life with, the way he was always pushing the boundaries back and questioning everything.

It was quite a scary experience, and sometimes things went a bit wrong and in some of the bars there were dangerous situations, lets say. He was very good at pushing a situation as far as it would go, and then somehow managing to get out of the the danger that he had created.

Francis Bacon and George Dyer on the Orient Express to Athens, 1965 (gelatin silver print), Deakin, John (1912-1972) / Private Collection / Photo  Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images

How did he go about explaining his art to you?

Hed say things like, What Im trying to do is give the sensation over as directly as possible. He had this sense of life and of death, and I think thats why I found it so horrific. Im not sure so many people find it horrific now, but then it was so new.

In London people were still coming out of the nightmare the immediate postwar period. We can see the beauty of the painting now, but it at the time it was so violent, so radical. The violence really was the force of the new.

George Dyer became a very important figure in Bacons life, both personally and professionally. The relationship between Bacon and Dyer may be what produced some of this fantastic art

Bacon was attracted to something as sexually different from himself as possible: muscular young men who he thought were dangerous criminals. George looked the part, even though as a crook hed been quite unsuccessful. He was always in prison although in reality he was quite a timid soul. Part of the tragedy is that Bacon took George out of that life by giving him enough money not to have to steal. For George, he got into this this very sophisticated world of Bacons and really lost his footing.

Francis Bacon photographed with his Triptych, 1976, at Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, 1977. Photo John Minihan/Evening Standard/REX Shutterstock.  The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2016

Dyer, as your book depicts so well in the passage on Bacons first big Paris exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in 1966, didnt really care for the art crowd

Bacon was always very amused by the fact that George didnt rate [these people]; he felt a certain truth there. George was always upsetting things and Bacon enjoyed that; he liked barriers to be broken.

What I find interesting from the book is you get a sense of Bacon as being a very jovial figure socially, and yet the work he was producing at this time is incredibly dark, almost tortured. How do you account for that dissonance?

I cant account for it, really. I dont pretend to know. I think Bacon was somebody who was stretched between extremes. He could be extremely generous, and unbelievably mean. He could be very supportive and unbelievably critical and destructive.

We see the paintings as dark because they come over with this incredible force. Its why a Bacon painting never disappears  its always there, youre always conscious of a presence. I lived with Three Heads for about 20 years when I was living and writing in Paris. I could never stare them down. Somehow, he managed to transmit this force into his paintings.

Francis Bacon (19091992), Two Figures, 1975. Oil on canvas. 77 5/8  27 3/4 in. (197.2  70.3 cm.) Estimate: 5,000,000-7,000,000. This work is offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Christies London on 11 February

This painting of George Dyer was done in 1975, four years after Dyer committed suicide. Can you talk us through Two Figures, and where you think it fits within that period of Bacons grieving and recovery?

How do you paint death? How do you paint loss? How do you paint guilt in a way that isnt sentimental? In a terrible way, Georges death gave Bacon the great subject of his painting. It was about loss, about grief, about guilt, because he felt guilty that he hadnt managed to save George from killing himself.

George had attempted suicide several times, and Bacon had managed to get him to hospital, but since his big exhibition opening at the Grands Ballets in Paris, he hadnt been available.

What followed Georges death was four years of painting, almost without interruption. These were very dark paintings, and this is where he begins to come to terms with his loss, and remembers a particularly intimate moment with George. So its remembering, in a sense  a passion, a certain happiness of the past. A happiness lost.

Bacon did a bigger picture, of which this one-half. I first had the complete picture, and then he came round to my flat in Paris one day and said, If I could get my hands back on that, you know, I think I could make it so much better. I said, Well, you know, you must take it back then.

He thought it was too narrative, and he wanted to cut it in two, and make two paintings out of it. It happened to me more than once in that hed see something that hed given me, and then want to take it back to improve it. Very often I wouldnt see it again.

Its only with hindsight that these things take on importance. It didnt occur to me that Id be standing here 40 years later, talking about it.
Police are investigating a fatal shooting inside a parking garage in southeast Houston.

According to initial information, callers reported hearing gunfire about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at a garage in the 9800 block of the Gulf Freeway.

Houston police officers responded to the scene and found a man shot to death on the second floor of the garage.

Police are continuing to search for the suspect. The motive for the fatal shooting has not been determined.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.
THE LEAD: How will Paxton pay?

-- A proposed ethics opinion would let AG Ken Paxton tap out-of-state donors for his legal defense, by the Express-News David Rauf and the Chronicles Lauren McGaughy. The Texas Ethics Commission is scheduled to vote Monday on legal guidance that would give Paxton, or any employee in the attorney general's office, the green light to accept gifts from some donors.

If approved, it would clear the way for the embattled attorney general to accept contributions to cover his legal expenses from out-of-state donors, with certain conditions. State law prohibits agency officials from accepting a benefit from someone under the agencys oversight.

Welcome to Wednesday, and another Donald Trump-owned news cycle. As the GOP candidates get ready for tomorrows debate, the first without Trump center-stage, let me know what youre watching for: bobby.cervantes@chron.com or on Twitter at @bobbycervantes.

-- Winning in a district long held by Democrats, Republican John Lujan outpolled Tomas Uresti in Tuesdays special runoff in Texas House District 118. Filling a seat vacated last year by former state Rep. Joe Farias, D-San Antonio, the GOP candidate will serve out the remainder of Farias unexpired term, through the end of the year.

Another election is set for March 1 to fill the seat for a two-year term starting in 2017. Lujan and Uresti are seeking their parties nominations in that race, and each has a primary opponent, so the winner wont be decided until Nov. 8, per the Express-News John Gonzalez.

-- Hegar sees storms, no falling sky in oil price drop, by the Express-News Peggy Fikac. Republicans as well as Democrats pushed for numbers as they look toward meeting state needs in areas including health care and education, even while leaders including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick place a continuing priority on tax relief. Patrick  in an interview before a meeting scheduled Wednesday in San Antonio of the Select Committee on Property Tax Reform and Relief  said the last place to back down is tax relief in the face of economic uncertainty.

-- Houston prosecutor has angered anti-abortion groups before, by the APs Paul Weber. Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson, a Republican originally appointed by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is now watching her party fume after she announced a grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of misusing fetal tissue  and instead indicted the makers of undercover video widely embraced by the GOP. But those who know the former judge say she is no ideologue and won't buckle to politics.

-- One Planned Parenthood investigation backfired. Heres why the next one wont, by the Texas Observers Andrea Grimes. We cannot underestimate the strength of the persecution narrative in the anti-abortion movement, and the degree to which these indictments will be seen not as proof of deception and fraud, but of the secular liberal establishments commitment to silencing these downtrodden warriors for life.

-- Despite indictments, the damage from the Planned Parenthood videos is already done, by the Chronicles Brian Rosenthal. Officials and experts on both sides acknowledged Tuesday the surprise indictments probably will not weaken - and may even strengthen - a nationwide wave of momentum against Planned Parenthood and fetal organ donation that has swelled in the months since California anti-abortion activists used heavily edited undercover videos filmed at a dozen clinics to accuse the organization of selling body parts of aborted fetuses.

-- Overnight from Quorum Report: Former Harris County GOP Chair Jared Woodfill to represent indicted Planned Parenthood videographers

-- Guns hearing yields few answers on campus, open carry, by the Chronicles Lauren McGaughy. (Sen. Joan) Huffman and campus carry bill sponsor Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, urged the chancellors to ensure students with a license to carry are not treated differently or "ostracized" by professors opposed to the new law.

-- Trump surprises with evangelical endorsement, by the Chronicles Dylan Baddour. Evangelical leaders in Cruz's home state of Texas agreed, highlighting Trump's past positions on hot-button issues such government spending, abortion rights and same-sex marriage. His opulent lifestyle, three marriages and casino ownership should put off the strictly religious, they said. Yet, he commands significant evangelical support.

SPEED READ

Texas Take: Free speech and abortion, Houston Chronicle

Charges: videographers used fake IDs to infiltrate Planned Parenthood, Houston Chronicle

Tilove: As Perry returns to Iowa, Sam Clovis opines on Trumps patriotic altruism, Austin American-Statesman

Grieder: Greeting from Iowa, Texas Monthly

Golandos experience hard to ignore in HD-116, San Antonio Express-News

Ruth Jones McClendon steps aside early, San Antonio Express-News

Paxton objects to resettlement of Syrians without advance notice, Houston Chronicle

Uresti undergoes treatment for tear in artery, San Antonio Express-News

Officials ask SCOTUS to stay environmental regs, Austin American-Statesman

Abbott is the right choice for VP, The Hill

Abbotts play for national audience draws questions about higher-office plans, The Dallas Morning News

Perry/Cruz road show: mistrust DC and Trump, love states rights, The Dallas Morning News

Cruz backer Steve King suggest Trump is buying endorsements, Politico

Tony Perkins , Dana Loesch endorse Cruz, Politico

MSNBC, Union Leader team up for unsanctioned Dem debate, Politico

Abbott asks Obama to declare disaster in North Texas, The Dallas Morning News

Failing to protect air quality is bad for the economy, Houston Chronicle

QUOTE TO NOTE

Im not upset about the loss. Im upset we had a terrible candidate. The difference between Republican John Lujan and Democrat Tomas Uresti is the difference between cat shit and dog shit.

-- Ed Espinoza, the Progress Texas executive director, on the Democratic loss in San Antonio Tuesday night

RACE TO 2016

-- There or not, Donald Trump drives the GOP debate, by the APs Steve Peoples. "The billionaire Republican's decision to tangle with Fox News and skip the final presidential debate before Iowa's kickoff caucuses all but ensures that he  and he alone  will dominate the conversation in the closing moments of campaigning in 2016's leadoff state. It's a move that for any other candidate would probably be viewed as un-presidential. But for Trump, it's more likely to serve as fresh evidence that he's successfully redefining the art of presidential politics.

-- Ted Cruz and allies are working hard to halt Donald Trumps gains, by the NYTs Matt Flegenheimer and Jonathan Martin. Senior aides were reluctant to confront Mr. Trump through television ads, even after weeks of his belittling Mr. Cruz in widely covered speeches and TV appearances. But now they are moving to halt Mr. Trumps momentum with the kind of everything-at-the-wall approach that suggests a campaign under duress: In less than two weeks, Mr. Cruz and his allies have assailed Mr. Trump as a lifelong liberal, a Twitter obsessive, an uninformed foreign policy mind and a deal-maker who would compromise on conservative values.

-- Behind Marco Rubios survival strategy, by Politicos Eli Stokols and Marc Caputo. Like a contestant on a Republican version of Survivor, Rubio has long been content to hang with the pack and avoid elimination. For months he has been playing the expectations gameand hearing a chorus of conservatives carping about his campaigns cool, confident approach. But now, with Donald Trump taking the lead back from Ted Cruz in Iowa, Rubios team says the caucuses are setting up to give their candidate the boost he needs to sideline rivals in New Hampshire.

-- Do Trump voters really exist? How both parties botched Iowa, by The Daily Beasts Gideon Resnick. With under a week left until people vote for the first time in 2016, the number of registered Democrats and Republicans has remained fairly static in the last six months. So the big crowds at rallies for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trumpwhere they boast of attracting new caucus goers in droveshasnt translated into big gains when it comes to registered support. At least not yet.
Courtesy of the artist

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Museums

Art Car Museum: "Seductions," works by Veronica Dyer, Sylvia Ellis, Rosanne Hudson, Sue Burke Harrington and Michelle O'Michael, through March 12; 140 Heights, 713-861-5526, artcarmuseum.com.

Art League Houston: Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin's "Fifty States: Wyoming," Ying Zhu's "Sugar Coated," Jessica Kreutter's "Small Cities on Stars" and Giovanni Valderas' "A Forged Utopia," through Feb. 27; 1953 Montrose; 713-523-9530, artleaguehouston.org.

Asia Society Texas Center: "Drawn From Nature," through Feb. 21, and "Yeesookyung: Contemporary Korean Sculpture," through March 27; $5; 1370 Southmore; 713-496-9901, asiasociety.org.

Blaffer Art Museum: Slavs and Tatars' "Mirrors For Princes," through March 19, and "Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?," through March 16; 4173 Elgin; 713-743-9521, blafferartmuseum.org.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston: "Jennie C. Jones: Compilation," through March 27, and "Island Time: Galveston Artist Residency - The First Four Years," through Feb. 14; 5216 Montrose; 713-284-8250, camh.org.

DiverseWorks: "What Shall We Do Next?," works by Danielle Dean, Kristin Lucas, Julien Previeux and artist collective Versace Versace Versace, through March 19; 3400 Main, 713-223-8346, diverseworks.org.

GalleryHOMELAND: Melinda Laszczynski's "Lady Palace," through Feb. 14; plus her "Tight Sticks" installation at the adjacent HOMEcore, through Feb. 21; 2327 Commerce, 503-819-9656, galleryhomeland.org.

Galveston Arts Center: Michael Kennaugh's "Locus in Quo," Natasha Bowdoin's HEXAM and Bennie Flores Ansell's "1 dpi & Projection," through Feb. 21; 2127 Strand, Galveston; 409-763-2403, galvestonartscenter.org.

Holocaust Museum Houston: Michael Roque Collins' "Sojourn in the Shadowlands," through March 13; $12 for adults, discounts for seniors and military, free for students; 5401 Caroline; 713-942-8000, hmh.org.

Houston Center for Photography: "2016 Print Auction Exhibition," through Feb. 17; 1441 W. Alabama; 713-529-4755, hcponline.org.

Houston Museum of African-American Culture: "The Abolitionists: Different Eyes Seeing the Same Reality," and "As Small as a Giant: Black Lives Matter," through Saturday; 4807 Caroline; 713-526-1015, hmaac.org.

Katy Contemporary Arts Museum: Chuck Hipsher's "Gestural," through Feb. 28; 805 Ave. B, Katy; 832-857-1340, katycam.com.

Lawndale Art Center: Randy Bolton's "Flicker & Fade; Almendra Castillo, Cinthia Gomez and Yma Luis' "Satellite"; Jorge Galvan Flores' "Alkanziyya"; and Georgia Carter's "Grisaille," plus Ned Dodington, Christoph Ibele, Jon LaRocca and Haldre Rogers' outdoor performance-art installation "BioCity," through Feb. 27; 4912 Main, 713-528-5858, lawndaleartcenter.org.

Menil Collection: "The Precarious," through May 1; "The Secret of the Hanging Egg: Salvador Dali at the Menil," through June 19; and "MicroCosmos: Details From the Carpenter Collection of Arctic Art," through Feb. 21; 1533 Sul Ross; 713-525-9400, menil.org.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: "Statements: African American Art From the Museum's Collection," through April 24; "Pleasure and Piety: The Art of Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638)," through Jan. 31; and "Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art From Latin America," through Feb. 28; 7.50-$23; 5601 Main; 713-639-7300, mfah.org.

The Printing Museum: "Of Birds and Texas: The Art of Stuart & Scott Gentling," opens Friday, through May 15; and "An American Visual Language: Specimens of Historic Wood Type Printed by John Horn at Shooting Star Press," opens Friday, through Dec. 31; 1324 West Clay; $6-$8 (12 and younger free); 713-522-4652, printingmuseum.org.

Project Row Houses: "Small Business/Big Change: Economic Perspectives From Artists and Artpreneurs," through Feb. 28; 2521 Holman; 713-526-7662, projectrowhouses.org.

Station Museum of Contemporary Art: "Corpocracy," through Feb. 14; 1502 Alabama; 713-529-6900, stationmuseum.com.

Galleries

2016-Open Your Eyes: Works by Rachel Fischer, Eric Ockrassa, Angel Castelan, Margaret McMillam; and "Kay Tasuji: Connected," through Feb. 13; Zoya Tommy, 4012 Fannin, 832-649-5814, zoyatommy.com.

David Aylsworth: "Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea," through Feb. 20; Inman Gallery, 3901 Main; 713-526-7800, inmangallery.com.

Andrea Bianconi: "Fantastic Planet," through Feb. 6; Barbara Davis Gallery, 4411 Montrose; 713-520-9200, barbaradavisgallery.com.

Michael Bise: "Born Again," through Feb. 20; Moody Gallery, 2815 Colquitt, 713-526-9911, moodygallery.com.

Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak: "Dialogues," through Feb. 19; Parrish Art Gallery, Building D, Lone Star College-Montgomery, 3200 College Park Drive, Conroe; 936-273-7021, lonestar.edu.

William Cokeley: "Traveler," through Feb. 6; d.m. allison art, 2709 Colquitt, 832-607-4378, dma-art.com.

Matthew Craven: "Monuments," through Feb. 6; David Shelton Gallery, 4411 Montrose; 713-393-7319, davidsheltongallery.com.

Earthworks: Works by Madeleine Dietz, Perla Krauze and Mario Reis, through Feb. 27; Gallery Sonja Roesch, 2309 Caroline; 713-659-5424, gallerysonjaroesch.com.

Garland Fielder: "The Map and the Territory," through Feb. 6; Anya Tish Gallery, 4411 Montrose, 713-524-2299, anyatishgallery.com.

Donald Fox: "Portals and Pathways," through Friday; Jung Center, 5200 Montrose, 713-524-8253, junghouston.org.

Tarina Frank: "Life Preservers as Amulet," through Sunday; Redbud Gallery, 303 E. 11th, 713-854-4246, redbudgallery.com.

Margaret Garrett: "Choros Paintings," through Feb. 4; Samara Gallery, 3911 Main; 713-999-1009, samaragallery.com.

Khaled Hafez: "Codes of Hermes," through Saturday; Deborah Colton Gallery, 2445 North; 713-869-5151, deborahcoltongallery.com.

Ann Harithas: "The Domain of Images," opens 1 p.m. Saturday, through March 4; HBU Contemporary Art Gallery, University Academic Center, 7502 Fondren, 281-649-3000, hbu.edu.

Erin Hunt: "Resonances," through Feb. 6, Front Gallery, 1412 Bonnie Brae, 713-298-4750, frontgallery.com.

Jennie C. Jones: "Editions," prints, through Feb. 27, and "Woodcuts" group show, through Saturday; Hiram Butler Gallery, 4520 Blossom; 713-863-7097, hirambutler.com.

Michael Kenna: "A Wonderful World," through Feb. 20; Catherine Couturier Gallery, 2635 Colquitt, 713-524-5070, catherinecouturier.com.

Paul Kittelson: "Falling Skies," and "Clark Derbes: Square Space," through Feb. 22; Devin Borden Gallery, 3917 Main, 713-529-2700, devinborden.com.

Looking South: Works by Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Julio Alpuy, Jose Gurvich, Francisco Matto and Augusto Torres, through Feb. 27; Sicardi Gallery, 1506 W. Alabama; 713-529-1313, sicardigallery.com.

Edward Lane McCartney: "Media whore: the persistence of making," through Feb. 20; Hooks Epstein Galleries, 2631 Colquitt, 713-522-0718, hooksepsteingalleries.com.

Ellen de Meijer: "Dissolution," through March 15; Unix Gallery, 4411 Montrose, Unit C; 713-874-1770, unixgallery.com.

Exchange: An installation by Ben Butler, through May 13; Heritage Plaza Lobby, 1111 Bagby; artsbrookfield.com.

Mari Omori: "The Habit of Being," through March 5; Hunter Gather Project, 5320 Gulfton, Suite 15; 713-664-3302, huntergatherproject.com.

Present Histories: New works by Jai Llewellyn, through Feb. 7; DesignWorks Gallery, 2119A Postoffice, Galveston, 409-766-7599.

ReelArt: "The Art of Celebration" group show, through Feb. 20; Nicole Longnecker Gallery, 2625 Colquitt; 713-591-4997, longneckergallery.com.

Resting Places: New work by Hollie Brown, through Feb. 25; BLUEorange, 1208 W. Gray, 713-527-0030, blueorangehouston.com.

John Tallman: "Not for Pleasure Alone, Objects 2007-2015," and "Deb Covell: Real Lines," through Feb. 13; Gray Contemporary, 3508 Lake, 713-862-4425, graycontemporary.com.

Simple Taste is Popular: Works by Bill Willis and Bradley Kerl, artist talk 1 p.m. Saturday; through Feb. 20; Art Palace, 3913 Main; 832-390-1273, artpalacegallery.com.

Ray Smith: "Unguernica," through March 5; McClain Gallery, 2242 Richmond; 713-520-9988, mcclaingallery.com.

Transmissions of Light: "Collected Works of Michael Roque Collins and Lowell Daunt Collins," through April 5; Two Allen Center Lobby, 1200 Smith, artsbrookfield.com.

Karl Umlauf: "Industrious: Then and Now!" through Feb. 6; William Reaves|Sarah Foltz Fine Art, 2143 Westheimer, 713-521-7500, reavesart.com.

Visual Arts Alliance: Ninth Juried Invitational Exhibition, through March 19; 1600 Smith Gallery, 1600 Smith, visualartsalliance.org.
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Wild & Scenic Film Festival

2009 W. Gray, cechouston.org

The Citizens' Environmental Film Festival on Tour stops in Houston. Eleven short documentaries will be screened at River Oaks Theatre.

7 p.m. Thursday Jan. 28

Houston Iranian Film Festival

Multiple venues; mfah.org

The 23rd edition of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's longest-running film festival will showcase seven films selected in collaboration with Tom Vick of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian Institution's museums of Asian art; Carter Long of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Barbara Scharres of the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.

Friday-Feb. 2

Discovery Green

1500 McKinney, discoverygreen.com

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF: When Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) takes a "sick" day from school in search of adventure, his suspicious principal (Jeffrey Jones) pursues the rogue student. Free

7 p.m. Thursday

River Oaks Theatre

2009 W. Gray, landmarktheatres.com

ENTER THE DRAGON: Incredible martial-arts action follows Bruce Lee as he participates in a brutal tournament against lethal opponents at a remote island fortress.

Midnight Friday and Saturday

Central Green Park

23501 Cinco Ranch, Katy; drafthouse.com

DESPICABLE ME: When a criminal mastermind uses a trio of orphan girls as pawns for a grand scheme, he finds their love is profoundly changing him for the better. Free.

Dusk Friday

14 Pews

800 Aurora; 14pews.org

MUSTANG: Free-spirited sisters in Turkey rebel after their parents make their home a prison where the only escape is an arranged marriage. (Turkish, with English subtitles)

7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

1001 Bissonnet; mfah.org

MONIR: The documentary looks at the life and work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who became one of the most influential artists of the Middle East, from her methods of constructing mirror mosaics to adjusting to the political changes in her own country of Iran. (Farsi, with English subtitles)

7 p.m. Friday

JAFAR PANAHI'S TAXI: A taxi driver navigating Tehran's bustling streets picks up a succession of lively passengers who engage in revealing conversations. Acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi stars as the taxi driver. (Farsi, with English subtitles)

8:30 p.m. Friday and 9 p.m. Saturday

I AM DIEGO MARADONA: A writer narrates his story with multiple beginnings, middles and ends. Laugh-out-loud moments are interspersed with dark humor that reward audiences along for the wild ride. (Farsi, with English subtitles)

7 p.m. Saturday

OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT DOCUMENTARIES: The featured films include "Body Team 12," "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness," "Last Day of Freedom," "Chau, Beyond the Lines" and "Claude."

1 p.m. Sunday

IN JACKSON HEIGHTS: For his 40th film, venerable documentarian Frederick Wiseman immerses us in the vibrant, diverse neighborhood of Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, where immigrants from dozens of countries, with more than 150 languages spoken, live and work.

5 p.m. Sunday
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Masroor Fatany is opening his own little piece of the Big Apple in Houston on Saturday.

Well, not so much Big Apple as Big Gyro.

The Houston native and Texas A&M University graduate is the franchisee for Texas' first The Halal Guys, a food truck with a cult following in New York City.

Fatany has plans to open 13 The Halal Guys in Houston, San Antonio and many points in between. But first he has to get Unit 1 open.

Surrounded by crews training in the small space off South Shepherd on Farnham, baby-faced Fatany exudes a confidence that belies his 29 years.

"We've got 1,600 people coming Saturday," he said, showing off the RSVP list on Facebook. That's a lot of bodies for a space that only seats 18 inside. The restaurant has a covered patio, too.

The Halal Guys specializes in platters and sandwiches stuffed with chicken, gyro or falafel. Opened in 1990, the NYC original was a hot-dog cart that took off after it began catering to Muslim cab drivers.

The New York restaurants boast of hiring bouncers to control the crowds that greet its multiple restaurants and food carts. Fatany didn't mention bouncers - the restaurant will be keeping bar hours on Friday and Saturday nights - but he did say that he would have police officers on hand to help direct traffic in the area.

"Our food attracts all ages and all walks of life. We have a very diversified clientele," Fatany said, adding that last week's Uber/The Halal Guys delivery promotion sold out in minutes each day.

Fatany said he had been working with The Halal Guys for about two years to open here. "It was a long vetting process," said Fatany, who also owns a successful garage-door franchise.

His management team spent a month in New York learning to cook the famously secret recipes. "Their standards are exacting," Fatany said, "but if you've eaten in New York, you will find the same exact flavors here."

The Halal Guys: 3821 Farnham

Perry's opens at Baybrook Mall

After 36 years in the Clear Lake area, Perry's Steakhouse & Grill is moving into posh new digs at Baybrook Mall Thursday.

The 10,000-square-foot restaurant will feature an open kitchen, a towering wine wall and the Houston-based chain's signature Bar 79. Also on the menu: USDA aged prime beef and Perry's famous table-side carving service. 700 Baybrook Mall, 281-286-8800

Bernadine's now serving lunch, brunch

Bernadine's, the new Heights restaurant helmed by chef Graham Laborde, has begun offering lunch 11 a.m.-3 p.m. weekdays and brunch 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The lunch menu features items such as Fried-Chicken Sandwich and Fried Oyster Salad; brunch touts dishes such as Head Cheese Hot Brown and BBQ Pork and Potato Skin Hash. 1801 N. Shepherd, 713-864-2565
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There is a so-called tiny house for sale on the HAR website at the moment for just over $110,000.

How tiny?

Just 288 square feet, according to the real estate listing. The whole thing is set on a 5,757 square foot lot.

The elevated home in the 10000 block of Teneha Drive in the Southeast Houston/Sunnyside area is located inside a heavily-wooded lot. The listing notes that the home was built in 2015.

It comes with a 25-foot deck up top perfect for parties and there is an expansive area around the stilts under the home. There isnt much room for entertaining inside but thats probably not a selling point.

RELATED: 44 of the most impressive tiny homes you've ever seen

The interior features repurposed oak and pieces of another home. There is a queen-size bed that folds into the wall and turns into a couch. Its also energy efficient.

It comes with burglar bars on all the doors and windows as well. It comes with one bedroom and one bathroom.

RELATED: The tiny house trend and Houston

The man who built the home is an architect. He designed the copper gutter system himself, along with the reinforced railings.

This is the first tiny home hes built. Hed like to one day build a whole community of them in the Houston area.

The home is just a 20 minute drive from downtown Houston and 15 minutes from the Texas Medical Center, making it reasonable for those working inside 610 Loop.

Sims Bayou is just a short walk to the south, though thats probably not a selling point.
A police officer shot and wounded a man early Wednesday morning during a confrontation at an apartment complex in Baytown.

The incident occurred about 1:30 a.m. at the Rosemont at Baytown apartments in the 6000 block of Garth, said Lt. Eric Freed, spokesman for the Baytown Police Department.

Freed said a 29-year-old woman who lives at the complex walked to a nearby emergency medical clinic to get help because she said her estranged husband, identified as 28-year-old Anthony Chapman, was damaging her home. An off-duty Baytown police officer who works an extra-job as security at the clinic called 911.

When two officers arrived at the scene, they drove the woman back to the complex to find Chapman. They spotted him walking in the parking lot and then saw him climb into his parked car. The officers approached him. One of the officers stood outside the driver's side door while the other was on the passenger side.

Freed said as the officer on the driver's side reached inside the vehicle, Chapman put his car in reverse and sped backwards. The officer's arm was entangled inside the car and he was pulled along as the car traveled backward about 40 feet. Fearful for his safety, the officer fired more than one gunshot at Chapman, wounding him.

Chapman was flown by LifeFlight medical helicopter to Memorial Hermann-The Texas Medical Center. Details of his injuries and condition were not released, but Freed said he is expected to survive.

The injured officer, whose name has not been released, was rushed to Houston Methodist hospital in Baytown. His hand and possibly his knee were injured. His condition was not released but Freed said he was treated and released and is expected to recover. He is a five-year veteran with the police department.

The woman and the other officer were not hurt.

Freed said investigators are trying to determine why Chapman was reportedly ransacking his estranged wife's apartment. Chapman, Freed said, has a warrant out of Harris County for harassing communications as well as a warrant in Minnesota for possession of cocaine.

Also, Freed said, officers have encountered the couple before regarding reports of disturbances. No information about those cases was released.

The officer who opened fire will be placed on three days paid leave, as is common when officers fire their guns while on duty.

As is customary, the BPD Homicide and the Internal Affairs units as well as the Harris County District Attorneys Office will investigate the case.
More details have been released after police officers opened fire on woman who had fired a gunshot at them after leading them on a chase in a stolen pickup Tuesday in east Houston.

Kimberly Anne Roco, 41, is charged with aggravated assault against a public servant in the incident which occurred about 11:15 a.m. in the 900 block of Woolworth near Arapahoe, according to the Houston Police Department.
A Nobel Prize-winning physicist has become a somewhat reluctant face of the anti-gun movement at the University of Texas at Austin after vowing to ban guns in his classroom even if it means getting sued.

Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in science in 1979, declared on Monday that he would ban guns in his classroom, regardless of what the law or the university says about it.

"I am willing by my own actions to expose myself to this," he said, according to the Texas Tribune. "Let's have it heard. We should allow the courts to decide it."

UT, like public universities across the state, is wrestling with how to comply with a new state law allowing concealed license holders to carry guns on campus beginning in August. UT's proposal would allow guns in classrooms, but would ban them from dormitories -- a suggestion running counter to an opinion from the state's attorney general, who has said a dorm ban would be an overreach.

The new law is unpopular with professors, hundreds of whom have signed petitions begging their employees to do anything they can to keep guns out of classrooms.

Weinberg was mentioned at a state legislative hearing on Tuesday, where the six chancellors of Texas' public university systems testified that they fully intended to follow the letter and intent of the state's new campus carry law, which goes into effect in the fall, but admitted to getting pushback from faculty opposed to guns in classrooms, offices and dorms.

"The faculty, staff continue to express serious concerns. Some have said they will leave the university," University of Houston System Chancellor Renu Khator said.

On Tuesday, Weinberg told the Tribune that he didn't intend to become a "local hero."

"I didn't do it for that reason," the 82-year old physicist said. "I'm a little embarrassed by it."

While Weinberg's stand has drawn attention, he isn't the first UT professor to make a bold declaration following the new campus carry law. In October, a longtime economics professor said he would leave the school, because he felt the law has "substantially enhanced" the chances of a shooting.

"With a huge group of students my perception is that the risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced by the concealed-carry law," economics professor emeritus Daniel Hamermesh, who has been at UT since the mid-90s, wrote in a letter announcing his departure. "Out of self-protection I have chosen to spend part of next Fall at the University of Sydney, where, among other things, this risk seems lower."

Take a look at some of the things you can't have on college campuses in the gallery above.
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WHARTON  After a Wharton County man was sentenced to death Friday for killing a state game warden, the parents of both men embraced and cried, sharing the enormity of their losses with each other.

Condemned killer James Garrett Freeman's mother and father crossed the wide gulf of the courtroom to console game warden Justin Hurst's parents and express remorse for their son's actions. And Hurst's parents hugged them back tightly, making clear they did not hold Freeman's family responsible.

"They expressed to us how sorry they were for all of this," said the slain game warden's mother, Pat Hurst of El Campo. "It was a sharing of the grief."

Jim and Lori Freeman declined to comment as they left the courtroom, but told Hurst's parents the man seen on police video firing nearly 40 shots at law enforcement officers was not the son they raised.

"We wanted them to understand there were no winners here," Pat Hurst said of the condemned man's parents. "Both families suffered losses. In no way do we want them to feel we held them accountable for what he did that night."

The conversation ended an emotional three-week trial in which the jury convicted the defendant, a 27-year-old man from Lissie, of capital murder.

After more than 13 hours of deliberations over two days, jurors concluded Garrett Freeman, an unemployed welder, would pose a future threat to society and found no mitigating circumstances sufficient to spare his life.

Defense attorneys Stanley Schneider and Lee Cox had argued that Freeman had problems with alcohol and depression. They also said he had no record of violent acts before the fatal shooting.

But Wharton County District Attorney Josh McCown and special prosecutor Kelly Siegler said Freeman has a smoldering temper that he cannot control.

Hurst, 34, was killed March 17, 2007, as he and six other officers closed in on Freeman after a 90-minute chase through Wharton and Colorado counties.

After Freeman's tires were punctured, he bailed from his truck at the Lissie Cemetery and fired nearly 40 shots from a Glock pistol and an AK-47 rifle in less than a minute, striking Hurst twice.

Victim's family speaks

The chase started when another game warden tried to stop Freeman to ticket him for illegally hunting an animal at night.

Freeman later told a Texas Ranger he didn't know why he shot Hurst.

Most jurors filed back in to the courtroom later Friday to watch Hurst's widow and parents read victim impact statements to Freeman, even though the jury had been excused.

One female juror closed her eyes and cried quietly, clasping the jury foreman's hand as Hurst's father spoke directly to Freeman for the first time.

"I had a son whose life was taken by a poacher for reasons that only that person will ever know," Allen Hurst said. "Yes, I had quite a son. God, how I miss him."

Amanda Hurst, 32, of El Campo, told her husband's killer she prays for him and his family daily because of the anguish he has caused his loved ones.

"Justin was considered a hero by his comrades," she said of her husband. "Against all training, he chose to leave his cover and expose himself in this horrific event."

Freeman sat quietly, watching each of Hurst's family members intently as they spoke. He showed no reaction when state District Judge Randy Clapp sentenced him to death.

The case was the first death penalty trial in Wharton since 1979.

peggy.ohare@chron.com
The nation's top cancer centers called Wednesday for increased vaccination against a sexually transmitted virus that can cause a number of tumors, a rare united effort born of frustration that an effective weapon against the disease isn't being fully deployed.

In a statement, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine's Dan Duncan Cancer Center and the 67 other National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers called low rates of vaccination against the human papillomavirus "a serious public health threat." Several strains of HPV cause the vast majority of cervical, throat, anal and other genital cancers.

"HPV vaccination represents a rare opportunity to prevent many cases of cancer that is tragically underused," says the statement. "As national leaders in cancer research and clinical care, we are compelled to jointly issue this call to action."

The statement calls out not just parents and guardians and young men and women but also pediatricians and other health-care providers. Studies show more than half of providers are not following national guidelines to recommend the vaccine.

"We encourage all health-care providers to be advocates for cancer prevention by making strong recommendations for childhood HPV vaccination," says the statement.

The 69 institutions are posting the 10-paragraph statement to their institutional websites. Center leaders say they cannot remember a time when all came together in such a concerted action.

The vaccine was found to protect against HPV in the early years of the century and was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2006. But it remains sporadically used  a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found 40 percent of girls and 21 percent of boys are receiving the recommended three doses of the vaccine.

The rate lags far behind those achieved by Australia (75 percent), the United Kingdom (84 percent to 92 percent) and Rwanda (93 percent). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has set a goal of 80 percent for the end of the decade.

The low rates are partly attributable to controversy that beset the vaccine from the beginning, based in part on concerns the vaccine would encourage premarital sex. Gov. Rick Perry's 2007 attempt to require inoculation of Texas school girls was shot down because even many doctors thought it was too soon to make it mandatory.
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Six months after Sandra Bland was found dead in a Waller County jail cell, her mother says she still doesn't know how it happened and doesn't feel ready to move on.

"We're just as in the dark as so many other people," Geneva Reed-Veal said in a three-part video interview with EBONY.com posted Monday.

Reed-Veal recalled speaking with her daughter on the morning last July before she was pulled over and arrested near Prairie View A&M University. On the phone, Bland had been upbeat and looking forward to her future, Reed-Veal said.

Authorities found Bland -- whom her mother described as smart and assertive, an activist and a lifelong friend -- dead in her jail cell days later. Autopsy findings indicated she had killed herself.

Reed-Veal said she has received neither the initial police nor Texas Ranger reports that she requested. Without evidence, the family still questions what happened to Bland. The mother said she couldn't simply believe what she was told and move on.

"I feel like Sandy's blood is calling out," she said in the interview. "I really do."

Criminal proceedings, meanwhile, are ongoing for the state trooper who pulled over and arrested Bland. He was indicted this month by a grand jury on a misdemeanor charge of perjury for allegedly lying about why he asked her to step out of the vehicle -- and the Department of Public Safety promptly said it had begun termination proceedings against him. Reed-Veal described the criminal charge as "the lowest charge on the totem pole" and said it did not constitute justice.

"My daughter doesn't get to be on administrative leave," she said. "My daughter's not here to fight her case."
Two anti-abortion activists indicted in connection with an undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood will be represented by Harris County's former GOP leader and a prominent criminal defense attorney.

Jared Woodfill and Terry Yates said their defense of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt will turn on First Amendment protections afforded to undercover journalists and will include a focus on the activists' "intent" when they created fake identifications and offered to buy fetal tissue from a Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast office last year.

Former Republican Party chairman Jared Woodfill said he and Terry Yates will defend the two activists against charges handed down by a grand jury he accused of acting outside of scope of the law.

"We believe this is a runaway grand jury that has acted contrary to the law," Woodfill told reporters. "They've gone after the whistle blowers."

He called upon Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson to dismiss the charges and let another grand jury look at the evidence.

Historically, the district attorney's office will not send a case to a second grand jury unless new evidence is uncovered.

"We'll treat this case like we do any other," said Jeff McShan, a spokesman for the office. "We'll continue to investigate and we welcome any new evidence that could come forward. That's what we do with any case."

Daleiden, 27, and Merritt, 62, face possible sentences of up to 20 years in prison after being charged with tampering with a governmental record, a second-degree felony.

Daleiden also is charged with trying to purchase human organs, namely fetal tissue, a Class A misdemeanor.

Woodfill said he expects the cases to turn on several issues, including "intent."

"They can't prove any intent to defraud or harm, which is part of the tampering statute," Woodfill said. "As for the misdemeanor, it's going to be very difficult for prosecutors to say that they intended to actually purchase human body parts."

The Harris County district attorney's office, the Texas Rangers and the Houston Police Department began investigating Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast after a video was released last August by the California-based Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group.

The video shows a Planned Parenthood employee discussing how to preserve aborted fetuses for research purposes, as well as the methods and costs of fetal tissue harvesting. The group claims the videos show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells body parts and organs from aborted fetuses to scientists for research.

CMP and Woodfill have argued the organization may be entitled to First Amendment protections, specifically freedom of the press.

"These are techniques that investigative journalists have used for years," Woodfill said. "If they were to criminalize this conduct, most investigative journalists would be prosecuted for doing the exact same or similar things."

Woodfill, who was ousted from the top county GOP post by Paul Simpson in 2014, has been an outspoken opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. He was the spokesman for the campaign to repeal HERO, Houston's equal rights ordinance.

Yates has represented high-profile judicial Republicans with legal problems, such as former Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina and former family court judge Denise Pratt.
Three criminals robbed a Chevron gas station near Navigation Boulevard in September, and have yet to be captured.

One of the men was wearing a bright orange hat; another neon green sneakers; and another white gloves. Other than those few distinguishing features, the three were mainly dressed in black.
Before hikers made Enchanted Rock a regular destination and before millennials captured yoga selfies atop the dome, the Hill Country behemoth was a mystical place full of legend and mystery.

When humans first inhabited the area 12,000 years ago, Enchanted Rock was seen as a strange structure from a supernatural world.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz issued a brazen challenge to leading rival, Donald Trump, Tuesday night: a one-on-one debate just days before the nation's first presidential primary caucus.

It comes after Trump snubbed Thursday's Fox News GOP presidential debate, declining to attend and citing his distaste for anchor and moderator Megan Kelly.

Cruz floated the idea of a two-man debate on the Mark Levin Show, suggesting Trump could pick his own moderator, or the candidates could go at it with no moderator.

"I'm happy to go an hour and a half mano a mano, me and Donald with no moderators any time before the Iowa caucuses," Cruz said.

Those caucuses will be Monday.

Cruz backed his statement with a tweet an hour later.

On Wednesday morning, there was no sign of a response from Trump. His twitter feed was occupied largely by jabs at Fox News and Kelly.

A Cruz-Trump debate, though unlikely to actually happen, would largely reflect what this GOP primary race has become: a two-man show, with the front runners grabbing the vast majority of media coverage.

In national polls, Trump commands a wide lead over Cruz, the runner up, with the other candidates fledgling far behind. But in Iowa, Trump and Cruz are virtually tied for the top spot. Iowa will host the first primary caucus, along with New Hampshire.

In that state, other GOP candidates including Jeb Bush and John Kasich are challenging Cruz for the second spot in the most recent polls.
Check out the Houston Chronicle's Cruz News each morning for fresh updates from the Houston-based presidential campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Holy war

Both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on Tuesday announced endorsements from big evangelical figures.

With days before the first primary caucus, it represents a battle for the GOP's most crucial voting block  evangelicals  that Cruz has long been assumed to carry.

On Tuesday morning, Trump got the support of Jerry Falwell Jr., whose late father founded Liberty University, where Cruz announced his candidacy.

On Tuesday night, Cruz got the support of Tony Perkins, a prominent evangelical political leader and president of the Family Research Council who has raised eyebrows for his descriptions of God's punishments for homosexuality.

Experts agree that Cruz boasts far more evangelical appeal  he was raised in Christian schools, frequently evokes God in his political speech and leads prayer circles at campaign events. But Trump's courtship of religious leaders shows he's competitive on Cruz's home turf.

Trump currently boasts a wide lead over Cruz, the runner up, in national polls, but the two are virtually tied for the top spot in Iowa. The primary caucus there Monday should influence each state caucus thereafter.

Read the full story from the Houston Chronicle.

Time to duel

Trump said Tuesday evening he would not appear in Thursday's Fox News GOP debate citing his distaste for anchor and moderator Meagan Kelly.

Cruz responded by challenging Trump to a one-on-one debate before the Iowa caucuses Monday. Still no word on Trump's response.





Neocons pick Cruz

For the last weeks, Republican Party officials have been coming to terms with a race they don't like. The moderate GOP candidates have been unable to build serious momentum, and days before the first caucus, hope is fading that they ever will.

So far, GOP pundits and officials have coped largely by lashing out at Cruz or Trump, presumably hoping it would drag them down the polls. But it hasn't worked.

Now, some big Republican names are throwing their weight behind their chosen anti-establishment candidate, and more are likely to follow. Eventually they'll have to.

Cruz won the implicit endorsements Tuesday of Elliot Abrams and Bill Kristol, two George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and leading voices in the push for war in Iraq.

Abrams, a Reagan administration official and national security adviser for Bush 43, told BuzzFeed he "would not hesitate to back Cruz as the nominee." Kristol, a prominent pundit and founder of The Weekly Standard, told BuzzFeed he "would be pretty happy with" a Cruz administration foreign policy.

Granted, big GOP figures don't have many choices in this race. But the neocon backers of Cruz come as a slight surprise. Cruz has been hostile towards Bush 43-era Republicans, one time referencing "these crazy neo-con invade-every-country-on-Earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East" folks.

It probably has something to do with Cruz's disappointment over not landing a position in the Bush administration after working on the campaign. It's also worth noting that Cruz has been hostile to almost every branch of non-tea party Republicans.

As the first caucus nears, the GOP front runners are waging a war of endorsements. Abrams and Kristol are some of the biggest party names in Cruz's corner yet. More prominent figures are likely to follow their lead in coming days as the choice between Trump and Cruz becomes imminent.


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AUSTIN -- A U.S. Supreme Court decision extending parole eligibility to convicts serving mandatory life sentences for capital murder committed as juveniles will not impact the 18 Texas prisoners who fit that profile, officials said Tuesday.

On Monday, the high court in a 6-3 decision made retroactive its 2012 decision in an Alabama case that held minors are constitutionally different in culpability and must have the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect "irreparable corruption."

That will require courts in many states to look at past sentences and review whether those convicts should be given a chance for release.

Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the 18 men serving life without parole for crimes they committed when they were under age 18 will not be affected because of a ruling two years ago by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest court for criminal matters.

"In 2014, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals . . . held that Miller v. Alabama (the earlier Supreme Court case) applied retroactively to juveniles convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole," Clark said.

He said that Texas court decision allowed affected prisoners to ask for a new sentencing hearing.

Nationally, officials estimate that more than 1,100 men and women serving life sentences for murder will be affected -- mostly in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Michigan, according to court filings.

Shannon Edmonds, with the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, a prosecutors' group, the fate of the 18 Texas convicts is already under review.

The high court's Monday ruling came in the case of Henry Montgomery, who has spent more than 50 years in Louisiana State Penitentiary for a murder he was convicted of committing when he was 17.
The summers final Live on the Waterfront concert was held Wednesday evening at Prince Arthurs Landing. The popular series in Thunder Bay has completed nine weekly shows that began on July 13. Wednesdays concert was unique as it was held one hour later in the evening to mesh with the 10 p.
When I wrote about public spaces for City Journal 24 years ago, I called them both the glory and shame of New York. The glory because of the liveliness, then and now, of our sidewalks and plazas; and the shame because those spaces had become places of danger, filled with thieves markets, menacing madmen, and mounds of garbagea key reason that, in 1991, pessimism about the city had been rising for six years, and half of all New Yorkers wanted to leave. In the later years of Ed Kochs mayoralty and in the one-term tenure of David Dinkins, gunshots and the sound of whirring helicopters in search of the shooters were familiar. Abandoned cars, ripe for stripping, abounded, and the city was rife with the odor of urine and marijuana. Perhaps worst of all was the aggressive panhandling by not always homeless but usually mentally ill mendicants, who created an aura of menace.

But 20 years of mayoral leadership under Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg brought a renewed energy and optimism to the city. The historic decline in crime began in the mid-1990s, when William J. Bratton, aided by George Kelling, cofounder of Broken Windows policing, first served as police commissioner under the newly elected Giuliani. After the proactive policing instituted by Giuliani and Bratton cleared the citys public spaces, Giulianis successor, Bloomberg, aided by his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, expanded them, building the Hudson River Park, the High Line, and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Bloomberg also reinvigorated old spaces like Madison Square Park and Union Square. Over the past two decades, New Yorks public spaces have reclaimed their former glory. Todays residents, as well as tourists and business travelers, enjoy the citys great advantagethe 24-hour pleasures of its public spaceswithout worrying about safety. The pervasive sense of threat and the fear at the sound of trailing footsteps that once accompanied an evening stroll have largely receded into memory.

Success has bred its own problems, however. With the citys rising population, subway crowding and car traffic are worse than ever. The sidewalks in Times Square overflow with tourists, who seem to find costumed characters like Elmo and Spiderman charming, even if some are unnerved by the topless women panhandlers known as the desnudas. New Yorkers are willing to overlook disturbances unimaginable in much of America. Earlier this year, my son Harry, a columnist for the Daily News, posted a picture of a packed outdoor cafe on Broadway and 21st Street. Yellow police tape extended from the edge of the cafe; directly around the corner from the diners stood a gaggle of cops. Sunday brunchers, next to the murder scene, he labeled the image.

But New Yorkers tolerance for the intrusion of unpleasant realities into everyday life only goes so far: some old concerns are starting to return. Though Gotham has seen record job growth in 2014 and 2015 and the city is approaching an unprecedented 4.2 million people employed, New Yorkers seem to fear that the city is going in the wrong direction. Asked if the quality of life has gotten better or worse in recent years, 53 percent say worse and only 14 percent say better. Several factors play into these perceptions, such as an increase in public smoking of pot and screaming tabloid headlines. New Yorkers sense something changing, and not for the better.

Much of this new unease seems to involve the rise in homelessness and increasing displays of disorder that take many new Gothamites by surprise while giving long-timers a chill of recognition. The citys recorded homeless population grew by 10 percent in 2014. Sixty percent of New Yorkers told Quinnipiac in October 2015 that they see more homeless people on the streets, in parks and on the subway now than they did a few years ago. Just 11 percent say that they see fewer. Yet for almost two years, Mayor Bill de Blasio denied that increase, pointing to a once-a-year street census that took place during an exceptionally cold snap, when fewer homeless would be outside.

In a May 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, de Blasio, his approval numbers dropping, came off as a mayor in denial. A lot of people outside New York City understand what happened in the first year of my New York City mayoralty better than people within Gotham, he said. That analysis didnt go over well, so de Blasio, backtracking, took to blaming the press and pollsters for his lagging support among New Yorkers. I dont say, Oh, why doesnt the public see through it?  he told the Daily News in September. Im actually sympatheticthat if you hear the same [antide Blasio] message over and over again, it affects your judgment.

De Blasio has tried to deflect criticism of his homeless policy by noting that the city produced 3,000 units of affordablei.e., subsidizedhousing last year, more than was brought on line from 2007 to 2013 under Bloomberg. He has promised many more units over the next 15 years. But these steps have done little to curb anxieties about homelessness.

De Blasios promises of gentler policing compound these worries. Overall, crime in the city continues to be contained, for which the mayor and his extraordinary police commissioner, William Bratton, back for his second tour of duty, deserve credit. But at the same time, de Blasio talks about a more discretionary treatment of transient people, an approach that, in practice, often puts police at a disadvantage in restoring order. The mentally ill homeless, in Americas only big city with a constitutional right to shelter, often dont want help. If police need to wait for them to break the law to take action, they wont get many of them off the streets.

Bloomberg, who dispensed vast sums to the citys charities and philanthropies, got a passor, at worst, sotto voce criticismson homeless issues, even as the shelters swelled with homeless families and the mentally ill made up a larger percentage of the citys jails. But under Bloomberg and Kelly, the homeless mentally ill were regularly rousted from their sidewalk haunts and not permitted to colonize public space. When de Blasio named homeless activist Steven Banks head of New Yorks Human Resources Administration, it meant that rousting was out. Instead, the city seems to move only when it becomes politically costly not to do soas when, for example, headlines about sizable homeless encampments force the de Blasio administration to start breaking them up, much to the dismay of the New York Civil Liberties Union and other progressive advocacy groups. But until things reach that point, the city does little to manage the problem, even as everyday New Yorkers grow uncomfortable with the presence of homeless on park benches, subways, and sidewalks.

De Blasio, guided by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and Gary Belkin of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, has eagerly funded supportive housing for the homeless; he has also talked of adding preventive mental health services. But he and McCray have refused to deal with the problem of the dangerously mentally ill who roam the citys streets. For reasons best known to the mayor, he has even refused to make full use of Kendras Law, which allows judges to require that mentally ill patients receive closely monitored treatment as a condition of remaining in the community. Until the mayor is willing to reduce the population of street homeless, New Yorkers will continue to feel anxious about their citys future and even newly wary of its public spacesthe most visible triumph of New Yorks historic revival over the last two decades.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Donald Trumps dominance in Republican presidential polls has prompted voluminous commentary on both left and right, most of it ominous, about the future of the GOP. No less than Glenn Beck has said that nominating Trump would trigger the end of the Republican Party, while Redstate.com editor Erik Erickson finds the party infested with charlatans, conmen, louts, and Donald Trump, a situation he compares with the dissolution of the Whig Party after the election of 1854. On the left, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson declares this the year that The Republican Party as we knew it was destroyed by Donald Trump, who, in Robinsons view, has exposed the chasm between the partys establishment and its voting base.

Yet even as we ponder the Trump phenomenon, another narrative has defined the Republican party over the last six yearsthe stunning success of state GOP organizations around the country. In fact, were it not for Trumps sturdy appeal to a slice of the GOP primary electorate, the real story of 2016 would be the decline of a Democratic Party increasingly dominated by public-sector unions, no-growth environmentalists, and redistributionists. Since 2009, these Democrats have been overwhelmed by an electoral tsunami at the state level, where the party has lost more than 900 state legislative seats to Republicans, who now boast 31 governors and control of 30 state legislatures. Republicans have achieved these gains largely through candidates and agendas that, while clearly a reaction against President Obamas progressive policies and extralegal efforts to circumvent the Constitution, reflect a more broad-based agenda than the Trump to-do list. Republican state victories, including in some of Americas bluest states, are the result of a coalition unlike any that Trump is likely to assemble, one that includes a significant portion of crucial independent voters repelled by the message of the modern Democratic Party. Though the turmoil caused by Trumps antiestablishment candidacy makes Republican prospects in November uncertain, the party may be in a better position to survive The Donald than some think.

Republican state gains began almost immediately after Obama assumed office, with 2009 gubernatorial victories in two Democratic-leaning statesNew Jersey and Virginia. Even at this early stage, it was clear that voters were reacting against Democratic governors and legislatures who had interpreted Obamas victory as a signal that big government was back. In 2009 alone, states raised taxes by $29 billion collectively, the largest tax increase among states in history. The next year, Republicans running on tax cuts, regulatory reform, and economic competitiveness gained 680 seats in state legislative elections, control of 26 state legislatures, and another seven net governorships. It seemed unlikely that the GOP could improve much on this performance, but in 2014, the GOP won governors races in three of Americas most Democratic statesIllinois, Maryland, and Massachusettswhile losing only one incumbent governor, in Pennsylvania, despite intense Democratic efforts to defeat several high-profile GOP governors. In 2008, according to Gallup, 35 states leaned Democratic; today, by contrast, Gallup rates only 17 states as solidly Democratic.

Many of these GOP victories, especially in blue and so-called purple states, demonstrated a remarkably successful appeal to independentswho make up nearly four-in-ten voters, according to Gallupand to blue-collar voters, despite the frequent lament that GOP elites are out of touch with working people. For instance, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who appeared to attack Trump when delivering the Republican reply to President Obamas State of the Union, garnered 64 percent of the independent mens vote and 44 percent of the womens vote when she was reelected in 2014. She also took home 55 percent of votes from those without college degrees. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a target of Democratic unions thanks to his successful efforts to limit collective bargaining for government workers, nonetheless won the blue-collar vote and captured 59 percent of independent men and 49 percent of independent women in a state now almost evenly divided between the parties. In Michigan, a state that still leans Democratic, Republican governor Rick Snyder (now coming under fire for the Flint water scandal) won reelection with the support of 63 percent of independent men and 58 percent of independent women.

Overwhelming support from independents also powered Republican victories in solidly Democratic states. In the second-most Democratic state in the nation, Maryland anti-tax advocate Larry Hogan won a close race with a tax-cutting message that gave him a 27-point advantage with independent voters. Bruce Rauner won in heavily Democratic Illinois with support from 68 percent of independent men and 59 percent of women. Other GOP candidates, including New Jerseys Chris Christie, Ohios John Kasich, and Georgias Nathan Deal won with a majority of both independent and blue-collar votes.

In the anti-establishment fervor now gripping parts of the Republican Party, candidates who so successfully attract independent votes might seem like compromisers willing to sacrifice basic party principles. Yet its clear from the campaign platforms of defeated Democratic gubernatorial candidates that GOP victories of the last five years prevented billions of dollars in local tax increases, avoided a vast expansion of state Medicaid programs under Obamacare, and installed governors willing to challenge the authority of federal agencies like the EPA to dictate policies to the states.

National elections, of course, involve different priorities than state-wide races. Much of the support Trump is garnering seems to be for his tough stance on international trade and tariffs (especially with nations like China), for his hyper-restrictive immigration agenda, and for a foreign policy that would include seizing assets like oil fields around the world in a display of U.S. power. Trump appears to be gaining with Republican voters frustrated by the partys inability to fashion a stronger response in Washington to President Obama, even though Republicans now control both houses of Congress.

But anger alone isnt a message that resonates with the broader electorate. In nationwide surveys of all voters, Trump struggles for support, especially among independentsa weakness that, if it persists in a general election, would seriously hurt his chances of victory. In a late December poll, Trump attracted just 37 percent of independent votes in a race against Hillary Clinton and 35 percent against Bernie Sanders. By contrast, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruzthe only other GOP candidates measured against Clinton and Sanders in the pollbested their Democratic rivals among independents and consequently ran more competitive races overall. Among all voters, Trump earned a favorable rating of just 33 percent and a stunning 59 percent unfavorable rankingthe highest of any candidate from either party. Perhaps most tellingly, only 5 percent of voters had no opinion on Trump, while about one-third on average said they didnt know enough about the other GOP candidates to form an opinion.

If Trump becomes the nominee, then, his legacy may be to hand the presidential election to Democrats in a year in which discontent with Washington and the weakness of the Democratic field should have produced a monumental GOP victory. But even if that happens, Republicans will still control dozens of state houses and governorships, and theres little evidence that Democratic organizations are poised to change their thinking. In a 2015 analysis of the partys state and local debacle of the last six years, the Democratic National Committee attributed its local woes to dark forces, like state laws that the party claims make it difficult for Democratic voters to turn out. Party leaders also argue unconvincingly that most Americans share Democrats values but that election defeats reflect a failure to communicate with voters. The analysis said virtually nothing about fiscal policy or economic competitiveness.

In an age when media commentary focuses so pervasively on national politics, its tempting to think that parties are exclusively fashioned and refashioned from the top down by federal elections. But the most consequential response by Republicans to Obamas agenda has occurred at the state level, where local victories have done the most to thwart the march of big government. That dynamic seems likely to stay in place, Trump turmoil notwithstanding.

Photo by Aaron Bernstein/Getty Images
Women in Online Work  program pentru femeile care isi doresc sa munceasca in companii internationale, de la biroul de acasa
This week, nonprofit Kaiser Health News (KHN) takes another step toward its goal of becoming, as California bureau chief Julie Marquis put it, a major source, if not the major source, of health policy news in California. KHN will begin producing California Healthline, a 16-year-old digest of healthcare news, policy, and opinion supplied free to the states policy makers and healthcare professionals by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF).

The takeover, part of a KHN-CHCF partnership announced in October, offers a chance for Healthline to expand its readership of about 30,000 and for Kaiser to push its brand of health journalism deeper into its home state. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the Menlo Park-based Kaiser Family Foundation.) With a two-year, $1.2 million grant from CHCF, KHN has also hired eight new newsroom stafferssome from Californias leading publicationsto join its existing team of five.* Marquis, who came to Kaiser two years ago from the Los Angeles Times, told me KHN aims to expand its reach in California in collaboration with other journalism organizations.

Collaboration is indeed the core of what Kaiser Health News is all about, having developed a long list of national partners since it launched in 2009. At that time, Kaiser had its pick of displaced and about-to-be displaced health reporters, and built the news service into a go-to source for health policy news just as healthcare was rising to the top of the national agenda. Its timing couldnt have been better. National outlets that have run KHN content or partnered to produce stories now include Time.com, The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times, Money.com, CNN Money, The Atlantic, Newsweek.com, Vox, Politico Pro, and Politico Magazine. Many regional publications, like the Seattle Times, also pick up KHN stories. The reach of KHNs existing partnerships figured into CHCFs decision to give Kaiser this sizable grant, according to Sally Mudd, communications director for CHCF. We think [partnerships] will work to strengthen health journalism.

To that end, Marquis says one of her tasks is to seek out news partnerships in the state, and she has a list of 200 media outlets, large and small, broadcast and print, that shes wooing. The mission, Marquis told me, is to find the best stories and do them with whatever partner suits the story. Partnerships could take many forms, she said, including offering fully developed stories to news outlets and helping them enhance the pieces with data, graphics, and perspective, or posting co-bylined pieces on the KHN website and offering them to state and national outlets. We are open to almost everything, Marquis said, adding that one specific goal is to deepen our relationship with lots of ethnic papers in California, noting they have deep relationships with their readers. Another goal is to find a way to partner with the LA Times, she told me, since to date we have not been successful working directly with them.

KHN has been quite successful, however, drawing Times talent to its own newsroom. Along with Marquis and former LA Times health writer Anna Gorman, two of KHNs new hiresChad Terhune and Russ Mitchellare also from the paper. Terhune, who has done some notable health business reporting over the years, told me it was a tough decision to leave the paper even to join what he called an all-star team. But KHN wanted big, ambitious stories and thats what I like to do, he said. They want investigative projects. Thats my passion. What I wanted to pursue, they wanted more of it. Bernard Wolfson, the business editor of the Orange County Register, also joined the expanded team as a senior editor. Wolfson, who covered health for the Register, said it was time to make a change given the instability in the newspaper business.

I asked Marquis and Wolfson about specific topics they will be coveringpointing particularly to Covered California, the states health insurance exchange that has too often escaped critical examination from local media. Marquis acknowledged that KHN has parachuted in and out of that story and said that the additional staff will make it easier to follow the exchange and other state regulatory agencies. Wolfson says the exchange is now part of the state landscape and something KHN will cover, if not more than other state agenciesalthough he said hed like to look into Covered Californias financial viability. Wolfson also hopes to cover the consolidation among health insurers, which he called dueling consolidators vying for the upper economic hand. Other issues the team has in its sights: aging and long-term care, building on the work that Anna Gorman has done.

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As a regular KHN reader, Im hopeful that a beefed-up reporting team will deliver fewer generic stories (like, for example, this) and more of the ambitious material that the site has occasionally produced or co-producedlike Jordan Raus pieces keeping tabs on Medicares hospital readmission penalties, which have helped reporters across the country check up on their local hospitals. Other standouts include Phil Galewitzs 2011 piece, a collaboration with The Washington Post, that disclosed emergency rooms were actually advertising for patients even as Medicaid sought to reduce unnecessary ER use, and Sarah Varneys 2014 work (in collaboration with Politico Magazine and with reporting help from Mississippi Public Broadcasting) delving into the Afforable Care Acts disastrous first year in Mississippi.

If an expanded Kaiser Health News proves successful in California, will KHN look to replicate the effort in other states? David Rousseau, a Kaiser vice president who oversees health policy media programs, told me Kaiser has not sought foundation partnerships in other states yet, noting that it takes time to build a level of comfort with potential partners who, like CHCF, must also value editorially independent journalism. Rousseau did say he was interested in Texas, Florida, and Georgia as potential growth areas. Could we be seeing the outlines of an emerging health news landscape where just a few organizationslike KHN and ProPublicasupply much of the in-depth reporting? What would that mean for local news outlets and for news consumers? For now, its good to see resources being put toward ambitious health reporting for Californians.



* This sentence has been revised to clarify that not all of the new newsroom staffers are reporters.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Trudy Lieberman is a longtime contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. She is the lead writer for CJR's Covering the Health Care Fight. She also blogs for Health News Review and the Center for Health Journalism. Follow her on Twitter @Trudy_Lieberman.
Japan has improved its nuclear safety regulation since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but it still needs to strengthen inspections and staff competency, a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday.

It was the first IAEA review for Japans Nuclear Regulation Authority since it was established in 2012. Japan adopted stricter safety requirements for plant operators, but a law regulating on-site inspections remained mostly unchanged.

The 17-member team, which concluded a 12-day inspection that included the wrecked Fukushima plant, said the Nuclear Regulation Authority demonstrated independence and transparency  crucial elements lacking before the disaster, when an earlier agency was in charge.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, triggering triple meltdowns. Government, parliamentary and private investigations have blamed complacency about safety, inadequate crisis management skills, a failure to keep up with international safety standards, and collusion between regulators and the nuclear industry.

The IAEA inspection team urged the Nuclear Regulation Authority to enhance inspection competence and the government to amend its nuclear safety law to make on-site safety checks more effective and flexible.

Mission leader Philippe Jamet, a French regulatory commissioner, said Japans inflexible inspection rules do not allow inspectors to move freely at nuclear facilities or respond quickly when there is a problem.

What we found is that the system that is regulating, that is defining the framework of inspection is very complex and very rigid, Jamet said at a news conference.

Japan has a comprehensive framework but it doesnt give enough freedom for the inspectors to react immediately and to provide results, he said. At any time and for any plant, inspectors should be allowed to go where they want.

A final report by the team is expected in about three months.

Japans top nuclear commissioner, Shunichi Tanaka, acknowledged the shortcomings and said, We have to focus on tackling the challenges of inspection system and human resources.

Masakazu Shima, a Japanese regulator who assisted the inspection team, said the inspection issue was also raised by an earlier IAEA mission in 2007 but Japan never took action.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A state analysis of a highway overpass collapse that killed a construction worker in southwestern Ohio has yet to be completed a year later and lawsuits over the accident continue as the mans family struggles with his loss.

The Jan. 19, 2015, collapse during demolition to remove an Interstate 75 ramp bridge just north of downtown Cincinnati killed Brandon Carl, of Augusta, Kentucky. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration determined a few months later that Carl died in a preventable workplace accident and fined Kokosing Construction Co. Inc. $14,000, citing it for two serious safety violations.

The Columbus-based contractor also completed its internal review last year, with CEO Brian Burgett acknowledging the company made an engineering mistake that may have contributed to the collapse and Carls subsequent death.

But the Ohio Department of Transportation, which contracted with Kokosing for the demolition, hasnt released any details of its ongoing analysis.

A department spokesman says the report isnt focused solely on the collapse, but is looking at overall ODOT construction processes. ODOT spokesman Brian Cunningham said the report may or may not result in any changes.

I cant provide any specifics because we havent seen the report, said Cunningham. He said there is no timetable for the report to be finished.

He said Kokosing continues as a major contractor for the state on that project and others around Ohio.

OSHA said the company corrected the violations and has been maintaining an agreement to use a third-party engineering firm to conduct bridge demolition engineering surveys. Kokosing spokesman John Householder said that practice is now standard procedure on all company demolition projects.

He said Kokosing marked Tuesdays anniversary of Carls death with a company-wide moment of silence.

Brandon and his family will always be in our thoughts and prayers, Householder said.

Carls mother, Sharon Frye, also of Augusta, Kentucky, said the anniversary of her sons death was very difficult for his family.

But I cry about every day said Frye, her voice breaking.

While Frye believes ODOT and Kokosing were negligent, she was satisfied with OSHAs investigation and said Kokosing at least acknowledged it made a mistake.

Why the states report isnt done is beyond me, Frye said. Even if they want to look at their overall construction processes, they should have released something by now. We deserve answers.

ODOT is named in one of two lawsuits charging negligence that was filed on behalf of Carls estate. Cunningham said the state doesnt comment on pending lawsuits. Kokosing hasnt been sued.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Typical legal malpractice policies do not provide coverage for the disgorgement of attorneys fees that were received by the insured attorney during the representation that gives rise to the malpractice claim. However, recently the United States District Court in Louisiana found otherwise in Edwards v. Continental Cas. Co., 2015 WL 5009015 (W.D. La. filed Aug. 19, 2015).

In Edwards, the legal malpractice insurer, Continental Casualty Co. (Continental) declined to provide Thomas Edwards with a defense and coverage under his law firms professional services liability policy. Under the facts of the case, Edwards represented Andrew Schmidt (Schmidt) in a personal injury case against Cal Dive International, Inc. (Cal Dive). Schmidt was a commercial diver for Cal Dive who sued to recover for disabling injuries he sustained during a dive performed in the course and scope of his employment. One week before trial the parties settled the case. The settlement was to be funded through a lump sum payment to Schmidt with the balance to be used to purchase three annuity contracts administered by an insurance company. One of the annuities flowed to Schmidt, one of the annuities flowed to Edwards, and the third annuity flowed to Schmidts other counsel in the case. One year following the settlement, Cal Dive and its insurance company filed a lawsuit against Edwards alleging that it had been fraudulently induced into settling the case as a result of Schmidts alleged exaggeration and/or fabrication of the extent of his injuries during the lawsuit. Cal Dive sought to vacate the settlement agreement in its entirety and sought an order that all undisbursed funds on the three annuity contracts be refunded.

Edwards submitted the lawsuit filed by Cal Dive and its insurer to Edwards malpractice carrier. Continental, the legal malpractice carrier, declined coverage asserting (1) that Cal Dive did not allege an act or omission in the performance of legal services; and (2) the damages sought by Cal Dive were legal fees excluded by the policy.

The Continental policy expressly stated that damages did not include legal fees, costs and expenses paid or incurred or charged by any insured irrespective of whether claimed as restitution of specific funds, forfeiture, financial loss, set-off or otherwise. The policy defined legal services to mean services performed by an insured as a lawyer. Relying upon the terms of the policy, Continental argued that the Cal Dive lawsuit did not meet either of the two requirements necessary to trigger coverage: (1) that the claim in the underlying action arose by reason of an act or omission in performance of legal services; and (2) the recovery sought in the underlying action must fall within the definition of damages. Specifically, Continental contended that Cal Dive and its insurers sought only the return of legal fees paid to Edwards as part of the settlement which were excluded under the policys definition of damages. Additionally, Continental contended that Edwards did not commit an act or omission in the performance of legal services because the Cal Dive lawsuit only sought restitution of the legal fees paid to Edwards from the settlement which was because of the clients conduct, not Edwards conduct.

The Court rejected Continentals arguments. The Court found that Continental advocated an oversimplification of the issue. The case did not present as a run-of-the-mill attorney fee dispute. Clearly, Edwards was acting as a lawyer who performed legal services for Schmidt by representing him and negotiating the settlement. Unlike typical fee disputes that arise between clients and attorneys upon the resolution of a matter, the Cal Dive lawsuit involved an attempt to unwind and vacate an entire settlement agreement and all of the proceeds paid that Edwards had negotiated on behalf of Schmidt which were based upon the allegations of wrongdoing by Schmidt. But for Edwards attorney-client relationship with Schmidt, the Court found that the claims against Edwards would not have occurred.

Turning to the legal fees exclusion and the definition of damages under the policy, the Court found that the claim against Edwards was integral to and could not be divorced from the legal services he performed for Schmidt. Cal Dive and its insurer were not simply seeking a return of legal fees paid, they were seeking to unwind the settlement and to recoup the entirety of the proceeds paid in settlement against Edwards client as well as Edwards himself. Continental did not cite any case where the legal fee exclusion it was advocating had been applied under similar facts.

In reaching its conclusion that coverage existed, the Court in Edwards cited with approval the District Court of Puerto Ricos determining in Citrus World, Inc. v. Ferraiuoli, Torres, Marchand & Rovira, P.S.C., 2014 WL 1007744, 16 (D. Puerto Rico, March 14, 2014). In Citrus World, a former client sued the insured lawyer for professional negligence. The malpractice insurer in Citrus World denied coverage based on the policys damages exclusion for the return of legal fees. However, the Court rejected the insurers argument finding that the return of or reimbursement for legal fees did not preclude coverage for either the fees paid by the lawyers former client to other counsel to remedy the lawyers alleged negligence or the fees paid by the former client to the lawyer. The Court in Citrus World reasoned that fees paid in the underlying action can take on a different character . . . there are compensable damages flowing [from] the act that forms the predicate for the claim. The Court in Citrus World reasoned that because attorneys fees may be the only damages at issue on a claim against a lawyer, it would make little sense to read out coverage of such claims from the professional liability policy. The Court in Citrus World concluded that the critical issue as to whether or not damages should be excluded as fee disputes required a determination of whether the claim was a consequence of a business practice by the lawyer, in which the claim could be excluded, or a consequence of the actual practice of law, in which the claim would be covered notwithstanding the exclusion.
Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastlines changing face.

Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Nino, a weather pattern thats bringing California its wettest winter in years  and all in the name of science.

The idea is that crowd-sourced, geotagged images of storm surges and flooded beaches will give scientists a brief window into what the future holds as sea levels rise from global warming, a sort of a crystal ball for climate change.

Images from the latest drones, which can produce high-resolution 3D maps, will be particularly useful and will help scientists determine if predictive models about coastal flooding are accurate, said Matt Merrifield, the organizations chief technology officer.

We use these projected models and they dont quite look right, but were lacking any empirical evidence, he said. This is essentially a way of ground truthing those models.

Experts on climate change agreed that El Nino-fueled storms offer a sneak peak of the future and said the project was a novel way to raise public awareness. Because of its crowd-sourced nature, however, they cautioned the experiment might not yield all the results organizers hoped for, although any additional information is useful.

Its not the answer, but its a part of the answer, said Lesley Ewing, senior coastal engineer with the California Coastal Commission. Its a piece of the puzzle.

In California, nearly a half-million people, $100 billion in property and critical infrastructure such as schools, power plants and highways will be at risk of inundation during a major storm if sea level rises another 4.6 feet  a figure that could become a reality by 2100, according to a 2009 Pacific Institute study commissioned by three state agencies.

Beaches that Californians take for granted will become much smaller or disappear altogether and El Nino-fueled storms will have a similar effect, if only temporarily, said William Patzert, a climatologist for NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

When you get big winter storm surge like they want to document, you tend to lose a lot of beach, he said. In a way, its like doing a documentary on the future. Itll show you what your beaches will look like in 100 years.

What the mapping wont be able to predict is exactly which beaches will disappear and which bluffs will crumble  all things that will affect how flooding impacts coastal populations, said Ewing, the California Coastal Commission engineer.

Were not going to capture that change, she said. Were going to capture where the water could go to with this current landscape and thats still a very important thing to understand because it gets at those hot spots.

So far, project organizers arent giving assignments to participants, although they may send out specific requests as the winter unfolds, said Merrifield.

If users wind up mapping real-time flooding events along 10 or 15 percent of Californias 840-mile-long coastline the project will be a success, he said. A realistic goal is a curated selection of 3D maps showing flooding up and down the coast at different dates and times.

The Nature Conservancy has partnered with a San Francisco-area startup called DroneDeploy that will provide a free app to drone owners for consistency. The app will provide automated flight patterns at the touch of a screen while cloud-based technology will make managing so much data feasible, said Ian Smith, a business developer for the company.

Trent Lukaczyk heard about the experiment from a posting in a Facebook group dedicated to drone enthusiasts. For the aerospace engineer, who has already used drones to map coral reefs in American Samoa, the volunteer work was appealing.

Its a really exciting application. Its not just something to take a selfie with, he said, before heading out to collect images of beach erosion after a storm in Pacifica, California.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Jesse Cook - 'One World' CD is A Surprise and Treasure to Behold

(Photo : (Photo by Pedro Gonzalez Castillo/LatinContent/Getty Images))

It's not often that instrumental guitarists can hold my attention, but Jesse Cook is no ordinary guitarist and his newest CD, One World, is no ordinary CD. His music has been described as nuevo flamenco, but listening to the CD, one finds he is not apt to stay in that box for more than a couple measures, much less an entire song. Nevertheless, Cook's flamenco roots are still very much visible. It seems it is his home, and the launching pad with which he begins each journey (song) anew.

Cook speaks through his guitar at once with passion and ease. His licks can be both declarations of war, then come back in the next track and be very tender and fragile. Also, Cook is not afraid to cross genres and is quite adept at landing in that one genre or another and adapt to it with ease. He is a musical sleuth, in the vein of Herbie Hancock, forever searching and prodding the sound that he makes.

The first song, "Shake," launches with a percussive beginning that conjures Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecilia". It remains the backbeat of the guitar as Cook's guitar invades and we are immersed in the passion of the moment. Cook and his band lay out the scene, the moment. It is your job to provide the characters.

"Taxi Brazil" follows. Light and airy, with a distinctly samba feel to it, Cook allows for peeks at his flamenco guitar styling. Don't blink, though, because he is off and running again...

To "Once", where he slows down and waits. For what? A lover maybe? Each note he plucks is meaningful and deliberate. No scampering about.

But then we move on to India and "Bombay Slam". This song captures the magic of Bollywood and, as you listen, an entire Bollywood dance sequence crafts itself in your imagination.

"To Your Shore" begins with the faint echos of Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," and it lingers in the background trying to force its way back in. It provides the atmosphere to a hauntingly beautiful composition.

"Three Days" is bare bones and reflective to begin with. The rest of the band comes in a little bit later, but Cook's guitar never shakes its melancholy. A beautiful piece of art set to sound.

"Tommy and Me " is a sly sort of piece. From its intro, Cook's guitar moves with purpose and poise. It is on a mission and doesn't have time for frivolities. "Tommy and Me" is a great companion piece to "Bombay Slam".

"When Night Falls" is another reflective track. It is the end of the day and Cook is taking stock with the aid of his guitar. An elegant piece of beauty.

"Steampunk Ricksaw" had high expectations because of its title. If you're going to have a such a creative title, you'd better come prepared to back it up and the whole band aids Jesse Cook in painting a vivid soundscape. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but no less powerful.

"Beneath Your Skin" and "Breath" are somber, fragile works of art, delicate yet sturdy. That also could serve as an apt description of Jesse Cook's playing.

One World takes you on a magical journey that both thrills, makes you want to get up and dance, and share it with someone you love dearly. It isn't so much jazz as an experience, a beautiful moment in time, made all the better by the distinctive soundscapes that Jesse Cook and his band paint.

Highly recommended.

.

 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

TagsJesse Cook, One World CD, REVIEW, Flamenco Guitar, Jazz, New Album
American Masters Presents New Documentary - 'B.B. King: The Life of Riley' February 12th

Thirteen Films, producers of the American Masters series, presents a new documentary coming February 12 at 9 PM (check your local listings) to PBS to celebrate black history month - B.B. King: The Life of Riley. The documentary will feature a treasure trove of whose who in the music, brought together to pay tribute to the iconic King. Bono, Eric Clapton, Aaron Neville,John Mayer, Bonnie and Ringo share their own perspective on King and what he meant to them and their careers.

B. B. King was born Riley B. King September 16, 1925 on a plantation in Itta Benna Mississippi. From those very humble beginnings, King would rise and become probably the most respected Blues musician ever. It is all chronicled in B. B. King: The Life of Riley. Directed by Jon Brewer, the great Morgan Freeman narrates. Made with the full co-operation of the B.B. King Museum, director Brewer spent two years working on the film and finished just before King's death in 2015. The life and challenges face by the great slate of interviewees.

A treasure for all fans will be the rare archival footage interspersed throughout the film, along with B.B. King's reminiscences about his life and journey, the ugliness of the racism he experienced. From the press notes on the PBS website, executive producer, Michael Kantor had this to say about King, "B.B. King became America's most recognizable and influential blues musician. The thrill isn't really gone yet - I think anyone who sees this film will be thrilled and inspired by this legendary artist."

Be sure to check out this exciting documentary February 12 at 9PM (check your local listings) on PBS of this great American legend and national treasure. February is Black History Month and PBS is honoring the great Americans of color. B. B. King did what he loved and overcame the greatest of poverty to become of the most cherished and recognized American musicians. B.B. proved it wasn't your color that made you. It was what you had inside.

 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

TagsBB King, Blues, PBS Documentary, American Masters, Black History Month, Life of Reilly
New Banksy Artwork Depicting Crying 'Les Miserable' Poster Child Emerges in Paris

People photograph a Banksy artwork opposite the French embassy on January 25, 2016 in London, England. The graffiti, which depicts a young girl from the musical Les Miserables with tears in her eyes as CS gas moves towards her, criticises the use of teargas in the 'Jungle' migrant camp in Calais.

(Photo : Carl Court/Getty Images)

Graffiti artist Banksy has popped up once more, this time across the pond in Paris. His latest artwork is a slam against Parisian authorities using teargas to clear a camp of Syrian refugees. The installation comes as the first interactive piece by the artist and features the iconic Les Miserables poster child with tears streaming from her eyes as teargas billows towards her.

Mr. Banksy has always immersed himself in political commentary with most of his installations featuring statements about the current status of affairs across the globe. Since the influx of refugees from the east, Paris and many other major cities across the world have been inundated with expatriates hoping to escape political turmoil pervading their region.

The mural features a stenciled QR code which links viewers to a seven-minute long video of police raids on the "Jungle" refugee camps in Calais on January 5. In the video, riot police employ teargas, rubber bullets and other nonlethal forms of crowd control to suppress what has been reported as an undoubtedly civil confrontation by the refugees.

Back in Dec. 2015, another Banksy art piece was discovered in a refugee camp, this one depicting Steve Jobs as a refugee himself and calling on the notion that Jobs' father was, in fact, a Syrian migrant who settled in Wisconsin in the 1950s.

Last August, too, the British street artist conceived his largest installation to date entitled Dismaland, a work that touched upon "bemusement" and this disillusioned state of the world in regards to its handling of refugees.

With that work at a close, parts from the large-scale installation have been scrapped and donated to Calais to help build camp shelters for the homeless refugees.

Where there is political strife, so will there be Banksy to comment on the expanding hypocrisy behind the motives of national governments and its treatment of homeless refugees wading in the balance.

 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

TagsRefugee Crisis, Les Miserables, Banksy
AKRON, Ohio -- An Akron couple is accused of making methamphetamine in the basement of their home where a 19-month-old boy also lived.

The boy's mother, Jennifer Scott, 39, and her boyfriend, Octavio Juarez, 45, face first-degree felony charges of making meth and fifth-degree felony child endangering charges.

A third man, Ervin Webb, 56, of Akron is charged with first-degree felony meth possession. All three are scheduled for their first court appearance Wednesday.

Webb brought a UPS package with a half-pound of meth to the couple's home in the 1100 block of Smith Farm Avenue. The delivery was coordinated by Juarez, according to court records.

Akron and Summit County drug detectives arrested Webb about 11:40 a.m. Tuesday at the home. Scott allowed the investigators to search her home, court records say.

Investigators found a meth lab in the basement, court records say. They also found the 19-month-old boy who is now in custody of Summit County Children Services.

Scott was convicted in 2012 of illegally purchasing pseudoephedrine, an ingredient used to make meth.
Ohio Turnpike snowplow in action.JPG

A snowplow on the Ohio Turnpike. Snowplow drivers in Akron are upset with a delay in a new labor contract that also involves police, fire and other service employees (the turnpike would not be affected). City Council has scheduled an emergency meeting Thursday to try and resolve the delay.

(Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission)

AKRON, Ohio -- Snowplow drivers in Akron, upset over a delay in approving a new labor contract with the city, are warning that they might be inclined to call off work in the event of an upcoming snow event.

George Johnson, president of Akron's AFSCME union, said he is trying to keep his union members calm after Akron City Council decided to take time to review a new labor agreement with the city, organized over the past year.

"I am trying to keep my members calm. I don't advocate for anything that would cause harm to the city, but I am hearing that people are mad and I have gotten phone calls to the effect that some workers may not come to work," Johnson said.

Johnson said he is trying to dissuade discord among union members and called for an emergency meeting to reconsider the new labor contract on Thursday. Questions could further delay the agreement, though, and a work slowdown during upcoming snow events could have local drivers slogging it out in the snow.

City Council will meet at 3:30 p.m. Thursday in emergency session to discuss the contract, but discord there could hold up the labor contract further.

Here's what the unions want and what could happen in the coming days.

Unions collectively agreed on a new labor agreement, save the city money

Facing healthcare costs, former mayor Don Plusquellic's administration called the city's unions to the table last year in hopes of renegotiating contracts for pay and healthcare benefits.

That agreement was finalized earlier this month, one of the city's first major accomplishments under new Mayor Dan Horrigan.

The new deal, if approved by City Council, would give a 3-percent raise to all city employees this year, followed by 2.5 percent raises in 2017 and 2018. In exchange, the unions agreed to benefits changes that would save the city $5 million per year on health insurance in the next three years.

As a final step before the labor agreement goes into effect, Akron City Council must review and approve the new agreement.

Concerns arise about administrative, city council raises

Some members of the council's budget and finance committee, which reviews all spending and salary agreements, are worried about contract provisions that give raises to the city's non-union administrators, some of whom have relationships with representatives on council.

In the past, whenever the unions have negotiated a raise in their contract, non-bargaining employees including city administrators and city council members have been included in the deal, Johnson said.

Linda Omobien, who raised concerns at Monday's committee meeting, has suggested striking the administrative raises from the package. That may not be a fix, though, according to Police Union President Frank Williams.

Williams said that if council doesn't pass the agreement in whole, it invalidates the entire agreement, forcing the city and unions to draw up a new agreement.

"I am hoping that's not what council tries to do because this is a great deal for the city and the employees," Williams said.

Councilman Zack Milkovich, also on the budget and finance committee, said he is concerned about a provision that includes city council members in the raise package.

"This is a part time job with full-time benefits," Milkovich said. "I don't want to give myself a raise, I don't know if I'm supportive of giving City Council a raise right now."

Potential snags could sink the labor deal

Johnson said he is furious over the delay and believes the contract has become a political pawn in a struggle among City Council members.

"All four union presidents are highly upset. They are changing horses in the middle of the race," Johnson said. The most recent union contracts have all included non-bargaining employees, including city administrators and council members, Johnson said.

"If they were upset with that, they could have changed the rules a year ago," Johnson said.

But many council members are new this year and a significant minority are coming in already opposed to many of the former mayor's policies.

Further complicating the issue is a councilman who might break a tie, can't vote. Bob Hoch is compromised because of a Ohio Ethics Commission complaint Plusquellic filed last spring.

Political infighting

Hoch has said he thinks the complaint was retribution for Hoch's resistance to a construction plan Plusquellic opposed.

The conflict between the two men became highly public when Hoch was uninvited from Plusquellic's state of the city speech. The mayor's spokeswoman then told a resident that Plusquellic was afraid Hoch would shoot him in front of his mother.

With a pending ethics investigation, which stems from Hoch's vote on the same labor agreement four years ago (Hoch has two sons in the fire department), Hoch said the city's law director advised him not to vote on this year's labor contract.

Without Hoch's vote, a potential 6-6 tie could leave the labor agreement stranded, and the city's police, fire and service employees fuming. On the other hand, if council reaches a majority on the issue it could be resolved quickly.
Rockne's

Rockne's is an Akron institution. The local chain's founder, Chris Hamad, died Tuesday.

(File photo)

AKRON, Ohio -- Chris Hamad, the beloved owner of Akron's Rockne's Pub, died Tuesday at his home in Cuyahoga Falls, the Akron Beacon Journal reports.

Chris Hamad was hired to manage the original Rockne's on Hudson Drive in Cuyahoga Falls and helped open the Merriman Road haunt known to attract prominent local politicians including former Mayor Don Plusquellic, in the early 1980s. He eventually became the sole owner.

A funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. Friday at St. Bernard's in downtown Akron, the newspaper reports. Rockne's will reopen several hours later.

Chick-fil-a makes a quiet entrance into downtown Akron: The Georgia-based chicken sandwich chain quietly opened two locations inside University of Akron buildings this week.

Chick-fil-a joins a Panda Express in replacing a generic concession inside the university's Student Union, The Buchtelite reports. In downtown Akron, chicken cravings can be satiated inside the Polsky Building through the High Street entrance. While aimed at University of Akron students, both locations are open to the public.

The university adds a slight markup to standard Chik-Fil-a prices, the student newspaper reports.

Postman spots fire at New Franklin house, calls for help: Owners of a New Franklin Township house have the U.S. Postal Service to thank for saving at least part of their estate from a house fire, the Beacon Journal reports.

A postal worker spotted flames on the roof when he was delivering mail to the residence in the 7000 block of Kepler Road about 10:45 a.m. Tuesday. The fire caused an estimated $110,000 in damage, the newspaper reports.

Old Cuyahoga Falls Theater renovation moves forward: The city approved sale of the Old Falls Theater to a development group that will use historic tax credits to convert the theater into HopTree, a combination brewery and gastropub, as well as modern retail space, the Falls News Press reports.

The agreement with the developers is contingent upon reopening Main Street to vehicular traffic, the newspaper reports, a plan currently behind studied by Mayor Don Walters' administration.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If you picked out your bank based on the locations of branches, or if you just set up automatic checking account payments for your car insurance or cell phone bill or gym membership, hold on.



We could be gearing up for a new wave of mergers among the nation's 6,200 banks, experts say.



Huntington Bank on Tuesday announced it's buying FirstMerit Bank, a merger that will create about 1,000 branches and $100 billion in assets. That has a huge impact locally, given the large presence both banks have in Northeast Ohio.



Also Tuesday, another bank with local branches sold. Talmer Bank, which has 10 branches in Greater Cleveland and Akron, sold to Chemical Bank of Michigan. Talmer has $6.5 billion in assets, which makes it a little smaller than Dollar Bank locally. The Chemical-Talmer merger will create a bank with $16 billion in assets, which is bigger than Third Federal but smaller than FirstMerit.



Talmer had been here for only a short time, after buying troubled First Place Bank in 2013. So the Talmer name will go away and the Chemical name will move in. Talmer has 10 branches in Solon, and Lorain and Portage counties, as well as 16 branches in Trumbull and Mahoning counties.



Put your seat belt on.



"We're going to see more deals," said banking analyst Fred Cummings of Elizabeth Park Capital Management in Pepper Pike. "This consolidation is happening in fits and starts. We expect to see more of it."



The FirstMerit and Talmer deals will be the seventh and eighth times that local banks have sold and changed names at branches in the last four years.



"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Richard Hunt, president and CEO Consumer Bankers Association in Washington, D.C.

Northeast Ohio banks that have disappeared the last few years:

Lorain National Bank of Lorain, with 20 local branches, was bought by Northwest Bank of Warren, Pa., in 2014.

Valley Savings of Cuyahoga Falls, with two branches, was bought by Westfield of Westfield Center in 2014



ParkView Federal Savings of Solon, with 16 branches, was bought by First National Bank of Pennsylvania bought in 2013.

First Place Bank, which had 11 branches in Greater Cleveland, was bought by Talmer of Michigan in 2013.



Ohio Commerce Bank of Beachwood was bought by People's Bank of Marietta in 2013.



Western Reserve Bank, with branches in Medina and Brecksville, sold to Westfield Bank, in 2012.

Huntington Chairman and CEO Steve Steinour agreed that the Midwest in particular will see more deals. "I do think there will be ongoing consolidation," he said Tuesday, hours after announcing his bank will become one of the 20 largest nationwide later this year.



FirstMerit Chairman and CEO Paul Greig, whose board agreed to sell for $3.4 billion, said now that most of the troubled banks have sold or failed, many future deals will be between two strong banks, as is the case with FirstMerit and Huntington. FirstMerit has the highest financial strength rating -- five stars -- and had posted profits for 17 straight years, even during recessions.



But continuing to post those profits for shareholders is getting more and more difficult.



Banks are being pressured by three big issues right now, Hunt said. First, new banking regulations under Dodd-Frank are onerous and expensive to comply with. Second, the economy is still only lukewarm; banks make money largely by lending, and there's not as much borrowing going on as banks would like. Third, the technology demands on banks are incredible, he said.



Cummings agreed, saying "this is a very challenging environment" for banks to pay for extra compliance while not bringing in a lot of extra revenue.



Richard Hunt, president and CEO of Consumer Bankers Association in Washington, D.C., said all eyes in the banking world will be on Ohio in the next several months. People will be waiting to make sure Ohio's two big deals get approved by regulators.



Besides the Huntington-FirstMerit deal, just three months ago, KeyCorp said it plans to buy First Niagara of New York, a huge deal that will create the nation's 13-largest bank.



"Everyone knows Ohio is a battleground state for the presidential race," Hunt said. "I didn't know it was also a battleground for bank consolidation."



The Key-First Niagara deal will create a bank that's not just too-big-to-fail, but is threatening to move into the Top 10. The Huntington-FirstMerit deal is interesting because there's so much overlap of customers. Nearly 40 percent of FirstMerit branches are within 1 mile of a Huntington branch.



The Huntington-FirstMerit deal "is critical not just to Ohio, but to the entire country," Hunt said.



Analysts are watching for other, out-of-town banks that may be interested in buying into Ohio. First National Bank of Pennsylvania and Northwest Savings, which bought ParkView and Lorain National respectively, could be looking to get bigger in Greater Cleveland, Cummings said.



Another Pennsylvania bank isn't yet in Greater Cleveland, but could make a move. It's S&T Bank, which has a loan office in Akron but no branches locally. Also a potential player: First Commonwealth Bank, which has branches in Chillicothe and Marietta, but none here. Citizens, which bought Charter One more than a decade ago, also could be looking to increase its market share. And Park National Bank of Newark may also be interested buying its way into Northeast Ohio.



Hunt said he expects that, in a few years, we'll have only three types of banks:



1. The tiny banks with less than $1 billion in assets, such as Middlefield and Geauga Savings. For perspective, Westfield Bank of Medina has more than $1 billion.



2. The bigger community banks, with $10 billion to $49 billion in assets. This includes banks like Third Federal Savings, FirstMerit and Ohio Savings' parent, New York Community Bank.



3. Huge banks, with more than $100 billion in assets. These would be your top 15 or 20 banks in the country, such as Chase, Bank of America, PNC, U.S. Bank, Fifth Third and Key.



"I think there's going to be an evolution in this country," Hunt said.

Bank size is generally measured by assets, which are mostly loans and other holdings. But in individual communities, bank size is gauged by deposits and the share of deposits because these often demonstrate how active they are in a community and how much their presence is felt.
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Six months ago Jim Cramer told investors that the railroad stocks were about to go off the rails. Since then, the group has been slammed so hard that Cramer now suspects the torture could finally be coming to an end.

"Some of the railroad stocks are starting to look attractive here, although there is no rush to buy them, and ideally, you should wait for the next marketwide sell-off before you pull the trigger," the "Mad Money" host said.

Railroad companies have been struggling with both secular and cyclical declines in many of their largest cargo loads, such as coal and oil. During the shale boom, oil producers were willing to ship vast amounts of crude by train because there was not enough pipeline capacity.

Needless to say, with the price of oil reaching $30 at the same time that many new pipelines have been built, railroad businesses have been crushed to the point where yields are beginning to look attractive again.

"The more aggressive of you can start at a little more than 3 percent yield  I will bless it as long as you don't buy in one fell swoop and you get a green light from the Fed in the form of a benign statement tomorrow," Cramer said.


Airlines, hotels and cruise operators serving Latin America and the Caribbean are facing growing concern among travelers spooked by the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

The outbreak of the virus, linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, comes as a record percentage of Americans plan a vacation in coming months and a near-record proportion of them look to take advantage of a strong U.S. dollar by going abroad.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned travelers via Twitter to consider postponing travel to areas with ongoing Zika transmission.

Canada and Chile are the only countries in the Americas the virus is not expected to reach, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

United Airlines said it was allowing customers who had reserved tickets for travel to Zika-impacted regions to postpone their trips or obtain refunds with no penalty. And American Airlines said it would give refunds to pregnant women who were planning to travel to parts of Central America.

A spokesman for Delta Air Lines said the carrier was monitoring the situation but not yet offering waivers. JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines were not immediately able to say whether they were offering refunds.

Southwest Airlines said it was sticking to its normal policy, which lets customers who cancel ahead of time reuse the value of their tickets. All of those airlines fly to at least some affected locations.



Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and rival Carnival said they would allow expectant mothers covered by the CDC advisories to reschedule cruises to a later date or switch to an itinerary outside the affected countries.
What do Apple , Boeing, Intel, AMD and Goldman Sachs all have have in common? They all say China and the global economy are weakening and getting worse. From smartphones and semiconductors to financials, companies representing all corners of the stock market say they are worried more and more about macroeconomic issues hitting revenue. "The CEO community that I'm talking to, which is our clientele, which is across all industry groups and all geographies, and most of our clients are global in nature so they've got businesses all over the world. They are clearly feeling some type of slowdown in their business," Gary Cohn, president and COO of Goldman Sachs, told CNBC last Thursday, according to a transcript. And nothing spooks investors more than when the most valuable company in the world confirms the global deterioration. "We're seeing extreme conditions unlike anything we have experienced before, just about everywhere we look," Apple's CEO, Tim Cook , said on the company's earnings conference call Tuesday, according to a FactSet transcript. Later in the call, Apple's CFO, Luca Maestri, said: "The macroeconomic environment is weakening. When you think about all the, particularly all the commodity-driven economies, Brazil and Russia in emerging markets but also Canada, Australia in developed markets, clearly the economy is significantly weaker than a year ago." Moreover Apple's vaunted business in China, which Cook last summer said was immune to the macro weakness, is faltering. The company's sales growth in the country dramatically slowed from 99 percent year over year during the September quarter to 14 percent year over year during the December quarter. And it's likely to decelerate further, according to management. "We began to see some signs of economic softness in Greater China earlier this month, most notably in Hong Kong," Cook said on the earnings call. Recent deterioration in the world's second-largest economy is spreading across the technology industry. Intel and AMD said the macro environment in China is noticeably slowing during their earnings announcements earlier in January. Even aerospace and defense is not immune to a global slowdown. Boeing gave tepid 2016 guidance Wednesday of $93 billion-$95 billion in sales versus the $97.3 billion FactSet Wall Street estimate, earnings per share of $8.15-$8.35 versus $9.41 consensus and commercial plane deliveries of 740-745, down from the 762 in 2015. The airplane manufacturer generates 58 percent of its revenue outside the U.S., according to FactSet. Here are some stocks overly exposed to China and the globe. If Apple and these others are right, investors may want to avoid these stocks. Read More JPMorgan: Market volatility to hit the economy

An Apple iPhone in a shop in Munich, Germany. Michaela Rehle | Reuters
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Bank of America is looking be the next U.S. consumer bank to take the plastic card out of the ATM transaction.

The company is developing automated teller machines that customers will be able to withdraw cash from using their smartphones instead of plastic cards, according to a person familiar with the bank's plans. "We're going to spend a lot of money on the ATM network this year," the person said. BofA isn't focusing on cardless transactions alone in its 2016 ATM upgrade. It includes enabling ATMs to accept payments from BofA's credit card customers and cashing checks from the machines. It also wants to allow customers to get varying denominations of cash from its ATMs.

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The bank acknowledged the cardless initiative and said the pilot program for cardless ATMs will kick off next month in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in California; Charlotte, North Carolina; Boston; and New York. A broader launch is expected in mid-2016. BofA increased its total number of ATMs more than 1 percent during 2015, to 16,038. Its brick-and-mortar locations fell 2.65 percent, to less than 4,800.

Bank of America is joining the fray of consumer banks that aim to provide better security and quicker transaction times by taking the plastic card out of the transaction. Read More BofA earnings beat tempered by oil price worries

In 2015, BMO Harris Bank, the U.S. affiliate of Toronto-based BMO Financial Group , launched cardless ATMs for its customers, and Illinois-based Wintrust Financial began testing an app-based program with its ATMs in 2013. The BMO Harris Bank program has customers accept a QR code on their phone, which they then scan at an ATM to withdraw cash.

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Saudi Arabia's late King Abdullah personally authorized a $681 million payment to Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, the BBC has reported.

Malaysia's attorney general revealed on Tuesday that the early-2013 payment, the subject of months of speculation, had come from the Saudi royal family and involved no corruption or improper conduct. Malaysia's prime minister had previously said that the cash was a private donation from a Middle Eastern donor that he declined to name.

Tuesday's revelation was the latest twist in a long-running political scandal around Najib and the country's ailing sovereign wealth fund Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), the advisory board of which the prime minister leads.

On Wednesday the BBC reported that the cash - $620 million of which was returned to the donor a few months later - was paid by Saudi Arabia to Najib to help the prime minister win 2013 elections at a time when the Saudis were worried about the global influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the time, the BBC said, Malaysia's opposition alliance included the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, which was loosely inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The newly opened Apple Store in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China ChinaFotoPress | Getty Images

As analysts and investors eye prospects for Apple stock, many are drilling down on the company's sales and earnings prospects in China, its biggest overseas market. On Wednesday, the company's stock was down as much as 5 percent, a day after the tech giant reported disappointing sales of the iPhone and the slowest year-over-year growth ever for the blockbuster device. That news raised a red flag, since those sales account for two-thirds of Apple's total revenue.

In response, Apple CEO Tim Cook remained confident on the outlook for China. He noted that Chinese incomes are rising and their savings rate is among the highest on the planet. China's consumers sent retail sales up 11 percent year-over-year in December  not very ruffled, for now, by the nation's market turmoil. The question, for Apple, is whether that confidence can last: Cook noted in a conference call after Apple's earnings announcement Tuesday that sales in Greater China, especially Hong Kong, began to "soften" in January. But for now, China's consumers are the reason why Apple execs rattled off a list of eight nations and regions they were worried about, from Canada to Turkey, without mentioning China. "Young urban Chinese elites have savings, so they can afford it,'' said Todd Lee, senior director of economic consulting firm IHS Global Insight. The damage was less for the simple reason that China's consumers are relatively flush, even as the nation's investment and export sectors are enduring shocks. Their savings rate is about 38.5 percent of income, and average per capita disposable income rose 7.4 percent in 2015, even as China's financial markets whipsawed throughout the second half of the year. That's also a reason why expectations are fairly high for the Jan. 28 report from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba , which RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said will boost adjusted profit per share by 31 percent. Consensus estimates are lower, calling for a 25 percent gain.

Apple said its overall profit for the first quarter of its 2016 fiscal year rose 1.9 percent, to $18.4 billion, or $3.28 per share, from $18 billion and $3.06 a share last year. (The 7.2 percent gain in per-share earnings reflects stock buybacks that reduced Apple's share count.) Sales rose 1.7 percent, to $75.9 billion, but would have been up 8 percent if the value of the world's different currencies had stayed the same as last year, Apple said. "The difference is about the size of an average Fortune 500 company," Cook said. iPhones' average price was reduced by $49, to $691, by the rise in the U.S. dollar, which makes each sale in local currency abroad less valuable to U.S.-based shareholders. Currency is also the reason for about a third of the drop in revenue that Apple projected for the March quarter.

Market forces at work

By contrast, Apple's Brazil sales fell because of a 40 percent drop in the Brazilian real that required Apple to raise iPhone prices there, dragging overall sales in the Americas 1 percent lower. Japan was down 12 percent, sales in Russia were hurt by the collapsing price of oil and the ruble, and the falling euro combined with Russia's woes to turn an 18 percent European sales gain in constant currency into only a 4 percent as-reported gain. Apple now gets two-thirds of its revenue from outside the U.S. "Major currencies, such as the Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Mexican peso and Turkish lira have declined 20 percent or more," Cook said, adding that "$100 of Apple's non-U.S. dollar revenue in Q4 of 2014 translated to only $85 last quarter due to the weakening currencies in our international markets."

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Analysts had expected Apple to earn $3.23 a share on $76.6 billion in revenue. Shares of Apple rose modestly after the earnings were announced, then sagged as Cook and other executives talked on the post-earnings conference call with analysts. Having closed at $99.99, they slumped under $95 on Wednesday morning. The stock was above $120 as recently as November. "[The] negative reaction after hours reflect[ed]  a huge shift in tone as AAPL sounded more susceptible to China macro versus 90 days ago," RBC Capital Markets analyst Amit Daryanani wrote. Apple's relatively strong China performance isn't an anomaly or tied to any Asian enthusiasm for a quintessentially American brand. China's retail sales gains all last year were nearly five times the rate in the United States, where consumer spending has also been growing faster than the economy as a whole. According to Moody's Analytics, China's retail sales were up by double digits in every month of 2015.

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China's pretty miffed at billionaire investor George Soros's dire warnings on the world's second-largest economy, and isn't afraid to say so. A flurry of chest-beating articles have appeared in state media in recent days, talking up the virtues of Chinese markets while warning investors about the dangers of speculation. The cause: a series of bearish comments on China made by the legendary investor at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In a commentary published Wednesday, Xinhua said that China had "ample reasons to stay confident in the face of speculators", citing firm 6.9 percent GDP growth in 2015, robust spending and overseas investment. And on Tuesday, the overseas edition of the People's Daily, a mouthpiece for the China Communist Party, singled out the 85-year-old billionaire for "declaring war" on the . Titled "Declaring war on the Chinese currency? Haha," the front-page editorial was written by Mei Xinyu, a researcher at the Ministry of Commerce. The editorial called Soros a "financial crocodile" (a long-time sobriquet for Soros in China) that had "publicly declared war on China."

"Because of his influence, fluctuations in the international financial markets has intensified ... Asian currencies are clearly under greater pressure from speculative attacks," the editorial said. But Soros' challenge to the yuan and Hong Kong dollar would be in vain, it went on, because China's macro-economic situation was healthy and the country was able to withstand temporary exchange rate volatility. It followed an article in Xinhua on Saturday that warned that "reckless speculations and vicious shorting will face higher trading costs and possibly severe legal consequences." Soros made waves last Thursday when he said that a hard landing in China was "practically unavoidable." "I'm not expecting it, I'm observing it," he told Bloomberg TV.

Although Soros did not refer directly to the Chinese currency or the Hong Kong dollar, his words carry plenty of clout. One of the world's most closely-watched investors, Soros is known as "the man who broke the Bank of England," in reference to fame (and infamy) he garnered in 1992 for selling short the British pound, helping force the country out of the European exchange rate mechanism. His Soros Fund management firm was also blamed for contributing to the Asian financial crisis in 1997, when former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad was one of his most vocal critic. Although not official pronouncements, commentaries in China's state media are closely watched as indications of the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party, which now appears to on the offensive against any opportunistic attempt to profit from its growing pains as the manufacturing giant transitions to a consumption-led economy. Despite the Chinese government's best efforts, Soros' comments likely hit market sentiment hard, said BNP Paribas Investment Partners' head of Asia Pacific equities, Arthur Kwong.


A man reads an article about drug lord Joaquin Guzman, aka 'El Chapo', showing a picture of him and actor Sean Penn, on the website of Rolling Stone magazine.

Celebrity endorsements for brands are not uncommon, however the face that sparked a recent purchasing frenzy for Barabas is quite unusual.

The Los Angeles men's clothing company saw a sudden boost in sales starting two weeks ago because of Joaquin Guzman, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The infamous criminal was photographed sporting fashion from Barabas for an article by "The Rolling Stone" magazine and suddenly the company was inundated with orders, according to the report.

Barabas, which employs only eight people, used to receive 10 to 20 orders a day. Now the company receives hundreds and has sold out of the two designs worn by El Chapo. The company expects its next shipment to arrive in early February.
This is the first half of a doubleshot. Check back this afternoon for Sam Waite's thoughts on the same book. Sam brings the perspective of someone who has lived in Japan for many years.

Genre: Travel Memoir





Description:





From the crowds of Tokyo to the bears of the far North, from the jungle of the tropical islands to the blooming cherry trees in Kyoto, eventually arriving at the big emptiness left by the devastating 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. Patrick Colgan, journalist and traveler, immerses himself in Japanese culture, nature and cuisine and writes about his discovery of a seemingly incomprehensible country. A place, Japan, where feeling a little lost can be fascinating, and trips never really end.







Author:





 Patrick Colgan was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1978, of an Italian mother and British father. He began traveling fifteen years ago with an InterRail pass and never stopped since. He has been in almost forty countries and all five continents but he loves going back to Japan, where he has been (so far) seven times. When he is not travelling around the world he is a Journalist at the daily newspaper Il Resto del Carlino . He has been writing his travel blog Orizzonti for years, in Italian. He has recently started a blog in English too.









Appraisal:





Early on in Horizon Japan the author set the stage with this paragraph:





Panic. Its what I feel while the half-empty Alitalia plane Im on is descending over Tokyo, on a crisp, clear January morning. Exhausted by twelve hours squeezed into an economy class seat, I suddenly find myself surrounded by people speaking a language I dont understand, while we are moving towards the unknown.





This resonated with me. From my limited foreign travels, I remembered this feeling. I'm not sure I'd call it panic, but a strange, contradictory combination of bone-weariness, adrenaline rush, apprehension, and excitement, all rolled into one. It's a feeling anyone might get when they're on the cusp of a new experience or adventure. As a traveler, I felt a more mild version of this on my first trip to New York (just before the first time a cab driver took me the long way to run up the meter). It was a stronger feeling on trips to Europe and South America. The more you expect the culture and language to differ from past experiences, the stronger the feeling.





However, the rest of the book didn't live up to the setup. The author made it clear, both explicitly and from various clues throughout the book, that the experiences chronicled were an amalgamation of several different trips. I found his experiences interesting and, having no firsthand knowledge to compare, they seemed credible. But too often they lacked the sense of discovery I was hoping to find based on the setup. I'd still recommend Horizon Japan as a worthwhile read. Just not as much as I'd hoped.









FYI:





Uses UK spelling conventions.





The book includes some photos which are much better viewed on a tablet or other color capable device.





Format/Typo Issues:





No significant issues.





Rating: **** Four Stars





Reviewed by: BigAl




Is the Fed about to give commodities a much-needed boost?

Gold tempered recent gains ahead of the Federal Reserve statement Wednesday. But if the central bank sounds dovish in its release at 2 p.m. ET, gold and other metals could be ready to surge.

In December, the Fed raised the federal funds rate for the first time in almost a decade. However, Phillip Streible of RJO Futures said he doesn't expect another rate hike for the rest of 2016. The absence of further rate increases should lead to a weaker dollar and higher gold prices.

"The metals markets: gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, they're all set to benefit from that type of move," Streible said Tuesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

Gold has gained more than 5 percent this year as the broader stock market has plummeted. But Neil Azous of Rareview Macro noted on Wednesday that while gold could see a move higher on a dovish Fed statement, a better liquid play would be to short FXY , the ETF tracking the Japanese yen.

Read More Oil is driving everything right now: Strategist



More broadly, Boris Schlossberg of BK Asset Management said that if the Fed looks less inclined to raise rates, "all the risk trades will do well. Equities will pop and I think oil will run as well."

There appears little chance of the central bank announcing a rate increase Wednesday, but traders are certain to keep a close eye on the Fed's commentary about what the path of hikes will look like in 2016. While some are hoping for it to allude to recent market volatility, and give that as a potential reason to delay rate rises in the future, Schlossberg says the Fed may disappoint on that front.

"They need to preserve the aura of invincibility in their decision-making process." he said in a Tuesday "Trading Nation" segment. "They're going to try to stay as neutral as possible, and that actually could be a disappointment to the market that's looking for a more dovish message."
Vestager also welcomed the accord, under which Italian banks will move the non-performing loans, currently on their balance sheets, to separate, individually managed entities in order to securitize them: sell debt backed by these assets.

The non-performing loans, which accumulated during a three-year recession between 2012 and 2014, tie up banks' capital and hold back new credit that could fuel a fledgling economic recovery.

The details are still being finalized, Italian Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan told reporters after a five-hour meeting with EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager, but the scheme is "a very useful instrument" based on state guarantees.

The European Commission and Italy reached an accord on Tuesday on a scheme to help Italian banks sell some of their 200 billion euros ($217.04 billion) of bad loans, ending almost a year of often-tense negotiations.

Banks will benefit from an Italian government guarantee on the senior tranches of the securitized assets held by such entities.

The state guarantees are to be provided and priced at market terms so as not to constitute state aid, Vestager said.

"The Commission, with the help of a monitoring trustee... will monitor the implementation of the scheme to ensure it is state aid free," the Commission said in a statement.

Under stricter rules Europe introduced after the financial crisis in an effort to shield taxpayers, state aid can be provided to an ailing lender only after investors in the bank have borne a loss.

Negotiations between Rome and Brussels over the bad loan scheme have stalled for months over whether or not it contained an element of state aid.

Italian bank shares have suffered heavy losses this year over fears that no effective way would be found to fix the bad loan problem. But the country's leading lenders rebounded on Tuesday as investors bet on a positive outcome of the meeting between Italy and the EU.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Italy's third largest bank, has been particularly hard hit by the uncertainty and has lost some 43 percent of its market value this year, more than twice the losses of the Italian banking sector as a whole.
Huge drops in U.S. stocks at the start of the year beg the question: What is the best way to divide an investment portfolio between stocks, bonds, cash and other holdings? Stocks aren't the only problem. Bonds look risky, too, as rising yields on new bonds could drive down prices of older bonds that pay less. Commodities and emerging markets stocks aren't doing very well, either.

Jeffrey Coolidge | Getty Images

So what should an investor do when the market looks like a minefield? If your portfolio is designed for 60 percent stocks, 30 percent bonds and 10 percent cash, should it stay that way? Most experts say it should, because the broad market has always recovered from even the worst downturns, and because the ideal asset mix assumes a long-term view. "If your investment horizon is decades ahead of you, remember there will be many market ups and downs between now and then," said Yvette Butler, president of Capital One Investing. When the holdings drift off target, it does make sense at some point to rebalance to restore the desired mix. "January is a great time to check in with yourself to be sure your portfolio is still aligned with your financial situation, goals and risk tolerance," said Lena Haas, senior vice president of retirement at E-Trade Financial. "Once you are confident in your baseline asset allocation, then consider rebalancing."

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Most experts will tell you that the single biggest factor in investment performance is asset allocation  the way one mixes the traditionally higher returns from stocks with the greater predictability and safety provided by bonds and cash. Key to the investor's allocation decision is the time horizon, or how long money can be tied up in each asset class. Money that will be needed during the next five years, for example, probably should not be invested in stocks, which could be in a downturn when cash is required. But for periods of five years or longer, history has shown that stocks tend to produce higher returns than bonds or cash. That's why a 20-something might have 80 percent or 90 percent of retirement investments in stocks, while a 70-year-old would have far less, putting more into bonds and cash in a bid for safety over return. Life changes, like marriage, divorce, childbirth or a job switch can also affect one's willingness to take risk, making it wise to alter the investment mix.



January is a great time to check in with yourself to be sure your portfolio is still aligned with your financial situation, goals and risk tolerance. Lena Haas senior vice president of retirement at E-Trade Financial

Hiring a pro to handle your allocation decisions can be costly, so many investors rely on online calculators or questionnaires to figure the best mix. While that's better than going with the gut, investors are wise to keep in mind the tools' limitations. First, they use past results to determine the potential risk and return offered by each asset class. There's no guarantee those assets will behave the same way in the future. Second, most of these tools ask questions to determine the investor's tolerance for risk, inquiring, for example, whether one would buy, sell or do nothing if stocks were to fall by 10 percent. The tool can therefore recommend an overly conservative asset mix if a worry-prone user doesn't realize that a 10 percent correction is just something to be expected from time to time. A user who is not well versed in the vagaries of investing may well benefit from the hand-holding and guidance offered by a professional advisor. Generally, experts recommend using an allocation tool from a large financial services firm, since it takes considerable investment to incorporate all the required factors, such as the performance of all types of holdings, the user's age, years to retirement and reliance on non-investment holdings, like real estate, a pension and Social Security benefit. Once the investor is satisfied with the asset-allocation goal, the portfolio should be managed to stay close to the targets.

January is a good time to think about this because year-end statements from brokerages, fund companies and banks make it easy to see where you stand, but experts have mixed views on timing and frequency in rebalancing. According to Ophir Gertner, CEO of Invest.com, investors are smart to think about rebalancing in the weeks before the new year, because selling money-losing investments before Jan. 1 can produce tax savings the next April. Chances are that if you were happy with your asset allocation at the start of 2015, you won't need a radical change today, since the stock market was virtually flat. And experts caution against rebalancing too often. The process can take time and money, and a minor shift in asset weights today may well be reversed tomorrow. Dave Louton, finance professor at Bryant University, recommends rebalancing only after a portfolio has drifted off target by a "substantive amount." "There is no need to reestablish all target weights to the penny," he said.



Hitting your targets

John Bucsek, managing partner of MetLife Solutions Group, suggests a two-pronged approach. Investors should reexamine their tolerance for risk at regular intervals, such as every January, to determine whether some factor, such as the approach of retirement, a marriage or birth, means the mix needs to change. But the rebalancing itself should be done only when one or more asset classes gets off target by a predetermined amount, such as 5 or 10 percentage points. The rebalancing doesn't have to be done in one fell swoop, either. "In some cases, it may be more beneficial to simply stop contributing any new funds to the overweighted asset class, while continuing to contribute to the underweighted asset classes," Gertner said. That way, you can get back on target gradually, without triggering taxes with sales or piling up transaction costs. It's important, too, to avoid becoming a slave to percentage points. "It's one thing to be okay with a 10 percent loss on paper, and it is another thing when this 10 percent loss means a real loss of $100,000 in your $1 million account," said Stephen Rhodes, a managing principal of Signify Wealth, a wealth management firm in Creve Coeur, Missouri. He suggests investors think in terms of dollars rather than percentages.

Keep a tab on costs

In rebalancing, investors should also strive to minimize costs such as commissions and taxes. One approach: Do any selling in tax-favored accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s, where sales of profitable holdings won't trigger taxes. So long as your portfolio as a whole has the asset mix you want, it's not necessary that each account match those targets. In addition, Haas says investors are wise to consider "asset location." Investments that spin off a lot of annual income, such as funds that pay big dividends or large year-end capital gains distributions, are best kept in tax-favored accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s, to avoid annual taxes. Meanwhile, "tax-efficient" holdings, like index mutual funds that have little or no annual payouts, can go into taxable accounts. If rebalancing seems like a daunting challenge, there is a cheap alternative to hiring a pro to do it for you: a target-date mutual fund. These funds, now offered by most major fund companies, use a specific year, such as 2040 for someone expecting to retire that year, to guide the mix of stocks, bonds and cash. As the investor ages, money is moved from stocks to bonds to emphasize safety over returns. The target-date fund typically contains several low-fee, index-style mutual funds. Target-date funds "do a good job of providing this kind of gradual rebalancing of the asset mix, smoothly and at reasonable cost," Louton said. But while these funds take a lot of the guesswork out of investing for retirement, there are some caveats: Target-date funds don't account for risk tolerances, they're not flexible, and there are fewer funds to choose from. In addition, some carry a high expense ratio. So be sure to do your research.
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Games that can communicate intelligently with players will be the next landmark advance in gaming, according to industry legend Robert J. Mical. But virtual reality headsets were less likely to take off a big way, Mical, who is best known for co-inventing the Atari Lynx and the 3DO Interactive multiplayer, told CNBC at the EmTech Asia conference in Singapore on Wednesday. A 32-year veteran of the gaming industry and currently director of games at Google , Mical said, "The next generation of games are going to have machine intelligence built into them [ with] the ability to really communicate with humans."

Mical said he expected virtual reality entities to become a part of peoples' experiences with technology. Such experiences could range from a simple assistant that helped people shop more effectively, to an intelligent entity that could become a companion to the user, he predicted. "However, that part of virtual reality where you have to wear something over your eyes, I'm more dubious about that becoming popular because it takes something away from you," he added. Games will also pave the way for new technologies to take root in other industries, something that is already taking place at Google, he said.

Tomohiro Ohsumi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Update: Tyson has replied with a diss track of his own , called "Flat to Fact." It's performed by Steve Tyson (Neil's nephew), and it's honestly nowhere near as good as "Flatline." It sounds like rap-ified "Schoolhouse Rock," and ends with Neil deGrasse Tyson reading one of his tweets to B.o.B The whole song is kind of unbearable corny. Nobody really won here. Everyone loses.

On Sunday, Grammy-nominated rapper B.o.B announced on Twitter that he does not believe the world is round, then picked a fight with celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that culminated in his releasing a catchy ditty that sampled and insulted Tyson  plus the Jews.

Here is the story of the most gloriously stupid Internet beef of 2016.

Audience member Robin Roy (C) reacts as U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets her at a campaign rally in Lowell, Massachusetts January 4, 2016.

Those basic facts of this saga are pretty nuts. Here's everything that happened up till then.

Throughout Sunday and Monday, the hybrid rock-rap artist tweeted about conspiracy theories. He suggested that the Apollo moon landing was faked, and he tweeted out cocktail-napkin math equations captioning what look like photos edited in Microsoft Paint. He urged people to investigate cloning centers, and for world governments to allow travel through Antarctica to see the edge of the Earth.

Here is a selection, in chronological order, of what he sent out over the past couple days:

B.o.B. tweet 1

B.o.B. tweet 2

B.o.B tweet 3

Eventually, pop scientist and professional cold-water-thrower Neil deGrasse Tyson stepped into the ring, hoping to persuade an indefatigable B.o.B (real name: Bobby Ray Simmons, Jr.). Here was his argument:



Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet 1

Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet 2

Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet 3

And on Monday night, B.o.B delivered a devastating, fact-free rebuttal in the form of a diss track on Soundcloud. It is called "Flatline  Feat. Neil Tyson." Its lyrics suggest that Jews control President Obama and reference the prominent Holocaust denier David Irving. B.o.B asks why NASA is part of the Department of Defense, and tells listeners to research Dr. Richard Sauder, the author of a book called "Underwater & Underground Bases: Surprising Facts the Government Does Not Want You to Know."

Of course, B.o.B is hardly the only the celebrity to believe weird stuff. Moral of the story: Don't get your science from B.o.B.

By Noah Kulwin, Re/code.net.

CNBC's parent NBC Universal is an investor in Re/code's parent Revere Digital, and the companies have a content-sharing arrangement.
U.S. auto safety regulators said Tuesday that air bag maker Takata declared 5.1 million U.S. vehicles defective, as the company disclosed an 11th death could be linked to a faulty airbag.

Most of the vehicles mentioned in numerous previous recalls involving Takata air bags have been older models, but the new recalls include at least one 2014 model. The Japanese company said newer vehicles remain under "investigation and could be subject to recall at a later date." The newly released documents show that regulators may prod automakers to recall recent models.

A deployed airbag is seen in a 2001 Honda Accord at the LKQ Pick Your Part salvage yard on May 22, 2015 in Medley, Florida. The largest automotive recall in history centers around the defective Takata Corp. air bags that are found in millions of vehicles that are manufactured by BMW, Chrysler, Daimler Trucks, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota. ( Getty Images

That could greatly increase the total number of vehicles recalled, which in the United States now stands at about 24 million vehicles involving about 28 million Takata air bag inflators. Ford Motor on Tuesday became the first of several automakers involved to announce a recall. A 2006 Ford Ranger was involved in a Dec. 22 crash that killed the driver when a Takata air bag inflator caused the bag to rupture, sending shrapnel into the vehicle. A similar airbag inflator was involved in a fatal rupture of a Honda model in Malaysia in 2014, which prompted a worldwide recall by Honda Motor . Takata said in a document released on Tuesday that there was another rupture of a similar inflator in August in India in a 2007 Honda Civic, but it is not clear if the rupture caused the death of the driver. That could be the 11th death worldwide attributed to defective Takata inflators. Nine deaths related to Takata air bags have occurred in the United States. The death in the Ford Ranger is the first not to involve a car made by Honda.
The government's lower figure helped trigger a relief rally in crude futures that erased steep losses and pushed the front month futures contract for West Texas Intermediate crude to settle at $32.30. Another factor driving oil higher was reports that possible coordination between Russia and OPEC was discussed by Russian companies. The market continues to speculate that OPEC members may strike a deal on production, but most analysts dismiss that.

That should continue to pressure oil prices, which rallied Wednesday because the large weekly build in supply was not quite as gigantic as feared. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that crude oil supplies grew by 8.4 million barrels last week, well below the 11.4 million reported Tuesday by the American Petroleum Institute.

U.S. oil production continues to defy forecasts that it is on the decline, and with refiners processing as much of the stuff as they can, the glut of oil, gasoline and diesel fuel keeps growing.

"It's a record amount of crude oil in storage. It's a huge build in gasoline, but there was a little strength in distillate demand, thanks to the weather. It's squarely bearish again," said John Kilduff, partner with Again Capital.

Read MoreBrent up more than 20 percent from low

One positive was a 4.1 million barrel drop in distillates inventories, which includes heating oil and diesel fuel. Gasoline supplies, however, grew by 3.5 million barrels.

The U.S. has now stockpiled 1.2 billion barrels of crude, and the growing supply in Cushing, Oklahoma, and elsewhere has analysts concerned that oil will start becoming difficult to store, meaning its price on the cash market could get even cheaper.

While the industry has been reporting rig shutdowns, the volume of oil pumped per day in the past week was steady at 9.2 million, but below the high of 9.6 million barrels per day in April.

"That is worrisome. The weekly number has been steady at 9.2 million for some period of time, as the EIA says shale oil production is coming off," said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates. "It means the industry must be producing more in places like the Gulf of Mexico where the investments are coming to fruition at the same time onshore rig count is going down."

Baker Hughes reported the oil rig count dropped to 510 last week, the lowest number since April 2010, and about 800 fewer than the same period last year.



"For crude to start rebounding, the market needs to see a significant reduction in U.S. production in the face of declining rig counts, or else their interpretation will be the oil producers have gotten so efficient that they're maintaining high levels of production which will just add to supply this year and into 2017," Lipow said.

Michael Wittner, global head of oil research at Societe Generale, said the market appeared to overreact to the weekly U.S. inventory data.

But a clear negative remains the U.S. production level. He is awaiting for the release of more reliable monthly government data Friday, but that will be November data. In October, the U.S. produced an average 9.3 million barrels a day, according to the EIA.

"We're sitting here bouncing around $30, give or take.  Right now it's about the big picture things, and the biggest being how long can we continue around these levels? The answer is a long time I have to think, especially with some of the reports coming out in recent days. With some of the big shale producers cutting their budgets, it does increase confidence that we are going to see a big decline in U.S. crude production," Wittner said.

Platts' forecasting unit Bentek said Wednesday it expects that overall production from the major formations in North Dakota and Texas dropped slightly in December versus November.

Bentek said oil production from the Eagle Ford shale basin in Texas actually increased slightly in December, by about 11,000 barrels per day, nearly 1 percent, from November. But production in the Bakken's Williston Basin fell by 9,000 barrels a day in December, or little less than 1 percent from November levels. Bentek said Eagle Ford was down 7 percent on an annual basis, and Bakken was off by 6 percent.

The market has been pinning its hopes this week on a deal between Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC producers. That would mean making a pact with Russia, the largest energy producer. The U.S. oil industry ranks in the top three but it is made up of dozens of independent producing companies.


Aberdeen Asset Management, one of Europe's largest asset managers, has been hit with $13 billion-plus in outflows in the last three months of 2015 -- nearly twice as bad as the year before -- as emerging market volatility took its toll on the group.

Thanks to their tough end to 2015, the fund house, which specializes in emerging market- and Asia-focused funds, has suffered 11 consecutive quarters of outflows, reporting a sharp drop in its assets under management amid investor redemptions and weak markets.

Martin Gilbert, Chief Executive of Aberdeen Asset Management. Getty Images

"Like the rest of the industry we continue to contend with the structural imbalances of the global economy and the cyclical slowdown in emerging markets, as well as the impact of falling oil and commodity prices. Despite the day-to-day fluctuations in investor sentiment we remain focussed on those issues that we can control," chief executive officer of the group, Martin Gilbert said in a statement.

A trading statement covering the three months to the end of December last year published Wednesday showed the company suffered outflows of 9.1 billion ($13.04 billion) in the quarter. In the same period in 2014, the company saw net outflows of 4.8 billion. Speaking to CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Gilbert told investors not to panic. "Don't panic, that's my clear message, and don't cut at the point of maximum pain. The money in equities tends to be made the days after the really bad days, so you've just got to hold your nerve, not look at the markets and have a cup of coffee and just relax," he told CNBC.

The slide in the oil price has forced some sovereign wealth funds from oil producing nations to de-risk, a factor which Aberdeen said has seriously dented assets under management (AUM), which now stands at 290.6 billion. "Management (at Aberdeen) indicated that at its height, sovereign wealth funds contributed 10 percent of total AUM, which has now reduced to 2.5 percent. The company stated that despite reduced outflows in Q1/FY16 in equities (except for in global where outflows accelerated) on the prior quarter, it remains 'too early to call a halt to outflows,'" said analyst at RBC Capital Markets, Peter Lenardos in a note published Wednesday. Credit Suisse lowered their earnings per share estimates for the group after the update. "Aside from the market depreciation impact, the main change we have made relates to net fund outflows, which we have increased for 2016 end from 15.9 billion to 26.0 billion. This incorporates a higher run-rate of net outflows  partly due to market conditions," said research analyst at Credit Suisse, Tom Mills.
Random thoughts of an American in Finland
After much rhetoric on Russia's "pivot East", the year started with bad news for Moscow and its push to strengthen its ties with China. The Chinese stock markets are tumbling growth is slowing and the volume of Russia's trade with China offers little room for optimism. Are things really as bad as they seem?

There are profound, strategic reasons that have led to Russia's pivot to Asia, one of the most dynamic regions in the world. Given Russia's geographical positioning, it is advantageous to participate in China's growth and strategically important for Moscow to maintain sovereignty over its own Far East.



However, questions have been asked about the rationale behind this pilot  and its viability. With business ties in the West looking fraught, the Russian economy has been backed into a corner, the turn to Asia has been seen by some as an act of desperation from the former world superpower running out of options.



Russia's economy has been badly hit by plunging oil prices and western sanctions and needs to replace lost sources of revenue and funding, as a matter of urgency. High growth markets in Asia and particularly China offer an obvious alternative, with push-pull factors involved for Russia.
SALINA, N.Y.  The insurance agency Haylor, Freyer & Coon, Inc. announced it has launched a new Private Client Division and made three new hires.

The division will focus on delivering insurance products and services to affluent individuals and families, the agency said in a news release.

To handle the clients in this new division, the firm has hired Craig Van Epps. He brings Haylor, Freyer & Coon more than 13 years of finance, insurance management, and leadership experience. Van Epps started his career at Liberty Mutual Insurance and has worked with many other insurance agencies, according to the release.

The firm also announced that Jodi Blaczinski has returned to Central New York and to Haylor, Freyer & Coon to continue the expansion of the firms Personal Insurance Division. She will work with specialty clients in the firms Syracuse Office. Blaczinski has more than 20 years experience as a specialist in the personal insurance area.

Shelly Fox-Kline has also joined Haylor, Freyer & Coons Personal Insurance Division. She has 24 years of insurance industry experience; is licensed in property casualty, life and health; and is also a notary public.

Contact The Business Journal News Network at news@cnybj.com
260116BUKA TOWN DRAINAGE QUESTIONED

By Aloysius Laukai



Residents of Buka town especially on the BMF road are calling on the Bougainville Technical Department to fix the Drainage system that is now reversing water from the roads into houses.

The drainage built by DEKENAI has been reversing water due to engineering problem as it was not fixed at the close of their sealing project in Buka town at the beginning of this year.

Residents said that they were reminded several times to fix the problem but their calls went into deaf ears.

They said that they have in many occasions approached the engineers to look into the matter.

AND last night again during heavy rain most of the drain water went into the houses.

The residents said that they were afraid if one heavy and continues rain for many days occur all buildings starting from the Kute Service Station down to Poloana will be under water.



Ends


Her health was at risk. But in Missouri, doctors could do nothing.
District Attorney Amy Weirich

SHARE Shelby County Juvenile Court officials say issues raised in a report by the federal Department of Justice are being resolved, including harsh treatment of youths and discrepancies due to race.

By Jacinthia Jones and Kayleigh Skinner of The Commercial Appeal

It's unclear how much impact this week's Supreme Court ruling on juveniles serving life sentences will have in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi, legal experts say.

The ruling says juveniles given life sentences for murder must be considered for parole no matter how long ago the crime occurred. In Tennessee, juveniles already have that option.

In the Volunteer State, first-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence. But by law everyone  adults and juveniles  can be considered for release after serving 51 years.

"You cannot automatically get life without parole in Tennessee," said Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich. "When you are sentenced to life it means you're eligible for parole after a service of 51 years."

District Attorney General Mike Dunavant, who serves a five-county area including Tipton and Fayette, said the Supreme Court ruling "won't constitutionally disrupt convictions in Tennessee."

"It won't immediately or directly create this wave of cases seeking resentencing," he said, adding that he disagrees with the ruling "but it's the law of the land."

"You know what we're saying to violent criminals: 'If you commit a violent, heinous crime before you're 18, you'll get a lighter sentence.' Isn't that what gangs do? They recruit younger and younger."

Stephen Bush, Shelby County's chief public defender, agreed the ruling won't change much in Tennessee. But he said the decision shows that the court acknowledges the differences between juveniles and adults.

"This is the latest in a series of decisions by the Supreme Court that recognizes what science has shown: that cognitive skills and brain functions don't fully develop until we're 25 years old. Kids are less mature, more impulsive and make rash decisions and they shouldn't be treated the same as adults."

The ruling expands on the court's 2012 decision that sentences of mandatory life imprisonment without parole for juveniles were unconstitutional and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Monday's decision applies retroactively to juveniles sentenced before the 2012 ruling.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections on Tuesday could not immediately provide the number of juvenile inmates serving life sentences without parole.

It's even less clear how the decision will affect juvenile inmates in Arkansas, which up until 2012 had mandatory life sentences without parole for youths.

Criminal defense attorney Jeff Rosenzweig has worked on several juvenile homicide and death penalty cases in Arkansas and represented a member of the West Memphis Three.

Rosenzweig said in 2013 that the state legislature made a "Miller fix" in reference to the 2012 Supreme Court case, Miller v. Alabama, which found that mandatory life sentences without possibility of parole were unconstitutional for juvenile offenders.

The fix made life sentences for juveniles in Arkansas non-mandatory, but it did not apply retroactively, Rosenzweig said.

"What it (the ruling) means is they will all have resentencing trials unless the Arkansas general assembly passes a law that retroactively makes them eligible for parole," Rosenzweig said.

Arkansas Attorney General spokesman Judd Deer said the attorney general's office is waiting to learn if the inmates themselves will need to request resentencing, or if that duty falls to the AG's office or the courts.

"Exactly how that's going to impact them, we don't know that yet," Deer said.

There are currently 58 inmates in Arkansas prisons who were sentenced to life without parole for murders they committed as juveniles.

Mississippi will not be affected by the opinion "in any meaningful way," according to Attorney General Jim Hood.

"Since 2013, the Mississippi Appellate Courts have already ruled that those sentences were already to be applied retroactively," Hood said in an email.

"Therefore, any juveniles so situated have already been resentenced."

The inmates who were automatically sentenced had to request resentencing, he said. No juveniles have been sentenced automatically to life without parole since 2013 as a result of the Miller v. Alabama decision, Hood said.

There are currently 60 inmates in Mississippi serving a life sentence they received as a juvenile, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
January 26, 2016 - Timothy McKinney enters the courtroom for the start of his trial Tuesday at 201 Poplar. McKinney is on trial on a charge he shot a person in the leg at the North Memphis Market at 1590 Vollintine Ave. on January 23, 2014. (Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)

SHARE January 26, 2016 - A shooting victim shows jurors where he was shot in the leg while testifying during Timothy McKinney's trial at the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center at 201 Poplar Ave. Tuesday. McKinney is on trial on a charge he shot a person in the leg at the North Memphis Market at 1590 Vollintine Ave. on January 23, 2014. (Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal) January 26, 2016 - Timothy McKinney takes notes as his shooting victim testifies during McKinney's trial at the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center at 201 Poplar Ave. Tuesday. McKinney is on trial on a charge he shot a person in the leg at the North Memphis Market at 1590 Vollintine Ave. on January 23, 2014. (Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal) Related Coverage McKinney convicted in 2014 shooting of teen

Man sentenced to life in prison for shooting bystander

By Katie Fretland of The Commercial Appeal

Former death row inmate Timothy McKinney is back in court this week on trial in the court of Shelby County Criminal Court Judge James Beasley in the shooting of a teen in North Memphis.

On the first day of the trial Tuesday, McKinney, 41, pleaded guilty to possessing a handgun while being a convicted felon. He pleaded not guilty to attempted first-degree murder, employing a firearm during a felony and reckless endangerment.

The charges stem from an incident Jan. 23, 2014, at the North Memphis Market in the 1500 block of Vollintine. A 14-year-old boy was driving home with his mother when she stopped at the market, said Assistant District Attorney Alanda Dwyer.

The mother asked the boy to run inside to get change, and he went to the cash register. Two men were ahead of him in line and a man was at the doorway.

According to surveillance video, the man at the doorway and one of the men in line point guns at each other. Instead of hitting each other, the 14-year-old was struck by gunfire, causing nerve damage and breaking his thigh bone.

Witnesses identified McKinney as shooting the 14-year-old and several people were in his line of fire, according to an affidavit.

In 2013, McKinney pleaded guilty in a plea agreement to killing Memphis police Officer Don Williams in 1997 after three trials.

McKinney was charged with fatally shooting Williams outside Crumpy's Comedy Club in Frayser where the officer was working security on the night of Dec. 25, 1997.

McKinney was sentenced to death in 1999, but an appeals court ruled his defense counsel was deficient making "the entire proceeding fundamentally unfair."

He was granted a new trial in 2010, but the juries in two retrials were hung. The jury in the first retrial was split 11-1 to find him guilty and the second was split 8-4 to find him not guilty. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder in exchange for his release, said defense attorney Marty McAfee. The plea agreement was for a sentence of 15 years, which he already served.
January 26, 2016 - Edward Stanton III (right), the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, talks with Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich following a press conference on the playground at Howze Park in Binghamton to announce two new safety zones formed by public nuisance petitions against members of the Vice Lords and Grape Street Crips operating in the area.

SHARE January 26, 2016 - A resident of Chickasaw Place Apartments looks out as various law agencies close Mimosa street and gather outside her apartment for a press conference in Howze Park across the street. An injection was filed against the Grape Street Crips and Vice Lord gang members operating in the area that bans members from gathering, even in pairs, in two designated safety zones in Binghamton. Related Coverage Lawyer challenges gang injunction as unconstitutional

By Jody Callahan of The Commercial Appeal

Just behind the row of local law-enforcement luminaries gathered in Binghamton's Howze Park Tuesday afternoon, a single word was spray-painted in white on the empty playground set.

"Crip."

More gang graffiti was spray-painted elsewhere in the park, which serves as something of a demarcation line for the two gangs who control that area of Binghamton: the Grape Street Crips and the Vice Lords.

But, if the Multi-Agency Gang Unit has its way, those gangs won't control that area for much longer. On Tuesday, Shelby County Dist. Atty. Gen. Amy Weirich and other MGU representatives announced that a half-square-mile area of Binghamton will be the city's newest "Safety Zone."

"Without using handcuffs, some 50 gang members were told today, 'Get out, and stay out of this area,'" Weirich said. "(We hope this means) you'll see children out playing. You won't hear sirens. You'll hear people talking about work that day, about being retired, about how great it is to live in Binghamton."

The point of such zones is to target gang activity. The injunction signed Tuesday by Environmental Court Judge Larry Potter identifies the gangs as public nuisances, and gives law enforcement additional means to combat them:

Police can arrest identified gang members for appearing together in public, even if it's just two of them.

Police can arrest gang members for intimidating members of the public who may be afraid to report crimes or to testify.

Gang members cannot act as a "lookout" to warn that police are coming.

Gang members cannot trespass on property not open to the public, or recruit new members.

"What makes this action so necessary in my mind, is these perpetrators use this park, and (Lester Elementary) School down the street, where children should be running and playing and be carefree. They used it to plan and conduct their illegal activities," Mayor Jim Strickland said. "This action not only tells these gang members to get out, but it also helps put a stop to their recruitment of the next generation."

Officially, Tuesday's designation adds two more Safety Zones, bringing the city's total to six. One of the new zones will target the Crips, the other the Vice Lords. Those two zones overlap in many places, indicating that those two gangs often cooperate in their illegal activities, officials said.

Weirich said Tuesday that the two gangs have committed murder, robbery and aggravated assault, among many crimes.

She added that, for the first time, the injunctions will also target domestic violence.

"We as law enforcement care what goes on in the living room," Weirich said. "Because the violence in the home, all too often, finds it way out here on the sidewalk."

The city's other Safety Zones are the Riverside area south of Downtown, the old Dixie Homes area north of the Medical Center and the Ridgecrest and Greenbriar apartments in Frayser.
SHARE Tennessee State Capitol

By Richard Locker of The Commercial Appeal

NASHVILLE  The state Senate unanimously approved a bill Wednesday that sets out how legislators confirm or reject the governor's appointees to the Tennessee Supreme Court and other appeals court judges.

The House of Representatives will likely follow suit Thursday and send it Gov. Bill Haslam to sign into law.

The issue was the subject of a dispute between the House and Senate since last year. The bill is needed to implement provisions of the amendment to the Tennessee Constitution ratified by voters in 2014 that altered how Tennessee selects judges on the state Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals and the Court of Criminal Appeals  a total of 29 judges in all.

The 2014 amendment removed election of appellate judges from the constitution and replaced it with a system of appointment by the governor and confirmation by the legislature within 60 days of the appointment, or from the start of an annual legislative session if the appointment occurs when the General Assembly is not in session.

House and Senate leaders were unable to agree until last week on what happens if one chamber approves an appointee but the other doesn't.

The compromise approved 33-0 by the Senate on Wednesday says confirmation will occur by default if only one house rejects the appointee  but if one house rejects by at least two-thirds of its members, the nominee is rejected even if the other house votes unanimously to confirm.

The compromise was drafted last week by a House-Senate conference committee, after days of discussion and after the work of a separate conference committee last year was rejected by the Senate at the end of last year's session.

"We ended up with a solution that was maybe not anybody's first choice but it ultimately was a very good discussion and it got a 10-0 conference committee report," Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), Senate sponsor of the bill, told his colleagues.

When the governor appoints an appellate court judge to fill a vacancy occurring after an eight-year term has begun, the public gets to weigh in with a retention election at the next statewide August election in even-numbered years. When the governor's appointment is for a full eight-year term  when, for example, a judge is not seeking a new term  the public doesn't get a direct vote until eight years later when the appointee is up for a new full term.

The bill also creates a new Trial Court Vacancy Commission to screen applications to fill vacancies in trial court judgeships across the state and send three nominees to the governor, who could appoint one or ask for a new slate of three nominees. The panel will be composed of five members appointed by the House speaker, five appointed by the Senate speaker and a chairman appointed jointly by the two speakers.
270116PAIS ON NAMATOA/WASPOS ROAD

By Aloysius Laukai

People who are living in and around the 14 Kilometre NAMATOA/WASPOS road are requested to wait for the awareness team that will visit them, starting next week.

Team leader of the awareness team, JOE PAIS told New Dawn FM today that the purpose of the awareness is to inform the people on the progress of the road upgrading that will start next month.

He said that as the work on this road progresses, his team wants the people to take ownership of their road and also look after the workmen and machines that will be used to upgrade this road.

Awareness will start on the first of February and will cover twelve villages starting from Sunvahora village and ending at Toresure.

MR. PAIS is calling on the people along this economic road to make sure they attend these meetings.



Ends


School bus

SHARE School bus

By Jennifer Pignolet of The Commercial Appeal

Shelby County Schools and the charter schools under its purview now have a formal agreement to work together in education after the SCS board voted Tuesday night to approve a charter compact.

The school board also approved a legislative agenda that includes limiting the takeover powers of the state-run Achievement School District, conditions for any voucher program the legislature approves and a renewed call to fully fund the Basic Education Program.

The charter compact brought about 100 people to the meeting, including several students. All who spoke publicly were in support of the compact.

The compact provides a framework for the district and charters to identify areas, like facilities and fees, that need to be addressed. But the specifics are yet to be determined by an advisory committee that will hash out the details of each goal or objective.

Aspire Public Schools Executive Director Allison Leslie commended the school board for its work on the issue.

"We are looking forward to more opportunities to collaborate, share best practices and increase the level of accountability for all schools here in Memphis," Leslie said.

The vote was a unanimous 7-0, with board members Miska Clay Bibbs and Shante Avant absent.

Board member Stephanie Love praised the charter leaders for coming to the meeting, and said she was glad they came so that the district could take down their names, numbers and dates and times of their monthly board meetings to give to parents who call SCS with charter school concerns.

"So when they call, we can make sure we give them that information," Love said. "Because the district has no governance over charter schools."

Charter schools are also mentioned in the legislative agenda the board passed. The document, which was not available with the board meeting agenda on the district's website until after the vote, calls for the state to require a mandatory administrative fee and an "assessment fee" to help pay the district's employee benefit responsibility known as OPEB.

Board member Kevin Woods said the document is similar to previous years. OPEB is one of the biggest concerns. With the loss of students, whether to charter schools through a normal transfer or a future voucher program, he said, the district loses funding but still has obligations.

"The district's biggest concern will continue to be how we support those who have given their lives to working for the district," Woods said. "With decreased enrollment, we still have a district to run."

The legislative agenda includes opposition to a voucher programs, which would give students public funding to attend private schools. It also lobbies for funding that would help offset the loss of students if a voucher program is approved. A bill approving vouchers was passed by the Tennessee House Finance Committee Tuesday night and now moves to the House floor.

On the Achievement School District, the legislative agenda calls for limiting the overall frequency with which the state can take over schools, a cap on the number of schools the ASD can have in a particular county, and increased parent involvement in the process.

In other business, the board passed a resolution encouraging the administration to continue pursuing a high school at Crosstown Concourse on Cleveland Avenue. The district has said Christian Brothers University is interested in partnering with SCS in a contract school at the site undergoing renovation in Midtown.
SHARE

By Marc Thiessen

WASHINGTON  Hillary Clinton went into damage-control mode when news broke that the inspector general of the intelligence agencies had identified additional classified emails on her private server, including ones containing intelligence on covert "Special Access Programs." Her campaign even accused the inspector general  an Obama appointee confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate  of engaging in a "coordinated leak" with Republicans "for the purposes of hurting her campaign."

Lash out as she might, Clinton's constantly changing email story is rapidly falling apart. First, Clinton claimed there was "no classified material" on her private server  which turned out to be untrue. Then she claimed none of the intelligence on her server was "classified at the time"  which also turned out to be untrue. Now, in a National Public Radio interview last week, Clinton said there was no information that was "marked classified."

But this is not a defense.

It is against the law to remove classification markings from classified information and enter it into an unclassified system  which is the only way this information could have found its way into more than 1,300 emails on Clinton's personal server. There is no way to "accidentally" send classified information by unclassified email. Senior officials have separate computers in their offices for classified and unclassified information. The two systems are not connected. The only way information from the classified system can make it onto an unclassified system is for someone to intentionally put it there  either by taking a document that is marked classified and typing the information without markings into an unclassified email, or by putting a thumb drive into their classified computer, downloading information and then putting that thumb drive into an unclassified computer, as Edward Snowden did. In either case, it is a crime.

So Clinton's defense that the information was not "marked" classified does not absolve her of wrongdoing. Quite the opposite, it puts her in greater legal jeopardy.

The revelation that the intelligence on her private server included discussions of Special Access Programs makes the situation even more serious. Having any classified information on your private server is against the law. But Special Access Programs contain information so sensitive, it is given a secret "codeword" and placed into a "compartment" to which only a small number of specially cleared people have access. To see this information, it is not enough to have Top Secret security clearance; you have to be cleared for that specific compartment.

Having that kind of super-sensitive, codeword-protected, compartmented information on her unsecured server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., basement put U.S. national security in grave danger  because foreign powers could easily hack into her system and get it. In August, NBC News reported that "China's cyber spies have accessed the private emails of 'many' top Obama administration officials . . . and have been doing so since at least April 2010. The email grab -- first codenamed 'Dancing Panda' by U.S. officials, and then 'Legion Amethyst'  was detected in April 2010 . . . [and] is still going on." We also know that Russian hackers successfully penetrated the State Department's computer systems. Does anyone believe they did not target Clinton's unsecured private server as well? It would be a miracle if the intelligence on her service was not currently in the hands of foreign intelligence services.

Clinton's latest defense is that "it's likely what they are referring to is the forwarding of a New York Times article" containing leaked intelligence about the drone program. First, she has no way of knowing that. Second, even if true, that is still not a defense. Think about her argument: Because the Obama administration leaked highly classified information about our drone program to The New York Times, she was no longer obligated as secretary of state to treat the program as classified? That is not going to go very far with the FBI agents investigating her right now.

Her team says the drone program was an "open secret." But our government has no category of "open secret," and the fact that a classified covert action program has been reported by The New York Times does not make it unclassified. When I was in the White House, I wrote President George W. Bush's speech acknowledging the existence of another special access program  the CIA interrogation program. Its existence had also been reported by The New York Times. But I had to write the speech in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the National Security Council, on a top-secret computer that was not even connected to the top-secret Internet system. Until Bush delivered it, the details were Top Secret/Codeword intelligence.

For government officials to discuss such a program on a private, unsecured email server is a criminal offense  a fact Clinton should soon learn the hard way.

Marc Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former speechwriter for George W. Bush. He wrote this for The Washington Post.
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A U.S. judge is giving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) an additional 90 days to get its act together on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program.

There are approximately 34,000 foreign workers in the U.S. employed under the Optional Practical Training STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) extension. All students are eligible to work on their student visa for 12 months; STEM students have the ability to work an additional 17 months.

This STEM extension was challenged by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, which sees the OPT program as a back-door H-1B visa.

In August, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle in Washington agreed with WashTech, and ruled the U.S. had erred by not seeking public comment prior to approving the 17-month extension in 2008.

In a ruling last August, Huvelle set a deadline of Feb. 12 for the U.S. to produce a remedy; if it failed to do so, OPT workers faced the possibility of having to return home.

DHS released a new OPT rule extending the 17-month STEM extension to 24 months. It sought public comments, but it missed deadlines for adoption of a new regulation. It blamed the large volume of comments, 50,500 in total, received in response to the proposed regulation.

As a result, DHS asked the court for an extension until May 10, which Huvelle approved.

"The Court does not doubt that U.S. tech workers might feel some adverse effect from a 90-day extension, but it has not been provided with any reliable data to support this proposition," wrote Huvelle, "and thus, it finds that the balance of equities clearly weighs in favor of an extension."
Someone in Israel's Electricity Authority, a government department charged with providing utility services, fell for a phishing attack, opened an email and thereby was infected with ransomware which reportedly spread to other computers in the network. Yet the department chose to take the computers offline. Details are somewhat sketchy, but it appears that the media heard electric, paralyzed and severe cyber attack before reporting the Israeli power grid was hacked and taken down.

There are over 10,000 cybersecurity professionals attending Cybertech 2016 Conference in Tel Aviv. The audience was supposedly thinning out during the final Cybertech panel, according to Haaretz, but when Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water, started talking about the severe cyber attack on Israels Electricity Authority, he had everyones full attention. Yesterday we identified one of the largest cyber attacks that we have experienced, Steinitz stated.

The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it, Steinitz said according to the Times of Israel. We had to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over  but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should.

This is a fresh example of the sensitivity of infrastructure to cyberattacks, he added, and the importance of preparing ourselves in order to defend ourselves against such attacks.

Ransomware?

Ynet reported that the malware was ransomware, presumably sent by e-mail before spreading to other computers on the network. Although neither the exact type of encrypting ransomware, nor the extortion amount were mentioned, Ynet claimed payment was demanded to unlock the computers.

Its not just the U.S. warning that a crippling cyber attack could take down critical infrastructure and the power grid; such warnings are issued across the world. In July, Israels National Cyber Authority issued a warning that the country would be targeted by a massive cyber attack. Government agencies were reportedly told be alert for any possible scenario and the warning applied to computer systems and cell phones.

Three years ago, when a secret demonstration for senator simulated a cyber attack on the power grid, the scenario was that the attack took down New York Citys power grid during a killer heat wave; Lawrence Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, predicted literally thousands of people would have died. He added, A cyber attack on electrical grids that was sustained for three to four weeks would be like returning to the dark ages.

In the case of the massive cyber attack on Israels Electricity Authority, the Jerusalem Post reported, The incident occurred during two consecutive days of record-breaking winter electricity consumption, with the Israel Electric Corporation reporting a demand of 12,610 megawatts on Tuesday evening as temperatures dipped to below-freezing levels.

Steinitz, according to the Israel National News, added, We need cybertech to prevent such attacks. Cyber-attacks on infrastructure can paralyze power stations and the whole energy supply chain from natural gas, oil, petrol to water systems and can additionally cause fatalities. Terrorists' organizations such as Daesh [ISIS], Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda have realized that they can cause enormous damage by using cyber to attack nations. Cyber-attacks are a great threat and I am certain that they will become a major threat in the next decade.

No, the power grid wasn't hacked and knocked offline

Hold the flipping phone though as Robert Lee, CEO of Dragos Security, pointed out on the SANS Industrial Control Systems security blog. Its not Israels power grid that got hit and taken offline, but the countrys Electric Authority which is regulatory body with about 30 people. The virus Steinitz referenced hit only the Israeli Electric Authority network. The cyber attack was simply ransomware delivered via phishing emails to the regulatory body's office network and it appears in no way endangered any infrastructure, Lee wrote.

But what about Steinitz saying the computers were taken offline? Taking systems offline is not preferable, Lee wrote, but the fact that systems were removed from the network does not necessarily make the incident more severe.

Lee added:

There have so far been no outages reported or any such impact of the attack quantified. It appears, only from what has been reported so far, that the use of the term cyber attack here is very liberal. Malware infections in industrial control system (ICS) networks are not uncommon. Many of these environments use traditional information technology systems such as Windows operating systems to host applications such as human machine interfaces (HMI) and data historians. These types of systems are as vulnerable, if not more so, than traditional information technology systems and malware infections are not novel.

Unless different details emerge, this attack was not like the one on Ukraines power grid  the first reported case of a hacker-caused power outage. SANS ICS Director Michael Assante said the outage was malware enabled, but not likely malware caused. However, the attackers demonstrated planning, coordination, and the ability to use malware and possible direct remote access to blind system dispatchers, cause undesirable state changes to the distribution electricity infrastructure, and attempt to delay the restoration by wiping SCADA servers after they caused the outage. This attack consisted of at least three components: the malware, a denial of service to the phone systems, and the missing piece of evidence of the final cause of the impact.
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AT&T and Verizon  the nation's two biggest carriers  are seeing their traditional U.S. wireless businesses shrink, having suffered from an ongoing price war and declining buyer interest in new smartphones.

To make up for that drop, both carriers are increasingly focused on new areas for growth, including Internet of Things projects, as well as far-flung investments like AT&T's wireless service in Mexico and Verizon's investments in new media through AOL advertising technology.

This movement into new business areas is seen as a long-range mega-trend that was borne out by the latest earnings reports from AT&T this week and Verizon last week. Both companies reported 5% declines in wireless service revenues.

"What we are seeing is that the traditional market that both carriers go after is saturated, since pretty much everyone who has wanted a cell phone already has one," said Chris Antlitz, an analyst at TBR. "They are both trying to grow new businesses and investing heavily in the hope they can offset the price war that's eating into their traditional business."

What's happening instead? "Both companies are getting big into IoT and machine-to-machine and that's a big growth engine. They both have powerful networks spanning the country and global partners so they can provide unique ways to connect their network to devices."

Both AT&T and Verizon have also invested significantly in cloud computing services to enterprises, but "that's been met with mixed success," Antlitz said.

There are even a variety of alternative growth initiatives, including AT&T's decision to buy DirecTV and to invest in wireless service in Mexico, where smartphone saturation is less than the U.S. (As of the end of 2015, AT&T had 8.7 million wireless subscribers in Mexico.)

In AT&T's earnings report for the quarter that ended Dec. 31, the carrier showed a 5% decline to nearly $19 billion in its Mobility division revenue. TBR analyst Steve Vachon attributed the decline to a 15% drop in equipment revenue that stemmed from fewer smartphone and device activations from customers who want to use their devices for a longer duration to avoid the cost of buying a new unsubsidized device.

"TBR believes AT&T's expanding IoT portfolio will be the main driver that will recover Mobility revenue," Vachon added.

At Verizon, which had its earnings call for the same quarter last week, Vachon noted that wireless subscribers are migrating to equipment installment plans, which had a positive impact on equipment revenues. The overall result was that revenue increases from equipment and Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic connections led to a 3.2% increase in consolidated revenue, even as wireless service revenues declined by 5.6% to $17.2 billion.

Also contributing to Verizon's bottom line was $882 million in revenue that benefited from AOL advertising technology  another alternative to the more traditional investment approach to wooing smartphone subscribers. If Verizon were to buy Yahoo, the deal would expand Verizon's footing in Web services and digital media markets, Vachon noted. Verizon acquired AOL in June 2015.

The long-term interest that Verizon has in a 5G wireless network rollout will also support the most futuristic of IoT applications that rely on massive data analytics, such as self-driving cars and complex medical solutions. Vachon noted that the 5G industry standard won't be established until 2020, although Verizon will begin marketing 5G beginning in 2017.

"Laying claim to offering 5G services before competitors will help Verizon distinguish the company from competitors and spur subscriber growth without succumbing to the wireless pricing war," Vachon said.

In its earnings statement, Verizon reported $200 million in IoT revenues from IoT for the quarter and $690 million for all of 2015, an increase of 18% over 2014. AT&T didn't break out the IoT category.

The price war's impact

Even though the price war has gone on for about two years and was initiated by T-Mobile, Antlitz said Sprint is now the leader. That's because Sprint has extended until mid-February a discount plan giving 50% off competitors' monthly rates.

"Sprint has acute issues and needs every subscriber they can get," Antlitz said.

"T-Mobile has been aggressive, but Sprint is now the price leader and is carrying the mantle," he added. "It has definitely become a price war for all the top tier carriers," a group that includes Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

T-Mobile's success has come largely at the expense of Sprint, at least in subscribers, although it is pretty clear that the resulting price war has affected Verizon and AT&T as well, especially by pushing them into new markets.

"T-Mobile is adding the most smartphone subscribers by far and siphoning them off from the other three," Antlitz said.

Ranking the carriers

By both subscribers and financial results, both AT&T and Verizon are far bigger than either Sprint and T-Mobile.

Carriers have recently begun reporting total wireless connections instead of subscribers, since one subscriber could own several devices with separate lines.

As of Dec. 31, Verizon was on top with 141.6 million wireless connections; AT&T had 128.6 million; and Sprint had 58.4 million. T-Mobile has not yet reported earnings for the final quarter of 2015, but TBR estimated it had 63.7 million as of Dec. 31.

In terms of financial results, most analysts noted that "free cash flow" is the most meaningful measure of financial health. Again, Verizon and AT&T come out far ahead.

For all of 2015, AT&T had $15.9 billion in free cash flow, which TBR defines as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures. Verizon had $21.2 billion, and Sprint had a loss of $3.2 billion. TBR estimated that T-Mobile had $100 million, since it has not reported yet.

"There is a clear duopoly by AT&T and Verizon, as both continue to get strong," Antlitz said. "T-Mobile is fighting hard and staking a position as a value play while Sprint has just fizzled away."

Antlitz said a company's cash flow is the most visible way to judge a balance sheet, since accounting practices make it easier to hide problems in other areas. "Cash flow is important since either you have the cash or don't and there's no tinkering with it," he said.

Comparing AT&T and Verizon on IoT

As both AT&T and Verizon focus on IoT, there's so far not much differentiation.

"These two companies are very similar and usually neck and neck in whatever they do," Antlitz said. "You rarely see a margin between them. Verizon is talking more about IoT, but if you look at the underlying story, AT&T is a little ahead."

While Verizon is producing IoT innovations, it also has been secretive about its plans, Antlitz said. "AT&T is not only talking, but showing business results for IoT."
270116PAIS QUESTIONS BPA PILLARS

By Aloysius Laukai



A paramount chief in Tinputz and long-time Politician, JOE PAIS today questioned why there has been no achievement in fulfilling the three pillars of the Bougainville Peace Agreement.

He said even no awareness has been made on the three pillars to the people of Bougainville since the ABG was formed in 2005 and time was ticking.

MR. PAIS told New Dawn FM in Buka today that him as a former combatant was very concerned at the slowness in carrying out any awareness.

He said we have not achieved a Gun Free Bougainville and we are also not ready economically as we cannot sustain the ABGs delivery of service with our internal revenue.

He called on the Momis/Nisira government to make some drastic moves to make Bougainville raise some funds to run its own affairs.

Chief PAIS said that as Bougainville moves into the Referendum mode the need to meet this benchmarks is more crucial.

The Three pillars of the Bougainville Peace Agreement are, REFERENDUM, WEAPONS DISPOSAL and GOOD GOVERNANCE.

New Dawn FM last year produced six awareness films on the three pillars of the Bougainville Peace Agreement and crosscutting issues like Government Corruption, War Widows and Missing Persons.

And they are free and public information that is readily available for distribution.



Ends


Scottish Conservatives are gaining ground on Labour

The Herald reports that the Tories are closing in on Labour in the battle for second place in Mays Holyrood elections  amidst signs that they might finally be starting to overcome long-standing stigma.

Ruth Davidsons troops were polled at 17 per cent in both the constituency and list vote preferences  compared to just 21 an 19 per cent for Labour. John Curtice suggests they could achieve Davidsons stated goal of 20 seats.

This has prompted the Shadow Cabinet to rally around Kezia Dugdale, who reportedly wowed them on a visit to London this week.

Meanwhile, members of the Government are reportedly considering timing Parliaments debate on Trident renewal to cause grief for Scottish Labour, according to Isabel Hardman in the Spectator  although Willie Rennie, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, accuses the Tories of jeopardising the Union.

Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, accused the SNP of scaremongering on the subject last week, and Davidson has taken a staunchly pro-nuclear stance.

She has furthered a differentiation strategy by advocating a clear tax-cutting agenda, backed by an independent report commissioned by the Party.

Welsh Conservatives hit out at Labours 825k ad buy

The Welsh Tories claimed that the Cardiff Bay administration has cranked up its propaganda machine ahead of Mays elections to the Assembly, according to Wales Online.

Andrew RT Davies, who leads the partys Assembly group, has denounced record spending on advertising Labours policies and programmes, calling it a flagrant abuse of taxpayers money  a charge backed up by the TaxPayers Alliance.

The Labour administration dismissed the charge, claiming the surge in advertising was connected to the tourism cycle.

This same week, Davies clashed directly with Carwyn Jones, the First Minister, and other Welsh leaders in a live radio debate, and set out his partys pitch to blue-collar voters.

Perhaps he might seek assurance from the Government that they dont intend to allow devolution to break up cross-border railway services between England and Wales.

Sturgeon refuses to back probe into MPs charity

The First Minister has claimed that it would not be appropriate for her to authorise an investigation into a charity alleged to have been suborned to promoting one of her MPs, according to The Herald.

The Scottish Asian Womens Association was founded by Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, now a Nationalist MP  but gave only three per cent of its substantial, taxpayer-funded income to good causes prior to her resignation as trustee following her election  whilst doing much to promote Ahmed-Sheikh.

Meanwhile, the trend of weekly woe for the Parliamentary SNP continued as the Scottish Daily Mail landed a frontpage scoop that Ian Blackford, its pensions spokesman, has lucrative connexions to a firm under investigation for nuisance cold-calls  despite personally calling for a crackdown on the same.

Also this week the Scottish Police interviewed the office manager of an SNP minister as part of their investigation into the alleged disappearance of 30,000 in donations from Women for Independence, which has led another Nationalist MP, Natalie McGarry, to resign the whip.

SDLP offer Sinn Fein Stalingrad battle for Foyle

A looming contest between Northern Irelands two nationalist parties looks set be hard-fought as the moderate SDLP laid down the gauntlet to their larger rivals, the News Letter reports.

According to the Belfast Telegraph Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, is set to seek a seat in the Assembly from the SDLP-dominated constituency of Foyle, which spans western Londonderry.

The seat has provided a redoubt for the SDLP as Sinn Fein supplanted it as the Provinces major nationalist party, and its loss could be terminal to the partys long-term future.

Nationalists face internal revolt over fracking

Rumblings of dissent from inside the SNP were felt this week, as activists reacted to the decision to block a debate on banning fracking from the Partys conference.

Party leaders stand accused of ignoring thousands of members by SMAUG, the awesomely-named anti-fracking group in the party, whilst environmental campaigners accused them of rigging the conference agenda.

This came as Sturgeon urged the Chancellor to cut taxes on the oil and gas sectors to help alleviate the crisis in the North Sea oil industry.

Welsh Labour under pressure on tuition fees and land sales

The Labour government in Wales has refused to repeat its 2011 election pledge to hold down university tuition fees, according to Wales Online.

Opposition parties have attacked the scheme as unsustainable, and now Jones party has postponed a decision until a review panel reports  in the autumn.

Also this week the First Minister apologised for a land deals scandal which saw property sold off at a greatly underestimated value, at a cost to Welsh taxpayers of some 37 million.

Sillars announces hes backing Brexit (or at least Scoxit)

Jim Sillars, a former deputy leader of the SNP and husband to the late separatist heroine Margo Macdonald, has offered his service to the Leave campaign in the EU referendum.

The Scotsman reports that the former MP, who has since parted ways with the SNP, professes surprise that so many nationalists support membership of the European Union, a profoundly undemocratic organisation.
Corporate taxes are always a sore spot politically  particularly when the rest of us are filing our tax returns. In retrospect, perhaps whoever runs the Chancellors twitter feed wasnt too wise to boast of the victory in securing 130 million in back taxes from Google. The Opposition, as well as various campaigners, have described on the sum as, variously, pathetic, outrageous and an example of corporate cronyism.

The rise of e-commerce has posed a genuine technical problem for tax systems: where does online profit legally live, for tax purposes? Should a company be taxed where the consumer is, where the seller is, where the server is, or  for an advertising firm, as Google essentially is  where the client is, where the sales department is or where the users at whom the advert is targeted are? As the FT reports, the OECD has been thrashing over these very issues for quite some time.

Those questions are further complicated when a digital company is not only selling internationally but has multinational operations. As this blogpost by Maya Forstater makes clear, back of a fag packet calculations of Googles UK profits dont quite provide the full picture  legally speaking, tax authorities also need to discount costs incurred in the US which make those profits possible. And since a major chunk of Googles technical work  making the site work and keeping it working  take place in the US, that eats into what is taxable in the UK. (The picture is further complicated by reports that Google is poised to pay a higher rate in Italy  though given that deal is yet to be concluded, the actual sum the company will pay there remains to be seen.)

Its evident from the fact that back taxes are now being paid that those rules needed to be made more clear and enforced more closely  and that HMRC would do well to look at whether it can present a bill to other firms in the same situation. Its also possible that, as new international agreements come into force, the amount Google and others pay in the UK will rise further in coming years.

Of course, its possible to change the rules if theyre deemed insufficient; Britain remains a sovereign state (in terms of most of its tax code, anyway). But doing so shouldnt happen by means of politicians just deciding that x firm or y person should pay more tax and trying to shame or force them into doing so. A country in which the terms of doing business were arbitrarily determined after the fact by the Government wouldnt be a particularly reliable or secure place to work or live  in fact it would essentially be Putins Russia.

So if you do want Google to pay higher taxes, then you need to seek a change in the law. Presumably the most simple way would be to redefine where a companys activities profits exist for tax purposes  in Googles case that would mean making it that all profits from UK advertising clients and adverts targeted at or seen by UK customers all exist here, and none of those technical costs incurred in the US could be discounted from the companys UK tax bill.

Thats do-able. But we shouldnt be under any illusions that doing it would be without consequences for other firms. There are unintended consequences for all aspects of public policy, and particularly in a field as complex as tax. We might be happy with the extra revenue secured from Google by such an approach. But would we be equally happy for other countries to apply such rules to our own exporters on all sales they make abroad, cutting the amount they currently pay in tax in the UK?

Of course, there is a simpler but less instantly crowd-pleasing way of increasing the amount we bring in from companies that currently have their homes overseas: attract them to move their base to the UK, through a high-skilled workforce, an attractive, low tax economy and a positive attitude to business.
You, as a consumer, no doubt think cheap oil is great. It has reduced the price of gasoline to levels not seen in nearly a decade.

But perhaps nothing so perfectly illustrates the gulf between the interests of Wall Street and Main Street as falling oil prices, because Wall Street definitely doesn't see it the way you do.

In recent weeks, stock prices have moved in tandem with oil prices. Oil prices plunge, so does the stock market. Oil prices rally and stocks surge.

Bloomberg News does an excellent job of explaining why Wall Street has such a different view of oil prices, and it boils down to this: too many institutions made big bets that oil prices would keep going higher. You could say they bet the bank on it.

Shale producers had to borrow a lot of money to fund their operations. That debt paid high interest rates and was eagerly purchased on Wall Street. Sound familiar?

Remember the housing bust?

A similar thing happened during the early 2000s housing boom, when subprime mortgages in particular were prized for their high interest rates. At the time, very few people thought home prices could actually go down. But they did.

In 2008 bad mortgage bets nearly sank the economy. Today's nervousness is due in part to the fear that bad oil bets pose their own systemic risk. So when oil prices get so low that U.S. producers can't be profitable, the people who have bought their debt get very nervous.

Making matters worse, in Wall Street's eyes, consumers are saving lots of money at the gas pump but aren't spending it. Instead, they're saving it for heaven's sake, or paying off their credit cards. So the complaint is that consumers are benefiting from low oil prices but aren't sharing the wealth, so to speak.

Economists rightly point out that this can be a problem. Since the Great Recession, the one area where the U.S. economy has enjoyed strong growth has been in the oil industry. Now that industry appears to be going down for the count, and with it the huge contributions it has made to the nation's economy.

It was hoped that the extra money flowing to consumers through lower gas prices would get spent elsewhere, providing a lift to the economy. That isn't happening, so the net effect is the slowdown in the oil industry has produced a drag on the overall economy.

Weak growth

But instead of blaming consumers for socking away the money they are saving at the gas pump, perhaps economists might better explain why the U.S. economy, absent the recent contribution from the oil industry, is so weak. Why haven't other sectors recovered? And why is it up to consumers to take up the slack?

Maybe one of the reasons Wall Street has been so volatile this month is the realization that there doesn't seem to be much there to backstop the economy when the oil industry isn't providing the economic growth it has over the last few years.

Was it always this way? Definitely not. But in the first quarters of the last two years, the U.S. economy has contracted. Will it be the same this year?

If so, there may be a lot of blame to go around. But it may not be fair to blame American consumers who have finally caught a break in the form of lower gas prices.
270116PAIS THANKS ABG

By Aloysius Laukai



A paramount chief of Tinputz and politician, JOE PAIS today thanked the Autonomous Bougainville Government, headed by President Chief DR.JOHN MOMIS for allocating TWO POINT SIX MILLION KINA to upgrade the 14 kilometre SUNVAHORA to NAMATOA road.

He made these remarks on New Dawn FM when talking on the awareness of the road that his committee is engaged in.

MR. PAIS said that this road is a very important economic road for the inland people of NAMATOA and making funding available to fix this road was well accepted by his people.

He said that many people had left their villages because of the condition of this road and fixing this road will make them return home and work on their Cocoa blocks.

MR. PAIS said that these economic roads are important to the economic survival of the region and must be maintained regularly to keep them in good conditions.



Ends


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The Zika virus is geared up to spread everywhere, all over the Americas, except Canada and Chile, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Sunday. These are the areas in which the 'Aedes aegypti' mosquitoes, are found. With large numbers of people being exposed to the Zika virus, the people here have not developed immunity to it.

"We've got no drugs and we've got no vaccines," Trudie Lang, a professor at the University of Oxford, told Reuters. "It's a case of deja vu because that's exactly what we were saying with Ebola."

Zika virus and its effects on health have not been explored much, although it is linked mostly with pregnant women giving birth to babies with microcephaly. Another link with the rare Guillain Barre syndrome is also possible. The illness can lead to paralysis and death.

Apart from the mosquito, the virus may be transmitted also through sexual contact, though it is not completely clear. It has been spotted in human semen.

Many countries, including Brazil, El Salvador, Colombia, Jamaica and Ecuador, have put out statements calling out for women to delay getting pregnant until more information becomes available, the Washington Post reported.

It is important to prevent mosquito bites and remove breeding areas of the insects, according to WHO.

"All people living in or visiting areas with 'Aedes' mosquitoes should protect themselves from mosquito bites by using insect repellent; wearing clothes (preferably light-colored) that cover as much of the body as possible; using physical barriers such as screens, closed doors and windows; and sleeping under mosquito nets, especially during the day when 'Aedes' mosquitoes are most active," the agency said.

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In a 6-3 majority vote, the Supreme Court ruled that those who are serving life sentences in prison and have no possibility of serving parole for crimes committed when they were juveniles can be permitted to petition for another chance to gain freedom.

On Monday, a decision extended a ruling from 2012, striking down automatic life sentences, and not giving the option of parole for juvenile murderers, reported the Associated Press.

This decision reverses the Louisiana Supreme Court's ruling and puts back the case to the lower courts.

People convicted long ago need to be either given the option to appeal for a new sentence or should be considered for parole.

The court's decision was a response to Henry Montgomery, a Louisiana man who in 1963 at the age of 17 killed a sheriff's deputy in Baton Rouge. He got a life sentence in the jails with no parole. In his trial, the court could not consider arguments that his age was important in their decision.

The court viewpoints were written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberal members, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, reported NBC News. In doing so, Kennedy said the court's decision in Miller v. Alabama made juvenile offenders eligible for parole.

"This would neither impose an onerous burden on the states nor disturb the finality of state convictions," he said, according to The Hill. "And it would afford someone like Montgomery, who submits that he has evolved from a troubled, misguided youth to a model member of the prison community, the opportunity to demonstrate the truth of Miller's central intuition-that children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change."

However, another point is that the ruling does not give any clemency for those who are undertaking life sentences. Instead, they can only consider for parole or appeal for a new sentence.

"The opportunity for release will be afforded to those who demonstrate the truth of Miller's central intuition - that children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change," he added.

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Now you could travel from New York to London in just 11 minutes if you board Canadian Charles Bombardier's newest jet design.

'The Antipode', the new design, is slated to be 12 times as fast as the Concorde and can touch speeds to Mach 24, according to the Daily Mail.

With 10 passengers, it can take less than an hour to zoom over 12,000 miles.

"I wanted to create an aircraft concept capable of reaching its antipode, or the diametrical opposite, as fast as possible," Bombardier said.

It is possible to build the aircraft with heat and pressure-proof materials. "LPM could help reduce heat, but it would not eliminate all of it, even if it's working in perfect flight conditions," he explained.

The Antipode would carry rocket boosters on its wings, and turn any airfield into a flying strip. When it touches a high of 40,000 feet, the accelerators would fall off the plane and come back to base, and would then use a magnetic field to push it on two conductive railings. After that, the rockets would fire and get propelled further into the atmosphere.

Scramjet engines would boost the jet even further, at 10 times the speed of sound.

Hence, over just 32 minutes, the airplane would be able to travel from New York to Sydney, Australia and 11 minutes from New York to London.

Among the drawbacks of the design is developing a stable and reliable scramjet engine, according to Bombardier. They also need to deal with the g-forces passengers would experience.

As the plane is still in the experimental phase, the building of a complete prototype will take many more years.

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At present, Argentina is gripped by an attack of locusts after 60 years, making farmers and fumigators struggle with the problem, says The New York Times.

"It's the worst explosion in the last 60 years," said Diego Quiroga, the agriculture agency's chief of vegetative protection. "It's impossible to eradicate; the plague has already established itself. We're just acting to make sure it's the smallest it can be and does the least damage possible."

Senasa, the government's agricultural inspection agency, is tapped by provincial authorities to decimate the problem in the dry forests of the north. However, these efforts may not be adequate. With locusts becoming a flying throng in the next few days, they threaten the crops and grasslands in the country.

While a few groups of locusts appeared in small pockets last June, they soon expanded due to the mild and rainy weather, which created fertile breeding grounds right till the winter. It led to sudden increase in population in spite of official measures to control them.

The Food and Agriculture Organization had warned last November that climate change would boost the locust plagues in Africa, but Argentina had not been referred to.

"There is clearly an impact in our country, too," Quiroga said. "We are definitely being affected."

The convenient whipping post is former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, with farmers accusing her of not taking the UN agency's warnings seriously. Yet, it is not really understood whether climate change is the cause of the problem.

"We don't know exactly where we're at," said Juan Pablo Karnatz, who represents the farmers of Argentina. "We may have contained some pockets, but it's not a definitive victory. If they fly, it could be disastrous."

Currently, Argentina's agricultural inspection agency says that it has managed to limit 31 outbreaks of locusts in Catamarca, Santiago del Estero and Cordoba, according to Yahoo News.

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U.S President Barack Obama is calling for more research on how to test and treat the mosquito-borne Zika virus that is spreading throughout the Americas.

"The president emphasized the need to accelerate research efforts to make available better diagnostic tests, to develop vaccines and therapeutics, and to ensure that all Americans have information about the Zika virus and steps they can take to better protect themselves from infection," the White House said in a statement Tuesday.

About 60 percent of the U.S. population could be exposed to the virus if it comes to the states during the warmer months, putting pregnant women and women trying to get pregnant at risk. Zika has been linked to a birth defect called microcephaly, which occurs when an infant is born with an abnormally small head.

In Brazil, authorities have seen a drastic increase in the number of cases of microcephaly. In 2015, there were more 3,000 confirmed cases whereas in 2014, the total was 150. Depending on how severe the case of microcephaly is, it can lead several different symptoms, such as mental retardation, seizures, hearing loss and even death. There is no cure for the condition.

U.S. health officials are increasing their efforts to further analyze the relationship between Zika and microcephaly. Research will also include potentially creating a vaccine.

"This is not going to be overnight," Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said in an interview Tuesday, reported by FOX News.

Vaccines can take up to years to develop.

Zika is considered a mild infection that causes symptoms such as a mild fever and rash. In about 80 percent of the cases, there will be little to no symptoms present, which can make it difficult for people to know that they are sick. Infected people are recommended to rest and stay hydrated but there is no actual treatment for it.

The virus is expected to spread to all countries in the Americas with the exception of Canada and Chile, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare
Gaza Speaks: This Is What The Decade-Long Siege Has Done to Us

By Ramzy Baroud

(With reporting from Yousef Aljamal in Gaza)

27 January, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Whenever Mariam Aljamals children hear the sound of thunder at night, they wet their beds. Their reaction is almost instinctive, and is shared by a large number of children throughout the Gaza Strip.

Mariams three children  Jamal, Lina and Sarah - were all born a few years after the Gaza siege was first imposed in 2006, and all of them have experienced at least one Israeli war.

My kids feel scared when the electricity goes off, which is most of the time, says the 33-year-old mother from Nuseirat Refugee Camp, who has a degree in Communication and is currently pursuing her MA. They are still living the trauma of the 2014 offensive. War is still haunting my family, and life has become so hard for us.

Indeed, after years of trying, Mariam is yet to find work. Unemployment in Gaza is the highest in the world, according to the World Bank.

The siege on Gaza was imposed in stages, starting January 2006, when the Hamas movement won the legislative elections in the Occupied Territories. Donors money was immediately withheld, so the new Government could not pay the salaries of its employees. The conventional wisdom, then, was the new Government would soon collapse, and Hamas rival, Fatah, would quickly resume its control over the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The Israeli hope, which was reinforced by the US and also shared by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and many in his party, never came to fruition. To speed up the projected collapse, Israel began sporadic bombardment of Gaza and carried out a sweeping campaign to arrest many of its elected MPs, coupled with a Fatah and Hamas dispute, which eventually turned into street battles in the summer of 2007.

It was then that the siege became complete, now ongoing for ten years. During this time, Fatah resumed its control over the PA in the West Bank, reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah largely failed, the Rafah border has been mostly sealed, and Israel has launched three major wars that have killed thousands.

The destruction in Gaza as a result of three consecutive wars (2008-9, 12 and 14) has been so severe, it has affected almost every aspect of the Strips already dilapidated infrastructure. Power outages, for example, have become part of life in Gaza. If all goes according to plan, Palestinians here have only 8-10 hours, per day, to utilize electricity, and for the rest of the day they suffer in darkness. The UN had already declared that life in Gaza will become uninhabitable by 2020.

But there are aspects of this drama that do not receive a fair share of attention, such as how the siege is hindering human development for an entire generation.

When the siege was imposed, Ahmad Ghazal was only 13-years-old. Now, he is 23 and works at a local library in Gaza City. Life here is not pleasant, he says. In the last ten years my family has suffered the lack of food, clean water, proper medical care and the most basic of human needs. But what frustrates me most is the fact that I am not able to move freely. The Israeli-Egyptian shut down of border crossings has brought our life to a standstill. I feel trapped.

Maher Azzam is 21 years of age and he, too, feels imprisoned. He teaches English at Smart International Centre for Languages and Development and aspires to be a writer. However, he sees life in Gaza as a slow death.

The number of martyrs in the Strip over the course of 10 years has exceeded 4,000, but those innocent people only died once, he says. People who are still alive in Gaza, have been dying every day for a whole decade. But we must stay optimistic and hopeful. We have learned to be creative to survive, to express ourselves and to carry on without submitting, despite Israels ongoing crimes and the silence of the international community.

Heba Zaher, a 21-year-old graduate from the Islamic University, also understands the centrality of hope to the Gaza narrative. She says, We have survived all of these years without losing hope, we certainly cant lose it now. Ten years of hardship have taught us to be stronger, to cope with life and to defeat the siege.

But defeating the siege is not an easy endeavor, as it has affected all aspects of our life, according to Heba. Many students have lost their opportunities of studying abroad. Many patients have died, waiting for the crossings to open so that they may get proper treatment. Construction is tied to the crossings, and life is now more expensive than ever.

The consequences of the siege are far-reaching to the extent that Anas Almassri, a student-intern at the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor in Deir al Balah, says that whatever remained of Gazas middle class is now dwindling. The middle class in Gaza continues to shrink as a result of the diminishing economic opportunities, and this affects the income of families terribly, who cannot send their kids to universities and, therefore, cannot maintain their standard of living.

For Ghada Abu Msabeh, 20, also from Deir Al-Balah, the siege has now become so rooted in the collective psyche of Gazans that it has grown to become the new norm. I think that we have come to the point that the siege has become a part of our daily life and routine, she argues. I honestly cannot imagine what life would be if we are able to move freely or even go for an entire day without power outage. It is honestly difficult to remember how life used to be before the siege.

Hana Salah, 25, a writer and humanitarian worker with Oxfam Italy, tried to seek an opportunity outside Gaza, but she was not successful. I didn't try again because seeing others' attempt and fail was enough to depress me, she says. I feel that we are living in a cage and have no idea what is transpiring outside this cage. I dont know what will happen, but can only hope and pray for Gods mercy.

Some of those who were able to leave to pursue their education outside Gaza, were stuck when they attempted to return for a visit. Rafaat Alareer, a writer and lecturer, embarked on his PhD studies at Universiti Purra Malaysia in 2012, but has been trapped in Gaza since 2014. He came to visit his family as the 2014 offensive destroyed their home and killed his brother. It's been a year and a half now, and I cannot go back because of the siege and the closure of the Rafah crossing, which has been practically shut down for a year.

The same was experienced by Belal Dabour, a young doctor at the Shifa Hospital, who is unable to leave Gaza to gain more experience and attend conferences, which he had hoped could bolster his academic qualifications. I had just graduated when the 2014 war started, he says. It was very traumatic. What I have experienced in one month at Al-Shifa is more than what other doctors would experience in many years of their practice. But now I have no job and like many of my colleagues have no source of income.

Walaa Al-Ghussein, a 23-year-old student at Al-Azhar University, concludes that, although more people now acknowledge the existence of a cruel siege on Gaza, life for Gazans remains the same. We need more than just protests; real pressure needs to be exerted on Israel so that this siege ends. Hundreds of patients are dying, students are losing their opportunities of studying abroad and a whole people are stranded.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada and his latest My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gazas Untold Story. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.




Rebuilding And Expanding The North American Relationship



By Dana Gabriel

27 January, 2016

Countercurrents.org

A major priority for Canadas new prime minister is to reset the relationships with both the U.S. and Mexico. There is a real opportunity for all three countries to recommit to building a North American community. This includes expanding political, security and economic cooperation, as well as greater coordination on issues such as energy and the environment. Further deepening Canada-Mexico ties is one of the keys to strengthening continental relations. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which builds on the commitments of NAFTA could also help take North American trilateral integration to the next level.



During a foreign policy speech before he became Prime Minister, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau emphasized the importance of North America and outlined his plans to improve Canadas relationship with its NAFTA partners. He discussed some of the problems facing Mexico and how Canada could help solve them. Trudeau noted, In many areas, Canadians have the necessary expertise to address Mexicos needs, from the building of public institutions to infrastructure development to civil policing. We should see in Mexico opportunities to develop our relations and our economies. He went on to say, What does this mean for Canada and the Canada-U.S. relationship? In my view, it means that we must once again look at the relationship in a continental context. We must see our own future in the future of North America. Trudeau also proposed creating a special cabinet committee to manage Canada-U.S. relations and promised to work towards reducing barriers to trade and commerce between both countries. Furthermore, he pledged to push for a North American agreement on clean energy and the environment.



In June 2015, the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade issued its report, North American Neighbours: Maximizing Opportunities and Strengthening Cooperation for a More Prosperous Future. The policy paper recommended, The Government of Canada explore opportunities for Canada-Mexico cooperation on governance, security and rule of law issues of mutual interest, such as law enforcement and judicial capacity building. It also identified energy, supply chain infrastructure and harmonizing regulations as some of the areas that should be addressed trilaterally. A news release described how, Trilateral cooperation between Canada, the United States and Mexico on issues of mutual interest holds great promise for increasing North Americas future competitiveness and prosperity. At the same time, the Committee conceded, Geographic, linguistic and other factors have prevented the Canada-Mexico relationship from reaching its full potential. Canadas relationship with Mexico should be an important focus. They concluded that, A stronger partnership with Mexico is a key way to strengthen the trilateral approach to North American relations.



After becoming Canadas new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his commitment to building better continental relations. Some of the key objectives highlighted in the Minister of International Trade Mandate Letter are to, strengthen our relationship with our North American partners, advance bilateral and trilateral initiatives to reduce impediments to trade between our countries and to strengthen North Americas global competitiveness. An important part of the Canada-U.S. relationship is the Regulatory Cooperation Council and the Beyond the Border deal, which promotes economic competitiveness and a perimeter approach to security. In March 2015, both countries signed an Agreement on Land, Rail, Marine, and Air Transport Preclearance, but it has yet to be implemented. Trudeau will get an opportunity to discuss border security, energy, climate change and trade, along with other bilateral issues when he meets with President Barack Obama on March 10 in Washington.



Some of the important priorities listed in the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mandate Letter are to, Improve relations with the United States, our closest ally and most important economic and security partner, and strengthen trilateral North American cooperation. This includes working to lift the Mexican visa requirement, which was imposed by the previous Conservative government and deeply resented in Mexico. Also high on the agenda is developing a continent-wide clean energy and environment agreement, as well as preparing for the next trilateral leaders summit that will be hosted by Canada sometime this year. At the 2014 North American Leaders Summit, the U.S., Canada and Mexico agreed to enhance energy collaboration, develop a continental transportation plan and establish a North American trusted traveler program. Last year, they announced an agreement to expand trusted traveler programs, which is the first steps toward the creation of a North American Trusted Traveler network. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was scheduled to host the 2015 leaders summit, but he postponed the meeting amid tension between Canada and the U.S. over the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was pending at the time.



On November 6, 2015, President Obama formally rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline, arguing that project would not serve the country's national interests and how it would undercut U.S. climate global leadership. While Obama admitted Prime Minister Trudeau was disappointed by the decision, he also pointed out how both leaders, agreed that our close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination. A statement by Prime Minister Trudeau insisted, The Canada-U.S. relationship is much bigger than any one project and I look forward to a fresh start with President Obama to strengthen our remarkable ties in a spirit of friendship and co-operation. Although the decision is a setback in enhancing North American energy integration, it does nevertheless provide an opportunity for both countries to reset relations. Just days after TransCanada was denied a permit for the Keystone XL, they were awarded a contract to build the Tuxpan-Tula Pipeline in Mexico. The company also recently launched a lawsuit over the Keystone decision. Under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, corporations have the power to challenge governmental laws and regulations that restrict their profits.



Before the Obama administration rejected Keystone, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came out against the pipeline. She stressed that, Building a clean, secure, and affordable North American energy future is bigger than Keystone XL or any other single project. Clinton followed this up by unveiling her, Vision for Modernizing North American Energy Infrastructure, which links the continents energy and climate objectives. If elected president, she has vowed to, launch negotiations with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to secure a North American Climate Compact that includes ambitious national targets, coordinated policy approaches, and strong accountability measures. With the creation of the Trilateral Working Group on Climate Change and Energy back in May 2015, the North American partners have already laid the foundation for closer cooperation on energy and the environment.



During his presidency, George W. Bush pursued deeper North American ties through the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Now the Bush Institutes Economic Growth program is continuing with this agenda. Theyve launched a North America Competitiveness Initiative, which aims to further strengthen continental economic integration. In November 2015, they released the North America Competitiveness Scorecard, as a tool to compare the competitive position of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as a region, relative to other major economic regions and countries with large economies. While North America earned a B+, the scorecard also identified areas where improvements could be made. A working group is currently developing a list of policy recommendations on issues regarding energy, human capital, and border infrastructure. The Bush Institute's Director of Economic Growth Matt Rooney stated, The key to the prosperity and security of the American people lies in a closer North American economic relationship  in embracing the de facto North American community that has long existed and shaping it to ensure that it continues to enhance our security and prosperity.



As part of efforts to encourage trilateral cooperation at a state and provincial level, the first-ever Summit of North American Governors and Premiers was held in October 2015. Mexican State Governor, Eruviel Avila Villegas acknowledged, We are living at an historic juncture, where local governments are becoming key transformation agents and the source of international cooperation efforts. The origin of this summit represents a big step toward the building of a North American community. When the event was first announced, a press release explained that the summit would, focus on promoting economic development and trade through improvements and innovations in infrastructure and supply chain management, education, energy technology and culture. Regional collaboration is already taking place through forums such as, the Council of the Great Lakes Region and the Annual Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers. In an effort to expand economic relations and advance cross-border trade, U.S. ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman has sent letters to the governors of all 50 U.S. states urging them to visit Canada. In the coming years, subnational governments will play a even greater role with respect to North American integration.



On October 5, 2015, negotiations concluded on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S., and Vietnam. The massive Pacific Rim trade pact is scheduled to be formally signed on February 4 in New Zealand, but it will still need to be ratified by each of the member nations. Like other trade agreements that have come before it, the TPP will ultimately fail to deliver on the promise of economic growth and prosperity. The controversial deal poses significant threats to internet freedom, food safety, public health and the environment. It includes NAFTA-style investor rights that allows corporations to sue governments over decisions that may affect their future profits. The agreement contains thousands of pages of legal text and technical language, which covers a lot more than just trade. With the U.S., Canada and Mexico all a part of the TPP, it amounts to a complete renegotiation of NAFTA through the backdoor.



The TPP marks another step towards greater regional cooperation and integration. The U.S.-driven trade deal changes how member countries manage their economies and businesses. It sets the rules for a new global economic order, which would further erode national sovereignty. The TPP together with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are part of plans to merge North America with Asia and Europe.



Dana Gabriel is an activist and independent researcher. He writes about trade, globalization, sovereignty, security, as well as other issues. Contact: beyourownleader@hotmail.com. Visit his blog at Be Your Own Leader




Hindutva Fanatics Threaten Sandeep Pandey In IIT-BHU Campus

By Subhash Gatade

27 January, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Close on the heels of the planned disruption of a speech by Siddharth Varadrajan, noted journalist and ex-editor of The Hindu on the Allahabad University campus by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has come the news that Sandeep Pandey, who has been working as a guest faculty in IIT-BHU for the last two and half years was recently threatened allgegedly by members of the same fraternity on the Banaras Hindu University campus itself.

It may be added here that Sandeep Pandeys services were abruptly terminated by the university on the charge of being a naxalite and being involved in anti-national activities. Looking at the aggressive manner in which members of the Hindutva fraternity seem to be moving it is quite possible that their threats will not remain merely at the level of words and one definitely perceives a danger to his well being at their hands.

As it is apparent that despite facing wrath of students and youth from across the campuses for its planned attempts to saffronise educational institutions  which is very much evident in the organised resistance put forth by students across the country on the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula or the historic strike by students of FTII which received national-international support and similar other cases  the BJP government at the centre is hell bent on furthering its agenda of exclusion and hate in education in very many ways and silencing of critical voices forms an important part of this overall strategy.

Pasted below is a press release issued by Sandeep Pandey himself :

Press Release : 25 January 2016 IIT-BHU has recently terminated my contract on the charges of being a naxalite and being involved in anti-national activities. Ive a months notice and have time until 5 February, 2016 to wind up. Today, on 25 January, 2016, at 7:30 pm two people associated with RSS Ravi Singh, who works in an IT firm in Bengaluru and is a 2004 IIT-BHU alumni and Awdhesh Dubey, a Geophysics alumni, encountered me in the IIT guest house. Ravi Singh was especially aggressive and said I should not discuss questions like beef in class. I said I discussed the vegan philosophy and think students should be exposed to varied thought. He said if Ive to discuss such things I should do it outside the university and instead I should discuss about Indian culture in my class. I said you cannot dictate a professor what he should or should not teach. Then he became more aggressive and started threatening me in a fascist way by saying I dont have the freedom to decide what Ill teach. I told him that the course has been duly approved by the IIT authorities and if he has any problems with the Development Studies course he should talk to the Director of the Institute. I decided to lodge a complaint with the local Lanka Police Station against Ravi Singh and Awadhesh Dubey for threatening me. Ravi Singh is also going to lodge a counter-complaint against me. Sandeep Pandey, Visiting Faculty, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, IIT, BHU, Varanasi

Contact mobile of IIT-BHU students: 8795217652 (Hemant Kannaujia), 7753066654 (Santosh Kumar)

e-mail: ashaashram@yahoo.com




Eliminate Tax Havens!

By Chandra Muzaffar

27 January, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Oxfam, the global aid and development confederation that focuses upon poverty, in a briefing paper launched on 18 January 2016 has shown how the global inequality crisis has reached new extremes.

Quoting Credit Suisse, it reiterates that the richest 1% have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together.Titled An Economy for the 1% Oxfams briefing paper reveals that In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people --- the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010. It elaborates that  the wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years since 2010 --- that is an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ( $ 542bn) to $1.76 trillion while the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period --- a drop of 41%.

These figures merely underscore an obvious truth. As Oxfam puts it, There is no getting away from the fact that the big winners in our global economy are those at the top. Our economic system is heavily skewed in their favour and arguably increasingly so. Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.

This is happening for a variety of reasons. In proportional terms, the larger share of the income of a nation has been going to the owners of capital rather than to workers. In fact, almost everywhere the workers share has been decreasing significantly. While many workers have seen their wages stagnate, there has been a huge increase in salaries for those at the top. Economic policy in recent decades has also emphasized liberalization, deregulation and privatization which have brought much greater benefits to the rich and powerful. This emphasis is part and parcel of a general enchantment with the market which is largely ideological.

Within these market dominated economies, it is the financial sector that has grown most rapidly in recent decades, and now accounts for one in five billionaires. In this sector, the gap between salaries and rewards and actual value added to the economy is largerthan in any other. A recent study by the OECD showed that countries with oversized financial sectors suffer from greater economic instability and higher inequality. Certainly, the public debt crisis caused by the financial crisis, bank bailouts and subsequent austerity policies has hit the poorest people the most.

This is why any attempt to reduce gross economic inequalities must address issues in the financial sector. Of these issues, Oxfam in its briefing paper has focused upon the global spiders web of tax havens and the industry of tax avoidance, which has blossomed over recent decades. Tax havens and tax avoidance lead to a situation where governments are forced to cut back on critical public services. This is happening both in the Global North and the Global South. In the Global North, welfare programmes are downsized while in the Global South efforts aimed at overcoming dire poverty, building primary schools and expanding basic health care are severely hampered by shrinking government budgets --- a victim of the rich escaping the tax net.

Oxfam provides a concrete example of this. Almost a third (30%) of rich Africans wealth--- a total of US 500bn --- is held offshore in tax havens. It is estimated that this costs African countries 14bn a year in lost tax revenues. This is enough money to pay for healthcare that could save the lives of 4 million children and employ enough teachers to get every African child into school. According to one source 7.6 trillion of individual wealth --- more than the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK and Germany --- is currently held offshore.

Tax havens, Oxfam argues, should be brought to an end. Only if this happens will it be possible to overcome inequalities. The governments of the world should work together towards this goal. It will require making some significant changes to domestic tax law and enacting new rules for global finance. It is the sort of change that will take time. But if there is the will it can be done.

Through its clarion call to bring tax havens to an end, Oxfam has thrown a challenge to the entire human family. Persuade governments to eliminate an institution which is a bane upon equality and justice. If we dont, our grandchildren will inherit a world where there is greater divisiveness and destruction than what we are now witnessing.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

Malaysia.

27 January 2016.




Not By Bread Alone: Concerning Dostoevskys Grand Inquisitor

By Gaither Stewart

27 January, 2016

Greanvillepost.com

One of a series of proposed images of Dostoevsky and of his works for a new Moscow metro station,

postponed because of fears they could cause suicides.

Rome: In the first line of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevskys famous poem, often referred to as the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan Karamazov says to his brother Alyosha that a preface is necessary to the unwritten story he is about to relate. Then in the third line of chapter V in Part Two of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Ivan asks rhetorically For what kind of a writer am I?, implying that although he, Ivan, is not even an artist, his creator, the author of the written book, Fyodor Dostoevsky, is the greatest of all.

The writer and/or his character, Ivan, seem to be informing future readers that this novel is Dostoevskys greatest work.

Is that what Dostoevsky is about in these lines? Is he reaching out of the book toward future generations of readers? Is he begging for praise or simply praising himself? Most likely all three. For like most writers he is vain, vain about his creations and their legitimacy. Especially vain about this novel, the work of three years and his most ambitious work. Whatever this great writer had in mindthere is always a chasm between a writers unarticulated ideas and the words that he puts on paperfrom the readers point of view he certainly succeeds.

Meant to crown his entire incredible work with this novel, Dostoevsky first did meticulous background studies because as he himself recorded THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV was his most difficult book. During those three years of the writing he was afraid his creative force would not suffice or that he would die before completing it.

The older I get, the harder it is, he wrote in his diaries. For in this book he had the Karamazovs to deal with! The performances of his creationsthe good (Alyosha), the cynical (Ivan) and the ugly Fyodor)could not be banal lest he, their creator, be a failure.

Above all, it had to be a work of art too, and that, he wrote very realistically and truthfully, is a most difficult and risky affair: it (the novel) should elevate and affirm my name, otherwise I have no hope.

In other words, he who had been sickly, indecisive and an addicted gambler to boot, was betting his creative life on it. So vanity or notwhich is forgivable in any casethis book was both his commitment and his desperation. In his turbulent and chaotic life Dostoevsky, like his creations, had already shown both his flawed character and his ambitious creative-intellectual force.

Dostoevskys characters, all parts of his complex person, are always at odds with and striving against their unstable identities; in this sense Dostoevsky resembles more modern authors than himself, especially in the philosophical and existential realm. All of his characters seem to be desperate in their seeking what they have in common with Dostoevsky himself. Just as one hundred years later, the Italian Alberto Moravia proclaimed that writers had to be desperate, as if to say, if not what would they write about? Such is the direction of Dostoevskian characters, dark, unformed, withholding, moving around in mysterious restricted places where anything can happen and in extremely short and cramped periods of time, where nothing is ever certain, everything is in flux, everything is innuendo, even ideas which are the essence of Dostoevskys work. He is simply too Russian to explain all the mysteries, even if he knew the answers. For the hand of God and/or Russian sudba (fate) had to play their role at the end  even though sudba too is as volatile as the soul of man.

The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is the culmination of the novel THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, just as THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is the culmination of Dostoevskys lifetime work, his final word on the question of mans freedom.

In pure Dostoevskian style, the Grand Inquisitor is more an idea than a story. Even the narrator of the poem, Ivan, fades from the readers mind. His interlocutor, Alyosha, hardly exists; he only smiles from time to time (mystically of course) and says, I dont understand, Ivan! So the legend is really not even a legend; Dostoevsky too calls it a poem. A poem-accusation against the organized Church, in this case and time, against the Roman Catholic Church.

The story line is threadbare: in the sixteenth century Christ returns to earth to the city of Seville where people immediately recognize Him and want to benefit from His miracles. The ninety-year old Grand Inquisitor who runs things in Seville also recognizes Him; there is no doubt in his mind about His identity. Immediately the priest has Him arrested. At night in His cell the old man interrogates Him. The interrogation is an accusation-monologue. Christ never speaks. The Grand Inquisitor (that is, Ivan the narrator and one part of Dostoevsky) prefaces his terrible charges with one question: Why did you come back?

In this chapter of twenty-one pages the Grand Inquisitor articulates the Churchs devastating message: God is God and the Church is the Church; the Church does not believe in God and man no longer needs God; the Church promotes His work like a product and uses His name, but it renounces Christ. The Church does Gods work for Him; it is a Church without God.

After threatening to burn Him at the stake like a heretic, the Grand Inquisitor is disconcerted by Christs silence. The prisoner only looks at him and then at the end quietly kisses the old mans bloodless lips with a kiss that the reader knows will burn for all eternity.

The old man starts, something moves on his lips, he goes to the door, opens it and tells Him: Go and never return again.

The prisoner leaves.

That is the story line.

Yet the meaning, the idea behind the story, is terrible. With Christs wordless departure, Dostoevsky, whose faith is always shaky, pronounces the divorce between faith and the Church. Neither Ivanwho pronounces Dostoevskys famous existentialist claim that if God is dead, all is permittednor Dostoevsky himself in reality attack Christ; they attack the Church. Ivan does not defend his atheism; he defends true belief. Dostoevsky charges the Catholic Church of having robbed Christs message for its own imperialistic ends. In substance, the writer charges all churches and organized religions of what was then called Caesarismthe rule by force of one charismatic leader.

The priest-Grand Inquisitor is not a believer. He does not believe in God and refuses to hear or listen to the God-Man. You have no right to add one single word to what you have already said, he tells his prisoner.

He does not believe in man either and insists that the Christian doctrine of free choice between good and evil is too great a responsibility for man. Christs man could choose freedom but if he did his conscience would torture him because of his sins. The Christianity offered by Christ is a religion of pain and suffering. A religion for only a few. For an elite of the strongest.

The Grand Inquisitor points out that man can choose submission instead. Man, he affirms, prefers comfort, or even death, to the freedom of choice between good and evil. Man only wants to be happy. He wants earthly bread. And that, he tells Christ, is the Churchs concern: mans happiness on earth.

The Grand Inquisitor-Procurator claims that the Church loves man more than does the creator who placed on mans shoulders a too heavy burden to bear. He charges that Christ overestimated the strength of his creation when he gave him the freedom of choice: You acted without pity for him, you demanded too much from him.

The religion Christ created is impossible for the masses. It is aristocratic. Ceasarist. Today we would be speaking of the 1%. Religion, the old man claims, must be for the masses. It must comfort all, the ignorant and the weak and the mean and the sick. It must be vulgar, as the 1% knows. Instead of the freedom and the uncertainty and spiritual suffering that Christ offers, the Church of the masses offers happiness. Since the weak and hungry and mean masses are not interested in heavenly bread, that Church promises them only earthly bread.

The Grand Inquisitor and his Church have chosen for man. For man, weak robot. The Churchs work, he says, is to correct Christs work. The earth is the reign of mediocre happiness. None of your great spiritual aspirations! he says. Oh yes, men will have to work. But then during their leisure we organize their lives like a childs game, childish songs and dancing. We even let them sin. (To this writer, this recalls the political programs of contemporary political parties.)

Here appears the highest point of Dostoevskys dialectical genius: he is for man, his whole idea is the human problem; he believes that godlessness leads to the denial of the freedom of the spirit to be a true individual. He foresaw revolution in Russia against the 1% ofhis time; he was in the Socialist camp and wanted revolution. But he wanted a revolution with God and Christ. Religious philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, labels Dostoevsky a socialist with Christ.

Dostoevsky aspired to a spiritual Communism in which all would be responsible for each other.

He opposed the idea of an aesthetic state, of the aesthetic socialism the Grand Inquisitor proposes. In that sense too his novels are tragedies of the human conditiondouble tragedies in that they are never resolved, no more than are his great mysteries. No more than did he resolve his dubious form of Christianity. Yet universal ideas stand behind those decisions he makes. In his revolutionary attack on the Church, he is attacking the Grand Inquisitors in every church, in every state.

Dostoevsky was the embodiment of the very Russian idea of vsyechelovechnost, the idea of an all-human brotherhood. Berdyaev suggests that the Internationalism (of Soviet Communism) was in reality a distortion of the Russian idea. Hence, at least until the Russian Revolution and the great wars of the twentieth century nationalism was largely foreign to Russian mentality. (That is something for the contemporary imperialist US Empire to think aboutif they only had some real understanding of others!)

In his interrogation-monologue the Grand Inquisitor reminds Christ of His rejection of the three temptations in the desert. First, He refused to use earthly bread to convince man to follow Him. Then, He refused to use authority to force man to follow Him because He wanted to be loved freely. Third, He refused to use miracles.

The Grand Inquisitors Church instead is founded precisely on Christs rejections: on earthly bread, authority and miracle. Man on earth wants three things, the Grand Inquisitor insists: someone to bow down to, someone to hand over his conscience to, and a way to unite everyone in one common anthill. The Christianity of his earthly Church is a Church for all, not only for the strong. For love of man, the Church betrayed God. According to the Grand Inquisitor the figure of Christ is a symbol to hide the fact that the Church is not spiritual but social.

As the oral poem develops Alyosha grasps that the great secret of Ivans Church is that it does not believe in God. Yet for Ivan and for Alyosha, for the Church and for all Dostoevskys characters, God is always the question. Disorder and anxiety are everywhere, in every character, caused by the question of God. Is He there or not? The mystery in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is God.

In this big book an enormous number of events take place in a very few days. The canvas is peopled by a vast cast. All with God on their lips. Everyone from the simplest of fools to the intellectuals to the monks have deep thoughts about God. Danger threatens, mystery reigns, presentiments and fates, crimes and passions, and secrets abound, but everywhere God is the question. If God does not exist, all is permitted!

In this work Dostoevsky does not question the existence of God, as Nietzsche was soon to do. Nor is his Christianity the vague type that Kierkegaard depicted. Dostoevsky is not interested in transforming the particular into the universal, or vice versa. He does not attack Christ-God; he attacks the Church. His Church calls to mind the contradiction between the life of St. Francis of Assisi who opted for God and poverty and lived in simplicity and talked with birds and the institutions his followers constructed: a super rich order and the town of Assisi turned to gold, all in His name.

The Existentialist Dostoevsky does not search for the secrets of creation. He does not delve into the idea of two Creator Gods as others have. He does not search for the secret of two humanities. His characters do not note that in Genesis God created one man on the sixth day and another on the eighth day, and that Adam, the man He formed on the eighth day, the man who could eat from all the trees except the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but did eat and that in such a manner the confusion began between a good strain and an evil strain of man.

Already here the mystery of mankind begins. Through most of his work Dostoevsky examines the evil strain, but he does not question God. Instead he questions the Church. The Church that in The Grand Inquisitor does not believe in God.

Today I find it strange that Ivan does not bring up the two CREATOR GODS and the two strains of man theories History shows that monotheism is not for all men. Primitive peoples saw the need for more. A plurality of gods, sometimes one against the other. A system of spiritual checks and balances. Besides, some philosophers contend that God needs man as much as man needs God. Even the God of the Old Testament complained through the mouth of His prophet Isaiah that He was a slave of man. That He needed help.

But the question remains that if there are twoor moreCreator gods, one good and one evil, which is the God of the Christian Church? Or, as Dostoevsky rightly says, does it have none? For the God of the Old Testament is truly terrible, committing all the sins He forbade to man. He blessed theft and treachery. He was jealous, no other God but Him! He fornicated with any woman He wanted under the eyes of their husbands. He favored genocide. He lied and made false promises. He cursed man in every way. And though He has absolutely nothing in common with Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Churchs Bible He even sent His own son to hang on a cross. And moreover, why did He always hide his face? Some think because He was the evil God, ashamed to show His face.

Dostoevsky continually mixes countless details and minute particulars with great universal truths. The Church of the Grand Inquisitor is the Roman Catholic Church of his times, the Church in incessant dispute with Russian Orthodoxy for the soul of European man. The sickness of the Church he attacks is an old sickness. The sickness infecting organized religions preceding Dostoevskys age that has now burgeoned in our times. Today, religion and God and Allah are on the lips of all, of believers, false believers and non-believers in every part of the world who claim to know the right way and the true God or gods. And perform the vilest actions in His name.

I would transpose the Grand Inquisitors society into our times in the guise of the immoral, big brother, capitalist, imperialist, Orwellian state which is leading inexorably to the death of the nation-state and democracy, the result of the aesthetic choice of earthly bread and non-freedom of the brainwashed herd, as opposed to Dostoevskys ethical choice of oneself and the freedom of the thinking, truly social man.

Here are some suggestions for readings for getting to the heart of Dostoevsky:

1. DOSTOEVSKY, Henri Troyat, Fayard, Les Grandes Etudes Litteraires, 1960. In English: FIREBRAND: the life of Dostoevsky, Roy Publishers, 1946.

2. THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM, Nicolas Berdyaev, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1960. (Maybe in out-of print books.)

3. LES HUMEURS DE LA MER-INTERSECTION, Vladimir Volkoff, Julliard/ LAge dHomme, 1980. (For thoughts on the idea of two Creator-gods and two strains of humanity.) See Internet for English translations.

4. EITHER/OR, Kierkegaard, Doubleday, 1959. In volume two, the Or part, in the chapter on Equilibrium, the author discusses freedom in Dostoevskian terms: man can choose himself as an individual, and thus choose freedom. The choice of freedom is an ethical choice, of oneself, as opposed to the aesthetic choice, which is the life of earthly bread the Grand Inquisitor offers. Nothing is further removed from Dostoevsky than the choice of the aesthetic life. Kierkegaard says that the more one lives aesthetically, the more requirements his life makes, and if merely the least of these is not fulfilled, he is dead.

5. AS MUCH as I admire Harold Bloom and his THE WESTERN CANON, I do not take to his reduction of Dostoevsky to his nihilists and his preaching anti-Semitism, obscurantism and the necessity of human bondage. In his many references to the writer, Bloom continually misses the point of Dostoevskys dialectic, and that his message was on the contrary human freedom.

Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, servesinter aliaas our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.




PA's Complicity With The Israeli Occupying Power

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

27 January, 2016

Countercurrents.org

The Palestinian political class has come to terms with the Israeli occupation. The Oslo Accords turned the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a subcontractor of the occupier, and the top brass feels comfortable with this situation in Palestine.

Right from the start, I opposed the so-called peace process because of the content of the documents Yasser Arafat had to sign. I already wrote in 1994 that the Gaza-Jericho Agreement would mean the beginning of the end of an independent Palestinian state. Palestine would be divided into Bantustans, today I would call them fenced in ghettos, which are guarded by the Israeli occupation regime. If the situation gets out of control, they are also bombarded. My worst "dreams" have come true. For the Palestinians, the Oslo Accords have become a nightmare

Nelson Mandela would have never accepted a deal with the South African Apartheid Regime for a few meaningless and hollow political symbols as Yasser Arafat did. And President Abbas has perfected this system of indirect rule and control to the detriment of his people.

The daily brutality of the Israeli occupation regime calls for an adequate answer before the Israeli colonial regime has incorporated the remains of Palestine. The Israeli Apartheid and occupation regime must go and should be replaced by a binational democratic state for all Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn Germany. He runs the bilingual blog http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de/




Back cover photograph on HRW report

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Download HRW report HERE

The Human Rights Watch (HRW), of the worlds most influential advocacy groups, has said that India was a weak proponent of human rights at the UN in 2015. Quoting examples, it says, In March, India voted in support of a Russian-backed resolution to remove benefits for same-sex partners of UN staff and abstained on Human Rights Council resolutions on Syria, North Korea, and Ukraine, and voted against resolutions on Iran and Belarus. Giving more instances, its new report says , In July, India abstained on a UN Human Rights Council resolution that called for Israeli accountability in the 2014 Gaza War. In fact, it adds, The Indian government said it had abstained from voting because the resolution included a reference to bringing Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC), which India considered intrusive.The report notes, with the exception of USAs Barack Obama, most other world leaders who visited India in 2015, or hosted Prime Minster Narendra Modi in their capitals showed any willingness to raise human rights concerns publicly, deferring all too readily to Indias sensitivity to perceived intervention in its domestic affairs.The report wonders why, despite its democratic traditions, India has not yet emerged as an effective proponent of human rights. It adds, For instance, in October, when India invited all 54 leaders of the African Union to a summit in New Delhi, it ignored calls by the ICC to arrest Sudans president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who faces charges of war crimes and genocide in Darfur.The report says, India is in the company of China, Ethiopia and Russia in setting the ball running for a less recognized but disturbing and destructive global trend: the adoption by many countries of repressive new non-governmental organization (NGO) laws and policies targeting individuals and groups that try to hold governments to account, including social media users, civil society groups, and the funders who back them.Further, the report says, India is in the company of Cambodia, Egypt, and Tajikistan for justifying restrictions on foreign contributions to civic groups as necessary to fight terrorism. Titled World Report 2016: Facts of 2015, the report was released in New York on Tuesday.Taking strong exception to laws that provide immunity to security forces and authorities, the report notes how Indian authorities ignored a May report by the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, even as expressing regret that India had not repealed or at least radically amended Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, environmental groups have been particularly victimized because of perceived challenges to official development plans, the report says, adding, at the same time, Modi did little to improve respect for religious freedom, protect the rights of women and children, and end abuses against marginalized communities.Even as the prime minister celebrated Indian democracy abroad, back home civil society groups faced increased harassment and government critics faced intimidation and lawsuits, the report says, pointing to how dozens of writers protested against sectarianism and the silencing of dissent by returning prestigious literary awards bestowed by the Sahitya Akademi.Artists, academics, filmmakers, and scientists also added their voices to the protest. Economists and business leaders warned that the Modi government risked losing domestic and global credibility if it failed to control Hindu extremism and restrictions on freedom of expression, the report states.
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By Zach Osowski

INDIANAPOLIS  A bill to allow Sunday alcohol sales once again failed to gain approval in the Indiana legislature. This time lawmakers didn't even vote it out of committee.

House Bill 1399, authored by Rep. Tom Dermody, R-LaPorte, would have allowed Indiana stores to sell alcohol on Sunday for the first time in 80 years.

But members of the House Public Policy Committee, citing concerns about the law being unfair for small businesses, voted the bill down 8-5 Wednesday.

"We have to have a level playing field," said Rep. Jim Lucas, R-Seymour. "And we're nowhere close to that with this bill."

The bill would have allowed all stores to sell alcohol and would have placed restrictions on where alcohol could be displayed inside grocery and pharmacy stores.

Liquor store representatives opposed the bill, saying it would allow big-box stores to sell alcohol like milk.

Liquor stores are more closely regulated than grocery stores, which, the store owners argued, was unfair.

The liquor stores supported last year's bill, which would have forced hard liquor to be sold from behind a counter at all stores. This year's bill took that stipulation out, which Patrick Tamm, president and CEO of the Indiana Association of Beverage Retailers, said was unfair.

"Let's make one thing clear: this had nothing to do with hard liquor," Dermody said, after some committee members expressed concerns about where hard liquor would be located with the new law. "This was about small businesses versus big-box stores. This was about letting people do on Sunday what they already do six days a week. I'm disappointed it's not going to get out of committee."

Rep. Terri Austin, D-Anderson, was a co-author on the bill. She said it was about convenience for shoppers, who tend to shop more on Sundays.

Austin said Indiana is the only state that allows residents to drink at bars, restaurants or sporting events on Sunday but doesn't allow carry out sales.

The future of a Sunday sales bill going forward is uncertain, with Dermody not seeking re-election in 2016. He has been trying to get something passed unsuccessfully for a few years now.

Dermody is also the chair of the Public Policy Committee. Current vice-chair Rep. Timothy Wesco, R-Osceola, voted against the bill.
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By Zach Osowski

INDIANAPOLIS  A bill allowing legislative employees to carry handguns inside the Indiana Statehouse gained approval in the Senate Tuesday.

Sen. Jim Tomes, R-Wadesville, is the author of Senate Bill 259, which says legislative employees and members of the Legislative Services Agency can carry a handgun inside the Statehouse, provided they are legally allowed to do so.

The bill passed 36-13.

Tomes said the people who work for the legislature work long nights and sometimes have to walk a few blocks to their car. Since only lawmakers are allowed to have firearms inside the Statehouse, Tomes said employees have no way of protecting themselves if they are attacked.

"A lot can happen. It's a violent world," Tomes said.

The law does not apply to state employees or the media. It will specifically apply to those employed by the legislative branch.

Several Democrats voiced concerns over the bill, including Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, who feared it could lead to more accidents in the Statehouse. He said the bill could allow about 200 more people to have a gun inside the Statehouse.

Sen. Jim Arnold, D-LaPorte, a former sheriff, said he understands what Tomes is trying to accomplish. His concern lies with the fact the bill does not require any type of training course for employees who want to carry a handgun.

"We need to have a training program," Arnold said. "If people want to carry a handgun, they need to know what they're doing."

Currently, Indiana residents only need to file an application and pay a fee in order to get a handgun permit.

Tomes said he would encourage anyone thinking about getting a handgun to go through training, but didn't require it in the bill. An amendment requesting a mandatory training program was rejected on Monday.

The bill now moves over to the House for further consideration.
By Zach Osowski

INDIANAPOLIS -- After more than five hours of testimony and debate, the Senate Rules Committee advanced a bill that would add sexual orientation to Indiana's civil rights law.

Senate Bill 344, authored by Sen. Travis Holdman, R-Markle, passed out of committee by a 7-5 vote. It will now go to a full vote in the Senate, where it faces an uncertain future.

"Its fate is unknown at this time," Senate President David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said before voting in favor of the bill. "But it will get a hearing."

Holdman and others admitted the bill needs some work, but those in favor of the bill said they want to see it get a full vote.

"This is a part of the process," Sen. Brandt Hershman, R-Buck Creek, said. "This is a boat to get us to the next point."

All four Democrats on the committee, as well as Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, voted against the bill.

The vote came after four hours of testimony on SB 344 and Senate Bill 100, which was not called for a vote.

Both bills were authored by Holdman, who said this has been a very long process trying to balance civil rights for the LGBT community, which he said is "the right thing to do," with his deep convictions that religious freedom needs to be protected.

While Senate Bill 100 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity, SB 344 dropped the gender identity stipulation. If the bill is passed as written, the issue of transgender individuals would instead be studied over the summer.

The lack of gender identity's inclusion was the reason the Democrats said they voted nay.

"We have to include the transgender community if we're going to have equal rights for all," Sen. Tim Lanane, D-Anderson, said before voting no.

SB 344 also has extensive carve-outs for religious organizations, including a few amendments that were added to the bill that broadened those exemptions. Holdman said various groups, such as adoption agencies and pregnancy centers, came to him asking for inclusion. Holdman said the groups are religious but not necessarily affiliated to a church and still deserve protections. The amendments passed along party lines.

Although it became emotional, the testimony was civil, as those for and against the bill traded places at the podium. Some said both bills would irreparably harm Indiana's religious freedom, while others claimed the bills didn't go far enough in their protections.

Indiana Chamber President Kevin Brinegar said passing either SB 100 or SB 344 was important for the Indiana economy.

"Normally we don't comment on social issues," Brinegar said. "But this debate has a profound impact on Indiana's economic outlook."

Even those in support had concerns about SB 344 because of the lack of rights for transgender individuals. Brinegar and Indiana University Law Professor Deborah Widiss were just two examples of people in favor of updating civil rights, but against SB 344.

Both Widiss and Brinegar said the omission of gender identity made the law incomplete. Widiss also had a problem with the multitude of carve-outs for religious organizations.

"The religious exemptions are unusually broad," Widiss said. "Especially compared to other states."

She even went on to say, after questions from Lanane, that she believed the law could possibly allow some hospitals to deny service to gay people because of the hospitals' religious convictions.

Barronnelle Stutzman, a florist from the state of Washington, and Melissa Klein, a cake baker from Oregon, both testified against the bill. Their stories were similar. Both of them were subject to lawsuits after refusing to work a same-sex wedding because of their religious beliefs.

"People said horrible things to us. We lost our dream business," Klein said, breaking down at the podium during her testimony. "Please don't pass these bills."

Members of the LGBT community were against the bills but because they believed they don't far enough in their protections. Rhiannon Carlson, transgender woman who is also an Iraq War veteran, said the bills are shameful.

"These bills are cowardly," Carlson said. "I find it ironic that veteran status would be included but not transgender individuals."

Korvin Bothwell, a transgender man, said the General Assembly doesn't need a study committee to know transgender people have a lot on their plate.

"Some people have a problem with people like me," Bothwell said, "and this is why we need protections."
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Brenda Tucker

Oakland City, Indiana

One of the reasons our infrastructure is shot (Flint water, etc.) is because of special interests groups!

Twenty-five years ago every Republican signed the Grover Norquist tax pledge, with a strategy to work for Grover Norquist instead of "we the people." Remember Norquist's quote? My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years to get it down to the size where they can drown it in the bath tub!

What he forgot to tell us was in the process of this chain of events they gave more tax breaks to the top 1 percent and cut our tax dollars that could have helped fix our infrastructure! I don't know about the rest of the voters but I want a President who is for "we the people, by the people, with liberty and justice for all."
About Outdoor Mom

Im Martha, the Outdoor Mom. Before becoming a mom, I was the public relations director at Omni Mount Washington Resort and Bretton Woods. Im an alpine, Nordic, and telemark skier, and I love to snowshoe, hike, and ride my road, mountain, and cyclocross bikes. Now, my husband and I are sharing the outdoor life with our daughter and son, and loving it. Get outside with me, join us for a family adventure, and share what inspires you to explore the outdoors!


SPREAD MESSAGE OF INDIAN NATIONAL SECURITY TO AS MANY INDIANS AS POSSIBLE. LET US FREE INDIA OF CORRUPTION BY SPREADING THE MESSAGE TO AS MANY PEOPLE.MANY OF THE ARTICLES HAVE BEEN RECEIVED AS FORWARDED MAIL FROM VARIOUS FRIENDS . SHOULD SOME FACTS BE NOT CORRECT , YOU ARE REQUESTED TO PUT IT IN REMARKS BELOW THE ARTICLE. THIS WILL ENSURE A MORE BALANCED PERSPECTIVE OF THE SUBJECT DISCUSSED.
Dato Paduka Awang Haji Hamdan bin Haji Abu Bakar, Deputy Minister at the Prime Ministers Office, in a group photo with Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Prime Minister of Malaysia, and other ministers during the launching of the conference. BERNAMA

Brunei remains vigilant against terrorism threatson: January 27, 2016 THE government of Brunei Darussalam will continue to be vigilant against terrorism or terror-related activities happening in the country, especially in the midst of the Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTF) phenomenon.This was said by Dato Paduka Awang Haji Hamdan bin Haji Abu Bakar, Deputy Minister at the Prime Ministers Office in a statement at the International Conference on De-radicalisation and Countering Violent Extremism 2016 (IDC 2016) held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from January 25 to 26.He said, In the case of Brunei Darussalam, in order to effectively address radicalisation and violent extremism, we must not undermine the fact that neither of these phenomena are exclusive to any one group or religion nor has it always been religiously motivated.Brunei intelligence and enforcement agencies will continue to learn and adopt best practices from our counterparts through the sharing of knowledge and their experiences to enhance the current strategies, policies and the undergoing rehabilitation programmes run by the government, he added, according to a statement issued yesterday by the Prime Ministers Office.The deputy minister also stated that, Although the process of de-radicalisation and reintegration is a long term process and evaluating the effectiveness of our rehabilitation efforts may be a long and daunting task, Brunei and the rest of the world strongly believe that these efforts are significant in ensuring the long term safety and security of our citizens.The deputy minister, together with other ministers and representatives from Asean member states and other invited countries delivered their Minister Statements  Policy on Deradicalisation on the first day of the conference.In his statement, the Deputy Minister also said that radicalisation continues to be a significant concern to security agencies all over the world and will remain as one of the potent threat facing our region, especially the extensive use of the internet as a tool in spreading violent extremism and radical propaganda.On the second day of the conference, the programme was divided into four plenary sessions with respective topics related to deradicalisation programmes in certain countries and steps taken to prevent and countering violent extremism shared by invited experts and scholars.The conference was launched by the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Najib Razak. Amongst other countries that took part in the conference together with Asean member states were Australia, Peoples Republic of China, Japan, France, United States of America, United Kingdom, Italy, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.Other members of the Brunei delegation who attended the conference included senior officials from the Prime Ministers Office and Internal Security Department.The Borneo Bulletin
Dump this anti-people govt

Last week former Defence Minister Kevin Andrews publicly advocated the dispatch of Australian ground troops to support the US in the Middle East, just like former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who once offered the US President Australian troops before even being asked for them.

After Abbott was deposed as Prime Minister in September he swore he would cause no trouble. However, he and his supporters have carried out an insidious and provocative campaign of public statements and media appearances. In December Abbott publicly warned against terrorism, which he linked to Islam, and last week he challenged Turnbull to make industrial relations the key issue in this years federal election.

Not all Turnbulls troubles can be blamed on Abbott or his faction. Junior minister Jamie Briggs was sacked and may be prosecuted for having released text messages and the image of a female public servant who had publicly protested at his unwelcome advances.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has publicly apologised after he mistakenly sent an email calling a journalist who covered the Briggs story a mad f***ing witch to the journalist herself.

Mal Brough, the suspended Special Minister of State responsible for ensuring ethical behaviour within government, may face prosecution for having authorised the copying of diary entries of the former parliamentary speaker Peter Slipper. Innovations Minister Christopher Pyne and assistant minister Wyatt Roy were also involved.

These incidents are allegedly highly informative about the arrogance, male chauvinism and reckless disregard of the law of some Liberal ministers, but not about the divisions within the Coalition. Those matters have been demonstrated by other events.

Last November Senators Cory Bernardi and Eric Abetz crossed the floor over a motion regarding partial student unionism. In December former cabinet minister Ian MacFarlane announced he intended leaving the Liberal Party and joining the Nationals.

Newly-elected MP Andrew Hastie recently warned about the theological roots of Islamic terrorism, leading the head of ASIO to ask Hastie and Liberal Dan Tehan to desist from any practice that might jeopardise intelligence links with the Muslim community.

The former speaker of the House, Bronwyn Bishop, is still refusing to step aside, and at a Liberal Party gathering in December Turnbulls statement We are not run by factions was greeted with scornful laughter.

Behind the turmoil

The Abbott faction, which holds lunchtime meetings hosted by Peter Dutton every week, is attempting to take control of the government from within the Coalitions parliamentary caucus. Turnbull has attempted to split their ranks by giving some of them cabinet portfolios  but not in sufficient numbers to allow them to jeopardise his position.

Although Dutton is a cabinet minister, Turnbull demoted him from permanent membership of cabinets national security committee, leaving it dominated by Turnbulls supporters. Backbencher Andrew Nikolic has pressured Turnbull to reinstate Dutton as a permanent committee member, and former minister Eric Abetz is pushing for Abbott to rejoin the cabinet.

Part of the reason for Abbotts overthrow was the governments low ratings in the poll following its infamous 2014 federal budget, which included the attempted introduction of GP co-payments and the virtual commercialisation of Australian universities.

Those initiatives were blocked in the Senate by Labor, the Greens and cross benchers. Moreover, it was clear that because of Abbotts snarling negativity, vindictive policies and personal hang-ups, (which resulted, among other things, in his amazingly stupid proposal to knight Prince Phillip), the Coalition would have no chance of winning an election and implementing its budget objectives with Abbott at the helm.

Abbott is doubtless still smouldering over the defeat of the 2014 budget policies. But that resentment alone would hardly justify the machinations of the Abbott clique  especially given that the Turnbull regime has merely changed the Coalitions tactics rather than renouncing the policies themselves.

Turnbull has rebutted Abbotts call for the deployment of more Australian troops. He is doubtless aware of the electoral danger posed by involvement in another seemingly endless Middle Eastern war, and of the very changed conditions, with Russian forces countering the US military presence in Syria.

But regarding industrial relations, economic and military issues Abbott and Turnbull differ only with respect to tactics and public relations. Their objectives are identical.

Climate change is a different matter. It has been a primary factor in the leadership battles between Turnbull and Abbott. The global energy market is about to undergo a fundamental change, and Turnbull is likely to lend a sympathetic ear to those sectors of capital that are deeply concerned about climate change and dont have an interest in preserving the status quo re carbon emissions.

Abbott, in contrast, is an obsessive crusader for the heavily-polluting coal and gas mining industries, and his government tried (albeit in vain) to eliminate government agencies responsible for tracking or mitigating climate change.

Turnbull has retained a formal commitment to the Abbott governments laughable direct action policies. However, the Abbott regime was overthrown just prior to last years Paris Climate Change conference and Turnbulls representatives did not play a key role in blocking agreement on climate change mitigation at the Paris Conference, as Abbotts did in Lima two years earlier.

The climate change issue was undoubtedly a crucial factor in MacFarlanes decision to transfer to the Nationals. He had been a member of Turnbulls shadow cabinet prior to Abbotts seizing control of the coalition in 2013, and received a key portfolio from Abbott immediately afterwards. When Turnbull regained power last October he pointedly refused MacFarlane a cabinet position.

Many National Party members have close links to the coal and gas mining industries.

If MacFarlane had joined the Nationals they would have exerted leverage to gain a fourth cabinet position, thereby increasing the influence of the pro-Abbott group. MacFarlanes membership application was rejected, but only by the smallest possible majority.

The economy, industrial relations and the Middle East conflict are all issues which members of the Abbott faction will use to gain influence within cabinet. However, their real motivating force in 2016 will undoubtedly be their commitment to maintaining the marketing supremacy of the coal and gas industries.

And its even possible that given their ability to undermine opposing forces, the Abbott gang might regain the Coalition leadership.

This election year is the time to dump this dysfunctional government with its vile, anti-people agenda. The Communist Party of Australia believes that profound social change in Australia will be led and then defended within communities, in the workplace and in the streets. But even at this stage, the chance to present pro-people alternatives to the current corporate agenda at election time cant be passed up.

For information about how you can assist the Party to register our electoral organisation, the Communists, to run candidates in this years elections, see Communists gear up for federal election.
Charges dropped against 28 CFMEU members

The CFMEU has called for a legal case against its members in Western Australia to be discontinued after a third of the defendants were dropped from the action.

Industrial action at the Perth Childrens Hospital site in Nedlands.

The Fair Work Building Inspectorate (FWBI) originally charged 101 workers who allegedly took unlawful industrial action at the new $1.2 billion Perth Childrens Hospital site in Nedlands in July 2013.

The Federal Court was last month told charges against five workers had been dropped. That number has now grown by 28.

Simon Millman of Slater & Gordon said he had never experienced such a situation. Thats 33 workers in total out of the original 101 whove now had their cases dropped by the FWBC, he said.

In my experience, and Ive been doing this for the union for a number of years, this is unprecedented. CFMEU state secretary Mick Buchan said the rest of the cases should also be dropped.

Its an absolute farce whats been going on, he said.

These workers, 101, were charged two years after allegedly attending a meeting for fair pay and conditions. Theyve been put through the mill for the last eight months.

Theyve had to come into our office on different occasions and speak to lawyers. Theyve had to give up family time, theyve had to put their family and their kids and their loved ones through the trauma associated with this.

The FWBC said the decision to drop charges against the workers was made after a subcontractor at the St John of God Hospital site in Midland was re-interviewed.

It was originally believed that a large number of the workers who had been charged should have been at the Midland site on the day in question. But an FWBC spokesman said they had discovered 28 of the charged workers were not rostered on that day.

An investigation into precisely where the workers came from is continuing.

The spokesman said the five workers who were earlier dropped from the action either could not be served, had moved away or were possibly deceased.

Mr Millman said the fate of the remaining workers who were charged remained unknown. Ive spoken this morning to another one of those blokes whos said well, whats happening with my case? Unfortunately Im in a position where Ive got to say to him, Im sorry mate, I dont know, he said.

Meanwhile Mr Buchan said the bringing of charges would not deter union members from raising issues where and when appropriate.

I think within our industry, if theres an issue based around health and safety and about protecting one another, it wont matter whats in place, workers will make a stand and take action, he said.

He rejected any suggestion projects may have been affected, saying they came in ahead of schedule and under budget.
Waroona fire

Australia and global warming

In 1994, Professor Tim Flannery released his seminal book, Future Eaters. In it he predicted what lay ahead for Australias climate and the impact it would have on the country and its people.

Among the predictions Flannery made in the book is the prescient warning that the south west of Australia would become a desert and Perth would become the first ghost metropolis of the 21st Century.

In 2007 he was interviewed while visiting Perth and said, The problem for Perth  and the south west was the state was growing on the back of a booming economy, at a time when the area was limping through 30 years of dwindling rainfall.

Today, in January 2016, the world watched as a large part of the south west went up in flames  an area larger than the Perth metropolitan area between Waroona and Harvey and out to the coast at Lake Clifton  Flannerys prediction for the climate of the south west is gradually taking shape.

The Lower South West which includes the town of Waroona has been becoming dryer since the mid 1970s, with reductions in mean annual rainfall for most of this area totalling more than 30 percent. The decreasing rainfall caused not only falling water levels in the dams but a drying out of the bush and farmland between the Darling Range escarpment and the coast turning it into a tinderbox.

On the evening of Wednesday January 6, 2016, a lightning strike ignited the bush at the Lane Pool Reserve, 50 kilometres north east of Waroona and 100 kilometres south of Perth near Dwellingup, itself the site of one of the states fiercest fires which burned for two weeks in 1961. The following morning the plume of smoke from the then out of control bushfire could be seen as far away as Perth to the north and Bunbury to the south.

By January 11, 2016, the fire had claimed the lives of two elderly men trapped in their homes in the historic timber milling town of Yarloop, where over half the towns 300 homes were destroyed by the blaze which swept through the town in seven minutes.

The region around Harvey, Waroona, Yarloop and out to the coast at Lake Clifton is also a vital part of the states food bowl, supplying milk and other dairy produce to the city folk in Perth and the rest of the state as well as pasture and dry feed for livestock. As the fire raged south, east and westwards it also destroyed critical power infrastructure including over 1,000 power poles and cut electricity not only to thousands of homes but also in the dairies.

Farmers who need to continue milking their cows or lose the milk supply from the animals were told to dump their milk as it could not be stored or transported.

In late January 2015, in five days, a fire had destroyed over 71,000 hectares affecting 414 farms and 3,300 hectares of pine plantation. In another fire 100,000 hectares were burnt out near Northcliffe fire on the states south coast.

Government agencies such as the Department of Fire and Emergency Services and the Department of Parks and Wildlife worked together with volunteer fire crews to try to control the most recent blaze. Mostly there was little they could do except get out of the way and warn others in the path of the fire storm to do likewise.

Will inquiry look at global warming?

The state government has since announced an independent inquiry to be headed by Euan Ferguson, a respected former Country Fire Authority chief in Victoria and South Australia. The inquiry bill will investigate the effectiveness of the response to the fire, as well as the causes of the fire and why it became so massive.

Premier Colin Barnett visited and addressed a meeting of 100 Yarloop locals on January 20, and while acknowledging The scale of the devastation to be quite shocking, also asserted that the Yarloop/Waroona fire was unstoppable with its severity worsened by a drying climate in WAs South West.

However, does this now mean Premier Barnett will stop endorsing coal mines, fracking and uranium mining and start plugging renewable energy?

There have been other reports into recent fires at Margaret River and Northcliffe but it would appear little change has occurred as a result. There are also calls for the enquiry into the Waroona fire to examine the fierce November 2015 fire in Esperance which killed four people and caused considerable crop and property damage.

Most Western Australians have worked out that the land has become much drier and the countryside has become loaded with fuel, which the government has tried to address through a program of prescribed burns. But often the conditions are not suitable to carry out burns that can be controlled.

It has been so dry at times that prescribed burns have taken place in June and July which are normally considered wet months in WA. If fuel loads cannot be lessened at a fast enough rate, strategies need to be developed to cope with the inevitability of increased fire risks in summer and a lengthening of the fire season.

Part of this unpredictable weather has its origins in anthropogenic climate change (change brought about by human activity). We can therefore improve or worsen the situation depending on what we do or what we fail to do about global warming. The Bureau of Meteorologys Western Australia in 2015 Weather Summary is instructive on this.

The past year was the second-warmest on record for WA and the warmest for the south/west land division, the mean maximum temperatures were the highest for the south/west and the eighth driest for the south/west with most of the drier years being in the past 11 years.

To underscore the impact of global warming on a drying climate in WAs south west, a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found, During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.90 Celsius above the 20th century average.

This was not only the warmest worldwide since records began in 1880; it shattered the previous record held in 2014 by the widest margin ever observed.

The US space agency NASA, which monitors global climate, said that the temperature changes are largely driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions in the atmosphere. To also highlight the increased unpredictability of a rapidly changing climate, in the week following the fire the countryside to the immediate south and south east of the Waroona fire was subject of some of the heaviest flooding in decades, with some centres recording daily rainfalls of between 100-200mm, damaging roads and crops.

The climate patterns experienced in Western Australia have been reproduced in other parts of Australia, most notably in Queensland and South Australia, which are experiencing prolonged periods of warmer and drier weather conditions  and intense storms bringing massive flooding.

Other parts of the planet from Russia to California, China, Africa, Europe, Middle East and Latin America, are all experiencing prolonged periods of warmer or drier conditions from melting glaciers, desertification, melting permafrost and drying rivers and lakes.

The Communist Party of Australia calls for our state, national and international leaders to act on the causes of human-made climate change and respond locally and come to a consensus on the necessary reductions in emissions.

If humans could restrict average global warming to less than 1.5 C and 350 ppm of carbon we might be able preserve life as we know it and control and lessen massive fire events like the one just experienced at Waroona.
Hanged warriors are not forgotten

The treatment of fallen Tasmanian Aboriginal warriors Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner is just as relevant today as it was when they were publicly executed amid carnival-like fanfare in 1842, according to artist Paola Balla. Shes curating Executed in Franklin Street, an exhibition of paintings, writings, video and photography relating to the warriors now on show in the Melbourne Town Hall.

Joseph Toscano (left) and Robbie Thorpe in 2012 calling for a memorial for the first people hanged in Melbourne. (Photo: Angela Wylie)

In what will be a national first, the Melbourne City Council has announced it will also fund a major memorial to the pair. Artists Brook Andrew and Trent Walter have been selected to create the monument, titled Standing by Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner. When completed, it will be first major memorial to the Frontier Wars in an Australian city.

Documents record 16 Tasmanian Aborigines were taken to Melbourne by Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson in 1839, to help rein in Victorian Aboriginal people.

Five of the party, including Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, absconded and became resistance fighters. In 1842 the pair were tried and convicted of the murder of two whalers in south-east Victoria. It is understood the whalers were killed as revenge for abducting and murdering Aboriginal people in Tasmania.

At the trial questions of sovereignty, jurisdiction and treaty were raised.

The warriors were tried with three women, Truganini, Planobeena and Pyterruner, who were acquitted and returned to Tasmania.

Sentenced to death, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenners execution was the first public one in Melbourne. It was the leading news of the day, with between 4,000 and 5,000 people, mainly women and children, reportedly turned out for the spectacle. The scene was described as resembling a racecourse rather than an execution.

These men were treated like animals on display, Paola Balla, a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman, said. This was the first major case of [an Aboriginal] death in custody that we know about. For me it wasnt an historical story, its a story of now.

That callousness and that indifference to Aboriginal suffering, not connecting emotionally. I think it has just continued. You can see it in the race hate thats coming out at our people now with the protests over forced [community] closures.

Ms Balla refers to the 1842 execution as terrorism; authorities wanted other black people to see what would happen if they defended their country.

The push for the recognition of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner started in 2006 when a group of 11 gathered for a commemoration, after Melbourne man Joe Toscano read the story of the pair in a second hand bookstore.

Soon after, a committee was formed to campaign for the memorial and momentum has grown over the years. Dr Toscana even stood as lord mayor to draw attention to the campaign. He said the Melbourne memorial should act as a template for activists around Australia to emulate. It is important for us as a nation and a people to ensure these struggles are acknowledged and remembered, he said.

For far too long Australians have focused on remembering the exploits of troops fighting other peoples wars in distant lands.

At noon on January 20 there was a gathering on the corner Bowen and Franklin streets, Melbourne, the site where Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were hanged, followed by a commemorative walk to the site at Queen Victoria Market where they are purported to be buried. Speakers included Caroline Briggs and Gary Foley.

Dr Toscana asked participants to bring flowers, as on Anzac or Remembrance Day. Speeches were broadcast live on Radio 3CR.

Executed in Franklin Street runs until February 1.

Koori Mail
WestConnex monstrosity threatens inner Sydney

Just before Christmas the NSW Baird government released the environmental impact statement for the second stage of the proposed WestConnex motorway. Public responses must be received by February, effectively minimising the time available for the public to prepare comments.

WestConnex would connect two existing motorways and run underground eight kilometres eastward from Concord via Haberfield to Rozelle, two kilometres west of the city, then five kilometres south to St Peters, then seven kilometres southwest to Kingsgrove. The proposal is accompanied by proposed mandatory zoning to allow high-rise residential development adjacent to WestConnex and other transport corridors.

The proposal would involve construction of gargantuan above-ground spaghetti-junction interchanges at St Peters and Rozelle, plus the removal of 350 mature trees, 14,000 square metres of the magnificent award-winning Sydney Park, and a huge strip of historic Ashfield Park.

The project would necessitate the compulsory purchase and demolition of 118 houses and other buildings, many with historic significance, plus a huge increase in traffic and pollution in Green Square, Alexandria, Ashmore and historic Haberfield, Erskineville, St Peters, Newtown, Redfern and Rozelle.

Euston Road on the eastern boundary of Sydney Park would become a six lane highway carrying 50,000 vehicles each day  a tenfold increase in car numbers and pollution for a threefold increase in capacity. Much of that traffic would enter historic King Street, Newtown, which is already a bottleneck.

The planned spaghetti-junction interchanges at St Peters and Rozelle.

A bridge to profit

Last week consultants working for the Sydney Motorway Corporation, which is running the WestConnex project, floated the idea of converting the deck of Sydneys Anzac Bridge and the western freeway approaches to the city into a public park linked to the adjacent foreshores.

This might seem insane, given that the bridge and freeway approaches, which were constructed within the last 25 years, now carry most of the traffic from the western suburbs into the city or northwards over the Harbour Bridge. But its a very appealing prospect for private corporations involved in the WestConnex project.

The Anzac Bridge is located less than a kilometre from the motorways proposed exit in Rozelle, and the freeway approaches feed directly into the northern side of Sydneys central business district.

The consultants say that building the Anzac Bridge was a mistake, and that the government is now interested in making a minor adjustment to the current freeway proposals, i.e. extending the WestConnex tunnel from Rozelle, to link it with the Cross City Tunnel, the Harbour Bridge and a new harbour road tunnel.

Implementation of this stupendously avaricious idea would cost the public billions of dollars and give private operators the right to toll approximately 100,000 motorists each day for trips they now enjoy free of charge, with no improvement in the service.

A phoney argument

The governments WestConnex proposal is the end result of a logical process based on the false premise that people travelling into cities or inner suburbs prefer to use private vehicles, and that governments should facilitate this by constructing motorways big enough to meet the demand.

This ignores the fact that vehicles, which usually carry only one or two passengers, are an extremely inefficient means of transport compared to Sydneys highly popular public transport system. Moreover, extra capacity provided by new or extended motorways is soon swallowed up by an increase in vehicles using the system.

The exception, of course, is where the toll imposed is so high that motorists shun the motorway and return to the old congested free-to-use roads, leaving taxpayers with a massive bill and no improvement in the situation. That happened with Sydneys Cross City Tunnel, whose two operators went broke before the government finally sold it at rock-bottom price to another corporation.

Constructing motorway tunnels certainly facilitates access to city centres, but the construction costs are astronomical, and their profitability is reliant on maximum use with no competition from public transport. This inevitably leads to an increase in vehicles entering the city, plus traffic gridlock and pollution.

The government is improving public transport, but not near motorway routes. Moreover, rail transport allocations are dwarfed by allocations for motorways, and changes to Sydneys rail systems have a long term focus on introducing private operation rather than optimising service to the public  even where this involves gross inefficiency, as in the new privately-run Metro rail system, whose engineering design is entirely different from that of the main rail network.

Taxpayers to foot the bill

WestConnexs anticipated cost has rocketed from $10 billion to $16.8 billion. The governments estimated fee for a WestConnex trip is at least $16, but the Greens say that given the construction costs the fee would have to be $26 to break even.

The Australian National Audit Office has claimed the Abbott government inflated the national deficit by transferring $1.5 billion for construction of Victorias East West link motorway, despite advice the payment was premature. The state and federal governments have now committed funding prematurely to WestConnex, even though the design is incomplete.

The Sydney Motorway Corporation intends to raise finance by introducing tolls to sections of Sydneys motorways that are currently free, and imposing a new toll on other sections when their current toll period expires.

The government claims that cutting a current 20 minute trip on the existing inner-city roads by nine minutes justifies spending $16.8 billion on WestConnex, and that the project could be completed within eight years.

Properties are already being compulsorily acquired, and home owners are complaining bitterly that the compensation offered is well below the market value of their property. In February 2014 consultants completed a report on the compensation system, but the government has so far refused to release it to the public. It claims that the Sydney Motorway Corporation does not have to obey Freedom of Information laws because its a private corporation, even though its two shareholders are government ministers.

But no amount of cover-up can conceal the governments real intention to transfer control of a huge chunk of the states publicly-owned road networks to private corporations, at an astronomical cost to the taxpayer, with a heightened risk of gridlock and massive pollution, and with no long-term solution to the citys transport problems.
Call to restore aid

The peak body for Australias aid and development organisations is calling on the Australian government to reinstate aid funding to Afghanistan following the Prime Ministers day-long trip to the country to visit Australian troops.

Australian aid is of vital importance to Afghanistan, a country with huge development challenges with more than a third of people living in poverty and high levels of violence said the CEO of the Australian Council for International Development, Mr Marc Purcell.

Malcolm Turnbulls recent visit has further highlighted Australias need to reinstate bilateral aid to the country, which has been drastically cut from $130 million in 2014/2015 to $78 million in 2015/2016.

That equates to a 40 percent cut to Australias aid to Afghanistan in one year, said Mr Purcell.

Information recently released through Senate Estimates indicates that the 40 percent cut will have a direct impact on the support of two programs in particular  the Afghanistan UNDP Law and Order Trust Fund and the Afghanistan World Bank Reconstruction Trust Fund.

Afghanistan is an important nation undergoing a critical transition. It requires substantial aid and development support, and for partners like Australia to keep their funding commitments, rather than cutting rapidly and drastically.

We call on the Turnbull-led government to reinstate aid levels, to better enable Australias aid program to contribute to reducing poverty and promoting peace and stability, Mr Purcell said.

Fourteen Australian aid and development agencies are working on vital aid and development projects in Afghanistan, investing $20 million annually.

The Australian aid program was cut by $1 billion, or 20 percent, in last years federal budget. A further $224 million is scheduled to be cut in this years budget, taking Australian aid to its lowest level ever.
Taking Issue  Rob Gowland

Fascism over the White House?

The most boorish of the clutch of Republican Party candidates for President in the next US elections is unquestionably Donald Trump. A billionaire, Trump has all the arrogance that goes with such colossal wealth, but he combines it with a public posture as an oafish larrikin, openly embracing the crudest racist rhetoric. Reflecting the Republican Partys long-term flirtation with the extreme Right, Trump is now the front-runner to be the Republican choice to run for President to replace Obama when his term in the White House ends on January 17, 2017.

Like all demagogues, instead of dealing with the very real problems confronting ordinary Americans, Trump chooses instead to focus on giving them someone to hate, in the process scape-goating people who are in no way responsible for the USAs very serious economic and social crises. Indeed, Trumps racist outbursts are intended to divert peoples attention away from the corporations and the ultra-rich who are the real causes of the US peoples present sorry position.

Initially he singled out Mexicans as his target, identifying as Mexicans all Latin American people trying to escape from poverty by gaining entry to the supposedly prosperous USA. He has no sympathy for their plight, labelling them all as drug-traffickers, gun-runners or worse. That the poverty south of the US border is largely the result of US corporations exploiting the people, resources and economies of those countries and of US governments over many years interfering in their internal affairs to boost US corporate power and profit does not concern him at all.

His only concern is making sure his racism has a suitable target. Hitler began with Jews but moved on to include Gypsies and ultimately the much more numerous Slavs. Trump has similarly expanded his racist rhetoric to include attacks on African-Americans (those who dare to take to the streets in demonstrations against police killings under the banner Black Lives Matter) and of course extraordinarily vulgar attacks on Muslims, all of whom are apparently terrorists.

Also like Hitler, Trump is pitching his campaign at middle class and working class whites who feel they have somehow missed out on the American Dream they were promised a share in. That the poor in the US would look to a billionaire racist to solve their problems and be sympathetic to their plight is no more strange than that exploited Australian workers would look to a millionaire merchant banker to solve theirs. Neither Malcolm Turnbull nor Donald Trump is interested in lifting the people of their respective countries out of poverty.

They are only interested in one thing: boosting corporate profit and making the rich richer. And theyre not too particular about how they do that.

It is sometimes hard for Australians to comprehend just how all-pervasive is racism in the USA. I encountered a taxi-driver in the USSR who had had a couple of American tourists, husband and wife, in his cab. A young chap who spoke excellent English, he had asked these two Americans whether he would be able to get a job if he went to the USA.

They were fulsome in their assurances that he would have no problem. They told him that there was no unemployment in the US, that the only people who were unemployed were Niggers who were too lazy to work. He was dreadfully embarrassed when we explained that the N-word was not used in polite company.

Curious, we enquired about his US tourists. They had happily told him what they did for a living: she was psychiatrist in private practice in New York, he was a corporate head-hunter in the same city. You can imagine what their combined weekly fees would have been. Their understanding of how Black Americans actually lived in New York, or indeed anywhere else in the USA, would have been negligible. They were before Donald Trumps time, but his policies would surely have suited them down to the ground.

Trump is one of those Americans who believe that Barack Obama should never have been elected President because he wasnt born in the USA. These people believe the racist rumour that was floated as soon as Obama was nominated, to the effect that he was a Muslim born in Kenya. Despite Obama producing his birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii, these people prefer to believe that somehow that document is a fake, part of some liberal conspiracy.

Its called the birther movement and Donald Trump is a fiercely vocal member of it. That a bellowing, racist vulgarian can even come close to being elected President of the most powerful country on Earth is a shameful indictment of the parlous state of US politics today.

And it is of course a reflection of the most parlous aspect of all: the stealthy spread of fascism across the country, combining racism with a massive militarised police force. The Republican Party in particular has made the delegitimising of non-white people central to its legislative efforts. Republican front-runner Trump makes no secret of his belief that Black Americans should not have the right to hold high office.

And many of the right-wingers in the Republican Party believe they shouldnt even be allowed to vote. After all, US intelligence agencies helped the Colombian drug cartels flood Black neighbourhoods in US cities with crack cocaine in return for their assistance in subverting and overthrowing popular Left-leaning regimes in Latin America. The deliberate policy of arresting and incarcerating Black men on drugs or other minor charges has resulted in a largely Black US prison population. Combined with privatised industrial prisons, the result is a new (or, more correctly, revived) form of slavery. At the same time the Republican Party has promoted the denial of voting rights to Black Americans because of their felony convictions!

In case you think that speculation about the rise of fascism in the US is nothing more than a beat-up by left-wingers, it has also gained traction in the mainstream US capitalist media. On December 10, the New York Daily News, not usually noted as a liberal rag, wrote that Donald Trumps racist rhetoric emboldens white supremacist groups, [including] neo-Nazis spouting hate on the Internet. Also in December, the well-regarded Washington Post wrote about the appeal of Donald Trumps campaign to the white supremacist movement in the US.

In 1983, professor William Manning Marable of Columbia University wrote a book with the self-explanatory title How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies. He founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia. In his book Professor Marable identified the threat of a Fascist coup (a la Pinochet in Chile) in the USA to resolve the crisis of US capitalism. That must have made him popular with the authorities!

He went on: The open encouragement of police brutalities against Blacks by law enforcement officials and elected politicians, plus the proliferating civil violence by white youths and adults against non-whites, sets the social and cultural climate necessary to establish an authoritarian regime. Professor Marable foresaw the likelihood of this new US venture into fascism eschewing the banners and parades that the Nazis had popularised, and which the American Nazis of the 1930s, the Silver Shirts, had emulated, in favour of a more laid back, apparently democratic form of fascism. Whether this regime is fascist in the classical model of Nazi Germany, or authoritarian, which would permit some domestic rights, could be simply a question of semantics, he wrote.

Hitler did not have access to nuclear weapons, and yet he caused the deaths of scores of millions of people. A nuclear-armed fascist in the White House would put the whole world at risk.

Inside the USA, Trumps campaign came under fire when its national spokesperson, Katrina Pierson, appeared on national television wearing a necklace made of bullets. She has also been revealed as having improperly claimed unemployment benefits while being handsomely paid for running Republican election campaigns and as a promoter of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. This ridiculous theory contends that the obligations the US has undertaken as a signatory to various UN-sponsored international treaties are part of a conspiracy for the UN to take over America. How can one country be so powerful and so frightened at one and the same time?

Towards the end of 2015, Trump announced that he would spend $2 million a week on TV ads for the rest of the campaign. Democracy in action, US style. Mind you he probably needs to spend that much if he expects to win. According to a poll released at the end of December by Quinnipiac University in the US, if the 2016 US presidential election had been held then, Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders would win by a landslide over Trump.

According to the poll, US voters favour Sanders over Trump 51 to 38 percent. Sanders, a progressive, would win by 13 points  more than any other candidate would get squaring off with the Republican favourite, including Sanders chief rival for the Democratic nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, while Clinton would likewise sail to victory over Trump, her lead would be approximately half as much, with voters favouring her by only 47 to 40 percent.

Outside the USA, Trumps racist, ultra-reactionary pitch fortunately seems to rouse anger more than support, probably because of Europes catastrophic experience of racism at the hands of Hitlers Nazis. In Britain, more than 200,000 people signed up within 24 hours to demand that Trump be banned from entering Britain because of his hate-filled speeches.

The British government of Camerons Tories would have none of it, of course, but we can say sincerely, Well done, British people!/p>
Our wildly inflated fear of terrorism is a self-fulfilling prophecy

One in 3.5 million: Thats your annual risk of dying from a terrorist attack in the United States, at least according to Cato analyst John Mueller. Rounded generously, that comes out to roughly three one-hundred thousandths of a percentage point, or 0.00003 percent.

And this, according to a recent Gallup poll cited by The New York Times, is the percentage of Americans worried that they or someone in their family would be a victim of terrorism: 51.

So thats 51 percent of Americans who think a terrorist attack against themselves is sufficiently likely to warrant their personal concern, versus a 0.00003 percent chance it might actually happen. If youll forgive my amateur number crunching, that means Americans are overestimating their personal exposure to terrorism by a factor of approximately 1.7 million.

Its no wonder people play the lottery.

A public mood that overestimates the risk of terrorism by upwards of 2 million times, you might imagine, is a pretty significant headwind for a presidential administration that  with a few notable exceptions, like the surge in Afghanistan and the free-ranging drone war  has generally sought to wind down the full-blown militarised response its predecessor took to terrorism.

But more militarisation, particularly in the Middle East, is exactly what this insanely distorted threat perception would seem to demand. With Americans more fearful of terrorism than at any time since 9/11, its no wonder Republican presidential candidates like Ted Cruz can call for bona fide war crimes like carpet-bombing Syria  and then revel in applause rather than opprobrium.

In a more rational world, it would be easy to explain away the problem by arguing that the risk of terrorism in the US is actually quite small, while the human costs of yet another military intervention in the Middle East could be enormous. But the politics of terrorism are anything but. As a society were irrational about it, said a former administration security official quoted by the Times. But government has to accept that irrationality rather than fight it.

Gawkers Hamilton Nolan drew a less charitable conclusion from those comments: The public is too dumb to hear the truth about terrorism.

Threading the needle

All this helps explain why Obama said what he did about Americas ongoing ISIS war in his final State of the Union address. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped, he allowed. But they do not threaten our national existence. Thats the story [the Islamic State] wants to tell; thats the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.

In all this, Obama was essentially correct. Yet he tempered this disclaimer with the reassurance that We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined  a fact more commonly cited by critics of Americas post-9/11 militarisation than its supporters.

And then came an appeal to the carpet-bombing constituency.

Calling the Islamic State killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed, Obama boasted: With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, and their weapons. We are training, arming, and supporting forces who are steadily reclaiming territory in Iraq and Syria.

Feel better?

Obama wanted to temper the hysteria of those who would look at ISIS and claim, as he put it, this is World War III. But given the apparently prevalent view to the contrary, he had to reassure his listeners that were still dropping an awful lot of bombs. Its a college try at breaking the political taboo, identified by the Times, against lecturing people about the real  and low  risk of terrorism.

Unfortunately, that only illustrates a much deeper American taboo about foreign terrorism against the United States: namely, admitting that its almost always a response to US foreign policies.

You know, policies like launching 10,000 air strikes.

Why us?

Obama said something else that was pretty instructive: In todays world, were threatened less by evil empires and more by failing states. Thats true, basically: Theres no conventional power on earth that poses an imminent military threat to the US.

But why, then, should failing states?

The usual answer is that weak or failing states offer fertile ground for militant groups to organise, train, recruit, and arm themselves. Thats how the Arab-dominated group that became Al-Qaeda used Afghanistan in the years between the Soviet invasion and the 9/11 attacks (though they also plotted in decidedly stable environs like Hamburg). And its how the Islamic State is using Syria now after bursting out of its origins in Iraq, where it formed the core of a Sunni insurgency against the US-backed Shiite government.

It makes sense that failing states might present opportunities for militant groups. And its reasonable to expect that failed states in the Muslim world would appeal to Islamist groups in particular. But all this explains nothing about why their militancy should uniquely threaten the United States. After all, if theyre simply religious zealots, hell-bent on killing or converting the infidels, why shouldnt these failing states be a concern to non-Muslim powers like Brazil? Or Japan? Or South Africa?

Why arent they reduced to bean-counting air strikes on countries halfway around the world?

The simple answer is that no other non-Muslim country on earth has intervened in the region as extensively as the United States has.

Our demons

Robert Pape  a political scientist whos studied every suicide attack on record  argues that while religious appeals can help recruit suicide bombers, virtually all suicide terrorism can be reduced to political motives that are essentially secular. What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, he concludes. Instead, they have a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly.

Lets look at some of our favourite demons.

In the years before Al-Qaeda pulled off the 9/11 attacks (and since, for that matter), the US propped up dictatorships in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which ruthlessly repressed Islamist challengers. It armed and protected Israel, even as the country bombed its Muslim (and Christian) neighbours in Palestine and Lebanon, and violated UN resolutions against illegal settlement building in occupied Palestinian lands. And in between its two full-scale invasions of the country, the US imposed a devastating sanctions regime on Iraq, which restricted the flow of food and medicine and is estimated to have caused some half a million Iraqi children to die.

Some Washington policy makers have professed benign motivations for these policies  in making strategic partnerships against terrorists, for example, protecting a besieged ally, or attempting to undermine the Iraqi dictatorship. But one could forgive the victims of those policies for seeing them differently.

In his letter explaining the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden mentioned all of these things and more to argue that US intervention in the Muslim world had to be stopped. Aside from its anti-Semitic ramblings, social conservatism, and appeals to the Quran, in fact, parts of the letter could have been written by any reputable international human rights organisation.

Similarly, the Islamic State  an avowedly murderous organisation, to be sure  emerged out of a Sunni insurgency against an increasingly sectarian US-backed government in Baghdad after the second Iraq War, expanding into Syria in an audacious bid for strategic depth and territory. To the extent that its engaged in international terrorism  against France, Turkey, Lebanon, and Russia, among others  the attacks have been levied principally against foreign powers that have thrown themselves into the Syrian civil war on the side of its enemies.

If ISIS attempts to attack the US, it will certainly serve a propaganda purpose like the one Obama described. But it will also serve as a counterattack for those 10,000 air strikes he boasted about.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

None of this excuses terrorism by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or anyone else. But if Obama or anyone else wants to take a realistic look at the threat, we cant just look at the likelihood of it. We have to look at the reasons for it.

All things considered, given the scope of US actions in the Middle East since 9/11  by my count weve toppled three governments, launched a drone war stretching from Somalia to the Philippines, and sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan  a 0.0003 percent per capita risk of terrorism is quite modest, even if it feels much higher to some critics of the president.

But with Obama responding to those critics by launching nearly 10,000 air strikes and training, arming, and supporting a hodgepodge of armed forces in the region, theres a very significant risk that our inflated threat perception will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact is, theres not a bomb on this planet powerful enough to heal the political divisions in Iraq and Syria that have enabled the rise of ISIS. But if Obama legitimises his hawkish critics by papering over the problem with bombs, hes only paving the way for the Ted Cruzes and Donald Trumps of the world to argue that if some bombs are good, more bombs are better. And our fear-fuelled plunge into intervention will only deepen our exposure to terrorism.

Information Clearing House
Culture & Life

Guns and the USA - again

The United States of America. The majority of the people who live there will tell you its the greatest country on Earth. Even the ones without a job or a home! (Brainwashed? You think?) Thanks to the inadequacy of their education system (which paradoxically they think is the greatest in the world), plus the control of their mass media by a cabal of billionaire press barons, and the way their population has been ruthlessly brainwashed since the Second World War, Americans have no comprehension of how people in other countries actually live (or think).

Contrary to what Americans are repeatedly told, people in other countries do not spend their time envying the inhabitants of the USA. Sure its a rich country, but most Americans dont see any of that wealth. They scrape by on minimum wages. Poverty is rife and getting more prevalent every year. And people in other countries know this.

They also know that US corporations backed up by the US military looted the wealth of Latin America as well as a lot of other countries and siphoned it into US bank vaults, making America (as distinct from Americans) rich. But America cant do that any more, at least not as easily as it used to. Now, the Latin American countries have their own trade deals, and Brazil part of the BRICS group of major economies that excludes the US and the EU.

Thanks to the way the countries of Latin America were looted by the US over many years, there is still a big wealth gap between them and the US, but not nearly as big as Americans think it is. Nevertheless, when the poor in Latin America get desperate enough, they try to cross the border into the USA, the land of the free in search of work that is denied them at home by companies whose head office more often than not is in the USA.

The national symbol of the USA is the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, celebrating the way the USA welcomed refugees and the poor from Europe when it needed settlers to build up its economy. Today the statue is a 93 metre tall sick joke, as would-be refugees and immigrants are hunted down by police and returned across the border. They are treated not as refugees but as criminals.

A plaque on the base of Miss Liberty, as Americans call the landmark statue, proclaims: Send me your huddled masses yearning to be free.

But unless the huddled masses are white and well heeled, there is no welcome for them in the USA today. Except, that is, as part of the thriving black economy, which depends on the cheap labour of illegal immigrants to provide the rich with all the services they take for granted, from house cleaning to waitressing to working in their non-unionised sweatshops.

Most Americans are aware of this situation, but they are not prepared to do anything about it, regarding it as basically just a fact of life. Like that other US fact of life, namely that there are approximately four million guns in the country. In fact, the presence of illegal immigrants in the country is often used as an excuse to justify the huge number of privately-owned guns. One has a right to protect oneself, doesnt one?

Well, thats what the gun nuts in the USA say all the time, but it doesnt make them safer. The USA is rife with mass shootings at schools, shopping malls and movie theatres. Compared to other countries, life in the USA is not safe by any definition of the term. And Americans know this. Most of them just wont accept it. They prefer to cling to the gun lobbys macho myths about the right to bear arms and fantasies about how all the victims of the latest mass shooting would have been saved if only I had been there at the time with my gun.

There are millions of guns in America, and yet you never hear of a gun nut pulling out his trusty Winchester and saving a school full of kids or a mall full of shoppers. One in three homes with children in the United States has a gun. Despite the headlines, most shooting deaths occur in the home or some related place. In fact, official statistics show that a gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher, suicide three to five times higher, and accidental death four times higher. For each time a gun in the home injures or kills in self-defence, there are 11 completed and attempted gun suicides, seven gun criminal assaults and homicides, and four unintentional shooting deaths or injuries. The children of the oppressed in America  poor Black, American Indian and Alaska Native children and teens  are disproportionately likely to die from a gun.

Thanks to the lobbying power of the gun industry and those corporations with a financial or political stake in maintaining the paranoia prevalent in the US population, the US Congress wont even permit federal funding of research into gun violence, prompting the question: Why is the National Rifle Association so afraid of the truth?

If the USA were a person rather than a country, its behaviour and attitudes would indicate the presence of a severe level of mental illness. How disturbed does a country have to be to make the assertion that a much more coordinated and concentrated research effort is crucial to make gun violence reduction one of the first major public health goals of the 21st century?

That reducing gun violence even needs to be seen as a public health goal, should be worrying enough. Just as worrying is the realisation that millions of Americans think reducing gun violence means you are a wimp.
Hey everybody, we've got some terrifying news: Paul Blart: Mall Cop is basically a documentary. As it turns out, in the real world Average Joes blunder into vast conspiracies all the time -- and some of them are actually of absolutely incredible consequence, unlike that one caper in which Paul Blart laid a fart on those thieves of art. (OK, so we watched the movie half-asleep on an airplane.)

5 Newspaper Boy Is Paid With A Fake Nickel, Uncovers Soviet Spying Ring

Department Of Defense

When spies are being trained, we imagine there are some obvious rules that they have to follow: Don't use your laser watch as a cat toy, use protection because it's difficult to be an expert marksman when your dick is a chemical weapons factory, and don't absentmindedly spend the fake coins that you use to hide secret documents. We don't know about the first two, but one spying ring operating out of 1950s Brooklyn certainly failed in that regard.

In June 1953, a newspaper delivery boy (known only as Jimmy) was collecting from his customers when he noticed something weird about one of the coins that he'd been given: It was really, really light. The reason soon became clear. After he dropped it on the ground, it split open and revealed a tiny photograph depicting a sequence of numbers. In any case, they clearly weren't communist numbers, so Jimmy didn't bother telling anyone about his discovery -- you know, except his friend, who mentioned it to her father, who mentioned it to his police detective friend, who mentioned it to the FBI.
The launch of the iPhone 6 helped Apple Australia achieve a staggering rise in sales for its 2015 financial year yet its tax expense fell  a fact that is likely to raise eyebrows against a backdrop of increased focus on corporate tax avoidance.

The iPhone maker's consolidated Australian revenue rose $1.7 billion or 27.9 percent to reach $7.9 billion for the 12 months to 25 September 2015, according to its annual report lodged this week with corporate regulator ASIC.

It's no secret how Apple chalked up such a massive rise in 2015 revenue  the company's fiscal year opened just a week after the blockbuster release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on 19 September 2014. The previous year, in which Apple launched only an iterative upgrade with the iPhone 5s, its Australian revenue remained roughly static, with a 0.5 percent decline to $6.07 billion.

For 2015, Apple Australia reported a rise in gross profit of 16.8 percent to $638 million, however, an increase in "sales, marketing and distribution expenses" helped reduce the company's taxable income to $207 million  down 17.4 percent on the previous year.

The fall in taxable income meant the company's income tax expense was lower than the previous year, though Apple ultimately paid $84.9 million after an $11 million adjustment relating to prior years. On the bottom line, Apple reported 2015 total comprehensive income of $122.7 million, a fall of $49.3 million (28.7 percent) from the previous year.

An Apple spokesperson told CRN: "Apple Australia pays all taxes it owes in accordance with Australian law".

Transfer pricing

Sales, marketing and distribution expenses include the price Apple Australia pays to affiliates for hardware. During last year's Senate Enquiry into corporate tax avoidance, the company denied "inflating the transfer price" of products in order to reduce taxable income in Australia.

The results come amid increasing scrutiny on the tax positions of major companies operating in Australia and the use of elaborate tax structures to reduce or avoid paying tax in Australia.

In December, the ATO published the tax positions of the largest 1,500 public and privately held companies in Australia for the 2013 and 2014 financial years and found a wide discrepancy in taxes paid. Almost 600 of the companies paid no tax at all.

That ATO release showed Apple's total 2014 income was $6.1 billion and the company paid $74.1 million in taxes on taxable income of $247.4 million, which was in accordance with Australia's corporate tax rate of 30 percent.

In April 2015, Apple Australia managing director Tony King was questioned in front of the Senate Enquiry into corporate tax avoidance, where he denied that Apple had strategies to reduce the tax it paid in Australia. King also highlighted the company's track record as a major employer and an environmentally sustainable business, and said Apple was "transparent and open with the Australian tax office".

"We declare all of our income in accordance with Australian tax law and we pay all of our taxes that we owe," King told the committee.

Apple is currently facing an ATO audit into its 2012 financial year, according to the 2015 annual report. "The Australian Taxation Office is currently auditing the company's income tax position for the year 2012. As at this date of this report, the outcome of tax audit cannot be predicted with certainty and reliably estimated, no adjustments have been recognised in the financial statements."

Apple has also been on watch since the beginning of the 2016 year due to fears of a fall in iPhone sales. Some of Apple's main Asian suppliers expect revenues and orders to drop this quarter, indicating iPhone sales are almost certain to post their first annual decline since the flagship product was launched almost a decade ago.
Channel programs News

Cognizant, HCL Named In Disney H-1B Visa Worker Suits

Michael Novinson

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Two outsourcing giants were sued Monday and accused of conspiring with Walt Disney World to replace American workers with foreigners on temporary visas.

A federal lawsuit filed by two ex-Disney workers claims that Teaneck, N.J.-based Cognizant, No. 8 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, and Noida, India-based HCL Technologies violated laws relating to the H-1B skilled-worker visa program by enabling Disney to displace U.S. workers.

"Over the past two years, hundreds of American Disney workers were fired from their positions with their companies and were immediately replaced by Cognizant H-1B workers with the specific knowledge of Cognizant," Sara Blackwell, attorney for ex-Disney worker Dena Moore, wrote in a U.S. District Court complaint filed in Tampa, Fla.

[Related: Boosting U.S. IT Skills Or Replacing U.S. Workers? H-1B Visas In The Crosshairs]

Blackwell filed a near-identical lawsuit on behalf of Leo Perrero, another Orlando, Fla.-based ex-Disney worker, who claimed he was replaced by an H-1B employee brought over by HCL. Blackwell is seeking class-action status for all 200 to 300 Disney employees who were terminated and replaced by H-1B visa holders certified by Cognizant or HCL.

Blackwell said Cognizant and HCL misrepresented the nature of the employment for their H-1B visa holders in order to bring workers over who could be leased or contracted with Disney.

Cognizant knew, or consciously avoided the fact, the jobs for which their H-1B employees would be filling were already filled with qualified American citizens, Blackwell wrote as part of the description of the racketeering acts.

The suits claim Disney told Moore and Perrero in October 2014 that they either had to train their replacements or lose their bonus and severance once their jobs were eliminated Jan. 30, 2015. Some terminated employees said they were blackballed from working at Disney for at least a year, with Moore claiming Disney management told her that jobs she applied for were open only to H-1B visa holders.

Disney disputes this claim, saying that Moore was offered another position in the company at comparable pay.

The suit also claims that only a couple of the employees fired in January 2015 were rehired, with the Cognizant- and HCL-sponsored H-1B visa holders telling the terminated Disney employees that they would not be rehired; Disney, though, said more than 100 of the affected workers were rehired.

"These lawsuits are based on unsustainable legal theory and are a wholesale misrepresentation of the facts," Disney said in a statement.

Similarly, Cognizant said it works with immigration law firms to remain current on best practices and periodically brings in a legal adviser to audit the company's immigration compliance.

"We have a robust internal compliance team that ensures our practices are not merely complaint with existing laws in letter and spirit, but also adhere to best practices," the company said in a statement.

HCL did not respond to a request for comment.

HCL submitted 3,763 H-1B applications in the first half of 2015 and 4,749 applications for H-1B visas in all of 2014, the sixth-highest figure among solution providers, according to the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC). Nearly 125 -- or 2.6 percent -- of the 2014 applications were submitted for jobs in Florida.

HCLs median salary for H-1B workers in 2014 was $70,304, the seventh-lowest among the 40 biggest channel users of the skilled worker visa program. Computer programmers, computer lab technicians and computer systems analysts made up the top occupations, according to the OFLC.

Cognizant submitted 441 H-1B applications in the first half of 2015 and 2,358 applications in all of 2014, the seventh-highest figure among solution providers, according to OFLC data. About 90 -- or 3.8 percent -- of the 2014 applications were submitted for jobs in Florida.

Cognizants median salary for H-1B workers in 2014 was $67,600, tied for the fifth-lowest among the 40 top channel users of the program. Nearly 95 percent of the applications were for computer systems analysts, the OFLC found.
Cloud News

BitTitan's Azure Starter Kit Gives Microsoft Cloud Partners An Entry Point To Selling Azure

Joseph Tsidulko

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Microsoft has around 77,000 "cloud transacting partners" and the software giant wants all of them to sell Azure, its public cloud.

But the majority of that channel isn't, as yet, doing any Azure business at all, instead focusing exclusively on Software-as-a-Service products like Office 365 or SharePoint, according to Rocco Seyboth, vice president of products at BitTitan, a Microsoft technology partner based in Kirkland, Wash.

"One area [Microsoft] is having trouble is finding use cases for these partners who understand email and documents well, but might not have expertise around some of the Azure use cases like application development," Seyboth told CRN.

[Related: BitTitan Introduces MSPComplete Platform For Selling Microsoft Cloud Services]

To address that challenge, BitTitan has created an Azure Starter Kit that enables just about any partner to quickly begin generating revenue by selling Azure -- without hiring new technicians, stepping out of their business or really even learning much about Azure -- by tackling two "low-hanging fruit use cases," Seyboth said.

First is migrating SQL 2005 databases that Microsoft soon will stop supporting. The second is migrating from Amazon Web Services unstructured data sometimes called "blob storage."

BitTitan has packaged tools to automate those two tasks with a discovery tool, HealthCheck for Azure, that assesses the feasibility and economics of migrating existing workloads to the cloud.

The Azure Starter Kit was added to BitTitan's MSPComplete platform in December.

HealthCheck for Azure can be deployed inside a customer firewall. It analyzes physical and virtual machines, looking for workloads that are compatible with the Azure environment and ready for migration. The tool also offers pricing data -- instantly creating a return-on-investment report partners can present to their clients.

"For partners not accustomed to having conversations with customers about Azure, we made that conversation really easy, because we know what workloads can go to the cloud and we know how much money they will save," Seyboth said.

In April, tens of millions of SQL 2005 on-premises databases will no longer be supported by Microsoft. Compounding the challenge, "there aren't more than a couple hundred partners worldwide for Microsoft that are experts in migrating databases," Seyboth told CRN.

With just a few clicks, the SQL migration tool solves a "huge problem for customers, a huge problem for Microsoft," he said.

While some users might choose to migrate to an on-premises SQL 2014 database, Azure SQL offers a cloud-based solution that will "save customer tons of money and they'll never have to do another upgrade like this again."

And as Microsoft and Amazon do battle, one Microsoft initiative is to get partners focused on the broad use case of "blob storage" -- heaps of unstructured data sitting around on file shares.

"Azure Starter Kit helps partners and customers attack that by migrating AWS blob stores to Azure blob stores," Seyboth said.

That migration capability should appeal to organizations already using Office 365 for email, or SharePoint. Some were Microsoft shops that years ago put their data in Amazon's cloud because Azure at the time didn't have the same capabilities, or couldnt match the price.

"That's not the case anymore," Seyboth said. "Azure has the same functionality as AWS, competitive pricing and better interoperability with other Microsoft cloud applications.

"But there's not a lot of partners out there today who know how to switch it over," he said.

Randall Crippen is a cloud architect at Comparex, a large IT consultant based in Leipzig, Germany, that opened a U.S. division with headquarters in Dallas about a year ago focusing strictly on Microsoft's cloud.

Comparex already uses BitTitan's email migration tool for Exchange Online migrations. The company is also using HealthCheck for cloud readiness assessments.

"The tool really allows us to gain insight into what's going on in somebody's infrastructure and capture the utilization of those resources," Crippen told CRN. "And by doing that, we can more accurately portray what that environment is going to look at in an optimized state, rather than just a cookie-cutter approach."

It's sometimes difficult for large providers like Comparex to develop practices offering line-of-business solutions typically requiring high degrees of customization, like database migrations. The Azure Starter Kit -- especially the SQL tool -- creates the possibility of scaling that practice by removing a level of complexity.

"Any tool that makes it repeatable is going to be interesting to larger organizations," he said. "There's a lot of opportunity in the market, and also a lot of confusion around it."

Seyboth told CRN another important feature of the starter kit is a trove of material that educates partners on how to take advantage of the three business opportunities it creates.

"We have to teach partners how to do some of these things and make money with them," he said.

The kit provides online content instructing partners on running assessments with HealthCheck for Azure, teaches how to activate a blob storage account, and shares information about SQL 2005 end of life.

BitTitan has an expansion for the starter kit planned for release in May. That one will move beyond selling and onboarding to creating managed service offerings around Azure, Seyboth told CRN.
P&O Cruises Pacific Aria made her maiden visit to Newcastle, signaling the growing popularity of the port city as a cruise destination, according to Carnival Australia.

The 55,820-ton Pacific Aria docked at Channel Berth in Newcastle, part of a five-night cruise from Brisbane, which also included a day in Sydney Harbour on January 26.

P&O Cruises Australia President Sture Myrmell said Newcastle was an increasingly popular call for P&O following the expansion of its fleet last year, which had opened up new itinerary opportunities.

Newcastle has a lot to offer our guests, from its beautiful beaches to the nearby Hunter Valley wine region. Its location between Melbourne and Brisbane makes it an ideal destination for our increasingly popular short breaks, providing a great way for holidaymakers from Victoria and Queensland to enjoy a long weekend indulging in some of the best food and wine Australia has to offer both onboard our ships and in the Hunter region, Myrmell said.
Israel's Minister of Infrastructure, Energy and Water, Yuval Steinitz, told CyberTech 2016 attendees on Tuesday that the country's Public Utility Authority had been targeted by malware, and that some systems were still not working properly.

"Yesterday we identified one of the largest cyber attacks that we have experienced," Steinitz said.

"The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it. We had to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli electricity authorities. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over."

Steinitz went on to say that the attack was an example "of the sensitivity of infrastructure to cyber-attacks, and the importance of preparing ourselves in order to defend ourselves against such attacks."

"We need cyber tech to prevent such attacks. Cyber-attacks on infrastructure can paralyze power stations and the whole energy supply chain from natural gas, oil, petrol to water systems and can additionally cause fatalities. Terrorist organizations such as Daesh, Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda have realized that they can cause enormous damage by using cyber to attack nations," Steinitz added.

In comments to local media, a spokeswoman for the Electricity Authority confirmed the attack and that because of it; some computers have been shutdown for at least two days.

However, by Tuesday evening, it was expected that the attack would be sorted out within hours.

The attack couldn't have happened at a worse time; Israel is experiencing a harsh winter with extremely low temperatures currently, which is taxing the power grid.

Steinitz didn't speculate on the source of the attack.

Not long after news of the attack started to spread, Robert M. Lee, the CEO of Dragos Security, published his thoughts on the matter over on the SANS ICS blog.

"Israel has threats that it must consider on a day-to-day basis. Critical infrastructure is constantly the focus of threats as well although there are a lack of validated case-studies to uncover the type of activity much of the community feels is going on in large quantities. However, reports of cyber attacks must be met with caution and demands for proof due to the technical and cultural challenges that face the ICS security community," he wrote.

"Simply put, there is a lack of expertise in the quantity required alongside the type of data needed to validate and assess all of the true attacks on infrastructure while appropriately classifying lesser events. Given the current barriers present in the ICS community the claims of attacks should be watched diligently, taken seriously, but approached with caution and investigated fully."

Update:

A report issued early Wednesday morning suggests that the attack referenced by Steinitz was actually a Ransomware attack. If so, then it wasn't something that impacted the power grid directly as was previously suggested.
One out of every three Americans was affected by a healthcare record breach last year, or more than 113 million people, up more than 10-fold from 12.6 million in 2014, according to a report released this morning by Bitglass.

Types of breaches changed dramatically, as well. In 2014, 68 percent of breached medical records were due to lost or stolen devices, but that percentage dropped to 2 percent last year.

Instead, in 2015, 98 percent of lost records were due to large-scale breaches.

"Lost and stolen devices have traditionally been the biggest source or compromised medical records," said Rich Campagna, vice president of products at Bitglass. "And that's completely switched."

One reason is that financial institutions have worked hard to reduce the value of stolen credit card numbers, he said, by quickly canceling and re-issuing stolen cards. Healthcare information, however, which includes insurance data, addresses, Social Security numbers and birth dates, continues to hold its value over time.

Meanwhile, healthcare organizations have locked down their devices.

There were a total of 140 breaches in 2014 due to loss or theft, and that dropped to just 97 last year.

"Last year, a much higher percentage of devices have shipped with encryption enabled," Campagna said.

Cyber attackers tended to use standard methods to compromise healthcare organizations last year, he added, using phishing to get employee credentials than leveraging those credentials to get at the data itself.

"It's striking how run-of-the-mill these attacks have been," he said.

CSO Staff

He recommended that companies train employees to spot phishing attacks, keep an eye out for similar-looking domains used to host spoofed corporate login or HR screens, and introduce two-factor authentication for suspicious logins.

"An employee logging in from a computer inside the network, it might be a low-risk situation," he said. "But if an employee is logging in from North Korea on an Android device -- when they previously only used iPhones -- that could be flagged."

In fact, many healthcare organizations are missing the opportunity to take advantage of two-factor authentication systems that are already in place.

For example, 37 percent of healthcare organization were using Google Apps or Office 365 in 2015, up from 8 percent in 2014.

But only 5.2 percent were using the single sign-on feature of these platforms, a basic security precaution.

"A lot of healthcare organizations are moving away from on-premises applications to the cloud," Campagna said.

"That makes the other types of authentication techniques, like multi-factor, much more important. It can be secure, but only if the cloud applications are used in a secure fashion."
The plunging price of oil may be welcome relief for customers at the gas pump, but its had the opposite effect at companies that service the industry such as Sikorsky, purchased last year by Lockheed Martin for $9.1 billion.

After commercial helicopter sales reached about $1.5 billion in 2014, a trend toward lower crude oil prices had Lockheed executives at the time of Sikorskys acquisition expecting revenue to be about half of that in 2016. But the continued decline in the oil markets has forced the new parent to further lower its expectations.

As it turns out, our current outlook is probably half of that number, said Chief Financial Officer Bruce Tanner said on a conference call discussing Lockheeds earnings this week. So think of that as roughly $375 million or so of commercial helo sales in the year 2016.

With Sikorskys helicopters used frequently to service offshore oil and gas facilities, a drop in oil prices means less need for that kind of service, cutting into demand for the helicopters.

According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lockheed reported profit of $52 million for Sikorsky in the first nine months of 2015, down from $167 million in 2014.

Sikorsky, since 1929 part of United Technologies Corp., was handed over to Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin when with the deal closed in November. The largest manufacturer in Connecticut, Sikorsky employs about 7,000 people in the state, mostly at its Stratford headquarters.

Lockheed and Sikorsky were jointly chosen by the Pentagon in 2014 for a $1.24 billion contract to begin building a new presidential helicopter. Sikorsky also won a series of other contracts from the U.S. military for a variety of helicopters, but with the payoff seemingly years away, the company was put up for sale.

Since then, cheaper oil has been consistently cited as problematic.

Sustained decreases in oil prices continue to drive significant declines in capital investments by oil companies in offshore oil exploration projects, impacting Sikorsky and resulting in reduced production levels, a Sikorsky spokesman said last year in a statement announcing the closure of its Bridgeport production facility. Those jobs were moved to Stratford.

Oil prices last week dropped below $30 a barrel for the first time in more than a decade before recovering somewhat this week.

The biggest change that we are seeing from when we announced this deal is the changes in sort of the OEM helicopter sales in the commercial marketplace, obviously driven by the oil and gas marketplace as we sit here today, Tanner said on the earnings call.

But Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson said the effects are limited.

I know that there is a lot of interest in terms of oil prices, she said on the conference call. Certainly oil prices affect our sale of commercial rotary wing, but in the balance of our business, while it does put some pressure on budgets in the countries that are buying natural security assets and things that they need to protect their citizens, the choices that they are making are cutting in other areas so that they can protect their citizens.

hbailey@ctpost.com; 203-330-6233; @hughsbailey
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When Ramze Zakka first entered the restaurant business 25 years ago, he simply wanted to fill a culinary void he felt existed on Greenwich Avenue.

So he opened Terra, a mom and pop eatery serving strictly northern Italian cuisine and offering an alternative to the fast-casual dining atmosphere of Greenwich at the time. But when Executive Chef and restaurant co-owner Albert DeAngelis joined the staff at Terra two years later, he had a different vision.

I wanted a multi-restaurant operation, DeAngelis said. He just wanted to open a small place, but thats not how it went down so here we are today.

DeAngelis and Zakka, as well as Zakkas son Adam, celebrated last month the opening of their third restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, a sleek new restaurant called Eastend serving signature cocktails and American cuisine.

This is a great privilege to now have three restaurants on Greenwich Avenue, Adam Zakka said. We are proud to say weve stood the test of time and remained open and were really proud of that.

Located at 409 Greenwich Avenue, the restaurant is the seventh in the Zakkas Z Hospitality Group, which owns and operates Mediterraneo and Terra on Greenwich Avenue, as well as Mediterraneo at Hotel Zero Degrees in Norwalk, Acqua in Westport, Sole in New Canaan and Aurora in Rye, New York. The group will also open a third iteration of Mediterraneo in White Plains later this spring, as well as a second Terra in Danbury in the fall.

The group, in conjunction with Hotel Zero Degrees, which operates in Stamford and Norwalk and shares a parent company with the Delamar in Greenwich, broke ground on a new hotel and restaurant in Danbury earlier this month.

A noticeably different atmosphere than flagship restaurant Terra, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in December, and 20-year-old Mediterraneo, Adam Zakka said Eastend seems to have attracted a new crowd to the lower end of Greenwich Avenue.

Its pretty similar but the average age is slightly younger and I think the atmosphere has a lot to do with it, Adam Zakka said. Its more approachable, we have a bigger bar  a great bar  and we get a good late night crowd. We turn up the music and its usually buzzing until 1 a.m. or later ... people finish their meal but they dont leave, and thats great to see.

Taking over the former home of MasterChef judge Graham Elliots Primary Food & Drink, which lasted just six months in Greenwichs sophisticated dining landscape, Eastend isnt the first new restaurant to open up shop at the bottom of the illustrious Greenwich Avenue. Most recently, Eastend joins celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarians The National, which opened in November.

But the Zakkas and DiAngelis agreed the number of top notch restaurants on Greenwich Avenue, particularly the lower half, have created a hub for culinary excellence thats bringing more foodies to the street rather than unfortunate competition for fledgling eateries.

We dont have any dishes here that are at our other places, everything from the salad dressings to the sauces are completely different, DiAngelis said. Not one recipe is the same.
Once is a timeless love story thats told in such a way that audience members feel as if theyre sitting in an Irish pub watching a relationship unfold, rather than viewing a show in a theater.

When the lead characters sing together, their harmonies are so striking, some audience members have said the beauty of it brought tears to their eyes.

Once was the winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in 2012. The national touring production comes to New Havens Shubert Theatre Thursday, Jan. 28, through Sunday Jan. 31.

An impressive ensemble of actor/musicians who play their own instruments onstage make the show unique. Once tells the enchanting tale of a Dublin street musician whos about to give up on his dream when a beautiful woman takes a sudden interest in his haunting love songs. The lead characters are known simply as Guy and Girl, perhaps to represent all women and men.

Sam Cieri, who plays Guy, said he feels a real connection to his character because he, too, almost gave up on his dreams. A motorcycle enthusiast and music lover, he shared more in a recent interview.

Q: After high school in Florida, you went from being a dueling piano player at The Mirage in Las Vegas to playing music in New York Citys subways. How did you find your way back?

More Information Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., New Haven. $126-$24. Thursday, Jan. 28, 7:30 p.m.; Friday, Jan. 29, 8 p.m.; Saturday, Jan. 30, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, Jan. 31, 1 and 6:30 p.m. 203-562-5666, shubert.com See More Collapse

A: I started writing these songs I really believed in and put everything I had in them. At the same time, I was playing covers in the subways to pay bills, which was starting to wear on me. When I finally had the opportunity to put my music out there, I made a record and really thought it would pull me up and out. When the record didnt do anything at all, I felt defeated. So I put the guitar away and got a real job selling motorcycles, which was good at first as a change of pace. But after a while, I couldnt handle it anymore. I had all these thoughts and feelings that I needed to express and couldnt. So I decided to follow another road. Acting was always something I really wanted to pursue, so I quit my job and auditioned for Rock of Ages. In doing the show, I started writing more, and through a twisted path found myself back in music. Once really brought that all home for me.

Q: You were recently seen as Drew, the lead in Rock of Ages. But how did you first get into music?

A: I did Rock of Ages on Norwegian Cruise Line for six months and had a blast doing it. Music originally started out for me as a way to get a date. I was a pretty awkward kid (not much has changed) and I would always stutter when I even attempted to talk to a girl. So when I saw this kid playing guitar on the stairwell for all these girls, I thought, Thats the ticket! ... My friend Ryan Martin got me listening to the classics, and I slowly learned how music can change you from the inside. One song can completely alter your soul. I picked up playing the piano and doing dueling piano in Las Vegas for a bit before coming to New York.

Q: In Once, theres a growing chemistry between your character and the young woman played by Mackenzie Lesser-Roy. But the unlikely connection between you turns out to be deeper and more complex than your everyday romance. What do you think is most compelling about this show?

A: The love story in this show is not just about me and Mackenzie, its about love in music, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, friends, strangers. It is honest and brutally so. Thats the most interesting thing to me. Its not just a pretty love story with some lovely music. Its an honest look at how hard it is to keep going in life. That is what we all struggle with every day, finding ways to become unstuck.

Q: What was the audition process like for Once?

A: I started auditioning while I was still on the ship through videos. It was submit and wait, submit and wait. When I made it to the final round of callbacks, I had to show up in New York in person. So I flew out of Bermuda at 5 a.m. after doing my last Rock of Ages. I am usually shocked when things go right. So I was very surprised and ... excited when I found out. The most difficult part in this show is going back in time, I guess. I think I have gotten past that person who gave up and was so self-destructive and depressed, but every night I have to face those things again. I have learned that it drains everything out of you each time. But it is worth it. I lose and find myself again in every performance.

lkoonz@newstimes.com; Twitter: @LindaTKoonz
Advocates for domestic violence victims and those supporting animal rights are teaming up to support the latest proposal for a public registry in Connecticut that would identify people who abuse animals.

The two groups contend those who abuse animals should be singled out because they're more likely to repeat certain types of abuses, such as animal hoarding, but also to commit violent crimes against people, especially in the form of domestic violence.

"We're continuously viewing opportunities to be responsive in unique ways to keep victims safe," said Karen Jarmoc, president and CEO of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. "At the end of the day, it's a very, very credible evidence-based link here."

One animal-rights activist recently attended a hearing in state Superior Court in Danbury where the owner of Animal Breeders on Federal Road pleaded not guilty to witness tampering charges in connection with an animal cruelty case.

Richard Doyle, 55, of Mahopac, N.Y., has also pleaded not guilty to three felony counts of animal cruelty and could face more charges. One of Doyles other stores recently closed after about 130 protesters picketed outside the business in Wappingers Falls, N.Y.

Connecticut lawmakers have proposed bills in the past, but to no avail, that would have created animal abuse registries similar to sexual abuser registries. This year, with the new legislative session starting Feb. 3, the concept has been resurrected by a task force created by the General Assembly to study the humane treatment of animals in municipal and regional shelters.

The group is suggesting a state-run online registry funded by annual fees charged to offenders. The name, identifying information and photograph of a first-time convicted animal abuser would be posted for five years. Repeat offenders would appear on the registry for 10 years.

Tennessee launched the first statewide animal abuse registry Jan. 1. Other registries exist for cities and counties.

North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda, the group's chairman, said pet shops, animal control officers and human animal adoption groups would be required to search the registry before selling or transferring a pet. The idea came up as a byproduct of the group's efforts to better protect animals, he said.

"What we have seen clearly is a linkage between animal abuse, domestic abuse, child abuse and substance abuse and sexual abuse," Freda said.

The relationship between domestic violence and animal abuse also caught the attention of a second state task force that's been studying the effects of domestic violence on children.

That group's draft report calls for more training on the link between animal cruelty and child abuse. A 2014 law already allowed cross-reporting of animal abuse and child abuse between the Department of Children and Families and animal control officers.

Jarmoc, who leads that task force, said abusers use many tools to try and scare a victim. One of them is threatening to kill or harm the family pet.

"Sadly, it's a reason quite often why victims stay. They're concerned if they can't protect their pet, who they love so dearly, they really can't leave," she said. The domestic violence coalition has an agreement with the Connecticut Veterinary Medical Association, which has made vets available to temporarily house pets while a victim is in a shelter.

The children's task force is also supporting another bill that would create an advocate in Superior Court to represent the interests of an animal in abuse cases and provide information and records to judges about the nature of the crime.

Rep. Diana Urban, D-North Stonington, who has proposed the legislation for several years, said that while she supports the animal abuser registry idea, it might not entirely useful, considering the state's conviction record for animal abuse cases is 18 percent. She contends that having an advocate in the court  a pro bono law student, under her proposal  will highlight the seriousness of the crime, heighten the conviction rate and ultimately boost the number of people on the abuse registry.

"We need to start looking at this as a real act of violence," she said.
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The Todd Haynes film Carol has been a critics darling since it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, and it has done well in terms of nominations during Academy Awards season, but the group that gathered for the recent Movie & A Martini screening in Greenwich was underwhelmed by the drama.

I didnt think there was any depth to it. I never understood what they saw in each other, Marion Beale, of Greenwich, said of the clandestine lesbian affair between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in the adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt.

They just spent a lot of time looking at each other, Beale added of the long, lingering wordless stares in many scenes.

Blanchett plays a wealthy woman in the midst of a divorce whose custody of her young daughter is threatened by her relationship with a department store saleswoman played by Mara. Carol takes place in the early 1950s, and shows the secretive nature of sexual relationships between women in an era when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness by most of the psychiatric community.

I loved the evoking of the period, Ken Staffey, of Bridgeport, said of the production and costume design that is reminiscent of the earlier Haynes 1950s period piece, Far from Heaven (2002). It not only looked like the 1950s, the characters acted like they were in the 50s, too.

The group admired the performances of the two lead actresses, but agreed that the characters back stories were thin. There is so little dialogue between them that we are left speculating about much of their lives before the fateful meeting in a New York City department store during the Christmas season.

The shopgirl is about to become engaged to a man who wants to take off for Europe, but runs off with Carol on a holiday road trip through the Midwest before Carols angry husband tracks them down. Because the story was created by Highsmith, a master of the American suspense novel, and Carol has a gun in her suitcase, the absence of melodrama was disappointing.

Staffey thought the movie could be viewed as a female variation on Brokeback Mountain, which also depicted two homosexuals suffering terrible repression during the pre-gay rights era.

One thing that stands out about the film is the reminder of a time when gay marriage was not allowed and how difficult it was to live freely then.

Next Movie & A Martini meeting: Joe Meyers at 6:45 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 28, at the Bethel Cinema, 269 Greenwood Ave. Visit facebook.com/martinimovie. Email jmeyers@hearstmediact.com
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Officers last year fired stun guns at blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than at white suspects and warned  but didn't fire at white suspects  at a higher rate than they did blacks or Hispanics.

Those are the findings of an upcoming report based on preliminary data from Connecticut, the first state to require police to document their use of stun guns.

The new data gathered by Central Connecticut State University in New Britain comes as police across the U.S. face increasing scrutiny over their use of force in the wake of high-profile fatal shootings by officers, especially of black suspects.

Although stun guns have been billed as non-lethal alternatives to firearms, they have resulted in deaths, and reliable information on how police use them has been lacking. In Connecticut, 17 people have died since 2005 after police hit them with stun guns, 12 of them minorities, according to the ACLU.

The CCSU report shows Hartford topping the list of incidents of stun gun use at 51, followed by Norwalk (40), East Hartford (36) and state police (34). The state's largest city, Bridgeport, reported 16 uses, while New Haven had 15.

In Bridgeport, police Detective Capt. A.J. Perez said the use of electronic devices have probably saved an unknown number of lives over the years.

In the old days, we really didnt have many options if, for example, someone was coming at you with a knife, he said. But now, when you pull your Taser, and the suspect sees that little laser light dot on his chest  well, that usually will defuse the situation right then and there. No one wants to get Tased.

The CCSU report will be released in the coming weeks. It was unclear whether stun gun in the report referred to both stun guns and Tasers, which are two different devices. Both are called electronic defense weapons and theyre often confused with one another in news reports.

Among the figures revealed in the raw data, obtained and reviewed by The Associated Press ahead of an official report expected in coming weeks:

State and municipal police reported 641 incidents involving stun guns last year, including 437 actual firings and 204 threats of use.

Within the overall number of stun gun incidents, officers fired them 60 percent of the time in cases involving whites, 80 percent of the time in cases involving blacks and 69 percent of the time in cases involving Hispanics.

Officers warned about firing but did not do so at white suspects 40 percent of the time, black suspects 20 percent of the time and Hispanic suspects 31 percent of the time.

When officers fired their stun guns in 2015, 43 percent of the suspects were white, 35 percent were black and 21 percent were Hispanic. But when officers only threatened to use stun guns and did not fire them, 61 percent of the subjects were white, 19 percent were black and 20 percent were Hispanic.

Thirty percent of the people involved in the overall incidents were black and 21 percent were Hispanic.

Perez said that when cops in Bridgeport fire their Tasers, the officer using the device has to fill out a full report on the incident thats reviewed by the police chief.

Bridgeport officers also have to fill out a Use of Force report every time the Taser is removed from its leg holster during an encounter with a suspect, whether or not the darts are actually fired.

He has to completely explain the circumstances, and this report goes right up the line from sergeant to captain to chief to the city attorney, and theres also a review board, Perez said. And the board will issue a verdict on the incident  good, bad or indifferent.

Perez said that if the Taser is fired, the suspect is taken to a hospital to have the barbed darts removed.

A 2014 law made Connecticut the first state to require all police departments to report every instance in which an officer discharges or threatens to use a stun gun. Researchers at Central Connecticut State University are reviewing the data and will submit a report with analysis to state officials, possibly by the end of February.

Tasers come equipped with a data device that records the time of each discharge as well as the ambient temperature.

The figures don't include data from several smaller towns that didn't submit reports. Researchers have contacted them and are awaiting responses.

State officials cautioned against making quick conclusions about the figures, saying they have just begun to analyze them after the Jan. 15 deadline for police departments to submit the reports. Civil liberties advocates also said that the data appear to show racial disparities on the surface, but that more analysis is needed.

"It seems like in the cases where it was threatened but not used, there were far more white people involved," said Michael Lawlor, state undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning. "Why that is and whether there is some other explanation, we're going to go through the data and try to figure it out."

Amnesty International has reported that at least 540 people in the United States died after being shocked with stun guns from 2001 to 2012.

The Connecticut data showed one death last year, in the community of Branford, researchers said. Media reports and the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut show two deaths in the state  the one in Branford and an additional one in Hartford. The reason for the discrepancy wasn't immediately clear.

Among injuries, the vast majority were from removal of the darts that deliver the shock, researchers said.

Of the new data on stun gun use, David McGuire, legislative and policy director for the Connecticut ACLU, called the statistics "alarming."

"I think this data will be helpful for policy makers and police chiefs in Connecticut to get a handle on the issue," he said.

Local police officials also cautioned against making quick judgments about the data. Differences between departments, including percentages of officers carrying stun guns, make it difficult to compare cities and towns, they said.

Norwalk Police Chief Thomas Kulhawik said all 177 officers in his department have stun guns, while other departments don't require all officers to carry them. He also cautioned against comparing stun gun use figures with population race data.

"The officers don't pick and choose who's going to resist arrest or flee," Kulhawik said. "Tasers have proven to be a less lethal method that avoids injury to the officer and the suspect. Serious injuries to suspects have dropped dramatically since the Taser became a tool."

Hartford Deputy Police Chief Brian Foley said police officials are reviewing their data and plan to use the information to improve how the department serves the city. He said 136 of the department's 400 officers carry stun guns.

Civilians can use a Taser or a stun gun in Connecticut, but only in the home. Theyre legal for civilian use in about 45 states; some require a permit, some dont.

Connecticut Post writer John Burgeson and Associated Press reporter Dave Collins contributed to this report.
SHELTON  A man State Police say was traveling north on the southbound side of Route 8 early this morning caused the highway to briefly be shut down.

The pickup was first spotted in Shelton, between exits 11 and 12, State Police said, and the driver refused to stop when a trooper approached him with lights and sirens.

Police in surrounding towns were notified to stop all traffic from entering Route 8, and Seymour police deployed stop sticks that punctured two of the pickups tires but failed to stop it.

The driver continued at speeds of up to 60 mph on two rims, maneuvering his pickup around several police cruisers trying to stop him. Troopers and local police warned motorists up ahead that a wrong-way driver was approaching, spokeswoman Kelly Grant said.

When the pursuit reached Exit 38 in Thomaston  33 miles from where it began a trooper pulled his cruiser across the road. He then stood on the right shoulder, where he saw the pickups driver intentionally strike the State Police vehicle, according to the incident report.

Knowing that traffic had been blocked ahead of him, another trooper pulled in front of the pickup, which again intentionally collided with it, before coming to a final stop just beyond Exit 38.

The driver, identified by State Police as Thomas Plesz, 55, of Fairfield was removed from the truck and taken into custody. He was held overnight on $25,000 in bonds and will be arraigned later today at Superior Court in Derby.

Plesz has been charged with reckless driving, disobeying an officers signal, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, driving the wrong way on a divided highway, interfering with an officer, assault on an officer and reckless endangerment.
BRIDGEPORT  In a town where even government insiders on the City Council complain about access to up-to-date budget information, a new online initiative will lay out the books for anyone with computer access.

It delivers the transparency Mayor Ganim has pledged for his administration, said Edward Adams, the ex-FBI agent who now has a job in City Hall.

On Wednesday, Adams and Ganim announced their intent to launch the OpenBridgeport website.

The site piggybacks on work already done at the state level by Comptroller Kevin Lembo when he successfully pushed for and created OpenConnecticut.

For $2,000 a month Bridgeport has access to the same software and updates Lembo uses to provide a slew of data to the public on budgets and expenses, including Connecticuts government payroll, pensions, tax credits, fees and contracts.

Or, as Lembo put it, Where are their tax dollars going? Whose getting paid what, for what?

The city now just posts the annual budget online as approved each spring by the mayor and council.

Ganim said the alternative to OpenBridgeport is letting people rummage through papers and departments, which is not very practical, probably antiquated.

Ganim ran the city from 1991 until 2003. During his successful comeback campaign last fall he re-cast himself as a government reformer, forging alliances with people like Adams.

One of Ganims promises was to making the citys business more transparent.

Not just regular taxpayers but even the people in charge of governing have been frustrated over the years with a perceived lack of information from City Hall.

The City Council, which has a finance committee, has often complained that its monthly budget updates are months behind and has even considered hiring its own independent budget adviser.

Lembo said the OpenConnecticut software is so user friendly and provides access to so much valuable information, that even state department heads reference it.

Ganim hoped to roll out OpenBridgeport within one to two months. The site will initially contain budget and expense information. The goal is to add more categories over time, with regular updates.

Lembo said the state, for example, updates expenses nightly.

John Marshall Lee, a self-appointed fiscal watchdog and one of the few residents who regularly attends council meetings and who analyzes budget documents, attended Wednesdays announcement.

He called it a good sign that Ganim intended to make City Hall more transparent.

Cheri Quickmire is executive director of the statewide Common Cause clean government group.

Quickmire said OpenConnecticut was certainly an improvement and I would certainly encourage other municipalities, not just Bridgeport, to offer similar opportunities for citizens to be able to look under the hood of their government.

But Quickmire acknowledged an online budget site will only contain so much information, and if a public official wants to get away with something, they still can, so citizens and the press must remain vigilant.

Nefarious business doesnt get put on the website, Quickmire said.
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MILFORD  It wasnt long ago that three Catholic elementary schools served the children of Milfords five parishes.

Soon there will be only one.

After 50 years of educating children of parishioners living in the Devon section of the city, St. Gabriels School on Tudor Road will close in June.

The announcement was made at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday to a standing-room-only crowd at St. Gabriels church hall. The decision was not made by the Archdiocese of Hartford, but by St. Gabriels parish in consultation with its administrator, trustees, school board and council, according to the church.

The schools fate has been a concern since 2014 because of declining enrollment, increasing costs and reduced church collections. Enrollment has declined from a high of 219 in the 2008-09 school year to the current 139, which includes about 22 special needs students.

The school has an operating deficit of $111,709, despite receiving $348,789 from the parish, $60,000 from the Catholic Schools Support Program and $15,000 from the Archbishops Annual Appeal. Most of the deficit was attributed to payments to the health and pension fund.

More Information St. Gabriel's School Established: 1965 Closing: At the end of the school year in June Grades: K-8 Capacity: 250 See More Collapse

Holding out hope

After Tuesday nights announcement, several angry parents questioned the speakers. A few left the church hall in anger.

One woman accused the church of protecting pedophile priests and spending millions in legal fees, but neglecting children seeking a Catholic education.

Iftekhar Hussein,whose daughter, Fayrose, is a fourth-grader at St. Gabriels, said he doesn't know if she will go to St. Marys.

This was a good school, he said. We'll have to assess the situation.

St. Marys, on Gulf Street, will be the only Catholic elementary school in the city come September. St. Anns School on Ridge Street closed in 2010.

In 2013, the neighboring Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport closed St. Peter and St. Ambrose schools, leaving it with 36 schools in Fairfield County.

No decision has been made on the fate of the St. Gabriels School building, slightly less than a half-mile from St. Gabriels Church on Naugatuck Avenue. The buildings of former Catholic schools like St. Peter and St. Paul in Ansonia have been sold by their parishes.

Some parents are holding out hope that the church will allow them to rent the building while they form a charity to run the school independently.

Dale Hoyt, the superintendent of the 59 schools in the Hartford Archdiocese, said arrangements have been made to offer a $500 scholarship for each of the next two years to any student who transfers to St. Marys School.

Additionally, Hoyt said, St. Marys will offer a $500 scholarship for each of the next two years to any student transferring from St. Gabriels.

Tuition at St. Marys is about $5,775 for Catholics and $6,275 for non-Catholics, compared to the $5,400 for Catholics and $5,650 for non-Catholics at St. Gabriels, according to the Archdiocese.

St. Marys teaches 197 students in grades K-8, but has space for 450 students, and an additional 80 in pre-kindergarten.

When other Catholic schools have closed, Hoyt said, anywhere from 60 percent to 85 percent of the students transfer to another Catholic school. As a result, he anticipates St. Marys will need to hire additional staff.

We have a high rate of placing our academic professionals  and will work with them to secure another job in the archdiocese, Hoyt said.

Part of a trend

The Hartford Archdiocese represents 700,000 Catholics living in New Haven, Hartford and Litchfield counties. It provides education for more than 13,500 students in its 50 elementary schools and nine high schools.

The closing is one of two Catholic elementary schools announced Tuesday. St. Vincent de Paul Elementary School in East Haven, which has 89 students, will also close in June.

Its truly a loss when we have to close any Catholic school, said the Rev. Thomas A. Sievel, pastor ot St. Vincent de Paul Church. But in both cases, demographics and finances made it inevitable. You can only ask for money from the same people so many times.

Raising tuition is a Catch-22.

Whatever percentage you raise, you often lose the same percentage of students, Sievel said.

The school closings are a sign of the times, Hoyt said.

Both of these schools were built in the 1960s, during the height of Catholic education, Hoyt said. Now, religious orders no longer staff the schools, which means hiring lay personnel, which means higher salaries and benefits.
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MILFORD  Tears flowed, accusation flew and vows were forged as parents of St. Gabriel students tried to find a way to keep the Tudor Road Catholic school open.

Emotions flared Tuesday night when parish officials announced to a standing room only crowd in St. Gabriel Parish Hall that their 50-year-old school would close in June.

Parents feel blindsided, claimed Kristen Tawczynski, who has a child in pre-kindergarten at St. Gabriel School. No effort was made to consider options.

The decision to close the school was made by the parish which owns the building and ratified by Bishop Leonard P. Blair of the Archdiocese of Hartford.

This isnt over by any stretch, vowed Greyson Schwing, who is the father of two students and married to the third-grade teacher at St. Gabriel School. Im so angry. It is shameful how the church operated here.

Schwing said he has talked to state Rep. Kim Rose, D-Milford and state Sen. Gayle Slossberg, both Democrats from Milford. Slossberg is chairman of the Senates Education Committee.

Ive been on the phone with the mayor (Ben Blake) and Dr. (Gail) Kingston (principal of St. Gabriel School), Rose said. My two children are graduates of St. Gabriels. Im hopeful we can bring the parents and the parish to the table. My understanding is, the parents have some plans to make the school viable, but those fell on deaf ears.

Mounting costs

Schwing said that in a perfect world the parish would allow the parents to rent the school for a nominal amount and then run the school using the plans they have formulated.

Officials of the Broadway Street church informed the unsuspecting parents of St. Gabriels 139 students that their school would close following the end of the academic year. Officials cited a continual decline in enrollment from a high of 219 in 2008-09, and increasing costs, which have left the school with a $111,709 deficit.

The church claims this comes despite receiving $348,789 from the parish, $60,000 from the Catholic School Support Program and $15,000 from the bishops Annual Appeal.

Additionally, church officials maintain the school showed a significant deficit from 1998-2014. To help defray that, there was discussion a few years ago about selling 2 acres of wooded property behind the school to the Beth-El Center, which would build housing for returning veterans. But that deal never really got off the ground.

Now parents say the church intends to sell the entire school property, believed worth at least $5.2 million.

Schwing said the land was donated to St. Gabriels with specific instructions that it be used for a school.

But Maria Zone, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Hartford, said there is no deed restriction on the propertys title as to how it may be used.

Tuition at the school is $5,400 for Catholics and $5,650 for non-Catholics.

In an attempt to appease parents, the Archdiocese of Hartford offered a tuition credit of $500 for each of the next two years if students transfer to St. Marys school on Gulf Street, which is about 4.5 miles away. St. Marys offered another $500 credit for each of the next two years. Tuition at St. Marys is $5,775 for Catholics and $6,275 for non-Catholics.

However, most of the parents interviewed Tuesday night said they would not send their children to St. Marys.

Im a mother of a special-needs child, said one sobbing woman, who declined to give her name. There are 22 special-needs students in (St. Gabriel School) who are integrated into classes. All have flourished here.

Seeking donations

Schwing and Bob Fleischer said parents will be meeting over the next several days to determine options.

One option  raising money  began Wednesday.

A Save St. Gabriel School account seeking to raise $500,000 was set up on the www.gofundme.com website. Twenty-five people had donated a total of $4,540 by late Wednesday afternoon.

Jaime Bereski, who has three children in the school, said she did not expect a closing announcement Tuesday night.

They dont realize what they are doing, Bereski said of the parish. Everything in this school is phenomenal. The administration is phenomenal. The parental community is phenomenal. If I needed anything, I could call anyone and they would help. Every child in this school knows every other childs name. I have never seen a school like this before.

Bereski said she has no Plan B right now for her children, with the exception of working to keep St. Gabriel School open.

And if that doesnt work?

Maybe well look into other towns, she said. Im not interested in St. Marys.

Rebecca Bok, a St. Gabriel School alumna whose daughter, Gabriella Gonzalez, is a second-grader at the school, called the decision to close unfair and unjust.

We submitted three viability plans which would enable the school to be self-sustaining, Bok said, and the trustees rejected each one.

Bok said she has nothing but good feelings and respect for the teachers and students during her years at the school.

This school saved my life, Bok said, fighting back emotion. I was teased brutally when I was little. My whole life changed when I came here.
Not too long ago Gray Davis, then governor of California, was recalled from office before his term ended because he had lost touch with the voters. He is only one of two governors to have been removed from office without being impeached or re-elected. The other was Lynn Frazier of North Dakota who was recalled in 1921 for supporting state ownership of industries to reduce the power of political influence of the Robber Barons to build monopolies for vast profits.

These recalls were made possible by provisions in state constitutions and statues. Today, the several states have provisions to recall elected officials for incompetence, neglect of duties, corruption, misconduct and other offenses.
Coming from a career at one of the largest home security companies in the U.S., Ryan Cook decided to completely change gears last summer and open Smart Spark Vape + Lounge in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.

Though he says his knowledge of the vaping industry and culture was very limited before Smart Spark, Cook says he chose to be a part of the brand-new franchise, because he felt deeply connected to companys mission -- to help people kick the habits of smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco.

"Its extremely rewarding to know that Im not only helping others kick a toxic habit, but Im also helping them protect their long-term health," Cook says.

Related: Franchise Players: A Franchisee Explores the Developing Field of Vapor Stores

Based in Trion, Ga. and founded in 2014, Smart Spark is the first authentic franchise brand in the vaping industry, merging an upscale lounge atmosphere with a vape shop retail component. Jeremy Kwaterski, Smart Spark's founder, says he became interested in the e-cigarette business in 2014, when he learned that his father, who was a heavy smoker, had stage-four lung cancer. After his father died in 2015, Kwaterski says on the company's website that he made a commitment to help others quit smoking via what he believes is a much healthier alternative -- vaping.

Currently, there are three Smart Spark Vape + Lounge locations open and operating in Georgia. Below, Cook describes what it's like to be a franchisee in the blooming vaping industry.

Image Credit: Ryan Cook

Name: Ryan Cook

Franchise owned: Smart Spark Vape + Lounge in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.

Q: How long have you owned a franchise?

I opened in June 2015.

Q: Why franchising?

Like many others, I didn't want to reinvent the wheel -- I wanted to hit the ground running. The idea behind buying a franchise is that you are getting into a business that has vetted most issues and problems confronting small-business owners. In theory, franchising gives you a higher chance of succeeding, since it is well documented that 90 percent of all businesses fail.

Q: What were you doing before you became a franchise owner?

I was a vice president for one of the largest home security companies in the U.S.

Q: Why did you choose this particular franchise?

The great profit margins and low startup costs are what originally drew me to Smart Spark. I recognized the profitability of the business after doing my initial research and quickly wanted in on the ground floor of this exciting new retail space.

The vapor industry is exploding, and there is currently over $120 billion a year being generated by more than 50 million tobacco users in the U.S. and Canada. With only 2.5 million vapers in the market today, theres a tremendous potential to convert tobacco users to vaping through Smart Spark. And whats pretty neat is that its not only a vape shop, its also an upscale lounge where you can hang around, enjoy your newly-purchased goods and mingle with other vape enthusiasts.

I chose Smart Spark also because I felt deeply aligned the companys mission, which is to provide a smarter, healthier alternative to smoking. Smoking is a habit thats pretty hard to break, and it could take years for someone to fully quit. A study was done of people who wanted to quit smoking, and of those people, about 60 percent were more likely to succeed if they switched to vaping, compared to those who used alternative nicotine replacement therapies such as, nicotine patches or gum.

Its extremely rewarding to know that Im not only helping others kick a toxic habit, but Im also helping them protect their long-term health.

Related: This Weed Man Smokes His Competition in the Lawn-Care Business

Q: How much would you estimate you spent before you were officially open for business?

$29,000 franchise fee

$12,000 inventory

$15,000 in leases and build out

$10,000 in furniture, fixtures and equipment

Q: Where did you get most of your advice / do most of your research?

I consulted with Smart Sparks founder, Jeremy Kwaterski. Jeremy is a franchise veteran who founded CPR Cell Phone repair and grew it to over 200 locations. He certainly knows how to capitalize on a booming trend and knows what it takes to start a successful business.

I learned a lot about the vaping industry just by talking to him. I also spent a considerable amount of time in the corporate locations. Seeing and trying out the products firsthand really sealed the deal, and I was able to get a really good grasp of how vaporizers work. When I compared what Smart Spark does that the competitors dont, I found that the vaporizers that Smart Spark offers are revolutionary, both in relation to traditional cigarettes and the majority of other types of vaporizers in the market.

Q: What were the most unexpected challenges of opening your franchise?

For me, the most challenging part was learning the vape culture. Before Smart Spark, my knowledge of vaping was very limited. I knew in order to succeed in this industry, I had to grasp as much information as I possibly could about vaping. Thankfully, the Smart Spark team provided me training on all aspects of the vapor business including retail sales, wholesale sales, business economic support and marketing. I recommend any franchisees who are not familiar with vaping to hire someone who is passionate about vaping and understands the vape culture.

Q: What advice do you have for individuals who want to own their own franchise?

The most important thing is to do your research -- especially if its an industry that you have a limited knowledge of. Ask a million questions, and make sure that the corporate team is able to assist you in every way possible.

Q: Whats next for you and your business?

We are going to be moving into a bigger location. In just a few short months, we outgrew our small retail store and need more room for customer to hangout and enjoy our high-end lounge.

Related: Why This Franchisee Added Beer to Her Coffee-Based Career

Related:

Vape Lounge Owner Wants to Spark Cigarette Downturn

How These Reluctant Franchisees Know They Made the Right Decision

It Takes More Than Just An Average Joe to Be a Serial Entrepreneur



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
For all of Bernie Sanders populist crusading against the political influence of millionaires and billionaires, when faced with a rare chance to pass major campaign-finance reform, he voted against it, putting the partys biggest donors first. The vote is worth remembering not only for what it says about Sanders, but also as a reminder of the Democratic Partys history of saying one thing about reform and doing another.

In 2006, House Republicans backed a bill to rein in spending by 527 groups (named for a section of the tax code), the forerunners to Super PACs. In the 2004 election, those groups raised more money for Democrats than their Republican counterparts in unlimited contributions from wealthy donors, especially George Soros, while Republican Party committees attracted more in regulated donations.

To address the imbalance, the bill treated 527s like party committees, with contribution limits and a prohibition against direct corporate and union contributions. It also lifted limits on what parties could spend in coordination with candidates campaigns. Major government-reform organizations including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters backed the bill, which was co-sponsored by Massachusetts liberal Marty Meehan. But for Democrats, passing the bill would have meant giving up a campaign advantage. So Sanders joined nearly all Democrats in voting against it.

The bill wasnt perfect. Some Democrats complained it didnt cover 501(c)(4) organizations that later became a vehicle for large anonymous contributions. But winning half a loaf was hardly the problem. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer put it plainly: This is not reform, its retaliation. In fact, it was both, but for Democrats, the latter mattered most. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared 527s a freedom of speech issue, though she now supports  as does Sanders  a constitutional amendment to restrict such speech.

It was neither the first nor last time Democrats balked on passing reform.

In 1992, a Democratic Congress passed a bill that included public funding of campaigns and voluntary spending limits, knowing that President George H.W. Bush would almost certainly veto it. (He did.) The following year, with Bill Clinton in the White House and pushing for a bill, the fear set in that reform might diminish their fundraising advantages, and there was less enthusiasm among Democrats for the issue. Both houses passed bills that were weaker than the 1992 bill, and when they couldnt reconcile their differences, the bills died.

In 2009, when Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority, campaign-finance reform wasnt on their agenda. Only in 2010, after the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate campaign spending, did Democrats push a modest bill that would have required corporations and independent groups  but not large unions  to disclose their campaign spending. They failed to convince a single Republican Senator to support the bill, and rather than negotiate, they let it die.

Democrats also had a chance to take on another issue close to the heart of reformers: gerrymandering. Then-Congressman John Tanner, Democrat from Tennessee, introduced a bill granting responsibility for drawing congressional district lines to bipartisan commissions in each state. The bill was referred to a subcommittee chaired by New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler. It never got a hearing.

I asked Tanner if Nadler or President Barack Obama ever expressed any interest in passing the bill. Afraid not, he told me. The only people who would sign on as sponsors were the Blue Dogs, because they were already in competitive districts. Last year, with Democrats stuck in the minority, Nadler signed on as a co-sponsor of a redistricting bill.

In his final State of the Union speech, Obama lamented the rancor that dominates Washington and called for passage of campaign finance and redistricting reform as a way to fix our politics. Changing the system, however, requires leadership when your party is winning. And unlike Tanner, most Democrats in Washington have a history of finding religion on reform only when they are losing. Lord, grant me chastity and continence, prayed St. Augustine, but not yet! Democrats have long said the same about campaign finance and redistricting reform.

Francis Barry writes editorials on politics and domestic policy. He previously served as director of public affairs and chief speechwriter for former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and CEO of Bloomberg LP.
Former Uruguayan President Jose Mujica and Lucia Topolansky are in Cuba

Former Uruguayan President and current senator Jose Mujica is in Cuba accompanied by his wife, senator Lucia Topolansky to take part in a literary forum at Havana's Casa de Las Americas Cultural Institution.

They will meet participants at the 57th Casa de Las Americas Literary Prize and will deliver a key-note lecture at the Che Guevara Hall in the cultural institution.

The former Uruguayan President will also attend an ongoing international conference on the life and work of Cuban National Hero Jose Marti, which is being attended by other personalities, including UNASUR general secretary and former Colombian president Ernesto Samper.
'Joe Biden can have them': Mastriano vows to bus migrants to Delaware

politics
Democrats demand DeSantis share plans on restricting abortion

Abortion is among the biggest campaign topics. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and many Republicans are silent as the midterm election nears.
As countless people clamour for a recipe they think might bag them a mate, others are starting to wonder: do we need to worry if our partner leaves the house with cookware?

by Samantha Selinger-Morris
Almost everyone who lives in this country accepts  admittedly after much moaning and sighing  that we have to contribute a significant proportion of everything we earn to the Exchequer, to spend as the Government sees fit.

Indeed, paying taxes means paying our dues as citizens: from each according to our means, to each according to their needs.

Except that in recent decades, one  vastly rich  section of society has been allowed an almost free ride. These are the owners of multinational corporations who do huge amounts of business in Britain and in other EU countries, but have devised elaborate schemes to escape corporate taxes.

On Monday, Osborne was pictured with Bill Gates celebrating a joint commitment to the eradication of malaria

Former Google CEO and now executive chairman Eric Schmidt chats to Prime Minister David Cameron at a drinks reception in 2012 - and has in the past advised Cameron on economic matters

Conspicuous among them are firms such as Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and, above all, Google.

Their chieftains, the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, proclaim from the rooftops their own claims to be benefactors of mankind. Yet their most conspicuous skill is for making themselves rich beyond the dreams of Croesus  at the expense of the rest of us.

What's worse, they seem to be able to do this with impunity and with the connivance of the Government.

Last Friday night, amid much fanfare, it was announced that Google had reached a settlement with Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC), whereby the company settled a long-running argument about its negligible tax payments  despite colossal sales in Britain  in return for a secret, one-off cheque for 130 million, to cover the past ten years.

Disgrace

George Osborne hailed it a 'major success'. Everyone else has denounced it as a disgrace and condemned the Chancellor for being stupid enough to fall for it.

Between 2006 and 2011, Google garnered revenues in this country of 11.5 billion on which it paid just 10 million in tax. That is a rate of less than 1 per cent. Its annual British income is now over 4 billion, a tenth of its global sales.

If any of the rest of us, in trouble over unpaid back income tax, offered HMRC a one-off settlement amounting to maybe 5 per cent of the rightful amount, the inspectors would laugh in our faces and steer us towards the dock at our nearest crown court.

There is a telling comparison. Google generates far less revenue in France, but the Paris government is not such a soft touch. It has just reached a settlement by which the internet giant will pay around 380 million in back tax.

As for the British 130 million deal, neither ministers nor HMRC have offered the public the slightest explanation about the financial or legal basis on which this sweetheart deal has been made.

HQ: This is Google's UK reception at one of its central London offices, where thousands are employed, but it insists that it has no 'fixed base' in Britain

For all we know, the two sides simply sat down together over a few beers, joshed around, then HMRC's rep prodded a Google executive amiably in the ribs and said: 'Give us a few quid to shut up the moaners and groaners at Westminster  Dave and George will be so grateful.'

Whatever, the gloating Google people produced 130 million for the British poor box out of their small change, and that was that.

It is a shameful and dirty story, made dirtier by the cringe-makingly cosy relationship between Osborne, Cameron and the tech companies.

For example, on Monday, Osborne was pictured with Bill Gates celebrating a joint commitment to the eradication of malaria. Yet the tax arrangements of Gates's company, Microsoft, in Britain and around the world, are as opaque and evasive as those of Google, Apple, Facebook and the rest.

Since 2010, Osborne and Cameron have held repeated meetings in Downing Street and elsewhere with the bosses of all these companies, whom they treat as if they were groupies entertaining rock idols.

Google's especially warm relationship with the PM can scarcely fail to have been influenced by the fact that until last year its public relations chief was Rachel Whetstone, a prominent member of Cameron's Chipping Norton social set and wife of his former strategist Steve Hilton.

French authorities have been aggressively chasing Google for more than 500million Euros, furious at the tax avoidance ploy used by the firm, which registered all European sales in Dublin and benefitted from the lower tax rate in Ireland. Pictured is Google's office in Paris

Also, among other incestuous links, Naomi Gummer (daughter of the president of the PM's local constituency association and previously a political adviser to Cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt) is Google's UK Policy Manager.

Cameron's judgment about people has always been poor. He appears as susceptible as was Tony Blair to wealth and glamour. It is extraordinary that he fails to see that it is unacceptable on the one hand to denounce Silicon Valley companies for their amoral approach to tax and on the other to embrace their bosses.

Burden

However eager Cameron was to oblige his old chum Rachel, he should have remembered that it was Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, who notoriously declared himself 'proud of tax avoidance . . . it's called capitalism'.

No, it is not.

The behaviour of these tech companies, almost all based in the U.S., though customarily channelling profits through Ireland and Bermuda, constitutes a serious threat to the credibility of capitalism.

British businesses suffer, too, because they pay much more tax than rival companies such as Amazon.

As retail chain John Lewis's boss, Andy Street, has said: 'Two companies making the same profit: one of them pays corporation tax at the UK rate; one does not because it claims to be headquartered somewhere else. That is not fair.'

In an era in which Western governments groan under the strain of funding unaffordable healthcare and pension costs, they must generate adequate tax revenues to stave off ruin.

If some of the largest companies on Earth escape making their rightful contribution to the societies in which they do business, their share of the tax burden falls on the rest of us.

Jeremy Corbyn is not wrong about everything. He echoed widespread sentiment when he said about the cosy Google/HMRC stitch-up: 'When you or I owe tax, it would just be collected. When Google does, a voluntary agreement is reached'

Do not be fooled by the claims of the giants of Silicon Valley, headed by Bill Gates and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, that they are great philanthropists.

The fact is they merely give away in a blaze of naive publicity a fraction of the stupendous sums that their companies should justly be paying in tax. They also take care to retain personal wealth beyond imagining.

Jeremy Corbyn is not wrong about everything. He echoed widespread sentiment when he said about the cosy Google/HMRC stitch-up: 'When you or I owe tax, it would just be collected. When Google does, a voluntary agreement is reached.'

Boris Johnson (who, of course, sees George Osborne as a rival for the future leadership of the Tory Party) called the settlement 'derisory'  and so it is.

The lessons of this sordid business are obvious, even if the PM and Chancellor need to be instructed about them.

Above all, Silicon Valley corporations operate by ethical standards lower than those of the fictional Mob boss Tony Soprano. They will never do the decent thing out of decency, but only if under threat of being suspended over a gas-fired barbecue.

If such threats are what it takes to oblige international businesses to pay a reasonable proportion of taxes to the governments of countries where they generate sales, then that is what must happen.

Abuse

Thus, if they trade in Britain, they must comply with the laws our government imposes. And if these must be changed to keep pace with Silicon Valley's wiles, so be it.

Just a year or so ago  before he was photographed grinning beside Bill Gates  Osborne said: 'Some technology companies go to extreme lengths to pay little or no tax here. If you abuse our tax system, you abuse the trust of the British people.'

But that seems to be precisely what he has allowed to happen. The sight of him and Mr Cameron kowtowing to tax-avoiding tech chiefs is repugnant.

There must be no more secret backstairs deals with Google and its kind, and no more Downing Street parties for the tax avoiders themselves, however famous and photogenic.

There is growing public anger about what these businesses are getting away with, and rightly so. Those of us who work and pay taxes here are left to make good the bills for those who take money from British customers, but airlift the profits to tax havens.
Cecil Parkinson, who has died at 84, never believed he was the father of Flora, the daughter of his secretary, Sara Keays, a friend of the former Tory statesman tells me, adding: 'He suspected her real father was Marcus Fox MP, who had been chairman of the Tories' 1922 Committee.'

Private Eye suggested, in 1983, that Fox, who died in 2002, had been 'discussing Uganda' (its euphemism for extra-marital sex) with Ms Keays.

She sued them for libel but the case appears to have been settled out of court.

Margaret Thatcher, unaware of the Eye's joke name for canoodling, famously dismissed the story, saying: 'I know for a fact that Marcus has never been to Africa.'

Cecil Parkinson (pictured in the 1980s), who has died at 84, never believed he was the father of Flora, the daughter of his secretary, Sara Keays

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, 67, is publishing his Little Book of Tweets, which feature, we're told, his 'selfies, rubber ducks and teddy bears.'

The apparent intention is to present a cuddly new image of Adams, once suspected of being the IRA's chief.

So the tweets don't mention Belfast housewife and mother of ten Jean McConville, 37, abducted by the IRA in 1972.

After her body was found on a County Louth beach in 2003, Adams denied all knowledge of her murder when questioned by police.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (pictured), 67, is publishing his Little Book of Tweets

George Clooney has been talking about working with revered film makers Joel and Ethan Coen, who cast him as an idiotic chain gang convict Ulysses Everett McGill in 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?'.

'I've now done four massive idiots for them,' Clooney boasts.

The Coens don't sound too cerebral themselves. The actor has been known to do an impression of the pair laughing  like geese honking.

George Clooney has been talking about working with revered film makers Joel and Ethan Coen, who cast him as an idiotic chain gang convict Ulysses Everett McGill in Oh Brother Where Art Thou? (pictured)

Tony Blair performed on a leading French breakfast show, Europe 1, yesterday, where his anti-Brexit message was much appreciated. So was his French.

A listener emailed to say: 'Monsieur Blair's French is even nicer than Jane Birkin's'  a reference to the English pop singer, now 69, who performed the sexy song Je t'aime with lover Serge Gainsbourg.

Some think Blair yodelling his own version of Je t'aime with French admirers improves his prospects of becoming European Union president.

Tony Blair (pictured) performed on a leading French breakfast show, Europe 1, yesterday, where his anti-Brexit message was much appreciated

Reflecting on setbacks during his 120-film career, Sir Michael Caine, 82, says in an interview: 'I went to the top and then I went down to the bottom every actor probably does.

I screwed up and took a couple of scripts that weren't that great.'

One was the widely-dismissed 1987 sequel, Jaws: The Revenge, of which he once remarked: 'I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible however, I have seen the house that it built, and it's terrific.'

Reflecting on setbacks during his 120-film career, Sir Michael Caine (pictured), 82, says in an interview: 'I went to the top and then I went down to the bottom

Can David Cameron call the European referendum for June 23, as suggested?

This would mean his fight for the UK to remain in a 'reformed' EU would take place during official celebrations of the Queen's 90th birthday, Trooping the Colour, Garter Day and Royal Ascot.

'The most patriotic ten days in the calendar,' observes a royal source dryly.
For a highly intelligent man renowned for political acumen, George Osborne can make appalling errors of judgment.

One such was his extraordinary choice of words to describe HMRC's sweetheart deal with Google, under which the internet giant will stump up a mere 130million to cover ten years of back taxes.

How can the Chancellor claim that the firm's agreement to pay a paltry 3 per cent, on estimated 6billion profits in Britain, represents a 'major success'?

Was it wise of Mr Osborne to send a junior to answer MPs' questions on the deal, while he was schmoozing with Microsoft's Bill Gates?

Millions of hard-workers who pay their dues (including those scrambling to meet Sunday's tax-return deadline, on pain of heavy fines) will take a very different view.

They will rightly conclude that the firm is getting away with daylight robbery on a huge scale  reinforcing suspicions, aired by Max Hastings on this page, that this Government is far too cosy with multinationals, and Google in particular.

Indeed, it emerges that Culture Minister Ed Vaizey was at its offices just 48 hours before the deal was struck.

Meanwhile, was it wise of Mr Osborne to send a junior to answer MPs' questions on the deal, while he was schmoozing with Microsoft's Bill Gates?

Citing 'taxpayer confidentiality', the Government refuses even to reveal how Google's bill was calculated by HMRC's departing boss Lin Homer (not for nothing is she known as 'Dame Disaster').

Suffice to say France, where the firm does far less business than in the UK, is demanding three times more tax.

If he wants to keep his hopes of No 10 alive, Mr Osborne must get tough on tax-avoiders  and stop taking the public for fools

How significant that even Mr Osborne's soulmate David Cameron appears to have distanced himself from the deal, admitting the Government 'clearly' has more work to do to ensure multinationals pay up.

He can say that again. With firms such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Vodafone paying peanuts in corporation tax, the Chancellor's constant threats of a crackdown look emptier by the day.

Mr Osborne should be careful. With his rosy Budget forecasts unravelling, it is not as if he can afford to be generous to multinationals raking in vast profits.

If he wants to keep his hopes of No 10 alive, he must get tough on tax-avoiders  and stop taking the public for fools.

Victims of failure

Though nothing will bring William Mead back, Jeremy Hunt deserves credit for his deep apology to the one-year-old's parents and his promise to learn lessons from the way he was failed by the NHS out-of-hours hotline, as revealed by the Mail yesterday.

But as we report today, the earlier deaths of at least three children were attributed to similar failings by inadequately trained staff. That's three opportunities missed to learn lessons.

How inappropriate of the beleaguered Health Secretary to describe the hotline as a 'victim of its own success'

Meanwhile, how inappropriate of the Health Secretary to describe the hotline is a 'victim of its own success'.

Since patients are driven to use it by the closure of GPs' surgeries, wouldn't it be more accurate to call it a symptom of wider NHS failures?

More U-turns, please

First, Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham admits his party was wrong to promote round-the-clock drinking.

Now Labour's Baroness Jowell demands action against the crack cocaine betting machines notoriously introduced on her watch as Culture Secretary.

After years of standing almost alone against 24-hour licensing and the liberalisation of gambling laws, this paper welcomes these belated conversions.
Contouring might have had its day but beauty lovers have a new trend to try out, thanks to a blogger.

Instagram star Tiana, 17, from Vancouver, demonstrated the new technique of colour correcting that sees women using different bright shades to counteract undesirable tones in the skin without even using foundation.

She posed for a striking picture showing how green products were used to balance out redness, purple reduced yellowness and blemishes while peach banished dark under eye circles.

Scroll down for video

Tiana, 17, from Vancouver, showed off the new technique of colour correcting to enhance make-up

The Instagram star shows off the finished result with no redness or dark eye bags in sight

Tiana has had more than 8,000 likes on her Instagram image showing the complicated method.

She wrote on the post: 'The purple is to correct any weird yellows on my skin, green is for any redness or blemishes I may have, yellow and the salmon pink are for any dark circles, darkness or any acne scarring.'

But she advised people trying it out not to use too much colour, 'unless you do have any extreme discolouration on your face.'

In a recent video posted on her YouTube channel three weeks ago, Tiana showed how to try out colour correction using less make-up.

Tiana demonstrated how to use an eye shadow brush to apply the right tones exactly where you need them

She explained that yellow and salmon pink are to correct any dark circles or acne scarring on the skin

The YouTuber showed off her NYX correcting palette with the tones needed to correct skin sins

She started with a salmon pink under her eyes, brushing it over the entire under-eye area, then used a mint green to balance out any redness.

Tiana used this over the side of her nose and over a blemish on her forehead.

She then used more green over her cheeks and chin to counteract any other redness in her face.

Tiana then blended after the first stage and her skin appeared improved. She followed it with foundation and a lighter shade of concealer for even more impact, although her skin is improved with just the colours.

She showcased a bold final look with clear unblemished skin and dramatic red lips

The video has been watched over 22,000 times since being posted.

Tiana's Instagram image, posted 22 weeks ago, has also attracted attention from many people wanting to try out the technique.

Although one posted named Izzy Woods wrote: 'But she looks like a clown.'
An online troll who pretended he had tortured, electrocuted and killed a missing man revealed he did it for the 'rush' and to get attention.

Stewart McInroy, from Scotland, contacted Allan Bryant Junior's family through Facebook to claim he had committed the murder after the man disappeared after a night out.

Stewart said he didn't think it was the 'biggest crime' when he spoke to beauty vlogger Em Ford - who was trolled herself after posting images of herself without make-up - as part of BBC3's Troll Hunters which airs tonight.

Stewart McInroy, from Scotland, pretended he had tortured, electrified and killed a missing man and revealed he did it for the 'rush' and to get attention

Beauty vlogger Em Ford, pictured, who was trolled herself spoke to Stewart about his actions as part of BBC3's Troll Hunters which airs tonight. He said he had made the claims while drinking heavily

Stewart said: 'I was just trying to see what reaction I would get out of people if I started trolling.

'When I was sending the messages at the time I was just laughing at myself, just laughing, laughing at people's reactions who were arguing with me. I didn't care at the time what people were saying.'

When the 23-year-old went missing after leaving Styx nightclub in Glenrothes, Fife, in November 2013, his family set up a Facebook page titled 'Find Allan Bryant jr!' as part of a campaign to solve the mystery.

CCTV footage showed him leaving in the early hours of the morning but he failed to return to the family home in the town.

In April 2014, Stewart used the page to contact Mr Bryant's father, Allan Bryant Senior, as well as two others and sent them a series of messages claiming that he had murdered Allan.

McInroy had set up a Facebook profile in a false name, Daniel Bunton, and used that to add Becky Gallacher - a friend of Allan Bryant Jr - to his friends list.

Allan Bryant Junior went missing after leaving Styx nightclub in Glenrothes, Fife, in November 2013. CCTV footage showed him leaving in the early hours of the morning but he failed to return to the family home in the town. His family set up a Facebook page titled 'Find Allan Bryant jr!' to try to solve the mystery

Stewart messaged a friend of Allan's using a false Facebook profile and falsely claimed to have killed and electrocuted Allan after kidnapping him

She then received a string of messages from that account - including claims he had taken Allan hostage and that his 'life was at stake'.

Stewart told Em: 'I said on social media that I was a killer of a missing person and that I was holding up his body or holding him hostage.

'I was refusing to give his body unless they met my demands.'

Stewart pleaded guilty on indictment to three charges of behaving in a threatening or abusive manner likely to cause fear or alarm at Dunfermline Sheriff Court in August 2014.

The message, from Daniel Bunton, read: 'I am the killer of Allan Bryant.

'When he walked home I stopped my van, grabbed him, holded [sic] him hostage til I found out he was on the news so I brutally tortured him.

'Tied to a chair, stabbed nails in him, wrapped with 240,000 volt wire and fried that f****r Allah Akbar f*** white people.'

But Stewart claimed it was the influence of alcohol which made him behave out of character.

Stewart had not committed the crime but told police about the fake profile and threats. He pleaded guilty to three charges of behaving in a threatening or abusive manner likely to cause fear or alarm at Dunfermline Sheriff Court in August 2014. Em, pictured, said she felt 'sad' for Stewart

He said: 'When I started trolling I thought I would just take it as a joke, not saying such and such, but they took it a serious matter and myself I was under the influence of alcohol at the time.

'I can be a wee bit aroused when under the influence. I didn't think trolling was the biggest crime going I didn't think it was even illegal because when I see people doing it on YouTube or online they get away with it.'

When pressed by Em about why he chose to troll the family, he replied: 'I think it was probably the interaction, it was quite enjoyable at the time when I was doing it. After committing it I felt disgusted.'

Describing when he set up the fake account, he said: 'When I set up the profile picture I took three litres of cider, then I drunk another three liters of cider and that's when my mind was going a wee bit crazy and that's when the rush started kicking in. That's when things started kicking off on Facebook.'

After making the claims online, Stewart contacted police saying he wanted to report threats made to him on Facebook through the Daniel Bunton profile.

Officers attended and discovered that the Bunton posts had come from a mobile phone owned by McInroy.

In a police interview he owned up to his false claims of murder.

Allen has still not been found despite his family investigating claims in September last year that his body had been dumped in a drain.

His family is still appealing for information and was said to have been devastated by Stewart's lies.

Allan Bryant Snr told the BBC: 'When he did this it caused us real concern, we wondered if this guy was real. It caused us a lot of heartache and pain. He is a very, very sick individual.'

Stewart told Em it was the 'interaction' he enjoyed when trolling the family of a missing man. He thought it was a laugh at the time but is now 'disgusted' by his actions

Em, with technology journalist David McClelland on the show, tracked down another troll who was targeting politician Louise Mensch online

Stewart said he felt 'disgusted' with himself afterwards 'because why would someone put that on social media?'

He added: 'That's a question I can't even answer myself. I think it's just a thrill of attention seeking.'

Stewart even expressed concern that he could do something like it again while under the influence.

Following her meeting, Em said she felt 'sad' for Stewart. As well as his issues with alcohol, she recognised that trolling was an 'addiction' for some people

Stewart received a 10-month sentence but was released after a fortnight.

Em, who runs the blog My Pale Skin, rose to internet fame in July last year when a beauty tutorial went viral.

In the video, which has since had more than 18 million views, she revealed all of the hurtful comments she had received online because of her acne.

She also spoke to former politician Louise Mensch, 44, who is often targeted by trolls on social media.

Although Louise said she takes the 'rough with the smooth on Twitter,' she wanted to meet a troll who has sent her several tweets containing porn and calling her a 'feminazi'.

Technology journalist David McClelland enlisted the services of an agency which specialises in the 'dark web' to find the troll who tweets under @Cruella180.

He was tracked down to Slough after complaining to the council about bins and posting images of his neighbour's cat.

Former politician Louise said she takes the 'rough with the smooth on Twitter'. However she wanted to confront a troll who has sent her several tweets containing porn and calling her a 'feminazi'

Beauty blogger Em, behind My Pale Skin, was trolled for posting images of herself without make-up. She made a video including the hurtful comments she had received online which has now been viewed more than 18 million times

They even found a Twitter image of the troll dressed in a smart suit which was captured from a reflection.

Admitting it he was not what she expected, Louise said: 'That does surprise me because that's a pretty nice looking flat.

'The guy in this picture is wearing a suit and tie and brogues and looks professional. And now I feel extremely angry and want to go get him.'

Louise, who now lives in New York, flew over to confront the man behind the account - who remained anonymous.

He simply said he had sent the pornographic images 'to upset you and wind you up, did it work?'

When questioned by Em, he said he doesn't use his real name 'like superheroes always wear masks' and did it to 'destroy authority'.

He said: 'I never considered myself a troll I never sent threats or told members of the public "I think you're scum". I've never threatened anyone - I've told them they're stupid.'

The man said: 'I've got to them if they block me. I just move on to someone else. I don't owe the world anything, the world owes me.

'I will speak to you but I don't owe you an explanation. I'm working class. I don't like white, middle class people, white middle-class english people.

'This country's obsessed with class and if you're the wrong class.'
Seventy per cent of Americans have had casual sex with someone just once and the statistics are assumed to be the same in the UK.

Like it or not, we now live in a world where its the norm for young (and not so young) adults to experiment and enjoy casual sex.

Theres been much written about the negative impact of our hook up culture where apps like Tinder make sex as easy to get as a takeaway from your local.

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We now live in a world where its the norm for young (and not so young) adults to experiment and enjoy casual sex, and Tracey Cox says that while a study found that only 54 per cent of women had positive feelings the morning after, a growing number are embracing the opportunity for no-strings encounters

One study found while 80 per cent of men had overall positive feelings the morning after a one-night stand only 54 per cent of women did.

But while some women do find casual sex soulless, degrading and disrespectful, others find it empowering and liberating.

While you probably wont have an orgasm (women are 50 per cent less likely than men to orgasm during casual sex), theres a growing number of women who do a victory lap rather than walk of shame the morning after.

Women today have different priorities. Its often career first, love later  and casual sex and relationships in between.

There are also evolutionary reasons why women are also susceptible to the lure of no-strings sex with strangers.

If youre shy, easily embarrassed or not terribly confident about your sexual abilities, sex with someone you love and trust is going to be more comfortable, but higher self-esteem increases the chances of a more positive one-night stand, according to Tracey

WHY WOMEN HAVE ONE-NIGHT STANDS

Its in our genes

If you carry the DRD4 gene, youre more likely to be drawn to casual sex (and more likely to cheat as well).

University of New York research indicates if the gene is in your DNA, youre prone to sensation-seeking behaviours and more attracted to instant highs like doing drugs and sleeping with strangers.

Mother Nature makes us

They dont call them animal impulses for nothing.

Evolutionary scientists say women are far more likely to sleep with a stranger when theyre ovulating and most likely to get pregnant.

Sexpert Tracey Cox explains that women who carry the DRD4 gene are more likely to have casual sex as they're prone to 'sensation seeking' behaviour

If youre having troubles getting pregnant, evolution also tries to make strangers look attractive to introduce new, possibly more viable, sperm.

We cant resist super hot men

Research (Brunel University in the UK) suggests while men are often up for casual sex regardless of how attractive the woman is, women are far more likely to go for it if the guy (or girl, if youre gay) is very attractive.

Attractive people look healthy and strong which is why evolution also nudges you their way  theyve generally got good genes.

Youve got wide hips

Your hip circumference and sexual history are linked, according to research at Leeds University.

In the study, women with wider hips reported having had more frequent casual sex than narrow-hipped women - with the conclusion drawn that it was because theyre subconsciously less worried about childbirth.

(Rather a large leap there but, hey, its interesting.)

Its long been believed (but actually not proven) that women with visually bigger hips give birth more easily than narrow-hipped women.

Another explanation ventured by the researcher was that women who looked very feminine and men who looked super masculine are seen as less likely to be looking for long-term love - presumably because theyre more likely to pull so less likely to settle - so get hit on more often.

WHEN ONE-NIGHT STANDS WORK

You like having casual sex

Theres lots of evidence linking sleeping around with depression and anxiety but theres also evidence that one-night-stands can give some people a positive psychological boost.

The crucial factor is how much you enjoy casual sex and what your motivation is.

If youre not that keen on it or having sex because you feel lonely, depressed, to feel better about yourself or for revenge, the aftermath is (obviously) nearly always negative.

But if youre having no-strings-sex because you love sex, like the person youve met and feel in control of the situation and your sexuality, it can actually lower depression and anxiety (New York University research).

Youre in a good space

The better you feel about yourself generally, the more positive the experience is likely to be.

Youre not looking for long-term love.

It might happen in movies but most one-night stands dont lead to long-term relationships. Manage your expectations.

Youre confident about sex

If youre shy, easily embarrassed or not terribly confident about your sexual abilities, sex with someone you love and trust is going to be one hell of a lot more comfortable.

You want to try something a bit 'out there'

We all have a dark sexual side thats turned on by things we dont necessarily want to do with the person were planning to share our life with.

Some women use casual sex to try out kinky sex.

Who cares if the person judges us if they have no idea who we are and well never see them again?

You dont care if society frowns on you

Even if no-one else but the person youre sleeping with can see what youre up to, there is still a double standard (yes, after all these years!) that says men who have casual sex are studs and women who have them are sluts.

If youre going to beat yourself up afterwards, whats the point?

Youre getting over someone
As plus-size modelling has gone big over the past year, many of it's biggest stars have expressed a desire to escape the label - but not Tess Holliday.

In fact, the 30-year-old size 22 stunner recently told Paper Magazine that not only does she embrace being called a plus-size model, she thinks the term is 'very important'.

'It's never been used as hurtful, it's something that's basically just for women to kind of find where they want to shop, I guess,' she said.

Throwing curves: Tess Holliday, 30, has said that she believes the term plus-size to be 'very important' to women coming to terms with their bodies

Saying her piece: The size 22 model also claims that the label helps women know where to shop for clothes

'I do think it's very important, especially for young women who are kind of coming into their bodies, and older women who are becoming more OK with their bodies, to have terms for being bigger.'

The red-haired beauty also hit out at other models who are looking to ban the term from the industry, calling the whole idea 'silly'.

'When [plus-size women] look online, or look in magazines, they see that label, or see that term, they feel like they're not alone,' she said. 'They have something to identify with. I'm really a firm believer in calling it what it is.'

One of Tess' fellow models Ashley Graham is one of those who would prefer the label to disappear, claiming she prefers to be known as 'curvy', a sentiment echoed by the likes of other fashion stars, including Robyn Lawley and Tyra Banks, as well as actress Melissa McCarthy.

Taking the heat: Tess also took aim at other models who want to ban the term from fashion, calling the suggestion 'silly'

Leading lady: When she isn't working as a model, Tess also works as a fashion designer and heads up the #EffYourBeautyStandards movement

Speaking out: Both model Ashley Graham, left, and actress Melissa McCarthy, right, have spoken out about their dislike of the term plus-size, with both insisting 'curvy' is a better description

Tess, who founded the #EffYourBeautyStandards movement and has herself designed plus-size clothing and been a frequent advocate for body positivity, also believes that the plus-size modelling industry needs more diversity in terms of race and gender.

During the new interview, Tess also revealed that she had wanted to model since a very young age, but didn't realize she could until spotting early plus-size models like Mia Tyler and Emme when she was a teenager.

Her early days in the business were unsuccessful, not just because of her large frame, but also for her relatively short height: 5'5. Yet she was determined to not give up on the dream.

'I think I was really interested in the fact that I "couldn't" and I thought, "Why can't I?"' she said.

Finally, after she did some headshots with a budding photographer she was dating, she shared her rockabilly-inspired look on Model Mayhem and was eventually contacted by a casting director - bagging her a big break modelling job.

Fight to the top: Tess had struggles in the beginning of her career because of her size - but also because of her 5'5 height

Big break: Tess was scouted by a casting director after she uploaded a headshot to Model Mayhem

Internet onslaught: Tess was forced to frequently defend her shape from online trolls, but eventually realized that 'my health is none of their business'

From 2010 plus-size models began to grow a following on social media, and Tess eventually came out as one of the leading ladies.

But along with the promotion social media provided her with, it was equally a source of stress as hundred of people coming across her pages felt the need to push their opinion of her body type onto her.

'There are so many people who think that being a plus-size model, that there's something wrong with it, or that I must be unhealthy or that I'm promoting an unhealthy lifestyle,' she said.
A common misconception is that people with mental illnesses are crazy, hysterical and they regularly sit alone in darkened rooms crying.

But in reality, mental illness is often invisible. Someone can look happy, but be suffering inside, or equally they can seem down but feel completely fine.

This point was no better illustrated than when Australian writer, Anna Spargo-Ryan, spoke up this week, after the Sydney Morning Herald printed a piece offering advice on how employers can find out whether employees were faking mental illness or not.

Speaking out: Anna Spargo-Ryan posted two powerful selfies on Facebook this week in response to an article about mental illness

These photos of me were taken three days apart, Anna wrote in a Facebook post accompanied by two selfies.

In the first one, I have a mental illness. And in the second one, I have a mental illness.

One of the recommendations from this absolute dropkick of a human was to issue a warning to those you suspect are faking it.

Strong comment: She posted after a newspaper piece ran accusing mental health sufferers of 'faking it'

She continued: Part of what makes mental illness so hard to identify in at-risk people is the constant reinforcement that were imagining it or that were just sad or that we have to want to get better.

'Its an ethereal illness, existing only because we cant be bothered to be well, or because weve talked ourselves into it, or because we didnt try hard enough, or because we are faking it

Both of these photos are mental illness. I hope this helps you spot the fakers, she finished.

Insensitive piece: The newspaper article has since gone viral, and has resulted in an apology from the author

Speaking to the Daily Mail Australia, Anna explained how upset and confused she was by the Sydney Morning Herald story, which has since gone viral and resulted in a note from the author stating an enormous amount of feedback on social media has made me realise the article was poorly written and insensitive.

The writer, James Adonis, wrote that the content of the article has been unfair on those with a mental illness and their loved ones. This was never my intention. My intention was to achieve the opposite. At this I clearly failed. Im genuinely sorry.

Were still at the beginning of understanding mental health in everyday life, Anna says to the Daily Mail Australia.

Increasing awareness: Anna says that we need to improve the public perception of mental health issues

The public perception is slowly improving, but theres still an overwhelming impression that mental health problems are a weakness. People associate these problems with craziness, and people who suffer from them find it even harder to talk as a result.

Im lucky because I find it easy to talk about my problems  I have a great support network and flexibility at work when I need it. But lots of people, especially men, feel they cant speak out. This explains the rising rates in male suicide.

To act as though mental health issues are an advantage at work  a perk even, as James did  is insulting. It showed a total lack of understanding and it prompted me to take the sad selfie as I was reading his words.

Huge reaction: However, Anna says that she wasn't expecting the huge reaction to her post she received

Anna has suffered from and been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder for several years now, and when she posted the selfies on her Facebook page, the post was liked, shared and commented on by thousands of readers.

I totally wasnt expecting the reaction I received, she says.

I thought people would think Annas just going on another rant and leave it at that. But I think its great that both people in general and the writer James have learned that this is a classic example of misunderstanding around mental health. I am glad James publicly said he felt differently and I understand his apology.

Total support: Anna says she is lucky because she can speak openly and has a great support network

Advice to others: She advises other sufferers to be pragmatic and avoid being hysterical

Anna explained that, for her, a good way of improving understanding around mental health issues, is to be as pragmatic as possible.

I think for employees the most important thing to do is plan your chat to your employer, she says.
She's become a phenomenon in the last month due to her open, honest and hilarious posts about life, love and mothering.

Now, mummy-blogger Constance Hall has written another of her trademark posts to her 314,000 followers, this time writing about losing her virginity - and telling young women to own their sexuality.

'When I first started having sex (if you can call it that) in my high school years. My sexuality didn't feel like mine. I didn't feel like I owned it, I kind of felt like I was given it to offer the boys, to get them to like me [sic].' the 32-year-old wrote on Facebook.

Mummy blogger star: Constance Hall has told her Facebook followers about the first time she had sex as a teen

Honest and hilarious: The Perth-based blogger said she prioritised men's pleasure over her own as a teenager

Her post spoke frankly about being a teenager who wanted to grow up and was 'dying to cross [sex] off the list' of grown-up things she had done.

The Perth-based blogger said that as a young woman she prioritised men's pleasure over her own and was too worried about what her partner was feeling to enjoy sex. She said that too many teen girls gave oral sex but didn't receive it, an inequality she perceives as unfair.

The mum-of-two also writes that no one should be having sex unless they are 'horney [sic]' and really want to - not because they feel it is the adult thing to do.

Equality during sex: Constance says she thinks she subconsciously believed a man's pleasure was more important than her own

Constance said that even when she was a young woman she was too concerned with how her partner was feeling to appreciate the pleasure she could have been receiving.

'Even into my young adult years I often think about receiving a good head job and all I can really remember is lying there, feeling awkward, being too concerned with what my generous lover was thinking to really enjoy what he was offering me....'

As the blogger points out, it's a problem that affects young women and not young men. 'I've never had a man decline a late night blowy because he was worried about disco balls? Hmm...' she wrote.

'Like a queen': Ms Hall said women should embrace their sexuality and not worry about men's orgasms

'Sex is hilarious and fun': The 32-year-old wants 'orgasm equality' between the sexes

Ms Hall said that teenage girls should be paying attention to their own bodies during sex, and 'I gave more head then I received, I wasn't concerned at all by my MIA orgasm yet I treated men's orgasms like some sort of holy miracle, the be all end all lord of sex [sic],' she wrote.

'Teenage queens, if your not HORNY (I'm going to keep saying that word until you finally stop cringing) your not ready.'

'Because sex is hilarious and fun and most of all it is to stimulate and satisfy you both. It is not Christmas it is not really about giving, give and take or f*** off.'

'Sex is hilarious and fun': Constance says she wants young women to orgasm as much as young men

Controversial: Ms Hall sparked debate last week after starting the hashtag #LikeAQueen for women to share their 'flawed' bodies and boost their self esteem

Ms Hall finished her post by telling young women to value their bodies and their sexuality. 'I want young queens to grow older and themselves in word that values their orgasm, I want them to feel vaginal pride, sexual pride,' she wrote.

'I want to bring it to be light, I feel proud of my sexual history, entitled to my sexual future and I want orgasm equality.'

Ms Hall has previously had posts she has written about anxiety and body image go viral. She started the hashtag #LikeAQueen and encouraged her followers to share pictures of their 'flawed' bodies on social media to normalise them.
Japan's Princess Mako of Akishino has made a very low-key appearance at the University of Leicester to collect her postgraduate degree - after going incognito at the institution for a year.

It was revealed in September that the 24-year-old royal - who has been compared to the Duchess of Cambridge - had chosen to complete her studies in the English city.

And on January 21 the granddaughter of Emperor Akihito maintained her under-the-radar profile as she received her Art Museum and Gallery Studies honour.

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Japan's Princess Mako of Akishino has made a very low-key appearance at the University of Leicester to collect her postgraduate degree - after going incognito at the institution for a year

It was revealed in September that the 24-year-old royal - who has been compared to the Duchess of Cambridge - had chosen to complete her studies in the English city

Princess Mako, who is the eldest daughter of Prince and Princess of Akishino, threw herself into student life, living amongst other pupils in a hall of residence and completing a work placement at a local museum.

During Thursday's graduation ceremony, Princess Mako proudly lined up with her peers before making her way onto the stage to shake hands with the university's chancellor.

Her name was called out without her official royal title, which is Her Imperial Highness Princess Mako of Akishino.

Pictured from left, Princess Akishino, Princess Mako of Akishino and Princess Kako of Akishino during the birthday celebrations of Japanese Emperor Akihito

During Thursday's graduation ceremony, Princess Mako proudly lined up with her peers before making her way onto the stage to shake hands with the university's chancellor

After enrolling at the university in 2014, Princess Mako joined 34 other students on her course.

As required by her programme, she completed an eight-week placement at Coventry Museum and collections-based research at New Walk Museum in Leicester.

The Imperial House of Japan held a press conference in September revealing her identity - the British press and majority of the student body had been none the wiser until then.

At the time the modest royal said her 12 months at the school 'was a wonderful experience.'

Princess Mako commented: 'I would like to express my sincere gratitude for having had the opportunity to pursue my studies in such a favourable environment.

'It has been a very fruitful year for me. I hope to apply what I have learned at postgraduate school in the future.'

Her name was called out without her official royal title, which is Her Imperial Highness Princess Mako of Akishino

The Japanese Imperial family poses for a photograph in December 2006. Pictured from left to right in back, Prince Akishino, Crown Princess Masako, Emperor Akihito, Empress Michiko, Crown Prince Naruhito and Princess Kiko holding Prince Hisahito in her arms. From left to right in front, Princess Mako, Princess Aiko and Princess Kako

In a video released by the institution last year, Professor Simon Knell praised the royal, saying: 'She's been like any other student. She's very polite, very enthusiastic, very generous and she's been a delight to teach.'

Meanwhile, president and vice-chancellor of the university, Professor Paul Boyle, described how Leicester's School of Museum Studies is 'world-renowned' and 'among the highest ranked research departments in the UK.'

He said: 'We are delighted that Princess Mako chose to study with us and trust she had a wonderful time in Leicester. We will be proud to count her among our alumni and hope that she will continue to engage with our university in the future.'
A woman who believes she was born a cat has opened up about her life as a feline, describing how she has a superior sense sense of hearing and sight which allows her to hunt mice in the dark.

Nano, 20, from Oslo, Norway, makes the revelation in an interview published on the NRK P3 Verdens Rikeste Land YouTube channel, and it's been viewed 122,000 times.

And she claims to possess many feline characteristics including a hatred of water and the ability to communicate simply by meowing.

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Nano, 20 from Oslo has revealed that while she may look like a normal woman she was born in the wrong species and is in fact a cat

In the video Nano, who reflects her inner cat by wearing a pair of pointed ears and an artificial tail begins her interview with a series of rather convincing 'meows'. She then explains that she first discovered her true identity as a teenager.

'I realised I was a cat when I was 16 when doctors and psychologists found out what was "the thing" with me. Under my birth there was a genetic defect,' she explains in the video.

Walking through Oslo's central station the presenter asked Nano what she could hear and see that a normal person might not.

'Suitcases rolling on the ground,' she says, 'Keys clinking in pockets. People with ice crampons under their shoes.'

Then all of a sudden, she lets out a hiss and takes a step back.

'There is a dog over there,' she explains. 'Sometime I hiss when meeting dogs in the street. It's because of their behaviour and my instinct automatically reacts by hissing.'

Cats are notoriously averse to water, and Nano explains that she's no different. She says water makes herself feel like washing her face like a cat and dons a pair of pink fluffy paws to groom herself

When the presenter asks if she was born like this Nano agrees, saying: 'Yes, born in the wrong species.'

Cats are notoriously averse to water, and Nano explains that she's no different.

'I hate water,' she says. 'Water is like you get the instinct to wash yourself in the face and stuff.'

I can see better in the dark than in daylight. That's no problem

Nano demonstrates another moment of affinity with cats by donning a pair of giant pink cat paws and rubbing at her face as if she's grooming herself.

She's then seen on her hands and knees, crawling around on the floor before going up to the window and looking out longingly as she paws at the wall and whimpers like a frustrated feline.

'It's also obvious that I'm a cat when I start purring and meowing,' she explains. 'And walking around on four legs and stuff like that.'

Nano also stresses that, like the small four-legged animals, she loves to 'sleep in the sink and in the windowsill' although she doesn't comment further on the size of either item.

One of the main advantages of being a cat, according to Nano is her heightened sense of hearing.

'You can hear a lot better than regular people, and you can see much more,' she reveals. 'You focus on things that normal people can't.'

And she even claims to possess night vision.

Nano exhibits cat-like behaviour when crawling around on all fours and meowing. She says she first discovered her true identity when she was 16 years old

She's seen looking longingly out the window and pawing the wall. Nano also claims to enjoy sleeping on the windowsill and in the sink, and says she has superior hearing

'I can see better in the dark than in daylight. That's no problem,' she says. 'I have been running a lot after animals that can be seen in the shadows.'

However she admits that despite her best efforts she has never managed to catch a mouse.

While most people would probably struggle to understand her life as a cat, she's found a kindred spirit in best friend Svien who is also interviewed.

'He has something called "personalities" and one of them is a cat,' she says.

'So you are born as a cat, but he has become one?' the presenter queries.

'He is human but has someone in his head that is a cat, and I am born as a cat,' Nano confirms.

Seeing in the dark is no problem for Nano, but despite chasing after mice she has never managed to catch one

Her best friend Svien has 'someone in his head' who is a cat, and the pair often communicate to each other by miaowing

Svien explains that the pair often talk 'in cat' by mewing at each other.

'Suddenly I start meowing or she does,' he says. 'And then we answer each other and communicate by cat language.'

Nano demonstrates with three quick meows that are supposed to translate as: 'Come on let's go.'

'I understand,' Svien confirms.

Nano sums up her life as a cat as 'exhausting' but says that you get you to living with 'cat acts and cat instincts'.
After having four daughters, a New York father was so shocked to learn he was finally going to have a son, he simply collapsed in shock.

Mastic Beach resident Julio Pena, 38, had all but given up on the idea of having a son, so when his wife Kari, 35, became pregnant once again, he was entirely expending news that they would be welcoming yet another little girl.

The couple learned the news of their baby's gender at a party for the occasion on January 17, with the cutting of a specially-made cake.

Making the cut: A new video shows father of four girls Julio Pena (right), 38, cutting into a cake revealing that he is about to be the father of a son

Following a doctor's appointment, the couple had been given an envelope containing news about the gender, but they didn't open in, instead letting their 16-year-old daughter Chastity be the lone person knowing the truth.

The teen then ordered a cake for the party to be blue underneath the icing, rather than pink, to reveal to her parents that their next baby was going to be a boy.

In the video, which was posted online on January 20, Julio and Kari are seen surrounded by their loved ones and many pink and blue balloons.

In the center of the room, there is a white frosted cake sitting on the table, which the couple then begin to cut together with a large knife.

Big news: As Julio cuts into the cake revealing a blue sponge, his wife Kari (left) and the rest of those in the room erupt into screams

Proud father: Julio takes a moment for the reality of the situation to hit him before he also cries out in joy

The family members around them are chanting 'Its a boy! Its a boy!' as the couple reveal that the cake is indeed blue.

Kari is the first to see the color, and begins jumping up and down and squealing with glee.

Julio, on the other hand, is quiet at first while everyone around him erupts into screams, but then is suddenly overcome, his knees buckle and he collapses to the floor behind the table.

Screaming as he goes down, his wife attempts to catch him but fails, bending down to make sure her husband is alright. Others in the room pull away the table and also rush to his aid.

Down he goes: Overcome with emotion, Julio collapses to the floor in a heap next to his wife

Stepping in: Others in the room pull away the table and rush to Julio's aid, but it's soon revealed with the smiles of his loved ones, that he's okay

'Ive been waiting for this for a long time. For a boy,' Julio, who works for a transportation company, told ABC News, adding that 'they had to sit me down in the sofa and I couldnt say anything. I was like in shock.'

Kari also told the station that her husband had been shaking even before they cut the cake saying that Julio was 'dying for a boy forever'.

The video and Julio's reaction is not unlike the previous viral clip showing Cher Lair from Apex, North Carolina, cutting into a cake revealing she was pregnant with a daughter after having given birth to six sons.
When the menopause hits, many women are left feeling tired and listless. But instead of curling up on the sofa they should make sure to keep moving.

Walking, jogging and swimming can make the symptoms less severe, a study has found.

Women who did at least three 30-minute sessions a week were around a third less likely to complain of bad hot flushes and extremely painful joints, the study of thousands of middle-aged women found.

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On the run: Walking, jogging and swimming can make symptoms of the menopause less severe, a study says

They were also less likely to be obese or depressed, and slept better.

Despite the benefits of exercise, fewer than a third of the 6,000 women questioned were active, the journal Menopause reports.

The study of Latin American women comes just a few months after a British study endorsed the benefits of an active middle age.

Research from Liverpool John Moores University found that women who worked up a sweat in the gym suffered fewer hot flushes than those with a more sedentary lifestyle. And the flushes they did experience were less severe.

This is important because hot flushes are the most common and distressing symptom of the menopause and can disturb sleep, drain energy and cause embarrassment. A single flush can last from a few seconds to a whole hour.

Researcher Dr Helen Jones said her results were so impressive that exercise could be a natural alternative to HRT (hormone replacement therapy).

It is thought that exercise makes it easier for the body to deal with the lapses in heat control that occur around the menopause due to hormonal changes.

Swim: Instead of curling up on the sofa, women should make sure to keep moving when the menopause hits

Even gentle exercise such as gardening could help. Staying active also brings many other benefits, such as reduced risk of cancer, stroke and depression.

Dr JoAnn Pinkerton, of the North American Menopause Society, which carried out the latest research, said: Regular physical activity reduces the risk of breast and colon cancer, dementia, heart attacks, stroke, depression; loss of lean muscle mass, and bone loss and improves immune system function.

One study showed that just one hour of walking daily cut the risk of obesity by 24 per cent. Fewer hot flushes, fewer health risks, increased well-being  who doesnt want these benefits?

The typical British woman goes through the menopause at 51 and symptoms can last as long as 14 years. Even for an average woman, it takes seven-and-a-half years for the body to adjust.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, the UKs first female Chief Medical Officer, has called for more recognition from employers.

Speaking last month, she said that addressing the great taboo would cut sick leave, boost productivity and keep more older women in the workforce.

Dame Sally said it was inexcusable that many women did not feel they could even discuss their symptoms with their boss.
President Barack Obama has called for the rapid development of tests, vaccines and treatments to fight the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus.

The virus has been linked to birth defects and could spread to the United States in warmer months.

U.S. health officials are now stepping up efforts to study the link between Zika virus infections and birth defects, citing a recent study estimating the virus could reach regions where 60 percent of the U.S. population lives.

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The mosquito-borne Zika virus - thought to cause a birth defect where the brain does not develop properly - has rampaged through the Caribbean and Latin America. President Barack Obama has called for the rapid development of tests, vaccines and treatments to fight the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus.

ZIKA CONFIRMED IN VIRGINIA A Virginia resident who traveled outside the United States has tested positive for the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, state health officials said on Tuesday. The adult resident had recently traveled to a country where Zika virus transmission was ongoing and the infection was confirmed through testing by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Virginia Department of Health said in a statement. 'Zika virus is acquired through the bite of an infected mosquito. Because it is not mosquito season in Virginia, this individual with Zika virus infection poses no risk to other Virginians,' Virginia Health Commissioner Dr. Marissa Levine said in a statement. Advertisement

Obama was briefed on the potential spread of the virus by his top health and national security officials on Tuesday.

'The president emphasized the need to accelerate research efforts to make available better diagnostic tests, to develop vaccines and therapeutics, and to ensure that all Americans have information about the Zika virus and steps they can take to better protect themselves from infection,' the White House said in a statement.

The virus has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil.

There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, a close cousin of dengue and chikungunya, which causes mild fever and rash.

An estimated 80 percent of people infected have no symptoms, making it difficult for pregnant women to know whether they have been infected.

On Monday, the World Health Organization predicted the virus would spread to all countries across the Americas except for Canada and Chile.

In a blog post, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins cited a Lancet study published Jan. 14 in which researchers predicted the Zika virus could be spread in areas along the East and West Coasts of the United States and much of the Midwest during warmer months, where about 200 million people live.

The study also showed that 22.7 million more people live in humid parts of the country where mosquitoes carrying the virus could live year round.

Given the threat, Collins said 'it is now critically important to confirm, through careful epidemiological and animal studies, whether or not a causal link exists between Zika virus infections in pregnant women and microcephaly in their newborn babies.' Microcephaly results in babies being born with abnormally small heads.

There is still much to learn about Zika infections, experts said. For example, it is not clear how common Zika infections are in pregnant women, or when during a pregnancy a woman is most at risk of transmitting the virus to her fetus.

Collins said the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease is conducting studies to more fully understand the effects of Zika in humans, and to develop better diagnostic tests to quickly determine if someone has been infected. The NIAID is also working on testing new drugs that might be effective against the virus.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also announced new instructions for pediatricians treating infants whose mothers may have been exposed to the virus during pregnancy.

Zika virus is common in parts of Africa and South East Asia, but since 2007 there have been various outbreaks outside of the disease's comfort zone. It spread to South America in 2014, before reaching Mexico and the Caribbean last year. The first US case was reported in Texas at the start of January

In those guidelines, the CDC made clear that it considers the Zika virus a nationally notifiable condition, and instructs doctors to contact their state or territorial health departments to facilitate testing of potentially infected infants.

Dr. Kathryn Edwards of Vanderbilt University, who serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on infectious disease, said the guidelines were intended to help establish whether Zika causes microcephaly and to help pregnant women who may have been infected with the virus.

Microcephaly is a lifelong condition with no known cure, the CDC website said. Symptoms range from mild to severe.

In mild cases, infants often have no symptoms other than small head size, but doctors still need to check their development regularly. In severe cases, babies may need speech, occupational and physical therapy.

The guidelines for testing infants affected by Zika infections follows CDC guidelines for caring for pregnant women exposed to Zika virus, which were first reported by Reuters. The CDC said last week it is trying to determine how many pregnant women may have traveled to affected regions in the past several months.

On Tuesday, the CDC added the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic to its list of countries and territories with Zika transmissions, bringing the total to 24.

The CDC has told pregnant women not to travel to countries and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean affected by Zika. Travel companies, including United Airlines, have begun offering refunds or allowing pregnant women to postpone trips to regions affected by Zika with no penalty.

There are no global estimates for how many people in the world have been infected by the Zika virus, World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier said on Tuesday.

He said that because Zika has such mild symptoms, the virus has 'not really been on the radar.'

Lindmeier said it was not yet clear whether the virus affecting Brazil and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean was a mutated version of the virus that has caused prior outbreaks.

He said the WHO was working with the CDC, the Institut Pasteur in France and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to establish that.

'There is a lot of effort going into this now, on the ground, in the laboratories, everywhere,' Lindmeier said.
More women will die from lung cancer in the UK this year than in any other EU country

More women will die from lung cancer in the UK this year than in any other EU country, a study found  because they took up the habit earlier.

Researchers looked at death rates from all cancers in the 28 EU member states where Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain are the largest.

They reported 'encouraging' downward trends in deaths from most cancers. Since 2011 there has been a fall in total cancer death rates in the EU of eight per cent in men and three per cent in women.

But the number of women dying from lung cancer will be higher in the UK this year, at 16,400, even than in the other large countries.

The rate per 100,000 women has started to fall, however  from 20.15 per 100,000 in 2013 to 19.37 predicted this year, while death rates are still rising in the other countries.

The rate is 8.77 per 100,000 in Spain, 10.96 in Italy, 12.18 in France, 15.72 in Germany and 17.12 in Poland.

Professor Carlo La Vecchia of Milan University, co-author with Professor Fabio Levi of Switzerland's Lausanne University of the study published in the journal Annals of Oncology, said: 'There is a moderate fall in death rates in female lung cancer in the UK, although UK rates are still higher than in other EU countries, except Denmark, as British women started to smoke earlier.

'Rates of deaths for all ages are still comparatively high, but they are levelling off, while rates for the young generation of UK women are lower than in most other large EU countries.'

Prof Levi added: 'We need effective tobacco control in European women in order for overall rates to level off at around 15 to 17 per 100,000.'

The study forecasts that between 2009 and 2016 death rates from leukaemia among children aged 0 to 14 will fall by 38 per cent in boys and 20 per cent in girls.

Researchers looked at death rates from all cancers in the 28 EU member states where Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain are the largest

Deaths from the disease in people aged between 15 and 44 will fall by 26 per cent in males and 22 per cent in females. Among men and women aged 45 to 69 the death rates will fall by 19 per cent.

Researchers say that improvements in management, multi-drug chemotherapy, immunotherapies, stem cell transplants, radiotherapy and treatments that have less toxic side-effects have all contributed to the improvement in survival from leukaemia.

However, some leukaemias remain hard to treat successfully, particularly those that are more common in adults and the elderly.

But Prof La Vecchia said: 'The absolute numbers of cancer deaths are likely to level off in the future.
It will take scientists around a decade to develop a vaccine for the fast-moving Zika virus, an infectious disease expert claimed today.

The US and other world leaders have called for swift action in developing a vaccine for the virus that is currently rampaging through Latin America and the Caribbean.

But Dr Amesh Adalja, senior associate at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told Daily Mail Online that officials shouldnt expect any fast results.

Before the current outbreak  which is linked to a surge in babies being born with abnormally small heads  Zika was not considered to be a public health risk.

Dr Adalja told Daily Mail Online: There wasnt any vaccine development being undertaken prior to this outbreak in Brazil.

It will be quite a while  and this is on the scale of about a decade for a vaccine to be developed usually.

An infectious disease expert told Daily Mail Online that a vaccine for the fast-moving Zika virus - which has been linked to birth defects - will not be developed for close to a decade. That's because, unlike other viruses that have had recent outbreaks, Zika was assumed to be 'mild' and no vaccine had been in development

There is currently no vaccine or treatment for Zika, which is a close cousin of dengue and chikungunya, two viruses that cause mild fever and rash.

Approximately 80 per cent of people who are infected with Zika have no symptoms.

The other 20 per cent experience mild symptoms, such as fever, rash, joint pain, and red eyes.

As a result, there weren't any Zika vaccines in the pipeline, according to Dr Adalja.

But in recent months, the virus has been linked to a rare birth defect called microcephaly  in which a newborn's head is smaller than normal and the brain may not have developed properly.

The virus has been found in 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The World Health Organization has warned it will soon spread to all countries across the Americas, except for Canada and Chile.

A lot of people might be thinking that all of the sudden they had an Ebola vaccine. This is different from Ebola  that vaccine had been in development for many years Dr Amesh Adalja, senior associate at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Dr Adalja explained that the public incorrectly assumes a vaccine will be available shortly  because of the rapid vaccine that was made available shortly after the Ebola crisis struck.

He said: A lot of people might be thinking that all of the sudden they had an Ebola vaccine.

This is different from Ebola  that vaccine had been in development for many years.

But now that Zika has become a public health concern, researchers are going into overdrive.

First off, scientists will have to do some basic science to see if parts of the virus can be presented to the immune system, according to Dr Adalja.

That phase of the research may involve animal studies in the laboratory  and will involve investigating different ways that the immune system may react to the virus.

And once the first step is completed, scientists will next have to determine whether the vaccine is safe or if it has a high burden of side effects.

They will also have to look into if the vaccine triggers any autoimmune reactions.

Zika virus is common in parts of Africa and South East Asia, but since 2007 there have been various outbreaks outside of the disease's comfort zone. It spread to South America in 2014, before reaching Mexico and the Caribbean last year. The first US case was reported in Texas at the start of January

The virus is spread through the Aedes mosquito (pictured). As a vaccine won't be available anytime soon, the medical community should focus on wiping out the mosquito that transmits the disease, the expert said

Dr Adalja said: It takes time, and there are a lot of steps where the process can fail, but it seems to me that because of Zikas ability to affect fetal abnormalities, it will become a priority.

He noted that the vaccine won't work just to limit the disease in adults  but also to limit the effect it can have on fetuses.

However, for the time being, there is no cure for Zika.

The doctor said: Once a person is infected, there is nothing that you can do.

It takes time, and there are a lot of steps where the process can fail, but it seems to me that because of Zikas ability to affect fetal abnormalities, it will become a priority Dr Adalja

If a pregnant woman is infected, there is no treatment that can be done to protect the fetus  it either happens or it doesnt.

The best way to prevent a fetus from getting infected right now is for pregnant women to avoid travelling to regions that are affected by the virus.

Dr Adalja added: While we wait for a vaccine, people really need to focus the battle on the mosquitoes that are transmitting the virus.

A developer recently revealed it created a genetically modified mosquito that reduces the number of mosquitoes spreading Zika.

Oxitec, a UK-subsidiary of US synthetic biology company Intrexon, said it developed a self-limiting strain of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

The male mosquitoes were modified so that their offspring will die before reaching adulthood or being able to reproduce.

The company said it saw strong results in controlling the population of the Aedes vector that carries Zika and also the dengue virus.
In a big setback for the Congress, President Pranab Mukherjee gave his nod to bring Arunachal Pradesh under central rule.

The border state has been witnessing political crisis since October last year, leading to bitter fights between the Congress and the BJP.

The approval for central rule came a day after Mukherjee sought clarifications from the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on the governments move.

Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kapil Sibal, V Narayanasamy and Arunachal CM Nabam Tuki address the media after meeting President Pranab Mukherjee

On the same day, the Congress sent a petition against the recommendation to the President and moved the Supreme Court, which is expected to hear the case on Wednesday.

The Congress cried hoarse and called the move a murder of democracy on a day India celebrated its 67th Republic Day. It accused the BJP of creating trouble in Arunachal Pradesh to oust the present government of Chief Minister Nabam Tuki.

Tuki met former Union Minister and Congress leader Kapil Sibal to discuss the fate of the partys petition in the apex court and the future course of action.

The Congress, which had raised the issue of constitutional crisis in Arunachal Pradesh during the previous winter session of parliament, said it will co-opt other political parties to broadbase its offensive against the BJP in the budget session scheduled to start next month.

Moving beyond the slogan of Congress-mukt Bharat, the BJP is now working to create an Opposition-mukt Bharat, Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said.

We will fight the battle in the court, inside the parliament and outside, he said.

The move has seemed to unite the Opposition.

This is a black day for the republic on the 67th Republic Day. This is against the spirit of co-operative federalism, said JD(U)s KC Tyagi.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also criticised the Centres move while invoking BJP veteran LK Advani, who has been out of favour with the saffron partys leadership since the Modi government came to power.

Prez rule in Arunachal. Advaniji was right in saying there are emergency-like conditions in the country, Kejriwal tweeted.

Point to me a single law and order problem in Arunachal Pradesh. You cant, because there is none, a miffed Tuki said.

The Centre had said the law-and-order condition in the state has deteriorated, an assembly session had not been held for six months and lawmakers were denied access to the assembly because the speaker had the building locked up.

The political crisis surfaced in Arunachal Pradesh in December when around half of the Congress lawmakers joined hands with the BJP in rebellion and supported a move to remove the speaker and chief minister at an assembly session convened by Governor JP Rajkhowa.

The rebel lawmakers held their meeting first in a community hall and then in a hotel, raising eyebrows. Congress leader Kalikho Pul blamed CM Tuki for the problem.

This is unfortunate. Arunachal Pradesh had to see this day because of Tuki, said Pul, denying the BJP was behind the crisis.

The BJP never said they want to form the government. They are not trying to do that, he said.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh told police to engage with the local community

The trust deficit with the public needs to be bridged to improve policing in the country.

This was the advice Home Minister Rajnath Singh gave to cops while addressing a national conclave on community policing in Kerala.

I always believe that the efficacy of any police force lies in its relationship and engagement with the local community, he said.

Singh pitched for a nationwide action plan, saying there is an urgent need to come up with a technical architecture connecting local police stations with the local community.

New chief justice for Delhi HC?

Justice Dhananjaya Yashwant Chandrachud, son of former Chief Justice of India Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud, has been recommended by the collegium headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur to be the Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.

There is also speculation that present Delhi High Court Chief Justice G Rohini has been recommended for a transfer to the Madras High Court in the same capacity.

On Tuesday the collegium appointed 35 new high court judges in Madras, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Allahabad, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

Humour at Supreme Court

Congress leaders Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram were short of Rs 800 from the court fee as they represented the party in the Supreme Court which took up the petition challenging the imposition of Presidents rule in Arunachal Pradesh.

There was peal of laughter in the courtroom when the judges pointed it out to Sibal. The bench was also unhappy with the font used in the petition.

Pre-budget meet for Northern Railways

Raising problems of their respective areas, MPs discussed their issues with senior railway officials on Wednesday.

The parliamentarians, keen to spend MPLAD funds on rail projects involving improvement of passenger amenities and construction of foot overbridges, discussed matters with railway authorities.

The meeting with public representaives was organised as part of the pre-budget exercise to know about the problems being faced in Northern Railways.

Congress readies ammo against Kejri

The Congress is planning to target Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal over the crisis brewing in the local municipal corporations.

The Congress said that Kejriwal had to be presurrised to release salaries of municipal workers, but the AAP leader increased salaries of the lawmakers by 400 per cent without any request.
India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru

The Nehruvian consensus was rudely shattered by an arriviste called Narendra Modi.

The consensus had held firm for 67 years - from 1947 to 2014.

What were its core principles? First, secularism. Second, socialism. Third, non-alignment. Fourth, dynasty. Just to make sure, Indira Gandhi injected the words secularism and socialism into the Constitution during the Emergency, without a trace of irony.

Ecosystem

Even through the six Vajpayee years, 1998- 2004, the consensus held. Its long duration nurtured an ecosystem composed of a curious amalgam: Marxist historians, Macaulays colonially-seduced bureaucrats, faux secular intellectuals, compromised journalists, and sycophantic politicians worshipping at the altar of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

These common threads formed the architecture of a secular, socialist democracy. Muslims were appeased, not empowered. They were kept in secular ghettos, paraded out every five years to vote for the Congress and its fairweather allies. Dalits were paid lip service. Like Muslims, they formed a rich vote catchment - however poverty-stricken they remained. Poverty and socialism went hand-in-hand.

While the GDP of countries in the rest of Asia - from Malaysia to Thailand - grew at over seven per cent a year through the 1960s, 70 and 80s, India crawled at the Nehruvian rate of growth (wrongly dubbed the Hindu rate of growth) of under three per cent a year.

Had Indias GDP growth matched that of other Asian countries in that 25-year period, Indias economy would today be double its size. Per capita income would be nearer $3,000 than $1,500 and poverty levels below 10 per cent, not todays 21 per cent. In short, 150 million more Indians would have been lifted out of the poverty they live in today.

The Nehruvian consensus was pregnant with good intent: Nehru himself was an honourable man, if mistaken in the way he tackled Pakistan and China. He was colonys child and allowed himself to be swayed more often than was good for India by the Anglo-German charms of Lord Mountbatten (whose original family name was Battenberg - berg is German for mount, hence the Anglicised surname).

Though he was an excellent first PM of India and responsible for building a strong institutional architecture for a newly independent country, Nehrus heirs in the Congress began distorting his legacy right from 1966 when daughter Indira, undeservedly, became prime minister. That set the example of dynastic politics which has spread through the body politic like a virus. It has today infected Indian governance with cronyism, feudalism and sycophancy.

Consensus

Indias intellectual elite, which often fell in line with the British during the Empire, dutifully fell in line with the Empires heirs. The Nehruvian consensus was blessed at birth by the British who had ensured Indias economy grew at less than 0.5 per cent a year during the British colonial occupation of India (again wrongly termed the British Raj, implying benign consent on the part of its subjects).

The Nehruvian rate of growth between 1947 and 1991, though slow, was higher than during the previous 190 colonial years. Indians, always easily satisfied, were content. Through this period, socialism and secularism took firm political root. Muslims were appeased. Their backwardness endured and eventually led to resentment and radicalisation.

A bankrupt treasury in 1991 forced PM Narasimha Rao and his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, under intense IMF pressure, to wring economic reforms out of a calcified system devoted to povertarianism.

And then along came Modi. During the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, he attacked Nehruvian politics. Dynasty was ruthlessly dissected. Left-leaning povertarian economics was clinically exposed. Communalism dressed up as secularism was unrobed. The Lutyens ecosystem of corruption, sycophancy and dynasty was shred. The public anger against all this catapulted Modi to power. Thats when the problems began.

Seizing power is easier than exercising it. In the first days of his prime ministership, Modi made a fatal error: he assumed that the Nehruvian ecosystem could be shamed into introspective retreat.

Luck

He was wrong. The ecosystem is like a lizard. Cut off its tail and it stays alive. Cut off its head and its tail writhes for long. Modi did neither. The ecosystem couldnt believe its luck. Here was a man who, after reducing the Congress to 44 MPs in the Lok Sabha, was leaving them well alone. A few bungalows were taken away. Schemes named after the Nehru-Gandhis were changed. But the edifice remained untouched. It was as if Modi regarded the prime ministership as the end, not the means to the end.

The Nehruvian consensus, led by the crafty and wealthy, regrouped. Gradually, it struck back. It began the anti-Modi campaign a year ago. US President Barack Obamas visit on R-Day in 2015 allowed it to mock Modis 15-lakh monogrammed suit. This was followed by insinuating that church attacks were orchestrated by right-wing extremists.

Modis ministers, meanwhile, scored own goals with intemperate statements. Award wapsi and the intolerance debate cast Modi as a dictatorial PM who had spawned an atmosphere of fear in minorities, who was callous about Dalits and who had damaged Indias secular image globally.

The Modi government made things worse for itself by cloaking itself in silence. Half-truths and disinformation were allowed to become the gospel truth. Clarifications came too late. Truth needs speed and clarity to survive, while lies thrive in an information vacuum.

Nehru, were he alive today, would have been mortified by the corrupt ecosystem that lives in his name. He would have dismantled it. Modi was elected to do that. He hasnt  yet. For that a new strategy combining a radically reshuffled Cabinet, outcome-oriented policies and sophisticated communications is needed. Time is running out.
First, the Delhi High Court told Delhi Police to keep a check on the burning of garbage in the open. And now, with MCD workers going on strike to demand their unpaid salaries, it has asked the Delhi Police to ensure that garbage is removed from the roads.

The bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath asked the Centre to ensure that civic agencies keep the national Capital clean in accordance with the Swachh Bharat mission, and directed the police to ensure there was no hindrance in garbage removal by civic agencies.

The commissioner of police, in coordination with the three municipal corporations, has to ensure that the garbage is removed from the streets, the bench said.

Delhi's Police Commissioner has been charged with removing rubbish from the streets in accordance with the Swachh Bharat mission

The development comes days after the National Green Tribunal had assigned station house officers (SHOs) and traffic inspectors to keep tabs on burning of garbage in the open.

The High Court noted that the Capital was turning into a garbage dump and said the residents must not suffer as they were also paying taxes in the name of sanitation.

The Swachh Bharat campaign has to be accepted and complied by all. There is a Swachh Cess also. Delhi is becoming a garbage dump. We want action, another bench of Justices Badar Durrez Ahmed and Sanjeev Sachdeva said while hearing a similar matter.

The judges also ticked off the MCDs for not keeping its word of converting three areas - Karol Bagh, Lajpat Nagar, Patparganj - one under each corporations jurisdiction to convert them into the model areas and set an example.

The court was hearing a PIL filed by NGO Nyaya Bhoomi which alleged that the civic agencies like Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Delhi Jal Board and Public Works Department had miserably failed to keep the city suitable for living.

Time and again these civic bodies have showed negligence in maintaining the city, thus causing inconvenience to the residents, it said.

The bench noticed that despite its orders to civic agencies to maintain three areas in Delhi as models of cleanliness, the areas have showcased the inefficiency of the various authorities.

The MCDs, in their defence, told the court that their sanitation staff declared a strike as they had not been paid salaries for last three months as the Delhi government was providing no financial aid.

The senior standing counsel for the Delhi government, Rahul Mehra, argued that the state government had disbursed 100 per cent funds to the corporations.

Corporations were not showing financial prudence as all three MCDs together have not collected outstanding property tax dues of about Rs 1,576 crore from the DDA, Mehra said.
Qutub Minar is one of the sites on the accessible heritage tour'

Delhi's heritage is largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. The list includes even UNESCO World Heritage Sites - Humayuns Tomb, Qutub Minar and Red Fort - as well as the lesser-known ones.

Some do not have Braille signage, while others do not have wheelchair ramps or accessible ticket windows. Places meant to set up a toilet for the disabled have mostly been kept dirty and locked.

In an unprecedented move for the disabled, an accessible heritage tour is now being organised at Qutub Minar and Mehrauli Archaeological Park on January 30.

The tour expects to see participation from 15-16 differently-abled people coming from as far as Mumbai, and will explore everything from Imam Zamins Tomb to Jamali Kamali and the beautiful Rajon ki Baoli.

The organiser, Neha Chopra, who runs Planet Abled - a travel company exclusively for the differently-abled - told Mail Today that the venture would help the differently-abled enjoy heritage spots.

Vikramjit Singh Rooprai, a heritage enthusiast who will lead the walk on Saturday said: Many disabled persons believe that heritage sites are a no-go-area for them. Ideally, though, nobody should be deprived of the beauty of our history and architecture just for being differently-abled.

The two have brought together 16 volunteers - sign language experts, wheelchair assistants and a disability trainer from a top commercial airline to hold the walk.

We will make the visually-challenged touch and feel the patterns on Qutub Minar, he says.
As cases of doctors being harassed by patients relatives keep surfacing, theres some good news for the doctors of Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC) and its associated Lok Nayak Hospital.

The Delhi government has promised to further tighten security on the hospital premises.

The government will deploy around four home guards in departments like gynaecology, paediatrics casualty, main casualty, and the burns & plastic department in different shifts.

A patient lies on a strecher at the emergency ward of the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Hospital

Security alarms will also be installed in all casualty wards of the hospital.

CCTV cameras will be put up in casualty and other sensitive areas of the hospital.

The move comes after a meeting between the striking doctors and Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain on Wednesday. After the meeting, the doctors of called off their strike.

No punitive action should be taken against the resident doctors relating to the incident. The meeting concluded with the resolve to maintain uninterrupted hospital services and patient care in the hospitals, in the larger public interest, said a document detailing minutes of the meeting, a copy of which is available with Mail Today.

Resident doctors at MAMC and its associated Lok Nayak Hospital went on a strike after relatives of a woman who died during treatment during the early hours of Monday allegedly roughed up the hospital staff.

After the meeting with the Delhi Health Minister, the doctors have resumed services.

The woman died during treatment in the gynaecology emergency ward, following which her kin and attendants allegedly went on the rampage. The doctors, who had gone on strike last year over security in government hospitals, claimed that a majority of home guards deputed to hospitals then had been withdrawn.

The strike has been called off, Dr Yogesh Sarin, medical superintendent of Lok Nayak hospital told Mail Today.

Even as the strike at Lok Nayak Hospital was called off, patients from various parts of the city continued to suffer due to the strike at MCD-run hospitals.
Grab: The Chancellor wants a kickback when savers pay into their pensions

If someone gave you a wad of cash and said, Please look after this, its all Ive got for 30 years of retirement, how would you react?

Imagine that this trusting person kept topping up the pot and gave you the green light to dip in every year to cover your expenses and your honesty.

Id feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of protecting these vital reserves. And slightly worried that taking a cut might rob my friend of what should be their golden years.

What I wouldnt do is collude with bandits to find a way to raid the fund legally  even if the marauders worked in the local tax office.

Yet this is the attitude insurers have taken to your pension. They control 2.7 trillion of savings  money that 12 million people are relying on to provide for their old age.

These giant fund managers are slicing off around 1.5 per cent in charges, or 40.5 billion a year. Its a sickeningly large fee for so little effort.

The industry was last year approached by George Osborne and his cronies  the tax officials in the analogy  with a crafty plan.

The Chancellor is tired of giving cash bonuses to savers, the firms were told.

Now his own funds are running low, hed like a kickback when people pay into a pension.

Insurers should have resisted Mr Osborne with all their might. If they had a conscience they would have argued that the proposal would hurt hard-working, careful people merely trying to look after their own.

But the giants supposed to be protecting your pension caved in without so much as a whimper.

When Money Mail saw responses to the Government consultation on reforming pension tax breaks, we were shocked. The firms had suggested drastic cuts and put at risk the financial futures of middle-income savers  their most loyal customers.

Most argued for a flat rate of tax relief. In simple terms, rather than a refund at your tax rate (20 per cent, 40 per cent or 45 per cent), everyone gets the same. Legal & General suggested 20 per cent, others 25 per cent.

This isnt greed  there is no benefit to insurers in cutting pensions tax relief for the middle classes. Its desperation.

The firms believe Mr Osborne is set on raiding pensions as he grapples with bulging UK debt.

He has struggled to cut the welfare budget and the global economy is wobbling. Insurers are terrified Mr Osborne will react by killing off their industry in one fell swoop.

So, most firms pushed for what they think is the least bad option. Rather than allow the Government to turn pensions into Isas  which would remove any incentive to save  the big insurers suggested cutting tax breaks for higher earners.

Most of the 10.8 billion saved would go to the Treasury. But a small chunk could be passed to basic-rate taxpayers, allowing the pensions industry and Government to spin it as a move for fairness. What a gamble to take with other peoples money.

By caving in, insurers have inadvertently cleared the path for future governments to whittle away tax breaks completely  for both rich and poor.

At Money Mail, we feel a tremendous sense of duty to fight your corner against the powerful people controlling your money.

In entrusting their cash, ordinary savers were depending on insurers to show the same stewardship. They have been stabbed in the back.

Playing with money: The proposed reforms to pensions are a huge gamble with savers' money

Tap and gone

My grandmother, who is in her 80s, is forever putting others first. One of her greatest pleasures in life is making people happy.

That is why it concerns me that, as her powers of memory weaken, she has been given a contactless card by her bank, Barclays.

On treating her family to afternoon tea recently, the waiter suggested she use tap-and-go to pay. You wave the plastic over a reader and theres no need for Chip & Pin.

In a flash, hed taken the card to his till and returned. All done, he said enthusiastically.

Now Im sure this cafe is far too honest to rip off the elderly. But what if it wasnt?

The waiter could easily have taken several lots of 30 (the limit). Even if my grandma noticed, I fear that she may have been too uncertain to complain.

Shockingly, Barclays only issues contactless cards. Even if you dont want one, there is no alternative.

It is another example of banks ploughing ahead with their digital revolution and forgetting the most vulnerable in society.
I took out a Vodafone contract via the Carphone Warehouse website. I was given a new mobile phone number, but I wanted to keep my existing one, which Ive had for many years.

A Carphone Warehouse manager told me that, as it was an internet deal, Vodafone would not allow me to transfer my number. As a result I cancelled the contract two days later without using the phone.

I then ordered a new iPhone directly from Vodafone, but they could not supply the colour I wanted, so I cancelled this, too. However, I later received a new contract.

On October 6, 711.35 was taken from my bank account by Vodafone without warning or explanation.

Vodafone claimed the money had been taken by Carphone Warehouse. However, Carphone Warehouse said that this was not the case.

Now I have received a letter from the Vodafone credit and collections team claiming my final balance of 711.35 has not been paid.

Vodafone has threatened to register my account as a bad debt with a credit reference agency and to instruct debt collectors.

T. D., Folkestone, Kent.

Communication breakdown: Vodafone billed one customer 711 for a phone he had sent back after two days

This farce typifies the rank bad service that blights the mobile phone industry. You exercised your legal right to terminate a contract that was agreed on the phone, online or on your doorstep within 14 calendar days.

Vodafone claimed you owed 711.35. A few days later they sent an aggressive letter addressed Dear Customer, threatening to register your account as a bad debt with a credit reference agency and to set debt collectors on you.

This, you were warned, would result in additional fees of 15 per cent.

Vodafone says the 711.35 termination fee was a mistake and claims it did not actually take it from your account.

However, because the money was not taken, the automated collections process continued, resulting in the threatening letter.

The debt was eventually cleared from their system manually.

Vodafone has apologised and offered a 50 goodwill gesture.

Based on the letters I receive, I, personally, would never do business with Vodafone.

Incidentally, Carphone Warehouse was quite blameless over this issue. The information you received regarding the inability to move your phone number was correct.

When you placed the order online, you were taking a new contract, rather than upgrading.

And Vodafone cannot port a number to another Vodafone contract, says Carphone Warehouse. That might initially strike you as rather strange, but when you consider that the departments dealing with cancellations, payments and debt appear not to speak to each other, it becomes rather less surprising.

YOU HAVE YOUR SAY Every week Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails. Heres what you had to say about our investigation into how the stock market might affect your finances: Its scandalous that the oil price has fallen so much and yet we have barely seen any fall in price at the petrol pumps. We pay at least a quarter more for fuel than they do on the Continent. T. P., Birmingham. Its scary to think we might be on the brink of another recession. If the stock market halves again people will lose their houses and jobs, and many will be entirely unprepared. S. H., London. The Government tells us that things are looking up, but based on whats happening in the stock market, it doesnt seem that this is the case. H. J., Sussex. Having low interest rates for so long has had terrible consequences. People spend instead of saving, household incomes are squeezed and the housing market has boomed leaving young people unable to get a foot on the ladder. D. G., Gloucester. I have sold all my shares. I had made about 50 per cent profit and I decided to get out before things really took a turn for the worse, which I think they will. K. H., Yorkshire. Governments are still in huge debt, company profits are down and individuals have no savings and are taking on more debt, too. It wont take much to bring the house down. M. T., Glasgow. I wont be selling all my stocks and shares. I will be looking for companies with low levels of debt and good cashflow to invest in. There are still opportunities in the stock market. B. K., Birmingham. People would do well to remember the classic stock market advice: buy when others are afraid. A. Y., Worcs. The recovery from the financial crisis has been going on for nearly nine years now. Its a joke. Companies and governments need to concentrate on stability and sustainability, not just printing more money and building up more debt. K. R., Exeter. If the stock market falls further, then it really doesnt matter. The dust will settle and it will even out over the long term  as long as you dont panic. O. C., Loughborough, Leics.




Argos has lost a key lieutenant just days before Sainsburys is expected to make a fresh bid to snap up the High Street chain.

David Robinson, who was chief operating officer at Argos, and widely credited for turning the business around, is to join Wine Rack owner Conviviality Retail.

He will head the arm running the franchise business of Conviviality Retail and take up the position of managing director. The business itself has recently bought Matthew Clark, which supplies pubs and shops with alcohol.

Key figure: Argos chief operating officer David Robinson has quit just days before rival Sainsburys is expected to make a fresh bid to snap up the high street chain

Robinson would have been a key manager Sainsburys might have wanted to retain as they make an improved bid for Argos owner Home Retail Group.

An approach by thje supermarket group, which was thought to be around 1billion, has already been rejected.

That figure was for both Argos and DIY chain Homebase. But Homebase has since been sold to Australian conglomerate Wesfarmers.

Sainsburys has until next Tuesday to table a formal offer or walk away under rules implemented by the Takeover Panel which regulates bid situations.

Sources says that Sainsburys (down 0.6p to 231p) is days away from making another approach. If the deal goes ahead, the grocer plans to pull down the shutters on up to 200 Argos shops that are too close to its stores.
Labradors with dodgy hips and rottweilers with gastroenteritis were probably not high on the list of challenges Andrew Bailey expected when he arrived at City regulator the Financial Services Authority in 2011.

With the banking system still in a state of extreme fragility, he could have been forgiven for thinking there were more important things to be worrying about than poorly pooches.

But that was not how angry pet owners saw it. They claimed they were being forced to have their beloved dogs put down or given to rescue charities after Halifax withdrew their insurance cover, leaving them with unaffordable vet bills.

Fighter: New FCA chief Andrew Bailey commands huge respect in the City and Westminster

Bailey, who has never owned a pet, did not see this as a matter of sentiment but one of principle: that banks should treat consumers fairly and stick to their commitments. So the FSA intervened. Lloyds, which had rescued Halifax Bank of Scotland in the crisis, did a U-turn, offering new policies to 4,000 customers, to the general relief of a nation of dog-lovers.

Despite this episode, 56-year-old Bailey has until now specialised in protecting the financial system, rather than acting as a consumer champion.

But when he takes the reins as chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, the nitty-gritty of stamping out mis-selling and poor practice will fall within his remit.

Bailey commands huge respect in the City and Westminster. The move also cements his credentials to be the next governor, once Mark Carney moves back to Canada.

The post will give him top level experience in regulating lenders conduct, the one area in which his CV is relatively light. Conveniently, Baileys five-year term at the FCA, is likely to end at the same time as Carneys stint as governor, allowing him to glide into the top job. All that, of course, is well into the future and might never happen.

What is notable right now is that Baileys appointment seems to confound those who expected the FCA to take a more lenient approach to regulation, as he is widely seen as a pragmatic operator who does not pull his punches.

Relations between his predecessor, Martin Wheatley and the banks had become strained to breaking point following a series of blunders and it was thought George Osborne, keen to arrive at a new settlement with lenders, wanted a more conciliatory figure at the helm.

Bankers who have crossed swords with Bailey  including former Barclays boss Antony Jenkins and the men behind the near collapse of the Co-op Bank  see him as anything but a soft touch.

Bailey was a late entrant into the race to take over from Wheatley. The first conversation he had about the job came only three weeks ago when he was approached after Tracey McDermott, the acting boss, pulled out of the race.

Although he had no burning desire to leave his job as head of the Prudential Regulation Authority, Bailey was persuaded that he could be of most value at the FCA.

He has no desire to return to the light touch regulation that prevailed in the years before the crisis, having seen the damage it allowed to happen at HBOS and elsewhere.

At the peak of the crisis in 2008-9, he was in charge of troubled building societies. One mutual that came under his eye was the Britannia, which went on to act as a catalyst for the downfall of the Co-op Bank, chaired by the notorious Reverend Paul Flowers.

Bailey was blunt in his view that the building society would have gone under had it not been taken over by Co-op. He described Flowers as pompous and accused Britannia boss Neville Richardson of being in denial about the mutuals difficulties.

Another banker to come off second best in a clash with Bailey was Antony Jenkins. In the summer of 2013, the former Barclays supremo appeared to suggest he would cut back on lending to businesses as a consequence of the Banks new rules demanding more capital.

Bailey was said to have been incandescent at what was seen as a barely concealed threat. Barclays was told to find another way of plugging the gap in its capital and duly unveiled a 5.8bn share issue.

There was also a clash in the mid-2000s between Bailey and former Bank governor Lord King and Fred Goodwin that with hindsight may have been an early warning sign.

Along with other Scottish and Northern Irish banks, RBS is allowed to print its own fivers and tenners, which have to be backed by holdings of Bank of England notes. Bailey and King were concerned about RBS after discovering it only actually held the required bank notes on the day they were checked.

FINANCIAL CONDUCT AUTHORITY VS PRUDENTIAL REGULATION AUTHORITY FCA The country's leading financial regulator took over most of the responsibilities and powers of the Financial Services Authority, which it superseded in 2012. It is an independent, not a Government, organisation and funded entirely by the firms it regulates. But it is accountable to the Treasury and the Government. It aims to ensure the financial industry is run with integrity and that customers of financial companies get a fair deal. It regulates the conduct of more than 70,000 businesses  and tries to ensure the good functioning and integrity of markets. PRA When the FSA was disbanded in 2012 it was felt the financial crisis had highlighted the need for a specific watchdog to focus on the prudential supervision and regulation of banks and building societies. The PRA, which is a subsidary of the Bank of England, also oversees credit unions, insurers and investment firms. Its purpose is to protect and improve the stability of the UKs financial system through regulation and supervision. It works alongside the FCA and has two statutory objectives: to promote the safety and soundness of financial companies and the financial system, and to secure protection for policyholders.

Goodwin went ballistic and sent round a lieutenant to the Bank to say a Scottish bank had not gone under for more than a century  a record it would come close to breaking in 2008.

A Bank veteran who joined 31 years ago, Bailey has served as Chief Cashier  which means he signed his name on the notes  and as private secretary to former governor the late Lord George. He is known as a consummate operator.

The working day begins when he arrives at the office between 7.45 and 8am. In between meetings he strives to find time to think, and to travel around the UK, rather than become locked in an ivory tower.

He chose not to hobnob with the assorted chief executives, film stars and hangers-on at Davos last week but went to Darlington and Durham instead, where he visited a small bank and a credit union.

Before Queens College Cambridge, Bailey went to Wyggeston Grammar School in Leicester. He is probably the second-most famous old boy after Sir David Attenborough.

He and his wife, American economist Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, a professor at the London School of Economics, have two children and spend time each year in her native Idaho. A huge lover of America, Bailey used to host a Fourth of July party each year at his house in Kent, friends say.

His family are accustomed to the compromises that have to be made for his job: he spent most of his 54th birthday celebration outside the restaurant on his phone as Cyprus was being bailed out.

Friends describe him as a scrupulously honest man with an old-fashioned sense of duty, inherited from his father, who was a headmaster.

Andrew is so clever and wise that some of us cant understand why he didnt opt to make millions in the private sector. But he has incredibly high standards and a real belief in public service.
They are replacing shop assistants and waiters, performing surgery, milking cows, driving cars and caring for the elderly  so how do you invest in the robot boom?

As machines become more and more a part of everyday life, the robotics industry is expected to grow to be worth 35billion by 2025.

By the 2030s, robots will have taken more than 11 million jobs, according to consultancy Deloitte. Thousands of units are being sold each year as companies switch to automated ways of working.

Logistics firms use robots to pick stock and package it for delivery and they are used on factory floors and production lines.

Taking over? Robots are replacing shop assistants and waiters, performing surgery, milking cows, driving cars and caring for the elderly

Robots are accurate, they can work for a long time without a break  and they learn incredibly quickly. Some need only be shown something once to be programmed to perform the task.

Shoppers are increasingly interested in robot products, too. Last year in Japan, a family robot called Pepper  a type of butler for your home  sold out of its limited issue of 1,000 in less than a minute.

One robotics firm reported selling 188,000 units, worth 32million, on Singles Day  a Chinese day of celebration for single people  in November. Its robotic products include vacuum cleaners, window cleaners and a security and air purification device.

They are also getting more affordable. A single unit will cost a business between 14,000 and 45,000 and it is only an average of six months before a company breaks even on the outlay.

Robots are now capable of performing just 10 per cent of tasks on a manufacturing production line, but this could rise to 45 per cent over the next decade.

In hospitals, machines are estimated to have performed around 1.5 million operations worldwide. They are overseen by a surgeon using a computer and joystick who can work more accurately and without having to stand for hours.

In demand: The Pepper robot sold out of its limited issue of 1,000 in less than a minute in Japan

With more operations performed through keyhole surgery, patients experience less pain, a quicker recovery and a shorter hospital stay.

Its not just humanoid machines performing complicated tasks. Robotics means driverless cars and even automated financial advice.

In Tokyo, a robot named ChihiraAico greets customers at a major department store, and Dubai officials have spoken of plans to introduce robocops by next year.

The Eatsa fast-food restaurant in San Francisco asks customers to order food on a tablet and collect it from a hatch.

Around 1.1 million accommodation and food services workers will be replaced by machines in the next three decades, according to Deloitte.

Robots could also be capable of providing 24-hour care for the sick or elderly, detecting falls, checking blood pressure and reminding them to take pills. In agriculture, they can be used to automate milking or monitor the moisture and nutrient content of soil.

Pictet Robotics is the only fund currently available to UK investors that focuses purely on the robotics industry.

It launched just three months ago, so does not have much of a track record. The fund invests in firms including German manufacturer Kuka and U.S.-based Intuitive Surgical, which has robots that perform operations.

Savers can still invest their money in this trend through a more established fund.

Several technology and Japan funds are invested in robotics firms, offering exposure to the trend without putting all your eggs in one basket.

The Aberdeen Global Technology Equity and Aberdeen Global Japanese Equity funds have around 3.5 per cent of their cash in the industrial robot manufacturer Fanuc.

The 962million Baillie Gifford Japanese fund has 2.6 per cent of its money in Yaskawa Electric, which makes robots that provide physical therapy for stroke patients, among other products.
17.55: The FTSE 100 Index closed up 1.3 per cent or 78.9 points at 5990.4, as oil lifted above $33 on brighter hopes for global trade.

Markets have endured dramatic swings in recent weeks, linked to oil price fluctuations and worries about the health of the world economy.

Germany's DAX and the Cac 40 in France were both up 0.5 per cent. In New York the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 34.9 points ahead at 16,202.1 in early trading.

Weak: US stocks started cautiously ahead of tonights statement from the two-day Federal Reserve policy meeting as, given the current volatility in global markets, commentators are expecting a more dovish tone

In London, banking stocks were hit after Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander revealed more massive charges for mis-selling scandals.

RBS led UK banks lower with a 2 per cent fall, down 5.2p to 255.7p, after it said it was putting by 1.5billion to cover civil legal action on US residential mortgage-backed securities.

In a gloomy start to the bank results season, Santander said UK profits fell 4 per cent last year to 1.3billion after it took another 450 million charge for PPI.

A number of London-listed banks sank into the red as investors feared a raft of further provisions in the upcoming annual results season, with Standard Chartered off 6p to 471.4p and Barclays down 1.2p to 181.8p, although Lloyds Bank edged up 0.2p to 64.9p and HSBC lifted 5.6p to 480.1p.

Apple chip supplier ARM Holdings was also down 2 per cent, or 19.5p, to 995.5p after the US technology giant forecast its first ever decline in iPhone sales later this year.

The biggest risers in the FTSE 100 Index were Sage, up 42.5p at 610p, Glencore, up 4.9p at 92p, Compass, up 45p at 1171p and BG Group, up 34.6p at 1029.5p.

The biggest fallers in the FTSE 100 Index were Capita, down 25p at 1142p, RBS, down 5.2p at 255.7p, ARM Holdings, down 19.5p at 995.5p and Shire, down 73p at 4050p.

17.15 (close): The FTSE-100 index at the close was up 78.91 at 5990.37.

15.05 (close): Another choppy session saw the Footsie rally higher in late afternoon trading as volatile oil prices recovered again, with Brent crude heading back towards $32 a barrel, even though US stocks started with falls amid caution ahead of tonights Federal Reserve policy meeting statement.

With an hour and a half of trading to go in London, the FTSE 100 Index was up 15.3 points, or 0.2 per cent at 5,926.8, well above the morning low of 5,870.75.

But European markets stayed weak, with Germanys Dax 30 index down 0.2 per cent and Frances CAC 40 index off 0.4 per cent.

And in early trade on Wall Street, the blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 161.8 points at 16,005.4, while the broader S&P 500 index shed 14.0 points at 1,889.7, and the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite fell 58.6 points to 4,509.1.

US stocks started cautiously ahead of tonights statement from the latest two-day Federal Reserve policy meeting.

Given the current turmoil in global markets, commentators are expecting a more dovish tone from the Fed than that which accompanied the meeting in December when the central bank hiked US interest rates for the first time since 2008.

David Morrison, senior market analyst at SpreadCo., said: In many ways this meeting should be a non-event. After all, there wont be an accompanying press conference from Chair Janet Yellen, nor will there be a summary of economic projections.

In addition, the Fed made its momentous decision to raise rates for the first time since June 2006 last month. There cant be anyone who seriously believes that the FOMC will act again so soon.

He added: Market participants cant possibly expect a full mea culpa from the Fed, but they will be hoping that the FOMC will dial back its projections for rate hikes this year.

Todays only US economic data showed new home sales jumping 10.8 per cent to 544,000 in December, the highest level since February, and well above forecasts of 506,000. Novembers previously-reported 490,000 figure was also revised up to 491,000.

Tech giant Apple was a big faller in New York, dropping 5 per cent after issuing a cautious outlook statement on iPhone sales with its record quarterly results released last night.

In London, chip designer ARM Holdings  a supplier to Apple - shed 14p at 1,001p as the US firm forecast its first ever decline in iPhone sales later this year.

Despite the recovery by UK blue chips, banking shares remained under pressure after RBS and Santander UK both today revealed further mammoth charges for mis-selling scandals  RBS shares fell 3 per cent, or 8.5p to 252.4p.

And energy issues still remained weak despite the tick higher in oil prices given the volatile market in the commodity, with Royal Dutch Shell off 2.0p at 1,418.5p and BP down 1.8p at 354.7p, though both were off earlier lows.

13.00: The Footsie remained weaker at lunchtime, though above earlier lows, with banks under pressure after RBS and Santander UK today revealed further mammoth charges for mis-selling scandals, while commodity issues fell as oil prices retreated again on oversupply concerns.

By mid session, the FTSE 100 Index was 16.3 points, or 0.3 per cent lower at 5,895.2, above the morning low of 5,870.75, but still reversing half of yesterdays 34 point rally.

In Europe, Germanys Dax 30 index and Frances CAC 40 index both fell 0.5 per cent.

Choppy trade: Global markets have seen dramatic swings since the start of the New Year, linked to oil price fluctuations, together with worries over global growth as Chinas economic power stalls

And US stocks futures pointed to opening falls today in New York, with energy stocks likely to drop again after making strong gains yesterday thanks to the short-lived oil price rally.

Tech giant Apple is expected to fall too after a cautious outlook statement on iPhone sales with its record quarterly results released last night.

Chip designer ARM Holdings  a supplier to Apple - was down 2.5 per cent, or 26p at 989p as the US firm forecast its first ever decline in iPhone sales later this year.

Jasper Lawler, Market Analyst at CMC Markets, said: Apple confirmed investors worst fear; that iPhone sales would likely see their first year-over-year decline in the current quarter. The forecasted decline comes on the back of just a 0.4 per cent rise year-over-year last quarter.

CEO Tim Cooks reasoning that Extreme global economic conditions explain the below par sales doesnt really stack up. Mr Cook cited particularly weak sales from China and Hong Kong but Chinese consumer spending has been on the rise in 2015 despite a slowing overall economy.

Everybody knows iPhone sales had to peak out at some point and because the iPhone 6s added little reason to upgrade over the 6, its happened now.

US investors were also likely to be cautious ahead of tonights statement from the latest two-day Federal Reserve policy meeting.

Given the current turmoil in global markets, commentators are expecting a more dovish tone from the Fed than that which accompanied the meeting in December when the central bank hiked US interest rates for the first time since 2008.

On currency markets, the dollar was in demand ahead of the Fed meeting outcome, with the pound falling 0.3 per cent to $1.4300. Sterling was also lower against the euro at 1.3148.

Energy stocks were weak in London as oil prices slipped back after yesterdays rally, although Brent crude still just held above $31 a barrel. BP shed 6.3p at 350.3p, Royal Dutch Shell fell 38.5p to 1,382.0p, and BG Group lost 3.8p at 991.1p despite news Shell shareholders today approved a deal for the firms takeover

RBS remained a top blue chip faller, dropping 3.8 per cent or 10.0p to 250.9p, having hit a new three-year low at one stage, after its bosses confirmed a 2.5billion charges hit - including another 500million for payment protection insurance  that will leave it nursing annual losses once more.

RBS, which is still 73 per cent owned by the Government, will reveal the scale of its losses when it posts full-year results on February 26. It will mark the bank's eighth straight year in the red.

In a gloomy start to the bank results season, Spanish lender Banco Santander said its UK profits fell 4 per cent last year to 1.3billion after taking another 450million charge for PPI.

The UK woes saw fourth quarter net profits almost wiped out for the Spanish parent, tumbling to 25million (19million) from 1.46billion (1.1billion) a year earlier.

London-listed banks sank into the red as investors feared a raft of further provisions in the upcoming annual results season, with Standard Chartered off 13.4p to 463.9p, Barclays down 4p to 179p and Lloyds Bank off 1.2p to 63.6p.

10.30: The Footsie stayed weak as the morning session progressed, weighed by big falls from heavyweight commodity issues as the recovery in oil prices stalled, while banks were hit as RBS warned it would see further losses in 2015 after revealing another 2.5billion in provisions.

By mid morning, the FTSE 100 Index was down 26.7 points, or 0.5 per cent at 5,884.7, just off earlier lows of 5,870.75, and reversing most of yesterdays 34 point rally.

European markets also stayed weak, with Germanys Dax 30 index and Frances CAC 40 index both shedding around 0.5 per cent.

Volatile showing: Energy stocks suffered again after oil prices slipped back after yesterdays rally stalled, although Brent crude still clung on to the $31 a barrel level

Global markets have seen dramatic swings since the start of the New Year, linked to oil price fluctuations and its implications for the health of world trade, together with worries over global growth as Chinas economic power stalls.

Investors were also cautious ahead of tonights statement from the latest US Federal Reserve policy meeting, with commentators expecting a more dovish tone than that which accompanied the historic US rate hike meeting in December given the turmoil in global markets.

James Hughes, Chief Market Analyst at GKFx, said: I dont expect any movement from the Fed in rates this evening, so the big talking point will be what sort of tone central bank takes over the recent market turmoil.

Comments from the Bank of England yesterday pointed to the Fed rate hike in December exacerbating recent market moves, a more dovish tone from the Fed will make me believe that they feel the same.

The big question will be will the recent volatility knock the Fed off course in the quest for higher interest rates. These types of moves were enough to derail and initial hike back in September, and could well delay the next hike for a least one meeting. 

On currency markets, the dollar was in demand ahead of the Fed meeting outcome, with the pound falling back 0.4 per cent to $1.4295. Sterling was also 0.4 per cent easier against the euro at 1.3151, with little impact from the days UK economic data.

After lender the Nationwide earlier reported a 0.3 per cent rise in UK house prices for December, figures from the British Bankers Association showed mortgage approvals in the same month jumped by 24 per cent year-on-year, with some 75,745 mortgages with a collective value of 12.4 billion getting the green light in December.

But consumers were less reliant on their credit cards to fund their Christmas shopping than a year earlier, with credit card purchases in December 3 per cent lower year-on-year.

Among equities, Chilean copper miner Antofagasta was a big faller, dropping 3 per cent, or 11.5p to 366.5p after it said while its copper and gold production accelerated in the fourth quarter, full-year 2015 production was lower than the year before and below forecasts.

Peer Rio Tinto also fell, down 1.5 per cent or 25.5p to 1,663.0p as it continued its exit from coal production with the $224million (156million) sales of its Mount Pleasant thermal coal project in Australia.

Energy stocks suffered as well after oil prices slipped back after yesterdays rally, although Brent crude still held above $31 a barrel  Royal Dutch Shell fell 12.5p to 1,408.0p, and BP lost 2.7p at 353.8p.

Banks were under pressure too, with Royal Bank of Scotland the top blue chip faller, dropping 3.3 per cent or 8.6p to 252.3p after the taxpayer-owned lender outlined a series of additional provisions and impairments it will book in the fourth quarter which will impact its 2015 results by just over 4billion.

RBS said it was putting by 1.5billion to cover civil legal action on US residential mortgage-backed securities, as well as 500million extra for payment protection insurance mis-selling compensation, and also pumping another 4.2billion into its pension scheme.

Meanwhile, Spanish-owned lender Santander UK also revealed another 450million hit from PPI today, which left its annual profits 4 per cent lower last year at 1.3billion.

And, as investors feared a raft of further provisions in the upcoming annual results season, Lloyds Bank shares fell 1.1p to 63.6p and Barclays was 3.1p lower at 179.8p.

Chip designer ARM Holdings was also down more than 2 per cent, or 24p, to 991p after US technology giant Apple forecast its first ever decline in iPhone sales later this year.

The prediction came as the California-based firm reported the largest single quarter profit in corporate history of $18.4billion (12.8billion), having sold 74.8 million iPhones in the three-month period.

But iPhone sales grew just 0.4 per cent, the slowest rate in the history of the Apple smartphone, and a huge drop compared to the 46 per cent growth in the same quarter last year.

On the upside with blue chips, Sage Group was the best performer, adding 5 per cent or 30.5p to 598.0p after the business software provider said its organic revenue rose in the first quarter, helped by 36 per cent growth in software subscription revenue.

Fund manager Aberdeen Asset was a strong blue chip gainer too, adding 1.8 per cent or 4.1p at 236.9p despite saying it continued to suffer net outflows in the quarter to the end of December, driven by continued volatility in emerging markets, as it said it will cut further costs as it looks to cope in a tough investment environment.

The group's assets under management at the end of September also increased to total 290.6billion, compared to 283.7 billion at the end of September, pushed higher by the recently-completed acquisitions of Arden and Advance.

Aberdeen also benefited from an upgrade in rating by Numis Securities to buy from hold, with the broker also making the same move on mid cap peer Ashmore which gained 3.2p at 209.4p.

Numis said in a note: With the EM newsflow likely to remain weak for some time, we know this probably won't be the absolute bottom, however we also know that we won't be able to time that perfectly.

We do still believe that EM assets will eventually recover and that with hindsight buying on the valuations available today will prove decent value.

Elsewhere on the second line, cinemas operator Cineworld Group gained 2 per cent, or 9.7p at 491.9p after Nomura upgraded its rating for the stock to buy from neutral.

Specialist lender Paragon Group was also in demand, adding 11.9p at 325.5p after it said its financial performance met expectations in the quarter to the end of December and that it remains confident on the outlook for the buy-to-let market in the UK, despite regulatory changes.

Among the small caps, Sirius Minerals dropped 12.5 per cent, or 1.8p to 12.2p after the firm said it has pushed back the definitive feasibility study for its major potash project in York, previously expected this month, to March.

08.15: The Footsie fell back in early trading as recent volatility continued, with weakness in Asian markets on China worries and a reversal by oil prices countering overnight gains on Wall Street as investors await the latest pronouncements of the US Federal Reserve tonight.

In opening deals, the FTSE 100 index was down 27.2 points, or 0.5 per cent at 5,884.2, with miners sharply lower on China concerns and chip designer ARM Holdings weak after results from Apple disappointed overnight with the US tech giant forecasting its first revenue drop in 13 years.

The UK blue chip index closed 34.46 points higher yesterday, rallying late on as rumours of possible production cuts drove the oil price back above $31 after an earlier dip.

Mixed progress: US stocks ended strongly higher overnight, helped by an initial oil price recovery, but as Brent crude slipped back  although it held above $31 a barrel - Asian stocks fell back today

European markets were also weaker, with the CAC 40 index in Paris losing 0.4 per cent, and Frankfurts Dax 30 index off 0.7 per cent as German consumer confidence remained stable this month, while French consumer confidence surprisingly rose.

US stocks ended strongly higher overnight, helped by that initial oil price recovery, but as Brent crude slipped back  although it held above $31 a barrel - Asian stocks fell back today led by fresh drops from Chinese stocks, with the Shanghai benchmark down another 3 per cent after a 6 per cent slide yesterday.

Craig Erlam, Senior Market Analyst at Oanda, said: With oil showing signs of coming off its lows, at least in the short term, there is the potential for a broader correction in these in the coming days, following what has been a rough start to the year.

He added: Of course, with the latest monetary policy decision from the Federal Reserve coming this evening, theres likely to be more than one major factor driving these markets today so the tight correlation that we saw between them on Tuesday may weaken a little.

The Fed still remains a key player in financial markets and any indication that the rate tightening cycle is going to be slower could have a significant impact. That said, the market has never really bought into the idea of four rate hikes this year so it will be interesting to see exactly how big an impact an acknowledgement on this from the Fed would actually have. 

Ahead of the Fed decision, there will be little economic data to provide any other interest, with only BBA UK lending numbers and US new home sales due for release later today.

Overnight, mortgage lender Nationwide said UK house prices rose at a slower month-on-month pace than expected in January.

House price growth cooled to 0.3 per cent this month from 0.8 per cent in December, falling short forecasts for an increase of 0.6 per cent.

On an annual basis, prices were 4.4 per cent higher in January, compared with a 4.5 per cent increase in December. The increase took the average house price across the UK to 196,829.

Stocks in focus in London include:

RBS  The taxpayer-owned lender said it would make a 4.2billion payment into its pension scheme due to changes in its accounting policy and would also set aside an extra $2.2billion for mortgage-related litigation in the United States.

ANTOFAGASTA  The Chilean mining firm said it expects a boost in copper production this year as it ramps up output at new mines after posting annual output for 2015 which was lower than its guidance.

ABERDEEN ASSET MANAGEMENT  The investment firm said more clients pulled cash from its funds in the December quarter due to concerns around economic growth that would likely impact flows for the rest of the year.

RIO TINTO  The global miner has agreed to sell one of its last remaining coal mines in Australia to a group owned by Indonesia's third-richest man, Anthoni Salim, continuing an exit from coal as it battles a sharp slump in prices.

ARM HOLDINGS  US tech giant Apple  to which the UK chip designer is a supplier - forecast its first revenue drop in 13 years and reported the slowest-ever increase in iPhone shipments as the critical Chinese market showed signs of weakening.

PARAGON GROUP  The specialist lender said recent fiscal and regulatory changes and proposals may soften the rate of growth for buy-to-lending as time progresses, but demand for rental properties would remain strong.

UK company news scheduled today includes:

Trading updates: Antofagasta, Aberdeen Asset, Britvic, Sage Group, Paragon Group, Ebiquity, Avocet Mining

Finals: Santander, Staffline, Ediston Property

Interims: Wizz Air (Q3)

Economic news scheduled today includes:

Nationwide house prices at 7am

BBA lending report at 9.30am

GfK German consumer climate at 9am

US new home sales at 3pm
Dyed-in-the-wool Tories say they will stop voting Conservative if George Osborne goes ahead with a tax raid on pensions.

Money Mail has been deluged with letters of support from readers since we launched the Save Our Pensions campaign last week.

We are calling on the Chancellor to abandon plans to cut tax relief, which could hit millions of middle-income workers.

You were furious to learn that the Chancellor and his civil servants were plotting to slash tax breaks and savings allowances.

Betrayed: Theresa Darnell and her husband Derek Langton have warned the Chancellor that if he goes ahead with his pensions tax raid it will cost the Conservatives their votes

Steve Parry, 51, says: I have been a Tory voter since the early Eighties when they had their last decent leader and Chancellor. If there is any deduction in the so-called tax relief on pensions, like many countless thousands, I will never vote for them again.

The IT worker from Chelmsford, Essex, has spent decades building up a pension pot. He said his opinion of the Chancellor would change irrevocably if the proposals go ahead.

Any more changes to the system will result in George Osborne never being prime minister, no matter what joker is in Opposition.

I may not vote Labour, but will stay at home or choose a party that stands up for hard work.

Derek Langton, 58, who lives near Reading, Berks, also warned it would cost the Tories his vote.

I strongly believe in people making their own way in life, but also in helping out those who struggle through no fault of their own, he says.

If the Conservative government further penalises people like me, who have saved into pensions in order to be self-sufficient during retirement, then I think it highly likely that I would never vote Conservative again.

I would feel the Conservative party had betrayed my trust and a core principle. I strongly believe that millions of others would feel exactly the same.

Mr Langtons wife, Theresa Darnell, a 55-year-old sales consultant, says the changes would leave her with little reward for a lifetime of work. She has been saving into a pension for 33 years.

I have saved hard all my life  I have had to pay a mortgage, but other than that I have been a saver as much as a spender, she says.

I feel really aggrieved that I am potentially going to be penalised for saving  that is simply not fair and does not encourage future generations to save.

Threat: IT worker Steve Parry has been a Tory voter since the early 80s

Please, Mr Osborne and your Conservative colleagues, do not penalise those who work hard, save for their pensions and generally do good for the country because we pay loads of tax and are not a drain on public funds.

Robert Forsythe is retired, but fears for his familys future. My son and daughter are in their 40s and they are going to be affected, but not as affected as my two young grandchildren, he says.

Their chances of finding a job that will ensure a decent salary and pension lessen as the years go on. We seem to be going back to the Victorian age.

I see this scheme is being pushed by civil servants in the Treasury. Maybe there is more room for savings in the feather-bedded public sector pensions.

Chris Baker, from Wandsworth, South-West London, has worked hard for 42 years.

Being a lifelong Conservative supporter, Im concerned by whats being contemplated, he says.

It will significantly affect people who have worked hard all their lives and striven to improve themselves throughout a career.

Ill genuinely never vote for this Conservative party again if they further detrimentally change the pension legislation.

Rob Rodgers fears hell be caught out by potential cuts to the amount workers can put into a pension. The 61-year-old has saved into a pension while working as a regional risk control manager for an insurance company  but he has only recently been able to afford to make significant contributions.

As a result, Mr Rodgers, from South Shields, Tyne & Wear, has been contributing the full 40,000 that savers are allowed to pay into a pension annually for the past three years.

I was looking forward to retiring at 65, but if the Chancellor cuts the amount I can save I will have to work for longer, he says.

Kate Archer knows how difficult it is to save for retirement.

She and her husband, Michael, are into their 70s and still working for the family printing business in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, after their private pensions badly underperformed.

She fears the Chancellors plans to shake up the pension system further will make it even harder for future generations to put money aside for their old age.

I cannot believe George Osborne is treating people like this, says Mrs Archer, 72.

I have been a Conservative voter all my life, but if this comes in the Tories will not get my vote.

He is punishing the people who may have a little money to put away, as well the self-employed and small business owners. It is unfair to penalise those who are only saving for their old age.
Shameless: Many of Britains biggest pension firms are failing to protect your money from a tax raid

Today, we lay bare how the giant companies responsible for looking after your retirement savings have betrayed their loyal customers.

Our investigation reveals that many of Britains biggest pension companies are failing to protect your money from a Treasury tax raid.

Rather than fight against radical changes that could kill off pensions, they have argued for cuts to savers tax breaks.

The Government is plotting to scrap or slash the savings incentives given to middle-income workers when they pay into a pension.

Last July, the Treasury asked for ideas on how to do this. Money Mail has obtained the responses sent to the Treasury by most major pension companies.

These show many firms are failing to fight their customers corner  despite making huge profits from their nest-eggs.

The documents sent to the Treasury effectively give Chancellor George Osborne the green light to do irreparable damage to the retirement prospects of millions of people.

Civil servants are poring over the reform suggestions. Mr Osborne will announce his choice on March 16 in his Budget statement.

Money Mail is calling on the Chancellor to rethink the shake-up and leave pensions untouched. We believe the changes being considered will make it harder for middle-class workers to save enough for a decent retirement.

HOW COULD THESE CHANGES AFFECT ME?

If you pay into a pension, you will receive a perk known as tax relief. You may not realise that youre getting it  but its a vital boost to your savings.

It is essentially a refund of the tax you have paid on money put into your pension at your usual rate of income tax  20 per cent, 40 per cent or 45 per cent.

To receive 1 paid into a pension, a basic-rate taxpayer needs to save just 80p because HM Revenue & Customs hands back the 20p taken from them.

Higher-rate taxpayers need to save just 60p to earn the same 1.

For many savers, tax relief is a desperately needed help in building a decent retirement pot. However, the Government wants to slash the 34.3 billion it spends on it each year.

Mr Osborne outlined a series of devastating reform options in his consultation document last year. These include scrapping tax relief, replacing it with a flat rate or introducing curbs to the amount that can be saved or built up.

Any one of these options could potentially be a devastating blow for middle-class workers who are struggling to save. At the worst, they could kill pensions stone dead.

The Treasury insists that no decision has yet been made. On the face of it, theres still everything to play for. But as we reveal, many pension firms have given up the fight.

FIRMS WHO WANT TO CUT YOUR TAX BOOST

Many pension companies are calling for a one-size-fits-all rate of tax relief  a flat amount for everyone, no matter how much they earn. The suggested figure ranges from 20 per cent to 33 per cent.

Insurers argue that a flat rate is fairer because it favours basic-rate taxpayers over higher earners.

But they are secretly terrified that the Government could choose a more radical reform that would leave companies with billions of pounds in extra costs.

They believe change is inevitable and are pushing for the least bad option.

Other firms see a flat rate as a marketing tool: they hope to attract millions of lower earners who do not currently save into pensions.

With a flat rate of more than 20 per cent, each 1 saved into a pension by a basic-rate taxpayer would cost them less than it does now because they would be paying in less than 80p.

By contrast, higher-rate taxpayers  who are rewarded under the current system  would face a considerable blow.

With a 25 per cent flat rate, someone aged 40 earning 50,000 a year who had already saved 100,000 would build a pension of 320,000 by retirement, down from 349,000 on full tax relief.

After taking the 25 per cent tax-free lump sum, they would have an income of 10,800 a year. Thats 900 a year less than what they would earn under the current system.

More importantly, removing the link between tax relief and income tax could set a dangerous precedent.

Shattered dreams: An attack on Britain's pensions would damage savers chances of a richer retirement

Once one government starts to chip away at tax relief, it opens the door for future governments to do the same. Experts are already warning that a rate of 18 per cent will be on the cards in the near future. That would hit the pension pots of all savers, no matter their income.

Some firms are already arguing for families earning more than 42,385  the higher-rate threshold in 2015-2016  to be stripped of the incentive to save.

Pensions giant Legal & General boasts in its 2014 annual report how it saw a 36 per cent boost in workplace pension customer numbers, thanks to new rules forcing employers to pay into pensions for all their staff. The amount of money under its management increased to 11 billion.

Yet the firm is calling for a flat rate of 20 per cent. At a stroke, it would remove all the benefit of saving for a higher-rate taxpayer, and basic-rate taxpayers would be no better off.

Legal & General says: Tax relief in its present form is unsustainable and regressive.

It warned that future generations could be burdened with public debt if the system was not changed.

In 2014, insurance firm Prudential did well from savers. Its operating profit on its UK life business rose 7 per cent to 752 million. Yet it is calling for tax relief to be slashed to as little as 25 per cent for everyone. It says this would be simple and encourage people to save.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI), a powerful pensions trade body that represents Britains largest pension companies, has put together an 82-page document laying out its response to the Treasury consultation.

It suggests flat rates of relief ranging from 33 per cent to 25 per cent.

AND SLASH WHAT YOU CAN SAVE

Another idea under serious consideration is cutting the amount that workers can save over a lifetime or each year.

Under the spotlight: George Osborne is plotting to raid savers pensions for billions of pounds

At present, the most that anyone can put away for retirement is 1.25 million over their career  a figure that will fall to 1 million in April.

There is also a 40,000 limit on the amount that you and your employer can pay in over a year.

If you bust these limits, you will be hit with a 55 per cent tax charge on the excess. The rules were supposed to affect only the wealthy, but middle-income workers have been dragged into the tax net.

Some firms are arguing for further cuts to the annual allowance.

A lower annual limit would hammer savers in their 40s and 50s. Those who started out on low earnings may have been unable to afford to pay much into their pensions when they were younger. Many make large contributions when they finally have some spare cash.

It would also affect small business owners and the self-employed, barring them from contributing more to their pensions when profits are high.

Pensions company Fidelity is calling for the annual allowance to be cut to 20,000. It also proposes a 25 per cent flat rate of tax relief.

It says this would be a fair trade-off if the Government scrapped the lifetime cap on pension savings.

The ABI says the Chancellor could rake in 1.3 billion a year by curbing the amount savers can put into a pension as well as introducing a flat rate of tax relief.

And insurer Aegon says it would not object to the Government cutting the annual allowance if it wanted to move to a flat rate of more than 30 per cent. It says this would be fairer for the majority of savers.

Pension firm Zurich, which, in its 2014 annual report, described how higher sales of workplace pensions had helped boost its profits, says it would also agree to a cut in the annual limit that workers can save, though it asked for a flat rate, which, it said, would be fairer and simpler, and restrictions on the amount that can be saved over a lifetime to be scrapped.

DOOR LEFT OPEN TO NUCLEAR OPTION

The most radical reform under consideration is the nuclear option of treating pensions in the same way as Isas.

It would be a radical shake-up, reversing the current system, where you dont pay tax when you save, but do when you make withdrawals.

Instead, money would be paid in from after-tax income, but would then be tax-free to withdraw.

Though none of the firms has advocated this publicly, a few have hinted they would not be opposed to it in some form.

PENSIONS TAX RELIEF The Government presently rebates all the tax on people's pension contributions, whether you pay income tax at the 20 per cent, 40 per cent or 45 per cent rate. Your pension is only taxed when you start making withdrawals in old age. This is based on a long-held principle dating back almost 100 years that saving into a pension is tax-free. The Chancellor launched a consultation on changes to retirement savings in last July's Budget, and we'll hear details of his plans in the next one on March 16. He is widely expected to devise some new arrangement that downsizes the Government's annual 34billion pensions tax relief bill. > Read our guide to pension tax relief

The Chancellor and the Treasurys most youthful whizz-kids are understood to be fans of this approach. They believe the popularity of Isas and their flexibility will appeal to voters.

But it would have a disastrous impact on savers retirement funds.

According to figures from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association trade body, a 40-year-old man with 100,000 in pension savings would have a pot of 349,000 when he retired under the current system (assuming 5 per cent annual growth).

After tax and taking his tax-free lump sum, his income would be 11,700 a year.

With a pension Isa, he would build a pot worth 273,000  a difference of 76,000. Withdrawals would be tax-free, but he would still be 2,500 a year worse off, with an income of 9,200. Over a 20-year retirement, he would have lost out on 50,000.

The big danger is that a future government might start hitting savers with tax when they withdraw their money, too.

Thankfully, the ABI brands the idea reckless and highly risky. But insiders say some of the industrys concern is due to the huge costs of implementing such a system  which might not be enough to stop the Treasury.

In its consultation response, Fidelity suggested that a pension Isa could work alongside traditional pensions. Savers could have a 20,000 basic annual savings limit for their pension, with an extra 10,000 a year allowed to go into their pension Isa.

This means one chunk of savings would grow slower than the other.

SILENT FIRMS THAT LOBBIED IN SECRET

While some companies have published lengthy statements detailing what they hope the Chancellor will do, others have not.

They have kept customers in the dark about what they have been advocating on their behalf.

Britains largest insurer, Aviva, which enjoyed a 9 per cent rise in profits from its life business in 2014 making 1.039 billion, refused to reveal details of its submission to the Treasury.

It instead pointed us to press releases and a short article written months before in which a boss at the firm railed against the idea of pension Isas and proposed a 30 per cent tax relief for all.

The firm says: Fairness is at the heart of what we have called for.

Prudential only revealed that it was calling for a 25 per cent flat rate when contacted by Money Mail. It says it will reveal full details of its submission in March.

FTSE 100 firm Hargreaves Lansdown, which sells pensions to millions of savers and whose profits rose 7 per cent in 2014 to 209.8 million, says it did not publish or distribute its responses to consultations.

But last week it sent out a marketing email to customers urging them to stash more money in their pensions now before a flat rate of tax relief kicks in. A spokesman says: We have called for a flat rate top-up of 33 per cent and the abolition of the lifetime allowance.

The ABI says: Our proposal will see more support for the 80 per cent of savers who are basic-rate taxpayers.
The wife of an ice addict who previously shared her story of her husband's harrowing addiction to the drug is ending her marriage after he allegedly assaulted her with an energy drink.

Thomas Pass, the former partner of Ashlee Pass, 25, from Kurunjang in regional Victoria, has been charged following the alleged assault on January 7 and will face court next month.

Ms Pass, who runs an ice support group, stuck by her husband through his struggles with crystal methamphetamine.

Ashlee Pass (left, right after the alleged attack) says she is ending her marriage after the alleged incident

Her husband Tom has been charged following an alleged assault at the family home in Kuranjang on January 7

Ms Pass, who runs an ice support group, stuck by her husband through his struggles with methamphetamine

In an interview with Daily Mail Australia in October 2015, she recalled her partner standing above her bed wielding an axe, babbling incoherently.

Suffering delusions, he then barreled down the street chasing after his imaginary tormentors. It was one of several harrowing incidents she recalled at the time.

Now, Ms Pass says: 'I held on for as long as I could.'

'I tried so hard to save him from his addiction but it is true, you can't save an addict, they have to save themselves.

'He wasn't ready to save himself and things were getting worse and worse by the day as he continued to make excuses, blame everyone else and use ice heavily.'

Ms Pass runs a support group for ice addicts, their families and friends online and held her first in-person community meeting in the suburb of Melton on Friday evening.

She wants the Australian community to come together and stop the drug, which she said has a 'hold' on people like little else.

Mr Pass is pictured left, during his addiction to ice, and right, while not under the influence

Ice pipe: Ms Pass provided these pictures of drug paraphernalia at her home previously

Her message to those affected by the drug is as follows: 'To their families and friends of addicts I would just say you need to realize that when you are dealing with (addicts), it is not them anymore.

'It is the drug you are dealing with.

'No rationalisation, nothing you will do will help them.

'Until they are ready to help themselves no matter what effort you put in it's just going to become nothing.

'Drug users: there is help out there.

'Realize in those down moments what this drug is doing for you - and reach out for that help.'
An intravenous vitamin drip chain that promises to re-hydrate customers and flush toxins from their bodies is not sufficiently warning them about negative side effects such as diarrhoea and deep-vein thrombosis, a doctor has claimed.

Doctor Ken Harvey, from Monash University, alleges the trendy iv.me hydration clinics in Melbourne and Sydney has broken the law by advertising false information or promoting unreasonable expectations in a complaint to the Pharmacy Board of Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The iv.me hydration clinics boast being able to rid someone of headaches, flushing toxins from the body and improving overall health and immune systems for more than $300 per session.

Doctor Ken Harvey (pictured), from Monash University, alleges the trendy iv.me hydration clinics in Melbourne and Sydney has broken the law by advertising false information or promoting unreasonable expectations

Dr Harvey said that the alleged health benefits are inaccurate and clients are being ripped off.

Adverse possible affects include 'osmotic diarrhoea, gastrointestinal upset and deep-vein thrombosis,' Dr Harvey wrote.

He also claims the company is breaking the law by allowing testimonials from customers online.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the iv.me hydration clinic for comment.

Hydration clinics have become a popular treatment for people looking to cure their hangovers or 'restart' their systems after a cold or flu.

Dr Harvey is urging the pharmacy board to penalize the company and deter other pharmacists.

He told Daily Mail Australia he stands by his complaints.

The iv.me hydration clinics (pictured) boast being able to rid someone of headaches, flushing toxins from the body and improving overall health and immune systems for more than $300 per session
Britain could slash net migration by more than 110,000 a year if it leaves the EU, a report claims today.

Campaign group MigrationWatch said the pressure on public services could be eased significantly by allowing in only the skilled workers the economy needs.

The intervention  on what is likely to be the most crucial issue of the in/out referendum debate  came as:

Britain could slash net migration by more than 110,000 a year if it leaves the EU, a report claims today (pictured, migrants arriving on Greek island of Lesbos)

A senior EU official admitted six in ten of the supposed refugees that came to Europe last month were economic migrants;

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond conceded that Britain's referendum demands are not top of the EU's list of concerns;

Bosnia  which has almost 4million citizens and an unemployment rate among Europe's highest  announced plans to join the EU;

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney claimed Britain's economic security would be at risk if we vote to leave;

Ministers tabled the legislation needed for a quick-fire June referendum  including the ballot paper.

Immigration is consistently found to be a top concern of voters after a decade in which the population has swelled dramatically due to migration from eastern Europe.

Yet in his referendum negotiations the Prime Minister is seeking only a limit to the benefits EU workers can claim. To the anger of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, he is not asking for restrictions on free movement.

In today's report, MigrationWatch stopped short of saying whether Britain should stay in the EU  but claimed leaving could have a dramatic impact on the numbers pouring in.

MigrationWatch claimed leaving Europe could have a dramatic impact on the numbers pouring into the UK (pictured, migrants near Serbian-Croatian border)

The report suggested that, if Britain votes to leave the union, a key change could be introducing permits to limit migrants from the EU to those who are highly skilled (pictured, a refugee centre in Macedonia)

Its analysis estimated that a regime including tighter restrictions on coming to the UK for work could see net migration from the bloc fall from 180,000 a year to about 65,000.

The report suggested that, if Britain votes to leave the union, a key change could be introducing permits to limit migrants from the EU to those who are highly skilled.

The group's chairman, Lord Green of Deddington, said: 'It is time to examine possible alternative immigration regimes. Under the current arrangements all the signs are that EU migration to Britain will continue at a substantial rate for the foreseeable future.

FACT BOX TITLE More than half of the migrants who arrived in Europe last month were not refugees fleeing war, a senior Brussels official admitted yesterday. In fact, a growing proportion of arrivals are simply economic migrants seeking a better life. European Commission first vice-president Frans Timmermans let slip that secret EU figures show 60 per cent of those who came in December were not refugees fleeing war-torn Syria. Instead, many of the 117,000 migrants who arrived through Greece and Italy were from North African states such as Morocco and Tunisia. 'These are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status,' Mr Timmermans told Dutch television. The European Commission last night refused to reveal the precise numbers behind the 60 per cent statistic, which comes from an unpublished report by EU border agency Frontex. A spokesman said: 'What I can tell you is that of course there are more and more economic migrants now reaching Europe  obviously using the momentum of the occasion of the refugee flows.' Advertisement

'Indeed, immigrants tend to generate further migration as their friends and relatives join them in their new countries. Net EU migration now amounts to 180,000 a year. Work permits for EU citizens would substantially reduce net migration and its resultant pressure on our population and public services.'

The report also challenged suggestions by the In campaign that a vote to leave would not affect net migration. It said this claim assumes Britain would remain in the European Economic Area and accept free movement as a principle of the single market.

The study said: 'A British exit from both the EU and the EEA would allow the UK to negotiate a new settlement.'

The paper claimed that only about 20 per cent of EU migrants who came to Britain between 2004 and 2014 were doing higher skilled work.

It suggested Britain could introduce work permits for EU citizens with a system similar to that which governs arrivals from outside Europe. It said: 'This could substantially reduce the EU inflow for work to perhaps one fifth of its recent level and would, in turn, substantially reduce net migration.'

The authors said there would be no need for restrictions on EU citizens coming as students or tourists, and workers who were 'self-sufficient'  including those searching for jobs  would also be free to live in Britain.

The system would have no restriction on EU family members of British citizens joining them, while relatives of European skilled workers and students would have the right to live and work in the UK. EU citizens already working in the UK would retain existing rights.

But James McGrory, of Britain Stronger in Europe, said: 'To suggest we can simply pick and choose which bits of Europe we like after voting to leave is a dishonest fantasy.'
Kadin Tige Mann, 5, (pictured) was accidentally shot and killed by an 11-year-old child while two played video games in their living room

A five-year-old boy was accidentally shot and killed by an 11-year-old child while the two played video games in their living room.

Kadin Tige Mann, 5, was pronounced dead at an Anchorage, Alaska, hospital after he was medevaced him from his home town of Kokhanok on Saturday.

Alaska State Troopers said on Monday that Kadin 'was playing video games in the living room of his residence when an 11-year-old child in the residence obtained a firearm and subsequently shot' the boy.

Kadin died on Sunday.

It isn't known yet how the 11-year-old got the .22 caliber rifle, and the Alaska Bureau of Investigation have not said who owned the gun.

A GoFundMe page was set up for Kadin's mother Tina Mann and to help with funeral costs. In one day 56 people raised more than $6,000.

'On January 24, Kadin Tige Mann left this Earth at the early age of 5, to become the newest Angel in heaven.

'He has left behind a loving mother, doting aunts and uncles, and many cousins.

Kadin's father, Glenn Ney, (pictured) thanked everyone who had reached out after Kadin died on Sunday

'He is cherished and is missed deeply, but we know he is watching over us from above,' the GoFundMe page reads.

The shooting happened in Kokhanok, Alaska. Kadin was flown by medics to a hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, where he was pronounced dead

Kadin's father, Glenn Ney, thanked supporters on the GoFundMe page.

'Thank you to everyone for supporting my son.

Who has loved him, who has helped out, whether you know him or not. I cannot thank you enough!' he wrote.

On his Facebook friends sent their condolences, saying they couldn't image what he was going through.

'A pain no father should feel... Sorry Glenn... I cant imagine the feelings man,' one friend wrote.

Another said: 'He was an amazing little kid with a big heart. Now he is an amazing angel with that same heart. I will miss him. So very blessed and fortunate I got to meet him.'

The state medical examiner's office has requested an autopsy on Kadin's body. Troopers say his next of kin was at the scene at the time of the shooting.
A boy, 15, living at centre, arrested on suspicion of murder is from Somalia

The mother of a Swedish woman allegedly stabbed to death by an asylum seeker last night declared her country was 'not safe' any more.

Sweden is one of the main destinations for migrants entering the EU and police have warned they cannot cope with the tide of migrant-related crime.

Chimene Mezher described her daughter Alexandra, 22, as an 'angel' devoted to helping some of the hundreds of migrant youths who have come to her home of Molndal without parents.

Psychology graduate Miss Mezher - whose parents fled Beirut more than 25 years ago - was stabbed in the back and thigh on Monday in a block of flats housing ten youths aged 14 to 17.

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Tragedy: Alexandra Mezher, pictured right with her best friend Lejla Filipovic at their high school graduation in 2012, died after being stabbed at her place of work - a care home for unaccompanied child refugees

Pride of the family: Social worker Miss Mezher, 22, a Christian whose parents are from Lebanon, is pictured at her university graduation in June 2015 where she studied psychology

Inspirational: Dedicated Miss Mazher, who was planning on going back to university to do a masters, had been working with refugee children at the centre (pictured) since last autumn

A 15-year-old boy, described as Somalian, is being held on suspicion of murder, and prosecutor Linda Wiking is expected to announce the official arrest on Wednesday.

Officers in Molndal say they have had to ignore lesser offences such as drug-dealing because they are so overrun by migrant crime, with gang fights and violent assaults.

And in capital Stockholm police this week warned that the capital's main train station was 'overrun' by gangs of Moroccan street children 'stealing and groping girls'.

Swedish police revealed they have sent plain-clothes officers to monitor swimming baths in Stockholm after increased reports of sexual harassment of girls and women.

Last night it was also claimed police had been forced to flee after being attacked by a mob of asylum seekers as they tried to relocate a ten-year-old boy amid allegations he had been 'raped repeatedly' at a refugee centre.

The country  with a population of 9.8million  took in more than 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015, with 35,369 of them unaccompanied minors.

Held: SiS ungdomshem Fagared, the youth detention centre in Molndal where the 15-year-old Somali boy accused of murder is believed to be currently held

Murdered: She was stabbed to death while working a night shift alone at the centre for migrant children in Molndal, on Sweden's west coast. A boy, 15, from Somalia, who lived at the centre, is in police custody

Full of life: Miss Mezher (pictured second from left) had only worked at the child migrant centre since the autumn. She was stabbed to death on Monday at 8am

Search: Detectives were at the migrant centre which houses children aged 14-17 searching for clues. Police today praised two hero teenagers who held the knifeman down until they arrived

Tribute: Flowers and candles have been left outside the housing for unaccompanied migrants in Molndal, near Gothenburg, where Miss Mezher was killed

'SOMETHING SERIOUS WILL HAPPEN': STAFF WARNED OF ISSUES AT HOUSING A YEAR AGO Staff at the Swedish migrant centre where social worker Alexandra Mezher was stabbed to death warned of that could not cope with looking after the troubled adolescents a year ago, it has been claimed. A therapist predicted that something serious would happen at the juvenile asylum seekers home in Molndal, near Gothenburg, due to a lack of staff but was ignored, Swedens Goteborgs Tidning newspaper reported. Alexandra Mezher had worked a night shift on her own at the Molndal migrant centre when she was ambushed and stabbed. Goteborgs Tidning reported: In December 2014 a therapist at the newly founded juvenile asylum seekers home in Molndal called the Department for Health Care and sounded the alarm about problems at the accommodation centre where Alexandra Mezher was killed on Monday. She said she spoke on behalf of other members of staff who all complained that they were extremely understaffed and stated that they often had to work alone, contrary to best work practice. So far nothing serious has happened, but it will do, the therapist, who asked not to be identified, told Goteborgs Tidning. The staff has talked with the management plenty of times, but they will not help. The management is not listening. However the centre was the subject of an unannounced inspection by the Department for Health Care three weeks later, the newspaper claimed. But the Department for Health Care review found no deficiencies in the service carried out at the centre. Advertisement

Yesterday Miss Mezher's mother, 42, said: 'We left Lebanon to escape the civil war, the violence and the danger. We came to Sweden where it was safe, to start our family. But it is not safe any more.

'And I just want to know why why Alexandra? She wanted to help them, but they did this. I just want answers.'

Her husband Bourous, 45, moved to Sweden from Beirut in 1989 and built up a pizza business. Mrs Mezher, who has three sons, said: 'She was not just my daughter, she was my angel. She was a just and fair human being. There were so many who loved her. She was my daughter, my friend.'

She blamed Swedish politicians for a dramatic rise in immigration in Molndal, a suburb of Gothenburg, where a population of 60,000 has grown by 8,000 migrants in less than a year  4,000 of whom are unaccompanied children.

The incident comes amid rising tensions over migration in Sweden. The number of threats and violent incidents at asylum facilities doubled between 2014 and 2015 and police have called for more resources.

Visiting Molndal, Swedish prime minister Stefan Lofven said: 'This is a tragedy. It is a terrible crime. I think that a lot of people in Sweden feel a great worry that there might be more similar cases after Sweden took in so many unaccompanied children and youths.'

Miss Mezher had been working at the housing block in Molndal since September. Despite rules that staff should work in pairs, she had reportedly worked alone overnight and was attacked half an hour before her shift was due to end.

Police praised the actions of the other children in the facility, hailing two 'heroes' who overpowered Miss Mezher's attacker.

A spokesman said the 15-year-old was being held in a police cell last night and would go to court as an adult suspect.

He said: 'We don't know anything about the boy's family. We have not even established his identity with a 100 per cent certainty yet.'

Police said Tuesday afternoon the forensic investigation of the scene of the crime is not yet completed, and that there are still question marks regarding the reason behind the attack.

Seven witnesses, all residents at the housing, have been moved to another accommodation and have all been interviewed by police.

Hard working: Psychology graduate Miss Mezher who was a Lebanese Christian whose parents were from Beirut, was today described by her mother Chimene as an 'angel'

Poignant: Miss Mezher, a Lebanese Christian, had posted a number 'inspirational quotes' on Facebook confirming her faith

Inspiration: Miss Mezher's Facebook profile give a poignant reminder of the loving, caring person she was. Paying tribute her mother said: 'She was a just and fair human being. There were so many who loved her'

Questioning: A boy, 15, living at the centre, from Somalia, is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder. Police have cordoned off the centre as forensics investigate

Scene: Molndal, on Sweden's west coast, where the migrant centre is, has been the scene of rising tension in recent months. Neighbourhood-watch groups have been sent out to prevent teenage girls from being sexually harassed on their way home from the commuter trains from Gothenburg

Miss Mezher's best friend Lejla Filipovic said: 'She gave a lot to others. She didn't expect anything back.

Alexandra was the first person in her family to get a degree and her family were so happy and proud of her. Now they are torn to pieces.'

Relative Charbel Aoen said Miss Mezher's youngest brothers Daniel, ten, and Elias, 17, had hardly spoken 'a single word' since the murder.

He said: 'Daniel is so silent it is scary. He is sad and filled with anger. He can't understand why she was alone in that institution and what her last seconds were like.'

Today,Lofven admitted that many people are fearful of attacks similar to the killing of Miss Mezher, because 'Sweden receives so many children and youths arriving alone'.

ALLEGED TEENAGE KILLER TO BE TRIED AS AN ADULT, SAY POLICE The teenage migrant accused of murdering a young Swedish social worker at a refugee centre will stand trial as an adult, it was revealed today. Authorities in Sweden have taken the unusual step of keeping the 15-year-old suspect in police custody due to the serious nature of the crime. Youngsters are normally sent to a secure children's home following arrest, but the teenager is being held behind bars due to public outrage follow the brutal knife killing of Alexandra Mezher. And he will be held in an adult prison until he goes on trial. 'A person is criminally responsible when they reach 15-years-old in Sweden,' a Gothanburg Police spokesman told MailOnline. 'The boy is being held at the police station. But it is very unusual that children to be kept in custody by the police. 'However the public prosecutor has deemed this as a special case due to the nature of the crime and will ask for the boy to be held in prison until he goes to trial.' The spokesman added: 'He is not known by the police and has not been arrested before. But there is always a variable of uncertainty about these kids identity. 'We dont know anything about the boy family. We have not even established his identity with a 100% certainty yet.' Advertisement

Home: Miss Mezher was living with her parents, originally from Lebanon, and her younger brothers in Boras, some 40 miles from Molndal

Centre: Miss Mezher, whose family are originally from Lebanon, had only worked at the accommodation for unaccompanied refugee children for a few months

SWEDISH LEGAL PROCESS: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT The prosecutor needs to file an application to the district court within 48 hours after a criminal has been arrested. The application is an appeal to the court to hear whether there are legal grounds to keep the criminal in custody. In this case the boy was arrested early on Monday morning, but the system works slowly so he was not formally arrested until Monday night. This document is a public document with the indicted persons name attached to it. The only reason a prosecutor can use to make this document secret is if the crime involves matters of National Security or Terrorism. There has been a few exceptions over the years when the district court has kept the criminals name a secret. Those cases are usually when there has been a police officer working under cover involved. It is for the indicted persons own security. After the prosecutor has send this application he or she will appear in court with the indicted person who also has a lawyer who speaks ion his behalf. A judge will then rule if the criminal is to remain in custody or be released. These hearings usually take around five minutes and are open for members of the public and pres to watch. Advertisement

Swedish police have today praised the actions of the other children living in the facility, hailing them 'heroes' after they overpowered the boy after he attacked Miss Mezher.

'Two boys held him down. It is a very good intervention. Had he intended to hurt anyone else, then they have prevented that,' said police spokesperson Peter Adlersson.

'It is easy to become injured yourself when intervening in this kind of situation. We are very grateful for these kinds of actions.'

Miss Mezher had only worked at the centre in Molndal for a few months.

It is is home to ten unaccompanied children aged 14-17, who arrived in Sweden seeking asylum without a parent or a guardian and has provoked unrest.

Neighbourhood-watch groups have reportedly been sent out to prevent teenage girls from being sexually harassed on their way home from the commuter trains from Gothenburg.

Parents have also spoken out against having their children in the same classes as the immigrants.

Two Kurdish migrants were injured yesterday in a gun battle at a migrant camp in Dunkirk. One was shot and the other was stabbed, sources indicated. Both were taken to hospital. The Grande Synthe camp  where 3,000 sleep rough  is to be closed by authorities in three weeks' time.

Clashes: Tensions are rising in Sweden as it struggles to cope with a record influx of migrants and asylum seekers (pictured: An estimated 15,000 people attended a Refugees Welcome rally in Gothenburg last year)
A Milwaukee man allegedly planning a mass shooting at a Masonic temple has been arrested after buying machine guns and a silencer from undercover FBI agents.

Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 23, wanted to kill 30 people and outlined detailed plans during conversations with confidential FBI sources, the US Department of Justice said in a statement.

Hamzeh thought the two sources were his accomplices. Their conversations happened in Arabic and were recorded and transcribed by the FBI since October last year.

He had once planned to travel to Jordan to attack Israeli soldiers and citizens in the West Bank and has been under investigation since September.

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Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 23, was arrested after buying machine guns and a silencer from two undercover FBI agents. He planned to carry out a mass shooting at a Masonic temple in Milwaukee

Hamzeh abandoned these plans because of family, financial and logistical reasons and decided to conduct an attack in the United States instead, according to the criminal complaint.

He settled on the Masonic temple, where Masons gather for fraternity meetings, earlier this month.

Hamzeh went to a local shooting range with the two FBI sources in January to practice shooting a handgun.

That same day, they took a guided tour of the Masonic temple with the two FBI sources in January, learning about meeting schedules and where people would be located during the meetings.

After the visit, Hamzeh discussed the attack in further detail, saying they would need one machine gun per person and three silencers.

Hamzeh discussed the attack with two confidential FBI sources, thinking they were his accomplices

He said that one of them would have to stay at the main door while the two others went upstairs to kill people during a meeting.

'As long as the one on the door understands he has bigger responsibility than the others,' Hamzeh said according to transcripts published by the US Department of Justice.

'For your information, he has to take care of everyone around him, the comers and the one that wants to go, he has to annihilate everyone, there is no one left, I mean when we go into a room, we will be killing everyone, that's it, this is our duty, as for the one at the door, he must have 20/20 eye vision and always alert for all the traffic around him.'

'We are Muslims, defending Muslim religion, we are on our own, my dear, we have organized our own group,' he added.

'We have our own group, not with Hamas, not with my a*s, we are here defending Islam, young people together join to defend Islam, that's it, that is what our intention is.'

Hamzeh said killing 30 people would be 'excellent'.

'If I got out, after killing thirty people, I will be happy 100 per cent... Because these 30 will terrify the world,' he said.

'I am telling you, if this hit is executed, it will be known all over the world,' he added.

'Sure, all over the world, all the Mujahedeen will be talking and they will be proud of us.'

Later in January, Hamzeh went to buy machine guns and silencers from two people who turned out to be undercover FBI agents.

They showed him the weapons and a silencer to Hamzeh, telling him that the weapons were capable of automatic fire and explaining how to use selector switch to fire automatically.

Hamzeh agreed to a price and paid it to the undercover agents, who then handed him a bag containing two automatic weapons and a silencer.
Giant corporations such as Google will inevitably pay less tax than ordinary firms, one of Britains top Revenue officials admitted yesterday.

Jim Harra, head of tax at HM Revenue and Customs, triggered outrage when he suggested it was unrealistic to expect multinational firms to pay as much as other businesses.

Mr Harra, who was involved in the tortuous six-year negotiations with Google, said big corporations would structure their affairs to pay lower bills than British competitors.

How Google got its tax break: This graphic shows how in 2014 the web giant's worldwide revenues came to 46billion and UK revenues 4.6billion. The tax paid on the UK revenues was the equivalent of 30million

His comments came as anger mounted over the sweetheart deal with Google, which will see it pay just 130million to cover a decade of back taxes. In other developments:

George Osborne faced pressure to release details of the deal for scrutiny by MPs, amid warnings it could undermine public confidence in the tax system,

The Government suffered further embarrassment over its cosy relationship with Google as it emerged business minister Ed Vaizey visited the firms London HQ two days before the deal was announced,

HMRC was facing allegations that it failed to challenge Google over its use of a key loophole,

Downing Street tried to paper over cracks with Mr Osborne over the deal, after he declared it a major success,

It emerged that the deal may allow Google to dodge a levy  nicknamed the Google Tax  that could have forced it to pay 25 per cent on its UK profits,

And another global tech firm, Facebook, insisted it would defend any attempts to force it to pay more tax in the UK.

Yesterday Mr Harra insisted officials had got the best deal under the existing law.

He said: I can certainly understand the (public) frustration. There is no doubt that multinationals have got capabilities and resources to make sure they organise themselves in the most tax-efficient ways  opportunities that are not open to domestic business that doesnt have subsidiaries around the world. That is an inevitability.

Rachel Reeves, a Labour member of the Commons Treasury committee, said Mr Harras approach to tackling the big technology giants was totally wrong.

Steve Baker, a Tory member of the Treasury committee, which has launched an investigation into the fallout from the deal, said Mr Harras comments demonstrated the need for sweeping tax reforms.

Mr Baker said: The tax system is simply too big and complicated, and its the big guys who are the winners.

The Government suffered embarrassment over its cosy relationship with Google as it emerged business minister Ed Vaizey (left) visited the firms London HQ two days before the 'sweetheart deal' was announced. George Osborne is now facing pressure to release details of the deal for scrutiny by MPs

DAME DISASTER'S EPITAPH The sweetheart deal with Google is likely to be the last major decision for which outgoing HMRC boss Lin Homer bears ultimate responsibility. It is a fitting epitaph. Since taking over in 2012, she has been dogged by criticisms over appalling customer service and failure to fully tax multinationals. In December 2013, a Public Accounts Committee report accused the taxman of going after easy targets such as small businesses. Then PAC chairman Margaret Hodge said it seems to lose its nerve when it came to multinational corporations. Despite her record at HMRC, and criticism of her previous tenure as head of the UK Border Agency, she was given a Damehood in the New Years Honours  leading to her being nicknamed Dame Disaster. Then, two weeks ago, it was announced the 58-year-old will retire in April with a pension pot totalling some 2.2million. However, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood described her as dedicated and professional. Advertisement

Senior Tories voiced disquiet at the Google deal. Former shadow home secretary David Davis called for its details to be published. London Mayor Boris Johnson asked for clarity and called it derisory.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell yesterday wrote to Mr Osborne demanding the release of the terms of the agreement, which is the subject of three separate inquiries.

Ministers have met with Google 21 times over the last five years, including on three occasions since the General Election, and on average more than once a month since 2010. During that period, David Cameron held talks with the internet giant six times and Mr Osborne five times.

In April 2013 Treasury minister David Gauke flew to Los Angeles, where Google has offices, to meet with US companies to discuss the UK tax system.

Mr Vaizey, who is also a culture minister, visited the firms 1billion HQ in London last week, where he spoke on the creative industries to Google and Facebook executives.

HMRC and the Treasury have both insisted details of the Google deal cannot be published without breaching their duty of confidentiality to individual taxpayers. Between 2006 and 2011 the companys revenue in the UK hit around 12.6billion but its corporation tax payments were 11.2 million.

In 2014 its UK revenues came to 4.6billion. The tax paid on this was the equivalent of 30million.

Critics claim the deal with HMRC will see Google pay an effective tax rate of three per cent. Mr Harra said this showed a fundamental misunderstanding of corporation tax, which is levied on profits, not revenues.

ITALY LEADS THE WAY WITH A DEMAND FOR 1BILLION FROM GOOGLE By Tom Kelly and Hugo Duncan Italian tax authorities have been chasing Google for 1billion in unpaid taxes. A deal is expected to be struck soon between Italys Treasury and the US technology firm. Prosecutors in Milan have led the probe into the internet giant, which in 2014 declared a turnover in the country of 54.4million (41.2million) and some 1.8million (1.4million) in profit. The Italian Treasury recently struck a 240million tax deal with Apple, another US technology giant that has been criticised for its tax arrangements around the world. Prosecutors, supported by the Guardia di Finanza tax police who are in charge of combating tax avoidance, have been probing Google over allegations profits generated out of its highly lucrative advertising business were registered in Ireland and Bermuda. Google employs some 130 staff members in Italy, including at its main base in Milan. Reaching a compromise has so far been a hard task, constantly delayed. As part of a crackdown on the undeclared profits of internet giants operating in Italy, the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi announced plans to introduce a so-called web tax. Other companies currently under scrutiny of the authorities include Amazon and Western Digital. Francesco Boccia, the Democrat deputy who is sponsoring the web tax, said it was about time internet giants start paying all their taxes and  understand that their profits are made in Italy. Googles French operation is facing demands to pay almost three times as much tax as the trivial amount clawed back by HMRC  despite being a quarter the size of its UK arm. French officials are reported to be aggressively pursuing the company for 378million  compared with the 130million to be paid to the British tax authorities over ten years. This is despite Googles UK arm employing four times as many staff and generating about three times as much revenue. While Google paid 2.3billion in tax around the world in 2014 it is estimated its UK arm paid only 46.2million in the 18 months to the end of June 2015. A Downing Street spokesman said George Osborne was aware of speculation France is seeking a large sum but added it does remain to be seen how much they get. HMRCs Jim Harra told BBC Radio 4s World at One: I am satisfied that we have carried out a thorough investigation and we have collected the amount of tax that is due under the law and I am quite happy to be held to account for what we have done. Advertisement

HMRC dismissed reports that it had failed to challenge Googles claim that it does not have a permanent establishment in Britain.

Treasury sources stressed that Mr Osborne was not involved in negotiating the deal, which was handled by HMRC officials. One insider pointed out that the deal includes back taxes that should have been paid under the last Labour government. The source added: Labour has a dismal record in this area.

Google said: We are paying the amount of tax that HMRC agrees we should pay. Governments make tax lawand Google complies with the law.

George and a clumsy late-night PR briefing

By James Slack, analysis for the Daily Mail

George Osborne was given the cold shoulder by Number 10  a very rare experience  after disastrously misjudging the public and political mood over his Google deal.

The Chancellors woes stem from what was supposed to have been a cynical late-night PR coup. On Friday, Google briefed the BBC and the Financial Times that they had struck a deal to pay 130million in taxes.

It was agreed in advance that the news would be made public shortly after 9pm  when the first editions of the Saturday newspapers had already gone to bed, keeping scrutiny to a minimum.

On Friday, Google briefed the BBC and the Financial Times that they had struck a deal to pay 130million in taxes. Head of Google Europe, Matt Brittin (pictured), then gave a soft interview for the BBC's 10pm News

A soft interview with Matt Brittin, the head of Google Europe, was also provided for the BBCs 10pm News, in which he said: We want to ensure that we pay the right amount of tax.

Officials will not say when Downing Street, Mr Osborne or anybody else in Government was made aware of the deal.

But, at 12.13am on Saturday, Mr Osborne went on Twitter to declare: Good to see #Google paying more tax on past profits. We want successful businesses in UK  but they should pay their taxes.

Two minutes later came a second message, which is the one he is most likely to regret: Google tax bill is a victory for the action weve taken. I introduced Diverted Profits Tax. We now expect to see other firms pay their share.

Misjudged: At 12.13am on Saturday, Mr Osborne went on Twitter to declare: Good to see #Google paying more tax on past profits'. But by Sunday night MPs on all sides were picking the deal apart

For the HMRC and the Treasury it was then off to bed, with a publicity coup apparently landed. Except it didnt play out that way.

Labour, to their credit, were quick on to the airwaves on Saturday morning to point out that 130million was relatively trivial.

By Sunday night, MPs on all sides were picking the deal  which amounts to a tax rate of roughly 3 per cent  apart.

On Monday, the Speaker granted shadow chancellor John McDonnell an urgent question that Mr Osborne would normally be expected to answer.

Instead, he sent one of his deputies, David Gauke, to face the music  citing a prior engagement touring the north west with Bill Gates (itself an unfortunate coincidence, given he was missing an appointment to talk about the Governments dealings with one set of billionaires, to go on an outing with another).

This did not, however, spare him the deeply bruising experience of being left to hang by Downing Street.

Three times the Prime Ministers Official spokesman was asked if David Cameron agreed that the corporate small change extracted from Google was a major success and a victory.

The best she could offer was the observation that it was a step forward. Cue headlines that Number 10 was lukewarm.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson  Mr Osbornes main rival for the leadership  was leading a chorus of MPs who dismissed Googles payment as trivial.

Number 10 was yesterday busy trying to limit the fallout, insisting Mr Cameron and the Chancellor were on the same page on Google.
Two presidential candidates are breathing a sigh of relief tonight, but one of them you've never heard of.

First up, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will appear on the main stage at Thursday night's Fox News Channel debate in Des Moines after being pushed off because of low poll numbers and demoted to the undercard debate in Charleston earlier this month  an opportunity he decided to boycott.

Additionally, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who has been running for president since July, was finally let back into a debate, participating in the earlier kids' table debate.

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Rand Paul will be allowed to sit at the big kids table on Thursday when Republicans debate one final time in Iowa before the state's caucuses on Monday

Earlier this month, Republicans gathered for a Fox Business Network debate in Charleston, South Carolina, but Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina were ushered to the kids table

Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia who has been running for president since July, will participate in his second debate this week. He'll line up in the undercard with Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee

Joining Paul, who will be standing at one of the side podiums because his poll numbers still aren't great, would be frontrunner Donald Trump, who would be standing front and center.

Trump's campaign manager said tonight that he will 'definitely not' participate in the debate over concerns about Megyn Kelly

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and then Paul are expected to attend.

Gilmore will be joined by Carly Fiorina, who made the main debate stage after the first Fox News debate, but then was demoted earlier this month back to the kids' table.

Additionally, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who both won the Iowa caucuses in previous cycles, will join Fiorina and Gilmore.

With the Iowa caucuses just six days away, the era of the junior varsity debate could be coming to an end.

In December, Rand Paul (far right) and Carly Fiorina (second from left) both made the main stage when the Republican debated in Las Vegas, Nevada, but by January they both got the boot

After Iowa, and then New Hampshire, a week later, the crowded GOP field will probably, finally, thin out, with political losers throwing their support to the candidates that placed in the top three or four in either state.

This week already, George Pataki, who got stuck in the undercard debate time after time, announced that he would be supporting Rubio.

While another former hopeful, Rick Perry, said he was behind fellow Texas, Ted Cruz.

Thursday's debate was supposed to feature a rematch between Trump and Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who was once again chosen to moderate.

Trump had been making a stink about Kelly, even offering supporters a chance to vote yes or no on whether he should even show up to the debate because the 'biased' journalist will be there with him.

Fox News has snarked back and defended Kelly, mocking Trump for throwing decisions to his Twitter following.
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While thousands of Australians across the country were waking up with sore heads on Wednesday morning after enjoying the nation's birthday, homesick Aussies abroad were just beginning to kick start some unique celebrations of their own.

From topless salutes and blow-up kangaroos in gloomy London to green and gold balloons flying high in a blizzard-blanketed New York city to iconic Tim Tam biscuits and Victoria Bitter beer in Los Angeles - those overseas proudly celebrated Australia Day as their time differences began to catch up.

In southwest Africa's Namibia a woman bared the flag on a horse while another woman wore it as a cape as she battled icy temperatures in Japan.

Formerly known as Foundation Day, Australia Day is the official national day of the country and is celebrated annually on January 26 to commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet to Sydney in 1788.

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Gloomy London weather wasn't going to stop these three girls from celebrating Australia Day - posing topless for a photo on their balcony

This lady wasn't going to let a raging blizzard in New York City stop her from celebrating Australia Day in style

This woman celebrated Australia Day in southwest Africa's Namibia by going for a horse ride while holding up a national flag

'You can take the girl out of Australia but you can't take the Australia out of the girl': This woman's Instagram caption says it all, as she pouts with a blow-up kangaroo and holds onto a Fosters beer can in a nightclub in London

Thousands of photos from all corners of the globe flooded social media on Australia Day. This group celebrated the day on the slopes of Sunshine Village in Banff, Canada

Thousands of photos flooded social media under the hashtags #AustraliaDay, #Straya and #Hottest100, showcasing a day that was fiercely celebrated across the globe by Australian citizens regardless of location, weather, or time of day.

In London and Los Angeles, locals were educated on some quintessential Australian staples, including Arnott's Barbecue Shapes, Tim Tam and Anzac biscuits, home-grown beers and Vegemite spread.

Others used the day to bring traditional Aboriginal artwork and instruments to work - including didgeridoos and carved wooden echidnas.

In Brazil a woman paid homage to Australia by eating 'Aussie bread' underneath Rio De Jainero's Christ Redeemer statue.

#Australiansinbrazil and #AustraliaDay accompanied this photo of a woman who spent the day hiking up to Christo Redentor in Brazil

Does it get much more Australian than this? A man draped in a flag and sipping from a Victoria Bitter can shows off a collection of classic Australian icons on his desk while in Los Angeles

This woman whipped out the Australian flag while skiing in the arctic conditions of Niseko, Japan

A group of Australians drink classic Australian beers like Toohey's Extra Dry and Coopers Pale Ale while listening to Triple J in a bar in Banff, Canada

'They asked if I could be more Australian for work': A selection of fairy bread, Anzac biscuits and Vegemite spread are on display for this man's English colleagues

These two women visit 'The Australian' bar and restaurant while staying in midtown Manhattan

As many nursed hangovers and begrudgingly dealt with an early-morning start to work back in Australia, one battler gave new meaning to the term 'champagne breakfast' - uploading a photo of a greasy-looking burger with a Victoria Bitter beer bottle wedged roughly in the middle.

Other photos showed revellers worse for wear after chugging down a few too many cold beverages, muscular men giving each other cheeky squeezes while kitted out in tight-fitting swimsuits and others turning the cargo tray of their utility vehicles into makeshift pools with large sheets of tarpaulin.

Warm weather in Sydney and Melbourne motivated thousands to strip down to a pair of flip-flops, boardshorts or a bikini and head down to a local sun-soaked beach.

Day in the sun: These two women get inventive with their drinking techniques while gearing up for a big day of partying on Australia Day

Australians cooled off in their pools on Australia Day, with temperatures in Sydney and Melbourne reaching above 25C

No pool? No problem! This outback group made do with what they had and turned the cargo tray of their utility vehicle into a makeshift pool with a large sheet of tarpaulin and a few hoses

Mateship: For some, Australia Day meant stripping down to your Budgy Smugglers and slapping on an Akubra hat

One man gave new meaning to the term 'champagne breakfast' - uploading a photo of a greasy-looking burger with a Victoria Bitter beer bottle wedged roughly in the middle

It had been forecast to be cloudy with showers in the likes of Sydney, but instead it proved to be pleasant and perfect summer weather

People were warned to go easy on the beer - police warned that they would target criminal and antisocial behaviour associated with drinking too much alcohol throughout the day

Quick nap? Photos flooded social media the day after Australia Day, showing the aftermath of a day of celebrating in the sun

Sydney's waterfront was filled with spectators of the Great Australian Swim, as Hundreds of keen swimmers endured a 2km swim around Farm Cove from the Opera House.

The annual Ferrython also drew crowds down to Circular Quay, as the cities iconic passenger ferries raced to the finish line underneath the harbour bridge.

In Melbourne, the annual Australia Day Parade saw thousands of people line Swanston Street . The parade included more than 100 community and cultural groups who came together to march and perform in honour of the national day.

Fireworks capped off most of the capital city celebrations, including Perth's Skyworks finale above the Swan Rive which showcased a new laser show, with 360 degree visibility from Langley Park to South Perth.

One of the day's most surprising developments was the weather. It had been forecast to be cloudy with showers in the likes of Sydney, but instead it proved to be pleasant and perfect summer weather.

But first, let me take a selfie: This woman makes the most of an opportunity to pout with a kangaroo

Some put their own personal touch to the celebrations with this man having a ride on his appropriately coloured bike

This woman has everything she needs to prove that she is a fully fledged Aussie

Two more friends get in the party spirit as the temperature begins to rise

However, people were warned to go easy on the beer. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that criminal and antisocial behaviour associated with drinking too much alcohol would be targeted by police throughout the day.

'The abuse of alcohol is by far and above the No.1 issue for us,' acting Assistant Commissioner Kyle Stewart, from the NSW Police Force said. 'If that's what your go is for tomorrow, know that there is a very real chance that you will be spending the night in one of my cells.'

Alcohol-free zones were in place at events and in many parks and beaches across the country.

'I urge those of you who are out in the public spaces tomorrow to be acutely aware of those alcohol-free zones,' acting Assistant Commissioner Stewart said.

'We will also have drink and drug drivers in our sights; hundreds of traffic police will be on duty tomorrow, so if you expect to drink and drive, expect to be pulled over and tested.'

The skies over the Sydney Harbour Bridge were a hive of activity with a squadron of Russian Roolettes, followed by a Qantas flyover and finishing with the Red Berets parachute display by the Australian Army.

However, there was a restricted airspace over Sydney Harbour for the first time on Australia Day with police asking those thinking about taking drones to the celebrations to keep them firmly on the ground.

Not that everyone was celebrating. Up to 200 people gathered for an Invasion Day protest near the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne to protest against Australia Day.

An Invasion Day March in Sydney was from The Block in Redfern to Town Hall and then onto Australian Hall on Elizabeth Street.

Family and friends gathered all over Australia to make the most of the good weather

This man may have overdone the bottles of water by the look of things here

Aboriginal dancers perform the Wugulora Morning Ceremony at Walumil Lawn at Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney

On a day like today one beer is really not enough and this is one way of getting round the problem
Noble allegedly admitted to injecting Mullen with a high dose as part of a 'Rome- and Juliet-style' suicide pact, but backed out after she died

Her boyfriend Anthony Noble, also 27, has been charged with her murder

Joette Mullen, 27, was found dead of a cocaine overdose in her car in Mont Clare,

A Pennsylvania man has been charged with murder after allegedly injecting his girlfriend with a fatal dose of cocaine as part of a suicide pact, but then pulling out of killing himself after watching her die.

Anthony Michael Noble, 27, of Phoenixville, is also charged with drug delivery resulting in death, tampering with evidence, and related crimes, the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office said.

His girlfriend, Joette L. Mullen, 27, was found dead in her car on the morning of December 14 near Schuylkill Canal Park in Mont Clare.

Police say that she and Noble had made a 'Rome and Juliet-style' suicide pact, but that he pulled out after witnessing Mullen have a seizure and die, Philly.com reported.

Botched pact: Anthony Noble, 27 (left), has been charged with first-degree murder after allegedly injecting cocaine into the arm of his girlfriend, Joette Mullen, also 27 (right), as part of suicide pact he later backed out of

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele says the evidence shows Noble purposefully prepared a fatal dose of cocaine and then injected it in Mullen's arm.

'This is First Degree Murder similar to a case where somebody takes a gun, loads it, points it at somebody, pulls the trigger and kills them,' he told Georgia World.

In his first interview with police, Noble said that he and Mullen were using rock and powder cocaine they bought in Philadelphia on December 13.

He said they agreed to do 'big shots' and, and passed out after injecting her and himself.

He claimed that he woke to find Mullen unresponsive.

Noble said he tried CPR, but fled when he realized she was dead.

He said he took the drugs and through everything in the river.

He told police that Mullen 'hated life and didn't want to be here anymore'.

Killed: The body of Joette Mullen was found in her car on the morning of December 14 in Mont Clare, Pennsylvania, by a passer-by

However police then interviewed one of Noble's friends, who said the suspect told him about the suicide pact, which he described as 'Rome and Juliet-style'.

He said Noble couldn't go through with the pact after seeing what happened to Mullen.

Noble was then interviewed again by police, and admitted to what happened.

Mullen's mother, Linda Ward, said her daughter suffered from depression.

Mullen's last text message was to her mother - sent at 2:04 a.m. the day she was found dead, and said: 'Mom, I'm fine.'

Noble is being held on an unspecified bail.
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Dressed in chainmail and brandishing swords and shields, these vikings gathered together to take part in the Shetland Islands festival of fire celebrating their Nordic roots.

The crowd of warriors stood alongside an unlikely ally with some of the thousand strong group of 'Guizers' dressed as stormtroopers.

The large gathering saw the vikings and stormtroopers march through the streets of Lerwick as the festival got under way. The event culminated in torchlit parade headed by the Guizer Jarl, the Viking chief, in which an elaborately-crafted wooden longship is set on fire.

The crowd of warriors stood alongside an unlikely ally with some of the thousand strong group of 'Guizers' dressed as stormtroopers

The event culminated in torchlit parade headed by the Guizer Jarl, the Viking chief, in which an handcrafted wooden longship is set on fire

'Up-Helly-Aa' is a variant of the Scots Uphaliday, denoting Epiphany as the end of the Christmas holiday, according to the New Oxford Dictionary.

Held on the last Tuesday in January, the festival features a dramatic torchlit parade followed by a spectacular finale involving the torching of a full sized Viking longboat.

Peter Malcolmson, the 1984 Guizer Jarl who portrayed a character entitled Eirik Bloodaxe Haraldson, said that before the tradition began, celebrations in Lerwick had been a much more rowdy affair.

'It's now a huge spectacle and tonight you'll see about 1,000 men with torches lining up in the streets getting ready for the procession,' he told BBC radio.

Held on the last Tuesday in January, the festival features a dramatic torchlit parade followed by a spectacular finale involving the torching of a full sized Viking longboat

The large gathering saw the vikings and stormtroopers march through the streets of Lerwick as the festival got under way

One of the key elements of the festival is the procession of torches by the large crowd of vikings, stormtroopers and spectators

Little of the boat's main timbers are spared from the ferocious heat of the fire as it destroys the great boat

The beautifully handcrafted longboat quickly breaks apart as the flames tear through the centre of the vessel

The spectacular scene is witnessed by a large crowd of viking clad locals and other men wearing stormtrooper outfits

'Shetlanders all over the world at the moment will be smelling the paraffin and that's a sense of the anticipation of the event and the pride in it.

'The adrenaline is flowing, the fun is there; it's just a great party.'

The merry-making goes on until after dawn tomorrow, when Shetland has a much-needed official public holiday.

Guizers have been working at least four nights a week since the end of October to build the galley and make the torches. Participants must have been a Shetland resident for at least five years.

The Shetland Islands are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles and are closer to Oslo than London. Around 105 miles northeast of the Scottish mainland, Shetland was invaded by Vikings in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

The archipelago was pledged to Scotland by the king of Norway in 1469 but the Norwegian spirit lives on in street and place names.

Several fierce looking vikings flick through a magazine as they kill time ahead of the historic event in Lerwick

'Up-Helly-Aa' is a variant of the Scots Uphaliday, denoting Epiphany as the end of the Christmas holiday

The archipelago was pledged to Scotland by the king of Norway in 1469 but the Norwegian spirit lives on in street and place names

The Shetland Islands are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles and are closer to Oslo than London. Around 105 miles northeast of the Scottish mainland, Shetland was invaded by Vikings in the late eighth and early ninth centuries
Police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz (pictured) staged his own death to look like he had been shot by a suspect. He actually committed suicide after he feared his mismanagement of a local youth group's funds would be revealed

An officer from Illinois who appeared to die in the line of duty but actually committed suicide after he allegedly stole funds from youth programs had plotted to hire a gangster to kill an official who was about to expose the embezzlement, investigators allege.

Police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, 52, also known as 'G.I. Joe', stole tens of thousands of dollars from the Fox Lake Police Explorers Post during a seven-year stretch, according to police.

A report by CNN says that investigators allege that he even plotted to hire a gangbanger to murder a village official who unwittingly was about to expose the embezzlement.

On September 1, 2015, the day he died, Gliniewicz, of Fox Lake, Illinois, radioed dispatchers to say he was following three men, two white and one black.

After calling for back up he was found dead in the woods from a gunshot wound to the torso.

FBI investigators initially had doubts about Gliniewicz's 'murder' after cell phone records showed him in the area for 30 minutes before radioing back up.

Local authorities ignored this and pursued a man hunt for the alleged suspects, which earned national attention.

Thousands attended Gliniewicz's funeral, which became a statewide event in Illinois, on September 7, 2015. In death, the 30-year police veteran was a hero until his supposed greed was revealed.

People in Fox Lake, Illinois, initially mourned the death of the fallen officer. However, after his misdeeds came to light, people in the town said they felt betrayed and hurt, including former members of his youth group

Gliniewicz's mishandling of the Explorer Post program funds, which teaches children how to use firearms and negotiate crime scenes in order to become cops or soldiers, threatened to be exposed when a new village administrator Anne Marrin was hired in March of 2014 and asked for an accounting and an inventory of the Explorer Post.

Gliniewicz panicked as, by then investigators say Gliniewicz had spent 'tens of thousands' of dollars on his mortgage, travel, access to adult websites, health clubs, Starbucks and other items.

Marrin was unaware that she had become his enemy. Text messages recovered in the investigation reveal how Gliniewicz feared he was about to be exposed.

In one message to his son he wrote: 'She hates me,' he writes. 'If she gets ahold of the old checking account, I'm pretty well f***ed.'

His son replies: 'Hopefully she decides to get a couple of drinks in her and she gets a DUI.'

He then responds: 'She does, but not around here and no one knows where. Trust me ive thougit (sic) through MANY SCENARIOS from planting things to the volo bog!!!'

This reference may be related to the Chain O' Lakes as a dumping ground for bodies.

Mel Gliniewicz (left), Gliniewicz's wife, attended vigils held to honor her husband who was initially hailed a hero

Marrin was surprised to hear of what Gliniewicz wrote about her when his text messages were recovered after his death as she said they never exchanged any 'bad words' and had always been pleasant to each other.

Authorities are also looking into people who might have been accomplices in Gliniewicz's alleged mismanagement of funds from the Explorers.

Morgan Galowitch, 20, who became a Police Explorer at age 14, told CNN: 'I didn't want to believe it all.

'I didn't want to accept the fact, I didn't want to hear about it, I didn't want to listen to anyone say it.

'I just, you know, you don't know how to feel. You feel so pissed off and you feel so betrayed

'You don't understand it.

'That's the part of me that doesn't like L.T. anymore, that makes it very difficult to miss him.

'He knew this was gonna happen, that he couldn't hide everything. I can't forgive him for that because, you know, he, he did love us.

'He, he spent all of his spare time with us.

'And for him to do this and to leave us in the position that we, we've been in, it's, it's difficult.'

The Explorers program has been suspended while the investigation continues.

Thought to be a hero: Officers and civilians came out in droves to mourn Gliniewicz after his death

The casket of Gliniewicz is carried from Antioch Community High School in Illinois following his funeral service

Gliniewicz also had a history of misconduct, which included passing out drunk while behind the wheel of a car and allegedly pressuring a female department employee under his command to perform oral sex on him five times.

The sexual harassment claim became a lawsuit in 2003 but the charges were dropped in 2005 after the woman and her attorney missed court deadlines.

Tributes were marked across Illinois after Gliniewicz, known as 'G.I. Joe', died from a self-inflicted gunshot
Students who have failed to gain the minimum entry requirement grades for their chosen degree are still being accepted into courses, a Fairfax Media investigation has found.

The University of Sydney, UNSW, Macquarie University and Western Sydney University are among NSW universities accepting school leavers with ATARs below the advertised cut-off.

The most significant differences include marks that are 40 points below minimum entry scores.

Sydney University accepted the least amount of students that received ATARs below the cut-off

HOW MANY STUDENTS HAD MARKS BELOW THE COURSE CUT-OFF? Almost half of the students that were offered places at these universities achieved marks below the advertised course cut-off. Macquarie University - 64% Western Sydney University - 59% University of New South Wales - 46% Sydney University - 27% (Data obtained from Fairfax Media) Advertisement

According to data from Fairfax Media, Western Sydney University's Bachelor of Construction Management had the most offers (53 per cent) which were more than 20 points below the cut-off of 85.

Coming in close behind is the Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) at Western Sydney University where 50 per cent of offers were more than 20 points below the cut-off of 83.2.

Two applicants that had only scored an ATAR of 67 were accepted into the coveted Combined Law degree at UNSW, which has the highest entry score for law in NSW at 99.7.

Western Sydney University accepted the most students with an ATAR more than 20 points below the cut-off

Other courses accepting students with marks well below the threshold include business and teaching at Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, UNSW and the University of Sydney.

All four universities offer bonus points for the disadvantaged, alternate pathways and transfer programs, which contribute to the increase in lower-performing students being accepted into top courses with a cut-off higher than what they achieved.

In other states such as Victoria, the University of Melbourne also offer guaranteed entry pathways based on academic performance in an undergraduate degree, and are not subject to any ATAR requirement.

Students that scored an ATAR of 67 were accepted into Combined Law (99.7) at UNSW

Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UNSW, Stuart Khan, said he interviews school leavers each year for a below-ATAR entry program.

'It's about identifying capable students.'

The University of Newcastle's Medicine degree is explicitly based on ATAR and non-ATAR aptitude assessments.

'Most universities recognise that there are other ways to assess aptitude,' Mr Khan told Daily Mail Australia.

NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said universities shouldn't be taking students with such low marks

At Melbourne's La Trobe University, if students pass two single subjects from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - which have no ATAR requirement - they'll be guaranteed entry into the Bachelor of Arts.

NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli told Fairfax Media, 'For universities that are concerned about their rankings internationally to be taking in students with such low ATARs is not a good look."

He said the federal government should introduce minimum entry requirements or restrict the number of Commonwealth supported places.

UNSW was ranked 46th in the 2015 QS World University Rankings

The ATAR, or Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, which replaced the UAI (University Admissions Index) in 2009, is a rank between 0.00 and 99.95 that measures a student's overall academic performance in relation to that of other students and helps universities rank applicants for selection into their courses.

The University of Sydney, UNSW, Macquarie University and Western Sydney University have all been contacted for comment.
Woes: George Osborne was given the cold shoulder by Number 10 after disastrously misjudging the public and political mood over his Google deal

George Osborne was given the cold shoulder by Number 10  a very rare experience  after disastrously misjudging the public and political mood over his Google deal.

The Chancellors woes stem from what was supposed to have been a cynical late-night PR coup. On Friday, Google briefed the BBC and the Financial Times that they had struck a deal to pay 130million in taxes.

It was agreed in advance that the news would be made public shortly after 9pm  when the first editions of the Saturday newspapers had already gone to bed, keeping scrutiny to a minimum.

A soft interview with Matt Brittin, the head of Google Europe, was also provided for the BBCs 10pm News, in which he said: We want to ensure that we pay the right amount of tax.

Officials will not say when Downing Street, Mr Osborne or anybody else in Government was made aware of the deal.

But, at 12.13am on Saturday, Mr Osborne went on Twitter to declare: Good to see #Google paying more tax on past profits. We want successful businesses in UK  but they should pay their taxes.

Two minutes later came a second message, which is the one he is most likely to regret: Google tax bill is a victory for the action weve taken. I introduced Diverted Profits Tax. We now expect to see other firms pay their share.

For the HMRC and the Treasury it was then off to bed, with a publicity coup apparently landed. Except it didnt play out that way.

Labour, to their credit, were quick on to the airwaves on Saturday morning to point out that 130million was relatively trivial.

By Sunday night, MPs on all sides were picking the deal  which amounts to a tax rate of roughly 3 per cent  apart.

On Friday, Google briefed the BBC and the Financial Times that they had struck a deal to pay 130million in taxes. Head of Google Europe, Matt Brittin (pictured), then gave a soft interview for the BBC's 10pm News

Misjudged: At 12.13am on Saturday, Mr Osborne went on Twitter to declare: Good to see #Google paying more tax on past profits'. But by Sunday night MPs on all sides were picking the deal apart

On Monday, the Speaker granted shadow chancellor John McDonnell an urgent question that Mr Osborne would normally be expected to answer.

Instead, he sent one of his deputies, David Gauke, to face the music  citing a prior engagement touring the north west with Bill Gates (itself an unfortunate coincidence, given he was missing an appointment to talk about the Governments dealings with one set of billionaires, to go on an outing with another).

This did not, however, spare him the deeply bruising experience of being left to hang by Downing Street.

Three times the Prime Ministers Official spokesman was asked if David Cameron agreed that the corporate small change extracted from Google was a major success and a victory.

The best she could offer was the observation that it was a step forward. Cue headlines that Number 10 was lukewarm.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson  Mr Osbornes main rival for the leadership  was leading a chorus of MPs who dismissed Googles payment as trivial.

Number 10 was yesterday busy trying to limit the fallout, insisting Mr Cameron and the Chancellor were on the same page on Google.
Labour's former culture secretary has admitted that her reforms led to a free-for-all of 'crack cocaine' gambling machines on high streets.

Tessa Jowell was in post when fixed-odds betting terminals were introduced in 2001, and four years later she brought in laws to regulate them.

The terminals allow users to stake 100 a time on games including blackjack, roulette and poker. They are so addictive they have become known as the 'crack cocaine' of gambling.

Baroness Jowell, who was culture secretary between 2001 and 2007, claimed yesterday she had always made it clear that FOBTs were 'on probation' and should be removed if evidence were amassed that they were promoting harm.

But she admitted that her 2005 Gambling Act, which gave the Gambling Commission the power to step in, had not worked.

Former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell (pictured in 2002) has admitted her 2005 Gambling Act, brought in to curb the potentially harmful effect of fixed odds betting machines, had not worked

It comes months after another senior New Labour figure admitted that another controversial policy  allowing round-the-clock drinking  had been a failure.

Andy Burnham, who was also culture secretary, said Tony Blair's 2005 law  blamed for leaving parts of Britain 'awash' with cheap alcohol and plagued by late-night violence  had been a mistake.

Yesterday it emerged that bookies were making record profits from FOBTs.

Figures, obtained by campaign group Fairer Gambling, show that Ladbrokes alone now makes more than 1,000 a week per machine, up 9 per cent in one year. Paddy Power and Coral have also seen profits rise, thanks to an increase in the numbers of gamblers using the terminals.

Earlier this week, David Cameron's former speechwriter, Clare Foges, compared his refusal to act on FOBTs to 'turning a blind eye while the poor destroy themselves on Gin Lane'. Baroness Jowell, who helped bring the 2012 Olympics to London, failed to secure Labour's candidacy for the London mayor last year.

Writing in The Times, she said the Gambling Commission should have done more to take action against FOBTs.

'Protecting the public from the harm that gambling can do was one of the overriding purposes of the Gambling Act 2005,' she said. 'That is why the Gambling Commission was given the power to regulate FOBT machines.

When the latter were first introduced, I made it clear that they were on probation and should be removed in the face of evidence of harm gathered by the commission; the number of machines, speed of play and size of stake were all within its regulatory power.

'In addition, however, further planning regulation should restrict the number of betting shops and therefore the number of FOBTs. So Clare Foges is right: the Government (and the Gambling Commission) should act  but so too should local authorities, which should be given power to restrict planning consent for new betting shops.'

Figures, obtained by campaign group Fairer Gambling, show that Ladbrokes (file photo of William Hill bookmakers) alone now makes more than 1,000 a week per machine, up 9 per cent in one year

Labour MP Frank Field also demanded fresh curbs on FOBTs  pointing out the 'havoc that gambling can wreak on mainly poorer households' budgets'.

He added: 'The political debate needs to return to proposals for capping the amount of money that can be gambled in one go on a fixed-odds betting terminal. But, as a first step, local communities should be given the power to decide whether they want FOBTs at all on their high street.'

The Liberal Democrats are campaigning for the maximum stake on FOBTs to be cut to 2.

The party's culture spokesman in the Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, has put forward a Bill with this aim. It has its second reading in the coming weeks.

He said: 'The Conservatives, despite public concern and research demonstrating harm, have inexcusably dragged their heels on any kind of meaningful reform to gambling on FOBTs.'

It is not the first time Labour has admitted mistakes on gambling. In 2007, days after becoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown scrapped Mr Blair's plans for a supercasino in Manchester.
She is still in discussions with the telecoms giant more than a year later

A pensioner who asked BT to install a landline at her home was told she would have to pay more than 22,000.

Jenny Stephen asked for the service shortly after she moved into a holiday village and assumed she would be connected by a nearby telegraph pole.

But more than a year later she is still in discussions with the telecoms giant which claims it must undertake a 'huge civil engineering task' of laying 1,300ft of underground cable.

BT Openreach quoted 18,799 plus VAT  a total of 22,558.80  despite a neighbour being linked to an overhead line in a nearby road.

A pensioner who asked BT to install a landline at her home was told she would have to pay more than 22,000 (file photo)

'Maybe it's because I'm old they think I'm stupid,' she told the BBC.

[I'm told] there's no option, although a radio link or a link to another house would work.

'I just want to make a phone call but I can't get any sense out of anybody.'

Mrs Stephen has struggled to get the phone line since she retired to her masinonette at Waterside village in Corton, Suffolk, 18 months ago.

Residents past and present last night complained they had come up against similar problems in the past.

Former resident Gary Gersch, who moved out in 2010, was quoted more than 15,000 for a landline.

'What I was gobsmacked about was the site office have got their own [telephone] wires running to their building,' he said.

'I had to use a mobile but 3 was one of the few providers whose service was adequate  but it was no more than adequate. You had to go outside to get it to work.

'And for broadband you had to use a dongle, which was very, very slow.

'I know someone else who was quoted a similar amount for a phone. It's ridiculous.'

BT Openreach quoted 18,799 plus VAT  a total of 22,558.80  despite a neighbour being linked to an overhead line in a nearby road

A resident, who asked not to be named, said: 'I was quoted a five-figure sum and eventually gave up on trying to get a sensible quote. It is very frustrating.'

Residents claimed some people had been connected for free because of 'medical reasons'.

A BT spokesman said: 'The price quoted is due to the huge civil engineering task to provide an underground service to one customer in Waterside holiday park.

'In this instance nearly 400m of cabling is required, as well as the need for surveys and complex underground service to one customer.'

Waterside's owners said they would be happy for BT to run overhead cables to Mrs Stephen's home.

Mrs Stephen, who has daughters living in London, suffered a stroke shortly before moving to the holiday village.

Her mobile phone reception is so bad that her family sometimes struggle to get hold of her.

BT said the astronomical charge would not apply if it was allowed to install overhead wires.
A primary school teacher who was sacked after being accused of helping a Year 3 student cheat on a NAPLAN test has successfully challenged her dismissal.

Sharon Hislop lost her job at Wundowie Primary School, east of Perth, in May after she was accused of pointing out the correct answers to her students during the national literacy and numeracy test.

The Year 3 teacher was also accused of calling a student a 'little b***h' for dobbing her in.

Sharon Hislop who was sacked from her job at Wundowie Primary School, east of Perth, in May after being accused of helping a Year 3 student cheat on a NAPLAN test has successfully challenged her dismissal

Ms Hislop successfully challenged her dismissal after the WA Industrial Relations Commission found on Monday that she was unfairly sacked.

A scathing Commission report from acting senior commissioner Pamela Scott found that the investigation conducted by the Department of Education and its conclusions were 'so flawed as to be unable to be relied on'.

It also found evidence given by the education department assistant who was present in the classroom when Ms Hislop administered the test was 'unreliable'.

Ms Hislop was accused of approaching a student with special needs during the NAPLAN test and indicated the correct answers to her.

The department also alleged she pointed out to other students the correct answer to circle and explained words they did not understand.

She was also accused of rearranging the classroom to make it possible for students to read their peers' test booklets and allowed all of the students an extra 20 minutes to complete their tests.

Sharon Hislop lost her job at Wundowie Primary School, east of Perth, in May after she was accused of pointing out the correct answers to her students during the national literacy and numeracy test

It is also alleged Ms Hislop later referred to the student she helped as a 'little b***h' for dobbing her in, but she told the Commission she used the word 'witch' because it was a pet name used by the girl's family because of her hair style at the time.

The Commission said the investigation into Ms Hislop was flawed because it did not take into account the NAPLAN test has a practice section where teacher's are allowed to help the students.

Concerns were also raised about investigators interviewing several eight-year-old's five weeks after they sat four different NAPLAN tests because the students couldn't distinguish between the various tests they sat.

The acting senior commissioner stated in her findings that the appropriate action would be for Ms Hislop to be reinstated to her former teaching position and she should be given the 12 months pay she has lost following her dismissal.
The family of murdered teacher Ann Maguire claim officials put up 'walls of secrecy' to hide full details of the crime.

The popular Spanish teacher was stabbed to death by a 15-year-old pupil during a lesson in 2014.

Although her classroom killer has been convicted, a vast amount of background to the classroom murder has never been disclosed.

Mrs Maguire's husband Don alleges the school, council and church refused to provide a 'full version' of events that could help prevent a repeat tragedy at another school.

Killer Will Cornick was convicted and detained for a minimum of 20 years for the murder of Ann Maguire

Other relatives have suggested the teacher was 'abandoned' by the authorities as it was also reported that colleagues at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds left the school after agreeing to gagging clauses.

The family now hope to get closer to the truth after a coroner yesterday agreed to carry out a full inquest in which the background to the killing will be examined in public.

Mr Maguire, 64, last night said he believed 'full disclosure' was vital to know if more should have been done to protect the 61-year-old teacher from a pupil who was known to be plotting her murder.

'We have had some information through the police on a continuous basis but it's incomplete and our understanding of the situation is incomplete, but official bodies such as Leeds City Council, the school, the church have not given us a full version of what has happened,' he added.

Within months of the crime, killer Will Cornick was convicted and detained for a minimum of 20 years.

Other relatives have suggested the teacher was 'abandoned' by the authorities as it was also reported that colleagues at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds left the school after agreeing to gagging clauses

Leeds Crown Court heard how he had hated the teacher and planned the atrocity for three years, even messaging friends on Facebook about his intentions. But because he admitted the crime there was no full examination of the facts and Mrs Maguire's family want to know if blunders have been kept secret.

Their 'Truth for Ann' campaign has attempted to seek a thorough, open and independent review'. With dogged determination, they have taken on the authorities  asking why council chiefs held a low-key internal review instead of a detailed serious case review. Mr Maguire also made a personal appeal to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan.

Official bodies such as Leeds City Council, the school, the church have not given us a full version of what has happened (Don Maguire)

Channel 4 last night claimed more than a dozen teachers have left the school in the months after the murder and a number were 'paid thousands of pounds' under severance agreements, which included confidentiality clauses preventing them speaking out.

Mrs Maguire's nephew Andrew Poole has said the family 'found the avenues of our enquiries carefully protected and safeguarded behind walls of secrecy'.

He added: 'We did... naively think that such a well-respected and admired woman and teacher would not be left abandoned by all those in power so that the opportunity may be lost to ensure that proper lessons are learnt...'

Corpus Christi's headteacher Steve Mort yesterday said no staff leaving after April 2014 signed a confidentiality agreement. Leeds City Council deny any cover-up, saying it has tried to 'respond positively' to requests for information.

West Yorkshire Coroner David Hinchliff announced on Tuesday that an inquest would be held because the death was 'entirely exceptional'.
The owner of two California maid service companies has been charged with double-billing customers who wrote negative reviews on Yelp.

Steve Yun, 42, the owner of online maid service companies West Coast Maids and California Maids, was charged with seven counts of identity theft for violations on four separate victims.

Los Angeles city prosecutors claim he illegally obtained personal information from four people in the process of overcharging their credit cards.

Steve Yun was charged with seven counts of identity theft for violations on four separate victims. He also allegedly made various threats to post negative comments on the victim's employer's website (file image)

Prosecutors said Yun contacted customers who wrote negative Yelp reviews and asked them to remove the reviews in exchange for refunds, then double-billed some who refused.

He also allegedly made various threats to post negative online comments on the victim's employer's website.

Yun could face up to seven years in jail if convicted and/or a $7,000 fine.

He wasn't arrested, and it's unclear whether he has a lawyer.

Yun didn't immediately comment on the charges.

City Attorney Mike Feuer wrote in a statement: 'Customers have a right to express honest views about a company.

'Illegally charging customers as retaliation for expressing their views is outrageous.'

The investigation was conducted by the Department of Consumer Affairs after receiving complaints from victims who had retained maid services through the use of the online referral services provided by West Coast Maids and California Maids since January 2013.
Britain's economic stability will be put at risk if it votes to leave the EU, the Governor of the Bank of England claimed yesterday.

Canadian Mark Carney said that a so-called Brexit could add a risk premium to the UK because of the size of its deficit.

His comments follow claims by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan that Britain will be better-off staying in. Leave campaigners fear there will be an Establishment onslaught against them, backed by generous donations from the big banks.

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, (pictured) said Britain's economic stability will be put at risk if it votes to leave the EU - despite the fact he is supposed to be neutral n the referendum debate

Mr Carney  who is supposed to be neutral in the referendum debate  made his intervention during an appearance before the Treasury select committee yesterday.

Asked if Britains current account deficit  the difference between imports and exports  will pose more of a risk to the economy if Britain leaves the EU, he warned of an increasingly febrile and volatile climate.

Relying on the kindness of strangers is not optimal in that type of environment, and thats what is the case when youre running a 4 to 4.5 per cent current account deficit, he said.

And secondly, the possibility of a risk premium being attached to UK assets because of certain developments exists. And that plays into the riskiness of the situation.

REVEALED, YOUR BALLOT PAPER Voters were yesterday given their first glance of the ballot paper for the EU referendum. Number Ten tabled a series of rules and regulations which are required by Parliament before the vote can take place. By submitting the documents yesterday, Downing Street left open the option of holding a vote on its favoured date of June 23. The draft regulations must be approved at least ten weeks before the poll takes place. Advertisement

Mr Carney, who attracted controversy last October by saying the UK was a leading beneficiary of the EU, was criticised by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said he should be cautious when addressing political subjects.

Tony Blair, who is paid around 2million a year as an adviser by JP Morgan, yesterday declared that leaving the Brussels club would trigger the break-up of the UK. He claimed Scotland would vote to leave the UK if there was a Yes vote in the referendum.

Goldman Sachs has made a six-figure donation to the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign in the past week

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said yesterday that the immigration crisis sweeping Europe was likely to delay David Camerons hopes of reform and that voters would have to take any referendum deal negotiated by the Prime Minister on trust.

Mr Hammond said a substantial period of time could elapse before any changes were written into EU treaties  giving Brussels opportunity to change its mind.

Admitting that Britains referendum negotiations were not top of the EUs list of concerns, he said that, as a result, it would be inappropriate and unwise for the UK to insist on sealing a deal at the European Council summit next month.
Hillary Clinton's campaign is pushing Bernie Sanders to participate in a newly proposed Democratic debate  one not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee  to be held just days before the New Hampshire primary.

But Sanders, who has surged ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire polls, has no plans to do so, his campaign said.

'The DNC has said this would be an unsanctioned debate so we would not want to jeopardize our ability to participate in future debates,' Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver said.

Bernie Sanders, who is experiencing a surge ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire, won't participate in an 'unsanctioned' debate his campaign manager said

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, who needs to gain a few points in the polls, would happily participate in a debate next week sponsored by MSNBC and the Union Leader in New Hampshire

Television network MSNBC and the Union Leader, New Hampshire's largest newspaper, announced the new debate on Tuesday, citing 'overwhelming' calls from voters for another forum prior to the state's Feb. 9 primary.

The proposal comes as Clinton and Sanders are locked in a tight race in first-to-vote Iowa and Clinton is trying to close the gap on Sanders in New Hampshire.

Clinton's campaign had pushed for fewer debates earlier in the campaign, but now says she will participate in the forum if her competitors do.

'Hillary Clinton would be happy to participate in a debate in New Hampshire if the other candidates agree, which would allow the DNC to sanction the debate,' Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley's campaign said he plans to attend.

The DNC has sanctioned six debates and said in a statement Tuesday night it plans to 'reconvene' with the candidates after voting in Iowa and New Hampshire to talk about further debates.

Weaver said Sanders hopes there will be at least 3 or 4 more debates following the two remaining scheduled debates planned in Wisconsin and Florida.
More than 200,000 patients were left without a GP last year when their surgeries closed down.

Some were told to register with a new practice an hours drive away, meaning they had to make a 60-mile round trip to see their family doctor.

The numbers of surgeries closing has more than trebled in two years because there is an exodus of GPs retiring early or quitting for jobs overseas.

Patients across the UK have been faced with their local doctor's surgery shutting down - and some have even been told to register with a new practice an hours drive away (file image)

They are not being replaced by younger doctors, who are opting for more prestigious and less stressful roles in hospital.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that 72 practices shut in England in 2015, with a total of 206,269 patients displaced.

This is up from 137,811 in 2014 and nearly five times the 43,649 affected by closures in 2013. Fifty-one surgeries shut in 2014 and 20 in 2013.

The toll is further evidence of the crisis in surgeries, which are also struggling to cope with increasing pressures of migration and the ageing population.

This Saturday, senior GPs will meet for a summit in Blackfriars, Central London, to discuss how to tackle the situation.

They will vote on taking several controversial courses of action, including stopping home visits to give them more time to see patients in their surgeries and threatening to retire en masse.

The doctors union the British Medical Association may adopt these into its official policy and lobby the Government to change GPs contracts so they do not have carry out home visits.

The closure figures were uncovered by Pulse magazine using the FoI Act, which has exposed numerous scandals and wasteful public spending in the NHS and other parts of the public sector.

But the publics right to know is under threat from a Government review of the Act, which could lead to people being charged for information or told it will not be available. When surgeries close down, patients receive a letter with a list of nearby GPs that may take them  if they are not already too busy.

The numbers of surgeries closing has more than trebled in two years because there is an exodus of GPs retiring early or quitting for jobs overseas (stock image)

Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern, said: It can be terrifying for patients, particularly the elderly. They have been to the same doctor for years and they know them very well.

Finding a new doctor can be a real struggle, that is if you can find a doctor. Practices really are crumbling under the strain.

When NHS managers decided to shut the practice in the Northumberland village of Harbottle, they suggested patients register with several GPs, including one in Humshaugh, 31 miles away.

It can be terrifying for patients, particularly the elderly. They have been to the same doctor for years and they know them very well Joyce Robins, Patient Concern

The closure caused such a public backlash that officials have since decided to keep the surgery open for some patients living nearby  but many others have had to find somewhere new.

Last October an investigation by the Mail revealed how 5,114 GPs had retired in the previous three years, their average age being 59.

Rising numbers of younger doctors are also quitting for less stressful lives in Australia and Canada.

Dr Richard Vautrey, of the BMAs GPs committee said: Its becoming increasingly difficult for small practices to cope with rising levels of bureaucracy and manage their workload.

Often they work in inner-city areas serving deprived communities, which can be really challenging. They havent had the investment in premises and other types of development, so its very difficult to attract new GPs.

The Department of Health said: These [Pulse] figures represent less than 1 per cent of the total number of GP practices in England. It has always been the case that a small number open, close, or merge over time.

Whats important is that patients continue to get access to the services they need.
Utility firms and councils digging up the roads are to be ordered to work at weekends as part of a drive to cut traffic jams.

Ministers have drawn up plans that would force firms to lift their roadworks at the weekends if they are not prepared to work on them  or face fines of 5,000 per day.

Similar fines will also be levied on firms that leave temporary traffic lights in place after the roadworks have been completed.

Ministers have drawn up plans that would force firms to lift their roadworks at the weekends if they are not prepared to work on them  or face fines of 5,000 per day

A government source said the measure was partly designed to cut congestion and pollution by reducing the length of time that roadworks remain in place. But it was also aimed at reducing the frustration felt by motorists held up by 'ghost' roadworks where no work is taking place.

'There is nothing more annoying than sitting in a traffic jam caused by roadworks where nothing is happening,' the source said.

'Of course, companies have to dig up the roads from time to time to carry out essential work. But they should be doing it in a way that minimises disruption to motorists.

'If they are not prepared to work at weekends then they should take the roadworks down.'

Official estimates suggest that roadworks carried out by the utility firms cost Britain 4billion a year in congestion and delays. The figure for London alone is 750million a year.

A transport source said the proposals, which will be put out to consultation, could produce 8billion in economic benefits over the next decade by cutting the length of time that disruptive works are kept in place.

Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: 'I want to deliver better journeys for drivers. Roadworks can be essential, but that doesn't mean they should be in place any longer than is absolutely necessary.

'That is why I am looking at proposals to reduce queues and make drivers' lives easier.

'These common sense measures will be a welcome relief to those trying to get from A to B on our local roads.'

A survey in 2014 found there were almost 25,000 roadworks in place at any one time, covering up to 3,000 miles of the road network

An AA spokesman said speeding up roadworks would help tackle the perception they are a 'national malaise', as well as potentially cutting congestion and pollution.

The motoring organisation's president, Edmund King, said: 'There is no doubt this is the bane of motorists' lives, so drivers will be happy to see a crackdown on unattended roadworks and unused cones  but let's hope it actually delivers.'

Firms working on trunk roads and motorways  which are managed by the Highways Authority  already face financial incentives to complete projects swiftly, including fines for over-running.

The new proposals will apply to the 24,000-mile network of A roads which are managed by local councils. Ministers believe the prospect of fines for refusing to work weekends will offset the cost of paying overtime to staff.

A Department for Transport analysis last year found that average speeds on A roads had been falling since 2012 and was now down to 24.3 miles-per-hour in the morning rush.

It added: 'Average speeds have continued to fall over the last two-and-a-half years, and roadworks can contribute to delay and disruption, and to frustration of road users.'
Tesco used mafia-style tactics to squeeze suppliers, driving some to the brink of bankruptcy.

Britains biggest supermarket has been found guilty of unfair and unreasonable behaviour in a damning report by the ombudsman.

The company delayed making payments, some as big as 2million, to suppliers for up to two years.

Damning report: Tesco used mafia-style tactics to squeeze suppliers, driving some to the brink of bankruptcy

Tesco also made unreasonable deductions from payments and double-charged firms whose products were pushed as part of supermarket promotions.

However, it has avoided a financial penalty  which could have topped 400million if linked to turnover.

This is because the Government delayed giving the ombudsman the power to impose fines, apparently at the behest of Chancellor George Osborne.

Suppliers have condemned Tescos behaviour as totally disgusting, while suggesting that the chain used its financial muscle to act like a mafia Godfather.

Mike Jessop, whose dairy-free confectionery firm nearly went bankrupt after Tesco delayed payments, accused the store of arrogance because of its dominant market position.

It was 100 per cent like the mafia and the film The Godfather, said Mr Jessop, who runs Moo Free Chocolates. They were involved in behaviour that no reputable UK business should be practising.

The Grocery Code Adjudicator (GCA) found that Tesco knowingly delayed paying money to suppliers in order to improve its own financial position. The net effect was to inflate Tescos profits and give the City a false impression of the firms performance.

A separate investigation by the Serious Fraud Office is looking into allegations that key directors effectively falsified Tescos accounts, boosting profits by more than 300million.

CHOCOLATE FIRM NEARLY WENT BUST OVER STORE'S LATE CASH A small confectionery business was driven to the brink of bankruptcy after Tesco refused to send payments on time. Mike Jessop, who owns Moo Free Chocolates with his wife Andrea, welcomed the ombudsmans report but said it was a shame that the store would not be fined. Payments were delayed for up to six months, he said. They made deductions from our invoices with no explanation. Mike Jessop, who owns Moo Free Chocolates (pictured) with his wife Andrea, welcomed the ombudsmans report but said it was a shame that the store would not be fined They kept telling us they would sort it out but it never happened. They tried to give the impression that it was an oversight and mistakes. At the time, we thought it was either complete incompetence or deliberate. Mr Jessop said his Reading-based company, which makes dairy-free chocolate, had problems getting a key payment from Tesco in November 2013. Angry: The small confectionery business run by Mr Jessop (pictured) was driven to the brink of bankruptcy after Tesco refused to send payments on time At the same time we were paying staff Christmas bonuses and buying new machinery, he said. The fact they refused to pay up meant my wife and I had to take out a personal loan to buy the new equipment we needed. The whole episode almost bankrupted us. He said the 7,000 payment was a big amount of money to us at the time, but to Tesco it was a tiny sum, just nothing. Tesco eventually paid up when threatened with legal action. Advertisement

Any prosecution could see some former Tesco executives in the dock and fines for the company of up to 500million.

The GCAs report represents a damning indictment of Tescos management and its former chief executive, Philip Clarke, who was in charge between 2011 and 2014.

The evidence of unfair practices covered the period from June 2013 to February 2015  although some believe the scandal dates back much further.

Adjudicator Christine Tacon found that Tesco had breached the legally binding code aimed at protecting grocery suppliers. The length of [payment] delays, their widespread nature and the range of Tescos unreasonable practices and behaviours towards suppliers concerned me, she said. I was also troubled to see Tesco at times prioritising its own finances over treating suppliers fairly.

Asked if she thought the firm had bullied suppliers, she said: I found lots of behaviour that breached paragraph two of the code, which is to treat people fairly and reasonably.

A separate investigation will look at whether Tesco effectively charged suppliers huge fees for shelf space, distorting competition and customer choice, which is also a breach of the code.

Suppliers treated unfairly by the store will receive no financial redress unless they take legal action, which is unlikely. Former Lib Dem Business Secretary Sir Vince Cable, who created the GCA position, suggested Mr Osborne had delayed plans to give the ombudsman the power to fine supermarkets  which only came into force after the Tesco investigation began.

Tescos group chief executive, Dave Lewis, accepted the GCAs findings. He said the report was consistent with an internal investigation into former harmful practices, adding: We shared these practices with the Adjudicator and publicly apologised.

Today, I would like to apologise again. We are sorry.
The body of one of two missing University of California, Santa Cruz students has been found on a beach near the place where a huge wave last week swept them into the ocean.

Authorities on Tuesday identified the body retrieved from Strawberry Beach in Wilder State Ranch State Park as that of 19-year-old Shireen Agha Ahsan.

A mountain biker spotted Ahsan's body on the remote beach at around 5.30pm Monday and contacted the authorities.

Tragic end: The body of missing University of California, Santa Cruz, student Shireen Ahsan, 19, was recovered from a California beach Monday, eight days after a wave swept her out to sea

Swept away: Ahsan (left) went missing on January 18 from Bonny Doone Beach along with 25-year-old UC student Solaiman Nourzaie (right)

Heartbreaking find: A mountain biker came upon the college sophomore's body along Strawberry Beach in Wilder State Ranch State Park (pictured)

Sara Ahsan, left, mother of 19-year old Shireen Ahsan, is embraced by loved ones as family and friends of Shireen and Solaiman Nourzaie held a vigil at Bonny Doon Beach last Wednesday

Jamla Nourzaie, mother of Solaiman Nourzaie, watches a video of her son at Bonny Doon Beach

She and 25-year-old Solaiman Nourzaie were on a rock jutting into the ocean when they were struck by a monster wave on January 18 that dragged them into the ocean.

A third student was also knocked off the rock, but made it back to shore.

Still missing: Search and rescue crews continued scouring the coast for Nourzaie by boat and from the air

The trio were among five UC students who climbed down a rope to reach the rock off Bonny Doon Beach in 10-15 foot surf, reported Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Officials with Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department broke the tragic news to Shireen Ahsan's family Tuesday morning.

Search and rescue crews continued scouring the coast for Nourzaie by boat and from the air Tuesday.

University of California, San Diego Chancellor George Blumenthal released a statement Tuesday mourning the 19-year-old sophomore.

'Words cannot express the sorrow we feel as a campus community,' Blumenthal writes. 'We want to extend our deepest personal condolences to her family, friends, and classmates.'

The chancellor said Ahsan was from Palo Alto and attended Kresge College.

'She was well loved and admired as a role model on campus and in life,' the statement reads. 'At Kresge, she was active in her college community as an academic assistant with the core course and with the Muslim Student Association.'

Ahsan's cousin Jafer Baig told the paper the 19-year-old loved the great outdoors and going on adventures, played classical piano, sang and planned to study computer science.

Last Wednesday afternoon, Ahsan and Nourzaie's family members, friends and classmates gathered at Bonny Doone Beach for an emotional vigil to pray for the missing students.

A family member said the Palo Alto resident played classical piano, sang and planned to study computer science. University of California, San Diego Chancellor George Blumenthal described the sophomore as a 'role model' who was loved and admired

Ahsan, who is survived by her parents and siblings, was said to have been adventurous and outdoorsy

On Tuesday, the girl's father said in an interview with KION news station that he was relieved that searchers were able to bring his daughter's body home.

'I thank god that we have her back and we have certainty that we will be able to bury her, said Agha Ahsan.
A serial rapist suspect who attacked three women in a spate of sexual assaults in New Zealand dating back to 2007 was living in Australia, police revealed on Wednesday.

The man, who was 28 years old at the time of the offences, was identified after New Zealand police lodged his DNA profile from a crime scene with Interpol.

Last year, police were told the sample had been matched to a New Zealand expatriate who was living in Perth in Western Australia.

A serial rapist suspect who attacked three women in a spate of sexual assaults in New Zealand dating back to 2007 was living in Australia. Pictured is the identikit released at the time of the attacks

Detective Inspector Chris Page, who led the rape investigation, received final confirmation of the man's identity on Saturday.

Before he moved to Australia, the man, who Det Insp Page did not wish to name, lived in Hamilton, south of Auckland on the North Island, and worked as a bouncer at local night clubs.

'He left New Zealand in June 2008 and went to Australia. He came to the attention of the West Australian Police in May 2013, when he was dealt with for a minor non-sexual offence,' Det Insp Page told reporters on Wednesday.

'The man died, in non-suspicious circumstances, in July 2013.'

The man was not on the police's 1,000-person suspect list and Det Insp Page said there was nothing in the suspect's background or circumstances to indicate he was likely to carry out the attacks.

Previously, the suspect has been described as 'charming' and 'trustworthy' by criminal profilers, and offered rides to two of his victims to lure them into his car before raping them, the New Zealand Herald reported.

One of the three victims (above) said a detective had told her the suspect had taken his own life while living in Australia. She is pictured here at the scene of the crime

'While he was known to police, his background does not contain any indicator or features that would draw attention to his likelihood as an offender for these terrible offences,' Det Insp Page said.

'Police will be undertaking further work with criminal profilers in order to get a better understanding about the circumstances that led to this significant offending.'

Det Insp Page said the man's family was shocked to learn of the revelation.

'Investigations have been undertaken this week with the mans family. Naturally, they are distraught about the news regarding his activities,' he said.

Det Insp Page said the man's victims, who were attacked within weeks of each other, had also been told of the news.

'Each of them is still coming to terms with the serious trauma inflicted by this offender,' he said.

'However I hope today's news allows them - and others in the Hamilton community who remain strongly affected by these offences - to no longer be fearful.'

The case, which was dubbed Operation Phil, would now be closed as the alleged rapist was dead.

The assaults were carried out over a number of weeks in Hamilton, south of Auckland

Speaking to stuff.co.nz, one of the three victims said a detective had told her the suspect had taken his own life while living in Australia .

The traumatised woman said a man came up to her in central Hamilton early in the morning after she had been drinking at home.

She had left home to buy food and cigarettes and she was sitting in the city when he sat down next to her.

The woman asked him where she could get some 'tinnies' and he replied 'yeah come with me'.

'He wasn't scary looking or anything. I wasn't worried at the time,' the woman recalled.

The man then took her behind a building where he told her to get on her knees and raped her.

Following the attack, he slapped and punched her in the face before running off.

Police released a identikit of the man who was described as Caucasian with blond hair and wearing a cap, and aged between 18 to 40, the Herald reported.
Special education teacher Jillian LaFave (pictured) was arrested and charged with performing a sex act with a pupil at Valley High School in Las Vegas

A special education teacher has been caught having sex with a 16-year-old student inside a classroom, according to police documents.

Married 25-year-old Jillian Lafave was arrested after a hall monitor allegedly caught the two during school hours at Valley High School in Las Vegas, Nevada, News 3 reported.

According to KTNV, the arrest report also stated that Lafave had exchanged more than 13,000 text messages with the student, who had a learning disability.

Some of the messages were allegedly sexual in nature.

The police documents stated the student would call his teacher 'mom' while she would refer to him as her son.

Lafave, however, told the teenager through texts that he should not call her mom when they were talking about sex, the report states.

Lafave, who was arrested earlier this month, told the police that she had kissed the student and touched his penis, but denied having sex with him.

He had tried touching her genitals, but she pushed him away, according to the arrest report.

The teenager had posted numerous photographs of himself with Lafave on social media, and told police he loved her when he found out she had been questioned.

Lafave is charged with performing a sex act with a pupil, court records show. She is scheduled to appear in District Court at the end of March and has since been released on bond.

A spokesperson for the Clark Country School District revealed she is currently on paid leave as the investigation continues.

According to KTNV , the arrest report stated that Lafave had exchanged more than 13,000 text messages with the student, who had a learning disability. Lafave and her student referred to each other as 'mom' and 'son', and some of the texts were sexually charged

Valley High School did not initially notify parents but principal Ramona Esparza sent home a letter yesterday stating the importance of the students' safety.

The letter referred to 'allegations related to inappropriate conduct' involving a teacher and stated it would cooperate with the CCSD Police Department.

Parent Raquel Martinez told News 3 Las Vegas: 'I think it's really sad because one thinks that their children are secure in school. If those things are happening it makes me worry.'

Lafave teaches English and special education at the school where her father also works as a physics teacher.

On a teacher network site, he wrote: 'Education is a Sacred Promise. The teacher vows to be the provider of both knowledge and inspiration to students.'

He has worked as a scientist, engineer, CEO, author and teacher.

A hall monitor at Valley High School (pictured), spotted the two during school hours. According to police, Lafave admitted she had kissed the student and touched his penis, but denied having sex with him
He called her his Lady Love. She lost all connection with her family, nearly right up to the day she died, when they found out about her correspondence with him.

They spent thousands of hours talking - behind bars, between letters, through other people - but they never touched, hugged, or kissed, not even once.

This is the love story between Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, and Joy Richards, a fourth-grade teacher.

It remained a secret to most until Kaczynski donated letters to his personal papers archive at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, recently obtained by Yahoo.

Scroll down for video

This is Joy Richards (pictured left), the woman notorious Unabomber Ted Kacynski would become pen pals in a relationship that eventually turned romantic as he dubbed her his 'Lady Love'

Kaczynski, now 73, pleaded guilty to bombings that killed three people and injured more than 20 others in 1998. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole

Kaczynski, now 73, became known by name in 1996 but his bombs, which killed three people and injured more than 20 others, had haunted the public and FBI for years.

A child prodigy and Harvard graduate who would go on to get a PhD in mathematics, Kaczynski mailed bombs to university professors and computer stores between the years of 1978 and 1995 and called for a revolution against technology in a 35,000-word manifesto.

It was his own manifesto that finally got Kaczynski behind bars. His brother David recognized it and tipped off the FBI, who had dubbed him a domestic terrorist.

Kacynski haunted the FBI for years, who released this sketch of him as they tried to find out his identity

Kaczynski eventually pleaded guilty to 13 federal bombing-related charges and is serving a life sentence without parole in Colorado.

It was there he received his first letter from Richards, who began a regular correspondence with him in 1998. They first met at the prison the next year, according to Yahoo.

At first it was only a friendship, but a close one. Richards spoke to his lawyers and the media on his behalf, and even communicated with the family he had cut off after David turned him in.

She told them about Kaczynski's life in prison and, David believes, hinted that sometimes she was passing on messages from him to his family as well.

Kaczynski couldn't stop talking about Richards with his pen pals, calling her his 'angel', decorating his cards with tiny hearts, writing her original classical music and having books sent to her.

Although he received letters from dozens of other women, some even including provocative pictures and marriage proposals, Kaczynski remained loyal to Richards.

He sent her copies of every letter he was sent and replied to when their relationship turned romantic, rewriting them by hand, and cut off any correspondence with other women who tried to steer the conversation into something sexual.

In one April 2002 letter, Kaczynski called Richards 'absolutely perfect'.

'You don't see her halo because she's too modest to wear it,' he wrote. 'She keeps it hung up in her closet. But really she is an honest-to-goodness angel.'

By contrast, Richards was intensely private about her personal life, although she did tell friends she found the Unabomber's manifesto to be 'brilliant'.

And although he may not have been often present in her life physically, Kaczynski was everywhere in Richards' apartment.

Kaczynski began a regular correspondence with Richards in 1998. At first it was only a friendship, but a close one. Richards spoke to his lawyers and the media on his behalf, and even communicated with his family

They met in person the next year, in 1999. Kaczynski couldn't stop talking about Richards with his pen pals, calling her his 'angel', decorating his cards with tiny hearts and writing her original classical music

There were belongings from his Montana cabin, a bound copy of the Unabomber manifesto, musical compositions he had written for her and art work he had drawn hanging on the walls.

In 2003 Kaczynski sold 1.4 acres of land he owned in Montana to Richards.

The sale made headlines and Richards' family found out about her correspondence with the Unabomber. They refused to speak to her for years.

That year Richards took a three-day trip to Colorado to visit Kaczynski. As they spoke to each other for hours, a pane of glass separating them, she coughed up blood.

It was lung cancer.

Richards and Kacynzski's relationship began to 'cool', as he later wrote a pen pal, as she delved deeper and deeper into her faith and became closer and closer to death.

Before she was baptized in 2006, Richards decided to confess to a priest and a couple she had become close with about her secret relationship with Kacynzski.

In 2003 Richards took a three-day trip to Colorado to visit Kaczynski. As they spoke to each other for hours, a pane of glass separating them, she coughed up blood. She was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 2006

Kaczynski was arrested after the FBI released his 35,000-word manifesto and his brother, David (pictured with their mother Wanda) recognized the writing and tipped off authorities

Although she had once told his brother that she could 'accept' and 'understand' the atrocities Kacynzski had committed, as her final days neared that compassion began to wane.

'She came to reject the killing and the things that he had done,' a friend who asked to remain anonymous told Yahoo.

'But she loved him. She had a deep connection with him until the end.'

Richards was only given months live in the summer of 2006, entering the hospital in November.

Meanwhile Kacynzski became desperate as he tried to find out her condition. As Richards moved in with the couple, who knew her secret, before her death, he sent a fellow pen pal to visit her.

The man put headphones on Richards and played the final piece of original music that Kaczynski had written for her, which he had then performed on a synthesizer.

It would be the day she died.
There is only one thing worse than losing a child. Realising that their death could have been easily prevented.

That is the agony faced by the parents of one-year-old William Mead, who died from sepsis following a catastrophic series of blunders on the part of medical authorities.

As Mrs Mead put it herself: Nothing can prepare you for seeing your baby in a coffin  but the worst thing is knowing he could have been saved.

William Mead, pictured with parents Paul and Melissa, died from sepsis after a series of medical blunders including an NHS 111 service operator not realising how serious his illness was

The list of errors that led to the little boys death is chilling. But whats worse is that it doesnt seem all that unfamiliar.

I know several parents who have experienced at least one of the factors that eventually led to Williams death.

Parents fobbed off with paracetamol when their child needed antibiotics or made to feel unwelcome as yet again they arrive in A&E.

Parents who fall prey to shift changes, weekend locums or simple blunders by inexperienced or incompetent junior medical staff.

In the case of my own William, thankfully a lively 11-year-old, I had my concerns about a nasty ear infection repeatedly dismissed.

Like Mrs Mead, my maternal sixth sense, which was flashing warning lights, was over-ruled by so-called professionals who dismissed me as an over-protective mother.

I was lucky: they realised something was wrong just in time. My Will only ended up with a hole in his skull and a lengthy stay in hospital.

Mrs Mead had the unimaginable horror of walking into her childs bedroom and finding his soft cheek cold, his hands frozen.

Oh, how I wish I had the power to undo that moment for her. As a mother who has known others lose their babies, who has seen children lowered into tiny graves on cold hilltops alone and far from home, Ive witnessed more than once the crushing, hopeless agony of losing a child.

Like all parents, the Meads could never have envisioned such an outcome when their little boy became ill in September 2014. They simply did what all of us do: put their trust in the doctors and nurses.

That trust was unforgivably betrayed. Even now, it must seem incredible to them that this bouncing baby with rosy cheeks and bright, inquiring eyes should have been allowed to slip away so easily.

As for the mealy-mouthed, corporate apologies issued by the Department of Health, well, the Meads are clearly far too nice to say it, but I wouldnt be half as charitable.

Tragic case... lessons will be learned... sympathies... The usual empty platitudes and impotent promises. A clear desire to move on.

And yet the death of William Mead should never be forgotten. Not just because it exposes gaping holes in NHS care; because it unites us all as parents.

His loss shows it doesnt matter how diligent or loving you are, you still cant protect your child from institutionalised incompetence.

William didnt die overnight; his parents had been taking him to the doctor for three whole months.

At one point, medics thought the boy might have asthma and prescribed an inhaler. He had pneumonia and later developed a lung abscess, which led to undiagnosed sepsis.

There is also a bitter irony that, almost a year to the day of his death, junior doctors were striking over plans to reform working practices and provide a better out-of-hours service for patients.

When no fewer than three separate doctors fail to spot a dying child, and when a hotline designed to diagnose medical emergencies fails to pick up clear signs of sepsis, how can it be possible to claim that nothing needs to change?

The NHS may be the envy of the world. But what use is it if it cant preserve the life of a healthy one-year-old with no underlying problems, whose parents did everything within their power to get their son the care he deserved? The answer is simple: none whatsoever.

Apparently, bikini selfies can help women lose pounds by making us visualise our weight loss and so stay motivated.

Hmm... I can honestly say there is nothing more likely to drive me straight to comfort food than a photo of me in a bikini.

Abbey the WAG's own goal

Strictly star Abbey Clancy claims she suffers terrible working mother guilt and refuses to hire a nanny to help look after her two daughters Sophia, four, and Liberty, seven months, with footballer husband Peter Crouch.

A millionaire husband, free childcare and a job that pays in one day what most people earn in a year. Its a hard life, writes SARAH VINE

Two things: Having your hair done and being photographed in a bikini is not most peoples idea of work.

And she may not have a nanny  but she has a mum, Karen, who looks after the girls for her.

So, to recap: a millionaire husband, free childcare and a job that pays in one day what most people earn in a year. Its a hard life.

Orla Kiely, the clever Irish designer whose quirky handbags and household accessories are everyones favourite middle-class cliche, has declared her dislike of rampant consumerism.

I dont like our throwaway culture, she tells the Radio Times.

Golly! Just as well I resisted the urge to buy one of her 132 signature flower bins in John Lewis at the weekend.

A new study at the University of Bath has found that wearing a helmet can actually be more dangerous for cyclists  because it gives them a false sense of confidence and encourages them to take more risks.

I think cycle lanes might have the same effect. They certainly seem to encourage the notion that owning a bike gives you carte blanche to jump red lights, career around corners at breakneck speed and actively try to kill anyone daring to cross the road.

Why is everyone in such a lather about asylum seekers in Cardiff having to wear wristbands to show they are entitled to free meals?

Exactly the same thing happens at pop festivals and holiday camps.

Since Britain appears to have become a giant, all-inclusive, all-you-can-eat leisure destination for half the world, it seems like an appropriate option.

Apostrophe apostate!

Jack Letts, 20, is the middle-class boy from Oxford reported at the weekend to have run off to join IS.

He vehemently denies all involvement with the terror group, but that doesnt seem to have stopped him from committing a series of heinous crimes  against the English language.

Its (sic) sort of awkward when the media thinks (sic) your (sic) Isis and your (sic) not, he writes on his Facebook page.

Thinks (sic) you have a son and you dont (sic). Thinks (sic) your (sic) married when your (sic) not.

Mr Letts claims he originally left the UK to study Arabic in Kuwait.

Given his tenuous grasp of his own language  and his abuse of apostrophes in particular  you can hardly blame the authorities for not quite buying his excuse.

Strictly Come Dancing: Emily Maitlis

I was surprised to read that Emily Maitlis was told to do Strictly by BBC bigwigs to pep up her career prospects.

I heard the exact opposite: that the producers of Newsnight suggested she lay off the lipgloss if she wanted to be taken seriously as a presenter.

Either way, her situation neatly demonstrates the dilemma all professional women face: how much does being prepared to trade on your appearance affect success in the workplace?

In the case of gorgeous, pouting Emily, I think we know the answer.

I loved the quote from the family of Debo Devonshire to justify selling off so many of the late Duchesss possessions  including a collection of Elvis Presley ephemera and 40 lots relating to her beloved hens.

There are more belongings than we can together accommodate. We are keeping items that are particularly precious to us, but we have made the decision to consign the remainder to Sothebys.

Translation: Despite owning Chatsworth, the palace of the Peak District with a gazillion rooms, we wouldnt be seen dead with Mummys frightful old tat  and besides, wed rather have the cash, thank you.
It is a few days until the crucial Iowa caucus on February 1.

And voters are wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

As Bernie Sanders rockets in the polls, closing in on competitor Hillary Clinton, his supporters are snapping up all manner of merchandise.

One man sported a dazzling sweater plastered with countless pictures of the candidate's face at a rally in Des Moines on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, in Sanders' state of Vermont, a company has launched a set of white briefs with the senator's face emblazoned on the behind.

Feeling the Bern! Former teacher Max Knauer III, 67, was seen hanging onto Sanders' every word at the United Steelworkers Local union hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday as he proudly wore the unusual shirt

In Sanders' state of Vermont, a company has launched a set of briefs with his face emblazoned on the behind

The 'Feel The Bern' briefs are available for men and women, costing $15 plus shipping and handling

It comes just a week after Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, launched a Bernie-themed ice cream called 'Bernie's Yearning', which is a tub of mint with a chocolate disk at the top to 'represent the 90 per cent of the wealth that has gone to the top 10 per cent over the last ten years.'

Proudly displaying his Bernie sweater in Des Moines on Tuesday, former teacher Max Knauer III, 67, was seen hanging onto Sanders' every word at the United Steelworkers Local union hall.

Sat with his wife Kittie, Mr Knauer cheered and took beaming selfies that he posted on Twitter.

'I've been a Bernie Sanders supporter since he declared,' Mr Knauser told DailyMail.com.

'My brother lives in Vermont and texted me the newspaper front page that day. Straight away I asked him to see if he could get me Bernie's signature on the paper. I've been following it ever since.'

Mr Knauer attended the talk with his wife Kittie Weston-Knauer (left), who settled simply with a Bernie badge

The sweater, Mr Knauer explained, has been a hit at a local t-shirt store in Des Moines called Ray Gun, where residents - 'young people and the older generation' - are flocking to snap up Bernie memorabilia

The sweater, he explained, has been a hit at a local t-shirt store in Des Moines called Ray Gun, where residents - 'young people and the older generation' - are flocking to snap up Bernie memorabilia.

Sandernistas who want to spice up their support can instead turn to KSE Partners in Vermont.

Three employees at the a strategic communications and government affairs firm have collaborated to launch a set of briefs which feature the message 'Feel the Bern'.

They are available for men and women, costing $15 plus shipping and handling.

The three workers say they created Bernie's Briefs as a fun side-business.

Sanders said recently on late-night TV and talk shows that he prefers briefs over boxers.

Bernie Sanders is rocketing in the polls, closing in on competitor Hillary Clinton whose lead is dwindling

Sanders said recently on late-night TV that he prefers briefs over boxers - sparking a range of Bernie briefs

The startup's founders called Sanders' passion for serious issues admirable. One founder says the political process has benefited from his campaign.

Ten percent of the proceeds will go toward the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which supports injured service members.

The margin between Sanders and Clinton in the Iowa polls closed to its narrowest point yet on Tuesday, as Hillary's lead shrunk to below 50 per cent, according to a Fox poll.

Clinton now has 49 per cent of the vote, down from 54 per cent, while Sanders is on 37 per cent.

Martin O'Malley is set to take one per cent of the vote, the poll shows.

According to Fox, support from Clinton's crucial base of African American voters is waning.
Oregon militia spokesman LaVoy Finicum has been shot dead after a traffic stop escalated into a shoot-out that saw Ryan Bundy wounded and eight leaders of the occupation movement arrested.

The group's leader Ammon Bundy was among the militiamen arrested during the encounter on Tuesday afternoon as they drove to attend a community meeting in the neighboring town.

It was the culmination of a tense stand-off between federal agents and the activists more than three weeks after they took over a government building in Burns, Oregon, to protest two ranchers being jailed.

According to local media, shots were fired within minutes of the traffic stop, killing Finicum and wounding 43-year-old Ryan Bundy.

It is not clear who opened fire first.

Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, and three other leaders of the occupation - Ryan Payne, 32; Brian Cavalier, 44, and Shawna Cox, 59 - were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers,Oregon Live reports.

All detained militia members were being held at Multnomah County Jail without bail Wednesday.

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Oregon militia leader Ammon Bundy (left) and his brother, Ryan Bundy (right), were arrested Tuesday night after a traffic stop escalated into a deadly shootout with police

Joseph O'Shaughnessy (left) and Peter Santilli (right) were arrested in Burns, Oregon, a short time after the traffic stop and shoot-out

Brian Cavalier (left) and Ryan Payne (right) were charged along with the others with conspiracy to impede federal officers

Shawna Cox, 59, was taken to Multnomah County Jail along with the other detained militia members Tuesday

KILLED: Oregon militia spokesman LaVoy Finicum (pictured) has been shot dead after a traffic stop escalated into a shoot-out between the activists and FBI agents on a highway on Tuesday afternoon

ARRESTED, CHARGED: Ammon Bundy (left), his brother Ryan (right) and five other militiamen were arrested at the scene and charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers. Ryan Bundy, who has a severed nerve in his face, was wounded in the confrontation

Sgt. Tom Hutchison stands in front of an Oregon State Police roadblock on Highway 395 between John Day and Burns by Oregon State police officers Tuesday after LaVoy Finicum and Ryan Bundy were shot

Another Oregon State police officer stands by a vehicle on Highway 395 after arrested five of the occupiers

An AirLife medical transport helicopter lifts-off from St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon on January 26 en route to Burns after the deadly shootout

The group was driving to a community meeting on Tuesday when they were stopped by traffic cops. Pictured: the highway between Burns, Oregon, and John Day, where they were driving to attend a meeting

Officials would not confirm the identity of the militiaman shot dead. However, Finicum's daughter Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, confirmed her father's death to The Oregonian, saying 'he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.'

Nevada state Rep Michele Fiore told the paper Ammon Bundy called his wife from the back of the police vehicle after his arrest and told her that Finicum was cooperating with the authorities when he was shot. However, other sources said that he resisted arrest.

In an interview with MSNBC three weeks ago, Finicum declared that he would rather die than face arrest.

'There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them,' he said at the time. 'I'm prepared to defend freedom.'

He sounded a similar note when speaking to CNN earlier this month.

'I'm just not going to prison,' Finicum said. 'Look at the stars. There's no way I'm going to sit in a concrete cell where I can't see the stars and roll out my bedroll on the ground.

'I want to be able to get up in the morning and throw my saddle on my horse and go check on my cows. It's OK. I've lived a good life. God's been gracious to me.'

Patriarch: Finicum, a Mormon rancher from Arizona, was a father of 11 and grandfather of 19. This Facebook image shows the militiaman with one of his grandkids

Family man: Finicum (center) and wife Jeanette (right) had been married for 23 years

Finicum, a Mormon rancher from Arizona, was a father of 11 and grandfather of 19 who was married to his wife, Jeanette, for 23 years.

His daughter Challice Finch told NBC News after the deadly standoff that her father and his fellow protesters were 'all committed to not firing on federal agents.'

Speaking to The Oregonian on the eve of his death, LaVoy Finicum noted that law enforcement officials 'have become more hardened' as of late.

'They're doing all the things that show they want to take some kinetic action against us, and we're saying, "Why be so unfriendly?"' the militia spokesman told the paper.

WHO WAS LAVOY FINICUM? LaVoy Finicum, 55, of northern Arizona, has been the right-hand man to the occupation's leader Ammon Bundy since the stand-off began on January 2. Acting as spokesman for the group, he gave numerous press conferences to communicate their position. At one point he personally climbed up a pole to dismantle surveillance cameras in an apparent show of defiance against the government. But he has not always held such a strong anti-government stance. Last year, he told the St George News that he complied with federal land controls until Cliven Bundy's stand-off in Nevada in 2014. The episode, he said, struck a chord with him. He joined the Bundys and 'did a lot of soul-searching' until he 'realized that Cliven Bundy was standing on a very strong constitutional principleand yet, here I was continuing to pay a grazing fee to the BLM.' Finicum's wife of 23 years recently arrived in Oregon, traveling up from Arizona, to celebrate his 56th birthday. Beyond life as a militiaman and rancher, Finicum was a father of 11 and grandfather of 23 who also found time to write a novel, Only By Blood And Suffering, about a time when guns are no more, cars have stopped working, the market has imploded, and the Chinese control everything. Advertisement

Joseph O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50, were arrested in Burns soon after the traffic stop and shoot-out.

An eighth group member, Jon Ritzheimer, 32, was arrested in Peoria, Arizona, after turning himself in to the police department, Fox reported.

All of those arrested face federal charges of conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to impede federal officers from discharging their duties, the FBI said.

The hospital where Ryan Bundy and LaVoy Finicum were taken, St Charles Medical Center, was placed on lockdown in the wake of the shootout.

Some 25 miles of Highway 395 was shut down in both directions following the incident, a dispatcher for the state department of transportation said.

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge in the wake of the shootout. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for 'patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution.'

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

'The entire leadership is gone,' he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. 'I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving.'

Thornton called the arrests 'a dirty trick' by law enforcement.

According to Oregon Live, the leaders had been en route to John Day - 70 miles from Burns - to appear as guest speakers at a meeting with hundreds of local residents.

The crowd was informed the group would not be able to make it to the event after the dramatic traffic stop.

Frustrated local and state officials have been increasingly urging the FBI to do something to resolve the situation.

Bundy and his group have held frequent news conferences at the site, traveled to meet with sympathizers and others to espouse their views and some even attended a community meeting last week, where local residents shouted at them to leave.

Federal authorities have taken a hands-off approach so far and say they want a peaceful resolution.

Bundy has been in contact with an FBI negotiator and local law enforcement.

On Friday, Bundy went to the Burns Municipal Airport, where the FBI has set up a staging area, and met briefly with a federal agent.

Bundy left because the agent wouldn't talk with him in front of the media. Sieges by federal authorities in the early 1990s led to deadly standoffs in at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.

The group took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 after a peaceful protest in nearby Burns, Oregon, over the conviction of two local ranchers on arson charges.

Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, said they lit fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006 to reduce the growth of invasive plants and protect their property from wildfires.

CHARGED: Ammon Bundy's bodyguard Brian Cavalier (left) and Jon Ritzheimer (right) were also arrested

CHARGED: Shawna Cox, regularly seen at Ammon Bundy's side, was also detained during the traffic stop

Within minutes, shots were fired, wounding Ryan Bundy and killing an unidentified militiaman. The hospital where Bundy and the unidentified victim were taken, St Charles Medical Center (pictured), is now on lockdown

It is the climax of a tense stand-off between the two groups more than three weeks after the Bundys took over a government building to protest two ranchers being jailed. Pictured: federal officers blocking the road

Ammon Bundy and three others - Ryan Payne, Brian Cavalier, and Shawna Cox - were detained and charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers

Bundy, pictured with fellow leader Lavoy Finicum (left), walked out of talks with the FBI because they wouldn't let him record the conversation

The two were convicted three years ago and served time  the father three months, the son one year.

But in October, a federal judge in Oregon ruled their terms were too short under U.S. law and ordered them back to prison for about four years each. Among the demands by the Bundy group is for the Hammonds to be released.

The alleged arrests on Tuesday come after an Army veteran was arrested for a DUI while he was heading to join the militia occupying federal land in Oregon.
A father accused of giving his two-month-old daughter the powerful prescription painkiller Oxycontin has been granted bail despite him not telling hospital staff what the child had ingested, a court has heard.

The 22-year-old Gold Coast man, who can't be named for legal reasons, allegedly gave his daughter the drug, known on the street as 'hillbilly heroin', on January 10 when she wouldn't stop crying.

The man and his partner called triple-0 when their daughter's health deteriorated and she was rushed to Gold Coast University Hospital for treatment.

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The 22-year-old Gold Coast man, who can't be named for legal reasons, allegedly gave his daughter Oxycontin, known on the street as 'hillbilly heroin', on January 10 when she wouldn't stop crying

Police opposed bail but the father was granted it in Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday under strict conditions.

The court was told the man didn't inform hospital staff about the drug drug he's accused of giving the baby at their home.

It's alleged he went home and after researching the effects of the powerful narcotic OxyContin, sent a text message to his partner at the hospital asking her to get staff to pump the baby's stomach.

'Even then he didn't provide medical staff with the information the child had ingested OxyContin,' Senior Constable Donna Minns told the court.

'Certainly there's a neglect on his part to attempt to assist the child.'

Police charged the father with administering poison with intent to harm and possessing a controlled substance. He was granted bail in Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday under strict conditions

Police charged the father with administering poison with intent to harm and possessing a controlled substance.

The child has since recovered and been discharged from hospital.

The 22-year-old's strict bail conditions include a ban on contact with his daughter unless supervised by child safety authorities.

The man's lawyer Paul Byrne told the court it's believed the OxyContin belonged to the baby's mother but it's unclear if she had a prescription or not.

The matter has been adjourned until February 25.




Italy is poised to secure a tax back payment from Google equivalent to 15 per cent of its revenues in the country as it gets tough with the internet giant.

A deal is expected to be struck soon between Italys Treasury and the US technology firm, with Google said to be preparing to hand over 150million (113million) to the countrys authorities.

Prosecutors in Milan have led the probe into the company, which in 2014 declared a turnover in the country of 54.4million (41.2million) and some 1.8million (1.4million) in profit.

Google in Milan: A deal is expected to be struck soon between Italys Treasury and the US technology firm, with Google said to be preparing to hand over 150million (113million) to the countrys authorities

And the new deal would be equivalent to 15 per cent of Googles 1billion (760million) revenues in Italy - although it is not yet clear how many years the dispute relates to, according to The Times.

The Italian Treasury recently struck a 240million tax deal with Apple, another US technology giant that has been criticised for its tax arrangements around the world.

Prosecutors, supported by the Guardia di Finanza tax police who are in charge of combating tax avoidance, have been probing Google over allegations profits generated out of its highly lucrative advertising business were registered in Ireland and Bermuda.

Google employs some 130 staff members in Italy, including at its main base in Milan. Reaching a compromise has so far been a hard task, constantly delayed.

As part of a crackdown on the undeclared profits of internet giants operating in Italy, the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi announced plans to introduce a so-called web tax.

Other companies currently under scrutiny of the authorities include Amazon and Western Digital.

Paris office: Googles French operation is facing demands to pay almost three times as much tax as the trivial amount clawed back by HMRC  despite being a quarter the size of its UK arm

Francesco Boccia, the Democrat deputy who is sponsoring the web tax, said it was about time internet giants start paying all their taxes and  understand that their profits are made in Italy.

Googles French operation is facing demands to pay almost three times as much tax as the trivial amount clawed back by HMRC  despite being a quarter the size of its UK arm.

About time internet giants start paying all their taxes and  understand that their profits are made in Italy Francesco Boccia, Democrat deputy sponsoring the 'web tax'

French officials are reported to be aggressively pursuing the company for 378million  compared with the 130million to be paid to the British tax authorities over ten years.

This is despite Googles UK arm employing four times as many staff and generating about three times as much revenue.

While Google paid 2.3billion in tax around the world in 2014 it is estimated its UK arm paid only 46.2million in the 18 months to the end of June 2015.

A Downing Street spokesman said George Osborne was aware of speculation France is seeking a large sum but added it does remain to be seen how much they get.
Susan Jordan (pictured), principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School for 22 years, died saving several of her students today by pushing them out of the way of an oncoming bus

An Indianapolis elementary school principal sacrificed her life to save several of her students by pushing them out of the way of an oncoming bus, authorities said today.

Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School for 22 years, is being hailed a hero after she was killed when a school bus suddenly lurched forward, fatally striking her.

The female driver of that bus said 'in the instant that the accident occurred' she witnessed Ms Jordan's heroism as the principal push several students out of the way.

The accident happened around 2.45pm this afternoon.

Two ten-year-old children were hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries thanks to Ms Jordan's fast action.

'At some point, the stationary bus lurched forward and jumped the curb. The bus was not moving at the time directly before it jumped the curb,' Reith said.

The bus driver told firefighters she was not sure what caused the bus to accelerate.

The driver and 25 students on the bus were examined by emergency responders but did not require treatment.

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The accident happened around 2.45pm. The scene of the crash can be seen above

The bus driver told firefighters she was not sure what caused the bus to accelerate. Scene shot pictured above

Ms Jordan was loved by her staff and the school community, Lawrence Township Schools Superintendent Shawn Smith said at a news conference.

'This is a great example of an educational leader in our state and our city.

'Just a phenomenal individual that truly cared about children.

'This is a tragic situation that we have. This loss is going to ripple across our district of 15,000 students,' Smith said.

Two ten-year-olds went to the hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injures due to Ms Jordan's heroism

The unnamed school bus driver (pictured) said she doesn't know what caused the bus to accelerate

The accident at Amy Beverland Elementary School happened around 2.45pm Tuesday afternoon

School in the district has been canceled for Wednesday but four locations were said to be open for counsling

The district canceled classes at all of its schools Wednesday and said in a statement that four locations, including a transportation center, would be 'open for emotional support to our staff and families'.

Indianapolis Police Commander Chris Bailey said the bus driver, whose name was not immediately released, would be given a blood test, a standard procedure in collisions involving fatalities.

Officers were on scene at Amy Beverland Elementary School where principal Susan Jordan was killed

The driver, whose name has not yet been released, will be given a blood test, which is standard for accidents

Children are picked up by their parents after the bus accident that killed principal Susan Jordan

Officers from the Indianapolis area secured the site where Susan Jordan was killed after saving students

Susan Jordan had been the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School in Indiana for 22 years
A new mugshot of former Oklahoma City police officer, who was convicted of raping four women and sexually assaulting several others while he was on duty, shows him with a clean-shaved head.

Daniel Holtzclaw, 29, has officially begun serving the 263-year sentence in an Oklahoma prison.

Authorities have not released where Holtzclaw will serve his more than two- and a half-century-long sentence

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This mugshot of Daniel Holtzclaw (pictured) was released by Oklahoma Department of Corrections on Jan. 25

Daniel Holtzclaw, 29, listens in court as he is sentenced to 263 years in prison for raping four women and sexually assaulting several others while working as a Oklahoma City police officer

In December, an Oklahoma City jury found Daniel Holtzclaw, 29, guilty on 18 of 36 charges of sexual assault, including rape.

The sentence was given by District Judge Timothy Henderson and came after victims told the court on Thursday that the former officer had destroyed their lives.

Prosecutors said Holtzclaw mostly preyed on women who had been in trouble with the law and forced them into sex, hoping their word would not hold up against his in court.

'I so desperately want my life back - the life I had before he took it away,' Jannie Ligons, one of the victims of Holtzclaw, told the court in an impact statement.

The judge denied a defense motion filed a day earlier seeking a new trial.

Holtzclaw's father Eric (center) waits for his son's sentencing on Thursday in Oklahoma City

Justice: Attorney Benjamin Crump, right, stands with Jannie Ligons, left, one of the victims of sexual assault by Holtzclaw, last month

Thirteen women testified against the former officer at his trial last year, describing encounters in which Holtzclaw forced his victims to perform sexual acts on him.

Holtzclaw sexually abused multiple women between December 2013 and June 2014, targeting victims from a poorer, mostly African-American area of Oklahoma City, prosecutors said.

Holtzclaw, who did not testify at his trial, was fired over the accusations in January 2015 after approximately three years on the job.

He broke down in tears when he was found guilty, telling jurors 'I didn't do it,' as he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.
A Cambodian man plagued by a giant growth on his face may have the opportunity to have it removed after two tourists started a Facebook campaign to help get him surgery.

Australians Diana Koski and her husband John Nettleton came across 34-year-old Vid while holidaying in the country's capital Phnom Penh last week.

Vid, who is believed to be homeless and unemployed, was born with the growth that has grown to hang below his chin and completely cover the right side of his face.

Vid, a 34-year-old Cambodian man plagued by a giant growth on his face, may have the opportunity to have it removed after two Australian tourists started a Facebook campaign to help get him surgery

'He just walked past us in the street near our hotel and it took us by surprise. I said to my husband we have to help this man,' Ms Koski told Daily Mail Australia.

'I started talking to him, but it was difficult because he didn't speak English. A few of the local people who we had seen shooing him away before came over to help translate.

'I told him I'd like to try and help him.'

Vid went back to the couple's Monsoon Boutique Hotel where the manager, Chan Southun, helped them find out how they could assist him.

'Whenever I walked with Vid, he walked seven paces behind me. Locals would try and shoo him away. Some of the locals tried to stop him walking in our hotel.

'He doesn't beg, he just walks the streets. I imagine he has had a pretty tough life.'

Australians Diana Koski and her husband John Nettleton came across 34-year-old Vid while holidaying in the country's capital Phnom Penh last week

Vid, who is believed to be homeless and unemployed, was born with the growth that has grown to hang below his chin and completely cover the right side of his face

Vid went back to the couple's Monsoon Boutique Hotel where the manager, Chan Southun, helped them find out how they could assist him. They got written permission from the chief of his village to help him

The couple were granted permission by the chief of the village where Vid was born to have surgery if they could arrange it.

'Vid didn't talk about family or whether he had a place to live. He must not have parents if we had to get permission from the village,' Ms Koski said.

'When I asked him if he wanted to have the growth removed, he said yes instantly. I didn't know if he would be frightened to go to another country.

'I told him we would do what we can, but it could take months.

'He has quite a sense of humour. He said maybe the girls might be interested in him if the growth is removed.'

While Vid's right eye is invisible underneath the growth, his nose and other eye allow him to breathe and walk around unaided.

The couple are waiting for Vid's medical records to be sent to them, which they will then send on to a surgeon in Singapore to see if surgery is even an option

Diana Koski and her husband John Nettleton, who live in Perth, posted a photo of Vid on Facebook as soon as they met him asking if anyone knew a plastic surgeon or any other way to help

'He said the growth doesn't give him headaches or think it's heavy, but he doesn't know any different,' Ms Koski said.

The couple posted a photo of Vid on Facebook as soon as they met him asking if anyone knew a plastic surgeon or any other way to help.

They were immediately contacted by a Perth businessman who is now coordinating with a highly regarded plastic surgeon he knows in Singapore.

The couple are waiting for Vid's medical records to be sent to them, which they will then send on to the surgeon to see if surgery is even an option.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his husband Sean Eldridge have bought a $24-million townhouse in the West village, seven months after putting their Soho pad on the market.

The 116-year-old house, located at 157 West 12th Street, has a screening room, a wine cellar and even an underground tunnel that connects it to a carriage house, the New York Post reported.

The house was previously thought to have been purchased by Mark Zuckerberg in September last year.

The deed was signed at the time by the manager of an LLC, Tom van Lobel Sells, who has worked with Zuckerberg in the past.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his husband Sean Eldridge have bought this $24-million townhouse in the West Village, which has a screening room, a wine cellar and even an underground tunnel to connect it to a carriage house

Hughes (right) and his Eldrige (left) sold their Soho loft last week for $8.5 million. They put it up for sale in June last year right after hosting a political fundraiser for Hillary Clinton

Van Lobel Sells, a tax consultant based in San Francisco, helped him register an LLC when he bought a home in Palo Alto in 2011.

He also assisted him when he refinanced that property in 2012 and is now the registered agent for Zuckerberg's Openness Foundation.

Former Facebook president Sean Parker, who had to step down from the company in its early days after he was arrested for possession of cocaine, also owns a $20-million home nearby in Greenwich Village.

Hughes and Eldridge, a venture capitalist, just sold their Soho loft last week for $8.5 million, seven months after they put it up for sale at $8.75 million.

Even though the apartment went for $250,000 below their asking price, it went for almost twice the $4.5 million they paid for it in 2010.

The 4,100 square feet pad, located at 30 Crosby Street, hit the market right after Hughes and Eldridge used it to host a political fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

Hughes and Eldridge's former Soho apartment comes with its own library (pictured), which is accessed via metal sliding doors

The loft, which has a 40-feet long living room (pictured) and a bar area (right), sold for almost twice the $4.5 million Hughes and Eldridge paid for it in 2010

The Crosby Street pad has three bedrooms and has retained original exposed brick walls and 12-foot ceilings from the 1890 building

It has three bedrooms, one of which currently used as a private gym, and a library. The building was built in 1890 and the loft still retains exposed brick walls and 12-foot ceilings from that era, 6sqft reported.

Hughes, who was Zuckerberg's friend and college roommate, started Facebook with him and is now worth an estimated $850 million.

He is now the owner and publisher of The New Republic political magazine.

The couple also own a $5-million 19th century farmhouse in Garrison, New York State, that takes up 80 acres of land.

Hughes also paid $2million in cash for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Shokan, also in New York State, in 2013.

Eldridge had decided to run for a House seat in New York's 19th congressional district, which includes Shokan, and later lost that election.
All 13 people were safely rescued by the Coast Guard without any injuries

Thirteen people were desperately battling choppy waters off the coast of Fort Lauderdale yesterday night after they made a distress call announcing their superyacht was sinking.

The 120ft Serena III, estimated to cost between $10million and $15million, was 13 miles off the coast when water began flooding into the vessel.

Less than two hours later, the luxury yacht rolled over and was completely submerged in waters measuring 1,200 feet deep, just 25 minutes after the last passenger was rescued.

Serena III, pictured above as it was sinking just 13 miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last night

Several rescue boats were on the scene after a distress call was made at 6pm. Choppy waters and high winds made the situation difficult, according to a member of the Coast Guard

Pictured, the 13 people on board after they were rescued by the Coast Guard. The Brazilian family of six, along with six crew and one captain, were heading for the Bahamas

Richard Paul Matheson, pictured right wearing a Serena III tshirt, is the registered owner of the superyacht

Infrared video taken by the Coast Guard shows the luxury yacht dramatically on its side.

Sea Tow Captain Tim Morgan, who was called on the scene, told the Sun Sentinel: 'It was a moonless night so it was very dark. The winds were blowing at about 15 knots out of the east and southeast, so it was a pretty rough ride.'

All 13 were taken to shore without injuries, although Morgan said the boat was impossible to save.

Despite having eight pumps ready, he told CBS Miami: 'The amount of water it was taking in, how quickly the boat sank, really, didn't think there was much anybody would have been able to do.'

Coast Guard Jon-Paul Rios called it a 'really hectic situation' amidst unfavorable weather.

Registered owner Richard Paul Matheson is the head of the Brazilian company ECISA, which develops and maintains shopping malls.

He was headed for a month-long trip to the Bahamas with five family members, six crew, and one captain.

Sea Tow Captain Tim Morgan told CBS Miami that the boat was impossible to save despite having eight pumps on hand

Infrared video shows the superyacht laying dramatically on its side before it was completely submerged. Pictured, debris and lounge cushions floating in the water

The rescued family is pictured on shore after the Coast Guard saved them from the sinking vessel. The superyacht was fully submerged just 25 minutes after the last person was rescued

The Coast Guard is investigating whether something could have struck the bottom of the yacht as it left the port, while Morgan suggested it may have been a mechanical problem.

Rescue crew managed to save a 18-foot tender, a smaller boat used to service and provide support to a yacht. A jet ski, inflatable life raft, and some luggage was also recovered.

Nearby fishing boats took in passengers before they were taken to

According to CBS, the boat had spent the last two years in Europe, then sailed across the Atlantic to arrive in Fort Lauderdale in January

Serena III is a Motor Yacht Expedition that was purchased by Matheson in 2012. Yacht Charter Fleet states the vessel can travel up to 12 knots and carry 56,650 liters of diesel on-board.

Serena III, measuring 120ft, is a Motor Yacht Expedition. The luxury superyacht is estimated to cost between $10-15million

CBS Miami reported that the Brazilian family had sailed across the Atlantic after the yacht had spent the last two years in Europe. All 13 people on board were safely rescued without any injuries




A 21-year-old man was arrested last night suspected of randomly slashing a 71-year-old grandmother in the face on the New York subway.

Damon Knowles was charged with assault, with intent to cause disfigurement and serious physical injury. The incident was the fourth seemingly random slashing in as many weeks in the city.

Carmen Rivera, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-nine, was attacked on Monday morning on a southbound 6 train that was approaching the Bleecker Street station around 7.15am.

Damon Knowles, 21, was taken into custody late on Tuesday night suspected of slashing Carmen River, 71

Courageous: Carmen Rivera, a 71-year-old grandmother-of-nine, smiles as she returns to her home in the Bronx on Tuesday, one day after she was slashed by a stranger on her morning commute to work

Optimistic: Rivera, who takes the same train to work each day, needed 30 stitches to close the four-inch cut

Police released this artist's impression of the suspect and CCTV footage of the man leaving the subway

Damon Knowles, pictured, was escorted to Manhattan Criminal Court where he was charged with the attack

The NYPD said a male passenger sitting across from Rivera lashed out at her. Both the man and Rivera got off at the next stop.

Footage from inside the subway station shows the suspect jumping over the turnstile as he ran away.

Knowles reportedly became a suspect after he was charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest in another incident on Tuesday, according to the Daily News.

Speaking outside her home on Tuesday, Rivera said she did not realize she had been cut until getting off the train.

She said the man fell on her as she was sitting, and somehow managed to hide the slashing and the blade.

Rivera needed 30 stitches to close the 4-inch cut on her left cheek.

However she insisted on returning to her job as a sample maker on Tuesday, and remains defiant about what happened to her.

'What's going to happen is going to happen. That's it,' she told CBS New York.

'I'm not afraid. I've never been afraid. I guess that is just me.'

'I take that train every morning.'

Family members said Rivera initially denied what happened to her, saying she had cut herself at work, before finally admitting that she was attacked.

Knowles, pictured, was arrested following Monday's attack on the 6 train which injured Carmen Rivera

Wounded: The injured woman was taken to Bellevue Hospital suffering from a four-inch laceration to her face

At least three other similar incidents involving slashings have occurred in Manhattan since the beginning of the new year.

Anthony Cristopher-Smith, 30, from Newark, New Jersey, was walking in the East village on January 19 when a man yelling profanities knocked him off his feet and slashed him in the face from his ear to his jawline.

Police later arrested Francis Salud, 28, in connection to the attack. Salud has also been charged for a similar attack on East 23rd Street in October.

Amanda Morris was viciously slashed in the face on her daily commute to work in Chelsea on January 6

Earlier incident: Anthony Christopher-Smith was walking down East 6th Street near Cooper Square with headphones on January 19 when he was knocked to the ground and slashed across the face

On New Year's Day, a 28-year-old woman suffered a facial wound at the hands of a total stranger in The Bronx, and less than a week later, 24-year-old Amanda Morris was sliced with a sharp object while walking to work in Chelsea.
Former watchdog chief: Trevor Phillips said in a talk at the Policy Exchange that it was disrespectful to assume Muslim communities would change

Muslim communities are not like others in Britain and the country should accept they will never integrate, the former head of the equalities watchdog has claimed.

Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said it was disrespectful to assume that Muslim communities would change.

He told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think tank in Westminster on Monday that Muslims see the world differently from the rest of us.

According to The Times, he said: Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect.

Because what you are essentially saying is the fact that they behave in a different way, some of which we may not like, is because they havent yet seen the light. It may be that they see the world differently to the rest of us.

Mr Phillips added that people of certain backgrounds in the UK are not going to change their views simply because we are constantly telling them that basically they should be like us.

The Muslim Council of Britain has insisted that members of the religion are compatible with UK life, and believes that the idea of demanding change from Muslims has promoted discrimination.

Praying: The Muslim Council of Britain has insisted that members of the religion are compatible with UK life, and believes that the idea of demanding change from Muslims has promoted discrimination (file picture)

A spokesman for the organisation told The Times: It assumes that Muslims are not equal, and not civilised enough to be part and parcel of British society, which they most certainly are.

The Prime Minister has previously made clear that integration failures have allowed extremist ideas to gain traction  resulting in around 700 British Muslims travelling to Syria to join Islamic State.

Counter-terror police say about half are thought to have returned and could pose a threat.

And last week David Cameron launched a new drive to counter extremism by calling on more Muslim women to learn English in the hope that they will turn into more powerful moderating forces.

Education: Prime Minister David Cameron launched a new drive to counter extremism by calling on more Muslim women to learn English in the hope that they will turn into more powerful moderating forces

Mr Phillips, 62, who is known for his outspoken views, hit the headlines last March when he claimed Britain was silencing debate on race issues by intimidating those who dare to ask questions.

In a devastating critique of a culture of misguided political correctness, he claimed far too many people felt unable to speak their minds because they feared being branded racist.

Mr Phillips said people would have to become more ready to offend each other as the price of free speech, and attacked the racket of multiculturalism which took root under Tony Blairs government.
Israels Prime Minister last night accused the United Nations chief of encouraging terror by trying to justify growing Palestinian frustration at Israel's occupation.

Benjamin Netanyahu issued a furious response after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said it was human nature for oppressed peoples to react to occupation.

Violence over the past four months in the region has killed 159 Palestinians and 25 Israelis, and Mr Netanyahu claimed Palestinian killers want to murder Jews wherever they are.

Fury: Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left, in Tel Aviv yesterday) responded after UN chief Ban Ki-moon (right, in New York yesterday) said it was human nature for oppressed peoples to react to occupation

Tension: Israeli army soldiers patrol as Israeli settlers walk in front of houses which they took over several days ago during a snow storm near the Ibrahimi mosque in the West Bank old city of Hebron yesterday

Yesterday, the Prime Minister said in a statement: The comments of the UN Secretary General encourage terror. There is no justification for terror.

Mr Ban told the UN Security Council of the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians - especially young people in the upsurge of attacks on Israelis since October.

Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process, he said.

As oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.

Violence since October 1 has killed 159 Palestinians and 25 Israelis, as well as an American and an Eritrean, according to a count by Agence France-Presse.

Most of the Palestinians killed since October have been attackers, while others have been shot dead by Israeli forces during protests and clashes.

Death: Security forces secure the area near a shop in the West Bank settlement of Beit Horon where an Israeli woman was fatally stabbed. Pressure is mounting on the Israeli government to stem a new wave of attacks

Buried: Flowers are placed on the grave of Israeli woman Shlomit Krigman, 24, after her funeral in Jerusalem. She was stabbed by two Palestinians in a West Bank settlement on Monday night and died overnight

Mr Ban condemned the Palestinian attacks, but said Israeli settlement building cast doubt on Israel's commitment to the goal of an independent Palestine alongside the Jewish state.

The comments of the UN Secretary General encourage terror. There is no justification for terror Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister

Continued settlement activities are an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community, he said.

They rightly raise fundamental questions about Israel's commitment to a two-state solution.

Mr Netanyahu responded that the Palestinians themselves were not working for two states.

The Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state, they want to destroy a state and they say it out loud, he said.

They want to murder Jews wherever they are and they say so out loud. They do not murder for peace and they do not murder for human rights.

Troubled area: Palestinian national security members on an emergency patrol during a snow storm in the West Bank city of Hebron yesterday as a storm hit the area with snow, torrential rains and strong winds

Meeting place: A group of Palestinians use woodfire to get warm during a snow storm in Hebron yesterday

Yesterday, an Israeli woman stabbed and killed by two Palestinians in a West Bank settlement was buried as pressure mounted on Mr Netanyahu's government to stem a new wave of attacks.

THE 400,000 ISRAELI SETTLERS WHO LIVE IN THE OCCUPIED WEST BANK About 400,000 Israeli settlers live alongside around 2.5 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The United States, United Nations and the European Union oppose all Israeli settlement building, and consider it an obstacle to peace. But Israel's defence ministry has approved the construction of 153 new settler homes in the West Bank, the Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said on Monday. The move marks the end of an informal construction freeze in the Palestinian territory that lasted 18 months, the on-governmental organisation said. US-backed peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel collapsed in April 2014 amid bitter mutual recriminations. A chief grievance of the Palestinians was Israeli settlement building on land they claim for a future state. Advertisement

Shlomit Krigman, 24, died overnight of wounds sustained in Monday's attack. The two attackers, identified as Ibrahim Allan, 23, and Hussein Abu Ghosh, 17, were shot dead by a security guard.

It was the third attack inside a West Bank settlement since January 17, when an Israeli woman was stabbed to death by a 15-year-old Palestinian at the entrance to her Otniel home.

A day later, an Israeli woman was stabbed and wounded by a 17-year-old Palestinian in Tekoa.

Before January 17, Jewish settlements built on land occupied by Israel in 1967 and considered illegal by much of the international community had been spared much of the violence.

But Monday's stabbings increased domestic pressure on Israel's government, which derives much of its support from the settler community.

Mr Netanyahu said on Monday he had told the army to submit a comprehensive plan to better ensure the security of settlements.

He added that he would revoke the work permits of the attackers' relatives, which allow them to be employed in the settlements or in Israel.
The case is being tried against Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah

Jeffs is currently in prison as a convicted felon and serving 20 years

Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, officals also used methods to allow Jeffs to avoid being captured

Willie Jessop told the court about cloak-and-dagger methods the church used to evade police forces from finding their fugitive leader, Warren Jeffs

of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints testified against two cities where the church practiced

Willie Jessop (pictured) testified at the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court in a trial against two polygamous towns in Arizona and Utah

A key witness in a trial against two polygamous towns in Arizona and Utah described the elaborate steps the church took to avoid outside law enforcement and help their fugitive-leader.

Willie Jessop served as a spokesman and head of security for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints before leaving the sect in 2011.

He testified about a list of cloak-and-dagger efforts that church leaders and officials in Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, undertook to evade authorities and help their fugitive prophet, Warren Jeffs.

The polygamist church was organized on the boarder of Utah and Arizona and practiced in both states.

The extreme measures included using 'burner' cellphones, encrypted radios and hidden all-terrain vehicles.

Church leaders were convinced the local cellphone tower was being monitored and drove 40 miles from town to make calls.

They collected disposable cellphones from around the U.S. and used encrypted radios.

Jessop said church officials received law enforcement training from former Secret Service members and even went to sniper training.

Many of the efforts were designed to assist Jeffs while he was on the FBI's most-wanted list in 2006, Jessop said.

Jeffs was on the run from charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men.

When Jeffs was being moved to a new location, Jessop said he would fly to places around the country as a decoy and throw law enforcement off the trail.

He also said church leaders positioned vehicles in various locations as part of their escape plans.

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The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints operated in Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah. Both cities are now accused of aiding Jeffs's evasion of police forces

Jessop, a former spokesperson and head of security of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, left the sect in 2011

When federal and county authorities showed up to serve a subpoena, Jessop said he and Jeffs' brother, a key figure in the church, motored away in an ATV that was stashed behind fake walls in a Colorado City building.

He said all of those efforts were made in cooperation with town officials in the trial before a jury in Phoenix.

Warren Jeffs (pictured) is a convicted felon serving a 20-year sentence. He is also the former President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Jeffs was captured during a 2006 traffic stop outside Las Vegas.

Investigators found more than $50,000, cellphones, laptop computers, a police scanner and wigs inside the SUV in which he was traveling.

Jeffs is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting one of his 24 underage brides. He is believed to rule the polygamous sect through letters and phone calls from prison.

Jessop also talked about how Jeffs communicates with his followers from behind bars, primarily through coded messages. And he said Jeffs' wives showed up at visits wearing watches that had recording devices.

The U.S. Justice Department alleges Colorado City and Hildale serve as an enforcement arm of the polygamous sect. The government says the towns have discriminated against nonbelievers by denying them housing, water services and police protection.

The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn't a motivating factor in their decisions.

Jessop told jurors that residents must have church approval to serve in government in the towns.

He said a turning point occurred in 2004 when 20 men were booted from the church. 'It changed from a church to a cartel,' he said.

Lawyers for the towns pressed Jessop on why he remained in the church for seven more years.

Jessop said he turned against church leaders after Texas authorities played him an audio tape in which Jeffs raped a 12-year-old girl. Jessop said he later reviewed another recording in which Jeffs confessed to a rape.

Hildale attorney Blake Hamilton objected to Jessop's testimony about the allegations against Jeffs.

'This is not the criminal trial of Warren Jeffs,' Hamilton said.

Outside court, Colorado City attorney Jeff Matura said: 'The testimony about Warren Jeffs and his criminal conduct is heartbreaking, especially with respect to this treatment of children, but it's not part of the allegations of this case.'

Jessop testified saying that church leaders got law enforcement training from former Secret Service members and even had sniper training
Two feminists looking for a flatmate requested 'no heterosexuals' apply

Two feminists looking for a flatmate have divided public opinion after they specifically requested 'no heterosexuals' apply for the position.

The pair - who identify as both queer and transgender - posted the controversial online advert for their four-bedroom villa in Wellington, New Zealand, last Thursday.

'We don't want to live with a couple, a heterosexual person, or someone who is loud at night, or drinks/does drugs/party[s] a lot,' the description read, according to a screenshot posted to Reddit.

'We also don't want to live with someone who is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic [sic], hates sex workers, hates migrants or is otherwise a jerk.'

'We don't want to live with a heterosexual person': Wellington flatshare advert posted by two feminists divides public opinion

'We also don't want to live with someone who is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic [sic], hates sex workers, hates migrants or is otherwise a jerk': The advert continued (stock image)

Since posting their very particular flatshare advert, they have been blasted on social media for being 'hypocrites' and having 'double standards.'

'I wonder what the backlash would be if the add read NO transgender,Vegetarian, queers? Could you imagine the uproar? Oh and Heterosexuals only please!,' wrote one man.

'Love the way a lot of people are defending this. If it said 'No Homosexuals' you would be up in arms. Bl***y hypocrites,' wrote another.

'They describe themselves as Queer, Transgender, Vegetarian, Feminist/Politically switched on Adults... they should've started with that..and there would have been little need to include 'No Heterosexuals,' one person wrote.

Other online users felt the upfront and honest approach was not an act of discrimination and was totally justifiable and within their rights to do.

'What about the flats that say 'no couples' 'no kids' and 'professionals over 30 ONLY' it's all discrimination. Don't pick and chose what you're going to chime in on,' a woman defended.

'I'm a proud hetro-sexual, and guess what? I'm not in the slightest bit offended? Why would I be? You should be able to advertise to live with whoever you like,' wrote another user.

Many believed the very particular advert was a case of double standards and expressed outrage

Other online users felt the upfront approach was not an act of discrimination and totally justifiable

Many considered the public reaction a reflection of a society that struggles to come to terms with 'new progressive understandings of tolerance' towards transgender people

The pair - who posted the property listing under the username queercore - have since clarified their preferences, NZ Herald reported.

The updated advertisement now reads, "We live in a society in which transgender people face high levels of housing discrimination".

"An extremely high number of transgender people are homeless, in unstable or unsuitable housing, and regularly face housing discrimination. We are routinely turned away from flats for being trans."

'You are not being discriminated against by us, we just don't want to live with you. Sorry your feelings are hurt, but we don't really care, we're busy surviving in a society which is hostile to our existence.'

'Being cisgender and heterosexual does not prevent anyone from finding a suitable place to live EVER.'

A spokeswoman for the Human Rights Commissiont told NZ Herald it was legal under the Human Rights Act to pick and choose potential flatmates on the basis of sexual orientation.
A woman has spoken of her horror at finding her boyfriend battered and unconscious after being attacked by a gang of at least four men in the early hours of Australia Day.

Jackson Crinis, 24, suffered a broken nose and dislocated shoulder after being set upon by the group and then left in a pool of his own blood by the side of a road in Wollongong, south of Sydney.

He called his girlfriend, Ashlyn Uren, but was so dazed that he couldn't remember where he was and thought the blood surrounding him belonged to someone else.

'He hadn't realised his shoulder had popped out. He freaked out when he [realised],' Miss Uren told the Illawarra Mercury.

Jackson Crinis, 24, suffered a broken nose and dislocated shoulder after being attacked by a gang of at least four men in the early hours of Australia Day

'He was covered in blood and he didn't know whose blood it was. He said he didn't know where he was.'

She 'freaked out' when she saw blood gushing from his nose and a deep gash running across his face to his eye.

Miss Uren tried to move the electrician into her car, but after he started screaming in pain she dialled triple-zero.

Mr Crinis had been drinking with friends at the Palm Court Hotel in Corrimal on Monday, but left in the early hours of the public holiday to try and find a taxi home.

He called his girlfriend, Ashlyn Uren (pictured together), but was so dazed that he couldn't remember where he was and thought the blood surrounding him belonged to someone else

He started home alone on the Princes Highway and vaguely remembers hearing a group of men yelling at him.

'He thinks he may have heard some guys yelling out to him and then there wasn't much warning before he was beaten up, but he's really struggling to remember,' said Ms Uren.

The 24-year-old was found lying in a car park off the busy highway just minutes from their home in Bellambi, north of Wollongong in southern NSW.

He was rushed to Wollongong Hospital and is now talking to a plastic surgeon about whether he will need surgery to straighten his nose.

Mr Crinis had been drinking with friends at the Palm Court Hotel in Corrimal on Monday, but left in the early hours of the public holiday to try and find a taxi home

NSW Police are investigating the attack and are reviewing CCTV footage in the area.

A spokesman for NSW Police said: 'The injured man has little recollection of the incident and police are appealing for witnesses or anyone who may have seen the man walking along the Princes Highway early yesterday.

'Initial inquiries indicate the man left a licensed premises on the Princes Highway, Corrimal, about 4am, and began walking south along the Princes Highway and into Railway Street near the shopping centre.
Fugitive New York real estate heir, Robert Durst, is set to plead guilty to a gun charge in Louisiana next week, a move that will let him return to Los Angeles to face a murder charge.

Durst is the scion of a prominent New York real estate family who gained new notoriety in the HBO documentary 'The Jinx' about his alleged crimes.

His attorney Dick DeGuerin told CNN said his client will plead guilty to one charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

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Real estate heir Robert Durst has agreed to be extradited from Louisiana to Los Angeles by mid-August to face a murder charge. He's pictured here in March in New Orleans after being arraigned

Court filings show U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt set February 3 as the date for Durst's re-arraignment on a charge of illegally carrying a .38-caliber revolver after being convicted of a felony.

The charge kept Durst in Louisiana even though he waived extradition to Los Angeles to face a charge that he killed a friend and onetime spokeswoman in 2000.

Filings show Durst made a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Louisiana.

In December, Durst's attorneys and Los Angeles County prosecutors filed an agreement stating that Durst will be extradited by Aug. 18, 2016.

The weapons charge has kept Durst jailed in Louisiana since March 2015, even though he waived extradition on the murder charge in Los Angeles.

Durst, an estranged member of the family that runs 1 World Trade Center in New York, faces a first-degree murder trial in Los Angeles in the 2000 death of his friend and onetime spokeswoman Susan Berman, 55.

The 72-year-old millionaire is accused of killing Berman to keep her from talking to investigators looking into the disappearance of his first wife in 1982.

Durst, an estranged member of the family that runs 1 World Trade Center in New York, faces a first-degree murder trial in Los Angeles in the 2000 death of his friend and onetime spokeswoman Susan Berman, 55

Durst was arrested in New Orleans on the eve of the finale of 'The Jinx,' a six-part HBO documentary about Durst, the disappearance of his wife, Berman's death, and the death and dismemberment of a neighbor in Texas in 2001.

Durst's lawyers say his arrest in New Orleans was timed to coincide with the conclusion of 'The Jinx.' Durst had registered at the hotel under the name Everette Ward and was lying low while HBO aired the final chapter of his life story.

U.S. District Judge Helen Berrigan in Louisiana postponed Durst's trial on the weapons charge earlier this month to give attorneys time to work out a date to sign a plea agreement. On Thursday, she scheduled a change of plea hearing for Feb. 3.

Richard DeGuerin, one of Durst's attorneys, said in a statement Tuesday that the extradition agreement is 'part of our effort to have Robert Durst face and defeat the California murder charge as soon as possible.'
Two people were killed and three others were wounded in a shooting at a homeless encampment known as the Jungle in South Seattle.

Detectives now believe they were specifically targeted as they continue to investigate.

All five had gunshot wounds and two men died after the shoot-out. One woman is in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Another woman and another man are also in serious condition, police said.

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Two men were killed and three other people were seriously wounded following a shooting in a Seattle homeless encampment nicknamed the Jungle

They were called around 7:15pm after receiving reports of gunfire near Airport Way South. The shooting happened in a wooded area nearby.

Officers found the three men and the two women as they searched the greenbelt.

Police are now searching the woods for suspects and collecting information about the shooting.

Two potential shooters are at large and are now sought by the police, Kiro7 reported.

Mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency as a result of Seattle's growing homelessness crisis in November last year.

The shooting happened minutes before Murray was scheduled to give a talk on homelessness at a shelter.

In June 2009, Bernardino Maceo-Toirac was also shot in the Jungle. Warren J. Bothwell was found with a chest wound in the same area the following month and died at the scene.
Locked up: Paul Hamilton was arrested at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon as an illegal immigrant and taken to a cell at an immigration removal centre

A US Shakespeare expert who was locked up for ten days without warning because the government saw him as an 'illegal immigrant' is due to be freed this afternoon - but is still being deported to his native country.

Paul Hamilton was taken to an immigration removal centre 100 miles away from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, after police swooped on the property and arrested him.

The 42-year-old scholar, who has spent nine years in the UK and received his PhD from the University of Birmingham in July, had applied for leave to remain in the UK after his student visa expired and says he was waiting for the Home Office decision.

He also said he bought an open ticket to return to Phoenix in Arizona and was prepared to leave the UK if his application was denied.

But, despite receiving no instruction to leave the UK, Dr Hamilton was unexpectedly arrested earlier this month and held behind bars at Morton Hall immigration removal centre, Lincolnshire, for ten days.

This morning, it emerged that the Home Office - who initially wanted him to face a court hearing and send him back to the US under lock and key - had reversed its decision to release Dr Hamilton from custody before his deportation.

But, despite what Dr Hamilton described as a 'small victory', the academic told MailOnline he was shocked over his treatment and was now leaving the UK under a 'black cloud' - despite following all the correct procedures.

He said: 'My overwhelming feeling is sadness, because this is not the way I wanted to leave the UK.

'I have spent the past nine years developing a professional reputation and meeting friends who I care deeply about and this is not how I wanted them to see me.

'I really love this country and to leave it with this black cloud hanging over me is humiliating and devastating and simply horrible.'

After his student visa lapsed at the end of his PhD course, Dr Hamilton applied for leave to remain in the UK to continue his research, in accordance with the guidelines.

The application, which costs 650 to submit, was put forward under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights on the basis he had built up a valuable network of professional contacts while in Britain.

The expert, who has set up various conferences in Britain as well as giving lectures and working on educational podcasts, was also in the process of making applications for funding to start a research fellowship.

However, he claims neither he nor his lawyer heard anything about his bid to stay in Britain until he was arrested on January 17 by immigration officers.

He subsequently spent ten days at the centre - but is finally due to be released this afternoon.

Dr Hamilton has now been ordered to return to the US, from where he will make a fresh application to continue studying in the UK.

He said: 'I had applied for leave to remain in the correct way and had heard absolutely nothing from the Home Office.

Dr Hamilton said from Morton Hall immigration removal centre in Lincolnshire (above) that he is 'devastated'

'Then, suddenly, I was arrested on my doorstep, in front of my neighbours - for having done absolutely nothing wrong.'

He said his plight showed how the government was 'flouting' human rights law.

'The government is essentially criminalising the process of further leave to remain. They are sending out the message that, if you dare apply to stay, you are subject to arrest,' he said.

'People are now going to think - even if they are likely to have their application approve - that they will not want to apply.

'What is even more of a farce is that there is a human right to be able to make these applications. What the government is doing is passively flouting the human rights convention under the table.'

Speaking about his time at the centre, Dr Hamilton said all the staff had been professional but that the processes suspects were subjected to were inhumane.

To be humiliated and forced to leave the country in these circumstances is beyond words Paul Hamilton

'When you're here, you constantly feel as though you are being punished,' he said.

'At the moment, I am looking through bars at a tall fence with barbed wire strung across it, which is intended for me,

'There is a peep hole in the cell door and, every night, they shine a light into your room, which is weirdly obscene. I understand why they do it - it is built into their procedures - but it makes you feel like a criminal.'

He added: 'I've been through all the emotions - shock, sadness, disappointment and anger.'

Dr Hamilton also believes he would never have been released if there had not been the publicity surrounding his case.

Some 150 of Dr Hamilton's friends, who say he has contributed 100,000 to the UK economy in tuition fees during his nine-year stay in Britain, signalled their support after PhD student Timo Uotinen launched a campaign to help him.

Among those who have signed their support are Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, John Gillies, professor in literature at the University of Essex and Dr Patricia McManus, senior lecturer in media and literature at the University of Brighton.

He said: 'Yesterday, I received a denial of my request to be released because the Home Office said my removal from the UK would be affected better if I was in custody.

'Thankfully, that has now been changed - but I believe that would not have happened without all these people fighting my cause.'

His lawyer Theresa Okogwa, from JBP Immigration Services in Northampton, said the Home Office arrested Dr Hamilton because they believed he was at risk of absconding once his application was refused on the basis he has no friends or family in the UK.

She said Dr Hamilton's application had been done by the book but that the Home Office had not acted in accordance with the rules.

'They did not give him a chance to speak, they did not give him a chance to make arrangements and they certainly did not give him the chance leave the country voluntarily,' she said.

'They claimed they had to detain him because they were scared he would abscond, due to not having family in the country. But surely that argument would apply to any single foreign student.

'He had always planned on leaving and knew the application would not definitely be approved - that's why he bought his ticket, ready to return.

'The Home Office told us that they could not be sure that we had not received a copy of the letter, so they are not even insisting that they are in the right. The whole thing has just been shocking.'

It is understood Mr Hamilton's application was classed as 'clearly unfounded' under the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, meaning he had no right to appeal unless he leaves the UK.

And under the Immigration Act 2014, which came into force last year, a person who is seeking leave to remain in the UK - but does not currently have leave to remain - is liable to be removed.

But officials are not obliged to convey the possible removal - or the removal decision - until the day of the enforcement visit, which is why Mr Hamilton was not given notice of his arrest.

A Home Office spokesman said: 'Mr Hamiltons application for indefinite leave to remain in the UK was refused on the grounds that he did not satisfy the relevant criteria under the immigration rules. He has the option of appealing this decision once he has left the UK.

'The Immigration Act 2014 clearly states that a person who does not have leave to remain in the UK is liable for removal. Enforcement action may be taken to remove these individuals.
A Danish teenager who was sexually assaulted near a migrant asylum centre has been told she will be prosecuted after using pepper spray to fend off her attacker.

The 17-year-old told police she was targeted in the coastal town of Sonderborg by an English-speaking man, who knocked her to the ground and tried to undress her.

But she managed to prevent the man from attacking her further by spraying the substance at him.

The teenage girl was attacked by a man as she walked through the centre of the coastal town of Sonderborg, pictured

However, as it is illegal to use pepper spray, the teenage girl is set to face charges. It is likely she will face a 500 Krone (50) fine

Local police spokesman Knud Kirsten told TV Syd: 'It is illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely to be charged for that.'

The man who attacked the girl fled from the scene and has not yet been charged. It is unclear if the man was an asylum seeker or refugee.

However, the case has sparked a controversy in Denmark, where there has been increasing reports of sexual harrassment towards women.

Earlier this month, several females in Snderborg reported feeling harrassed by the aggressive nature of male refugees at the local asylum centre.

It comes after it was reported that there have been a rising number of sex attacks by migrant gangs across a number of European countries, including in the German city of Cologne.

The Buddy Holly nightclub in Sonderborg, where owners will only admit customers if they speak English, German or Danish

Security staff check IDs at Kastrups train station outside Copenhagen, Denmark, where parliament after parliament approved laws to confiscate valuables from asylum seekers to finance their upkeep

This has prompted several nightclubs in Sonderborg to bar people from entering unless they can speak Danish, German or English.

The language requirements have reportedly been put in place in several establishments in the wake of reports of 'foreign men in groups' harassing female guests.

Buddy Holly, a night club in Snderborg, near the German border, popular with local students, applies a language policy for all guests, and the owner defends it as a safety measure.

'We have some rules so that our guests can have a pleasant experience and feel safe,' owner Tom Holden told TV2, adding that it has been the club's policy for years.

Meanwhile Denmark's parliament has voted in favour of seizing asylum seekers' assets in a controversial bid to reduce the numbers moving there.

Under a new law, officials will have the power to search migrants for valuables and take cash and possessions worth more than around 1,000 to help pay for their stay.

Only wedding rings and items of sentimental value will be exempt.
Donald Trump has offered his backing to Vladimir Putin over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko - insisting he has seen 'no evidence' indicting the Russian leader.

The Republican presidential nomination suggested that no-one knows who is responsible for poisoning the spy, who died in November 2006 after his tea was laced with deadly polonium-210.

A public inquiry in London last week concluded that the Russian dissident's assassination was 'probably' sanctioned by Mr Putin, describing it as 'state sponsored'.

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Donald Trump has offered his backing to Vladimir Putin over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko - insisting he has seen 'no evidence' indicting the Russian leader

But billionaire Mr Trump - the favourite to win the Republican vote ahead of November's election - has opted to side with the Russian president, who denies having any involvement in Litvinenko's death.

The businessman stressed that speculation can be 'untrue' and that until he is convicted, Putin should be believed.

Speaking on Tuesday, Mr Trump said: 'First of all, he says he didn't do it. Many people say it wasn't him. So who knows who did it?

'Have they found him guilty? I don't think they've found him guilty. If he did it, fine - but I don't know that he did it.

'You know, people are saying they think it was him, it might have been him, it could have been him. But in all fairness to Putin - and I'm not saying this because he says "Trump is brilliant and leading everybody" - the fact is that he hasn't been convicted of anything. Some people say he absolutely didn't do it..

Billionaire Mr Trump - the favourite to win the Republican vote ahead of November's election - has opted to side with the Russian president, who denies having any involvement in Litvinenko's death. The businessman stressed that speculation can be 'untrue' and that until he is convicted, Putin should be believed

He added: 'They say a lot of things about me that are untrue too.'

Trump, whose latest polls show to be far ahead in the race to be the Republican candidate to replace Barack Obama in the White House, has previously spoken of his respect for the Russian premier.

He responded to Putin calling him 'an absolute leader' by describing it as a 'great honor'.

The 69 year old added that he was 'a man highly respected within his own country and beyond'.

Trump reached a new high in US polls this week - less than seven days before Iowa becomes the first state to vote.

The Republican presidential nomination suggested that no-one knows who is responsible for poisoning Mr Litvinenko (pictured), who died in November 2006 after his tea was laced with deadly polonium-210

According to the CNN study, Mr Trump has 41 per cent of the Republican vote. Texas senator Ted Cruz is on 19 per cent, while no other candidate reached double figures.

A 327-page report published last week by retired High Court judge Sir Robert Owen concluded Mr Litvinenko was murdered by former KGB agents Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun.

However, Russia refutes the claim.
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Firearms officers have staged a mock terror attack outside a Glasgow shopping centre to test how the emergency services would deal with a deadly atrocity in the city.

The multi-agency action took place last night at the Intu Braehead centre on the outskirts of the city, and saw officers posing as masked gunmen who had 'opened fire' at a crowded bus stop, while others played the role of hostages and the injured.

Police Scotland said the exercise had been planned since early last year, and was not held in response to a recent incident or specific threat. However, poignantly it took place just over a year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in which 12 people died.

A firearms officer plays the part of a gunman opening fire at a packed bus stop as part of an exercise to test the responses of the emergency services to a firearms attack at the Intu Braehead centre on the outskirts of Glasgow

The multi-agency action took place last night at the shopping centre, and saw officers posing as masked gunmen who had 'opened fire' at a busy bus stop

The last 12 months have also seen 39 people killed when a lone gunman opened fire at a beach in Tunisia that was packed with tourists and the Paris massacre in November in which 130 people were killed in six separate assaults.

'The emergency services and partners plan extensively for a wide number of challenging situations from naturally occurring events caused by the weather to significant industrial accidents or criminal acts,' said assistant chief constable Bernard Higgins.

'This exercise has been in the planning for a year and specifically focuses on a major firearms incident and will test how our specially-trained armed officers respond alongside other emergency services at a crowded place, which for the purposes of this scenario, is a major shopping venue.

'I must reiterate that this exercise is not in response to recent events in Paris or any threat to any specific location.'

He said training exercises allowed authorities to ensure the response to a genuine incident was current and ran as 'efficiently and effectively as possible'.

Police Scotland said the exercise had been planned since early last year, and was not held in response to a recent incident or specific threat. However, poignantly it took place just over a year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in which 12 people died

People playing the role of gunmen stand guard outside the bus stop, while others played the role of hostages and the injured

'Whilst everyone in Scotland hopes we never have to activate any major incident plan, it is important that we are ready to do so should the need develop. This proactive approach to preparedness helps to protect Scotland's status as a safe and secure country,' he added.

Gary Turnbull, general manager for the shopping centre, said: 'The emergency services do an extremely important job keeping the public safe.

'This training, planning and preparation to deal with all eventualities is essential and we had no hesitation allowing them to use our facilities for their exercise while the centre was closed.'
A boy, 15, living at centre, arrested on suspicion of murder is from Somalia

Staff at the Swedish migrant centre where social worker Alexandra Mezher was stabbed to death warned of that could not cope with looking after the troubled adolescents a year ago, it has been claimed.

A therapist predicted that something serious would happen at the juvenile asylum seekers home in Molndal, near Gothenburg, due to a lack of staff but was ignored, Swedens Goteborgs Tidning newspaper reported.

Staff had warned of the dangers of working on their own several times in the months leading up to the brutal killing on Monday, it stated.

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Pride of the family: Social worker Alexandra Mezher, 22, pictured at her university graduation in June 2015 where she studied psychology, was stabbed to death at the refugee housing in Molndal, Gothenburg

Warning: Staff at the shelter for unaccompanied teens warned in December 2014 that they were understaffed and that some thing serious 'will happen'

The question of lone working at night was discussed with management several times, the therapist is quoted as saying.

No one should work on their own, she warned.

We all cried and someone said that it was what we had said earlier.

Alexandra Mezher had worked a night shift on her own at the Molndal migrant centre when she was ambushed and stabbed.

Goteborgs Tidning reported: In December 2014 a therapist at the newly founded juvenile asylum seekers home in Molndal called the Department for Health Care and sounded the alarm about problems at the accommodation centre where Alexandra Mezher was killed on Monday.

She said she spoke on behalf of other members of staff who all complained that they were extremely understaffed and stated that they often had to work alone, contrary to best work practice.

Tragedy: Alexandra Mezher, pictured right with her best friend Lejla Filipovic at their high school graduation in 2012, died after being stabbed at her place of work - a care home for unaccompanied child refugees

Murdered: She was stabbed to death while working a night shift alone at the centre for migrant children in Molndal, on Sweden's west coast. A boy, 15, from Somalia, who lived at the centre, is in police custody

Full of life: Miss Mezher (pictured second from left) had only worked at the child migrant centre since the autumn. She was stabbed to death on Monday at 8am

Held: SiS ungdomshem Fagared, the youth detention centre in Molndal where the 15-year-old Somali boy accused of murder is believed to be currently held

So far nothing serious has happened, but it will do, the therapist, who asked not to be identified, told Goteborgs Tidning.

The staff has talked with the management plenty of times, but they will not help. The management is not listening.

However the centre was the subject of an unannounced inspection by the Department for Health Care three weeks later, the newspaper claimed.

A report by the Department for Health Care stated: The workforce had been reduced by the company since housing began operations in September 2014, among other things, this has meant more hours and staff members working alone.

We have mainly dealt with the complaints from workers about working alone and according to the staff there were too few staff at the centre.

But the Department for Health Care review found no deficiencies in the service carried out at the centre.

We found no deficiencies there, Department for Health Care inspector Annelie Andersson wrote. We actually had found no flaws at all in the business as we have been there three times.

A report of an inspection of the centre in October last year only mentioned the conditions of the children, not staffing levels Goteborgs Tidning reported.

Search: Detectives were at the migrant centre which houses children aged 14-17 searching for clues. Police today praised two hero teenagers who held the knifeman down until they arrived

Tribute: Flowers and candles have been left outside the housing for unaccompanied migrants in Molndal, near Gothenburg, where Miss Mezher was killed

Meanwhile, all kitchen knives and other sharp kitchen objects at asylum in Molndal must be locked up, according to new rules brought in today following the brutal murder of social worker Alexandra Mezher.

Of course we want to avoid something like this [the murder of Alexandra Mezher] happening again, Birgitta Korpe, operations manager of unaccompanied asylum seeker children services told Swedish newspaper Goteborgs Posten.

When young people need sharp objects we will be there to watch them.

Locking up sharp objects is not something unusual, Ms Korpe maintained, but the kitchen and dining area is often closed and locked at night.

In the current situation in Molndal, only the staff have access to kitchen knives and when the children want to use them the staff must attend, she told Goteborgs Posten.

This follows revelation by Swedish police that the Somalian teenager accused of murdering Miss Mezher will stand trial as an adult, it was revealed today.

Hard working: Psychology graduate Miss Mezher who was a Lebanese Christian whose parents were from Beirut, was today described by her mother Chimene as an 'angel'

Questioning: A boy, 15, living at the centre, from Somalia, is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder. Police have cordoned off the centre as forensics investigate

Scene: Molndal, on Sweden's west coast, where the migrant centre is, has been the scene of rising tension in recent months

Authorities in Sweden have taken the unusual step of keeping the 15-year-old suspect in police custody due to the serious nature of the crime.

Youngsters are normally sent to a secure children's home following arrest, but the teenager is being held behind bars due to public outrage follow the brutal knife killing of Alexandra Mezher.

And he will be held in an adult prison until he goes on trial.

'A person is criminally responsible when they reach 15-years-old in Sweden,' a Gothanburg Police spokesman told MailOnline.

'The boy is being held at the police station. But it is very unusual that children to be kept in custody by the police.

'However the public prosecutor has deemed this as a special case due to the nature of the crime and will ask for the boy to be held in prison until he goes to trial.'

The spokesman added: 'He is not known by the police and has not been arrested before. But there is always a variable of uncertainty about these kids identity.

'We dont know anything about the boy family. We have not even established his identity with a 100% certainty yet.'

Home: Miss Mezher was living with her parents, originally from Lebanon, and her younger brothers in Boras, some 40 miles from Molndal

Centre: Miss Mezher, whose family are originally from Lebanon, had only worked at the accommodation for unaccompanied refugee children for a few months
A Kosovan refugee has been jailed after threatening to cut out his wife's heart because she had become 'too English'.

Behar Kasemi, 42, told police that he believed women in Kosovo should 'obey their husbands and look after the children'.

He made the comments after he was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and put under a Domestic Violence Prevention Notice for threatening to cut out his wife's heart.

Kosovan refugee Behar Kasemi has been jailed after threatening to cut out his wife's heart because she had become 'too English'. He appeared at Swindon Magistrates' Court (pictured)

He has now been jailed for breaching that order, just hours after it was imposed.

The order had banned Kasemi from returning to his marital home in Swindon, but his wife phoned police to report the breach shortly after he was released from custody.

Detective Constable Rob Sweeney told magistrates at Swindon Magistrates' Court that Kasemi was 'aggressive' during his interview.

He described his wife as having become 'too English' before saying: 'In my country it is for the women to obey their husbands and look after the children.'

Kasemi, who spat at the glass in the dock during the hearing, was jailed for four weeks after admitting breaching the order.

But magistrates criticised police for failing to arrange another option for the defendant. The court was told he had been released on bail at 2.20am and had nowhere else to go.

In my country it is for the women to obey their husbands and look after the children Behar Kasemi

Wayne Hardy, defending, said the Kosovan did not know what else to do after he was eventually released in the middle of the night.

He criticised the police for not helping him or arranging to accompany him to collect his belongings or money from the family home.

Geoff Earl, chairman of the bench, also asked DC Sweeney: 'What on earth do you think was going to happen?'

'You threw him out on the streets from the police with no money, no keys and no accommodation at 2.30 in the morning with a notice saying he can't go home and if he does he is committing a serious offence and you expect him to be back here at ten in the morning.
Cologne and Bonn carnival organisers have begun handing out rules for refugees for next week's jollity - with warnings about women, alcohol and urinating in public.

The cities are on edge after mass sexual assaults by immigrants against hundreds of women on New Year's Eve in Cologne. The number of complaints resulting from the frenzy in and around the main station now stands at over 820.

Carnival is, if anything, even bigger than New Year in the Rhineland where cities like Bonn, Cologne and Dusseldorf go crazy in a week long celebration of parades, parties, dances and fetes.

Warning: Bonn carnival chief Christoph Arnold hands out a leaflet to refugees in Bonn, Germany, warning them about the rules for next week's Carnival - including not sexually assaulting women or urinating in public

A million people are expected on the streets of Dusseldorf alone next Monday when the party gets underway.

A massive police presence, both uniformed and undercover, will be deployed to try to ensure there is no repeat of the scenes which marred the last day of the year in Cologne and in several other German cities.

In Bonn, carnival organisers have now printed leaflets welcoming migrants - provided they behave themselves.

Printed in several languages including Arabic, the flyers read: 'People dress up to celebrate, sing and dance together. In the carnival time everyone must deal respectfully with one another and observe the laws.

'Butzen - that means kisses on the cheeks. Sexual approaches are not allowed! Women and men must always be in agreement. No means no!

Rules: The leaflets being handed out to refugees in Bonn and Cologne, in preparation for next week's Carnival celebrations. The flyers are printed in several languages, including Arabic

Attacks: Police in Cologne have received more than 820 reports of robbery and sexual assault, which are alleged to have taken place on New Years Eve. The attacks have left the cities on edge about next week's Carnival celebrations

'Dancing to the music is also a way to celebrate carnival. Many people also celebrate with drinks and alcohol. Please - only in moderation!

'Urinating in public is forbidden!'

Bonn carnival chief Christoph Arnold went with representatives of the police and the local integration commissioner Colette Manemann to a refugee centre to hand out the leaflets in person.

In Cologne one of the points raised on the leaflet - which is printed in Arabic too - is also about alcohol, which Muslims are not supposed to consume.

It reads: 'Many in Cologne will be drinking beer or other alcoholic beverages at carnival time, but of course there is no obligation to do so.

'Having fun, singing and dancing can all be done as well without alcohol.'
Claims 'asleep at the wheel' taxmen still allowed it to send funds to Ireland

Barney Jones says 'heads must roll' at HMRC over 130m sweetheart deal

A Google executive who claimed the tech giant funnelled billions in British profits through Ireland to Bermuda today called its UK 130million tax bill 'trivial'.

Barney Jones, 37, who worked for the company between 2002 and 2006, said 'heads should roll' at HMRC for agreeing the 'sweetheart' deal.

Mr Jones handed over 100,000 emails to the taxman he claims proved the tech giant does business in the UK and was 'cheating' the taxpayer out of around 200million a year in tax.

Today he slammed 'naive' civil servants who agreed to a 130million deal to cover a decade of back-taxes when French officials angry about Google's offshore structure are set to get 380million.

It came as Steve Hilton, once the Prime Minister's closest political adviser, said he could understand public anger and admitted that big businesses are now operating 'above the law'.

Whistleblower: Barney Jones, 37, who worked for the US company between 2002 and 2006, said 'heads should roll' at HMRC for agreeing the 'sweetheart' deal - especially after he handed them 100,000 damning documents

HQ: This is Google's UK reception at one of its central London offices, where thousands are employed, but it insists that it has no 'fixed base' in Britain

Mr Hilton, who is married to former Google executive Rachel Whetstone, whose younger son has Mr Cameron as a godfather, also demanded a 'stronger spotlight on the behind the scenes lobbying businesses do to get their way'.

FACEBOOK SET TO BE NEXT GIANT TO FIGHT AGAINST TAX CLAW BACK Facebook is set to clash with tax officials next over its UK tax bill. Mark Zuckerberg's multi-billion pound business is being investigated by HMRC over whether it owes more tax between 2010 and 2014. According to the Financial Times today, Facebook has said that they will 'defend any and all such claims'. If it's liable it could end in court or perhaps another deal with the taxman. In 2014 it paid 4,000 in corporation tax, despite reporting UK revenues of 105million. Last year Facebook signed a 16.5million deal for a new London headquarters that will be its UK base for the next 15 years. It employs around 200 staff in Britain, and pays them an average of 237,000 a year. Facebook also claims like Google to have no permanent UK base and also sends money from sales via Dublin, with its lower rate of corporation tax. The social media giant also faces tax investigations in Ireland and the United States. Advertisement

Barney Jones handed investigators 100,000 emails that he alleged showed that London-based Google staff were closing deals - not the tech giant's claims this was done in Dublin, where there is a lower tax rate.

He said that tax officials just responded by saying: 'It's the politicians that set the taxes, we just apply them'.

Mr Jones told the Daily Telegraph: 'They were absolving themselves of responsibility for the fact that they are unable to collect tax from these larger companies. I said to them, 'you were the experts for the politicians. You have a responsibility'.'

HMRC appears to have accepted Google's claim it has no 'permanent' base in the UK, even though it is its biggest market outside the US where it employs thousands of staff.

This allows Google to send its UK profits believed to be around 1,2billion a year via Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda, where there is zero corporation tax.

Mr Jones said despite the evidence he offered them: 'HMRC have a very naive attitude'.

He told The Times: 'When a UK user interacts on a UK computer seeing adverts agreed by a Google UK sales rep, in what sense is that an overseas transaction?'.

Experts have said the 130million for a decade of tax should have been Experts have claimed been around 200million a year.

Aggressive French officials are close to getting 380million from Google even though Britain is its biggest market outside the US and employs thousands more people than in France.

Paris tax bosses have refused to accept Google's ploy of funnelling its international sales via Dublin to benefit from Ireland's lower tax rate.

Italian tax authorities have been chasing Google for 1billion in unpaid taxes.

A deal is expected to be struck soon between Italys Treasury and the US technology firm.

Prosecutors in Milan have led the probe into the internet giant, which in 2014 declared a turnover in the country of 54.4million (41.2million) and some 1.8million (1.4million) in profit.

The Italian Treasury recently struck a 240million tax deal with Apple, another US technology giant that has been criticised for its tax arrangements around the world.

Steve Hilton, former senior strategy adviser to David Cameron, told Today he understood public anger that big companies increasingly appeared to operate 'above the law'.

'There is a growing sense that companies that are so big and so dominant - not just in the marketplace but in the way they relate to governments, their lobbying efforts and so on - that they really are above the law.

'In this particular case they have made clear that they were abiding by the law then, when the arrangements caused anger, and now that they have new arrangements.

'The truth is that those of us who really believe in the power of business and capitalism to do good things for society - and I am definitely one of those people - we have really got to make clear to businesses that they have a responsibility to behave in a way that earns public trust.

'Otherwise you are going to see a growing call for policies that actually damage the capacity of business to grow and create jobs and do all the things we want them to do.'

Mr Hilton, pictured with David Cameron in Downing Street in 2010, was the prime minister's closest aide in the first years of his government

How Google got its tax break: This graphic shows how in 2014 the web giant's worldwide revenues came to 46billion and UK revenues 4.6billion. The tax paid on the UK revenues was the equivalent of 30million

Mr Hilton, who after leaving Downing Street in 2012 went to California to lecture and became CEO of tech start-up Crowdpac, said governments had to make it easier for competitors to enter markets.

Yesterday one of Britain's top Revenue officials admitted giant corporations such as Google will 'inevitably' pay less tax than ordinary firms.

Jim Harra, head of tax at HM Revenue and Customs, triggered outrage when he suggested it was unrealistic to expect multinational firms to pay as much as other businesses.

Google is set to pay three times more back tax to France than the UK, despite making three times as much money and employing four times more staff in its British outpost (pictured)

Mr Harra, who was involved in the tortuous six-year negotiations with Google, said big corporations would structure their affairs to pay lower bills than British competitors.

He said: 'I can certainly understand the (public) frustration. There is no doubt that multinationals have got capabilities and resources to make sure they organise themselves in the most tax-efficient ways  opportunities that are not open to domestic business that doesn't have subsidiaries around the world. That is an inevitability.'

Rachel Reeves, a Labour member of the Commons Treasury committee, said Mr Harra's approach to tackling the big technology giants was 'totally wrong'.

Steve Baker, a Tory member of the Treasury committee, which has launched an investigation into the fallout from the deal, said Mr Harra's comments demonstrated the need for sweeping tax reforms. Mr Baker said: 'The tax system is simply too big and complicated, and it's the big guys who are the winners.'

Senior Tories voiced disquiet at the Google deal. Former shadow home secretary David Davis called for its details to be published.

The Tories have long been accused of cosying up to the tech giant and Mr Davis told MailOnline: 'It makes it all the more important that both Google and the Government are absolutely transparent about this tax deal'.

Mr Davis also said HMRC had for years been 'appallingly poor' in its negotiations with big businesses in the past, which includes Google, Vodafone, Amazon and Apple.

He said: 'HMRC has 101 different measures that are punitive for small businesses or normal citizens but not companies like Google. You shouldn't allow big businesses to negotiate a lower tax rate because they create jobs, corner shops could not negotiate that so why should they.

'It is not difficult to solve, money earned in this country should be taxed in this country no matter where you say your nominal office in Dublin or Luxembourg is'.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell yesterday wrote to Mr Osborne demanding the release of the terms of the agreement, which is the subject of three separate inquiries.

Ministers have met with Google on average more than once a month since 2010. During that period, David Cameron held talks with the internet giant six times and Mr Osborne five times.

In April 2013 Treasury minister David Gauke flew to Los Angeles, where Google has offices, to meet with US companies to discuss the UK tax system.

Mr Vaizey, who is also a culture minister, visited the firm's 1billion HQ in London last week, where he spoke on the creative industries to Google and Facebook executives.

HMRC and the Treasury have both insisted details of the Google deal cannot be published without breaching their duty of confidentiality to individual taxpayers. Between 2006 and 2011 the company's revenue in the UK hit around 12.6billion but its corporation tax payments were 11.2 million.

In 2014 its UK revenues came to 4.6billion. The tax paid on this was the equivalent of 30million.

Critics claim the deal with HMRC will see Google pay an effective tax rate of three per cent. Mr Harra said this showed a fundamental misunderstanding of corporation tax, which is levied on profits, not revenues.

HMRC dismissed reports that it had failed to challenge Google's claim that it does not have a 'permanent establishment' in Britain.

Treasury sources stressed that Mr Osborne was not involved in negotiating the deal, which was handled by HMRC officials. One insider pointed out that the deal includes back taxes that should have been paid under the last Labour government. The source added: 'Labour has a dismal record in this area.'

Google said: 'We are paying the amount of tax that HMRC agrees we should pay. Governments make tax lawand Google complies with the law.'

The Government suffered embarrassment over its cosy relationship with Google as it emerged business minister Ed Vaizey (left) visited the firms London HQ two days before the 'sweetheart deal' was announced. George Osborne is now facing pressure to release details of the deal for scrutiny by MPs

George and a clumsy late-night PR briefing

By James Slack, analysis for the Daily Mail

George Osborne was given the cold shoulder by Number 10  a very rare experience  after disastrously misjudging the public and political mood over his Google deal.

The Chancellors woes stem from what was supposed to have been a cynical late-night PR coup. On Friday, Google briefed the BBC and the Financial Times that they had struck a deal to pay 130million in taxes.

It was agreed in advance that the news would be made public shortly after 9pm  when the first editions of the Saturday newspapers had already gone to bed, keeping scrutiny to a minimum.

On Friday, Google briefed the BBC and the Financial Times that they had struck a deal to pay 130million in taxes. Head of Google Europe, Matt Brittin (pictured), then gave a soft interview for the BBC's 10pm News

A soft interview with Matt Brittin, the head of Google Europe, was also provided for the BBCs 10pm News, in which he said: We want to ensure that we pay the right amount of tax.

Officials will not say when Downing Street, Mr Osborne or anybody else in Government was made aware of the deal.

But, at 12.13am on Saturday, Mr Osborne went on Twitter to declare: Good to see #Google paying more tax on past profits. We want successful businesses in UK  but they should pay their taxes.

Two minutes later came a second message, which is the one he is most likely to regret: Google tax bill is a victory for the action weve taken. I introduced Diverted Profits Tax. We now expect to see other firms pay their share.

Misjudged: At 12.13am on Saturday, Mr Osborne went on Twitter to declare: Good to see #Google paying more tax on past profits'. But by Sunday night MPs on all sides were picking the deal apart

For the HMRC and the Treasury it was then off to bed, with a publicity coup apparently landed. Except it didnt play out that way.

Labour, to their credit, were quick on to the airwaves on Saturday morning to point out that 130million was relatively trivial.

By Sunday night, MPs on all sides were picking the deal  which amounts to a tax rate of roughly 3 per cent  apart.

On Monday, the Speaker granted shadow chancellor John McDonnell an urgent question that Mr Osborne would normally be expected to answer.

Instead, he sent one of his deputies, David Gauke, to face the music  citing a prior engagement touring the north west with Bill Gates (itself an unfortunate coincidence, given he was missing an appointment to talk about the Governments dealings with one set of billionaires, to go on an outing with another).

This did not, however, spare him the deeply bruising experience of being left to hang by Downing Street.

Three times the Prime Ministers Official spokesman was asked if David Cameron agreed that the corporate small change extracted from Google was a major success and a victory.

The best she could offer was the observation that it was a step forward. Cue headlines that Number 10 was lukewarm.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson  Mr Osbornes main rival for the leadership  was leading a chorus of MPs who dismissed Googles payment as trivial.

Number 10 was yesterday busy trying to limit the fallout, insisting Mr Cameron and the Chancellor were on the same page on Google.

But he will not like it one bit that  so soon after the tax credits debacle  his famed political antennae once again did not detect trouble.

HOW GOOGLE FUNNELS ITS MONEY VIA A WEB OF COMPANIES TO SHRINK ITS TAX BILL Web: This is Google's complicated web of holding companies that allows the web giant to reduce its international tax bill. Google US has set up two Irish companies, one of which is based in Bermuda, with a middle company in the Netherlands. The network allows revenue from around the world to be sent back to Bermuda via Ireland and Holland, with their generous tax rates, allowing Google to reduce its tax bill Google manages to reduce its tax bill by using a set of subsidiary companies across the globe. The network - nicknamed the 'Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich' - is hugely controversial but totally legal. Google moved its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to Ireland in 2008 to benefit from the country's lower tax rate on profits. In Britain, its biggest market outside the US, Google is classified as having no 'fixed base' so none of its sales are technically made in the UK. It means when a British company buys a Google advert for the UK, for example, the money goes straight to Dublin, meaning it pays little tax to the UK Treasury. After paying Ireland's lower corporation tax rate of 12.5%, international profits are then funnelled via Google Netherlands Holdings, taking advantage of generous tax laws there. The profits are then sent to Google's main overseas company, another Irish business domiciled in Bermuda - where the corporation tax rate is zero. This complicated arrangement is explained by experts as the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich - with the Irish businesses being the bread and the Dutch subsidiary being its filling. It means that Google's overseas tax rate on all its profits falls to around five per cent when in the UK it would have to pay 20 per cent. Though this process has been branded 'immoral' by MPs, it is not illegal and Google says it has abided by international tax rules. The company also says its Bermuda operation does not impact the tax it pays in the UK. Executives say the reported UK profit margins are far below the group average because most of its algorithms and codes, which drive the company's profits, are developed outside the country. Google still pays the majority of its taxes in America, but on its American profits only. Advertisement

Revealed: The incredibly close links between Google and Downing Street

David Cameron and the Tories have links to the very top of Google going back decades.

The Prime Minister has enjoyed a special relationship with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who made billions making the business into a global powerhouse.

For years Mr Schmidt was on Mr Cameron's business advisory board, which is used as a 'sounding board' on business matters, but the Google executive left in July.

The billionaire has reportedly also offered Mr Cameron on economic policy.

Former Google CEO and now executive chairman Eric Schmidt chats to Prime Minister David Cameron at a drinks reception in 2012 - and has in the past advised Cameron on economic matters

Links: Steve Hilton was David Cameron's policy guru and his wife Rachel Whetstone (together left) was a Google PR executive who worked for the Tories (right with Boris Johnson)

The links do not end there because Steve Hilton, once the Prime Minister's closest political adviser, is married to Rachel Whetstone, who was vice-president of global communications at Google until last year before she moved to Uber.

Rachel Whetstone is a former No 10 aide and was Michael Howard's director of communications when he was Tory leader and Mr Cameron is godfather to her younger son.

Mr Hilton was godfather to Ivan Cameron, the late eldest child of David and Samantha.

Hilton and Whetstone have been called the 'most powerful couple in Britain' while she and Mr Cameron have known each other since starting at Conservative Central Office in their early 20s.

Hilton and Whetstone later bought an Oxfordshire holiday home close to the Camerons.

Last year Mr Hilton, who quit as Mr Cameron's former chief strategist, admitted too many of those at the heart of government go to the same dinner parties and send their children to the same schools.

Mr Hilton warned: 'Regardless of who's in office, the same people are in power. It is a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite no matter the electoral outcome.'

In 2013 David Cameron, accompanied by his wife Samantha and their daughter Florence, went to the wedding of a Naomi Gummer, a senior Google executive with the brief of 'public policy'.

She was previously a political adviser to Jeremy Hunt when he was Culture Secretary in charge of internet regulation  so he was in attendance too.

Guests: David Cameron and his wife Samantha attended the wedding of Naomi Gummer, right with husband Henry, a senior Google executive with the brief of 'public policy'.

The Hilton/Whetstone axis is not the only relationship between Google and Government.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has long been close to Downing Street and has in the past advised Cameron on economic matters.

In 2006, Mr Cameron travelled from visiting Google in Silicon Valley to Bournemouth to address the Conservative Party conference.

Then in 2010 when Cameron announced a review of Britain's intellectual property laws as the founders of Google have said they could never have started their company in Britain'.

In 2012 it emerged that Tory ministers held meetings with Google an average of once a month.

Official records show that David Cameron met Google executives three times and Chancellor George Osborne four times.

Google has held five meetings with the UK government over the past two years to discuss launching driverless cars in Britain.

It is not just a case of former government policy staff exiting through Westminster's 'revolving door' to Google  it works the other way too.

Tim Chatwin was Mr Cameron's head of strategic communications and had worked closely with Mr Hilton since the start of the Cameron modernisation project. He joined Google after the 2012 Tory conference.

Amy Fisher was once Google's PR chief for European affairs and later bagged a job advising then Justice Secretary Chris Grayling.

Tim Chatwin was Mr Cameron's head of strategic communications and joined Google after the 2012 Tory conference

THE BILLIONAIRE GOOGLE BOSSES WHO CLAIM TO BE PAID AS LITTLE AS $1 Larry Page, 42, Google co-founder and chief executive at Alphabet - Google's parent company Salary: $1 Worth: 36.8bn Computer scientist and entrepreneur Page (right) co-founded Google Inc with Sergey Brin - his friend at Stanford University - in 1998, when they developed a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages as part of a research project. Both men became billionaires in August 2004 when Google held its initial public offering. Page stepped aside as CEO in August 2001 in favour of Eric Schmidt, but re-assumed the role in April 2011. Last July he announced his intention to step aside a second time, in order to to become CEO of Alphabet. Documents filed with regulators in April last year also disclosed that Page and the company's other founder, Sergey Brin, limited their 2014 pay to $1 each, as has been their practice for years. In 2011, he splashed out $45m on his own super yacht - but unlike many moguls, he bought his yacht second-hand. Last year, a survey by review site Glassdoor named him as the highest-rated chief executive in America. Sergey Brin, 42, Google co-founder, Alphabet President and head of Google X Salary: $1 Worth: 36bn Born in the Soviet Union, Brin (right) and his family moved to the US when he was six years old. He met Google co-founder Page in 1995 after he went to Stanford University to study computer science, and the pair set up what was initially called BackRub would become the internet giant as part of a project. Like Page, Brin takes a salary of just $1, but his wealth is estimated at 36bn. Brin is also an investor in Airship Ventures and a private space travel company, Space Adventures. He became a benefactor for research into Parkinson's disease, after his mother, Eugenia was diagnosed with the disease. He also learned he has a genetic mutation increasing the odds that he he too will get it, and in February 2014, Brin and his now ex-wife Anne Wojcicki donated $53 million to Michael J Fox Foundation. After the couple's separation in 2013, Wojcicki remained in the couple's $7million Los Altos home with their two children. Eric Schmidt, 60, Executive chairman at Alphabet Pay/bonuses: $109m Worth: $9billion Schmidt (right) was brought in as Google's CEO in 2001 by creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who relied on his expertise to turn their modest internet search engine into a global media powerhouse. Also known for his colourful private life, Schmidt is among the world's richest people with an estimated fortune of $9 billion, according to Forbes. He reportedly owns a $72.3million superyacht, a $15 million penthouse in Manhatten, a home near Google's Silicon Valley HQ, and a $38 million estate in Montecito, California In April last year it was revealed he had earned nearly $109 million in that financial year while the company's stock slumped. Most of this consisted of stock valued at $100 million - the largest stock package that Schmidt had received since 2011 when Google Inc. awarded him a bundle valued at $94 million at the time he relinquished the CEO's job to company co-founder Larry Page. Schmidt also pocketed a $1.25 million salary, a $6 million bonus and perks valued at nearly $1 million. His total pay last year soared by more than five-fold from 2013 when his Google compensation was valued at $19.3 million. Sundar Pinchai, 43, Google chief executive Pay/Bonuses: $50m Worth: $150m Long-hailed as a rising star in the company, Pinchai (right) was promoted to Google's chief executive last August as part of the firm's radical shake-up and Alphabet rebrand. Twitter tried to poach him in 2011, and he was slated to become Microsoft CEO in 2013, but stuck with Google - where he has ascended to the top in just over six years. The 43-year-old married father-of-two (one son, one daughter) was born in Chennai, India, and reportedly did not own a telephone until he was 12. Pichai moved to America after his bachelor's degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He went to Stanford for his MSc, the University of Pennsylvania for his MBA, then worked in business management and engineering before joining Google in 2004. At Google he was one of the driving forces behind Gmail and Google Maps, and has headed up the development side of Chrome and Chrome OS. He is widely described as 'nice', 'mild-mannered' and warm'. Advertisement

Is the Google sweetheart deal another blunder by HMRC boss Dame Disaster?

Google's 130million 'sweetheart deal' with the taxman could be another blunder by HM Revenue and Customs boss nicknamed Dame Disaster.

HMRC has refused to say who signed off on the Google agreement but Treasury sources have said that the deal is likely to have been signed off by Lin Homer.

It is not the first 'sweetheart deal' agreed with HMRC as her predecessor Dave Hartnett also signed off agreements which saved Starbucks and Vodafone millions or even billions in tax payments.

High life: Dame Lin Homer is pictured here sipping champagne on a plane after an HMRC crisis and as boss it is likely she has signed off the Google deal

An inquiry into Google's tax arrangements started in 2009 when Mr Hartnett was in charge before he left in 2012 and Mrs Homer took over.

Her tenure has been tarnished by a string of blunders and she will stand down two years early in April with a pension worth 2.2million.

Her 35-year career in the public sector has been dogged by a string of scandals and failures.

Previous HMRC boss Dave Hartnett, pictured, also signed off agreements which saved Starbucks and Vodafone millions or even billions in tax payments.

In 2005, as chief executive of Birmingham City Council, she was caught up in a postal votes scandal, which a judge said would have 'disgraced a banana republic'.

Election judge Richard Mawrey said Mrs Homer, acting as the city's returning officer, had 'thrown the rule book out of the window'.

She went on to become the 200,000-a-year boss of the immigration system, at the time it was branded 'not fit for purpose' by the then Home Secretary John Reid.

During her time in charge it emerged that 1,000 foreign criminals had been mistakenly released, and 450,000 asylum case files were discovered dumped in boxes at the Home Office.

She later became head of the now defunct UK Border Agency, where she was criticised by MPs for a 'catastrophic leadership failure'.

Despite the criticism, she was rewarded with a new post as head of HMRC.

At the time of her appointment, in 2012, the Home Affairs Committee said it was 'astounded' that she was being promoted to become the chief executive at Revenue & Customs adding: 'The status quo, in which catastrophic leadership failure is no obstacle to promotion, is totally unacceptable.'

Recently pictures emerged of her as she raised a glass of champagne in first class, this is the head as she jetted off to America as her department floundered.

Days before her summer holiday last July she announced that 18million of the 60million annual calls to the HMRC helpline were never answered by staff.

Dame Lin was forced to set aside an extra 45million to improve customer service because so many calls were never picked up or were met with a busy tone.

She said at the time: 'Despite our best efforts, our call performance hasn't been up to scratch and we apologise to all those customers who have struggled to get through to us'.
Lt Norville Gorse (pictured during his pilot training in California) survived the first catastrophe but was then forced to ditch another bomber into the North Sea just two months later

The astonishing story behind a doomed American bomber's final flight off the east coast at the height of the Second World War has emerged.

Divers found the 73-year-old wreck of the huge US Army Air Force B-17 'Flying Fortress' in the sea off Blakeney, north Norfolk.

Researchers began to piece together how the warplane had come to its watery grave and the fates of the nine brave airmen on board.

The bomber's co-pilot, 2nd Lt Norville Gorse, survived the terrifying crash aged just 19.

And now his nephew, Lt Col John Gorse, a US Air Force pilot himself, has come forward with his uncle's account of the crash, which he wrote in 1989.

This new first-hand account of the first catastrophe, in which the pilot, Captain Derrol Rogers, was killed, adds to the tale assembled by North Norfolk Divers, who found the wreckage last year.

The 96th Bomb Group plane B-17 42-29752 ditched in the North Sea on May 13, 1943, after taking off from RAF Grafton Underwood, Northants, en route to a target in St Omer in France.

Lt Gorse's Flying Fortress, pictured here during its doomed flight near Blakeney, was crippled when part of its tailplane was shot off accidentally by one of the plane's machine gunners

Disaster struck when a machine gun went off without warning, hitting two crew members and shooting off the plane's right stabiliser.

In a jaw-dropping display of valour and skill, Capt Rogers and Lt Gorse managed to control the stricken aircraft for two hours.

They jettisoned their bombs in The Wash, off the UK's east coast, and allowed their seven crewmates to bail out safely.

Once the last two had jumped through the bomb bay near King's Lynn, Rogers and Gorse continued to the North Sea.

THE LIFE OF NORVILLE GORSE Born in 1924, he was the son of a Chicago tailor who counted gangster Al Capone among his customers. He began his pilot training aged just 19, eventually leaving the Air Force in 1945. Lt Gorse went on to design rockets for NASA. He married and has a son who is a specialist doctor in Missouri. His nephew remembers him as a disciplined man who would do 50 sit-ups and push-ups a day at the age of 79. Lt Norville Gorse ended the War in a PoW camp Advertisement

By now the engines were starting to fail and the battered bomber was fast losing height.

In his account, Gorse wrote: 'Rogers told me to jump.

'The engines began misfiring as I left my seat, so I sped back to the bomb bay and dropped out.'

Gorse estimated that the plane was, at that time, just 400ft above the water.

The American loosened his harness.

'I dropped into the water from about 20ft above the choppy sea.

'After entering the water, the shoreline undertow took hold.

'I didn't stop sinking until I could pull off my boots (about 20ft below the surface) and swim with full strength toward the surface.

'I was just able to hold my breath long enough to reach it.'

Gorse was in the sea for more than an hour before the crew of a rescue boat pulled him out with a large hook at the end of a pole.

Gorse was quickly returned to duty but Capt Rogers died of exposure.

Gorse, who died in 2003, was forced to ditch another Flying Fortress into the North Sea just two months later.

On July 28, Gorse was at the controls of Dallas Rebel, another Flying Fortress, serial number 42-30355, which took off from Snetterton Heath to bomb the Focke Wulf warplane assembly plant at Oschersleben, Germany.

The lumbering bomber was hit by German fighters 30 miles west of Heligoland on the way to the target, torching the bomb bay area and knocking out the intercom system.

Four crew bailed out by parachute and were never recovered.

They included two men who had survived the ill-fated May 13 accident with Gorse.

Gorse managed to ditch Dallas Rebel in the sea and he and the other five crew - including another three men who had been with him in the B-17 on May 13 - then drifted for three days in a small rubber dinghy.

The little party was eyed up by a predatory shark on their first afternoon at sea.

2nd Lt Gorse (third left) just after his rescue from the sea off Blakeney; he was back on duty after a short sleep and a meal but would be forced to ditch another bomber in the North Sea just two months later

Gorse's memoirs recall: 'We clearly saw his mouth, fin and that he was 10 to 12ft long.

'He then swam in a wide circle around the raft, coming to within a few feet of the boat, but not touching it.

'We were still, and he swam away after circling only once.'

On their second day adrift, 15ft-high waves threatened to capsize the dinghy in a storm, and they were drenched by rain and spray.

A hole in the bottom of their boat, accidentally gouged out by the 'cowboy boot heel' of a crew member, meant they were constantly bailing out water.

On July 30 they were spotted by a German Junkers JU-52.

Paul Hennessey and Mandy Frary led the team of North Norfolk Divers who discovered the wreck off the coast of Blakeney in November 2015

The divers were the first to uncover the remarkable courage of Capt Rogers and Lt Gorse, who saved the lives of nine people when they managed to keep control of the stricken plane for two hours

B-17 bombers, also known as Flying Fortresses, dropped 640,000 tonnes of bombs during World War II

Half an hour later a Nazi seaplane landed beside them and they were taken into captivity.

Gorse began his imprisonment in Stalag Luft III, the camp on which the iconic Steve McQueen film The Great Escape is based.

He was later transferred to another camp before he was liberated at the end of the war in 1945 and flown back to the USA.

A brilliant engineer, he helped design rockets for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a while.

He later worked for a major electrics company in the USA.

Mr Gorse married and has a surviving son, who is a specialist doctor in Missouri.

Lt Gorse pictured during his time as a German prisoner of war after he was rescued from the North Sea and captured by the Nazis

His nephew John Gorse remembers him as a very disciplined, physically fit man who was doing still doing 50 push-ups and 50 sit-ups a day aged 79.

Lt Norville Gorse's nephew, John Gorse, said his uncle taught him 'humans can live through a lot'

Family divorce meant that Lt Col John Gorse, 49, was not aware of his uncle Norville until he began researching his family history as a young man.

Poignantly, the young John first met his war-hero uncle at his pilot training graduation in Texas, having invited him to the ceremony.

Married with a family, Lt Col Gorse flies C-130 military transport aircraft and is currently commander of 440 Operations Group, based at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina.

During his career, Lt Col Gorse has also served in conflict zones including the First and Second Gulf Wars, Iraq, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia.

He recalls once asking his uncle Norville's advice on conflict.

His uncle replied: 'You will figure it out'.

Lt Col Gorse added: 'And I did figure it out.

'If I learnt anything from him, it was that humans can live through a lot.'
As the world remembers the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust, the plight of those who lived through the horror and survived has been forgotten.

Today is World Holocaust Day, a day for remembering the torturous conditions that millions of people were made to live and die in during the Second World War.

But in Israel, almost a quarter of all holocaust survivors are now living in poverty and have been left to die in squalor by the state.

For more than seven decades of her life, Melinda, 83, has been suffering from the same recurring nightmares of an incident she witnessed when she was just five years old.

Survivor: Romanian-born Melinda, 83, lost 14 members of her family in the Holocaust, including her father who was shot dead in front of her when she was just five years old

Born in Romania into a Jewish family, she was a child when World War Two erupted. One day, Romanian officers came to her house and marched her parents off to forced labour duty.

The little girl refused to let her parents go, and ran after them in tears. After the local Jews of the village were rounded up, the officers lined them up in a single file and forced them to march, including Melinda who stood behind her father.

Suddenly he was seized by a coughing fit so severe he stopped walking.

Furious to see the line stop moving, an officer walked up towards him, took out a pistol and without hesitation shot the man dead in front his daughter.

'I screamed and cried and I remember a non-Jewish woman dragging me away from there,' Melinda recalls, her voice shaking. Although she was reunited with her mother, 14 other members of her family perished in the Holocaust.

Coming to Israel was supposed to be a new start. But today, the octogenarian is one of 189,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel - 45,000 of these, Melinda included, live in poverty, subsisting on a budget of 3000 NIS (around 530) or less a month, with minimal support from the government.

Poverty: But now, living in a cramped flat in Lod, Israel, Melinda has such serious financial trouble that she can rarely afford to buy basic foods like meat and fish

Hard work: After she was fired from as cooking job, Melinda was forced to carry on working as a cleaner well past retirement age, sweeping and washing the stairs of apartment blocks until the age of 79 so she would have the money to survive

In her cramped flat in Lod, a city in central Israel notorious for its high rates of crime and drug trafficking, her fridge is almost empty save for numerous bottles of medicines which stand in place of milk cartons, orange juice and eggs.

Melinda is regularly forced to forego buying even basic products like meat and fish for weeks at a time.

Around the house, the wallpaper is peeling off from the walls and the toilet is flooded. On the sofa, which Melinda proudly said she's had for 32 years, a battery operated lamp is charging from a socket in the wall - 'in case the electricity cuts out'. In her bedroom, a light fixture above the bed hangs precariously from the ceiling on a few thin, exposed wires.

I screamed and cried and I remember a non-Jewish woman dragging me away from there. Melinda, 83, describes the moment her father was shot dead in front of her when she was just five years old

'It was my dream to come to Israel - I would've come sooner if they [Romanian authorities] had let us leave'. Upon arrival, Melinda got a job as a cook, work she said she enjoyed very much.

'I felt like I was the Queen of England. I felt free, independent.'

When she was later fired from her position, she continued working as a cleaner well past retirement age, sweeping and washing the stairs of apartment blocks until the age of 79 out of a necessity to do what she learnt to do best as a young child - to survive.

Yet Melinda said she considers herself one of the lucky ones, as she receives some support from the Association for the Immediate Help for Holocaust survivors, a volunteer-led group who helps the most needy pensioners who find themselves living in destitution. This week, the organisation took her on a fully-funded 'supermarket sweep' where Melinda could buy anything she liked without worrying about the cost.

'I'm not supposed to eat chocolate' said Melinda, as she stood in the middle of a supermarket aisle looking pensively at the five bars of milk chocolate she has just picked up from the shelf.

Misery: Scenes after the liberation of Belsen in April 1945. The photograph shows SS men at the camp being made to remove the dead bodies of their victims to lorries for burial. Melinda lost 14 members of her family during the Holocaust

'But, sometimes, I just close my eyes - and put a piece in my mouth,' she said with a mischievous grin, as she puts the chocolate into a supermarket trolley overflowing with meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, as well as cleaning detergent, socks, toilet paper - even a giant roll of table cloth. The trip to the supermarket and the purchases she said 'were a dream come true'.

'Since my husband died four years ago, I've lost around 30kg in weight,' she said, showing her wedding ring now dangling loosely on her finger.

The organisation regularly helps Melinda and others with groceries, household repairs, visits to the doctor and much more, and have fitted iron bars on her windows due to the high instances of crime in the area. Before this, Melinda said her flat was burgled twice.

Tami Sinar, director of external relations of Yad L'ezer l'Haver, an NGO that looks after Holocaust survivors in need in the Haifa region in northern Israel, said the demand for accommodation is higher than the number of available vacancies.

They don't cook and don't have money to buy meat or other things. They don't even have the energy to cook for themselves or to make a soup in the cold winter. Tami Sinar, director of external relations of Yad L'ezer l'Haver

'The cost of living is very expensive - the survivors need to pay rent, and buy food, pay municipality taxes, electricity and water bills- and they simply can't manage it,' she said.

According to a 2015 study by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, 30 per cent of the country's 189,000 survivors have forgone buying food products over the previous year out of concern for money, 25 per cent have not bought the relevant medicines they need, and around 27 per cent can't afford to heat their homes during the winter months.

Ms Sinar said she sees the consequences of this every day, when the organisation holds a soup kitchen for survivors who come to get a hot meal. 'They don't cook and don't have money to buy meat or other things. They don't even have the energy to cook for themselves or to make a soup in the cold winter.'

The organisation, like other NGOs in Israel striving to help holocaust survivors, operates with skeletal staff on a minimum wage and relies on volunteers to operate.

'I don't have an answer [as to why the government does not do more to help]. I wish I did,' added Ms Sinar.

In Israel, many are outraged by the conditions in which survivors like Melinda and others live.

In 2013, 83-year-old Holocaust survivor Dora Roth took to the podium in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, to denounce the situation facing tens of thousands of people.

Support: Thanks to the Association for the Immediate Help for Holocaust survivors, Melinda was able to go on a fully-funded 'supermarket sweep' where she could buy anything she liked without worrying about the cost

'Seeing a Holocaust survivor that doesn't have money for food or heat is your disgrace, the disgrace of this house,' she told Israeli parliamentarians. 'It was very hard to live with this for six years; I was hungry and dreaming of bread. The committees are unnecessary. Do one thing  let the remaining survivorslet us die honourably without deliberations.'

Until recently, holocaust survivors who had arrived in Israel by 1953 were automatically entitled to a monthly pension from the government - but those who arrived after 1953 did not enjoy such terms.

In 2014, the government approved an amendment to legislation, providing a budget of approximately $1.2billion (840million) over the course of five years and free medication for survivors. The legislation allocated equal treatment to survivors who had immigrated to Israel after 1953  but only if they had been in concentration camps or ghettos.

Seeing a Holocaust survivor that doesn't have money for food or heat is your disgrace. Holocaust survivor Dora Roth

'This isn't just an amendment to legislation, it is an amendment of an historic injustice,' said the then minister of finance, Yair Lapid.

But many say these steps are just a drop in the ocean.

Boris, from Belarus, is one of those who has only recently been able to access funds from the Israeli government with the help of the Association for the Immediate Help for Holocaust survivors. The funds he said are enough to obtain the necessary medical treatment he needs through private clinics - but are not enough for him to be able to rent out a place to live.

'Last year, I used to money to fund two cataract operations in my eyes,' he said. 'This year, I hope to use it in order to repair my teeth,' he said.

Many of Boris's teeth are cracking or have fallen out due to the malnutrition he experienced as a child during the war and, by going to private clinics, he hopes to be sure that medical treatment is successful and long-lasting. He was only three years old when his family escaped the war and the pogroms in Belarus by fleeing to Georgia.

'In Belarus, my father was working as a professional musician in the army. When the war began, they [the authorities] summoned all his friends to fight according to their specialities - pilots, for example. But my father was put in charge of the trains that evacuated people from Belarus. When he began working there, he realised that we had better leave too.'

But doing so was tricky. In their Soviet passports, Boris and his family were listed as Jews, which made travelling risky as the widespread rounding up and persecution of Jews was already underway.

Home: Boris, from Belarus, is also living in poverty despite surviving horrific treatment under the Third Reich. Although he now lives in accommodation for homeless people, his financial troubles were so bad he used to live in his car

Healthcare: Boris relies on support from survivor organisations to help him pay for the medical treatments he need, such as cataract operations and dental work. Due to the malnutrition he experienced as a child during the war, many of his teeth are cracked or missing

Bleak: A photograph taken in 1942 shows Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp, their last stop before the German concentration camps. Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors now live in poverty in Israel

With the help of his friends, Boris's father managed to change their passports, so that their ethnicity stated Russian, instead of Jewish.

'That was the safest way for us to flee out of Belarus. My father couldn't forge my mother's papers as she studied in a Jewish school and spoke terrible Russian - she'd be found out the moment she opened her mouth. But he managed to smuggle her out with us anyhow.

'The Brest Fortress held the Nazis out at first, but then they managed to break through.'

By that time, Boris and his family had already fled.

For four years, the family lived in open barracks in Georgia with other families, 'with hanging sheets separating one family from the other instead of walls,' he said. There, his younger sister died as a baby due to malnutrition. 'I remember burying my sister, how they set the tombstone on the grave, how the Georgians would put small stones on the grave, just like the Jews.'

I remember burying my sister, how they set the tombstone on the grave, how the Georgians would put small stones on the grave, just like the Jews. Holocaust survivor Boris

After the war, when the family came back to Minsk, Boris said his parents 'barely recognised it.'

'Everything! They destroyed everything! The Nazis had ransacked and ravaged the entire town. Only a few buildings were left standing which the Germans used as headquarters - everything else was bombed out.'

In Minsk, 'Yama' - meaning 'ditch' - one of the largest Jewish ghettos in eastern Europe where tens of thousands of Jews would be murdered, was set up.

'The ghetto was worse than a concentration camp,' said Boris, who has since studied the period after hearing the stories from his parents. 'The Nazis would come and shoot people en masse.'

'They didn't leave a stone unturned in Minsk - if we had stayed, we would've been killed.

'Today, there's a memorial on the site, showing these hopeless, starving people descending into the pit, with nowhere else to go. I keep a picture of this on my computer. Every year, the remaining Jews and some non-Jews meet there and remember those who had perished.'

Boris said he remembers seeing the German prisoners of war who had to stay behind in Minsk and help rebuild the city. 'They were there for around 10 years', he added.

Boris emigrated to Israel from Belarus as soon as he could in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Belarus, there was 'frightful antisemitism,' he said. 'it was difficult to get into university faculties, difficult to rise to the top of the job ladder: there was a joke going round that behind every boss there would be a Jewish deputy.'

Upon arrival in Israel, Boris, who speaks fluent Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish and plays in an orchestra, obtained a job in a factory making artificial leather for car seats. But 12 years later, the factory went bust, leaving Boris and hundreds of others unemployed. Already in his 60s, Boris struggled to find work.

Torture: This aerial view shows the layout of the largest concentration camp and death camp run by Nazi Germany during World War II at Auschwitz near the Polish town of Oswiecim, Poland, in August 1944

Desperate: Female inmates at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, many of them sick and dying of typhus and starvation, wait inside a barrack, in this photograph from April 1945

'I was not alone,' he emphasises. 'All around me, people who had mortgages and rents to pay could no longer afford to pay them. They lost their houses and had to sell off their possessions.' For Boris, it was impossible to even receive his pension from Belarus, despite having worked there for decades.

Unable to keep his flat, Boris moved to live in an empty construction caravan in Petah Tikva, a town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, sharing the dwelling with a few others.

'But then they [the Israeli authorities] decided to build a road there, so they evicted us and demolished the caravans. I was left on the street. What was I to do?'

At this point, the situation became so bad that Boris was forced to spend several months living inside his own car.

We keep on talking, but the Holocaust survivors are nearing the end of their lives. Miryam Greiver, a Holocaust survivor

'It was cold at night. I would run the heater on the full blast in the evening to make it warm.'

Due to the lack of the most basic necessities, Boris had to improvise. 'I parked my car near a cafe kiosk where you could buy something to eat for not very much. The owner used to let me use his kettle to make coffee. And it's not a secret that one can go to the beach, and use the outdoor showers there,' he said, recounting his story in a practical, even optimistic, tone, and frequently emphasising that there were others who were worse off than he was. 'I knew one man who spent five or six years living in his car.'

'For me, this experience was very sobering - it was like being dipped into freezing cold water,' he said. 'Ultimately, I feel it has made me stronger' he said. 'I survived those terrible times. I didn't run back to Belarus. I stayed and I survived.'

Eventually, Boris managed to find a job as a carer for older people.

'At first I tried working as a live-in carer looking after elderly person, but it was too difficult,' he said. 'You end up working almost 24 hours a day.'

But with an income of just 1080 NIS (190 GBP) per month and a small allowance from the state he was still unable to afford to live in his own flat. 'So I would rent a room in a flat with a family. I moved from place to place.

'People have to co-operate in order to live together - elderly couples would share a flat with others. You have to economise: instead of buying a kilo of tomatoes, you'd just buy three.'

For the past eight months, Boris has been living in accommodation provided by the Association for the Immediate Help for Holocaust survivors with other homeless holocaust survivors - currently, a room in a house with a single bed and a table where he keeps a television, a kettle, a computer and all his possessions. He has access to a bathroom next door, which he has kitted out to double as a make-shift kitchenette.

Disaster: When already well into his 60s, Boris - who is fluent in Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish - was made redundant along with hundreds of other workers when the factory where he worked went bust. He warned that the state doesn't do enough to support survivors

'Its ok. I cant invite friends over, but its not so terrible. At least Im not living from hand to mouth like before,' Boris said. 'I can buy myself something nice to eat. Thank God, Im not an alcoholic, Im not a drug addict, im not ill, I have a lot of friends. I take care of myself.

'But materially, we don't receive enough help. I don't have enough money to pay for a flat,' he said. 'The state needs to do more to help us.' The little help that came from the state due to recent legislation is helpful, but too little and too late. 'I used to spend 300 NIS (53) per month just on tablets alone'.

Despite the dire situation, in mid-2015, the Claims Conference, a Jewish-American non-profit organisation which supports a variety of projects for Holocaust survivors announced that it would be suspending the soup kitchens for holocaust survivors in Israel due to concerns from its funders that non-Holocaust survivors were also benefiting from the service. The decision was overturned in December 2015 after another stormy debate in the Knesset.

It's really unacceptable that those people who in their youth suffered so grievously should have to live out their declining years in deprivation, isolation and poverty. Stuart Eizenstat, special advisor on Holocaust issues to John Kerry

'The time has come for the Social Affairs Ministry, the prime minister, the Treasury, everyone, to unite and say, 'We are really going to help the Holocaust survivors, give them respect during the final years of their lives and give them money',' said Miryam Greiver, a Holocaust survivor addressing the parliamentary committee in December.

'We keep on talking, but the Holocaust survivors are nearing the end of their lives.'

Every day, around 40 Holocaust survivors die in Israel.

Poverty is also a problem for more than half a million holocaust survivors elsewhere in the world.

In the United States, out of the 140,000 survivors, one in four live on or below the poverty line, including one in two of the 60,000 survivors living in New York City alone. In the countries of the former Soviet Union, 'upwards of 85-90 per cent' of the survivors live in poverty, Stuart Eizenstat, special advisor on Holocaust issues to John Kerry said in May 2015.

'It's really unacceptable that those people who in their youth suffered so grievously should have to live out their declining years in deprivation, isolation and poverty,' he said.

But as well as economic hardship, holocaust survivors are also plagued by the psychological scars of the trauma they suffered during the Second World War, which follows many throughout their adult lives.

'It's something terrible,' said Ms Sinar. 'Some of them are very uptight, very nervous, they are suspicious, very edgy, they don't sleep in the nights. Some of them didn't manage to rebuild their lives again. Because of their trauma, their quality of life is very poor, and some of their children live abroad because they can't stand to live alongside this trauma all their lives. They're alone and need company.'

For Boris, continuing to volunteer in order to help immigrants from Belarus, as well as other holocaust survivors, is a key principle he is determined to stick by, despite economic hardships. 'All my life I've helped people - I will continue doing so,' he said.

'But it's easier to do this if you have food and a warm home.'
NHS boob job scrounger Josie claims she endured six months of sex abuse at the hands of Jimmy Savile

NHS boob scrounger Josie Cunningham claims she endured six months of sex abuse at the hands of Jimmy Savile, saying: 'Jimmy was the last ever man to call me pretty'.

The 24-year-old - who had an abortion so she could have a 7,000 nose job - claimed Savile tried to squeeze her boobs and kiss her when she was just 14.

And despite never going to the police about her ordeal, she says the events have left her deeply traumatised.

In an interview with The Sun, the mother-of-three, who bragged about using a 4,800 NHS boob job to become a celebrity, claims her body insecurities stemmed from the time she met Savile.

She told the newspaper: 'He went to squeeze my boobs. I don't think he was actually going to touch them but he was definitely testing the waters.

'It was at this age that I had started to realise my body wasn't developing as quickly as everyone else's.

'My chest hadn't changed since I was a child, yet my body had physically changed in every other way related to becoming a woman.'

Miss Cunningham, from Leeds, attended Temple Moor High School - close to where Savile lived in a flat.

Her first encounter with the pedophile came when she was walking home from school in December 2003.

She claimed the meeting was a 'bit of a fluke' and she then made efforts to bump into him again - often 'loosening her tie'.

Then in the New Year, outside Miss Cunningham's home, she claimed Savile, who raped children as young as nine while working at the BBC, asked her if she had a mobile phone before he attempted to squeeze her boobs.

She says she tried to control the situation, by hugging him and putting his hands on her bottom before he gave her a kiss on the side of her mouth.

Later that year, in April, Savile then called Miss Cunningham 'pretty' and 'darling' which made her feel 'more mature', according to the newspaper.

But the mother claims his compliments soon began to 'creep her out' and that she didn't like him that way.

The 24-year-old - who had an abortion so she could have a 7,000 nose job - claimed Savile (pictured) tried to squeeze her boobs and kiss her when she was just 14

In a interview, the mother-of-three, who bragged about using a 4,800 NHS boob job to become a celebrity, claims her body insecurities stemmed from the time she met Savile

The single mother, pictured left arriving at Leeds Magistrates Court, claims she has never gone to the police about her encounters but says the events have left her deeply traumatised

And during another encounter she says Savile, who was wearing short running shorts, gave her a cuddle before pushing himself against her.

The single mother claims he then put his hand down the front of the waistband on her skirt as she pulled away.

Today her agent and friend Rob Cooper said Miss Cunningham had confided in him about her ordeal three years ago.

He told MailOnline: 'Josie confided in me three years ago that there was a celebrity that had acted inappropriately towards her in her childhood, it clearly upset her so I never pushed her to speak about it again.

'About a year ago she revealed what had happened and who the celebrity was. Since that point we've tried to encourage her to seek psychological help in dealing with any knock on effect this may have had.'
It comes as a Belgian mayor suggested a ban on male refugees at pools

Swedish police are to send undercover officers in a bid to prevent attacks

Swedish police have resorted to sending undercover officers to Stockholm's swimming pools amid a rising number of sex assaults on girls by migrants.

Plain clothes police will monitor swimming baths in the Swedish capital after 'a few dozen' suspected cases of sexual harassment were reported mainly by parents of teenage girls.

It comes amid reports that a number of girls said they had been sexually assaulted by young male asylum seekers at the city's Eriksdalsbadet Olympic baths in the past three weeks.

The four cases involve girls under the age of 18 and have taken place in hot tubs, pools or in the changing rooms of Eriksdalsbadet, Stockholm (pictured), in the past three weeks

Swedish police have resorted to sending undercover officers to a Stockholm's swimming pools amid a rising number of sex assaults on girls by migrants (file picture)

The four cases involve girls under the age of 18 and all sexual assaults have taken place in hot tubs, pools or in the changing rooms.

The baths have started segregated whirlpool bathing after an increase in reports by girls and women that they had been groped underwater.

Stockholm Police spokesman Kjell Lindgren did not want to comment on the suspected perpetrators except to say they were mostly boys or young men.

But police have said there has been an increase in reports of sexual assaults against women by foreign men.

Lindgren said measures were also being adopted at the Eriksdals baths.

'We do not wish to point fingers to a specific group, but we are talking about boys without a parent or guardian,' Stockholm City police chief Elisabeth Anestad told Expressen.

Eriksdalsbadet, which is the biggest aquatics centre in Stockholm, has previously reported a spike in sexual assaults - mainly incidents involving boys and young men groping women.

As a result, Stockholm police will not have uniformed police regularly patrolling the swimming centre, and the pool's hot tubs are now segregated by sex.

Marc Vanden Bussche, mayor of Kokzijde, Belgium, has proposed a temporary ban on male asylum seekers in the town's public pools

It comes as a Belgian mayor announced that he would propose banning male refugees from a swimming pool for a month on Monday after complaints from female bathers.

'We had women complain because they felt stared at and selfies had been taken with them. It's escalating. We never had any complaints before,' said Marc Vanden Bussche, mayor of the coastal town of Kokzijde.

Bussche said he had decided to act after police were called in to investigate an Iraqi man who had caught an 11-year-old girl as she came off a slide.

The politician from the Dutch-speaking liberal party Open VLD, said he would propose a one-month ban at a council meeting on Monday to allow tempers to cool. The town recently took in 300 asylum seekers.

'In the meantime we will teach them about our way of life and explain the rules of the pool to them,' he said, adding the ban would not affect children and their mothers.

Belgium's state secretary for migration, Theo Francken, advised against the move.

'It's never wise to punish a whole group for the transgressions of a few,' he said in a tweet. 'Asylum seekers live in open centres, they're free to go swimming. But hands off!'

These are only the latest incidents reported in mainland Europe in recent weeks involving sexual assaults allegedly committed by male asylum seekers in public swimming pools.

The German town of Bornheim, 19 miles south of Cologne, temporarily banned male asylum seekers from its pool this month after receiving complaints of sexual harassment.

Last week, the historic baths Johannisbad baths in Zwickau, Saxony banned all migrants after male asylum seekers had been caught masturbating in a hot tub and sexually assaulting women.
Germany has banned a far-right website for spreading 'racist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic content' and arrested two people in a clampdown on hate crime.

The ban on the Altermedia Deutschland platform came as raids were carried out in homes in four German states as well as in the northeastern Spanish town of Lloret de Mar.

Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the clampdown was 'a clear sign that the rule of law doesn't allow hate crime'.

Germany has banned a far-right website for spreading 'racist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic content' and arrested two people in a clampdown on hate crime (file picture)

The prosecutors' office said that two Germans, identified only as Jutta V. and Ralph Thomas K. in line with German privacy rules, were arrested on suspicion of founding a criminal organisation and incitement. Three other suspects weren't arrested.

The two arrested people were the administrators of the Altermedia website and therefore responsible for its content.

Material included banned Nazi slogans and the denial of the Holocaust as well as incitement of violence against foreigners, the prosecutors' office said.

Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere (pictured centre) said the clampdown was 'a clear sign that the rule of law doesn't allow hate crime'

The server was located in Russia to prevent German authorities gaining access, it added. German officials asked Russia to switch it off in the coming days.

German security officials say that the far right has become much more savvy in using of the Internet and social media to push its message to a broader audience.
A murdered is taunting the mother of his schoolboy victim from behind bars.

Lewis Daynes, 20, appears to have posted blogs blaming the family of Breck Bednar for his death.

He mocks Breck's mother, Lorin LaFave, for her claim to have been incapacitated with grief. And he accuses the media of falsely portraying him as a paedophile.

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The mother of schoolboy Breck Bednar (pictured) who was murdered by an internet sex predator he met while gaming online says the killer has been posting rambling open letters from his prison cell

Daynes lured 14-year-old Breck to his flat and launched a 'sexually or sadistically motivated' knife attack in February 2014.

But in the online posts Daynes claims Breck attacked him first  because the younger boy had anger problems caused by his family.

Miss LaFave told the Daily Mail that the killer, who was jailed for life last year, was lying to torment her.

'Everything that he does is with the intention of controlling and manipulating people,' said the 48-year-old.

'He is a convicted murderer who is able to use the weapon of the internet to harass my family. He is taunting me from behind bars and the system is allowing him to do it.'

Breck's mother Lorin LaFave (left) believes killer Lewis Daynes (right) has been posting open letters bemoaning his lot online from his prison cell

It was unclear last night how Daynes posted the blogs, which can be seen on his Twitter account.

The Prison Service insists that his cell was searched after the posts appeared and that no electronic devices were found.

A spokesman added: 'Prisoners are banned from using mobile phones and social media. If they break the rules they will be disciplined and can have time added on to their sentence.'

The first note was posted on November 26. Miss LaFave, who was born in the United States, believes it was timed to clash with Thanksgiving celebrations that day.

It claims to offer comfort to Breck's family by saying 'his death ensued seconds after the injury' in a fight.

But the blog then alleges the teenager was subjected to 'drunken, abusive behaviour' at home which drove him 'away from family life and towards the virtual world'.

Breck died in February 2014, after Daynes lured him to his flat in Grays, Essex, (pictured) bound his legs and arms with tape and slit his throat

The second of the two letters, which Ms LaFave believes were written by Daynes, was posted yesterday, prior to a documentary Murder Games: The Life and Death of Breck Bednar airing on BBC Three. She is pictured during her appearance on the programme

The second letter was posted on Tuesday, hours before a BBC3 documentary about the case.

In it Daynes claimed he was no sinister internet paedophile and railed at descriptions of his grotty flat.

He accuses Miss LaFave of lying about being bed-bound and incapacitated after the murder because she set up a charitable trust within 48 hours of her sons death.

In fact, the Breck Bednar Memorial Foundation was set up by friends to raise awareness of the risks of the internet. Miss LaFave, who is divorced from Brecks father, oil futures trader Barry, 51, believes the abuse allegations are aimed at her.

She said she had done no worse than shout at her son to stop him staring at his computer, and drink was not involved.

Breck was killed after secretly taking a train to Daynes flat in Grays, Essex. There was evidence he was bound with duct tape, indicating a sexual motive, prosecutors said.

Ms LaFave says she had a lot of contact with Daynes, and knows the way that he speaks - leaving her in no doubt that he wrote the two letters

Daynes met Breck (pictured) through online gaming and spent months grooming him, turning him against his family, his school and even his Christian faith

On the night of his death, Breck told his oil tycoon father, Barry Bednar (left), that he was staying with a friend. Ms LaFave (right) had raised concerns with police about Daynes' in the months before her son's death

Chelmsford Crown Court heard they had met through an internet forum where they talked about their shared obsession with video games, some violent. Daynes slowly turned Breck against his family, school and even his Christian faith.

Essex Police are investigating whether Daynes, who is serving a minimum of 25 years after admitting murder, wrote the letters and how they were posted online.
He was living in apartment with Mann but nature of relationship is unclear

They want to find Gambian who had lost right to stay in Austria

An American nanny has been found 'murdered' in her apartment in Vienna, local police have confirmed.

Lauren Mann was discovered lying half-naked, face-down on a mattress at her fourth district address on Tuesday.

Authorities say the 25-year-old's body was found surrounded by a 'considerable amount of blood' as police confirmed they are treating her death as a homicide.

Lauren Mann (pictured in a Facebook photo) was discovered lying half-naked, face-down on a mattress at her fourth district address on Tuesday

She had a pullover across her face and her arms were stretched along her body, local reports said.

A Gambian man who had lost his right to stay in Austria had been living with her in the apartment but has not been traced.

He is one of the focuses of the police inquiry, a source told one local newspaper. The nature of their relationship was not explained.

Mann, a nanny from Paonia, Colorado, had been studying and working in Vienna for around three years.

According to The Local, the young woman's employer became alarmed when she failed to arrive for work on Monday.

He called police who, with the help of firemen, broke open the door to her studio apartment on the Wiedner Hauptstrasse on Tuesday evening.

They found her body inside in complete darkness. All of the light bulbs in her apartment had burned out.

Authorities say the 25-year-old's body was found surrounded by a 'considerable amount of blood' as police confirmed they are treating her death as a homicide

Mann, a nanny from Paonia, Colorado (pictured in Facebook photos) had been studying and working in Vienna for around three years

An autopsy showed she had no external injuries. Detectives have now ordered a toxicological report to check if she had any suspicious substance in her bloodstream.

Police spokesman Thomas Keiblinger said blood found near her head may indicate an internal injury.

Her employer described her as 'very reliable', hence why he found it unusual when she did not arrive at work.

Mann had studied piano and French at the University of Colorado before moving to Europe to study German in Vienna.

Her friends have begun paying tribute to the 25-year-old after she was found dead in her Vienna apartment yesterday.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Online, close friend Martin Skubal described her as 'a sensitive and nice girl' and added that he 'loved to speak with her about music'.

Skubal, who also lives in the Austrian capital, continued: 'I'm really sad about it [Lauren's death].

'Lauren was a sensitive and nice girl and I loved speaking with her.'

Another close friend, Svante Helmbk Tiren, took to social media to share the news of her death and wrote on Facebook that he will 'miss her every day'.

The Swede, who studied at Vienna's Akadmie der Bildenden Kunste Wien, added: 'Today I have lost one of my dearest friends, Lauren.

'I will miss her every day and my heart goes out to all her family and friends. Please remember to cherish and be grateful for all the wonderful friends and people in your lives.'

The creative 25-year-old described herself as an avid reader and lover of art, and literature and music.

The U.S. Embassy in Vienna confirmed her death and said it was working with Austrian authorities on their investigation.

'We extend our deepest condolences to her loved ones,' the embassy told NBC News.
A billboard criticising 'greedy politicians' faces ridicule after the campaign's central hashtag contained a glaring error.

The board was erected in Iowa in an apparent bid to persuade residents they should not support Washington's 'pointless vanity projects'.

But the hashtag used on the poster - 'Take Back Are Country' - has been ridiculed by social media users who pointed out its grammatical inaccuracy.

A billboard criticising 'greedy politicians' faces ridicule after the campaign's central hashtag contained a glaring error. The board was allegedly pictured (above) earlier this month

Matt Mozzone wrote on Twitter: '#TakeBackAreCountry what a bunch of uneducated yokals!'

And Nick Smith, who also appeared to mock the political stance of the campaign, added: 'Teaching the difference between "our" and "are" in school? That's commie bulls**t!'

The campaigner has since addressed the mistake on their Facebook page, which is called Shares From Your Aunt.

A post written on January 23 read: 'A lot of cyberbullies are trying to tell me there's a grammer error on the board.

The hashtag used on the poster - 'Take Back Are Country' - has been ridiculed by social media users who pointed out its grammatical inaccuracy

'I asked the billboard guy about it, and he emailed me saying "Look lady, that's the way it's written". So I hope that settles it. Its written correctly' (sic).

Explaining the billboard, the campaigner added: 'If we really want to #TakeBackAreCountry from the greedy politicians and there media elite enablers in hollywood, we've got to get are message in front of a broader audience than just the Internet' (sic).
MPs could be rehoused in a courtyard in Whitehall as part of plans to revamp the decaying Palace of Westminster.

Parliamentary authorities are searching for a new home for MPs and peers while essential repairs take place in the Palace, which is riddled with asbestos, leaking ceilings, rodents and moths and was described as a 'death trap' by one close to the refurbishment plans.

It could see a specially-made chamber in the courtyard outside the Department of Health being built  just 100 yards down the road from the centuries-old Palace of Westminster.

The proposal to move to the Department of Health is among the most popular because it is housed just 100 yards from the Commons entrance and many MPs' offices are in the adjacent building at 1 Parliament Street

An independent report commissioned by Parliament estimated that the revamp would cost more than 7bn and take 32 years to complete if politicians did not move out of the building temporarily.

But the costs could be halved to an estimated 3.5bn and take just six years if MPs and peers agree to a temporary new home.

Plans to rehouse MPs to a location in Whitehall appears to be the preferred option among MPs, rather than relocate outside London, as some have suggested.

Remaining close to the Palace of Westminster would be the most convenient option for government ministers, who would continue to work in Whitehall departments and must be held accountable to Parliament.

Plans to rehouse MPs in Whitehall was discussed by Labour's Shadow Leader of the Commons at Monday's Parliamentary Labour party meeting, according to reports in the Guardian and Huffington Post.

Mr Bryant told his colleagues that Parliament's Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster had all but ruled out the idea of relocating MPs outside London.

Chris Grayling, the Leader of the Commons and chairs the cross-party committee overseeing the refurbishment plans, is expected to tell Tory MPs of the plans later this week.

Where to relocate roughly 800 peers is proving more difficult.

Chris Bryant, the Shadow Leader of the Commons, briefed Labour MPs about the plans to relocate MPs at a meeting on Monday. He told them that the idea of rehousing MPs outside London had been all but ruled out

MPs will have to move out of the House of Commons chamber temporarily while the refurbishment takes place

One idea is to move MPs to the House of Lords, pictured above. The last time MPs debated in the upper chamber was after bombing damaged the House of Commons chamber during the Second World War

Similar courtyards in the Treasury or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office could be used as part of the refurbishment, which is expected to begin following the 2020 general election.

MPs moved to the House of Commons during the Second World War after bombing damaged the chamber.

Moving MPs to a courtyard in the Department of Health is popular with some MPs because it could easily be integrated into the current Parliamentary estate.

It is located next to 1 Parliament Street and Porcullis House, where many MPs' offices are housed, meaning MPs could go to vote in the temporary chamber without leaving the estate and avoiding security concerns.

Department of Health staff would have to move out of the offices in Richmond House at 79 Whitehall while a temporary chamber is built.

Previous proposals for relocating MPs caused controversy, with a plan to house politicians in an underground car park generating outrage because it was the spot where Tory MP Airey Neave was killed by an IRA car bomb in 1979.

A suggestion to rehouse MPs in an underground car park on the estate caused outrage because it was the spot where Tory MP Airey Neave was killed by an IRA bomb in 1979

Tory MP Stuart Andrew told the Mail on Sunday that the plan was 'bonkers'.

'The very idea of us holding debates in an underground car park  especially that location  will be anathema to most of us,' he said.
While human children must learn to read and write, cheetah cubs must learn how to perfect their hunting skills.

This brilliant footage shows adorable cheetah cubs learning to hunt for the first time at Naankuse wildlife sanctuary in Namibia, Africa.

The playful cubs were taken away from their mum at a young age to live in a wildlife sanctuary, to protect them from predators  but it means the young cubs never learned to fend for themselves in the wild.

So staff at the sanctuary are teaching the cubs how to hunt on their own for the first time.

Got you! The adorable video was taken at Naankuse wildlife sanctuary in Namibia, Africa and shows adorable cheetah cubs learning to hunt for the first time by staff

By giving the cubs meat wrapped up in cloth, volunteers are encouraging the wild cats to rip open their prey to get to the tasty grub.

However, the cubs clearly still have some way to go before they'll be ready to tackle wild prey and are keen to play fight and take naps beside each other in between their lessons

Stacey Feltham, wildlife volunteer at the sanctuary, said: 'These cubs are growing quicker and quicker every day  in all honesty they are a little miracle.

'They were found on the soft release site owned by Naankuse, where cheetahs go to live the most natural life possible in captivity  with hopes that one day they will be released.

'Against all odds a wild male cheetah had climbed the electric fencing and mated with a female cheetah known as Pepper on the inside of the fence.

'The cubs were discovered by chance by two biologists studying the cheetahs.

Come here! By giving the cubs meat wrapped up in cloth, volunteers are encouraging the wild cats to rip open their prey to get to the tasty grub

Walkies: They were found on the soft release site owned by Naankuse, where cheetahs go to live the most natural life possible in captivity  with hopes that one day they will be released. Against all odds a wild male cheetah had climbed the electric fencing and mated with a female cheetah known as Pepper on the inside of the fence. The cubs were discovered by chance by two biologists studying the cheetahs

'They had a high chance of being killed by another cheetah in the site, so to protect them they were removed from their mother and brought back to the reserve.

'Due to the removal, the cubs weren't taught how to hunt  so we teach them through playing.

'Volunteers are encouraged to interact with the cubs, to help the cubs grow more trust and understanding of people  and to have an epic play time session that the cubs adore.'

Stacey Feltham, wildlife volunteer at the sanctuary, said: 'These cubs are growing quicker and quicker every day  in all honesty they are a little miracle'

Today there are fewer than 10,000 cheetahs in Africa, with about 70 percent of those in Namibia  compared to more than 100,000 wild cheetahs in the 1990s.

Stacey added: 'Many Namibian cheetahs live on livestock farms, often creating conflicts that result in the death of the cheetah  in the past 16 years 90 percent of the cheetah population have been ripped apart.

'The African cheetah population is in the hands of farmers, and we need to educate them on how to protect their livestock from predators.

'If we don't turn things around now, we can say goodbye to these beautiful animals.'

Rough and tumble: The playful cubs were taken away from their mum at a young age to live in a wildlife sanctuary, to protect them from predators  but it means the young cubs never learned to fend for themselves in the wild
A mother wore her night clothes on the school run just a day after a primary school headteacher asked parents not to drop their children off while wearing their pyjamas.

Kate Chisholm, headteacher at Skerne Park Academy, Darlington, is urging the adults to dress properly so they set a decent example to pupils.

She complained about the trend after noticing an increase in the number of parents wearing pyjamas and slippers at the gates - with some even attending school assemblies and meetings in nighttime attire.

But today parent Karen Routh, 49, from Darlington, defied the head's recent letter and attended the school in red pyjamas decorated with snowflakes.

Another parent Kim Daniel has taken the drastic step of removing her two children from school.

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Parent Karen Routh, 49, (left) completed the school run in her pyjamas in protest against headteacher Kate Chisholm (right), who asked parents not to bring their children to school in their nightclothes

The mother said she was running late as she arrived at Skerne Park Academy in Darlington wearing her pyjamas

Ms Routh, who rushed into school with her eight-year-old daughter Holly, said she didn't have time to get dressed.

The former receptionist said: 'I am running late, this is a one-time thing. I even forgot to put my false teeth in!

'I got stuck at home, my leg went into cramp and I didn't want to be late dropping Holly off so I just grabbed my coat. After all I didn't want my child to be late for school.

'I wouldn't ever come in my slippers but if I want her to get to school on time, that's the most important thing.

'I see parents in pyjamas come in with their children all of the time. I only saw the Head's letter last night when my friend showed it to me on Facebook.'

Ms Routh said it didn't matter what parents chose to wear on the school run, it was about getting your child to school on time.

Her trip to the school this morning came as mother-of-three Ms Daniel removed her children from the school in response to the letter.

The 23-year-old, who says she rarely wears pyjamas for the school run, took her kids, Julian, six, and Theo, five, to school as normal this morning.

But, the full-time mum said: 'Later in the morning, when I was getting off the bus I saw at the school that Ms Chisholm was dressed in a low-cut top, talking on her mobile, wearing high heels and I thought, I'm not having this.

Primary school headteacher Kate Chisholm (pictured) has written a letter to parents to ask them to stop dropping off children while wearing their pyjamas

She wrote the letter (pictured) after noticing an increase in the number of parents wearing pyjamas and slippers at the gates - with some even attending school assemblies and meetings in nighttime attire

'I don't even really wear pyjamas to school but I don't think it's right, her telling us how to dress when she dresses like that.

'What example is she setting the kids? She's already tall and she wears high heels.

'I'm not going to take them back. This is it now. I told the school I was taking the kids out today because of the fuss and they said that was fine.

'If it was any other day they would be going mad. It's a load of double standards.'

She said: 'As for the message it sends to children, I don't think any child would want to grow up and think about wearing pyjamas in the outside world to interview or to work. When I worked as a receptionist I would wear suits.'

Ms Routh was taking her her eight-year-old daughter Holly to school

At the school gates today, other parents said they hoped more parents would turn up in their pyjamas in protest to the headteacher's letter.

Full-time mum Julie Craggs, 38, who is mum to ten-year-old Imogen, said: 'I know a lot of parents in the school and they are not happy, it is ridiculous.

'When we received the letter from Imogen I admit I was quite shocked. I thought it was very harsh and came across a bit snobbish.

'I have never worn pyjamas to school but I don't have anything against anyone who wants to as I have seen it myself when I drop her off.'

Parent Claire Slaven, 33, said she felt judged after reading the letter from head Kate Chisholm and has since received abuse online.

She added: This has made everyone on Skerne Park look bad  and thats not fair on those of us who dress properly to bring our kids to school  weve had all kinds of abuse on social media since the letter was sent. Were not lazy, idle people. The majority of the parents are decent and hardworking.

Mother Cheryl Wright, 30, said: [The head] might be trying to raise standards but as long as the kids arrive on time and are well dressed what harm does it do?

Another mother said: Its just snobbery. The head should be dealing with the real issues at the school, like the bullying, instead of looking down on people from Skerne Park and telling them what to wear.'

In her letter to parents, Ms Chisholm wrote: 'I have noticed there has been an increasing tendency for parents to escort children to and from school while still wearing their pyjamas and, on occasion, even slippers.

'Could I please ask that when you are escorting your children, you take the time to dress appropriately in day wear that is suitable for the weather conditions.'

Ms Chisholm said her letter was not a 'judgement' but was in a bid to set good example for the children.

'If we're to raise standards it's not too much to ask parents to have a wash and get dressed,' she said.

'I have had loads of support from the community and people saying it's about time something was done. If I get the parents on board then we often get the children too and in order to get the best chances for the children we have to raise the bar with the parents.'

Following the letter she defended her decision, saying the trend had 'escalated', particularly for the afternoon pick-up.

'Then there were some parents turned up in pyjamas to see their children in the Christmas performances and even for parents evening,' she said. 'It is now becoming the norm.

Phil Naylor (left), a parent who has children at the school, received the letter and said he supports the request but Connie (right) who has a niece at the school, disagreed and turned up in nightwear in protest

'It is important that parents are role models and for them to see that they should maybe not attend events in nightwear.

'That they should not sit around in pyjamas because they don't have to get dressed for work.

'I don't give two hoots how people dress at home, I just think if they're a good role model for their children and want them to get a job and better yourself then they ought to get dressed.'

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Ms Chisholm said she had mainly had support from the parents who received the letter.

'I've had lots of positive remarks from parents at the school and in the community,' she said. 'But I have also had negative remarks, mainly from those people who choose to wear pyjamas.

'But in the next breath they have told me they consider that I dress too nice for work. Us staff have a dress code and the children have a dress code too. It's about us all feeling part of a team.

'I imagine there might be some people who keep up wearing pyjamas for the next six months to prove a point.

'I can't force people to get dressed but I will keep sending letter home in the hope that they decide to put on a pair of jeans.'

Phil Naylor, a parent who has children at the school, added: 'We all support the school and I hope this helps get the message across to parents.

'It's disgraceful, we should be guiding our children not giving them bad habits.'

Five years ago, parents and carers in Middlesbrough were also requested to stop wearing pyjamas on the school run.

Headteachers across 11 schools requested that mums and dads show decency and respect when attending school premises.

In another incident, Joe McGuiness, head of St Matthews primary in Belfast, wrote a similar letter to parents saying as many as 50 mothers would regularly turn up at the school gates in pyjamas and slippers.
One of the adverts showing a teddy bear that looks like Hitler that sparked outrage in Norway

An advert highlighting the dangers of dust gathering on toys has been released in Norway after featuring teddy bears that look like Hitler, Colonel Gaddafi and former North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Il.

The campaign by the country's Heart and Lung Association wanted to show parents that dust and other microbes can accumulate on children's soft toys in their bedrooms.

The advert was prompted by a rise in asthma and allergy cases across Norway, which experts say can be caused by dust.

But as part of the shocking campaign, the adverts feature teddy bears dressed as the Nazi leader, the former Libyan prime minister and the North Korean dictator.

They are pictured under the heading: 'Teddy bears can be dangerous.'

It then goes in to say: 'Collections of dust in children's rooms can provoke asthma and allergies. Wash stuffed animals four times a year.'

But the advert sparked outrage, especially with Jewish leaders in the country, which was occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Members of the Norwegian Jewish society, Det Mosaiske Trossamfund, said they were concerned that a Hitler teddy might soften the mass murderer's image among the young.

One said: 'Hitler was a mass murderer and he doesn't deserve this kind of attention.

'I'm worried that Hitler can be made to seem less dangerous when he's used in such a way.'

But the firm Kitchen, who were behind the adverts defended the campaign saying it highlighted the issue.

Kitchen spokeswoman Maren Gimnes said: 'With a simple and clear message combined with a very bold idea we managed to turn LHL Asthma and Allergy from an organization no one knew to being on everyone's lips.

'But most importantly, the Norwegian people became aware of a very important fact - that they have to wash their stuffed animals so they don't become dangerous.'

The adverts were designed to highlight the dangers of dust accumulating on children's toys. Pictured are bears from the other adverts dressed as Kim Jong-il, left, and Colonel Gaddafi, right

While copywriter Bendik Romstad added: 'By focusing on children's bedrooms we want to stop the problem of asthma and allergies before it even starts to develop.

'This campaign addresses how dangerous stuffed animals can be if they are not washed regularly.

'For children, stuffed animals can be just as dangerous as the world's worst despots.'

Asthma and Allergy said that the number of children in Norway affected by chest and allergy problems has increased four-fold since the 1970s.

It says for parents to wash their children's teddy bears four times per year and to always wash children's bedding at 60 degrees Celsius.

And it believes that the image of despots on teddies was necessary in order to get their message to hit home.
A woman promoting a fur fashion shop in Moscow was shot dead by a resident of the same block who was irate about her constant loudspeaker announcements.

Anna Nosova, 25, was gunned down from a third floor window by nuclear engineer Sergei Galakhov, 58, as she tried to lure customers into her store near Lyublino metro station.

Her killing stunned her co-workers and people on the crowded pavement. She was carried into the fur store but an ambulance crew which rushed to the scene pronounced her dead.

Anna Nosova (pictured), 25, was gunned down as she tried to lure customers into her fur store in Moscow

The 25-year-old was gunned down by nuclear engineer Sergei Galakhov (pictured) who was irate about her constant loudspeaker announcements

Galakhov (pictured) admitted he took the law into his own hands and did not issue any warning before shooting

Employed to promote the shop, her loudspeaker advertising messages had annoyed some residents, according to the residents of the same block, but Galakhov admitted he took the law into his own hands.

He did not issue any warning before shooting the single woman from a window in his flat.

Keen sportsman Galakhov confessed to gunning her down with an unspecified weapon after being detained by police on suspicion of murder.

The gun used to shoot Ms Nosova was found by police, it was later reported.

Gunned down: The killing of Anna Nosova (pictured) stunned her co-workers and people on the crowded pavement

Keen sportsman Galakhov (right) confessed to gunning Nosova (left) down with an unspecified weapon after being detained by police on suspicion of murder

Married Galakhov told police he had been drunk after he was fired from his job the previous day.

In an online profile, Galakhov described himself as 'fair, just, able to listen to people, admit mistakes - and be responsible for them'.

A graduate of Bauman University - one of the most prestigious in Moscow - he is a keen skier, mountain biker, ice swimmer and boxer. He had a license for the gun, according to police.

Neighbours said they had 'only good recollections' about the man who now faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted.

There was an outpouring of grief in online messages which paid tribute to 25-year-old Ms Nosova (pictured)

A shop employee said Ms Nosova's co-workers were 'horrified and aghast' at her death in Moscow

Married Galakhov (pictured) told police he had been drunk after he was fired from his job the previous day

In an online profile, Galakhov (pictured) described himself as 'fair, just, able to listen to people, admit mistakes - and be responsible for them'

There is no indication the killing was in protest about the fur industry which remains popular in Russia, with many women and men wearing fur coats and hats in winter.

There was an outpouring of grief in online messages for Ms Nosova.

A shop employee said co-workers were 'horrified and aghast' at her death.

Ekaterina Kuzmina wrote: 'I just do not believe this, Anna, how could it be? I will never forget you! Rest in peace. We remember, we love, we grieve.'

Another friend said: 'Only her mother and sister are left, and they never seek help, even though it is needed.

'So we decided that assistance will come from the people who loved, valued and respected Anna. There are a lot of us.'

Employed to promote the shop, Ms Nosova's loudspeaker messages had annoyed some residents, according to the residents of the same block, but Galakhov admitted he took the law into his own hands
Dr James Kew was killed when he came into contact with a sagging 11,000 volt power line while out jogging

A power company has been fined 1million after a scientist died when he ran into a sagging 11,000-volt power line while out jogging.

Dr James Kew, 41, was leading members of a running club through a cornfield in Essex when he was electrocuted from the cable, which had come loose from a telegraph pole.

Just 17 minutes before his death, UK Power Networks was warned about the faulty overhead cable by a concerned couple out walking their dogs.

The fine followed findings that the firm failed to act promptly by remotely switching off the cable.

A judge at Chelmsford Crown Court criticised 'the culture' of UK Power Networks for sending out engineers to assess reported problems of downed lines, rather than switching off the lines remotely from control rooms.

Married family man Dr Kew, of Ashdon near Saffron Walden, died instantly from severe burns.

He was a director of biology in GlaxoSmithKline's research department in Stevenage, Hertfordshire.

Dr Kew was taking part in his regular Tuesday night training with Saffron Striders' Running Club on the Harcamlow Way - between Harlow and Cambridge - when the accident happened.

He was crossing a field near Debden Road, Newport.

UK Power Network (Operations) Ltd admitted a health and safety offence, in that between November 27 2008 and July 31 2013, it failed to ensure that Dr James Kew and others were not exposed to the risk of electrocution by coming into contact with a live conductor from a wholly or partly downed overhead power line.

Judge Anthony Goldstaub QC imposed the 1 million fine and ordered the company to pay a further 153,459 costs in respect of the prosecution brought by the Health and Safety Executive.

Judge Goldstaub said: 'The reason for the failure was in my judgment cultural.

Dr Kew, 41, pictured with members of his running club left, was making his way through a cornfield in Essex when he was electrocuted from the cable, which had come loose from a telegraph pole (right)

Just 17 minutes before his death, UK Power Networks was warned about the faulty overhead cable (pictured) by a concerned couple out walking their dogs

'The defendants' culture was, if there was a problem on the line, to send an engineer to look and see what it was and how it could be put right and the engineer would assess the danger.'

The court heard about a similar incident on New Year's Day in 2007 when University of Plymouth Vice Chancellor Roland Levinsky, 63, was electrocuted while walking near his house in Devon just hours after Western Power were warned about a fallen power cable.

A spokesman for UK Power Networks said: 'Ever since the tragic accident our thoughts have been with Dr Kew's family and friends and are acutely aware of its permanent consequences for them.

'We are truly sorry that it happened.

'Safety is our top priority as we deliver power across the East, South East and London, and for two years UK Power Networks has had the best safety performance in the industry.

'We urge anyone who sees equipment they feel may be dangerous to call us immediately on 0800 31 63 105.'

Police attended the cornfield at the time of Dr Kew's death. They investigate a patch of grass that was burned following the accident
A Syrian migrant has fallen ill and died after queueing for days outside of an overworked immigration processing office in Berlin.

In recent days there have been chaotic scenes outside the building as struggling volunteers buckled under the pressure of the sheer numbers of asylum seekers.

Tents have been erected outside in sub-zero temperatures after many were forced to wait for their papers to be processed.

Migrants queue up outside the State Office for Health and Social Affairs overnight in freezing temperatures waiting for their papers. A migrant who was waiting outside for days has died

The man had developed influenza while waiting in he queue and became more sick before suffering a cardiac arrest

And a death notice for the unnamed migrant has appeared in a local newspaper after being posted by charity workers helping asylum seekers.

The notice read: 'We mourn for you. You were 24 years old. You came from Syria. You survived so much. You did not survive LAGeSo.

'You got fever, chills and then a cardiac arrest. You died last night. We cry for you.'

LAGeSo is the German acronym for the State Office for Health and Social Affairs where refugees in the capital go to register.

A charity worker later said: 'Now it is done. A Syrian, 24, who for days has stood in freezing temperatures in the slush, died after fever, chills, then cardiac arrest.

'Who accepts responsibility here? Who has the guilt, the failing management or the political will - who else knows what's going on?'

The death was reported by Moabit Helps, the refugee aid organisation located in the district of the city where the LAGeSo office is located.

In recent days there have been chaotic scenes outside the building as struggling volunteers buckled under the pressure of the sheer numbers of asylum seekers

Diana Henniges, a spokeswoman for the group, said the young man was rushed to hospital after collapsing at the site but died of cardiac arrest a short while afterwards.

She added: 'The condition of the man was very bad. He was completely destitute, had no insurance and was completely emaciated.

'He suffered an influenza infection which proved lethal.

'We have so many people who are sick and we are getting more and more behind with helping them.

'So many are sick, that we can't help them all.'

Media reports say the queues contain people suffering from cancer, diabetes sufferers with no insulin, and children who are 'completely emaciated.'

Ms Henniges added: 'It's terrible, but we do not have sufficient capacities to help everyone.'

LAGeSo is the German acronym for the State Office for Health and Social Affairs, pictured, where refugees in the capital go to register

Police in Berlin said they were aware of the incident and are reviewing information but because the man's death was not as the result of crime, it is not within their remit.

The Berlin Senate for Health and Social Affairs, which is responsible for LAGeSo, said it was 'checking the details' of the man's demise.

It comes after report in recent days of starving refugees in Berlin again.
The Kremlin has accused Germany of covering up an alleged rape of a Russian 13-year-old girl by 'Arabic looking men' for 'the sake of domestic politics'.

A teenager identified only as Lisa - the child of Russian immigrants in Berlin, Germany - was allegedly attacked in the city earlier this month.

The incident was then turned into a diplomatic row by Russia, which accused Germany of 'covering up reality in a politically correct manner for the sake of domestic politics.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Germany of 'covering up reality' amid allegations a Russian 13-year-old girl was raped by 'Arabic looking men'

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said : 'I hope there will be no repeat of cases like that with our Lisa. It's completely clear that she didn't disappear voluntarily for 30 hours.'

Lavrov claimed that Lisa was abducted and raped repeatedly over a 30-hour period. But Berlin police furiously deny this version of events and the matter is still being investigated.

They say that she did go missing - but that any sexual contact she had seems to have been consensual.

'We cannot say more out of respect for the girl and her family and the privacy of all,' said a spokesman.

A teenager identified only as Lisa - the child of Russian immigrants in Berlin, Germany - was allegedly attacked in the city earlier this month (file picture)

Berlin prosecutors are investigating the incident. But the incident has strained relations with Russian immigrants in Germany.

Over the weekend thousands protested in various towns, including 700 in Berlin who turned up to a demonstration outside Chancellor Angela Merkel's office.

The crowd held banners reading: 'We're against the refugees' and 'Lisa we're with you.'

Lisa's aunt told a Russian TV channel that 'an Arabic looking man' kidnapped her on January 11.
David Cameron was branded 'shameful' and 'callous' today after he described people in the Calais refugee camp as 'a bunch of migrants' during Prime Minister's Questions.

Mr Cameron is facing calls to apologise for using 'inflammatory language' as he ridiculed Jeremy Corbyn's visit to the makeshift French camp known as the Jungle last weekend.

The Prime Minister lost his temper with the Labour leader and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell after they criticised Google's controversial 130million tax deal.

He said: 'They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could come to Britain - the only people they never stand up for are hardworking British families.'

Junior ministers immediately defended Mr Cameron insisting he was making clear his opposition to handing migrants in Calais a 'free pass' to enter the UK and Speaker John Bercow later ruled his language had not been 'unparliamentary'.

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Controversial: David Cameron, pictured today at the Commons despatch box, referred to a 'bunch of migrants' at PMQs in a heated exchange with Jeremy Corbyn, also pictured in the Commons today

Mr Cameron's remarks at Prime Minister's Questions today, pictured, immediately sparked a wave of protests both inside and outside of the Commons

Mr Cameron's words have been branded 'disgusting' by opposition MPs while refugee rights campaigners said he was being 'flippant to score political points'.

During a row over Google in the Commons Mr Cameron pointed at Mr Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell and said: 'The idea that those two would stand up to anyone in that regard is laughable.

'They met with the unions they gave them flying pickets. They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falklands.

'They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could come to Britain - the only people they never stand up for are hardworking British families.'

After a complaint Speaker John Bercow ruled Mr Cameron's remarks were not 'disorderly' or 'unparliamentary' but added people could make their 'own assessment'.

Defending him Culture Minister Ed Vaizey told the BBC: 'We always talk about language, people will have their views.

'The Prime Minister was making the point that he does not agree with Jeremy Corbyn that the people camped in Calais should come to this country and be given a free pass.'

But Labour's Chuka Umunna led criticism when he said: 'The PM refers to 'a bunch of migrants' in Calais at the Dispatch box just now. Inflammatory and unbecoming of his office. Shameful.'

Comedian David Baddiel was among those to protest the remarks outside Parliament.

He said: 'Not the right day #HolocaustMemorialDay for the bunch of migrants thing.'

Lisa Doyle, the Refugee Council's head of advocacy said: 'When we are facing the greatest refugee crisis of our time, it is disappointing the Prime Minister is using flippant remarks to score political points.

'We have all seen the pictures of the desperate conditions people are living in across Europe, including just miles from the UK's border.

'The Prime Minister should be showing political leadership and work with other European countries to ensure that people can live in safety and dignity.'

Shadow Scotland Secretary Ian Murray said: 'PM barks 'he (corbyn) met a bunch of migrants at Calais'. He met terrified unaccompanied kids in danger of exploitation. Dispassionate PM.'

Shadow international development secretary Diane Abbott immediately branded the remark 'shameful' and added: 'So Cameron refers to refugees in #CalaisJungle as 'bunch of migrants'.'

David Baddiel was among the critics of the Prime Minister's remarks - highlighting it was Holocaust Memorial Day. Chuka Umunna was among Mr Cameron's harshest critics in Parliament

Following today's clash, the Prime Minister's official spokesman defended Mr Cameron.

When asked if it was wrong for the Prime Minister to use the 'pejorative' term, 'a bunch of migrants', he said: 'He very strongly disagrees with the approach Labour wants at Calais and that's to open the doors and let people into Britain because he believes it will make the situation worse and bring even more people to Calais'.

Later, Tory business minister Anna Soubry said: 'He was using the language of ordinary people.

'You are damned if you do and damned if you don't. I'm sure he meant to say group'.

Mr Cameron was vigorously defended by Tory MP Andrew Percy - suggesting 'left types' should thank Mr Cameron for giving them something to be 'smug and self righteous over'.

He added: 'The left really are ridiculous and getting more ridiculous.'

Speaking to ITV on Monday following his visit, Mr Corbyn called for a humane response to the migration in Calais.

He said: 'I'm not saying all 9,000 should come. Start with those that have a British connection and a British passport - that's an obvious one.

'And the Home Office can let up a bit and be reasonable in those cases.'

Mr Corbyn said he had been 'surprised' by how many people at the camp he had met who held British passports.

The Prime Minister's remark drew an immediate reaction from Labour MPs on Twitter as Chuka Umunna said the language was 'inflammatory'

Shadow international development secretary Diane Abbott said Mr Cameron was being 'callous' with his use of language

Shadow Scotland secretary Ian Murrary piled in with a claim Mr Cameron was being 'dispassionate' about the 'terrified kids' Mr Corbyn had met

Comedian David Baddiel questioned the wisdom of the Prime Minister's remarks on Holocaust Memorial Day

He rejected the suggestion he was 'naive' about the implications of dramatically increasing the number of refugees it takes in.

PM STILL YET TO MAKE CALL ON TAKING IN 3,000 REFUGEE CHILDREN The Prime Minister is still yet to make a decision on whether Britain will accept 3,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Europe. David Cameron is under growing pressure to take the young people who have arrived in Europe without their parents. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has been leading the campaign with Save The Children and also called on the Prime Minister to go to migration 'hot-spots' like Calais to see conditions for himself. Former cabinet minister Sir Eric Pickles told the House of Commons the Government should consider taking in more children, drawing a comparison with the Kindertransport trains which saved Jewish children from the Nazis in the Second World War. Syrian Refugees Minister Richard Harrington told the Commons today the Prime Minister would make an announcement 'shortly'. He said: 'So far as children are concerned, there's been a lot of talk about it and all I can say is that the Prime Minster is considering the situation and I do believe we can expect an announcement shortly. 'I'm sorry I can't give any more information than that, but the point's been very well made.' Advertisement

He said: 'Germany has taken several hundred thousand people already, Austria less but taken a lot.

'Britain is taking 20,000 over five years - that is the equivalent of a few tube trains.

'There is a refugee crisis on Europe's borders, there is a refugee crisis in the world. We can't ignore it, we can't wish it away.

'We have to deal with the political causes - the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war in Syria, the war in Libya.

'But in the mean time we cannot just ignore the fact that are a large number of people in a very serious, deeply depressed state and they need our help.'

Last July, Mr Cameron sparked a major political row after describing hundreds of migrants in Calais as a 'swarm'.

Labour's then acting leader Harriet Harman said the Prime Minister should remember he is talking about 'people, not insects' as tensions mounted over the government's response to the crisis.

But political opponents accused him of 'dog-whistle' politics and the Refugee Council condemned the 'awful, dehumanising language'.

Speaking to ITV about the migration crisis, he said: 'This is very testing, I accept that, because you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it's got a growing economy, it's an incredible place to live.

'But we need to protect our borders by working hand in glove with our neighbours the French and that is exactly what we are doing.'

Mr Corbyn visited Calais on Saturday to see for himself the conditions thousands of migrants were living in northern France

Detritus: A mattress, sleeping bags, clothes and other belongings have been discarded in the Dunkirk camp, close to where migrants are living
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One of the world's rarest collection of stained glass windows has been restored to its former glory after 200 years.

More than 400 colour panels dating back to the 16th century were carefully removed from the famous Lady Chapel at Lichfield Cathedral, Staffordshire, and painstakingly cleaned for the historic restoration.

Unlike Coventry Cathedral located 30 miles away, Lichfield was spared during WW2 by the Luftwaffe, who used its three spires as a navigational aid.

If the enemy airmen reached the cathedral, built in 1195, they knew they were at the point of no return in terms of fuel limit.

Lichfield Cathedral was spared by the Luftwaffe during WW2 because they used the spires as navigational aids

The stained glass windows at the Staffordshire cathedral have been cleaned for the first time in 200 years, restoring its stunning display

The cathedral was also spared by King Henry VIII, who had abbeys and monasteries destroyed during the Reformation.

His 'Dissolution of the Monasteries' between 1536 and 1541 saw hundreds of Catholic monasteries, convents, priories, churches and friaries disbanded, with their valuables seized.

The glass has now been re-installed, creating a stunning display that has not been witnessed by any living person.

Lichfield's windows were originally bought from a local landowner for 100 around 200 years ago.

He had taken from a Belgium monastery which had fallen into disrepair and shipped it back to England.

It also survived a siege during the English Civil War, when it was surrounded by a ditch and used as a fortress.

Due to its incredibly luck in surviving so many threats, the windows now make up one of the rarest and most important collections of medieval stained glass windows in the world.

Lichfield's recognisable spires (pictured above left) were used as navigational aids by Luftwaffe airmen during WW2 - although its real value lies in its restored stained glass windows

The windows were restored when it was noticed that the walls around it them were crumbling and in danger of collapse

Chris Gary, the events manager at Lichfield Cathedral, said: 'Several years ago the stone work was in a danger of crumbling which could have resulted in the windows possibly falling out.

'So the glass was taken out to be cleaned and bounded back together.

'It was fitted in a new zinc housing and then brought back and re-installed inside isothermic glass to make it double glazing.

'It is a stunning result and it make a huge difference in the colour because there was so much grime on them that had built up over the years.

'It really is staggering.'

Lichfield's windows were originally bought from a local landowner for a bargain 100 after it had been taken from a Belgium monastery which had fallen into disrepair

The cathedral was spared by King Henry VIII, who had abbeys and monasteries destroyed during the Reformation

Mr Gray added: 'The collection originated from the Abbey of Herkenrode in Belgium which was stripped of its monastic responsibility during the Napoleonic Wars.

'It fell into disrepair and was going to be knocked down when a landed gentry from this area happened to be over there and saw all this glass and decided to buy it and have it shipped over to England.

'We think the cathedral paid 100 for it which was quite a significant sum of money in those days.

'But today the windows are priceless.

'They are some of the most important medieval windows in existence because there are so few of them around anymore.'
The head of the Swedish police has sparked outrage by expressing sympathy with the teenage asylum seeker accused of murdering social worker Alexander Mezher.

National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson, who has already admitted police cannot cope with the wave of migrant crime, said he has concerns about the horrors and trauma the accused murderer may have witnessed.

He said he was distraught on behalf of Miss Mezhers family but also for the killer, saying: What has that person been through? Under what circumstances has he grown up? What is the trauma he carries?

It came as court documents showed the boy suspected of the killing is being held in a secure psychiatric that specialises in patients with psychotic illness, drug and alcohol addiction.

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Controversy: Dan Eliasson, left, said that although he is 'distraught' on behalf of Alexandra Mezher and her family, he also has sympathy at the horrors the 15-year-old Somalian boy may have been through

In an with SVT Mr Eliasson said: 'Well, you are of course distraught on behalf of everyone involved.

'Naturally, for the person killed and her family, but also for a lone young boy who commits such a heinous incident.

'What has that person been through? Under what circumstances has he grown up? What is the trauma he carries?

'This entire migration crisis shows how unfair life is in many parts of the world. We have to try to help solve this best we can.'

MailOnline has contacted Mr Eliasson for further explanation of his comments, but a spokesman would not reveal where he is.

His comments sparked angry reactions across social media, with some saying the police chief made them want to vomit.

Jenny Sundelin wrote on Twitter: I vomit when I see you. You are supposed to be the person most responsible for our safety and you defend those who murder us

Billy TheBritt added: Does the nerd @dan_eliasson feel sorry for Breivik too? What about the Trollhattan killer? Does Dans heart bleed for him too?

Kent Ekeroth, a member of parliament for the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats tweeted: This is where Dan Eliasson feels sorry for the guy who knifemurdered the woman at the asylum home - resign!'

Eliasson is not the first senior political figure in Sweden to demand compassion for the 15-year-old boy being held on suspicion of murder.

Marie Osth Karlsson, a senior local government commissioner, said: 'I also have to express sympathy for the man behind the crime, there is also a person behind it'

Both Eliasson and Osth Karlsson belong to the ruling Social Democrat party, which has been criticised in the past year for its handling of the migrant crisis.

Anger: Mr Eliasson's sympathy for Miss Mezher's alleged killer sparked outraged from those on social media

Tragedy: Alexandra Mezher, pictured right with her best friend Lejla Filipovic at their high school graduation in 2012, died after being stabbed at her place of work - a care home for unaccompanied child refugees

Inspirational: Dedicated Miss Mezher, who was planning on going back to university to do a masters, had been working with refugee children at the centre (pictured) since last autumn

Unknown: Court documents filed in Gothenburg today show that police do not know the true identity of the alleged killer, who has claimed he is a 15-year-old from Somalia

His comments follow the release of court documents which show murder detectives do not know the true identity of the Somali boy who allegedly stabbed to death Miss Mezher.

Reports suggested the boy was 15 and living in a child migrant centre in Molndal where Miss Mezher worked.

But next to the suspect's name are the words 'ID ej styrkt', meaning 'ID not proven'.

It means the boy had nothing to prove his identity when he arrived in Sweden  and that he could be 18 or even older.

A police spokesman in Gothenburg yesterday told MailOnline: 'We are not 100% sure about the boys identity. But we do have a good picture and will find that out eventually.

'This is usually the case with unaccompanied refugee children. It is hard to establish if their identity is true or not.'

The boy has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

He is being held at the high security psychiatric clinic at Sahlgrenska University Hospital is run by the Swedish NHS called Landstinget.

The prosecutor said there are 'exceptional grounds' to detain the suspect as he will attempt to destroy evidence and flee the country.

Murdered: Miss Mezher (right) was stabbed in the back and thigh while working a night shift alone at the centre for migrant children in Molndal, Gothenburg, A Somali boy, 15, is being held at a psychiatric unit

Full of life: Miss Mezher (pictured second from left) had only worked at the child migrant centre since the autumn. She was stabbed to death on Monday at 8am

Search: Detectives were at the migrant centre which houses children aged 14-17 searching for clues. Police today praised two hero teenagers who held the knifeman down until they arrived

Tribute: Alexandra's mother wept bitterly as she remembered her 'angel' daughter at memorial service today

Controversial police chief Eliasson, 54, has held several senior positions within the Swedish justice system.

After completing a law degree, and studying European Integration in Amsterdam, he went on to work on for the Swedish government both in the Foreign office and the Justice department.

He has since served in a number of positions, including acting head of the Swedish Security Service and the Ministry of Justice Chief of International Affairs.

A former lawyer, he was Director-General of the Swedish Migration Agency, from which he resigned in 2011, just before the migration crisis started.

He became the Director-General of the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, the government agency for welfare benefits.

However, long before he embarked on a career in law and politics, he was a passionate musician.

In the late 1970s he was in a punk group called 'Bad Boo Band', who sang 'Knulla i Bankok' (F*** in Bankok), criticising Thailand's sex tourism.

Earlier this week, Eliasson demanded 4,100 more police officers as Sweden struggles to cope with the new wave of migrant related crime.

He said: 'We are forced to respond to many disturbances in asylum reception centres. In some places, this takes significant police resources.

'This was not the case six months ago and it means that we won't be able to respond as effectively in other areas.'

Miss Mezher's friends and family gathered at a memorial service today in her hometown of Boras, 40 miles east of Gothenburg.

The psychology graduate, whose parents fled Beirut more than 25 years ago, was stabbed in the back and thigh on Monday in a block of flats housing ten youths aged 14 to 17.

Her mother wept bitterly as she remembered her 'angel' daughter.

Dressed entirely in black, Chimene Mezher, 42, repeatedly broke down as she told mourners of her 'utter devastation'.

A hundred friends and family came together in grief at a local church and cried for Alexandra.

They hugged each other as they gathered around a table with candles and a single framed photograph showing Alexandra wearing a mortarboard hat on her graduation day - the proudest moment of her mother's life.

Grief-stricken friends brought pink and white roses, Alexandra's favourite flowers.

Hard working: Psychology graduate Miss Mezher who was a Lebanese Christian whose parents were from Beirut, was today described by her mother Chimene as an 'angel'

Poignant: Miss Mezher, a Lebanese Christian, had posted a number 'inspirational quotes' on Facebook confirming her faith

Questioning: A boy, 15, living at the centre, from Somalia, is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder. Police have cordoned off the centre as forensics investigate

The service at Korskyrkan church in Boras, was organised by Alexandra's best friend Lejla Filipovic, 22, who said: 'Everyone is in such shock.

'The grief is still very raw. This is just a small service for family and close friends.

'We would like people to see the photo of Alexandra and the flowers, but we do not want there to be photos of her mother and the people crying.'

Yesterday, Mrs Mezher, said: 'We left Lebanon to escape the civil war, the violence and the danger. We came to Sweden where it was safe, to start our family. But it is not safe any more.

SWEDISH LEGAL PROCESS: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT The prosecutor needs to file an application to the district court within 48 hours after a criminal has been arrested. The application is an appeal to the court to hear whether there are legal grounds to keep the criminal in custody. In this case the boy was arrested early on Monday morning, but the system works slowly so he was not formally arrested until Monday night. This document is a public document with the indicted persons name attached to it. The only reason a prosecutor can use to make this document secret is if the crime involves matters of National Security or Terrorism. There has been a few exceptions over the years when the district court has kept the criminals name a secret. Those cases are usually when there has been a police officer working under cover involved. It is for the indicted persons own security. After the prosecutor has send this application he or she will appear in court with the indicted person who also has a lawyer who speaks ion his behalf. A judge will then rule if the criminal is to remain in custody or be released. These hearings usually take around five minutes and are open for members of the public and pres to watch. Advertisement

'And I just want to know why why Alexandra? She wanted to help them, but they did this. I just want answers.'

Her husband Bourous, 45, moved to Sweden from Beirut in 1989 and built up a pizza business. Mrs Mezher, who has three sons, said: 'She was not just my daughter, she was my angel. She was a just and fair human being. There were so many who loved her. She was my daughter, my friend.'

She blamed Swedish politicians for a dramatic rise in immigration in Molndal, a suburb of Gothenburg, where a population of 60,000 has grown by 8,000 migrants in less than a year  4,000 of whom are unaccompanied children.

Officers in Molndal say they have had to ignore lesser offences such as drug-dealing because they are so overrun by migrant crime, with gang fights and violent assaults.

And in capital Stockholm police this week warned that the capital's main train station was 'overrun' by gangs of Moroccan street children 'stealing and groping girls'.

Swedish police revealed they have sent plain-clothes officers to monitor swimming baths in Stockholm after increased reports of sexual harassment of girls and women.

Last night it was also claimed police had been forced to flee after being attacked by a mob of asylum seekers as they tried to relocate a ten-year-old boy amid allegations he had been 'raped repeatedly' at a refugee centre.

Miss Mezher had been working at the housing block since September.

Despite rules that staff should work in pairs, she had reportedly worked alone overnight and was attacked half an hour before her shift was due to end.

'Two boys held him down. It is a very good intervention. Had he intended to hurt anyone else, then they have prevented that,' said police spokesperson Peter Adlersson.

'It is easy to become injured yourself when intervening in this kind of situation. We are very grateful for these kinds of actions.'

Police said Tuesday afternoon the forensic investigation of the scene of the crime is not yet completed, and that there are still question marks regarding the reason behind the attack.

Seven witnesses, all residents at the housing, have been moved to another accommodation and have all been interviewed by police.

Today, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven admitted that many people are fearful of attacks similar to the killing of Miss Mezher, because 'Sweden receives so many children and youths arriving alone'.

Scene: Molndal, on Sweden's west coast, where the migrant centre is, has been the scene of rising tension in recent months. Neighbourhood-watch groups have been sent out to prevent teenage girls from being sexually harassed on their way home from the commuter trains from Gothenburg

Centre: Miss Mezher, whose family are originally from Lebanon, had only worked at the accommodation for unaccompanied refugee children for a few months
Ex-Dragons' Den star Doug Richard (pictured) used the name 'Dominant' when he approached a 13-year-old on a 'sugar daddy' website, a court heard today

A former Dragons' Den star met around 100 young women from a 'sugar daddy' website for Fifty Shades of Grey experiences, he told his trial yesterday.

Doug Richard, 57, who is accused of paying a 13-year-old girl for sex, said he was addicted to 'dominance and submission' roleplay.

The former business adviser to David Cameron told the court he chatted to hundreds of young women almost every day for more than four years about his sexual fantasies on a website called Seeking Arrangements.

Richard, a father of three who called himself a sugar daddy, met about two women, known as sugar babies, every month to see 'if they wanted to take it further'.

One of those he met was the 13-year-old, who the businessman spanked and had sex with as her 15-year-old friend waited in the next room.

Richard, who accompanied the Prime Minister on a trade mission to Africa in 2011, was yesterday asked what his 'arrangement' was with the teenager.

The millionaire replied: 'Lots of sexy texting and me being dominant and a Christian Grey figure and her being submissive.'

Christian Grey is the fictional wealthy entrepreneur from the Fifty Shades of Grey books.

Richard told the Old Bailey that he had been attending counselling sessions for his addiction.

'As mortifying as it is to say, I was looking for roleplay and fantasy relationships involving dominance and submission,' he said. 'It was a Fifty Shades of Grey type of stuff.

'It was secret, it was infidelity. I was cheating on my wife. It bothered me but I was also quite addicted to this.' Richard, who has two daughters and a son, had sex with the 13-year-old girl last year after exchanging a string of sexually graphic messages with her on the internet.

In one conversation, the technology entrepreneur, who used the nickname 'Dominant' on the website, asked her: 'Are you free to come to London after school?'

Richard claims he thought the girl, who is 5ft and weighs less than six stone, was 17  despite her sending a naked picture  and says he was mortified to learn that she was 13.

However, prosecutor Gino Connor said: 'A man of your experience must have appreciated either when you saw the picture or when you first met her that she was not 17 years old.'

Richard replied: 'I absolutely thought she was 17. We had long, elaborate sex chats. She sent me a photo of her naked.

'None of these raised the alarm and had they raised the alarm I would have been horrified. I'm horrified now.' Mr Connor suggested his addiction to the sugar daddy website had been 'out of control'. The defendant replied: 'I cannot say.'

The technology entrepreneur (second from left, with his Dragons Den co-stars) quit the popular BBC show after famously failing to invest a penny in the second series

Richard denied paying the girl for sex, adding: 'I was trying to be a sugar daddy type of guy. I was trying to be nice so gave her money to go shopping.'

In an unusual move, the jury passed the judge a series of questions as Richard gave evidence.

We weren't talking about money, what we were speaking about was doing what we wanted to do which was to have this 50 Shades of Grey roleplay between us Doug Richard

One question, which was read out by judge Richard Marks QC, said: 'If this was your daughter would you blame the man and think what he did was wrong and that he was using the legal age, and 16 being the very youngest while still being legal, to get himself out of trouble?'

Judge Marks then told Richard that he did not have to answer the question.

The entrepreneur, who received an award from the Queen for services to enterprise in 2006 and appeared in the first two series of the BBC's Dragons' Den, said his 'reputation has been shattered'.

He told the court that his company School for Startups is near bankruptcy and he has had to lay off 99 per cent of staff since his arrest 12 months ago.

The entrepreneur, who is originally from California but lives in Islington, North London, denies three charges of sexual activity with a child, one of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and a charge of paying for sexual services.

Richard admits having sexual activity with the 13-year-old but says it was consensual and said he thought she was 16 or older.
Adolf Eichmann, dubbed the architect of the Holocaust, while on trial in Israel. A newly found letter has shown how he begged not be executed

A handwritten letter penned by Adolf Eichmann dubbed the architect of the Holocaust has been revealed showing how he begged not to be executed as he was only following orders.

Eichmann was one of the main organisers of the murder of Jews and oversaw their rounding up and deportation to death camps such as Auschwitz.

He fled to Argentina after escaping a prison camp after the Second World War but was captured in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and smuggled back to Israel.

After a trial two years later for war crimes he was executed by the Israelis for his role in the Holocaust.

Now a letter to then President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi has been found, where he describes himself as a 'mere instrument' of leaders responsible for the deaths of six million Jews.

He then pleads for his death sentence to be overturned in the letter, wrote in ballpoint pen, which is dated two days before his hanging.

It reads: 'There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.

'I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.

'I am not able to recognise the courts ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honour Mr President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.'

The letter was signed and dated: 'Adolf Eichmann Jerusalem, May 29, 1962.'

A spokesman for current Israeli president Reuven Rivlin said although the plea for clemency had been public knowledge since Eichmanns trial in Jerusalem, the actual letter had only recently been found when documents were being scanned for digital archiving.

In the letter, pictured, to then President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi he describes himself as a 'mere instrument' of leaders responsible for the deaths of six million Jews

Eichmann also begs not to be executed and signs off his letter, wrote two days before his death, 'Adolf Eichmann Jerusalem, May 29, 1962'

It was released to the media to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day and Rivlin said during a ceremony at his official residence that he would like the document to be put on display at Israels Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

The ability of the security services to bring him to justice was a source of pride for the Jewish state, and Rivlin referred to the trial as a momentous moment in Israels history.

Rivlin said: 'In the first years after the Holocaust, the people in Israel were busy rebuilding and founding an independent state.

'The renewed Israeli society was not in the mindset to or able to remember.

The letter, pictured, was released to the media to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day, which is being marked around the world today

Israel president Reuven Rivlin is now calling for the letter to be put on display at Israels Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial

'The Eichmann trial broke the dam of silence. The ability of the young Jewish state to capture the Nazi murderer afforded a basic sense of security to the survivors of the Holocaust.'

Israel and its allies have continued to use their resources across the globe to pursue those responsible for carrying out the Holocaust, even though the majority of perpetrators are now close to death.

On Tuesday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center - named after a famous Nazi hunter - produced a list of 10 alleged Nazis who could be prosecuted in 2016.

Of the 10, four have trial dates already in Germany for this year.

The letter was released to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and current Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, pictured centre, said he would like the document to be put on display at Israels Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial

Mr Riviln embraces Rafi Eitan who headed the operation to recapture Adolf Eichmann who escaped a prisoner of war camp and fled to Argentina

Mr Eitan looks at a photocopy of the letter of the handwritten note by Gideon Hausner wrote his opening statement before Eichmann's trial

Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre, said they would continue to chase every remaining perpetrator as 'we owe it to the victims.'

He said: 'The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers. Old age should not afford protection to people that committed such heinous crimes.
Papers show police don't know boy's true identity and could be an adult

Next to the boy's name are the words 'ID ej styrkt', meaning 'ID not proven'

The refugee boy accused of murdering a Swedish social worker at the centre where he lived is being held at a psychiatric hospital amid fears he will flee the country if he is set free, prosecutors said today.

The 15-year-old Somali is being detained at a high security hospital that treats patients with 'psychotic illnesses' after police warned he will tamper with evidence if he is not locked up.

Court documents obtained by MailOnline show that the teenager - who claims he is 15 and from the east African nation - has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

Murdered: Alexandra Mezher was stabbed to death while working a night shift alone at a centre for migrant children in Molndal, Gothenburg. A boy, said to be 15, from Somalia, who lived at the centre, is in police custody

Unknown: But court documents filed in Gothenburg today show detectives investigating the murder, do not know the true identity of the alleged killer, who has claimed he is 15 and from Somalia

Locked up: The high security psychiatric clinic at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, where the boy accused of Miss Mezher's murder is being held. The facility is for patients with psychotic illnesses

Alexandra Mezher, 22, was stabbed to death in the back and thigh as she worked alone on the night shift at a centre for unaccompanied migrants on Monday morning. She died of her injuries in hospital.

Her attacker was pinned down by two other boys who lived at the home, where ten young people aged between 14 and 17 were staying, and arrested by police at 8.10am.

The boy is being held at the high security psychiatric clinic at Sahlgrenska University Hospital is run by the Swedish NHS called Landstinget.

The 18-bed unit specialises in the treatment of psychotic illness and drug and alcohol addiction.

The prosecutor said there are 'exceptional grounds' to detain the suspect as he will attempt to destroy evidence and flee the country.

Tragedy: Miss Mezher, pictured right with best friend Lejla Filipovic, was stabbed in the back and thigh. A boy is being held on suspicion of murder. Prosecutor Linda Wiking is expected to announce the official arrest today

Crime scene: The boy was arrested at the refugee centre for children (pictured) on Monday. In Sweden, the prosecutor needs to file an application to the district court within 48 hours after a suspect is arrested

Details of the boy's custody come after Miss Mezher's mother declared that her country was 'not safe' any more.

Chimene Mezher described her daughter Alexandra, 22, as an 'angel' devoted to helping some of the hundreds of migrant youths who have come to her home of Molndal without parents.

Psychology graduate Miss Mezher - whose parents fled Beirut more than 25 years ago - was stabbed in the back and thigh on Monday in a block of flats housing ten youths aged 14 to 17.

Mrs Mezher, 42, said: 'We left Lebanon to escape the civil war, the violence and the danger. We came to Sweden where it was safe, to start our family. But it is not safe any more.

'And I just want to know why why Alexandra? She wanted to help them, but they did this. I just want answers.'

Her husband Bourous, 45, moved to Sweden from Beirut in 1989 and built up a pizza business. Mrs Mezher, who has three sons, said: 'She was not just my daughter, she was my angel. She was a just and fair human being. There were so many who loved her. She was my daughter, my friend.'

She blamed Swedish politicians for a dramatic rise in immigration in Molndal, a suburb of Gothenburg, where a population of 60,000 has grown by 8,000 migrants in less than a year  4,000 of whom are unaccompanied children.

In total, Sweden has taken in 160,000 migrants and refugees in the past year, nearly 40,000 of whom were unaccompanied minors.

Court papers: The prosecutor submitted the papers with the district court in Gothenburg today to remand the boy in custody. But in the papers next to his name are the words 'ID ej styrkt', meaning 'ID not proven'.

Tribute: Flowers and candles at a memorial service held for Miss Mezher today in which her mother wept and paid tribute to her 'angel'

Earlier this week, National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson demanded 4,100 more police officers as Sweden struggles to cope with the new wave of migrant related crime.

He said: 'We are forced to respond to many disturbances in asylum reception centres. In some places, this takes significant police resources.
Trump currently leads Ted Cruz 30 percent to 23 percent according to the latest poll in Iowa

out, but took to Twitter Wednesday to criticize debate co-host Google for not paying fair tax

The Fox News and Donald Trump feud is heating up now that the Republican front-runner has announced he will not be attending the network's debate Thursday night over the presence of anchor Megyn Kelly.

And while the network appears to be publicly siding with Kelly, who is still set to moderate Thursday's debate, the network is also reportedly trying to privately plead with Trump the best way they know how - through the women in his life.

Joe Scarborough, who has a close relationship with many people at Fox News, revealed on Morning Joe Wednesday morning that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had been trying to contact both Ivanka and Melania Trump hoping they could convince Trump to change his mind, but that Trump would only speak to Rupert Murdoch.

Trump may be able to address some of these issues and claims Wednesday night as he is set to appear on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

Kelly meanwhile welcomed a surprisingly liberal guest on her program Tuesday night, Michael Moore.

The documentary filmmaker was there to promote his new film Where to Invade Next?, but also took time to applaud Kelly and ask how she was dealing with the very public feud between her and Trump while mocking the presidential hopeful over his refusal to attend the debate.

Meanwhile, Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski continued with their unified attack on Kelly Wednesday morning during an appearance on Good Morning America saying that the anchor is 'completely obsessed' with the presidential hopeful.

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Troubles: Donald Trump's refusal to attend Fox News' debate on Thursday night has sent Fox News into chaos and network CEO Roger Ailes reaching out to Ivanka and Melania Trump (Trumps above in December 2012)

Reason: Trump refuses to attend over the inclusion of anchor Megyn Kelly (above) as one of the debate moderators

No worries: Rupert Murdoch was seen out to dinner in London with new fiance Jerry Hall and friend Michael Caine on Tuesday night (above) as the Trump and Fox News feud raged

Moore also offered Kelly the ultimate compliment about her feud with Trump on her program Tuesday when he said; 'In all seriousness, let me say this, youve done something that Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rubio, Cruz - none of them have been able to do. Which is to, essentially, frighten him.'

Not looking good: Ailes' (above) inability to get Trump to debate on Thursday could mean major problems for the CEO

Then, in a move that no doubt left many viewers shocked, Moore appeared to ask Kelly out on a date, saying; 'I was thinking I was maybe going to have to, like, take you out to dinner afterwards. We could talk. You could emote  get it out. Im here for you.'

New York's Gabe Sherman is reporting that Moore's appearance on Kelly's show had some at the network fuming, with one of her fellow anchor's noting; 'That would be like Rachel Maddow laughing along with Charles Koch as he trashed Hillary Clinton!'

Some at the conservative network seem to be angry that Kelly has now undeniably become the face of Fox News, something which was recently cemented with her appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair.

She has said little about Trump, while he of course has continued to bash her in public and on social media, writing Wednesday morning; 'I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!'

Trump meanwhile is refusing calls from Ailes and will only speak to the man at the very top - News Corporation founder Murdoch.

Scarborough said on Morning Joe Wednesday; 'Per our sources, Roger Ailes was calling Ivanka, he was trying to get in touch with Trump, he was calling Melania, people that he's got a good relationship with, they love Roger. They have a great respect for him.

'But at this point, Trump's only gonna talk to Rupert, and they're going to figure it out.'

Prior to that Scarborough had said on the program; 'I have a ton of friends at Fox, I love Fox and I know a lot of people at Fox are really twisted up at about how this has gone down and how Megyn Kelly, has somehow, with Michael Moore, taken over the network.'

Murdoch meanwhile is not being shy about chasing someone to join the race for president - Michael Bloomberg.

FOX NEWS RESPONSE TO TRUMP 'We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president  a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.' Advertisement

He wrote on Twitter Wednesday; 'This is Bloomberg's last chance. You never know until your hat is in the ring! Events change everything, especially during elections.'

He also went after Google, who is co-hosting the debate, in a series of tweets, saying they do not pay fair taxes.

Murdoch was seen enjoying dinner with fiancee Jerry Hall and friend Michael Caine and his wife Shakira Tuesday night at C London, with the four mugging for the camera as they left the London eatery.

It is not clear if Murdoch has spoken to Trump but the entire situation could spell trouble for Ailes.

'The CEO earned Murdoch's trust because Fox generates $1 billion in profit, but also because he was always in control. But in recent months Murdoch has been attending news meetings at Fox in the wake of a health scare that forced Ailes to take an extended leave of absence,' writes Sherman.

'Succession planning at Fox is very much on Murdoch's agenda. If Ailes loses his grip on the Trump situation - and right now it looks like he is - Murdoch will have another reason to worry about the stability of his most valuable asset.'

Lewandowski pointed out the major problem the network is facing during his appearance on Good Morning America Wednesday, saying; 'My guess is that people who bought advertising time thinking that Donald Trump was going to be on the stage are going to be very disappointed when nobody decides to watch that GOP debate.'

Main man: Trump will only speak to network head Rupert Murdoch according to reports (seen above last week as he was busy being loved up in London by new fiance Jerry Hall)

Trump is also continuing to attack the network, writing Wednesday morning; 'The statement put out yesterday by @FoxNews was a disgrace to good broadcasting and journalism. Who would ever say something so nasty & dumb.'

The first statement released by the network said; 'We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president  a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.'

Big deal: Kelly has now become the face of Fox News (Vanity Fair cover above), much to the chagrin of some of her fellow hosts

Then Fox News released an official statement, which said; 'We're not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing  Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage.

'Capitulating to politicians' ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly.

'In a call on Saturday with a Fox News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a "rough couple of days after that last debate" and he "would hate to have her go through that again." Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so.

'We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees. Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly, just as he has been during his 132 appearances on FOX News & FOX Business, but he can't dictate the moderators or the questions.'

Trump has said that instead of attending the debate he will host an Iowa town hall to benefit veterans and let let other networks cover it as his opponents debate just days before the first votes are cast in the primary election.

Poll Do you think Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the debate will backfire? Yes No Do you think Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the debate will backfire? Yes 1753 votes

No 5799 votes Now share your opinion





The feud between Trump and Kelly began during the first Fox News debate in August, when Kelly asked the candidate if previous, disparaging comments he made against women were acceptable for a man who hoped to be president.

He responded by saying the next day of Kelly; 'You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.'

Trump's absence means that the debate on Thursday will now feature Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Ohio Governor John Kasich and Senator Rand Paul.

And of course Kelly, who said on her program Tuesday night; 'Ill be there.

'The debate will go on with or without Mr. Trump.'

According to a poll from Monmouth University, Donald Trump earns 30% support and Ted Cruz has 23% support when likely caucusgoers are asked who they will caucus for on February 1st.

Marco Rubio (16%) and Ben Carson (10%) are in the field's second tier.
Two 'Captain Calamities' have vowed to continue their disaster-struck voyage despite needing help from emergency services nine times.

Bob Weise and Steve Shapiro, both 71, left Norway in July aboard their vessel Nora hoping to sail to North America.

But on Tuesday the two yachtsmen called rescue teams for the ninth time in seven months after failing to tie up their yacht correctly in Hayle, Cornwall, causing it to tip over and create a fire on board the cluttered vessel.

The two blundering yachtsmen called rescue teams a ninth time in seven months after failing to tie up their yacht correctly in Hayle, Cornwall, causing it to tip over

Steve Shapiro (left) and Bob Weise (right), who are attempting to reach Maine in the US but have had to be rescued nine times since leaving their starting destination of Norway

The pair, from North America, previously had to call on rescue teams in Norway, Denmark, Scotland and Ireland, and the cost of their capers is totting up too.

The RNLI costs 410,000 per day to run and rescues on average 24 people - meaning each person costs 17,000 to rescue.

Now authorities fear the pair could endanger themselves and would be rescuers if they continue their odyssey and have advised them to stop.

But it appeared the pair were undaunted by the latest setback.

After the latest emergency which involved firefighters, coastguards and the ambulance service Mr Shapiro, a screenwriter and author originally from California, said: 'We're re-tying up in Hayle; some things have to be fixed, but the boat is fine.

'There was a candle which burnt some clothes, otherwise there was no real damage. Soon as we get northerly winds we'll go out.'

Hayle Harbourmaster Peter Haddock said he was concerned for the safety of Mr Shaprio and Mr Weise, an ex-US Army helicopter pilot from Idaho.

The pair started their journey in Norway, where they encountered their first hiccup, and have gone on to experience issues in Denmark. They also had to call for help in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland, and have experienced multiple issues since arriving in Cornwall last week

Emergency services get to work saving the boat from going under after the two sailors failed to tie it up properly, causing it to tip over and start a fire on board

Steve Shapiro, aged 71, pictured on his boat Nora at the Hayle Harbour in Cornwall, surrounded by clutter after the fire

He said they hadn't been on board at the time of the fire which had started when the yacht fell over when the tide went out.

Mr Haddock said: 'The yacht was assisted into harbour on Monday evening and the owners were told how to tie up to the quayside.

'They either didn't understand or couldn't do it properly because they didn't comply and the yacht fell over when the tide went out. It's thought that when the yacht fell over something caught alight on board.

'The owners were not on board at the time. But the fire service and coastguards attended for three hours until they were satisfied the fire was out.

'It's hard to tell what condition the yacht is in now and whether it's seaworthy. I believe the owners will be still sleeping on board.

'But it will need to be properly assessed - especially the hull. I would be very concerned should the owners wish to proceed to sea without a thorough assessment.

The bungling sailors were not on board the 18-tonne Nora when the fire broke out. Two fire engines were later called to the scene to put it out

The fire was thought to have been started by a candle on board the ship, which toppled over after the boat tipped to one side when the tide went out

Hayle Harbourmaster Peter Haddock said he was concerned for the safety of the pair following the latest setback and was unsure as to whether or not it was seaworthy

'They're both elderly gentlemen.The wisest thing would be to wait at least a few days. All I can do is offer advice to the owners.

'But I fear should they go to sea and need assistance again it could be dangerous for all concerned including would be rescuers.'

An article on Sail World.com also pleaded for an intervention. It read: 'Oh dear, now a ninth emergency, should they be stopped?

'This would be funny if it was not so serious, two "sailors" though that might be the wrong term to use have once again struck trouble.

The two Captain Calamities claim they have just been unlucky but their run of misfortune took an extreme turn when their 40ft boat Nora tipped over while tied up in Hayle Harbour, Cornwall

'The entire British rescue system is likely to be on Red Alert as they take to sea again. One wonders if there is any law that can stop this farce, before someone dies?'

Regarding the fire on board the yacht a spokesman for Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service said: 'One appliance from Hayle Fire Station and one appliance from Tolvaddon attended a small fire on an 18-tonne sailing yacht.

'The yacht was alongside so for safety purposes the water rescue teams from Penzance and Falmouth also attended.

'The crews used three breathing apparatus, two hose reels and one triple extension ladder to exinguish the fire. Police and Coastguard were also in attendance and the incident has been left in the hands of the Harbourmaster.'

The pair were rescued by lifeboat crews earlier this month after their yacht's engine faltered two miles off the coast of Cornwall

On Tuesday a spokesperson for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said: 'We can confirm that a yacht in Hayle Harbour caught fire and capsized earlier today.

'St Ives and Portreath Coastguard Rescue Teams attended the scene alongside Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service, South West Ambulance Service and Devon and Cornwall Police Service.

'The fire is now out and both crew members are accounted for and safe.'

Last week the Nora was rescued by the St Ives Lifeboat after experiencing engine trouble making it the seventh time in six months the two elderly yachtsmen had been rescued.

The St Ives All Weather Lifeboat was tasked by Falmouth Coastguard and launched on Tuesday January 19 to the yacht which had no propulsion.

The Nora had the engine running but was getting no drive and was drifting 1.5 miles north off St Ives.

At the time a spokeswoman from the Maritime & Coastguard Agency said: 'The UK Coastguard has responded on two occasions over the last three days to assist the crew of the NORA.

'The crew were right to call us when they got into trouble - we respond to all calls from those in difficulty.

'The crew and their vessel were brought to a place of safety near St Ives.

'However, it is the responsibility of the crew to undertake the necessary repairs to safely prepare them for the next stage of their journey.

'It's not of role the UK Coastguard which is an emergency service, to arrange a vessel's repairs or to move a vessel to a location that's more convenient for the crew.
A Texas father has been found not guilty of theft after he took his 12-year-old daughter's phone away as punishment.

Ronald Jackson, 36, had been charged with theft of property of at least $50 but under $500 after taking his daughter's iPhone 4 when he found an inappropriate text in September 2013, WFAA reported.

A judge ordered for Jackson to be found not guilty on Tuesday citing insufficient evidence to continue the case.

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Ronald Jackson, 36, of Texas was found not guilty of theft after he took his 12-year-old daughter's phone away as punishment in September 2013

He had been charged with theft of property of at least $50 but under $500 after taking his daughter's iPhone 4 (pictured) when he found inappropriate texts

Jackson had taken his daughter's phone away to teach her lesson after reportedly finding a text he thought was rude regarding another woman.

'I was being a parent,' he told CBSDFW. 'You know, a child does something wrong, you teach them what's right.

'You tell them what they did wrong and you give them a punishment to show that they shouldn't be doing that.'

The girl's mother, Michelle Steppe, said in court on Monday that she called police that same day who then went to Jackson's home and asked for the iPhone back, but the father refused.

'At that point, I decided the police don't interfere with my ability to parent my daughter,' Jackson told WFAA.

Steppe said that she was upset because the property was not his to take as it belongs to her and that she maintained the cell phone plans under her name.

'You can't take someone's property, regardless if you're a parent or not,' she told WFAA.

Jackson and Steppe are no longer a couple and were never married but had their daughter together, who is now 15.

Steppe's spouse is a Grand Prairie police officer, CBSDFW reported.

The girl's mother, Michelle Steppe, said in court on Monday that she called police on that same day who then went to Jackson's home and asked for the iPhone back, but the father refused

'At that point, I decided the police don't interfere with my ability to parent my daughter,' Jackson, who still has the phone, said of the incident

Three months following the 2013 phone incident, the father was sent a citation in the mail for theft of property less than $50 in value, a Class C misdemeanor, according to WFAA.

Jackson, who was offered a plea deal in January 2014 if he returned the phone, hired a lawyer and requested a jury trial.

The city attorney's office requested for the case to be dismissed and refiled the case with a harsher offense, a Class B misdemeanor, punishable to up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine, WFAA reported.

A warrant was issued for Jackson's arrest and he was taken into custody at his home in April 2015 before he posted a bail of $1,500 to get out of jail, according to his lawyer, Cameron Gray.

Jackson might have been found not guilty but the case is not over as his lawyer plans to lawyer file a federal complaint for civil rights violations over the way Jackson was treated by police and the city attorney's office

Police said officers made several attempts to return the property to its owner but they were unsuccessful, according to WFAA.

'After unsuccessful recover of the property, this case, as with any other of this monetary value, was investigated and those results were provided to the Dallas County District Attorney's Intake Office who subsequently forwarded it to the trial court for prosecution,' Grand Prairie Police Detective Lyle Gensler said in a statement.

Over the course of the two-day trial, the teen testified in court against her father about the incident. Jackson still has the phone, according to WFAA.

Steppe noted that was the last thing she wanted her daughter to go through and that she was not happy with the verdict because she had purchased the cell phone.

'Even if you purchase something with your own money and have a receipt, it's not yours,' Steppe told WFAA. 'Someone can take it from you.'

Jackson reportedly did not become apart of his daughter's life until she was seven years old. Following this incident, he said that he 'can't ever have a relationship with them again.'
Already said 'boisterous' guard dog and hourly checkups keep him awake

Complained about being unable to sleep due to light through his lawyer

Drug lord El Chapo is imprisoned after being recaptured for the third time

Mexican drugs lord El Chapo, pictured during his recapture in January, has claimed he is being 'tortured' by prison officers leaving the light on at night

Mexican drugs lord El Chapo has claimed he is being 'tortured' by prison officers leaving the light in his cell on at night.

The cartel leader is awaiting extradition from Mexico to the United States after being recaptured on January 8 following his escape from prison.

He has now lodged an official complaint about his treatment at the Altiplano maximum security prison, where he is being held.

The complaint alleges the drugs baron has suffered 'psychological abuse' due to sleep deprivation, with his lawyer claiming he started waking up 'every hour' after authorities installed an all-night light.

It comes just one day after it was reported the criminal boss - real name Joaquin Guzman - complained he is unable to sleep properly due to a 'boisterous guard dog' and hourly checkups.

Mexican newspaper La Jornada claimed the court is being asked to grant an application for the cessation of 'harassment'. The order is often granted to curb torture and cruel or degrading treatment as well as for cases of imminent exile.

El Chapo's lawyer, Jose Gonzalez, also revealed a text the crime boss had written to him where he claimed he had not been able to sleep at all.

El Chapo wrote: 'They wake me up to take the register every hour during the day and every two hours at night, and there is a dog next to me which barks a lot and stops me sleeping.'

His lawyer has also stated in the public declaration that El Chapo has not 'seen his family since before he was detained'.

He also puts this down to a 'complete lack of facilities, as there are no phones in the rooms'.

The president of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, has explained that the State Attorney General for the republic is working to 'accelerate' the extradition of El Chapo to the U.S.

The cartel leader is awaiting extradition from Mexico to the United States after being recaptured on January 8 following his escape from prison. Above, a photograph from July 2015 of the tunnel El Chapo used to escape through

El Chapo's lawyer, Jose Luis Gonzalez Meza (pictured), passed on the drug lord's concerns to the media

El Chapo is considered by the country's Department of the Treasury as the 'most powerful drug trafficker in the world'.

He escaped from the maximum security jail in 2015 through a one mile tunnel, which burrowed up through the floor of the shower in his cell.

Officials claimed his meeting with actor Sean Penn was instrumental in leading them to his recapture, after facilitating an interview which was subsequently published in Rolling Stone magazine.

Meanwhile, actress Kate del Castillo, who is at the center of a Mexican money laundering probe after she helped the Hollywood star interview El Chapo, said Mexico's government wants to 'destroy her,' Univision reported over the weekend.

Mexican authorities claim El Chapo's recapture was helped in part by his decision to meet with actor Sean Penn (pictured)

He has lodged an official complaint about his treatment at the Altiplano maximum security prison (pictured), where he is being held

Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez has said that there were 'indications' the actress may have used money from Guzman to help finance her tequila business.

A publicist for del Castillo did not immediately respond to a request for comment when asked yesterday.

An official for Mexico's attorney general's office declined to comment on the remarks, but noted that Gomez has guaranteed that the presumption of innocence will be respected.
When he was away they allege that Benjamin raped and killed the

American tourist Jessica Colker was raped before being killed, Grenada's top policeman revealed today - after her alleged murderer appeared in court.

Police Commissioner Sir Winston James said a post-mortem examination on the 39-year-old showed she had been the victim of a sexual assault.

Speaking at a press conference at the Grenada police headquarters in Fort George he also gave new details into the brutal murder of Coker.

The press conference was held just hours after her David Benjamin made his first court appearance.

Benjamin, 27, was charged with capital murder which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Sir Winston said evidence against Benjamin would include DNA and circumstantial evidence that detectives had gathered during their investigation.

'We believe that from the investigation so far that she was severely sexually assaulted,' he said.

'It was confirmed by the pathologist that she was raped. The evidence will show she was raped.'

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Charged: David Martin Benjamin faces life in prison if convicted of the murder of Jessica Colker

Court appearance: Jessica Colker's alleged murderer was charged and appeared in front of a magistrate today. He made no plea and was remanded in custody

Handcuffed: David Benjamin was sent to the island's St George's Prison. He may spend up to a year in remand before trial

Driven away: Benjamin kept charging documents over his face as he was placed on the back seat of a white pick up truck and driven at speed to prison

Sir Winston said the rape was not previously mentioned in autopsy results as they were only to determine the cause of death.

Colker died from an extensive skull fracture and asphyxia.

Sir Winston said Benjamin had become a suspect as he had been seen in the area of the Le Cheasere beach in the days before Colker's death pestering other tourists for money.

'He was on the beach asking people for money,' said Sir Winston.

Sir Winston said Benjamin has not confessed to murder. Police have interviewed the victim's 62-year-old husband Brian Meloti.

Sir Winston said he was unable to divulge why Colker was left alone with the alleged killer while her husband ran over half a mile to get help.

But a police source said it was likely Colker was held hostage while her husband was ordered to return to the hotel to get money.

During the time he was away Colker was raped and killed. Her body was found an hour after the alarm was raised. Meloti did not suffer any injury.

Sir Winston said US tourists should not be afraid to visit Grenada. 'I would say they can still come to Grenada is safe and there is not reason for anyone to stay away from visiting.

'If you look at the crime statistics of the other countries surrounding Grenada we are very low.

Murdered: It has been confirmed that Jessica Colker, (pictured here with her husband Brian Melito) was killed while she walked along a beach in Grenada on Sunday

No questions: Murder suspect David Benjamin's father Joseph Benjamin was furious today when he was questioned about his rapist son being accused of the brutal killing

Crime scene: The remains of the police investigation at the site where Jessica Colker was murdered. Officers tried to help save her life but were unable to

'Last year there were six murder cases and in 2014 we had eight. It is no going up it is going down'.

Benjamin made a brief appearance at Grenville Magistrate's Court where he was charged with non-capital murder.

The 26-year-old did not speak during the hearing before Magistrate Nevlyn John.

He was remanded in custody to St George's prison.

Benjamin attempted to hide his face as he was led in handcuffs to a waiting car from Grenville Police Station.

The alleged murderer, who wore a green and white checked shirt and jeans, held up his charging sheet to his face.

Detectives led him to a white unmarked pick up truck where he was helped into the back seat.

The alleged killer stared out of the blacked-out windows of the vehicle as it sped away.

He was driven to St George's prison in Grenada's capital where he has been remanded until his next court appearance.

He is likely to held on remand for up to a year before he comes to trial. During the brief court appearance Benjamin did not enter a plea.

Grenada has the death penalty but non-capital murder means that Benjamin will not face the ultimate sanction if found guilty.

Her distraught husband spent Tuesday with officials at the US consulate in Grenada's capital of St George.

He is preparing to fly back to their home in Atlanta with his wife's body after it was released for burial by a medical examiner on the island.

The death of Colker has sent shockwaves through the small Caribbean island which depends heavily on tourists, particularly from the US.

Evidence: Grenada Police Commissioner Sir Winston James (center) outlined the case police have built in the wake of the murder of Jessica Colker and urged tourists not to be put off coming to the island

Peaceful: The Le-Cheasere beach where Jessica Colker was murdered after going for a walk with her husband on the first full day of her vacation. The bay is a popular place because it is quiet

Forensic search: Police had investigated the area where Jessica Colker was attacked

Benjamin's father was in court but refused to comment as he left.

The father had expressed fury yesterday when approached by a Daily Mail Online reporter when approached at the bar shack he runs, and where his son was living before the attack.

Benjamin Snr at first refused to acknowledge his son was in police custody.

He then shouted out aggressively: 'I have got nothing to say to you  talk to the police.

'I don't want to say anything. The police are the only ones who can help you now. I can't say anything.'

Neighbors said his son David had been living with his father since being released from prison in December having been jailed for raping a14-year-old girl.

Sentenced to 15 years he is thought to have been released early after serving five years.

The Benjamin family home is a ten-minute walk from the Le-Cheasere beach in the parish of St David where the attack took place on Sunday afternoon.

Colker and her 62-year-old husband, a doctor, were on their first full day of their vacation when they were attacked.

The couple had walked along a trail from the La Sagesse hotel to a deserted crescent shaped beach that can only be reached by following a path through a dense mangrove.

It would have taken the couple at least 15 minutes to reach the secluded spot where waves from the Caribbean crash onto the beach.

When Daily Mail Online visited the murder scene the area was deserted.

Less than ten yards in from the beach yellow police tape could still be found wrapped around a palm tree where it had been used to seal off the murder scene in the dense undergrowth.

Home: This is the bar shack where David Benjamin was living with his father until the murder of Jessica Colker. He had only just been freed from prison

Village: David Benjamin was living in Coals Gap, which is ten minutes from the scene of the crime

Held: St Davids police station, where David Benjamin was initially questioned over the murder of Jessica Colker

Police spokesman Sylvan McIntyre said officers from the local police station attended the scene but nothing could be done to save Ms Colker.

McIntyre, who attended the murder scene, said Colker was fully clothed when found.

At the La Sageese hotel one of the managers who would only give his name as Mike told how he drove a distraught Brian Meloti to the US embassy.

He said: 'He was in complete shock and not saying anything. What could he say?'

Mike said Dr Meloti and his wife had only planned to stay at their hotel for two days before moving on to another hotel.

He said the deserted beach where the attack took place was part of a trail around the Le Cheasere beach.

'It is a popular trail. It is isolated and quiet and that is why so many people like it,' he said.

A day after the murder David Benjamin walked into the St David's police station to hand himself in.

Traveler: These pictures of the Atlanta anesthesiologist date from 2014 when she took a vacation to Italy with her new husband

Marriage: This picture of Jessica Colker and Brian Melito was posted to their wedding registry website ahead of the ceremony on November 1, 2014

Tragic: Jessica Colker was killed on a deserted stretch of sun-splashed beach about twelve miles outside the capital of the Caribbean island of Grenada. Above are her shoes that she kicked off before going off on a walk

A police source told Daily Mail Online: 'Benjamin was set free in December. He had been locked away for the rape of a young child.'

Benjamin, who has three teardrops under his left eye that in gang culture means he has killed or is prepared to kill, has not yet been charged.

He was held at St George's Police station in the island's capital and was questioned by detectives.

Grenada Police spokesman Sylvan McIntyre said of Benjamin: 'What I can tell you now is that he is in custody. He was not captured, but he turned himself in and our investigations will continue, as we believe he can assist us with our investigation into the incident.'

Until recently the set jail term for rape in Grenada was 15 years.

A recent amendment to the criminal code means that any person who is convicted of rape is sentenced to prison for a maximum of 35 years.

Grenada's criminal courts have been dominated by sexual offenses, accounting for more than one-third of all the cases before the High Court for trial.

Colker was a registered pediatric anesthesiologist at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

She and her husband are both seasoned travelers and first met at a dance workshop in Costa Rica according to their wedding website profile.

Helped: Hotel worker Mike drover Brian Meloti to the US embassy and said he was 'in shock'

They say they had a smoothie together on the second day of the class and then spent the rest of the week 'dancing, talking, surfing, eating great food, swimming in the ocean under the stars and generally falling in love.'

They became engaged in August of 2014 and wed in November of 2014 in Atlanta.

In their statement issued on Monday afternoon, the US Embassy said they were 'working closely with officials investigating Ms. Colker's death'.

Police in St George's confirmed that 'at about 12.00 noon on Sunday January 24, 2016, it was reported to the police that a woman, who was in the company of her male companion went missing following an attack by a man at Le-Cheasere beach in St David.

'A search was mounted in the area and a person later identified as the missing woman was found dead.

'A suspect is currently in custody assisting police with their investigation.'

Colker is the second visitor to have been murdered on the island in just over a month.

In December, Canadian Linnea Veinotte was murdered and suspect, Akim Frank, is charged with her murder. At the time police said the killing was an isolated incident and the island was safe for tourists.

According to the hotel's website the resort is 'Grenada's Best Romantic Getaway'.

Tourism chiefs in Grenada have moved to calm fears of visitors in the wake of the brutal murder.

They said the death of the 39 year old, who was found battered and strangled on a deserted beach, was not the 'norm' for the island.

A spokesman told Daily Mail Online it was the first serious tourist related incident in 15 years.

Brief stay: Brian Melito and Jessica Colker had only planned to stay at La Sagesse hotel for two nights when she was brutally attacked

Death in paradise: Grenada is one of the more southern Caribbean islands and the La Sagesse Hotel is marked on the map in relation to the capital, St George's

Trouble in paradise: Authorities are concerned that the murder will affect tourism to the island, whose capital, St George's, is popular with vacationers

In a bid to reassure those visitors already on the island and the thousands preparing to stay during the coming months a spokesman for the Grenada Tourist Authority said the police were continuing to be 'vigilant' to protect tourists.

In a statement issued to Daily Mail.com they said: 'The directors, management and staff of the Grenada Tourism Authority (GTA) are deeply saddened and express our deepest sympathies to Jessica's husband, her family and her friends.

'We are working closely with the Royal Grenada Police Force who has informed that a suspect is in custody assisting the investigation.

'This regrettable occurrence is not the norm. Grenada receives about 30,000 visitors from the United States of America every year, and over the last fifteen years there has been no such serious tourist-related incidents..

'The Royal Grenada Police Force continues to be vigilant in protecting Grenadian citizens and visitors to our country. The GTA and the RGPF continue to collaborate with tourism stakeholders to maintain the safety of the nation's cruise, yachting and stay over visitors.

'Our deepest condolences are extended to Jessica's husband, family and friends.'

Its Facebook page says: 'Blending the elegance and charm of an English country house with the tropical climate, beautiful palm tree shaded beach and lush vegetation, this wildly romantic hideaway offers a wonderful opportunity for recreation, relaxation, nature appreciation and the ambiance in which to enjoy it.'

A staff member at the hotel said then had been told not to talk about the incident.
She then heard lilies are toxic to cats after she posted on social media

A cat owner is devastated after her four-month-old kitten died because he ingested pollen from lilies.

Elizabeth Mackie, found her beloved kitten Mr Mistoffelees covered in orange pollen from some flowers she had been given.

Worried that the pollen wouldn't come off she shared a picture of the kitten on social media for advice - but to her horror was told that it is deadly to cats.

Elizabeth Mackie, 38, and her kitten Mr Mistoffelees - she had bought the cute pet to 'cheer herself up' after her mother died of a stroke

Close bond: The white and black-coloured Mr Mistoffelees snuggling up to Elizabeth who did not know the danger lilies pose to cats until she made a post on social media

Warning: Elizabeth makes a post on Facebook telling cat owners to keep their pets away from the flowers

The pub manager's local vets advised her to rush the cat into their emergency surgery, where they frantically tried to save Mistoffelees - but he sadly died later that day.

The white lillies were bought for Elizabeth as a thank you present after she gave away a chest of drawers to a friend.

Both Elizabeth and the veterinary surgery have now launched a petition demanding supermarkets and other florists put warning stickers on all lilies, stating that they should not be kept near cats.

The 38-year-old, from Whitchurch, Shropshire, said: 'Had I known that lilies were so deadly to cats I would never have had them in my house.

He was a cutie: Despite the best efforts of vet, Andy Nelson, little Mr Mistoffelees could not be saved - and pictured right a peace lily

Alarm bells: Elizabeth's Facebook post asking for advice after her kitten kept playing with her lily plant - to the 38-year-old's horror she then found out how dangerous the flowers are to cats

'Someone had given me them as a thank you and I had put them on the window ledge in a big bay window. Mistoffelees had been brushing up against them a lot as he liked to look out of the window.

HOW LILIES ARE DANGEROUS TO CATS - AND OTHER PLANTS WHICH CAN PROVE FATAL Cats Protection warn several types of lilies have been found to be deadly to cats, including Easter lily, tiger lily, rubrum lily, Japanese show lily, some species of day lily, and certain other members of the Liliaceae family. Ingesting just one leaf can result in severe poisoning, and within a very short time your cat will exhibit signs of toxicity. All parts of the lily plant are considered toxic to cats, and consuming even small amounts can cause severe poisoning. Kittens are particularly prone to being poisoned as they explore their environment, and older cats are often affected simply because they brush against the flower and get pollen on their coats. Later they groom the pollen off, and of course ingest the lily pollen as they clean their fur. The primary toxic effects are on the kidneys. Other plants which can affect cats include poinsettia, which can give symptoms including diarrhea and cramps; rhododendron which causes vomiting and can be fatal; and daffodil bulbs which can also cause vomiting - with just a small amount potentially being lethal. Advertisement

'I found him covered in orange and realised it was pollen. He kept getting upset when I tried to clean it off so I put a post on social media to see if friends had any advice of how to do it.

'Suddenly people started warning me that lily pollen is toxic to cats and I should check he hadn't eaten any.

'I had never heard this before, I was immediately very worried so I called the vets. They advised me to rush him in as an emergency even though it was a Sunday.'

Once at Leonard Brother Veterinary Clinic in Whitchurch, veterinary surgeon Andy Nelson sedated the kitten and tried to induce vomiting in case lilies had been consumed.

However Elizabeth soon realised that Mistoffelees had licked pollen off his fur and his condition quickly deteriorated and he died of kidney and liver failure that afternoon on Sunday, January 10.

She said: 'When he stopped breathing the vet went to get adrenaline. I massaged his chest as shown by the vet in a bid to save him while he got the adrenaline but unfortunately we couldn't revive him.

'I was devastated. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life as he was just a baby and I was there trying to save him like that. It was awful.'

The petition has now reached more than 800 signatures - just 192 off the 1,000 target.

'I had no idea that lilies could do this and since launched the petition lots of people have got in touch saying they didn't know either,' Elizabeth said.

Support: Vet Andy Nelson (pictured here) is backing the petition, calling on supermarkets and florists to add warning stickers to lilies

'If only I had known I would have got rid of them and Mistoffelees would be fine.

'I would hate for anyone else to go through what I have so I hope that our petition can at least raise some awareness and if the shops do start labelling them, then that could save a lot of cats from dying a horrible death.'

Veterinary surgeon Andy Nelson, who helped create the petition and owns a cat himself, said: 'This is the second cat in the last year that I have seen die from lilies just because the owner did not know that they were dangerous for cats.

'I'm amazed at the number of people who simply do not know how deadly they can be for cats, as they are popular pets and lilies are popular flowers - but the two just cannot go together.

'I hope our petition at least raises some awareness about the danger but I'm really hoping we can get the shops to put a sticker on lilies to ensure it doesn't happen anymore. It's a very simple change but could save a lot of cats a very painful death from kidney failure and their owners a lot of heartache.'
An unattended toddler who was found lying on her side with her nose and mouth submerged in 15 centimetres of water drowned in 'a minute or so' when her grandfather left to go check on her sister, a coroner has found.

Leila Sofia Riquelme, from Brisbane, was a couple of weeks from her second birthday when she drowned in a bath after her grandfather Fernando Riquelme left her unattended for a matter of minutes while he left to room to attend to her four-year-old sister.

Mr Riquelme had left the door open and was listening out for trouble while the young girl bathed in the family's room at the Wellington Rydges Hotel in March 2014 but did not hear the toddler quietly drowning, the Courier Mail reported.

Leila Sofia Riquelme was a month from her second birthday when she drowned in a bath after being left unattended for a 'minute or so'

New Zealand coroner Garry Evans ruled the death an accident, stating that Mr Riquelme had taken precautions and done his best to revive his granddaughter once finding her body.

He said that as Mr Riquelme had left the door open and did not leave Leila for an extended period of time it was clear the father-of-four had taken 'a degree of caution and care towards the deceased' which had not been successful.

Mr Evans found that he had also taken 'reasonable steps' to revive Leila once he found her, but pressed that guardians must constantly watch over children who are in or around the water.

'The facts of his very safe case illustrate again the importance of constant watchfulness over children in a water environment of any kind,' his report said.

'In this care Leila drowned within the space of one minute or so.'

Leila's mother Sophie Riquelme returned as Mr Riquelme was performing CPR on her daughter.

They had been staying at the Wellington hotel for a wedding, with Mr Riquelme offering to bathe the two children while the rest of the family enjoyed breakfast before they returned to Brisbane.

According to reports, the toddler had been suffering from cold like symptoms including a runny nose and fever, which Ms Riquelme suspected could have been a medical condition that contributed to her death.

However, the Courier Mail reported that the sickness was found not to have caused or significantly contributed to her death.

Leila was found to have been left in a 15 centimetre deep bath for a minute or so before she died

They had been staying at the Wellington hotel for a wedding, with Mr Riquelme offering to bathe the two children while the rest of the family enjoyed breakfast before they returned to Brisbane

Friends, family and kind strangers raised $31,762 to help the Riquelme's bring Leila back to her native Australia to be buried.

'What you have done for us, with the amount that has been raised to help us bring Leila home and to support Nina, our eldest daughter, through the grieving process, is unimaginable,' the family wrote on a crowd funding page.

'Your donations have meant we were able to bring Leila home today, with us, her family, on the same flight.'

Ms Riquelme spoke of her grief on social media following her daughter's tragic death.

'I will never forget how much love and happiness you showed us on earth,' she wrote two months after Leila's death.

'My heart breaks every night when I wait for you to sneak into our bed as you liked our cuddles, I miss your cheeky shout for mummy or daddy after kindy when we picked Nina and you up.. I just miss my baby!'

She told the Courier Mail that Leila and her sister Nina had been flower girl's at the wedding they attended a day before her death and that the toddler had spent the majority of the day running around and blowing bubbles.
Two teen boys in rural Tennessee died this past week after allegedly drinking a cocktail of Mountain Dew and racing fuel known as 'DewShine'.

Logan Stephenson, a 16-year-old student at Greenbriar High School, was found dead in his bed the morning of January 21.

Just minutes later, paramedics were called to Stephenson's best friend J.D. Byram's house, when the boy started having seizures.

'They noticed the color of his skin had changed and he started having a seizure. His hands started drawing up,' Greenbrier Police Chief K.D. Smith told WZTV.

Byram, a student at the same high school, died Monday night at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

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Too young: Logan Stephenson, 16 (left), and his best friend J.D. Byram (right) died in the past week after ingesting a cocktail of Mountain Dew and racing fuel

After his hospitalization, two other boys came forward to authorities, admitting that the four of them had made a cocktail out of the Mountain Dew soda drink and racing fuel.

The lethal cocktail is known as 'DewShine' but is not the same as DEWshine, an non-alcoholic beverage made by PepsiCo.

The two other teens were evaluated at the hospital and then released.

It's unclear when the group consumed the beverage. An investigation into Byram and Stephenson's death is ongoing and final autopsy and toxicology reports will take several weeks to determine the exact cause of death.

Local police are concerned that teens may be drinking DewShine as an alternative to alcohol, which they are barred from purchasing.

Racing fuel costs about $7.50 a gallon and when mixed with Mountain Dew, it's still much more potent than regular hard alcohol.

Tribute: Above, a makeshift memorial set up in the parking lot of the teens' school - Greenbriar High School

Lethal: Police are worried that teens may be taking the cocktail of Mountain Dew and racing fuel nicknamed 'DewShine' without knowing the potentially deadly consequences

'We have certainly seen methanol infections, but nothing like this. I mean, this was a product that was almost 100 percent methanol, which is quite unusual,' Dr Donna Seger, the director of the Tennessee Poison Center, told WKRN.

Dr Seger says drinking DewShine can make one intoxicated, just like alcohol, but that it can have far more damning effects ranging from nausea to coma and then death.

Following the boys' deaths, a memorial was set up at their high school, where a vigil was held Tuesday night.

As the investigation is ongoing, the Greenbriar Police Department are asking anyone with information on the incident to call 615-643-4467.

In memory: Funeral services were held for Logan Stephenson on Tuesday in Greenbriar. Above, the scene outside the church

'You will not be in trouble with law enforcement if you were present at this gathering,' police said. 'Our goal is to ensure the safety of our citizens and get medical help for those who may need it.'

Funeral services were held Tuesday for Logan Stephenson. He is survived by his parents, stepmother, stepfather, two grandparents and six brothers and sisters, according to his obituary.

Stephenson's family is also collecting funds in his memory, via a GoFundMe page, which they are speaking with the school on how best to distribute.

'The family will be meeting with the school to discuss how to disburse these funds,' the obituary reads. 'Their desire is that it will be used to educate children of the many dangers which they face which parents are not aware of and therefore not able to warn them.'

The director of the Robertson County Schools also released a statement, saying 'our heartfelt sympathies go out to the parents and family members of these young men'.
Police in New York City are searching for a man suspected of slashing a woman on the hand after issuing a terrifying threat on board a subway train, marking the third such attack in 48 hours.

Police responded to a southbound 3 train at the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn at around 9.30pm Tuesday after receiving a 911 call about an assault.

Officers who arrived on the scene found a 29-year-old woman suffering from a cut to her right hand.

Do YOU know this man? the NYPD are searching for this man, who is suspected of slashing a woman's hand on board a 3 train in Brooklyn Tuesday evening

Police say the suspect, described as a black man, about 5-foot-9, weighing 175lbs, approached another rider, told her, 'I will chop you up on this train,' and then sliced her hand with an object wrapped in cloth

The seemingly random attack took place as the 3 train was pulling into the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn

Eight minutes after the 3 train assault, a 32-year-old man was slashed in the face while waiting for a 6 train at the 116th Street station in Harlem

The victim told police that a fellow subway rider approached her with the words, 'I will chop you up on this train, and then proceeded to strike her with an object wrapped in cloth. When the train came to a stop, the attacker fled.

The woman was taken to an area hospital to be treated for her injuries and was later released.

The NYPD has released CCTV screenshots showing the suspect in the attack, who was described as a black man, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing 175lbs, with short black hair.

He was last seen wearing a black puffy jacket, green cap and green camo pants, and he was carrying a white backpack.

Just eight minutes after the attack on board the 3 train, a 32-year-old man was slashed in the face inside the 116th Street train station along the 6 line in East Harlem, reported New York Daily News.

The victim then walked to Harlem Hospital, where he received stitches and was released. Police said the man is not cooperating with the investigation.

The two incidents occurred just hours after a 21-year-old man was arrested for allegedly slashing a 71-year-old Brooklyn grandmother in the face inside a D train Monday.

There has been a string of seemingly random slasher attacks in New York City since the beginning of the year.

Damon Knowles was charged with assault with intent to cause disfigurement and serious physical injury in connection to the attack on Carmen Rivera, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-nine.

Rivera was attacked on a southbound 6 train that was approaching the Bleecker Street station at around 7.15am Monday.

Damon Knowles, 21, was taken into custody late on Tuesday night suspected of slashing Carmen River, 71

Courageous: Carmen Rivera, a 71-year-old grandmother-of-nine, smiles as she returns to her home in the Bronx on Tuesday, one day after she was slashed by a stranger on her morning commute to work

Police released this artist's impression of the suspect and CCTV footage of the man leaving the subway

The NYPD said a male passenger sitting across from Rivera lashed out at her. Both the man and Rivera got off at the next stop.

Footage from inside the subway station shows the suspect jumping over the turnstile as he ran away.

Knowles reportedly became a suspect after he was charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest in another incident on Tuesday, according to the Daily News.

Speaking outside her home on Tuesday, Rivera said she did not realize she had been cut until getting off the train.

She said the man fell on her as she was sitting, and somehow managed to hide the slashing and the blade.

Rivera needed 30 stitches to close the 4-inch cut on her left cheek.

However she insisted on returning to her job as a sample maker on Tuesday, and remains defiant about what happened to her.

Knowles, pictured, was arrested following Monday's attack on the 6 train which injured Carmen Rivera

'What's going to happen is going to happen. That's it,' she told CBS New York.

'I'm not afraid. I've never been afraid. I guess that is just me.'

'I take that train every morning.'

Family members said Rivera initially denied what happened to her, saying she had cut herself at work, before finally admitting that she was attacked.

The Monday attack was preceded by at least three other similar incidents involving slashings since the beginning of the new year.

Anthony Cristopher-Smith, 30, from Newark, New Jersey, was walking in the East village on January 19 when a man yelling profanities knocked him off his feet and slashed him in the face from his ear to his jawline.

Police later arrested Francis Salud, 28, in connection to the attack. Salud has also been charged for a similar attack on East 23rd Street in October.

Amanda Morris was viciously slashed in the face on her daily commute to work in Chelsea on January 6

Earlier incident: Anthony Christopher-Smith was walking down East 6th Street near Cooper Square with headphones on January 19 when he was knocked to the ground and slashed across the face

On New Year's Day, a 28-year-old woman suffered a facial wound at the hands of a total stranger in The Bronx, and less than a week later, 24-year-old Amanda Morris was sliced with a sharp object while walking to work in Chelsea.
An Aboriginal woman says she was the victim of a racist attack on Australia Day when a stranger yelled speak English in Australia after she spoke to her toddler in an indigenous dialect.

Artist and nurse Elizabeth Close was running errands at an Adelaide suburban shopping centre with her two-year-old daughter on Australia Day morning when her little girl ran off.

I called her back, speaking to her, as I often do, in our native Pitjantjatjara language. Awa! Ngala pitja! Pitja!!! Wanti! (Hey! Come here! Come! Stop!), Ms Close wrote in a blog about the alleged incident on Tuesday.

A 20-something woman with Australian-flag novelty leggings yelled at me: Its Australia Day! We speak English in Australia!!

Artist and nurse Elizabeth Close was running errands at an Adelaide suburban shopping centre with her two-year-old daughter on Australia Day morning. She says she was the victim of a racist incident

The mother-of-two says she was instantly hurt by the harsh statement from the stranger, which left her in tears. She is proud of her heritage, identifying as Anangu and a Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara woman from the APY lands in Central Australia.

I was aghast. I thought surely she must be joking. Ive read stories of things like this on the internet but surely it doesnt happen in real life, she wrote.

Ms Close says she responded with Pardon me? and the young woman retorted: Its AUS-STRAYA-DAY. WE SPEAK ENG-LISH.

She (was) speaking slowly as to ensure comprehension because obviously Im either intellectually disabled or stupid, wrote Ms Close.

Im speaking my native Australian Aboriginal language. Its Pitjantjatjara? I couldnt get more Australian!! Ms Close told the stranger, who stared blankly before walking off.

For Ms Close, Australian Day is a day of mourning and she feels as though Australians are celebrating the dispossession, oppression and genocide of her people with tacky singlets, BBQs and singlets (stock pic)

Pitjantjatjara is a dialect which has been spoken in Australia for tens of thousands of years before English settlement.

Ms Close says she was so upset by the altercation her eyes immediately welled up with tears.

However, she insists she does not feel upset for herself but rather what it means for her childrens future and the country they, and other Indigenous people, will grow up in.

For Ms Close, Australian Day is a day of mourning and on January 26 each year she feels as though Australians are celebrating the dispossession, oppression and genocide of her people with tacky singlets, BBQs and singlets.

She believes the date of Australia Day should change as a symbolic gesture to recognise the hurt and suffering of the Aboriginal people.

One I personally like is moving it back to the 25th of January  but one day  a symbolic gesture that captures the last day that we and we alone were the custodians of this great land, she wrote in her blog post.

Until we stop holding BBQs in the name of genocide, we cant move forward. We cant join hands as a nation.
David Cameron will have surprise talks with Commission president Jean Claude Juncker in a bid to ensure his renegotiation is completed next month, it was revealed today.

Mr Cameron faces a race against time to complete a deal by next month's EU summit and any hitch now could derail hopes of a summer referendum.

Downing Street confirmed a late change to Mr Cameron's schedule shortly before Prime Minister's Questions. He will now travel to Brussels on Friday - instead of a planned trip to Scandinavia.

Mr Juncker has previously said he was 'quite sure' a deal could be reached but it emerged this week the UK and Germany remain far apart on dealing with Mr Cameron's concerns about migration.

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David Cameron, pictured in Downing Street today, is due to make a surprise visit to Brussels on Friday after cancelling his visit to Scandinavia

The Scandinavian leg of Mr Cameron's diplomatic offensive would have followed similar trips to Hungary and the Czech Republic in recent weeks, telephone talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a Downing Street meeting with Irish premier Enda Kenny.

It emerged this week Britain and Germany were far apart on how to define a worker, a key part of Mr Cameron's desire to cut migration to Britain.

The key sticking point in Mr Cameron's renegotiation has been how to meet British demands to stop new migrants claiming in work benefits for four years.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has also admitted the on-going migrant crisis in Europe could push the British talks down the agenda and doom hopes of a swift end to talks.

A senior Number 10 source declined to say whether Mr Cameron or Mr Juncker had requested Friday's meeting.

They said: 'As you would expect, as we get closer to the February Council, there are meetings to be held with some of the people most closely involved in the process, such as President Juncker.

'The opportunity for a meeting on Friday has come up, so we are taking that opportunity.'

The source insisted the last-minute addition of a meeting with the EC president was 'absolutely' a positive development.

Mr Cameron has insisted he is in no hurry to complete the deal, preferring instead to get the detail right - but speculation about a June poll has been rife ever since the Prime Minister indicated he wanted a deal at next month's summit.

Asked later whether it reflected concern that the timetable for agreement may be slipping, the PM's official spokeswoman said: 'Across Europe, we are seeing leaders - whether in the institutions or other countries - clear that they want to see a deal secured in February.

'The ambition is there. There's clearly more work to do. The PM has said many times that what matters most is that we get the substance right and fix the problems and concerns of the British people.'

Mr Cameron is due to meet with Commission president Jean Claude Juncker, pictured, on Friday in a surprise meeting

A European Commission spokesman said: 'The Commission acts as a facilitator in the UK talks.

'It is in this spirit that President Juncker will meet PM Cameron to discuss the latest state of play in the talks, which as you know are taking place under the authority of EUCO President D. Tusk.

The outlines of a deal had been due to be presented by council president Donald Tusk next week.

And Mr Tusk raised expectations of a deal being imminent when he addressed MEPs.

Earlier this month he said: As of today the result of the referendum is more unpredictable than ever before.

Time is of essence here. And this is why I will work hard to strike a deal in February. It will not be easy but it is still possible.

He added: We agreed to work together to find solutions in all four baskets raised by Prime Minister Cameron: relations with the euro area, sovereignty, competitiveness and on benefits and free movement.

Hard work on all these baskets is progressing and as we speak my people are working with the Commission to bring us closer to the solution.

In the run-up to the February European Council, I will table a concrete proposal for a deal with the UK to all EU leaders.

Speaking to a House of Lords select committee yesterday, the Foreign Secretary suggested the possibility of a summer referendum could be taken away from the Government.

He admitted: 'We have to recognise the fact the European Union has got a couple of other issues on its plate and although the British renegotiation is number one our European agenda I'm afraid it isn't number one on the European agenda of any of our partners, except perhaps for the Irish.

He added: 'Unfortunately some of the other things are very much real-time challenges for the EU whereas this agenda is one which can be dealt with in slightly slower time.

'I think it would be inappropriate of us, and it would also be unwise of us, to try and push our agenda ahead of other things which the other EU member states will see as being pressingly urgent to discuss at the summit.'

He said it would be 'possible to hold a referendum in June' if a deal is reached at February's summit.
Two relatives of an 82-year-old woman who authorities say died after she sat in the same chair for six months have been arrested and charged with neglect.

Documents show that mother and son Carole Beam Howell, 74, and David Scott Howell, 43, were arrested on January 21 and charged with abuse or neglect resulting in the death of a vulnerable adult.

Barbara Beam died January 2, 2015, at her Greenville home. She lived with her sister Carole Howell and Howell's son David.

Carole Beam Howell, 74, left, and David Scott Howell, 43, right, were arrested and charged with neglect a year after the woman's sister was found dead in a chair

At the time of her death, police said that Beam's sister told them the woman couldn't move on her own.

Carole Howell said the woman 'stays in the chair located in the bedroom and that she had not moved out of the chair for approximately six months,' according to a report.

The sister told police Beam refused to eat a few hours before her death and they watched a soap opera together in her bedroom before she went to the kitchen.

When the sister returned, Beam was slumped in her chair, and didn't have a pulse, police said.

Paramedics took Beam from the chair and put the 200-pound woman on the floor. Her legs were still bent in a sitting position when the officer arrived and she was not wearing pants, according to the report.

Officers noted indentions on the back of Beam's legs and body fluids staining the chair, saying the home's smell was so bad that firefighters set up a fan at the door as they worked.

The Greenville County Coroner's Office ruled Beam's death a homicide by neglect, saying that she died from a blood clot in her lung.

Beam also had deep vein thrombosis, which are clots caused by sitting for long periods of time, and a serious infection that started in her kidneys, according to the coroner.

Prosecutors have been reviewing the case for a year. David Howell was listed in jail Wednesday, and Carole Howell was released on a personal recognizance bond.

David Howell has been arrested more than a dozen times since 1991, including charges for drug possession, underage drinking and making obscene phone calls.

There are also several arrests for criminal domestic violence, assault and stalking, although some of those charges were ultimately dropped, according to state police records.
Qayyum has denied harming the dog and claimed Schaniel made 'racist slurs' and punched him in the face several times

Dog was left with a dislocated hip and injured right leg requiring surgery and driver was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals

She told him it was a service dog but he refused to drive them before he is then said to have attacked the dog

Passenger Mojeh Adams Schaniel, 30, had gotten into his cab with her dog Brooklyn but he said he would not take the dog in his car

A New York Uber driver has been arrested after he allegedly yanked a passenger's service dog by its leash out of the owner's lap before slamming it to the ground.

The Silky Terrier was left with a dislocated hip and an injured right leg following the incident, which occurred after driver Muhammad Qayyum told the passenger she could not have the dog in his car, police said.

Qayyum, 23, of Queens has denied harming the animal according to an Uber spokeswoman, who said that all Uber drivers are required to accommodate service animals, DNAinfo reported.

New York Uber driver Muhammad Qayyum was arrested after he allegedly yanked passenger Mojeh Adams Schaniel's service dog by its leash out of the owner's lap before slamming it to the ground (the owner and dog pictured above)

The Silky Terrier was left with a dislocated hip and an injured right leg following the incident, which occurred after driver Muhammad Qayyum told the passenger she could not have the dog in his car, police said

It is not clear how the service dog is used to aid the woman.

The ordeal unfolded on January 21 when passenger Mojeh Adams Schaniel, who at the time was nine months pregnant, got into the cab with her dog in Midtown around 7.30pm, the New York Post reported.

Police said Qayyum then told the 30-year-old Manhattan resident: 'I will not take your dog in my car.'

The woman told Qayyum that her dog, Brooklyn, was a service animal but he refused to drive them and reportedly got out of the car, opened the rear passenger door and grabbed the dog's leash from her hand.

He then yanked the dog out of the owner's lap and threw it to the ground, according to authorities.

Qayyum claimed that after Schaniel refused to provide documents that proved her dog was a service animal she punched him in the face several times, according to the Uber spokeswoman.

He also claimed the passenger made 'racist, religiously disparaging slurs,' DNAinfo reported.

Following the incident, police said the dog was taken to Blue Pearl Veterinary Partners where it underwent surgery.

The ordeal unfolded on January 21 when passenger Mojeh Adams Schaniel, who at the time was nine months pregnant, got into the cab with her dog in Midtown around 7.30pm

Qayyum has denied harming the dog and claimed that Schaniel punched him in the face several times and made 'racist, religiously disparaging slurs'

Qayyum was arrested charged with aggravated cruelty to animals and harming a service animal.

He has since been released without bail and an order of protection was issued against him, according to DNAinfo.

The Uber spokeswoman said that both the passenger and driver's Uber accounts have been suspended pending an investigation into the incident.

'Any mistreatment of animals is abhorrent, and we do not tolerate violent behavior on the platform,' Uber said in a statement.

Schaniel, who is married, gave birth to a baby boy on Monday night and the couple's doorman said he was said to hear what happened to the dog, according to the New York Post.
Donald Trump may not be the only billionaire businessman from New York City running in the upcoming presidential race, especially if Rupert Murdoch has his way.

Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns Fox News, encouraged former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to join the election, writing on Twitter Wednesday: 'This is Bloomberg's last chance. You never know until your hat is in the ring! Events change everything, especially during elections.'

He had previously said on Saturday; 'Allegedly Bloomberg again considering running. If he does, may hurt Clinton more than Trump. Seems 2016 the year for populists.'

Murdoch's encouragement came just one day after Donald Trump announced he would not be participating in Thursday's Fox News debate and was the second time Murdoch had shown his support for a Bloomberg run.

And Murdoch was not done tweeting either, as he then posted a series of comments attacking Google for not paying a fair amount of taxes.

Google is co-hosting Thursday's debate with Fox News.

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Pals: Rupert Murdoch encouraged Michael Bloomberg (pair above in 2006) to run for president on Twitter Wednesday morning

Murdoch tweeted his encouragement and then posted a series of comments attacking Google for not paying a fair amount of taxes

Murdoch had previously encouraged Bloomberg to run last August

Timing: Murdoch's tweet came a day after Donald Trump (above on Tuesday) announced he would not appear on Thursday's Fox news debate

It was reveled by The New York Times over the weekend that Bloomberg was exploring the possibility of a run for president.

He reportedly made the decision feeling that Trump had gone too far right and Hillary Clinton had gone too far left in an attempt to keep voters from leaving her in favor of Bernie Sanders.

Bloomberg, 73, would run as a Independent, which he has been registered as ever since 2007 when he left the Republican party.

Busy: Bloomberg (above) appeared at a climate change summit on Wednesday

And he had only been a Republican since 2001 at the time he switched parties, having previously been a Democrat.

Bloomberg, who is worth over $40billion thanks to his eponymous media company, has set a deadline of early March to make a decision about a potential run.

Murdoch is no doubt hoping that Bloomberg might consider also joining the stage for Thursday's Fox News debate now that Trump will be absent.

Trump will however be on The O'Reilly Factor Wednesday night in what was a previously scheduled appearance.

Bloomberg would be an interesting addition to Thursday's debate, especially given how strongly some of his views differ from the Republican candidates.

He is in favor of clean energy and reducing carbon emissions unlike almost all those men and woman, so much so that he is appearing at an investor summit on climate change at the United Nations on Wednesday.

And he is also a strong supporter of gay rights and same-sex marriage, as seen by his public support for Mayor Kaminis of Athens, Greece on Twitter Tuesday after he signed a partnership bill into law.

Where he really differs though is gun laws, with beliefs on gun control that are even stricter than the ones held by the Democrats running for president.

Murdoch meanwhile has been keen on Bloomberg running for a while now, tweeting last August: 'With Trump becoming very serious candidate, it's time for next billionaire candidate, Mike Bloomberg to step into ring. Greatest mayor.'

He then added: 'I did not say I would vote for him! Just a friend I admire.'

No worries: Rupert Murdoch was seen out to dinner in London with new fiance Jerry Hall and friend Michael Caine on Tuesday night (above) as the Trump and Fox News feud raged

Murdoch posted a series of tweets, pictured above, taking aim at Google for not paying taxes

Murdoch, though often quite private, has been known to get vocal on Twitter, as he did earlier with his attack on Google.

'Google et al broke no tax laws. Now paying token amounts for p r purposes. Won't work. Need strong new laws to pay like the rest of us,' wrote Murdoch on Wednesday.

'Global tech companies making enormous profits most places, funneling $$ thru tax havens. Unless stopped will ruin local businesses who pay.'

He then chalked the entire thing up to their lobbying efforts and how impressive the men appear to some in politics.

'Tech tax breaks facilitated by politicians easily awed by Valley ambassadors like Google chairman Schmidt eg, posh boys in Downing Street,' wrote Murdoch.

'Google has cleverly planted dozens of their people in White House, Downing St, other governments. Most brilliant new lobbying effort yet.'

Last Friday, Google announced an agreement to pay U.K. tax authorities about 130million ($185million) in back taxes for the past decade.

The company has been minimizing its tax bill for years overseas by keeping its headquarters in Ireland, where rates are lower.

Those lower tax rates have in turn helped Google boost stock price thanks to bigger profits.
This is the moment a woman performed a raunchy impromptu dance for cheering police officers while reporting a stolen phone at their station - only to be fined for inappropriate behaviour.

The drunken reveller had gone into a police station in the city of Ussuriysk in south-eastern Russia's Primorsky Krai region to complain about the theft.

Video footage shows the woman, dressed in a yellow two-piece party outfit, starting to belly dance in front of officers who can be heard cheering.

Moves: Video captuted the moment a woman performed a raunchy impromptu dance for cheering police officers while reporting a stolen phone at their station - only to be fined for inappropriate behaviour

She had been on her way home from a party, when she realised the device was missing and decided to report the theft straightaway.

Although not named, the 26-year-old had then noticed the tune playing on the radio was one of her favourites, and started performing an impromptu dance.

Police officers reportedly turned up the music to the delight of the girl who started dancing even more enthusiastically.

Fined: Video footage shows the woman, dressed in a yellow two-piece party outfit, starting to belly dance in front of officers - who later fined her

One of them then had the idea of filming the girl while the others started commenting and cheering in the background.

One of them says: 'What a girl, she's performing that dance right from the heart.'

However, the policemen's superior spotted what was going on was not impressed.
He was a popular Fox News contributor who had an audience hooked on his every word.

Appearing as a retired CIA operative, his prime time media slot even got him into the Pentagon's inner circle of military analysts - and even earned himself a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld.

But prosecutors claim Wayne Simmons has been living a lie for almost 30 years - and the alleged facade could land him a hefty prison sentence.

Last October, the government charged him with multiple counts of fraud, saying he had never worked for the agency at all.

The 62-year-old from of Annapolis, Maryland, is accused of pretending to be an 'Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Officer' for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 to 2000.

Wayne Simmons was a popular Fox News contributor who had an audience hooked on his every word

But prosecutors claim Wayne Simmons has been living a lie for almost 30 years - and the alleged facade could land him a hefty prison sentence. He is pictured in 2007 following an assault on a cab driver in Annapolis, Maryland, where he insisted he was a CIA agent

Over almost 30 years he ran a limousine service, a gambling operation and an AIDS-testing clinic; worked for a hot-tub business, a carpeting company and a nightclub.

He even briefly played defensive back for the New Orleans Saints and tried to start up his own airline in Maryland - Simmons Air.

But he never worked for the CIA, U.S. Attorneys claim. Simmons says a short time after he began serving in the Navy in 1973, he went on to 'spearheading deep-cover intel ops against some of the world's most dangerous drug cartels and arms smugglers.'

During the alleged lie he even built up criminal convictions, according to Rolling Stone, including multiple DUIs, plus charges for weapons possession and assault.

In 2007, he was arrested in his hometown for attacking a cabdriver. He allegedly said: 'F*** you, you can't do s*** to me  do you know who I am?'

He then insisted that he was CIA, and that the cabbie, who was Pakistani, had a bomb. A police dog found no explosives, and a CIA representative told the cops to take whatever actions they deemed necessary.

Appearing as a retired CIA operative, his prime time media slot even got him into the Pentagon's inner circle of military analysts - and even earned himself a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld. As a result he was given lucrative jobs with defense contractors until his alleged lie was exposed

Simmons is pictured left as a US Navy sailor in 1973. He has allegedly pretended to be an 'Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Officer' for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 to 2000

Prosecutors say Simmons used his supposed intelligence experience not only to secure time on Fox, but also earned him an audience with Donald Rumsfeld.

His apparent expertise, which on the surface was vast, also got him jobs with defense contractors, including deployment to a military base in Afghanistan.

He was also charged with bilking $125,000 from a woman, with whom prosecutors say he was romantically involved, in a real-estate investment that did not exist.

He's pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his trial is scheduled to begin February 23rd.

As recently as April, Simmons was identified on air on Fox radio as a 'Fox News contributor.' In a 2009 Fox News clip, he calls House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi 'a pathological liar' in a segment about CIA interrogation techniques.

Fox News spokeswoman Carly Shanahan downplayed Simmons' role, saying he was never more than a guest on the network and that the reference to him on air as 'Fox News contributor' was an error.

'He was never a paid commentator,' she said.

One ex Fox News producer told Rolling Stone he may have slipped through their vetting procedures and pre-interviews as he started out appearing at the weekends.

They said: 'If you want to play Talented Mr. Ripley, once you get inside, nobody's going to think twice about whether you should be there.'

Simmons is pictured left posing with former Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and right with former Congressman and retired Army Lt Colonel Allen West Read

While it is unclear at this time how the 62-year-old pundit was exposed as a fraud, the indictment stated that Simmons falsely claimed on national security forms that his previous arrests and convictions were related to his CIA work and that he had held a top secret security clearance.

By 2004, Simmons was appearing on a sometimes-weekly basis, often in prime-time, which caught the eye of the Pentagon's public-affairs office.

Two years earlier, in October 2002, it had created the military-analysts program to help build support for the War in Iraq.

Allison Barber, who oversaw the program as deputy assistant secretary of Defense, told Rolling Stone: 'It was really about giving people with on-the-ground experience a chance to get more information.'

In his many appearances on Fox News, Simmons has made a number of questionable statements, most recently in March of last year when he claimed that ISIS could be decimated in a week if US armed forced ran thousands of 'sorties.

He also once claimed that there are 'at least 19 paramilitary Muslim training facilities' scattered around the US.

Simmons was appearing on a sometimes-weekly basis, often in prime-time, which caught the eye of the Pentagon's public-affairs office

In his private life, Mr Simmons is a widowed father of two grown children, son Wayne and daughter Allison, who got married last year.

He lost his wife of 36 years, Corinne, to breast cancer in 2012. An inscription on her headstone refers to her husband as 'SN Wayne Simmons USN,' which stands for 'Seaman of the United States Navy.'

In one photo posted on Simmons' Facebook page in 2013, he is pictured as a young man wearing a Navy sailor's uniform. The caption accompanying the image reads: '1973-No longer Navy. Next stop...27 years in Outside Paramilitary Special Operations!!!'

According to Rolling Stone he has been confined to his home since his arrest. He reportedly hasn't made a mortgage payment since 2010 and recently had his car repossessed.

He is only allowed to leave his home to tend to his horses or see his doctor. Simmons asked to attend family gatherings over Christmas but his request was turned down.

A US Navy spokesman revealed to Daily Mail via email in October that hewas unable to find a record of Simmons ever having served in that branch of the military.

The Navy declined to comment further on his case.
'It was because we were so loud that she put tape on our mouth,' October said

A first-grade teacher accused of putting duct tape on her students' mouth all day long was fired on Monday.

The teacher, identified by parents as Dawn Renfro, reportedly used duct tape on her students to keep their mouth closed last Thursday at Zundy Elementary School in North Texas.

News of the duct tape quickly reached parents who filed police reports about the alleged incident.

Detectives and Child Protective Services are investigating the incident to see if any criminal charges will be filed against the woman, according to KFDX-TV.

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Trauma: First-grader October Love (pictured left) describes seeing her peers' red faces after they took off the duct tape. Her mother Tamilyn Love (pictured right) said her daughter has been having nightmares ever since her teacher allegedly put duct tape on her mouth

The school: The teacher, identified by parents as Dawn Renfro, was fired after she reportedly used duct tape on her students to keep their mouth closed last Thursday at Zundy Elementary School in North Texas (pictured). She allegedly told her students that it 'was a fun game'

The 22 students in the class were given a questionnaire with 10 questions. Students wrote that they were told the duct tape was part of a game and that it was put on them so that they would 'be good,' according to KFDX-TV.

'According to our children, they've told us that she said it was for fun and that they shouldn't tell their mom and dad because she didn't want to get fired,' outraged parent Tamilyn Love said.

'I've asked her what happened if they went to the bathroom, something like that. She said they took the tape off, put it on their desk, and when they returned it was put back on,' she said.

'So obviously she knew it was wrong, otherwise she would have let them be in the hallway like that,' Tamilyn Love said of what allegedly happened to her daughter October and other students.

October described seeing her peers' red faces when they took off the tape.

'When she pulled the duct tape off, there was red all over a whole entire square of her (students) mouth,' October Love told News Channel 6.

The tape was only removed for the students' lunch period or if students needed bathroom breaks, October said.

'It was because we were so loud that she put tape on our mouth,' October told News Channel 6.

Ashley Thomas, communications officer for Wichita Falls Independent School District, said that the teacher has been put on administrative leave and that she is no longer employed by the district.

Nightmare: Love said her daughter is traumatized and that she plans to file a lawsuit against the school. She said that her daughter recently had a dream that she couldn't breathe

'As soon as the incident was brought to administration's attention, she was placed on administrative leave in order for us to do the investigation into the allegations and as of this morning, she is no longer employed with the district,' Thomas told KFDX-TV.

Love said her daughter is traumatized and that she plans to file a lawsuit against the school. She said that her daughter recently had a dream that she couldn't breathe.

'It's a disturbing incident and it is no way indicative of the behavior that we expect out of teachers in our district. So we want students to know that they can feel safe at school that this is not something that they should fear happening again,' Thomas said.
Ukip leader Nigel Farage warned in previous referenda the EU Commission had a 'history' of running billboard campaigns

Brussels could use taxpayers money to put up pro-EU billboards across Britain ahead of the referendum despite a pledge to not spend a penny on propaganda during the campaign, it was revealed today.

The eurocrat in charge of the European Commissions Brexit taskforce yesterday said it would not overtly campaign but would continue to spend on providing information about its work.

At a hearing in front of Ukip MEPs in the European Parliament, Jonathan Faull said: The Commission will not spend a penny on propaganda in the referendum campaign.

'We do not intend to indulge in propaganda at all.

We have no intention of participating directly in any referendum campaign, we never do and the UK won't be different from previous ones.

But he added: I'll be perfectly frank Of course the normal business of the EU will continue,

Ukip leader Nigel Farage told Mr Faull that the Commission had a history of putting up information billboards during referendum campaigns.

I say this as somebody who was actively involved in both the Lisbon referendums that took place in Ireland, he added.

When I went back for the second referendum, from Dublin airport to the centre of town, virtually every single billboard had been taken up by the European Commission.

You may not call it propaganda, but giving the Irish people information about how good EU membership had been for Ireland.

Are you saying there will be no advertisements paid for by the European Commission from Monday onwards [when the referendum campaign period set by the Electoral Commission starts]?

Mr Faull replied: The Commission will in the UK as in the other 28 member states continue to inform citizens, businesses, consumers and so on about its activities.

We're not going to close down our spokespersons service, we're not going to close down our offices in the UK, we're not going to close down our directorate of communication.

But you asked a question about propaganda, we will not do that, we will participate directly, we will not finance campaigning organisations in the referendum, we never do.

The EU spends hundreds of millions of pounds on promoting itself. In 2014, it set aside 664 million euros (506million) for promotional and communication spending through budgets where their primary purpose was promoting the EU and the political priorities of the Union.

Mr Faull was criticised earlier this month after he refused to be questioned by a House of Lords committee in public.
Vessels are liable for fines if they damage coral - and government has powers to seize the vessels too

Paul Allen faces having his $160 million super yacht confiscated after its anchor dragged through a coral reef in the Cayman Islands.

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder and his crew could also be fined up to $600,000 and be jailed for up to four years for the incident involving the 300ft MV Tatoosh.

Tim Austin, the deputy director of research and Department of the Environment said that under the Cayman Islands national conservation law, damaging coral could be prosecuted as a criminal offence.

Along with the $600,000 fine and jail term any assets involved - in this case the Tatoosh - could be seized during a prosecution.

Officials in the Cayman Islands say the MV Tatoosh's anchor chain destroyed 80 per cent of a protected yacht. It's still unclear how the destruction happened

Evidence: The Cayman Islands Port Authority released this image of what it said was the damaged reef

Allen's officials have pitted the blame on the Port Authority, saying they were simply following instructions from officials on where to anchor the boat

'

Paul Allen's (pictured in October 2014) super yacht has reportedly caused extensive damage to a protected reef in the Cayman Islands

On top of that there could be a civil prosecution which has an unlimited fine.

Allen is currently estimated by Forbes as having a net worth of $18.2 billion.

Austin said that in the area where the anchor dragged the 'prime attraction' is the reef which is vital for aquatic life.

He said: 'The whole of the west side of a prime diving site - because of the coral it's a great dive site.'

A spokesman for Vulcan Inc, Mr Allen's investment and philanthropy company, said that the incident had been 'greatly exaggerated'.

The spokesman said: 'The local port authority had directed the Tatoosh to anchor in a designated area, and the crew moved the vessel, on its own accord, as soon as it learned from local divers that there might be a problem.

'The crew is cooperating fully with the local authorities in this matter'.

The spokesman refused to say if Allen was on board at the time of the incident.

In a later statement, the spokesman added a more detailed account of Allen's side of events.

'Vulcan Inc. and Paul G. Allen have a long history of responsible exploration and a commitment to ocean conservation,' the spokesman said.

'On January 14, 2016, MV Tatoosh was moored in a position explicitly directed by the local Port Authority.

'When its crew was alerted by a diver that her anchor chain may have impacted coral in the area, the crew promptly, and on their own accord, relocated their position to ensure the reef was protected.

'Vulcan and the ships crew are actively and cooperatively working with local authorities to determine the details of what happened. An investigation by local authorities is ongoing.

'Through his longtime philanthropic and scientific endeavors, Paul G. Allen is a global leader in supporting ocean health. Earlier this year, he announced support for cutting-edge research designed to stabilize and restore coral reefs.'

An investigation is now ongoing involving the Department of the Environment, the Cayman Islands Port Authority and Allen's crew.

Local divers conducted a survey of the damage last week.

They found that 13,800 square feet of reef had been damaged - and within that area 80 per cent of the coral was destroyed, the department of the environment said. The reef is in the larger West Bay diving zone.

A spokesman for the department told Cayman News Service: 'In addition to assessing the damage and determining the cause of this incident, we are also paying close attention to lessons learned so that we can more effectively prevent these accidents while still hosting visiting yachts,'

The incident happened on January 12 and pictures on social media show that Allen's yacht was in the islands last week. The Tatoosh is also based there.

Officials say the boat was anchored close to the Doc Poulson shipwreck and The Knife dive site when it did the damage.

Allen tried selling the yacht for $160million in 2010, but he took it off the market in 2014 after failing to find a buyer. The boat pictured above anchored in Venice, Italy

Officials say the boat was anchored close to the Doc Poulson shipwreck and The Knife dive site when it did the damage. It's unclear if Allen was on the yacht at the time

Technically, any vessel that damages protected reef in the islands is subject to a fine, but the government has reportedly failed time and time again to collect on these sanctions, according to CNS.

Allen celebrated his 63rd birthday last week, on January 21, and was recently in the news for reportedly purchasing a $5.4million bungalow on Seattle's exclusive Mercer Island.

He owns a 10,000-square-foot home on the island, and has been known to buy up smaller properties around it for house guests. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also has his main home on the island.

Were the Tatoosh found to be to blame for the damage to the reef it would be embarrassing for Allen, who in the past has championed environmental causes.

In 2014 he spent $2.6 million funding the University of British Columbia's Sea Around Us project fight illegal fishing.
The grandmother who claimed she had a 33million lottery ticket but accidentally put it in the washing machine is definitely not the winner, it was claimed last night.

Grandmother-of-four Susanne Hinte, 48, of Worcester, said she had washed the winning ticket in her jeans - and sent her crumpled and torn piece of paper to Camelot to be verified.

But the Watford-based company has allegedly already decided she did not win, with its investigators not even trying to obtain CCTV footage from the shop where she claimed to have bought the ticket.

Keeping a low profile: Grandmother-of-four Susanne Hinte, 48, of Worcester, said she had washed the winning ticket in her jeans - and sent her crumpled and torn piece of paper to Camelot to be verified

Selfie: Hinte poses in front of her washing machine after claiming her winning 33million ticket was ruined in there

Washed out: The image of the photocopied ticket. The draw date has been obliterated by a tear. The barcode at the bottom and the ticket's ID number have also been ruined. The numbers, however, are still visible

A senior security source told Daily Telegraph reporter Robert Mendick: If Miss Hinte was even suspected of winning the lottery the first thing Camelot would have done is grab that CCTV footage.

Camelot, which has revealed the winning ticket was bought in the Worcester area, has declined an offer from newsagent owner Hamsa Patel to be sent the video of her apparently buying the ticket.

This therefore indicates the winning ticket was bought elsewhere in the city, reported the Telegraph.

A spokesman told the newspaper that 'fewer than five' people in the firm's security team knew where and at what time the winning ticket was bought.

Separately, it emerged yesterday that Hinte will stand trial at Birmingham Magistrates Court on March 1 after being charged with two counts of dwelling theft. She first appeared there last June.

The alleged offences took place in January 2015 and it is understood the case centres around allegations the grandmother stole a purse containing money in a distraction theft from a property.

A West Midlands Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said: 'We can confirm that Susanne Hint has been charged with two counts of theft. She will appear at Birmingham Magistrates Court on March 1.'

Hinte has made national news after claiming she found a ticket with the winning numbers after it had been placed inside the pocket of a pair of jeans which had gone through the washing machine.

She claims the date and the barcode were washed off the ticket but the numbers remained visible.

The Sun today revealed the grandmother was questioned by police over claims she stole a 1,000 gold necklace from a man she met through a dating website.

Labourer Trevor Stirling, 44, told the newspaper the necklace - a gift from his mother - had gone missing after she stayed at his house on Valentine's Day.

Hinte sent a lorry driver topless snaps soon after getting in contact with him on an internet dating site

Police questioned her but no further action was taken.

Mr Stirling, who said they first met through a dating website, told The Sun: 'Shed turn up at my flat with police dancing gear. She was good in bed. I was a little bit in love but didnt trust her.'

It came as a lorry driver claimed Hinte sent him topless photographs after getting in touch through a dating site.

The 41-year-old told The Sun they had enjoyed a drink together and shared a kiss before things changed.

He claimed Hinte asked him for 80 to get to the airport when she was flying back to Germany and a further 80 when she needed a phone.

But he told the newspaper he was not willing to become her 'cash cow' as he barely knew her.

Worcester shopkeeper Natu Patel says he is '100 per cent sure' the person who bought the life-changing Lotto was captured making the purchase by his in-store cameras.

Key numbers: How the winning ticket would look in a mock-up produced by the lottery organisers Camelot

Camelot bosses know exactly where and when the winning ticket was bought and have already ruled out hundreds of incorrect claims.

Meanwhile the Mail has obtained an image said to show a copy of the slip submitted to Camelot by Miss Hinte.

The photocopied image appears to show severe damage to most parts of the ticket  including the crucial barcode used by lottery officials to help establish its authenticity.

If Miss Hinte was even suspected of winning the lottery the first thing Camelot would have done is grab that CCTV footage Security source

Its serial code and terminal number  showing where the ticket was purchased  are also illegible, while a small tear obliterates most of the information showing which draw the ticket was purchased for.

The image emerged as a former friend of Miss Hinte told The Sun the grandmother has previously tried to collect a 200 prize on a damaged scratchcard, claiming it had been dropped in a puddle.

Miss Hinte told a cashier worker that she had revealed three '200 symbols'. When the woman said only two were visible, Miss Hinte told her that the third was smudged in the water.

The former friend added: 'The episode does tell you a lot about her fantastical Lotto claim'.

Another source said the disputed ticket was photocopied by Miss Hinte, before she posted it to Camelot for verification on Friday.

The source added: 'She has been careful to tell people that her win has not been confirmed, yet on the other hand she has been waving this ticket around with the winning numbers on it. It is all very odd.'

The image emerged as lottery bosses warned this week that anybody who maliciously attempted to claim they had won could face fraud charges.

Waiting game: Miss Hinte (pictured left and right) describes herself as a nurse on dating websites and claimed to have bought the winning ticket at her Ambleside News shop in Warndon, Worcester

Camelot has already revealed it has received hundreds of submissions from people claiming to have lost the winning ticket for the January 9 draw  with the numbers 26, 27, 46, 47, 52 and 58.

A spokesman said anybody 'intentionally attempting to defraud' could face charges. The offence of fraud by misrepresentation carries a maximum penalty of ten years in jail.

Miss Hinte separated from her second husband, Nick Scott, 44, around 15 years ago, but the roofer told reporters on Monday that the pair were not divorced.

THE CHECKS TO COUNTER FRAUD As a record exists of where every lottery ticket is purchased Camelot checks if the winning ticket was bought there

The 'winner' is quizzed on the number and combination of tickets purchased and whether any were Lucky Dip

The time and date of the purchase is checked against the claimant's story

If legible then the barcode is double-checked

Available CCTV is studied and the retailer who sold the ticket is questioned

Claims have to be made in writing within 30 days Advertisement

He added: 'I'm hoping she's won technically I could put a claim in for half.'

Miss Hinte states she is a nurse on dating website Plenty of Fish and describes herself as a 'dare devil'. She wrote on the site: 'I enjoy spending time with my family and friends enjoy cooking and goin out for meals aswell as goin to a club now and again still.

'Everyone deserves happyness in life so my outlook in life is tat if ur lucky enaugh to find it then u should hold on to it as u neva no if u goin to be that lucky again. Afta all life is to short as it is.

'I should be worth it cuz afta all i could end up being the woman of ur dreams u neva neva no.lol xx'

Miss Hinte claimed to have bought the winning ticket at her Ambleside News shop in Warndon, Worcester. There was no sign of the mother-of-two at her housing association property on Tuesday.

But she told friends on Facebook: 'Not once have I said I have the winning ticket. The ticket did have the winning numbers on it. Camelot will do the checks so as it stands nobody knows if it's the winner.'

Speaking to a friend of her son earlier this week, she also said: 'I almost wish I haven't won it because it's taken my life away.

'I'm waiting for Camelot to get back to me - I haven't heard anything. I'm definitely sure it's that ticket though, I remember going in and buying it.'

Involved: Natu Patel, owner of Ambleside News, said he remembered Miss Hinte purchasing a ticket in the 24 hours leading up to the January 9 draw

Neighbours said the former barmaid and custody security officer's ten-year-old Peugeot 206 had been driven away on Monday night.

One, who did not wish to be named, said Miss Hinte was 'keeping a low profile' in the house.

Property: Miss Hinte has not been seen at her home in Worcester since she made the claim

Electoral roll records show the mother uses a combination of names, alternating between both Susanne and the German version of the name, Sanne, as well as her maiden name of Hinte and her two married surnames.

Earlier this week the Daily Mail revealed twice-married Miss Hinte had been summoned to court six times in the last six years over unpaid fines, and was also fined at a seventh court hearing for failing to reveal the identity of a driver.

West Midlands Police said a decision about whether to investigate a false lottery win claim would 'depend on the circumstances'.

It is understood a police probe is unlikely if someone claimed to have won but offered no proof.

However if a person produced a fraudulent ticket with the intention to deceive lottery organisers, charges could be brought. The Lotto firm may examine CCTV as part of its investigations into damaged tickets.

It was revealed last week that a half-share of the record 66million jackpot from earlier this month was bought in Worcester.

A Camelot spokesman said: 'With prizes of this size, it's perfectly normal to receive lots of claims from people who genuinely think that they may have mislaid or thrown away what they believe was the winning ticket.'

Natu Patel said he remembered Miss Hinte purchasing a ticket in the 24 hours leading up to the January 9 draw, and was 'surprised' Camelot had not asked to view his CCTV.

He said: 'I remember the lady who claims she bought the ticket coming into buy the ticket either on the Friday before the draw or on the day of the draw. As far as I can remember she bought a lucky dip.

I'm waiting for Camelot to get back to me - I haven't heard anything. I'm definitely sure it's that ticket though Susanne Hinte, speaking to her son's friend

'If the ticket was bought from our shop we will definitely have that person on CCTV.

'I have not watched the CCTV and have not been asked to hand it over to Camelot. There are strict rules about when to hand over CCTV. You have to have permission from the particular person in the footage.

'Camelot are handling it in there way and I am letting then do this. The situation has become a bit of a nightmare but there you go.'
Compensation of almost 400,000 was paid to schoolteachers who were injured after being attacked by violent students in classrooms 'akin to war zones' last year.

A survey of councils discovered there were 26 payouts to teaching staff including one case in Nottingham where a teacher was paid 60,000 for the injuries they suffered.

In Staffordshire a teaching assistant was paid 2,850 compensation after suffering injuries to their face and teeth after being attacked by a pupil.

Will Cornick (left) was jailed for a minimum of 20 years after stabbing teacher Ann Maguire (right) to death

In Hillingdon, London, a student with learning difficulties threw a ball of clay in the classroom which hit and injured the teacher.

The compensation case was eventually settled by the council for 14,085.

Details of the incidents reveal the teachers are sometimes set upon by students wielding classroom furniture and equipment.

And teaching staff offer suffer injuries when they step in to restrain violent children who have lost their temper or are trying to attack other children.

The revelation of the payouts comes after a number of high profile cases where students have launched vicious assaults.

In November, Will Cornick was jailed for a minimum of 20 years after he stabbed teacher Ann Maguire, 61, to death at their school in Leeds.

Cornick, who was 15 at the time of the attack, launched the assault with an eight-inch long kitchen knife in front of a horrified class of students.

And earlier this year a 14-year-old boy was jailed for launching a racist knife attack on supply teacher Vincent Uzomah, 50, at a school in Bradford.

Violence: A survey of councils discovered there were 26 payouts to teaching staff last year (stock image)

The court heard the pair clashed after Mr Uzomah attempted to confiscate a mobile phone from the teenager.

The disclosure of the payouts comes as official figures reveal there were almost 20,000 separate incidents of schoolchildren being suspended or expelled for attacking teachers in the last school year.

Other compensation cases settled by councils in the last year include:

Greenwich Council, in London, paid a teaching assistant 13,500 after they were hurt trying to restrain an out-of-control child;

In Sheffield the council agreed to pay 13,000 to a teacher who was injured in an attack by a pupil;

A teaching assistant in Wandsworth, London, settled a case for 27,705 in compensation after being injured by a chair that had been thrown by a violent student;

In Bexley, London, a teaching assistant was paid 22,362 after being hit in the head by a door which had been kicked by a pupil;

Cambridgeshire Council settled three cases for a total of 26,460 where teaching staff were assaulted by pupils or hurt while trying to restrain violent students;

North Somerset Council paid out 19,000 to a teacher injured in an attack by a pupil, while Birmingham settled a similar case for 8,256.

Experts believe the figure is just the tip of the iceberg as many town halls used data protection laws to refuse to give specific details on the nature of the cases where they paid compensation to teachers.

With the survey uncovering a fraction of what is believed to be the real figure and solicitors' costs sometimes coming in at double the compensation payout, it is feared the real cost of these attacks is in excess of 1million per year.

Christopher McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'Too many classrooms are more akin to war zones than to places of learning.

The revelation of the payouts comes after a number of high profile cases where students have launched vicious assaults (stock image)

'It is outrageous and completely unacceptable that, in some schools, the personal safety of teachers is under threat.

'Classroom disorder is a key reason why so many young teachers throw in the towel and exit the profession. It is also a major cause of teacher recruitment problems.

'We need to restore the traditional whole-class teaching methods that underpin the most successful education systems in the world.'

Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers' union: said: 'It's important that schools are safe places for pupils and teachers, and all injuries at school will be a source of concern.

'While we make every effort to resolve cases early and to the satisfaction of all parties there will regrettably be situations where this is not possible.

'We advise teachers to ensure that any accident or injury is reported and recorded, in order that steps can be taken to address any problems and prevent further injury.'

A Department for Education spokesman said: 'Violent behaviour in schools, at any age, is totally unacceptable. That is why we have taken decisive action to give teachers the powers they need to tackle poor behaviour and discipline.
The Wounded Warrior Project, the nation's most recognizable veteran's charity, has been accused by dozens of former employers of wasting donor money on parties and events instead of recovery programs for veterans.

Former employees of the Wounded Warrior Project have spoken out about their concern that the charity is straying from its mission.

Many of the former staffers said the organization has become more focused on raising money than serving wounded veterans, according to a CBS News investigation.

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The Wounded Warrior Project spent $26million in 2014 on conferences and meetings - which is about the same amount the group spends on its top program, combat stress recovery - compared to $1.7million in 2010 (file image)

The charity's fundraising has brought in more than $300million in donations in 2014.

Army Staff Sgt, Erick Millette, who returned from Iraq in 2006 with a Bronze star and a Purple Heart, told CBS News that the project 'provides important life skills that help warriors succeed'.

Millette was hired in 2013 as a public speaker for the charity.

He quit last year because he said the program has become more of a fundraising vehicle.

He said: 'I began to see how an organization that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year is not helping my brothers and my sisters. Or at least not all of them.'

Retired Army Staff Sgt Erick Millette said the charity has become more of a fundraising vehicle

The charity spent $26million in 2014 on conferences and meetings - which is about the same amount the group spends on its top program, combat stress recovery - compared to $1.7million in 2010.

Former employees told CBS that spending has skyrocketed since Steven Nardizzi took over as CEO in 2009 and many point to the 2014 annual meeting at a luxury resort in Colorado Springs.

One employee told CBS that Nardizzi 'rappelled down the side of a building' at one of the events.

The employee added that he's also made appearances on a Segway and a horse.

Another employee said a lot of the warriors aren't getting the mental health treatment they need from the charity.

Wounded Warrior Project declined interview requests for Nardizzi, but offered Captain Ryan Kules, the director of alumni and a recipient of their services for comment.

He denied there was excessive spending on conferences and said: 'It's the best use of donor dollars to ensure we are providing programs and services to our warriors and families at the highest quality.'
Vodafone employee Mike Halligan has been named as the sixth person to die after falling from the exclusive Coq D'Argent restaurant in the City.

He is the latest person to jump from the seventh floor, rooftop restaurant since 2007.

Mr Halligan, 29, was killed after falling 80ft from the restaurant in Bank, central London, on January 17.

Vodafone employee Mike Halligan has been named as the sixth person to die after falling from the exclusive Coq D'Argent restaurant

Mr Halligan, 29, was killed after falling 80ft from the Coq D'Argent restaurant (pictured) in Bank, central London

He worked for Vodafone Ireland's retail department, and was on a short holiday from Dublin, where he was studying a part-time business computing degree at the Dublin Business School.

His relatives said he would be 'very sadly missed by his heartbroken father' and the rest of his family. One of five brothers, he had spent years living and working abroad.

They asked for donations to Pieta House, which runs centres for the prevention of self-harm and suicide in Ireland.

Mr Halligan's death is not being treated as suspicious by City of London police and an inquest is due to open next month.

Friend Stephen Morgan said: 'He was such a genuine, down-to-earth person who would do anything to help someone out.'

And Al O'Connor wrote on Facebook: 'Michael will be remembered always by many for the wonderful person he has always been.'

Julian Corcoran added: 'Michael I love u n glad u got to see the world look over the family plz.'

Mr Halligan is the sixth person to jump from the exclusive City restaurant (pictured)

Flowers were laid at the spot where Mr Halligan died after falling from the rooftop restaurant on January 17

Afton Noonan posted a picture of Mr Halligan and wrote: 'Lost a little diamond of a friend today. Never will forget the fun & mischief we had throughout school.love you lots pal.Rip Mike Halligan xxx'

In a statement, Vodafone said: the company 'is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Michael Halligan, a Vodafone Ireland Retail employee, while on personal travel in the UK'.

It added: 'Vodafone offers sincere condolences to Michael's family and friends... The company wants to respect the privacy and wishes of Michael's family and has no further comment.'

Formerly owned by Sir Terence Conran, who put it up for sale in 2012, Coq D'Argent has become the unlikely scene of several suicides in the City of London.

An inquest into the death of Nico Lambrechts in January 2013 heard the restaurant was to erect a 6ft barrier to prevent further suicide attempts.

It also instructed security guards to question anyone found alone on the rooftop bar while volunteers from the Samaritans have trained staff at the restaurant, a favourite with financial workers.

The restaurant at No 1 Poultry appeared in the James Bond-themed sequence for the Olympics opening ceremony that featured the Queen's parachute drop.

Formerly owned by Sir Terence Conran, who put it up for sale in 2012, Coq D'Argent has become the unlikely scene of several suicides in the City of London

In February 2015, food blogger Wilkes McDermid (left), 39, lost his life in a fall from its roof garden. South African investment manager and father-of-three Nico Lambrechts (right), 46, died in similar circumstances in October 2012

Richard Ford, 33, (left) died in 2007 after falling from the restaurant and landing on a bus. Anjool Malde (right) died after being seen falling from the same spot clutching a glass of champagne

In October 2012, South African-born investment manager and father-of-three Mr Lambrechts, 46, jumped after being put under extreme stress following a move from investment bank Merrill Lynch to Investec in July 2011.

The previous month, former British Library manager Rema Begum, 29, plunged to her death after suffering from depression when she lost her job at Christmas 2011 and fell victim of a Facebook stalker who exposed her westernised lifestyle to her strict Muslim parents.

In July 2009, Oxford graduate stockbroker and Deutsche Bank employee Anjool Malde, 24, fell to his death from the venue holding a glass of champagne.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton gets plenty of whack-a-doodle questions during her campaign rallies, but one in particular on Tuesday struck her fancy: Would she nominate President Barack Obama to the Supreme Court?

'Wow, what a great idea!' Clinton said during a campaign stop in which she had offered her microphone to front-row listeners after her stump speech. A middle-aged man had asked the question shortly and simply.

'Nobody has ever suggested that to me Wow,' Clinton said. 'I love that. Wow. He may have a few other things to do, but I'll tell you, it's a great idea.'

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Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton fielded a variety of questions at a town hall event in Iowa on Tuesday, including an unexpected one - would she nominate President Obama to the Supreme Court?

Clinton went on to say she agreed with the questioner's initial assertion - that America's next president could have the opportunity to appoint up to three Supreme Court justices - and said 'the Supreme Court, unfortunately, has been heading in the wrong direction' in recent years.

'We need new justices who actually understand the challenges we face. I can't tell if it's just naivete or if its ideological, theoretical views,' she said.

Clinton slammed the Court's recent judgments on the Voting Rights Act, of which a provision was stripped out, as well as the Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to funnel money towards political candidates as free speech.

She then stepped back to note that 'three sets of billionaires are running ads against me,' ostensibly referring to GOP front-runner Donald Trump and the Republican-aligned Koch Brothers.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also a billionaire, is flirting with the idea of a presidential run but has not yet aired any ads.

'I would certainly take that under advisement,' Clinton told a crowd of about 450 inside a ballroom. 'I mean he's brilliant, and he can set forth an argument, and he was a law professor, so he's got all the credentials.'

See Hillary Clinton news as she says Obama on the Supreme Court would be 'a great idea'

Clinton agreed with her questioner's assertion that the next US president may get the opportunity to nominate up to three new Supreme Court justices

'Now we do have to get a Democratic Senate to get him confirmed, so you're going to have to help me on that, OK?' she added.

Obama has been asked the question before - and there is precedent. In 1921, eight years after leaving the presidency, William Howard Taft was nominated by President Warren Harding to serve on the Supreme Court as its Chief Justice.

Taft - to date the only U.S. president to go on to serve on the Supreme Court - served until 1930.

For his part, Obama has been asked the question before.

In 2014, in an interview with the New Yorker, he was uncertain.

'I love the law, intellectually,' Obama said, 'I love nutting out these problems, wrestling with these arguments. I love teaching. I miss the classroom and engaging with students. \'
Today the pictures have inspired a book, calendar and even a line of high-end Jimmy Choo bags and purses

Mantesso sketched humorous situations around his black and white bull terrier and an internet sensation was born

The 33-year-old began snapping the photos after his wife walked out on him taking everything but his

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A heartbroken artist who began snapping hilarious pictures of his dog after his wife walked out on him has turned his hobby into a best-selling book - and his pet into a fashion icon.

Three years ago, Rafael Mantesso's divorce had left him alone in an empty New York apartment with nothing but his bull terrier - named by his ex-wife after her favorite shoe designer Jimmy Choo, for company.

On their first night within those white, furniture-less four walls, Mantesso was mulling over his broken marriage and everything he had lost when he looked up to see an excitable Jimmy happily running round.

Artist Rafael Mantesso's pictures of his bull terrier, Jimmy Choo, (pictured with a piano keyboard that Mantesso has drawn in on the floor around him, at his studio in Belo Horizonte, Brazil) have become an internet sensation

'When I sat in my empty living room, Jimmy was happy, running from one side to the other side, in circles, crazy,' said the Brazilian-born photographer.

'The apartment was a playground to him. He was loving that empty place. That energy was amazing. I looked at him and said to myself, 'Oh my God, I was thinking everything was lost and I had the most important thing in the house  Jimmy,' Mantesso said.

He noticed that the white bull terrier's ginger and red ears contrasted with the white walls, floors and ceilings.

At some point, Mantesso picked up a piece of white cardboard, drew a skeleton with a red heart on it, put it in front of Jimmy and took a photo.

He liked it, put it on Instagram (#jimmythebull) and they were in business.

Now 33, Mantesso and six-year-old Jimmy have hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world.

Demand for the hilarious photographs has even led to a best-selling book - A Dog Named Jimmy - and a Jimmy the Bull calendar.

While his namesake, high end shoe designer Jimmy Choo - loved the Instagram sketches so much they even created a line of Jimmy-inspired bags and purses.

'Many people ask me why I shoot my dog,' Mantesso wrote on Instagram. 'And the answer is quite simple: he loves to be center of my attention, it's our moment together, when we have fun. Shar(ing) this with all of you was the way that I found to give back all his love.'

The author admitted he never believed when he started taking pictures of Jimmy he never dreamed the images would be so popular.

'I never thought this day would come when I first picked up my phone and started shooting Jimmy, the only thing I wanted was to show people how dogs are blessed beings and how amazing bull terriers are.

'Jimmy has never left me, never took his sight out of me, he is always happy waiting for me at home as long as I take him walking.

'Thank you for every like, every comment, thank you for following us story from the other side if the screen.'

Once he began shooting, the ideas came fast. Mantesso would get Jimmy to pose while he sketched humorous situations around his black and white bull terrier.

'Everyone ask(s) 'How do you make a crazy dog freeze in position you want?' I think Jimmy knows that I want him in that position and he just stay(s),' Mantesso said.

The snapper credits a tweet by actor Ashton Kutcher for putting focus on his early Jimmy art.

Mantesso (left) began snapping hilarious pictures of his dog Jimmy (right) after his wife walked out on him has turned his hobby into a best-selling book - and his pet into a fashion icon

Kutcher retweeted a drawing depicting the spaghetti scene from 'Lady and the Tramp,' where the dogs are slurping strands of spaghetti. Views went from 10,000 to 100,000 that night, Mantesso said.

Jimmy also kept Mantesso going at a time when he was feeling down.

Because of Jimmy, Mantesso had to take a walk twice a day. Because he had to buy Jimmy food, he bought food for himself. And because of Jimmy, he was motivated to keep taking pictures. He liked what he was doing so much that they worked side by side for 90 uninterrupted days, he said.

Pictures are generally black except for Jimmy's pink nose or ears. In one, Jimmy lies on the floor wearing a pair of Ray Ban shades. In front of him is the sketch of a piano, a microphone and music book titled 'Ray'.

Together, it appears as though the canine version of Ray Charles is about to launch into a soul tune.

In another pictures Jimmy steals Snoopy's favorite napping place for a rest, appears as Ziggy Stardust, Maleficent, Simba and many other beloved characters.

Eventually 'A Dog Named Jimmy' was ready for the publisher, while the images also appear on a deck of cards and a calendar.

They've come a long way since people demanded that Mantesso muzzle the pit bull. 'People still cross the street when they see Jimmy, but now it's to ask if they can take pictures with him,' he said, adding that Jimmy's received fan mail from over 100 countries.

His planned Jimmy Foundation will fund pet food drives, spay and neuter clinics and adoption campaigns at shelters throughout Brazil.

He doesn't accept every endorsement offer, but he did say yes to Netflix, the Jimmy Choo fashion house and Porsche.

'They want my dog to drive a Porsche convertible. I said, 'Come on, I want to drive it too.''
Stepans Bereznojs (pictured) flew into Stansted airport from his native Lativa in November, having drunk 700ml of brandy and several beers on the flight

A father-of-one who drank a bottle of brandy before telling airport staff he was a terrorist who was going to 'blow them all up' has been jailed for a year.

Stepans Bereznojs was told he was lucky he wasn't shot after pulling the stunt as he arrived at Stanstead Airport from his native Latvia last November.

Chelmsford Crown Court heard how Bereznojs had drunk a 700ml bottle of brandy and several cans of beer on the flight back to the UK.

Upon landing, the 31-year-old - described as 'hopelessly drunk' - then approached customer service advisor Michael Stolborg-Price at the Essex airport with his middle finger in the air, calmly telling him: 'I want to declare I am a terrorist.'

When Mr Stolborg-Price asked him to repeat himself he said: 'I declare I'm a terrorist and I'm going to blow you all up.'

Prosecutor Karl Volz said: 'Police assistance was requested and he turned back and saw the defendant 10 feet away saying in an elevated voice 'Allah Allah'.

'Then the defendant got up and faced Mr Stolberg-Price and said 'I'm joking'.'

Mr Volz said the officer had been frightened by the threat, made at about 10.50pm, and 'believed an explosion to be imminent'.

When interviewed by police, Bereznojs admitted he had been drinking, both during the day and on the flight.

But he told officers he had no memory of the November 22 incident at all and his first thing he clearly recalled after getting off the plane was being in a police cell.

However, he did have a vague memory of asking people to let him go ahead of them in the queue, because he was worried he would miss the last bus to Peterborough, where he lives.

Mitigating, Rakesha Sharma admitted his client had done a stupid thing but stressed Bereznojs - who had been in Lativa celebrating the country's independence day - posed no risk to the public.

He said: 'Of course it was a stupid thing to do, if there were an offence of crass stupidity then this defendant would be guilty of that.'

Bereznojs told the court through his probation officer that he was as bemused by his actions as anyone else.

'I can't ever imagine why I would do this. I don't even understand now.'

Sentencing Berejnovs to a year behind bars, Judge Anthony Goldstaub QC said: 'The environment has become a lot more tense with the development of the Islamic State organisation with an emphasis on terror.

On landing, the 31-year-old approached staff with hands in the air saying he was a terrorist - and he was arrested. Bereznojs has no memory of the incident at all, and no idea why he pretended to be a terrorist

'You were lucky not to be shot in the circumstances and there would have been danger to other passengers in the terminal...

'It wasn't a joke at all. You were hopelessly drunk on brandy. It might have been your idea of a joke but it terrified the employee.

'People who make bomb threats or indicate that they are terrorists or pretend to be terrorists are playing with fire - there is no question about it.

'It has absolutely dire consequences.'

Judge Goldstaub added: 'You will go to prison and anybody else who does this will do so as well.'
His wife Brida, 51, who is also known as Mary, handed over 139,175.24

The Connors paid vulnerable drifters as little as 5 a day to work for them

Five gypsy gangmasters who lived in luxury while forcing homeless drug addicts to work as slaves have been forced to pay back 2million.

The Connors clan paid the vulnerable drifters as little as 5 a day to work for their paving and patio business.

Their victims were kept in squalor and beaten with rakes and brooms to keep them obedient.

The family raked in a fortune and had homes with hot tubs, a fleet of cars, Caribbean cruises and holidays in Mexico and Dubai and had 500,000 in the bank.

Family boss William Connors (left), 55, was ordered to repay pay the bulk of the cash - 1,512,576.47 - and his wife Brida (right), 51, also known as Mary, had to hand over 139,175.24

The family raked in a fortune and had homes with hot tubs, a fleet of cars (pictured, a Mercedes confiscated from their home), Caribbean cruises and holidays in Mexico and Dubai and had 500,000 in the bank.

Five members were jailed in 2012 for a total of 19 years after making 5million of ill-gotten gains.

They have now been ordered to repay 2million in cash, cars and even a house that was mysteriously wrecked by a mystery man who repeatedly rammed it with a lorry.

The Crown Prosecution Service recovered the money through the Proceeds of Crime Act.

Family boss William Connors, 55, was ordered to repay the bulk of the cash - 1,512,576.47.

His wife Brida, 51, also known as Mary, had to hand over 139,175.24.

Their son James, 23, was told to pay 135,121.10 and his brother Johnny, 32, was forced to hand over 301,828.57.

The couple's son-in-law Miles Connors, 27, had 17,866.81 seized.

The cash was seized this month after their trashed four-bed bungalow in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, sold for 282,500 at auction.

Bizarrely, the Connors, who were jailed for a total of 20 years in 2012, kept money in a toilet at one of their caravans

The Connors owned 170,000 caravan park Willowdene (pictured) and Hayden Laurels, which was bought in July 2007 for 390,000

Wealthy traveller William Connors, 51, berates one of his labourers at a caravan park

The Connors clan paid the vulnerable drifters as little as 5 a day to work for their paving and patio business (pictured, one of the cars confiscated from their home)

Around 149,824.90 of the returned money will be used as compensation and divided between 12 of their 37 victims.

The remainder will go into Government coffers and divided between the Home Office, CPS and courts.

Five members of the Connors family were sentenced or a total of almost 20 years in prison in December 2012.

William Connors was sentenced to more than six years, his wife Mary received more than two years, and their son was jailed for four years.

Their other son James got three years of detention in a young offenders institution and son-in-law Miles Connors was given a three-year prison sentence.

Police began investigating the family in 2008 after the remains of a former worker were found near a caravan site.

Undercover surveillance revealed workers were living in cramped, filthy conditions, while the Connors lived the high life in plush accommodation and jetted off on luxury holidays.

William Connors (right, several years ago) was sentenced to more than six years, his wife Mary (left) received more than two years, and their son was jailed for four years

Five members of the Connors family were sentenced or a total of almost 20 years in prison in December 2012

As well as holidays, they drove around in top-of-the-range cars, including a silver A-Class Mercedes saloon, a Rolls-Royce, a red Mini convertible, a Toyota Hilux pick-up, a Ford Ranger and a Mercedes van, and had built up a mounting property portfolio potentially now worth millions of pounds.

Several houses - including one with a hot tub and accompanying flat screen television - were registered in the names of other relatives.

The family bought two caravan parks in Gloucestershire for 545,000 more than a decade ago and had 576,000 in bank accounts seized by the police.

The Connors' enterprise came to an end when police raided sites in Staverton, Gloucestershire, in Enderby Leicestershire and in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in March 2011 following a lengthy surveillance operation.
Some will even get academic credits for attending the gathering

Miami University (MU) of Ohio and Haverford College in Pennsylvania are partly funding students who want to go

The misspelling is intentional so 'man' is taken out of the word

Some titles of the seminars change the spelling of woman to 'womyn'

There will be 20 workshops covering sex, race, and gender

Around 1,500 are set to be at the four-day

Colleges across the country are paying for their students to go to an annual event called 'The White Privilege Conference.'

More than 1,500 people are expected to attend the gathering held in Philadelphia over four days in April, and will be charged $400 a piece.

There will be 20 workshops covering sex, race, and gender - including one session that deals with those who might be 'exhausted, burned out from working to dismantle racism and white supremacy.'

Some titles of the seminars have had the spelling of woman changed to 'womyn' - so 'man' is taken out of the word.

According to Campus Reform, Miami University (MU) of Ohio is covering more than half the cost and charging students a flat fee of only $60, potentially $240 less than the total expense of the conference.

Colleges across the country are paying for their students to go to an annual event called 'The White Privilege Conference' in Philadelphia

Haverford College in Pennsylvania is sending students to the event free of charge, according to their website.

In the past, the University of Wisconsin-Madison sponsored grants to attend it.

One workshop is called 'Self-Care and Healing as Change Agents.'

The description of the session reads: 'Feeling exhausted, burned out from working to dismantle racism and white supremacy, and other forms of oppression in organizations, groups, and individuals?

'Still deeply committed to creating greater equity, inclusion and social justice in society and in organizations, yet finding yourself, at times, too weary or overwhelmed to make meaningful change?

'We all deserve spaces to heal, refuel, and re-commit to our vision and goals.

This picture shows the inside of a workshop from a previous event titled: 'I'm Not Racist... Am I?' Some titles of the seminars have had the spelling of woman changed to 'womyn' - so 'man' is taken out of the word

'In this engaging, supportive session, participants will explore the roots of their stress and burn-out and deepen their capacity to rejuvenate, re-energize, and retool themselves as powerful change agents.'

Another session is called Blackness, Whiteness, & Womynness: Embracing the Intersectionality of Race and Gender Practice While Building Equitable and Just Relationships Toward Effective Anti-Racist [sic].

The description of that workshop reads: 'As we strive to build cross-racial anti-racist partnerships, what are the challenges we face that may prevent us from working together effectively?

'This institute will draw on our experiences as a Black cisgender womyn and a white cisgender womyn partnering as anti-racist educators and administrators with a commitment to re-imagining equity and justice in our relationships as womyn.' [The misspelling of 'woman' are intentional; a way to excise 'man' from the word  ed.]

Miami University (MU) of Ohio is covering more than half the cost and charging students a flat fee of only $60, potentially $240 less than the total expense of the conference

Haverford College in Pennsylvania is sending students to the event free of charge
The U.S. is considering banning travel to North Korea after a University of Virginia student was arrested and accused of crimes against the state, it has been reported.

Officials are believed to be worried that American tourists such as Otto Warmbier, 21, who was detained in Pyongyang on January 2, could be used as political capital by Kim Jong-un's regime.

News of Mr Warmbier's arrest came as UN diplomats were negotiating a new package of harsh sanctions against North Korea following claims it carried out a successful atomic bomb test.

U.S. officials are believed to be considering a travel ban to North Korea amid fears that Kim Jong-un's regime may try and use tourists such as Otto Wamrbier, 21 (right), as political capital

Officially, Mr Warmbier has been detained for committing a 'hostile act against the state', and of acting with the 'tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its manipulation.'

However, no details of the crime have yet been revealed, but linking the offenses directly to the U.S. government is highly unusual, and could suggest a political motive.

America and North Korea are still technically at war, and as such have no diplomatic relations.

As such, getting American prisoners back typically requires high-ranking officials to travel to Pyongyang and ask for their release.

In 2009, it took a visit from former President Bill Clinton to have journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling released after they crossed the border illegally from China.

U.S. spy chief James Clapper also had to attend a meeting in Pyongyang in 2014 to bring home Miller and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been incarcerated for two years.

Such a move provides valuable propaganda for Kim's regime, which presents the events as Western capitulation to their benevolent leader.

Meanwhile it frustrates American attempts to completely isolate North Korea from the rest of the world and weaken Kim's hold on power.

Mr Warmbier was arrested in North Korea on January 2 after going to the country as part of a tour group and has now been accused of crimes against the state

News of Mr Warmbier's arrest broke as UN diplomats were considering fresh sanctions against North Korea after state officials claimed to have carried out a successful nuclear test

The U.S. State Department long cautioned against travel to North Korea, thought has never banned it completely, as it did with Cuba.

The U.S. is now reportedly seeking a ban on tourism and restrictions to keep North Korea's flagship airline, Air Koryo, from flying into and out of airports abroad.

A majority of those traveling to the secretive Communist state board their flights to Pyongyang from Beijing, where tour companies are based.

Mr Warmbier was taking part in one of those tours for his New Year vacation when he was arrested on the final day of five-day visit.

Reports at the weekend said Warmbier had been up all night drinking before attempting to catch the early flight from Pyongyang.

The tour group Warmbier was with, Young Pioneer Tours, wrote on their website at the weekend that Warmbier was the last member of the group to go through customs when he was arrested.

The tour guide said she was informed of the arrest and tried to go back to see Mr Warmbier, but was not allowed back through immigration.

While travel to North Korea has long been discouraged by the State Department, it is still legal and a few thousand Americas travel there via Beijing each year (pictured)

Getting American prisoners back from North Korea usually requires high-ranking officials to go there in person, hampering attempts to isolate the nation and handing a political victory to Kim's regime

China-based Young Pioneer stressed in a news release that Warmbier was the first of the 7,000 people it has taken to North Korea over the past eight years to face arrest.

Uri Tours, based in New Jersey, said it has also only had one such case - American Matthew Miller, who ripped up his tourist visa on arrival in what he has said was a deliberate attempt to get arrested.

Beijing-based Koryo Tours, the biggest agent specializing in bringing Westerners to North Korea, was not immediately available for comment.

Uri Tours CEO Andrea Lee said: 'We serve about 1,000 travelers per year on average to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

'About 40 percent of our travel clients are American. We have been operating in the country for nearly 15 years, and the only one incident we've had was the case of Matthew Miller.'

Mr Warmbier is still being detained, possibly in the relative comfort of Yanggakdo, a tourist hotel where his group had stayed that has previously been used to keep detainees until they are deported or more formal legal measures are taken.
Protesters want Hollande to take Rouhani to task on human rights abuses

There are fears it could spark a diplomatic row between the two countries

But France refused to take off the menu and suggested a breakfast instead

Iran's President Rouhani was due to dine with President Francois Hollande

A lunch between the French and Iranian presidents in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani has been on a tour of Europe, signing billions of pounds worth of business deals with different nations, after economic sanctions against the country were lifted.

He was due to dine with President Francois Hollande at an upmarket restaurant in the French capital.

A lunch between French President Francois Hollande and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (centre) in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu

The French insisted on serving local food and wine but the Iranians demanded a halal menu in keeping with their Muslim faith.

Hollande's officials said preparing the meal to be 'Iran friendly' went against France's republican values.

The Elysee Palace suggested a breakfast with Rouhani instead, but this was said to be snubbed by the Iranian leader for being 'too cheap'.

A diplomatic source told the RTL radio station: 'The leaders have missed out on a great opportunity to meet in the relaxed environment of a meal.'

In contrast, the Italians made sure the Iranian visit went smoothly by keeping alcohol off the menu for state dinners and covering up its nude statues.

A wooden box was placed around several pieces, including a Venus dating back to the Second Century BC, at Rome's Capitoline Museum, before the Italian and Iranian premiers spoke there.

Rouhani, who signed 12billion worth of deals with the Italian government and businesses, said he did not make any specific requests for museum officials to cover up naked statues but the gesture was appreciated.

The French insisted on serving local food and wine but the Iranians (pictured, the Iranian delegation in Paris today) demanded a halal menu in keeping with their Muslim faith

He added: 'I know that Italians are a very hospitable people, a people who try to do the most to put their guests at ease and I thank you for this.'

Some Italian politicians condemned the gesture as 'cultural submission'.

Two years ago, the Swedish ambassador to Iran sparked a diplomatic spat by 'insultingly' crossing his legs in front of then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Peter Tejler adopted the casual seating pose at a meeting in Tehran, causing huge offence by accidentally revealing the soles of his shoes.

Rouhani's first ever visit to France this week comes after a nuclear deal was struck between the Islamic republic and world powers.

France took a hard line in the nuclear talks and condemned Iran for supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

After starting his trip to Paris by meeting some 20 company executives, Rouhani is due to deliver a speech to business leaders on Thursday at a Franco-Iranian forum, where Iranian ministers will outline their plans.

The Elysee Palace suggested a breakfast with Rouhani (centre) instead, but this was said to be snubbed by the Iranian leader for being 'too cheap'

Protestors in France are demanding that Hollande take Rouhani to task over the thousands of political prisoners jailed in Iran for speaking against the regime, election rigging and public executions

He told French business leaders that Iran was open for investment as he started a visit in France to revive business ties despite diplomatic differences.

Several agreements are due to be announced after a meeting with President Francois Hollande.

Iranian officials have said they are poised to agree on a deal for Airbus aircraft, while car manufacturers Peugeot and Renault may also agree contracts.

Airport design and construction talks may be on the agenda too, potentially involving builders Bouygues and Vinci and airports operator ADP.
Young Democratic voters look to be 'feeling the Bern' in Iowa just days before the Feb. 1 caucuses where Americans will cast the first votes for major-party presidential nominees.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by a 7821 per cent margin among voters between the ages of 18 and 44.

Clinton is ahead by a similar 7121 margin among voters 65 and older. She also holds a smaller 5339 edge in the middle of the age curve, the 45- to 64-year-old contingent.

The independent Quinnipiac University Polling Institute released its latest survey results on Thursday, finding that Sanders, 74, is running ahead of the 68-year-old Clinton by a 4945 per cent score overall.

HARDLY A GRAY HEAD IN THE HOUSE: Bernie Sanders, pictured on Jan. 24 in Independence, Iowa, has eclipsed Hillary Clinton in Iowa by appealing to young idealists despite his own advanced age

GRANDMA AIN'T GOT IT: Clinton has made appearances on shows like 'Ellen' in order to humanize herself and show off a playful side that hasn't appeared to translate into support from millennials

With 19 per cent of Iowa Democrats saying they still might change their minds about whom to support Monday, Sanders and Clinton are keeping a furious campaigning pace all across the Hawkeye State.

Clinton has been trekking through Iowa with one eye on history, recalling the 2008 campaign that saw a third-place candidate named Barack Obama leap to the front of the pack and win the caucuses unexpectedly.

'Is this deja vu all over again? Who would have thunk it when the campaign began? Secretary Hillary Clinton struggling to keep up with Sen. Bernie Sanders in the final week before the Iowa caucus,' said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

'It must make her think of eight years ago when her failure in Iowa cost her the presidency.'

BUT SHE DIDN'T BOWL: Clinton gave a speech at a campaign event inside a bowling alley on Wednesday in Adel, Iowa, but didn't show off her pin-keggling skills

Brown said the Iowa caucuses are won and lost on the basis of who shows up to participate.

A campaign's success is determined by its ability to motivate voters to leave their homes on a cold February night and listen to political speeches for two hours or more.

'Perhaps more than other contests, the Iowa caucuses are all about turnout,' Brown said.

'If those young, very liberal Democratic Caucus participants show up Monday and are organized, it will be a good night for Sen. Sanders. And if Sanders does win Iowa, that could keep a long-shot nomination scenario alive.'

GRANDPA IS ON FIRE: The 73-year-old Sanders is appealing more and more to young voters for the lion's share of his support in the Hawkeye State

Clinton remains ahead with women, by a 14 per cent margin, but Sanders' edge with men is much larger, 31 per cent.

And Hillary's female advantage disappears when the women are millennials.

A USA Today/Rock the Vote poll released two weeks ago found that women between ages 18 and 34 prefer Sanders by a 19-point spread.

That poll found that most of the senator's enthusiasm comes from the very young end of the spectrum: He won 57 percent in the 1825 age group but just 36 per cent among those age 2634.,
Five militia members are believed to still be on the wildlife reserve which is now completely surrounded by police

Three more suspected militia men involved in an armed standoff with authorities at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon have been arrested.

The FBI and Oregon State Police announced that they arrested Duane Leo Ehmer of Irrigon, Oregon and Dylan Wade Anderson, 34, of Provo, Utah. Jason S. Patrick, 43, of Bonaire, Georgia was also arrested several hours later. They join the eight members already behind bars.

The arrests follow the release of federal court documents which claim that the militia men were equipped with night vision goggles and explosives. Federal authorities received a tip off soon after the group stormed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 that they were prepared to fight at the refuge or in the nearby town of Burns.

Scroll down for video

Oregon militia leader Ammon Bundy (left) and his brother, Ryan Bundy (right), were arrested Tuesday night

Bundy's lawyer Michael Arnold, left, read out a statement from his client where he urged the remaining militiamen still at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge stand down and go home to hug their families

Emotional: A visibly shaken Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward told reporters on Wednesday the standoff with the Oregon militia has been tearing the local community apart

In a statement, militia leader Ammon Bundy described Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum, center, who was shot dead by federal agents as his 'beloved friend' and one of 'the greatest men and greatest patriots'

The arrested leader of the group Ammon Bundy has called on his followers to pull out of the wildlife reserve in a statement released through his lawyer Mike Arnold.

According to the statement, Bundy said: 'To those remaining at the refuge, I love you. Let us take this fight from here. Please stand down. Go home and hug your families. This fight is ours for now in the courts.'

The militia leader praised his 'beloved friend' Robert LaVoy Finicum, 55, who was shot dead during the incident which led to Bundy's arrest.

He said: 'LaVoy is one of the greatest men and greatest patriots I have ever seen. I mourn for him and his family.

'Right now I am asking the federal government to allow the people at the refuge to go home without being prosecuted.'

Last week there were believed to be 30 people, including women and children at the wildlife reserve, although this figure is believed to have dropped as a result of the corden being enforced around the facility.

The Oregonian on Thursday reported that only five armed protesters remained.

David Fry, 27, who is among them, told the newspaper that they would only leave if felony charges were dropped against another militia member, who has a warrant out for his arrest.

Special agent Greg Bretzing of the FBI's Portland office said: 'We will continue to look for safe, peaceful procedures on how to bring this to a peaceful conclusion.'

Harney County Sheriff David Ward said: 'It's time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on. There doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community.'

Heavily armed police and federal agents have closed in on the wildlife reserve in an effort to bring the stand-off to a conclusion with militia leader Ammon Bundy urging his followers to go home and hug their families

'Please go home': Ammon Bundy, pictured earlier this month, released a statement through his attorney Wednesday asking protesters to leave the site of an armed anti-government protest

In a livestream that has been broadcasting from the protest site, an armed man was seen urging supporters to join them and to kill any law enforcement officer who tried to prevent their entry.

'There are no laws in this United States now! This is a free-for-all Armageddon!' the man yelled into the camera. '(If) they stop you from getting here, kill them!'

The men were described as being in contact with the FBI and officials said the men chose to turn themselves in to agents on a road near the refuge.

As with Bundy and the seven others arrested a day earlier, officials said the men will each face a felony charge.

Law enforcement tightened security around the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge after Bundy and his group were taken into custody at a traffic stop on Highway 395 in northeast Oregon.

Shawna Cox (left), 59, was taken to Multnomah County Jail along with the other detained militia members Tuesday. Jon Ritzheimer (right), 32, was arrested in Peoria, Arizona, after turning himself in to police

Brian Cavalier, 44 (left), and Ryan Payne (right) were charged along with the others with conspiracy to impede federal officers

Joseph O'Shaughnessy (left) and Peter Santilli (right) were arrested in Burns, Oregon, a short time after the traffic stop and shoot-out

However, some protesters said they refused to use the word 'surrender'.

'I don't know what surrendering looks like,' Jason Patrick said. 'They're walking through the checkpoint and going home. That's what I've heard unless I'm being lied to.'

Patrick added: 'It's getting emptier over time, some people leaving, some people still there holding on to what they're holding on to.'

Authorities declined to divulge details of what led to the fatal shooting of Arizona rancher Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum.

However, various onlookers say Finicum took off in his vehicle at high speed from the traffic stop.

When curtailed by a roadblock, he stopped and exited the vehicle. FBI sources told CNN that the then reached to his waistband for his gun and the SWAT team opened fire.

Bundy's brother, Ryan, was also shot in the arm over the incident.

'Let me be clear: It is the actions and choices of the armed occupiers of the refuge that have led us to where we are today,' Bretzing said. 'They had ample opportunity to leave the refuge peacefully and, as the FBI and our partners have clearly demonstrated, actions are not without consequences.'

Another eyewitness account claims, Finicum, of Cane Beds, was gunned down after charging at law enforcement officials.

Mike McConnell, who claimed to have been behind the wheel of one of the vehicles heading to a community meeting in the town of John Day Tuesday, posted an eight-minute video on his Facebook page Wednesday recounting what happened during the confrontation between the militiamen and the authorities.

Memorial: The group marched up and down N. Broadway Avenue holding a vigil for Finicum, who would have turned 56 on this day

The protesters marches Wednesday night on what would have been the 56th birthday of Robert Finicum

In protest: A group of more than 20 people marched up and down a street in Burns, Oregon, on Wednesday night holding a candlelight celebration of the life for Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum

Contrary to earlier accounts claiming that Finicum was shot while kneeling and raising his hands in a sign of surrender, McConnell said the 55-year-old was shot after charging at police officers who were standing at a roadblock.

'LaVoy was passionate about this, about the movement,' McConnell said.

His account has not been independently verified or corroborated by officials, but some aspects of it matched what law enforcement sources had said about the shooting earlier, according to The Oregonian, which first reported on the Facebook video.

The witness, who was driving a pickup truck carrying militia leader Ammond Bundy and another occupier at the time of the incident, said he was briefly detained for questioning but later released.

Bundy, his brother Ryan and three other leaders of the occupation - Ryan Payne, 32; Brian Cavalier, 44, and Shawna Cox, 59 - were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, Oregon Live reports.

All detained militia members were being held at Multnomah County Jail without bail Wednesday. They were expected to have their initial court appearance later today.

During a press conference this morning, a visibly shaken Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward told reporters, with his voice breaking: 'I'm disappointed that a traffic stop yesterday that was supposed to bring peaceful resolution to this ended badly.

FBI Special Agent Greg Bretzing (pictured) said at a press conference Wednesday that the occupiers' actions were to blame for the violent confrontation the day before

Sheriff Ward said, with his voice breaking: 'I'm disappointed that a traffic stop yesterday that was supposed to bring peaceful resolution to this ended badly'

Police officers block the turnout to Sodhouse Lane, which is the main road leading to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters Wednesday

Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group

Witness speaks: Mike McConnell, who claimed to have been behind the wheel of one of the vehicles that were pulled over during Tuesday's fateful traffic stop, said in a video that Finicum was shot after charging at police

'Multiple law enforcement agencies put a lot of work into putting together the best tactical plan they could, to take these guys down peacefully... If it was as simple as just waiting out some folks down there to get out of some buildings, we could have waited a lot longer,' Ward said.

'But this has been tearing our community apart. It's time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on. There doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community.'

Ward said if the occupiers had legitimate grievances with the government, they should use the 'appropriate manner' to address them.

'This can't happen anymore. This can't happen in America and it can't happen in Harney County,' he said.

Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the occupation, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that five or six group members remained inside the refuge.

Speaking to Reuters by phone, Patrick said they would stay until the 'redress of grievances'.

'I've heard 'peaceful resolution' for weeks now and now there's a cowboy who is my friend who is dead - so prepare for the peaceful resolution,' Patrick said.

In a live feed from the occupied refuge, a man (right) tells his mother on the phone: ''If I die, I died for my country'

On Wednesday morning an occupier posted what appeared to be a live feed from the refuge on a YouTube page called 'DefendYourBase.' In it, a few occupiers, some dressed in camouflage, were seen in front of what appeared to be a heavy-duty 320D excavator, at least two of them carrying firearms.

At one point, a man spoke on a phone with a person he identified as his mother and offered her reassurance.

'If I die, I died for my country, I died a free man,' he said. 'That's how I want to die.'

The man added that his group had 'food and everything for the long haul'.

About 13 miles from the refuge headquarters, a sign warned drivers to turn around because a roadblock was ahead. Reporters and others who approached the vehicles blocking the road were met by FBI agents wearing camouflage body armor and helmets and carrying assault rifles. A spike strip, designed to puncture tires, was laid across the pavement just beyond the roadblock.

Police and news media have converged on the nearby town of Burns, where most hotels are booked to capacity.

Ammon Bundy (left), his brother Ryan (right) and five other militiamen were arrested at the scene and charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers. Ryan Bundy, who has a severed nerve in his face, was wounded in the confrontation

Sgt. Tom Hutchison stands in front of an Oregon State Police roadblock on Highway 395 between John Day and Burns by Oregon State police officers Tuesday after LaVoy Finicum and Ryan Bundy were shot

Another Oregon State police officer stands by a vehicle on Highway 395 after arrested five of the occupiers

An AirLife medical transport helicopter lifts-off from St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon on January 26 en route to Burns after the deadly shootout

The group was driving to a community meeting on Tuesday when they were stopped by traffic cops. Pictured: the highway between Burns, Oregon, and John Day, where they were driving to attend a meeting

Officials would not confirm the identity of the militiaman shot dead. However, Finicum's daughter Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, confirmed her father's death to The Oregonian, saying 'he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved'.

Nevada state Rep Michele Fiore told the paper that Ammon Bundy called his wife from the back of the police vehicle after his arrest and told her that Finicum was cooperating with the authorities when he was shot. However, other sources said that he resisted arrest.

In an interview with MSNBC three weeks ago, Finicum declared that he would rather die than face arrest.

'There are things more important than your life, and freedom is one of them,' he said at the time. 'I'm prepared to defend freedom.'

He sounded a similar note when speaking to CNN earlier this month.

'I'm just not going to prison,' Finicum said. 'Look at the stars. There's no way I'm going to sit in a concrete cell where I can't see the stars and roll out my bedroll on the ground.

'I want to be able to get up in the morning and throw my saddle on my horse and go check on my cows. It's OK. I've lived a good life. God's been gracious to me.'

Patriarch: Finicum, a Mormon rancher from Arizona, was a father of 11 and grandfather of 19. This Facebook image shows the militiaman with one of his grandkids

Family man: Finicum (center) and wife Jeanette (right) had been married for 23 years

Finicum, a Mormon rancher from Arizona, was a father of 11 and grandfather of 19 who was married to his wife, Jeanette, for 23 years.

His daughter Challice Finch told NBC News after the deadly standoff that her father and his fellow protesters were 'all committed to not firing on federal agents'.

WHO WAS LAVOY FINICUM? LaVoy Finicum, 55, of northern Arizona, has been the right-hand man to the occupation's leader Ammon Bundy since the stand-off began on January 2. Acting as spokesman for the group, he gave numerous press conferences to communicate their position. At one point he personally climbed up a pole to dismantle surveillance cameras in an apparent show of defiance against the government. But he has not always held such a strong anti-government stance. Last year, he told the St George News that he complied with federal land controls until Cliven Bundy's stand-off in Nevada in 2014. The episode, he said, struck a chord with him. He joined the Bundys and 'did a lot of soul-searching' until he 'realized that Cliven Bundy was standing on a very strong constitutional principle - and yet, here I was continuing to pay a grazing fee to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management).' Finicum's wife of 23 years, Jeanette, recently arrived in Oregon, traveling up from Arizona, to celebrate his 56th birthday. Beyond life as a militiaman and rancher, Finicum was a father of 11 and grandfather of 23 who also found time to write a novel, Only By Blood And Suffering, about a time when guns are no more, cars have stopped working, the market has imploded, and the Chinese control everything. Advertisement

Speaking to The Oregonian on the eve of his death, LaVoy Finicum noted that law enforcement officials 'have become more hardened' as of late.

'They're doing all the things that show they want to take some kinetic action against us, and we're saying, 'Why be so unfriendly?'' the militia spokesman told the paper.

Joseph O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50, were arrested in Burns soon after the traffic stop and shoot-out.

An eighth group member, Jon Ritzheimer, 32, was arrested in Peoria, Arizona, after turning himself in to the police department, Fox reported.

All of those arrested face federal charges of conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to impede federal officers from discharging their duties, the FBI said.

The hospital where Ryan Bundy and LaVoy Finicum were taken, St Charles Medical Center, was placed on lockdown in the wake of the shootout.

Some 25 miles of Highway 395 was shut down in both directions following the incident, a dispatcher for the state department of transportation said.

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge in the wake of the shootout. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for 'patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution'.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

'The entire leadership is gone,' he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. 'I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving.'

Thornton called the arrests 'a dirty trick' by law enforcement.

According to Oregon Live, the leaders had been en route to John Day - 70 miles from Burns - to appear as guest speakers at a meeting with hundreds of local residents.

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's three sons and 'about 150' militiamen have occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge HQ to protest the pending imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers accused of arson

Rancher Cliven Bundy speaks to media while standing along the road near his ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, after visiting the family of LaVoy Finicum

The crowd was informed the group would not be able to make it to the event after the dramatic traffic stop.

Frustrated local and state officials have been increasingly urging the FBI to do something to resolve the situation.

Bundy and his group have held frequent news conferences at the site, traveled to meet with sympathizers and others to espouse their views and some even attended a community meeting last week, where local residents shouted at them to leave.

Federal authorities have taken a hands-off approach so far and say they want a peaceful resolution.

Bundy has been in contact with an FBI negotiator and local law enforcement.

On Friday, Bundy went to the Burns Municipal Airport, where the FBI has set up a staging area, and met briefly with a federal agent.

Bundy left because the agent wouldn't talk with him in front of the media. Sieges by federal authorities in the early 1990s led to deadly standoffs in at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.

The group took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 after a peaceful protest in nearby Burns, Oregon, over the conviction of two local ranchers on arson charges.

Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, said they lit fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006 to reduce the growth of invasive plants and protect their property from wildfires.

Charged: Ammon Bundy's bodyguard Brian Cavalier (left) and Jon Ritzheimer (right) were also arrested

Charged: Shawna Cox, regularly seen at Ammon Bundy's side, was also detained during the traffic stop

The two were convicted three years ago and served time - the father three months, the son one year.

But in October, a federal judge in Oregon ruled their terms were too short under U.S. law and ordered them back to prison for about four years each. Among the demands by the Bundy group is for the Hammonds to be released.

The alleged arrests on Tuesday come after an Army veteran was arrested for a DUI while he was heading to join the militia occupying federal land in Oregon.
The wife of a northern Illinois police officer who killed himself after embezzling from a youth program has been indicted on charges of money laundering and disbursing charitable funds from the same organization.

Melodie Gliniewicz turned herself in on Wednesday at the Lake County Sheriff's Office after the grand jury agreed she should face criminal charges.

She was being processed and taken to the county jail Wednesday afternoon, he said. Her bond was set at $50,000.

Her husband, Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, also known as 'G.I. Joe', stole tens of thousands of dollars from the Fox Lake Police Explorers Post during a seven-year stretch, according to police.

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Melodie Gliniewicz (above) turned herself in on Wednesday at the Lake County Sheriff's Office after the grand jury agreed she should face criminal charges for allegedly distributing funds from a youth program

She is the wife of a northern Illinois police officer who authorities say killed himself after embezzling from a youth program

The grand jury indicted Gliniewicz on felony counts of money laundering and disbursing charitable funds without authority for personal benefit. When the allegations came to light, her bank accounts were frozen in November

He staged his suicide on September 1 to look like a homicide because he feared investigators were close to discovering and unveiling his illicit scheme.

Joe Gliniewicz had run the Explorer program for teens interested in possible careers in law enforcement. Authorities say Melodie Gliniewicz served as an adviser to the Explorer Post and had a fiduciary role with the program's finances.

Her accounts were frozen in November when the allegations came to light.

In November, an official with knowledge of the death investigation identified Mrs Gliniewicz as one of the recipients of thousands of pages of incriminating text and Facebook messages Joe Gliniewicz had sent. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the probe publicly.

Below are two of the messages the official says they exchanged:

One of the conversations was on April 14, when a worried Gliniewicz and his wife exchanged messages about money, a retirement date and whether someone, presumably new village administrator Anne Marrin, had the authority to conduct a review of village finances.

Mrs Cliniewicz said: '...maybe we need to hide the funds some how.'

In a June 22 message, Gliniewicz informs his wife that he used the Explorer account to pay for a travel expense:

'Used the exploder acct for the flight, $624.70. It can wait for a while, their acct is sitting at $3000'ish now,' the officer said.

Gliniewicz's death touched off an intense manhunt involving hundreds of officers and raised fears of cop killers on the loose.

Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz (left), also known as 'G.I. Joe', stole tens of thousands of dollars from the Fox Lake Police Explorers Post during a seven-year stretch, according to police. Her bond was set to $50,000

Above she is pictured on September 2, 2015, with her sons at a vigil for her husband after his death

Two months after Gliniewicz' death, authorities announced that he had killed himself after embezzling from the village's Police Explorer program for seven years, prompting tough questions about why it had taken so long to reach that conclusion.

'We completely believed from day one that this was a homicide,' George Filenko, the commander of the Lake County Major Crime Task Force, told reporters at the time.

Gliniewicz had reportedly plotted to hire a gangster to kill an official who was about to expose the embezzlement.

On the day he died, the veteran cop radioed dispatchers to say he was following three men, two white and one black.

After calling for back up he was found dead in the woods from a gunshot wound to the torso.

FBI investigators initially had doubts about Gliniewicz's 'murder' after cell phone records showed him in the area for 30 minutes before radioing back up.

He (pictured alongside Melodie) staged his suicide on September 1 to look like a homicide because he feared that investigators were about to discover his illicit scheme

In October, Mrs Glinewicz did an interview with Crime Watch Daily, insisting her husband hadn't committed suicide. She said: 'I wholeheartedly believe [my husband] was murdered. [To suggest] otherwise is disrespectful, hurtful, irresponsible'

Local authorities ignored this and pursued a man hunt for the alleged suspects, which earned national attention.

Thousands attended Gliniewicz's funeral, which became a statewide event in Illinois, on September 7, 2015. In death, the 30-year police veteran was a hero until his supposed greed was revealed.

In October, Mrs Glinewicz did an interview with Crime Watch Daily, insisting her husband hadn't committed suicide.

She said: 'I wholeheartedly believe [my husband] was murdered. [To suggest] otherwise is disrespectful, hurtful, irresponsible.

'When the coroner said it could be suicide there was a lot of anger. The coroner is an elected person, he did not perform the autopsy.

'The one that performed the autopsy came and stood on my deck and told me everything.'

Mrs Gliniewicz said the autopsy showed her husband was hit with two bullets, one that was stopped by his bullet proof vest, and another that hit him in the torso.
Mills had both personal and government devices, and had been warned about mixing up the two

Hillary Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department lost a Blackberry device on which she had stored classified information, a new report this week shows.

Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton associate, notified a state department staffer of the development in a March 20, 2010 email.

''Somewhere b/w my house and the plane to nyc yesterday my personal bb got misplaced; no on [sic] is answering it thought [sic] I have called,' Mills wrote from her personal email account, according to the report in The Daily Caller.

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Former State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills testified before the Republican-controlled House Select Committee on Benghazi in September about the department's role in the Sept. 2012 terrorist attacks

Mills with Clinton at the former secretary of state's day of testimony on Capitol Hill on Oct. 22

The report says it appears that Mills sent and received multiple messages on the device that the State Department has retroactively determined to have contained classified information.

Such emails include a discussion about a situation in Guinea with the State Department's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and another about a situation in Haiti.

The State Department has retroactively classified over 1,300 emails that were housed on Clinton's private, home-based email server. She and the agency have both maintained that the information in those messages were not considered classified at the time.

Conservative media have been scrutinizing Clinton's Blackberry usage as secretary of state, reporting multiple times on her usage of the device.

The DC reported this month that the State Department offered her use of a government-issued device with an official email account, but that was rejected by aide Huma Abedin. Meanwhile, aides such as Mills used both types of devices.

On Monday, Fox News reported that Clinton and other top aides often used their Blackberries to send emails with sensitive information.

Mills is a longtime aide and confidante of both Bill and Hillary Clinton

The DC report on Tuesday said some State officials were concerned about Mills' use of a personal Blackberry device along with her official one.

'I cannot stress too strongly that any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving emails, and exploring calendars,' Eric Boswell, then the head of State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, told Mills in a March 2009 memo.
A Defence Minister has said British troops need 'more than body armour' when they are sent into battle as they have to deal with spurious claims from 'parasitic' lawyers when they return to the UK.

Around 4,000 claims of mistreatment have been lodged against British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, costing the Government more than 30million so far.

Speaking during a Westminster Hall debate Tory minister Penny Mordaunt revealed among the claims the courts have dealt with are an insurgent bomb-maker who sued the UK because he was taken prisoner and detained until it was safe to transfer him to local forces - when instead we could have shot him.

Around 4,000 claims of mistreatment have been lodged against British troops who were based in Iraq and Afghanistan, costing the Government more than 30million so far

Ms Mordaunt revealed the details of the cases as Tory former minister Richard Benyon warned legal action against Iraq veterans could put British soldiers serving in war zones at risk.

Mr Benyon, a former soldier who serves on the Defence Select Committee, criticised the long-running investigation into claims that British military personnel abused civilians during the 2003 to 2009 conflict.

CASES SUBMITTED TO THE COURTS AGAINST BRITISH TROOPS Claimed 'hysterical' British solider shot Iraqi - despite Danish forces accepting liability and paying compensation

Said girl, 13, killed after picking up British cluster bomb when it was actually a boy who died when he was standing near Iraqi missile launcher destroyed by coalition helicopter

Insurgent bomb-maker is attempting to claim after British troops did not shoot him but instead took him prisoner

A man who died in a UK controlled detention facility. It later emerged he had previously been diagnosed with a heart condition, he was given appropriate medication but later suffered a suspected heart attack and died Advertisement

He also suggested British soldiers operating abroad should not to be subject to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Tory MP Johnny Mercer, another former soldier, said the situation was beyond parody and called for the Government to warn troops before detectives turn up on their doorsteps to quiz them.

Ms Mordaunt said Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) submitted allegations in 2014 of an 'hysterical' British solider shooting an Iraqi - despite Danish forces accepting liability and paying compensation over the incident 11 years earlier.

In a further case, Ms Mordaunt said PIL claimed a 13-year-old girl had been killed after picking up part of a UK cluster bomb.

But she explained the law firm later acknowledged it was a 13-year-old boy who had been killed while in the vicinity of an Iraqi mobile missile launcher preparing to attack Kuwait - which was destroyed by a coalition helicopter.

Case number 82 was cl;aim following an investigation into the death of a man who died in a UK controlled detention facility.

The evidence gathered by IHAT showed that he had previously been diagnosed with a heart condition, and this had been picked up from a medical he had had at the detention facility. He was given appropriate medication.

He later suffered a suspected heart attack and died while UK forces were taking him to hospital.

Tory minister Penny Mordaunt revealed among the claims the courts have dealt with are an insurgent bomb-maker who sued the UK for troops taking him prisoner instead of shooting him

Ms Mordaunt said no apologies should be made for investigating and holding to account British armed forces.

But she added: 'The steady creep of extending the reach of European human rights legislation not written for conflict situations is eroding international humanitarian law, and it is the behaviour of parasitic law firms churning out spurious claims against our armed forces on an industrial scale which is the enemy of justice and humanity - it is not our armed forces or the Ministry of Justice.'

Ms Mordaunt added: 'When the courts entertain claims against our armed forces of the likes of an insurgent bomb-maker suing us for not shooting him in a firefight, but instead taking him prisoner and holding him we until we could guarantee he would not face mistreatment in the local justice system, then it's not just our armed forces who suffer, the strain on them and the corrupting effect on their behaviour in the field, it is the cause of human rights that suffers too.

'Today when faced with the likes of Leigh Day and PIL we need to wrap our service personnel in more than just body armour when we send them out to defend freedom.'

Addressing some of the 'illuminating' cases dealt with by the courts, Ms Mordaunt said: 'Case number 377 - it was alleged that a passenger in a car was shot by "an hysterical British soldier in a tank".

'That Ihat investigation ascertained that PIL had submitted this allegation in October 2014 despite Danish armed forces accepting liability for this incident and paying compensation in 2003.'

One Tory MP could be heard saying 'shame' as Ms Mordaunt finished reading out the details.

Some Iraq veterans are being investigated into their actions during the campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan

Ms Mordaunt added: 'Case number 123 - it was alleged that a 13-year-old girl had been killed when she picked up part of a UK cluster bomb that had failed to detonate.

'The Ihat investigation established that a 13-year-old boy had been killed but was unable to ascertain whether it was Iraqi or UK munitions responsible.

'PIL challenged the MoD's decision not to refer this to the IFI. The MoD defended the challenge on the basis of that information.

'Shortly before the hearing, PIL disclosed a witness statement by the boy's father made before the Ihat investigation in which he said he'd been killed while in the vicinity of an Iraqi mobile missile launcher preparing to fire missiles into Kuwait, which was destroyed by coalition helicopter.

'There are many other cases I can mention, which concluded through thorough investigation that UK service personnel had acted in self-defence, in the defence of others and lawfully.

'That enables us to meet our obligations to investigate serious wrongdoing and its work is exonerating those wrongly accused and rejecting bogus allegations.'

Ms Mordaunt went on to claim that while between 2010 and the beginning of 2014 Iraqi citizens had lodged only 192 claims with the IHAT through PIL, between July 2014 and October last year the firm lodged a further 1,200 cases.

She added the fact that so many people decided to independently seek out the firm and initiate litigation in the courts, over a decade after the alleged incidents took place 'defies credibility.'

Conservative MP for South Dorset, Richard Drax, a former soldier, hit out at personal injury lawyers Leigh Day, telling MPs: 'The perception is that left-leaning lawyers are intent on undermining one of the pillars of the establishment, namely the armed forces, and given the opportunity are jumping to the task with relish.'

Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to crack down on 'spurious' legal claims made against troops who served in the Iraq War.

The allegations made against British troops were initially investigated by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, an independent agency within the Ministry of Defence.

However, three years ago the High Court ruled that IHAT did not meet the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights in all cases.

In response, the Iraq Fatality Investigations panel was set up to probe a small number of cases which require a full investigation but do not involve criminal prosecutions.
A Northern California couple has pleaded not guilty to killing two young children and abusing a third in the woman's care.

Tami Huntsman and her 17-year-old boyfriend Gonzalo Curiel are accused of abusing to death 6-year-old Shaun Tara and 3-year-old Delylah Tara, whose bodies were found in a Redding storage unit last month, and the severe abuse of a 9-year-old girl. All three of the children were in Huntsmans custody.

The pair is also charged with abusing a 9-year-old girl, who was found starving and with broken bones in the back of an SUV parked in Quincy, California.

Pleaded not guilty: Tami Huntsman and her 17-year-old boyfriend Gonzalo Curiel are accused of abusing to death 6-year-old Shaun Tara and 3-year-old Delylah Tara

Three-year-old Delylah Tara (right) and six-year-old Shaun Tara (left) were in the custody of the suspects after their father's arrest and are believed to have been dumped in the storage unit

The three victims were siblings and in the custody of 39-year-old Huntsman. The three victims lived with Huntsman and Curiel in Salinas.

Investigators believe the children were killed in Salinas due to sustained physical abuse and neglect.

Salinas police chief Kelly McMillin said last month that two dozen investigators were still trying to piece together the tangled and horrific series of events that led to the deaths.

'In my 32-year career, this is the most egregious child abuse homicide case I've ever seen,' McMillin said.

Monterey County District Attorney Dean Flippo also said autopsies had determined the children  ages 3 and 6  died around Thanksgiving in Salinas of ongoing physical abuse.

Huntsman, who is believed to be their aunt, and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Gonzalo Curiel, faced charges of felony child abuse, torture, and mayhem after the gruesome discovery in Redding, California, last month.

Autopsies show the two dead children were 'clearly' killed in Monterey County - more than 300 miles way - at some time near Thanksgiving, Shasta County District Attorney Stephen Carlton said.

The revelation came just a day after it was revealed that social services made four visits in the past year to Huntsman but decided the children were not at risk.

The children were believed to have been staying with Huntsman after their mother died in a car accident and their father was arrested in connection with a 120-acre forest fire in El Dorado County, California

Gruesome: Huntsman, who is believed to be their aunt, and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Gonzalo Curiel, faced charges of felony child abuse, torture, and mayhem after the gruesome discovery in Redding, California, last month

The family are believed to have still been at their former home in Salinas, Monterey County, on Thanksgiving. The homicide investigation will now be transferred there.

Police were led to the remains after they discovered a 'severely abused' nine-year-old girl at an apartment owned by Huntsman in Quincy, California.

The youngster was taken into surgery suffering multiple injuries.

Plumas County Sheriff Greg Hagwood said she weighed about 40 pounds, had broken bones in her shoulder, broken fingers, a dislocated jaw, and teeth that were missing or loose. She reportedly had open sores and was infested with lice.

Hagwood told the Plumas News: 'This has shaken my staff to the core.

'That little girl had been subjected to the most unspeakable measure of torture for an extended period of time. This is child abuse, the likes of which we haven't experienced here.'

It is believed that the two children were killed in Salinas, California and dumped in Redding. Police began searching for the children after they found a badly injured nine-year-old girl in Quincy, California

Huntsman and Curiel were arrested and questioned about the girl. The pair were also questioned about the girl's younger brother Shaun, 6, and sister, Delylah, 3, who are missing.

It is alleged that during questioning Curiel told detectives they could find the missing children inside a pair of plastic bins in a storage container in Redding, about 150 miles from Quincy.

Huntsman assumed custody of the children because a man believed to be her brother - their father - was arrested in connection with a massive wildfire and the youngsters' mother died in a car crash.

Two older children - 12-year-old male and female twins - who were at an East Quincy residence where Huntsman and Curiel were staying with a friend were immediately placed in foster care, the Plumas News reported.

It emerged last month that social services made four visits in the past year to Huntsman's home.

None of the five children living in the apartment were removed from the woman's custody because there was no evidence they were at risk, Elliot Robinson, head of Monterey County Department of Social Services, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

A commercial storage unit facility is shown last month, where two children were found dead in Redding

There were four complaints between September 2014 and August about general neglect, a category that includes poor supervision, improper feeding, lice infestation and dirty household conditions, Robinson said, adding that none of the complaints alleged physical abuse.

He said: 'General neglect calls rarely will result in the removal of the child. More often than not it's about poverty.'

Social services officials were reviewing the agency's handling of the four neglect complaints.

Robinson told the San Francisco Chronicle: 'We're looking at the case to see if there's anything we should have done differently that could have prevented this tragedy.'

Chief McMillin said Salinas police responded twice to Huntsman's house over the past six months to check on child abuse reports.

Officers didn't find anyone at home the first time and didn't see any evidence of neglect or abuse when they returned later.

Huntsman's Facebook profile claimed her job was: 'Being The Best Mom I Can Be'.

Huntsman's estranged husband spoke out last month and said she was never an 'evil' person.

'Tami Huntsman was the perfect mother, the perfect housewife, the perfect person, up until the point she met that kid,' Chris Criswell told KSBW.
Joked how he was the 'best available' and apologised to those hoping to see notable ex-students Eddy Grant, Ms Dynamite and Lee Thompson

He poked fun at former state school pupils who said he should be banned

Old Etonian actor Damian Lewis poked fun at former state school pupils who said he should be banned from attending their anniversary party, saying they had 'missed the point'.

The Homeland actor was invited to switch on a laser display at Acland Burghley School in Camden, north London, to help the school mark 50 years since its opening.

Former students started a petition against his role as guest of honour after claiming he represented 'privilege and inequality' and was not appropriate given the school's 'long and proud tradition in comprehensive education'.

Lewis joked he was the 'best available' and apologised to those hoping to see the notable former students, Eddy Grant, Ms Dynamite or Madness saxophonist Lee Thompson.

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Addressing the crowd at the event tonight, Damian Lewis poked fun at those who criticised his attendance and said they were 'missing the point' of the event

The Homeland actor joked: 'For those of you who were hoping to meet Eddy Grant or Ms Dynamite or Lee Thompson from Madness, I can only give my apologies. I was the best available'

Standing next to headteacher Nicholas John (left) and Lucy Amis (centre), the daughter of the school's architect Stanley Amis, Lewis heaped praise on the 'creativity' and 'diversity' of Acland Burghley School

Speaking tonight, the Wolf Hall star said: 'For those people out there who suggested by kindly writing into the newspapers this morning that perhaps I shouldn't be here at all because I wasn't at the school, what I would say to them is I think they are missing the point slightly because it seems to me that this evening is about more than that.

'It seems to me that this evening is about a celebration of our community here in Tufnell Park and he role the school has played here in Tufnell Park in the last 50 years.'

Lewis, whose wife Helen McCrory stood in the audience as he addressed a crowd of around 450 before starting a countdown to a laser show, said he had lived in the area for a decade.

Standing next to headteacher Nicholas John and Lucy Amis, the daughter of the school's architect Stanley Amis, he said: 'It strikes me every time I walk down the street that there is more creativity, independence and support in this neighbourhood than any other neighbourhood I have lived in in London.

'That is of course exactly the qualities they teach the students here at Acland Burghley.

'It's central to its ethos, and why it has been such a success and why it has been recognised as special status in performing arts and creative studies.'

Referring to his Eton education, he said he was lucky to benefit from a 'thriving creative community' and schools were more successful if they excelled in the arts.

Speaking from notes he concluded: 'I share with you the hope that Acland Burghley can continue to grow and be a beacon of curiosity, independence, creativity and diversity right here in the heart of Tufnell Park.'

Lewis has two children, Gulliver, eight, and Manon, nine. They would be too young to attend Acland Burghley, which takes children aged 11 to 18.

Some former pupils of Acland Burghley School said the Wolf Hall star, who lives less than ten minutes away on foot, was too privileged to lead the event which marks the institution's 50th anniversary

Prior to the event, Rachel Cohen, 44, who attended the school between 1982 and 1989, and Harriet Yudkin, a health improvement practitioner, who was also at the school in the 1980s, started the petition which had garnered 100 signatures.

Ms Cohen said: 'It's really just about how do you celebrate the anniversary of a really good comprehensive school that has always taken a very radical and socially progressive attitude towards education and been very committed to inclusive education within the community and arts being very central to that.'

But she insisted it was not a personal protest against Lewis and she hoped he would become more involved in the school in the future.

Miss Yudkin, who now lives in Newcastle, added: 'It is not about snobbery it's about celebrating the comprehensive education the school champions. If Damian publicly championed the benefits of state schools then that would be fine.'

She added: 'I decided that it didn't really feel that appropriate. We don't want to detract away from the success of the school in anyway but the 50th anniversary of the school should be a celebration of the diversity comprehensive education can offer.

'There is nothing wrong with someone being privately educated and there were people at the school when I was there that were well-off so it just felt like a strange choice.

'My parents were both doctors but worked for the NHS their whole lives and I champion the idea of state education and mixing with people from all walks of life.

'It would be great if they chose another famous person to open it who actually went to the school. Ms Dynamite went there and she would be a great role model for younger people so that would have been a good choice.'

Acland Burghley is in the leafy Tufnell Park area of Camden. Its last full inspection by Ofsted in 2013 saw it downgraded from 'good' to 'requires improvement'

The actor had agreed to switch on a laser display at Acland Burghley School in Camden, north London

Referring to his Eton education, Lewis said: 'I was very lucky at my schools to having a thriving creative community. I believe sincerely that the success of schools is greater when there is a thriving creative community within the school'

Headteacher Mr John, who was himself privately educated, is hoping the start of the celebrations will help him to raise money to improve some of the half-century old buildings.

He said he wanted to the school to focus on improving its academic standards and continue excelling in the arts and engagement with the community.

'The fact that he is an actor involved in the community is great,' he said about Lewis.

'It's about community and creativity.'

He added: 'The school he went to is of no consequence.'

The protestors also came under fire from Neil Roskilly, chief executive of the Independent Schools' Association, who accused them of pushing an 'outdated' antagonism.

He said: '[Mr Lewis] should be applauded for taking such an active role. He does a lot in the local community and they should be proud of him.

'How fortunate that someone who is held in such high regard professionally is willing to give so much time to the community and recognises the importance of education and is willing to give his time to support such an important event.

'It's strange how every once in a while you still come across this 'us and them' divide, it's outdated, the world is just not like that anymore.
North Korea may be preparing to launch a long-range missile as soon as next week, just days after dictator Kim Jong-un claimed he had weapons capable of obliterating the U.S.

Japan's Kyodo news agency, citing an unnamed Japanese government official, said there are signs of possible preparations for a missile launch based on analysis of satellite imagery of the North's Tongchang-ri missile test site on its west coast.

The government source said a missile launch could occur in about a week at the earliest, Kyodo reported.

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Dictator: The news of the possible long-range missile launch comes just days after Kim Jong-un claimed he had weapons capable of obliterating the U.S.

The report comes amid discussions among U.N. Security Council members for fresh sanctions against the North after it conducted its fourth nuclear test on January 6. The country is already under sanctions for its nuclear and missile programmes.

North Korea last conducted a long-range rocket launch in late 2012, successfully putting an object into orbit in what is believed by experts to be part of its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Earlier this month, North Korea's state news agency KCNA, reported that the leader's scientists 'are in high spirit to detonate H-bombs of hundreds of kilotons and megatons, capable of wiping out the whole territory of the US all at once'.

The declaration came after the pariah state claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb and released suspect footage of a submarine-launched ballistic missile it claims could deliver such a weapon.

State television broadcast footage of the test, said to have taken place in December, and boasted about the hermit nation's ballistic missile technology. Pyongyang said it would allow the country to deliver a nuclear warhead.

Experts have largely dismissed the H-bomb test, saying the yield  around six kilotons  was far too low for a fully-fledged thermonuclear device, which would have been 100 times more powerful.

Kim Jong Un watches a submarine-launched ballistic missile which he claims could deliver a nuclear warhead, however experts claim the footage was faked

The KCNA commentary said the test 'was neither to "threaten" anyone nor to "provoke" someone for a certain purpose'.

KCNA insisted that the main focus was on providing a 'sure guarantee' of the North's immunity from attack by hostile forces.

Prime among those forces was the U.S. it said, offering an apocalyptic vision of how it would respond to US aggression.

On January 12, the U.S. House of Representatives voted nearly unanimously to pass legislation to broaden sanctions on the North.
Students in Anne Arundel County in Maryland where delighted on Tuesday when they received a message informing them school would be closed the following day because of the weekend's snowstorm.

They were pleased not only by the thought of the impending snow day, but also by the way the message was delivered: a voice message in the form of a song inspired by Adele's hit single Hello.

'Hello, it's me, it's the voice you love to hear from and the face you do not see,' began the message.

British singer Adele's hit single Hello was parodied in a voice message announcing a snow day in Maryland

The humorous robo-call was sent out by schools spokesman Bob Moiser, who recorded it together with his daughter Emilie, 17.

Musical duo Bob and Emilie Moiser collaborated on the funny phone message

The song was sent out at 7pm Tuesday and preceded by a regular phone call two hours earlier.

'It was bouncing around in my head for a while. And everyone has seen the Adele parodies. And everyone is going stir crazy,' Moiser told the Capital Gazette.

'I didn't expect this kind of reaction. I was just trying to take some levity out of the situation.'

Moiser's daughter, who goes to North County High School, which was among the schools affected by the snow day, told the Gazette she is a big Adele fan.

'I literally thought he was kidding,' she said of her father.

'I didn't think he wanted to do it for real.'

Some of the song lines that she sang included, 'I am loving this semester break but my friends I cannot see, this is dreadful, socially, just so many selfies I can take and send to all my peeps.'

Emilie told the Gazette her Twitter was 'blowing up' after the message was sent out and that she wants to give 'props' to her dad for penning the lyrics.

Wednesday's snow day was the third day of the week that classes were cancelled at Anne Arundel County schools; on Monday and Tuesday students were off for break.

Twitter post apparently made by a Maryland student who received the humorous message
The former Perth schoolgirl who survived an axe massacre that left her parents and brother dead will never remember the violent attack on her family despite making a full recovery from her injuries.

Marli van Breda, who was 16 at the time, and her brother Henri, then aged 20, were the only survivors of the attack on January 27 last year when businessman Martin van Breda, his wife Teresa and their eldest son Rudi, 22, were killed in their South African mansion in Cape Town.

Channel Nine News reports that the now 17-year-old, who suffered severe head and throat injuries and now lives with her uncle and aunt in Cape Town, suffers from retrograde amnesia, and cant and wont comment on her brother Henris alleged role in the incident.

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Former Perth schoolgirl Marli van Breda has retrograde amnesia after the brutal attack on her family

No one has been arrested over the murders, which Henri blamed on an intruder in a phone call to police allegedly made hours after the attack had taken place at their home.

However, it emerged that an audio recording of the emergency phone call made by Henri, obtained by eNews Channel Africa, seemed to reveal him 'giggling' as he explained the details of the bloody massacre.

A cleaner who worked for one of the van Breda's neighbours also saw the young man, covered in blood, using his phone outside the house shortly after the attack.

Police also confirmed at the time that there was no signs of a break-in at the home.

Henri van Breda (back left) escaped the attack while his father Martin (back right), mother Teresa (front right), and brother Rudi (back centre) were killed. Marli, (front left), suffered severe head and throat injuries

While recovering from her injuries Marli posted this photograph on her Instagram account of her father Martin (centre) and mother Teresa (right) along with a caption 'The people I love most'

The teenager paid tribute to her murdered parents and brother three months after the brutal attack

Marli's lawyer Louise Buikman said that the 17-year-olds recovery had been nothing short of miraculous, but that she would likely never remember what happened on that fateful night.

She is very well physically. She is a beautiful 17-year-old girl, the lawyer said.

Mentally, she is also coping remarkably well... she is obviously terribly sad about the loss of her parents and her brother.

'Marli suffers from retrograde amnesia. It is extremely unlikely that she will ever recall the event.

Marli's recovery from her injuries has been described as nothing short of miraculous

An emergency call made by Marli's brother Henry (pictured) seemed to reveal him 'giggling' as he explained the details of the bloody massacre

Martin (left) and wife Theresa (right) both died at their home in Stellenbosch, Cape Town

The case is currently with South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority, which has still not made a decision on how to proceed with the case.

It was reported that the two surviving siblings have not yet come face to face as it was previously reported Henri was banned from seeing Marli in hospital over fears he may traumatise her.

The family of five had returned to South Africa after residing in Perth in Western Australia for six years.
A dog named Lucky had a close escape after trapped on the fragile surface of an ice-covered lake in China, forcing a brave passerby to take courageous action to save it.

The dog's saviour, Mr Xiang, walked out onto the lake in Hefei, Anhui province, east China, to break through the ice and rescue the mutt from danger right opposite Laishaoqi Art Museum, according to Huanqiu.com, an affiliation of People's Daily Online.

Xiang, a photojournalist by trade, spotted Lucky struggling to get out of the lake at around 12.30pm on January 25 while he was taking photos and decided to help its owner, Ms Gao, get it out.

Under threat: Lucky got stranded in the ice on a frozen lake in Hefei, east China, and had to be rescued quickly

Quick: Xiang, a photographer, (right) was taking photos when he spotted the dog and used his tripod to help

Panic: Lucky began howling desperately as it realised it was stuck and unable to free itself without help

Realising the patent danger it was in, Lucky began yowling at the assembled crowd for help.

As the dog got tired and began gradually sinking beneath the surface, Xiang used his professional tripod to hack a path through the ice and made his way slowly towards Lucky with Ms Gao in tow.

After 10 minutes, he successfully reached the spot where the three-year-old retriever was floundering, 100 feet from the lake's shore, and managed to haul it out of the freezing water.

Not to worry: The three-year-old retriever's owner Ms Gao (pictured) thought the dog would be able to escape

Safe and sound: None of the parties involved suffered any lasting injuries or hypothermia from the incident

Relief: Ms Gao said she was grateful to Mr Xiang for the rescue and would 'give him a dog as a gift' as thanks

He later told journalists: 'Its owner kept telling it to use its strength to climb out. I knew the water wasnt deep, and I can swim too.'

Neither Mr Xiang, Ms Gao nor Lucky suffered lasting injury from traversing the freezing conditions.
Psychologist warns of impact on students' creativity and social aptitude

A school in China desperate to halt burgeoning young romance in its tracks has established a somewhat tyrannical regime banning male and female students from eating lunch together.

The middle school in Shenmu county, Shaanxi Province, north-west China, has instructed that for a few months students of opposite genders must stay apart, according to People's Daily Online.

The school has set up two separate dining areas for girls and boys, with a teacher patrol and harsh punishments for anyone who crosses the clear divide.

Divided: Girls and boys at the middle school in Shenmu , Shaanxi Province, north-west China are kept apart

Infamous: The dreaded sign hanging outside the canteen, directing the girls one way and the boys the other

The announcement created a flurry of disapproval from readers and students when it was posted online, with many branding it excessive and not conducive to student happiness and satisfaction.

When asked, the majority of students confirmed that the regulations made them feel uncomfortable and removed an important aspect of middle school life.

One student said: 'A boy and a girl sitting together does not necessarily mean they are in a relationship. They could be just talking or discussing school work.'

Principal Qiao Zhenyi, speaking to China Central Television Station, said that the measures had been brought in after reports of inappropriate behaviour between students in the canteen.

He said: 'The boys and girls used to sit together, and they behaved indecently which could affect others adversely and provides fertile ground for puberty love [love between teenagers].'

Qiao argued that the new system has been received favourably by parents, as it helped 'completely eradicate the indecent behaviour, thus preventing premature love affairs.'

Controversial: Weibo users harshly criticised the move, slamming the school when they heard (file photo)

Freedoms under threat: Most students said the regulations made them feel uncomfortable (file photo)

Upon hearing the news, Weibo users harshly criticised the move, slamming the school and its head.

'Smozando' posted: 'It's the silliest school regulation! The more severe the authority's repression, the more students in their rebellious phase will revolt.'

Similarly, user 'Klansjar' wrote: 'Are they going to put on gas masks to prevent any intimacy? After all, they're breathing the same air.'

Meanwhile clinical psychologist Wang Guirong, from Yulin Number Two Hospital said that the practice may work temporarily to create order in the school.
A 13-year-old girl from central China had 34 metal pellets removed from her face after she was shot by her cousin with a plastic air rifle.

Qian Qian was at home in Wuhan city when the seven-year-old boy picked up the gun, pulled the trigger, and repeatedly shot her in the face on January 8, reports the Peoples Daily Online.

She was immediately rushed to a local hospital where doctors removed 10 pellets. Then sent to the Wuhan University Stomatological Hospital, where the last 24 pellets were removed yesterday with the help of 3D navigation.

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Shocking: 13-year-old Qian Qian from central China was shot in the face by her cousin with a BB gun

Painful: The X-ray shows how many of the tiny bullets were lodged in her face when she was shot in Wuhan city

Qian Qian and her cousin - who has not been named - were allegedly playing together after school. She was squatting on the floor and using on her phone when he took the gun and shot her.

The report suggests the young boy did not know the plastic gun was harmful and believed it was just a toy.

A BB gun is a type of air gun with round metal pellets, they can be extremely dangerous and can often be mistaken as handguns.

Surgeons at the hospital spent five hours successfully removing the 24 pellets that remained in her face after she initially went to hospital and the doctors were unable to remove them.

They each measured three millimetres in diameter and were mainly spread around her cheeks and chin.

Advanced technology: 3D navigation was used to locate each pellet so surgeons could remove them

Time consuming: It took surgeons five hours to successfully remove 34 pellets from Qian Qian's face

Lucky: If the pellets had been closer to Qian Qian's neck then her injuries could have been life threatening

After the operation, a video was released on Chinese media showing the stages of the surgery and the severity of the damage caused by the pellets.

Doctors used the 3D navigation equipment to locate the pellets in her face, its designed to optimize the surgical experience so doctors can pinpoint the exact location of the pellets.

In the 40-second footage the tiny pellets can be seen ingrained into Qian Qian's head.

Speaking to reporters, Li Zhifu, one of the surgeons who operated on Qian Qian said: What is lucky is that all the pellets gathered on the left side of the face.

'Had the gun aimed a bit higher, perhaps Qian Qian would have lost her eyesight; had the pellets been closer to the neck, then it would have been life threatening.

Though Qian Qians injuries were not life-threatening, she could have been blinded as some of the pellets were in her eye socket and extremely close to her eye.
If you live somewhere with the word Warren or Chase in the address, you could be sitting on a small and growing fortune.

For the locations with these names tend to be the most expensive in the country, new research has revealed, with a property expert claiming they carry an air of exclusivity.

The analysis of the most common street names in Britain, by property website Zoopla, found a home in a road with Warren in its title is typically worth 607,267 - more than double the national average of 282,978.

Bragging rights for those who live at the UK's most common addresses go to those on a Road, its average price of 293,403 compares to 184,722 for a Street, which props up the table as the cheapest address.

Living on a road with a royal title can mean your property is worth more than the national average.

The second most expensive address contained the word Chase worth an average of 482,867, followed by Mount at 390,500.

The words Park, Park End, Green, Way and Land also feature in the country's priciest properties.

Then there are the road names where the cheapest properties are found. These include those with the word Street in their address,followed by homes with the word Court or Terrace, worth 190,851 and 194,403, respectively.

But the findings also suggested that living on a road with a royal name can also mean your property is worth more than the national average.

Addresses that contain the word 'King' have a higher than average house price at 299,572, while the word Queen means an average of 249,295 and Elizabeth an average of 291,381.

The most common residential location and home to 2,125,670 properties is Road, where the average property value is 293,403.

This is followed by Street with 1,036,227 properties and Close with 325,528 properties averaging 268,957.

Zoopla's Lawrence Hall said: 'The saying goes that the three most important factors in buying a house are location, location, location.

'Our research shows that even the road name you choose can make a difference to how much you can expect to pay when finding a property. Where a Warren might appeal for those looking for exclusivity, Streets, Courts and Terraces could offer more affordable options.'

Homes in Kensington Palace Gardens are among the most expensive in Britain - an address with gardens in it puts homeowners 11th in the road name league table

What's in a name? Addresses that contain the word King have a higher than average house price but those that have Street in the name come bottom of the address league
It likely started as a simple stroll through their crops, but the footprints left in the mud by a family of farmers 2,500 years ago are now providing a rare insight into their lives.

Archaeologists discovered the tracks left by what appear to be farmers, children and even their dog as they wandered through the fields on a site in Tucson being developed for a new highway.

The footprints have frozen the Native Americans' daily activities in time, giving a rare record of what these ancient farmers were doing.

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The barefoot prints left by a family of early Native American farmers 2,500 years ago as they walked through their fields have been unearthed on the construction site of a new highway bridge in Tucson, Arizona. The footprints (one pictured) were preserved in the mud after a nearby creek flooded and coated them in sediment

The prints, found near Tucson, Arizona, were left in thick mud which then preserved when a flash flood is believed to have blanketed the area in sediment, which later formed a hard crust.

Archaeologists told MailOnline the prints are providing a unique glimpse into how these Native American farmers lived and grew their crops.

WHO LEFT THE FOOTPRINTS? Archaeologists believe the prints were made by some of the earliest formal farmers in North America. While exactly who this family were is still unknown, they are thought to be the ancestors of the Hohokam culture that later emerged in the region around the Santa Cruz river in Arizona. They are known to be farmers who relied upon irrigation canals to water their crops. The Hohokam typically cultivated cotton, tobacco, maize, beans and squash. They also made distinct red clay pottery. They are thought to have first emerged around 300AD before eventually disappearing around 1450AD. The Sunset Prints show adults, children and pets in the field, together with a network of irrigation channels. Planting holes left by crops have also been preserved in the mineralised mud, which may eventually provide clues as to what kind of crops they were planting there. Advertisement

In particular, the tracks show adult farmers treading heavily across the fields while children scampered around them and a dog followed its owners faithfully.

In another spot, a parent can be seen to have stooped to pick up a child before setting it back down again on the ground.

Alongside the footprints, the hand print of a young child was also discovered just two days ago preserved in the mud.

Yet even though more footprints are being unearthed every day in the excavation by been by SWCA Enviromental Consultants, they are due to be destroyed to make way for a bridge being built from a nearby highway.

Doug Gann, a preservation archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest which has also been involved in the work, has been using advanced 3D scanning to record the prints before they are cleared.

He said working with such an intimate connection to the lives of a group of ancient people had left him with a 'lump in his throat'.

'I've been working in archaeology for 30 years, and I have to admit I'm pretty jaded, but this exposure brought me to tears' he explained to MailOnline.

'I've never seen or experienced a more direct connection to the lives of ancient peoples.

'What is really important here is that this is not just footprints, it is the totality of the context that the footprints are sunk into.

The Sunset footprints, which they have become known, were found during excavations ahead of building work on a new highway alongside Interstate 10 to the north west of Tucson, Arizona (illustrated)

The prints show adults walking across the fields, stopping to do some work in irrigation ditches while children play around them and a dog follows at their heels. Archaeologist Dan Arnit (pictured pointing at the prints) said it is possible to follow the activities of the people who made the prints as they moved around during a day

Archaeologists have used 3D scanning to record the footprints in virtual models so they can be studied in detail. The interactive graphic can be used to explore the site (Credit: Archaeology Southwest/Doug Gann)

'What has been excavated is a preserved surface that makes up a recording of what must have been a wet day on the farm. On this surface, American Indians, walked, lived, and farmed.

'Some 400 square meters (4,300 square feet) have been exposed so far, showing the footprints of men, women, children and dogs going about their daily lives.'

The prints were discovered during excavation work being carried out before the construction of a new highway bridge in the Sunset area to the north west of Tucson.

The site is sandwiched between the Santa Cruz River and Interstate Highway 10.

The footprints (one pictured) were left in mud that was then covered in sediment by a flooding creek, which mineralised and preserved the prints for 2,500 years before they were uncovered during excavations

The site has also revealed evidence of irrigation channels and earthworks used to water the crops. It is thought these people were among the earliest in North America to use such formal methods of farming. The artist's impression shows what the farm may have looked like 2,500 years ago

Casts have also been taken of some of the best footprints (pictured) before they are cleared to make way for a new highway bridge. Archaeologists said they provide a rare glimpse of daily life for these ancient farmers

Archaeologists unearthed the tracks while examining the site for Pima County under the National Historic Preservation Act.

Dan Arnit, an archaeological excavator, was the first to spot them as he moved earth using a digger.

As he and his colleagues removed more of the dusty soil, they were able to follow the barefoot prints as they moved around the field.

They have also found a network of irrigation channels, earthworks and ditches that would have kept the fields watered.

One set of prints appears to walk diagonally across the field, stopping to do some work on a ditch before continuing their stroll in a different direction.

The prints were left by adults (pictured) as they made their way across the field, stopped to work on irrigation ditches and by children who were running around them

One set of prints reveal the footprints of an adult and the smaller prints left by a child (the two smaller, darker holes in the mud pictured centre). It appears the adult picked up the youngster before setting them back down again and walking on to continue their work

Archaeologists working on the site (pictured) told MailOnline they have been moved to tears by the unique and intimate connection the prints provide to a group of people who lived and farmed 2,500 years ago

This interactive graphic reveals some of the different features seen preserved in the mud. Click on each of the numbers to get more information (Credit: Archaeology Southwest/Doug Gann)

Another print has the paw mark of a dog inside it as the animal faithfully followed its master.

Two tiny feet marks also reveal the presence of a child and the archaeologists say they can even see how they interacted with their parents.

One set of prints appears to be of a child that was picked up before then being set back down again in the mud in a different position.

While the Sunset prints, as they are being called, are far from being the oldest to be found in the North America  a set more than 13,000 years old were found on an island off British Columbia last year  they are among the most detailed.

Alongside the footprints, archaeologists also uncovered the tiny handprint of a child that was left there as it played on the ground. An adult work glove is placed next to it for scale. The left handprint sits to the right of the glove and the outline of the thumb and little finger are faintly visible

Archaeologists have painstakingly removed the soil that has built up on top of the prints (Dan Arnit pictured). Alongside the footprints themselves, they found planting holes where crops had been placed shortly before the site flooded and was preserved in sediment

Together with recent discoveries about the planting techniques of American Indians, they are revealing how farming was conducted 2,500 years ago.

Mr Gann said: 'On that wet day on the farm, the footprints show men and women moving from canal gate to canal gate, pushing aside or building thick mud dams to divert a surplus of rain and river water to the thirsty corn plants.

'Completing this all too human scene, kids and dogs must have been all over the fields as well.'

It is thought the prints were made by the ancestors of the Hohokam  a prehistoric culture that lived in this area of Arizona until around 1450AD.

Mr Gann continued: 'The findings are so new that scientific archaeology has yet to really provide them with a distinct name, so we have just been calling them the farmers of the early agricultural period.

It is thought the prints were made by the ancestors of the Hohokam  a prehistoric culture that lived in this area of Arizona until around 1450AD. Digital reconstructions of the site (pictured) are allowing researchers to study the footprints and even create 3D models providing greater details about what the people were doing

The prints are so well preserved it is possible to make out the impressions left by the toes (pictured)

'I think it is likely that this far back in time, these farmers are direct ancestors of a large percentage of modern Native Americans in the US southwest and Mexican northwest.

'I think it is also safe to say these farms along the Santa Cruz river were some of the first formal farms north of the valley of Mexico.'

Although the site is due to be cleared to make way for the bridge construction, Archaeology Southwest has been using 3D modelling techniques to record the surface as it is exposed.

Casts have also been taken of some of the footprints and there are hopes to incorporate some of these in the sidewalks that will line the bridge.

Using the detailed scans, archaeologists have also been able to 3D print some of the outlines to reveal new details not visible in the mud.

Mr Gann said it is possible that there may also be other fields waiting to be discovered around the same area.

'We are only looking at the exposure of two planting plots. There should be at least 100 more.
Clever people are more likely to be healthier than those with a lower IQ due to a genetic link between how our bodies manage diseases and intelligence.

Researchers from Scotland analysed data from around 100,000 people held in the UK Biobank.

They compared each person's mental test data with their genome and found that traits linked to disease and thinking skills shared the same genetic influences.

Researchers from Scotland analysed data from around 100,000 people held in the UK Biobank. They compared each person's mental test data (stock image) with their genome and found that traits linked to disease and thinking skills shared the same genetic influences

In particular, the international team of scientists led by the University of Edinburgh found 'significant negative genetic correlations' between a person's education and verbal-numerical reasoning skills and Alzheimer's disease, coronary artery disease and strokes.

In other words, well-educated people who excel at problem solving are less likely to contract the conditions.

HOW DNA CAN PREDICT HOW LONG YOU'LL LIVE Scientists have identified a biological clock that could help predict a person's lifespan. Researchers studied chemical changes to DNA to establish an individual's biological age which they compared with their actual age. They found that people whose biological age was greater than their true age were more likely to die sooner than those whose biological and actual ages were the same. Four independent studies tracked the lives of almost 5,000 older people for up to 14 years. Each person's biological age was measured from a blood sample at the outset and participants were followed up during the study. Researchers found that the link between having a faster-running biological clock and early death held true even after accounting for other factors such as smoking, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Advertisement

Greater risk of type 2 diabetes was also associated with leaving school or college early, and lower verbal-numerical scores.

Clever people were also less likely to be overweight.

The team found there was a negative genetic correlation between body mass index and verbal-numerical reasoning, while a greater risk of high blood pressure was associated with lower education.

The researchers explained: 'Our results provide comprehensive new findings on the overlaps between cognitive ability levels, genetic bases for health-related characteristics such as height and blood pressure, and physical and psychiatric disorders even in mostly healthy, non-diagnosed individuals.

'They make important steps toward understanding the specific patterns of overlap between biological influences on health and their consequences for key cognitive abilities.

'For example, some of the association between educational attainment - often used as a social background indicator - and health appears to have a genetic [cause].'

However, the team added: 'It has not escaped our notice that there are multiple possible interpretations of these genetic correlations.

In particular, the scientists found 'significant negative genetic correlations' between a person's education and verbal-numerical skills and Alzheimer's disease (CT scans pictured), coronary artery disease and strokes. In other words, well-educated people who excel at problem solving are less likely to contract the conditions

SMART PEOPLE LIVE LONGER The results of the latest Edinburgh-based study build on previous research that found 95% of the link between intelligence and life expectancy is genetic. Using a study on twins, experts from the London School of Economics found brighter twins tend to live longer and noted the pattern was much more pronounced in fraternal - non identical - twins, than identical pairs. By looking at both fraternal twins - who only share half their twin's DNA - with identical twins, researchers were also able to distinguish between genetic effects and environmental factors, including housing, schooling and childhood nutrition. Advertisement

'Not only might particular genes contribute both to cognitive and health-related traits, but genetic variants relating to health conditions could have indirect effects on cognitive ability and vice versa, [on] lifestyle choices.'

As an example, poorly educated people may be less likely to make informed choices about what they eat and how much they drink.

The study is not all good news for intelligent people, though.

The team did find that the genetic variants associated with obtaining a degree were also related to a higher genetic risk of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism.

Edinburgh University Professor Ian Deary, who led the research, said the study could help in understanding some of the links between low levels of cognitive function and poor health.

Psychologist Saskia Hagenaars, who worked on the research, added: 'The study supports an existing theory which says that those with better overall health are likely to have higher levels of intelligence.'

Clever people were also less likely to be overweight (stock image). The study is not all good news for intelligent people, however - the team did find that the genetic variants associated with obtaining a degree were also related to a higher genetic risk of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism

The UK Biobank, launched in 2007, is a major long-term investigation into the respective contributions of genetic predisposition and environmental exposure in the development of disease.

The findings are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The results build on previous research that found 95 per cent of the link between intelligence and life expectancy is genetic.

Using a study on twins, experts from the London School of Economics found brighter twins tend to live longer and noted the pattern was much more pronounced in fraternal - non identical - twins, than identical pairs.
Google is rumoured to be developing a new version of Google Glass dubbed the 'Enterprise Edition' for business users.

But it may not bear the name Glass, since the search giant has closed all social media accounts connected to its Google Glass consumer product.

The move to call time on the gadget's Twitter, Instagram and Google+ accounts comes a year after the Glass public Explorer programme, which let ordinary people trial Glass, closed.

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Google has closed all social media accounts connected to its Google Glass consumers product. The move to call time on the gadget's Twitter, Instagram (pictured) and Google+ accounts comes a year after the Glass public Explorer programme, which let everyday consumers trial Glass, closed

The Twitter and Instagram pages have been wiped clean so there are no longer any pictures or updates, while there is a short message on Google+.

It reads: 'Hi Explorers, we've had a blast hanging out with you on G+ throughout the Explorer Program.

'From now on, if you have any questions about your Glass, you can get in touch with us here.'

The consumer device failed to take off, partly because of privacy concerns and a steep price tag, with wearers of Glass even branded 'Glassholes'.

The Twitter and Instagram pages have been wiped clean so there are no longer any pictures or updates, while there is a short message on Google+ shown above

In December, the FCC leaked what's thought to be images of the Google Glass Enterprise Edition (pictured) which is set to be more robust than the original, and has a folding hinge

The headset was launched in a beta version and Google gave software developers the chance to buy Glass for $1,500 (990).

However, it is rumoured that the firm is working on a similar, yet redesigned, gadget, codenamed 'Project Aura' for business customers.

The Federal Communication Commission revealed its new design in December.

'The device has a more robust build, and has a hinge that allows it to fold and is built to withstand bumps and bruises in the workplace,' said 9to5Google.

The original headset (pictured) was launched in a beta version and gave software developers the chance to buy Glass for $1,500 (990)

The new version can be easily folded for storage.

THE RISE OF THE GLASSHOLE The previous Google Glass headset was launched in a beta version under the firm's Explorer programme. This programme gave software developers the chance to buy Glass for $1,500 (990), and was launched in the US in 2013, and the UK last summer. But, as the Explorers hit the streets, they drew stares and jokes. Some people viewed the device, capable of surreptitious video recording, as an obnoxious privacy intrusion, deriding the once-proud Explorers as 'Glassholes.' 'It looks super nerdy,' said Shevetank Shah, a Washington, DC-based consultant, whose Google Glass now gathers dust in a drawer. 'I'm a card carrying nerd, but this was one card too many.' Advertisement

It continued that the gadget is planned to be solely distributed through the Glass for Work startups selected by Google.

'Glass for Work partners will likely be loading their proprietary software onto device before they're even distributed, and at this point it's not likely that Google will be selling this device to consumers in any capacity.'

However, although the images were shown on the FCC website, Google has yet to formally announce the Enterprise Edition of Glass.

It is believed Google is experimenting with three new versions of its ill-fated Glass wearable computer - one on which dumps the screen.

Instead, the gadget will use a 'bone conduction' speaker to tell users key information, and is likely to be aimed at athletes.

A second version, aimed at corporate customers, may include a screen, according to The Information

A second version, aimed at corporate customers, may include a scree

'We've learned that Google's revamped Google Glass project, dubbed Project Aura, is working on a wearable with a screenand at least one without,' Jessica Lessin, the founder of the site recerntly claimed.

Rumours suggest Google is working on a new, clip-on version of Google Glass (pictured) called The Enterprise Edition, which will be aimed at businesses in the healthcare, manufacturing and energy industries

The Enterprise Edition (shown) is expected to come with an external battery pack that attaches via magnets. Other improvements include increasing the size of the prism that projects images into the user's vision, effectively giving it a bigger display, while at the same time making it thinner and more compact

'People tell us there have been three versions of the head-mounted device in development, although the three may be consolidated into two.'

Previous reports claimed Google has already secretly released a new clip-on version of Google Glass, and hopes to have a version ready to sell to businesses in the autumn.

However, sources claim Glass' new boss Tony Fadell - an ex-Apple employee who invented the Nest smart thermometer - wants to redesign the headset from 'scratch' and won't release it until 'it's perfect'.

Electronic devices need to receive the FCC Declaration of Conformity, or FCC label, before they can be sold and manufactured in the US.

Although similar in design, the new version has a larger prism and is tougher. A version will not be available to buy until the middle of 2016 at the earliest, according to a Wall Street Journal report

The new version of the wearable device will not be mounted on a head set like the original but will be attachable to any set of glasses or goggles.

The search giant has also developed a new battery pack for the device that reportedly boosts the battery life to two hours.

The new version of Google Glass will be aimed at businesses in the healthcare, manufacturing and energy industries.

Other improvements include increasing the size of the prism that projects images into the user's vision, effectively giving it a bigger display, while at the same time making it thinner and more compact.

A version will not be available to buy until the middle of 2016 at the earliest, according to the report.
While some of us appear to be better at keeping track of time than others, new research is revealing our brains may well have specific cells to help keep us on schedule.

Neuroscientists have found the same brain cells that act as our internal GPS also work as a 'mental clock', helping to combine the concept of time and space together.

This may help to explain how humans are generally so good at monitoring time  from predicting how long it will take a car to reach us as we cross a road, to musicians timing a beat perfectly.

Although many of us rely upon watches and clocks around us to keep track of time (stock picture of a woman looking at her watch), researchers have found we also may have our own internal clock - made up of 'time cells' in the hippocampus - that helps us monitor the passing of time in certain situations

A study conducted by researchers at Boston University has shown that a group of cells, known as grid cells, not only track of distance but also, time.

Tests in rats have shown that the cells, which are found in the hippocampus area of the brain, fire not only when an animal is in a specific place, but they also produce a beat that measures the passing of seconds.

WHAT ARE GRID CELLS? Grid cells are a type of neuron found in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus that encode the physical position of an animal in space in the brain. Individual neurons fire when an animal passes through a specific position. The picture above shows the activity of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex of a rat They are thought to interact with place cells to help record an animals location like a sort of internal GPS. Grid cells, however, do not require any visual input and continue to produce patterns associated with their environment even if all the lights are turned off. Advertisement

The researchers said the findings provide clues about how the brain is able to encode memories into both space and time.

Dr Howard Eichenbaum a neuroscientist at Boston University who led the research, told MailOnline: 'Our memories for everyday experiences are organized in time and space, and we think the hippocampus is the organizer of the events that compose a memory.

'So, for example, you might remember that when you got up this morning, you showered, dressed, then made breakfast - a series of events organized in space and time.

'If you imagine a videoclip of this experience, the contents of the events are the pictures within each frame and the ordering of the frames is what the hippocampus does.'

Speaking to Quanta Magazine he added: 'I don't think the hippocampus is a clock, but it's using a clock to map out when things happened in a memory to keep them in order.'

The grid cells are thought to operate separately from the body's circadian rhythm.

This rhythm uses light to synchronise its processes on a roughly 24-hour cycle.

Dr Eichenbaum and his colleagues were able to study the role grid cells play in monitoring time by training rats to run on treadmills.

The animals were placed on the treadmills for a set period of time and then were given a reward.

After the rats ran on the treadmill several times, the researchers found neurons in the rat's brains began firing at regular one second intervals until each session ended.

The researchers said the grid cells appear to be marking out the time interval by firing individually until the entire time on the treadmill had elapsed.

This, they explained, allows the animals to work out how long it has been on the treadmill.

And the researchers added that this neural clock is so accurate, they can also tell how long an animal has been on the treadmill by looking at which cells are active.

The researchers found individual neurons in the brains for rats fired to mark the passing of time (shown on the right) while separate neurons fired to map out distance (shown on the left)

By repeating the experiment with different treadmill speeds, the researchers were able to show that the cells were not simply monitoring distance covered by the animals as they ran.

These 'time cells' behave rather like a stopwatch so the same pattern of neural activity can be seen each time the 'clock' starts.

If the time period on the treadmill was changed, they found new cells fired to fill the interval.

Writing in the journal Cell, Dr Eichenbaum and his colleagues said the time cells also only fired when in specific circumstances that require monitoring of time.

Researchers added that the 'time cells' play a key role in the formation of chronological memories by the hippocampus (shown in the illustration above) and helping us to sort them by time

At other times they are also involved in mapping a creature's location in a physical space.

Writing in the journal Cell, the researchers said: 'Grid cells were more sharply tuned to time and distance than non-grid cells.

'Many grid cells exhibited multiple firing fields during treadmill running, parallel to the periodic firing fields observed in open fields, suggesting a common mode of information processing.

'These observations indicate that, in the absence of external dynamic cues, grid cells integrate self-generated distance and time information to encode a representation of experience.'
In a post-apocalyptic future, what might happen to life if humans left the scene?

After all, humans are very likely to disappear long before the sun expands and exterminates all living things from the Earth.

So if we were given the chance to peer forward in time some 50 million years after our disappearance, what would we find?

Here, writing for The Conversation, Luc Bussiere, lecturer at the University of Sterling explains the odds of other species inheriting the Earth, and why its unlikely to be primates.

Luc Bussiere, a lecturer at the University of Sterling has explained the odds of other species inheriting the Earth, from bacteria to worms and primates (still from the Rise of the Planet of the Apes is pictured) should humans become extinct. He also asks whether humans are the best the planet is going to get

The question has inspired a lot of popular speculation and many writers have offered lists of candidate species.

Before offering any guesses, however, we need to carefully explain what we mean by a dominant species.

One could argue that the current era is an age of flowering plants.

But most people aren't imagining Audrey Two in Little Shop of Horrors when they envision life in the future - even the fictional triffids had characteristically animal features, predatory behaviour and the ability to move.

FIVE GREAT EXTINCTION EVENTS Five times, a vast majority of the world's life has been snuffed out in what have been called mass extinctions. End-Ordovician mass extinction The first of the traditional big five extinction events, around 440 million years ago, was probably the second most severe. Virtually all life was in the sea at the time and around 85% of these species vanished. Late Devonian mass extinction About 375-359 million years ago, major environmental changes caused a drawn-out extinction event that wiped out major fish groups and stopped new coral reefs forming for 100 million years. End-Permian mass extinction (the Great Dying) The largest extinction event and the one that affected the Earth's ecology most profoundly took place 252 million years ago. As much as 97% of species that leave a fossil record disappeared forever. End-Triassic mass extinction Dinosaurs first appeared in the Early Triassic, but large amphibians and mammal-like reptiles were the dominant land animals. The rapid mass extinction that occurred 201 million years ago changed that. End-Cretaceous mass extinction An asteroid slammed down on Earth 65 million years ago, and is often blamed for ending the reign of the dinosaurs. Advertisement

So let's keep the discussion to animals.

By some standards the world is now, and always has been, dominated by bacteria despite the nominal end of the 'age of microbes' some 1.2 billion years ago.

This was not because bacteria ceased to be, or declined in prevalence, but rather because in our myopia we tend to place more importance on the large multi-cellular organisms that came after.

By some accounts, four out of five animals is a nematode - a roundworm - so from all these examples it's clear that neither prevalence, abundance nor diversity is the prime requisite for being a 'dominant' form of life.

Instead our imaginations are captured by large and charismatic organisms.

There's an undeniable degree of narcissism in the human designation of dominant species and a strong tendency to award the title to close relatives.

The Planet of the Apes imagines that our closest primate relatives could develop speech and adopt our technology if we gave them the time and space to do so.

But non-human primate societies are unlikely to inherit our dominance of the earth, because the apes are likely to precede us to extinction.

We are already the only living hominid that's conservation status is not endangered or critically endangered and the kind of global crisis that would extinguish our species is unlikely to spare the fragile remaining populations of the other great apes.

In fact, any extinction event that affects humans will probably be most dangerous to organisms that share our basic physiological requirements.

Even if humans succumb to a global pandemic that affects relatively few other mammals, the great apes are precisely the species that are most at risk of contracting any new diseases that drive us from the Earth.

Will another, more distant, relative develop intelligence and human-like society? That too seems unlikely.

The Planet of the Apes (pictured) imagines that our closest primate relatives could develop speech and adopt our technology if we gave them the time and space to do so. But non-human primate societies are unlikely to inherit our dominance of the earth, because the apes are likely to precede us to extinction

We are already the only living hominid that's conservation status is not endangered or critically endangered. Plus, any extinction event that affects humans will likely be dangerous to primates too. If humans succumb to a pandemic, the great apes are the species most at risk of contracting it, for example (Ebola test is pictured)

Of all the species that were arguably dominant animals at some stage in the history of the Earth, humans are alone in their remarkable intelligence and manual dexterity.

IS THE SUN GOING TO DIE? The sun supplies the energy for almost all of life on Earth, but all good things come to an end. When the sun's time comes and it starts to run out of fuel, its core will collapse as the outward force  due to fusion  can no longer balance the strong inward force of gravity. At the same time, its outer envelope will inflate, expanding the star into a red giant, and engulfing the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and potentially, Earth. Eventually, the dying sun will transform into a dense white dwarf surrounded by a dazzling planetary nebula. Humans won't be around to see this; the sun's fuel supply will start to run low about five billion years from now, but Earth will be inhospitable long before. Advertisement

It follows that such traits are neither requirements for being dominant among animals, nor particularly likely traits to evolve.

Evolution does not favour intelligence for its own sake, but only if it leads to higher survival and reproductive success.

Consequently it's a profound mistake to imagine that our successors are likely to be especially intelligent or social creatures, or that they will be capable of speech, or adept with human technology.

So what can we safely speculate about the dominant species, some 50 million years after humanity?

The answer is both dissatisfying and thrilling all at once.

While we can be reasonably confident that it won't be a talking chimpanzee, we otherwise have no idea what it will look like.

The world has seen a number of mass extinction events in the course of its history.

The diversification of life following each event was relatively rapid - and the 'adaptive radiation' of new species produced new forms including many unlike the ancestral lineages that spawned them after surviving the prior extinction.

Bacteria such as Adenovirus, and worms were also possible options to take over

The world has seen a number of mass extinction events in the course of its history (the mass extinction of the dinosaurs is illustrated). The diversification of life following each event was relatively rapid - and the 'adaptive radiation' of new species produced new forms including many unlike the ancestral lineages that spawned them

The small shrew-like creatures that scurried beneath the feet of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period looked very different to the cave bears, mastodons and whales which descended from them during the age of mammals.

BIGGEST THREATS TO HUMANITY The apocalypse may be a popular subject of sci-fi films, but there are some very real scientific theories in danger of becoming reality. These include being blown to smithereens as an asteroid smashes into Earth and a highly infectious pandemic that wipes out huge swathes of the global population within days. How It Works magazine recently detailed seven of the most devastating scenarios and threats facing mankind. These include a supervolcano erupting, a nuclear winter, an asteroid impact, the so-called runaway greenhouse effect, the death of the sun, a gamma ray burst and a global pandemic. Advertisement

Likewise, the reptiles that survived the late Permian extinction some 250 million years ago, which killed off 90 per cent of marine and 70 per cent of terrestrial species did not clearly foreshadow the pterosaurs and dinosaurs and mammals and birds that descended from them.

In Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the late Stephen J. Gould argued that chance, or contingency, as he called it, played a great role during the major transitions of animal life.

There is room to argue about the relative importance of contingency in the history of life, which remains a controversial subject today.

However Gould's insight that we can hardly foreshadow the success of modern lineages beyond a future extinction is a humbling reminder of the complexity of evolutionary transitions.
Globular clusters consisting of millions of closely-packed stars make 'baby' stars by 'adopting' spare gas and dust as they travel the cosmos.

This is the surprising explanation for recent observations showing old clusters contain surprisingly young stars.

It may explain why 'sibling' stars appear at intervals of hundreds of millions of years.

Globular clusters consisting of millions of closely-packed stars make 'baby' stars by 'adopting' spare gas and dust as they travel the cosmos, according to a new study. This image shows the globular cluster NGC 1783

It used to be thought that globular clusters  dense spherical clouds of stars that orbit the outskirts of galaxies  formed all their stars at about the same time.

But this view was scuppered when Hubble Space Telescope images revealed multiple generations of stars within clusters, meaning that a mechanism for new star formation had to be found.

It was thought the clusters could make new stars by recycling material from internal nova and supernova explosions, or by retaining enough gas and dust from their formation to crank out multiple generations.

Now astronomers at Peking University, Northwestern University, Adler Planetarium, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences claim they have a better explanation.

It used to be thought that globular clusters  dense spherical clouds of stars that orbit the outskirts of galaxies  formed all their stars at about the same time. But this view was scuppered when Hubble Space Telescope (pictured) images revealed multiple generations of stars within clusters

WHAT ARE GLOBULAR CLUSTERS? Among the most striking objects in the universe, globular clusters are glittering, dense clouds of stars which orbit the outskirts of galaxies. They are tightly bound together by their own gravity, giving them a spherical shape, and may contain hundreds of thousands of stars. Earlier this month, scientists suggested that globular clusters might be the best place to search for intelligent life. The close proximity of stars to one another could give rise to advanced civilisations that can travel between their home worlds, they speculated. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts at least 150 globular clusters. Most of them are quite old, so the KIAA-led research team turned their attention to young and intermediate-aged clusters found in two nearby dwarf galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds. They used Hubble Space Telescope images of the globular clusters NGC 1783 and NGC 1696 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, along with NGC 411 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Advertisement

They found that young stars within globular clusters have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside the clusters themselves.

Turning to Hubble images of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - small galaxies close to our Milky Way  they looked at three globular clusters called NGC 1783, NGC 1696, and NGC 411.

The ages of individual stars were determined by looking at their colour and brightness.

NGC 1783, for example, consists mostly of stars 1.4 billion years old, but within the cluster are two further populations.

This formed 890 million and 450 million years ago respectively.

'Our explanation that secondary stellar populations originate from gas accreted from the clusters' environments is the strongest idea put forward to date,' explained Richard de Grijs, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (Kiaa) at Peking University.

'Globular clusters have turned out to be much more complex than we once thought.'

Some globular clusters might even retain enough gas and dust to crank out multiple generations of stars, but this seems unlikely, according to study co-author Aaron M Geller of Northwestern University and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

'Once the most massive stars form, they are like ticking time bombs, with only about 10 million years until they explode in powerful supernovae and clear out any remaining gas and dust,' he said.

Now experts have found that young stars within globular clusters have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside of the clusters themselves. They studied three clusters - NGC 1783, NGC 1696, and NGC 411 (pictured) in the Milky Way to come to their conclusion

'Afterwards, the lower-mass stars, which live longer and die in less violent ways, may allow the cluster to build up gas and dust once again.'

Chengyuan Li, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, added: 'Our study suggests the gaseous fuel for these new stellar populations has an origin that is external to the cluster, rather than internal.'
This could provoke political or armed conflict between space-faring nations

satellites could be seen as an attack

The space surrounding our planet is getting increasingly crowded as more and more satellites, spent spacecraft and debris orbit the Earth.

But this steady rise in potentially dangerous 'space junk' could spark the start of a conflict that may lead to a new world war, a team of space scientists has warned.

It claims that a collision between an operational satellite and the fragments of old space hardware hurtling around the planet could easily be mistaken as an intentional attack by another nation.

Scroll down for interactive graphic showing space debris

There are an estimated 500,000 pieces of space junk being tracked in orbit around the Earth (illustrated) with most concentrated around the Low Earth Orbits used by military satellites. Scientists warn this could lead to collisions with operational satellites where the cause can't be determined, potentially sparking conflicts

There are 500,000 pieces of 'space junk' currently being tracked as they orbit the planet at speeds of up to 17,500mph (28,160km/h) - and millions more that are too small to be accurately traced.

Even a tiny paint fleck traveling at these speeds can cause damage to a spacecraft.

THE WEIRD WORLD OF SPACE JUNK Since the first object, Sputnik One, was launched into space 53 years ago, mankind has launched thousands of spacecraft, satellites and rockets into space. This has created a swarm of tens of millions of pieces of debris. The rubbish circling the planet comes from old rockets, abandoned satellites and missile shrapnel. But it also includes a missing spatula, a lost glove and a stray toothbrush. Bags of rubbish ejected into space by cosmonauts on board the Mir Space Station also still pose a risk. Among the more unusual items to be added to the list of space junk was a spatula dropped by astronaught Piers Sellers while conducting repairs on the space shuttle discovery in 2006. A tool bag was lost by astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn in 2008 and it added to the hazards in orbit until it burned up in 2009. A glove lost by astronaut Ed White on the first US space-walk and a pair of pliers were lost during a space walk in 2007. Advertisement

Professor Vitaly Adushkin, an expert in geosphere dynamics at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow, and his colleagues at the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, said space debris now posed a 'special political danger'.

They warned that an impact with another spacecraft  especially one used for military purposes  could provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations.

Despite extensive efforts to track space debris, it would be almost impossible to identify the real cause of a collision if it occurred with an unregistered piece of 'junk'.

As many military satellites also occupy low earth orbits, this puts them in a region that is at highest risk of such collisions due to the density of debris there.

The experts said: 'In the last decades, there have repeatedly observed sudden failures of some spacecraft for defense purposes the causes of which have not been found either by observations or by telemetry.

'So, there are two possible explanations - first, unregistered collision with space debris, or second "machinations" of the space adversary.

'And this is a politically dangerous dilemma.

'Special political danger posed by such a grouping in near-Earth space is that the impact of its element on some spacecraft - especially for military purposes - may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations.'

Nasa said it is currently tracking 500,000 pieces of debris that are larger than a marble and 20,000 that are larger than a softball.

The European Space Agency estimates there are at least 700,000 dangerous pieces of debris in orbit around the Earth.

Click on the coloured dots above to learn about a piece of debris. Scroll in and out to get a closer look and drag your mouse to change the angle. Click on the help button to get more instructions (Credit: Stuff in Space)

A speck of debris left this pit (pictured) in the window of the Challenge Space Shuttle while in orbit in 1983. Travelling at more than 17,500 mph, even tiny fragments of debris can cause considerable damage

The Russian Space Surveillance Systems is tracking more than 23,000 objects more than four inches wide.

TRACKING SPACE JUNK IN ORBIT Nasa said it is currently tracking 500,000 pieces of debris that are larger than a marble and 20,000 that are larger than a softball. The European Space Agency estimates there are at least 700,000 dangerous pieces of debris in orbit around the Earth. The Russian Space Surveillance Systems is tracking more than 23,000 objects more than four inches wide. It estimates there are 100,000 pieces half that size, 600,000 between a third of an inch and four inches across and hundreds of millions less than a third of an inch in size. Many are pieces of old rocket and satellites while there are also objects including a spanner, dumped rubbish from Russia's Mir space station. Advertisement

It estimates there are 100,000 pieces half that size, 600,000 between a third of an inch and four inches across and hundreds of millions less than a third of an inch in size.

Many are pieces of old rocket and satellites while there are also objects including a spanner, dumped rubbish from Russia's Mir space station.

The space debris crisis has been made worse by past collisions and explosions that have increased the amount of material needing to be tracked.

In 1996 a French satellite was damaged by debris from a French rocket that had exploded a decade earlier while in orbit around the planet.

The Chinese used a missile in 2007 to destroy an old weather satellite in an anti-satellite test, creasing 3,000 pieces of debris.

A defunct Russian satellite collided and destroyed a functioning US commercial satellite in 2009, producing 2,000 pieces of debris in the process.

Professor Aduskin and his colleagues, whose study is published in the journal Acta Astronautica, said the International Space Station has had to take evasive action five times in 2014 to avoid space debris.

Nasa said it is currently tracking 500,000 pieces of debris that are larger than a marble and 20,000 that are larger than a softball. An illustration of the debris in orbit is shown

The other authors of the study include Stanislave Veniaminov, from the Scientific Research Centre Kosmos at the Russian Ministry of Defence in Moscow.

They suggest launching moving shielding structures that could be erected around spacecraft in low Earth orbits to help protect them from debris.

But while some steps can be taken to mitigate damage to satellites, it is almost inevitable there will be collisions in the future.

The researchers said: 'The owner of the impacted and destroyed satellite can hardly quickly determine the real cause of the accident.
A stuffed duck with unusual pink feathers around its head has been used to solve a puzzle about how the extinct species of bird got its vivid plumage.

The pink-headed duck is thought to have died out 67 years ago, leaving scientists baffled about how it developed the distinctive colouration that earned the bird its name.

While some birds such as flamingos are known to be pink due to the large quantities of red and blue-green algae they consume, how the pink-headed duck got its colour was a mystery.

Scientists used the 68-year-old stuff remains of a pink-headed duck (pictured top) to work out what is responsible for the animal's vivid plumage around its head (close up bottom left). Scientists found natural pigments called carotenoids (illustrated in the graph bottom right) were responsible for the distinct pink colour

Now scientists have used a stuffed specimen that has been held by the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, for 68 years to solve the puzzle.

They used an advanced non-destructive testing method known as Raman spectroscopy to examine the bird's feathers.

They found the ducks, which were endemic to the Gangetic plains of India and Bangladesh, used the same organic pigments - carotenoids - as flamingos to produce their pink plumage.

The only other duck to be found to have these carotenoids is in the feathers of the tiny 'ear' spots of Australia's Pink-eared Duck  an animal which is otherwise entirely black, brown, and white.

The pink headed duck (artists impression pictured) was last seen in the wild in India in 1949 and is thought to have died out. They were once widespread across India, Bangladesh and Myanmar

The study suggests the plumage of the two ducks may even contain a highly specific type of carotenoid, although its origin remains a mystery.

Dr Daniel Thomas, a zoologist at Massey University in New Zealand who led the study, said: ''The pink-headed duck has not been alive for many decades and this specimen was a physical and sombre reminder of extinction.

FLAMINGOS USE MAKE-UP Flamingos use make-up to enhance their natural good looks, research has shown. A three-year study of the iconic birds revealed that the preening oil they use to waterproof their feathers doubles up as a cosmetic. Rubbed onto the neck, breast and back, the pigments in the waxy substance brighten the signature pink hue of their plumage. With the substance applied most frequently and most vigorously just ahead of the breeding season, it seems that flamingos, like people use make-up to attract a mate. And, just like in the human world, the female of the species uses make-up more often. Advertisement

'I was grateful that the skin had been preserved in the collections at the Smithsonian Institution.'

There are many other birds that are famously pink including cardinal birds and some gulls, but the pink-headed duck is the only game bird to display a large area of pink feathers.

The bird was once widespread across India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, but the last living bird from the species was seen alive in the wild in India in 1949.

Due to the rarity of the specimen, Dr Thomas and Helen James of the Smithsonian Museum turned to Raman spectroscopy to analyse the precious feathers.

This non-destructive method meant the preserved duck in the museum did not even need to be plucked.

To solve the mystery of how the duck got a pink head, researchers would usually seek out the pigments by analysing the chemistry of feathers by a 'wet chemistry' process.

This approach was ruled out because it would have involved destruction of irreplaceable museum specimens.

Flamingos (pictured) are a species of bird that famously have pink plumage, which is caused by pigments from the algae they eat, which are rich in these natural organic pigments

Reporting their findings in the journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances, the scientists say their work highlights the cost of extinction and the value of museum collections.

The study shows the potential of Raman spectroscopy to investigate bird colouration, said Dr Mary Caswell Stoddard, an expert on bird colouration from Harvard University.
Pepper, the Japanese humanoid robot's resume already includes helping out in financial institutions, car companies, food and beverage firms - and now it can add cell phone retail.

Softbank announced its plans to open a pop-up mobile phone shop that is entirely staffed with the four foot-tall robots.

Since these humanoids have the ability to read emotions and formulate accurate responses, the firm believes it will prove to be a successful selling machine.

Scroll down for video

Softbank announced its plans to open a pop-up mobile phone shop that is entirely staffed with the four foot-tall robots. Since these humanoid have the ability to read emotions and formulate an accurate response, the firm believes it will prove to be a successful selling machine

'I don't know how this will turn out, but it should be a quite interesting experiment,' said SoftBank director Ken Miyauchi during a two-day exhibition called Pepper World.

The store opens March 28 until April 3, with hours between midday and 7 pm in the Tokyo's Omotesando shopping district, reports Japanese Times.

The robots will be zipping around the store answering questions, providing customers with directions and most importantly, selling phones.

There is no news on the brand of phone Pepper will be working with.

WHAT CAN PEPPER DO? Pepper can recognize faceS, speak, hear and move around autonomously. Users can personalize robots by downloading software applications that teaches Pepper to dance, play, learn or even chat in another language. Pepper has been designed to identify users emotions and to select the behavior best suited to the situation. Based on a users voice, the expression on their face, body movements and the words used, Pepper will interpret their emotion and offer appropriate content. He will also respond personally to the mood of the moment, expressing himself through the colour of his eyes, his tablet or his tone of voice. Advertisement

Since Pepper has the ability to decipher facial expressions, observe body language and understand tone of voice, Softbank believes they will provide excellent customer service.

Softbank said it will staff the shop with five to six robots and there will also be humans to intervene, since Pepper isn't programmed to check people's IDs for the phone contracts.

There is no news on the brand of phone Pepper will be working with. And since Pepper has the ability to decipher facial expressions, observe body language and understand tone of voice, Softbank believes they will provide excellent customer service

The commercial version of Pepper launched last fall and is used by 500 companies in Japan, including Nestle and Mizuho Bank.

Softbank will also be launching 'RobotApp Market for Biz' next month that will allow clients to download apps straight to their Peppers and about 200 firms will work on developing the software.

The firm will open four retail locations in a few weeks to allow business customers to meet the cyborgs.

IS YOUR JOB THREATENED BY ROBOTS? Claims made by an expert in artificial intelligence predict that in less than five years, office jobs will disappear completely to the point where machines will replace humans. The idea that robots will one day be able to do all low-skilled jobs is not new, but Andrew Anderson from UK artificial intelligence company, Celaton, said the pace of advance is much faster than originally thought. AI, for example, can carry out labour intensive clerical tasks quickly and automatically, while the latest models are also capable of making decisions traditionally made by humans. 'The fact that a machine can not only carry out these tasks, but constantly learn how to do it better and faster, means clerical workers are no longer needed in the vast quantities they once were,' Mr Anderson said. For example, a machine can recognize duplicate insurance claims by knowing it has seen a phone number or an address before. Advertisement

'I think this year will be the beginning of the smartrobot era for corporate (customers),' Miyauchi said, referring to devices that are connected to the Internet and can use cloud-based artificial intelligence at the conference.

Pepper will also hit the US sometime this year, but no price has been listed yet.

It sells for around $2,000 in Japan and requires monthly subscription fees for updates and maintenance.

Softbank said it will staff the shop with five to six robots and there will also be humans to intervene, since Pepper isn't programmed to check people's IDs for the phone contracts. The commercial version of Pepper launched last fall and is used by 500 companies in Japan, including Nestle and Mizuho Bank

There is no denying Pepper has brought an enormous amount of publicity to SoftBank, but according to the numbers that's all the device is bringing in.

Fumihide Tomizawa, who heads SoftBank's robot arm, SoftBank Robotics, said the Pepper business will not turn a profit this year or next.
A radical new type of 'neurochip' that works like the human brain has been revealed by Russian scientists.

They have created a neural network using the technology, and say it could lead to radical new types of computer.

It could dramatically improve machine vision, hearing, and other sensory organs, and even give robots a mind of their own.

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A team led by Russian researchers has created a neural network using the 'neurochip' technology, and say it could lead to radical new types of computer.

WHAT IS A MEMRISTOR? A memristor is an electric element similar to a conventional resistor. The difference between a memristor and a traditional element is that the electric resistance in a memristor is dependent on the charge passing through it, therefore it constantly changes its properties under the influence of an external signal: a memristor has a memory and at the same time is also able to change data encoded by its resistance state. Advertisement

Scientists from the Kurchatov Institute, MIPT, the University of Parma (Italy), Moscow State University, and Saint Petersburg State University worked together on the breakthrough.

They created a neural network based on polymeric memristors - devices that can potentially be used to build fundamentally new computers.

'The results provide a great promise toward new approaches for very compact, low-volatile and high-performance neurochips that could be made for a huge number of intellectual products and applications,' the researcher wrote in the journal Organic Electronics.

A memristor is an electric element similar to a conventional resistor.

The difference between a memristor and a traditional element is that the electric resistance in a memristor is dependent on the charge passing through it, therefore it constantly changes its properties under the influence of an external signal: a memristor has a memory and at the same time is also able to change data encoded by its resistance state.

'In this sense, a memristor is similar to a synapse - a connection between two neurons in the brain that is able, with a high level of plasticity, to modify the efficiency of signal transmission between neurons under the influence of the transmission itself,' the researchers say.

A memristor enables scientists to build a 'true' neural network, and the physical properties of memristors mean that at the very minimum they can be made as small as conventional chips.

The work could dramatically improve machine vision, hearing, and other sensory organs, and even give robots a mind of their own.

Some estimates indicate that the size of a memristor can be reduced up to ten nanometers, and the technologies used in the manufacture of the experimental prototypes could, in theory, be scaled up to the level of mass production.

'However, as this is 'in theory', it does not mean that chips of a fundamentally new structure with neural networks will be available on the market any time soon, even in the next five years,' the teams say.

The task was so difficult that up until the publication of their paper in the journal Organic Electronics, there were no reports of any successful experiments using organic materials.
A German tourist created a scare on board a Jet Airways flight in India when he opened an emergency exit door shortly after the plane landed.

The man, identified by local media as Steve Titschler, told flight attendants he opened the door just for fun, authorities claimed.

Cabin crew werent amused and the man could now face criminal charges after he was handed over to police at Mumbais international airport.

The plane was parked when the passengers allegedly opened the door (pictured: a Jet Airways Boeing 777)

The incident occurred on Sunday after a two-and-a-half hour flight from Abu Dhabi to Mumbais Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Mid-Day reported.

The Boeing 737-800 was parked when the door was opened.

Titschler was taken to a police station and was barred from boarding a connecting Jet Airways flight to Delhi.

The passenger was escorted off the plane and barred from boarding a connecting flight later in the day (file)

A Jet Airways spokesperson said: 'A guest, who travelled from Abu Dhabi to Mumbai by Jet Airways flight 9W 585, opened the emergency exit after the aircraft had parked at the bay at the Mumbai airport.

'The matter was reported to the security agencies.'

In a separate incident the same day, a Jet Airways passenger was accused of smoking a cigarette in the lavatory on a flight from Singapore to Mumbai.

The man, identified as Ravi Dhankar, was allegedly intoxicated and was taken into custody when the plane landed in Mumbai.
Passing through airport security is regarded as one of the dullest experiences at the airport.

But every now and then travellers witness something mind-blowing when theyre queuing to have their hand luggage scanned by an X-ray machine.

From fur-lined handcuffs to a tourists trusty toilet seat, passengers and airport workers have revealed some of the most bizarre items they have spotted at security checkpoints.

One traveller said he saw a woman 'looking absolutely mortified' after pink fur-lined handcuffs were found

Traveller Richard Garand said that he was emptying his pockets when a man in front of him opened a large case and did something that shocked other travellers.

Garand wrote on Quora: He opened it up, took out a sword that looked very real, and proceeded to put it all the way down his throat.

After he took it out everyone around applauded and asked for an encore. So he did it again.

The security agents seemed to be satisfied with this  I believe the sword was plastic  and he went through.

Occasionally, passengers suffer an embarrassing moment when security officers find an intimate item that isnt allowed on board.

Passenger Jim Ryan said he once saw a twenty-something woman looking absolutely mortified when a security officer removed a pair of pink fur-lined handcuffs from her carry-on luggage.

Marcia DiMiceli said she was waiting in a queue at the airport in Cancun when she spotted the strangest thing.

She said: I happened to notice a woman open her suitcase and try to rearrange something. Seems she never goes anywhere without her own toilet seat.

At LAX, one passenger was held up by a man whose 'bulging bags' contained dozens of live turtles (file photo)

Sandra Barron said she was flying back from Japan when she was pulled aside at Los Angeles International Airport to go through enhanced agricultural screening.

She said: Our bags were checked quickly, but we were held up because the man ahead of us was denying that he had any idea that the contents of his bulging bags would be a problem  dozens and dozens of live turtles.

Holidaymaker Mira Zaslove was travelling through Puerto Rico when she spotted a stray puppy at the tiny airport on the island of Vieques.

The dog was regularly fed by tourists and even wore a hat and clothes, she said.

One tourist was so charmed she decided to take it with her on a domestic flight.

Zaslove wrote: She took a liking to the puppy and actually put him in her purse and began walking to her flight. The security folks reluctantly let her.

Sean Steele claimed he once saw a passenger take a live pig through security at Honolulus airport.

He added: The man in front of me at security had a pig on a leash with him  He attempted to put it through the baggage scanner but an officer stopped him saying that would harm the pig.

He claimed the man was eventually allowed to take the live pig onto the flight.

Airport workers who are tasked with finding dangerous objects have seen and heard almost everything, but some discoveries can shock them.

Colm Flaherty, who has scanned passengers luggage for seven years, said he once spotted a suspicious object that he initially feared was a human body.

It showed up on the screen as a leg with a bent knee and the bag was so heavy he was unable to lift it.

After using a hoist to remove the bag from a conveyor belt staff searched it and discovered a massive stone Buddha statue.

Flaherty wrote: The passenger was a devout Buddhist and part of his thing was hauling this massive stone Buddha wherever he went to set up his meditation routine.

Passengers also told tales of travellers getting caught with souvenirs they had taken from landmarks.

Mark Levinson said a man who was in front of him in the queue was caught with a large green tile in his suitcase.
If he had made the journey by train it would have cost

He has always been willing to go the extra mile to save money - but this time he went 1,017.

Jordon Cox, 18, was so incensed by the cost of a train ticket from Sheffield to his home in Shenfield, Essex, that he decided to see if flying was cheaper.

After ransacking the internet for a deal, he flew from East Midlands Airport to Stansted via Berlin and still saved cash, despite spending his seven hour layover on a whistlestop tour of the German capital feasting on currywurst.

This extreme option may not be for everyone. Jordon's journey took 13 hours door-to-door, while a train trip would have been just three-and-a-half.

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Jordon Cox in Berlin by the Brandenburg Gate on his trip home to Essex via Germany

This is the unusual route, and over 1,000 miles further than he had to travel, that Jordon Cox took to get home to Shenfield from Sheffield

Jordon, who blogs on how to save money, was dubbed The Coupon Kid by friends when he started saving money by using vouchers. He once got 600 of groceries for 4p.

On the day of his Berlin jaunt, he had travelled from Shenfield to Sheffield by train to teach a class on couponing.

The teenager had managed to book a cheap 19 ticket for the journey north. But when he discovered the cheapest fare home was 47, he looked for alternatives.

An open return from Shenfield to Sheffield would have set him back 97.70.

He discovered he could fly home via Milan, Copenhagen, Dublin or Berlin with Ryanair and it would be cheaper than a single train journey in England.

'Even by my usual standards, I'll admit this is a rather extreme way of saving money,' he said.

'In the end I chose to travel via Berlin as it was the cheapest and the furthest away so I would get my money's worth.

Clearly excited, Jordon gets set to board his plane out of East Midlands Airport on his 'journey home'

This shows how much the rail journey would have cost the 18-year-old, and how much he actually spent going by air via Berlin

'It is also a city on my bucket list that I have never been to before, so to have a short holiday there for less than the price of my train fare was brilliant.

'I know that flying is not environmentally friendly and I won't do this every time I travel, but this was the cheapest way for me to get home and I got to enjoy a 'free' mini holiday to a city I've always wanted to visit.'

Jordon, who blogs for MoneySavingExpert.com, booked his flight around three weeks in advance, flew from East Midlands Airport to Berlin.

He spent 4 on a train from Sheffield to Derby, 4.20 on a bus from Derby to East Midlands Airport, 11.83 on a Ryanair flight to Berlin, 9.54 on a flight from Berlin to Stansted and 8 on his bus ride home, totalling 37.57. A train from Sheffield to Shenfield was 47.

The teenager had decided not to book a return ticket to Sheffield as that cost 97.70.

Jordon's extraordinary talent as a bargain hunter first hit the headlines in 2013 when it emerged he had bought his mother Debbie more than 100 of groceries for almost 100 off. On one occasion he got a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings for 10p.

Jordon worked out he would save over 7.72 getting back to Essex from Sheffield by flying via Germany

He was able to take in the tourism highlights while visiting the German city on his bargain journey

The teenager has since been turning his money-saving prowess into a job. He began by holding seminars at his local theatre in Brentwood, Essex, to give adults tips on how to save hundreds of pounds on day-to-day purchases.

He also set up Facebook and Twitter pages where he shared his top coupons and deals.

And though his single-minded pursuit of a bargain may seem a little unusual, Jordon originally did it to help his mum.

She was struggling to make ends meet after a divorce. Though Jordon's father helped with the mortgage, bills had become problematic.

At the time, Debbie said: 'When my husband and I split up it I was panicking. I didnt know how Id cope financially. When Jordon mentioned couponing I was a bit sceptical.

But hes made some incredible savings and its really improved our lives. We had been spending around 120 a week before my husband left and now were down to just 10.

After seven hours touring Berlin, Jordon got set to return home to Essex, after setting out from Sheffield
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A young male polar bear guarding his kill, a puffin in flight and a reindeer herder with frost on his eyebrows.

These are some of the stunning images submitted to the 2016 National Geographic Traveller UK Photography and Video contest with many capturing breathtaking scenes of nature at its most resplendent.

One photographer, Geoffrey David Whittle, caught a mesmerising image of two wild horses fighting in the Namib Desert - where only the fittest survive - and another, Megan Lee, captured the moment two zebras linger before a turbulent horizon at a nature reserve in south east England.

Hundreds of entries have been sent to National Geographic from photographers across the UK and Ireland, and now the finalists have been selected with landscapes, sunsets and some of the world's most ferocious wildlife submitted into the mobile, portfolio, photography and video categories.

This year's competition aims to find the talented shutterbugs and winners will be sent on a photographic commission to destinations including Tanzania, Vietnam, Abu Dhabi, Italy and Iceland.

The winning photo will be announced on February 13. Pat Riddell, Editor for National Geographic Traveller, said: 'We've been incredibly impressed with the response and high standard of submissions to our annual Photography Competition. With more prizes and opportunities for a commission available this year, the competition quality was extremely high.'

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Simon Morris took this stunning photograph in Yamal Siberia in the winter of a reindeer herder

Stankey Dellimore captured this shot from the Olympic Tower in Munich, Germany, after becoming fascinated by the shapes of Olympia Hall and its scale relative to humans

Megan Lee captured the moment two zebras watched the turbulent horizon together while she was visiting a nature reserve in south east England

A fisherman demonstrates his technique whilst balancing on one leg in Burma in front of keen photographer Jeremy Flint

A puffin with an eel catch in her mouth was captured on film by a photographer on Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire

In this dramatic scene a young male polar bear guards his kill, a bearded seal in Svalbard

Cindy Lou-Dale took this colourful snap from the balcony of the Nelson Mandela suite at the Soweto Hotel where she was staying

Geoffrey David Whittle, caught a mesmerising image of two wild horses fighting in the Namib Desert during a trip to southern Africa

Emma Muir snapped this picture when she visited the dance show 'Bagore Ki Haveli' while travelling around Udaipur, Rajasthan in India

Ellis Anastasiades snapped this image as he punched his way through the water while diving head first into a swimming pool in Greece

Gail Henshaw was selected as a finalist for her photograph taken in the sacred city of Anuradhapura, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, at sunrise

Sue O'Connell captured the moment an exhausted worker had a nap amid the mayhem and madness at Yangon fish market

Harry Villiers submitted this shot taken on his iPhone during a bike ride through Thetford Forest in Norfolk

During one of Peter Brisley's several visits to Myanmar, he witnessed the weekly ritual of head shaving that takes place

Matt Parry shot this image of Paris's Eiffel Tower on his fourth and final day there, where he experienced nothing but persistent rain

Margaret Soraya entered this image of the mist surrounding Borlum Bay at Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands

Wandering around Havana and Trinidad in Cuba, Alan O'Riordan approached people that caught his eye, including these two women
Holliday Grainger looked incredible as she attended the premiere of his latest movie The Finest Hours in Hollywood on Monday.

The British beauty was joined by her handsome co-star Chris Pine at special screening, held at the TCL Chinese Theater.

The 27-year-old showcased her cleavage in the black floor-length dress, which had a V-slash to the naval and left little to the imagination.

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Style star: Holliday Grainger showcased her slender frame in sexy black gown as she joined co-star Chris Pine at The Finest Hours premiere on Monday

Heroic adventure: Chris was every inch the dapper gent in his smart grey two-piece suit

Her shapely pins were also on display as the daring gown also featured a thigh-high split.

The beauty, who is from Manchester, added some platform sandals which featured a quirkily designed heel.

Keeping her honey bob hair-style straight, she vamped it up in bright red lipstick.

Daring: Holliday, 27, flashed the flesh in a plunging gown at the TCL Chinese Theater

Flashing the flesh: She showcased her cleavage in the black floor-length dress, which had a V-slash to the naval and left little to the imagination

A beauty: Keeping her honey bob hair-style straight, she vamped it up in bright red lipstick

On the move: Her shapely pins were also on display as the daring gown also featured a thigh-high split

Chris looked handsome as ever in a stylish grey suit which fitted his toned torso to perfection.

He kept in simple with a white open-necked shirt, as he wore his hair in a side parting and fixed his azure-hued eyes on the waiting photographers.

The Star Trek actor is playing Bernard C Webber in the historical Disney drama, who took part in the famous rescue mission after two oil tankers split in half in a fierce storm off Cape Cod.

Action: The good-looking pair star in the true-life story of a perilous sea-rescue

High spirits: The co-stars happily chatted away away with reporters before the screening

Smart: Chris looked handsome as ever in a stylish grey suit which fitted his toned torso to perfection

Stunning: Actresses Rachel Brosnahan (L) and Holliday both walked the red carpet of the Disney drama

Sheer-delight: Rachel, 25, looked sensational in a revealing green lace number and strappy black heels

He's joined on screen by Eric Bana, who arrived in impeccable sartorial style, wearing a deep-blue two-piece suit.

There was no shortage of glamour on the red-carpet, as actress Charlotte Ross, 48, showed off her toned figure in a tight fitting galaxy-style dark green dress.

Star turn: Eric Bana, Holliday, Chris and Casey Affleck and the cast of Disney's The Finest Hours were greeted by the U.S. Coast Guard Band and Honor Guard

Doing their thing: Casey and Holliday posed up a storm together at the event

Timeless beauty: Soap opera actress Charlotte Ross, 48, showed off her toned figure in a tight fitting galaxy-style dark green dress

Sharp: Hulk star Eric arrived in impeccable sartorial style, wearing a deep-blue two-piece suit

Glamour: Lucy Knapp put on a leggy display in a thigh-skimming cream dress, and black platform heels - alongside her husband Beau - who plays the best friend of Pine's character

Lucy Knapp put on a leggy display in a thigh-skimming cream dress, and black platform heels - alongside her husband Beau - who plays the best friend of Pine's character.

Zella Day revealed her back in a colourful striped floor-length gown which featured a halter-neck.

The movie is due to open to audiences on January 29.

More VIPS: Tammy Townsend also made a stylish appearance at the screening

Hippy chic: Zella Day revealed her back in a colourful striped floor-length gown which featured a halter-neck

Bold move: Veronica Dunne turned heads in a grey two-piece and a pink satin jacket

Meanwhile, Chris has also been hard at work on the set of the new Wonder Women movie in London.

He was spotted while filming, looking dapper in a navy fedora, beige mac and grey suit.

The actor is taking on the role of Steve Trevor, a USAF pilot and Wonder Woman's love interest, and appeared to be aiding his co-star Gal Gadot with the handling of her weapon, for the film due for release on June 23, 2017.
Screams of joy, cries and lots of 'oh my God' were what could be heard coming from Sydney alternative rock band The Rubens after their song Hoops took out first place in Triple J's Hottest 100 on Tuesday.

The five-piece rock band, hailing from Menangle in Sydney's south-west, could be seen leaping to their feet in a short video taken by the radio station during the momentous announcement.

Hoops only reached number 25 on the ARIA Singles Chart in 2015, so it came as a huge surprise for brothers Sam Margin, Elliott Margin, Zaac Margin, as well as Scott Baldwin and William Zeglis who make up the band.

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Tears of joy! Sydney band, The Rubens, scream with joy after they were announced the winners of Triple J's Hottest 100

Speaking on air afterwards, they said they were 'blown away' by the result.

The group also took to Instagram to share a picture of themselves celebrating the music feat.

'We honestly don't believe it. Thankyou everyone who voted!! Goodness gracious you make us feel special #triplejhottest100 @triple_j,' the band wrote next to a picture of themselves holding up wine glasses to the camera.

Hugs all round: The five piece group embraced each other after they topped the annual poll, played on Australia Day

Number one! While the group celebrated their new music feat, Triple J fans took to the radio station's Facebook page to write their disdain for their poll topping spot

Fans of the group took to the radio station's Facebook page to congratulate their poll topping position.

One fan said: 'These guys, bloody deserved, they toured pubs around Australia: didnt matter how small, how shit, the way musos used to do it. Build a grass roots following and smash a national survey of everyone with a brain under 40, take note bands [sic].'

Another added: 'Jesus! How hot are the Rubens boys! I voted for their song, thought it would be top 10, but awesome it came in number 1.'

While others weren't so pleased the rock group stole the top spot away from fan favourite Kendrick Lamar and his song King Kunta.

Vote for Hoops and we'll party like it's 2011 and our first ever Hottest 100': The band took to Instagram to encourage fans to vote for them in the annual radio poll

Hoops, only reached number 25 on the ARIA Singles Chart in 2015, so it came as a huge for brothers Sam Margin, Elliott Margin, Zaac Margin, as well as Scott Baldwin and William Zeglis who make up the band

One wrote: 'How do you have this as number 1, wen they didn't even have a single other song from their album in the top 100?! #riggedbykingsmill [sic].'

Another added:

'Remove the rubens and shuffle everyone down the list...Thats how it should of been. Kendrick, major lazr and tame impala in the top 3 [sic].'

Winners! The annual music poll received more than two million votes for 16,000 songs

The annual music poll, played on Australia Day, received more than two million votes for 16,000 songs.

Of the top 100 hits, 54 were from Australian artists.

Other Australian acts to make the top ten included Tame Impala who took fourth and fifth place respectively.

Jarryd James made seventh position with the song Do You Remember.

And, Chet Fakar was placed in sixth spot with the Marcus Marr collaboration, The Trouble With Us.

Aussie, Aussie: Other Australian acts to make the top ten included Tame Impala, Chet Fakar and Jarryd James
Shock jock Kyle Sandilands has told of the 'terrifying' moment a fisherman exposed himself and attempted to molest him whilst on a family holiday.

In a searingly honest segment on-air, the KIIS FM presenter recalled the childhood memory when he was in a dingy with a fisherman, who exposed himself whilst they were alone on Bribie Island, Queensland.

Speaking openly about the incident he dubbed 'a Rolf Harris moment' Kyle, 44, told listeners on Tuesday: 'Some bloke attempted to molest me when we were out fishing in an 8ft dinghy.'

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Candid: Kyle Sandilands recalled the time he was holidaying with his family on Bribie Island, Queensland, when a fisherman exposed himself to him in a dinghy forcing him to swim one mile back to the family caravan

'He asked me to come back to his caravan to watch dirty pornos... And asked have I ever kissed a girl or kissed a boy? And I thought "I'm the F out of here".

He continued: 'I jumped out of the dinghy, swam across the Bribie Island passage, which is one mile long..., back to the beach, ran, terrified, to the caravan and burst through the caravan doors and said "Mum, that bloke showed me his d**k." That was attempted molestation'.

In his attempt to recall exactly what happened, Kyle, whose parents Peter and Pam reportedly divorced when he was ten-years-old, arranged for his mother to verify his version of events over the phone.

'I was terrified': The 44-year-old, who dates model Imogen Anthony, (pictured) said he was forced to swim one mile back to the family caravan after the man exposed himself

His 66-year-old mother did indeed confirm what had happened but recalled her son had not told her about it until four years afterwards when the man, who lived on the river near their home in Brisbane, invited her younger son Chris to go fishing.

She explained: 'You [Kyle] said to me "Don't let Chris go anywhere near him"... That's when you told me what happened to you.

'You were just frightened out of your wits,' said Pam, adding, 'that's when you said this happened to me and that happened to me...'

Asked by fellow KIIS FM presenter Jackie 'O' Henderson if Pam later approached the man, she said she had and that he had since passed away.

Recalling the past: The DJ, pictured with his 24-year-old girlfriend, has often told of his fractured childhood

Wrapping up the segment on the show, Kyle told his mother: 'Mum thank you for saving me from the Rolf Harris moment...

'What a creep...but that's what happens when you take your kids to a Bribie Island holiday park, what do you expect?'

Kyle, who dates Maxim model Imogen Anthony, 24, has often told of his fractured childhood.

It has been reported that the DJ's world was rocked when his parents divorced when he was ten-years-old.

He has claimed that, aged 15, he was kicked out after his mother Pam and stepfather discovered he had thrown a gathering without their consent.

In 2007 he told Andrew Denton's Enough Rope on ABC: 'I rode my bike off into the sunset and never went home,' adding that he was thereafter homeless for 'a bit under a year'.

Supportive: The radio presenter's co-host Jackie O'Henderson, pictured, asked his mother Pam if she later approached the man

Kyle eventually moved in with his father's sister, Jill Stevens, who spoke to Sydney Morning Herald in 2005 about her nephew's stay.

'I didn't know what I was getting myself in for,' his aunt told the publication. 'He would lie and cheat and take things from the house.'

She also mentioned she felt sorry for him as he constantly asked whether she thought his parents might one day reunite.

Carving out his future: The shock jock is ambitious and has been determined to carve out a successful career from a young age

'He used to listen to that Tammy Wynette song D-I-V-O-R-C-E and just cry and cry,' she said. 'He used to sit outside his father's house at night and watch the lights go out.'

In 2009 Kyle's father said that his son didn't spend more than a night or two on the streets.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph he said: 'We have always said it's about time something came out about this homeless business.'

'He always did have a home but he couldn't get on with his stepfather and his behaviour at that time went from bad to worse.'

Peter added: 'He might have spent one night as a street kid."
She has long been a fundraiser for Breast Cancer Care, but actress Sadie Frost now has a more personal reason to lend her support.

She's been told she is at 'high risk' of developing the disease. Frost, 50, was given the prognosis after undergoing a breast thermal imaging scan, the results of which she published online.

Thermal imaging is a controversial screening technique  costing from 295 per scan  which picks up changes in the breast that may lead to cancer before a tumour starts to grow.

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Actress Sadie Frost (pictured), 50, who has long been a fundraiser for Breast Cancer Care has been told she is at 'high risk' of developing the disease

'Really intrigued and interested and glad to be supporting this new technology in breast care,' she wrote alongside the images. 'I found out I was high-risk but, by doing a few simple steps (taking iodine and omega), I am low-risk.'

Frost has three children from her second marriage to actor Jude Law and a 25-year-old son, Finlay, from her first marriage to Spandau Ballet star Gary Kemp.

Giving an accompanying interview promoting the technology, Sadie explains: 'Breast cancer runs in my family and I'm passionate about anything that might help women and give them more choices.'

However, breast thermal imaging has proved contentious in the medical community, with many respected scientists claiming it is bogus.

In 2013, a Liverpool clinic was found guilty by the Advertising Standards Authority of 'misleading' women by claiming it could detect breast abnormalities, but failing to present any 'robust' evidence to back up its claims.

Frost (pictured) was given the prognosis after undergoing a breast thermal imaging scan, the results of which she published online

On its website, Cancer Research UK warns that, despite a systematic review of all the research done on heat scans, they could not find enough evidence to show whether it could detect breast cancer, explaining: 'Until we have research evidence to show it is reliable, thermography is not recommended as a screening test or to try to diagnose breast cancer.'

It is unclear whether Frost, who has not remarried since divorcing Law in 2003, is being paid to promote breast thermal imaging, but she does caution: 'Breast thermal imaging does not replace orthodox screening, but it might give early warnings of potential risks.'

Pink Floyd star: London's a ghetto for super-rich

Despite strumming out a successful career on stage, former Pink Floyd bassist Guy Pratt admits even he is affronted by the cost of living in Britain. 'I don't know what's happening to London, especially Notting Hill,' says Pratt, who grew up in the affluent West London neighbourhood.

'It's become a super-rich ghetto, while everyone else is struggling to keep their heads above water. It's just not right. It's happening everywhere, too, not just London.'

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and Roger Waters have amassed 90million and 160million respectively.

Guy, 54, now lives in Brighton in a 1.4million seafront house. 'It's impossible to explain how happy the sea makes you,' he says. 'I like London so much more now I don't live there. I only have to go to the nice bits.'

Robert Peston has Corbyn on the brain

ITV's new political editor Robert Peston has barely been in the job two weeks, but he's already managed to commit a howler by mixing up one-time Labour leadership contender Liz Kendall MP with the man who beat her to the job, Jeremy Corbyn.

'Oh, God! I make boo-boos all the time and I made a classic one today,' confessed Peston at the Debrett's 500 party at London's Rosewood Hotel.

'I was interviewing the lovely Liz Kendall and we had been talking about Jeremy Corbyn and, at the end, I said: 'Thank you very much, Liz Corbyn!'

'I got mixed up because I used to have a producer called Liz Corbin.'

ITV's new political editor Robert Peston (left) has committed a howler by mixing up one-time Labour leadership contender Liz Kendall MP with the man who beat her to the job, Jeremy Corbyn

Speaker John Bercow and his MP colleagues recently pocketed a whopping 10 per cent pay rise.

So are the so-called 'men in tights' who run the Commons administration hoping there might be a bit extra for them, too?

A remuneration committee is being set up to consider performance-related packages for the Clerk of the House, David Natzler, and his senior colleagues.

The Commons is recruiting an external committee chairman, who will be paid 900 a day  enough to put anyone in a generous mood.

Speaker John Bercow (pictured) and his MP colleagues recently pocketed a whopping 10 per cent pay rise

BBC Trust boss' freebies

BBC Trust chairman Rona Fairhead accepted hospitality at Radio 1's Big Weekend, taking her daughter to see Taylor Swift and enjoying overnight accommodation in Norwich.

The following weekend, she took her son on a freebie to the FA Cup Final, watching the action from the Royal Box. Husband Tom didn't miss out, joining the hospitality express for complimentary tickets and a reception at the First Night Of The Proms.
She's undergone countless operations since her life was changed for ever in a cruel 2008 acid attack.

But Katie Piper, 32, displayed her eternal optimism as she flashed a beaming smile from her hospital bed on Tuesday, uploading a photograph to Instagram to let her followers know she was checking into hospital for ongoing health problems.

The inspirational TV personality and philanthropist explained in the accompanying caption that she'd been experiencing problems with her stent, a small tube that's used to treat narrow or weak arteries.

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Staying positive: Katie Piper put on a brave face as she checked into hospital on Tuesday to fix problems with her stent, a small tube that's used to treat narrow or weak arteries

'Evening spent in A&E now been moved into hospital! More problems with my stent! #burnsurvivorlife #boring #painful', she wrote alongside the black and white image.

It wasn't long before Katie was inundated with well wishes from her supportive fans, who enthused, 'Hope you feel better soon' and reminded her, 'You are one of a kind'.

'Just did a GC and sliced through my nail into the skin and lost a lump of skin and nail edge! #kitchenaccident'.

Inspiration: The 32-year-old TV star, who was last seen at the NTAs in central London last week, never lets her health worries get her down

The lovely lady was having a spell of bad luck since she was rushed to A&E earlier in the evening for a nasty cut on her finger.

Referring to Gemma Collins slicing her finger on CBB, Katie wrote: 'Evening spent in A&E now been moved into hospital! More problems with my stent! #burnsurvivorlife #boring #painful'.

MailOnline has contacted Katie's representatives for comment.

Ouch: The lovely lady was having a spell of bad luck since she was rushed to A&E earlier in the evening for a nasty cut on her finger

This comes after Katie put on an incredibly stylish display at the National Television Awards last week, daring to bare in a black dress with a plunging neckline.

The star pulled out all of the stops in an asymmetric black dress as she posed up a storm on the red carpet.

The risque gown's provocative neckline conceded inches below her bust, while the cut-out arms flashed a racy glimpse of side-boob.

The design also allowed the star to exhibit one of her toned, tanned legs, while the other half concealed beneath a draping black fabric.

See full coverage of the 2016 National Television Awards with more red carpet pictures

Strike a pose! The 32-year-old star pulled out all of the stops in an asymmetric black dress as she posed up a storm on the red carpet

Cheeky! The risque gown's provocative neckline conceded inches below her bust, while the cut-out arms flashed a racy glimpse of side-boob

Katie finished the look with caged stilettos which offered the star a welcome height boost as she glided along the red carpet.

The TV personality toted her essentials in a contrasting white clutch bag while her accessories also included a diamond necklace and an equally glitzy ring.

Her brunette locks were worn in a sleek mid-ponytail to ensure the glamorous make-up look she modeled was the focal.

Despite going all out for the star-studded award bash, it seemed Katie didn't stay out too long as the star tweeted at the end of the ceremony that she was heading home to catch the second half of her TV series, Bodyshockers.

Teasing: The design also allowed the star to exhibit one of her toned, tanned legs, while the other half concealed beneath a draping black fabric

Fancy footwear: Katie paired the look with caged stilettos which offered the star a welcome height boost as she glided along the red carpet

Sharing an image of one of this week's case studies, the philanthropic star wrote: 'In a taxi on route home to catch the 2nd half of tonight's #Bodyshockers Ready to see this ladies story......'.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Katie opened up about the spoils of family life and the idea of having more children when she appeared on ITV chat show Lorraine.

About her wedding at the end of last year, she said: 'It was amazing and we postponed it so many times because I had all these problems with my throat so in the end we were able to go through with it.

'It had been quite a difficult year health-wise so it was a nice way to end the year and it was a small thing, close friends and family.'
Lena Dunham hosted Glamour's Women Rewriting Hollywood Lunch on Tuesday night.

And the actress dressed for the snowy Utah weather but flashed a little skin in a cropped sweater as she joined other stars at the Sundance Film Festival event.

The 29-year-old star teamed a black long-sleeved top with tight jeans and sported very little make-up for a natural look.

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Keeping it casual: Lena Dunham flashed some midriff as she attended the Glamour's Women Rewriting Hollywood Lunch in Park City Utah

She opted for some brown knee-high boots and layered on a chic Aztec design coat.

The actress posed alongside The Gift actress Rebecca Hall who sported an all-black ensemble.

Hall, 33, currently stars in biographical drama Christine - which centres around 1970s Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck and will be presented at the festival this week.

Jazzing it up: The actress wore a long Aztec design coat over the top of her casual ensemble

Twinsies: She wasn't the only one wearing a chic coat and had a good giggle about it with her co-hosts Jenni Konner (Girls producer) and Cindi Leive (Glamour Editor-in-chief)

Cheers! The 29-year-old sipped on champagne as she posed with Lily Baldwin and Chloe Sevigny

So chic: Brooklyn Decker sported a beautiful floral coat over an all-black outfit

Lena was joined by her co-hosts Girls producer Jenni Konner as well as Cindi Leive, Glamour Editor-in-chief.

The ladies appeared to have a giggle as they stood in matching tan coats with clashing patterns.

Meanwhile, Lena has joined the #OscarsSoWhite debate and is urging Hollywood studios to diversify like the productions she's seen at Sundance.

Stylish knits: Actresses Sarah Gadon and Amandla Stenberg arrived in wintry layers

Standing out: Orange Is The New Black star Alysia Reiner looked slender in a bold green sweater

Low key: Actors Rosanna Arquette and Kate Lyn Sheil also made an appearance

'The idea that there aren't enough diverse filmmakers or there aren't enough woman filmmakers to give jobs to, it's simply a fallacy and I know that because I'm here [in Utah] and I'm seeing the movies,' the writer and producer told E! Online on Monday.

'If the studio system is ignoring these voices then we have a very serious problem and they are and the fact is this dialogue and the promises that the Academy has made is the beginning of shifting that, but what really needs to happens is that people need to take notice and give resources to these voices.'

During Sundance, Lena is also supporting her new documentary, Suited.

Radiant: Journalist Katie Couric wore a colourful jacket with fur trim

All smiles: The attendees toasted the event with a glass of wine each

Words of inspiration: Leive was pictured making a speech during the event

The film focuses on transgender men and how the act of finding a perfect suit - at custom clothier Bindle & Keep in New York - highlights their masculinity while having a profound effect on them.

It follows the story of Derek, who needed a suit for his wedding, Aiden, who required one for his bar mitzvah and interview-bound Everett.

Lena and Konner produced the film, the third documentary from their Casual Romance production company.

Catching up: Brooklyn posed alongside Hart Of Dixie star Megan Ferguson
He might be the proud father of two young children, but that's doesn't mean TV personality Tom Williams is going to seed.

The 45-year-old former competitive surf lifesaver proved he's still in top shape as he joined his wife Rachel Gilbert and their daughters Storm, 2, and Sloane, two months, at the beach.

The clan were spotted on Wednesday last week soaking up the warmer weather, when they were on their holiday at Byron Bay.

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Looking fit! TV personality Tom Williams showed off his buff body while at the beach with his family at Byron last week and is seen here with daughter Storm, 2

Tom went shirtless for the day and topped up his tan, and skipped the budgie smugglers for blue board shorts.

He covered his eyes from the glare in dark tinted sunglasses.

Designer Rachel meanwhile, showed off her trim pins in a khaki singlet and white baggy shorts.

She also wore a black and cream straw hat and sunnies.

Family fun! The 45-year-old former competitive surf lifesaver proved he's still in top shape as he joined his wife Rachel Gilbert and their daughters Storm, 2, and Sloane, two months, at the beach

Hitting the sand: Tom went shirtless for the day and topped up his tan, and skipped the budgie smugglers for blue board shorts

Looking good: Designer Rachel meanwhile, showed off her trim pins in a khaki singlet and white baggy shorts

The pair had dressed their eldest daughter Storm in a blue polka dot rash shirt to protect her porcelain skin, and covered her up with a red and white spotted hat.

Sloane meanwhile was kept safely tucked in the stroller while Tom doted over Storm during a refreshing dip in the ocean.

In a tender moment, Tom and Rachel were seen embracing as they sat down and watched the waves with their tiny tots next to them.

They arrived at the beach prepared for the day, with towels, pillows and sand buckets at the ready.

Up and away! The hunky star pushed Storm up to his shoulders and she loved it

Daddy's little girl! At one point, Tom took Storm out for a refreshing dip in the ocean, and doted upon her

One for the photo album: The duo took pictures together as they frolicked and as he held her in his arms

While sitting on the grass, the parents let Storm roam about but kept a watchful eye over her.

At another point of the day, Tom and Rachel both enjoyed time with Storm playing on the sand with her bucket.

Tom stretched out on the sand as he watched her play, and Rachel was also seen sitting next to her little one and bonding.

Cooling off: Tom also went for a dip by himself at another stage of the day

Still got it! The star is a former competitive surf lifesaver and proved he's still in top shape

Showing her how it's done! Tom kicked back in the water and continued snapping

Walking back to shore: The pair made their way back to their family after splashing about

Not old enough to swim! As Sloane was kept in her pram, it was set up in the shade on the grass

The family are based in Sydney and had been enjoying time at the holiday hot spot on a short break.

They have recently returned to Sydney, with Tom sharing pictures to his Instagram page having visited Cronulla.

The Daily Edition star also gushed about their trip online, writing underneath a family snap: 'Family holidays are so important and you all made it the best time ever,' after thanking people who are apart of Rae's accommodation and restaurant.

Tom and Rachel welcomed Sloane in November and Storm back in January 2014.

The pair first met at an awards ceremony in 2011 and became engaged in 2012 and wed that year in November.

Sweet: In a tender moment, Tom and Rachel were seen embracing as they sat down and watched the waves with their tiny tots next to them

Prepared: The parents had towels and sand buckets at the ready for the day

Mum duty: While sitting on the grass, the parents let Storm roam about but kept a watchful eye over her

Quality time: At another point of the day, Tom and Rachel both enjoyed time with Storm playing on the sand with her bucket

Relaxed: Tom stretched out on the sand as he watched her play

Apple of his eye: Tom couldn't wipe the smile off his face as he enjoyed time with her

Family escape: The family are based in Sydney and had been enjoying time at the holiday hot spot on a short break

It's over: They have recently returned to Sydney, with Tom sharing pictures to his Instagram page having visited Cronulla

Reflecting: The Daily Edition star also gushed about their trip online, writing underneath a family snap: 'Family holidays are so important' in part of his post

Parenthood: Tom and Rachel welcomed Sloane in November and Storm back in January 2014

Dad duty: Tom happily pushed the pram for his girls
Former Bachelor star Chris Soules claims he is one of the most famous celebrities in the country in a new lawsuit it emerged on Tuesday.

He alleges dating website FarmersOnly.com used his image and story without his permission in an advert, even though he did not appear in it nor have his name mentioned.

In the suit filed at the Los Angeles Superior Court, the Iowa farmer claims the company misappropriated his right of publicity.

Wanting to fill his pocket: Bachelor star Chris Soules has sued a dating website for using his image and story in an advert even though he was not in it

According to TMZ, the 34-year-old says in his papers that he is 'one of the most famous celebrities in the United States,' and because of this he must be an unnamed cowboy whose heartrending story is told in the ad.

In the advert his face is never actually shown, nor is his name mentioned, but a silhouette shows a cowboy over the Hollywood sign as a voice over talks about the mystery man's love problems.

It is said the commercial used a description of his appearance on the show and his story of how his relationship with a 'city girl' from Chicago did not work out.

Break up: His engagement to Chicago nurse Whitney Bischoff only lasted six months until it ended last May

Mystery man: Even though his face or name was not used the farmer claims they used his story and image

Then it allegedly says if the man had gone to FarmersOnly.com he could have found a country woman that would be a better match for an Iowa man like him.

In real life he chose Chicago nurse Whitney Bischoff to be his partner on the nineteenth ABC show, but their engagement ended after a mere six months in May 2015.

He ended up on the programme after a popular run on companion show The Bachelorette, where he finished third despite confessing his love for Andi Dorfman and taking her on a romantic tractor ride.

The reality television personality is hoping to net all the cash the site made due to the commercial, as well as damages.
She's the bubbly television host who is usually up for anything.

But on Wednesday Samantha Armytage seemed a little hesitant to join her fellow Sunrise co-hosts in a buggy race held at a caravan park in Umina, New South Wales, citing her wardrobe as a cause for concern.

Dressed in a tight fitting skirt, the 38-year-old appeared to be put at a disadvantage to her fellow opponents as she found it difficult to move her legs on the pedals in the restricting garment.

Ready, set, go: Samantha Armytage joined her fellow Sunrise co-hosts in a buggy race held at a caravan park in Umina, New South Wales on Wednesday

Before the race even commenced, Samantha predicted she was going to have some troubles in her chosen outfit.

'Just be careful with the skirt,' she was heard saying.

As the race began the blonde bombshell immediately began to lag behind at a noticeable distance, while fellow co-host, newsreader Natalie Barr, who was dressed practically in a pair of pants, zoomed ahead.

It then became a neck-neck race to the finish line with Natalie and sports presenter Mark 'Berets' Beretta,' both putting all of their energy into finishing first.

Getting out of it: Before the race even commenced, the 38-year-old predicted she was going to have some troubles in her chosen outfit stating 'Just be careful with the skirt'

Meanwhile Samantha was riding easy at the back, pedaling at her own pace, however still managing to eclipse an even slower David 'Kochie' Koch.

Meanwhile, Berets finally tore through the finish line first, with Nat following closely by in second place, yet demanding a 'photo finish.'

Once Samantha finally completed the race she was heard complaining about her wardrobe, saying: 'That was very difficult in a skirt!'

Despite not being appropriately dressed, on Tuesday Samantha nailed the perfect on-screen look, wearing her hair in a stylish ponytail and parading a zebra-print dress.

Finish line: Once She finally completed the race she was heard complaining about her wardrobe, saying: 'That was very difficult in a skirt!'

The television personality struck a stylish silhouette as she joined her fellow Sunrise host 'Kochie' reporting from within the shadows of the Sydney Harbour Bridge for their Australia Day edition of the show.

Samantha looked stylish as she took to the airwaves sporting just a dusting of make-up and in pretty pearl stud earrings, while Kochie looked smart in a crisp white shirt.

The Sunrise team is currently road tripping across Australia to film a series of outside broadcasts while their Sydney studio receives a makeover.

On Thursday the team will travel to Narrabean in New South Wales, and on Friday they will broadcast from Queenscliff in Victoria.

Stylish updo: Samantha nailed her perfect look wearing her hair in a stylish ponytail n and an animal print dress as she reported for Sunrise on Australia Day on Tuesday

The Presenter returned to work just last week after a leisurely trip around California during a break over the festive season.

Throughout her American adventure the bubbly blonde kept her followers updated and regularly shared snaps of her holiday, including a stint in jail.

Samantha travelled to San Francisco and spent a day at Alcatraz Island and posted several images of herself inside a jail cell, and admitted to fans that she was relishing the peace and quiet.

Upbeat: The effervescent host stuck a chirpy demeanour as she and Kochie made the most of the national public holiday reporting beside the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Hotel heir Conrad Hilton has avoided jail time but has been ordered into substance abuse treatment after failing drug tests and violating his probation.

A Los Angeles judge on Tuesday ordered Conrad into a residential treatment program for at least 90 days after violating his probation related to his meltdown on a British Airways flight.

The judge rejected a request by authorities to put Hilton behind bars for up to six months, although his probation was extended for another three years, reports the New York Daily News.

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Avoiding jail: Conrad Hilton attends his sentencing in LA in June, 2015 after his abusive outburst on a flight from London to LA

The brother of Paris and newly-pregnant Nicky Hilton was sentenced to probation and community service last year after an outburst on a British Airways flight from London to LA, where he threatened to kill the crew and called passengers 'peasants.'

Authorities say the 21-year-old violated probation by trespassing, failing drug tests, failing to complete three treatment programs and traveling out of California without permission from his probation officer.

He was put on probation but was then accused of numerous violations, including failing a drug test and allegedly breaking into an ex-girlfriend's home after she took out a restraining order against him.

Relaxed: The hard-partying hotel heir has been ordered into residential rehab after violating his probation by failing drug tests, traveling without permission and allegedly breaking into his ex-girlfriend's home

On the flight, the heir threw an epic tantrum, screaming, threatening flight attendants and shouting, 'If you wanna square up to me bro, then bring it and I will f**king fight you.'

He also yelled 'I will f**king own anyone on this flight; they are f**king peasants.'

During the flight Hilton also was accused of smoking weed in the bathroom of the plane. He became so erratic the flight crew had to restrain him to his seat after he had passed out.

Rehab bound: Conrad Hilton was seen leaving a federal courthouse in LA in February

Restraining order: While on probation over the flight meltdown, Conrad was arrested for allegedly breaking into the home of his ex-girlfriend Hunter Salomon, who had taken out a restraining order against him

He was charged with a felony for threatening the flight attendants and interfering with the crew, but had that dropped to a misdemeanor assault charge after he entered a plea deal.

The prosecution agreed to recommend to the judge Hilton get probation, not jail time. The initial felony charge carried a maximum jail time of 20 years but the misdemeanor charge only carried jail time up to six months.

Hilton was ordered to obey all laws per his plea deal until he was sentenced by the court.

Famous family: Conrad joined sisters Paris and Nicky Hilton for a shopping trip in Aspen in 2011

However, according to documents filed on April 30, Hilton violated the terms of his plea deal by failing a drug test. He admitted to smoking marijuana, and was ordered to enroll in outpatient substance abuse treatment.

He was also slapped with a curfew requiring him to stay home between the hours of 10pm and 5am.

Conrad was ultimately sentenced to 750 hours of community service for the outburst, and was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine along with undergo mental and substance abuse treatment and be put on probation for 3 years, and was ordered to avoid alcohol or drug use.

Famous family: Hotel heir Conrad is the youngest sibling of socialite and DJ Paris Hilton

However, he violated the terms of his parole when he was arrested back in June for allegedly breaking into the home of his ex-girlfriend, Hunter Salomon, after she broke off their relationship.

Hunter is the daughter Rick Salomon - Conrad's sister Paris' co-star in her infamous sex tape, and of actress E.G. Daily.

Prior to Hilton allegedly breaking into her home, Hunter filed for a restraining order against him, explaining she had dated Conrad for several years but they broke up.

She claimed Hilton became obsessive, calling her the love of his life, and threatened to commit suicide.

Heir: Conrad Hilton, seen with parents Kathy and Rick Hilton at the 2009 People's Choice Awards in LA

She said he would show up to her house at all hours, would cry to her mother saying he wanted to marry her daughter and had recently showed up to her home refusing to leave and telling her to get a restraining order because he can't stop himself.

Hunter was granted a temporary restraining order by a Los Angeles judge, who ordered Hilton to stay 100 yards away from her at all times.

But the restraining order didn't stop Conrad, and he was arrested in June for breaking into his ex's home after helicopters and police swarmed the house.
He is famed for being as fit as a fiddle.

And Bradley Cooper proved he is as sprightly as ever as he effortlessly hopped over mounds of snow as he went walkabout in post-blizzard New York on Tuesday.

The 41-year-old showed the sort of action man prowess one would expect of an American Sniper as he went about his business in the bustling metropolis.

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He could be part of a crack commando unit: A-Team star Bradley Cooper made it look easy as he hopped over a snow mound in New York on Tuesday

Bradley was looking in fine form in a puffy winter jacket, shell trousers, trainers and warm woollen hat.

He added an extra dash of movie star cool to what seemed a routine outing by completing his look with a trendy pair of aviator sunglasses.

Bradley seemed in high spirits as he pounded the pavements of the Big Apple, despite the slightly treacherous conditions.

And it seems the modest star is an adept multitasker, as he was able to continue his intense conversation on his hands-free device as he negotiated the hazard.

Like a coiled spring: The powerful star exploded as he made his way past the roadside hazard

Talking to Mandy? The Barry Manilow lookalike was chatting intensely on his hands-free device

Could it be time for some hairdressing magic? The star could have even been out to get an affordable trim

The gifted star was nominated for a prestigious Tony Award last year after treading the boards on Broadway in the Elephant Man.

Sadly for the big man he lost out to the talented Alex Sharp, who won for his unforgettable performance in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

And he was back on stage in NYC on Monday for a one-off charity performance to celebrate the 100th birthday of playwright Arthur Miller.

The handsome thespian actor joined actress pal Nina Arianda, 31 for the show at the Lyceum Theater in the city.

It's good to talk: He seemed to be having a great time as he spoke to his mystery friend

And off he goes: Perhaps Bradley was catching up with his stunning model girlfriend Irina Shayk
It was reported in October that James Blunt and wife Sofia Wellesley were expecting their first child.

But Sofia's baby bump was nowhere to be seen as the couple attended a party in London on Tuesday night.

A spokesperson for the singer, 41, declined to comment when approached by MailOnline.

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Keeping mum: James Blunt and his wife Sofia Wellesley announced they were expecting their first child in October, but Sofia's baby bump was nowhere to be seen as they attended a party in London on Tuesday night

Sofia, the granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington, looked pretty as a picture in a figure-hugging metallic mini dress as she cosied up to her singer husband at the event for GP Nutrition Supplements at Annabel's.

The legal consultant - who had a sizable bump in October - showed off her svelte figure in the dress, which was cinched-in at the waist and featured peplum detail across the front.

A pair of tights and glitzy black heels finished off the blonde beauty's glam look as she smiled for the cameras with her suited and booted husband by her side.

James, who recently wrapped up his debut season on The X Factor Australia, revealed the couple were expecting their first child in October.

Looking glam: Sofia showed off her figure in a figure hugging metallic dress at the bash. A spokesperson for the singer declined to comment to MailOnline

Party time: Sofia was sporting a sizable bump at the Loyal Foundation Sportsman's Lunch in Sydney in October 2015 when the couple (pictured with Kyly Clarke) discussed the pregnancy for the first time

The You're Beautiful crooner confirmed he was going to become a father when the couple attended the Emerald and Ivy Ball in Sydney.

When asked whether Sofia was expecting, he told Australia's Daily Telegraph newspaper at the time: 'I try not to talk about it much on the red carpet.'

The 41-year-old musician has spoken previously of his desire to have children, describing fatherhood as 'an amazing thing'.

Later that month, Sofia proudly showed off a sizable bump at the 2015 Loyal Foundation Sportsman's Lunch in Darling Harbour.

Smart pair: Sofia showed off her svelte figure in the dress, which was cinched-in at the waist and featured peplum detail across the front, while James was suited and booted for the party

James has made no mention of any new addition on his popular Twitter account, but has been absent from social media for a couple of weeks.

He seemed to explain his silence in a tweet posted on January 17, revealing: 'Sorry havent Tweeted in a while. I Blocked myself by mistake.'

James and Sofia married in September 2014, tying the knot offically in a secret ceremony on the 5th, the day after Elton John's End Of Summer party in Windsor.

'They got married the morning after Elton's party' a source told the Mail on Sunday at the time. 'Sofia joked to friends that she was almost too hungover to get married.'

The couple then threw a big wedding party a few weeks later in Majorca, where Sofia's parents have a house.
They are infamous for their on/off relationship.

But, despite a period apart, it seems that Geordie Shore's Charlotte Crosby and Gaz Beadle may be enjoying something of a reconciliation.

The pair were spotted in a selfie of themselves, which Gaz uploaded to his social media account on Tuesday.

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Back on again? Geordie Shore's Charlotte Crosby and Gaz Beadle have sparked rumours of a reconciliation

Taken at close range, the snap sees the former lovebirds cosy-up for the camera lens while wearing colour co-ordinated outfits.

Flanked by an all-white background, Charlotte can be seen in a sleeveless ivory dress while resting against Gaz's back.

Meanwhile, sporting a crew-neck top, he can be seen trying top smoulder in the indulgent image.

Not camera shy: The image, which was followed by this solo selfie of Gaz, was liked nearly 10,000 times in just 24 hours, while also being re-tweeted more than 2,500 times

Posting it to his well-populated page, he captioned the shot with 'Back with this 1 today', which certainly raised eyebrows with reality TV fans.

The image was liked nearly 10,000 times in just 24 hours, while also being re-tweeted more than 2,500 times.

It comes just a few days after he shared another image of the Newcastle-born pair taking part in a media interview for a magazine.

Back on? It comes just a few days after he shared another image of the Newcastle-born pair taking part in a media interview for a magazine

The flurry of social media shots comes just two weeks after the Geordie Shore lothario bet her 20 they will end up in bed together again - after she said they'd never reunite.

Speaking in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel, the 27-year-old teased his ex-girlfriend for suggesting their romance was just a 'fling', saying: 'Charlotte, you can say that all you want.

'I guarantee that next time we film [Geordie Shore]; you'll get smashed and come into my room going, "Gary, Gary".

'And we'll end up having sex again. In fact, I bet you 20 we'll have sex again.'

Confident: Gaz isn't just body-confident, but has also bet Charlotte 20 that they'll sleep together again

Ill-fated? The beginning of Gaz and Charlotte's relationship dates back to Season 1 in 2011 and it has been a love-hate one in the house ever since

Meanwhile, Charlotte - who recently ended her short-lived romance with Love Islands Max Morley - said she would consider leaving Geordie Shore if she found the right guy.

If I do fall in love again, and its the real deal, then I might [quit], she admitted on This Morning. But Im not in love yet and I dont think I will be for a long time.
Paul Hollywood has laughed off reports that suggest him and his Great British Bake Off co-star Mary Berry are set to receive a 100,000 pay rise.

The Sun newspaper claimed that the much-loved GBBO judges were set to be rewarded with the large sum - taking their salary to a reported 600K each - after the success of the latest series, which saw Nadiya Hussain crowned the winner.

Taking to his Twitter page on Tuesday, TV star Paul rubbished the claim, revealing he is yet to see that much money in his account.

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'Currently I'm missing thousands of pounds!': Paul Hollywood has laughed off reports that suggest him and his Great British Bake Off co-star Mary Berry are set to receive a 100,000 pay rise

If you can prove this because currently I'm missing hundreds of thousands of pounds, he tweeted, alongside a link to a report about the suggested pay rise.

The Great British Bake Off final was the most-watched show of 2015, with 13.4 million viewers tuning, and pulled in the highest viewing figure since the football World Cup final in 2014.

Paul, 49, and Mary, 80, were reportedly given a pay rise last year when the show switched from BBC2 to a primetime slot on BBC1.

Is it true? A new report claimed that the much-loved GBBO judges were set to be rewarded with the large sum - taking their salary to a reported 600K each - after the success of the latest series

Hitting back: Taking to his Twitter page on Tuesday, TV star Paul rubbished the claim, revealing he is yet to see that much money in his account

When asked about the recent report, the BBC said: We don't comment on speculation about pay.

Speaking previously about the shows huge success, Mary confessed told The Telegraph: 'This is not a hyped-up programme. It's totally sincere. We aim to get people baking and to enjoy it and to further their skills.

'It's very tough but they are friendly to each other and we encourage them, we don't want to make them cry.

Popular: Paul, 49, and Mary, 80, were reportedly given a pay rise last year when the show switched from BBC2 to a primetime slot on BBC1

'I think the audience enjoy it because it's fun, and they get attached to the characters who, although they are competing and dying to win, still help the person next to them.''

Meanwhile, the popular judges will return to TV screens on Wednesday as celebrities will compete in a special series, The Great Sport Relief Bake Off.

The four-part run will see 16 celebrities bake off against each other in a bid to raise money for Sport Relief.
Yolanda Foster has written a blog post defending her children Bella and Anwar, amid questions about their Lyme disease diagnosis.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star penned a strongly-worded post after watching the latest episode of her reality show, which saw some of her co-stars discuss Bella, 19, and 16-year-old Anwar's health.

Yolanda, 55, who was diagnosed with the debilitating disease herself in 2012, explained the severity of Bella's condition has meant she's had to give up on her 'lifelong dream' of competing in equestrian events at the 2016 Olympics.

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Heartbroken: Yolanda Foster has explained in a new blog post that the severity of daughter Bella's Lyme disease symptoms has meant she's had to give up on her 'lifelong dream' of competing at the 2016 Olympics

In the blog entry posted on Tuesday evening under the heading 'I Have Nothing To Prove,' Yolanda explains that both her children have been receiving 'extensive holistic treatment ever since' their diagnosis three years ago.

She also points out that 'it's very common for multiple family members to be affected by Lyme disease,' and adds that she believes all three of them contracted the bacterial infection, which is spread to humans by infected blacklegged ticks, when they lived on a horse ranch in Santa Barbara for a decade.

It was during this time that 19-year-old Bella developed her love of horse riding, a passion her mother shares.

Brave: Yolanda's two youngest children Anwar, 16, and Bella, 19, were diagnosed with the same disease as their mother three years ago

But while Bella told Porter magazine in October that she was working toward representing the USA in equestrian events at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this summer, Yolanda has revealed her daughter has had to shelve her dream.

'Bella had to give up her lifelong dream of having a professional riding career and a shot at the Olympics due to her severe symptoms and inability to ride. This was the biggest heartbreak of her life and an extremely sensitive subject for her,' Yolanda wrote.

The teenager is instead focusing on her blossoming modelling career, with Yolanda praising her 'resilient' daughter as she 'makes a name for herself in the modeling industry while she struggles with symptoms of chronic Lyme every day.'

On hold: While Bella revealed in October that she was working toward representing the USA in equestrian events at the 2016 Olympic Games, Yolanda has now explained her daughter has had to shelve her dream

'It's day by day, one foot in front of the other. When there is a good day, you soak up that moment. Those "good selfie" moments are captured because they're a gift,' the proud mother added of her own reaction to the disease.

Yolanda signed off her post with a congrats to both Bella and her older daughter Gigi who both walked the Chanel runway during Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris on Tuesday.

'Cheers to my girls on an amazing couture week in Paris I can't wait to be front row sometime very soon,' she Yolanda wrote.

Yolanda posted a photo on Instagram on Tuesday showing Bella, 19, receiving a treatment for Lyme disease with an IV line in her arm while they both reclined in bed, writing in the caption:

'Watching my brave babies stuffer in silence in order to support me in my journey has struck the deepest core of hopelessness inside of me.'

Catwalk star: The teenager is instead focusing on her blossoming modelling career, walking in the Chanel show this week at Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris

Bella has had a hectic schedule this week as she told her Instagram followers that she had travelled across the channel after her Paris show for a photoshoot in London.

'Just touched down in London for a few hours to shoot with two of my favorite humans,' the model wrote alongside a selfie with her team.

Meanwhile, Yolanda's blog post on Tuesday night also saw the reality star and former model hit back at her RHOBH co-stars for discussing her children's health on the series.

'I have nothing to prove and know that my journey is public due to the job I've chosen as a Housewife, but I can't accept something so delicate as my children's health being talked about in such a way,' Yolanda wrote.

Jet-set lifestyle: Bella has had a hectic schedule this week as she told her Instagram followers that she had travelled across the channel after her Paris show for a photoshoot in London

Keeping positive: Yolanda has said that for her and her children they deal with their chronic illness 'day by day, one foot in front of the other'

'I know I'm not the only mother who would speak to this It's one thing when your integrity is doubted, spoken of behind your back, but it strikes another cord when it's your children.

'Shame on those who think it's OK to spread rumors and provoke doubt about something so heart-wrenching,' she added after her ex-husband, and Bella's father, Mohamed Hadid slammed claims that he said his children don't suffer from Lyme disease.

Mohamed, 67, set the record straight on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live following Tuesday's episode of Yolanda's show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, during which Lisa Vanderpump claimed Mohamed had told her Bella and Anwar didn't have the debilitating disease.

Talk show host Andy Cohen read a statement from Mohamed - who is also the father of top model Gigi Hadid - addressing the matter. I can only imagine that my response to a question asking how my kids are doing with ''fine'' was misconstrued, read the statement.

Daddy's girl: Yolanda's ex-husband, and Bella's father, Mohamed Hadid has also this week slammed claims that he said his children don't suffer from Lyme disease

Answer misconstrued: Mohamed suggested that his response to a question about his children during an episode of his wife's reality show Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was misconstrued

I have too much respect for all five of my children to speak about them publicly in a restaurant or otherwise. I will not speak further on something that should now be put to rest,' the statement said.

Yolanda, who was diagnosed with the debilitating condition in 2012, first revealed Bella and Anwar's diagnosis during a speech at the Global Lyme Alliance Gala in New York in October, telling the audience her 'babies have been struggling in silence' with the disease.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection spread to humans by infected blacklegged ticks, which are found in woodland areas and on pets. When ticks bite into human skin, the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi infects the persons body.

Sufferers usually experience a circular rash, muscle pain, joint pain and flu-like symptoms after infection. And left untreated, the infection can spread to the joints, heart and central nervous system.
He's one of Hollywood's most recognizable stars with his granite jaw and imposing screen presence.

But Josh Brolin's latest look didn't sit will with Jimmy Fallon when the Sicario star appeared on his show to promote his latest film Hail Caesar, on Tuesday night, sporting a moustache.

Arriving on the set of The Tonight Show in New York, the comedian accused the 47-year-old actor of growing a 'porn' moustache, before cajoling him into shaving it off live on air.

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Lose the 'stache! But Josh Brolin's latest look didn't sit will with Jimmy Fallon when the Sicario star appeared on his show to promote his latest film Hail Caesar, on Tuesday night, sporting a moustache

Poking fun of the chiseled Gangster Squad star's dated facial hair, Jimmy, 41, asked if he could shave it off, before taking a pair of clippers to one side of the actors face.

Attempting to answer Jimmy's questions while his upper lip was being given a trim, Josh talked about his latest movie, Hail Caesar.

However the star was left spitting hairs out of his mouth as Jimmy giggled, before leaving one-half of the moustache intact.

Before and after: Arriving on the set of The Tonight Show in New York, the comedian accused the 47-year-old actor of growing a 'porn' moustache, before cajoling him into shaving it off live on air

The chat show host then telling the actor he could now 'play two characters at once', with Joshing hamming it up by switching between the two looks on camera.

But when Jimmy produced a badger hair brush, a wet razor and mirror the actor sprang into action and groomed himself.

Giggling and laughing as he slapped shaving cream over the star's features, Jimmy joked: 'This is so awesome right now, this is like a fantasy camera or something...like "You get to shave with Josh Brolin!" It's like so fun.'

Playing barber: Poking fun of the chiseled Gangster Squad star's dated facial hair, Jimmy, 41, asked if he could shave it off, before taking a pair of clippers to one side of the actors face

Left spitting: The star was left spitting hairs after trying to answer Jimmy's questions, before the funnyman left one-half of the moustache intact to create 'two characters'

Two for one: The chat show host then telling the actor he could now 'play two characters at once', with Joshing hamming it up by switching between the two looks on camera

To which Josh chuckled and quiped, 'You're doing my porn' - referencing their earlier joke about his facial hair.

But turning the conversation to one of the Hollywood star's more unlikely friendship, Jimmy asked if it was true that Josh and Republican presedential hopeful Donald Trump were friends.

Revealing the polarising billionaire businessman and TV star was a friend, the Jonah Hex star revealed their relationship started when Donald kindly lent him $20 for a taxi.

Time for the rest: But when Jimmy produced a badger hair brush, a wet razor and mirror the actor sprang into action and groomed himself

A pressing question: Turning the conversation to one of the Hollywood star's more unlikely friendship, Jimmy asked if it was true that Josh and Republican presedential hopeful Donald Trump were friends

Freinds in high places? Revealing the polarizing billionaire businessman and TV star was a friend, the Jonah Hex star revealed their relationship started when Donald kindly lent him $20 for a taxi

He explained he was out for a meal at a restaurant and having forgotten his wallet didn't have any money to pay for a taxi, and after asking 'anybody' for the money, the business man ponied up.

Joking about the kind favour, Josh said: 'He's a good guy! he should be president!'

The actor appeared on the show to promote his latest film, Hail Caesar which also stars Geroge Clooney, and also discussed his current project, The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter.

The film, also starring Danny McBride, has just wrapped up filming and is due out December 2017, while Hail Caesar will hit screens in the UK in March.

A little short: Explaining he was out for a meal at a restaurant and having forgotten his wallet didn't have any money to pay for a taxi, the business man ponied up
She recently confirmed their engagement when she flashed her diamond ring at the Golden Globes earlier this month.

And Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and boyfriend Jason Statham looked typically smitten they were pictured snuggling in the back of a taxi after enjoying a romantic meal at The Ivy restaurant in London on Tuesday night.

Despite being famed for his tough action man roles, the 48-year-old actor looked ever the doting gentleman as he held his wife-to-be in his arms.

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Loved-up: Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and boyfriend Jason Statham looked typically smitten they were pictured snuggling in the back of a taxi after enjoying a romantic meal at The Ivy restaurant in London on Tuesday night

During one tender moment, Jason even placed a soft kiss on Rosie's forehead as she nuzzled her head on his shoulder as they drove off.

True to form, the Mad Max: Fury Road actress looked stunning in an all black ensemble as she cosied up to her long-time beau.

Her blonde locks were swept away from her face in a low chignon, while her lips were coated in a vivid scarlet shade to inject a splash of colour into the otherwise monochromatic look.

Mad for each other: Despite being famed for his tough action man roles, the 48-year-old actor looked ever the doting gentleman as he held his wife-to-be in his arms

Gorgeous: Rosie's blonde locks were swept away from her face in a low chignon, while her lips were coated in a vivid scarlet shade to inject a splash of colour into the otherwise monochromatic look

Gushing about her full ruby pout, Rosie shared a stunning selfie on Instagram, which was brandished with the words: 'Red lip for dinner... always a winner'.

Jason sported his typically dapper style in a flat cap and tailored jacket as he indulged in an intimate dinner at the celebrity hot-spot.

The couple - who reside in Los Angeles - are revelling in a brief sojourn to their native country after Rosie walked the runway for Versace during Paris' Haute Couture Fashion Week.

Indeed! Gushing about her full ruby pout, Rosie shared a stunning selfie on Instagram, which was brandished with the words: 'Red lip for dinner... always a winner'

Suave: Jason sported his typically dapper style in a flat cap and tailored jacket as he indulged in an intimate dinner at the celebrity hot-spot

The low-key dinner would no doubt have come as a welcome treat following a busy few days in the French capital, where the model of the moment was also seen partying with the likes of Gigi Hadid and Irina Shayk following their triumphant show.

The newly-engaged couple might have had a little celebrating to do, however, as Wednesday marked the launch of Rosie's new cosmetics line with Marks and Spencer.

The 28-year-old already boasts her own lingerie line with the major British retailer and recently unveiled her own activewear range too.
He is known for being the host of Network 10's The Bachelor and Bachelorette.

But on Wednesday Osher Gunsberg made the switch and attended rival Channel Seven's My Kitchen Rules launch party in Brisbane.

The 41-year-old got into the party spirit as he dressed in a red floral Hawaiian shirt for the event.

Ready to party: Osher Gunsberg dressed in a red floral Hawaiian shirt on Wednesday as he attended the My Kitchen Rules launch party in Brisbane

While opting for the out-there number, he matched it with a pair of beige straight-cut slacks.

Osher seemed to be in holiday mode at the star-studded event as he displayed his groomed unshaven facial hair.

The media personality, who announced his engagement three weeks ago, couldn't wipe the smile off his face as he posed for photos throughout the night.

Down to earth: The 41-year-old displayed his groomed unshaven facial hair at the event

Making the switch? His attendance at the event comes as a surprise as he works alongside rivals Network 10 for The Bachelor and Bachelorette

Also in attendance at the annual function was MKR judges Manu Feildel and Colin Fassnidge.

Manu, 41, dressed smart as he opted for a matching grey suit which he teamed up with a white button-up shirt.

He kept his outfit on trend while ditching the traditional tie and leaving his top buttons undone.

Colin matched his co-star and showed off his bare chest as he slipped into a shirt and a deep navy suit jacket.

The 45-year-old chef kept the bottom half of his outfit casual as he opted for a pair of faded denim jeans and Converse sneakers.

Appearance: Also in attendance at the annual function was MKR judges Manu Feildel and Colin Fassnidge (R)

Trendy: Manu, 41, dressed smart as he opted for a matching grey suit which he teamed up with a white button-up shirt and black dress shoes

Doing the ditch: He kept his outfit on trend while ditching the traditional tie and leaving his top buttons undone

MKR 2016 Teams Group 1 Cheryl and Matt - 'cougar and cub' - Queensland Monique and Sarah - 'cops' - New South Wales Mitch and Laura - 'brother and sister' - Victoria Rosie and Paige - 'best mates' - South Australia Anna and Jordan - 'mother and son' - Western Australia Gianni and Zana - 'married lawyers' - Victoria Group 2 Alex and Gareth - 'miners' - Queensland Luciano and Martino - 'Italianos' - New South Wales Tasia and Gracia - 'sisters' - Victoria JP and Nelly - 'lovebirds' - Queensland Nev and Kell - 'tradie and cleaner' - Western Australia Jessica and Marcos - 'fitness friends' - Victoria Advertisement

He tied his long dark locks back into a ponytail for the event.

New contestants of MKR Cheryl and Matt also attended the event ahead of the launch next week.

The couple, who have been described as 'the courage and the cub', happily wrapped their arms around each other as they walked through the arrival guard.

Cheryl, 50, donned a strapless floor-length dress which hugged tightly around her figure.

She slicked her brunette locks back and tucked them behind her ears, giving clear view of her dark pink drop earrings.

Her beau, who is 24 years her junior, opted for a pair of dark blue jeans and a white button-up shirt.

All smiles: Colin matched his co-star and showed off his bare chest as he slipped into a button-up shirt and a deep navy suit jacket

Loved up: New contestants of MKR Cheryl and Matt also attended the event ahead of the launch next week

On the move: MKR judge Pete Evans was pictured earlier in the day departing Sydney for the Queensland event while dressed in a navy button-up shirt

Matt, 26, accessorised with a deep grey vest and a royal blue bow-tie.

MKR judge Pete Evans was pictured earlier in the day departing Sydney for the Queensland event while dressed in a navy button-up shirt.

With his long sleeves rolled up, Pete tucked the garment tightly into his jeans.

Last week at the Sydney launch of the reality television show, Pete gushed about working beside Manu for the sixth year in a row.

'We have a ball,' revealed Pete, adding: 'There's no one else I would rather work with for six months of my life.'

Manu agreed, telling Pete: 'It's a perfect thing for six months of the year, then I can't stand you after six months, but then I don't see you for six months!'

My Kitchen Rules launches on Monday February 1 on Channel Seven.
Scarlett Johansson showed just what a hands-on mother she is on Monday.

The 31-year-old actress might have had an entourage with her at Miramar's Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, but she was the one carrying her daughter Rose.

Kissing her 16-month-old daughter tenderly as she made her way across the car park, the film star was clearly relishing her main role as mum, ahead of the shoot for sci-fi film Ghost in the Shell.

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Mommy mode! Actress Scarlett Johansson kissed her daughter Rose tenderly before placing her in the car as she left Miramar's Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand on Monday

Scarlett dressed down for the meeting at the film studio wearing high-waisted jeans, folded up at the ankle, with a printed T-shirt, baggy cardigan and wooden heel clogs.

The red carpet regular, who is known for her luscious locks, rocked a choppy blonde pixie do and appeared to be make-up free for the outing.

Seemingly a natural at the motherly juggle, the Lost In Translation star held a water bottle under one arm, while her baby rested on the other

Hands on! The 31-year-old seemed a natural at the juggling act, holding a water bottle under one arm while her 16-month-old daughter rested in the other

Casually clad! The mother-of-one dressed down for the visit to the studio wearing high-waisted jeans, a printed T-shirt and baggy cardigan

Meanwhile the tiny tot was also warmly dressed in red and white striped tights, a grey jumper, matching coloured socks and purple shoes.

According to the New Zealand Herald, the BAFTA Award winning actress headed to the studio on Monday for a meet and greet with other actors and crew on the anime-inspired movie.

'She met the wardrobe, directors, various VIPS that take care of things, other actors,' a source said.

After landing in Wellington on a private jet with her French husband Romain Dauriac on Saturday, accompanied by a nanny and security guard, it's understood the actress has done well to fit in.

Meet and greet: It's understood the actress visited the studios for a meet and greet with actors, crew and wardrobe ahead of filming for the movie

Entourage! The blonde beauty flew in via private jet on Saturday with her husband Romain Dauriac on Saturday as well as security and a nanny, who appeared to join the actress on Monday

Fitting right in: The award winning actress has been said to be making her way around town largely unnoticed

The blonde beauty has been making her way around town largely unrecognised, even going to the local shops and hitting the gym.

'She arrived at a local south Wellington gym fairly innocuously with a group, she was wearing trainers, training gear and a hat,' one local told the publication, adding: 'To the uninitiated no-one would have known she was a star.'

The young family are understood to be living in a luxury house in the coastal suburb of Seatoun Heights, overlooking the Wellington Harbour, for the next two months, staying south east of the CBD and near the studios.

Gym junkie: The buxom babe was spotted at a gym over the weekend but locals say she flew under the radar

Taking the lead: Despite all her staff around her, Scarlett ensured she was the one placing Rose in her car seat

Settling in: The young family are understood to be living in a luxury house in the coastal suburb of Seatoun Heights, overlooking the Wellington Harbour, for the next two months

The movie is based on the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow and is set in 2029

Scarlett is set to play a female special ops cyborg, Motoko Kusanagi, who leads an elite task force called Section 9 as they try to bring down notorious hacker Puppet Master.

The sexy star will appear alongside English actor Sam Riley (Maleficent) and will be directed by Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman).
They're tying the knot in the sunny climes of Barbados later this week.

And on Tuesday bride-to-be Kimberley Walsh and her fiance Justin Scott had the legalities to attend to as they headed to the local government offices to pick up their marriage certificate.

The Girls Aloud star made the most of the sunshine in a pretty strapless maxi dress as she left the office with her partner of 14 years.

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Not long now! Kimberley Walsh and her fiance Justin Scott had the legalities to attend to as they headed to the local government offices in Barbados to pick up their marriage certificate ahead of their wedding this week

Kimberley, 34, looked gorgeous in her maxi, already showing off a hint of tan after jetting into Barbados with her family the day before.

She kept comfortable in flat sandals and added a pair of dark shades.

Her blonde locks were pulled back off her face into a simple up do, while the star sported minimal makeup for her meeting.

Holiday wardrobe: Kimberley, 34, looked gorgeous in a printed maxi dress, already showing off a hint of tan

Ex Triple 8 band member Justin was also dressed for the weather, teaming denim shorts with a grey t-shirt and white trainers.

The couple were accompanied by a male pal as they continued the prep for their big day.

Kimberley and Justin were pictured arriving in Barbados on Monday, along with their 18-month-old son, Bobby and the rest of their family.

Exciting time: Triple 8 band member Justin was also dressed for the weather, teaming denim shorts with a grey t-shirt and white trainers

Important paperwork: Kimberley was seen clutching an envelope of documents as the couple left their meeting

While the exact date is being kept under wraps for now, Kimberley has said she has been planning the big day for months.

She has been dating property developer Justin for 14 years, and they welcomed their first child into the world in late 2014.

Her former bandmates Cheryl Fernandez-Versini and Nicola Roberts will act as bridesmaids on the day, while Sarah Harding and Nadine Coyle are reported to have been left off the guestlist.

Nice bling! The bride-to-be flashed a look at her engagement ring as she adjusted her sunglasses

Keeping cool and calm: The Girls Aloud singer and her partner of 14 years looked relaxed despite their impending nuptials

Final prep: While the exact date is being kept under wraps for now, Kimberley has said she has been planning the big day for months

Meanwhile, Kimberley told Hello! Magazine that she will not be able to look at close pal Cheryl during her big day, as she'll break down in front of the altar.

'I used to be good at keeping up an icy exterior but since I had Bobby, I'm so much more emotional,' she explained. 'I'm slightly worried about the wedding to be honest.

'A few happy tears are fine, but I don't want to spend the whole day sobbing, so I'm going to have to be careful about even looking at Cheryl and my sisters, because they'll definitely cry and that will set me off.'

Summer style: Kimberley kept comfortable in a pair of pretty flat sandals for her busy morning

Three's a crowd: The couple were joined by male pal as they completed their official business

Revealing her excitement about her the ceremony, Cheryl told the publication: 'Kimberley is just the best friend you could wish for. I'm so excited for the wedding.

'It is a celebration of two people in love that we've all been a part of, and I am so excited to celebrate their love story.'

Last week, Kimberley celebrated her hen night in style, along with her two best friends and former Girls Aloud bandmates, Nicola Roberts and Cheryl.

Cheryl, 32, was on top form as a bridesmaid, kicking up her heels and putting her troubles with husband Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini behind her.

The chart-toppers, who were once part of Britain's biggest girl-group Girls Aloud, certainly didn't hold back as they painted the town red at the animal-print themed 'Last Wild Night' hen do, held at London hotspot The Cuckoo Club.
They recently announced their engagement following a whirlwind four-month romance.

And Rupert Murdoch, 84, and his bride-to-be Jerry Hall couldn't have looked happier as they enjoyed an evening out with Sir Michael Caine and his wife Shakira on Tuesday.

The media tycoon and the 59-year-old Texan model flashed beaming smiles as they left C London restaurant in the capital following a gourmet meal.

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Happy couple: Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall were the picture of happiness as they left C London restaurant on Tuesday evening

Jerry showed off her sizable engagement ring, a 20-carat marquise rock rumoured to have cost Murdoch an eye-watering 2.4 million

Sparkler: Jerry showed off her sizable engagement ring, rumoured to have cost Murdoch 2.4 million

The statuesque blonde radiated happiness as she showed off the glittering sparkler for one of the very first times.

David Allen, creative director of 77 Diamonds, told the MailOnline: 'A Marquise diamond of this size is incredibly rare in the market so Mr Murdoch will have spared no expense at this impressive jewel.

'This unique diamond shape was originally commissioned by King Louis XV in 1745 to create a diamond that resembled the smile of his mistress Madame de Pompadour and has been popular ever since, with Victoria Beckham and Catherine Zeta-Jones both sporting Marquise cut engagement rings.'

Jerry and Rupert went arm-in-arm as they headed home for the evening, clearly having enjoyed a fun night out with A-list actor Michael.

Mick Jagger's ex looked incredible in a classic all-black outfit, sporting smart trousers and a polo neck top.

Night on the town: The newly-engaged couple had clearly enjoyed catching up with Michael Caine and his wife Shakira over dinner

Arm-in-arm: Texan model Jerry led the way out of the restaurant, radiating happiness as she displayed her engagement ring

Timeless chic: The 59-year-old star opted for a classic, all-black outfit set off with a bright blue scarf

She carried a patent leather handbag over one arm and dressed up her look with an electric blue scarf.

Rupert cut a casual figure in a blue shirt and black coat as he accompanied his glamorous fiancee.

The pair were joined by Caine and his wife of 43 years Shakira, biding them a fond farewell as they went their separates ways.

Sophisticated style: The mother-of-four carried a leather handbag over one arm and completed her look with patent flats

Whirlwind romance: The pair got engaged in Los Angeles on the weekend of the Golden Globes

Catching up: The pair were perhaps seeking advice from Michael and his wife Shakira, who have been married for almost 43 years

Jerry and Rupert got engaged in Los Angeles on the weekend of the Golden Globes, which they attended and is one of their few public appearances as a couple.

The news was announced via a post on the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of the The Times, which is owned by Murdoch's News Corporation.

The billionaire's new fiancee has four children with former partner Sir Mick Jagger, although the couple were never legally married.

Surprise announcement: The engagement news was announced via a post on the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of the The Times, which is owned by Murdoch's News Corporation

First official union: Jerry was with the father of her children, Mick Jagger, for 23 years, but the pair were never legally wed

Parting ways: Jerry and Mick had a Hindu ceremony in 1990 in Bali, Indonesia, but a court ruled the ceremony was not legally binding when they split

Given it is Jerrys first marriage, it is only fitting that Rupert slides a sizable piece of bling on the finger of his intended bride.

She and The Rolling Stones front man had a Hindu ceremony in 1990 in Bali, Indonesia, but a court ruled the ceremony was not legally binding when they split nine years later.

Rupert's impending matrimony to Jerry will be his fourth, having divorced Wendi Deng in 2013.

His first marriage was to Australian Patricia Booker before he went on to wed Glasgow-born journalist Anna Torv.

Fourth time lucky: The billionaire was previously married to Australian Patricia Booker, Glasgow-born journalist Anna Torv, and split from Wendi Deng in 2013

Calling it a night: The couples bid each other a fond farewell as they went their separates ways

Proud: Jerry showed off her 20-carat marquise rock, a style popular with the likes of Victoria Beckham and Catherine Zeta-Jones

Old friends: The Youth actor, 82, was enjoying a catch up with media tycoon Murdoch, 84
Kanye West reignited his long war with ex-girlfriend Amber Rose after dragging her name into a 30 tweet tirade against Wiz Khalifa on Wednesday.

But her revenge was rather more concise - a short, shocking and sexually explicit response that caused a collective gasp across the Internet.

The latest chapter in this ugly battle of the exes began when Kanye launched an epic rant at Wiz, Amber's rapper ex-husband, and father of her son, Sebastian.

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Hitting back: Amber Rose got involved in the Twitter spat between ex Kanye West and her estranged husband Wiz Khalifa on Wednesday (pictured at the Golden Globes on January 11)

Graphic: The social media salvo was triggered by an angry exchange between Wiz and the Yeezus rapper, but soon Amber got involved and fired off a very crude Tweet

Initially, Kanye, 38, referred to Amber as a 'stripper' and implied she was a gold digger by referencing lyrics to his hit song during an exchange with Wiz.

Kanye wrote: 'You let a stripper trap you.'

'I know you mad every time you look at your child that this girl got you for 18 years', Kanye tweeted referencing Wiz's soon to be three-year-old son Sebastian with Amber.

'You wouldnt have a child if it wasnt for me.'

Kanye later deleted his tweets after Amber got involved, with the model firing off a crude missive that ricocheted across the internet.

It read: 'Awww @kanyewest are u mad I'm not around to play in ur a*****e anymore?#FingersInTheBootyA**B**ch'.

Not playing clean: Initially, Kanye, 38, referred to Amber as a 'stripper' and implied she was a gold digger by referencing lyrics to his hit song during an exchange with Wiz (pictured last week arriving at LAX)

And she later hinted that Kanye backed off because he was worried about her weighing in, tweeting soon after: 'Lol Now u wanna delete ur tweets cuz Muva has arrived?'

Meanwhile, the cause of the vitriolic exchange on Wednesday appears to have been Wiz, who was upset over Kanye renaming his album Waves, which is a term in the hip-hop community in reference to the style of rapper Max B, who is currently in prison.

However, the conflict may have something to do with a new leaked track from Kanye's upcoming seventh studio album, where he appears to blast his ex by suggesting she doesn't look as good as she used to.

Volatile: Kanye, here in June 2009 with Amber, has previously stated he only dated her because his now wife Kim Kardashian was not available

Throwback: Amber, here in January 2010, was 25 when she first dating Kanye in 2008

A snippet from the track, features the lyrics: 'My ex said she gave me the best years of her life, I saw a recent picture of her, guess she was right.'

Amber, now 32 and a mother-of-one, dated the U.S. artist between 2008 to 2010 and claimed to have broken up with him over his now-wife Kim Kardashian.

It's fair to say the relationship did not end amicably with Amber branding Kim, the mother of Kanye's two children, a 'homewrecker'.

In January 2012, Amber accused Kanye of cheating on her with Kim, who was then dating American footballer player Reggie Bush.

She told America's Star magazine: 'They were both cheating. They were both cheating on me and Reggie with each other.

'She was sending pictures, and I was like, "Kim, just stop. Dont be that person."'

She says Kim is a homewrecker: Kanye went on to date Kim, here in February 2015, with whom he is now married and has two children, though Amber has always insisted there was an overlap

Kanye was bold about slamming his former girlfriend in 2015 when he said in an interview that he had to take '30 showers' after dating Amber.

He candidly confessed: 'If Kim had dated me when I wanted, there would be no Amber Rose.'

The rapper is said to have had his eye on Keeping Up With The Kardashians star Kim as early as 2008, naming her his 'girl of the week' in early blog posts which resurfaced in October 2014.

He added in the one-to-one: 'It's very hard for a woman to want to be with someone that's with Amber Rose. I had to take 30 showers before I got with Kim.'

Going to war: Kanye unleashed a stream of consciousness list of vitriol on Wednesday

At the time, Amber responded by tweeting: 'After all these years I never snitched on u and I don't plan on starting now. We once loved each other so I won't do u like that.'

'I'll leave that up to the Kartrashians to humiliate u when they're done with u,' she added.

'I'm always so quiet and just a cool fun girl,' she wrote. 'The funny thing is I'm all for a woman making something out of nothing.'

Kanye is said to have spotted Amber on a video shoot for Ludacris' 2008 single What Them Girls Like and they struck up a bond.

Muva and the rapper! Amber dated Wiz on and off for five years, having their son Sebastian in 2013 and marrying later that year, pictured in August 2014 at the MTV VMAs; they split one month later

After their relationship broke down, Amber dated Wiz on and off for five years, having their son Sebastian in 2013 and marrying later that year. The two then split in September 2014.

Meanwhile, Kanye has previously been hit with rumors that he might be gay and in a secret relationship with French fashion designer Olivier Rousteing, according to the Inquisitr.

The allegations reportedly stemmed from an ex-boyfriend of Rousteing, who allegedly posted photos to a gay website, suggesting there was something more than friendship between the designer and the rapper.

While in 2014 an article by MediaTakeOut suggested that Kanye was involved with openly gay designer Ricardo Tisci.
She is reportedly in the midst of her own marriage crisis.

But Cheryl Fernandez-Versini did not let her romance woes quash her excitement for the forthcoming wedding of her best pal and former Girls Aloud band mate Kimberley Walsh.

The 32-year-old hitmaker took to Instagram on Wednesday to share a cute snap as she touched down in Barbados to attend her pal's nuptials, where she will act as a bridesmaid.

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And she's landed! Cheryl Fernandez-Versini did not allow her own romance woes quash her excitement for the forthcoming wedding of her best pal and former band mate Kimberley Walsh

Sporting a cobalt blue cut-out shirt and wearing perfectly applied make-up, Cheryl pouted into the camera while raising her eyebrows in mock shock.

Rather than mention her pal's wedding, The X Factor judge opted to share her delight at landing in the home of fellow pop star Rihanna, who she lovingly dubbed 'Ri Ri'.

In the caption she wrote: 'just touched down in Ri Ri's town #Barbados #dataccentdoe' - clearly enjoying the dialect of the locals she had met since arriving in the Caribbean.

Cheryl Fernandez-Versini news as she arrives in Barbados for Kimberley Walsh's wedding

Sorting out the forms: Earlier in the day, Kimberley and her fiance Justin Scott had the legalities to attend to as they headed to the local government offices to pick up their marriage certificate

Earlier in the day, Kimberley and her fiance Justin Scott had the legalities to attend to as they headed to the local government offices to pick up their marriage certificate.

The Girls Aloud star was spotted making the most of the sunshine in a pretty strapless maxi dress as she left the office with her partner of 14 years.

Kimberley, 34, looked gorgeous in her maxi, already showing off a hint of tan after jetting into Barbados with her family the day before.

Selfie queen: Cheryl is well known for her love of a selfie on Instagram

Cheryl recently revealed her excitement for the ceremony, telling Hello! magazine: 'Kimberley is just the best friend you could wish for. I'm so excited for the wedding.

'It is a celebration of two people in love that we've all been a part of, and I am so excited to celebrate their love story.'

While the exact date is being kept under wraps for now, Kimberley has said she has been planning the big day for months.

She has been dating property developer Justin for 14 years, and they welcomed their first child into the world in late 2014.

Her former bandmates Cheryl and Nicola Roberts will act as bridesmaids on the day, while Sarah Harding and Nadine Coyle are reported to have been left off the guestlist.
She's currently planning her wedding to fiance Nick Young and it appears that Iggy Azalea may have already found some racy underwear for the big day.

The Australian rapper paid a visit to the La Perla store on Rue Du Faubourg Saint Honore in Paris, France on Wednesday and judging from the large bag that she left with she must have purchased several pricey sets.

Iggy was seen perusing the luxury lingerie with the help of a male shop assistant and it seemed like she knew what she was looking for.

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Shopping for the big day? Iggy Azalea was seen picking out lingerie sets at La Perla in Paris, France on Wednesday

The Fancy singer was dressed in a rather racy ensemble for her shopping trip, wearing a sheer high-necked top with her bra completely on display.

The daring clothing item also left her cleavage on display, showing off the results of her subtle breast augmentation, which the rapper admitted to last year.

Iggy teamed the top with a grey crochet maxi skirt, an outfit she had been seen in earlier at the Viktor & Rolf Spring/Summer 2016 show.

See Iggy Azalea updates as she dons sheer top to shop for racy lingerie at La Perla in Paris

Sheer delight! The 25-year-old rapper wore a see-through top with her bra completely on display for the shopping trip

Covering those curves: Iggy was seen browsing the wares while showing off her own assets in a sheer top and a tight fitting skirt

The pink-haired singer has been spending time in the French capital for various different fashion events and on Tuesday she attended the Giorgio Armani Prive view.

And in the spirit of the fashion season Iggy left the lingerie shop wearing another striking outfit, making the most of the opportunity to show off several different looks in one day.

Iggy wore an all-white outfit for her exit from the boutique wearing a skin-tight white jumpsuit with a matching blazer over the top.

Helping hand: An assistant was on hand to help the rapper select items that would suit her figure

One shopping trip, two outfits: Iggy left the boutique dressed in an all-white ensemble with a black and a overcoat

And demonstrating exactly how pull of a layered look Iggy wore a long black coat draped around her shoulders with a blue fur stole wrapped around her neck.

The star is planning to tie the knot with Nick Young after the basketball player popped the question last summer with a $500,000, 10.43-carat yellow diamond ring.

However, the sports star recently confessed planning their wedding was proving a 'nightmare'.

Enjoying Europe: Iggy has been in the French capital attending fashion events this week

Lots of lingerie: Iggy left the boutique with a large bag filled with wares from the luxury brand

'I think we should go to the courthouse,' Nick told Billboard.com of their struggle to compromise.

'Its tough, it takes a lot of time and compromising and arguing but eventually the women always win. I think wedding days should just be womens day.'

Oh so fashion! Earlier in the day Iggy was seen Viktor & Rolf Spring/Summer 2016 show
Oregon wildlife refuge holdouts told to go home after one killed

Armed anti-government protesters occupying a US wildlife refuge for the past three weeks are refusing to leave even after one of their group was killed as police tried to arrest him, officials said Wednesday.

Eight protesters including the protest leader Ammon Bundy were taken into custody in a dramatic twist to the standoff in Oregon involving ranchers and farmers angry over federal land management policies.

Local authorities and the FBI called on those still holed up at the refuge to give up and go home.

A television truck along Highway 78, located approximately 4 miles from the Malheur Wildlife Refuge headquarters near Burns, Oregon on January 27, 2016 Rob Kerr (AFP)

"It's time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on. There doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community," Harney County sheriff David Ward told reporters.

Authorities have now blocked the access road leading into the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But the occupiers are free to leave, although they will be identified as they do so, and authorities want to end the ordeal peacefully, said Greg Bretzing, head of the FBI's Portland office.

"We will continue to look for safe, peaceful procedures on how to bring this to a peaceful conclusion," he added.

Authorities gave few details on the arrests, one of which took place in Arizona, and the fatal shooting incident.

Ward said some of the protesters went to his office Tuesday and "had ultimatums that I couldn't meet." He did not elaborate.

The FBI said it and local authorities later devised a plan to arrest members of the group as they drove on a highway -- far from any innocent bystanders.

They were reportedly headed to a meeting with local people.

But police stopped them on the way. One man died of a gunshot wound as police tried to arrest him, Bretzing said. Five others were arrested at the scene.

- Arrest 'ended badly' -

"I'm disappointed that a traffic stop yesterday that was supposed to bring peaceful resolution to this ended badly," Ward said.

He added: "It didn't have to happen. We all make choices in life. Sometimes our choices go bad."

Bretzing did not say how many occupiers remained at the refuge.

Ammon Bundy, the rancher who led the initial January 2 occupation in the northwestern state, was among the five arrested on the highway, the FBI said Tuesday night in a statement.

Bundy, 40, and the others face a federal felony charge "of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats," the FBI said.

After the highway incident, the FBI and Oregon state police arrested two other men in Burns, the town nearest to the refuge.

An eighth person surrendered to police in Arizona on the same charge, police said.

Bretzing would not identify the dead person. But The Oregonian newspaper said it was group spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum.

The FBI said another person suffered non-life threatening injuries and was rushed to a hospital before being placed under arrest.

The Oregonian reported that two men -- including Bundy's 43-year-old brother Ryan -- had disobeyed orders when agents stopped the two cars they were travelling in, and resisted arrest, resulting in shots being fired.

The Bundy brothers are the sons of Cliven Bundy, 69, a vitriolic anti-government activist who in 2014 engaged in an armed standoff with federal authorities over unpaid cattle grazing fees at his Nevada ranch.

Cliven Bundy confirmed Finicum's death on his Facebook page, saying that he "was Shot and murdered in Cold blood today in Burns Oregon" (sic) by the FBI and state police.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is some 30 miles (48 kilometers) away from Burns, which has a population of 3,000.

Last week, some 30 people, including women and children, were at the site, but it was unclear how many were present on Wednesday.

The gunmen originally took over the reserve in protest at the jailing of two local ranchers, Dwight Hammond and his son Steven, who were convicted of arson.

Their demands soon grew to include calls for the government to turn over area federal land to local ranchers. In Oregon, nearly 53 percent of the land is federally owned.

The Hammonds distanced themselves from the movement and voluntarily began their scheduled prison sentences after the occupation began.

Several members of the local community, notably the Oregon Cattlemen's Association, had condemned the takeover of the reserve, while expressing sympathy for the Hammonds.

Standoff in Oregon

Ammon Bundy, leader of the armed anti-government militia at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters near Burns, Oregon, January 5, 2016 Rob Kerr (AFP/File)

FBI special agent Greg Bretzing speaks during a press conference on January 27, 2016 at the Harney County Chamber of Commerce in Burns, Oregon Rob Kerr (AFP)
Bomb kills Kenya police as troops pull out of Somali bases

At least five police officers died in a roadside bomb attack in eastern Kenya, police and reports said Wednesday, as troops inside Somalia pulled out of some bases after Islamist attacks.

Kenyan police chief Joseph Boinnet confirmed "there was an incident where a police lorry hit an improvised explosive device" on Tuesday, but gave no casualty toll.

One senior police officer, who asked not to be named, said five officers were killed in the blast as the truck drove towards Mpeketoni, in the coastal Lamu region.

People attend a vigil on January 21, 2015 in Nairobi in honour of Kenyan Defence Force soldiers killed in southwest Somalia's El-adde region Tony Karumba (AFP/File)

Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper also reported five police were killed, while The Standard reported six, and The Star said seven died.

Officials have been reluctant to give numbers of those killed in attacks after Shebab militants stormed a Kenyan army base at El-Adde in southwest Somalia, in the latest incident of an African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) base being overrun by the Al Qaeda-linked group.

A Shebab statement said more than 100 Kenyan soldiers were killed and others captured. Kenya has so far refused to say how many of its soldiers were killed, injured or remain missing.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a statement that the Shebab would "have no time to breathe" and vowed revenge.

He is due to attend a memorial service on Wednesday, alongside visiting Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

The blast targeting police came as Kenyan soldiers inside Somalia pulled out of some of its bases in southern Somalia.

The army however said it was not leaving Somalia and remained committed to the fight.

"There is a reason that took us to Somalia, which is to liberate and pacify those areas, and the mission is still on," army spokesman David Obonyo said.

Kenyan soldiers vacated at least two military bases in El-Adde and Badhaadhe, witnesses said, adding that Shebab fighters occupied the bases after the withdrawal.

"Shebab fighters took control of El-Adde after the Kenyan soldiers pulled out," said Abdulahi Mohamud, a traditional elder.
Murray, Konta raise Union Jack at Australian Open

World number two Andy Murray celebrated a day of rare British success on Wednesday after he outlasted Spain's David Ferrer to join compatriot Johanna Konta in the Australian Open semi-finals.

Murray, the four-time runner-up, saw off the tenacious Ferrer 6-3, 6-7 (5/7), 6-2, 6-3 in three hours, 20 minutes to set up a clash with Milos Raonic on Friday.

It was Murray's sixth Australian Open semi-final and 18th overall in the Grand Slams, as he attempts to go one better after finishing runner-up at four of the last six editions in Melbourne.

Britain's Andy Murray celebrates after victory against Spain's David Ferrer in the Australian Open quarter-finals on January 27, 2016 William West (AFP)

But for the first time, Murray has British company in the tournament's final stages after Konta downed China's Zhang Shuai to become the first British woman to a reach a Grand Slam semi-final since 1983.

It is the first time that two British singles players -- man or woman -- have featured in the last four at the same Grand Slam event since John Lloyd and Sue Barker at the 1977 Australian Open.

And adding further lustre to the British day to remember, Murray's brother Jamie reached the men's doubles semi-finals with his Brazilian partner Bruno Soares.

Murray said it was a special time for British tennis, after he also led his country to Davis Cup glory against Belgium in November -- the first time they have won the tournament since 1936.

"It's pretty good for us to have people competing in almost all of the competitions. So, yeah, it's been a good Australian Open so far. Hopefully we can keep it going," Murray said after his win.

"It's unlikely that everyone is going to win the events, but to be in this position is great.

"It's really, really good for tennis on the back end of last year with the Davis Cup as well. Extremely positive. Just got to try and capitalise on it."

- Thunderstorm -

Ferrer proved a difficult proposition for Murray, relentlessly slugging it out from the baseline and keeping the Scot working hard in a physically demanding match.

Murray appeared to benefit in the change to the slower court conditions when the roof was closed on Rod Laver Arena in the third set ahead of an approaching thunderstorm.

"When the roof closed, I was up a break in the third and was feeling good," he said. "That first game after the delay was a very important. I saved a couple of break points, but then actually played a good game.

"So it was nice to get through that game. Then I felt like I started to play better as the match went on."

Murray, who has noticeably boosted his previously weaker second serve, extended his record over Ferrer to 13-6.

The Spanish baseliner made 17 errors on the way to dropping the opening set in 45 minutes following a service break in the fourth game.

In a titanic second set, Murray double-faulted on break point to go 0-2 down before breaking back in the seventh game when Ferrer's forehand was well out.

Ferrer had the better of the tiebreak, including winning a memorable 31-shot rally, and he claimed it on his first set point when Murray's forehand was wide.

Murray got a crucial early break in the third set before play was temporarily delayed to close the stadium roof.

The world number two looked better suited to the slower court speed in the indoor conditions, and he broke Ferrer again in the eighth game to take a two sets to one lead.

Murray grabbed another break early in the fourth set when Ferrer's running backhand crosscourt was just wide.

He handed back the break in the next game but then broke Ferrer in the sixth and went on to take it on his first match point, with a wide serve forcing Ferrer's return out.

Britain's Johanna Konta beat Zhang Shuai of China on January 27, 2016 to reach the Australian Open semi-finals William West (AFP)

Britain's Andy Murray in action against Spain's David Ferrer during the Australian Open in Melbourne on January 27, 2016 William West (AFP)
Rights groups rap treatment of Indonesian sect members

Indonesia has relocated more than 1,500 members of a controversial sect from their village "for their own safety", an official said Wednesday, but rights groups described their treatment as religious persecution.

Members of the mysterious Light of Nusantara Movement -- or Gafatar -- have been moved from a remote communal farm in Indonesia's half of Borneo island after a mob attack.

They are now in the country's main island of Java undergoing "rehabilitation" instruction sessions on Islam and civic duties.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, is seen as largely tolerant and pluralist, but a number of high-profile attacks against minority groups in recent years has marred this image Romeo Gacad (AFP/File)

Meanwhile, followers of a separate minority group face ejection from their community unless they convert to mainstream Islam, according to Human Rights Watch.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, is seen as largely tolerant and pluralist. But a number of high-profile attacks against minority groups in recent years has marred this image.

The controversy surrounding Gafatar, a group accused of luring followers from across Indonesia to practise a deviant blend of the Muslim faith, has captivated national attention despite its tiny following in a country of 250 million.

Last week an angry mob torched their village base in Kalimantan, displacing roughly 500 families -- more than 1,500 people. They were evacuated by government authorities first to temporary shelters then back to Indonesia's main island of Java, some by warship.

A spokesman for President Joko Widodo said the decision was made "for their own safety" and several government departments had been instructed to handle the crisis.

"We must protect our citizens regardless of their identity. They are also Indonesian citizens," spokesman Johan Budi told AFP.

Gafatar insists that it does not practise deviant Islam. The country's top clerical body, the Indonesia Ulema Council (MUI), is expected to rule next month on whether its beliefs are heretical.

Anyone charged with heresy under Indonesian law can face five years in prison, said Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono. Police have said they are investigating any criminal links to the Gafatar movement.

The evacuees in Java have begun what officials are calling "rehabilitation" sessions on religion and civic duty, some run by the MUI.

The classes are expected to last five days and include special instruction for women and children and those deemed "ideologues" within the Gafatar movement, said Central Java MUI chairman Ahmad Daroji.

"We are teaching them to come back and be one of us again. We hope after the programme these people can return to their community," he told AFP.

Several local rights groups, including the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute and the Setara Institute, have criticised the treatment of Gafatar.

"It is religious persecution," Harsono told AFP. "This re-education programme is simply an abuse of human rights."

Meanwhile a community of Ahmadis -- a minority Muslim sect -- living in Indonesia's west has allegedly been ordered to convert to mainstream Sunni Islam or face expulsion, Human Rights Watch said.

The New York-based rights group says the local government is conspiring with religious groups to harass and "unlawfully expel" the small cluster of Ahmadi families from Bangka island off Sumatra.

Ahmadis have long been targeted by hardline groups in Indonesia, who oppose their belief that a lesser prophet followed Mohammed.
Trevor Noah pens book on apartheid childhood

South African comedian Trevor Noah, the host of America's "The Daily Show", will release a book about being the child of an illegal mixed race relationship under apartheid, his publishers said Wednesday.

Noah, who grew up in the township of Soweto, shot to fame last year as the surprise choice to host the nightly satire show, taking over after Jon Stewart's celebrated 16-year stint.

A child of a then prohibited relationship between a black woman and a white Swiss father, Noah has often joked about his upbringing as a mixed-race boy among black children in Soweto where both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu once lived.

South African comedian Trevor Noah succeeded Jon Stewart as the host of "The Daily Show" in September 2015 Mujahid Safodien (AFP/File)

The book details "growing up in South Africa during the last gasps of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that came with its demise," said Pan Macmillan South Africa in a statement.

"I couldn't find a good book about myself so I decided to write one," added the 31-year-old comedian.

"And just like me this book doesn't have an appendix."
Iran's Rouhani rules out apology for Saudi embassy attack

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday he hoped his country could reconcile with fellow Middle Eastern powerhouse Saudi Arabia, but refused to apologise for an attack on a Saudi embassy.

"We did everything we had to, we condemned" the attack, Rouhani said of the torching of the embassy earlier this month by demonstrators protesting the execution of a prominent cleric from Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority.

"We arrested the culprits, it was right to do so and we did," he said, insisting the ball was now in Saudi Arabia's court.

Iranian protesters set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran during a demonstration against the execution of prominent Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr by Saudi authorities, on January 2, 2016 Mohammadreza Nadimi (ISNA/AFP/File)

"Why should we apologise? Because (cleric) Nimr al-Nimr was executed? We are the ones to apologise because they are killing the people of Yemen? Apologise to them because they are helping terrorists?" he asked.

"We do not want tensions with Saudi Arabia to continue," he said, but insisted there was "no justification" for what he described as Riyadh's "aggressive" policies in the region.

"They are the ones who should apologise to Muslim people, hundreds of times," he said.

The Gulf kingdom and some of its allies severed diplomatic relations with Iran over the January 2 embassy attack.
Iran's Rouhani denies asking for Venus cover-up

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday he had not asked his Italian hosts to cover up classical nude statues in a Rome museum he visited with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

A smiling Rouhani told reporters he had "no contact on the subject" with Italian authorities.

"I know that the Italians are very hospitable, a people who seek to make their guests' visits as pleasant as possible and I thank them for that," he added.

A visitor photographs Venus at Rome's Capitoline Museum on January 26, 2016 Filippo Monteforte (AFP)

Rouhani and Renzi made speeches in Rome's Capitoline Museum on Tuesday, with a huge statue of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius on a horse featuring prominently in many of the photographs of the event.

But nude statues, including a Venus dating from the second century BC, had all been covered up in temporary wooden cartons, removing the risk of them creeping into any of the shots -- or catching Rouhani's eye.

Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, who accompanied Rouhani on the museum trip, called the classical cover-up "incomprehensible".

He insisted that neither Renzi nor himself had been made aware of the decision in advance.

The Italian media on Wednesday railed against an "excess of zeal" and placed the blame on the office in charge of protocol during visits by foreign dignitaries.

Sources in Rome's city hall, which manages the museum, assured the press that the municipality had played no role in the decision.

The museum cover-up was not the only step taken in Italy to ensure the Iranian visit passed off smoothly.

As Rouhani refuses to attend official meals at which any alcohol is available, wine was strictly off the menu at both lunch with President Sergio Mattarella and dinner with Renzi.

According to media reports, France has baulked at making a similar placatory gesture, leaving diplomats preparing for Rouhani's visit to Paris from Wednesday with a major protocol headache.

Italy's anti-immigration Northern League denounced what it called "submission to a culture which we don't share".

A visitor walks past marble statues on display at Rome's Capitoline Museum Filippo Monteforte (AFP)
Saudis battle for oil market supremacy

By abandoning the tight rein it held for decades on the oil market, OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia launched a battle for control that sent crude prices plummeting.

It has been a painful fight, experts say, but with its vast resources the Gulf kingdom is showing no signs of giving up.

The huge drop in oil prices since mid-2014, from more than $110 a barrel to around $30, followed a decision by the Saudi-influenced Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries not to cut output as it had in the past to keep prices high.

Saudi Arabia is showing no signs of giving up is battle for oil market supremacy Marwan Naamani (AFP/File)

The move came as traditional suppliers like Saudi Arabia were facing increasing pressure from new market players, in particular US shale producers, and aimed to squeeze them out.

It also sought to put pressure on non-OPEC member Russia -- the biggest global oil producer -- and to force a trimming of output by fellow OPEC member Iran, Riyadh's regional political rival.

As the freefall in prices has continued, calls have grown on Riyadh and its Gulf Arab neighbours to reconsider.

With the market awash in crude, even the chairman of state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco has said prices have reached "irrational" levels.

But still Riyadh has given no indication of wavering.

"The Saudis are well aware that if they cut production, it will not greatly impact prices because their cut will be replaced by other producers like Iran, Iraq, Russia," said oil expert Jean-Francois Seznec at Georgetown University.

- 'Protecting market share' -

"The Saudis want producers to suffer enough to agree to a negotiated cut across the board," Seznec told AFP.

Saudi Arabia, the world's second-biggest oil producer and largest exporter, spent tens of billions of dollars in the past two decades to raise its crude production capacity to 12.5 million barrels per day.

It became the only producer with spare capacity, allowing it to raise and lower production to influence the market.

The kingdom boasts the world's second-largest crude reserves, at 268 billion barrels, and sits on the fifth-largest natural gas deposits, at 300 trillion cubic feet (8.5 trillion cubic meters).

At less than $10 a barrel, its production cost is also the second cheapest in the world, according to Rystad Energy, a private consultancy.

"Saudi Arabia's main goal is achieving stability in the oil market and protecting its market share," Kuwaiti oil expert Kamel al-Harami said.

"The kingdom could not let high-cost producers compete in its own markets," Harami told AFP.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf peers in OPEC also have huge fiscal cushions to cope with low oil prices, accumulated in the years when oil prices were high.

So while Saudi Arabia's oil revenues have plunged, leading to a record $98 billion budget deficit for 2015, the kingdom can still count on more than $600 billion in reserves.

"There is no wish to cut production when you have costs lower than the others and ultimately you can resist longer than the others," Patrick Pouyanne, the CEO of French oil giant Total, told AFP during the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

- Producers 'cannot bleed forever' -

"We have scale... We have technologies that have allowed us to maintain our low cost," Aramco chairman Khalid al-Falih said at the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh this week.

"That is going to be even sharper in a more low-price environment," he said, adding that the company's investments had not slowed down despite the price fall.

In a report on Monday, Jadwa Investment in Riyadh said Saudi Arabia remains the only country with spare production capacity, leaving it "well equipped to hold off any attempts of encroachment on its market share".

So far, Harami said, the battle is not yet won.

"Shale oil has proven to be much more resilient than they had initially expected," he said.

But a Western diplomat based in Riyadh said the Saudi oil policy reflects a more assertive attitude under the new King Salman, who took power a year ago, and is unlikely to be abandoned.

The kingdom will "defend its interests internally and externally" whether that pleases outsiders or not, the diplomat told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

And Seznec said he expects the strategy to start yielding results in the near future.

"I think sooner rather than later there will be an arrangement with non-OPEC producers, who cannot continue to bleed forever," the analyst said.

Even the chairman of state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco has said oil prices have reached "irrational" levels Seyllou (AFP)

The market is awash in crude oil though oil prices have plunged below $30 a barrel from more than $110 in mid-2014 Geoff Robins (AFP)
Israel court rules Palestinian hunger striker to stay in jail

A hunger-striking Palestinian journalist is to remain in Israeli jail despite warnings over his deteriorating health, the country's top court ruled Wednesday.

The Supreme Court said it would not release Mohammed al-Qiq immediately but would follow his health on a daily basis.

Qiq has been on hunger strike for 63 days over his detention under Israel's administrative detention law and his organs are at risk of failure any day, his legal team says.

A Palestinian man carries a placard bearing a portrait of Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qiq during a demonstration demanding his release near the Beit El settlement, north of Ramallah, on January 22, 2016 Abbas Momani (AFP/File)

The European Union on Wednesday said it was "especially concerned" about his deteriorating health.

After 50 days of a hunger strike, the risk of death grows daily, experts say, with few able to survive beyond 70 days if only drinking water.

His lawyer Jawad Boulus asked the Supreme Court to release him but the three judges ruled that an earlier decision by a military court to detain him was legal.

Boulus said the judges were "briefed on classified material and are convinced" that Qiq "constitutes a danger to the security of Israel," so declined to overturn the military court's ruling.

The evidence provided by the Shin Bet security services was presented to the judges without witnesses, who had to leave the room.

Under Israel's controversial administrative detention law, the state can hold suspects for renewable six-month periods without trial.

Qiq, a 33-year-old father of two and a correspondent for Saudi Arabia's Almajd television, was arrested on November 21 at his home in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Shin Bet said he was arrested for "terror activity" as a member of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

He denies the charges and has been refusing food since November 25 in protest at the "torture and ill-treatment that he was subjected to during interrogation", according to Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organisation.

During the trial, which was attended by four Arab members of the Israeli parliament, judge Elyakim Rubinstein brought up the case of Mohammed Allan.

Allan ended a two-month hunger strike last summer after Israel suspended his detention without trial. During his strike and after his release he became a symbol of resistance for many Palestinians.

Rubinstein asked how long after abandoning his strike Allan was able to return to health, and he was told about a month by lawyer Boulus.

Over 680 Palestinians are currently under administrative detention, out of 6,800 in jail in Israeli prisons, according to Addameer.

Qiq was jailed for a month in 2003 and then for 13 months in 2004 for Hamas-related activities.
Nigeria suicide blasts 'kill 13' in Chibok

At least 13 people were killed on Wednesday when three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok, where Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls.

The blasts happened at about midday (1100 GMT) as the remote town in Borno state was packed with traders from surrounding villages for the weekly market, Chibok elder Ayuba Chibok told AFP.

"Ten died on the spot and another one died on the way to hospital," said health worker Dazzban Buba, who volunteered to treat the injured at hospital.

Nigerian authorities said the blasts happened on market day

"A woman and a child died as they were being admitted (to hospital), so now the death toll stands at 13. Thirty others were injured, 21 critically."

The blasts bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has repeatedly hit "soft" civilian targets such as markets, mosques and bus stations as well as military and civilian vigilante checkpoints.

Chibok came to prominence in April 2014 when Islamist fighters stormed a boarding school and kidnapped 276 girls, causing global outrage.

Fifty-seven girls managed to escape in the immediate aftermath but 219 are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video in May that year.

Chibok was briefly overrun by the Islamic State group-allied rebels in November 2014 but recaptured by the military after several days.

Ayuba Chibok and Buba both said Wednesday's blasts were suicide attacks and had prompted terrified residents to lock themselves inside their homes or flee in fear of repeat attacks.

Buba said the first explosion, at a checkpoint where people coming into the town were being searched, was thought to have been carried out by a young boy.

But identifying the attacker's age was difficult, as only his legs were recovered.

The second, at the market, and a third nearby were carried out by women, he added.

- Lull in attacks -

Buba said he rushed to help his brother who was injured in the first blast in the Bamzir Road area of the town.

The second blast happened shortly afterwards, fitting a pattern of Boko Haram suicide attacks with multiple bombers setting off their devices almost simultaneously.

But Buba said it was still unclear whether the third bomber deliberately detonated her explosives or whether the device was triggered when troops opened fire as he fled.

The 30 injured were mostly suffering from burns and fractures, and that nine had been discharged, he added.

President Muhammadu Buhari, in Kenya on a three-day state visit, made no direct mention of the Chibok attack at a memorial service to commemorate Kenyan soldiers killed by Shebab militants.

But he told the congregation: "Terrorists should not have a place in our communities, villages, towns, cities and countries.

"We must all rise against the culture of intolerance, hatred and extremist ideologies, which drive terrorism."

Recent weeks have seen a lull in Boko Haram attacks, with only three recorded in Nigeria this month but those that have occurred underline the difficulty in protecting hard-to-reach rural areas.

The insurgents raided a village in Yobe state on Sunday, killing one man, while on January 11, another raid in the Adamawa state town of Madagali left seven dead.

Seven people were killed in a raid and suicide bomb attack in Izgeki village on January 5. Gunmen also looted food and burnt a large part of Nchiha village near Chibok earlier the same day.

On December 6, there was a similar attack in Takulashi village, also near Chibok, which again saw fighters raid food and steal more than 200 cattle.

Buhari on December 24 declared the rebels were "technically" defeated but at least 66 people were then killed in raids and suicide bombings in the days following.

According to an AFP tally, more than 1,650 people have been killed since Buhari came to power in May last year, vowing to crush the insurgency, which has left at least 17,000 dead since 2009.

On Monday, 32 people were killed when at least three suicide bombers blew themselves up at a market in Bodo village in northern Cameroon.

Members of the "Bring Back Our Girls" movement at a rally in Abuja on January 14, 2016 for the release of the schoolgirls kidnapped in 2014 in Chibok
Chelsea's Ramires joins Jiangsu in record China football deal

Brazilian midfielder Ramires on Wednesday moved from Chelsea to Jiangsu Suning for a reported $35 million -- making him the biggest-ever signing by a Chinese club.

Chelsea said that a "permanent transfer" for the 28-year-old had been agreed, without giving details of the fee. British media said Jiangsu had paid at least 25 million (33 million euros,$35 million).

The Ramires deal is a new sign of the financial power of Chinese football clubs in the international transfer market.

Brazilian midfielder Ramires has left English Premier League side Chelsea to join China's Jiangsu Suning Tobias Schwarz (AFP/File)

According to a FIFA report released last week, China was the sixth biggest transfer spender in 2015 and the biggest outside the major European leagues in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

The $168 million spent by Chinese Super League clubs in 2015 was 68 percent higher than for 2014 and observers said the Ramires transfer is a sign that the record will be smashed again this year.

Ivory Coast striker Gervinho moved from Roma to Hebei Fortune in another major move from Europe to the east.

Ramires joined Chelsea from Benfica in 2010 and won the Champions League and the Premier League in 251 appearances for the London club, during which he scored 34 goals.

He was a favourite under Jose Mourinho but has struggled to get a game in recent months.

Ramires famously scored the goal -- a chipped shot over Victor Valdes -- that brought Chelsea back into the game in their Champions League semi-final against Barcelona in 2012.

Chelsea went through to the final on away goals but the Brazilian also received a yellow card and was suspended for the win over Bayern Munich in the final.

The Chinese club, based in Nanjing, already have a host of foreign players and their current coach is another former Chelsea player, Dan Petrescu.
Only Syrians invited to Geneva peace talks: UN

Only Syrians have been invited to peace talks in Geneva, the UN said Wednesday, in an apparent contradiction to Turkey's suggestion that it would be included.

On Tuesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara would "boycott" the talks set to open on Friday if the Syrian Kurdish group Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Ankara believes is linked to militants fighting inside Turkey, was at the negotiating table.

But Khawla Mattar, a spokeswoman for the UN's Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said there was "no plan to invite" non-Syrians when asked about the possible inclusion of observer delegations from Turkey, Russia, the United States or France.

A Kurdish fighter guards a checkpoint near the Syrian town of Ain Issi Delil Souleiman (AFP)

She declined to comment on which parties had been given invitations, which were issued by de Mistura on Tuesday.

Moscow has said the PYD's inclusion was key to the talks' success.

Turkey's objection threatens to be a major blow to the negotiations, which have already been delayed by a stalemate over the make-up of the opposition delegation.

Members of the Syrian opposition's so-called High Negotiations Committee (HNC) were meeting in Riyadh on Wednesday to decide whether to attend the UN-brokered talks.

The HNC has asked de Mistura to send the full list of proposed participants before making its decision.

Asked whether the UN envoy had complied, Mattar said there were "no pre-conditions" attached to joining the talks, suggesting the HNC would not be able to view the guest list before deciding whether to come to Geneva.
Obama urges swift action on Zika virus

US President Barack Obama has called for faster research on the quick-moving Zika virus, which is spread by mosquitoes and has been linked to a rise in birth defects in Brazil.

Obama on Tuesday urged better diagnostic tests and the development of vaccines and treatments against the virus, which the World Health Organization has said is likely to spread throughout the Americas.

As of now, there is no vaccine or medicine to treat Zika virus, and no way to prevent it other than by trying to avoid mosquito bites.

A lab researcher works with mosquitos on January 25, 2016 in Medellin, Antioquia department, Colombia Raul Arboleda (AFP/File)

Obama was briefed on the situation by top science experts in the US government, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health, according to a White House statement.

The CDC also expanded its travel warning for pregnant women and those considering becoming pregnant to avoid 24 areas in Latin America and the Caribbean that have seen cases of Zika virus.

Now, travelers are advised to postpone visits to the US Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic, along with Puerto Rico, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Saint Martin, Samoa, Suriname and Venezuela.

- US under threat -

There have not yet been any cases of local transmission of Zika virus within the United States, although infected travelers have returned to the country after visiting other areas.

However, a recent study in The Lancet suggests that Zika virus could reach regions of the United States in which 60 percent of the population lives, or some 200 million Americans.

"This highlights the need for NIH and its partners in the public and private sectors to intensify research on Zika virus and to look for new ways to treat the disease and prevent its spread," NIH director Francis Collins wrote on his blog.

Zika virus is spread to people primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito, according to the CDC.

Symptoms are usually mild and may include fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis.

However, the virus can pass from a pregnant women to her fetus, and global health authorities are concerned by an apparent link between Zika virus and nearly 4,000 cases of babies born with unusually small heads -- a condition known as microcephaly -- in Brazil.

Collins stressed that more research is needed to prove if there is any cause-and-effect between the Zika virus and brain defects.

Meanwhile, experts are also concerned about "reports in French Polynesia and Brazil of a possible connection between Zika infection and Guillain-Barre syndrome, a mysterious condition in which the immune system attacks part of the peripheral nervous system," said the NIH director.

He added that US health authorities are "mobilizing swiftly" to respond to Zika, and researchers at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases are already "working on vaccine candidates to prevent Zika virus from infecting people."

The first documented case of human infection with Zika virus was in 1952, according to the World Health Organization.
Republican voters don't see Trump as religious: poll

Most Americans do not believe Donald Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, is very religious or even religious at all, says a poll released Wednesday.

That could be an obstacle for the billionaire turned politician in a country where most Americans say they would be less likely to vote for someone as president who does not believe in God.

The poll by the Pew Research Center found that nearly 60 percent of Americans believe Trump is either not religious enough (22 percent) or not religious at all (37 percent).

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets guests at a rally on January 26, 2016 in Marshalltown, Iowa Scott Olson (Getty/AFP)

Only 30 percent said Trump, who identifies as a Presbyterian, is religious enough (25 percent) or "very" religious (five percent.)

Among Republicans, 47 percent don't regard Trump as religious.

"The conventional wisdom in American politics has long been that someone who is not religious cannot be elected president of the United States," Pew said.

And yet, the poll also found that 56 percent of Republicans consider Trump to be a "good" or "great" candidate.

On that question, Trump scored better than Senator Ted Cruz, a Baptist; former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Seventh Day Adventist; and Senator Marco Rubio, a Roman Catholic.

By far, more Americans see all three Trump rivals for the Republican nomination as religious -- 65 percent, 68 percent and 61 percent respectively.

Americans are more evenly divided on the subject of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner: 43 percent regard the Methodist candidate as either not religious or not religious enough, while 48 percent believe she is religious enough or very religious.

Her main Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, says he is "not particularly religious" -- a view shared by about 40 percent of Americans. But only 35 percent say he falls short on religion, compared to Clinton's higher numbers on that question.

The poll found that 51 percent of Americans said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who does not believe in God, but to 46 percent it didn't matter. Only six percent said they were more likely to vote for a non-believer.

"Being an atheist remains one of the biggest liabilities that a presidential candidate can have," Pew said.

The poll found some signs of changing attitudes, however. The percentage of Americans who say they would be less likely to vote for an atheist is down 12 points from 2007 in the Pew poll.

If the candidate were Muslim, 42 percent of Americans said they would not vote for him or her. But 53 percent said it would not make a difference. Only three percent said they would be more likely to vote for a Muslim presidential candidate.
UK's Cameron under fire for 'bunch of migrants' comment

British Prime Minister David Cameron came under fire in parliament on Wednesday for referring to "a bunch of migrants" in Calais, with opposition MPs condemning his words as "divisive" and "shocking".

Cameron was speaking about a visit last week by opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn to migrant camps in Dunkirk and Calais in northern France.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais. They said they could all come to Britain," he said.

People in Calais on January 23, 2016 rally in support of migrants living in the Jungle camp Francois Lo Presti (AFP)

Yvette Cooper, who chairs the Labour Party's refugee task force, said that Cameron's words, made during parliament's weekly Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) session, were inappropriate for a "complex and sensitive" issue.

"Cameron very wrong to talk of 'a bunch of migrants' in . Divisive, not statesmanlike," she tweeted.

Labour MP Imran Hussain said it was "shocking" and a senior Labour source said it was "entirely unacceptable to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep".

The quote was also quickly picked up on social media, with many commenters pointing out that Cameron used similarly pejorative language last year when he referred to migrants in Calais as a "swarm".

Many tweets also included poignant images of Europe's migrant crisis alongside Cameron's words and pointed out the irony of his earlier tribute to the victims of Nazi repressions on Holocaust Memorial Day.

"Today it struck an especially discordant note," columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian.

"One of the lessons of the Shoah... is that is all too easy to dehumanise other people, to turn them from human beings with lives and needs and hopes into a problem to be repelled," he said.

"To speak the way he did was beneath the office he holds -- and beneath him," he concluded.

Corbyn, a veteran left-wing campaigner before he became Labour party leader, visited two migrants camps saying he wanted to see the crisis for himself and calling on Britain to do more to address the problem.

French riot police officer patrol alongside the A16 motorway near the entrance to the Channel tunnel on January 21, 2016 Philippe Huguen (AFP)
'Dramatic rise' in DR Congo rights abuses, UN warns

The United Nations warned Wednesday of a sharp rise in rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, holding government officials responsible for half of them as political tensions rise ahead of uncertain presidential elections.

Jose Maria Aranaz, the UN's rights chief in DR Congo, told a press conference his office had "reported a dramatic rise in human rights violations" in 2015, a 64 percent increase in cases compared to 2014.

"In total, we have registered 3,847 violations of human rights violations in the territory," he said as he presented his annual report, adding that the situation in the nation's Orientale, as well as North and South Kivu regions were the worst affected.

The UN rights chief in DR Congo says his office had "reported a dramatic rise in human rights violations" with the situation in North and South Kivu provinces among the worst affected Federico Scoppa (AFP/File)

The UN believes government officials committed 49 percent of the reported violations, which included 294 extrajudicial killings.

Aranaz's office said 260 of the cases were linked to DR Congo's fraught electoral process, which has seen political tensions soar.

The opposition accuses President Joseph Kabila, in power since 2001, of trying to cling to power despite being banned under the constitution from running again after his mandate expires in December.

Last week some 5,000 people protested in the eastern city of Bukavu to demand the elections are held on schedule by the end of 2016. But as electoral registers are badly out of date, this appears increasingly unlikely.

Kabila, re-elected in 2011 after a vote marked by massive fraud, has proposed holding a "national dialogue" with a view to ensuring elections that would be peaceful, but delayed.

His opponents are split between those willing to take part in the process and those insisting the vote must be held on schedule, deriding the "national dialogue" as a stalling mechanism to keep Kabila in power.

The UN, rights groups and the opposition have repeatedly deplored political repression by Congolese authorities in recent months.

Aranaz said Wednesday that his office is concerned by a "reduction in the political space and the restriction of public freedoms" which he said "runs contrary to the spirit of credible elections".

Recent opposition protests in the capital Kinshasa and the southeastern city of Lubumbashi have been suppressed by police, including planned demonstrations to mark the death of dozens of people in anti-government riots a year ago.
Megyn Kelly: the US journalist feared by Trump

Megyn Kelly, the American television journalist whom Donald Trump demanded Fox News dump from the Republican debate, is one of the most watched and powerful anchors in US cable news.

The billionaire's decision to skip the debate, days before Iowa becomes the first state to vote in the 2016 presidential election process, has jettisoned the 45-year-old blonde mother of three back into the headlines.

"I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!" the Republican frontrunner tweeted in a customary insult Wednesday.

An August 6, 2015 photo shows presidential primary debate moderator Megyn Kelly (C) flanked by fellow moderators Chris Wallace (L) and Bret Baier (R) Mandel Ngan (AFP/File)

"What (Trump's) not free to do and what no news organization would allow, would be for him to... dictate the terms of the debate," Kelly wrote to her more than 1.4 million followers.

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes stood firmly behind the woman whose prime time show "The Kelly File" is the second-most watched program in American cable TV news on the most-watched cable news channel.

"Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist," he told The Washington Post. "She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night."

A former corporate litigator, Kelly joined Fox in 2004 as a television reporter from Washington DC, rising rapidly through the ranks thanks to her good looks, fierce ambition and clear intelligence.

Lampooned by satirists in 2013 for telling children on air that Jesus and Santa Claus were white, she has nonetheless burnished the journalism credentials of a network best known for Republican partisanship.

She won accolades in 2014 for challenging former vice president Dick Cheney over the invasion of Iraq. "Time and time again history has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir," she said.

"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?" she asked strategist Karl Rove, who questioned whether Barack Obama had been re-elected on the night of the 2012 presidential election.

In 2014 she was the only woman journalist listed on the TIME 100: The Most Influential People in the World list.

She has also won support across the political spectrum for taking guests to task over lack of support for maternity leave and defending the increase in female breadwinners.

But it was her run-in with Trump last August during the first Republican TV debate of the 2016 election that shot her to much wider fame.

She and two male colleagues moderated the debate, which pulled in a record 24 million viewers. When Trump took offense to her tough questions, he insinuated that she treated him unfairly because she was menstruating.

"You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever," Trump told CNN afterward.
Coalition adapts Iraq training to breach IS defences

US-led coalition troops have adapted their training for Iraqi forces to teach them how to breach Islamic State group defences in larger-scale combined assaults on jihadist strongholds.

IS, which overran large parts of Iraq in 2014, has saturated territory it controls with bombs, booby-traps and other obstacles that Iraqi forces must break through to drive the jihadists back.

Military operations in Ramadi, which was recaptured from IS at the end of last month, as well as other cities and towns showed the need for training in which soldiers combine different capabilities to breach jihadist defences.

US soldiers chat as they train Iraq's 72nd Brigade in a live-fire exercise in Basmaya base, southeast of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, on January 27, 2016 Ahmad Al-Rubaye (AFP)

The training "is based on the lessons that we learned watching the challenges in Ramadi... and Tikrit and Sinjar and Baiji," said Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, the commander of the international operation against IS.

"It's not about defeating IEDs (improvised explosive devices); it's about breaching obstacles," MacFarland said following a training exercise at the Besmaya base near Baghdad.

The aim of live-fire exercises of this kind is to practice integrating "infantry, armour, engineers and indirect fire to overwhelm the enemy and combine the effects on an enemy force", he said.

Two brigades -- the 71st and 72nd -- have been through the new training, with the latter finishing the final exercise of more than two months of instruction on Wednesday.

During the exercise, 72nd Brigade soldiers combined mortar fire for smoke cover, engineers equipped with mine-clearing charges and bulldozers to open gaps in defences, and infantry in armoured vehicles to provide covering fire and then advance toward the objective.

A Mine-Clearing Line Charge fired from a trailer early in the exercise was the most dramatic weapon employed, sending a massive cloud of smoke and dust sweeping over the field as it opened a path for soldiers to advance.

But the soldiers also have a smaller clearing charge known as the APOBS -- Anti-Personnel Obstacle Breaching System -- as well as bulldozers to clear obstacles including the dirt berms that IS frequently erects.

- 'A conventional army' -

"The skills that they've been taught here now are all a product of stuff that we've bean learning from Ramadi," Brigadier James Learmont, the deputy commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq, said at Besmaya.

"You see what they've (the jihadists) got in Ramadi, these massive minefields which they put everywhere," he said. "Ramadi as a city is littered with improvised explosive devices, booby traps."

"We literally had to go back to the drawing board and say, 'OK, what do we need in order to actually defeat this?' And it is coming back to (this) breaching," he said.

For this mission, the engineers are key, but they cannot operate alone and unprotected, while infantry are also needed to capitalise on gaps in enemy defences.

"You can't just allow engineers to go forward, 'cause they're vulnerable," Learmont said.

"That's why you see the overwhelming application of fire... to give them the necessary support to keep the heads of (IS) down."

IS has moved on from the insurgent tactics of past years to become a force that holds territory and uses tactics like those of a regular army, the officers said.

"They're fighting very much like a conventional force," MacFarland said.

Learmont agreed, saying that IS "actually is a conventional army in its own right, and it's using weapons systems like a conventional army."

Coalition forces have been training Iraqi troops since 2014.

But the combined arms exercise at Besmaya -- where Spanish forces have been leading the training, with other countries also involved -- is a more advanced level of instruction.

"In the past... we concentrated on firing the rifle, basic skills. But now we've advanced past the basic skills to... what we would describe as collective training," Learmont said.

The Iraqi soldiers will soon be relying on that training in combat.

"We are preparing and training forces to fight (IS)," Learmont said. "They will literally finish here, and they'll go into the front line."

Military personnel arrive in a Chinook before Iraqi soldiers take part in a live-fire exercise under the surveillance of US-led coalition forces at Basmaya base, southeast of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, on January 27, 2016 Ahmad Al-Rubaye (AFP)
Air India bomber released from Canadian prison

The only person ever convicted over the 1985 Air India bombings that killed 331 people was released from a Canadian prison on Wednesday after serving two decades behind bars.

Inderjit Singh Reyat, a Sikh immigrant from India, served two-thirds of a nine-year sentence for perjury in one of the deadliest airline attacks in history, said a spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada, confirming his release.

Reyat -- convicted of lying in court to cover for his co-accused -- previously served more than 15 years in prison for making the bombs that were stuffed into two suitcases and planted on planes leaving Vancouver.

This June 6, 2001 artist's rendering shows Air India bombing suspect Inderjit Singh Reyat in a Vancouver courtroom

One bomb tore apart Air India Flight 182 as it neared the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard, including entire families. The second exploded at Japan's Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers as they transferred cargo to another Air India plane.

The near-simultaneous bombings on opposite sides of the world took place during an Indian crackdown on Sikhs fighting for an independent homeland, and those behind it were allegedly seeking revenge for the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Indian troops.

Reyat was working as a mechanic in westernmost Canada and had purchased the dynamite, batteries and detonators used to construct the bombs.

The person who later checked the baggage containing the explosive devices at the Vancouver airport never boarded the jetliners.

Bal Gupta, who lost his wife in the attacks, said he would never be able to forgive those responsible.

"We have learned to live our lives slowly, but a thing like this, the wounds are deep," he told public broadcaster CBC.

"It's not only me," he said, recounting the lives lost of 86 children under the age of 12 and the 29 families that were "completely wiped out."

"If I had to face him (Reyat), I would tell him that if you have any shred of humanity in you, come forward and tell the name of the conspirators that worked with you... and be honest so that the criminals can face their time and justice will be done," he said.

- 'Unmitigated liar' -

In 2010, Reyat was convicted of lying while testifying in the mass murder trial of alleged co-conspirators Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, who were later acquitted for a lack of evidence.

He had avoided being tried alongside the pair by pleading guilty to lesser manslaughter charges, and was called to testify about the plot.

Prosecutors say the verdict in the trial of Malik and Bagri would have been different if Reyat had told the truth on the stand instead of protecting his alleged co-conspirators, while Judge Ian Josephson called him "an unmitigated liar."

His nine-year perjury sentence was the longest ever handed down by a Canadian court.

Reyat has been ordered to live at a halfway house until August 2018, when his perjury sentence will expire, and abide by several strict conditions set by the parole board, including having no contact with victims' families or alleged co-conspirators, and no political activities.

He must also have counseling to address violent tendencies, a lack of empathy and "cognitive distortions" -- or what one official described as his exaggerated beliefs.

A 2013 psychologist's report found that Reyat lacks "true empathy and remorse" for the bombing victims, and he has only recently accepted a small measure of responsibility for his crimes.

He also maintains his affiliation to a group of Sikh nationalists based in Canada, although the ties were "inactive" during his incarceration, according to the parole board.

"If at any time his parole officer feels there's a risk to the community he can return Mr. Reyat to prison," parole board spokesman Patrick Storey told AFP.
Replace pipes that 'poisoned' Flint water, lawsuit demands

The downtrodden US city of Flint was poisoned in a misguided drive by penny-pinching officials to save money, a lawsuit filed Wednesday claimed, demanding that corroded lead pipes that contaminate its tap water be immediately replaced.

Officials are accused of ignoring months of health warnings about foul-smelling and discolored water, even as residents complained it was making them sick.

"In a failed attempt to save a few bucks, state-appointed officials poisoned the drinking water of an important American city, causing permanent damage to an entire generation of its children," Michael Steinberg, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, said in announcing the lawsuit.

Matt Hopper holds and comforts Nyla Hopper, age 5, after she has her blood drawn to be tested for lead on January 26, 2016 in Flint, Michigan Brett Carlsen (Getty/AFP)

"The people of Flint cannot trust the state of Michigan to fix this man-made disaster and that is why court oversight is critically needed."

Governor Rick Snyder -- who faces calls to resign over his handling of the scandal -- appointed a team of outside experts Wednesday to help the state resolve Flint's water crisis and deal with the long-term health impacts.

In an interview with CNN Wednesday he admitted the number of children harmed by lead in the water is likely much higher than tests have so far revealed.

"There could be many more," the governor told CNN, "and we're assuming that."

About 100 children have tested positive for elevated blood lead levels. But since those tests only show recent exposure, Snyder said officials are concerned that the problem is much more widespread.

Lead exposure is harmful to everyone. But it can have devastating impacts on young children by irreversibly harming brain development. It has been shown to lower intelligence, stunt growth and lead to aggressive and anti-social behavior.

Water treatment plants across the United States are required to closely monitor lead levels in tap water and use chemicals to reduce acidity and coat pipes to prevent corrosion.

Snyder vowed at a news conference to help "address the damage that's been done" in the predominantly poor and black city of 100,000.

But he stopped short of promising to replace the pipes, which began leaching lead after Flint switched to a cheaper but dangerously corrosive water supply.

"It's a lot of work to take out pipes, to redo the infrastructure," Snyder told reporters.

"The short-term solution is to hopefully recoat, and have it validated by third parties so we know the water is safely coming out."

- $1.5 billion fix -

Flint's mayor has estimated that the cost of fixing the damage done to the city's infrastructure by the corrosive water could reach $1.5 billion.

The cash-strapped city was reportedly hoping to save $5 million over two years by drawing water from the Flint River beginning in April 2014 rather than continuing to buy it from nearby Detroit.

The state's environment department approved the switch even though the city's treatment plant was not able to produce water that met state and federal standards.

It cost $12 million to switch Flint back to the Detroit water system in October after a local pediatrician released a study showing that the number of children with elevated blood-lead levels had doubled since the city began using river water.

- Nation's pipes need replacing -

Activists and environmentalists says the state now needs to spend whatever it takes to make sure the water is safe to drink.

"For years the state told us we were crazy, that our water was safe, which wasn't true," said Melissa Mays of Water You Fighting For, a Flint-based organization which joined the ACLU and the Natural Resources Defense Council in filing the lawsuit.

"For the sake of my kids and the people of Flint, we need a federal court to fix Flint's water problems because these city and state agencies failed us on their own."

Replacing all the lead pipes in Flint would take years and cause major disruption for residents because roads would need to be shut down to dig them out of the ground, said Greg DiLoreto of the American Society for Civil Engineers.

But while short-term fixes might be able to resolve Flint's lead problems for now, replacing those pipes is something that Flint -- and most other American cities -- has to start planning for, he told AFP.

A large proportion of the nation's water systems were built in the early 20th century and some pipes date back to the late 1800s.

"No engineer designed any system to last 150 years," DiLoreto said in a telephone interview.

"This is like your house. At some point you're going to have to put a new roof on it."

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder speaks to the media regarding the status of the Flint water crisis on January 27, 2016 at Flint City Hall in Flint, Michigan Brett Carlsen (Getty/AFP)

Tears stream down the face of Morgan Walker, 5, as she gets her finger pricked for a lead screening on January 26, 2016 in Flint, Michigan Brett Carlsen (Getty/AFP)
Tunisia PM defends policies in face of unrest

Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid defended his government Wednesday before parliament, faced with unemployment and poverty at the root of the worst social unrest since the 2011 revolution.

"We have tried, as far as possible, to improve the situation," he told a special parliamentary session on last week's protests that led to clashes with security forces in which dozens of people were injured, mostly in disadvantaged central Tunisia.

"We could make people quieten down by telling them, 'We are going to create 1,000 jobs' ... but we want to tell the people the truth," he said.

Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid addresses the parliament over the ongoing wave of social unrest, on January 27, 2016, in the capital Tunis Fethi Belaid (AFP)

"We've started to find solutions. We don't have solutions for everybody but we do have some solutions," the prime minister said, without giving specifics.

"The responsibility (to find solutions) lies not only with the government," said Essid, urging opposition parties and civil society to join forces with his administration to address people's demands.

But his appeal was spurned by critics in parliament who demanded "real solutions".

"We do not want a government that sells illusions and inspires despair," said Hassouna Nasfi, one of around two dozen lawmakers who recently quit President Beji Caid Essebsi's Nidaa Tounes party.

Others called for measures to tackle graft -- a major grievance of protesters.

"The revolution of dignity has become the revolution of corruption," said Hafedh Zouari of the Afek Tounes party.

A nationwide nightime curfew was imposed Friday after the protests, which started in the central town of Kasserine where an unemployed man died of electrocution during a January 16 protest over the lack of economic prospects in the region.

The unrest, the worst since the revolution five years ago that ousted longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, spread to several other towns and to Tunis where shops were burned and looted in one suburb.

The demonstrations have ebbed in recent days although a few were held on Monday.

While Tunisia is considered a rare success story of the 2011 regional uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the authorities have failed to resolve the problems of social exclusion and regional inequalities.

The economy barely grew last year and unemployment is above 15 percent. For young graduates, it is twice as bad.

Essid stressed he understands the frustrations but "has no magic wand" to solve a situation he said was inherited by his government.

Apart from the economic damage wrought by political instability in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, two attacks by the Islamic State jihadist group last year targeting foreigners killed 60 people, battering Tunisia's vital tourism industry.

The group was also behind a suicide bombing in Tunis in November that killed 12 presidential guards and prompted the authorities to declare a nationwide state of emergency that remains in place.

The recent social unrest echoes the public anger that erupted after the death of young fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi in the central town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2011.

Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at unemployment and police harassment, sparking the uprising that toppled Ben Ali -- whose rule was tainted by graft accusations -- and inspiring the Arab Spring revolts.

Faced with growing public discontent, Essid earlier this month replaced his foreign and interior ministers in the first reshuffle since taking office in late 2014.

Tunisian protesters clash with security forces in the central town of Kasserine on January 21, 2016 Mohamed Khalil (AFP/File)
Court upholds jail terms for 5 Egypt activists

An Egyptian court on Wednesday upheld two-year prison sentences for five secular opposition activists convicted of joining illegal demonstrations staged in memory of protests that were violently suppressed.

On November 19, 2011, protests were held near Cairo's Tahrir Square against the military junta that took over after the popular uprising that January and February which ended the rule of president Hosni Mubarak.

The 10 days of protests that followed claimed 42 lives in clashes between demonstrators and security forces.

Members of the Egyptian police special forces stand guard on Cairo's landmark Tahrir Square on January 25, 2016, as the country marks the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising Mohamed El-Shahed (AFP/File)

A Cairo appeals court on Wednesday confirmed two-year jail terms for the five, among them a surgeon and an activist from a small leftist party.

According to a court official and a defence lawyer, they were accused of taking part in an event in November 2015 in memory of the violence four years earlier.

In December, they were convicted of attending gatherings, blocking roads and "demonstrating without a permit", the sources said.

They can still appeal to the Court of Cassation.

Wednesday's ruling coincides with the fifth anniversary of the uprising that erupted on January 25, 2011 and led to Mubarak's fall.

Defence lawyer Anas Sayyid told AFP that the five were arrested last November "in an arbitrary manner, in an area where there were not even any demonstrations".

Since the military removed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, again taking the reins of power it had controlled for decades before the 2011 uprising, the authorities have ruthlessly repressed any opposition.

Limited at first to Morsi supporters, the crackdown later spread to secular and leftist movements that took part in the revolt against Mubarak.

Rights group Amnesty International called Wednesday's verdict "yet another example of the unfair and arbitrary nature of Egypt's criminal justice system".

An Amnesty statement said at least two of those convicted "say they were tortured and ill-treated during interrogation".

"Their case is one more appalling example of the relentless government campaign to crush independent and critical voices and activists in Egypt today," said the London-based rights organisation.

Meanwhile, the trial of four activists on charges of "incitement to strike", due to begin on Wednesday, has been postponed until next Monday, a judicial official said.
'Long way to go' on race in S. Africa: Mandela friend

A former prison comrade of Nelson Mandela said Wednesday there was "a long way to go" on race relations in South Africa, as he and others received a high-profile honour in London.

Denis Goldberg, an anti-apartheid activist who was jailed alongside Mandela in 1964 and was his friend for over half a century, said South Africa had come "a tremendously long way" since the end of apartheid in 1994.

"But the racial segregation was burnt into the minds of every South African," he added. "There is still a long way to go."

South African politician Ahmed Kathrada (L) and South African social campaigner Denis Goldberg (R) pose holding certificates of their award of the Freedom of the City of London during a ceremony at the Guildhall in London on January 27, 2016 Ben Stansall (AFP)

Goldberg, who is 82, made the comments as he and fellow activist Ahmed Kathrada received the freedom of the City of London alongside their former lawyers George Bizos and Joel Joffe.

Previous figures given the honour include Mandela himself plus Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill and Diana, princess of Wales.

The freedom of a city is a symbolic honour given to individuals to recognise their contribution to society.

The City of London has been giving out the honour since 1237.

Its freemen have the right to drive sheep and cattle over London Bridge, which crosses the Thames, but this and other such arcane privileges are seldom exercised.

Among others attending the ceremony was Mandela's granddaughter Tukwini.

"There's a lot of work that still needs to be done in South Africa but I'm hopeful," she told AFP.

"The young people of South Africa are really hopeful about South Africa's future and they really want to contribute to the political process so my feeling is one of great hope."
Libya asks to be labelled top health emergency by WHO

Libya on Wednesday asked the World Health Organization to raise the emergency level in the country to the highest category, saying it would help mobilise resources for people in need.

There are currently five crises that WHO has classified as "level-three" health emergencies: Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and the parts of west Africa hit hardest by Ebola.

In principle, the classification calls for maximum medical personnel and supplies in to be sent to the crisis zone.

Libyan army soliders and citizens gather outside Benghazi's Al-Jalal hospital as wounded victims from clashes between Libyan Special Forces and Ansar al-Sharia militiamen are rushed in to be treated on November 25, 2013 Abdullah Doma (AFP/File)

"We are asking the WHO today to raise the emergency level for the health system in Libya to the highest possible level," the country's health minister Reida El Oakley told reporters in Geneva.

He said persistent fighting in the conflict-scarred country had forced the closure or partial breakdown of 60 to 70 percent of the country's hospitals and that the country needed $3 million (2.7 million euros) per day to buy medicine.

He added that collapsing oil prices had also hit revenues in the crude producing country, which is hoping to begin emerging from crisis after an agreement on a new unity government was reached earlier this month.
Sudan orders borders with S.Sudan to be reopened: media

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on Wednesday ordered the reopening of the country's contested borders with South Sudan, state media reported after a dispute that in 2012 led to armed conflict.

Relations between Juba and Khartoum had been tense since South Sudan's secession split in 2011 under a peace deal that ended a bloody 22-year civil war, with disputes over several areas along the border.

"Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir, president of the republic, issued a resolution today (Wednesday) opening the border with the state of South Sudan," the Sudanese state news agency SUNA's website said.

South Sudanese refugees wait at a Sudanese border checkpoint in Joda, where Sudan's White Nile state meets the South's Upper Nile, after fleeing battles between rebel and government forces on January 16, 2014 Ashraf Shazly (AFP/File)

The brief statement also said Bashir had ordered the "competent authorities to take all measures for the implementation of this resolution on the ground", but gave no further details.

Juba and Khartoum had remained at odds since 2011 on several unresolved issues from the secession, including the frontier.

The two briefly battled for the Heglig oilfield in April 2012 on the frontier before Sudan took the area.

Bashir's move came days after media reports that South Sudanese President Salva Kiir ordered his troops to withdraw to five miles (eight kilometres) from the border with Sudan.

At independence, South Sudan took most of the formerly united country's oil resources with it, but agreed to pay transit fees to Khartoum for using its pipelines and facilities.

Last week Bashir agreed to review those fees following a request from Juba to lower them.

South Sudan descended into civil war in December 2013 when fighting erupted between forces loyal to Kiir and his then deputy Riek Machar, splitting the country along ethnic lines.
UN's Ban in new swipe at Israel over 'stifling' occupation

Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday renewed his criticism of Israel's "stifling" occupation of Palestinian territories, a day after similar hard-hitting remarks by the UN Secretary-General angered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The UN chief made clear that he would not retreat from the broadside he directed at Israel over its expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

UN diplomats said privately that Ban had upped the pressure on Netanyahu in a final bid to revive hopes for peace before he steps down as secretary-general at the end of the year.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon speaks during a Holocaust memorial ceremony on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust at the UN in New York on January 27, 2016 Jewel Samad (AFP)

"After nearly 50 years of occupation -- after decades of waiting for the fulfilment of the Oslo promises -- Palestinians are losing hope," Ban told a UN committee on Palestinian rights.

"Young people especially are losing hope. They are angered by the stifling policies of the occupation."

Netanyahu on Tuesday accused Ban of "encouraging terror" after Ban said that it was "human nature to react to occupation."

Speaking to the UN committee, Ban reiterated that "nothing excuses terror," but added that a security clampdown will not succeed in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The UN chief called for a return to negotiations, saying it was the "one and only path to a just and lasting solution -- an end to the occupation that began in 1967" and a Palestinian state.

"You can count on me to continue to speak up and speak out -- to push and to prod -- to do all in my power to achieve long-overdue Israeli-Palestinian peace," he said.

Ban said Palestinians had heard "half a century of statements" condemning Israel's occupation, but that their lives had not improved.

"We issue statements. We express concern. We voice solidarity. But life hasnt changed. And some Palestinians wonder: Is this all meant to simply run out the clock?

"They ask: Are we meant to watch as the world endlessly debates how to divide land while it disappears before our very eyes?"

The UN chief's sharp criticism of Israel came amid ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence and recent Israeli decisions to build new Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Syria conference to urge doubling of financial contributions: UK

A Syria donors' conference in London next week will urge participating countries to double the amount of money they are giving to tackle the humanitarian crisis, Downing Street said Wednesday.

On a call between the leaders of Britain, Germany and Norway, they agreed "that all countries in attendance should look to at least double their 2015 financial contribution to the crisis," Prime Minister David Cameron's office said in a statement.

Britain, Germany and Norway are co-hosting the event on February 4 with the United Nations and Kuwait. Leaders from around the world are expected to attend.

Artillery casings are seen on the ground after Syrian pro-government forces retook the town of Sheikh Miskeen in southern Daraa province from rebel forces on January 26, 2015

They will discuss how to help 13.5 million people who are either vulnerable or displaced inside Syria, as well as 4.2 million people who have fled to neighbouring countries like Jordan and Lebanon.

Last year, UN agencies asked for $8.4 billion (7.7 billion euros) from governments worldwide to fund the Syrian aid effort but received only $3.3 billion.

The call between Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg also agreed that the conference would bid to "secure an ambitious package of measures to spur economic growth and enable thousands of Syrian refugees across the region to work, as well as helping host countries deal with the impact."

Cameron also spoke to Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who promised "high-level attendance" from his country at the talks, Downing Street said.

More than a million migrants and refugees, many from Syria, crossed into Europe last year.

This has caused the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II and prompted the European Union to consider allowing states in the passport-free Schengen zone to reintroduce border checks for up to two years.
Heavy rains cause flooding, strain power supplies in Gaza

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP)  Heavy rains caused widespread flooding in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, placing further strain on run-down infrastructure and power supplies in the blockaded Palestinian territory.

Rescue services used paddle boards to evacuate residents from a dozen flooded homes. Pools formed on main roads due to the poor drainage network.

Some 1.8 million people live in the coastal enclave, which is controlled by the Islamic militant group Hamas.

A Palestinian man drives his horse-drawn cart through a flooded beach-side street, in Gaza City, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Gazans can expect only three hours of electricity as demand on the already-loaded power grid in winter increases when there is a rainstorm. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

Hamas said dozens of chickens had died in Gaza farms. At one chicken coop, workers waded through waist-high water to retrieve dead birds and eggs.

Frequent power cuts and gas shortages have worsened due to the inclement weather, and some residents are burning wood to keep warm.

Mahmoud al-Shawa of the gas distributors' union says not enough gas is entering the territory.

Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza when Hamas seized the territory from the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in 2007.

Palestinian children walk in the rain on their way to buy breakfast from a neighborhood restaurant, in Gaza City, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

A Palestinian vendor pushes his cotton candy cart during a rainstorm, in Gaza City, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

Palestinians sit around wood set alight in a fireplace outside their home in Gaza City, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. Gazans get only three hours of electricity a day as demand on the already-scarce power increased since a rainstorm hit the area. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
Kerry presses China on North Korea, South China Sea

BEIJING (AP)  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called Wednesday for China to do more to rein in North Korea's nuclear activities and decrease tensions over disputed parts of the South China Sea.

Wrapping up an eight-day, around-the-world diplomatic mission in Beijing, Kerry hailed U.S.-China cooperation on several issues, including the Iran nuclear deal and climate change, but said consensus on North Korea and the South China Sea remained a work in progress.

"Clearly we have several important issues that we need to find the way forward on," Kerry told reporters as he began his meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Kerry called North Korea "a major challenge to global security" and noted U.S. "concerns and activities in the South China Sea."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, shakes hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi ahead of their meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, on the final leg of the secretary's latest round-the-world diplomatic mission. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)

"We have proven ... when our two countries find common ground and work together, we can make things happen," he said. "And it is my hope that today will be constructive and we will find a way forward."

In his opening remarks, Wang mentioned both issues briefly and said he was eager to hear what Kerry had to say. But he offered no hint as to whether China would respond to the entreaties beyond saying he hoped the two nations would be able "to deepen our understanding and mutual trust to deepen our strategic cooperation."

The U.S. badly wants China to take a firmer stance in urging North Korea to end its nuclear testing. China is North Korea's main link to the outside world, and American officials say Beijing isn't doing enough to persuade North Korea to stop the tests and return to disarmament talks.

The so-called six-party talks between the North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan have been stalled since they were last held in December 2008. Pyongyang has since conducted three nuclear tests, including the latest on Jan. 6, sparking worries the country has made progress in its bomb program.

Kerry, who after meeting with Wang was set to see State Councilor Yang Jiechi and hoped to meet later with President Xi Jinping, also called on China to halt land reclamation and construction in disputed areas of the South China Sea, which have alarmed its smaller neighbors.

Kerry arrived in China from stops in Laos and Cambodia, where he called on the two members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to present a united front in dealing with increasing Chinese assertiveness over the South China Sea claims. His visits to Vientiane and Phnom Penh come ahead of a summit with the leaders of all 10 ASEAN nations that President Barack Obama will host next month in California.

China, which claims sovereignty of much of the territory in the South China Sea, rejects claims from countries like the Philippines and Vietnam and has bristled at U.S. warnings that its activities threaten the freedom of navigation in some of the world's busiest commercial shipping lanes. Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei also have overlapping claims in the strategically vital sea, through which around $5 trillion in world trade passes each year.

The U.S. says it takes no position on the claims but says developments in the South China Sea are a national security interest. It has urged that the disputes be settled peacefully and that a binding code of conduct be established for the area.

Tensions have been especially high since Beijing transformed seven disputed reefs into islands, where it is now constructing runways and facilities that rival claimants say can be used militarily. China has said it built the islands primarily to foster safe civilian sea travel and fishing.

In response, the U.S. sent a guided-missile destroyer close to one of the Chinese-built islands, called Subi Reef, in October in a challenge to Beijing's territorial claims, sparking warnings from China. U.S. officials vowed to continue maneuvers to protect freedom of navigation and overflight.

Recent developments, including China's movement of an oil rig into a zone disputed with Vietnam and warnings against Philippines overflight of what it claims to be its territory, have raised those levels of concern. China dismisses the warnings as unwarranted, but has harshly criticized a U.S.-Philippines defense pact that allows American forces, warships and planes to be based temporarily in local military camps. China says that will "escalate tensions and undermine peace and stability in the region," echoing language the United States uses to criticize China's actions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, listens to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during their meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, on the final leg in his latest round-the-world diplomatic mission. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)
Medics beat blizzard to make transplant happen

STONY BROOK, N.Y. (AP)  Melanie Chirichella had been waiting a year and a half for a kidney transplant when she finally got the call from her doctors Saturday that they had found a perfect match in South Carolina.

"It was like a miracle," the 64-year-old told The Associated Press. "When she called and said, 'We have a kidney for you,' I almost fell off the bed."

But there was a problem: A blizzard was raging up and down the East Coast. The medical team would have to beat the elements and the clock to make sure the transplant surgery happened while the organ, taken from a brain-dead patient on Friday morning, was still usable.

Paramedic Pete Amato, left, answers questions during an interview while visiting with Stony Brook University Hospital patient Melanie Chirichella, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Stony Brook, N.Y. Amato navigated through whiteout conditions during Saturday's blizzard to take her nearly 20 miles to the hospital to receive a kidney transplant which she had been waiting for for nearly a year and a half. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

In the end, Chirichella got her new kidney, but it required a combination of daring and improvisation, maybe even a little recklessness. And more than once, it looked as if she and the organ might not even make it to the operating room.

At first, emergency crews told her there would be no way an ambulance could navigate through whiteout conditions to bring Chirichella the nearly 20 miles from her home in Bohemia, New York, to Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island.

But paramedic Pete Amato was undeterred. A decade ago, his brother had received a lifesaving kidney transplant. He knew there wouldn't be time to wait. He hopped behind the wheel of a hospital SUV, turned on the lights and sirens and hit the road.

"This needs to happen," Amato remembered thinking. "I knew the sense of urgency."

Ideally, doctors try to transplant a kidney within 24 hours of its removal, but that can be extended to 48 hours under the right conditions.

The kidney, plus a second one bound for a different patient at New York City's Presbyterian Hospital, had left Charleston, South Carolina, on a Delta flight Friday evening.

The storm had already begun to disrupt air travel by then, but this flight got through fine. Airlines are informed when a transplant organ is aboard and the flights get special status to avoid delays. The organs ride up front with the pilots.

The kidneys arrived at the New York City offices of the donation coordinator, LiveOn NY, at 9 p.m. Friday, just around the time the snow began to fall in New York. Then they had to undergo a battery of tests. Final results weren't available until 9 a.m. Saturday, when the wind was howling and the snow coming down hard. Driving was already treacherous.

Wilson Li, an organ preservationist at LiveOn, was given the job of delivering both kidneys with the help of a driver from the medical transportation company TransCare.

First stop was Presbyterian Hospital, perched high on a ridge in Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River. The SUV carrying the team got stuck trying to get up the hill and had to be pushed to the top by a city sanitation vehicle, Li said.

After the delivery, they ditched the SUV and waited 45 minutes for an ambulance for the 60-mile drive out to Long Island.

"It was really hard to see," Li said. "There was a lot of snow. A lot of wind."

A lot of ice, too. They stopped every 15 to 20 minutes to de-ice the windshield because the wipers couldn't keep up. But they kept going, delivering the kidney to Stony Brook at 4:12 p.m.

Meanwhile, Amato was delivering his own precious cargo  the patient.

As he drove along the Long Island Expressway, his SUV was nearly hit by a tractor-trailer and he watched a Jeep spin out of control.

"My fear was that someone was going to crash into us or that we'd get stuck," Amato said.

After undergoing the 3 1/2-hour operation, Chirichella, whose original kidneys were damaged by diabetes, is recovering well, doctors said.

On Tuesday, Amato visited Chirichella in her hospital room. As she saw him for the first time since he wheeled her into the hospital, Chirichella leaned over and kissed his cheek.

Amato recalled the moment he arrived at her door in the snow to take her to the hospital.

"I saw the look on your face  that shock when I got there," he said. "Somebody wanted us to meet."

___

This story has been corrected to show the spelling of Wilson's last name is Li, not Lee.

Melanie Chirichella answers questions during an interview in her room at Stony Brook University Hospital, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Stony Brook, N.Y. Chirichella was transported 20 miles by paramedic Pete Amato through whiteout conditions during Saturday's blizzard to receive a kidney transplant which she had been waiting for for nearly a year and a half. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Paramedic Pete Amato, left, talks with Stony Brook University Hospital patient Melanie Chirichella in her room, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Stony Brook, N.Y. Amato navigated through whiteout conditions during Saturday's blizzard to take her nearly 20 miles to the hospital to receive a kidney transplant which she had been waiting for for nearly a year and a half. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

In this Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016 photo provided by Paramedic Pete Amato, right, and his brother Greg Amato, left, wheel Melanie Chirichella into Stony Brook University Hospital, in Stony Brook, N.Y. Pete Amato navigated through whiteout conditions during Saturday's blizzard to take her nearly 20 miles to the hospital to receive a kidney transplant which she had been waiting for for about a year and a half. (Michael Beck/Stony Brook Hospital via AP)
Shots fired, 1 killed in arrest of Oregon militants

BURNS, Ore. (AP)  The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center in John Day, a Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests - including Bundy.

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. A more than 50-mile stretch of highway in Oregon has been closed near where an armed group has been occupying a national wildlife refuge. A group led by Ammon Bundy seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for "patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."

Those arrested were Ammon Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, all during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds and was treated at a hospital, the agencies said. Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported ( http://bit.ly/1nOammV ) that Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her father's death to the paper, saying "he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

Ammon Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement. "The leaders of this group are now in custody and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender."

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Deschutes County Major Incident Team and the Harney County District Attorney's Office.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West.

___

Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.

Sgt. Tom Hutchison stands in front of an Oregon State Police roadblock on Highway 395 on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 between John Day and Burns, Ore. The FBI on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a federal wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon for the past three weeks. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

FILE - In a Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016 file photo, Ammon Bundy speaks during an interview at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, near Burns, Ore. Authorities said Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, that Bundy, leader of the armed Oregon group, has been arrested. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired Tuesday during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said another person, Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, was arrested in Burns. In a statement, the FBI said one individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased." (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. A more than 50-mile stretch of highway in Oregon has been closed near where an armed group has been occupying a national wildlife refuge. A group led by Ammon Bundy seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
Immigration at center of Pope's visit to Mexico-US border

REYNOSA, Mexico (AP)  The young Salvadoran woman was robbed and forced to dodge kidnappers working for a drug cartel during her four-month odyssey to this border city of belching factories and swirling dust across the Rio Grande from Texas.

She hoped to be on the other side long before Pope Francis visits the region next month and delivers what promises to be a highly symbolic homily addressing immigration. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will flock to the border to hear him speak, and America's political class will likely be listening as well. Francis' Feb. 17 Mass in Ciudad Juarez comes just eight days after the New Hampshire primaries, and three before contests in South Carolina and Nevada.

Immigration has been a hot-button campaign issue particularly among Republican hopefuls such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who have taken an increasingly hard line with Trump vowing to deport the more than 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally and Cruz aiming to end birthright citizenship for their U.S.-born children. It is also an issue close to Francis' heart, and while analysts doubt he will wade too blatantly into the political thicket, his very presence along the border speaking on the issue will turn heads.

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, Central American migrants embrace as they wait for assistance at a center for newly-arrived migrant families with children, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. Assistance includes clothes, a meal, a shower and access to medical care. Migrants pass through the center after being processed by U.S. immigration authorities, who outfit parents with ankle monitors and ensure that migrants' relatives have purchased bus tickets for their onward journey within the U.S. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

"Migration is a complicated situation and he's not going to ignore the demands of national sovereignty ... (but) he's calling for a more open and generous approach," said Tom Quigley, former Latin America policy adviser for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "You can't assume that he's going to say 'You all come,' but he will clearly be urging the United States government, implicitly at least, to find ways of addressing the reasons why people are leaving El Salvador and Honduras and other countries."

For the Salvadoran woman, who gave only her last name, Miranda, all the talk makes little difference to her plans. She said she was not even aware the Pope was coming, and nothing Trump or the other candidates say can dissuade her from seeking a better life.

Back home in El Salvador  which last year recorded a homicide rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, believed to be the highest of any country not in open war  she faced death threats from hyper-violent gangs that rule entire neighborhoods largely unchallenged.

"It does not make you want to go less," Miranda said of the rhetoric, "because you know that immigration is never going to stop."

Violence is also rampant in neighboring Guatemala and Honduras, the latter of which had been the world's reigning murder capital in recent years. Gangs in all three countries kill with impunity, extort broad swaths of the population and recruit young people so aggressively that some stop attending school or even leaving home.

Living in many parts of those countries "is like living in a dark, dangerous, dead-end alley, and migration is a dark, dangerous tunnel  but it's a tunnel," said Kay Andrade Eekhoff, who works for Catholic Relief Services in El Salvador overseeing programs for at-risk Central American youth.

Statistics show that many continue to risk the tunnel, despite a surge in enforcement by the U.S. and by Mexico along its own southern frontier. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says apprehensions of unaccompanied children mostly from Central America totaled 17,370 in October-December. That was up 117 percent from the same period a year earlier, while apprehensions of families rose 187 percent. Still, total detentions remain well below historic highs.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Jan. 2 began rounding up Central American immigrants who entered without permission since May 2014.

Earlier this month Secretary of State John Kerry announced an expansion of a program letting Central Americans apply for refugee status before traveling north. But some say they may not qualify, or it's simply too dangerous to wait.

Those in a hurry include a 20-year-old man in San Salvador who was deported from the U.S. just months ago. On his last trip north, last summer, the Gulf drug cartel kidnapped and held him in Reynosa for five weeks until his family scraped together ransom. U.S. border agents later captured and sent him home. A police officer's son, he's now planning to try again after getting gang threats.

"They told me if I did not join them, something was going to happen to me or my dad," the man said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of gang reprisals.

Francis has made the plight of migrants one of the hallmarks of his papacy, denouncing what he called the "globalization of indifference" toward people desperate to flee poverty and persecution. He has taken his message of compassion to Lampedusa, Italy, destination for many African migrants, and to the European Union and the United Nations.

Last fall in the U.S. Congress, Francis lectured lawmakers that "we must not be taken aback by (migrants') numbers but rather view them as persons." He reminded them that they, too, descended from immigrants drawn by the dream of a new future.

In Ciudad Juarez, the Argentine-born Francis plans to celebrate Mass in a huge open field on the border and then walk to the Rio Grande to salute people on the other side in a powerful show of solidarity with his Latin American compatriots. Vatican officials say he intends to address violence and drug trafficking as well. Francis will also come close to fulfilling his wish to cross the border during the U.S. visit, something that was ultimately scrapped for logistical reasons.

It's a message that resonates with Sister Norma Pimentel, director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

"They are people and we need to treat them that way," said Pimentel, whose work Francis has praised and who was invited to meet him in New York last year. "They need our help, and so we welcome them to restore their dignity."

Pimentel's center at the Sacred Heart church in McAllen receives about 100 migrants a day who have been detained, processed and released by the Border Patrol. Each adult gets an electronic monitoring anklet to ensure they make court appearances.

On a recent morning, Erica Johana Garcia was breakfasting with her two children at the center before catching a bus for the final leg of their journey to Los Angeles. They left Guatemala after thugs told her 15-year-old son they would rape his 8-year-old sister if he didn't join their gang.

Fingering her ankle bracelet, Garcia, 34, vowed to fight to be able to stay.

"I can't go back because I risk my children," she said, "especially my son."

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Associated Press writers Peter Orsi in Mexico City and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, drawers of bras, underwear and socks, organized by gender and size, line a wall at a center that provides assistance to newly-arrived migrant families with children, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. The reception center at the church in McAllen receives families caught and processed by Border Patrol, about 100 immigrants each day. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 4, 2016 photo, Ramon Rodriguez of El Salvador holds his feverish 18-month-old son Dylan at the Casa del Migrante shelter run by Catholic nuns in Reynosa, Mexico. Rodriguez, who was traveling with his wife and son, said he didn't know how his family would get the thousands of dollars per person charged by organized crime groups who control the flow of migrants across the Rio Grande to Texas. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 4, 2016 photo, a pair of jeans lay to dry on rusted folding chairs at the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico. Many migrant families are fleeing the violence of Central America. For example, in El Salvador, there were 69 percent more murders in 2015 than the previous year, a rate that could make it the worldis most violent country. Itis an ignominious ranking that its neighbor Honduras has sat atop in the past. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, a Central American girl lies down to get some rest, alongside the donated cowboy boots she selected as her new shoes, at a center that provides assistance to newly-arrived migrant families with children at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. Even with stepped up Mexican enforcement at its southern border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says apprehensions of unaccompanied children at the southwest border from October through December was up 117 percent over the same period a year earlier and apprehensions of families were up 187 percent. More were caught crossing here into southernmost Texas than anywhere else. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 6, 2016 photo, a Central American teenager holds up his drawing that reads in Spanish: "I love you, mama," at a government shelter for unaccompanied child migrants in Reynosa, Mexico. Dozens of mainly teenagers wait up to two months at the shelter until diplomatic formalities are completed for their deportation to their home countries. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 4, 2016 photo, Jennifer Guarcas plays with a balloon with her mother Marleny Gonzalez at the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico. The 4-year-old is recovering from two broken legs and deep cuts to her arm after a truck they were traveling in overturned during their journey from Guatemala. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, Catholic Sister Norma Pimentel poses for a picture inside the center she runs to provide assistance to newly-arrived migrant families traveling with children, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. The American people are conscious that they are human beings, they are people and we need to treat them that way, said Pimentel who was invited to meet the pope in New York last year. They need our help and so we welcome them to restore their dignity. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 6, 2016 photo, Texas state troopers speed toward a park in Reynosa, Mexico, as they head out on patrol along the Rio Grande from Anzalduas Park in Mission, Texas. Even with stepped up Mexican enforcement at its southern border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says apprehensions of unaccompanied children at the southwest border from October through December was up 117 percent over the same period a year earlier and apprehensions of families were up 187 percent. More were caught crossing here into southernmost Texas than anywhere else. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, migrants wait in line to take a shower, as they sit by a U.S. map at a center that provides assistance to newly-arrived migrant families with children, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. iWe must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation,i Pope Francis said in an address to the U.S. Congress. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, Jennifer Lorenzo of Guatemala looks around as she sits on her father's lap inside a center that provides assistance to newly-arrived migrant families with children, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. In January, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that a program allowing Central Americans to apply for refugee status before migrating would be expanded. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 6, 2016 photo, Texas state troopers prepare to take a patrol boat out on the Rio Grande, in Anzalduas Park in Mission, Texas, a short distance across the river from Reynosa, Mexico. On Jan. 2, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began rounding up Central American immigrants who had entered the country illegally since May 2014 with their families and been ordered to leave by a judge. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 6, 2016 photo, migrants participate in a Three Kings Day Mass at the Casa del Migrante shelter run by Catholic nuns in Reynosa, Mexico. Many migrant families are fleeing the violence of Central America. For example, in El Salvador, there were 69 percent more murders in 2015 than the previous year, a rate that could make it the worlds most violent country. Its an ignominious ranking that its neighbor Honduras has sat atop in the past. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 4, 2016 photo, newly deported migrants swap stories with those waiting to cross, in the women's dormitory at the Casa del Migrante shelter run by Catholic nuns in Reynosa, Mexico. iWe must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation, Pope Francis said in an address to the U.S. Congress. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, eighteen-year-old Rose Danubia Maldonado, left, looks on as volunteers offer food to her 14-month-old son Miguel Yahyr Padilla at a center that provides assistance to newly-arrived migrant families with children at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. Pope Francis often raises the plight of immigrants seeking better lives for their families, including during a visit to the U.S. last fall and is expected to do so again in Mexico in February. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Jan. 5, 2016 photo, a Romanian migrant shaves at a center that provides assistance to newly-arrived migrant families traveling with children at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. Migrants are entering a country of stepped up border enforcement and anti-immigrant sentiments. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Obama to honor 4 who protected Jews during Holocaust

WASHINGTON (AP)  President Barack Obama is honoring four people, including Americans from Indiana and Tennessee, for risking their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

The United Nations has designated Wednesday as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland in 1945.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust.

Obama was joining Jewish leaders at a ceremony Wednesday at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where Righteous Among the Nations medals are to be presented posthumously. It's the first time the ceremony is being held in the United States. Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., said Obama's participation "will be a worthy tribute to the worthiest among us."

Last year, Obama said the international anniversary was an opportunity to reflect on progress "confronting this terrible chapter in human history" and on continued efforts to end genocide.

"Honoring the victims and survivors begins with our renewed recognition of the value and dignity of each person," Obama said in a written statement last January. "It demands from us the courage to protect the persecuted and speak out against bigotry and hatred."

Americans Roddie Edmonds of Knoxville, Tennessee; Lois Gunden of Goshen, Indiana; and Polish citizens Walery and Maryla Zbijewski of Warsaw are being recognized by Yad Vashem for protecting Jews from harm during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, based in Jerusalem, is the world's Holocaust education and research center.

Righteous Among the Nations is an official title awarded by Yad Vashem on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Master Sgt. Edmonds participated in the landing of U.S. forces in Europe and was taken prisoner by the Germans. When the Germans ordered all Jewish prisoners of war to report, Edmonds defied the order by figuring out how to keep the Jewish POWs from being singled out for persecution.

Gunden, a French teacher, established a children's home in southern France that became a safe haven for children, including Jewish children she helped smuggle out of a nearby internment camp. She protected the children when French police showed up at the home.
US senator assails Pentagon for relying on Russian rockets

WASHINGTON (AP)  The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee assailed Pentagon officials on Wednesday for relying on Russian rocket engines to launch American military satellites into space, arguing that the practice enriches friends of President Vladimir Putin and puts U.S. national security in jeopardy.

"Today Russia holds many of our most precious national security satellites at risk before they ever get off the ground," Republican Sen. John McCain, said at a hearing to examine military space launch capabilities.

Yet McCain said the Pentagon has actively sought to undermine the committee's direction to limit that risk and end the use of the Russian RD-180 engines by the end of this decade. McCain also blamed the U.S. contractor that acquires the engines, United Launch Alliance, and two senators who support the company, Richard Shelby, a Republican, and Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, for thwarting the committee's instructions.

FILE - In this Jan. 22, 2016, file photo, Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a government meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. American tax dollars should not subsidize the purchase of Russian rocket engines because the sales help enrich the friends of Putin, say two senior Republican lawmakers who aim to reverse the current practice. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Air Force Secretary Deborah James told the committee the department is working to end the use of the Russian engines as soon as possible. She said disengaging from use of the Russian engines is far more complicated than it appears. She recommended a stockpile of 18 of the RD-180s until an American-made rocket can be tested and fielded.

McCain and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, are introducing legislation Thursday to repeal a provision in law that they say allows the unlimited acquisition and use of RD-180 engines, which are manufactured by NPO Energomash. The manufacturer is owned primarily by the Russian government and controlled by several of Putin's confidants, according to the lawmakers.

United Launch Alliance is under contract with the Air Force to launch military and spy satellites. The purchases effectively reward Putin's inner circle even as Washington continues to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine's Crimea region, its continued support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, and other hostile actions, the lawmakers said.

"The benefits to Vladimir Putin, his network of corruption, and the Russian military industrial complex" are well known, McCain said Wednesday. "Yet despite the availability of alternatives, a select few still want to prolong our dependence on Russia while they target our satellites, occupy Crimea, destabilize Ukraine, bolster Assad in Syria, send weapons to Iran, and violate the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty."

Yury Melnik, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said Russia considers congressional discussions about the RD-180 "an internal U.S. matter" and would not comment on "specific remarks by different lawmakers."

Proponents of using the RD-180s to launch a range of national security satellites said the Russian engines fill a crucial gap while the U.S. develops and tests a domestically made rocket. Barring the purchase of the Russian engines could delay important missions during that transition period, they said, while also undercutting the competition among American companies essential to ensuring costs stay under control.

United Launch Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Rye said the company had no comment.

The debate over the Russian equipment also illustrates a longstanding tension between congressional committees that have similar yet distinct responsibilities. McCain's panel is an authorization committee that writes defense policy and approves annual military spending levels. But the appropriations committees actually allot the money, and their actions can occasionally contradict what the authorizers decided.

United Launch Alliance, which uses the RD-180s on its Atlas V launch vehicle, has manufacturing facilities in Decatur, Alabama. Defense industry giants Boeing, based in Chicago, and Lockheed Martin formed United Launch Alliance as a joint venture. Shelby, who faces a Republican primary challenge, helped craft the spending bill but then ended up voting against it because the bill didn't tighten the vetting process for Syrian refugees seeking to enter the United States.

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Online:

United Launch Alliance: http://www.ulalaunch.com/

SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com/

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Follow Richard Lardner on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rplardner
S. Korea stops search for missing in overturned Chinese boat

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Korean maritime police on Wednesday withdrew divers after they failed to find at least four people believed to be trapped inside a Chinese fishing boat that capsized and killed at least one passenger near a small island off South Korea's southwest coast.

It was now up to Chinese coast guardsmen who arrived at the scene late in the afternoon to decide whether to continue with the search and rescue efforts or tow the boat away, according to an official from the Ministry of Public Safety and Security. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing office rules.

Four people were rescued by nearby Chinese fishing boats, and South Korean divers hours later saved another passenger, who was conscious and able to talk. Another man pulled earlier by South Korean divers was pronounced dead.

In this photo provided by the South Korean West Sea Fisheries Management Service, a Chinese fishing boat, center, is capsized in the water off Gageo Island, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. South Korean divers were looking for at least four people believed to be trapped inside a Chinese fishing boat that capsized near a small southwestern island on Wednesday. (South Korean West Sea Fisheries Management Service via AP)

Four other passengers are believed to be inside the boat, which wasn't approved by South Korean authorities to fish in the country's waters, the official said. Weather conditions made it difficult for South Korean divers to search the boat and the possibility of the remaining four passengers being alive was considered low, he said.

An official from maritime police in the port city of Mokpo, who also didn't want to be named, said the boat was being towed by other Chinese vessels over unspecified problems when it rolled over 85 kilometers (52 miles) northwest of Gageo island. The other vessels kept the boat from fully submerging until South Korean rescuers arrived, he said.

The accident occurred not far from a spot where a ferry sank in 2014 and killed more than 300 people, mostly teenagers on a school trip, in what was the country's largest maritime disaster in decades.

Chinese fishing boats have been going farther afield to feed growing domestic demand for seafood as catches decrease in waters close to China's shores. South Korea's maritime police seized about 570 Chinese ships last year for illegal fishing, according to the ministry.

In this photo provided by the South Korean West Sea Fisheries Management Service, a South Korean Coast Guard boat sails to search for missing passengers near a capsized Chinese fishing boat in the water off Gageo Island, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. South Korean divers were looking for at least four people believed to be trapped inside the Chinese fishing boat that capsized near a small southwestern island on Wednesday. (South Korean West Sea Fisheries Management Service via AP)
NYC flood defense plan advances, but completion years off

NEW YORK (AP)  After ocean waters poured into lower Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy, experts began dreaming up a solution: a U-shaped barrier of earthen berms, walls and gates that would keep floods out and the nation's financial capital dry.

Now, more than three years later, a version of that idea has stacked up over $600 million in backing, including a $176 million shot in the arm from the federal government last week. But it is still hundreds of millions of dollars and several years away from being finished.

"We've been full steam ahead," said city resiliency director Daniel Zarrilli, "knowing that we don't really know how long we have before these things need to be in place."

FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2012 file photo, water from New York Harbor spills into New York Citys Battery Park during Superstorm Sandy. After ocean waters poured virtually unchecked into lower Manhattan during Sandy, experts began dreaming up a solution: a U-shaped barrier of earthen berms, walls and gates that would keep floods out and the nations financial capital dry. Now, more than three years later, the idea has stacked up over $600 million in backing, including a $176 million shot in the arm from the federal government, but it is still hundreds of millions of dollars and several years away from becoming a reality. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Officials aim to start building next year and finish by 2022, building segments that can begin providing some protection before the more than 5-mile-long project is complete. Still, there's no final plan yet for what the project will look like, how much it will cost, or where the city will get the minimum of $300 million more it has said is needed to finish. A devastating flood could come in decades or as soon as the next storm.

"There's much more hope" after the latest infusion of funding, said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, a Democrat who represents some affected areas. "But there's ongoing anxiety. Because this is not something that can be a generation-long project."

Sandy struck in October 2012, killing over 180 people and causing $65 billion in damage in the U.S. alone. The storm swamped downtown Manhattan apartment houses and office buildings, flooded subways and cut power to almost everywhere south of the Empire State Building.

Architects and engineers participating in a federal design competition later sketched out a 10-mile-long "Big U" of barriers that varied by neighborhood.

The city's current proposals echo that idea but cover less territory, extending around Manhattan's southern end roughly from Bellevue Hospital on the East Side to half a mile north of the World Trade Center on the West Side. The path wraps around Wall Street and trendy neighborhoods, but also around several public housing developments hard by the East River.

Plans describe a mosaic of different approaches: a big, grassy berm in a park, floodwalls under an elevated highway, a levee system at Manhattan's southern tip, and in other spots moveable flood barriers, pumps and more. The proposal also calls for flood-proofing vulnerable public housing and weaving plazas and park improvements into the water barriers.

Planning experts say it sets an example for multifaceted flood protection that "combines engineering with ecology with community" instead of just walling off water, says Rob Freudenberg of the Regional Plan Association, a research and advocacy organization.

The federal Housing and Urban Development Department two years ago put up $335 million for the first, roughly 2-mile chunk. HUD awarded another $176 million last week toward the remainder of the project, adding to $115 million in mostly city money pledged last summer. Still, the total is about $320 million short of what the city sought for that piece.

Zarrilli says officials are working to line up the rest and "can put in place some substantial improvements with what we have," as a start.

Meanwhile, some institutions, utilities and building owners in low-lying lower Manhattan are doing their own storm-proofing. Transit officials have been working on seals for subway stations. And the city itself is working on other projects in Manhattan and elsewhere as part of a $20 billion plan to help New York weather storms and floods.

Communities along the lower Manhattan waterfront are keenly waiting, both inside and outside the planned flood defenses.

"Obviously, we need a 'Big U,' not a 'Big J,'" says Tobi Bergman, chairman of a community board in the West Village, which saw some flooding in Sandy but is outside the protections planned so far. But, he added, "I think every New Yorker is glad to see progress begin."

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Reach Jennifer Peltz on Twitter @ jennpeltz. See some of her work at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/jennifer-peltz.

FILE - In this Oct. 29, 2012 file photo, flood waters from Superstorm Sandy surround a vehicle near the Consolidated Edison power plant in New York. With funds from different government sources, New York City plans a network of berms, floodwalls and a levee system to protect the citys southern tip from storm related flooding. (AP Photo/ John Minchillo, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2012 file photo, cars are submerged at the entrance to a parking garage in New York's Financial District in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. After ocean waters poured virtually unchecked into lower Manhattan during Sandy, experts began dreaming up a solution: a U-shaped barrier of earthen berms, walls and gates that would keep floods out and the nations financial capital dry. Now, more than three years later, the idea has stacked up over $600 million in backing, including a $176 million shot in the arm from the federal government, but it is still hundreds of millions of dollars and several years away from becoming a reality. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012 file photo, Joseph Leader, Metropolitan Transportation Authority vice president and chief maintenance officer, shines a flashlight on standing water inside the South Ferry 1 train station in New York in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. The federal government promised $176 million that will enable New York City to start work on fortifying itself against flooding from future storms like Sandy. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File)

In this Jan. 19, 2016 photo, benches are fenced off in an area of the East Side Esplanade beneath the Manhattan Bridge in New York. Lower Manhattan, including the area in this photo, will receive an additional $176 million in federal funding for a large-scale flood protection system that will eventually wrap from Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side, around the tip of the borough, and up through Battery Park City. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

In this Jan. 19, 2016 photo, a pedestrian walks along the East Side Esplanade in an area beneath the FDR drive just north of the Manhattan Bridge, left, in New York With $176 million promised by the federal government, New York City plans to construct a system of berms, floodwalls, moveable flood barriers, pumps and other infrastructure improvements to protect itself against floodwaters like those seen in Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

In this Jan. 19, 2016 photo, a jogger runs beneath the FDR Drive in an area below the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Lower Manhattan will receive an additional $176 million in federal funding for a large-scale flood protection system that will eventually wrap from Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side, around the tip of the borough, and up through Battery Park City. The area in the photograph would be affected under the plan. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
Vietnam ruling party boss re-elected, cements hold on power

HANOI, Vietnam (AP)  Vietnam's Communist Party Wednesday re-elected its 71-year-old chief for a second term, an expected outcome that sees the conservative pro-China ideologue cementing his hold on power.

The party's congress elected Nguyen Phu Trong (pronounced Noo-yen Foo Chong) to a 19-member Politburo, the all-powerful body that handles the day-to-day affairs of the government and the party. In a subsequent vote, he was immediately chosen as the general-secretary, the de facto No. 1 leader of the country.

The announcement was made on the official Vietnam News Agency's website.

FILE - In this July 3, 2015 file photo, Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong gestures during a meeting with the Western press in Hanoi, Vietnam. Vietnam's Communist Party on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, re-elected its 71-year-old chief for a second term, officials said, an expected outcome that sees the conservative pro-China ideologue cementing his hold on power. The party's congress elected Nguyen Phu Trong to a 19-member Politburo, the all-powerful body that handles the day-to-day affairs of the government and the party. In a subsequent vote, he was immediately chosen as the general-secretary, the de facto No. 1 leader of the country. (AP Photo/Tran Van Minh, File)

Officials said Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc was also elected to the Politburo, and he is now expected to become the prime minister. He will replace Nguyen Tan Dung, who had had led economic reforms over the last 10 years and had harbored ambitions for the top job. His challenge, however, was snuffed by Trong's supporters during the weeklong party congress that ends Thursday.

The third most important member elected to the Politburo was Minister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang, who will be the country's new president, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The general secretary, the prime minister and the president, along with the chairman of the National Assembly, are the four key members in the collective leadership represented by the Politburo, and the 180-member Central Committee, which handles policy.

The renewal of the leadership means little change for Vietnam.

Trong is expected to continue to push Dung's economic reforms. Despite having a reputation for being pro-China he is not likely to be totally subservient to Beijing as that would risk massive anger from ordinary Vietnamese who harbor a deep dislike and historical suspicion of China.

"Many people were afraid that a conservative trend would prevail if Mr. Trong is re-elected. But ... whoever they may be, and however conservative they may be, when they are at the helm they are under pressure to carry out reforms," Le Hong Hiep, a visiting Vietnamese fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asia Studies in Singapore, told The Associated Press.

The Communist Party is entitled by the constitution to govern and Vietnam's 93 million people have no direct role in electing the leaders of the 4.5 million-member party.

It is believed that as a compromise with Prime Minister Dung's camp, Trong will not serve his full five-year term but may hand over power to another leader mid-way.

Dung was seen as a pro-business leader who investors believe would have continued with economic reforms he set in motion 10 years ago that helped Vietnam attract a flood of foreign investment and was partly responsible for tripling the per capita GDP to $2,100. He was also seen as standing up to China, which is making aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea and building islands, much to the chagrin of Southeast Asia nations who have conflicting claims in the waters.

China sent an oil rig into Vietnamese waters in 2014, triggering a massive backlash among Vietnamese, including attacks on Chinese businesses. Dung was vocal in criticizing China then, while Trong was muted.

Despite Trong's reputation as being an anti-thesis of Dung, the reality is not so black-and-white. Observers agree that the economic reforms Dung started have the blessings of the collective leadership, including Trong.

A clear example came when a plenum of the outgoing Central Committee overwhelmingly endorsed Vietnam joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a U.S. led free-trade initiative.

As for China, Trong will likely not risk the ire of the public by being soft if Beijing's assertiveness impinges on Vietnam territorial integrity.

The cosmetic change in the leadership also means that Vietnam has no immediate hopes for political reforms, even though there is a desire in the government to loosen up on public freedoms.

"They are faced with a dilemma. They want to maintain the one-party rule and at the same time they want to have reforms in some limited areas," said Hiep, the Vietnamese scholar.

"Their trend is to change, but they will still be cautious, because the party's ultimate goal is to maintain their monopoly on power," Hiep said.

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Tran Van Minh contributed to this report.

Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang, front row left, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, front row third left, and Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, front row third right, pose for a group photo with the Army generals after the election for the new Central Committee in Hanoi, Vietnam, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Trong secured more than 80 percent of the votes from delegates at a party congress to win election to the Central Committee, one of the two pillars of the ruling establishment, several delegates said. (AP Photo/Na Son Nguyen)
Yahoo Japan defends online ivory sales as criticism grows

TOKYO (AP)  Yahoo Japan said Wednesday it is strengthening policing of illegal ivory on its online commerce site as criticism grows it is supporting a trade that fuels the slaughter of wild elephants.

A spokeswoman for the company said it prohibits sales of raw ivory and ivory products that breach a 1989 treaty largely banning the trade. Enforcement a challenge since Japan allows the sale of old ivory such as ornaments that were produced before the treaty came into effect.

"Since there is a chance some sales may be illegal we are strengthening our policies. If we find a sale was illegal we cancel it straight away," Takako Kaminaga of Yahoo Japan's public relations office said. "We 'patrol' 24 hours a day."

She said Yahoo Japan, which is part owned by Yahoo Inc. and Softbank Corp., does not restrict sales of ivory that do not violate the law.

Nearly 1.1 million people have endorsed an online petition by environmental groups aimed at pushing Yahoo Japan to stop its sales of ivory products.

Various other online commerce sites, such as Amazon, say they have already stopped such sales or advertising.

Raw ivory is sought after for making ornate traditional seals and other decorative items. Poachers kill tens of thousands of elephants a year to meet demand for the material, despite the trade ban, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and other groups.

A Washington, D.C.-based conservation group, Environmental Investigation Agency, said late last year that it had found loopholes and weaknesses in Japan's ivory controls.

The group also said that the Yahoo Japan Auctions site sold more than 12 tons of ivory products, including whole elephant tusks, in 2012-2014. That site and others feature thousands of ads for ivory and ivory products.

The international environmental campaign group Avaaz addressed its petition to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Manabu Miyasaka, CEO of Yahoo Japan, and "all other companies allowing ivory sales online."

"As global citizens, we are appalled that you allow ivory to be sold on your site/platform, fuelling elephant extinction," it says.

"We call on you to urgently stop all ivory sales from sites/platforms in Japan and all other markets."

Softbank said in a statement that it had no comment on the issue.

Kaminaga, of Yahoo Japan, said the company was in touch with the Environment Ministry and other agencies on the issue and with Yahoo and other shareholders.

"You can't say there's absolutely no intention to change," she said when asked if Yahoo Japan might alter its stance on the issue.

In September, the United States and China agreed to work toward nearly complete bans on the ivory trade, and Japan is increasingly isolated in its stance favoring continued sales.

EIA, the conservation group, contends that widespread use of fake documents has enabled traders to "legalize" more than 1,000 tusks a year since 2011.
A look at past WWII-related visits by Japanese Emperor

TOKYO (AP)  A visit by Japanese Emperor Akihito to the Philippines this week is the latest in a series of trips that are seen as an attempt to show his commitment to peace and remorse for World War II, a conflict Japan fought in the name of his father, Hirohito.

The current emperor has repeatedly expressed regret for the damage caused by the war, but has never offered a straightforward apology. The furthest he has gone is to express "deep" remorse in an address last year marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the fighting.

A look at his past World War II-related visits, from his statements of remorse to the hostility he faced in Britain and Okinawa.

FILE - In this May 26, 1998, file photo, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II accompanies Japan's Emperor Akihito to the State Banquet Hall at Buckingham Palace in London. Akihito repeatedly encountered jeering by former prisoners of war and civilian internees protesting their harsh treatment by the Japanese military. The POWs demanded a formal apology and turned their backs on the emperor as he was taken by Queen Elizabeth along The Mall to Buckingham Palace. (John Stillwell/Pool Photo via AP, File)

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OKINAWA, JULY 1975  Akihito, then crown prince, visited Okinawa on behalf of his father Emperor Hirohito, who reigned until January 1989. Akihito's visit 30 years after the bloody Battle of Okinawa came when residents' anger toward the Japanese government and its war responsibility was still strong. A protester threw a Molotov cocktail at Akihito when he and Empress Michiko visited a war memorial; the couple was unhurt.

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THAILAND, MALAYSIA, INDONESIA, SEPTEMBER 1991  Two years after becoming emperor, Akihito's first foreign destination was Southeast Asia. During state banquets in each country, he noted Japan's postwar effort to build new friendships with the countries based on a commitment "never again to repeat the tragedy of the horrors of the unfortunate war, and to live as a peace-loving nation."

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CHINA, OCTOBER 1992  The Japanese government saw Akihito's visit to China as an opportunity to heal wounds left by Japan's wartime aggression. He offered what was then the strongest imperial statement of remorse over the war, though stopped short of apologizing. "In the long history of relationships between our two countries, there was an unfortunate period in which my country inflicted great suffering on the people of China. To this I feel deep sadness," he said.

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GREAT BRITAIN, MAY 1998  Akihito repeatedly encountered jeering by former prisoners of war and civilian internees protesting their harsh treatment by the Japanese military. The POWs demanded a formal apology and turned their backs on the emperor as he was taken by Queen Elizabeth along The Mall to Buckingham Palace. Akihito said ahead of the visit that he believed "it is important to put oneself in the position of others and strive to have a full sense of the pain in their hearts." In London, he said the great suffering of many people caused by the war is an "unforgettable memory" for him.

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SAIPAN, JUNE 2005  Six decades after the war, Akihito made the first trip by a Japanese monarch to an overseas World War II battlefield. He paid tribute to the 55,000 Japanese killed on the Pacific island of Saipan, and offered prayers and flowers at memorials for thousands of Americans and islanders. Akihito also prayed for the first time for Koreans forced to fight for Japan. Korea was a Japanese colony at the time. The fall of Saipan was a turning point in the war.

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PALAU, APRIL 2015  Seven decades after the war, Akihito and his wife Michiko laid bouquets of white chrysanthemums, Japan's Imperial symbol, in front of a memorial for Japanese victims who died in the battle of Peleliu in the Pacific island nation of Palau. The couple later prayed at a separate memorial for Americans. At a state banquet, Akihito said it was "truly painful" that the battles caused casualties among the islanders and thanked residents for helping recover the remains of Japanese war-dead. Many Japanese are still unaccounted for in the Pacific.

FILE - In this Oct. 23, 1992, file photo, then-Chinese President Yang Shangkun, left, leads Japan's Emperor Akihito as they review an honor guard during a welcome ceremony outside Beijing's Great Hall of the People. The Japanese government saw Akihito's visit to China as an opportunity to heal wounds left by Japan's wartime aggression. He offered what was then the strongest imperial statement of remorse over the war, though stopped short of apologizing. (AP Photo/Greg Baker, File)

FILE - In this June 28, 2005, file photo, Japan's Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko bow their heads in silent prayers at Saipan's Banzai Cliff, or Puntan Sabaneta, to pay tribute to the Japanese soldiers and civilians who jumped off the rocky cliff during World War II rather than surrender to U.S. forces. Six decades after the war, Akihito made the first trip by a Japanese monarch to an overseas World War II battlefield. He paid tribute to the 55,000 Japanese killed on the Pacific island of Saipan, and offered prayers and flowers at memorials for thousands of Americans and islanders. (Eriko Sugita/Pool Photo via AP, File)
Road project puts Israel, EU on collision course

JERUSALEM (AP)  A narrow country road outside Jerusalem has turned into a new battleground between Israel and the European Union, deepening a dispute between the allies over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.

The EU is financing the paving of the dirt road by Palestinians as part of a broader effort to help them develop the local economy on the way to eventual independence. Israel, however, says the roadwork is illegal because it was done without Israeli permits and has ordered it to stop.

The dispute goes far beyond the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) road, which Palestinians say is to help farmers in the area reach their land. At issue is the future of portions of the West Bank known as "Area C," the 60 percent of the territory that remained under full Israeli control as part of interim peace accords two decades ago. Its ultimate fate has been a major contention point in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

In this Jan. 16, 2016 photo, a Palestinian walks on a newly-made section of a road that was financed by the European Union, on the outskirts of the West Bank village of Taqoa, near Bethlehem. Construction of the narrow country road has turned into a new battleground between Israel and the EU, deepening a dispute between the allies over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. The EU is paying for Palestinians to pave the dirt road as part of a broader effort to help them develop the local economy on the way to eventual independence. But Israel says the work is illegal and has ordered it to stop. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as the heartland of a future independent state.

Israel seeks to keep large chunks of the area, which is home to 300,000 of the West Bank's 2.4 million Palestinians as well as the 370,000 Israeli settlers in the territory. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the hard-line "Jewish Home" party, has even said the area should be annexed.

According to interim peace accords, any construction in Area C needs permission from Israel. Israel rarely grants approval for Palestinian building.

The international community has urged Israel to freeze settlement activity and lift restrictions on Palestinian development in Area C. The Palestinians, backed by organizations like the World Bank and the EU, say they cannot establish a viable state without developing this land.

In the maze of lines created by the Oslo accords in the West Bank, Area C divides up the territory under Palestinian control into isolated enclaves, making expansion of Palestinian communities difficult. Under the accords, that division was supposed to be temporary, with much of Area C to be transferred to Palestinian control, but with the breakdown of the peace process that never happened.

Last week, the EU Foreign Affairs Council said a change of policy by Israel in Palestinian areas, and particularly Area C, "will significantly increase economic opportunities, empower Palestinian institutions and enhance stability and security for both Israelis and Palestinians."

The EU runs dozens of projects in Area C. The Israeli government views these efforts with great suspicion and often demolishes projects it says are illegal.

Between January and May 2015, for instance, 41 EU-funded structures that cost some 236,000 euros ($255,000) to build were torn down by Israel, the EU's commissioner for aid and crisis manager, Christos Stylianides, recently told the European Parliament.

Those are the most recent figures available from the EU. But the dispute seems to be worsening. In a meeting with foreign journalists earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the EU-funded structures "illegal."

"They're building without authorization against the accepted rules and there's a clear attempt to create political realities there," Netanyahu said.

The spat comes against the backdrop of a larger dispute over Israeli settlement construction.

The Palestinians say Israel is expanding settlements in order to create its own political reality  entrenching its control over the West Bank. The international community considers the settlements illegal or illegitimate, saying they undermine the goal of establishing a Palestinian state.

Last year, the EU passed a bill requiring Israeli settlement products to have special labels if they are sold in Europe. Earlier this month, it said all agreements with Israel must "unequivocally and explicitly" show that they cannot apply to occupied territories, further underscoring its opposition to the settlements.

The new EU-funded road is meant to help Palestinian farmers gain better access to their land, Palestinians say. The road runs near the Palestinian town of Tukou, about 8 miles southeast of Jerusalem.

The Palestinians say that since the road already existed, the project is not considered new construction and there was no need to ask Israel for a building permit, said an official from the Union of Agricultural Works Committee, the Palestinian nonprofit that has been carrying out the work. He spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the issue with the media.

After work began last summer, Regavim, an Israeli advocacy group with ties to the Jewish settler movement, filed a challenge to the Supreme Court and Cogat, the Israeli military body responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Ari Briggs, a Regavim official, said his group objects to the construction on security grounds and fears that the Palestinians will expand their presence into settler areas. He accused the EU of "defying" Israeli law and establishing facts on the ground. "This is something that's illegal," he said.

In December, Cogat ordered construction to stop.

The Palestinian union official said 90 percent of the road was completed before the work was halted. He said the union is complying with the order, but is planning a legal challenge.

Ralph Tarraf, the EU representative to the Palestinian territories, said the 28-country bloc will carry on its mission in Area C.

"The EU provides humanitarian assistance to communities in need in Area C in accordance with the humanitarian imperative. And second, the EU also works with the Palestinian Authority to develop Area C and support the Palestinian presence there," he said last week at a ceremony in the in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Tarraf declined an interview request.

With the battle showing no signs of abating, Netanyahu suggested that Israel and the EU "reset" their relationship on the issue.

He told reporters that he recently met with the EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, in Paris, and told her the sides need to get past their differences.
The Latest: Migrant boat sinks in Aegean; 6 bodies recovered

ATHENS, Greece (AP)  The latest news on the continuing migration of asylum-seekers and others from the Middle East to Europe:

10:05 a.m.

Greek authorities say six bodies have been recovered from a boat carrying migrants or refugees which sank off the northern coast of the island of Kos.

Refugees from Iraq carry their belongings while walking towards the border with Serbia, from the transit center for refugees near northern Macedonian village of Tabanovce, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. European Union nations took a step Monday toward isolating Greece amid acrimony over Athens' failure to stem the flow of migrants at its Mediterranean island borders. The member states "gave a clear signal" that if they can't stop the migrants reaching Greece, they would consider helping Greece's neighbor Macedonia to better seal its border to slow the movement of migrants into other European countries. (AP Photo/Boris Grdanoski)

The coast guard said one survivor managed to reach the shore and raise the alarm. The survivor told authorities that roughly 10 people were believed to have been in the boat when it sank.

A coast guard patrol boat, a vessel from the European border control agency Frontex, a helicopter and a vessel from a Greek volunteer rescue group were searching the area for potential survivors. The bodies of three men, two women and an infant were recovered from the eastern Aegean sea.

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9:30 a.m.

Greek authorities have mounted a search and rescue operation in the eastern Aegean after a boat carrying migrants or refugees sank off the northern coast of the island of Kos. The body of one infant has been recovered.

The coast guard said one survivor managed to reach the shore and raise the alarm. The survivor told authorities between six and 10 people were believed to have been in the boat when it sank.

A coast guard patrol boat, a vessel from the European border control agency Frontex, a helicopter and a vessel from a Greek volunteer rescue group were searching the area for potential survivors.
FBI: Man said Masons 'playing with the world like a game'

MILWAUKEE (AP)  Samy Mohamed Hamzeh wanted to shoot up a Milwaukee Masonic event center in the name of Islam because he thought the group that owns it is "playing with the world like a game," according to federal authorities.

But a member of the fraternal organization, which is not a religion, said Wednesday it isn't at "the root of some of the world's problems."

"We can hardly plan a pancake breakfast," said Gavin DeGrave, who is a secretary for the Valley of Milwaukee, which includes four Masonic chapters.

Samy Mohamed Hamzeh is seen in an undated photo provided by the Waukesha County (Wis.) Sheriffs Department. Federal prosecutors charged 23-year-old Samy Mohamed Hamzeh on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, with unlawfully possessing a machine gun and receiving and possessing firearms not registered to him. Federal agents said Tuesday that Mohamed Hamzeh wanted to storm a Masonic temple with a machine gun and kill at least 30 people in an attack he hoped would show "nobody can play with Muslims" and spark more mass shootings in the United States. (Waukesha County (Wis.) Sheriffs Department via AP)

Hamzeh, 23, has been charged with unlawfully possessing a machine gun and receiving and possessing improperly registered firearms in what authorities say was a planned mass shooting at a Masonic temple. Some people who know Hamzeh, however, have cast doubt on whether he was capable of such an attack, including a former co-worker who said he smoked a lot of marijuana.

At a court appearance Tuesday, Hamzeh told the judge the charges against him are "not true," according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which obtained an audio recording of the hearing and posted it on the newspaper's website.

While the FBI has not publicly identified which temple, DeGrave said the FBI told the fraternity that the alleged target was the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center in downtown Milwaukee. That location, he said, had been used for banquets and wedding receptions, but has been restricted since last year to Masonic functions.

The federal criminal complaint does not make clear whether Hamzeh or informants recommended the Masonic center as the target. But Hamzeh told informants: "They are all Masonic; they are playing with the world like a game, man, and ... we don't know what's going on, these are the ones who are fighting, these are the ones that needs to be killed." He said later, "these are the ones who are making living for us like hell."

Wisconsin's top federal defender, Daniel Stiller, told The Associated Press in an email that Hamzeh's defense is likely to focus on the accuracy of undercover recordings that were made in Arabic and translated to English. He also said the defense will examine what the informant was "contributing" to the conversations.

Defense lawyers in other federal stings have challenged the operations on the basis that their clients were entrapped and suggested that agents are taking advantage of misguided thoughts or mental illnesses and effectively grooming clients into plotting acts of terror.

FBI spokesman Leonard Peace said Wednesday he didn't have any additional information. U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Dean Puschnig said a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Feb. 9.

Hamzeh was being held in the Kenosha County jail, about 30 miles south of Milwaukee. Associate federal defender Craig Albee has been appointed to the case.

Hamzeh hasn't been asked to enter a plea, but during his court appearance on Tuesday, he told U.S. Magistrate Judge David Jones that he had read and understood the federal complaint filed against him, but that he doesn't agree with it.

In the recording posted by the Journal Sentinel, when Hamzeh was asked whether he understood he was facing decades behind bars if convicted, he replied, "Yes I understand, but this is not true, sir."

No media was in court because the case had been sealed until the hearing.

Hamzeh appeared with federal defender Ronnie Murray, who asked that Hamzeh be released under "reasonable conditions." The judge ordered that Hamzeh be detained.

Stiller told the AP he didn't know whether Hamzeh is an American citizen, and Albee didn't immediately return an email seeking that information. Attempts to reach Hamzeh's father by phone weren't successful.

According to the affidavit, agents were tipped off in September that Hamzeh planned to travel to Israel to attack Israeli soldiers and citizens in the West Bank. He abandoned those plans due to "family, financial and logistic reasons," the affidavit said, instead focusing his efforts on a domestic attack.

Last week, Hamzeh discussed his plans to attack the Masonic center and kill 30 people with the informants, telling them they needed more machine guns and silencers.

Hamzeh was arrested Monday, after he paid two undercover FBI agents for two automatic machine guns and a silencer and put them in the trunk of his car.

Masons are members of a fraternal organization that carries out a variety of activities, including charity work. Wisconsin has nearly 11,000 Masons in 180 lodges, according to Frank Struble, grand master of Free and Accepted Masons in Wisconsin.

But they were the target of Hamzeh's attack, according to federal authorities.

"We are Muslims, defending Muslim religion," he said, according to the criminal complaint. "We have our own group, not with Hamas ... we are here defending Islam, young people together join to defend Islam, that's it, that is what our intention is."

Jawad Jawad, a delivery driver for a Milwaukee restaurant, said he has known Hamzeh for about two years and that Hamzeh had been fired from two jobs where they worked together.

"He smoked weed all the time. He's crazy. He didn't show up" for work, the 32-year-old Jawad said. "He's just a stupid kid, super stupid."

Hamzeh also recently was fired from a job as a trainer at downtown kickboxing gym after several member complaints. Gym owner Delia Luna said Hamzeh wasn't a good fit and was "very intense, very militant."

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US, China spar over North Korea, South China Sea

BEIJING (AP)  Top U.S. and Chinese officials sparred Wednesday over how to deal with North Korea's latest nuclear weapons test and ease tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met for more than four hours and said their discussions were "constructive" and "candid." But at a joint news conference, they presented sharply opposing positions on the two issues.

Kerry acknowledged that "our differences will continue to test us." Still, he stressed that the world benefits when the United States and China are able to work together, including on the Iran nuclear deal and climate change.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, is seen through a loop of a rope used as a security line for the media as he and U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus, left, meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, Pool)

On North Korea, Kerry said the United States wanted new U.N. Security Council action that would impose "significant new measures" to punish Pyongyang for its test this month and boost pressure on the North to return to disarmament talks.

"There's been a lot of talk about North Korea through these past years. Now we believe is the time for action that can bring North Korea back to the table," Kerry said.

Wang said China, which is North Korea's most important ally, chief trading partner and a key source of economic assistance, agreed on the need for a new resolution. But he suggested that Beijing would not support new penalties even though it has condemned the testing. "Sanctions are not an end in themselves," he said.

"The new resolution should not provoke new tension in the situation, still less destabilize the Korean Peninsula," Wang said.

Later Wednesday, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told reporters that countries "need to accelerate progress" on negotiating a U.N. resolution.

Kerry noted that sanctions had brought Iran to the nuclear negotiating table. "More significant and impactful sanctions were put in place against Iran, which did not have a nuclear weapon than against North Korea, which does."

"All nations, particularly those who seek a global leadership role, or have a global leadership role, have a responsibility to deal with this threat," he said, referring to China.

Kerry said the sides agreed both on the need for a strong new resolution on North Korea, but also to accelerate talks on what that would entail.

"It's good to agree on the goal. But it's not enough to agree on the goal, we believe we need to agree on the meaningful steps necessary to get to the achievement of the goal to the negotiations that result in denuclearization," Kerry said.

Wang also took umbrage at U.S. complaints that China is not doing as much as it can with the leverage it has on North Korea. He noted that China's position has been consistent in opposing North Korea's nuclear weapons program and supporting a diplomatic resolution to the matter.

"For many years China has been working hard to implement these," he said. "We have delivered on our obligation."

Kerry said China is North Korea's main link to the outside world, and that it could do more to limit cross-border transactions that benefit North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his government.

Kerry also called on China to halt land reclamation and construction of airstrips in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Those steps have alarmed its smaller neighbors.

"I stressed the importance of finding common ground among the claimants and avoiding the destabilizing cycle of mistrust or escalation," Kerry said.

Wang denied that China has was doing anything other than protecting its territorial sovereignty. He rejected assertions by the United States and others that China was not interested in peaceful resolutions to the disputes or militarizing the areas.

In a later meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Kerry hailed the "critical role" China played in the Iran nuclear agreement and on tackling global warming.

"The effort on climate was really historic and you made a key decision with President Obama to change the whole debate," Kerry said.

Xi, who met with Kerry at the Great Hall of the People in the heart of Beijing, described the bilateral relationship as "smooth and on the way up in the past year."

"Generally speaking, when China and the United States work together we can make good things happen with win-win results for both sides and that contributes to peace, prosperity and stability in the world," Xi said.

China claims sovereignty of much of the territory in the South China Sea. It rejects claims from countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam and has bristled at U.S. warnings that its activities threaten the freedom of navigation in some of the world's busiest commercial shipping lanes.

Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei also have overlapping claims in the strategically vital sea, through which around $5 trillion in world trade passes each year.

The U.S. says it takes no position on the claims but says developments in the South China Sea are a national security interest. It has urged that the disputes be settled peacefully and that a binding code of conduct be established for the area.

Tensions have been especially high since Beijing transformed seven disputed reefs into islands, where it is now constructing runways and facilities that rival claimants say can be used militarily. China has said it built the islands primarily to foster safe civilian sea travel and fishing.

In response, the U.S. sent a guided-missile destroyer close to one of the Chinese-built islands, called Subi Reef, in October in a challenge to Beijing's territorial claims, sparking warnings from China. U.S. officials vowed to continue maneuvers to protect freedom of navigation and overflight.

Recent developments, including China's movement of an oil rig into a zone disputed with Vietnam and warnings against Philippines overflight of what it claims to be its territory, have raised those levels of concern.

China dismisses the warnings as unwarranted, but has harshly criticized a U.S.-Philippines defense pact that allows American forces, warships and planes to be based temporarily in local military camps. China says that will "escalate tensions and undermine peace and stability in the region," echoing language the United States uses to criticize China's actions.

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Associated Press writer Cara Anna at the United Nations contributed to this report.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, introduces his delegation to Chinese President Xi Jinping before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, Pool)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, Pool)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, poses with Chinese President Xi Jinping prior to their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Kerry is in China on the final leg in his latest round-the-world diplomatic mission. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)
French justice chief resigns amid flap over terrorism bill

PARIS (AP)  France's charismatic justice minister unexpectedly resigned Wednesday after objecting to President Francois Hollande's push to revoke citizenship from convicted terrorists with dual nationality.

Hollande announced Christiane Taubira's resignation just ahead of a Cabinet meeting and hours before a Parliament commission takes up the citizenship bill.

Taubira, a leftist best known for championing the legalization of gay marriage, tweeted that "sometimes to resist is to remain, sometimes to resist is to leave." As a black woman from French Guiana on the Caribbean coast, she has been a pioneer for women and minorities in French politics but sometimes a target for racist slurs by far-right militants.

FILE - In this Jan.13, 2016 file photo, French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira walks out after the weekly cabinet meeting at the Elysee Palace, in Paris. Taubira has resigned Wednesday, Jan.27, 2016 after objecting to the presidents push to revoke citizenship from convicted terrorists with dual nationality.(AP Photo/Jacques Brinon, File)

"I'm leaving the government on a major disagreement," Taubira told journalists. "The terrorist threat is serious and unpredictable but we have learned to hunt it down. ... I think we cannot concede it any victory, whether it's a military, diplomatic, political or symbolic one."

Taubira is being replaced by Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a Socialist lawmaker from Brittany considered a specialist on security issues who is seen as close to Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

The citizenship bill, prompted by the deadly Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, is popular among conservatives and the far right but is especially divisive for the governing Socialists. Polls show most French support the idea, but opponents fear it would unfairly target Muslims. Some critics compare it to the revocation of citizenship of French Jews during World War II.

French and Belgian extremists linked to the Islamic State group, some of them of Moroccan descent, were behind the Paris attacks, which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds.

French anti-racist organization SOS Racisme on Wednesday praised the "courage of a great lady."

"As a justice minister, despite racism she has faced too often in the silence of her peers ... Christiane Taubira has been able to stand up for her values and try to change the justice system," it said.

Taubira was supposed to travel Wednesday to the United States, where she was to meet with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and members of the Black Lives Matter group and receive an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin. But her office said the trip was canceled.

The bill presented by Valls on Wednesday includes a range of measures for convicted terrorists that would go from the depriving them of the right to vote and the right to become a civil servant to revoking citizenship.

The prime minister, however, made a last-minute modification to it to find a consensus that would satisfy both the left and the right. Valls said no mention of dual nationality would appear in the constitution and France would respect its obligations under international law that prevent it from leaving a person stateless.

Opponents of the measure say it would create two classes of citizens  dual nationals who could lose their citizenship and others who cannot  in opposition to the principle of equality in France's constitution.

The bill is to be debated next week in France's lower house of parliament, the National Assembly.

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Angela Charlton contributed from Paris.
Ammon Bundy urges last refuge occupiers to go home

BURNS, Ore. (AP)  A day after eight members of an armed anti-government group were arrested, their jailed leader on Wednesday urged a handful of remaining militants to abandon the Oregon wildlife refuge they have occupied for more than three weeks and where they are now surrounded by federal agents.

After militant leader Ammon Bundy made his first court appearance in Portland on Wednesday, his attorney, Mike Arnold, read this statement from his client: "Please stand down. Go home and hug your families. This fight is now in the courts."

It was unclear whether the remnant of Bundy's followers still holed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns was ready to heed his advice.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward speaks at press conference at the Harney County Community Center in Burns, Ore., Thursday, Jan. 27, 2016. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP)

Meanwhile, details began to emerge about the confrontation Tuesday on a remote highway that resulted in the arrest of Bundy and other leading figures in the group of occupiers, and in the death of militant Robert Finicum.

Bundy followers gave conflicting accounts of how Finicum died. One said Finicum charged at FBI agents, who then shot him. A member of the Bundy family said Finicum did nothing to provoke the agents.

An Oregon man who says he witnessed the shootout says he heard about a half-dozen shots but didn't see anyone get hit, and that the shooting happened quickly  over maybe 12 or 15 seconds. Raymond Doherty told KOIN-TV (http://is.gd/AgNSdm) that he was about 100 feet back and couldn't see who specifically was shooting. But, he added, "I saw them shooting at each other."

There was no immediate way to confirm the accounts. Authorities refused to release any details about the encounter or even to verify that it was Finicum who was killed.

Also on Wednesday, a federal judge in Portland unsealed a criminal complaint that said the armed group had explosives and night-vision goggles and that they were prepared to fight at the refuge or in the nearby town of Burns.

Someone told authorities about the equipment on Jan. 2, when the group took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, according to the document.

Bundy and the seven others are charged with felony counts of "conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats."

The criminal complaint stresses that point. It states that the 16 employees at the wildlife refuge "have been prevented from reporting to work because of threats of violence posed by the defendants and others occupying the property."

Federal law officials and Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward held a news conference on Wednesday in which they called on the rest of the occupiers to go home. There is a huge law enforcement presence in the region, and the FBI has now set up checkpoints outside the refuge.

FBI agent Greg Bretzing said people could leave through checkpoints "where they will be identified." He did not say whether any of them face arrest. He said negotiators were available to talk if they have "questions or concerns."

Bretzing also defended the FBI-led operation that resulted in the arrest of Bundy and other leaders, and in the death of Finicum. "I will say that the armed occupiers were given ample opportunities to leave peacefully," he said.

Ward said multiple law-enforcement agencies put together "the best tactical plan they could."

Bundy followers took to social media to offer conflicting accounts of Finicum's final moments.

In a video posted to Facebook, Mike McConnell said he was driving a vehicle carrying Ammon Bundy and another occupier, Brian Cavalier. He said Finicum was driving a truck and with him were Ryan Bundy  Ammon's brother  as well as three others.

He said the convoy was driving through a forest when they were stopped by agents in heavy-duty trucks. He said agents first pulled him out of the vehicle, followed by Ammon Bundy and Cavalier.

When agents approached the truck driven by Filicum, he drove off with officers in pursuit. McConnell said he did not see what happened next, but he heard from others who were in that vehicle that they encountered a roadblock.

The truck got stuck in a snowbank, and Finicum got out and "charged them. He went after them," McConnell said.

Relatives of Ammon Bundy offered similar accounts, but they said Finicum did nothing to provoke FBI agents.

Briana Bundy, a sister of Ammon Bundy, said he called his wife after his arrest. He said the group was stopped by state and federal officers.

She said people in the two vehicles complied with instructions to get out with their hands up.

"LaVoy shouted, 'Don't shoot. We're unarmed,' " Briana Bundy said in an interview with The Associated Press. "They began to fire on them. Ammon said it happened real fast."

"Ammon said, 'They murdered him in cold blood. We did everything they asked, and they murdered him. We complied with their demands,' " she said.

McConnell had a different perspective.

"Any time someone takes off with a vehicle away from law enforcement after they've exercised a stop, it's typically considered an act of aggression, and foolish," he said in the Facebook video.

McConnell said he was questioned by authorities, and he believes he was not charged because he was not considered a leader of the group. Briana Bundy confirmed that McConnell was in the convoy on Tuesday.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The group, which has included people from as far away as Michigan, calls itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom It came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

___

Petty reported from Portland. Associated Press writers Ken Ritter in Las Vegas, Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, and Martha Bellisle in Seattle contributed to this report.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Greg Bretzing reacts as he speaks during a press conference at the Harney County Community Center, in Burns, Ore., Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Bretzing was recounting the actions taken Tuesday night by police and federal authorities including the killing of one of the armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP)

Rancher Cliven Bundy stands along the road near his ranch after speaking with media Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Bunkerville, Nev. Cliven Bundy and his wife Carol Bundy was returning from a trip to visit the family of LaVoy Finicum, a 55-year-old rancher from Cain Beds, Ariz., who died Tuesday after law enforcement officers initiated a traffic stop near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It's unclear what happened in the moments before his death. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Oregon State Police man a roadblock at the intersection of highways 395 and 20 outside of Burns, Ore., Wednesday morning, Jan. 27, 2016. Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward speaks at press conference at the Harney County Community Center in Burns, Ore., Thursday, Jan. 27, 2016. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP)

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward speaks at press conference at the Harney County Community Center in Burns, Ore., Thursday, Jan. 27, 2016. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP)

People wait inside the Harney County Community Center before a news conference, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Burns. Ore., regarding the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Authorities Tuesday arrested the leaders of the armed group who had been occupying the refuge headquarters to protest federal land policies. (Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Kim Rollins, 64, of Burns, stands outside the Harney County Community Center in Burns, Oregon, before the start of a news conference by officials Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Authorities on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group who had been occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters to protest federal land policies. (AP Photo/Keith Ridler)

Police officers block the turnout to Sodhouse Lane, which is the main road leading to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, near Burns, Ore. Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Law enforcement personnel block an access road to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, near Burns, Ore. Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested. (Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
Previous arrests of tourists in North Korea

TOKYO (AP)  North Korea has never hesitated to mete out harsh punishments for foreign missionaries, illegal border crossers or anyone involved in acts it considers to be hostile or subversive. But until a few years ago, hardly any foreign tourists were arrested or detained for much more than questioning, though North Korea may be lowering its bar.

Here are some recent cases involving foreigners, mostly Americans, who arrived on tourist visas  and often their own agendas  but wound up in jail:

MERRILL NEWMAN  In 2013, North Korean authorities detained and then deported 85-year-old Merrill Newman, an American tourist brought into the country by Beijing-based Juche Tours. Newman, a Korea War veteran, was held for nearly two months for his wartime involvement in training anti-North Korea fighters. He later told his story in an e-book in which he claimed North Korea sent the Swedish Embassy, which handles U.S. consular affairs in North Korea, a $3,241 bill for the time he spent in detention at the Yanggakdo Hotel. He says he declined to pay.

FILE - In this Sept. 1, 2014, file photo, Mathew Miller, an American detained in North Korea, speaks to The Associated Press in Pyongyang, North Korea. Miller, a California native, was arrested at Pyongyangs airport on April 10, 2014, after tearing up his tourist visa and later sentenced to six years of hard labor for espionage and other charges. He has told the media he wanted to get arrested, though his motives remain unclear. He stayed in custody until U.S. spy chief James Clapper flew to Pyongyang in early November that year to retrieve him. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)

JOHN SHORT  Short, a 75-year-old Australian missionary on a tourist visa, was taken into custody for distributing Biblical materials on the Feb. 16 birthday of the late leader Kim Jong Il in 2014. He was deported the following month. As is the general rule in North Korea, Short's release followed a written confession and apology. He recanted after he left the country, which is also typical.

JEFFREY FOWLE  After getting into North Korea as a tourist, Fowle was arrested in May 2014 and eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaving a Korean-English Bible at a provincial club frequented by locals. He was in North Korean custody for about six months before being flown out on a U.S. government aircraft sent to retrieve him. After his return to the U.S., he said he deliberately planted the Bible because he wanted to spread Christianity in the North.

MATTHEW MILLER  Miller, a California native, was arrested at Pyongyang's airport on April 10, 2014, after tearing up his tourist visa and later sentenced to six years of hard labor for espionage and other charges. He has told the media he wanted to get arrested, though his motives remain unclear. He stayed in custody until U.S. spy chief James Clapper flew to Pyongyang in early November that year to retrieve him and American missionary Kenneth Bae, who was already serving a long prison sentence for anti-state activities.
FBI: Wounded officer led drug raid, shot outside bedroom

NEW ORLEANS (AP)  A sheriff's deputy severely wounded during a drug raid he was leading was shot outside a bedroom by an assailant who later told police he was a drug dealer and that he thought he was being robbed, the FBI said Wednesday.

The suspect, identified as Jarvis Hardy, is in FBI custody. He was charged Wednesday in federal court with attempted murder and attempted murder of a federal officer, the FBI said.

In a criminal complaint filed Wednesday, the FBI said officers first announced themselves and when they got no response, battered down the door. As they were searching the house, someone inside a bedroom opened fire and hit Stephen Arnold.

Officials work the scene where a sheriff's deputy was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Another member of the task force shot back into the bedroom while Arnold was taken to safety, the document said. Shortly afterward, Hardy was arrested.

Hardy made a brief court appearance Wednesday, wearing a red jumpsuit with his hands and feet shackled. He was appointed a public defender and future court dates were set.

At one point, when he was told the maximum sentence he could face  20 years  an elderly family member in the audience yelled out "Oh, my God!" and collapsed on the floor. Neither his family nor his public defender spoke to the media following the hearing.

The FBI said Hardy "made statements saying he shot because he thought he was being robbed."

A .40-caliber gun and bullet shells were found in the bedroom, the FBI said.

Arnold was still in critical condition Wednesday and on a ventilator, said Col. John Fortunato of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's department where Arnold worked.

"We will not rest or stop until we eradicate the plague of persistent violent crime in our state," said FBI New Orleans Special Agent in Charge Jeff Sallet.

The agency said Hardy told authorities that he only heard the officers identify themselves after he opened fire, although the FBI said officers announced themselves before entering the house and repeatedly during the raid. The agency also said Hardy told investigators he was a crack cocaine dealer.

Hardy's mother, Gail Hardy, was home during the raid and told investigators that she knew her son was a drug dealer.

The FBI said the mom told investigators that she heard the knocks on the front door, saw that it was a police raid and ran into her son's bedroom and hid in a corner, the FBI said. The FBI said she told her son the police were at the house.

Hardy bought his gun at a pawn shop in Chalmette, Louisiana, a town next to New Orleans, the agency said.

Eight drug task force teams had fanned out to conduct raids Tuesday morning, said Debbie Webber, a spokeswoman for the New Orleans office of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Twelve officers from federal and local agencies were involved with the team where the shooting took place, she said.

The raids were part of a seven-month investigation into drugs, heroin and violent offenses that has resulted in 73 arrests, Webber said.

New Orleans has long struggled with crime. Signs of hope appeared when the homicide rate fell to a 43-year low in 2014, but it jumped last year by 10 percent. To combat street crime, local and federal law enforcement agencies have teamed up in recent years to target neighborhood gangs.

___

Associated Press Writer Bill Fuller contributed to this report.

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand talks to reporters outside University Medical Center, after a deputy was transported there after being shot multiple times in New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Behind him are Mayor Mitch Landrieu, second left, and Police Superintendent Michael Harrison. Woman far right is unidentified. (AP Photo/Cain Burdeau)

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Justice Dept. targeting collusion in heir-tracing industry

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Justice Department is investigating an industry that seeks out heirs to the recently deceased and is looking into whether price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices have ripped off relatives who have enlisted the companies' services, law enforcement officials said.

Federal prosecutors have announced plea agreements in the last month with two industry executives and a California company as part of an antitrust investigation that is likely to result in additional criminal charges.

"American consumers and businesses are entitled to the benefits of free competition," Kalina Tulley, assistant chief in the Chicago office of the Justice Department's antitrust division, said in an interview. "When you have competition, you expect that there will be lower prices and better products than when there is no competition."

FILE - In this May 14, 2013, file photo, the Department of Justice headquarters building in Washington is photographed early in the morning. An industry that seeks out heirs to the newly deceased is under scrutiny from the Justice Department, which is looking into whether price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices have ripped off unsuspecting relatives. (AP Photo/J. David Ake, File)

The investigation spotlights a small and little-known industry that's been publicly defensive of its practices while boasting that it's helped heirs secure millions of dollars in inheritances that they otherwise may never have known they were entitled to.

"There's a long history of missing-heir search firms looking for windfall profits," said C. Tim Rodenbush, president of HeirSearch.com, which decries the "excessive fees of inheritances" sought by others in the business.

The investigation focuses on potential collusion among the firms, which specialize in locating family members of people who die without a will and without close family relationships. Such relatives, who typically have never met or even known of the deceased, are sometimes referred to as "laughing heirs" because of their windfalls.

"It's never a first cousin or a daughter. It's always someone who is far enough removed that they didn't keep in touch with a branch of the family," said Lori Perlman, a wills and trusts lawyer in New York.

The businesses employ workers to sift through probate filings in search of people who have recently died and who may have missing or unknown heirs.

Then, using court and census records, atlases, genealogical documents and other public data, they compete to track down potential beneficiaries of an estate and then sell their services  helping heirs prove their lineage and secure an inheritance  on a contingency-fee basis.

For competitive reasons, the firms typically withhold details of the estate  such as the name of the deceased or the amount of the inheritance  until after they secure a binding and exclusive contract with a client that guarantees them a cut of any inheritance they secure.

"The heir would be sitting there and getting, so to speak, 'offers' from these different services," said Gerry Beyer, a Texas Tech University law professor and expert in estate planning.

Though the companies tout their ability online to recover money for cousins far removed, they also acknowledge that their business practices have raised eyebrows. Rhetorical question-and-answer sections on some of the companies' websites include questions such as, "How do I know this is legitimate?" and "Is this some type of scam?" as well as answers meant to reassure potential customers that their methods are sound.

In a pair of criminal cases, Justice Department officials have accused the industry of being tainted by efforts to eliminate competition by colluding on contingency fees and sharing customer payments.

As part of the scheme, prosecutors allege, once a firm would contact with an heir, rival firms would agree to back off from approaching other heirs to the same estate, but still share in the contingency fees.

"If the companies compete, the contingency fees are going to go down in the country," Tulley said. "Eventually, you might reach a level that's a lot less profitable. If there's no competition, they can charge whatever rate they feel someone will pay and not ever have to worry about being undercut."

In December, prosecutors unveiled a plea deal with Brandenburger & Davis, a Sacramento, California-based firm that markets itself online as a company of private investigators, genealogists and historians with an "excellent track record of identifying and locating missing and unknown heirs throughout the world." The firm has agreed to an $890,000 criminal fine and one of its executives, Bradley Davis, has also agreed to plead guilty, according to the Justice Department.

The firm declined to comment, and a lawyer for Davis did not return repeated messages.

Then, this month, Richard A. Blake Jr., the president of a Braintree, Massachusetts heir-hunting firm was charged with allocating heirs with another, unnamed company, and with setting contingency fee rates at collusive and non-competitive rates. Prosecutors say Blake also has agreed to plead guilty. Blake and his attorney did not return phone messages seeking comment.

____
Rights group: fearing refugees, West curtails human rights

ISTANBUL (AP)  Western governments fearful of terror attacks and the potential threat posed by refugees are adopting counterproductive policies in the name of security, Human Rights Watch said in its world report Wednesday.

HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said "fear of being killed or starved" drove millions of people to flee Syria and other conflict zones in 2015, while fear of "what that influx of asylum-seekers would mean, particularly in Europe, led many governments to try to raise the gates" to block refugees.

He chided Europe and the United States for allowing fear of terrorism  particularly since November's Paris attacks  to give rise to "blatant Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees" which alienates the very communities that could help in counterterrorism efforts.

"As a counterterrorism measure, Islamophobia is the last thing you would want," he said.

The organization unveiled its annual report reviewing human rights practices around the world in Istanbul. Turkey is home to 2.2 million Syrian refugees and the main departure point for migrants headed to Europe.

Roth urged Turkey, which has been promised $3 billion by the European Union in aid to prevent the outflow of migrants, to avoid measures such as turning refugees back to Syria or becoming party to any EU effort "to deny the basic rights of people to flee persecution."

The estimated 1 million asylum seekers who reached Europe by sea in 2015 would represent only 0.20 percent of the European Union population if member countries shared in resettlement, he said.

"'Creating a safe and orderly way for refugees to make their way to Europe would reduce lives lost at sea while helping immigration officials to screen out security risks," Roth said.

Policy makers in the U.S. and Europe, the report said, are using the terrorist threat as an opportunity to expand law-enforcement powers, including mass surveillance.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have embarked on the largest crackdown on civil society in decades, according to the 659-page report reviewing more than 90 countries. It noted similar trends in Turkey, Kenya, Sudan, South Africa and Israel.

Roth said the group is deeply concerned that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are "trying to undermine any institution that is capable of holding it into account."

Senior HRW Turkey researcher Emma Sinclair-Webb said Turkey is witnessing the "most serious deterioration of human rights" since the AKP came to power in 2002.

Sinclair-Webb also raised concerns over civilian casualties amid escalating violence following the collapse of the peace process between Ankara and the outlawed Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK.

"Many people have died in circumstances which are extremely difficult to scrutinize because of the curfews" and restrictions on media access," she said.
France asks EU partners for new sanctions on Iran

PARIS (AP)  France has asked its European Union partners to consider new sanctions on Iran for its recent missile tests, officials have told The Associated Press, even as Paris welcomed the president of the Islamic Republic, which is flush with funds from the lifting of other sanctions over Tehran's nuclear program.

The ambiguous signals emerging Wednesday from France came as President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate elected in 2013, signed billions of dollars in business deals on an earlier stop in Italy and met with Pope Francis in the first such Iranian foray into Europe since 1999.

France hopes for similarly lucrative deals during Rouhani's two-day visit, along with regional peacemaking efforts as the once-pariah state emerges from decades of isolation.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani smiles ahead of a meeting in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

But amid the courting of Iran, two officials from EU nations told AP that the request for new sanctions came shortly after the EU and the U.S. lifted sanctions on Tehran on Jan. 16 in exchange for U.N. certification that Iran had scaled back its nuclear programs. Iran said those programs were peaceful but critics feared it wanted to build nuclear weapons.

The two officials said the French request came after the United States had imposed new sanctions on Iran over the firing of a medium-range ballistic missile.

The two officials said the French proposal is formally under EU review, but most other EU members view it as counterproductive to efforts to revive political and economic ties with Iran after the long chill over the nuclear dispute. The officials, who were briefed on the issue, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

The French government did not respond to AP requests for comment by late Wednesday. In an email to AP, the European Union also did not address whether France had asked for a review.

A French diplomat who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly on the topic cited Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius as saying the EU is reviewing the possibility of new sanctions on Iran. He declined to say which nation initiated the process.

Disclosure that the French asked for such a review  even if it is ultimately unsuccessful  could complicate Rouhani's low-key visit. About 20 accords between companies and ministries were to be signed Thursday, the French president's office said.

Paris also wants to draw Tehran into a role as peacemaker in a Middle East that is fraught with civil war in Syria, where Iran has played an active role in support of President Bashar Assad, and in Yemen.

There was little fanfare in France for the new era being ushered in for Iran as Rouhani works to help his nation of 80 million emerge from isolation and raise its profile in the West, balancing ties with Russia and China. His Paris visit will be marked by a two-hour meeting with President Francois Hollande and ministers.

France, which has deep ties with Arab countries, also conducts a balancing act in the region. Last week, Fabius visited Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia, Iran's fierce rival, and Paris will shortly welcome the Saudi crown prince.

While Shiite powerhouse Iran actively supports the Assad government in Syria, Saudi Arabia  like France  firmly opposes him, and supports rebel groups.

Tensions recently escalated with Saudi Arabia breaking ties with Iran after its embassy in Tehran was mobbed by crowds protesting the execution in Saudi Arabia of a prominent Shiite cleric and opposition figure.

France is trying "to ease tensions by speaking to everyone, which is our vocation," said a ranking French diplomat ahead of Rouhani's arrival. He was not authorized to speak publicly about the visit and asked to remain anonymous.

Iran's human rights record, including hundreds of executions, adds another note of caution for France which presses for the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

For its part, Iran could raise the issue of France harboring the headquarters of the most organized Iranian opposition group, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran  which planned a Thursday demonstration against Rouhani.

Both countries clearly are opting for pragmatism.

Rouhani was expected to oversee the signing of contracts, including a possible deal with Airbus to renew Iran's fleet of passenger jets. Iran's aviation industry has suffered under sanctions in the past three decades, and of 250 commercial jetliners, only about 150 are flying.

Oil giant Total, engineering group Alstom and carmakers PSA Peugeot-Citroen and Renault-Nissan, with a past presence in Iran, are among companies that could clinch deals, too.

The Italian government and private companies inked more than a dozen accords with Iran covering the metals industry, oil services, rail transport and shipbuilding.

France showed its eagerness to take up where it left off in Iran as soon as the July nuclear deal was signed. Fabius visited Tehran, as did an important delegation of France's main business group, known as Medef, where Rouhani will address business leaders Thursday.

Rouhani was originally scheduled to visit Paris in November, but the trip was called off after Nov. 13 Islamic extremist attacks that killed 130 people.

Rouhani said he and Pope Francis discussed the need for religious leaders to speak out against extremism and terrorism during their audience Tuesday. But in an apparent reference to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, attacked by extremists a year ago for lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, Rouhani said freedom of expression "doesn't mean offending that which is sacred to other people's faith."

___

Jahn reported from Vienna. Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet and Angela Charlton in Paris and John-Thor Dahlburg and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani waits before a meeting with French Senate President Gerard Larcher, in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, third left seated, attends a meeting with French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron and French business leaders in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani leaves after a meeting in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani waves to journalists on the occasion of his visit at Rome's Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right, walks past a Swiss guard, at the end of a private audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican,Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Irans president asked Pope Francis to pray for him after the two men held private talks at the Vatican Tuesday as Tehran aims to carve out a role in resolving Middle East conflicts thanks to the nuclear accord and lifting of sanctions. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

An unidentified member of the Iranian delegation following President Hassan Rouhani takes a photo with a tablet during Rouhani's visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right, visits Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, bottom with white turban, waves to journalists on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right with white turban, is flanked by Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, right, on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, center with white turban, is flanked by Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, right, on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, center with white turban, waves to journalists on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, bottom right, waves to journalists as his entourage take pictures on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Supporters of Maryam Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, demonstrate against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. Banner on the right reads " Human rights. No complaisance. 2000 executions after 2 years with Rohani". (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Supporters of Maryam Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, demonstrate against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. Banner on the right reads "2000 executions after 2 years with Rohani". (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Supporters of Maryam Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, shout as they demonstrate against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. Banners read "No to Rouhani". (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

An unidentified member of the Iranian delegation following President Hassan Rouhani takes a photo with a tablet during Rouhani's visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Supporters of Maryam Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, shout as they demonstrate against the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Supporters of Maryam Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, demonstrate against the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. Banner on the right reads "Human rights. No complaisance. 2000 executions after 2 years with Rouhani". (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani waits before a meeting with French Senate President Gerard Larcher, in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
The Latest: Rouhani faces protest, corporate bosses in Paris

ROME (AP)  The Latest on Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit to Europe (all times local):

7:20 p.m.

Corporate leaders and government ministers  as well as opposition activists  have greeted Iran's Hassan Rouhani's first visit to France as president.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, bottom right, waves to journalists as his entourage take pictures on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

After arriving in Paris on Wednesday from Rome, Rouhani and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron.

Rouhani then hosted leaders of France's business community in his Paris hotel soon after arriving Wednesday from Rome.

A few dozen people protested the visit in front of France's Foreign Ministry, some shouting "Rouhani dictator, down down Rouhani." The demonstration was linked to the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, the most vocal and best organized Iranian opposition group, which is based in France and plans a bigger demonstration Thursday.

The group, formerly on the U.S. and EU terror lists, was notably protesting executions in Iran.

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4:25 p.m.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has landed in France for the first such visit by an Iranian leader in 17 years, as part of a European trip meant to usher in a new era after a landmark nuclear deal.

Rouhani arrived Wednesday from Italy, where the Iranian delegation reached billions of euros in business deals. The Italy stop also drew controversy when a Rome museum covered up naked statues in an apparent effort to avoid offending Rouhani.

In France, he will be hosted at the French presidential palace by President Francois Hollande. He will also give a foreign policy speech and meet corporate leaders as French companies eye the resumption of what was once lucrative trade with Iran.

The trip comes after the end of economic sanctions prompted by a deal to curb Iran's nuclear activities.

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1:45 p.m.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is squeezing in a bit of sightseeing during the first official visit by an Iranian leader to Italy since 1999.

Before leaving Rome for Paris, Rouhani got a guided tour of Rome's most iconic monument, the Colosseum. Rouhani and the Iranian delegation spent about a half-hour at the arena, receiving a guided tour by Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini.

While tourists were cleared from the Colosseum complex when U.S. President Barack Obama visited last year, sightseers milled about as usual while Rouhani took his tour. Bodyguards, however, kept them at a distance from the Iranian leader and his delegation.

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1:30 p.m.

Italy's culture minister says the decision to cover up naked Roman statues in an apparent bid to not offend the visiting Iranian president was "incomprehensible."

Culture Minister Dario Franceschini told reporters Wednesday that neither he nor Italian Premier Matteo Renzi authorized the cover-up. Several wooden panels were erected Monday to hide nude statues at Rome's Capitoline Museums where Rouhani and Renzi held a joint press conference.

Franceschini said: "I think there easily would have been other ways to not offend an important foreign guest without this incomprehensible choice of covering up the statues."

Some Italian politicians have denounced the cover-up as "cultural submission."

Rouhani said Wednesday that Iran didn't contact Italian officials about the issue but that he appreciated the welcome he had received.

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1:15 p.m.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says the visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to France is important for both geopolitical and economic reasons.

In a statement Wednesday with The Associated Press ahead of Rouhani's arrival, Fabius said: "This visit, which we hope is successful, will allow us to address the international situation and regional crises where we hope Iran can play a positive role  notably in Syria and Lebanon  and our bilateral relations, particularly economic."

He said the nuclear accord, which France helped push through, "opened the way to a reinforcement of our relations."

 This version corrects the day of the week to Thursday, and corrects that Fabius comments were made in a statement, not an interview.

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11 a.m.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says Iran didn't make any specific requests for Rome museum officials to cover up naked statues but says he nevertheless appreciated the welcome he received.

Rouhani laughed Wednesday when asked at the end of a three-day visit to Italy about the statue cover-up, which made headlines in Italy and around the world. Some Italian politicians decried the "cultural submission" implied in Italy's gesture.

Rouhani said Iran made no specific request for the cover-up, saying there were "no contacts about this" from the Iranian side.

But he added: "I know that Italians are a very hospitable people, a people who try to do the most to put their guests at ease and I thank you for this."

Ahead of a joint news conference Monday with Premier Matteo Renzi, wooden panels were erected around some Roman-era statues in Rome's Capitoline Museums.

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10:45 a.m.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says his first visit to Europe since the nuclear accord was signed has proven that there are "great possibilities" for economic, academic, scientific and cultural cooperation and that "today we are in a win-win situation" after years of mutual losses due to sanctions.

At a press conference Wednesday on his third day in Rome, Rouhani said he hoped that such developments could also take place in the United States, but said the U.S. Congress was getting in the way.

He says, "The key is in Washington, not in Tehran."

After visiting the Colosseum, Rouhani next heads to France.

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10:10 a.m.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says freedom of expression doesn't extend to insulting other people's faith.

Rouhani told reporters Wednesday that he and Pope Francis discussed the issue during their audience at the Vatican on Tuesday.

Francis was once asked about the extremist attacks on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. He suggested that a violent reaction could be expected when someone's faith is insulted, saying that anyone who insults his mother can expect to be punched.

Rouhani concurred, saying "freedom of expression doesn't mean that people can do what they want."

He made the comments hours before arriving in Paris on the next leg of his European trip.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right, walks past a Swiss guard, at the end of a private audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican,Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Irans president asked Pope Francis to pray for him after the two men held private talks at the Vatican Tuesday as Tehran aims to carve out a role in resolving Middle East conflicts thanks to the nuclear accord and lifting of sanctions. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani waves to journalists on the occasion of his visit at Rome's Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right, visits Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, bottom with white turban, waves to journalists on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, center with white turban, waves to journalists on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, center with white turban, is flanked by Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, right, on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right with white turban, is flanked by Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, right, on the occasion of his visit to Rome's ancient Colosseum, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Rouhani leaves Rome later today for Paris, his second stop of his four-day visit to Europe, the first by an Iranian president in almost two decades. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
The Latest: Macedonia closes border to refugees

ATHENS, Greece (AP)  The Latest on the continuing influx of asylum-seekers and migrants in Europe: All times local:

8:15 p.m.

Greek authorities say neighboring Macedonia has stopped letting in refugees heading north to central Europe, leaving about 2,600 people stranded on the Greek side of the border.

Refugees and migrants disembark from a Ferry at the Athens' main port of Piraeus, early Wednesday, Jan 27, 2016. Greek authorities say a total of seven bodies, including those of two children, have been recovered from the sea off the eastern Aegean island of Kos after a boat carrying migrants or refugees sank early Wednesday.(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Macedonian police stopped letting refugees through on Wednesday afternoon, but the reason was not clear and authorities were not available for comment. The country took similar action for two days last week.

After a five-month free-for-all that ended in November, Macedonia started to only allow in migrants whom it deems to be bona fide refugees  Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan nationals. All others are considered economic migrants and left trapped in Greece, where they are told to seek asylum, agree to voluntary repatriation or be deported.

Macedonia later limited transit to refugees whose stated country of destination is Austria or Germany.

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7:55 p.m.

Greece says a European Union investigation that found major flaws in its border management is outdated and that the situation with migrant screening and registering has become much better.

Government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili said Wednesday that it is "not constructive to try to create a mood isolating Greece" based on an assessment from Nov. 10, when conditions were very different.

The EU report could pave the way for other member states to isolate Athens and introduce long-term ID checks to restrict migrants from entering further into the continent.

Gerovassili said Greece is doing its best but has received only partial response to its appeal for greater EU help in registering migrants, while an EU agreement to relocate 160,000 refugees from the country has only been implemented for 414 people so far.

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7:25 p.m.

A German court official says a Moroccan and a Tunisian have been charged over a theft on New Year's Eve in Cologne, the first indictments related to assaults blamed largely on foreigners that caused public uproar.

Cologne administrative court spokeswoman Sonja Heidel said the two men, who weren't identified, were charged over the alleged theft from a man of a bag containing a camera near the city's main station, news agency dpa reported. She said the men are in custody and could go on trial in February.

The unease caused by the New Year's Eve events has centered on reported sexual assaults on women. Almost 1,000 criminal complaints have been filed, more than half alleging sexual assaults. Authorities have identified 35 suspects, of whom 32 are from North Africa.

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4:45 p.m.

Berlin police say they're investigating reports that a 24-year-old Syrian refugee died after waiting for days in the cold at the city's central registration point for asylum-seekers.

However, police spokesman Stefan Petersen said Wednesday that so far authorities hadn't even been able to locate a body to examine.

Police began looking into the matter after activists wrote a post on social media that said a Syrian man died of cardiac arrest after suffering from a high fever, accusing the city of negligence.

Berlin's central registration point for asylum-seekers has been criticized for months for its chaotic and slow procedures of helping refugees getting registered or paying out financial support. Critics have also repeatedly pointed out that refugees had to wait in the cold, because not enough indoor waiting rooms were provided.

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3:25 p.m.

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is withdrawing his works from two museums in Denmark to protest a new law that allows Danish authorities to seize valuables from migrants.

Ai announced on social media Wednesday that he no longer wanted to have his works on display at the Aros museum in Aarhus and the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen.

Curator Jennie Haagemann told AP that Ai called the owner of the Faurschou Foundation to inform him of his decision.

Aros museum officials said they didn't know anything beyond what Ai had posted on Twitter and Instagram.

Museum director Erlend Hoeyersten said he has "great respect" for Ai's criticism of Danish immigration policies, "but I also find it unreasonable that an entire people is punished for the government's policies."

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3:05 p.m.

A European Union investigation has found major flaws in Greece's management of its borders due to the migrant influx, which could pave the way for its EU partners to introduce long-term ID checks.

The findings of the investigation by surprise inspection teams in Greece and its Aegean Sea islands in November and December was made public in a report Wednesday. The EU's top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, says their "report shows that there are serious deficiencies in the management of the external border in Greece."

If the EU's executive Commission rules that Greece has demonstrated "serious deficiencies in the carrying out of external border control," some EU partners could maintain tight border controls for up to two years.

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2:35 p.m.

Greece's migration minister says his country is seeking European Union backing for the swift deportation of migrants not considered eligible for asylum from Greek islands back to Turkey.

Ioannis Mouzalas told Skai television Wednesday that EU-supervised screening centers being set up on the Greeks islands could be used to send back ineligible migrants on chartered boats to Turkey "the next morning."

Mouzalas conceded the government was experiencing delays with setting up the island screening centers  known as hotspots  but said Athens is seeking additional assistance with the project.

Over a million migrants and refugees reached the European Union last year, with more than 80 percent of them traveling to the Greek islands facing the coast of Turkey.

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12:20 p.m.

The German Cabinet has approved measures meant to make it easier to deport foreign criminals  a package that ministers drew up amid outrage over New Year's Eve assaults in Cologne.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas said the measures approved Wednesday, which must still be passed by Parliament, are also in the interest of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Germany. He said that "they do not deserve to be lumped together with criminals."

The changes mean that even a suspended prison sentence would be grounds for deportation if someone is found guilty of certain crimes. These include homicide, bodily harm, sexual assault, violent theft and serial shoplifting. Youth sentences would be covered too.

The Cologne assaults have been blamed largely on foreigners, heightening tension over Germany's migrant influx.

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11:50 a.m.

Greek authorities say a total of seven bodies, including those of two children, have been recovered from the sea off the eastern Aegean island of Kos after a boat carrying migrants or refugees sank early Wednesday.

Rescue crews recovered the bodies of three men, two women, a boy and a girl. There were two survivors  a man and a woman.

A search and rescue operation in the area by vessels from the Greek coast guard and the European border patrol agency Frontex, a helicopter and Greek rescue volunteers was called off after all on board the boat were accounted for.

In this Friday, Jan. 15, 2016 photo, an Afghan man with his daughter walks after they receive a wristband tags at Tabakika registration center, Chios island, Greece. The island now has a functioning system which aims to process new arrivals through registration as fast and as painlessly as possible. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Refugees and migrants disembark from a Ferry at the Athens' main port of Piraeus, early Wednesday, Jan 27, 2016. Greek authorities say a total of seven bodies, including those of two children, have been recovered from the sea off the eastern Aegean island of Kos after a boat carrying migrants or refugees sank early Wednesday.(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Spain: PM defends party despite new corruption arrests

MADRID (AP)  Spain's acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Wednesday he sees no reason why the arrest of 24 people in a new corruption scandal affecting his conservative Popular Party should damage his efforts to form a new government following last month's inconclusive elections.

Myriad investigations into alleged corruption scandals in recent years are blamed for the party's plunge from a majority in the 350-seat Spanish Parliament to a minority of 123 seats in the Dec. 20 elections.

Rajoy told Telecinco television the party was fighting corruption and had reacted responsibly in removing members of the party who were arrested Tuesday. He denied the party was under investigation.

The 24, including several former Popular Party local government officials, were arrested in the eastern Valencia region as part of a probe into illegal commissions for public contracts.

Rajoy spoke as King Felipe VI began another round of talks with party leaders to try to find one capable of getting enough parliamentary support to form a new government. Rajoy turned down a petition by the king last week, saying he didn't have sufficient support in Parliament at the time.

Rajoy's only possible partner for the moment, the anti-corruption centrist Ciudadanos party, said the arrests would influence the talks.

The raids brought to four the number of corruption scandals involving the Popular Party in the last two weeks alone.

The Berlin-based Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index said Wednesday that Spain had fallen from rank 37 to 36 in its latest list.

The group said the situation in Spain, as well as some other countries, was "very worrying."

It included Spain as a place "where there was once hope for positive change. Now we're seeing corruption grow."

The index is based on expert opinions of public sector corruption.

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Italian gay rights debate prompts rethink of sacred family

ROME (AP)  In Italy, family is considered so sacred that marriage is lauded in the Constitution. But what kind of family?

That has become a bitterly divisive question in a nation where the Vatican packs considerable political weight and where gays have grown impatient as other traditionally Catholic European countries have either allowed same-sex couples to marry or legally recognized their civil unions.

On Thursday, Italy's Senate will plunge into a debate on proposed legislation to grant legal recognition to "civil unions," including those of homosexual couples, without equating the partnerships to marriage.

FILE - In this Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016 file photo, activists demonstrate in favor of rights for gay couples, in Rome. On Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016 the Italian Senate will plunge into a debate on proposed legislation to grant legal recognition to ''civil unions,'' including of homosexual couples, without equating those partnerships to marriage. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)

The coalition government of Premier Matteo Renzi is pushing for the legislation, which includes the right of inheritance, to receive the pension of his or her deceased partner, or to make medical decisions about a partner in hospital. But one provision of the bill, to permit gays to adopt the biological children of their partner, has generated animosity even within Renzi's coalition.

Opponents fear the so-called "stepchild adoption" will encourage male couples to turn to surrogate mothers abroad. Surrogacy is banned in Italy, as well as in many other European countries. Headlines warning of a surge in "rented uteruses" have abounded lately in Italian Catholic publications, as well as in more conservative lay newspapers.

Intentionally or not, Pope Francis has waded into the debate. Last week, in an annual address to the Vatican tribunal that grants marriage annulments, the pontiff declared: "There can't be any confusion between the family intended by God and every other kind of union."

And the head of the politically influential Italian Bishops Conference defended Catholics' having their say in the debate. Laity must "inscribe divine law into earthly life," Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said.

According to Vatican teaching, homosexual relations are sinful and marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

Pro-Vatican elements among Renzi's Democrats are among those insisting the adoption provision be jettisoned, and the premier has told lawmakers "to vote according to your conscience."

While politicians squabble over what rights gay couples should have, Italian courts increasingly have been approving the adoption by gays of their partner's biological children on a case-by-case basis.

"This law is needed. Period," Renzi told an Italian radio station recently, as political debate grew more acrimonious.

Besides the faith factor, the proposed bill has prompted a rethink of what constitutes family in a country where people rely on relatives or spouses when the state falls short. Grandparents care for children because public daycare spots are scarce; hospital staff often assume Italians will bring hot meals to their relatives' bedside.

"Culturally, family is the ballast to Italian identity," said Lisa Colletta, a professor of gender studies at The American University of Rome.

In her apartment in Rome, Martina Castagnole wakes in the middle of the night to care for 7-month-old Gabriele, and during the day plays with him, exactly like the boy's biological mother, her partner, Giulia Filibeck, does.

"But in everyday life, I have no rights. I can't take my son from school, I can't travel with him abroad. If the baby is in the hospital, I cannot be involved" in his care, Castagnole told The Associated Press.

She said neighbors, or people whom the couple run into in the supermarket, accept the baby, which was conceived with sperm from a donor in England.

"It's ever more frequent that people we meet, doctors, others, treat us and talk to us like we are both parents," Castagnole said.

"Society is more advanced than the law," she added, while lawmakers "have pressures on them, political, cultural, from the church."

Opponents of the proposed legislation fear gay civil unions will pave the way for gay marriage. They have promised to draw 1 million people to Rome's ancient Circus Maximus field on Saturday to loudly lodge their objections to "stepchild adoption."

"We uphold the position of the Catholic church on marriage, a millennia-old institution," said a rally organizer, Paolo Maria Floris. He stressed that organizers support "individual" rights for gay couples such as inheritance. "But the rights of children come first; they need to have a mother and a father."

Next weekend's rally comes in contrast to rallies in nearly 100 cities nationwide last Saturday, when homosexuals and other backers of the legislation sounded alarm clocks at the same hour to signal that the time has come to give rights to same-sex couples.

In a curious twist, some backers of the bill hail from the conservative fold of former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, whose fiancee is an outspoken advocate for gay rights.

The bill's path will likely be a long one. Opponents have tacked on several thousand amendments in a bid it to slow down the process, and it is not known when lawmakers will vote on the proposal.

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2015 file photo, Pope Francis, right, blesses a newly wed couple during his weekly general audience in the Pope Paul VI hall, at the Vatican. On Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016 the Italian Senate will plunge into a debate on proposed legislation to grant legal recognition to ''civil unions,'' including of homosexual couples, without equating those partnerships to marriage. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)
Germany: Numbers of extremists heading to Syria, Iraq grows

BERLIN (AP)  Germany's domestic intelligence agency says the number of Islamic extremists heading to Syria and Iraq continues to grow, raising concerns over trained fighters returning who could carry out attacks in Europe.

The agency said Wednesday its latest evidence shows 790 people so far have made the trip from Germany to link up with militant groups in the Mideast, up from 750 in October, and about one-third had returned.

Agency head Hans-Georg Maassen says "the security situation is serious."

Germany so far has been spared mass-casualty attacks by Islamic extremists such as the Nov. 13 Paris attacks but security officials say it is also a target.
Suicide attacks kill 4 Iraqi troops in western Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP)  Officials say a series of suicide attacks have killed at least four Iraqi security forces and wounded ten others in western Iraq.

Sheikh Mal-Allah al-Obeidi, head of the town council in al-Baghdadi, in Anbar province, said five suicide bombers attacked his guesthouse at dawn on Wednesday, killing a tribal fighter guarding the building and wounding 10 others.

He says another two suicide attackers bombed the police patrol that headed to the scene, killing the local police chief and two policemen.

A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, confirmed the details and casualty figures.
PICTURED: Thousands brave the cold to cross sea to Greece

CHIOS, Greece (AP)  The seas are rough and cold. The wind is bitter. The overcrowded smugglers' boats are far from seaworthy, with many unable even to make it across a few miles of water  and the bodies of those who drown as the boats sink are fished out of the churning seas day by day.

Yet tens of thousands of men, women and children fleeing violence and poverty in their homelands continue to risk their lives this winter to make the relatively short but dangerous journey from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands, seeking a better future in Europe.

Boats carrying dozens of asylum-seekers reach the eastern Aegean island of Chios and the nearby deserted island of Pasas each night. Many land on rocky, inaccessible parts of the coast, forcing the new arrivals to scramble up steep inclines or cliffs, sometimes with the help of ropes.

In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, an Afghan boy asks for help to climb a rock leading to the main road after arriving on a dinghy from the Turkish coast to the Greek island of Chios. Despite the bitter winter cold and rough seas, tens of thousands of men, women and children fleeing violence and poverty in their homelands continue to risk their lives to make the relatively short but dangerous journey from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands, seeking a better future in Europe. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Those who land on Pasas must wait until morning, warming themselves around fires, until the Greek coast guard can come to ferry them off to Chios and the migrant registration center.

There they go through a screening and fingerprinting process before being given registration documents and catching ferries or flights to the Greek mainland. Then the migrants continue their journey through the Balkans toward more prosperous European countries.

More than 850,000 people, most fleeing conflict in Syria and Afghanistan, entered Greece by sea in 2015, according to the UNHCR. Already in 2016, 35,455 people have arrived despite plunging winter temperatures and days of stormy weather.

In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, refugees and migrants who have arrived from Turkey at the shore of the deserted Greek island of Pasas wait for the Coast Guard to transport them to the nearby Oinousses island. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, newly arrived migrants and refugees use ropes to scramble up a hill from a tiny beach on the deserted Greek island of Pasas they were driven by a smuggler. The smuggler ignored the searchlight, the shouts and the warning shots fired by the Greek coast guard, deftly navigating his small white vessel the shore (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, a Syrian woman with her children takes a shelter in a iron box during a rainfall after they arrived from Turkey to the Greek deserted island of Pasas near Chios on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 . (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016 photo, Afghan migrants look on a smart phone inside the Souda camp as on the background is seen the stone wall of the castle of Chios island. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Friday, Jan. 15, 2016 photo, refugees wait their turn at the Tabakika registration center, Chios island, Greece. Despite the bitter winter cold and rough seas, tens of thousands of men, women and children fleeing violence and poverty in their homelands continue to risk their lives to make the relatively short but dangerous journey from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands, seeking a better future in Europe. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, refugees and migrants warm up their selves above a makeshift fire after they arrived from Turkey to the Greek deserted island of Pasas near Chios. More than 850,000 people entered Greece by sea in 2015, according to the UNHCR. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this early Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, Afghan refugees disembark from a dinghy after crossing a part of the Aegean sea from Turkish coast to the Greek island of Chios. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Friday, Jan. 15, 2016 photo, an Afghan man with his daughter walks after they receive a wristband tags at Tabakika registration center, Chios island, Greece. The island now has a functioning system which aims to process new arrivals through registration as fast and as painlessly as possible. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016 photo, a woman carries her young boy inside the Souda camp for refugees and migrants in front of the stone wall of the castle of Chios island , Greece . The 800-person camp placed in the dry moat of Chios towns medieval castle began operating in early November 2015.(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

in this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016 photo, a Syrian man with one leg walks at the Greek deserted island of Pasas after he arrived with others from Turkey. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016 photo, an Afghan couple use a blanket to calm their baby inside the Souda camp in Chios island , Greece. Despite the bitter winter cold and rough seas, tens of thousands of men, women and children fleeing violence and poverty in their homelands continue to risk their lives to make the relatively short but dangerous journey from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands, seeking a better future in Europe. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Grenada man charged with murder in death of US tourist

ST. GEORGE'S, Grenada (AP)  A man accused of killing a tourist from Georgia in a machete attack on an isolated beach in Grenada made his first appearance Wednesday before a judge on the Caribbean island to face a charge of capital murder.

Dave Martin Benjamin did not enter a plea and was not given an opportunity to speak in the brief hearing. A lawyer has not yet been appointed to represent him. The 27-year-old could get the death penalty if convicted. Grenada has not carried out an execution since 1978.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the courthouse to get a glimpse of Benjamin as he was led into court in jeans and a checkered shirt.

The suspect surrendered to authorities Monday, a day after the body of Jessica Colker, a 39-year-old physician's assistant from Atlanta, was found in a wooded area near an isolated beach where she had been walking with her husband.

Benjamin became the chief suspect because people had seen him begging on the beach before the incident, Acting Police Commissioner Winston James said after the court hearing. He did not disclose what other evidence investigators had collected and said that Benjamin had not confessed to the crime.

Police say Benjamin waylaid Colker and Brian Melito around noon on Sunday as they walked along the shore. The husband fled to get help and his wife was missing when he returned. Her body was found later that day in a wooded area. An autopsy found that she died from extensive skull fracture and asphyxia. James said there were signs of sexual assault.

Colker worked as a physician's assistant at a children's hospital in metro Atlanta. Melito is a physician. The couple, who met at a dance workshop in Costa Rica, married in November 2014, according to an online wedding album.

"Jessica could fill the room with laughter in a second," Kristin McManus, a friend from her hometown of Yorktown, Virginia told WAVY-TV. "And her smile just glowed, and she was such a caring person, an open person."

Police said earlier that Benjamin was convicted of robbery and burglary in 2009 and of a rape in 2013. He was released early from prison in November because of good behavior.
Image of Asia: Demanding resignation of Indian minister

In this photo by Altaf Qadri, a student shouts slogans demanding the resignation of India's education minister while being detained by police at a protest in New Delhi. The protesters accuse Hyderabad University's vice chancellor along with two federal ministers of unfairly demanding punishment for five lower-caste students involved in a clash last year with students supporting the governing Hindu nationalist party. The five lived in a tent outside the gate of the university since their suspension Dec. 21, and one of the students, Rohith Vemula, died in what police said was a suicide. They are investigating whether the actions by the officials contributed to the 26-year-old doctoral student's death. He belonged to the Dalits, lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy. India outlaws discrimination by caste and sets quotas at universities and in jobs to overcome discrimination, but caste remains influential in society.
Snyder: About 200 Flint kids have elevated blood-lead levels

FLINT, Mich. (AP)  The latest on Flint's water crisis and efforts to fix the problem of lead in the drinking water (all times local):

6:15 p.m.

Gov. Rick Snyder says officials have identified about 200 Flint children with elevated blood-lead levels since the city's water crisis was exposed in the fall.

An archway on a planter straddles the Flint River in downtown Flint, Mich., on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. From its founding, Flint's fortunes essentially were entwined with a single industry. First it was the fur trade, which shifted to lumber, which gave way to the horse carriages that led to it being called Vehicle City. It was a fitting moniker for its next, most important role, as a powerhouse of auto manufacturing and the original home of General Motors. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Snyder disclosed the figure during a tele-town hall event Wednesday with nearly 8,000 listeners. He says the state is working to ensure all kids are tested.

Michigan officials had said earlier Wednesday that water samples in Flint are "trending better," but that it's too soon to give the go-ahead to residents to resume drinking unfiltered water.

Department of Environmental Quality Interim Director Keith Creagh said the test results are not statistically valid because there's no guarantee homeowner-provided samples are coming from homes at higher risk. Further testing continues.

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5:35 p.m.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has convened the first meeting of a panel that will work on finding solutions for Flint residents whose drinking water is contaminated with lead, something he calls a "terrible tragedy."

The Flint Water Interagency Coordinating Committee is a 17-member panel that will make recommendations regarding the health of people exposed to lead, study Flint's water infrastructure, and establish ways to improve communication between local and state government.

Snyder told committee members it presents an opportunity to "leverage the resources" each brings.

The committee includes Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, who has extensively studied the issue in Flint and elsewhere, and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is credited with bringing the problem to the public's attention after state agencies initially dismissed her concerns.

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3:45 p.m.

Senate Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois says Democrats will offer an amendment to a bill on the Senate floor to address the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Durbin says Democratic Sens. Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan will seek to amend a Senate energy bill being debated on Thursday. Durbin offered few details, but said the measure would "protect children from water that is deadly or poisonous."

State officials disconnected Flint from Detroit's water supply in 2014 and began using the Flint River to save money. Regulators failed to ensure the new water was treated properly and lead from pipes leached into the water supply, contributing to a spike in child lead exposure.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Democratic candidate for president, called Flint's water problems "one of the great public health crises in modern times."

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2:45 p.m.

Democrats in Michigan's Republican-controlled Legislature have introduced legislation to repeal an emergency manager law they say contributed to Flint's lead-tainted water crisis.

The law lets the state appoint a manager to control a local government or school district's finances. Flint was under state financial management when it disconnected from Detroit's water supply and began using the Flint River to save money.

State environmental regulators failed to ensure the new water was treated properly, which led to lead from pipes leaching into the supply.

Rep. LaTanya Garrett says emergency managers are unaccountable to residents and notes the worsening finances of Detroit's school district under state management.

Majority Republicans favor the law. House Republican spokesman Gideon D'Assandro acknowledges "mistakes were made in Flint" but says there are no cities under emergency management for the first time in 15 years. He says "that shows the early warning program and improved intervention measures we put in place worked."

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1 p.m.

Michigan officials say that water samples in Flint are "trending better," but that it's too soon to give the go-ahead to residents to resume drinking unfiltered water.

Residents have been using bottled water and filters because the improperly treated supply was tainted with lead from pipes leading to old homes.

State Department of Environmental Quality Interim Director Keith Creagh stressed Wednesday that the test results are not statistically valid because there's no guarantee homeowner-provided samples are coming from homes at higher risk. Further testing continues.

Creagh says officials are studying whether the city's pipes are being recoated with enough of a lining of phosphates to keep the lead from leaching.

The state is working to identify newer neighborhoods with no lead pipes, so those residents can potentially get the all-clear on their water sooner.

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12:05 p.m.

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver says she has hired a Virginia Tech professor whose extensive testing helped bring the city's lead-tainted water problems to light.

Weaver said at a news conference Wednesday that Marc Edwards will oversee all water testing done by the state and federal governments. She added he will be "fully independent," report to her and get paid through private donations. She also touched on the issue of Flint residents' water bills. Supplemental funding approved by the state House last week included $3 million to help residents pay their bills.

Gov. Rick Snyder says Edwards and Weaver are part of a 17-member group of medical experts selected to determine long-term solutions to fix Flint's water system and help residents who have been exposed to lead.

Snyder also announced that the state would have an increased administrative presence in Flint and called it the beginning of a long-term effort.

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9:20 a.m.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Flint Mayor Karen Weaver have scheduled a news conference to address the actions the Michigan city has taken and the next steps it will take to deal with a public health emergency caused by lead-tainted water.

The state's website says the news conference will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Others expected at the news conference are Michigan State Police Capt. Chris Kelenske, Department of Environmental Quality Interim Director Keith Creagh and Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon.

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9 a.m.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has named a group of medical and field experts to a committee that will determine long-term solutions to fix Flint's water system and help residents who have been exposed to lead.

In a news release issued Wednesday, the governor says the 17-member committee will make recommendations regarding the health of people exposed to lead, study Flint's water infrastructure and determine potential upgrades, and establish ways to improve communication between local and state government.

The committee includes Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, who has extensively studied the issue in Flint and elsewhere, and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is credited with bringing the problem to the public's attention after state agencies initially dismissed her concerns.

Members will serve three-year terms expiring Dec. 31, 2018.

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8 a.m.

A new lawsuit asks a federal judge to force Michigan and the city of Flint to replace all lead pipes in Flint's water system to ensure residents have a safe drinking supply.

The complaint, filed Wednesday, says service lines from water mains into homes should be replaced at no cost to customers. The suit seeks an order requiring city and state officials to remedy alleged violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

It's at least the fourth lawsuit filed over Flint's lead-tainted water. The others seek financial damages and class-action status.

The plaintiffs are the Natural Resources Defense Council, American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, Concerned Pastors for Social Action and resident Melissa Mays.

This item has been corrected to reflect the proper name of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Registered Nurse Brian Jones draws a blood sample from Grayling Stefek, 5, at the Eisenhower Elementary School, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 in Flint, Mich. The students were being tested for lead after the metal was found in the city's drinking water. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Certified Medical Assistant Tamika Dukes draws a blood sample from Alaia Croom, 7, at the Eisenhower Elementary School, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 in Flint, Mich. The students were being tested for lead after the metal was found in the city's drinking water. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
Venezuela doctors fume at official silence on Zika

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP)  Venezuela's medical community is demanding the government publish statistics about the Zika virus and warning that the South American country, which borders nations that are hotbeds of the illness, could already be facing an epidemic.

Venezuela's Ministry of Health has so far limited itself to confirming the presence of the mosquito-borne illness suspected of causing birth defects. It used to publish weekly data on all epidemic diseases, but stopped making those statistics public last year.

Meanwhile, other Latin American countries are stepping up mosquito eradication efforts and officials in some, including neighboring Colombia and Brazil, have been so concerned that they have recommended women consider postponing pregnancies.

"The Ministry of Health must be the first to issue warnings about the existence of a public health threat; they cannot be the last one to speak," said Jose Oletta, who was formerly Venezuela's health minister and now works with the Network to Defend National Epidemiology.

"We already have a weakened health care system, which tends to make these problems spread more rapidly. Add to that the lack of information and it's a perfect storm."

Zika, which is spread by the same mosquito that transmits dengue and yellow fever, hit Brazil last year at the same time the country saw a sudden, dramatic jump in cases of microcephaly, in which people are born with unusually small heads. Investigators are also studying a possible link to Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can cause temporary paralysis.

Brazilian officials estimate that there have been hundreds of thousands of Zika cases there. Colombia says it has seen more than 16,000 suspected or confirmed cases and expects that number to multiply.

The Venezuelan Society of Public Health has chastised the socialist administration for remaining silent. It said a study by non-governmental organizations that sought reports of fevers found a rise in cases of acute fever in the past six months that could correspond to 400,000 cases of Zika here.

"Data is an essential tool for controlling this new health problem and to guiding public health measures," the organization said in a statement.

Medical professionals in this highly polarized country tend to lean toward the opposition and many blame the socialist administration for widespread shortages of medical supplies and a worsening brain drain that has deprived the country of specialists and young doctors.

On Tuesday, the opposition-controlled Congress declared that Venezuela was in a humanitarian health crisis stemming from a lack of medical supplies, crumbling hospitals and high turnover within the government administration. Lawmakers accused the administration of hiding information about Zika and another mosquito-related illness, chikungunya.

Health Ministry officials reached by telephone declined to comment.

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Hannah Dreier is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hannahdreier
Kenya honors troops slain in Somalia with memorial service

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Wednesday led an interfaith memorial service honoring Kenyan soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Somalia.

President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud attended the event at a military barracks in Eldoret.

"We owe these young patriots who gave everything a debt of honor," Kenyatta said. "We can begin to discharge it by resolving never to forget their sacrifices. We must also make sure that every single one of the cowards who murdered them will be hunted down and brought to justice."

Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, right, leads an interfaith memorial service honoring Kenyan soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Somalia, accompanied by President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, center, and Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, left, at a military barracks in Eldoret, Kenya Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. In Nigeria Buhari faces the Boko Haram extremist insurgency while Mohamud's government in Somalia relies on foreign troops including Kenya's to protect against the Islamic extremists al-Shabab. (AP Photo/John Muchucha)

In Nigeria Buhari faces the Boko Haram extremist insurgency while Mohamud's government in Somalia relies on foreign troops to protect against the Islamic extremists al-Shabab.

"Nigeria is standing in solidarity and is willing to work with Kenya and indeed other African countries and the global community at large with a view to defeating these (extremists)," Buhari said.

The Somali Islamic extremist group al-Shabab claims it killed about 100 Kenyan peacekeepers stationed in southern Somalia on January 15. Kenyan officials have not given a death toll, and it is unclear how many Kenyan peacekeepers have been killed or wounded in Somalia.

Before the ceremony started, relatives of the victims were seen being counselled as some broke down in tears.

Kenya first deployed troops to Somalia in 2011 to prevent Islamic extremists from crossing the border and launching attacks that threatened the country's crucial tourism sector.

Al-Shabab opposed the deployment, and vowed to launch more attacks inside Kenyan territory. To stem the attacks, Kenya has also considered building a high wall across the border.

Despite being pushed out of Somalia's major cities and towns, al-Shabab continues to launch deadly guerrilla attacks across the Horn of Africa country. The group frequently targets African Union troops, government officials and foreigners.

Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, center, lays a wreath as Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, center right, and President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, center left, stand behind at an interfaith memorial service honoring Kenyan soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Somalia, at a military barracks in Eldoret, Kenya Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. In Nigeria Buhari faces the Boko Haram extremist insurgency while Mohamud's government in Somalia relies on foreign troops including Kenya's to protect against the Islamic extremists al-Shabab. (AP Photo/John Muchucha)

Kenyan soldiers pay their respects to fallen comrades at an interfaith memorial service honoring Kenyan soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Somalia, attended by Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, and Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, at a military barracks in Eldoret, Kenya Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. In Nigeria Buhari faces the Boko Haram extremist insurgency while Mohamud's government in Somalia relies on foreign troops including Kenya's to protect against the Islamic extremists al-Shabab. (AP Photo/John Muchucha)

Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, and Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, stand to the left of a military monument at an interfaith memorial service honoring Kenyan soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Somalia, at a military barracks in Eldoret, Kenya Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. In Nigeria Buhari faces the Boko Haram extremist insurgency while Mohamud's government in Somalia relies on foreign troops including Kenya's to protect against the Islamic extremists al-Shabab. (AP Photo/John Muchucha)

Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, center-right with red tie, leads an interfaith memorial service honoring Kenyan soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Somalia, accompanied by President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, center, and Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, center-left, at a military barracks in Eldoret, Kenya Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. In Nigeria Buhari faces the Boko Haram extremist insurgency while Mohamud's government in Somalia relies on foreign troops including Kenya's to protect against the Islamic extremists al-Shabab. (AP Photo/John Muchucha)
Rights group: UN report erodes UK logic for arming Saudis

SANAA, Yemen (AP)  Human Rights Watch said Wednesday that a leaked United Nations report contradicts Britain's rationale for selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, pointing out that it says the Saudis as well as their Yemeni adversaries violated international humanitarian law.

David Mepham, the U.K. Director of Human Rights Watch, said the report's findings "flatly contradict repeated statements made by British ministers about the actions of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen."

"For almost a year, (Foreign Secretary Philip) Hammond has made the false and misleading claim that there is no evidence of laws of war violations by the U.K.'s Saudi ally and other members of the coalition," he said. Hammond made the comments to lawmakers in the House of Commons this month.

Shiite fighters, known as Houthis, and other people carry the coffin of judge Yahya Rubaid, who was killed with his family by a Saudi-led airstrike in Sanaa, Yemen, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Mepham added that the report shows the violations are frequent and widespread, including attacks on medical facilities, schools, mosques and populated residential areas. He urged the British government to halt the transfer of any military equipment to Saudi Arabia and its coalition allies that might be used for such violations.

The United States has been Saudi Arabia's main arms supplier, selling it $1.3 billion worth of munitions alone at the end of last year when Riyadh was running low due to the Yemen war. Britain, France and others have all taken part in the bonanza over the years, selling the kingdom billions of dollars' worth of arms, some during the fighting in Yemen.

The U.N. report, obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday, was made by panel of U.N. experts who monitor U.N. sanctions, and had not been released publicly.

Yemen has been torn by conflict since 2014, when Shiite Houthi rebels allied with a former president captured large swaths of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, which they took in September that year.

In March 2015, a coalition of mainly Gulf Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia began launching airstrikes against the Houthis, later expanding the intervention to include a ground invasion. More than 5,800 people have been killed and over 80 percent of Yemen's population is in dire need of food, water and other aid, according to the U.N.

Coalition airstrikes targeting the Houthis in and around the capital have killed more than 20 rebels since Tuesday, security and medical officials said.

Some 26 people from both sides were killed during pro-government advances in the central city of Taiz, they said, adding that fighting also continued in the northern Jawf province and air raids hit the western coastal city of Hodeida.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

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Associated Press writer Brian Rohan in Cairo contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to show that the British foreign minister made the remarks in question this month, not last December.

People bury the body of judge Yahya Rubaid, who was killed with his family by a Saudi-led airstrike in Sanaa, Yemen, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)
See more news on the migrant crisis at www.dailymail.co.uk/migrantcrisis

Athens has now been given until end of April to improve their checks

A snap EU inspection has found 'serious deficiencies' in Greece's border management saying officials regularly failed to register migrants or check their travel papers.

Expert teams arrived in Greece and on islands in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey to test the level of border checks.

But the EU's top migration official Dimitris Avramopoulos said their report shows that there are 'serious deficiencies in the management of the external border in Greece.'

Migrants arrive at the port of Piraeus near Athens today. An EU inspection has found 'serious flaws' in Greece's border controls

Expert teams arrived in Greece and on islands in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey to test the level of border checks. Pictured are migrants arriving in Athens earlier today

A Syrian woman pushes her child in a wheelchair after disembarking a ferry in Athens. Germany has temporarily reintroduced border controls in its part of the passport-free Schegen area until May 13

They also issued Athens with a deadline of three months to fix the problem.

Now there are fears that other EU nations could isolate Greece and introduce long-term ID checks to further restrict arrivals of migrants into the continent.

The new report comes as Germany has temporarily reintroduced border controls in its part of the passport-free Schegen area until May 13.

But if the EU's executive commission rules that Greece has demonstrated flaws in its border control, countries like Germany, Austria and Sweden could possibly keep their border controls for up to two years.

EU nations would have to vote in favour of the move by around a two-thirds majority, but Greece alone could not stop them.

Men, women and children walk in sub-zero temperatures near the Serbia-Croatia border on January 26

Migrants, some fleeing war zones, have been braving freezing temperatures near the Serbia-Croatia border

A group of migrants wrapped in blankets, pictured near the Serbia-Croatia border waiting to buy train tickets

Any failure in the next few weeks to come up with a new mechanism allowing the border controls could see the whole Schengen border region unravel.

European Commission vice president Valdis Dombrovskis said: 'Schengen is one of the most formidable achievements of the European Union and it must be protected.'

But Greek immigration minister Ioannis Mouzalas added: 'I am uneasy because there is an effort to create an atmosphere against Greece.

'It's a bad report for us and it documents something that is true.'

Mouzalas said things have already improved since the inspections late last year.

He added: 'Our commitment now is to be ready by mid-to-late February.'

Wrapped in a blanket and carrying their belongings, migrants pictured walking in the snow in Serbia this week

A migrant holds a child wrapped in a blanket close to his chest while braving freezing temperatures in Serbia

The UNHCR also predicts that an increasing number of women and children will arrive in Europe

News of the report comes after an analysis by the UN found that Europe should expect one million more refugees during 2016.

The UNHCR also predicts that an increasing number of women and children will arrive in Europe, after either being sent ahead or seeking to re-join male relatives.

The report says: 'This trend may continue to rise as more families are travelling.

'In addition an increasing number of reports suggest that women and children are being sent ahead or trying to join their male relatives who already in destination countries.'

More than 850,000 people are thought to have entered Greece last year seeking sanctuary or jobs in Europe but Greece only has shelter for about 10,000 people.

The Greek coastguard is simply overwhelmed, and thousands of migrants have moved north, hoping to find a home in wealthy EU countries like Germany or Sweden.

Members of the Red Cross bring in a dinghy full of migrants who have crossed the Aegean Sea and landed on the island of Lesbos

More than 850,000 people are thought to have entered Greece last year seeking sanctuary or jobs in Europe but Greece only has shelter for about 10,000 people

A young girl is wrapped up in a thermal blanket as she arrives with her family on the Greek island of Lesbos
Charged: Tracy Lawrence was arrested on Tuesday after hitting an assistant principal at her child's elementary school

Police say a Virginia mother hit an assistant principal at her child's elementary school in the head, knocking her unconscious briefly.

Portsmouth police said in a news release that the confrontation occurred Tuesday afternoon, around 2.30pm, when 43-year-old Tracy Lawrence visited Lakeview Elementary School to speak to the assistant principal about an issue involving her child.

Police say witnesses told the investigators that Lawrence was unhappy with the assistant principal's final decision on the matter so she hit her on the head, causing her to lose consciousness.

After that, Lawrence reportedly became disorderly - shouting and drawing attention to herself.

A school resource officer called police, but by the time they arrived on the scene, Lawrence was gone.

They tracked down the woman to her home where she was arrested and charged with assault and battery and disorderly conduct.

Police say they don't believe any children witnessed the altercation.

Lawrence appeared in court on Wednesday for a bond hearing, at which point a judge ordered her held on $10,000 bail and was barred from having contact with anyone at the school.
Cloak-and-dagger steps to protect fugitive sect leader in US

PHOENIX (AP)  The former head of security for a polygamous church in the U.S. rattled off a list of elaborate steps used to assist the sect's leader while he was a fugitive a decade ago and outlined how towns in Arizona and Utah took orders from the church.

Willie Jessop, who left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 2011, said those who assisted church leader Warren Jeffs used disposable cellphones and encrypted radios to communicate. They drove 40 miles (64 kilometers) to make calls out of fear that authorities were monitoring their phones.

Jessop is a key witness at a trial in Phoenix in which the federal government alleges that Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, served as an enforcement arm of the sect.

Willie Jessop, a former spokesperson and head of security of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints before leaving the sect in 2011, leaves the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court after a day of testifying during a federal civil rights trial against two polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

The former security chief said he would fly to places around the country to serve as a decoy and throw law enforcement off the trail while Jeffs was being moved to a new hiding place.

Jeffs, who was on the run from charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men, was captured during a 2006 traffic stop outside Las Vegas in an SUV with $50,000, cellphones, a police scanner and wigs. He is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting one of the 24 underage brides.

The towns are accused of discriminating against nonbelievers by denying them housing, water services and police protection. The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn't a motivating factor in their decisions.

Jessop told jurors that residents must have church approval to serve in government in the towns.

He said a turning point occurred in 2004 when 20 men were booted from the church. "It changed from a church to a cartel," he said.

Lawyers for the towns pressed Jessop on why he remained in the church for seven more years.

Jessop said he turned against church leaders after Texas authorities played him an audio tape in which Jeffs raped a 12-year-old girl. Jessop said he later reviewed another recording in which Jeffs confessed to a rape.

Hildale attorney Blake Hamilton objected to Jessop's testimony about the allegations against Jeffs.

"This is not the criminal trial of Warren Jeffs," Hamilton said.

Outside court, Colorado City attorney Jeff Matura said: "The testimony about Warren Jeffs and his criminal conduct is heartbreaking, especially with respect to this treatment of children, but it's not part of the allegations of this case."

Federal investigators say Colorado City officers claimed to have no information on Jeffs' whereabouts while he was a fugitive, even though it was later discovered that some of them had written letters to the church leader during that time.

Willie Jessop, a former spokesperson and head of security of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints before leaving the sect in 2011, leaves the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court after a day of testifying during a federal civil rights trial against two polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line begins Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

CORRECTS SPELLING OF LAST NAME TO CLARKE INSTEAD OF CLARK - U.S. Justice Department attorney Sean Keveney, left, and Jessica Clarke, center, and another attorney on the team arrive at the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court after a day of testimony during a federal civil rights trial against two polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Attorney Jeff Matura, middle, representing the town of Colorado City, Ariz., and attorney Blake Hamilton, right, representing the town of Hildale, Utah, leave the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court after a day of testimony during a federal civil rights trial against two polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Willie Jessop, a former spokesperson and head of security of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints before leaving the sect in 2011, leaves the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court after a day of testifying during a federal civil rights trial against two polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
The Latest: Suspect in deputy shooting appears in court

NEW ORLEANS (AP)  The Latest on a shooting of a deputy involved in a drug raid in New Orleans (all times local):

2:30 p.m.

The man accused of shooting and critically wounding a Louisiana sheriff's deputy has appeared in court for the first time after the shooting.

Officials work the scene where a sheriff's deputy was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The 26-year-old Jarvis Hardy appeared Wednesday in a New Orleans federal courthouse.

Hardy wore a red jumpsuit and his hands and feet were shackled.

At one point during the hearing, when he was told of the maximum sentence he could face  20 years  an elderly family member in the audience yelled out "Oh, my God!" and collapsed on the floor.

Hardy was assigned a federal public defender and future court dates were set in the case.

The FBI charged Hardy earlier Wednesday with attempted murder. They say he opened fire Tuesday when the deputy, Stephen Arnold, was leading a drug raid in the house.

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11:25 a.m.

The FBI says the sheriff's deputy who was critically wounded during a drug raid was shot outside a bedroom as officers were searching the house.

In a criminal complaint filed Wednesday, the FBI says 35-year-old Stephen Arnold led the raid into the house.

The agency said before entering the house, officers identified themselves and then battered down the door.

As they were searching the house, several gunshots came from a bedroom, hitting Arnold five times.

The suspect, identified as Jarvis Hardy, is in FBI custody. The agency says Hardy told authorities he thought he was being robbed, and that he only heard the officers identify themselves after he opened fire.

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10:40 a.m.

The FBI says the sheriff's deputy who was severely wounded during a drug raid was the first through the door.

In a criminal complaint filed Wednesday, the FBI says that 35-year-old Stephen Arnold led the raid into the house.

Arnold was shot five times during the raid, which was part of a sweeping set of drug raids Tuesday.

The FBI charged Jarvis Hardy on Wednesday with attempted murder.

The agency said that after his arrest, Hardy told authorities that he shot because he thought his home was being robbed.

The FBI also said Hardy's mother was home during the raid and told investigators that she knew her son was a drug dealer.

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10 a.m.

The FBI says the suspect in a drug-raid shooting that left a deputy in critical condition has been charged in federal court.

The FBI says it charged 26-year-old Jarvis Hardy on Wednesday morning with attempted murder and with attempted murder and assault of a federal officer.

Hardy is accused of shooting Stephen Arnold, a 35-year-old sheriff's deputy who was part of a federal task force conducting the raid. Arnold was shot five times in the neck, torso and arm. Authorities say the raid was part of a sweeping set of predawn drug raids Tuesday in efforts to root out drugs in New Orleans.

In a statement, FBI Special Agent in Charge Jeff Sallet says law enforcement "will devote whatever resources necessary to bring the perpetrator of this heinous crime to justice."

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3:20 a.m.

Friends and family are praying for a Louisiana sheriff's deputy critically wounded in New Orleans while serving a warrant as well-wishers donated blood for his recovery.

Debbie Webber, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said late Tuesday that Stephen Arnold was still in the intensive care unit after losing a lot of blood.

She said doctors would be monitoring him closely over the next few days to make sure there's "nothing wrong with his brain."

Arnold was shot five times while taking part in a task force serving a warrant in New Orleans.

The man suspected in the shooting, identified by police as Jarvis Hardy, was in FBI custody.

Friends and well-wishers have been lining up at centers in Jefferson Parish, where the officer was from, to give blood.

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand talks to reporters outside University Medical Center, after a deputy was transported there after being shot multiple times in New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Behind him are Mayor Mitch Landrieu, second left, and Police Superintendent Michael Harrison. Woman far right is unidentified. (AP Photo/Cain Burdeau)

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Officials investigate the scene where a police officer was shot in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Debate feud injects fresh chaos into Republican primary

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  An explosive feud between 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Fox News is overshadowing the final sprint to Iowa's presidential caucuses, injecting a new sense of chaos into the contest.

On the eve of the final debate before Iowa voters weigh in, Trump refused to back off his decision to boycott Thursday's prime-time faceoff. His campaign insisted that debate host Fox News crossed a line with a sarcastic statement mocking him and continued to criticize moderator Megyn Kelly. In turn, Fox accused Trump's camp of trying to terrorize its employees.

"They think they can toy with Mr. Trump," campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ''Mr. Trump doesn't play games."

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at Farmington High School, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016, in Farmington, N.H. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Next Monday, Iowa residents will gather in schools, churches and even private homes to choose among the Republican and Democratic candidates battling to be their party's 2016 presidential nominee  the first in a series of state-by-state contests to choose delegates to each party's presidential nominating convention.

Meanwhile, Democratic candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders met with President Barack Obama at the White House in what was widely seen as a chance for the president to display public neutrality in the heated and unexpectedly tight primary race to replace him  refuting suggestions that he favors Sanders' rival Hillary Clinton.

Some thought the absence of Trump could make another leading contender, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a prime target for campaigns eager to spark a last-minute shakeup.

Cruz challenged Trump to a separate one-on-one debate, a challenge that was dismissed by his opponent.

"Even though I beat him in the first six debates, especially the last one, Ted Cruz wants to debate me again. Can we do it in Canada?" Trump tweeted, referencing Cruz's birthplace.

Some foes saw the shakeup as an opening to rise above the ruckus.

"These kinds of theatrics by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are an entertaining sideshow, but they have nothing to do with defeating Hillary Clinton," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said. "We don't have time for these kinds of distractions."

Despite the attention, there was little sense that Trump's move would significantly change the trajectory of the Republican contest in Iowa. While the former reality television star holds a big lead in most national polls, he and Cruz are locked in a tight race here.

Trump has substituted mass rallies for normal meet-and-greet events, made inflammatory statements that would have sunk other candidates, and spent much of his time giving his views on television news shows and Twitter.

Instead of debating Thursday night, Trump has promised to hold a simultaneous event to raise money for wounded veterans.

But Trump has threatened to skip debates before. In December, he threatened to skip a CNN debate unless the network paid him $5 million, which he said he'd donate to charity. The network did not pay up, and he showed up nonetheless. And in October, he and rival Ben Carson's campaign threatened not to show unless their demands for a shorter run time and other conditions were met. The network adjusted and they appeared.

"He'll show up. I've got a $20 bet on it," former Florida governor and Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush told reporters as he left a Des Moines campaign stop.

Trump's Fox feud dates back to the first primary debate, when Kelly took him to task over derogatory statements he'd made about women.

The mocking Fox statement on Tuesday was the final straw.

It said the leaders of Iran and Russia "both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president" and that "Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings."

Taunting and juvenile, Trump and his campaign manager said.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton applauds after a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Turkey: Professor to stand trial for insulting Erdogan

ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  A philosophy professor says he will stand trial next week on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for suggesting in an article that the Turkish leader should go on trial over a range of claims, including alleged corruption and the violation of the constitution.

Orsan Oymen said Wednesday he faces up to four years in prison for the article published in the opposition Aydinlik newspaper in April. The trial is set for Feb. 4.

Hundreds of people  including celebrities, journalists and high-school students  are being prosecuted under a previously seldom-used law that bars insults to the president. Free speech advocates say Erdogan is aggressively using the law to muffle dissent.
US restricts access to Oregon refuge after fatal standoff

BURNS, Oregon (AP)  Authorities in the U.S. were restricting access on Wednesday to an Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested.

The group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2. They want federal lands turned over to local authorities.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge.

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ammon Bundy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Bundy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

Details of the fatal encounter were sparse. It happened as Bundy and his followers were heading to a community meeting late Tuesday afternoon in John Day, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Burns.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed that her father, Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, was the man killed, the Oregonian reported. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

"This is where I'm going to breathe my last breath, whether I'm 90, 95 or 55," Finicum told The Associated Press on Jan. 5. " ... I'm going to not spend my days in a cell."

The FBI and Oregon State Police would only say the man killed in the police shooting was wanted by federal authorities, and said no more information would be released pending identification by the medical examiner.

Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the occupation, told radio station Oregon Public Broadcasting that five or six group members remain inside the refuge.

For weeks law enforcement vehicles have been noticeably absent from the roads surrounding the refuge. Wednesday, however, marked law enforcement cars are dotted throughout the region. The FBI and Oregon State Police said they were setting up checkpoints and only allowing ranchers who own property in specific areas to pass.

Police and news media have converged on the nearby town of Burns, where most hotels are booked to capacity.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

Thornton called the arrests "a dirty trick" by law enforcement.

Each defendant will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

Law enforcement previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies but opposed the refuge takeover.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The group, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

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Associated Press reporters Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ryan Bundy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Bundy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2016 file photo, LaVoy Finicum, a rancher from Arizona, speaks to the media after members of an armed group along with several other organizations arrive at the at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country. The Oregonian reported that Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

This combination of photos provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office shows eight people involved in the occupation of the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon on Jan. 2, 2016, who were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Top row from left are Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier and Shawna Cox. Bottom row from left are Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, Ryan Payne, Jon Eric Ritzheimer and Peter Santilli. (Multnomah County Sheriff's Office/Maricopa County Sheriff's Office via AP)

This photo provided by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Jon Ritzheimer, who was arrested in Arizona on Tuesday, Jan. 26, in connection with the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. (Maricopa County Sheriffs Office via AP)

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Joseph O'Shaughnessy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. O'Shaughnessy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Peter Santilli, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Santilli and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Shawna Cox, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Cox and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ryan Payne, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Payne and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Brian Cavalier, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Cavalier and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)

Sgt. Tom Hutchison stands in front of an Oregon State Police roadblock on Highway 395 on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 between John Day and Burns, Ore. The FBI on Tuesday arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a federal wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon for the past three weeks. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired Tuesday during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said another person, Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, was arrested in Burns. In a statement, the FBI said one individual "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased." (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Highway 395 is blocked at Seneca between John Day and Burns, Ore., by Oregon State police officers the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities say shots were fired during the arrest of members of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in Oregon for more than three weeks. The FBI said authorities arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan Bundy, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. In a statement Tuesday, the FBI said one individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
Putin aide: Syrian vote must include refugees

MOSCOW (AP)  Syrian refugees should be given an opportunity to cast their ballots in the country's future elections, Russia's security chief has told The Associated Press, adding that the international community should focus on creating conditions for a free vote in Syria.

However, demands for the immediate departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad would be counterproductive, said Nikolai Patrushev, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin who serves as the executive secretary of the presidential Security Council.

"Let's remember the sad experience of Iraq and Libya," Patrushev told the AP in a written reply to questions Tuesday  his first remarks ever to a foreign news organization. "Have they succeeded in stabilizing the situation there following a foreign intervention and physical removal of those countries' leaders?"

FILE - In this Tuesday, May 26, 2015 file photo Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, flanked by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, meets with the BRICS countries' Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa senior officials in charge of security matters in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. Patrushev, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin, told The Associated Press in a written reply to questions that Syrian refugees should be given an opportunity to cast their ballots in the countrys future elections. He argued that the international community should focus on creating conditions for a free vote in Syria. (Sergei Karpukhin/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russia has recently joined forces with the United States and a dozen other nations to help broker Syrian peace talks set to start in Geneva on Friday, which are intended to pave the way for a new constitution and new elections in a year and a half.

The nearly five-year Syrian conflict began in 2011 with protests against Assad's rule and has morphed into an all-out civil war, involving a myriad of opposition units. It has seen the Islamic State group carve out a sizeable chunk of the country's territory and killed a quarter of a million people and displaced millions. Moscow has staunchly backed Assad throughout the war, shielding his government from U.N. sanctions and providing it with weapons.

Patrushev reaffirmed Russia's longtime stance that it's up to the Syrian people to determine Assad's fate and the country's future.

"What Syria should look like and who should be at its helm tomorrow must be determined by the Syrian people, not Russia or any other country," Patrushev said.

Moscow has denied media reports claiming that Russia's top military intelligence officer recently visited Damascus to urge Assad to step down.

"Different assessments could be made of the incumbent Syrian president, but insisting on his immediate departure isn't just political short-sightedness but an open interference into affairs of a sovereign state," Patrushev said.

"Efforts by the international community must be directed exclusively at creating the necessary preconditions for ensuring a free expression of will of all citizens of Syria," he added. "Russia is ready to support the idea to create opportunities for Syrian refugees to vote, naturally under the same strict international control as in Syria itself."

Amid tough bargaining over who should represent the opposition in the Geneva talks, Moscow has pressed its air campaign in Syria. Russian warplanes have flown nearly 6,000 combat missions in Syria since Moscow launched the air blitz on Sept. 30, helping Assad's military to gain ground in recent weeks.

Moscow says it's targeting IS and other extremist groups, but the U.S. and its allies claim Russian warplanes have also targeted the moderate opposition in a bid to shore up Assad.

Patrushev said that Russia believes it's necessary to more actively engage in political settlement with "constructive opposition forces, which are ready to fight the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations."

"After approving a list of terrorist groups at an international level, it would be necessary to precisely determine locations of non-radical militant units, which are ready to confront terrorists, to avoid hitting them with air strikes," he said.

The Russian security chief noted that Moscow's military action in Syria has prompted France, Britain, Germany, Italy and NATO as a whole to show more interest in joint efforts with Russia in fighting terrorism.

He emphasized that "attempts to divide terrorists into good and bad ones are categorically unacceptable," adding that "it's necessary to renounce any preconditions while creating a joint front against terrorism."

Patrushev said that Moscow's relations with the U.S. and its NATO allies have been strained by the Ukrainian crisis and the alliance's expansion eastward that put Russia's security at risk.

"We have seen a pointed buildup of NATO's military activity, the replacement of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe with newer models, and we have heard NATO generals' hostile statements about our country," Patrushev said.

He emphasized a "serious destabilizing potential" has been created by the continuing development of NATO's U.S.-led missile defense in Europe.

Patrushev noted that the latest edition of Russia's national security doctrine reflects the challenges posed by NATO's expansion to Russia's borders and its ongoing military buildup. Like Putin and other Russian officials, he chafed at U.S. action in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, saying it has destabilized the international situation and contributed to the spread of terrorism.

Despite the tensions, Patrushev voiced hope for improving ties with the U.S., saying that "we are interested in developing a full-fledged partnership with the United States on the basis of common interests, including in the economic sphere, and taking into account a key impact of Russian-American relations on the international situation."

"It's necessary to return to a normal dialogue, strengthen cooperation in the sphere of arms control and non-proliferation of mass destruction weapons," he said. "Russia and the United States have big experience in anti-terror cooperation and the settlement of regional conflicts."

FILE In this Tuesday, May 26, 2015 file photo Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, flanked by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, meets with the BRICS countries' Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa senior officials in charge of security matters in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. Patrushev, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin, told The Associated Press in a written reply to questions that Syrian refugees should be given an opportunity to cast their ballots in the countrys future elections. He argued that the international community should focus on creating conditions for a free vote in Syria. (Sergei Karpukhin/Pool Photo via AP, File)
Putin aide: Kiev refuses to honor Minsk deal

MOSCOW (AP)  Kiev has failed to meet its obligations under the Minsk peace accord and has instead introduced an economic blockade of eastern Ukraine, Russia's security chief says.

Patrushev  a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin who serves as the executive secretary of the presidential Security Council  made the remarks in a written reply to questions posed by The Associated Press, and strongly called for the implementation of the February 2015 peace agreement signed in the Belarusian capital.

He insisted that the Minsk agreements obliges Kiev to coordinate with rebel leaders to "conduct a constitutional reform, amnesty, ensure the approval of permanent legislation on a special status of certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, work out the issue of local elections and take steps to improve the humanitarian situation in southeastern Ukraine."

FILE In this Tuesday, May 26, 2015 file photo Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, flanked by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, meets with the BRICS countries' Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa senior officials in charge of security matters in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. Patrushev, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin, told The Associated Press in a written reply to questions that Syrian refugees should be given an opportunity to cast their ballots in the countrys future elections. He argued that the international community should focus on creating conditions for a free vote in Syria. (Sergei Karpukhin/Pool Photo via AP, File)

"Instead of a direct dialogue with representatives of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Ukrainian side has introduced a total blockade of the region," he said, adding that Kiev has dealt a heavy blow to local residents by refusing them pensions and other social payments and blocking banking services.

"They are forcing people, who, by the way, have Ukrainian passports, to starve," he said.

The Ukraine peace deal, brokered by France and Germany, was intended to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine that erupted in April 2014 weeks after a former Moscow-friendly Ukrainian president was chased from power by massive protests and Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

Patrushev reaffirmed the Kremlin view that the removal of Ukraine's former leader was a "coup" organized by the United States and the European Union.

More than 9,000 people have died in fighting in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russia rebels and government forces. While the Minsk deal has helped reduce hostilities, a political settlement still appears to be far off.

The Minsk agreement envisaged an amnesty to the rebels, broad autonomy for the rebel regions and local elections, followed by the re-establishment of Ukraine's control over the border with Russia. Ukraine and the West say the border has been a conduit for Russian troops and weapons backing the rebellion, claims that Moscow has denied.

The conflicting parties have blamed each other for the failure to honor the Minsk agreement and sporadic skirmishes.

Ukraine has demanded the full withdrawal of Russian troops from the rebel areas, while Moscow has countered by saying Russians there are volunteers who went to the region on their free will to help defend the local population.

Patrushev credited Germany and France for their efforts to reach a settlement, saying they are "sincerely trying to help solve the problem." He added, however, that Washington wields more influence with the Ukrainian government and could persuade it to comply with the Minsk deal.
Albanian on trial for allegedly joining IS group in Syria

TIRANA, Albania (AP)  An Albanian Muslim cleric has been put on trial in absentia in Tirana on terrorism charges for allegedly joining the extremist Islamic State group in Syria with his wife and two children.

Prosecutors say Almir Daci, 31, a former imam in an eastern Albanian village, left the country in 2013 with his family, and fought with the group.

His father, Xhevahir Daci, denied his son had joined the group, saying he left Albania to seek a job abroad.

The trial opened Wednesday.

Separately, another nine Albanian Muslims, including two preachers, are on trial accused of allegedly of recruiting more than 70 men to fight with rebels in Syria.
The Latest: Teacher says principal pushed students to safety

INDIANAPOLIS (AP)  The Latest on a bus crash at an Indianapolis elementary school that killed the school's principal (all times local):

6:20 p.m.

A third-grade teacher who witnessed an Indianapolis school bus lurch forward onto a sidewalk while students were being dismissed says the principal pushed several students to safety before she was fatally struck.

Students at Amy Beverland Elementary School are picked up after school after a bus accident in Indianapolis on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities said an adult was killed and two children were seriously injured when a bus waiting outside the elementary school suddenly lurched forward and struck them. (Mykal McEldowney/The Indianapolis Star via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

Debbie Thie says everything happened so fast, but believes she saw Susan Jordan pushed six to 10 children out of the way of the bus.

Thie says Jordan was in her usual position outside Amy Beverland Elementary School Principal, trying to keep everyone safe as school let out Tuesday afternoon.

Thie says she saw one boy trapped under a wheel. She says she thought several students were trapped under the bus, and was surprised to learn later there weren't more victims.

She says her first instinct was to get her children back inside so they wouldn't see what was happening.

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5:15 p.m.

Colleagues of the Indiana elementary school principal who was fatally hit by a bus outside her school say she made it a point to get to know every student and bring out the best in each of them.

Amy Beverland Elementary School Principal Susan Jordan was killed Tuesday afternoon when a bus suddenly lurched forward and struck her. Her funeral has been scheduled for Saturday.

The president of the school's parent-faculty organization, Amy Bilyeu, says Jordan expected the best out of everyone. She says Jordan did "everything in her power to make sure that any child that attended that school is going to be successful."

Denna Renbarger is director of early childhood education for the school district. She says Jordan "loved that school with every inch of her."

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2:15 p.m.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of an elementary school principal who pushed children out of the way before being struck and killed by a school bus.

Pence's office says flags will be lowered at state facilities in Marion County from sunrise to sunset on the day of Susan Jordan's funeral, which has not yet been announced.

The governor is also asking businesses and residents to lower flags.

Jordan was the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School in Indianapolis, on the city's far northeast side. She was killed Tuesday when a school bus suddenly lurched forward and went over a curb outside the school.

Two 10-year-old children were also struck. Both were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

Authorities are still investigating what caused the bus to accelerate.

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1:20 p.m.

Indianapolis police say an initial investigation has found no mechanical problem on a bus that lurched forward and fatally struck an elementary school principal.

Indianapolis Police Sgt. Kendale Adams said Wednesday that the investigation is ongoing into what caused the bus to strike Susan Jordan and injure two 10-year-old students Tuesday afternoon.

Adams says investigators are "going off the premise this was a tragic and unfortunate accident." He says the driver showed no visible signs of impairment.

Adams says the bus was parked in a line near a sidewalk with other buses about 2:45 p.m. when for "some unknown reason it went over the curb" and struck Jordan. The bus driver told firefighters that she saw Jordan push several students out of the way.

The students were hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries.

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2 a.m.

An Indianapolis fire official says an elementary school principal was seen pushing several students out of the way of an oncoming bus before the vehicle fatally struck her.

Authorities say Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School, was killed Tuesday when the school bus suddenly lurched forward.

Indianapolis Fire Department Capt. Rita Reith (ryt) says buses were lined up outside the school when the accident happened. She says one bus went over a curb and struck Jordan and two 10-year-old children. The children were hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries.

Reith says the female bus driver told firefighters she saw Jordan push several students out of the way before she was hit. The driver also said she was not sure what caused the bus to accelerate.

CORRECTS FROM DEANNA TO DENNA- Denna Renbarger, left, and Jamie Strebing hug following a news conference, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Indianapolis. The women shared memories of Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School, who was killed when a bus suddenly lurched forward Tuesday afternoon. Two 10-year-old children were also hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

Signs and balloons honoring Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School, decorate the entrance to the school, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Indianapolis. Jordan was killed and two 10-year-old children were hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries when a bus suddenly lurched forward Tuesday afternoon. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

CORRECTS FROM DEANNA TO DENNA- Denna Renbarger, left, and Jamie Strebing speak during a news conference Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Indianapolis. The group shared memories of Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School, who was killed when a bus suddenly lurched forward Tuesday afternoon. Two 10-year-old children were also hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

A school bus driver yells to a parent that their child is safe after a bus accident at Amy Beverland Elementary School left several students injured and one adult dead on school grounds on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 in Indianapolis. Authorities say a bus waiting outside the Indianapolis elementary school suddenly lurched forward and struck them. (Mykal McEldowney/The Indianapolis Star via AP) NO SALES; MANDATORY CREDIT

Students at Amy Beverland Elementary School are picked up after school after a bus accident in Indianapolis on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities said an adult was killed and two children were seriously injured when a bus waiting outside the elementary school suddenly lurched forward and struck them. (Mykal McEldowney/The Indianapolis Star via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

A police officer talks on the phone as he secures the site of a bus accident at Amy Beverland Elementary School in Indianapolis on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities said an adult was killed and two children were seriously injured when a bus waiting outside the elementary school suddenly lurched forward and struck them. (Mykal McEldowney/The Indianapolis Star via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

A woman puts up a cellphone to her ear while standing by the site of a bus accident at Amy Beverland Elementary School in Indianapolis on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Authorities said an adult was killed and two children were seriously injured when a bus waiting outside the elementary school suddenly lurched forward and struck them. (Mykal McEldowney/The Indianapolis Star via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Fergie applauds Jean Paul Gaultier's couture homage to '80s

PARIS (AP)  It was probably before the time of his front row stars singers Fergie and Beth Ditto  but they laughed and applauded nonetheless at Jean Paul Gaultier's fashion homage to the Palace club, France's answer to New York's once-famous Studio 54.

Here are the highlights of Wednesday's spring-summer 2016 couture collections in Paris.

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A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

THE PALACE PARTY

The glamorous, underground theater was the hippest place in Paris from its inauguration in 1978 by Grace Jones, who famously serenaded guests with her version of "La Vie en Rose" all the way to its end in 1983.

The converted theater represented a golden age in French disco culture and saw Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Andy Warhol rub shoulders with designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, and, yes, Gaultier himself. It was immortalized in a song by disco-queen  and Salvador Dali muse  Amanda Lear, who sat at the Gaultier show as her music boomed in the soundtrack.

Model Farida Khelfa, also a famed Palace regular, laughed and clapped from the front row.

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GAULTIER'S '80s THEATRE

At Wednesday's show by Gaultier, the fashion dial was first turned to the beginning of '80s.

Sequined pill box hats, strong shouldered tuxedos, jumpsuits, silken pajama suits, and big, big hair dazed guests at the high-energy show delivered with a funky 1980s soundtrack. The litany of stars that graced the famed Palace venue were the inspirations for the designer's myriad 69 looks.

Grace Jones was reimagined in a dull shimmering black-and-brown sequined jumpsuit and brown lace robe. Khelfa was spotted on the catwalk in a black perfecto jacket with blood-red nails, lips and shirt.

And one look, big blond hair against a black crepe bustier dress with fuchsia satin, must surely have been the glamorous Hall.

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GALLIANO'S COLLAGE COUTURE

John Galliano demonstrates a seemingly effortless flair in anything he does.

For Maison Margiela's spring show, the former Dior man explored the process of couture through the construct of collage and spontaneous fusion. It made for the wackiest styles seen this season  but possibly also the most artful.

Twenty-five creations played on billowing volumes, contrasting fabric and styles, and pieces of clothing stitched together in unexpected places. If this sounds like a recipe for a fashion mess, in the hands of Galliano it blossomed.

An off-white trench coat in triple georgette and baggy black riding boots meshed with a layered, pleated skirt, cutting a beautiful feminine silhouette.

A silk dress with Chantilly lace was covered at the front with an enveloping layer of sheer black silk that wrapped the entire look  as if blown on the model accidently by the wind. It billowed gracefully backwards as the model walked forward  proving true method in the madness.

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ELIE SAAB'S EMBELLISHED PASTELS

Wednesday's show was one of his most embellished couture displays to date for the popular Lebanese designer Elie Saab, who explored looks that channeled pastel foliage-clad princesses against a verdant tropical forest.

With tiaras and diamond jewelry, the 50 pastel looks in blue, lavender, pink, white and flashes of cobalt blue, riffed of the sheen and sparkle of glimmering leaves. As ever, cinched-waist floor-length gowns were the go-to silhouette. But fine embroideries of silk, sequins and beads made this an atypical, poetic collection.

A lavender jacket and an A-line gown sported delicate embroideries that glistened like morning dew on a spider web. Some bolder printed multicolor silk dresses, meanwhile, had a great hazy look, as if washed by water.

___

VIKTOR & ROLF'S SURREAL COUTURE

They say couture is the "ideas factory" for the fashion industry.

No one tries to demonstrate this more than Dutch design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren  who in Wednesday's installment conjured up a bizarre series of huge, white fabric figurative face sculptures.

The show started with a wearable buttoned white mini-dress  of which the vertical buttoned down part morphed into a large human nose in profile. As the collection progressed  things took a turn for the surreal, at times evoking Pablo Picasso's one-line drawings on the 1950s.

Blown-up segments, which resembled pieces of paper cut into shapes, adorned the looks.

They started small  like a face across the bust  but grew in size and complexity until the models' faces were completely obscured by the weird paper-like sculptures. Some fashionistas were worried that one model, with a huge fan covering her face, might crash into the front row.

She didn't.

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Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, center, dancing with models, acknowledges applause at the end of his Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection presented in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

A model wears a creation for Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection presented in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

A model wears a creation for Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection presented in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

A model wears a creation for Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection presented in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Models wear creations during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

Dutch fashion designers Viktor Horsting, left, and Rolf Snoeren acknowledge applause from the audience after Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

Models wear creations during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

Models wear creations during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation for Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection presented in Paris, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

A model wears a creation during Viktor and Rolf's Spring-Summer 2016 Haute Couture fashion collection, presented in Paris, France, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)
Medics in Brazil investigating head-shrinking birth defects linked to the Zika virus revealed last night there were just six cases from more than 700 children examined.

Researchers have been probing 4,180 suspected microcephaly cases reported since October - and doing intense analysis on 732 of those cases which has confirmed 270 and ruled out the other 462.

However Brazil's Health Ministry said only six of the 270 confirmed cases were found to have the Zika virus - with two being stillborn and four live births, three of whom later died.

Concern: Gleyse Kelly da Silva, 27, holds her daughter Maria Giovanna, who was born with microcephaly, outside their house yesterday in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil

Combating the problem: Municipal workers spray insecticide to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit the Zika virus at the Imbiribeira neighbourhood in Recife

Operation: Municipal workers refill the insecticide sprayer during an operation to combat the mosquitoes

Experts say it is hard to say what the figures mean, because they do not answer whether the tropical Zika virus is causing the babies to have unusually small heads - or explain the size of the problem.

Paul Roepe, director of the Center for Infectious Disease at Georgetown University in Washington DC, said: I don't think we should lower our alarm over the Zika outbreak.

Brazilian officials still say they believe there's a sharp increase in cases of microcephaly and strongly suspect the Zika virus, which first appeared in the country last year, is to blame.

The concern is strong enough that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month warned pregnant women to reconsider visits to areas where Zika is present.

Meanwhile officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have even suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.

But the World Health Organization and others have stressed that any link between Zika and the defect remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.

Working: A municipal worker in Brazil gestures during an operation to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes

Probing: A health worker shows larvae of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes found inside a warehouse in Recife

And the new figures were a reminder of just how little is known about the disease and its effects.

The arrival of the mosquito-borne illness in Brazil initially caused little alarm as the virus' symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue.

I don't think we should lower our alarm over the Zika outbreak Paul Roepe, Georgetown University

Then late last year, after noting what they said was a spike in the birth defect, Brazilian authorities for the first time asked doctors to report cases of patients in their care. So there are no solid numbers to compare with the new tally.

In 2014, only about 150 cases were reported in Brazil in a year - a surprisingly small amount for a largest country with nearly 3 million births a year.

The United States, with about 4 million births a year, has an estimated 2,500 cases of microcephaly a year, said Margaret Honein, a CDC epidemiologist.

Brazilian health officials have dismissed the idea there might have been a large number of unreported cases previously.

Insect problem: Aedes aegypti mosquitoes sit in a petri dish at the Fiocruz Institute in Recife yesterday

Protection: Residents run away and others cover their faces as municipal workers spray insecticide in Recife

But the rate of recorded microcephaly cases was only a fraction of what some experts thought it ought to be.

In establishing a registry, the Health Ministry cast a wide net, including live births, stillborn and miscarried babies, and foetuses shown to have unusually small heads by ultrasound or other diagnostic tests, the ministry said.

In subsequent investigation, tests were done to see if the brain has been affected. The condition can cause lasting developmental problems.

Brazilian health official did not detail what they found in the 462 reports that were ruled out, but many of them were just premature and under-sized, a health ministry spokesman said.

The birth defect can be caused by factors such as genetics, malnutrition or drugs. Infections are also a cause - in the US, one of the leading causes is cytomegalovirus - although Zika-like viruses have not previously been linked to microcephaly.

The CDC's Ms Honein said shifts in the numbers reported out of Brazil were not surprising, and much more investigation is needed.

Big effort: Brazil's health minister said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations

Armed forces: A Brazilian Army soldier inspects a house during an operation to combat the mosquitoes

She was echoed by Dr Ganeshwaran Mochida, a paediatric neurologist at Boston Children's Hospital who specializes in microcephaly.

He said 270 confirmed cases is still quite a substantial number in a country that has been reporting far lower counts.

He also said that health official will have to watch for other problems, including far less obvious issues that can be caused by congenital infections - for example, deafness.

Brazilian officials said the babies with the defect and their mothers are being tested to see if they had been infected.

On Tuesday, Brazil's health minister, Marcelo Castro, announced that 220,000 military personnel were being deployed to bolster efforts to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Mr Castro said the government also would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women.
US voters conflicted on relevance of Clinton marriage drama

WASHINGTON (AP)  Bill Clinton's past behavior with women is becoming something of an issue in his wife's campaign for U.S. president.

And potential voters seem conflicted over whether it should be.

In dozens of AP interviews across the U.S., people give strong and opposing views about how  and whether  Hillary Clinton should be measured by how she dealt with her husband's past.

FILE - In this Dec. 19, 1998 file photo, First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton watches President Clinton pause as he thanks those Democratic members of the House of Representatives who voted against impeachment. The long-running drama of Hillary Clinton's marriage _ her husband's infidelity and how she dealt with it _ is back as a subtext in this year's presidential race. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The issue has a sharper edge than before.

Voters are processing old events in an era of heightened concern about sexual assault  and after Donald Trump alleged that she had helped to discredit her husband's accusers.

But is it fair game, or ancient history?

Both Clintons have tried not to engage in the matter. They've uttered an identical "I have no response" when questioned separately about the matter

FILE - In this Jan. 26, 1998 file photo, President Clinton emphatically denies having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky during a White House event. The long-running drama of Hillary Clinton's marriage _ her husband's infidelity and how she dealt with it _ is back as a subtext in this year's presidential race. (AP Photo/Greg Gibson)
With no budget, Rauner repeats calls for pro-business reform

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner used his State of the State address Wednesday to make another case for changes he says would make Illinois more competitive, even as he acknowledged that huge opposition from Democrats has prompted a record budget stalemate and crippled social services and other programs.

Rauner touched on many of the same agenda items he's pushed unsuccessfully for the past year: imposing term limits on lawmakers, freezing property taxes and allowing local governments to strip unions' collective bargaining rights.

He also attempted to show he's taking a more bipartisan approach to 2016, saying again that he will back Democratic Senate President John Cullerton's plan to overhaul Illinois' worst-in-the-nation pension system and referencing Cullerton's call for school funding reform in saying he wants to direct more money to classrooms.

FILE - In this Jan. 11, 2016 file photo, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner talks to The Associated Press at the Executive Mansion in Springfield, Ill., on the eve of the one-year anniversary of his taking office. Rauner is scheduled to give his second State of the State address Wednesday, Jan. 27 while there still is no budget deal for the year that began July 1. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)

"All of us in this chamber had a difficult year together in 2015 as we debated a budget with structural reform," Rauner said. "But it is not too late for this General Assembly to make historic progress for the people of Illinois."

But his roughly 40-minute speech made clear that the battle lines over a budget impasse about to enter its eighth month haven't changed. And Democrats  almost all of whom refrained from joining Republicans in applauding the governor  were quick to criticize.

"Until I see substantive progress, my patience with this charade of cooperation has all but dissolved," said Senate Assistant Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat from Maywood.

Rauner and Democrats who control the Legislature have been unable to agree on a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.

Democrats want the governor to approve a tax increase to help close a roughly $5 billion deficit. Rauner says he won't sign off on a tax hike until Democrats give him some of his "structural reforms." Democrats have refused, saying those changes will hurt working families and drive down wages while helping Illinois' highest earners get richer.

"In terms of finding new revenue, I've said consistently that I'm prepared to negotiate with the governor," said Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan. "But I do believe that as part of a revenue package that we ought to have increased taxes on the wealthy of Illinois."

Republicans applauded the governor's speech, saying it struck a conciliatory tone. They blamed Democrats for the budget deadlock, which began after the majority party in May passed an out-of-balance budget, which Rauner vetoed. Democrats insist the governor could've vetoed only parts of it to reduce spending instead of dismissing it entirely.

"The fact is they gotta stop playing the victim," said Republican House Leader Jim Durkin. "They put us in this position. They sent that ridiculous budget to the governor and I applaud the governor for vetoing it."

Without a budget, social service agencies have had to close and thousands of college students aren't receiving state grants to help pay for tuition.

Last week, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois announced that it would close 30 safety-net programs and lay off 750 employees because of $6 million in overdue bills from the state. The programs impacted include services for the homeless, mentally ill and seniors who need home care. Chicago State University has said that come March, it won't be able to make payroll.

The governor also touted his efforts to "transform" state government, from overhauling health and human services to reducing the state prison population by 25 percent over the next decade by focusing more on rehabilitation rather than imprisonment.

He said he will use an executive order to create a private, non-profit office to recruit businesses and jobs to Illinois, after Democrats last year shot down his plan to turn the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity into a private-public partnership.

Rauner also called for holding schools more accountable through testing and offering low-income students more "quality school choice options."

Illinois Federation of Teachers President Dan Montgomery ripped Rauner's plan as "so-called education reforms" that won't improve teaching or student success and said the governor has failed on his top responsibility  the budget.

"His calls for bipartisanship are difficult to take seriously, especially given his identical words last year and his unwillingness or inability to lead since," Montgomery said.

Cullerton said he looks forward to working on a plan to address Illinois' $111 billion pension debt, but said there are still "many disagreements" about other pieces of Rauner's agenda.

"We've got to find ways to work together to solve problems, and we need to start now because Governor Rauner's first year in office didn't work for anyone," he said.

Rauner noted that other places, including left-leaning states such as Massachusetts, have passed similar reforms and said he stands ready to work for a deal.

"To achieve a grand compromise, we must cast partisanship and ideology aside," Rauner said. "We must break from the politics of the past and do what is right for the long term future of our state."

___

Associated Press writer Ashley Lisenby contributed to this report.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner delivers his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly in the House chambers at the State Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Springfield, Ill. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner delivers his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly in the House chambers at the State Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Springfield, Ill. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Illinois House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, R-Western Springs, right, and Illinois Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno, R-Lemont, left, along with other Republicans applaud Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner as he delivers his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly in the House chambers at the Illinois State Capitol Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Springfield, Ill. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner delivers his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly in the House chambers at the Illinois State Capitol Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Springfield, Ill. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner waits to be announced before delivering his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly in the House chambers at the State Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Springfield, Ill. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)
Rancher killed in standoff vowed to die before going to jail

BURNS, Oregon (AP)  A member of an armed anti-government group who was killed in a traffic stop in Oregon vowed a few weeks ago that he would die before spending his life behind bars.

LaVoy Finicum, a 55-year-old rancher from Cane Beds, Arizona, died Tuesday after law enforcement officers initiated the stop near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Finicum was a leader of the armed group that took over the southeast Oregon refuge Jan. 2 to protest federal land restrictions and object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2016 file photo, LaVoy Finicum, a rancher from Arizona, speaks to the media after members of an armed group along with several other organizations arrive at the at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire  and one death  along a highway through the frozen high country. The Oregonian reported that Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

He and other occupiers were heading to a community meeting in the town of John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns.

It's unclear what happened in the moments before his death. Authorities said shots were fired but have declined to say how many, or if Finicum or any of the other activists exchanged gunfire with officers.

Eight occupiers were arrested, including group leader Ammon Bundy. On Wednesday, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said the traffic stop initiated on a stretch of road away from populated areas was a tactical decision that officials hoped would bring a peaceful end to the standoff.

Finicum was a prominent presence at the refuge and frequently talked with reporters. His affable but passionate demeanor made him a popular subject for on-camera interviews.

Finicum seemed to have made up his mind about how his role in the occupation was likely to end  with his death.

Just a few days into the occupation, he came barreling to the refuge entrance in a federal truck.

Rifle in hand, Finicum sat in the middle of the driveway, telling the reporters gathered around him that he learned there was a warrant for his arrest and he wanted to make it easy for federal agents to find him.

At the time, he said he didn't know what the warrant charged him with, but he believed agents would try to arrest him soon.

"I don't think it really matters. There's enough things they could make a warrant for us, I believe," he said.

Finicum said he had neither threatened nor harmed anyone during the occupation.

"I have grown up loving the fresh air. I love the elements. And this is where I'm going to breathe my last breath," he said. "... I'm not going to spend my last days in a cell. This world is too beautiful to spend it in a cell."

He then gave a message to his family: "And kids, if I don't come, you know I love you and I'm proud of every damn one of you."

The rancher was media-savvy and tried to popularize and monetize his political beliefs on his website, www.onecowboystandforfreedom.com. He used the site to sell his book, a 252-page paperback titled "Only by Blood and Suffering," as well as T-shirts, bumper stickers and posters emblazoned with slogans like "Let Freedom Ring" and "Defend the Constitution Original Intent."

He described himself as a longtime friend of Ammon Bundy's father, Cliven Bundy, and he participated in the standoff with federal authorities over grazing fees at the elder Bundy's Nevada ranch in 2014.

Finicum and his wife, Jeanette, raised dozens of foster children, though social workers removed the kids from the couple's home a few days after the occupation began.

Finicum said the foster kids were the family's main source of income.

Catholic Charities paid the family more than $115,000 in 2009 to foster children, according to tax filings. Foster parents are generally paid a small per-child amount by the government. It's intended to reimburse them for the costs incurred in fostering. The money sometimes is disbursed through nonprofit partners.

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Boone reported from Boise, Idaho. This story has been corrected to show LaVoy Finicum lived in Cane Beds, Arizona, not Cain Beds, Arizona.

FILE - In this Jan. 6, 2016 file photo, Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum carries his rifle after standing guard all night at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested the leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks during a traffic stop that prompted gunfire, and one death, along a highway through the frozen high country. The Oregonian reported that Finicum was the person killed, citing the man's daughter. (AP photo/Rick Bowmer)

Police officers block the turnout to Sodhouse Lane, which is the main road leading to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, near Burns, Ore. Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Law enforcement personnel work at the airport Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Burns, Ore. Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested. (Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
Some of what's known about the armed standoff in Oregon

BURNS, Ore. (AP)  Law enforcement officers aren't releasing many details about an armed standoff at a national wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon. Here is a bit about what we know  and what we don't  about the standoff between a group of armed protesters angry over federal land-use policy and law enforcement officers:

___

Q. What's going on at the refuge?

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward speaks at press conference at the Harney County Community Center in Burns, Ore., Thursday, Jan. 27, 2016. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP)

A. Federal and state law enforcement authorities have blocked the roads leading to the refuge, but one of the armed protesters at the refuge is uploading videos and livestreaming footage from the refuge on his YouTube channel, "DefendYourBase."

One of David Fry's videos showed a member of the group using an excavator to dig a large hole or trench. Another showed a helicopter repeatedly flying over the headquarters buildings, and people at the refuge remarked that it appeared to have camera equipment attached.

Some of those at the refuge have pledged to stand and fight if law enforcement officers attempt to remove them from the site. The group is heavily armed.

___

Q. What actions are law enforcement agencies taking?

A. The FBI hasn't said what steps it will take next. Neither have state or local law enforcement officers. At a news conference held late Wednesday morning, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward became emotional as he urged the armed activists still at the refuge to leave.

Ward said the standoff was tearing the community apart, and said, "there doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community."

___

Q. What's next for those arrested?

A. So far, eight people have been arrested, including Ammon and Ryan Bundy. They all face the same charge  conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force. However, charges could be added or dropped depending on the results of the FBI investigation, which is still underway.

Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox and Ryan Payne are being held in the Multnomah County jail and are expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday afternoon.

Another member of the armed group, Jon Ritzheimer, turned himself in in Peoria, Arizona.

___

Q. Why did federal officials wait so long to take action?

A. It's not clear why law enforcement officials chose Tuesday evening as the time to make their arrests and converge on the refuge after nearly a month of taking a largely hands-off approach. But they were facing increasing criticism from people, including Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, who thought they should have moved sooner to end the occupation.

Law enforcement personnel work at the airport, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Burns, Ore. Authorities were restricting access on Wednesday to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the group's leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; NO LOCAL INTERNET; THE MERCURY OUT; WILLAMETTE WEEK OUT; PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

This photo provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, shows Ammon Bundy, one of the members of an armed group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as part of a dispute over public lands in the Western U.S. Bundy and several others were arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 26, prompting gunfire and leaving one man dead during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregon's frozen high country. (Multnomah County Sheriff via AP)
Coal projects advance but won't be final under moratorium

CASPER, Wyo. (AP)  U.S. officials on Wednesday cleared the way for a review of two mining projects that would dig up 644 million tons of coal from public lands, despite a recent government moratorium halting federal coal sales.

Wyoming, Montana and U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials approved moving forward with a multiyear evaluation of the projects located next to existing mines in the states' Powder River Basin, the nation's largest coal-producing region.

The Jan. 15 moratorium from the Obama administration allows coal sale applications to be reviewed but blocks their final approval pending a sweeping review of the federal coal program, expected to take three years.

FILE - In this April 4, 2013 file photo, a mining dumper truck hauls coal at Cloud Peak Energy's Spring Creek strip mine near Decker, Mont. The U.S. Interior Department is poised to move forward with consideration of two mining projects totaling 644 million tons of coal beneath public lands, after a panel on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016 recommended proceeding with the applications despite a recent moratorium halting federal coal sales. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)

Industry opponents had urged officials to block the applications. They cited concerns over climate change and other environmental effects from burning coal and questioned if taxpayers were getting a fair deal in a program that has sold more than $2.2 billion of coal since President Barack Obama took office, at prices below $1 per ton in many cases.

While the administration has aired similar concerns, Wednesday's vote indicates it remains unwilling for now to shut down a program that gives private companies cheap access to massive coal reserves in the Western U.S. and provides significant revenue to states.

Gillette, Wyoming-based Cloud Peak Energy and Lighthouse Resources Inc. of Salt Lake City are seeking the coal applications. Company representatives said it was crucial that work start soon on their applications in order to have coal available for mining in future years, when current reserves are depleted.

Lighthouse Resources wants to increase its annual production from 3 million tons to as much as 15 million tons at its Decker Mine in southeastern Montana, environmental manager Jordan Sweeney said. The company wants to export the fuel through new coal ports proposed on the West Coast.

Cloud Peak's Antelope Mine produces coal for U.S. markets and would continue to do so with the additional fuel it's seeking, said Blake Jones, the mine's technical services manager.

The company submitted an application involving another federal coal tract in 2005, and it was approved only last year, Jones said. Most of that coal likely will be mined by the time a decision is made on the latest application, he said.

"With this long of a process, we need to move forward to get it started," Jones said.

Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, WildEarth Guardians and other environmental groups said power plants burning the coal sought by Cloud Peak and Lighthouse Resources would generate over 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide gas, the main contributor to global warming.

"We know the federal coal system is broken. President Obama has called for a deep review of the program, and the world is turning to cleaner options," said Diana Best with Greenpeace USA.

A shift in the industry's fortunes reached a critical juncture last year, when cheaper natural gas overtook coal to become the dominant fuel used to generate electricity in the U.S.

In response to the declining demand, coal mining companies had sharply scaled back their pursuit of new leases even before the moratorium.

In November, Peabody Energy and Arch coal  the two largest U.S. coal mining companies  withdrew applications to lease almost 2 billion tons of coal in Wyoming. Other companies have asked federal officials to delay sales on three leases totaling 668 million tons.

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Stephen Furst, of Animal House fame, says the Academy has been ageist and sexist in blaming the #OscarsSoWhite

Since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it was altering membership rules in response to an outcry over the diversity of its voters and nominees, another uproar has erupted around Hollywood. Many academy members are protesting that the new measures unjustly scapegoat older academy members and imply they're racist.

Fiery letters have poured into the academy. Trade magazines are littered with critical op-eds from members. Meanwhile, civil rights leaders and others say the academy's actions didn't go far enough. More steps are needed, they say, to make the Oscars and the industry more inclusive.

Reforms meant to calm a crisis seem to have only further enflamed it. This year's February 28 Academy Awards are looking less like a glitzy gala and more like a battlefield.

Host Chris Rock has sidestepped calls to step down as host of the night, amid rumors he has torn up his original monologue and started anew to reflect the #OscarsSoWhite row.

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Controversy continues: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been accused of ageism in light of the recent race row. Chris Rock (pictured) said this week he will stay on as host of the February 28 gala

'We all have to calm down a bit. The conversation has become unduly vitriolic,' says Rod Lurie, the writer-director of 'Straw Dogs' and 'The Contender' and a member of the academy's directors' branch.

'Nobody in the academy should dignify any accusations of racism,' Lurie said in an interview, 'but there obviously are biases that are created by the demographics of the academy.'

The typically slow-moving academy acted swiftly last week, holding an emergency meeting of its Board of Governors.

In the wake of a second straight year of all-white acting nominees  and calls for a boycott of the Oscars broadcast  the 51-member board unanimously voted to revamp membership rules in an effort to change the makeup of the largely white, male and older association of some 7,000 exclusive members.

Though Oscar voting was previously for life, it will now be restricted to members who have been active in the industry within the past 10 years, with a few exceptions like for previous Oscar nominees. The academy also set a goal to double minority and female members by 2020.

Some academy members, while applauding efforts to diversify the academy, said taking away voting rights from older members smacks of ageism, and that they aren't to blame for the dearth of minority nominees in the past two years; the industry is.

Jada Pinkett Smith (left), along with her husband Will Smith and Spike Lee, will be boycotting the Oscars. Charlotte Rampling (right), nominated for Best Actress, said that 'perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list'

Jada Pinkett Smith tweeted and issued a video explaining her boycott of this year's Oscars event on February 28. The Academy President has since released a statement announcing a plan to diversify membership

Studies have proven that minorities remain underrepresented in all levels of the movie business, from protagonists on screen to executives who can green-light a film.

But the last two years are something of an aberration in recent Oscar history. In the 10 years prior, 24 of the 200 acting nominees were black. (Far less is the rate of nods for Hispanics or Asian-Americans, however.)

William Goldstein, a composer and longtime academy member, chastised the academy in a Los Angeles Times editorial for 'capitulating to political correctness' while missing the bigger picture.

He believes outreach and mentor programs will make a difference, not manipulating demographics.

'The set of voters that they're going to get rid of have seen more movies and have more context in which to judge something than any newbie coming into the academy,' Goldstein told The Associated Press.

'You can bring in more women, you can bring in more anybody. Everybody's a human being. They're going to vote what they're going to vote. Nothing's going to change.'

In a letter to the academy, Stephen Geller, a member of the writers branch and screenwriter of 'Slaughterhouse-Five,' accused academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs of 'grey-listing' its older members.

Something to say: Sir Ian McKellen has waded into the Oscars' diversity debate, saying on Monday: 'No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar; I wonder if that is prejudice or chance'

Julie Delpy (left), was also criticized for saying: 'I sometimes wish I were African American because people don't bash them afterward.' Delpy starred alongside Chris Rock in 2012 romantic comedy, 2 Days in New York

Stephen Furst, the 60-year-old actor and academy member best known as Flounder from 'Animal House,' wrote to the academy lamenting 'the insulting and unfounded generalities the academy has made about the character and judgment of older academy members.'

In an oped to Variety, Furst said it was disturbing that 'the Academy Board of Governors has chosen to scapegoat the older members of the Academy in order to deflect the criticism about the lack of diversity this year in the nominees for Academy Awards'.

He said he feared he, and fellow older, male members, would now be branded 'irrelevant'.

'The Academy can't fight issues with diversity by engaging in ageism and sexism,' he said.

James Woods, the 68-year-old, twice-nominated actor, went further: 'The motion picture academy announced separate bathroom facilities today: one for Members and one for Old White People,' he mocked on Twitter.

Upset: Actor Stephen Furst, known for Animal House, has publicly hit out at Oscars organizers for 'scapegoating' older male members in an attempt to deflect the racism controversy

Stephen Furst is best known for the 1978 comedy National Lampoon's Animal House (pictured center)

The academy indirectly responded to the furor in the 'frequently asked questions' section of its website on Monday.

'We're not excluding older members,' it reads.

The Academy has been accused of being ageist and sexist in blaming its membership for race drama

'These rules are not about age. In fact, under the new rules many veteran Academy members will retain voting privileges.'

Others, though, maintained that the academy's steps don't address the real problems of the industry. Directors Guild of America president Paris Barclay in a statement said 'structural changes' were needed in Hollywood to change hiring practices.

'Many times, with the best of intentions, a subject that is a symptom of this industry plague, but not the root cause, is targeted,' said Barclay. 'This alone will do little to create more choices and get more films and television made that reflect the diversity we all deserve.'

In a letter to Isaacs requesting a meeting, Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, Rev. Al Sharpton and Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civil Participation, called the academy's plan 'anemic and inadequate.'

Part of their frustration, Morial said in an interview, is that he's seen previous declarations made on diversity come and go. He specifically cited conversations that didn't lead anywhere with Sony Pictures after leaked emails led then co-chairman Amy Pascal to apologize for private comments denounced as racist.

Morial is seeking wider, systemic change from the academy and the studios.
US criticizes planned island visit by Taiwan president

WASHINGTON (AP)  The State Department is criticizing plans by Taiwan's outgoing president to visit a Taiwanese-occupied islet in the disputed South China Sea.

Spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday the U.S. was disappointed by President Ma Ying-jeou (MAH YEENG JOH)'s plans to travel to the Taiping Island as it could exacerbate tensions.

Taiwanese media reported Ma is scheduled to visit the island Thursday, his first trip there during his eight years as president. His term ends in May.

It comes less than two weeks after his Nationalist Party, which has cultivated closer ties with mainland China, was defeated in presidential and legislative elections.

The incoming party leans toward independence for Taiwan, which Beijing claims to be part of China.
Man charged with seed corn theft conspiracy pleads guilty

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  A naturalized U.S. citizen from China entered a plea agreement with federal prosecutors Wednesday, admitting he participated in a conspiracy to steal seed corn from U.S. companies.

Mo Hailong, a lawful and permanent resident of the United States, was living in Florida when he was arrested in December 2013.

He is accused of traveling to the Midwest to work with other employees of Kings Nower Seed, a subsidiary of Beijing-based DBN Group to take corn seed out of fields in Iowa with the intent of shipping it to China so scientists could attempt to reproduce its genetic traits.

In the plea agreement, Mo admits that he conspired to steal trade secrets from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto.

He is the only one who has been prosecuted for conspiracy. Five other Chinese nationals working with Mo fled the country. Charges were dropped last year against his sister, who is married to DBN's billionaire CEO, and she was allowed to return to China.

Mo, 46, who goes by the name Robert Mo, will be sentenced later in Des Moines. He had faced 10 years in prison on the charges but the government agreed to seek no more than five years.

His attorney Mark Weinhardt said Mo recently completed treatment for a rare and aggressive cancer "and his health is his paramount concern. Robert and his family are relieved that they can avoid the strain of a long and complex trial."

Mo "looks forward to getting this matter behind him and moving forward in life with his wife and children," Weinhardt said.

He has lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years, and his wife and children are U.S. citizens.

The plea agreement indicates Mo will give the government farms near Monee, Illinois, and Redfield, Iowa, used in the operation of the conspiracy. It also said that he also acknowledges he may be immediately deported from the U.S. after he serves his prison sentence.
Johanna Konta is 'living the dream' after booking Australian Open semis spot

Johanna Konta admits she is living her childhood dream after her fairytale run at the Australian Open extended to a place in the semi-finals.

Konta had never even made the main draw in Melbourne before this event but now she stands just two victories away from winning the title after beating Chinese qualifier Shuai Zhang 6-4 6-1.

The British number one, who last year went out in qualifying, will play Germany's Angelique Kerber on Thursday for a place in the final.

Johanna Konta has reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open

"I'm incredibly humble and grateful for the position that I'm in," Konta said.

"I understand how much this means to my family, to the people that have stuck by me through years and years and years of ups and downs.

"In terms of what it means to me, I'm just so happy that I'm enjoying what I'm doing. That is me living my dream.

"When I was a little girl I dreamt of winning Grand Slams and being number one in the world.

"That dream stays the same I think as long as you're doing the career that you're on. I think it would be silly for that to change.

"That's why I started this sport, that's why I'm still in this sport."

Kerber, ranked sixth in the world, will represent Konta's toughest test so far but after beating seven top-20 opponents since last summer, including Venus Williams here in round one, anything is possible.

After taking down her latest foe, Konta was asked about her switch from Australian to British nationality in 2012.

"Actually I am a tri-citizen," she said. "I've got a Hungarian passport as well. Just add that into the mix - I'm pretty much the female version of Jason Bourne."

She will need the CIA assassin's nerves of steel against Kerber, who arrives in the last four on a high following a momentous win over Victoria Azarenka.

"She's just an incredibly good player," Konta said.

"She's an amazing competitor. She's showed that time and time again over the last numerous years.

"I'm going to go out there really enjoy it and enjoy the battle, hopefully play a good level and give the crowd a good match."

Konta is the first British female in a grand slam semi-final since Jo Durie at the 1983 US Open and the first at the Australian Open since Sue Barker in 1977.

She joins Andy Murray in the last four of the singles while in the doubles Jamie Murray has made the semis alongside Brazilian Bruno Soares.

"The UK is a number of thousands of miles away and a completely different time zone, which in this case it might be quite nice," Konta said.
European Union useless and corrupt, says Sir Bernard Ingham

The European Union is useless, corrupt and riddled with fraud, Sir Bernard Ingham has said.

In a withering attack, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary asked: "Why should the UK throw another 12 billion a year down these mafia and assorted criminal drains?"

Writing in the Yorkshire Post, Sir Bernard said that in his renegotiations, David Cameron was asking for too little and would get less.

Sir Bernard Ingham says the EU is largely useless when it comes to international action

"Europhiles might usefully address themselves not to the question why we should stay in the EU, but why we should ever want to be a member of it at all when the institution is corrupt and so riddled with fraud that the auditors have felt unable to sign off its accounts for nigh on 20 years.

"It is dedicated to exactly what we do not want - ever closer union. It has already wrecked much of Europe's economy, though not the UK's, with its single currency, and has generated politically dangerous levels of unemployment in its southern states."

He said the EU was amassing powers at the expense of the member states, and had substantially usurped the authority of those parliaments, with potentially damaging consequences for Western democracy.

Sir Bernard also said the EU was largely useless when it came to international action, even though it pretended to have a foreign service.

"The present EU model is a discredited mess and everyone knows we cannot go on like this.
Ireland boosted as Keith Earls commits to Munster

Keith Earls has rejected Saracens' advances to sign a new three-year contact with Munster in a clear boost to Ireland's battle to keep top talents on home soil.

Scrum-half Conor Murray has completed a three-year dual contract with Munster and the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) as expected.

But Earls' dual deal with Ireland completes a late about-turn from the Munster centre, who came very close to a move to the Aviva Premiership.

Ireland's Keith Earls is staying with Munster

Ireland boss Joe Schmidt rubbished suggestions of a mass player drain in the wake of Ian Madigan moving to Bordeaux this summer and Marty Moore heading to Wasps.

And now the head coach's bullish words have been backed up by the IRFU and Munster tying down two prized assets to new long-term deals.

"We are delighted that Keith has signed a new IRFU contract which will see him remain a Munster player until the end of the 2019 season," said IRFU performance director David Nucifora.

"We are delighted that Conor has signed a new IRFU contract too. Conor is a hugely important, admired and respected player and makes a real impact in every game he plays for Munster and Ireland.

"Keith is a gifted footballer and has shown great commitment throughout his rugby career for both Munster and Ireland

"The IRFU are committed to retaining players like Keith and we know that Munster and Ireland supporters will be delighted with today's news."

Ireland boss Schmidt had been at pains to reject outside insinuation that a host of top talents could now take up more lucrative contracts overseas and Ireland remain candid in their determination to prioritise the Test careers of those stars plying their trade on home soil.

Schmidt admitted Madigan's Bordeaux switch could dampen his international ambitions, though prop Moore only misses the Six Nations due to a hamstring injury.

"There's only Ian Madigan in the squad currently who has signed abroad," said Schmidt.

"Ian and I had a long discussion about it.

"When I arrived at Leinster Ian was learning French, so there was an uneasy feeling at that stage.

"I know he wants to play at 10, and I think he'll go into a head-to-head duel with Lionel Beauxis and fair play to him if he gets the better of that.

"He won't be out of our thoughts, but Paddy Jackson came off the bench in several of the Six Nations matches last year and Ian Keatley started against Italy last year.

"So there is competition for Ian, and there's always a risk in him going away."

Schmidt's positive mindset was also boosted by linchpin fly-half Johnny Sexton proving his fitness for Ireland's RBS 6 Nations opener against Wales in Dublin on Sunday, February 7.

Sexton was withdrawn from Leinster's 51-10 Champions Cup defeat to Wasps but passed initial pitch-side Head Injury Assessment (HIA) and has since completed further tests to return to training.

Ireland head coach Schmidt lamented suggestions his frontline playmaker should consider quitting the sport to preserve his long-term health.

Schmidt branded those calls "a disappointment", frustrated that observers outside the Ireland camp have questioned expert medical opinion.

"Johnny trained really well yesterday, he's fully fit and ready to go, he's passed his three (tests) so that's the protocol," said Schmidt.

"It was this time last year that the problem really arose and he had the break.

"Since that time he hasn't really had too many problems.

"He trained really well yesterday. I think he's good to go."

Outspoken columnist and former Ireland international George Hook has led calls for Sexton to consider quitting the sport over frequent head injuries.

Sexton was stood down for 12 weeks by French club Racing after suffering four concussions inside 12 months.

Despite Sexton's latest head injury concern, Ireland and Leinster have insisted the 30-year-old did not suffer a concussion against Wasps and is now free to play.

"All we can do is go on the medical opinion and he had two of the best guys that are around," said Schmidt. " When they give him the all-clear we've got a lot of trust in them.

"I have a number of dealings with medical practitioners that we have huge trust in, and you know they are the experts.
David Cameron: No government has done more to crack down on tax avoidance

David Cameron has insisted he has done more than any other prime minister to crack down on aggressive tax avoidance amid controversy over Google's 130 million tax deal.

Mr Cameron blamed Labour for failures in collecting taxes from large multinationals after Jeremy Corbyn pressed him on Google's settlement wiht HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

Mr Corbyn said the internet giant made 6 billion profits in the UK between 2005 and 2015, the period covered by the deal, claiming it was paying an effective tax rate of 3%.

David Cameron has defended Google's controversial 130 million tax deal

Mr Cameron replied: "Let's be clear what we're talking about here, we're talking about a tax that should have been collected under a Labour government, raised by a Conservative Government, that's what we're talking about.

"I do dispute the figures that you give, it's quite right this is done independently by HMRC.

"But I am absolutely clear that no government has done more than this one to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance.

"No government, and certainly not the last Labour government."

Mr Corbyn highlighted the mixed messages from the top of the Tory Party over the deal, with Chancellor George Osborne initially describing it as a "major success" before No 10 rowed back, calling it a "step forward", while Boris Johnson labelled it "derisory".

During Prime Minister's Questions, the Labour leader added: "What exactly is the Government's position on this 3% rate of taxation?"

Mr Cameron then went on to explain the measures the Government has put in place to tackle tax avoidance and evasion before claiming the tax rate for Google under Labour was "0%".

The PM said: "We have put in place the diverted profits tax that means that this company and other companies will pay more tax in future.

"And more tax in future than they ever paid under Labour, where the tax rate for Google was 0%, that is what we face.

"Let me tell you what we have done - we have changed the tax laws so many times that we raised an extra 100 billion from business in the last parliament.

"When I came to power banks didn't pay tax on all their profits - allowed under Labour, stopped under the Tories.

"Investment companies could cut their tax bill by flipping the currency their accounts were in - allowed under Labour, stopped under the Tories.

"Companies could fiddle accounting rules to make losses appear out of thin air - allowed under Labour, stopped under the Tories.

"We've done more on tax evasion and tax avoidance than Labour ever did.

"The truth is you are running to catch up but you haven't got a leg to stand on."

In a week when people are filling in their tax returns, they will be thinking there is one rule for big multinationals and one rule for small businesses and self-employed workers, Mr Corbyn insisted.

The Opposition leader also pointed to a series of meetings Google has had with Government ministers.

"Millions of people are this week filling in their tax returns to get them in by the 31st," he said.

"They have to send the form back, they do not get the option of 25 meetings with 17 ministers to decide what their rate of tax is.

"Many people going to their HMRC offices or returning them online this week will say this - 'Why is there one rule for big multinational companies and another for ordinary, small businesses and self-employed workers?'"

Mr Cameron brushed off the criticism, claiming Mr Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell do not stand up to anyone and that they had "met a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could all come to Britain".

Mr Corbyn this week described the conditions in refugee camps in northern France as "disgraceful" after visiting Dunkirk.

Mr Cameron told him: "All those people filling in their tax returns are going to be paying lower taxes under this Government, that is what's happening.

"And I have to say to you, you can if you want criticise HMRC but HMRC's work is investigated by the National Audit Office and when they did that they found that the settlements that they have reached with companies are fair, that is how it works.

"The shadow chancellor's pointing - the idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable.

"Look at the record over the last week - they met with the unions and they gave them flying pickets.

"They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falkland Islands.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain.

"The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working taxpayers."

Earlier, Mr Corbyn asked his customary question from a member of the public, saying a working 30-something called Jeff had asked whether he could pay the same tax rate as Google and other large corporations.

"What do you say to Jeff?" he asked.

But Mr Cameron criticised the last Labour government, highlighting the lucrative corporate links former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown now enjoy alongside former chancellor Alistair Darling.

He said: "What I say to Jeff is that his taxes are coming down under this Government and Google's taxes are going up under this Government."

Mr Cameron went on: "If like me, you are genuinely angry about what happened to Google under Labour, can I tell you a few people you could call?

"Maybe you should start by calling Tony Blair - you can get him at JP Morgan.

"Call Gordon Brown - apparently you can get him at a Californian bond dealer called PIMCO.

"You can call Alistair Darling - I think he's at Morgan Stanley but it's hard to keep up.
Tigers charity couple could see cash they fight over go to lawyers, warns judge

A couple who launched a project aimed at saving endangered Chinese tigers, then got involved in a divorce cash battle, have been warned by a senior judge that all the money they are fighting over could go to lawyers.

Lady Justice King - who sits in the Court of Appeal - issued the warning after urging former banker Stuart Bray and conservationist Li Quan to negotiate and settle their differences.

The judge says the couple, who launched the Save China's Tigers project more than a decade ago, have already run up legal bills of more than 2 million - a nd she says there is a "real possibility" that the "funds at the centre of the dispute" will be "wholly dissipated in costs".

The couple's project, Save China's Tigers, acquired land in South Africa with the aim of ''re-wilding' South China tigers

Ms Li has won the latest round of the fight.

Two appeal judges - Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs - decided in December that a judge's ruling in favour of Mr Bray following a High Court trial should be reviewed at a full Court of Appeal hearing.

And on Wednesday the two judges dismissed a bid by Mr Bray to halt that appeal hearing.

But Lady Justice King warned Ms Li that the price of her latest win might be too great.

"In the event that the wife succeeds in her appeal, it may well be a Pyrrhic victory for her, leading to re-trial at vast further expense and a real possibility that the funds at the centre of the dispute will have been wholly dissipated in costs," said Lady Justice King, in a written ruling dismissing Mr Bray's application to stop the hearing in the appeal court.

"It is for that reason that the court (has) urged the parties to negotiate."

The couple initially fought at a hearing in the High Court in London and Ms Li had complained about a ruling by judge Sir Paul Coleridge.

She argued that money put into the Save China's Tigers charity was used to fund the couple's ''personal lives'', but Mr Bray disagreed.

Sir Paul had ruled in Mr Bray's favour b ut Ms Li complained that there was a ''lack of detail'' in Sir Paul's ruling and called for a review.

Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs concluded in December that Sir Paul's ruling should be reviewed at a full Court of Appeal hearing.

Mr Bray then complained about their decision.

He said lawyers representing Ms Li had "grievously misled" Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs.

And he said Ms Li's request for permission to appeal against Sir Paul's ruling should be re-argued at a fresh hearing.

Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Briggs disagreed and dismissed his application.
Lower drink-drive limit to match Scotland, say North East PCCs

Three police and crime commissioners have joined calls to lower the drink-drive limit in England and Wales to the same as Scotland.

The House of Lords will debate the issue on Friday after it was introduced by Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe as a Private Members' Bill.

North East PCCs Vera Baird, Ron Hogg and Barry Coppinger, for Northumbria, Durham and Cleveland, have written to Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin to express their support.

The limit in England and Wales is 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood

The limit in England and Wales is 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, but in Scotland it is lower at 50mg, and that could cause confusion for people crossing the border from Northumberland, Ms Baird said.

"I'm adding my support to the many local residents calling for a lower drink-drive limit," she said.

"If we can get this into law now, I know that many lives will be saved in the weeks, months and years ahead.

"As the Northumbria force borders on to Scotland, many local residents could be abiding by the drink-drive limit in our region, but find themselves breaking the law in Scotland."

Lowering the limit in England and Wales in line with Scotland's would have saved around 25 lives last year, an RAC report released last month revealed.

Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said despite a rapid increase in traffic growth, the number of people killed in drink-drive accidents had fallen dramatically, down 85% since 1979.

But more could be done.

He said: "It would be a poor argument to suggest we should cut the drink-drive limit just because everyone else has done it. But this report makes the case on robust data and sound analysis.
David Cameron slammed for 'bunch of migrants' comment

David Cameron has come under fire for referring to a "bunch of migrants" when describing Europe's refugee crisis.

Former Labour leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper asked the Prime Minister to withdraw his comments, which were made in response to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's visit to the makeshift Calais camp known as the Jungle.

Ms Cooper, who is chairing Labour's refugee task force, suggested the PM should use "much more statesmanship-like" language on such a "complex and sensitive" issue, particularly given ongoing commemorations of Holocaust victims.

The Prime Minister was taken to task for his comments by Yvette Cooper

Speaking during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron brushed off criticism of the Government's tax agreement with Google by claiming Mr Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell do not stand up to anyone.

He added they had "met a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could all come to Britain".

Speaking outside the chamber, a senior Labour source said: "The people we saw at Calais and Dunkirk over the weekend were families, kids, babies... to consider those people we saw as a 'bunch of migrants' demonstrates an attitude that is entirely unacceptable to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep."

Commons Speaker John Bercow ruled Mr Cameron's comments were not "disorderly" nor "unparliamentary", adding people will "make their own assessments" of the issue.

Several Labour MPs objected to the comments on Twitter, describing them as "shameful" and the PM as "odious".

Comedian David Baddiel also expressed concern, writing: "Not the right day #HolocaustMemorialDay for the bunch of migrants thing."

Raising a point of order in the Commons, Ms Cooper told Mr Bercow: "The House will have heard many tributes made to Holocaust Memorial Day today and the Holocaust Educational Trust campaign doesn't stand by.

"In that light and in that spirit, don't you think that it was inappropriate for the Prime Minister to use language referring to the refugee crisis in Europe and talk about 'a bunch of migrants'?"

Other Labour MPs could be heard saying "disgraceful" as Ms Cooper repeated the PM's comment.

Ms Cooper went on to the Speaker: "Do you think it'd be appropriate for the House to ask the Prime Minister to withdraw that language, to use much more statesmanship-like language about the need to build a cross-party consensus on such a complex and sensitive issue?"

Mr Bercow replied: "You speak with enormous experience in this House and I respect what you say.

"I completely identify and empathise with your observations about Holocaust Memorial Day, which you and I on other occasions have marked at events together - so I take what you say extremely seriously.

"I do have to say to you and the House that the observation in question was not disorderly, it was not unparliamentary.

"Everybody must take responsibility for the remarks he or she makes in this House and it is very clear that you would not have used that term.

"It is open to the Prime Minister to comment on it if he wishes but I am not entitled to try to oblige him to say anything on the matter.

"But you have made your point very clearly and it's on the record and people will make their own assessments of this matter."

Earlier, Mr Cameron had told Mr Corbyn: "All those people filling in their tax returns are going to be paying lower taxes under this Government, that is what's happening.

"And I have to say to you, you can if you want criticise HMRC but HMRC's work is investigated by the National Audit Office and when they did that they found that the settlements that they have reached with companies are fair, that is how it works.

"The shadow chancellor's pointing - the idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable.

"Look at the record over the last week - they met with the unions and they gave them flying pickets.

"They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falkland Islands.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain.

"The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working taxpayers."

A senior Downing Street source later said the Prime Minister had been "referring to the fact that the Labour approach of effectively opening the doors and allowing people to flow in would just provide an incentive for more people to come to Calais and wouldn't deal with the issue but would actually make the issue much worse".

Asked whether Mr Cameron thought his choice of words was acceptable, the source said: "The Prime Minister thinks that the key thing here is to get the policies right, and I think that's what the people of Britain are concerned about.

"The policy we are proceeding with is to give nearly 1.2 billion to support people who have been forced from their homes by the Syrian conflict with shelter and food, and also to take refugees from the region rather than providing an incentive for people to make that dangerous journey."

A Labour source rejected the suggestion that the party would "open the doors" to migrants, pointing out that Mr Corbyn had said priority should be given to refugees - particularly children - with links to Britain and that applications should be processed more quickly.

Labour MP Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) told BBC2's Daily Politics: "I was shocked when I heard the Prime Minister say it. It was offensive, it was hurtful and it was divisive.

"It is not the first time we have heard David Cameron slip up in this way."

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey told the same programme: "We always talk about language, people will have their views.

"The Prime Minister was making the point that he does not agree with Jeremy Corbyn that the people camped in Calais should come to this country and be given a free pass."

Speaking later outside the chamber, Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said: " On Holocaust Memorial Day, the Prime Minister chose to refer to desperate refugees fleeing from war as a 'bunch of migrants', a statement which diminishes his office and our country.
Nelson Mandela's fellow ex-prisoners honoured for anti-Apartheid struggle

Two men who were sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela have said there is "still a long way to go" in the fight for human rights following Apartheid.

Ahmed Kathrada and Denis Goldberg, who between them served 48 years in prison in South Africa were awarded the Freedom of the City of London for their dedication to the cause, even when then they knew they faced a possible death sentence.

During a ceremony at London's Guildhall on Wednesday, Lord Joel Joffe and George Bizos, the lawyers who defended them during the Rivonia Trial in 1963-1964, were also presented with the title.

Ahmed "Kathy" Kathrada and Denis Goldberg, who were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, receive the Freedom of the City of London award alongside Lord Joel Joffe and George Bizos from their defence team

Mr Kathrada and Mr Goldberg's comrade, Andrew Mlangeni, was also due to receive the title but could not attend due to ill health. It is hoped he will receive it when he is well enough to travel to London.

Reflecting on their struggle, Mr Goldberg, now aged 82, said: "In only 21 years we have come a tremendously long way in undoing what the Apartheid government did. But the racial segregation was burnt into the minds of every South African. There is still a long way to go."

Mr Goldberg was arrested with his comrades after police discovered their plan for a 7,000-strong uprising against the government.

However, being the only white defendant in the case, he was kept in a separate "whites only" prison in Pretoria.

He said: "I still don't know how we got caught - probably through our own carelessness. We were all certain we were going to be hanged.

"Had we remained undiscovered for even a week longer, by which time we would have actually begun producing weapons, we most likely would have been."

Mr Kathrada, now 86, worked alongside Mr Goldberg as part of the African National Congress to organise protests, even after government orders to shut down the group.

He said: "Even when we were banned we knew we had to carry on our work in some form or other."

The formal Freedom ceremony was attended by Nelson Mandela's daughter and granddaughter, and the son of Mr Mlangeni.

Denis Goldberg, a former member of the African National Congress (ANC) military wing, was sentenced to four life terms in prison after being convicted of armed resistance to Apartheid in 1964.

He served 22 years in a "whites only" prison in Pretoria.

Kathrada, aged 86, joined the passive resistance campaign of the South African Indian Congress when he was 17, which led to his first arrest and prison sentence for defying laws discriminating against Indians.

It was in 1952 that he met Mandela and joined his fight against Apartheid laws.

In 1962 he was put under house arrest but was found to be breaking orders by continuing his campaign underground.

He spent 26 years in prison, 18 on Robben Island, before his release on October 15 1989.

But despite their many years in prison, the comrades said they always knew they would win their fight.

Mr Goldberg said: "Nelson Mandela always said it would be a long walk to freedom, and we always knew we were going to succeed.

"We didn't want to die, but we felt that if we had to, then so be it.
Alexander Litvinenko widow to meet Theresa May

The widow of poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko will meet Theresa May on Thursday.

Marina Litvinenko will have private talks with the Home Secretary a week after an official inquiry into her husband's death concluded that his killing was " probably approved" by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Following the publication of the inquiry report, which sparked a diplomatic row and calls for the UK to impose sanctions against Moscow, Mrs May said the findings were "deeply disturbing".

Marina Litvinenko will hold discussions with the Home Secretary

Ahead of Thursday's meeting, a Home Office spokeswoman said: "The Home Secretary made clear that she would meet with Mrs Litvinenko and listen very carefully to what she has to say.

"We are not going to confirm details or timings of what is a private meeting."

Mrs Litvinenko called on Prime Minister David Cameron to impose "targeted economic sanctions and travel bans" against individuals, including Mr Putin.

Moscow has dismissed the findings, describing the inquiry as a political "whitewash".

Earlier this week Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned it would "certainly worsen" relations between London and Moscow and even suggested that British officials could be sued for slander.

The Government has announced financial sanctions against Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, who allegedly carried out the killing. Both deny involvement.
Serial killer Levi Bellfield admits murder of Milly Dowler, 13

Serial killer Levi Bellfield has admitted abducting, raping and killing schoolgirl Milly Dowler for the first time, police said.

Bellfield, who was given a whole-life prison sentence in June 2011 for the brutal slaughter of the 13-year-old, made the admission during an investigation into whether he had an accomplice, Surrey Police said today.

The force also revealed it had arrested a man in his 40s on Wednesday before releasing him without charge over the allegation, after finding there was no evidence to support it.

Levi Bellfield has been convicted of three murders, including that of Milly Dowler in 2002

In a statement issued through solicitors, Milly's family said: "The Dowler family has been made aware of the recent arrest.

"They have been aware for some consideration time that a new police investigation was taking place into the circumstances of the abduction and murder of Milly.

"The effect of this information has been devastating for a family which has already had to endure so much.

"We must stress how important it is that, notwithstanding this development, the Dowler family should be afforded privacy and space to go about their lives, and we are grateful for the consideration of the public and media in that regard."

Milly was snatched from the street while on her way from school to her home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002. Bellfield was found guilty of abducting and killing 13-year-old Milly following a trial at the Old Bailey.

In February 2012 he lost a bid to challenge his conviction at the Court of Appeal in London.

A police spokesman said today: "During this investigation police have also spoken to Levi Bellfield and he has admitted his responsibility for the abduction, rape and murder of Milly Dowler.

"Despite his conviction, this is the first time Bellfield has made such admissions to police.

Bellfield was already in jail for the murders of Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, when he went on trial accused of killing Milly.

In 2008, he had been given a whole life term for murdering Ms McDonnell, 19, in 2003, and murdering Ms Delagrange, 22, and attempting to murder Ms Sheedy, 18, in 2004.

Milly's body was found in a wood in Yateley Heath, Hampshire - 25 miles from Walton-on-Thames. Experts could not say how she died.

Bellfield, who now calls himself Yusuf Rahim, lived 50 yards from where Milly vanished but did not become a suspect until he was arrested by police in London for the other crimes in 2004.

The Surrey Police spokesman added that the man arrested today was held "in relation to allegations of rape and assisting an offender".

He added: "The arrest was made following new information regarding an accomplice being involved with Levi Bellfield (who now calls himself Yusuf Rahim) in the abduction and rape, but not murder of Milly Dowler.

"Police have thoroughly investigated this claim and as the final part of their inquiries made the arrest today. The man arrested has subsequently been released with no further action as no evidence has been found to support the allegations."

The judge at his trial described Bellfield as a "cruel and pitiless killer".

After he had been convicted of Milly's murder Bellfield yawned as he was led from court.

When he refused to return to the Old Bailey for sentencing the next day, Mr Justice Wilkie said Bellfield had ''not had the courage'' to come to court.

Bellfield subjected Milly's family to the "appalling anguish" of many months of not knowing what had become of her, the judge had said.

He added: "But most cruel of all, in an attempt to divert responsibility from himself, he instructed his lawyers in this trial to expose to the world her most private, adolescent thoughts, secrets and worries, and sought to hint that she was a dark, unhappy and troubled person."
Warning over plans for internet firms to store web and social media records

The data watchdog has issued a stark warning about Home Secretary Theresa May's plans for internet firms to store records relating to people's web and social media use for up to a year

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said the proposals would create a "huge haystack of potential problems" given the threat of cyber attack on telecoms firms.

Communications service providers (CSPs) will be required to retain internet connection records (ICRs) for up to 12 months under the draft investigatory powers bill.

Communications service providers will be required to retain internet connection records for up to 12 months under the draft investigatory powers bill

These will detail services a device connects to but not users' full browsing history or the content of a communication.

Mr Graham, who was giving evidence to a cross-party committee investigating the TalkTalk hack, said the regime would have to be "very carefully managed" and MPs would have to be "very convinced it was necessary".

Culture, Media and Sport select committee chairman Jesse Norman suggested that Mr Graham "must be very concerned" about the plan because "it is going to create these enormous pools of data" and firms may not have the required levels of cyber security.

Mr Graham told the committee: "It creates a huge haystack of potential problems and would have to be very carefully managed a nd Parliament would have to be very convinced that it is necessary, given the risk that is created."
'Parasitic law firms' blamed for legal actions against UK troops

British troops need more than body armour when sent into battle as they are also up against "parasitic" lawyers, a Defence Minister has said.

Penny Mordaunt told MPs the courts have dealt with claims of an insurgent bomb-maker who sued the country's armed forces for not shooting him and instead taking him prisoner.

She also said Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) submitted allegations in 2014 of an "hysterical" British solider shooting an Iraqi - despite Danish forces accepting liability and paying compensation over the incident 11 years earlier.

Some Iraq veterans are being investigated into their actions during the campaign

In a further case, Ms Mordaunt said PIL claimed a 13-year-old girl had been killed after picking up part of a UK cluster bomb.

But she explained the law firm later acknowledged it was a 13-year-old boy who had been killed while in the vicinity of an Iraqi mobile missile launcher preparing to attack Kuwait - which wa s destroyed by a coalition helicopter.

Ms Mordaunt revealed the details of the cases as Tory former minister Richard Benyon warned legal action against Iraq veterans could put British soldiers serving in war zones at risk.

Mr Benyon, a former soldier who serves on the Defence Select Committee, criticised the long-running investigation into claims that British military personnel abused civilians during the 2003 to 2009 conflict.

He also suggested British soldiers operating abroad should not to be subject to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Conservative Richard Drax (South Dorset), also a former soldier, hit out at PIL and Leigh Day, telling MPs : "The perception is that left-leaning lawyers are intent on undermining one of the pillars of the establishment, namely the armed forces, and given the opportunity are jumping to the task with relish."

Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to crack down on ''spurious'' legal claims made against troops who served in the Iraq War, with more than 1,500 allegations submitted to the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat).

Speaking during a Westminster Hall debate, Tory minister Ms Mordaunt said no apologies should be made for investigating and holding to account British armed forces.

But she said: "The steady creep of extending the reach of European human rights legislation not written for conflict situations is eroding international humanitarian law, and it is the behaviour of parasitic law firms churning out spurious claims against our armed forces on an industrial scale which is the enemy of justice and humanity - it is not our armed forces or the Ministry of Justice."

Ms Mordaunt added: "When the courts entertain claims against our armed forces of the likes of an insurgent bomb-maker suing us for not shooting him in a firefight, but instead taking him prisoner and holding him we until we could guarantee he would not face mistreatment in the local justice system, then it's not just our armed forces who suffer, the strain on them and the corrupting effect on their behaviour in the field, it is the cause of human rights that suffers too.

"Today when faced with the likes of Leigh Day and PIL we need to wrap our service personnel in more than just body armour when we send them out to defend freedom."

Addressing some of the "illuminating" cases dealt with by Ihat, Ms Mordaunt said: "Case number 377 - it was alleged that a passenger in a car was shot by 'an hysterical British soldier in a tank'.

"That Ihat investigation ascertained that PIL had submitted this allegation in October 2014 despite Danish armed forces accepting liability for this incident and paying compensation in 2003."

One Tory MP could be heard saying "shame" as Ms Mordaunt finished reading out the details.

Ms Mordaunt added: "Case number 123 - it was alleged that a 13-year-old girl had been killed when she picked up part of a UK cluster bomb that had failed to detonate.

"The Ihat investigation established that a 13-year-old boy had been killed but was unable to ascertain whether it was Iraqi or UK munitions responsible.

"PIL challenged the MoD's decision not to refer this to the IFI. The MoD defended the challenge on the basis of that information.

"Shortly before the hearing, PIL disclosed a witness statement by the boy's father made before the Ihat investigation in which he said he'd been killed while in the vicinity of an Iraqi mobile missile launcher preparing to fire missiles into Kuwait, which was destroyed by coalition helicopter.

"There are many other cases I can mention, which concluded through thorough investigation that UK service personnel had acted in self-defence, in the defence of others and lawfully.

"Ihat enables us to meet our obligations to investigate serious wrongdoing and its work is exonerating those wrongly accused and rejecting bogus allegations."

Opening the debate, Mr Benyon recalled his personal experience of a 19-year-old soldier who "in a tense situation" shot and killed someone - contrary to the rules for opening fire.

The MP said: "He was convicted for murder and it's a case that's haunted me for 34 years.

"My worry is that the legal imperialism we have seen in recent years and the existence of organisations like Ihat will put a dangerous caution into the minds of the sniper of the future.

"Rather than taking a life to save many, a caution prompted by fear of legal implications might - to quote (Sir Nicholas Soames, Tory MP for Mid Sussex) - 'put a splint around his trigger finger'.

"The analogy extends to every area of war, from the most junior soldier just out of training to the most gnarled veteran of a quarter century of expeditionary warfare, the Apache pilot, the mortar platoon commander, the frontline rifleman, all need to be governed by the rule of law - but which law.

"That is the matter the minister and the Government must tackle with haste.

"However despicable we might think the actions of certain lawyers are, they are only responding to the circumstances and a climate by governments of the past and the present.

"My argument is that the rules we have created actually put our servicemen and women in greater danger in the future. That cannot be right."

Tory MP Victoria Prentis (Banbury), who was previously in charge of the MoD's litigation team, said her team faced "a tsunami of litigation" from 2010.
Swansea in talks to sign Chievo striker Alberto Paloschi

Swansea hope to complete an 8million move for Chievo striker Alberto Paloschi in the next few days, Press Association Sport understands.

The 26-year-old has emerged as Swansea's number one striker target with new head coach Francesco Guidolin understood to be a big admirer of his compatriot.

Paloschi has been capped by Italy at Under-21 level and has scored over 40 goals since joining Chievo from Parma in 2011.

Swansea are in talks to sign Chievo striker Alberto Paloschi.

He has scored eight goals in 21 games for Chievo this season and it is understood discussions are ongoing between the clubs and Paloschi's representatives.

Swansea, who are four points above the Barclays Premier League drop zone, have identified the signing of a striker as their top priority in the January transfer window.

Only bottom club Aston Villa have managed fewer than Swansea's 22 goals in 23 games.

However, Swansea face competition from Sampdoria for Paloschi's signature, according to reports in the Italian media.
Damian Lewis shrugs off Eton row as he launches school celebrations

Critics who slammed Eton-educated Damian Lewis for opening the anniversary celebrations of a local comprehensive school had missed the point, he said at the event.

The Homeland and Wolf Hall actor instead heaped praise on the "creativity" and "diversity" of Acland Burghley School in Camden, north London which opened its 50th anniversary celebrations on Wednesday.

Former students started a petition against his role as guest of honour after claiming he represented "privilege and inequality" and was no appropriate given the school's "long and proud tradition in comprehensive education".

Damian Lewis launches the celebrations, which included a light display, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Acland Burghley School in Camden

Standing next to headteacher Nicholas John and Lucy Amis, the daughter of the school's architect Stanley Amis, Lewis joked that he was the "best available" and apologised to those hoping to see the notable former students, Eddy Grant, Ms Dynamite or Madness saxophonist Lee Thompson.

He said: "For those people out there who suggested by kindly writing into the newspapers this morning that perhaps I shouldn't be here at all because I wasn't at the school, what I would say to them is I think they are missing the point slightly because it seems to me that this evening is about more than that.

"It seems to me that this evening is about a celebration of our community here in Tufnell Park and he role the school has played here in Tufnell Park in the last 50 years."

Lewis, whose wife Helen McCrory stood in the audience as he addressed a crowd of approximately 450 before starting a countdown to a laser show, said he had lived in the area for 10 years.

He said: "It strikes me every time I walk down the street that there is more creativity, independence and support in this neighbourhood than any other neighbourhood I have lived in in London.

"That is of course exactly the qualities they teach the students here at Acland Burghley.

"It's central to its ethos, and why it has been such a success and why it has been recognised as special status in performing arts and creative studies."

He added that he was lucky to benefit from a "thriving creative community" at Eton and that schools were more successful if they excelled in the arts.

Speaking from notes he concluded: "I share with you the hope that Acland Burghley can continue to grow and be a beacon of curiosity, independence, creativity and diversity right here in the heart of Tufnell Park."

While many parents and students celebrated his appearance as an "inspiration" - including 13-year-old Louie Cooper who jumped into a picture with the actor, some disagreed.

Rachel Cohen, 44, attended the school between 1982 and 1989 and started the petition which had garnered 100 signatures before the event.

She said: "It's really just about how do you celebrate the anniversary of a really good comprehensive school that has always taken a very radical and socially progressive attitude towards education and been very committed to inclusive education within the community and arts being very central to that."

But she insisted it was not a personal protest against Lewis and she hoped he would become more involved in the school in the future.

Headeacher Mr John, who joined the school in September, is hoping the start of the celebrations will help him to raise money to improve some of the half-century old buildings.

He said he wanted to the school to focus on improving its academic standards and continue excelling in the arts and engagement with the community.

"The fact that he is an actor involved in the community is great," he said about Lewis.

"It's about community and creativity."
Venezuela oil minister to visit OPEC, non-OPEC countries

CARACAS, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Venezuela's oil minister will tour OPEC and non-OPEC countries in a bid to drum up support for joint action to stem the tumble in crude prices, President Nicolas Maduro announced on Tuesday night.

"I've given the order to minister Eulogio del Pino for him to immediately start a tour of OPEC and non-OPEC countries," the leftist leader said in a televised broadcast.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is considering a request from cash-strapped Venezuela to hold an emergency meeting to discuss steps to prop up prices, and Venezuela has called for a meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC nations in February.

"We must stop this madness," a solemn-faced Maduro said about oil prices, urging "clear, consequential and coordinated" action.

It was not immediately clear what countries del Pino, who is also the president of state oil company PDVSA, would visit.

OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia and top non-OPEC producer Russia are showing signs of flexibility about agreeing to tackle an oil glut that has pushed prices to 12-year lows, the oil minister of Iraq said on Tuesday.

OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri said other producers should work with the group to tackle swollen global stockpiles so prices can recover, essentially reiterating OPEC's position that it would consider cutting output only if others pitched in.
U.S., China agree on need for new U.N. measure on North Korea

By David Brunnstrom and Megha Rajagopalan

BEIJING, Jan 27 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed on Wednesday on the need for a significant new U.N. Security resolution targeting North Korea after its Jan. 6 nuclear test, though there were few signs of concrete progress.

Kerry, on a two-day visit to Beijing, had been expected to press China, North Korea's lone major backer, for more curbs on Pyongyang after it said it had successfully conducted a test of a miniaturised hydrogen nuclear device, though the United States has voiced scepticism as to whether it was that powerful.

China has insisted it is already making great efforts to achieve denuclearisation on the "Korean peninsula" and Wang rejected any "groundless speculation" on its North Korea stance, following remarks from U.S. officials that China could do more.

"We agreed that the U.N. Security Council needs to take further action and pass a new resolution," Wang told reporters at a joint briefing with Kerry.

"In the meantime, we must point out that the new resolution should not provoke new tensions."

Kerry said the two sides had agreed to an "accelerated effort" at the U.N. to reach a "strong resolution that introduces significant new measures" to curtail North Korea's ability to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

"It's not enough to agree on the goal. We believe we need to agree on the meaningful steps necessary to get the achievement of the goal," Kerry said.

The exchange of goods and services between China and North Korea was one area where steps could be taken to pressure Pyongyang back to talks, he said.

Kerry also said that shipping, aviation, trade of resources, including coal and fuel, and security at border customs, were key areas in the sanctions debate. North Korea is heavily reliant on China for oil, gasoline and trade.

"All nations, particularly those that seek a global leadership role, share a fundamental responsibility to meet this challenge with a united front," Kerry said.

He added that the U.S. would take "all necessary steps" to honour security commitments to allies, signalling that the U.S. was prepared to continue ramping up its military presence in the region, a move that would likely unsettle Beijing.

"North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat, to the world, and it has stated its intention to develop a thermonuclear weapon," he said. "In addition, it has made clear its intent to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile with the capacity to carry a nuclear warhead."

The 15-member U.N. Security Council said at the time of North Korea's test that it would begin working on significant new measures in response, a threat diplomats said could mean an expansion of sanctions.

Since then, diplomats said Washington and Beijing have been primarily negotiating on a draft resolution, but when asked on Saturday if they were nearing agreement, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said no.

After talks on Wednesday, which went hours past schedule, Kerry said details still had not been set.

In a sign that Beijing could be reluctant to take a more hardline stance on North Korea, state news agency Xinhua said it was "unrealistic to rely merely on China to press the DPRK to abandon its nuclear programme, as long as the U.S. continues an antagonistic approach wrought from a Cold War mentality".

"Bear in mind that China-DPRK ties should not be understood as a top-down relationship where the latter follows every bit of advice offered by the former," Xinhua said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Xinhua commentaries are not official government pronouncements, but can be read as a reflection of official thinking. Wang added that sanctions should be seen as a path to negotiation, and not as a punitive end in themselves

SOUTH CHINA SEA MILITARIZATION

Kerry said that a need for the United States and China to find a way forward on easing tension in the South China Sea weighed heavily in talks.

"I stressed the importance of finding common ground among the claimants and avoiding a destabilising cycle of mistrust or escalation," Kerry said. "Foreign Minister Wang Yi accepted the idea that it would be worth exploring whether or not there was a way to reduce the tensions and solve some of the challenges through diplomacy."

Wang said China's activities in the region, which have elicited unease from the U.S. and its allies, should not be construed as militarization.

"China has given a commitment of not engaging in so-called militarization, and we will honour that commitment," Wang said. "We cannot accept the allegation that China's words are not being matched by action."

His remarks came as Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou said he planned a trip to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba, known as Taiping Island in Taiwan, in the sea, a move a U.S. official called "extremely unhelpful" in resolving disputes over the waterway.

China claims almost all the disputed waters in the potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea, parts of which are also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Kerry was in Cambodia on Tuesday after a visit to neighbouring Laos as part of an effort to urge unity among leaders of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the sea issue before a summit with President Barack Obama next month.
Denmark resident tests positive for Zika virus -DR

COPENHAGEN, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Denmark resident who travelled outside Denmark has tested positive for mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, the national broadcaster DR reported on Wednesday, citing health officials.

Health authorities from second largest Danish city, Aarhus, said the patient travelled to South and Central America where the Zika virus has taken hold, DR said. It did not elaborate.

The mosquito-borne virus has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil. There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika.
Romania - Factors to watch on Jan 27

BUCHAREST, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Romanian financial markets on Wednesday.

MONEY SUPPLY

Romania's central bank to release M3 money supply data for December.

IPOS

Romania's government is committed to launching initial public offerings for power company Hidroelectrica and state-owned power holding Oltenia, Energy Minister Victor Grigorescu said on Tuesday.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION AUDIT

The European Commission's handling of bailouts for countries hit by the financial crisis was "generally weak" and inconsistent, the European Union's Court of Auditors (ECA) said on Tuesday.

MOLDOVA

Romania's prime minister pledged on Tuesday to send emergency aid to Moldova and work to bring its ex-Soviet neighbour closer to the European Union as long as it makes greater efforts to reform its system and end corruption.

CEE MARKETS

The zloty and Central European equities reversed a fall on Tuesday as a rebound of crude prices curbed risk aversion in global markets.

GAS DEMAND

Romania's total natural gas demand for 2016 is estimated at roughly 15.5 TWh, energy regulator ANRE said on Tuesday, and roughly 96 percent of it will be covered by domestic production.

CORRUPTION

Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors sent senator Dan Sova to trial on Tuesday on charges he used his influence to convince a state-owned energy company to hire a law firm, for which he allegedly received 100,000 euros.

For the long-term Romanian diary, click on

For emerging markets economic events, click on

For an index of all diaries, click on
PRESS DIGEST - Bulgaria - Jan 27

SOFIA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - These are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Wednesday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

-- Bulgaria needs to show it is serious about combating organised crime and corruption and send criminals behind bars and overhaul its judiciary, a draft of a monitoring report of the European Commission, the EU's executive, showed. (Trud, Standart, Sega, Monitor, Capital Daily, Duma, 24 Chasa)

-- The ruling centre-right GERB party asked the Supreme Judicial Council, the judiciary system's executive, to resign following number of scandals that have marred its work and further cut Bulgarians' trust in the judiciary. (Telegraph, Standart, Capital Daily, 24 Chasa)

-- Bulgarians saved over 3.3 billion levs ($1.83 billion)last year, central bank data showed, pointing that household bank deposits rose to 42.5 billion levs. (Trud, Standart, Monitor, Capital Daily)

-- Bulgarian court acquitted senior ruling GERB party official Tsvetan Tsvetanov for banning the tapping of the telephone calls of an interior ministry official investigated for possible corruption during the time he served as interior minister. The court's decision is final. (24 Chasa, Duma, Trud, Capital Daily, Sega, Standart)
Qatar emir names new foreign minister in cabinet reshuffle

DOHA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Qatar's emir issued a decree on Wednesday replacing the foreign minister and merging some portfolios, the state news agency said, in what was seen as a move to consolidate his power and cut costs after a sharp drop in oil prices.

The world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, Qatar is one of the Gulf's richest countries, although the value of its energy exports almost halved last year.

The new foreign minister was named as Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, a member of the royal family.

Khalid al-Attiyah, the outgoing foreign minister whose father was the founder of the Qatari armed forces, will become state minister for defence affairs.

The emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who took over in 2013 after his father stepped down, holds the post of defence minister.

Late on Wednesday Sheikh Tamim said that Qatar needed to diversify its income and he urged an end to corruption. He said citizens should not "fear or panic" about the tumbling price of hydrocarbons.

"As citizens your responsibilities are greater due to the low oil prices; however, citizens' welfare and way of life should not be affected by the situation," he said in a speech carried by Qatari state news agency QNA.

Sheikh Tamim, like his Gulf neighbours, is seeking to diversify the economy to reduce Qatar's dependence on oil and gas, which the International Monetary Fund says constitute 90 per cent of government revenues.

He has used the slump in oil prices to emphasise that the government can no longer "provide for everything" for its population, and to encourage private sector employment.

Qatari is set to spend around $200 billion (131 billion pounds) on infrastructure projects over the next decade, many related to its hosting of the 2022 soccer World Cup.

Construction industry sources say some projects have been delayed or suspended in the past year, partly to avoid waste and ensure quality.

A Western diplomat in Doha said cost-cutting was one reason for the ministerial changes, following the sharp decline in oil prices. The decree merged several ministries, including communication and transport and culture, youth and sports, heralding the possibility of many job cuts.

"But this is also about Sheikh Tamim's slow consolidation of power after 2-1/2 years in the job," the diplomat said.

"He's still pushing out the old timers loyal to the former emir who were not necessarily that effective but couldn't be sacked all in one go."

The outgoing minister of state for defence affairs, Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, was appointed as an adviser to the emir with rank equivalent to a prime minister, QNA said.
Ukraine needs big scalps to fight "brutal" corruption - ombudsman

By Marc Jones

LONDON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Ukraine must show resolve in tackling "brutal" corruption by prosecuting high-level officials or face widespread disappointment at home and among foreign institutions, the head of its internationally-funded anti-graft ombudsman said.

Former Lithuanian finance minister, Algirdas Semeta, whose role was created last year to give Ukraine's firms a way to report bribery or other government wrongdoing, warned distrust about officials' behaviour was growing again in the country.

The Business Ombudsman Council has been set up for a two-year trial period at a cost of $3.5 million as part of the West's efforts to root out graft pervading the economy.

But like most ombudsman it has no formal powers and relies on government departments like the economy ministry and new anti-corruption bureau to enforce any punishments, something Semeta said had proved insufficient so far.

"I have to say, most of the issues we deal with are very brutal violations of law and regulations," Semeta told Reuters.

"So far progress (with convictions) is rather limited. I think 2016 will be a crucial year, it will demonstrate whether those institutions, which have been created with the assistance of the entire world, can really demonstrate practical results."

Fighting corruption is a key requirement for $40 billion support from the International Monetary Fund.

Power struggles in Kiev last year, however, delayed the appointment of a new head corruption prosecutor and there has been little to suggest it is getting to grips with the biggest problem, oligarchs who exploit state-controlled firms.

"The oligarchs remain very powerful in the country, I think too powerful," Semeta said.

Tackling oligarchs, who made vast fortunes with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and exert some political influence, is still the job of government. The anti-corruption bureau has been tasked specifically with convicting government officials who have taken kick-backs to buy big houses and expensive cars.

"Of course people see what is going on and they want action now," Semeta said.
Syrians fleeing war find unlikely refuge in Sudan

By Yousra Elbagir

KHARTOUM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Frantically serving up Syrian-style sandwiches and platters of chicken and meat, Shawermat Anas opens onto a busy street in Khartoum. Those from Damascus might recognise the name from the original restaurant back in the Syrian capital, 2,000 km away.

"All the young men that work with me have fled the war. I employ around 40 Syrians between two branches and house them all," said the owner, Anas Khalid, himself from Syria.

Syrians fleeing the five-year-old civil war mostly head to neighbouring countries like Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan or make the dangerous journey to Europe by sea or on foot.

But as some European countries close their doors and neighbours struggle to cope, an increasing number of Syrians are finding welcome refuge in an unlikely destination - Sudan.

Battling with an economic crisis and rebellions in its own far-flung hinterlands, the African country has nevertheless opened its doors, offering Syrians safety and citizen status, with its allure of access to public healthcare and schools.

A survey conducted by the Syrian Support Committee in July 2015 found more than 100,000 Syrians living in the country as a direct result of the war, a number that has since grown.

Khalid arrived in Khartoum in 2007, long before the Syrian war, but opened his restaurant in 2014 to help provide jobs for an influx of Syrians fleeing the conflict that has so far claimed 250,000 lives and forced millions from their homes.

"Before the Syrians began migrating here in masses I worked at a Syrian restaurant and a factory. I started up the restaurant as a way of helping the young men coming in who I knew would struggle to find work and pay rent," said Khalid.

"He's my relative and he's my relative,' he said, pointing towards men carving a rotating slab of chicken and exchanging money with customers. "I know most of them from back home and knew they were coming. Any man over the age of 18 has no choice but to leave or join the military and face certain death."

A shared language and the promise of help from old friends and relatives already in Sudan has encouraged more Syrians to make a life there. The streets of Khartoum are now lined with Syrian restaurants.

Every week, two flights arrive from Damascus. Syrian families effortlessly pass through passport control with no need for visas, in stark contrast to the strict border controls they face around the world.

"We began pushing to accommodate Syrian refugees just over a year ago," says Ahmed Gizouli, Commissioner of Refugees for Sudan. "Initially, there was a small number but this eventually increased, following the orders of the president to allow Syrian refugees entry without a visa."

Sudan has distanced itself over the past year from its longtime ally Iran, a backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, it has developed warmer political ties with Saudi Arabia, which has supported rebels fighting to remove Assad from power and offered Khartoum much-needed economic aid.

HARSH REALITIES

While Syrians are thankful to escape dangers and psychological stress of the war back home, they face economic challenges in Khartoum.

Housing shortages and foreign demand have driven up the price of land and rent, leaving newcomers with little time to get on their feet.

Abdelkareem Abuzamar, a 28-year-old working in Khalid's kitchen, arrived in Sudan from Turkey in the summer of 2015 after struggling to find work in the saturated job market there.

"I got in touch with a Sudanese family on Facebook and told them about my plans to move to Sudan. They met me at the airport and welcomed me into their home," said Abuzamar.

"I stayed with them for a month before getting in touch with Anas, my neighbour back home in Syria, and started work with him."

Though he works 12-hour shifts, Abuzamar still struggles to make ends meet.

"I'm engaged to a Syrian girl I met here but my wages won't cover the cost of rent. It's stressful because the cost of living is going up and the wages are staying the same," he said.

"After losing cousins and friends to the war back home, all I want is to settle down."

Despite the hardships, those who have made a new life in Sudan have been effusive in their gratitude.

In July, an initiative called Shukran Sudan, Arabic for "thank you Sudan", was launched by a group of Syrians who handed out sweets and water to passing cars.
Algeria suspends flights to Libya - aviation authority

ALGIERS, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Algeria has suspended flights to Tripoli, a few days after it detained hundreds of Moroccans trying to travel to Libya having arrived at the international airport in the capital Algiers.

Libya has become a regional concern since Islamic State militants gained ground there and called for foreign recruits, especially from North Africa. Algeria is an important U.S. ally in its fight against armed groups in the region.

The decision to suspend flights to Tripoli was taken by the Algerian civilian aviation authority on Tuesday. No reason was given for the suspension.

"The decision will be effective on Jan. 29," according to a statement from the aviation authority.

Algerian officials did not say when they would resume flights to Tripoli.

The authorities fear that Moroccans entering Algeria to then cross into Libya may be planning to reinforce the Islamic State militant group, which has set up a base in the Libyan city of Sirte, security analysts say.

The decision to suspend the flights was taken hours after the new Libyan prime minister, Fayez Seraj, who heads a U.N.-backed national unity government, travelled to Algeria where he met President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
Hackers may have wider access to Ukrainian industrial facilities

By Pavel Polityuk

KIEV, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Hackers were able to attack four sections of Ukraine's power grid with malware late last year because of basic security lapses and they could take down other industrial facilities at any time, a consultant to government investigators said.

Three power cuts reported in separate areas of western and central Ukraine in late December were the first known electrical outages caused by cyber attacks, causing consternation among businesses and officials around the world.

The consultant, Oleh Sych, told Reuters a fourth Ukrainian energy company had been affected by a lesser attack in October, but declined to name it.

He also said a similar type of malware had been identified by the Ukrainian anti-virus software company Zillya! where he works as far back as July, making it impossible to know how many other systems were at risk.

"This is the scariest thing - we're living on a powder keg. We don't know where else has been compromised. We can protect everything, we can teach administrators never to open emails, but the system is already infected," he said.

Sych, whose firm is advising the State Security Service SBU and a commission set up by the energy ministry, said power distributors had ignored their own security rules by allowing critical computers to be hooked up to the Internet when they should have been kept within an internal network.

This so-called "air gap" separates computer systems from any outside Internet connections accessible to hackers.

"A possible objective was to bring down some branches (of the Ukrainian energy system) and create a 'domino effect' to collapse the entire system of Ukraine or a significant part," Sych said.

Ukraine has also been targeted in other cyber attacks, which included hacking into the system of Ukraine's biggest airport and TV news channels.

Security services and the military blamed the attacks on Russia, an allegation dismissed by the Kremlin as evidence of Ukraine's tendency to accuse Russia of "all mortal sins".

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and has supported separatist rebels in east of the former Soviet republic, arguing that Kiev's Western-backed government, elected after the Moscow-backed president fled widespread protests, was illegitimate.

Sych, who said he could not reveal all the details of the probe, said there was no conclusive evidence that the attacks originated in Russia. One of the emails was sent from the server of a German university, another from the United States, he said.

INSIDER

International cyber-security researchers who have studied the attacks believe the attackers broke into networks by sending targeted emails designed to trick utility insiders to click on Excel documents that were poisoned with malware used to gain control inside the networks.

Sych agreed, saying:

"We understand that this couldn't have happened without an insider. To carry out this kind of attack you need to know what kind of operating system and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) are used and what software controls the industrial facility," he said.

SCADA software is widely used to control industrial systems worldwide.

"The attackers must have known what software was installed ... to test (the malware) on it. Clearly preliminary investigations were carried out and this was easy to do with this kind of insider information."

He said the hackers had sent the e-mails in question to workers at the affected power distribution companies with infected Word or Excel files that were meant to look like official correspondence from the energy ministry.

They contained topics that would have been recognisable to the workers and were not sent out en masse but targeted certain individuals instead. One of the emails was about regional electricity production levels, he said.

"It was all very simple and stupid," Sych said, adding that the hackers totally wiped the data of some of the computers in one of the firms.

Details of the impact of the attacks have been sketchy, but one is reported to have affected 80,000 customers for two hours. The three named companies declined to comment on Sych's remarks.

"All experts agree this sort of attack on electric utilities or other critical infrastructure was bound to happen because engineering-wise, physics-wise it is technically possible to do," said Kenneth Geers, a Kiev-based national security analyst who worked for U.S. intelligence agencies for 20 years until 2013.

All it takes is the political will or opportunism to try something like this, he said.
Israel feels the heat of U.S., EU and U.N. criticism

By Luke Baker

JERUSALEM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - The United States, European Union and the United Nations have issued unusually stern criticism of Israel, provoking a sharp response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and raising Palestinians' hopes of steps against their neighbour.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday described Israel's settlements as "provocative acts" that raised questions about its commitment to a two-state solution, nearly 50 years after occupying lands the Palestinians seek for a state.

Ban also laid some of the blame for four months of stabbings and car rammings by Palestinians at Israel's door, saying "as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism".

Netanyahu's response was quick and furious. Ban's remarks "give a tailwind to terrorism", he said, and ignore the fact "Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state".

"The U.N. lost its neutrality and moral force a long time ago," he added, singling Ban out for personal criticism.

While terse words between Israel and the United Nations are nothing new, Israel's closest allies, the United States and the European Union, have publicly expressed their own frustration with the policies of Netanyahu's right-wing government.

Speaking at a security conference last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro questioned how equitably justice is applied in the occupied West Bank, saying: "At times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians."

That, too, drew an angry response from Netanyahu. Shapiro later said he regretted the timing of his remarks, made on the day an Israeli mother of six, stabbed to death by a Palestinian in a West Bank settlement, was buried.

The European Union's policy of labelling products made in Israeli settlements has provoked similar anger from officials, while Sweden's foreign minister was branded an anti-Semite after calling for an independent investigation into Israel's efforts to quell the current wave of violence.

NOT SO RESOLVED

The criticism, particularly about the settlements, where some 550,000 Jews live in around 250 communities scattered across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has raised Palestinian hopes that world powers might finally be minded to support a U.N. resolution condemning Israel's policy outright.

"We are continuing our contacts with the international community... and will go to the Security Council for a resolution against the colonial settlement enterprise," Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said last week.

The last attempt at such a resolution failed in 2011 after the United States vetoed it, saying it harmed the chances for peace. The feeling among Palestinian diplomats now is that the United States may be less inclined to veto given the absence of peace talks and the depth of U.S. frustration with Israel.

Israeli diplomats are also wary of that possibility.

"It's always a risk and we are extremely attentive to it," said Emmanuel Nahshon, the Foreign Ministry's spokesman.

"There has indeed been a lot of criticism of Israel recently, but I don't know whether that necessarily translates into a U.N. resolution."

He said there had been "anti-Israeli resolutions" at the United Nations in the past, regardless of developments on the ground.

The Palestinians hope France, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, might sponsor such a resolution, but it is unclear whether the French have the appetite for such a course.

"If the French want to play a useful and positive role in the Middle East, they can't stand behind an initiative that is against Israel and only antagonises us," said Nahshon.

Even if a resolution were to be drafted, diplomats played down its prospects. While President Barack Obama may have a fractious relationship with Netanyahu, he is unlikely to want to isolate Israel in a U.S. election year, with Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton keen to draw the Jewish vote.
EU gives Greece warning to fix border "neglect"

By Alastair Macdonald and Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS, Jan 27 (Reuters) - The European Commission warned Greece on Wednesday it could face more border controls with other states of the free-travel Schengen zone in May if it does not fix "serious deficiencies" in its management of the area's external frontier.

EU countries have been increasingly critical of Athens' handling of the continent's worst migration crisis since World War Two. More than one million migrants reached Europe last year, mainly through Greece.

"If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to ... allow member states to temporarily close their borders," European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a news briefing.

He was speaking after the Commission, the EU's executive body, accepted a report saying cash-strapped Athens had "seriously neglected" its obligations to fellow Schengen states.

The use of that phrase could pave the way for EU governments to exercise the option of reinstalling controls on their national borders for up to two years once short-term measures currently in place expire in May.

Several EU member states have instituted emergency controls on their borders and warned they may effectively suspend Athens from the passport-free zone. Most of the irregular migrants arriving in the EU have come from Turkey via Greece and trekked northward to Germany.

Dombrovskis said Greece was not effectively identifying or registering people arriving, not uploading fingerprinting data to relevant bases systematically and not checking travel documents properly and against key databases.

Greece responded by saying EU interior ministers had concluded at a meeting on Monday that Turkey held the key for tackling the crisis and that it must deliver on agreed measures.

"We think that trying to isolate Greece is not constructive," said government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili.

EU border agency Frontex says its mission to the Greek island of Lesbos in January showed improvements in registration procedures. But EU officials carried out an assessment in Greece in November that led to Wednesday's conclusion alleging "serious deficiencies" in Greek frontier control.

Gerovassili said Greece's request for support from Frontex had only been partially met and that a plan to relocate refugees, agreed at an EU Council in September, had stalled, with only 414 out of 160,000 refugees relocated.

SEALING GREECE OFF

The step of imposing border controls can be taken for up to six months and can be renewed up to three times for a total of two years.

Dombrovskis said the Commission was intent on preserving Schengen, one of the EU's key achievements, and said Greece had improved its border controls since November - but not enough.

The next step in the process would be for Schengen member states - 26 countries, most of which are also in the EU - to confirm the Commission's conclusions in a majority vote. The executive would then recommend remedial measures and assess by May whether Athens had complied.

Greece has no land borders with the rest of the Schengen zone, so installing new frontier checks would affect only air and sea ports.

Diplomats and officials described the move to penalise tourism-dependent Greece as a way to raise pressure on Athens, which is already mired in a financial crisis, to better implement EU measures to deal with the migrant crisis.

The EU is also looking into using Frontex more to help guard the border between Greece and Macedonia, which is not a member of the EU or Schengen. Some Frontex personnel are already at Greece's northern border, but the agency's mandate does not allow for interventions in third countries.

Some diplomats said countries could send more police or border guards to Macedonia on the basis of bilateral agreements.
Curfew widened in southeast Turkey, clashes kill 23

By Seyhmus Cakan

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Security forces killed 20 Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey while three Turkish soldiers died in a rebel attack, the military said on Wednesday, as authorities widened a curfew in the mainly Kurdish region's largest city, Diyarbakir.

Hundreds of locals, including children and the elderly, fled curfew-bound areas of Diyarbakir's Sur district as gunfire and blasts resounded and police helicopters flew overhead, a Reuters witness said. Some people cried as they carried away possessions.

Southeastern Turkey has endured its worst violence in two decades since a 2-1/2-year-old ceasefire between the state and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants collapsed in July, reviving a conflict that has killed 40,000 people since 1984.

The army said 11 PKK members died in the town of Cizre, near the Syrian border, and nine more in Sur on Tuesday, bringing the militant death toll in the two towns to some 600 since security operations began there last month.

It said three soldiers were killed in a militant attack in Sur, where security sources said militants opened fire with rifles and a rocket launcher.

The ancient Sur district, enclosed by Roman city walls, has suffered extensive damage in the fighting and much of it has been under a round-the-clock curfew since Dec. 2.

The district governor's office said the curfew was extended to five more districts so security forces could remove explosive devices and barricades and fill in ditches set up by militants.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union all classify the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The PKK says it is fighting for autonomy for Turkey's Kurdish minority.

"URGENT SITUATION"

Rights groups and locals have voiced growing concern about the civilian death toll in the security operations since last month. The pro-Kurdish HDP party puts the toll at nearly 120.

Rights groups and the HDP have highlighted the plight of some 28 people sheltering in a Cizre cellar, where four have died and three are in a critical condition, according to information obtained by Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch.

"Medical attention is not being provided to those in need. This is an urgent situation that the Turkish government needs to address imminently to prevent loss of life," she told a news conference in Istanbul.

Rights groups, and a doctors' association have called for ambulances to be allowed to rescue the wounded. The HDP said three of its parliamentarians had gone on hunger strike and were staging a sit-in at the offices of the Interior Ministry to force authorities to send ambulances.

The local governor's office said emergency services were unable to enter the area because of the PKK.
International court to investigate 2008 Georgia-Russia war

By Thomas Escritt

AMSTERDAM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - International Criminal Court judges ordered an investigation of alleged crimes committed during the 2008 Georgian-Russian over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia - the court's first investigation outside Africa.

The five-day war saw Russia strengthen its grip over largely pro-Russian South Ossetia, which had effectively been beyond Tbilisi's control since 1990. Russian troops pushed through South Ossetia deep into Georgia before withdrawing.

In a statement on Wednesday, judges said there was reason to believe crimes against humanity, including murder and the driving of Georgians from their homes, had been committed during the conflict, as well as war crimes including attacks on peacekeepers by Russian-backed South Ossetian and by Georgian forces.

The ICC, which has handed down just two convictions, of little-known Congolese warlords, has been criticised for bringing investigations only in Africa since being set up 13 years ago.

Last October, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked to open an investigation after finding that up to 113 ethnic Georgian civilans had been killed and 18,500 driven from their homes as part of a "forcible displacement campaign" run by the authorities in mainly Russian-speaking South Ossetia.

Investigators will investigate allegations of crimes committed betweeen July 1 and October 10, 2008, covering periods either side of the five-day August war.

Opposing Georgian and South Ossetian forces appeared to have killed 12 peacekeepers, both Russian and Georgian, while Georgian forces had attacked a medical facility, Bensouda said.

The investigation pits Russia, a non-member of the ICC, against a strongly European-backed court at a time when east-west tensions are running high following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria last year.

The Hague-based ICC is already considering whether to open an investigation into crimes committed in Ukraine, another West-leaning former Soviet republic which is fighting Moscow-backed separatists in the east of the country.
Nigerian crime gangs 'use UK airports' to traffick women - BBC

By Tom Esslemont

LONDON, Jan 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - British airports such as Gatwick are increasingly used as entry points to the European Union by Nigerian trafficking gangs seeking alternatives to perilous Mediterranean Sea crossings, Spanish police have warned.

BBC News quoted a crime squad officer in Barcelona as saying his team had bust a notorious Nigerian crime organisation running a network of trafficked prostitutes across the city.

But the gang, known as the Supreme Eiye Confraternity (SEC), is also "using forged documents and passports to fly its Nigerian victims into places like Gatwick," Xavier Cortes, head of anti-trafficking at Catalonia police, said in a BBC interview.

The word 'Eiye' means 'bird' in Yoruba, the main language of southwestern Nigeria where the group originates, the BBC report said.

The Home Office, which oversees immigration controls at UK airports, did not respond to the interview remarks.

A record one million migrants arrived in the European Union last year, many reliant on criminal gangs to smuggle them out of conflict-ridden countries like Syria and Afghanistan as well as many African countries.

The surge in arrivals has heaped pressure on European police and authorities to break a network of organised crime spanning the continent.

The number of people identified as potential victims of human trafficking in Britain rose by 21 percent to 3,309 in 2014, the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) said last year.

The nationality of the victims was known in only 2,100 cases of which nearly 9 percent were Nigerian, the agency's data showed.

The overall rise in trafficking cases may have been due to improvements in the way police and other professionals spotted signs of the hidden crime, the NCA said.

Spanish police officer Cortes said the English-speaking SEC and other Nigerian gangs preferred the British trafficking route, suggesting they may have official help in their home country to obtain forged passports.

"These (fake) documents are expensive, though, and need co-operation of people working in the government to get," Cortes was quoted as saying on the BBC's website.

In 2014 over 240 million passengers passed through UK airports, according to the Civil Aviation Authority.

RAPED AND BEATEN

The SEC's victims are often approached by traffickers in Nigerian towns and cities, including Benin City, lured by the promise of making money through prostitution, according to the BBC report, which first aired on Tuesday.

But one woman said she had no idea of the pain she would have to endure.

"I did not know I would be beaten and raped and have to have sex every night of the week," the victim told the BBC.

Another woman, speaking after she was freed by a recent Spanish police raid in Barcelona, said she had been hit over the head with a glass bottle after telling a gang member she could not meet his demand for payment.

"I had scars all over my body," she told the BBC.

The raid on the SEC in Barcelona mentioned in the BBC report took 18 months of planning and resulted in 23 arrests.

But the SEC has hundreds of members running operations out of Ibadan, about 100 km (60 miles) northeast of the Nigerian city of Lagos, the BBC report said.

In 2014, 70 percent of nearly 900 Nigerian citizens applying for asylum in Britain had their applications refused, government data shows.

Nigeria's government has failed to comply with minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking, though it has made some progress, the UK Home Office (interior ministry) said in a report on the country last year.
South Africa's Malema urges voters to fire warning shots at ruling party in local polls

By James Macharia

JOHANNESBURG, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Julius Malema, who seeks nationalisation of mines and land and the curbing of white economic power, called on other opposition parties to unite with his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) to break the grip of the ruling party at municipal polls this year.

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) remains dominant and still likely to win, but enduring poverty 25 years after apartheid was ended in South Africa have eroded its support, especially among restive young people born after 1994.

Malema said the weak economy had raised the possibility that the ANC could lose control of either or both the commercial hub Johannesburg or capital Pretoria at the ballot.

"South Africans must shoot warning shots now, through their votes," Malema told Reuters in an interview.

"It is an opportunity now for South Africans to show the ANC that they are tired ... that the ANC should begin to take them seriously, ahead of the national elections in 2019."

Africa's most industrialized economy is struggling. The World Bank has forecast growth to reach only 1.4 percent this year and unemployment stands at 25 percent.

Even President Jacob Zuma, head of the ANC, has forecast a tough test from the opposition at the polls.

Malema - who points to the Johannesburg Securities Exchange as a symbol of the capitalism and white power his party aims to dismantle - said the ANC was still relying on the memory of liberation hero and former president Nelson Mandela to woo votes.

Many older South Africans feel grateful to the ANC for winning their freedom, ensuring the party unbroken power for the past two decades. But surveys show most people reaching the voting age of 18 are not automatically joining the ANC.

"The only thing they know is liberation, so they want to tell people about Robben Island," he said referring to South Africa's most feared prison which remains inextricably linked with Mandela, its most famous inmate.

"To young people those things do not appeal," said the former leader of the ANC's youth wing who fell out with party leader Zuma, referring to the so-called "Born Free" generation with no memory of white-minority rule.

ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe told a press briefing his party "is confident of retaining all metropolitan municipalities we currently govern and will be fighting to win the City of Cape Town" where the Democratic Alliance (DA) leads the Western Cape provincial government.

GRAND COALITION

The EFF won 6 percent of the vote in the 2014 general election, while DA made in-roads with middle-class urban blacks despite a reputation as the party of white privilege, winning 22 percent of the vote. The ANC claimed 62 percent, down from 66 percent in 2009.

Despite its minority representation, Malema's party has caused waves in the usually calm parliament.

Security officials forcefully removed Malema after he disrupted Zuma's annual address in February last year, an unprecedented sign of discontent with his administration.

Malema was demanding to be allowed to ask the president when he would repay part of a $23 million state-funded security upgrade of his rural home. Zuma denies any wrongdoing.

The EFF leader said he backed the idea of a grand opposition coalition of smaller parties to take on the ANC.
"Seeds of hope" for gay rights in Africa, says special U.S. envoy

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI, Jan 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Southern Africa is moving towards greater acceptance of sexual and gender minorities though there is still a long way to go, the United States' first special envoy for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people said on Wednesday.

Randy Berry, an openly gay senior U.S. diplomat, was speaking at the end of a 10-day visit to Malawi, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, one year after his appointment.

"I believe in all of these countries, there are seeds of hope," Berry said, speaking from South Africa in a phone-in with journalists.

"With government representatives, I found them to be sensitive to the issues, wanting to engage very clearly... After these consultations, I am quite hopeful."

Homosexuality or acts of gay sex are outlawed in most of Africa's 54 states and persecution of gay people is rife across the continent.

U.S. policy is to combat violence and discrimination against LGBT people through dialogue and support for rights groups via the State Department's Global Equality Fund, created in 2011.

"Change is not going to occur because the U.S. wants it to," said Berry. "Change comes through those people working indigenously within those societies to produce a more equitable framework."

Berry said he was encouraged by governments' willingness to discuss the issue and to give LGBT groups space to operate.

"The fact that we can actually have a rational, coherent, quiet conversation is really important," he said. "The problem we face in a global sense is one of ignorance and non exposure."

Many Africans, particularly religious leaders, argue that decriminalising homosexuality would be akin to promoting it and that it goes against their traditions and culture.

Being gay "is not a learned behaviour. It is not somehow produced by external forces. This is how people are born," Berry said.
After attack, president says Kenya to remain in Somalia peace force

By Ben Makori

ELDORET, Kenya, Jan 27 (Reuters) - President Uhuru Kenyatta said on Wednesday Kenya was committed to remaining part of an African Union-led peacekeeping force in Somalia, after al Shabaab militants said they killed more than 100 soldiers in an attack on an army base.

The Islamist militants attacked the remote base close to the border with Kenya on Jan. 15, killing soldiers and seizing military equipment. Kenya has declined to say how many died.

"This is not the time to waiver or to listen to the voices of defeat and despair," Kenyatta told a televised memorial service for the dead soldiers, attended by Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud and Nigeria's Muhammadu Buhari.

"We fight because our cause is just, because we want to restore a productive peace in Somalia and we also wish to protect ourselves from an enemy that would seek to destroy us."

The main opposition party in Kenya has called for the withdrawal of troops from Somalia but Kenyatta said Kenya was committed to bringing stability to the neighbouring country.

African Union troops, now numbering about 22,000 from several African nations, have spent nearly a decade battling al Shabaab in Somalia, a country mired in conflict since civil war broke out in 1991.

Al Shabaab, which seeks to overthrow the Western-backed government in Mogadishu, often says its attacks against Kenyan targets are retaliation for its participation in the force, known as AMISOM, which also includes Uganda and Burundi.

The al Qaeda-aligned militants have been driven out of major strongholds in Somalia by AMISOM and Somali army offensives, but the group still controls some rural areas and often launches guerrilla-style assaults and bomb attacks.

Mohamoud repeatedly thanked the Kenyan people for their assistance in his government's fight against al Shabaab, which he called "barbaric devils."

"I want to assure you, we will defeat them," he said.

Buhari, whose country also faces an Islamist insurgency from the group Boko Haram, expressed solidarity with Kenya, saying Nigerians "share your pain and grief."

Newspaper pictures of coffins draped with Kenyan flags bringing back dead soldiers from the attack have increased pressure on Kenyatta and his military chiefs.
Turkish prosecutor seeks life without parole for jailed journalists -document

By Gulsen Solaker and Ece Toksabay

ANKARA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Turkish prosecutor is seeking life sentences without parole for two prominent journalists on charges of assisting terrorists, according to a court document seen by Reuters, after they published video footage purporting to show the state intelligence agency helping to send weapons to Syria.

Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of the secular Cumhuriyet newspaper, and senior editor Erdem Gul were arrested in November in a case that has drawn international condemnation and revived concern about press freedom under President Tayyip Erdogan.

The two are charged with intentionally aiding an armed terrorist organisation and the publication of material in violation of state security.

Cumhuriyet published photos, videos and a report in May which it said showed intelligence officials transporting arms to Syria in trucks - allegedly to opposition fighters - in 2014.

Turkey's involvement in Syria is particularly sensitive as the NATO member is under pressure to step up the fight against Islamic State militants.

Erdogan, who has cast the newspaper's coverage as part of an attempt to undermine Turkey's global standing, has said he would not forgive such reporting.

He has acknowledged that the trucks, which were stopped by gendarmerie and police officers en route to the Syrian border, belonged to the MIT intelligence agency and they were carrying aid to Turkmens in Syria. Turkmen fighters are battling both President Bashar al-Assad's forces and Islamic State.

However, Erdogan has said prosecutors had no authority to order the trucks be searched, and that they acted as part of a plot to discredit the government - allegations that the prosecutors denied.

A prosecutor is seeking two life sentences plus 30 years for each man, according to the 473-page document submitted to an Istanbul court on Wednesday and seen by Reuters. The sentences include one of "aggravated" life, which means no chance of parole and solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. It also limits family visits.

The court has yet to decide whether to accept the indictment, according to lawyers familiar with the case. Erdogan and the state security agency are listed as the two plaintiffs in the indictment. The court declined to comment.

Government officials have said the case is matter purely for the judiciary, not a political issue.

Dundar and Gul say the case has no legal basis. They told Reuters in a faxed message from prison last week that their arrest was instead designed to send a warning to journalists.

The government denies there is a political agenda behind the investigation, saying there was an "open breach of law".

Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch expressed dismay, saying: "We are absolutely clear that Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, in publishing stories on the subject were doing their jobs as journalists and no more than that."

European Union Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said on Twitter he was "shocked by life sentences" demanded for Dundar and Gul and that Turkey, negotiating for EU membership, must respect freedom of expression.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on a visit to Istanbul last week that Turkey was setting a poor example for the region in intimidating media. He met Dundar's wife and son during his trip, according to Turkish media reports.
Libya's health needs can't wait for unity government, minister says

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Donors must help Libya rebuild its devastated health care system and fight increasing outbreaks of disease, not wait for a unity government to be formed, the health minister and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday.

Health Minister Reida El Oakley also said that Islamic State was "like a cancer" in the North African country that must be fought with support from the international community.

Libya's internationally recognised parliament voted on Monday to reject a unity government proposed under a United Nations-backed plan to resolve the political crisis and armed conflict.

"I think the international community, including the U.N., should divorce the humanitarian needs of the Libyan people away from any political dialogue," El Oakley told a news briefing. "Anything short of that I would consider to be a crime. It is a crime, actually.

"At least 60 to 70 percent of our hospitals are shut down or totally dysfunctional. We have more than 80 percent of our staff in highly skilled areas like intensive care and emergency rooms and operating rooms that have left," he said, referring to the period since the 2011 revolution that topped Muammar Gaddafi.

Libya has become a regional concern since Islamic State militants gained ground there and called for foreign recruits, especially from North Africa.

"ISIS is like cancer, it is growing fast. And cancer, the earlier you treat it, the better you have a chance to control it," said El Oakley, a heart surgeon.

"Despite that, the U.N. and international community said we will not help you fight ISIS, we will not help you to have your medicine for your poor people or have a shelter for the 3 million people who have lost their homes unless you sign a paper that you are okay between east and west you have a political agreement. This is wholly inappropriate."

An estimated 1.9 million people in the country of 6.3 million are in need of "urgent health assistance", said Dr. Jaffar Hussain, the WHO Representative in Libya.

"Medicines are not available, the health work force is not available, the hospital is bombed, electricity is not there, fuel for the generator is not there, or it is in a conflict area which people have fled - the doctors, nurses and paramedics," Hussain said.

Programmes for tuberculosis, malaria, chronic diseases, mental health and HIV/AIDS are "increasingly becoming dysfunctional," he said. "We have an acute shortage of life-saving medicines."

"We will end up with massive outbreaks, we will end up with mortality and morbidity rates rising exponentially and we will end up compromising the health and the future of the people of Libya if you don't act now."

The WHO is seeking some $50 million for Libya this year, including vaccines for children and insulin for diabetes.

"The member states are willing to support, but they are waiting for a government of national accord to be in place," Hussain said.

"The humanitarian response should not wait for that, it should not be linked to the political process, it may take weeks, it may take months, it may take years. We don't know."
Many of our recipes have come from immigrants and evolved into what is called American cuisine. Over the years, we have added or eliminated traditional ingredients, changed the flavor of a dish and made it American. This often has been the case with Italian cuisine.

Americans fell in love with pizza after the Second World War when rsoldiers returning from fighting in Italy praised pizza. Over the years, Americans have added other ingredients to the traditional pizza dough covered with tomato sauce and a sprinkling of chopped fresh basil. Now, even pizzas with pieces of chicken and bits of pineapple are standard.

A similar evolution has happened to lasagna. Lasagna has changed in Italy over the centuries, depending on the areas where it is being prepared. However, Americans have added our own favorite ingredients to lasagna. There is even a Southwestern version, which I like. Yes, it is based on tortillas.

Lasagna is one of those dishes that can be made early in the day, then baked in the evening, and the leftovers can be reheated several days later. It also can be frozen. Lasagna is a one-dish meal, which only needs a tossed green salad to complete.

Lasagna is also a dish where you can use your own preferences of ingredients. I frequently make vegetarian lasagna, using a tomato-based sauce with no meat and include sliced zucchini and chopped carrots in the sauce. Slices of eggplant are frequently used instead of pasta for lasagna.

In Italy, lasagna ranks with spaghetti as the favorite national dish. The Italians insist that the best lasagna is prepared with homemade noodles, using only flour and eggs. This is the traditional dough of Emilia-Romagna, a province in the north of Italy, which includes the towns of Parma and Bologna.

Today, no-cook dried lasagna noodles are readily available on our grocery shelves. All you have to do is layer the noodles with the sauce of your choice and bake.

In Italy, a few ounces of cooked and chopped spinach are often added to color the dough for lasagna Verdi. Regardless of the color, traditionally, the well-kneaded dough is rolled out thin and cut into rectangles about 8 by 4 inches. (In this country, we use 2-inch wide strips.)

In some regions of Italy, water is used in the dough in place of one or more eggs. This makes the dough softer and less elastic. Today, most Italians do not have time to make the dough at home and purchase the dried lasagna noodles, as well as the no-cook variety.

Historians tell us that, in Roman times, lasagna denoted large, flat noodles that were cooked and covered with a sauce, not layered. In medieval times lasagna noodles were used similar to a pie crust, with pasta on the bottom and top and a filling in-between.

Lasagna is traditional in many regions of Italy, but each area makes a slightly different dough. It is cut in different lengths and widths, sometimes served immediately as pasta and sometimes baked with different sauces.

One regional specialty is lasagna al sangue  literally, bloody lasagna, which does not sound appetizing. It is a very old dish from the hilly Piedmont region in northern Italy. The -inch-wide dough for this lasagna is made with flour, eggs and water. The noodles are first parboiled and then sauteed for 2 to 3 minutes in a pan containing, onion, local sausages, sweetbreads, rosemary and parsley. Some of the blood of a newly slaughtered pig is added, hence the name.

In Genoa, lasagna became known as piccage. It consists of flat noodles dressed with pesto.

In the eastern corner of Veneto, there is lasagna da formel. Its origins are more central European than Italian, since it is made with a buttery sauce. The sauce contains golden raisins, dried figs, walnuts, grated apples and poppy seeds. It sounds sweet and therefore more like a dessert, but it is eaten as a main course.

Further south is the real kingdom of lasagna  Emilia-Romagna, where all kinds of pasta dishes achieved perfection. Lasagna al formo originated there. It is usually prepared with green lasagna, a rich and tasty meat sauce (known as ragu in Italy) and a velvety, delicate bechamel (white sauce). One sauce is used on the bottom layer and the other on the top layer.

In the region around Venice, lasagna has a Middle Eastern influence, originally brought to Venice by the spice traders. It is not a sweet dish and is not served as a dessert, but as an accompaniment to grilled meats.

In southern Italy, there is only one traditional lasagna-type dish, lasagna di Carnevale, which is traditionally eaten at Carnival time. The square lasagna noodles are lavishly layered with local sausage, tiny fried meatballs, mozzarella, ricotta and hard-boiled eggs  all generously sauced with a classic Neapolitan ragu (tomato sauce).

Today, there are many versions of lasagna in modern Italian cooking. One of the most popular is pasticcio di pesce, which is lasagna with fish. There is also lasagna al radicchio trevisano, which is a lasagna layered with red radicchio, a bechamel sauce and Parmesan cheese. Lasagna alla boscaiola is layered with slices of hard-boiled eggs, mushrooms and Fontina and Parmesan cheeses. Just about anything goes in preparing Italian lasagna.

While we were living in New Mexico, a Mexican friend gave me the following recipe for Mexican Lasagna. I tried it and have used it ever since. I shared it with my readers several years ago, and for those of you who did not save it, here it is.

This dish is also a good way to use leftover chicken; if doing so, just lightly saute the chicken, as it is already cooked.

MEXICAN LASAGNA

 1 pounds chicken tenders or boneless skinless chicken breast

 2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil

 2 teaspoons chili powder

 1 teaspoon ground cumin

 1 (14-ounce) can diced tomatoes, Mexican style

 1 (8-ounce) can tomato sauce

 2 cups diced fresh tomatoes

  cup chopped green pepper

  cup chopped red pepper

 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped

 1 (2-ounce) can sliced olives

  (1-ounce) package taco seasonings

 1 (15-ounce) container low-fat ricotta cheese

 1 (4-ounce) can diced green chilies

 cup chopped fresh cilantro, divided

 12 (6-inch) corn tortillas

 1 cup (4 ounces) shredded Cheddar cheese

Cut the chicken into 1-inch pieces.

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the chicken and sprinkle it with the chili powder and cumin. Saute the chicken for about 4 minutes, or until brown on both sides. Remove the chicken from the skillet and set aside.

Add the tomatoes, tomato sauce, fresh tomatoes, diced peppers, olives and taco seasoning to the skillet. Bring to a slow boil and then cook over low heat for about 5 minutes until well blended.

In the meantime, combine the ricotta cheese, chilies and  cup of cilantro in a small bowl and mix well.

Add the chicken to the tomato sauce. Spoon half of the chicken mixture in the bottom of a 12- by 8-inch casserole or baking dish. Top with 6 tortillas, overlapping them when necessary. Spread the ricotta mixture on top of the tortillas and top with the remaining 6 tortillas. Spread the rest of the chicken mixture on top of the tortillas and sprinkle with the remaining cilantro. (May be prepared ahead to this point and refrigerated, covered with aluminum foil).

Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake in a preheated 375 F. oven for 35 minutes or until hot and bubbly. (If refrigerated bake for 45 minutes.) Cover the top of the casserole with the shredded Cheddar cheese and bake another 6 to 8 minutes or until the cheese is melted. Serves 6.
Many Indonesians travel on unsafe boats to work in Malaysia illegally. (Photo: AP)

Kuala Lumpur: Five more bodies believed to be those of illegal Indonesian migrants were found in Malaysia on Wednesday following a boat tragedy, raising the death toll to 18, police said.

Thirteen bodies were found on Tuesday after their boat capsized in rough seas off southern Johor state.

Local police chief superintendant Rahmat Othman said the five male bodies were found on the beach.

"They were trying to enter Malaysia illegally. We will continue the search and rescue mission because investigations revealed that there could have been between 30 to 35 people on board the twin engine boat," he said.

Rahmat said there had been local reports of some survivors making it alive to shore.

"We believe the remaining missing migrants could have either drowned or are hiding in nearby jungles waiting for smugglers to take them to a safe destination," he said.

Rahmat said the illegal migrants could have departed from the nearby Indonesian island of Batam.

The southern Johor state has a long coastline and shares a maritime border with Indonesia, making illegal entry easy into Malaysia, the third largest economy in Southeast Asia.

About two million Indonesians, many of them working illegally, now live in Malaysia, generally employed in labour intensive jobs.

Deadly accidents in the strait are not uncommon, with illegal migrants typically attempting the crossing in rickety vessels and often at night to avoid detection.
The additional biometric screening across the city state's checkpoints comes in the wake of heightened terror threat to ensure that Singapore does not fall prey to terrorist attacks, the Straits Times reported.

Singapore: Singapore on Wednesday said that all travelers entering the country by land, air or sea will have their fingerprints taken from June as part of plans to step up border security in the wake of rising terror threat.

The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority will be taking the fingerprints of anyone who enters Singapore at its air, land and sea checkpoints, senior minister of state for home affairs Desmond Lee told Parliament on Wednesday.

The fingerprint scans will allow the immigration authorities to verify the traveler's identity before he is allowed entry into Singapore and will facilitate automated self-clearance during his departure, Lee said.

The additional biometric screening across the city state's checkpoints comes in the wake of heightened terror threat to ensure that Singapore does not fall prey to terrorist attacks, the Straits Times reported.

More than half a million people pass through Singapore's checkpoints every day, with the Woodlands checkpoint, linking to peninsular Malaysia at the southern tip, being the busiest land checkpoint in the world, Lee said.

"Attackers can gather and plan just outside Singapore before coming into Singapore to carry out the attack," Lee was quoted as saying by the daily.

"Border control is therefore our first line of defence to prevent an attack from taking place in Singapore," he added. At least three countries scan the fingerprints of visitors. The United States started doing so in 2004 after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan also introduced fingerprint scans in 2007.

The prosperous city state is also a major transit point for Asia, where a number of countries have recently reported increasing threats from Islamic State and related terror groups.
Hyderabad: Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan on Tuesday asserted that the relationship between the Chief Ministers of TS and AP and both the governments was the best that he has ever seen. They are very friendly. I can tell you that much. I met both of them today morning. I participated in the parade. I can tell you that it (the relationship) is really better than at any point of time. That much I can tell you with confidence and comfort, Mr Narasimhan said.

He was reacting to a question on the absence of Chief Ministers K. Chandrasekhar Rao and N. Chandrababu Naidu at an At Home hosted by him and his wife Vimala Narasimhan at the Raj Bhavan on the occasion of Republic Day here on Tuesday. As reporters continued to ask questions, the Governor reiterated, with the support of Mrs Narasimhan, Today, the relationship between the two Chief Ministers and two governments is probably the best you have ever seen. You can ask them also if you want. They will verify this. Tell them that the Governor has said this. Ask them together. If you ask them separately they may say something. You fellows are mischievous, he said in a lighter vein.

I am custodian of two states. I told you last time its a fact they are absent. There is no denying it. They must have a reason. I dont know, he added. Several dignitaries from TS and AP, including TS Legislative Council chairman Swami Goud, Speaker Madhusudhana Chary, Deputy CM Kadiam Srihari, Chief Justice Dilip B. Bhosale, home minister Nayani Narasimha Reddy, Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya, other Cabinet ministers, IAS, IPS and other officers, AP Legislative Council chairman A. Chakrapani, ministers Devineni Uma Maheswara Rao, Ganta Srinivas Rao, K. Atchannaidu, P. Sujata, Padma awardees Ramoji Rao, Yarlagadda Prasad among others attended the function.
Rio De Janerio: Brazil's health minister says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects but he also says the war is already being lost.

Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. Agency spokesman Nivaldo Coelho said on Tuesday details of the deployment are still being worked out.

Castro also said the government would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

But the minister also said the country has failed in efforts against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

"The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito," the ministers told reporters as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.

A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations, public health experts have said. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as the virus' symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didn't become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.

The World Health Organisation repeated Tuesday that the link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.

But worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.

One of them, the US territory of Puerto Rico, reported 18 new confirmed cases of Zika on Tuesday, though none involve pregnant women. One case had been reported earlier.

Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.

Repellent has disappeared from many Brazilian pharmacies and prices for the product have tripled or even quadrupled where it's still available in recent weeks since the government announced a suspected link between Zika virus and microcephaly.

Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in the country in all of 2014.

Castro's remarks have proven controversial, both in and outside Brazil.

World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier said he hadn't seen the remarks, "but in general terms I think that this would be a bit of a fatalistic approach because this should mean we could lay down all our approaches now and declare the war lost.

"I don't think this is the case," he added at WHO headquarters, in Geneva.

In Brazil, some called for Castro to be fired.

"He is incapable of occupying his position," wrote Helio Gurovitz, a columnist with G1, the internet portal of the Globo television network. "To prove that Castro doesn't have the capacity to occupy such an important position, at such a delicate moment with the spread of the epidemic, all that's needed is a selection of such comments."

Both Brazil's Zika outbreak and the spike in microcephaly have been concentrated in the poor and underdeveloped northeast of the country, though the prosperous southeast, where Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are located, are the second hardest-hit region. Rio de Janeiro will host the Aug. 5-21 Olympic games.

On Tuesday, officials in Rio also ramped up their fight against the Aedes aegypti, dispatching a team of fumigators to the Sambadrome, where the city's Carnival parades will take place next month, and the region's governor was distributing mosquito-fighting vehicles for poor suburbs of the city.

Officials in another hard-hit South American country, Colombia, also ramped up efforts against Zika on Tuesday.

Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria visited the city of Ibague, a hotbed of Zika, to start a "Tour of Colombia" campaign to educate local officials on how to fight the mosquitoes. Colombian officials say they've recorded more than 13,500 suspected cases and President Juan Manuel Santos said there could be 600,000 cases by year's end.

The WHO's Lindmeier said Tuesday that the UN agency plans a special session on the virus during a Geneva meeting of its executive board on Thursday.
Copenhagen: Denmarks Parliament on Tuesday adopted reforms aimed at dissuading migrants from seeking asylum by delaying family reunifications and allowing authorities to seize valuables, under legislation that has sparked widespread condemnation.

The government insists the law is needed to stem the flow of refugees even though Denmark and Sweden recently tightened their borders a move that prompted Germany and Austria to turn back new arrivals heading for Scandinavia.

After just under four hours of debate, the bill presented by the right-wing minority government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was approved by 81 of the 109 lawmakers present.

Approval had been widely expected, as the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, backed the measures as did two small rightwing parties.

Theres no simple answer for a single country, but until the world comes together on a joint solution (to the migrant crisis), Denmark needs to act, MP Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of Rasmussens Venstre party said during the debate.

The legislation had stirred great controversy, but Rasmussen defended it as the most misunderstood bill in Denmarks history.

International outrage focused on plans to allow police to seize cash and valuables from refugees to help pay for their stay in asylum centres, while rights activists blasted a proposed three-year delay for family reunifications as a breach of international conventions.

Some likened the Danish proposals to the confiscation of gold and other valuables from Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

What is the alternative?

Rasmussen shrugged off the criticism, seemingly more concerned with opinion polls showing that 70 percent of Danes rank immigration as their top political concern.

Social Democrat Dan Jorgensen addressed opponents of the bill, demanding: To those saying what we are doing is wrong, my question is: What is your alternative?

The alternative is that we continue to be (one of) the most attractive countries in Europe to come to, and then we end up like Sweden.

Copenhagen has often referred to neighbouring Sweden as a bad example, where 163,000 asylum applications were submitted last year five times more than in Denmark relative to their population size.

Denmarks minority government eventually backtracked on parts of the plan to confiscate migrants valuables in order to secure wider backing.

Asylum-seekers will now have to hand over cash exceeding 10,000 kroner (1,340 euros, $1,450) and any individual items valued at more than that amount, up from the initial 3,000 kroner proposed.

After thorny negotiations with the other parties, integration minister Inger Stojberg agreed to exempt wedding rings and other items of sentimental value.

The government points out that Danes seeking to qualify for social benefits sometimes also have to sell their valuables.

However, they are not subjected to the kind of searches proposed in the new asylum law.

Plain wrong

Once a champion of refugee rights, the Scandinavian countrys goal is now to become significantly less attractive for asylum-seekers, Stojberg said.

The tone in the public debate about refugees and immigrants has undoubtedly become tougher, Kashif Ahmad, the leader of the National Party, which hopes to enter Parliament by targeting the immigrant vote, told AFP.

John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia director at Amnesty International, said the law was plain wrong and a sad reflection of how far Denmark has strayed from its historic support of international norms in the Refugee Convention.

European states must stop this dismal race to the bottom and begin to meet their international obligations, by upholding refugees human rights and dignity, said Dalhuisen. Anything less is a betrayal of our common humanity.

But Marcus Knuth, Venstres spokesperson on integration issues, said such criticism was unfair.

Denmark continues to be one of the most welcoming and caring places that you can seek asylum in. So the criticism that all of a sudden we were doing something wrong we find highly, highly unfair, he said.

We simply wish to be put more at par with other European countries so that we are not one of the countries that receive by far the most asylum-seekers.

Home to 5.6 million people, Denmark registered 21,000 asylum applications in 2015, making it one of the top EU destinations per capita.

Criticism had mounted ahead of Tuesdays vote, with the UN refugee agency UNHCR and the Council of Europe questioning compatibility with international conventions.

But Rasmussen, whose party won a June election after promising an immediate slowdown of Denmarks refugee influx, was unfazed, arguing in turn that the UN Refugee Convention may need to be changed if refugees keep pouring into Europe.

Twenty-seven MPs voted against the bill in the one-chamber Parliament, including three dissenting Social Democrats. A legislator for Greenland, a Danish territory, abstained and 70 MPs did not take part.

The bill is scheduled to be signed into law by Denmarks Queen Margrethe within a few days.
New Delhi: Congress, JD-U and AAP on Tuesday attacked imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh as "murder" of democracy and federalism and accused the BJP-led government at the Centre of "insulting" the highest court of the country that is right now hearing the matter.

BJP, however, defended the decision saying it needs to be seen from multiple perspectives and is as per Constitutional mandate and in turn accused the Congress of politicising the issue.

"This is murder of democracy...The matter is sub-judice and government has acted in haste. It is a clear-cut insult to the highest court of the land. Democracy has been murdered," Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkan said.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal compared the imposition of President's rule to an Emergency-like condition.

Prez Rule in Arunachal. Advani ji was right in saying that there are emergency like conditions in the country  Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) January 26, 2016

"Prez rule in Arunachal Advaniji was right in saying that there are Emergency-like conditions in the country," he tweeted.

Attacking the decision, outgoing Arunachal chief minister Nabam Tuki said they will approach the court as matter is sub-judice. He also claimed that there is no law and order situation in the state, which is peaceful, and claimed Congress had 31 out of 44 MLAs, with BJP having only 11, besides two independents.

"Rules have not been followed in Arunachal. Decision taken by the government is unconstitutional...We will approach the Supreme Court about the decision. Today is a historic day when every citizen is celebrating Republic Day and such a decision by the Union Cabinet is enforced on this day."

Yesterday, Mukherjee called Home Minister Rajnath Singh and put some queries to him on the need for the imposition of President's rule even as Congress, the ruling party in the state, met him and opposed the cabinet decision.

The party urged the President not to give assent to the cabinet decision saying the issue was before the Supreme Court which has decided to hear the Congress petition tomorrow.

Arunachal Pradesh has been rocked by a political crisis since December 16 last year when 21 rebel Congress MLAs joined hands with 11 of BJP and two independents to 'impeach' Assembly Speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue, in a move branded as "illegal and unconstitutional" by the Speaker.

The Supreme Court decided to hear on January 27 Congress plea challenging the Cabinet decision.

The petition seeking urgent hearing was mentioned before Chief Justice T S Thakur, at his residence, who directed the matter to be listed for hearing on Wednesday.

The Union Cabinet's decision was based on state Governor Jyoti Prashad Rajkhowa report.

Up in arms against Tuki, 21 rebel party MLAs, including 14 disqualified a day before, with the help of BJP and independent legislators, congregated at a community hall after

the state Assembly complex was 'sealed' by the local administration, and 'impeached' Rebia in an impromptu session chaired by Deputy Speaker T Norbu Thongdok.

27 MLAs in 60-member Assembly, including the Chief Minister and his ministerial colleagues, boycotted the proceedings.
A central Delhi-based firm in contract with the Libyan government was allegedly cheated of Rs 5.5 crore by a local associate with fake and exaggerated hotel and transport bills.





The contract was for providing medical treatment to Libyan citizens and those injured in the Libyan Civil War.



Over 300 persons from the country have undergone treatment in Delhi.

A sister concern of EL-Yasa General Contracting is a registered overseas recruiting agency, registered with Overseas Indian Affairs Ministry.

They have also been recruiting medical and para-medical staff for government hospitals in Libya for more than two decades.



The managing director of EL-Yasa General Contracting claims to have been approached by Libyan government due to the background of health services they provided. The Libyan government signed a contract after formal inspection of the hospitals and hotels, said a police officer.



Medical treatment

As per the agreement, the Libyan government was to send its citizens for medical treatment in India and EL-Yasa General Contracting would facilitate the patients visit.



Since a large number of Libyan patients were expected to arrive, the complainant was looking for a professional service provider to assist with logistic services.

It included services like air tickets, transport and hotel rooms.



They later signed a contract with Gurgaon-based Fore Representations and Travels, the officer added.



Two groups of about 210 Libyan patients were the first to arrive in March 2012. They were checked into hotels at Dwarka and Janakpuri.



The complainant claims that payment was being made to the associate firm without necessary proof of the services provided.



It is now alleged that crores of rupees were claimed from EL-Yasa General Contracting on the basis of fake and highly exaggerated bills.



When checked by the complainant, the hotels said that they charge Rs 7,000-7,500 per room per night. But the Gurgaon firm had allegedly raised invoice of Rs 14,000-16,000 per room per night.



There is apprehension that the accused caused huge financial benefits to the tune of Rs 5.5 crore, EL-Yasa General Contractings MD stated in the complaint to police.

A case under Indian Penal Code was filed with economic offences wing police station last week.


Six-year-old Aaditya woke up at 5 am on Tuesday as he wanted to witness his first 26 January Parade at Rajpath, his aunt Dimple told Deccan Herald.





Like Aaditya, many children braved the chilly winter of Delhi and arrived at the Rajpath wearing a cloak of patriotism.



Last year as the security arrangements were very tight for Obama, Aaditya had to watch the parade on TV. This year, however, he was insisting on us to take him to Rajpath and let him watch the parade live, said Aadityas aunt.



Aadityas elder brother, 12-year-old Lakshya, is a big fan of Prime MInister Narendra Modi, and watches all his speeches. Seeing Modi in flesh and blood was like seeing his favourite superhero in real life.



I liked when Modiji came walking and waved at the people, it was a unique gesture. Normally, cameras are not allowed, but this time, they were. So we clicked a lot of photos of Modiji. I also made his videos, said Aaditya.



Apart from kids, youngsters also arrived from all parts of the country to watch the 67th Republic Day Parade.



It was a spectacular event. I have never seen something like this in my entire life. I liked the military bands, camel march and ultimately the fly-past of fighter aircrafts. Because of the parade, I could watch Modi twice today. I think he is really reaching out to people, and people are crazy about him. Never saw such mass hysteria for a leader before, said Mano Teja, a civil service aspirant from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh.



A group of friends working in Delhi, but hailing from

Maharashtra suggests that every Delhiite should watch

the parade at least once in their life.



Republic Day symbolises the transition from a monarchical form of government to the government of the republic, of the people. So I think, every countryman should celebrate it and if you live in Delhi and havent witnessed it yet, its a shame, said Rahul Singh, an electronic engineer living in Munirka, Delhi.



From people singing the

national anthem and standing in respect for war veterans, to applauding the contingent of women marchers, there were many instances during the parade for people to feel proud about being born in India.


Synchronised display of Indias military prowess and cultural diversity not only left the local spectators spellbound but also made a deep impact on many foreigners who had arrived at Rajpath to witness the 67th Republic Day Parade.





While the roar of Sukhois and Jaguars flying past sent the onlookers into a tizzy of joy, international spectators were particularly impressed by the rich ultural heritage which the parade showcased in the form of tableaux of different states.



Bastien Wanner, a Swiss citizen, and Solange Ghernaouti, a Swiss and French citizen, who had cancelled their trip to Bangalore to witness the parade, told Deccan Herald that the experience was so enriching and memorable that it would have taken them multiple trips of the country to know as much as they learnt on a single day.



The parade was a mix of Indias hard and soft power, which together becomes the countrys smart power. While I was impressed by the display of women cadets the most, the unity of the country was best presented when the tableaux of different states were moving and people from every parts of the country were applauding them; encouraging their effort, said Bastien Wanner, a PhD student from Switzerland.



India will look into the future; the woman commentators words were very propitious. We hope this turns out to be true, he added.



Impressed by the arrangements made by the authorities to tackle such a huge crowd, Solange Ghernaouti, professor at the University of Laussane, Switzerland, said the police, and particularly the spectators, were very cooperative and friendly.



An Indian sitting next to me explained to me the significance of the tableau showcasing the image of Dr B R Ambedkar. He also told me about Ambedkars contribution in the process of nation-building, said Ghernaouti.



Being a French citizen, Ghernaouti was emotional seeing the French President arriving and waving to the crowd through his car window. This was also a special moment for her as the French 35th Infantry Regiment was given the honour of leading the marching contingents.



Today I can feel the emotional connect which the Indian people have for their country. After seeing the French President arrive at the Rajpath, as a citizen of France I felt honoured. I can understand (what people would have felt) when the Indian Prime Minister came on the street and waved to the people, I think this shows his desire to reciprocate the feeling which the countrymen have for him and the nation, she added.


Thousands of armed security personnel were part of a multi-layer security blanket across the capital on Tuesday due to which the 67th Republic Day was celebrated without any untoward incident.



Security was beefed up at sensitive locations near Rajpath, and vehicles entering the capital were randomly checked. In east Delhi's Ghazipur, a suspicious Maruti Gypsy looking like an Indian Army vehicle was also impounded for a brief period as the driver failed to produce documents.



Even as the driver claimed that he had recently purchased the vehicle from the Army during an auction, police were in no mood to take any chances. The driver and the vehicle were released only after he produced genuine documents. A detailed verification of the documents confirmed that he was the actual owner of the vehicle, said a police officer.



Sources said Police contacted the Indian Army headquarters to confirme that the vehicle was auctioned and the buyer was the same person who was taken into custody.



According to police, the Gypsy was spotted during patrolling duty in east Delhis Ghazipur. When the driver was asked to produce documents of the vehicle, he claimed that the documents were at home and he had forgotten to carry them with him, the officer added.



Snipers with sophisticated arms were on high-rises while police personnel kept the eight km parade route from Rajpath to Red Fort under their watch to ensure that the event passed peacefully.



It, however, turned out to be a bitter experience for hundreds of enthusiastic people who braved the winter chill and travel restrictions to turn up at Rajpath. Police near Rajpath were seen denying entry to several valid ticket and pass holders citing overcrowding.



Police had also set up a centralised wireless integrated public address system at 31 crowded spots and markets as well as 13 Delhi Metro stations.



On Tuesday evening, Delhi Police Commissioner Bhim Sain Bassi thanked all security forces for partnering with the department and making Republic Day celebrations a grand success. Bassi said the security witnessed in the past couple of days was commendable.


Scores of municipal sanitation workers today staged protest outside Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence here to demand "immediate" release of funds for payment of their salaries and arrears, threatening to go on an "indefinite" strike if their demands were not met.





"It has been two-three months since workers received their salaries. Despite repeated requests, our demands have gone unheard. Hence, we staged our protest here. We will call off work for an indefinite period if our demands are not met," Mazdoor Vikas Samyukta Morcha president Sanjay Gehlot said.



Gehlot claimed employees from all three civic bodies took part in the protest outside Kejriwal's residence.



As part of the protest, United Front of MCD Employees, an umbrella group of MCD workers' unions, will hold dharna at Jantar Mantar later in the day.



"Around 20 unions have joined us over the demands," Rajendra Mewati, general secretary of the Front, said.



Besides salaries and arrears, the employees are seeking regularisation of contract-based employees and unification of the three corporations.



Workers attached to the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) had gone on strike over similar demands in October last year. But the strike was called off after Delhi High Court directed the city government to release funds to the Corporation.
Incharge Vice-Chancellor of Hyderabad Central University (HCU) Vipin Srivastava today faced the ire of agitating students when he reached their protest site to initiate a dialogue with them to break the impasse over Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula's suicide.





Srivastava stood at the protest site for a few minutes even as the students raised slogans against him, asking him 'to go back'.



He left after a few minutes. Some one banged on his car when it was about to move.

"We have been criticised constantly that no one is making an effort. The truth of the matter is that the police have been stopping me. It is stopping us, Prof Appa Rao Podile (the VC who has gone on leave) as well as me. Because they felt that it may result in a law and order situation," Srivastava said.



Noting that a large number of students, agitating over the suicide of Rohith, gheraoed his residence in the staff quarters this morning when he was busy in a meeting with non-teaching staff, he said he prevailed upon the police today to let him go and interact with the protesting students.



"I told the police once again that, look, this is what is happening and they are not unruly. I would like to go and talk to them then they gave me the clearance and I went along with my colleague... both of us went there. I think you were there, you saw what happened," Srivastava said.



He said he could have stayed at the protest site for a longer duration but felt that there was no purpose.



"I could stay have stayed for longer. But then, I did not see any purpose because they were not willing to speak. I thought they wanted some body to come and talk to them. So I went, there was no possibility," the incharge VC said.



Dickens, a representative of protesting students, said they hold Srivastava "equally culpable" in the alleged wrong affairs in the university and that they are demanding that he should step down from the post of VC.



"We will not actually have any dialogue with any committee formed under the order of the Vice Chancellor. We see him (Srivastava) equally culpable on the wrongs that have been done as the chairperson of executive council. We want him to step down first that is why we also went to his house," he said.




Protesting the alleged "delay in justice" to Hyderabad university research scholar, scores of students from varsities across Delhi today once again marched to the HRD Ministry where 60 of them were detained by Delhi police.





According to police, due to security concerns, around 60 students were detained from outside Shastri Bhawan and taken to Parliament Street police station.



"Every time we try to go to the Ministry and raise our demands with HRD Minister Smriti Irani, we are held back and detained by police. Protesting is a basic right. We can't be denied that at a time when the government is trying to cover up 'institutional murder'," JNU Students Union vice president Shehla Rashid Shora said.



Members of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) and Left-backed All India Students Association (AISA) were also part of the protesters.



"We are protesting against the delay in justice to the student who had to end his life due to the harassment by the institution. Who will be held accountable for similar such suicides in varsities across country which go unreported?" Sucheta De from AISA, asked.



The protests over the issue have been rocking the national capital since last week, with three JNU students sitting on an indefinite hunger strike since Sunday.





26-year-old Rohit Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar, was found hanging at Hyderabad Central University's hostel room on January 17.



He was among the five research scholars who were suspended by Hyderabad Central University (HCU) in August last year and also one of the accused in the case of assault on an ABVP student leader. They were also kept out of the hostel. The suspension was revoked later.



Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya and Hyderabad University Vice Chancellor were named in an FIR over the death of the scholar, which triggered massive protests and demands for their removal from their posts.



The issue also took a political turn with allegations that the extreme action was a result of discrimination against Dalit students after Dattatreya had written a letter to Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani seeking action against their "anti-national acts".



In a bid to defuse the raging controversy, the Centre had last week decided to set up a judicial commission to go into the suicide, and announced an ex-gratia payment of Rs 8 lakh to his family but protests continued.



Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his silence and expressed grief over the death of Vemula, students are demanding the removal of Irani and Dattatreya and the Vice Chancellor.
In an embarrassment to the Congress government in Karnataka, a minister has boasted about his role in the abrupt transfer of a senior woman police official for putting his call on hold on her mobile phone.





A video footage showing Labour Minister P T Parameshwara Naik making a boastful claim for the shunting out of Deputy Superintendent of Police of Kudligi sub-division in Ballari district Anupama Shenai has gone viral.



The claim by Naik, the district minister in charge, to party workers in Hadagali assembly constituency, has added more embarrassment as it comes only a few days after he rejected any role in the transfer as "far from the truth."



The Minister had then claimed that the officer has been transferred for administrative reasons.



"You are important for me, not officers, I have never played politics on officials. For 42 seconds, DySP spoke to me, it is 42 seconds not minutes," Naik is seen telling a group of party workers in the video.



"When I called her again, she did not receive, so I have got her transferred, this is true. Why do we want officials who don't take district Minister's phone?" he said.



Shenai had reportedly received a call from a number which said the Minister would speak to her.



At the same time, she also received a call from the Superintendent of Police, Ballari and she allegedly put the Minister's call on hold and spoke to the SP.



Angered by this, Nailk reportedly took her to task and also complained to her higher-ups.

Meanwhile, Home Minister and State Congress Chief G Parameshwara has said that the DySP has not been transferred.



"I want to clarify to you she has not been transferred, she has been sent on OOD (On Official Duty) by concerned head of the department, we also won't know about it. It happens naturally in administrative and official setup," he said.



The minister drew flak from BJP, with its state unit President Prahlad Joshi, alleging that the morale of the state police had considerably gone down due to the action of politicians like Naik.
Al-Qaeda's north Africa affiliate has claimed the kidnapping of a Swiss woman in Mali's Timbuktu in a video, as Switzerland demanded her unconditional release.





Beatrice Stockly, who was previously abducted by Islamists in northern Mali in 2012, was taken for the second time on January 7 by armed men who stormed her home in the country's fabled city.



The eight-minute video includes triumphant montages of jihadists brandishing weapons and a masked English-speaker who claims responsibility for the abduction on behalf of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).



"Beatrice Stockly is a Swiss nun who declared war against Islam in her attempt to Christianise Muslims," the speaker said. Stockly has previously been identified as a missionary and social worker in her 40s who had lived in Timbuktu for years.



With at least three other fighters dimly lit in the background, the speaker said AQIM carried out the abduction and listed conditions for Stockly's release.



They include the release of a number of AQIM fighters jailed in Mali and one of their leaders, Abu Tourab, detained at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.



Abu Ahmad Tourab is the nom de guerre of Ahmad al-Faki al-Mahdi, who is accused of ordering the destruction of historical monuments in Timbuktu in 2012.



Tourab, who was a leader of the Al-Qaeda-linked Malian group Ansar Dine, is the first jihadist to appear before the war crimes court.



Stockly appears at the end of the video dressed in a black hijab. She identifies herself and the date as Tuesday, January 19, 2016. A Swiss foreign ministry spokesman told AFP that Bern was "aware of the video in question," and called for the hostage's unconditional release.



The foreign ministry has previously said that it discouraged Stockly from further travel to Timbuktu following her first kidnapping. The security situation in northern Mali has not stabilised since a loose coalition of Islamists and Tuareg rebels overran the region in 2012.



Jihadist fighters were largely chased from the area in 2013 by a French-led military intervention, but entire swathes of the area remain beyond the reach of both the Malian army and foreign troops.



The speaker in the video said AQIM had developed an expertise in dealing with Western hostages and was prepared to be "patient" while waiting for its demands to be met.
Still in the dark over the whereabouts of four suspected terrorists who fled from a city hotel after being asked to produce identity proofs on Republic Day eve, Odisha Police has alerted its Andhra Pradesh counterpart suspecting they might have sneaked into the state.





"The CCTV footage indicates that the car used by the four suspected terrorists has crossed the check gate at Girisola bordering Andhra Pradesh. The vehicle bearing the same Delhi registration number crossed the check gate on the night of January 25, about seven hours after being sighted here," a senior police officer involved in the investigation said.

Andhra Pradesh Police has been alerted, the officer said. The Special Task Force, which is probing the incident with the central intelligence wing, has also contacted the police in Delhi, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh, he said.



Meanwhile, the city police has interrogated several persons, including one from Iran and another from Russia in connection with the case.



"Yes we have spoken to many people, but no information on the suspected four persons so far," deputy commissioner of police Satyabrat Bhoi said, adding cars bearing Delhi registration numbers are being tracked in different places.



Inspector General Arun Botha, who is heading the STF team, said steps are being taken to locate the four persons who fled from the city.



The state government had yesterday sounded high alert after the four men, presenting themselves as Iraqi nationals, disappeared when asked to produce their identity proof at a hotel here on Monday night.



The police have released CCTV grabs of the vehicle and one of the four suspected persons last evening and sought public help to nab them. Director General of Police B K Singh had yesterday said the four were suspected to be terrorists.



The four men had estimated height of 6.5 feet and spoke in Hindi and English. They came to the hotel in a car with a Delhi registration number which turned out to be fake, police said.



"In the wake of the incident, the security of the chief minister's carcade has been beefed up. We don't want to take any chances and have heightened security and frisking," police commissioner R P Sharma said.
At a time when the highly-stressed banking sector is unable to finance Indias creaking infrastructure, the government is launching a fully-dedicated Rs 40,000 crore fund, with the help of foreign investors to give a leg-up to patchy roads, rail and highways holding back economic growth.





To be launched next week under the aegis of National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), this will be Indias first sovereign wealth fund to finance long-term infrastructure projects.



The government will maintain an arms distance. It will eventually have not more than 49 per cent equity in it. All investment decisions will be taken by investment company of NIIF, a top official source told Deccan Herald.



Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is expected to launch NIIF at the India Investment Summit on February 4-5. The size of the fund will be Rs 40,000 crore, with an initial capital of Rs 20,000 crore.



Countries, such as the UK, the UAE, Singapore, Russia and Australia, have already expressed their interest in the fund.



The government may have finalised at least two overseas investors for the launch, the source said on the condition of anonymity.



Similar fund in Singapore is called Temasek, while in the UK, it is known as the Green Investment Fund.



Until now, the basic model of Indias infrastructure financing was somewhat different, where the Centre borrowed funds from the World Bank or Asian Development Bank, or the Japan International Cooperation Agency, and gave it to implementing authorities in the states.



But the new initiative will change the way infrastructure projects are financed in India, the official said.



According to the latest Reserve Bank of India data, the stressed loan in the banking sector reached 24 per cent of their total advances by June 2015, from 22.9 per cent, in the same period previous year.



As of date, the total infrastructure exposure to the bank loans are Rs 8,40,000 crore. Out of this, Rs 2,00,000 crore worth of loans are stressed.



Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, earlier this month, cleared 42 stalled projects in the infra sector, involving Rs 1.15 lakh crore of investment.




The protest by the drivers and paramedics of the 108 Arogya Kavacha ambulance service intensified on Wednesday night after the drivers began handing over keys of the ambulances to the district health officers (DHOs) across the State and struck work.





The decision to strike work was taken after the Bengaluru police detained around 1,700 drivers and paramedics in the afternoon after they had threatened to march from Freedom Park to Vidhana Soudha and sweep the streets in protest and also consume poison. Even as the protest was on from Monday, the drivers and paramedics had not refrained from work.



Having anticipated the move, the department of health and family welfare had planned a number of interim measures. The BMTC and KSRTC bus drivers are to drive the ambulance vehicles. Also, one out of three staff nurses from the 24-hour primary health centres would be deployed in place of the protesting paramedics, officials said.



Members of the Karnataka 108 drivers and paramedics association have been protesting, refusing to sign an undertaking which their employer GVK EMRI had given them, on the grounds that this would take away their basic constitutional rights. Led by former minister Goolihatti Shekar, the protesters began marching from Freedom Park, forcing the police to detain them.



Shrishail Hallur, president of the association, said: We have only asked them to give us our share of money. Ours is not a great demand that the government is taking so long to respond. We are also ready to go on a hunger strike for the cause, he added.



The employees disagree with three points in the undertaking which states that they cannot talk to the media nor the government about their grievances. It also says drivers cannot refrain from work or stage a protest come what may.



Staged protest

Terming the protests as a charade, Health Minister U T Khader said the entire protest was stage-managed by drivers, to intentionally inconvenience the public. He said the drivers had been suspended with immediate effect. The DHOs have been instructed to book criminal cases against the protesting drivers and paramedical staff who have not handed over the ambulance keys and the mobile phones. If need be, the department would integrate around 800 government ambulances into Arogya Kavacha, for the time being.



Conspiracy comes to the fore

Addressing the media after a video conference with DHOs, Minister Khader released a 12-minute audio clip, a conversation between two drivers, who he said were masterminds behind the protest.

In the audio clip, Ashok and Narasimha from Chikkaballapur and Bengaluru are heard conspiring against the department and Khader.

They decide to hold the protest on Republic Day as the entire police force will be busy. They also decide to pull out the ambulance service in the night and ask all drivers to switch off their phones. This way, the public will certainly be inconvenienced. To make sure that there is proper media coverage, they decide to pose as patients and give statements against the department. They also plan to file a PIL in the court, posing as members of the public. Not only are they heard calling Khader names using unparliamentary language, they also decide to bribe media personnel. The drivers are convinced that the department is not in a position to invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) or make alternative arrangements. This way, they could teach the government a lesson.
The City Police, on Wednesday, brought four members of the notorious Irani gang from Hyderabad to the city.





Muththooz, Hyder, Shoaib and Gufran  all hailing from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh  are the suspected chain snatchers, brought to the city on body warrant. They were lodged in a jail at Hyderabad.



DCP (Crime and Traffic) N D Birje told Deccan Herald, during interrogation, the arrested persons had told Hyderabad police that they had also committed crime in Mysuru along with several other cities. So, the Hyderabad police had informed the State (Karnataka) Home department.



Acting on the information, a team of police personnel, led by Ashokapuram Police Inspector N G Krishnappa from Mysuru was sent to Hyderabad recently. The suspects were brought to the city on a body warrant.



The city police, who produced the suspects before a court, sought 10-day police custody of the accused. However, the court remanded them in police custody for four days.



On July 21, 2015, eight chain snatching cases were reported in the city. Following this, the investigators had analysed the modus-operandi of the chain snatchers with the help of CCTV camera footage. Eventually, the needle of suspicious was towards the Irani gang.
Twenty-four candidates, including Congress Rahaman Sharief and BJPs Y A Narayanaswamy, filed their papers for the Hebbal Assembly bypoll with nominations closing on Wednesday.





In an embarrassment to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, the party high command, on the eve of closure of nominations, denied his choice of candidate - Byrathi Suresh - a ticket to contest the Hebbal bypolls, favouring former Union minister C K Jaffer Shariefs grandson Rahaman Sharief.



On Wednesday, the Rahaman Sharief was more or less isolated by all the leaders when he went to file his nomination paper, which brought to the fore the simmering discontent against his candidature.



Transport Minister Ramalinga Reddy and MP Rajeev Gowda were the only leaders to accompany him.



Reddy claimed that the other leaders were busy with prior engagements and hence they could not come along with Sharief.



Jaffer Sharief too was absent. He, however, had gone to his grandsons rescue earlier in the day, when the latter had been kept waiting by Siddaramaiah for nearly one and a half hours at his official residence Cauvery.



Siddaramaiah eventually gave the duo an audience. Jaffer Sharief said the chief minister had promised to campaign for Rahaman and extend him all assistance.



Conceding that there were internal differences, Ministers G Parameshwara and Dinesh G Rao, who were present at Cauvery, said the differences had cropped up owing to severe competition among aspirants. The differences would be sorted out in two to three days.

Soda bottle clash When Rahaman Sharief was filing his papers, there was a minor clash between two Congress workers, with one of them hitting the other on the head with a soda bottle. The police, however, brought the situation under control.



Y A Narayanaswamy of the BJP filed his papers at the BBMP office in JC Nagar after offering pooja at Radhakrishna Temple in Sanjaynagar.



He was accompanied by several leaders, including R Ashoka, P C Mohan, Katta Subramanya Naidu, among others.



A rally was also taken out by Narayanaswamys supporters. Ismail Sharief of the JD(S) also filed his papers on Wednesday.



In Bidar, the Congress has given the party ticket to Rahim Khan who lost the Bidar seat by 1,800 votes in 2013.



The JD(S) candidate is Ayaz Khan. Khan quit the Congress and joined the JD(S) after he was denied a party ticket. In all, 11 candidates have filed their papers.



In Devadurga, the late Venkatesh Naiks son Rajashekar Naik filed his nomination papers. Former minister Shivanagouda Naik is contesting from the BJP and Kareamma Naik from the JD(S). In all, four candidates have filed their nominations.



The scrutiny of the papers would be taken up on Thursday. January 30 is the last day for withdrawing the nomination and elections are scheduled to be held on February 13.


The State Congress will hold a massive workers convention of the districts coming under the Mysuru revenue division at the Maharaja Grounds in Mysuru on February 6 as part of its preparations for the forthcoming zilla panchayat and taluk panchayat (ZP/TP) elections.





Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Wednesday convened a meeting of the district in-charge ministers of the division to discuss the strategy for the polls, which are being held in two phases - February 13 and 20.



The Mysuru revenue division comprises the districts of Mysuru, Chamarajanagar, Chikkamagaluru, Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Hassan, Kodagu and Mandya. Similar conventions will be held in other three revenue divisions.



The stakes are high for the Congress in general and Siddaramaiah in particular, as the ZP/TP polls come just two years ahead of the 2018 Assembly polls.



Wednesdays meeting comes just a day after Siddaramaiah had to face an embarrassment with the party high command denying his choice of candidate - Byrathi Suresh - a ticket to contest the Hebbal byelection.
The balloon shot down by the Indian Air Force aircraft on Tuesday flew in from Pakistan and could have been a ploy by the neighbouring country to assess how fast India could respond to such airspace violations, sources in the government said on Wednesday.





A Sukhoi 30 aircraft of the IAF shot down the US-made helium-filled balloon over Jaisalmer in Rajasthan on Tuesday, when the nation was celebrating Republic Day.



Our radars picked up a shiny flying object entering our airspace. A fighter jet was quickly scrambled, which intercepted it and shot it down, Defence Minister, Manohar Parrikar, told journalists on Wednesday.



The Ministry of Defence later issued a statement saying that Indian Air Force radar had picked up an unidentified flying object moving easterly in Jaisalmer area.



An Indian Air Force fighter jet intercepted the object which was found to be balloon of about three meters diameter. Due to heightened security alert, the balloon was shot down as it would have been carrying unknown payload, it said. The MoD added: However, on analysis of the debris, it was established that there was no dangerous payload.



Sources said that the balloon could have been used by the Pakistan Air Force to gauge the time the IAF would take to scramble in case of such violation of airspace.



Another in Delhi



Security agencies at Delhis Indira Gandhi International Airport went into a tizzy over an unidentified balloon-shaped object which was spotted moving in south Delhi on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, threat calls were also made to Jet Airways about bombs being placed in two Delhi-Kathmandu flight.



The control room of Gurgaon Police had informed Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) that the balloon was seen moving from Gurgaon towards Delhis Arjangarh Air Force Station.



The Air Force Station staff had reported sighting the balloon  a meter in diameter  flying between 1-1.5 kilometres high. The airports Air Traffic Control (ATC) and the Delhi Police were also informed.



The call regarding the balloon came at about 5 pm. We did not see the balloon, but were on alert as the area is near the airport, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (IGI Airport) Dinesh Kumar Gupta.



The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) which is responsible for the airports security also confirmed the development.



We received information from Delhi Police that a balloon was spotted about a kilometre away from the airport. An alert was sounded over this matter, said a CISF officer. No balloon has been recovered yet.
Small Scale Industries Minister Satish Jarkiholi has said a new Act would be brought in to empower the Karnataka State Small Industries Development Corporation (KSSIDC) to acquire land, so that more industrial estates could be developed fast.





Speaking at an interaction programme with industrialists at the Karnataka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) here on Wednesday, he said the plan was to allow KSSIDC to hold negotiations with farmers directly and acquire land up to 50 acres for each industrial estate.



New industrial estates could not be developed in the past several years due to lack of land. After placing the demand, the Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board, which comes under the Major Industries Department, takes several years to allot land to develop industrial estates. A proposal to allow KSSIDC to acquire land for developing industrial estates would be submitted to the government within a month, the minister said.



Of the 391 grievances received from small scale industries, only 100 could be redressed so far, as the officials concerned are busy with Invest Karnataka.



The remaining grievances would be redressed after holding meetings with other departments concerned after the investment meet and attempts would be also made to get funds in the budget for the development of industrial estates, Jarkiholi added.


SC/ST Teachers Forum at University of Hyderabad has said their members would launch a hunger strike from Thursday demanding justice for Dalit scholar Vemula Rohit, dashing hopes of resuming classes early.





We demand the resignation of Vice Chancellor P Apparao and the interim VC Prof Vipin Srivastava to resume academic and administrative activities, the Forums convener S Sudhakar Babu said.



The Forum has despatched notices to the interim VC, the Registrar, Executive Council members and Prof Apparao.



Meanwhile, the Student JAC for Social Justice decided to intensify its agitation with the support of teaching, non-teaching staff and casual labourers in the campus.

Despite a few non-dalit teachers visiting Velivada (dalit quarters) to declare their support to the agitation, many are yet to follow suit.



The greatest movement ever to occur on Indian campuses was actually the gift of Rohit. This agitation has shook the foundations of the nation, Prof Anupama of Computer science department said.



On Wednesday, the JAC, which called for a nationwide university ban, conducted a rally in the UoH campus till the residences of interim Vice Chancellor Prof Srivastava and Chief Proctor Prof Alok Pandey.



They raised slogans like Sanghi Gunde Hosh me Aavo before the residences and sat for a protest.



Later, holding a rally up to the campus gate, students burnt effigies of the Vice Chancellor and interim Vice Chancellor and demanded their resignation. Across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, students held rallies in Osmania, Kakatiya, Andhra and Venkateswara universities.



UoH security evicted six of the seven students on indefinite strike and moved them to health centre. They are said to be in a stable condition. Devi Prasad, a sociology scholar, is continuing his hunger strike.



While the agitation Rohit launched reached its 24th day, the strike action began to protest Rohiths suicide has reached its eighth day.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will now have monthly review of execution of important schemes undertaken by various ministries.





During Wednesdays meeting with ministers, Modi took stock of implementation of Cabinet decisions and public schemes and stressed that timelines should be followed to ensure there are no delays in either seeking approval or clearing bureaucratic bottlenecks.



Government sources said discussions were held on Namami Gange which is national mission for cleaning Ganga.



Modi also sought to know from the agriculture and food and civil supplies ministries on progress made for revival of three fertiliser plants, setting up of an agriculture university in Bihar and soft loans to cash-starved sugar mills.



He reportedly instructed food and civil supplies ministry to plan ahead to avoid pulses crisis as was witnessed last year where Tur Dal prices soared to Rs 200 per kg.



Government sources said that the prime minister is keen to meet his colleagues in batches every month. The audit exercise will offer him leads to build perception on individual ministers performance ahead of Cabinet reshuffle which is expected soon after the Budget Session in late March.



Earlier in the day, Modi chaired his ninth interaction through PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation)  the multi-modal review platform.



Taking strong exception of complaints and grievances from people, related to the customs and excise sector, the prime minister asked for strict action against responsible officials, the PMO said in a release. He urged all secretaries whose departments have extensive public dealing, to set up a system for top-level monitoring of grievances immediately.



Among the significant projects reviewed were the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Jal Marg Vikas Project from Allahabad to Haldia. He also reviewed the progress of the Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana and implementation of the National Old Age Pension Scheme.



The cabinet secretary also made a presentation on the works of each of ministries like Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Civil Supplies, Water Resources and Fertilisers. The idea was that the five ministries should know the works done by each other.



The presentation on fFertiliser Ministry included reviving fertiliser plants, including the one in Gorakhpur. In the presentation on Agriculture Ministry, emphasis was laid on the prime minister's scheme for irrigation.
MLC M A Gopalaswamy said he would resign if the allegations against the Congress and him, made by MLA and JD(S) leader H D Revanna, were proved, on Wednesday.





Addressing reporters here, the MLC said, Revannas allegations that he won the MLC election due to money power were baseless.



Revanna should prove his allegations against me or else he should retire from politics. He should lodge a complaint and produce the documents before the Election Commission, if he is sure of the allegations, Gopalaswamy challenged.



After A Manju took charges as the District In-charge Minister, Revanna is losing his hold and popularity in the district. The JD(S) is afraid of Zilla and Taluk Panchayat elections and thus the leaders are making baseless allegations against the Congress and its leaders. During the MLC election, Revanna himself had distributed money in Alur to his party workers, he alleged.



Sugar factory



Gopalaswamy listed out various irregularities in the Chamundeshwari Sugar Factory. The factory, under private management, has failed to follow the norms laid out by the government. Though the factory was handed over to the company on lease when Kumaraswamy was chief minister, the factory has not paid the money as per the agreement till date, he said.



The authorities have not paid Rs 5 crore to the government as per the agreement. The factory needs no administrative council but, an administrative officer. The administrative council will favour only a section of the people. Even though there was a single tender, the sugar factory was handed over to the company. I will release the documents to prove the irregularities, soon, said Gopalaswamy.
These two convicts could not but feel forlorn. They were among 375 prisoners freed from various prisons across the State and among 114 released from the Hindalga jail on Tuesday.





While others of their ilk may have felt a sense of joy in their bossoms, having been given the opportunity to reunite with their families, it was as if life failed to blossom again for Ningappa Doddabhimappa Dalwai, a 60-year-old native of Morab in Navalgund (Dharwad district), and Suresh Arjappa Annacharti from Gadhinglaj in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. None of their kin was at the prison gates to receive them.



The Republic Day release only landed Dalwai and Annacharti at the Nirashrita Parihara Kendra (rehabilitation centre for the homeless) at Mache near here. The jail has no facility to house released convicts.



No family member visited them even while they were lodged in the prison.



To add to their misery, they did not know where to go from the jail. Both were convicted for murder and spent over a decade in jail.



While Dalwai spoke about the village he hailed from and his family members,

Annacharti could only give the date on which he had murdered his wife.



Officials at the Nirashrita Parihara Kendra said both the convicts may require psychiatric evaluation.



As of now, they have been provided accommodation on the basis of the letter from the prison authorities, but the Kendra does not have a provision to house convicts released.



Duo mentally disturbed

Prison Superintendent T P Sheesha said that both of them were mentally disturbed and required treatment.



Members of the prison advisory board said that they had recommended the

release of Dalwai and Annacharti so that they could be provided treatment.




The 11th international conference of Global Communication Association (GCA), on the theme Ombudsman: Media and Social Responsibility will be inaugurated by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah at Crawford Hall, here, on Thursday.





The University of Mysore (UoM), which is celebrating its centenary this year, is the academic partner of the two-day conference (www.gcaconference.com), being organised by the GCA. This is the sixth such conference being held in India.



Food and Civil Supplies Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao, Member of Parliament from Mysuru-Kodagu Prathap Simha, UoM Vice Chancellor K S Rangappa, Chairman of Singapore-based My Kingdom Holdings Venu G Somineni and Chairman of GCA Yahya R Kamalipour will participate.



Awards



A P Chowdappa memorial award for excellence in communication in six categories will be presented on Friday at a private hotel in the city. Former chief minister S M Krishna, Energy Minister D K Shivakumar, and former union minister Manish Tewari will be present.



At a time when there is a massive explosion of media, it is increasingly being looked upon as a powerful instrument of social change. On the flip side, there are also other powerful forces that will misuse media for vested interests. To enable the debate, the GCA has invited industry and academic experts from across the globe, said K S Rangappa, vice chancellor, University of Mysore, and 11th GCA conference president.



The conference will provide an opportunity for discussing topics concerning government and private organisation communication strategies. It aims to share the knowledge dealing with the ways and methods in which an NGO, for example, can use communication tools to gain substance and credibility.



The communication patterns between the government and the public and ways in which we can make it more effective and people friendly and identification of the target audience through proper communication can be achieved, says Yahya R Kamalipour.



In the two-day conference, there will be over 62 speakers, 12 keynotes addresses, 10 panel discussions, 24 paper presentations, seven awards with over 400 delegates participating from around the world.



The speakers will discuss different topics with an intrinsic aim to share information, promote culture, identify challenges, find solutions and exchange the most updated knowledge on various topics of public relations, media and communication, said Krishna B Mariyanka, conference curator and organising secretary.
A day after Presidents Rule was imposed in Arunachal Pradesh, Governor J P Rajkhowa took over the reigns of governance in the North-Eastern state.





The governor convened a meeting of top civil and police officials and reviewed the law and order situation. Laws must be enforced in letter and spirit, was what Rajkhowa asked top officials, including Chief Secretary Ramesh Negi.



The governor has stressed upon more security cover across capital Itanagar and adjoining areas. The governor has ordered proper security cover for all MLAs as per entitlements. There is no law and order threat as of now. Additional forces have reached, Negi told reporters.



Rajkhowa has also asked the chief secretary to issue a circular to all departments and offices to maintain transparency in decision making and execution of various works and take firm action against corruption.



The Centre appointed former Delhi Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal and retired IAS officer G S Patnaik as advisors to the governor. Seventeen additional companies of Central security forces have reached Itanagar, sources added.



AAPSU slams move



The powerful All Arunachal Pradesh Students Union (AAPSU) on Wednesday termed the Centres decision for invoking Presidents Rule in the state as hasty.



We cannot accept such a decision by the Centre in haste without verifying the facts and will oppose it tooth and nail, AAPSU president Kamta Lapung said in a statement.



AAPSU claimed that protest rallies in the state capital did not amount to deterioration in law and order situation which prompted the governor to recommend for promulgation of Article 356 (1) in the peaceful state.
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has switched over to the online mode for pre and post examination management system for Classes X to XII.





Ahead of the upcoming board examinations, it has launched a new web portal e-CBSE where schools can generate roll numbers of students for main examination and make corrections in the candidates particulars, upload students photos using the existing user IDs and passwords.



Schools can also upload internal subject assessment grades of Class XII students online with 3 internal subjects each.



Change of subject, however, is not allowed at this stage, a CBSE official told Deccan Herald. Schools will receive examination related material, including admit cards, pertaining to about 25 lakh Class X and class XII students through the e-CBSE portal from this year.



Apart from this being a time saver, it is also an environment friendly move. Uploading of data will reduce the use of paper, the official said.



About 17,000 schools affiliated to the CBSE have already joined the new system and remaining schools are in the process of becoming a part of it. A total of 17,165 schools are affiliated with the board, both in India and abroad.
A letter stating that a bomb had been planted in an Air Asia aircraft triggered panic among passengers at Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru (KIAB) here on Wednesday afternoon.





Only after a thorough screening did the airport security heave a sigh of relief, but the search delayed the flight by four hours.



Landing from Jaipur in the morning, the Air Asia flight, I5-1721, was scheduled to take off to Goa at 12.35 pm. But the KIABs ground staff cleaning the aircraft found the letter inside the plane. The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) was immediately alerted.



Passengers checking into the flight were frisked and their baggage thoroughly checked.



Bomb disposal and dog squads then took over, subjecting the aircraft to a detailed search that lasted over three hours. The threat was subsequently declared a hoax and the aircraft cleared. The flight took off for Goa at 4.31 pm, airport sources said.



A KIAB statement said the CISF and the State police were taking all precautionary measures to ensure the safety and security of all passengers. All other flight operations continue to be normal. Heightened security alert, which was implemented for Republic Day, continues till January 30 as directed by the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, informed a KIAB spokesperson.



An Air Asia release said the bomb threat letter was first spotted by the in-flight cabin crew after landing. The aircraft was taken to the isolation bay, checked thoroughly by the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad and nothing was found, the release said.



No case has been registered in the jurisdictional police station. Although a senior police official reportedly claimed it was a mock drill, Additional Commissioner of Police, West, Charan Reddy denied it.




A day after a Manipur policeman Thounaojam Herojit Singh made sensational revelation about a fake encounter leading to the killing of former militant, his family has lodged a missing complaint in Imphal.





On January 25, 33-year-old head constable of Manipur Police Thounaojam Herojit Singh, revealed to select group of media that the killing of Chungkham Sanjit Singh in July 23, 2009, was staged and he had shot the former militant at the order from his senior officer who then told him that the clearance had come from the chief ministers office. He also said that the then DGP was aware of it. Herojits interview was first published on January 26 in Imphal Free Press.



Herojit has alleged that the order to kill Sanjit was given to him by Akoijam Jhalajit Singh, the then Additional SP of Imphal West and presently the SP of Imphal West, at the spot of the crime itself, Imphal Free Press quoted Herojit. The constable has been suspended along with nine others after CBI took charge of the enquiry.



Meanwhile, the state government refrained to comment on the allegations made by the constable who was known as encounter specialist among his colleagues.



The accused police officer Akoijam Jhalajit Singh issued a press statement on Wednesday claiming that the allegations were baseless and concocted.



While a section of police sources claimed that Herojit is in New Delhi, his family members on January 25 last have lodged a missing complaint at local police station in Imphal.
India was ranked 76th on the latest international corruption index prepared by Transparency International, climbing nine notches from the previous 85th position.





Though there is an improvement in ranking, there is nothing much for delight as India scored only 38 points on a scale of 0-100, the same as in 2014. Also, the number of countries ranked in 2015 are 168 as against 174 in 2014.



India joins 113 other countries that scored less than 50. In 2013 and 2012, India was ranked at 94 with a score of 36, according to the report released on Wednesday.



As per the scoring system, the higher the score on a scale 0-100, lower is the corruption in the country.



The report noted that in India and Sri Lanka, a host of governments came to power on anti-corruption platforms last year. However, it claimed, in India and Sri Lanka, leaders are falling short of their bold promises.



It found fault with Bangladesh government for exacerbating corruption by clamping down on civil society. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, a failure to tackle corruption is feeding ongoing vicious conflicts, while Chinas prosecutorial approach isnt bringing sustainable remedy, it added.



Denmark, which scored 91, retained the top position as the least corrupt state in the world followed by Finland with a score of 90, Sweden 89, New Zealand 88 and the Netherlands and Norway at 87.



Ranked eighth, Singapore is the lone Asian country in the top 10 with a score of 85. North Korea and Somalia are the worst performers, scoring just 8 points each, while the United States stood at 16th position scoring 76. In the neighbourhood, Bhutan at rank 27 is the least corrupt and the only country ahead of India.
The Islamabad High Court dismissed a petition by the Pakistan government seeking permission to obtain voice samples of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks accused, an order that could have consequences on the Pathankot air base attack probe too.





The Pakistan governments prosecutors had filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court seeking permission to obtain voice samples of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, who was released on bail in April, and his six other incarcerated accomplices.



The voice samples could have been used to match with the recordings of the phone conversations between the 10 terrorists who carried out the November 26-28, 2008, terror attacks in Mumbai, and the LeT operatives, who coordinated the strikes from Pakistan.



Indias intelligence agencies had intercepted the conversations and New Delhi had sent the recordings to Islamabad, asking the latter to use it to nail the LeT operatives. The PTI reported from Islamabad that the high court on Monday dismissed the petition.



Officials in New Delhi told Deccan Herald that unless the voice samples are matched with the voices in the phone conversations intercepted by intelligence agencies, it would be difficult to prove that the attack had been coordinated by LeT operatives based in Pakistan.They are also worried over the implication of the high courts order on the prospects of bringing to justice the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) plotters behind the recent attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot.



Pakistan arrested several JeM men after India provided Islamabad recordings of the intercepts of the purported phone conversations between them and the terrorists who carried out the January 2-5 attack.



Though Pakistan came under international pressure after 26/11 attack and seven LeT plotters were arrested in early 2009, the trial before the Anti-Terrorism Court in Rawalpindi, however, has been going on at a snails pace with repeated adjournments, straining New Delhis complex relations with Islamabad.
The East division police have arrested a 21-year-old youth who used to extort money from women under the threat of uploading their morphed nude pictures on social networking sites.





According to police, the arrested has been identified as Ahmed Ali, 21, a resident of Chennai. He had completed diploma in Automobile Engineering and was working with an automobile servicing unit. He quit the job around six months ago and since then Ali was unemployed.



Three days ago, a victim Meghana (name changed) approached Jeevan Bima Nagar police with a complaint stating that she came in contact with Ali through Whatsapp Messenger service. Soon they became friends on Facebook also. After a few days, Ali started demanding money from Meghana under the threat of uploading her nude morphed photographs into social networking sites if she did not pay up.



Meghana did not take the threat seriously. However, a friend of her told her that someone had posted a nude photo with her (Meghanas) face on her Facebook page.



After realising it to be the handiwork of Ali, Meghana agreed to pay him Rs 20,000 for deleting the photograph. On Alis instructions, she credited the money to his bank account after which Ali deleted her photograph from the Facebook page. But, Ali again continued with his old trick and Meghana approached the police.



We started tracking Alis his mobile phone and traced him to Chennai, from where he was arrested. During interrogation, Ali revealed that he used to obtain contact numbers of girls from his common friends said a senior police officer, who was part of the investigating team.



He was using the nude pictures of women available on the Internet for creating morphed images, the officer added. Jeevan Bima nagar police have registered a case.
The roads leading to the Palace Grounds are getting asphalted and the potholes are being filled. These improvement works are in preparation for the global investors meet - Invest Karnataka - to be hosted at the iconic Palace Grounds next month.





Also, BBMP has deployed mechanical sweepers to clean the roads in the City, especially the ones leading to the Palace Grounds. They have identified 36 roads such as Race Course Road, Cubbon Road, Palace Road, Sankey Road, Kumara Krupa Road and Palace Guttalli Road for the clean-up act.



BBMP Commissioner G Kumar Naik told Deccan Herald on Wednesday that the Palike had two mechanical sweepers of its own and two had been hired from private contractors. As per the governments direction, the Palike is using them on 36 prime roads ahead of the meet.



Lakshman, chairperson of the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB), said that using such sweepers was a good idea as around 20 per cent of pollution in the City was due to dust. Through this, the government wants to portray the city as clean and green.



However, people have started questioning as to why these vehicles are not used frequently as Bengaluru has, of late, earned the sobriquet of asthma capital. They demand that these vehicles should be used regularly on prime roads, especially where works are on and dust pollution is high.



Use them often



I am surprised to learn that the government has dust-cleaning vehicles. They should be a part of every road construction, especially where Tender SURE work is on. They should run regularly on the City roads, said Lakshmi K, a commuter.Meghana R, a student, said that the government was bothered only about its image and not about peoples health.



If the government is concerned, such vehicles will be used more often. These vehicles are deployed only before asphalting work, she said. Naik said that these vehicles will be used for other prime roads in the City too in the days to come.

More vehicles



The BBMP was planning to buy more of these vehicles to use them on major arterial and sub-arterial roads.
In the wake of the increasing pollution levels in the City, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, has written to the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB), seeking details of pollution levels and measures taken to contain it.





The letter, dated January 22, was received by KSPCB on January 25. The letter has been sent in compliance with the National Green Tribunal order dated January 6.



The letter, a copy of which is with Deccan Herald, states that the situation in major cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Patna, Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur, Varanasi, Pune, Nagpur, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar is being looked into and the governments of Gujarat, Bihar, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Jharkhand have been asked to file a comprehensive affidavit, stating steps taken for prevention and control of air pollution.



Dust emissions



Ambient air quality samples must be taken and analysis reports have to be submitted before the tribunal. They shall also state the steps they are taking for controlling and preventing air pollution resulting from dust emissions because of construction and other activities, emission from burning of municipal solid waste and other waste, including burning of agricultural residue, and vehicular pollution.

The pollution control board of the respective state, in consultation with the Central Pollution Control Board, shall prepare a report and analyse the ambient air quality samples forthwith in the cities concerned, the letter states.



The ministry has also sought the compilation of the analysis of ambient air quality data along with meteorological parameters (temperature, wind speed, wind direction and mixing height) of last five years (2011-15) pertaining to these cities.



It has also sought a comprehensive report with five years raw data (including data of past four months September-December 2015) to the Central Pollution Control Board by January 28.



The state boards have to submit the proposed action plan for the respective cities for the next five years to mitigate air pollution.



KSPCB member secretary S Shanthappa told Deccan Herald that they have received the letter and the work on collecting, compiling and analysing data has already started. It will be sent to the ministry within the stipulated time.
Former Marine Paul A. Hernandez was walking point on a search and destroy mission in 1969 near Da Nang, South Vietnam, when he was seriously injured in an ambush.

Although there is no doubt the shrapnel that scarred the Denver Marines knee entered his body during a fierce firefight with the Viet Cong, the Navy refused Hernandez the Purple Heart because he couldnt prove the injury wasnt caused by friendly fire.

But a lawsuit Hernandez filed Thursday in U.S. District Court says he deserves the medal because Congress enacted a law that said soldiers injured during friendly fire incidents also are entitled to be awarded a Purple Heart.

His quest for a Purple Heart began in 2006, but has been stalled repeatedly, according to the lawsuit filed by Broomfield attorneys Richard Borchers and Hilary Holland.

After getting referred back and forth from one Navy office to another over the course of a decade, Hernandez attorney received a final letter on Dec. 7.

We have repeatedly requested his service record and have been unsuccessful in obtaining the requested documents. As a result, we are unable to process his case due to lack of information and will be administratively closing his case, the letter said.

The civil lawsuit asks a federal judge to intervene by ordering the Navy to fulfill his request for a Purple Heart. He is also asking for attorneys fees.

Defendants have failed to follow the regulations that have been promulgated by the Department of the Navy, the lawsuit says.

Following in the footsteps of his father who had been a Marine, Hernandez joined the Marine Corps on Nov. 15, 1968, and was trained at Treasure Island at San Francisco. The rifleman was assigned to the First Battalion 26th Marines 9th MAB, Delta Company outside of Da Nang.

On Oct. 14, 1969, he was leading a patrol on a search and destroy mission when another Marine in the unit saw movement in the tall grass and immediately fired an M-79 grenade launcher.

A declassified document attached to the lawsuit says that 26 Marines were ambushed by six VC, or Viet Cong soldiers in which one of the enemy soldiers was killed and a second was injured. Four VC were seen running away from a hooch.

Hernandez was injured in the legs with shrapnel, taken to various hospitals in South Vietnam, Japan and the United States.

His military records describe his injury. During his service, Hernandez was awarded two Bronze Stars, among other awards.

His 2006 request for a Purple Heart was denied in April of 2007 on the basis that records indicate that you sustained non-hostile injuries while serving in the Republic of Vietnam.

He hired an attorney in 2012 and obtained affidavits from unit members Joseph Fisher and Alan Knight about the firefight.

After convalescing from the wound, Hernandez was released from active military duty on Nov. 13, 1970.

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, kmitchell@denverpost.com or @kirkmitchell or denverpost.com/coldcases
The prime minister of Vietnam has given the go-ahead for a development project aimed at expanding 3G/4G broadband across the country by 2020.

The programme has the goal of extending broadband to 95% of the countrys inhabited areas, as well as connecting fixed-line to 40% of houses in the same timeframe. In addition, it targets a download speed of 25Mb/s to at least 60% of subscribers.

Vietnams government is attempting to offer the broadband service through 100% of the countrys public internet access points, half of which can deliver a minimum 50Mb/s download speed. Wireless access has more modest speed targets  4Mb/s for urban and 2Mb/s for rural areas.

The initiative is an attempt to create a welcoming environment for investment in broadband infrastructure, as well as simplifying the process of obtaining a telecoms licence. The network will not treat state companies any differently to private firms in an attempt to foster fair competition.

Local firms will be involved in equipment manufacture and assembly in order to lower costs and reduce reliance on imports.
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by Kathleen Gilbert BEIJING, September 7, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com)  Escaped Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is leading international opponents of forced abortion in calling upon the worlds largest company to end compliance with the Chinas one-child policy. Family planning police have targeted employees (569)

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Church Militant, we need to band together to protect our religious liberties and win the culture war!
Before a magazine or a newspaper comes into being, it goes through various painstaking processes. Reporters are deployed, articles are written, images are curated, font sizes are decided, complex software is used to create visually appealing covers and finally content is printed and distributed for you to enjoy. But, things have changed. Haven't they?



While many print publictations still follow this cumbersome process just to get news to the few who still read physical copies, the real content consumption no longer happens at the publisher's end. It happens in places like Facebook or Twitter or Google or Apple or Yahoo, or the slew of apps that promise to keep us updated and connected every second of our lives.



The new newsmakers

Tech companies are known to adopt creative marketing strategies and right now, the trend is clearly tilting towards monetising user content. In the recent past, we have seen most major tech companies enter the news and media arena, pushing out publishers to retain as many of us as they can, on their own platforms.



Apple made its News app available with the rollout of iOS 9. "You no longer need to move from app to app to stay informed," says the page advertising the Apple News app on the company's website. The app presents users with contetnt from 70+ publishers including - The New York Times, New Yorker, Quartz, Vanity Fair and more. Apple News is also expected to adopt a subscription based model soon, allowing publishers to charge for their content.



Facebook introduced a standalone news app called 'Notify' in November. Notify includes content from the likes of CNN, Buzzfeed and other popular media publications. So whether youre into sports, celebrities, news, movies, music or shopping, Notify sends you notifications from selected stations across a variety of categories.



Google initiated the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) platform to load content faster by providing programming infrastructure to publishers. The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages. Nearly 30 global publishers signed up for the AMP initiative



Twitter launched the Moments service to provide users with curated Tweets from top stories. There is also an option of integrating the Periscope app, which allows live-streaming and viewing of content. The company is also planning to go beyond its 140 character limit, which could then be another viable place to offer news content.



Microsoft has also been in the news distribution market for a while and has just launched a new iOS news app called News Pro, which aims at providing users with news stories related to their work.



Yahoo has been a news player for a long time now and runs apps such as the Yahoo News Digest, to offer political, entertainmnet, tech and other such stories



Clearly, competition is heating up in the content space but the battle is ensuing not between publishers and publications, but between tech companies vying for our attention. It's also no surprise that the most popular interface will win this battle. The only question is - which one?



So, what does this mean for the content of the future?



It is a well known fact that the internet and the avenues of its access are only going to expand in the future. For tech companies to build content, it's as simple as a handshake with content publishers and then building some code. Every major tech company that we engage with today is feeding us with our daily dose of information and admit it or not, we are addicted. What would Facebook be without a customised news feed and autoplay videos? What would Twitter be if media companies decided to delist from the platform and start their own? Obviously, the popularity of these platforms will ensure such a situation never occurs, but it makes for a grave realisaton - Not only the data generated by us but also the data consumed by us, is (and will be in the future) largely controlled by the technology industry.

Did You Know: Amazon and Netflix are this year's biggest buyers of films and documentaries showcased at the Sundance film festival .

Interestingly enough, if reading content curated by tech companies is a disturbing fact, what's more worrying is the fact that all these tech companies are also pushing to provide internet services. Facebook has Free Basics, Google has its Loon project, Microsoft is partnering with local governments to provide free WiFi hotspots. So now, not only are tech companies our content providers but they will soon be responsible for providing us with internet access as well. Hence, it is absolutely neccessary for us as consumers to make an informed choice when relying on tech platforms for news consumption. But, is the choice really ours to make?
Lava has announced the launch of the V5, a 4G-enabled smartphone with an emphasis on the rear camera. Kicking things off with the specifications of the smartphone, it has a 5.5-inch HD IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by a 64-bit MediaTek quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz and 3GB of RAM along with 16GB of onboard storage that can be expanded to an additional 32GB via a microSD card. The device runs Android Lollipop v5.1 skinned with Lava's Star OS 2.0. Lava has guaranteed that it will be upgraded to Android Marshmallow v6.0 later. It is equipped with a 3000mAh battery and comes with support for CAT4 4G LTE as well as VoLTE.

The Lava V5 4G LTE has a 13MP ISOCELL camera located at the back of the device. The camera features phase detection autofocus and a 5 layer Largan lens. The company claims that the devices camera has an autofocus time of 0.18 seconds and is three times faster than normal smartphone cameras. On the front is an 8MP camera with an 84-degree wide-angle lens and LED flash. The device also comes with Lavas MagicPix software that offers features like Beauty-fi, Pic Focus, Wide selfie, Night pro, GIF Maker, Intelligent Selfie, and Multi-Angle view.

Now that we have the specifications of the Lava V5 out of the way, lets move to the build and design of the smartphone. It has the standard candy bar form factor that we have seen on a plethora of other devices. On the right side, the smartphone has the power button and the volume rocker and the top and bottom of the device (when held in portrait mode) have the headphones jack and the micro-USB port respectively. The rear panel is removable, below which rest the two SIM card slots and the micro-SD card slot. It's nice to see that there is no hybrid slot here. Below the display you have the standard back, home and menu buttons. The menu button can be long pressed to reveal the multitasking window. There are better designs that this price range.

Coming to the performance, there was little we could judge since there was no Internet connectivity and we played with the device for barely 20 minutes. But in the time we spent with it, the phone felt fairly smooth and responsive. Star OS 2.0 has a unique look to it and we cant wait to check out how well it is optimised for the smartphone. Coming to the camera, we clicked a few pictures at the event and it seemed responsive but we would like to reserve our final judgment for our review of the Lava V5. At its price point, the smartphone also boasts 4G connectivity, which is a plus point. The device also has regional language keyboards preloaded on the smartphone, which is a nice touch too.

Considering the price point of the Lava V5, it is up against some tough competition in the form of the Lenovo K4 Note, Asus Zenfone 2, Moto G Turbo and the Meizu M2 Note, all of which are great performers considering the price point. Is a good camera and 4G capabilities enough to put the Lava V5 on the map? Stay tuned for our review to find out.

Watch Lava V5 First Impressions Video
Shares in Aberdeen Asset Management were volatile after the emerging markets-focused fund manager continued to endure outflows in the last three months of 2015, but some analysts were seeing the positives.

Total assets under management of 290.6m at 31 December were up 2.4% in the last three months thanks to acquisitions that completed in the quarter, as the 11th consecutive quarter of net outflows saw 9.1bn net exiting the company but counterbalanced by a combination of positive investment performance and positive forex movements.

The outflows were less than those feared by the market, which together with the strong investment performance and unexpected AUM rise saw the shares initially leading the FTSE risers.

This might have been helped by upgrades to 'buy' for Aberdeen and fellow EM-focused asset manager Ashmore from broker Numis in a note entitled 'Catching a falling knife - no pain no gain'.

"With the EM newsflow likely to remain weak for some time, we know this probably won't be the absolute bottom, however we also know that we won't be able to time that perfectly. We do still believe that EM assets will eventually recover and that with hindsight buying on the valuations available today will prove decent value," analyst David McCann said.

Shore Capital warned the rapid decline in the revenue base could start to exert a more damaging impact on profitability as operational gearing works in reverse and requires more cost savings.

"Therefore our initial inclination is to stick with the 'sell' stance, but remain mindful of the fact that if Aberdeen can somehow arrest the gross outflows, then there should be more limited downside below 200p."

Likewise, noting the stock's high sensitivity to EM and Asia sentiment, Peel Hunt said it remained positive on the potential for an improvement in sentiment.

The update was not as bad as expected, RBC Capital Markets agreed, though it reflected that the market rout so far in 2016 should temper any enthusiasm for an inflection in the companys flows.

"In our opinion, Aberdeen remains a company in a stressed position, with net flows negative and investment performance behind key benchmarks. We believe that any enthusiasm that greets todays statement should be short-lived."

This was correct, as shares moved into the negative around noon, as a later update from Credit Suisse saw the broker keep its 'neutral' rating but lower its EPS estimates by 15%, 20% and 20% for the current and next two years.

Chiefly, that was due to the effect that weaker than expected market levels were likely to have on flows, the Swiss broker said, with its net fund outflows estimate for 2016 hiked to 26.0bn from 15.9bn.
Sages first quarter management statement contained both positives and negatives and with the stock trading at a slight premium to its sector Panmure Gordon reiterated its recommendation to 'hold'.

On the upside, the business software provider reiterated its fiscal year guidance and there was an up-tick in organic revenue and net debt, analyst George OConnor said in a research note sent to clients.

Furthermore, the company was confident on the outlook for fiscal year 2016, projecting an increase of at least 6% in organic revenue and operating margins of 27%, he said.

However, the company made no comment on the US, where there had been at least one high-profile departure.

Also on the negative side of the ledger, the outfit was focused on customer acquistion with more subscribers typically coming in at the lower end of the low value products range, as it focused on customer acquisition at the entry level, OConnor explained.

It had begun a price war in that segment, which entailed the risk that customers would flip-flop between competing offers, OConnor added.

Historically, the company had a poor record in terms of customer renewals as it pursued M&A and then "milked" the customer base of the companies it acquired, the analyst said.

Nevertheless, OConnor stood by his target price on the shares of 594p.
Mitsubishi Electric (Melco) and Hitachi have been hit with a 137.8m (135m) penalty by the European Union's executive arm for running a cartel to fix prices for alternators and starters.

Three firms ran the cartel, Melco, Hitachi and Denso, but Denso was not fined as it blew the whistle on the anti-competitive activity.

The European Commission said the three companies coordinated prices and allocated customers or projects for more than five years.

"Although contacts associated with forming and running the cartel took place outside the European Economic Area (EEA), the cartel affected European customers as alternators and starters were also sold directly to car manufacturers in the EEA," the EC said.

Antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager said: "Breaking cartels remains a top priority for the Commission, in particular when they affect important consumer goods, such as cars.

"Today's decision sanctions three car part producers whose collusion affected component costs for a number of car manufacturers selling cars in Europe, and ultimately European consumers buying them. If European consumers are affected by a cartel, the Commission will investigate it even if the cartel meetings took place outside Europe."

The EC's investigation revealed that between September 2004 and February 2010 the companies met at each other's offices and in restaurants and were in contact over the phone on a regular basis, in order to limit competition between them.

The trio agreed their responses to certain calls for tenders issued by car manufacturers, to determine what price they would tender and who should win the specific business.

They also shared out certain vehicle manufacturers and projects between themselves in terms of which of the three would supply alternators and starters, as well as exchanging commercially sensitive information such as price elements and market strategies.
Chinese authorities on Wednesday warned billionaire investor George Soros not to bet against the countrys currency, the renminbi.

In an unusual step, in a front page opinion article the Peoples Daily - the Communist Partys mouthpiece - said "Soross war on the renminbi and the Hong Kong dollar cannot possibly succeed - about this there can be no doubt," the Financial Times reported.

The article was penned by a researcher from the Chinese commerce ministry and entitled "Declaring war on Chinas currency? Ha ha."

In remarks to Bloomberg TV in the previous week, Soros - who had become famous for successfully speculating against the UK pound in 1992 - said China lay at the heart of the drop in global stocks this year.

Soros also said that in the short-term the slowdown in Chinas economy was a greater threat to its neighbours economies than to its own, due to the deflationary impact of falling commodity prices.

"Reckless speculations and vicious shorting will face higher trading costs and possibly severe legal consequences," the Peoples Daily threatened.

Asias largest economy had lost $700bn of international reserves over the last 18 months to $3.3trn, as investors reacted to the end of the 'one way bet on a stronger renminbi after nearly a decade and expectations increased for policy tightening in the US.
The European Commission and Italian authorities reached a deal on Wednesday which it is hoped will help restore the flow of credit to the countrys businesses.

Under the terms of the agreement, Italian lenders will be allowed to offload up to 337bn in non-performing loans - 17.5% of Italian banks total loans) to a special purpose vehicle which in turn will securitise them - including special incentives - and sell them.

Critically, the Commission decided that the deal - the technical details of which still need to be thrashed out - do not constitute state aid under the blocs competition rules. That is because the state guarantees which the new securitised loans will carry will be extended at market prices.

The guarantees will also only be offered on those securities which have not previously enjoyed an investment grade rating.

Banks participating in the scheme should thus be able to avoid having to bail-in their creditors and uninsured depositors, RBS explained in a research note sent to clients.

"Shifting NPLs (337bn in total, or 17.5% of total loans) is important for relieving banks of unproductive capital and allowing them to increase lending to productive businesses.

"This is especially important for the Italian economy because over 95% of Italian firms are micro-companies (<10 employees), reliant on bank lending for credit," RBS said.

Nevertheless, the broker retained a cautious stance on the sector.

"Italy and the EC reach a deal on bad bank, but NPL sales with state guarantees are not a game-changer for Italian banks, in our view. Stay long [on credit of] only the strongest banks: Intesa, UBI, Mediobanca. Avoid everything else," the broker added.

"Italys banking system needs to become leaner and more efficient. To get there, more cost reduction and consolidation will be needed. While some reform efforts have been made results have been slow to materialise."
Greece was accused of "seriously neglecting its obligations" when it came to border controls on Wednesday, in a draft report from the European Commission.

The report said Greece could face new border controls with other European states if it didn't fix "serious deficiencies" in the way it managed the passport-free Schengen area's international borders.

Greece failed to register, check and fingerprint migrants arriving in November, said the report which - if approved - would give Greece three months to improve, or face possible border controls with its neighbouring European partners.

At a press conference in Brussels, European Commission vice president Valdis Dombrovkis said there were "serious deficiencies in the carrying out of external border controls, that must be overcome and dealt with by the Greek authorities."

The commission's migration and home affairs commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos did say that Greece had begun efforts to rectify and comply with the Schengen rules since the report was researched in November.

The report needed the approval of the Schengen members before the three months compliance deadline could be imposed.

It was the latest signal from Europe leaders that the passport-free Schengen zone was at risk amid the current migrant crisis. Nearly 900,000 refugees and migrants arrived in Greece last year alone.

Since the start of January, more than 40,000 migrants have arrived in the Greek islands - most landing at Chios, Lesbos and Samos.

Once processed, most were reported to have travelled through Europe to countries such as Germany and Sweden. Several European states had already put in place border controls in a bid to stem the flow, including Hungary and Austria.
Saudi Arabia approached the Russian Federation about possible oil output cuts within the framework of the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries, Transneft chief Nikolai Tokarev said on Wednesday, according to a report from TASS.

"Saudi Arabia came forward with the initiative to have a discussion that would include the members of OPEC," Tokarev said following a meeting between oil company executives and the Ministry of Energy.

"In particular, we talked about oil prices, the measures everyone should take, what is going to change the situation for the better, including the negotiations in the framework of OPEC in general and bilateral options as well. The initiative came from Saudi Arabia, they are the main negotiators."

According to Interfax, Tokarev also said Russia would participate at an OPEC summit which might be held in February.

Alexander Korsik, the boss of Russian intergrated oil company Bashneft, was also cited as saying Russian oil output in 2016 would be level with the previous year.

As of 17:41GMT traders had pushed front month Brent crude oil futures 4.6% to $33.33 per barrel on the ICE after catching wind of the news, alongside gains of 3.76% for West Texas Intermediate crude futures.

However, earlier in the day senior Kremlin officials had told Reuters the government was not discussing cooperation with OPEC.
Economists at Berenberg see an increased likelihood of a British exit from the European Union, or 'Brexit', after a shift in public opinion polls towards support for the "leave" campaign, dragging the pound to long-term lows.

According to reports earlier in the week the UK will go to the polls on 23 June to vote in a referendum on continuing membership of the European Union.

The German bank upped its risk of a Brexit to 35% from 30%, saying its monitoring of newsflow had shown a fivefold increase in "Brexit news" since the start of the year, with events in Cologne and Paris adding to the heavy flow of news on the EU migrant crisis.

Wednesday saw a prime example, with a new hoo-ha erupting around the unsympathetic reference from Prime Minister David Cameron to refugees living in the Calais camps as "a bunch of migrants".

Berenberg's senior UK economist Kallum Pickering said: "The risk that the EU referendum becomes a vote on immigration rather than about membership of an economic and political union is a significant threat".

He noted that sterling pricing was beginning to reflect heightened risk, with the pound weakening by over 6% in the last month.

While Pickering is more confident the UK will vote to remain in the EU, with Cameron likely to secure agreement to his concessions and gain the support of the British public, he said if risks remain elevated or even increase leading up to the vote, "heightened uncertainty is likely to cause a modest disruption to economic and financial market activity until after the referendum has passed".

UK business interests are generally supportive of the UK remaining in the EU, with economists having warned that a Brexit would prove harmful for the economy.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney on Tuesday said that Brexit fears could pose a current account deficit risk, part of the rate-setting committee's reasoning behind delaying an eventual rate hike.

Credit Suisse earlier in the week said a Brexit could see a further sharp drop in the pound and lead to an "immediate and simultaneous economic and financial shock for the UK", amid a toxic mix of depressed confidence, tightening financial conditions and falling real incomes.

Not only that, but it would be likely to reignite and strengthen Scotland's push for independence, ratings agency Fitch has said.
Looking for great things to do this weekend? Here are 10-plus

events
Tokyo is the capital of contrasts. On one hand, its a mesmerising metropolis, a manic assult on the senses, a melange of anime, cosplay, neon lights, Lolita girls and more raw fish than you could eat in a lifetime.

On the other hand, its a city deeply steeped in tradition. In the shadows of Tokyos glittering skyscrapers and mammoth screens are meandering alleys, microscopic shanty bars and ancient temples wreathed in incense.

This is the city other cities dream of being. A city turned up to 11. A city straight out of Blade Runner or The Fifth Element  eccentric, electric, bewildering, beguiling. Tokyo pushes the boundaries of whats possible in urban living, simultaneously stretching towards the future and anchored firmly in the past.

Its not a place you can visit once. Japans sprawling capital feels like multiple cities stuck together, each with its own architecture and atmosphere. You could spend a weekend in every neighbourhood and still not see it all.

But lets say a weekend is all you have. To attempt to experience everything Tokyo has to offer in 48 hours is a fools errand, but thoughtful planning can give you an exhilarating overview. Decide ahead of time what kind of trip you want and use the DMarge guide to Tokyo to determine the must-dos, must-sees and must-eats. Youll be planning your next visit before the first has even finished.

For The First-Timer

The first thing you notice about Tokyo is its size. For a first-time visitor, the immensity of the city is both terrifying and exhilarating. You could while away lifetimes exploring the secrets of its cramped corners and antiquated alleyways, searching for the perfect ramen spot or the locals bar thats untouched by tourists.

But seeing as this is your first time in Tokyo  and you probably feel like a very small fish in a very big, very bright ocean  you probably want to cross the classics off your to-do list. The Tokyo Skytree and Tokyo Tower are the two tallest structures in the country, as well as two of its most recognizable symbols. For a slightly less trafficked view, visiting the free observation decks of the imposing Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.

For a glimpse of Tokyo in its bustling, modern incarnation, a scramble across the famous Shibuya Crossing cant be missed. Stop in at the Starbucks overlooking the intersection for a prime view of the action below. At the other end of the spectrum is Tokyos historic side, which is magnificently illustrated in the Imperial Palace (tours are conducted by reservation only) and the idyllic Meiji Shrine.

For The Foodie

Japan is a foodies paradise. Gourmands dont come here for 12-page menus that inexplicably include include cuisine from every continent. Japanese restaurants tend to do one thing  and because they concentrate all of their efforts on it, they do it exceedingly well. Theres a reason Tokyo is home to more Michelin stars than any other city in the world.

Japans quintessential dishes include sushi, ramen, tempura, soba, shabu-shabu, okonomiyaki, tonkatsu, yakitori, gyoza, takoyaki and kaiseki  the countrys haute cuisine. Try Ichiran for ramen and the memorable experience of ordering from a machine, then eating in a private stall. Gyoza enthusiasts love Gyoza Lou, while takoyaki addicts swear by Gindacos perfectly friend octopus balls. For sushi, theres nothing fresher than the inimitable Tsukiji fish market.

Tokyos best eats arent all found in restaurants. Head to the basement of the Isetan department store for a foodie fantasyland that will leave no tastebud untickled. For dessert, try one of Tokyos bountiful bakeries. Kimuraya, located in Ginza, is the birthplace of traditional Japanese sweet roll anpan. Dont overlook the convenience stores  the fare found in Lawson or 7-Eleven blows other countrys convenience stores out of the water.

For The Fashion Plate

From crazy clothing to cutting-edge electronics, Tokyo sets trends for the rest of the country  and perhaps the rest of the world. The shopping is prolific and feverish. While some neighborhoods cater to the eleganant and refined, others embrace the bizarre, the trendy and the teenage. Like Japan itself, shopping in Tokyo will both delight and confuse.

Harajuku is home to some of the citys most iconic shopping. Walk down Takeshita Dori for a blinding snapshot of Tokyos youth culture. Its bright, brash and unapologetically in-your-face  though you may not be tempted to buy, the spectacle alone makes it worth a visit. Stop in at RRL & Co afterwards for a mindblowing selection of dapper menswear from across the ages.

South of Takeshita Dori is Omotesando, a tree-lined avenue full of brand name shops thats sometimes referred to as Tokyos Champs-Elysees. For shopping at its most glamorous, make your way to Ginza. The prestigious district is dominated by luxury department stores and high-end boutiques. Quirkier purchases can be found in Akihabara, the cultural hub of Tokyos flourishing nerd culture.

For The Culture Vulture

Arriving in Tokyo can feel like landing on another planet. Its easy to be overwhelmed by the complete brainblast of culture shock that lurks outside your hotel door. If youre not ready to dive into maid cafes, love hotels and crowded izakayas, there are more high-brow pleasures to be had.

The Tokyo National Museum is a vast complex housing the worlds largest collection of Japanese art. Amongst its treasures are ancient pottery, Buddhist sculptures, samurai swords, kimonos and colourful woodblock prints. A more modern museum experience awaits at the Ghibli Museum, a spectacular tribute to the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.

For an up-close-and-personal peek at some of Japans oldest traidtions, take in a traditional kabuki performance at Kabuki-za. Visitors can also partake in the time-honoured ritual of a tea ceremony. A variety of options are available, often in upscale hotels or picturesque public parks.

For The Japanophile

We couldnt end a guide to Tokyo without acknowledging  and embracing  the citys strange side. Tokyo does weird like nobody else. The Japanese capital flies its freak flag proudly, and most would agree they wouldnt want it any other way.

On the family-friendly side of things are the karaoke spots and the animal cafes, where visitors can spend time with cats, rabbits, goats, dogs and even owls. Take a trip to Yoyogi Park on the weekend and you may encounter the weekly gathering of Tokyos kooky dancing Rockabilly gang.

Golden Gai, the seedy Shinjuku neighbourhood famous for its crooked alleys of dingy drinking establishments, is no longer Tokyos most authentic nightlife option, but its still a one-of-a-kind experience. The maid cafes and host bars are also tourist havens more than locals joints, but still offer an experience thats distinctly Tokyo.

Want to get weirder? Theres Ms, the seven-floor sex goods shop near Akihabara Station thats guaranteed to destroy whatever innocence you have left. But for the weirdest of the weird, youll have to go underground. Word on the street is theres a maid cafe dedicated specifically to drinking breast milk  directly from the source  but the only way to find places that subversive is to be invited by a regular.

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Finally, round out your visit with a trip to the Robot Restaurant . Skip the terrible food and take in the show  an extraordinary, and completely inexplicable, cataclysm of flashing lights, mock battles, glowsticks, scantily clad women, taiko drums, techno music, dinosaurs, samurais and, of course, enormous robots. Its over-the-top Tokyo at its finest, a spectacle that cant be explained in words as well as it can in letters: WTF.
We will wait until the funeral is gone, and then we will walk up and down, and then peacefully disperse, Rebecca Quinn, representative of the families evicted from Woodland Park halting site, told those who had gathered for a peaceful demonstration on Friday last.

The county council had already gone. Well, the doors of the County Hall were locked and wooden blocks placed between the handles in case anyone tried to get in.

The support for the protest came from Dundalk and from all over the county, from Meath and from Dublin and elsewhere.

Michael McDonagh of the Meath Traveller Workshop said it is disgraceful that Louth County Council would evict these families.

To use the Carrickmines situation is disgraceful, he said. I am a proud Dundalk man, but Im ashamed when I see this and Im asking the people of Dundalk to support this stand.

He said Louth County Council should have spent the money it cost to evict the residents, on works that would develope the Woodland site.

Green Party councillor Mark Dearey spoke of his high regard for Martin McDonagh and the need to resolve this issue

This is a rights issue, he said. The only way to get beyond the impasse is through ongoing dialogue.

Rebecca Quinn said a meeting is planned to take place with Oireachtas members at the Dail this Wednesday.

One of the main issues with Traveller groups is their concern that fire audits will now be used to evict Travellers from sites.

The council have said the evictions were on health and safety grounds, following a fire-safety audit of the site last October.

This was carried out after the fire tragedy at an unofficial Traveller site at Carrickmines in Dublin when 10 people lost their lives in a fire.

After the eviction which began on Friday week last, 15 January, families with very young children were provided with B&B accommodation. But 15 families moved to another illegal site.

down the road to a disused carpark at the Dundalk retail park, alongside the Inner Relief Road, where there is no electricity, running water or toilets.

The families said they were told by the gardai to leave this site within 24 hours.

Louth County Council said discussions are ongoing between Louth County Council and Traveller representatives.

The council met with representatives from the Travelling Community concerned with Woodlands Park, Rebecca Quinn and Eleanor Kelly.

The agreement reached between Louth County Council and the Traveller representatives on Friday 15 January remains in place, and is the central focus of the work of Louth County Council in respect of Traveller accommodation.

A number of short-term solutions were discussed and agreed and the council is committed to continue working with the representatives of Woodlands Park towards a longer term solution, the council statement said.
A Dundalk woman is organising a fundraising dinner to help raise money for her brother's heart transplant.

Jaki McCarrick was to raise money for her brother Roger (49), who is to undergo a life saving heart transplant in the US.

Roger is a priority case in Stanford hospital California - All funds raised at this event will go towards Roger's post hospitalisation care.

The operation will cost a staggering $1million dollars - which is covered by Roger's health insurance.

However it does not cover his aftercare and he is hoping to raise an extra $50,000 to cover the cost of his aftercare.

Jaki - herself a successful playright and poet - told the Democrat: Roger has always had a fantastic approach to his health problems.

Hes a positive person, very similar to my mum. He's overcome issues with his heart in the past and come through that and now hes just focused on getting better.

Born and raised in London, Roger was diagnosed with transposition of the great arteries (TGA). a life threatening illness which mean blood is not pumped away from his lungs efficiently. He underwent operation as a child and later as an adult in Boston.

He moved to Dundalk with his parents when he was eight, with Jaki and two other sisters.

Jaki is hosting the fundraising dinner this Friday January 29th at Riva at 7pm.

You can book a table for 60 by visiting Riva website and for more information you can visit #IHeartRogerMcCarrick on Facebook.
Austin Duffy is set to release his debut novel 'This Living and Immortal Thing', through Granta Books on February 2nd. Austin grew up in Muirhevna, Dublin Road, Dundalk where his family still reside.

He studied medicine in Trinity College, Dublin. After his graduation in 1988, he set off to work in the field in Australia and New Zealand. He moved to the USA in 2006, pursuing a fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, New York. He enrolled at The Writer's Studio in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

He now lives with his family in Washington DC where he practices as an Oncologist at the National Cancer Institute. His areas of expertise are immunotherapy, pancreatic cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, immune check-point inhibitors, metastatic colorectal cancer. Austin continuously carries out scientific research on myeloid-derived suppressor cells in human cancer.

In 2011, Austin was awarded RTEs 'Francis MacManus Award' for his short story Orca. His story was chosen from 810 entries, narrowed down to a shortlist of 25. Leading Irish authors Alan Titley, Molly McCloskey and John MacKenna chose 'Orca' as the winner. Austin was presented with a cheque of 3,000 . 'Orca' tells the story of the emotive bond between a doctor and a child, terminally ill with cancer. This is a subject which is obviously very close to Austin's heart.

This Living and Immortal Thing' is set in a New York cancer hospital where a disillusioned and alienated Irish Oncologist questions death, life and love. Whilst searching for a scientific breakthrough in the lab of a New York hospital, he struggles with his failing marriage and his growing alienation within the city. He finds comfort in the measurable work of tending for the laboratory mice's health. As he starts a new treatment on his mice, he meets a beautiful but elusive Russian translator at the hospital, just as his estranged wife begins to call, his neighbours act strangely towards him and his supervisor pressures him into displaying visible professionalism. He also has a never-ending feeling of being called back home to his family in Ireland.

Ive always been very interested in the biology of cancer and the paradox that surrounds it, Austin told the Dundalk Democrat.

Cancer arises from a random genetic mutation through our DNA, which is also how evolution occurred, so its almost like cancer is the flip-side of evolution. You dont get one without the other. I was always struck by that paradox, which is hard to get your head around but is striking in its own way as well. That was one of the fundamental things I wanted to get across in the book.

Cancer has affected many families across Ireland, it made the world-news a fortnight ago, with the tragic passings of David Bowie and Alan Rickman.

Recent research, however, has discovered that there are several holes in a faulty p53 protein. Scientists believe that by filling these holes with molecular protein, this could potentially 'beat cancer'.

Javier Marias, Denis Johnson, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Philip Roth and Jenny Erpenbeck are the authors that, Austin states, inspired Austin to become one himself. Fellow author William Boyd, (James Bond: Solo) described 'This Living and Immortal Thing' as A tremendous, strange and beguiling novel that has a bearing on all our lives. Droll, disturbing and surreptitiously profound.

The novel is written beautifully, delving deep into every scientific detail, keeping the reader enthralled.

This Living and Immortal Thing can be purchased through Amazon, as well as retailers such as Eason and Waterstones on February 2nd. For more information on research carried out in The National Cancer Institute's Centre for Cancer Research, visit ccr.cancer.gov/research.
The 2012 NNI Journalism Awards took place last Thursday, October 25 and among the nominees was Political Editor of The Irish Daily Mirror and local Ardee woman, Sarah Bardon.

The 2012 NNI Journalism Awards took place last Thursday, October 25 and among the nominees was Political Editor of The Irish Daily Mirror and local Ardee woman, Sarah Bardon.

Sarah was nominated for Young Journalist of the Year, a category that the judges of the competition described as, a show-case of some of the best journalistic talent and they were incredibly impressed with the high standard of work submitted by Sarah, and her fellow nominees in this category.

Unfortunately Sarah lost out to Jennifer Bray of the Irish Daily Mail.

However speaking to the Dundalk Democrat Sarah told us that she was just happy to be nominated and looked forward to entering the competition again next year.

It was great to be nominated.

I never expected to win, I was in a category with so many other great journalists.

I was just thrilled to be nominated. I still have two more years in that category so there is always next year!

Sarah worked at the Dundalk Democrat for two months in 2008 before she left for the Mirror HQ where she was promoted to Political Editor in 2011.

2012 has also been a great year for Sarah, she has made a few appearances on RTEs Leaders Questions as well as travelling to New York and Washington where she got to meet US President Barack Obama.

The future is definitely bright for this young journalist and the Dundalk Democrat wishes her the best of luck in her future endeavors.
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Bellway launches its latest development in Morpeth

Bellways latest development in Morpeth, Collingwood Manor has been designed with families in mind. With prices starting from 219,995 and providing a mix of two, three, four and five bedroom homes, Collingwood Manor appeals to a broad spectrum of buyers.

The development will feature some of Bellways most popular designs, including the three bedroom Brampton and Salisbury and four bedroom Brentwood, Portland and Wedmore. Visitors to the development can view the site layout and the house types that Bellway is making available. First completions are expected later this year.

Morpeth is an extremely popular location with an attractive park and market town. Judging by the amount of interest we have received from potential buyers since we started working on the development we are extremely confident that homes will be snapped up very quickly, said Bellways Sales Director, Rob Armstrong.

Sales Advisor, Margaret Wilkinson said: For buyers getting in early we can add that bespoke touch to their homes from our extensive range of additions. Our customers love to individualise their homes and can specify from a range of additions that we offer including a variety of kitchen upgrades such as granite worktops, also available are decorative light fittings, a selection of floor finishes and bathroom vanity units plus much more.

For buyers with a home to sell, we can also offer our free-off-charge Express Mover Service. Bellway will manage the sale of your old home by appointing an estate agent on your behalf who is focussed upon completing a swift and satisfactory sale, leaving you free to focus attention on your new home.

Bellway is also offering customers the Governments Help to Buy scheme enabling a buyer to secure a new home at Collingwood Manor with a minimum deposit of five percent and benefit from a five year interest free Government loan.

The Help to Buy scheme has been incredibly successful, confirmed Margaret. It has enabled many of our buyers to access the housing ladder far earlier that they ever expected and has also meant the some people have been able to upgrade to larger homes as a result of the five year interest free loan and the fact the you only require a seventy five percent mortgage means mortgage repayments are reduced during the first five years.

For families, there are a number of well-regarded schools near the development, including Abbeyfields First School and Morpeth First School for younger children and The King Edward VI School for older students. Northumberland College offers a range of apprenticeships and higher education courses, and is a 15-minute drive away in Ashington, while the University of Northumbria and Newcastle University can be reached in around 20 minutes by car.

For more information, visit bellway.co.uk.



This development is currently marketed from our divisional office. Opening hours are 9:00am  5:00pm Monday  Friday.
New homes go on sale this Saturday in Croydon at site linked to iconic David Bowie album

New homes at Cane Hill Park in Coulsdon will be unveiled next week as Barratt Homes and David Wilson Homes officially open their doors at this brand new community.



The site, which was formerly home of Cane Hill psychiatric hospital, which featured on David Bowies album cover for The Man Who Sold The World, will open on Saturday January 30.



Already interest in the new homes has been high and Pam Reardon, sales and marketing director at David Wilson Homes, confirmed that a number of its homes have already been reserved by eager buyers.



There has been tremendous interest in the new homes since we first announced plans for Cane Hill Park and several people have already bought off plan, she said. It seems the combination of this fantastic location, the design of our homes and the overall concept of the development is proving a real draw for homebuyers. Were looking forward to opening our doors at the end of the month and letting people set foot inside Cane Hill Park for the first time.



David Wilson Homes is set to release a mix of four and five bedroom homes at Cane Hill Park at the end of this month and will be showcasing its style and quality with the three bedroom Keats show home. Its four bedroom homes are expected to start from 619,995.



Barratt Homes will also be releasing a number of three and four bedroom properties.



Lynnette St Quintin, sales director at Barratt Homes, said the development is generating a huge amount of interest among a wide range of buyers. Weve seen an unprecedented number of enquiries from first time buyers, families and London commuters so were delighted to be able to officially open the doors, she said. Homes at the new development have been created to provide the styles of modern living that buyers are searching for in a new home.



All of the properties at Cane Hill Park have been designed with energy efficiency in mind and will include rooftop solar panels as well as an innovative waste-water heat recovery system, allowing homeowners to reduce their ecological footprint.



An ideal location for commuters, nearby Coulsdon South station offers fast train services into London Victoria in just 26 minutes. Cane Hill Park is also conveniently located for London Gatwick as well as being a short distance from the M25.



For further information about the new homes at Cane Hill Park and to book an appointment for the January launch, visit barratthomes.co.uk and dwh.co.uk.
Joe O'Shaughnessy



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Following a veto of the move last week by Lockport Mayor Anne McCaffrey, Alderman-at-Large Joe O'Shaughnessy issued a press release Monday night defending the Common Council's 4-1 vote to hire a full-time city assessor, calling the measure "good business."In April 2015, I issued a press release critical of the Mayor McCaffreys decision to then hire a part-time Assessor," O'Shaughnessy said in his release. "A full 10 months ago, I questioned paying someone $650 to work only one day per week; when we already had a long tenured employee who had done the job and who knew the workings of that department better than anyone. I said then, as a businessman, it just didnt make any financial sense to me. Now, this mayor wants to pay someone with zero knowledge of the city, $72-plus dollars per hour, for his one day per week assignment. As someone responsible and experienced in running a business, this again makes no financial sense to me."The Democrat went on to say, I remind the mayor and the press of this fact because neither I nor my colleagues are new to the problems in the assessors office. We have done due diligence and purposely chose to act now in order to right the ship and not let that department become another disaster; as mayors Tucker and McCaffrey let happen to the Treasurers office which nearly led to our financial downfall."O'Shaughnessy added, There are two other important points that need to be made. First, the mayors and council presidents Wohlebens belief that the assessors job can be done one day per week proves beyond any doubt they just dont understand all the duties and responsibilities of that position. The assessor does a lot more than just sign the assessment rolls and represent the city at valuation appeals in small claims court. The assessor is charged with personally establishing property valuations and revaluations. There are 8,200 parcels in the city and the monthly volume of permits for new builds, additions, remodels and demolitions far exceeds what can be attended to one day per week. Add to that, meetings with taxpayers, realtors, lawyers and other duties such as filing reports, training and supervising appraisal staff; and it just cant be done one day a week."OShaughnessy said when campaigning he questioned what had been done in the assessors office since the last temporary appointment expired at the end of 2014. Taxpayers should question whether new or changed parcels are being properly and timely valued. Are exemptions being reviewed or litigated matters settled? Are residential or commercial property owners apt to be overcharged because of an inaccurate equalization rate? Did we miss the chance to add to our total valuation. For the third year in a row, the citys total property valuation has decreased. Thats a huge red flag.The second point to consider is that the Councils bipartisan approach actually saves taxpayer dollars and provides for greater productivity. The mayor wants to spend $30,000 for a temporary assessor plus fully fund the real property appraiser position for a total cost around $80,000 for 43 productive hours per week. Again, I question whether any outside assessor can be productive with little or no knowledge of the city. The Councils approach envisions the worker in the appraiser title being appointed full-time City Assessor, off of a Civil Service list, and then negotiates a stipend for them, in the $16, 000 to $18,000 range, to perform the essential duties of the Real Property Appraiser position simultaneous to being Assessor. Productivity, being the total number of hours per week devoted to assessor and real property appraiser duties, is far greater under the councils approach than what the mayor would have you believe.OShaughnessy said the mayors claim of added legacy costs of a full-time assessor are false. We already budget and pay for health insurance and retirement costs for the real property appraiser. Those costs will simply be shifted to the assessor line in the budget.He continued, To me, the mayors veto is just another example of her wanting to understaff departments and cut budgets to the point where departments are non-functioning; then point fingers at workers and contract for services which can and should be kept in-house.I will vote to override the mayors veto, said OShaughnessy because it makes financial sense and thats what voters expect from the new council.He said he would urge his fellow council members to do the same.Voters threw out every alderperson except Anita Mullane for a reason," he said. They are tired of rubber-stamp politics and demand a different approach to running this city.In addition, OShaughnessy said he will now call for an audit; to be conducted by the State Comptroller and the State Attorney General of both the Assessors Office and the City Treasurers Office. Lockport taxpayers must know whether the financial and legal requirements of these offices have been fully met.
Niagara County Sheriff's Deputy Joe Tortorella and Niagara County Sheriff Jim Voutour pose with Tortorella's "Deputy of the Year" award from the New York State Sheriff's Association. (PHOTO COURTESY OF NCSO / FACEBOOK)



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The New York State Sheriff's Association honored a Niagara County Sheriff's deputy today with its "Deputy of the Year Award," lauding him for his actions on an incident in Wheatfield in which is risked life and limb to protect students at a local elementary school.On April 17, Deputy Joe Tortorella responded to a 911 hang-up call at a residence in Wheatfield. While investigating the source of the 911 call, Tortorella was confronted by an armed male who had just shot both his parents. During a lengthy shootout with the suspect, Tortorella was shot in the chest.The residence in Wheatfield was located next to Errick Road Elementary School which was in session at the time of the incident. During the gun fight, Deputy Tortorella called dispatch over his radio to alert the school to lock-down. When the suspect, who was shot three times, ran back behind the house, Tortorella ran towards the school to place himself between the school and the suspect.Tortorella, a 10-year veteran of the Sheriffs Office, has been exclusively assigned to the Wheatfield area since 2009.Niagara County Sheriff Voutour said the award ceremony was extra meaningful. Voutour is the president of the New York State Sheriff's Association. As president, Voutour didn't vote on Tortorella's selection, but he did nominate him. And the committee "voted him Deputy of the Year without any reservation.""To be honest, I wish it'd never happened," Voutour said. "But in a year that I'm president to have that act of bravery take place, that is pretty special.Tortorella was also one of four finalists for the 2015 IACP/ Target Police Officer of the Year, which was awarded to Officer Scott T. Angulo from the Tallahassee Police Department in a ceremony in Chicago on Oct. 24.Also awarded today by the New York State Sheriff's Association was Orleans County Sheriff's Deputy Jim DeFilipps, who was recognized for a March 21 incident in which he was shot twice following a high-speed chase.DeFilipps, despite getting hit twice by gunfire, shot and killed the gunman, ending the threat to his own life and that of his fellow police officers who were on scene and residents in the vicinity."It's kind of nice that Niagara and Orleans got the co-deputies of the year," Voutour said.
One of responses that Gov. Rick Snyder has had to his administrations poisoning of Flints drinking water is to hire public relations people. LOTS of public relations people, in fact. Back in December, he brought on PR specialist Chris DeWitt.

Then, even before he had given his State of the State Address, he hired Bill Nowling, another communications expert. Then, last Friday he announced that he had brought on the PR firm Mercury Public Affairs.

Mercury is an interesting group. They are run largely by former Republican operatives and are willing to take on some very sketchy clients. For example, after Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed that nations draconian anti-LGBT bill that makes even knowing a gay person and not exposing them illegal, the Ugandan government hired Mercury to do PR for the country:

One month after the U.S. government announced the first substantial sanctions against Uganda in response to its Anti-Homosexuality Act, the government of Yoweri Museveni signed a contract with the D.C. consulting firm Mercury to help with public relations and lobby in the United States. Uganda signed the one-year contract worth $600,000 on July 17, according to federal disclosure filings. Messages to Mercury representatives were not immediately returned, but the contract says that Mercury will provide consulting and communications services to promote trade and investment opportunities in Uganda. That includes managing media relations, and specifies that the firm will monitor coverage of President Museveni as well as the country as whole. The filing is signed by former Republican congressman and Romney campaign adviser Vin Weber, a partner at Mercury.

In addition, during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, Mercury clients have given over $3.8 million to Republicans.

Whats interesting about Gov. Snyders hiring of Mercury is the timing. He had already hired an independent PR person for the Flint water crisis back in December. Then he brought on Bill Nowling. These hires are, of course, in addition to his full-time communications director, his full-time press secretary, two deputy press secretaries and countless support staff for all of them. The interesting timing is that he announced the hiring of Mercury on January 22nd, the very next day after it was announced that he may be invited to testify before Congress about the Flint situation.

When you look at the facts, it really makes you wonder if Mercury was hired not to do public relations but, rather, to lobby members of Congress to keep the Governor from having to go to Washington, D.C. to answer hard questions during a Congressional hearing.

Oh, and one more thing: Gov. Snyder is paying Mercury from a separate, private fund, Moving Michigan Forward Fund, not with state funds.
When Rick Snyder needs to have something done, he often turns to one man: Richard Baird. Baird has long been Snyders right hand man, enjoying a position in the governors Executive Office and listed as his Transformation Manager:

Baird has a list of scandals in Michigan that he is tied to. He was originally paid from a fund set up by Gov. Snyder called the New Energy to Reinvent and Diversify (NERD) Fund. Funding for the NERD Fund was never fully revealed before it was shut down by the governor under mounting criticism and evidence that donors were receiving special favors in return for their contributions. For example, CVS Caremark, the only known contributor, received a $60 million no-bid contract with the City of Detroit under Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr (a Snyder appointee) following their donation to the NERD Fund.

Baird was also one of the originators of the now infamous Skunk Works project, an off-the-books team of people that were scheming to siphon education tax dollars into the bank accounts of private corporations using an illegal voucher program.

Additionally, Baird was also involved in an effort to secure business for Gov. Snyders cousin George Snyder to ensure he was protected from budget cuts in 2011. George Snyder runs DBI, a business furniture company with a contract with the state of Michigan and Baird intervened on his behalf to ensure that his contract was safe.

Baird was also once accused at one time of illegal lobbying.

And finally, theres this:

Baird was also responsible for bringing in Kevyn Orr as Detroits Emergency Manager, well ahead of the time Detroit was even found to be in a financial emergency through the process outlined by our laws. When a lawsuit was filed, the judge in the case ordered Baird to produce the names of the people he had interviewed for the job and Baird claimed that Gov. Snyder had conferred executive privilege on him and cited Richard Nixon. That caused this hilarious response from Ingham County Circuit Judge William Collette: Theres not one (state) case anywhere that says the governor has an executive privilege, the judge said. Peter Ellsworth, a private attorney representing Baird, cited two federal cases involving executive privilege: the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr and former President Richard Nixons attempt to keep records related to Watergate scandal under wraps.



No one in their right mind in the last few years has ever cited Richard Nixon for anything, Collette said, later adding: Nixon doesnt stand for anything other than someone attempting to hide a crime.

Richard Baird was known as an enforcer during his time inside the Snyder administration. State employees contacted me to reveal that he was making the rounds to many departments to let staffers know that they were expected to get in line and stay in line when it came to supporting Gov. Snyder and his policies. Baird told them stories about people who had paid the price for not toeing the line. Following Bairds stories, one state employee told me, The entire staff were completely silent. Not one of us missed the threats and intimidation the he presented to us.

Now that Gov. Snyder is up to his ears in alligators over his administrations role in the poisoning of Flints drinking water with lead, Snyder has once again turned to his go-to guy, Richard Baird:

The governor is dispatching his fixer and confidant, Rich Baird, to Flint to help coordinate the state response and to reassure the citys elected leaders of direct, daily contact with the governors office.

Its astonishing that Gov. Snyder would turn to someone with Bairds sordid history for such a critical position. Baird has extremely thin skin, particularly when it comes to dealing with women in power. He once threatened to sue then-Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer and former Michigan AFL-CIO president Karla Swift for having the temerity to publicly criticize him.

With Gov. Snyder being accused of obfuscating and deflecting any responsibility for his administrations role in the Flint water crisis, hiring a shadowy, behind-the-scenes operator like Richard Baird is the absolutely wrong choice.

Its also the absolutely predictable choice.
AOL on Monday announced that it has agreed to purchaseAlephD as it ramps up efforts to boost its key assets: its global content brands, millennial-focused over-the-top content, original video content, and programmatic advertising platforms.

AlephDs algorithms focus on publisher analytics and price floor optimization. They let publishers control and optimize the pricing and packaging of their inventory to maximize revenue.

The company also helps publishers find the optimal price for deals, monitor the performance of new and ongoing deals, and monitor and analyze auctions.

It will become a key part of ONE by AOL: Publishers, into which five other technologies previously available as separate offerings will be consolidated:

Marketplace

Adap.tv, now called ONE by AOL: Video

AOL On

Vidible

Millennial Media, which AOL acquired last year for $238 million

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AOL is building toward becoming the worlds largest mobile technology company, and through solutions like ONE by AOL: Publishers, we are helping to grow the revenue pie, not only for AOL, but also for the 75,000 publisher partners that we work with, AOL spokesperson Gerasimos Manolatos told the E-Commerce Times.

More About AlephD

Publishers pay about 50 percent of revenue to technology middlemen for yield optimization and other capabilities, a fee called the tech tax in the industry, an unnamed AOL spokesperson said in a statement provided by Manolatos.

They get locked into technologies offered by startups and have to give away their data and content to use these technologies.

AOL seeks to change that: It will integrate AlephD into ONE by AOL: Publishers over the course of the year, and the resulting product will let publishers find the right audiences for their products and deliver more creative branding to them, the AOL spokesperson told the E-Commerce Times.

The Pain of Publishers

There have been major complaints about advertising in general, observed Michael Goodman, a research director atStrategy Analytics.

The overarching issue publishers have had with respect to digital ads is that CPM (cost per thousand) prices are pushed to the bottom, he told the E-Commerce Times. This is a long-standing issue with digital advertising.

Programmatic advertising has become the trend, but to a certain extent [it] hasnt always been the best thing for publishers, Goodman added.

But its here to stay, and the question now is how to make it better, and if you have something like price floors that gives publishers more control over their pricing, that will make it more attractive, he said.

The Evolution of the Market

The old notion of the business transaction  in which the buyer and seller negotiate a price, sign a deal and conclude the transaction  is gone, remarked Mike Jude, a research program manager at Frost & Sullivan.

Weve been evolving toward continuous transactions which take place on the fly in real time, typically on an agreed set of metrics, exactly the way the stock market works, he told the E-Commerce Times.

This already has happened with airline tickets and hotel prices, as consumers go to aggregators, and to some extent on eBay, where the weight of the market determines the value of the good or service, Jude pointed out. The same things happening with content.

The change isnt a good thing or a bad thing. It simply means the market moves faster, and when that happens, the market generates higher revenues, he said. This is capitalism at the speed of analytics.

AOL has invested about $1 billion in seeking to become a major media player, and if it catches on, AOL can be more successful than it has been heretofore, Jude said. AOL has been reinventing itself forever.

Verizon purchased AOL last year to pursue its vision of becoming a force in the OTT market, and the markets going that way, with Facebook, Google and other players tracking consumers across platforms, Strategy Analytics Goodman said. Thats the key for all targeting  to be able to go across platforms.
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(Credit: REUTERS/GARY CAMERON)Real estate developer Donald Trump displays his hairline after a luncheon speech at the National Press Club in Washington May 27, 2014.

Donald Trump may be riding high in polls as the No. 1 Republican contender in the U.S. presidential race, but he has taken heavy blows from a black newspaper columnist and a conservative clerical commentator for trying to claim to represent Christians.

New York Daily News columnist Shaun King blasted the property magnate who is heading the polls in a Jan. 26 piece entitled, "The fake Christianity of Donald Trump (and Jerry Falwell Jr.)."

The second hammering Trump received was in Western Journalism on Jan. 26, written by Rev Michael Bresciani in a piece titled, "Donald Trump does not represent Christ, Christians or the Bible."

King said that Trump has all but broadcast to the world that he knows absolutely nothing about Christianity.

The Daily News columnist notes that people can know what's in a person's heart by studying how they live.

"There is nothing surprising about Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the conservative "Christian" mega-college, Liberty University, endorsing Donald Trump.

"I have always believed that at the heart of southern white conservative Christianity isn't Jesus, but whiteness, not religion, but racism and the Republican Party.

"Donald Trump is the most prominent and popular bigot in modern American history. White supremacist hate groups openly profess their love for him and are actively campaigning for him.

King notes that over the past year Trump has openly stated that the United States should ban all Muslims from entering the country, blamed African-Americans for the overwhelming majority of white murder victims.

He has also been "overtly racist toward Mexican immigrants, has been consistently sexist and crass toward women - and has offered absolutely no apologies for any of it."

King asserts, "These aren't just political statements, but a terrible mix of lies and practices that fly in the face of Christianity.

'KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT CHRISTIANITY'

Not only do Trumps words stand in stark contrast to the compassionate Christ of the Bible, he has also broadcast to the world he knows nothing about Christianity.

"Maybe it has something to do with Jesus saying it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven, but whatever the case, Trump has done a terrible job at even pretending to be Christian.

"When asked if he has ever asked God for forgiveness or repented of his sins, a key tenant of Christianity, Trump openly said no, and could not really recall a time, ever, that he needed to ask God for forgiveness.

"Had President Obama uttered such a phrase, white people would've used it as indisputable proof that he was an undercover Muslim or the anti-Christ."

King also say Trump is unable to name his favorite Bible verse when asked.

"When speaking at Liberty University, he so badly flubbed the name of one of the most popular New Testament epistles that it became a trending topic. He's not a young man, mind you, he's a senior citizen. He's 69 years old. He doesn't know these things because they aren't a real part of his life."

The Daily News columnist also notes that most conservative Christians claim to despise divorce, but Trump has been married three times.

"His Christianity is so fake, so phony, that if a fictional conservative character was created to fake it the way he has, it would seem so outrageous, so preposterous, that it would seem like a complete impossibility."

Brescani's takes Trump to task for making the hand symbol for a gun and saying in Iowa, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?"

"Is the idea of getting away with murder and still being a front-runner his best example for America's children?

"Donald's behavior is anything but presidential; it clearly shows what he thinks of the average voter. In this context, he may as well call his own followers (and perhaps the entire nation)."

Brescani raises the issue of idolatry citing 2 Kings 17: 33, in which ancient Israel is charged with fearing God, but serving idols.

"Trump's rallies are dotted with autograph-seeking, shouting and smiling Christians trying to get a glance at their idol, as if they expected him to win both the presidency and the latest televised broadcast of American Idol.

"The Evangelicals may think they don't need to follow the Lord of Righteousness, and now they can follow their lord of self-absorption, Mr. Trump; but they have become conspicuously misguided.

"Author Dr. Don Boys says: "For a Christian to vote for Trump is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."
In Kansas, where cutting taxes is seemingly a favorite pastime, educators have wrestled with politicians for decades over who gets what out of the states ever-shrinking coffers. That culminated in the states highest court ruling in 2014 that the states spending habits on school aid was unconstitutional, a monumental move and a potential victory for starving school districts.

But now, just as politicians get ready to craft a new formula, a legislative committee says the state government needs to more heavily scrutinize school spending. Superintendents are spending $1 billion more than they did a decade ago in state money, and yet student performance has either stagnated or fallen, according to a controversial report issued by the committee last week.

The state legislature should conduct more frequent audits of districts, consolidate services, and dictate what efforts should be funded to improve student learning, the report says. In addition, it recommends the state board of education hire an outside company to create its academic assessments and have all its high school students take the ACT.

Taxpayers across the state have to get a better handle on where their money goes, said Rep. Ron Highland, a Republican and the chairman of the Committee on K-12 Student Success who authored the report. Theres no mention of cutting, but in our view, the money needs to get to students who need the most help. Thats been our whole thrust in this conversation.

Pushing Back

The 12-page report garnered swift response from editorial boards, education advocates, and school district officials who argued that the proposals would just pave the way for further cuts in spending and that more oversight would undermine the authority of the state department of education and local districts. Further, the states funding of schools still falls far short of what courts have ruled is an adequate amount.

While recognizing the state has room to grow academically, Mark Tallman, a spokesman for the Kansas School Board Association, said legislatures should admire how much district officials are able to accomplish with so little money.

In our view, the decisions were making seem to be making a difference. Tallman said.

Legal Battle

The three Democrats on the 13-member committee contend that the report was heavily influenced by the Kansas Policy Institute, a conservative anti-tax organization, and have said they will issue a counter report.

The committees final report did not come attached with recommended legislation, and observers said it was thin on detail as to how the state would enact many of the proposals.

Districts in the Sunflower State have long complained that the state has failed to provide schools with enough money to give its students an adequate education as required under the state constitution. Kansas spends about $4 billion on education, about $13,000 per student. In 2010, Kansas City and four other districts sued the state alleging that it fails to adequately and equitably fund its schools.

In its 2014 ruling, the states supreme court ordered the legislature to fix the unequal funding. In response, legislators switched the schools from a per-pupil funding formula to a block-grant formula for two years until they could come up with a new formula. The block grants dont provide for any annual increases in funding.

Districts again sued, complaining that the block-grant formula didnt include increases and was also unconstitutional. A panel of three lower-court judges agreed, ordering the legislature to revert to the earlier funding formula. That order is pending a Supreme Court decision.

Across the country, Delaware, Montana, and Nebraska are set to make significant changes to their funding formulas this year. None, except for Kansas and Washington state, however, is tasked with completely overhauling its formula.

(Washington is under a court ruling to come up with a funding formula and is being fined $100,000 a day until it does so.)

The Kansas committee began meeting in October and heard presentations from dozens of education advocates, budget analysts, and district superintendents. In an early draft of the report, Rep. Highland said the state now spends about $1 billion more than it did a decade ago. The state picks up more than half the cost of education, with local and federal tax dollars funding the rest.

Despite that, its academic ranking on some elements of the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell precipitously in the most recent rankings, from 11th in 4th grade math in 2013 to 25th in 2015.

The draft of the report points out that while enrollment in the mostly rural state has climbed only 7 percent, the state has increased its teaching staff by 17 percent and its administrative staff by 41 percent.

Most alarming was the achievement gap,  Highland writes. The gap has remained virtually unchanged for decades with significant increases in spending. About half the states students qualify as low-income.

The theory is that poverty determines an individuals ability to learn, he wrote in the draft. This thinking is discriminating and has no place in education.

Do More With Less?

Michael Rebell, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has followed the legal battles over school funding in Kansas, said legislatures would be wrong to tell schools to do more with less.

In Kansas, Id take with a grain of salt what the current governor and legislatures have been saying because they havent been providing schools with an adequate amount of money for years, Rebell said, pointing to a study commissioned by the legislature in 2001 that says as much. I dont doubt that educational services can be provided in a more cost-effective manner. But that requires close attention to what best practices are.

The final report, approved by the committee Jan. 19, was stripped of much of its charged language about poverty and school performance. But it kept some key themes, including that the state rein in spending and use a state metric instead of a federal one to determine if students qualify as poor.

And it suggests that the legislature establish subcommittees to examine teacher pay, funding for at-risk students, special education, and whether the state benefits from receiving federal funds.

Meanwhile, the states legislators this year are faced with closing a $190 million deficit caused, in part, by Gov. Sam Brownback making almost $7 billion worth of business- and income-tax cuts in recent years. Legislators wrongly predicted the economy would grow with the cuts.

Democrats in the state have doubted that the states Republican-dominated legislature will propose a new funding formula this year, forcing the districts to go another year with the block grants.
Toronto, Canada, Jan 27 (EFE).- Canada said it will lift sanctions imposed on Iran and eventually re-open its embassy in Tehran after the agreement reached with western countries to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Stephane Dion, Canadian Foreign Minister, said Tuesday in the Parliament that the UN has asked countries which maintain sanctions against Iran to lift them, following the implementation of the agreement.

"Canada will lift its sanctions but will maintain a level of mistrust for a regime that must not have nuclear weapons, a regime that is a danger to human rights and is not a friend to our allies, including Israel," Dion said.

The announcement comes after the publication in local media of information indicating that Bombardier, the Canadian manufacturer of aerospace and rail transportation equipment, one of Canada's most important companies, is interested in selling aircraft to Iran.

Dion noted that the re-opening of the Canadian embassy in Tehran is not a priority of the new Canadian government, which rose to power after the elections, held on October 19 with the victory of the Liberal party of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but that it is necessary that Canada is represented in Iran.

Conservative former Prime Minister Stephen Harper closed the Canadian embassy in Iran unexpectedly in 2012 and proceeded to expel Iranian diplomats accredited in Canada.

"We need to be there to be sure this agreement will be fulfilled and implemented and respected," assured Dion.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed on January 16 that Iran has taken the necessary steps to remove military possibilities from its nuclear program, as planned in the agreement reached last July.

In return, the U.S., European Union (EU) and UN announced the lifting of economic and financial sanctions on Iran.
Psychological evaluation and earlier start of primary school



It was one of a few suggestions of the KG teacher in response to our bored (and consequently increasingly disruptive) but very bright son. Her suggestion was also supported by the school psychologist, for an initial trial period, to then assess what was right.

The school head however was very cautious with the advice that often the benefits can be immediately clear, but the problems / risks only manifest themselves later, around or after puberty, when it is too late, and he's seen this too often. And more so with boys than with girls. This view was also supported when we sought a second psychological opinion (which was all the more credible for us coming from a mother of three boys ranging in age from 7 to 15, I.e. very relevant for us) - she advised that she and her colleagues see many older tween/teen aged kids who were pushed ahead based on above average early academic ability, but later on they are unhappy or suffer low esteem or even worse are socially isolated because they are that much younger (both in physical stature and emotional maturity) than their school peers, again citing the risks are greater for boys than with girls, particularly during/post-puberty. Academic ability/performance is only one piece of the puzzle, so to speak.



An alternate focus is 'enrichment' - i.e. extra curricular activities, sports, hobbies, musical tuition, etc. that further challenge the child mentally and physically outside of the school curriculum. Depending where you are, schools often have their own programmes to support bright kids, but of course us parents also have a huge responsibility and role when considering the whole picture of education and upbringing of our children. It is not just the job of the school system.



Every child is different and a decision such as skipping a grade should be weighed up very carefully IMHO, as it can have long lasting detrimental effects for your child. Of course, that might not be the case - it could be the best thing for your child, so much depends on the child. It is so difficult to know what to do for the best, if only we had a crystal ball You don't give the reasons, OP, that you would like your daughter to move up to school early. But we were recently in the situation of assessing whether to skip the rest of 2nd KG and move up to school early. Our experience may or may not be relevant to you, but just in case it helps, here's our anecdotal experience...It was one of a few suggestions of the KG teacher in response to our bored (and consequently increasingly disruptive) but very bright son. Her suggestion was also supported by the school psychologist, for an initial trial period, to then assess what was right.The school head however was very cautious with the advice that often the benefits can be immediately clear, but the problems / risks only manifest themselves later, around or after puberty, when it is too late, and he's seen this too often. And more so with boys than with girls. This view was also supported when we sought a second psychological opinion (which was all the more credible for us coming from a mother of three boys ranging in age from 7 to 15, I.e. very relevant for us) - she advised that she and her colleagues see many older tween/teen aged kids who were pushed ahead based on above average early academic ability, but later on they are unhappy or suffer low esteem or even worse are socially isolated because they are that much younger (both in physical stature and emotional maturity) than their school peers, again citing the risks are greater for boys than with girls, particularly during/post-puberty. Academic ability/performance is only one piece of the puzzle, so to speak.An alternate focus is 'enrichment' - i.e. extra curricular activities, sports, hobbies, musical tuition, etc. that further challenge the child mentally and physically outside of the school curriculum. Depending where you are, schools often have their own programmes to support bright kids, but of course us parents also have a huge responsibility and role when considering the whole picture of education and upbringing of our children. It is not just the job of the school system.Every child is different and a decision such as skipping a grade should be weighed up very carefully IMHO, as it can have long lasting detrimental effects for your child. Of course, that might not be the case - it could be the best thing for your child, so much depends on the child. It is so difficult to know what to do for the best, if only we had a crystal ball
Re: Do you believe in Merkel? Quote: esto Time is ticking, but I don't think it's too late. Not all the people who are there now need to stay either. Germany can try to repatriate them when they deem their home country safe. Or maybe not all the migrants will want to adapt to German society and return home on their own. Even right now, there are weekly planes taking asylum seeks back to Iraq, because they found that Germany wasn't what they expected it to be



http://www.dw.com/en/next-stop-erbil...ome/a-18999030



There are some refusals at the border for those trying to reach Sweden. Funny though is they return the next day and say they want to go to Germany, and are let in. Those deported can come back with a different identity. For a vast majority, there is nowhere to deport them to. As the weather clears, millions more will make their way.



The only real solution to this is tight control of the border. For as long as there isn't, there is no real intent to address, and all is just political posturing to buy time. And a large portion of German political sentiment still believe they cannot dare to do anything that resembles selfish national interests. But even if they seal the German border, they will bottleneck in Italy and Greece. I hear there is a trickle out, but interviews of the ones who leave seem to be of decent people.There are some refusals at the border for those trying to reach Sweden. Funny though is they return the next day and say they want to go to Germany, and are let in. Those deported can come back with a different identity. For a vast majority, there is nowhere to deport them to. As the weather clears, millions more will make their way.The only real solution to this is tight control of the border. For as long as there isn't, there is no real intent to address, and all is just political posturing to buy time. And a large portion of German political sentiment still believe they cannot dare to do anything that resembles selfish national interests. But even if they seal the German border, they will bottleneck in Italy and Greece.
Swissforum.fr.co.uk.com...? .



Armed with this information you can also remind the next Swiss that tells you you're a filthy Auslander and to piss off back home that you are merely taking part in an exchange program. And that it would mean the Swiss who couldn't stand it here so much they felt compelled to leave would then have to return.



http://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/22661006

http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/...story/28413441 Read this this morning, basically it highlights the number of Swiss living abroad by country. Some of the figures are quite surprising. 80k Swiss in the US, 200k in France, 30 odd thousand in the UK. That's similar numbers to the number of foreigners from those countries here in Switzerland. Nice to imagine that somewhere back at home there could be Swiss complaining that the shops are open all the time, the neighbours are too loud and that there's too much choice in the supermarketArmed with this information you can also remind the next Swiss that tells you you're a filthy Auslander and to piss off back home that you are merely taking part in an exchange program. And that it would mean the Swiss who couldn't stand it here so much they felt compelled to leave would then have to return.
While certain heart health markers increase the risk for death in people with dementia, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, and high cholesterol do not seem to have the same effect on mortality risk

Dementia (a decline in memory and other mental abilities) is a serious condition, and its prognosis (the likely course of the disease) is marked by progressive loss of cognitive function and complications such as infections and falls. Dementia has no cure, and is increasingly a cause of death in the United States. Heart disease and diabetes, which affect blood vessels and circulation, have similar risk factors to dementia, so it's important for healthcare professionals to understand links between these conditions.

In new research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers reviewed 12 studies that included more than 235,000 people with dementia. They learned that older adults with dementia and diabetes have a significantly higher risk for death (called a "mortality risk") than do people with just dementia. People with dementia who smoked tobacco were also at a much higher risk for death, and those with dementia who had coronary heart disease had a somewhat higher risk for death. In addition, the researchers learned that men who had dementia had a worse forecast for the likely course of their disease than did women.

On the other hand, having high blood pressure, being overweight, and having high cholesterol did not seem to increase the risk for death for older adults with dementia.

The researchers said that their findings raise questions about how to treat high cholesterol and high blood pressure in older people with dementia, since those conditions don't seem to be linked to a higher risk for death. Decisions about treating people with dementia for those conditions should be based on an older person's preferences and whether the treatment will improve quality of life, while also weighing the risks and benefits of treatment, noted the researchers.

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This summary is from "The Impact of Vascular Risk Factors and Diseases on Mortality in Patients with Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis." It appears online ahead of print in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study authors are Irene E. van de Vorst, MD; Huiberdina L. Koek, MD, PhD; Rehana de Vries, MSc; Michiel L. Bots, MD, PhD; Johannes B. Reitsma, MD, PhD; and Ilonca Vaartjes, PhD. The research team is from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.

About the Health in Aging Foundation

This research summary was developed as a public education tool by the Health in Aging Foundation. The Foundation is a national non-profit established in 1999 by the American Geriatrics Society to bring the knowledge and expertise of geriatrics healthcare professionals to the public. We are committed to ensuring that people are empowered to advocate for high-quality care by providing them with trustworthy information and reliable resources. Last year, we reached nearly 1 million people with our resources through HealthinAging.org. We also help nurture current and future geriatrics leaders by supporting opportunities to attend educational events and increase exposure to principles of excellence on caring for older adults. For more information or to support the Foundation's work, visit http://www.HealthinAgingFoundation.org.
GeoSpace

Rapid warming over the Indian Ocean reduces marine productivity

Increasing water temperatures in the Indian Ocean are taking a toll on the marine ecosystem, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters. Researchers suggest rapid warming in the Indian Ocean has reduced marine phytoplankton up to 20 percent during the past six decades.

Going digital: Building a better geological map of Alaska

In the early 1900s, before Alaska was part of the United States, geologists roamed this northern territory on foot and horseback, noting its features and terrain on hand-drawn maps. Nearly 100 years later in 1996, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research geologist Frederic Wilson and a dozen colleagues created the first fully digitalized geological map of Alaska.

On Twitter, oceanographers show deep appreciation for data-collection device

On Friday, while many people were tracking the progress of the winter storm bearing down on the eastern United States, oceanographers were rummaging through their fieldwork photos for images of CTDs to share on Twitter in honor of #CTDAppreciationDay.

The Landslide Blog

The greatest ever debris flow video? Aconcagua in Argentina

Dave Petley nominates this landslide footage, located on the flanks Aconcagua in Argentina, for "greatest ever debris flow video." It starts slowly, but hang in there!

Eos.org

Arctic research on thin ice: consequences of Arctic Sea ice loss

Scientists embarked on a 6-month expedition in the Arctic Ocean to study the thinning sea ice cover, improve our understanding of sea ice loss effects, and help predict future changes.

New research papers

The northward march of summer low cloudiness along the California coast, Geophysical Research Letters

The Global Positioning System constellation as a space weather monitor: Comparison of electron measurements with Van Allen Probes data, Space Weather

Find research spotlights from AGU journals and sign up for weekly E-Alerts, including research spotlights, on eos.org. Register for access to AGU journal papers in the AGU newsroom.

The American Geophysical Union is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences, and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit, professional, scientific organization representing more than 60,000 members in 139 countries. Join our conversation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media channels.

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After children with leukemia receive a course of chemotherapy at a hospital, are they better off remaining in the hospital, or going home with their families?

The answer is not obvious, which is why the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is funding a three-year, $1.8 million multicenter study to learn more. A pediatric oncologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is leading a collaborative study with 10 other U.S. pediatric hospitals to gather data from patients, families and clinicians.

"The study will not only give us clear data on the safety of each discharge strategy, but will also ask patients and families about their preferences," said the study's principal investigator, Richard Aplenc, M.D., a CHOP pediatric oncologist. "Both types of information will help us as oncologists to better work with families to find the best strategy for their children."

Leukemia is the most common pediatric cancer. The study focuses on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the most life-threatening form of leukemia, which requires the most intensive chemotherapy.

While medical advances have improved survival in AML, chemotherapy results in significant side effects. Because killing cancer cells destroys a patient's white blood cells, the child is vulnerable to life-threatening bloodstream infections.

Because of this risk, some physicians prefer to keep children in the hospital for close monitoring. Other doctors worry that the prolonged post-chemotherapy hospital stay is too challenging for children and families, and advise patients to go home and return to the hospital if a fever occurs.

No one knows whether keeping the child in the hospital reduces the risk of infection or improves the odds that the child will undergo the next course of chemotherapy on schedule.

The study, entitled "Home or Away from Home" will compare physician-directed and patient-centered outcomes in two groups of patients--those who stay and those who go home. Covering nearly 400 patients from the participating children's hospitals, the study will measure outcomes, including bloodstream infection and chemotherapy delays.

The researchers will also perform in-person interviews with patients and caregivers, and carry out quality-of-life surveys. To help include patient and family concerns, the study team will call on family consultants, staff members of a cancer advocacy foundation and the members of the Patient Advocacy Committee of the Children's Oncology Group, a national collaborative research organization representing pediatric cancer centers in the U.S. and Canada.

"We are very excited about this highly collaborative study that we hope will help us improve our care for children with acute myeloid leukemia," added Aplenc.

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The PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund research to provide patients, caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information they need to make better-informed healthcare decisions. More information is available at http://www.pcori.org

About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 535-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
An international research team has simplified the steps to create highly efficient silicon solar cells by applying a new mix of materials to a standard design. Arrays of solar cells are used in solar panels to convert sunlight to electricity.

The special blend of materials--which could also prove useful in semiconductor components--eliminates the need for a process known as doping that steers the device's properties by introducing foreign atoms to its electrical contacts. This doping process adds complexity to the device and can degrade its performance.

"The solar cell industry is driven by the need to reduce costs and increase performance," said James Bullock, the lead author of the study, published this week in Nature Energy. Bullock participated in the study as a visiting researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley.

"If you look at the architecture of the solar cell we made, it is very simple," said Bullock, of Australian National University (ANU). "That simplicity can translate to reduced cost."

Other scientists from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, ANU and The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) also participated in the study.

Bullock added, "Conventional silicon solar cells use a process called impurity doping, which does bring about a number of limitations that are making further progress increasingly difficult."

Most of today's solar cells use crystalline silicon wafers. The wafer itself, and sometimes the layers deposited on the wafer, are doped with atoms that either have electrons to spare when they bond with silicon atoms, or alternatively generate electron deficiencies, or "holes." In both cases, this doping enhances electrical conductivity.

In these devices, two types of dopant atoms are required at the solar cell's electrical contacts to regulate how the electrons and holes travel in a solar cell so that sunlight is efficiently converted to electrical current that flows out of the cell.

Crystalline silicon-based solar cells with doped contacts can exceed 20 percent efficiency--meaning more than 20 percent of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. A dopant-free silicon cell had not previously exceeded 14 percent efficiency.

The new study, though, demonstrated a dopant-free silicon cell, referred to as a DASH cell (dopant free asymmetric heterocontact), with an average efficiency above 19 percent. This increased efficiency is a product of the new materials and a simple coating process for layers on the top and bottom of the device. Researchers showed it's possible to create their solar cell in just seven steps.

In this study, the research team used a crystalline silicon core (or wafer) and applied layers of dopant-free type of silicon called amorphous silicon.

Then, they applied ultrathin coatings of a material called molybdenum oxide, also known as moly oxide, at the sun-facing side of the solar cell, and lithium fluoride at the bottom surface. The two layers, having thicknesses of tens of nanometers, act as dopant-free contacts for holes and electrons, respectively.

"Moly oxide and lithium fluoride have properties that make them ideal for dopant-free electrical contacts," said Ali Javey, program leader of Electronic Materials at Berkeley Lab and a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.

Both materials are transparent, and they have complementary electronic structures that are well-suited for solar cells.

"They were previously explored for other types of devices, but they were not carefully explored by the crystalline silicon solar cell community," said Javey, the lead senior author of the study.

Javey noted that his group had discovered the utility of moly oxide as an efficient hole contact for crystalline silicon solar cells a couple of years ago. "It has a lot of defects, and these defects are critical and important for the arising properties. These are good defects," he said.

Stefaan de Wolf, another author who is team leader for crystalline silicon research at EPFL in Neuchatel, Switzerland, said, "We have adapted the technology in our solar cell manufacturing platform at EPFL and found out that these moly oxide layers work extremely well when optimized and used in combination with thin amorphous layer of silicon on crystalline wafers. They allow amazing variations of our standard approach."

In the study, the team identified lithium fluoride as a good candidate for electron contacts to crystalline silicon coated with a thin amorphous layer. That layer complements the moly oxide layer for hole contacts.

The team used a room-temperature technique called thermal evaporation to deposit the layers of lithium fluoride and moly oxide for the new solar cell. There are many other materials that the research teams hopes to test to see if they can improve the cell's efficiency.

Javey said there is also promise for adapting the material mix used in the solar cell study to improve the performance of semiconductor transistors. "There's a critical need to reduce the contact resistance in transistors so we're trying to see if this can help."

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Some off the work in this study was performed at The Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Berkeley Lab.

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science, Bay Area Photovoltaics Consortium (BAPVC); the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a DOE Energy Innovation Hub; Office federal de l'energie (OFEN); the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the CSEM PV-center.

More information about Ali Javey's research is available here: http://nano.eecs.berkeley.edu/.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
IC 1613 is a dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). This VST image [1] shows the galaxy's unconventional beauty, all scattered stars and bright pink gas, in great detail.

German astronomer Max Wolf discovered IC 1613's faint glow in 1906. In 1928, his compatriot Walter Baade used the more powerful 2.5-metre telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California to successfully make out its individual stars. From these observations, astronomers figured out that the galaxy must be quite close to the Milky Way, as it is only possible to resolve single pinprick-like stars in the very nearest galaxies to us.

Astronomers have since confirmed that IC 1613 is indeed a member of the Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies that includes our home galaxy, the Milky Way. IC 1613 itself lies just over 2.3 million light-years away from us. It is relatively well-studied due to its proximity; astronomers have found it to be an irregular dwarf that lacks many of the features, such as a starry disc, found in some other diminutive galaxies.

However, what IC 1613 lacks in form, it makes up for in tidiness. We know IC 1613's distance to a remarkably high precision, partly due to the unusually low levels of dust lying both within the galaxy and along the line of sight from the Milky Way -- something that enables much clearer observations [2].

The second reason we know the distance to IC 1613 so precisely is that the galaxy hosts a number of notable stars of two types: Cepheid variables and RR Lyrae variables [3]. Both types of star rhythmically pulsate, growing characteristically bigger and brighter at fixed intervals (eso1311 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1311/ ).

As we know from our daily lives on Earth, shining objects such as light bulbs or candle flames appear dimmer the further they are away from us. Astronomers can use this simple piece of logic to figure out exactly how far away things are in the Universe-- so long as they know how bright they really are, referred to as their intrinsic brightness.

Cepheid and RR Lyrae variables have the special property that their period of brightening and dimming is linked directly to their intrinsic brightness. So, by measuring how quickly they fluctuate astronomers can work out their intrinsic brightness. They can then compare these values to their apparent measured brightness and work out how far away they must be to appear as dim as they do.

Stars of known intrinsic brightness can act like standard candles, as astronomers say, much like how a candle with a specific brightness would act as a good gauge of distance intervals based on the observed brightness of its flame's flicker.

Using standard candles -- such as the variable stars within IC 1613 and the less-common Type Ia supernova explosions, which can seen across far greater cosmic distances -- astronomers have pieced together a cosmic distance ladder, reaching deeper and deeper into space.

Decades ago, IC 1613 helped astronomers work out how to utilise variable stars to chart the Universe's grand expanse. Not bad for a little, shapeless galaxy.

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Notes

[1] OmegaCAM is a 32-CCD, 256-million-pixel camera mounted on the 2.6-metre VLT Survey Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. Click here - http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/search/?ranking=0&release_id=&minimum_size=0&description=&published_until_year=0&published_until_month=0&title=&instrument=46&subject_name=&credit=&published_until_day=0&published_since_day=0&published_since_month=0&id=&published_since_year=0 to view more images taken by OmegaCAM.

[2] Cosmic dust is made of various heavier elements, such as carbon and iron, as well as larger, grainier molecules. Not only does dust block out light, making dust-shrouded objects harder to see, it also preferentially scatters bluer light. As a result, cosmic dust makes objects appear redder when seen through our telescopes than they are in reality. Astronomers can factor out this reddening (http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/I/Interstellar+Reddening) when studying objects. Still, the less reddening, the more precise an observation is likely to be.

[3] Other than the two Magellanic Clouds, IC 1613 is the only irregular dwarf galaxy in the Local Group in which RR Lyrae type variable stars have been identified.

More information

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world's largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".

Links

* Photos taken with the VST - http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/search/?adv=&facility=62

* Images of the VST - http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/search/?adv=&subject_name=VLT%20Survey%20Telescope

Contacts

Richard Hook

ESO Public Information Officer

Garching bei Munchen, Germany

Tel: +49 89 3200 6655

Cell: +49 151 1537 3591

Email: rhook@eso.org
Death rates from leukaemia among people of all ages in Europe are falling, according to the latest predictions for European cancer deaths in 2016, published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Wednesday).

The study shows that falls in leukaemia death rates will be greatest among children and young adults of both sexes. Between 2009 and 2016 death rates from leukaemia among children aged 0-14 will fall by 38% in boys and 20% in girls, and by 26% and 22% in young men and women respectively, aged between 15-44. Among men and women aged 45-69 the death rates will fall by 19%.

The authors of the study say that improvements in management, multi-drug chemotherapy, immunotherapies, stem cell transplants, radiotherapy and treatments that have less toxic side-effects have all contributed to the improvement in survival from leukaemia. However, some leukaemias remain hard to treat successfully, particularly those that are more common in adults and the elderly.

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is most frequent in children, adolescents and young adults, and it has a five-year survival rate of over 90%. Stem cell transplants and new chemotherapy treatments have improved survival in acute myelogenous leukaemia, which is relatively common in adults and the elderly. However, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), which is more common in the elderly, is difficult to cure, although long-term survival has been achieved in chronic myeloid leukaemia due to the introduction of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (drugs that block signals promoting cancer cell growth).

Carlo La Vecchia (MD), Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan (Italy), one of the study authors, said: "Predictions of death rates from leukaemia are complicated by the fact that leukaemias are a varied collection of blood cancers, with some being more treatable than others. However, the important falls in overall death rates from this group of diseases are very encouraging and are a testament to the hard work of researchers and clinicians in developing and implementing better diagnosis and treatments. We do not understand much about the causes of leukaemias, and so more research is needed in this area."

The study by researchers in Italy, Switzerland and the USA looked at cancer death rates in the EU 28 member states as a whole and also in the six largest countries - France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK - for all cancers, and, individually, for stomach, intestines, pancreas, lung, prostate, breast, uterus (including cervix) and leukaemias for men and women. This is the sixth consecutive year the researchers have published these predictions and there are encouraging downward trends in deaths from most cancers.

Since 2011 there has been a fall in total cancer death rates in the EU [2] of 8% in men and 3% in women. In 2016 the predicted age standardised rate of deaths [3] in men will be 133.5 per 100,000 of the population and 85.2 per 100,000 in women. As the number of elderly people in Europe is increasing, the actual number of deaths will rise from 734,259 in 2011 to 753,600 in men in 2016, and from 580,528 to 605,900 in women, making a total of nearly 1,359,500 deaths predicted for 2016. However, Professor La Vecchia said: "The absolute numbers of cancer deaths are likely to level off in the future."

He continued: "Although we are seeing declining death rates, the number of new cases of cancer are increasing, placing a growing burden on national health services, and so governments should be aware of this and plan for it."

In men, death rates from lung, colorectal and prostate cancer are predicted to fall by 11%, 5% and 8% respectively since 2011. In women, death rates from breast and colorectal cancer will fall by 8% and 7% respectively, but lung and pancreatic cancer rates will rise by 5% and 4%; in 2016 the death rates from lung cancer in Europe will be 14.4 per 100,000 women (compared to 13.51 in 2011) and 5.6 per 100,000 for pancreatic cancer (compared to 5.39 in 2011).

However, the picture varies from country to country. For instance, among the six largest countries, although the actual numbers of female deaths from lung cancer will still be the highest in the UK in 2016 than in the other large countries (at 16,400), the rate per 100,000 women has started to fall (from 20.15 per 100,000 in 2013 to 19.37 predicted in 2016), while death rates are still rising in the other countries.

Professor La Vecchia said: "There is a moderate fall in deaths rates in female lung cancer in the UK, although UK rates are still higher than in other EU countries, except Denmark, as British women started to smoke earlier. Rates of deaths for all ages are still comparatively high, but they are levelling off, while rates for the young generation of UK women are lower than in most other large EU countries."

Co-author, Fabio Levi (MD), Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, (Switzerland), said: "We need effective tobacco control in European women in order for overall rates to level off at around 15 to 17 per 100,000, and so that subsequently we can start seeing a fall in female lung cancer rates in Europe."

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Notes:

[1] "European cancer mortality predictions for the year 2016: with focus on leukaemias", by M. Malvezzi, G. Carioli, P. Bertuccio, T. Rosso, P. Boffetta, F. Levi, C. La Vecchia and E. Negri. Annals of Oncology. doi:10.1093/annonc/mdw022

[2] The EU now has 28 member states, with Croatia joining in 2013. Updated data from the World Health Organization has made it possible to obtain accurate EU age standardised death rates for 2011, against which the predictions for 2016 can be compared.

[3] Age-standardised rates per 100,000 of the population reflect the annual probability of dying.
New Rochelle, NY, Jan. 27, 2016--The first use of soft robotics in the deep sea describes the non-destructive interaction and sampling of fragile organisms in their natural environments. The design and grasping capabilities of these innovative soft robotic grippers and their successful use at deep sea depths are described in an article in Soft Robotics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free for download on the Soft Robotics website until Feb. 27, 2016.

In "Soft Robotic Grippers for Biological Sampling on Deep Reefs," Kevin Gallaway and colleagues, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett, Haifa University, Israel, City University of New York, and American Museum of Natural History, NY, examine the potential for applying soft robotic technology to explore deep sea coral reefs, where diverse organisms with unique genetic adaptations reside. The researchers describe the ability to use compliant materials matched to natural environments to construct the robot's gripper arms, enabling the robot to interact with the soft, fragile organisms without harming or altering them.

"This paper is a milestone for soft robotic manipulation because it is one of the first to show the advantages of this approach in a real world application," says Editor-in-Chief Barry A. Trimmer, PhD, who directs the Neuromechanics and Biomimetic Devices Laboratory at Tufts University (Medford, MA). "We know there is a lot more to do before soft robots are commonplace but this paper is certainly leading the way."

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About the Journal

Soft Robotics, a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly online with Open Access options and in print, combines advances in biomedical engineering, biomechanics, mathematical modeling, biopolymer chemistry, computer science, and tissue engineering to present new approaches to the creation of robotic technology and devices that can undergo dramatic changes in shape and size in order to adapt to various environments. Led by Editor-in-Chief Barry A. Trimmer, PhD, and a distinguished team of Associate Editors, the Journal provides the latest research and developments on topics such as soft material creation, characterization, and modeling; flexible and degradable electronics; soft actuators and sensors; control and simulation of highly deformable structures; biomechanics and control of soft animals and tissues; biohybrid devices and living machines; and design and fabrication of conformable machines. Tables of content and a sample issue can be viewed on the Soft Robotics website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science, technology, and biomedical research, including 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing and Tissue Engineering. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.
The first females of a scarcely known chameleon species from Northeast Madagascar have been described. Because of lack of genetic data, X-ray micro-computed tomography scans of the chameleon's head were used for species assignment. Regrettably, the habitats of this and many other chameleon species are highly threatened by the ongoing deforestation in Madagascar. The study is published in the open-access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.

Chameleons belong to the most popular animals of Madagascar and have been quite intensively studied in the past. However, many new species are still being discovered and described, and several species are only known by a single or a few specimens. Likewise, the chameleon species Calumma vatosoa from northeastern Madagascar was described in 2001 based on a single male. The identity of females of this species has been unclear until now.

Recently, the PhD student David Proetzel of the herpetology section of the Zoologische Staatssammlung Munchen (ZSM), Germany, found specimens of female chameleons in the collection of the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, that looked similar to Calumma vatosoa. The problem was, how to prove this? The specimens from Frankfurt were collected back in 1933 and therefore, the extraction of DNA for genetic analysis was not possible anymore.

Researchers of the ZSM have been using X-ray micro-computed tomography scans for a few years to study the internal morphology of organisms in a non-invasive way.

"With the help of Micro-CT you can investigate even the skeleton of very valuable samples like holotypes without destroying them," explains David Proetzel.

"In chameleons the morphology of the skeleton, especially the skull, contains important characteristics that distinguish different species," explains the researcher. "Here, the comparison of the skulls of the male and the female showed that they belong to the same chameleon species. With the help of modern technology we could describe females of Calumma vatosoa for the first time, and add another distribution locality of this species."

"The habitats of many chameleon species, and not only, are highly threatened by the ongoing deforestation in Madagascar and we need rapidly to expand our knowledge about the biodiversity, so that suitable conservation measures can be taken," he stresses.

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Original source:

Proetzel D, Ruthensteiner B, Glaw F (2016) No longer single! Description of female Calumma vatosoa (Squamata, Chamaeleonidae) including a review of the species and its systematic position. Zoosystematics and Evolution, 92 (1): 13-21. doi: 10.3897/zse.92.6464
It's hard to imagine life today without computers, but computer technology was not warmly welcomed in Germany following World War II.

That's one conclusion Assistant Professor Corinna Schlombs, who teaches history in Rochester Institute of Technology's College of Liberal Arts, found while studying productivity and trans-Atlantic technology transfer and their impact following the war. Her research was made possible with a $90,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

"The American government was bringing computers to western Germany after World War II as productivity machines to help raise their standard of living," Schlombs said. "Germany looked at them as automation, machines that would bring poverty and technological unemployment. It's a very different reception than what Americans had expected."

Her findings will be part of a book she's writing about productivity and culture. The grant is enabling her to take time away from teaching to focus on her research for the book, which she expects to complete this summer. In the course of her research, she has traveled to Munich, Koblenz and Sindelfingen in her native Germany, the National Archives near Washington, D.C., and the Walter Reuther Library in Detroit. A trip to Frankfurt, Germany, is also planned.

"Computer history for a long time was about nuts and bolts, how they worked," Schlombs said. "Since the mid-'90s, historians started asking more questions about human relations, how technology was embedded in our lives and culture, who works with these computers, who maintained them... In other countries, computer development had a much different background. In Britain, for example, there was far less government funding for computing research than in the U.S., and in Germany, government funding early on included small and medium computers. That has influenced how computers have developed in other countries."

Computer technology transfer followed the Marshall Plan initiative to help rebuild European economies following World War II. The United States was the leader in computer technology in the 1950s, as the production of the vacuum tubes needed to make computers work were allied controlled, she said.

The first electronic computers were brought to Europe in 1956. One of them, a Univac, was the size of a room and was flown overseas, so it wasn't damaged by salty ocean air during a long ship voyage.

The Germans constructed a building specifically for the massive computer, leaving one wall open to accommodate its delivery and installation.

"Americans brought in this notion of productivity which was highly debated in Germany," Schlombs said. "As it turned out, unemployment rates did not skyrocket as they did in the U.S."

Schlombs plans to create a website to go with her book so other historians can use the resources she's found. "It will help us reflect how we will deal with productivity in the United States in the future. Our way is not the only way. Technology carries the values of the people who created it."

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HOUSTON - (Jan. 27, 2016) - Common coaxial cables could be made 50 percent lighter with a new nanotube-based outer conductor developed by Rice University scientists.

The Rice lab of Professor Matteo Pasquali has developed a coating that could replace the tin-coated copper braid that transmits the signal and shields the cable from electromagnetic interference. The metal braid is the heaviest component in modern coaxial data cables.

The research appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Replacing the outer conductor with Rice's flexible, high-performance coating would benefit airplanes and spacecraft, in which the weight and strength of data-carrying cables are significant factors in performance.

Rice research scientist Francesca Mirri, lead author of the paper, made three versions of the new cable by varying the carbon-nanotube thickness of the coating. She found that the thickest, about 90 microns - approximately the width of the average human hair - met military-grade standards for shielding and was also the most robust; it handled 10,000 bending cycles with no detrimental effect on the cable performance.

"Current coaxial cables have to use a thick metal braid to meet the mechanical requirements and appropriate conductance," Mirri said. "Our cable meets military standards, but we're able to supply the strength and flexibility without the bulk."

Coaxial cables consist of four elements: a conductive copper core, an electrically insulating polymer sheath, an outer conductor and a polymer jacket. The Rice lab replaced only the outer conductor by coating sheathed cores with a solution of carbon nanotubes in chlorosulfonic acid.

Compared with earlier attempts to use carbon nanotubes in cables, this method yields a more uniform conductor and has higher throughput, Pasquali said. "This is one of the few cases where you can have your cake and eat it, too," he said. "We obtained better processing and improved performance."

Replacing the braided metal conductor with the nanotube coating eliminated 97 percent of the component's mass, Mirri said.

She said the lab is working on a method to scale up production. The lab is drawing on its experience in producing high-performance nanotube-based fibers.

"It's a very similar process," Mirri said. "We just need to substitute the exit of the fiber extrusion setup with a wire-coating die. These are high-throughput processes currently used in the polymer industry to make a lot of commercial products. The Air Force seems very interested in this technology, and we are currently working on a Small Business Innovation Research project with the Air Force Research Laboratory to see how far we can take it."

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Co-authors are graduate students Robert Headrick and Amram Bengio and alumni April Choi and Yimin Luo, all of Rice; Nathan Orloff, Aaron Forster, Angela Hight Walker, Paul Butler and Kalman Migler of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Rana Ashkar of NIST, the University of Maryland and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Christian Long of NIST and the University of Maryland.

Pasquali is the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, chair of the Department of Chemistry and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of chemistry.

The research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Force Research Laboratories, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, NIST, the National Science Foundation and a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship.

David Ruth

713-348-6327

david@rice.edu

Mike Williams

713-348-6728

mikewilliams@rice.edu

Read the abstract at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.5b11600

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2016/01/27/nano-coating-makes-coaxial-cables-lighter/

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews

Related Materials:

Complex Flows of Complex Fluids (Pasquali Lab): https://pasquali.rice.edu/home/

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: http://naturalsciences.rice.edu

Video: Spinning nanotube fibers at Rice University: https://youtu.be/4XDJC64tDR0

Images for download:

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/0201_COAXIAL-1-WEB.jpg

Rice University research scientist Francesca Mirri holds a standard coaxial data cable (bottom) and a new cable with an outer conductor of carbon nanotubes. Replacing the braided metal outer conductor with a conductive nanotube coating makes the cable 50 percent lighter, Mirri said. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/0201_COAXIAL-2-WEB.jpg

A coating of carbon nanotubes, seen through a clear jacket, replaces a braided metal outer conductor in an otherwise standard coaxial data cable. Rice University scientists designed the cable to save weight for aerospace applications. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/0201_COAXIAL-3-web.jpg

Replacing the braided outer conductor in coaxial data cables with a coat of conductive carbon nanotubes saves significant weight, according to Rice University researchers. (Credit: Pasquali Lab/Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,910 undergraduates and 2,809 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for best quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceUniversity.
Los Angeles, CA (January 27, 2016) A new review of research out today outlines roles and recommendations for peers, parents, schools and new media platforms to stop bullying. This review was published in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) journal published in partnership with SAGE Publishing.

"The fact that there are so many ways to intervene provides hope for stopping bullying and its negative effects," wrote study author Dr. Amy Bellmore. "Yet even with a mound of evidence about what may work, we still face many challenges to implementing these changes, as the most effective approaches are likely to require action on many fronts."

Building on more than 20 years of bullying research, Bellmore constructs a multi-tiered approach to stop bullying, with recommendations for four stakeholders:

Peers Higher levels of bullying are reported in classrooms where victims are not defended by their peers than in classrooms where students intervene on the victims' behalf. Students can defend victims by sharing their emotional reactions, offering support and helping to shape peaceful alternatives. In addition, students should be informed that adults can help stop bullying only when they see or hear about specific instances. Though students have a role in stopping bullying, the overall process must be instigated and supported by adults within school and at home.

Parents Children that have warm relationships with their parents are less likely to become bullies or victims, compared to children that have neglectful or abusive parents. To help reduce bullying, schools or communities could provide training in relevant parental skills to help facilitate communication about incidents of bullying occurring in schools. Such training may also be effective for parents whose children are not at risk of becoming bullies or being bullied as it could help parents encourage their children to defend their peers.

Schools The school-based anti-bullying programs that have been most successful at reducing bullying and victimization are those that last longer, have more intensive interventions and many components, such as school rules, discipline, playground supervision and parent informational and training meetings. When deciding on whether or not to implement anti-bullying programs, schools should view their efforts to reduce bullying as promoting a positive school climate for all students as focusing on wide-ranging benefits will help motivate schools that are concerned about limited time and resources. Schools should select bullying intervention programs that have evidence of success, implement the programs with caution and evaluate success within their specific context and among their students.

New Media Platforms Law enforcement may not get involved in cyberbullying unless it results in such behavior as harassment and threats and schools are still seeking guidance in determining their level of involvement; however, the public opinion is that companies running social media platforms have some culpability. To ensure the safety of its users, some large social media sites offer resource pages dedicated to bullying, instructions for blocking accounts of bullies and reporting mechanisms for users to report online abuse.

"Bullying is not a harmless rite of passage for children," continued Bellmore. "Bullying is destructive to youth who experience it directly, to the schools in which it resides, and to the broader public."

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Find out more by reading the full article, "Whose Responsibility Is It to Stop Bullying?" in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. For an embargoed copy of the full text, please email tiffany.medina@sagepub.com.

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 900 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. A growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company's continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. http://www.sagepublishing.com

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences is an annual publication of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) that presents original research and scientific reviews relevant to public policy. This annual will allow scientists to share research that can help build sound policies, allow policymakers to provide feedback to the scientific community regarding research that could address societal challenges, and encourage the scientific community to build models that seriously consider implementation to address the needs of society. http://bbs.sagepub.com/
HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS (1/27/16) -- A study funded by the National Science Foundation will explore if prison visitation can help reduce recidivism rates and whether there are gender, racial, and ethnic differences in these patterns.

Melinda Tasca of Sam Houston State University and colleagues from Arizona State University and Florida State University will collaborate on the study, which is based on all inmates released from the Arizona Department of Corrections between Fiscal Year 2011 and 2013 as well as interviews with a sample of offenders from all levels of custody.

"Prison visitation has emerged as a promising tool to protect against the potential criminogenic effects of imprisonment," said Tasca, Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at SHSU. "In particular, visitation may serve to create, mend or maintain the social ties that are critical for successful offender reentry into the community."

The study will examine levels of support received in prison and whether support varies by inmates' gender and race/ethnicity. The study will result in recommendations for policy and practice on prison visitation.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,561,400 men and women incarcerated in federal and state prisons at the end of 2014.

Tasca serves as principal investigator for the Arizona Prison Visitation Project (APVP), a mixed-method study aimed at advancing knowledge on prison visitation and its effects on recidivism, misconduct, and self-harm. Her dissertation, funded by the National Institute of Justice, examined the emotional and behavioral responses of children who visited their parents in prison.

Tasca, who recently was elected as a member of the American Society of Criminology Division of Corrections and Sentencing Executive Board, specializes in the consequences of incarceration for prisoners, children and families, correctional policy, and the intersection of race and gender within these contexts. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals as Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Violence Against Women, and Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice.

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LA JOLLA, CA - January 27, 2016 - Philanthropist and businessman Samuel Yin of Taiwan has given $12.8 million to The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) to help fund construction of a new building complex on the La Jolla campus. The gift also secures additional funding from a previous challenge grant, bringing the total in private donations for the project to more than $25 million.

"I would like to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Yin for this transformative gift," said TSRI's CEO Peter Schultz. "Together with a generous matching grant from an anonymous donor, the support provides critical anchor funding for the construction of cutting-edge new laboratories."

"We are extremely grateful for Dr. Yin's gift," said TSRI President Steve Kay, "and pleased that the donation calls on us to honor one of our most esteemed faculty members, Chi-Huey Wong, who is Professor of Chemistry at TSRI and President of Academia Sinica, the highest academic institution in Taiwan. At Dr. Yin's request, it is our pleasure to designate one of the future new buildings the 'Chi-Huey Wong Chemical Biology Laboratory.'"

"I am most grateful for this unexpected honor," said Wong, whose research tackles major problems in biology and medicine--especially those associated with cancer and infectious diseases--through a focus on synthesis of glycoproteins, vaccines and other biologically active molecules. "Dr. Yin is a visionary committed to making a better world, and I am doubly appreciative of the recognition because it is at the behest of this great man."

Yin is Chairman of the Ruentex Group and Chief Development Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Engineer of Ruentex Construction & Development. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University and a Professor at Peking University, where he advises PhD students.

In the West, Yin is perhaps best known as the founder of the Tang Prizes. The Tang Prizes, biennial awards first given in 2014, are selected by panels of judges convened by Academia Sinica for research excellence in Sustainable Development, Biopharmaceutical Science, Sinology, and Rule of Law.

Yin is also a long-time supporter of scholarships for the study of Chinese literature and history, programs in higher education, and a number of foundations he launched to serve people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

His latest gift to TSRI makes possible a new state-of-the-art building complex that will help consolidate research labs on the La Jolla campus, encourage collaboration among the institute's scientists and strengthen ongoing programs at the intersection of biology and chemistry.

"It is my great honor to contribute to the building of new state-of-the-art laboratories, which will further enable major advances in biomedical research at TSRI," said Yin.

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For more information on Yin, see the Tang Prize website. For more information on Wong, see his TSRI faculty web page. For more information on the building project, see TSRI's Philanthropy website.
Conventional methods of stock monitoring are unsuitable for certain fish species. For example, the infestation of an area with invasive Ponto-Caspian gobies cannot be identified in time by standard methods. Researchers at the University of Basel have developed a simple, effective and cost-efficient test for these introduced non-native fish, they report in the magazine PLOS ONE.

Gobies from the Black and Caspian Sea are spreading along the shipping routes in Central Europe and North America. They have been present in the Swiss part of the Rhine for about four years and already dominate the bottom of the stream in the region of Basel. So far, they have not advanced further than the water power plant in Rheinfelden, but a continuing expansion seems inevitable.

Current methods of fish monitoring are not suited to adequately measure the spreading of Ponto-Caspian gobies as they are labor-intensive and not sufficiently sensitive. Accordingly, infestations of an area with gobies are often only discovered when they have reached high densities and efforts of containment remain futile. Researchers of the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Basel have now developed a test that allows for the detection of Ponto-Caspian gobies in streaming and stagnant water.

Measuring the environmental DNA

With a commercially available, though slightly modified, water column sampler, water samples are taken from the bottom of the water body, where invasive gobies live. Via feces or scales, the fish release so-called environmental DNA into the stream. The water samples are then analyzed for traces of this so-called eDNA in the lab. The test developed at the University of Basel reacts exclusively to the genetic material of Ponto-Caspian gobies, but not to domestic fish species.

The procedure is less time and cost-intensive than angling, and the samples can even be drawn by untrained individuals. Unlike electrofishing, the method does not impact the fish fauna and can consequently be used in protected zones and breeding grounds.

First test for lotic water

Five species of invasive gobies populate wide areas of freshwater and brackish waters in Central Europe -- the species that is most common to the region around Basel, Neogobius melanostomus, even figures among the 100 worst invaders in Europe. "Our test is one of the first approaches that targets a specific fish species and detects it successfully in flowing freshwater" says the study's lead author, Dr. Irene Adrian-Kalchhauser. "We hope that our work contributes to establishing eDNA as a standard method in European water resource management. Similar tests have been used for a few years to track the expansion of the Asian carp in the United States."

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A study of 35 families led by a UC San Francisco psychiatric researcher showed for the first time that the structure of the brain circuitry known as the corticolimbic system is more likely to be passed down from mothers to daughters than from mothers to sons or from fathers to children of either gender. The corticolimbic system governs emotional regulation and processing and plays a role in mood disorders, including depression.

A large body of human clinical research indicates a strong association in depression between mothers and daughters, while many previous animal studies have shown that female offspring are more likely than males to show changes in emotion-associated brain structures in response to maternal prenatal stress. Until now, however, there have been few studies that attempted to link the two streams of research, said lead author Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, a UCSF associate professor of psychiatry.

The finding does not mean that mothers are necessarily responsible for their daughters' depression, Hoeft said. "Many factors play a role in depression - genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment, and life experiences, to name only three. Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it.

"But this is the first study to bridge animal and human clinical research and show a possible matrilineal transmission of human corticolimbic circuitry, which has been implicated in depression, by scanning both parents and offspring," said Hoeft, who directs the UCSF Hoeft Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience. "It opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational transmission patterns in the human brain."

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience on January 27, 2016.

The corticolimbic system includes the amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Hoeft and her research team used non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure grey matter volume (GMV) in the corticolimbic systems of parents and their biological offspring from 35 healthy families. None of the family members were diagnosed with depression. The association between mothers' and daughters' corticolimbic GMV was significantly greater than that between mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters.

The study is the first to use MRI in both parents and their children to study intergenerational transmission of the pattern of brain structures, said Hoeft. "This gives us a potential new tool to better understand depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as most conditions seem to show intergenerational transmission patterns," she said. "Anxiety, autism, addition, schizophrenia, dyslexia, you name it - brain patterns inherited from both mothers and fathers have an impact on just about all of them."

One limitation of the study, said Hoeft, is that it does not differentiate between the potential effects of genetics, prenatal conditions and postnatal conditions on the inheritance of brain structures. She hopes that a new study funded by the UCSF Academic Senate, which is just getting under way, will address that shortcoming.

Hoeft and her team will use MRI to study brain structures in families where children have been conceived and delivered using different types of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The researchers will image the brains of parents and children in families where the birth mother was implanted with a donor egg; families where a surrogate was implanted with the biological mother's egg; and families where the mother was implanted with her own fertilized egg in a procedure known as homologous IVF.

"With donor eggs, there is no maternal genetic input, but there is maternal prenatal and postnatal influence," Hoeft explained. "In gestational surrogacy, there is genetic and postnatal input from the biological mother, but no prenatal input. With homologous IVF, there are maternal genetic, prenatal and postnatal influences. Comparison of these three groups allows us to control for potential effects of the IVF procedure itself."

By studying these different family groups, she said, "we will for the very first time be able to examine, and hopefully distinguish between, the effects of genetics, prenatal environment and postnatal environment on brain function, structure, and cognitive function."

While Hoeft and her team are funded to look at corticolimbic circuitry, "this does not preclude our looking at other brain systems," she said. "We will be examining the language network, the reward system, and different networks implicated in psychosis. We will cast a wide net, gain a lot of information and maximize this fantastic opportunity."

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Other authors of the current study are Roeland Hancock, PhD, and Tony Yang, MD, PhD, of UCSF; Bun Yamagata, MD, PhD, and Masaru Mimura, MD, PhD, of Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan; Kou Murayama, PhD, of the University of Reading, Reading, UK; Jessica Black, PhD, of Boston College; and Allan Reiss, MD, of Stanford University.

The study was supported by funds from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the UCSF Dyslexia Center, a UCSF Academic Senate Award, a UCSF-CCC Neuroscience Fellowship and the Dennis & Shannon Wong - DSEA '88 Foundation.

About UCSF: UCSF is a leading university dedicated to transforming health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. Founded in 1864 as a medical college, UCSF now includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with world-renowned programs in the biological sciences, a preeminent biomedical research enterprise and top-tier hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals. Please visit http://www.ucsf.edu/news.
For more than 100 years, marine biologists have sought an understanding of how the minute larvae of marine invertebrate animals - cast out into the vast ocean - find and settle in the right ecological settings for survival, growth and reproduction. A grant, totaling more than $870,000, from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of Hawai'i (UH) will support research to understand the mechanisms by which marine biofilm bacteria - bacteria that live in slime films on the surfaces of all objects submerged in the sea - induce the settling of larvae of marine invertebrate animals.

In the last two decades there has been growing recognition that bacteria are likely the factor that causes many free-floating larvae to settle and transform, yet very little is known of the diversity of bacteria that stimulate larvae to settle, and less is known of the mechanisms through which these bacteria act.

With this grant, a UH research team will focus on a small tube worm, Hydroides elegans, that settles onto marine surfaces in warm ocean waters around the world where they form masses of hard, calcified tubes. The team, led by professor Michael Hadfield at the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, Pacific Biosciences Research Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH-Manoa (UHM), includes larval biologist Brian Nedved (Kewalo Marine Laboratory), microbiologist Rosie Alegado (Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education, SOEST, UHM), and natural products chemist Shugeng Cao (Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy, UH-Hilo).

"We have isolated specific strains of bacteria from marine biofilms that induce the worm's larvae to settle and metamorphose. Using these bacteria, our goals are to determine what factors produced by the bacteria cause the larvae to stop swimming, stick to the surface and undergo the dramatic physical changes that make up the process of metamorphosis," said Hadfield.

During the two-year project, Hadfield and colleagues will also study the larva's receptor or response system. Understanding the relationship between the tube worm and bacteria will shed light on the complex phenomena that lead to the establishment and maintenance of healthy marine seafloor communities throughout the ocean.

Larvae are very particular in selecting surfaces on which they will settle - which is why different communities of invertebrate animals live on sandy beaches, rocky coasts, pilings and other surfaces in enclosed harbors.

"For many - probably most - of these animals, biofilm bacteria are the key. This research holds promise to reveal the basis for differential larval settlement in the sea," said Hadfield.

The current project arose from long-running research in Hadfield's laboratory. In the lab, Hadfield has studied the biology of marine larvae and long ago established Hydroides elegans as a useful model organism for studying larval settlement and "biofouling" - the accumulation of undesirable organisms on marine surfaces.

Larva of barnacles, tube worms, oysters, and other organisms settle on ship hulls, pilings and in the pipes used to draw cooling water into electrical plants and factories resulting in millions of dollars in loss annually in these maritime trades. Knowing why larvae settle in particular places is an important first step in ensuring they do not settle where they are not wanted.

Moreover this work may have real-world application to areas such as mariculture, where the goal is to successfully raise larvae of clams and oysters and have them settle on a particular surface, as well as for the development of methods to deter larval recruitment onto the hulls of ships and other marine surfaces.

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This news release is available in French.

No autism is alike. This is also true of most mental disorders. "We now understand that each gene mutation has a specific effect, which adds to other effects to draw a unique picture of the disease in each patient," said Dr. Sebastien Jacquemont, a geneticist who sees on a daily basis children who are referred to him for a potential genetic diagnosis of mental disorder such as autism. To understand this additive effect, a precise quantification of the effect each identified mutation has in these patients is necessary. "We have just discovered, for example, that a missing copy of a region in chromosome 16 results in a 25-point intelligence quotient (IQ) drop in carriers. Addition of a copy in the same genomic region results in an approximate 16-point drop. Strangely enough, even if carriers show much differentiated sets of symptoms - and sometimes no symptoms at all - the specific effect of these two mutations seems to remain the same," said Jacquemont, who is a clinical researcher at CHU Sainte-Justine, the mother-child hospital affiliated to University of Montreal, where he is also professor. Together with international collaborators, the scientist authored an article in the renowned scientific journal JAMA Psychiatry.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers measured the intelligence of 700 family members who had at least one relative carrying the same genetic mutation on chromosome 16, which is known to predispose to autistic spectrum disorders. Even in study participants whose IQ was considered to be normal, the researchers found a substantial 25 points IQ drop induced by 16p11.2 gene deletions. Indeed, it is quite common for mutation carriers to show no mental health problems.

"Intellectual faculties are the sum of many factors, the majority of which are genetic and inherited from parents. Each first-degree relative - parents and offspring, siblings - has 50% of their genetic code in common and therefore 50% of the genetic factors that partially determine cognition," said Dr. Jacquemont. Studying families thus enabled the researchers to measure the factors that combine with the mutations which effects they wanted to quantify. "For example, depending on the additional factors involved, a 25-point IQ drop can determine whether or not a person has crossed the threshold of 'intellectual disability."

Further studies are needed to quantify the effect of all mutations associated with autism and characterize the additive effects that lead to this psychiatric disorder. "No single mutation can cause the whole set of clinical signs shown by these patients," concludes the scientist.

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About the study

The article "Defining the effect of the 16p11.2 duplication on cognition, behavior, and medical comorbidities" was published online on December 2, 2015 in JAMA Psychiatry. Dr. Sebastien Jacquemont is a clinician-geneticist at CHU Sainte-Justine and associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Montreal. His work is financially supported through a career award from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Current approaches to reconstructing past climate by using tree-ring data need to be improved on so that they can better take uncertainty into account, new research led out of New Zealand's University of Otago suggests.

Tree growth rings are commonly used as climate proxies because they can be well-dated and the width of each ring is influenced by the climatic conditions of the year it grew in.

In a paper appearing in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, statistics and tree ring researchers from Otago, the US and UK examined the statistical methods and procedures commonly used to reconstruct historic climate variables from tree-ring data.

The research was led by Dr Matthew Schofield of Otago's Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His co-authors on the paper are departmental colleague Professor Richard Barker, Professor Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, Director of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia Professor Ed Cook, and Emeritus Professor Keith Briffa of the University of East Anglia, UK.

Dr Schofield says that their approach was to explore two areas where currently used approaches may not adequately account for these uncertainties. The first area involves the pre-processing of tree-ring data to remove non-climate related factors believed to be largely unrelated to climate effects on tree growth. Such factors include tree age, as the older a tree gets the less wide its rings tend to grow.

"This is convenient to do and the resulting tree-ring 'chronologies' are treated as relating to only the climate variables of interest. However, it assumes perfect removal of the non-climatic effects from the tree-ring data and ignores any uncertainty in removing this information," Dr Schofield says.

The second area of uncertainty the researchers studied involves the particular modelling assumptions used in order to reconstruct climate from tree rings. Many of the assumptions are default choices, often chosen for convenience or manageability.

"This has made it difficult to evaluate how sensitive reconstructions are to alternate modelling assumptions," he says.

To test this sensitivity, the researchers developed a unified statistical modelling approach using Bayesian inference that simultaneously accounts for non-climatic and climatic variability.

The team reconstructed summer temperature in Northern Sweden between 1496 and 1912 from ring measurements of 121 Scots Pine trees.

They found that competing models fit the Scots Pine data equally well but still led to substantially different predictions of historical temperature due to the differing assumptions underlying each model.

While the periods of relatively warmer and cooler temperatures were robust between models, the magnitude of the resulting temperatures was highly dependent on the model being used.

This suggests that there is less certainty than implied by a reconstruction developed using any one set of assumptions.

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As wind energy development blossoms in Canada and around the world, opposition at the community level is challenging the viability of the industry. A new study with research from the University of Waterloo, published in Nature Energy, identifies four major factors leading to disputes over wind farms, and offers recommendations on avoiding disagreements.

The research project focuses on the province of Ontario. It lists socially mediated health concerns, distribution of financial benefits, lack of meaningful engagement and failure to treat landscape concerns seriously, as the core stumbling blocks to a community's acceptance of wind energy development.

"There has been debate over whether reported negative health outcomes in nearby residents are valid" says Tanya Christidis, a PhD researcher at Waterloo's School of Planning, who contributed to the study by looking specifically at the health impacts section in the publication. "Regardless of whether or not people are sick from wind turbine noise or from social factors they deserve to be acknowledged if renewables are going to become a key part of our future energy mix."

The study makes recommendations for all four identified major areas of dispute.

For community members who feel the distribution of financial benefits is unfair, it recommends the province, which is constitutionally responsible for managing all energy resources within its territory, mandate more community-level decision-making and ownership. It also recommends increased transparency and compensation distribution for everyone in a community.

The study suggests that Ontario's approval process does not encourage enough meaningful engagement. Acknowledging that this is difficult to mandate, its recommendation is that improvements in this area should still be pursued.

Finally, the study recommends greater consideration for the impact on landscapes, and in particular changes to the cultural landscapes of areas with wind energy development.

Over the past decade global wind energy capacity has increased eight-fold. Ontario, with a population of close to 13 million people and land area of 1.1 million km2 is approximately equivalent in population, size and contracted wind energy capacity (5,700 vs 6, 200 MW) 2 to Sweden and Norway combined.

Research for the report was assembled by researchers, from Waterloo. York University, Western University, Queen's University, University of Ottawa as well as Trent University. The study is unique as it also includes a community representative and a wind industry advocate engaged in the Ontario wind energy industry.

About the University of Waterloo

University of Waterloo is Canada's top innovation university. With more than 36,000 students we are home to the world's largest co-operative education system of its kind. Our unmatched entrepreneurial culture, combined with an intensive focus on research, powers one of the top innovation hubs in the world. Find out more at uwaterloo.ca

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The first ever measurement of the temperature of electrons in a nanoelectronic device a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero was demonstrated in a joint research project performed by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, Lancaster University, and Aivon Ltd. The team managed to make the electrons in a circuit on a silicon chip colder than had previously been achieved.

Although it has long been possible to cool samples of bulk metals even below 1 millikelvin, it has proved very difficult to transfer this temperature to electrons in small electronic devices, mainly because the interaction between the conducting electrons and the crystal lattice becomes extremely weak at low temperatures. By combining state-of-the-art micro and nanofabrication and pioneering measurement approaches the research team realized ultralow electron temperatures reaching 3.7 millikelvin in a nanoelectronic electron tunnelling device. A scientific article on the subject was published in Nature Communications on Jan. 27, 2016.

This breakthrough paves the way towards sub-millikelvin nanoelectronic circuits and is another step on the way to develop new quantum technologies including quantum computers and sensors. Quantum technologies use quantum mechanical effects to outperform any possible technology based only on classical physics. In general, many high sensitivity magnetic field sensors and radiation detectors require low temperatures simply to reduce detrimental thermal noise.

This work marks the creation of a key enabling technology which will facilitate R&D in nanoscience, solid-state physics, materials science and quantum technologies. The demonstrated nanoelectronic device is a so-called primary thermometer, i.e., a thermometer which requires no calibration. This makes the technology very attractive for low temperature instrumentation applications and metrology.

The breakthrough was made possible by bringing together internationally-leading groups and experts each of whom have their own track record of achievements in the fields of nanotechnologies and high performance sensors (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd), custom low-noise electronics (Aivon Ltd, Finland) and ultralow temperature refrigeration and device characterization (Ultra Low Temperature Physics group and Quantum Technology Centre at Lancaster).

VTT is looking into possibilities together with BlueFors Cryogenics to commercialise the primary thermometer component.

Dr Mika Prunnila, Nanoelectronics Research Team Leader at VTT, said: "Creating a new measurement tool for calibration-free thermometry is a big step forward. This is an important device for quantum machines which need the low temperature environment in order to work and the device is available right now for benchmarking different systems."

Dr Rich Haley, Head of Ultra Low Temperature Physics at Lancaster, said: "This is a notable achievement in that the team has finally broken through the 4 millikelvin barrier, which has been the record in such structures for over 15 years."

Dr Jon Prance of the Lancaster Quantum Technology Centre said: "Not only have we measured the coldest ever nanoelectronics temperature, but we have also demonstrated techniques which open the door to even lower temperatures."

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Article: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS10455

Further information:

Dr Mika Prunnila, Research Team Leader, Nanoelectronics

358-0-40-537-8910

mika.prunnila@vtt.fi

http://www.vtt.fi\

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd

Dr Richard P Haley, Head of Ultra Low Temperature Physics

44-0-1524-593224

e-mail. r.haley@lancaster.ac.uk

Lancaster University

Further information on VTT:

Olli Ernvall

Senior Vice President, Communications

358-20-722-6747

olli.ernvall@vtt.fi

http://www.vtt.fi

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd is the leading research and technology company in the Nordic countries. We use our research and knowledge to provide expert services for our domestic and international customers and partners, and for both private and public sectors. We use 4,000,000 hours of brainpower a year to develop new technological solutions. VTT in social media: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter @VTTFinland.
NEW YORK (January 27, 2016) - WCS announced today that a team of scientists discovered a new species of chameleon in Tanzania.

The brown and green chameleon with scattered blue spots was found in four montane forest patches in the Udzungwa Mountains and Southern Highlands. The species, Kinyongia msuyae, is named for Charles A. Msuya, a pioneer of Tanzanian herpetology who collected the first known specimen attributable to this species and has spent most of his life studying Tanzania's reptiles and amphibians.

The chameleon is described in the journal Acta Herpetologica 10(2): 111-120, 2015. Authors of the study include: Michele Menegon of the Museo delle Scienze in Trento, Italy; Simon P. Loader of the University of Roehampton in London; Tim Davenport and Sophy Machaga of WCS; Kim M. Howell of the University of Dar es Salaam; Colin R. Tilbury of South African National Biodiversity Institute; and Krystal A. Tolley University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

The authors say the discovery sheds more light on a region called the Makambako Gap, a supposed zoological barrier between the distinct faunas of the Southern Highlands and Eastern Arc Mountains that Davenport and WCS have long argued doesn't exist. Evidence from this new species points to even closer biological affinities between the Udzungwa and the Livingstone Mountains of the Southern Highlands.

Tanzania's Southern Highlands has emerged as a hotbed of new discoveries in recent years. In 2003, WCS discovered the kipunji - a species of primate that turned out to be an entirely new genus - a first for Africa since 1923. And in 2012, WCS found Matilda's horned viper, a new variety of snake.

"Along with our discoveries of the Kipunji, Matilda's horned viper and other reptiles and frogs, this new chameleon really seals the deal as regards the boundary of the Eastern Arcs," said Tim Davenport, Director of WCS's Tanzania Program and co-discoverer of the new chameleon. "It is very clear now that the so-called Makambako Gap doesn't exist zoologically, and that the Southern Highlands is every bit as biodiverse and endemic-rich as all other Eastern Arc Mountains. With its own unique fauna and flora the region thus warrants as much protection as we can possibly afford it."

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WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society)

MISSION: WCS saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature. To achieve our mission, WCS, based at the Bronx Zoo, harnesses the power of its Global Conservation Program in nearly 60 nations and in all the world's oceans and its five wildlife parks in New York City, visited by 4 million people annually. WCS combines its expertise in the field, zoos, and aquarium to achieve its conservation mission. Visit: newsroom.wcs.org Follow: @WCSNewsroom. For more information: 347-840-1242.
In collaboration with PacBio, scientists at San Diego Zoo Global and the University of Hawaii, Hilo have fully sequenced the genome of the 'Alala, or Hawaiian crow and shared the results of this effort at the recent annual Plant and Animal Genomics XXIV Conference in San Diego. The 'Alala was once reduced to a population of about 20 birds, and the sequencing of the species' genome will be important to track any genetic challenges that may occur due to the reduced genetic diversity now seen in the species.

"In our efforts to bring species back from the brink of extinction, we have worked with a number of species that have gone through a genetic bottleneck, possibly reducing the genetic fitness of the species due to the limitations of the remaining genetic diversity," said Oliver Ryder, Ph.D., geneticist for San Diego Zoo Global. "Knowing in detail the genetic pattern of the 'Alala will help us to understand challenges faced by this species as it makes its recovery."

The sequencing of its genome comes at the beginning of what is hoped to be an important year for the Hawaiian crow. Conservationists hope to reintroduce this species into prepared habitat on the island of Hawaii later this year. The 'Alala has been extinct in the wild since 2002, preserved only in the program run by San Diego Zoo Global at their bird centers in Hawaii.

"We have been working for many years to build up a large enough -- and genetically diverse enough -- population to allow us to begin putting the 'Alala back in the wild," said Bryce Masuda, conservation program manager of the San Diego Zoo's Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program. "We have achieved our goal, and are now preparing to release birds into the wild in 2016."

The program's goal has been to increase the 'Alala flock to 75 or more individuals before releasing them into their native forests on the island of Hawaii. The 'Alala is a member of the crow family that was brought to the brink of extinction by loss of habitat, and introduced predators and diseases. For species that have been at the brink of extinction, genetic fitness and the information stored in their genome may prove an important tool in the fight to save them.

"Learning more about the genome of the species can help us understand more about how that species will interact with and fit back into its native habitat," said Jolene Sutton, assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, Hilo. "Through scientific collaboration with PacBio, we now have a map of 'Alala DNA that could prove critical to their long term recovery. We are absolutely thrilled with the quality of the sequencing, and we have already identified several gene locations that we think could have a big influence on reintroduction success."

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Bringing species back from the brink of extinction is the goal of San Diego Zoo Global. As a leader in conservation, the work of San Diego Zoo Global includes on-site wildlife conservation efforts (representing both plants and animals) at the San Diego Zoo, San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, as well as international field programs on six continents. The work of these entities is inspiring children through the San Diego Zoo Kids network, reaching out through the Internet and in children's hospitals nationwide. The work of San Diego Zoo Global is made possible by the San Diego Zoo Global Wildlife Conservancy and is supported in part by the Foundation of San Diego Zoo Global.


Take action now: Contact United Methodist officials and urge them to overturn their ban on Discovery Institute.

On the United Methodist Church and its ban on intelligent design, we have so far presented primarily reporting that should disappoint thoughtful members of that church. But heres some good news for a change  an influential United Methodist who gets it:

The UMCs 2016 General Conference takes place this May in Portland, Oregon, where Discovery Institute, a think-tank that advocates for intelligent design, asked to have an exhibit table. That request, however, was rejected by officials who cite, among other things, a conflict with their social principles.

John Lomperis, a conference delegate and the United Methodist director at the Institute on Religion & Democracy (IRD), notes a striking contrast.

These very same leaders that are excluding the very mild-mannered Discovery Institute have on the other hand not been willing to take a firm stand against letting outside militant gay rights groups from forcibly taking over business meetings of the General Conference, Lomperis points out.

He goes on to tell OneNewsNow that while the IRD will be allowed to have an exhibit table, his organization was actually rejected from being a paid sponsor of the General Conference. Staples, the office supply store, is being allowed to be a paid sponsor.

Groups like Discovery Institute and my group get treated as weve got to be careful of them because theyre bringing a particular agenda,' Lomperis laments. But the fact is so many of the denominations general agencies are run by activist liberals who are very actively and openly opposed to our denominations biblical doctrine and values and use that greater access they have to advocate against the churchs own values. So, thats very unfortunate to see this unfair treatment, he concludes.

Note, Lomperis is a conference delegate. Does the UMC hierarchy listen to its members or simply dismiss dissenters as bastards? The General Conference is not till May, so that remains to be seen. Find our full coverage of the ID ban here.

Image credit:  stephaniemurton / Dollar Photo Club.
Take action now: Contact United Methodist officials and urge them to overturn their ban on Discovery Institute.

Weve stressed the way the United Methodist ban on intelligent design reveals a propensity for censorship, group think, and surrender to materialism on the part of that church and similar groups, religious and otherwise, that should know better. But in a BreakPoint commentary, John Stonestreet puts the matter in a different but related perspective: the crackup of liberal Christianity.

He begins by pointing out that claims of Christian demographic disaster are really about the mainline churches:

The big religion story of last year? Christianity is in decline in America. The sensational headlines were based on data from the Pew Research Center. But as Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Research observed in the USA Today, the folks writing the headlines must not have read the study. It turns out that almost all of the reported decline took place not among evangelicals, but in mainline Protestant denominations, which have been in freefall spiritually and numerically for decades. And no wonder. The Christianity preached in many of them sounds more like the Huffington Post opinion pages than the Bible.

From my outsiders perspective, that sounds about right. Stonestreet gives an assortment of illustrations, including the United Methodist minister who call[s] on God to bless abortion clinics. About the UMCs move to block us as an exhibitor at their General Conference:

Faithful believers in the United Methodist Church might wonder why UMC leadership recently rejected an application from Discovery Institute to exhibit at their upcoming General Conference. Discovery, the think-tank at the heart of the Intelligent Design movement, appealed the decision, insisting that it isnt a creationist front-group intent on teaching religion in schools. [Intelligent Design], Discovery said, is a science- not a faith-based idea. And though compatible with Christianity, it doesnt rely on the Bible or even identify the intelligent Designer. In response, United Methodist leaders reiterated the ban and refused to offer any further information, striking an odd discord with their denominations slogan: Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors. Evidently the UMC is open to all ideas  except the idea that creation gives evidence of its Creator.

Theres a kind of derangement here  the Esau syndrome, Id call it. You see the same thing in other contexts; politics, for example. Inheritors of a great tradition are so indifferent or even shamed by it that they will go to nearly any ends to secure validation from representatives of ideologies  in this case, materialism, secularism  that stand opposed to their heritage. Desperately seeking approval, in a heartbeat theyll sell their birthright for that famous mess of pottage.

Image: Esau and the Mess of Pottage, by Jan Victors [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Plans for a visa surcharge on British employers recruiting people from outside the European Union should not apply to the whole of the UK, it is claimed.While there is concern in England about the number of skilled professional workers coming from abroad and worried that they could be taking jobs from British people, businesses in Scotland say they need more migrants.  Jamie Kerr, an immigration lawyer, has called for an emergency summit of Scottish business leaders to discuss the situation and examine whether Scotland can be exempt.The surcharge has been endorsed by the UK's Migration Advisory Committee and its recommendation for a 5,000 surcharge per employee is expected to come into force later this year.The Committeeis recommendation that the minimum salary for skilled overseas workers should be increased from 20,800 to 30,000 is also causing concern.Kerr and business leaders in Scotland believe that these changes to the visa rules for workers from outside of the EU could stunt Scotlandis economic growth and damage the country's competitiveness on the international stage.The calls come at a time when Scottish political leaders have not given up on the idea of another referendum on independence from the UK. During campaigning for the last vote it was argued that contrary to the view of the UK government, Scotland actually needs more migrant workers."These rules are extremely concerning and there is no question that they will stunt Scotlandis economic growth. They will act as a barrier to Scotland attracting the international skills and talent that our businesses need to compete internationally and will ultimately cripple our current economic plans to innovate, internationalise, grow and attract inward investment," said Kerr."Their only aim is to cut immigration numbers without regard for the consequences that will flow from that. It will affect the public and private sectors; business large and small as well as all of Scotland's key sectors from engineering to digital, food and drink to healthcare, the third sector and the creative sectors," he explained."We all need to come together to tell the UK government that Scotland's economic growth comes before meaningless targets around migration numbers," he added.
WAUSEON, Ohio  New farmers and first-time farm buyers can learn how to improve their farm profitability during a four-part workshop series in February offered by the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at Ohio State University.

The NextGen Farm Management Series runs Feb. 2, 9, 16 and 23, from 6:30 p.m.-9 p.m. at the Robert Fulton Agriculture Center, 8770 state Route 108, in Wauseon.

The event will focus on cost control and farm profitability, said Eric Richer, an Ohio State University Extension educator.

Although the series targets next generation farmers, couples and first-time farm buyers, any farmer is welcome to participate to learn more about how to improve their farm operation, Richer said. The meetings will also provide participants the information they need to analyze and benchmark their farm enterprises against others in the Midwest.

Professional speakers

The series is taught by OSU Extension educators and specialists, as well as agriculture industry professionals. The series will feature guest speakers as well as a preparation session on completing a FinPack financial analysis package for the farm, Richer said.

At the end of the series, each farmer will have the opportunity to submit at an additional cost, the FinPack analysis to benchmark their farm against others in the Corn Belt or use the financial statement data on their own, he said.

Registration for the series is $40 per person or per couple by Jan. 29. The cost includes materials and light refreshments.

For more information, contact Richer at 419-337-9210, or richer.5@osu.edu. Details about the event, including a downloadable, mailable registration form and a link for online registration, can be found at fulton.osu.edu.

Feb. 2: Making Your Records Do More than the Tax Return, and An Introduction to the FinPack Financial Analysis System and Balance Sheets.

Feb. 9: Developing Your Farms Business Plan, and Completing the Income Statement and Cost Analysis.

Feb. 16: Grain Marketing and Crop Insurance Strategies, and Calculating Each Enterprises Cost of Production.

Feb. 23: Options for Paying Members in a Family Farm LLC, and Completing the Ending Balance Sheet and Making Adjustments.
Shropshire

A Full-Time position is available for an assistant herdsperson on a family dairy farm in mid Shropshire. We have a 250 dairy herd rearing own replacements together with a b...
New report backs farmers' calls for better waste crime policies
"We don't think there's any plans for CBH to become huge in the fertiliser market at this point in time, but there are other things where costs are creeping up and getting to a level where they present a major part of the budget.
The state of Missouri may soon require a unique application of its ethics laws. A state lawmaker recently proposed a bill seeking to require lobbyists to disclose any sexual relations they may have with lawmakers (or their staffers).

The bill seeks to achieve this through an expansion of the definition of gifts under the current state ethics laws.

Representative Bart Korman proposed the bill as part of the Missouri legislatures push for ethical reform after a series of high profile sex scandals rocked the state in 2015. He said he intended the bill to discourage sexual relations between lobbyists and government officials.

I hope it deters any of that activity, Korman said, but that if activity does occur, its at least transparent.

Missouris current ethics law mandates disclosure of expenditures made on behalf of public or elected local officials that fall into certain categories, including gifts. It also requires monthly disclosures by registered lobbyists, which are made publicly available. This new provision differs from the other categories of gifts because it does not require a dollar valuation for reporting.

We firmly believe in the importance of a rigorous ethics regime (see here, here, here and here), but several aspects of this proposal are concerning.

First, the bill gives no guidance as to what sexual acts or relations require disclosure. We can only imagine the rigorous analysis that may be required in order to determine what exactly must be disclosed. Rep. Kormans guidance on this point has been as clear as mud: the law would presumably cover general sexual relations in order to avoid the many shades of grey involved in sexual relations. Got it.

Second, requiring a disclosure of this nature is, ahem, rather invasive. The bill requires private citizens to publicly disclose personal information about their sexual history. This violation of personal privacy raises obvious and significant legal concerns.

In addition to questions of privacy, the disclosure requirements create a potential for manipulation and extortion. Lobbyists could threaten lawmakers with disclosing real or fake relations unless the lawmaker acts pursuant to the lobbyists wishes. The bill does not provide a way to confirm the veracity of the disclosure, besides the lobbyists word. The potential for abuse is staggering.

While even the author of the bill recognizes that it stands little chance of being passed, its introduction reminds us that very real concerns exist regarding improper influence in government. We applaud legitimate attempts to strengthen state ethics laws, particularly at a time when most state regimes are notoriously lax.

In this case, however, Missouri needs to go back to the drawing board.

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Jessica Tillipman is a Senior Editor of the FCPA Blog and Assistant Dean at The George Washington Univeristy Law School. You can follow her on Twitter at @jtillipman.

Whitney Suflas is a 2L at The George Washington University Law School.
Image courtesy of SBM OffshoreThe chief executive of SBM Offshore, Bruno Chabas, and supervisory board member Sietze Hepkema, have reached an out of court settlement with Brazilian authorities tied to the ongoing Petrobras corruption probe, with small fines and no admission of guilt.

In a statement posted on its website Monday, SBM Offshore said it learned on January 15 that a judge in Brazil referred the allegations against both men back to the public prosecutor to propose an out-of-court settlement, on a no admission of guilt basis.

Chabas and Hepkema both accepted the offer and agreed to pay fines of about $60,000 each.

Netherlands-based SBM Offshore said it will pay both fines.

The company said this type of settlement is common for misdemeanors of the kind alleged but didnt provide more details about the allegations.

The statement Monday said,

The company emphasizes that this settlement does not involve an admission of guilt and remains of the opinion that the accusations are without merit. However, SBM Offshore also believes that accepting the settlement offers a pragmatic opportunity to expeditiously resolve this matter that avoids long and costly legal proceedings and allows the companys management team to concentrate on the business.

In the statement, SBMs supervisory board also affirmed its support for Chabas and Hepkema.

The company provides floating production systems for the oil and gas industry. Petrobras, Brazils state-owned energy giant, is one of its biggest customers.

In late 2014, SBM paid $240 million to Dutch authorities to settle allegations that it bribed government officials in Angola, Brazil, and Equatorial Guinea. The U.S. Justice Department dropped an investigation into the company when the Dutch settlement was announced.

The company said an internal investigation in 2014 found certain red flags in Brazil but did not find any credible evidence that the company or the companys agent made improper payments to government officials (including state company employees).

The plea deal in Brazil must still be confirmed by the judge handling the case. He hasnt set the confirmation date.

The company said last month it was seeking clarification about reports that Chabas and Hepkema appeared on a list of current and former Petrobras executives, sales agents, and SBM Offshore executives who may be prosecuted in Brazil for the Petrobras corruption scandal.

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A version of this post first appeared on Petro Global News and is republshed here with permission.
Mark Wright is determined to fly out to South Africa "as much as" he can when his wife Michelle Keegan films 'Our Girl'.

Michelle Keegan and Mark Wright

The 'Take Me Out: The Gossip' presenter is not looking forward to spending six months away from his spouse when she jets off in a few weeks to shoot her lead role in the army drama, but he's keen to visit her as often as possible.

Speaking exclusively to BANG Showbiz, he explained: "She's going away to South Africa. I'm going to miss her but I'm going to go out there as much as I can. I'm going to miss her, I really am but I'm excited for her."

And, when he's not hopping on a plane to see his wife, whom he married last year following three years of dating, Mark will be busy shooting the 'Take Me Out' spin-off with Laura Jackson.

He said: "We've got four more episodes coming up on 'Take Me Out: The Gossip', which are explosive. I don't think I'd ever go back to 'The Only Way is Essex' [the show that made him famous] - I just want to stick to presenting now."

Meanwhile, although Mark is devastated to part with Michelle for almost half a year for her new acting gig, the brunette beauty can't wait to get stuck into her role of Georgia Lane.

She said: "I'm so excited about it; I can't wait to get over there and start filming. I've known about it for so long."
David Gilmour will perform in Poland with a 30-piece orchestra on June 25.

David Gilmour

The 69-year-old guitarist will continue his 'Rattle That Lock' world tour and make a stop in Europe including a special concert at Freedom Square, Wroclaw, Poland, as part of the city's celebrations as European Capital of Culture 2016.

The evening will be different to any of David's previous gigs as it will include the orchestral section conducted by his long-term collaborator Zbigniew Preisner and will also see a guest appearance by Polish pianist Leszek Mozdzer.

It will be the former Pink Floyd musicians first concert in the European country in a decade.

The 'Wish You Were Here' hitmaker last performed at the Gdansk shipyards, to celebrate the founding of the Solidarity trade union, a show became the successful live album and DVD 'Live In Gdansk'.

The tour is in support of his fourth solo studio LP 'Rattle That Lock, which was released in September and has been a global success, reaching number one in 11 countries, including Poland and the UK.

David will bring the tour to North America and Canada next, where he will perform sell-out March/April shows in Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago and New York.

Tickets for the Freedom Square date are on sale now available from:

sklep.ebilet.pl/en/Event/Details/2251799813685250
Stooshe are in talks to support a "major" male artist who they are not allowed to name.

Stooshe

The girl group - consisting of Karis Anderson, Alexandra Buggs and Courtney Rumbold - are set to return with their second album this year and are already planning on touring with a mystery "massive" artist.

Karis exclusively told BANG Showbiz: "There is a massive name that we can't name. Fingers crossed it happens. If it does it will be major like, major. A certain male."

Meanwhile, the girls have been to songwriting camp getting songs together for their forthcoming record.

The 'Lock Down' trio have been out of the spotlight since 2012, but have been busy behind the scenes writing and managing their own career since splitting from their label in 2013 and are currently putting the finishing touches to the record

Asked if the album is finished, Karis said: "Nearly. It was half way finished and we've just had a writing camp and got a whole influx of new songs that we've written. So now we are like we need to do more recording and get it all done. We are going to have a lot of choices to choose from, which with our last album we didn't have."

The follow-up to their debut 'London with the Lights On' is expected to drop this summer.
Is Valentines' Day an opportunity to express how you really feel about someone or an absurdly overrated greetings card day?

Valentine's Day on Female First

My team at The Fresh Start Guy recently conducted a quick poll and discovered that Valentine's Day generates some strong points of view for most if not all the men questioned. A man's current relationship status will clearly have an effect on his viewpoint and some of the single guys we spoke with hardly notice Valentine's Day or pay it much attention. Of the men we interviewed, it was a 50/50 split regarding whether they were single or in a relationship.

Here's the gist of what they said.

The standout opinion from the majority of the men that took part, was that the true meaning of Valentine's Day has long since been lost. What started out with sincere sentiments of couples celebrating their love for each other has morphed into a completely different modern day experience. They believe that we now have an absurdly overrated commercial opportunity for flower shops, restaurants and greetings card manufacturers to charge over-inflated prices, which they are expected to pay willingly. They also feel the added pressure to shower their lady with romantic gifts and displays of affection on a Hollywood movie scale. And all of this on one specific day, rather than on a day of their own choosing.

The pressure is clearly on and truly being felt.

I guess most men do not like having to bow to societal pressure, however, and most interestingly, 100% of the guys in the poll said that their desire to keep their partner happy would override their opinion on the subject and that they would genuinely make the effort for her on the day. Many said that to veer away from most women's' expectations of the day would be seen as far too risky, because of the response it would most likely provoke. Most of the guys said that they would genuinely try to avoid upsetting their partner and, not surprisingly, wished to avoid having to deal with the fallout.

One shared viewpoint was that Valentine's Day can be a great opportunity to express your feelings for your lover at a time when everyone is doing the same. That way you can avoid looking like an idiot on your own! Romantic gestures made in public by men are generally few and far between, some men said, and on any other day of the year these guys can feel embarrassed about being too affectionate in public. There is much less risk of embarrassing yourself by simply going along with the crowd and the sentiments of Valentine's Day. One of the men interviewed said that it is rather like admitting to using moisturiser. Many men use it, however most do not wish to bring attention to the fact that they do.

The majority of the men also suggested that they are really not fussed about the day for themselves and that they ultimately wanted to make the effort for their partner because of the perceived importance of the day to women. Valentine's Day is clearly seen by most men as a 'ladies day', with the emphasis clearly on the man to make the effort. Half of those polled highlighted that there is little emphasis for the lady to reciprocate and also accept that it is the nature of the day.

In my experience with helping men find love, I see that virtually all guys have good intentions for being in a relationship. They want to treat their partner well, spoil them at times and make them feel loved and appreciated. The problem is that doing this in a creative and original way does not come naturally to every man. They then fall to the behest of what society may throw at them on days such as Valentine's. If they then leave it too late and time pressures are added as well, it can prove annoying, frustrating and stressful to come up with the goods. The easy way out then becomes the flowers, restaurants and greetings cards at over-inflated prices. A bit of a vicious cycle? One thing is for sure - the one day designed to celebrate love may have a lot to answer for when it comes to the male psyche.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Manj Weerasekera is an expert in personal communication and a Life Skills Mentor to high net worth individuals (including some honoured by her Majesty the Queen).

Manj has a world-class skills set that includes Humanistic Neuro-Linguistic Psychology, Performance Mindset Conditioning and the Psychology of Attention. He has worked with the House of Lords, co-produced a series of BBC audio books, and is author of the forthcoming book, 'The Divorced Man's Guide to Finding Mrs. Right: The 5 Deadly Mistakes Divorced Men Make & How to Avoid Them' and 'The Merlin Approach '.

Website http://www.freshstartguy.com/

Twitter name @FreshStartGuy

FB Page URL https://www.facebook.com/freshstartguy
Britain's Duchess of Cambridge will join the 75th birthday celebrations of the RAF Air Cadets.

Britain's Duchess of Cambridge

The 34-year-old royal - who is the Air Commodore-in-Chief after being handed the honour by her grandfather-in-law, the Duke of Edinburgh - is set to make an appearance on February 7 to pay tribute to the organisation's successes.

To mark the occasion, Duchess Catherine will attend a service at St Clement Danes church on the Strand, which has RAF links, before joining guests at a reception at the nearby Royal Courts of Justice.

Meanwhile, Prince Philip was previously praised for his outstanding 63 years of service to the Air Cadets as Air Commodore-in-Chief by Air Commodore Dawn McCafferty.

She said at the time of his departure: "We will be forever grateful to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh for his outstanding commitment to the Air Training Corps over the decades. He is admired and respected by cadets and volunteers alike and we will miss his ready sense of humour and genuine interest in the development of the nation's youth.

"Her links to the RAF family are already well-established and her desire to support youth development is well recognised around the world."
Britain's Prince Charles was "honoured" to receive the European Union prize for Cultural Heritage on behalf of the newly-opened Prince of Wales Studios.

Britain's Prince Charles

The 67-year-old royal was handed the award by Europa Nostra for the pottery studios in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent which have been revamped thanks to The Prince's Regeneration Trust, of which the Prince is a founding member and a patron.

He said: "I can't remember how many years ago I first met the former, eminent MP for Burslem, but I do remember she advanced on me determinedly - 'When are you coming to help Burslem?'

"I said I'd do my best and finally I have got here and I've been doing what I can to help little bits of Burslem. This project here is something, of which I could not be more proud, and the fact Europa Nostra have given it this award is an enormous honour to say the least. It is a great tribute to all of the people at the Prince's Regeneration Trust who have put so much effort into rescuing this place."

The Prince - who is heir to the throne - spoke of his "battle" to save the pottery factory, where the new studios sit beside and admits he is "hugely encouraged" by the build.

Speaking at the event, he added: "Twice we had to battle to save this place, but it would take a lot to prevent me in the determination of finding a way of saving and reusing these very special places.

"There are so many of them around the country, but his one here has demonstrated something very special in that it has also maintained the all important jobs of the important pottery industry which has a great history and a great tradition.

"For me today to be able to see these studios completed, having seen them right from the very beginning, and seeing the other studios and workshops occupied with all kinds of young people is hugely encouraging."
Indian garment exporters have called for simplifying key operational mechanisms in the export process under the new Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) announced last April.The Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) has asked the textiles ministry to simplify the policy's authorisation, inspection and classification norms, the Business Standard has reported.

Indian garment exporters have called for simplifying key operational mechanisms in the export process under the new Foreign Trade Policy (FTP)#

The AEPC's main request is the withdrawal of the need for a landing certificate for exported goods, required as proof to claim benefits under the Merchandise Exports from India Scheme (MEIS). Introduced in April 2015, the scheme aims to boost sagging exports, covering tariff lines for 5,012 items that earn duty credits.Exporters claim that getting the documents to show proof of landing at the destination country entails cost and delay. According to the AEPC, electronic shipping bills should be sufficient for declaration of intent. While filing the said bills, exporters are required to declare they are claiming rewards under MEIS and to mark 'Y' in the reward item box. Recently, many had complained of inefficient Customs house agents inadvertently ticking 'N'. Thus, though the item in many cases was eligible, once an 'N' had been ticked, such shipping bills were not transmitted to the online system run by the directorate general of foreign trade (DGFT).To help exporters claim MEIS benefits in such cases, DGFT has allowed them to give physical copies of the shipping bills after filing an MEIS application to its regional authorities. However, this relaxation is restricted to exports made in April and May in 2015. The AEPC has demanded an extension of this facility.The AECP has asked the government to emulate long-term garment exporting rival Bangladesh to facilitate easier transportation and avoid corruption by allowing vehicles carrying finished export merchandise and headed towards exit points like sea ports, airports and rail heads to display 'On Export Duty' signage. It has also asked for 'On Export Processing Duty' signage for vehicles carrying input material for production of export merchandise.It has also called for proper identification and classification of goods from the current challan system.To boost competitiveness, AEPC also wants the norms for advance authorisation for annual requirement be relaxed. Required for all duty exemption schemes, it has asked the authorisation be allowed for garment exporters only based on past performance.Earlier this month at the India International garment Fair (IIGF), AEPC Chairman Ashok G Rajani had called for a stimulus from the government, saying the garment export industry can potentially generate 2,200 jobs on every investment of Rs 30 crore. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena declared open the newly built apparel factory of the Hirdaramani group at Puthukkudiyiruppu in the country 's north, saying it would help in resolving rising unemployment among the youth in the region, according to a report in news.lk, the Lankan official government news portal.At the opening ceremony, President Sirisena said that the government has planned to launch new investment projects in the North where people are struggling with unemployment and poverty due to the civil war that lasted for nearly 30 years. The apparel factory provides employment to nearly 1,000 people in the district.

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena declared open the newly built apparel factory of the Hirdaramani group at Puthukkudiyiruppu in the#

He pointed out that many investment plans have been offered by many local and foreign investors to help resolve the unemployment problem among the youth in the North. The future of the country is with the youth and the country can be built with their strength, utilizing their energy and ensuring their democratic rights to build the nation, he said.The President exchanged views with the employees of the factory. Many of them requested the President to find their missing relatives, release the suspects under custody and about the shortcomings in development work. The President assured them to resolve all issues gradually, the report said. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
Walmart and Amazon, two of the leading retailers globally, are planning to invest more than Rs 2,000 crore to increase their network in India, according to media reports.

Amazon will be infusing Rs 1,696 crore through a rights issue into Amazon Seller Services, taking the total investment of the company in Amazon Seller Services to Rs 4,800 core in the past 12 months. The online retailer expects India to become its largest market outside the US surpassing UK, Germany, and Japan.

Walmart will also add funds valued at Rs 360 crore, according to an ROC filing. The retail giant plans to expand by opening about 50 stores in India at a time when it recently announced the closing of 269 stores in the US as a part of an exercise to actively manage its portfolio of assets.

Walmart and Amazon, two of the leading retailers globally, are planning to invest more than Rs 2,000 crore to increase their network in India,#

Walmart is learnt to be exploring ways to tie up with leading Indian e-commerce companies such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, ShopClues, Grofers and Bigbasket to tap the growing online retail opportunity.

Goldman Sachs has projected that Indian e-commerce will be a $100 billion market by 2020, from a single-digit figure now. (HO)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has reassured local and foreign investors of her government's commitment to facilitating the implementation of their pragmatic proposals and simplification of investment procedure for most productive use of their money.At the Bangladesh Investment and Policy Summit 2016 in Dhaka, she also said her government was going to establish the Bangladesh Development Authority to help their businesses flourish, according to an agency report Jointly organized by the Board of Investment (BoI), Business Initiative Leading Development (BUILD) and Prime Minister's Office (PMO), the summit drew more than 100 local and foreign investors."We're planning to establish 100 economic zones across the country . More than 30 sites have already been selected for them while foundation stones of 10 zones will be laid next month.""We achieved a 6.51 per cent GDP growth in the last financial year. During the previous five years, our average GDP growth was 6.2 per cent. We've been working to achieve 7 per cent GDP this year" she added.The PM noted that the ability to attract private investment, both foreign and local, has increased now.She said to identify private sector policy issues and resolve them in a systematic, research-backed and fact-based manner, the PMO has set up the Private Sector Development Policy Coordination Committee (PSDPCC).For long an RMG export powerhouse, Bangladesh is trying to break new ground to boost its GDP.The major opportunities for foreign investors in Bangladesh exist in the physical infrastructure sector, including gas and electricity generation, roads, highways and bridges, tertiary health care and pharmaceuticals, ports development, Hasina pointed out.

Assuring investors of security and profitability of investment, Hasina said this is the most opportune moment for dynamic investors and urged them to be part of Bangladesh's historic growth and development.



"This summit will give you the most appropriate platform to know Bangladesh's investment trend, policies and potential more concretely and systematically -- for seeing is believing," she told investors.

She said Public Private Partnership in infrastructure investment offers a new window of opportunity for investors while the existing Export Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones are being expanded and developed for competitive manufacturing in local and global markets.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has reassured local and foreign investors of her government's commitment to facilitating the implementation#

Wendy Jo Werner, country manager of the International Finance Corporation for Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, said the World Bank's private sector lending arm's annual investment in the country would reach $2 billion a year within a couple of years, from $650 million a year now. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
Bangladesh capital Dhaka is all set to host the 13th Dhaka International Textile and Garment Machinery Exhibition (DTG 2016), an international fair of leading brands in textiles and garment technology, machinery and parts from tomorrow.

Bangladesh Textile Mills Association (BTMA), Yorkers Trade and Marketing Service Company of Hong Kong Taiwan's exhibition management firm Chan Chao International Company are organising the fair which will be held in Bangabandhu International Conference Centre from January 28 to 31. The fair is open to visitors from 12pm to 8pm.

More than 1,000 textile equipment manufacturers from 34 countries, including Bangladesh, will display a variety of state-of-the-art textile and garment technologies and machinery, Tapan Chowdhury, president of BTMA, told reporters. He further added, The sector has established a strong backward linkage industry for the country's garment industry. As a result, the apparel sector has been able to keep up its growth momentum and remain sustainable.

Bangladesh capital Dhaka is all set to host the 13th Dhaka International Textile and Garment Machinery Exhibition (DTG 2016), an international fair#

Exhibitors will showcase the latest in textiles and apparel technology through 1,160 booths to spinners, weavers and knitters, said Judy Wang, an executive director of Chan Chao International Company. Exhibitors will showcase the latest in textiles and apparel technologies, machinery, parts, accessories and the latest market trends, to spinners, weavers and knitters.

Global brands such as Mayer & Cie, Pai Lung, Santoni, Shima Seiki, Stoll, Terrot, Picanol, M&R, Fong's, Groz-Beckert, Karl Mayer, LMW, Rieter, Saurer, Tajima and Toyota will display their products. Companies form major textile and garment machinery producing countries like Germany, Italy, China, Japan, Switzerland, etc will be showcasing their latest machinery and equipment at the show.

Last year's exhibition had 880 exhibitors, occupying 1060 booths, and attracting 37,005 local and international business visitors. The exhibitors sold machinery worth $220 million at the fair. (NA)

Fibre2fashion News Desk - India
A mobile app developed by a young computer engineer from Ahmedabad's Nirma University, has come as boon to powerloom weavers in Surat who now have an opportunity to transact business in a secure environment without worrying about fly-by-night operators.The app bridges the gap between the powerloom weavers and textile traders in the country's largest man-made fabric (MMF) hub, according to a report in The Times of India.

Twenty-year-old Pushpal Maheshwari calls his mobile application ConnecTex. The aim of this application is to make deals between traders, wholesalers and weavers of Surat's textile industry, faster and secure.



Around 300 weavers and traders from the city have joined the network application for doing business in a secure environment.



According to the report, the textile industry sees defaults of over Rs 200 crore every year with shady traders duping weavers. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
Civil society, academics and businesses generally want Thailand to join the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that was finalized last October, according to the Commerce Ministry. But they have also urged caution, telling policymakers to study the likely impact of TPP carefully before making any final decision.The Commerce Ministry has had meetings with businesses, non-profit organisations, academics and the farm and livestock sector over the past few months, and they mostly said Thailand should join the new the new trade bloc," said Commerce Vice-Minister Winichai Chaemchaeng, the Bangkok Post has reported."But we still need to hear comments from other parties, particularly in provincial areas where we are scheduled to hold meetings from February."Winichai said the business sector was particularly active in backing Thailand joining the TPP. The business sector says rice, sugar, frozen and processed shrimp, canned tuna, tapioca and starch, garments, gems and jewellery, pharmaceuticals, air transport, health tourism and direct sales would be most competitive if Thailand joined the pact.But farm operators have urged authorities to study the pros and cons, saying Thailand was not yet able to compete with TPP members in terms of production costs of animal feeds.They also urged the government to work out remedial measures for sectors that would be hit if Thailand joins the TPP.The TPP is a trade agreement among 12 countries led by the US and includes Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunei.

The 12 TPP members account for 40 per cent of Thailand's trade and 45 per cent of foreign direct investment (FDI) annually.



Thailand has free-trade agreements with most of the 12 countries except for the US, Canada and Mexico.



Exports to Canada and Mexico account for less than 1 per cent of exports, while FDI from the two countries account for less than 2 per cent of FDI. On the other hand, the US accounts for 8 per cent of direct investment flows into Thailand annually.



The largest potential impact from the agreement on Thailand will be greater competition in the US market from TPP members.



Exporters are concerned that Thai exports to the US will be less competitive than similar products from TPP members because tariffs charged on Thai products will be higher than those on products from TPP countries.



Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak said last month that Thailand was highly likely to join the new trade bloc. (SH)

Civil society, academics and businesses generally want Thailand to join the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that was finalized last October#

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
After seven years of research, the Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI) has come up with a ground breaking luminous fibre, Lumi Long, which glows in the dark. TTRI releasedLumi Long glow-in-the-dark fibre to the public this week.

After seven years of research, the Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI) has come up with a ground breaking luminous fibre, Lumi Long, which glows #

President of TTRI Bai Chi-chung said the fibre was named "Lumi Long" because it could glow for long periods of time. Its main fluorescent material is enveloped in thin fibres, and can emit light for up to six hours, by absorbing the surrounding light for 10 minutes, without use of any electricity or heat. The key feature of this fabric is that it is non-poisonous and emits no harmful radiation. It is washable and can also help save energy at night. Fabric made from this fibre is completely safe for human use and is also skin-friendly. The radiant characteristic of the fibre gives it a unique identity. The resultant fabric can be used to make clothing material, accessories, hats, scarves, underwear, socks, and sandals.The product description says, "Ever since the beginning of time, people have been afraid of darkness. This made the appearance of light particularly moving and surprising. Perhaps it was the fall of darkness that had prompted light, and created moments of wonder."Taiwan's textile industry used to be a global leader, a main driver pushing the country into its economic heights, said Bai. Though economic crises had dealt heavy blows to the sector, the industry is now evolving and moving towards a greater focus on innovation and high-quality products.The institute said it has sped up the development of Lumi Long fibre, and integrated the product's distribution chain. It expressed hopes that its market potential would be realized with the help of the current programme, aimed at commercializing the textile technology. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
The Attorney-General, Mr. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, held a fruitful discussion with the tripartite mission from the International Labour Organization (ILO) today.



The tripartite mission has held several meetings in Fiji this week, including with the Honourable Prime Minister, Voreqe Bainimarama; the Minister for Employment, Productivity and Industrial Relations Mr. Semi Koroilasevu; the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Justice, Law and Human Rights; the FTUC; the FCCI; the FICTU; the FCEF; the FMA; the FPSA; and the Employment Relations Advisory Board (ERAB).



FTUC National Secretary Mr. Felix Anthony attended the ERAB meeting, the first time since May 2015.



The AG informed the tripartite mission that the check-off provision, which allows union dues to be deducted from employee pay checks, is in place. All individual employees need to give their consent before dues are deducted.



It is important for workers to agree before the money they earn is deducted from their pay for any reason. They have earned this money, it is their property and no one should be able to take it without their express permission, said the AG.



The Government had agreed last year to reinstate all employment grievances that stood before the tribunal before they were terminated by the Essential National Industries Decree (ENID). Government also recommended last year that the notice given for strikes be reduced from 28 days to 14 days. The AG said at the upcoming Parliamentary session meeting, Government will enact legislative changes that will give effect to both of these reforms.



These were fruitful discussions conducted in an atmosphere of good will and cooperation which were focused on the future, he said.
HON PM BAINIMARAMA - REMARKS AT THE DEDICATION OF CLASSROOM BLOCKS AT NAQALIMARE DISTRICT SCHOOL





It is a pleasure to be here with you all today here to open these new and renovated classroom buildings for you students and teachers. So far, 2016 has been a great year for the students of Fiji, because my government has been able to provide new buildings and equipment to schools from Labasa to Naitaisiri and many places in between. I cant imagine a better way to kick off the new year.

Bula vinaka and a good morning to you all.Every minute I get to spend time with our nations children brings a smile to my face. Watching their faces light up when they see the new improvements to their schools is always a treat. Its rewarding to see students happy and excited about their education, and I share in that spirit of optimism for what theyll be able to accomplish.Our schools, especially in rural areas, are much more than just buildings where teachers work and student go to learn. They are centers of activity for our communities and a home away from home for many of our students. The Naqaliare District School serves the villages of Toga, Tawatawadi, Vunaqoru, Koroua, Rarabasaga, Naveyago, Sautabu and Koronisagana in the District of Naqalimar. Those are eight villages that rely on vthis institution to provide their children with a safe, comfortable space to grow up and learn valuable lessons in life.When our students see the investments made in their education, when they see the new, modern infrastructure they are provided, they feel important and they rise to the occasion, meeting the great expectations that we place on them. My Government believes in the potential of our children, and that is why we are committed to the Naqalimare District School, and every other school in Fiji.Education brings opportunity. The better equipped our students are now, the better suited they will be to lead our country one day. And providing our children with a quality education  as any parent here can agree is well worthy our time, our energy and our money.My Government has held firm to that conviction since the day I become Prime Minister. That is why we launched the free education initiative, that is why Ive visited schools all over Fiji, and that is why I am here with you this morning.Today, we are officially opening the renovated classroom building, new kindergarten building and ablution block  something we would all call a bathroom. This project has been completed at a total cost of $168,041, every penny of which has been used to give your students the learning environment they rightly deserve.My Government has heard the request of your school management and moved the kindergarten closer to the primary school to make life more convenient for your students and your teachers. Weve built the new bathroom facility so you can stay clean and healthy while focusing on your schoolwork. And we will continue to keep our ear to the ground, and develop future assistance that is tailored specifically to what your school needs.Ladies and gentlemen,Our children will one day inherit this country from us. It is our duty to make sure we build a new Fiji that we can be proud to pass onto them. That new Fiji should be a country that rewards on the basis of merit that has a strong, sustainable economy and a network of reliable infrastructure. That Fiji should also be have a flag that represents an independent nation-state with a rich history and culture to call its own.That is why we are currently in the process of finding a new national flag. Our current flag has flown well for Fiji, but is time that we as Fijians fly a flag that symbolizes our national unity with imagery that says, This is Fiji.The deadline for flags submissions has been extended until the 29th of February. In March, you will have the chance to make your voice heard on five final flag designs, then on Constitution Day 7 September. Fiji will raise a flag that shows the world the beauty of our country and makes a strong statement on what Fiji has become, and where we are headed.Its an exciting time for our country, so I will hope you will join us by submitting your designs and sharing your opinion on the final five designs. The process of finding our new flag is better off every time another Fijian contributes to this important national conversation. So together, lets leave behind a strong country and a flag that truly speaks to who we are as Fijians.To our students: please appreciate and respect your new school buildings. They represent our hopes and dreams for what you can accomplish. Study hard, be curious in the classroom and I know youll lead the next generation of Fijians to do great things.Thank you, vinaka vakalevu.
Since the moment, we came to know that the French President Francois Hollande has invited Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for a luncheon in Delhi, we can't stop gushing about her. And we need to say that the actress never leaves a single chance to make us feel proud!

The Jazbaa actress met President Francois Hollande at a special lunch hosted by French envoy Francois Richier in Delhi yesterday (January26, 2016). Draped in red traditional saree, Aishwarya was looking nothing but ethereal! No wonder, why the world is crazy about her mesmerising beauty.

Click On 'Show Photos' To View All The Pics!

With Francois Hollande! A beautiful candid picture of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, while interacting with French President Francois Hollande at a special luncheon in Delhi, yesterday (January 26, 2016). All In Smiles Another candid picture of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan with French President Francois Hollande and other guests, presented at the special luncheon. It seems like all are having really a good time with the gorgeous lady. Surprising Fact About Aishwarya's Saree Do you know that only natural fibres and eco-friendly dyeing was used in the making of the sari, a source close to the designers, told IANS. It was only fit that that Aishwarya chose a creation so deeply rooted in Indian technique and craft to meet the French President? So Gorgeous! One of the most gorgeous divas of Bollywood, Aishwarya is looking breathtakingly beautiful in these pictures, while posing for the camera with lady guest, who was also presented at the special luncheon. Picture Perfect Don't you think that it difficult for us to take our eyes off from her? We wonder how Aishwarya manages to look picture perfect in each and every stills! Red Hot! Made in Banaras, age-old weavers from where are poised for a facelift courtesy Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the six-yard wonder that the actress wore, was woven with fine mulberry silk and zari made from pure silver threads dipped in gold. On The Work Front On the work front, the actress will be next seen Omung Kumar's Sarbjit, in which she will be seen playing the role of Sarabjit's sister, Dalbir Kaur. (In Pics: With French President Francois Hollande) Cute Selfie (In Pics: With French President Francois Hollande) A super cute selfie of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan with one of the guests presented at the special luncheon. Keep watching this space for more updates.

Aishwarya is said to have had a 'hospitable' experience when she met French President Francois Hollande at a special luncheon on Tuesday, looking radiant and ravishing in a red Banarasi sari. Their conversation ranged from talking about movies to her experiences at Cannes, a guest at the lunch told IANS, adding that Hollande even made Aishwarya join him at his table. "The French president was very warm," the insider said.

Aishwarya, who has been in the midst of shooting her new film Sarbjit, took out time from her busy schedule to attend the lunch. The former beauty queen, a past recipient of the prestigious 'Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters', a civilian award by the French government, was the only Indian actor to be present. Hollande attended the lunch following his appearance at the country's colourful Republic Day parade on Rajpath as the chief guest.

Did you know that Aishwarya is also an ambassador of French cosmetics and beauty company L'Oreal Paris, for which she recently starred in an ad with Eva Longoria. In fact, she even shot for her international film Pink Panther 2 in Paris. Amazing, isn't it?

CLAPS! Here's How Aishwarya Rai Bachchan Left Everyone SPEECHLESS On The Sets Of Sarbjit!
Nivin Pauly, the actor who is all set to release his upcoming movie Action Hero Biju, says that it is a soulful movie. He was talking in a recent interview.

According to Nivin, the movie has no similarities with the highly popular police stories of Mollywood. It is not an adventurous, high-voltage action thriller; but a simple movie.

The actor states that Biju is a highly realistic police characters, who has no traces of larger-than-life characters like Inspector Balram or Bharath Chandran IPS.

But playing a police character is a dream-come-true opportunity for Nivin, who highly admires Surya's character Anbuchelvan IPS from Gautham Menon's Khakka Khakka.

Nivin says that the team knowingly delayed the release, as they wanted Action Hero Biju to be perfect. The actor says that he doesn't believe in rushing towards a pre-fixed release date.

He remarks that they followed the same method for Premam, and it has helped a lot in the success of the movie. Nivin feels that quality is more important that the quantity.

Action Hero Biju also marks the production debut of Nivin, who produces the movie himself, along with Shibu Thekkumpuram, under the banners Pauly Jr. Pictures and Full On Studios.
After the infamous war of words between Ram Charan and Dasari Narayana at several occasions, the orders from Dasari Narayana Rao, chairman of Telugu film directors association, to halt Chiranjeevi's comeback film is drawing attention.

However, there are no personal agendas involved, since the issue is between writer N Narasimha Rao and the makers of Kaththi remake. Apparently, the writer claims that the original story of Kaththi is penned by him and he requests to halt the pre-production works of the film, if the producers are not ready to give him his due.

Though the story writers association warned the producer Ram Charan and co-producers Lyca Productions earlier, they seems to have not responded over the issue. So, now the orders were sent out to several film unions to announce their non-cooperation for the film, until the issue is resolved.

Looks like the project, which is in pending from months, have to go through yet another test, before it gets on to the floors. Meanwhile, we are yet to know what the story writer of the film, A R Murugadoss had to say about Narasimha Rao's claims. Lets us wait and watch where this new twist around Chiranjeevi's 150th film will end up. Stay tuned to this space for further updates.
Superstar Mahesh Babu-Koratala Siva's Srimanthudu bagged six awards at the first edition of IIFA Utsavam. Of the 12 award categories, Srimanthudu managed to fetch the most sought-after ones like Best Actor in Leading Role and Best Actress in Leading Role.

Though Mahesh and Shruti Haasan deserve them for pulling off their roles with ease, the jury's choice is receiving a lot of criticism, since many opine that Prabhas is fitting to get his due for Baahubali. Neverthless, Baahubali bagged five awards at the event, including the Best Picture and Best Director.

But the fan wars among Mahesh Babu and Prabhas fans are giving rise to the discussions, if Mahesh really deserves it over Prabhas. However, the worthy point to note of all that it is being said is, IIFA Utsavam announce its awardees on the basis of public voting system, conducted on their website prior to the awards ceremony.

Apparently, the myth that awards are only presented to the actors/actresses, who are willing to attend the event, is adding fuel to the fan wars. The downside of the awards and the lack of transparency in the polling system are largely in debate, making the awards lose its credibility. Perhaps, it is just not about IIFA Utsavam, but all the award ceremonies that we have today.

So, the discussion 'if Mahesh deserves it or Prabhas deserves it', has now moved on to' whether the awards hold any esteem?'. Albeit, there is also an argument that if all the award ceremonies continue to glorify 'only' Baahubali and its cast and crew, then the awards this year will go single-handed, making the other releases of the year appear disregarded.

A few opine that it is going to be a controversy in any which way if we go on discussing. What is fair and what is unfair will always remain a point of conflict, and we stick to this take.
FinanceAsia has named Credit Suisses Helman Sitohang as winner of its Outstanding Achievement Award for 2015, honouring his excellent stewardship and deal-making skills.

In the face of intense competition, the judges said Sitohang stood out for his leadership as Switzerlands second-largest bank restructured its operations in the region, helping it through a period of intense market volatility from China to Southeast Asia.

He received his award at FinanceAsias annual awards dinner at the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong before more than 260 leading players from the world of Asia-Pacific banking.

"I'm honored to receive this award, which is as much a testament to our clients as it is to the team that we have built at Credit Suisse," Sitohang said, after receiving his award from FinanceAsia editor Alison Tudor-Ackroyd. "This award is a reflection of the growing importance of Asia Pacific in the global banking industry, as well as the increasing sophistication of the capital markets in the region."

"For Credit Suisse, Asia Pacific has increasingly become a focus," he added. "Last year we formed our new Asia Pacific division, demonstrating the increasing significance of this region to our franchise globally and also underscoring [the] commitment we are making to the region."

Tudor-Ackroyd said FinanceAsia wanted this year to recognise a banker who had made his name in the region.

"He kept operations running through the depths of the Asian financial crisis and as a result he is the trusted adviser to some of Southeast Asia's most powerful businessmen," she said.

Long regarded as the best-connected banker in his native Indonesia, Sitohang was named Credit Suisses chief executive for the Asia-Pacific region in October 2014, in addition to his role as head of the companys investment bank in the region.

He took a further step up a year later when he joined the companys global executive board. That appointment came as Credit Suisse announced a strategic review with the ambition of doubling its CHF133 billion ($139.2 billion) of assets under management in the region by 2018.

During his career with Credit Suisse, Sitohang has been involved in around $150 billion of mergers and acquisitions and capital raisings across the globe. Based in Singapore, he led the origination of many of the banks high-profile transactions across Asia and Australia.

Sitohangs background is far from typical for an Asian banker. He was born in Prague where his Indonesian father met a Slovakian fellow student, Sitohangs mother, and studied economics on a Soviet-sponsored scholarship in what was then communist Czechoslovakia. The family was later to return to Indonesia, where Sitohang studied at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology.

After starting his working life as an oilfield engineer, Sitohang turned to banking. He went on to join Credit Suisse in Indonesia in 1998, when the Asian financial crisis was at its peak and in a time of political turmoil in Jakarta.

He helped Credit Suisse stay the course in Indonesia and become a dominant player. After more than a decade as country head, he went on to become Credit Suisses chief executive officer in Southeast Asia in 2010.
(Bloomberg) -- A federal proposal for stricter rules on retirement product sales helped spur American International Groups decision to sell its broker-dealer operation, according to CEO Peter Hancock.

Its a business we are not the best owner of, particularly in the light of potential Department of Labor rules, Hancock said Tuesday in a conference call. With the new DoL rules, that was a big factor in thinking whether this was better owned by somebody independent of us.

President Obama has said that new rules are needed so advisers put their clients best interests first for retirement accounts. The proposal could increase compliance costs for the industry.

Hancock announced plans Tuesday to sell AIG Advisor Group to investment funds affiliated with Donald Marrons Lightyear Capital and to PSP Investments, a Canadian pension investment manager.

A LOT OF HYPERBOLE

The insurers comments show that the industry believes the rule is going to move forward, according to Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

There will be a lot of hyperbole from the firms on the effects of the rule and blaming the rule for things that they would have done otherwise, Roper said. That doesnt mean they will stop fighting it. It just means those efforts move into a new phase.

Hancock said the broker-dealer network earned about $40 million in 2014, yet consumed a disproportionate amount of AIGs compliance cost. The sale was part of a larger plan the insurer announced to simplify operations and improve results, as the New York-based company faces pressure to break up from activist billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

The rule is basically going to increase the risk and cost of distributing a number of retirement products, and so therefore it could have a chilling effect on sales and commissions, said Randy Binner, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets. Relative to everything else thats going on at AIG  which is a lot  this is just a distraction they dont need.

CLIENTS BEST INTERESTS

The Labor Department proposal would require brokers handling retirement accounts to put their clients best interests first. Brokers are now required to offer investments that fit a clients needs and risk tolerance at the time of sale, but are able to push their own companys products. Under the proposed rule, brokers could earn sales commissions and other income if they sign a contract with investors to disclose fees and incentives that might influence recommendations.

Being a stand-alone firm allows us to avoid the potential conflicts of interest of being owned by a product manufacturer, said Valerie Brown, who was previously CEO of Cetera Financial Group and will become executive chairwoman of Advisor Group after the sale. Independence is key.

AIG Advisor Group had more than 5,200 independent advisers and more than 800 full-time employees, according to AIG. The unit is comprised of four broker-dealers: FSC Securities, Royal Alliance Associates, SagePoint Financial and Woodbury Financial Services.

Marron ran Paine Webber Group for more than two decades through 2000, when he struck a deal to sell the retail brokerage to UBS for more than $10 billion. At Lightyear, he built Cetera through acquisitions, including a deal in 2013 to buy two of insurer MetLifes broker-dealer affiliates to add about $25 billion under management. Marron announced an agreement in 2014 to sell Cetera to RCS Capital, which is now headed toward a bankruptcy filing.

With reporting assistance by Sonali Basak.

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The accident was probably the clients fault, remembers Austin Frye, CEO of the Frye Financial Center in Miami. He said that he was driving two Uber passengers and made a lazy left turn at an intersection, Frye says. A motorcyclist clipped him as he went through the intersection, spun out, crashed and died.

The client was shaken up by what had happened, Frye continues. He was also scared by what could happen to his assets, especially after his insurance company declined to cover him because he was using a private vehicle for commercial purposes.

Was bankruptcy the next step?

Frye looked at the clients assets: an IRA, a small 401(k) and his home.

In Florida, all those assets are exempt from creditors, Frye says. I advised him that there was no reason for him to go bankrupt, because he had no assets that would be subject to bankruptcy.

WHEN TO CALL AN ATTORNEY

In helping his client explore the possibility, Frye took all the right steps. He didnt pretend to be a bankruptcy attorney. Instead, he calmed his client, considered asset types and titles both before and after the accident, and was ready to refer the man to an attorney if that seemed necessary.

Planners must remember that they arent bankruptcy lawyers, says John Friedman, founder of John Friedman Financial in San Francisco and a former attorney who worked in bankruptcy law for about two years. But, he adds, a planner should have a good nose for knowing when to call a bankruptcy attorney. A planner who has known a client for a long time and served a vital role should be intimately involved with the decision-making process. If you can help someone in their darkest hour, thats profound service.

When she suggests seeing a bankruptcy attorney, Denver-based planner Kristin Sullivan outlines the reasons she thinks that conversation could be helpful. Its like giving estate-planning advice, she says. You need to keep it very general, so that a person can go interact with an attorney in a smarter, more efficient way.

She adds that she never tells clients bankruptcy is or isnt for them. When youre in the business of charging for advice, you better be sure that youre giving advice that youre qualified to give, Sullivan says.

PROTECT ASSETS

Instead of making recommendations on a bankruptcy filing, planners should focus on protecting client assets.

Anyone who visits a financial planner has some assets, and protecting those assets should be part of every conversation, Frye says. The time to consider protection is before there is a claim, because any measures taken after that could constitute fraudulent conveyance.

Every U.S. state legally protects some assets from creditors. The list varies by state, and its important to know what rules apply in the state where your clients live.

In order for that protection to stick, however, some conditions may apply. Frye has another client who still owes money to a bank that foreclosed on his rental properties, because the properties sold for less than the clients mortgage balances.

They worked out a payment plan where he pays a small amount each month, Frye says. Hell have to live to be 120 to pay it off, and his estate is liable for it, so when he dies, there will be a claim against his estate.

The good news for the clients family, however, is that he has few assets beyond his home and retirement accounts. His retirement accounts are exempt, as long as he names a beneficiary, Frye says. Not doing so could make it subject to claims, as well as to probate. He needs to name a person or a qualified trust. Otherwise, he creates a huge problem for his kids.

Titles are another important consideration. Fryes Uber-driving client is the sole owner of the car involved in the accident. If he and his wife had owned the car together, Frye says, he would have been sued as the driver, and they both would have been sued as the owners of the car. Titling the car in his name protected his wifes assets.

In other instances, titling assets in common can protect them from creditors. A Frye client who was considering divorce is an obstetrician who faced the possibility of malpractice judgments. In Florida, assets that two spouses own in common cant be divided to satisfy judgments against just one partner. Divorcing his wife would have put half the assets solely in his name, making them vulnerable to creditors. He reconciled with his wife as a result, Frye says.

Rather than wondering whether joint or sole ownership will help or hinder, some clients form limited liability corporations, which can legally own assets. LLCs are generally protected from creditors, Frye says.

STOP THE SPENDING

Andy Tilp, president of Trillium Valley Financial Planning in Sherwood, Ore., has seen clients consider bankruptcy because of consumer debt. We walk through their budget and talk about needs versus wants.

People get in the habit of having a certain lifestyle. I tell them that solving the problem will require sacrifice and change, he says.

Some clients, Tilp says, will never fully recover, particularly clients older than their 50s. Clients in their 30s, on the other hand, may have enough time to rebuild their financial lives  but only if they keep a lid on future spending.

Celebrities, athletes, contractors, and anyone who lives on commission can get themselves in trouble, because they anchor to their top year, says Rick Kahler, president and owner of Kahler Financial Group in Rapid City, S.D. They say, I made $8 million last year and set their lifestyles accordingly, and then in the bottom year they make $4 million and dont cut their lifestyle.

GET PAID

If a client is broke, how does a planner get compensated? If you have assets under management in retirement accounts, youll continue to get your management fee, Sullivan says, because those assets are protected typically.

Planners who charge hourly for advice should do so. Let them pay you, Friedman says, particularly if payment occurs before the preference period. A bankruptcy court can order payments made during the 90-day preference period returned for more general distribution to a clients creditors. Debts incurred after a bankruptcy filing are not part of the bankruptcy, so there is no risk that payment for advice a planner gives after the filing will be recalled.

If a client owes you a significant amount, Friedman suggests getting an attorney of your own. If you have a pre-petition debt from the person going into bankruptcy and you want to get paid, youre going to get lumped in with everyone else. If the sum youre owed is a big enough number, get a lawyer who knows something about bankruptcy. People get paid out of bankruptcies all the time  and theres no reason planners cant be among them, he says.

Ingrid Case, a Financial Planning contributing writer in Minneapolis, is a former editor at Bloomberg News.

Read more:
ORLANDO -- A top FINRA official says the industry watchdog has started reaching out to broker-dealers who offer robo advice, asking how they determine client risk tolerance, among other factors.

Up until now, it had only put out an investor alert about robos jointly with the SEC. Meanwhile, the SEC has already stated it is pondering what a fiduciary duty means for a robo advisor.

From a FINRA perspective, Ive reached out to firms, asking them if theyve been participating as robo advisors, about their controls, said Dawn Calonge, FINRA surveillance director, at the FSI OneVoice conference on Tuesday.

Of particular interest: how firms record data, the suitability of robo advice and how customers are able to access and change their profiles, she told FSI OneVoice attendees in Orlando, Fla.

For a surveillance director who is assessing your business, wed be reaching out, asking you about your business, asking you about the controls you have in place, Calonge said. We will be speaking to our firms and understanding the controls you have.

In terms of suitability, FINRA wants to know how firms assess customers risk tolerance. The effective practice is to consider risk and the ability [of the customer] to take risks, she said. It may not be appropriate for a customer to be in a robo account and its important that a firm is able to determine that, she added.

And what happens when customers change their profiles? Calonge said firms should ask, Why is that happening? And what are firm processes for handling contradictory and inconsistent answers when customers input their own information, Calonge asked hypothetically. An effective practice has some way to reconcile this.

Central to any regulator examination will be to determine if a firm properly assessed client risk tolerance, says Ron A. Rhoades, attorney, fidcuiary advocate and chair of the financial planning program at Western Kentucky University.

The major risk of a robo is how well they are assessing risk tolerance or more appropriately, the need for risk of clients, Rhoades says.

There is a lot of concern that risk tolerance questionnaires  even if they are 100 questions long  are mere snapshots in time of a clients emotional state. And while they may reflect risk tolerance, they really dont reflect risk need.

FIRMS UNDER SCRUTINY

When asked whether FINRA was examining particular types of broker-dealers, Calogne said the prevalence of robo advice was more important than the type of firm.

When a business is purely digital there are a lot of questions, Calogne said. We would be looking to assess how strong a firms controls are. How much human interface is there? How much of a supervisory governance system is there?

Going forward, she said, We encourage you to speak to your surveillance staff. There are lots of things in draft form (that can help) give some guidance. Reach out to us. Let us know what youre doing. We can give you some thoughts on policy and guidance on what youre planning to do.

Rhoades says that firms can find ways around these questions by ensuring that the risk tolerance and suitability process is not left to an automated system.

I believe that human interaction with the client at this very important stage is required, he said. Software has not reached anywhere close to the sophistication to be able to judge the needs to take on risk.

With reporting by Suleman Din.

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The firms will initially invest 600m into building purpose built private rental housing across the UK, providing over 3000 homes.

The partnership has been seeded with three Build to Rent development schemes; Bristol, Salford and Walthamstow, forecast to deliver over 650 homes.

PGGM has invested in Built to Rent housing for over 40 years. It currently owns close to 3 billion of residential investment exposure through its strategic partnerships in the Netherlands and the US. It is also in detailed discussions on the acquisition of numerous sites, all situated in urban locations where there is strong demand.

In America and Europe, fully fledged institutionally funded and managed rental property markets have developed to increase the supply of homes, lower prices and provide better quality products and service, according to Legal & General Capital. It wants to disrupt the status quo of ever increasing rental rises by investing long-term institutional funds into building new homes to rent at scale, and by developing a UK institutional rental market.

Paul Stanworth, Managing Director of Legal & General Capital, said:

The UK rental market, compared to the US and Europe, is dysfunctional, with ever increasing rents and increasingly poor accommodation. For this to change, and renting to become more affordable, we need to invest in the new, and build new homes to rent, and just stop inflating the prices of old housing stock. At Legal & General were going to play our part by disrupting the market, and invest significant sums of long-term institutional money to build new rental housing, and develop a UK institutional rental market.

Mathieu Elshout, Investment Director Real Estate at PGGM, commented:

Investing in residential is the perfect long term real estate investment, as it provides a relatively high income security and diversification relative to other sectors. This partnership allows us to build and own good quality residential assets in the UK at scale, with a high degree of control over our investments.

As a responsible investor we believe that we have an obligation to contribute to a sustainable world. We can do so via impact investment, or investing in solutions, as we call it. This partnership not only addresses the supply/demand imbalance, it also aims to improve the UKs built environment; acting as a catalyst for wider urban regeneration and creating rental stock in sustainable urban schemes centred around key transport hubs.
For UK consumer media only

Boehringer Ingelheim is delighted to welcome the news that, following a full technology appraisal, OFEV?(nintedanib) is now recommended for use by NICE within the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales.1

This decision is set to benefit patients across England and Wales and will provide doctors with a new option for treating the rare lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

NICE has recommended OFEV for use in adult patients with IPF who have moderate disease as defined by a predicted forced vital capacity (FVC) between 50% and 80%. The recommendation states that OFEV, compared to placebo, reduces the decline in lung function in patients with IPF.1

The full advice can be found here:

www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ta379

Welcoming the news Professor Klaus Dugi, Medical Director and Managing Director, BI UK and Ireland said,

"This NICE recommendation for OFEV is very welcome news for patients in England and Wales who have this devastating disease, as it gives doctors a much needed new option in the management of IPF. At Boehringer Ingelheim, we have over 90 years of experience in the field of respiratory medicine and are delighted to be leading the way in bringing this novel medicine to people with IPF."

Mr Mike Bray, Chair of Action for Pulmonary Fibrosis, made the following statement:

"Having been involved in the NICE appraisal process, Action for Pulmonary Fibrosis is very pleased that nintedanib has been approved for the treatment of patients with IPF. With no cure and very limited treatment options, nintedanib offers an alternative therapy which will be much welcomed by patients."

About IPF

IPF is a progressive and severely debilitating lung disease with a high death rate.2 It causes progressive scarring of the lungs, resulting in continual and irreversible deterioration in lung function and difficulty breathing.3 In patients with IPF, lung function loss is measured by a decline in a patient's FVC, the maximum volume of breath that can be exhaled during a forced breath.

Every year in the UK, more than 5,000 people are diagnosed with the disease,4 with a median survival time of approximately three years from diagnosis.3

About OFEV

OFEV is a small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) taken orally.5 It targets growth factor receptorswhich studies have implicated in the pathogenesis of IPF. OFEV's mechanism of action is thought to occur through inhibiting 3 of these TKIs; vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR), fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) and platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR).

-ENDS-

About Boehringer Ingelheim

The Boehringer Ingelheim group is one of the world's 20 leading pharmaceutical companies. Headquartered in Ingelheim, Germany, Boehringer Ingelheim operates globally with 146 affiliates and a total of more than 47,700 employees. The focus of the family-owned company, founded in 1885, is researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing new medications of high therapeutic value for human and veterinary medicine.

Social responsibility is an important element of the corporate culture at Boehringer Ingelheim. This includes worldwide involvement in social projects, such as the initiative "Making more Health" and caring for the employees. Respect, equal opportunities and reconciling career and family form the foundation of the mutual cooperation. In everything it does, the company focuses on environmental protection and sustainability.

In 2014, Boehringer Ingelheim achieved net sales of about 13.3 billion euros. R&D expenditure corresponds to 19.9 per cent of its net sales.

For more information please visit www.boehringer-ingelheim.co.uk.

REFERENCES

1. NICE TA379 Available at: www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ta379

2. Raghu G, Collard HR, Egan JJ, et al. An official ATS/ERS/JRS/ALAT statement idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: evidence based guidelines for diagnosis and management. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2011; 183:788-824.

3. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in adults: diagnosis and management

NICE guidelines [CG163] Published date: June 2013

Available at: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg163

Last accessed: January 2016

4. Navaratnam V. The rising incidence of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in the UK. Thorax 2011; 66:462-467.

5. Richeldi L, Costabel U, Selman M. Efficacy of a Tyrosine Kinase inhibitor in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1079-1087

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160126006321/en/

Contacts:

Boehringer Ingelheim Limited

Richard Pitt

Corporate Affairs Manager

Tel: +44 (0)1344 744757

richard.pitt@boehringer-ingelheim.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 01/26/16 -- Timmins Gold Corp. (TSX: TMM)(NYSE MKT: TGD) (the "Company") is pleased to report that it has finalized an agreement with Sprott Resource Lending Partnership and Goldcorp Inc. (the "Lenders") to re-finance its existing US$10.2 million secured credit facility.

The new credit facility is effective as of January 26, 2016 and has a maturity date of June 30, 2016. Interest is payable monthly at the rate of 12% per annum, and the principal amount outstanding is payable on the maturity date. In consideration of the re-financing, the Company will pay a bonus to the Lenders under the credit facility, in the amount of US$408,901.47 on the earlier of the repayment of the loan and June 30, 2016. The bonus is payable at the option of each Lender, in relation to its proportion of the credit facility, in cash or in common shares of the Company. Any shares issued in connection with the bonus payment shall be issued at a deemed price equal to the volume weighted average price per share on the TSX for the ten days immediately preceding issuance, less 10%.

"This credit facility provides the Company with the time and flexibility required to continue pursuing all available options to build a solid financial foundation," stated Mark Backens, Interim CEO. "We are committed to unlocking and realizing the true value of our asset base to benefit all shareholders."

About Timmins Gold

Timmins Gold is poised to become an emerging intermediate, Mexican-focused gold producer with a portfolio of high-quality production and growth assets all based in Mexico. The Company owns and operates the San Francisco open pit, heap leach gold mine in Sonora which provides a solid base of operations, allowing the Company to develop two economically robust growth projects with manageable capital requirements, the Ana Paula and Caballo Blanco gold projects.

Neither the TSX nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX) nor the New York Stock Exchange MKT accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements which relate to future events. Such statements include estimates, forecasts and statements as to management's expectations with respect to, among other things, business and financial prospects, financial multiples and accretion estimates, future trends, plans, strategies, objectives and expectations, including with respect to production, exploration drilling, reserves and resources, exploitation activities and events or future operations. Information inferred from the interpretation of drilling results and information concerning mineral resource estimates may also be deemed to be forward-looking statements, as it constitutes a prediction of what might be found to be present when, and if, a project is actually developed.

In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may", "should", "expects", "plans, "anticipates", believes", "estimates", "predicts", "potential", or "continue" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our or our industry's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

While these forward-looking statements, and any assumptions upon which they are based, are made in good faith and reflect our current judgement regarding the direction of our business, actual results will almost always vary, sometimes materially, from any estimates, predictions, projections, assumptions or other future performance suggestions herein. Except as required by applicable law, Timmins Gold does not intend to update any forward-looking statements to conform these statements to actual results.

Contacts:

Timmins Gold Corp.

Mark Backens

Interim CEO and Director

604-682-4002

www.timminsgold.com




LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Rio Tinto Plc (RTPPF.PK, RIO.L, RIO, RTNTF.PK) said that it has reached a binding agreement to sell its Mount Pleasant thermal coal assets to MACH Energy Australia Pty Ltd for US$224 million plus royalties. With the recently announced binding agreement for the sale of Rio Tinto's interest in the neighbouring Bengalla coal Joint Venture, this amounts to US$830 million of agreed sales. Rio Tinto Copper & Coal chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques said 'These agreements for over US$800 million in asset sales deliver significant value for our shareholders, with the potential for future royalties from Mount Pleasant. Mount Pleasant is a large-scale, thermal coal asset in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales with total marketable reserves of 474 million tonnes. The sale is subject to certain conditions precedent being met, including completion of the restructure of Coal & Allied and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016. Rio Tinto recently reached a binding agreement for the sale of Coal & Allied's 40 per cent interest in the Bengalla coal Joint Venture in Australia to New Hope Corporation Limited for US$606 million. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
TOKYO (dpa-AFX) - Toyota Motor Corp (TYT.L, TM) and Suzuki Motor Corp (SZKMF.PK) denied a report they were discussing a potential partnership. Previously, Nikkei Asian review reported that Toyota Motor and Suzuki Motor have begun talks on a tie-up, looking to take advantage of each other's know-how and capitalize on demand for compact cars in India and other emerging economies. The reported said that Suzuki and the Toyota group will discuss the potential partnership from a variety of angles, with cross-shareholdings a possibility. Separately, Nikkei reported that Toyota Motor plans to make Daihatsu Motor a wholly owned subsidiary through a stock swap. Toyota currently owns 51.2% of Daihatsu, whose market capitalization stands at around 630 billion yen ($5.31 billion). It plans to parcel out treasury stock to Daihatsu's shareholders to acquire all of the smaller company's shares as early as the first half of this year. It may let others hold partial stakes. Daihatsu's effective conversion to a wholly owned subsidiary would likely lead to its delisting from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the report noted. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - Profits earned by Chinese industrial enterprises declined at a faster pace in December, figures from the National Bureau of Statistics showed Wednesday. Industrial profits fell 4.7 percent year-over-year at the end of the year, which was worse than the 1.4 percent decrease in November. It was the seventh month of drop in a row. In the whole year 2015, total industrial profits contracted 2.3 percent compared with the preceding year. Among sectors, profits earned by mining industry slumped 58.2 percent in 2015, while manufacturing sector logged a growth of 2.8 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
F-Secure Corporation, Stock Exchange Release, 27 January 2016, 09.00 (EEST)F-Secure Corporation to publish its financial results for Q4/2015 and full year 2015 on Friday, 5 February, 2016 at 9.00 a.m. (EEST).A news conference for analysts and media will be held (in Finnish) in the Company's headquarters (address: Tammasaarenkatu 7, 00180 Helsinki) on Friday, 5 February 2016 at 11.00-12.00 a.m. (EEST).A webcast for international investors and analysts will be held (in English) on the same day at 14.30 p.m. (EEST).To participate in the online meeting via web, please click on the link: https://meet.f-secure.com/tapio.pesola/YSQ6FCV9To join via phone, please dial in to +358975110100. The conference ID is 387938.During the webcast, the presentation material including live video is only available via the online meeting.The material will be available at the company's website before the call begins: www.f-secure.com/investors.Additional information:Tapio Pesola, IR Manager tapio.pesola@f-secure.com tel. +358 44 373 4693

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.


STOCKHOLM (dpa-AFX) - Ericsson (ERIC) reported a profit for the fourth-quarter of 2015 that increased 68% from the prior year. Profitability improved year-over-year, with higher IPR licensing revenues and lower operating expenses as main contributors. Network Rollout continued on its path to sustainable profitability. Reported sales increased by 8%. Sales, adjusted for comparable units and currency, decreased by 1%.



Ericsson said it is confident in its ability to achieve 9 billion Swedish kronor cost and efficiency program by 2017. It is closely monitoring market and business development and will take all necessary actions to remain competitive across the entire business.



Net income for the fourth-quarter jumped 68% to 6.978 billion Swedish kronor from 4.165 billion kronor in the prior year.



Net income attributable to stockholders of the Parent Company for the quarter surged to 7.056 billion kronor or 2.15 kronor per share from the prior year's 4.223 billion kronor or 1.29 kronor per share.



Non-IFRS earnings per share improved to 2.50 kronor from 1.71 kronor in the prior year.



Operating income 11.035 billion kronor up 75% from 6.302 billion kronor in the prior year. Operating income increased YoY, supported by improvements in all segments. The increase was due to higher sales, lower operating expenses and reduced negative effect of currency hedge contracts. The net currency effect had a positive impact on operating income.



Operating expenses, excluding restructuring charges, decreased to 15.5 billion kronor from last year's 17.6 billion kronor, driven by the ongoing cost and efficiency program. The main part of the savings was related to R&D.



Net sales grew 8% to 73.568 billion kronor from 67.986 billion kronor. Sales, adjusted for comparable units and currency, decreased by 1%. Sales in the quarter were supported by high IPR licensing revenues. In North America, the mobile broadband investments remained stable, with additional hardware sales in the quarter. 4G deployments in Mainland China recovered after a weak third quarter.



The company stated that the strategic partnership with Cisco, announced in the quarter, will give us strong end-to-end network solutions with a complete IP portfolio. As a result of the partnership, the company will extend its addressable market and expect to generate $1 billion or more of additional sales by 2018. Additional sales are expected to be accretive to operating income in 2016.



The Board of Directors will propose a dividend of SEK 3.70 (3.40) per share for 2015, an increase of 9% compared with last year.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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NNIT delivers organic revenue growth of 7.9%, an operating profit margin of 10.3% and free cash flow growth of 38% in 2015.

Performance highlights for 2015:

Revenue increased by 7.0% in constant currencies to DKK 2,579m and by 7.9% in reported currencies to DKK 2,600m

Operating profit margin was 11.6% in constant currencies and 10.3% in reported currencies. Reported operating profit was negatively impacted by currency headwind

Operating profit increased by 13.0% to DKK 300m in constant currencies and operating profit in reported currencies increased by 1.4% to DKK 269m reflecting a negative impact from currency development

Net profit increased by 1.5% to DKK 212m in reported currencies mainly due to a higher operating profit

Free cash flow increased by 38% to DKK 211m driven by a strong operating cash flow

Order backlog for 2016 at the beginning of Q1 2016 increased by DKK 104m to DKK 2,020m, corresponding to 5.4% compared with the order backlog for 2015 at the beginning of Q1 2015

Outlook for 2016 in constant currencies:

Revenue in constant currencies is forecasted to grow at least 5%, and revenue growth in reported currencies is expected to be at the same level based on current exchange rates

Operating profit margin is forecasted to be 10-11% in constant currencies, whereas operating profit margin in reported currencies is expected to be around 0.3pp higher based on current exchange rates

Per Kogut, CEO at NNIT comments: "In our first year as a listed company, the performance has been reassuring and we have delivered on our targets. Despite a competitive market and currency headwinds, we have been able to deliver organic revenue growth of 7.9% and an operating profit margin of 10.3%.

Our encouraging results - including the strong increase in free cash flow of 38% - allow us to propose a dividend of DKK 4.00 per share corresponding to a pay-out ratio 46% of net profit."

The Annual report 2015 is available on www.nnit.com (http://www.nnit.com).



Conference call details

NNIT will host a teleconference January 27, 2016 at 10:30 CET about the financial report for 2015. Please visit the NNIT webpage at www.nnit.com (http://www.nnit.com/) to access the teleconference, which can be found under 'Investors - Downloads'. Presentation material will be available on the website approximately one hour prior to the start of the presentation.

Contacts for further information

Investor relations:

Jesper Vesterbk Wagener

Head of Investor Relations

Tel: +45 3075 5392

jvwa@nnit.com (mailto:jvwa@nnit.com)

Media relations:

Rikke Dalager

Head of Communications

Tel: +45 3077 8080

rida@nnit.com (mailto:rida@nnit.com)

About NNIT

NNIT A/S is one of Denmark's leading IT service providers and consultancies. NNIT A/S offers a wide range of IT services and solutions to its customers, primarily in the life sciences sector in Denmark and internationally and to customers in the public, enterprise and finance sectors in Denmark. As of December 31, 2015, NNIT A/S had 2,538 employees.

For more information please visit www.nnit.com (http://www.nnit.com/).

Financial report for 2015 and Annual General Meeting 2016 (http://hugin.info/163771/R/1980924/725934.pdf)



This announcement is distributed by NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions on behalf of NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: NNIT A/S via Globenewswire



HUG#1980924


MUMBAI, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Rolta announces that it has been selected for the Geospatial World Leadership Award in the category of 'Geospatial Solutions Company of the Year 2015'. The award recognizes Rolta's contribution to theglobalgeospatialindustry, and will be presented to Rolta at the Geospatial World Forum 2016, in Rotterdam.



(Logo:http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121023/570667)



Geospatial World Leadership Awards have been established by Geospatial Media since 2007 and over these many years, they have evolved as premium geospatial awards having reputation of being most well accredited Geospatialglobal awards and recognitions. The Jury comprising of renowned international professionals representing industry, academia, government and multilateral organisations, met in person in Amsterdam to select the Awardees.

The eminent Jury recognized that Rolta has been moving up the value chain consistently by developing many "state of the art" Solutions and Intellectual Property to deliver comprehensive spatially enabled business and analytics solutions in defence, homeland security, transportation, energy, and plant management worldwide. Rolta's pursuit of being a knowledge company has been well supported by investments in developing scientific and technological competence, infrastructure and human resource leadership at every level. The jury took note of the fact that Rolta has been very successful in integrating and aligning its geospatial expertise with Data Science, IT, Engineering and Communication technologies to unleash the power of location and geospatial information across business, enterprises and government functions.

Acknowledging Rolta's contribution, Mr. Sanjay Kumar, CEO, Geospatial Media stated, "Going forward, the true value for geospatial solutions lies in integration across industry workflows. Rolta has been successfully consolidating its technology and solutions and undertaking integration for the benefit of various industries such as defence, homeland security, e-governance. It has also started to demonstrate the potential of this integration across new and upcoming areas such as smart cities that will be key business area for geospatial industry."

Speaking on this occasion, Mr. K. K. Singh, Chairman & CEO of Rolta Group, stated,"At Rolta, we are committed to developing world class solutions that uniquely combine our Intellectual Property with specialized knowledge in the domains of Geospatial, Engineering and Information Technology to meet the critical needs of our customers. I am delighted to hear about this selection of Rolta as Geospatial Solutions Company of the Year 2015. This global recognition clearly vindicates our business strategy of providing IP led solutions."

AboutRolta:

Rolta is a leading provider of innovative IT solutions for many vertical segments, including Federal and State Governments, Defense, Homeland Security, Utilities, Oil & Gas, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail, and Healthcare. By uniquely combining its expertise in the IT, Engineering and Geospatial domains, Rolta develops exceptional solutions for these segments. The Company leverages its industry-specific know-how, rich repository of field-proven intellectual property that spans photogrammetry, image processing, geospatial applications, Business Intelligence, Big Data analytics, Cloud computing, and Software Defined Infrastructure for providing sophisticated enterprise-level integrated solutions. Rolta is a multinational organization headquartered in India. The Company operates from 40 locations worldwide through its subsidiaries, and has executed projects in over 45 countries. Rolta is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange in India. The Company's GDRs are listed on the Main Board of London Stock Exchange. The Company's 'Senior Notes' are listed on Singapore Stock Exchange.

Disclaimer:This press release includes statements that are not historical in nature and that may be characterized as "forward-looking statements", including those related to future financial and operating results, benefits and synergies of the Company's brands and strategies, future opportunities and the growth of the market for open source solutions. You should be aware that Rolta's actual results could differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements, which are based oncurrent expectations of Rolta management and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, Rolta's ability to integrate acquired operations and employees, Rolta's success in executing its strategies, Rolta's ability to take a competitive position in the industry, business conditions and the general economy, market opportunities, potential new business strategies, competitive factors, sales and marketing execution, shifts in technologies or market demand, and any other factors. The Company may make additional written and oral forward-looking statements but do not undertake, and disclaim any obligation, to update them.

For more information, visit -http://www.rolta.comor contact:

Rajesh Ramachandran

President & CTO

Global Products & Technology Solutions

Rajesh.Ramachandran@rolta.com

Telephone: +91 (22) 2926 6666

Sohrab Bhot

Sr. Vice President

Business Operations

Sohrab.Bhot@rolta.com

Telephone: +91 (22) 2926 6666




27 January 2016



Acron Group Releases 2015 Operating Results



Group's Consolidated Output (Operating Results for Acron, Dorogobuzh, Hongri Acron and NWPC)



Product, kt 2015 2014 YOY, % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MINERAL FERTILISERS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ammonia 1,765 1,822 -3.1



Incl. in-house consumption 1,729 1,707 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nitrogen fertilisers 2,999 3,017 -0.6



Incl. in-house consumption 481 536



AN 1,516 1,434 5.7



Incl. in-house consumption 87 119



Urea 624 646 -3.4



Incl. in-house consumption 395 417



UAN 860 937 -8.2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Complex fertilisers: 2,485 2,531 -1.8



Incl. in-house consumption 24 36



NPK 2,428 2,443 -0.6



Incl. in-house consumption 24 36



Bulk blends 56 88 -36.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total commercial output for Mineral Fertilisers* 5,015 5,091 -1.5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Organic Synthesis Products 447 401 11.5



Incl. in-house consumption 232 207



Methanol 91 83 9.8



Incl. in-house consumption 82 71



Formalin 168 144 17.0



Incl. in-house consumption 148 135



UFR 188 174 7.7



Incl. in-house consumption 1 1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Non-organic compounds 840 808 3.9



Low-density and technical-grade ammonium nitrate 266 230 15.5



Calcium carbonate 405 383 5.6



Liquid carbon dioxide 57 53 7.6



Argon 6 7 -11.4



Hydrochloric acid 107 136 -21.3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total commercial output for Industrial Products* 1,055 1,003 5.2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------



PHOSPHATE INPUTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apatite concentrate 1,135 891 27.4



Incl. in-house consumption 775 718 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total commercial output for Apatite Concentrate* 361 173 108.0 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------



TOTAL COMMERCIAL OUTPUT* 6,431 6,267 2.6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Commercial output is output less in-house consumption.



Chairman of Acron's Board of Directors Alexander Popov comments:



'In 2015, Acron Group continued to increase output of its core commercial products. The Group has been increasing its output for seven years and we expect this trend to be stable in the coming years.



'In the short term, we will commence start-up operations for technological equipment at our new ammonia unit in Veliky Novgorod and plan to produce the initial batch of product in late March. Operating results in 2016 will improve with commissioning of the new unit and a lighter schedule of overhauls at the Group's facilities compared to 2015. Over 2017-2020, we plan to gradually increase apatite concentrate output as the second stage of the Oleniy Ruchey mine is brought into operation.'



Comments on Operating Results:



In 2015, Acron Group's commercial output was 6,431 kt, up 2.6% year-on-year due to increased output of apatite concentrate and non-organic compounds.



Commercial output of mineral fertilisers and ammonia was down 1.5% in 2015 to 5,015 kt due to equipment upgrade at Hongri Acron to improve environmental sustainability and a planned overhaul of Acron's facilities in Veliky Novgorod in April-May and August-September. At Dorogobuzh, however, commercial product output was up 21.6%.



Commercial output of industrial products was up 5.2% due to increased production of UFR and low-density and technical-grade ammonium nitrate. In early 2015, the Oleniy Ruchey mine reached its first stage design capacity of 1.1 mt, which more than doubled apatite concentrate output for sales to third parties.



Comments on Market Trends



Mineral fertiliser prices lost considerable ground over 2015 as the commodity market deteriorated. This was mainly due to weaker demand in some consumer countries, general market uncertainty, increased sector competitiveness and the lower cost of production in some producing countries with lower energy costs and weaker national currencies.



According to our estimates, urea prices dipped below the cost of production for most Chinese producers, which resulted in a substantial decrease in urea exports from China in H2 2015 year-on-year. China is a marginal producer and accounts for approximately 45% of global urea production and approximately 20% of global urea supplies. China's cost of production is, therefore, a crucial consideration for the market. We believe that the potential for urea prices to decrease within economically feasible limits has been exhausted. Even so, commodity markets remain highly volatile and speculative, which we believe should level off in the short term.



In 2015, prices for such premium products as AN and UAN also decreased. AN saw weaker demand in Brazil, where the economic slowdown, more expensive credit and a weaker national currency conspired to reduce farmers' purchasing power.



NPK prices remained almost unchanged in H1 2015, backed by sustainable phosphate and potash sectors. Nevertheless, NPK prices also adjusted in Q4, driven by commodity prices and severe drought in Southeast Asian countries.



We expect the global mineral fertiliser market to recover in Q1 2016 as we approach the spring sowing season in the Northern hemisphere, which will support prices in the nitrogen and phosphate sectors.



Average Indicative Prices, USD/t, FOB Baltic/Black Sea



+--------------+------+------+-----------+------+------+-----------+ | | 2015 | 2014 | Change, % | Q4 | Q3 | Change, % | | | | | | 2015 | 2015 | | +--------------+------+------+-----------+------+------+-----------+ | NPK 16-16-16 | 355 | 354 | 0.3 | 340 | 359 | -5.1 | +--------------+------+------+-----------+------+------+-----------+ | AN | 223 | 282 | -21.0 | 210 | 194 | 8.5 | +--------------+------+------+-----------+------+------+-----------+ | UAN | 198 | 243 | -18.6 | 162 | 183 | -11.4 | +--------------+------+------+-----------+------+------+-----------+ | Urea | 267 | 311 | -14.1 | 246 | 265 | -7.4 | +--------------+------+------+-----------+------+------+-----------+



Contacts for media:



Tatiana Smirnova Tel.: +7 (495) 777-08-65 (ext. 5196) Public Relations



Contacts for investment companies:



Ilya Popov Tel.: +7 (495) 411-55-94 (ext. 5252) Investor Relations



Additional information:



Acron Group is a leading global vertically integrated mineral fertiliser producer in Russia with a diversified product portfolio consisting of complex and straight nitrogen-based fertilisers, as well as industrial products. In 2014, the Group's sales volume was 6.3 million tonnes. Acron sells its products in 66 countries. Russia and China are its key sale markets.



In 2014, the Group posted consolidated revenue under IFRS of RUB 74,631 million (USD 1,943 million) and net profit of RUB 6,904 million (USD 180 million). Acron's shares are listed on the Moscow Exchange and its global depositary receipts are traded on the London Stock Exchange (ticker AKRN). Acron employs over 15,000 people.



A high degree of vertical integration, including three chemical production facilities, a phosphate mine, a potash-mining project, wholly owned transport infrastructure and an international distribution network, create a platform for the Group's dynamic growth.



Further information is available on our website at www.acron.ru/en.



This announcement is distributed by GlobeNewswire on behalf of GlobeNewswire clients. The owner of this announcement warrants that: (i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and (ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.



Source: ACRON via GlobeNewswire [HUG#1981493]



B3BS5Q4R4



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - January 27, 2016) - Home Care Assistance, a home care company headquartered in Silicon Valley with 130 locations worldwide, recently announced the availability of 12 strategically planned Master Franchise opportunities throughout the United Kingdom. Home Care Assistance is actively seeking master franchise owners in the following areas: London, the South West, the South East, East of England, East Midlands, West Midlands, Wales, North West, North East, Yorkshire, Scotland and Ireland.

Currently the UK is home to more people over the age of 60 than those under the age of 18, indicating an increasing need for long-term care options such as in-home care services. The number of centenarians in the UK has risen by an incredible 73% over the last decade due to medical advancements and increased lifespan; nearly one in five people in the UK will live to see their 100th birthday. In keeping with this trend, analysts predict that the number of people over the age of 85 will double in the next 23 years, further illustrating the tremendous need for at home care and an outstanding opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Home Care Assistance is looking for franchise owner partners that are passionate about making a difference in the lives of seniors while simultaneously transitioning to a rewarding and potentially lucrative career; the average revenue for Home Care Assistance locations tends to be much higher than similar concepts, with median performance in year three alone topping $1.3 Million U.S.

"I am excited to bring Home Care Assistance's innovative senior care programs such as the Cognitive Therapeutics Method' and the Balanced Care Method' to the UK," said Jack Johnson, Head of Franchising at Home Care Assistance. "While other home care services and established North American brands are already in the UK, nothing can match the level of service or franchise opportunity Home Care Assistance provides. Compare our Item 19 to any other company and you will quickly see why Home Care Assistance is leading the pack of one of the hottest industries on the planet. Our average client spends over one thousand dollars per week to receive services compared to the industry average of five hundred to six hundred dollars per week in the U.S. We are looking to partner with visionary franchise owners to share in our mission to change the way the world ages by helping seniors live happier, healthier lives at home."

As UK seniors live longer, their nutritional, mental and physical needs are best addressed by an expertly trained caregiver provided by Home Care Assistance. Home Care Assistance caregivers are trained in the Balanced Care Method', a holistic approach to healthy ageing, and the Cognitive Therapeutics Method', a cognitive stimulation program designed to promote brain health; both programs are unique only to Home Care Assistance and will be the cornerstones of the services offered by franchisees.

Senior home care is one of the fastest growing industries with over 4000 people turning 85 every day. Home Care Assistance helps older adults age gracefully and independently in the comfort of home with trained, professional caregivers and premier home care services. By professionalizing the in-home care industry, Home Care Assistance is able to offer peace of mind for older adults and their families, while providing resources for the challenges our ageing population faces.

To learn more about Home Care Assistance franchise opportunities, please visit www.franchise.homecareassistance.com or call 702-204-1436 today.

ABOUT HOME CARE ASSISTANCE

Home Care Assistance is the leading provider of home care for older adults across the United States, Canada and Australia. Our mission is to change the way the world ages. We provide older adults with quality care that enables them to live happier, healthier lives at home. Our services are distinguished by the caliber of our caregivers, the responsiveness of our staff and our expertise in home care. We embrace a positive, balanced approach to ageing centered on the evolving needs of older adults. A 2016 Franchise500 and Inc. 5000 Company, Home Care Assistance has received numerous industry awards including Entrepreneur's Fastest-Growing Franchises and Franchise Business Review's Top 50. For more information about Home Care Assistance and our services, visit homecareassistance.com. For more information about franchise opportunities, visit franchise.homecareassistance.com.

Media Contact:

Kathryn Zakskorn

Director of Franchise Marketing

650-462-9501

kzakskorn@homecareassistance.com
SYDNEY, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

DocsCorp's cleanDocs and compareDocs enhanced with new cloud-based capabilities, Office 365 integration and powered globally by Microsoft Azure

DocsCorp, a global leader in integrated document workflow solutions and technologies, today announced plans to deliver a new, cloud-based capability that will be called DocsCorp Cloud. In addition, DocsCorp will publish new Add-Ins that will extend the functionality of cleanDocs and compareDocs within Office 365.

The new solutions will be hosted on public cloud platform Microsoft Azure. The DocsCorp Cloud-based versions of cleanDocs and compareDocs will not replace desktop editions of these products, but will provide clients with additional options and a greater degree of flexibility in accessing DocsCorp technologies from devices such as Surface Pro, iPad, Mac, and web browsers. DocsCorp will continue to develop and enhance its suite of Windows-based desktop products, including contentCrawler and pdfDocs in addition to cleanDocs and compareDocs. The company is also in discussions with key partners in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Document Management System (DMS) space about integrating their software with the DocsCorp Cloud.

Dean Sappey, DocsCorp President and Co-founder remarked, "The Microsoft Azure environment presents clients with an entirely new and innovative way in which they can access our software to do their work - one that is not tied to the desktop, but rather can be accessed from any device, anytime, anywhere for greater flexibility.

"With these exciting new cloud-based offerings, we anticipate significant growth in our client base as more and more businesses move to a cloud only environment and seek cloud-based solutions such as DocsCorp Cloud. This will help us surpass the 50 percent annual growth we saw this past year across North America, Europe and APAC operations."

Steven Miller, Director Applications and Services at Microsoft Australia said, "We're excited to facilitate DocsCorp's move to the cloud. We believe their ability to deliver their software and increased integration via Azure will increase productivity for our Office 365 users and for DocsCorp clients as well."

About DocsCorp

DocsCorp provides document professionals who use enterprise content management systems with integrated, easy-to-use software and services that extend document processing, review, manipulation and publishing workflows inside and outside their environment to drive business efficiency and to increase the value of their existing technology investment. DocsCorp operates in all countries around the world with customers located throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia/Pacific. More than 3,500 organizations rely on DocsCorp software every day.

For DocsCorp:

Global media contact

Kerry Carroll

kerry.carroll@docscorp.com

U.S. PR contact

Christy Burke

cburke@burke-company.com

+1-917-623-5096

Regional media contact

Kim Dunn

kim.dunn@docscorp.com
The bank's annual general meeting will be held at 5:00 p.m. Wednesday 24 February 2016 in ROFI-Centret, Kirkevej 26, Rindum, DK-6950 Ringkbing, Denmark. Agenda as per the articles of association:1. Election of chairperson2. The board's report on the bank's activities in the previous year The board of directors proposes that the report be adopted.3. Presentation of the annual report for approval The board of directors proposes that the annual report be approved.4. Decision on allocation of profit or covering of loss under the approved annual reportThe board of directors proposes that the distribution of profit be approved.5. Election of members of the shareholders' committee The following members will be retiring: Jens Arnth-Jensen, Claus Dalgaard and Else Kirkegard Hansen. Else Kirkegard Hansenhas advised that she is not offering herself for re-election, and Jens Arnth-Jensen will retire from the shareholders' committee due to the provision on age in the articles of association.The shareholders' committee and the board of directors propose re-election of:-- Claus Dalgaard, Ringkbing, deputy manager, born 1962The shareholders' committee and the board of directors propose election of:-- Poul Johnsen Hj, Hvide Sande, fishing boat skipper, born 1964 -- Carl Erik Kristensen, Hvide Sande, co-owner and manager of A/S Hvide Sande Shipyard, Steel & Service, born 1979 -- Bjarne Bjrnkjr Nielsen, Skjern, co-owner and manager of Aadum Autoophug A/S, born 1973In recruiting and proposing candidates for the shareholders' committee, the committee and the board of directors have focused on ensuring diversity among the committee members, including in relation to business experience, professional qualifications and expertise, age etc.6. Election of one or more auditors The shareholders' committee and the board of directors propose re-election of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Statsautoriseret Revisionspartnerselskab.7. Authorisation of the board of directors to permit the bank to acquire own shares within current legislation until the next annual general meeting to a total nominal value of ten percent (10%) of the bank's share capital, such that the shares can be acquired at current market price +/- ten percent (10%)The board of directors proposes that it be authorised to permit the bank to acquire own shares in accordance with current legislation until the next annual general meeting to a total nominal value of ten percent (10%) of the bank's share capital, such that the shares can be acquired at current market price +/- ten percent (10%).8. Any proposals from the board of directors, the shareholders' committee or shareholders8a. Proposed amendments to the articles of association The shareholders' committee and the board of directors propose the following amendments to the articles of association:Articles 2a and 2b An extension until 23 February 2021 of the authorisations under Articles 2a and 2b is proposed. This is thus an extension of one year. Besides this the authorisations will be on unchanged terms.8b. Proposal to reduce the bank's share capital by nom. DKK 500,000 by cancellation of own shares The board of directors proposes a reduction in the bank's share capital from nom. DKK 23,350,000 to nom. DKK 22,850,000 by cancellation of 100,000 nom. DKK 5 shares from the bank's holding of own shares, to a nominal value of DKK 500,000.It is advised in accordance with Section 188 (1) of the Danish Companies Act that the object of the reduction in the bank's share capital is payment to shareholders, and the amount of the reduction will be used as payment to shareholders for shares acquired by the bank under previous authorisation of the board of directors by the general meeting.The share capital will consequently be reduced by nom. DKK 500,000 and the bank's holding of own shares will be reduced by 100,000 nom. DKK 5 shares. It is advised in accordance with Section 188 (2) of the Danish Companies Act that the shares in question were acquired for a total sum of DKK 142,619,294, meaning that apart from the reduction in nominal capital, DKK 142,119,294 will be paid to shareholders.The board of directors' proposed reduction of the share capital is being made to maintain flexibility in the bank's capital structure.If the proposal is adopted, it will mean an amendment to Article 2 and of Articles 2a and 2b of the bank's articles of association such that the amount of "23,350,000" in Article 2 is changed to "22,850,000" and the amount of "37,560,980" in Articles 2a and 2b is changed to "37,060,980".8c. Proposal for adoption of a buy-back programme to implement a subsequent capital reduction The board of directors proposes the establishment of a special buy-back programme, under which the board of directors can permit the bank to acquire own shares up to a market value of DKK 140,000,000, but maximum up to 140,000 nom. DKK 5 shares before the next annual general meeting. This special buy-back programme requires purchase of the shares at market price. It is also proposed that the board of directors be authorised to cancel or reduce the buy-back programme if this is considered commercially appropriate for the bank, in the bank's long-term interest, or the bank's circumstances with respect to capital otherwise so require. The shares covered by the buy-back programme will be acquired by the bank for subsequent implementation of a capital reduction.8d. Proposed authorisation for the board of directors or its designated appointee The board of directors proposes that the board of directors, or whoever the board may so designate, be authorised to apply the decisions which have been adopted at the general meeting for registration and to make such changes to the documents submitted to the Danish Business Authority as the Authority may require or find appropriate in connection with registration of the decisions of the general meeting.Requirements for passing resolutions The proposals in points 8a and 8b require adoption by at least two thirds (2/3) of both votes cast and of the share capital with voting rights represented at the meeting. The other proposals can be adopted by simple majority vote.The size of the share capital and the shareholders' voting rights and date of registration - the right to attend and vote at the general meeting It is advised with respect to the size of the share capital and the shareholders' right to vote that the share capital is nom. DKK 23,350,000 in 4,670,000 nom. DKK 5 shares. Each shareholding up to and including nom. DKK 500 carries one (1) vote, and bigger shareholdings carry two (2) votes, which is the highest number of votes a shareholder may cast.The right to attend and vote at the general meeting may only be exercised by shareholders who, on the date of registration, Wednesday 17 February 2016, are listed as shareholders in the register of shareholders or who have submitted a request to the bank for inclusion in the register of shareholders by this date and the bank has received the request.Registration for the general meeting, questions and admission Cards Registration for the general meeting can be made on the bank's website www.landbobanken.com or at one of the bank's branches. Shareholders or proxies may be accompanied by an adviser. Shareholders may ask questions in writing on the points on the agenda or the bank's position in general to be answered at the general meeting. Questions may be sent by letter to Ringkjbing Landbobank A/S, att.: General Management, Torvet 1, DK-6950 Ringkbing, Denmark, or by e-mail to regnskab@landbobanken.dk.Considerations of space require the ordering of an admission card for the general meeting in accordance with the bank's articles of association by 11:59 p.m. Friday 19 February 2016, after which time admission cards can no longer be ordered.Voting Shareholders may attend and vote in person or by proxy at the general meeting. Postal voting is also possible before the general meeting.Shareholders may issue a proxy to the bank's board of directors or third party by 11:59 p.m. Friday 19 February 2016. The proxy may be issued electronically on InvestorPortalen at VP Investor Services, via the bank's website www.landbobanken.com or in writing on a proxy form which is available from the bank's branches.If a written proxy is used, the proxy, completed and signed, must be received by the bank by the above deadline, 11:59 p.m. Friday 19 February 2016. The proxy may be sent by post to Ringkjbing Landbobank A/S, att.: Accounts department, Torvet 1, DK-6950 Ringkbing, Denmark by e-mail to regnskab@landbobanken.dk or by fax to +45 7624 4913.Shareholders may also send a postal vote before the general meeting. Postal votes may be cast electronically on InvestorPortalen at VP Investor Services via the bank's website www.landbobanken.com or in writing on a postal vote form which is available from the bank's branches.If a postal vote in writing is cast, the vote must be returned by post to Ringkjbing Landbobank A/S, att.: Accounts department, Torvet 1, DK-6950 Ringkbing, Denmark by e-mail to regnskab@landbobanken.dk or by fax to +45 7624 4913. Postal votes cast electronically must be submitted by Tuesday 23 February 2016 at 10:00 a.m., at which time a postal vote in writing must also be received by the bank.Exercising financial rights Ringkjbing Landbobank's shareholders can choose Ringkjbing Landbobank A/S as the account-holding institution for the purpose of exercising the financial rights through Ringkjbing Landbobank A/S.Further information The annual report and full proposals for amendments to the articles of association will be published on the bank's website at www.landbobanken.com and made available for inspection by shareholders in the bank's branches on Wednesday 27 January 2016.Ringkbing, 27 January 2016On behalf of the board of directorsJens L. Kjeldsen, chairmanAttachment:https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=543700
Geneva - Temenos, the software specialist for banking and finance, today announces that Nordea Bank SA, the international private banking arm of the Nordea group, has gone live with its award-winning WealthSuite.

This successful system modernization project will help transform the bank's business. By implementing WealthSuite, Temenos' integrated wealth management solution combining back office standardisation with front office differentiation, Nordea will be able to drive efficiency in its operations at the same time as transforming its customers' banking experience, providing an ideal platform for growth.

WealthSuite is helping to transform customers' banking experiences. The bank has replaced its complex 'multi-system' front-office workspace in favour of a single workstation giving a 360o client view, leading to better relationship management and client service efficiency. In addition, WealthSuite gives customers complete access to their banking information, which they will soon be able to access across any device and, since fully integrated, in real-time.

WealthSuite has also significantly reduced complexity in Nordea's operations. The platform offers integrated functionality across back-office, front-office, e-banking and client reporting. As such, Nordea has been able to more than halve the number of separate systems and interfaces it runs, allowing for much higher levels of automation as well as much reduced IT maintenance expenditure.

The bank was supported in its implementation of WealthSuite by a team comprising consultants from Temenos and its partners Deloitte and Syncordis.

Steen Jensen, Regional Director Northern Europe at Temenos, commented: "We are delighted that Nordea is now live with WealthSuite. It offers the bank a cutting-edge, integrated platform that will enable them to increasingly differentiate their customer proposition in a ...

Den vollstandigen Artikel lesen ...
MALTA (dpa-AFX) - Malta's producer prices declined at a faster pace in December, figures from the National Statistics Office showed Wednesday. The producer price index fell 3.38 percent year-over-year in December, which was worse than the 2.62 percent drop in the previous month. Producer prices have been falling since January 2015. Both domestic and foreign market prices dipped by 2.90 percent and 3.68 percent, respectively in December from a year ago. The decrease in December was largely caused by a 14.02 percent slump in energy prices. Prices for intermediate goods slid 4.69 percent, while prices in the capital goods sector registered an increase of 2.1 percent. On a monthly basis, producer prices rose 0.66 percent in December, following a 0.62 percent increase in November. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Regulatory News:

Addtech Components, a business area in the Addtech Group, has today signed an agreement to acquire all shares outstanding in Goodtech Products AS.

Goodtech Products delivers products, solutions and services in the field of automation to Norwegian industry and the public sector. The company represents leading suppliers in the field of automation and industrial communication.

Goodtech Products will very effectively complement Addtech's current operations in the business unit Addtech Components Norway. The Company has 23 employees and sales of around NOK 85 million.

The closing is estimated to take effect in the beginning of February 2016 and to have a marginally positive effect on Addtech's earnings per share during the current financial year.

Stockholm, January 27, 2016

Addtech (publ)

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005577/en/

Contacts:

For further information,

contact Johan Sjo, President, Addtech AB,

+46 8 470 49 00

or

Anders Claeson, Business area manager,

Addtech Components,

+46 708 641 516
VIENNA (dpa-AFX) - U.K. stocks fell notably in early trade on Wednesday as oil resumed declines to head back towards $30 a barrel and a slew of European companies such as BASF and Novartis reported disappointing quarterly results. The focus remained firmly on the Federal Reserve's first meeting of the year later today, although most expect no change amid increasing concerns over weaker global growth and stressed markets. The benchmark FTSE 100 was down 26 points or 0.45 percent at 5,885 after gaining 0.6 percent the previous day. Elsewhere, the German DAX was moving down 0.4 percent and France's CAC 40 was declining half a percent. Oil stocks led losses, with BG Group, BP Plc and Royal Dutch Shell losing 1-2 percent. The Royal Bank of Scotland tumbled 3 percent after saying it would take a 3.6 billion-pound ($5.2 billion) hit to the value of its assets. Rio Tinto dropped 1.4 percent after the mining giant signed a binding agreement to sell its Mount Pleasant thermal coal mine to MACH Energy Australia for $US224 million ($A319 million) plus royalties. Copper miner Antofagasta lost 3 percent after missing its 2015 output target. ARM Holdings shed 2 percent after Apple posted its slowest growth in iPhone sales since the product's 2007 launch. In economic releases, U.K. house prices climbed 4.4 percent year-over-year in January, slightly slower than a 4.5 percent rise in December, official data showed. Economists had forecast the annual growth to accelerate to 4.6 percent. Another report from the British Bankers' Association revealed that U.K. mortgage approvals declined unexpectedly to a 7-month low in December. Elsewhere, Japanese shares led the region's gains to hit a near two-week high ahead of the policy meetings at the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan. Chinese shares trimmed early losses to end slightly lower after China's state-run media issued a blunt warning to speculators not to bet on a falling yuan. U.S. stock futures pointed to a lower open after sharp gains on Tuesday. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
SEATTLE, WA -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Baristas Coffee Company, Inc. (OTCQB: BCCI), "Seattle's World Famous Costume Coffee announced today that it has been approved to export to Mexico the only White Coffee single serve cups compatible with the Keurig K-Cup Brewing System 2.0 available anywhere in Mexico. This is being accomplished by Baristas exclusive international distributor agreement with ComNery's Brand Distribution, L.L.C. -- an Affiliate of Nery's Logistics (www.neryslogistics.com) the exclusive distributer of Baristas line of products throughout Mexico. ComNery's through its affiliation with Nery's Logistics distributes products throughout Mexico to retail outlets including Walmart, 7 Eleven, Oxxo, Sam's Club, Calimax, and Comercial Mexicana, among others.

White Coffee is a rarity and is developed using a slow and low heat roast that preserves a much higher caffeine level than a traditional roast. Because the beans have been under-roasted, white coffee has a lighter taste than traditional coffee and is described as both neutral and nutty. Both Baristas White Coffee and Espresso Roast Single Serve Cups are available and utilize Baristas award winning five bean variety of pure Arabica beans that have been hand selected and individually roasted to touch all seven parts of the taste experience in the perfect combination.

ComNery's will initially distribute the Baristas White Coffee and Espresso Roast K-Cups as well as other specialty products to be announced. The exclusive international distributor agreement includes the right to sell Baristas branded equipment, and food beverages and supplies throughout all of Mexico.

Barry Henthorn, CEO, stated: "Mexico is a very compelling market for us to enter into especially being able to do so with such a strong distributor. The response we have had having sold out our initial product run in the first day and having sold out on Amazon on the first day as well is very encouraging. The single serve market in Mexico is just beginning to mature and Baristas is excited to be able to have our products introduced at a time when the consumers are rapidly adopting to what has become commonplace in the United States."

About Baristas Coffee Company (BCCI): Headquartered in the Seattle, Washington area, Baristas Coffee Company, Inc. was formed to create a national brand of drive-thru espresso stands. BCCI is accomplishing this by acquiring established businesses that fit its model, opening new locations, and by franchising. Baristas has retail coffee products such as single serve cups compatible with Keurig 2.0 and other branded products.

Baristas has separated itself from the competition with its "theme" of joining attractive female baristas in entertaining costumes preparing the finest beverages available on the market. Baristas can currently be found in greater Seattle area locations as well as in Florida, and Montana. Your state, Coming Soon!

For more information on this fascinating concept please visit us at www.baristas.tv

For Investor Relations Contact:

Barry Henthorn

barry@baristas.tv

(206) 579-0222




BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - Ku6 Media Co., Ltd. (KUTV), a leading internet video company focused on User Generated Content in China, announced the company has entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with 720Yun.com to enhance the company's virtual reality strategy. 720Yun.com will provide three-dimensional panorama technology and contents to Ku6 Media in the form of video and picture, and serve as technical support for the company's new virtual reality products. Ku6 Media and 720Yun.com's cooperative VR community currently features eight categories. The company expects to add additional categories to the VR community in the future. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
PUNE, India, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The report "Specialty Oilfield Chemicals Market by Type (Inhibitors & Scavengers, Demulsifiers, Gellants & Viscosifiers, Friction Reducers, Rheology Modifiers, Specialty Surfactants, Specialty Biocides, Pour-Point Depressants, and Others), Application, and by Region - Global Forecast to 2020", The Market is projected to to reach USD 13.65 Billion by 2020, registering a moderate CAGR of 5.5% between 2015 and 2020.

Browse more than 83 market data tables and 56 figures spread through 184 pages and in-depth TOC on"Specialty Oilfield Chemicals Market".

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/specialty-oilfield-chemicals-market-517.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The global specialty oilfield chemicals market is projected to reach USD 13.65 Billion by 2020, registering a moderate CAGR of 5.5% between 2015 and 2020. This growth is fueled by the increasing oil production from some regions and at the same time is expected to face a restraining pull due to the declining oil prices.

Growth in the production of oil from some regions is expected to drive the market

The increasing oil production from some of the regions such as the Middle East and North America is expected to drive the market during the forecast period. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is actively managing the production of oil with high supply targets. As the major countries in OPEC and some countries in North America have increased the production of oil, the demand of specialty oilfield chemicals, especially production chemicals are expected to increase during the forecast period.

Specialty biocides are projected to witness the highest growth rate during the forecast period

The specialty biocides are projected to witness the highest growth rate owing to the level of microbial contaminants in water that may affect the product quality. Several developments towards developing eco-friendly formulations of biocides are expected to increase the growth of specialty biocides during the forecast period.

Inquiry Before Buying: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=517

Production chemicals is projected to witness the highest growth rate, followed by EOR during the forecast period

Production chemicals application segment is projected to grow rapidly in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America & RoW, and the Middle East & Africa regions because of the projected increase in production of oil & gas in the newly found onshore and offshore reserves. To increase the production of oil and improve oil recovery from existing as well as new fields, newer grades of specialty oilfield chemicals and processes are being developed. Because of the above factors, production chemicals and EOR are projected to be the fastest-growing application segments in the specialty oilfield chemicals market. Also, the production of unconventional crude oil is increasing as heavy crudes are produced from Latin America & RoW. As the production of the heavier crude increases, the consumption of production chemicals is expected to increase, resulting in a high growth rate between 2015 and 2020.

The major players such as BASF SE (Germany), AkzoNobel N.V. (Netherlands), The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.), Schlumberger (U.S.), Halliburton (U.S.), Lubrizol Corporation (U.S.), Kemira Oyj (Finland), Clariant (Switzerland), Nalco Champion (U.S.), and others have adopted development strategies such as expansions, new product developments, and mergers & acquisitions to achieve growth in the global specialty oilfield chemicals market.

Browse Related Reports:

Production Chemicals Market by Type (Demulsifiers, Corrosion Inhibitors, Scale Inhibitors, Asphaltene Inhibitors, Biocides, Scavengers, Surfactants, and others), by Oilfield Type (Onshore and Offshore), and Region - Global Trend & Forecast to 2020.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/production-chemicals-market-224156113.html

Oilfield Stimulation Chemicals Market by Types (Gelling Agents, Surfactants, Friction reducers, Corrosion and Scale Inhibitors, Acids), by Application(Hydraulic Fracturing, Matrix Acidization, Acid Fracking) & by region - Global Trends & Forecasts to 2020.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/oilfield-stimulation-chemicals-market-200204163.html

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After several acquisitions and opening up its equity, Jaguar Network, a key player in the European market for Cloud & Telecoms, appoints Alexandre BERTUZZI as Chief Executive Officer to boost business development in France as well as in Europe, and strengthen its revenue growth (28% per year, over the last five years).

Alexandre Bertuzzi takes over the operational management of Jaguar Network, aiming to turn it into a key national operator and spur the international development of the Marseille-based company targeting 100 million euros over the next 5 years.

Alexandre Bertuzzi: "Over the last fifteen years, Jaguar Network's developed into a success story, emerging as a major challenger on the Hosting, Cloud and Telecom markets. My goal is to strengthen the national presence of Jaguar Network and accelerate its international expansion. Along with the members of the Executive Committee, we will be working on the differentiation of our offers and solutions in order to refine our strategic positioning. Leveraging the expertise and trust that Jaguar Network earned from its customers, we will improve our track record and tackle this development phase by building on our key assets: excellence and agility. I am excited to join Kevin and his enthusiastic teams at this stage of development of the company. Jaguar Network has all the human and technological resources required for a successful transformation. "

Kevin Polizzi adds: "The arrival of Alexandre as CEO, highlights our ambition to embark on a new phase of growth for Jaguar Network. His innovative management will empower our teams of experts to meet the requirements of our maturing target markets. Our customers and partners expect an immediate impact on their business and we are focused on delivering the means to achieve this objective together.

From now on, I will be focusing on my role as a President and continue to add value on major technological and strategic decisions that we will need to make to fulfil the expectations of our customers and partners.

This announcement is distributed by NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions on behalf of NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Jaguar Network via Globenewswire



HUG#1981574



Alexandre Bertuzzi, 45, is a graduate of EPITA (a French Computer Science grande ecole) who has an accomplished career both in France and internationally. As a high-profile figure on the IT market, he stringed together success stories thanks to an innovative approach to business strategy and team management. Alexandre is a renowned specialist in managing companies in defining their strategic plans and has assisted over the last few years many companies both in France and internationally. Among the latest missions, we can mention various companies within specific industries, such as customer relationship management for Yoursl, B2B Conciergerie Services for John Paul, helping the development of technological offers for Pointgreen or selling services to value-added operators for HDWay. Alexandre has had several executive management and sales management positions for notable network and security companies such as Fore Systems, Radware or A10 Networks 
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

On the recommendation of the Degree Quality Assessment Board (DQAB), University Canada West's (UCW) undergraduate programs were granted unconditional five-year consent by the Minister of Advanced Education. With this consent the University continues to offer its Bachelor of Commerce and the newly renamed Bachelor of Arts in Business Communication.

"Thank you to the Minister and the Board for their reaffirmation and consent of UCW's undergraduate programs," said UCW Vice-President, Academic and Students, Dr. Brad O'Hara. "Our growing University continues to prosper and this consent from the Ministry further validates this. We're proud that intelligent and ambitious students from around the world can continue to enroll in our undergraduate programs and work towards their dreams."

Representatives of the Board conducted an extensive review of the two undergraduate degrees and determined that "UCW programs met or exceeded the learning outcomes specified" without condition. To better reflect the mission of the institution and the evolution of the degree program, the Board also recommended that UCW modify the name of its Bachelor of Arts in Media and Communication to a Bachelor of Arts in Business Communication. This change is effective immediately and in making this change UCW becomes the only university in British Columbia to offer this degree.

DQAB's role is to oversee the quality assurance process for degree level education in British Columbia, as an independent advisory board appointed by the Minister of Advanced Education.

University Canada West (UCW) delivers programs that provide students with the applied and theoretical basis for success in the workplace and future academic endeavours. Established in 2004, UCW continues to offer quality education with courses that transfer broadly into the public education system. Courses are offered at UCW's downtown Vancouver campus and online. For more information visit http://www.ucanwest.ca.
BERLIN, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Says new report by World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation

European Bioplastics (EUBP), the association representing the bioplastics industry in Europe, welcomes the new report by the World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation on 'The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics'. The report provides an overarching vision of a global circular plastics economy in which bioplastics play an essential role in decoupling the economy from fossil resources and help to return nutrients to the soil.

The vision of the 'New Plastics Economy' aligns with the principles of the circular economy and outlines concrete steps on how plastics never become waste but, instead, re-enter the economy as valuable technical or biological nutrients. "The report demonstrates very clearly how bioplastics can help to deliver better economic and environmental outcomes by replacing fossil with bio-based feedstocks, while developing the many benefits of plastic packaging," says Hasso von Pogrell, Managing Director of EUBP. The report acknowledges that "feedstock from renewable sources helps decouple plastics production from finite fossil feedstocks and reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of plastic packaging [...] and potentially act as a carbon sink throughout their life cycle."

Furthermore, the report recognises that compostable packaging can "help return organic nutrients to the soil in applications that are prone to be mixed with organic contents after use." It recommends scaling up the adoption of industrially compostable plastic packaging for targeted applications such as biowaste bags and food packaging and calls for the set-up of corresponding waste management infrastructure.

"The report provides an excellent fact-base for future discussions and a comprehensive vision on how the plastics industry can move towards a circular economy," Pogrell concludes.

Full report: http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/news/new-plastics-economy-report-offers-blueprint-to-design-a-circular-future-for-plastics;

More information on bioplastics: http://en.european-bioplastics.org/multimedia/

Contact: Kristy Lange, press@european-bioplastics.org, +49(0)30-28482356.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Field-Centric Approach to Digitizing Farms Takes Root Across Russia, Brazil, Australia, Canada and the U.S.

Farmers Edge', a global leader in precision agriculture and independent data management solutions, announced today it has received a $58 million CAD raise led by existing investors, Mitsui & Co., Ltd., Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' Green Growth Fund and Osmington Inc. The investment will go towards the expansion of the data science team, new product development and global growth into South America, Australia and Eastern Europe. Kenji Otake, General Manager, First Business Dept., IT Platform Div. of Mitsui & Co., Ltd. will join the Farmers Edge Board of Directors.

"Today, Mitsui is responsible for the procurement of 17.5 million tons of food resources each year, including grains, corn and soybeans, and we are committed to increasing those levels, in a sustainable manner, as global population rises," said Kenji Otake of Mitsui & Co., Ltd. "Meeting that global goal is what drove our first investment in Farmers Edge. Today, as Farmers Edge demonstrates its ability to operate in regions like Brazil that lack traditional infrastructure to support technology-enabled agriculture, our strategic alignment deepens."

"There's a huge shift underway in agriculture as technology continues to enable the digitization of farming,"said Brook Porter, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' Green Growth Fund. "Traditional incumbents are struggling to keep pace with this disruption, as farmers seek better tools to enable increased yields and profitability across multiple crops, in wide geographic regions around the world. Reducing costs while also reducing environmental impact is more important than ever - and Farmers Edge is leading this transformation."

Today's investment comes on the heels of a significant growth period for Farmers Edge, marked most notably by the opening of its U.S. headquarters in Minnesota, as well as its entrance into three of the world's most prominent, emerging breadbaskets. In Brazil alone, there are nearly one billion acres of arable land that represent a significant and largely untapped market opportunity, primed for increased agricultural productivity. With partnerships across the industry,that bridge large multi-nationals to leading, regionalagribusinesses, Farmers Edge has emerged as the prominent technology provider in the world's largest agriculture markets.

"Global agriculture companies are looking for scalable business solutions to efficiently increase sustainability and traceability throughout the supply chain, and Farmers Edge has emerged as that market mover," said Brian Hayward, Chairman of Farmers Edge. "This investment signifies the confidence that Mitsui and existing investors place in Farmers Edge to tap into previously underutilized agriculture regions around the world."

"Over the past decade, we've become the largest independent agricultural network in the world. As we move into this next high growth period, we will continue to expand into lucrative markets like the U.S., as well as Russia, Australia and Brazil, where our field-centric approach to predictive modeling is generating high yields even in data-sparse regions," said Wade Barnes, President and CEO of Farmers Edge."At the end of the day, our goal is to bring the precision agriculture movement to the largest broad acre markets in the world, creating a new generation of breadbasket regions in previously untapped land."

About Mitsui

Mitsui & Co., Ltd. is one of the most diversified and comprehensive trading, investment and service enterprises in the world, with 141 offices in 66 countries as of March, 2015. Utilizing its global operating locations, network and information resources, Mitsui is multilaterally pursuing business that ranges from product sales, worldwide logistics and financing, through to the development of major international infrastructure and other projects in the following fields: Iron & Steel Products, Mineral & Metal Resources, Infrastructure Projects, Integrated Transportation Systems, Chemicals, Energy, Food Resources, Food Products & Services, Consumer Services, IT & Communication, Corporate Development Business. Mitsui is actively taking on challenges for global business innovation around the world.

About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) partners with the brightest entrepreneurs to turn disruptive ideas into world-changing businesses. The firm has helped build and accelerate growth at pioneering companies like Amazon, Google, Lending Club, Nest, Twitter, Uber, and Mandiant. KPCB offers entrepreneurs decades of operating experience, puts them at the center of an influential network, and accelerates their companies from success to significance. KPCB invests in all stages from seed and incubation to growth companies and operates from offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Shanghai and Beijing. For more information, visithttp://www.kpcb.comand follow us on Twitter @kpcb.

About Osmington Inc.

Formed in 1995, Osmington is a private commercial real estate company, owned and controlled by David Thomson, Chairman of Thomson Reuters. Osmington operates with the highest degree of integrity and has a stellar reputation in the Canadian real estate market. The Company's investment focus has been and continues to be focused on value creation. Signature projects for the Company include the retail redevelopment of Toronto's Union Station and the purchase and relocation of NHL's Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg to become the Winnipeg Jets.

About Farmers Edge

Farmers Edge is a global leader in precision agriculture and independent data management solutions. Leading the development and application of new technologies on the farm, Farmers Edge is defining the future of agriculture through innovation. For more information on Farmers Edge, please visit:http://www.farmersedge.ca.

Media Contact: MissionCTRL Communications for Farmers Edge, FarmersEdge@MissionC2.com
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Itinerary for the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, for Wednesday, January 27, 2016:

Ottawa

10:00 a.m. The Prime Minister will attend the National Caucus meeting. 2:00 p.m. The Prime Minister will attend Question Period. 3:30 p.m. The Prime Minister will attend a celebration of the life of the Honourable Maurice Strong. Sir John A. Macdonald Building 144 Wellington Street Ottawa, ON Notes for media -Photo opportunity only 5:00 p.m. The Prime Minister will attend a reception on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of Canada-China diplomatic relations. Victoria Hall 111 Sussex Drive Ottawa, ON Notes for media -Photo opportunity only

Contacts:

PMO Media Relations:

(613) 957-5555




NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, IN, INTO OR FROM ANY JURISDICTION WHERE TO DO SO WOULD CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF THE RELEVANT LAWS OF THAT JURISDICTION

For immediate release

Shell shareholders vote in favour of the recommended combination between Shell and BG

The Hague, January 27, 2016 - Royal Dutch Shell plc ("Shell") announces the poll result from today's General Meeting held at the Circustheater, Circusstraat 4, 2586 CW, The Hague, The Netherlands. Shell shareholders expressed their support for the recommended combination with BG Group plc ("BG") by carrying the resolution to approve and implement the transaction.

Full details of the resolution passed, together with explanatory notes, are set out in the Shell shareholder circular dated December 22, 2015 (the "Circular"), including notice of the General Meeting, which is available at www.shell.com. The resolution was proposed as an ordinary resolution.

The expected timetable of remaining principal events remains as set out in the Circular.

Should BG shareholders approve the offer at shareholder meetings to be held on January 28, 2016, the transaction would be expected to complete on February 15, 2016, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of certain customary conditions, including the sanction of the scheme of arrangement to implement the combination by the High Court of Justice.

Commenting on the shareholder vote, Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell, said:

"I am delighted with the positive shareholder vote and the confidence that shareholders have shown in the strategic logic of the combination of Shell and BG. Our immediate focus is on the successful completion of the transaction and we now await the results of tomorrow's BG shareholder vote."

Results of the Shell General Meeting

RESOLUTION VOTES FOR % VOTES AGAINST % TOTAL VOTES % OF ISC VOTED VOTES WITHHELD To approve the acquisition of BG Group plc by the Company , as more particularly described in the Notice of General Meeting 3,272,360,952 83.08 666,259,619 16.92 3,938,620,571 61.24% 22,241,824

Please note that votes withheld are not votes under English law and have not been counted in the calculation of the proportion of the votes 'for' and 'against' the resolution. Pursuant to the Listing Rules, a copy of the resolution will be submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and will be available for inspection at: http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/nsm.

Shell Shareholders may request a hard copy of this announcement by contacting Equiniti during business hours on +44 (0)121 415 7073 or by submitting a request in writing to Equiniti at Aspect House, Spencer Road, Lancing, West Sussex BN99 6DA.

-END-

Enquiries

Shell Media Relations

International: +44 207 934 5550

Americas: +1 713 241 4544

Shell Investor Relations

Europe: + 31 70 377 4540

North America: +1 832 337 2034

Cautionary note

The companies in which Royal Dutch Shell plc directly and indirectly owns investments are separate entities. In this announcement "Shell", "Shell Group" and "Royal Dutch Shell" are sometimes used for convenience where references are made to Royal Dutch Shell plc and its subsidiaries in general. Likewise, the words "we", "us" and "our" are also used to refer to subsidiaries in general or to those who work for them. These expressions are also used where no useful purpose is served by identifying the particular company or companies. "Subsidiaries", "Shell subsidiaries" and "Shell companies" as used in this announcement refer to companies in which Shell either directly or indirectly has control, by having either a majority of the voting rights or the right to exercise a controlling influence. The companies in which Shell has significant influence but not control are referred to as "associated companies" or "associates" and companies in which Shell has joint control are referred to as "jointly controlled entities". In this announcement, associates and jointly controlled entities are also referred to as "equity-accounted investments". The term "Shell interest" is used for convenience to indicate the direct and/or indirect ownership interest held by Shell in a venture, partnership or company, after exclusion of all third-party interest.

This announcement contains forward looking statements concerning the financial condition, results of operations and businesses of Shell and the Shell Group. All statements other than statements of historical fact are, or may be deemed to be, forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements of future expectations that are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Forward-looking statements include, among other things, statements concerning the potential exposure of Shell and the Shell Group to market risks and statements expressing management's expectations, beliefs, estimates, forecasts, projections and assumptions. These forward looking statements are identified by their use of terms and phrases such as "anticipate", "believe", "could", "estimate", "expect", "goals", "intend", "may", "objectives", "outlook", "plan", "probably", "project", "risks", "seek", "should", "target", "will" and similar terms and phrases. There are a number of factors that could affect the future operations of Shell and the Shell Group and could cause those results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward looking statements included in this announcement, including (without limitation): (a) price fluctuations in crude oil and natural gas; (b) changes in demand for Shell's products; (c) currency fluctuations; (d) drilling and production results; (e) reserves estimates; (f) loss of market share and industry competition; (g) environmental and physical risks; (h) risks associated with the identification of suitable potential acquisition properties and targets, and successful negotiation and completion of such transactions; (i) the risk of doing business in developing countries and countries subject to international sanctions; (j) legislative, fiscal and regulatory developments including regulatory measures addressing climate change; (k) economic and financial market conditions in various countries and regions; (l) political risks, including the risks of expropriation and renegotiation of the terms of contracts with governmental entities, delays or advancements in the approval of projects and delays in the reimbursement for shared costs; and (m) changes in trading conditions. All forward looking statements contained in this announcement are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements contained or referred to in this section. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking statements. Additional factors that may affect future results are contained in Shell's 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2014 (available at www.shell.com/investor and www.sec.gov ). These factors also should be considered by the reader. Each forward looking statement speaks only as of the date of this announcement, January 27, 2016. Neither Shell nor any of its subsidiaries nor the Shell Group undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward looking statement as a result of new information, future events or other information. In light of these risks, results could differ materially from those stated, implied or inferred from the forward looking statements contained in this announcement.
In connection with the sale and leaseback of Odfjell's main office, an extraordinary general meeting of Odfjell SE will be held at the Company's headquarters in Conrad Mohrs veg 29, Bergen, Norway on Wednesday 17 February 2016 at 16:00 hours.

Attached please find notice of the extraordinary general meeting, which will also be posted on the Company's web-page www.odfjell.com (http://www.odfjell.com/) with other documentation concerning the matter for approval.



Investor Relations contact:

Tom A. Haugen, Vice President Finance

Tel: +47 55 27 46 69,

Email: IR@odfjell.com (mailto:IR@odfjell.com)

Notice to Extraordinary General Meeting (http://hugin.info/156/R/1981604/726030.pdf)



This announcement is distributed by NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions on behalf of NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Odfjell SE via Globenewswire



HUG#1981604




WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - In its symbolic look at the likelihood of Armageddon, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has announced the 2016 time of the world's so-called Doomsday Clock, setting it at three minutes to midnight.



A metaphor for the end of the world as we know it, the Doomsday Clock has been set at 11:57PM since January 2015, when it was moved down from five minutes to destruction. It's the closest the clock has been to midnight since the Cold War in the 1980s.



The Bulletin scientists said the clock is staying right where it is because recent progress in the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord 'constitute only small bright spots in a darker world situation full of potential for catastrophe.'



A statement accompanying the Doomsday Clock decision Tuesday opens with the following words: 'Three minutes (to midnight) is too close. Far too close. We, the members of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,want to be clear about our decision not to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock in 2016: That decision is not good news, but an expression of dismay that world leaders continue to fail to focus their efforts and the world's attention on reducing the extreme danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change. When we call these dangers existential, that is exactly what we mean: They threaten the very existence of civilization and therefore should be the first order of business for leaders who care about their constituents and their countries.'



The decision about the time reflected on the Doomsday Clock is made by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board in conjunction with the Board of Sponsors, which includes 16 Nobel Laureates. The hands of the Doomsday Clock were moved to three minutes before midnight on January 22, 2015, marking the direst setting of the Clock since 1983, at the height of the Cold War.



In addition to a news event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, the Doomsday Clock also was unveiled by a panel at Stanford University in California featuring Governor Jerry Brown; former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz; Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford distinguished fellow, Hoover Institution; and William J. Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense.



While recognizing the important progress represented by the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, the Bulletin cautions that these positive steps have been offset in large part by foreboding developments.



The statement also reflects concerns about 'the nuclear power vacuum' around the globe.



Rachel Bronson, the publisher of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: 'Last year, the Bulletin's Science and Security Board moved the Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes to midnight, noting: 'The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.' That probability has not been reduced. The Clock ticks. Global danger looms. Wise leaders should act - immediately.'



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/4mtwnp/poland_b2c) has announced the addition of the "Poland B2C E-Commerce Market 2015" report to their offering.

This new market report, titled Poland B2C E-Commerce Market 2015 finds that online retail in Poland is on the rise, driven by consumer confidence and increasing online shopper penetration. Furthermore, important market trends in Poland include the expansion of M-Commerce and growth of cross-border online shopping.

The sixth largest country in the EU in terms of population, Poland's standing in B2C E-Commerce is in line with other emerging markets across Europe. In terms of sales, Poland was behind only Russia and Turkey in Eastern Europe in 2014 and enjoyed faster growth rates than Russia. Sales are expected to continue rising at double digit growth rates over the next few years, with B2C E-Commerce's share of total retail sales to grow by around one percentage point in 2015.

Online shopper penetration in Poland reached over one third of the population in 2015, but still reaches less than half of the Internet users in the country, according to the report. Online shoppers increasingly use mobile devices to browse E-Commerce websites and make purchases online, sparking M-Commerce sales which are predicted to grow at even faster rates than overall online retail sales. Another important trend is cross-border E-Commerce, with over 10% of online shoppers making purchases cross-border in 2014, from websites such as eBay, Amazon and AliExpress.

These developments are also reflected in the competitive landscape in Poland, which remains dynamic. The report shows that local market leader Allegro retained strong positions in 2015, while international players such as Amazon heavily invested in local distribution networks and fulfillment centers in Poland.

Key Questions Answered

How does the Polish B2C E-Commerce market compare to other markets in Europe?

What are the main trends in B2C E-Commerce in Poland and how do they develop over time?

How large is the Polish B2C E-Commerce market in terms of sales and share in total retail?

What are some of the key characteristics of online shoppers in Poland?

Which products, delivery options and payment methods are preferred by online shoppers in Poland?

Key Topics Covered:

1. Management Summary

2. Overview International Comparisons

3. Trends

4. Sales Shares

5. Users Shoppers

6. Products

7. Payment

8. Delivery

9. Players

Companies Mentioned

50-Style

Aliexpress

Allegro

Amazon

Ceneo

Czasnabuty

E-Timberland

eBay

Gumtree

Mango

OLX

Sizeer

Zalando

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/4mtwnp/poland_b2c

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005720/en/

Contacts:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

Sector: E-Business
ORLANDO, FL -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Wendover Housing Partners, a privately held real estate development, investment and management company, today announces the opening of its newest property, Weston Park. As a premier transit oriented development (TOD), Weston Park offers the first multi-family residential housing directly adjacent to the City of Longwood's SunRail Station. Now accepting applications for new residents, the 208-unit apartment home community encourages residents to adopt a more car-independent lifestyle.

"As Central Florida continues to grow, access to public transportation will become invaluable to commuters wanting to avoid congested highways and interstates," said Jonathan L. Wolf, President and Founder of Wendover Housing Partners. "Wendover recognized the lack of housing in close proximity to stops on the SunRail line, making the option to ride less convenient. Weston Park is a step in the right direction in creating a more transit-friendly city."

Weston Park, which broke ground in December 2014, is the result of a $30 million investment and multiple government partnerships. In addition to more than 200 temporary construction jobs created by the project, Wendover has hired an in-house management staff to run the property. The development also includes a parking structure, which is open to SunRail riders as well as residents, and is within walking distance to local shops and businesses.

"Whether or not you sign a lease at Weston Park, the property benefits the Longwood community as a whole. Non-residents wanting to ride SunRail will be able to utilize the parking garage with easy access to the station and local shops," said Wolf. "Not only has the development created new jobs, it will also enhance the city's culture and drive new business."

Weston Park offers residents access to exclusive comforts including concierge services, as well as superior community amenities such as a luxury clubhouse, pool, fire pit, game room and dog park. The TOD community is now leasing one, two and three bedroom units, ranging from $953 to $1,460 per month. For more information about Weston Park, visit www.westonparkapts.com or call (407) 260-2642.

For additional information about Wendover Housing Partners, visit www.wendovergroup.com.

About Wendover Housing Partners

Headquartered in Altamonte Springs, Wendover Housing Partners, LLC is a privately held real estate development, investment and management company founded in 1995. As one of the Southeast's premier housing companies, Wendover specializes in the development of single and multi-family homes, apartment communities, senior communities, and transit oriented development. Wendover's expansive portfolio of affordable and mixed-income developments demonstrates the company's success in creating housing opportunities in a variety of economically and socially diverse neighborhoods.

To find out more about Wendover Housing Partners, visit www.wendovergroup.com.

Media Contact

Melissa Landy

Uproar PR for Wendover Housing Partners

321.236.0102 ext. 233

Email Contact




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- ModernAdvisor today announced the launch of Canada's first online financial advisor to offer responsible investment options. ModernAdvisor's mission is to provide a more honest way to invest by offering transparent, unbiased investment management services. The company uses technology to bring Canadians intelligent investing at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor.

"We've seen firsthand the growing market demand for portfolio options that extend beyond the bottom line, allowing clients to be a catalyst for change while making sure their portfolio is positioned for growth," said Navid Boostani, founder and CEO of ModernAdvisor. "Equally important to our clients: smart technology, accessibility and of course transparency - all areas we cover in spades."

ModernAdvisor offers a low minimum investment and aggressively low fees, ranging from 0.35 per cent to 0.50 per cent per year, a fraction of what the average mutual fund costs in Canada. The company uses technology to create personalized, diversified and optimized ETF portfolios for its clients. ModernAdvisor rebalances clients' portfolios in response to changing market conditions to ensure their investments remain suitable for their financial goals. Canadians can use the service as a hassle-free way to manage their RRSP, TFSA and taxable accounts.

Clients will be able to monitor daily updates on their investments through the ModernAdvisor app, which is now available in the App Store for iOS. ModernAdvisor has tailored its offering to digital age investors - millennials and digital-savvy members of Gen X - who not only care about what they're investing in, but also want to see data supporting their portfolio's management.

ModernAdvisor offers responsible investment options via ESG portfolios, as well as Canadian and emerging market bond ETFs and real estate investment trusts (REITs). Options will include investments in the iShares Jantzi Social Index ETF; iShares MSCI KLD 400 Social ETF; iShares 1-5 Year Laddered Government Bond Index ETF; and Vanguard FTSE Canadian Capped REIT Index ETF. The company will also offer the BMO Emerging Markets Bond Hedged to CAD Index ETF. The indexes used by the ETFs chosen for the responsible portfolios were created by industry leaders in the ESG marketplace.

"As we grow, we'll look to increase our portfolios beyond ESG, into the expanded realm of impact investing. Right now, we're pleased to be the first online investment management platform in Canada to offer portfolio options to the socially conscious investor," added Boostani.

ModernAdvisor raised $2.2 million in the fall of 2015 in its Series A funding round. Investors included Moray Keith and Jim Bond. Canadians can visit ModernAdvisor.ca today to open an account or preview the service including a personalized asset allocation recommendation, free of charge. ModernAdvisor is registered in all Canadian provinces and the Northwest Territories.

About ModernAdvisor

ModernAdvisor is an online financial advisor helping Canadians invest the way they want to. The first to offer responsible investing options via ESG (environmental, social, governance) portfolios, we're making investing how it should have always been - transparent, low-cost and accessible. ModernAdvisor is registered in all Canadian provinces and the Northwest Territories.

About ESG portfolios

ESG portfolios look beyond just profitability. ESG portfolios place a heavy emphasis on finding investments that meet strict standards for environmental, social and governance criteria. Companies that rank high on ESG factors are thought to outperform companies that score low on ESG factors over the long-term. Environmental factors include climate change and carbon emissions, air and water pollution, energy efficiency and waste management. Social factors include labour standards, workplace diversity, product safety, human rights practices, community relations and corporate philanthropy. Governance factors examine executive compensation, board composition, board accountability, shareholder rights and corruption.

Contacts:

Media Contact:

Melissa Orozco / Esther Tung

Media Relations Manager

media@modernadvisor.ca

Phone: 604.558.1656

Cell: 778.968.0503




HENDERSON, NV -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Readen Holding Corp (OTC PINK: RHCO) (The Company) announces the completion and closing of the acquisition of Neckermann.com and will open 13 stores in 2 countries as announced in the filling on OTC Markets January 26, 2016.

Neckermann started in 1930 in Germany and quickly grew to be one of the biggest mail order companies in Europe. Active as retailer, tour operator, insurance company and consumer credit facilitator, the Neckermann group had a turnover of 1,29Billion euro in 2010. Neckermann was sold completely to Sun Capital Partners Inc. in 2010.

In 2012 Neckermann needed to file for bankruptcy; the company was split and sold to multiple investors. Neckermann Benelux was bought by Axivate Capital Partners in 2013, and in 2015 Neckerman.com was able to obtain the approval of the AFM (Dutch Authorities financial markets) again, which gives Neckermann.com the opportunity to sell on consumer credit again. This will significantly boost the sales of Neckermann.com.

Readen Holding Corp has taken a majority share in Neckermann.com and will merge its current consumer retail activates (D5avenue.com) with Neckermann.com combining the 80% brand awareness of Neckermann with the strong sourcing capabilities of Readen Holding Corp into one company. Together with the acquisition of Neckermann 8 stores in the Netherlands and 5 stores in Belgium will be opened in February 2016.

Kitty Koelemeijer, Professor Marketing and Retail at the Neyenrode Business University: "This is the future of retail, online shops with physical stores. Some products ask to be seen, touched and experienced; you can't do that online. And in physical stores the connection with your customers is much bigger and a higher service level can be given."

Ronald Steenbergen, CEO Readen Holding Corp: "The acquisition of Neckermann.com and the opportunity to open 13 stores in 2 countries in February 2016 fits our focus and growth strategy. With a brand as Neckermann.com we will be able to soon reach significant turnover and claim a position in the top 5 retailers in The Netherlands and Belgium within 2 years."

Readen Group's mission statement: To be a valuable and reliable partner for customers, suppliers and investors in terms of quality, communications and service. Adding value for all the stakeholders is the main objective.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Readen Holding Corporation and its plans, products and related market potential. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of the words "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "should," "could," "would," "may," "will," "believes," "estimates," "potential" or "continue" and variations or similar expressions. These statements are based upon the current expectations and beliefs of management and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties discussed in Readen Holding Corporation's postings on the OTC Markets Disclosure &; News Service and future filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which factors are incorporated herein by reference. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements. Readen Holding Corporation undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect actual outcomes.

Readen Holding Corporation

www.readenholdingcorp.com

+31356299970

info@readenholdingcorp.com






WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The mosquito-borne Zika virus, which had a devastating outbreak in Latin America, has now been found in 19 people in Puerto Rico, reports quoting the Caribbean Island's health secretary said.



None of the infected persons were pregnant women, the group most at risk, Puerto Rico's Health Secretary Ana Rius was quoted as saying.



The World Health Organization Monday warned that Zika virus is likely to spread across nearly all of the Americas. US health authorities have warned pregnant women not to travel to 22 places in Latin America and the Caribbean to avoid exposure to the Zika virus.



The biggest concern is the potential impact on babies developing in the womb, and pregnant women have been advised not to travel to Latin American and Caribbean countries because of the virus. Nearly 4000 suspected cases of microcephaly - babies born with tiny brains - has been reported in Brazil alone since October.



Rius reported that 18 new cases of the Zika virus have been detected in Puerto Rico, raising the total to 19 since the US unincorporated territory's first case was confirmed last month. So far the virus has not been detected in the continental United States. However, a number of residents have contracted it while traveling and officials are concerned that it could spread if they are bitten by mosquitoes after returning home.



Arkansas became the latest state to raise concerns Tuesday after tests showed a resident had contracted a mild case of Zika while abroad. Florida, Hawaii and New York have also reported cases in recent weeks of residents who contracted Zika after they traveled to areas impacted by the virus.



Puerto Rico's cases of Zika were concentrated in the island's southeast, Rius said. 'We appeal especially to pregnant women, that if they have symptoms of fever, to go immediately to their doctor, Rius said.



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DUBLIN, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/mr5mhh/global_light) has announced the addition of the "Global light vehicle OE exhaust & emissions aftertreatment systems - forecasts to 2030" report to their offering.

This latest report edition offers a global review of the OE automotive exhaust systems sector, its suppliers, top markets, technologies and market forecasts.

This global market study offers:

- Automotive OE exhaust systems market size estimates - Latest technologies and trends - Market share data tables - Exclusive interviews with major companies - Profiles of the major players including their strategies and prospects - Market size forecasts

You can use this report to:

- Understand the scope and scale of the major markets - Get an overview of the global automotive exhaust systems sector - Identify opportunities and threats - Prepare demand and supply forecasts - Review the latest technological drivers - Know the key trends within the sector and what's driving them - Get up to speed with latest company activities and prospects - Hear direct from major companies on strategies and plans - Carry out competitive analysis

Companies Mentioned

- BASF SE - Benteler AG - BorgWarner - Bosal International N.V. - Calsonic Kansei Corporation - Clean Diesel Technologies (CDTi) - Corning Inc. - Cummins Inc. - Delphi Automotive LLP - Dow Automotive Systems - Emitec - Faurecia SA - Federal Mogul Corporation - Friedrich Boysen GmbH & Co KG - Futaba Industrial - Inergy Automotive Systems - J Eberspacher GmbH & Co. Kg - Johnson Matthey Plc - Katcon Global - Kolbenschmidt Pierburg (KSPG) - Magneti Marelli S.p.A. - Martinrea International Inc. - Others - Sharda Motor Industries - Sumitomo Chemical - Tenneco Inc. - Umicore - Valeo SA - Wescast Industries Inc

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/mr5mhh/global_light

Media Contact:

Laura Wood, +353-1-481-1716, press@researchandmarkets.net
SHANGHAI, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd. ("JinkoSolar" or the "Company") (NYSE: JKS), a global leader in the solar PV industry, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to supply up to one gigawatt (GW) of solar PV modules to sPower, a leading US independent power producer (IPP) company.

This agreement is JinkoSolar's largest contract in the United States to date. JinkoSolar will supply over three million of its high efficiency solar PV modules to sPower for use in various projects that are to be built before the end of 2016.

sPower develops solar and wind energy projects across the United States and the UK for several years, including utility-scale solar projects in California. The company recently announced the doubling of its operating portfolio in 2015 to 500 MW and plans to bring an additional 700 MW on line within the next twelve months.

"JinkoSolar is proud to be sPower's strategic partner, a key player in the US solar development market," commented Mr. Nigel Cockroft, General Manager of JinkoSolar US."This agreement is evidence of the reliability of JinkoSolar's operation and competitiveness of its advanced module technology. This deal affirms that JinkoSolar has quickly become one of the leading solar panel suppliers in the US."

"The timing of the agreement is significant in light of the recent extension by the US Federal Government of Investment Tax Credits for utility-scale solar development," said Ryan Creamer, sPower CEO. "Strategic sourcing is an element of sPower's plan to secure resources in order to ensure that we successfully achieve our aggressive development goals."
Regulatory News:

Total (Paris:FP) (LSE:TTA) (NYSE:TOT) has reinforced its Marketing Services presence in the Caribbean with the acquisition from Putney Capital Management of a majority 70% interest in the leading Dominican fuel retailer. The transaction includes a well established network of 130 stations, along with significant commercial oil products and lubricants sales positions.

"This acquisition illustrates Total's strategy in the Marketing Services segment of selectively expanding in growth areas while maintaining strong profitability. This partnership allows the Group to continue its development in the Caribbean retail market, where it is now one of the regional leaders," explained Philippe Boisseau, Member of Total's Executive Committee and President of Marketing Services. "Combining Total's operational excellence and Putney Capital Management's market knowledge allows us to unlock synergies with our existing operations in the area."

Putney Capital Management will continue to play an important role as Total's local partner in the Dominican Republic, retaining a 30% stake.

The joint-venture will be named Total Dominicana and managed as part of Total's network of 600 service stations throughout nine countries in the Caribbean. Total has been present in the region for more than forty years and holds leading positions in major Caribbean markets such as Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica and the French West Indies.

With a population of 10 million, the Dominican Republic has a dynamic economy with GDP growth of around 6% per year. This economic growth drives the country's growing oil product demand of 3.2 million tons per year, positioning the Dominican Republic as the second largest open oil market in the Caribbean.

About the Marketing Services division of Total

Total Marketing Services develops and markets products primarily derived from crude oil, along with all of the associated services. With 32,000 employees in 150 countries, Total Marketing Services serves more than 4 million customers daily throughout its network of over 15,500 service stations. As the world's fourth largest distributor of lubricants and the leading distributor of petroleum products in Africa, Total Marketing Services operates 50 production sites worldwide where it manufactures the lubricants, bitumen, additives, special fuels and fluids that sustain its growth.

About Putney Capital Management

Putney is an asset management firm and an affiliated partner of VICINI, focused on industrial and energy sectors throughout the Caribbean and North of Latin America Region. Putney currently manages VICINI's energy and industry investment funds. Putney was founded in 2007 with offices in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and San Juan, Puerto Rico. putney-capital.com

About VICINI

VICINI is a private asset management firm that operates through partnerships with unique managers focused on the North of Latin American Region to capture long-term value for investors, clients, partners and associates. vicini.com

About Total

Total is a global integrated energy producer and provider, a leading international oil and gas company, and the world's second-ranked solar energy operator with SunPower. Our 100,000 employees are committed to better energy that is safer, cleaner, more efficient, more innovative and accessible to as many people as possible. As a responsible corporate citizen, we focus on ensuring that our operations in more than 130 countries worldwide consistently deliver economic, social and environmental benefits. total.com

Cautionary note

This press release, from which no legal consequences may be drawn, is for information purposes only. The entities in which TOTAL S.A. directly or indirectly owns investments are separate legal entities. TOTAL S.A. has no liability for their acts or omissions. In this document, the terms "Total" and "Total Group" are sometimes used for convenience where general references are made to TOTAL S.A. and/or its subsidiaries. Likewise, the words "we", "us" and "our" may also be used to refer to subsidiaries in general or to those who work for them. This document may contain forward-looking information and statements that are based on a number of economic data and assumptions made in a given economic, competitive and regulatory environment. They may prove to be inaccurate in the future and are subject to a number of risk factors. Neither TOTAL S.A. nor any of its subsidiaries assumes any obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information or statement, objectives or trends contained in this document whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005770/en/

Contacts:

Total

Mike SANGSTER

Nicolas FUMEX

Patrick GUENKEL

Romain RICHEMONT

Tel.: 44 (0)207 719 7962

Fax: 44 (0)207 719 7959

or

Robert HAMMOND (U.S.)

Tel.: +1 713-483-5070

Fax +1 713-483-5629
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia and FRANKFURT, Germany, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Leading Telecommunications Firm Implements a 'First in Malaysia' Cloud-based Applications Model Alongside Installed Software for Greater Visibility, Compliance and Control Over Spend

Axiata Group Berhad, DBA Axiata, a leading telecommunications company in Asia, selected Bristlecone and SAP as its partners on their journey to transform their sourcing and procurement departments, and to drive best-in-class processes. This would enable the company to gain visibility on their spend across all the Operating Companies (OpCos) and facilitate compliance, identify and harness spend reduction opportunities and identify the inefficient, non-standard processes that were previously in place. By standardizing and streamlining procurement processes across all OpCos, Axiata hopes to improve governance and increase savings.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140902/703601-a)



A first-of-its-kind project to be executed in Malaysia, Axiata are using the on-premise version of the SAP Supplier Relationship Management application for "Requisition to PO" processes and the SAP Spend Performance Management analytic application for Spend Analytics Process, alongside its cloud-based procurement applications from Ariba, an SAP company. As a part of this initiative, Bristlecone is also supporting Axiata to streamline and standardize the Sourcing, Procurement and Spend Management processes across the group for greater efficiency, visibility and governance through the deployment of a harmonized, scalable world-class eProcurement platform.

Axiata chose to cooperate with SAP for its best-in-class functionality and flexibility to tailor solutions as needed, and for the high level of security and scalability with which its software is delivered. As a result of this implementation, Axiata employees now have a centralized system through which they can search, source and buy items, while complying with corporate purchasing procedures. The new system provides functionality for creating Purchase Request/Shopping Cart, generating Purchase Orders (POs) and for automating the goods received and invoicing processes, using SAP Supplier Relationship Management application for Sourcing, Contracting and Supplier Information Management.

Axiata's approach which integrates solutions from SAP and Ariba provides not only an end-to-end experience for users but more importantly, enables a full end-to-end process transparency and full spend visibility.

Axiata recently won the prestigious 'Procurement Transformation Award' in the prominent "Procurement Leaders Awards 2015 in Asia Pacific. Out of nearly 400 entries from 28 countries within the global membership network, Axiata was recognized as the winner in the Procurement Transformation category.

Peter Chen Heng, Head - Process and Compliance of Axiata, said, "The transformation journey has not been an easy one. Bristlecone's dedication, professionalism and commitment have been crucial factors in the implementation of the e-Procurement platform which has been one of the key elements in our transformation process."

He added, "We are also excited about collaborating with SAP, to enable smarter purchasing decisions through improved comprehensive reporting and process functionality. The intended reduction of procurement expenses and the efficient automation of procurement processes will fuel the business growth we are aiming for in the future."

"Axiata was by far the most mature implementation in the Procurement Ecosystem out of our 250+ engagements we have successfully completed. They are truly ahead of the market," said Irfan Khan, CEO and President, Bristlecone. He added, "The multi-country implementation had many complexities, but resulted in tangible benefits for the Axiata Procurement teams."

Terrence Yong, SAP Malaysia Managing Director also commented,"The 21st century enterprise cannot achieve its cost, revenue and cash flow goals without being connected. Software from SAP will help assist Axiata to organize resources and optimize collaboration across their current procurement structure, to achieve new levels of innovation, efficiency and agility to run simple. We look forward to working with Bristlecone to enable this digital transformation at Axiata."

Along with these success stories, Bristlecone is accelerating its India and Southeast Asia investments to enlarge its footprint in the region.

About Bristlecone

Bristlecone is a leader in advising clients on how to maximize the strategic value of their supply chains and how to assist them in unleashing that value rapidly through the effective use of enabling technologies. Rated by Gartner among the top Supply Chain Management System Integrators, Bristlecone has enabled strategic, incremental value for over 300 customers across multiple industry verticals. With its singular focus on addressing procurement and supply chain challenges, it helps clients diagnose, design, enable and enhance their operations by encapsulating years of experience into pre-configured solutions, accelerated deployments and enhancement packs for the leading supply chain technologies.

Headquartered in California's Silicon Valley, Bristlecone also has offices located across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Malaysia and India. To know more visit: http://www.bcone.com

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device - SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 304,500 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. To know more, visithttp://www.sap.com .

About Axia ta

Axiata Group, Malaysia, is one of the largest telecommunication conglomerates in Asia with operations in Asian markets including Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Cambodia, also holding significant strategic stakes in leading mobile service companies in India, Singapore and Iran.

The "Axiata" Group's mobile service subsidiaries and associates operate under the brands of "Celcom" in Malaysia, "XL" in Indonesia, "Dialog" in Sri Lanka, "Robi" in Bangladesh, "Smart" in Cambodia, "Idea" in India and "m1" in Singapore.

To know more visit: http://www.axiata.com

SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates."""

Press Contacts

Eugene Ho, +65 6664-6239, eugene.ho@sap.com, SGT

Audrey Pereira - Loong, SAP, +65-6664-4498, audrey.pereira@sap.com

Rama Krishnamurthy, Bristlecone - India and SEA markets - +91 95389 65878, rama.krishnamurthy@bcone.com

Rebecca Nerad, Bristlecone - North America and Global markets - +1-802-999-7641, rebecca.nerad@bcone.com


PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwired - January 27, 2016) - Exterro  Inc., the preferred provider of software specifically designed for in-house legal and IT teams at Global 2000 organizations, today announced the results of their second annual Federal Judges Survey. The survey asked 14 Federal Judges and 22 leading attorneys who specialize in e-discovery a variety of questions on the current state of the legal community. Survey questions covered: the effectiveness of the new FRCP amendments, e-discovery competency, and emerging legal trends related to data and technology. While there were areas where the Judges and Attorneys disagreed (such as who or what is to blame for e-discovery incompetency and the potential effectiveness of the FRCP amendments) the key takeaway from the survey is the vital role e-discovery plays in the legal process, and that both attorneys and judges need to become more educated to fully realize the benefits that the FRCP amendments are intended to impose.

"There's been an awful lot written, said, and predicted about the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that went into effect on Dec 1," says Bill Piwonka, chief marketing officer at Exterro, "but as Chief Justice Roberts has written, these changes will only be effective if the entire legal community steps up to the challenge of making real change. Our intent with this survey is to get a sense from both sides of the bench as to the current state of the e-discovery process."

Survey Highlights

Judges and Attorneys slightly disagree on whether the FRCP amendments will help solve problems that currently occur in e-discovery today (57% of Judges thought so, while 50% of attorneys agreed) but agree that Rule 37(e) and Rule 26(b)(1) will have the biggest impact on E-Discovery.

Both parties agree that e-discovery competency continues to be an issue in courtrooms today. 65% of all respondents completely or somewhat disagree that 'The typical attorney possesses the subject matter knowledge (legal and technical) required to effectively counsel clients on e-discovery matters.'

Judges and attorneys differ in where the blame lies for the lack of e-discovery knowledge. 71.43% of Judges surveyed blame a lack of cooperation between parties, while 55.45% of attorneys look towards a general aversion or lack of experience in dealing with e-discovery issues.

As for data sources, there was agreement from both sides that despite all the new data sources popping up, both sides see email as the biggest source of responsive data today (70% of attorneys and 100% of judges).

When trying to predict the future of new data sources, 36% of judges are looking towards mobile data, while only 5% of attorneys view mobile as the data source of the future.

The importance of E-Discovery has been highlighted recently with the FRCP amendments and comments written by Chief Justice John Roberts in the Supreme Court 2015 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary. Roberts weighed in on the recent changes to the FRCP saying, "The 2015 civil rules amendments are a major stride toward a better federal court system. But they will achieve the goal of Rule 1 -- 'the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding' -- only if the entire legal community, including the bench, bar, and legal academy, step up to the challenge of making real change. ...Judges and lawyers [have an obligation] to work cooperatively in controlling the expense and time demands of litigation. ...Lawyers -- though representing adverse parties -- have an affirmative duty to work together, and with the court, to achieve prompt and efficient resolutions of disputes."

According to John M. Facciola, retired United States Magistrate Judge from the District of Columbia and survey participant, "The new Rules amendment requires the parties, as well as the courts, to work towards the 'just, speedy and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding'. Effective judicial administration of the discovery process is an obvious goal of the amendments. This emphasis on efficiency and the productivity of counsel requires that lawyers simply must understand the technology of E-Discovery and how to use the available mechanical and legal tools to get the job done. The survey provides an accurate assessment by the judges of whether the bar is meeting and will meet this vital demands."

Attorney survey participant, Bennett Borden, Partner & Co-Chair of the Information Governance and E-Discovery Group, Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP says, "As this important survey shows, there is a wide variety of opinion among the bench and the bar about the impact the amendments will have. It seems certain, however, that the interplay between the reduced scope of discovery and the new sanctions framework will create strategic opportunities to press for significant change in e-discovery obligations, especially regarding preservation. Proportionality has become an increasingly important aspect of managing discovery; it will now take on primary importance."

The second annual Exterro Federal Judges Survey results, including quotes from participating judges and attorneys can be downloaded here.

About Exterro

Exterro, Inc. is the preferred provider of software specifically designed for in-house legal and IT teams at global 2000 organizations. Founded with the simple vision that applying the concepts of process optimization and data science to the way companies respond to litigation would drive more successful outcomes at a lower cost, Exterro is once again positioned as a leader in Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for E-Discovery Software. Built on an open architecture platform, Exterro's e-discovery and information governance software integrates with existing IT, HR and legal systems to deliver complete visibility into all critical data required for managing information assets more efficiently.

Kristin Kolasinski

Marketing Communications & Events Manager

Exterro, Inc.

kristin.kolasinski@exterro.com

(503) 501-5141
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- It took the promise of a new life to make Teddie Fason realize that he was tired of bouncing around between jobs and ready to set an example for his young son. But he soon learned that employers were not as forgiving when it came to his work history.

Luckily for him, Ronnie Morris was willing to give Fason a second chance.

Morris is the owner of Express Employment Professionals in Jackson, Tennessee, and he created the Second Chance Program as a way to give job seekers another chance at finding work, despite their past mistakes.

A second chance meant everything for program participant Kenneth Burgen of Jackson, Tennessee. He admits he "messed up" in the past, but says that the Second Chance program gave him a "new beginning."

"I want to be an example of what to do after you get a second chance," said Burgen, who is now succeeding and receiving positive reviews from his job placement.

Job seekers qualify for the Second Chance Program if they are former Express associates who have been "inactivated" for failing to appear for an assignment. An associate might also have been inactivated, or removed from consideration for job openings, if a business reported dissatisfaction with a worker.

"Express recognizes that some mistakes are outside of an associate's control," Morris said. "Difficult life circumstances may arise or, in other cases, associates come to regret their mistakes. With additional support from our office, they demonstrate a renewed commitment to the job placement process. We believe this makes them worthy of a second chance."

As part of the Second Chance Program, the Jackson, Tennessee Express office develops a list of inactive Express associates who, based on their skills and desire for work, would be good potential matches for job assignments. They are invited to a learning session, where Morris personally discusses with them the key elements to being successful in a job placement. Values such as dependability, attitude, flexibility, appearance and initiative are covered in the session.

"If the Second Chance candidate makes a commitment to the program following the learning session, he or she will be signed up for another interview with Express before being reactivated, making them eligible to be placed with a business," Morris said.

"We're excited about the results we've seen. We've had very positive feedback from our clients and associates alike. We're able to help people who deserve it. It's actually made our office more efficient and effective, and there's been so much interest in the program that we're considering two Second Chance classes a week, instead of just one."

The Second Chance Program has been running as a pilot program, but now the Express International Headquarters is offering an opportunity for Express offices across North America, to adopt the Second Chance program in their markets. Within a month of announcing this opportunity, 150 offices, including five Canadian offices, have requested information to move forward with implementing the program.

With many areas of the country experiencing tighter labor markets, the Second Chance Program has the added benefit of expanding the talent pool for businesses that are finding it increasingly hard to match skilled workers with open positions.

"Under Ronnie's leadership, the Second Chance pilot program has achieved results-for workers seeking jobs and for jobs seeking workers," said Bob Funk, CEO of Express, and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. "I'm proud that Express is now working to make this program a reality in more communities across the country. It's good for our associates and good for the businesses we work with."

Morris said he ends every class stressing the importance of "adding value." He tells the class, "In the end, it's all about adding value, and the way you do that is by making the place where you work better when you're there."

The Second Chance Program will help Express Employment Professionals reach its long-term goal of putting one million people to work annually.

If you would like to arrange for an interview with Bob Funk to discuss this topic, please contact Kellie Major at (613) 222-7488.

About Robert A. Funk

Robert A. "Bob" Funk is chairman and chief executive officer of Express Employment Professionals. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, the international staffing company has franchises in the U.S., Canada and South Africa. Under his leadership, Express has put more than 5 million people to work worldwide. Funk served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and was also the Chairman of the Conference of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve.

About Express Employment Professionals and Express in Canada

Express Employment Professionals puts people to work. It generated $3.02 billion in sales and employed a record 500,002 people in 2015. Its long-term goal is to put a million people to work annually. Express launched in Canada in July 1996, with a franchise in London, Ontario, and since then, has expanded and grown across Canada significantly. There are currently 37 Express franchises in Canada - six in British Columbia, five in Alberta, two in Saskatchewan, 23 in Ontario and one in Nova Scotia.

Contacts:

Media Contacts:

Kellie Major

613.222.7488

kellie@mapleleafstrategies.com



Sherry Kast

405.717.5966

sherry.kast@expresspros.com



@ExpressPros

CanadaEmployed

www.ExpressPros.com/CanadaEmployed




LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Dataguise, a technology leader in secure business execution, today announced that it has partnered with Trace3 to deliver the company's data-centric security solutions to the enterprise. To initiate the partnership, Dataguise will participate in the 2016 Trace3 Evolve Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The technology and leadership conference, which features a keynote address by Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple and Chief Scientist for Primary Data, will be held at the Red Rock Resort and Spa, Las Vegas, on January 27-29.

As the democratization of data accelerates, Dataguise is enabling organizations to safely unlock the value of information without exposing it to internal and external threats. The partnership with Trace3 makes that a reality for data-driven enterprises by expanding availability of DgSecure to their customer base. Enabling business transformation through a continuum of IT expertise, services and solutions designed to give organizations the ability to remain competitive in today's ever evolving marketplace, Trace3 empowers organizations to keep pace with the rapidly changing IT landscape. With a strategic approach to IT, Trace3 partners with strategic technology companies like Dataguise to bring its clients best-of-breed solutions for their enterprise environments.

At Evolve 2016, Dataguise will discuss the merits of its flagship solution, DgSecure. The software delivers a one-stop, out-of-the-box solution to ensure compliance with security mandates for a wide range of data types and platforms. Now integrated with the leading Hadoop distributions, DgSecure helps organizations to safely unlock the benefits of big data with a precise approach to security for the detection, auditing, protection, and monitoring of sensitive data assets in real time.

"Our customers face growing challenges in protecting sensitive data throughout the enterprise," said Juan Guevara, VP, Big Data Solutions, Trace3. "Our partnership with Dataguise addresses those concerns, since Dataguise delivers data privacy protection and risk assessment analytics that allow organizations to safely leverage and share enterprise data. In particular, Dataguise's DgSecure solution provides improved visibility into the sensitive data landscape in HDP and its protection status for our customers. As data enters Hadoop, DgSecure can also inspect and detect all data sources for sensitive data according to the customer's policy classification."

"There is a large market opportunity for data security, and our new channel partnership with Trace3 helps to address this opportunity," said JT Sison, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development for Dataguise. "Dataguise's solutions proactively locate sensitive data, automatically protect it with appropriate remediation polices, and provide actionable compliance intelligence to decision makers, in real time. In Hadoop deployments, our solutions simplify risk management and improve operational efficiencies, and reduce regulatory compliance costs. We're excited to partner with Trace3, which is known for helping their customers create a first-mover advantage and transformational clarity that ensure a competitive edge in today's marketplace."

Resources:

Follow Dataguise on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/dataguise

Follow Dataguise on LinkedIn at: http://www.linkedin.com/company/dataguise

Follow Dataguise on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/dataguise

Contact Dataguise directly at: http://dataguise.com/?q=inquiries

About Dataguise

Dataguise is the leader in secure business execution, delivering data-centric security solutions that detect and protect an enterprise's sensitive data, no matter where it lives or who needs to leverage it. Dataguise solutions free the enterprise from traditional security constraints to support the data-driven organization and maximize the business value of information. DgSecure by Dataguise makes data security painless, delivering a powerful solution that provides the highest level of protection without the need for programming. The company is proud to secure the data of many Fortune 500 companies committed to responsible data stewardship. To learn more about how Dataguise is spearheading the secure data revolution, visit: www.dataguise.com.

Agency Contact:

Joe Austin

The Ventana Group

(818) 332-6166

Email Contact




NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Mobile Broadcasting Holding, Inc. (OTC PINK: MBHC) is pleased to announce that the Company, in light of the recent friendly takeover, seeks to provide a shareholder update.

Stated Stephen A. Jones, founder and CEO of Medically Minded, "We just wanted to inform investors of our new corporate vision, transition strategy, and an update of recent fundamental milestones achievements. We also wanted to inform investors that we have submitted application to FINRA for symbol and name change to Medically Minded, Inc., formally requested a new CUSIP number, and are completing updates to OTC Markets, which will resolve the current stop sign issue. We are developing some aggressive business initiatives, but want to resolve our transitional housekeeping issues first."

Medically Minded plans to establish itself as a distinguished brand led by noteworthy industry pioneers in the medical community including Ken Sobel, Heather Manus, RN, and others board members to be soon announced. The Company's business focus is on providing medical cannabis, medical cannabis-related products, and medical tourist services. Although the Cannabis Patient Care Act is set for passage as early as March/April 2016, to accelerate its ability to seek immediate business opportunities, Company management announced it has fundamentally restructured its subsidiary Medically Minded, LLC, into Medically Minded USVI and Medically Minded International.

For Medically Minded USVI, Stephen A. Jones will serve as President and CEO. While Medically Minded International develops immediate business opportunities, Medically Minded USVI will lay the groundwork for its business operations in the United States Virgin Island in advance of legislative passage which seems imminent.

Currently, 23 states and the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.) have legalized medical use and cultivation of cannabis. The U.S. Territories of Guam and Puerto Rico have also implemented medical cannabis programs. U.S. Virgin Island legislation passage is expected to occur in March/April 2016.

SAFE HARBOR AND INFORMATIONAL STATEMENT: This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act), including all statements that are not statements of among other things: (i) the Company's financing plans; (ii) trends affecting the Company's financial condition or results of operations; (iii) the Company's growth strategy and operating strategy; and (iv) the declaration and payment of dividends. The words "may", "would", "will", "expect", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "intend" and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors including the risk disclosed in the Company's reports filed with the SEC. The Company is not eligible to rely on the safe harbor provided by Section 21E(c) of the Exchange Act because it is not subject to filing periodic reports under Sections 13 or 15(d) of the Exchange Act.

Mobile Broadcasting Holding, Inc.

Stephen A. Jones

Chief Executive Officer

Stephen@MMUSVI.com




MINNEAPOLIS, MN -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- Indian Motorcycle, America's first motorcycle company, today announced it has joined forces with the Jack Daniel Distillery to create the Limited Edition Jack Daniel's Indian Chief Vintage motorcycle. The partnership brings together two of America's most iconic brands that share a mutual commitment to independence, originality and American craftsmanship that dates back more than a century. The collaboration commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Jack Daniel Distillery, which was registered in 1866.

The 2016 Limited Edition Jack Daniel's Indian Chief Vintage will on display January 23-31 at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Collector Car Auction. It will also make an appearance at a series of events throughout 2016 including Daytona Bike Week, taking place March 4-13. Ultimately, this first-in-the-series display bike will be auctioned at the Barrett-Jackson Auction in Las Vegas, which takes place October 6-8. All monies raised from the charity auction will be donated to support "Operation Ride Home," a partnership between the Jack Daniel Distillery and the Armed Services YMCA that provides funding and travel assistance to help junior-enlisted military personnel spend time with their families during the holiday season.

"This one-of-a-kind motorcycle is the perfect pairing of these two classic American brands, and while they look great together, we've inscribed this unique collector's edition masterpiece with our 'Bottles and Throttles Don't Mix' mantra to remind all our friends that drinking and riding are meant to be enjoyed separately," said Dave Stang, Director of Events & Sponsorships for Jack Daniel's. "We'd like to thank our friends at Indian Motorcycle for their help on this project and their support for Operation Ride Home."

The Limited Edition Jack Daniel's Indian Chief Vintage will be produced in very limited quantities, taking the iconic Indian Chief Vintage platform to a whole new level with an array of genuine Indian Motorcycle accessories and custom accessories, as well as Jack Daniel's-inspired custom paint and logos, badging, leather saddle and saddlebags. The bike's fender is also inscribed with the names of the seven Master Distillers who have overseen the Jack Daniel's distilling process over its 150-year history. Final customization work was designed and completed by Brian Klock and his inspired team at Klock Werks in Mitchell, S.D. Additional details on the production schedule and ordering process will be released during Daytona Bike Week.

"It's a pleasure to partner again with our friends at Jack Daniel's on this project as a tribute to originality and American craftsmanship, and to do so for the benefit of our military personnel and their families," said Steve Menneto, President of Motorcycles for Polaris Industries. "Jack Daniel's and Indian Motorcycle proudly support our troops, military families and our veterans and we are honored to join forces again in 2016."

For more information about Operation Ride Home, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit: www.jdoperationridehome.com

Jack Daniel's press information can be found at the Jack Daniel's press room located at www.jdpressroom.com. Indian Motorcycle images are also available at the Indian Motorcycle press site at www.IMCPress.com.

ABOUT JACK DANIEL'S

Officially registered by the U.S. Government in 1866 and based in Lynchburg, Tenn., the Jack Daniel Distillery, Lem Motlow, proprietor, is the oldest registered distillery in the United States and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Jack Daniel's is the maker of the world-famous Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey, Gentleman Jack Rare Tennessee Whiskey, Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Tennessee Whiskey, Jack Daniel's Tennessee Honey, Jack Daniel's Tennessee Fire, Jack Daniel's Sinatra Select and Jack Daniel's Country Cocktails. Jack Daniel's encourages its friends to drink responsibly and reminds bikers that Bottles and Throttles Don't Mix.

ABOUT THE ARMED SERVICES YMCA

The Armed Services YMCA (ASYMCA) is a nonprofit organization which has been dedicated to making military life easier for more than 150 years. Impacting over 500,000 families annually, the ASYMCA offers low and no cost programs through 200 service centers at 32 branch and affiliate locations serving 45 of the largest military installations nationwide. Of the 1.2M active duty military stationed in the US, approximately 82 percent are located where the ASYMCA has a branch or affiliate nearby to help make military life easier. The ASYMCA does not receive government funding and does not charge dues or membership fees for their programs. Eighty-nine cents of every dollar donated goes directly to support programs. In 2013 the ASYMCA was designated as a top-rated charity by CharityWatch and for the 8th consecutive year received the highest (4-star) rating from Charity Navigator. Your tax deductible donation (Tax ID #36-3274346) to the ASYMCA will make a significant impact on the lives of junior enlisted service members and their families. Please visit asymca.org to learn more.

ABOUT INDIAN MOTORCYCLE

Indian Motorcycle, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Polaris Industries Inc. (NYSE: PII), is America's first motorcycle company. Founded in 1901, Indian Motorcycle has won the hearts of motorcyclists around the world and earned distinction as one of America's most legendary and iconic brands through unrivaled racing dominance, engineering prowess and countless innovations and industry firsts. Today that heritage and passion is reignited under new brand stewardship. To learn more please visit www.indianmotorcycle.com.

ABOUT POLARIS INDUSTRIES

Polaris Industries Inc. (NYSE: PII) is a global powersports leader with annual 2015 sales of $4.7 billion. Polaris fuels the passion of riders, workers and outdoor enthusiasts with our RANGER, RZR and POLARIS GENERAL side-by-side off-road vehicles; our SPORTSMAN and POLARIS ACE all-terrain off-road vehicles; VICTORY and INDIAN MOTORCYCLE midsize and heavyweight motorcycles; SLINGSHOT moto-roadsters; and Polaris RMK, INDY, SWITCHBACK and RUSH snowmobiles. Polaris enhances the riding experience with parts, garments and accessories sold under multiple recognizable brands, and has a growing presence in adjacent markets globally with products including military and commercial off-road vehicles, quadricycles, and electric vehicles. www.polaris.com

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=2955403



MEDIA CONTACT

Megan Kathman

Skyya Communications

www.skyya.com

ph: (646) 661-1524

megan.kathman@skyya.com




DUBLIN, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/fzlpwv/spandex_fiber) has announced the addition of the "Spandex Fiber Market by Production Process (Solution Dry Spinning, and Solution Wet Spinning), by End-Use (Textile, and Healthcare) & by Region (Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe, and RoW) - Forecast to 2020" report to their offering.

The global spandex fiber market was valued at USD 3.57 Billion in 2014, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.2% between 2015 and 2020

Increasing disposable income in the emerging economies such as China, Japan, India, and others is increasing demand for textile products. Textile being the major segment, is fueling the growth of the spandex fiber market.

Manufacturing of spandex fiber entails two processes, namely, solution dry spinning and solution wet spinning. These two processes are covered in the segment of production process of this market. The solution dry spinning is the most cost efficient process, the fibers manufactured through this process offer better elastic recovery. This is the reason why it accounts for the largest market share out of the two manufacturing processes.

Textile is the fastest-growing segment in the spandex fiber market. The demand for applications such as sport wear, active wear, intimate wear, and others is increasing and hence the segment is growing. Spandex fiber has unmatched physical and chemical qualities, which makes it the most favorable choice for fabric manufacturers. Other than the textile industry, spandex is also used in the healthcare industry in applications such as stretchable bandages, compress bandages, and medical housing. This segment is witnessing higher growth from the European region, due to large number of bandages manufacturers present in the region.

The market in the APAC region accounts the largest share and is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The increasing demand of textile products in the economies such as China, Japan, India, and South Korea among many others drives the spandex fiber market in this region. Also, the presence of large number of local players in china are contributing towards the growth of spandex fiber market.

However, this fiber if exposed to high temperature can damage the structure of the fiber and cause the fiber to shrink. This fiber can also cause skin allergies, as several chemicals are used in the manufacturing of the fiber.

Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Premium Insights

5 Market Overview

6 Industry Trends

7 Spandex Fiber Market, By Production Process

8 Spandex Fiber Market, By End Use Industry

9 Spandex Fiber Market, By Region

10 Competitive Landscape

11 Company Profiles

Acelon Chemical And Fiber Corporation

Asahi Kasei Corporation

E. I. Du Pont De Nemours And Company

Far Eastern New Century Corporation

Hyosung Corporation

Indorama Corporation

Invista

Teijin Limited

Toray Industries Inc.

Toyobo Co., Ltd

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/fzlpwv/spandex_fiber

Media Contact:

Laura Wood , +353-1-481-1716, press@researchandmarkets.net
Technavio's latest enterprise application industry report covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global 3D mapping and 3D modelling market 2016-2020.

In this report, Technavio's ICT research experts announce their key market highlights for the 3D mapping and 3D modelling market. Their findings include:

North America has emerged as the largest revenue contributor to the global 3D mapping and 3D modeling market

The 3D mapping and 3D modeling market in North America generated revenues close to USD 1190 million in 2015, growing at a CAGR of around 8% until 2020. The US is the major market for 3D mapping and 3D modeling in North America. The US government uses 3D mapping for GIS (geographical information system) purposes. AutoCAD Map 3D is also increasingly used in the US. For example, the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities uses this technology for the construction of electric utility network assets. The Canadian government uses AutoCAD Map 3D, along with Esri, to speed up map preparation. AutoCAD Map 3D enables the quick generation of maps, with the data loaded from Esri software.

Segmentation of global 3D mapping and 3D modelling market by geography 2015

Europe is the second largest market for the 3D mapping and 3D modeling. The automotive industry is one of the largest end-user industries for 3D mapping and modeling in Europe. The German automotive industry reported a turnover of close to USD 510 billion in 2014, which has helped Germany retain its position as the largest motor vehicle manufacturer and contributor to 3D modeling for automotive in Europe.

3D modeling is finding increasing application in the automotive sector for R&D purposes. For instance, Ferrari, based in Maranello, Italy, uses Autodesk 3D modeling software in the early stages of product development, before prototyping. 3D mapping technology is also widely used across the military sector in Europe, with the UK and France contributing heavily to the growth of the market in this region.

Use of 3D mapping and modeling software in the healthcare sector a major driver of the market

The 3D mapping and 3D modeling market in the healthcare sector is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 9% until 2020. Many healthcare organizations are adopting 3D applications to diagnose cancer, which has led to the increased demand for 3D modeling software. 3D mapping and modeling software is used to map human anatomy and helps in the modeling of surgeries.

"There are many 3D mapping and modeling software geared to the healthcare industry and these are gaining demand. For instance, CARTO 3 is a 3D mapping system that helps electrophysiologists to make treatment decisions. The popularity of this type of software is expected to increase during the forecast period, which will be beneficial for the market," said Technavio lead ICT research analyst Amrita Choudhury.

Large initial investment a key deterrent dissuading new players from entering the market

The purchase of equipment like LIDAR sensors, aerial photography cameras, and GIS recording tools requires huge initial investment. It is a deterrent for many smaller players trying to venture into the market, thus the threat from new entrants is relatively low. End-users are also largely unaware of the benefits of having mapping and modeling software. Because of these reasons the adoption rate of the software in countries such as India remains lower than the US, Japan, and China. Thus, lack of awareness among end-users will pose a key challenge to the growth of the market during the forecast period.

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Global Biometrics Market in BFSI Sector 2015-2019Global Biometrics Market in the Transportation Sector 2015-2019Global Voice Recognition Biometrics Market 2015-2019

Purchase three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform.

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005525/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com

media@technavio.com
CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwired - January 27, 2016) - Supermodel and internationally recognized advocate for positive body image, EMME, is launching a six month BodyBeaUtiful@SupermodelEmme digital media campaign as she continues to shed light on the prevalence of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, shame, guilt and fear our culture can impact on our bodies, perversely affecting our lives. As an industry leader, EMME wants to derail the blind and feverish acceptance of "body dissatisfaction" created by and supported within our culture.

Over the next six months, videos, messages, and personal stories will show a collective voice emerging for body positivity and change to the current status quo. Individuals will speak and share heartfelt and personal feelings with EMME on behalf of their bodies. This will also be part of the upcoming BodyBeaUtiful documentary to be released this summer.

"We're proud to support this important campaign launched by Emme, who has always been a great pioneer of body acceptance and positive body image in our culture," said Kim Dennis, MD, CEO and medical director of Timberline Knolls, a residential treatment center in the Chicago area for women and adolescent girls struggling with eating disorders, addiction, trauma and mood disorders.

"We see firsthand the devastating messages our society is feeding women and adolescent girls regarding their bodies. False messages that convey 'as women we're not enough -- not thin enough, youthful enough or beautiful enough, just as we are.' This campaign will not only start a conversation to shift how we think as a society, but also has potential to heal our broken eyes and help us see ourselves as the beautiful women we already are," adds Dr. Dennis.

Timberline Knolls, along with Sierra Tucson, are sponsors of the BodyBeaUtiful campaign. EMME and her team interviewed a diverse group of people, male and female, to specifically answer: What does their body want to say to the world? Their answers were refreshingly bold, honest, heartbreaking and real. What she learned will inspire you, and importantly, encourage you to celebrate your own body's voice!

The BodyBeaUtiful Project will launch as a digital media campaign and allow people to get involved through sharing their own BodyBeaUtiful stories and become part of the BodyBeaUtiful conversation. There is also an opportunity for individuals engaged in this conversation to be selected and become part of Supermodel EMME's BodyBeaUtiful documentary. Specific details can be found by joining the public Facebook group "BodyBeaUtiful with Supermodel EMME".

About Timberline Knolls:

Timberline Knolls is a leading residential treatment center for women and adolescent girls (ages 12 to 65+) with eating disorders, substance abuse, trauma, mood and co-occurring disorders. Located in suburban Chicago, residents receive excellent clinical care from a highly trained professional staff on a picturesque 43-acre wooded campus. Women and families seeking Christian treatment can opt for specialized Christian-based therapy. For more information on Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center, call us at 877.257.9611. We are also on Facebook - Timberline Knolls, LinkedIn - Timberline Knolls and Twitter - @TimberlineToday.

Mary Anne Morrow

602-359-68989
CARLSBAD, California, andNEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --A record number of life science industry executives attended the eighth annual Biotech Showcase' investor and networking conference, held January 11-13 in San Francisco.

More than 2,500 executive-level delegates representing qualified private and public equity investors, industry analysts, bankers, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry executives attended from 1,600 companies and participated in 5,650 one-to-one investor meetings.

Over 300 innovative company presentations took place featuring mid-small cap and private life sciences across the therapeutic spectrum as well as platform, diagnostic and tool companies hoping to pique the interest of the nearly 600 public, private and strategic investors in attendance. As well, special presentation tracks were included in two new one-day events within Biotech Showcase, Medtech Showcase and Digital Health Showcase.

"The widespread commercialization of the biotech industry presented life sciences investors and industry leaders with new opportunities and challenges this year as they gathered for this year's Biotech Showcase. We are proud that the event has become a home base for the life sciences industry during the healthcare industry's busiest week of the year," said Sara Jane Demy, CEO of Demy-Colton Life Science Advisors.

"Although 2015 has been a volatile year for biotech, Biotech Showcase attendance is at an all time high. This speaks to the sustained interest within the investor community in biotech innovation," said Anna Chrisman, Group Managing Director, EBD Group. "This year we provided more space, more one-on-one meetings which we hope resulted in more opportunities. It was overwhelmingly successful."

Biotech Showcase is produced by Demy-Colton Life Science Advisors and EBD Group. Both organizations have a long history of producing high quality programs supporting the biotechnology and broader life sciences industry.

Biotech Showcase is powered by partneringONE, the industry's most advanced meeting system that enables delegates to efficiently identify and arrange meetings with potential investors.

Up-to-date coverage of Biotech Showcase, including panel videos and interviews, can be found on the Biotech Showcase website, on partnering360:Insight, and on the partnering360 Blog.

The next edition of Biotech Showcase will be held January 9-11, 2017 in San Francisco.

About EBD Group

EBD Group is the leading partnering firm for the global life science industry. Since 1993, biotech, pharma and medical device companies have leveraged EBD Group's partnering conferences, technology and services to identify business opportunities and develop strategic relationships essential to their success.

EBD Group's conferences are run with the support of leading corporations and international trade associations and include:

BIO-Europe  and BIO-Europe Spring 

and BIO-Europe Spring BioPharm America'

Biotech Showcase'

BioEquity Europe

ChinaBio  Partnering Forum

Partnering Forum Biolatam

EBD Group's sophisticated web-based partnering service, partneringONE , is used as the partnering engine at numerous third-party events around the world, and partnering360  is the open online community of life science dealmakers that enhances partnering experiences throughout the year.

EBD Group is an Informa company. Informa is the largest publicly-owned organizer of exhibitions, conferences and training in the world.

EBD Group has offices in the USA and Europe.

For more information please visit www.ebdgroup.com.

About Demy-Colton Life Science Advisors

Demy-Colton Life Science Advisors is focused exclusively on facilitating the growth of the life science industry. Demy-Colton has developed a number of high-value added conferences to address the business and development needs of the biotechnology industry; it provides partnering services and it has helped launch a unique investor website and newsletter.

Demy-Colton's conferences include:

Biotech CEO Summit Europe' - Co. Wicklow, Ireland , June 28-30, 2016

, The Biotech CEO Summit' - Napa , July 12-14, 2016

, Trans-Pacific Health Sciences Dialogue' - Boston , September 27-29, 2016

, Life Sciences Summit' - New York City , November 1-2, 2016

, Biotech Showcase' - San Francisco , January 9-11, 2017

, MedTech Showcase' - San Francisco , January 10, 2017

, Digital Health Showcase' - San Francisco , January 11, 2017 http://www.biotechceosummit.com/

Demy-Colton's online partnering system, Networking2', supports Demy-Colton's events and facilitates investor and venture meetings for the pharma industry and partnering for other organizations.

For more information please visit www.demy-colton.com.
PUNE, India, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The report"Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Marketby Type (Printed, Unprinted), Application (Beer, Water, Carbonated Soft Drinks), Application Form (Can, Bottle, Brick), Application Pack Size (3x2, 4x2, 4x3, 6x3), and by Geography - Global Forecast to 2020, published by MarketsandMarkets, The market is projected to reach USD 2.53 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 3.3% from 2015 to 2020.

Browse more than 81 market data Tables with 52 Figures spread through 154 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/shrink-film-beverage-multipacks-market-191222271.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The market reportdefines and segments the Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market with analysis and projections of the size of the market both in terms of value and volume. It also identifies the driving and restraining factors of the market with analysis of trends, opportunities, and challenges. The market is segmented and projected, on the basis of region into Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World (RoW).

The Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market is projected to reach USD 2.53 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 3.3% from 2015 to 2020. In this report, the Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market is segmented by type, application, application form, application pack size, and region, and analyzed in terms of value (USD Million) and volume ('000 tons). Shrink film for beverage multipacks on the basis of application are broadly categorized into beer, water, carbonated soft drinks, and others. Key countries which accounted for a large share in each region have been studied individually. The market size for the remaining countries in the respective regions has been studied collectively as a single market at the end of each of the respective segments. In 2014, Europe contributed to the highest demand for shrink film for beverage multipacks in the global market followed by the Americas.

Water: Largest market segment

The water segment accounted for the largest market share in 2014, followed by the carbonated soft drinks segment in the Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market. Water and carbonated soft drinks have contributed significantly in the demand for shrink films packaging with the increase in demand for mineral water and carbonated drinks. The growing consumption of alcoholic beverages such as beer has also contributed in demand for Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market.

Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market, by application form

The Shrink Film for Beverage Multipacks Market consists of three application form categories, namely, can, bottle, and brick. The demand for shrink film for beverage multipacks in the bottle segment accounted for the largest share in 2014.

The consumption of packaged beverages such as bottled water, milk, carbonated soft drinks, fruit juice, and energy drinks are high in the U.S. and the European countries. These are increasingly becoming popular in Asia-Pacific and RoW as well. Different designs of bottle packaging have been introduced for the purpose of branding. Soft-drinks and water are usually packaged in bottles after which shrink film is used for its secondary packaging.

Ask for Brief Illustration of this Report:http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=191222271

Companies such as AEP Industries Inc. (U.S.), Amcor Limited (Australia), Bemis Company, INC (Wisconsin), Berry Plastics Corporation (U.S.), Ceisa Packaging SAS (France), and Coveris Holdings S.A (U.K.) are some of the players with a strong portfolio in this market. These companies have also been developing customized offerings to suit the demands of different packaging designs with high shelf appeal and eco-friendly features. Leading brands have been involved in extending the market share in developing regions such as Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Existing companies such as Coveris Holdings, Amcor Limited, and Bemis Company have been actively involved in the acquisition of regional suppliers to strengthen their market presence.

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http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/shrink-stretch-sleeve-labels-market-26633552.html

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About MarketsandMarkets

MarketsandMarkets is world's No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.

M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.

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CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwired - January 27, 2016) - In the news release, "Timberline Knolls Partners With Supermodel EMME for BodyBeaUtiful Campaign," issued today, January 27th, 2016 by Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center, we are advised by the company that the phone number in the contact field should read "602-359-6989" rather than "602-359-68989" as originally issued. Complete corrected text follows.

Timberline Knolls Partners With Supermodel EMME for BodyBeaUtiful Campaign

Supermodel EMME Asks Individuals: "What Does Your Body Want to Say to the World?"

CHICAGO, IL -- January 27th, 2016 -- Supermodel and internationally recognized advocate for positive body image, EMME, is launching a six month BodyBeaUtiful@SupermodelEmme digital media campaign as she continues to shed light on the prevalence of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, shame, guilt and fear our culture can impact on our bodies, perversely affecting our lives. As an industry leader, EMME wants to derail the blind and feverish acceptance of "body dissatisfaction" created by and supported within our culture.

Over the next six months, videos, messages, and personal stories will show a collective voice emerging for body positivity and change to the current status quo. Individuals will speak and share heartfelt and personal feelings with EMME on behalf of their bodies. This will also be part of the upcoming BodyBeaUtiful documentary to be released this summer.

"We're proud to support this important campaign launched by Emme, who has always been a great pioneer of body acceptance and positive body image in our culture," said Kim Dennis, MD, CEO and medical director of Timberline Knolls, a residential treatment center in the Chicago area for women and adolescent girls struggling with eating disorders, addiction, trauma and mood disorders.

"We see firsthand the devastating messages our society is feeding women and adolescent girls regarding their bodies. False messages that convey 'as women we're not enough -- not thin enough, youthful enough or beautiful enough, just as we are.' This campaign will not only start a conversation to shift how we think as a society, but also has potential to heal our broken eyes and help us see ourselves as the beautiful women we already are," adds Dr. Dennis.

Timberline Knolls, along with Sierra Tucson, are sponsors of the BodyBeaUtiful campaign. EMME and her team interviewed a diverse group of people, male and female, to specifically answer: What does their body want to say to the world? Their answers were refreshingly bold, honest, heartbreaking and real. What she learned will inspire you, and importantly, encourage you to celebrate your own body's voice!

The BodyBeaUtiful Project will launch as a digital media campaign and allow people to get involved through sharing their own BodyBeaUtiful stories and become part of the BodyBeaUtiful conversation. There is also an opportunity for individuals engaged in this conversation to be selected and become part of Supermodel EMME's BodyBeaUtiful documentary. Specific details can be found by joining the public Facebook group "BodyBeaUtiful with Supermodel EMME".

About Timberline Knolls:

Timberline Knolls is a leading residential treatment center for women and adolescent girls (ages 12 to 65+) with eating disorders, substance abuse, trauma, mood and co-occurring disorders. Located in suburban Chicago, residents receive excellent clinical care from a highly trained professional staff on a picturesque 43-acre wooded campus. Women and families seeking Christian treatment can opt for specialized Christian-based therapy. For more information on Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center, call us at 877.257.9611. We are also on Facebook - Timberline Knolls, LinkedIn - Timberline Knolls and Twitter - @TimberlineToday.

Mary Anne Morrow

602-359-6989
According to the latest market study by Technavio the global mobile crane market is predicted to record over USD 43 billion in revenue by 2019, growing at a CAGR of close to 7%.

In this report, Technavio covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global mobile crane market for 2015-2019. The market size has been calculated based on the total revenue generated from the consumption of mobile cranes globally. Market predictions are based on investments in the construction sector.

The global mobile crane market is also segmented into the following regions:

Americas

APAC

EMEA

APAC: largest mobile crane market

"In 2015, APAC emerged as the largest region for the mobile crane market with over USD 14 billion in revenues. The construction industry in APAC is witnessing high growth with countries such as China, India, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia having earmarked on large-scale investments in urban infrastructure projects," said Technavio lead construction equipment research analyst, Soumya M.

"Governments of China and India in particular are focusing more on the development of smart cities which in turn is boosting the demand for mobile cranes in the region. Technavio estimates the mobile crane market in APAC to reach around USD 20 billion by 2019," said Soumya.

Kobelco and TADANO are some of the leading vendors headquartered in APAC. Some of the other prominent vendors driving the growth of the global mobile crane market are Liebherr, Terex, Escorts Construction, Furukawa UNIC, Guangxi LiuGong Machinery, Hitachi Construction, KATO Works, Konecranes, Komatsu, Manitowoc, Sany XCMG, and Zoomlion Heavy Industry.

Ask for a sample of this report: bit.ly/1kRuKRS

EMEA to grow at a CAGR of close to 15% through 2019

EMEA was the second leading region in the global mobile crane market in 2015. The market is driven by the growth in the construction industry in MEA and a revival of construction activities in Europe.

Investments in power plant construction and the development of transport infrastructure are driving the demand for mobile cranes in EMEA. Turkey, France, Poland, and Romania attracted huge investments from their governments, particularly toward urban transport infrastructure development in 2015.

Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt are also envisaged to become attractive hubs for foreign investments in infrastructure development over the next four years. In June 2015, the Egyptian government signed a deal worth over USD 5 billion with Siemens for the development of wind and gas power plants. Many similar projects in the MEA region will buoy the demand for mobile cranes during the forecast period.

Growth of mobile cranes in Americas

The mobile crane market in the Americas was valued at close to USD 6 billion in 2014 and is the third leading region in the global crane market. The largest demand for mobile cranes comes from North America owing to sustained investments in infrastructure developments.

Infrastructure projects in the US, Brazil, and Canada are likely to drive the demand for mobile cranes in the region in the next four years. In addition, the mobile cranes market in the Americas is witnessing investments into the reconstruction of existing infrastructure in these countries. For instance, in early 2015, the Government of Canada earmarked over USD 4 billion for infrastructure spending, part of which will be invested in reconstruction activities, reports Technavio's analysis. Growth in the equipment rental industry is also expected to significantly contribute to the growth of the mobile crane market in Americas until 2019, notes Technavio's research analyst, Sowmya.

Browse related reports:

Mobile Crane Market in China 2015-2019

Mobile Crane Market in Indonesia 2015-2019

Global Mobile Crane Market 2014-2018

Global Crane Market 2015-2019

Purchase any of these three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform.

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005548/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com

media@technavio.com
BOCA RATON, FL -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- PF Hospitality Group, Inc. (OTCQB: PFHS) ("PF Hospitality Group" or the "Company"), a management firm which develops and operates innovative and healthy brands within the restaurant, hospitality and retail industries, announces that the company's common stock has been approved for quotation on the OTCQB tier of the OTC Markets as of Wednesday, January 20, 2015.

"PF Hospitality Group's management strength paired with the recent launch into the fitness retail space has increased existing shareholder interest as well as interest from potential investors," said Vaughan Dugan, CEO of PF Hospitality Group. "The basis of the company's decision to qualify for the OTCQB is to offer our investors improved confidence and a greater baseline of transparency through stringent Securities and Exchange Commission reporting requirements and regulation. The criteria for our common stock to be quoted on the OTCQB makes it easier for investors to access trading information on PF Hospitality's common stock, as well as to financial disclosures and reports on our company at www.otcmarkets.com."

For more information on PF Hospitality Group, please visit: www.PFHospitalityGroup.com.

About PF Hospitality Group

PF Hospitality Group, Inc., (OTCQB: PFHS) is a management firm which creates, develops and operates innovative and healthy brands within the restaurant, hospitality and retail health and wellness markets. As the creator, current advisor and strategist of the global, all-natural and organic pizza franchise, Pizza Fusion, PF Hospitality Group oversees the franchise's 16 locations throughout the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. PF Hospitality Group also created "Shaker & Pie," an interactive restaurant concept which combines wood-fired pizzas with healthy, hearty Italian-influenced street food, slated to launch in Q4 2016 from its initial Boca Raton, Florida location. Anchoring PF Hospitality Group's retail health and wellness division is EXO, a designer and producer of active wear brands offered in national fitness retailers throughout the U.S. Leaning on its resources and retail experience, PF Hospitality Group is actively pursuing partnerships with brands that share a vision to provide a compelling value proposition so that new and unique concepts may be developed and operated with the customer, environment, and bottom line profitability in mind. For more information on PF Hospitality Group, please visit: www.PFHospitalityGroup.com.

Safe Harbor and Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains statements that involve expectations, plans or intentions (such as those relating to future expansion or financial results) and other factors discussed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These statements are forward-looking and are subject to risks and uncertainties, so actual results may vary materially. You can identify these for- ward-looking statements by words such as "may," "should," "expect," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "intend," "plan" and other similar expressions. Our actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors not within the control of the company. The company cautions readers not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The company disclaims any obligation subsequently to revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events.

Investor Relations:

561-939-2520

IR@PFHospitalityGroup.com



Media Relations:

Nicole Biscuiti

(561) 445-0447

n.biscuiti@PFHospitalityGroup.com




According to the latest market research report by Technavio, the global polyisobutylene (PIB) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over close to 5% until 2020.

In this report, Technavio covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global PIB market for 2016-2020. Based on applications, the report segments the market by automotive, additives, and others. Based on product types, the report segments the market by heavily reactive PIB and enhanced PIB.

"PIB materials are finding growing popularity in the manufacturing of photovoltaic panels, a trend which is predicted to significantly impact the market over the next four years. PIB-based materials are widely used in the photovoltaic industry due to their low gas permeability, high level of flexibility, and weather resistance," said Sriram Mohan, Technavio's industry manager for chemicals and materialsand a subject matter expert.

"These materials are used as a sealant to protect the electrical assemblies and moisture-sensitive PV cells from high temperature, humidity, and UV radiation. The use of PIB-based materials in these systems is predicted to grow significantly during the forecast period," added Sriram.

APAC: fastest growing region for the global PIB market

APAC emerged as the fastest-growing region, accounting for close to a 23% share of the global PIB market in 2015. China accounted for the majority of the demand for PIB from this region. Over the next four years, India, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand are also expected to contribute significantly to the APAC market for PIB.

Growth in the automotive and pharmaceutical segments in particular, is predicted to support market growth as PIB materials are widely used in these sectors. Growing economic activity in China's automotive industry, and the increasing use of PIB in medical stopper manufacturing will act as its key drivers. In the pharmaceutical packaging sector, PIB is slated to gain popularity for its application in preventing counterfeit drug use. This trend will further augment to the robust growth of the PIB market in APAC, reports Sriram.

Europe: the largest consumer of PIB

In terms of consumption, Europe emerged as the largest region for the global PIB market in 2015. Our market research analysts believe, the PIB market in Europe will grow at a moderate rate during the forecast period, largely due to rising automobile manufacturing activities in Germany and Italy. Stringent standards implemented by the EU, regulating the external rolling noise of tires is expected to further increase the demand for highly reactive PIB among high-performance tire manufacturers. European legislation focusing on controlling emissions from diesel cars will also drive the demand for PIB in the region.

North America: largest manufacturing region for the global PIB market

North America is the largest producer of PIB, with its regional vendors generating over 33% of the global output. The US was the leading manufacturer and consumer of PIB in 2015 and will continue to dominate the market during the forecast period.

As the demand for PIB is low in this region due to market maturity, we expect the market to grow at a relatively slow rate during the forecast period. However, a rise in gasoline prices has compelled the US government to implement stringent fuel efficiency standards. Therefore, consumer demand for lubricants and alternative fuels for improved efficiency is also expected to increase over the next four years. This trend will emerge as a key growth driver for this market until 2020.

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Purchase any three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform.

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

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MasterMind Communications Co Ltd (for Scan Inter PCL) Orn-arong ("Fah") Pattaravejkul T: +66-2-612-0281 #129 M: +66-86-884-4458, E: ornanong.p@mtmultimedia.com orn_tabo@hotmail.com

BANGKOK, Jan 27, 2016 - (ACN Newswire) - Scan Inter PCL, or SCN (SET:SCN), the operator of a fully-integrated natural gas business, has responded positively to the government's policy in allowing the private sector to invest in the expansion of the NGV service station network, as well as floating the NGV price with some conditions. It has indicated that this is of benefits to SCN's NGV business for the automotive market. In this regard, SCN has announced the intended acquisition of at least 3 more service stations, both within and outside of the gas pipeline areas. The estimated investment is approximately 200 million Baht with the ultimate aim of becoming Thailand's 2nd largest NGV provider, expecting to generate revenue from the NGV business for the automotive market totaling 2,000 million baht annually.Dr. Littee Kitpipit, Executive Director, Administrative & Marketing Director, SCN, has commented positively on the government's policy to float the NGV price, conditional upon PTT's price guarantee that does not exceed 13.50 Baht per kilogram before floating the price entirely to reflect its true cost in July. He said this is advantageous to the Company since the floating of NGV price in relation to the oil price in the market keeps the NGV price cheaper than diesel price by about 50% in the long run. This in turn encourages confidence among NGV users and results in higher NGV demand in the future.Meanwhile, this particular development has allowed other private sector companies or PTT Group to expand their NGV service station network all over the country in order to facilitate more convenience for customers. With this, it is also SCN's prime opportunity to expand its NGV business, particularly gas service stations serving the automobile segment to drive more revenue from NGV sales.Dr. Littee stated with regards to the government's policy, the Company would still focus on the expansion and acquisition of the NGV service station network both within and outside of the gas pipeline areas through M&A deals or investment in the development of at least 3 additional gas service stations. The estimated investment budget is approximately 200 million Baht and this initiative is expected to generate higher NGV revenue, on top of the Company's existing 7 NGV stations; 4 of which are owned and operated by the Company and 3 of which are under the cooperation with Susco PCL. It is anticipated that the 10 NGV service stations altogether will generate daily sales volume of over 450,000 kilograms, or equivalent to 2,000 million Baht annually."The government's policy in support of the gas service station expansion and floating the NGV price is of great benefits to SCN's business this year as the Company will be able to generate higher revenue from natural gas-related businesses, especially outstanding growth in the natural gas service station business, eventually enabling SCN to become Thailand's 2nd largest operator with highest NGV sales after the market leader PTT Group," said Dr. Littee.About Scan Inter PCLScan Inter PCL is engaged in CNG Business, including CNG private mother stations, NGV logistics, CNG distribution and retail, CNG compressors and dispensers, NGV station installation and maintenance, high pressure equipment, and other businesses. For more information, please visit www.scan-inter.com.Source: Scan Inter PCLContact:Copyright 2016 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Technavio's latest hardware and semiconductor industry report covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global spectroscopy market 2015-2019.

In this report, Technavio's semiconductor equipment research experts announce their key market highlights for the global spectroscopy market. Their findings include:

Food safety testing fueling growth for global spectroscopy market

The global spectroscopy market was valued at USD 7.2 billion in 2014 and is expected to generate revenue worth USD 9.55 billion in 2019, growing at a CAGR of 5.9%. The progression of the food safety testing market is the major driver fueling the growth of the spectroscopy market.

"Demand for food testing has risen in tune with more need for processed and convenience food. Other factors like increasing globalized food trade and awareness of foodborne diseases have also led to this demand," said Technavio lead semiconductor equipment analyst Asif Gani. "Food regulatory authorities across the globe have tightened regulations and the testing procedures of processed food, which is driving the growth of the food safety testing market. We expect the food safety testing market to reach USD 15 billion by 2019."

Contamination of food products in cross-border threats is often high. Developing and under-developed countries are more prone to foodborne diseases, therefore, strong food regulations are being passed by these countries to control foodborne diseases. For instance:

In 2014, China amended its food safety law, which now includes the operation of food additives to be subject to government license along with stringent regulations on infant food.

In 2015, India planned to set up food recall rules; where food companies would need to recall any product, which is found to be unsafe and perform test measures and disclose the contamination to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).

"We expect the growth in food safety testing to have a high impact on the processed food industry, as spectroscopy equipment is used in the testing of processed food to check the quality and level of preservatives," said Gani.

The Americas was the largest contributor to the market with a share of over 42% in 2014

In 2014, the Americas was the largest contributor to the market with a 42% market share. The presence of large pharmaceutical companies, such as Abbott Laboratories, Johnson Johnson, and Pfizer, contributes to the region's dominance. The market in this region was valued at just over USD 3 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach USD 3.9 billion by 2019, growing at a CAGR of 5.3% during the forecast period.

In 2014, the spectroscopy market in EMEA was valued at USD 2.6 billion and is forecast to reach USD 3.45 billion by 2019, growing at a CAGR of 5.5%, during the forecast period. Government institutions and private research labs involved in drug discovery in this region have increased their spending on spectroscopy technologies and instruments.

The spectroscopy market in the APAC generated USD 1.55 billion in revenues in 2014 and is expected to earn USD 2.2 billion in 2019, growing at a CAGR of 7.4%. The region has many CROs that use sophisticated spectroscopy technology and instruments, while increased funding for processed food and environmental testing by developing countries like China, India, and Malaysia, will support the growth of the market.

NMR spectroscopy is the largest segment in the global molecular spectroscopy market, accounting for over USD 1 billion in revenue

In 2014, NMR spectroscopy was the largest segment in the global molecular spectroscopy market and accounted for revenue of USD 1.07 billion, however, sluggish growth is expected during the forecast period. Lack of demand has led to lower profit margins and vendors have decided to close down this segment or decrease production. Leading vendor Agilent Technologies decided to remove the NMR section from their business because of low return from 2014.

IR spectroscopy will be fastest growing segment during the forecast period. This segment earned USD 738 million in 2014 and is expected to surpass USD 1 billion in revenue by 2019. IR spectroscopy is used in extraction analysis applications in the oil and gas sector and also in forensic science to identify polymer degradation and determine blood alcohol content.

Top vendors covered in this report:

Agilent Technologies

Bruker

Danaher

Perkin Elmer

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Browse Related Reports:

Global Distributed Acoustic Sensing Market 2016-2020

Global Optical Transport Network (OTN) Equipment Market 2016-2020

Global Fiber Optics Market 2016-2020

Purchase these three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform.

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160127005709/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com

media@technavio.com
Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft).

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 01/27/16 -- NOVAGOLD RESOURCES INC. (TSX: NG)(NYSE MKT: NG) today released its year-end financial results and project update for its flagship 50%-owned Donlin Gold project in Alaska and its 50%-owned Galore Creek project in British Columbia.

Details of the Company's financial results for the year ended November 30, 2015 are presented in the consolidated financial statements and in the annual report filed on Form 10-K with the SEC that will be available on the Company's website at www.novagold.com, on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov. All amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated and all resource and reserve estimates are shown on a 100% project basis.

In 2015, NOVAGOLD achieved the following:

-- Reached a major milestone in permitting Donlin Gold: -- The Corps published the Donlin Gold draft EIS, initiating a five- month public comment period -- Advanced multiple major permits - Section 404, integrated waste and water management permits, reclamation permit -- Received State comments on the air quality permit application with targeted permit issuance in 2017 -- Advanced Galore Creek project design: -- Continued optimization of the integrated mining, waste rock and water management concepts -- Awarded generalized tunneling practice study to assess access and material handling; phase 1 is already underway -- Continued in depth engagement with local communities through outreach in Alaska and British Columbia: -- Completed over 30 village visits in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region -- Released 4-part Alaska Video Series featuring the vibrant yet harsh realities of life in the remote communities -- Funded youth initiatives, delivered safety messages & equipment, donated books and sponsored internships -- Participated and volunteered in numerous state-wide and local events, including a children's literacy camp in Northern British Columbia -- Maintained strong financial position: -- Total spending for our operations and investments in Donlin Gold and Galore Creek was 21% lower than planned -- NOVAGOLD ended the year with $127 million in cash and term deposits, sufficient to complete permitting of Donlin Gold, fund activities at Galore Creek and fulfill other current obligations

President's Message

This was a year marked by a number of achievements that required tremendous efforts by all parties involved in the permitting of our flagship asset, the Donlin Gold project. As time passes, this unique and industry-leading development asset has only become more valuable, representing an incredible opportunity for all of NOVAGOLD's stakeholders. Our most important achievement in 2015 was the publication of the Donlin Gold draft EIS, a major milestone in the permitting process for the project. NOVAGOLD and its joint-venture partner Barrick Gold are particularly gratified with the professionalism of all the parties involved in the process and the level of constructive engagement of the Native Corporations, local communities, various levels of government and non-governmental organizations. We are all working together to achieve an important common goal of permitting this world-class project.

Permitting a major project such as Donlin Gold, within the framework of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), requires collaboration and team spirit from all parties who participate in the process. Now, three years into permitting, with significant and early input by cooperating agencies as well as the public, many issues have been identified and thoroughly considered in the EIS process. The five-month public comment period, which commenced in December, will include public meetings in 15 villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region and Anchorage. The Corps will host the public meetings and present an overview of the draft EIS, which considers the potential environmental, social, and economic impacts of the proposed project along with seven alternatives: no action; proposed applicant action; upriver port at Birch Tree crossing; pipeline route alternatives; haul trucks fueled by liquefied natural gas (LNG) versus diesel; diesel pipeline versus natural gas pipeline; and dry stacked tailings. The Corps will accept comments on the draft EIS until the close of the comment period at the end of April and will subsequently review and respond to all the comments in a final EIS, which the Corps' schedule anticipates should be published in 2017. Concurrent with the NEPA analysis, Donlin Gold has been submitting major permit applications to relevant agencies to obtain the more than 100 individual permits required for the project.

Beyond permitting activities at Donlin Gold, NOVAGOLD and Barrick remain aligned and committed to also evaluating alternatives to reduce initial owner capital through third-party owner-operator agreements and optimized development scenarios that would increase the project's value and reduce execution risk. With respect to owner-operator agreements, a Request for Expression of Interest (RFEOI) for third-party participation in the natural gas pipeline was issued to potential candidates in 2015. As anticipated, responses came from experienced and responsible bidders. Capital costs matter to both partners who are on record stating that they will not be proceeding with construction without ensuring that the project provides the owners with an attractive rate of return, which, in turn, will largely depend on the price of gold. On that note, our corporate view on the gold price is bullish and predicated rationally on the declining supply and increasing demand for gold. This outlook was further supported by a recent report published by Jeffrey Christian, who is the Managing Partner at CPM Group, where he states that the gold outlook largely depends on two important factors: on the demand side, investor (including central bank) demand and on the supply side, mine production. Based on CPM's assessment of the fundamentals, over the longer-term he sees rising private and central bank demand and a sharp decline in gold production around the world. Such a gold-price environment, coupled with recent dramatic reductions in the cost of energy and other commodities that comprise the individual components of the total capital and operating costs for Donlin Gold, could in our view, give a huge boost to its overall project economics at just about the perfect time. We plan on updating the economic study on Donlin Gold as we get closer to securing permits for Donlin Gold.

Relationship-building with our local partners is the foundation for the successful advancement of our projects. The alignment we enjoy on many fronts did not happen by chance. Through our 2015 outreach program in Alaska, approximately 60 project updates to villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, trade organizations as well as State and Federal elected officials were completed. Workforce development is another key element of our outreach initiative; increasing awareness of potential job opportunities for residents and stimulating early career development efforts. NOVAGOLD's collaboration with its Native Corporation and First Nations partners in Alaska and British Columbia, respectively, as well as local communities, has very deep roots. Our tenure in these jurisdictions is sufficiently time-tested, enabling all parties to have common objectives and share the same vision. These stakeholders view Donlin Gold and Galore Creek as promising future profitable businesses capable of providing much needed socio-economic benefits to all parties who share in the success of these projects.

At Galore Creek, with our partner Teck, we have advanced project design by gathering additional information to complement earlier work to optimize integrated mining, waste rock and water management conceptual designs. Additionally, we have initiated a generalized tunneling study to assess access and material handling. In 2015 we continued with local outreach efforts in Northern British Columbia, where Galore Creek and NOVAGOLD sponsored local fundraising events and supported the Tahltan literacy camps. Galore Creek also awarded ten bursaries to Tahltan members pursuing post-secondary education in Canada based the following criteria: academic achievement, community involvement, as well as educational and career goals.

Over the past four-year period, we have been careful stewards of the Company's financial resources. Our total expenditures of $39 million in 2015 were $6 million lower than planned. Given our current cash and term deposits of $127 million as of November 30, 2015 and anticipated spending of approximately $25 million in 2016, NOVAGOLD is expected to end 2016 with sufficient financial resources to complete permitting of Donlin Gold and conduct necessary activities at Galore Creek.

NOVAGOLD and its team see unprecedented opportunity in the years ahead as we continue to advance Donlin Gold. It is a one-of-a-kind asset with all the key attributes you could wish for in a mining project - size, quality, longevity, exceptional exploration potential, great partnerships and the jurisdictional appeal of being located in the United States. With 39 million ounces of gold in the Measured and Indicated resource categories, grading 2.2 grams of gold per tonne (more than twice the grade of a typical project in our sector), and anticipated annual gold production greater than one million ounces per year over a 27-year mine life and multiple exploration targets along the 8-kilometer gold-bearing mineralized trend, Donlin Gold simply has no peer in the gold industry. There is no doubt that the development of a major mine such as Donlin Gold represents a significant permitting, technical, logistical and financial challenge, but I am confident that the hard work, determination, conviction and patience of our experienced team will be rewarded.

We feel privileged to have a portfolio of high-quality, company-making assets such as Donlin Gold and Galore Creek. More importantly, we enjoy strong relationships with the Native Corporations, Calista and TKC, in Alaska, and with the Tahltan First Nation in British Columbia. We also appreciate the support of various government and non-government agencies. As always, we thank our shareholders for their faith in the future of this great company and, last but not least, we express our gratitude to a very dedicated Board of Directors for providing us with valuable guidance as NOVAGOLD continues to advance two exceptional projects up the value chain.

Financial Results

For the year ended November 30, 2015, NOVAGOLD reported a decrease in loss from operations of $6.3 million from $38.0 million in 2014 to $31.7 million in 2015. The decrease resulted from lower general and administrative expense and lower losses from equity investments in the Donlin Gold and Galore Creek projects. General and administrative expense decreased $2.2 million, primarily due to lower professional fees and favorable foreign exchange translation of expenses incurred in Canadian dollars. Our share of losses at the Donlin Gold project decreased by $3.0 million, as 2015 activities continued to focus primarily on permitting. At the Galore Creek project, our share of losses decreased by $1.5 million due to reduced activity and a gain on the sale of surplus equipment. Evaluation expense includes $0.4 million for the Company's share of the Donlin Gold project joint studies with Barrick.

Net loss decreased from $40.5 million ($0.13 per share - basic and diluted) in 2014 to $32.0 million ($0.10 per share - basic and diluted) in 2015. The decrease resulted primarily from the $6.3 million reduction in the loss from operations in 2015 compared to 2014. Interest expense decreased by $1.7 million primarily due to the repayment of the remaining $15.8 million of convertible notes in 2015.

in thousands of U.S. dollars, except for per share amounts Year ended Year ended November 30, November 30, 2015 2014 $ $ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- General and administrative expense 19,887 22,046 Share of losses - Donlin Gold 11,016 13,985 Share of losses - Galore Creek 392 1,941 Evaluation 366 - Depreciation 35 36 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total operating expenses 31,696 38,008 Loss from operations (31,696) (38,008) Other income (expense) (103) (2,213) Income (loss) for the period (31,952) (40,484) Income (loss) per share, basic and diluted (0.10) (0.13) Cash and term deposits 126,731 165,325 Total assets 433,584 524,546 Total liabilities 104,288 119,430 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liquidity and Capital Resources

During 2015, cash and cash equivalents decreased by $28.6 million and term deposits decreased by $10.0 million. The total decrease in cash and term deposits of $38.6 million was primarily related to the $15.8 million repayment of the remaining convertible notes, $11.4 million used in operating activities for administrative costs and interest payments and $11.0 million to fund our share of the Donlin Gold and Galore Creek projects.

2016 Outlook

In 2016, we expect to spend approximately $25 million, including $9 million to fund our share of expenditures at the Donlin Gold project, $1 million at the Galore Creek project, $1 million for our share of joint Donlin Gold studies with Barrick, $12 million for general and administrative costs and $2 million for working capital and other corporate purposes.

Looking at the year ahead, NOVAGOLD will continue to focus on five key areas: to advance the Donlin Gold project toward a construction/production decision; advance Galore Creek mine planning and project design; maintain a healthy balance sheet; maintain an effective corporate social responsibility program; and evaluate opportunities to monetize the value of Galore Creek.

Conference Call & Webcast Details

The conference call and webcast to discuss these results will take place January 28, 2016 at 8:00 am PT (11:00 am ET). The webcast and conference call-in details are provided below.

Webcast: www.novagold.com North American callers: 1-866-426-5215 International callers: 1-704-908-0398 Conference ID: 21642231

The webcast will be archived on NOVAGOLD's website for one year. For a transcript of the call please email info@novagold.com.

About NOVAGOLD

NOVAGOLD is a well-financed precious metals company engaged in the exploration and development of mineral properties in North America. Its flagship asset is the 50%-owned Donlin Gold project in Alaska, one of the safest jurisdictions in the world. With approximately 39 million ounces of gold in the measured and indicated resource categories (541 million tonnes at an average grade of approximately 2.2 grams per tonne), Donlin Gold is regarded to be one of the largest, highest grade, and most prospective known gold deposits in the world. According to the Second Updated Feasibility Study (as defined below), once in production, Donlin Gold should average approximately 1.5 million ounces of gold per year for the first five full years, followed by decades of more than one million ounces per year on a 100% basis. The Donlin Gold project has substantial exploration potential beyond the designed footprint which currently covers only three kilometers of an approximately eight-kilometer long gold-bearing trend. Current activities at Donlin Gold are focused on permitting, community outreach and workforce development in preparation for the construction and operation of this top tier asset. The Donlin Gold project commenced permitting in 2012, a clearly defined process expected to take approximately five years. NOVAGOLD also owns 50% of the Galore Creek copper-gold-silver project located in northern British Columbia. According to the 2011 Pre-Feasibility Study (as defined below), once in production, Galore Creek is expected to be the largest copper mine in Canada, a tier-one jurisdiction. NOVAGOLD is currently evaluating opportunities to sell all or a portion of its interest in Galore Creek and would apply the proceeds toward the development of Donlin Gold. NOVAGOLD is well positioned to stay the course and take Donlin Gold through permitting.

Scientific and Technical Information

Scientific and technical information contained herein with respect to Donlin Gold is derived from the "Donlin Creek Gold Project Alaska, USA NI 43-101 Technical Report on Second Updated Feasibility Study" compiled by AMEC with an effective date of November 18, 2011, as amended January 20, 2012 (the "Second Updated Feasibility Study"). Kirk Hanson, P.E., Technical Director, Open Pit Mining, North America, (AMEC, Reno), and Gordon Seibel, R.M. SME, Principal Geologist, (AMEC, Reno) are the Qualified Persons responsible for the preparation of the independent technical report, each of whom are independent "qualified persons" as defined by NI 43-101.

Certain scientific and technical information contained herein with respect to Galore Creek is derived from the technical report entitled "Galore Creek Project British Columbia NI 43-101 Technical Report on Pre-Feasibility Study" dated effective July 27, 2011 (the "2011 Pre-Feasibility Study"). The Qualified Persons responsible for the preparation of the independent technical report are Greg Kulla, P. Geo., Principal Geologist (AMEC Americas Limited), and Jay Melnyk, P. Eng. (AMEC Americas Limited), each of whom are independent "qualified persons" as defined by NI 43-101.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, the timing of permitting and potential development of Donlin Gold, statements relating to NOVAGOLD's future operating and financial performance, outlook, and the potential sale of all or part of NOVAGOLD's interest in Galore Creek are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "potential", "possible", and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions, or results "will", "may", "could", or "should" occur or be achieved. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the 2016 outlook; perceived merit of properties; anticipated permitting timeframes; exploration results and budgets; mineral reserve and resource estimates; work programs; capital expenditures; timelines; strategic plans; completion of transactions; market prices for precious and base metals; or other statements that are not statements of fact. Forward-looking statements involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from NOVAGOLD's expectations include the uncertainties involving the need to obtain permits and governmental approvals; the need for additional financing to explore and develop properties and availability of financing in the debt and capital markets; uncertainties involved in the interpretation of drilling results and geological tests and the estimation of reserves and resources; the need for continued cooperation with Barrick Gold Corporation and Teck Resources Limited for the continued exploration and development of the Donlin Gold and Galore Creek properties, respectively; the need for cooperation of government agencies and native groups in the development and operation of properties; risks of construction and mining projects such as accidents, equipment breakdowns, bad weather, non-compliance with environmental and permit requirements, unanticipated variation in geological structures, ore grades or recovery rates; unexpected cost increases, which could include significant increases in estimated capital and operating costs; fluctuations in metal prices and currency exchange rates; and other risk and uncertainties disclosed in NOVAGOLD's Annual Report filed on Form 10-K for the year-ended November 30, 2015 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Canadian securities regulators, and in other NOVAGOLD reports and documents filed with applicable securities regulatory authorities from time to time. NOVAGOLD's forward-looking statements reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date the statements are made. NOVAGOLD assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors

This press release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the securities laws in effect in Canada, which differ from the requirements of U.S. securities laws. Unless otherwise indicated, all resource and reserve estimates included in this press release have been prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM)-CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council, as amended ("CIM Definition Standards"). NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators which establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and resource and reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the term "resource" does not equate to the term "reserves". Under U.S. standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. The SEC's disclosure standards normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves" by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of "measured" or "indicated resources" will ever be converted into "reserves".

Investors should also understand that "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of the "inferred resources" will ever be upgraded to "indicated resource", "measured resource", or "mineral reserve" status. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources" may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by SEC standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves" are also not the same as those of the SEC, and reserves reported by NOVAGOLD in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth herein may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards.

Contacts:

NOVAGOLD RESOURCES INC.

Melanie Hennessey

Vice President, Corporate Communications

604-669-6227 or 1-866-669-6227



NOVAGOLD RESOURCES INC.

Erin O'Toole

Analyst, Investor Relations

604-669-6227 or 1-866-669-6227

www.novagold.com






SHELTON, CT. (January 27, 2016) - The Board of Directors of Hubbell Incorporated (NYSE: HUBB) announces the election of Judith F. Marks as a Director of the Company effective January 26, 2016.



Ms. Marks currently serves as the Executive Vice President, Global Solutions at Dresser-Rand, a Siemens Business, and global supplier of custom-engineered rotating equipment for the oil, gas and power industries. She assumed the role in October 2015 after having been the President and CEO of Siemens Government Technologies, Inc. since 2011.

Hubbell's Chairman, President and CEO, Mr. David G. Nord, said "We are very pleased to welcome Judy to the Hubbell Board. She brings a strong operational background and global business experience that make her a highly valuable addition to our Board. We look forward to her future contributions and perspectives."

Prior to joining Siemens, Ms. Marks spent twenty-seven years at Lockheed Martin Corporation in varying strategic and operational roles. She received her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University.

Hubbell Incorporated is an international manufacturer of quality electrical and electronic products for a broad range of non-residential and residential construction, industrial and utility applications. With 2014 revenues of $3.4 billion, Hubbell Incorporated operates manufacturing facilities in the United States and around the world. The corporate headquarters is located in Shelton, CT.

######

Contact: Steve Beers

Hubbell Incorporated

40 Waterview Drive

P.O Box 1000

Shelton, CT 06484

(475) 882-4000





This announcement is distributed by NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions on behalf of NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Hubbell Inc. via Globenewswire



HUG#1981780


CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The Philippines will on Thursday release Q4 numbers for gross domestic product, setting the pace for a busy day in Asia-Pacific economic activity. GDP is expected to rise 2.2 percent on quarter and 5.7 percent on year after adding 11 percent on quarter and 6.0 percent on year in the three months prior. Australia will provide Q4 figures for import and export prices. Import prices are tipped to fall 0.8 percent on quarter after rising 1.4 percent in Q3. Export prices are called lower by 3.9 percent following the flat reading in Q3. Japan will see December data for retail sales, with forecasts suggesting an increase of 1.0 percent on month and 0.2 percent on year following the 2.5 percent monthly decline and the 1.1 percent yearly fall in November. Sales from large retails are expected to add 0.2 percent on year after slipping 1.6 percent in the previous month. Singapore will release Q4 figures for unemployment, with the jobless rate expected to hold steady at 2.0 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Centurion Minerals Ltd. (TSXV: CTN) ("Centurion", "the Company") wishes to announce that further to its January 8, 2016 news release, the TSX Venture exchange has accepted its proposal to settle $348,353 in outstanding debt to various creditors by issuing 3,483,530 common shares valued at $0.10 per share. The debt has now been extinguished and the issued shares will be subject to a four month escrow hold period expiring in May 2016.

ABOUT CENTURION

Centurion Minerals Limited is a Canadian-based company with an international focus on the exploration and development of gold and other mineral projects.



On Behalf of the Board,



"David G. Tafel"

President and CEO

For Further Information:

David Tafel

Director

604-683-1991

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of

the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may contain forward looking statements concerning future operations of Centurion Minerals Ltd. (the "Company"). All forward looking statements concerning the Company's future plans and operations, including management's assessment of the Company's project expectations or beliefs may be subject to certain assumptions, risks and uncertainties beyond the Company's control. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and that actual performance and exploration and financial results may differ materially from any estimates or projections.
Campanda GmbH, a Berlin, Germany-based global platform for RV/Campervan rentals, has acquired Airvy, its French competitor.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

The acquisition aims to allow Campanda to increase its offering by over 1000 exclusively available vehicles in France.

Founded in April 2013 by Chris Moller, Campanda allows users to search for RV rental deals around the world or offer their own motorhome or trailer to prospective customers.

Customers can compare price, location and vehicle amenities on the website and then book their chosen camper online.

The company offers eight localized websites in English, German, Italian, Spanish and French, featuring more than 25,000 vehicles in over 600 locations in 32 countries.

It is a b-to-v portfolio compnany.

FinSMEs

26/01/2016
Rakuten Ventures, Rakutens early stage corporate venture capital firm, has launched a new fund dedicated to Japan.

The 10 billion yen (approx. US$84m) Rakuten Ventures Japan Fund will focus on making investments in and empowering the community of Japanese startups with advanced technology and business models.

The fund, which will be led by Managing Partner SaeMin Ahn and Investment Manager Hogil Doh, will also seek to support business growth by driving synergies with the technologies and platforms of the Rakuten Group.

Originally launched in 2013, Rakuten Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of the Rakuten Group, one of the worlds leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer- and business-focused services including e-commerce, eBooks & eReading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports.

Rakuten Ventures currently counts Carousell, Visenze, Coda Payments and Send Anywhere among its investment portfolio.

In June 2014, the subsidiary launched a US$100 million global fund to target startups and companies in Israel, Asia Pacific, and the USA, with a focus on companies that can enable better user experience and facilitation, and currently includes PocketMath, Algorithmia, AdsNative, Epic! And OneSignal in its portfolio.

FinSMEs

27/01/2016
PESHAWAR, Pakistan The Pakistani university attacked by Taliban militants in a deadly assault last week will remain closed indefinitely until security is beefed up, staff said on Tuesday, as some teachers demanded the government issue them with weapons.

Four Pakistani Taliban gunmen killed 21 people at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda in the country's northwest on Wednesday after scaling its rear walls, battling security guards and then firing into packed classrooms and hostels.

University staff and students met on Monday, after briefly reopening the campus, to review security as at least 200 students protested outside to demand the government protect them.

"We decided to keep the university closed for some time so we can repair the damaged building and further improve the security situation," Fazal Rahim Marwat, a professor at the university, told Reuters.

He said some teachers had demanded licensed weapons for self-defence, a suggestion that is rejected by other teaching members and has reignited a debate about arming school staff.

Educational institutions have become an increasingly common target for the militants waging war against the Pakistani state. In December 2014, gunmen killed 134 children at an army-run school in the city of Peshawar, about 30 km (19 miles) from the site of last week's attack.

Authorities say last week's assault was planned and carried out by Pakistani Taliban militants based in neighbouring Afghanistan. Five suspects have been arrested in Pakistan for acting as "facilitators".

Pakistan has launched a major crackdown against militants holed up along its porous border with Afghanistan, but the university attack shows they retain the capacity to launch deadly raids, particularly against targets where security is relatively weak.

The Pakistani Taliban commander who says his fighters were behind the Bacha Khan assault released a video last week vowing more attacks on schools.

(Reporting by Jibran Ahmed; Writing by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Robert Birsel)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New Delhi: The Delhi government has appointed a Commission of Inquiry to address "unheeded" complaints of women by the police and tasked it to recommend action in cases of crime against women and amendments to existing laws.

The three-member commission, to be headed by retired district judge Dinesh Dayal, will receive complaints, including on violence, sexual harassment, stalking and voyeurism against women since February 2013.

The appointment of the probe panel was notified by Delhi Women and Child Development Department on 19 January.

The Arvind Kejriwal government had in August called a one-day assembly session, which had passed a resolution to set up the commission following the brutal murder of a 19-year-old girl in Anand Parbat area here on 16 July, 2015.

The tenure of the commission shall be for a period of two years and it will submit its report to the government every three months from the date of its first sitting.

According to the terms of reference of the panel, it will receive "unheeded" complaints of crimes committed against women since February 2013, that is, subsequent to amendments made to IPC (1860) and CrPC (1973) on the basis of some recommendations made by Justice Verma Committee and to suggest action to the state government.

"Its scope of work also includes suggesting necessary amendments to relevant laws, if any. It will also need to recommend to the government if any case of negligence or collusion is made out prima facie in the cases examined," a senior official said.

Among others, the panel is expected to recommend measures to expedite all the proceedings in such criminal cases, propose steps for proper implementation of existing laws and the Verma committee recommendations so as to prevent recurrence of such incidents.

"It is also expected to recommend welfare measures for improving the working condition of the real foot soldiers in the law enforcing agencies and address any other issue which it may find relevant during the course of its inquiry," the official added.

PTI
A horrifying on-camera confession by Manipur Police head constable Thounaojam Herojit Singh of killing an unarmed alleged militant Sanjit Meitei in a 23 July 2009 fake encounter in broad day light is just one of the many similar incidents in the state where extra-judicial killings have allegedly taken place.

In an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN, Singh admitted that he had pumped bullets from a point blank range with a 9mm pistol into the chest of the former PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) militant acting on orders from his senior, the then additional superintendent of police in Imphal.

"Commandos of Manipur Police were in July 2009 accused of killing Sanjit Meitei, an alleged terrorist who had surrendered but was shot dead on a busy road in Imphal. The killing of the unarmed youth had led to protests in the state," the CNN-IBN report said.

What is even more worrying is that the Manipur Police commando claimed that the then Manipur DGP and chief minister were aware of the incident and that he now fears for his life.

Meitei's mother had later filed a police complaint accusing the police of staging a fake encounter involving his son and the case was subsequently transferred to CBI in 2010 for a thorough probe. She on Wednesday demanded justice from authorities failing which Singh be handed over to her.

Reacting to the report, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who is on a visit to Kerala, said in Thiruvananthapuram, "I will get the information and then I can comment...then we will look into it."

Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said the Centre has taken "cognisance" of the said reports on the

purported confession.

"I was little disturbed to see this news and confession which has been reported. We have taken cognisance of this

revelation and necessary steps will be taken," Rijiju said.

Congress leader RPN Singh questioned the silence of the police commando in the matter for all these years but said

it needed to be investigated if the reported confession was true. The incumbent Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh of the Congress was also the chief minister at the time of the alleged fake encounter.

Manipur is no stranger to fake encounters.

On 11 August, the Supreme Court had asked Manipur and the Centre "why no police cases have been lodged against the members of security forces who were suspected to have been involved in fake encounter and accidental killings in the state", according to an NDTV report.

In November 2013, the National Human Rights Commission examined 44 cases, the half of which were already declared earlier as not genuine incidents of gunfights between alleged militants and security personnel in Manipur by the human rights body.

"In 2013, the Supreme Court of India set up a three-judge committee to examine a case alleging 1,500 fake - or staged - encounters in Manipur carried out by the Indian security forces. Led by Justice Santosh Hegde, the committee selected six cases and found that none of them were genuine, a Firstpost article had said earlier.

With inputs from PTI
India's Republic Day celebrations this year were unusually representative of its state of affairs. Last year, US president Barack Obama had been the chief guest and there had been fanfare about the resolution of the nuclear liability deadlock; 12 months on, there has been little to show for it on the ground. French president Francois Hollande's visit  the guest of honour this year  has been relatively subdued by comparison.

Despite 19 deals  including 13 memoranda of understanding  being signed between India and France in several sectors such as space cooperation, food safety, smart cities, renewable energy, and railways, the two big ticket items  the 126 Rafale Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft contract (downgraded to 36 in 2014) and the six EPR reactors for Jaitapur  are still stuck in negotiations.

Much like the promised reforms under the Modi government, progress on the Rafale and Jaitapur deals has followed salami tactics - slice by slice - rather than whole hog. The Jaitapur project was approved in December 2010 and the Rafale deal announced in January 2012. Neither are close to conclusion, let alone fruition.

After his meeting with Indian officials, Hollande announced that he hoped the nuclear sale would be concluded by the year's end. By way of contrast, the Iranian nuclear negotiations started clandestinely in Muscat, Oman, in March 2013 and a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was concluded in July 2015. It is worth bearing in mind that the JCPOA was conducted between six countries, some hostile to each other, on a matter of grave disagreement. By contrast, the Rafale and Jaitapur deals are between two friendly countries with strategic relations working towards similar goals.

It is true that foreign relations are not built on big ticket item deals alone. Strong and sustainable ties are built only through a greater enmeshing of economies, institutions, and people. However, it is the major deals that act as beacons of intent. Sophisticated technologies, particularly in advanced weapons systems, are not traded on a purely pecuniary calculus or Western relations with China and the Gulf countries would have been very much different today. Similarly, the 2008 Indo-US nuclear deal was a landmark more for what it heralded politically than its dollar value alone, which has not yet added up to much. India's relations with Japan have blossomed but are still viewed as incomplete because the two states are yet to establish firm nuclear and defence relations. And had Australia refused to sell uranium to India until the latter signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, relations would have been much frostier.

The high symbolic value of certain sectors is sometimes pooh-poohed by some analysts. Particularly in nuclear cooperation, they say, it is this mindset that contributes to more proliferation. This is ridiculous, of course: the symbolism accrued to certain sectors like nuclear and defence does not come from a postmodern construction of values but from an implicit expression of trust between states. A clear example is the US position on potential nuclear proliferation by Iran and the alleged proliferation by Israel. Perhaps something that is genuinely pure symbolism is the Indian contingent marching in France's Bastille Day celebrations in 2009 and French soldiers returning the honour in the Republic Day parade this year.

What ails the discussions between Paris and Delhi is not apparent either. India's hypersensitivity to an informed public sphere means that only sanitised tidbits from bureaucrats of either side are available: basically, it is rumoured to boil down to cost. No matter, the Rafale and Jaitapur deals are important to India for reasons beyond mere symbolism. Indian Air Force readiness hangs precariously and country-wide energy shortages are apparent.

One can admonish the government, suggest steps required to remedy its hurdles, or point out the economic and other losses incurred by its lethargic pace but that has been of little use for the past four years. Delhi needs to realise that it is not just important that reforms and agreements move forward but it is crucial that they do so in a timely manner. In its own neighbourhood, China's rapid rise while India dilly-dallied over core reforms should have been a lesson to Delhi that power is not absolute but relative; there is a cost to the slow and steady approach as the Bharatiya Janata Party gets its house in order...one citizens might not want to pay.
Chandigarh: A retired BSF personnel on Wednesday allegedly committed suicide by consuming poison behind the Haryana Secretariat in Chandigarh.

In a note recovered from his bag, the victim blamed some police personnel as being responsible for his suicide.

Sandeep, from Kharkhoda in Sonepat district of Haryana consumed poisonous substance at the Secretariat following which he was rushed to a government hospital. As his condition was serious, he was referred to PGIMER where he died, police said.

In the note Sandeep accused his wife of having illicit relations with some police personnel in Kharkhoda and forcing his 15-year-old daughter into having physical relations with them.

Sandeep alleged that he was ending his life as he was being harassed by police officials.

A case under Section 306 (abetment of suicide) of the IPC has been registered in this regard, SHO of Sector 3 police station Neeraj Sarna said.

Several letters addressed to Haryana chief minister, DGP Haryana and CBI, have also been recovered from the deceased's bag, he said, adding investigation is on.

PTI
Fresh reports have emerged that RK Pachauri of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), accused of sexually harassing a 29-year-old woman researcher in February last year, a male researcher has now alleged pressure from seniors in TERI to 'ask' the complainant to settle out of court. The male researcher filed a complaint with the Delhi police that the senior officials asked him to opt for an out-of-court settlement. However, the news channel reported that Dinesh Verma of TERI has denied the allegations.

According to this Economic Times report, the male researcher was told in a "patronising" tone that he should reach out to his "lady friend and get her to settle it out of Court as this will be good for her as there is nothing more left to achieve". The male researcher also complained that as many as four officials working in senior positions in TERI "coaxed and cajoled" him to approach the woman researcher (complainant). The male researcher has resigned from the organisation citing "appalling" and "insensitive" conduct of TERI officials, according to the Economic Times report.

This comes after repeated complaints from the victim that the organisation has done nothing to help her case and that Pachauri is still the "most influential man" in the organisation. The male researcher told ET that instead of removing Pachauri, the organisation instead promoted him to an executive position. He added that he was willing to be deposed in front of the court and wants to "bolster others to come forward and tell the truth."

The case

In February last year, the researcher registered an FIR in Delhi, alleging that the director-general of TERI had committed offences under Sections 354, 354A, 354D, 506 of IPC, which deal with outraging the modesty of a woman, sexual harassment, stalking, and criminal intimidation, respectively. The complaint stated that Pachauri had started making inappropriate advances towards the researcher soon after she joined the organisation in 2013.

According to The Economic Times report about the incident, the inappropriate behaviour included, "unwanted physical advances, emails, text and WhatsApp messages" and that such behaviour continued even after she asked him to stop. Before approaching the police, the researcher had filed a complaint within the organisation as well, where Pachauri is the top-hat and has been since 1981.

The woman researcher quit the organisation shortly after. According to Gulf News, she alleged that the think tank treated her in the "worst possible manner" and failed to "uphold my (her) interests as an employee."

RK Pachauri and his 'influence'

Naina Lal Kidwai who ended her 13-year-stint at HSBC as chairman told The Economic Times that many women members of staff were rooting for Pachauri and that a senior team requested that the 'person under evaluation return'. However, the complainant rubbished such claims and said that the employees were unhappy with his return and had written an anonymous letter expressing "anxiety and distress" from Pachauri's return. However, the governing council in TERI according to the complainant ignored this letter.

An employee who spoke to Quint, said that employees at TERI are divided  while the older lot are blinded by his achievements, the younger lot are disgruntled; "Due credit should be given to the man for his work, but something like this cannot be forgiven," the former employee told the web journal.

According to Business Standard, Pachauri went on leave when the allegations were fresh, but joined work in July 2015, armed with court orders, quashing the internal committee report that found him guilty of misconduct. According to the journal, one of the two female members of the governing council also resigned during this period as "matter of principle" since she believed that Pachauri should have stepped down till he was absolved.

Though Ajay Mathur was appointed as director-general soon after the allegations, in December 2015, there has been little clarity in the role Pachauri would play in the organisation. One of the pre-conditions, as reported by Hindustan Times was that Ajay Mathur did not want any interference from Pachauri in day-to-day operations since his contract had no termination clause. Mathur raised concerns over Pachauri's 'powers' many times.
Durgapur: Union HRD minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday alleged that Trinamool Congress leaders visited Hyderabad after the Dalit student's death due to votebank politics and lashed out at Mamata Banerjee government over Malda violence claiming it was "appeasing" minorities.

Addressing a public meeting, the BJP leader questioned why the Trinamool leaders did not visit Nadia in the state in 2015 when an alleged incident of atrocities against Dalit women had occurred there.

"In 2015 when three Dalit women were tortured in Nadia district, nobody said anything. Mamata Banerjee was silent then," Irani said.

"TMC sent delegation to Hyderabad University to pursue votebank politics. Why didn't they send a delegation to Nadia district then? Why didn't Derek O'Brien go there?", the HRD Minister asked.

A two-member TMC delegation led by its national spokesperson Derek O'Brien had visited Hyderabad University, where the body of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula was found hanging in a hostel room in the campus on 17 January.

Accusing the TMC government of indulging in "minority appeasement politics", Irani said "What is happening in Malda? In Malda a police station was burnt under the patronage of the ruling party and the police remained a mute spectator. What were they doing? TMC is pursuing votebank politics," she alleged.

Irani claimed that the state the government had "completely failed" in maintaining law and order situation which has led to increase in crime against woman.

"TMC had come to power saying they owe their victory to Ma, Maati and Manush (Women, Land and People). Now, when the women and the people are tortured in the state, they remain a mute spectator.

"TMC is making a mockery of the dignity of women in Bengal. Women are being raped and the chief minister is fixing Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 as compensation for them," she alleged.

Turning to the issue of illegal mining in Asansol-Durgapur region, she alleged, "Though the TMC government speaks publicly against illegal mining, they actually encourage mine mafias and provide support in running the illegal mines."

PTI
The Madras High Court on Wednesday ordered another autopsy on one of the students who had allegedly committed suicide in Villupuram in Tamil Nadu. The High Court gave the go-ahead for fresh autopsy after it heard the plea by the parents of one of the girls, Monisha.

The court said the medical team conducting the postmortem should include a doctor of the parents' choice.

Monisha's father has alleged foul play in his daughter's death and filed a petition seeking a fresh postmortem. The family has refused to take possession of the body.

The bodies of the three students of SSV College of Naturopathy and Yoga Sciences were removed from a well opposite the college on Saturday.

Principal surrenders in Chennai, sent to judicial custody

Days after three SSV college students allegedly committed suicide, the head of their college surrendered in a court in the state capital earlier this week and was arrested along with two others, including its principal. Vasuki Subramanian, head of the Kallakurichi-based naturopahty and yoga college, surrendered before a court here and was remanded to judicial custody, police said.

Three students of SVS Yoga Medical College at Kallakurichi near Villupuram in Tamil Nadu committed suicide Saturday evening accusing the administration of charging excess fees and torture, and blaming college chairman Vasuki Subramanian for their death.

After questioning, we have arrested Kalanidhi (college principal) and Suvagur Varma, (adminstrator and son of Vasuki Subramanian) and they were produced before a court which remanded them to judicial custody, a senior police official told reporters. He said the probe was still on and they were on the look out for some more persons in connection with the case.

The father of one of the girls, Tamilarasan, moved a petition on Monday in the Madras High Court, seeking a CB-CID inquiry and post-mortem in a state-run hospital in Chennai. He had also requested that a doctor of his choice be present during autopsy.

Meanwhile, the Registrar of the TN Dr MGR Medical University, Dr P Arumugam told reporters, we have not given affilation to the BNYS and BHMS courses of the Kallakurichi-based college for 2015-16 till date.

On Saturday, three second-year girl students committed suicide alleging exorbitant fees and harassment by their college. The triple suicide snowballed into a major issue with political parties demanding tough action. The college was sealed on Sunday. Expressing suspicion on the manner of their deaths, the girls parents had filed complaints claiming that their daughters were murdered.

In the Madras High Court, meanwhile, Justice M M Sunderesh before whom Tamilarasans, (Monishas father) petition came up for hearing today, directed the registry to post it before another court dealing with petitions of a similar nature. DMDK chief and leader of Opposition, Vijayakanth, demanded a CBI inquriy into the matter.

The college has only courses which are BNYS (Bachelor of Naturopathy and Yogic Sciences) and BHMS (Bachelor of Homoeopathic Medicine and Surgery).

With Agencies
To create an elemental shift in human consciousness, the feminist movement  not unlike other ideological movements  relies on sharing a common goal to define, establish and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal and social rights for women. Since the occurrence of the modern feminist movement in two major waves in the US from the late 19th Century till its fanning out into radical, socialist, cultural or liberal wings, history tells us that major goals were achieved only when there has been consensus and coherence sustained over a period of time.

That fact that the feminist movement is facing a global crisis now despite the advancement in millions of womens lives owes a lot to the gaping fault lines. These fault lines  old and new  thrive on economic, cultural, legal, or even chronological differences between countries and have, of late, severely affected the fight over womens rights and bodies. For developing countries like India, therefore, the key point is to understand that the battle against gender bias and cultural constructs requires a sustained effort.

It must be fought tirelessly.

Activism and campaigning must be paired with everyday efforts to eventually create a fundamental shift in society's thinking and to challenge its deep-rooted misogyny. An intense but essentially spasmodic outrage over a Sabarimala or a Shani Shingnapur could be wonderfully suited to cockfights on TV debates. The supply of the outrageous is vast enough in this vast country to keep us in a state of 'perma-scream'.

But it is unsustainable and ultimately, self-defeating.

The aim of these lines is to bring perspective to the heated debate taking place now in India over cultural traditions that are mired in gender discrimination. The context of the debate lies in two recent developments:

One, Kerala's Sabarimala temple authorities have stuck to their stand  in the face of legal scrutiny from the Supreme Court  of banning all women between the ages of 10 and 50 from entering temple precincts citing ritualistic practice and tradition. They claim deity Lord Ayyappa, who attracts more than 50 million devotees each year, is a sworn celibate. They do not want the apex court to interfere in religious practices.

Two, on Tuesday, Maharashtra police foiled a plan by 350 women activists to barge into Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district to break a 400-year-old tradition banning women from entering its sanctum sanctorum. The women activists from the Bhumata Brigade led by Trupti Desai planned to slither down a rope to land on the temples platform after alighting from a helicopter that will hover over the temple. (On Wednesday, however, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced that he will be meeting representatives of the organisation to give their concerns a hearing)

Confrontation and outrage plays a crucial function in the battle against gender bias by turning society's focus into a specific issue.

TV debates are generated and many storms are raised in teacups. The momentum that is generated is easily lost when stunts like invading a temple precinct isn't backed by a sustained, de-politicised effort that seeks to end centuries of patriarchal social construct. A few TV debates and articles later, we revert to square one. The larger question that needs to be asked is whether this sudden activism against ritualistic practices in Hindu temples is a legit, genuine effort to break century-old traditions, or is it fuelled by a narrow motive to pile political pressure on a government that has been accused of indulging in cultural majoritarianism?

Dabholkar's campaign in 2000

In 2000, Narendra Dabholkar and his Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS) launched a move to accord "dignity to women" by being allowed entry into temples. Led by the rationalist  who was later murdered allegedly by right-wing extremists  activists including artistes from theatre, film and grassroots leaders marched from Pandharpur to Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar to protest against the temple's tradition which allows male devotees to go up to the platform to offer puja wearing a wet cloth but bans women from doing so.

According to a report in The Indian Express, party workers from BJP, Sena and other Hindu organisations joined hands to prevent MANS activists from gaining entry into the temple along with women who had come from across the state. "We were all arrested and spent two days in jail," said MANS activist Nisha Bhosale. "Nearly 5,000 to 7,000 people from across Maharashtra had turned up  a majority of them being women," she said.

While the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government maintained a studied silence, Dabholkar took the fight to the Bombay High Court.

Sabarimala tradition

Sabarimala's current practice has behind it the sanction of a 1983 verdict of the Kerala high court directing the authorities not to allow women aged between 10 and 50 years. According to the Travancore Devaswom Board which manages the temple, the Thazhamon family whose members serve as Tantris and the Nair Service Society, which speaks in the name of the largest group of beneficiaries of the caste system, tantra does not permit women of menstruating age to enter the temple as the idol has been installed treating the deity as a perpetual bachelor.

Lack of sustained effort

As we see in each of these cases, temples follow decade-old ceremonial practices rooted in century-old social constructs. Despite Dabholkar's efforts, the fact that we haven't moved even an inch became clear when last November, nine small steps taken by a woman to enter and offer prayers at the Shani shrine was considered to be 'breach' of a 400-year-old practice. The temple committee suspended seven security guards and villagers performed a milk purification of the idol.

And it is preposterous to suggest that all villagers in this temple town are BJP or right-wing activists. The patriarchal mores lie so deep that even women (and probably more so) were the first ones to take umbrage of the 'breach' which they fear will bring calamity on their families. The simple reason why the commendable fight started by Dabholkar didn't bring desired results because it wasn't backed by a tenacious campaign that would seek to clear centuries of social cobwebs.

Why such a gap?

While the recent cacophony and helicopter stunts are great for attention-grabbing, they are doomed to fail in their primary duty  that of challenging the patriarchal hegemony over religion, its practices and ending stigmas against women. Things will remain as they are long after the last OB van of a TV channel has returned home. Whether Sabarimala's skewed tradition or Shani Shingnapur's regressive practice, we wake up every 15 or 20 years or so only when it is politically convenient for us.
General VK Singh just cannot mind his words. And presstitute seems to be his favourite one. That the former Army chief holds the media with some contempt is no secret but if contempt it has to be, as Union minister one would expect him to be more tactful with what he utters. If thats so difficult an ask, then he should at least be more imaginative in berating people he dislikes.

Gen Singh went hyper again in response to a video clipping doing the rounds in the social media which shows a man touching the feet of BJP chief Amit Shah. Some social media comments linked him to the act. In his Twitter post, he clarified that the clipping involved Vijayapal Singh Tomar, head of BJPs Kisan Morcha. He went on to add that it was case of mischief by presstitutes.

Of course, no one in the media is in doubt what presstitute is supposed to mean. A vowel dropping out and another coming in dont make a difference to the sense of what the venerable general wants to convey. He might have reason to get angry  many in the social media are certainly not decent people and they are least mindful of the reputation or dignity of the person they are targeting - but coming down their level does not behove someone who once headed the most respected institution in the country. And he should be mindful that the profession also includes a large number of women and such a word demeans them.

The problem with General Singh is he is a repeat offender, and he has no regrets whatsoever. Last year, he had used the same word when newspersons quoted him as saying that visiting the Pakistan High Commission was more exciting than evacuating Indians from Yemen. ..What do you expect from pressitutes, he had tweeted then. He had clarified then, saying it was meant for the biased section of the media. It practically meant no expression of regret since the media could be called biased every time it came up with something that does not suit someone.

Would he have called the same media presstitute when it was fighting his case for tenure extension against the UPA government not long ago? He was the darling of the media then and he pampered them. His critics were pilloried then, but none of them went to the extent of calling the media names. Gen Singh certainly thinks relationship with the media is a matter of convenience. If he chooses to treat the media with disdain, it does not matter, but the language? Surely, he could improve upon it.

Here goes a personal appeal: coming to media people, Sir, we are thick-skinned people and nobody in power really loves us. But no one of us deserves to be called a prostitute, by whatever other name you might put it. The repeated usage of the word reflects that your vocabulary has not improved much after joining politics. Why not use words such as sickular, intolerant and pseudo-intellectual instead. These are words your party and its sympathisers use often. These are certainly more dignified than words like pimp, paedophile and prostitute.

Sir, please mind your language, because language defines a man.
By K.A.Antony

With Assembly elections round the corner a con woman has dropped a bomb powerful enough to shatter the prospects of the Oommen Chandy government in Kerala.The deposition by the con woman, Saritha S Nair before the Solar judicial commission that she had paid Rs 1.9 crore as bribe to the chief minister has already generated much heat in Kerala politics with the Opposition parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party demanding Chany's resignation.

Things have been getting worse for Chandy and his friends ever since the solar scam scandal came to the fore in 2013 as the names of Chandy and some of his cabinet colleagues and two Congress MPs found place in the list people having links with the con woman and her Team Solar Energy Company. Though Chandy had been feigning innocence since the beginning the role of his office became clear at a later stage and two of his personnel staff and a body guard to be dismissed.

What is most shocking for Chandy and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) in Kerala is that Saritha's deposition before the judicial commission about paying bribe has come when the government is struggling hard to fight the bar bribery case which has already forced two ministers to step down. This apart, the Opposition had named Chandy as the key player in the bar bribery case.

Saritha said she and her team were offered full support and cooperation by the chief minister himself. The woman even contradicted whatever Chandy had said deposed before Justice Sivarajan commission during his 14-hour long grilling on Monday. While Chandy refused to undergo lie detection test Saitha has offered to undergo the test to prove her claims true.

Though Chandy has denied the allegations pulling himself out of the quagmire into which he has fallen would not be an easy job at this point. The CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Bharatiya Janata Party has asked Chandy to step down as chief minister while Bharatiya Janata Party state president Kummanam Rajasekharan demanded an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI) into the solar scam scandal.

 It is big lie.Nobody will believe her(Saritha), was Chandys immediate reaction to Sarithas latest allegations that has raised the mercury in the political barometer of Kerala. His close lieutenant and Kerala Cultural Minister KC Joseph also defended Chandy saying that the people of Kerala will not be carried away by the baseless allegations of a con woman.  She is a fraudster and the liquor barons who have lost a lucrative business owing to the new liquor policy are behind her, he said.

Electricity Minister Aryadan Mohammed, another Chandy confidant also faces bribe charges in the same case. Aryadan also denied the allegations saying that he never took money from Saritha and never did any favour to Team Solar.

Sarithas revelations about the direct involvement of Chandy raises some doubts as it has come at a time when the elections are round the corner. It can also be presumed that Saritha is in for a big game and has closed all the doors on the Congress as the chances of it retaining power in Kerala is bleak.

The veracity of the Sarithas claims are yet to be proved. Even her readiness to undergo a lie detection test to prove her claims true need not be taken for granted. But the recorded version of a conversation between her and Thampanoor Ravi, a Chandy confidant in which the latter is heard asking Sartitha not to contradict what Chandy had told the commission is kicking up enough dust.

Though the Congress high command has extended full support to Chandy, his fate hangs in balance. The going will be tough for Chandy as Opposition and the BJP are sure to mount pressure on him and his government to step down.
The 2016 Tamil Nadu elections could see a dramatic realignment of parties as arch rivals AIADMK and DMK try out new political combinations, reports The Economic Times.

The prospects of DMK and Congress coming together could prompt Jayalaithaa to align with GK Vasan's Tamil Maanila Congress. BJP's poor show in the last LS polls, could see DMDK's Vijayakanth reconsidering his alliance with the saffron party, says the newspaper.

Senior BJP leader L Ganesan cozied up to both the leading parties in Tamil Nadu praising AIADMK and not ruling out alliance with the DMK either.

The News Minute reports that Ganesan, speaking in Namakkal, said the BJP is in touch with parties which were part of the NDA alliance during the Lok Sabha elections for possible tie-ups during assembly elections.

Ganesan said AIADMK is the only party which has the guts to go it alone in Tamil Nadu while other parties hunt for allies.

DMK party President M Karunanidhi is sticking to his line that all poll pacts should be 'welcomed'.

"We will not say no to parties willing to come (into DMK-led) alliance. We will welcome any party which will ensure democracy's victory," Karunanidhi said earlier this week.

DMK has been attempting to stitch a formidable alliance against the ruling AIADMK and Karunanidhi had even invited Vijayakanth-led DMDK for a poll-pact to face the coming elections.

Vijayakanth, the Opposition Leader in Tamil Nadu Assembly, had aligned with J Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK in the 2011 elections, in which DMK was routed and relegated to the second spot among the opposition parties with a mere 23 seats in the 234-member House.

Jaya tells cadre to "destroy rivals"

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa said she will finalise the AIADMK strategy for the upcoming Assembly polls at an appropriate time and has kept the question marks on pre- poll alliances wide open.

Jayalalithaa underlined the party's performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, in which AIADMK emerged as the third largest party in Parliament. I will take the right decision as per the situation like the way we did in the past. There is no uniform strategy to win elections." she said.

The AIADMK party has formed the government in the state six times - three times under the party founder late M.G. Ramachandran and three times under Jayalalithaa,

"Parties that were part of the AIADMK alliance in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls were not the partys allies for the 2011 Assembly polls,"Jayalalithaa said referring to the Left parties and Vijayakanths DMDK.

Speaking in the Assembly last week, Jayalalithaa asserted that the electoral promises made by the AIADMK in 2011 have been fulfilled and said her government has made all round progress across sectors in the past nearly five years.

She listed a slew of welfare schemes and freebies including 20 kilo rice at free of cost, cooking oil and pulses at highly subsidised prices to ration card holders every month, green houses and free of cost milch cows, and goats to beneficiaries.

Although we are implementing several welfare schemes so that people could live peacefully, charges are being made continuously inside and outside the House, and accusations are being made...though we give explanation for the charges that were made against us, some persons repeat their falsehood.

I dont see growth only as economic growth, growth should reach each and every one. This is a government for the common man and poor, it is a government that uplifts the have-nots, she said amid thumping of treasury benches.

On higher education, Jaya said Tamil Nadu stood first at the national level. While Gross Enrollment Ratio at the national level is 23.6 per cent, in Tamil Nadu it has touched 44.8 per cent, she said adding the GER stood at 18 per cent when she assumed power in 2011.

With Agencies
MEXICO CITY The wealthy Texas youth known as the "affluenza" teen after he killed four people in a drunk driving incident in 2013 will be deported to the United States imminently after dropping a legal challenge in Mexico, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

Ethan Couch, 18, and his mother, Tonya, were arrested in Mexico last month following a more than two-week manhunt. His mother was deported to the United States last month.

"He has withdrawn the legal challenge," said Fernando Benitez, Couch's lawyer in Mexico. "His return is imminent. At any time."

Mexican authorities have not yet announced a date for his deportation.

Couch was sentenced to 10 years of drug-and-alcohol-free probation for intoxication manslaughter, a punishment condemned by critics as privilege rewarded with leniency. He now faces the prospect of charges in the United States for violating his probation.

During Couch's trial, a psychologist sparked outrage by saying in his defense that Couch was so wealthy and spoiled he could not tell the difference between right and wrong - hence, he was a victim of "affluenza."

Tarrant County, Texas, prosecutors say Couch is responsible for his own absence by fleeing to Mexico. His mother was returned to Texas and faces a third-degree felony charge for helping her son to flee that could result in a 10-year prison sentence if she is convicted.

"We've been hearing for a while that he is about to come back, but we haven't been notified of anything yet," said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson.

U.S. marshals are in Mexico and are waiting to bring him back, he said. Upon his arrival, Couch will be placed in juvenile detention, Anderson added.

If Couch is found to have violated his probation, he could be held in adult detention for about four months.

He faces a detention hearing in Fort Worth on Feb. 19 to determine if his case will be transferred to the adult system. Tarrant County prosecutors are looking into whether he could face additional charges.

(With reporting by Marice Richter and Jon Herskovitz in Texas; Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Lisa Shumaker)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
BURNS, Ore. State and federal authorities urged a group of armed men occupying a U.S. wildlife refuge in Oregon to abandon the protest over land rights on Wednesday, a day after their leader and seven other people were arrested and one man killed.

Law enforcement tightened security around the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge after occupation leader Ammon Bundy and his group were taken into custody at a traffic stop on Highway 395 in northeast Oregon.

Authorities declined to give details of what led to the fatal shooting of one member of Bundy's group, identified by activists as Robert LaVoy Finicum, a rancher who acted as a spokesman for the occupiers. Bundy's brother, Ryan, was wounded in the incident.

At a news conference in Burns, Oregon, on Wednesday morning Greg Bretzing, FBI special agent in charge of the agency's Portland office, said that the remaining occupiers were "free to leave" the refuge and would be identified at checkpoints manned by law enforcement.

"Let me be clear: It is the actions and choices of the armed occupiers of the refuge that have lead us to where we are today," Bretzing said.

Bretzing said he could not give details of the traffic stop and shooting incident because they are under investigation.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward also did not give details but, with his voice breaking, said: "I'm disappointed that a traffic stop yesterday that was supposed to bring peaceful resolution to this ended badly. Multiple law enforcement agencies put a lot of work into putting together the best tactical plan they could, to take these guys down peacefully ...

"If it was as simple as just waiting out some folks down there to get out of some buildings, we could have waited a lot longer," Ward said. "But this has been tearing our community apart. It's time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on. There doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community."

Ward said if the occupiers had legitimate grievances with the government, they should use the "appropriate manner" to address them.

"This can't happen anymore. This can't happen in America and it can't happen in Harney County," he said.

Amid concerns that Finicum's killing could escalate violence, the Pacific Patriots Network, Oath Keepers and the Idaho III% - all self-styled militia groups sympathetic to the occupiers - said in a joint statement they were issuing an immediate stand by order to followers.

'COOLER HEADS MUST PREVAIL'

"During this time, cooler heads must prevail," the statement said. "We do not wish to inflame the current situation and will engage in open dialogue until all of the facts have been gathered."

One of the remaining occupiers at the reserve, Jason Patrick, told Reuters by phone they would stay until the "redress of grievances."

I've heard 'peaceful resolution' for weeks now and now theres a cowboy who is my friend who is dead  so prepare for the peaceful resolution, Patrick said.

On Wednesday morning an occupier posted what appeared to be a live feed from the refuge on a YouTube page called "DefendYourBase." In it, a few occupiers, some dressed in camouflage, were seen in front of what appeared to be a heavy-duty 320D excavator, at least two of them carrying firearms.

At one point, a man spoke on a phone with a person he identified as his mother and offered her reassurance.

"If I die, I died for my country, I died a free man," he said. "That's how I want to die."

The man added that his group had "food and everything for the long haul."

The Malheur takeover, which started Jan. 2 with at least a dozen armed men, was a flare-up in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a decades-old conflict over federal control of millions of acres in the West. Protesters say they are defending the Constitution.

Bundy's father, Cliven, was a key figure in a 2014 armed standoff with federal officials over unpaid grazing fees in Nevada.

The arrests have angered anti-government protesters across the country, said Mike Vanderboegh, a gun-rights activist active in self-proclaimed militia circles. "It's all I can do to keep people from going and shooting feds right now," he told Reuters.

Vanderboegh said he believed the FBI had acted too quickly to end a situation that was already headed towards peaceful resolution.

Federal officials said Tuesday they had probable cause to arrest Finicum, who told NBC News earlier this month that he would rather die than be detained.

Those arrested face federal charges of conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to impede federal officers from discharging their duties, the FBI said. Local KATU-TV reported that they were expected to make an initial court appearance on Wednesday afternoon.

(Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, Jonathan Allen, Melissa Fares, Amy Tennery and Ed Tobin in New York and Andy Sullivan and Julia Edwards in Washington, D.C.; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bill Trott)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Gaza City, Palestinian Territories: Eight members of the militant group Hamas were missing on Wednesday after the collapse of a tunnel in the Gaza Strip caused by rain and flooding, a security source said.

The tunnel collapsed overnight in the area of Jabalia in the north of the Palestinian enclave after several days of rainfall, the security source in the area said on condition of anonymity.

"The resistance tunnel collapsed last night due to the weather and flooding," the source said, adding that the tunnel belonged to Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip.

"There were 11 resistance men inside. Three of them escaped in the first hour after the accident, but the security operation... continues to search for the eight others."

Such collapses have previously occurred in the coastal strip, which is under an Israeli blockade and has seen three wars with the Jewish state since 2008.

On Saturday, a tunnel collapse killed a 30-year-old man, according to Hamas officials. Residents said the tunnel was located in Al-Maghazi in the central Gaza Strip.

In December, 14 Palestinians were rescued after being stranded for hours in a tunnel near the Egyptian border when it flooded and partially collapsed.

During a 50-day conflict in 2014, Israeli warplanes destroyed a large part of the underground network of tunnels used by Gazans.

At the end of 2014, Egypt began the construction of a buffer zone in the northern Sinai Peninsula, on the border with Gaza, including destroying hundreds of tunnels it says are used for smuggling weapons.

Hamas has reportedly rebuilt tunnels destroyed in the 2014 conflict that Israeli officials say could be used to carry out attacks.

Israel's blockade severely restricts the movement of people and goods into and out of the enclave.

Egypt's sole border with Gaza has also remained largely closed following the 2013 overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, effectively trapping the 1.8 million Gazans into the territory.

AFP
For the first time since he (unfortunately) entered the US presidential race, Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump has made a remark focused on India.

"India is doing great," Trump told CNN in an interview on Monday.

"That was the beginning of China. That was the beginning of India, when India  by the way, India is doing great. Nobody talks about it. And I have big jobs going up in India. But India is doing great... All of a sudden, people are talking about China and India and other places, even from an economic standpoint. America has come down a long way, a long way. The United States has come down a long way, and it's very, very sad. We're not respected"

Even though Trump's sudden respect for India comes as a surprise keeping in mind his views on basically anything or anyone not American, this statement definitely does not mean India is an exception to his profound views. In fact, that very idea is laughable.

If Trump miraculously becomes US President in November this year, India will have to deal with some unstable ties with the US  almost on the verge of being bipolar. As recently as November 2015, Trump had actually accused India of "taking advantage of the US".

"If you look at the way China and India and almost everybody takes advantage of the United States  China in particular, because theyre so good, The Hindu had quoted Trump as saying.

Of course, this outburst by Trump was not really noticed a lot by Indians because, as the report adds, India was mentioned only once and Trump's focus was more on the "China threat".

But the fact that a US presidential aspirant said that India was doing great just two months after accusing it of taking advantage of the US is quite disturbing.

Of course, 'taking advantage' is a concept with which Trump is well-versed. Let's not forget he's got two massive projects coming up in Mumbai and Pune. Imagine the hordes of activists, politicians, karyakartas and general bystanders that would gather to protest outside the construction sites of his Trump towers in both cities if he spewed negative pronouncements about India.

The argument can be made that in November last year, he was still a joke candidate  whose views were brushed aside, but by now, has captured the imagination of the American Right and extreme Right to emerge as a genuine contender.

Yes, that last part made us shudder too.

More importantly though, do we really need praise from a man who wants to build a wall along the southern border of the US to prevent immigrants from Mexico coming into the country?

And then make Mexico pay for that wall?

Does India need validation of its greatness from the man who wants a complete ban on Muslims in the US?

Trump as US President would be bad for all Indians because each and every Indian, irrespective of caste or religion, would an immigrant and part of a minority in the US. And we all know what Trump feels about immigrants and minorities.

Moreover, Trump as US President will also be bad news for India's employment rates. In August last year, Trump had proposed to raise the minimum wage for H-1B visas, the most popular work visa for Indian technology professionals, as he released his policy of putting American workers first, PTI had reported.

In fact, in a Huffington Post article titled 'Why Donald Trump's Rise Is Good News For India', it was argued that Trump's rise is actually better for India provided "there is no practical way Donald Trump can be elected President."

Keeping that assumption in mind, Trump's rise would then actually boost Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming US President. And Clinton as US President, the article said, would be better for India because "with her record of support for India against Pakistan, her progressive immigration policy and her general concentration on Asia, Clinton might turn out to be a better friend for India in the White House than other candidates."

In any case, it doesn't matter how many times Trump tries to woo India by calling it great.

Until he gets rid of his xenophobic views (which will probably never happen), Trump will be bad for India... and the world.

With inputs from PTI
In a statement that could potentially change the way European countries address the refugee issue, European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans claimed that new figures prove that 60 percent of those who seek refugee status are actually economic migrants and not people fleeing war in their home countries.

Timmermans told Dutch TV NOS that most of this 60 percent were people from North Africa, especially from Morocco and Tunisia. He stated that it is important to repatriate these economic migrants back to their own countries quickly so that resources can be used to help those who are genuinely fleeing war.

Europe is in the midst of its biggest migration crisis since World War Two, according to the United Nations. Several European countries are being overwhelmed by the refugee crisis and are trying to find ways to stop refugees from entering their country

On Friday, Hungary and Slovenia urged the erection of a fence along Greece's northern border, effectively sealing off the EU's passport-free Schengen area to migrants seeking to enter the bloc via the western Balkans.

"We should take a man's stance and say we expect a fence to be built on the Macedonian and Bulgarian border with Greece and stop the migrant wave," Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at a joint news conference with Slovenian counterpart Miro Cerar.

Cerar warned that Europe faced "conflicts and disintegration" if the EU failed to find a solution for the migrant crisis before the flow picked up again with the onset of spring and warmer weather.

Austria on Monday stepped up pressure on frontline Greece to bolster the European Union's main external border against the flood of asylum seekers. An overwhelmed Austria has for days called on Greece to do more to reinforce its sea border with Turkey, the main gateway for the more than one million Syrian and other asylum seekers who entered the 28-nation bloc last year.

"Greece has to reinforce its resources and accept help," Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told reporters as she arrived for talks with her EU counterparts in Amsterdam. "If we do not manage to secure Europe's external border, this is the Greek-Turkish border, the European external border will move towards central Europe."

On Tuesday, Denmark's parliament adopted reforms aimed at dissuading migrants from seeking asylum by delaying family reunifications and allowing authorities to confiscate migrants' valuables.

Germany on Wednesday trimmed back its economic forecast for this year from 1.8 percent to 1.7 percent but insisted Europe's top economy remained "in good shape", with the refugee influx likely to boost short-term domestic demand.

More than one million refugees and migrants braved the seas in 2015 seeking sanctuary in Europe, nearly five times more than in the previous year, the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in December 2015. About half of the 1,000,573 men, women and children who made the perilous journey came from war-torn Syria, while Afghans accounted for roughly a fifth. Most people who took to the water for Europe made their way on the Aegean Sea to Greece's islands from Turkey, it said. From Greece, many travel to wealthier western Europe.

With inputs from AFP
WASHINGTON Lieutenant General John "Mick" Nicholson, the current head of NATO's Allied Land Command, has been chosen as the new commander of international forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Wednesday amid concerns about setbacks in the fight against the Taliban.

Nicholson, whose selection must be confirmed by the Senate, would replace General John Campbell, who has commanded U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan for the past 18 months and is expected to retire.

Nicholson is a veteran of multiple deployments in Afghanistan. He commanded the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment as well as the 82nd Airborne Division, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told a news briefing.

"He understands the importance and complexity of our mission in Afghanistan," Cook said, having served previously as chief of staff of operations for the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, and U.S. Forces Afghanistan.

The transition comes amid growing concern about the security situation in Afghanistan, where Taliban militants have caused large numbers of casualties among Afghan troops and Islamic State affiliates have made some inroads.

The Taliban seized the northern city of Kunduz last year before being driven out by the Army. They also seized districts in Helmand province and threatened the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, a spokesman for the international mission in Afghanistan, said last week that Afghan security forces had "mixed results" in their first year of carrying out the fight against the Taliban on their own.

"Whenever they conducted deliberate, planned operations, they actually did fairly well," he said. "Where they had trouble and they didn't do so well was in response to crisis situations."

The security situation prompted President Barack Obama to announce in October that the United States would maintain a force of about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016 instead of drawing down to an embassy-based presence by 2017.

(Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Tom Brown)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Beijing, China: North Korea's nuclear programme is a "major challenge to global security", US Secretary of State John Kerry told his Chinese counterpart on Wednesday, urging Beijing to increase pressure following its wayward neighbour's latest atomic test.

The North's pursuit of atomic weapons is "one of the most important issues for the security of the United States of America", the top US diplomat told Wang Yi on the last stop of his Asian tour.

A US official said earlier the issue would be at the top of Kerry's agenda, adding: "The Secretary has made no secret... of his conviction that there is much more that China can do by way of applying leverage (on Pyongyang)."

China is North Korea's chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor, but those ties have become strained in recent years as Beijing's patience wears thin with Pyongyang's unwillingness to rein in its nuclear weapons ambitions.

After the latest test on 6 January -- which Pyongyang said was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, a claim largely dismissed by experts -- China said it "firmly opposes" the North's actions and summoned its diplomats for "solemn representations".

Nevertheless, the Asian power has proven reluctant to follow Washington's lead on the issue and no substantive actions towards the North have been announced.

Wang welcomed the fact that Kerry's trip had taken in a number of Asian countries, saying visiting them could help him understand the continent. "It can help you listen to voices more objectively," he added.

As Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, the state-run China Daily ran an article headlined: "Experts have low hopes for Kerry's China trip."

Before Wednesday's meeting, the official news agency Xinhua issued a commentary blaming the US's "uncompromising hostility" and "Cold War mentality" for the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Washington's actions, such as flying a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber close to the inter-Korean boder, were heightening the North's "sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship", it added.

China's leverage over Pyongyang is mitigated, analysts say, by its overriding fear of a North Korean collapse and the prospect of a reunified, US-allied Korea directly on its border.

AFP
Islamabad: In a fresh setback to the Mumbai attack trial, a Pakistani court has dismissed the government's petition seeking voices samples of 26/11 mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects in the case.

The prosecution had filed an application in the Islamabad High Court seeking voice samples of the suspects to compare it with the communication intercepted by Indian intelligence and then present it before the anti-terrorism court (ATC) as evidence against the seven suspects in the Mumbai attack case.

The Islamabad High Court on Monday dismissed the petition.

In 2011 and 2015, the issue of obtaining voice samples of Lakhvi had been dismissed by the trial court on the grounds that "no such law exists that allows obtaining of voice sample of an accused".

The prosecution's petition said the Indian intelligence agencies had intercepted communication between the suspects and the terrorists in connection with the Mumbai attack in 2008.

In the recorded intercepts, the suspects are alleged to be instructing the terrorists.

The prosecution lawyers had argued that the samples were essential for concluding the investigation of this high profile case.

The trial court had also rejected another petition of the prosecution requesting the court to declare Ajmal Kasab and Faheem Ansari absconders in order to meet legal formalities.

The prosecution had told the court that unless it declared the two men absconders, the trial against them would remain "inconclusive" as both have been cited as accused in the Mumbai attack case by Indian authorities and that they were also wanted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that was probing the 26/11 case.

Pakistani authorities arrested seven Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) members involved in the planning of the attacks including the terrorist group's operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the mastermind of the Mumbai attack.

Six accused  Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum  have been in Adiala Jail for more than six years in connection with planning and executing the Mumbai attack in November, 2008, that left 166 people killed.

Lakhvi, 56, secured bail in December, 2014, and was subsequently released from Adiala Jail on April 10, 2015, after the Lahore High Court set aside the government's order to detain him under a public security act.

A trial is underway against them at the ATC since 2009.

PTI
Rome, Italy: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wraps up his visit to Italy on Wednesday before heading to France on the second leg of a trip signalling the dramatic rapprochement between Tehran and the European powers since the lifting of sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Rouhani's visit to Paris is expected to result in the signing of important business contracts, after sealing multi-billion dollar deals in Italy.

A major order for 114 Airbus planes to modernise Iran Air's ageing fleet is expected to be confirmed in France, along with tie-ups with carmakers Peugeot and Renault.

Before heading to Paris, Rouhani will conclude his two-day trip to Rome with a visit to the Colosseum with Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini.

The president is accompanied by a delegation of more than 100 ministers, officials and businessmen marking the return of Iran on the international economic stage with the lifting of sanctions after a historic deal over Tehran's nuclear programme.

Rouhani, a 67-year-old former academic and diplomat who is seen as a pragmatist, was elected in 2013 on a pledge to end sanctions and improve relations with the West.

The Iranian leader on Monday met with his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, with whom he attended the signing of several economic agreements in the prestigious setting of the Capitole.

Italian officials said contracts signed in Rome would be worth up to 17 billion euros ($18.4 billion), underlining the huge economic stakes involved in Iran's re-opening, particularly for Europe's manufacturing and engineering sectors.

On Monday, Rouhani attended a business forum at which he portrayed Iran as the ideal base for companies seeking a foothold in a region of 300 million people, reassuring would-be investors their contracts would be honoured.

"Iran is the safest, the most stable country in the entire region," Rouhani said.

"Everyone understood that the nuclear negotiations represented a win-win situation for both sides.

"Now we have created the conditions for investment and for the transfer of know-how. There has to be an advantage for both sides: we invite you to invest and we will provide stability and ensure that you can make adequate returns."

Rouhani then visited the Vatican for the first time and met Pope Francis, who has urged Iran to work for peace in the Middle East.

In a statement afterwards, the Vatican said Francis had urged the Iranian leader to use Iran's important role to promote, together with other countries, "adequate political solutions" to the problems afflicting the region and to help combat terrorism and arms trafficking.

It was the first official visit to the Vatican by an Iranian president since Mohammad Khatami was hosted by John Paul II in 1999.

'Modernising our fleet'

Rouhani is due to arrive late on Wednesday afternoon in Paris where he will meet the following day with President Francois Hollande and French business leaders.

Ahead of Rouhani's European trip, Iranian Transport Minister Abbas Akhoundi on Sunday announced a major contract with Airbus for 114 planes.

Akhoundi, quoted by Iranian media, said the deal "will be signed between Iran Air and Airbus" when Rouhani is in Paris. An Airbus spokesman declined to comment.

Akhoundi's deputy, Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan, told AFP that Iran "essentially wants to buy Airbus A320s, A321s and A330s".

"We will take delivery in 2016 and 2017 of Airbus A320s and A321s, with the A330s coming later," he said.

"From 2020, we will take delivery of Airbus A350s and A380s. We want eight A380s and 16 A350s."

Before flying to Europe, Rouhani himself mentioned economic projects between Iran and France.

"We need to modernise our aviation fleet and buy locomotives," he said Monday.

He indicated Iran was also looking at the automotive sector.

"Important contracts will probably be signed on this trip including with Peugeot and Renault," he said.

A joint press conference is planned after Rouhani's meeting with Hollande on Thursday, the French presidency said.

Iran has been rebuilding its relations with Italy and France which were among Tehran's main economic partners before the tightening of international sanctions in January 2012.

Competition to tap the Iranian market has been fierce as it emerges from international isolation with the lifting of sanctions.

AFP
Kabul, Afghanistan: The United Nations has launched an appeal for $393 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan to reach millions of vulnerable people this year.

The UN's humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, Mark Bowden, and the country's chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, launched the appeal on Wednesday in a live national television broadcast.

The 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan for Afghanistan targets millions of people in need of food and other essentials, including shelter, health care, nutrition, safe water and other necessities, Abdullah says.

Abdullah says he is hopeful that donor countries will match their commitments of previous years to assist and support the country's vulnerable people.

Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, and regularly suffers natural disasters like earthquakes and storms that displace people from their homes and contribute to widespread hunger.

AP
Helsinki: Danish hospital officials say that a Danish tourist has been infected by the Zika virus after visiting southern and central America.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Aarhus University Hospital said the patient ran a fever, had a headache and muscle aches and was discovered as having the virus on Tuesday.

There hospital released no further details about the patient but it says that there is little risk of it spreading in Denmark because the mosquito carrying the virus isn't found in the country.

Danish broadcaster DR quoted Professor Lars Ostergaard from the university hospital as saying the case involved a young man. Ostergaard said the patient was allowed to go home after doctors made sure that he was feeling well.

AP
Anghus Houvouras on Hollywoods ongoing diversity drama

Im white. Take a minute, let that settle in. I know its shocking. Im like the Rick Astley of film columnists because you probably first thought I was black and like Rick Astley youre always a little bummed when you click on a link and it turns out to be me. Im not just white, Im super white. Roger Deakins uses me to color balance his camera. My blood can be used as liquid paper. Im so white the Academy Awards are considering giving me a lifetime achievement award. So take the rest of this column with a grain of salt, because a white man talking about racism is like an arsonist talking about fire safety: were familiar with the subject but probably not the best suited to discuss the topic with any sensitivity.

A few weeks back the Oscar nominees came out and almost immediately there was a knee-jerk reaction/freak out over the fact that there were very few nominees that didnt fall somewhere on the eggshell color side of the spectrum. Sure, there were some nominees of the non-white variety, mostly in the Foreign Film Category, but for the most part this was a lily-white affair. #OscarsSoWhite started trending and everyone started talking about a boycott. And by everyone I mean a half-dozen people who at best had a 50/50 shot of being invited anyway. Im sure Spike Lee gets an invite every now and then and Jada Pinkett-Smith is a +1 if Will is attending. Danny Glover just said he think we should do away with the Oscars and then grumbled something about being too old for this shit. Other than giving Chris Rock some prime The Oscars are so white material for his opening monologue, the whole thing has been more talk than action.

Frankly, Im tired of the talk. Last year when everyone was up in arms about Selmas lack of quality nominations, I proposed every pissed off individual call for a boycott. If for no other reason than the subject has been talked about for so long that Ive become bored. Fifteen years of film columns and every year its the same thing. When the Academy Award nominees are diverse, people celebrate the progress. When theres not a very vocal minority gets bent out of shape and demands action. Action that never really gets taken.

It amazes me how sacred the Oscars are treated. No one wants to rock the boat. I mean, no one. There were plenty of words when they decided to give Elia Kazan, a guy who gleefully called out suspected communists during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, a lifetime achievement award. However, the most action you saw were the members of the angry mob electing to not clap when he took the stage. The Academy Awards are an event that so many in the film industry hold as a sacred institution.

The Oscars make people stupid. We know this. Just look at the amount of online real estate devoted to the topic each year. At best, its embarrassing. At worst, its an orgy of sycophantic star fuckers who treat it like the prom they probably didnt go to because they were too busy getting high and trying to sync up The Wizard of Oz to Pink Floyds The Wall. Or was that just me?

For the most part I find myself without a horse in this particular race. I agree that the Oscars are a very old, very traditional group of voters who often prefer more traditional fare. Its a stodgy bunch who are far more likely to nominate Eddie Redmayne in a mediocre movie like The Danish Girl than OShea Jackson in a great movie like Straight Outta Compton.

This week at Sundance, Nate Parkers highly anticipated movie about an 1831 slave revolt The Birth of a Nation debuted. Critics were quick to call out its genius and declare it an early favorite for next years Oscars. Next year like 2017. I find it odd that were already talking about the 2017 Oscars when this years trophies are still being monogrammed. Its because film bloggers and critics see the controversy of OscarsSoWhite and are already looking forward to next year when it seems like well have a movie with a black actor, writer, director, and producer in the drivers seat for next years ceremony. So, good news everybody: The problem with the Academy Awards lack of diversity has already been solved by a movie that only a handful of critics have seen and wont be released to the general public until October. Crisis averted! Ah, sweet sweet hyperbole.

And can we talk for a moment about the temerity of naming a movie to be a major award contender this far out? Its a freaking year away. While I have no problem believing that Birth of a Nation has the potential to be a major award caliber movie, why would anyone want to heap those kind of expectations on a movie less than 24 hours after its premiere? Youve just slung an enormous albatross around the neck of the film. It has to endure 12 months of being the Oscar front-runner? Why on earth would you want to paint that target on a movie you claim to love? I remember hearing the same thing about Selma and Lee Daniels The Butler. And it sucks for Birth of a Nation like it sucks for those films. Do you want to know why?

Because the films dont get remembered for their quality. They are remembered for what they didnt accomplish. And this is the fault of the film columnists who continue to push the idea that films like The Butler and Selma are only successful if they are bestowed with Oscar gold. That is a ridiculous level of expectation to heap upon any film, and now its been done to Birth of a Nation. For people who actually love movies and not the fancy dress balls that celebrate them, that is deeply depressing.

Im not sure why so many people pray at the altar of Oscar or why they imbue it with so much power. No one applied that kind of logic to Mad Max: Fury Road when it came out. People talked about what a great movie it was, but the perception of the films success had nothing to do with the fact that it garnered so much award praise at years end. Can the same be said about Birth of a Nation, or any high-profile film about racism/slavery/Civil Rights? Its a ridiculous load to bear, and shame on the critics who are too busy anointing the film with award potential instead of just reviewing the damn movie. I think wed all be better off if critics/bloggers stopped talking about films as important or relevant & more time discussing, you know, the film.

The relevance thing is another pain point for me. Fox Searchlight paid 17.5 million dollars for the distribution rights and immediately released a statement that read the films portrayal of injustice is unfortunately still relevant today The thing is, its that unfortunate relevance that made you pay a record fee for the distribution rights. Its that unfortunate relevance that makes this movie so timely and utterly poignant and therefore valuable to a distributor. Plus from what every major news outlet tells me, its a shoe-in for next years Oscars! Yes, Fox Searchlight. Ill bet youre hella-bummed about the unfortunate relevance the movie holds. So much so that for every ticket sold theyll produce a genuine, glistening tear. And for every award Birth of a Nation receives theyll drop to their knees and cry out NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO because, you know the unfortunate relevance. Its always nice when boiling racial tensions can help provide a supporting argument for distributing a major motion picture.

Progress, real progress, is more than checking off a box or assigning a film as the defacto diversity film for 2016, which is the perception Birth of a Nation now has to fight from now until its inevitable release. The media wont allow the film to just be a great movie. It has to have resonance beyond the theater and achieve a heightened level of importance. But why? Is that true of any of the nominees for Best Picture this year? Is the same level of crushing expectations weighted on Spotlight or The Big Short? Of course not. The media will not allow Birth of a Nation to just be a movie and judged on the merits of what happens from the opening frames to the final credits. I struggle with that. It feels patently unfair, as if every movie from a black filmmaker on the subject of race has to be some kind of cross cultural experience or it ends up being perceived as a failure.

The Birth of a Nation sounds like an amazing movie that Im looking forward to seeing. Not because its an award season front-runner a year ahead of the nominations, or because the film is relevant. But because between the yammering about importance, relevance, and award potential, it sounds like it might be really good.

And frankly, thats all a movie needs to be.

Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker and the co-host of Across the Pondcast. Follow him on Twitter.
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All eyes will be fixated on Texas Senator Ted Cruz on Thursday night with Donald Trump officially bowing out of the Fox News/Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Republican presidential primary debate.

Trump pulled out on Tuesday saying he will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. This marks the first GOP debate Trump has not attended.

Cruz reacted to the news by challenging the Donald to a one-on-one debate via Twitter (NYSE:TWTR):

I challenged @realDonaldTrump to a one-on-one debate. Tell him to accept: https://www.tedcruz.org/l/ducking-donald/  #DuckingDonald

The tweet included a link to Cruz's campaign page asking supporters to vote on the issue. Trumps campaign did not respond at the time of publication.

According to recent polls, the freshman Texas Senator has been holding strong at second place which will put him front and center on the main debate stage.

Leading up to the Iowa Caucuses, the two rivals have been battling with TV ad wars and taking shots at each other on the campaign trail.

This is an opportunity for Ted Cruz to make his case without being badgered by Trump. Cruz must win Iowa and anyway he can pull this out is good for him, said Ford O'Connell, Republican political strategist and former McCain Palin campaign advisor.

He says with Cruz center stage the rest of the GOP contenders will have their elbows sharpened to go after him. One weakness that candidates will surely target is Ted Cruzs inability to unite the party with his congressional record. O'Connell says Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who is ranked in third place in most polls, has been making that case aggressively with one strategy in mind, Rubio knows if Cruz slips up, he will be the one to slip into second place.

Other Republican contenders that have been fighting to break out of low poll numbers will also be vying for a chance to shine with Trump out of the picture and will certainly take aim at the billionaire businessman.

Outside of Marco Rubio most of the other candidates have not been good at the debates, so the question is whether or not they will use the opportunity well, said O'Connell. I expect all the candidates will take an unabated shot at Trump, I cant imagine they wont go after him.

O'Connell says this is the last chance for the candidates to make an appeal to voters before the Iowa Caucus on February 1.

The Fox News/Google GOP primary debate is set for Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa starting at 7pm ET on the Fox News Channel.
A Catholic priest who took the ice bucket challenge with Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik last year has died of the disease they were raising money to cure: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrigs disease.

Christ the Light of the World Parish announced the death of the Rev. Dennis Colamarino on Saturday.

That was one of two Duquesne parishes the priest pastored when he and Zubik took the challenge August.

Zubik donated an undisclosed sum to the John Paul II Medical Research Institute, which uses only adult stem cells to research the disease. The Catholic church disagrees with using embryonic stem cells to try to find a cure.

Colamarino was diagnosed in 2013. A group at his church raised $26,000 for a walk to support ALS research in his name.
There is currently "no justification" for asking Mexican women to postpone getting pregnant because of an outbreak of the mosquito-born virus Zika, a senior Mexican Health Ministry official said on Tuesday.

Zika, which has spread across the Americas, has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil, leading health authorities in Colombia and El Salvador to advise women against getting pregnant for anywhere up to two years.

There are 18 cases of Zika in Mexico, with 13 in the southern state of Chiapas, four in the northern state of Nuevo Leon and one in the western state of Jalisco, said Pablo Kuri, deputy minister for prevention and health promotion.

"In Mexico, right now, there is no justification to tell a woman not to get pregnant when we only have cases in three places," Kuri said in an interview.

"We'll have to see in the future, given the experiences in Central and South America, if these types of recommendations really have any effect. You can tell people not to get pregnant, but that doesn't mean they won't."

Kuri said all 18 people contracted the virus in Mexico, rather than catching it abroad and traveling to Mexico.

But he said the many migrants traveling north to the United States from Central America, and particularly El Salvador, which has been badly hit by the outbreak, could add to the Zika tally in Mexico.

Given the paucity of cases, he said that "the risk of coming to Mexico is extremely low," as many parts of the country, including Mexico City, had such high elevations that the low-lying Zika mosquito could not strike there.

On Monday, the World Health Organization predicted the virus would spread to all countries across the Americas except for Canada and Chile.

There is currently no vaccine for Zika. The Sao Paulo-based Butantan Institute is leading research on Zika and says it plans to develop a vaccine "in record time," although its director warned that was still likely to take three to five years.

Kuri was skeptical about those claims.

"The development of the dengue vaccine took various decades," he said. "A vaccine is no trivial thing. You can't just make it in someone's garden."
A 26-year-old Chinese man died in December after consuming excessive amounts of an herbal supplement meant to cure hair loss.

Central European News (CEN) reported that Cui Fei, from the eastern Chinese province Anhui, died of liver failure after consuming over 6.6 pounds of a supplement called TuberFleeceflower. Also known as Fallopia multiflora, heshowu, or Chinese knotweed, the plant is used in traditional Chinese medicine. The herb is also sold in the United States.

In 2014, the China Food and Drug Administration, which regulates food, drugs and medical devices in the country, issued a warning about the herbs potential side effects, which include liver failure.

CEN reported that Jinan Hospital was one of the medical centers that prescribed Cui with the hair-loss treatment, but that the hospital said the dosages it gave him were within the normal recommended limits. The hospital also said it has a policy that requires doctors to check for side effects of the herb every two weeks.

Cui, who had recently graduated from Central South University of Forestry and Technology in Changsha, the capital of central Chinas Hunan Province, reportedly became ill two weeks into taking the herb. In August, doctors diagnosed him with drug-induced liver damage, and Cui stayed in the hospital for four months up until his death.


At least six U.S. residents have tested positive for the Zika virus, with officials in New York, Arkansas and Virginia confirming cases in each state.

Four people who had returned from travel abroad have tested positive in New York state with infections with the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, local health officials said on Wednesday.

Two tested positive in New York City, city health officials said. Neither had severe complications, they said.

A person who resides in Nassau County had traveled to a country with documented transmission of the virus and developed symptoms in August, had a mild illness, was not hospitalized and has completely recovered, a county health department spokeswoman said.

An Orange County resident who had traveled to South America tested positive, the county health commissioner's office said. The office did not provide information on the person's condition.

On Tuesday, the Virginia Department of Health said an adult resident of the state had recently traveled to a country where the Zika virus transmission was ongoing. The department didnt specify where the person traveled, nor did it clarify his or her gender or age. Health officials confirmed in a statement that other residents were not at risk of catching the virus from the infected person.

"Zika virus is acquired through the bite of an infected mosquito," State Health Commissioner Dr. Marissa Levine said in a statement. "Because it is not mosquito season in Virginia, this individual with Zika virus infection poses no risk to other Virginians."

Earlier Tuesday, the Arkansas Department of Health confirmed that an individual who recently traveled outside of the United States had also tested positive for the virus, which is carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The department said the resident has a mild case of Zika, but it would not confirm the individuals age or gender. The individual traveled to the Central America-Caribbean region, but officials did not specify which country.

The Zika virus has been linked to a spike in cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that can cause babies to be born with abnormally small heads and partially formed brains symptoms that can lead to lasting developmental problems. Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in the country in all of 2014. There is currently no vaccine for the virus, nor is there an effective treatment.

Health officials in Virginia and Arkansas urged residents planning to travel overseas to check health advisories. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expanded its travel alert to pregnant women planning trips to the Caribbean and Latin America. Officials added the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic to the list, which already included 22 destinations.

The move comes as Puerto Rico also reported a jump in the number of confirmed cases from one to 19. None of the cases include pregnant women, but the country is testing more than 200 other potential cases that have tested negative for dengue and chikungunya, two other viruses the Aedes aegypti mosquito carries. Puerto Rico epidemiologist Brenda Rivera said the majority of cases are in the islands southeast region, and many of the victims are elderly.

Brazil has instructed more than 3,000 health inspectors in Rio de Janeiro to step up inspections for mosquito-breeding areas near the citys Carnival sites as part of a bid to stem the spread of the virus. Inspectors will also begin spraying insecticide around Sambadrome, the outdoor grounds where thousands of dancers and musicians will parade during the citys February celebrations. The world-famous festivities are expected to attract tourists from around the globe. Officials concentrated on inspecting peoples homes, stagnant bodies of water, and areas where garbage is collected.

In Colombia, officials said 16,490 people are infected with the disease, including 1,090 pregnant women. The increase in cases comes as Colombian President Juan Manuel Santa said officials expect to see 600,000 cases of Zika this year. The rise has prompted the countrys authorities, as well as those in El Salvador, to advise women against getting pregnant for anywhere up to two years.

Some womens activists have called the advice naive because women in both El Salvador and Colombia face sexual violence and little access to contraception or abortion. In Mexico, where there are 18 confirmed cases of Zika, officials said there is currently no justification for asking women to delay pregnancy.

Well have to see in the future, given the experiences in Central and South America, if these types of recommendations really have any effect. You can tell people not to get pregnant, but that doesnt mean they wont, said Pablo Kuri, deputy minister for prevention and health promotion.

The virus was first discovered decades ago in Africa, but was long thought to be more of nuisance illness with symptoms generally much milder than dengue.

Eighty percent of patients infected with Zika are asymptomatic, according to the CDC. Those people who do present symptoms may experience fever, rash, joint pain or conjunctivitis. Severe cases may require hospitalization, but no deaths have been linked directly to Zika. Most patients who exhibit symptoms do so for several days to a week.

On Tuesday, President Obama met with national security officials about Zika, and leaders from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the CDC, and the Department of Health and Human Services briefed him on steps being taken to protect Americans from the mosquito-borne illness. They also briefed him on how the virus may spread further, and affect the economy and development in the hemisphere.

Scientists are developing various vaccines, all at different stages of development, for viruses in the same family as Zika including dengue, West Nile and chikungunya to try to suppress the outbreak, Dr. Anthony Faci of the NIH told the Associated Press Tuesday.

This is not going to be overnight, Fauci said, adding that the NIH also plans to boost funding to some Brazilian scientist to accelerate Zika-related research.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.


A Ukranian village dubbed The Land of Twins for its extraordinarily common instances of twin births may be poised to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as its total number of twin pairs has surpassed 61.

Central European News (CEN) reported that Velikaya Kopanya, in southwest Ukraine, has fewer than 4,000 residents, making its high number of twins all the more notable. The village is about 450 miles from Ukraines capital, Kiev, and lies close to the borders of Romania, Hungary and Slovakia.

While genetics and alternative fertility treatments can influence whether a woman has twins, denizens in Velikaya Kopanya attribute their propensity to conceive twins to their clean water.

The ultimate baby boom came in the year 2004, Maryana Savka, a local councillor, told CEN. But ever since then we are having at least between two and three sets of twins born every year."

The villagers say the area also has above-average births of cow twins.

The BBC reported in 2010 that twins in the village are held in high esteem and are often envied by their non-twin classmates.

For that 2010 story, the news site interviewed Maria Chorba, then 75 years old and reportedly the villages oldest twin. Chorba told the BBC she has three pairs of twins among her grandchildren, and that twins have long been prevalent in the region, but she doesnt know for sure whether the villages water quality is the reason.

"When we were growing up we had some friends [who were] twins, Chorba told the BBC, so we are definitely not the first ones here.
Each day brings new details about the classified information Hillary Clinton had on her homebrew server. The disclosures are inevitably followed by demands that she be indicted.

Color me skeptical that she will face criminal charges, especially after President Obamas kind words for her.

His praise of Clintons experience in an interview, twinned with his comparison of Bernie Sanders as a bright, shiny object, were widely interpreted as a Clinton endorsement.

Correctly so, but theres more to it. Obama wouldnt be endorsing Clinton if he intended to let the Justice Department indict her. Thus, I believe his remarks also were meant to signal the all-clear on the FBI investigation.

As interviewer Glenn Thrush put it, Obama couldnt hide his obvious affection for Clinton or his implicit feeling that she, not Sanders, best understands the complexity of the job.

While the White House insists that Obama remains neutral, Thrush quoted an aide saying the president is clearly thumbing the scale for Hillary.

To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.


Donald Ducks. With a tip of the hat to my friend Chris Loesch for the title, Donald Trump has ducked out of the Fox News debate because the network refused to toss Megyn Kelly from the debate. Trump has sought, again, to revise history by claiming it was Fox Newss later press release that caused the commotion, but as Fox pointed out, Trumps campaign repeatedly threatened to attack Kelly if she was not removed. Fox refused to remove Kelly, so Donald ducked out of the debate.

It is worth remembering what caused this. It was one question in the very first debate in August of 2015. Megyn Kelly, the one lady among the moderator panel, asked Trump a question that he is going to get asked by Hillary Clinton, by a general election debate moderator, and others. The transcript of the debate shows her question and exchange went this way:

KELLY: Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you dont use a politicians filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women.

Youve called women you dont like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.

(LAUGHTER)

Your Twitter account

TRUMP: Only Rosie ODonnell.

(LAUGHTER)

KELLY: No, it wasnt.

(APPLAUSE)

Your Twitter account

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: Thank you.

KELLY: For the record, it was well beyond Rosie ODonnell.

TRUMP: Yes, Im sure it was.

KELLY: Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about womens looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

TRUMP: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.

(APPLAUSE)

Ive been challenged by so many people, and I dont frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesnt have time either. This country is in big trouble. We dont win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody. And frankly, what I say, and oftentimes its fun, its kidding. We have a good time. What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you dont like it, Im sorry. Ive been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldnt do that.

That is it. That question is what the hubbub is all about. That.

Ive been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. She pointed out Donald Trumps statements and he turned on her. He then went on a multi-day attack accusing Megyn Kelly of bleeding from her eyes or her where ever.

It seems pretty clear that Trump does not like taking questions about his prior record and past statements. That is the gist of his rage against Megyn Kelly. She had the audacity to ask him not about what he will do, but about what he had done and said. Trump knows his record is his biggest weakness.

Since Trump announced last summer, few in the media have dared review Trumps record. His record is a Democrat funder who supports socialized medicine like Bernie Sanders, gay rights, abortion rights, open borders, high taxes, and gun control. Only recently and opportunistically has he pivoted on most of those issues.

Megyn Kelly dared ask him about his prior statements on women. He no doubt fears this time she will ask him about his prior positions, including one taken in that first debate in August of last year. Trump defended Canadian style socialist, universal health care. Because of the nature of the debate, no one followed up. It is just the sort of statement Megyn Kelly would seize on. But Donald Trump cannot have anyone question his authenticity or his record. That is exactly what Megyn Kelly is known for doing and what she would do if Trump got on stage in Des Moines Thursday night.


As an Israeli diplomat to the United Nations, the annual Holocaust Memorial ceremony has always had profound resonance. This Wednesday, the U.N.'s Holocaust Commemoration will have special personal significance. For, this time it will be my father, Haim Roet, a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, who will speak from the podium of the General Assembly.

My father was born in Amsterdam, the youngest of six children. His parents were modern middle class orthodox Jews whose roots in Holland can be traced back to the 17th century

When my father was 7-years-old the Germans marched into Holland. Two years after the Nazi invasion he and his family were forced to move to the Ghetto.

In September 1943, on Rosh Hashanah eve (the Jewish New Year), the Waffen SS knocked on the door of his sisters apartment. Before being taken away the two sisters were able to warn their parents.

With the help of the Dutch resistance my father and his brothers were hidden at different places without any contact with each other.

Some may doubt that in such dire circumstances one person can make a difference. But in Nieuwlande, there was such an individual. His name was Johannes Post, a farmer and father of 7 children who organized the efforts which saved over 100 Jews, including my father.

Johannes Post, a hero of the Dutch resistance, was later captured and executed by the Nazis.

After two months of hiding, the Resistance found my father a new place with a bakers family. They risked their lives and the lives of their own families in order to save a stranger.

A year and a half after being torn from his family, thinking he was all alone in the world, my father was reunited, in the middle of the night, with his parents and my surviving brothers.

That same night, he was told that his sisters, his grandfather and nearly all of his family had perished.

From the podium of the General Assembly hall, my father will read from a postcard sent by his sister Adela on March 12, 1945, a few weeks after Auschwitz was liberated:

"Dear loved ones, after a most terrible year in the Birkenau concentration camp, my sister Rosientje died in Auschwitz. I was not present. Grandpa and Uncle Isaac were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival on February 2, 1944; Aunt Riek died on April 21, 1943.

"I survived because of willpower, the help of God, the unforgettable home memories of Friday nights and the holidays. Looking everywhere for (my) father, mother and brothers. Looking for assistance to return home soon, to see each other very soon, as soon as possible -- Adela

Although liberated from the death camp, Adelas frail body could not recover to keep on living. Adela was 20-years-old when she died.

During the last 30 years my father has been vigorously engaged in social activities to commemorate the Holocaust and to improve society.

He is the initiator of the worldwide Holocaust memorial project Unto Every Person There is a Name, Chairman of the Committee for the Recognition of Jews who Rescued Jews and the founder Tseela, an NGO that promotes the improvement teams methodology for dealing with major macro-social problems and assisting NGOs.

My father, who, after all he went through, remains forever optimistic in the ability to make a difference, will call member states of the United Nations to work together to make sure genocides will be stopped and will end his speech with these words:

"70 years after the Holocaust, there are less and less survivors who can tell their story. These stories must continue to be told.

"As a society we have an obligation to remember and understand the lessons of the Holocaust so that they serve as a warning to where blind hate and racism leads."
The technology revolution continues at a fevered pace, while the global economy slows down. People are rightly concerned and intrigued about the future. There is much to be worried and excited about in every economic sector and aspect of human life.

Alec Ross is one of our nations top experts on innovation. In his new book, "The Industries of the Future," Ross offers an in-depth analysis of the relationship between technology and government, business, and education, and predicts how future innovation will disrupt society as we know it.

For an inside look at whats to come in the modern world, check out my interview with Alec below:

DANA PERINO: In the beginning of "The Industries of the Future," you say the book you wish your father and grandfather had read would have been about what globalization was going to do to the world. Is your new book the 2016 equivalent to that?

ALEC ROSS: It is! The mission of the book is to help people see around the corner a little bit, to better understand the forces that are going to shape our futures at home and work so that we can make choices for ourselves and for our children to help us get ready.

PERINO: In the chapter, Here Come the Robots, you write that what we have experienced in the form of manufacturing job loss due to robots is now encroaching on the service job sector. Is that cause for additional worry, or is there a way to turn that into a positive?

ROSS: The robots from the cartoons and movies of the 1970s are going to be the reality of the 2020s. In the future, it will increasingly be the case that when you go to work, either youre telling a machine what to do or a machine is telling you what to do. This is very scary if you are in a job that can be easily automated. I think there are certain jobs in the service industry that will always require the human touch, but there are many more that wont. I helped put myself through college by working as a midnight janitor. I think of folks who had jobs like mine mopping floors or washing dishes, and I worry about them.

The way for us to make this a positive is for us to do a better job as a country of making sure that todays kids are getting the education and skills they need for tomorrows economy. Its hard enough for us to compete with cheap labor in a global marketplace, if were now competing with robots who dont get paid a salary, well, youd better have some other job skills.

PERINO: Regarding genomics and The Future of the Human Machine, are discussions about whats right and wrong when it comes to genetic engineering already being overtaken by events? Is there so much advancement in the science and technology that the moral arguments are moot?

ROSS: No! We should never let science and technology overtake our values. Lets not lose our humanity as we do the good and important work of continuing to innovate.

For example, scientists are now able to tell just 10 weeks into pregnancy a lot of genetic characteristics of the baby from its likely height, hair and eye colors, to more shocking information about its likelihood to get certain illnesses or have certain predispositions, like alcoholism. This will be mainstream in about 2 years. Just because we can do this scientifically does not mean we should start using genetic selection to only bring to term those babies that match our idea of what is perfect. Genes can tell us a lot but not everything. Who a child becomes is more a product of environment and upbringing than DNA.

PERINO: How should your research on The Geography of Future Markets affect decisions by governments on trade deals?

ROSS: I think that in a global economy, trade deals tend to benefit the United States so Im all for them. When middle classes grow larger around the world you know what they end up doing? Going to American movies. Listening to American music. Buying American technology. Even buying our breakfast cereals and taking the big annual family vacation to Disney World. This is to our economic benefit. Whats more, sometimes our businesses will make progress with a foreign countrys citizens when our governments are squabbling with each other. The research I did for"The Industries of the Future" made me all the more in favor of the U.S. being able to sell American products wherever we can.

PERINO: I thought that "The Industries of the Future" was in many ways a parenting book, and then in the conclusion you write that the most important job youll ever have is being a dad. What do you want parents who read your book to take away?

ROSS: Three things:

1. Make sure your kids are studying languages, foreign languages, computer languages and mastering the English language (we need better communicators!)

2. Dont rely on your schools to educate your kids. Yes, we need to hold them to account and push for the best possible education at school but we cant count on them. Hold yourself to account, too. My mom had a nickname when I was growing up, Becky the Barbarian. She earned that nickname because she was such a ferocious advocate for her kids at school and home, and thats why a public school kid from West Virginia was able to write this book.

3. Understand and accept that we live in a more global economy, and that means our kids need to learn more about the 195 countries in the world that arent the United States.

PERINO: You seem bullish yet a bit cautious about what the industries of the future will hold for humans. Would you describe yourself as a glass half-full kind of person after writing the book?

ROSS: Some people may think its hokey, but Im a believer in the American Dream. I believe in the American Dream because Im living it and that most certainly makes me a glass half-full person!

My grandfather was the son of Italian immigrants, and he had to ride the rails during the Depression to hustle for work and food. Just two generations removed from that, Im living a life for which I am very, very grateful. The industries of the future will produce disruptive change for millions of Americans, but it can be a positive change if we get in front of it and prepare ourselves. Its not the strongest who succeed, or the most intelligent, but those most adaptable to change.
A quarter-century has passed since the nations first charter-school law was enacted in Minnesota, leading to arguably the most fundamental shift in public education in my lifetime.

Across the 42 states that now have charter-school laws, access to a quality education is no longer determined by the neighborhood in which a student lives. Families in these states have grown accustomed to competition and choice in the K-12 education marketplace. For nearly three million charter school students and their families, there is no going back.

Just as critical, the 6,700 individual charter schools that have opened nationwide are serving as incubators of the most forward-thinking leaders in public education. In my home state of Arizona, families may choose from 556 public charter schools  including those that specialize in STEM instruction, the arts, college-prep, online instruction and more.

That is what happens when school leaders are freed from traditional education bureaucracy. Its the essence of local control.

Thats why the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was enacted at the end of last year, is so monumental. Not only does this bipartisan measure return power over public education to where it rightfully belongs  the states  it also includes a provision I offered that prioritizes federal education tax dollars to expand student access to the highest-performing public charter, magnet and district schools.

Currently, the lack of additional capacity keeps an estimated one million students nationwide locked out of the charter school of their choice. Im confident the Every Student Succeeds Act will begin to address this enrollment bottleneck.

Of course, educational performance is the best indicator of success, and research shows that students are best served when teachers, parents and schools have control over education  not Washington bureaucrats.

The latest round of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows nationally that scores were flat or declining in reading and math. But Arizona charter schools bucked the trend, with charter students achieving a marked improvement.

In fact, if Arizonas 170,000 public charter school students were measured as an individual state, that state would have ranked 2nd nationally for both eighth-grade math and reading, according to the non-partisan Center for Student Achievement. Arizonas fourth grade charter school students did nearly as well, ranking 5th nationally in math and 7th in reading.

The emphasis in Arizona is now on replicating and expanding those schools that have discovered a winning formula, and more aggressive monitoring of overall school performance. Failing charter schools should be closed. No excuses.

The result of these combined actions is undeniable. Nearly one-third of all Arizona public schools are now charters, and charter students  as a whole  are performing on-par or better than their peers in upper-crust, northeastern states, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Vermont.

This is what is possible when decisions about our childrens education are kept local, innovation is rewarded and school leaders are empowered.

Twenty-five years later, these principles remain at the heart of a charter and school choice movement that is remaking K-12 education in Arizona and nationwide. Our children are the beneficiaries.


Analogizing Palestinians to the Jewish victims of the Nazis: thats how the UN is marking this weeks International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The epicenter of modern antisemitism on a global scale is not somewhere over there, but in the middle of Turtle Bay.

For public tour groups, and their busloads of impressionable American students from around the country, the UN s permanent Palestine exhibit has now been arranged to be within a few feet of the UNs permanent Holocaust exhibit.

This weeks activities follow suit.

On January 25, 2016, a temporary exhibit called Holocaust by Bullets was opened in the UN visitors lobby. The painstaking research of the French organization Yahad-In Unum substantiates how two million Jews were shot to death in the presence of normal folks all over Europe.

But Holocaust by Bullets follows the UNs December exhibition, which is titled Palestinian Children: Overcoming Tragedies with Hope, Dreams, Resilience and Dignity. That month-long display in the visitors lobby consisted of scenes of Palestinian children suffering from devastating wanton, unprovoked Israeli operations.

Father Patrick Desbois opened Yahad-In Unums exhibit by explaining that his team locates the bodies of Nazi victims and then honors the dead. He is driven to ensure that Europe does not bury all its values by building its future on unacknowledged and unvalued human beings in mass graves.

Palestinian UN representative Riyad Mansour opened Decembers exhibit with a different set of values  incitement for Palestinian children to kill more Jews. As Mansour explained: we are so proud that in this popular uprising, the backbone of this uprising are the youth of Palestine.

On January 26, 2016, the Security Council held a debate on The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. The hate speech against the Jewish state flowed uninterrupted for seven hours and was broadcast around the world. Israel was said to be guilty of crimes against humanity, execution of children, apartheid, racism, brutality, terrorism, war crimes, assassinations, torture of children, and Judaization  the allegedly vile presence of Jews on Arab-claimed territory.

So picture this. Upstairs, Council members listened unperturbed to repeated rants about Judaization. Downstairs, the Holocaust exhibit recounted how ordinary people did nothing while their neighbors were rounded up with cries of Juden, Juden, Juden.

In the evening of January 26, the German UN mission opened a second exhibit in the visitors lobby called Life after Survival. Among other things, the German exhibit argues that Holocaust survivors had to be rehabilitated from their hatred towards their former tormentors and all Germans because such hatred would work to their own disadvantage.

By contrast, a few hours previously at the Security Council session on Israel, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was commiserating with the haters  at least those whose targets are Jews. The Secretary-General told the Council:  oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.

How can one square what will clearly be interpreted as a call to arms with the Secretary-Generals repeated statement that nothing can justify terrorism. No cause or grievance can be accepted as an excuse to commit a terrorist act?

The answer is that at the UN, even the recent stabbing death of an Israeli mother of six  in front of her children  is not considered a terrorist act. Recent word games about violent extremism do not help. For as Ban Ki-moon reported to the General Assembly just weeks ago, its all relative: definitions of terrorism and violent extremism are the prerogative of Member States

At the Security Council meeting, Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon railed against the obvious discrimination. He pointed out that in the past four months Israelis have been stabbed in their homes, shot at in the streets, and run over by terrorists using cars as weapons with thirty deaths and hundreds injured. During this same period of time, the Israeli Ambassador continued, the Council adopted 12 resolutions against terrorism and condemned terrorist attacks in France, Sinai, Lebanon, Mali, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Sudan. But not in Israel. When it came to Israelis, there was no condemnation, no expression of solidarity, not even a statement of concern.

This is the context in which, for a brief two hours on January 27, 2016, the General Assembly marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

And on exactly the same day, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will kick off its UN-based year-long program to justify the murder of Jews in the here and now.

The UN has learned the lessons of Holocaust remembrance showmanship, not the lessons of the Holocaust. So heres lesson number one: embracing elderly survivors while imperiling their progeny is a dangerous deceit.
A group of over more than dozen states are petitioning the Supreme Court to halt the Obama administration's far-reaching climate rules for power plants.

The states are already suing in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but after Friday's decision by the court to not stay the rules, the states are taking the unprecedented move of going straight to the Supreme Court for a ruling to place the landmark regulations on ice.

The court of appeals still plans to take up the states' arguments. It only ruled that it would not stay the regulations before doing so. It consequently scheduled oral arguments for June.

"Without Supreme Court intervention, West Virginia and other states will suffer irreparable harm as job creators and state agencies spend untold resources to comply with a rule that is likely to be struck down as illegal," said West Virginia Attorney Genreal Patrick Morrisey, who is leading the states.

Read more on WashingtonExaminer.com
The spirited fight for the evangelical vote is in full swing  but faith leaders remain sharply divided over who to support ahead of Monday's Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa.

Some, like Jerry Falwell Jr., are openly supporting GOP front-runner Donald Trump. But others say the billionaire businessman does not represent their values, and are backing Ted Cruz and others.

To be sure, the emergence of Trump has complicated the time-honored race for the evangelical vote in the first-in-the-nation caucus state and beyond -- given some of his past positions and statements. While some see a dynamic, breaking-the-mold leader, others see a candidate well out of line with their traditions.

Oklahoma Wesleyan University president Everett Piper recently took Trump to task in his Talking Points blog.

Donald Trump simply doesnt represent OKWUs behavioral, theological, moral or political ideals, he wrote, responding to requests to invite the billionaire businessman to speak at the school.

RELATED: Why Are So Many Evangelicals Supporting Trump?

In recent days, several religious leaders not endorsing Trump have broken instead for Cruz, the Texas senator running close to Trump in the Iowa polls.

He secured an endorsement from James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family in December, and on Tuesday earned the backing of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

I have many friends in this race, but I believe the one who is best positioned, best prepared to lead this nation forward, pulling it out of the tailspin this president has put us in, I believe it is Ted Cruz, Perkins told Fox News Megyn Kelly.

According to a new Pew Research national poll, Trump is considered the least religious candidate among Republicans and Democrats vying for a presidential bid. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson polled the highest at 68 percent. Regardless of where they poll, all the candidates know that support from evangelicals could make or break a presidential bid.

Cruz was the first candidate to launch his official presidential campaign -- at Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the world. In his March 23 speech, he rallied the crowd and hammered home the message that he would be the best candidate to carry the evangelical message to the White House.

Today, roughly half of born-again Christians arent voting. Theyre staying home. Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values, he said at the time.

Unfortunately for Cruz, Liberty Universitys president threw his evangelical weight behind Trump.

Falwell, who made the endorsement official on Tuesday, called Trump a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.

Some have raised eyebrows at the endorsement after Trump, who recently spoke at Liberty University, seemed to struggle through his speech and botched a Bible verse.

Two Corinthians, 3:17, thats the whole ballgame, he said, though he meant to say Second Corinthians.

Luckily, the crowd forgave him -- some even giggled, while others applauded.

Americans United for Life president Charmaine Yoest believes Trump is so successful because he represents the alienation of grassroots groups.

Some of them are responding by really reacting to the energy of Donald Trump and his assurances that hes actually going to do something, she told FoxNews.coms Strategy Room.

However, Yoest warns Trump's appeal among the religious community is not universal.

Youre seeing different elements of the evangelical wing line up in different ways, she said.

Piper wrote that Trumps past pro-choice stance -- Trump says he's now pro-life -- and history of name-calling are two of the reasons, among others, he would not be asked to speak at the school.

Anyone who mocks the handicapped is not on my side. Anyone who has argued the merits of a government takeover of banks, student loans, the auto industry and healthcare is not on my side. Anyone who has been on the cover of Playboy and proud of it, who brags of his sexual history with multiple women and who owns strip clubs in his casinos is not on my side, Piper wrote.

While Trump and Cruz grabbed headlines for their high-profile endorsements, other candidates in the field also have pulled in big-name supporters.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio recently scored an endorsement from Wayne Grudem, a professor of Biblical studies and theology at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona.

Democratic strategist Joe Lestingi told FoxNews.com he believes support for a candidate is going to come down to who is more electable.

Are we going to sit here and say Donald Trump is the moral compass of this country? Really, is that the argument were having? Lestingi asked.

He added, This is where religion and politics  when they start to mix, you start to see people wanting to now  instead of back their values  back a winning candidate, he said.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins announced Tuesday that he was endorsing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for president.

Perkins made the announcement on Fox News' "The Kelly File", then followed up his endorsement with a series of explanatory tweets.

Perkins said he supported Cruz when he ran for the Senate in 2012 and says he's confident the Texan governs "based on conservative principles."

Cruz is in a tight race with Donald Trump to win the GOP vote in the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses in Iowa on Monday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hundreds of badges, credentials, cell phones and guns belonging to Department of Homeland Security employees have been lost or stolen in recent years -- raising serious security concerns about the potential damage these missing items could do in the wrong hands.

Inventory reports, obtained by the news site Complete Colorado and shared with FoxNews.com, show that over 1,300 badges, 165 firearms and 589 cell phones were lost or stolen over the span of 31 months between 2012 and 2015.

The majority of the credentials belonged to employees of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), while others belonged to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) employees.

The lost or stolen guns also mostly belonged to CBP employees, though others were cited as belonging to TSA and ICE workers. The agencies all fall under DHS.

The missing badges and guns suggest a shocking lack of security from federal law enforcement officers and represent a significant security risk, experts say.

Its scary that youd have that number of credentials out there that someone could manipulate, Tim Miller, a retired Secret Service special agent, told FoxNews.com.

While Miller said the phones are likely to have enough protocols in place to prevent them from being used for nefarious purposes, the badges and credentials are an entirely different matter and could allow access to sensitive areas such as cargo.

The thing thats particularly concerning is that if you get real credentials, its very easy to manipulate them, and youve got someone elses picture on what law enforcement would see as valid," Miller said. "Then you factor in terrorism, its a significant concern that people would run around with authentic credentials and be able to access areas they wouldnt otherwise be able to access.

When reached for comment, DHS did not dispute the inventory report data -- which Complete Colorado, a Colorado-based online news site, had obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. The reporter who obtained the data also works with Denver-based free-market think tank the Independence Institute.

In a statement to FoxNews.com, a DHS spokesman said they strive to be good stewards of government resources and have improved oversight and reduced the number of lost or stolen items over the past few years.

If a credential holder loses or has their credentials stolen, the holder must report the incident to their supervisor and credential issuance office immediately, spokesman Justin Greenberg said. Once the incident has been reported, this information is entered into appropriate DHS and law enforcement databases, which disables use of the lost or stolen item.

He also noted that DHS encrypts all mobile devices, laptops and tablets.

Miller said officials need to be doing more, considering the sheer number of guns and badges that have been lost or stolen.

Lawmakers also have expressed concern about the safety of DHS property in the past. In December, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee approved legislation that would tighten screening of TSA workers, review security protocols and increase fines and enforcement requirements related to missing credentials.

The legislation was put forward after members of the committee wrote to TSA officials in March expressing concern about reports of unaccounted TSA badges, and the reported use of badges to bypass security checkpoints.

Officials entrusted with protecting the American public cannot consider the loss of sensitive items normal or routine," Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., chairman of the committee, told FoxNews.com.

"When the Commerce Committee looked at lost and missing airport security credentials, we discovered that existing rules werent being effectively enforced. Mistakes happen, but if we dont work to eliminate them and insist on accountability, then were left with unacceptable risk, Thune said.


President Obama met privately Wednesday with Bernie Sanders, just days after the sitting president gave an extensive interview where he appeared to downplay the Democratic senators White House bid.

The two met in the Oval Office, and Sanders afterward told reporters they had a good session.

I thought it was a very positive and constructive meeting, Sanders said.

Coming just days before the leadoff Iowa caucuses, the one-on-one meeting could help Obama display some public neutrality in the heated and unexpectedly tight primary race to replace him -- refuting suggestions that he's in the can for Sanders' rival Hillary Clinton.

Days earlier, in an interview with Politico, Obama had likened Sanders to a bright, shiny object and dismissed comparisons between Sanders bid and his own 2008 campaign.

The Obama-Sanders sit-down may have been scheduled before that report. According to the White House, Sanders had sought the meeting with Obama weeks earlier  and it happened to come together late Wednesday morning.

For her part, Clinton has tried to portray Sanders as an Obama detractor who not only wants to replace his signature health care law but in 2011 openly considered recruiting a primary rival to run against the president.

Sanders and Obama do have their differences, Sanders acknowledged Wednesday.

But he sought to downplay them after the meeting.

He noted Obama was kind enough to campaign for me when he was a senator and I've never forgotten that. Likewise, Sanders said he campaigned for Obama in 2008 and 2012 (though Sanders in 2011 casually discussed the possibility of Obama getting a challenger, he did not ultimately recruit one).

"We have got to do a lot better to protect the middle class, but it's important to remember how far we've come under President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders said.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Sanders, during a holiday party last month, originally suggested a sit-down meeting, and Obama thought that was a good idea.

This is a meeting that came together in the last week or two, Earnest said, adding Obama was pleased to have the opportunity.

Still, the White House isn't suggesting Obama and Sanders are kindred spirits, or even close political allies. White House officials say the men lack much of a personal relationship and have markedly different approaches to politics. Obama allies bristle at comparisons between Sanders and the president.

Their reaction is a reminder that even as Obama watches the nomination battle from a distance in Washington, he is personally tied to the outcome. Obama remains focused on ensuring a Democrat wins the White House and on protecting his legacy. Increasingly, it appears, he sees Clinton as his best hope.

With the Iowa caucuses just days away, Obama showered praise on Clinton and threw some cold water on Sanders, in his interview with Politico.

Sanders' visit to the Oval Office was his first extended meeting with the president since becoming a leading contender. The visit was one of several trips to the Obama White House for Sanders, typically for large, social events or policy rollouts. But the senator hasn't been a close ally or regular staple in strategy meetings.

That's a sharp contrast to Obama's relationship with Clinton -- which has been both deep and complicated. As his secretary of state, Clinton spent hours on Air Force One, shared personal moments and some policy clashes. Even since leaving her post, Clinton has met privately with Obama periodically, often for lunches at the White House.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Donald Trumps rivals are seizing on his decision to skip Thursdays Fox News/Google debate, with Ted Cruz in particular using the boycott to challenge his closest rivals readiness for office.

If you're afraid to have anyone ask a question, that does not bode well for what kind of commander-in-chief you'd make, the Texas senator told Fox News Hannity, on the heels of Trumps decision.

Other candidates also suggested Trumps absence might help give the rest of those on stage a better chance to be heard.

Itll give us more time to talk, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told Fox News. And thatll be good for me and good for the other people on the stage.

Christie, too, ripped Trump for his decision, saying: You gotta show up.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made a similar comment on Twitter, shortly before Trump formally backed out of the debate:

.@realDonaldTrump Do you know who else is scared of tough qs from Fox & @megynkelly? Barack Obama. Enough whining.  Jeb Bush (@JebBush) January 26, 2016

Trumps decision had escalated out of a feud between him and co-moderator Megyn Kelly.

Trump, for his part, doubled down on his decision Wednesday, taking to Twitter to criticize both Kelly and Fox News. Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told MSNBCs Morning Joe that the boycott had nothing to do with Megyn Kelly.

But a half-hour later, Trump again went after Kelly on Twitter, calling her a lightweight reporter.

Trump also has cited press statements by Fox News, pertaining to his feud with Kelly, that apparently contributed to his decision not to participate in Thursdays debate.

The Fox News/Google debate is set for this Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, and would mark the first GOP presidential primary debate that Trump has not attended.

Cruz, who is battling to make up ground against Trump in the Iowa polls ahead of next weeks caucuses, had some of the toughest statements on Trumps decision.

If you're afraid of Megyn Kelly, then you're going to be afraid of Hillary Clinton and you're going to be afraid of Vladimir Putin, Cruz said.

Addressing the matter on The Kelly File, Kelly said: Ill be there.  The debate will go on with or without Mr. Trump.

Trumps campaign said in a statement that instead of doing the debate, Trump will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors.

Whether Trumps decision helps or hurts his campaign in Iowa and beyond remains to be seen.

READ THE FOX NEWS STATEMENT ON TRUMP DECLINING TO PARTICIPATE IN FOX NEWS/GOOGLE DEBATE.

Despite his complaints, he had qualified as one of the eight candidates in the prime-time event Thursday. Fox News announced the candidate lineup for that debate earlier Tuesday evening, and the qualifying participants were:

Trump; Cruz; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; Bush; Christie; Ohio Gov. John Kasich; and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

The participants qualifying for the earlier, 7 p.m. ET debate were:

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum; and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.

Meanwhile, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes has defended Megyn Kelly amid the criticism from Trump. He issued a statement earlier to The Washington Post saying, Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her. She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night."

Fox News also issued a statement after Trumps decision saying Lewandowski had threatened to ramp up the attacks.

In a call on Saturday with a FOX News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a rough couple of days after that last debate and he would hate to have her go through that again, a Fox News statement said late Tuesday.

Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We cant give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees, the statement added.

The Fox News/Google debate in Des Moines this Thursday will be the candidates last before next weeks Iowa caucuses  which kicks off the Republican presidential nominating process.

The debate will be moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and Kelly.
Four Republican senators are calling for cutting foreign aid to Ghana if two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners who were transferred to the African nation escape or return to terrorism.

The move marks a renewed effort by security-minded lawmakers to use the power of the purse to effectively pressure other countries considering taking Guantanamo detainees.

In the case of Ghana, the country earlier this month accepted two detainees from Guantanamo Bay, part of the Obama administrations latest wave of transfers out of the prison camp. But the senators, in a letter Wednesday to key committee leaders, warned that Ghana may be ill-equipped to handle the prisoners.

The [Ghana] prison system is plagued by decay and mismanagement, Sens. Mark Kirk, R-Ill.; Roy Blunt, R-Mo.; James Lankford, R-Okla.; and Steve Daines, R-Mont., wrote in the letter.

They said theyre concerned about the governments capacity to hold, monitor and ensure these terrorist detainees do not reengage in terrorism against the United States and our allies.

In the letter to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the senators asked that an upcoming appropriations bill include language cutting aid to Ghana by $10 million per detainee in the event either of these detainees escapes from confinement or reengages in terrorism while in their custody.

The request could pose yet another complication as President Obama seeks to bring down the number of detainees at Guantanamo and ultimately shutter the camp, a goal many in Congress oppose. In the process, the administration has had to deal with countries that dont typically take terror detainees, like Ghana.

The inmates in question, Yemeni detainees Mahmoud Omar Mohammed Bin Atef and Khalid Mohammed Salih al Dhuby, were transferred on Jan. 6.

Bin Atef is an admitted member of the Taliban and fought for Usama bin Laden, while al Dhuby trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The two inmates were the first of a group of 17 detainees expected to be transferred out of Guantanamo Bay

Fox News Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.
Benjamin Franklin is credited with the observation that nothing is certain except death and taxes.

Bernie Sanders would probably agree, and then some. In an election season marked by populist anger, his plan to raise at least $19.58 trillion in higher taxes over 10 years -- almost 20 times the tax hikes Hillary Clinton proposes -- has not dulled his rise.

And, despite the anti-tax fervor of the Tea Party wave a few years ago, neither Democratic candidate seems shy about pushing an aggressive tax plan in their presidential primary battle.

"Raising taxes in the Democratic primary is a vote winner," said Grover Norquist, of the anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform.

Sanders, for one, was defiant about his proposed tax hikes at a CNN town hall on Monday.

"I start off with the premise that in the last 30 years ... there's been a massive redistribution of wealth in this country," Sanders said. "It's gone from working families, trillions of dollars, to the top one-tenth of 1 percent."

Sanders is beating Clinton by nearly 15 percentage points in New Hampshire, and is virtually tied with her in Iowa, in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average. His popularity largely is attributable to his message about the need for wealth redistribution.

The Vermont senator seemingly has tapped into a tried-and-true socialist formula in times of economic hardship -- blaming private-sector corporations and the wealthy. "What this campaign is about is to say to profitable corporations who, in some years don't pay a nickel in taxes, to the wealthiest people in this country who sometimes have an effective tax rate lower than truck drivers or nurses, yes, you are going to start paying your fair share of taxes," he said.

That message especially rings true for young Democrats, a demographic group burdened with college debt and poor job prospects, and heavily represented in the public sector.

"So much of the Democratic activist base are government employees or people who get government grants, Norquist explained. So when he talks about raising taxes, his enthusiasts ... are hearing they will not be paying higher taxes. They think they will be getting more money."

Clinton has steered clear of a broad-based policy to increase taxes on the middle class, while partially tapping into Sanders class warfare rhetoric. In a January Democratic debate, she tried to explain their distinctions on taxes: "I'm the only candidate standing here tonight who has said I will not raise taxes on the middle class. I want to raise incomes, not taxes, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that the wealthy pay for debt free tuition, for child care, for paid family leave."

Kyle Pomerleau, of the Tax Foundation, said Clintons proposals are closer to what the Obama administration has proposed."

"More targeted higher-end tax increases on investment income, also high-income earners rather than broad tax increases for all Americans," he said.

Heres how the plans stack up.

Among Clintons proposals:

The New College Compact to limit the cost and debt of a college education. Costing $350 billion over 10 years, she says it would be paid for by limiting certain tax breaks for high-income taxpayers.

A $275 billion infrastructure plan, paid for through business tax reforms.

Clinton also promises to expand ObamaCare. She wants to lower co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as reduce the cost of prescription drugs. But she has not spelled out specifically how such programs would be paid for.

Among Sanders tax proposals, many meant to help pay for a government-run health care system that replaces ObamaCare:

Business health care premium tax: $6.3 trillion over 10 years

Ending tax-free status of employer health insurance: $3.1 trillion

Wall Street speculation tax: $3 trillion

Individual health care premium tax: $2.1 trillion

Social Security tax hike: $1.2 trillion

Marginal income tax rate increase: $1.1 trillion

Corporate offshore income tax: $1 trillion

Capital gains tax hike: $920 billion

Payroll tax hike: $319 billion

Estate tax: $243 billion

Ending tax deductions: $150 billion

Energy tax: $135 billion

Carried interest tax: $15.6 billion

Sanders says that while taxes would rise under his plan, health costs would drop.

Sanders home state of Vermont also had such a plan for a state-run, single-payer system, but Gov. Peter Shumlin shelved it in late 2014 after learning how much it would cost in new taxes.
Donald Trumps campaign said Tuesday night that the Republican presidential primary front-runner does not plan to participate in the upcoming Fox News/Google debate, shortly after the debate lineup was announced.

Trumps campaign confirmed the decision to Fox News.

The Republican presidential candidate already had said he probably would not be going, accusing Fox News of playing games with him. Trump has cited concerns with one of the debate moderators, Megyn Kelly  but apparently made his decision not to attend following press statements from Fox News.

Trump, though, took heat for his decision from his closest rival in the polls, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who accused Trump of being "afraid of Megyn Kelly."

If Donald is afraid to defend his record, it speaks volumes, Cruz said in a radio interview with Mark Levin, challenging Trump to a one-on-one debate.

Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told MSNBCs Morning Joe on Wednesday that the boycott had nothing to do with Megyn Kelly.

But a half-hour later, Trump again went after Kelly on Twitter, calling her a lightweight reporter.

The Fox News/Google debate is set for this Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. It would mark the first GOP presidential primary debate that Trump has not attended.

His campaign put out a statement Tuesday night confirming the candidate will not be participating in the Fox News debate and will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors.

Addressing the matter on The Kelly File, Kelly later said: Ill be there.  The debate will go on with or without Mr. Trump.

Despite his complaints, he had easily qualified as one of the eight candidates in the prime-time event.

Fox News announced the candidate lineup for that debate earlier Tuesday evening, and the qualifying participants were:

Trump; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie; Ohio Gov. John Kasich; and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

The participants qualifying for the earlier, 7 p.m. ET debate were:

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum; and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.

The lineup reflects a polling boost for Paul, who did not qualify for the most recent Fox Business Network prime-time debate earlier this month, and declined to participate in that programs evening event.

This time, Paul suggested hell attend, saying the campaign is very excited about qualifying for the main stage.

Meanwhile, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes has defended Megyn Kelly amid the criticism from Trump. He issued a statement earlier to The Washington Post saying, Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her. She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night."

Kelly has withstood Trumps attacks since the August debate, when he accused her of purposely attacking him. As part of Trumps explanation for not participating in Thursdays debate he called the "Kelly File" host a "lightweight" and "third-rate reporter."

Trumps campaign manager Corey Lewandowski even threatened to ramp up the verbal attacks Trump has repeated since the first August debate.

In a call on Saturday with a Fox News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a rough couple of days after that last debate and he would hate to have her go through that again, a Fox News statement said late Tuesday.

Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We cant give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees, the statement added.

READ THE FOX NEWS STATEMENT ON TRUMP DECLINING TO PARTICIPATE IN FOX NEWS/GOOGLE DEBATE

Trump, speaking earlier in Iowa, said hed probably raise money for veterans instead of doing the event. And speaking with Fox News Bret Baier, Trump said he didnt like the press releases Fox put out.

The Fox News/Google debate in Des Moines this Thursday will be the candidates last before next weeks Iowa caucuses  which kicks off the Republican presidential nominating process.

In the run-up, the candidates are ramping up their ad spending and shoe-leather campaigning, while going after each other in the process.

After clashing at the most recent GOP debate, Iowa front-runners Trump and Cruz have only turned up their attacks in recent days  particularly as Trump regains his Iowa lead over Cruz in most polls. The race, though, remains close. The latest Quinnipiac University poll showed Trump leading Cruz just 31-29 percent in Iowa.

Cruz said Tuesday that no state is a must-win for us. But the reality is his campaign is fighting hard for an Iowa victory, as Trump maintains a huge polling lead in the next contest: the New Hampshire primary.

One new ad from a Cruz-supporting super PAC is accusing Trump of being aligned with Democrats on government-run health care. Another from the Cruz campaign returns to the well of criticizing Trumps New York values, while playing a clip of him saying, How stupid are the people of Iowa?

Trump, meanwhile, called Cruz a liar in an MSNBC interview Tuesday.

Nobody likes him, Trump said, attempting to draw a contrast with his own business experience by saying Cruz cant make a deal with anybody.

The debate on Thursday will be moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace.

The candidate lineup was decided based on the results of national, New Hampshire and Iowa polling  released before 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

To qualify for the prime-time debate, a candidate had to place in the top six in an average of recent national polls, or in the top five in an average of recent Iowa or New Hampshire polls. The evening debate features other candidates who received a minimum 1 percent in at least one recent national poll.
A letter written by Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in which he requests clemency two days before his execution has been released in Israel.

Eichmann, who was executed in 1962 for his role in the Holocaust, wrote the letter to then-Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi following his war crimes trial.

The letter was placed on display Wednesday during a ceremony at the residence of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin marking International Holocaust Remembrance day. Eichmanns letter forms part of an exhibition commemorating the Eichmann trial.

Related: Radar technology helps rediscover the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, 70 years after its destruction

In the letter Eichmann refused to admit any guilt for his part in the Holocaust, Haaretz reports. In their evaluation of my personality, the judges have made a significant error, since they cannot put themselves in the time and situation I was in during the war years, he wrote.

I never served at a rank so high that it could have been involved in such decisive and independent powers. I never gave any order in my own name, but rather always acted on orders, he added.

Eichmann, an SS lieutenant colonel and one of the architects of the Holocaust, argues in the letter that he was not a responsible leader but was forced to serve as a mere instrument in the hands of the leaders.

Haaretz reports that, although knowledge of Eichmanns clemency plea was known, the letter, which is written in German and translated into Hebrew, was only recovered recently during a digital archiving process.

Letters from Eichmanns wife and brothers also are on display as part of the exhibit.
Google.org is donating $5.3 million to help Syrian refugees get connected.

The grant will provide Chromebooks to nonprofits working with evacuees in Germany.

"As they make it through a dangerous journey, the first thing refugees need is to find shelter, food and access to care," Jacquelline Fuller, director of Google.org, wrote in a blog post.

"But soon enough, they have to learn the local language, acquire skills to work in a new country, and figure out a way to continue their studiesall in an effort to reclaim and reconnect with the lives they had before," she added.

Low-cost Chromebooks are popular with schools, but can also be configured to fit the needs of nonprofits, ensuring relevant programs, content, and materials for the displaced.

"For example, they can run an educational game for children, a language course for younger adults or even feature information about the asylum application process on a pre-installed homepage," Fuller wrote.

Nonprofits interested in Project Reconnect can apply online.

Google is no stranger to philanthropy: In September, the Web giant began matching refugee aid donations up to $5.5 million, raising more than $10.8 million.

The next month, it developed the open-source "Crisis Info Hub," used to disseminate local information about lodging, transportation, and medical facilities to refugees via smartphones.

The European migrant crisis began last year, when an increasing number of refugees journeyed to Europe to seek asylum from the Middle East and Africa. It became one of the most-talked about topics on Facebook in 2015, and caused a spike in queries on Google.
When it comes to cable companies, bigger definitely isn't better for consumers.

That was the message last week, when a group calling itself the Stop Mega Cable Coalition ratcheted up its opposition to a proposed merger of Charter and Time Warner Cable, which would also include the acquisition of smaller cable operator Bright House Networks. If the merger goes through, it will create the country's second-largest broadband provider and its third-largest pay TV company.

During a conference call with reporters, the advocacy groupwhich includes Consumers Union, the policy and advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, Public Knowledge, Common Cause, Dish Networks, and US Telcom-The Broadband Association, and other organizationscalled on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice to intervene to either block the deal outright, or impose strong restrictions on how the combined company can do business.

The coalition argues that the new company could have the power to stifle innovation and reduce competition, especially when it comes to new Internet-based video services. It could also raise rates for consumers, and offer even poorer customer service than Charter and Time Warner already do, since there would be little incentive to invest in new technologies and staffing.

These two have typically been among the lowest-ranked companies for customer service in Consumer Reports annual surveys. Of the 24 companies listed for TV service, Charter was ranked 20th, while Time Warner Cable was 23rd. The results were similar for their broadband services.

The proposed Charter-Time Warner Cable merger is playing out against the landscape of a rapidly consolidating industry. While a planned merger between Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator, and Time Warner was called off last year, AT&T recently acquired satellite TV company DirecTV, making it the nation's second-largest pay TV provider. And French telcom company Altice is in the midst of a bid to acquire Cablevision after completing its purchase of Suddenlink Communications, a smaller company, in December. If Altice's Cablevision deal goes through, the combined company would become the fourth largest cable company in the U.S.

Broadband Domination

Chief among the coalition's concerns is that a merged Charter/Time Warner Cable would become the second largest broadband provider in the U.S., trailing onlyyou guessed itComcast. Together, the coalition said, the two companies would control access to about 90 percent of the high-speed broadband connections in the country, including some of the biggest markets, including Los Angeles and New York City. (The tech website Ars Technica, however, argues the group relied on out-of-date FCC data, and that the two companies' reach is actually closer to 70 percent.) Either way, alternatives to traditional pay TVso-called "over-the-top" (OTT) online video servicesrely on consumers having access high-speed broadband Internet connections, which are dominated by cable companies.

Calling the two companies a "dangerous duopoly," the coalition worries that a bigger Charter and Comcast could work together and leverage their market power to curb or suppress emerging OTT alternatives, since they'd essentially control the pipes into people's homes. The companies could push customers to their own bundled TV/broadband packages by raising prices for standalone broadband service, the group says, or they could exert pressure on programmers to keep top shows from appearing on online video services trying to compete with them.

Netflix Likes the Deal

The merger, though, is getting thumbs up from some seemingly unlikely allies. Perhaps the most notable supporter is streaming video service Netflix, which was a vocal opponent of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has publicly pushed for the deal, calling the it "tremendously positive" for streaming services such as Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix, because Charter is publicly supporting net neutrality, which bans Internet service providers from blocking or slowing down traffic from content providers unable or unwilling to pay more for better or faster access.



Netflix's support for the deal, though, is easier to understand within the context of the interconnection agreements the service has struck with cable and other companies to ensure that its video is delivered to subscribers' homes without buffering. Comcast and some other companies charge Netflix fees for those interconnections. Charter, most likely anticipating regulatory scrutiny of its policies during the review of its merger, has pledged to support free interconnections, at least until the end of 2018. So basically Netflix is getting free access to Charter's broadband customers for almost three years.

In a statement issued in response to the Stop Mega Cable campaign Charter cited the "significant and broad support" it has received, not just from Netflix but also from independent programmers and multicultural organizations such as National Urban League, National Action Network, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, due to its "commitment to diversity and inclusion." Comcast made similar arguments, and rounded up similar allies, in an effort to bolster its proposed merger.

Charter has also argued that unlike the canceled Comcast deal, its merger with Time Warner Cable would benefit consumers and businesses by creating new jobs and providing it with an incentive to increase Internet speeds. The company also said it doesn't impose data caps or modem fees for its customers.

While all the members of the Stop Mega Cable Coalition agree that the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal is bad for consumers, they disagree about exactly what should be done. Some groups are calling for the deal to be blocked outright, while others are pushing for restrictions. Consumers Union's position is that the merger should be blocked unless federal regulators can impose a set of sufficiently strong conditions to prevent anti-competitive behavior.

Based on recent comments by the FCC, it appears that the agency is weighing the impact that such mergers would have on the development of new streaming options. That factor evidently played a key role in the FCC's decision to block the Comcast-Time Warner merger last year.

Although Charter expected the deal to be completed by the end of 2015, the FCC is still reviewing the proposal. A decision could come in the spring.

Copyright  2005-2016 Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. No reproduction, in whole or in part, without written permission. Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this site.
A Texas teenager who used an "affluenza" defense in a fatal drunken-driving accident has dropped an appeal against deportation from Mexico and will return to Texas to face new charges in the coming days. Attorney Fernando Benitez said Tuesday that Ethan Couch formally ratified his decision to drop the appeal on Monday. Couch is scheduled to appear at a hearing in Texas on Feb. 19 over whether his case will be transferred to the adult system.

Here's a look at what has happened so far and what could happen in coming days or weeks:

FLIGHT TO MEXICO

Couch, 18, had been fighting deportation since he and his mother, Tonya Couch, were found in late December in the Pacific Coast resort city of Puerto Vallarta. Texas officials say the pair fled to Mexico after a video surfaced that appeared to show Ethan Couch at a party where people were drinking. He was banned from drinking under the terms of his probation for a drunken-driving wreck that killed four. A defense witness had argued at that time that Couch had been coddled by his wealthy parents, a condition the expert called "affluenza."

A detention warrant was issued for Ethan Couch in December after he missed a meeting with his probation officer.

When they were arrested, Ethan Couch appeared to have tried to disguise himself by dying his blond hair black and his beard brown, according to investigators. Tonya Couch was quickly deported to Los Angeles, and, days later, sent back to Texas, where she is charged with hindering an apprehension, a third-degree felony that carries a sentence of two to 10 years in prison.

___

RETURN TO U.S.

Mexican immigration officials, the U.S. Marshals, or both will transfer Ethan Couch to Texas from the immigration detention center in Mexico City where he has been held since late December. Though his flight route is unclear, U.S. Marshals spokesman Trent Touchstone said Couch will likely fly direct into Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Because Couch dropped his deportation fight, transferring him to the U.S. "will be a lot easier and a lot quicker," Touchstone said.

The sheriff's office will take custody upon his return to Texas.

Couch will be held in a juvenile detention center until a juvenile judge holds a hearing to decide whether to continue to hold him there, book him in an adult jail or let him go, said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson.

A separate hearing will be held next month to decide whether to transfer his case to adult court.

___

PUNISHMENT

Ethan Couch was driving drunk and speeding near Fort Worth in June 2013 when he crashed into a disabled SUV, killing four people and injuring several others, including passengers in his pickup truck. He was 16 at the time. He pleaded guilty in juvenile court to four counts of intoxication manslaughter and two counts of intoxication assault causing serious bodily injury. He was sentenced to 10 years' probation.

During the sentencing phase of his trial, a defense expert argued that he had been coddled into a sense of irresponsibility. "Affluenza" is not recognized as a medical diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association, and its invocation drew ridicule.

Rather than seeking a revocation of Couch's probation, Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson has asked a judge to transfer his case to adult court.

If that takes place, Couch could face up to 120 days in an adult jail, followed by 10 years' probation. If he violates probation again, he could face up to 10 years in prison per death, Wilson said.

If the judge declines to transfer Couch to adult court, he could be held in a juvenile facility until his sentence expires when he turns 19 next April.

"We are not seeking to request violation of his juvenile parole, as the maximum it could offer at this point would be to hold him in a juvenile facility until his nineteenth birthday," said Tarrant County district attorney spokeswoman Samantha Jordan.
El Paso city councilors have unanimously approved plans for the much anticipated visit from Pope Francis to the Mexican city of Juarez next month.

Both border cities will draw hundreds of thousands of visitors aiming to get a glimpse of the pope on Feb. 17.

El Paso will close a portion of its border highway, several downtown neighborhoods and city government. The city estimates these moves will cost about $1 million. At least two El Paso school districts are also closing that day.

The pontiff's Juarez visit will come at the end of a five-day Mexico trip. He will give a mass on a large Juarez field near the international border that people in El Paso may be able to hear. The Catholic Diocese of El Paso is hosting a mass viewing event at the Sun Bowl.
A judge has ruled the attorney who prosecuted the murder trial of a New Jersey man accused of kidnapping and killing Etan Patz (AY'-tahn payts) in 1979 may participate in the retrial.

Joan Illuzzi worked for the Manhattan district attorney's office last year and prosecuted Pedro Hernandez in the missing boy case. It ended in a mistrial after one juror refused to convict.

Illuzzi then ran unsuccessfully for Staten Island district attorney. She's now returned to the Manhattan DA's office.

Hernandez's attorneys wanted Illuzzi banned from being in front of a jury because of comments she made about the case during her campaign.

The attorneys argued the comments could bias a jury. Judge Maxwell Wiley disagreed.

Six-year-old Etan vanished on his way to school in New York City.
A number of Christian church leaders, including Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren, spoke out about the vital need for believers to follow Jesus' footsteps and help refugees at the GC2 Summit at Community Christian Church in Naperville, Illinois, on Wednesday.

The conference featured a number of sessions focused on the ongoing refugee crisis that is gripping the world, most notably with the millions of people in Syria and the surrounding region fleeing civil war and seeking refuge in Western nations. Evangelical pastors spoke alongside relief groups, such as World Vision and World Relief, about the urgent need for the Church in America to get involved and help in meaningful ways.

Rick Warren focused his message to the audience at Naperville, alongside all those watching via live stream, on the life and mission of Jesus Christ, and urged believers to care about the things that Jesus cared about.

"Jesus loves the Church, and he loves the world," Warren said.

The Saddleback pastor also pointed out that Christ was indifferent to things such as personal danger, politics, and even religious traditions  "He valued relationships much more than rules," he added.

"Jesus never got angry at irreligious people. He only got mad at people who should know better. All of the woes in Matthew 23 and Luke 11 are for religious people. And that's why the common people and the street people loved Jesus. The only people who had a problem with Jesus were the religious ones. When Jesus saw people taking advantage of the poor, he got angry," the pastor continued.

Read the Original Story from ChristianPost.com
The charity for wounded veterans, the Wounded Warrior Project, is facing accusations of using donor money toward excessive spending on conferences and parties instead of on recovery programs, according to a CBS News report.

Army Staff Sergeant Erick Millette, who returned from Iraq in 2006 with a bronze star and a purple heart, told CBS News he admired the charitys work and took a job with the group in 2014 but quit after two years.

"Their mission is to honor and empower wounded warriors, but what the public doesn't see is how they spend their money," he told CBS News.

Millette said he witnessed lavish spending on staff, with big catered parties.

"Going to a nice fancy restaurant is not team building. Staying at a lavish hotel at the beach here in Jacksonville, and requiring staff that lives in the area to stay at the hotel is not team building," he told CBS News.

According to the charity's tax forms obtained by CBS News, spending on conferences and meetings went from $1.7 million in 2010, to $26 million in 2014, which is the same amount the group spends on combat stress recovery.

Two former of employees, who were so fearful of retaliation they asked that CBS News not show their faces on camera, said spending has skyrocketed since Steven Nardizzi took over as CEO in 2009, pointing to the 2014 annual meeting at a luxury resort in Colorado Springs.

"He rappelled down the side of a building at one of the all hands events. He's come in on a Segway, he's come in on a horse, one employee told CBS News.

About 500 staff members attended the four-day conference in Colorado, which CBS News reported cost about $3 million.

Wounded Warrior Project declined CBS News' interview requests for Nardizzi, but instead sent Director of Alumni and a recipient of their services, Captain Ryan Kules, who denied there was excessive spending on conferences.

"It's the best use of donor dollars to ensure we are providing programs and services to our warriors and families at the highest quality," he said.

Kules added the charity did not spend $3 million on the Colorado conference, but he was not there and was unable to say what it did cost. He also told CBS News that the charity does not spend money on alcohol or engages in any other kind of excessive spending.

Click for more from CBS News
The leader of a group of armed protesters who had occupied a federal wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon for 24 days was arrested along with four others Tuesday after a traffic stop prompted gunfire that reportedly left the group's spokesperson dead and another person injured.

The FBI and Oregon State Police arrested Ammon Bundy, 40, his brother Ryan, 43, Brian Cavalier, 44, Shawna Cox, 59, and Ryan Payne, 32, at around 4:25 p.m. local time on U.S. Highway 395.

Three other people were arrested separately. The FBI said Joseph O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50, were arrested in the nearby town of Burns, Ore. Hours later, authorities said Jon Ritzheimer, 32, turned himself in to the Peoria, Ariz., police department.

The FBI said all eight face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

Neither the FBI nor Oregon State Police released details about what set off the gunfire at the traffic stop. The Oregonian reported that the deceased man was 55-year-old Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, the group's spokesperson. Authorities said no other information about the deceased would be released pending formal identification by the local medical examiner's office.

Finicum and Ryan Bundy allegedly disobeyed orders to surrender and resisted arrest, The Oregonian reported, citing sources. But that narrative is being challenged.



Ammon Bundy told his wife that Finicum was cooperating with police when he was shot, according to Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore. A Facebook account reportedly operated by one of Finicum's 11 children, Thara Tenney, also said Finicum was cooperating.



"I want the world to know how my father was murdered today," the post said. "His hands were in the air and he was shot in the face by the American authorities. Ammon Bundy reported there are six witnesses to this evil."



One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds and was treated at a hospital, law enforcement agencies said.

The protesters were heading to a public meeting in the town of John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents about the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge when the traffic stop took place, law enforcement officials told Fox News.

The Oregonian newspaper reported several hundred people had gathered at the John Day Senior Center on Tuesday evening and were told the "guest speakers" would not be appearing.

The Harney County Hospital in Burns was placed on lockdown out of concern that the protesters may cause a disturbance there.

Ammon Bundy's group, calling itself the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, seized the refuge's headquarters on Jan. 2 in protest of what they viewed as onerous federal land restrictions, as well as the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires. Law enforcement officers converged on the wildlife refuge after the arrests and were expected to remain at the site throughout the night; it was unclear how many people, if any, remained in the buildings.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy recently had begun traveling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a written statement. "The leaders of this group are now in custody and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender so this community can begin to heal the deep wounds that this illegal activity has created over the last month."

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Deschutes County Major Incident Team and the Harney County District Attorney's Office.



Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The attorney for the leader of an armed group occupying an Oregon wildlife refuge said Wednesday the man wants those remaining at the refuge to "please stand down" and go home.

Ammon Bundy made an initial appearance in federal court in Portland, Oregon after he and seven others were arrested Tuesday during an incident with police that killed 1.

Mike Arnold, Bundy's attorney, read a statement afterward in which Bundy urged those still at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to leave.

In the statement, Bundy asked the federal government to allow the people remaining at the refuge to depart without being prosecuted. Addressing those still holding out, Bundy's statement said: "Please stand down. Go home and hug your families. This fight is now in the courts. Please go home."

Earlier in the day countys sheriff lamented there doesnt have to be bloodshed in our community and said he was disappointed that the incident ended badly.

We all make choices in life, an emotional Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said during a Wednesday news conference. Sometimes our choices go bad.

Robert LaVoy Finicum, 55, was killed during a traffic stop Tuesday in which Bundy, 40, and three others were also taken into custody, The Oregonian reported. Ammon Bundys brother, Ryan, was shot and wounded during the incident. Three other members of the group were taken in to custody separately.

The group had occupied the remote refuge for the better part of a month, protesting, they said, for ranchers rights. Ward said the militias methods were wrong.

"We're just trying to figure out how a dead cowboy equals a peaceful resolution."  Jason Patrick

A federal criminal complaint against those arrested says that the armed group had explosives and night-vision goggles and was prepared to fight. The complaint says refuge employees were unable to report to work because of threats of violence from the group.

"We dont arm up and rebel, he said. We work through the appropriate channels. This cant happen anymore. It cant happen in America. And this cant happen in Harney County.

The events surrounding Finicums death remain unclear, and officials did nothing to clarify the incident on Wednesday, taking no questions during the news conference.

FBI special agent in charge Greg Bretzing placed the blame for the deteriorating situation squarely on the protesters.

It is the actions and choices of the armed occupiers of the refuge that have led us to where we are today, Bretzing said.

He added: Actions are not without consequences."

An unknown number of protesters remained at the refuge Wednesday, but members of the media began leaving after the FBI reportedly told some journalists the Bureau couldn't offer "protection."

KTVZ reporter Lauren Martinez tweeted a video of her leaving the compound area with the ominous note "@FBI warns media no protection." Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter John Sepulvado tweeted ".@OPB was told by FBI that we were on our own -- essentially stuff is going down and we need to move."

Earlier in the day, Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the crew remaining at the outpost, said he could see an armored convoy and a number of law enforcement officers gathered from his perch in the compound.

"Sounds like the definition of peaceful resolution is either forcefully kidnapping me or death," Patrick told USA Today. "A peaceful resolution is not dead people."

The FBI and Oregon State Police were also establishing a series of checkpoints along key routes in and out of the refuge on Wednesday. The agencies said in a statement that the containment was to 'better ensure the safety of community members."

Bretzing said any remaining occupants of the refuge were free to leave through the checkpoints, but those leaving would be identified on their way out.

Patrick wouldnt say how many people remained with him at the refuge, but he told The Washington Post that occupiers werent planning on leaving because of the arrests.

Right now, were doing fine, Patrick said. Were just trying to figure out how a dead cowboy equals a peaceful resolution. Patricks comments could have been aimed at Oregon Gov. Kate Brown who asked for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution.

Patrick told The Oregonian: Were all standing here ready to defend our peaceful resolution.

Other protesters suggested the standoff may be petering out.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasn't sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A Chinese national faces sentencing for supplying Iran with devices that can be used to make nuclear weapons-grade uranium.

Prosecutors will recommend a 15-year prison term for Sihai Cheng, who pleaded guilty in December to conspiring to commit export violations and smuggle goods from the U.S. to Iran and illegally exporting U.S.-manufactured pressure transducers to Iran.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

Cheng's lawyer says he'll argue that the nearly two years Cheng has served in jail is enough punishment. He was arrested in London in Feb. 2014.

Prosecutors say Cheng set up shell companies in China to receive transducers from the Shanghai subsidiary of MIKS Instruments Inc., based in Andover, Massachusetts. The government has said that MKS sent the instruments to China without knowing they were to go to Iran.
One of the three violent convicts who escaped from a Southern California jail Friday had been ordered deported to his native Vietnam in 1998, but was able to remain in the U.S. and rack up more criminal convictions.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Tuesday that Bac Duong, 43, came to the United States legally in 1991 but was ordered removed seven years later after he served time in state prison for a 1997 burglary conviction. However, the Orange County Register reported that Vietnam routinely refused requests from the U.S. to accept Duong and other deportees.

Duong escaped from the Orange County jail on Friday along with Jonathan Tieu, 20, and Hossein Nayeri, 37, by sawing through a quarter-inch thick grill on a dormitory wall and climbing through plumbing tunnels to reach an unguarded area of the roof. There, the men moved aside razor wire and rappelled to the ground using bed linen.

Immigration officials said they took Duong into custody a second time in 2003 and released him the following year. He continued to check in with authorities as required until 2014, the statement said.

In the intervening years, Duong also faced a series of charges involving burglary and drug possession and did stints in state prison. Last year, he was charged with attempted murder and assault in the shooting of a man outside a home in Santa Ana.

Federal officials can't keep immigrants locked up indefinitely while they await deportation. Most must be released after six months, except those accused of posing a terrorist threat or deemed especially dangerous.

In 2008, Vietnam agreed to provide travel documents for deportees, but only those who entered the U.S. since July 1995, eaning it didn't apply to Duong.

Duong's case is is one of thousands involving criminal immigrants who federal authorities want to deport but haven't been able to because their native countries wouldn't take them back.

In 2012, ex-convict Binh Thai Luc was charged with killing five people in San Francisco after Vietnam didn't issue the travel documents needed to repatriate him.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from The Orange County Register.
New Orleans firefighters Wednesday morning are battling a large six-alarm blaze near the Roosevelt Hotel on Canal Street.

Fire trucks were seen heading to the fire around 4 a.m. Live television pictures from the scene show flames leaping from the roof. Several blocks of Canal Street, which borders the citys French Quarter, have been closed.

Commuters have been advised to avoid the area while firefighters battle the blaze, according to Fox 8 Live.

No injuries have been reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Fox 8 Live.
A Georgia State Trooper and suspect were shot Wednesday after a chase ended along Interstate 75 northwest of Atlanta, according to the Georgia Department of Public Safety.

The shooting happened around 4 p.m. along the highway, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

Capt. Mark Perry said Trooper Jacob Fields and the suspect were shot after a 10-mile pursuit on Interstate 75 in Marietta. Both were taken to WellStar Kennestone Hospital.

The pursuit began after the trooper attempted a traffic stop but the driver refused to pull over, Perry said. Additional troopers joined the chase and ultimately surrounded the vehicle.

Perry said the fleeing vehicle struck another vehicle, at which point the suspect got out and began shooting at troopers, who returned fire.

Fields was shot in the leg and abdomen just below his vest, Perry said, but the three-year veteran was alert and in stable condition, with family around him.

The condition of the suspect, who Perry said was shot multiple times, was unknown. The suspect's name has not been released.

Video from Georgia Department of Transportation cameras showed multiple lanes of traffic shut down in the area while authorities investigated the shooting.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it will continue to investigate the shooting.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Fox5Atlanta.com
Its been a shocking turn of events. Investigative videos that exposed Planned Parenthoods horrific sale of human fetal tissue will now, apparently, not harm the organization that did the selling.

Instead, it will harm two of the individuals who brought this horrific story to light: the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, David Daleiden, and one of its employees, Sandra Merritt. The two were indicted by a Texas grand jury, while Planned Parenthood, the countrys biggest abortion provider, seemingly will come out of the scandal unscathed, at least for now.

Daleiden and Merritt face felony charges of tampering with a government record, while Daleiden also faces a misdemeanor charge for purchasing human organs.

We were called upon to investigate allegations of criminal conduct by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, said Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson about the decision. As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us. All the evidence uncovered in the course of this investigation was presented to the grand jury. I respect their decision on this difficult case.

Many questions remain about this, including which government record was tampered with. The Center for Medical Progress issued a statement on Tuesday pointing out the glaring inconsistency of the findings.

"We respect the processes of the Harris County District Attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see."

The Center for Medical Progress also defended its use of "the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and (it followed) all applicable laws."

Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., who was a nursing professional before she became a lawmaker, wrote the House-passed "Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015," and said she was "profoundly disappointed" in the indictments.

"It is a sad day in America when those who harvest the body parts of aborted babies escape consequences for their actions, while the courageous truth-tellers who expose their misdeeds are handed down a politically motivated indictment instead," she said.

Planned Parenthood is already celebrating the indictment as a victory.

"These anti-abortion extremists spent three years creating a fake company, creating fake identities, lying, and breaking the law. When they couldn't find any improper or illegal activity, they made it up," said Eric Ferrero, vice president of communications for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The implication that the videos were dramatized is being proclaimed from the rooftops by every Planned Parenthood executive in America. But the Center for Medical Progress has already released countless hours of unedited footage.

Even so, the edited video does not explain the actual words from the mouths of Planned Parenthood employees. In one of the videos, an employee said, "Because number one, the Federal Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation."

In Planned Parenthood's case, it seems the law isn't just up to interpretation  the law doesn't really apply.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the state's investigation of Planned Parenthood is continuing.

"The Health and Human Service Commissions inspector general and the attorney generals office have an ongoing investigation into Planned Parenthoods actions," his office told LifeNews. "Nothing about todays announcement in Harris County impacts the states ongoing investigation. The State of Texas will continue to protect life, and I will continue to support legislation prohibiting the sale or transfer of fetal tissue."

More from LifeZette.com:

I Will Not Be a Helicopter Mom

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Please Nurse in Private

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An Indianapolis elementary school principal is being hailed as a heroine Tuesday after she was seen pushing students out of the way of an oncoming bus before being struck and killed.

Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School was killed and two 10-year-old children were hospitalized with serious but non-life threatening injuries when the bus lurched forward, authorities said.

Indianapolis Fire Department Capt. Rita Reith said the buses were lined up outside the school when the accident happened around 2:45 p.m.

"At some point, the stationary bus lurched forward and jumped the curb. The bus was not moving at the time directly before it jumped the curb," Reith said.

The female bus driver isnt sure why the bus was able to accelerate, Reith said in a statement Tuesday evening. The driver also said "in the instant that the accident occurred" she saw Jordan push several students out of the way, according to the statement.

Reith said the driver and 25 students were examined but didnt require treatment.

Jordan, who had been principal of the school for 22 years, was loved by her staff and the school community, Lawrence Township Schools Superintendent Shawn Smith said at a news conference.

"This is a great example of an educational leader in our state and our city. ... Just a phenomenal individual that truly cared about children. This is a tragic situation that we have. This loss is going to ripple across our district of 15,000 students," Smith said.

The district canceled classes at all of its schools Wednesday and said in a statement that four locations, including a transportation center, would be "open for emotional support to our staff and families."

Indianapolis Police Commander Chris Bailey said the bus driver, whose name was not immediately released, would be given a blood test, a standard procedure in collisions involving fatalities.

Fox 59 reported that members of the Lawrence Township community posted condolences on social media and expressed appreciation and their fondest memories of Jordan.

I cannot express deeply enough the sympathy and condolences that all of the city feels, only for the family of Susan Jordan but for those children that were affected by todays accident. We dispatched first responders, IMPD and IFD, in cooperation with our Lawrence partners on scene. We will continue to be on scene throughout the rest of the evening with critical response personnel as well as chaplains to serve the needs of the people of this community, Mayor Joe Hogsett said in the press conference.

Amy Beverland Elementary, Belzer Middle School and the Lawrence Education and Community Center will all be open to offer emotional support. Classes are expected to resume on Thursday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Fox 59.
The Marine who suffered a gunshot wound to the leg during last summers terror attack on military installments in Tennessee -- including his recruitment center -- said he was humbled to be awarded a Purple Heart Tuesday, but deflected questions about the military's policy of recruiters being unarmed at these facilities.

Ill do whatever my chain of command tells me to do, Sgt. DeMonte Cheeley told The Marine Corps Times. If they say, You dont need to arm yourselves, Ill just act accordingly.

The July 16 shooting rampage raised a national debate on whether U.S. service members should be armed at these military facilities. There is little secret that these centers are high-profile and vulnerable to terror strikes. The debate only grew when a privately-owned pistol was recovered at a nearby reserve center, where the second shooting that day occurred. Authorities believed the gun belonged to a fallen Marine.

Cheeley was the first Marine wounded during the attack at the Armed Forces Career Center where he worked as a recruiter. He suffered a gunshot wound to the leg at the hands of Muhammed Youssef Abdulazeez. Abdulazeez was later shot and killed by police.

The shootings took place minutes apart, with Abdulazeez stopping his car and spraying dozens of bullets first at Cheeleys recruiting center, then driving to a Navy-Marine training center 7 miles away. The attacks were over within 30 minutes.

Cheeley recalled the chaotic scene, when he heard the first gunshots and then, sitting in the career center unsure that he had been hit.

He told FoxNews.com that when the first gunshot rang out, he thought it was a firecracker. But he determined the sound was gunshots when the exterior glass at the center began to shatter.

I didnt believe it when I got to the hospital because the doctors couldnt see anything on X-rays, he told The Marine Corps Times. They only saw an entrance and exit wound. Not until I got home and I saw the PT shorts I was wearing had a hole in the back right where the wound was, thats when I believed them. Im like: OK, I guess it really did happen.

The five troops were killed at the nearby training center. Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan; Staff Sgt. David Wyatt; Sgt. Carson A. Holmquist; Lance Cpl. Squire D. Skip Wells and Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Smith all died that day. They are in line to receive a Purple Heart at a later date, a Marine official told Military.com.

The Purple Heart is one of the most respected awards in the U.S. military and it is awarded, according to WRCBTV.com, to those injured or killed while serving. In a majority of cases, the award is earned fighting in a combat zone. The FBI and the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, however, determined that the Chattanooga attack was inspired by a foreign terror group.

What Ive always been taught is the Purple Heart is a combat award, being deployed overseas and for me to receive it in Chattanooga, Tennessee I kind of have mixed feelings about it, Cheeley, who served in Afghanistan in 2011, told the station. He said he is honored to receive the award, but he does not want to take away from the fallen five.

Though rare, the military has in the past given out Purple Hearts for attacks on U.S. soil. In Feb. 6, 2015, the Army approved awarding the Purple Heart to soldiers wounded in the 2009 attack on Fort Hood in Texas after pressure from Congress and victims families.

Cheeley told The Marine Corps Times: I still have a job; Im still a Marine Corps recruiter, and who knows, maybe one day I might recruit the next Gunnery Sgt. Sullivan or Staff Sgt. Wyatt or the other three fallen.
A small Catholic university in New Hampshire is offering its undergraduate students a program that will guarantee to land them a job within nine months of graduation.

Rivier Univeristy, which boats about 2,600 students, will either pay their federally subsidized students loans for up to a year or enroll them in up to six masters degree courses tuition free if the student doesnt get a job. The school is calling this the Employment Promise Program.

"We want to send a message that we recruit not just for the first year, but we're a partner throughout an educational experience with students," university president Sister Paula Marie Buley said.

"The Rivier Employment Promise is really the university's commitment to partner with students in the classroom, on campus, in the community and ultimately, a career," she said.

The program expected to begin with the Class of 2020, next falls freshmen. The school has about 200 incoming freshman each year and Buley is expecting most of them to participate in the program. For a student to stay in the program, they must maintain a 3.0 minimum grade point average and participate in activities, including career counseling, community service and internships. In return, the university will provide specialized academic and career action plans designed to enhance a student's employability.

"We're focusing on the goal of an undergraduate education  the academic rigor, the values, the skill set, the ability to work with other people, to communicate ideas  and we give students ways to practice all their skills while they're still at the university," Buley said.

Buley told the Nashua Telegraph that students currently fare well after school. She said that at least 95 percent of Rivier students are employed, in graduate school or in the military in some way between six and nine months after graduation.

The program is a first of its kind in New Hampshire, but far from the first in the nation.

In Maine, Thomas College pays federal student loans for up to a year or offers free masters degree courses to students who follow certain steps as undergraduates and dont get jobs related to their majors within six months of graduation.

Capitol College in Laurel, Maryland, guarantees qualified graduates a job with a competitive salary within 90 days of graduation or the school will provide up to 36 additional undergraduate credits. And Adrian College in Michigan pays some or all student loan payments until graduates make $37,000 a year.

When the latter program was launched in 2014, college officials framed it as a solution to skyrocketing tuition costs and student loan defaults. At Rivier, where the annual undergraduate tuition is $28,800, Buley said the program also is aimed at reassuring parents that the significant cost is worth it.

"We know that they are very interested in the career preparation and the employability of their students in all academic disciplines," she said. "I think you see even more today that parents and students are in partnership in selecting an institution, and this really speaks to the interests of both parents and students."

Courtney Campbell, 17, of Stoughton, Massachusetts, was recently accepted to Rivier and is deciding between the Nashua school and one other college. After hearing about the new program Tuesday from her guidance counselor, she said she's definitely leaning toward Rivier.

"It really helps me feel less nervous about getting a job," said Campbell, who plans to study early childhood education.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A man legally named Santa Claus was arrested after police in Idaho said they saw him driving on the wrong side of the street.

KREM-TV in Spokane, Washington, reports that 67-year-old Claus initially was booked on one count of DUI. He later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving. He paid a $700 fine.

Claus, pictured in a jail photo with a big white beard, was arrested Thursday in Post Falls, near the Washington border. Claus told police he wasn't from around Post Falls and wasn't familiar with the streets, according to police documents.

Police noted he was cooperative throughout the arrest.
Two BASE jumpers are presumed dead after leaping off an iconic California bridge, authorities said on Tuesday.

The Monterey County Herald reported that authorities first realized the two jumpers were missing on Saturday, although the jump is thought to have occurred Wednesday morning. They said the woman who jumped off the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur first likely drowned, as did the man who jumped trying to save her.

Monterey County Sheriffs officials said Monday that a video from a helmet camera showing Mary Katherine Kate Connell, of Ventura, descending roughly 300 feet and landing on Bixby Creek, which feeds into the Pacific. Shortly after the landing, large waves overtake her.

"As the water retreats back into the ocean, Connell and the parachute are not seen retreating back to shore," Sheriff Steve Bernal said.

The camera then captures the mans view as he jumps off the bridge and heads toward the beach below, according to the Los Angeles Times. Monterey County Sheriffs Cmdr. John Thornburg said after the man lands safely, he removes his helmet and parachute and goes after Connell.

Bernal said there are no plans to release the video. Divers are searching the area and other officials are searching from the land and by airplane, Bernal said.

Bernal said the mans name and the pair's ages have not been released. Investigators have said the man was originially from Finland.

Deputies learned of the jump when they recovered an abandoned rental car Saturday afternoon, after callers reported seeing a parachute on the beach. A parachute and helmet were found partially buried in the sand, and the camera and the recording were recovered later.

Deputies looked up the car renter's name and discovered he had an extensive background in BASE jumping and skydiving. Bernal said Connell was an experienced skydiver with more than 300 jumps.

Jackie Faust, general manager of Skydive Monterey Bay in Marina, said while skydiving and BASE jumping are similar, there isn't much overlap in the communities. She said BASE jumping can be more dangerous and isn't regulated like skydiving.

"(BASE jumpers) don't have two parachutes, they have one, and it's completely different equipment," she said.

Jumping off Bixby Bridge can be especially dangerous because of the ocean and the relatively quick drop, Faust said.

The bridge is 290 feet above Bixby Creek. The creek flows into the Pacific Ocean at a high-rate of speed, according to the Times. Thornburg said the water is difficult to navigate for inexperienced swimmers.

He said the bridge is mostly known for the amount of people who leap off of it to commit suicide. Jumping off the bridge is illegal.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from the Los Angeles Times.
A 25-year-old American woman who worked as a nanny in Austria was found dead in her Vienna apartment Tuesday, and investigators say it appears somebody killed her.

Police spokesman Thomas Keiblinger told the The Local, a news website in Vienna, the womans half-naked body was found Tuesday evening on a mattress in the bathroom after she failed to report for work and her employer notified police.

Niles Cole, a spokesman with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, identified her to the Associated Press as Lauren Mann.

Detectives said that an autopsy showed she had no external injuries, and have now ordered a toxicological report to see if she was poisoned, the Local reported.

Police spokesman Thomas Keiblinger told the news outlet that traces of blood were found near her head, which may indicate an internal injury.

A forensics team initially had trouble examining the scene as all the light bulbs in her apartment had burnt out and had to be replaced with the help of a ladder.

Keiblinger said the woman had been studying and working in Vienna for around three years.

Mann's family issued a statement on Facebook Wednesday, ABC News' Denver affiliate KMGH-TV reported.

"We are heartbroken to tell you our daughter and sister Lauren Mann has been found dead in her apartment in Vienna, Austria. An investigation is in progress. It has been released in Austria to the media and is being sensationalized. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers," the statement read.

Mann attended the University of Colorado at Boulder College of Music, where she studied piano and played in several recitals, according to the university website.

She was also a member of Club francais @ CU Boulder, where people learn French.

University spokesman Ryan Huff said the university was saddened by news of her death.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
France has asked the European Union to consider new sanctions against Iran over recent missile tests, in a request made shortly after the EU ended sanctions over Iran's nuclear program, officials have told The Associated Press.

Two officials from European Union nations said the French proposal is under EU review but most other EU members view it as counterproductive to efforts to revive political and economic ties with Iran after the protracted chill over the nuclear dispute. The officials, who were briefed by people who attended the meeting, spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Disclosure that the French asked for such a review  even if it is ultimately unsuccessful  could complicate a visit by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who arrived in Paris from Rome on Wednesday to improve political and economic ties now that the sanctions have been removed.

A French diplomat who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the topic cited Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius as saying the EU is considering possible new sanctions on Iran. He declined to say which nation initiated the process.

The officials said the request came at a meeting of 28 EU foreign ministers shortly after the EU and the U.S. lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for U.N. certification that Iran had scaled back its nuclear programs. Iran said those programs were peaceful but critics feared it wanted to build nuclear weapons.

Another diplomat from an EU nation said hovever that the review was not discussed at the meeting. He declined to comment on whether France had requested a review about such sanctions elsewhere and demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the issue publicly.

The French government did not respond to AP requests for comment by late Wednesday. The European Union also did not address whether France had asked for a review.

The United States had imposed new sanctions over the firing of a medium-range Iranian ballistic missile shortly before the reported French request.

___

Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet and Elaine Ganley in Paris and John-Thor Dahlburg and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed.
Hundreds of potentially violent Islamic radicals, including at least 50 who have traveled to and from the Islamic State where they took up arms for ISIS, now live in Berlin, a top German law enforcement official told FoxNews.com Wednesday.

Investigators have identified 680 hardcore Islamists in the German capital, nearly half of whom are geared toward violence, said a spokeswoman for the Berlin office of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germanys equivalent of the FBI. While the ISIS veterans are most worrisome, all pose a serious threat, she said.

We consider the ideology of the 680 to not be compatible with our freedom and that can be dangerous.  German law enforcement spokeswoman

We consider the ideology of the 680 to not be compatible with our freedom and that can be dangerous, Isabelle Kalbitzer told FoxNews.com, adding that the 50 estimated to have returned from Islamic State pose the most immediate threat.

The number of radical Islamists in Berlin has nearly doubled from the 350 identified in Berlin just five years ago. And at that time, fewer than 100 were considered violent. In recent years, as ISIS has risen, much of the Middle East has become engulfed in war and millions of refugees have poured into Europe, Berlin has become a magnet for terrorists, say experts.

According to a report in the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, Berlin Integration Minister Dilek Kolat said Berlin is stronghold of the Salafism, referring to a virulent and violent strain of Sunni Islam that gave rise to groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Bernd Palenda, head of the Berlin intelligence agency, concurred, telling the paper Berlin is a hot spot for Salafists."

Throughout Germany, federal law enforcement estimates there are 7,000 active Salafists animated by the goal of a return to 7th-century Islamic society. They openly advocate stripping women of their rights and an austere way of life governed by a harsh form of Islamic Sharia law. They can be seen in Berlin handing out copies of the Koran and propaganda materials.

Now, the entrenched radicals have a new audience in the growing pool of Muslim migrants and refugees that have flocked to Berlin from the Middle East and northern Africa, she said. Nearly 50,000 refugees have landed in Berlin, most from Muslim-majority countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt and Iraq.

Recruiting by violent Islamists occurs in Berlins mosques and even in front of the citys main refugee registration center. In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood, designated a terrorist organization by the UK as well as Egypt, has a recruitment presence at the Lageso refugee center in the heart of Berlin, said Kalbitzer said.

There are meeting places where the Salafists are recruiting, she added said. It continues to happen in different circles.

The poisonous message of firebrand imams can be heard on Fridays in the citys mosques, where attendance is swollen by the influx of refugees. Last month, a cleric named Sheikh Hassan Shahrour delivered a sermon in which he praised child murderer and Hezbollah fighter Samir Kuntar. In a 1979 attack in Israel, Kuntar bludgeoned four-year-old Israeli girl Einat Haran, whose father and two other Israelis were also killed.

Kuntar was released by Israel in a 2008 prisoner exchange, and promptly went to fight in Syria, where Israel reportedly killed him in an airstrike in December.

You should give him a big round of applause, said Shahrour. The audience responded with clapping.

In 2014, the radical Danish Imam Sheikh Abu Bilal Ismail called for the extermination of Jews at a Berlin mosque. He said it was necessary to destroy the Zionist Jews..., and to count them and kill them to the very last one. Dont spare a single one of them....

According to a 16-page court verdict obtained by FoxNews.com , he was convicted and fined the equivalent of $1,400 for incitement to hatred.
As Germanys dwindling survivors of Nazi death camps mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day Wednesday, they and younger members of the nations Jewish community are fearful of a new tide of anti-Semitism driven by old hatred and a new influx of Muslim refugees.

Commemoration of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the camp in Poland where 1.1 million Jews were murdered, is always a somber event, but on the 71st anniversary current events have cast a new and dark shadow. Waves of refugees from countries where hatred of Jews is taught and practiced have flooded Germany, prompting some of the nations 100,000-strong community to fear for their future.

There are growing anxieties in the Jewish communities about a potential rise in anti-Semitism and the security of Jewish life, said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committees Berlin office.

There are growing anxieties in the Jewish communities about a potential rise in anti-Semitism and the security of Jewish life.  Deidre Berger, American Jewish Committee

Berger and others note anti-Semitism has persisted for decades among the extremist fringe, which ironically is gaining strength in reaction to the Muslim influx. While Germany has long condemned the Nazi regime and the genocide it carried out, the flame of deadly prejudice was never fully extinguished.

After the Holocaust, only the explicit manifestations of anti-Semitism vanished, but the thoughts did not disappear, said Monika Schwarz Friesel, a professor of linguistics at the Technical University in Berlin and an authority on anti-Semitism.

On Wednesday, Ruth Kluger, 84, a Holocaust survivor, addressed the German Bundestag with a chilling reminder of Germanys Nazi past. She said she is alive today only because a stranger told her to lie about her age and say she was 15 instead of just 12. To her Nazi tormentors, the age difference meant she could work and was worth keeping alive.

The lie was whispered to me from a friendly writer two minutes before; she was a prisoner like me, and I just bravely repeated it, Kluger recalled. The SS man looked at me and said that I would be very small. The writer claimed boldly that I had strong legs, Look at her, she can work.

He shrugged his shoulders and accepted it, Kluger continued. I owe my life to a coincidence of few minutes and to a kind young woman, who I saw only once in my life. The rest of the transport to Theresienstadt that I arrived with was gassed in the next days.

Such haunting memories have long been passed on to new generations of German Jews as a means of honoring their past and safeguarding their future. But now, some leaders are concerned that some of the more than 1 million Muslim refugees that Germany accepted last year are anti-Semitic. This week, the centrist newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, published articles about two Jews who are debating whether to leave Germany.

Some of this hatred from refugees comes from young people who come from countries where hatred for Jews is widespread, Chancellor Angela Merkel warned earlier this month, adding that the new wave of anti-Semitism must be dealt with urgently, and has no place in German society.

Data curated by MooseRoots

A German expert has similar concerns.

Most Middle Eastern and African countries have fostered fervent anti-Semitism, said Professor Wolfgang Bock, an expert on national security at the Federal Academy for Security Policy. A large part of the Muslims living in European nations harbor deep-seated anti-Semitism as well.

A report in Tuesdays Die Welt, a leading German newspaper, indicated that anti-Semitic graffiti was seen by a visitor to Berlins Tempelhof airport, which is now being used to house refugees seeking asylum in Germany.

Die Welt reported that an Israeli Jew, wearing a skullcap, saw maps of the Middle East with Israel absorbed by its Arab neighbors. The visitor also saw a swastika and a Star of David next to 666, which represents the devil.

Theres been widespread criticism of Merkels open-door policy for refugees fleeing war zones, which Merkel asserts is Germanys obligation given its own role in creating so many refugees generations ago. Opponents say the country cant house and school the staggering influx of refugees, especially given their different cultural and religious backgrounds.

If the chancellor, who said the security of Israel is the raison detre of German policy, pursues a refugee policy that makes Jews anxious or threatened, this would be a great blow to her policy, Malte Lehming, opinion editor of Der Tagesspiegel, told FoxNews.com.

Lehming said Jews are leaving France because of anti-Semitism.

If the Jews start leaving Germany for the same reason, that would be the end of the chancellors government.

Norbert Lammert, the leader of the Bundestag, told the legislature when it marked the liberation of Auschwitz in 2011 that 20 percent of Germans harbored anti-Semitic sentiments. The number came from a study sponsored by the German government.

That is 20 percent more than we should have in Germany, Lammert said at the time.

Four years later, many Germans, including members of the Jewish community, fear a Europe-wide trend could mean the figure is rising.
Iran is poised to become one of the richest countries in the world -- and its potential for profit goes far beyond oil.

After years of economic sanctions and international isolation, the Islamic Republic stands to make an estimated $700 billion off its vast deposits of minerals -- such as copper, iron ore, zinc and lead.

"They are an incredibly mineral-rich nation," said Rebecca Keller, a science and technology analyst with the Texas-based global intelligence company, Stratfor.

"Theres potential for high-quality, fairly low-cost mining in Iran," Keller told FoxNews.com Wednesday, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tours Europe this week, signing business deals with Western countries clamoring to profit off its natural resources, including its mineral deposits.

"They are an incredibly mineral-rich nation."  Rebecca Keller, Stratfor

Iran has more than 3,000 active mines -- mostly privately owned -- that contain copper, iron ore and heavy rare earth elements, according to the website mining.com.

"They're everywhere," Keller said of Iran's minerals, noting the potential for mining near the Afghanistan border and through a ridge that runs down the middle of the country.

"Theyre also looking into exploiting rare earth elements, but theyre still in the early stages of this," Keller said of Tehran.

Companies from the oil sector to car making are jostling to take advantage of the opening of the country of nearly 80 million people. Most sanctions were dropped last week after Iran agreed with world powers on a plan to limit its nuclear capabilities.

Some business deals are ready to be inked, but others are still in negotiation as a few sanctions not related to the nuclear program remain in place, particularly by the U.S., on the trade of goods that could be used for military or intelligence purposes.

In Italy, the government and private companies signed more than a dozen accords with Iran covering the metals industry, oil services, rail transport and shipbuilding.

Irans Deputy Industry, Mine and Trade Minister, Mehdi Karbasian, said his country hopes to finalize investment plans worth about $5.4 billion during Rouhani's visit to the country.

According to Tasnim News Agency, the deals with Italy include joint investments in the steel production chain in southern Iran. Tehran also is expected to seal a contract with Italian and Chinese companies to carry out the second phase of Salco, Irans largest aluminum smelter plant, Trend News Agency reported.

At a press conference Wednesday in Rome, Rouhani invited American businessmen to join their European counterparts in investing in Iran and taking advantage of the new era of "win-win" collaboration after years of mutual losses.

"It's possible, but the key is in Washington, not in Tehran," he said. "At the same time today, if American investors and the heads of the American economy want to come to Iran and invest in my country, there are no problems from our point of view."

Rouhani, a relative moderate elected in 2013, flew to France later Wednesday and was meeting with Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron and a group of French business leaders.

While the potential mineral profits are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars, experts like Keller say it will likely take time before such wealth can be seen.

"Unlike oil -- which they have the ability to release into the market immediately -- its going to take awhile for these mining operations to scale up," Keller said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani invited American businessmen to join their European counterparts in investing in Iran as he wrapped up three days of multi-billion dollar deal-making in Italy by saying the lifting of European sanctions had opened a new era of "win-win" collaboration.

Rouhani heads next to Paris, where his originally scheduled visit was called off after the Nov. 13 attacks.

Rouhani told reporters that he and Pope Francis discussed the need for religious leaders to speak out against extremism and terrorism during their audience Tuesday. But in an apparent reference to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, Rouhani said freedom of expression "doesn't mean offending that which is sacred to other people's faith."

Francis was asked last year about the Charlie Hebdo attacks and suggested that a violent reaction could be expected when someone's faith was insulted. He said while violence must be condemned, anyone who insults his mother can expect to be punched.

Rouhani concurred and said Francis had told him the anecdote. While saying extremist violence must be condemned, "All religions are to be respected, their books and the millions of people who follow the faith," Rouhani said. Insulting them, he said, "creates division and doesn't help anyone."

Rouhani's visit was aimed at pushing Iran into a more prominent role on the world stage after the nuclear deal with Western powers ended most European economic sanctions on Tehran.

He said that Europe and the U.S. had lost out as a result of the sanctions, but that now European countries were in a position to not only recover their traditional trading relationship but improve on it. Italy signed some 14 agreements representing billions of euros in deals in areas such as energy, industrial machinery, shipbuilding and transportation.

Such a positive relationship could exist with the U.S. if Congress were to "end the tensions and hostility," Rouhani said.

"It's possible, but the key is in Washington, not in Tehran," he said. "At the same today, if American investors and the heads of the American economy, if they want to come to Iran and invest in my country, there are no problems from our point of view."

He added that it was in Washington's interest to no longer isolate Iran given the geopolitical reality of the region, saying it shouldn't be pressured by the Israeli and Jewish lobby, which he said "are very influential in the U.S."

"The Americans know well the important regional questions, that without Iranian presence, without the Iranian contribution, without Iranian opinion, these questions will not be resolved," he said. "The Middle East is a very sensitive, very delicate region. We hope that the Americans end the hostility and this enmity and rather than always look to the past let them look more to the future."
Please see bottom of story for an update.

While the United Nations waits for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to issue his latest report on curbing sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, a gadfly reform group has come up with its own radical prescription: take the monitoring and pursuit of the U.N. wrongdoers away from the world organization entirely.

Its time to take the entire function out of the hands of the [U.N.] Secretariat, declared Paula Donovan, co-director of a non-government organization named AIDS-Free World. Donovans group has been carrying out an aggressive, nearly year-long campaign, dubbed Code Blue, against peacekeeper sex crimes and how the U.N. handles them.

Donovan termed years of U.N. efforts so far to curb those abuses a stunning failure in all regards, and suggested instead that a small but high-level diversified board composed of judges, academics, military and police authorities and other knowledgeable experts (including women) do the policing and take cases directly to U.N. member states instead.

The expert group would constitute a kind of independent internal monitor, working alongside the U.N. bureaucracy at every level, in Donovans phrase, to watch for sexual crimes and abuse on a real-time basis.

"The U.N. has substantial privileges and immunities that allow it to shield its own people as well.  Brett Schaefer, of the Heritage Foundation

Whatever Ban himself proposes, the new Code Blue P.R. offensive is clearly intended to spark discussion about a critical U.N. problem: What to do when not only peacekeeper sexual abuse but other forms of criminality or negligence force the world organization to police itself -- something that, by and large, many experts overwhelmingly feel it has done badly, while efforts at reform have proceeded in fits and starts for the best part of a decade.

Its not just peacekeepers, observes Brett Schaefer, a U.N. expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Other people in the U.N. system are part of the problem as well. The U.N. has substantial privileges and immunities that allow it to shield its own people as well.

While skeptical about the Code Blue proposal itself, he felt that AIDS-Free World had put its finger on the heart of the problem: The U.N. feels enormous pressure to avoid accountability for the actions of those working for it.

By way of illustration, Donovan contrasted the new suggested approach with the cumbersome post-facto investigations involved in U.N. sexual abuse probes, which have frequently been blunted through bureaucratic indifference or outright obstruction and have ended, as Donovan sarcastically put it, in a travesty of justice and the same pantomime of remorse.

As she elaborated in a press release, The world is waiting to see whether member states will solve a catastrophe of the U.N.s own making. In our analysis, the crisis cannot be managed from within.

Just how the crusading board would work, how it would be selected -- beyond the fact that it would be done directly by U.N. member states, rather than by the U.N. bureaucracy -- and just exactly how its independent authority would work, Donovan and her co-director, Stephen Lewis, a onetime Canadian ambassador to the U.N. and former U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, did not say.

Indeed, Donovan claimed, we dont want to be too prescriptive about the measure, but rather put it forward to provoke discussion with [U.N.] member states -- clearly an attempt to put heat on, or steal thunder from, Bans regular February report on the topic, a ritual ever since he proclaimed a zero tolerance policy toward peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse in 2012.

As part of that provocation, the duo said that they had been circulating their proposal among a group of about 15 countries, including the U.S., Britain, Germany, Sweden, South Africa and even tiny Lichtenstein. According to Lewis, two governments -- he did not specify which -- had shown interest, while an anonymous third country had asked for a meeting.

One likely reason for the interest is that AIDS-Free World and its campaign have well-established bona fides as a conduit for U.N. insiders unhappy with the way the world organization has struggled with the sex-abuse problem so far.

Among other things, the Code Blue campaign has published internal U.N. documents that described what investigators called a culture of silence and enforcement avoidance among U.N. peacekeeping forces where sexual abuse is involved.

The campaign also unveiled internal emails that last December led an independent panel of jurists to rip specific U.N. officials for inaction and deliberate coverup in the probe of sex crimes against children by non-U.N. peacekeepers, in the Central African Republic.

The panel conclusions came in a 143-page report that offered its own solutions to the sex-abuse crisis and a strong recommendation that such crimes be treated as human rights abuses rather than violations of military discipline -- a key reason behind the torpor, in the panelists view.

Secretary General Ban has said he would take the panels recommendations under advisement, and they are almost surely going to be reflected in his own February report. Just when in February Bans document will appear, however, is still unclear.

His spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, told journalists yesterday that it should be coming out in the not-too-distant future. He added in response to a question from Fox News that the Secretary-General very much wants to see improvements as soon as possible, much before the end of his tenure -- which concludes on December 31.

No one doubts that to be true. The question is how much the secretary general, and U.N. member states themselves, are prepared to do about it, when measured against, among other things, the efforts required to keep the U.N.s huge peace-keeping machinery up and mostly running.

One major reason for the peacekeeping abuse crisis is the huge extent of U.N. peacekeeping itself, in vast areas of the world where law and order, economies and social structures have been battered or destroyed: some 16 missions, involving nearly 125,000 personnel and an annual budget for 2015-2016 of -- so far -- $8.27 billion. (Starting in 2016, the U.S. pays some 28.6 percent of the total bill, up from 28.4 percent for the previous three years.)

But another major reason is that the enforcement of penalties, and very often the investigations themselves, have largely been left up to the member states who provide the troops involved in the offenses, after filtering through an elaborate U.N. bureaucratic process -- the same member states that Code Blue wants to prod into more dramatic action.

The attitude of troop-producing countries is one major reason why the Heritage Foundations Schaefer, while he applauds the effort in principle, is skeptical about Code Blues chances for success with its initiative.

Additionally, he told Fox News, Its really difficult to establish an external body to oversee an intergovernmental organization. That concept in itself is unprecedented.

Even though a large part of the problem is that the U.N. is unwilling to hold itself to its own standards, a more fruitful avenue, he suggested, would be to pressure the U.N. to get really firm and send home entire units of peacekeeping troops when patterns of sexual abuse were detected, and also to withhold large, rather than token, amounts of the money it pays troop-contributing countries until it is sure that sexual offenders and other wrongdoers are truly being brought to justice.

For their part, U.N. peacekeeping officials themselves vow, as a spokesman put it, that the issue of abuses committed by peacekeepers -- whether working under U.N. authority or not -- is of the highest priority for the secretariat, the secretary general and the U.N. system as a whole.

The spokesman added that for quite some time, the secretary general has also been saying that dealing effectively with the issue cannot be left solely to the U.N., and that member states and troop contributing countries have to live up to their responsibility in this matter.

The spokesman asserted that in his upcoming February report, Ban would name specific countries whose troops had been involved in credible allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse. He also said that new six-month deadlines for investigation of alleged abuses by U.N. probers have been set; and that where troops or police were credibly suspected of such offenses, the payments that the U.N. makes to their countries of origin would be suspended -- albeit only for the individual involved.

Much else that Ban says he wants to do, however, involves more negotiating, either with the troop providers or the U.N. membership in general. That includes the installation of investigators in U.N. contingents to watch out for abuse, tougher procedures to vet troops for prior misconduct, and possible eviction of entire peacekeeping units, or their commanders, when egregious patterns of abuse occur.

Ever since Ban appointed his Central African Republic investigating panel last June, however, the U.N. says it has been greatly speeding up notifications to troop-supplying countries of allegations of abuse against their soldiers or police, and asking for the same six-month investigation deadlines that it applies to its own watchdogs.

In response to a question from Fox News, however, a spokesman for U.N. peacekeeping said he did not have the exact number of notifications of sexual abuse that have been issued since June to hand.

Update: After this story was published, a U.N. peacekeeping spokesperson told Fox News that since July 1, 2015, troop contributing countries have been informed 24 times of sexual exploitation and/or abuse allegations against their personnel, and have been asked to investigate. The tally for the entire year is 34. In each case, the country was asked to complete an investigation within six months.

George Russell is Editor-at-Large of Fox News. He is reachable on Twitter at @GeorgeRussell and on Facebook at Facebook.com/George.Russell
Seeking "revenge," Russian forces stormed a Syrian town on the border with Turkey hunting for the attacker who claimed he shot and killed the pilot of a downed Russian jet, state media reported Monday.

A Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down the Russian aircraft near the Turkish border north of Latakia, Syria on Nov. 24, a senior U.S. official tells Fox News. Soon afterwards, Turkish citizen Alparslan Celik said in a video that he killed the pilot on the ground because Russia had been dropping bombs minutes before the jet was downed.

"There is no place for a person who has bombed civilian Turkmens every day," Celik said, according to Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News. He reportedly added, "Reprisal is the most natural right."

Russia claims special forces rescued the other man on the jet, a navigator.

State media report the gunman is in the town of Rabia, in Latakia province, which Syrian government forces recently recaptured from rebel fighters.

Russian president Vladimir Putin's government did not make clear what would happen to Celik if soldiers found him, but they were looking to "take revenge," according to state media. Previously, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova ordered Turkey to "take immediate steps to apprehend Alparslan Celik and his accomplices and bring them to justice for the murder of the Russian pilot."

The nearly five-year Syrian conflict that began in 2011 with protests against President Bashar al-Assad's rule, has morphed into an all-out war that has killed a quarter-million and displaced millions.

Fox News' Jennifer Griffin and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Police in Grenada say a suspect has been charged with the machete attack on a U.S. couple that left a Georgia woman dead.

The Royal Grenada Police Force identify the suspect as 27-year-old Dave Martin Benjamin. A police statement doesn't specify the charges. Benjamin is scheduled to appear before a judge Wednesday on the Caribbean island.

Martin is suspected in the machete attack on Jessica Colker and her husband, Brian Melito along a remote beach on the southeast of the island. Authorities have not disclosed a suspected motive in the attack that killed the 39-year-old physician's assistant who lived in Atlanta.

Police said earlier that Martin was convicted of robbery and burglary in 2009 and of a sex offense in 2013. He got out of prison in November.

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Appetite For Sub Sandwiches Drives Strong Unit Growth For Jersey Mikes

January 27, 2016 // Franchising.com // MANASQUAN, N.J.  Jersey Mikes Subs, known for its authentic fresh sliced/fresh grilled subs, continued its strong growth in 2015, opening 197 new locations around the country, and exceeding the 1,000 unit mark.

Following its successful recipe of deliberate, well-considered expansion, Jersey Mikes has more than doubled in size in just three years. Started in 1956, the sub chain expects to double in size again by 2019.

While weve seen another year of substantial growth, we remain focused on the right growth  finding franchise partners who are excellent operators and share our passion for serving a sub above, said Hoyt Jones, president, Jersey Mikes Franchise Systems.

Last year, for the second year in a row, the company was named the #1 fastest growing chain in the Nations Restaurant News Top 100. Jersey Mikes was also named the fastest-growing among larger restaurant chains, according to Technomics 2015 Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report.

In 2015, Jersey Mikes continued attracting experienced franchisees, awarding 97 territories representing nearly 200 restaurants. More than 70 percent of the territories awarded went to existing owners, the first time that multi-unit operators outnumbered single-unit franchisees in the Jersey Mikes system. New territories, including Mobile, Ala., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Albany, NY, came on board.

Jersey Mikes also continued seeing success with its non-traditional development strategy, awarding and opening its first casino location at the popular Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. The company also opened several university sites on New Jersey campuses. Additionally, in the first half of 2016, Jersey Mikes expects to open at Orlando International Airport, which joins other travel sites including Newark (NJ) Liberty International Airport, McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Amtraks 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.

The growth is fueled by passionate Jersey Mikes fans who crave their subs made Mikes Way with the freshest vegetables  onions, lettuce and tomatoes  topped off with an exquisite zing of the juice  red wine vinegar and olive oil blended to perfection. Jersey Mikes premium meats and cheeses are sliced on the spot, piled high on in-store baked bread and served up with a helping of neighborly banter from a dedicated and high-energy team.

CEO Peter Cancro started the company at age 17, before he was even legally able to slice a sub. The company remains committed to making a difference in the communities it serves. Since 2010, Jersey Mikes locations throughout the country have raised nearly $14 million for worthy local charities and have distributed more than 1.5 million free sub sandwiches to help numerous causes. In 2015, the companys 5th Annual Jersey Mikes Month of Giving in March raised more than $3 million for 150 local charities throughout the country.

About Jersey Mikes

Jersey Mikes, a fast-casual sub sandwich franchise with more than 1,500 locations open and under development nationwide, believes that making a sub sandwich and making a difference can be one and the same. Jersey Mikes offers A Sub Above, serving authentic fresh sliced subs on freshly baked bread  the same recipe it started with in 1956  and is passionate about giving back to its local communities. For more information, please visit www.jerseymikes.com or follow us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/jerseymikes) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/jerseymikes).

SOURCE Jersey Mikes

Contact:

Kyle Potvin

Principal

Splash Communications, LLC

O: (603) 893-1707

M: (917) 838-4500

E: kpotvin@splashllc.com

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Holiday Inn Hotel Opens In Downtown Houston

January 27, 2016 // Franchising.com // ATLANTA  InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the worlds leading hotel companies, announces the opening of the newly-converted 212-room Holiday Inn Houston Downtown hotel in Houston, Texas. This is the first Holiday Inn hotel located in the downtown area of the city and joins theCrowne Plaza Houston-Downtown hotel and the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Houston-Downtown Convention Center hotel, already located nearby. The hotel boasts a second floor terrace with a wonderful view of Houstons Downtown Skyline and is conveniently located near Houstons Metrorail.

Eric Lent, Vice President, Holiday Inn Brand, The Americas, IHG said: We are delighted to expand the Holiday Inn brand to downtown Houston. It is a strong market for business travel given its proximity to some of the areas big businesses, and we are confident that guests staying here will find that the propertys amenities and service help them balance the demands of business travel with an enjoyable and relaxing stay.

The Holiday Inn brand opened the doors of its first hotel more than 60 years ago and since then has been making travel more enjoyable for generations of travelers all over the world. Whether on the journey of a lifetime, a family vacation or business, guests know they can expect the contemporary design, modern amenities, and warm, welcoming service that distinguish the Holiday Inn brand.

Holiday Inn hotels are designed to provide a welcoming and sociable environment for business travelers spending time away from home. Amenities including free Wi-Fi, easily accessible outlets throughout guestrooms, ample meeting space and convenient open public areas ideal for collaboration or post-meeting relaxation help travelers stay productive and accomplish their goals in a warm atmosphere, making business travel about more than just work.

The Holiday Inn Houston Downtown hotel also includes a fully-equipped fitness center overlooking the hotels terrace and Burger Theory, the hotels on-site restaurant and bar which offers various casual dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Kids 12 and younger eat free when ordering from the kids menu in the hotel restaurant and accompanied by a dining adult.

Donato Pinierio, General Manager, said: "With our close proximity to the Theater District and the George R. Brown Convention Center, and convenient access to a number of big businesses such as Chevron, Deloitte and JP Morgan Chase, as well as Houstons Metrorail, we anticipate our hotel will quickly become a favorite choice of business and convention travelers visiting the area.

The hotel, located at 1616 Main Street is owned by HDT Hotels LLC and managed by Pathfinder Development. The Holiday Inn brand is part of IHGs diverse family of brands in nearly 100 countries and territories. The scale and diversity of the IHG family of brands means that its hotels can meet guests needs whatever the occasion  whether an overnight getaway, a business trip, a family celebration or a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The Holiday Inn brand participates in IHG Rewards Club. The industrys first and largest hotel rewards program is free, and guests can enroll at IHGRewardsClub.com, by downloading the IHG App, by calling 1-888-211-9874 or by inquiring at the front desk of any of IHGs more than 5,000 hotels worldwide. The hotel also participates in IHG Green Engage and offers unique programs to ensure sustainability.

About the Holiday Inn brand

With 1,196 hotels worldwide, Holiday Inn is the most widely recognized lodging brand in the world and has helped millions of travelers discover the joy of travel since its inception in 1952. Designed to meet the needs of both business and leisure travelers, Holiday Inn hotels deliver memorable experiences through warm and welcoming service, contemporary design that blends the familiar with the new, and a sense of comfort unique to the brand and its iconic green sign. At Holiday Inn hotels, guests can find amenities to help them work and play, including full-service restaurants where Kids Eat Free, meeting and business facilities, bright swimming pools and comfortable lounges all designed to help guests relax and refresh, making travel more enjoyable for all. For more information about the Holiday Inn brand, visitwww.holidayinn.com or call 1-888-HOLIDAY. Find us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/holidayinn or Facebook www.Facebook.com/holidayinnhotels.

About IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group)

IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) [LON:IHG, NYSE:IHG (ADRs)] is a global organisation with a broad portfolio of hotel brands, including InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, HUALUXE Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts, Hotel Indigo, EVEN Hotels, Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites andCandlewood Suites.

IHG franchises, leases, manages or owns more than 5,000 hotels in nearly 100 countries, with more than 1,300 hotels in its development pipeline. IHG also manages IHG Rewards Club, the worlds first and largest hotel loyalty programme with more than 90 million members worldwide.

InterContinental Hotels Group PLC is the Groups holding company and is incorporated in Great Britain and registered in England and Wales. More than 350,000 people work across IHGs hotels and corporate offices globally.

Visit www.ihg.com for hotel information and reservations and www.ihgrewardsclub.com for more on IHG Rewards Club. For our latest news, visit: www.ihg.com/media and follow us on social media at: www.twitter.com/ihg, www.facebook.com/ihg and www.youtube.com/ihgplc.

SOURCE IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group)

Media Contacts:

Jordan Worrall

Holiday Inn Brand

jordan.worrall@ihg.com

+1(770) 604-5010

Shelby Lits

IHG

shelby.lits@ihg.com

+1(770) 604-8343

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Romanos Macaroni Grill Says 'Ciao' to Jeddah

Third location in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues chains international growth.

January 27, 2016 // Franchising.com // HOUSTON  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia recently welcomed its third Romanos Macaroni Grill, and its first in the city of Jeddah.

One of the worlds most popular Italian restaurant brands, Macaroni Grill officially opened its newest restaurant in Saudi Arabia on Dec. 27 on Thaliya Street, opposite Tahliya Mall in Jeddah. The restaurant opened to rave reviews thanks to its authentic Italian menu, welcoming atmosphere and excellent service.

Tarfeeh (a Sedco Holding company) is the exclusive franchisee of Macaroni Grill in Saudi Arabia. The franchisee has implemented an aggressive expansion strategy that has resulted in remarkable growth over the past two years. The company also operates two popular Macaroni Grill locations in Riyadh, and there are plans for additional expansion throughout the Kingdom.

I am confident that with the opening of Macaroni Grill in Jeddah, we will bring a whole new dining experience to the Italian restaurant category, said Kamran Khan, Tarfeehs Vice President Business Development & Marketing. We intend to expand the brand to all the important regions of the country, which will also create good job opportunities for Saudi youth in this exciting and growing industry. We are very keen on hiring Saudis and providing them opportunities to build a career in the hospitality sector.

From bronze-cut Italian pastas with seasonal ingredients to grilled steak, seafood, hand-stretched pizzas and flatbreads and decadent desserts, a visit to Macaroni Grill is truly an affordable indulgence. The restaurant also offers a complete children's menu.

We are extremely pleased to be introducing the people of Jeddah to the Macaroni Grill brand, said James Deyo III, Executive Vice President of Franchising and Development at Romanos Macaroni Grill. Once again, Tarfeeh has done a wonderful job in constructing the new restaurant, and we know they will continue their excellent track record of providing outstanding customer service and the best Italian dining experience possible.

Following the Jeddah opening, Khan commented on his expectations for the continued growth of Macaroni Grill throughout the region.

As the economy and, in particular, the restaurant business continues to grow tremendously in Saudi Arabia, we foresee more expansion opportunities for Macaroni Grill and we will make sure that the brand grows successfully across all major provinces and cities of the Kingdom, said Khan.

Macaroni Grill has grown to nearly 150 company-owned locations in 33 states, plus 26 franchise locations in the U.S. and 11 other countries (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Germany, Taiwan, Japan and the Middle East (Egypt, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman). The company generates more than $300 million in U.S. sales and another $70 million through its franchise operations.

More information about Tarfeeh and Macaroni Grill may be found at tarfeehksa.com and macgrillksa.com, respectively.

About Romano's Macaroni Grill

Romanos Macaroni Grill is an Italian restaurant brand founded in 1988 by Phil Romano, one of the industrys leading innovators. Inspired by the Italian country cuisine served in Romanos grandmothers kitchen, Macaroni Grill blends Italian traditions with progressive culinary inspiration from all regions of Italy and the U.S. in a polished casual atmosphere.

SOURCE Romano's Macaroni Grill

Contact:

Ladd Biro

Champion Management

Founder & Principal

O: 972.930.9933

C: 817.675.3499

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Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said in a pair of television interviews Wednesday that Trump, a billionaire businessman, "knows when to walk away from a bad deal."

"They think they can toy with Mr. Trump," Lewandowski said of Fox News on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "Mr. Trump doesn't play games."

The decision comes after a showdown between the network and GOP candidate over who should moderate Thursday night's debate. Trump has been in a feud with Fox News host and scheduled debate moderator Megyn Kelly since the first Republican primary debate, when Kelly took Trump to task over derogatory statements he'd made in the past aimed at women.

While Trump has threatened to skip debates in the past and not gone through with the threat, a sarcastic statement from Fox appeared to push him over the edge.

That statement said the leaders of Iran and Russia "both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president" and that "Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings."

Trump, who has called Kelly a "lightweight" and biased, told reporters at an Iowa press conference Wednesday night that he would be holding a fundraising event in Iowa at the same time as the debate to benefit veterans and wounded soldiers instead.

While Fox questioned how "Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute," Lewandowski said the decision shows Trump is a leader who "understands when a bad deal is in front of him and is ready to walk away from a bad deal, something that this country should be able to do."

"At the end of the day," he added on MSNBC, "Mr. Trump is going to have the last laugh."
Public debate about the vaccine  and, possibly, the low levels of vaccine use among adolescents  likely stems from the virus sexual transmission, said Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center virologist Dr. Denise Galloway. Galloway made critical discoveries linking HPV to cervical and other cancers and her laboratory helped lay the groundwork that made the vaccines development possible.

[The low uptake] has to do with it being considered a vaccine to protect against a sexually transmitted infection, thats likely the case, said Galloway in a previous interview. Even though hepatitis B should fall in that same category, its been portrayed more as protecting against a liver disease.

Galloway and her colleagues at Fred Hutch, which is among the NCI-designated cancer centers issuing the statement in support of HPV vaccination, want parents and adolescents to think about the HPV vaccine in the light of cancer, not sex.

I think people in the United States are leery of vaccines or they dont trust pharma or they dont want to talk about sex, Galloway said. So something that could prevent cancer is not having the impact that it should.

Proactive steps to combat a public health threat

Even though so few U.S. families are following recommendations for this particular vaccine, it is still having a positive effect: HPV infection rates among adolescent girls dropped from nearly 12 percent in the years before the vaccine was routinely available to about 5 percent after the vaccine was introduced in 2006.

The CDC also estimates that every year, 27,000 men and women are diagnosed with HPV-driven cancers. The majority of these diseases can be prevented with currently available HPV vaccines.

The HPV vaccine is an amazing public health advance, but it doesnt guarantee eradication of HPV. Its important to remember that the vaccine works best in those who havent been infected with the virus, which means, essentially, people who are not yet sexually active, said Dr. Gary Gilliland, president, and director of Fred Hutch.

The cancer centers consensus statement arose from a summit held at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston last November to discuss concerns about low HPV vaccination rates in the U.S. and ways to improve uptake. Experts from more than half of NCI-designated cancer centers, the NCI, CDC, and American Cancer Society met at the event, starting conversations to develop the shared endorsement for HPV vaccination.

The statement also echoes the spirit of President Barack Obamas recent call for a moonshot to cure cancer. In 2013, the Presidents Cancer Panel, comprised of expert advisers to the president on cancer-related topics, chose to focus its yearly report and recommendations on improving HPV vaccine uptake.

The Presidents Cancer Panel applauds the NCI-designated cancer centers for issuing this consensus statement urging HPV vaccination for the prevention of cancer in support of the Panels recommendations, Dr. Barbara Rimer, chair of the panel, said in an email. We are confident that if HPV vaccination for girls and boys is made a public health priority, hundreds of thousands will be protected from these HPV-associated diseases and cancers over their lifetimes.

Cancer center representatives hope that by joining together, they will send a stronger message to the U.S. public that the vaccine is a safe and important means to prevent potentially deadly cancers.

Every day we delay, that means more people are going to get infections that in the future could end up causing cancers that could have been prevented, said Dr. Melinda Wharton, director of the CDCs National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, at the summit. There really is great urgency to stop this from happening.
On Wednesday, Carter accepted the first honorary Hutch Award on behalf of his grandfather. Fred Hutch President and Director Dr. Gary Gilliland bestowed the award during a ceremony and luncheon at Seattles Safeco Field.

For the trip, Carter carried a letter from the man whos simply called Papa by his family. Since last summer, the former president, 91, has been receiving immunotherapy infusions every three weeks to attack his melanoma.

Immunotherapy harnesses the bodys immune system to fight disease and carries far fewer side effects than conventional cancer treatments. Its a cornerstone of ongoing research at the Hutch where scientists have used immunotherapy to increase survival rates for patients with leukemia and other blood cancers  and have shown its promise to fuel the first cures for some of the most challenging solid tumors, including lung, pancreatic and ovarian cancers.

Gigantic blessings

The blessings hes had in his life are incredible, Jason Carter said in an interview. And this [blessing] that he got as a result of the research  that we all got as a result of the research thats being done there  is a gigantic one.

President Carter revealed in August that melanoma had been detected in his liver and brain. That month, he had surgery to remove a small mass from his liver, and he began receiving pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug. In December, he said his latest brain scan did not reveal any signs of the original cancer spots nor any new ones.

All I can tell you is the way that it feels on the inside of this family. And the way that it feels is its really a remarkable thing, Jason Carter said.

When people think about cancer treatments, they think about some of the horrible side effects of serious chemo. To avoid that is remarkable. And the idea that our own bodies can be turned against this disease is powerful, he added.

During his Hutch tour, Carter spent time in the lab of Dr. Beverly Torok-Storb, a transplantation biologist, and he spoke with clinical researcher Dr. Sylvia Lee, who's leading a TIL immunotherapy trial for patients with melanoma.

As for Jimmy Carters current health, his grandson reports that he feels good and remains amazed on some level at the ability to get treated. The infusions cause some fatigue that requires a couple of days to feel 100 percent normal.

No signs of slowing

But the former president has maintained a rigorous schedule. Each morning, he rises at 5 to read the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He has finished numerous paintings and hes writing a book, his grandson said. During the treatments, he also continued his longtime  and physical  service with Habitat for Humanity.

Obviously, nobody knows whats next, but he feels great. He hasnt slowed down at all, Jason Carter said. He made this big announcement [last year] that he was going to pull back or slow down his schedule but nobody has seen any real evidence of that.

I think, the way that he feels, he has surprised himself even.

Jason Carter, the Democratic nominee for Georgia governor in 2014, now chairs the board of trustees for the Carter Center, a nonprofit founded in 1982 by Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter. The organization has led a coalition to reduce incidence of Guinea worm disease from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 126 reported cases in 2014, according to the World Health Organization. Carter Center members also have observed 101 elections in 39 countries to help foster democracies.

The Carter way

As part of his role, Jason Carter recently traveled to Myanmar to monitor that nations historic parliamentary elections. Early in his career, after completing a political science degree at Duke University, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to a village on South Africa's border from 1998 to 2000. (His great-grandmother, Lillian Carter, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in India from 1966 to 1968 while in her late 60s.)

What Jason and his grandfather have in common is the dirt-under-your-nails type of service, said Thomas Bates, who roomed with the younger Carter at Duke from 1993 to 1997. Bates is special counsel and director of government affairs at Fred Hutch.

Bates has seen both the former president and his college buddy in action in the field.

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Bates and the two Carters headed to a tree-planting project at a park outside the Mile High City. Well-intentioned rangers had already dug the hole and inserted the baby tree  with burlap still covering the root ball, Bates recalled.

When [Jimmy Carter] got there, he said: Thats not how I do things. And also, if you dont take the burlap off of this tree, it will die. Then, he literally pulls the tree out of the hole, pulls the burlap off, re-digs the hole and plants it himself, Bates said.

To me, thats the Carter way of service.
Wearable Robots, Exoskeletons Market Growing Swiftly Owing To High Demand In Healthcare Applications Till 2021: Radiant Insights

The wearable robots, exoskeletons market stood around USD 16.5 million in 2014. It is set to attain about USD 2.1 billion by 2020

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The wearable robots, exoskeletons market stood around USD 16.5 million in 2014. It is set to attain about USD 2.1 billion by 2020. Demand for exoskeletons in the healthcare industry around the globe is the most significant factor, driving market demand. Novel technologies from various sellers offer fully- operational products.

This augurs well for the wearable robots, exoskeletons market and drives its incomes. These devices leverage improved technology and favour longer battery lives, and quality & light weight materials. They are also utilized by the physically disabled to walk & move.

Access full research report: http://www.radiantinsights.com/research/wearable-robots-exoskeletons-market-shares-market-strategies-and-market-forecasts-2015-to-2021

Wearable robots, exoskeletons are available in various designs and have multiple features. They help industrial workers in lifting weights. They also display other functions. These devices help in learning lost movements and assist in walking upright. Exoskeletons aid aging people to walk post strokes.

These provide quality treatment and expansion base to clinical settings. Exoskeletons are estimated to execute a prime function in production, ship construction, and warehouse administration. The wearable robots, exoskeletons market is expanding swiftly for industrial applications.

Related Reports by Radiant Insights:

o Hip and Knee Orthopedic Surgical Implants Market

o Abdominal Surgical Robots Market

o Hip and Knee Orthopedic Surgical Robots Market

About Radiant Insight

Radiant Insights is a platform for companies looking to meet their market research and business intelligence requirements. We assist and facilitate organizations and individuals procure market research reports, helping them in the decision making process. We have a comprehensive collection of reports, covering over 40 key industries and a host of micro markets.

Contact:

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Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Radiant Insights Inc.

United States

Phone: 1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: sales@radiantinsights.com

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For more information about us, please visit http://www.radiantinsights.com/research/wearable-robots-exoskeletons-market-shares-market-strategies-and-market-forecasts-2015-to-2021

Contact Info:

Name: Saurav Chakravorty

Organization: Radiant Insights

Address: 28 2nd Street

Phone: 14153490058

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/wearable-robots-exoskeletons-market-growing-swiftly-owing-to-high-demand-in-healthcare-applications-till-2021-radiant-insights/102076

Release ID: 102076

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The Hansen Injury Law Firm Opens Boise-Area Office in Meridian

Offering all-inclusive representation to accident and injury victims, new office is staffed by two experienced attorneys who personally understand clients' needs, Hansen Injury Law Firm reports

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The Hansen Injury Law Firm has opened a Boise-area office in Meridian at 2484 N Stokesberry Place, #150. Staffed by experienced attorneys Matthew J. Hansen and Ken Christensen, the Hansen Injury Law Firm Meridian office provides comprehensive counsel and assistance to those injured through the faults of others. With founder and top Idaho Personal Injury Attorney Hansen having recently been named to the National Trial Lawyers' prestigious "40 Under 40" list, the opening of the new office will give people throughout the region access to valuable legal services that will ensure their interests are protected as they recover from their injuries.

"We're happy to announce that our new office in Meridian is now open and accepting clients," Hansen reported, "With Ken and I having both been involved in serious accidents ourselves, we understand how frightening and disruptive such events can be. We stand ready to provide everything injured people in the Boise area need, from dealing with insurance companies to fighting fiercely for the compensation they are owed. All that it takes to get started is a free, no-obligation consultation, and we never charge fees unless we are victorious."

While he was still in college, Hansen Injury Law Firm attorney Ken Christensen was struck in his car by a driver who had heedlessly run a red light. Assuming that the driver's insurance provider would live up to its obligations, Christensen tried to be as solicitous and cooperative as possible, only to discover that the company seemed determined to pay out as little as possible.

That experience instilled in Christensen a drive to help others who faced similar problems, a commitment that has made him a perfect fit for the firm founded by Hansen, who had an analogous story of his own to tell. Together, the two Boise Car Accident Lawyers have since written "The Idaho Accident Book," a resource available for free at the Hansen Injury Law Firm website that provides practical, concrete information about what residents of the state should do after an accident of any kind.

Unlike most other legal practices in the area, the Hansen Injury Law Firm focuses solely on accidents and personal injuries and handles every last detail of each case for clients. With an experienced, devoted Boise Personal Injury Attorney seeing to everything from the payment of medical bills to car repairs and negotiations with insurers, Hansen Injury Law Firm clients are able to focus entirely on getting better.

The opening of the firm's conveniently located Boise-area office in Meridian comes directly on the heels of founder Hansen's being named to the National Trial Lawyer's influential "40 Under 40" list that highlights the top young attorneys nationwide. Those interested in what the Hansen Injury Law Firm has to offer can learn more at the practice's website, where a convenient form allows visitors to submit details of their own cases to be personally reviewed by Hansen himself.

About Hansen Injury Law Firm:

With energetic, comprehensive counsel and service that frees clients to focus on recovering, the Hansen Injury Law Firm is one of Idaho's top accident and personal injury practices.

For more information about us, please visit https://www.hanseninjurylawfirm.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Matthew J. Hansen

Organization: Hansen Injury Law Firm

Address: 2848 N Stokesberry Place #150 Meridian

Phone: 208-577-5300

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/the-hansen-injury-law-firm-opens-boise-area-office-in-meridian/102110

Release ID: 102110

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New Sections for Online PhD UK Programs The Online PhD UK Programs website is a free resource geared towards International students looking to take advantage of the flexibility and support of universities around the world without compromising quality and high standards. View as PDF Print View January 26, 2016 (FPRC) --Students are advised on wide spectrum of topics including but not limited to information about admission requirements, desired academic marks, the selection process and duration of the selected program as well as available funding and scholarships. The website offers support and help to prepare the student for the application process of the different institutes. It is a valuable tool in helping the student select the right program for their individual needs and fields of study.



The new additions to the Online PhD UK programs website will offer insight on International scholarships and funding offered to students around the globe, as well as the individual process to acquire the scholarship at the institute of their choice.



Access to the available information will deepen the understanding of the traditional PhD programs as well as the long distance PhD programs, and help better understand the differences to make the best decision for the student. It allows the student to see the whole picture, weighing the pro and cons of every selection.



The new sections will also offer extensive pool of information on PhD programs offered around the world to help create a better understanding of the resources and education available to the student not only in their home country but also around the world.





About Online PhD UK Programs

Online PhD UK Programs is an online company established by Mr. David Long, offering free information and tools to PhD student looking to further their education through distance PhD programs offered by British institutes.



About Online PhD Programs website.

Online PhD UK Program website aims to provide current and up to date information about distance PhD programs offered world wide in select institutes as well as PhD virtual learning, and prepare the student to make the best selection for them, while offering the best tools and support required.





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02079555566 Recent Press Releases By The Same User
New Thriller Portrays Cyber Warfare as the Next Terror Threat

The digital revolution is on. Technology has generated many fabulous enhancements to daily life, but new dangers are becoming ever present. The incidents of "hacking", cyber attacks or penetrations, into both government and corporate databases are on the rise. Experts have warned of these ever-increasing vulnerabilities. But what are people and corporations supposed to do?

January 26, 2016 (FPRC) -- Do you think your personal information is safe from a cyber attack? Do you think your government or a corporation can protect you from an incident of "hacking"? Is our financial system safe?



Sadly, according to many experts, including those interviewed on the PBS News Hour program, October 2015, the answer to all of these is probably not. Yet, more and more, sensitive personal information is stored online or held by companies that may be subject to a cyber attack.



In the new spy thriller, The Secret Keepers by Geoffrey M. Gluckman, the vulnerabilities of cyber penetrations are portrayed in a mesmerizing and twisting tale.



In this sequel to the award-winning thriller, Deadly Exchange (2007), Sara Nardell returns with Frank Revere and join Peter Wellington's elite special operations force, AEGIS, all now under the auspices of the United Nations.



Sara and Peter meet with a man telling a tale of an upscale brothel in the heart of Manhattan, a front for girls held hostage for the sex trade. Sara soon discovers a world rampant with sex trafficking from Vancouver to China.



What begins as a simple rescue leads to a race to prevent a financial meltdown of Western markets by cyber attack. At the core of it, shrouded in deception, hides a Chinese government-sanctioned group, known only as The Elders.



Like sediment stirred in a stream, deeper layers only further muddy the waters of truth...and increase peril for all.



-30-





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877-778-6793

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Building Set Toy Company Click-A-Brick Pleased With Increase In US Toy Sales Last Year

The group behind building set toy company Click-A-Brick says they are pleased to see a report about the growth in toy sales last year, saying it mirrors what the company experienced itself. The team also says they are confident this year will see strong sales.

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The team at building set toy company Click-A-Brick say a reported increase in toy sales in the United States last year is promising and matches the growth they've seen in their own numbers last year. The report has them hopeful that 2016 will continue that momentum across the industry.

Market research company NPD Group recently released toy sales figures from 2015 and revealed that US toy sales increased by 6.7 percent to $19.4 billion last year. This increase was more than the 6.2 percent increase the NPD Group had predicted for 2015.

Nine out of the 11 toy subcategories the market research firm identifies showed growth, with only "Arts and Crafts" and "Youth Electronics" declining by 4.3 and 4.9 percent, respectively. Categories that showed an increase included the "Building Sets" category, which was a welcome sign for the Click-A-Brick team. One of the fastest growing segments last year was licensed toys associated with movies, outperforming the market with a growth rate of 9.4 percent.

"The toy industry had an incredible year and, as is typically the case, there isn't one reason," Juli Lennett, the NPD Group's US toy industry analyst said in a statement.

The growth seen by the toy industry last year is a good sign for businesses of all sizes, Click-A-Brick Co-Founders Jason Smith and Georg de Gorostiza say, and it mirrors the growth in sales that Click-A-Brick itself saw in 2015.

"Obviously we're pleased with any sign of growth in the toy industry, but we're especially pleased to see that building sets saw an increase," Smith said. "Our own sales increased in 2015 and we're buoyed by the numbers we see for the overall toy industry. It's no surprise that movie-related toys did well again last year with the release of films like Jurassic World and Star Wars. But, a healthy, growing industry is good for toy companies in general, not just the ones that have licensing deals. We had an incredible 2015 and we're hoping to see more growth both in the industry and specifically for Click-A-Brick this year."

The company is currently getting ready for the release of its next set, tentatively slated for next month, and has plans this year to also release some motorized sets and pursue licensing deals. With movie-related toys having shown the most growth last year, licensing deals are highly lucrative. However, Smith says, most big movie franchises seem to procure deals with Lego, meaning they are already have licensing deals with a building block company and may not be able to issue a license to a company offering a similar line of toys.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.clickabricktoys.net/

Contact Info:

Name: Rob Swystun

Organization: Click-A-Brick Toys LLC

Phone: 855-976-3664

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/building-set-toy-company-click-a-brick-pleased-with-increase-in-us-toy-sales-last-year/102162

Release ID: 102162

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Education Advocacy Recorded The Success Rate of 93%, or The Highest Success Rate In the UK This Week

Education Advocacy is a UK-based company that represents parents with children that have special educational needs. They offer guidance and any type of legal support to parents from the whole UK. The main goal is to help to the children with special needs in education.

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Education Advocacy is an important company for parents with children that have special educational needs. In any other way, this company isn't needed nor the services they offer. The company is constantly advancing and making its relation with its client stronger and better than ever.

United Kingdom, Jan 26, 2016

Melksham: According to the latest survey, conducted by the government of the United Kingdom, Education Advocacy has the highest success rate of all companies that offer the same type of service. The success rate is 93% and 80% of the cases ends up without going to the tribunal, of course, in the favor of a client. In addition, the aforementioned survey, was conducted this week on the internet.

After the survey, a spokesperson of the company said "We are glad to share our success with the world. However, we are not going to stop here. 100% are very close and we are going to reach them eventually."

Recently, Education Advocacy announced that they will perform rigorous tests on their employees in order to determine the efficiency of the whole team. In addition, they announced that they will be hiring new employees, later this year!

This success rate is possible due to the fact only the best caseworkers have the opportunity to work for this company. All of them are well-educated and they must keep their record clean and success rate high. You can check the testimonials of satisfied clients on the website of the company.

The government of the United Kingdom claims that this and similar companies are important for proper education of the future population. In order to help parents, the government will conduct additional surveys and test the performance of the aforementioned companies. All companies that have low, success rate are going to be assisted so they can increase the success rate.

Education Advocacy announced that they are planning additional changes in order to make their success rate even higher. After all, 100% are very close and definitely reachable.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.educationadvocacy.co.uk

Contact Info:

Name: Bogdan Popa

Organization: Education Advocacy

Address: Kingsbury House-Kingsbury Square, Melksham, Wiltshire, SN12 6HL.

Phone: 03303334130

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/education-advocacy-recorded-the-success-rate-of-93-or-the-highest-success-rate-in-the-uk-this-week/102118

Release ID: 102118

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LA Yacht Charters Launches Redesigned Multi Media Website

LA Yacht Charters is the number one rated yacht rental provider by customers, and has just launched a new website designed to make it an intuitive experience for visitors.

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Taking a yacht out on the beautiful Los Angeles Harbor, or even visiting the stunning Channel Islands, is one of the dream images people have in their heads of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. As such, many people want to make this dream come true as part of a unique holiday experience. LA Yacht Charters specializes in helping people achieve this affordably and in style, and has just redesigned their website to attract even more clients organically through search engines.

The new website is aesthetically pleasing, using high quality imagery of their stunning vessels, easy to read plain English descriptions, and a list of events and occasions catered for in order to help people find all the information they could need. Beneath this presentation is an infrastructure designed to maximize the way the site picks up on people's organic searches online through major search engines, so individuals can find the best provider when undertaking a search.

Individuals will then be led through the site (http://yachtrentallosangeles.com/newport-beach-yacht-rentals/), which features full contact details and an address so individuals can get in touch via email or phone, turning that search into a real dream holiday.

A spokesperson for LA Yacht Charters explained, "LA Yacht Charters is one of the most popular providers of luxury yacht experiences in Orange County, and while we have thrived on personal recommendations for years, we realised that now more people will go to Google than a friend to find what they're looking for. As such, we wanted to make sure our online game was the best it could be, so that individuals who have never heard of us before can discover and choose our services for their cruising needs."

About LA Yacht Charters: LA Yacht Charters offer premium yachts for special occasions, holiday parties, corporate events, and even adventures out to sea to go snorkelling and scuba diving to interact with wild fish. They are the premier provider of yacht rentals in Los Angeles and Orange County. They provide Yacht Rental Los Angeles for a cruise around the stunning Los Angeles Harbor, or to visit the Channel Islands.

LA Yacht Charters

1000 Bristol St N #17

Newport Beach, CA 92660

(949) 432-6282

For more information about us, please visit http://yachtrentallosangeles.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Michael Moreno

Organization: LA Yacht Charters

Phone: (949) 432-6282

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/la-yacht-charters-launches-redesigned-multi-media-website/102185

Release ID: 102185

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Net Lawman Launches Online Legal Document Assembly Software

Net Lawman has launched web-based legal document assembly software, enabling individuals and small business owners to generate legal documents tailored to their requirements within minutes and without knowledge of the law.

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Drawing watertight legal documents can be complicated and expensive, requiring expert knowledge. Despite the need for high quality documents, individuals and small businesses often do not have the budget to hire a solicitor and as a result, "go without" leaving themselves open to enormous risks.

Net Lawman's new online software produces high quality, customised documents at a fraction of the hourly fee of the average lawyer.

Customers complete a questionnaire in plain English on the website, in a similar way that a solicitor might take instructions from a client. A questionnaire takes about 10 minutes to complete. After reviewing the answers, the client can immediately download a customised legal document. The software completely removes the need for customers to have any knowledge of the law.

Document assembly software is not new. Firms of solicitors have been using it offline for many years. However, Net Lawman is one of only a handful of companies that have developed a web-based version that is available to small businesses and individuals. Moreover, the software is much more sophisticated than that of competitors.

For example, Net Lawman's online questionnaire for last will and testaments is the first in the UK that considers life interests or management options for trusts.

The software can produce documents in either Microsoft Word or PDF format. It can even complete third party forms such as those published by government departments, as well as Net Lawman's own documents written by in-house solicitors.

The company plans to use its existing large library of over 500 contracts and agreements as templates for the system. Wills are the first documents to be made available and will be followed shortly by residential property agreements and business start-up documents. The company plans to make a number of documents available for the UK first before launching the software in the other countries in which it operates, notably Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

A spokesperson for Net Lawman said, "We now have a unique service offering within our market. Customers can choose between downloading document templates for editing offline and using our document assembly software online. No other legal document provider offers the benefits of both."

About Net Lawman: Launched in 2001, Net Lawman was a pioneer of selling legal document templates on the Internet providing customers with a cheaper and more convenient alternative to using a high street solicitor. It now publishes legal forms, contracts and agreements for seven countries throughout the world. Clients include SMEs, individuals, and professionals such as accountants, solicitors and surveyors.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.netlawman.co.uk

Contact Info:

Name: Thomas Taylor

Organization: Net Lawman Limited

Phone: +44 (0) 1284 848 275

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/net-lawman-launches-online-legal-document-assembly-software/102181

Release ID: 102181

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Salt Lake City Furnace Replacement No Credit Check Financing Launches 1/26/2016

Friendly Plumber Heating & Air announced the availability of their new Furnace Replacement Financing "No Credit Check Furnace Financing" beginning 1/26/2016. More information can be found at http://www.myfriendlyplumber.com/furnace-replacement-financing-no-credit-check/.

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Customers looking for the latest Furnace Replacement Financing will soon be able to purchase No Credit Check Furnace Financing by Friendly Plumber Heating & Air. Today Daniel Scott, Owner at Friendly Plumber Heating & Air releases details of No Credit Check Furnace Financing's development.

No Credit Check Furnace Financing is designed to appeal specifically to Salt Lake City Home Owners and includes:

No Credit Check - This feature was included because it allows home owners needing to replace their furnace the opportunity to get a new furnace without having to pay for the full cost of a furnace replacement upfront. This is great news for the consumer as replacing a broken furnace is not something that homeowners often plan for. Friendly Plumber Heating & Air's no credit check furnace financing allows any customer the opportunity to replace outdated or broken furnaces or make necessary furnace repairs without having a huge upfront out of pocket expense.

90 Days Same as Cash - This was made part of the product, since sometimes long term financing isn't necessary. Customers who get a furnace replacement should enjoy this feature because it allows customers the ability to replace the heating equipment without financing for a long period of time. .

Professional Installation - Friendly Plumber Heating & Air made sure to make this part of the Furnace Replacement Financing's development as when financing a furnace with Friendly Plumber Heating & Air customers get peace of mind that the furnace installation will be backed by a warranty from a professional installer. Customers will likely appreciate this because they can rest assure that no matter how they pay for the furnace replacement, they will have a warm home that will last.

Daniel Scott, when asked about No Credit Check Furnace Financing said:

"Often times there are customers that need a furnace replacement but cannot qualify for traditional financing or have the extra money just lying around. So Friendly Plumber Heating & Air partnered with a solution provider to allow us to offer No Credit Check Financing to homeowners regardless or their credit score. "

This is Friendly Plumber Heating & Air's first product to offer no credit check financing to customers but it is expected to expand their financing line in the Spring with air conditioning financing as well release of a new product and Daniel Scott is particularly excited about this release because no other HVAC companies in Utah to offer this innovative financing to Salt Lake City Residents.

Those interested in learning more about the business can do so on the business website at http://www.myfriendlyplumber.com/

Those interested in learning more about furnace financing can go directly to the product listing, here: http://www.myfriendlyplumber.com/furnace-replacement-financing-no-credit-check/

For more information about us, please visit http://www.myfriendlyplumber.com

Contact Info:

Name: Daniel Scott

Organization: Friendly Plumber Heating & Air

Address: 347 W 3000 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84115

Phone: 1 801 883 9317

Release ID: 102169

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Chris Daems must be one of the few practitioners who can claim to have put auto-enrolmentin both a box and a book, and to do both successfully.

I am an admirer of the sterling work that Mr Daems has delivered through AE in a Box, his online solution for small companies looking to comply with auto-enrolment, and the objective of his book Three Circles: A practical guide to automatic enrolment compliance. Written in plain English, Three Circles is designed to help employers understand more about AE and its importance to their business. From the introduction onwards, Chris sets out what the book will cover in a manner that is both comprehensive and sensible  the reasons for auto-enrolment, the impact on UK firms, the background of the legislation, what happens if you do not comply, the importance of giving yourself time to implement the necessary changes and the process of getting a scheme in place.

As you would expect from someone with Mr Daems experience in the AE market, he has hit upon a clear way to explain the implementation process, regulation, pension and payroll. By introducing this straightforward approach, he manages to distil the seemingly huge and complex issue of AE into manageable chunks, while simultaneously communicating a lot of fairly heavy information in a way which makes it seem if not simple, then at least manageable.

The strength of Mr Daems work is recognising that there are numerous ways through the AE maze, depending on where you begin and who you have to take with you. I was particularly interested in the way in which he would approach payroll, and the opportunities for collaboration between advisers and accountants. Mr Daems has clearly experienced the changing capabilities of payroll, and has captured an informed picture of who owns different parts of the process as we head into the SME market.

I was reflecting, while reading this, if it will be Workie who gets employers to enter the AE journey and this book that gets them over the line. I hope so, but I did find it difficult to turn the pages with my fingers crossed. Perhaps this work is going to have its greatest and most positive effect in giving those business advisers who read it the confidence to handle their key clients yet to stage AE, and the tools to recognise when and how to collaborate with others.

Tom Nall is workplace solutions director of the SimplyBiz Group
I do my best to refer individual clients back to any adviser who refers work to me. It works well; I will advise the company and provide information to the employees and he will provide advice to those employees who want it. I present jointly with the adviser to the employees and ensure that he is seen as the expert to contact for individual advice, which is something I do not provide. I have a call scheduled in the afternoon with one of the pension providers to an existing client regarding their retirement offering and potential new joiners from a defined benefit scheme that will be closing to future accrual. I will be conducting a market review to ensure that the trustees can obtain suitable and competitive terms for these new members.

Market review time for many group life and income protection and private medical insurance plans. Most of my clients have renewal dates between February and April, so I have spent some time preparing a list of which plans are going to the market and knowing who is still in their rate guarantee period and will renew. Insurers are bombarded during February and April and turnaround times for those who manually price their schemes can increase. It is important to get specifications and member details to them as early as possible as sometimes mistakes in the quotations provided by the insurers need to be corrected.

Wednesday

I have two presentations to two different companies employees today. The companies have had pension schemes set up by their accountants and they have asked for presentations to their employees to let them know what is happening. So no advice from me as I will just be explaining how everything works. I will be delivering the presentations at the companys offices and there will be some driving between the two firms as they are not that close together.

Thursday

Although based in Derbyshire, I used to live in London and I have many contacts and clients there. My train is booked and I have three different companies to meet with today. The first will be a discussion with employees at a merchant bank to gain feedback on what they would like from their new company pension, then a review meeting with an existing client followed by a presentation to some of their new employees. Then it is an installation meeting for a new client who is setting up a group personal pension (GPP) and a group life scheme.

Friday

I have a meeting planned with an accountant somewhere near the middle of the M1. We will be discussing two clients of his with auto-enrolment staging dates of March and June this year. The accountant has just been appointed. All payroll functions have been outsourced to them and they need help with the unresponsive insurance company. There is an existing GPP in place and I know the insurance companys offering well, but time is of the essence here.
RWCs John Innes has made a contrarian move to top up positions in BP and Shell at a time when the oil price has plummeted to levels not seen in more than a decade.

Mr Innes, a founding partner of RWC and manager of its long-only UK Focus fund, said he was continuing to employ a strategy that sees him buy out of favour and fashion equities.

This meant adding to BP and Shell in recent months even as their share prices slumped.

The price of a barrel of Brent crude oil fell below $28 last week, a 12-year low, and oils continued plunge has hurt BP and Shell, which have fallen by 17 and 35 per cent respectively over the past 12 months.

But Shell remains Mr Inness biggest holding at 5.7 per cent of his fund; BP is also a sizeable position at 3.5 per cent.

We bought banks in 2008 and industrials during the recession, so now were buying oil companies, Mr Innes said.

He added: Shell has a lot of downstream earnings that can cushion the blow. It is cutting investment and squeezing suppliers so if the oil price did stabilise, you would have costs continuing to go down as revenues rise.

Mr Innes said Shells planned 35bn takeover of rival BG Group, hotly disputed in some quarters, would improve its cost base, and that it benefited from being financed by Shell shares at reduced debt levels. Thats a deal that will look good over time, he added.

Looking ahead, Mr Innes said he would buy only larger, liquid oil firms that can withstand the low oil price.

Suppliers to BP and Shell looked terrible. He said the two will have further opportunities to beat up these suppliers on price, keeping their own costs down in the process.

Mr Innes said exploration and production companies such as Tullow Oil, whose share price fell more than 65 per cent last year, were basing their sustainability on futures contracts that price oil at $85. On Tullow, he said: The market will remain rational longer than [it] can remain solvent.

Despite his BP and Shell positions, Mr Innes acknowledged his fund was still biased towards stocks benefiting from low energy costs.

He favours retailers such as DFS and Dixons Store Group, and said he expected further upside from two of the strongest contributors to his 2015 performance, International Consolidated Airlines (IAG) and cruise operator Carnival.

Mr Innes said consolidation in the airline industry and partnerships and code-sharing among airlines was making the sector more profitable.

A British Airways agreement with American Airlines made its transatlantic route a gold mine, the manager added.

On two of the firms that form part of IAG, he said: British Airways and Iberias cost-cutting initiatives have come through as the oil price drops.

The managers UK Focus fund has returned 28 per cent over three years compared to the Investment Association UK All Companies sector average return of 18.2 per cent, according to FE Analytics.
The Treasury select committees chairman has asked the chancellor for assurances and veto powers on any future hirings and firings of the regulators bosses.

Andrew Tyrie addressed chancellor George Osborne in a letter sent yesterday (26 January) to reiterate previous calls in 2012 for a parliamentary veto on appointment and dismissal of the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority chief executive.

This follows the announcement that Andrew Bailey is to take over as the FCAs chief, once a replacement can be found for him as chief executive of the PRA.

Mr Baileys appointment comes after HM Treasury effectively ousted his predecessor Martin Wheatley last summer.

Mr Tyries concerns were only heightened by suspected government intervention in the FCAs decision to drop a review into banking culture on New Years Eve - something which his committee grilled the regulators bosses about earlier this month.

Allegations have been made that the FCA has been vulnerable to political pressure, influencing the way that it approaches the fulfillment of its statutory obligations. Whatever the substance of these allegations, and there may be none, the perception of them may remain, the letter read.

It is partly the need to address these concerns, and to entrench the FCAs independence, that has led the committee to conclude that it requires a veto on both the appointment and the dismissal of the FCAs senior leadership.

The committee currently only has veto powers over senior appointments made to the Office for Budget Responsibility, something which Mr Tyrie would like to see extended.

The Treasury select committee would welcome assurances that you will put in place a similar veto [to the OBR] on the appointment and dismissal of the chief executives of the FCA and PRA.

A first step would be a personal assurance that you will not make an appointment or decision on an incumbent without the prior agreement of the committee.

Garry Heath, director general at Libertatem, backed Mr Tyries demands, although he doubted whether they would actually be listened to by the chancellor.

Parliament must have some influence, because currently we have a notionally independent regulator, told to do by the Treasury and key players, who are in turn leaned on by the big banks threatening to leave the UK.

peter.walker@ft.com
Farmworkers in Northern Ireland are set to get a 2% pay rise in April, taking the rate for a standard worker to 7.05/hour.

The Agricultural Wages Board (AWB) for Northern Ireland has proposed to increase existing minimum rates for agricultural workers across all grades by 2% from 6 April 2016, with a rise in the accommodation offset to a maximum of 34/week.

If a farmworker is provided housing for free as part of their job, the accommodation offset is added to their pay.

See also: 2015 Farmers Weekly pay and careers survey results

The minimum rate, applicable for the first 40 weeks of cumulative employment, will be 6.76/hour.

The other rates will be as follows:

Grade 2  Standard worker: 7.05/hour

Grade 3  Lead worker: 7.74/hour

Grade 4  Craft grade: 8.31/hour

Grade 5  Supervisory grade: 8.80/hour

Grade 6  Farm management grade: 9.53/hour

The board has asked for any objections to the proposals to be sent by registered post to: The Secretary, Agricultural Wages Board, Room 917, Dundonald House, Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast BT4 3SB, to arrive on or before Friday 26 February 2016.

Board members will meet again on 11 March 2016 to make an order to introduce the new rates.

Pay rise for Welsh farmworkers

Meanwhile, an Interim Agricultural Wages Order is expected to come in to force in Wales in mid-February, which will result in the first increase in farm wages in Wales since 2012.

The order will increase statutory pay levels for agricultural workers in Wales by about 6%.

This will take the Grade 1 rate to 6.72/hour, which is 2p above the current national minimum wage.

The minimum wage for farmworkers in Scotland with more than 26 weeks service rose to 7.24/hour on 1 October 2015.

England is the only country in the UK that no longer operates an AWB to decide minimum pay rates for farmworkers.
The aisles at this years Lamma show were packed to the gunnels with the latest cultivation kit, providing the perfect opportunity for those looking to upgrade their tillage setup.

Age-old technology like ploughs and power harrows rubbed shoulders with a few new ideas, such as Claydons Terrastar and Einbocks upgraded camera-based weeding system.

Here are a few of our favourites:

TWB Alternator

Lincolnshire manufacturer TWB has added another row of discs to its heavy metal Alternator cultivator.

The new arrangement is designed to run instead of levelling boards and flatten off the surface just before the packer. It adds about 3,500 to the price tag but it doesnt require a whole lot more horsepower.

The 4.5m version on the stand will need the fat end of 400hp to do a decent job, which is Caterpillar crawler territory. The two rows of discs at the front take some pulling, and its possible to push the second row in a bit deeper provided youve got the horsepower to do it.

Behind those is a row of subsoiler legs that will dig down to 350mm to loosen up the rooting zone. Shear tab protection should prevent any of the legs getting bent and is less of a faff than traditional shear bolts.

The asking price is 40,000, though youll have to pay a few quid extra if you want hydraulic brakes.

See also: 5 eye-catching muck and slurry machines on show

Cousins harrow

Cambridgeshire firm Cousins caught the eye with a 6m version of its combination harrow.

Front tines are designed to chip at clods rather than haul them out of the ground, so are set to run roughly 10cm below the surface. Levelling boards run behind the tines and their position heavily affects the size of tractor required on the front.

The rubber packer presses the soil back down without encouraging too much of it to stick to the roller, ahead of a gang of spring tines and a big crumbler at the back.

The crumbler diameter has been upped to 600mm to increase the number of bars that are in contact with the ground at any one time. The new design should help maintain the working depth consistency even as soil types change.

The 6m version will take as little as 200hp to pull and has a list price of 25,000, but widths extend up to 8m for those that want to cover the ground even quicker.

Einbock Chopstar

The job of keeping weeds at bay without herbicides has traditionally required some expert driving skills, but with more laser and camera equipment coming to the market things are getting a whole lot easier.

Einbocks Chopstar is imported to the UK by Norfolk-based Terrington Machinery and is available with 12, 16, 24 and 32 rows, though things can be quickly adjusted to suit different sowing widths.

Einbock designed its own row guidance system but uses Claas cameras to scout out the position of plants and make adjustments accordingly. Its particularly useful for those running hoes on the tractor rear linkage, where its more difficult to keep an eye on the position of the coulter in relation to the crop rows.

Realistic travel speed is about 10kph and the company reckons drivers can practically double their output with the camera system fitted.

The only catch is the cost  it adds about 18,000 to the price of the weeder. The hoe itself costs between 10,000 and 23,000 depending on the width and number of rows.

Hubert ploughs

The iconic apple green livery of Dowdeswell will live on after Agri Hire made arrangements to start building its own mainframe and leg bracket to fit the defunct firms ploughs.

Dowdeswell folded last summer, although the parts and service side of the business continues to operate and ensures existing customers will have a reliable source of spare parts.

Agri Hire had previously been a Dowdeswell dealer and parts stockist and, although the new ploughs now come with a Hubert badge, they are practically identical to the implements built by the Warwickshire firm.

Buyers can order their ploughs with between five and nine bodies, and theres the option of running them on land or in the furrow. Hydraulic offset and furrow adjustment are also part of the package.

Assembly takes place at Agri Hires Ipswich base and the pricing will remain almost the same as equivalent Dowdeswells, so expect to see a 22,000 ticket price on a 6+1 furrow 145.

Bullock Tillage Tinecut

Buyers after a reasonably-priced cultivation tool have another option to add to the list after Malvern-based Bullock Tillage revealed several new machines.

The Tinecut cultivator comes with six 20mm low-draught subsoiler legs protected by shear bolts and spaced 540mm apart.

They are designed to work down to 450mm and are followed by two rows of 510mm serrated discs mounted on rubber shock absorbers. A steel packer does the business at the back and theres also the option of fitting an Airseeder for small seed drilling at the same time.

Total weight is about 2,200kg and power requirements will vary with soil type up to about 250hp. The asking price is a cheap-sounding 6,900.

Claydon Terrastar

Direct drilling specialist Claydon has come up with a new take on the stubble cultivator that does a more aggressive job that its straw rake.

Instead of tines, the Terrastar uses four angled rotors with a series of knives along their length that lift and cultivate the soil surface, creating a fine tilth.

The maker says this provides ideal conditions for weed seeds to germinate, helps with drainage and doesnt interfere with the soils ability to carry machines.

Once seeds have germinated a pass with a straw harrow apparently wipes out young weeds without the need to spray.

Like the straw rake, the Terrastar is designed to cover large areas cheaply and can zip along at speeds or around 15kph.

At the moment theres just one 6.11m version available which costs 15,000. An optional tined following harrow is also available.

Lemken Heliodor 9

Lemken has introduced a new disc cultivator with 510mm discs that plugs the gap between its existing small- and big-disc machines.

The Heliodor 9 sits between the makers Rubin primary cultivator and Heliodor 8 secondary cultivator and is designed to do a decent job of both those tasks.

Optional hydraulic levelling boards are available at the front as well and full hydraulic depth adjustment. List price is 25,652.
CSULB alum wins gold at the 38th Long Beach Marathon  which was his first
The Svens have shared their signature style of cowboy surf poetry music all over Corvallis the past nine years, but Jeff Morre says people might not understand what the band does.

The front man and guitarist, known by many locals as "Viking," said he writes tongue-in-cheek cowboy and pioneer stories, some true and others fabricated. They accompany those stories with instrumental surf rock and spaghetti western tunes to create their unique shows.

"People come to our shows for the story and the music. We try to fit the music in a very poetic way as well. The combination of things makes it a performance," Morre said.

The Svens' next performance is a release show for their new CD, "Clara's Song," Friday night at Imagine Coffee in Corvallis. As it turns out, there's quite a story behind the title, but first some band history.

The cowboy surf poetry style evolved from the 17 years Morre played drums for a band in Austin, Texas, called "Herman the German and Das Cowboy." That's where Morre earned that "Viking" moniker. The band's concerts included an eclectic collection of music, but not enough of the storytelling Morre thought they should feature in a performance.

When he came to Corvallis, where he works as lab manager for the Mass Spectrometry Facility at Oregon State University, Morre and friend Will Allen, "Bass Sven" (whom he's known since the third grade) taught themselves to play guitar and bass.

They formed The Svens with Rob Birdwell, "Saxy Sven," a local conductor who plays saxophone and brass, drummer Dan Bregar, "Sticky Sven," and guitarist Mike Rhodes. Michael "Billy" Burand has since replaced Rhodes in the band.

"I love to play surf music, so we just expanded on the idea I had in Austin and finally put it into fruition," Morre said.

Drake, Missouri, where his father and grandparents lived a pioneer life, is a common setting in many of the 32 original stories Morre has written for shows. He has introduced multiple characters from Drake, including the blacksmith, the marshal and others.

"The small town is eight days off of the Oregon Trail. That line is, in some fashion, used in every show," Morre said.

So, about 18 months ago, local theater director Mary Jeanne Reynales handed Morre a story. It's about her grandmother, Miss Clara Stevens, who traveled along the Oregon Trail from Iowa to Echo, Oregon, with her 5-year-old daughter, Frances, Reynales' mother.

Clara headed to Echo in response to a lonely hearts advertisement in which a wealthy ranch owner was seeking a wife who could cook. The ad said, "Cowboys seeking women, any women."

"I read the facts and was amazed by Clara's struggles and travels as a woman growing up and traveling in the west," Morre said.

One year later, The Svens have recorded and released their new album, "Clara's Story." Morre received help from former high school friends and band mates to make the album. Producer and engineer Stuart Sullivan of Wire Recording in Austin provided the final mastering, and Tom Pounders of PoundersInk in Denver, created the cover art. Drew Ferreira and Jake Banzmer also contributed to the album on drums and guitar.

"He asked me to write it and he added flourishes," Reynales said. "The rest is the story with music you hear on the CD," she added.

Reynales, who said she hasn't missed one of The Svens' cowboy surf poetry shows since moving to Corvallis, is delighted with the finished product. She was the first person outside of the band to hear it.

"I am most satisfied with 'Clara's Story,' the music production, the cover art work and of course my Grandma Clara, and my mother, Frances," Reynales said.

Morre said he is excited to share a piece of history with an album he put his heart into making, including the narration for every chapter of story and music.

The Svens will unveil "Clara's Song" Friday night.

If people haven't seen a Svens' show yet, Morre encourages them to come.

"We are truly a unique art form. We play a very interesting selection of songs and tell a story."
8:54 P.M. UPDATE: At 8:30 p.m., the FBI's Phoenix Division arrested Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32, on a federal charge related to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County. Ritzheimer turned himself into the Peoria, Arizona, police department. The arrest was without incident.

He faces one federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.

8:10 P.M. UPDATE: According to a joint statement from the FBI and Oregon State Police, the suspect who suffered an injury in the original enforcement action has been treated and released from a local hospital. He is now in FBI custody.

7:47 P.M. UPDATE: At 6:30 p.m., the FBI also arrested Peter Santilli, 50, of Cincinnati, Ohio. He faces the same federal felony charge as the others. The arrest was without incident.

7:05 P.M. UPDATE: One person is dead and several others, including Ammon Bundy, are in custody after a traffic stop Tuesday night on Highway 235.

According to an FBI statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police began an enforcement action at around 4:30 p.m. to bring into custody a number of individuals associated with the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Shots were fired during the arrest. One person, who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest, is dead. No further information will be released pending identification by the medical examiner's office. Another suffered non-life-threatening injuries and was transported to a local hospital for treatment. He was arrested and is now in custody.

Those arrested include Ammon Edward Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho; Ryan C. Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nevada; Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada; Shawna Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah; and Ryan Waylen Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Montana.

At around 5:50 p.m., in a separate event in Burns, Oregon State Police arrested Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, of Cottonwood, Arizona.

All of the named defendants face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 372.

CNN is reporting that Ammon Bundy, the leader of the militants occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refugee, has been arrested along with several of his followers during a traffic stop.

Shots were apparently fired, it is not clear who shot first.
While Linn Countys unemployment rate continued to decrease in December, Benton Countys rate increased slightly  though it still was tied for the lowest unemployment level in the state.

Here are highlights from the monthly county employment reports, released Tuesday by the Oregon Employment Department:

Benton County

In Benton County, unemployment increased to 4.4 percent in December, up from 4.3 percent in November. During the past year, Benton County lost 270 jobs for a decrease of less than 1 percent.

Patrick OConnor, a regional economist with the Oregon Employment Department, wasnt too worried by the fairly flat trend, however, as Benton County was tied with Wheeler County for the lowest unemployment rate in the state.

And Benton Countys economy is healthier than before the recession. Thanks to growth at Oregon State University and other factors, there were 1,220 more jobs than the areas prerecession peak in November 2007, an increase of roughly 3.1 percent.

Growth at OSU masks the losses that happened in other sectors, OConnor said.

Linn County

Linn Countys rate dropped from 6.9 percent in November to 6.4 percent in December, according to employment department figures.

This was a month where Linn County typically loses 80 jobs, and it was up 150. There was more hiring than typical, O'Connor said.

The Albany Lowes store, with 125 new workers, was reflected in December figures, as retail was up about 140 jobs.

Over 2015, Linn Countys employment grew by 920 jobs, a 2.2 percent increase.

Compared to the years of the recession, thats real strong growth for Linn County. Lets hope that continues, OConnor said.

Still, employment was still down more than 1,500 jobs, or roughly 3.5 percent, from Linn Countys prerecession employment peak in February 2008.

Linn County isnt alone in that. Only 10 of Oregons 36 counties are back above their pre-recession employment levels, OConnor said.

Oregons statewide unemployment dropped from 5.7 percent in November to 5.4 percent in December. During 2015, Oregon had job growth of 3.0 percent, compared to 1.9 percent throughout the United States.
March 15, 1967  Jan. 24, 2016

Our dear loved one Cori left this world suddenly and unexpectedly due to a pulmonary aneurism on Jan. 24, 2016, at the age of 48.

Cori was born March 15, 1967, in Los Angeles to Jack and Judy Arnason. Her mother, Judy, passed away when Cori was an infant. Her father met Catherine Arnason soon thereafter, and together, they raised her, along with her siblings. Cori was raised in Utah and attended Carbon High School and later the College of Eastern Utah. She worked in the printing business for many years and most recently was enrolled at Linn-Benton Community College studying Graphic Design and Art.

Cori will forever be known as a bright, energetic and vibrant woman who was always up for having fun and going on adventures. She was incredibly kind and generous with her time and affection and expertly made everyone she knew feel loved and appreciated. She especially cherished spending time with her family and loved her role as a grandma.

She was exceptionally creative and good with words, often writing poems and speaking eloquently at special occasions. Bringing people together in the spirit of celebration and togetherness was certainly her specialty. She is already incredibly missed but her spirit will live on through those she touched with her light and love.

Cori is survived by her spouse, Edward Jon Mercier; children Rikki Hoggatt, Randi Hoskins and BJ Hoggatt; granddaughters Kendra Hoskins and Brynnly Hoggatt; siblings Charles Wenig, Teri Arnason, William Bill Arnason and Steve Arnason; as well as her father, Jack Arnason.

She was preceded in death by her mothers, Catherine Arnason and Judy Arnason.

C.O.R.I  Creator Of Real Inspiration

A celebration of life potluck will be at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, 29699 Peoria Road, Shedd. Everyone is welcome.
Four Oregon State University scholars will explore the implications of the treaty that came out of the recent climate change talks in Paris in a panel discussion today at OSU.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. today in Room 213 of OSUs Memorial Union, 2501 S.W. Jefferson Way.

The agreement drafted during the latest Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP-21, will open for signature on Earth Day. It will be the first legally binding international accord to address global warming.

The panelists will be political science professor Amy Below, speech communications professor Gregg Walker, climate science professor Andreas Schmittner and environmental philosophy professor Allen Thompson.
State Sen. Sara Gelser is optimistic that theres a future for the so-called fifth-year programs, in which many mid-valley school districts use Oregon State School Fund money to pay for students to attend a year of community college after graduation.

Maybe. Well know more about the future of fifth-year programs after this years short legislative session, which starts next week. Among the items for the Legislature to consider in its five-week run this year is a bill from Gelsers Education Committee that would allow the programs to continue in a reduced capacity.

In a recent meeting with the Gazette-Times editorial board, Gelser said that the bill aims to put some financial and policy sideboards on the fifth-year programs. That idea of sideboards  especially finding ways to control the costs of the programs  likely is an essential part of any kind of legislative deal to continue the programs, even in a reduced capacity.

So the bill would require eligible students to enter the new Oregon Promise program, which established a fund to provide grants to recent Oregon high school graduates attending state community colleges. The idea is that the Oregon Promise program would help cover community college costs not paid for through federal grants.

Its clear that legislators, particularly those in the Portland metro area, are much more amenable to the Oregon Promise program than they ever were to the fifth-year programs, which had the misfortune of being born (and mostly used) by school districts in the mid-valley. And, to be fair, as Gelser puts it, there is a significant policy question surrounding the issue of whether its proper to use State School Fund money to pay for community college costs. (And, again to be fair, the fifth-year programs mid-valley school districts have adopted cannot be adopted statewide without a huge price tag.)

But the fifth-year programs have a significant advantage over the Oregon Promise in terms of giving students a better chance of success after they graduate from high school: The Oregon Promise grants are available only to those students who had a high school grade point average of 2.5 or higher. That often means that low-income students or English language learners, who sometimes struggle in high school, might not be eligible.

And that brings up one of the hidden benefits of the fifth-year programs, at least as theyve been developed by mid-valley districts: The secret sauce, so to speak, isnt so much the free tuition  its the access to counseling services that helps these students navigate through their first few years of college that can make all the difference, particularly to minority students and students who might be the first members of their families to attend college. It will be interesting to see how much of that manages to survive this years legislative review.

Its clear that part of Gelsers long-term strategy is just to keep the fifth-year programs alive, even in a reduced state, until we get hard data for their effectiveness. But the struggles the programs have faced statewide say something about the difficulty of educational innovation in Oregon.

Gov. Kate Brown recently talked about her plans to hire a state official whose job would be to spearhead educational innovation. It seems that the first bit of business facing that person, whenever she or he is hired, would be to encourage exactly this sort of innovation, instead of figuring out all the reasons why we have to settle for what we have now.
The Oregon State University College of Business is planning to expand into Portland.

The college has a new space in the Pearl District at 220 N.W. Eighth Ave. that will be the home of a new MBA program in innovation.

Its an exciting time for us to grow in the Portland market, said Mitzi Montoya, who took over as College of Business dean in September. "OSU is an engine of innovation and Portland is an exciting and growing innovation economy. I am excited about the tremendous potential of our work to grow Portlands capacity to innovate even further.

OSUs MBA program is a hybrid one which offers a mix of online and in-person work. The innovation MBA will focus on entrepreneurial business growth, starting new businesses and advancing existing companies.

The program also includes tracks in executive leadership and business analytics. The university plans to add tracks on supply chains and logistics management and a financial planning certificate in the fall.

The program will be housed in the WeWork building, part of a national chain of shared office buildings. The businesses share space, equipment and related amenities.

WeWorks entrepreneurial environment and its mission, to support hard-working members who produce results, align with the culture of the College of Business, our alumni and our programs, Montoya said.
Corvallis Housing First is rebooting its plan for a full-service homeless shelter operation on Southwest Fourth Street.

The groups board has shifted its focus to permanent supportive housing and only will offer limited emergency or short-term housing, whether it builds on Southwest Fourth or at another location, said Gregg Olson, executive director of Corvallis Housing First.

Olson said the group is looking to build on the model of Partners Place, a 14-room permanent, supported housing building that Corvallis Housing First operates on Northwest Harrison Boulevard.

We are hoping to extend this type of housing for many more of the chronically homeless men and women of Corvallis, Olson said. As we have looked at our cold weather shelter populations, we have realized most would be better served with more case management in permanent supported housing.

Services will only be provided for our clients, Olson said, and residents would be required to be safe to self and others with no possession of illegal drugs or weapons allowed. Men's and women's facilities would be widely separated, Olson said, but there would be little room for those needing immediate help.

"Shelter operations are a humane response to the medical needs of being homeless in harsh weather but are not necessarily the best way to provide stability and good case management," Olson said.

The groups earlier proposals also included plans to include spur-of-the-moment accommodations as well as meal and drop-in service.

What is really gone is any multifunction facility, Olson said. Partners Place has fit into a residential neighborhood very nicely for four years. It has taken many severely mentally and physically ill homeless off the streets and drastically reduced their demands on the medical and criminal justice system.

Housing with strong case management has been the key to (fighting) homeless in Utah and other places. We want to do that here.

Olson noted that although centers with a broad range of services are efficient, social problems can arise. In a smaller city like Corvallis, it seems more appropriate to keep the footprint and impacts smaller.

The Corvallis Housing First reached its decision on the new approach Jan. 11, but information on their altered plans has not been widely disseminated. Thus, both opponents of the previous shelter plan and advocates for better homeless services had a limited basis on which to comment.

I havent seen anything detailing the new plan so Im hesitant to comment on something that, once again, is not well-defined, said Paul Cauthorn, an opponent of the earlier plan and a member of Citizens for Protecting Corvallis, which has been gathering signatures for a possible ballot measure that would limit where homeless shelters could be constructed.

It was not clear what impact the new Corvallis Housing First plan might have on the initiative campaign.

We dont think CHF has the resources or expertise to operate anything, Cauthorn said. Also, the community just doesnt trust CHF to respect community values.

Corvallis Mayor Biff Traber, who led a City Council work session on homeless issues in December, said he had not heard of specific plans by CHF but added that the community needs to continue to develop plans to provide emergency housing both in the long term and during the transition.

Councilor Roen Hogg, whose Ward 2 includes the Southwest Fourth Street site, also said he had not seen the new plans. Hogg noted the concerns that downtown businesses and neighborhood associations have regarding shelter plans and said it is important that there be a community-wide discussion about the future plans for this site since it impacts so many people.

And there should be a community-wide discussion about how best to provide an emergency cold-weather shelter.

We have indeed tried to listen to concerns about large congregations gathering in one place for varied services, Olson said. We wish to continue our discussion with local neighbors to try to address their concerns.
Bonn Four cars parked in Bonn inner city were broken into on Sunday and Monday. A mobile phone and other items were stolen.

Police are investigating a series of cars being broken into and theft of items inside. The break ins occurred in the Bonn inner city. On Sunday, the lock of a car parked on Heisterbacherhofstrae was forced open, and a backpack and Netbook stolen from that car.

On Thomas-Mann-Strae, the window of a car was bashed in on Sunday night between 8:15 p.m. and midnight, and a cell phone stolen. On Munsterstrae, a cars window was bashed in sometime between midnight Sunday and 6:30 a.m. Monday morning, and a purse and clothing stolen. On Monday at around 4:30 p.m., the window of a car parked on Konviktstrae was smashed. There was no information about contents stolen from that car.
Apple plans to offer subscription based content through Apple News News oi -Sudhiir

Apple has been working to make subscription content available through its news app. This allows users to use subscription based content. Reuters has reported about Apple's plans to develop its current Apple News app in order to give the advantage to both Readers and Publishers alike.

SEE ALSO: Xiaomi Mi 5 to be announced on February 24

This would make a difference to Apple news and make it different from Facebook Instant Articles, which is free and is not subscription based. This will also give apple a boost from a growing crowd of cluttered news apps. The model closely follows Google Play Store's News Stand on the which gives access to magazines and Newspapers for a fee.

Several people access News via Apple and Facebook's news feeds and the number today runs into hundreds of millions.

Apple new paid model will attract both subscribers and readers alike.This gives publishers to have greater control over who accesses their content. For example, Publishers can share their articles for free or share excerpts from the same. In this way those interested in accessing the entire article can pay for it. This creates a paywall for accessing content. This is synonymous with websites like the WSJ or the FT which require subscription to access most of the content.

SEE ALSO: Lenovo Vibe X3 with 5.5-inch display, 21MP camera and 3GB RAM launching in India on January 27

However, there is a lack of information that publishers receive about readers. Apple revealed in October that nearly 40 million people were reading Apple News to access news content.

Google too is working on a program for Android devices that allows users to access news instantly.

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Four-phase Japan-U.S. operation plan towards Diaoyu Islands worked out in 2012: Japanese media

People's Daily Online

By Yuan Can (People's Daily Online) 17:17, January 25, 2016

During the office of former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) and the U.S. forces worked out a four-phase operation plan for Diaoyu Islands in 2012, according to a report by Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun on Sunday.

According to the report, the two countries reached consensus that the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan can be applied to the Diaoyu Islands during the Defense Chiefs' meeting in September 2012. Meanwhile, both of the two countries started to work out an operation plan for the islands. The plan was worked out by the Defense Ministry of Japan and officers from the Headquarters U.S. Forces Japan. The plan did not directly mention China and the Diaoyu islands but used marks that are both used by the U.S. and Japan.

The operation plan assumed that armed forces dressed up as fishermen land on and capture the Diaoyu Islands and then the U.S. and Japan fight together for the islands in four phases: firstly, in order to prevent enemy getting on the islands, the two countries will enhance alert by deploying ships and planes; secondly, after small group of the enemy armed forces land on the islands, the two countries will prevent reinforcements from getting close and cut all reinforces; thirdly, the two countries will launch general offensive to the enemies on the islands by gunfire and air attack and fourth, the two countries will get on the islands and regain it. According to the treaty, JSDF will take main action while the U.S. Forces will assist Japanese forces.

The report said that this plan had been signed by the top leaders of both JSDF and the U.S. Forces and had been reported to Japanese Prime Minister by Defense Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Japanese government has not disclosed this plan as it remains the top secret in Japan. However, the plan did not take effect as the Democratic Party lost its power in 2012.

Both Defense Chiefs in Japan and the U.S. began to work out a joint operation plan after meetings in November 2015. The Japanese newspaper cited an official from Defense Ministry that the 2012 operation plan is the basis of the one for 2015. The official also said that the new operation plan is set for Chinese attacks.

China has reiterated that the Diaoyu Islands and its adjacent islets have been an inherent part of Chinese territory since ancient times.

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Coalition Continues Anti-ISIL Strikes in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, January 26, 2016  U.S. and coalition military forces have continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

Officials reported details of the latest strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

Strikes in Syria

Attack and remotely piloted aircraft conducted three strikes in Syria:

-- Near Hawl, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit.

-- Near Raqqah, a strike destroyed two ISIL cranes.

-- Near Mar'a, a strike struck an ISIL headquarters building.

Strikes in Iraq

Attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 15 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:

-- Near Huwayjah, a strike suppressed an ISIL mortar position.

-- Near Habbaniyah, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed five ISIL mortar systems.

-- Near Kisik, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.

-- Near Mosul, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL weapons storage facility and destroyed four ISIL fighting positions and an ISIL weapons cache.

-- Near Ramadi, nine strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit, denied ISIL access to terrain and destroyed an ISIL staging area, two ISIL tactical vehicles, an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL armored bulldozer and an ISIL fuel tanker.

-- Near Sinjar, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is a strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target.

Part of Operation Inherent Resolve

The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat they pose to Iraq, Syria, the region, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.

Coalition nations conducting strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations conducting strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

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The cost of America's "secret war" in Laos

By Jared Ferrie

YANGON, 26 January 2016 (IRIN) - The United States may increase the $15 million a year it spends on dealing with the legacy of its "secret" bombing of Laos, said Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday in the capital, Vientiane.

Yet, even a few million more would come nowhere near to matching the amount it cost the US to bomb the country between 1964 and 1973. The campaign came with a staggering price tag of $17 million per day in today's dollars, according to Legacies of War, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Funding is already at record levels, up from $5 million per year when I visited the country in 2010. At the time, one person a day was being killed or injured by the unexploded ordnance (UXO) that litters Laos.

"We're now down to about 50 a year, and 50 a year is still too many," said Kerry.

The decrease in casualty rates has been helped by the increase in funding for programmes aimed at clearing UXO, as well as mapping contaminated areas and paying for rehabilitation for victims.

"We've gone from $5 million of commitment to it to $9 million to $12 million, now $15 million this year, and I know that we're looking at whether or not that could be plussed up even more," Kerry said.

The commitment of President Barack Obama's administration to addressing the deadly legacy America left in Laos is commendable. But considering the damage wrought over decades, the question remains  how much is enough to make up for crimes committed against an entire nation?

Legacies of War said in a statement yesterday that it would be appropriate for the US to, at minimum, double the level of its current funding over the next decade. As the group noted: "The US flew 580,000 bombing missions over Laos, the equivalent of one bombing mission every eight minutes, around the clock, for nine years."

The fallout from that campaign, which was kept secret from Congress at the time, is hard to comprehend.

When I visited Laos in 2010, Maligna Souvignongs, who was then the head of the government agency tasked with clearing UXO, showed me a map of the country with contaminated areas marked by red dots. In some regions, the dots were indistinguishable  they ran together like bloodstains on the countryside.

Aside from causing countless deaths and injuries over decades, Souvignongs said UXO contamination had also crippled the economy. Most of the country's 6.8 million people are farmers, but much of the farmland remains contaminated, and contaminated areas coincide with the poorest districts, he said.

When I asked how long it would take to rid Laos of UXO at the rate they were being cleared at the time, Souvignongs said 100 years.

So, nine years of bombing left Laos with a lethal mess that will take about a century to clean up. The increased funding in recent years is welcome, for sure. But perhaps the US can do even better to make amends for a historical wrong.

jf/ag

Theme (s): Conflict,

Copyright  IRIN 2016

This material comes to you via IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations or its Member States.

IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

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Tucson Visits Singapore During Indo-Asia-Pacific Deployment

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS160126-02

Release Date: 1/26/2016 10:10:00 AM

From USS Tucson Public Affairs

CHANGI, Singapore (NNS) -- The Improved Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Tucson (SSN 770) arrived in Singapore Jan. 21 for a visit as part of its Indo-Asia-Pacific deployment.

With a crew of approximately 150, Tucson will conduct a multitude of missions and maintains proficiency of the latest capabilities of the submarine fleet.

'USS Tucson continues to support the theater commander's goals specifically in building a stronger relationship with our allies in port,' said Cmdr. Michael Beckette, commanding officer.

Tucson's crew has the ability to operate in varying environments and is always prepared to tackle any mission that comes their way.

'Everyone in this crew plays an important role whether you are roving the engine room, cooking food, smashing trash or cleaning deep in the bilges,' said Senior Chief Electronics Technician Billy Daly, chief of the boat. 'We could not succeed without a full team effort.'

For many of the crew members, this was their first time visiting Singapore.

'I look forward to our time in Singapore,' said Machinist's Mate 3rd Class Tevin McKenzie. 'I enjoy being immersed in other cultures, sightseeing and having some quality time to relax with my shipmates.'

Measuring more than 360 feet long, Tucson is one of the stealthiest and most advanced submarines in the world. This submarine is capable of supporting a multitude of missions including anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface ship warfare, strike, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Homeported in Pearl Harbor, Tucson is able to operate in all oceans of the world. Tucson is the 59th Los Angeles-class attack submarine and the 20th Improved Los Angeles-class attack submarine.

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Afghan battle claims 38 lives including 10 police within day

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 20:54, January 26, 2016

KABUL, Jan. 26 -- Afghan militancy and counter-militancy have claimed four dozen lives with majority of them militants elsewhere in the conflict-ridden country in a single day on Tuesday, officials said.

The government forces in crackdown against militants launched major offensive against Taliban bastion in Dand-e-Ghori district of the northern Baghlan province early Tuesday and during the continuing operation which 18 armed insurgents have been killed, provincial governor Abdul Sattar Bariz told Xinhua.

He also confirmed that three more militants and a government soldier have been injured during the ongoing operations in Dand-e-Ghori district.

Taliban militants, however, are yet to make comment on the situation in Dand-e-Ghori district.

Similar operations, against Taliban fighters in Khogiani district of the eastern Ghazni province on Tuesday have left 10 militants including a group commander Mullah Sharif dead, provincial police spokesman, Fahim Amiri told Xinhua.

Taliban militants however confirmed the clash, saying militants have been fighting the government forces in Khogiani district over the past two days.

In another violent incident, a Taliban loyalist disguised himself as police personnel, first poisoned and then killed 10 police personnel in a checkpoint in Chinarto district of the southern Uruzgan province early Tuesday and made his good escape to join Taliban rank, local officials said.

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UN calls on Israel to stop settlement expansion

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 6:53PM

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has blasted Israel over plans to construct new illegal settler units in the occupied Palestinian territories, calling for an end to the unlawful activity.

"Progress towards peace requires a freeze of Israel's settlement enterprise," Ban said in an address to the UN Security Council's periodic Middle East debate at the UN headquarters in New York on Tuesday.

Ban also described the Tel Aviv regime's continued settlement activities 'an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community.'

The UN chief also expressed concern over plans by the Israeli regime to build over 150 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and to confiscate 380 acres (154 hectares) of agricultural land in the Jordan Valley near the West Bank city of Jericho.

"These provocative acts are bound to increase the growth of settler populations, further heighten tensions and undermine any prospects for a political road ahead," he added.

Over half a million Israelis live in more than 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds (Jeruslaem).

The United Nations and most countries regard the Israeli settler units as illegal.

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Saudi royals gave Malaysian PM $68m as gift: Court

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 11:5AM

The findings of a probe into a high-profile corruption case in Malaysia show that Prime Minister Najib Razak had received nearly USD 700 million as a gift from Saudi Arabia's royal family.

Malaysia's attorney general, however, cleared Najib of any criminal wrongdoing Tuesday, saying the USD 681 million transferred into Najib's personal bank account in 2013 was deemed personal donations.

"I am satisfied with the findings that the funds were not a form of graft or bribery," Attorney General Mohamed Apandi Ali said.

"Based on the evidence from witnesses and supporting documents submitted, I am satisfied that no criminal offence has been committed in relation to the said ($681 million) donation," he said.

He said Najib had returned USD 620 million of the money to the Saudi royal family in August 2013, about five months after the transfer.

Apandi said no reason was given for the donation, which was a matter between Najib and the Saudi royals.

He also said no criminal offence was committed by Najib in relation to three investigations submitted by Malaysia's anti-graft agency, and that no further action would be taken.

There was no immediate comment from Najib, who has recently come under immense pressure to resign over the issue.

Saudi government officials have made no immediate comment about the investigation either.

Opposition lawmaker Tony Pua denounced the attorney general's decision, saying the fact that it was a personal donation does not rule out corrupt motives or transaction.

Opposition and some ruling party members believe the money was siphoned off from debt-ridden state-owned strategic development company 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) that Najib had launched.

The prime minister sacked the previous attorney general tasked with probing the issue, and appointed the current one who has close ties to the ruling party.

Najib came into office in 2009, promising clean government and a more relaxed rule.

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Saudi jets eliminate 11-member Yemeni family

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:49AM

Saudi aircraft have bombed an area in the northwestern Yemeni province of al-Jawf, killing an entire family of 11 people.

The fatalities occurred on Tuesday, Yemen's al-Masirah television network reported, identifying the head of the family as Sheikh Saleh Hadi Herman.

The attack came two days after Saudi warplanes killed a Yemeni judge and six members of his family after bombing their home in Hay al-Nahzah district in the capital Sana'a.

Saudi Arabia has been pounding Yemen since March last year. Nearly 8,300 people have been killed since the onset of the war.

On Tuesday, the Yemeni army allegedly repelled a Saudi offensive to take back military bases in the city of al-Raboueh in the kingdom's Jizan region. According to Yemen's official Saba Net news agency, Saudi forces suffered heavy losses.

The Yemeni army also targeted a gathering of loyalists to fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in the Dhubab district of the Ta'izz province. Officials said an unknown number of mercenaries were killed or injured in the attack.

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UN agrees to monitor potential Colombia ceasefire

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:23AM

The UN Security Council has approved a resolution ordering the formation of a monitoring body that would observe cessation of hostilities between the Colombian government and rebels.

The council approved the resolution on Monday, responding to a request for such a mission that it had received from both Bogota and the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The monitoring mission is slated to comprise unarmed observers from Latin American and Caribbean nations. It is to be given a 12-month-long mandate, which can be extended upon request.

"Finally, our continent will have life without conflict," said Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin, reacting to the approval of the resolution. "I would like to convey to the members of the council that their willingness to work with Colombia on this matter is essential for the success of the process."

Bogota and FARC have been at war since 1964. The conflict has killed more than 220,000 people and uprooted six million others from their homes.

The two sides have been holding peace talks in the Cuban capital of Havana. The negotiations have made several key advances in recent months, and the two sides have set a deadline of March 23 to sign a final accord for a ceasefire.

Six main areas of disagreement have been discussed in the talks, namely justice for victims, land reform, political participation for former rebels, fighting the drug trafficking that has fueled the conflict, disarmament, and the mechanism by which the final accord will be ratified.

Deals have been reached on the first four issues. The latter two, however, are yet under discussion.

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Tel Aviv plans to build over 150 new settlements: NGO

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 12:50AM

The Israeli regime has ratified plans to build over 150 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, Israeli rights group Peace Now says.

The plans, adopted last week, involve small settlements in the Ariel area in the northern West Bank, the Carmel settlement in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron), and the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, the NGO said on Monday.

The move represents an end to an informal construction freeze in the Palestinian territory that lasted 18 months, the group added.

On December 28 last year, Peace Now published a report based on official data obtained under a Freedom of Information Act, revealing that the Israeli regime's housing ministry was seeking to build 55,548 units in the West Bank of which more than 8,300 would be in a contentious area known as E1, which is located adjacent to East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

More than half a million Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds.

The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.

The Palestinian Authority wants the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinians state, with East al-Quds as its capital.

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Russian-Egyptian Eased Navy Access Protocol Enters Into Force

Sputnik News

23:53 26.01.2016(updated 00:19 27.01.2016)

Russia's protocol with Egypt on simplifying navy ships access to mutual waters has come into force, according to the text of the document published by Russia's official legal information database on Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The protocol was signed on November 24, 2015, during Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's visit to Cairo.

The protocol authorizes the Russian and Egyptian navies and crew members, as well as establishes the procedures, access to each others' ports.

The authorized sides are required to exchange mutually important information and are prohibited from carrying weapons of mass destruction, nuclear fuel, chemical weapons, radioactive materials or narcotics on board.

The five-year intergovernmental protocol can be renewed for additional five years until one of the sides notifies the other of intending to exit out of the agreement.

 Sputnik

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Indonesian Defense Chief Plans April Russia Visit Eyeing Su-35 Purchase

Sputnik News

16:45 26.01.2016(updated 16:50 26.01.2016)

Indonesian Ambassador to Russia Djauhari Oratmangun said that Indonesia's defense minister plans to visit Russia in April to continue discussions on the procurement of Russian Su-35 Flanker-E superiority fighters.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Indonesia's defense minister plans to visit Russia in April to continue discussions on the procurement of Russian Su-35 Flanker-E superiority fighters, Indonesian Ambassador to Russia Djauhari Oratmangun said Tuesday.

'The negotiations are ongoing. The Minister of Defense wants to visit Russia in April to continue the discussions,' Oratmangun told RIA Novosti.

Indonesian Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu announced Jakarta's intention to purchase the Su-35s to replace the country's aging fleet of US-made Northrop F-5 Tiger II fighters, in September.

A joint military-technical cooperation commission held discussions late in November in the Indonesian capital.

The director for international cooperation at the Indonesian Defense Ministry told RIA Novosti at the time that Indonesian law required that at least 35 percent of the procured technology be transferred to the country when entering into contracts for the purchase of foreign weaponry.

 Sputnik

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Gbagbo Supporters in Ivory Coast Gearing Up for His Trial

by Emilie Iob January 26, 2016

The trial of former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo is due to begin January 28 at the International Criminal Court. Gbagbo is facing charges of crimes against humanity, based on acts allegedly committed during Ivory Coast's post-election violence in 2010 and 2011. Gbagbo supporters plan to closely follow the trial, which many of them perceive as an insult.

In the hall of his party's new office in Abidjan, giant posters of former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo are plastered on almost every wall.

Party official Aboubacar Kone said Gbagbo's detention at the International Criminal Court 'is a hostage-taking situation that does not say its name.'

Kone is acting spokesperson of a faction of Gbagbo's former party, the Ivorian Popular Front, or FPI. The party broke into two factions last year before the presidential elections.

Kone was among those who linked the party's participation in the vote to Gbagbo's release from the ICC. That did not happen, so that faction boycotted the elections.

A few days ago, Kone called for Gbagbo supporters to pressure the ICC to release the former president, claiming his detention is the result of a conspiracy.

'The ICC is perceived by a lot of Africans as a tool for neo-colonial domination,' he said. 'It is not about justice, it is about politics.'

Crimes against humanity

Gbagbo and his former ally Charles Ble Goude are charged with four counts of crimes against humanity for violence that occurred in the months after the 2010 presidential elections.

Gbagbo supporters clashed with backers of challenger Alassane Ouattara after Gbagbo refused to concede defeat.

The violence left about 3,000 people dead, and ended in April 2011 with the arrest of Gbagbo. Ouattara was then installed as president and was reelected last year.

Kone said the defense would show the innocence of Gbagbo and Ble Goude.

"If you watch all the video and listen to all the tapes nobody can prove that either of them is soliciting any violence," he said.

But ICC prosecutors argue otherwise, and intend to present several thousand documents aimed at proving Gbagbo and his allies organized a plan to remain in power by all means necessary, including violence against civilians.

While Kone said the faction has sent a delegation to The Hague to follow the trial from the courtroom, other supporters will be following the trial from Abidjan, like Okou Thiero, the president of a pro-Gbagbo youth forum.

Thiero said he had no doubt Gbagbo was innocent, and would be released. According to him, that would help national unity. "It is the missing link to the reconciliation," he said.

In other parts of the country, too, Gbagbo supporters will be watching, like in Gagnoa, a Gbagbo stronghold.

"We have planned to hold a vigil," said Leandre Guika Diokri, acting spokeperson of the local FPI office. "Then on Thursday morning, we will sit in front of the TV to watch it."

Laurent Gbagbo is the first former head of state to go on trial at the ICC.

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CAR Court Annuls Legislative Polls; Presidential Runoff Vote Set

by VOA News January 26, 2016

The top Central African Republic court has annulled last month's legislative elections, but confirmed that two former prime ministers will face off for the presidency.

The C.A.R.'s Constitutional Court ruled late Monday that the first-round legislative vote Dec. 30 was marred by numerous irregularities, and said some candidates appeared to be involved in them.

Court president Zacharie Ndoumba said election officials had received more than 400 complaints about the polls.

'The court has decided to cancel the [legislative] election of 30 December 2015 and to reschedule it for the whole country,' Ndouba said late Monday.

Next steps unclear

The court did give the green light for a presidential runoff election between the top first-round vote-getters, Anicet Georges Dologuele and Faustin Archange Touadera.

On Tuesday, the national election authority scheduled the second round of presidential polls for Feb. 14. It has not yet given a date for the new legislative elections.

The court's decision raises questions over the next steps for the electoral process. The former French colony could now find itself with a president but no new parliament.

Six of the 30 presidential candidates submitted challenges to the court, saying polling was marred by irregularities and called for the vote to be annulled or recounted, but the court dismissed them.

In results announced earlier this month, Dologuele won 24 percent of the vote, followed by Touadera with 19 percent.

Dologuele, 58, is an economist who served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001 under the government of President Ange-Felix Patasse.

Toudera, also 58, is a mathematician who was prime minister under President Francois Bozize from 2008 to 2013.

It was Bozize's ouster by the Seleka rebel group in 2013 that triggered the C.A.R.'s political crisis. Since then, sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians has displaced nearly 1 million people.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.

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Burundi: Would Welcome S. Africa's Role in Intra-Burundian Dialogue

by James Butty January 26, 2016

Burundi's government said it would welcome any offer by South Africa to facilitate the ongoing intra-Burundian dialogue.

Foreign Minister Alain Nyamitwe said although such an offer has yet to be officially made, his government would not refuse it if it is made because South Africa played a critical role in the Burundian peace process in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

East Africa Community-mediated peace talks led by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have so far failed to yield practical results.

The last talks that were scheduled to resume on January 6 in Uganda's capital, Kampala did not take place because the Burundian government said the date was set by mediators without consulting the government.

Complementary peace effort

Nyamitwe said if South Africa offers to facilitate the dialogue, its role would not be incompatible, but rather complementary to what is being done by President Museveni and the East Africa Community.

"I don't think it has been confirmed yet, but I believe South Africa, being a country which has immensely contributed to the peace process in Burundi in the late [19]90's and early 2000, it's absolutely a country that can play a critical role in the dialogue process that we have embarked upon."

Nyamitwe said his government has not yet received any request from South Africa, but if such a request is made, it would be formulated and processed through diplomatic channels.

Intra-Burundian dialogue participants

He reiterated that Burundi would not find it to be a problem if South Africa would offer to support the regional efforts on Burundi.

There has been disagreement on who should participate in the intra-Burundian dialogue.

The Burundian government is on record as saying it will not negotiate with certain opposition figures it considers as "coup plotters" or "sponsors of acts of terrorism.'

Nyamitwe said any Burundian can be part of the dialogue as long as they adhere to U.N. Security Council resolution 2248, which calls on the government and all parties to reject violence and refrain from any action that threatened peace and stability.

Jean Minani, the exiled leader of the Opposition Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU) told VOA earlier this month that Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza does not want to negotiate because he knows he is the cause of the crisis the country is experiencing today.

"Nkurunziza is the cause of the crisis of Burundi. He's afraid to come with all the people, with the international community to talk with us because there's nothing to talk about. He can't come to talk with us because he knows he has nothing to talk about," Minani said.

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Russia's Lavrov says Daesh militants trained in Georgia

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:47PM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow has information that Daesh Takfiri militants are being trained in a valley region in Georgia near the Russian border.

Speaking at an annual press conference in the Russian capital Moscow on Tuesday, Lavrov said that the Daesh militant group is attempting to create terrorist cells in certain Central Asian countries as well as in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge.

The top Russian diplomat added that some detained terrorists have confessed to receiving training in the troubled region and having links with the terrorist group.

Parts of Georgia's porous border with Russia lie in remote areas of the Caucasus mountains and there have been reports in the past about militants from Chechnya and other Russia's turbulent North Caucasus being trained there.

Moscow in the past has said that Georgia's Pankisi Gorge on the border with Chechnya serves as a hideout for militants. Georgia, which has a turbulent and problematic relationship with Russia, has denied the allegations.

Russia has been fighting militants since the mid-1990s in its North Caucasus region, where the republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia have been the scene of sporadic attacks and militant clashes.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Russian foreign minister also pointed out that Moscow's military operations in Syria have reduced terrorist activities there.

Authorities in Russia say hundreds of Chechens have left for Syria to join Daesh Takfiris since March 2011.

The Russian official also voiced concern about the threat the foreign terrorists in the Middle Eastern states pose to their home country upon possible their return.

Moscow began its aerial campaign against Daesh in Syria on September 30 upon a request from the Damascus government.

The US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has said foreign militants from over 90 countries, including at least 3,400 people from Western countries and more than 150 Americans, have traveled to Syria to join the terrorist groups there.

Some Western countries and their regional allies, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have been giving financial, logistical and military support to the militant groups fighting to oust the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.

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French President Presses For Extension of State of Emergency

Sputnik News

20:57 26.01.2016(updated 21:01 26.01.2016)

French President Francois Hollande's government is seeking parliamentary approval to extend the country's state of emergency, despite receiving widespread condemnation that is erodes the founding principle of the French Republic and people's freedoms.

A group of UN special rapporteurs and Europe's largest human rights group, the Council of Europe, have warned the French president of the risks involved. Thorbjorn Jagland, president of the pan-European human rights watchdog wrote in a letter to President Hollande:

'I would like to draw your attention to the risks that could result from the prerogatives conferred on the executive by the provisions that apply during the state of emergency if they are not accompanied by appropriate safeguards from the point of view of respect for fundamental freedoms.'

Thorbjorn Jagland also warned of the 'risks' involved in renewing emergency powers, including decisions on 'circumstances in which administrative searches or house arrests may be carried out' and the use of firearms by French security forces.

'I sincerely hope that the current plans for constitutional and criminal-law reforms will secure this essential balance to which you are personally committed.'

A state of emergency was declared in France following the terrorist attacks on 13 November 2015 which killed 130 people.

It gives the government, security services and police more powers to ban organizations and public demonstrations. Police raids can also be carried out at any moment without a warrant and digital equipment seized from anyone whose 'behavior can seriously be considered a threat to security and public order.'

The government also has the power to block websites and social media accounts on the Internet for three months.

A state of emergency also allows beefed up counterterrorism measures to be passed quickly through parliament; such was the case following the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, when France adopted a new surveillance bill, 'Projet de loi relative au renseignement.'

The new bill gave the government and intelligence agencies the authority to tap into any telephone or cellular data belonging to any suspected terrorist. It also gave agencies the right to plant recording devices in private property and install 'keylogger' devices that record key strokes on a computer keyboard.

The warning from the Council of Europe follows concerns already voiced by human rights campaigners, who are worried that the state of emergency measures could remain permanently in France.

'They must be used only when strictly necessary and should not become a permanent addition to France's anti-terror arsenal,' said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's Director of Europe and Central Asia.

Dalhuisen voiced concerns that the emergency measures will become part and parcel of ordinary law, 'chipping steadily away at human rights'.

'In the long run, the pernicious ideology underpinning the Paris attacks can only be defeated by upholding the foundation values of the French Republic,' Dalhuisen said.

President Holland will ask parliament to approve a three month renewal of the emergency powers on 3 February 2016. The current state of emergency in France is set to expire on 26 February 2016.

 Sputnik

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Kerry Asking China to Rein In North Korea's Nuclear Tests

by Pamela Dockins January 25, 2016

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, now in Beijing, will urge China to do more to press North Korea to stop its controversial nuclear tests during his talks beginning shortly in the Chinese capital.

Kerry has meetings planned with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi early Wednesday, and the two top diplomats will hold a news conference before they hold further talks at a working lunch, U.S. officials said.

Earlier this month, Pyongyang conducted what it said was a successful test of a hydrogen bomb -- a move that drew international condemnation.

China is an economic lifeline for North Korea. A focal point for Kerry will be urging Beijing to use its leverage to try to convince Pyongyang to stop such tests, which are considered provocative by world powers.

Also, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, China's support is crucial for passage of any U.N. penalties against North Korea.

Competing interests

However, analysts say China sometimes appears to be hesitant about imposing additional penalties on its neighbor because of competing interests.

"For China, the challenge is balancing the need to punish North Korea with their concerns about stability in North Korea. So, they want to push but they don't want to push too hard," says Scott Snyder, a Korean studies analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken traveled ahead of Kerry to Asia where he discussed North Korea's action with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.

Blinken said they stood firmly united "in strongly condemning this test, and in our determination, to impose costs for the DPRK's (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) flaunting of its international obligations.'

Chinese officials

Kerry will meet with officials including China's President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Another focal point during the talks will be the maritime dispute in the South China Sea, where China and others in the Asia-Pacific region, including Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines, have overlapping claims.

Earlier this month, regional tensions flared when China tested a runway on one of its artificial islands in the region.

China is the last leg of Kerry's three-nation tour of Asia that also included stops in Laos and Cambodia.

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US Further Clears Path for Travel, Commerce With Cuba

by Mary Alice Salinas January 26, 2016

The United States is clearing the path for more travel and commerce with Cuba as it seeks to further engage the Cuban people and normalize relations with the island nation.

The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a series of actions it says will promote ties between U.S. and Cuban citizens and urged the communist government to do its part to "remove impediments that have been holding Cubans back."

Steps taken by the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments include removing financing restrictions for most types of authorized exports, amending regulations to make it easier for some individuals and entities to get export licenses, and further easing regulations on authorized travel.

The White House said the new actions to ease sanctions continue a policy to empower the Cuban people by creating economic opportunities between Cubans and Americans.

"By expanding people-to-people ties, business opportunities, and greater access to information, we are promoting the transformation of our relationship in ways that advance U.S. interests and improve the lives of the Cuban people," the White House said.

The U.S. urged the Cuban government to take steps to make it easier for Cuban citizens to start businesses, engage in trade and access information online.

During a speech in Havana, U.S. Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda urged Havana to expand Internet and communications connectivity .

While the government has taken some "positive steps" in the last year, Sepulveda urged Cuba to upgrade its wireless technology, establish more Wi-Fi hotspots and lower the cost of Internet access, which is $2.00 an hour. That effectively means that it costs the average Cuban about 10 percent of his or her salary to get online, Sepulveda said.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Tuesday the U.S. will continue to take steps to "help the Cuban people achieve the political and economic freedom that they deserve."

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said the regulatory changes will "help strengthen civil society in Cuba and enhance communications to, from and among the Cuban people."

In December 2014, President Barack Obama announced the United States would re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba and begin the process of normalizing relations more than 50 years after they severed ties.

The policy change is sharply opposed by many in the Republican-led Congress and by some Republican presidential hopefuls, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has threatened to reverse the change in U.S.-Cuba relations.

Critics argue Obama gave Havana too many concessions without insisting the communist government bring an end to its oppressive policies and human rights abuses.



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Araqchi: JCPOA opens new era in relation with other countries

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, Jan 26, IRNA -- Deputy Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araqchi underlined that the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will open a new chapter in relation with other countries.

'The day which JCPOA will be implemented is considered a new era in establishment of ties with other states, especially India,' Araqchi said on Tuesday night, addressing a ceremony held at the Indian embassy in Tehran on the occasion of the anniversary of the Republic Day of India.

He pointed to India as close ally of Iran, and said, 'Indians have been with us during the difficult times and they are real friends.'

Araqchi said that deepening of relations between Iran and India has countless advantages for both sides, adding, 'We are planning to enhance our bilateral ties in different areas, including road transit.'

He recalled that India has contributed to Iran's economy, especially in the energy sector, and said, 'Iran and India will have good cooperation in the road transit field in the near future.'

'Chabahar port is the symbol of cooperation between Tehran and New Delhi and we are sure that bilateral relations between Iran and India will further expand in future,' Araqchi added.

2050**2050

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Iran to build large oil terminal in Jask, Sea of Oman coasts

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Bandar Abbas, Jan 26, IRNA -- In order to diversify country's ports capable of exporting crude oil, Iran has decided to construct the country's largest oil terminal capable of exporting one million bpd.

The Iranian oil ministry has announced plans to build the new terminal to protect Iran's oil exports against potential problems in the Persian Gulf and to boost shipments of Caspian oil, and providing an alternative option for Iran's main export terminal at Kharg Island.

Shana news website quoted the head of the Iranian Oil Terminals Company (IOTC), Seyyed Piruz Mousavi, as saying that the new terminal would be built at Jask Port, on the coast of the Gulf of Oman on the south coasts of Iran.

'In the event of any type of problem in exporting crude oil from the Kharg terminal, the new one can provide backup for exports,' Musavi said.

The new terminal would be connected to the Caspian Sea port of Neka using a one million barrel a day pipeline, the report added.

According to Mousavi the terminal would have a storage capacity of 20 million barrels and could cost up $2.2 billion to build.

The announcement came just a few weeks after the United Arab Emirates said earlier this month they had completed work on a new strategic oil pipeline bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.

The idea to construct the Jask oil terminal was first initiated during President Rouhani's visit of Hormuzgan province and his Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh welcomed the idea.

Mousavi earlier told IRNA that the plans for the construction of the new oil terminal are being pursued jointly by the government and the Petroleum Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Engineering and Construction Company (NIOEC) will implement it in accordance with the devised time schedule.

The required land for the construction of the new oil terminal is already purchased.

Jask Port is located at a 400 kilometer distance to the east side of Hormuzgan province capital city, Bandar Abbas.

2329**1416

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Iran to start final phase of naval drill Wednesday

ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency

Tue 26 Jan 2016 - 10:27

TEHRAN (ISNA)- Iran plans to start the final phase of a large naval drill dubbed 'Velayat 94' from Wednesday, said Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari.

The military exercise covers eastern Strait of Hormuz, Oman Sea and northern Indian Ocean, he said.

The drill started on January 21. The phase of stationing forces has been accomplished and its tactical phase starts on Wednesday, he said.

It also includes test firing different classes of missile and naval parade, he said, adding, the military drill aims to show Iran's might in establishing security in seas.

Selected units of the Navy including submarines, destroyers, missile launchers, logistic vessels, marine brigades, electronic war, hygiene and intelligence units would be used in the exercise.

He also said some cross-regional forces have joined the drill.

Sayyari further highlighted importance of Indian Ocean and said establishing security in northern Indian Ocean is of great importance for moving of Iranian trade vessels.

He said that Iran would practice establishing security in northern part of the ocean in the drill.

End Item

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Iran set to launch final stage of Velayat 94 naval drills

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 11:33AM

Iran is set to hold the final stage of large-scale naval maneuver codenamed "Velayat 94" in the high seas.

The final stage of the massive drills will be held in an area of three million square kilometers east of the Strait of Hormuz, Sea of Oman and northern part of the Indian Ocean, Iran's Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said Tuesday.

"The maneuver has been underway since January 21 and the forces have been deployed to their positions," Sayyari said, adding the tactical phases of the military exercise will begin on Wednesday.

Sayyari said that the naval drills aim to demonstrate the might of Iranian naval forces in maintaining security in the seas.

"In this war game, we will exercise how to maintain security in the northern part of the Indian Ocean," he said.

He added that various types of submarines, destroyers, missile launchers, auxiliary cruisers, and marine brigadiers, would take part in the maneuvers.

In recent years, Iran has made major breakthroughs in its defense sector and attained self-sufficiency in the production of important military equipment and systems.

The country has also conducted major military drills to enhance the defense capabilities of its armed forces and to test modern military tactics and state-of-the-art equipment.

The Islamic Republic maintains that its military might poses no threat to other countries, stating that its defense doctrine is merely based on deterrence.

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Iraqi forces seize control of village in Anbar

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 3:7PM

The Iraqi army and volunteer fighters seized control of a village in the western province of Anbar on Tuesday, closing in on the city of Fallujah.

The city is considered the main gateway to areas under the control of Daesh Takfiri terrorists. Current reports say Fallujah is now surrounded by Iraqi forces from three directions and efforts are underway for a decisive blitz into the city. Fallujah became the focus of the anti-Daesh battle after Iraqis liberated Anbar's provincial capital of Ramadi last month.

Iraqi media said the forces recaptured the village of Rumaylah located in Saqlawiah region, north of the capital, Baghdad.

The Iraqi military says control over Fallujah could pave the way for a final push to flush the terrorists out of the major city of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Province, which was overtaken by Daesh in the summer of 2014.

Also on Tuesday, pro-government forces launched offensives against Daesh in Anbar's eastern region of Husaybah. Nearly 30 terrorists were reportedly killed. More than two dozen terrorists were also killed in rocket attacks by Iraqi forces on al-Bushjal and al-Naimiyah regions east of Anbar.

Iraq has been gripped by turmoil since summer 2014, when Daesh overran parts of the country in the west and the north. The military and allied fighters have recaptured key towns such as Tikrit in the northern province of Salahuddin.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi vowed after the liberation of Ramadi that the year 2016 will be the year for the final elimination of Daesh from the Iraqi soil.

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National will behind formation of popular units: Iraq FM

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 6:51AM

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has defended volunteer fighters operating against Daesh, saying they are legitimate forces who have made many sacrifices for the Arab state.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Arab-India Cooperation Forum (AICF) in Bahrain, Jaafari said the volunteer fighters, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces or Hashd al-Shaabi, are an inclusive umbrella group that is not sectarian as it includes members from different Iraqi sects.

He was reacting to recent insulting comments by Saudi Ambassador to Baghdad Thamer al-Sabhan, who said the volunteer fighters were not popular among Iraqi people and accused them of sectarianism.

Iraq summoned the Saudi ambassador over the remarks, denouncing them 'a break of diplomatic protocol and based on inaccurate information.'

'The Hashd al-Shaabi are fighting terrorism and defending the country's sovereignty and acting under the umbrella and command of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces,' the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Jaafari also said the Popular Mobilization Forces "are a national Iraqi power that entered the parliament' through people's vote.

The top Iraqi diplomat said the main priority for the volunteer forces is to assist government forces in the battle against Daesh terrorists.

They "have countered terrorism, stopped its progress and made sacrifices for the sake of Iraq's unity, for the sake of Iraq's unity. They have defeated terrorism," Jaafari stressed.

Jaafari emphasized that Iraq does not evaluate the volunteers "through the statements of other states."

Iraqi Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi also dismissed criticism of volunteer forces, saying they prevented the fall of Baghdad and continue to assist the army in the anti-Daesh fight.

The Popular Mobilization Units have called for the expulsion of the Saudi ambassador for 'instigating sedition and insulting the Iraqi people,' saying al-Sabhan has "exceeded all the limits."

Violence has plagued the northern and western parts of Iraq ever since Daesh terrorists launched an offensive and captured parts of the Iraqi territory.

The Popular Mobilization Units, which were formed after the rise of Daesh in Iraq in 2014, have joined forces with the army to win back militant-held regions.

In the early days of Daesh emergence in Iraq, the volunteer fighters played an important role in strengthening the army, which had initially suffered heavy losses amid quick advances of the Takfiri terrorists.

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Police forces discover new mass grave in western Iraq

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:48AM

Iraqi police have found a new mass grave in the western province of Anbar, containing the remains of scores of people believed to have been executed by Takfiri Daesh militants.

A police source said security forces uncovered the grave as they were combing the Jamiah district of the provincial capital of Ramadi on Monday, Arabic-language al-Sumaria television said.

The source said the mass grave is thought to contain the remains of as many as 50 civilians and soldiers killed by Daesh just before Ramadi was fully liberated by the Iraqi army forces on December 28.

Many of the bodies bear signs of torture or other violence, including bullet wounds, and some have even been dismembered and decapitated.

The discovery came more than a week after Iraqi Kurdish fighters found a mass grave in the country's northwestern town of Sinjar, two months after retaking the town from Daesh terrorists. The mayor of Sinjar, Mahma Khalil, said the bodies of children and women were found among those buried.

Iraqi officials found three new mass graves in Sinjar, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) northwest of Baghdad, in late November. They contained 80 to 100 bodies, thought to be those of members of Iraq's Izadi minority group.

On November 28, a bomb-rigged mass grave, believed to be containing 123 bodies, was uncovered west of Sinjar.

Violence has racked northern and western parts of Iraq ever since Daesh Takfiris launched an offensive in June 2014, and took parts of the country. The militants have been committing crimes against all ethnic and religious communities in Iraq, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians.

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Iraqi Forces Find 40 Bodies of Daesh Victims in Ramadi Mass Grave

Sputnik News

20:53 26.01.2016

Iraqi forces said they found 40 bodies in a mass grave on territory until recently held by the Daesh terrorist group.

Iraqi security forces said they found 40 bodies in a mass grave in Ramadi, the Anbar province capital recently retaken from Daesh, according to AP.

Iraq retook the city in December, after it was held by Daesh for over a year. The victims, both civilians and police officers, are believed to have been executed in May 2015, police Major Tareq Abdulkarim told AFP.

'Video footage from the site shows local security forces and a small forensics team wearing face masks and digging with shovels,' AP reported.

Mass graves have been found in other areas previously occupied by Daesh, which often films its massacres and the videos freely available on the Internet.

Although airstrikes by the US-led coalition have accompanied the Iraqi military and militia advance against Daesh, a leading militia leader told Reuters on Tuesday that the strikes have been ineffective.

 Sputnik

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New unity government to be proposed in ten days in Libya

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 2:23PM

A new unity government is to be proposed in ten days in Libya after the internationally recognized parliament rejected the initial lineup.

Prime Minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj will present the new cabinet at the request of the parliament, which had criticized the first one as too large, said Fathi Ben Issa, adviser to the unity government, on Tuesday. "We will respect the deadline of ten days."

The internationally recognized parliament based in Tobruk voted on Monday against the initial ministers of the UN-backed unity government.

Eighty-nine out of 104 members of parliament who attended the Monday session rejected the cabinet formed by the UN-sponsored unity Presidential Council (PC).

Libya currently has two rival governments and parliaments.

The unity government was announced on January 19 to bridge a political divide that has undermined the fight against terrorist groups.

Militants affiliated with the Takfiri Daesh terrorists are also present in the country, making efforts to gather local support.

Libya has been grappling with violence and political uncertainty since the oil-rich country's former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was deposed and later killed in 2011.

After fierce rivalry between militant groups in the country, the Libya Dawn faction took control of the capital, Tripoli, in July 2014. They established their own government in the city, whereas the internationally-recognized government of Libya was based in the eastern cities of Bayda and Tobruk.

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Kremlin dismisses US accusation of corruption against Putin

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 11:39AM

The Kremlin has rejected a US official's accusation of corruption against Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling the claim official and challenging the US to provide evidence for it.

Adam Szubin, the acting under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Treasury, claimed on the BBC Panorama program aired on Monday that Putin was a "picture of corruption."

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Tuesday, "Concerning the BBC show, this would just be another example of typical irresponsible journalism if it weren't for the comment by a US Treasury official. Here the situation is different. This is an official accusation."

He asked for proof. "First of all this shows clearly who pulls the strings. Secondly, it requires proof," Peskov said.

"The airing of such accusations from such an institution as the US Treasury without concrete proof to back them up casts a shadow on this institution," the Russian official said.

Peskov had earlier told the BBC that the claims were "pure fiction."

The US and Russia have had strained relations over the crisis in eastern Ukraine. Western countries have imposed a number of sanctions against Moscow over the issue. Russia says the Ukrainian crisis has nothing to do with it.

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Kremlin Slams U.S. Official's Comment On Putin Being Corrupt

January 26, 2016

The Kremlin says a U.S. Treasury official's comments to the BBC on Putin being corrupt 'amount to an official accusation.'

'It's an official accusation,' Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists in a conference call.

'[Bilateral] relations are now in such a state that a lie like this is unlikely to aggravate them even further,' he added.

Adam Szubin, acting Treasury secretary for terrorism and financial crimes, said in an interview with BBC Panorama that the Russian president had been amassing secret wealth.

The BBC report said Szubin declined to comment on a 2007 Central Intelligence Agency report that estimated Putin's wealth at $40 billion, but he said the Russian leader's stated wealth was an underestimation.

The Kremlin has denied such allegations.

For his part, Putin has repeatedly said that he has read press reports about his immense wealth, including that he was even the world's richest man, but he has denied those reports as nonsense.

The United States has placed sanctions on a number of Russian businessmen loyal to Putin as part of its drive to put pressure on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine.

Based on reporting by Interfax and Reuters

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-slams-us- official-on-putin-corruption/27511839.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Why Putin Is Afraid Of Lenin

January 26, 2016

by Brian Whitmore

The first colored revolution was neither rose nor orange -- it was red.

It didn't originate in Tbilisi or in Kyiv and it wasn't planned in Washington or Brussels. In fact, it started in Vladimir Putin's own hometown.

Nearly a century ago, Russia pretty much invented colored revolutions.

And as the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution approaches -- and approaches with Russia's economy heading into a tailspin -- this uncomfortable historical fact is very much on Putin's mind.

Speaking to pro-Kremlin activists this week in the southern city of Stavropol, the Kremlin leader raised eyebrows by denouncing Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks for executing Tsar Nicholas II along with all his family and servants, killing thousands of priests, and placing a 'time bomb' under the Russian state.

Putin's comments expanded on remarks he made in Moscow on January 21, the 92nd anniversary of Lenin's death.

'Letting your rule be guided by ideas is right, but only when these ideas lead to the correct results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilyich. In the end that idea led to the fall of the Soviet Union,' he said.

'We did not need a global revolution.'

The Kremlin leader's flurry of anti-Lenin comments is only the most recent example of the regime's skittishness and schizophrenia about how to approach next year's big anniversary.

They also illustrate palpable fears among the Russian elite that 2017 could turn out to be a revolutionary year.

Putin's Kremlin fears any revolution 'regardless of its color or meaning' because 'the present-day Russian authorities subconsciously fear an analogous outcome for themselves,' political commentator Alina Vitukhnovskaya wrote recently.

We got an early hint of the Kremlin's anxiety a couple months ago.

Instead of marking the 98th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, Russia commemorated the 74th anniversary of a parade that marked the 24th anniversary of the revolution.

Confused? Well that's sort of the point.

Thousands gathered on Red Square for a reenactment of the massive November 7, 1941 military parade that both marked the revolution -- and also sent Russian soldiers off to fight in World War II.

Putin has long used Soviet symbolism and nostalgia to bolster his rule.

But which Soviet past the Kremlin has chosen to glorify speaks volumes about the regime's thinking -- and its fears.

The idealism and upheaval of 1917 is out. The military discipline of Josef Stalin's Soviet Union is in. Revolution is out. Repression and mobilization are in. Lenin the revolutionary out. Stalin the state builder is in.

As longtime Kremlin-watcher Paul Goble wrote on his blog, Putin took the 'revolution' out of the revolution's anniversary.

The move, he added, 'reflects both his fear of revolutionary change' as well as 'his desire to keep the Soviet inheritance, which he values, as far removed from its revolutionary origins as possible.'

In other words, the last thing Putin's Kremlin wants the Russian people thinking about is revolutions -- lest they get any ideas.

Better, of course, to keep their minds focused on war -- preferably victorious ones.

And just a few months before the Kremlin turned the revolution's anniversary into a celebration of Stalin's victory in World War II, Putin denounced the Bolsheviks for causing Russia to lose World War I.

In 1917, 'some were shaking Russia from within, and shook it to the point that Russia as a state collapsed and declared itself defeated,' Putin said in August at the Seliger National Youth Forum, a summer camp for pro-Kremlin activists.

The Bolsheviks, he added, were responsible for the 'betrayal of the Russian national interests' and 'wished to see their fatherland defeated while Russian heroic soldiers and officers shed blood on the fronts of the First World War.'

In a recent column in Snob, political commentator Artem Rondaryev noted the paradox facing Putin and his ruling clique as next year's centennial approaches.

'Love for the USSR is combined in a paradoxical hatred to everything that the revolution which created this very USSR initially brought with it  the avant-garde, feminism, free morality, and social transformation,' Rondaryev wrote.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/why- putin-is-afraid-of-lenin/27512980.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Germany Backtracks on Condemnation of Saudi Executions, Agrees to Sell Arms

Sputnik News

14:45 26.01.2016(updated 16:13 26.01.2016)

Despite its threat earlier this month to restrict arms exports to Saudi Arabia, the German government has nevertheless given permission for the construction of boats for the Saudi navy, Der Spiegel reported.

Despite threats from the German government to restrict arms sales to Saudi Arabia, including the delivery of defensive armaments, Germany's Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel has nevertheless agreed to the sale of arms to Riyadh, Der Spiegel reported on Monday.

The newspaper reported that Gabriel, who doubles as Germany's vice-chancellor and head of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), has been vocal in his criticism of Riyadh but has recently proved reluctant to match his decisions to the rhetoric.

'Only in December he (Gabriel) caused a small diplomatic scandal when he made a public accusation against the major partner in the Syrian talks, saying that mosques in Germany financed by Saudi Arabia are focal points for potential terrorists,' Spiegel wrote.

Regarding arms sales, Gabriel told Spiegel on January 4 that 'now we need to check if also we need to assess more critically the future sale of defensive armaments to Saudi Arabia, which so far we have been supplying.'

'This shows that it was right to deliver neither battle tanks nor G36 assault rifles to Saudi Arabia,' declared Gabriel.

On January 5 the German federal government stated that it 'noted with dismay' Saudi Arabia's execution of 47 prisoners on January 2, a move which inflamed sectarian conflict in the Middle East.

The German government said the execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr 'could also worsen religious and political tensions in the region,' and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for 'deescalation' and 'dialogue.'

The government 'noted with great regret' that Saudi Arabia had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran.

'Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, however turbulent they may be, are fundamental to resolving the crises in Syria and Yemen and to achieving stability across the entire region,' government spokesman Steffen Seibert said.

The statement also mentioned the possibility of greater restrictions on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and cited the example of the G36 assault rifle, which it has refused to sell to Saudi Arabia.

'Exports of military equipment are one instrument in foreign and security policy  the German government takes a restrictive approach to any exports of military equipment to the Gulf region.'

However, despite the announcements, last week the Minister for Economic Affairs admitted that a 1.5 billion euro deal between Germany and Saudi Arabia for the construction of 15 patrol boats for the Saudi navy is nevertheless going ahead, and that construction of the boats has begun at the Lurssen shipyard in northern Germany.

The revelation came in response to a question in the Bundestag from one of the Green Party's representatives, Agnieszka Brugger.

'Instead of making ever more big media announcements, the vice-chancellor should finally end irresponsible arms deals with Saudi Arabia,' Brugger told Spiegel.

 Sputnik

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Iraq, Syria call for united stance against terror

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 7:12PM

Iraq and Syria Tuesday called for more cooperation between the two countries in the fight against terrorism, saying the Arab neighbors are required to work closely in the ongoing fight against groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda.

Iraqi President Fouad Massoum said through joint efforts, Iraq and Syria could facilitate their way to victory against terror groups which have been wreaking havoc in some territories of the two countries.

Massoum, who made the comments during a meeting with visiting Syrian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Jihad al-Laham, said full cooperation between Iraq and Syria is necessary for eliminating terrorism and the terrorists of al-Qaeda and Daesh.

The Syrian official, for his part, highlighted the significance of cooperation between Iraq and Syria in combating terrorism, saying that such joint action can be boosted through the support provided by some regional and extra-regional governments.

Laham, who has been in Baghdad to attend the 11th session of the conference of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Member States (PUIC), said, however, that some other regional governments like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, continue to play a negative role in Iraq and Syria by interfering in the internal affairs of those two Arab countries.

More than 260,000 people have been killed and millions more have been displaced in more than four years of turmoil in Syria. The government's battle against militants has seen a major boost over the past months especially since late September 2015 when Russia began supporting Damascus through combat sorties against terrorist groups.

Iraq has fought its own battle against the Daesh Takfiri group since summer of 2014, with government forces managing to dispel the terrorists from key urban areas in north and west of the country.

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Turkey opposes Kurdish PYD presence in Syria talks

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 1:44PM

Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has voiced Ankara's strong opposition to the participation of the Syrian Kurdish group Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the upcoming UN-backed talks to end the crisis in Syria.

He told ruling party lawmakers in parliament on Tuesday that Turkey is "categorically" against the PYD and its military wing the People's Protection Units (YPG) "sitting at the table."

Ankara accuses the PYD and YPG of links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.

The Turkish premier, however, said that the presence of Syrian Kurdish representatives in the negotiations is a "necessity," without naming any other Syrian Kurdish groups he would like to see involved in the talks.

Describing the PYD "a terrorist organization," Davutoglu said the group "joining the ranks of the opposition during the talks is unacceptable from our viewpoint.'

The United Nations on Tuesday sent out invitations for the peace talks, including to figures excluded from a key opposition body.

'The United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Mr. Staffan de Mistura, has addressed invitations to the Syrian participants today,' his office said in a statement.

The comments come as Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday called for the participation of Kurds in the peace talks scheduled for January 29 and insisted that the meeting would not be successful if Kurdish representatives are not invited.

Over the past several months, Moscow has moved to renew its ties with Kurdish groups and had held talks with PYD leader Salih Muslim, a step that has raised Ankara's concerns.

The UN Security Council on December 18 adopted a resolution, calling for a nationwide ceasefire in Syria and the formation of a "credible, inclusive and non-sectarian" government within six months.

The Syrian conflict began in 2011 and has reportedly claimed the lives of more than 260,000 people, and displaced almost eight million others.

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Parties to Syria talks must avoid irrelevant conditions: Russia FM

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 11:27AM

Russia's foreign minister has slammed certain parties to international talks on Syria for behaving "capriciously" by setting conditions.

Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday it was "the biggest mistake" to put forward "irrelevant conditions" in the talks instead of focusing on the fight against terrorism.

"When there are attempts to put conditions for collective fight against terrorism, conditions that are irrelevant, such as 'if you agree to a regime change, for example, in Syria, then we will for real begin to fight terrorism collectively'... that is, I believe, the biggest mistake," he said.

Lavrov further defended Moscow's campaign against terrorists in Syria, saying the military action helped to reverse the situation in favor of army forces on the ground.

"It has become clear who is fighting the terrorists, who are acting as their accomplices, who tries to use them for their unilateral, selfish goals," he said.

Russia launched the airstrikes at the request of the Syrian government last September.

His comments come days before another round of peace talks to end the crisis in Syria are set to begin in Geneva Switzerland.

The peace talks, originally planned to start on Monday, have been rescheduled for Friday.

Russia along with the US, Saudi Arabia, Iran and several and over two dozen other countries are taking part in the UN-backed negotiations.

On Tuesday, head of the Syrian opposition's negotiating team casts further doubt on whether the group will attend the Geneva meetings on Friday.

Assad al-Zoubi, speaking to Arabic news channel Al-Hadath, said recent diplomatic moves 'did not give cause for optimism over the negotiations'.

He added that the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, 'cannot impose conditions' on the opposition team.

The High Negotiations Council (HNC) was due to meet in Riyadh later on Tuesday to decide whether to attend the Geneva session.

The UN Security Council on December 18 adopted a resolution, calling for a nationwide ceasefire in Syria and the formation of a "credible, inclusive and non-sectarian" government within six months.

The Syrian conflict began in 2011, has reportedly claimed the lives more than 260,000 people, and displaced almost eight million others.

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Russia accuses Turkey of Syria border buildup

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 8:58AM

Russia has accused Turkey of military buildup on the Syrian border as it rejected claims of Moscow's plan to establish a new airbase in the Arab country.

The rebuttal followed remarks attributed to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggesting Russia might be establishing a base in Qamishli.

Erdogan "expressed alarm" after 200 Russian personnel were allegedly observed strengthening the runway on the Syrian border with Turkey, the reports said.

Russia's Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov dismissed the reports as 'a complete farce.'

The general said the allegations were 'an awkward attempt to provide a cover-up for the large deployment of Turkish troops to the Syrian border close to Qamishli."

"There are no 'new' airbases or additional 'jump-up bases' for Russian military aircraft in the Syrian Arab Republic, as well as no plans to create any," Konashenkov said on Monday.

The official said Russian fighter jets based at Hemeimeem in Syria's coastal western province of Latakia can reach any location in the country in half an hour, 'so there is no need for any additional base.'

Lt. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi of the military's general staff said Russian warplanes have been flying between 70 and 100 sorties daily over the past few days to provide air support for the Syrian army's operations against foreign-backed Takfiri militants.

President Vladimir Putin has said the Russian air campaign in Syria will last for as long as it is necessary, and that Moscow's goal is to help Damascus defeat terrorists.

Moscow began airstrikes against Daesh and other terrorist groups in Syria on September 30 upon a request by the Syrian government.

The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria, which flared in March 2011, has reportedly claimed the lives of more than 260,000 people and left over one million injured.

The UN says 12.2 million people, including more than 5.6 million children, remain in need of humanitarian assitance in Syria. The violence has also displaced 7.6 million people.

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Twin Daesh bombings kill 22 people in Syria's Homs

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 7:38AM

At least 22 people have been killed and more than a hundred others been injured in twin blasts by the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group in the Syrian province of Homs.

The terrorist attacks were conducted in al-Zahraa district in the city of Homs early on Tuesday.

Syria's official news agency SANA said the first terrorist attack in the residential area of al-Zahraa was a car bomb assault and was followed by an attack by an individual wearing an explosive belt.

Meanwhile, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human rights said on Tuesday that a loud explosion rocked al-Baghilia district in the northwest of the city of Dayr al-Zawr, adding that the blast was carried out by Daesh terrorists.

The report further said the blast was followed by fierce clashes between the Syrian army and the terrorists.

Earlier, the observatory had said that 19 militants from the so-called Ahrar al-Sham terror group and four civilians were killed in a bomb explosion in the Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday.

The attack reportedly hit a checkpoint at the entrance to a security complex belonging to the militant group. The report further said that several prisoners being held by the terrorist group at a facility in the complex were also believed to have been killed.

No group or individual has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.

The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria, which flared in March 2011, has reportedly claimed the lives of more than 260,000 people and left over one million injured. The UN says 12.2 million people, including more than 5.6 million children, remain in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria. The violence has also displaced 7.6 million people.

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Syrian army takes control of Sheikh Miskeen

Iran Press TV

Tue Jan 26, 2016 7:2AM

The Syrian army has reportedly managed to take full control of a strategic town in the southern province of Dara'a as they continue to gain ground in battles against foreign-sponsored Takfiri militants.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday that Syrian forces liberated the key town of Sheikh Miskeen from militants, cutting off their routes between eastern and western Dara'a Province.

A day earlier, Syrian army sources said the army had taken control of more than 90 percent of Sheikh Miskeen.

The UK-based group said the clashes are now taking place outside the western parts of Sheikh Miskeen, which lies at a crossroads linking the provinces of Suwaida, Quneitra and Damascus to the southern part of the country.

The army, backed by airstrikes carried out by Russian and Syrian warplanes, launched the offensive against militants in the town late last month.

A security source told AFP that Sheikh Miskeen was a "launching pad" for militant operations, and one of the opposition's "centers of gravity for the whole of Dera'a Province."

Damascus has been fighting foreign-backed militant groups in the country since 2011.

Gains by the government have come at a speedier pace over the past months, especially since late September 2015, when Russia endorsed a request by Damascus to dispatch its warplanes over Syria for combat sorties against positions of Takfiri terrorists.

Bomb blast in Idlib

The observatory also said that at least 23 people, many of them militants, were killed in a bomb explosion in Syria's Aleppo city on Monday.

The report said that 19 militants from the so-called Ahrar al-Sham terror group and four civilians were killed in the blast, which occurred in the Sukari district of the city.

The attack reportedly hit a checkpoint at the entrance to a security complex belonging to the militant group.

The report further said that several prisoners being held by the terrorist group at a facility in the complex were also believed to have been killed.

It also said the explosion destroyed three buildings, while people were missing under the rubble.

No group or individual has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.

In another incident on Monday, an Ahrar al-Sham commander and 11 members of his family were killed in a Russian airstrike on an area between northern Idlib and western Aleppo province, according to the report.

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Suicide Blast Hits Syrian Rebel Group, Kills 23

January 26, 2016

At least 23 people, mostly from the Syrian rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, were killed by a suicide bomber in a tanker truck in Aleppo on January 25, a monitoring group said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 19 fighters from the powerful Islamist group, including four commanders, and four civilians were killed in the blast in the Sukari district of the city.

The attack hit an Al-Sham checkpoint at the entrance to a security complex belonging to the group.

Several prisoners being held at a facility were also believed to have been killed in the blast, which destroyed three buildings, the monitor said.

It was unclear who was responsible for the blast, but Al-Sham has been targeted by a string of assassinations recently.

In September 2014, most of its top leadership was wiped out in a devastating explosion at its headquarters in Idlib Province that killed nearly 50 people.

Suspicion has fallen on the Syrian regime and the Islamic State, the conservative religious group's rival.

The observatory said an Al-Sham commander and 11 family members also were killed on January 25 in a Russian air strike, with three children among the dead.

Al-Sham is a leading member of the Army of Conquest alliance that controls Idlib Province along with Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front.

Based on reporting by AFP, Reuters, and AP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/syria-islamists- suicide-attack/27511925.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Syrian Army Close To Recapturing Key Rebel Stronghold

January 26, 2016

The Syrian Army is close to recapturing a rebel stronghold in the southern province of Deraa with help from Russian air strikes, a monitoring group says.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting is now concentrated outside the town of Sheikh Maskin, which lies at a crossroads linking the provinces of Suwaida, Quneitra, and Damascus to the southern part of the country. It also links eastern and western Deraa.

'The town is very important for both sides. They have both fought fiercely. Now by taking it, the regime has cut off the rebels links between eastern and western Deraa,' said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Britain-based Observatory, which tracks the violence in the country through a wide network of local sources.

'The destruction in the town is huge,' he told Reuters.

The army launched its offensive against insurgents in Sheikh Maskin late last month with support from dozens of air strikes by Russian and Syrian warplanes.

Southern Syria is the last major stronghold of the so-called mainstream insurgents who have been weakened elsewhere by the ultra-hard-line Islamic State group in the east and north, and gains by the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's wing in Syria, in the northwest.

The Syrian Army has been gaining ground since Russia started supporting its ally with air strikes in September.Before the move into Daraa, the regime had recaptured several key rebel towns in coastal Latakia Province, and was advancing in the northern province of Aleppo.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/syria- army-advancing-deraa/27511931.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Russia Denies Building Second Air Base In Syria

January 26, 2016

Russia has no plans to set up a second air base in Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry has said.

The ministry's statement on January 25 followed news reports that Russia could be preparing to create another base in Qamishli in northeastern Syria near the border with Turkey.

Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said the military had no intention to set up any additional air base in Qamishli or advance airfields in Syria.

Russian warplanes have flown nearly 6,000 combat missions from the Hemeimeem air base in Syria's coastal province of Latakia since Moscow launched its air campaign in September.

Konashenkov emphasized that Russian warplanes based at Hemeimeem can reach any location in Syria in a half-hour, so there is no need for any additional base.

The Russian air blitz has helped Syrian President Bashar Assad's army to launch offensives and seize some key areas from the opposition in recent weeks.

The recent gains have strengthened the Syrian government's hand before planned peace talks with the opposition, expected to start on January 29.

Based on reporting by AP and AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-denies- building-second-air-base-syria/27511374.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Netherlands Should Only Bomb Syria If Sure Would Bring Peace - Lawmaker

Sputnik News

23:15 26.01.2016(updated 23:51 26.01.2016)

The Dutch government should only extend its military action from Iraq to Syria, as part of the US-led international coalition, if it is sure the move could help stop the violence in the country, a Dutch lawmaker told Sputnik on Tuesday.

STRASBOURG (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA), announced its support for the extension of the anti-Daesh airstrikes from Iraq to Syria, giving the ruling People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) a majority in parliament on the issue.

'I think that if we decide to extend the bombingto the Syrian territory, we should really know what the effects would be  if it could promote a more sustainable solution and peace, or if it would raise the risk of accumulating more violence and would expose the Syrian citizens to even more violence. So I'm quite ambiguous about this,' Tineke Strik told Sputnik, stressing the uncertainty of striking more bombs on Syria.

The Dutch legislature has to date committed 380 troops to the anti-Daesh operation in Iraq, 250 of whom manage four F-16 fighters and 130 train local forces.

The Netherlands is part of the coalition led by the United States. France, whose capital experienced the deadliest terrorist attacks claimed by Daesh last November, issued a call to EU member states to expand their anti-Daesh mission to include Syria.

Russia, having outlawed Daesh, launched its own operation against the group in Syria after a request of the Damascus authorities.

 Sputnik

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Russian Actions in Syria Cause Daesh to 'Lose Foothold for First Time'

Sputnik News

23:07 26.01.2016(updated 23:33 26.01.2016)

Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vitaly Churkin stated that the military campaign conducted by Russia against Daesh and other terrorist groups in Syria has contributed to their losing standing in the country.

UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  The military campaign conducted by Russia against Daesh and other terrorist groups in Syria has contributed to their losing standing in the country, Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vitaly Churkin stated on Tuesday.

'So as to assist the Syrian government, the Russian side continues to provide military assistance in combating ISIL [Daesh] and other terrorist groups,' Churkin told a UN Security Council debate on the Middle East. 'For the first time they stopped, they have lost their footholds.'

The UN Security Council holds a debate on the Middle East every month. On December 18, 2015, it unanimously adopted Resolution 2254 at a ministerial-level meeting, which set the sequence of events necessary to solve the Syrian conflict.

UK Permanent Representative to the UN Matthew Rycroft accused Russia during the debate on Tuesday that Moscow is responsible for causing significant number civilian deaths in Syria.

'[T]here have been repeated and well-evidenced reports that Russian and Syrian regime bombing raids have resulted in extensive civilian losses,' Rycroft claimed.

Churkin, however, retorted that 'information regarding the numerous civilian casualties as a result of airstrikes in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, our UK and US colleagues have ignored, traditionally.'

'Russia continues to provide military assistance in the campaign against ISIL and other terrorist groups at the request of Syrian authorities. For the first time they have begun to lose captured positions,' Churkin told the UN Security Council.

The envoy noted Russia's humanitarian activities in the Arab republic, including aid deliveries to Deir ez-Zor, where Daesh militants cut off passage to over 100,000 civilians.

Churkin roundly rejected 'various allegations in connection with Russian actions in Syria.'

'It is especially strange when they are spread by members of the Western coalition, which in contrast to the Russian Aerospace Forces, acts completely without transparency and inefficiently,' he stressed.

Churkin further pointed to the 'traditional disregard' of numerous civilian casualties caused by US and UK airstrikes in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.

Earlier on Tuesday, the UN envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura sent out invitations for the inter-Syrian talks under Resolution 2254, with the intention of beginning the proximity talks on Friday.

The Islamic State, also known as Daesh, is a designated terrorist group that is outlawed in the United States, Russia and numerous other countries. The group has captured since 2014 huge sways of territory in Iraq and Syria, where it proclaimed a caliphate under Sharia law.

 Sputnik

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Syrian Army Claims Control Over Northern Outskirts of Daraa - Spokesman

Sputnik News

21:10 26.01.2016(updated 21:25 26.01.2016)

Syria's Brigadier General Ali Mayhoub said that the control of Sheikh Miskeen allowed the government forces to cut several terrorist supply routes as well as to ensure security in areas adjacent to the Daraa-Damascus highway.

LATAKIA (Sputnik)  The Syrian army with support of armed militia and the Russian air group on Tuesday assumed full control of the northern outskirts of the city of Daraa in southwestern Syria, an army spokesman said.

'This morning the units of the Syrian army and groups of people's militia with support of the Russian and Syrian combat aircraft, took full control of the town of Sheikh Miskeen and northern outskirts of Daraa,' Brigadier General Ali Mayhoub told reporters at a regular news briefing.

The general stressed that the control of Sheikh Miskeen allowed the government forces to cut several terrorist supply routes as well as to ensure security in areas adjacent to the Daraa-Damascus highway.

 Sputnik

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Turkey Threatens to Boycott Syria Peace Talks if Kurdish PYD Invited

Sputnik News

19:09 26.01.2016(updated 19:19 26.01.2016)

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that if representatives of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) are invited to take part in the intra-Syrian reconciliation talks, Ankara will 'certainly' boycott talks.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  Ankara will boycott the UN-backed intra-Syrian reconciliation talks if representatives of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) are invited to take part, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday.

Turkey considers the PYD to be an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and views it as a terrorist organization.

'In what capacity the PYD will be at the negotiating table? Can a terrorist organization represent people? These are talks between the opposition and the regime. Terrorists organizations should not be allowed to attend,' Cavusoglu said in an interview with Turkish NTV television.

'If the PYD has been invited to attend the Geneva talks, we will certainly boycott them,' the minister stressed.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura earlier on Tuesday sent invitations to designated participants of intra-Syrian peace talks in Geneva scheduled for January 29. The list of invitees has not been disclosed.

 Sputnik

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Hearts and Minds: Syrian Army Wages Tactical Warfare Against Militants

Sputnik News

16:09 26.01.2016(updated 16:12 26.01.2016)

The Syrian Army has liberated all major cities in the province of Latakia from Islamist militants.

The Syrian Arab Army, supported by Russian Aerospace Forces, has managed to drive Islamist militants from the city of Rabia in Latakia Province, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).

The military now intends to use the city, which used to be the last major Islamist stronghold in Latakia, as a staging area for offensive operations against militant forces entrenched in Idlib Province, the news agency adds.

Syrian Army sappers are currently sweeping the city, which has been held by Islamist militants for four years, looking for booby traps left behind by the retreating rebels.

'We've liberated a large swathe of territory,' one of the Syrian soldiers told RT. 'The terrorists are holed up in the town of Han-ash-Sheikh, trying to stage a counterattack.'

Han-ash-Sheikh is currently being held by members of Jabhat an-Nusra  the local branch of al-Qaeda  but the Syrian military is reluctant to launch an all-out assault as it will likely result in numerous civilian casualties.

'The militants know that we want to avoid civilian casualties, so they try to stick close to residential buildings. We always hold fire if there's a risk of hurting civilians,' a Syrian army tank commander named Anas explained.

Meanwhile, Syrian forces have managed to liberate roughly 46 square miles of Latakia Province during the latest offensive, and are making significant gains in several of the country's other provinces.

 Sputnik

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Kurds Must be Included in Intra-Syria Talks - Syrian Politician

Sputnik News

15:10 26.01.2016(updated 15:27 26.01.2016)

A member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party stated that in order for the Geneva intra-Syrian talks to yield, they should involve all opposition groups.

GENEVA (Sputnik), Svetlana Alexandrova  In order for the Geneva intra-Syrian talks to yield, they should involve all opposition groups, including Kurdish representatives, despite Turkish and Saudi opposition, Tarek Ahmad, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, told Sputnik on Tuesday.

'If Geneva's target is to construct a new democratic secular regime in Damascus, all parties and all sides to the Syrian conflict should be invited along with the government and the civil society,' Ahmad said.

He stressed that no opposition group inside or outside of Syria could be excluded, 'including Kurds, for example, just because Turks or Saudis do not want to invite them.'

Syria has been mired in a civil war since 2011, with government forces loyal to President Bashar Assad fighting a number of opposition factions and extremist groups.

In December, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on Syrian settlement, which reaffirmed the goals of the Vienna agreements to bring the entire spectrum of political groups in the crisis-torn country to the negotiating table and stated that the next round of the talks would take place in January, 2016.

Turkey has strongly opposed the inclusion of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the reconciliation talks. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu reiterated over the weekend that Turkey makes 'no distinction' between the PYD and the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is outlawed in Turkey.

On Monday, one of the leaders of the Syrian Popular Front for Change and Liberation, Qadri Jamil, told Sputnik it would a few days to decide on the list of participants in the talks.

 Sputnik

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Syrian Army Liberates Southern Town of Sheikh Maskin

Sputnik News

15:01 26.01.2016(updated 15:09 26.01.2016)

According to a military source, Syrian government forces have consolidated their positions and liberated the southern town of Sheikh Maskin in the Daraa Governorate from terrorist groups.

DAMASCUS (Sputnik)  Syrian government forces have consolidated their positions and liberated the southern town of Sheikh Maskin in the Daraa Governorate from terrorist groups, a military source said Tuesday.

'This morning, our forces strengthened their positions throughout the city. At present, Sheikh Miskin can be considered fully under control of the army,' the source told RIA Novosti.

Overnight, government storm troops took control of the town's entire perimeter, cutting off all terrorist supply routes. The army began to clear districts where militants had sought cover, the source explained.

Combat engineers, whose task is to clear key roads and buildings of explosive devices, worked alongside special army units in the operation, he added.

Dozens of militants were killed and numerous cars mounted with machine guns, homemade rocket launchers were destroyed in the course of the assault, the source noted.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with the country's government fighting a number of opposition factions and radical Islamist groups, including the jihadist group Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia.

 Sputnik

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Take Cover, Daesh: Syrian Army Continues to Destroy Militants in Aleppo

Sputnik News

08:57 26.01.2016(updated 11:46 26.01.2016)

The Syrian Army and the country's National Defense Forces have reportedly taken full control of a strategic district located near Kweiris Airbase in the northern province of Aleppo.

A strategic district northwest of Kweiris Airbase in Aleppo Province has been liberated by the Syrian Army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) from Daesh militants, according to media reports. Several terrorists were reportedly killed or wounded in the attack.

'Pro-government troops set the Arbid Al-Judaydah district free following several hours of heavy fighting in the region,' the Iranian news agency FARS quoted the source as saying.

The liberation of the district came after the Syrian troops and the NDF liberated the strategic villages of Qatar and Tal Hattabat located to the north of Kweiris Airbase late last week.

Meanwhile, retired Lebanese Brigadier General Ali Maqsoud has said that the Syrian Army is due to stage a massive attack on al-Nusra Front militants in the coming days in order to break the siege of the Shiite-populated towns of al-Zahra and Nubl in northwestern Aleppo.

The towns have been surrounded by terrorists for years, and the civilian population has been besieged and starving there for at least several months.

'All terrorist groups that are targeting the towns of Nubl and al-Zahra will experience a defeat similar to the defeat they faced at Kweiris Airbase in Aleppo Province,' Ali Maqsoud was quoted by FARS as saying.

Adding to the Syrian Army's anti-terror effort is Russia's ongoing air campaign in Syria, which was launched on September 30, when more than fifty Russian warplanes, including Su-24M, Su-25 and Su-34 jets, commenced precision airstrikes on Daesh targets in the country at the behest of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Russian General Staff said on Monday that combat aircraft from the Russian air group in Syria have carried out 169 sorties in the last three days, hitting more than 480 terrorist targets. The statement came as dozens of Daesh terrorists were killed and many more wounded after the Syrian Army repelled a spate of militants' attempts to seize hilltops located near the strategic town of Baqaliyeh in the eastern province of Deir ez-Zor.

 Sputnik

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After Fierce Fighting Syrian Army Retakes Strategic Town in Deraa Province

Sputnik News

04:12 26.01.2016(updated 07:15 26.01.2016)

In its fight against Daesh, also known as IS/Islamic State, the Syrian Army has liberated Sheikh Maskin, a strategic town in the Deraa province, along a major supply route.

Last month, the Syrian Army launched an offensive on Sheikh Maskin, supported by Russian airstrikes. A strategic hub linking the Suwaida, Quneitra and Damascus provinces to the southern part of Syria, the town also links eastern and western Deraa.

According to monitors on the ground, Sheikh Maskin has been retaken after less than a month of fierce fighting.

'The town is very important for both sides. They have both fought fiercely. Now by taking it, the regime has cut off the rebels links between eastern and western Deraa,' said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The town is back in the control of the Syrian government, but sustained heavy damage during the fighting.

Holding Sheikh Maskin will allow the Syrian Army to push onward to al-Harra hill, the highest point in the Deraa province.

With the assistance of Russian airstrikes, the Syrian government has made a number of advances. Earlier on Monday, reports surfaced that insurgents had been stopped at the town of Baqaliyeh. Daesh is said to have suffered heavy losses.

'The Daesh strongholds near the villages were massively bombed by the Syrian warplanes, which claimed the lives of many terrorists and wounded many others,' the army sources said.

Syrian forces have also liberated roughly 46 square miles of the Latakia province.

'Syrian Arab army in cooperation with militias gained control over 120 kilometers of Latakia province's territory in the last two days,' according to a Syrian Army statement released on Sunday.

Russia launched its air campaign in Syria on September 30, and has since carried out thousands of sorties. Acting at the behest of the legitimate government of the country, President Bashar al Assad, the airstrikes have eliminated thousands of Daesh targets.

 Sputnik

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Turkey Pressured to Allow Kurdish Group at Syria Talks

by Dorian Jones January 26, 2016

Turkey is insisting the Syrian Kurdish group the PYD be excluded from planned Syrian peace talks in Geneva. Ankara accuses the group of being a terrorist organization. The dispute is casting doubt over the talks, but Ankara is finding itself increasingly isolated.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, speaking in parliament Tuesday, reiterated his stance the Syrian Kurdish group the PYD and its armed militia, YPG, are terrorist organizations, and have no place at peace talks on Syria in Geneva.

Davutoglu accused the groups of being extensions of the Kurdish rebel group the PKK, which Turkish security forces are fighting.

But Carnegie Europe visiting scholar Sinan Ulgen said Ankara was finding itself increasingly isolated.

'There is no willingness on the Turkish side to carve out a space for the Syrian Kurds, on the other hand the Syrian Kurds are viewed from Washington as being successful in fighting the Islamic State on the ground. So there the U.S. approach is closer to Russia that wants to give a bigger role to the Syrian Kurds at the negotiating table,' said Ulgen.

Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Tuesday the Geneva talks would fail if the PYD was excluded. On Monday in Ankara, EU foreign affairs commissioner Frederica Mogherini stressed the importance of the widest participation at the Geneva talks.

Political scientist Cengiz Aktar, of Istanbul's Suleyman Sah University, said Ankara viewed the dispute as an important test of its power in the region.

'Turkish government is adamant, it does not want the Syrian Kurds in Geneva. The last time they managed to keep the Syrian Kurds out, we will see this time, what will be exact weight, and importance of Turkey, regarding the future of Syria. And the test will be whether the condition of Turkey will be excepted or not,' said Aktar.

In an attempt to build support, Davutoglu is due to visit key regional ally Saudi Arabia later this week. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu spoke twice this week with his U.S. counterpart, John Kerry, on the issue.

But Cumhuriyet newspaper political columnist Semih Idiz said with Ankara having few allies, its options were limited.

'The only thing it can do is boycott the Geneva talks. Of course they might be intermediary formula, where the PYD is represented under the American established Syrian Democratic Forces, which everyone really knows is a Kurdish entity and Turkey may have to accept that.Other than that I do not think it has any leverage in this regard.'

Pro-government media has suggested Ankara has threatened to boycott the Geneva talks, but analysts says such a move is risky, with Turkey's leaders well aware of the old diplomatic adage, 'If you are not at the table, you will likely be on the menu.'

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Challenges Could Derail Syria Talks

by Mohamed Elshinnawi January 26, 2016

U.N. envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura says he hopes to convene peace talks between Syrian government and opposition members Friday in Geneva, but the process has been facing serious challenges because of disagreements over who should be invited and the future of Syria's president.

De Mistura has not publicly said which Syrian opposition groups will be invited to take part in the talks.

George Sabra, Deputy Chief of the Syrian opposition negotiating team, told VOA there are many challenges facing the U.N.-sponsored talks.

"Russia is attempting to impose who represent the Syrian opposition in the Geneva talks; the Syrian regime is ignoring U.N. Security Council resolution 2254 which is calling for an end to the indiscriminate use of weapons against civilians." Sabra added "The Syrian opposition insisted that the regime should stop bombarding Syrian villages and lift its starvation siege before it can join the talks but it is being pressured to participate."

But Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated U.S. support for the opposition. 'The position of the United States is and hasn't changed,' Kerry said. 'We are still supporting the opposition, politically, financially and militarily.'

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia's four-month air campaign backing Assad has helped "turn the tide" in Syria where the government has been battling rebels for 5 years.

Confident Assad

Josh Landis, President of Syrian Studies Association, argues that Russian support contributed to recent military gains by Syrian President Bashar al- Assad and convinced Assad that he is winning, so his regime will not compromise in the Geneva talks.

"Russian air power has changed the balance of power and made it very difficult to convince Assad to stop fighting and to make peace."

Secretary Kerry downplayed comments from the Syrian government indicating it would not bend on its positions heading into the talks. He also said it is ultimately up to the Syrian parties to decide the future of their country, including the role of President Assad.

Sabra ruled out any possibility of accepting a future role for Assad in any political transition.

"It would be extremely impossible to talk about a political solution in Syria with Assad as a part of it. That defies the logic of a political transition."

Recommendations to get through

Former U.S. Ambassador Edward Djerejian acknowledges the tough challenges facing the U.N.-sponsored talks, but he offered a diplomatic solution.

"I think the compromise would probably be that Assad does not have to leave immediately, but with an understanding that there would be elements of his regime that could be involved leading to a political transition which at the end of the day Assad and his key lieutenants would not be there."

Djerejian said "I think there are solutions but they require a major effort to get everyone on the same page to resolve the Syrian conflict."

Robert Ford, the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria, sent his vision to rescue the upcoming talks through an open letter to Secretary Kerry.

"The administration needs to focus on developing an agreement with the Russians and other states about the issues the Syrians must negotiate.' Ford added, "The U.S. and other states need to agree about a force that would robustly monitor a cease-fire, how to improve local security and what the U.N. Security Council will countenance when the cease-fire is violated."

Ambassador Ford stressed that Syrians must compromise just as the Tunisians did, and warned against any U.S. or other foreign leaders trying to micro-manage the process, which, in his opinion, could undermine the chances for sustainable progress.

But Landis argues there is no good will to ensure any optimistic outcomes of the talks, even if all parties attended.

"I believe the upcoming Geneva talks will be in vain as the previous efforts were, simply because neither side is willing to compromise." Landis said, "It is quite clear that Russia and Assad believe that they can achieve a conquest in the battlefield and the Syrian opposition groups still believe they can take Damascus by force."

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Major Powers Express Support for Intra-Syrian Talks

by Margaret Besheer January 26, 2016

Major world powers are urging that political momentum be seized following the U.N.'s announcement that Syrian talks would begin Friday in Geneva.

"There has not been this level of diplomatic activity over Syria since the last round of talks in Geneva in 2014," Britain's U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said Tuesday during the Security Council's regular meeting on the situation in the Middle East. "It is in all our interests to maintain the momentum, to build on the optimism."

Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, announced that invitations had been sent out for the talks between the Syrian government and opposition. He did not elaborate on who the participants would be. Questions remain particularly around who will make up the opposition delegation.

Earlier, the opposition comprising the recently formed High Negotiations Committee cast doubt on whether it would go to Geneva, accusing the United States of adopting unacceptable Iranian and Russian ideas for solving the conflict.

Opposition official Asaad al-Zoubi told Arabic news channel Al-Hadath that he was pessimistic, but that a final decision had yet to be taken.

'Uphill battle'

The talks are expected to start with the parties in separate rooms and U.N. mediators shuttling between them. De Mistura said these so-called proximity talks were scheduled to continue for six months, with the first round lasting two or three weeks.

He said Monday that it would be "an uphill battle," but "the important thing is that we keep the momentum."

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told the council that the continued "suffering and barbarity" in Syria highlighted the urgency of working toward a political solution for the nearly five-year-old conflict.

"The initiation of U.N.-facilitated Syrian negotiations to reach a political transition, in accordance with the Geneva Communique, is a critical step toward ending the conflict in Syria," she said.

The Geneva Communique, agreed to at an international peace conference in June 2012, is a six-point plan for stopping the violence and moving the two sides toward a political settlement, including the establishment of a transitional governing body that would "exercise full executive powers."

'Window of opportunity'

Russian envoy Vitaly Churkin, speaking of the coming Geneva talks, said 'there is a unique prospect that's been created" to reach a political settlement. "We must take this window of opportunity."

In late September, Russia began airstrikes in Syria, saying President Bashar al-Assad had requested Moscow's help to battle the self-proclaimed Islamic State group. But members of the large Western anti-IS coalition have criticized the Russian strikes, saying the vast majority have been against launched in armed-opposition areas.

"We have heard different ideas regarding Russia's activities in Syria," Churkin told the council. "We decisively push them back, in particular from sides who are part of the Western coalition." He criticized the Western coalition, saying its air forces were not acting transparently or effectively, especially in reporting civilian casualties.

Objectives

France's U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre stressed that there must be progress on three fronts if the Geneva negotiations are to be successful: improving the humanitarian situation, letting the opposition choose its own representatives for the talks, and including the political transition in the discussions.

"Only a political solution," Delattre said, "will put an end to the suffering and the ongoing outgo of civilians and reduce the terrorist threat we all face."

Diplomacy has repeatedly failed to resolve the Syrian conflict, which has killed 250,000 people and forced millions from their homes, spawning a refugee crisis in neighboring states and Europe. De Mistura is the third international envoy for Syria. His two predecessors  Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi  both quit.

The United States has supported the opposition to Assad, who it says has lost legitimacy and must leave power. But the opposition has been increasingly critical of U.S. policy. Opposition leader Riad Hijab said earlier this month that the United States had backtracked on its position on Syria, softening its stance to accommodate Russia.

Russia has sought to expand the opposition delegation to peace talks to include a powerful Kurdish faction that controls wide areas of northern Syria. The Sunni Arab opposition says the Kurdish PYD party should be part of the government delegation. PYD leader Saleh Muslim said he expected his party to be invited to Geneva, though it was unclear in what capacity.

Participation of Kurds

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday it would be impossible to reach a peace agreement in Syria without inviting Kurds to take part in the negotiating process.

The Syrian Kurds say the autonomous government they have established in the northeast is a decentralized model for how to resolve the war.

Turkey, a major sponsor of the insurgency, said however that it was against the participation of the Kurdish YPG militia, which is affiliated with the PYD. The YPG has become an important partner in the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State. Turkey views the YPG as an extension of the PKK, which it sees as a terrorist organization.

The Syrian government and its allies have made significant gains against rebels in western Syria in recent weeks.

On Monday, they captured the rebel-held town of Sheikh Maskin in southern Syria near the border with Jordan. It was the first significant gain for Damascus in that area since the start of the Russian intervention on September 30.

In recent weeks government forces and their allies have also captured two strategic towns in the northwestern province of Latakia, where they are trying to seal the border to cut insurgent supply lines to Turkey.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.

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Russia Hardens Position Ahead of Syria Peace Talks

by Daniel Schearf January 26, 2016

Russia appeared to be hardening its position on Syria as it backed government forces making gains against rebels before hoped-for peace talks Friday in Geneva.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Tuesday that the Syrian Army, with the help of Russian airstrikes, seized control overnight of a strategic rebel-held town near the border with Jordan.

Syrian opposition groups had signaled they would not participate in talks unless the Russian and Syrian airstrikes were halted and sieges against towns were lifted.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday said Russia's air support had drastically altered the situation in Syria and 'helped narrow the area controlled by terrorists.' He added, 'moreover, we also got a clear picture of who is fighting the terrorists and who is acting in the role of their accomplices, trying to use them in their own egotistic, one-sided goals.'

Russia began accusing Turkey of supporting terrorists in Syria after a Turkish warplane shot down a Russian bomber in November along its border. Ankara denies the accusation. Turkey is part of a U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State and other terrorist groups in the region.

Disagreement over PYD

Russia labels all the rebel groups fighting its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as terrorists and is accused by Assad opponents of targeting rebels instead of Islamic State terrorists. Russia is accused of killing hundreds of civilians with its air campaign, while Moscow claims zero civilian deaths.

Russia has clashed with the U.S.-led coalition on which Syrian opposition groups should participate in peace talks.

Speaking Tuesday at his annual news briefing in Moscow, Lavrov said Syrian Kurds represented by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) should be invited to participate. Turkey, a member of the U.S. coalition, is against the PYD taking part.

The Russian foreign minister said, 'Without this participant, the talks cannot bring the result that we want, that is the final political settlement [of the conflict] in Syria.'

The PYD is an offshoot of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party; but, while the PKK is considered by Turkey, the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization, the United States has supported the PYD in fighting Islamic State terrorists inside Syria.

Turkey's prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Tuesday they remain strongly opposed to the PYD joining the Syrian opposition at the peace talks. It was not clear if the hardened positions were enough to scuttle the Friday talks.

Rivalries 'quite visible'

Moscow-based political scientist Victor Mizin says the differences between the sides are stark.

'The rivalries and the divergences in approaches are quite visible. And, I think that ... it is quite evident that they would be also visible in the coming negotiations.'

Lavrov denied a report that Moscow had urged Assad to step down, but was rebuffed.

The Financial Times newspaper this month cited sources saying Russia's former head of foreign intelligence, Igor Sergun, made a special trip to Damascus earlier this month to offer Assad asylum if he gave up power.

'I've read the speculations published with reference to late Igor Sergun claiming that he had allegedly made a trip to Damascus to ask Assad to resign,' Lavrov said Tuesday. 'This is not true. Such a conversation with Assad was not necessary.'

Lavrov also dismissed speculation Russia might offer Assad asylum.

'Nobody has asked us for political asylum,' Lavrov said, adding, 'No offers of the sort have been made.'

The U.S.-led coalition was supporting Syrian opposition calls for Assad to leave power, but changed its position to support talks between the two sides as Russia stepped up its military support.

Lavrov painted a bleak picture of global terrorism and alleged Western attempts to contain Russia. He complained of Western dominance and asking Russia for favors, while also claiming that dominance is being eroded and Russia is ready to cooperate with Europe and the United States on other contentious issues, such as implementing a peace deal on Ukraine.

He blamed Kyiv and the West for a lack of progress on the February cease-fire deal made in Minsk. Kyiv and Western governments say Russia's ongoing military support for pro-Russia rebels is to blame.

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Turkey's Oil Trade With Daesh Sponsors Terrorism  Israeli Defense Minister

Sputnik News

19:10 26.01.2016(updated 00:21 27.01.2016)

During his visit to Athens, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon accused Turkey of sponsoring terrorism by buying oil from Daesh terrorist group.

'As you know, Daesh (Islamic State) enjoyed Turkish money for oil for a very, very long period of time. I hope that it will be ended,' Ya'alon said during a meeting with his Greek counterpart Panos Kammenos in Athens.

The Israeli defense minister further accused Turkey of 'allowing the jihadists to move freely from Europe to Syria and Iraq and back to Europe, and in this become part of the Islamic State's infrastructure in Europe,' the Ynet reports.

'It's up to Turkey, the Turkish government, the Turkish leadership, to decide whether they want to be part of any kind of cooperation to fight terrorism. This is not the case so far,' Moshe Ya'alon said.

Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISILIS), which is outlawed in many countries including Russia, controls large areas in oil-rich Syria, Iraq and Libya. Earlier in December, the Russian Defense Ministry presented evidence showing that the jihadists had been smuggling oil across the Syria-Turkey border in large volumes.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly denied profiting from IS oil trafficking and vowed to resign if indisputable evidence emerged that confirmed his family's involvement in the Daesh oil business.

 Sputnik

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Defence Secretary welcomes deeper security relationship with Germany

25 January 2016

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon discussed the strengthening of Britain's security ties with Germany when he met counterpart Ursula Von der Leyen in Berlin today, where the Ministers confirmed their shared vision for a closer and stronger partnership.

Germany is a key ally for the UK  a fact that was formally recognised in November's Strategic Defence and Security Review when Germany was elevated to a 'tier one' defence relationship, alongside the US and France.

Mr Fallon and Dr Von der Leyen discussed how the countries' Armed Forces can develop their collaboration on operations, missions and training. This will be in evidence as Britain becomes a lead nation for the Transatlantic Capability Enhancement and Training (TACET) initiative, working alongside Germany and the US to deliver a robust military presence in Eastern Europe. Both countries will also work together to ensure NATO remains strong and united; tackle terrorist threats; build capacity outside of Europe; and enhance the interoperability between their Armed Forces.

The Ministers also announced a new UK-Germany 'Ministerial Dialogue on Equipment and Capability Cooperation'. At the first meeting, in March, Ministers will discuss reducing support costs on common aircraft, notably A400M and Typhoon, and exploring future innovation.

The Defence Secretary also took the opportunity to welcome Germany's expanded role in the counter-Daesh coalition, following last week's meeting in Paris where it was agreed to intensify strikes against the militants' infrastructure in Iraq and Syria.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said:

'Our defence review elevated Germany to a top tier ally, alongside France and the United States. We are already working closely together within NATO and in the fight against Daesh. Now I want to see more collaboration on operations, missions and training and deeper industrial cooperation.'

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TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Jan. 26, 2016) - Reliant Gold Corp. ("Reliant" or the "Corporation") (TSX VENTURE:REC) announces that it has made the following board and management changes effective January 26, 2016:

Dr. Trevor Boyd has resigned as a director, VP Exploration and Corporate Secretary of the Corporation in order to pursue other opportunities.

Mr. J. Errol Farr has resigned as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation. Mr. Farr continues in his role as Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Chief Financial Officer of the Corporation.

Mr. Kabir Ahmed is appointed as a director of the Corporation, and has also been appointed as the Corporation's President and Chief Executive Officer, Corporate Secretary and Corporate Counsel, which are all subject to regulatory approval as may be required. Mr. Ahmed has two decades of experience as a corporate and securities lawyer, and is the founder of Reliant. As part of their mandate, Mr. Ahmed and Mr. Farr will be reviewing strategic options for the Corporation.

The Corporation thanks Dr. Boyd for his many years of service as a valued director and officer of Reliant. He has been instrumental in identifying prospective mineral exploration projects for Reliant and for expertly leading the Corporation's exploration and development programs over the past several years.

ABOUT RELIANT

Reliant is a junior mineral exploration company with an experienced management team engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of properties for the mining of precious and base metals. Reliant holds a 49% joint venture interest in the Borden Lake South Property, comprised of 20 mining claims representing 294 claim units covering approximately 4,704 hectares, and located 10 kilometres east of the Town of Chapleau, Ontario.

The common shares of Reliant trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the stock symbol "REC".

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Certain statements in this press release may constitute "forward-looking" statements which involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of Reliant or the industry in which it operates to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. When used in this press release, the words "estimate", "believe", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "plan", "may", "should", "will", the negative thereof or other variations thereon or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the current expectations of the management of Reliant with respect to future events based on currently available information and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by those forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time, including, without limitation, under the heading "Risk Factors", in Reliant's prospectus and in other continuous disclosure documents that are filed by Reliant from time to time with the Ontario, Alberta or British Columbia Securities Commissions which are available at www.sedar.com and to which readers of this press release are referred for additional information concerning Reliant, its prospects and the risks and uncertainties relating to Reliant and its prospects. New risk factors may arise from time to time and it is not possible for management to predict all of those risk factors or the extent to which any factor or combination of factors may cause actual results, performance and achievements of Reliant to be materially different from those contained in forward-looking statements. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Reliant cannot assure investors that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. Given these risks and uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results.

The forward-looking information contained in this press release is current only as of the date hereof. Reliant does not undertake or assume any obligation, except as required by law, to release publicly any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

No securities commission or regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the contents of this press release.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Rio Tinto will reimburse Reservoir's costs from the drilling started in September 2015, up to a maximum of US$500,000, which will form part of the Stage 1 earn-in expenditure.



A Management Committee has been formed comprising of 2 representatives from each of Rio Tinto and Reservoir, which will meet to approve work programs and budgets on a quarterly basis, with quarterly cash calls being made in advance.



Reservoir will be the Manager of the Tilva Project until such time as Rio Tinto exercises its right to assume the role.



The focus of initial work will be data compilation, geological, geochemical, geophysical and structural modelling in order to prioritize targets for fieldwork and the next round of drilling.

VANCOUVER, Jan 26, 2016 - Reservoir Minerals Inc. ("Reservoir" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:RMC) (OTC PINK:RVRLF) (BERLIN:9RE) is pleased to announce that its subsidiaries Tilva (BVI) Inc., and Global Reservoir Minerals (BVI) Inc., have been notified by Rio Tinto Mining & Exploration Limited (" Rio Tinto "), that the condition precedent has been met relating to the earn-in and joint venture agreement ("Agreement") signed between Rio Tinto and Reservoir. Under the terms of the Agreement, Rio Tinto has the option to earn in stages up to a 75% interest in Reservoir's four wholly-owned exploration permits in the Timok Magmatic Complex; Nikolicevo, Kraljevica, Coka Kupjatra and Tilva Njagra in Serbia ("Tilva Project"), by sole funding project expenditures of up to US$75 million (see Reservoir news release of November 12, 2015 for details).Simon Ingram, President and CEO of Reservoir Minerals Inc., commented: "Reservoir is pleased to be continuing work on the four exploration permits of the Tilva Project, which will be solely funded by Rio Tinto via this Joint Venture during the sole funding period. The Timok belt has excellent exploration potential for large-scale copper-gold deposits and we look forward to building on Reservoir's experience and success in this belt with Rio Tinto."Dr. Tim Fletcher, Chartered Engineer (UK) and Vice President of Exploration for the Company, a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects of the Canadian Securities Administrators and a consultant to the Company, approved the technical disclosure in this release and has verified the data disclosed. Reservoir Minerals Inc. is an international mineral exploration and development company run by an experienced technical and management team, with a portfolio of precious and base metal exploration properties in Europe and Africa. It operates an exploration partnership business model to leverage its expertise through to discovery.For further information on Reservoir Minerals Inc., please consult our website: www.reservoirminerals.comNeither TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Chris MacIntyre, VP Corporate Development+1.416.703.0010chris@reservoirminerals.comwww.reservoirminerals.com
VANCOUVER, Jan. 26, 2016 /CNW/ - Taseko Mines Ltd. (TSX: TKO; NYSE MKT: TGB) ("Taseko" or the "Company") today responded to comments from activist Raging River Capital LP ("RRC"), which requisitioned a special meeting of Taseko shareholders after acquiring slightly more than the minimum shares for a requisition.

RRC, a recently created entity with no mining assets or operations, began accumulating Taseko shares on December 29, 2015, two weeks before the requisition. One of its principals, Mark Radzik, is also Managing Partner of a Chicago-based investment firm that describes itself as making "opportunistic" investments.

"While we welcome the views of all shareholders, it is unfortunate that RRC made no good faith effort to constructively engage with us before rushing into what will likely be a costly proxy contest," said Russell Hallbauer, Taseko's President and Chief Executive Officer. "RRC's engagement consisted of two telephone calls totaling less than an hour. During those calls, RRC indicated that it was unwilling to consider any possible accommodation or compromise on its Board representation demands."

HDSI's Flexible Services Arrangement

Linda Thorstad, Chair of a Special Committee of independent directors formed to assist Taseko's Board in its response to the RRC meeting requisition, added, "RRC has made a number of unwarranted assertions with respect to Taseko's advantageous relationship with Hunter Dickinson Services Inc. ("HDSI"), a private mining services company. HDSI provides services to Taseko as well as several other publicly traded mining companies, and is owned by several mining professionals, three of whom are directors of Taseko.

Taseko's Board takes conflicts of interest seriously. Taseko has always disclosed its policies and practices with regard to HDSI. Independent Taseko directors regularly review the cost and quality of services from HDSI to ensure that Taseko derives significant benefit from this arrangement."

Taseko enjoys a flexible, as-needed services arrangement with HDSI which provides experienced personnel, as requested by Taseko, for periodic geological, engineering, corporate development, administrative, legal and financial management tasks. Taseko is always free to select any service provider other than HDSI and Taseko has the right to cancel HDSI's services on 30 days' notice. Taseko filed a copy of the HDSI service agreement on SEDAR in September 2010.

As part of its decision process Taseko regularly reviews rates for the range of services requested by Taseko from HDSI for comparison with rates for similar services from other vendors. Taseko is satisfied the rates are competitive with, if not lower than, other suppliers of similar services. The aggregate charges for HDSI's services amounted to less than 1% of Taseko's gross revenue in 2015 and much of that amount was office rent, which is passed through on a cost basis.

Benefits of the Curis Transaction

RRC has also raised misplaced concerns with Taseko's 2014 acquisition of Curis Resources Ltd. Curis owns the advanced stage, high quality Florence Copper development-stage project, which has large copper reserves and the potential to be a long-life, low cost copper producer. Florence Copper strengthens Taseko's development project pipeline and may help bridge a future production gap at a relatively low capital cost.

Moreover, Florence Copper's location in Arizona provides Taseko with geographic diversification. Taseko screened dozens of potential targets throughout the Americas and concluded that Florence Copper represented the best project available and the best value to meet the Company's strategic goals.

Mr. Hallbauer and two other Taseko directors, Ronald Thiessen and Robert Dickinson, who held less than 8% of Curis, recused themselves from the acquisition process and all voting decisions. Taseko took exhaustive steps to ensure best-practices in corporate governance were applied throughout the 18-month process leading up to the transaction. Among other things, the Board struck a Special Committee of independent directors to oversee the acquisition, review and execute due diligence on Curis, and make recommendations to the Board.

Taseko's Curis Special Committee engaged independent legal counsel to it, and a major Canadian bank provided the Taseko Board with an independent fairness opinion on the transaction. Several financial analysts commented favorably on the transaction, appreciating Taseko's strategic rationale for the acquisition and the up-side potential for the Florence project.

Disciplined Governance Processes

RRC has also raised unwarranted questions about Taseko's governance processes. RRC's dissatisfaction fails to take into account Taseko's regular reviews of, and updates to, its manual of governance procedures and ethics code. In 2013, for example, Taseko established the position of lead director to, among other things, schedule regular meetings of the independent directors and assume other responsibilities if the Chair of the Board, for any reason, is not fully independent.

Taseko has paid special attention to procedures involving HDSI, including adopting a Related Party Investment Protocol. As described in the governance manual available on Taseko's website, the protocol ensures that directors follow best practices in related party situations, including review by a special committee of directors who are independent of HDSI and who consult outside advisors. This protocol, which codified practices that were already in place, was added to the manual in May 2014. These governance improvements, which followed cooperative engagement with shareholders, were implemented long before RRC made its first purchase of Taseko shares.

Comprehensive Procedures for Director Evaluation and Nomination

Taseko's Board has comprehensive procedures, conducted by independent directors, for ongoing and incoming director evaluation and nomination prior to each shareholder meeting. These procedures will continue for the meeting requisitioned by RRC.

In the past, these procedures have resulted in the nomination of Board candidates who have been put forward by arms-length shareholders. This demonstrates that Taseko is certainly not closed-minded or dismissive about alternative Board nominees. The focus is on the quality and experience of the potential candidate, how that candidate's skill set meshes with the existing Board and that candidate's strategic vision for the Company.

Mr. Hallbauer and the other two incumbent directors targeted for removal by RRC, Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Thiessen, have been repeatedly re-nominated on the strength of their decades of experience in the mining industry persisting through numerous commodity cycles. Each has been recognized with prestigious awards from the mining industry.

The three directors targeted by RRC have also been long-term Taseko shareholders. They each have a personal ownership position, collectively amounting to approximately 2.8% of Taseko's shares outstanding. The removal of these directors would significantly weaken Taseko's Board.

Poised for Growth with Rising Copper Prices

With its portfolio of large, long life mineral assets, Taseko is poised for growth and improved operating results with rising copper prices. Compared with its peers, Taseko's share price has performed in line or better over the past year.

Taseko's flagship Gibraltar mine in British Columbia is Canada's second largest open pit copper mine, and has been significantly expanded and modernized since Taseko restarted the mine in 2004. An experienced operations team is required to generate positive cash flow from this challenging, low-grade orebody.

Taseko's management team, led by Mr. Hallbauer, has deep industry knowledge and experience managing mining projects. Mr. Hallbauer, President and CEO since 2005, is a 35-year mining veteran who understands the benefits and risks of the commodity price cycle.

Mr. Hallbauer's 2010 initiative for Taseko to sell a 25% interest in the Gibraltar mine for $180 million proved to be a prudent and far-sighted move. These funds were used in large part to increase Gibraltar's production capacity by some 40% and to reduce its production costs. This in turn has helped Taseko's balance sheet and helped Gibraltar to deliver positive cash flow even with the copper price decline of the last few years. The buyers of that 25% interest, a Japanese consortium, also provided Gibraltar with an offtake agreement for its production at market prices.

Despite current low commodity prices, which have impacted Taseko like all copper producers, Taseko has confidence in its business strategy and its ability to create value for all shareholders. Reflecting that confidence, Mr. Hallbauer has recently acquired Taseko shares in the open market. He and other members of the Board may acquire more shares prior to the requisitioned meeting

Requisitioned Meeting

Taseko has set a date of May 10, 2016 for the meeting requisitioned by RRC. Taseko expects to report financial results for the first quarter of 2016 prior to the meeting date. The record date for the requisitioned meeting is March 11, 2016.

Shareholders will receive detailed information about the above and other matters by way of a Management Information Circular well in advance of the requisitioned meeting. Shareholders should read the circular carefully before reaching a decision with regard to their votes. In the meantime, there is no need for shareholders to take any action.

Russell Hallbauer

President and CEO

About Taseko

Taseko is focused on the operation and development of mines in North America. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Taseko is the owner (75%) and operator of the Gibraltar Mine, the second largest open pit copper-molybdenum mine in Canada. Taseko's Aley Niobium Project, Florence Copper Project, and New Prosperity Gold-Copper Project are all advanced staged projects which provide the Company with a diverse commodity pipeline.

No regulatory authority has approved or disapproved of the information contained in this news release.

Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This document contains "forward-looking statements" that were based on Taseko's expectations, estimates and projections as of the dates as of which those statements were made. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "outlook", "anticipate", "project", "target", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "intend", "should" and similar expressions.

Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These included but are not limited to:

uncertainties and costs related to the Company's exploration and development activities, such as those associated with continuity of mineralization or determining whether mineral resources or reserves exist on a property;

uncertainties related to the accuracy of our estimates of mineral reserves, mineral resources, production rates and timing of production, future production and future cash and total costs of production and milling;

uncertainties related to feasibility studies that provide estimates of expected or anticipated costs, expenditures and economic returns from a mining project;

uncertainties related to the ability to obtain necessary licenses permits for development projects and project delays due to third party opposition;

uncertainties related to unexpected judicial or regulatory proceedings;

changes in, and the effects of, the laws, regulations and government policies affecting our exploration and development activities and mining operations, particularly laws, regulations and policies;

changes in general economic conditions, the financial markets and in the demand and market price for copper, gold and other minerals and commodities, such as diesel fuel, steel, concrete, electricity and other forms of energy, mining equipment, and fluctuations in exchange rates, particularly with respect to the value of the U.S. dollar and Canadian dollar, and the continued availability of capital and financing;

the effects of forward selling instruments to protect against fluctuations in copper prices and exchange rate movements and the risks of counterparty defaults, and mark to market risk;

the risk of inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance to cover mining risks;

the risk of loss of key employees; the risk of changes in accounting policies and methods we use to report our financial condition, including uncertainties associated with critical accounting assumptions and estimates;

environmental issues and liabilities associated with mining including processing and stock piling ore; and

labour strikes, work stoppages, or other interruptions to, or difficulties in, the employment of labour in markets in which we operate mines, or environmental hazards, industrial accidents or other events or occurrences, including third party interference that interrupt the production of minerals in our mines.

For further information on Taseko, investors should review the Company's annual Form 40-F filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission www.sec.gov and home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com.

SOURCE Taseko Mines Ltd.
BRISTOL, Va., Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (ANRZQ) applauds the outstanding safety performance of 11 affiliate operations in West Virginia that were honored for safety achievements in 2015 by the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health Safety and Training.

The 11 Alpha affiliates received the Mountaineer Guardian Safety Award, presented to selected mines and mining-related entities that meet strict safety performance criteria. The award recognizes organizations with fatality-free operations, superior internal safety programs, cooperative teaming with authorities, and minimal safety violations. In addition, inspectors with the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health Safety and Training may nominate mines and facilities for the awards.

The following operations in West Virginia received the 2015 Mountaineer Guardian award:

Underground Operations

Brooks Run Mining Company, LLC Horse Creek #1

Brooks Run Mining Company, LLC Lower War Eagle

Aracoma Coal Company Cedar Grove 2

Aracoma Coal Company Hernshaw Mine

Marfork Coal Co., Inc. Allen Powellton

Mammoth Coal Co., Inc. Slabcamp

Surface Operations

Brooks Run Mining Company, LLC Seven Pines

Republic Energy, Inc. Workman Creek

Preparation Plants and Loadouts

Kepler Processing Company, LLC Kepler No. 1 Prep. Plant

Power Mountain Coal Company Power Mountain Processing

Litwar Processing Co., LLC Litwar Preparation Plant

Two of the Alpha-affiliated award recipients are multiple winners of the Mountaineer Guardian Safety Award. The Litwar Processing Plant has won the honor five of the last six years and the Lower War Eagle mine has received the award for the last three years in a row.

"These are outstanding achievements by our miners," said Allen Dupree, Alpha's senior vice president of Running Right and Safety. "In light of the difficult market conditions that continue to face our industry, these mining professionals have demonstrated tremendous focus and attention  not only to their own safety, but the safety of their fellow employees."

The West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training and the West Virginia Coal Association co-sponsor the awards to promote safety in West Virginia coal mines and facilities.

About Alpha Natural Resources

Alpha Natural Resources is one of the largest and most regionally diversified coal suppliers in the United States. With affiliate mining operations in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Wyoming, Alpha supplies metallurgical coal to the steel industry and thermal coal to generate power to customers on five continents. Alpha is committed to being a leader in mine safety with our Running Right safety process, and an environmental steward in the communities where its affiliates operate. For more information, visit Alpha's website (www.alphanr.com).

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alpha-natural-resources-affiliate-operations-in-west-virginia-honored-for-safety-performance-300210702.html

SOURCE Alpha Natural Resources
Up in Smoke will serve tacos for lunch - but you'll have to wait til the evenings for smoked meats. Photo: Craig Sillitoe

New barbecue joint Up in Smoke is set to shake up smoke-and-fire traditionalists when it officially opens in Footscray this Thursday with a menu that co-owner Shayne McCallum describes as "American-ish".

McCallum is a bit of a pioneer in the area. He brought the first decent burger joint to the neighbourhood (nearby 8bit, which recently expanded to a second CBD outlet), now he's transformed an old kitchenware shop, just past Footscray Market on Hopkins Street, into an industrial home for his $20,000 double barrel Yoder Frontiersman offset smoker. You can look but you can't touch; it's safely tucked behind a glass partition.

"We're not trying to be too traditional" says McCallum, referring to the distinct regional differences in America's barbecue culture. "Texas-rub with a Kansas sauce? Sure, if people like it, that's great."

Ten beer taps pour craft beers and Carlton Draught. Photo: Craig Sillitoe

A street-side beer garden space will soon be fully functional (sometime next week); for now a 60-seat dining room with a '70s industrial vibe (think brushed cement tabletops, charcoal-black brickwork and copper pipes) offers a more traditional dining experience, bar seating for 16 or so is good for a casual bite.

Heading the kitchen is long-time friend Robi Smith (ex-Zigfrids in Geelong), who's been itching to get his hands on another smoker since he ran now-closed rockabilly diner Hard Luck Cafe in Auckland.

Smith will run the smoker overnight, and brisket, pulled pork and beef short ribs will be ready from 6pm (until sold out). During the day there'll be brisket sandwiches, tacos and salads for the lunch crowd.

Barbecue sauces are made in-house. Photo: Craig Sillitoe

They're making dry rubs and sauces in-house  eventually you'll be able to buy them off the shelf; there's an adjoining shopfront which will become a "grocery store" for takeaway sandwiches, coffee, chilli sauces, mustards and other barbecue-related dry goods.

As you'd expect, there's a good selection of mid-range bourbon, rum and tequila and they're focusing on a rotating list of Australian craft beer across 10 taps (the more local, the better, McCallum says) without getting hoity-toity  you can still grab a pot of Carlton Draught for $4.50.

Open daily from 11am-late (smoked meats available from 6pm).

28 Hopkins Street, Footscray, 03 9689 8188, upinsmoke.net.au
The native bunya nuts used by Noma in Sydney. Photo: Edwina Pickles

The National Indigenous Culinary Institute has been instrumental in placing its young chefs in some of the country's top restaurants, and now three from the program are about to join the ranks at Noma Australia, the 10-week pop-up that sold out in four minutes. The chance to work with the world renowned chef Rene Redzepi is, for many chefs, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The program first started five years ago , spearheaded by Barry McDonald (big man on Cafe Sopra/Fratelli Fresh campus) and recently launched in Melbourne. Supported by Neil Perry and Michael McMahon, not to mention the Fratelli network, the young chefs take part in a three-year program and work in three different restaurants.

That is, if they can be dragged away from their posts. Some chefs like the restaurants they're working in so much they can't find it within themselves to leave. No matter what, at the end of it they're fully qualified chefs. "I want them to be role models, not just cooks," McDonald says.

The idea, he says, is for them to work in really great places for those three years. At the end of their tenure, the two chefs showing the most promise are then sent to work overseas. Past placements have included Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and the Ledbury, and this year two will go and work with Thomas Keller at either the French Laundry or Per Se.

A little closer to home, chefs Stephen Thorpe (Charcoal Lane), Luke Bourke (Rockpool Bar and Grill) and Jade Santo (Fratelli Fresh Walsh Bay) have recently been accepted onto the Noma team to work alongside some of the world's greatest chefs for next few months or so. "I think it's life changing for these kids. I really think it's important,'' McDonald says. "They'll probably learn more than they do at our restaurants about native produce."
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Group looks to thwart GMO food labeling

By Jim Spencer

WASHINGTON  The nations food and farm industries are mounting a furious, last-ditch push against mandatory labeling of foods made with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, with dozens of Minnesota businesses backing the effort as part of a national coalition.

With Vermont set to become the first state in the country to force GMO labels on foods on July 1, opponents of on-package labeling are running out of time.

A national solution is needed to prevent a patchwork of 50 different state laws, Golden Valley-based General Mills said in a statement. If Congress doesnt step in now, thats exactly where were headed, and that doesnt serve anyone well.

Supporters of labeling laws say consumers have a right to know whats in the food they eat. But food and farm interests counter that labels cast a stigma on genetically engineered foods that have not been proven to be less healthy than organic alternatives.

A publicity blitz against labeling includes a six-figure campaign that is running ads in prime time on network and cable TV in and around the nations capital.

The Coalition for Safe Affordable Food, funder of the ad campaign, is working urgently with Congress to pass a national uniform labeling standard and stand up against on-package labeling of GMOs, said spokeswoman Claire Parker.

Food coalition members include Moorhead-based American Crystal Sugar, the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative and a long list of Minnesota and national trade groups representing the states massive dairy, corn, egg and turkey growing interests, as well as food giants like General Mills, Land OLakes and Hormel.

The food and farm interests do not just want Congress to pass uniform labeling legislation that supplants all state laws with a national standard. It wants that national standard to virtually eliminate mandatory on-package GMO labels like those Vermont would require.

The U.S. House passed a bill that would have done that in 2015. The bill now sits in the Senate Agriculture Committee, where the lobbying battle continues. An attempt to attach a ban on on-package GMO labeling to the recently passed federal budget bill failed. It is unclear whether an inside-the-Beltway ad barrage can now succeed.

Weve known ever since Vermont passed its labeling law that there would be some kind of Hail Mary to take away states rights, said Heather Kurth Flesland, campaign director of Right to Know Minnesota, which is working to pass a state GMO labeling law based on Vermonts model.

Labeling genetically engineered foods and beverages would change the packaging of tens of thousands of products. A July 2015 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture demonstrated how widespread GMOs have become. Soybeans grown from GMO seeds increased from 17 percent in 1997 to 94 percent in 2015, the USDA said. Corn grown from GMO seeds jumped from single digits to 92 percent in the same period.

Thus the substantial six-figure Washington-area ad campaign, which seeks to frame GMO labeling as a policy that will hurt farmers, cost families and keep the hungry malnourished.

Consumers deserve a uniform standard for labeling food, a female narrator says on one TV ad. As Congress stalls, harmful state laws are being passed that threaten family farmers and increase food prices by $500 per family.

Some consumer groups are trying to push back. Scott Faber of the group Just Label It called the coalition ad an unbelievable misrepresentation.

Food labeling advocates still lack the money to make big campaign contributions or finance major ad buys. But they have learned how to lobby assertively. The day before Thanksgiving, the group Food and Water Watch delivered a genetically engineered meal to U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchars Minneapolis office. Among other things, the meal contained a giant severed salmon head, drawing attention to the Food and Drug Administrations Nov. 19 approval to sell genetically engineered salmon.

Faced with competing business and consumer constituencies, Klobuchar and Sen. Al Franken, both Minnesota Democrats, choose their words carefully. Asked by the Star Tribune whether they favor a national labeling standard that mandates or forbids on-package GMO labels, neither would say.

There isnt a Senate bill related to the House-passed bill at this time, Klobuchar said in a statement. One thing I have learned is that a patchwork of state laws will not work for consumers or producers. Our Senate Agriculture Committee has yet to consider legislation.

Franken noted in a statement that people feel very passionately about this issue, so I want to make sure we do this in the right way. At the moment, individual states are moving toward a patchwork of labeling regulations, which I dont think is workable. He wants stakeholders to work out a single standard.

Congress may want to spare the food industry from differing state regulations, but a national law that all but eliminates the governments ability to mandate on-package GMO labels could be a hard sell.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, recently said she will place a hold on the nomination of Dr. Robert Califf to head the FDA because that agency did not require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered fish. One of the countrys biggest corporate players, Campbell Soup Co., just announced its support for federal legislation that requires foods and beverages to be clearly and simply labeled for GMOs.

The Hershey Co.s recent decision not to use genetically engineered beet sugar in its popular chocolate Kisses hit Minnesotas nation-leading beet sugar producers. It also demonstrated the traction gained by consumers who want to know if foods contain GMOs. National surveys place that number at roughly 90 percent.

In August, Flesland attended a meeting of GMO disclosure advocates. She said 30 states were pushing legislation modeled on the Vermont law. Bills were introduced in Minnesota last legislative session, but did not move out of committee.

Many disclosure advocates say a national law would be fine so long as it lets shoppers determine GMO content by looking at the package.

Weve urged the food industry to work with us on on-package disclosure that gives information in a way that does not disparage GMOs, said Faber of Just Label It.

The food industry is working on a voluntary initiative called SmartLabel that lets shoppers access product details on the Internet. Hormel, General Mills and Land OLakes are among 30 companies piloting the project.

Faber and Flesland said most shoppers would not use such a system because it is too difficult to access. On-package disclosure, they added, is the most efficient way to report the presence of GMOs.

A simple designation wont work because opponents of GMOs have successfully demonized the term, said Karolyn Zurn. With her husband and sons, Zurn grows genetically engineered sugar beets, corn and soybeans in Callaway, Minn. She says GMO seed has reduced her use of pesticides and allowed her to grow more abundant crops.

At the same time, any listing of GMO connotes something negative, Zurn said. I know very well that genetically engineered food is safe. Ive fed it to my family for years.



VERMONT GMO LABELING BASICS

For unpackaged raw agricultural commodities, a sign that says Produced with Genetic Engineering.

For packaged raw agricultural commodities, an easy-to-read label with the same wording on the package.

For unpackaged processed food, a label on the shelf or container displaying the food that says Produced with Genetic Engineering, Partially Produced with Genetic Engineering, or May be Produced with Genetic Engineering, as appropriate.

For packaged processed food, an easy-to-read label with the same wording on the package.
Rashda Khan/Standard-Times San Angeloan Gardner Wiseheart with his son, chef Andrew Wiseheart, at Gardner Restaurant in Austin.

Son invites father to cook at eatery that bears his name

San Angeloan Gardner Wiseheart enjoys food and cooking. His father taught him how to cook and appreciate fried egg sandwiches and cornbread crumbled in buttermilk. When he had his own family, he enjoyed cooking family meals and introducing his children to different foods. He still chuckles about the time he introduced his son, Andrew, and his friends to lengua (beef tongue) burritos.

"We played in the kitchen," he said. "It's just been a casual, easygoing thing. We like to surprise each other."

Yet, recently when Andrew  now an award-winning chef in Austin  invited his father to cook with him, Gardner was touched and nervous.

"Yes, we've cooked together before, but that was at home. Not in a five-star restaurant," he said.

Andrew and his business partner and friend Ben Edgerton opened Gardner (named after Gardner Wiseheart), a sophisticated, nature-inspired restaurant in East Austin in 2014. The restaurant was recently nominated by Bon Appetit magazine as one of the 50 best new American restaurants for 2015, and the restaurant was one of seven projects profiled in the September 2015 Architectural Record Interiors issue.

"I thought me and him collaborating on a dinner would be a good idea and made it happen," said Andrew, who was two weeks away from becoming a new father at the time of the interview. "We don't cook together often enough."

Gardner offers a Sunday roast, a three-course family-style dinner at $25 per person. Father and son cooked the Sunday roast on Jan. 10 for about 65 guests, including family and friends. The dinner featured slow-roasted pork loin (roasted for 72 hours and then braised), sauteed mushrooms and grilled kale, soup made from pea tendrils and shrimp and lobster corn dogs. It ended with Andrew's grandmother's pecan pie served with bourbon ice cream.

"I was very close to my grandmother," Andrew said. "She made the best chicken-fried steak, cornbread, chili and gravy.

"She taught me how to make gravy and we serve it at Contigo (the first Austin restaurant he and Ben opened in 2011).

Andrew, who was refused entry into the culinary program at Central High School in his senior year, went on to graduate from Le Cordon Bleu in Austin. After working in the Michelin-starred La Toque and Angele, he decided to explore the art of charcuterie and travel, cooking and learning along the way. He thumbed rides, walked and went rock climbing throughout Europe, picked olives and tended vineyards.

Once he returned to the United States he spent time working at a ranch in Crockett County and continues to work cows every year on a ranch in Eldorado. Now he's settled in Austin and has kept the food scene buzzing with his culinary explorations.

"I have always known Texas was going to be home," Andrew said. "This is where my family is."

"When he was young, I would be like 'Hey, try this,'" Gardner said. "Now he's turning the tables on me and saying, 'Hey, try this!' I'm incredibly proud."

Rashda Khan is a San Angelo-based food enthusiast, writer and culinary instructor. She moderates the Facebook group San Angelo Eat Local. Originally from Bangladesh, she is now a proud West Texan. She can be reached at rashda.khan@gosanangelo.com or 325-659-8381.

The Andrew Wiseheart file

Restaurants: Contigo, a ranch-based restaurant (2011), and Gardner, a vegetable-focused restaurant (2014) opened with friend and business partner

Location: Austin

Culinary education: Le Cordon Bleu in Austin

Worked at: Michelin-starred restaurants La Toque and Angele in Napa. He also staged and worked in restaurants in Italy and Denmark.

About his childhood: Growing up in San Angelo instilled a good work ethic in me. I understood hard work in the kitchen.

Best food memories: Lunch in a village in Croatia, a meal at French Laundry  a Thomas Keller restaurant  with his dad, and Christmas mornings with his family: We have a big spread of lots of different snacks, ceviche, pigs in a blanket, cured ham, smoked salmon, grits and whiskey.

Strangest food his father introduced him to: pickled herring. They were disgustingly delicious.

Strangest food hes eaten since then: cow nuts cooked over a branding fire.

His favorite dish: My wife, Ambers, enchiladas.

On life: All my experiences in my life have been focused around food. Our experiences is what defines us.

Accolades and recognitions: 2012 Starchefs Rising Star award, Eater Austins Chef of the Year 2014 and three consecutive nominations for The Peoples Best New Chef: Southwest from Food & Wine in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Contigo and Gardner were both winners of Eater Austins So Hot Right Now Best New Restaurant award in 2011 and 2014, respectively, and Contigo was awarded Eater Austins Restaurant of the Year in 2012.

Most recent good news: He and his wife welcomed baby boy Lincoln Hayes Wiseheart to the family.
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By Tom Avril

PHILADELPHIA  Scientists have linked teenage marijuana use with a host of undesirable outcomes: difficulty in paying attention, weaker memory and lower verbal ability and intelligence.

But is the drug to blame?

Two long-term studies of twins published Monday suggest that other factors are at fault, at least as far as vocabulary skills are concerned.

In one study, children who went on to become marijuana users were not as bright to begin with as their abstinent peers.

And in both studies, drug-using teens fared no worse on IQ tests than their non-using twins in the same household, suggesting that some other factor was to blame, the authors wrote.

Something in the family environment perhaps, or simply the fact that kids who gravitate toward pot use may be less motivated to try hard in school.

Results of the two studies, described in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surely will not settle the debate.

In interviews, two of the authors cautioned that even if marijuana does not directly impair intelligence in the developing brain, there are plenty of other reasons that teenagers should steer clear of weed.

The studies did not measure executive function  an umbrella term that covers the ability to focus and organize, among other skills  and previous research suggests that pot use can weaken it.

And despite the push to legalize marijuana in some states, it remains illegal for teens, said the University of Pennsylvania's Adrian Raine, who helped design the studies with the University of Southern California's Laura A. Baker, the paper's senior author.

"We're only talking about verbal ability," said Raine, a professor of criminology, psychiatry and psychology at Penn. "There's more to life than verbal ability."

Joshua D. Isen, a colead author of the paper, cautioned that teen use of the drug also is associated with poorer performance in school.

"I'd think marijuana use could be a symptom of a larger problem," said Isen, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

That kind of talk bothers one prominent marijuana advocate: Ed Forchion, owner of a Trenton, New Jersey, restaurant called NJ Weedman's Joint. (Slogan: "Healthy, hearty, homemade food for Trenton's 'high society.'")

"Anybody can look at me," Forchion said. "I'm far from being stupid. I consume a lot of marijuana. I've always done very well on everything from SAT scores to IQ tests."

To the extent that drug users have trouble getting ahead in the world, Forchion blames others.

"It's other people's stereotypes, and other people's accepting of the government's propaganda," he said.

One of the studies started with 2,277 Minnesota youths age 11 to 12, 93 percent of whom were white. The other tracked 789 adolescents from the Los Angeles area, age 9 to 10, three-quarters of whom were racial minorities or of mixed ethnicity.

By the time they reached their late teens, 36 percent of the Minnesotans said they used marijuana. A subset of them was included in the study because they had shown disruptive behavior and "academic disengagement."

In the California group, 60 percent of the teens reported they had used the drug, but they were 20 when surveyed  about two years older than their Minnesota counterparts.

In Minnesota, the future users started out two points lower on the vocabulary portion of an IQ test, and six years later the gap had widened by 4 points. In California, the future users and nonusers started out with similar scores as young adolescents, but the users scored 3.4 points lower when tested at age 20.

The researchers did not find similar before-and-after disparities in some other IQ subtests, such as one called "block design," which involves rearranging colored blocks to match a pattern.

The researchers cited two results in concluding that the drug does not directly impair intelligence:

In a subset of households in which one twin smoked pot and the other did not, the smokers did not score any worse. And overall, those who reported using pot more than 30 times scored no worse than users who had tried it fewer than 30 times.
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Nearly half have sex; only 1 in 4 get tested

By Lindsey Tanner

CHICAGO  Fewer than 1 in 4 high school students who've had sex have ever been tested for HIV, a troubling low rate that didn't budge over eight years, government researchers say. Young adults fared slightly better, although testing rates have declined in black women, a high-risk group.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an influential preventive health panel recommend routine HIV testing at least once for teens and adults. They also advise at least yearly screening for high-risk patients including those with multiple sex partners, gay or bisexual boys and men and injection drug users. The American Academy of Pediatrics has similar advice targeting teens only.

Nearly half of U.S. high school students have had sex, often without using condoms, which can help prevent the spread of HIV, which causes AIDS. About 15 percent report having had at least four sex partners.

Some teens underestimate their HIV risk and have doctors who are unaware of the recommendations, according to the CDC researchers who did the study. The health agency says inadequate sex education is another challenge; in a report last month, it said fewer than half of U.S. high schools and middle schools teach CDC-recommended sexual health education including HIV-related topics.

Other CDC data show there's been an overall decline in HIV cases nationwide in recent years.

About 50,000 people are diagnosed each year with HIV and 1 in 4 new infections occur in those ages 13 to 24.

The new study was published online Tuesday in Pediatrics.

Led by CDC health scientist Michelle Van Handel, the researchers analyzed 2005-13 national health surveys involving high school students, and 2011-13 surveys involving adults aged 18 to 24.

Some highlights:

SCREENING RATES

Overall, 22 percent of high school students reported ever have been tested for HIV  and only one-third who'd had at least four sexual partners  rates that remained stable during the study.

The rate remained at an average 27 percent for young adult men but dipped among young women from 42 percent to 40 percent. It was much higher for black women but fell from 69 percent to 60 percent.

HIV INFECTIONS

Nearly 10,000 13- to 24-year-olds were diagnosed with HIV in 2014, CDC data show. The rate was minimal for 13-year-olds, climbed to almost 9 out of 100,000 for 15- to 19-year-olds and nearly tripled for 20- to 24-year olds. Van Handel said those spikes in infections underscore the importance of starting testing early.

Adults aged 25 to 29 have the highest infection rate among age groups  almost 36 per 100,000. Rates are higher among some other groups, including blacks.

THE TESTS

HIV screening can be done with simple blood draws, mouth swabs or urine tests; insurance generally covers FDA-approved lab tests as free preventive care. Routine testing offers the best chance for early detection and treatment, the CDC says.
associated press Marion Jones, who was treated for breast cancer, beside her painting Street in Provence at her house in Silver Spring, Md. Lost in the debate over whether women should begin mammograms at age 40 or 50 or somewhere in between is the question of when to stop.

SHARE Experts say ongoing aerobic exercise may slow the progression of Parkinson's disease, a progressive disorder of the nervous system. (Photo courtesy Fotolia/TNS)

When to stop mammograms tricky issue as population ages

By Lauran Neergaard

WASHINGTON  Lost in the arguing over whether women should begin mammograms at age 40 or 50 or somewhere in between is the issue they'll all eventually face: when to stop.

"There's a point at which everybody begins to scratch their head and say how much longer do you have to keep doing this?" said American Cancer Society specialist Robert Smith.

It's an increasingly complex balancing act as older women are living even longer. The risk of breast cancer rises with age. But so do the odds of other serious illnesses that may be more likely to kill in a senior's remaining life span  or to make them less able to withstand the rigors of cancer treatment.

"If we pick up a cancer in someone who's 75 and they die at 76 of something else, did it really matter? That's really the question here," said Dr. Susan Boolbol, breast surgery chief at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

Medical guidelines don't agree.

The cancer society's advice: Women should continue mammograms as long as their overall health is good and they have a life expectancy of at least 10 more years. Last week, guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said there's not enough evidence to recommend for or against mammograms at age 75 and older, because that age group just hasn't been studied enough to tell.

Getting such evidence is "critical, given the graying of America," said Dr. Jeanne Mandelblatt, an expert on cancer and aging at Georgetown University.

Indeed, some in the 80-and-beyond crowd are as spry as 60-somethings.

"People are taking better care of themselves," said Yale University pathologist Dr. Fattaneh Tavassoli. "If we don't start discussing it, it's going to be more difficult to come up with management approaches for these patients."

She recently reported that Yale's medical center is diagnosing more breast cancer at 90 and older, averaging about eight diagnoses a year since 2000, compared with one a year during the 1990s. Many were diagnosed after the woman or doctor detected an abnormality, not from routine mammograms, Tavassoli said. But she's asked if other hospitals see a similar trend and also wants to study what treatment they underwent.

Marion Jones was 84 and active when a mammogram spotted breast cancer. Surgeons removed a small tumor but during follow-up chemotherapy Jones developed pneumonia and blood clots. She needed a portable oxygen tank for a year until her lungs healed.

For Jones, mammograms were "just a habit" that she didn't question when a new doctor said she was due, and she's grateful her cancer was detected. But now 86 and healthy again, the Silver Spring, Maryland, woman recently told her oncologist that if her cancer ever returns, she doesn't want chemo.

"She said, 'Marion, at your age you probably won't die of breast cancer anyway. It'll be something else,' " Jones recalled. "That's nice to hear."

About 26 percent of breast cancer deaths each year are attributed to a diagnosis after age 74, according to the American Cancer Society.

"The question we have not really studied very carefully is what fraction of those deaths is truly avoidable," Smith said.

Mammography does decline as women get older. About three-quarters of women age 50 to 74 have had a mammogram within two years, compared with 41 percent of the 85-plus group, according to 2013 government figures.

Mammograms bring pros and cons for the oldest women like they do for middle-aged ones, the possibility of reducing breast cancer death versus false alarms, unneeded biopsies and detection of a tumor so small or slow-growing that it never would have posed a threat.

Georgetown's Mandelblatt used math models to analyze that balance, and estimated that healthy older women could benefit from regular screening through age 78 or 80. But among women who already had other moderate to severe illnesses, the harms of screening could outweigh benefits as early as 68, she said.

If cancer is found in the frail, Mount Sinai's Boolbol notes there are less aggressive options that aim to stop a tumor's growth rather than eradicate it.

She wants doctors and patients to have frank discussions about the woman's overall health in deciding how long to continue mammograms.

"It really needs to be based on their health status, and not your age," Boolbol said. "Because it's not one-size-fits-all."
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By Matt Phinney

It's the showpiece of the Caverns of Sonora, and staff members say it's priceless.

A Butterfly formation that took millennia to form was broken and part of it taken in seconds.

Operations Manager Bill Sawyer isn't worried about who broke off the wing piece ? he just wants it back.

The caverns staff made a public plea Tuesday for whoever broke off about a third of the right wing of the formation to return it. The Butterfly, the signature formation in the caverns, was damaged sometime during a tour around Thanksgiving.

Authorities have narrowed down information to the approximate time of the tour, but Sawyer declined to release that information, saying he is afraid the person or people responsible will panic and destroy the wing.

He just wants the wing piece returned ? no questions asked ? so an attempt can be made to reattach it.

The Butterfly is the icon of the cave, he said.

"We're just focused on the return of the Butterfly," he said. "We're appealing to the human side. All we

are putting out there is it's gone and how critical it is to get it back. We are hitting all the bases to get this word out.

"Please, if you took it, there are no repercussions: We just want the formation back."

The damage at Sonora is considered a Class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

It was unclear Tuesday whether a dollar value is associated with the Butterfly formation and whether it specifically was insured.

Tours are going as scheduled at the caverns. As many as 29,000 people visit the caverns yearly, Sawyer said.

The Caverns of Sonora, a privately owned park, is about eight miles west of the city of Sonora off Farm Road 1989 in rural Sutton County. The cave system is 90 percent active or "alive," meaning most of the formations are still growing as minerals are deposited by percolating water within the caves, according to the park's Web site.

The National Park Service lists the Caverns of Sonora as a National Natural Landmark.

The caves feature unusual helictite formations that grow in whatever direction they want. The park is best known for the Butterfly, a set of two quartz fins that grew as a pair facing each other, mimicking the form of a butterfly.

It is the only formation of its kind known to exist in the world.

The Butterfly is about 5.5 inches from wing tip to wing tip, Sawyer said, and each wing is about 5 inches from top to bottom.

The broken piece is about 3.5 inches long on one side, in a triangular shape.

According to educated estimates, the formation is about half a million years old, Sawyer said.

Workers discovered the piece was missing about 15 to 20 minutes after it was broken off, Sawyer said, during the next tour. Sawyer was off work that day but went to the caverns immediately after hearing about the vandalism.

Sawyer said the Sutton County Sheriff's Department has assisted in investigating the incident, but progress was not going as fast as cavern officials had hoped. The longer the wing is outside the cave, the harder it will be to repair the formation.

The piece is dehydrating outside the highly humid cave, Sawyer said.

Gerry Ingham, whose family has owned the land for five generations, said Sonora cave tours consist of about 12 people and the guide. They are among the smallest cave tours in the nation.

Cave officials have discussed eight-person tours, but that would probably lead to higher ticket prices, she said.

"This particular formation is unique in the world, and it's been photographed by photographers from every corner of the globe," Ingham said. "Its picture is in hundreds of books."

It only takes a second for someone to break off a piece of a formation. She said Texas needs stricter cave-protection laws because a majority of caves are privately owned.

"This can happen to anyone in the cave business, anywhere in the world," Ingham said. "The cave owners need better protection. Our caves are an untapped massive resource of history, climatology and other scientific information and need all the protection they can get."

Jim Werker and Val Hildreth-Werker, a husband-and-wife team from Hillsboro, N.M., are on standby to reattach the formation.

The Werkers are National Speleological Society conservation division co-chairs. The group does more than any other organization to study, promote, protect and encourage responsible management of caves and their unique environments and promote responsible caving, according to the group's Web site.

Val Hildreth-Werker said there is no exact timeframe for when the piece needs to be returned, but the sooner, the better. The two don't repair natural breaks but are well-known for repairing accidental breaks and vandalism.

The couple will prepare a plan to repair the formation that would include care not to damage any other formations in the cave, she said.

"It can be carefully tedious, but we need to get this piece back up there," she said.

Sawyer said he saw the Butterfly for the first time when he was 12, and he continues to be inspired by the formation. Students and adults from around the world flock to the caverns to see the special Butterfly, he said.

A tour from Hungary was at the caverns Tuesday looking for the Butterfly, which is what catches people's eyes and what they remember of the caverns, Sawyer said.

"We're devastated," he said. "We have to get the ball rolling. That's why we have cavers all over the U.S. looking. They are all in the loop on this and know what happened. They are the ones that will be instrumental in getting this back."

standard-times photo by john S. merculief ii

The Caverns of Sonora's Butterfly formation was recently vandalized ? a portion of the right wing area was broken off and taken. In a November 2003 tour, guide Bill Sawyer (not pictured) shone a flashlight on it from the side to accentuate photographers' pictures.

On the Net

Find more pictures of the Caverns of Sonora's Butterfly formation at gosanangelo.com.

Broken wing

Someone broke off roughly one-third of the right wing of the Caverns of Sonora's famous Butterfly formation around Thanksgiving.

The cave park's owners believe it can be successfully reattached if the missing piece is returned soon. Anyone with information about the wing can call the caverns at (325) 387-3105.
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By Federico Martinez

Brian Huntley, who is listed as one of three directors of a family-operated gambling business in San Angelo that was raided and shut down by federal investigators this month, says he resigned from the company nearly nine years ago and has nothing to do with the business' recent legal troubles.

The company was operated by his brother Steven Ray Huntley, who is serving a 10 years at El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, for conspiracy to traffic firearms, being a convicted felon in possession of firearms, and aiding and abetting. Steven Ray Huntley was the company's president and their father was a co-director, Brian Huntley said.

"My father will have to speak for himself," Brian Huntley said on Wednesday. "I have no working relationship with them. I resigned from the company on Dec. 31, 2007, and disassociated myself from the company."

On Jan. 13 authorities from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided The Magic Spot III, a gambling business at 3930 Sunset Drive  one of four gambling venues that operate under the corporate name H 3 Gaming Inc, which was formed in 2003. Those articles of corporation list the names of Steven, Brian and Ronald Huntley as directors of the company, with Steven also listed as president.

Brian Huntley, who sells real estate in West Texas, acknowledged that his brother Steven has a long history of legal troubles. Brian said he resigned the co-director position in 2007 because he did not want to be associated with any venture that might be involved in illegal activity. He does not know who, if anyone, replaced him as a director.

Huntley also said he does not know anything about the federal investigation of his brother's company.

Federal authorities have declined to release any details about their investigation, including whether anyone is in custody or being charged with any crimes related to the Jan. 13 raid.

"I just want the public to know that I have no involvement with my brother's business," Brian Huntley said. "Let me put it this way: You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends."
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By Rashda Khan

The San Angelo Tea Party kicked off the first candidate forum for the 2016 elections cycle to a full house Tuesday evening. According to the group's head count, the event drew 71 attendees despite the cold and wet weather.

Candidates in the locally contested races for 391st District Judge, 119th District Attorney and Tom Green County Commissioner Precinct 1 attended the meeting. Rick Green and Paul Green, jousting for Supreme Court Justice Place 5, were both absent.

The candidates running for the Precinct 1 county commissioner seat  incumbent Ralph Hoelscher and challenger Willie Ruiz  faced the most questions from the crowd. Issues included the building of a new jail, challenges faced by the county, the budget and retirement and pension plans.

Hoelscher, who has served as commissioner since 2004, said the county has not raised the tax rate during his tenure, but actually managed to lower it twice.

The key issues facing the county government include water, road maintenance and the jail, Hoelscher said.

"There's never enough money for road maintenance," Hoelscher said. "Roads have been a major concern of mine."

An audience member asked if the Commissioners Court has considered the expense of busing prisoners to and from the proposed new jail location and the county courthouse.

Hoelscher explained that while the front facade of the Tom Green County Jail downtown looks beautiful and will stay, two out of three sections of the jail are considered structurally damaged and have been condemned. "The only solution we can see is to build a new jail on property we own," he said.

His opponent, Ruiz, said the "biggest problem in Tom Green County is not a county problem, but a people problem."

"Instead of building a new jail, maybe we should focus on schools," Ruiz said, adding that he knows county commissioners don't have much to do with schools, but "we have to come together as a community to look for solutions to all our problems."

Ruiz  who said his experience includes farming, oil field work, finance, and nursing  considers another major county issue to be pension plans that are hard to fund.

"Private industry saw this coming 20 to 25 years ago," he said. "I see future of government pensions going the same way as private industry." He described it as a blend of pensions and 401(k) plans.

Hoelscher said the county was required by law to adopt a balanced budget, with the largest cost being judicial, but trying to keep expenses down was a challenge. Some places that might be considered for budget cuts, he said, include the library, the sheriff's department, the jail and parks, but each has its own issues that don't make it a good choice.

Ruiz's solution to save county money is re-examining the budget and doing operational audits. The scenario he described was a company with a 100 employees making technological advances that would allow it to be productive with only 40 employees. However, if they didn't do an operational audit, they would continue with 100 employees despite their gains, he said.

Both John Best and Andrew Graves, running for the 119th District Attorney's position, spoke about their experience, crime in Tom Green County and the need for solutions beyond prosecution.

Best, who has served in the Tom Green County District Attorney's office for 14 years, said being lead counsel brings many opportunities to make a difference. He cited his service with the Children's Advocacy Center and Hope House, among others.

His challenger, Graves, who has had juvenile offenders as clients, said: "In the DA's office your job is to seek justice. It's not to seek convictions, but justice.

"Make no mistake, both of us believe in enforcing the law. John and I are both dedicated to that."

The other set of candidates  Carmen Symes Dusek and Brad Goodwin competing to be the 391st District Judge  dealt with a recent story by a local media outlet about yard signs that were alleged to be in violation of Texas Ethics Commission rules. Dusek tackled the issue head-on during her introduction and publicly apologized to the Goodwin family about the matter becoming a media issue.

"I didn't do it, but someone who works for me did. The buck stops with me," Dusek said, adding that it was important for her to teach her 11-year-old daughter, who was in the audience, by example about taking responsibility.

When the issue was brought again, Goodwin spoke up: "Voters are concerned with safety and experience. They are not worried about the size (of) anything."

The primary election takes place March 1, with early voting scheduled for Feb. 16-26. Deadline for voter registration is Feb. 1.
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By Michelle Gaitan of the San Angelo Standard-Times

Shannon Medical Center has partnered with Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth to connect pediatric patients to telemedicine care.

Meeting a need based on geographical location, the two hospitals announced Tuesday a "first-of-its-kind program" that will allow Shannon physicians to consult with a variety of board-certified pediatric specialists from Cook about diagnoses and treatment plans.

Usually when babies need a higher level of care they need more than one type of specialist, said Bryan Horner, president and CEO of Shannon. When Shannon's pediatricians need to consult with specialists in cardiology or orthopedics, they can do so via telemedicine with Cook, Horner said during a live demonstration Tuesday at Shannon's Women and Children's Hospital.

This project, funded by the Children's Miracle Network at Shannon, uses a telemedicine unit to transmit information over a secure Wi-Fi connection and works much like Skype, Horner said. Specialists can see patients in real-time using a portable camera attached to a desktop screen and discuss a patient's X-rays alongside Shannon's physicians.

"We have here at Shannon nine board-certified pediatricians that are actually highly trained to take care of sick babies, but there comes a time when we need a super specialist like a neonatologist, a pediatric cardiologist, a pediatric geneticist, a pediatric surgeon, and we don't have that in San Angelo because of the size of the city," said Doug Schultz, Shannon Clinic's chief medical officer.

By partnering with Cook, Shannon will be able to consult and use the technology in real-time to help patients and create care plans, he said.

"In addition, the families will be able to meet and talk with the Cook's physicians, which I think will help make the families feel better about what's going on and know we're are trying to achieve the best possible care here at Shannon," Schultz said.

Dr. Darryl Miao from Cook, who is board certified in neonatal-perinatal medicine and is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, joined the live demonstration via the telemedicine unit.

"I think this is really great; it allows us to help (Shannon's physicians) to keep the babies there and close to family," he said, noting that if the babies have to travel to Cook the families already will have established a relationship with their specialist through the telemedicine unit.

Miao said this is the first time Cook has used this type of technology to reach out to other hospitals.

"We are in talks with several other hospitals as well to try to expand Cook Children's ability to help support other hospitals," he said.

Schultz and Miao agreed that using this type of everyday technology will reduce the number of patients needing to be taken to a higher level facility for care.

About 20 infants per year are transported out for care for various reasons, but that number goes up and down each year, Schultz said.

Because this unit is portable, Schultz said, it could be used in other areas of the hospital such as the ER.

Another possibility would to to use it in the delivery room before a baby is born because sometimes physicians know in advance when a baby is going to have a problem at birth. A specialist could be in the room, ready to help with any problems, he said.

"I've never had that scenario before; I think that's pretty exciting," Schultz said.
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The light rain late Tuesday in San Angelo was the remnants of a norther that apparently jumped over the northern Concho Valley to produce heavy downpours of rain from Del Rio back to Sonora and snow in Eldorado.

Blizzards that paralyzed the nation's Midwest and Northeast over the weekend are credited to a strong El Nino, according to John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas state climatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.

"There's the possibility that this El Nino, although it's already pretty strong, is actually going to strengthen a bit more because of the wind patterns in the Pacific Ocean," he said. "You can think of the tropical Pacific as a giant bathtub, and the winds blow the warm water typically over toward the far west end.

"When those winds weaken and even reverse, that's what causes El Nino. The winds bring the warm water over to the east, toward South America. And recently we've had an increase in those west to east winds. That's going to reinforce the effects of El Nino," Nielsen-Gammon said.

Well, hold on to your hat, there is another potent strong storm system expected to move in from the Pacific Ocean over California late this weekend which could fuel a severe weather outbreak over the central United States early next week, including on Groundhog Day, according to Henry Margusity, AccuWeather.com senior meteorologist.

The storm could bring dramatic and dangerous weather conditions as it pushes east of the Rockies early next week in addition to heavy rain and mountain snow to California and the interior West, Margusity said. A buildup of warmth will take place early next week over the southern Plains ahead of the storm.

"The warm-up and strong winds aloft associated with the system will help to fuel heavy, gusty thunderstorms that could evolve into a severe weather outbreak perhaps centered on the Mississippi and lower Ohio valleys on Tuesday," he said.

Looking forward to summer, Nielsen-Gammon said long-range predictions are always a gamble, but there is some evidence that the current superstrong El Nino will be followed by its counterpoint, a strong La Nina that could mean next winter will be dry.

"Eventually, as the winds change, the warm water is going to slosh back," he said. "About half of the moderate-to-strong El Ninos switch over to La Ninas. They basically overshoot the average conditions. It takes several months. The Pacific Ocean is a pretty big bathtub."

This means the wet winter is going to more than likely continue for another few months, with elevated chances of rain through May, especially in the northern part of Texas, Nielsen-Gammon said.

Meanwhile, the winter wheat crop across the Lone Star State is a mixed bag of good to bad, according to Clark Neely, small-grain specialist at College Station.

"By some accounts, only 20 percent of the (Blacklands) region's planned wheat acres were planted," Neely said. "Moreover, some wheat that did get planted early has spent much of its time since emergence in waterlogged soils or even standing water.

"Most of the rest of the state  particularly the High Plains and Rolling Plains  is in pretty good shape," he said. "They've had plenty of moisture, but not so much that they weren't able to get the crop in, though many acres were planted later than normal."

Neely said another issue for Central Texas wheat growers is volunteer wheat. The region had a bumper crop in the works last spring. Then came record rains in April and May, resulting in head sprouting and heavy lodging. As a result many fields were zeroed out for crop insurance last year.

"So we had a lot of seed on the ground, and then it turned dry, and that seed did not germinate until the rains in October," he said.

Neely said because of a mild, wet winter, wheat farmers could face a bad rust challenge. "It could be a problem for the entire state, but right now, we're only seeing it around College Station," he said.

The spread of the disease will heavily depend on whether wet conditions continue through the spring, which is the current prediction. For the state, wheat acreage as a whole is estimated at 5.3 million acres this year, down 12 percent, Neely said.

Part of the decrease is because of prevented plantings, but it's also due to wheat prices being quite low right now," he added.

Jerry Lackey is the agriculture editor emeritus. Contact him at jlackey@wcc.net or 325-949-2291.
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Air war going better than war in cyberspace

By Donna Abu-Nasr And Jeremy Hodges

A year before the Islamic State group declared its caliphate in Syria and Iraq, Abdulmunam Almushawah noticed a disturbing development from more than 1,000 miles away in Saudi Arabia.

The head of a program financed by the Saudi government that tracks jihadi online said he saw new trends emerging among the militants as early as 2013. They were forming technical groups to help radicals send encrypted messages. There was a flurry of activity in French, and calls for jihad in Europe were mounting. Two years later, there were massacres in Paris, first at magazine Charlie Hebdo last January and then at multiple targets in November.

"We understood that they had been building today's reality," Almushawah said in an interview at his base in Riyadh. "What happens in real life has a previous shadow in the electronic world."

The U.S. and its allies say they are winning the fight against the Islamic State group, also known by the nicknames ISIL and ISIS, reclaiming territory over the past year and liberating towns lsuch as Kobane in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq. Yet ground is being lost in an area airstrikes can't reach, a space largely controlled by U.S.-based companies. Executives of Google and Facebook, with government officials, are now rallying support for a response.

The information gathered by Almushawah encapsulates how tough it is to turn what's currently hindsight into foresight. The Internet campaign by Islamic State group militants helped entice thousands of foreign foot soldiers and inspire lone-wolf attacks.

The one in San Bernardino, Calif., showed how the Internet helps "crowdsource terrorism, to sell murder," FBI Director James Comey said. It involved people "consuming poison on the Internet," he said in a speech two weeks after the December attack.

Almushawah most recently noticed an increase in dialog involving Indonesia. A bomb in Jakarta claimed by Islamic State group militants killed eight people this month.

Social media companies have cooperated with Western intelligence agencies, but have been walking the fine line between helping the fight against extremism and unleashing a torrent of demands from countries worldwide to delete postings.

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that when one Islamic State group page is removed, it's just replaced by another. "The best antidote to bad speech is good speech," she said, citing an example of neo-Nazis in Germany whose page was undermined by messages of tolerance.

"There's a new dynamic to the threat in this digital age that demands a new response," Shields said. "While airstrikes are degrading their positions in Iraq and Syria, (Islamic State militants) are fighting a second war for the hearts and minds of the next generation, spreading a warped world view."

As that online reach expanded, so have efforts by law- enforcement agencies to counter it as they did with al-Qaida.The U.S. this month announced its Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which will integrate the effort at home, and another organization to work with international partners.
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WASHINGTON  Of all Donald Trump's political skills, perhaps the most impressive is his ability to persuade people to support him by suspending their deepest, lifelong beliefs.

Some prominent conservatives have embraced Trump, despite his recent support for dramatically higher taxes on the wealthy and a single-payer health care system. They are saying, in essence: Because he is an immigration restrictionist and speaks in a non-PC vernacular, it doesn't matter that he has endorsed the two main policy priorities of modern liberalism.

The same can be said of some pro-lifers, who must look past Trump's previous support for partial-birth abortion and his inability to provide a serious rationale for his pro-life conversion (other than the obvious political imperative). Ann Coulter put it bluntly, admitting she doesn't "care if (Trump) wants to perform abortions in the White House," so long as he builds a wall and expels 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Many evangelical Christians are now in a similar position. In considerable numbers (Trump was the presidential choice of 42 percent of them in a recent poll), they are attracted to Trump's unvarnished populism and his identification with middle-class anxiety and anger.

But this support comes at a price. Most obviously, it represents the final triumph of Clintonism  Bill Clintonism  which is the belief that personal character, particularly on sexual and family matters, has no serious public implications. Evangelicals have been cultural holdouts on this matter. "You brag about many affairs with married women," Sen. Ben Sasse recently challenged Trump. "Have you repented? To harmed children and spouses? Do you think it matters?" For evangelical supporters of Trump, it doesn't matter.

The greater problem for evangelicals is found not in the field of biology but of theology. Trump's defining personal and public characteristic is pride. In making America great again, he offers not a set of political ideals or policies but he himself. He, he says, is better, smarter and tougher than our corrupt and stupid leaders. Pride is his platform.

It is also, in the traditional Christian view, a vice, and a particularly pernicious one. "The essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride," wrote C.S. Lewis. "Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison; it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind."

Why is pride so dangerous? Because it is never sated, and always breeds conflict. "Pride is essentially competitive," says Lewis, "while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. ...

"Other vices may sometimes bring people together: You may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity  it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God."

In our personal experience, we know that pride is often at the root of resentment, rivalry, jealousy, antagonism, greed and a desire for revenge. It is the unifying conviction of evangelicals that people eventually come to the end of their ego and need to look upward; upward from the foot of the cross.

For some, this humility comes naturally. For others, it involves humiliation, failure or loss  what some might call being a loser. But it is precisely at this point of surrender and trust that the prodigal is welcomed home: "You are my beloved son, on you my favor rests." So blessed are the poor, the hungry and the weeping. They are often the closest to God.

What does this mean for politics? A leader with an overweening, compulsive pride finds it difficult to learn or change: What of worth can others possibly teach? A narcissistic leader is always at enmity with other people and groups, and cannot be a unifying figure.

As Abraham Lincoln displayed, the capacity to heal requires humility and empathy. A narcissistic leader is vindictive, keeps lists of his grievances and enemies and is vulnerable to the abuse of power. A narcissistic leader finds it difficult to feel sympathy for those regarded as failures and losers, for the wounded and disabled, for strangers, refugees and the vulnerable.

This is what evangelicals are sacrificing in their search for a savior. There is but one. And it is not Donald Trump.

Michael Gerson is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him at michaelgerson@washpost.com.
Pensions will be a contentious topic again this year, with many states still struggling to find an affordable way to fund these promises to retirees. In Kentucky, which has the worst-funded state pension in the country, some officials are worried the plan has already reached the point of no return.Kentucky's largest retirement plan has been in slow and steady decline for years. Lately, it's faced poor stock market returns and an increasing need to cash out investments or move money into low-risk, low-return bonds in order to make retiree payments. All that has led to an increase in the pension systems unfunded liabilities to just over $10 billion.The state legislature has passed several laws over the years aimed at reining in skyrocketing bills. But despite their efforts, the situation is getting worse.The debate in Kentucky about what to do next offers a glimpse of what could be in store for other state pension systems that have a history of poor government funding.In 2013, a new law created a hybrid cash balance plan for new employees, which is similar to a defined-benefit plan but carries less risk for the state. It also essentially eliminated retiree cost-of-living increases and required the state to make its full actuarial payments immediately -- something it hadnt done regularly since the 1990s.But some are worried the changes came too late.Over the past year, the plan lost nearly a third of its assets, dropping to $2.3 billion in 2015 from $3.1 billion in 2014. It now has just 19 percent of the assets it needs to meet its total pension liabilities over the next three decades.We understood that there was going to be several years of decline even after the latest reforms, said Jim Carroll, cofounder of Kentucky Government Retirees, an advocacy group. What [lawmakers] havent realized now is how deep and fast that trough has occurred."As in many states, lawmakers have tried to reverse the plans downward course for years. They cut retirees' health benefits in 2004 and eliminated pension spiking, which offered higher benefits for workers whose earnings increased at the tail end of their career, in 2008. But it was only the most recent legislation in 2013 that forced the state to make its full pension payments. As a result, Kentuckys employer contribution (which comes from money from the state's General Fund, among other places) leapt to $521 million last year. That represents more than twice what it contributed in 2012 and one-third of the total payroll costs for state employees.Kentucky's not alone.Both Illinois and New Jersey have repeatedly failed to make their full pension payments because of budget constraints. This year, at least Connecticut and Pennsylvania lawmakers are debating major overhauls of their pension systems. All of these states -- plus Kentucky-- have been slapped with credit rating downgrades in the last few years, either as a result of inaction on pensions or because of the financial pressures that unfunded liabilities are putting on their budgets. But none have yet reached the cash flow situation that Kentucky is facing.Gov. Matt Bevin, just over a month into his new job, said this week in his State of the State address that he'll order independent audits of every state pension system so he can propose "substantive structural changes" next year. He's already called for eventually replacing the current system with a 401(k) retirement plan for new employees and letting current public employees transfer their traditional pensions to a 401(k) if they want. Until then, his latest budget would put $130.7 million from the General Fund toward the state employees' pension, which is slightly more than what's required.Carroll said his organization was still vetting the governor's full proposal but called it "encouraging" that Bevin was making funding a priority. The 401(k) aspect of his proposal, however, has already incurred opposition from pension advocates.The situation calls for negotiation and creativity, pension consultants say, but most of the ideas have been tried before. Some have proposed issuing bonds instead of using more General Fund money to infuse cash into the pension fund over time. But a similar bond proposal for the Kentucky Teachers' Retirement System failed last year, and neither the legislature nor Bevin have shown much of an appetite for bonds.Without decisive action, Kentucky will likely face even tougher budget choices down the line.The struggling territory of Puerto Rico, for example, has recently started defaulting on some of its debt in order to pay its legally required obligations, including pensions. Some cities have been able to file for bankruptcy to overhaul their pensions, but territories and states cant go that far.States can become structurally bankrupt where its very difficult -- if not impossible -- to make up the gap, said Daniel Liljenquist, a former Utah lawmaker and a board member of the Retirement Security Initiative, a newly-formed group promoting sustainable retirement policies. I think at that point you do have to go back and renegotiate with your retirees.That option isn't palatable yet in Kentucky. Pension advocates are quick to point out that retirees have already given up some of their health benefits and their cost-of-living raises.My advice to [retirees] has been dont spend any more money, said Carroll. This is a [pension] plan that will fail if nobody acts.
Back from the campaign trail, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced a plan Tuesday for the state to take control of Atlantic City's finances.Christie, flanked by Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat, and Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian at a Statehouse news conference, said "all three of us up here agree" that greater state involvement is needed in Atlantic City, which has been rocked by casino closures.Guardian's presence in Trenton alongside Christie and Sweeney represented a detente in a high-stakes standoff that had state officials threatening a hostile takeover while city officials considered bankruptcy. Guardian said a phone conversation Thursday about the coming storm had led to the cooperation.Under new legislation, the state would get the authority to restructure municipal debt, amend or terminate city contracts, and consolidate or share municipal services with Atlantic County or other towns, Christie said.Asked whether the actions amounted to a "takeover," Christie said: "You can call it whatever you want."But Guardian said Tuesday night after meeting with the City Council: "We're not going to do a takeover. The old takeover bill has been pulled. Everything is back on the table."Notably absent from the Trenton news conference was Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, a Democrat."I will review any proposal to help Atlantic City, but I will be especially concerned about any effort to unilaterally alter collective bargaining agreements," Prieto said in a statement. "The fact is that no one speaks for the Assembly except for the Assembly. If the Assembly is not involved, then there is no agreement."Christie said his office would work with Sweeney and Prieto to try to pass legislation in February.If the state's "expanded responsibility" measure passes, it would last for no more than five years, Christie said. It also could help delay further talk of bankruptcy, which city officials had been set to consider at Tuesday afternoon's council meeting."That is clearly not my preference; it's not the Senate president's preference, and it's not the mayor's goal," Christie said.Guardian said Tuesday evening that he had agreed to back off the heated bankruptcy rhetoric when Sweeney and Christie agreed to throw out the original takeover bill and start over."I believe it's a partnership," City Council President Marty Small said. "Bankruptcy is not 100 percent off the table. But I'm happy we'll have a seat at the table. The state takeover is off the table."In Trenton, Guardian said, "The reality is very clear." Atlantic City's finances are in a "structural deficit" that even bankruptcy would not solve."We're not dead," Guardian said. "We're just wounded."The city has about $240 million in debt and owes an additional $160 million in tax appeals to the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa. It faces a projected $300 million deficit over the next five years, not including nonbonded obligations such as deferred pension and health benefit payments and tax appeals, according to the emergency manager Christie appointed to analyze the city's finances."We remain open to good-faith discussions to resolve this matter fairly," Tom Ballance, president of Borgata, said in a statement Tuesday.Borgata and the city are locked in a legal battle. Guardian said in Trenton that the "force the state brings" would help in resolving the logjam.Last week, Christie vetoed legislation that was intended to stabilize Atlantic City's finances, saying he wouldn't "permit the people of New Jersey to pay for their excess any longer."The city had balanced its $262 million budget for 2015 on the assumption that it would receive $33.5 million in state aid from the legislation to pay its debt service.At Tuesday's news conference, Christie said those bills were only "partial solutions." But he said the new legislation would incorporate a payment in lieu of taxes agreement. The previous legislation would have set terms for tax payments by casinos for 15 years, preventing future tax appeals.Guardian left Trenton immediately after the news conference and returned to Atlantic City, where the City Council and a room full of residents awaited, believing the council would be voting on a possible Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing.The council adjourned to meet privately with Sweeney. Asked on the way to that meeting whether the deal amounted to a takeover, Guardian said: "No."Sweeney left after the meeting without appearing publicly, and council members said they would support the process toward a new bill authorizing some kind of state role in Atlantic City. They passed a resolution supporting a "balance between state intervention" and a complete takeover.Sen. Jim Whelan, a Democrat, said the price of getting financial support would be a greater state role."When you talk about a state takeover or any takeover of anything, you're talking about the entire operations. Fiscal and everything else," he said. "I don't think the state is going to be saying, 'Put this cop here, and put that fireman there.' That's not the level of takeover."Residents at the City Council meeting said they had been left with "crumbs" from decades of casino gaming."The city was raped and now they're killing you," said resident Alma Johnson.Small said the council had been prepared to take action Tuesday on bankruptcy _ he called it "the B word" _ but held off after meeting with Sweeney and Guardian.In New Hampshire last Thursday, Christie had accused Guardian of not having the "guts to do his job." But on Tuesday, he said, "We're working together now, and it's a beautiful thing."Referring to a comment by Guardian earlier in the news conference, Christie said: "I think he called it kumbaya. I'll quote the mayor."
Gov. Matt Bevin called for $650 million in "cuts across the board" in his first state budget proposal to the General Assembly on Tuesday, with the details, including possible layoffs of state employees, to be left to his cabinet secretaries.Bevin said his $21 billion, two-year budget would dedicate $1.1 billion to the state's ailing pension systems for state workers and schoolteachers, although it was not immediately clear from where that money would come, and even that large sum falls short of what the teachers' system requested.The Republican governor pledged to protect per-pupil K-12 school funding, Medicaid, social workers, prosecutors, state police and prison correctional officers; hire more public defenders; and fully fund DNA testing of rape kits and last year's Senate Bill 192, meant to curb the heroin addiction epidemic.But most of the rest of state government -- such as universities, regulatory agencies, parks, public television, workplace safety, public health, environmental quality and economic development -- would face spending cuts of 4.5 percent for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends June 30, and 9 percent over each of the next two fiscal years. Schoolteachers and state workers other than those in the protected categories should not count on a pay raise during that time.This comes on top of $1.6 billion that has been sliced from state spending since 2008 by Bevin's Democratic predecessor, Steve Beshear."This is my challenge to you. This is what we need to do. We need to shore up our foundation," Bevin said in his budget address to legislators gathered in the House chamber. "Because to continue to ignore our financial problems is no longer an option. It just isn't."After the budget address, Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, complimented the governor for making a priority of the pension systems while preserving per-pupil school funding. House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, said he would like to have seen a long-overdue increase in per-pupil funding, but overall, Bevin might get the budget he wants."It's his government to run," Stumbo said. "If he thinks his agencies can sustain that sort of reduction, I don't know that we're going to interfere with him."Kentucky must pour far more money into the pension systems to address years of funding shortfalls, Bevin said. The pension fund for most state workers is only 17 percent funded; the pension fund for teachers is 42 percent funded. Collectively, the state is $35 billion short of what it's expected to need to pay promised benefits to future public retirees."The most important thing to do is stop digging," Bevin told lawmakers.He said he would let his cabinet secretaries decide what should be cut or closed in their departments to satisfy the spending cuts. Dismissing rumors that he ordered the elimination of the Kentucky Arts Council, which remained funded in the budget proposal released Tuesday, Bevin said, "There's no single one thing that is being singled out as being thrown under the bus. ... Anything that specific has never even been a topic of conversation."As he works to balance the budget, Bevin said he is not pursuing tax cuts he previously supported on business inventories and inherited wealth, which could have drained tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue, or any other tax reductions."I would love to see tax cuts. So would many of you," he said. "We can't afford them right now."The budget proposal now goes to the Democratic-led House, which can make changes and then pass it to the Republican-led Senate, which will have its own ideas. A conference committee representing the two chambers will hammer out a compromise to be signed into law before the legislature adjourns in April.However, Bevin warned lawmakers that he won't give them much leeway."This is a budget that is serious," he said. "It is one that I don't, frankly, expect a whole lot of equivocation on. There will be debates. The House will have their versions, the Senate will have their versions. But it is not my intention to have a whole lot of debate about getting off in the weeds on this. And I will not sign a bill that looks tremendously different than that which we're gonna put out. I just won't."Bevin successfully campaigned last year on a platform of fiscal conservatism and smaller government, sweeping 106 of the state's 120 counties and beating his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, by nine points.Now Bevin has a chance to put his plans into action. He said his budget would:-- Give $130.7 million more to the Kentucky Retirement Systems as the General Fund contribution for state workers and $591.5 million more to the Kentucky Teachers' Retirement System as the contribution for schoolteachers. In addition, he said, if "certain conservative budgeting targets are met and the budget reserve trust fund is strengthened as a result," $135.7 million more could be dedicated over the biennium to stabilize both systems.Bevin acknowledged that sum falls short of the full budget request by KTRS, which asked for more than $1 billion over the next two years to meet its actuarial goals."KTRS alone, I'll just tell you right now, we cannot in year one, even with everything we've talked about, cover everything that they want. We can't. We don't have a half a billion dollars to cover that," Bevin told reporters.A spokesman for 31,000 retired teachers called Bevin's budget "encouraging.""He always said in his campaign that we've gotta pay the bill," said Bob Wagoner, executive director of the Kentucky Retired Teachers Association. "So to me, it's encouraging that he's willing to put this much money into the budget. The request was $500 million a year, and this is less, but I never anticipated that he would provide all of the requested money."House Democrats have proposed a $3.3 billion pension bond to borrow money that could be used to stabilize KTRS in the short term. But Bevin rejects that idea, calling it "borrowing from our children."Apart from the budget, Bevin said he soon would order independent audits of all state pension agencies and, armed with that information, would propose "substantive structural changes" at the start of the 2017 legislative session. Bevin has called for enrolling future state employees in defined-contribution retirement plans, like a private sector 401(k), to minimize the state's financial liability.-- Provide $4.8 million over the biennium to hire more social workers and social service clinicians, and raise entry-level wages, affecting 2,030 positions statewide.-- Include $12.4 million to boost salaries for Kentucky State Police and $4.5 million in retention raises for correctional officers at state prisons. The prisons are grappling with a 67 percent turnover rate among employees, Bevin said."We have folks who are working (in prisons) for 12 hours on 12 hours on 12 hours on 12 hours. It's crazy," the governor said. "We have to offset some of that."-- Add $6.3 million to hire 44 public defenders, reducing caseloads for the lawyers at the state Department of Public Advocacy who represent indigent criminal suspects. Also in the courts, Bevin said he would fully fund last year's heroin bill, known as Senate Bill 192; fully fund Operation UNITE, an anti-drug task force in southeastern Kentucky; exempt prosecutors from budget reductions; and include $6.4 million for the KASPER system, which tracks prescriptions for controlled substances.Public advocate Ed Monahan was delighted to learn of the additional money to hire more public defenders."I think it's a very smart investment that will help reduce the frustrations of victims and prosecutors," Monahan said. "Better capacity at the front end allows cases to be resolved more quickly, more fairly and more reliably."
For weeks, law enforcement had kept their distance from the isolated wildlife refuge. They wanted to avoid a massacre out in Oregon's high desert.Since Jan. 2, former rancher Ammon Bundy and several other armed activists had chosen the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as the site of a daring protest that riveted and infuriated many Americans.The men, who gave news conferences in their cowboy hats, opposed the government's prosecution of two local ranchers _ as well as federal administration of the West's vast public wildlands. The local sheriff, fearing violence, pleaded for the men to leave.They called his bluff and refused, and on Tuesday afternoon, the government finally played its hand.At least one occupier was killed and eight others were in custody on federal charges Tuesday night after law enforcement struck in a flurry of surprise arrests that caught protesters who had temporarily left the occupied refuge, apparently to attend a community meeting.Gunshots broke out when the FBI and the Oregon State Police apparently intercepted Bundy and several of his supporters on a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 395.The protesters had been en route to a meeting with hundreds of Oregon residents, many of them supporters of the occupation, about 100 miles north of the refuge in the town of John Day. They never made it.Details of what happened during the showdown were scant. Officials would only say that shots were fired.His brother, Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., was shot in the arm, and Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, a 55-year-old Arizona rancher who had acted as a spokesman for the group, was killed in the highway confrontation, according to Nevada state Assemblywoman Michele Fiore.Ammon Bundy, 40, who has acted as a leader of the occupation, told his wife in a phone call that the group had been cooperative when law enforcement agents confronted them, according to Fiore, a Bundy family supporter who spoke with Bundy's wife on Tuesday.She said Bundy told his wife that Finicum was shot three times while he had his hands up in the air. This account could not immediately be confirmed."It's very unfortunate. The only saving grace is there's six witnesses to it," Fiore said in an interview."My perspective is our government has acted lawless and we have got to stop" it, she said.Ryan Bundy, a resident of Bunkerville, Nev., was taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, treated and released into FBI custody.The Bundy brothers are the sons of Cliven Bundy, a southern Nevada rancher who was at the center of a tense armed standoff of his own with federal Bureau of Land Management officials in 2014.When federal officials seized some of the family's cattle over an estimated $1million in unpaid grazing fees, a ragtag band of armed militiamen rode to his defense at his ranch about 90 miles outside Las Vegas. The BLM backed down and released the cattle."Isn't this a wonderful country we live in?" the elder Bundy said sarcastically Tuesday night when the Los Angeles Times informed him about the arrests and the death."We believe that those federal people shouldn't even be there in that state, and be in that county and have anything to do with this issue. ... I have some sons and other people there trying to protect our rights and liberties and freedoms, and now we've got one killed, and all I can say is, he's sacrificed for a good purpose," he said.In addition to the Bundy brothers, those arrested on the highway included Brian Cavalier, 44, also of Bunkerville; Shawna Cox, 59, Kanab, Utah; and Ryan Waylen Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont.Within two hours, officials had also arrested Peter Santilli, 50, of Cincinnati and Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, of Cottonwood, Ariz. Another occupier, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32, turned himself in to police in Peoria, Ariz., without incident, officials said.All face a federal felony charge of a conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.The group of about 15 men and women took over the wildlife refuge Jan. 2 after a march in support of Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond, a father and son who had been sentenced to prison for setting fires on federal land.The protesters have issued a muddled set of demands for ending the occupation. They demanded freedom for the imprisoned Hammonds and asked that federal land be returned from the U.S. government to local landowners, the county and the town of Burns, near the refuge.They made it clear they were willing to resort to violence if the federal government moved against them, but also said they did not want such a confrontation.Firearms were a constant presence at the wildlife refuge. Men walked around casually with assault rifles slung over their shoulders or with handguns holstered on their hips. One day a reporter saw a man dressed in military clothing with a patch that read "MILITIA," cleaning a Russian rifle.When asked on Jan. 15 about all the weaponry, Ammon Bundy replied, "That's ridiculous that you would connect walking around with arms to violence. That's what keeps it peaceful."Through it all, the protesters won support from around the country, and also among some local residents. But they also angered many. Around Burns, signs popped up declaring: "Bundy militia go home" and "No Bundy caliphate."The occupiers repeatedly said they were protesting on behalf of their fellow citizens."We're trying to accomplish the task of restoring rights to the people who have lost them or surrendered them," Ryan Bundy said earlier this month."We don't want it to end with violence. We're not looking for bloodshed," he said in an interview with The Times.But around Burns, frustrated community members wondered when the occupation might end."We can enforce the Constitution in Harney County, and that's what we intend to do," Ammon Bundy told reporters one day. "We have a lot of plans."
Nearly every large police department in a new nationwide survey said it plans to move forward with body-worn cameras, with 95 percent either committed to body cameras or having completed their implementation. But as body cameras become more common, police will face a host of policy issues they must sort out.The survey, conducted by the Major Cities Chiefs Association and Major County Sheriffs' Association, asked 70 law enforcement agencies around the country about their plans for implementing body-worn recording devices. Results of the survey shed light on the different policy approaches police are taking.So far, only 18 percent of agencies considered their body cameras fully operational last year. About half of the agencies surveyed had started or completed pilot programs, and just 5 percent indicated that they either don't intend to implement body cameras or chose not to do so after completing pilot programs.The police chiefs who don't plan on adopting the cameras cite privacy concerns or fears that the footage could be posted publicly online, said David Roberts, a program manager with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), at a conference in Washington on Thursday. But those holdouts aren't likely to remain much longer, he said. Ultimately, theyre going to need to adopt it. Juries, prosecutors and the courts will demand it.For the departments that are bringing in cameras, the move raises a number of important policy questions.One of the first that must be answered is when to turn the cameras on. Rules vary; many agencies won't record inside private homes or under other specific circumstances, such as interviews with sexual assault victims. Until fairly recently, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called for police to record all public encounters, but that stance has shifted to be more in line with police departments' views. The ACLU's now advocates that police activate cameras only when responding to calls for service or any other law enforcement or investigative encounter between a law enforcement officer and member of the public, with some exceptions.Partially because of the varying policies dictating when officers have to turn on their cameras, some agencies are recording far more footage than others. In just under half of agencies surveyed (49 percent), officers record an average of three or fewer hours of video per day. About 10 percent of departments estimated their officers record four to six hours of video per day, and only 3 percent reported an average of seven or more hours per day. Perhaps more notable is that nearly 38 percent of agencies indicated they hadn't yet determined how many hours of video officers were recording, suggesting they may be struggling to track all the footage.Police departments are also employing different rules about whether officers have to notify people when theyre being recorded. Eleven states have some form of two-party consent laws, requiring cops to ask citizens permission to record them -- although some state legislatures have agreed to waive requirements for police cameras.Another important policy decision police are grappling with is how long theyll retain the footage. Its a safe assumption that most departments would prefer to keep it for longer, but because of the cost of data storage, that's just not feasible, said Jeff Gould, president of SaveGov.org, an online forum of IT experts.I think the emerging consensus is that you want to keep it probably more than 90 days, but less than five years, said Gould.But if a piece of video is considered evidence in a criminal case, police must retain it longer than other recorded interactions. Approximately 70 percent of agencies surveyed keep video that's considered evidence for longer than 180 days. For video not considered evidence, about a third of agencies reported retaining footage for no longer than 90 days, while another 31 percent keep such video for more than 180 days.Once body camera programs are implemented, police departments usually grant other public agencies access to their video systems. Three-quarters of departments surveyed allow their internal affairs units access; 70 percent provide access to district attorneys' offices; and 45 percent grant access to city attorneys offices.Responding to public records requests for camera footage has posed problems for some departments. Agencies in some states, such as Washington, adhere to broad open records laws, while a few others have declined to release any footage to the public at all. The survey found about 72 percent of agencies are required to provide footage in response to records requests. Just under 9 percent are exempt, and the remaining 18 percent reported they hadnt yet determined or didnt know their policy.The vast majority of agencies indicated that they planned to redact videos released to the public. Gould said he expects all departments to eventually redact released videos. Software makes it possible to automate much of the redaction process, but it still requires some additional time from police personnel. separate effort by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of different advocacy groups, is tracking implementation of recommended body camera polices across 25 police departments.One recommendation calls for policies specifying when officers must record and requires concrete justifications from officers not recording events. Most agencies reviewed adhere to this recommendation, but at least six lack requirements for officers to justify any failure to record. Only one agency reviewed has adopted another recommended policy that explicitly permits individuals filing police misconduct complaints to view all relevant video recordings.
Paul Ricard is not ruling out hosting a revived French grand prix at the circuit near Marseille.

This week, the track has been hosting three top F1 teams for Pirelli's wet tyre test, but Paul Ricard chief Stephane Clair says his sights are set even higher.

"Everything is possible," he is quoted in a French-language report by the AFP news agency.

Paul Ricard, owned by a company controlled by Bernie Ecclestone's family trust, last hosted F1 testing action in 2008.

That was the same year that Magny Cours held the country's last grand prix, and so Clair says Paul Ricard is capable of bringing the sport back to France.

"We know we can realistically accommodate up to 50,000 people per day," he said.

Clair has reportedly already talked about the possibility with Emmanuel Macron, France's minister of the economy.

He said one possibility is that Magny Cours shares the costs by annually alternating the French grand prix with Paul Ricard.

"It could be this taking turns," Clair explained. "There are no closed doors. We must find a financial balance."

(GMM)
Pirelli has played down reports that Kimi Raikkonen is unhappy with F1's new generation of wet weather tyres.

The Finnish driver was at the wheel of last year's Ferrari when Pirelli began testing at the artificially-watered Paul Ricard track on Monday.

Afterwards, he was quoted as saying he preferred the 2015 wets.

"Kimi tested various prototypes," Pirelli's racing manager Mario Isola is quoted by the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti.

"As far as I know, he was happy. He did not see big differences to the previous tyres, which is of course not a surprise," he added.

As the Paul Ricard test ended on Tuesday, Isola was also asked by reporters about claims the F1 drivers' representative body GPDA is pushing for Pirelli to produce dry-weather tyres that corner considerably faster.

He said Pirelli is capable of producing tyres like that.

"We have always said that we want to do what F1 asks us to do," said Isola.

"If we have to produce tyres with degradation, we focus on that. If we have to produce long-lasting tyres, we focus on that."

(GMM)
Bernie Ecclestone has not yet given up on the future of the US grand prix in Austin.

Late last year, a dark cloud moved over the popular race when the governor of Texas dramatically slashed funding from $25 million a year to less than $20m.

"To use a technical term," promoter Bobby Epstein said at the time, "I think we're screwed."

But Ecclestone told Time Inc's website The Drive: "We have a contract with them, with COTA. They do a good job and I hope it will continue."

The Circuit of the Americas' October date on the 2016 F1 calendar is listed as "subject to confirmation".

(GMM)
The T-Hybrid (based on a Kia Optima) ( earlier post ) and the ADEPT (based on a Ford Focus) ( earlier post ) both utilize an advanced 48V lead-carbon battery system with bolt-on electrical components that allow for significant engine-downsizing without loss in performance.

Current mild-hybrid vehicle projects, in partnership with Ford and Hyundai/Kia, that utilize advanced 48V lead-carbon batteries, can reduce CO 2 emissions by 15-20%, according to the latest data from the Advanced Lead Acid Battery Consortium (ALABC), presented at the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference (25-28 January, Mainz).

This engine downsizing means less fuel usage and subsequently lower CO 2 emissions compared to the base vehicleincluding a 16% reduction in the Kia Optima.

Project Partners for the T-Hybrid include ALABC, Hyundai Motor Group, AVL Schrick, Valeo, and East Penn Manufacturing.

This concept vehicle is powered by the Optimas existing 1.7 liter CRDi turbo-diesel engine, paired with a Valeo 10 kW electric starter generator and electric supercharger powered by a 48V version of East Penns lead-carbon UltraBattery system.

The diesel-electric powertrain concept enables the T-Hybrid (turbo-hybrid) to be driven in electric-only mode at low speeds and when cruising, with deceleration serving to recharge the battery pack. It includes start-stop functionality and regenerative braking, but also provides the enhanced power and torque at low speeds that have made it popular in test drives.

Some of the support for the Kia Project was obtained through special funding from ALABC members such as the RSR Corporation, the Doe Run Company, Teck Metals, Acumuladores Moura, Britannia Refined Metals.

The low additional cost of introducing 48V mild-hybrid powertrains is continuing to attract automakers because it is the most cost-effective means of complying with stringent CO 2 regulations over the next 10 years. Alistair Davidson, ALABC

The ADEPT vehicle has undergone early testing, and is targeting to cut CO 2 emissions levels to 75g CO2CO 2 kmfar below the EU requirements for CO 2 levels. New automotive designs in the EU are currently required to emit no more than 130 grams of CO 2 per kilometer (g CO 2 /km), and by 2021, automakers will need to reduce that by an additional 28% to meet the requirement of 95g CO 2 /km.

Project partners in ADEPT include ALABC, Ford Motor Company, Ricardo, CPT, Provector, Faurecia, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Sheffield.

Based on a Ford Focus, the ADEPT (Advanced Diesel Electric Powertrain) combines low-cost, micro/mild hybrid technologies to reduce CO 2 emissions by an additional 15-20%. This vehicle indicates a pathway to 70g/km at a cost/emissions reduction ratio superior to a full-hybrid solution.

The system includes regenerative braking and other efficiency improvements for optimized oil flow and pressure control, as well as a 48V electric turbine that captures exhaust waste heat for conversion to additional recovered electrical energy. However, unlike the T-Hybrid, it does not have an electric supercharger but will rely solely on the starter/generator for initial torque assist on the engine.

The 48V vehicles also solve some of the problems with making 48V low-emission systems appealing to the general consumer, ALABC said.

By downsizing and down-speeding the engine to reduce CO 2 emissions, you significantly reduce the vehicles performance, making it less fun to drive. But by adding electrical components like the Valeo supercharger and the CPT SpeedStart ISG, you can give a 1.4 liter engine the performance of a 1.8 liter engine or better, and still provide the same enhanced emission benefits. In essence, this system allows you to reduce fuel consumption with additional electrical components, but increase performance while still maintaining a low production cost because of the use of lead-carbon batteries. Allan Cooper, European projects coordinator for ALABC

Advanced lead batteries are 99% recyclable, and are significantly cheaper than alternative battery technologies used in HEVs.
GREENSBORO  The city will consider investing $2.5 million in development and site readiness at Piedmont Triad International Airport, even though other area governments havent yet committed money.

Greensboro City Councils Economic Development Committee discussed the funding at its meeting Tuesday after hearing a presentation from PTI.

The council passed a resolution in March 2015 authorizing the money, to be used for water, sewer and transportation infrastructure development as PTI continues to expand. But that was contingent on other local and regional governments  which could include the cities of High Point and Winston-Salem and Guilford County  investing an additional $1.5 million for a total government investment of $4 million.

There have been some preliminary discussions with other governments in the area, City Manager Jim Westmoreland told the committee Tuesday. But no real movement.

Councilman Jamal Fox, chairman of the Economic Development Committee, said the city shouldnt wait any longer.

Id like to move for-ward and just invest that $2.5 million, not wait on the other partners, he said.

Fox asked council members to discuss the issue with elected leaders in the other governments.

He said hed like Greensboro to approve its $2.5 million investment at the councils next full meeting, Feb. 2.

Councilman Tony Wilkins said hed be more comfortable moving forward with other government partners on board.

Westmoreland agreed with Fox.

If we already have our money banked or allocated, I think it would make a difference in those conversations with other municipalities, he said.

It would make a stronger statement, he said.

Representatives from PTI gave a detailed presentation to the committee Tuesday, emphasizing that the completion of the part of Interstate 73 adjacent to the airport will allow expansion into almost 1,000 additional acres as growth continues at the airport  already home to passenger and cargo airlines and companies like Honda Aircraft Co. and HAECO.

The presentation also delved into the economic impact of PTI in the area. According to the presentation:

About 5,000 people work at PTI, with the average salary between $60,000 and $65,000.

PTI generates about $300 million in direct salaries.

Those salaries generate an estimated $20.4 million in state payroll tax. Thats more than the $19 million the state spent on aviation funding in 2014, the last year for which full figures were available.

Former Councilman Zack Matheny, now CEO of nonprofit Downtown Greensboro Inc., attended the committee meeting Tuesday. As a councilman he had been heavily involved in talks on funding the further growth of PTI. He strongly advocated moving forward with the financial support.

This is our megasite right here, he said of the potential economic impact of expanding PTI. Start shoveling dirt and people will come with you.
Lifestyle site Thrillist set out to find the most beautiful building in each state and Philip Johnson's New Canaan Glass House got the nod for Connecticut.

Click here for the full list

Started in 1949, Johnson built the glass dwelling on his 47-acre property as his own home. The house is iconic for its glass exterior, leaving a completely exposed interior. Among the first of its kind, New Canaan's Glass House inspired many modern homes.

Johnson was part of a group of architects known in the 1950s as "The Harvard Five." The group also included Johnson M. Johansen, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores and Eliot Noyes. Together, they ushered in a modern architecture movement, and made New Canaan a mid-century modern mecca.

"The Harvard Five was so well known, and well respected that young architects wanted to be here too to work for those architects," New Canaan Historical Society Executive Director Janet Lindstrom told Hearst in 2014. "Even if you go now to look at the telephone directory, you'll see there are really a lot of architects in New Canaan, because it's still a place people know as a hub for it."

Other iconic buildings on Thrillist's list include the Hearst Castle, San Simeon in California, the Capitol building in Washington DC, the Empire State Building and the Breakers mansion in Rhode Island.
On Jan. 30 we will have the mitzvah of being able to formally celebrate our Temple Sholom Centennial.

Our Centennial celebration is not just for the Temple itself, but our entire local Jewish community. In 1636, when the colony of Connecticut was established, it was a Puritan settlement. The royal charter established the Puritan faith as the official religion. By 1708, Connecticut agreed to tolerate Anglicans, Quakers, and Baptists. The charter officially denied Jews the right to build synagogues, to gather for worship, or to build a cemetery.

It wasn't until 1850 that Jews could vote or hold public office in Connecticut. Even with this original Connecticut anti-Semitic attitude, Jews still settled here.

In 1916, 10 Jewish families established the Greenwich Hebrew Institute. For the first three years, the Greenwich Hebrew Institute held High Holiday services in Abrams Hall on Greenwich Avenue. In 1919, a small house of worship was built on East Elm Street and a formal charter was granted from the State of Connecticut.

Six years later, this tiny Jewish community was finally able to begin weekly Shabbat Services. In 1931, the local Jewish cemetery was purchased on Riversville road. In 1934, the first local community Seder was held.

During the 1930s and 40s, the Greenwich Hebrew Institute deepened its spiritual and community ties for Greenwich and our bordering towns, especially Rye Brook, N.Y., and Stamford. It had its first confirmation class, established the local Jewish Welfare Fund and pulpit exchanges were initiated with the local churches.

With the onset of World War II, the Greenwich Hebrew Institute was immersed in helping support the war efforts. Many of the congregations sons went to war and after the war concluded, the Service flag was proudly displayed: 32 blue stars for each local Jewish young man who served and one gold star in loving memory of Aaron Resnick ZL, who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

Over the next 35 years, the Greenwich Hebrew Institute became our community's body, heart and soul for all Jewish activities. By the early 1950s, the East Elm Street facilities were no longer adequate, and in 1953 the building was sold to the Town of Greenwich. The Greenwich YMCA hosted the Jewish worship services and the First Presbyterian Church hosted the Hebrew School.

In 1955, the Greenwich Hebrew Institute was renamed Temple Sholom and became the Putnam Hill neighbor to Christ Church, just as is the case today and our first building on East Putnam was erected.

In 1981, Rabbi Hillel Silverman, Temple Sholom's Rabbi Emeritus, came to our community. Under his rabbinic leadership, partnering with lay leaders, the sole temple of greater Greenwich continued to grow rapidly. In 1990, the decision was made to completely re-build the Temple and a mere 10 years later, a new school wing was added. Temple Sholom grew from the original 10 families in 1915 to a membership of 90 families in 1950.

As an originally unwelcome religious group, we are now an intrinsic part of the community we call home. Temple Sholom itself has approximately 700 households as part of its congregational family, but the greater Greenwich Jewish family is significantly larger.

Today, beside Temple Sholom, we have regular local worship services and programming with Chabad Lubavitch of Greenwich, Chavurat Aytz Chayim, Greenwich Reform Synagogue, Hebrew Wizards, and Shir Ami. Additionally, we have our local Jewish communal Day School, Carmel Academy, and the Jewish communal institutions of Jewish Family Services of Greenwich, JCC Greenwich and UJA Greenwich.

A hundred years ago, the only Greenwich synagogue barely had enough members for a minyan. Today, thousands of local Jews gather at their respective Greater Greenwich Houses of Worship so as to celebrate the High Holidays. The Greater Greenwich local Jewish community is a paradigm of success. The numbers themselves are amazing, but its much more than growth in numbers. Every local Jew is part of a communal tapestry that has  and will continue to do so  significantly influence both Jewish and secular local life.

The previous generations of our local Jewish community wanted to assure that we continue providing Jewish vibrancy and commitment for the generations of local Jews to come. Temple Sholom's Centennial is a special opportunity for remembering all that came before us, what has changed and what's exactly the same.

But even more important than looking back at this milestone anniversary is our opportunity to travel together into the future as we dream about what we can yet become over the next 100 years for our local Jewish Community. Together, we can build our Jewish future and embrace our sacred responsibilities. We can continue to create a welcoming Jewish community that honors diversity. Together, we communally open our gates, forge bonds and deepen our spiritual experiences on all levels. Let us continue, as our Hebrew Scriptures proclaim: Let us go from strength to strength.

Rabbi Mitchell M. Hurvitz is Senior Rabbi Temple Sholom of Greenwich, co-founder of the Sholom Center for Interfaith Learning and Fellowship, and a past-president of the Greenwich Fellowship of Clergy. For an archive of past columns, visit www.templesholom.com
Curry-spiced ramen with chicken and seafood broth, minced beef, and bean sprouts. Photo: Melissa Hom

Shigetoshi Jack Nakamura is what you might call Japanese ramen royalty: Hes been at it for 17 years, having opened his first ramen-ya when he was 22 and contributing menu development to his brothers chainlet, Afuri, an influential shop that debuted more than a decade ago in Tokyo with light soups and a heavy emphasis on fish in the stock. Hes been praised by the likes of Ivan Orkin and David Chang. In New York, the chef is likely best known as the mastermind behind the defunct ramen flights at Sun Noodles original New Jersey incarnation of Ramen Lab, which he also briefly ran after it relocated to New York. Now hes back on the Manhattan noodle scene with the first Stateside shop of his own, aptly named Nakamura.

In a Lower East Side storefront squeezed into the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, Nakamuras menu is tight, with just four bowls of ramen available. These include the two bowls Nakamura served at Ramen Lab: his light, restorative torigara shoyu, based on a recipe thats more than a century old; and his XO miso vegetarian ramen, made with David Changs vegan version of the famous Hong Kong sauce thats traditionally made with dried seafood and Chinese ham.

The other two bowls are ones Nakamura has served in Japan but only tested at Ramen Lab. One, the richest of the bunch, is a curry-spiced ramen that sous-chef David Forster says is Nakamuras attempt to combine the two favorite foods of Japanese children, and its meant to reflect the flavor profile of Japanese curry as opposed to Bassanovas Thai-inspired version.

The last of the four is the yuzu dashi, which Forster calls the lightest of the bunch, all the better to emphasize the citruss aromatic, floral qualities. Nakamura has been serving yuzu ramen for years  Sun Noodles Kenshiro Uki remembers eating it at his first restaurant  but it has only recently started emerging in New York and is starting to pop up more and more. Yuzu-inflected bowls are now being served at two other recent openings in Mr. Taka Ramen, which has another Tokyo ramen star in the kitchen, and Ramen by Mew, while Bassanova serves a todaku yuzu wadashi bowl, Jin Ramens shio has yuzu-kosho paste in the broth, and last year Ippudo debuted an atsumori tsukemen that has a pork broth with yuzu vinegar.

Along with those aforementioned noodles, Nakamura also serves a single appetizer of pork gyoza, a very solid rendition of the dumpling, but Forster says theyll likely add some others like, perhaps, a cucumber salad. Theres only tea to drink for now, while a beer-and-wine license is coming soon. Once it does arrive, theyll serve sake along with Japanese and local beers. In keeping with the times, the restaurant also has a no-tipping policy, and further down the road, Forster adds, theyll start making their own noodles, too.

The torigara ramen is made with chashu, menma (pickled bamboo shoots), and spinach. Photo: Melissa Hom

Nakamuras yuzu ramen with chashu, menma, spinach, and shoyu tare. Photo: Melissa Hom

The XO miso ramen is made with Momofukus vegetarian version of the sauce. Photo: Melissa Hom

The teppan gyoza (pork, cabbage, and ginger) come out sizzling. Photo: Melissa Hom

Go get some noodles. Photo: Melissa Hom

Nakamura, 172 Delancey St., 212-614-1810
Lenovo has launched its Vibe X3 smartphone in India, which will be the company's flagship device in the market. The phone will be available through Amazon for INR 19,999 ($293).

The Vibe X3 puts a lot of focus on the audio quality aspect. The phone has powerful stereo speakers up front. The headphone output is handled by a premium 32-bit ESS Sabre 9018C2M DAC with 3x op-amp for music and Cirrus Logic Wolfson WM8281 for phone calls. The phone also offers Dolby Atmos effect over headphones and speakers.

Otherwise, the specs are fairly run of the mill. It has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, Snapdragon 808 processor, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage with microSD support, dual SIM, LTE, IR, 21 megapixel rear camera with PDAF and 4K, fingerprint sensor, 3600mAh battery, and Android 5.1 with Vibe UI.

Lenovo stresses the focus is more on the experience than the specs. The phone has a metal frame with a curved back for a comfortable grip. The display has 100% NTSC color gamut coverage. The Vibe UI has been scaled back a bit and is closer to stock Android in some places. The phone also supports Lenovo's TheaterMax feature that works with the optional ANTVR headset for a bigscreen experience for your movies or games.

The phone goes on sale tomorrow, January 28, on Amazon at 2PM IST.
Back in September last year, there were reports that Samsung is planning to launch an Apple-like phone leasing program for its Galaxy smartphones. And now, a new report from the company's home country of South Korea is suggesting that the program will be launched alongside the Galaxy S7 flagship.

This means that those purchasing the Galaxy S7 family of smartphones (which are expected to be unveiled at MWC next month) from Samsung will be able to pay in monthly installments. In addition, they will also be able to upgrade their device every year.

For those who aren't aware, Apple announced the iPhone Upgrade Program at the iPhone 6s/6s Plus unveiling event last year. It requires you to sign a two-year financing agreement and pay a little over $32 a month. In return, you get a new, unlocked iPhone every year directly from the company. The program also includes Apple Care+.

Via
On Jan. 22, many thousands marched over ten miles up Port-au-Princes Delmas road to Petionville then back down the Bourdon road to the capitals central square to demand new elections and denounce a government ban on demonstrations that was to begin that midnight.

The marching, chanting multitude scared the daylights out of Haitis Petionville elite, loudly pouring into the narrow, tony streets of the wealthy mountain enclave while young men scattered large rocks and telephone poles across roadways and set aflame cars and columns of tires.

The tumultuous day forced Haitis Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), six of whose nine members have now resigned in disgrace or disgust, to indefinitely cancel the third round of widely denounced elections, which had been scheduled for Jan. 24.

The Police's Company for Intervention and Maintenance of Order (CIMO) armored vehicles shadowed the marchers on side-streets throughout the afternoon, occasionally engaging them with shots in the air or teargas, but mostly they put out fires with their water canon trucks and made a show of force in front of ministries and embassies the marchers passed.

Despite the CEPs announcement, the Haitian masses have continued marching in cities throughout Haiti on every day since last Fridays historic march, emboldened by their victory and calling for the immediate departure of President Michel Martelly and the United Nations military occupation troops known as MINUSTAH. Martelly is constitutionally required to step down on Feb. 7.

However, the Martelly regime is now planning to deploy death-squads against the popular uprising and opposition leaders, according to a source in the Haitian National Police (PNH).

The government is also spending tens of thousands of dollars in a bid to buy the allegiance of sectors of the population during the celebratory days leading up to Carnaval, which falls this year on Tue., Feb. 9, two days after Martelly is supposed to resign.

According to a reliable PNH source, on Mon., Jan. 25, a police officer called "Chariot" assigned to the PNHs Presidential Guard and Security Unit (USP) received at the National Palace weapons, four Prado SUVs, and money to sow trouble in the capitals largest slum, Cite Soleil, and the semi-rural suburb north of the capital, La Plaine.

According to the source, Chariot has the collaboration in the USP of a former Lavalas activist named "Yabout," who will be a key actor in the planned terror.

Chariot also gave two Galil rifles to a paramilitary thug known as Noe (Noah) to murder anti-Martelly people in La Plaine and Croix des Bouquets, the police source said.

Chariot himself lives in the area of Papo in the capital district of Croix des Missions Cross and owns a nightclub called Scandale Disco in the Anba Mapou area of Croix des Missions.

Among the people to be targeted by Chariots assassins are Rony Colin, the new mayor of Croix des Bouquets, supposedly elected in the contested polling under the banner of the Palmis party, and Caleb Desrameaux, the similarly elected deputy of Tabarre, from the Verite (Truth) party. The assassins would try to make it look like the anti-Martelly opposition was responsible for the murders, according to the police source.

On the morning of Tue., Jan. 26 in Croix des Mission, partisans of Martellys Haitian Bald Headed Party (PHTK) blocked the main artery to the Haitis north, National Highway No. 1, by disabling a tractor-trailer truck in front of the Damiens bridge. Until Tue. afternoon, when this report was written, the truck was still blocking the road and any northbound traffic.

The PNH reportedly received instructions not to intervene if PHTK partisans block roads or demonstrate, our police source said.

According to another anonymous source close to the PNH, the PHTK has distributed 300 million gourdes (US $ 51,000) to mobilize support for the Martelly government in a demonstration scheduled for Jan. 28. The action was originally planned for Jan. 26 but was called off at the last minute.

Meanwhile, Guy Philippe, the leader of the paramilitary rebel force which helped overthrow former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, has declared that he and his partisans will divide the country and are ready for war against the anarchists who stopped the vote, according to Reuters. A former Haitian cop and soldier, Philippe is today a Senate candidate in the now-postponed run-off and a close Martelly ally. He has been holed up in the picturesque south-western seaside town of Pestel since 2004, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has made two half-hearted attempts to arrest him in the last decade. Each time, the accused drug trafficker supposedly could not be found.

As the battle lines in Haiti draw up, the Group of Eight opposition presidential candidates, who contest the results which put the PHTKs Jovenel Moise in the lead with 33% of the vote, issued their proposal on Jan. 24 for the provisional government that would take over when Martelly steps down. They proposed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court be named President (as dictated by the 1987 Constitution) and choose a consensus prime minister with a cabinet of no more than 15 ministers chosen from Haitis known political personalities.

This provisional government would then set in place a five-member independent commission of inquiry drawn from the leading organizations of the media, human rights, women, the university, and national election observers. After reviewing the results of the elections violence-and-fraud-plagued first two rounds on Aug. 9 and Oct. 25, the commission of inquiry would then recommend to the provisional government of consensus all the measures deemed useful and susceptible to reestablish trust.

The G8 also proposed that the illegally sworn-in parliamentarians determined by the independent commission of having won their seats fraudulently would be ejected and the CEP would be reconstituted.

In light of the bloody repression being prepared by the Martelly regime, the G8's moderate and half-step recommendations are likely to enrage the masses, who are chanting we want revolution as they march. The last proposal will surely be found particularly galling: To guarantee the protection of the members of the Tet Kale (Bald Headed) executive against all harassing and wrongful prosecution.




Haiti - FLASH : Good news, return of tourists to Labadee





Tuesday morning, the cruise ship Allure of the Seas of the Royal Caribbean Cruises with a capacity of 6,200 passengers, docked at the tourist port of Labadee, after the cancellation of the previous 3 stops due to protests of the population in the area https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16422-haiti-flash-a-3rd-cruise-ship-cancels-its-stop-at-labadee.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16385-haiti-flash-2nd-cruise-ship-canceled-in-labadee.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16371-haiti-flash-labadee-port-calls-canceled-due-to-demonstration.html



The Government welcomes the resumption of cruise operations in Labadee and welcomes tourists. During that week 4 more cruise ships of Royal Caribbean Cruises are expected : Independence of the Seas with on board, 4,200 cruise passengers, Anthem of the Seas (5,200 cruise passengers), Silhouette of the Seas (3,000 cruise passengers) and Grandeur of the Seas (2 000 cruise passengers).







"Haiti is pleased to welcome tourists of Royal Caribbean Cruises in a beautiful site like Labadee. The Government will continue to work constantly and together with the people of Labadee on the development projects of the zone," declared Stephanie Villedrouin, Minister of Tourism and Creative Industries (MTIC).



To recall, last weekend, the Government has initiated talks with residents of the community of Labadee and the Bande-du-Nord and reassured the Committee of the zone of tourist port that the Government remained attentive to the population and reiterate its support to all partners of the sector concerned. https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16422-haiti-flash-a-3rd-cruise-ship-cancels-its-stop-at-labadee.html



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Education : Relocation of students of burned schools





Following the arson occurred in the Ecole nationale mixte of of Leogane during recent opposition demonstrations, https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16402-haiti-news-electoral-zapping.html and to the lycee Fabre Geffrard of Gonaives, the Ministry of National Education informs the public in general that it has taken all steps for the supervision and relocation of 663 students concerned who must continue their academic learning.



So Tuesday, January 26th, the students of the Ecole nationale mixte of of Leogane were temporarily accommodated in the School congregational Ste.-Rose of Lima of Leogane, in the presence of the Minister of Education, Nesmy Manigat.



By next week, the school will be relocated to a new space redesigned to receive the two shifts of the establishment until the end of the year. Cleaning work is already underway on the site. The Ministry thanks the leoganaise community, especially Pastor Henry Milien, the Mayor of Leogane and the Rotary Club for their support for the respect of the right to education of these children.



In the long term, the Ministry intends to proceed with the reconstruction of the torched establishment and is already looking for a land with the City Council.



Regarding high school Fabre Geffrard whose a classroom of 7th was burned, the affected students are already placed in other classroom with their peers pending redevelopment work of their initial space with new school facilities by the end of this week.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Politic : The G8 rejects the statements of Guy Philippe





Following the statements of Guy Philippe, the former military leader of the anti-Aristide uprising in 2003-2004 and Senate candidate in 2015 for the Grand'Anse (admitted to the second round), under the banner of the National Consortium of political parties Haitian (CNPPH), who had called Sunday to revolt against the anarchists of the Republic of Port-au-Prince who want to set up a transitional government https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16415-haiti-flash-guy-philippe-ready-for-armed-struggle-against-the-anarchists.html ; Me Samuel Madistin, the Spokesman of the G8 has reacted strongly Monday morning, to these statements on a radio station in the capital. Rejecting statements by Guy Philippe he declared "[...] I think that Haiti is the only country in the world where a drug dealer can also speak loudly [...] or could be a candidate to the Senate of the Republic [...]"



In response to this accusation, Guy Philippe, who maintains his statements informed "to get the power you have to go through elections," doubting of the lawyer skills of Me Madistin, astonishing that a lawyer could bring charges against him in the absence of judgment.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16415-haiti-flash-guy-philippe-ready-for-armed-struggle-against-the-anarchists.html



HL/ HaitiLibre
























Haiti - News : Electoral Zapping...





An office of the platform Repons Peyizan burned

Friday during protests of the opposition, an office of the platform "Repon Peyizan" locate at Cameau street in Port-au-Prince, was burned, Eudes Lajoie, Coordinator of the platform point finger on the G8 members as the intellectual authors of this fire he described as criminal. Eudes Lajoie called his supporters to a peaceful mobilization to demand elections and rejects any idea of forming a transitional government.



The MPDP supports disobedience and rebellion

The initiative Democratic People's Patriotic Movement (MPDP) of the opposition said supporting the movement of disobedience and rebellion general for the establishment of a transitional government in Haiti, that must lay the foundation for finding solutions to the cyclical and structural crisis of the country. According MPDP "only a government of democratic transition popular may allow the Haitian people to recover its freedom and sovereignty," adding that "this government must have as a compass the national interest and that of the majority population."



The Argentine Government and the political crisis in Haiti

The government of Argentine President Mauricio Macri today expressed its "concern at the suspension of the second round of elections in Haiti," the Argentine government "remains attentive to the evolution of the current political crisis" in Haiti and stressed the "importance for all stakeholders to express their views peacefully and engage in a frank and constructive dialogue" calling to "complete by consensus and non-violence, the electoral process in order to achieve a peaceful and orderly transition power" in 2016.



The NEHRO trivializes Guy Philippe statements

Tuesday Anthonal Mortime, Secretary General of the New England Human Rights Organizations (NEHRO) trivialized the position of the former military leader Guy Philippe, who believes he can demand that each department is represented in a possible transitional government. In addition, favorable to a transition he said against the idea that the head of state is replaced by the current President of the Court of Cassation, Jules Cantave for not having been chosen by the Senate...



Forthcoming elections without Jovenel

Rene Monplaisir, Coordinator of an organization called "Sector Popular Haitian", a structure member of the party VERITE was in favor to the establishment of a provisional government after February 7, 2016, with a maximum term of 4 months that would have the responsibility to ensure the continuity of electoral process with a new CEP, without the candidate Jovenel Moise, which according to him is the largest beneficiary of fraud on 25 October. In addition he wants the departure of President Martelly before February 7 to avoid chaos [?]... Nothing less !



HL/ HaitiLibre


















By Lisa Espinosa | Published on 2016/01/26

This episode was all about the building of friendship. Chi-ang and Si-woo look past their massive prides and see the good in each other. The kids at school learn via guilt that their treatment of the boys was cruel and uncalled for. And under all of that "Moorim School" continues to plod along pedantically.

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The show spoon feeds emotions to its audience rather than create situations that can wrench them from viewers. Emotions and special moments are drawn out or repeated so often that they often lose their impact. The tightest relationship is that between Chi-ang and Si-woo because their fierce prides and sharp tongues keep the dialogue rolling and their bromance a-building. They cannot see what Dean Hwang plans for them: force them to face trials together, and they will come together as a result. It's an obvious ploy that strangely escapes the two very intelligent boys, and also the rest of the equally bright students. Again, this is much like a kitchy Taiwanese drama manga adaptation where plot lines tend to be overly simplistic and narratives require hoards of people to deliver them. The faculty and students are much like a Greek chorus, explaining happenings and feelings to keep the audience apprised of all the show's doings. It is a method that prevents serious emotional impact.

A good point of this episode was that we got to know Chi-ang and Si-woo the more they got to know each other and learn what friendship means. Their budding friendship made for some hilarious moments. Chi-ang literally "burns through" money, the cash in his wallet, to keep them warm in the forest. Their battles with wild dogs were fun, but could've resulted in fewer longing gazes and pensive moments. It's a method of filling up the time slot that is messy along with flashbacks. It's too early in the drama for so many flashbacks. We're only on episode 4!

There is a little romance budding and some antagonism in store. Chi-ang opening likes Soon-deok who is quietly nurturing a crush on Si-woo. It very obviously endangers the budding friendship between the young men. An obvious ploy, but it works because of the fine acting by Seo Yea-ji and Lee Hyun-woo. Not to mention that they have fantastic chemistry.

The antagonist kid at school is relegated to a scene or two and doesn't provide much tension. Neither does the storyline with Chi-ang's mother the mistress being hidden away like an embarrassingly gaudy trophy. they should either be dropped as points of tension, or more thoroughly developed.

We can do nothing more than wait for the next episode of "Moorim School" to see what will happen. The rather lackluster episode endings do little to ramp up anticipation. So, until we meet again for episode 5, adieu.

Written by: Raine from 'Raine's Dichotomy'

"Moorim School" is directed by Lee So-yeon-I, written by Yang Jin-ah, and features Hong Bin, Lee Hyun-woo, Shin Hyun-joon, Seo Yea-ji, and Jung Eugene.

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Published on 2016/01/27 | Source

On the third episode of MBC's Wednesday & Thursday drama, Han Mi-mo (Jang Nara) was brutally rejected by Goo Hae-joon (Kwon Yul) after all.

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Han Mi-mo went to Goo Hae-joon's hospital and confessed her heart towards him honestly while she was returning the gown she had borrowed.

However, Goo Hae-joon's attitude was firm and clear. He said, "What I hate most is a some relationship" and repeated that he would not interfere with the relationship between Song Soo-hyeok and Han Mi-mo. He added, "I don't have any intention to jump in the troublesome three cornered romance. And also you aren't that attractive to stir my friendship with Soo-hyeok".

Han Mi-mo responded, "I didn't intend to stir up your friendship nor form a cruel triangle love relationship. I was just confessing my heart. Although the beginning of our relationship might be a little awkward, I didn't think it was in appropriate".

Han Mi-mo said, "I changed my mind so many times until I walked up to the door. But I liked it because my heart fluttered. Although I was rejected this brutally..." She then quickly turned around from Hae-joon.

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The Fair Work Commission has rejected a 7-Eleven pay deal because it would have left workers around $80 out of pocket each week.



The proposed enterprise agreement by a Sydney 7-Eleven franchise has failed the commissions Better off Overall or BOOT test, because it was deemed employees would earn less than they would under standard award wage rates, Fairfax Media reported.



Patricia Ryan from The Workplace Lawyers says the Commissioner required the franchise, trading as 7-Eleven Bexley and 7-Eleven Rozelle, to demonstrate that proposed weekend rates would adequately compensate for potential loss of award entitlements.



The BOOT test states that the employees must be better off under the EA on an overall basis when compared with the rates in the applicable modern award (the award that would otherwise cover the employees), Ryan told HC Online.



The rates do not need to be the same  for example, an EA may have a 20% Saturday penalty instead of 25%, provided the base rate between Monday and Friday is higher than the base rate under the award to compensate, Ryan says.



She said the commission would determine whether the monetary amounts in proposed enterprise agreements meet the Better off Overall test when compared to what employees would earn under the applicable modern award.



Ryan says HR managers drafting enterprise agreements need to be able to demonstrate that the proposed rates meet the BOOT and when told the rates dont meet the BOOT, provide satisfactory explanations as to how it does or provide undertakings which effectively amend the agreement.



She also said wage audit mechanisms need to be employer directed and should not rely on an employee to request one.



Commissioner Roe said the salary proposal failed the 'better off overall' test and the employer should be responsible for determining any shortfall in wages.



The company was criticized for exempting itself from paying wage shortfalls if employees had requested particular rosters and for failing to restrict the amount of weekend work required of employees to a reasonable proportion of their total weekly hours, the SMH reported.



Commissioner Julius Roe has advised the company in December to make further submissions responding to his concerns.

"Further submissions were received from the applicant but I was not satisfied that the loaded hourly rates were sufficient to ensure that employees who worked a considerable proportion of their working hours on weekends would be better off overall," he told the SMH.

"If an employee is unaware that they have received less than the award and or fails to make a request to the employer for a reconciliation, then they will not be better off overall," he was quoted saying.



"Furthermore, it is a matter for the employer to determine if there is any shortfall. How this calculation is to be made and what factors are to be included is not specified.

Commissioner Roe concluded that the application was dismissed because the company failed to provide acceptable undertakings to remedy these issues.



Ryan said some key considerations for HR professionals drafting new enterprise agreements include:


Publicly declare that racism will not be condoned

Provide staff with diversity training

Be on the lookout for signs of racism in the workplace

Investigate complaints quickly, thoroughly and sensitively

Take disciplinary action against those who break the policy

acked Toll worker who was reinstated to his role after making Islamic State racist slurs against his colleague may be out of a job once the Fair Work Commission reviews his case.The worker was reinstated to his role and back paid seven weeks wages after lodging an unfair dismissal complaint with the Fair Work Commission, with the backing of his union.However a counter-appeal by the trucking giant has seen the commissions initial judgment quashed, as the full bench of the commission ruled that significant errors had been made.Although the employees conduct was inappropriate, Commissioner Bernie Riordan said at the time of the hearing that the company had failed to provide a final warning for persistent and unacceptable conduct, Fairfax Media reported.Riordan also said Toll's investigation and disciplinary processes had been flawed.Toll appealed Commissioner Riordans judgment, saying he had failed to take into account that the employee's misconduct was a "pattern of unacceptable behaviour"."These errors are sufficiently significant to require the decision to be quashed," Fair Work Commission vice-president Adam Hatcher was quoted in Fairfax Media.The unfair dismissal case will be re-heard before a commissioner.The Toll employee was fired for allegedly making racist, sectarian and inappropriate remarks to an Afghan co-worker.He allegedly asked his co-worker if he was from the Taliban and made offensive comments about Islamic State."Does Islam say to kill? ... I enjoy seeing people having their heads cut off, do you enjoy it too?" he was alleged to have asked his colleague, who is of Middle Eastern heritage.Commissioner Riordan says that making racial slurs "in order to get a reaction" was not acceptable workplace behavior."Since the 1970s and 1980s, Australian workplaces have been forced to transition from the old-fashioned prejudicial Angelo-Saxon male domains," he says"It is no longer appropriate for employees to "stir up" or "take the mickey" out of their colleagues based on their sex, religion, culture or heritage in order to get a reaction, Commissioner Riordan says.While the employee appeared to be "under the misconception" that he was being funny, Commissioner Riordan says "in fact, he was just being stupid". Lisa Annese , CEO of the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA), told HC Online that racism in the workplace is an issue employers need to urgently address,She said previous DCA research has shown that employers need to urgently improve their responses to workplace racism, as key findings have shown approximately 10% of Australian employees had experienced racial harassment or discrimination in their workplace in the previous 12 months.The Australian Human Rights Commission says employers have a legal responsibility under the Rational Discrimination Act to take all reasonable steps to prevent racial discrimination and should have policies and programs in place to prevent racial discrimination in the workplace.Strategies for employers wanting to minimize racism at work include:
By Jesse Wood

At the behest of the Wilkes County Sheriffs Office, deputies with the Watauga County Sheriffs Office located a stolen vehicle in Foscoe over the weekend that is related to a murder investigation in Wilkes County.

On Thursday afternoon, law enforcement and medics in Wilkes County responded to a call of a deceased white male at 1365 Roaring Gap Road in Thurmond.

After an initial investigation, Wilkes County Sheriffs Office Chief Deputy David Carson announced that the case was being treated as a homicide. On Tuesday, he wouldnt identify the victim or comment on the cause of death until an autopsy comes back.

We are 99 percent sure of who it is, but we are waiting on fingerprint[s]  to come back to make a positive ID, Carson told High Country Press on Tuesday.

The Wilkes Journal-Patriot reported that the deceased resided at the residence, which Todd and Dawn Beyer own, according to tax records.

Tax records listed their address as 181 Park Ave., Watertown, N.Y., and show they bought the mobile home and 5 acres on Roaring Gap Road in April 2015, the Wilkesboro paper reported. A resident of the area around the mobile home on Saturday said Beyer and his wife had New York license plates on their vehicles when they moved into the mobile home last spring 

The victims vehicle was reportedly found at an unspecified block on Church Road. Carson confirmed the victims vehicle was found in Watauga County, however, he said, We dont think it had anything do with the case.

We dont believe it was involved, Carson said.

Carson mentioned that the investigation is still ongoing and that detectives are currently conducting interviews and trying to determine what the victim was up to during the last few days of his life.

At this point, there isnt a whole lot to tell, Carson said.

The State Bureau of Investigation is assisting in the investigation.

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By Bailey Faulkner

Are you a fan of fresh, hometown rock? Mark your calendars for Friday, Feb. 5 when Black Cat Burrito will host Boone favorite indie-rock band The Remarks. The band will be joined by out-of-town opening acts Indighost and Minnesota License Plate.

The Remarks

Formed in early 2015, The Remarks have quickly proved themselves as one of Boones most exciting rock groups. The four-piece band is filled out by:

Aaron Aiken (guitar, vocals)

Chris Peroni (guitar)

Ethan Sermersheim (bass)

Stephen Sigmon (drums)

Inspired by a wide range of bands and influences, the members of The Remarks have meshed together their own tastes to create a truly unique sound.

The band already has several notable achievements under its belt. Although based in Boone, The Remarks have not hesitated to expand beyond the High Country.

On July 10, the band travelled to The Grey Eagle in Asheville to open for Australian indie-pop band Dick Diver. The Grey Eagle has been voted one of the nations top 25 live music venues by touring musicians.

A few days after their Asheville show, The Remarks trekked to Chapel Hill to play at Local 506 alongside Sol Cat and Hot Water & the Bone.

With ASUs fall semester approaching, the band began recording its debut album in August at the Robert F. Gilley Recording Studio on campus. The group recorded its debut effort with the help of engineer Chris Pope, a senior in the Music Industries program at App State.

He did a killer job, Aiken said.

Wrapping up the recording process, the band released its album in November. It is now available for streaming and purchase on the bands website, theremarksband.com, and on Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes and other online music services.

The group also headlined a show at Legends in November. They played alongside Boone native opener Unaka Prong, and the show was a hit.

Now, a few weeks into a new semester at school, the members of the band are setting their sights on the future.

Second to booking, writing new material is something we feel is necessary to keep flowing in the background, Aiken said.

Unlike some groups, The Remarks rely heavily on each member during the songwriting process.

On our own, its hard to keep focused and see the creative process through. Thats why Im thankful to have other heads to bounce ideas off of, Aiken added.

The band hopes that its hard work and dedication will lead to even more success in the future. Besides spreading its music, the band has other reasons for wanting success.

Hopefully well make enough money to eventually get away from the Wendys 4 for $4 value meal. Its killing us, Aiken said.

The band will surely enjoy eating at Black Cat Burrito before its upcoming show.

Black Cat Burrito

Fridays show will mark the bands first Boone appearance of the new year. Since last semester, the band has been able to work on new material, expanding its already deep repertoire from the groups nine-track album.

There will definitely be new songs in the Black Cat set, Aiken revealed.

While each of the bands shows seems to be a unique experience, every performance is guaranteed to be exciting. For the first time, The Remarks will share the stage with Indighost (Bristol, Tennessee) and Minnesota License Plate (Rock Hill, South Carolina). The Remarks hope to return the favor and play alongside their openers in their hometowns in the coming months.

Fridays Black Cat show will begin at 10 p.m. There will be a $5 cover charge.

Before the show, fans should tune in to WASUs The Local Lowdown for a chance to hear the hottest tracks from The Remarks and other local bands.

Get ready for an awesome show on Friday!

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The state-owned provider of postal and logistics services will according to a press release begin negotiations with its staff with the preliminary objective of laying off a maximum of 860 personnel in production, administrative, sales and customer service functions.

Posti has announced that it is mulling over shedding hundreds of jobs as part of its attempts to adapt to a sharp decline in mail delivery volumes and evolving customer needs.

This year, the fall in delivery volumes will reduce Posti's net sales by 75 million euros, it highlights.

Heikki Malinen, the chief executive officer at Posti, called attention to the decline in delivery volumes and its impact on the revenues of the company in a recent interview with Uusi Suomi.

The net sales are expected to continue to decline at the same rate also in 2016, according to the provider of postal and logistics services.

Posti's result would turn markedly negative without efficiency improvements and other remedying actions, it argues.

Malinen points out that mail delivery volumes have already slid back to the levels of the 1960s due to digitalisation. We must adapt and reform our operations in order to ensure Posti will maintain its financial capability to build new business [and] compensate for [the decline in] mail deliveries, he explains.

The transformation is unfortunately so dramatic that we also have to target savings to our personnel.

Last year, the volume of delivered letters and other addressed shipments fell by eight per cent year-on-year to 102 million.

Malinen nevertheless voices his confidence in the ability of the state-owned company to create new jobs in the future, especially in parcel and logistics services.

Posti emphasises that its objective is to realise as much of the reductions as possibly through voluntary arrangements, retirement schemes, temporary lay-offs and other similar measures. It is also set to convert the contracts of some of its full-time employees to fixed-term contracts.

The consultative negotiations will commence on 2 February and concern a total of 7,600 people employed on a full-time basis in Finland by Posti Group Oyj, Posti Oy and Posti Kiinteistot Oy. Posti provided employment to a total of 21,187 people last September.

Posti affirms that all personnel who are made redundant will have access to training and other services intended to support their efforts to re-employ themselves through its support programme, New Path.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Markku Ulander  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
On the other hand, he expressed his opposition to the so-called jewellery law adopted by Denmark in an attempt to discourage asylum seekers from entering the country.

Timo Soini (PS), the Minister for Foreign Affairs, pointed out in an interview on MTV3 on Wednesday that the concerns he and his party comrades have voiced about the risks associated with immigration are no longer dismissed as scaremongering.

The law grants authorities the power to seize cash and valuables, such as gold and jewellery, in excess of 10,000 krone, or roughly 1,350 euros, from newly-arrived asylum seekers. Soini is not an advocate of adopting similar measures in Finland.

Wedding rings belong on people's fingers, not in pawn shops. We do have to look into the amount of social security benefits [provided to asylum seekers], which is exactly what we're doing, and address the pull factors [that attract asylum seekers], he said.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs also pointed out that several political leaders in Europe have warned that the European social model could collapse unless the influx of asylum seekers is brought under control.

These are harsh words that as recently as six months ago no one thought they would ever hear. The Finns Party's earlier warnings about the effects of mass immigration were dismissed as scaremongering. That's no longer the case, he said.

Soini also said he opposes the proposal to introduce lower wages for immigrants and asylum seekers because it could result in a general decline in wages or the alienation of segments of the labour force in certain sectors.

He instead called attention to a beautiful and sweet example of the integration of asylum seekers: a report published by YLE of the relationship between an 80-year-old widower from Kirkkonummi, Linnea, and the asylum seeker who became her personal aide, Ali.

I believe most of these people want to work and build [the society]. There is also a small group of people who have not entered the country with good intentions and who may be involved in international crime. But that's a small group, said Soini.

What does an ordinary human being want? Love, safety, work, loved ones, everyday life. I doubt anyone of us wants to lie around at a reception centre day after day.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Petteri Paalasmaa  Uusi Suomi

Source: Uusi Suomi
Chopper crew rescues man from Mt. Pisgah

Members of the North Carolina Helo-Aquatic Rescue Team, known as NCHART, rescued a man Monday night who was stranded near the top of Mt. Pisgah after the cable car used to transport him to and from the transmitting equipment stopped working, leaving him about 400 feet down an embankment in more than two feet of snow.

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The man called his employer who then called 911, but deep snow covered the access trail that would allow ground crews to reach him, the N.C. Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Five N.C. Mountain Rescue teams, comprised of 30 highly-trained mountain rescue technicians from Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson and Mitchell counties, were also deployed to support ground-based rescue efforts. With concerns about the onset of hypothermia, NCHART was sent to aid in the rescue.

Approximately three and a half hours later, the NCHART crew  this time comprised of a North Carolina National Guard Black Hawk and three rescue technicians from the Charlotte Fire Department  was deployed, rescued the man and delivered him safely to the Asheville Airport. Local emergency medical teams checked the stranded person and found him in good condition, not requiring further treatment.

The coordination between North Carolina Emergency Management, North Carolina National Guard, Haywood Emergency Management and Charlotte Fire Department to rescue this man is an extraordinary example of dedication beyond measure, said N.C. Emergency Management Director Mike Sprayberry. It takes remarkable effort and skill to execute a strategic rescue mission in harsh winter conditions. The NCHART pairs the best civilian rescuers with military and law enforcement aviation resources, making these teams a valuable asset to North Carolina.

The NCHART is a North Carolina Emergency Management resource that brings local, state, military and law enforcement agencies together to respond to search-and-rescue missions. Local rescue technicians complete extensive helo-aquatic rescue training and are paired with helicopters from the State Highway Patrol or N.C. National Guard. On any given mission, two or three of the 60 specially-trained technicians are called upon and paired with helicopter pilots to rescue stranded or injured persons. Technicians and pilots train together monthly, rotating venues so they can practice various types of rescues: people stranded in rapidly moving water, on mountains, cliffs or waterfalls.

Yesterdays rescue technicians were from the Charlotte Fire Department, but the first responders could have been from any of the 14 emergency service agencies that participate in the program.

Begun in 1999, the NCHART program was the first of its kind in the nation to implement a regimented training and response program that combines civilian and military resources. Teams have saved hundreds of lives since the programs inception.
MANY of those who played an active role in the Easter Rising were first radicalised through Irish poetry and song, language classes, or membership of the Gaelic League  as they later indicated in statements to the Bureau of Military History.

I was awakened to an awareness of Irish nationality, like so many others of my generation, by the poetry of Yeats, especially Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Irish legends collected by Standish OGrady, Lady Gregory and others, the Abbey plays and all the writings of the Celtic Twilight School

 Dorothy McArdle, Cumann na mBan, Dublin

It was during the weekends in [senior IRB leader] Bulmer Hobsons cottage that I first read Ethna Carberys poemsI can assure you they did much to fan the fires of patriotism to white heat. From now on my outlook on life was completely changed

 Gary Holohan, Fianna Eireann, Dublin

Something in the songs [at a Gaelic League Feis in 1902]  though I could understand only a few of the words, something in the music, something in the atmosphere  gripped me, and I seemed to be put in touch with something far back in the race. Unknown depths in me were stirredI understood, accepted and felt myself to be at one with the Gael. For the first time I saw the whole of Ireland

 P.S. OHegarty, IRB, Cork

My brother would come home at holiday time and talk tremendously about the language movement....We started to read papers about every single thing that was said by Arthur Griffith...

 Min Ryan, Cumann na mBan, Dublin
Patrick Hugh Holahan was born in 1897 and grew up at Rutland Cottages in Ballybough.

His father served in the British Army in India and Afghanistan. In 1909, along with his older brother Garry, Paddy joined Na Fianna Eireann.

In 1914 at the Howth Gun Running he sounded a bugle (which hes carrying in the picture on the left) when the Asgard appeared.

As Easter 1916 approached he was inducted into the IRB and informed of the plans for the Rising.

He participated in the attack on the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park and then joined the 1st battalion under Cmdt Ned Daly in the Four Courts Garrison.

He participated in an attack on Broadstone train station, refusing to retreat until he assisted one of his company who was isolated. He was later appointed captain of his company.

With the help of the Capuchins he negotiated a truce with Lieut Col Taylor on Easter Saturday.

When he received written notice from Pearse of the surrender he told his men it was the hardest task they were called upon to perform.

Paddy later fought in the War of Independence, leading the raid on Collinstown Aerodrome, and fought on the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War.

During the Emergency he was appointed commandant of the 26th battalion that brought together men from both sides of the Civil War to help heal the bitter wounds of that time.

Later he was OC of the Construction Corps.

Patrick married Johanna Holahan in 1920 (she had joined Cumann na mBan after the 1916 Rising) and they had five children together.

Paddy was a man of high principle who believed that his word was his bond and that a job worth doing was worth doing well.

In later years he was in charge of the Office of Public Works in the Phoenix Park. He died in 1946.

Details submitted by Ciaran Holohan (grandson)
Michael Staines was among the last to leave the GPO

Michael Joseph Staines was born on May 1, 1885 in Kiltarnaght near Newport, Co Mayo.

His family moved to Dublin in 1904 and lived at Murtagh Road in Stoneybatter.

Staines worked at Henshaws ironmongers on Parliament Street and joined the Irish Volunteers at their inaugural meeting in November 1913.

Following a stint as quartermaster of the Dublin brigade, he took

up the position of quartermaster general of the national movement on March 16, 1916. He also held the rank of captain.

Stretcher

Staines spent the morning of Easter Monday 1916 delivering arms to the rebels headquarters at the GPO - as Padraig Pearse read the Proclamation outside the building - before leading the assault on the top floor of the building, which was held by a group of Connaught Rangers.

On the Thursday of Easter week he led a sortie to Williams Lane, between Abbey and Princes Street, to retrieve the wounded James Connolly, bringing him back to the GPO for medical treatment.

By Friday afternoon, the GPO was under heavy fire. The building was alight in every quarter and the front portion was a roaring furnace, according to a later account.

The order was given to evacuate.

Houses

Staines was in the last group of rebels to leave, carrying Connolly on a stretcher alongside Padraig Pearse, Willie Pearse and Judge Law Smiths chauffeur.

The men placed Connolly on a bed in a property at Moore Street before cutting through the houses and arriving at Sackville Lane, where The ORahilly lay dead. On the Saturday, Staines selected six men and carried Connolly on a stretcher towards Dublin Castle to negotiate terms.

They were booed almost the entire way by the gathering crowds who at times came close to attacking the party.

In the years following the Rising Staines remained heavily involved in Irish politics and played an active role in the War of Independence.

He sat on the supreme council of the IRB, was elected commandant of the rebel prisoners at Frongoch internment camp in Wales, was a member of the first Dail Eireann, served as a TD and senator, and was the first commissioner of An Garda Siochana.

He died in 1955 and is buried in Clontarf alongside his wife Julia and daughter Sheila.

Details submitted by Michael Staines (great-grandson)
When the Abbey Theatre unveiled its commemorative programme for 2016, entitled Waking the Nation, its male-dominated nature provoked such a backlash that the beleaguered directors surely fantasied about unearthing a previously hidden typescript by a woman playwright.

The place to search would have been under the Abbeys main stage. In 1916 the secretive space beneath the boards the actors trod on was a cornucopia of hidden treasure.

The printing press on which the Proclamation was printed was supposedly hidden there and it most certainly concealed a rifle belonging to Arthur Boss Shields  a 20-year-old Abbey actor.

Shields only returned to Dublin on Easter Sunday 1916 from an Abbey tour abroad, aware that an insurrection was planned.

He was bitterly disappointed to find only a few confused fellow volunteers from his company had assembled as arranged in Fairview on Easter Monday.

For an actor though, the show always goes on. Amid the bewildering counter orders Shields sought permission to briefly leave his fellow volunteers and go into the Abbey.

If the insurrection did not go on, then the Abbeys Bank Holiday matinee would. Shields intended to appear in one or the other.

But when he reached the Abbey, the GPO was already occupied by the rebels. He lingered in the theatre long enough to retrieve his hidden rifle before crossing OConnell Street to report to James Connolly.

Shields week, which could have begun with a matinee, led him into the heaviest fighting in the GPO and Moore Lane.

Just before the surrender he was among seven volunteers chosen for a suicide mission  a diversionary charge to distract the British machine guns by running at them.

Suicidal

Thankfully this suicidal charge never occurred. Shields was there when Pearse surrendered to General Lowe, who was accompanied by his own son, John (Lowe) Loder  a junior British Army officer.

In later life John Loder and Boss Shields enjoyed successful careers as Hollywood actors. I didnt know if their paths crossed but I suspect that they might have agreed that no film set was more dramatic than Pearses surrender at Moore Lane.

The Abbey matinee did not happen on Easter Monday  the management cancelled it as soon as they heard the first shots fired in the greater piece of theatre occurring nearby.

But appropriately the shelved production was of Yeats incendiary play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan.

In a late poem Yeats posed a rhetorical question when asking: Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot? Yeats was partly showboating here, sharing Patrick Pearses tendency to want to place himself at the centre of things.

Tom Clarkes widow, Kathleen, noted that Sean MacDermott was always complaining to Tom that Pearse was not satisfied with getting honours he may have earned but wanted to grab what was due to others.

Yeats rhetorical question displays a touch of this. Yet his play was sufficiently influential for Pearse, during his court martial, to mention its impact on him, and for Countess Markievicz, during her testimony, to call it a sort of gospel.

While this and some other Abbey plays captured the zeitgeist of the time, they had little impact on more practical leaders like Tom Clarke, Eamon Ceannt and Sean MacDiarmada, who were rooted in their physical force tradition.

But Yeats play caused a link in the public mind between the Rising and the Abbey.

This link saw the Abbey become the first national theatre to receive a state subsidy, shortly after independence.

Veterans

It was solidified in 1966 when Sean Lemass unveiled a plaque at the Abbey to Boss Shields and six other 1916 veterans who had worked there.

Over time their stories were forgotten but now a book by the historian Fearghal McGarry, The Abbey Rebels of 1916: A Lost Revolution (Gill & Macmillan), reclaims these overlooked figures.

They range from actors like Maire Mic Shuibhlaigh  the Abbeys first leading lady  to the usherette Ellen Bushell.

Also present is the actor Sean Connolly, whose last performance in the Abbey was in Kathleen Ni Houlihan, and who was the first rebel to die. When Connolly was shot (by a sniper) on the roof of City Hall, he was comforted by another Abbey stalwart, Helena Molony.

The Abbey rebels also included Bernard Murphy, a stage carpenter, and Peadar Kearney, who worked backstage, and whose Soldiers Song became more influential than any Yeats play.

Three of the seven are female and their experiences during the Rising presaged what was to come for women.

Thomas MacDonagh only reluctantly allowed Maire Nic Shuibhlaigh to join his garrison in Jacobs factory, sourly informing this sophisticated 33-year-old woman that: We havent made any provisions for girls here.

Ellen Bushell similarly struggled to gain entry to a garrison and had to carry dispatches and food between outposts.

But McGarrys fascinating account of the Abbeys direct and indirect involvement with the Rising highlights these seven ordinary Dubliners.

They moved from being actors, prompters, carpenters and usherettes in imaginary plays about a risen Ireland to playing dangerous roles in the most realistic, deadly piece of theatre that Dublin had even seen.
Beaumont Hospital is yet to fill some 235 staff positions - with the hospital operating with a shortage of 116 permanent nurses, according to new figures seen by the Herald.

The hospital has seen the number of permanent nursing vacancies almost double in the past three months.

It is believed 62 nursing positions were unfilled at the North Dublin hospital in October - with a total of 143 staff positions left vacant.

Since October, the hospital has recruited 30 nursing students, dropping the present nursing shortage to 86.

Shortage

Lorraine Monaghan, of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), told the Herald that the "severe shortage" in nurses is down to a very high attrition rate at the hospital.

Ms Monaghan said that, while hospital management have been actively recruiting staff, a high number have been leaving the hospital for a number of different reasons.

She said that location and working conditions were two of those reasons.

"Obviously, there are major issues when staffing levels are so low, because patient care is compromised and staff are faced with intolerable workloads - and there's an impact on their own health and well-being, so there's an impact for staff as well," she said.

"Staff feel obliged to work additional shifts to help out their colleagues and it's unsafe - they're working more and it's putting them under extreme pressure," she added.

Ms Monaghan said "a lot of work needs to be done to bring nurses back home", adding: "These nurses left the country to get jobs and superior working conditions. They're desperately needed in this country and you can see that in the likes of Beaumont - they are recruiting but are struggling to get nurses to fill the positions," she added.

Meanwhile, the hospital worst hit by overcrowding yesterday said "every available bed space" had to be brought into service as more than 50 patients endured long waits on trolleys in its emergency department.

The spokesman for St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin said it had also cancelled all non-urgent procedures for the next 24 hours due to the surge in patients. Nationally, the numbers on trolleys breached the 500 mark again yesterday morning.

Briefed

Health Minister Leo Varadkar, who briefed the Cabinet on the ongoing trolley crisis, said it will be another two weeks before the levels of flu peak.

The virus is now a major driver behind emergency department congestion, with the numbers of patients with it presenting for treatment up 10pc, he added.

The Cabinet was told that 'at risk' groups are being urged to get the flu vaccine .

Other measures include using private hospitals to cater for patients on public waiting lists, offering more staff overtime and increasing community intervention teams.
The chiselled good looks of Irish-born celebrities such as Michael Fassbender, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy are the exception to the rule, according to an international dating site that has again ranked men from Ireland the ugliest in the world.

Fewer than one in 10 single Irish males who applied to put their profiles on elitist site beautifulpeople.com last year were accepted.

But there's better news for Irish women, who have scored their best ever rating after being voted the ninth best-looking nationality out of 21.

Hottest

Analysis of last year's statistics found that Sweden is judged to be home to the planet's best-looking men, while Norway has the bragging rights to the world's hottest babes.

The LA-based site, which has a worldwide membership of more than five million, makes no apology for only accepting the globe's best-looking singles.

There is some small consolation for Irish men, who get to share last place in the handsome table with the UK and Poland.

Greg Hodge, who runs the site, said he believes Irish men could fare better if they made more effort with their profile pictures before applying.

"A topless selfie shot in a seedy room or an image of them at the pub, pint in hand, does not go down well with women. Men are not just selling themselves, they are selling a lifestyle," he said.

"A polished image showing an interesting lifestyle would greatly improve their acceptance rates."

Further analysis of the Irish statistics on beautifulpeople.com revealed that applicants from Dublin, both male and female, had the highest acceptance rates on the site, while romance-hunters from Limerick were most likely to be rejected.
Embattled gangster Jason 'Jay' O'Connor is facing more trouble after a junior associate of his beat up a girl at a house party.

The isolated criminal, who is involved in a bitter west-Dublin feud, is now "in bother" with his former associates on the city's southside over the incident in Blanchardstown at the weekend.

"Jay is in a pretty weak position and the last thing he needs is the fellas who he considers to be his friends to be giving him grief," a source said.

"He was not even at that party but he is still facing questions over what his younger associate did. O'Connor is just so volatile at the moment and is under so much threat that people don't want anything to do with him anymore."

O'Connor is involved in a feud that has already seen one murder last summer where he was the intended target.

His main rival can't be named here for legal reasons but the man survived an assassination attempt earlier this month when an associate of O'Connor was suspected of using a gunman to target him at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown.

Only days before that, O'Connor was detained by gardai investigating reports that he had damaged the property of a female friend.

In another blow, one of his closest associates was arrested shortly before Christmas.

Imploded

It is believed that a psychopathic criminal, who is suspected of making two failed attempts to murder exiled crimelord John Gilligan, has also taken up a contract on O'Connor's life.

All this has led to sustained armed garda patrols in the Blanchardstown area.

The feud that O'Connor is involved in began as part of a deadly falling out between former associates in the notorious Westies gang when the north Dublin mob imploded over a decade ago.
A major 385m investment package will be spent on replacing and refurbishing public nursing home facilities.

The investment is planned for 90 centres across the country between now and 2021.

It includes the replacement of 33 existing facilities, and the refurbishment or extension of 57 others.

In addition, the investment will deliver some 215 additional beds in centres being built or refurbished in locations identified as having particular capacity issues.

Funding

The investment is made up of 148m in the current HSE capital plan and a further 237m capital made available under the government's recently published multi-annual Capital Plan.

In addition, 10 homes costing 150m are likely to be provided for which public private partnerships (PPP) or alternative funding arrangements will be considered.

Minister for Social Care Kathleen Lynch said that, as a result of this investment, it is intended that all public nursing homes will be compliant with the environmental aspects of the Health Information and Quality Authority's (HIQA) standards by 2021.

"The 90 facilities between them have 4,723 beds. Having visited very many of these facilities I know that residents and their families attest to the excellence of the care received, but the physical environment needs improvement," she said.

Increasing the number of public nursing home beds is also seen as playing a role in alleviating the Emergency Department crisis.

Waiting

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation's figures showed that 517 patients were languishing on trolleys and on wards waiting for a bed yesterday.

A spokesman for St Vincent's University Hospital said yesterday it had cancelled all elective procedures for the next 24 hours due to a surge in the number of people attending the Emergency Department (ED) who required admission.

Every available bed space in the hospital was brought into service, he said.
Victoria Smurfit as she usually looks (Photo: Anthony Woods)

Victoria Smurfit has followed in the footsteps of Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks by giving up her blonde locks in favour of a fiery red style.

The Dalkey native has abandoned her trademark colour in favour of the classic Irish look.

Smurfit is one of a number of actresses favouring red alongside Interstellar's Jessica Chastain and Jurassic World's Bryce Dallas Howard.

The 41-year-old started out in Ballykissangel and is now known for her role of Cruella De Vil in fantasy series Once Upon A Time.

Underworld

The prime time show attracts huge audiences, with around 12 million fans tuning in to each episode.

Smurfit's character had been killed off but was brought back as the storyline focuses on the Underworld.

She will appear in the latter half of the fifth series which will hit screens again in March.

Meanwhile, it appears she may have found love after splitting from her husband, Douglas Baxter.

The couple had been married for 15 years and are parents to Evie Dorothy, Ridley Belle and Flynn Alexander.

However, Smurfit has been dating film-maker Alistair Ramsden, who was an assistant director on her recent film, Bait, which she produced.

The pair have shared numerous snaps of them together and they attended the HBO Golden Globes party earlier this month.

According to his online profile, Ramsden works with Creative Development for ITV Studios USA.

He previously worked on English soap Emmerdale before moving to Los Angeles last October.

Before relocating to the States, he was also in Ireland with Smurfit when she attended the Dublin Comic Con convention to discuss her role in Once Upon A Time.

Since then, the pair have shared photos of them celebrating Christmas together, on a ski trip with her children and on a trip to Disney World.
Kathleen Clarke became pregnant shortly before her husband Tom went off to fight in the Easter Rising. When they met for the final time in Kilmainham Gaol, she decided not to tell him about their unborn child.

A few months later she miscarried and had a near-death experience, during which she saw Tom ordering her to go back as there was important work for her to do.

Like so many relatives of the 1916 leaders, Kathleen carried on fighting her husband's battle. She was a founder member of Cumann na mBan, a Fianna Fail TD and the first female Lord Mayor of Dublin.

For the remaining 56 years of her life she preferred to be addressed by her married name - Mrs Tom Clarke.

Traditions

When it comes to the widows and children left behind after 1916, there are no easy generalisations. Some came from strong republican traditions, others from Protestant families with unionist connections.

Some had known about the Rising all along, others were kept in the dark until it was too late to argue. Some were happy to become public figures in their own right, others preferred to fade into the background.

The one thing they all had in common was that each had suffered a terrible trauma. They could not even bury their loved ones, since the British had hastily interred the bodies in a mass grave at Arbour Hill.

On a more practical level, the families all lost their main breadwinners at a time when there was no social welfare safety net.

Of the seven men who signed the 1916 Proclamation, only two died single. Patrick Pearse was a bachelor and may have been gay - although there is no conclusive evidence either way.

Sean MacDermott had a steady girlfriend, Min Ryan, who later married the Civil War commander and Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy.

Aine Ceannt, widow of Eamonn, threw herself into charity work. She was particularly active in the White Cross, an organisation set up to help nationalist families who had been bereaved in 1916.

She also stayed active in republican politics and often sheltered Michael Collins in her Ranelagh home when he was on the run.

Two of the 1916 widows were siblings. Grave Gifford famously married the terminally ill Joseph Plunkett in prison shortly before he was shot.

Her middle-class parents strongly disapproved, while her new in-laws refused to honour Joseph's will and left her with long-term money problems.

Grace's sister Muriel, wife of Thomas MacDonagh, outlived him by barely a year. She drowned in 1917 while swimming in the sea off Skerries.

Lillie Connolly obeyed the wish of her dying husband James and converted to Catholicism.

For the most part, however, she was happy to let their children take up his cause.

Nora Connolly, who had cooked breakfast for the Rising leaders in Liberty Hall on Easter Sunday, went on a lecture tour of the US and was a republican activist all her life.

Roddy Connolly, who at the age of 15 fought alongside his father in the GPO, later founded the Irish Communist Party.

Burden

Other 1916 children found their parents' legacy a heavy burden to carry. Ronan Ceannt wrote after his mother's death: "For years past, I have wondered if mammy was disappointed in me for not having shown myself to be as fine a man as my father... she may, deep down, have felt I was a bit of a failure."

When the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921, almost all of the Rising relatives condemned it as a betrayal of their loved ones.

Some also had their houses raided during the Civil War on suspicion of harbouring anti-Treaty gunmen.

Aine Ceannt even recognised one raider as a man who had served in her husband's battalion in 1916.

Long after the Irish state was established, Kathleen kept defending Tom's honour. She resigned from her Fianna Fail cumann over the sexist references in Eamon de Valera's constitution, pointing out that the 1916 Proclamation had given women equal rights.

As Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1939 she removed a portrait of Queen Victoria from the Mansion House, saying she could not sleep there until that woman was gone.

The Easter Rising leaders are being celebrated this year as heroic martyrs. Their wives and children, however, also made a huge sacrifice - and they deserve to be remembered too.
Halloween is coming! Here's when to trick or treat in your town
This weekend might be the last warm one we have in awhile
Blacks are twice as likely as whites to lack the required photo ID they would need to provide when casting a ballot on Election Day, an expert testified Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Winston-Salem.

Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on the stand for the second day of a federal trial on North Carolina's controversial photo ID requirement, part of a sweeping election law that state Republican legislators pushed through in 2013. The N.C. NAACP, the U.S. Department of Justice and others filed a federal lawsuit soon after Gov. Pat McCrory signed the legislation into law.

Stewart analyzed voter registration data from the State Board of Elections and compared them to database maintained by the N.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. He matched the two databases to see how many registered voters matched with those people listed as having a driver's license or other valid photo ID.

He based his analysis on data as of July 2014. Stewart said the data analysis indicated a racial disparity between blacks and whites. Blacks were twice more likely to lack a photo ID, he said.

That racial disparity persisted even when taking into account that state Republican legislators amended the photo ID requirement in June 2015, Stewart said. The amendment allowed voters to use expired photo IDs as long as they were within four years. The amendment also allowed voters to sign a "reasonable impediment" declaration in which voters will say why they were not able to obtain a photo ID. County election officials would allow the voter to cast a provisional ballot that would be counted later after election officials verified voters' reasons.

Stewart said that after accounting for newly available data and the amended photo ID requirement, 5.7 percent of all registered black voters did not match with the DMV's database, as opposed to 2.5 percent of whites.

Stewart also testified that his analysis also showed that blacks who lacked photo ID tended to live in places where there were lower rates of education and income and where people lacked access to a private car. That meant, Stewart said, that blacks would have a harder time obtaining one of six required photo ID.

Tom Farr, an attorney for the state, cross-examined Stewart. Farr pointed out that Stewart did not update his analysis to consider voters who may have been removed from the registration rolls after July 2014.

Farr also pointed out to Stewart that his most recent analysis shows that about 95 percent of registered black voters have photo ID. Plaintiffs have argued that a disproportionate number of black voters lack photo ID as compared to white voters.

Plaintiffs are arguing that the photo ID, even as amended, places an undue burden on blacks and Hispanics, and that the law is also unconstitutional and a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Defendants allege that there is no evidence that the law is discriminatory.

U.S. District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder is presiding over the case. The trial is expected to last through the end of the week.
Indo-Lanka relations have not looked this strong in decades, but renewed ties hold little hope for Sri Lankas northern fishermen, whose livelihoods are in serious question because of their Indian counterparts.

The new dynamic between the countries followed the dramatic regime change in Sri Lanka in January 2015. It was hard to miss South Blocks relief over the defeat of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was seen as leaning dangerously towards China. New Delhi promptly reached out to the new government in Colombo led by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, known to be pro-West and a friend of India. President Sirisena, in turn, made New Delhi his first port of call after assuming charge.

In no time, the neighbours cemented diplomatic ties in a series of high-level visits, including Prime Minister Narendra Modis historic visit to Sri Lanka in March 2015, the first bilateral visit to the island by an Indian Prime Minister in almost three decades. Soon after, following victory in Sri Lankas August parliamentary elections Mr. Wickremesinghe made his customary visit to New Delhi. And now, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj is scheduled to visit Sri Lanka early February.

Eager to cash in on the new goodwill, India has been pushing for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which New Delhi and Colombo have been discussing since 2000. India sees the pact as a breakthrough, for it would open up the Sri Lankan market for Indian goods, services and investment. The two countries already have a Free Trade Agreement but for New Delhi CEPA, or a similar new trade agreement, will be that deal-clincher that consolidates Indo-Lanka relations on the foundation of economic integration. There has been no final word from Colombo, but there are positive signals from the Sri Lankan Government with further negotiations and a likely deal in 2016.

Clearly, the political economy of Indo-Lanka relations is going through a transformation, with both governments not only aggressively pursuing neoliberal policies in their own economies, but also seeking to further liberalise ties between the two countries. Significantly, these economic and security ties are also determined by the geopolitics of proximity to the West while distancing China.

Misery for northern fishermen

All is apparently well in terms of diplomatic and trade ties. However, none of this has even remotely helped the nearly 2 lakh people in Sri Lankas Northern Province who continue to lead miserable lives, mainly due to Indian trawlers that poach relentlessly in Sri Lankan waters. Tied to the sea and dependent on the fisheries sector for survival the fisher folk in Jaffna, Killinochchi, Mannar, Mullaitivu and the smaller islands off Jaffna peninsula are struggling to rebuild their lives after three decades of a brutal civil war.

The bottom-trawlers from Tamil Nadu not only cross the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) demarcating territorial waters in the narrow Palk Bay separating the neighbours, but also systematically destroy the Indian oceans marine ecology. They virtually scoop out fish and other marine organisms from the ocean bed.

Hundreds of trawlers charge ahead every other day, tearing apart Sri Lankan fishermens fishing nets and boats, their primary assets. Indeed, there is a major asymmetry of power in the Sri Lankan waters of the Palk Bay; some 6,000 motorised 18-feet boats and over 5,000 kattumarams of 9 to 15 feet length on the Sri Lankan side face as many as 2,000 Indian trawlers 30 to 60-feet-long with very powerful engines. In perpetual fear of losing what remains of their modest fishing equipment, the northern Tamil fishermen do not venture out to the sea during the three days of the week when they expect the Indian trawlers. Their catch has fallen due to the repeated assault of trawlers and consequently, they are trapped in debt.

A problem that began during the war, when the Sri Lankan navy and the LTTE barred northern fishermen from going to the sea, has only become worse since it ended in 2009. The Sri Lankan Navy arrested nearly 400 Indian fishermen in 2015 on charges of poaching. The number of fishermen arrested are usually only a fraction of those actually poaching. The Sri Lankan Navy, too, has oscillated between being very stringent or lenient depending on Indo-Lanka relations at a given point.

Several rounds of talks between fisher leaders of both countries have proved futile. The arrested fishermen of Tamil Nadu, often daily wage labourers, are pawned in the diplomatic tussle between the two countries manipulated to an extent by Tamil Nadu. They are released around major bilateral meetings, just as President Sirisena released 104 Indian fishermen on Pongal Day, about a fortnight before he meets Ms. Swaraj.

Tamil Nadus hypocrisy

As New Delhi consolidates its ties with Colombo and pursues its economic vision in Sri Lanka, it has the responsibility of addressing the fisheries issue convincingly and with a sense of urgency. Anticipating the shrill and unreasonable demands from Tamil Nadu, aimed at electoral gains, New Delhi will have to come up with a sound strategy to address this problem. More so this year as Tamil Nadu goes to polls. Considering that the fisher folk along its coast constitute a significant electoral segment, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalaithaa, eyeing another term in power, is likely to politicise the issue further, pressuring New Delhi to get the arrested Tamil fishermen released, as she usually does.

Tamil Nadu stands increasingly exposed with the Palk Bay crisis. After proclaiming political solidarity for decades to Sri Lankas northern Tamils it has now emerged the chief culprit in this fisheries conflict. How can Tamil Nadu claim to have any sympathy towards the Tamils in Sri Lanka when it strongly backs its fishermen who so ruthlessly exploit livelihoods of the war-torn Tamil fisher-folk? The revival of the fisheries sector in Sri Lankas north is a crucial component of post-war reconstruction.

A marked shift within Sri Lanka

As long as Rajapaksa was in power, his Government leveraged the fishing conflict to neutralise New Delhi on other fronts, amid mounting pressure on human rights and militarisation in the North. The arrested fishermen and seized trawlers were released accordingly. Virtually no one spoke for the Sri Lankan fishermen.

However, the northern fishermen have recently found the unlikely support of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), Sri Lankas the largest Tamil party. Its leaders, for the longest time, refrained from raising the issue, fearing they would antagonise political supporters in Tamil Nadu. With the situation of northern fisher-folk becoming worse, the TNA broke its silence last year, for the first time raising the fisheries conflict with the visiting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in February 2015. More recently in October, Sri Lankas Opposition Leader and TNA veteran R. Sampanthan made a powerful speech in parliament on the plight of northern fishermen. He spoke at length on the hopeless condition of fishermen who were growing indebted by the day and of the serious damage being caused to Sri Lankas marine resources.

Upon his request, President Sirisena met with the fisher leaders and the various arms of the state to heighten efforts to address the fishing conflict. He urged the foreign ministry to have discussions with both New Delhi and Tamil Nadu to find a solution. He also proposed that the Indian Navy or the Indian Coast Guard collaborate with the Sri Lankan Navy in a joint patrolling exercise. There is now a national consensus in Sri Lanka calling for strict measures to end poaching by Indian trawlers. There is growing pressure for larger fines and the permanent seizure of trawlers.

Lack of political will

If New Delhi has been trying to convince Tamil Nadu, clearly it has had little success, despite a few promising signs in discussions on alternatives. The Indian Government has been contemplating a buy back scheme where the central government  which along with international agencies in the 1970s incentivised trawlers under problematic fisheries policies  would now purchase the trawlers from the fishermen. It would instead, support fishermen to take up deep sea fishing methods.

However, there can be no drastic change without political will in Tamil Nadu. Furthermore, leaders in both countries have to consider the livelihoods of the Northern fishing community as well as the ecological sustainability of the ocean resources, which has to necessarily begin by ending bottom trawling.

It might be tempting for those taking forward the new vision of Indo-Lanka relations, or the shining high growth policies in New Delhi and Colombo, or the fast industrialising policies in Tamil Nadu, to turn a blind eye to the problems of downtrodden fisher-folk.

Here, it is the daily struggles of the fisher-folk that will be a powerful reminder of the social and economic realities of many citizens in both countries, whose lives get blurred in the pursuit of narrow political gains, or grand economic and foreign policies.

(Meera Srinivasan is the IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow 2015-16 and Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economy researcher based in Jaffna)
Glass cabinets filled with mundane but poignant objects including cologne bottles, dentures and postcards form the centrepiece of a London exhibition presented by Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk on Tuesday.

The unique collaboration between the 63-year-old author and the Somerset House gallery physically recreates his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence.

The novel tells the story of wealthy socialite Kemal Bey and his beautiful twice removed cousin Fusun through everyday items that take on emotional significance during their doomed romance. Pamuks labour of love has already led to the creation of the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, which opened in 2012.

Read: Orhan Pamuk unplugged

We are happy to be in a good gallery, the boxes come from Istanbul and are a selection of our work, the ones I like best, because they look nice, he told AFP.

They are objects you would find on bed tables at the time. The novel is also autobiographical, he added.

The exhibition, which runs from Wednesday until April 3, comprises 13 of the 83 cabinets found in the Istanbul museum, which correspond to the books 83 chapters.

Glass cabinets filled with mundane but poignant objects including cologne bottles, dentures and postcards form the centrepiece of a London exhibition presented by Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. (somersethouse.org.uk)

For example, box 74 is about the death of Kemals father, explained the author.

The objects will be contextualised by excerpts from British filmmaker Grant Gees documentary Innocence of Memories, which premiered earlier this year at the Venice Film Festival and which debuts in London on Tuesday.

During the film, Pamuk revealed that he conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously.

The more objects I collected, the more I wrote, he said. Each object Kemal collected represents a moment in their history.

The lines that connect objects create stories and the lines that connect moments create time.

Read: A Strangeness in My Mind review

However, he denied treading the same philosophical ground as French writer Marcel Proust, who explored the triggering of memory through a madeleine, a small French cake, in Remembrance of Things Past.

Proust has his madeleine, based on involuntary memories. My Kemal is not a Proustian because he deliberately wants to remember, he explained. Kemal is a self-conscious Proustian.

Somerset House director Jonathan Reekie is in talks to take the exhibition, which takes up three rooms of the grand central London gallery, to several countries including Belgium, France and the United States.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk was published on August 29, 2008. (Twitter)

Meanwhile, Pamuk has just completed a new novel The Red-Haired Woman, which will be released in Istanbul on February 2.

True to form, the author pulled no punches when turning to the political situation in his native country and the regime of the Islamic-conservative President Tayyip Erdogan.

It is a very bad situation, university professors are being pressured and imprisoned for signing a petition, he told AFP, calling for a halt to fighting between Turkish troops and Kurdish rebels.

It has nothing to do with free speech. We have an electoral democracy, but not a full democracy, he added.

Its always on ones mind, its a problem for everyone.

Follow @htlifeandstyle for more.
With its order book seeing a revival, the government is hopeful that Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (Bhel) can reverse the three-year long trend of declining profits.

Rajan Katoch, secretary, department of heavy industries, which controls Bhel, said: One should expect Bhels turnaround over the next six to eight months. Large orders are under process which should help it record healthy numbers.

Bhel, Indias largest power equipment manufacturer, has seen its revenue decline from Rs 48, 352 crore in 2011-12 to Rs 30, 788.6 crore in 2014-15.

Net profit during the same period has declined from Rs 11, 223.5 crore to Rs 1,450.4 crore. This has hit EBITDA margins have dropped by half from 22.6 % to 10.9 %.

In fact on January 13, 2015, Bhels market capitalisation of Rs 36, 300 crore dwarfed that of its rival Siemens by more than 10%.

After these orders the future of the company looks relatively bright. As of now it is running at 30%-35% of its capacity, but soon we expect more orders to come in, Katoch added.

Having said that, in 2015-16 the order flow of the company improved. Apart from a Rs 17, 900 crore order for a power plant in Telangana the companys order book saw 60% increase in this fiscal. It has also emerged as the lowest bidder to supply equipment for a 1,300-MW joint-India-Bangladesh power project.

The company will start delivering the equipment in phases of these orders in next three months, Katoch said.
Mehbooba Mufti has been handing out lessons in coalition dharma to the BJP over the last three weeks. If it was grief that held her back from immediately taking over as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, following the death of her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, it is clear now that the impasse is due to her attempts to reset the terms of her partys alliance with the BJP.

The reasons for her alienation are by now well-known. First, it was personal. Sayeed was battling illness at AIIMS in the national capital for two weeks till his passing on January 7, but few BJP bigwigs came by to visit him. That Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not do so will rankle, particularly since he tweets birthday greetings to party colleagues and effusively welcomes foreign dignitaries. For the clubby political elite in New Delhi, which gets along well socially despite ideological differences, that constitutes an unforgettable breach of protocol that lends itself only to political interpretations.

Second, Mehbooba is unlikely to forget that her father and the PDP had to virtually grovel for much of 2015 for a financial package from the Centre to help rebuild Kashmir after the devastating floods in September 2014. As news of paltry assistance became common knowledge, the anticipation of a package became the only source of legitimacy for the PDP for months on end, even as it watched the Press periodically speculate about the actual figure to be disbursed. And when the Rs 80,000-crore package was announced in November, it left much to be desired as Rs 34,000 crore was for projects already approved by the UPA and only Rs 7,854 crore was for flood relief  far less than the Rs 44,000 crore that the state government formally requested.

More than this, the BJPs overall approach seemed to be geared to undermining the PDPs support base in the Valley, which was anyway angry with Sayeed for allying with Hindu nationalists. For instance, there were calls by BJP leaders to rethink Article 370, proposals to build separate enclaves for returning Kashmiri Pandits and plans for retired soldiers to be settled in the Valley. The anti-minority rhetoric in other states took its toll as a young Kashmiri was set ablaze in Udhampur on rumours of cow slaughter. The spectacle of armed RSS activists in a procession at Jammu in October coupled with legal challenges to J&Ks special status through a petition on Article 35A, stoked a sense of siege in Kashmir and inevitably put more pressure on the Muftis.

In pursuing such a path, the BJP seems to have forgotten the function that mainstream parties, like the PDP and National Conference (NC), perform  that they are vehicles for building consent and play a crucial part in pacifying Kashmir, which has been alienated from New Delhi for decades. For the parties to play that strategic role for India, they need local legitimacy, which is nurtured by economic development and ensuring a measure of critical distance from the Centre, which they maintain by calling for restoration of autonomy and persevering the states special status.

The BJP leadership would do well to reflect on this and imagine the scenario if Mehbooba walks away from the coalition. A prolonged period of governors rule will increase restiveness in Kashmir, which the Centre will have to tackle without the buffer of a state government. Elections will yield another stalemate with the NC expected to make gains without vanquishing the PDP in the Valley or able to form a government on its own. That Omar Abdullah is strongly opposed to the BJP leaves the latter with few options. The BJP is probably banking on the fact that Mehbooba too cannot give up on the coalition easily as she has needs power to keep the party together. But attempts to frustrate the PDP with failed commitments yet again will tempt her to walk away at a suitable juncture in the future. The absence of a viable government in J&K is also not ideal for Modi who remains keen on progress with Pakistan.

To summarise, Mehbooba as chief minister is useful for the Centre as an instrument of pacification and as an (elected) champion of India-Pakistan peace, which has its uses. But the BJP should know that Mehbooba is currently on the defensive; she is battling intense criticism from Srinagars intelligentsia who portray mainstream party figures as political entrepreneurs who do New Delhis bidding while being powerless to ease State pressure on ordinary Kashmiris. She needs tangible commitments to bolster her standing. Economic assistance may be easier to wrest than political concessions. Facilitating dialogue with separatists is no longer viable given the BJPs views, so other symbolic steps, like lifting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and persuading the Army to give up land, will be crucial. Essentially, Mehbooba needs to show she can wrest a major concession from New Delhi and be assured of the space to govern before she can assume office.

She will also need to agree with New Delhi on ways to manage separatist blowback. The constant clampdown on political activity is a real embarrassment for J&K governments and is a perennial leak on their authority. Repression has never worked. Only a combination of strategies can work in Kashmir: Restoration of democratic rights, quick economic dividends, a reduced military presence, an improved India-Pakistan climate that inhibits separatist activism and a pushback against anti-minority rhetoric in India as a whole. Political stability depends on choreographing several moving parts. Mehbooba has an awkward role in all of this. The BJP must resolve that it will let her govern without undermining her, keeping the big picture in mind.

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The Delhi high court on Wednesday commuted to life the death sentence of a man convicted of killing several people and dumping their beheaded bodies outside the citys Tihar Jail, saying there was no evidence.

Over the course of nine years, 49-year-old Chandrakant Jha was accused of murdering seven people who he thought were indulging in immoral practices such as drinking, womanising and doing drugs.

A bench of justices Sanjiv Khanna and RK Gauba said, In the present case, there was no witness and the prosecution had to rely on circumstantial evidence.

However, it said that Jha would have to spend the remainder of his life in jail without remission.

We would convert the death sentence to life imprisonment i.e. imprisonment for entire life without remission without affecting the power under Article 72 and 161 of the Constitution of India. This would be an appropriate and proportional sentence. We order accordingly, the high court bench said.

The convict had earlier been sentenced to death in two cases, awarded life imprisonment in a third one, but let off for want of evidence in another four. Most of Jhas victims were acquainted with him.

Jha, from Ghosai village in Bihars Madhepura district, was known to allegedly kill people simply because he did not approve of their habits. In 2013, a Delhi court presided by additional sessions judge Kamini Lau had sent Jha to the gallows because he could not be reformed.

Jhas first alleged murder was in 1998, when he killed an acquaintance called Anil Mandal at Adarsh Nagar in New Delhi. Though the Haiderpur resident remained behind bars for over three years in this connection, he was eventually released for lack of evidence.

Jha allegedly murdered Shekhar  another acquaintance  in 2003 because he found the latters addiction to alcohol distasteful. However, he was acquitted in this case too.

It was with his next murder, that of another acquaintance called Umesh the same year, that Jha launched his macabre routine of disposing of decapitated bodies outside Tihar Jail. This was followed by the killing of Guddu in 2005 because Jha reportedly didnt approve of his marijuana addiction.

The tide of justice, however, soon turned against him. Jha received the death penalty for killing another acquaintance Amit because he had committed the sin of womanising in 2006, and the murder of 19-year-old Upender for entering into an affair with the daughter of one of his friends.

Jha final murder was that of Dalip in 2007, after the latter was found having non-vegetarian food. He earned a life term till the end of his life for this particular offence.

However, there were many aspects to the case that left police dumbfounded  the most bizarre among them being Jhas habit of playing Robin Hood before killing the very people he had helped. The convict used to help migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar obtain jobs and house them at his JJ Colony residence. However, the moment they stepped out of line and began indulging in habits he considered abhorrent, Jha would murder them.

(ends)
The Capital headed for a civic and health nightmare on Wednesday as 130,000 municipal workers went on an indefinite strike over non-payment of salaries, an issue caught up in political stink.

The protest triggered fears of a rerun of last Octobers stinking situation when piles of garbage on roadsides during a strike sparked fears of disease.

It could turn worse this time because 5,000 doctors and paramedics are staying away from municipal hospitals and dispensaries while sanitation workers of the three BJP-ruled municipal corporations, who clear 10,000 tonnes of trash every day, are on strike.

This is the not time to die too because services in 72 crematoriums have been curtailed because of the strike.

The protesters, holding chief minister Arvind Kejriwal responsible for the salary trouble, gave a three-day ultimatum to address the matter.

They protested outside Kejriwals home, burnt his effigy, and shouted slogans at a rally in Jantar Mantar.

Read: Municipal employees on indefinite strike, descend on Kejriwals house

All the workers will be on strike for the next three days. If the government fails to react, we will begin dumping garbage on city streets, warned Sanjay Gehlot, the president of Swatantra Majdoor Vikas Sayunkt Morcha.

The Delhi government clarified that it has disbursed funds to the municipal corporations for payment of salaries and that all the three civic commissioners written back about receiving the amount.

Sanitation workers of Municipal Corporation of East Delhi (EMCD) block road in protest against non-payment of their salaries, causing huge traffic jam at Laxmi Nagar in New Delhi on Thursday. (Arun Sharma/ HT Photo)

The strike started on a day the Delhi high court issued notices to the Centre, the Delhi government and the municipal corporations over non-payment of salaries.

A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath also directed the Delhi police to ensure that sanitation workers, who have been spearheading the protest, do not face any difficulty at work.

The AAP government counsel Rahul Mehra asked the bench to order the strike called off, stating that the government has released 100% funds to the corporations.

Delhi tourism minister Kapil Mishra alleged that the corporations had Rs 300 crore that they are not spending. You are creating a drama. What happened to the money the corporations get from parking, advertising, house tax, toll tax, and property conversion? What happened to the money? Why arent you paying the poor employees? This is deep-rooted corruption. There is also a conspiracy hatched by the BJP to bring shame to the city and force Delhiites to live in filth, he said.

The BJP countered with north Delhi mayor Ravinder Gupta saying that chief minister Kejriwal has lost his mind. He should go to a mental hospital instead of naturopathy, he said, taking a dig at the chief ministers medical trip to Bangaluru.

An official said employees of the South Delhi Municipal Corporation have been receiving salaries on time but joined the strike in solidarity with their colleagues from the other two agencies.

Its astonishing to see that the governments are busy blaming each other for our unpaid salaries, rather than actually helping us. The situation has reached a point where we must go on strike if we want to get paid our dues, said a doctor at a civic hospital.
The Centre, which has been at loggerheads with the AAP government over powers of governance, on Wednesday told the high court that Delhi remains in their control as it is not a full-fledged state.

S Balakrishna committee... report had studied various capitals of the world and came to the conclusion that Delhi cannot be a full-fledged state, a bench of chief justice G Rohini and justice Jayant Nath was told.

This recommendation is the fountain-head of Article 239AA of the Constitution, said additional solicitor general (ASG) Sanjay Jain, appearing for the Central government.

He further said that Delhi remains to be under the overall control of the Centre as it is not a full-fledged state but a union territory/National Capital Territory.

The submission was made by ASG during the final hearing on the issue of interpretation of Article 239AA regarding the powers of the Lieutenant Governor (LG) on governance of Delhi.

A total of eleven cases arising out of the spat between the LG and the Delhi government, are being heard together by the bench headed by the chief justice.

ASG further contended that office of the LG is unique and not as that of the Governor.

Governor enjoys constitutional immunity but not the LG. He (present LG of Delhi) is the executive head of the state. The Chief Minister and his council has to aid and advise him, if there is a difference. Then the issue has to be referred to the President. LG is not a Mayor or a titular head, he said.

He further said Delhi is a centrally-administered capital, there has to a balance of powers.

Here we have an elected government with a Chief Minister, but the CM is not like that of other states because here we have a CM of a union territory which is also the capital of the country, the Centre said.

The Delhi government on May 28 had approached high court challenging the Centres May 21 notification giving the LG an absolute powers in appointing bureaucrats in the city.

Along with the May 21 notification, Delhi government had also challenged the July 23, 2014 notification of the Centre which limited ACBs jurisdiction to Delhi government officials only.
A 55-year old woman from Jalandhar in Punjab died in a moving taxi in mysterious circumstances in outer Delhis Rohini area early on Wednesday, police said.

According to police, the woman was travelling with a man in the taxi which they had hired from the Old Delhi Railway station to go to her relatives home in Narela.

A preliminary probe hinted that the woman died a natural death and that she was facing some medical complications for the past couple of years. Investigators, however, are waiting for the autopsy report to establish the exact cause of her death.

They are questioning the man who was accompanying the woman and the taxi driver. The man is said to be her live-in partner who was living with her at her Jalandhar home after the death of her husband.

The matter came to notice at around 2.30am when the taxi driver rushed his vehicle to Baba Saheb Ambedkar hospital after he saw that the womans health was deteriorating. He also called the police control room.

The taxi driver told police that he became suspicious and called the police as the man accompanying woman insisted on hiring an ambulance and taking her to Punjab for treatment.

Vikramjit Singh, deputy commissioner of police (outer), said the woman has been identified as Kamlesh and had come to Delhi with Om Prakash from Punjab. She came to the Capital to withdraw the money which her husband, who was in Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and died around five years ago, had received as pension.

The two arrived late Tuesday night on a train at the Old Delhi Railway station. They hired a taxi to Narela as they had planned to spend the night at their relatives home and withdraw the pension money on Wednesday morning, said Singh.

According to the DCP, they questioned Om Prakash and he told them about her medical history. Om Prakash said he had an argument with the taxi driver over payment after which the driver called the police told them that she died in mysterious circumstances in the moving cab.

Prima facie, we dont suspect any foul play behind the widows death. But a clean chit will be given to the two men only after we get a confirmation from her autopsy report that she died a natural death, Singh said adding the Rohini North police is looking into the matter.
Hours after a Kathmandu-bound Jet Airways flight with 111 people on board was delayed due to a bomb hoax, the pilot of another Jet flight complained of being distracted by a laser beam during landing at the Delhi airport on Monday.

The pilot of Jet Airways flight 9W 643 (Lucknow to Delhi) said he was distracted by the laser beam while the plane was preparing to land on Runway 29, from the direction of National Highway 8, at the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

A similar incident had taken place in October last year also when an Air Vistara pilot had complained of getting distracted by a laser beam just before landing.

Read more: Air India flight to Milan returns to Delhi after smoke in cabin

Airport officials said that laser beams were a major security threat for flights and the Delhi Police had been informed about Mondays incident.

The incident took place on Monday around 8.30 pm when the Jet Airways flight was approaching the airport and had been cleared to land on Runway 29. The pilot complained of some distraction and immediately informed the Air Traffic Controller, who informed the manager on the ground, an airport official said.

A senior Delhi Police officer said: We are looking in to the incident and believe that someone from Vasant Kunj or around the area might have created this mischief. We are also in touch with the pilot-incommand.

Delhi Police had earlier banned the use of laser lights around the airport after the Air Traffic Control reported numerous incidents of distraction of pilots by laser beam while they approached the runway to land. Such lights were regularly used at wedding venues around the airport.

It is not just a source of nuisance but also a major threat to the safety and security of passengers/crew and aircraft, the official added.

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Classes at the Jawaharlal Nehru University were suspended on Wednesday over the suicide of Dalit student, Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad University. Students will hold a protest outside the Ministry of Human Resource Development on Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, at the university, more students from the Centre for International Politics Organisation and Disarmament (CIPOD) have come out to speak against the alleged discrimination after Dalit researcher Madan Meher of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) threatened to commit suicide alleging discrimination.

While for Meher, it was the issue was of his scholarship money not being granted, Kavita and few others have alleged that the centre is not considering their marks for the completion of their MPhil and PhD thesis.

The academic council has asked students to give chance to students whose grade are between 4-5 and my centre is not doing anything. I have requested several times but the head says what is the guarantee that even if I give you a chance you will pass. What am I to make of this? said Kavita, Mphil student from Allahabad. She was given admission under the is under the OBC category.

However for Meher, the School of International Studies centre has already held a meeting with the chairman.

Mehers case is being treated with priority. His scholarship should be processed in few days time. There are certain problems with few students and I will individually try and sort every students problem, said Anuradha Chenoy, dean Centre for International Studies.

The centre has said they will immediately take the matter with the new Vice Chancellor who is taking over on Wednesday.

Meher, a Dalit scholar, had threatened to commit suicide if the university does not release his senior research fellowship. In a letter received by the JNU vice-chancellor on January 25, the scholar alleged that he has been denied extension for pursuing his PhD for over a year now.

Meher, who has qualified NET/JRF, also that claimed an RTI reply revealed not a single Dalit student has got PhD from his centre.

The university officials maintained that Meher had taken a grant of R 66,000 for a field trip in 2013 but did not go for it and until the student settles the account, his SRF cannot be released.

I am from a very poor family and I had to use the field trip allocation for a family emergency. I thought I would pay it back using my SRF but first I was denied extension and then my SRF is not being released, Meher said.

JNUs student union on Tuesday took up the issue and said, Victimisation of Dalits is a larger problem across Universities.
Furious over non-payment of salaries, municipal employees led a protest near Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwals house on Wednesday morning, besides going on an indefinite strike from today. Approximately 500 workers were seen shouting slogans and burned an effigy of the chief minister who they hold responsible for the delay.

Protestors were however blocked by the Delhi police and later dispersed. They now plan to sit in at Jantar Mantar to continue their indefinite strike until their salaries and arrears are paid in full.

Conflict between municipal employees and the Delhi government has been on-again off-again for many months now over non-payment of salaries, effecting the sanitation situation in the city. The current strike is expected be the hardest hit the city has yet to take.

In October last year, municipal employees had gone on strike on the same issue and the most visible impact was the heaps of garbage that piled up along the roads during the strike. Sanitation workers have been at the forefront of the strike and had also threatened to stop work earlier after which money was released for salaries.

This, according to municipal corporation officials, was enough only for salaries till December last year.

According to employee organization heads, all employees will join the strike to put pressure on the state and central government to release funds for the remaining payments.

More than half of all the employees have not received their salaries and our silent protests have failed to move the governments. We will have to go on an indefinite strike to made our voice heard, Sanjay Gehlot, president, Swatantra Majdoor Vikas Sanyukt Morcha had said on Tuesday.

On Monday, Kejriwal said that the Delhi government did not owe any money to the municipal corporations and his government had this in writing from the commissioners.

Mayors are political animals and they have a compulsion to raise such issues but we have it in writing from all the commissioners of the Municipal Corporations that the Delhi government does not owe them any money, Kejriwal had said.

Meanwhile, Brijesh Shukla, member of a certain Swaraj Janta Party has written to the Delhi Police Commissioner and the Lieutenant Governor demanding action against Kejriwal for allegedly misleading the people of Delhi for saying that the municipal corporation is not under the Delhi governments control.

I filed an RTI and the Delhi government, in its reply, has said that the corporation is under its control. Kejriwal come out with a full-page advertisement in newspapers saying this was not the case. Action should be initiated against him for misleading people and spending public money for spreading lies, Shukla has said in a letter to the Police Commissioner and the L-G.
The Delhi government on Wednesday clarified that it has already disbursed funds to the municipal corporations for the payment of salaries and that all the three commissioners of the corporations had given it in writing that they had received the amount.

Reacting to the strike called by municipal employees over the non-payment of salaries, the government spokesperson said, North MCD has received Rs 892.92 crore, East Rs 465 crore and South MCD Rs 668 crore from the Delhi government this financial year for payment of employees salaries. Commissioners of all three MCDs confirmed in presence of Delhi government officials on January 15 that they have received the entire amount meant for salaries. The three MCDs have an outstanding loan of Rs 5908 crore, which they owe to Delhi Government. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia has already announced a moratorium on this loan.

Delhi tourism minister Kapil Mishra also alleged that the corporations had Rs 300 crore that they are not spending.

You are creating a drama. What happened to the money the corporations get from parking, advertising, house tax, toll tax, and property conversion? What happened to the money? Why arent you paying the poor employee? This points towards deep-rooted corruption. There is also a conspiracy hatched by BJP to bring shame to the city and to force Delhiites to live in filth he said.

The municipal corporations, where the BJP is in power, is planning to file a contempt of court petition against the AAP government for the alleged non-release of fund, Delhi BHP chief Satish Upadhyay said.

The mayor of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, meanwhile, called Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal mad. He should go to a mental hospital instead of naturopathy, said the mayor Ravindra Gupta, taking a dig at the CMs medical visit to Bangalore which started Wednesday.

The municipal employees indefinite strike started on Wednesday. The municipal employees also led a protest near Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwals house in the morning. The protestors, approximately 500 in number, raised slogans and burned an effigy of Kejriwal holding him responsible for the delay in salary payments. The protestors were soon stopped by the Delhi Police. According to the protestors, they now plan to sit on an indefinite strike at Jantar Mantar until their salaries and arrears are paid in full.
The Modi governments decision to recommend Presidents rule in Arunachal Pradesh at a time when the Supreme Court was hearing the matter has resulted in the escalation of confrontation between the ruling side and the opposition.

The issue has once again united the opposition and cast a shadow on the smooth functioning of the budget session of Parliament. The government has a heavy legislative agenda, including the goods and services tax (GST) and key labour reforms, for the session.

Earlier, the opposition had united when Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan suspended 25 Congress MPs for their unruly behavior in the monsoon session.

The Arunachal issue had also resonated in Parliament in the winter session when the government found itself at the receiving end not only from the opposition but even friendly parties such as the AIADMK and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). Both these parties came out in full support of the Congress and questioned Arunachal Pradesh governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowas decision to convene the assembly session without the nod of the state cabinet. Both the AIADMK and the BJD were vociferous in their demand for recall of the governor. Their strong stand on the issue had then come as a surprise to the ruling side.

Perhaps government managers must have considered that aspect before arriving at the decision to recommend Presidents rule in the sensitive state bordering China. The other important factor that the government would have kept in mind is that the NDA does not have a majority in the Rajya Sabha and the possibility of such a decision, even after the Presidents approval, getting rejected in the upper house was quite high. For this reason, the Congress apprehends that the BJP would try to form the government in Arunachal Pradesh before the start of the budget session so that they dont have to seek Parliaments approval for the decision to impose Presidents rule in the state.

The BJP has justified the Centres action, saying it had to intervene because the crisis in Arunachal Pradesh amounted to violation of the Constitutions Article 174(1) which prescribes that there should not be a gap of more than six months between two sessions of a state legislative assembly. But senior Congress leader and former union law minister Kapil Sibal sought to debunk that argument by referring to the BJPs stand in the Supreme Court and the Gauhati high court. According to Sibal, the high court had held valid the session that was convened by the Governor and conducted by deputy speaker Tenzing Norbu Thongdok at a community hall in Itanagar on December 16 after speaker Nabam Rebia had ordered closure of the assembly complex. That is the position of BJP and the Governor before the Supreme Court and the high court. So, if they feel that the session was validly held, then how can they (Centre) impose Presidents rule. This is a contradiction in itself, he said.

But the BJP is right in pointing out that the political crisis in the state is the result of the Congress partys internal conflict. The Congress, which has 47 MLAs in the 60-member assembly, suffered a jolt when 21 of them rebelled against chief minister Nabam Tuki. Eleven BJP MLAs backed the rebels in the bid to upstage the Congress government. Later, 14 rebel Congress MLAs were disqualified. The governor then called assembly session on December 16 in which the deputy speaker revoked disqualification of 14 rebel Congress MLAs and removed Rebia from the post of Speaker.

Stung by the move, the Congress has declared an all-out war against the trampling of the Constitution by the Narendra Modi government and also sought to rally round all non-BJP parties against the move in and outside Parliament.

The matter is now before the Supreme Court.

The fresh Congress plea challenging the Presidents rule in Arunachal Pradesh assumes significance as already a five-judge Constitution Bench, headed by Justice JS Khehar, is examining the scope of discretionary powers of the Governor under the Constitution in convening an assembly session without the advice of the chief minister and his council of ministers.

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A lawsuit by two sacked employees of Walt Disney World against the company and two IT partners, HCL Technologies and Cognizant, is the latest in a series of obstacles faced by Indias IT industry in the United States that smell of non-tariff barriers. In the past, India has had to wrestle with quota ceilings on the H1B visas, which function as work permits for Indians. Infosys had to face an investigation into allegations of using temporary visas to employ its staff at client sites for longer terms. Though it denied charges of fraud, Infosys paid $34 million in 2013 to end a probe. US authorities or labour lobbies put up various barriers that go against the market-friendly policies Washington expects when its own companies come to do business in India. Last year, the US doubled visa fees for Indian IT companies, and this is expected to add a $400 million per year burden in costs. The US accounts for more than 60% of Indias IT-business process management exports, which have crossed $100 billion.

Labour unions in the US routinely target Indian IT companies for taking away local jobs, although independent studies have shown how these companies strengthen the US economy. The noise tends to peak during election years, and this year on that count needs extra watching. In the immediate instance, Disneys employees accused the company and its IT partners of conspiring to replace US workers with costly foreigners. Common sense tells us that no company would pay more for trouble. The lawsuit says the companies violated US laws that require them to ensure that comparable domestic employees will not be adversely affected. The law in itself is protectionist, and unfair litigation with undertones of intimidation makes it worse. Such fiery rhetoric requires some effective dousing.

There have been murmurs about India reaching out to the US on the visa issue. In effect, prohibitive visa fees are to services what customs duties are to products. Unfair lawsuits must count in the same league. India must not hesitate to step up lobbying in Washington and sparring at the World Trade Organization (WTO) against non-tariff barriers that hamper its showpiece industry.
Fast and Furious franchise likes its records. Never the one to shy away from creating explosions and blasts, Fast and Furious 8 has a big one in the offing -- the crew has reportedly planned to film a scene involving the largest explosion ever in Iceland.

Read: Heres the first picture of Fast 8

Director F Gary Gray will partly film Fast and Furious 8 in Arkanes, Iceland. The town mayor, Regina Asvaldsdottir, confirmed the report and said that Vin Diesel and the film crew members would arrive in April, reported Aceshowbiz.

Fast and Furious 8s first picture may show you New York but the real blast is taking place in Iceland. (Universal)

As Universal Pictures stated earlier, the studio is currently in the process seeking approval from the United States and Cuban governments to explore shooting a portion of the next installment of the Fast & Furious series in Cuba. The majority of filming, however, will take place in New York and Atlanta.

Read: Fast 8s shooting location sets a new record

In Fast 8, Diesel will reprise his role as Dominic Toretto. Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jason Statham and Kurt Russell also star in the movie. The street-racing movie will be released in North America on April 14, 2017.
News / Africa

by Staff Reporter

African ambassadors and African Union (AU) commissioners based in Ethiopia are reportedly pushing for 91 year old President Robert Mugabe to have a second term as the African body leader.They claim that Mugabe has outstanding leadership qualities.Mugabe is due to hand over the AU chair to Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno at the 26th Summit in Ethiopia later this week.According to Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Foreign Affairs chairperson, Zanu PF's Kindness Paradza who led a Zimbabwean delegation to Ethiopia recently on a fact finding mission and reported on his return that Mugabe's leadership is admired by the AU staff."The majority of African ambassadors in Addis Ababa and AU commissioners had a consensus that if it was possible, President Mugabe would be given a second term as chairman or assume any other supreme role to fulfill the Pan-African vision of the continental body," he said.Paradza said Mugabe was credited for successfully spearheading a number of initiatives which brought back the AU union on the world map in areas such as health where he chaired the Ebola high level conference to curb the epidemic, the Sino-Africa Summit and led the AU to effectively deal with conflicts arising in Africa.However, his tenure has been characterised by such big problems as xenophobia in South Africa, political unrest in Swaziland, as well as the general instability of the socio-political situations in countries such as Zimbabwe and Lesotho.More unrest emerged also on the African continent where Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza refused to step down and instead amended the country's constitution to allow him to stand for elections for another term.Terror organisations like Boko Haram have also been a major problem on the continent.
A commission of inquiry has been set up by the Delhi government to look into unheeded complaints pertaining to womens safety since February 2013.

Complaints regarding violence, sexual harassment, stalking and voyeurism against women will be taken up by a three-member committee headed by a retired district judge Dinesh Dayal. Dr Surbhi Singh and Richa Mishra Pandey, wife of Aam Admi Party member Dinesh Pandey, constitute the rest of the panel.

The commission will have a two-year tenure and will have to submit report of its findings every three months from the date of first sitting, according to the notification that was issued on January 19.

The terms of reference of the commission will be to receive unheeded complaints regarding crimes such as violence, sexual harassment, stalking, voyeurism etc that are committed to against women since February 2013, i.e. subsequent to amendments made to IPC (1860) and CrPC (1973) on the basis of some of the recommendations made by Justice Verma Committee and to suggest action to Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi, the notification reads.

The committee will also be mandated to recommend measures to expedite proceedings in criminal cases, amendments to make currents laws more effective and recommend welfare measures for improving working condition of personnel in law enforcement agencies, among others.
Arunachal Pradesh is just not the right stage for the theatre of political absurdity. Two-thirds of the state is claimed by China, a dormant Naga insurgency could always come back to life, and much of Indias toughest frontline straddles this culturally distinct state in the far northeast.

President Pranab Mukherjee has given his approval to the cabinets recommendation for the state to be put under the Presidents rule, a constitutional provision that allows direct administration from New Delhi, following the political turmoil that began in November.

The states granular political slugfest has resulted in a Congress-BJP face-off at the national level. Heres a quick recap of what led to this situation:

The actual crisis was set off on December 16, when 21 rebel Congress MLAs joined hands with 11 BJP members and two Independents to impeach speaker Nabam Rebia at a makeshift venue because he had locked down the assembly.

Serious infighting broke out in the ruling Congress government led by chief minister Nabam Tuki, with 21 of the 47 members gunning for Tukis scalp. Faced with an imminent floor test, Tuki is believed to have delayed an assembly session while Rebia failed to convene the House within six months -- as required. The deadline lapsed on January 14.

Read | All you need to know about Presidents rule in Arunachal Pradesh

Things precipitated when governor JP Rajkhowa called for rescheduling the assembly session, and asked the deputy speaker to take up a motion seeking the removal of Rebia from the Speakers post. Soon, the battle moved to the judicial arena, with the Gauhati high court ordering that the governors orders be kept in abeyance. The Supreme Court referred the matter to a larger bench.

The Congress has alleged the governor was a BJP man who was trying to pave the way for a saffron government.

All this political instability doesnt bode well for the state. Instability, whether political or (related to) law and order in nature is not a good thing for a border state. China closely observes events occurring in India, which is an open book. But we hardly get to know whats happening in China, said a former governor of the state who has served in the armed forces.

China claims that the state is part of what it calls South Tibet. The Communist neighbour still protests visits by the President or Prime Minister to the state  as had happened during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit last year. The visit infringes on Chinas territorial sovereignty and interests, magnifies the dispute on the border issue, and violates the consensus on appropriately handling the border issue, the Chinese foreign ministry had said.

Nevertheless, although the suspension of an elected government isnt desirable, imposing Presidents rule in the state isnt a bad idea: It will put the Centre firmly in control, there would be no hindrance to the army executing its duties, and policing will not suffer. Elections are due in six months time.

Politicians should understand that this state is Indias pride, another army general who served as the governor said.

Read | Arunachal under Presidents rule, SC to hear challenge today

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The BJP seems unwilling to expand the ambit of the agenda of alliance with the Mehbooba Mufti-led PDP in Jammu and Kashmir and will not cede any more ground than what was agreed upon before forming a government under Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, whose death this month led to a political uncertainty in the state.

The Mehbooba Mufti-led Peoples Democratic Party had sounded out to the BJP that it wants the Centre to agree to lift the controversial Afspa from at least two districts of the state and deliver its commitment to vacate buildings occupied by security forces before she takes oath as the chief minister.

The state was placed under governors rule earlier this month after the PDP put off Mehboobas swearing-in after her father Sayeeds death to nudge its alliance partner to give her party a better deal.

There are issues (such as Armed Forces Special Powers Act) on which we have historically held different views. After a detailed discussion, we reached a common ground in the agenda of alliance. Now, it would be difficult to broaden the scope of the alliance... Like her, we also have certain constituencies to address, a BJP leader in New Delhi told HT.

Read | PDPs stand keeps BJP hopes of forming Kashmir govt afloat

He went on to point that the Bharatiya Janata Party was ready to give her sufficient time to make up her mind on forming a government. We are not putting any pressure on her but we wont buckle under pressure either, he said.

Another party leader said he expected the fresh concessions being sought by the PDP to be a starting point for any negotiations  rather than the ending  that might take place at a later date.

So far, there have been no formal talks between the two sides. BJP leaders indicate that they would have a clearer idea of the situation when Mehbooba meets her partys leaders on January 31 and could hear from her side soon after.

Read | PDP -BJP alliance in no hurry to form government

A meeting between Mehbooba and BJP chief Amit Shah is also expected once there is a broad agreement on the terms of forming the government. The BJP does not expect Mehbooba to pull out of the alliance that was stitched together by her father in the immediate future.

But there is some recognition that the PDP chief  who does not want to leave a political vacuum that separatist groups such as the Hurriyat occupy  may not be as flexible as her father.

I think both of us will have limited elbow room but will have to manoeuvre within the available space without stepping on each others toes, a source said.

A commitment to withdraw Afspa from any part of Kashmir is expected to be vociferously opposed by the armed forces which had scuttled a similar plan proposed by former home minister P Chidambaram.

The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act was enacted in disturbed areas of the state with effect from July 1990. The act is operational in the districts of Anantnag, Baramulla, Badgam, Kupwara, Pulwama and Srinagar since July 1990 and in of Jammu, Kathua, Udhampur, Poonch, Rajouri and Doda districts from August 2001.

BJP leaders argue that de-notifying the disturbed areas essentially has to be a decision based on the security assessment and should not be mixed with politics.

Read | J-K: Farooq asks PDP-BJP to resolve differences or seek fresh polls

There is already a mechanism to deal with it, one of them said, pointing that at best the proposal could be put before the security establishment and a decision left to their wisdom.

In the agenda for alliance, that the two sides drew before forming the government, it was agreed that the coalition government will examine the need for de-notifying disturbed areas and enable the Union government to take a final view on the continuation of Afspa in these areas.

The alliance document also maintained that all lands other than those given to the security forces on the basis of lease, licenses and acquisition under the provision of the land acquisition act shall be returned to the rightful legal owners, except in a situation where retaining the lands is absolutely imperative in view of a specific security requirement.

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Protests swept through several top universities across the country, including Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi where classes were suspended on Wednesday as the agitation over the death of a Dalit scholar turned into a movement against caste bias on campus.

The nationwide agitation came in the midst of widespread outrage over the suicide by Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, an incident which had turned into a political duel between the Congress-led opposition and the BJP government at the Centre.

What fanned the agitation at the JNU was the threat by a Dalit research scholars to commit suicide after he was allegedly denied an extension for pursuing his PhD.

Read: More students speak up against discrimination at JNU

Students from JNU and Delhi University staged demonstrations at the iconic Jantar Mantar and demanded resignation of Union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya as well as the Hyderabad university vice-chancellor, accused of abetting Rohiths suicide.

Students of Jawaharlal Nehru University are on indefinite hunger strike in New Delhi. (Saumya Khandelwal/HT)

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) members also joined the protests.

After the tragic death of Rohith Vemula, the MHRD has been trying its level best to pretend that it had nothing to do with the victimization of Rohith and four other Dalit students. However, the letters clearly show that the MHRD too was actively involved in pressurising the university to act against Rohith and other Dalit students, said Ashutosh Kumar, the secretary of the Left-wing All India Students Association, Delhi.

The Irani-led ministry had written several times to the university after Dattatreya complained that the campus had become a den of casteist and anti-national activities.

Read: Depression or oppression: What led to Rohith Vemulas suicide?

Rohith Vemula suicide: The mystery behind Mayawatis silence

Members of the National Students Union of India (NSUI) too gathered outside Smriti Irans residence demanding justice for Rohith Vemula.

We will not let BJP get away with this case. We demand her resignation from the minister, the NSUI said in a statement.

In Ranchi, NSUI activists burnt the effigy of Dattatreya outside the Ranchi University main gate on Monday while protest rallies were also taken out in Jamshedpur, Dhanbad and parts of Santhal Pargana.

Read: Dalit student at JNU threatens suicide, demands release of grant

At Hyderabad, the epicentre of the agitation, protesting students burnt the interim vice-chancellors residence and shouted slogans against him. However, the interim vice-chancellor Vipin Srivastava  who took over the previous VC after Appa Rao went on long leave  was not present.

Students also took out a rally from the universitys south campus to the north shopping complex, the protest venue and said they will not allow classes till their demands of removal of VC and compensation of Rs 50 lakh to Rohiths family is met. The university has announced compensation of Rs 8 lakh to Rohiths family.

tudents of various universities and colleges during a protest over Rohith Vemula's suicide at Hyderabad Central University campus. (PTI Photo)

In Guntur of Andhra Pradesh, Rohiths home district, students boycotted classes at the Nagarjuna University in solidarity with the all India strike call given by the Joint Action Committee.

It has been 10 days since the suicide but no action has been taken by the government. Irani and Dattatreya should resign and VC Appa Rao should be suspended, said a student who sat on protest at NU.

Hyderabad University has been witnessing protests ever since Rohith committed suicide on January 17 after being suspended by the authorities along with four others. They were accused of assaulting an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad union leader.

Though the university has revoked the suspension, the students have refused to call off their strike until the VC resigns.

(With inputs from HTC Ranchi)

Read: Lal Salaam to Jai Bhim: Why Rohith Vemula left Indian Marxists

The medias caste: How its to blame for Rohith Vemulas death
Seven policemen were killed and six others injured in a landmine blast in Maoist-hit Chhaterpur village of Jharkhands Palamu district on Wednesday evening.

The police team was returning to Hussainabad after conducting long-range patrolling in the Kala Pahar region, considered a Maoist hotbed.

Hussainabad police station officer-in-charge Rajesh Prasad Rajak, who was leading the team, miraculously escaped as explosion took place seconds after his vehicle crossed the spot.

The blast, suspected to have been triggered by CPI (Maoists), was reported around 5.30pm. The policemen, who were travelling in a mini-truck, were in violation of the standard operational procedure, a source said.

Seven police personnel including the police driver, chowkidar, one head constable and four constables were killed and six injured when an IED triggered by the Maoists blew up their vehicle, inspector general (Operation) MS Bhatia said.

Read | The jungle gangs of Jharkhand

All the injured police personnel have been rescued from the spot and admitted to a Daltonganj hospital. An MI- 17 helicopter has been sent to Daltonganj to bring them to Ranchi for better treatment, he added.

A group of Maoists had on Monday set fire to an under-construction mobile phone tower owned by BSNL in the Kala Pahar region. They also clashed with members of rival Tritiya-Sammelan Prastuti Committee on Wednesday.

Kala Pahar -- a densely forested hilly terrain  is near the border with Bihar and provides easy access to the Maoists infiltrating from the state.

The security forces had launched an anti-Maoist offensive in the Kala Pahar region recently and raided the hideout of the extremists.
In a startling admission, an accused Manipur police head constable, who was suspended over the alleged fake encounter of 22-year-old Chungkham Sanjit Meitei in July 2009, has said he had shot the suspected member of the insurgent group Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on the order of his superior officer.

Thounaojam Herojit Singh, 35, a gallantry award recipient, told media persons that he had shot an unarmed Sanjit on the order of additional superintendent of police, Imphal west district, Dr AK Jhaljit Singh.

Herojit, who was one of nine accused policemen in the case being probed by the CBI, said he was coming out with the truth now because he was no longer safe. The recent disclosure contradicts the Manipur polices account of the incident submitted in court and to the CBI.

Now, its clear that he was killed in a fake encounter. So those who were involved in the incident, including the superior officer, should be punished, said Sanjits cousin Chungkham Anandi, 32.

The case was transferred to the CBI in 2010. Sanjits mother Chungkham Taratombi, who lodged the FIR, had also petitioned the Gauhati high court in 2009. The incident had caused widespread protests in Manipur after images of Sanjits body being carried to a pharmacy were released in the media. Thokchom Rabina, a pregnant woman who was a bystander, also had died in the firing.

Union minister Kiren Rijiju said the Centre has taken cognisance of the reports on the purported confession.

I was a little disturbed to see this news and confession which has been reported. We have taken cognisance of this revelation and necessary steps will be taken, he said.

Meanwhile, Dr Jhaljit, who is the current SP of Imphal west district, on Wednesday refuted the charges saying the allegation was motivated, concocted and baseless, but refused to comment further on the matter as the case is sub judice.

Regarding future course of action, Human Rights Law Network Manipur director Meihoubam Rakesh said, When the (CBI) investigates into the disclosure made by the accused, it may submit an additional charge sheet or evidence before the court where trial is going on, then the trial court can take into account the statement or additional disclosure made by the accused.
A Muslim womens group on Tuesday came out in support of womens entry into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra, charging male-dominated bodies which run shrines with bias.

The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan said it supports demands by Hindu women to be allowed to enter the chabutra or sanctum sanctorum at the well known temple in Ahmednagar.

We salute the women activists for their democratic protest and assertion of their right to worship in the face of all odds placed by the patriarchal male temple administration, it said in a statement.

We condemn the discriminative arrangement at the temple and urge the temple trustees to correct their stand in line with the principles of gender justice enshrined in the constitution.

Andolan co-founders Zakia Soman and Noorjehan Safia Niaz said they were shocked at the imposition of Section 144 by the district administration to bar the women from proceeding peacefully to the temple.

Condemning the police action, the group urged the Maharashtra government to immediately take steps to correct this continued denial of justice to women devotees at the temple.

The group said religious trusts presiding over temples, dargahs and churches must come clean and make amends to the patriarchal practices that have kept women out of places of worship.

God or deities or pirs are not private properties of any individuals or trusts. Religions of the world - Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism - do not discriminate between the genders.

The temple and dargah trusts do not have the authority either from religious or legal sources to discriminate against anyone. We call upon the male-dominated trusts and bodies to correct their stance urgently, failing which more and more women are bound to protest and demand their right to worship, the group said.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) is in the process of identifying and arresting around more than a dozen suspects who were part of an Islamic State-inspired outfit in the country, sources told HT.

In the past one week, the NIA arrested 14 alleged members of the outfit known as Janood-ul-Khalifa-e-Hind (the army of Caliph) that was formed at the instance of a person named as Yusuf al-Hindi, who Indian security agencies believe is Shafi Armar, a resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka. Armar and his brother Sultan are key members of terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM).

Shafi is now believed to be in the Islamic State (IS)-held area along the border of Iraq and Syria. He connected all the boys who basically got hooked to the IS ideology. There are around 12 to 15 more members of the group who are in the process of being identified and arrested. We have also found links of the group with four boys arrested by the Delhi police in Uttarakhand few days ago and even one of the four boys that disappeared from Malwani in Mumbai. Two of the Malwani boys came back to their families. One is believed to have left India and the fourth boy is still suspected to be here, said an investigator who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The investigator added that a person named Rizwan arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad from Uttar Pradesh was allegedly in touch with one of the boys from Malwani who is suspected to be still in India.

The outfit held many meetings in the past six months at places like Tumkur and Bengaluru in Karnataka; Pune and Mumbai in Maharashtra; Tonk in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow and Telangana capital Hyderabad, said sources.

The outfit had allegedly anointed Mumbai resident - Mudabbir Mushtaq Shaikh as the chief or Ameer-a-Hind, Rizwan as deputy chief or Naib Ameer, Mangalore resident Najmul Huda as chief of military wing or Ameer-a-Askari and Hyderabad resident Mohammed Nafees Khan as head of their logistics wing, said the investigator.

After arresting the first lot of 14 suspects, the NIA in a statement had said these individuals were planning and making efforts to establish a channel of procurement of explosive and weapons, identify locations to organize training camps including training of fire arms, motivate new recruits to target police officers, foreigners in India and to carry out terror plans in various parts of the country.

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Dalit research scholar of Jawaharlal Nehru University has threatened to commit suicide if the university does not release his senior research fellowship. In a letter received by the JNU vice-chancellor on January 25, the scholar alleged that he has been denied extension for pursuing his PhD for over a year now.

Madan Meher, registered with International Organization Division at JNUs Center for Inter national Politics Organization and Disarmament (CIPOD), alleged that he was refused 9b  a one-year extension given to students to complete PhD after usual term of four years if the student has completed 90% of work  for one year and four months despite submitting required chapters.

If you will not provide my remaining SRF of one year within one week, then I will make suicide in front of administrative bloc, JNU, New Delhi. For this death, you and JNU will be responsible (sic), Meher wrote in his letter sent four days after a Dalit student committed suicide in the University of Hyderabad leading to an uproar in the student community.

Meher, who has qualified NET/JRF, also that claimed an RTI reply revealed not a single Dalit student has got PhD from his centre. He said that he could only get 9(b) last year after three attempts. ORG/CIPOD deliberately blocked my 9(b), because they know that if they block my PhD 9(b) for more than one year then I will not get scholarship, and through which I will not survive in JNU, and finally I will not be able to complete my PhD (sic), he wrote.

Vice-chancellor SK Sopory said that he had asked the administration to keep a watch on the student and prevent him from taking any extreme step.

I have asked the departments concerned to look into this issue and it will be resolved within a day or two, said Sopory.

Meher had started his PhD in 2010 and applied for a 9 (b) extension in 2014 but it was only in May 2015 that he got the extension. The university officials maintained that the student had taken a grant of ` 66,000 for a field trip in 2013 but did not go for it and until the student settles the account, his SRF cannot be released.

The student was allotted money for a field trip to Brussels but he did not go for that. Later for around a year and a half he de-registered from his PhD. He re-registered only last year in July. His SRF from July can be released once he settles the previous balance. He needs to get clearance from his supervisor, said Hanuman Sharma, controller of examination.

I am from a very poor family and I had to use the field trip allocation for a family emergency. I thought I would pay it back using my SRF but first I was denied extension and then my SRF is not being released, Meher said.

JNUs student union on Tuesday took up the issue and said, Victimisation of Dalits is a larger problem across Universities. We had meetings with administration and they have assured that this problem will be solved, said Rama Naga, general secretary JNUSU.

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Jammu and Kashmir firebrand legislator Sheikh Abdul Rashid, who is also known as Engineer Rashid, on Wednesday said the J-K is not a part of India just like Azad Kashmir is not a part of Pakistan.

Angry over the continuous restrictionson his activities by the police, Rashid alleged that he was being victimised by the Indian state for speaking the truth in the state assembly.

My every activity is peaceful. If I speak the truth, then why are they stopping me? We want them to resolve the issue of Kashmir and seeking plebiscite is not a crime. I will raise the demand till my death. Even if you hang me, I will still maintain that neither Azad Kashmir is the part of Pakistan nor Jammu and Kashmir is the part of India. Let us go for a plebiscite and let us allow people of Kashmir and Jammu to decide which side of the border they want to go,Rashid said, while addressing a press conference in Srinagar.

24 seats are vacant in the J&K assembly (for the areas under Pakistan rule). May be (after plebiscite) they will also join you and we will get a full quorum,he said, adding, If seeking plebiscite is a crime then former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru committed it before me.

The press briefing by Rashid came a day after he was allegedly restricted to his home by police in Srinagar despite getting an invitation by the state administration to participate in the Republic Day function.

Rashid said he would be sending a letter to the governor of the state describing as to how he really fells suffocated after becoming an MLA.

During the past 6 years as an MLA, I conveyed your good self on a number of occasions as to how security agencies are creating hurdles in my peaceful political activities. However, since last one year the situation seems to have gone from bad to worse due to the reasons best know to the top brasses. It seems to be a well-designed plan to create hurdles in my movement, right to speech and way of working,he said.

The Langate MLA alleged that he had nothing against police as an institution, but Indian state has been using police to curb his voice.

My request to the governor is to look into the issue otherwise I will be forced to resign from assembly,he said.

If you cant face a single individual like Rashid then how are you advising people to fight elections? You are also saying that we will bring militants to negotiation table, but you are not ready to listen to my genuine voice,he said, adding that he was humiliated at the hands of police and was not allowed to move places like Chenab Valley, Doda, Kishtwar and other places in Jammu.

My record is before them. I have never pelted a stone. Not a single youth in my constituency has been booked under Public Safety Act. I told people not to pelt stones and that I will raise your political voices in the assembly. That is why I talk of plebiscite in the assembly. Because I know if a youth of Langate will throw a stone he will get a bullet in return. You check the crime rate of Langate. Nobody is protesting there. No one is booked under the PSA,he claimed.

The independent MLA alleged that those wanting to negotiate with the government over Kashmir issue had been humiliated by the respective union governments.

First you asked people holding gun to drop weapons and we will talk to you, then you maligned them. Then you wanted Hurriyat to talk. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik and others accepted the invitation, but they were also humiliated. You said that you will talk to Pakistan, but are not ready to talk. You said you will talk to democratically elected government but trashed autonomy and self-rule documents,he said.

Urging governor NN Vohra to look into the incidents of police interference into his functioning, Rashid said there seems to be some big conspiracy either to eliminate me or stop me from doing political activities. I humbly request your good self to hold an impartial inquiry into all these incidents so that my rights are protected,he said.
News / Africa

by Staff Reporter

A MAN out on bail for allegedly raping his daughters was bust again.Daily Sun reported that on Friday the 52-year-old father and his two friends aged 44 and 20 appeared in the Maluti Magistrates Court near Matatiele on charges of rape.They allegedly took turns to rape the 15-year-old girl at her home in Outspan Village.According to cop spokesman Lieutenant Raphael Motloung, the teenager returned home from school on 13 January and was repeatedly raped by her father."He then called his friends who also allegedly took turns. She was threatened and told to keep quiet about the incident. It was only some days later when the girl visited a clinic that she told of her ordeal."A doctor diagnosed her with a sexually transmitted disease and questioned her further. She then broke down and social workers were called in. In their presence she told them of the repeated abuse at the hands of the accused. The officials then alerted police and arrests were made soon after," Motloung said.He said they were still establishing information on accused number one's previous bail conditions and how he ended up living in the same house as his victims.
A warden of Red Cross working women hotel on Tuesday alleged that she was assaulted by an official of her organisation and police personnel during the Republic Day function in Gurgaon attended by Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.

I was one of the invitees for Republic Day function at Tau Devi Lal stadium. I was standing in a corner of the venue, when Shyam Sundar Sharma, Secretary of the hostel, came and started threatening me. He was forcing me to leave the venue, alleged warden of the Red Cross working womens hostel Urmil Raish.

She further claimed when she said that it was her fundamental right to participate in Republic Day function just like common people of the country, and she also had a valid invitation card for entry, he held me by my arm and pushed me.

As a result, Raish alleged she fell down, her spectacle also fell down and she also lost her ear rings.

Sharma, who had pushed the warden, was later given an award for outstanding job in the field of Social Justice and Empowerment by the Chief Minister during the event.

s Raish alleged that her apathy did not end there as policewomen deployed at the venue also pushed me along with Sharma to leave the place.

However, District Magistrate TL Satyaprakash, who was also present during the function termed it as a trivial issue and said we are looking into the matter.

Prima facie, he said, it could be a matter of personal conflict between the two Red Cross society officials.

Raish had lodged a complaint in Sadar police station against Sharma.

The conflict between Raish and Sharma is said to have started after Satyaprakash, who is also a president of district Red Cross Society, outsourced contract of working womens hostel to a private organisation.
A day after she tried to storm into the Shani Shingnapur temple with her supporters, Trupti Desai, who is spearheading the right to worship crusade, met Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday and requested him to visit the shrine with his wife.

After her meeting, Desai said Fadnavis told her he supported her crusade.

In a letter she handed over to the chief minister, Desai asked Fadnavis to suspend the trust and appoint a government administrator. She also requested him to visit the temple along with his wife Amruta.

Desai said she would also write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi apprising him about the situation here.

Meanwhile, though the trustees at the Shani temple were firm on their stand of not allowing women inside the temple, they said the trust was ready to have a dialogue with the Bhumata Brigade.

The trust showed its readiness for talks with the women activists after the chief minister asked the temple authorities to sort out the issue through dialogue.

Several women, en route the Shani Shingnapur temple to break the decades-old tradition that has prohibited women from entering the sanctum sanctorum of lord Shani, were stopped by the police at Supa, 70 kilometers away from the temple, on Tuesday afternoon.

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A primary school student was found dead in the toilet of a private school at nearby Tirupur on Wednesday, police said.

Shivaram, 6, had gone to the washroom after coming to school. His classmates found him on the floor with bleeding head injuries and informed the teachers and principal, police said.

The boys parents rushed to a private hospital where he was admitted, but doctors there declared him brought dead.

Authorities declared a holiday for the school, even as adequate number of police were deployed in the area as a precautionary measure after tensions prevailed for some time.

Police said investigations have been initiated to know the exact cause of death.
Kathmandu

India-Nepal relations appear to be on the mend after a very turbulent phase following violent protests against the new constitution adopted by the Himalayan nation in last September.

Amendments to the statute, which seek to delimit constituencies based primarily on population and to increase the number of parliamentary seats in the Terai region, are responsible for the thaw.

The United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) has rejected the amendments, which address some demands raised by protesting Madhesi parties, but the move has brought New Delhi and Kathmandu closer.

Relations had dipped for few months due to misunderstandings. But they are warming up gradually due to collective efforts from both sides, Deputy Prime Minister Kamal Thapa, who also holds the foreign affairs portfolio, said at a function on Monday.

New Delhi, which did not welcome the promulgation of the constitution as it did not address concerns of the Madhesi people, has described the amendments as positive and expressed the hope that all outstanding issues will be resolved soon.

Resolution of all internal issues should be found through talks with a spirit of flexibility and compromise, said Indian ambassador Ranjit Rae.

Madhesis under the banner of the UDMF have been protesting against the constitution since August as they felt its provisions discriminate against people living in the Terai plains bordering India.

Protesters blocked the key border trade point at Birganj, resulting in a severe shortage of petroleum products. Kathmandu accused New Delhi of siding with the Madhesis and enforcing an unofficial blockade  a charge India has denied.

The UDMFs demands include fresh demarcation of states and proportional representation of Madhesis in all state bodies. As the recent amendments remain silent on demarcation, the front has announced fresh protests.

The protests will continue till there is a package deal on all our demands including fresh demarcation of states, Upendra Yadav, chief of the Federal Socialist Forum-Nepal, a constituent of the UDMF, told Hindustan Times.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli indicated to a group of editors he wouldnt visit India till the blockade is lifted. But there are signs that it may end in the next few weeks.

Goods have been ferried across the blocked Birganj border in horse-drawn carts over the past few days, and the smooth movement of vehicles through other border points has eased the shortage of essential goods and fuel.

Differences within the UDMF on ending the blockade have led to speculation that the protests may peter out.

Officials on both sides believe the blockade will end in a gradual manner and preparations are underway for Olis visit to New Delhi towards the second half of February.

Once that happens, India-Nepal ties are expected to head north.

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The top two leaders of the Ansar-ut Tawhid fi Bilal al-Hind, the Indian wing of the Islamic State (IS), were instructed by their foreign handlers to scout for potential targets for terrorist strikes in Delhi and Mumbai, sources in security agencies said on Wednesday.

As most of the IS suspects arrested as part of a nationwide crackdown ahead of the Republic Day celebrations did not have Indian passports, the instruction from their handlers was to lure as many fresh local recruits as possible with a view to carrying out terrorist attacks whenever possible, investigators have found.

Mudabbir Mushtaq Sheikh, 33, from Mumbra, the amir (chief) of IS India, is currently in the National Investigation Agencys custody while Khalid Ahmed Ali alias Rizwan, 20, the second-in-command of the organisation arrested from UP, is in the custody of the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad (ATS).

Maharashtra ATS sleuths have recovered what they suspect is a bomb-making circuit from the residence of one of the arrested accused. The arrests were made in Maharashtra and other places when the suspects were in preparatory mode to carry out a strike, a senior IPS official said, requesting anonymity. Sources said the role given to Mudabbir and Khalid was to incite youngsters to carry out terrorist strikes.

Khalid played a crucial role in sending Ayaz Sultan from Malwani abroad, the sources added. Ayaz, a call centre employee, left on October 25 and a missing persons complaint was registered on October 30 at a Malwani police station by his mother. The ATS registered a case against Sultan and others under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

Ayaz Sultans radicalisation process began online in 2014. He also started identifying potential recruits from Malwani and tried to radicalise several youngsters, a source said, adding he targeted at least eight people. Of these, sources said, two refused to agree to his views and opposed his ideology and interpretation of religion. Of the remaining people, Wajid Sheikh, 23, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayeed, 26, and Noor Mohammad Shaikh, 32, left their homes in mid-December. Wajid and Noor have returned, but the search for Mohsin is on. Three others were to leave, but aborted their mission after Ayazs name appeared in media reports.

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A students body for social rights formed by agitators at the University of Hyderabad has reiterated its call for a strike at universities across the country on Wednesday.

A statement from the All-India Joint Action Committee for Social Justice, which was formed on Tuesday, voiced its demand for a systemic change that provides legislative protection to students from marginalised communities in higher education  something that it wants titled the Rohith Act.

The university has been witnessing protests ever since a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, committed suicide on January 17 after being suspended by the authorities along with four others. They were accused of assaulting an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad union leader.

University sources said that two of the suspended students  Sunkanna and Vijay  were expected to sit on hunger strike from Wednesday.

Earlier, in a controversial move, the committee screened a documentary called Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai at the universitys protest venue around 10.30 pm on Tuesday. The entire episode of events that unfolded at the university started in the context of the protest (over) the movie screening of Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai by the Ambedkar Student Association, the committee stated in a press release, adding that students had decided to go ahead with the event to register their protest against the injustice meted out to Dalit research scholars.

Meanwhile, interim vice-chancellor Vipin Srivastava requested agitating students in his Republic Day address to help the administration restore normalcy. He said the university had revoked the suspension of the four Dalit scholars and announced an ex-gratia of `8 lakh to Vemulas family in keeping with their demands.

It may also be noted that no court case has been filed by the university, and no complaint has been filed against any student in any agency, Srivastava said, adding that the current crisis would delay completion of the course  thereby affecting the students career prospects.

Everything from the disbursement of fellowships, scholarships and salaries (especially that of Class IV and contract employees) is getting delayed inordinately, he said.

Telangana Congress chief Uttam Kumar Reddy reportedly handed over a cheque of Rs 5 lakh to Radhika, the mother of Vemula.

Even as activities on the university campus remained in limbo for the ninth consecutive day on Tuesday, rising discontent over the situation could be seen among other students at the institution. Many of them took to social networking platforms such as Facebook to decry instances of shutting varsity facilities to bolster the agitation.
New Delhi: Having faced flak for not providing a helping hand to the parent party during the 2014 Lok Sabha and subsequent elections, the Youth Congress has launched a campaign to reconnect with the young voters in five states going to polls in April-May this year.

The campaign  launched from Assam on January 22-23  will take Youth Congress president Amarinder Singh Raja Brar and his team to 200 districts across the country this year alone.

The target is to complete all the districts in the country in the next three years, Brar said. India has about 650 districts.

The youth wing of the Congress had come under severe criticism from party seniors for not coming to the aid of the party when it was fighting one of the most difficult elections.

The general refrain of the Congress leaders was that the youth wing was full of people who prefer armchair politics and shy away from agitations and the heat and dust of a campaign.

We need to change that perception. We will definitely live up to our reputation of being the sword arm of the Congress party, Brar said.

The Youth Congress leaders have also toured Kerala, which is one of the five states going to polls in April-May. Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry are the other states.

The decision to launch a nationwide campaign came after Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi asked Brar to reactivate the youth wing cadre and reconnect with the aspirational youth who are widely believed to have moved away from the party in the wake of the anti-corruption movement launched by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal in 2011.

Ironically a year later, the Youth Congress had boasted of being the only youth organisation in the world to have more than 1.3 crore (13 million) members.

Brar said he and other Youth Congress leaders will campaign extensively in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab where assembly elections are due in 2017.

In Punjab, we have just started a programme called Kuch suniye, kuch sunaiye, Punjab ko bachaye to reconnect with the youth, he said.

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Caught between its conservative right-wing support base and its attempts to present a progressive face in the state, the Devendra Fadnavis-led government is in a bind over the issue of entry of women into the sanctum sanctorum of the Shani temple at Shingnapur in Ahmednagar, 250km from Mumbai.

After his administration detained some women activists of the Bhumata Ranragini Brigade, who planned to visit the temple and offer worship in the sanctum sanctorum on Republic Day, Fadnavis tweeted a carefully-worded comment. He said, In Indian tradition and Hindu religion, women have always had the freedom to worship. Our culture says that there should be change in traditions and rituals according to changing times. It is not in our culture to discriminate over access to worship.

After making this point, the chief minister, however, lobbed the ball back in the court of the temple administration and society at large, calling for a dialogue to resolve the issue and sidestepping the issue of the legality of such restrictions. Sources close to Fadnavis said he intervened as the protests were threatening to snowball into a nation-wide controversy. The other reason that forced the CMs hand was that the organisation leading the protest was not an elitist group.

It is a grassroots organisation that has as members farmers, housewives, college students. Its leader Trupti Desai, who cut her teeth in political activism with Anna Hazares India Against Corruption, is in no mood to give up.

Desai, who met Fadnavis on Wednesday in Pune to submit a memorandum, told HT, This is not the end of the issue. We will continue with our agitation until women are given equal right to go up to the chauthara at the Shani temple. Every day, four women will try to make this attempt. We have asked the CM to take over from the temple administration and make a decision to allow women to pray from its sanctum.

The issue snowballed after a woman last month climbed the platform that holds the idol called the chauthara and offered worship. The temple authorities then performed rituals to purify it claiming a 400-year-old tradition had been violated.

The temple administration has now tried to resolve matters by making it clear that neither women nor men were allowed to climb on to the chauthara anymore.

To add to his troubles, Fadnavis colleagues havent been much help. Just last month, the states women and child development minister Pankaja Munde justifed the ban, saying it should not be linked to womens rights. Many others in the cabinetalso regard the controversy as a ``non-issue and believe that these things are best sorted out by the temple administrations and the gram sabhas concerned.

``This is an attempt by left wing groups to get dividends by politicising worship and devotion. This is an ongoing trend to deflect attention and malign the government. There are serious doubts whether these groups of women really are Shani devotees or worshippers, said BJP spokesperson Madhav Bhandari.

Amidst talk of a possible peaceful dialogue and resolution, the hardline Hindu right wing organisation, Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (one of its sister-outfits is Sanatan Sanstha) issued a statement congratulating the government for foiling the attempt by ``a few egoistical women hankering after cheap publicity.

And herein lies the problem for the BJP-led government. Its core support base consists of such hardline organisations. The chief minister will have his work cut out reconciling their views and those of other sections of civil society.

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Two buses will start plying from Nepal to Ghaziabad and Delhi from Thursday after an agreement was reached between the Nepalese and Indian governments. These buses were inaugurated in Nepal on Wednesday evening.

The buses, belonging to Nepals department of transport management, will start plying from Mahendranagar bus terminal in Nepal and halt at Sahibabad bus depot in Uttar Pradesh to drop off passengers before terminating the journey at Anand Vihar bus terminal in Delhi.

Currently, two Uttar Pradesh State Roadways Transport Corporation (UPSRTC) buses run from Anand Vihar bus terminal at 9pm every day to Mahendranagar via Sahibabad.

After a night-long journey, the buses first halt at 5.30 am at Kanchanpur bus depot in Nepal, which is six kilometres from the Indian border. They then make their way towards Mahendranagar bus terminal, which is 13 kilometres from the Indian border.

To reach Mahendranagar, the buses have to cross the bridge on Sharda river which is open for heavy vehicles only from 6am to 8am and 6pm to 8pm. So we have to cross it within this designated time only. The return journey starts from Mahendranagar at 6pm, said Anil Kumar, additional regional manager, Sahibabad bus depot.

Lately, there has been an increase in the number of passengers travelling between Nepal and India.

While many who go from here to Nepal are tourists, many from Nepal come here in search of work. We had started with one bus to and from Nepal last month, but with the increase in demand, we added one more bus earlier this month, said PK Bose, UPSRTC regional manager, Ghaziabad.

A general 2x2 bus was started in December with a fare of Rs 480 and early in January an AC 2x2 bus was started with a fare of Rs 570 for going to Nepal.

Many tourists prefer this route as it goes through a wildlife reserve and crosses over snow-clad mountains, said Kumar.

He added that online booking of tickets is available and the buses are always full when they set out for Nepal.

Bose said passengers have to go through strict security measures as it is a cross-border travel. As the security of our country is the topmost priority, all passengers boarding the bus from Nepal for India have to go through an intensive security check to avoid any possibility of an untoward incident, Bose said.

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Aam Aadmi Party Labour Wing staged a protest against the municipal corporation and objected to the dictatorial style of functioning and highhanded eviction drive against street vendors by the corporation on the eve of Republic Day at Field Ganj.

Large number of party volunteers along with Rehri-Farhi Association staged a dharma opposite to Kucha Number 8 and raised slogans against the municipal corporation.

Speaking on the occasion AAP circle in-charge and president of Rehrhi-Farhi Association Ludhiana Bal Krishan Pappi criticised the corporation drive and said that instead of solving the problem of the street vendors the municipal corporation, authorities only moved this step to support mafia in the city.

As per the directions of the Supreme Court, the officials should allocate vending zones for the street vendors instead of committing allegedly atrocities on the common people.

On the occasion AAP Ludhiana zone coordinator Col CM Lakhanpal (retired) and others were present and extended full support to the agitating street vendors.
News / Africa

by South African Tourism

In exactly one hundred days' time, South Africa and the coastal city of Durban will play host to Africa's biggest gathering of tourism exhibitors, buyers and industry stakeholders, for the annual INDABA travel and trade show.Billed as Africa's largest tradeshow, INDABA brings exhibiting tourism product owners from the continent to meet and do business with global hosted and non-hosted buyers  the very people tasked with identifying suitable tourism offerings for their clients. Also in attendance is a legion of local and global media, industry leaders and stakeholders who too are keen to see and find out more about the increasingly recognised potential of Africa's tourism industry."We have always promoted INDABA as a business facilitating platform for tourism product owners who want to capitalise on tourism's growth. This platform allows exhibitors to put Africa's incomparable tourism offerings on the continental and global centre stage by facilitating business meetings with reputable buyers enthusiastically looking for the next best destination or African tourism product offering to include in their portfolios," explains Sthembiso Dlamini, Acting Chief Executive Officer of South African Tourism.The development of tourism impacts widely on areas such as the economic growth of countries, job creation, and exposure to global markets. As visitors continue to visit these destinations, the host countries benefit through investment in infrastructure, skills development and building the reputation of Africa.Suzanne Bayly-Coupe from Classic Portfolios can attest to this:"In the fifteen years since our organisation has been participating at INDABA, we have seen a definite improvement and positivity around our brand awareness on the continent. Although the numbers have dwindled, the vibe on the exhibition floor is always wonderful to be a part of. We look forward to this year's show and to meeting with the key trade partners and buyers," she says.For Brett Thomson, Managing Director of Sun Destinations, participating at INDABA is a wonderful way of showcasing our camps to new buyers, as well as updating and maintaining relationships with current agents."We also make use of our time at INDABA to catch up with old industry friends and suppliers and build relationships with new clients. The online diary system which we properly utilised for the first time last year, has been a wonderful instrument in connecting us with the great hosted buyers in attendance," says Thomson.Classic Portfolios and Sun Destinations are two of the exhibitors already registered to exhibit at INDABA 2016. Some of the other exhibiting companies are from Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, Seychelles and Malawi, to name but a few. There are also just under 300 buyers that have met the stringent criteria and therefore been approved on the system."INDABA has grown to assume the position of the leading quality business enabling tradeshow offering buyers, exhibitors and delegates maximum value. There is no other travel tradeshow that is as widely representative of the African tourism industry and as distinctively African as this. Likewise, there is no other tradeshow that guarantees exhibitors the unrivalled business opportunities one can find at INDABA. We thank all exhibitors and buyers for the support and look forward to meeting them later this year," concludes Dlamini.INDABA 2016 takes place from 7-9 May 2016 at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre in Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal.For more information or to register as an exhibitor or buyer, visit www.indaba-southafrica.netAlternatively, you may download the INDABA App from Google or Play store or follow us on Twitter @SATravelTrade
After much flip-flop on whether the Congress would contest the February 13 Khadoor Sahib bypoll, Punjab party unit chief Captain Amarinder Singh had his way as he announced a boycott hours before the nomination process ended on Wednesday.

The former chief minister again deftly played the Panthic card to sell the boycott as the partys protest against the state governments failure to nab the culprits of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib and unprovoked police firing on Sikh protesters in October last year -- the reasons which led to Ramanjit Singh Sikkis resignation as the Khadoor Sahib MLA.

Amarinder chose to play it safe as part of his larger strategy for the high-stakes 2017 assembly polls, which, by his own admission, is his last elections and for which he would take no chances. After his swear-by-gutka act at his coronation rally at Bathinda in December, this is the second time that the Captain has struck a more-Panthic-than-thou pitch to outdo the Akalis on the Panthic pedestal. Amarinder, who had earlier denied that Sikki had expressed his reluctance to contest, said the decision was based on the latters sentiments.

During a meet-the-press programme at Chandigarh Press Club, Amarinder said: Sikki wrote to me on January 21, saying that he resigned over the issues of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib and death of two protesters in police firing, and that he would not like to contest as the government has failed to act against the culprits on both counts. I agreed with his sentiments and sent his letter to party president Sonia Gandhi. Though she approved Sikkis name, she left it to me to take the final call. We have decided that the sacrilege of Guru Garnth Sahib is a bigger issue than contesting the Khadoor Sahib bypoll. It is not important if we win another seat. How will CM Parkash Singh Badal and Akalis justify why they are contesting the bypoll?

Political tremors in own, rival camps

Coming a day after the All India Congress Committee (AICC) announced Sikkis name, the news set off political tremors in the Akali-BJP and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) camps, but the first ones were felt within the Congress itself. Even as Amarinder was addressing the media, former Congress MP Jagmeet Brar lost no time in hammering the former CM with his tweets. He said Amarinder had played a big fraud with the party high command as Sonia Gandhi had announced Sikkis name. Amarinder has backstabbed again and the party has dug its own grave. He is using Guru Granth Sahib as a shield for political purposes, Brar said.

Calling it a unilateral decision taken by Amarinder without taking them into confidence, several senior Congress leaders said the party would appear like running away from a contest and the high commands authority, too, had been undermined. Signalling his disapproval, Amarinders predecessor Partap Singh Bajwa said he had no comment to make on the issue, while AICC general secretary Shakeel Ahmad, too, struck a discordant note, saying that the AICC was in favour of the contest.

The AICC made it clear that the party wants to contest the bypoll and Sikkis name was announced as he was the best candidate. But after receiving his letter, we authorised the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee to take the final call keeping Sikkis sentiments in mind, and the PPCC took the decision to boycott the bypoll, Ahmad told HT.

As expected, the ruling SAD -- which now remains the only mainstream political party in the fray -- said the Congress had fled out of fear of a certain and humiliating defeat. The Aam Aadmi Party, which had announced its decision not to contest the bypoll soon after Sikkis resignation was accepted, said the boycott reeked of a secret pact between the Congress and the SAD.

Amarinder was left firefighting the Opposition and his own party leaders onslaught. He dubbed AAPs charge as pot calling the kettle black as the party was the first to flee from the contest. He dismissed Brar as someone who loves to plough a lonely furrow.

The Captains reasons to opt out may be more than Sikkis sentiments. The former CM, under whose command the party has lost two back-to-back elections, is obviously taking no chances in his last poll battle. A victory wont be more than a morale-booster but a defeat -- which he believes the ruling party is capable of inflicting through arm-twisting -- can make it an inauspicious start to the grand finale in 2017.

#Khadoor sahib Sonia Gandhi approves Congress candidate, we run away from contest. Humongous fraud, betrayal, Amarinder backstabs again.  Jagmeet Singh Brar (@jagmeetbrar7) January 27, 2016

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Farmers across the state  representing 12 farm and labour organisations  have called off their six-day protest after their meeting with chief minister Parkash Singh Badal scheduled for Wednesday (January 27) failed to materialise, owing to the CMs ill health.

Demanding Rs 40,000 per acre as compensation for damage to cotton crop and better rates for basmati  among other demands  farmers had been camping at Rai Ke Kalan village in Bathinda district, in Amritsar and at other districts.

Sources said the CM office informed the protesting farmers through the district administration that their meeting had been postponed. After this, the protesters held a meeting and decided to call off their protest till the CM resumed office.

Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ugarahan) general secretary Sukhdev Singh Kokri said, The decision to call off the protest was taken jointly by all farm and labour organisations. This is a temporary withdrawal. If our demands are not met, we will re-launch the protest.

He added that protests would be held at all district headquarters on Friday (January 29) to revoke the Prevention of Damage to Public and Private Property Act. Other demands include Rs 20,000 per acre for farm labourers who could not get work because of damage to the crop, minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 4,500 per quintal for basmati 1509 and Rs 5,000 per quintal for basmati 1121 and clearance of sugarcane growers dues.
The school education department would be introducing monthly test monitoring system to create central repository of monthly tests for all classes and subjects in all government schools and generate analytical reports, Haryana education minister Ram Bilas Sharma said on Wednesday.

Referring to the information technology (IT) initiatives taken by the department to further improve its efficiency, Sharma said that academic inspection monitoring system was also being adopted to create central repository of school inspections carried out by different inspecting officials. The objective of the system was to conduct academic inspection of every school at least once a year and ensure that every inspecting officer visits the minimum prescribed number of schools every month for inspection and submits inspection report online.

He said that other such initiatives included court cases monitoring system. The vision of parivartan scheme was to orient the system towards academic quality, transparency, accountability by creating robust and integrated and automating backend processes and to transform the department into digitally empowered organization.

It would enable the teachers to lay more focus on academic activities. It would also streamline the departments administrative processes like student admissions, scholarship distribution, printing of text books, redistribution of posts, transfers of teacher through automation, he said and added that a unique identity number would be allotted to each student and Aadhaar integration of all students and teachers and bank accounts of students for direct benefit transfer would be done.

Stating that data of more than 22 lakh students had been digitized, he said that there was a target to make data of more than 26 lakh students, more than 1 lakh employees and 14,570 schools online.

Holidays till January 31

Keeping in view the prevailing cold waive and dense fog, the state government had decided to close all the government, private and government-aided schools across the state till January 31, 2016, Haryana education minister Ram Bilas Sharma said on Wednesday.

He said that all the deputy commissioners in the state had been directed to ensure strict compliance of these orders through district education officers and district elementary education officers.
When contacted, Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan (DJJS) spokesperson Swami Vishalananda asserted that the sect head was in samadhi and its followers believed that Ashutosh would come back.

Maharaj ji has been kept under a sub-zero temperature that is maintained continuously. There is no visible change in the body, which authenticates our belief that he is in samadhi, said Vishalananda.

On the high courts verbal observations to settle the issue amicably, the DJJS spokesman said they were ready to talk to the state government.

After the court orders, the state government fixed a meeting with us recently, but it did not happen due to the Pathankot terror attack. We are hoping for a meeting in February. The HC has directed us to settle the issue out of court. It has not asked to dispose of the body. Our stand on the samadhi is clear, the spokesman added.

On keeping the body in deep freeze, the DJJS has repeatedly said that it has been done to create a conducive Himalaya-like environment for the samadhi.
With a Portugese court extending the detention of fugitive Khalistani terrorist Paramjit Singh Pamma till February 15 on Tuesday, immediate extradition of fugitive Khalistani terrorist Paramjit Singh Pamma is ruled out. The courts decision was taken in view of a pending administrative decision from Portuguese minister of justice as informed to the court by the office of general public attorney, Portugal.

Sources said that Tuesdays decision was likely to set in motion a fierce extradition battle between Indian and Portugal, reminiscent of a three-year tussle for gangster Abu Salem in 2002.

Sources said if the Portugese government had treated the case as a special case under its extradition laws, the situation would not have risen.

However, not treating the present case under the exceptional category, the office of the general public attorney moved a letter in the Evora court on the day of hearing that Indias extradition plea had been forwarded to the ministry of justice for consideration.

After this, the court extended the detention of Pamma, currently lodged in Beja Prison (two hours from Lisbon) till February 15.

Sources added the minister for justice had nearly three weeks to decide whether the extradition proceedings should start before the Evora court or the evidence presented by the Indian authorities is not sufficient to continue with the extradition proceedings.

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With a Portugese court extending the detention of fugitive Khalistani terrorist Paramjit Singh Pamma till February 15 on Tuesday, immediate extradition of fugitive Khalistani terrorist Paramjit Singh Pamma is ruled out. The courts decision was taken in view of a pending administrative decision from Portuguese minister of justice as informed to the court by the office of general public attorney, Portugal.

Sources said that Tuesdays decision was likely to set in motion a fierce extradition battle between Indian and Portugal, reminiscent of a three-year tussle for gangster Abu Salem in 2002.

Sources said if the Portugese government had treated the case as a special case under its extradition laws, the situation would not have risen.

However, not treating the present case under the exceptional category, the office of the general public attorney moved a letter in the Evora court on the day of hearing that Indias extradition plea had been forwarded to the ministry of justice for consideration. After this, the court extended the detention of Pamma, currently lodged in Beja Prison (two hours from Lisbon) till February 15.

Sources added the minister for justice had nearly three weeks to decide whether the extradition proceedings should start before the Evora court or the evidence presented by the Indian authorities is not sufficient to continue with the extradition proceedings.

Pammas extradition documents as with the Indian authorities are with Joana Marques Vidal, the attorney general of Portugal, who will forward the formal request to the minister of justice to seek his approval before the resumption of the trial, said Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, legal adviser to US-based human rights group Sikhs For Justice that is fighting Pammas case in Portugal.

According to him, they have already moved a parallel petition before the minister not to allow Pammas trial.

We will rebut every evidence which Punjab Police will furnish during the trial since all the co-accused in Rulda Singh and Patiala bombing case in which his extradition is sought have been acquitted by the Indian courts, he said

He added the furnishing of a guarantee by the Punjab government that Pamma would not be hanged if extradited to India showed lack of character of Badal-led regime as they were still struggling with Sikh prisoners who had completed their terms still languishing in jails. He claimed that the Sikh community from the UK and the US had sent more than 20,000 email requests to the President of the National Assembly of Portugal, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, urging him to repatriate Pamma to the UK where he has been granted indefinite refugee status since 2000.

DIG led team to return tomorrow

A team of Indian officials lead by Patiala range deputy inspector general Balkar Sidhu that is in Portugal since Jan 21 to seek Pammas custody will return on Thursday evening, said sources.

On being asked about the courts interim order in Pammas extradition, Iqbal Preet Singh Sahota, director bureau of investigation, said he was yet not apprised of legal developments there. As far as I know, all legal formalities have been completed, he added.

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Ashu baba aayenge...  this song has been an integral part of the monthly gathering (bhandara) of the Nurmahal-based Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan (DJJS). However, in the past two years, sect preachers have been using the song to make followers believe that their clinically dead head, Ashutosh Maharaj, would come out of deep freeze for the welfare of humanity.

In the wee hours of January 29, 2014, senior political leaders of Punjab had started getting calls from the sansthan, informing them that its spiritual head and founder had died of cardiac arrest. A few hours earlier, on the intervening night of January 28 and 29, an ambulance had been called from Ludhiana-based Satguru Partap Singh Apollo Hospital after Ashutosh complained of chest congestion. Following an examination, a team of doctors declared him dead.

Read more: Twists and turns, one after another

However, the arrival of four Delhi-based DJJS leaders turned things on its head. The dera started claiming that Ashutosh was in samadhi (state of deep meditation) and he would come out of it very soon.

Two years on, dera managers continue to assure Ashutoshs disciples that he will be back. The devotees themselves look forward to this second coming as Ashutosh had told them: My soul will disappear and return after completing a few important tasks of mankind.

No access to public

After being declared dead, Ashutosh was shifted to a mortuary chamber hired from the local Bhootnath temple. Later, on the insistence of DJJS leaders, his body was kept in a freezer under a controlled temperature. However, sources in the dera claimed that in September last year, the body was shifted to a 12x15 ft glass room in the special enclosure where the sect head used to reside.

Ashutoshs followers sitting in the samadhi mode on the premises of the Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan at Nurmahal in Jalandhar district. (HT File Photo)

The room is guarded 24x7 by DJJS security guards. Only the sects top brass has access to the body. In January 2015, when the Punjab and Haryana high court had told the state government to give a status report on the body, officers of Jalandhar district were not initially allowed to see it. However, when the district administration took a tough stand, a one-time access to the body was granted.

An officer who saw the body in January last year told HT, The body has turned completely black and shrunk to a great extent. It has been kept under observation of the sansthan doctors who inspect it on alternate days. A special chemical is used to ensure its preservation.

Succession row

The DJJS succession row, termed as the main reason behind the sect not admitting to Ashutoshs death  in the absence of a worthy successor  has not yet been settled.

The dera is now being governed by DJJS leaders from Delhi. Local leaders, including Swami Arvindanand, who hails from nearby Bilga village, have been sidelined. However, dera officials say that the DJJS is already being governed by a Delhi-based registered trust and all its properties belong to the trust.

The case has witnessed several twists and turns, with Puran Singh, former driver of the DJJS head, and Bihar native Dalip Jha, who claims to be Ashutoshs son, filing petitions in the Punjab andHaryana high court, seeking permission to perform his last rites and demanding a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into his death.

Dont miss: No visible change in Ashutosh Maharajs body, says dera

On November 30, 2014, a high court bench led by justice SK Mittal (now transferred as chief justice of the Rajasthan high court) had told the state government to make efforts to settle the issue amicably. The court had directed the DJJS to come up with a proposal to make a temple/shrine (samaad) in Ashutoshs name and consider performing the last rites.

On December 1, 2014, the single-judge bench told the state government to perform the last rites within 15 days. However, the division bench later stayed the order. The next date of hearing in the case is February 24, 2016.

The state government has preferred to keep itself at a safe distance, calling a religious matter. A government should intervene when there is a law and order problem. If the followers want to keep the body, how does it matter to the state? said a senior government functionary.

Footfall down

Though the DJJS continues to give the impression that the sect is functioning normally even in Ashutoshs absence, the Punjab Polices CID (criminal investigation department) has witnessed a sharp drop in the number of visitors to the dera.

A senior CID official, who is tracking DJJS activities, told HT that due to the controversy over Ashutoshs death, the number of political leaders usually visiting the dera has also decreased.

Ashutosh was a spiritual leader whose knowledge of mankind was vast. Since there is no dera leader now of that stature, there is no point in making repeated visits, said a senior BJP leader who has had an old association with the DJJS.

A Nakodar-based senior sect follower, who is in favour of performing Ashutoshs last rites, said: The DJJS may have its reasons to advocate the samadhi theory, but the negative publicity has brought disrespect to Ashutosh.
With the Congress on Wednesday deciding not to contest the Khadoor Sahib bypoll, the battle has been reduced to the SAD versus Independents.

Till recently, former Congress MLA Ramanjit Singh Sikki, who had resigned from the post to protest against the sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib in a Tarn Taran village, was the likely Congress candidate.

On Wednesday, people, officials and media kept waiting for Sikki. There were a lot of phone calls wanting to know about Sikkis candidature. Is Sikki coming to Khadoor Sahib to file the nomination papers? Has he left the Golden Temple for Khadoor Sahib? What did Capt Amarinder Singh decide on contesting the byelection? Is the Congress boycotting the bypoll? were the questions doing the rounds of the SDM office.

Media and others were seen repeatedly calling sources close to Sikki and every time they got the reply that he had left the shrine or had reached Khadoor Sahib but was awaiting Amarinders decision. In the end, all were left waiting as he did not reach the office of the returning officer till the afternoon.

Meanwhile, Sikkis family conducted an akhand paath at Gurdwara Mal Akhara to pray for Sikkis victory. The bhog of the akhand paath was held around 11 am. The akhand paath was conducted as it was expected that Sikki might contest the bypoll.

Now, the battle is between SAD candidate Ravinder Singh Brahmpura, and independent candidates, mainly Congress rebel Bhupinder Singh Bittu and AAP dissident Bhai Baldeep Singh.

Of the other candidates who filed the nomination papers, Puran Singh is associated with Bahujan Samaj Party (Ambedkar) but the party has no sway in the constituency. Rest of the candidates are independents. With the Congress boycotting the bypoll, the rest of the candidates had a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, Sikki, who is busy with sewa at the Golden Temple, remained inside the shrine throughout the day.
At least 13 people were killed and thirty others were injured when three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok on Wednesday.

The blasts happened at about midday (1100 GMT) as the remote town in Borno state was packed with traders from surrounding villages for the weekly market, Chibok elder Ayuba Chibok told AFP.

Ten died on the spot and another one died on the way to hospital, said health worker Dazzban Buba, who volunteered to treat the injured at hospital.

A woman and a child died as they were being admitted (to hospital), so now the death toll stands at 13. Thirty others were injured, 21 critically.

The blasts bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, which has repeatedly hit soft civilian targets such as markets, mosques and bus stations as well as military and civilian vigilante checkpoints.

Chibok came to prominence in April 2014 when Islamist fighters stormed a boarding school and kidnapped 276 girls, causing global outrage.

Fifty-seven girls managed to escape in the immediate aftermath but 219 are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video in May that year.

Chibok was briefly overrun by the Islamic State group-allied rebels in November 2014 but recaptured by the military after several days.

Ayuba Chibok and Buba both said Wednesdays blasts were suicide attacks and had prompted terrified residents to lock themselves inside their homes or flee in fear of repeat attacks.

Buba said the first explosion, at a checkpoint where people coming into the town were being searched, was thought to have been carried out by a young boy.

But identifying the attackers age was difficult, as only his legs were recovered. The second, at the market, and a third nearby were carried out by women, he added.

Lull in attacks

Buba said he rushed to help his brother who was injured in the first blast in the Bamzir Road area of the town.

The second blast happened shortly afterwards, fitting a pattern of Boko Haram suicide attacks with multiple bombers setting off their devices almost simultaneously.

But Buba said it was still unclear whether the third bomber deliberately detonated her explosives or whether the device was triggered when troops opened fire as she fled.

The 30 injured were mostly suffering from burns and fractures, and that nine had been discharged, he added.

President Muhammadu Buhari, in Kenya on a three-day state visit, made no direct mention of the Chibok attack at a memorial service to commemorate Kenyan soldiers killed by Shebab militants.

But he told the congregation: Terrorists should not have a place in our communities, villages, towns, cities and countries.

We must all rise against the culture of intolerance, hatred and extremist ideologies, which drive terrorism.

Recent weeks have seen a lull in Boko Haram attacks, with only three recorded in Nigeria this month but those that have occurred underline the difficulty in protecting hard-to-reach rural areas.

The insurgents raided a village in Yobe state on Sunday, killing one man, while on January 11, another raid in the Adamawa state town of Madagali left seven dead.

Seven people were killed in a raid and suicide bomb attack in Izgeki village on January 5. Gunmen also looted food and burnt a large part of Nchiha village near Chibok earlier the same day.

On December 6, there was a similar attack in Takulashi village, also near Chibok, which again saw fighters raid food and steal more than 200 cattle.

Buhari on December 24 declared the rebels were technically defeated but at least 66 people were then killed in raids and suicide bombings in the days following.

According to an AFP tally, more than 1,650 people have been killed since Buhari came to power in May last year, vowing to crush the insurgency, which has left at least 17,000 dead since 2009.

On Monday, 32 people were killed when at least three suicide bombers blew themselves up at a market in Bodo village in northern Cameroon.
News / Africa

by Staff reporter

A hoax story originally posted by a Somali website reported that unnamed "activists" posted a memo on a social media site allegedly from the Eritrean government asking men to marry at least two wives due to shortage of men caused by war.The document, which was written in Arabic, says the State of Eritrea called for all men in the country to marry at least two wives and the government assuring that it will pay for the marriage ceremonies and houses. It added any man or woman who oppose the decision "will face a life sentence".The story was then picked up by the Digital Standard, a popular tabloid Kenyan website, whose audience are very active on social media sites like Twitter.Since their report, the Eritrea hashtag has been trending in Kenya and Nigeria. Hundreds of tweets have been made, with many men from Kenya and Nigeria professing they will visit Eritrea to get their share of wives.Amid the frenzy of tweets, many Eritreans pointed out that the bogus report goes against the recently instituted Penal Code of Eritrea, which practically makes polygamy illegal in the country:1) Except where polygamy is recognized under civil law in conformity with tradition or religious usage, a person who, being tied by the bond of a valid marriage, intentionally contracts another marriage before the first union has been dissolved or annulled; or(2) Any unmarried person who marries another he knows to be tied by the bond of an existing marriage, is guilty of bigamy, a Class 1 petty offence, punishable with a definite term of imprisonment of not less than 6 months and not more than 12 months, or a fine of 20,001  50,000 Nakfas, to be set in intervals of 2,500 Nakfas; or(3) Limitations of criminal proceedings shall be suspended until such time as one of the marriages shall have been dissolved or annulled.Moreover, there is no shortage of Eritrean men. According to the CIA Factbook, Eritrea has the same male/female ratio as most countries.
The US and China on Wednesday agreed to support new UN sanctions against North Korea following Pyongyangs fourth nuclear test earlier this month but Beijing cautioned that the move should not escalate tensions in the region.

After his talks with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry said North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat to the world.

The US will do what is necessary to protect our country and our friends and allies in the world, Kerry said during a news conference with Wang.

The two sides had agreed on an accelerated effort at the UN to reach a strong resolution that introduces significant new measures to curtail the reclusive communist countrys ability to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, he said.

We agreed that the UN Security Council needs to take further action and pass a new resolution, Wang said. In the meantime, we must point out that the new resolution should not provoke new tensions.

Wang rejected assertions that Beijing could do more to denuclearise North Korea, describing it as groundless speculation.

China is North Koreas closest ally and key economic benefactor but had strongly criticised the latest nuclear test.

Kerry indicated China should use its economic leverage over North Korea to get it back to talks on denuclearisation. Reuters quoted Kerry as saying that shipping, aviation, trade of resources, including coal and fuel, and security at border customs, were key areas in the sanctions debate.

If Washington and Beijing appeared to agree on North Korea, their stands on the tense South China Sea remained a clear point of difference.

China has given a commitment of not engaging in so-called militarisation, and we will honor that commitment, Wang said. We cannot accept the allegation that Chinas words are not being matched by action.

A strongly word commentary by state-run Xinhua news agency said: As US Secretary of State John Kerry raised concerns about the South China Sea during his Asia tour, he may have been unaware of one thing: the US meddling in the issue is an ill-considered move, which could boomerang and escalate regional tensions.

It was advisable that Washington plays a constructive role in promoting peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region...instead of sowing discord, because (muddying) the waters in the South China Sea could blow up in Washingtons face, the commentary added.
The leader of an armed occupation at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon and others were arrested on Tuesday after shots were fired during a traffic stop, leaving one person dead and another wounded, the FBI said.

Protesters were still occupying the remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon after leader Ammon Bundys arrest and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was setting up a perimeter, a law enforcement official told Reuters.

The takeover at Malheur that started January 2 is the latest flare-up in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a decades-old conflict over the U.S. governments control of millions acres of land in the West.

A total of seven people were arrested. Bundy and four leaders of the occupation were taken into custody following the confrontation along Highway 395 in northeast Oregon around 4:25 pm (0025 GMT), according to the FBI.

A sixth individual was arrested by the Oregon State Police in Burns, Oregon, about 1.5 hours later. The FBI said a seventh person was later arrested, 50-year-old Peter Santilli, an independent journalist who livestreamed events at the refuge.

All of those arrested face federal charges of conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to impede federal officers from discharging their duties, the FBI said. The Oregonian reported that Bundy had been en route to a community meeting in John Day, Oregon, with several other members of the occupation, where he was scheduled to be a guest speaker, when authorities stopped his vehicle.

The newspaper said 43-year-old Ryan Bundy, Ammons brother, was injured in the arrest, suffering a minor gunshot wound. Authorities did not release the identity of the person killed, but added that he was the subject of a federal probable cause arrest.

Ammon Bundy arrives to address the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon in this January 5, 2016 file photo. (REUTERS)

Some 25 miles (40 km) of Highway 395 was shut down in both directions following the incident, a dispatcher for the state department of transportation said. The highway was expected to remain closed as authorities investigate the shooting.

The occupiers of the wildlife refuge said they were supporting two local ranchers who were returned to prison this month for setting fires that spread to federal land. The ranchers lawyer has said the occupiers do not speak for the family.

Burns Mayor Craig LaFollette told Reuters that while he had limited information about the nights events, he hoped the stand-off would come to a peaceful end.

I think my perception is that peoples patience was running thin and that the community as a whole was looking for some resolution and to have these people leave, he said.

Law enforcement officials had largely kept their distance from the buildings at the refuge, 30 miles (48 km) south of the small town of Burns in rural southeast Oregons Harney County, in the hope of avoiding a violent confrontation.

Local residents have expressed a mixture of sympathy for the Hammond family, suspicion of the federal governments motives and frustration with the occupation.
A Pakistani court has dismissed a petition from the governments main investigation agency seeking voice samples of seven suspects charged with involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks because prosecutors did not pursue the matter.

A division bench of the Islamabad High Court dismissed the Federal Investigation Agencys (FIA) petition during a hearing on Tuesday because of non-prosecution. The move is being perceived as a setback to the Mumbai attacks trial in Pakistan.

The court also dismissed another petition from the FIA to declare Ajmal Kasab and Faheem Ansari as proclaimed offenders or fugitives in the Mumbai attacks case so that the investigation against both men could be closed.

The prosecution was asking for voice samples of the suspects, including Lashkar-e-Taiba operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, to compare them with communications intercepted by Indian intelligence and to present them as evidence in the anti-terrorism court conducting the trial of the seven suspects.

This was the second time the high court dismissed the FIAs petition since 2012 because the prosecution did not appear before the judge to argue the case.

In 2011, the FIA approached the high court to obtain voice samples of Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jamil, Jamil Ahmed and Younas Anjum.

In September 2012, the court dismissed the petition for non-prosecution  in other words, the FIA had not pursued the matter. After the dismissal, the FIA woke up again and its counsel filed a fresh petition seeking the voice samples.

According to the petition, Indian intelligence agencies had said they intercepted communications between the suspects and the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in 2008. In the intercepts, the suspects were allegedly instructing the terrorists.

The FIAs petition said information received from Indian authorities showed Ajmal Kasab alias Abu Mujaid along with his other accomplices was allegedly trained and launched by Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, Abu Hamza, Kahafa, and other associates of the LeT.

Under Pakistans laws, voice samples cannot be obtained without the permission of suspects.

Kasab, the lone attacker to be captured alive, was executed in November 2012. Faheem Ansari was acquitted in the Mumbai attacks case by an Indian court in 2010 but he continues to be in custody in connection with other crimes.
US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump on Tuesday abruptly withdrew from a debate with party rivals this week out of anger at host Fox News, leaving the last encounter before Iowas first-in-the-nation nominating contest without the front-runner.

Trumps campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told reporters after a combative news conference held by the candidate that Trump would definitely not be participating in the debate scheduled for Thursday.

During the news conference before he addressed a large crowd in Marshalltown, Iowa, Mr. Trump expressed irritation that Fox News planned to leave in place as a moderator the anchor Megyn Kelly, whose questioning of Trump at a debate last August angered him.

He also expressed displeasure at a Fox News statement on Monday night saying .Trump would have to learn sooner or later that he doesnt get to pick the journalists and that were very surprised hes willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly.

I was all set to do the debate, I came here to do the debate. When they sent out the wise-guy press release done by some PR person along with (Fox News Chairman) Roger Ailes, I said: Bye bye, OK

Lets see how much money Fox makes without me in the debate, he added.

Trumps blunt-speaking candidacy has boosted ratings for the Republican presidential debates. The August debate on Fox News drew 24 million viewers, a record for a presidential primary debate and the highest non-sports telecast in cable TV history.

His boycott will leave Thursdays debate without the leader in the crowded Republican field not only in Iowa but nationally. Ahead of Iowas caucuses next Monday, Trump leads in the polls over Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom Trump dismissed as a nasty guy who nobody likes.

A boycott could prove risky for Trump as Iowa Republicans seek to take one more look at who they want as their presidential candidate for the Nov. 8 election. Rivals like Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson could reap the benefits.

But Trump, a billionaire businessman and former reality TV star said he would hold a competing event to raise money for U.S. military veterans.

Trump has been engaged in a public spat with Fox News since the network hosted the first debate and Mr. Kelly asked Mr. Trump about his treatment of woman, prompting a stream of insults from the candidate.

At the news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump was introduced by Arizonas Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has sought tougher measures against illegal immigrants.

Everything I believe in hes doing and hes going to do it as president, said Arpaio.

Trump, pressed on his plans to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and deport many illegal immigrants, defended his proposal and said he would be able to persuade the U.S. Congress to go along with his plan.
The United Nations (UN) on Wednesday affirmed that only Syrians have been invited to peace talks in Geneva, a move which is being seen as an apparent contradiction to Turkeys suggestion that it would be included.

On Tuesday, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara would boycott the talks set to open on Friday if the Syrian Kurdish group Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Ankara believes is linked to militants fighting inside Turkey, was at the negotiating table.

But Khawla Mattar, a spokesperson for the UNs Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said there was no plan to invite to non-Syrians when asked about the possible inclusion of observer delegations from Turkey, Russia, the United States or France.

She declined to comment on which parties had been given invitations, which were issued by de Mistura on Tuesday.

Moscow has said the PYDs inclusion was key to the talks success.

Turkeys objection threatens to be a major blow to the negotiations, which have already been delayed by a stalemate over the make-up of the opposition delegation.

Members of the Syrian oppositions so-called High Negotiations Committee (HNC) were meeting in Riyadh on Wednesday to decide whether to attend the UN-brokered talks.

The HNC has asked de Mistura to send the full list of proposed participants before making its decision.

Asked whether the UN envoy had complied, Mattar said there were no pre-conditions attached to joining the talks, suggesting the HNC would not be able to view the guest list before deciding whether to come to Geneva.
More than 200,000 troops have been mobilized in Brazil to combat the outbreak of the Zika virus in that country, a disease which has been linked to a horrific birth defect epidemic. As such, the soldiers are primarily concerned with distributing leaflets and dispensing advice, as well as repellent, to at least 400,000 pregnant women on social welfare in the country, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

A recent surge in the virus, which for many adults merely causes flu-like symptoms for up to a week, has seen cases spread across Latin America and  due to those picking up the disease while travelling  into Europe as well. Concerns are high that the outbreak could become a major issue in the lead-up to the Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro in August.

Newborn or in-utero babies are the most at risk of permanent defects, and scientists have linked it to brain damage and microencephaly, or shrinking of the head. Brazil has recorded at least 3,893 microencephaly cases since October, according to The Straights Times. Previously an annual average of 160 cases was the norm.

The disease is spread through mosquitoes, and not person-to-person, which makes those in tropical regions more vulnerable. Scientists estimate that as many as 1.5 million people could be infected in Brazil. Colombia has the second highest infection rate, with more than 13,500 people infected.

The country's health minister Alejandro Gaviria has urged women to delay pregnancies, but that has angered women's right campaigners. "It's incredibly naive for a government to ask women to postpone getting pregnant in a context such as Colombia, where more than 50 percent of pregnancies are unplanned, and across the region where sexual violence is prevalent," said Monica Roa, a member of Women's Link Worldwide, in an interview with the Thompson Reuters Foundation.

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People love their gin and tonics, their vodka sodas, their Manhattans, their scotch on the rocks, and their Tom Collinses, but what do you do when you're sick of standard liquor fare? You go international! There's a near-infinite number of liquors produced around the world, most of them available at your local liquor store, so you should give some of these more unconventional liquors a chance.

Cynar. This Italian bittersweet liqueur is made with artichoke and 13 herbs, but don't worry, it doesn't taste like spinach and artichoke dip. It adds complexity to any drink, and it's been enjoyed since the 50s in Italy. It's 16.5 percent, so it's great for sipping over ice, but it's also excellent in cocktails, says Serious Eats. (It's pronounced "chee-nar" for when you want to ask your bartender to fix you a little something with Cynar.)

Vermouth. You know vermouth from its role in martinis all over the world, but did you know that it's delicious when served over ice with olives and an orange slice? It's stronger than wine but lighter than liquor and makes for a delicious afternoon drink.

Mezcal. The smoky flavor that accents this Mexican liquor makes it a fantastic liquor to sip or mix into a cocktail. Make a shaken margarita with mezcal instead of tequila, or if you want something even more different, try mixing it into a Basil Cranberry Julep from Serious Eats.

Soju. This rice-based Korean liquor is 20 percent, but it sneaks up on you if you're not careful, says The Hungry Partier. It's normally drunk in shots, and is known for its monstrous hangover-causing power, but it's also the most-sold distilled liquor in the world, says Obsev, so there's definitely something special about it.

Chartreuse. This bright-green liquor has been made since 1737 in France by monks who apparently liked to party. It's unmistakably green-tasting, as it's made with 130 different plants, but be careful with this one - it's 55 percent, says the liquor's website. The website has a list of cocktails for you to try it out without having to take a shot.

St Germain. St Germain is an elderflower liqueur, and it makes some of the prettiest-tasting drinks in the land. If you taste it, you'll understand. It's light, floral and sweet, but adds an assertive and interesting twist to a gin and tonic.

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In October, the FBI stopped processing denial appeals on gun background checks because the bureau's background check examiners were overwhelmed by the number of Americans attempting to buy guns, reported USA Today.

The decision means that 7,100 appeals will indefinitely remain backlogged, which the National Rifle Association said is tantamount to halting the right to due process for the prospective gun buyers who have been denied the right to purchase a gun and are currently appealing the decision.

FBI Assistant Director Stephen Morris told USA Today that all 70 of the bureau's appeal examiners have been temporarily reassigned to help catch up on the surge of background check applications that came in the wake of recent mass shootings and calls for gun control regulation.

The agency even had to suspend annual leave for the more than 400 employees who work at the National Instant Criminal Background Check System's (NICS) facility in West Virginia.

"The last several months, we've kind of found ourselves in a perfect storm," Morris said.

The storm was brought on by the terrorist attacks in Paris in November followed by the December terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., along with President Obama's announced executive order that will expand background checks for gun buyers.

As Americans rushed to buy guns, NICS processed more than 2.2 million background checks in November and a record 3.3 million in December. At the end of 2015, the NICS had processed more than 23.1 million background checks, 10.4 percent more than the previous year, but per the FBI's NICS website, it appears that as of mid-September, the bureau was still processing appeals received in June 2015.

"As much as the Brady Campaign, Bloomberg's Everytown, and the Obama administration contend that submitting oneself to the FBI's NICS is a fast and simple process that does not significantly burden lawful firearms transferees, the fact is that for many of Americans that simply isn't true," the NRA wrote.

Gun Owners of America executive director emeritus Larry Pratt told Breitbart that the FBI's decision to stop processing background check appeals shows that "background checks are not constitutional."

"When a fundamentally protected right - like the Second Amendment - is placed in the hands of the government, they will decide whether or not a sale can be made, and who can own, and things like that, then we must realize we have all the sudden given away the store," he said. "And look what happens under an administration like that of Obama; you give him an inch and he takes a mile."

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Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that not only will Canada lift its sanctions on Iran, but also that its aircraft maker, Bombardier Inc., will be allowed to export there as well. The development comes shortly after the U.S., the European Union and other major nations lifted some of their own sanctions against Tehran, according to Reuters.

"Canada will lift its sanctions but will maintain a level of mistrust for a regime that must not have nuclear weapons, a regime that is a danger to human rights and is not a friend to our allies, including Israel," Dion said, responding to questions in the House of Commons.

"We'll do it in accordance with our allies. They are keeping sanctions to be sure that Iran will not have the capacity to be involved in nuclear military measures, so we'll certainly be very responsible in our way," Dion continued, repeating his pledge but not giving a specific timeline, CBC reported.

The announcement follows the completion of the nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, allowing the U.S., the EU and other major nations to begin lifting economic sanctions brought in over Iran. Furthermore, P.M. Justin Trudeau expressed willingness to restoring diplomatic relations with Iran earlier in January, saying that Tehran had made significant strides towards dismantling parts of it program ever since Canada shuttered its embassy there in 2012.

In addition to the lifting of sanctions, Bombardier will be allowed to export to Tehran, which comes after Iran announced over the weekend that it would purchase more than 160 European planes, primarily from Airbus. Dion argued that Canada's reluctance to lift sanctions after so many other countries had already done so only served to hurt Bombardier and help Airbus.

"If Airbus is able to do it, why will Bombardier not be able to do it?" Dion asked, according to CTV News. "In which way is it helping Canada, or the Iranian people, or Israel, or anyone, that Canada is hurting its own industry?"

Despite the lofty intentions, not everyone was onboard with the intended policy shift. The Conservative's foreign affairs critic, Tony Clement, spoke out against it, saying the government is "going 180 degrees in the wrong direction."

"Iran continues to be a state sponsor of terrorism, continues to deny as state policy the very existence of Israel. It continues to oppress its people," Clement said. "Now is not the time to review or remove sanctions against a country that is still not within the world family of nations that cooperates and works with other nations."

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News / Local

by Auxilia Katongomara

ONE person died while 17 others were seriously injured after two commuter omnibuses collided along the Plumtree road in the Belmont industrial area in Bulawayo.The accident occurred on Monday evening near Founders High School turn-off.Witnesses said the kombi heading towards the city centre was speeding. They said the driver lost control of the vehicle and it overturned."The roads were slippery due to the rains. I think the kombi driver who was heading towards the city centre with three passengers failed to control his vehicle and it overturned and rolled twice encroaching onto the lane of oncoming traffic resulting in the collision with another kombi."It was a scary site. The other kombi was going towards the western suburbs. People started screaming, and for a moment I held my breath as I saw what was about to happen. The fire brigade came in no time and confirmed that one of the passengers in the kombi had died," the witness said.Bulawayo Chief Fire Officer, Richard Peterson, said his men were at the scene six minutes after the accident.He said one person was already dead by the time they arrived and they rushed the injured to United Bulawayo Hospitals."The kombi going towards the western areas had 17 people, including the driver. One of the passengers from this kombi died on the spot and 15 others were injured. The other two who were injured were from the other kombi," said Peterson.
The downward slide of Puerto Rico's economy through the past decade has started to impact migration patterns in the region. In recent years, there has been a reversal of the migration trend that has traditionally seen people from the Dominican Republic moving to Puerto Rico - within the larger trend of migrants from both countries moving toward the United States in search of employment opportunities, according to the Associated Press.

Seeking stable jobs or to start their own businesses, authorities say that exactly how many Puerto Ricans have moved to the Dominican Republic in recent years is difficult to determine because they fall under the broader category of U.S. citizens, but they maintain that the trend is undeniable: "It used to be extremely rare for a Puerto Rican to stop by and seek a work visa," Franklin Grullon, Dominican consul in Puerto Rico's capital of San Juan, told the Associated Press. "There's been a surge in all types of visas, and we believe this flow will only increase."

Most of the Puerto Ricans applying for business visas are young to middle-aged men, as Grullon described, with many seeking tourism sector jobs because their English-speaking skills generally make it easier to find work. There has also been a significant rise in the number of Puerto Rican professionals, including architects and engineers, who are traveling to the Dominican Republic in order to work in the country's thriving construction sector. "There's been a considerable change in the last two years," said German Monroig, executive director of the Office of Puerto Rican Affairs, according to Dominican Today.

Grullon said that even Dominicans are leaving Puerto Rico in increasing numbers to return home, with the illegal migration of Dominicans into the U.S. territory also reducing dramatically: the U.S. Coast Guard detained 1,565 Dominicans in 2004, compared with 133 in 2014, according to the Associated Press.

The main migratory draw is the Dominican's stronger economy, which had a second consecutive growth year in 2015, growing by 7 percent. This makes it the strongest economy in the Latin American and Caribbean region, as the Washington Post reports, with particular strength in construction, banking and tourism.

In contrast, Puerto Rico's economy has stagnated for almost a decade, and the U.S. territory's population of 3.5 million people faces an unemployment rate of 12 percent, along with $72 billion in public debt that has been deemed by the Governor Alejandro Padilla to be insurmountable, as the BBC has explained.

Even with Puerto Rico's debt restructuring talks to be held on Jan. 29, the flow of Puerto Ricans trying to escape the U.S. territory's economic crisis is likely to continue.

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Maine Gov. Paul LePage said on Tuesday that penalties for drug traffickers are not harsh enough, suggesting that the state should reinstate the death penalty and bring back the guillotine so there could be public executions of serious offenders.

The Republican governor, known for his colorful and controversial statements, made the comment during his weekly interview on Maine radio station WVOM when asked about a push for harsher penalties for those who traffic drugs into the state.

"I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers," LePage said, arguing that legislative proposals to increase prison sentences for drug traffickers do not do enough. "We should give them an injection of the stuff they sell."

LePage decried critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, who he accused of protecting drug traffickers.

"What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back," he said, interrupting the hosts as they tried to wrap-up the interview, according to CNN. "We could have public executions and we could even have which hole it falls in."

This isn't the first time LePage has made comments that have fallen under mass scrutiny. Earlier this month, the Maine governor came under fire after he made a controversial comment about drug dealers impregnating white women.

"With the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty - these types of guys - they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home," LePage said at a town hall event, according to the Talking Points Memo. "Half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave."

He has since apologized for his comments, arguing that his use of the term "white girls" was a slip of the tongue, and blamed local media for intentionally blowing his words out of proportion while ignoring the state's ongoing drug epidemic.

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Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Tuesday that an additional debate in New Hampshire ahead of the early voting state's primary is unlikely to happen, dealing a blow to co-hosts MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader.

"We have no plans to sanction any further debates before the upcoming First in the Nation caucuses and primary, but will reconvene with our campaigns after those two contests to review our schedule," Wasserman Schultz said in a statement, referring to early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. "Our three major candidates are already scheduled to appear on the same stage next week for the New Hampshire Democratic Party dinner on February 5th."

The New Hampshire Union Leader announced on Tuesday that it was set to partner with MSNBC to host a Democratic debate on Feb. 4, just five days before the state's primary, according to CNN. Joseph McQuaid, the publisher of the Union Leader, said that it would be the first time in 32 years that the people of New Hampshire would not have a Democratic debate before heading to the polls.

"Our readers have demanded a debate to help them see who is most fit to be the Democratic nominee for President," said Joseph W. McQuaid, president and publisher of the Union Leader, according to the paper. "We were always concerned that this would have been the first time in 32 years without a Democratic debate before the New Hampshire primary. We are glad to partner with MSNBC to ensure Granite Staters have the information they need to make a critical decision on Feb. 9."

All three of the major campaigns reacted positively, although only Martin O'Malley definitively said that he would participate. "Hillary Clinton would be happy to participate in a debate in New Hampshire if the other candidates agree, which would allow the DNC to sanction the debate," Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri said, according to The Hill.

The DNC, however, has an exclusivity clause that requires candidates to only participate in sanctioned debates. Those who do not risk being suspended from other Democratic debates.

Wasserman Schultz, who has been under fire for not expanding the debates beyond the six that are on the schedule that has been perceived as an advantage to Clinton, also struck a defensive tone in her statement, saying, Here are the facts. Democratic debates this cycle have far exceeded the viewership of debates in past competitive primaries. Our October debate in Nevada set a Democratic primary record with 15.8 million viewers, the sixth-biggest non-sport cable broadcast in U.S. history, while our most recent debate on NBC was the third highest-rated debate in Democratic primary history with 12.5 million viewers including broadcast and online streaming."

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I liked the way Donald Trump disrupted the GOP establishment, but enough is enough of his childish attacks. Before the last debate, before Iowa has even begun, the GOP frontrunner is back to bullying Fox News anchor and debate moderator Megyn Kelly. In a disjointed, rambling rant at a press conference in Iowa, Trump backed out of Thursday's scheduled debate. Sounding like an egomaniac, Trump accused Fox of "playing games," blasting Kelly as "lightweight" and declared, "It's time that somebody plays grownup" - just not him!

In an interview earlier this week with CNN, Trump told Wolf Blizter that before the first GOP debate, which Kelly also co-moderated, "no one even heard of her." Sorry Donald, like you, Kelly was hugely famous before she moderated that first debate. You didn't make her a star. She made herself one long ago, before you decided to run for president.

"Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?" Kelly asked Trump in last year's first GOP debate, and it's an even better one now.

I defended Trump after Fox's treatment of him during the first debate. While some, including me, felt Kelly dealt with him unfairly, asking him personal questions that she didn't ask other candidates, I now believe Trump needs to get over it and move on.

Journalists have the right to ask whatever questions they choose. Candidates and elected officials aren't always going to like them or their questions. But men and women who seek to be elected to the highest office in the nation should try to behave like leaders.

They answer questions from reporters in debates - whether they think the reporters are biased or not - to prove they can handle the heat and are worthy of the job. In Iowa, Trump said America needs a leader "to make great deals with Russia." But if Trump is afraid of Megyn Kelly, can we trust that he really knows how to stand up to world dictators and terrorists, or will he throw a tantrum?

Fox News made the same observation, albeit slightly facetious, in its published response to his threatened exit from the upcoming debate, releasing the following statement yesterday:

"We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president - a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings," a Fox spokesperson said.

So Trump "doesn't like" Kelly. Yeah, we get that. But his obsession with her is starting to make him sound a little unhinged - like a rejected suitor. Could it be that Trump has a little crush on Megyn that's not reciprocated? Or was Kelly right in the first debate that Trump has a problem when it comes to women?

Whatever the answer, it's time for Trump to act like a leader, move on to important issues, and stop attacking Kelly.

---

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessary represent those of Headlines and Global News.

Crystal Wright is the author of the newly published book "Con Job: How Democrats Gave Us Crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering, and Racial Division" and editor and publisher of the blog Conservative Black Chick. As a black conservative woman living in Washington, D.C, some would say she is a triple minority: woman, black and a Republican living in a Democrat-dominated city. Wright is the principal owner of the Baker Wright Group, LLC , a full service public relations firm, specializing in communications counseling, media relations, message development, media training and crisis communications. Follow her on Twitter at @GOPBlackChick.

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The Danish parliament has approved a controversial proposal to confiscate asylum seeker's valuables to pay for their upkeep. Now authorities will be able to seize migrants' cash and individual items if they exceed $1,450 in value - a measure that backers of the proposal said is necessary to cover housing and food costs and keep them in line with jobless Danes.

The proposal's approval was almost a given, since Social Democrats, the primary opposition of the right-wing minority that presented bill, along with two small right-wing parties, backed the measure, according to the AFP.

And as expected, despite some opposition, the bill was passed with an overwhelming 81 to 27 majority vote in just under four hours.

"There's no simple answer for a single country, but until the world comes together on a joint solution (to the migrant crisis), Denmark needs to act," MP Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of Rasmussen's Venstre party said during the debate.

With the policy in place, supporters of the bill say the policy brings migrants in line with jobless Danes, who must sell assets above a certain level to claim benefits.

"All Danish citizens and refugees coming here receive universal health care; you receive education from preschool to university, and you receive elderly care; you receive language training and integration training free of charge, paid for by the government," Jensen said of the proposal, according to CNN.

"The only demand that we set to measure this is if you have the means to pay for your housing and for your food - regardless of whether you are a Dane or whether you are a refugee - then you should," he asserted.

Those opposing the bill were not convinced of its intentions however, saying the measures would cause more harm than anything else.

"The decision to give Danish police the authority to search and confiscate valuables from asylum seekers sends damaging messages in our view," UNHCR spokesman Adiran Edwards said before the vote, according to the BBC. "It runs the risk of fuelling sentiments of fear and discrimination rather than promoting solidarity with people in need of protection."

Social Democrat Dan Jorgensen addressed such concerns, challenging opponents of the bill to find a viable alternative.

"The alternative is that we continue to be (one of) the most attractive countries in Europe to come to, and then we end up like Sweden," he warned, referencing the fact that Sweden received more than 160,000 migrants, compared to Denmark's 18,000 in 2015.

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Tony Perkins, president of influential Christian conservative lobbying group Family Research Council, threw his weight behind GOP presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz Tuesday night, saying the "constitutional conservative" is "best prepared to lead this nation forward, pulling it out of the tailspin this president has put us in."

"I have many friends in this race, but I believe the one who is best positioned, best prepared to lead this nation forward, pulling it out of the tailspin this president has put us in, I believe it is Ted Cruz," Perkins told Fox News' Megyn Kelly, reported TIME. "He is smart, he is bold, much like you, he is not afraid to upset people to do the right thing."

Perkins, 52, added: "I trust Ted to fight to pull America out of the political and cultural tailspin that President Obama's policies have put us in. This is no normal election; this election is about the very survival of our Constitution and our republic."

Cruz said he was "honored" to gain an endorsement from Perkins, a man who has "incredible principle and faith," according to The Washington Times. Perkins has been president of the Family Research Council, a socially conservative, pro-family issues group, since 2003.

The endorsement comes as Cruz battles Donald Trump for the support of Christian conservatives ahead of the all-important Iowa caucuses on Monday.

Cruz has also received endorsements from past Research Council President Gary Bauer, social conservative leader James Dobson, conservative media personality Glenn Beck and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Trump, on the other hand, recently won the support of 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as well as Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr.

Earlier this month, a Fox News poll from Iowa showed Cruz beating Trump by four points, but Trump has regained his footing in the latest poll to come out of the Hawkeye State, leading the pack with 39 percent support, a full 20 points higher than second-place Cruz.

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The Wounded Warrior Project, the charity for wounded veterans, is being criticized for how it is spending donor money, with a CBS News investigation alleging that a majority of the money that should be used on recovery programs is instead used for conferences and lavish parties.

Speaking to an assortment of current and former employees, the investigation team discovered just how deeply the charity's misappropriation of funds ran.

One such testimony came from Army Staff Sergeant Erick Millette, who returned from Iraq in 2006 with a bronze star and a purple heart, as well as traumatic brain injury and PTSD. He said that he initially admired the charity's work and even participated in its programs, becoming a public speaker with the group in 2013. However, he wound up quitting only two years later.

He said that he witnessed needless spending on staff and lavish parties during his two-year tenure, according to Fox News.

"Their mission is to honor and empower wounded warriors, but what the public doesn't see is how they spend their money," Millette said.

"Going to a nice fancy restaurant is not team building. Staying at a lavish hotel at the beach here in Jacksonville, and requiring staff that lives in the area to stay at the hotel is not team building," he added.

Just how much money does the group spend on these conferences and meetings? Tax forms obtained by CBS indicate that in 2014, the charity spent $26 million for such gatherings, up from the $1.7 million used in 2010.

Two former employees, who asked CBS not to show their faces on camera, blamed CEO Steven Nardizzi, who rose to the position in 2009, for the spending increase. In their accusation, they referenced a 2014 annual meeting at a resort in Colorado Springs that cost about $3 million.

"He rappelled down the side of a building at one of the all hands events. He's come in on a Segway, he's come in on a horse," one of them said.

In particular, what surprised the investigation team was just how much of its budget WWP actually spends on vets. Based on public records from Charity Navigator, the Wounded Warrior Project spends about 60 percent of its budget on vets. This a far cry from the 96 and 91 percent Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust and Fisher House devotes, respectively.

The investigation into the charity follows in the footsteps of another conducted in 2012-2013 by The Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Though it didn't make the "worst 50 list" based on money blown on soliciting costs, the investigation did find that it has gotten mixed reviews from independent charity watchdogs. For example, Charity Watch gave the group a "C+" grade, up from a "D" in 2010.

In the meantime, armed with this knowledge, CBS tried to get into contact with Nardizzi but was instead referred to Director of Alumni Captain Ryan Kules, who denied the excessive spending accusations.

"It's the best use of donor dollars to ensure we are providing programs and services to our warriors and families at the highest quality," Kules said.

He reiterated that answer when asked about why the conferences are held at five-star resorts instead of cheaper alternatives: "Like I said, it's to make sure we are aligned and can build as a team. Be able to be able to provide the best quality services."

Kules concluded by denying that the Colorado conference cost $3 million, but he was unable to say how much it did cost. Likewise, he denied that charity spends money on alcohol or any other kind of excessive spending as a whole.

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A locked safe was discovered within a wall of drug lord Pablo Escobar's former Miami Beach pink mansion, after it was demolished by its new owners on Tuesday. Christian de Berdouare of Chicken Kitchen bought the mansion in 2014 for $9.65 million and was in charge of having it demolished, as reported by HNGN.

Amid hopes the safe could contain a loot stashed by Escobar during his reign over a $20 billion drug empire, de Berdouare moved quickly to hide it off-site, according to The Daily Mail.

The 1,300-pound (600 kg) safe was found when excavator operator, Miguel Mato, knocked down the last walls on the 7,336-square-foot home overlooking Biscayne Bay. "We had left one of the walls because they had to film a scene for a documentary. When I started to knock it down, a piece of rubble hit the foundation, the floor sunk and I saw it," Mato said, according to The Miami Herald. "It was something gray. I grabbed it with the excavator's claw, realized it was a safe and started to yell to tell them."

Professional treasure hunters were hired by de Berdouare to search the rubble. He believed when he bought the Miami mansion that Escobar, who was killed by Colombian police, may have hidden cash and diamonds there, according to BBC News.

"This is real. It's still locked. It's very, very heavy. We can't believe it. Now Pablito is my best friend," de Berdouare told the Miami Herald.

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Iran continues to lead the world in the number of executions carried out against offenders who were convicted while minors, despite recent reforms and pledging more than 20 years ago to move away from using the death penalty for people under the age of 18, Amnesty International said in a new report released Tuesday.

In its 110-page report, titled, "Growing Up on Death Row: The Death Penalty and Juvenile Offenders in Iran," the human right's group said that the Islamic Republic hanged at least 73 juveniles between 2005 and 2015, including at least four last year.

"This report sheds light on Iran's shameful disregard for the rights of children. Iran is one of the few countries that continues to execute juvenile offenders in blatant violation of the absolute legal prohibition on the use of the death penalty against people under the age of 18 years at the time of the crime," Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director Said Boumedouha said.

Amnesty, a leading advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, listed the names and locations of 49 juveniles currently facing execution, and the United Nations says that at least 160 minors remain on death row. The numbers are likely much higher, as Iran keeps such information under lock and key and never announces when a person who was convicted as a juvenile is executed, Amnesty said.

The majority of juveniles put to death over the past decade were convicted of murder, while others were executed for rape, drug offenses and threats to national security.

Iran has boasted laws recently passed that are supposedly designed to improve children's rights and has insisted that it doesn't execute anyone younger than 18. However, Amnesty said that the laws are actually attempts "to whitewash their continuing violations of children's rights and deflect criticism of their appalling record as one of the world's last executioners of juvenile offenders."

Iran still has laws on the books that allow "girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 15 to be sentenced to death," according to Said.

Hassan Hanizadeh, the editor-in-chief of the Meher News Agency in Tehran, told Al Jazeera that Iran "is a country of law and has an independent judiciary - unlike the neighboring Arab countries for example - which means that the Iranian legal system takes due diligence in its sentencing guidelines."

He insisted that those "executed were major drug dealers who were using Iran as a transit country to smuggle drugs into Europe and other countries."

"As far as Amnesty's report and other Western organizations that accuse Iran of illegally executing people, one must question the motives of these organizations before taking their reports as credible information," Hanizadeh said. "These international groups deal with these issues from a political perspective and often try to smear Iran's reputation out of political motives and political agendas."

A U.N. report from October found that Tehran continues to execute more individuals per capita than any other country in the world, hanging at least 694 people between Jan. 1 and Sept. 15, which likely puts the execution rate at its highest in some 25 years. By year's end, Iran had executed 966 people, up from 721 in 2014, according to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.

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News / Local

by Staff Reporter

Residents at Glenwood and Umbilo in Durban South Africa are reported to have been angered by prostitutes whom they demand should be removed from the area.Daily Sun reported that now the residents are fed up, demanding that the sex workers be removed as they have lowered property prices.Residents also complained that their friends no longer visited them.Ward committee spokesman Ben Madokwe (37) said eThekwini Municipality should find a private and decent place for the sex workers to operate.Madokwe said: "They can't be let free to wander the streets and our doorsteps like hungry vultures with their short skirts that reveal bums. When you tell them to move away from your home, they swear at you."They are teaching our kids filth and that's not acceptable!"Madokwe said the invasion by the magoshas has affected the two neighbourhoods badly."People don't want to buy our houses any more," said Madokwe."We can't even have visitors in our homes because the magoshas harass them."The moment they stop at the gate, the prostitutes run towards them and start moving their bodies inappropriately to attract them.""We are not against their business, but there has to be a decent place in which they can operate."We have reported the matter to the municipality several times, but nothing has happened."Tozi Mthethwa, spokeswoman for eThekwini Municipality, said the council was aware of the matter.Mthethwa said the city's safer cities unit and Metro cops have been working closely with the United Nations Embassy, the SAPS and the National Prosecution Authority."The aim is to establish programmes that will identify prostitution hot spots and help rehabilitate the young women in need of assistance," she said.KZN police spokesman Brigadier Jay Naicker said the cops were also doing their best to sweep the streets clean.
Y oung first-time buyers are competing with investors for smaller flats and houses, ahead of new stamp duty hikes for buy-to-let property that come into force in April.

The stampede to buy is great news for anyone ready to sell their first flat. However, moving up to a bigger family house is not so easy.

According to a report by Lloyds Bank, the average owner looking to make their second step up the property ladder needs to find an extra 125,694 to plug the gap between the sale price of their current home and the cost of their ideal buy, typically a detached property. Thats a lot of money, even taking into account the capital you have built up in your first home.

But if you are prepared to house-hunt in new areas, it is possible to make the jump to a more spacious house.

Catford

Trendy Brixton or East Dulwich might be out of your price range, but you get an awful lot more for your money in south-east London if you head to somewhere like Catford. A really smart four- bedroom period house would cost from about 600,000, while three-bedroom Victorian houses  some with attics crying out to be converted  can be on the market at about 500,000.



Catford is the focus of regeneration, with plans to do up its tired high street and revamp some of its ugly estates. Barratt Homes is also redeveloping the towns former dog track, building 588 homes and 113 retail properties.

Transport links in the town are excellent. It is in Zone 3 and commuters can be at Blackfriars in 22 minutes. There is green space in the form of Ladywell Fields, and schools include Rathfern Primary, rated outstanding by Ofsted. For seniors, Conisborough College gets a good report.

Charlie Reed, sales negotiator at Robinson Jackson estate agents, says the top address for families is the Culverley Green conservation area. A four- to five-bedroom Victorian semi in this enclave would cost a little more  about 750,000 to 800,000

Leytonstone

The north-east London area of Leytonstone is gaining traction from buyers priced out of Hackney. Its benefits include having Wanstead Flats on the doorstep and some good Victorian terraces, while Davies Lane Primary is outstanding, according to Ofsted.

Trains from Leytonstone High Road will deliver you to Fenchurch Street in half an hour and an annual season ticket costs 1,520. Three-bedroom terrace houses cost about 500,000  much of what you would pay for a modern two-bedroom flat in Stratford, less than two miles away.

Charlton

Buyers priced out of Blackheath or Greenwich are looking further south east, with Charlton a popular choice, says Graham Lawes, a director at JLL. A mid-terrace Victorian house would cost 600,000 to 700,000.

620,000: good schools nearby make this three-bedroom semi-detached house in Elliscombe Road, Charlton, a good second-stepper option. Through Conran Estates



The area has very good schools, including All Saints School, rated outstanding by Ofsted and, as such, there has been a natural migration of young families to the area, says Lawes.

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Charlton has several lovely parks and, for summer, a really good lido. Its shops are ordinary, but there are some decent pubs. A key local landmark is The Valley, Charlton Athletic FCs ground.

It is in Zone 3 and trains to Charing Cross or Cannon Street take less than half an hour. An annual season ticket costs 1,520.
"Everyone eats!" is the motto I cite far too often to express the importance of having stellar F&B operations, both in terms of service delivery as well as the ingenuity of your cuisine. Fine these days does not cut it anymore, and unless you are constantly attempting to improve your operations, you run the risk of instilling complacency and a tired brand perception.

With new restaurants opening daily with fresh menus and concepts sourced from across the world, your job as a manager and restaurateur is only getting harder. Here's what I've learned from my travels in the past quarter which you can apply for the calendar year of 2016.

1. A restaurant doesn't have to focus on one specialty. Yes, it's easier to market, but blending two very different yet established styles into one venue can work if you give both the attention they deserve. The one example that captured the best of both worlds was a steakhouse with sushi for appetizers and several fish fillet entrees.

2. Reinventing house wines. Why not create custom blends at recognized vineyards, curated uniquely for your restaurant? Partner with serious wineries and price your bottles appropriately (that is, not bottom-of-the-barrel jug wines) to provide a beverage experience unique to your property.

3. Mix and match appetizers. Often couples or groups want to share taste experiences as it adds to the conversation. This is especially true for starter or tapas-style menus. Using a 'three place' and 'four place' serving dish, offer the customers an opportunity to select multiple appetizers at a combined price.

4. Appetizer samples with beverages. Imagine that every cocktail served in the bar had an accompanying appetizer that was specifically matched to the drink. This creates a playful companion service while adding to margins. You might also consider a tiny portion accompaniment as an amuse bouche to introduce an element of surprise.

5. The case for tacos. I've been smitten by some of the best tacos ever created on the face of the earth, and this trend is not exclusive to the American Southwest. Literally, any meat, vegetable and sauce mixture your chef can create can be supported within a soft taco shell. Use your imagination and have some fun. Tacos can be apportioned for starters or mains  they're adaptable!

6. Tea Time done right. Sorry, but few of us outside of the Commonwealth elite know how to serve tea properly (the traditional British way). It's time to take tea seriously: teapots unique to each tea blend, teacups with saucers and very hot water. Local sourcing isn't always possible, but nevertheless be on the lookout for small-batch suppliers.

7. The days of 'supersizing' are over. Smaller portions and unique preparations are the future. Even something as simple as a burger and fries has been right-sized. The key is higher quality ingredients; patrons will feel full off of smaller portions because the ingredients have higher concentrations of nutrients. Local sourcing naturally implies quality as most forms of storage or processing reduce nutrient concentrations.

8. Heat has no bounds. Hot sauces, spicy accompaniments and custom chipotle items are appearing everywhere. A chili infusion seems to be the standard for many new menu elements, even if it's a subtle kick muddled by yogurt or aioli. Sriracha is the new hot sauce; harissa is the new sriracha. Any way you put it, the days of bland food are over.

9. Breakfasts are no longer boring. Throw out your standard continental breakfast menu. Yes, many people will seek normalcy to kickoff their days, but the world is slowly awakening to a more adventurous morning. Think regional specialties, unique approaches to staples like eggs benny and artisanal breads. Find your chefs the freedom they need to innovate.

10. Buffets for foodies. The words 'buffet' and 'foodie' are rarely used in the same sentence, unless of course you are dealing with a foodie subculture devoted to the former. Consider the new trend of high-end buffets which are actually more in the ways of samplers with everything you would expect at a chef's table - not inexpensive, obviously, but still an outstanding way to break from the pack.

With these ten suggestions, it's time to challenge your team. Encourage them to go to new restaurants on a regular basis. Learn what you can and don't be afraid to make it happen.

Larry Mogelonsky

Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited
First, I'd like to start this article by saying "Felicitations!" and "Gratuliere!" to hoteliers in France and Germany. It is an exciting time to be a European hotelier because the laws relating to rate parity are being amended as we speak/write.

In July 2015, the French National Assembly completed the process to ban rate parity clauses in contracts between online travel agencies (OTAs) and hotels. Germany's courts have decreed that OTAs cannot have a "best price" clause in their contracts with German hotels  and that all OTA contracts must be amended by January 31, 2016.

As many European properties obtain 70% of their business from the OTAs (vs. 35% to 50% in the US) and because most consumers choose a hotel room based primarily on price, the new laws can help French and German hoteliers funnel more business to the direct channels, minimizing their reliance on the OTAs, while increasing occupancy, decreasing the cost of acquisition and increasing overall RevPAR.

While it is still not clear exactly how the European market as a whole will be affected by this ruling over the long-term, we are seeing drastic changes on the horizon that will have HUGE effects on the industry  both in Europe and abroad. Booking.com and Expedia are implementing changes in their contracts in other European markets, allowing hoteliers to offer lower prices on competing OTAs but NOT through their direct channels. The two OTAs are making this change in an effort to preempt further legislation (similar to France and Germany's rulings) that would banish rate parity clauses across the board.

While Booking.com and Expedia's contract changes will help hoteliers (as it allows them to direct more business to smaller OTAs with lower commission rates by offering lower rates through these channels), it will not create the widespread changes that are necessary to give hoteliers control back over their revenues. Until hotels are allowed to offer the cheapest rate through the direct channel (and/or all restrictions are eliminated completely), European hotels will remain reliant on the OTAs for the majority of their income, and therefore, will be sacrificing a large percentage of revenue to commissions.

As a whole, the European Commission is moving towards making a European-wide decision on the issue, which  if enacted - will have HUGE impact on both European hoteliers and eventually, North American hoteliers (who will follow suit at some point once laws are amended in Europe).

But until rate parity laws are amended worldwide, it is still possible for hoteliers to increase the amount of revenue that they earn through the online channels  without changes in legislation.

By using a sophisticated revenue management system (RMS) that facilitates automated pricing updates made in real-time (as the market changes), hoteliers can guarantee that they will be pricing their rooms at the right price, at the right time, across all of the online channels, which will result in a drastic increase in occupancy and revenue. An automated pricing strategy will also continue to benefit hoteliers long after the law is implemented in every European country, as it will help hoteliers to adapt to any pricing and distribution trends that manifest as a result of the new legislation  no matter which possible outcome is realized.

Andrea Carr

RevPAR Guru Inc.
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The Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) requires $458 million this year to buy coal and operate a diesel plant.According to a paper presented at a consultative meeting in Bulawayo recently, ZPC requires $124 million to purchase coal and $8 million for Kariba water.A further $22 million is for Hwange diesel plant and $242 million for payroll costs, administration, depreciation and to pay Zimbabwe Electricity Regulatory Authority regulatory fees, among other expenses.In 2014 and 2015, the total expenditure was $498 million and $458 million respectively.ZPC is proposing a 22% increase in power costs from 5,06 cents per kilowatt hour to 6,64 cents per kilowatt hour on sale to Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC).ZETDC wants a 49% tariff hike to 14,69 cents per kilowatt hour which it says is cost reflective and necessary to augment emergency power imports. Zesa has recently started to import 300MW from South Africa's Eskom to supplement local generation.ZPC executive assistant Douglas Chingoka who presented the paper said 3 million tonnes of coal were required to meet the targeted output and coal costs for small thermal stations take into account the need to transport the coal by rail or road.He said Kariba Power Station will need 11 billion cubic metres of water at an average price of $0.000681 per cubic metre."Water costs also include dam maintenance. Diesel will be used for commissioning of units after planned and forced outages, as well as for stabilising flames. Costs of some inputs have significantly increased since the last tariff increase in 2011," he said.
Montage Hotels & Resorts and Ares Management, L.P. (NYSE: ARES) announced today that a real estate fund managed by Ares has made a strategic investment in Montage Hotels & Resorts, a leading luxury hospitality management company.

Montage Hotels & Resorts and Ares Management, L.P. (NYSE: ARES) announced today that a real estate fund managed by Ares has made a strategic investment in Montage Hotels & Resorts, a leading luxury hospitality management company.

As part of the transaction, Ares will purchase a minority stake of up to 20% in Montage Hotels & Resorts. Ares also will provide up to $200 million in future growth capital to Montage Hotels & Resorts, with a strategic focus on the continued expansion of its portfolio of Montage- and Pendry-branded hotels and resorts.

As the company's largest shareholder, Alan J. Fuerstman will remain at the helm of Montage Hotels & Resorts, continuing to serve as the Founder and CEO, as well as Chairman of the Board. All original investors in Montage Hotels & Resorts also remain invested, including Ohana Real Estate Investors. Jay Glaubach, a Managing Director at Ares Management and Co-Portfolio Manager of Ares' opportunistic real estate funds, now joins the Montage Hotels & Resorts Board of Directors.

"We are delighted to welcome Ares into the Montage family," said Mr. Fuerstman. "We greatly admire the vision, culture of excellence and track record of investment success that the Ares team has established over the last several years. With the continued support of our original investors and now also with Ares, Montage Hotels & Resorts is poised for tremendous growth and success in the years ahead."

"We are excited to be making this investment on behalf of our investors because of the unparalleled caliber of Montage's existing portfolio and its management team. Montage continues to achieve superb financial results for its owners as well as provide exceptional service to its loyal guests and residents. We see tremendous growth opportunities for the company, and look forward to working with Alan and the team to continue to build out this leading platform," said Mr. Glaubach.

This transaction marks the second Ares investment with Montage Hotels & Resorts. Funds managed by Ares made an investment in Pendry San Diego, part of the company's new luxury lifestyle brand, Pendry Hotels. The new hotel will debut in San Diego's historic Gaslamp District in the fall of 2016.

"This transaction comes on the heels of our company and our hotels having achieved our best-ever operating results, with even further growth anticipated for 2016 and beyond," added Mr. Fuerstman. "The future is bright."

Dentons served as counsel to Montage Hotels & Resorts.
Excerpted from Stanley Turkel's book 'Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi (AuthorHouse 2013)'

1. Hotel History: The Willard Hotel (335 rooms)

The National Park Service and the U.S. Department of the Interior describe the history of the Willard Hotel as follows:

American author Nathaniel Hawthorne observed in the 1860s that "the Willard Hotel more justly could be called the center of Washington than either the Capitol or the White House or the State Department." From 1847 when the enterprising Willard brothers, Henry and Edwin, first set up as innkeepers on the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the Willard has occupied a unique niche in the history of Washington and the nation. In 1847, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe leased the establishment to Henry A. Willard and his brother, Edwin. In 1858, the Willards expanded again, purchasing the property of Col. James Kearney and built a six-story addition to the hotel.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new Willard Hotel was built by the George A. Fuller Company to the designs of the famous architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh. In 1922, a major fire caused the evacuation by Vice President Calvin Coolidge, several U.S. Senators, composer John Philip Sousa, movie producer Adolph Zukor and other attendees at the annual Gridiron Dinner.

Presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, Grant, Taft, Wilson, Coolidge and Harding stayed at the Willard. Other notable guests have included Charles Dickens, Buffalo Bill, David Lloyd George, P.T. Barnum, and countless others. Walt Whitman included the Willard in his verses and Mark Twain wrote two books there in the early 1900s. It was Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, annoyed at the Willard's high prices, who coined the phrase "What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar."

Situated just two blocks from the White House, the hotel is replete with the ghosts of the famous and powerful. Over the years it has been the gathering place for presidents, politicians, governors, literary and cultural figures. It was at the Willard that Julia Ward Howe composed "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Gen. Ulysses S. Grant held court in the lobby and Abraham Lincoln borrowed house slippers from its proprietor. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jenny Lind were all part of the parade of celebrated Willard guests.

Even the uniquely political term "lobbyist" is said to have been coined at the Willard to describe those 19thcentury special-interest promoters who cornered politicians in the opulent Willard lobby.

The Willard sat vacant and in danger of demolition from 1968 until 1986 when it was restored to its former glory. A $73 million restoration project was carefully planned by the National Park Service to recreate the hotel as historically accurate as possible. Sixteen layers of paint were scraped from the woodwork to ascertain the hotel's original 1901 colors.

New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote on September 22, 1986:

Most restorations of venerable buildings fall into one of two categories; They are either attempts to recreate as faithfully as possible what once was, or they are inventive interpretations that use the original architecture as a jumping-off point.

The newly rehabilitated Willard Hotel is both. Half of this project involves the respectful restoration of Washington's greatest hotel building, a distinguished Beaux-Arts structure by Henry Hardenbergh that had been derelict since 1968, a victim of the decline of its neighborhood, a few blocks east of the White House. The other half is an exuberantly conceived, brand new addition containing offices, shops, public plaza and a new ballroom for the hotel.

The hotels grand reopening in 1986 under the management of the InterContinental hotel chain  its full name is the Willard InterContinental Washington  was credited with rejuvenating downtown Washington.

The Willard InterContinental Washington is a member of Historic Hotels of America and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

*Excerpted from my book Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi (AuthorHouse 2013)

2. Hot Off The Press: Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry

In his Foreword, Lawrence Horwitz, Executive Director of Historic Hotels of America describes my new book:

If you have ever been in a hotel, as a guest, attended a conference, enjoyed a romantic dinner, celebrated a special occasion, or worked as a hotelier in the front or back of the house, Great American Hoteliers, Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry is a must read book. This book is recommended for any business person, entrepreneur, student, or aspiring hotelier. This book is an excellent history book with insights into seventeen of the great innovators and visionaries of the hotel industry and their inspirational stories.

Those seventeen great hotel innovators are:

Stewart Bainum, Sr., Curtis L. Carlson, Cecil B. Day, Louis J. Dinkler, Eugene C. Eppley, Ray C. Kelley, Arnold S. Kirkeby, Julius Manger, Robert R. Meyer, Albert Pick, Jr., Jay Pritzker, Harris Rosen, Ian Schrager, Vernon B. Stouffer, William C. Van Horne, Robert E. Woolley and Stephen A. Wynn.

If you want to order an autographed hardcover copy (with dust jacket), send a check for $36.00 to:

Stanley Turkel

147-03 Jewel Avenue

Flushing, N.Y. 11367

Be sure to include your mailing address.

About Stanley Turkel, CMHS

Stanley Turkel was designated as the 2015 and the 2014 Historian of the Year by Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This award is presented to an individual for making a unique contribution in the research and presentation of hotel history and whose work has encouraged a wide discussion, greater understanding and enthusiasm for American History.

Turkel is a well-known consultant in the hotel industry. He operates his hotel consulting practice serving as an expert witness in hotel-related cases, providing asset management and hotel franchising consultation. He is certified as a Master Hotel Supplier Emeritus by the Educational Institute of the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

Stanley Turkel is one of the most widely-published authors in the hospitality field. More than 275 articles on various hotel subjects have been posted in hotel magazines and on the Hotel-Online, BlueMauMau, HotelNewsResource and eTurboNews websites. Two of his hotel books have been promoted, distributed and sold by the American Hotel & Lodging Educational Institute (Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry and Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi). A third hotel book (Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York) was called "passionate and informative" by the New York Times. His fourth hotel book was described by the New York Times: Nostalgia for the Citys caravansaries will be kindled by Stanley Turkels... fact-filled... Hotel Mavens: Lucius M. Boomer, George C. Boldt and Oscar of the Waldorf.

All of these books can be ordered from the publisher by visiting www.stanleyturkel.com.



Stanley Turkel, CMHS

917-628-8549

stanturkel@aol.com

www.stanleyturkel.com
This is the first Holiday Inn hotel located in the downtown area of the city and joins the Crowne Plaza Houston-Downtown hotel and the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Houston-Downtown Convention Center hotel, already located nearby.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) announced the opening of the newly-converted 212-room Holiday Inn Houston Downtown hotel in Houston, Texas. This is the first Holiday Inn hotel located in the downtown area of the city and joins the Crowne Plaza Houston-Downtown hotel and the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Houston-Downtown Convention Center hotel, already located nearby. The hotel boasts a second floor terrace with a wonderful view of Houston's Downtown Skyline and is conveniently located near Houston's Metrorail.

Eric Lent, Vice President, Holiday Inn Brand, The Americas, IHG said: "We are delighted to expand the Holiday Inn brand to downtown Houston. It is a strong market for business travel given its proximity to some of the area's big businesses, and we are confident that guests staying here will find that the property's amenities and service help them balance the demands of business travel with an enjoyable and relaxing stay."

The Holiday Inn brand opened the doors of its first hotel more than 60 years ago and since then has been making travel more enjoyable for generations of travelers all over the world. Whether on the journey of a lifetime, a family vacation or business, guests know they can expect the contemporary design, modern amenities, and warm, welcoming service that distinguish the Holiday Inn brand.

Holiday Inn hotels are designed to provide a welcoming and sociable environment for business travelers spending time away from home. Amenities including free Wi-Fi, easily accessible outlets throughout guestrooms, ample meeting space and convenient open public areas ideal for collaboration or post-meeting relaxation help travelers stay productive and accomplish their goals in a warm atmosphere, making business travel about more than just work.

The Holiday Inn Houston Downtown hotel also includes a fully-equipped fitness center overlooking the hotel's terrace and Burger Theory, the hotel's on-site restaurant and bar which offers various casual dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Kids 12 and younger eat free when ordering from the kids' menu in the hotel restaurant and accompanied by a dining adult.

Donato Pinierio, General Manager, said: "With our close proximity to the Theater District and the George R. Brown Convention Center, and convenient access to a number of big businesses such as Chevron, Deloitte and JP Morgan Chase, as well as Houston's Metrorail, we anticipate our hotel will quickly become a favorite choice of business and convention travelers visiting the area."

The hotel, located at 1616 Main Street is owned by HDT Hotels LLC and managed by Pathfinder Development.
In yesterday's session the stock of Origin Clear Inc (OTCMKTS:OOIL) took a bit of a stumble on a considerable volume spike. By the bell OOIL was over 7% down at $0.025 per share, having shifted a dollar volume of over $160 thousand.

The stock is falling into a bit of a routing where every climb, no matter how small, is followed by a significant selloff on massive volume  something that can be observed in early December, as well as in mid-January.

OOIL completed the acquisition of an entity called Progressive Water Treatment for $1.5 million back in 2015 and published the entity's balance sheet in an 8-K filing. The figures were encouraging, as even though PWT was not profitable for the six-month period ending June 2015, it generated far greater revenues than OOIL and its net loss was far smaller.

On Jan 12 OOIL announced that NYSE-listed Xcel Energy awarded the company with a $2 million contract, which seems to be a significant vote of confidence. The market did not react in any meanintful way to the news with OOIL closing flat on the day of the PR and a fraction of a percent up on the next.

Traders should perhaps also be aware of the situation with OOIL's share structure. The company increased its authorized shares four-fold in Q3 of 2014, going from 250 million to 1 billion AS. This space is already being used up, with OOIL reporting 211 million OS as of mid-November 2015, with another $2.6 million in remaining balance on convertible notes that turn into shares at a 50% discount from the lowest share price recorded after the original effective date of the notes.
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Melissas House Grant to Benefit YWCA Columbus Historic Renovation Grant funds will be used to renovate a residential lounge.

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 01-27-2016 3:29 am

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Columbus, OH (PRWEB) January 21, 2016Melissas House, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create comfortable, nurturing environments for adults living with mental illness, has joined forces with the YWCA Columbus to announce a significant grant agreement. Melissas House has pledged $100,000 to help transform the Griswold Building, the YWCA Columbus downtown home at 65 S. 4th Street. The Melissas House grant will be used to renovate a third-floor residential lounge, which will have a major impact on the lives and families of more than 90 women living in the buildings residences. We are so pleased to be partnering with the YWCA Columbus,  said Jeff Knupp, Melissas House Chairman of the Board. Many of the women who live there are recovering from mental illnesses. Creating a space that is warm and comfortable will enhance their environm...

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One of Those "REALLY? with Seth and Amy" Stories About Sexual Harassment

Posted by Lisa Smith on Tuesday, 01-26-2016 9:48 pm

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Hey HR Compliance Warriors! This is really one for the Idiot Book. Famous international yoga guru Bikram Choudhury and his yoga college must pay at least $924,000 in damages for sexually harassing his former legal adviser and wrongfully firing her for investigating sexual discrimination and assault claims against him, a California jury concluded Monday. Really?? CMON Man! After less than two days of deliberation following last weeks closing arguments, the nine-woman, three-man jury found in favor of Choudhurys former legal adviser, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, on her claims of sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, awarding her $924,000 in compensatory damages. OK, lets break this down. This loser is an international yoga guru with 720 yoga schools in 220 countries. He pioneered the very popular Hot Yoga you see in most cities around the world. He harassed his ATTORNEY. REALLY?? Yes. He even told CNN allegations that he sexually assaulted...

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SICKWEATHER PRO FORECASTS FLU ACTIVITY 15 WEEKS IN ADVANCE Can Help HR Professionals Mitigate Costs of Absenteeism and Presenteeism

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 01-27-2016 5:19 am

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BALTIMORE, MD  January 21st, 2016  Sickweather, developer of the worlds first real-time map of illness, has just launched Sickweather Pro, an enterprise solution providing detailed intelligence on the spread of illness with flu activity forecasts up to 15 weeks in advance with 91% accuracy. Sickweather Pro is powered by Nightingale: Sickweathers data science engine for classifying public reports of illness from social media. This engine leverages Sickweathers patent-pending disease surveillance technology with additional crowdsourced input from Sickweathers own consumer-facing apps and 3rd party partners like Johnson & Johnsons HealthyDay app, Swaives Smart Ear Thermometer, and more. "Sickweather Pro offers the full might of our new Nightingale engine to HR professionals and public health organizations, among others, who can use it to get the earliest warning available of illness trends in the US, says Graham Dodge...

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YourNurse - Innovation or common sense? New service provides integrated physical and mental health services for employees with easy single-point access and transparency for employers

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 01-27-2016 5:15 am

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MARKHAM, Ont. (January 19, 2016)  Replacing programs such as Employee Assistance Plans, Medical Second Opinion, Disability Support, Caregiving/Healthcare Navigation and Chronic Disease Management Services, YourNurse provides a single point of contact to help employees navigate their health benefits with experienced nurses as their guides.Employee health services have focused on either a physical or mental health concern, but employees challenges are often more complicated. At the same time employers and plan sponsors deal with ambiguous reporting and unclear organizational value.But a newly launched service  YourNurse  is bringing clarity to the marketplace and giving employees and employers the excellent service they deserve.Employees shouldnt have to struggle to get the help they need and employers shouldnt be left in the dark about how the benefit programs theyve purchased are being used, said Jamie Marcellus, President ...

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As the population ages, millions of people are discovering shortfalls in their retirement strategies. The standard of living they planned for is becoming increasingly difficult to reach and harder to maintain. Experts believe this problem will only grow over time. Studies show the current workforce is ill-prepared for retirement dates that are still 20 to 30 years away. For these workers, access to reliable retirement funds is worse than it was in the 1980s, underlining the critical situation that has developed for retirees over the past 40 years. A Major Problem The Employee Benefit Research Institute found that the U.S. median for 401(k) account balances was $18,433 in 2013. The numbers are a bit better for employees aged 55 to 64, who managed a median of $76,381. However, nearly 40 percent of workers across all demographics have less than $10,000 saved, and, as the Center for American Progress reports, more than 30 percent have no retirement savings at all. Among retirement-aged people, 19 percent are without any pension or retirement income beyond Social Security. These shortfalls are going to place even more pressure on over-burdened resources such as government agencies, charities, and families that are already starting to feel the weight of the retirement crisis. Missing the Mark When defined-contribution plans such as 401(k) and IRAs were introduced, the allure of amassing wealth tax-free through prudent investments was a promising prospect ...
Open enrollment often occurs at the end of the year, but despite coinciding with the holidays (most open enrollment periods go from November to January), many businesses find that this is the opposite of the most wonderful time of the year. In fact, with all the paperwork and the decisions that your company must make to ensure that your employees get coverage that will work for them, while simultaneously meeting the requirements and provisions of the Affordable Care Act, open enrollment can be a business owner's most stressful time of the year. As youre determining open enrollment contribution strategies, here are some things to keep in mind. Understand All the Choices Available Traditional insurance plans dont make sense for every employer, especially small businesses with few employees. If you are a small or micro business, it might make more sense to reimburse employees for their own individual plans through a defined contribution health plan, allowing them to shop around and find the lowest cost plan that makes sense for their situation, or go in the direction of a health savings account (HSA). As a small business employer, you need to stay educated about all the options that are out there so you are able to find the one that has the smallest impact on your bottom line, while simultaneously providing employees with competitive and high quality benefits. Let Your Employees Decide Whats Best Consumer-directed ...
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by Staff Reporter

ZESA Holdings will import 40 mega watts of electricity from Mozambique, making the proposed tariffs increase inevitable as the energy from Mozambique is expensive.ZESA has already agreed with the National Electridad de Mozambique (EDM) for the importation of 40 mega watts at 15 cents per kilowatt hour.The agreement was reached last week after ZESA Holdings went to Mozambique.ZESA Holdings Group CEO, Engineer Josh Chifamba said the importation of electricity is part of efforts to keep the industry running."We negotiated for 100 mega watts but we have agreed on 40 mega watts which will come at 15.5 cents per kilowatt hour. This is being made to ensure that lights will remain on, otherwise the country will be in darkness," he said.Engineer Chifamba claimed that there is improvement of supply of electricity owing to innovations that the organisation has come up with as a way of managing water in Kariba Dam.The power utility is selling electricity to clients at a cost of 8.64 cents per kilowatt hour.The importation of electricity at a high cost of 15 cents per kilowatt hour means ZESA will have to increase tariffs to break even.
The New Year has arrived! And with its arrival, many employees are focused on resolutions to exercise more, eat healthier and lose weight. Thanks to the ongoing wearable fitness tracker trend, it is easier than ever for employees to track their resolution progress. However, data alone doesnt always provide employees the motivation they need to stick to their goals. This gap in fitness tracker functionality, however, is one that can be easily filled by corporate wellness programs. A natural connection exists between fitness trackers and corporate wellness programs. While wearable devices provide tracking that is vital to success, wellness programs offer the motivation that keeps employees going. This partnership of wellness tools has the ability to transform New Years fitness resolutions from short-term goals to lifelong health habits. 5 Simple Ways to Embrace the Fitness Tracker Trend Is your organization ready to embrace the growing fitness tracker trend? Read the tips below for insight into how incorporating wearable devices into your wellness program can help you boost employee health and productivity. 1. Create a Tracking Culture While fitness trackers are growing in popularity, not all employees have access to these devices. In fact,...
Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 16-01-27 Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/> CONTENTS [01] Tsipras: Structural reforms are necessary for the viability of the pension system [02] Mitsotakis to Tsipras: 'You turned hope into despair' [03] One infant dies in new refugees boat tragedy [01] Tsipras: Structural reforms are necessary for the viability of the pension system Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday began an off-the-agenda debate in Parliament on the government's proposed social security reforms, noting that all the political parties are obliged to adopt a position on an issue of such gravity, i.e. the viability of the country's pension system. "If future generations are to have social insurance, there is no room for stalling or prevarication," Tsipras said, pointing out that the system is not currently viable. "Unless we take measures, it will collapse," he underlined. The prime minister blamed 40 years of state pension fund mismanagement and "looting" under New Democracy and PASOK governments for the system's current problems, as well as an aging population and "political choices in the year of crisis that shrunk GDP by 25 pct and shot unemployment up from 7 pct to 25 pct." He blamed some parts of the population of denying the dialogue with the government and added: "We are open to dialogue, we are not in conflict with the farmers." Tsipras recognised that there are some "grey zones" which should be put in order, stressing that farmers do not have anything to fear, but the intermediaries that have undeclared high profits. The prime minister accused main opposition New Democracy newly elected leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis of having adopted the most extreme positions of the creditors and specifically the IMF. He also stressed the importance of giving a fight so that pensions are not cut. "We must not destroy social cohesion. We need social consensus in a brave reform effort so that the social security system becomes viable," he underlined. [02] Mitsotakis to Tsipras: 'You turned hope into despair' Addressing lawmakers in Parliament during Tuesday's off-the-agenda debate on reforming Greece's pension system, main opposition New Democracy new leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis launched a full-scale offensive and accused the government of "turning hope into despair." "You are the most pernicious government in Greece's history [after the fall of the junta in 1974]. You have led the country to the verge of exiting the Eurozone, closed the banks and signed a third memorandum," he said. On the issue of pension reform, Mitsotakis noted that a solution for the country's pension system required a new social contract. He also admitted that mistakes were made in the past and that he had made a commitment, as the party's new leader, not to repeat them. "You, however, do not assume your responsibilities, and don't tell us that you have none," he added. Referring to ND's efforts to address the pension system's problems, he said that steps of progress toward reforming the system had been made leading up to 2015. The third memorandum clearly stated that the reforms of 2010 and 2012, if implemented, would improve the system's viability, he added. There was no need to cut pension or pressure from the institutions for cuts in 2014, Mitsotakis pointed out. "The 1.8 billion euros in additional measures were created by your ineptitude. You are part of the problem, you are not part of the solution. You did not take us forward, you took us two years back and society is turning its back to you," he said. Mitsotakis also criticised Tsipras for what he called a "divisive attack" in speeches on Sunday, during the first anniversary of SYRIZA's government, accusing him of "poisoning society with class hatred." "The dilemma today is between the yesterday of populism and the tomorrow of truth and reforms," he said. ND's leader criticised the government's proposals on pension reform, saying that the government plan skewed the reciprocity of the system and eliminated incentives to continue working, since additional years did not increase the size of pensions. He also deplored the government's failure to make any progress on the minimum guaranteed income, which he said was "abandoned". "What will happen to main pensions in 2019? The 'personal difference' simply transfers the problem to the future. You plan is not costed and without any financial validation. The refusal or inability to cost is delaying the negotiation and creating tension in society. You ask the opposition for an alternative proposal. We could reply that we did not create the problem of 1.8 billion euros but we won't," he said. [03] One infant dies in new refugees boat tragedy A baby's body was found on a beach on Kos island, north of Cape Ammoglossa. The baby, along with aprroximately 10 refugees and migrants were on a boat that sank off Kos coasts. One of the passenger that managed to reach the coast showed to the Coast Guard officers area of the wreck. A Greek Coast Guard vessel, a frontex patrol boat assisted by a super puma helicopter are currently searching the area to locate the missing migrants. Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article
Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 16-01-27 Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/> CONTENTS [01] Alt.Migration Minister Mouzalas: Europe is divided over the refugees issue [02] Day of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust [03] Ships docked until Friday morning due to seamens' strike [04] Farmers close Tempi Valley; Peloponnese non accessible [01] Alt.Migration Minister Mouzalas: Europe is divided over the refugees issue "If the crossing point at Idomeni closes, the borders do not close and the borders extend to thousands of kilometres and...Instead of protecting the legal migration, we support the illegal migration and we help terrorists and give job to human traffickers," Alternate Migration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas told private SKAI TV. Referring to Denmark's decision to take the personal valuables from the refugees he noted: "Denmark's stance reminds me of the Jews in the trains ...the memories are still fresh." He added that "others do not want the black people, others do not want bachelors, others mothers with children, this is not a European prospect". Regarding Ankara's stance, Mouzalas said that "in the last period Turkey accepted back 123 migrants and sent 60,000". The outcome of Monday's meeting (of EU ministers) was that Turkey holds the key of the inflow and has not met its responsibilities. We proposed that when migrants and refugees arrive on Greek islands to be counted and to be sent to hotspots, separate the migrants from the refugees and the next day to go back to Turkey, he underlined. Mouzalas said that November's report on the progress made in the construction of hotspots will be discussed today at the College of the Commissioners. "The report is bad," he said and added that "it is true that the works have not progressed as they should have done so" and reiterated that the hotspots will be ready by the end of February and will operate in early March. [02] Day of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust Thessaloniki paid a heavy toll in the period of Nazi occupation, on the altar of inhuman and unhealthy Nazi plans, the so-called "final solution." The approximately 50,000 indigenous Greek Jews members of a flourishing social, economic, cultural life of Thessaloniki's Jewish community were led to crematoria, on nineteen rail death missions, from the old station (March to August of 1943). Less than 2,000 of them managed to survive and return to Thessaloniki (a thousand of them from the camps and the rest from the countryside, where they had been hiding) in a city that hardly resembled the one they had left behind. The Greek state, in a particularly difficult period after the World War II and before the civil war, was among the first ones in Europe to adopt laws on the restitution of property. Many Jewish beneficiaries fought in courts for years to prove that they own their property as their title deeds had been lost or destroyed, and their relatives, acquaintances, neighbours, friends, witnesses who could confirm ownership of property had died. Today we celebrate with the rest of Greeks, the "Day of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust," that the Greek parliament adopted, unanimously, by Law 3218/2004 (Government Gazette A 12). It is the first time since the day it was established that a delegation of Greek Jews will attend a special session of the parliament plenum held on the occasion on Wednesday. Guests of honour will be the Greek Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. "It is an important day as because though these events we condemn intolerance, anti-Semitism and racism and we give a message to the younger generations. This day is not only for the Jews. It is for the lessons the Holocaust has taught us. We must not forget, we should draw conclusions so that such things do not happen again," the president of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki David Saltiel told ANA-MPA. Thessaloniki has been declared a "martyr city" since 2012 and is included in the "Martyr Cities & Villages of Greece Network." [03] Ships docked until Friday morning due to seamens' strike Ships will remain docked until Friday morning at 06:00 following a 48h strike declared by the Hellenic Seamen Federation (PNO) against the government's reforms in the social security system. PNO demands the withdrawal of the social security draft law referring to the government's "intransigent and inflexible stance" and has decided to participate in public sector union employees (GSEE ) 24h strike on February 4. The Seamen's Union also warns with escalation of their mobilisations the day the controversial bill will be tabled in parliament. [04] Farmers close Tempi Valley; Peloponnese non accessible Farmers will block with their tractors the Athens-Thessaloniki motorway at Tempi valley from 12:00-15:00. The farmers of Thessaly escalate their mobilisations protesting against the government's reforms in the social security system and in the taxation. Meanwhile, farmers from Peloponnese closed Athens-Corinth old national road at Isthmus at 11:00 on Wednesday interrupting the connection between Peloponnese and central Greece. It is reminded that farmers have closed on Tuesday afternoon the new Athens-Corinth national road at Corinth Canal toll station for an indefinate period. Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article
Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 16-01-27 Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/> CONTENTS [01] Greek PM Alexis Tsipras begins visit to Israel [02] European Commission accepts report that Greece 'seriously neglected' Schengen obligations [03] Germany urges Turkey to act against migrant traffickers, pledges support for Athens [04] German, French ministers to visit Greece over migration issues on Feb. 4 [01] Greek PM Alexis Tsipras begins visit to Israel A meeting between Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who is currently on a visit to Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got underway here on Wednesday afternoon, in the context of the Greece-Israel High-level Cooperation Council. Bilateral meetings are also being held between ministers of the two countries and their counterparts. According to sources, the talks are dealing with cooperation agreements in energy, maritime transport, innovation, water technology and environmental protection, transport, tourism, security and trade agreements. Earlier, Tsipras began his trip to Israel by visiting the Greek consulate in Jerusalem, where he met Jerusalem Patriarch Theophilos III and was briefed on a plan for conservation and restoration work on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. [02] European Commission accepts report that Greece 'seriously neglected' Schengen obligations ANA-MPA -- The European Commission on Wednesday accepted a report finding "serious deficiencies" in Greece's management of the external EU borders, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis announced. He said the report, based on inspections carried out last November, showed Greece had "seriously neglected" its obligations to fellow Schengen states. Among the problems, it cited inadequate procedures for recording, fingerprinting and inspecting the documents of refugees and migrants, and no connection with data from European services, such as Interpol. "If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to ... allow member states to temporarily close their borders," Dombrovskis told a news briefing. If the Commission's conclusions are confirmed by a majority of the 26 Schengen states, he continued, the European Commission will then recommed remedial procedures, giving Greece three months in which to comply. Noting that Greece had already made some progress since the assessment mission in November, Dombrovskis made it clear that more needed to be done. If Greece failed to comply, he said, the other Schengen-area states could reinstall controls of their national borders with Greece for a period of up to two years, not a maximum of six months as at present. [03] Germany urges Turkey to act against migrant traffickers, pledges support for Athens BERLIN (ANA-MPA/ F. Karaviti) -- Turkey must move against migrant traffickers operating in the Aegean, part of the European Union's external borders, with "greater intensity and consistency," German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Wednesday. The current situation, where traffickers were allowed to operate unchecked between two member-states of NATO was "unacceptable," he noted, adding that Germany was willing to support Greece on this issue. Asked whether he was could rule out the possibility of military intervention, Seibert replied that he "could not rule out anything here," and cited the common European talks on how to organise effective guarding of the borders. "Greece will, of course, participate in this intensively, because it has a special interest. Both we and many other countries are willing to support Greece on this and on other levels," he said. "The situation as it is now, between two countries that are, after all, members of NATO, with traffickers able to operate almost undisturbed and daily place the lives of people at risk is unacceptable and should be unacceptable for both countries that this issue concerns," he said. [04] German, French ministers to visit Greece over migration issues on Feb. 4 German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere and his French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve are due in Greece on Feb. 4 for a joint visit focusing on the refugee and migration crisis. The planned visit was announced after a meeting between de Maiziere and Cazeneuve in Berlin, and later confirmed by the office of Alternate Minister for Migration Policy Yiannis Mouzalas in Greece. According to sources, on the day following their arrival, the two ministers will visit the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos accompanied by Mouzalas. Athens News Agency: News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article
As New Zealand moves towards an Australian health and safety model, employers are being reminded of the impending laws that will revolutionize the issue of personal liability in the workplace.



Due to come into effect on April 4, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 will mirror Australias current model, under which senior business leaders can be held personally responsible for the safety of their workplace.



Early reaction suggests that corporate New Zealand, and in particular its directors and officers, are taking the new laws very seriously, says leading employment lawyer Jack de Flamingh.



Sir Peter Jackson, perhaps one of New Zealands most famous figures, has already resigned as a director of Wellington-based design company Weta Workshop  reports indicate the decision was in direct response to the new WHS laws.



Even Australian employers who were reluctant to believe they could be held personally liable have now accepted the responsibility as part of their position.



They must be 'safety literate,' explains de Flamingh. This means they need to be able to sign off, on an informed basis, on safety initiatives and robustly interrogate their executives about safety  in much the same way that they must be financially literate in order to sign off on financial matters.



Directors and executive officers will soon be required to exercise due diligence and ensure the company complies with its WHS duty. Due diligence, says de Flamingh, is defined to include the following steps.
Clay that's long been used by B.C. First Nations for healing purposes is killing bacteria that other drugs can't beat, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia.

The mud, found in Kisameet Bay about 400 kilometres north of Vancouver, has been used by the Heiltsuk First Nation to treat conditions including arthritis, colitis, skin irritations and burns for centuries.

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UBC researchers Julian Davies and Shekooh Behroozian pose with a bucket of clay from Kisameet Bay, B.C. (Photo: UBC)

UBC researchers Julian Davies and Shekooh Behroozian teamed up to test the clay against strains of ESKAPE bacteria  potentially deadly pathogens that are responsible for the majority of hospital infections in the U.S.

The bacteria are also "essentially untreatable" with antibiotics, said Davies in a media release. But 16 strains from Vancouver hospital samples were successfully "killed" with the Kisameet clay in recent lab tests.

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Clay from Kisameet Bay, B.C. is showing promise against a strain of bacteria that doesn't respond to traditional antibiotics. (Photo: UBC)

A business called Kisameet Glacial Clay partnered with UBC on the research program. The firm markets cosmetic and medicinal products made from the clay.

President Lawrence Lund said he hopes a safe antimicrobial can be developed to fight against the ESKAPE pathogens and other infections.

The university said no side effects have been reported by humans using the clay, and the next clinical step is toxicity testing.

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by Zvamaida Murwira

President Mugabe yesterday met a special envoy from Burundi president Pierre Nkurunziza at State House in Harare where the African Union chairperson was appraised about political developments in that country.Briefing journalists after a two-hour meeting, Chief-of-Staff in the Office of the President, Major-General Everiste Ndayishimiye said he came to brief President Mugabe on political developments in Burundi ahead of the African Union summit to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, later this week.Burundi has been on the spotlight after it rejected a proposal by AU to send troops to Bujumbura to protect civilians in the wake of the death of 400 people and displacements of more than 200 000 owing to hostilities.The hostilities had been spawned by the decision by president Nkurunziza's to seek a third term as some opposition parties protested against the move arguing that he was in violation of the two term limit provided for by that country's constitution.President Nkurunziza has on the other hand argued that he started serving his second and final term since the constitution did not earlier on provide term limits.But Maj-Gen Ndayishimiye said President Mugabe had indicated that the issue of Burundi would come up for discussion at the AU summit."You know there is a meeting which is going to be held in Addis Ababa. He told us that they will discuss these issues. We have confidence that they will know the reality and they will not consent to send troops in Burundi," said Maj Gen Ndayishimiye.Asked why Burundi was refusing to accept deployment of AU troops, Maj-Gen Ndayishimiye said there was no need for that because there was peace prevailing in that country.He said it did not make sense to deploy foreign troops when Burundi had more than 5 000 security forces on peacekeeping missions in several countries like Somalia."Burundi is protecting other countries. How can you send other troops to protect Burundi. In my view, AU can send other troops in Somalia and Central Africa to help them keep peace quickly. But for Burundi, we send troops because we have peace."If we had no peace we could bring back our forces, but now there is no need to bring back our forces because those that remain in the country are working well," said Maj-Gen Ndayishimiye."We have more than 5 000 troops in Somalia. We are assisting Central Africa with more than one battalion, the police are also in Sudan, Haiti, Mali and its known by everyone. So there is no need to send troops to Burundi to protect Burundi when we are protecting other countries."He said the deaths of more than 400 people were as a result of criminals, something he said was even common in some developed countries."What we have is ordinary criminality and the police and the army are dealing with that situation. Every country has criminals and Burundi is faced with that. Even in the United States, they have criminals who kill people in classrooms."In Burundi we did not see anyone who is shooting in schools. They kill some people to steal, attack families to steal, so it's ordinary criminality that we are faced with," he said.Mr Ndayishimiye said Government was busy unifying people after the end of election mode."You know when political parties are preparing for election they try to divide the people so that this group can support them, but after the election the main duty of the Government is to unify and reconciliate people."Now that is what we are doing and is going on well. We put in place a commission for national dialogue which is working well and we hope that in few months everything will be normal and His Excellency President Mugabe has told us that he is supporting Burundi since a long time and even today he will continue to support Burundi," he said.The event was attended by Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs Sydney Sekeramayi and other senior Government officials.
Jason Franson/CP, Facebook

A longtime Alberta politician is detailing his own experience with depression after a paraplegic man who struggled with mental illness was shot by Calgary police last weekend.

David McQueen, 53, was killed by police in the Calgary neighbourhood of Huntington Hills after he "indiscriminately" fired shots into the community. One bullet nearly hit a Calgary Transit bus driver.

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Alberta Liberal Leader David Swann said McQueen's death has prompted him to share his own struggle with depression, in hopes of ending the stigma around mental illness.

Swann told CBC News that he has fought a serious depressive illness, and it was "by the grace of God and people around me" that he was about to overcome a "tremendously dark time."

The doctor and Calgary MP told CBC: "Mental illness is part of life, and physical illness is part of life. There should be no blame or judgment attached to it."

"Mental illness is part of life... there should be no blame or judgment attached to it."

Swann said in a statement Monday that McQueen contacted his constituency office many, many times.

"I have heard many stories like Davids. Very, very few of these individuals will ever wind up in a situation where they hurt others, but Alberta has now seen several incidents involving people suffering from mental health problems.

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"There has to be real change, and soon."

Startling numbers

Unfortunately when cases like McQueen's make the news, it can seriously increase stigma for those living with mental illness, Laureen MacNeil, executive director with the Canadian Mental Health Association Calgary Region, told the Calgary Herald.

According to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, people suffering from mental illness are actually more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

Most often, that violence is self-inflicted. In Alberta alone, data from 2011 puts the province at 13.3 suicides per 100,000 people, above Canada's average suicide rate of 10.1 per 100,000.

Numbers from the Chief Medical Examiner's office shows the province's suicide rate increased by 30 per cent over the past year, possibly due to the economic recession.

"There has to be real change, and soon."

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Annastasia Stevens of the Calgary Senior Resource Society said McQueen's story resonated at her office, as seniors often struggle with mental isolation, mobility issues and loneliness.

She's urging people who know anyone who might be struggling with mental illness or isolation to check in on them regularly.

"Armed with knowledge and compassion, I know our society can do better," wrote Swann, who is the co-chair of Alberta's Mental Health Review. The group is set to release recommendations for dealing with Alberta's struggling mental health system and increased suicide rate in the coming weeks.

If you or someone you are feeling suicidal or struggling with your mental health, please contact a 24-hour distress line in your area.

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$25 billion in deficits forecast for each of next two years

Impact of oil crash on government finances could prove long lasting

Larger deficit would be welcomed by some economists

The federal governments forecasts for economic growth are far too optimistic, and Ottawa faces $50 billion in deficits over the next two years, says a report from National Bank Financial.

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The governments 2016 forecast for nominal GDP -- which largely determines how much tax revenue it will take in -- is more than double what the country is likely to see, economists Krishen Rangasamy and Warren Lovely wrote.

They see the federal government running a deficit of $15 billion in each of the next two years, not including the $10 billion in stimulus spending the Liberal government has promised. That amounts to $25 billion in deficits in each of the next two years.

Worse, the impact on government finances could prove long lasting, Rangasamy and Lovely write.

Because of the severe drop-off in business investment in Canada caused by the oil price collapse, the economys potential for growth risks being severely curtailed, they added.

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The collapse of oil prices caused investment in Canada's economy to shrink in 2015, even as consumer demand and foreign trade strengthened. National Bank Financial says this means Canada's economy will grow more slowly in the years to come. (Chart: NBF)

The federal Liberal government seems to be aware of the possibility of larger deficits ahead. Finance Minister Bill Morneau warned earlier this month that economic growth will fall short of the previous Conservative governments projections, but he didnt make any predictions about how that would affect the budget.

"We knew when we were campaigning we were facing a slow-growth environment," he said. "The challenge is greater than we expected."

Not everyone thinks running deficits in this economic environment is a bad idea. A growing number of economists have actually been urging the Trudeau government to run larger deficits than the $10 billion the Liberals promised during the election.

"If the government wasn't spending years strengthening our nation's balance sheet to use it as a weapon against downside economic risks as is the case today, then what was the point of it all?"

CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld says a $30-billion annual deficit would be well warranted under the circumstances, and estimates that would add some 0.5 percentage points to economic growth.

Its apparent to me that the economic outlook has deteriorated to the point where one could easily question whether [a $10-billion deficit] is a sufficient boost, particularly with some provinces in a restraint mode, he said, as quoted at the Globe and Mail.

David Rosemberg, chief economist at wealth management firm Gluskin Sheff, says the feds could run $24 billion in deficits every year through 2020 without going above the average public debt burden seen among developed economies. Canadas debt-to-GDP ratio is 31 per cent, compared to 70 per cent among OECD countries, on average.

"What is Ottawa waiting for?" Rosenberg wrote, as quoted at the CBC.

"If the government wasn't spending years strengthening our nation's balance sheet to use it as a weapon against downside economic risks as is the case today, then what was the point of it all?"

That certainly seems in keeping with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's own philosophy. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, the prime minister urged other nations to spend their way out of economic stagnation.

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La Poutine Week

Your winter woes are about to get meatier, cheesier and covered in gravy. La Poutine Week is back for another year of over-the-top poutine creations across Montreal, Toronto and Quebec City.

The official week of cheese curds, French fries and gravy will run for a week from Feb. 1 to Feb. 7. Restaurants signed up this year (at least 170 of them across each city and internationally), will serve up their latest take on Canada's national food treasure for a fixed price, ranging from $7 to $20.

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"More this year than ever I saw poutines that were not poutines."  La Poutine Week co-founder Na'eem Adam.

"This year there is more variety and poutines are really out-of-the-box," says La Poutine Week co-founder Na'eem Adam. "A couple of years down the road we won't see the classic poutine anymore."

Adam is referring to this year's roster that includes everything from a poutine hamburger to a "poutine pasta" made with gnocchi to even a poutine on fire. In fact, many of these dishes below aren't necessarily your average poutine, and unsurprisingly, Montreal by far has the most creative versions of it  it's time to step up your game, Toronto.

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"More this year than ever I saw poutines that were not poutines," Adam says. "I would get into debates with some of the chefs."

Adam says for the most part, chefs stuck with potatoes, cheese and a gravy or sauce.

For the second year in a row, the poutine team also expanded its doors to international restaurants, including dishes from Australia, U.S., France and the U.K. Organizers have also come up with a La Poutine Week app that will let you track down restaurants and a $20 "poutine pass" that offers discounts and freebies.

A full list of all participating restaurants can be viewed here and in the meantime, check out our list of some of the most noteworthy poutines. Just to keep things balanced, we've included a classic poutine as well.
Immigration Minister John McCallum irked Conservatives in question period Wednesday after he said a vast majority of Syrian refugees are super happy to resettle in Canada.

Michelle Rempel, opposition critic for immigration, took to Twitter to criticize McCallums response to Tory MP Bob Saroyas question about the governments failure to provide long-term living solutions to some refugees.

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Rempel tweeted a link to a CityNews report from this week on residents of a Toronto hotel who were given eviction notices to make space for the newcomers.

On a Q re this story, https://t.co/2cdBpqNMZv, @JohnMcCallumLPC says refugees are "super happy" and it's "perfectly normal"  Michelle Rempel, MP (@MichelleRempel) January 27, 2016

Getting a notice to move out of your accommodation? Check out @JohnMcCallumLPC's "perfectly normal" response in QP today.  Michelle Rempel, MP (@MichelleRempel) January 27, 2016

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Refugees are people, not numbers on a scorecard, Saroya said, borrowing words from a National Post headline published earlier in the day.

McCallum responded by saying a vast majority of Syrian refugees who have arrived are super happy to be in this country. But the longtime Liberal also acknowledged amid the intake of thousands of new Canadians, the process is prone to hiccups.

Canadians can be reassured that this operation is a great success.

There are some issues in hotels, which we are dealing with, McCallum said. But it is perfectly normal for refugees to spend some weeks in hotels before going on to their permanent accommodations.

Saroya pressed on to suggest the federal government is prioritizing refugee cases above others, subjecting some Syrians to temporary, cramped housing for weeks

Yes, they are spending some time in hotels  that is normal for the process. And it is also the case that refugees applications from other countries are proceeding as planned, said McCallum.

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So Canadians can be reassured that this operation is a great success and we will soon have 25,000 new Canadians on our soil.

Hotel residents evicted

An unnamed resident of the Toronto hotel told CityNews Monday the news of her eviction hit her really hard and that she and others were given a whole bunch of reasons but the bottom line was they needed the space.

Toronto Plaza Hotel assistant general manager Ahmed Ibrahim defended the decision to the Toronto Sun, saying the three-month deal is good for business.

We lay off so many people in the winter. Now, weve hired more people, Ibrahim said. This has never happened before in the winter time.

According to a federal website, nearly 20,000 refugees have either arrived in Canada or have been approved for resettlement. The Liberals have pledged to resettle another 5,000 before the end of February.

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Christine Ross and Joja Smiljanic-Jazic greet refugees as they arrive at Pearson International Airport in Mississauga on Dec. 10, 2015. (Photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Details of the countrys refugee policy, under the direction of the former Conservative government, were recently revealed in newly-released documents showing how some refugee files were cherry-picked above others.

Next week, Canadas policy regarding its intake of Syrian refugees will be the subject of a U.S. Senate congressional committee, focused on possible implications on homeland security.

Canadas ambassador to the U.S., Gary Doer, declined an invitation to testify, citing preference to not participate in partisan political debate in the Senate.

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Oxford Dictionary issued an apology for a "flippant" tweet and promised to review its example sentences after a Canadian anthropologist cited examples of sexism in their text.

Michael Oman-Reagan slammed the publication on Twitter last week for its example sentence for the word "rabid," which, according to the dictionary means, "having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something." The example phrase for the definition? "A rabid feminist."

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The Newfoundland-based PhD candidate suggested that Oxford review its listing, and also cited several other examples that he said produced "sexist stereotypes," in a Medium blog post.

"Obviously when they include 'rabid feminist' they are actually choosing that example sentence from possible sentences, so why that one?" Oman-Reagan wrote.

The dictionary responded jokingly to Oman-Reagan's request on Twitter:

If only there were a word to describe how strongly you felt about feminism https://t.co/mAsmjUBoOs  Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) January 22, 2016

Which backfired when other users took note of the debate.

@pickwick@OmanReagan@OxfordWords indeed, would be so easy to say 'thanks for drawing this to our attention, we'll look into it  Sarah May (@Sarah_May1) January 22, 2016

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@OxfordWords Snide, smug, sarcastic misogyny. I dunno who you are, intern, but you gravely need to reassess your suitability for this role.  Phil McArthur (@pyrotyger) January 22, 2016

A day later, Oxford Dictionary apologized for the tweet, saying they would review their example sentence for the word rabid.

1/4 We were flippant in some of our tweets yesterday. Sorry.  Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) January 23, 2016

3/4 We'll review the primary example sentence used for 'rabid'.  Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) January 23, 2016

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The dictionary didn't acknowledge other sexist example sentences Oman-Reagan pointed out, such as "a nagging wife" and "she still does all the housework."

They did, however, post a link on their Twitter account seeking to clarify how example sentences are selected, explaining that choosing them is just as difficult as deciding on the actual definition.

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"Needless to say, as in any human enterprise, the selection of example sentences sometimes falls short of the idea."

The post went on to accept that "rabid feminist" was a "poorly chosen example" and a more generic example such as "rabid extremist" would have sufficed.

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Justin Trudeau is a young, exciting addition to the world stage, according to British billionaire Richard Branson. And the Virgin Group founder is particularly tickled over the Liberals promise to legalize marijuana in a country the size of Canada.

Branson published a 577-word blog post on Wednesday, speaking highly of the Canadian prime minister after recently meeting him at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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It is great to see such a large country going in the right direction, Branson wrote.

I congratulated him on his commitment to gender equality, he continued about Trudeau. I also discussed Canada's policies on the war on drugs and told him it was wonderful to see a country the size of Canada pledging to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana.

Former Toronto police chief and rookie Liberal MP Bill Blair has been tasked to oversee the governments marijuana legalization plan.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets Virgin Group founder Richard Branson in Davos, Switzerland.

Later in the post, Branson said two of his colleagues from the Global Commission on Drug Policy joined Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion for a meeting. Without releasing any details, Branson relayed some optimism.

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They returned expressing enthusiasm for ambitious drug policy reform in Canada, he wrote. I am very hopeful this will stimulate even more progress in other countries in the months and years to come.

Branson is No. 330 on Forbes' list of the worlds billionaires with an estimated net worth of around $4.6 billion.

Swanning and one percenters

On Monday, the Conservative Opposition wasted no time attacking Trudeau on the first day back in Parliament, accusing him of hobnobbing with the worlds elite in Davos.

Interim Tory Leader Rona Ambrose accused Trudeau in question period of swanning about Switzerland to hang out with the one per cent while Conservative MPs were at home listening to business owners and volunteers and regular Canadians.

Maybe the prime minister should stop using his cellphone for selfies with Leo DiCaprio.  Rona Ambrose

Trudeau shot back, saying meetings with leaders such as Jack Ma from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba catalyze plans to create jobs at home. Ambrose, however, used another opportunity to poke fun at the prime ministers vanity.

Maybe the prime minister should stop using his cellphone for selfies with Leo DiCaprio and pick it up and call Denis Coderre and fight for natural resources, she said, referring to a growing debacle over the proposed 4,600-kilometre Energy East pipeline.

Trudeau responded by taking a shot at the Conservatives' record after nearly a decade in power.

Once again it is interesting that the members opposite are criticizing us for not getting done in 10 weeks what they were unable to do in 10 years, he said.

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With debates about unbuilt pipelines again raging in Canada, it seems the interim Conservative leader has opened a new line of attack that won't hold water.

In a Calgary Sun story published late Tuesday, Rona Ambrose said many Albertans are upset by what she deemed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's reluctance to stand up for the energy sector.

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"People want to know their prime minister is on their side, especially when they've just lost their job," she told the Sun.

"The problem is there is no evidence. The prime minister won't even say the word pipeline. He won't even say the word."

Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau enter the House of Commons earlier this week. (Photo: Matthew Usherwood/Canadian Press)

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The problem for Ambrose? Trudeau used the "p-word" hours earlier at a widely covered press conference with Montreal mayor and Energy East opponent Denis Coderre.

"Obviously, as was in the news, we talked about pipelines and energy policy," Trudeau told reporters asking about the meeting at Montreal City Hall. "I highlighted that I'm always happy to hear perspectives from across the country on various projects."

Trudeau said it's his job to ensure that national projects are treated in "a way that both contributes to the economy, to a secure environment, to bringing people together and mostly to creating a better future."

He later said that, for 10 years, the previous government acted as a "cheerleader" for projects instead of a "responsible referee."

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Justin Trudeau and Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre spoke to media on Tuesday. (Photo: Canadian Press)

While it's possible Ambrose missed Tuesday's presser, Trudeau also referenced pipelines last month while responding to her question in the House of Commons.

The interim Tory leader noted at the time that tens of thousands of Albertans have lost their jobs due to plunging oil prices and said Trudeau has not responded.

"Why is the prime minister turning his back on Albertans in their time of need?" she asked.

"They built their entire strategy around hoping that oil prices would remain high and when those did not, they were unable to help Alberta."  Justin Trudeau on Conservatives

Trudeau said Conservatives made a "big show about being a great friend to Alberta" but got nothing done for a decade.

"For 10 years, they were not able to build a pipeline," he said. "They built their entire strategy around hoping that oil prices would remain high and when those did not, they were unable to help Alberta."

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Ambrose lauds Trudeau for taking her advice'

Conservatives have made Energy East a key area of focus since Parliament returned this week.

At a press conference Monday, Ambrose called out Coderre for opposing the project, saying such a move was "not in the spirit of national unity."

Later in question period, Ambrose sparked huge applause when she urged the prime minister to "stop using his cellphone for selfies with Leo DiCaprio" and instead use it to call Coderre.

Trudeau shot back that it was curious Tories were criticizing his government for "not getting done in 10 weeks what they were unable to do in 10 years."

On Tuesday, Ambrose rose in question period to cheekily "thank the prime minister for taking my advice and meeting with Mr. Coderre."

I'm pleased to hear the Prime Minister is going to take my advice and talk to Mayor Coderre. https://t.co/eLDOVLFGyK  Rona Ambrose (@RonaAmbrose) January 25, 2016

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Norwood Thomas never thought this day would happen.

The 93-year-old World War II veteran is set to spend Valentine's with his one-time girlfriend, a woman he hasn't seen in over 70 years.

Im numb, he told The Virginian-Pilot.

I have no idea what my emotions are going to be once we meet face to face.

Thomas, who lives in Virginia Beach, Va., told WTKR he met Joyce Durrant (now Morris) during the war while he was stationed near London with the 101st Airborne Division.

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He was completely smitten with her, but their relationship wasn't meant to be.

He returned to the U.S. after the war and married someone else, but after his wife died, he began to think of Morris again.

The two got back in touch late last year after a simple online search, and during a Skype call, the now-88-year-old Morris explained why she had refused to join him in America.

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One of his letters left her with the perception he was already married and would leave his wife for her, something she opposed.

She told him she had looked at a photo of him every morning for the previous few weeks.

I say good morning to you every morning. And then I say, What mischief have you been up to?" she teased during their conversation.

After their online date, a woman who had read the Virginian-Pilot story started a GoFundMe campaign to fly Thomas to Australia, where Morris now lives.

The fund raised more than C$10,000, and Air New Zealand recently confirmed it will cover first-class tickets for Thomas and his son.

"All through my life, I had this little thought of what if?" Thomas told WTKR.

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by Staff reporter

"As an African I have been paying attention to what he has been doing in Zimbabwe and in Africa. He works hard for his people and he has contributed to peace and development in Africa."A NIGERIAN artiste Victor Edoja has released a track titled "African Unity - R. G Mugabe" in honour of President Mugabe's tenure as African Union Chairman from January 2015 to January 2016.The song salutes President Mugabe for his continental leadership from the days of Africa's liberation struggles to the contemporary thrust towards the implementation of the African Union Agenda 2063 that was launched and adopted during his tenure.The song, recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, on January 25, 2016, includes snippets from President Mugabe's acceptance speech after his election as AU Chairman, delivered on January 30 2015 at the 25th AU Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he called for "renewed boundless zeal, commitment and dedication in implementing programmes and projects that we have set for ourselves in the various political, social, economic and security sectors."Edoja, is a Bachelor of Science degree holder from the University of Calabar.Speaking from Nigeria, Edoja said he had been inspired by President Mugabe's statesmanship and how he has stood out as a leader over the years."As an African I have been paying attention to what he has been doing in Zimbabwe and in Africa. He works hard for his people and he has contributed to peace and development in Africa," he said.Asked how he had remained immune from the negative reports emanating especially from western media about President Mugabe, Edoja said: "I believe what he has been doing he has not been for himself but for his people and Africa."Edoja said he admired President Mugabe and his holistic leadership."I fell in love with his background, I loved his courage to fight for political freedom for his people, and the fact that he succeeded in that ordeal is really great because that was a massive relief to the majority which were blacks in Zimbabwe. So I played around those ideas in my head while writing the song."Africa, Edoja said, had to be fully independent and self dependent in line with the Vision 2063.On continental leadership he said: "Well, we need leaders that are sensitive to the challenges of the developing nations which they preside over and their primary goal should be to sustain and to improve generally on every aspect of the nations' well being and not allowing things to fall apart."If it happens, they should always take prompt action to provide solutions and ensure continuity of good leadership."Zimbabweans welcomed the recognition of President in song and said the gesture was consistent with the popularity and respect President Mugabe commands on the continent and Diaspora despite negative western propaganda against him."Through his tenure as African Union Chairperson, and indeed his record as a Pan Africanist who has dedicated his life to the liberation of Zimbabwe and Africa at large, the Diaspora has been able to stand proud and tall as Zimbabweans who can be relied upon to defend and advance the African agenda without compromise," said Zanu-PF United Kingdom branch chairman, Ndavaningi Nick Mangwana."President Mugabe is very popular among the African Diaspora which includes all Black People of African Origin engaged in African Affairs. When we attend Pan Africanist Events held by our Afro-Caribbean Cousins there is always pandemonium when we are introduced as Representatives of Robert Mugabe's Party. There are always "Mugabe Lives" Chants."This is the kind of stature of the man and the sentiment he invokes in the African Diaspora. Even though every poll has vindicated his popularity. The Legend of the man precedes him."Play the song below:
Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press

Last April, Vancouver announced plans to be entirely powered by 100 per cent clean energy within the next 20 years. The announcement was met with applause as the city's deputy Mayor told the world about the "compelling moral imperative" and "fantastic economic case" to take bold climate action.

It was a markedly different moment in Canadian climate politics from last week when Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, along with over 80 other Quebec mayors, announced their opposition to the Energy East tar sands pipeline. The announcement was based on the same "compelling moral imperative" and "fantastic economic case" to move beyond fossil fuels, but was met by vitriol from politicians and pundits alike. While the two announcements were different, looking at them side by side illuminates a major problem with the conversation around energy development in Canada. Blinded by the push to build unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure, politicians and pundits are drowning the conversation we need to have -- how to make the necessary shift to a 100 per cent clean energy economy.

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The reality is that if Canada is serious about climate change, that's going to mean needing to leave most of the tar sands in the ground.

But, for the sake of argument, let's forget about community opposition to these projects. Take that out of the mix and you still have to deal with the fact that Canada can't meet our commitment to a 1.5C climate limit and build more pipelines. United States President Barack Obama set a new high bar for climate leadership when he rejected the Keystone XL pipeline because of the project's climate impact, and now, whether Canadian politicians like it or not, every pipeline will be judged on its climate impacts. In fact, the Government of Canada just confirmed plans to formally implement a climate test on pipelines.

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OK, so what if we ignore both community opposition and climate science? Even without this, pipelines are running headlong into indigenous peoples opposing the projects. On the West Coast, the Save the Fraser Declaration has been signed by more than 100 First Nations, forming an unbroken chain from the U.S. border to the Arctic Ocean opposing tar sands exports along the Pacific Coast. In the east, an "East-West Treaty Alliance" between indigenous communities in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec recently came together to oppose the Energy East pipeline.

The power of indigenous opposition to pipelines is so strong that even now, years after its approval, the Northern Gateway pipeline is considered a dead project. Just a few weeks ago, a court case brought by the Gitga'at determined that pipeline reviews failed to properly consult First Nations on the Northern Gateway pipeline. Even the Line 9 pipeline, so far the only project to start moving tar sands oil, is facing a legal challenge from the Chippewas of the Thames. Since the Government of Canada continues to tout its commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, you can bet that pushing pipelines without respecting the principles of Free Prior and Informed Consent promised in the declaration will not help to get pipelines built.

Add all this up and you can only really come to one conclusion -- trying to build tar sands projects is a pretty bad idea, especially if you're looking for "shovel ready" projects that will put people to work. On the other hand, job creation in the renewable energy sector outpaces fossil fuels by a rate of 15 to two. In other words, if you invest a million dollars in the clean energy economy, you'll create at least seven times as many jobs as that same money being dumped into the fossil fuel economy. That's probably why, in 2014, a report found that clean energy jobs made up more of the Canadian workforce than the tar sands.

Over the past decade, the Governments of Alberta and Canada spent millions of taxpayer dollars trying to get the Keystone XL pipeline built, and we all know how well that worked out. Now, these same governments seem to poised to repeat history in their fight for pipelines like Energy East and the Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain. What if instead of these doomed strategies, we chose to invest our money and political energy into speeding the just transition to a job creating clean, renewable energy economy?

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Instead of lecturing Leonardo DiCaprio, Prime Minister Trudeau could be inviting him to ribbon cuttings at mass transit and clean energy projects. Instead of attacking the Mayor of Montreal, politicians could focus on clean energy projects that create good, long term jobs at a time when their constituents desperately need them. Instead of fighting the stream of history and indulging in the "petty provincialism" of pipeline politics, Canada could become a global leader on climate change.

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Canada is on the verge of signing on to two free trade deals that could have a broad impact on our country's laws and policies.

Don't blame yourself if you don't know much about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or the Canada-EU trade deal confusingly known as CETA. Considering what's at stake, there has been a surprising lack of discussion on this subject, at least in Canada. Seriously: Where is the debate on this new, unprecedented era of transoceanic trade deals?

It's something we need to be talking about, and now. Both these trade deals are moving into the ratification phase. A symbolic TPP signing ceremony, no doubt designed to put pressure on negotiating countries to ratify the deal, takes place next month. Yet we still haven't debated whether these deals would actually be a net benefit to Canada.

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According to a new study from Tufts University, one that's bound to be controversial, the 12-country TPP deal would reduce employment in Canada by 58,000 jobs over 10 years while adding a measly 0.28 per cent to GDP.

For the U.S. the TPP projections are even worse, with 448,000 jobs lost and an actual reduction to GDP of 0.54 per cent within 10 years.

Chart: Tufts University

The World Bank has a somewhat rosier forecast, but even their recent report suggested the TPP would have only a marginal benefit to the developed economies in the trade area. Canada would see a GDP that's 1.2 per cent higher a decade after the deal comes into force, or an increase of some 0.12 per cent per year.

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The deal is "unlikely to affect overall employment in the long run," the World Bank concluded.

Are either of these forecasts correct? Your guess is as good as mine. The thing to remember about economic models is that they are built on assumptions, and what assumptions you build into your model determines, to an extent, what results you get. In other words, all economic models are biased.

But could a trade deal actually be a negative for a country? Of course it could. The key word in the phrase "free trade deal" is "deal" -- that's what these are, deals, and like any deal, a trade deal can be good or bad.

But that's not how our political and bureaucratic leadership sees it. For years now, these agreements have been pushed forward on the basis of a dogmatic dictate that when it comes to trade, any deal is a good deal. The philosophy amounts to "let's sign up to whatever deal comes along and not worry too much about the details."

In just about any other context, someone who thinks that way would quickly be marked a sucker.

U.S. President Barack Obama, centre, and other leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership countries pose for a photo in Manila, Philippines, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015.

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You can see this sucker attitude in the previous Harper government's tunnel-visioned insistence on signing one free trade deal after another, lobbying for years to be included in TPP talks.

One thing is certain: This is not an evidence-based approach to trade deals.

Did you know the Trudeau government is holding consultations right now on the TPP? No? That's probably because they aren't exactly going out of their way to tell anyone. The non-debate continues under a new government.

The Destructive Logic Of Trade Deals, Or Why We Can't Just Walk Away

That Tufts University study makes another forecast about the TPP: It will be much worse for the countries that aren't in it.

While most TPP countries would see net economic growth from the deal, developed non-TPP countries will see their GDP reduced by 3.77 percentage points in the decade after the deal, the study says, as they lose access to markets and miss out on opportunities.

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Walking away from the TPP would mean shifting Canada into that column of countries that stand to lose big time if and when the TPP arrives.

In fact, this is the argument that has been used most often to justify our participation (and the participation of many other countries) in these new trade deals -- that it would simply be worse to be left out. It's telling that, at the end of the day, it's this argument (rather than any potential positives) that the pro-free trade crowd employs.

Excuse me, but what sort of economic policy is this? We're signing on to a possibly damaging free trade deal in order to avoid worse damage from not signing on to it?

How about just scrapping the whole thing and starting over? Or refocusing on more specific trade deals, with specific partner countries or for specific industries, where the benefits can be clearly seen? Has anyone considered that?

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No, apparently not. Imagine the shock in Brussels or Washington or Ottawa if you even suggested something like that. Our political leadership, both within Canada and globally, is on auto-pilot. Say "free trade deal" and they're ready to sign on the dotted line.

Free trade deals have become the opiate of the ruling classes. Today, any world leader can sleepwalk their way to "economic success" by signing a trade deal, any trade deal. Take a load off and light a cigar, you don't need to think anymore.

Free trade deals, as far anyone knows, are forever. Once you sign up to a major international treaty, you can't walk away without seriously damaging your foreign relations. These deals have never been cancelled, only sometimes replaced by bigger ones.

So the future wealth of our nation -- all these nations -- is at stake, and for the long run. We need to do a lot better than sign on to a trade treaty because we assume they're all the same, and they're all a good idea.

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At a time when our consumption of the news is at an all-time high, the very institutions at the heart of our news media are in crisis -- and demanding the attention of our political leaders.

In just the past week, Postmedia combined newsrooms in Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver in a move that not only saw many talented and dedicated journalists pushed out the door, but also saw distinctive voices quieted.

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In British Columbia, Black Press announced the closure of the 141-year-old Nanaimo Daily News, and in Ontario Torstar closed the Guelph Mercury, which had published daily since Canada's Confederation.

We all suffer when a newspaper closes. Across this country, the vital role played by journalists is being challenged like never before. Without a thriving news media, our democracy is diminished.

Take the four cities hit by Postmedia's move. Until now, each was served by both a broadsheet paper and a scrappy tabloid -- each with its own approach to the news of the day, and each competing with the other to stay one step ahead.

That competition made them both better papers, as they each strove to beat the other with exclusive stories, more in-depth coverage and different angles. By combining their newsrooms, their distinctive voices and the competition that made them better have now been lost.

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The Internet has ensured the news can be consumed almost anywhere on many different digital platforms. And while this has increased readership to all-time highs, media organizations struggle to find the revenue they need to keep producing the news as traditional newspaper advertising dwindles and Google and Facebook alone gobble up half the online advertising available.

"Our current Liberal government must move fast and take a hard look at what can be done to ensure a healthy media industry in this country, drawing on the expertise of all players in the industry."

But however you get your news, it's worth remembering that newspapers remain the bedrock of journalism in this country. That's why Postmedia's decision to combine newsrooms and the closure of the Guelph and Nanaimo newspaper are so devastating.

Postmedia's move came with barely a peep from the Competition Bureau that's meant to protect Canadian interests. As Carleton School of Journalism Professor Dwayne Winseck told the CBC, the Bureau made a "foolishly" hasty decision to accept the merger of the newsrooms this week, despite promises made only a year ago to do no such thing.

To many, this all seems too predictable. Beleaguered by the debt of multiple sales and resales over the last decade or so, newspapers across Canada struggle to meet the unrelenting demands of their owners and debt holders.

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When the Postmedia chain of newspapers was formed in 2010 with money from U.S. vulture funds when Canadian investors failed to come forward, the company got around restrictions on foreign ownership with promises to return the papers to Canadian hands before long, and with pledges that the Canadians would run the show despite being minority investors. The Competition Bureau meekly accepted this, and Postmedia has enjoyed the same favourable tax treatment given to truly Canadian-owned papers ever since.

The broadcast industry is also facing challenges due to questionable CRTC rulings under the Harper government that hurt funding for local TV. Just before Christmas, CHCH TV in Hamilton declared bankruptcy, and other stations across Canada are struggling.

It's not too late to act. Our current Liberal government must move fast and take a hard look at what can be done to ensure a healthy media industry in this country, drawing on the expertise of all players in the industry.

The fate of Postmedia's newspapers has been determined by the exacting demands of the U.S. vulture funds, whose concerns are not with the health of these newspapers or their valuable contributions to their communities and our democracy.

Vulture funds exist to extract what value they can from so-called distressed companies, and they have done that with Postmedia. Jobs have been slashed. Bureaus closed or reduced to skeletons of their former selves and real estate auctioned off.

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And, to top it off, before any bills are paid or good journalism funded, the first 10 cents of every dollar coming into the papers is hived off and sent to the vulture funds in New York City.

You can be sure they got theirs, whatever the cost here in Canada.

It is time for our new government to take action before any further damage is done.

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The following is an excerpt from Karen Hill's essay "On Being Crazy," featured in her novel Cafe Babanussa, posthumously published by HarperCollins Publishers, available on February 2nd, 2016.

I was so sure that they were going to kill me that night that my 18-year-old daughter insisted that I call her from my room on the psych ward throughout the night, every hour on the hour, so she could make sure I was okay. It was December 2008 and she was away doing her first year at university. She cajoled me through my fears and supported me with her love. Only that was supposed to be my job. How did the tables get turned like this?

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They're pretending to be busy but they're watching me. I know that they even have cameras in the washrooms and the showers out on the floor, perverts!! Uh-huh! Today they're all wearing colours for the different guys I'm enamoured with, to show their support for one or the other. Purple, red, black, white. The guys, they're always yacking at me and arguing but I can barely hear them. What do they expect; they're all talking at once. Then they get mad 'cause I can't seem to respond to each one individually. I want us all to live together under one roof. Crazy me. The head doctors are constantly trying to hypnotize me with their eyes again. Drain the information out of me. Can't fight against it; they always win.

In my family, the incidence of mental health problems runs high. My mother and her twin sister are both bipolar. On my father's side, one of my aunts was bipolar and two of my cousins are schizophrenic. While some people dispute the idea that mental illness can be hereditary -- and I, too, believe in the importance of social and environmental causes -- you can nonetheless see that the odds were pretty high that someone else in my immediate family might get hit over the head with it, too. The only mitigating factor was that, having witnessed my mom in periods of illness, we already knew something about it and were well aware of the signs.

This first experience of psychosis with delusions and hallucinations was a surreal nightmare.

In 1979 I graduated from university and took off to Europe. Six months later I was 21 and living in Berlin. I was too busy living my adventure to worry about mental illness. I worked under the table cleaning houses, travelling whenever I could. After two years I married the young German man I was living with and got my work permit. I landed an excellent job at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In the summer of 1984 the institute asked me to attend a conference in West Germany on my own as a member of the Betriebsrat, a kind of internal watchdog for the institute, with something like a union role. This conference brought together Betriebsraten members from across Germany, and it was an honour to be asked to represent my workplace.

My German was very good by then. But when I was wrangled into presenting complicated findings from the week's working meetings, I felt like the lamb led to slaughter. The pressure was intense, and I found myself not sleeping, walking the halls, then tossing and turning in bed and then up pacing again. Underlying all this was an increasingly unhappy relationship with my husband. I was a wreck by end of the week, not able to think straight, totally at a loss. I made a mishmash of presenting the group's findings in front of a crowd of 200 and then collapsed in a sobbing, ranting mess. Someone drove me the three-hour drive back to Berlin because I wasn't fit to get on a plane. From there on in I just got worse. A week later I was going to the doctor's office to get injections of an antipsychotic drug, Haldol, and about three weeks later I was an inmate at the Schlosspark hospital.

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This first experience of psychosis with delusions and hallucinations was a surreal nightmare. Emotionally I was petrified -- and soon physically petrified as well, as the side effects of the medications slowed my reflexes and made me feel as if my body was slowly turning to stone. I met with the staff psychiatrist regularly. He was never arrogant or condescending, nor was he intrusive or threatening. Our meetings were always one-on-one, and we usually met in his office, unlike at the hospitals in Toronto when there is almost always a small group of doctors peering at you while you're sitting uncomfortably on your bed. Other meetings at hospitals here in Toronto sometimes took place in small conference rooms, and again there was always more than one doctor present and I always felt intimidated. When I told my psychiatrist in Berlin that I didn't want to go to group therapy, instead of badgering me, he immediately suggested I join a music program instead, and that worked wonders for me.

My brother Larry came to stay in Berlin for a few weeks as soon as he could get there. He saw me at my worst, before I was hospitalized. In November of 1984, my parents came over, and I remember our many walks on grey autumn afternoons through the palace grounds behind the hospital. In December of 1984, after two months and countless visits from friends, I was released. By February 1985, I was in a deep depression, and my brother Dan came to visit and took me swimming almost every day. By the end of his stay several weeks later, I was finally coming to, shaking off the vise of blackness that had me in its grip.

One of the most important pieces about this story is that the German doctors deliberately chose not to diagnose me with anything, despite knowing of my family history of mental illness. Instead, immediately upon my release they embarked upon a plan to have me weaned off the antipsychotics over the course of a year and a half. When I was completely off those drugs I wasn't on any other mood stabilizers or other medication. For the following thirteen years I was drug-free and incident-free.

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Oxfam

A women's committee in South Sudan, where domestic violence is widespread and a major threat to women displaced because of the ongoing conflict.

By Julie Lafreniere, Women's Rights Specialist at Oxfam Canada

In South Sudan, domestic violence is widespread and largely tolerated. In the all-too-common words of two young women from Warrap State: "We are often beaten. When we make a mistake, we are beaten -- and there are so many mistakes."

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So when widespread conflict broke out across the country in December 2013, causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, it was unfortunately not surprising that gender-based violence (GBV) was a major threat for women living in IDP and refugee camps.

Some aid workers struggled to fully grasp the issue and take action in a timely way, and at times exacerbated the situation by failing to incorporate GBV considerations into the design and delivery of the very services that were meant to protect and save lives. They also missed opportunities to address some of the underlying women's empowerment and gender equality issues that could have led to lasting change.

South Sudan is by no means an isolated example. When I traveled to Jordan in 2014, the international community was already struggling to deal with the massive influx of refugees, and humanitarians on the ground had real concerns about the rise in violence against women and girls. In the camps, colleagues from a number of organizations described challenges related to protecting women and girls -- such as ensuring proper lighting, locks on latrines and safe fuel collection.

Although many actors were aware of the risks to women, girls and marginalized groups, they did not systematically include them in the design and implementation of projects. And although they were aware of their sector-specific guidance -- such as the Sphere Handbook -- they faced huge challenges in incorporating GBV into their programming, both technically (in terms of what to do) and operationally (in terms of how to do it).

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There was a clear need for a practical tool that would help them prevent GBV in camps and in urban areas. Fortunately, practical and relevant assistance is now available, in the form of new guidelines.

I was in Jordan as one of the authors of the revised Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Guidelines for Integrating Gender-based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Action (GBV Guidelines). Following a two-year consultative process led by UNICEF and UNFPA, the revised GBV Guidelines were officially launched in September in South Africa.

The first version of the guidelines was published in September 2005. Nearly 10 years later, the humanitarian community has made significant progress come in moving GBV from the sidelines, where it was viewed as a "niche" area of work, to the forefront of humanitarian action.

During those 10 years, the UN established a special representative focused explicitly on sexual violence in conflict; the security council passed critical resolutions promoting a more robust security response to sexual violence; many UN entities and NGOs scaled up their engagement in this area of work; and far more young professionals are choosing to focus their careers on the prevention of GBV and Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG).

These revised guidelines are a practical, field-tested tool for humanitarian actors and crisis-affected communities. An important contribution of the Guidelines is that they show that all humanitarian actors have a role to play in preventing GBV, whether a water engineer or a food security specialist.

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Specifically, they target actors working in 13 sectors, including education, the theme of this year's 16 Days of Activism. In many humanitarian settings, attending school can be a risky endeavor. The erosion of standard protection mechanisms in humanitarian emergencies means that students and education personnel -- particularly females -- often face an increased risk of sexual harassment, sexual assault or abduction while travelling to and from school.

There are also significant risks in schools: lack of supervisory staff increases the risk of bullying, sexual harassment and assault occurring on school grounds by peers as well as teachers and other adults.

The Gender-based Violence Guidelines make a number of practical recommendations for designing and implementing education interventions that reduce or minimize risk to women and girls including, for example, considering alternative, informal or non-traditional approaches and ensuring that locations and times of programmes meet the needs of women and adolescent girls who have domestic and family-related responsibilities.

Today I am reflecting back on my time in Jordan and other humanitarian settings -- and seeing the opportunity that the new guidelines afford all of us to treat gender-based violence prevention and response as a life-saving priority right from the start of humanitarian crises -- across all sectors. Let's make it happen.

Oxfam was actively engaged in the drafting of the Guidelines and is supporting their roll-out and implementation. Ending GBV and VAWG is critical to Oxfam's mission of addressing the root causes of poverty and suffering. Special thanks to Ann Witteveen, Manager, Humanitarian Unit at Oxfam Canada for her inputs into this post.

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NICHOLAS KAMM via Getty Images Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau arrives to give a press conference in Ottawa on October 20, 2015 after winning the general elections. AFP PHOTO/NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

What a difference a year makes.

Former Prime Minister Harper launched Bill C-51, the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, at a campaign-style event in Richmond Hill, Ontario, on Jan. 30, 2015. According to Harper, C-51 was a response to "violent jihadism." That event was emblematic of the politicization of law and policy during the last decade.

Fear & Politics

Despite the rhetoric, C-51 brought unprecedented changes to Canada's national security landscape reaching far beyond "violent jihadism" or even terrorism. It was a bait and switch, exploiting fears still fresh from the killing of soldiers Patrice Vincent and Nathan Cirillo, to dramatically expand the national security apparatus.

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The new law introduced:

Information Sharing: C-51 created a vast government-wide information-sharing regime predicated on the open-ended basis of "undermining the security of Canada." The new regime lacks effective safeguards and transparency. After Snowden's revelations we should be worried about information collection, manipulation and sharing in a Big Data world.

No-fly List: C-51 codified the no-fly list but left it shrouded in secrecy and failed to address whether no-fly lists are effective in keeping air travellers safe.

Criminal Code: C-51 relied on ambiguous terms to criminalize expression that may be far removed from actual criminal acts. This may silence unpopular but non-criminal expression either directly or through self-censorship. Furthermore, C-51 extended the period of detention without charge, which is a striking departure from our constitutional values.

CSIS Powers: C-51 gave the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) dramatic new powers to "reduce" threats to the security of Canada. This ignores the rationale for creating CSIS in the 1980s in response to the illegal activities of the RCMP Security Service. CSIS was established to separate intelligence gathering from enforcement. The "reduction" powers mean that CSIS may engage in a wide range of enforcement-like activities in secret. This is a recipe for trouble not only in terms of dirty tricks and mistakes, but also because it dampens CSIS's incentives to co-operate with the RCMP in national security investigations. As well, under C-51 judges can authorize Charter of Rights violations, which perverts the judicial role in our legal system.

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Secrecy: C-51 allows evidence to be withheld from special security-cleared lawyers in closed hearings involving immigrants and refugees. This flouts a key Supreme Court decision that found total secrecy in these proceedings contrary to Charter rights.

Support for C-51 eroded as Canadians learned more about it. Despite the public's discomfort, the Conservatives dismissed concerns out of hand and stooped to usingad hominemattacks against critics. The C-51 debate stands as a low point in our nation's public discourse because it mimicked the toxic political culture of contemporary America.

I advocated for the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association on C-51, collaborating with a nationwide coalition of leading civil society organizations. Our concerns about C-51 fell on deaf ears in the halls of power.

A Fresh Start?

Canada has a new government with a markedly different tone. Gone are the cardboard villains and divisive rhetoric.

Despite voting for it, prime minister Trudeau promised that C-51 would be amended. However, because C-51 is deeply flawed the best approach is to scrap the legislation and start fresh. That brings these advantages: (i) it allows reasonable and focused legislation to be developed that responds to genuine national security needs while respecting the Charter and rule of law, (ii) it provides opportunities for broad-based engagement to foster trust and build social license for Canada's national security project, and (iii) it creates ownership in a critical public policy area that is not based on the flawed legislation of a predecessor with a starkly different worldview.

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If the Liberals do not start fresh, they should begin with the following amendments to address C-51's most egregious defects:

Information Sharing: Tighten and limit the basis for information sharing. Introduce centralized transparency, safeguards and accountability over all national security-related information sharing. Limit and strictly control the sharing of information outside Canada's government. Remove government immunity from litigation for harms caused by information sharing.

No-fly List: Undertake a robust public review of the no-fly list system's effectiveness. Ensure fairness, transparency and an effective redress process for those adversely affected.

Criminal Code: Ensure that only expression directly linked to criminal activity is captured. Strictly control the use of detention without charge and limit police and security agencies' authority over detainees in these cases to avoid abuses of power.

CSIS Powers: Repeal CSIS's power to "reduce" threats to the security of Canada. Ensure that the exercise of all CSIS powers is consistent with the Charter.

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Secrecy: Restore security-cleared lawyers' access to all evidence in immigration and refugee proceedings.

Reforming National Security

C-51 isn't the end of the road on national security reform; it's the beginning. Canada's national security sector requires transformative change. In that regard, the government should begin work on the following:

Accountability: In addition to a Parliamentary Committee on national security Canada needs a unified review body that will have: (i) jurisdiction over all national security functions across government, (ii) a strong mandate and appropriate security clearances to examine the work of the national security sector, (iii) sufficient resources to carry out its work, (iv) security-cleared lawyers on staff to test government claims and evidence in all national security-related secret proceedings, and (v) robust investigation, complaints and remedial processes. The government should also establish an independent watchdog similar to the UK's Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. These changes will help create a culture of accountability, build public trust and drive positive reform.

Secrecy: Where secrecy is used in national security proceedings security-cleared lawyers should be present to test government claims and evidence.

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Torture: Abolish the "Suresh exception", where the Supreme Court left the door open for deportation to torture, by introducing an absolute prohibition against deportation to torture in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Also, repeal the previous government's directives to the security agencies allowing the use and sharing of information linked to torture.

Arar Recommendations: Implement the Arar Inquiry recommendations.

National security is important because it is linked to things that matter to each of us, like public safety, human rights and civil liberties. That's why it's crucial to keep Canadians safe in a manner that doesn't compromise the spirit and values of the nation we are trying to protect.

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The fluctuating feud between Donald Trump and Fox News reached a fresh nadir on Tuesday when the Republican presidential frontrunner said he will skip Thursdays TV debate over the participation of moderator Megyn Kelly.

Trump and Kelly clashed at a Fox News debate in August over the tycoons derisory attitude towards women. The day after, Trump excoriated Kelly, attributing her "poor performance" to her menstrual cycle.

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This weeks Fox News debate in Des Moines is the final event before the vital Iowa caucuses next week.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, and Fox News Channel host and moderator Megyn Kelly

Speaking in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Tuesday afternoon, Trump said "most likely I won't be doing the debate. He added: Lets see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me.

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Later on Tuesday, the businessmans campaign manager confirmed that Trump would not take part. Corey Lewandowski said the property mogul will not be participating in the Fox News debate on Thursday, adding that position was non-negotiable.

It would be a remarkable gamble by Trump to miss the debate, leaving a stage bereft of the candidate leading across all national polls. Of course, Trump may still turn up; Tuesdays announcement may be a ploy to ensure the tycoon dominates the headlines in the days leading up to the debate.

Fox News later released a statement on Trumps boycott:

FOX: We cant give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees. pic.twitter.com/TsFJLq5yj9  Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) January 27, 2016

Want to know how primary voting works? Click here for an explainer.
Hate crime witnessed by 27% of people in past year, new poll claims

A fifth witnessed abuse based on religion and 25% on race or ethnicity

Of those who failed to intervene, almost 70% later regretted it

Research carried out to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day

"They said: 'You're Jewish'. And they started hurling abuse at me," says Michelle Annis, a British Jew from Manchester, describing a visit to a local Marks & Spencer. Her children have been called "fucking Jews" on public transport. In not one of those cases did anyone intervene.

This did not happen 70 years ago but in 2013, shortly before Annis, her husband and two daughters emigrated to Israel over what she regards as the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Britain. "You no longer felt comfortable, living in a Jewish area, sending your children to a Jewish school. Attacks on Britain are on the increase," she tells HuffPost UK by phone from Israel.

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As people commemorate the victims of genocide today on Holocaust Memorial Day, a survey has found that more than a quarter of us witnessed a hate crime within the last year and, of those who failed to intervene, 69% later regretted it.

Of the 12% of survey respondents who said they had been victims of hate crime themselves in the last year, 60% of them said not one of the witnesses present intervened when it happened, research by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) found.

More than a fifth of Britons - 22% - have witnessed hate speech over someone's religion and overall 27% of us witnessed a hate crime - violence or hostility directed at someone over their identity, such as race, sexuality, religion or disability - in the last 12 months, according to the survey.

The Metropolitan Police recorded 14,110 religious or racially-motivated hate crimes in London in 2015, up from 11,549 in 2014.

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The HMDT is now encouraging people not to stay silent when they witness such incidents with the "Don't Stand By" theme to today's commemorations.

London has seen a large increase in reported religious and racially-motivated hate crimes

Annis' family lived in Whitefield and her children attended the Orthodox King David High School. She told The Huffington Post UK she had suffered anti-Semitic abuse in Manchester city centre while walking past a stand manned by activists opposing Israel.

"I tried to enter a store with my daughter and they said 'you're one of them, aren't you?' I said: 'Pardon?'. They said: 'You're Jewish'.

"And they started hurling abuse at me." She also described one incident where her children were called "fucking Jews" on a bus in the city.

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When asked if anyone said or did anything to intervene in either incident, she said: "Everyone was very quiet. You have to remember that the average British person doesn't want to get involved. Why should they? British people don't get involved with other people. Someone hurling abuse at someone? They don't get involved."

She added: "I don't think people get involved until it gets far too worse, otherwise we'd have never [have] had the Holocaust, would we?"

Annis, 53, now lives in Ra'anana near Tel Aviv. She emigrated with her husband Michael, a pharmacist, after their daughters Alyssa and Danielle finished their first year of high school and A Levels respectively.

HMDT chief executive Olivia Marks-Woldman explained that remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides is largely about finding ways to make sure they can never happen again.

"We know that silence and indifference in the face of discrimination and hatred allows persecution to take root, so we want to encourage people to stand up and speak out, in the way many brave souls have in the past."

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When asked whether and how people should intervene, Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton, the national police lead for hate crime, told HuffPost UK: "Every situation is different and members of the public should always consider their own safety, as well as the risk to the victim, before intervening.

"However, we can all do something by urgently reporting any incidents to the police and showing our support for diversity and tolerance."

"The police recognise that most hate crimes are never reported despite their devastating impact," he added. Being yourself is not a crime. Hate crime is.

In October, research by Faith Matters found that bystanders were not intervening in Islamophobic hate crime and warned this tolerance was making abuse "normal".

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At the time, Fiyaz Mughal, director of attack reporting service Tell Mama told HuffPost UK the lack of intervention "doubles the impact of alienation and isolation" among Muslims.

He said: "A lot of victims - this not just a one-off - are saying no one is helping them when theyre in trouble or when they are targeted. Thats a concern.

Victims are saying I wish somebody had called the police, I wish somebody had just asked me if I was okay. It doesnt mean getting involved in the fray, just giving that reassurance. But people were just walking past."

The HMDT survey found that verbal abuse, such as name calling, was cited as the most common form hate crime took.

Three quarters of those who witnessed something in the last year said it was verbal.

A total of 30% witnessed harassment, 20% witnessed threats of violence and 14% had seen actual physical attacks.

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A total of 28% witnessed abuse online. More than three-quarters - 77 % - said communicating abuse online was just as bad as shouting it in the street.

The survey also suggested younger people seem more willing to challenge a hate crime by confronting the person responsible.

Seventeen percent of 16-24 year-olds said they had intervened in what they witnessed, compared to 13% of 25 to 34 year olds and 7% of 35-44 year olds.
Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman have a new film out that promises action, explosions and... godawful punnery.

oh my god this tagline no pic.twitter.com/m9irERhlyC  Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) January 26, 2016

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Is it supposed to be a joke? Have our dear American cousins simply failed to grasp good old British humour?

More importantly, why didn't anyone intervene?!

The makers of 'London Has Fallen' - sequel to 'Olympus Has Fallen' - have been contacted to clarify this linguistic debacle. UPDATE - This is the US-only poster which is still no excuse.

As the Guardian's Jessica Elgot puts it...

i mean, by jove, this is bloody awful chaps.  Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) January 26, 2016

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Schools that allow pupils to wear face veils could be ruled "inadequate," according to the head of Ofsted. The chief inspector of schools in England, Sir Michael Wilshaw, wrote a letter on Tuesday to inspectors demanding they mark down institutions where they judge a veil acts as a "barrier to learning."

A ban for the veil already has support from Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, who said previously Muslim pupils and teachers should not be allowed to wear the controversial garb. Wilshaw added on Tuesday: "I am concerned that some heads and principals who are trying to restrict the wearing of the full veil in certain circumstances are coming under pressure from others to relax their policy.

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"I want to assure these leaders that they can rely on my full backing for the stance they are taking, he continued. I have also made clear to my inspectors that where leaders are condoning the wearing of the face veil by staff members or by pupils when this is clearly hindering communication and effective teaching, they should give consideration to judging the school as inadequate."

Chief Inspector of Schools Sir Michael Wilshaw delivers his keynote speech at the Guildhall, London

However, the Ofsteds chief comments were decried by the Muslim Council of Britain, which accused the Office for Standards in Education of resorting to "the megaphone of the media to show that it is flexing its muscles". A spokeswoman for the Council added: "We are a country that prides itself in accommodation and fair play. It is a shame that the niqab - the full face veil that a minority of Muslim women wear - has become a polarising issue when it need not be.

The Ofsted chief justified his stance, saying he was determined to ensure "discrimination, including on the grounds of gender, has no place in our classrooms". He added: "We want our schools, whether faith schools or non-faith schools, to prepare their pupils equally for life in 21st century Britain. We need to be confident our children's education and future prospects are not being harmed in any way."

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The face veil is more than a piece of clothing. Its symbolic role means it should have no place in British schools. https://t.co/uE0VQsrlE6  Secularism UK (@NatSecSoc) January 26, 2016

National Secular Society campaigns manager Stephen Evans welcomed Wilshaw's action, even though the group does not back a ban of the veil in public. He said: Full face veils are obviously inappropriate in a classroom and inhibit communication between staff and pupils. There should be every expectation that pupils and staff can communicate and identify each-other easily in schools. School dress codes will not generally permit face coverings to be worn and no concessions should be made to those who wish to cover their faces on religious grounds."

However, the National Union of Teachers warned Wilshaws plan could leave pupils and teachers isolated. Sir Michael Wilshaw once again has chosen to issue punitive diktats to threaten schools through the use of 'inadequate' Ofsted judgments, rather than enabling them to develop their own sensible and appropriate policies on the wearing of religious clothing at school, said Kevin Courtney, the NUT's deputy general secretary. Rather than assisting school leaders, this will have the effect of alienating many staff and pupils."
Entertainment / Music

by Bongani Ndlovu

In a desperate attention seeking move meant to entice followers, Zimdancehall musician Nashie (real name Tinashe Mararanyika) faked his death last week.The death hoax which was part of efforts to market his forthcoming album saw the Kuchibhorane hit-maker, through his girlfriend, communicating to friends that he had died in a car accident while travelling to Gweru.The girlfriend initially sent a message with images of the accident scene saying: "Your friend Nashie asked me to tell you that he got involved in a serious accident on his way to Harare."An hour later, she sent another message informing Nashie's friends that he had died.As a result, most friends took to social media networks to express their shock and dismay at the death of the muso. Pictures of the vehicle in which Nashie had purportedly perished in soon went viral on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.A concerned friend Calvin_Treazy tweeted: "Heard that Nashie Mushona Kuchibhorani passed away . . . I'm lost, still can't believe it."Unknown to them, Nashie had taken them for a ride as he resurfaced on Monday with the release of a single  Handifi Zvekumhanya  announcing that he was alive. It then emerged that Nashie, who has two albums to his name and is not known to many, had faked his death so that he could be in the limelight.The artiste took advantage of free Twitter connection offered by mobile operator Econet Wireless as he released the song on that platform.But to his disappointment, Twelebs did not take the gimmick lightly as they immediately responded to his tweet expressing their displeasure."How can you fake your own death in four hours, then release a song inonzi 'Atife zvekumhanya?' . . . childish," tweeted DearAngelbert.TVYangu tweeted: "Byo artist Nashie fakes death so he can drop a track. That has to be the dumbest stunt we've ever heard #ZERO ."Explaining himself, Nashie said he had pulled the stunt to get people to follow him."It was just a marketing gimmick to make people aware that I'm releasing an 18-track album 'MA-Recovery' on February 14."I hope my fans aren't angry, I just wanted to get people talking about me," said Nashie."The car that was posted as my car crash was actually that of my friends that crashed two weeks ago. No one was hurt. I decided to use it to fake my death."The artiste said he was not troubled by the negative feedback he was receiving from people as he feels he accomplished his mission."I don't listen to what people say. They might think I'm being desperate or seeking attention, it doesn't matter. It's my life and I can do whatever I want."He has since scheduled a Valentine's Day show in Botswana.
Abe Vigoda, best known for playing a doomed member of the Mafia in 'The Godfather', has died in his sleep aged 94.

His daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs, told The Associated Press that Vigoda died Tuesday morning in his sleep at Fuchs' home in Woodland Park, New Jersey. The cause of death was old age. "This man was never sick," Fuchs said.

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After 'The Godfather', Vigoda went on to play Detective Phil Fish on the hit sitcom 'Barney Miller', but will always be best remembered for his role as Tessio.

Abe Vigoda in 2011

In 2009 he told Vanity Fair: "Im really not a Mafia person. Im an actor who spent his life in the theatre.

"But Francis [Ford Coppola] said, I want to look at the Mafia not as thugs and gangsters but like royalty in Rome. And he saw something in me that fit Tessio as one would look at the classics in Rome."

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He said of the film: "'The Godfather' changed my life."

Vigoda played the role in 'The Godfather: Part II' in 1974 during a flashback scene. He also appeared in 'Cannonball Run II' and 'Who's Talking and North'.

As Detective Phil Fish

His mis-reported death became a running joke and often appeared on lists of celebrities believed to have died. He and those around him would play along with the hoaxes.

Billy Crystal once said in a speech at a club: "I have nothing to say about Abe. I was always taught to speak well of the dead."

Born in New York City in 1921, Vigoda attended the Theater School of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall. In the early 1950s, he appeared as straight man for the Jimmy Durante and Ed Wynn TV comedies.

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For 30 years, he worked in the theater, acting in dozens of plays in such diverse characters as John of Gaunt in "Richard II" (his favorite role) and Abraham Lincoln in a short-lived Broadway comedy "Tough to Get Help."

Vigoda attributed his high percentage in winning roles to his performance in auditions. Instead of delivering the tired soliloquies that most actors performed, he wrote his own, about a circus barker. At a surprise 80th birthday party in New Jersey in 2001, he gave a spirited recital of the monologue to the delight of the 100 guests.

Reflecting on his delayed success, Vigoda once remarked: "When I was a young man, I was told success had to come in my youth. I found this to be a myth. My experiences have taught me that if you deeply believe in what you are doing, success can come at any age."
Getty Images

The Israeli government released a handwritten letter on Wednesday, penned by Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in which he pleads for his life.

The missive, written in 1962, two days before Eichmann was due to be put to death, was sent to former Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and was publically revealed for the first time as part of a ceremony to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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In the letter, Eichmann refuses to accept responsibility for his crimes, writing that the judges at his trial "made a significant error, since they cannot put themselves in the time and situation I was in during the war years."

Eichmann standing in a glass cage in the Jerusalem courtroom in 1962 where he was tried for war crimes

"I never served at a rank so high that it could have been involved in such decisive and independent powers," he continued. "I never gave any order in my own name, but rather always acted on orders"

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There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders, he wrote. "I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty."

"I am not able to recognise the courts ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honour Mr President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out."

According to Haaretz, the letter, which was written in German and translated into Hebrew, was recently recovered during the digitisation of Israels archives. The letter will form part of an exhibition about Eichmanns trial at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

In response to Eichmann's plea, Ben-Zvi returned a letter, stating that he had rejected the requests and would not "use my authority to pardon on reduce the penalty for this case."

A lieutenant colonel in the Schutzstaffel (SS), Eichmann was one of the key organisers of the Holocaust, overseeing logistics for the mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

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He fled to Argentina after the Second World War, but was captured and smuggled to Israel by Mossad agents in 1960. After two trials, the Israelis eventually hanged Eichmann a few minutes after midnight at a prison in Ramla on 31 May 1962.
The grandparents of a severely disabled teenager who won a Court of Appeal challenge over the lawfulness of the so-called bedroom tax said they could cry with happiness following Wednesday's verdict.

Paul and Sue Rutherford's case was one of two that judges today said were discriminatory, with another case involving a victim of domestic violence.

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The Rutherfords' grandson, Warren, has a rare genetic disorder which means he is unable to walk, talk or feed himself and is doubly incontinent.

Paul Rutherford speaking to the BBC following Wednesday's ruling

The family live in a three-bedroom bungalow, adapted for his needs, with the couple in one room, Warren in another, and the third needed for carers staying overnight and to store equipment.

Mr Rutherford said he was absolutely delighted with the court's ruling today.

Speaking to the BBC, he said: I am a bit lost for words. I could almost cry with happiness. And I hope that other people in our situation are going to benefit from this court's decision as well.

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Speaking of the relief he felt at the ruling, he said: We had the discretionary housing payments from the council to make up the shortfall but we were always worried that that would stop.

So we never felt secure being here anymore and that put a big strain on Sue and I as people - just the uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen in the future all the time.

Appeal Court judges rule so-called 'bedroom tax' is discriminatory in 2 cases. Here is victorious Paul Rutherford: https://t.co/xV2toaViXt  Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) January 27, 2016

They launched a judicial review over the regulations, which allow for an additional bedroom if the claimant or their partner require overnight care but make no provision for children who need an overnight carer.

When their case was dismissed at the High Court in 2014, Mr Justice Stuart-Smith said that a discretionary housing payment made by Pembrokeshire County Council covered the rental shortfall until April 2015 and there was no evidence to suggest it would refuse to make up the shortfall in the future.

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Disability charity Scope welcomed today's ruling.

Beth Grossman, head of policy at Scope, said: For the vast majority of disabled people these are not spare bedrooms, these are essential rooms. Many people need a room for specialist equipment, or so that their disabled child can sleep separately from their siblings, or with a carer.

Weve spoken to disabled people who arent able to share a specially adapted bed with their partner, and have to sleep in a separate room.

Theyre being forced to move, or find the extra cash they dont have to pay their rent. Life costs more if you are disabled. Scope research shows disabled people pay more for all kinds of everyday things  on average a premium of 550 per month.

We should be looking at ways to bring costs down rather than ramping them up.

Carers UK said that there are currently 60,000 carers affected by the subsidy.

Helena Herklots, Chief Executive of Carers UK, said: This policy is having a catastrophic impact on families, many of whom are already struggling practically, emotionally and financially to care for seriously-ill or disabled loved ones.

Carers UK has argued that the policy unfairly penalises carers since it was first introduced in April 2013. Our research shows that those carers who are affected by the bedroom tax are being left unable to pay their electricity and heating bills and some families are falling behind on their rent and facing eviction.

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Following todays ruling, we urge the Government to amend the regulations to protect carers and their families. The policy is clearly having a devastating impact on vulnerable families and the Government cannot allow this to continue.

Another case was brought by a single mother living in a three-bedroom council house fitted with a secure panic room to protect her from a violent ex-partner. Her case highlighted the effect of the "bedroom tax on women living in Sanctuary Scheme homes.

Judges had previously heard that the domestic violence victim had been raped, assaulted and threatened by her former partner. Yet she was still faced with losing 11.65 a week from her benefits.

This was because her panic room was regarded as a spare room under the regulations and she was deemed to be under occupying her home, the Press Association reports.

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The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) argued that her challenge lacked credibility because funds in the form of discretionary housing payments (DHPs) were available through local councils to people facing exceptional circumstances.

In both cases it was argued that the policy, which came into force in April 2013, unlawfully discriminates - against women and domestic violence victims and against children in the situation of the Rutherfords' grandson.

Commenting on today's verdict, Rebecca Hilsenrath, CEO at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the group is pleased the court found the impact of the bedroom tax discriminatory and unjustified.

She said: Victims of serious domestic violence who are reliant on full housing benefit are in an extremely vulnerable situation and their life can be under threat. Their protection is paramount.

The new regulations reduced housing benefits for those within the Sanctuary Scheme because their accommodation was a safe-house and therefore larger than usual.

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This could result in an inability to pay the rent and therefore eviction. The effect for a victim of domestic violence of losing a secure home is profound and could be extremely dangerous.

The Government rejects the term ''bedroom tax'' and says the regulations remove what is in fact a spare room subsidy, with the aim of encouraging people to move to smaller properties and save around 480m a year from the housing benefit bill.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas, Lord Justice Tomlinson and Lord Justice Vos announced that they were allowing the appeals in both cases on the ground that the admitted discrimination in each case ... has not been justified by the Secretary of State.
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 05: Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, delivers a speech following the announcement of Nigel Farage's promotion to party leader again on November 5, 2010 in London, England. Mr Farage, who led the party from 2006 till 2009, was re-elected following a postal ballot of all 18,000 UKIP members. Mr Farage was injured in a light aircraft crash on the day of this year's general election. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Oli Scarff via Getty Images

Former Ukip leader Lord Pearson has been told off by a Bishop for using the House of Lords to drive a wedge between Christians and Muslims.

On Wednesday afternoon, Lord Pearson asked the government whether there was a "risk that Christians could be recorded as having committed an anti-Muslim hate crime from April 2016 by preaching the divinity of Christ in public or by reading out loud sections of the bible in public".

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Lord Pearson's comments come as new research suggested a quarter of people in the UK have witnessed hate crime in the last year.

In response, the Bishop of Worcester, who sits in the Lords, told the Ukip peer: "Questions phrased in this manner are not conducive to building positive relations between faith communities and in-particular with the Muslim communities as we are endeavouring to do in the Church at at time when Muslims are feeling unfairly stigmatised," he said.

He added: "Muslims and people of all faiths bring great enrichment to our society and make a very significant contribution to the common good."

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Lord Pearson led Ukip between November 2009 and September 2010 before Nigel Farage returned to the top job in the party.

The peer also praised David Cameron as "brave" for saying "Jesus is the only son of god" as it would not have gone "down well with the Islamists".

Answering for the government, Conservative minister Lord Ahmed said "anyone who preaches any kind of hate has no place bigotry has no place, any kind of hatred based on race, sexual orientation, or religion, has no place in British society".

A Censuswid poll, carried out to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday, showed 27% of those questioned had seen a form of hate crime, with a fifth witnessing abuse based on religion and 25% based on race or ethnicity.

Of the 2,007 people asked, 440 said they had witnessed hate crime and regretted not challenging it.

In separate figures the Everyday Antisemitism Project - a scheme where Jews share experiences of discrimination - reported a surge in submissions, with 303 received in the last three months of 2015, compared to a monthly average of 32 in the preceding 14 months.

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Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which commissioned the questionnaire, said: "The theme for the thousands of Holocaust Memorial Day events taking place across the country today is 'Don't stand by', and these figures show just how important that message is.

"Today is about remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, but it's also about finding ways to make sure they can never happen again. We know that silence and indifference in the face of discrimination and hatred allows persecution to take root, so we want to encourage people to stand up and speak out, in the way many brave souls have in the past."

Verbal abuse was the most common form of hate crime reported in the poll, while 28% of the incidents witnessed were online abuse on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Three quarters of those asked (77%) said there was no difference between bullying or "trolling" someone online and shouting abuse at them in the street.
Leader of the BNP Nick Griffin after losing his seat during the European Parliamentary elections count at Manchester Town Hall, Manchester. Anna Gowthorpe/PA Archive

The British National Party has re-registered itself as a political party, but managed to fluff its application with a glaring spelling error.

The far-right group earlier this month admitted there had been "a small clerical error from a party that is supposed to be dead in the water" that meant it was removed from the Electoral Commission's register of political parties in Britain.

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BNP staff re-applied in time to be able to field candidates in May's local and London mayoral elections, their proposal replacing references to deposed Nick Griffin with ones to new leader Adam Walker.

But they also announced a fairly curious policy.

Walker shakes hands with ex-leader Nick Griffin

Among the list of their 'proposed descriptions' - "at the heart of our community", "British jobs for British workers" and so forth - was a pledge to fight unstainable housing. "Because We Care".

"Unstainable Housing."

You can see the lexical lapse at point five.

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The hunt to find London's so-called 'Croydon cat killer' has intensified after two more felines were found beheaded on Tuesday.

The latest victims brings the total of decapitated dead pets to 35, and now campaign group 'People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) have offered a 5,000 reward for information leading to arrest.

So far, victims have been discovered in Croydon, Mitcham, Streatham - and up to 13 miles away in Charlton.

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In one instance, a mother found her pet moggy with its leg dismembered.

Celebrity Dermot OLeary and his successor as X-Factor host Caroline Flack have both leant their support to efforts to catch the cat killer, calling on social media followers for their help to uncover vital information.

Lead guitarist of band 'The Vamps', James McVey, is also offering free tour tickets to anyone who can help to track the killer down.

O'Leary has called for the cat killer to be stopped

"We're grateful to these compassionate stars for alerting their millions of fans about this sickening case," PETA's associate director, Elisa Allen, said.

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"Someone in South London must know something about the cruel individual who committed these callous acts, and we're calling on anyone with information to come forward.

"A person capable of deliberately causing this kind of suffering to helpless animals demonstrates a very worrying psychological state and must be found."

A Met Police spokesperson said: Police in Croydon are investigating a number of incidents relating to cat deaths in the area. We are currently working to establish the facts.
Madness has descended upon Twitter today as people try to decipher the burning question on the front page of Wednesday's Daily Mail.

The social media site has been inundated with answers to the newspaper's vital question "Why do so many celebrities have knobbly knees?".

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The answers came flooding in:

Suspect this will be blamed on: 1) Foreigners 2) The BBC 3) Political correctness 4) Jeremy Corbyn 5) The BBC... again  The Media Blog (@TheMediaTweets) January 27, 2016

One person blamed controversial columnist Katie Hopkins... And migrants:

@TheMediaTweets I imagine Katie Hopkins will say it's to do with her husband leaving her or migrants. Probably.  tom burke (@tommyyyyyyyy) January 27, 2016

Whilst another blamed not conforming:

@TheMediaTweets@jk_rowling Because knees don't feel the need to conform to the "sexy knee" stereo type. Give them time off ok..  Sophieee  (@SophieCross14) January 27, 2016

Even Jeremy Corbyn and the Kardashians were brought into the mix:

@TheMediaTweets@Peston I'm guessing the answer is one of asylum seekers, the Kardashians, or Jeremy Corbyn?  Graeme (@01892_dad) January 27, 2016

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As well as global warming:

Then an actual celeb tried to clear things up:

Once someone posted pictures of my knees saying they looked like babies faces... Weird thing is they were not wrong. https://t.co/7bVsy7gg74  Ruby Rose (@RubyRose) January 26, 2016

Whilst one person actually offered a serious answer:

@TheMediaTweets FFS. One line answer: because they are thin! Groundbreaking.  Dee Alexis (@psst_alexis) January 27, 2016

Well, if you really wanted to know the answer, the Daily Mail wrote this:
David Cameron faced a fresh backlash over his attack on Labours Sadiq Khan after he declared that the Tories were the best party to fight extremists that want to divide our country.

In his most outspoken intervention yet in the London Mayoral race, the Prime Minister used a rally alongside Zac Goldsmith to declare that residents would become lab rats in a Jeremy Corbyn experiment if Khan was elected this May.

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But in the same speech he had also referred to the need for vigilance against terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks, declaring the capital needed a Mayor who would be tough on Islamist extremists that want to divide our country.

I know working with Zac Ill be able to do just that, Cameron added.

Supporters of Khan claimed that the Prime Ministers remarks, with their implication that Labour would be weak on security, sounded like another dog whistle to voters on the issues of terrorism and Islam.

A Labour source told HuffPost UK: Its obvious what Cameron was trying to do there. Londoners will see straight through it.

The clash follows spats between Goldsmith and Khan over claims that he is a radical and divisive figure.

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Speaking at the rally in Mill Hill, north London, Cameron told an audience of Tory supporters [see video above] why security was at the heart of the Mayoral election.

We have to recognise the scale of the terrorist threat we face in London. What happened in Paris, that could have happened here and I will do everything I can as your Prime Minister to help keep London and Londoners safe, he said.

And I know working with Zac Ill be able to do just that: a mayor and a Prime Minister who know we have got to be tough on the Islamist extremists that want to divide our country.

We know we have got to be tough in terms of providing the extra policemen on our streets.

And we know weve got to be tough in making sure there are sufficient armed policemen on Londons streets so they can respond if they need to in the result of there is an incident. And that will always be the case when Im your Prime Minister and hes your Mayor.

So youve got the man, youve got the plan, now just think for a moment about the alternative. Weve got one man with a record of delivery - and weve got another man with a record

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The Prime Minister then went on to ridicule Khan for nominating Corbyn and listed the Labour leaders recent remarks about holding discussions on the Falklands and bringing back flying pickets for secondary strike action.

Khan tweeted today that the use of the word rats was inappropriate, but No.10 countered that his response was hysterical.

Im shocked the PM described Londoners as rats. I love this city and the people who live here. Desperate stuff from a desperate campaign.  Sadiq Khan MP (@SadiqKhan) January 27, 2016

Some in Labour fear that the Conservatives will go all-out to attack the party on terrorism and security in coming weeks, especially as recent polls show Khan has a clear lead over his rival and as some Tory MPs complain about their candidates lack of political street-fighting ability.

The battle for the mayoralty has become increasingly bitter, with a Goldsmith leaflet accusing Khan of being a radical who wants to divide Londoners, and even attacking him for his record on chicken shops.

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One aide to Khan said the word "radical" to describe a Muslim against the backdrop of a climate of terrorism was "divisive dog-whistling.

Labour has hit back with a leaflet describing Goldsmith as a serial underachiever, an Etonian millionaire who inherited his wealth.

The leaflet quoted Tory donor and businessman Sir Nigel Rudd claiming Goldsmith was left money by his daddy, hes never had a job other than a job given to him by his uncle, so what qualification has he got to do anything?"

The Tories today unveiled a new poster describing Khan as Corbyns man.

Zac Goldsmith marks 100 days until the London mayoral election with a new electronic poster in Vauxhall. @itvlondonpic.twitter.com/44uqY1uxKh  Simon Harris (@simonharrisitv) January 26, 2016

A senior Tory source told HuffPost UK: The point the PM is making is that he doesnt want hardworking Londoners subjected to a trial run of the extreme, radical policies of Jeremy Corbyns Labour party which are a threat to our national security, our economic security and the security of every family in the country.

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Sadiq Khans claims are a desperate bid to distract attention from his support for Labours extreme policies - even though he personally nominated Corbyn for the leadership.
David Cameron has been criticised for referring to the people living at the camp in Calais "bunch of migrants".

The prime minister deployed the phrase while going after Jeremy Corbyn and Labour during PMQs on Wednesday. "Look at their record over the last week. They met with the unions and gave them flying pickets," he said.

"They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falkland Islands. They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers."

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Corbyn has proposed Britain allow in refugees who have a family link to Britain. However Cameron has dismissed the idea, claiming it would make the French border a magnet for more migrants."

Former Labour leadership candidate Yvette Cooper demanded the prime minister withdraw his remark given today was Holocaust Memorial Day.

She asked Commons speaker John Bercow immediately after prime minister's questions: "Doesn't he think it was inappropriate of the prime minister to use language referring to the refugee crisis in Europe and talk about a 'bunch of migrants'?"

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Cooper said Cameron should use "much more statesman-like language" about the need to "build a cross-party consensus on such a complex and sensitive issue".

Cameron was also criticised by shadow home secretary Andy Burnham and former shadow cabinet minister Chuka Umunna.

Once again, Cameron's mask slips. He just dismissed desperate people fleeing conflict as a "bunch of migrants" - on Holocaust Memorial Day.  Andy Burnham (@andyburnhammp) January 27, 2016

The PM refers to "a bunch of migrants" in Calais at the Dispatch box just now. Inflammatory and unbecoming of his office. Shameful #PMQs  Chuka Umunna (@ChukaUmunna) January 27, 2016

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Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said Cameron "diminishes his office and our country" with his comment. "Whether Mr Cameron planned to use this phrase in advance or whether it was an off the cuff throw away remark it shows his true attitude towards those most in need," he said.

On his LBC phone-in, Alex Salmond was asked if felt Cameron's comments painted migrants as "sub-human and was effectively "hate-speech". He replied: "I agree with you".

Salmond also claimed Cameron used the term to deflect attention away from the Google tax deal. He said: "I think David Cameron learnt a bit from the Australian maestro of spin, and disgusting spin at that".

Several political commentators also speculated as to whether the phrase had been deliberately used to distract from the ongoing row over whether the government had allowed Google to get away with not paying enough tax.

The term "dead cat" strategy, made famous by Cameron's Australian general election guru Lynton Crosby, refers to a politician making a deliberately provocative statement to change the terms of debate.

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Cameron's "bunch of migrants" comment looks like a dead cat to distract from Google (last time it was non-doms). #PMQs  George Eaton (@georgeeaton) January 27, 2016

Cameron probably happy to have "bunch of migrants" row to take heat off Google tax deal. Dropping a dead cat  Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) January 27, 2016

"Labour have a policy just to open the doors," says a Tory spokesman, suggesting No10 not entirely unhappy to be discussing migrants.  Robert Hutton (@RobDotHutton) January 27, 2016

Conservative Anna Soubry told BBC Radio 4 she may "not necessarily" have used the same langauge as the prime minister, but dismissed the suggestion Cameron's line had been scripted as "silly".

"What everybody forgets is, in the heat of thing, one says things that you might say in a conversation which you might not necessary say when it's analyses and picked apart," she said. "We all use slang."

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"I will not criticize the prime minister on this. I know when you are standing at the Despatch Box .. you've for all the row and noise around you, it is very easy to use a word which on reflection may not be the best way. I am sure he meant to say 'a group'."

"I would be amazed if that was a scripted line," she added. "I dont believe that for one moment. If anyone says that they are being silly."

"Swarm", "bunch" David Cameron betrays disturbing attitudes in his choice of language. You could try "children", "people", "refugees" #pmqs  Natalie Bennett (@natalieben) January 27, 2016

The row echoes one from last July, when Cameron was criticised for branding the migrants and refugees gathered at the Calais camp as "a swarm".
FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2015 file photo, Rupert Murdoch arrives at the 2015 Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, Calif. Murdoch, issued an apology Thursday, Oct. 8, after he faced social media backlash following his suggestion that President Barack Obama isn't a Evan Agostini/AP

Rupert Murdoch has hit out at David Cameron and George Osborne - deriding the pair as "posh boys" lobbied by Google executives cleverly planted in Downing street.

The News International boss warned that global tech companies would "ruin local businesses who pay" following revelations that Google would pay only 130 million in back-taxes - which critics say amounts to just a 3% tax rate.

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In a series of posts on social media, Murdoch claimed the search engine giant had orchestrated the "most brilliant new lobbying effort yet" by infiltrating the corridors of power in Westminster and the White House.

Tech tax breaks facilitated by politicians easily awed by Valley ambassadors like Google chairman Schmidt eg, posh boys in Downing St.@  Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 27, 2016

Google has cleverly planted dozens of their people in White House, Downing St, other governments. Most brilliant new lobbying effort yet.  Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 27, 2016

He went on to call for stronger tax laws to clamp down on companies that avoid paying millions of pounds in corporation tax, but admitted that Google had not contravened statute.

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Google et al broke no tax laws. Now paying token amounts for p r purposes. Won't work. Need strong new laws to pay like the rest of us.  Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 27, 2016

Global tech companies making enormous profits most places, funneling $$ thru tax havens. Unless stopped will ruin local businesses who pay.  Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 27, 2016

Some took Murdoch's outburst at Google's extensive planting of employees in senior government offices as an opportunity to remind him of the influence his own staff wielded in close proximity to the prime minister.

@rupertmurdoch You had Rebekah in Dave's kitchen and Andy in his office.  GOsborneGenius (@GOsborneGenius) January 27, 2016

@rupertmurdoch What you mean just like you  Audere2010 (@Audere2010) January 27, 2016

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The media baron's comments come just hours after one of Cameron's closest aides warned the dominance of firms like Google had led to people believing the companies are "above the law".

Steve Hilton, the prime minister's ex-director of strategy, said on Wednesday that there was growing "anger" at the behaviour of large companies.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

The MDC-T spokesperson Obert Gutu has distanced his party from the on going houses demolitions in Harare saying Zanu PF was responsible for the inhuman move."The Constitution of Zimbabwe provides for the fundamental human right of freedom from arbitrary eviction. Section 74 of the Constitution provides that no person may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances," Gutu said."In the past few days, some residents of Harare had their houses demolished by agents acting on the instructions of the Zanu PF government. Several houses that were built along the Airport Road in Harare were demolished. The MDC understands that the people who had built the demolished houses belonged to members of a Zanu PF-controlled housing co-operative society known as Nyakavanhu Housing Co-operative."He said it is always very painful and distressing to witness the demolition of houses belonging to people who would have worked extremely hard in order to provide shelter for their families. He said the right to shelter is indeed, a basic and fundamental human right."As a social democratic political party, the MDC will never, ever condone the indiscriminate, illegal and insensitive demolition of any citizen of Zimbabwe's place of residence. As such, we call upon all local authorities in the country to exercise restraint and circumspection when it comes to the decision to demolish houses. More importantly, no house should ever be demolished without strictly taking into consideration the provisions of Section 74 of the Constitution," said Gutu."Because of rampant and unmitigated corruption, many urban centres in Zimbabwe are now facing the scourge of greedy and criminal land barons. Most, if not all, these unscrupulous land barons are senior members of the faction-ridden Zanu PF political party. These greedy land barons have illegally parcelled out municipal and in some cases, even State land, to unsuspecting members of the public."He said members of the public are being made to pay huge amounts of money to these greedy and corrupt land barons who would then, illegally parcel out land for housing development.Gutu said most local authorities, particularly the Harare City Council and the Bulawayo City Council, have literally lost all control of municipal housing land to these greedy but politically, very powerful Zanu PF land barons."As a law-abiding and peace-loving political party, the MDC also calls upon the country's law enforcement agencies to ruthlessly clamp down on the illegal activities of these Zanu PF land barons. We would also urge all our councillors in the local authorities that we control to ensure that no municipal land is illegally allocated to any land baron or any other individual for that matter," he said."Sanity and order should be allowed to prevail in all our urban centres. We cannot allow and/or tolerate a situation whereby people are illegally allocated residential stands. In some cases, residential stands have been allocated even in open spaces designated for recreational use such as public parks. We have also experienced a situation where residential stands have been illegally allocated in wetlands; thus leading to serious ecological challenges such as the lowering of the water table as well as the depletion and/or extinction of natural plants and animals."Gutu said as part of the holistic harmonisation of the country's urban housing policy, the Zanu PF government should move very swiftly to enact a new and appropriate Urban Councils Act to overhaul the old Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29 : 15)."The Constitution of Zimbabwe was unanimously adopted in May 2013,but almost three years down the line, there are more than four (4)hundred pieces of legislation that are yet to be harmonised with the country's Constitution. We still do not have formally legislated metropolitan councils in Harare and Bulawayo. As a result, these two big cities still have ceremonial mayors whose day to day functions and activities are essentially directed by the central government through the Minister of Local Government," said Gutu."The Zanu PF government must be compelled to respect the provisions of the country's Constitution. The Constitution of Zimbabwe is the supreme law of the land. Section 2 (1) of the Constitution clearly and unambiguously states that the Constitution is the supreme law of Zimbabwe and any law, practice, custom or conduct inconsistent with it is invalid to the extent of the inconsistency."
Conservative MP, Philip Hollobone, addresses the audience during the launch of the 'Grassroots Out', a new cross-party group that will campaign for the UK to leave the European Union, in the Kettering Conference Centre in Kettering, north of London, on January 23, 2016. An in-or-out referendum on Britain's membership of the bloc will be held by the end of 2017, with British Prime Minister David Cameron hoping to strike a deal on renegotiating Britain's ties, before campaigning to stay in the union. AFP PHOTO / LEON NEAL / AFP / LEON NEAL (Photo credit should read LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images) LEON NEAL via Getty Images

A Conservative MP has said women should be banned from wearing a face veil in public because it stops them from "saying hello" to people.

Philip Hollobone, who has previously proposed a Face Coverings (Prohibition) Bill, told LBC Radio on Wednesday morning he was in favour of a "complete ban".

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"I don't want to live in a country where we go around with our faces covered," he said. "Part of the British way of life is smiling, waving, saying hello to passers by.

"If we are all going to go around with our faces covered its going to be a very miserable place indeed. I think it's really sad that in 2016 we're talking about it being acceptable to live in a miserable country where everyone goes around with their faces covered.

He added: "How miserable is that?"

The Kettering MP said "I don't think you should be able to cover your face in public".

LBC presenter Nick Ferrari replied: "Good lord. what about balaclavas on a cold day?"

Last week, David Cameron said he would give his backing to certain institutions such as schools and hospitals implementing a ban on Muslim women wearing veils.

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However the prime minister stopped short of supporting a French-style ban in public places. "I think in our country people should be free to wear what they like, within limits live how they like, and all the rest of it," he said.
Actor and philanthropist Peter Capaldi has recorded a powerful but simple message in support of refugees, after a visit to a camp in Jordan with the UNHCR.

The 57-year-old made a video, uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday morning by the UN body, after visiting families who had fled war-torn Syria.

"I think what a lot of people don't understand, is that the majority of the people who have been made to flee - they want to go home, it's all anybody wants to do is go home," he said during his emotional plea.

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Peter Capaldi met with Syrian families in Jordan

"These camps are not full of people sitting saying - you know - oh it would be great to go to Europe, or it would be great to go to London or America or whatever, they just want to go home," he continued.

The Dr Who star also met refugee families and helped communicate some of their extraordinary stories of escape and survival.

One family told Capaldi how their children had suffered nightmares from witnessing beheadings, and how their father was suffering from polio.

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But the writer revealed despite this, the family had still managed to triumph over despair: "All this was awful and yet there they were, they had survived with great dignity - and had their goodness in tact.

"These people would open the door to other people, these people would help and even through the most terrible experiences, they remained generous in spirit."

The actor then ended on a poignant note, clearly moved by the stories of the people he had met.

"It's really impressive what human beings can do, they do awful awful terrible things, but god they do wonderful things.

"And that's what you have to keep reminding yourselves, that we are incredibly lucky not to be in that position," he said.

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According to the UNHCR there are some 664,102 refugees residing in Jordan, with Syrians fleeing the ongoing violence in their country still constituting the majority of this population.

Approximately 20% of Syrian refugees reside in refugee camps, while the remaining live in non-camp settings.
Jeremy Corbyn should be directing questions about the size of Googles tax bill to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, David Cameron argued today in a fiery Commons clash.

Speaking during Prime Ministers Questions this afternoon, Mr Cameron defended the deal which has seen the internet giant agree to pay 130million in back-taxes.

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Mr Corbyn said the relatively small amount  calculated by some experts to equal just three per cent on Googles UK profits - showed there is one rule for big multi-national companies and another for ordinary small businesses and self-employed workers.

The Prime Minister disputed the three per cent figure, and launched into a tirade against the previous Labour Governments record on collecting taxes from multinational corporations.

Addressing Mr Corbyn across the Despatch Box, he said: If like me hes genuinely angry about what happened to Google under Labour can I tell him a few people he could call? Maybe he should start by calling Tony Blair  you can get him at JP Morgan. Call Gordon Brown, apparently you can get him at a Californian bond dealer called Pimco. Alastair Darling  I think hes at Morgan Stanley but its hard to keep up. These are the people to blame for Google not paying their taxes, were the ones who got them to pay.

The 130million deal was given a lukewarm reception when announced earlier this week.

Chancellor George Osborne called the agreement a major success, but Labours Meg Hillier, who chairs the influential Public Accounts Committee, tweeted: Bet individual taxpayers wouldnt get off as lightly as Google on back tax. Cosy deal. Will call HMRC and Google to @CommonsPAC to explain,

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Mr Corbyn pressed the Prime Minster over the deal, and read out a question from a gentleman called Jeff about the announcement.

He said Now you might well laugh but Jeff actually speaks for millions of people when he says to me 'Can you ask the Prime Minister whether as a working man of over 30 years whether there is a scheme that I can join that pays the same rate of tax as Google and other large corporations'. What does the Prime Minister say to Jeff?

Mr Cameron said Jeff was paying lower taxes thanks to the Tories, while Googles taxes are going up.

He said: No Government has done more than this one to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. No Government, and certainly not the last Labour government.
A teenager discovered it was cheaper for him to travel from Sheffield to Essex via Berlin, rather than going direct - although he only saved 8 in the process.

Jordon Cox, nicknamed the Coupon Kid for his money-saving skills, found that international flights with some budget airlines are cheaper than a rail ticket, so he decided to use the opportunity for a trip to a city he had never visited before.

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The 18-year-old flew with RyanAir to the German capital - and even had some money left over for a currywurst sausage at the Brandenburg Gate for lunch.

Jordon Cox on his trip home via Berlin

Writing on MoneysavingExpert.com, he explained: I know that flying is not very environmentally friendly and I wont do this every time I travel, however this was the cheapest way for me to get home and I got to enjoy a free mini holiday to a city Ive always wanted to visit.

Even by my usual standards, Ill admit this is a rather extreme way of saving money. I was teaching a class on couponing in Sheffield and I had booked a cheap train up there from Essex, but coming back home the cheapest one-way rail ticket was 47, so it needed some blue-sky thinking.

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Cox shows how his trip worked out

Cox enjoyed a mini trip to Berlin rather than a direct train journey

It turned out that flying out from East Midlands Airport to Berlin, spending seven hours exploring the city and then flying to Stansted and getting the bus home was cheaper than a single train journey in England.

But thats not all, I also figured out I could buy a return train ticket to Berlin city centre, enjoy a free tour of a government building and lunch while I was out there and STILL save money.

His advice to anyone else who fancies trying a similar trip?

This isnt for everyone as it can take a whole day to get to your final destination, but if youre not in a rush, your focus is saving money and you fancy a little walk around a European city, its worth a look.
Today, BBC World Service is holding a debate in South Africa around the question 'Can Africa afford free education?', which we have been helping them answer.

Inequality in education: poverty as a major factor.

The new agenda calls for 12 years of free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education, yet, as of 2010, on average in the region, 20-24 year olds had only attained 6.6 years. A lot of the blame for this unfinished business falls on the persisting inequalities in education, not the least of which is related to poverty. The 2015 GMR underlined this fact, showing that in low and middle income countries, the poorest children are 4 times less likely to go to school than the richest, and are 5 times less likely to complete primary education. The poorest children are also almost 6 times as likely to be unable to read as the richest.

Recently, we reemphasized the point in relation to the bid to achieve 12 years of free education as written into the SDG agenda: we showed that, in Africa, across 44 countries, children from the richest households had completed at least 12 years in only 4 countries. Children from the poorest ones had completed 12 years in none.

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Do African countries guarantee free education today?

In committing to make education free, as was done in the 1948 Universal Declaration of human Rights, reiterated in the Dakar Framework for Action, and now in the Sustainable Development agenda adopted last September in New York, countries are recognizing that costs, either direct or indirect, are clearly a barrier to education.

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his is why many countries in Africa abolished school fees. Among the 53 countries with data available in the continent, 42 now legally guarantee free education at the primary level.

This has had a positive impact on enrolment as Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, the United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda show. In Burundi, for example, primary enrolment rates were 54% in 2004, the year preceding fee abolition; they increased to 74% in the year after fees were abolished, and by 2010 reached 94%.

But, is primary education truly free?

Clearly, as the BBC is also hinting at, once education is made legally free in terms of tuition fees, this is only a small part of the picture.

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Various surveys show that school fees continue to be charged despite the legal guarantee of free education, an issue we covered in our latest blog about Tanzania's latest move to abolish fees at the secondary level. This is the case in 17 countries in Africa including 3 Arab States in the continent (Egypt, Mauritania and Sudan) according to GEM Report analysis.

The GMR 2015 also showed that even in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa where there are no school fees, much of the actual cost of education is still being covered by the household, rather than the government. Textbooks, as our latest paper showed, can also cost parents significant amounts, making up over half of the amount the poorest households are putting aside to spend on education for instance.

Globally, the poorer a country, the larger the burden on households. In Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Zambia, households are covering more than half of the total cost of education. By contrast, in Austria, Finland and Italy, households account for less than 10% of total education expenditure.

How expensive is a free education?

If education is to become 'free' and cost barriers therefore removed, African governments will not only have to spend more on infrastructure, on teacher salaries and on keeping large cohorts of children in school. They will also have to cover a larger share of the total costs of education. Will the added financial burden on governments be one they can realistically afford to cover?

As part of the GEM Report's estimates of the finance gap for achieving new education targets by 2030, we calculated that, across all low income countries, the cost per primary student will increase almost three times from 2012 to 2030; the cost per secondary school student will almost double.

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Realistically, covering the lion's share of these costs is something that will require external aid. The finance gap left over even once domestic contributions are scaled up is particularly large in low income countries, where it totals US$21 billion, and constitutes 42% of annual total costs.

To sum up, therefore, can Africa afford make education free?
The tradition of watching minorities being ignored at the Academy Awards is as familiar as eating that tired stale fruit cake every Christmas. Hard, old and annual. I am not just talking about black people. I am talking about women, the disabled and other ethnic minorities too. The fact that we are still referred to as "minorities" is telling. Women are 49.6% of the global population, and so called "ethnic minorities" are approximately 83% of it, though western countries are the vast majority of the wealthiest countries on earth. So the concept of inequality is far from new . Watching black people being excluded from the Oscars is about as surprising as the death of Amy Winehouse. So what is the difference this year?

Many black media moguls including Wendy Williams, Trevor Noah, Larry Wilmore and Fox News correspondent Stacey Dash have weighed in on the matter while actors Will Smith, Jada Pinkett-Smith and director Spike Lee have decided to boycott this year's event. The only thing that is shocking to me about this situation is that this has not happened sooner. Why are we still looking for acceptance and recognition from an organisation with such a long history of bigotry?

The first black person to win an Oscar was Hattie McDaniel in 1939 for playing the role of "Mammy" (yes I said Mammy) in "Gone With the Wind" and of course she was not permitted to attend the ceremony because she was black. In 1973 Marlon Brando declined to accept his Oscar in protest of the racist depictions of Native Americans in the film industry. Not to mention experiments like the "Bechdel Test" exposing the common and continual dismissal and objectification of women in film. All of these examples serve as a blatant reminder that we are a long way from equality.

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Over the years there has been a small handful of black winners and nominees almost exclusively gaining recognition for portraying subservient submissive victims of slavery and racism. The Oscar committee is simply not qualified or even capable of giving the black community recognition because they are disconnected and ultimately unable to understand it. They are simply unable to see us in a complete light. The tokenism that we do see at the academy awards exists because the truth is the only colour is green. Excluding minority groups from any business venture is bad business and will be almost impossible to sustain.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was set up to monitor and regulate the UK's 500million IVF industry. The HFE Act enjoins the HFEA to take into account the welfare of children before providing IVF treatment, but not specifically the welfare of women undergoing treatment.

As a result no-one is monitoring the drugs (type or dosage) given to women during IVF treatment or the effects of the same despite the fact that one of the main health risks to women is OHSS (Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome) a condition which can lead to emergency hospital admission and which is linked to the use of stimulatory drugs given during treatment. Despite OHSS being a potentially life threatening condition, clinics only need report cases on a voluntary basis, meaning we have little indication of how many women develop this serious complication.

This glaring omission in the HFE Act is one that Siobhain McDonagh MP (Mitcham and Morden), last week took to the Health Minister in a Parliamentary debate on the need to consider the safety of women in IVF. In raising this issue with Parliament, Siobhain made four key calls to action:

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An explicit commitment to the protection of the welfare of women being added to the HFE Act 1990,

A request for the HFEA to start collecting information about all drugs, dosages and off-label drugs administered to women during IVF treatment and early pregnancy

That the HFEA should introduce licence condition expressly focused on reducing the incidence of OHSS

Finally, the HFE Act should be amended to link the HFEA registry with hospital, cancer and death registries, to enable accurate recording and publication of the links between IVF treatment and incidence of severe OHSS, cancer and mortality among women.

Such measures are by no means radical and indeed exist already across Europe, the United States and Australia and have the potential to save lives and reduce the strain on the NHS by ensuring that each and every clinic holds a clear and direct responsibility to protect the health and welfare of women undergoing IVF treatment. Following Siobhain's speech, the Health Minister responded. Unfortunately, most of her rebuttals were incorrect and do not conform with advances in practice.

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Separating fact from fiction

One of the most striking inaccuracies was her response that OHSS cannot be predicted, and is not in fact determined by drug dosage levels. There are ultrasound (Antral Follicle Count) and hormonal (Anti Mullerian Hormone) markers that can be performed prior to IVF treatment to identify those who are at the highest risk of over-response and OHSS and allow the adjustment of the stimulating dose. The Minister's claim that "that drug dosage levels do not determine the risk to individual women of OHSS" is also incorrect as most women undergoing IVF treatment, and nearly all women undergoing NHS-funded treatment, have either normal or high egg reserve. In these women the stimulating drug dosage can be adjusted to reduce the risk of OHSS. It is only in minority of women who are either older or have low egg reserve where high dosage does not lead to OHSS.

The Minister noted that "only" 0.33% of cycles out of 60,000 annually carried out in the UK result in serious incidents - suggesting that such figures are not worthy of action. Yet I would argue that up to 200 women suffering serious clinical incidents cannot be regarded as negligible. Severe OHSS can be prevented with a short-acting analogue trigger during treatment in modern IVF practice. Siobhain also highlighted the gross under-reporting of moderate to severe OHSS, which meant that the figure given by the Minister is highly unreliable. Evidence for this can be calculated from HFEA's own database by the number of women who had more than 20 eggs collected which is a strong predictor of the risk of severe OHSS and admission to hospital. For example, over the first half of 2013 there were 1764 IVF cycles where there were more than twenty eggs collected but only forty-six cases of severe OHSS were reported which is an unrealistically low figure. Therefore currently, it is impossible to know the true incidence, and only a linkage to hospital registries would provide the true picture.

A number of additional concerns raised by Siobhain as yet remain unanswered. These include the use of "off label" intravenous immunology drugs, which are potentially harmful and of no proven benefit, and also come with a health warning from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. There was also no response from the Minister to either the call for collection of information regarding drugs given to women during IVF treatment and early pregnancy, or for the establishment of linkages between the HFEA database and NHS registries for hospital admission, cancer and mortality.

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What next?

The HFE Act has to be updated to protect the safety and welfare of women. Currently the HFEA lacks the legal framework to undertake its role fully. As the Health Minister rightly notes "within its statutory and regulatory remit, the HFEA is taking proportionate action". The point is, its statutory and regulatory remit must be broadened.
I was shocked (and not much shocks me!) to hear and read in the news yesterday that a Headteacher wrote to parents asking them to wear weather appropriate clothes, not pyjamas and slippers, to school.

Is this really a thing? Are parents really turning up, at the school gates in the mornings, as well as for assemblies, parents' evenings and other school meetings, in their pyjamas? What kind of example does this set for the children?

According to the BBC, Headteacher Kate Chisholm, of Skerne Park Academy, Darlington, said she had noticed a growing trend of adults turning up in pyjamas and slippers and that she was keen to raise standards and get better outcomes for the children.

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As a former teacher who now works with schools on a regular basis, I know and see how hard teachers work to ensure children get the best possible education and are not just taught but nurtured and cared for in the school environment. Teachers have a tough job to do with very limited and ever-dwindling resources. Parents are often quick to criticise when they feel a teacher or a school is not doing their job properly.

What about parental responsibility though? When did it become OK to abdicate the responsibility for raising your children? What happened to setting an example?

I know this is turning into a bit of a rant, but really? Come on, people! Whatever happened to common sense?

It is heartening to read in the news article that Ms Chisholm has had more support than criticism, with other parents and local residents backing her.

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After first hearing about this story on the radio in the car, I came home and googled it to get the full story and oh my goodness!

It turns out this isn't a new 'thing' at all!

Headteacher Chris Wain of Pallister Park Primary school in Middlesbrough made a similar appeal to parents in 2011. As long ago as 2007, the Principal of a Northern Ireland primary school faced the same issue. This worrying behaviour is also not limited to schools; a social welfare office in Dublin put up a sign banning pyjamas in 2012.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the discipline to get up, get washed and get dressed in the morning is an important one. Everyone is entitled to pyjama days - at home! - but why would you want to embarrass yourself and your child by turning up at school in your nightwear?

Anyone turning up to a welfare office for jobseeker interviews without bothering to get dressed should not, in my opinion, be getting benefits as they are not demonstrating any kind of willingness to make an effort to get a job.

You wouldn't go to a job interview or to work in your pyjamas (well, you may do it once, but you wouldn't have a job for long!). Actually, I must say, in the interest of transparency, that photos exist of me, in my pyjamas, fluffy dressing gown and slippers in my office in a previous job many years ago! This was, however, a day we all went in dressed like that to satisfy the request of a colleague on their last day with the company. And yes, we did get some very strange looks from delivery personnel and anyone else coming into the office that day! We were also, interestingly, not as productive as usual, distracted as we were by our unusual attire.

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So I say 'Bravo!' to Ms Chisholm and shame on you if you are going to school meetings in your nightwear. Get washed and put some clothes on!

What do you think? Is Ms Chisholm (and am I) over-reacting?
Last year there has been some talk about excluding all European passport holders who have travelled to Iran, Sudan, Iraq and Syria in the past 5 years as well as dual citizens of these countries from entering the US without a costly tourist visa.

To me this new regulation sounded too pointless and discriminatory to be true and the fact that there wasn't any information about this on any of the US Government sides seemed like a confirmation that it's just a bad rumor.

Well, last week it turned out that this bad joke has turned into reality and the US government indeed started excluding this whole group of people from the ESTA visa waiver program. Twitter users started sharing screenshots of their declined ESTAs online and one British-Iranian journalist had to find out the hard way when she was refused permission to board her US bound flight at Heathrow airport.

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The visa waiver program called 'ESTA' allows European passport holders to enter and stay in the US anytime for up to three month without applying for a visa. Instead, travellers can just file the ESTA form online up to 72 hours before boarding their flight.

Travelling with ESTA has given countless people like me who have friends, family or professional ties in the US the opportunity to keep up these ties without any hustle or added costs that normally come with a visa.

I have lived and studied in the US for the better half of a decade and since then always considered New York as my second home. Whenever I felt 'homesick' missing my old friends who became like family or the city itself, whenever I had the opportunity to work from our New York office for a few weeks I would just book a flight and go without worrying if I might actually get a visa to do so.

According to the new regulations this won't be possible anymore because I have visited Iran and Sudan last year. From now on, everyone who has dual citizenship or who has travelled to Iran, Sudan, Iraq and Syria will have to go through a gruelling visa procedure:

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First you will have to make an appointment at the US embassy and then most likely take a half day off work to attend the visa interview. Then you will have to go through some thorough questioning of why you want to visit the US, what you will be doing there, who you will stay with and so on. On top of all that you have the pleasure of paying 160 $ for that inconvenience. That is, if you do get the visa because there is no guarantee for that neither.

All this because apparently having visited or worked in one of these countries or even worse being a dual citizen makes one now automatically a suspicious person.

I can't see how this would make any sense or how it would make anyone safer. If any terror groups such as ISIS wanted to commit an attack they would surely be able to find someone who hasn't traveled to any of these countries or doesn't have a dual citizenship.

Most of the Paris attackers for example were actually French or Belgian citizens and some of them have never even traveled to Syria or Iraq. Terrorism has nothing to do with passports or previous travel destinations.

To me, these new visa regulations sound like a slippery slope: The next step might be to ban a whole group of people based on their ethnicity followed by just banning all Muslims.

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Last year several councils proposed to solve the homeless problem in England and Wales by fining rough sleepers up to 1000. In response to this, a new survey which was polled by YouGov has found that 61% of people in London believe that the number of homeless people is increasing. In another survey of Londoners, housing was the most important issue and there is a housing crisis in the capital.

In response to the importance of housing a new campaign called Lead London Home has been launched this month. This campaign highlights the link between homelessness and imprisonment. In a report in 2015, Matt Downie from the homeless charity Crisis explained how homeless people need additional support and "any move to criminalise sleeping rough could simply create additional problems to be overcome". A number of suggestions have been made by the campaign Lead London Home, however these have not illustrated what is known about the link between homelessness and women in prison.

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Pathway into prison:

People are homeless for many reasons, however in places such as London the cause for homelessness is now an economic and political problem. The scope of the problem has been recognised within other countries around the Western World and there is a consensus that housing should be central to the provision of a range of services. The problem of homelessness is complex for example with young female offenders a study has found high levels of association between homelessness, alcohol and drug use (Wincup et al, 2003). In order to illustrate the complexity of homelessness and potentially many people can be affected; an organisation called Coalition for homeless in the United States has produced a diagram.

Leaving prison:

The majority of research which links homeless and imprisonment focuses on women leaving prison. The prison service has recognised within their policy documents that issues relate to having or maintaining a house to return to. Imprisonment has also been linked to the closure of tenancy agreements and arranging accommodation on release (2012). While it is known that there are examples of support and advocacy for prisoners leaving prison, the housing crisis is likely to increase the likelihood of homelessness on release. A substantial proportion of women claim they find it difficult to get accommodation on release (Hollin and Palmer,2006) and this will affect not only the women concerned but also their children, health and wellbeing.

Remand prisoners:

Remand prisoners have a right to housing advice and maintenance of housing. It appears that this is not widely known about and research found that only 32% of prisoners were aware of this support. In a survey conducted by the Prison Inspectorate in England and Wales, a female prisoner claimed, 'housing advice is there for you to go to, but it takes too long. You could be homeless before you get any help' (HMIP, 2012).

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Pregnant women in prison:

Unlike other women in prison, pregnant women are categorised as a priority for housing. There is no data about how many pregnant women there are in prison however it is known that many women serve very short sentences. The shortages of housing highlighted by recent surveys in London, illustrate difficulties for women leaving prison. This issue of applying to a local authority for housing is complex. For example in a recent consultation document it was explained that women will need a local connection for being housed and there is limited housing available (Elizabeth Fry Charity, 2013).

The homeless crisis is complex. Homelessness has been associated with the cause of imprisonment due to non-compliance of fines, mental health, drugs and other social or welfare issues.
News / National

by Staff reporter

The civil trial of business tycoon John Arnold Bredenkamp began at the High Court yesterday with the applicant, Yaqub Ibrahim Mohammed, telling High Court judge Justice Priscilla Chigumba that he had lent the prominent businessman $3,8 million allegedly to support Zimbabwean troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo 15 years ago.Mohammed said since borrowing the money, sometime in 2002, Bredenkamp made several promises to repay, including writing acknowledgements of debt through his lawyers, but nothing had materialized.Mohammed also told the court at one point he approached law enforcement agents and placed fraud charges against the tycoon.But when the matter was taken to the then Attorney-General Johannes Tomana prosecution was declined on the grounds that Bredenkamp was an ally of the government.
Food and the female body have always shared the eternal job of 'perpetuating life'. It is therefore no surprise that language that objectifies the female form is often entwined with the flavour, shape and texture of food.

From Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra as a 'feast' that Antony's 'eyes eat only', to the minefield of "sweetie pies" and "cupcakes" that have littered many a work place, comparing women to food could at first be seen historically as a primarily male occupation.

Thankfully, things are changing. With the overtly chauvinist page three 'crumpet' on its last legs, the recent closure of 'lads mags' Zoo and FHM and campaigns such as #noangel and #thisgirlcan the way we describe women's bodies is shifting from objectification to validation of achievement and strength. It seems that everywhere we look the media are starting to find alternatives to the now increasingly stale recipe of women as high in sugar airbrushed snacks. Until, that is, you open a woman's magazine.

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Why in 2016 are women's bodies still subjected to the humiliation of being likened to food by the very publications that claim to celebrate them?

Like most women I have navigated most of my life through a smorgasbord of insults and 'compliments' regarding my body - more often than not comments that somehow compared my body to food. I had to learn fast what food types it was ok to be and what were definitely not.

At the back of the school bus, each journey home was like some kind of culinary based judgement day where girl's names would be rattled off according to how attractive, promiscuous or overweight they were. Waiting for my turn, flushed and clammy palmed, I would try and crack the code of this dessert based bingo call. I was pretty sure that to be a 'cupcake' or 'sweetie pie' was better than being a 'tart' but that all of the above were preferable to the life destroying 'pudding'.

At 11, me and my friend Amy poured over Shout magazine's multiple choice quiz 'Which Body Shape Are You?'. We were presented with the unnerving prospect of inhabiting the shape of an apple, a pear or the even more terrifying banana silhouette. Despite the fact that in our pre-pubescence we were both still a couple of string beans was irrelevant, destiny had been set, we would do everything in our power to become the one shape that was not some form of comical fruit, the seductive hour-glass.

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Now in my 30s I can happily say that I have become a part apple, banana, pear hybrid, a meal deal fruit cocktail if you will, and this is, by and large, absolutely fine. I am happy to have survived the cat calls of my adolescence and twenties. I got through the emotional torment of having 'fried eggs' for most of my teenage years only to wake up with 'melons' on my 17th year. But there is nothing like a woman's magazine to bring me right back to my string-beaned, sunny-side-up, insecure former self.

The critical eye of Heat magazine will happily provide 'circles of shame' that will point out any unwanted 'orange peel', 'bingo wings' or 'muffin tops'.

Like the worst best friend you ever had magazines provide an onslaught of 'advice' on how to get a 'juicy' behind, avoid 'cottage cheese' thighs and why that essential bikini wax will prevent that oh so unappetising 'fur pie' look on the beach.

We may have arrived at a post-sexual landscape where food comparisons are no longer used to compliment or seduce, but what effect is this vicious attempt to ridicule and chastise the female form having on our self-esteem?

With the New York Magazine calling Katy Perry a 'tasty nothing burger' our insistence on comparing the female form to food has evolved into something even more sinister: it's not just our physical form, but our personalities which are under this food-based scrutiny. Kim Kardashian is described as a 'smart cookie' for marrying Kanye West and graduating from 'Arm candy' to Wife, but Perry is criticised for being vacuous and more importantly unnourishing.

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Whilst competing on The Voice, Tom Jones gave me the nickname 'The Singing Politician', which is due in no small part to growing up in one of the most multicultural communities on the planet.

I spent my childhood in Hackney: an amazing smorgasbord of ethnicities that includes Irish travellers, West Indian, African, Indian, Chinese and White British communities (and that's just the tip of the iceberg). Although pitted as a fairly 'edgy' area by some; I can't imagine a more enriching place in which to learn how to become an adult.

Just popping for a casual shopping trip in the area is like going around the world and back again: from the incredible fusion of West Indian and Western food and delicious world spices at Ridley Road Market, to the fascinating Jewish communities at Stamford Hill.

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It's a veritable melting pot of trends, music and culture. The area has produced a diverse array of talent who are widely celebrated today; from esteemed writer (Edgar Allen Poe), to top businessmen (Alan Sugar) and even man-of-the-moment Idris Elba. Local institutions like the 115 year old Hackney Empire has helped provide platforms for this multicultural talent over the years, and the Industrial and Jungle electronic music genres even originated from the area.

My family are of Guyanese descent, so naturally I've adopted many cultural traditions from the country. But my family's customs are by no means the only ones that I embraced whilst growing up in the area. For example there's a large Turkish community in the borough, and one of my fondest childhood memories is learning how to speak the language at school.

There are several studies suggesting that multiculturalism makes us smarter and more creative; and I can attest that being part of such a varied community provided me with some amazing opportunities whilst growing up - such as being elected in to the Diversity Office for the Hackney Youth Parliament, or learning the ropes at the Artist Development Program at the Hackney Empire. The experience I gained from meeting and talking to such a varied group of people has made me the person I am today: much more than anything that could be gleaned from a text book.

This sense of sharing and learning from the world's cultures applies to the whole of London: from the curry houses of Tooting to the canals of Little Venice. But London (and the country, for that matter), is rapidly changing. And not for the better.

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All around the capital, high rise council flats that have been home so many for so long are now seen as eyesores; whilst new million pound flat developments are being built just around the corner. Whole communities are losing this very sense of multiculturalism that is essential to their identity, as they are priced further and further out of London.

Whilst it's fantastic that there's been so much investment in more disadvantaged boroughs of London, it's hard to deny that this is for the benefit of a privileged few - not the people who have lived there for years and made the area what it is today. Put simply: if an area is going to be developed, it needs to be for the benefit of the whole community, not just those with money to spend.

And there are similar concerns brewing with self-expression too. France's headline grabbing ban on the burqa is prompting debates about whether we should adopt the same policy, for example - so where do we draw the line? When will it become unacceptable to watch a certain film, or like a particular band? We should be embracing these cultural differences (as we have been for years), not shying away from them.

What makes Britain (and London) 'Great' is that it houses such a tolerant culture that accepts and embraces people from all walks of life. It also isn't afraid to adopt traditions and lessons learned from these cultures, and then transform them into something that is inherently 'British'. This very sense of tolerance and diversity is on the line, and as a nation I fear we risk losing ourselves.
In this last week, I was in two places in Yemen that exemplify the unnecessary suffering of this uncivil war. On Monday, in a centre for the rehabilitation of the injured, in the capital Sanaa, I met wounded children. Brave girls and boys struggling to master their broken bodies and patched up limbs. Three days later in Taiz, a city under siege since May, I was in a battle scarred hospital, only a quarter of which was still intact. Gaunt doctors and nurses comforted mothers giving birth in wards without electricity or drugs. Of twenty two health facilities in the city only four are open, and these are struggling to provide even the most basic treatment.

These children are among the more than 1,108 injured in the last year, but at least they are alive: Over 747 more have died, in airstrikes, from bombs, bullets and the explosive remnants of a war they did not chose to be a part of.

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Two boys hold shrapnel from exploded artillery shells Unicef/2015/Yemen/Hamoud

But far more risk dying from disease, than from bullets. The destruction of health services, the implosion of the economy, spiraling food and fuel costs and the lack of clean water means that children are at risk from what would normally have been easily preventable and relatively harmless diseases. 2.5 million children risk suffering from diarrhoea and another 2.6 million children could well miss vaccination against measles. 1.3 million children are at risk of becoming acutely malnourished, of whom 320,000 will suffer from severe acute malnutrition over the next year if the situation does not improve drastically. Unicef estimates that 10,000 more children, under the age of five, will die than if there had not been this war.

A child in vaccinated for polio in the capital, Sana'a Unicef/2015/Yemen/Yasin

The health system is on the brink of collapse, but somehow in most of the country it just about hangs together thanks to the bravery of its staff, the determined work of aid organisations and the support of donors. Crucially the warring parties have, so far, tacitly agreed not to drag the social services into their struggle. Government health workers, at great personal risk, work across the battle lines to vaccinate children and cure them of malnutrition. Where it works, where funds from donors like the UK provide therapeutic food, fuel to run generators to keep lifesaving equipment working, and vaccines cool, the impact of the conflict has been lessened.

What can be done to protect the children in Yemen?

The warring parties and those advising them, including the United Kingdom, must work to ensure that civilians are neither killed nor injured, and that schools and hospitals are not bombed. This means that indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions, random shelling from mortars, artillery and these vast bombs that shake the cities of Yemen should not be used where civilians live or gather together. Far too many civilians have been struck down in their homes, in markets, at weddings and in hospitals.

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A boy sits amid rubble, all that remains of his home, which was destroyed in an airstrike Unicef/2015/Yemen/Hamoud

It is difficult to work here, difficult to get into the country, the borders are closed, it is cut off by sea, No airlines fly here. Humanitarians here risk to fall victim to the fighting and are the targets of kidnapping. But the needs are so great, far more than we can at this moment cover. The humanitarian organisations that are here stand with the people of Yemen, but they need far greater resources, to protect them from the results of this brutal conflict. Donor countries must double the funding to this crisis.

The different parties to the conflict need to be convinced to keep health services, hospitals and health centres neutral. If this does not happen they will fragment and collapse. Not only will that lead to the death of children today but it will leave them vulnerable for decades to come. We have learnt from the Ebola crisis in West Africa, how the legacy of war can sap health systems, leaving people vulnerable to pandemics years after the last bullet has been fired. We must prevent this from happening again in Yemen. If the social services can be kept neutral, donors including the British government, should support them and fund local doctors, nurses and health centres.

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A boy holds a large piece of exploded artillery shell Unicef/2015/Yemen/Hamoud

The United Kingdom has influence on the warring sides in Yemen, it should use that to reduce the suffering of children here. It must pressure the warring parties to stop the use of indiscriminate weapons in civilian areas. United Kingdom's funding to Humanitarian organisations should be doubled, and that assistance should be allowed to support essential local state health services. And above all the United Kingdom must push for peace, the only true end to this catastrophe.

The author is the resident Representative for Unicef in Yemen since 2013.

Please sign the petition telling David Cameron to make protection from violence a priority at the Summit - unicef.uk/protect
1.Mental health doesn't affect me

Just like we all have physical health, we all have mental health. To many, the terms 'mental health' and 'mental illness' mean the same thing, but just like we can have positive physical well-being, we can also have positive mental well-being.

Mental health is a continuum and our mental health can move between poor and good on a daily basis. Things that can affect our mental health include relationships, financial concerns, work and even what day of the week it is. Just as our mind is unique, so is our mental health and what affects it.

2.People with mental health problems can't work

I recently asked a series of people in senior management roles the following question, 'When I say mental health, what comes to mind?'

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The responses were very interesting. Although some said that it was 'the way you think and feel', the majority of respondents said things like, 'illness', 'schizophrenia' and 'care home'.

This misunderstanding of mental health enforces the misconception that people with a mental illness can't work.

In actual fact, people with mental health problems can and do work. With one in six employees predicted to be experiencing problems with stress, anxiety and depression, it is likely that you work with someone with a mental illness.

3.People with mental health problems never recover

Firstly, it is worth noting that recovery isn't always defined by an absence of symptoms. Understanding what causes mental illness and learning how to deal with the effects, can enable an individual to manage a condition on a daily basis.

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If someone has a broken leg you can see that they have an injury, and can see when they have their cast removed. Does this mean they have recovered? Many people require physio to continue the healing process, just as some people need a bit of support every now and then to monitor and maintain positive mental health.

People with mental health problems can get better and many can recover completely.

4.Mental health problems are a sign of weakness

There is a huge stigma surrounding mental illness, and part of this is down to the fact that it isn't necessarily something you can see.

This is often why people believe they are to blame for causing their mental illness or that they should be able to control it or "cure" themselves. Admitting to one's self that something isn't right can be difficult, and can cause great upset and distress. For someone to share their feelings and concerns about their mental health, with even just one person, takes extreme courage and strength!

Anyone can experience a mental health problem, it does not make you weak.

5.If you tell people that you have a mental health problem, everyone will turn against you.

Often, people fear that telling others they have a mental illness will change how people treat them. Many think that people will feel awkward around them, that they may lose friends or be isolated. In fact, most people admire those who are able to talk about their mental health and would like to offer their help and support.

In some instances, telling people about mental illness can create an environment in which mental health can be discussed openly without prejudice and thus encourage others who may be suffering to come forward and seek help.

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6.Mental health problems only affect adults

Mental illness can affect anyone at any time, and with over 200 classified forms of mental illness, no one is insusceptible. In fact 50% of mental health problems are established by age 14 and 75% by age 24.

People often believe puberty is to blame for young people experiencing difficulties such as mood swings, aggression, anxiety and sadness. Although this may be the case for some, puberty can trigger mental illness.

It is essential that we recognise that mental illness is something that can affect all of us, regardless of age.

7.People with mental health problems are violent

According to statistics obtained by Time to Change, the majority of violent crimes and homicides are committed by people who do not have a mental illness. They in fact claim that people dealing with a mental health problem are more dangerous to themselves than they are to others.

8.Mental health problems are a result of bad parenting

A common misconception is that mental health problems are a result of bad parenting. Although we must acknowledge that home environment and parenting can make a problem worse, in the majority of cases, a child will have a condition because of biological causes.

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A lot of parents with a child who has a mental illness feel they are to blame and that others are judging and also blaming them, when in fact most want the best for their child, and suffer emotional turmoil, extreme distress, along with guilt, anxiety and countless sleepless nights, whilst fighting for and supporting them.

9.You're alone

1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health problem in any given year.

Those finding it difficult dealing with their mental health often feel they are alone and that no one could understand what they are going through. They may feel isolated, embarrassed or ashamed. To them, I say, you are not alone, and you will never be alone.

Family and friends are usually first in line to offer help and support, however, for some, confiding in relatives may be too difficult or even impossible. Nevertheless, there is so much support out there. Your GP can be a great place start. Besides listening and offering their medical opinion, they can refer you to people and organisations that will be able to help.

If you don't feel able to visit your doctor, there are helplines you can call or text including The Samaritans, Mind and Rethink. The main thing to remember is, you are not the first person to experience a mental illness, and you won't be the last! There are loads of us! You are not alone!

10.People with a mental health problem can just 'snap out of it'.

If it was that easy, we would all do it! 'Snap out of it, pull yourself together, get on with it', the list of cliches are endless. Often, people say these when they don't know what to say, or their knowledge of mental health is lacking.

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Some people who are uninformed about mental illness can consider symptoms, such as an inability to get out of bed, with laziness, which may explain their attitude and use of phrase.

This is their issue, not yours. Remember, mental illness can affect anyone. Bill Clinton once said, '"Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all. "
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse than 'revenge porn', there's a new fun thing that grew from it like a mould. For those still blissfully unaware of this practice, Image Based Sexual Abuse (Revenge Porn) is the act of uploading and posting to the internet intimate and explicit images or videos of an ex partner (or anyone known to the posters, overwhelmingly women). It dates as far back as 'Hustlers' vs 'Beaver Hut' in the 1980s and it is vile.

The poster of the material captions it with the victim's full name, age, home address, email address, Facebook account, Twitter account and any other contact methods that they know of. Additionally they may also post the victim's colleagues and family's email addresses, school or university Facebook page, and so on. This is done to facilitate the other user's sharing of the material directly into the victim's life. They call the victim a collection of abusive names, rate her looks and body, and discuss what they would like to do to her physically.

The intention of revenge porn is to humiliate and demean the victim and to trample her privacy and dignity. The original poster of the material chooses to massively breach any trust the victim had in him until that point, most of them relishing in how devastated she will be to discover what he has done. The website users get off on the knowledge that a stranger's life will soon fall apart, hence including the victim's colleague's work email address and so on. Often it is used to blackmail the victim.

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Needless to say the victim does not consent to this behaviour. Sometimes they are forced to pay huge fees to 'reputation management' agencies to cover the tracks online. Often the victim's life is destroyed; they get inexplicably fired, can't find a new job, families and relationships are irrevocably damaged. Additionally, the psychological response is similar to that of any sexual trauma - intrusive thoughts and images, dissociation, depression , hyper vigilance and anxiety plague a victim, with the additional torture of knowing that there is no knowing when or where these images might pop up again. It can and has led to suicidal ideation and suicide.

Some jurisdictions have passed laws against revenge porn - Germany, the UK, Victoria in Australia, Israel, and 27 states of the US. In Ireland this abuse is completely legal, but luckily there are resources; organisations, and certain pieces of legislation that can help.

Revenge porn is so last year though. This year in new ways to demean and humiliate women and how to top the charts in low living creepdom, it's all about 'C*m Tributes'. And it is highly disturbing.

A couple of weeks ago some teenage girls from Cork, Ireland, discovered that photos of themselves were found on a revenge porn type website. The photos had been taken from the girl's Facebook pages and were not explicit; mostly they were selfies or pictures of the girls ready for a night out.

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A 'c*m tribute' is the act of printing out a picture of a person's face and ejaculating on it. Glossing over the fact that it originates from the porn-fueled act of ejaculating on a face (which is a whole topic in itself) this behaviour is your own business. However, it's a totally different story when you print a picture of a teenage girl's face, ejaculate on it, take a photo, and post the results online on a specialist niche website, or just all over the internet as happened to Emma Watson.

The material posted might be different to the explicit content found in revenge porn (though user 'Irish Exposed' promises 'nude pics' upon request), but everything else is exactly the same; the identical ingredients of power, control, and intention to sexually demean, are all present and grimly accounted for.

The victim's name, location and sometimes place of work is revealed, amongst other details about her life.

The users allude to knowing the victim: "This is my 'friend'/I work with the slut/What age is she now? She's living in London isn't she?/She works in a pub in town I go to a lot./She thinks I'm her friend. Dumb slag./See her out sometimes/She's a friend of mine/I recognise a few of these, even f*cked one of them".

They don't care about whether the victim is underage or not, some request it - "Got any of her when she was 13?" one user asks hopefully. Another exclaims that one girl "only just 18!" They call her names like f*ckmeat, whore, f*ckpig, uptight c*nt, cow, rapemeat, f*ck toys, sl*t. They refer to the girl as "it"; "You just know this one thinks it's a classy lady. Now it's only wankmeat on the internet hahaha". They describe her physicality -"fat cow" - and her personality; "my snobby arrogant pal" / "cock tease".

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Often they include polls to vote on what the best course of action would be if one had the opportunity of romancing the victim: In one poll the users discuss this hypothetical circumstance in relation to "a 19 year old f*ck pig from Cork"; 16 users want to "rape her violently", 1 user would prefer to "kidnap her, rape her, and sell her to a brothel", 13 want to "face f*ck her", 8 want to "f*ck her ass", four lean towards "beat her within an inch of her life", two would like to "make her another rape/murder statistic", and a whole 10 are keen to "keep her in a dungeon as a sex slave".

The original poster of the poll, the aptly named 'Woman Hater' says that she deserves "some serious beating" and opines that she is "perfect rapemeat". They know what they are doing is wrong; "the whore trusts me completely, lol", chuckles anonymous user 'Hornymachine'.

You may think that for these men and boys this is not reality, they do not have genuine plans to rape and murder the target, they aren't currently researching how to force her into prostitution. You are probably right. Or not. Who knows? Think about how terrifying it must be for these women and girls not to know. These men are in their locality, talking online about how they would like to degrade and assault them, and they don't know who they are. Also, think about how these misogynistic attitudes, completely lacking in respect, for themselves or otherwise, is impacting on the women unfortunate to be in these men's lives. Think about how their woman hating might be influencing their children. I can hazard a guess that it isn't great.

The anonymous users like our friends 'Irish Exposed', 'HornyMachine', and 'Woman Hater' are likely not bespeckled sweaty loner teenaged stereotypes, with no social interaction bar one handed clacking away on a keyboard. Like all men who sexually offend they are our brothers and our fathers and our sons and our uncles and our cousins and our friends. They are men with wives and girlfriends and men with children and jobs and friends and hobbies and a social life.

Abusing women and girls online is a minimal effort, risk free method of sexually abusing someone and expressing your gross misogyny from the comfort of your own laptop. It's consequence free, encouraged, enabled and nurtured woman hating. And whenever there is misogyny we all gaily trip over ourselves to make sure the blame lands on women and it's all her fault for allowing it. We basically apologise to the offenders when even the scent of responsibility wafts in their direction. We enthusiastically let the offenders off the hook because it is easier than looking at the root of the problem, which is the misogyny inherent in our society. Enough.

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'Revenge porn' and whatever it spawns is psychological and sexual abuse. It is breathtakingly misogynistic. It is violence and it is terrorism and it has to stop.

Consider signing this petition.
'I thought the dead were perhaps luckier than the living; they were no longer forced to endure this hell on earth, to see the cruelty of men.'

The words of Shlomo Venezia, forced by the Nazis to join the hideously named 'special squad', or Sonderkommando, at Auschwitz, and carry out the most gruesome and cruel duties: disrobing victims and leading them directly to the gas chambers.

Shlomo, a Greek-born Italian Jew, was one of the few to survive. Many Sonderkommando were killed by the Nazis in an attempt to hide evidence of their crimes and prevent future testimony.

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Yet even in these unimaginable circumstances, there were some remarkable individuals, members of the Sonderkommando who refused to stand by. Against the odds and at enormous risk, Zalman Loewenthal, Zalman Gradowski and Leib Langfus obtained pens and paper and recorded their experiences. Following liberation, these documents, known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, were found buried, amongst the cremated ashes of burned bodies.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Today is the day to remember and honour these brave men and other heroes who refused to stand by in the face of evil. And not just during the Second World War.

In Rwanda in 1994, it took just 100 days for extremist Hutus to murder nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. After decades of tension, Hutu civilians were told it was their duty to wipe out the Tutsis. Despite its colossal scale this genocide was carried out almost entirely by hand, with machetes and clubs. Tutsi men, women and children were killed in their thousands. Often the killers were people they knew - neighbours, workmates, former friends, sometimes even relatives through marriage.

Appolinaire Kageruka worked as a teacher. When the violence erupted his family and many others hid in a church. They were discovered and killed. Appolinaire only survived because the father of one of his students - a Hutu - provided sanctuary for him in his own home.

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Stories like these are inspiring. It is important that we hear about people who assisted and rescued victims of genocide. We need to know there were those who resisted, culturally, spiritually and physically. It provides us with hope.

But we have to understand, also, that there were many who did nothing.

Bystanders enabled the Holocaust and subsequent genocides to take place. They stood by silently - at best afraid to speak out, at worst, indifferent. By tolerating insidious persecution and not challenging propaganda, they allowed hostile cultures to take root.

People like to think the Holocaust was a one-off. But genocide has happened again in Rwanda, in Cambodia and in Bosnia. It is happening today in Darfur, where thousands of people have been murdered and millions have been forced to flee to makeshift refugee camps.

Even in our own communities right now, we see hate crime. People are abused because of their race or ethnicity, their religion, or their sexuality. People witness this abuse. And many do nothing.

In fact according to research released today, a quarter of people in the UK have witnessed at least one hate crime or hate incident based on race or ethnicity in the last year. And more than a fifth have seen an incident based on religion or beliefs.

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More than two thirds of those who've witnessed abuse of this kind say they regret not challenging it.

So today the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust asks everyone to not stand by to intolerance, hatred and genocide.

We can all do something.

Report incidents of hostility or hatred based on ethnicity, faith or other characteristic. Watch and share our remarkable film in which Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack tells a unique story of surviving genocide. Contribute to Flames for Humanity's Heroes, a new online gallery honouring those who did not stand by in the past. And mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Today, over 3,600 activities will be held across the UK, in libraries, galleries, civic centres, schools and colleges, prisons, and cinemas. Tonight, the UK Ceremony, taking place in London this afternoon, will be broadcast by BBC2.

Holocaust Memorial Day helps people learn about bystanders who let the Holocaust and subsequent genocides take place, and about the people who refused to stand by to incremental, legalised discrimination.

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Holocaust Memorial Day calls everyone to action, demanding that we Don't Stand By.

For information about Holocaust Memorial Day and events happening across the country, visit the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust's website.

Watch a remarkable film in which Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack tells a unique story of surviving genocide.

See the Flames for Humanity's Heroes gallery and add your own image.
Since my election to Westminster last May, nuclear convoys have on several occasions passed through my constituency of Midlothian, along busy commuter routes and in close proximity to homes, business and schools.

These convoys pass almost without warning - apart from eagle-eyed civilian trackers - and with no regard to the danger they could pose to local communities. When my constituents learned of these convoys, they were horrified, and understandably so. Although I wrote to the Secretary of Defence at the time and lodged Q's to ministers I, and my constituents, have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of safety information, reassurances and transparency available.

Pushing this matter against a Tory government hell bent on maintaining and renewing our Nuclear weapons has been difficult, and the opportunity to raise this in the chamber was a great step in raising awareness of the issue, both within my own constituency and as an issue for the whole of the UK.

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Because this is not just an issue for Midlothian, or Scotland - there is a never-ending movement of weapons and components between Berkshire, where the weapons are made and service, and Coulport in Argyll, where they are stored and loaded.

If Trident is renewed, this movement could increase as older weapons are decommissioned and new ones come online. These convoys travel under time constraints, sometimes overnight, sometimes in severe weather conditions where you and I would choose not to travel.

I am also concerned about the convoys being a terrorist target and the risks of detonation should an attack on a convoy happen. We are all far too aware of the appalling damage, and the loss of life that a terrorist attack can result in - but, running convoys of nuclear weapons through the country does nothing to deter that.

That is why I used last week's Ten Minute Rule Bill to discuss controls on the transportation of nuclear weapons - I am calling on the UK Government to clarify what safety measures they have in place, and ultimately to put a stop to convoys travelling through our towns and cities.

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A Ten Minute Rule Bill is a type of Private Members Bill that is introduced in the House of Commons that allows a backbench MP to make the case for a new piece of legislation in a speech that can last up to ten minutes. The Bill is now due to receive its Second Reading in the House of Commons on Friday 4th March 2016.

If the Bill progresses this will put a stop to nuclear weapons convoys that drive past homes, shops and schools on their way to and from Coulport in Argyll and I am delighted to have received parliamentary support for this proposal.

Ideally, I hope this bill helps to persuade other MPs - even those in favour of Trident renewal - to agree there are real risks involved in nuclear convoys. The convoy policy as it stands lacks transparency, is counter-productive in protecting us from terrorism, and shows a blatant disregard of our own citizens; it should not be based on an argument of convenience at the expense of safety.
Ralph Burgess

If you need convincing that its the volunteers keeping refugees alive as they land in Europe, you need look no further than Moria.

Moria is the only place in Lesbos where volunteers haven't been able to lead the response. Everywhere else they have been first to the scene, cooperating to organise swift results. They save refugees firstly from drowning in the sea and secondly from hyperthermia on the beaches.

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After this most refugees go to Moria for registration, carried out by Greek police units. The UNHCR (the UN refugee agency) 'coordinates their protection.'

When I arrived at Moria in November, the UNHCR had 3 staff, Oxfam and Save The Children delivered food in the daytime and MSF and MDM officially had a 24 hour schedule for doctors on duty but all too often the medical huts were closed.

www.betterdaysformoria.com

I was one of 8 volunteers unofficially allowed to work at Moria. At night we usually found ourselves alone.

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On my second day, the head of UNHCR in Moria explains to me, "I have to leave for the weekend. Fill up the barracks, there's enough room for 300 refugees. Don't split up families. There's 150 blankets. If anyone is hungry, there is a box of high-energy biscuits."

That was it. For 5,000 refugees, including 1,700 children. All currently strewn out over the frozen concrete and olive groves beyond, now plastered in human faeces after weeks of neglect.

As dusk falls fear starts to trump frustration for the refugees. Their focus turns to finding a safe place for their wife, some place warm enough for their child. A toilet, a doctor, a blanket. Blocking them from these solutions is a 10m high barbed wire fence and riot police.

Merel Graeve

Ignoring the wailing, arm-grabbing and the crying, we robotically walk through the crowds deciphering who is "most vulnerable"...a family huddled silently under a blanket; an old woman who can't walk; a man with bronchitis.

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There are too many children under 5 so I abandon protocol and split the families. I select people, march them up the hill, haggle with the police, find them a bare patch of concrete within a scabies-infested room, find another family and do it again, family after family, for 8 hours.

At 2am another 300 arrive. The smell of mud and seawater is unmistakeable, they're drenched. We have a room full of dry clothes but the police don't want them inside to change. Jack and Odi stuff bin liners full of dry clothes and take them out but most remain soaked into the next day.

Meanwhile the men stand next to another fence queueing to register. Nathan and Annie put up tarp to shield from the elements but it is against regulations and is removed.

Artur Tixiliski

The night continues. An old lady with a broken arm. A sick baby. A kid travelling alone.

A new Police Chief starts his shift and blocks me as I attempt to solve each case. He encourages me to take a cigarette whilst he explains all the work he isn't doing. I oblige in an effort to build rapport, pretending to ignore the baby continuing to scream less than 10 metres away.

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What needs to be understood within this madness is that the island had plenty of resources but couldn't get them into Moria. There were volunteers full of skills but no permission to apply them and warehouses full of supplies but no way of distributing them.

If you can't get the people to the services (because there is an 10m high barbed wire fence and a man with a gun in the way) then take the services to the people.

I quit volunteering inside Moria and struck a deal with a farmer to manage his land and build toilets. In return he gave permission for volunteers to operate.

www.betterdaysformoria.com

It began. Hadia and Sophie coordinated doctors and medical care.

Nathan turned up in his converted Royal Mail van, built a tent and declared it the clothes distribution point. And so it was.

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Because We Carry delivered vans full of clothes daily. Delighted that they could finally replicate some of their work in the south, Starfish sent tents and sleeping bags down from their warehouse.

We set up a tent hotel.

I met a mad Swiss girl in a bar, Kiki, straight off the plane. Within an hour she set up a Facebook group to coordinate volunteers. She made an information hut the next day.

www.betterdaysformoria.com

Then came Elena, with 20 volunteers whom she directed to clean the entire hill, faeces and all.

Juval appeared with a tent and started serving chai all day, every day, indefinitely.

Anastocia set up a kids area. (She gave them pens and they drew bombs landing on their houses and stick men drowning in the sea.)

A shipping container arrived from Athens.

Skipchen turned up from Calais and promptly built Moria's first kitchen.

Lisca and her Winterproof team donated and drove a truck from Holland full of marquees, tents, fencing, generators, lighting, heating.

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10,000 Hours sent teams to direct all this infrastructure, kicking off by building a 25 metre barn acting as a field hospital.

www.betterdaysformoria.com

2 dentists pulled 100 rotten teeth out in a single day.

Clowns and musicians visited and entertained.

And so it went on, it was and is its own animal. This cooperative of volunteers has done what UNHCR failed to coordinate NGOs to achieve for months: They clothe wet people on arrival; They give them cheaply produced food and chai; They explain what the registration process is, why they have been brought to Moria. There is a doctor 24 hours a day.

No one is paid. Everything they distribute is donated.

If you want a simple solution that works, start here.
As an officer at the National Union of Students I directly represent people of LGBT+ backgrounds. I'm also a qualified lecturer in health and social care. Both of these roles mean I have been confronted with the daily reality of people being treated differently, because of who they are or where they come from.

As someone who is lucky enough to be well-educated, with qualifications, a degree and postgraduate education, I thought I understood history well. But when I attended the Holocaust Educational Trust's Lessons from Auschwitz Project, it was clear to me that my own understanding wasn't what I thought it was. The lessons I learnt on the course were far more horrifying than any textbook in school could ever teach us. Being confronted with this history face-to-face was a harrowing experience I will never forget.

I was aware of the recorded number of people murdered during the Holocaust. It's a figure relatively well known by a lot of people. But that number is far too many for any of us to be able to comprehend in reality - let alone when you take into account the fact that most accounts don't count the persecution and extermination of certain groups, such as LGBT people, as Holocaust victims.

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During the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau we heard stories of so many who suffered based on their identity. The stories of those, even when the camps were liberated, who were imprisoned, victimised and persecuted because of who they were. Stood at the camp, I remember being utterly horrified that human begins could treat each other in this way. I was particularly struck by the fact that many of the survivors of such barbarity weren't free even once they had been 'liberated'. As someone who campaigns every day for people to be free, no matter who they love, and regularly uses the term of 'liberation', this was something I found difficult to comprehend.

Remembering all the people who were murdered and victimised under Nazi rule is incredibly important. As living memory fades, we must ensure that future generations remember these terrible scars on human history. They cannot be forgotten. There is no rationale or excuse for fascism and my journey to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust showed me the human tragedy it leads to.

I certainly think more carefully when I use words like 'fascism', 'Nazi' and 'Holocaust' since the trip. Nothing can replicate the suffering or the scale of the Holocaust for the peoples whose life it took and affected. To be stood at the place where that happened, where millions upon millions of Jewish people were systematically murdered through state oppression, is something that will stay with me forever.

Throughout history, the hatred of groups of people based solely on their identity has led to atrocities all over the world. This year, as antisemitic attacks have risen, we are reminded that such discrimination and hatred still exists in the world. We have to do more in society to stamp it out for good. I believe many more people need to be exposed to the harsh realities and lessons of history that come with visiting Auschwitz. People need to understand more about the consequences when discrimination goes unchallenged and is made socially acceptable.

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But far too often it appears that the only people fighting to remember the Holocaust are Jewish people. It is incredibly important that Jews themselves lead us all to remember and learn the lessons of the Holocaust, but supporting their work, educating society and whole generations should be the responsibility of every single one of us. This is particularly important when so many people from so many different identities and groups were persecuted by fascists - in many states - but particularly under the rule and direction of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. If we truly want to educate society about these atrocities and the Holocaust, more needs to be done.

I believe that our curriculum and teaching of history does not do enough to educate young people on the true horrors of what happened - not just at Auschwitz-Birkenau but at all camps throughout Europe. As somebody who represents students, I want to ensure more people receive a hands-on-history approach by visiting historical sites. Sitting in a classroom will never give students the same opportunity to learn the lessons of history for themselves.

But this isn't just about primary and secondary education. As part of the student movement, I want organisations like NUS to work closer with people like the Holocaust Educational Trust, as well as the Union of Jewish Students and others, to ensure more students and student leaders can take the same journey through history as I did in Poland.

Lessons from Auschwitz is one of the most powerful lessons anyone can ever take. As we see a worrying resurgence of scapegoating and far right extremist politics, we must do more to ensure that students of all ages can benefit from that lesson of history, and not just in the class room. Educating future leaders and building a stronger society through active citizens is the only way we can be assured that we will never forget the Holocaust.
In eight weeks' time the tides will fade away across the Mediterranean. The snow will begin to thaw across the Balkans. The numbers of asylum seekers entering Europe is set to once again reach record highs. At this moment in time the EU is neither resourced, nor equipped to deal with another year like the last. We are approaching the point of no return.

Tough actions and even tougher words are being deployed in efforts to regain some control of the ever-growing migrant crisis. This kind of rhetoric was roundly condemned a year ago as lacking compassion but finally leaders are realising that compassion is only possible with some common sense policies.

The policies pursued to date have eroded public opinion; whilst the lack of resources, squalid camps and poor integration policies have let down migrants and refugees who deserve to be treated as human beings even if they do not have a right to remain here.

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Quite simply, we need to be firm but fair. To date, we have been neither. When I was UK immigration minister, we resettled thousands of Bosnian refugees. I was proud of that fact, but I also realised that we could only offer refuge to those most in need, because race relations and community cohesion are central to any successful immigration policy. It was no coincidence that my Prime Minister made me both the Minister for Immigration, and for Race Relations. The two are mutually important.

Parts of the Middle East are ablaze. Those whose lives are at risk should be offered refuge, and that will mean large numbers of people being offered at least temporary shelter in safer countries - including European countries. However, our mistake was in attracting millions who see the EU as a beacon of economic and social opportunity for them. Combine that with a small group of those people who come to cause us harm, a difficult economic situation across our own Continent that stretches resources, and a shambolic and unilateral set of political decisions, and we see how we have wandered into the perfect storm.

Last week the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said "We need to get a grip on this issue in the next six to eight weeks". His words have been echoed by many other leaders. But how?

The situation can be stabilised, but only if we act now and act together, rather than looking for a miracle solution which does not exist. We need to set aside the debate that has become so polarised by those who seek to blur the difference between migrants and refugees: either to let them all in, or to keep them all out. Neither option is sustainable.

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So the EU needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel with grand gestures that would take years to implement correctly. We saw an example of this with the emergency relocation system, which has been a complete failure. Instead we should focus on how we can resettle people most in need directly from the conflict areas.

Now the proposed magic solution is to suspend the Schengen border-free area and effectively begin re-erecting border checks. For some countries this will be effective. I have long argued that border controls are needed on the EU's border with Greece, because it has failed for over five years to live up to its responsibilities when it comes to providing humane conditions for refugees. However, in Britain we think with an island mentality that borders are manageable. Most EU countries have vast land borders with each other and simply putting border controls on a few motorways will likely inconvenience Europeans going about their business far more than many migrants.

There is no single solution to either the migrant or security crises. Instead we need better implementation of what we have in place: external border management, more intelligence sharing, and countries taking responsibility and sticking to the rules. Processing and fingerprinting asylum seekers is not an option but a legal requirement, along with the swift removal of those people who do not meet the criteria for asylum. Allowing refugees to travel around the EU is not an option, yet countries are actively encouraging this secondary movement.

In the EU we have the Dublin Regulation, which is grounded in the principles of international asylum law that say those people fleeing for their lives would seek asylum in the first safe country. Of course, we all agree that Dublin has failed across the EU because of the actions of one country: Germany. Its good intentions have brought terrible consequences. However, Dublin is not to blame and the basic principles behind it are sound, even if the regulation itself can be made stronger, simpler and clearer. Dublin plays a substantial role in preventing the movement of people through the EU, and those countries that cannot be part of the system should be offered as much help as is needed, or they should understand that we will protect ourselves and our borders.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Mbombela - An Mpumalanga minibus taxi owner who raped and repeatedly impregnated his daughter since she was 11 is appealing his life sentence, News24 reported.The 57-year-old, who may not be named to protect his daughter's identity, appeared in the Nelspruit Regional Court on Tuesday.In December, Magistrate Vanessa Joubert found him guilty of rape and of assaulting his wife.He was arrested in March 2012, after the girl and her mother escaped from him and broke their silence.The trial was delayed several times for various reasons, including having forensic tests done on three love letters he denied writing to his daughter.After the family refused to get him a lawyer, he finally agreed to be represented by a Legal Aid lawyer.The court heard that he raped his biological daughter and impregnated her three times between 2001 and 2003. He forced her to abort the foetuses.Joubert found him guilty based on evidence from the daughter and her mother. She sentenced him to life, plus 15 years imprisonment, and a further three years for assault.During his appearance on Tuesday, he wore a bright white shirt, light blue jeans, and sported a well-trimmed beard and cap."Your appeal has been delayed due to the fact that we still have not received the transcripts of the trial," said Joubert.Last year, three of the courts were flooded when it rained, damaging the recording machines. They could not retrieve some of the transcripts."Once the process of obtaining the transcripts has been finalised they will then be forwarded to your attorney," said Joubert.She postponed the case to February 3.
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An Australian man and his American companion who died in an avalanche just outside the boundary rope of the US ski resort of Jackson Hole were not properly prepared for the back country, a resort spokeswoman has said.

Sydney man Dave Hannagan -- a 46-year-old surfer and real estate agent from Bondi known as "Big Wave Dave" -- and his American companion Cathy Grimes, 36, were both killed by an avalanche which it appears they triggered.

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Its upsetting because these folks... we dont think they were properly prepared for the back country, said Jackson Hole spokesperson Anna Cole.

They didnt have transceivers and they apparently didnt know the terrain very well.

There has been a spate of recreational skier and snowboarder deaths caused by avalanches in both the US and Europe in recent years, as adventurous snow-lovers seek challenges beyond the patrolled slopes inside resort boundaries. Yet many skiers still fail to carry avalanche equipment like shovels and tranceivers, which allow people to find them under the snow.

This is the area where Mr Hannagan and Ms Grimes are believed to have ventured before triggering a fatal avalanche.

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Jackson Hole, which is situated on a particularly steep-sided, dramatic offshoot of the Rocky Mountains known as the Teton Range, is renowned for its steep back country, or "side country" as locals often call it.

The Tetons are not to be treated lightly

Multiple warning signs alerting skiers to all manner of dangers dot the boundary ropes. It appears that the two skiers paid insufficient respect to the signs and ventured out to an area which is crossed by a band of cliffs and had an unstable snowpack after recent snowfalls and wind.

Mike Rheam, a forecaster for the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center, told local news outlet the Jackson Hole News & Guide that there had been fatalities in that region in the past.

People who arent familiar with the terrain  it gets steeper and the avalanche breaks over them  they were carried over the cliff," he said.

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The 60 metre-wide avalanche occurred just after 2pm on Sunday afternoon local time, after the resort had received about 12cm of new snow the day prior. Rescuers probed the snow and had found both skiers by 3.32 pm. One was found under a metre of snow, the other just 30 cm. Both were apparently killed by trauma, the News & Guide reported.

A third skier in the group "grabbed a tree and was not carried over the cliff or buried, Mr Rheam said.

Mr Hannagan's boss and friend Ric Serrao told Fairfax Media that Dave Hannagan was "a bit of an icon" around Bondi.
US Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has been pulled up by the Washington Post for telling some "whopper" tales about Australia, gun control and crime.

Cruz reckons that since Australia's 1996 gun buyback program, "the rate of sexual assaults, the rate of rapes, went up significantly, because women were unable to defend themselves."

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Analysis by the Washington Post shows while the rate of sexual assaults in Australia increased slightly between 1996 and 2014, "there was no significant spike or drop after the 1996 legislative changes or buyback program".

"The increase likely is affected by the increase in reporting, and there wasnt prevalent use of handguns for self-defense before 1996, as Cruz suggests," they wrote.

The WaPo also points out, correctly, there was no blanket exemption allowing people to use handguns for self-defence before the Howard Government introduced gun control legislation.

There also hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since the gun buy back.

The newspaper, which once brought down a president, graded the presidential hopeful with four Pinocchios -- a whopper.

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The Washington Post does not have a fifth Pinocchio.

"[W]e wavered between Three and Four Pinocchios. Despite the litany of caveats, there was a gradual increase in sexual assault rates over a decade after the 1996 changes -- which places his claim in the range of Three Pinocchios," the WaPo wrote.

"But the rates didnt go up 'significantly' after the buyback, and theres no evidence that changes to gun laws in Australia affected sexual assault rates or jeopardized (sic) the ability of women to protect themselves.

"His false characterization of this law and its effects tipped his statement to Four Pinocchios."

It is not the first time pro-gun lobbyists have been accused of cherry picking facts when it comes to statistics.

Cruz is currently locked in an intense Republican primary battle against the frighteningly popular Donald Trump, who is now polling at 41 percent.

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Fairfax Media

Australia's record on asylum seekers, counter-terrorism, rights of minorities and foreign policy has been savaged by Human Rights Watch in its 2016 annual report.

The international organisation's World Report 2016 devotes a chapter to Australia for just the third time in the report's history, lambasting policies including mandatory offshore detention, boat turnbacks, data retention laws and the revocation of citizenship for dual nationals convicted of serious crimes.

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Also in the firing line are conditions in immigration detention facilities, the representation of indigenous Australians -- especially children -- in the prison system and the Northern Territorys 'paperless arrest' powers.

"Australia has a solid record of protecting civil and political rights, with robust institutions and a vibrant press and civil society that act as a check on government power. However, the governments failure to respect international standards for asylum seekers and refugees continues to take a heavy human toll," the HRW report stated.

"The government has also instituted overly broad and vague counterterrorism laws and has done too little to address indigenous rights and disability rights."

HRW's Asia director Brad Adams attacked Australia's policies and directly called for their reform.

Despite the international outcry over its refugee policies, Australia did little to redeem its reputation in 2015," he said in a statement.

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"Australia needs to seriously rethink its abusive refugee policies and take steps to restore its international standing as a rights-respecting country."

On asylum seeker policy, HRW detailed a number of concerns including the attacks on Human Rights Commission chief Gillian Triggs, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott claims that Australia was "sick of being lectured" by the United Nations after its special rapporteur on torture found detention centre policy was in violation of the Convention Against Torture. It also listed changes to the Australian Border Force Act which set out punishments for doctors and aid workers to spread information they obtained while working with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and the wider practice of mandatory indefinite detention for unauthorised arrivals.

Counter-terrorism laws, including data retention and the stripping of citizenship for dual citizens, were also roundly criticised by the organisation.

"Measures such as stripping citizenship from dual nationals without basic legal safeguards are major steps backwards for Australia," Adams said.

"While Australia has a responsibility to protect those on its soil from harm, it shouldnt be undermining respect for basic rights and staining its international reputation."

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Concerns were also raised in the report about Australia's candidacy for a seat on the United Nations' Human Rights Council, considering the country's report card.

Earlier this month Michael Garcia Bochenek, the senior counsel for Human Rights Watch's Childrens Rights Division, claimed Australia's policy of immigration detention was directly based off the USA's infamous Guantanamo Bay prison.

"Australias own offshore detention of asylum seekers draws directly on the U.S. experience at Guantanamo in its earlier incarnation as a refugee camp," Bochenek wrote.

"Whether in the Pacific or at Guantanamo, offshore refugee detention is calculated to serve two underhanded purposesto deter further arrivals of people who might be fleeing persecution and violence, and to create a law-free zone to evade legal scrutiny."
Higher education in America has created a nearly insurmountable paradox: With just a high school diploma, it's almost impossible to get a job that pays a living wage, but given the costs of post-secondary education, few people without a high paying job can afford the tuition.

This has created a growing middle-skills jobs gap. Many employers don't need workers with a four-year degree. They do need employees with a rigorous high school education plus additional skills and vocational training; yet there aren't enough people earning those qualifications.

The skill gap is starting to wreak havoc on employers across the country. Sixty-nine percent of HR executives say their inability to attract and retain middle-skills talent frequently affects their firm's performance, according to a 2013 report, Bridge the Gap: Rebuilding America's Middle Skills.

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A 2014 report from the Lumina Foundation found that while Pell Grants covered over 100 percent of the cost of a two-year public education in 1973, those same grants in 2013 covered only 60 percent. If the price of two-year degrees continues to rise, middle-skilled American workers may be a thing of the past.

The skills gap apocalypse is coming. Here are three scary problems the climbing costs of community colleges are causing and what they mean for the middle-skills gap:

Problems

#1: Workers ready to enter the job market can't afford to obtain the skills they need and desire.

When many young adults earn their high school diploma or a GED, it's difficult for them to determine the next step in their career. Without a clear idea of what they need to do to get the job they want, young adults are wary of the financial risk of enrolling in postsecondary education blindly.

If the cost of community colleges continues to rise, motivated students will be forced to abandon or forgo their education. According to the Pew Research Center, the average salary for someone with only a high school diploma is just $28,000. Without more training, these young people will have to take jobs that pay significantly less, which gets them caught in a cycle that's difficult to escape.

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The aforementioned Lumina Foundation report revealed that, if an independent student makes around $30,000 a year, the cost of their public two-year education will take up 42 percent of that income.

So, even though there are young people out there who want to obtain more marketable and in-demand skills, they can't afford to do so, especially without career guidance, and employers continue to find middle-skills jobs persistently hard to fill.

#2: The time required to get an education leads to poor graduation rates.

We all know that time is money. Now consider the investment in time required for current employees to further their training.

There are only so many hours in the day, and when a full-time employee tries to enroll in classes, one of two things happen: they have to cut back on their hours at work, or they have to find a way to add a course load on top of a roughly 40-hour work week.

For most people, the former just isn't an option. Either their employer won't allow them to take time off for their education, or the employee cannot afford to cut their hours and take home a smaller paycheck with which to cover their tuition costs. So that leaves the second option, which leaves many feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

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Whether it's due to financial stress, the time-related costs, or other factors, part-time students also have the lowest graduation rates. A 2014 study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that 81 percent of students who enrolled in a two-year college as a part-time student failed to complete their degree within six years.

The cost of education, in time and money, is making it extremely difficult for your workforce to get the training you want them to have. They're not likely to start, and they're even less likely to graduate.

#3: Companies are forced to shoulder the burden of training.

It seems logical that, if employers can't count on outside sources to train their workforce, they'll have to do it themselves. Yet the 2015 Talent Shortage Survey by Manpower Group found that only one in five employers are taking measures to provide their employees with additional training.

One of the reasons employers aren't developing and implementing training programs is the associated cost. For companies already struggling due to a lack of trained employees, it's difficult to find the funds and resources to effectively train employees in-house. In other words, your classic chicken or egg scenario.

Unfortunately, although companies in the same industry are joining together to partner with community colleges that can provide training, it takes years of effort to see any results. Companies are able to share the risk and cost of training employees, but must also take on the complications of organizing and cooperating with outside groups. This leaves companies with a hard choice: shell out the cost to train employees in-house, or navigate the messy process of incorporating outside stakeholders.

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A few rays of hope.

Even if President Obama's free community college initiative passes, the middle-skills jobs gap is not going to be fixed overnight. There are things employers can do right now to help fight the effects of higher education costs on the middle-skills jobs gap:



Define career paths for employees.

One of the things that worries workers about spending money on their education and training is the idea of never getting that money back. Show them that, if they invest in learning new skills now, it'll pay off if they follow a clear career path.

Outside groups and partnerships have already begun to show how career guidance can help close the middle-skills gap. The GED Testing Service, for instance, is working to empower students to engage in and complete post-secondary studies. Through a partnership with my career exploration startup, PathSource, they are providing every GED student with the tools and resources they need at no cost to create a focused and informed career path they can successfully follow.

But you as an employer need to do your part, as well. Map out ways different types of employees can be successful at your company. Seeing the steps laid out will focus and encourage current and future employees to perform at a higher level within their current role and follow through with enhancing their skill set for future roles.



Fund scholarships for potential employees.

Your company may not be able to afford training dozens or hundreds of employees, but it can support students with high potential through scholarships. Decide what qualities an ideal recipient would possess and how you would want them to use the skills they learn.

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Once you find worthy students, provide them with the financial support to reach those goals. When they graduate, the relationship is already in place to turn them into quality employees.

Provide loan assistance for qualified job candidates.

Attract new graduates with the skills you need by offering to help pay off their student loans during some or all of their time at your company. This will draw in skilled talent that have taken on debt and help you attract the middle-skilled employees you need.

Offer flexible work hours or paid leave for current employees.

Balancing a job, financial issues, and a course load is incredibly difficult. Do what you can to help your current employees go back to school and learn middle-skills.

Flexible schedules allow employees to work and study successfully, and paid educational leave helps them feel financially secure while they're in school. You might not be able to give them full salary, but any assistance shows your employees that you support their decision to further their education and training.

The skills gap apocalypse is coming. On a macro level, it's a looming problem for the country and thoughtful, fast action is required by our policy-makers to address it. Fortunately, your business is going to be OK. The steps above can help you survive while your competitors are starved of the skilled labor pipeline they need.

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What do you think? How else can employers help workers overcome the high costs of colleges in order to close the middle-skills gap?
Osama bin Laden made it his strategy to lure the U.S. into war, and we obliged, spending trillions, costing thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi lives. With boots on the ground, we failed to stabilize either country, and particularly mismanaged Iraq. Instead of promoting Sunni-Shia reconciliation, we supported a regime which polarized the two religious groups. IS, or rather NB, the New Barbarians, rose from the ashes of our policies.

We encouraged the Arab Spring, then failed to support the reformers, because some of them did not agree with our values. Syria has become part of the great game between Russia and the U.S. Many thousands have died, and millions have fled. The U.S. avoids major responsibility for the flood of refugees.The Middle East is in flames, and the NB continues like a mosquito to sting the elephant, who thrashes around trying to relieve the itch.

Now our failures have spread to Europe, which is following a similarly foolish path. The European Union, facing an apparently unlimited numbers of refugees, responds by trying to shut the door. Paying Turkey and others to close the borders and house the refugees looks attractive in the short-run. What will happen when the refugee camps fail to offer adequate housing, education, integration and jobs? The refugees will attempt to move North, and then what? Shoot them?

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Right-wingers everywhere have equated refugees with terrorists, and many country's leaders are tightening the borders and increasing intrusive security measures. Germany is isolated in the European Union, and the pressure on Chancellor Merkel to reverse her humanitarian course increases daily. Her only way out may be to call for every EU member to accept up to 2 percent of its population in refugees, and embarrass the EU into agreeing. It is not at all clear that the EU cares enough to be embarrassed.

Now, the EU and the U.S. are attempting to bomb the NB into oblivion. It will not work. What is certain is that the bombing will kill more civilians than it will the NB. How will that help solve the problem?

Remember Vietnam, where we treated anything that moved as an enemy, killed millions, and still lost? No one can really believe that an air campaign will succeed. The NB will increase the number of stings, and soon we will hear calls for more boots on the ground. And if the EU and the U.S. again bring troops into the Middle East? It will be a war of the West against Islam. We cannot win such a war.

Instead of short-term thrashing around, we need to consider a more realistic and effective strategy. The only boots on the ground with a chance of neutralizing the NB are Islamic boots. Sunni's, in particular, have to lead the fight. But why should they bother when the elephant is so obliging?

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We need to do everything possible to bring our Islamic allies into this fight. Radical imams should lose their state support. Extremism in the Middle Eastern media needs to be managed and muted. Education, jobs and support services need to be strengthened everywhere. This is not a call for democracy as much as a call for responsibility. Saudi Arabia, especially, needs to be a voice for tolerance. This will not be easy to achieve, but it is an essential goal.

And if our Middle Eastern allies continue to sit on the sidelines? Perhaps we should withdraw, and wait for them to recognize that the fight is theirs to win or lose. Perhaps if they feel threatened by the NB, they will respond.This is not a religious war. It is a conflict between the values of a civilized world, especially the objective rule of law, with fairness and security for everyone, versus the values of the NB.

It is essential to remember that the elephant can tolerate the stings, painful as they are. The U.S. and the EU can handle and cope with terrorist attacks without mindless retaliation. The U.S. and the EU can accept many more refugees, and save many lives.
For those of you who haven't heard, there's a new kind of corporation in town. The B Corp is to business what Fair Trade certification is to coffee or USDA Organic certification is to milk. B Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Today, there is a growing community of more than 1,400 Certified B Corps from 42 countries and over 120 industries working together toward 1 unifying goal: to redefine success in business.

These for profit, socially conscious business models are gaining traction as younger generations look to their community impact as a more decisive factor in career direction. New generations want to see their contribution in the world. If a company hopes to recruit the best, they need to offer the best work experience. The demand has driven the government to establish a new class of corporation, the Benefit Corporation (B Corp), to encourage this kind of profit structure. "A B Corp is a for profit corporation which is certified by the non-profit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency." Other well known B Corps include Patagonia, Ben and Jerry's and Method.

Pedal Forward is one such corporation. It began as the brainchild of 2 college friends, Matt Wilkins and Chris Deschenes. They wanted to build a product that was about the how and why. In thinking about the full life cycle of not just material, but also of the labor and production, they developed a plan to sell bamboo bikes, employ formerly homeless, and support transportation efforts in the global community. Pedal Forward manufactures sleek and sustainable bamboo bikes; they hire resident members of Back on My Feet NYC to build the bikes, then use 10% of the proceeds from each bike sale to distribute bikes in developing nations. Matt and Chris were the winners of the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative University Commitment Challenge for their work, and last May were recognized by The White House as Global Emerging Entrepreneurs.

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"When we look at global communities, we don't just want to be exporting labor and materials, we want to reinvest in local economies, and share our passion for getting around the best way possible - via bike!" said CMO, Chris Deschenes. With over 70% of the world's poor lack basic transportation to get from A to B, they are unable to reach vital services, goods and opportunities. Adding a bike is a means of transportation and acts as a huge stimulus to struggling communities.
Jemaa el Fna square in Marrakech, Morocco

Americans have rare excuse to applaud an Arab state given the turmoil in the Middle East. What with ISIS, Iran's dangerous support for terror, the endless violence, and Jihadi threats gripping the region, it is a challenge identifying a strong dependable, and extraordinarily supportive Arab ally in the chaos.

Fortunately, out of the 22 members of the Arab League, there are several good, reliable American friends, notably Morocco. Morocco has earned a particular expression of gratitude lately because of what its government has accomplished just this year alone in our joint battle against radical Islam.

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I served as ambassador to Morocco under President Bill Clinton nearly 20 years ago during a more tranquil period in the Middle East. I had the privilege then to work with its government in its acclaimed peacemaking initiatives to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, in support of American efforts to end the violence in Rwanda, and providing the U.S. with a continuous flow of reliable intelligence on events affecting U.S. foreign policy.

Morocco has been at the forefront of effective, evolutionary political transformation that has avoided all of the tumult of the failed "Arab Spring." And following 9/11, the cooperation and "below-the-radar" joint-counter-terrorism initiatives against Al Qaeda and its franchise cells in the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa dramatically accelerated. Morocco's support is proving indispensable in protecting the U.S. homeland (I know, one of the cells Morocco uncovered in North Africa was targeting U.S. diplomatic and military installations. Pull aside any American counter-terrorism official and inquire. I assure you Morocco earns a unanimous "High Five.")

Morocco has eliminated Al Qaeda and ISIS cells in North Africa and has trained and transformed Mauritanian, Chadian, Tunisian and Malian intelligence operations into more effective anti-ISIS success stories. I personally participated in joint anti-ISIS counter-terrorism initiatives in recent months led by Moroccan anti-ISIS social media experts. If Americans only knew how much Morocco has contributed to our nation's well-being in the joint struggle against radical Jihadi extremists they would take heart that there are such shining Muslim stars hovering above those stormy sands.

In recent weeks, Morocco has provided vital counter-terrorism intelligence to U.S. and French authorities on ISIS converts and terrorists plotting attacks from bases in Belgium, Spain, France, Tunisia and Libya. Morocco's Special Forces are deployed with American and French counter-terrorism special forces in Europe working with local security forces to uncover ISIS cells. Morocco has even been supporting the UN, Kenya and Somalia in the fight against Al Shahab.

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Yes, Donald Trump, you know not what you speak!! Muslim Morocco is a worthy, historic, dependable ally.

It is a record of serious support and quiet accomplishment from a country that remains one of the few peaceful, violence-free nations in the entire Middle East -- a haven for tourism, and as General Patton once extolled to the then Emir of Morocco in 1943: "It's like the Bible and Hollywood rolled into one!"

Moreover, Morocco is making a vital contribution to peace and stability by promoting economic development in the North and Sub-Saharan Africa. For the second consecutive year, congress included in the recent Budget Act bipartisan language mandating that U.S. aid to Morocco be spent, in part, in Morocco's western Sahara region.

The accompanying congressional report goes further, urging the Obama Administration to actively encourage investment there by the US private sector. The law constitutes an important, well-earned acknowledgement by the U.S. government that Morocco is peacefully integrating the western Sahara into its economy and providing new, important political and entrepreneurial liberties to its indigenous population. It's a smart move -- because in these turbulent times, when many unemployed youth in the MENA region are restless and seeking answers in the wrong places, it is essential to support economic growth and opportunity for those targeted by terrorist recruiters.

Under Morocco's responsible stewardship, the western Sahara region is achieving remarkable economic growth with a dynamic and pluralistic political culture, a thriving civil society, and an entrepreneurial spirit. US engagement and investment -- girded by a U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement, will help the people of western Sahara make the most of their economic and political freedom.

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Moroccan King Mohammed VI has committed some $7 billion more over the next 10 years to facilitate economic growth for its southern lands, recently unveiling a range of development programs for transportation, agribusiness, energy, manufacturing, health, education, and tourism. Morocco has made real progress to provide these new opportunities in spite of a radical, foreign-sponsored Polisario Front political organization intent on waging a shop-worn Soviet-style socialist struggle to create a jihadi-oriented failed state smack in the middle of Al Qaeda's scope of operations in Sub Saharan Africa.

Rather than place the needs of the region's people above parochial political ambitions, the Polisario Front's continuing interference in the western Sahara region's quest for political and economic stability and growth must be contested.

Now Congress and the Obama Administration are on record to oppose efforts to deny indigenous Moroccan inhabitants the opportunity to transform the region into an economically self-sufficient Western-oriented success story that does not pose a strategic sanctuary for terror or Jihadi machinations. The Polisario's leadership insists that indigenous Sahrawis live in tents and mud huts, captives in camps where they have no work, no opportunity, and no hope. Corruption and trafficking in contraband are rife under such hopeless conditions, leading UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to voice serious concern that the camps could be a breeding ground for terrorism Under Morocco's regionalization plan, which was put into action this year with a series of local and regional elections in the western Sahara, significant political control has been devolved to local leaders. US technical assistance can help them develop best practices to nurture stable self-government.
PADBORG, DENMARK - JANUARY 06: Migrants, many of them from Syria, walk to police vans after police found them while checking the identity papers of passengers on a train arriving from Germany on January 6, 2016 in Padborg, Denmark. Denmark introduced a 10-day period of passport controls and spot checks on Monday on its border to Germany in an effort to stem the arrival of refugees and migrants seeking to pass through Denmark on their way to Sweden. Denmark reacted to border controls introduced by Sweden the same day and is seeking to avoid a backlog of migrants accumulating in Denmark. Refugees still have the right to apply for asylum in Denmark and those caught without a valid passport or visa who do not apply for asylum are sent back to Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

There will be no prizes for anyone when the refugee crisis is over. European countries big or small will need to do a lot of soul searching about how the political elites squandered their opportunity to lead, how they missed the moment to show that they care more about Europe than they care about themselves.

All those who believe in our way of life should put their political rivalries behind them, hold hands and find ways to work together to manage this situation, which will get worse before it gets better. Whether it gets better hinges on leadership in Europe, of which we see little or none at all.

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Let's also not forget about those, who are now surprisingly silent, hiding behind the backs of others, who early on played a role, a narrow minded, short sighted and cynical role in pushing for the influx of migrants, who only saw this as an opportunity to acquire cheap labor. Or yet others, who saw this as an opportunity of disruption to the European project.

In many ways, Denmark has been singled out as the devil, when it comes to the treatment of refugees. The recent decisions of the Folketinget (Parliament) have not exactly been helpful. The ambiguous measure of confiscating the valuables of arriving refugees, is not smart. Knowing the bad memories it brings back from the past, this law -- not created for refugees -- should have been suspended from the start. Not doing so only poured gasoline on the fire, which is being stoked by those who see caution and moderation as a flaw of liberal democracies.

On a recent visit to Copenhagen, I experienced the very deep soul-searching and the struggles to figure out how to deal with the refugee/migrant situation. My Danish friends were down and rightly so, but it is unfair that others point to Denmark as the worst example of what is going on in Europe. No, Denmark is not Hungary, the leader of the populist pack in Europe. The public debate is serious and elevated, short and long term views being tilted against one another. It is a sign of society's health.

We should not forget the backdrop. Denmark was an early target of radical Islam, after the publishing of the "Muhammed Cartoons" in 2005 in the daily Jyllands Posten. Too little credit was given to the Danes, to the courageous newspaper editors, to the Danish government for standing up on behalf of all of us, who believe in the freedom of speech and the rule of law. It was an act of bravery: unravelling of democracy starts with self-censorship.

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And Denmark has a long history of taking in refugees too. It does distinguish between political asylum seekers and economic refugees. Its efforts to integrate newcomers has not been perfect (it never is in any country), but has largely been a success. Some, like Naser Khader, a Palestinian/Syrian refugee, has risen to the top of politics and is now a conservative member of Parliament. Nima Astanehdost, an Iranian refugee, rose to become a key executive of an important corporation. Danish women of Muslim descent are increasingly ambitious, rising through the ranks and leaving behind the traditional roles proscribed for them by previous generations, and are embracing their "inner Danishness". But integration and adaptation takes time and there will be many impediments along the way. With the rise of radical Islam, they have had to learn to live with something new for the country: antisemitism, which brought about a terrorist attack on a Copenhagen synagogue last year. Do not forget the exceptional deed of saving Danish Jewry in October 1943, when almost all their Jewish citizens were brought to safety across the resund, to neutral Sweden.

And yes, the populist right is on the rise in the country. That is not a Danish phenomenon. It's happening throughout the continent. Whether the Danish government ( a minority government, which is dependent on the parliamentary support of the populist Danish People's Party) is making too many concessions to populism, is of course part of the honest debate.

Denmark will survive this deluge of negative international press. Its image has been hurt, but not seriously damaged. Denmark has a huge credit of goodwill. It must be attentive to the world's reaction. However, in an effort to change the perception it should not, I repeat, it should not start writing explanatory "letters to the editor", like the worst human rights offenders do.

Denmark must look ahead. The incredible creativity of its people must be put to use, to clear the fog surrounding the blurred picture. They should just do what they do best, be Danes: the fundamentally tolerant, smart, creative and, when needed, tough nation that has been the example for so many in the past.

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It must send the message, that the one thing it will not give up is its deep belief in the freedom and democracy we cherish.
Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley and Hillary Clinton met for a town hall in Des Moines, Iowa Monday night to answer why they are the right choice to be commander-in-chief of the U.S. Here's a recap of what you may have missed from Drake University.

Clinton plays towards young voters

CNN moderator Chris Cuomo began his interview session with Clinton, who went third behind Sanders and O'Malley, by reviewing her rather significant week -- she received endorsements from the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe and received glowing praise from president Barack Obama in an exclusive interview with Politico, calling her "wicked smart" and saying she "knows every policy inside out."

But the Des Moines Register endorsement also brought criticism. The editorial said Clinton is "not a perfect candidate" and that she hasn't seemed to learn to admit when she makes a mistake, a point of criticism she told Cuomo was fair. And others know there isn't unified support for Clinton, either. One audience member that spoke to Clinton acknowledged younger Americans' support for Sanders and wanted her to address why they didn't share the same enthusiasm for her.

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"There are very different visions, different values, different forces at work," Clinton said. "And you have to have somebody who is a proven, proven fighter. Somebody who has taken them on and won and kept going, and will do that as president. That's why I hope you'll reconsider."

Nonetheless, nothing stood out about Clinton during her time at the town hall more than her confidence, an attribute each candidate exhibited Monday night at Drake University. She delved into Benghazi, Israel, Islamophobia and even the Civil War with more knowledge and wit than Sanders or O'Malley demonstrated all night. It was clear her experience as First Lady, Secretary of State and New York senator have prepared her for -- if elected -- the presidency.

Sanders pushed to limit by moderator, audience questions

Cuomo asked the Vermont senator to respond to criticism his "Medicare for All" plan has received: raising taxes.

"The criticism is, to pay for this, what you're really asking for is one of the biggest tax hikes in history," Cuomo said.

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Sanders said the criticism was unfair.

"If you are paying now $10,000 a year to a private health insurance company and I say to you, hypothetically, you're going to pay $5,000 more in taxes -- or actually less than that, but you're not going to pay any more private health insurance, are you going to be complaining about the fact that I've saved you $5,000 in your total bills?" he asked.

Cuomo repeated the question.

"But just to be clear, you are going to raise taxes to do this?," Cuomo asked.

"Yes... we will raise taxes, yes, we will," Sanders conceded.

He was also asked by an audience member to address his comfortability in the term "socialist," a term that, according to the audience member, Sanders has sometimes embraced. He responded to this request, too.

"What Democratic Socialism means to me in its essence, is that we cannot continue to have a government dominated by the billionaire class, and a congress that continues to work for the interest of the people on top while ignoring working families," he answered confidently.

"What this campaign is about, and what I believe, is creating a government that works for all of us, not just a handful of people on the top. That's my definition of Democratic Socialism."

But still, many of Sanders' detractors use "democratic socialism" as a point of criticism. Ben Verhassle, a 22-year-old student at Drake University and a Sanders supporter, said he believes the 74-year-old candidate would benefit by finding different words to express the same message.

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"If anything in the entire world, he's consistent," he said, "but I think, even in the audience and even me as a Bernie supporter, I would just love to hear him find new verbiage for those issues he's so passionate about."

Sanders' message for a political revolution in America seemed to resonate with the Des Moines audience, and led up to the Democratic candidate lowest in the polls: former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley.

O'Malley poised, in to win

O'Malley polled at two percent Monday before the town hall -- 36 points behind Sanders and 50 points behind Clinton. But he made very clear that despite low numbers in the polls, he isn't going away any time soon.

In fact, Cuomo asked O'Malley what he would advise his supporters to do if he didn't receive enough caucus support --15 percent-- and his voters had to switch to Sanders or Clinton.

O'Malley decided not to give a de facto endorsement and held strong, and encouraged his voters to do the same.

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"Hold strong at your caucus, because America's looking for a new leader," he said. "America's scanning the horizon. We cannot be this fed up with our gridlocked, dysfunctional national politics and think that a resort to old ideologies or old names is going to move us forward. So I tell my people hold strong."

And while many may count O'Malley out of the race, he answered every question as if he were the frontrunner, including what may have been the toughest question of the night.

"How are you planning to ensure racial equality when your history in office contradicts your current platform to fight structural racism?" one audience member asked.

O'Malley remained calm and painted a picture opposite what the audience member implied -- he said he saved hundreds of lives from overdose deaths, drove down the use of fatal police-involved shootings, restored voting rights to 52,000 people and decriminalized the possession of marijuana.

With six days until the Iowa caucuses, Clinton tops Sanders 52 points to 38 points in the most recent Democratic CNN poll, and O'Malley lags behind at just two points.

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Vancouver-based filmmaker Gary Charbonneau has just released Vancouver Aquarium Uncovered, a new documentary that reveals cruelty and corruption at Canada's most famous marine park.

The documentary features interviews with leading experts, examines the suffering endured by whales and dolphins in captivity, and exposes misleading claims made by Vancouver Aquarium officials.

The many problems documented in Vancouver Aquarium Uncovered include:

out of ten orca, beluga, and dolphin births, only one animal--a beluga--survived infancy. This 90 percent infant mortality rate is at least four times that found in nature.

public claims not to have a breeding program are contradicted by the aquarium's quietly moving their belugas around for breeding purposes.

the Vancouver Aquarium assisted the Georgia Aquarium to import belugas hunted in Russia, despite publicly denouncing wild capture.

despite claiming to be dedicated to conservation, research and education, the budget percentage allocated to these items dropped from 22.6 percent in 2004 to 12 percent in 2013.

there is no evidence that any so-called research at the Vancouver Aquarium has aided a single wild cetacean.

the president of the accrediting association, CAZA, is also the vice president of the Vancouver Aquarium. The aquarium is effectively accrediting itself.

contrary to claims made by aquarium officials, not a single cetacean death at the aquarium could be considered to be from a "natural cause."

"Even I was surprised by the layers of corruption and cruelty at the Vancouver Aquarium," says filmmaker Gary Charbonneau. "The public would be shocked to know what the aquarium is covering up under the veneer of 'conservation' and 'education.' In reality, the Vancouver Aquarium is nothing but a big business disguised as a non-profit, raking in cash on the backs of misfortunate captive animals."

PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has called Vancouver Aquarium Uncovered a "stunning expose."

A bill is currently before the Canadian Senate that would ban keeping whales and dolphins in captivity. So far, 12 countries have already implemented such a ban. The only remaining facilities in Canada that keep captive, performing whales and dolphins are Marineland and the Vancouver Aquarium.
News / National

by Thobekile Zhou

Zimbabweans should brace for a Robert Gabriel Mugabe university, Higher Education minister Jonathan Moyo has revealed.Moyo, a once fierce critic of the 91 year old leader said Government is planning to name a university after Mugabe."At the moment we are thinking of naming a university after RGM," Moyo posted on his twitter account.Moyo disclosed while joining a debate on declaring a Robert Mugabe Day.Zanu PF youth league is pushing for such a day, w development that has been condemned by political parties and youths not linked to Zanu PF.Representatives of the Zanu PF-aligned Youth Against Poverty recently approached Harare mayor Bernard Manyenyeni requesting for land to construct a stadium in honour of the President.Political activist and commentator Setfree Mafukidze described the proposal as naive."It is naive and unfortunate that we have youths who advocate for a Robert Mugabe Day when 90% of the youths are unemployed," he said."It is Mugabe's responsibility to create a conducive environment, which will accommodate university graduates and all those eligible for employment to get jobs."
These are the proverbial uncharted waters.

The enormously capable and talented Roger Ailes has been at Fox News for 20 years (his current four-year contract was set to expire this year, but it was renewed last year). A brilliant visionary and skilled professional, Ailes is a force to be reckoned with.

The new co-chairman of News Corporation, which oversees the Fox network, is Lachlan Murdoch, who would like to have greater influence over Fox News. Lachlan is the son of Fox icon Rupert Murdoch, the brilliant entrepreneur who is now less active at the helm.

The elder Murdoch was divorced three years ago from his third wife. Now 84, the legendary Murdoch -- elder statesman of international media -- recently announced his engagement to Jerry Hall, 59, the six-foot tall former model-actress who had four children with Mick Jagger.

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Already many hardcore conservative backers of Trump are reading the immigration issue into a hidden agenda that Fox has to supposedly take down Trump. In this narrative Fox News is a stepchild to Fox Broadcasting and the News Corporation. The thinking goes that Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family are internationalist, open-borders and into cheap labor for the crony capitalist Chamber of Commerce. Never mind that Sean Hannity and others on Fox push very hard against illegal aliens. The conspiracists see something sinister in a Fox plan to bring down Trump because he is going against their alleged 'open borders' Big Business agenda. Expect this interpretation to gain ground among Trump's suspicious base.

If you continue this interpretation, then Rupert Murdoch prefers Marco Rubio, and Roger Ailes is pursuing a master plan to discredit Trump. Thus, in this view, if you follow the reasoning, the next debate -- that is, tomorrow's debate, was a set-up to finally bring down Trump, and that's why Trump pursued the confrontation. He simply preempted a Fox plan to make him look bad, and Megyn Kelly would have been a prop.

In any case, Ailes is proving he still is the man in charge at Fox News. Ailes is personally involved in the network's confrontation with Donald Trump. Last year, when Trump criticized Megan Kelly for her opening question in the first GOP debate, Ailes wisely played it cool and deflected Trump's threat to boycott Fox News.

But this time, Ailes took the bait when Trump said he might not appear at Thursday's Fox News debate in Des Moines. Fox News issued a statement that sounded like something Ailes wrote - a sarcastic rebuke the "Ayatollah and Putin" would treat Trump as president "unfairly" (Trump's word against Megyn Kelly). Generally, Ailes is more strategic and deliberative, rather than tactical and reactive.

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Trump has called Kelly a "lightweight." Meanwhile Trump's opponents imply he is a lightweight looking for an excuse to avoid a debate. Expect Trump to easily turn down the challenge by Ted Cruz for a two-man debate without a moderator. But give Cruz credit for trying.

The unintended effect of the Fox adversarial approach is to give Trump ammunition. It seems as if Fox is taking sides. The reality is that Fox has given Trump massive coverage over the past few months, and Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Howard Kurtz and others have been more than fair.

But diehard Trump supporters and some undecided Iowa voters may now see Fox News as part of the supposedly threatened "Conservative Establishment" which conspires against Trump, as evidenced by last week's attack on Trump by National Review. They might be even more likely to turn out to vote for Trump as the self-funded independent taking on the powerful.

These are the proverbial uncharted waters. Trump's opponents hope voters will see him as a my-way-or-the-highway guy who intimidates and, if he doesn't get his way, throws a tantrum.

By the time you read this, Trump may yet find a rationale to appear at tomorrow's debate. If so, he surely will have raised the ratings. And if he instead follows through with his own plan for a competing television program to raise money for vets, will the debate ratings go down?

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I was betting he might go on the debate and then still do his veterans fundraiser before the Monday caucuses. But as of this writing, this doesn't appear to be the case.

Perhaps Trump is playing a long-range chess game. He believes that if he is the party nominee he will have to take on the mainstream media, that is, the Liberal Media, in the general electio. By taking on Fox now, he establishes a precedent for confrontations in the Fall. It is him against the Media Establishment -- anyone who questions him is "unfair." Also, by his dispute with Fox, he implies for the general election that he is not "in the pocket" of right-wing media.

Last but not least, it's one thing for Trump to say he'll pull out of the debate and Fox ratings will be hurt. It's quite another to carry a vendetta and threaten the would-be moderator. Indeed, several years ago Trump was interviewed by Megyn Kelly and praised her professionalism --specifically, "as a moderator."

Fox last night issued a longer statement asserting "Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski...in a call on Monday with a Fox News executive...stated that Megyn had a 'rough couple of days after the last debate' and 'would hate to have her go through that again.'"

If Lewandowski indeed used those words, he crossed the line. Trump is loyal but not stupid. I I previously had written, "Don't be surprised if Lewandowski is sanctioned or demoted." Now, I'm not so sure.

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Lewandowski is robotic -- he speaks like Trump's other talking-heads, highly disciplined in machine like staccato fashion about "Mr. Trump." In another campaign, Lewandowski might be old news and gone. In this one, he is perhaps a good soldier.
For the past week, the hashtag #traditionallysubmissive has been trending on Twitter. David Cameron implied that in many traditional Muslim cultures, the role of women is submissive, and that we should perhaps try and adopt policies in this country to make sure that women from those kinds of backgrounds are not marginalized, but instead are given every opportunity to become full, thriving members of our society. Cue an onslaught of thousands of Muslim women who took to Twitter to post pictures of their achievements to prove that Muslim women are not, in fact, "traditionally submissive".

So let's try and make sense of this. Had, the Prime Minister said that (all) Muslim women in general are submissive, that would have obviously been a monumentally stupid thing to say. Did he actually say that? No. A government source said that there is a cultural tendency amongst traditionalist Muslim cultures to regard it improper for women to be socially assertive. Much like our own culture would have done up until the last few decades. The words "traditionally submissive", if indeed they had been said as such, are not the choicest. And if an adult, white, male, British politician said that out loud it would inevitably reek of some kind of underlying prejudice or even racism. It is the sort of thing Nigel Farage would say without any comprehension of why it is a stupid thing to say. But it is not even clear that Cameron actually said those exact words.

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So were the thousands of women who took to Twitter wrong to do so? Strictly speaking, they have done so in error. But in the wider context of where our political discourse is, it is perfectly understandable that they would leap on an opportunity such as this, even if misconstrued, to vent their frustration. "The Muslim Woman" is, in the way we casually drop stereotypes in political conversation these days, truly the most pathetic character: forever condemned to be a wilting flower hidden from the world under a black veil, any protestation of empowerment and self-worth casually dismissed by even the most sympathetic commentator. To constantly have to defend the value of your own existence against this kind of nonsense would probably drive any of us up the wall.

So how about we try to go through the facts, for a change. Are there thousands of "traditionally submissive" Muslim women? No. Nor many hundreds of thousands like them. This is not about (all) Muslim women. Are there women in Britain today who are being marginalized and deprived of the chance to be full members of our society within the context of traditionalist patriarchal cultures in Muslim ghettos all around the country? Absolutely.

It may not be solely a Muslim thing, or inherently to do with Islam, but it is probably the case that we have the biggest problem in this regards in our communities, and we have to own that. There are tens of thousands of Muslim women who are brought over, especially from the Indian subcontinent, just to have their children and look after their household by men who have no intention of making them full participatory members of society because either they have outdated views on the role of women in society or they enjoy the single lads lifestyle too much. I know many families in that situation myself.

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Saying that this sort of thing happens should not be taken as offense by people who are perfectly accomplished and should not feel they have anything to prove. This is not about you. This is about tens of thousands of Muslim women who should have every chance to be as accomplished as you are, but to whom we, as a society, are failing to give those opportunities.

Muslims make up a disproportionate number of prisoners in the UK. They are 5% of the population but make up over 15% of prison population. Muslims are at the bottom of the social economic ladder of all minority groups with the least educated and least in professional jobs, with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis right at the bottom of all ethnic groups. Those are just facts. If I post pictures to Twitter about the fact that I, personally, am a Pakistani origin Muslim and an academic and successful businessman, that does not say anything. Nor am I doing anything to help that situation.

The problem the Prime Minister identified in some of our communities is very real. And if he has ideas about how to tackle that problem, we should invite him wholeheartedly to speak. I'm not sure threatening to deport vulnerable women is the most brilliant idea anyone ever came up with, but surely getting these women to speak English is a bare minimum we should be doing. So how about less posturing, both from the Prime Minister and his deportations, and from ourselves, and more solutions to this genuine problem?


The call for nations to destroy their confiscated ivory stockpiles is still echoing around the world.

The latest heed of the call is from a nation that has long resisted the pressure to destroy its stocks because it had been reserving them for temples and religious buildings.

Today at 9 am local time at Galle face in Colombo, the Sri Lankan government will destroy 359 elephant tusks in a massive stone crusher, followed by a religious ceremony that will honor the slaughtered elephants.

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Most notable among the cache are the tusks from a 2012 seizure from East Africa, valued at over US $3 million. The 300 plus tusks, confiscated right there in the Port of Colombo, was the largest consignment of tusks ever taken into custody in Sri Lanka. Officials have symbolically added 2 tusks from poached Sri Lankan elephants as well.

The destruction will ensure that these tusks will never re-enter the market for illegal trade of elephant ivory.

John Scanlon is attending event and will likely speak to the audience on the need to continue the fight to stop elephant poaching through enforcement and public awareness.

I am inspired by the response of more than a dozen countries to destroy their ivory stockpiles ever since the event in Denver in 2013 when the US Fish and Wildlife Service invited me and my IFAW colleagues to watch as they destroyed six tons of ivory.

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The destruction events worldwide since Denver have collectively reduced more than 65 US tons of ivory to dust and ash.
People Holding Lit Candle In Ku Klux Klan Rally

News reports live a short life in the media. Many seem to have already forgotten the militant organization that continues to occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. But then many also do not know that these militants are also Christians.

Their motivation is ostensibly a religious one, seeking to appease the "Lord" by armed struggle, posting footage blowing shofar (the Jewish horns made out of ram horns) as a call for "spiritual warfare". The reference to divine militancy is reminiscent of the tragedy of Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in November 2015, when a militant Christian, obsessed with eschatology and salvation through sacrifice, killed three people. Then there is Reverend Paul Jennings (1994), Scott Roeder (2009) and many other Christians with similar motives.

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So, let's call these incidents for what they are: Christian terrorism. While violence in its terroristic form is not an exclusively Christian practice, it cannot be denied that Christians have committed most acts of terrorism throughout history.

Since antiquity, Christians have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people based on the concept of "Holy War". From the Crusades to European colonial conquests, violence has been a central feature of a faith known for glorifying the suffering of its God on the cross. But such suffering is less about self-inflicted violence and more about seeking spiritual glory on the battlefield exemplified by "soldier-saints" such as St George, St. Sebastian, and Joan of Arc.

In modern history, numerous Christians have committed dreadful acts of violence, many times against the civilian population. Here is a short list of modern Christian terrorist groups: Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda; Antibalaka in Central African Republic; the National Liberation Front of Tripura and the National Socialist Council of Negaland in India; the Maronite Christian militias in Lebanon; and, of course, IRA and the Orange Volunteers in Northern Ireland.



For American Christianity the story has a darker side. Since the end of the Civil War in 1865, Ku Klux Klan has used arson, lynching, murder, intimidation, such as cross burning, against the African-American population. Groups such as the Army of God, Eastern Lightning, a.k.a. the Church of the Almighty God, and the Lord's Resistance Army are just a few Christian terrorist organizations that have used or advocated violence based on the Christian beliefs and values. In fact, since 9/11 white Christian terrorists have killed more Americans in the U.S. than any other terrorist groups.

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Most analysts are hesitant to associate terrorism with Christianity, a world religion with the most followers in the world, and prefer to view such violence as a mere marginal features of the Christian world. Christianity, they argue, is the religion of love and peace. Those terrorists who claim to be Christians have merely perverted the true teachings of the Bible to justify violence for their personal gain. And likewise the white American Christians (mostly men) who commit terrorism are "lone-wolves," who have mistakenly adopted an anti-abortion or militant agenda as a Christian ideal.

But a mere a glance at various terrorist movements shows that there is something inherently violent about the faith. The violence of course is a natural extension of the Bible, where violence is explicitly stated in the sacred book in terms of vengeance or punishment (see for example Romans 3:10-18; Numbers 31:2; Deuteronomy 20:16-17; Samuel 15:18; Psalms 55:15).

So how can we hold Christianity accountable for the acts of its violent followers? What can Christians do to change their religion? Does Christianity need to be reformed (again)?

Not really. And what you just read was a mockery of a discourse about Islam that has become all too normal in the American public sphere. I used the example of Christianity as an alternative way to show the simplistic approach that defines religion based on ideas, sacred texts and purported ethical ethos that are actually historically dependent on human interpretation in shifting contexts.

You see, the problem is that religion is not all about ideas, regardless of how often times they are expressed as though. The key to religious action is the complex ways it is performed through social practice, and by that I mean the complex ways people bring into "religion" a feature of their human experience and make them sacred, and by extension profane, in a social setting. Sacred text is only an aspect of the social practice.

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In religion there are no fixed contents (though certainly many would like to think there are) but only changing experiences. And you know how experiences are like: confound, blurry, messy, especially when the person claims to be absolutely convinced of his or her faith; that's when doubt is most evident.

Let me explain my point about religious action in a different way. The turning of ideas into action is as complicated as driving your car from home to a grocery store: it involves many turns, lefts and rights, distractions, lane changes, stops, and a hectic parking on a busy day. Forget about actually going to the grocery store; I am just talking about possible ways you can zigzag your way just to get there.

What makes us act or behave in a certain way is always constraint to complex processes, with religious "belief" serving only as a means to make sense of the world. "Belief" does not define the mind-set; it only frames it. Now the notion that there is an autonomous set of ideas called "religious values" expressed through "belief" begs the assumption that those who adhere to a religion essentially take doctrines, theologies, eschatology or orthodoxies at face value. However, values are pragmatic accords in the making, not ready-made objects.
New analysis finds that China holds the key to achieving the 2 degree Celsius global climate goal reaffirmed by 195 countries last month in Paris. According to research by Barclays Bank, China accounts for 33-40 percent of the carbon emissions gap between current trends and a 2 degree Celsius pathway. This is not surprising, since China was responsible for over one-quarter of the world's carbon emissions in 2014, more than the U.S. and the European Union combined.

The good news is that China is moving forward much faster than anyone expected to cut its coal use and CO2 emissions, with enormous implications for public health, the environment, and climate. These trends are expected to continue. In fact, China is now on a path to achieving its Paris climate commitments well before its 2030 target date.

China's physical coal consumption, after increasing at an annual rate of 8.8 percent from 2000-2013 and falling by 2.9 percent in 2014, dropped an additional 5 percent in 2015, even while the economy continued to grow. China's coal imports also fell by a whopping 30 percent in 2015, including a 35 percent year-on-year reduction in December alone compared to the previous December. These reductions are extremely important because coal is responsible for about 83 percent of China's fossil fuel-related CO2 emissions and 50-60 percent of the most damaging form of air pollution choking China's cities.

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As a result of the drop in China's coal consumption, analysis suggests that China's CO2 emissions from fossil fuel consumption dropped by a record-breaking 2 percent in 2015, equivalent to about 200 million tons of CO2, more than the total for entire countries like Argentina, Venezuela or Poland. That is roughly equal to the cumulative emissions from the 100 countries with the lowest emissions. This decline is striking given the fact that China's annual emissions had been growing by an average of 6.7 percent per year over most of the last decade.

Moreover, thanks in large part to China's decreasing coal use, global CO2 emissions are estimated to have declined by about 0.6 percent in 2015. If this is confirmed, it will be the first-ever drop in global CO2 emissions during a period of economic growth.

The drop in China's coal consumption is not just a statistical error. Many other measures confirm that China's coal industry has been on a downward spiral for the past two or three years. China's coal mining industry has about 1.5 billion tons of surplus production capacity, with over 80 percent of China's coal mining companies operating at a loss. Job losses are mounting in the coal industry, and coal exporting countries like Australia have been hit hard as Chinese imports of foreign coal fell.

The news that China's coal consumption is dropping may be somewhat confusing, given the fact that China recently revised its historical coal consumption statistics upward. Yet this revision only applied to the 2000-2013 time period, and should not overshadow the fact that the Chinese coal industry has experienced a dramatic downturn since then, and actually may have peaked in 2013-2014. Moreover, as the PBL Netherland Environmental Assessment Agency noted, all national emission inventories are subject to uncertainty, and the considerable effort China put into revising its energy statistics has "definitely resulted" in better estimates of real fossil fuel consumption - which should also help to make future estimates more reliable.

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Source: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2015 Report (The Hague, 2015).

So why did China's coal consumption and CO2 emissions drop?

It's not just due to China's economic slowdown, as some have speculated. Rather, it is being driven by the political imperative to tackle air pollution (which first sparked major public outrage in 2013), concerns about climate change, and the recognition that an economic model focused on heavy industry is no longer sustainable. As a result, China has now adopted a different economic model, focused on slower but higher-quality growth, with positive results for the climate. As the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency explained in its 2015 report:

The main reason for the curbing of global CO2 emissions is the change in the world's fossil-fuel use due to the structural change in the economy and in the energy mix of China over the past three years...towards a less energy-intensive service sector and a high value-added manufacturing industry that is focused more on domestic consumption, with more energy efficiency, and towards a low-carbon energy mix.

These structural changes are not accidental: China is taking decisive action to curb its reliance on coal, massively scale up non-fossil energy, phase out heavy industry, and cut energy demand through greater efficiency. Here's how:

Curbing Coal:

In December 2014, China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and five other ministries jointly released a document titled Provisional Methods for Key Region Coal Consumption Reduction and Substitution (Chinese) that requires the key air pollution regions to set concrete coal consumption reduction targets. This includes Beijing, which is reducing its coal consumption by 13 million tons by 2017 compared to 2012 levels, as well as major industrial provinces like Hebei and Shandong, which will need to reduce coal consumption by 40 million and 20 million tons respectively. That means the reductions from these three places alone would reduce China's coal consumption by an amount equal to Canada's total coal consumption in 2012. The regulations also require coal consumption reductions in the industrial areas of Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu, and the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong.

(Chinese) that requires the key air pollution regions to set concrete coal consumption reduction targets. This includes Beijing, which is reducing its coal consumption by 13 million tons by 2017 compared to 2012 levels, as well as major industrial provinces like Hebei and Shandong, which will need to reduce coal consumption by 40 million and 20 million tons respectively. That means the reductions from these three places alone would reduce China's coal consumption by an amount equal to Canada's total coal consumption in 2012. The regulations also require coal consumption reductions in the industrial areas of Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu, and the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong. The Provisional Methods created a new government entity, the Regional Coal Consumption Reduction and Substitution Working Group, to oversee China's transition from coal to cleaner energy. Composed of personnel from key national and regional government bodies, the Working Group will evaluate the progress being made in regional coal consumption reduction plans and will have the power to do spot evaluations of each region's programs to check on their progress.

created a new government entity, the Regional Coal Consumption Reduction and Substitution Working Group, to oversee China's transition from coal to cleaner energy. Composed of personnel from key national and regional government bodies, the Working Group will evaluate the progress being made in regional coal consumption reduction plans and will have the power to do spot evaluations of each region's programs to check on their progress. A follow-up government announcement in May 2015, titled Work Plan for Strengthening Coal Consumption Control in Key Air Pollution Management Cities (Chinese), took this enforcement system one step further, specifying that the 10 cities with the worst air pollution in China (eight cities in Hebei, as well as Tianjin, and Jinan, the capital of Shandong province) must set coal reduction targets and develop plans to reduce and replace coal. Their progress will be evaluated and publicly reported by an inter-ministry team led by the NDRC, China's central economic planning department, and one of the country's most powerful political bodies. Local governments may also conduct on-site evaluations of plant operations, and have the power to impose penalties like punitive energy price increases or closure of plants which exceed energy efficiency standards.

(Chinese), took this enforcement system one step further, specifying that the 10 cities with the worst air pollution in China (eight cities in Hebei, as well as Tianjin, and Jinan, the capital of Shandong province) must set coal reduction targets and develop plans to reduce and replace coal. Their progress will be evaluated and publicly reported by an inter-ministry team led by the NDRC, China's central economic planning department, and one of the country's most powerful political bodies. Local governments may also conduct on-site evaluations of plant operations, and have the power to impose penalties like punitive energy price increases or closure of plants which exceed energy efficiency standards. On the last day of 2015, China announced that it will not approve any new coal mine projects for the next three years and will close down a thousand small coal mines.

China has put removal of excess production capacity at the top of a list of five economic tasks for 2016. My colleague Yang Fuqiang notes that this will have a particularly strong impact on the coal industry, as well as coal-consuming firms such as producers of steel, concrete, and construction materials.

Scaling Up Clean Energy

China, already the world leader in wind and solar energy, boosted its investment in clean energy another 17 percent in 2015 to a record $110.5 billion, about equal to the combined investment of the United States and the European Union. China has also just surpassed Germany as the world's largest installer of solar panels.

China has been able to cover all of its growth in electricity demand since 2011 - a 20 percent increase - with non-fossil energy.

Between now and 2020, China plans to triple its grid-connected solar capacity to 100 gigawatts and double its grid connected wind capacity to 200 gigawatts, achieving grid price parity with coal power.

By 2030, China plans to install more wind (345GW) and solar (325GW) energy than exist in the world today, doubling the world's total capacity.

China has adopted a slew of policies to level the playing field for clean energy, including a priority dispatch policy for renewable energy and a national carbon trading program to be launched next year.

Improving Energy Efficiency:

China reduced its energy intensity (energy consumption per unit of GDP) by nearly 20 percent from 2006-2010, and is on track for another 16 percent reduction below 2010 levels by 2015.

China's mandatory Top 10,000 program covers two-thirds of China's total energy consumption. It is a comprehensive energy efficiency program targeting about 17,000 enterprises, and designed to save 250 million tons of coal equivalent by 2015.

In its 2015 international scorecard, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy ranked China first in building energy efficiency.

China is in the process of closing large numbers of inefficient and highly polluting small coal boilers in favor of larger and more efficient facilities.

As a result of all of these efforts to phase out coal, accelerate clean energy, and improve energy efficiency, as well as transition to a more service-oriented economy, China has actually begun to decouple its economic growth from electricity demand and reliance on polluting industries, a remarkable feat for any country. And according to Sophie Lu of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, "as electricity demand continues to slow, clean energy may be used more to replace dirtier capacity."

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This trend is expected to continue. According to a Bloomberg report, the Chinese government announced this week that it will cut crude steel production capacity by as much as 150 million tons and make further "large-scale" reductions in coal output this year as part of major supply-side reforms designed to curb overcapacity and excess labor in state-owned industries. The China Academy of Sciences expects coal production to fall another 4 percent in 2016, the third straight year of decline. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis projects that electricity demand will grow only 3-4 percent in 2016, but the planned 64 GW in additional zero carbon electricity capacity will be more than enough to meet total demand growth.

It remains to be seen just how quickly China will be able to achieve its Paris climate commitments - to peak CO2 emissions, meet 20 percent of its energy demand with non-fossil sources and cut carbon intensity by 60-65 percent below 2005 levels. These are far from easy tasks. The government still needs to tackle oil and gas consumption, reconsider plans to build new coal power bases, and coal chemicals plants in western China, and rein in local government officials, who approved 64 GW of effectively idle thermal power generating capacity last year, when electricity demand was essentially flat. It will also have to find ways to help workers and families hit hard by these massive economic reforms.

But one thing seems clear: China is turning away from coal faster than anybody expected. And that is very good news for the health of China's citizens and for the future of our planet.
I've been blogging for HuffPo Religion for a few months now, and some readers might be wondering, what's her niche? What spiritual cubbyhole can I put her into? Progressive Christian? Spiritual-but-not-religious? Agnostic?

I've been wondering a lot about this myself. Where do I belong? Where are my spiritual peeps? Where are my writing soul mates? It's not easy to categorize me, and believe me I've tried.



Jesus -- Not Just Another Nice Guy

I'm not a born-again Christian, brimming with certitude. But I don't belong in the ranks of those who believe that Jesus was just another nice guy either. I'm not an inward-looking meditator or mystic, but neither am I a peace and justice activist devoting all my waking hours to putting the world right. Politically, I'm not a neo-con, but neither am I a knee-jerk liberal (not any more anyway).

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I'm at home with Catholics . . . Photo by Barbara Newhall

Where do I belong? None of the niches seem to fit. Where are my readers? Does anybody out there get me?

The Loneliness of Nichelessness

For a writer, nichelessness can be a problem. If I were a born-again Christian, I'd be a Christian Booksellers Association author with tons of hungry readers. Conservative Christian book publishers would be wooing me and my book, and so would the many mainstream publishers who've gotten into the evangelical act in recent years.

If I were a Catholic, same thing. The Catholic market is big and focused. It has plenty of publishers and readers who would like my Catholic stuff. Similarly, if I were a progressive Christian with an activist bent, I could join forces with the people who write for places like Sojourners magazine.





. . . and Jews . . . Photo by Barbara Newhall

Come to think of it, a Buddhist would also be a great thing to be these days - lots of literate, thoughtful, book- and magazine-buying Buddhists are out there right now looking for something to read. Crystals? Numerology? Astrology? People read about those things. Too bad I can't write about them.



Hopelessly Open-Minded

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I'm the Episcopalian daughter of a Catholic mother and a Methodist father, but those labels don't really describe me: I'm a hopelessly open-minded, wondering, seeking, yearning skeptic who, despite her doubts, senses that the Holy is at work in the lives of human beings of every sort -- Christians, Jews, Pagans, true believers, doubters, students of religion, atheists, humanists, sensualists and ascetics.

I love them all. And to tell the truth, I like it where I sit. I like it that my horizons are so wide. I can see a lot from here. So, although it may be hard for some people to get me, maybe I don't want to be gotten if the price is being niched.

But nichelessness can be lonely. Where is my writing community, I've often wondered. Who do I talk to when I want to mull things over? My writing groups have been wonderfully supportive of my writing, but often they have no feeling for what I am trying to write. One dear friend, brought up in an atheist family, is uncomfortable whenever I use the word God. A cultural anthropologist colleague has to struggle to think outside the science box to see religion as anything but a useful social glue. Another dear friend, this one a Buddhist, gets nervous if I mention Jesus.

. . . and Buddhists. I'm like God, I love them all. Photo by Barbara Newhall

I'm liking it here at Huffington Post, where Buddhists, Christians and Sikhs hang out with Pagans, humanists and atheists. My kind of people. People who, I'm hoping and hoping, as they read more and more of my posts will, one of these days, get me.

 2014 Barbara Falconer Newhall. All rights reserved.

A version of this essay first appeared on BarbaraFalconerNewhall.com, where Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life, family, books, writing, and her rocky spiritual journey. Her interfaith book, "Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith," is available from Patheos Press.
Red stethoscope

In February 1977 I had been a junior faculty member for 3.5 years. I was filled with youthful zest and boundless enthusiasm. I had finally begun to realize my goal as an academic physician. My commitment to medicine was absolute, and my knowledge of medical literature and medical science was excellent. In contrast, my clinical experience was still in a formative, developmental stage.

On a cold winter morning I was called to the coronary care unit by one of our trainees to evaluate D.D., a 27-year-old man who had just been transferred to our medical center from a local hospital because of shock following an apparent massive myocardial infarction (heart attack). The situation sounded ominous.

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I rushed to the unit to meet the patient and my cardiology fellow. D.D. was lying quietly, looking very ill. His blood pressure was dangerously low. He was pale, with cool extremities, and was sweating profusely. The electrocardiogram revealed a large heart attack, which was also confirmed by a radioisotope heart scan. He was conscious and, after several doses of analgesics, was no longer having pain.

As I pulled back the covering sheet to examine him more fully, I was immediately struck by a crude blue swastika tattooed on his right forearm.

The sight of this symbol produced a feeling of intense anger and antipathy that was almost physical as it pulsed through my entire body. These feelings were soon coupled with conflict. Faced with this universally-recognized Nazi symbol prominently displayed on D.D.'s body, the symbol of the systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews, could I care for this patient?

Over the three years prior to meeting D.D., reading Holocaust literature had become almost an obsession. I consumed volume after volume. Within my own extended family, several were lost to the ravages of the Nazis. Before that era, in a post-World War I pogrom, the grandparents, aunts and uncles I never knew were mercilessly murdered only because they were Jews.

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These thoughts and the resultant conflict circled in my mind as I concluded my exam and laid out a plan of action for D.D. I saw him frequently over the next two days. Fortunately, we were able to gradually stabilize his medical condition.

During the same period I spent two nights of fitful sleep debating whether I could remain his doctor. Could I overcome my bias, my horror, and my contempt? If I thought this was possible, would I truly be fair to both patient and myself? In the end, I felt that as a physician I did not have the luxury of deciding who I would and who I would not care for. With a persistent feeling of trepidation and lingering uncertainty, I would serve as his cardiologist.

During the course of the hospital stay I got to know D.D. much better. He was married and had two young children and had a stable job. After our relationship had matured further, I asked about the swastika tattoo. He dismissed this rather briskly, indicating that this was a foolish and irresponsible thing he had done when he was younger. It had been done with no understanding and no commitment to Nazism or anti-Semitism and all they stood for. How glad and relieved I was to have trusted my initial instincts and not acted presumptuously to sever our patient-doctor relationship.

I continued as D.D.'s cardiologist until his death approximately 15 years later. It's now almost 39 years since that fateful event. Over this period of time I have never questioned my decision. As my practice has grown and evolved, I have served as cardiologist to some individuals who might be considered "unsavory." None were turned away because of either who they were or who they were purported to be.

Much has been written about the ethics of physicians refusing to provide medical services because of intrinsic ethical or moral beliefs. Do physicians retain the right to refuse care because it conflicts with their moral beliefs? Do physicians have autonomy comparable to that granted to patients? This issue has been quite visible in the area of abortion, sterilization, contraception, reproductive technology and end-of-life care. It is generally felt that physicians are obligated to provide emergency care under all circumstances. In more stable chronic situations, if the physician feels that, due to conscience or moral values that care cannot be provided, alternative health care providers or services should be recommended.

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During the current wave of terrorism in Israel, the Israeli Medical Association provided new rules for those called on the scene to provide care to both terrorists and their victims. Previously, medical professionals would treat terror victims first, and then address the medical needs of the perpetrators of terror. Under the new directive issued in December 2015, physicians and health providers were directed to treat all individuals based only on disease severity, and not on whether they were terrorist victim or terrorist.

Dr. Tammy Karni, the head of the Ethics Panel of the Israeli Medical Association, was quoted as stating: "Doctors are not judges." To my mind, this is the highest level of commitment to the primacy of our mission as physicians and healers.

The decision I made in 1977 was important. It provided me, early in my career, with an ethical and moral construct for administering medical care to all patients. We are indeed healers, and we are not judges. As such, we have been given the unique privilege of caring for those who are ill. This responsibility is a sacred one. It entails treating the patient only as a patient and not as a focus of individual moral indignation. To do less would be a compromise to who we are and what we should be.
Solar panels in foreground to city.

We constantly hear how solar and wind energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. A few months ago, Bloomberg Business declared that "wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies."

If renewable energy is cheaper than dirty fossil fuels, why isn't everyone adopting them? Are we so irrationally addicted to polluting energy sources that we won't even embrace cheaper and cleaner alternatives?

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Well, as you might have guessed, it turns out that wind and solar energy isn't cheaper than fossil fuels in the real world. Quite the opposite.

A new report from the same Bloomberg now warns that if subsidies are phased out by 2020 in the U.K, the renewable industry will dry up and drop off a cliff. But if they're already cheaper now, why on earth would it matter if we stop paying even more for wind after 2020?

With formidable doublespeak, Greenpeace tries to square this circle by saying that renewables are both competitive and need subsidies for many years after 2020: "Wind and solar energy are at the point of becoming really competitive with fossil fuels, but failure to support them for another few years will result in huge losses of potential jobs."

That is a claim we've heard many times since the 1970s - just a few more years of subsidies, and we'll be off. In 1976 Lovins told us that "a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic." And it still isn't.

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Truth is, wind and solar PV will be trivial contributions to global energy for the next quarter century. The International Energy Agency estimates that today just about 0.5 per cent of global energy comes from solar and wind (see graphic below). Even in 2040, even if everyone does everything they've promised at the Paris climate summit, the world will get just 2.4% of its energy from solar and wind.

Still, it will cost a fortune. This year the world will spend about $106 billion on subsidies for solar and wind, and even by 2040 it will not be cheaper than fossil fuels - we will still have to pay $84 billion in subsidies annually. The International Energy Agency estimate that even by 2040, renewables will on average be more expensive both in the developed and developing world than any other energy source, like oil, gas, nuclear, coal and hydro.
Five years since the Arab revolutions, Tunisia stands as the lone country to have embarked on a democratic path - our exceptionalism instilling both a sense of pride and significant concern. We endured three horrific terrorist attacks last year, the most recent one in the heart of Tunis killing 12 presidential guards. Keeping our citizens and visitors safe is our top priority.

Years of instability have also ravaged our economy. The current unrest in Kasserine -- sparked by the death of Reda Yahyaoui, a young man electrocuted while protesting his exclusion from a list of government jobs -- illustrates that we need to tackle the conditions that lead our youth to such desperation. One in six Tunisians currently lives below the poverty line and unemployment is nearly 29 percent among graduates of higher education. In a country where three-quarters of the unemployed are 15-30 years of age, upward mobility of a promising economy is pivotal to reducing our vulnerability.

Steady progress on critical reforms

Over the last year, Tunisia's coalition government has been hard at work focused on economic reforms. The parliament recently passed a new law to facilitate joint private-public partnership projects. To boost investment, the government presented a new code to simplify the investment framework and open up new opportunities for the development of industrial incubators. This will promote added-value sectors such as IT and aerospace and facilitate transition away from the informal sector. The economic reform program will provide the state budget with approx. $2 billion over the next five years.

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Progress has also been made on reforming the subsidy system in the energy sector, striking a balance between improving fiscal and equity considerations without increasing social tensions. Energy subsidies, which peaked in recent years, are expected to decline from approximately $400 million in 2015 to approx. $270 million in 2016.

The government is stepping up efforts to revamp the regulatory environment, adopting long-standing legislation to boost investment and initiating labor market reforms. This will improve employability of graduates through additional training and reconnecting unemployed youth, particularly the long-term unemployed, with mentors and enterprises. In parallel, an entrepreneurship program is being introduced to facilitate the launching of start-ups in close cooperation with financial institutions. This will strengthen the business ecosystem and stimulate entrepreneurial spirit among our youth.

Tunisia is also working closely with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to meet its criteria for reforms, particularly to narrow the budget deficit, reform the banking system and make the economy more efficient. Quantitative performance criteria noted in the IMF-supported program have been met. Despite the difficult international economic environment, Tunisia has succeeded in maintaining its macroeconomic stability. After the success of the IMF's Stand-By program, we have started discussion of a new Extended Fund Facility program for the next four years.

To ensure that these reforms do not result in an increase in short-term poverty rates, Tunisia is increasing its public spending. Last month, we injected $440 million into state-owned banks ("Societe Tunisienne de Banque" and "Banque de l'Habitat") to boost their restructuring. The government is also working with the IMF and other partners to provide technical assistance and capacity building in the public sector. A new banking law is currently in the works that will make our central bank independent of government.

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The five-year development plan 2016-20

We are drawing on the same spirit that united Tunisians to design our unique political consensus model to now come together around our structural reforms. The Tunisian government, in collaboration with political leaders, civil society and professional organizations, is developing a five-year plan that we will begin to implement this year.

Our success will depend on the effective improvement of the business environment, as well as progress in the execution of the structural reforms, especially those pertaining to modernization of the administration, the revision of the procurement system, the promulgation of a new investment code and the implementation of tax and customs reforms. The reforms will allow a gradual recovery and consolidation in economic activity over the next two years, before realizing takeoff beginning 2018.

Aiming High: 5 percent growth by 2020

Tunisia expects to grow 2.5 percent in 2016 and about 5 percent in 2020. This is an ambitious target -- but given our demographics, potential and challenges, a crucial one for our future. Tunisia has the ability to successfully make these reforms and grow at our planned levels, but we need international support - a dramatic increase in economic assistance from the G8 countries. We need $25 billion over the next five years to finance the development of infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and other public works, particularly in previously neglected regions. This will create much-needed jobs and stimulate economic activity.
Fourth-year neurology student Anjali Ramkissoon saturated our newsfeeds last week when a video of her attacking an Uber driver went viral. The footage, showing Ramkissoon punching, kicking and hurling profanities at the driver, has received hundreds of thousands of views since it was posted to YouTube.

As expected in the age of digital mass consumption, a jurisprudential body of social media account holders took to their devices and began calling for her termination from her medical program, bolstering this with negative reviews on her professional online platforms and colorful language of their own out of outrage for her behavior.

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As a medical professional, it is quite clear that Ramkissoon is held to a higher standard than the common frat boy who drinks his body weight in beer and wreaks havoc on the town. It is also conceded that her assault of the Uber driver was a far cry from this said higher standard. Throughout the United States, state medical boards regulate physician conduct and regularly determine whether a physician's behavior or abilities call for a modification, suspension, or revocation of their license to practice medicine. Medical boards contain their own investigative bodies to assist with making these tough determinations.

Although laws vary from state to state, consistent examples of recognized unprofessional conduct with respect to alcohol consumption, known as impairment regulations, are limited to the sphere of medical practice (i.e.: drunken impairment while treating a patient) and do not always result in license revocation. In fact, in cases involving impairment by a controlled substance, medical boards are often privy to place restrictions on licenses while prescribing rehabilitative care or special training to target certain impairment issues. However, if Ramkissoon is suspended from her residency program (before even getting to the state medical board), she may very well be hard pressed to find a new program to complete her medical studies thus rendering her unable to complete her medical degree. At the moment, she has been suspended from her clinic, according to Jackson Health Systems, and her termination remains a possibility.

Nonetheless, the Internet, in its famed uproar, has demanded Ramkissoon's license be immediately revoked despite the attenuated investigative and disciplinary process described above. Much more revealing, however, was the commentary that accompanied many of these cries for her termination from the medical profession--rife with racist slurs and violent rallying for her physical and sexual abuse. Some of these comments, all pulled from the original YouTube post, are provided below though similar language has been spewed on Facebook, Twitter, and on her professional platforms.

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With respect to racist bigotry, a substantial variety of derogatory statements were made referring to Ramkissoon's perceived South Asian background or Hindu beliefs.

Santa, really, you too!?

Even more disturbing, a substantial number of male commenters also thought that rape and further violent abuse would serve as an appropriate retributive justice.

Aside from the obvious issues with respect to this level of intrusion in the age of social media, and the difficult question of whether this Internet "trial" backlash was warranted, reactions like those exhibited above are quite telling of the social realities faced by, arguably, one of the most vulnerable groups of the complicated American fabric: women of color.

In terms of race relations, it has become abundantly clear that the Internet brings out both the best and the worst of humanity. This has been no exception. While it is very obvious that Ramkissoon disrespected this driver's property and person, attacks on her ethnic identity exemplify the harsher scrutiny that people of color experience in situations of any kind of malfeasance. Remarks degrading Indians and Hindus as savages or third-world scum also exhibit that people of color are subject to collective suffering, but hardly to collective sympathy.

After the assault of Inderjit Singh Mukker, a Chicago taxi driver who was beaten within inches of his life by a teenager who referred to him as a terrorist and told him to "go back to his country," the Internet did not flower into the level of defense that has been assigned to Ramkissoon's Uber driver, aside from support from South Asian, Sikh, and Muslim organizations. Rather, Mukker's story remained a headline cataloged for one day only to be lost in the archives thereafter.

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Similar whispered outrage occurred when New York cab driver Barry Mamadou was shot and killed in a robbery during his shift. His life was snatched away and nothing close to viral condemnations of violence followed the release of the sad news of his death. Perhaps it is because their experiences were not captured on tape in the way this Uber driver's had been. Maybe visualization is the key to empathy and outrage. But this flimsy foothold based on optics begs for many answers with regard to the disparity between white suffering and colored suffering, as well as white misconduct and colored misconduct. It begs for answers with respect to whether this really has anything to do with a newfound collective repulsion against physical abuse, or simply repulsion for when such abuse is perpetrated by a person of color.

In the same vein, violence against women is an oft-exhibited response to women who display breaches of some perceived code of female behavior. The comments showcased herein calling for Ramkissoon's rape and death are part of the norm in the realm of backlash for sensationalized and viral videos featuring women, especially women of color--a tendency that demonstrates the persistent and thriving rape culture that informs these slews of commenters who believe sexual abuse is an apt disciplinary measure for women who are too loud, too vulgar, or too anything. Truly, these remarks depict nothing more than how women have, historically, been subjugated, conquered, and humiliated--through threats and violations of our sexual sanctity.

While it is clear that Ramkissoon will be dealing with this backlash both personally and professionally for a long time coming, reactions to her violent night in Miami have made even clearer points with respect to grim race and gender relations in the U.S. and beyond. Muddy waters have become even muddier, and the phenomenon of viral sharing has rendered them almost impossible to navigate, all while affirming the golden rule of the Internet: stay away from the comments section (unless you're on Humans of New York).

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Elizabeth Jaikaran is a New York-based freelance writer, who has written everything from comedy to legal analysis. She is a third-year law student at New York University School of Law and is interested in foreign policy, international law, and corresponding theories of social consciousness and gender politics. Her favorite hobby is binge-watching Netflix with her husband.
News / National

by Thobekile Zhou

GOVERNMENT has put a freeze on allocating of land to land developers as it is concerned with mushrooming of illegal settlements.Local Government minister Christopher Chingosho on Tuesday told journalists that government was now working with local authorities to bring sanity to the housing sector."Let me at this point reiterate that government has instituted a moratorium on all and allocations to so-called land developers and as policy, going forward shall be utilising the Urban Development Corporation for all development on state land.Harare has been rocked my demolition of houses built on land which government says was illegally allocated.Government have been sucked into the Arlington Estate saga where Harare City Council is demolishing houses built on land reserved for the expansion of Harare International Airport. An estimated 60 houses were demolished in a bid to bring order to the Arlington area.Most of the residents of Arlington have since moved to Stoneridge where a re-allocation exercise has been put in place by Government.A section of residents have however opted to stay in Arlington claiming they have been purposefully overlooked while some residents say they cannot move to Stoneridge because of financial challenges.Other residents claim the re-allocation process has been marred by corruption through double allocations.
This morning I awoke to a series of emails which made me realize that the Information Age is dead and we are now in The Age of Noise, Clutter & Spying on Us.

And it would appear that adding broadband speeds just adds more garbage faster. But after I realized the extent to which they are tracking us, spying on us, this all just pissed me off, as it is clear it is getting worse.



The Age of Noise & Clutter

The noise is everywhere and it is cluttering up my life. Let me explain.

Pinterest, (which I joined because every time I put up a new article it places that pin on the graphics), keeps sending me 'New topics you might love'.

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Now, I don't search for new topics, ever. And the machine has no idea what I might love.

But this one was funny - Pinterest believes I might love pictures of "fiber" -- but when I click on it, it takes me to knitting and crocheting pictures. I sent the email to someone else and when they clicked on it, it took them to a page of healthy eating/fiber pictures.

Some much for the computer matching my 'likes', much less 'loves'. And even if it was related to 'fiber optics', I still wouldn't care.

A few emails down and it is from Linkedin, the business networking site. They are telling me that there are jobs available -- "Top job picks for you!" I'm not looking for a job. And these jobs are not something I would consider. I haven't programmed a computer for decades and I doubt I'd make a good Director of Technical Accounts for Verizon.

This 'keep in touch' marketing is everywhere and all it does is annoy me and it wastes my time.

As the Rolling Stones said in their song, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" -- "some useless information supposed to fire my imagination".

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And I've given these companies a privilege to enter my "Inbox" as opposed to this all just being dumped into the 'spam section', where I get hundreds of emails daily promising me millions of dollars or a new wonder drug, or it's just a virus or some other nasty malware, etc.

After thinking about how to shut off these emails, I find an 'unsubscribe" on Pinterest and it sends me to this:

I see the phrase "more Pinterest emails". I wonder how many different categories there are?

'Preferences' that are Garbage--The Pile-On

The idiot machines have taken over and we spend more and more time attempting to go around their endless stream of noise and clutter. Of course we can blame the idiot programmers who think that they have a 'preference' engine that works.

Take Netflix and my "because you watched" choices. "Amadeus" is the story of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and how a jealous, hack composer is out to kill him. Robinson Crusoe is a remake of a famous tale of a man marooned on an island, played by Pierce Brosnan.

What do "The Roosevelts" have to do with Mozart? Or how does someone marooned on a mostly deserted island have anything to do Marilyn Monroe in "River of No Return"? Would Caruso have left the island if Marilyn had shown up?

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I remember in the 1990's, there was a 900-number for horoscopes and one lazy information provider recorded 12 different messages and then would just rotate them through the different signs; Capricorn would hear the same message as a Leo, sooner or later. This feels more like that then 'my preferences'.

The Age of Spying on Us

But what really pissed me off was how we are being tracked, shadowed, and spied on.

A few months ago I did a search for an electric music keyboard for my brother, in the $200.00-400.00 range, which included a Casio and a Yamaha.





The next day I go to another site, and for some reason, there is a picture of the same keyboards I was looking at. I go to another site, and there is an Amazon ad for one of the keyboards. I think I had seen the same ads at least seven different times.

How could this be? Were they blanketing the Internet with this ad or somehow they were magically following me?

I posted on some lists: "This is not right. How do I shut it off, or is this a search thing or something else going on?"

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And, why would I want to see a continuous stream of ads for the same keyboards after the search was done, is beyond me, but it kept reappearing.

I track down the culprit. On the top right side of a lot of these ads there is something that says 'AdChoices". This one advertisement is for Verizon, (and it's in Spanish) which 'found me' when I was reading a story on the San Jose Mercury News web page.

And this is what happens when you click on AdChoices. It was spying on me and while it claims it is about 'preferences', I don't even speak Spanish, among other things.

I click on the 'Set Your Ad Preferences' and I get to Truste, which shows 42 different services/companies/who are now tracking me.

I click to get rid of their tracking and it eliminates only 18 of the culprits; the rest show a question mark.

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If you notice, it says that they are tracking the sites I have visited, and it is known as "behavioral advertising". And while you can't shut off the ads, they will be glad to just give you ads that are more randomly picked.

I.e., they are legally (maybe) spying on me, and then doing a profile. Who gave them the right to track me?

The keyboard ads that were appearing happened because they had tracked me. They then kept flashing the same exact product at me because, well, there's a software program who thinks it understands me; it knows my 'preferences'.

Shut It Off Completely?

I end up at this page -- the industry association, Digital Advertising Alliance -- and they are doing me a favor that they are attempting to get rid of the clutter by providing me with 'relevant advertising'.





It might be time to design a free 'behavioral response' program that clicks on the ads 1,000,000 times each, as the advertisers pay for this -- and let them start screaming at the companies offering these services. I assume they have some other program that would stop it, but I'd get some satisfaction in bombarding them with 'useless information'.

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I also found that there are 'privacy' settings. This is the list that showed up when I just put in the term 'privacy setting' into Google -- Do I have to go through every service and device and operating system to deal with the privacy settings?

I admit freely that I just use this stuff and am just another naive consumer, like the majority of you reading this.

But questions remain.

When they enter my Internet browser or computer, are they entering my home, my premises? Or is the 'Internet' just a public space? If the Internet is "Title II" and telecommunications, as the FCC suggests in the Net Neutrality ruling, then these companies are violating the basic rights of "common carriage", as you can not just spy on someone without a legal court-ordered warrant -- i.e.; they can't tap your phone conversations or track your regular phone calls.

And this is not some 'meta-data' about lots of people being averaged or profiled; this is a specific attack on each one of us, and I don't want someone spying on me. Period.
Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, looks downward while listening to a question from the crowd at a campaign event at Bridge View Center Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Ottumwa, Iowa. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

"McCain Rejects Hagee Backing as Nazi Remarks Surface", reported the New York Times on May 22, 2008. Once again, as in 2008, a short Youtube video I've compiled is making waves in national politics, driven -- as in 2008 [1, 2] initially by coverage from liberal media. Once again, at the forefront is the public embrace, by a top Republican presidential contender, of a pastor who claims God sent Hitler. Looming in the background is form of hyper-politicized Christianity known as dominionism, the mandate that believers must achieve control, either overtly or through stealth, over all sectors of society.

Ted Cruz' enthusiastic acceptance of a political endorsement from Kansas City evangelist Mike Bickle mirrors, in many respects, John McCain's 2008 acceptance of John Hagee's endorsement. As MSBNC political news show host Rachel Maddow pointed out, in a Friday January 22, 2016 segment, Cruz and Bickle have in effect co-endorsed each other; in 2008 MSBNC show host Keith Olbermann made a similar observation concerning the McCain-Hagee embrace.

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Are politicians responsible for all statements and views of their endorsers ? Hardly. But when politicians publicly, enthusiastically accept such endorsements and run their campaigns based on the support ? "[Y]ou kind of own it", opined Maddow.

Amid growing media coverage of my video, will Presidential contender Ted Cruz reject his new political endorsement from Bickle, who in the video footage is shown claiming the world's Jews are collectively "under the discipline of God" because "perversion and sin" and will soon be forced, per God's will, into "prison camps" and "death camps" ?

Among Bickle's many distinctions, he also claims that same-sex marriage is a "unique sign of the end-times" and paints Oprah Winfrey as a harbinger of the anti-Christ. But perhaps even more toxic is Mike Bickle's repeated claim that Hitler was a "hunter", sent by God to persecute the world's Jews after their stubborn refusal to be converted to Christianity.

Ted Cruz' acceptance of Bickle's endorsement merited a dedicated press release on Cruz' official campaign website. Gushed Cruz, "Heidi and I are grateful to have his [Mike Bickle's] prayers and support. With the support of Mike and many other people of faith, we will fight the good fight, finish the course, and keep the faith".

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Let's revisit the 2008 Republican presidential campaign:

It was John McCain's worst campaign nightmare; in late May 2008, the Republican presidential hopeful was forced, amid an embarrassing media firestorm, to reject a long-sought political endorsement from influential conservative evangelical leader John Hagee who, my research had uncovered, had publicly claimed in a globally broadcast 2005 sermon (later packaged and sold by John Hagee Ministries as part of a 3-CD video set) that God sent Adolf Hitler to persecute Europe's Jews.

Leading up to the February 2008 Hagee endorsement, McCain had worked hard to court the religious right after having alienated the movement during the 2000 presidential election primaries when the Arizona Senator criticized Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance".

Leading up to the 2000 primaries, McCain had misjudged the electoral importance of conservative evangelicals and gambled on running against the religious right, as a secular "maverick": a fatal mistake. Religious right leaders eventually opted to throw their political support to Texas governor George W. Bush. And who helped broker that deal ? -- None other than the very young Ted Cruz.

As I reported back in 2013, in 1999, Cruz arranged a key meeting, between the Bush For President campaign and co-architect of the modern religious right Paul Weyrich, that cemented movement backing for Bush. Cruz would go on to serve on Bush's 2000 Florida vote recount team.

"Cruz For President Announces Endorsement of Mike Bickle", proclaims Ted Cruz' official campaign website, which bills International House of Prayer founder and head Mike Bickle as a "prayer and justice leader".

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In repeated sermons from 2004 to 2009 Bickle has predicted that in the coming end-times God will send "fishers" to convert Jews to Christianity and later, when two thirds of Jews reject such evangelizing efforts, send "hunters" to persecute and slaughter them, as part of God's judgment for "perversion and sin" in a second, divinely mandated Holocaust.

It's hardly Cruz' first brush with religiously-based genocidal ideas. In November 2015, Huffington Post Gay Voices editor Michelangelo Signorile pointed out the shocking lack of mainstream media coverage following the participation of presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal in a "religious liberty" conference organized by pastor Kevin Swanson, who at the event called for the mass execution of unrepentant gays and lesbians.

Bickle is one of the more influential leaders in the radical, cultic Christian supremacist New Apostolic Reformation movement according to evangelical author and NAR expert Holly Pivec.

During the 2000 presidential election, one of the NAR's acolytes, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, shut down a vote recount that might have tipped the razor thin Florida vote margin from George W. Bush to Al Gore. As noted in a 2006 Charisma magazine story, Harris had been close to top NAR leaders such as Dutch Sheets and Cindy Jacobs.

Not all NAR leaders are backing Ted Cruz' presidential bid; a significant faction of the NAR's apostles and prophets has thrown its weight behind the candidacy of Donald Trump. The split in NAR endorsements may reflect a growing strategic maturity; in 2011, the NAR decisively backed the presidential bid of Texas governor Rick Perry, who launched his campaign from a prayer rally dominated by the NAR's apostles and prophets.

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Perry's 2012 election presidential bid and proximity to the NAR brought unprecedented mainstream media scrutiny to the NAR and its dominionist strain of politicized Christianity.

That scrutiny, in turn, provoked a fusillade of denial from elite media op-ed writers such as the Washington Post's Michael Gerson, who claimed dominionism "is a movement that could fit in a phone booth" and the New York Times' Ross Douthat, who portrayed concern over the political influence of Christian dominionism as poorly informed and rooted in conspiratorial thinking. After mainstream media turned its attention away, NAR leaders resumed exhortations, to their followers, that "You Must Take Dominion Over Everything".

But both Michael Gerson and Ross Douthat are tied to the spectrum of the evangelical right that bleeds over into overt dominionism -- the two have been repeatedly welcomed to speak at the elite invitation-only yearly event known as The Gathering, during which multimillionaire and billionaire philanthropists who bankroll the evangelical right, including overtly dominionist factions and Mike Bickle's ministries too, assemble and strategize to maximize the impact of their philanthropic dollars.

The biggest foundation at The Gathering, representing a dominant fraction of the community's philanthropic dollars, is the mammoth National Christian Foundation, now one of the biggest philanthropies in America.

NCF is one of the biggest financial benefactors of elite organizations of the dominionist evangelical right such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and Campus Crusade for Christ -- all of which are in the vanguard, globally, of pitched battles over LGBT rights. The most recent available NCF 990 tax form submitted to the IRS, for 2013, shows NCF gave Mike Bickle's various IHOP ministries over $260,000 that year.

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Ted Cruz' proximity to the dominionist movement is hardly a passing one. In the years leading up to his current presidential bid Cruz' father Rafael Cruz has been crisscrossing the nation speaking at evangelical churches, in preparation.

In an August 2012 appearance at an Irving, Texas megachurch, Rafael Cruz indicated his son was one of those chosen by God to "take dominion" and effect a great transfer of wealth, from the "wicked" to the "righteous". Explained Cruz, who had talked of "Kings who are anointed to go to war, win the war, and bring the spoils of war to the priests",

The pastor [Larry Huch] referred to Proverbs 13:22, a little while ago, which says that the wealth of the wicked is stored for the righteous. And it is through the kings, anointed to take dominion, that that transfer of wealth is going to occur. God, even though he's sovereign, even though he's omnipotent, he doesn't let it rain out of the sky -- he's going to use people to do it.

Bearing in on a theme characteristic of the New Apostolic Reformation movement, Cruz outlined a version of the "Seven Mountains" mandate which instructs believers to gain positions of power and influence atop seven key sectors of society:

What's the battlefield ? The battlefield is the marketplace. To go to the marketplace and occupy the land. To go to the marketplace and take dominion. If you remember the last time I was in this pulpit, I talked to you about Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, where God says unto Adam and Eve, 'Go forth, multiply, TAKE DOMINION over all creation.' And if you recall, we talked about the fact that that dominion is not just in the church. That dominion is over every area -- society, education, government, economics...

In 2013, Ted Cruz himself was directly blessed and anointed by dominionist evangelical leaders including Christian history revisionist David Barton, who has claimed that ideas in the U.S. Constitution were based on Old Testament scripture including the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

In September 2013, Senator Ted Cruz told Politico reporter Stephanie Simon that,

David Barton is a good man, a courageous leader and a friend. David's historical research has helped millions rediscover the founding principles of our nation and the incredible sacrifices that men and women of faith made to bequeath to us the freest and most prosperous nation in the world.

Cruz' friendship with Barton is especially telling; the factually challenged Christian nationalist history narratives of David Barton (who himself is quite close to the apostles and prophets of the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation movement) play a crucial role for America's Christian supremacist right, explains researcher Frederick Clarkson:
Prison

On Monday morning, kids in the metro D.C. area woke up to the exciting (though unsurprising) report of a snow day. But even better news for kids came out of the nation's capital yesterday.

First, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court held that all individuals serving a mandatory life without parole sentence for a juvenile crime deserve a second chance. The case raised complex legal questions related to the implementation of the Court's 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama. In Miller, the Court held that states cannot impose mandatory life without parole sentences on juveniles, even juveniles convicted of homicide. Instead, the Miller Court held, states must afford juveniles an individualized sentencing hearing at which their youth and its mitigating attributes are taken into account. Moreover, the Miller Court said that life without parole sentences for any juvenile defendants should be "uncommon" given "children's diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change." Miller was a big victory for juvenile advocates, but it left open the question of what effect, if any, the ruling would have on cases settled long ago - cases like that of Henry Montgomery.

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Montgomery was convicted of killing a deputy sheriff in Louisiana in 1963, when he was 17 years old. The jury in his case returned a verdict of "guilty without capital punishment," which, at the time, meant that Montgomery was automatically sentenced to life without parole. Almost 50 years later, the Supreme Court held in Miller that this kind of automatic life without parole sentence for children is cruel and unusual because it fails to recognize the fundamental ways in which children are both less culpable and more amenable to rehabilitation. This past October, Montgomery argued that individuals whose cases had been finalized before the Miller decision should also benefit from the ruling - that he and the approximately 2500 people in this nation serving life without parole for a juvenile crime all deserve an opportunity to demonstrate that they have matured and are prepared to re-enter society. And the Court, in a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Kennedy, agreed with Mr. Montgomery.

Much work remains to be done in the wake of this most recent juvenile-friendly case from the Court. States like Louisiana, that had previously not considered the retroactive application of Miller or that had outright rejected it, will now have to grapple with implementing the Montgomery ruling. They may opt to provide resentencing hearings for individuals like Montgomery, or they may choose to make individuals like Montgomery immediately parole-eligible. Either way, the Supreme Court sent a strong signal to the states (again) that children are different in the eyes of the law and that they cannot be judged exclusively by the worst mistake they've ever made.

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Second, also on Monday, President Obama announced a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles housed in federal prisons. The President's action comes in the wake of high-profile cases and lawsuits regarding juveniles spending months, if not years, in solitary confinement, a practice condemned both domestically and internationally.

Kalief Browder's case is perhaps the most well known. Accused of stealing a backpack at the age of 16, Browder was sent to Rikers Island, the New York City jail. He spent three years at Rikers, awaiting a trial that he would never have. For almost two of the three years, he was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Even after being released, when the state dismissed the case because it no longer had a testifying witness, Browder was unable to bounce back from his experience in solitary. He had suffered too much trauma, and he took his own life at the age of 22.

Solitary confinement, as President Obama's directive recognizes, is a devastating practice even for adults. It can cause anxiety, depression, paranoia and "perceptual disturbances" - and that's assuming the inmate is healthy going into segregation. Mentally ill prisoners placed in solitary confinement often "decompensate;" not surprisingly, suicides occur at a disproportionately high rate among inmates held in solitary. For juveniles, the outcomes are similarly disastrous. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has taken the position that solitary confinement should never be employed with juveniles, and, if it is, the juvenile should be evaluated by a mental health professional after 24 hours.
In 2016, the world faces uncertainty and volatility -- as well as huge opportunities for significant progress. Africa stands not just to gain from these major shifts, but also to lead some of them.

The global landscape is certainly challenging, with the political and economic news dominated by slowing growth, rocky stock markets, falling commodity prices, risks in emerging markets (especially China), increasing numbers of refugees, geopolitical tensions and the threat of violent extremism.

However, 2016 may not see the catastrophe some are predicting. The markets are most likely overreacting. The IMF is predicting growth of 3.4 percent in 2016 and 3.6 per cent in 2017, up from 3.1 per cent in 2015. Behind the gloom of the 24-hour news cycle, there are many reasons to be optimistic.

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Whereas 2015 was the year of agreements (see Ten Reasons to Watch Africa in 2015), 2016 will be a year of transformations -- in energy, finance, technology and global partnership. These will have profound effects on Africa.

Here are ten scenarios that we see unfolding in 2016 for Africa:

Climate gains: COP 21 in Paris was an unambiguous success. The expectations of many were surpassed and the 'direction of travel' was identified. In 2016, the challenge will be the speed of that travel. We need to move faster. At COP 21, African nations seized the chance to shift the climate narrative from one of dependence to one of opportunity and transformation. 2016 will see Africa making advances in low-carbon energy while defending its right to exploit fossil fuels. With the cost of solar falling rapidly (by over 10 per cent each year) huge opportunities exist.

Private sector momentum: The private sector will emerge as a critical catalyst for achieving global climate targets, especially ensuring that carbon emissions peak within the next five to ten years. 2016 will hear more CEOs demanding a carbon price. With its growing population, increasing consumer demand, and massive infrastructure needs, Africa is ideally placed to benefit from this new catalytic private sector.

Energy leapfrog: Africa's energy challenge is substantial. The Africa Progress Panel, chaired by Kofi Annan, is calling for a ten-fold increase in power generation in Africa by 2030. Over the last year, the political ambition across Africa to radically transform the energy sector has increased substantially. The global context is also shifting in the light of COP 21. 2016 will see greater global and regional political engagement on Africa's energy access. The African Development Bank's New Deal on Energy for Africa will encourage a broad coalition to seize the momentum of 2015 and achieve quick wins by 2020. Key partners include the U.K.'s Department of International Development and USAID's Power Africa.

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Building the new multilateralism: In 2015, Africa received the global attention it deserved at top-level international meetings on financing for development, new global development goals and climate change. At these meetings, governments across the world showed they could look beyond their own borders. 2016 is now about full and fair implementation. Citizens will play a key role by holding their leaders to account against the targets they have set themselves.

Falling commodity prices drive diversification: Resource-rich African economies such as Angola, Nigeria, Ghana and Zambia face a serious threat from falling commodity prices. These countries need to find alternative sources of finance. China will continue to be a key player in this respect, but in 2016, India will be a strong competitor. Falling commodity prices may also offer some African countries the opportunity to diversify their economies and cut fuel subsidies that have exacerbated inequality.

Africa's green and blue revolutions: For many countries, the story about falling commodity prices will transform into a story about Africa's green and blue revolutions: to diversify their economies, these countries will focus on agriculture and fisheries. African farming will no longer be seen as a development problem but an exciting business opportunity. Smallholder farmers across Africa have an unrivaled capacity for resilience and innovation and could feed rapidly growing urban populations and generate exports to meet demand in global markets. An immediate priority will be promoting import substitution to cut Africa's US$35 billion annual food import bill. This will require measures to cut tariffs and non-tariff barriers to regional trade, eliminate transport cartels, and develop marketing infrastructure. Increased investment in infrastructure and research will begin to dramatically raise farmers' yields and incomes.

Fourth Industrial Revolution: Significant investments will be made in new technologies led by the private sector and supported by the international community. As neatly described in Klaus Schwab's book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is the fusion of new technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital and biological domains that make a fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions. Venture capital funds are ready and waiting to invest across Africa. The next step is to bring together public and private sectors to drive the deals as quickly as possible. In 2016, rapid technological changes have the potential to create new industries, reduce inequality and drive structural transformation.

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Financing forward: A lack of available finance continues to be a key constraint for Africa. But 2016 will see significant investments as big finance moves to tap the potential of the 80 per cent of citizens who are excluded from the financial system. Mobile technology will be pivotal in addressing this unmet need. Local banks will begin to function more as "real" banks serving the demands of small and medium-sized enterprises, many of whom are dynamic "agropreneurs." Mobilizing domestic savings will be crucial. Pension funds will be increasingly seen as an essential and exciting means to provide long-term capital.

Managing migration: Out-migration from Africa will continue to feature on the international policy and news agendas. In 2016, some African leaders will begin to tackle the underlying forces driving this trend. At the same time, the global dialogue related to the movement of people from Africa to Europe will start to shift from being seen as a crisis to a potential win-win if managed more proactively.
Photo credit Jim Gillooly/PEI

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg must know that this is his last rodeo. If he does not run for President in 2016, the year in which he turns 74, there will be no opportunity for him in four years. News reports suggest that he is giving serious thought to a third-party candidacy and is willing to spend perhaps a billion dollars of his personal fortune to make the run. In his deliberations, there are three fundamental questions he must consider: Is there an opening for a third-party candidate? What is his rationale for running? And, can he win? Let's consider each of these.

First, there surely seems to be an opening for a third-party candidacy. Both major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, appear vulnerable to third-party challenges. To take the Republicans first: The two candidates who have the clearest path to the nomination are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

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It is hard to imagine either one of these men winning the presidency. Donald Trump is a nativist and xenophobe. He has risen to the top ranks of GOP contenders by making a series of ever more outrageous promises. He will expel eleven million undocumented aliens and build a wall on the Southern border. He will make Mexico pay for that wall. He will at least temporarily halt the travel of Muslims to the United States. Each of these promises is offensive. Taken in their entirety, they are not so much a political platform as a cry for a racially, religiously, and ethnically purer United States. It is a disgusting platform, in other words, that is wholly unbefitting of an American leader.

At the moment, Ted Cruz is Trump's only plausible challenger. Cruz is a one-term Senator from Texas who in that single term has caused unparalleled mischief. He played an instrumental role in the government shutdown in 2013. He has poisoned the atmosphere between establishment and insurgent members of his own Party. The chairman of his superpac, David Barton, has been plausibly described as a Christian nationalist. Certainly, a review of Barton's writings suggests that he favors a radical revision of the constitutional law of church and state and there is every reason to believe that Cruz shares that view.

The Republican Party has experienced insurgency candidacies before. But this year is different. The GOP Establishment is in disarray. The Jeb Bush coronation never materialized and none of the other Establishment candidates have gained much traction. Some members of the Establishment (most notably Bob Dole) have even expressed a willingness to acquiesce to a Trump nomination. Is it exhaustion? Surrender? A bankruptcy of ideas? Call it what you will, the Establishment has failed.

But what about the health of the Democratic Party? Certainly, its vital signs are stronger than the Republicans. But one can still discern fissures within the Democratic coalition. Hillary Clinton is no Jeb Bush, but she does represent a political dynasty and this year at least is not a good time for dynastic candidacies. For sure, Clinton has numerous accomplishments. She was a Senator from New York. She completed a successful term as Secretary of State. But substantial segments of the Democratic Party are craving a new face.

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Bernie Sanders has become that improbable new face. He is summoning Democrats back to the principles and ideals that animated the Party from the days of Franklin Roosevelt, through Harry Truman, and on to Lyndon Johnson. He favors health care for all, a living wage, low-cost college, a renewal of the civil-rights movement, and hope for a broadly-shared prosperity. This platform is not a radically socialist agenda, but the fulfillment of old progressive promises of a juster, fairer America.

The Democratic contest, in other words, is evolving into a struggle between the head and the heart, the pragmatism of Hillary Clinton pitted against the aspirations of Bernie Sanders. And most such contests get heated, even nasty.

So, yes, there is a potential opening for Michael Bloomberg in what could become a bipartisan mashup.

So, let's turn to the second question: What is Bloomberg's rationale? Most recently, he has devoted his time and his treasure to challenging the power of the gun lobby. Guns have acquired totemic significance in American society, and Bloomberg has quite laudably sought to move public opinion in the direction of gun control and gun safety. But a presidential candidacy must have a broader platform than this single issue.

The most logical issue for Bloomberg to make his own is his economic expertise. He has enjoyed a long career on Wall Street. Equity and credit markets are in turmoil around the globe. Credible economists now forecast the possibility of a significant economic slowdown, perhaps even a global recession.

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If Bloomberg were to run, he would likely want to position himself as a centrist on these issues. If Donald Trump were his Republican opponent, he would challenge Trump's advocacy of protectionist trade policies. And if Bernie Sanders were his opponent on the left, he would attack him as a "tax-and-spend liberal." His most difficult opponent would probably be Hillary Clinton.

Could Bloomberg win? If he runs, I suggest that the closest historical parallel might be the 1912 presidential campaign. In that year, the Republican Party broke in two. Theodore Roosevelt, who had served as president from 1901 to 1909, grew dissatisfied with his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and sought to unseat him at the Republican convention. When that effort failed, Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate on the progressive Bull Moose Party.

In the general election, Roosevelt succeeded in marginalizing Taft, his Republican opponent, who carried only two states and won eight electoral votes. Still Teddy Roosevelt lost the general election, even though he held Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, to a little less than 42 % of the popular vote.

As a third-party candidate, Bloomberg would need to distinguish himself from the other two main contenders and hope to marginalize one of the them. His most logical target, again assuming he is the nominee, would be Trump. Bloomberg would try to paint Trump as a bully and a buffoon, and attempt thereby to rally center-right voters to his candidacy.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, would be a more difficult target. If faced with a Bloomberg challenge, Clinton should emphasize her progressive credentials. She must promise to preserve and protect Social Security and Medicare and to ensure access to health care and education. She must, in other words, hold out hope of a brighter future for all Americans. She would also need simultaneously to show that Bloomberg represents a grasping plutocracy at its worst.

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"Angela Merkel," said Bill Bryson, "is my hero." We were sitting by a lake, in a quiet part of Surrey, talking about his new book, The Road to Little Dribbling. It was only a year since he had completed his own British citizenship test, after living in the "small island" that made him his fortune for nearly 40 years. Angela Merkel had just announced that all Syrians would be "welcome" in her country. "Germany is a strong country," she said. "We will manage".

Germany is a strong country, but now even Europe's most powerful country is struggling to cope. In the months since Merkel's welcome, barbed wire fences have gone up across Europe. More men, women and children have climbed into boats. More men, women and children have drowned. It was a photo of a dead toddler washed up on a beach that triggered Angela Merkel's announcement. It took a photo of a dead toddler to trigger a wave of what you could call compassion. The trouble is that compassion isn't the same as a policy. And there doesn't seem to be all that much doubt that the policy has failed.

On Monday, a Banksy artwork popped up on a building site in Knightsbridge. The picture was of Cosette from Les Miserables, and she was weeping in a cloud of tear gas. Next to her was a QR code which, when scanned into phone, links to video of police using teargas and bullets in the "jungle" in Calais. The site is opposite the French embassy and the message was clear. You are bastards. You should show these people some compassion. We should all show these people some compassion. Unfortunately, Banksy doesn't say exactly what form that compassion should take.

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In Calais at the weekend, Jeremy Corbyn also wanted to show compassion. He saw people living in horrible conditions and he thought that the best way to make things better for them was to let them all come and live in the UK. "We're talking 3,000 people," he said. "It's not very many."

On this particular point, Jeremy Corbyn is right. 3,000 people is "not very many". What he didn't say was what happens next. When the next 3,000 people go to Calais, and the 3,000 after that, and the 3,000 after that, do you keep welcoming them into the country because 3,000 people is "not very many"? Angela Merkel thought she might get half a million refugees and migrants. Germany has an aging population and it can probably cope with half a million refugees and migrants. Last year, 1.2 million people arrived in her country. They are still pouring in to her country. Some of them, of course, are escaping war. But only a fifth of the people who tried to claim asylum in Europe last year are from Syria. The vast majority are not trying to escape a war, and the vast majority are young men.

It is, of course, very sad that so many young men around the world feel they would have a better future in Europe. But you'd only need to look at a graph to see why. Germany is the fourth richest country in the world. Britain is the sixth richest country in the world. Most of the 7.4 billion people in the world will probably be right to assume that life in Britain, Germany and other countries in Western Europe is likely to be easier than it is in their own. Forty percent of people in poor countries, according to a Gallup poll, want to move to a richer country. And poorer countries don't just have a lower standard of living. They're also likely to have more violence, more repressive governments and more wars. In 2004, the asylum rules changed to include anyone who was at risk of "indiscriminate violence in a situation of international or armed internal conflict". There is a lot of "armed internal conflict" in the world. In an ideal world, we should be able to offer a safe haven to all of the people who are trying to get away from poverty, repressive governments and "indiscriminate violence", but this is not an ideal world, and the truth is: we can't.

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So we have decided, instead, to have a system that rewards the youngest, the fittest and the male. Last year, nearly three quarters of asylum seekers in the UK were male. When you take into account dependents, it's still more than two thirds. Ninety per cent of the asylum seekers under the age of 18 were male. It's the same throughout Europe. When you see the footage of people queuing up by barbed wire fences, most of the people in those queues are men.

I have nothing against men. I even quite like some men. But are we really saying that Europe is much more likely to be a safe haven if you're male? And are we really happy to let the people smugglers decide who gets into Europe and who doesn't? The people who are happy to take people's life savings, cram them on to a boat that should never go near a sea and finger their cash as they watch them die?

I like Bill Bryson. I respect Angela Merkel. Jeremy Corbyn? Not so much. But this is not what I call compassion.
After nearly 20 years of advocacy on behalf of an appropriate public health response to the public health emergency of rising rates of severe autism, I'm honored to be joined by mothers of teenagers with autism and full time, tireless autism advocates, Katie Wright and Lisa Wiederlight in writing a response to Secretary Hillary Clinton's "Plan to Support Children, Youth, and Adults Living with Autism and Their Families".

Nine years after her remarks in 2007 that autism is "one of the most urgent--and least understood--challenges facing our children today," autism prevalence has climbed from 1 in 150 to 1 in 45 American children, with no cause and no new treatments identified.

Secretary Clinton is a long-time child and disability advocate, so we were not surprised to see her be the first out of the gate with some concrete recommendations that will positively affect the lives of many with autism. Her insightful remarks in New Hampshire this month included recognition of autism's increasing prevalence, and the need to prevent and treat it. Specifically:

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"I think we have to take seriously what seems to be an increasing diagnosis of autism. And we need to do much more research about what is causing it. We've got to do what we can to prevent it. And then when it is diagnosed, intensive treatment."

Secretary Clinton's Plan provides many necessary changes for improving the safety, education, employment, and housing of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The focus on reducing bullying, banning certain kinds of restraints in schools, having appropriate transition plans for young adults, reaching out to underserved populations, and the development of the Autism Works Initiative deserves full support.

However, many families living with autism believe that finding the causes of autism is just as important as providing supports for people who have this condition.

Our nation must not accept an ever-growing number of Americans with severe autism and related conditions as a "new normal" to be met only with services and accommodations.

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Finding the modifiable causes of autism will serve as the foundation for preventing future cases and developing biological treatments which change the course of autism towards reduced disability or even recovery. Reducing demand for the extensive programs and services described in Secretary Clinton's Plan through prevention and effective treatment is critical. Addressing and treating co-occurring conditions common among people with ASD, such as gastrointestinal disease, epilepsy, immune disorders, and suicidality are cost-effective policy priorities that are noticeably absent her proposal.

By way of examples:

A University of California Davis study published last year in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that the total costs for caring for people with ASD in the US in 2015 were $268 billion, and this number is forecasted to rise to $461 billion in 2025. Incredibly, the current costs of ASD are more than double the combined costs of stroke and hypertension. These figures don't take into account Secretary Clinton's proposed programs and services--the costs of which have not yet been released publicly.

A study published in the November 5, 2015 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry found that people with autism are more than twice as likely as their peers in the general population to die prematurely. The study found that the risk of suicide in individuals with mild autism is about 10 times higher than in the general population. Secretary Clinton's proposal to address bullying and provide fulfilling employment and safe and affordable housing will hopefully address this tragic statistic. However, the most common cause of death among people with severe autism is epilepsy. Epilepsy affects approximately 40 percent of people with autism. Secretary Clinton's plan makes no mention of this critically-important issue.

Many people with autism are chronically ill, with immunological problems, metabolic disorders, and digestive system disease. Many still have significant disability even after receiving high-quality, intensive behavioral therapies. Increasing research efforts beyond behavioral interventions and genetics towards medical protocols will result in healthier children and more cost-effective and sustainable programs and services in the next four years and beyond.

Secretary Clinton can find these paradigm shifts already being addressed by her former colleagues in the U.S. Senate. In the Report accompanying the 2016 Appropriations bill, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the National Institutes of Health inserted the following language relative to the National Institute of Environmental Health Services (NIEHS):

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"The Committee urges NIEHS to enhance its support for research, including experimental and observational research, on potential environmental risk factors that may play a role in the initiation or promotion of ASD at any life stage. Further, with respect to regressive autism, NIEHS is encouraged to focus research on the susceptibility of subpopulations to environmental risk factors and consider approaches to the mitigation of environmental risks associated with ASD."

This language signifies a necessary and significant policy direction change on autism research, away from the genetic and psychiatric approaches that have consumed nearly all federal dollars on autism causation research so far.

It seems to us, however, that Secretary Clinton's previously-announced platform to address Alzheimer's would be equally appropriate for addressing autism, if not more so, given the chronic, virtually lifelong nature of autism, autism's higher annual cost ($268 billion vs $200 billion for Alzheimer's), and autism's increased mortality rate. The Clinton Alzheimer's Plan, found here: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2015/12/22/an-end-to-alzheimers-disease commits $2 billion dollars each year for research "preventing and effectively treating Alzheimer's by 2025" and "invests the needed resources, organizes a broad national effort, and inspires leaders in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors to develop effective interventions to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer's and related dementias".

We are grateful that Secretary Clinton's Plan addresses many salient points that will assist the autism community. However, the Plan must also address the foundational issues that underlie the autism crisis. It is a beginning, but families facing autism are looking forward to working with Secretary Clinton to make it even better.
President Obama won the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination and the Presidency on his message of hope and change. He did not win as the most experienced candidate, as a one-term Illinois Senator. He did not win on his then youthful looks. And he certainly did not win the Democratic primary on his name recognition of Barack Hussein Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 2008 as we are seeing in 2016, name recognition, looks or experience matter less than hope and change for a better America.

Senator Bernie Sanders looks like he could have played alongside Jack Lemmon in the movie Grumpy Old Men. Hillary Clinton looks poised to meet with world leaders or enter the Blue Room of the White House at any time. This year, looks are not what matters to voters. If looks mattered, GOP contender Donald Trump would be last in polls and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would be in a tie for first place.

Looking at the political landscape at this time last year, it appeared that the two highest names recognized, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, would be in a face-off for November, 2016. While anything is possible, it does not seem likely that the two will be squared off in November.

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Many Americans are struggling whether trying to put their children through college or putting food on their dinner table. Most Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, assuming they have a paycheck. Despite vast improvements under the Obama administration, the economic picture is not coming up roses for everyone. Unemployment of African Americans is nearly double that of the national average at 9.1 percent in July, 2015 while the national average was 4.6 per cent. Latino unemployment stood at 6.5 per cent. And many working Americans, who faced the 2008 downturn and lay-offs, returned to lesser paying jobs. Some lost all of their savings while searching for their present jobs.

The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") enables millions of Americans to receive health insurance. Many Americans, while insured, still cannot afford health care due to high deductibles. For those individuals who do not qualify for the subsidy and must pay their own health insurance, the insurance rates are not what everyone views as affordable.

For many reasons, the hope and change movement that President Obama ushered in 2008 still resonates with voters, albeit in different ways. Some Millennials who once followed President Obama or were too young to vote for him in 2008, now stand with 74 year old Bernie Sanders. They are hopeful for a better future. Many Independents stand with Bernie Sanders because they want change in our political system. And Donald Trump resonates with those Republicans who hope to "make America great again."

This year just like 2008, authenticity matters. Just as President Obama spoke of his mother and maternal grandparents in 2008, Bernie Sanders was able to come across the same way during the Iowa debate on January 25. He spoke of his father who came to America as a Polish immigrant with no money and died years later with little money. While these things matter less to politicians and policy wonks, many average voters want to see someone who might understand their issues. It's difficult for Hillary Clinton to appear authentic as her life's story has already been watched like an open book. Hillary Clinton comes across as a former Secretary of State ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one. And from her point of view and a logical one, that should be enough, except if 2016 is 2008 revisited.

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Photo Credit: 'HRC' by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Key Swing Moderate Independent Voters Should Consider Hillary

I was formerly a registered Republican voter and a volunteer for Senator John Maverick McCain in 2007 when he ran against Republican candidate Mitt Romney. I again volunteered for Sen. McCains campaign in 2008 when he ran against President Barack Obama. While I was trying to help the moderate Republican McCain beat the extremist candidate, Mitt Romney, I was also keeping an eye on the Democratic Primaries between Obama and Hillary.

Admittedly, I was scared to death of Hillary Clinton  more so than Obama, because at the time I believed Hillary was too extreme for my comfort. When Obama beat McCain, I thought it was the end of our mixed economy world as we knew it to be  but that was not the case. It turns out that President George W. Bush had the worst track record on jobs (according to the Wall Street Journal), and it was under the Obama administration that a net of 9.5 million private sector jobs have been created, and nearly 13 million if you start counting after the Great Recession Bush handed over to Obama when he took office. While the unemployment rate went up under Bush, Obama pushed it back down.

The immigration issue is one of the most important reasons for my decision to leave the Republican Party forever to become an independent registered voter. The Republican Party adopted Kris Kobachs anti-immigrant platform under Chairman Reince Priebus leadership in 2012. I also began to see their hypocrisy with other issues such as the pro-life issue as Republican leaders attacked the 14 amendment and birthright citizenship. Staunch pro-life advocates believe the 14 amendment is the crowing jewel for their beliefs. The GOP claimed to be for smaller government ideas, yet Sen. Marco Rubio and others promoted bureaucratic methods with the National ID system.

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Fast forward to the 2016 elections where I see the dangerous probability of an extremist such as Donald Trump becoming the Republican Presidential nominee even though he probably will not do well with general election voters. On the other hand, I see Democratic Presidential Nominee Secretary Clinton being the most electable candidate with the better chance (better than the Independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders) to beat Trump. According to the Gallup Polls, in the U.S. a socialist Presidential candidate is the least appealing, while more than nine in 10 would vote for a Catholic, African-American, or woman candidate.

I repeat: A socialist is the least electable while more than nine in 10 would vote for a woman.

I am not a registered Democrat voter, nor will I ever be a member of the two major party system ever again because there is a sense of freedom I have not having to be loyal and cheering for my Partys team anymore. I can see how a person can be disillusioned with that. Even though I voted for a Democratic President in 2012 for the first time in my life, I did so because I used immigration as my litmus test. That said, immigration is not the sole issue I follow, and other issues matter to me as well, such as the economy, taking care of domestic matters, and also a strong national defense. With Republicans committing assault after assault against my people, it was time to hold the GOP responsible at the voting booths and I could not in good conscience reward them with my vote.

I am amazed how some Democratic voters are supporting the long-time Independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, over the long-time registered Democratic Secretary Clinton. It is a well-known fact that both Hillary and Bill Clinton were proud members of the Democratic Party with a long history, steeped in those Democratic principles. Aside from knowing Karl Rove (the political genius behind the President George W. Bush campaigns and negative ads) is helping Bernie Sanders by launching attack ads against Hillary Clinton in Iowa, we also witnessed Sarah Palin pay Sen. Sanders a compliment during her swipe at Hillary on Facebook. It does not stop there; repeatedly we see the Chairman of the Republican Party and other GOP leaders direct most of his attacks against Hillary  not Bernie  and in fact, Reince says he is feeling the Bern, too, because he knows the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist is not electable. Indeed, Tea Party Republicans would like to see Bernie Sanders win the Democratic nominee, because general election and moderate voters like myself cannot stomach voting for extreme socialist ideas he is bringing to the political table. It is a concern to me when Bernie considers the likes of Eugene Debs (a man who ran for President under the Socialist Party ticket) as a hero, and as far as Im concerned, that socialist message is an old 1912 idea that did not work back then either. But thankfully, sound folks are on the record for criticizing socialism. Recently Democratic Vice President Joe Biden denigrated socialism while addressing the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

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We know Tea Party Republican tactics still work because of the numerous government shutdowns they are known for, and their prevention of getting policies fixed. The far-right wingers have lived up to their reputation of being the Party of No. Soon after Obamacare was passed, the Republican Party gained control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and in 2016, the Republicans gained control of the U.S. Senate, too. When Hillary Clinton is President, she will continue to defend the Affordable Care Act, but she will also fight any effort to privatize or weaken Medicare and Social Security, which our growing aging populations depend on. Even though Hillary is also in favor of a strong National defense, she is tenacious enough to keep military spending in check while ensuring Americans are getting the care that they need, too.

When President Obama nominated Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, some Democrats and government insiders questioned whether she would be too independent and politically ambitious to be an effective Secretary. But she proved them wrong and led with a soft power approach. She was even-keel, in my opinion, and I feel comfortable with her after years of watching her helm the foreign affairs department. She did not suggest using nuclear weapons to nuke Iran, and she did not begin any other conflicts, either  she held it together until it was time for her to leave and consider her 2016 run.

Much has happened since the 2007 / 2008 elections, and watching Secretary Hillary has calmed fears I once had. In my view, she has shown that she is ready to be our first woman President, given all of her combined experiences. There is also a safety net knowing she will be bringing along Bill Clintons experience, and our Nation can use more of his successful economic record. I cannot help but see hints of Madeleine Albright and Margaret Thatcher in Hillary  except Hillary Clinton would be our very own American version of the Iron Lady, working in a male dominated political atmosphere. Im proud of her, and I hope to see more of her passion and compassion as I did seeing her speak about the ISIS and terrorist problems during the Democratic Town Hall in Iowa. I saw for a moment, that maternal instinct side of her kick in making a promise to use diplomacy first and using war as a last resort. As a woman voter, with two high school sons, I do not want future American Presidents to quickly send our sons and daughters to Unnecessary wars. Hillary has earned my trust and my vote, and I'm signaling to other key swing moderate independent voters to consider Secretary Clinton for President.
Close-up of prescription drugs

Presidential candidate and Art of the Deal author Donald Trump recently embraced the idea of having the government (presumably the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)) negotiate drug prices in Medicare. He asserted that "doing so could save $300 billion per year" and that the U.S. currently doesn't let the government negotiate "because of the drug companies."

Sorry, 0 for 3. Having HHS "negotiate" won't save the taxpayers any money. It certainly won't save $300 billion a year (Hint to Mr. Trump: Medicare Part D spending is only about $60ish billion annually.) And the reason why HHS shouldn't negotiate is because it does not save money; not because of the drug companies.

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But having a "big zero" for a policy does not leave Mr. Trump alone. Presidential candidate and Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders announced the "Prescription Drug Affordability Act" to control the costs of prescription drugs. Where Mr. Trump used unhinged math, the Senator substituted unhinged rhetoric: "the greed of the pharmaceutical industry is killing Americans and making many of them much sicker than they otherwise would have been."

But the policy is still the same. Sanders' bill would allow the Secretary of HHS to negotiate with prescription drug manufacturers on behalf of the Medicare Part D program -- something banned by the so-called "noninterference" clause included in the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act (MMA).

And to round out menage a trois of poor pharmaceuticals policy, Secretary Hillary Clinton endorsed exactly the same idea.

The notion of negotiations by HHS is hardly a new issue. It arose during the passage of the MMA and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted at the time that getting rid of the noninterference provision would have a negligible impact.

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This is hardly surprising. Drug companies negotiate annually with prescription drug plans. Those plans go into the negotiations with some strong leverage: millions of customers that could be delivered to the drug company or, faced with too high a price, its competitors. Adding HHS to the mix does not change that leverage. Here's how such a negotiation would go:

HHS Secretary: I'd like a discount on your prescription drugs.

Drug Manufacturer: What do you have to offer?

HHS Secretary: I can guarantee millions of senior citizens as customers; shouldn't I get a discount?

Drug Manufacturer: Sorry, the prescription drug plans have already guaranteed us the customer base and we've given them the discounts. What else have you got?

HHS Secretary: Uh, a used copy of healthcare.gov ?

Drug Manufacturer: We are done here.

The essence is that the private sector prescription drug plans already have all the market-based leverage available. Of course, there is one thing that the government can do that the private sector can't: price controls. For that reason, one usually suspects that a call to repeal the noninterference clause is really just government price-fixing in disguise. Price-fixing never works, and price-fixing in one sub-market like Medicare typically has negative fallout more broadly.
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by Staff Reporter

'Zimbabwe A Revolution Waiting To Happen' 'Robert Mugabe from Freedom Fighter To The People's Enemy' 'The Rise of Grace Mugabe-The Fall of ZANU PF' and the latest one 'Everything Is Possible Without ZANU PF'

The Kwekwe based human rights defender, writer and democracy activist Nkosilathi Emmanuel Moyo Snr has reportedly sent a birthday present to President Robert Gabriel Mugabe ahead of the 21st February Movement.President Robert Mugabe will be turning 92 years of age on the 21st of February and the ZANU PF government is running around organizing for the multi-million dollar 21st February Movement scheduled for Masvingo this year.With some of ZANU PF apologists lobbying for Mugabe's birthday to be declared a national holiday dubbed 'Mugabe Day' human rights defender and writer Nkosilathi Emmanuel Moyo has sent a prison uniform as a birthday present for the President.The present sent to the office of the President though DHL Kwekwe (Tracking Number 2220952661) is comprised of a prison uniform, handcuffs and a portrait inscribed 'Wanted-R.G Mugabe for Crimes Against Humanity'.In a video message released today, the 28 year old human rights defender explained that he is aware of how busy the office of the President is hence the need to send his gift at least three weeks before the birthday so that the President receives it in time. 'I have sent a birthday present to President Robert Mugabe today and I wish him well on his 92nd birthday scheduled for the 21st of February. The gift is comprised of a prison uniform, handcuffs and a portrait written WANTED-R.G MUGABE; FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY'.I feel the President must be brought to justice one day for crimes against humanity and gross human rights violations committed by his ZANU PF government for the past three and half decades that they have been in power.So with this gift I say Happy birthday in advance President Mugabe and bear in mind that one day justice will prevail on this land', Moyo told Bulawayo24. The present will be delivered at the President's office tomorrow morning.'I would have loved to go and deliver it at Munhumutapa building in person but after wide consultations I realized that I might get harmed by his brutal security that is why I decided to send it through DHL' he said.Moyo who is based in the small mining town of Kwekwe made headlines last year with his four anti-Mugabe books which he is distributing for free on his website www.nkosilathiemmanuelmoyo.org The books are titledwhich he published this month. He can be contacted on his mobile +263775037579
Globe showing North America with gavel signifying justice.

Leaders are global citizens who recognize the reality of our shared humanity and common destiny. This realization is motivation to embark on a journey to create a more just world. On this journey, leaders seek to make a lasting impact which transcends borders and uplifts our global village. The Honorable LaJune Lange exemplifies the qualities of a global citizen and leader in her daily life. Judge Lange is on a mission to make justice a lived reality across the globe.

The global citizen is rooted in core values.

Throughout her career, Judge LaJune Lange has demonstrated the qualities of global citizenship by serving in the community, promoting equity, and upholding the rule of law. Her work is rooted in the value of service. She began her career as a Hennepin County public defender where she advanced equal justice under the law. She sought to protect her client's right to a fair trial and uphold due process of the law. Her commitment to service and natural leadership ability led to her appointment by the governor to the trial court in 1985. She served as a Fourth Judicial Court judge where she handled civil and criminal cases. Since her retirement from the bench, she has continued to serve as an advocate for justice.

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Judge Lange's leadership is also deeply rooted in the value of equity. This sense of fairness and justice motivated her to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court Task Force for Gender Fairness in the Courts. She was also the Co-Vice Chair of the Minnesota Supreme Court Racial Bias Task Force. As a result of these efforts, significant reforms were implemented in Minnesota which improved access to justice for women lawyers and litigants, racial minorities, and persons needing interpreters.

Judge Lange uplifts the rule of law through her advocacy. Lange works as an international expert to help women in other countries transform the laws on female inheritance, domestic violence, and advises world leaders on constitutional reform and election procedures. She has served as a powerful advocate & difference maker for organizations like the United Nations World Conference on Race and National Bar Association.

Judge Lange recognizes the importance of participatory leadership rooted in the value of civic engagement. "We must be fully present in the world. Exercise the right to vote in an informed way, holding candidates accountable on issues before, during and after the election," stated Lange. By being fully present, each person can aid in developing innovative solutions to the challenges they face.

The global citizen empowers others to discover the leader within.

Leaders inspire others to take action and lead social change. This compels ordinary people to do extraordinary things by tapping into their leadership skills and making a difference. Judge Lange challenges young lawyers and community members to engage in a process of self-discovery where they begin to cultivate the transformative power in their hands. This power is then channeled into the collective action needed to eradicate injustice and eliminate inequities.

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Judge Lange empowers others to lead by modeling the way. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Global citizens recognize the fact that social justice issues are pervasive and far-reaching. Whether it be promoting global development or developing equitable governance strategies, Judge Lange stands ready to lead change by combining her legal training with her natural leadership abilities of strategic thinking, reflective listening, and creative problem solving.

Judge Lange has created training opportunities to educate, equip, and train leaders. She serves as the Honorary Consul for South Africa. Over 20 years ago, she founded the LaJune Thomas Lange International Leadership Institute. ILI was founded to help create transformative leaders who would work to make a positive difference one person at a time. Judge Lange describes leaders as "a repairer of the breach. A partner across cultures and oceans." This type of leader is someone who is willing to go into difficult situations to listen, assist and train. She embodies these qualities as she facilitates the process of transformational change and engages leaders from political stakeholders to grassroots organizers.

A global citizen makes a lasting impact.

Judge Lange has built the solid foundation for her leadership legacy. Her work will continue to set the gold standard for future lawyer-leaders. Judge Lange's leadership has transformed the lives of countless law students and young lawyers. She is committed to training young leaders to serve as ethical, morally responsible leaders. She is welcomed into classrooms across the world to share about her leadership journey and plant the seed of leadership in the next generation.

Judge Lange serves as a historian and valuable contributor to the narrative of Minnesota's history. Judge Lange was an honorary member of the board of advisors to the Minnesota African American Museum (MAAM), an educational, cultural, and archival museum. She diligently works to ensure history captures the rich story and legacy of African Americans in Minnesota. Most recently, she was instrumental in commemorating the first Dred and Harriet Scott days in the state of Minnesota (December 5-6, 2015). The first weekend in December now honors the Scott family's struggle to realize freedom from the bondages of slavery and attain the promise of equal citizenship.

The struggle for freedom and liberty still persists today. Judge Lange reminds us not to accept that change cannot happen. Instead, Judge Lange challenges each of us to pick up the mantle of leadership and serve as a global citizen. Change begins with each of us. Through this collective action, we can move from the valley of despair to an oasis of hope where liberty, freedom, and justice reign supreme.
Floodwaters surrounding houses in Dhaka,Bangladesh



Dr. Jane showing that smiling isn't bad on the beds at a Vietnamese Orphanage

My cousin Mara and Andy Cohen's daughter, Alana, contacted me through text while I was in Vietnam last week visiting the programs of WWO. She is a junior in college studying graphic design in London and she has traveled with her family to WWO sites in the past. During the summer of 2015, she traveled with her mother, Mara, to Haiti. She texted me while I was in Vietnam last week to have a FaceTime call about a school project. She wanted to ask me how I feel when returning from a trip abroad. She wanted to know how I transition back to my life in the US and how I deal with what I see in places where there is such suffering.

How perfect was this chat? I have been home for 3 days and my fierce denial about jet lag should give you a good indication of how I deal with how I feel about my travel. Alana gave me the opportunity through this interview to drill down and get to the essence of how I feel. By her example, she revealed to me how she felt after her time in Haiti. She felt guilty for all that she has in her life. Her tender admission was striking. She is 21 and yes, she has had the advantages of private school and a University of Michigan education as well as a lot of leisure travel abroad with family, but when she was in Haiti, she experienced the poverty and challenges of the orphans and vulnerable children WWO serves. She was having trouble reconciling her life with the lives of those less fortunate, very poor children.

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Thanks Alana, for your kindness and love of the children we serve. You are full of grace and kindness and you will inspire me and all those you meet to be better human beings because you have taken the time to go abroad to witness another reality and you feel compassion. Your search for how this fits into your life is admirable. You are daring, Alana, because really seeing what others feel is likely the greatest challenge we have in the world. By not seeing the suffering, we risk compartmentalization and we then can't experience the feelings of others. This might be why we can't achieve peace in the world.



Dr. Jane pondering before she visits rural homes in Vietnam with WWO supporters

I am always affected by my travel in the same ways actually. Since 1989 when I first when abroad to Greece, I always felt the same about my work with very poor children and families. I long to help and I feel inadequate. I am inspired by the courage of children and adults who are facing the lack of opportunity, employment, chronic illness, and stress and trauma from the day in and day out fight to survive. When I go on a visit to a family living homelessly in a makeshift shelter on the Saigon River, I feel privileged to be with them and enter their home. I have this same feeling when I visit the tent homes in Kenscoff, Haiti. The families are proud of their homes and their ability to manage their lives in spite of adversity and they appreciate our respect.

From the earliest years of my life as a child working in my father's grocery store in Jamaica, Queens, I have taken in poverty and not avoided it. I have not always understood what poverty meant, but when I worked with kids living with HIV and did home visits and met orphans in orphanages in Romania, Russia and China, I always made sure that I showed respect for the poor because my father had shared his feelings about the poor and because he had always shown the poor his respect and kindness.

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WWO has never photographed nor filmed children with dirty faces, flies, ripped clothing and poorly fitting shoes. We have concentrated on the dignity of the families and children and felt proud of their courage and bravery. We have always seen and felt the trauma and emotional pain of the individuals we served in the last 18 years and we envisioned from the very beginning, that the people we served deserved to be understood. What does this mean specifically? Our work is focused on the psychosocial aspects of life and we interview families and children and we ask very personal questions about feelings of hope and sadness. We learn details about how loss and sickness in families living with HIV affects them. We listen to tragic stories and we are sympathetic and sensitive.

When you are not poor, it is very hard to see poverty. When you have comfort and don't experience trauma and stress from not having money, food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education, it is sometimes almost impossible to get what you are seeing. You look for drama in what you see and when the people who are poor look clean and are clad in neat clothes that fit, you wonder whether they are indeed poor and you wonder whether you are actually really seeing deprivation and anything worth feeling sad about. Can you imagine this puzzle? The children are poor and yet they might not be sad; the children are sick, but are hopeful. The families work together to surmount inescapably bleak surroundings and circumstances. There is resilience and a healthy attitude in poor settings.



A young boy in Vietnam showing off his clean hands!

What does poverty look like? Can you really identify it and see it? Can you, those who are not poor, know poverty and recognize the needs or do you deny what you see and look for something more striking? Does it frighten us away and do we deny what we see?

I find that on service trips, visitors often practice triage of a sort. They see poverty and the statistics are real, but the people look too good to be poor. We often need the surroundings to be ugly and intensely and graphically scary, but frankly poverty can look rather nice and there are good reasons for this. Poor people are brave and eager to feel better. They fight hopelessness and depression and when they have services from a dedicated non-governmental aid organization like WWO, they can achieve a very happy mood. We test them and find very positive feelings that are surprising. If there is psychosocial support which includes unconditional love, poor downtrodden children and adults achieve happiness and can escape poverty and break the cycle.

The more we do our job in loving the community of the poor, the better people feel and look and then anyone visiting can be fooled into thinking that there is really no poverty at all. That could be a seriously confusing moment where the mission can be questioned and donors may not be inclined to give gifts. We can't judge poverty and decide that those who look more needy are in fact more deserving of service.

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I implore you to rethink what poverty looks like and not to be afraid to see it in all of its forms....it can look ugly and scary and it can look normal and lovely.....but it is poverty all the same and those poor individuals all need support and unconditional love. They are not trying to deceive you or fool you...they are working hard to get healthy and be successful in the world.
By: Kimberly Hayes Taylor

Relief from big names and big business is rolling into Flint amid the city's man-made water disaster.

The Rev. Jamal H. Bryant announced he is hosting the Environmental Justice #WaterForFlint Rally at noon Monday, leading a 50-vehicle caravan of 50,000 cases of water to the city. At least 60 churches from around the nation, including 30 Detroit congregations collected water and will join him in the effort he is calling an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"This is environmental terrorism, and to exact this kind of cruel and unusual punishment to American citizens on our shores is completely inexcusable," Bryant, the dynamic leader of the 12,000-member Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, told EBONY.com. "We're calling for the accountability of the state, and an independent investigation."

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Earlier this month in his State of the State address, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder apologized for the crisis and vowed to fix it. "Apologies for children who have rashes on their skin and have a level of brain stimulus being retarded in the process that's going to take years for them to know the full scope is much larger than saying, 'I'm sorry,'" Bryant said.

To help with foreshadowing legal action against the state of Michigan and its governor, Attorneys Benjamin Crump and Billy Murphy, attorneys for the Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray families, respectively, will join Bryant in the beleaguered city.

The Rickey Smiley Show will broadcast live from Flint Monday, and Radio One's Roland Martin Show also will feature the Flint crisis in its Feb. 1 broadcast. Bryant will host a live telethon from 8 to 10 p.m. Monday on The Word Network, based just outside Detroit.

Soul legend Aretha Franklin pledged 25 to 50 free hotel rooms and food to Flint residents who have been affected by the water crisis, and exposed to lead poisoning.

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"Detroiters usually come to the aid of Detroiters--and Flint is certainly regarded as Detroit," Franklin told Detroit television station WDIV Tuesday.

Her donation to her neighbors about 68 miles north of Detroit is among the latest in a long line of celebrities who have stepped forward to help the relief effort.

Motown artist Kem donated $10,000 to the Salvation Army and doled out bottles of water in Flint Tuesday. The R&B crooner, who lives in Detroit, also gave his support to the non-profits "text to give" campaign to fund water filters and other aid for Flint. People are asked to donate by texting "WATER" to 91999.


(Source: Getty Images)

72 Hours to Change the World...

Changing our perspectives is difficult. We become entrenched in our world views, safe in our beliefs, cosy in our own contexts, luxuriating in the warm familiarity of what we 'know'. As a consequence shifting our own awareness, attitudes and perceptions can be painful, forcing us to let go, reassess, reframe and readjust. Transition is often uncomfortable.

Travel is the epitome of transition. On Saturday morning I awoke in a chalet full of friends, old and new, in a village in the French Alps after a week of snow-boarding adventures in which the temperature had plummeted to -20 degrees Celsius on some nights. Seventy two hours later I arrived on an overnight bus in the town of General Roca in Patagonia, Argentina with the temperature almost sixty degrees hotter. Needless to say my context has somewhat dramatically shifted during that relatively brief period.

As a habitually slow traveller I am rather unused to this intensity of change. Grounded travel tends to facilitate gentler adjustment, the easy flow of landscape, culture, people and language. Not so the breezy discombobulation of flight. We had returned to London overland by train from our ski-trip to Morzine. One night abed at home and then my first holiday by plane in twelve years whisked me from London to Buenos Aires. In 48 short hours I'd traversed continents, the Atlantic, the equator and hemispheres, plunging head-first into Latin America and the 'Paris of the South'*.

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I shuffled wearily in the immigration queue at Ministro Pistarini airport amongst my fellow jet-lagged passengers, their souls, as William Gibson eloquently puts it 'being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought [them] here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic'. To be collected, after a delay, like luggage from the arrivals lounge carousel.

And thence to lunch with a stranger. On Sunday night I'd idly posted on Facebook 'Anyone fancy lunch in Buenos Aires tomorrow?'. And confounding the supposedly superficial self-interest of the social network, I'd been connected with a lawyer friend-of-a-friend (they'd met, just the once, on a Mexican holiday twelve years previously). With the spectacular, life-affirming generosity of spirit such encounters often engender, we'd toured the city, before settling for a late al fresco lunch in the trendy side-streets of Palermo.

Determined to give me a rapid immersion in his country, my host ordered a bountiful spread of famed asado grilled steak, a plethora of trimmings from candied garlic to pungent aubergine, followed by a huge slab of 'flan' with cream and dulce de leche (like caramelized condensed milk). On top of all this the signature digestif of bitter Fernet Branca, sweetened with coke was almost too much for me. It turned out to actually be too much for my up to then convivial host, who subsequently threw up all over his own steering wheel when driving me back to the Terminal de Omnibus shortly after.

There I demonstrated my rusty travel skills by falling for one of the oldest scams in the book. In open-hearted and friendly mood after lunch I was approached by a guy asking a question about the taxi rank. Pointing him in the right direction I was distracted for the simple split-second that is all a seasoned bag-snatcher needs, and sure enough on turning back round to my rucksack my smaller bag had vanished.

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Fortunately the essentials, money, passport, phone were still about my person. So the liberator of my bag would only enjoy a rather miscellaneous selection of items; my notebook (a fascinating read obviously), a half-read copy of the riotous 'A Confederacy of Dunces' my brother had given me and which I had been hugely enjoying, a pair of prescription sunglasses, a heavily dented Sigg water bottle and that-never-leave-home-without-it essential - a tweed cap.

As my night bus to General Roca pulled out of the Terminal I spotted the many pavement higglers squatted along the dusty roadside. Their 'wares' a motley selection of random bits and pieces, which the contents of my bag would surely be shortly joining. Hopefully their liberation from me and subsequent sale would change someone's world that night. Perhaps a family would eat.

I had transitioned, arrived and connected in Latin America, three days had already changed my world. And with these thoughts in mind the bus rumbled on through the Buenos Aires traffic and off into the sunset towards Patagonia and the end of the earth.

Ed Gillespie is Co-Founder of www.wearefuterra.com, author of 'Only Planet - a flight-free adventure around the world' and off to the Antarctic...

Follow Ed Gillespie on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frucool

This blog is part of a series. Read the first instalment here. Or visit the author's profile page.
The proposal to seal the border between Macedonia and Greece made by the Slovenian Prime minister and being considered by Brussels is the latest round in last year's Eurozone crisis, in which the plan to expel Greece has entered through another door. Having held off doing the irrevocable at the last minute in 2015, Brussels is now proposing to take the more incremental step to expel Greece from the Schengen free travel zone. Under the Slovenian plan, the rules of Schengen would be changed to deny Greece the European right of free travel.

The expression "ring-fence Greece" often heard in the press is a weasel word. To "ring-fence" should mean to place a fence around an area. In this case, the fence would obviously not go around Greece, only across its northern border. Being open to the sea, Greece's southern and eastern borders would continue to be accessible to the rickety, unseaworthy craft that transport migrants to Greece from Turkey and other points in the middle-east. Turkey has so far declined to assist Europe in stemming the flow of migrants, so the EU is considering "ring-fencing Greece," redrawing Greece's border to leave Greece out.

In addition, "ring-fence" has another, sinister connotation. We speak of "ring-fencing" a section of a bank or a business when its financial condition is precarious and is believed to threaten the solvency of the whole. In fact, that is the true sense of the Slovenian suggestion. Greece is a problem, so this is the way to solve the problem -get rid of Greece.

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As early as 2014, I argued in the Mediterranean Review ("Greece--the Open Circle," Mediterranean Quarterly Review, August 2014,) that in conjunction with its agreement with the Eurozone, Greece should be given EU assistance to monitor the flow of refugees into the country. Now, events have joined these two crises -the Eurozone crisis and the migration crises- together. The role of Greece is central to both.
By: Candice Hughes





Image Source: ThinkStock

A New Year Needs New Approaches



Just after the start of the New Year, I was sitting in Derry, New Hampshire in a Town Meeting with Hillary Clinton. Regardless of political view, this event was professionally managed by one of the most skilled teams in the country. What lessons could be learned from them? I pondered this as I sat on a steel folding chair in a middle school gymnasium, waiting for Hillary to appear. The energy in the room grew as seats filled then spilled over as rows of people formed behind me. On a platform at the back of the room, a flock of news cameras emerged from duffle bags and were perched on top of tripods taller than me. On the surface of it, the hoopla of this event seemed far from the average corporate meeting.

Can Politicians and Business Mix?



I wondered, was there anything here that could be relevant to business leaders? In the middle of the room, Hillary was winding down her speech. Applause echoed through the room then finally died down. As soon as the questions began rolling in from the audience, I knew I had my answer. At the heart of it, both politicians and business leaders serve customers. The customer service role was starkly clear. A middle-aged woman with waist-length hair asked Hillary's opinion on climate control. A twenty-something man in the front asked about paying educational debt on a teacher's salary. A middle-school aged girl in a striped tee-shirt asked what Hillary could do to help her family since her mother had overdosed resulting in this little girl being placed in foster care. The whole room paused in silence.

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Politicians have the brutally hard job of having everyone as their customer (forget market segmentation) and making decisions that can have immense impact on their customers lives, as these diverse questions and concerns show. One could argue that business leaders have it much easier being able to focus, for example, on women who are fitness fans aged 20 to 40 years. Or teenage boys who love games and science fiction.

Do You Really Listen or Do You Fake It?



No matter who your customer is (everyone in the country or some specific subgroup), you can't succeed as a leader or remain profitable without listening to them in person and in detail. Filtered information may be just that: filtered. It may leave out emotional undertones, key nuances of likes, worries and needs. Besides that, it's not enough just to listen. Watching a highly experienced politician interacting and responding to her customers, I could see that what really matters is that a leader actively listen. In other words, listen with an intent to empathize and take action.

No one wants to share their feelings and concerns and receive a nod and smile, as the leader moves on, dismissing them and their concerns. Fake listening leads to loss of respect and anger. If you ask, you need to follow through. Take action to resolve concerns or clearly explain (with a reasonable rationale) why you are not following through. Answers like, "It's too expensive." Or, "We don't have time." are not going to cut it. The customers will tell you that themselves if you listen.

In fact, at this event, one woman asked Hillary what she was going to do to continue listening to and showing supporters that she still heard and valued them after the election. At this event, Hillary promised her team would follow up with the little girl whose mother had overdosed. And they did. Right after the event ended, her team stood next to the girl with their clipboards, getting the necessary information.

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World Class Brands Earn World Class Customers



If you want to have a world class brand and a brand with avid followers, there are no shortcuts. It takes authenticity, active listening, and follow through. Customers want to know they have been heard and that their chosen brand values them. Companies exist to support customers, not to support products or services. The New Year is a fabulous time to set a goal to listen and support your customers!

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Laritza Diversent, a Cuban lawyer, once explained why she wrote a blog. She said that her daily realities were not reflected in the Cuban media. She started blogging to "show my country as I see it and feel it."

Those words illustrate the power of the Internet in Cuba. In countries where the state controls the media narrative, the Internet allows ordinary people to tell their own stories. Over the years, determined activists like Laritza have made great efforts to get online. They would save their writing on flash drives and then post their blogs from hotels or embassies. But they are a minority. Because Internet access has been so limited and expensive, most ordinary Cubans have remained disconnected. As a result, their voices are not heard outside of the Island.

Ernesto Lopez, a photographer from Havana, put it this way: "The Cubans who are online are mostly government officials and a few dissidents. Neither represent the majority of the Cuban population who have our own Cuba, the Cuba of all of us."

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Now that more Cubans are experiencing the real-time Web, this situation is finally changing. There are now Wi-Fi hot spots across the island. For $2 an hour, people can video chat, send emails or check what's happening on Facebook. The U.S. embargo only exacerbated Cuba's disconnectedness, and the new relationship with the United States is likely to bring even more Cubans online. Cubans' clear excitement about their newfound connectivity, limited as it still may be, shows that the genie is out of the bottle. Now that Cubans have a taste of the Internet, they will only want more.

This is not to say that the Internet will open the floodgates of information. China has hundreds of millions of people online but it also has systematic censorship. It is too soon to know to if Cuban authorities will emulate this model. But even if they do, the Internet can still have a transformative effect. Cubans will receive better and faster information. More people will make their voices heard, both inside and outside the country. Ordinary Cubans will have a chance to tell the story of their country, in their own words.

As Lopez puts it, "In connected countries like the United States, political parties use the Internet to spread their message and to get votes, and businesses go online to sell their products. Ordinary citizens and artists can also use websites and blogs to inform people about social or environmental causes, or even just a concert. Imagine if all that was possible in Cuba."

Emily Parker is a fellow at New America and author of "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground." Parker is a member of the Policy Council of Engage Cuba, a bipartisan organization dedicated to mobilizing American businesses and non-profit groups to support the ongoing U.S.Cuba normalization process.

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DES MOINES, Iowa -- Not everyone has had the chance to serve Hillary Clinton a Blue Moon - but Sherry Waner has.

From the outside, the Des Lux Hotel bar doesn't look like much. No brightly-lit signs hang in the windows to draw in customers. Its location outside Iowa capital city's East Village separates it from the majority of this city's hangout spots. Seen through the windows, the bar's interior is dimly lit and inconspicuous.

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Usually, the bar is like any other of its kind in any other city: It draws a large crowd of politicians, businessmen and salespeople of all ages - as well as the diverse array of travelers who stay in the hotel itself.

"My bar is kind of like the Cheers of Des Moines," said Waner, the bar manager of 12 years and an Iowa native. "I introduce people to each other, because eventually they'll all come back and run into the same people."

But once every four years, Iowa becomes inundated with politicians and political tourists. As local shirt company RAYGUN LLC branded it, "Iowa: For some reason you have to come here to be President."

And the people who come to Iowa wanting to be President, as well as those participating in or observing campaigns, go to Des Lux bar.

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"Mitt Romney's been in here before," Waner said. "Rudy Giuliani, George Foreman and Zig Ziglar were all here at the same time. And Hillary Clinton was here for the Democratic debate."

The 2016 elections will be Waner's third election cycle at Des Lux. The bar, said Waner, is a perfect place for notable people to relax and drink without being seen by the general public.

"We're more low key, quiet, darker... some people don't like to be seen all the time," Waner said. "It's just comfortable."

Ryan Ellsworth, a Des Lux bar regular and Des Moines resident of five years, said that although Des Lux bar was always busy, it was especially busy during election years.

"Governors have been in here and senators have been in here," he said. "They get bands and performers that stay here and come through this bar. I would like to see the laundry list of people who have been through here; I couldn't begin to quote too many names, but I know they come through."

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But it wasn't just the atmosphere of the bar itself that drew in Presidential candidates and regulars.

"I've [been in this bar] one other time," said Minnesota-resident Mike Olson, who was in town on business, and said he would return to the spot. "Sherry was the bartender last time I was here. She plays the best music on the planet and makes a great drink. She's awesome."

Olson was visiting the Des Lux bar one week before the 2016 Presidential caucuses - during the time CBS had booked the entire hotel. He said Sherry treated her customers equally, despite their fame or notability.

To Waner, election years were one of the most exciting aspects of her job. While she was disappointed she always worked during caucus night, she appreciated the unique view of the political world she got through her customers.

"I get anywhere from the TV camera guys, to the lobbyists, and some governors," she said. "Ann Selzer [the legendary Iowan pollster] is a regular and a friend of mine. This is politics in a bar times 100, there's always some type of political conversation that comes up."

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But to Waner, Hillary Clinton was the most exciting of the customers she had seen pass through Des Lux bar.

"Hillary Clinton's probably the most notable that I've ever met," she said. "She was just here for the Democratic debate, it was pretty surreal. She was very sweet to all the customers, and to everyone that came in here."
Young successful start-uppers together with experts on innovation coming from local and regional authorities came together at the 3rd edition of [Y] FACTOR. The conference, hosted and organized by the young professionals at the European Committee of Regions in Brussels, aimed to discover synergies on strengthening the 'smart' and innovative components within European cities.

The debate generated from the event was a product of passion. The young professionals of the European Committee of the Regions took undertook the challenge of the [Y]FACTOR as a team building activity, but most importantly, with the desire to afford to entrepreneurs and those fascinated by innovation a meeting with representatives of European cities and those of the business sector within an EU institution. The life of a young professional in the 'euro bubble' can be quite demanding, and organizing yet another event requires a high awareness of other endeavors put forth during the already busy EU quarter. In an attempt to bring relevance and an added value, the organizers aimed to bring forth something close to their professional identity; their young age and a good understanding of the local needs and developments around EU Member States. Whilst the many challenges facing the EU today do little to ensure a prompt response at the supra-national and national level, the local (glocal) level may serve as a microcosms for testing possible solutions that can benefit the EU as a whole.

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The forum granted a nexus between entrepreneurial realities and local political representatives. In the same vein, the format proposedfacilitated interaction between presenters and participants. This translated into an exchange of views on innovation and the development of 'smart cities' within EU Member States and a lively debate on the role the young generation of entrepreneurs.

Markku Markkula, President of European Committee of the Regions, stressed the need to innovate to invent the desired future and quality of life for people in Europe. The newly found definition of billionaire, could very well be connected not to the money one earns but the number of people's life one changes for better.

In defining the meaning behind 'smart cities' the people's factor was underlined. Indeed, only an environment full of skilled and connected people can make for a 'smart city'. People need to be part of the process in facing global challenges with the use of ICT. Indeed, resilience and sustainability are key component for an environment to be able to face global challenges.

The role of local and regional authorities (LRAs) in fostering entrepreneurship and the added values of young entrepreneurs was explored first among smaller groups of eight, in a newly proposed format within the [Y]FACTOR series, later returning to the whole room and share comments and ideas.

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Daugilas Kakaras (mCity, Itero IT) warned against the difficulties that are often associated with entering into business with government structures. The implementation phase-because of long bureaucratic procedures-can take ten times as long as offering the same innovative services to private business sectors. Kakaras noted that the private sector is more flexible and willing to adapt to times and available new technologies. Practical advices to young entrepreneurs were to research the market with the view of responding to specific needs. Replicability differentiates a simple and good idea, from a brilliant solution to problem X.

Ingrid Willems (iMinds and DataScouts) provides as part of her everyday business life, insights about the ecosystems that businesses are operating in. To her, building a network of creative hubs with vibrant ecosystems allows for bridging creativity and technological know-how that ultimately bring about new products. In Europe, there are a few cities that could meet the description above like Aarhus, Brussels and Barcelona. However, potential is there, Europe-wide, but scarcity of resources is an acknowledged problem to materialize an idea into a business. Often, it is not only about material resources but as well about mentorship and know-how. She identifies four indicators for a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem 1)density of young entrepreneurs; 2) diversity of skills, passions and inputs that afford for new synergies; 3) mobility of people which is up to today facilitated in Europe through the free movement of people; 4) interconnectivity. Ideally within the EU the conditions are there for the young entrepreneurs to offer a concrete answer to unemployment and lack of growth. However, not all conditions are the same EU wide, ranging from bureaucratic steps to time required to set up a new business, to taxes. The EU has a long way to accomplish a balanced, entrepreneur friendly environment.

Neale Richmond (Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Councillor) offered a few success stories from Ireland where one-stop shop was created to facilitate a young entrepreneur in materializing his idea into a business- at least on regional level. However, depending on the target population, LRAs do not have a large enough capacity to both facilitate and get involved with disadvantaged communities, through community enterprise sectors in aiding citizens. As one of the countries severely affected by the economic crisis, Ireland knows that youth (in this instance-in their twenties) not only have a better vision of what the future is going to be, but they create growth and employment. The examples coming from the vibrant entrepreneurial hubs in Europe are positive. Young entrepreneurs that had moved to Silicon Valley have not shied away from paying forward, sharing their expertise with their home communities. In this line, there was a consensus among the audience that Europe's path to growth is paved with tablets and smartphones.

Lorenzo Pagliasco (YouTrend and Quorum) underlined the continuing relevance of 'small data' in both corporate and political sector. Indeed, innovation in many other sectors relies heavily in 'small data' - used to determine current states and conditions.

Henriette van Eijl (EC DG Move) stressed the two development waves within 'smart cities': the wave of technology and big data and reminded the need of continuously look for innovative ways in using available data.
The federal government has burst the confines of the Constitution, and we the people must do something about it. That's the premise of recent calls by Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Governor Greg Abbott for an Article V amendments convention, at which they intend to propose constitutional amendments to limit the federal government's size and scope. While their specific proposals differ, Rubio and Abbott both believe that the federal government has been transformed from a carefully limited entity with "few and defined" powers into an unchecked, unaccountable, and unconstrained leviathan that voraciously consumes tax dollars, exercises powers constitutionally reserved to the states, and menaces individual freedom.

While well-intended, the proposed convention is a long shot that may well distract proponents of constitutionally limited government from a more modest -- but equally potent -- response to the problem of overweening government: a properly engaged judiciary. For decades, federal judges, following the Supreme Court's explicit instructions, have systematically abdicated their responsibility to ensure that the U.S. government only exercises constitutionally authorized powers. Those who support the idea of a constitutional convention should ask themselves two simple questions: Has the judiciary consistently enforced the government-limiting terms of our existing Constitution, and if not, why should we suppose it will do any better with any new amendments?

It is undeniable that the Constitution's limits on federal power have been almost completely drained of substance. Consider the first sentence of Article I: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress..." Most of the law we live under today is written not by our elected representatives but by unelected bureaucrats at administrative agencies, who draft and enforce hundreds of thousands of regulations that control what Americans can and cannot do. Reading the terse list of seventeen specific "powers" enumerated in Article I, Section 8 gives scant indication of the authority that the federal government currently claims over our food, land, water, jobs, finances, health care, transportation, and innumerable other areas of American life. Not even the famous six-toed cats at the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida are free of the federal government's regulatory reach--in 2012, a federal court of appeals held that the Department of Agriculture had the power, under the Commerce Clause, to regulate the cats' living conditions.

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Importantly, the Framers did not believe that government officials could be trusted to act as the constitutional judges of the scope of their own powers -- it is for that very reason that they established an independent judiciary. In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton argued that constitutional limitations "can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice." Absent a federal judiciary committed to "inflexible and uniform" enforcement of the Constitution, Hamilton recognized that "all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing."

One of the primary reasons that the Constitution's limits on government power all too often "amount to nothing" today is that the judiciary has abdicated its responsibility to enforce those limits. The Supreme Court has held that courts must defer to agency interpretations of broadly worded congressional statutes unless those interpretations are "unreasonable," perpetuating a status quo of rule by administrative fiat. The Court has created a default standard of judicial review--the so-called "rational-basis test"--that gives confers an effectively irrebuttable presumption of constitutionality upon most governmental burdens on Americans' pursuit of happiness. The Court has effectively deprived the Fifth Amendment's requirement that eminent domain only be exercised to seize property for a "public use" of any force, holding that the government may condemn private property and transfer it to other private parties for purposes of "economic development." Finally, the Court not once but twice rewrote the Affordable Care Act--the largest expansion of federal power since the New Deal -- in order to preserve it.

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These decisions are not the product of any failure on the part of the Framers to specify the limits of government power. They are a product of a judicial posture (often wrongly praised as "judicial restraint") that is fundamentally flawed -- one that holds that judges must generally defer to assertions of government power unless the government's actions are clearly and unambiguously unconstitutional. Government will remain unchecked and unbalanced until judges reject such unwarranted judicial deference and embrace judicial engagement -- conscientious, impartial judicial inquiry into whether the government is pursuing constitutionally proper ends through means that are necessary to accomplish those ends.
News / Press Release

by King Lobengula Foundation

The King Lobengula Foundation in conjunction with the Amakhosi Cultural Group are hosting an Event for the Mathebeleland Delegates, comprising of Chief Nyangazonke; Khula Thobela - the High Priest at Njelele Shrine; Albert Matshelela; and Luke Mnkandla - Board Member of Highlanders F.C. It is expected that certain members in our society who have vested interest in the History and Heritage of African People will be among those who will give honour to the heir to the throne of King Lobengula, the son of Mzilikazi kaMatshobana on the 20th of Feb 2016 at Fingo Village, Grahamstown.The King Lobengula Foundation has invited different Stakeholders from the Public Service, our Local Municipal Council, the Mayor Cllr.N.Gaga and the Premier of the Province, Mr. PG. Masualle and the Private Sector to be part of this prestigious Cultural Event that is meant to unite and build Long-term Relationships for both Countries.The Socio-Economic Impact of this event will benefit the Communities of Kwa-Ndancama, Fingo Village including the greater Cacadu Region and Mathebeleland by means of new Trade and Tourism Routes to be established in the next 10yrs prior to the 2026, Centennial Celebration of its founding. It is the "Window of opportunity" to bring forth Innovative and New Methods that would stabilize our SADC Region, Politically and Economically.The event is meant to kick-start bilateral negotiations between South Africa and Zimbabwe to the envisaged plan by Princess Zila and the Ndebele People to repatriate the bones of Alban Njube kaLobengula kaMzilikazi "Iqanda leNgwenya" and his son Rhodes kaNjube kaLobengula.The egg has been found and it is ready to hatch, and this is the right moment to stop the AbaThwakazi from mourning for the lost heir, but be united and celebrate the coming of the son of the soil back home, to be laid to rest with his forefathers, his People. This event is the precedent to the Highlanders @90 Celebrations that will begin on the 28th of Feb, Barbourfields Stadium, Bulawayo.We anticipate a huge turnover from our prestigious Academic Institution, Rhodes University and would welcome them as part of this Cultural Event as some of its students come from neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe.The Foundation would also like to invite Traditional and Cultural; Artists and anyone who would like to participate on this day, to contact Sizwe @ 073 664 9849. For more info Pls email: czoemda61@gmail.com.
Once again, leave the glory of the French capital and head to Marseille if you want a fresh insight not only on how France became France but still more on the role art, science, graphics and design together helped develop the Arab rage that is coming home to roost across the western world. There, in one of Europe's most creative museums, the MuCEM, you'll find a stunning show: Made in Algeria: Geneology of a Territory.



It is a subtle, nuanced history of empire and colony, how the French in alliance with Spaniards and Italians, conquered a land four times the size of France and remade it as a laboratory for everything from pharmaceutical testing to urban design to jurisprudence. It all begins with glorious maps and landscapes that portrayed the Algerian territory and sold the Algerian territory to Europeans as a vast empty space--much as Americans sold the "wild west" as an empty continent where no real people--just Indians--lived.



Though the war for Algerian independence has been over for half a century, it's still a raw and sensitive subject for many French--as I discovered one morning in my neighborhood cafe. I was sitting at the bar sipping my expresso when I mentioned a new found historical item: after the war was over, only one architect remained in the old colony

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"Bah, of course," sputtered my bar-neighbor. "The French were forced out" as though it were inconceivable that that this land might have had actual Algerian. But that was not all. His round white bearded head was growing red with rage. "Algeria was not a colony. It was France, a department of France!" he expectorated drawing all the other heads in the cafe toward us.



There was a sliver of accuracy in his sputtering declaration. General De Gaulle had identified labeled most of Algeria as French departments after World War II, but in fact as all serious historians have noted they were at best second class departments in which a maximum of 40,000 Algerians who "merited" French citizenship were granted French papers. The rest of the population had no legal papers at all.

My bar-mate, who never deigned speak to me again though he was there most every morning, would have done well to visit the MuCEM exhibit, not least the colonization recruitment posters that had been plastered an walls all over Paris well into the 20th Century.



Large, bold type at the bottom of those posters left no doubt that the land that mother France was selling to the would be colonists was strictly reserved to French or European people. Actual Algerians need not apply.

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As much as it presents the story of colony and empire won and lost, this exhibit captures intimately the strange, often displaced, romance that a great power harbored in its conquete civilisatrice -what it imagined its colonial mission was as much as it erased the reality and history of those it was colonizing.

As curator Zahia Rahmani, a native Algerian and art historian living in France put it,

"The idea of modernity was everywhere. Pharmaceuticals, vaccines, treatment of illnesses, eye diseases, skin diseases." Many of the epidemics that swept French Algeria were due to the installation of northerners who had no resistance to local illnesses, but managing those epidemics meant that the mixture of Europeans and Arabs amounted to a sort of living medical laboratory that benefitted the France's burgeoning pharmaceutical industry--even if it did little for the Algerians.

Modernism became something of an obsession for a France dedicated buried in its reverence for ancient kings and chateaux. The vast so-called emptiness of Algeria offered a platform for invention. New formulas of cement and plaster and brickwork kept young French engineers busy ripping down the ancient coastal casbahs, building roads and lined with modern homes for the French. When there were not enough French to fill them up they recruited Spaniards and Italians to maintain, as Zahia Rahmani explained, to maintain a "correct" European demographic balance, all of them well segregated from the natives..

"They experimented with new and old materials and later with building housing along the new roads... all the so-called 'tropical' materials for buildings climatized homes" prior to the invention of air condition. At the same time the vast coastal plateaus offered new opportunities for agricultural experiment and development, models for the huge farms that would eventually displace family plots in the 1950s, employing fleets of hand labor, including school children before modern machinery had been invented.



"Enormous experiments in agriculture were undertaken including new botanic species, and we have to say as well maintaining a sort of farming that depended on hand labor to keep the actual Algerians in place. What is an agricultural worker?" Rahmani asked with a smile. "It's a human who uses his hands and not his head," again paralleling the infamous bracero system of the post-war years in California.



"The territory completely changed, the forests devastated [for wood products]. Monstrous development of tourism completely destroyed the coastal landscape" creating the first system hivernage or winter tourism--exclusively reserved for Europeans.

The most direct consequence of the Algerian social and urban development "laboratory" remains even today in the grim blockhouse housing estates that surround Paris, Marseille and Lyon to house the immigrants who came north to do the low-paid work that French natives preferred not to do, leaving the bitter taste that has turned many of the immigrants grandchildren toward jihad and drugs.



Surely, I asked Rahmani, some of those new modernist creations must have also benefited the indigenous Algerians. She thought a moment. "Yes, of course, housing and construction and road building improved along with viticulture. And of course the great 3000-mile Trans-Saharan highway linking Algeria with formerly French Niger and Nigeria. It was there on the mountainous and desert stretches of the Trans-Saharan that many of the world's car makers filmed ads demonstrating the performance solidity of their models.

Yet how much did the colonized Algerians really benefit from the great colonial laboratory? "It depends," Zahia Rahmani answered with another chuckle, "on what you mean by profiting. In 1914, well into the 20th Century, only 3 percent of Algerians went to school. But by the 1950s it had begun to improve a little bit."
LONDON - DECEMBER 9: Auschwitz survivor Mr. Leon Greenman, prison number 98288, displays his number tattoo on December 9, 2004 at the Jewish Museum in London, England. Mr. Greenman O.B.E age 93 and a British citizen, spent three years of his life in six different concentration camps during World War II and since 1946 he has tirelessly recounted his life through his personal exhibition at the museum where he conducts educational events to all age groups. January 2005 will be the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination and concentration camps, when survivors and victims who suffered as a result of the Holocaust will commemorated across the world. (Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am very concerned when I see presidential candidates fanning the flames of animosity. In the '30s in Germany, Jews were the target, but the dangerous rhetoric of today is focused on Muslims and particularly Syrian refugees. Like the anti-Semitic tirades of decades ago, many of the same ingredients are present in the speeches of candidates who hold surprisingly high levels of support from the American people.

It is an all too familiar recipe: Strip away individuality and wrap everyone in the group into an amorphous and frightening entity. Speak about what they will take from us and add in a strong nationalist sentiment that allows people to justify their hatred as patriotic allegiance. It was this lethal combination that sent my family to Auschwitz, my father to the gas chamber, and me, a boy of 16, to a slave labor camp where I was forced to build railroads on starvation rations. The SS guards were able to do this to us because they lost sight of our humanity and of our individuality.

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"Leaders can be persuasive, and rhetoric can be powerful, but we always have the option to think more deeply than these politicians..."



Unfortunately, there will always be leaders who will attempt to garner power through the vilification of others. McCarthy in the '50s, and George Wallace a little later, come easily to mind. History is never on the side of these leaders. Instead, it reveres the people who opposed them. And so it will be with our fear mongering candidates and the citizens who refuse to support them.

Leaders can be persuasive, and rhetoric can be powerful, but we always have the option to think more deeply than these politicians and to resist being swayed by words meant to denigrate others. We have some powerful tools in the arsenal of our own minds. Scientists have found that we can resist prejudice by focusing on the commonalities between others and ourselves, by recognizing the joys and pains experienced by the individual and how these are so very similar to our own experiences.

When I see Syrian refugees on television struggling to make their way to safety, I see the similarity between their plight and my own struggles to come to America after I was liberated from the camps. I can remember what it was like to flee danger in search of a safe place to begin my life anew, the fear as we bribed Soviet border guards to let us pass, the arduous journey, day and night, carrying all of our belongings on our backs, the grief and worry for family who had stayed behind.

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If you have been lucky enough, like most Americans, to not know this suffering, then take what you do know and use your imagination. Think about the last time you were frightened for yourself or a loved one, or a time when you felt scared and alone. Think about the last time your travel plans went awry and you were stuck at some airport, tired and hungry. Multiply that discomfort by some amazingly high number, and you can generate the human empathy to gain at least a little insight into the plight of a Syrian refugee. And remember a time when hope kept you going through great difficulty, and when the offer of even a small assistance from someone else took on great magnitude for you.

I felt that human connection when I was in the camps. I had the good fortune to be assigned to work for two weeks with a kind German civilian engineer. He did not see me as the dirty vermin that I was in the twisted minds of my SS guards. He saw me as a 16-year-old boy in desperate condition, close to starvation and completely alone in the world. He snuck me food from the SS kitchen -- a crime for which he could have been punished had he been discovered.

He was like a father to me for those days that marked a critical point in my survival. If he was able to see through the propaganda that surrounded him, step away from the easy path of prejudice and self-justification, and risk his life in an act of humanity, then we as Americans, protected by all of the freedoms we enjoy, can do the same.



"Empathy can be painful -- by definition it means feeling what another feels. But empathy is so much more courageous than hate."



On this Holocaust Memorial Day, I ask you to make the necessary human connection to today's refugees, see yourself in them and them in you, because that connection is the antidote to the hateful ranting of politicians. Empathy can be painful -- by definition it means feeling what another feels. But empathy is so much more courageous than hate. Hate killed my father, empathy saved me, not only when I was helped in the camps, but when America opened its doors to me in 1947 and gave me a new home and a new start.

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I served in the U.S. military several years later, I am a devoted citizen, I have made a contribution to this country by speaking to school kids about my experiences. And in their minds, filled with empathy for the pain I experienced, the German civilian engineer is a hero. History rewards humanity, every time.
Say what you may, 2015 was a year that pulled back the invisibility cloak on the transgender community.

What was found underneath that cloak, many of us who have been part of the community for some time was well known. For most of the population there was so much new to wrap their brains around. Yes, for so many this was not an easy task. Some people were open, and wanted to learn, while some were resistant. The unsupported, fear-based arguments about bathrooms often overwhelmed the issue of living authentically and saving real lives.

Yet, we were visible and the word "transgender" was heard on many lips, whether they knew what it was or not.

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In fact, let me show you how the word is on the lips of even my 4-year-old grand-daughter. A few weeks ago I gave a copy of the book I AM JAZZ to my son and he started to read it to Maya, who instantly fell in love with the story. She made him read it to her over and over. Mind you she is only 4; she does not know how to read; she has two other grandmothers and only knows me as Grace. Yet watch her "read" and there may be only a single word on her lips that is clear... Yes an important word, indeed.

It appears that the new generation will know this word, and that those of us who are transgender are just like them too.

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Yes, the word is out there, which is a great start. But, there is much more to be done. Many of the activists who have been raising their voices for years are now being heard. It is still a battle in many places to be seen and to be heard; to be understood and accepted; to come out of hiding and being afraid. In different areas, we have to fight for our rights to just be who we are.

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In many places we are being seen and heard and finding allies in high places. We have politicians who not only see us and hear us, but come and talk to us and fight for us.

This past week, at the 36th annual First Event Transgender Conference, we were honored to have had the honor to have two major leaders come to speak to our community to provide both support and hope to not only those of us in Massachusetts, but for trans people and their families everywhere.

Last Friday night at First Event we held our annual fashion show and for the first time we were happy to integrate a number of trans kids into the program, some who sang and rapped in front of over 300 adults to wild applause. Our guest speaker for the night was Maura Healey, the Attorney General of Massachusetts, who is a staunch supporter of our community.



Attorney General Maura Healey at First Event, photo courtesy of Denise Maccaferri

Having Ms. Healy attend and send a letter of support to us certainly shows the progress our community has achieved in being visible.

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This was also the first year we expanded our youth and family program to both cover both Saturday and Sunday. We were honored to be visited for the Sunday Family luncheon to be addressed by United States Congressman Joe Kennedy III.

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Congressman Joe Kennedy III at First Event

He shared with us about a bill that has been introduced in Congress. He told us this.

Introduced by Congressman David Cicilline from Rhode Island, the Equality Act would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected categories in the Civil Rights Act. That means that any transgender citizen -- and any member of the LGBT community -- could never be fired for who they are. Or denied housing because of how they identify. Or turned away from a movie theater because of the hand they held on the way in. Walking through airport security should never be a traumatic experience. Planning a road trip should never involve researching which state will allow you to use your bathroom. And no one should ever be met with intolerance from classmates and administrators when they walk through their school's doors. Our lives are full of those fleeting, small moments that we take for granted every day. The ones we don't think about until we realize that they aren't so small after all. It is those often overlooked moments that lie at the heart of this effort. The Equality Act would ensure that every American gets to take those moments for granted too.

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Last weekend, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, we have been seen, and heard, and learned that we matter like everyone else. Yes, there is still some important work to do. Not all of our elected leaders have heard us and seen us quite yet. I know in my heart that they soon will. Leaders do not really want to be on the wrong side of history.

There is still work to do. However, it is true that we are not so transparent anymore.

###
Florida's famous Sunshine Law is under attack in the state legislature today as a state House Committee has already voted to eliminate the provision that guarantees government agencies must pay citizens' attorney fees when public records are illegally withheld.

Its companion measure, Florida State Senate Bill 1220, passed in committee today with a 3-0 vote and two abstentions.

Republican Senator Rene Garcia proposed the Senate Bill, and maintains offices in both his district - which can be reached by phone at (305) 364-3100 to leave comment -and another office in Florida's capitol of Tallahassee which can be reached at (850) 487-5038 while the legislature is in session as it is right now. Emails to the legislature can be sent through Garcia's official page of office as well.

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Please call him, let him know that you prefer government in the sunshine.

The Hialeah senator's proposed changes make awarding attorney fees discretionary for judges when plaintiffs prevail in public records lawsuits that prove that government agencies have violated the law.

Today, judges must order the state and its covered agencies to reimburse citizens' attorney fees mandatorily, and this acts as the only enforcement mechanism to keep Florida's government agencies, school districts, cities, counties, tax districts and town honest about responding to public records requests and providing citizens with the records created at taxpayer expense.

Garcia's proposed bill 1220 would give judicial discretion to award attorneys fees to Florida citizens who've had their civil rights violated under the State Constitution's much ballyhooed "Sunshine Law", which is

of its Declaration of Rights also known as Article I.

"This is without a doubt the worst attack I've ever seen on open government in Florida," said Florida open government activist Joel Chandler, "If it passes, it's going to be a train wreck."

"The "shall pay" provision in the Sunshine Law saves taxpayers money in a few distinctly important ways," says Chandler, whose Sunshine Law advocacy includes lawsuits which he pursues pro se (without a lawyer), "First, it greatly incentivizes agencies to settle public records actions, rather than going the distance.

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"Second, it limits the amount of fees these cities and agencies spend on outside counsel defending these actions. Also there's an immeasurable value to the possibility of official misconduct being discovered, which acts as a check on government abuses."

Chandler says that he will only settle with a government agency that agrees to ensure future compliance with the Sunshine Law as part of its terms, including remedial training and/or to place and maintain a printed copy of the Florida Attorney General's Government in the Sunshine Manual (free download) in the publicly accessible areas of their government offices.

"Keeping the Sunshine Manual available is intended to avoid future litigation," said Chandler, "so that if I or anyone were to show up in the future and have a dispute about the Sunshine Law, the reference is right there for our public servants to use."

Additionally, changes proposed in Garcia's bill would force citizens to put their governments on further notice of non-compliance and crucially, the changes would require citizens to list all documents for which they wish to sue and deliver those formal notices five days before the lawsuit.

How can a citizen who is denied access to public records, know all names of the records to which they're denied?

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Present Florida statute 119 known as the Public Records Act recognizes that delay of delivery constitutes an illegal imposition on Floridians' right to records by allowing an "immediate hearing" which can take weeks to obtain in practice, or more, and cost nearly $500 in legal filing fees and service of process alone.

It seems like this kind of prior notice requirement and discretionary fee system would create a system whereby insiders have access to remedies, but lawyers who aren't favored with judges will be denied fees, or to those shouted down by crowds of government employed attorneys, without any standards or reason since the rest of the Sunshine Law gives no reason for payment other than actual violation.

A Florida Constitutional challenge to the equal protection of this key law is sure to follow if this rancid piece of legislation is passed.

And if it passes, just kiss Florida Man goodbye too.

It'll become nearly impossible to obtain any sorts of public records in a reasonable amount of time when governments face zero penalty for stonewalling the public.

Corruption will flourish in Florida without the Sunshine Law's already expensive and time prohibitive, but ultimately available remedy of the attorney fees and costs paid back to citizens who've been denied public records access.

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The Sunshine Law is actually a three-part combination of civil rights protections for Floridians aimed at keeping "government in the Sunshine" which include the Open Meetings Law, the Public Records Law and a listing in the Florida Constitution's Bill of Rights which gives citizens, "the right to inspect or copy any public record" subject to a few limited exemptions.

Pushed by the Florida League of Cities, legislators in both the Florida House and Senate filed bills this session to gut provision of the law which awards attorney's fees to citizens only when state law is broken, and records are unlawfully withheld.

The relevant portion of the Public Records Law, which is Chapter 119 of Florida Statutes reads thusly:

119.12 Attorney's fees.--If a civil action is filed against an agency to enforce the provisions of this chapter and if the court determines that such agency unlawfully refused to permit a public record to be inspected or copied, the court shall assess and award, against the agency responsible, the reasonable costs of enforcement including reasonable attorneys' fees.

The word "shall" is underlined, because as you're about to see, it's the heart of this problematic legislative proposal. Changing it to "may" as shown below is enough to gut the law of any power of enforcement for citizens.

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Currently, most lawsuits for public records in Florida are pursued by citizens on a "contingent fee" basis. Without a guarantee of payment, lawyers require hefty up front fees when suing for public records because of the difficulty of encountering a municipal corporation's legal department and bottomless, tax-money filled pockets.

I am also currently pursuing a case in civil court under Florida's public records act. Thousands of pages related to a local zoning decision were withheld by that municipality, and many of the withheld documents have been delivered since the start of the lawsuit in November 2015, but still to this day key documents which are known to exist remain entirely missing.

The case is being handled on a contingent fee basis, because that is the only way this author could afford to pursue the claim.

"Elimination of the mandatory fee provision would significantly undercut Florida's constitutional guarantee of access to public records, and only the wealthiest citizens could afford to enforce the public's rights to obtain records about what the government is doing," said Florida lawyer Sam Dubbin whose Coral Gables, Florida practice includes representing clients filing suit to obtain records.
Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, speaks during a town hall forum at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. With a week to go until the Iowa caucuses and the Democratic presidential race there in a virtual dead heat, Hillary Clinton and Sanders are mapping out divergent paths toward winning the first votes of the nomination process. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Pool via Bloomberg

If the notion of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination and White House in a landslide seems unbelievable, I explain my thought process during an appearance on The David Pakman Show. In this segment, I highlight numerous reasons Bernie Sanders is poised to defeat both Clinton and Trump in dominating fashion.

Below are five reasons Bernie Sanders will win the presidency in a landslide, and while many in the media are just starting to jump on Bernie's bandwagon, the paradigm will change dramatically after Iowa and New Hampshire wins.

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1.Media Coverage after Bernie Sanders wins Iowa and New Hampshire will help Sanders win Nevada and South Carolina. Four straight wins will be too much to overcome for the Clinton campaign.

In terms of media coverage, The Los Angeles Times writes that "Historically, Iowa and New Hampshire account for about half the news media coverage of the entire primary season, with the winners absorbing the lion's share of the attention."

If almost half of the coverage is about Bernie Sanders winning, his campaign will be able to achieve even more that it has already; without the stigma of being a long shot. Suddenly, Clinton's invincibility narrative will morph into Bernie's inevitability.

Already, Bernie Sanders is the only leading presidential candidate with positive favorability ratings. In addition, the more people hear about Sanders, the more they respect his sincerity; his trustworthiness rating won't be affected by increased coverage like Clinton or Trump. You might not agree with Bernie Sanders, but you know he's genuine and sincere.

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As for Clinton's polling lead among African Americans and Latinos, that too will change, primarily because of increased attention towards her record on racial issues. This record is highlighted in a Huffington Post piece titled Hillary Clinton Says She'll End Private Prisons, Stop Accepting Their Money:

Lobbying firms that work for two major private prison giants, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, gave $133,246 to the Ready for Hillary PAC, according to Vice... Immigrant and civil rights groups have urged Clinton to stop accepting contributions from donors with ties to GEO and CCA.

Don't expect Clinton to maintain her current lead among minority voters, especially in light of the fact prison lobbyists have funded her campaign.

Bernie Sanders has never taken money from prison lobbyists.

If terms like white supremacy, or white privilege mean anything, they presumably correlate to never voting for a person who accepts money from prison lobbyists.

These terms might also mean holding a candidate accountable for running a 3 a.m. ad with a "racist sub-message" against Barack Obama, or addressing the fact South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn once stated, "black people are incensed over all of this."

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If Clinton's 2008 campaign against Obama were waged by a Republican, instead of a Democrat, progressives everywhere would declare her campaign's "dirty tricks" to be racist.

As stated by The Guardian in 2008, "Barack Obama's campaign team today accused Hillary Clinton's beleaguered staff of mounting a desperate dirty tricks operation by circulating a picture of him in African dress, feeding into false claims on US websites that he is a Muslim."

In addition, two initial losses in Iowa and New Hampshire will allow voters everywhere to evaluate Clinton's campaign without the aura of invincibility. As a result, her record on race, from an "abysmal" record on racial justice (according to Boston's Black Lives Matter President) to accepting prison lobbyist donations, will no longer be overshadowed by the notion of inevitability.

Ultimately, Clinton has only her name recognition, not the presence of advocates likening her policies to the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, or championing her campaign.

Two initial wins for Bernie Sanders won't only shed a much-needed light upon his campaign. These wins will also shed a much-needed light upon Clinton's record with the demographic groups essential to any hope for her nomination.

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2.Bernie Sanders enjoys more political momentum than anyone in 2016. Two initial wins will increase this momentum exponentially.

What is achieved by a campaign, without the help of media, is the heart of political momentum. Political momentum decides presidential elections, and only one candidate has enough momentum to raise a record 2.3 million campaign contributions, while getting only 1/23rd the coverage of Donald Trump.

How does this happen without name recognition?

Bernie Sanders just surpassed Hillary Clinton (in recent polls) in Iowa and New Hampshire, in addition to a continued surge nationally. Sanders is now only 7 points behind Clinton nationally in one recent poll.

His surge is based upon immense grass roots support, bolstering his fundraising and continual ascent atop the polls.

If you view this to be hyperbole, did you ever imagine Bernie Sanders winning Iowa and New Hampshire?

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3.Hillary Clinton's polling lead is dwindling faster in 2016 than it did in 2008.

Imagine last year, when Bernie Sander was mired at .08% support within the 2016 Democratic Primary, that you'd read a headline titled Hillary Clinton's national lead is slipping faster in 2016 than it did in 2008:

If we compare where Clinton is now in the Real Clear Politics polling average, the 2016 picture and the 2008 picture aren't really all that similar. Nationally, she was doing much better in 2008 than she is right now... If you look at her national numbers after Iowa in 2008, she lost three-quarters of her lead after the caucuses...

Most importantly, remember 2008. As stated by The Washington Post, "If you look at her national numbers after Iowa in 2008, she lost three-quarters of her lead after the caucuses..."

Also, how many pundits imagined Bernie Sanders would break Obama's fundraising record for contributions?

4.Once America finds out Bernie Sanders is more like Teddy Roosevelt, than a "Fox News socialist," voters will overwhelmingly choose Sanders over Clinton and Trump.

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What is holding Sanders back, from national prominence, is the belief among many observers that Americans won't elect a socialist. The problem with this myth, however, is that Sanders is a Democratic-Socialist, similar to Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, and the antithesis of anything conjured up by Fox News.

Wins in Iowa and New Hampshire will help destroy this myth, especially since these victories will result in attention towards his mainstream policies.

Also, Bernie Sanders wins "a landslide of epic proportions" against Trump, as stated in a Hill piece titled In blockbuster poll, Sanders destroys Trump by 13 points:

In the new Quinnipiac poll, Clinton would defeat Trump by 7 percentage points...while the Sanders lead of 13 points would bring a landslide of epic proportions...



Already, even with Sanders trailing Clinton nationally, he does better in a matchup against the likely GOP frontrunner.

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Combine the words "landslide of epic proportions" in a general election poll, along with two initial wins and the inevitable media coverage, and Bernie Sanders duplicates his success into Nevada and South Carolina.

5.The FBI could give Bernie Sanders a landslide victory at any moment.

As for the ongoing FBI investigation of Clinton's private server, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explains why this saga might derail Clinton's campaign. The Week highlights the severity of Clinton's email saga in an article titled Did Russia read Hillary Clinton's emails? Robert Gates says the odds are 'pretty high.':

Gates, who served under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, said he agreed with that assessment, adding that "the odds are pretty high" that Clinton's communications were accessed by unfriendly nations... Gates' remarks come on the heels of the revelation that Clinton's private system processed information "of a higher level of classification than 'top secret'" which was never supposed to leave secure government servers.

With the nature of the internet and email, as well as classified data, the FBI could at any moment declare Clinton jeopardized national security.

All of these factors: political momentum, Clinton's dwindling lead in the polls combined with Sanders's surge, and an FBI scandal that could derail the Clinton campaign at any moment, create the perfect storm for an epic Bernie Sanders victory.

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BRIGHTON, UNITED KINGDOM - MARCH 14: Ric OBarry, star of the Academy Award winning documentary The Cove, signing the petition board requesting the closure of all dolphinariums at WhaleFest 2015 on March 14, 2015 Brighton, East Sussex, England. PHOTOGRAPH BY photosbydavid.org/Barcroft Media (Photo credit should read photosbydavid.org/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

"The Japanese government is cracking down on those who oppose their war on dolphins." -- Ric O'Barry, Founder/Director, Dolphin Project

For more than one week, my husband, Ric O'Barry, has been incarcerated in a Japanese detention center, after immigration officials refused to allow him entry into the country. The day started off normal enough, and when he was pulled aside for a "routine" interrogation, he wasn't overly concerned. Since the release of The Cove, the 2009 Oscar award-winning documentary that exposed the brutal dolphin drives in Taiji, Japan, he has been questioned longer, more aggressively, and often for hours at a time. But nothing like what would transpire that day.

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I am deeply concerned for him, and every day, am contacted by people from all over the world who want to know how he is, and when he will be released. They are shocked at how he has been treated. Why, they ask, when it's a well-known fact that O'Barry has been traveling to Japan for years, and has many friends there. It is a country he loves dearly, always speaking about Japan with tremendous respect for its people. And, while wearing his activist "hat," he always operated fully within Japanese law, making it absolutely clear that his only problem with Japan is the horrendous killing of whales and dolphins that goes on there.

So what's different this time? Are certain people in Japan so desperate to silence him, they are willing to treat him like a criminal, despite the fact that his work methods have been 100 percent peaceful? Is it because he has been so successful at bringing worldwide attention to the cruelty against marine mammals that takes place every year at "the cove," in Taiji, Japan?



Richard O'Barry, left, and my son Lincoln watch dolphins at an aquarium in Taiji, Japan. (AP Photo/Junji Kurokawa)

For those just learning about this issue for the first time, the dolphin hunters of Taiji do all they can to hide the dolphin slaughter from the Japanese people, as well as the rest of the world. They carry out their gruesome activities behind blue tarps, barricades, barbed wire and metal gates in order to prevent anyone from witnessing the dolphin blood bath. One of them, when asked if he thought the Japanese people had a right to know about the slaughter, responded, "It is none of their business."

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But it is their business. It is their country, too, and they are entitled to know that hundreds of dolphins are hunted down, killed and butchered in the most brutal way imaginable each year in Japan. This year's drive quota is set at 1873 animals. They also deserve to know that this is how aquariums in Japan and some other countries obtain dolphins for their profitable dolphin shows and captive dolphin swim programs.

During the hunts themselves, many dolphins die from injuries, with many animals being observed bleeding, and sinking underneath the surface, never to reappear. Dolphin trainers, in the water to select the best looking dolphins for their clients, do nothing to assist the injured or dying.



"The authorities can use their power to prevent O'Barry and other dolphin protectors from entering Japan, but they cannot take away our freedom of expression."



At the time of this writing, my husband continues to be locked up in a detention center. He has been harassed, handcuffed and repeatedly interrogated -- all potentially for just speaking his mind about the slaughter and for insisting that the Japanese people be allowed to know about it. Since 2003, O'Barry, driven by empathy and determination, has been bringing attention to the dolphin massacre, a practice so cruel, it continues to be surrounded by secrecy and denial. And I believe this is why Japanese authorities are so committed to putting duct tape over his mouth and deporting him.

But make no mistake: Despite long and repeated interrogations, he will not be intimidated into confessing to having broken Japanese laws, because he is guilty of no crime. If O'Barry is deported from Japan, it will likely happen because of a deep-running fear of what might result if more Japanese people learn about the goings-on in Taiji. Fear of truth is a powerful motivator for Japan, it would seem. But the truth cannot be suppressed forever. He will never give up. The authorities can use their power to prevent O'Barry and other dolphin protectors from entering Japan, but they cannot take away our freedom of expression. That power they do not have.

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My concern now is for my husband's safety and well-being, as it is understood he is being held in a facility housing dangerous criminals. Japan would be well-advised to pay attention to the world: Our voices, instead of being hushed, are becoming louder.

***


All photos by Vali Barbulescu

Diana is my model in life. She is an amazing writer, a passionate traveler, a very smart and beautiful woman, she is a gifted journalist (editor-in-chief at Forbes), she is well-grounded, sensible and altruistic, and she makes every dream possible. When I read her words, I have one predominant feeling: "now it's time to fly". And I make you a promise: you'll never forget her!

1. You've traveled the world, you saw a lot of beautiful places and you could live anywhere. Why did you choose to live and work in Romania?

For me, the whole magic of traveling resides in being constantly on the move, while having a cozy place to call home. I lived and studied in London, Geneva, Vienna, Leiden (close to Amsterdam) and I travelled for interviews or personal pleasure in over 50 countries, but I need a foothold for my adventures. After getting my Masters degree 7 years ago I decided to come back home, to work and live in Romania, because it just felt right. I tend to listen to my inspired hunches and gut feelings, they're the best life compass in my case.

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If you're good at what you do and you're a hard worker, I truly believe you can adapt and become valuable in any company, on any continent, but you should settle down in the place where your feel you belong. I belong in Romania. I am often asked why I don't write a book or make a blog in English, with a global scope, and maybe one day I will find the time for that, it's on my list, but my priority at this time is writing for my people, offering them my stories, my take on life. The day is too short to do both international and local and at this point it just makes sense to do more local content.

I believe in profound and durable change that stems from information, from shaping one's outlook on life, from educating one's expectations and tastes. That is my goal for now, with my current projects. And, in a way, I think i'm like Antaeus from the Greek Mythology, one of my favorite characters ever: he was the son of Gaia, goddess of the earth, so he got stronger when he touched the earth, it replenished his powers. Even though I'm a globetrotter at heart, my strength comes from always coming back to my one place, touching "my earth". Each of us has to find whatever works for him or her. Whatever floats your boat.

2. Tell me more, please, about the differences and similarities between writing books, an online project and Forbes Magazine.

I'm lucky to be in a somewhat ideal situation for anyone who loves writing. With "Povestile unei inimi" ("Stories of a Heart"), I have the satisfaction of seeing how a book evolves over time, how it picks up speed and gets a life of its own. It's been 4 years since it came out and I still have people discovering it and sending me messages about it. I still write autographs on pristine copies, which is overwhelming. A story never dies as long as there are people still discovering it, so every new reader of my book is a new encounter for me, a clean slate, and I am truly grateful for this gift.

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With the two magazines that I am editor-in-chief of - "ForbesLife", monthly and "Up by Forbes", quarterly - I've learn to build my entire existence around a deadline. For over 7 years now, I've been doing a total of 15 magazines every year. In this field, we work in the present tense - the current issue is always where 90% of the energy goes - but at the same time we have to be on the lookout for the next good story and the next best thing. It never ever stops, not when you go home, not when you meet your friends for dinner, not when you leave on holiday, not when you switch the light off and go to sleep at night. The ideas can come at any time, triggered by any image, encounter or minor detail you notice. You learn to embrace the process and to love it. It's not a job, it's a way of life.

And, if the magazines keep me grounded in the "now", with my new online project I can now understand the incredible adrenalin of the "right now". Seeing how people share your work in real time, how they make it their own by commenting, by acknowledging you, that is amazing. It's still me in every project, but it's a nuanced me for each of the three different channels: books, magazines & website.

This mix has shown me that I can write in three different ways and think in three totally different ways. If, for instance, I get an inspired idea for an article right now, I know precisely where I will develop it, in which section of the magazines or in what part of the website and how it's going to unfold. I know it right away. Being a journalist nowadays may be challenging and harder than before, but it gets you thinking real fast and I love that. I sometimes "write" entire articles in my head, while walking to work (I walk a lot every day, it fuels my energy and creativity) or when I'm going home at night. Passion doesn't take days off for holidays, weekends or vacations, my imagination is like a creative shop where the lights are always on. All the time.

3. Can you tell us a surprising story about your new project, Fine Society? What is behind the image?

Essentially, it's me. Just me. I wanted a place of my own, to store all my thoughts, experiences and view of the world, because deep down I'm a sharer. When I find out something interesting, hear a good story, read an insightful book or get a meaningful revelation, my first impulse is to tell someone, to give someone a glimpse of that, to put it out there. I see so many wonderful things every day and not all of them are suitable subjects for Forbes. I needed a headquarters for the bits & pieces that touch my heart every day. And the most surprising and in a way "predestined" thing about it relates to the name: the word "fine" always rang special to me. In Transylvania, where I used to spend my summers as a child, there is a local word called "fain". It is pronounced exactly the same as "fine" and it's the Romanian equivalent of "cool". Also, as a kid I saw a movie that I liked very much and the main character had a shop called "Fine Things". That kind of stayed with me. So now, at this point in my life, it felt incredibly right to use "fine" as a name for my project.

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Speaking of which, I remember interviewing a master-perfumer from Japan, 5 years ago, for Forbes. She was also a clairvoyant, so she would close her eyes and tell each one of us, journalists, what she "saw" in our aura. It was the first time we met, she didn't even know our names and I must admit I wasn't a big believer in this whole clairvoyance thing. However, in my case, she said that she could see a big old mountain, with an antenna on top, transmitting to the world. It makes me smile to think of that, because the image still lives in my mind. That's essentially what I do now, with "Fine Society": I write from a place of experience, from my own feelings, from the stuff I observe every day, from my own dilemmas and interests. That's my "old mountain", what I have gathered inside me, and I am always ,,broadcasting" something.

The tagline for Fine Society is - in loose translation - "About everything that's fine and refined", because I think people really need more fine things, more beauty in their lives. It looks like a full-blown website, not like a typical blog, even though for now it's just me coming up with the content. I wanted it this way, because a blog is essentially all about the blogger, while "Fine Society" is about the community of people that have been reading my stuff for the past 7 years. A society of people who love the beautiful things in life. Everything that goes in there is felt, imagined and "woven" by me. I'm sometimes happy, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes full of enthusiasm, sometimes doubtful. It's a very honest project. I'm not trying to "pose" in a certain way, quite the contrary, I'm really putting myself out there.

4. Why would you recommend a foreigner to visit Romania? What are the three special places that someone must see in our country?

It may sound cliched, but there are hundreds of beautiful places to visit, many of them very remote, wild and gorgeous. However, when you go to a new country, you also want to see the "staples", not just the unbeaten road, so I would first recommend three places that are not so difficult to reach and, in my view, should be explored before wandering off into the more unknown and mysterious ones. First: the royal city of Sinaia, with its Peles Castle, repeatedly selected by famous publications worldwide among the most beautiful castles in the world. It's relatively easy to reach from Bucharest and shouldn't be missed.

Then, my favorite city in Romania, Brasov, where I would suggest spending one day walking around the old city centre, eating a delicious traditional dish, then going up to see the panorama of the city, from our very own Hollywood-sign" - the letters that make the name Brasov" - up on Mount Tampa. And, thirdly, I would recommend Cheile Bicazului, a gorge excised by the Bicaz river, with kilometers and kilometers of ravines, steep cliffs and a landscape that simply takes your breath away. It's the kind of place that you never forget, no matter what other breathtaking scenery you get to see in this lifetime.

5. What is your best memory from a trip through Romania?

Although I was born and raised in Bucharest, my dad's family is from Transylvania and my mum's side is from Northern Bucovina, so, growing up, I've spent my summers in both places. The closest to my heart is a little village in Transylvania, called "Poiana Ilvei" ("Ilva's Glade", Ilva being the river that flows through the region). My grandfather was born there, the old house he built still stands and when I was a kid we used to go there every August, for a few weeks.

The trip from Bucharest to Poiana was the ultimate adventure of every summer. The train ride would take around 10 hours, by night, passing through major Transylvanian cities and to a 6-year-old that was better than New Year's Eve. We would leave Bucharest on a super-hot summer evening and arrive at 6:00 a.m the next morning at our destination, in the mountains, where it was freezing-cold. I was freezing but had a huge smile on my face and to this day I remember the inner joy I felt stepping down from the train into that incredibly tiny train-station. Those were moments of utter and unadulterated happiness.

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To visit relatives in the neighboring village we would wake up really early in the morning and cross a hill, literally a three hours hike up and down the slope. You could only hear the sound of the wind, nothing else, just stillness. I still feel that fresh smell of the grass in my nostrils. If I could take one memory and close it in a glass box, to keep it intact forever and ever, that would be it. Now that I think of it, all my memories are about traveling, moving, voyaging. It's probably my DNA.

6. What is your biggest struggle right now?

Simplifying my life, streamlining everything. I think life should be like a seamless tuxedo jacket: perfectly crafted, just the right size, like a second skin, with no visible seams. That's my goal for the 2016. It's a process that has been ongoing for some time, but this year will be a game-changer because I think I've learned quite a few lessons along the way. By simplifying my life I'm referring to discipline, effectiveness in juggling my multiple activities, clear-cut choices and decisions.

I'm a minimalist at heart and, although I tend to pour my soul into everything that surrounds me - be it people, memories, objects I grow fond of - I also have a clear and sharp sense of who I am, of what's relevant and what's not. It was acquired painstakingly in years of practice and self-discovery, so I am ready to really put it to use in 2015. Lately, for example, it has been truly liberating letting go of stuff. If my life were, figuratively, a big white room, furnished with only what is valuable for me, I would say I am now redecorating and it's going just wonderful.

7. What is your biggest dream?

Visiting at least 100 countries in the world before I die and writing good stories from each and every one of them.

8. If you could have one thing in the whole world, what would you want most?

If I could make one preposterous and ardent wish, I would like to spend a month as a first officer for a Boeing 777 airliner. A co-pilot of dreams: always airborne, writing about it, exploring the world. My grandfather was an aviator and I think I get the flying gene from him. I love to fly, I could spend my entire life on an airplane. And, to let you in on a secret, last year I flew in the cockpit of an Airbus A320 for the approach and landing. It was amazing!

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9. What is your greatest gift to the world?

I like to think it's the honesty that I put into every piece of writing. I personally value honesty a lot because I find it scarce nowadays. Also, when I first started blogging as a hobby, in college, it was about things that mattered to me and that I couldn't find answers to anywhere else. Very personal and profound stuff. Years on, I still try to do just that: tell true and meaningful stories that people can relate to and do it in a vivid and inspiring way. I've never censored myself because it felt awkward or because I wanted to "save face". An actress I once interviewed told me that any artist aspiring to greatness must have a "coefficient of vulnerability" in his work, turning the most fragile parts of his soul into strengths. I'd like to think this is what I do in my work as well.

10. Romania definitely has something special. What is it?

Romania is a mix of contrasts that work very well together, like a patchwork made of happy floral hues, muted colors, black and whites, lots of grey shades, all sewn together, sometimes with loose threads hanging out. It doesn't look like anything else, but you cannot take your eyes off the pattern.

Despite a tough past, Romania still holds a precious sense of purity that you can rarely find elsewhere. People have been through a lot, so they're hardly naive or exceedingly credulous, but they also have this endless capacity to hope for the best, while being able to handle the worst. We're great hopers. Also, what makes us special is the Romanian sense of humor, our way of laughing off the bad times. If a meteorite were to hit planet Earth tomorrow, there would certainly be one or two Romanians cracking a joke about it. We can laugh at everything: life, death, sorrow, sickness, happiness. There's never anything too delicate, dark or taboo to make fun of. I think it's our shock-absorber of life.
Apple announced its revenue and earnings Tuesday. While earnings beat expectations, $3.28 per share versus $3.23 per share, revenue disappointed at $75.9 billion compared with expectations of $76.54 billion. Apple's iPhone sales also missed the mark with 74.8 million instead of the 75.46 million expected. CEO Tim Cook told analysts that Apple expected iPhone unit sales to decline in the fiscal second quarter. Similarly iPad and Mac sales also came in lower than expected. What's going on?

Evolutionary rather than revolutionary

Apple executives explain the disappointing sales results on economic weakness around the world. Many believe the real reason is Apple's current inclination to make evolutionary rather than revolutionary products. They think the lower-than-expected sales of the iPhone 6S is a result of a perceived small incremental improvement over the iPhone 6. It seems as if Apple is following Toyota's approach to innovation rather than that of its former CEO, Steve Jobs.

Works for Toyota

Few would argue that Toyota makes great automobiles. In a Harvard Business Review interview, Katsuaki Watanabe of Toyota said,

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There is no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.

Over a 35-year period, Toyota's innovation culture increased the number of annual suggestions per employee 480-fold from 0.1 to 48.

Apple is competing in a different ballpark

Even though Apple is supposedly developing a high-tech automobile, the company needs to travel in a different lane than Toyota. Toyota is competing in the car market where innovation is happening, but at a slower pace than Silicon Valley where Moore's Law sets a higher bar. With cars, safety, government regulations, and sharing of thoroughfares with pedestrians and other vehicles dictate a more conservative approach. That's why Toyota's incremental innovation strategy works really well in its market. When it comes to computers, mobile gadgets, and the IoT (Internet of Things), a more "revolutionary" approach is required to compete.

Apple Watch falls flat

Many believe that the first really innovative product Apple has launched in the post Steve Jobs era is the Apple Watch. By most accounts, this product did not live up to the expectations or standards of Apple new product launches. Since it was the first product shepherded by Tim Cook and Angela Ahrendts outside of Steve Job's shadow, its lackluster performance increases concerns about Apple's ability to innovate after Jobs.

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What Apple needs to do
Here is another entry from a translation of the recently discovered Diary of Moses, originally scratched onto sheep's skin in a steady ornamental hand.

In this account, Moses muses about one of his sons.

Dear Diary



Sinai Desert

Spring 1232 BCE

Sunday

My first-born son, Gershom, is a troubled loner. Zipporah, my wife, Gershom's mother, says he's just delicate, like one of those lapis lazuli vases we plunged fistfuls of marigolds and delphiniums and lobelias and yarrows in when we were back in Egypt.

(We did break a clutch of those vases, didn't we, setting them on marble table tops by six-foot windy windows?)

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I have Ziporrah's word that Gershom is my child. But he's not what I call a shard off the old clay pot.

He lacks my hairline, he lacks the noble hanging of my nether lip, he lacks my philological depth, and he lacks my predilection for illusion. But he does have my ability to find true north in a low sky desert dustwind.

The Rough Cut



I blame it on the rough cut. It's a sore spot for all of us. I didn't circumcise Gershom because, let me face it right now, I thought it was beneath my principles to do such a thing, even though in Egypt the practice was customary ever since the Pleiades first adorned a pencil-mapped sky.

To me it mars a beautiful thing--this circumcision, this cutting.

G-d fumed. I mean G-d was beyond a word like anger when he saw I hadn't cut the baby. And G-d tried to kill me outright. (Someone get this down and call it 'Exodus 4:24-26.')

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Zipporah saved my life by snapping up that flint and cutting Gershom's penis ring round, flinging the pink flesh at my foot, arresting the irritated justice of Divinity. Ah, how the baby wailed. Howled. And why not? It was a botched, slipshod, amateurish job, executed with a piece of shale!

A piece of shale! Nile crocodiles in a rowboat! Frel-a-sod-dam-duck! A piece of shale!

If there's any way an early hurt can linger and mold the mind, this is the hurt that can do it. Nothing is lost to the mind. It stores all.

This is why my darling Gershi has hobbled through life: his mother (his mother!) rudely stamped him.

And Why ?



Because G-d gave us unhygienic physical defects that human art must mend? Because G-d cannot tell us apart otherwise? Because there's too much of the hint of labia in a foreskin? Because of the daily, weekly, monthly usage of a penis? Because there must be blood? Because it looks better? What is it? Why?

Gershom, Gershom!



Dear boy, rest in your talents, your painted beads, your elevated mathematics, your mucked up horticulture, your kitchen spoons and bowls, your tuneful ditties.

You lack no religion, though you like no religion.

Here in this desert, out of Africa, out of Egypt, on the way to our promised land, I will look to you Gershom as my pillar of light, my sparrow-like leader, my Troubled Loner who, ever so infrequently, slips silently to my side and paces another day northward in this awful, shadeless, rock-strewn wilderness.

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The dynamics of collaborations between artists are often informative, even revelatory to the viewers as well as the artists. By deliberately casting your creative lot with that of another you are taking a bit of a risk, experimenting with your own conceptions, responding alongside and in tandem with the style and vision of your partner.

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Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Today, on a windy Brooklyn roof, we look at a fresh collaboration between Oakland's Faring Purth and Rochester's Thievin' Stephen, and we wonder how it will play to the J train audience who pass by it in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood.

Purth travels the country in service to her nearly spiritual in-the-moment musings, her willow-limbed figures ephemeral and hash-marked, comporting themselves outside of realism. The surety of a knife-cut line ensures that stencil-wielding Stephen would not be as on-the-fly when spraying out a portrait, even that of a surrealistic frog sponge being squeezed by his main lady.

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

We spoke with the artists to get their take on the collaborative experience and we learned that despite their stylistic differences the creative partnership was strengthened by "Cypress, Top Wrung" and by facing the challenges of painting outdoors in Brooklyn during January.

How did the collaboration come about?

Faring Purth: We met a few years back during the 2013 Wall\Therapy festival in Rochester, New York. We formed a very unusual close bond after a crazy week of creating - and subsequently surviving a chemical fire on the rooftop of an abandoned building where we were working with a few other artists. Since then, we have adopted each other as family, becoming very familiar with each other's work. Collaborating was a natural progression to that.

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Thievin' Stephen: Whenever Faring is back in Rochester we make it a habit to link up, and I'll take her to paint in one of my favorite abandoned spots. We used to explore together and do separate pieces, but after we had fun on a quick collabo this fall in the abandoned Rochester subway, the next logical step was to work together on a bigger wall. Our schedules lined up, so we decided to take advantage of the bizarre January heat wave and meet in Brooklyn.

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Faring Purth: It's our first official, large scale collaboration. We tossed around a few different locations and ideas. Brooklyn ultimately won - we both have a particular love for this area. The piece itself developed through dialogue and then through exchanging sketches until a cohesive blueprint was formed. That blueprint was the basis and we are thrilled with how the piece ultimately manifested.

Where did the name Cypress come from, and is that the character in the painting?

Faring Purth: It is. While we were completing the work, two friends of mine gave birth to their first child, a beautiful baby girl whom they named Cypress Valentina. The name immediately struck me and resonated as I continued to carve away at this pearl in the freezing cold. I found myself rolling it off my tongue while shivering and clapping my hands together to get the circulation back in my fingers. The elements tested us to say the very least and "Cypress" became a strange mantra for me the following week - helping me feel a little bit stronger and a tiny bit warmer every time I said it.

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Thievin' Stephen: Yeah, Faring usually gives her women a name, and I enjoy using word play related to my imagery.

Faring Purth: I ultimately decided the figure in the painting should take the name of her celestial twin. It's not every pearl that gets to share their shucking with a human birth. And it's not every name that carries such profound wisdom. Cypress Valentina is now ten days old. Cypress, Top Wrung is two days old. I hope one day their paths cross and that they unlock some universal secret not even I know.

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Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

The work began immediately after the new year began and that became of certain significance in itself: It's the first of an epic year to come, the release of an epic year just lived. This piece exposed me to a very different process than my own and provided me with many tools and lessons going forward. The experience simultaneously tested my body & spirit greatly. By the time the work was actually done, I had massive bruises, battle wounds, & life lessons to show for it.

As for the stylistic juxtaposition of the work & the various narratives the piece inspires, both are open to interpretation and a happy side effect of our familiarity as artists and friends. We knew how to work with and play off of each other's visions and allow that dialogue to unfold on its own.

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Your styles couldn't be more different yet the balance and the composition works really well within the context of the piece. Can you talk about your thoughts and experiences creating it.

Faring Purth: "Cypress, Top Wrung" was an incredible learning experience both in the complications of the wall itself and in the personal life that was being lived during its creation. As for me, the two are impossible to separate... One always reflects and reveals elements of the other and in so doing provides me with certain personal epiphanies I needed to have at that moment. Suffice to say, creating Cypress was no different in this respect.

Thievin' Stephen: My favorite collaborations are those where two friends divergent styles come together so that was the most exciting thing about melding my work with Farings'. My color theory mixed with Faring's grey-scale compliment each other, and I think that's what makes this mural feel like the true winter-time creation that it is.

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It was fun watching the interplay between my sharpness and her fluidity unfold, and you can see it best where the hand and sponge connect, which was the last thing we did. Waiting for that moment to be done, as we went back and forth getting it right, that felt like a big pay off as it was really the first time our two styles merged into one piece.The wall also benefits from the combination of Faring's painterly line work with my style of stencilism. I put forty something layers of stencils up on this wall. While our aesthetics are certainly far apart, I think the surreal anatomy that Faring gives her women harmonizes with my impossible creatures.

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

The finished piece probably means quite different things to Faring and me, and I think that makes it a more intriguing creation for the viewer.

It's always great to be surrounded by the humanity you encounter in Brooklyn, and Bed-Stuy never disappoints. A lot of crazy shit and hilarious things happened during the creation of this wall, but nothing overshadows the roof top experience. The elevated train line of the J right behind me was a nice inspiration, along with busy-ass Broadway directly below. You know it's a memory when you have to put rock salt under your ladders! Being at the top of a ladder on the very corner of a roof top definitely attracts attention. MTA construction guys thought we were nuts. Maybe we were. I'm happy with the wall, and glad it felt like the good old days.

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

Faring Purth & Thievin' Stephen "Cypress, Top Wrung". (photo  Jaime Rojo)

*********************

The artists would like to thank Cernesto and ArtsOrg for their help.

Please note: All content including images and text are  BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer's name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!

This article is also posted on Brooklyn Street Art.

Read all posts by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo on The Huffington Post HERE.

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News / Regional

by Mashudu Netsianda

A PLUMTREE man who raped his girlfriend's 11 year-old daughter after luring the girl into her mother's bedroom, was yesterday sentenced to 30 years in jail.Akim Ndlovu, 21, of Tokwana village was convicted of two counts of rape by Bulawayo regional magistrate, Sibongile Marondedze.He will serve an effective 25 years in jail after five years were suspended for five years on condition that he does not within that period commit a similar crime.Marondedze, in her judgment, said although Ndlovu pleaded not guilty, there was enough evidence linking him to the crime."From the evidence before the court we are satisfied that the State has managed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt and you are accordingly found guilty as charged," Marondedze ruled.She expressed concern over the increase rape cases."The courts are worried by the increase in rape cases and this calls for deterrent sentences. You betrayed the trust bestowed on you by your girlfriend when you raped her daughter during her absence. What is aggravating is that instead of protecting the victim, you chose to rape her," said Marondedze.She said Ndlovu was a danger to his community and deserved a lengthy prison term."The court frowns at such kind of behaviour and cannot condone it. People like you should be removed from society because they are a danger to their communities. A clear message has to be sent to the community that rapists have no place in our modern society. In the circumstances, a lengthy prison term will meet the justice of the case," ruled Marondedze.Prosecuting, Concilia Ncube said sometime in 2014, Ndlovu visited the complainant's mother at her home and the two spent the night together.The court heard that on the following morning, the complainant's mother left her daughter in the custody of Ndlovu as she went to fetch water.Ndlovu took advantage of the absence of the complainant's mother and invited her to the bedroom."He ordered her to remove her clothes after which he asked her to join him in bed before he went on to rape her," said Ncube.After committing the crime, Ndlovu threatened to assault the complainant if she reported the matter to anyone.
Donald Trump's presidential campaign is "actively engaged" in trying to find a volunteer to be shot by the billionaire reality TV star and current Republican presidential front runner in the wake of Trump making comments over the weekend intimating that he could shoot someone and not drop in primary polling.

After telling a crowd in Iowa that he "could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody" and he "wouldn't lose voters," sources close to the Trump campaign say that The Donald is determined is show the country how right he was in his assertion. Sources say that Trump is hoping the volunteer will be either Hispanic or Islamic because that will play to the base that Trump has been riling up with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric since he entered the race last year.

"Mr. Trump knows that Republican voters fear many things," Howard Bremmer, Deputy Assistant Media Relations Liaison for Trump's Iowa operation told reporters Monday morning, "but chief among them right now are Mexicans and Muslims. We call them the M&M's of successful Republican fear mongering. What better symbolism for Trump than to shoot a Mexican or a Muslim," Bremmer asked rhetorically to a pool of stunned-looking reporters.

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Bremmer confirmed for reporters that the search for their volunteer to be shot may take them to places outside Iowa, and are hopeful that by the time they find someone that the public hasn't forgotten what Trump said. "So that's why he'll be repeating the line at every stump speech," Bremmer said, "after which he'll tell people that if there's anyone in the audience willing to be shot in the name of Making America Great Again, to raise their hands and Trump will shoot them."

"No one has to worry too much," Bremmer said, "Mr. Trump is a terrible shot, so we're thinking that there will be a lot of flesh wounds, grazings, and outright missing the mark when it's all said and done. Still the thought of him actually hitting someone and watching his numbers go up and not down is enough to make this stunt all worth it in the end."

Asked for comment, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was "adamantly against" Trump shooting any Americans just to make a point. "Then again," McConnell said after thinking a moment, "we Republicans have to ask -- are immigrants really Americans? Do Muslim Americans really count as much as Christian Americans do? All of these things we'll have to sort out through the first 100 days of Emperor Trump's reign, and if a few Mexicans or Muslims have to be shot to hammer out all the fine print, isn't that worth it in the end?"
Donald Trump just fired himself from the next Republican debate.

At a press event earlier this evening, Trump announced that he "most likely" will not participate in the Fox News debate scheduled for Thursday night because Fox News refuses to replace moderator Megyn Kelly. A follow-up announcement by Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, further clarified that Trump is "definitely" out.

Naturally, Twitter is all up in Trump's face over the announcements, mocking him as only that social network can, primarily skewering him for being afraid of Megyn Kelly while boasting that he would topple ISIS -- in my opinion, a fair critique. During the first Fox News debate, it was Kelly who called Trump out for decidedly sexist, misogynistic comments about women in general. In part, Kelly stated:

You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

But according to the Vox article from which that quote was derived, this was a planned attack on Trump by a faction within Fox News, and by Rupert Murdoch in particular. Murdoch once tweeted:

When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let

alone the whole country?  Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) July 19, 2015

For more on the history of Donald Trump's war with Megyn Kelly, see this ABC News article.

But perhaps the Trump/Kelly feud was the opening salvo of Donald Trump's war on the media as a whole. At the same press conference earlier this evening, Trump crossed the line with a specific reporter, who began his question by quoting Trump on abortion rights in a 1999 Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert. Trump almost immediately interrupted and criticized the reporter, appearing to chastise him for not beginning the question with Trump's remark, "I hate the concept of abortion." Trump continuously interrupted the reporter whenever he tried to respond and escalated the argument, finally stating, "you're not a very good reporter":

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Well, it turns out that the reporter did quote Trump correctly, at least according to a transcript posted by PolitiFact in a report detailing Ted Cruz's latest attack ad on those same comments. But Trump still wasn't done with this particular reporter. Later, when he attempted to ask Trump a follow-up question, Trump refused to allow him to ask it, instead asking over and over again, "Do you apologize?" for not reading his quote correctly. When the reporter did not give a satisfactory answer, Trump told the reporter "Okay, forget you," and refused to even allow the follow-up to be asked:

Note: This video splices together both exchanges between Trump and this reporter.

Of course, these are not the only incidents where Donald Trump has been abusive of media personalities. We cannot forget Trump's mocking of New York Times Reporter Serge Kovaleski's physical disability due to a chronic medical condition. This was followed by Trump effectively segregating journalists at campaign rallies, forbidding them from recording any protests occurring at rallies, and even threatening to "blacklist" journalists who refused to abide by the restrictions. In short, for a candidate campaigning for arguably the most publicly-visible job on Planet Earth, Donald Trump has done everything possible to prevent the media from giving public access to a large portion of that journey. And when you count all of the incidents of protesters being forcibly ejected from his rallies, it appears he is also denying the American public at large their rights to be concerned about the direction in which he would ultimately attempt to move the world.

So while we can tweet our mockery and contempt of Donald Trump on-line, there's a more serious discussion that we need to have concerning Trump's overall contempt of the news media on which his campaign has so heavily thrived. And that's his utter lack of respect for the principles of the First Amendment, which guarantees not only our rights to speak freely, but also the press' right to cover critical events in the nation, and our right to peaceably assemble in protest. Donald Trump's attitude, and his conduct at his own campaign rallies, violates every tenet of the First Amendment. Right now, Trump is proposing to skip out on an entire debate -- arguably the most important platform from which Americans can learn about the candidates -- just to spite a single journalist. I'm sure Megyn Kelly never realized she had that much power over the Republican front-runner!

But this lack of respect also extends to the American people as a whole. Donald Trump only cares about the people who show up at his rallies to support him, who are willing to serve as glorified bouncers for anyone he doesn't see fit to attend. He only cares for those who are likely to show up to vote for him, thus advancing his campaign to the next stage and keeping him in the limelight. And look how quickly he has now made so-called friend Senator Ted Cruz into an enemy.

The bigger question is how much Trump's overall contempt for fundamental American values will grow should he secure the Republican nomination (as looks increasingly likely) or even the presidency itself. America is in danger of electing a President who already tramples upon some of the most important rights given to us by the Constitution just in the act of campaigning! Would President Trump invite reporters to the White House and publicly shame them in the same manner he currently does on the campaign trail? What precedents would that set regarding First Amendment rights regarding a free press? And just as importantly, would Trump seek executive action, perhaps on national security grounds, which would dismantle the right to peaceably assemble in protest of tragedies like the killing of Tamir Rice? Trump has already decreed that "the police are the most mistreated people in this country." So we also need to be asking just what Trump would do to push back against this alleged mistreatment as more and more black people die from police violence while their murderers remain unpunished.
In the nine long months after political reporter Eli Stokols left Fox 31 Denver, it looked like the local TV station's surprising reputation as a go-to source for political news, cultivated by over a decade of obsessive work by Stokols, was going to be completely lost.

Serious politics coverage at Fox 31 essentially vanished overnight. It was an unbelievable fall, and depressing. (Not to say Fox 31 didn't have some good pieces and journalists, but the unfilled hole was huge.) But on the positive side, it showed the impact one talented reporter can have on a news outlet, especially a TV station, and on an entire state.

That's why it's great that Fox 31 has hired a reporter, Joe St. George, to take over Stokols' political beat, showing that the station's commitment to politics coverage didn't start and stop with Stokols--as can be the case at local TV outlets.

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Joe St. George arrived at the station last month after covering politics in Virginia for over three years and, before that, for a stint in Iowa. So he's got nothing comparable to Stokols' experience, but he seems to be hard-working and, jeez, all of the people of Colorado are glad to see him given the chance, though they don't know it.

"Joe's passion is in political reporting," said Fox 31 News Director Holly Gauntt. "He did a lot of good political reporting at his former station and has a good reputation there. It's rare. He's one of those guys who breathes, eats, lives, sleeps politics, so I snatched him up as soon as I found out about him."

Gauntt says it will be tough for St. George to replace Stokols, whom she described as "the best political reporter in the state.

St. George's "number one priority" will be politics, including, eventually, the type of in-the-weeds blogging produced by Stokols. St. George will do that once he develops the contacts and knowledge required, said Gauntt

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"I think politics is hugely important," said Gauntt in response to my saying that Fox 31 deserves a ton of credit for hiring a new political reporter and giving Stokols the space to focus on politics when he was here -- because many local TV outlets don't have any political reporters at all. "Some of it's not for broadcast. You can't get too far into the weeds, but that's the beauty of websites and blogs and all of that."

For his part, St. George says he's "very lucky" to be covering politics for a local TV station in his third swing state.

"I would never have left Virginia if I didn't have an equally exciting opportunity to cover politics in a state like Colorado," he said.

St. George has "followed Eli's work for years" and hopes to work on multiple platforms like Stokols did.

"While not every politics story is a great TV story, it has a place online if it doesn't have a place on television," said St. George, who hopes to start blogging soon. "I consider myself not just a TV journalist but a multi-screen journalist."

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Stokols hoped his former station wouldn't drop serious political reporting after his departure.

"I'm glad to see that Fox31 remains committed to covering Colorado politics and policy debates in its newscast and across additional platforms," wrote Stokols when asked for a comment about St. George's hire. "I look forward to following Joe's coverage from afar."
Dear Mr. Mohr,



I just wanted to thank you for such a great podcast -- funny, irreverent and relevant all at the same time; eclectic, thought-provoking, varied and honest. I am a veteran of the war in Afghanistan where Canada fought alongside its NATO and U.S. partners for over 10 years. The podcast that got me hooked was the podcast with Nate Boyer. For three years we kept the Taliban at bay in Kandahar; Canada held the homeland of the Taliban where we lost over 160 souls (may not sound like much, but our military is only 60,000 folks so you basically know everyone.) A lot of them who came back also took their lives, and we have had an epidemic of suicides as well. I think every country that was involved has seen this trend. [Nate Boyer's] story brought back a lot of memories of friends lost, injured or who have issues to this day. PTSD can be a devastating illness, and in my role running the combat hospital, we saw a lot of battle trauma. At one point, the NATO Role 3 Combat Hospital was the busiest trauma hospital in the world. In the hospital, doctors, surgeons, nurses and other medical folks from six different NATO countries (Canada, U.S., U.K., Dutch, Denmark, Aussies) came together to form a team the likes have been seen in a long time, not since Vietnam and Korea. We did not do it for medals or glory, but we did it because the men on patrol like Nate depended upon us, that if they hit our doors, they would live. Our overall survival rate was 98 percent and that's after seeing literally thousands of patients (soldiers, Afghans, UN civilians, children, men and women, bomb dogs, you name it, we treated it). It was like the tale of two cities... It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. It's the most satisfying job that I have ever done and the most heartbreaking at times.



A lot of those people that I worked with saw a conveyor belt of broken and wounded bodies that affected them greatly, and they came back changed and I understand Nate's comment regarding this on the podcast. In my experience, you can't pinpoint what has changed, but you just know that something is different. Your family notices, your wife notices, but you don't. You're somehow blind to it or desensitized or afraid to acknowledge it. I, for one, kept it down inside and kept on keeping on being a soldier until I got to a point where my glass just spilled over. My wife came to me and said 'Get some help, or I am leaving. I love you but am tired of losing you little by little.' PTSD is a death of a thousand mental cuts. Believe me I know. I was also a senior officer, and I could not allow weakness to be shown or to portray myself as weak. The stigma of mental illness is there whether we want to acknowledge it or not. In the military culture and even those first responder cultures, you're supposed to be impervious to this type of thing. PTSD can destroy you or it can sometimes be for the better; the changes make you stronger. I suffered with the realization of having PTSD for over six years before I found help and I know what Nate is trying to accomplish with 22kill website.



Like General Mattis' view, he doesn't want the public to see all veterans as victims. 'I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans and that is they are somehow damaged goods,' Mattis said. 'I don't buy it. If we tell our veterans enough that this is what is wrong with them they may actually start believing it.' Like Nate tried to convey to your listeners is that Mattis cloned the term 'post traumatic growth' where you come out of a situation like that and 'you actually feel kinder toward your fellow man and fellow woman.' That's the way we should be reframing the discussion on veterans and PTSD.



I just wanted to say that this podcast was one of your best and well, I have listened to a lot of them since I found your show. I have listened to most of them, as I have a one-hour commute one way to and from my unit, where I am the CO. I watched your special that was nominated for the Grammy and your wife Nik and her wicked sense of humor coupled with your honest and loving delivery of it, made me laugh for a long time afterward. Especially the bit about 'mutual dislikes.' For me and my wife it was the epiphany when we were at a Starbucks drive-through and saw a bunch of granola crunching, skinny jean and flannel shirt sporting, big-assed bushy beard hipsters. You just wonder if the invasion of the body snatchers has arrived and instead of aliens they are producing hipster clones. Why can't people be themselves, a just 'you do you' type of thing? And tell Nik she is still easy on the eyes, meant very respectfully. She was awesome in Las Vegas. I listened to the podcast where you two just shot the shit, and that was an amazing connection you guys had. You could just tell and the wit displayed by you both was great. Like you said, I am not washing your balls here, it's just my appreciation of good, dry wit like mine.



I bit of a ramble, but hey that's what we humans do. Again, thanks for the great podcast and thanks for the mental stretch each day. Tell Nate that he is bang-on and his brothers in Canada support him as well.



-- 'Doug' Commanding Officer 1 Canadian Field Hospital
RECIFE, BRAZIL - JANUARY 27: Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, examines a 2-month-old baby with microcephaly on January 27, 2016 in Recife, Brazil. The baby's mother was diagnosed with having the Zika virus during her pregnancy. In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants. The ailment results in an abnormally small head in newborns and is associated with various disorders including decreased brain development. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Zika virus outbreak is likely to spread throughout nearly all the Americas. At least twelve cases in the United States have now been confirmed by the CDC. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The GOP has evolved (ironically, a process they would deny) to be the proud political party of anti-intellectualism, harking back to the Dark Ages with a never-ending campaign against evolution, tired rants denying the reality of climate change, and a medieval understanding of human reproduction. But sadly this anti-science bent is not restricted to right wing ideologues, but instead has also infected the far left. While manifesting itself with symptoms in different areas of science, the underlying disease is the same on both extreme left and right: ignorance of the scientific method and the reliance on faith over fact.

In the case of liberals gone bad, vaccines offer the most prominent divergence from reality. The anti-vaccine movement gives us the clearest picture of how the far left and extreme right have become one stubborn bloc of boneheads impervious to the inconvenience of objective truth.

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In a rather odd twist of fate, the anti-science rants from the right about climate change and the far left campaign against vaccines meet at a common point of ignorance about tropical disease. Consider two people circumnavigating the globe at the equator from the same starting point but moving in opposite directions; the two points furthest apart converge at the end where the journey began; so too here with anti-science zealotry on left and right: so far apart they merge together in a bond of extremism. Nowhere can this circle of delusion be seen better than with the emergence of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease that can cause devastating brain damage in newborns.

Brazil has seen about 4,000 such cases of microcephaly since October as a consequence of the rapid spread of Zika. U.S. officials warn us that this "once obscure virus" is spreading rapidly across Latin America and the Caribbean. So much so that the Center for Disease Control has issued a travel warning, urging pregnant women to avoid more than a dozen countries in which Zika can now be found. If you think you are safe here in North America, reconsider: the World Health Organization concludes that the Zika virus will spread to the United States. In North America alone, about 200 million people live in areas conducive to the transmission of the virus.

Why Zika now? As with the emergence of West Nile in the United States, we are witnessing the inevitable march north of tropical diseases as a direct result of a warming planet. The number of diseases coming our way, or already here, is as frightening as it is real. That climate change would impact the transmission of infectious and tropical diseases has long been predicted from the very first reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Those predictions are now our new reality.

So the GOP denies the indisputable truth of global warming as Zika moves north; and the far left denies the extraordinary benefits of vaccines, which would obviously include a vaccination against Zika (research is being done). Tell the mother of a child who could be saved with a vaccine that we should not develop one because vaccinations are harmful. What we have here is the perfect convergence of ignorance mixed with political extremism, wrapped together in a bundle of delusional wishful thinking.

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Enough Already

Climate change is real and caused by human activity; consequently tropical maladies are moving north. Vaccines, ever more important with advancing diseases, have proven beyond any and all doubt to be extraordinarily efficacious. Vaccines are the most important, effective, and safest medical advance in all of human history. Vaccinations have led to the eradication of smallpox and the near-eradication of polio. Anytime you might have even a twinge of a thought against vaccinations, think of the millions of people who suffered terrible disability and death prior to the development of vaccines for these horrible diseases. And the millions of people now free from those scourges because of vaccines.

And no, making a personal decision to eschew vaccines is not benign. If enough people do not get vaccinated, the entire community may suffer because "community immunity" becomes jeopardized. When a critical number of people in a population are immunized, even those unable to get vaccinated, like infants, the elderly, pregnant women, or immunocompromised patients, gain protection from the spread of contagious disease. In some cases, if immunization drops below a certain percentage of coverage even those vaccinated are offered less protection. In 2000 measles was nearly eradicated in the United States; with a drop in immunization due to unjustified concerns about vaccines, the United States is witnessing this year the largest measles outbreak since 1996.

The deep, terrible irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the incredible success of vaccines has caused the uninformed to forget how important, successful and safe vaccination programs are; and how vital vaccines are to preventing horrible diseases from reemerging. And reemerge they do, as measles has. Measles is highly contagious and spreads rapidly among the non-vaccinated. There is no treatment for measles, only prevention. Ignorance, false claims to expertise and scientific illiteracy are threatening our children's health.

These preventable outbreaks should remind us that every year vaccines save 3 million lives among children younger than five years old every year by preventing diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles; if adults are included, vaccines save up to 6 million lives annually. If you oppose vaccinations you are willfully condoning the death of an additional 3 million children every year. The Third Edition of the State of the World's Vaccines and Immunization reports that, "Between 2000 and 2007, the number of children dying from measles dropped by 74% worldwide, from an estimated 750,000 to an estimated 197,000 children. In addition, immunization prevents sickness as well as lifelong disability, including measles-related deafness, blindness, and mental disability."

The study also states that, "In 1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries and paralyzing an estimated 350,000 children every year (close to 1000 cases a day). By the end of 2007, polio had been eradicated in three of WHO's six regions - the Region of the Americas, the European Region, and the Western Pacific Region. Following implementation of the rubella elimination strategy in the Americas, the number of reported cases of rubella declined by 98% between 1998 and 2006. By 2000, 135 countries had eliminated neonatal tetanus and by 2004, annual deaths from neonatal tetanus had fallen to an estimated 128 000, down from 790,000 deaths in 1988."

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If you oppose vaccinations, try to justify that position with the reality that in the absence of vaccinations polio would paralyze 10,000 children every year; German measles would cause birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 kids, and diphtheria would be a common cause of death in school children. Anytime you have an urge to oppose vaccination, think of your kid dying of diphtheria. If you oppose vaccinations, you willingly accept that 10,000 kids each year become paralyzed with no reason.

Fact vs. Fiction: How the Left Was Lost

Any Google search will show that the left has linked vaccines to autism. This bizarre claim comes from just one paper published in 1998 in the medical journal Lancet, subsequently withdrawn for suspicions of scientific fraud, and fully discredited by later study. Repeat after me: there is no evidence, none, zero, absolutely nothing, to link vaccinations with autism. It is a myth, a fallacy, factually incorrect. Yet tens of thousands of parents risk their children's health by withholding critical vaccinations. Many parents still to this day insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the complete absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper. You might as well claim that vaccines cause baldness. I am bald, and I have had many vaccines, ergo...

No, no, I've got the perfect claim: vaccines are ineffective and dangerous but prevent global warming. In that we combine belief in something for which there is no evidence and disbelief in another other for which there is indisputable proof. Perfect.

Vaccines save lives, millions of lives, and prevent untold suffering and misery. Would anti-vacciners deny a pregnant woman a Zika vaccine? Vaccines are safe and effective, as proven by billions of doses given with no harm. The efficacy of vaccines is beyond dispute with the eradication of some of humankind's greatest scourges and the precipitous drop in diseases once common. Of course absolutely nothing is 100% safe and effective; sitting on your couch with a helmet does not guarantee an airplane tail won't fall through your roof and kill you. But the awesome, amazing benefits of vaccines vastly, incredibly, outrageously outweigh any potential risk.

Opposing vaccines is foolhardy, dangerous, irresponsible, and just plain ignorant. Much like right wing opposition to climate change. Right and let extremism converge.

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His name is Farley Flex. And if you're a Canadian musician and this name escapes you, remedy that quick.

The Canadian Idol judge and key founder of Toronto radio station Flow 93.5 is no doubt one of the top players in the music game.

During the last Kaleidoscope Ball, a major fundraiser for The Scarborough Hospital, I caught up with Flex and picked his brain about all things business.

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Here are the top 5 pieces of advice right from Flex presented to you as social media friendly quotes.
PTSD. If you're like most people, the four-letter acronym--meaning Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder--conjures up images of military vets home from war always on edge, jumping at sudden noises, awakening in darkness in cold sweat. Or maybe even "the American Sniper," back home, unable to sleep or focus, longing to return to war, or the former marine who kills him at a Texas shooting range.

I have never served in the Army or Air Force or Marines, but I suffer from PTSD.

Red. White. Blue. The sight of a police car in my rear view or side view mirror, even a black car or SUV that could potentially be an unmarked police car in my rear view or side view mirror, the sound of sirens while driving (I'll never understand why rappers think it's okay to have this as background noise) elicit in me a sense of panic.

I can't breathe.

Heart races, sense of terror, impending doom takes hold. Sometimes I feel a loss of control, sweat secretes on cue, flashbacks of exchanges with police like disparate clips. Sirens like gunshots. Whites of eyes holding a nation's white imagination. Now, it's usually this one evening with the LAPD in the spring of 2015. I'm pulled over by a racist cop for driving under the influence (while sober), bullied by three or four cars of police officers, searched over and over, handcuffed, and arrested.

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And yet. It's more than my own memories. More than Sandra Bland, who's still alive then, not yet aware she'll soon be hanged in a Texas prison, her face the new Kendra James, Rekia Boyd, poster child for post-race strange fruit, Black women's dispensability. They used to put us on postcards. More than the metal nooses cuffed around my wrists, sirens and snide comments playing in my ear on heavy rotation. More than never feeling free. It's the daily stories of unarmed Black girls and boys, women and men gunned down by white cops like wild game, unlawfully arrested, found dead behind bars. It's the videos that go viral of young Black men being choked to death on cement, shot with hands in the air. It's the little Black girls being thrown and body-slammed in their classrooms, tackled and dragged by their hair while outside in bikinis.

I can't breathe.

I once read that nearly a fifth of all active duty cops suffer from PTSD, the leading cause of police death. I also read that one-third of children living in urban neighborhoods throughout the U.S. have PTSD--nearly twice the rate reported for troops returning from war zones in Iraq. According to more recent research and the country's top child trauma experts, most of these children are exposed to recurrent trauma: community violence, murder, assault, a separate and unequal way of life that leaves them prone to structural violence, living in chronically unsafe or hostile environments. And like the forming of a sedimentary rock, layer after layer gradually building up over time, the trauma accumulates in the mind and develops into PTSD--sadly nicknamed "Hood Disease." America's urban youth are not considered children but "survivors of urban warfare."

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PTSD, according to Dr. Monnica T. Williams, a clinical psychologist and associate director of the University of Louisville's Center for Mental Health Disparities, impacts more than 9 percent of all African-Americans. In a 2013 Psychology Today article, Williams writes: "One major factor in understanding PTSD in ethnoracial minorities is the impact of racism on emotional and psychological well-being. Racism continues to be a daily part of American culture, and racial barriers have an overwhelming impact on the oppressed." Not only does racism result in unwarranted arrests, death, and discrimination, it perpetuates our anxieties, leads us to be constantly vigilant--exhibiting "cultural paranoia"--puts us at an elevated risk for chronic illnesses like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular heart disease, our babies more likely to succumb to infant mortality because of the daily stresses of Black mothers, leaves us always sick, always tired, always sick of being sick and tired.

Williams' findings build on 2011 research that reported Black people who experience more instances of discrimination have a significantly higher chance of suffering generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which has psychological and physical symptoms so debilitating they can severely impact everyday tasks. Symptoms include chronic worrying, intrusive thoughts, difficulty concentrating, tension headaches, extreme fatigue, and ulcers.
Metal globe

DAVOS, Switzerland -- While global leaders who gathered at the World Economic Forum's meeting debate solutions to social, political and economic uncertainty, quietly a new force is gaining credibility around the world: the desire for "soft power."

Let's start with the data. For the launch of our inaugural Best Countries rankings, we surveyed 16,200 elites, business decision-makers and citizens from 36 countries in four regions of the world. And we asked them to rate 60 nations on more than 75 dimensions, from leadership to economics and social issues. And what people see as a "Best Country" is innovation and compassion in equal measure.

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Indeed, the top three factors shaping image and future investment in a nation are innovation and entrepreneurship, quality of life and global citizenship. Taken together, they explain more than 57 percent of future gross domestic product (PPP) creation while economic and political power accounted for only 8 percent of the effect on future growth.

One might argue then that "banks and tanks" have defined a traditional type of power, but people are looking for something more. Among the top 10 Best Countries, Canada ranks No. 2, while Sweden, Australia, Netherlands and Denmark all make the top 10. Taken together they account for less than 25 percent of America's GDP.

Moreover, Swedes, Canadians, Danes, Dutch and Aussies round out the top five for Citizenship as global respect tilts to nations that lead on social and environmental issues. Sweden, for instance imports garbage to generate power while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets migrants at the airport and staffed his cabinet with equal parts women and men. Canada was rated as the No. 2 Best Country for Women behind Denmark, and both are seen as among the most transparent. Even tiny Luxembourg, the smallest country geographically, gains the strongest reputation for "doing good."

Does this portend a global re-ordering of power? Well perhaps not immediately, but leaders and policymakers might be wise to pay attention to what people want. In research for our book "The Athena Doctrine," 72 percent of people around the world said that "today, power is about influence rather than control."

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The Republican National Committee and Fox News say there won't be an empty podium on the stage during the Iowa Republican debate to symbolize the absence of Donald Trump. The implication is that that's not fair game. In 1980, Jimmy Carter refused to appear in a League of Women Voters debate with Ronald Reagan and John Anderson, so a podium stood in for him. Apparently attitudes have changed since then.

But the podium question shows how significant the decision is to use or not to use that prop.

Why is an empty podium such a powerful symbol? After all, the candidates can still eviscerate their absent rival whether there's an empty physical space there or not. Clint Eastwood didn't really need to put an empty chair next to him at the Republican convention in 2012 to carry on his one-sided debate with President Obama, but he clearly saw the dramatic advantage of an object that focuses the imagination.

Psychotherapists often use an empty chair to signify an important person in their client's life. There's a neat bit of neuroscience here. Ask me to pretend I'm talking to, say, a deceased parent with whom I have some unfinished business and I might hesitate. Put a chair in front of me and the brain seems to have a much easier time exercising the imagination.

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Even more basic, when a parent or child has died a family might well leave their usual place empty, perhaps a chair at the dining room table or their bedroom as a kind of shrine. An empty throne signifies the absence of the monarch, often a dangerous circumstance for a leaderless state. Thus Americans were chilled when President Kennedy's funeral included the traditional riderless horse, a weekend when some feared for the future of the country.
Police stand guard following demonstrations in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Jan. 12, 2015. AFP.

On January 19, 2015, Congolese youth descended into the streets in response to an appeal from opposition figures to defend the country's constitution and nascent democracy. The matter at hand was president Joseph Kabila's latest attempt to legitimize extension of the December 19, 2016 term limit. The Kabila regime tried to muscle through an electoral law requiring a census before presidential and legislative elections. Analysts argued that a census would take several years, pushing the elections well beyond 2016.

When the youth flooded the streets for successive days in what came to be known as the #Telema uprising (Telema means Rise Up in Lingala, a Congolese language), the Congolese senate withdrew the law and the people claimed victory. The victory came at a cost; dozens were killed, scores injured and hundreds arrested including notable human rights activists like Christopher Ngoyi who is still in prison.

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Since the January 2015 uprising, the Kabila regime has unleashed a systematic onslaught on Congolese youth. The regime has killed, injured, disappeared, jailed and driven into exile the youth, and can rightly be characterized as a regime that devours its own children. It can rightly be characterized as a regime that devours its own children.

Emblematic of this onslaught are these high profile cases:

Fred Bauma (member of La Lucha) & Yves Makwambala (web developer) - arrested on March 15, 2015 and still in prison.

Radek Supreme (Congolese hip hop artist) - arrested on May 19, 2015 and released 210 days later for medical reasons.

Juvin Kombi and Pascal Byumanine (members of La Lucha) - arrested on November 30, 2015 with 7 other individuals in Goma and remain in jail.

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Jean Marie Kalonji (Congolese youth leader of Quatrieme Voix - The Fourth Voice) - arrested on December 15, 2015 and remains in the clutches of the Congo's security services.

The Kabila regime has created a climate of fear where both the regime and the people are gripped by dread and paranoia. In its desperation, the regime reveals its weakness and illegitimacy. A strong representative state would not need to invest in security forces, surveillance, and harass advocates who voice a contrary position to policies initiated by the government. Non-violent youth activists live in constant fear of being jailed or worse as their country slips ever deeper into Orwellian terror.

One year later, the regime is still desperately trying to legitimize its stay in power in contravention of the country's constitution. The rationale du jour is the so-called inclusive dialogue. In several speeches since November 28, 2015, president Kabila has argued that the path to elections is through a national inclusive dialogue. A substantial segment of civil society and political opposition have rejected the dialogue as a stalling tactic.

On Lumumba Day, January 17, 2016, the statue of Lumumba in Kinshasa was guarded by Congolese security forces blocking anyone who wanted to pay respect to Congo's independence hero. Even as faith leaders and opposition politicians attempted to commemorate the lives lost in the January 2015 demonstrations on January 19, 2016, the government clamped down by deploying security forces to shutdown meeting sites and arrest dozens of would-be participants.

Unable to rule by consent, the Kabila regime has doubled down on rule by force, which as any observer of history knows, is untenable. It is only a matter of time before the people cast off a repressive regime and reassert basic human rights.

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News / Regional

by Mashudu Netsianda

A UNITED Kingdom-based aspiring chief has taken his two uncles and the Minister of Rural Development, Promotion and Preservation of National Culture and Heritage, Abednico Ncube to court following a protracted wrangle over the Lukuluba chieftainship in Silobela.Joseph Sayi, who is the applicant, has filed an urgent chamber application at the Bulawayo High Court citing his two uncles, Lawrence Builder and Moses Sayi, Minister Ncube, Gweru district administrator, Langton Mupeta and President Robert Mugabe as the respondents.Joseph, in his founding affidavit, is seeking an order interdicting Lawrence Builder from presenting his name for appointment as Chief Lukuluba of the Hogo clan to President Mugabe.Joseph, who is based in the UK, through his lawyers, Masiye-Moyo and Associates, argues that he is the rightful heir to the throne."I aver that after the death of my great grandfather, Mkhuhlane, his eldest son, Ntemba who is my grandfather was the next in line. However, since Ntemba was employed at the then Gweru District Commissioner's office, his uncle Shumba served as regent awaiting the availability of Ntemba," said Joseph.He said during that period the Hogo/Lukuluba community was relocated from Hogo near Gweru to Silobela by the Rhodesian government."When the chieftainship was to revert to Ntemba, the colonial authorities dismantled the Lukuluba chieftainship and reduced it to that of a headman and my father, Mpiyabo subsequently took over the reins following the death of my grandfather," said Joseph.The Lukuluba chieftainship was later restored in line with tradition following a petition to the government."My father is now late and as the first born son whose mother is the senior wife I automatically qualify to take over the chieftainship. During his lifetime my father played a leading role in petitioning the government of Zimbabwe to restore the Lukuluba chieftainship, but unfortunately he died before the issue was resolved," said Joseph.He accuses his two uncles of secretly convening a meeting during which Lawrence Builder's name was submitted to the Gweru DA and Minister Ncube's office for appointment as Chief Lukuluba to President Mugabe."Sometime in December last year I received a phone call from one of my grandfathers while I was in the UK and he advised me that a delegation from the Ministry of Rural Development, requested my clan to submit a name for appointment to the position of Chief Lukuluba. However, when I arrived in Zimbabwe on December 27, I learnt that a meeting was held during which Lawrence Builder's name was submitted for appointment as chief," said Joseph.He argued that in terms of their customs and traditions, by virtue of being the eldest son of his father's senior wife, he automatically qualified to take over the chieftainship. Joseph said his uncle has no basis to claim the Lukuluba chieftainship.Joseph said he has since written a letter to President Mugabe to intervene in the wrangle."While I await the intervention of the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, I've reasonable apprehension that the first and second respondents (Lawrence Builder and Moses) will forward the name of first respondent as being duly nominated Chief Lukuluba thus misleading the fourth respondent (Minister Ncube) who may then forward the name to President Mugabe. Clearly my two uncles have conducted themselves in an unacceptable and perverse way," said Joseph.Justice Nicholas Mathonsi ruled that Lawrence Builder and Moses' actions were unlawful and interdicted them from submitting the first respondent's name.The judge also interdicted Minister Ncube from submitting Moses' name to President Mugabe for appointment as Chief Lukuluba."Pending the resolution of the dispute concerning the appointment of Chief Lukuluba of the Hogo clan by the third respondent (President Mugabe) in terms of section 283 (3) of the constitution of Zimbabwe, fourth respondent be and is hereby ordered not to accept and or forward the name of the first respondent for purposes of appointment as Chief Lukuluba," ruled Justice Mathonsi.The judge ordered Lawrence Builder and Moses to foot the legal expenses incurred by the applicant in the lawsuit.
(Photo Credit: Chad Kamenshine)

The Brooklyn-based electronic music duo Beacon is back with a new album titled Escapements, to be released on February 5th via Ghostly International. The new album tackles more of a higher tempo than their previous works but continues to tap into that dark, yet soulful sound that has always been embedded in their music. It's as much as moody R&B as it has a trip-hop feel mixed with dance floor energy.

Recently, I was able to chat with Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett of Beacon before they hit the road for their upcoming tour with electronic producer Natasha Kmeto, and we talked about the new album and how it translated to their live show, and how they met.

When you were going into making this album, what was the thought process of what you wanted to do?

Jacob: We had toured quite a bit off the last EP and LP, so we wanted to go into the studio with making a more kind of record that lend itself to performing. There's a lot of more uptempo tracks on this record I think then previous releases of ours. Some more dance inspired cuts on the record for sure.

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Thomas: Our creative process in not all that planned out or organized even, its really fluid. A lot of our best ideas come out of just these entrancing jams that we do where we just not even talking to each other, but two hours later have something that we kind of like that turns into an idea. We don't ever have a concrete goal when we go into these sessions.

How will this new record translate to the live show?

Thomas: It already has in a way. We've developed a new live show. The technology behind is based around getting these songs the best versions of themselves. The best kind of iterations and the best platform to perform them, so they definitely influence how we set up this upcoming tour for sure.

Jacob: We invested in a lot of new gear for this tour so its like new ground all around. Just a bunch of new elements we're bringing out on this tour that we're super excited to share.

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How did you guys first get together to form Beacon?

Thomas: We met at the first day of classes in art school Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Jacob: We were working on stuff collaboratively through school, but slowly started working on music over those four years, then upon graduating, started performing live around the city, around Brooklyn, and started recording material around that time as well.

What's it been like to work with a label like Ghostly International?

Jacob: For us, it was such an ideal situation. Coming out of an art school setting, coming from a certain visual place with the project as well, it just fit really well under the Ghostly umbrella. The label honestly cares about the visual ascetics of the music. It fit really well for us. It was a name we were hoping to link up at some point early on, felt very fortunate.
Photo Source: Sama TV, Pakistan

Tensions between the Pakistani and the Afghan governments are gradually coming out in public following the terrorist attack on the Bacha Khan University by the Taliban on January 20th. Although Pakistan's army chief General Raheel Sharif had called the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to seek their help in tracing the perpetrators of "this heinous act" and bringing them to justice, the Pakistani authorities had cautioned that their communication with the Afghan officials did not mean that Islamabad suspected Kabul's official involvement in the attack. On Monday, Pakistan's Foreign Office summoned Syed Abdul Nasir Yousafi, Afghanistan's Islamabad-based Charge d'Affaires and urged his government "to take action against the perpetrators of this heinous act of terrorism and extend cooperation to Pakistani authorities to bring them to justice at the earliest possible."

Afghan complaints against attacks by the Pakistan-based-and-sponsored Taliban are legitimate but they are already so widely known that they no longer excite the media. Remember former President Hamid Karzai publicly cry in 2006 while expressing utter helplessness that terrorists coming from Pakistan [and also NATO strikes] were killing his country's children?

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Ghani has equally been upset with Pakistan. Last summer, he criticized Islamabad for its failure to curb terrorist attacks. "We hoped for peace, but war is declared against us from Pakistani territory," he said at a news conference as, Wall Street Journal reported, "Afghanistan's top security officials stood behind him in a show of support."

Many within the Afghan government question Ghani's toughness toward Pakistan. For instance, last month, Rahmatullah Nabil, the head of National Directorate of Security, quit his job citing "lack of agreement on policy matters" with President Ghani. Apparently, he was upset with Ghani's visit to Islamabad to discuss economic cooperation with Pakistan, a country many Afghans blame for supporting the Taliban that have destroyed and divided the Afghan society.

"Our innocent countrymen were being martyred and beheaded in Kandahar airfield at the moment when [Pakistan] Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif once again said Afghanistan's enemy is Pakistan's enemy," Al-Jazeera quoted a Facebook post by the enraged intelligence chief as he quit his job in protest.

Contrary to the Afghans, it is relatively new for the Pakistanis to publicly show desperation and helplessness toward the Taliban who have found safe sanctuaries in Afghanistan. The fact that Pakistan's army chief, instead of the prime minister, hastily called Afghanistan's President and Chief Executive, reflects the anguish and helplessness that prevails in Islamabad these days. While Islamabad has always had the ability (but certainly not the will) to utilize military or diplomatic channels to control or quash the so-called "good Taliban" and the "bad Taliban", President Ghani's weak government in Kabul simply does not have the capability to prevent the Taliban from operating inside Afghanistan let alone stopping them from attacking Pakistan.

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When they met last month in Rawalpindi on the occasion of the Heart of Asia Conference, Pakistan's General Sharif told Ghani that his country was "committed to work together with Afghanistan on the basis of mutual interest and respect." But, Ghani, in response, reminded him that Pakistan's recent military actions against the Taliban "had created unintended consequences bringing about the displacement of a significant number of militant groups on Afghan soil."

Pakistan faces a dilemma in Afghanistan. Historically, the "good Taliban" [referring to those who do not attack the Pakistani state] and the "bad Taliban" [who attack the Pakistani army and civilians] all mushroomed under the patronage of the country's intelligence agencies. Those focusing on Afghanistan felt deeply betrayed when General Musharraf joined the U.S.-led war against terrorism that not only toppled the Taliban government but also landed several key Taliban leaders in American prisons. My Life with the Taliban, the biography of Taliban's former ambassador to Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was arrested and kept in Guantanamo, explicitly explains the bitterness and sense of betrayal the Taliban feel toward Pakistan. Furthermore, Pakistan is even under pressure to sever ties with the "good Taliban" whom India recently blamed for the January 2nd attack on Pathankot Air Force Station. President Obama, in an interview with the Press Trust of India, reaffirmed the call for Pakistan to take action against all Taliban groups. The President said:

"Pakistan has an opportunity to show that it is serious about delegitimising, disrupting and dismantling terrorist networks. In the region and around the world, there must be zero tolerance for safe havens and terrorists must be brought to justice."

Meanwhile, Pakistan is also getting frustrated with its inability to bring the Taliban back to the negotiation table since the disruption of talks last summer following the disclosure of the news about the death of the Taliban chief Mullah Omar. The more Pakistan shows weakness and frustration, the brighter a future the Taliban will see for themselves in the region hoping that they can once again regain control over Afghanistan and also parts of Pakistan through a renewed insurgency waged from Afghanistan.

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Pakistan will have to approach and deal with the Ghani government carefully. Harsh gestures, such as the summoning of the Afghan envoy in Islamabad on Monday, can backfire. Islamabad and Kabul will have to prepare for a long battle against various Islamic extremist groups (such as the Taliban and the regional brand of the Islamic State). The longer the two governments remain patient with and helpful to each other, the better they can avert a fresh violent wave of radical Islamic movements in the Af-Pak region.
WINDSOR, ON - JANUARY 21: Fans bring in donations of bottled water prior to the game between the Flint Firebirds and the Windsor Spitfireson January 21, 2016 at the WFCU Centre in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The Windsor Spitfires organization requested that fans bring in a donation of bottled water to help with the Flint Michigan water crisis. (Photo by Dennis Pajot/Getty Images)

Many of you have contacted me wanting to know how you can help the people of Flint with the two-year long tragedy of drinking water contaminated by the radical decisions made by the Governor of Michigan. The offer is much appreciated by those who are suffering through this and who have not drank a glass of unpoisoned water since April of 2014.

Unfortunately, the honest answer to your offer of help is, sadly, you can't.

You can't help.

The reason you can't help is that you cannot reverse the irreversible brain damage that has been inflicted upon every single child in Flint. The damage is permanent. There is no medicine you can send, no doctor or scientist who has any way to undo the harm done to thousands of babies, toddlers and children (not to mention their parents). They are ruined for life, and someone needs to tell you the truth about that. They will, forever, suffer from various neurological impediments, their IQs will be lowered by at least 20 points, they will not do as well in school and, by the time they reach adolescence, they will exhibit various behavioral problems that will land a number of them in trouble, and some of them in jail.

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That is what we know about the history of lead poisoning when you inflict it upon a child. It is a life sentence. In Flint, they've already ingested it for these two years, and the toll has already been taken on their developing brains. No check you write, no truckloads of Fiji Water or Poland Spring, will bring their innocence or their health back to normal.

It's done. And it was done knowingly, enacted by a political decision from a governor and a political party charged by the majority of Michigan's citizens who elected them to cut taxes for the rich, take over majority-black cities by replacing the elected mayors and city councils, cut costs, cut services, cut more taxes for the rich, increase taxes on retired teachers and public employees and, ultimately, try to decimate their one line of defense against all this, this thing we used to call a union.

The amount of generosity since the national media finally started to cover this story has been tremendous. Pearl Jam sent 100,000 bottles of water. The next day the Detroit Lions showed up with a truck and 100,000 bottles of water. Yesterday, Puff Daddy and Mark Wahlberg donated 1,000,000 bottles of water! Unbelievably amazing. They acknowledged it's a very short-term fix, and that it is.

Flint has 102,000 residents, each in need of an average of 50 gallons of water a day for cooking, bathing, washing clothes, doing the dishes, and drinking (I'm not counting toilet flushes, watering plants or washing the car). But 100,000 bottles of water is enough for just one bottle per person -- in other words, just enough to cover brushing one's teeth for one day.

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You would have to send 200 bottles a day, per person, to cover what the average American (we are Americans in Flint) needs each day. That's 102,000 citizens times 200 bottles of water - which equals 20.4 million 16oz. bottles of water per day, every day, for the next year or two until this problem is fixed (oh, and we'll need to find a landfill in Flint big enough for all those hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles, thus degrading the local environment even further). Anybody want to pony up for that? Because THAT is the reality.

This is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. There is not a terrorist organization on Earth that has yet to figure out how to poison 100,000 people every day for two years -- and get away with it. That took a governor who subscribes to an American political ideology hell-bent on widening the income inequality gap and conducting various versions of voter and electoral suppression against people of color and the poor. It was those actions that led Michigan's Republican governor to try out his economic and racial experiment in Flint (and please don't tell me this has nothing to do with race or class; he has removed the mayors of a number of black cities.

This, and the water crisis in Flint, never would have been visited upon the residents of Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe -- and everyone here knows that). We have now seen the ultimate disastrous consequences of late-20th century, neo-conservative, trickle down public policy. That word "trickle," a water-based metaphor, was used to justify this economic theory -- well, it's no longer a metaphor, is it? Because now we're talking about how actual water has been used to institute these twisted economic beliefs in destroying the lives of the black and the poor in Flint, Michigan.

So, do you still want to help? Really help? Because what we need in Flint - and across the country - right now, tonight, is a nonviolent army of people who are willing to stand up for this nation, and go to bat for the forgotten of Flint.

Here's what you and I need to do:

1. Demand the removal and arrest of Rick Snyder, the Governor of Michigan.

When the police have an "active shooter" situation in a building, they must first stop the shooter before they can bring aid to the victims. The perp who allowed the poisoning to continue once he knew something was wrong -- and his minions who cooked the evidence so the public and the feds wouldn't find out -- must be removed from office ASAP. Whether it's via resignation, recall or prosecution, this must happen now because he is still refusing to take the aggressive and immediate action needed. His office, as recently as this past Thursday, was claiming the EPA had no legal authority to tell him what to do. You know the EPA -- that federal agency every Republican politician wants eliminated? Governor Snyder is not going to obey the law. He has covered up the crime, and I submit he has committed an act of voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. Last month I posted a meme of me holding a pair of handcuffs with the hashtag #ArrestGovSnyder:

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It went viral, so I posted a petition (link) to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to arrest the governor -- and asking President Obama to send help to Flint immediately. As each day brought a new revelation of the Governor's corruption or incompetence, and with Rachel Maddow on a nightly tear, the momentum built. MoveOn.org and Democracy For America joined me in circulating our petition. We are now on our way to having a half-million signatures! Then Bernie Sanders became the first candidate to call for the Governor's removal. That same day, President Obama issued his first emergency order for Flint. The next night, Hillary Clinton fiercely called out the racist actions of the Governor.

You want to help? Sign the petition -- and get everyone you know to sign it. Now. Another half-million signatures could become the tipping point we need. All eyes are on Flint.

2. Make the State of Michigan pay for the disaster that the State of Michigan created.

The governor wants the president to declare Flint a federal disaster zone and have him send federal money to fix the problem. Not so fast. All relief aid for Flint currently coming from the federal government to Michigan is going through the Governor's office to disburse. That is literally paying the fox to fix the chicken coop he destroyed.

As a Michigan resident and voter, I think that the people who elected Governor Snyder must show some of that personal responsibility they're always lecturing about to the poor. The majority of my fellow Michiganders wanted this kind of government (they elected him twice), so now they should have to pay for it. This year the state treasury posted nearly a $600 million surplus. There is also another $600 million in the state's "rainy day fund". That's $1.2 billion -- just about what Flint's congressman, Dan Kildee, estimates it will cost to replace the water infrastructure and care for the thousands of poisoned children throughout their growing years.

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And before there is any talk of federal tax dollars being used (and, yes, they will be needed), the state legislature must remove the billion-dollars' worth of tax cuts the Snyder administration gave the wealthy when he took office. That will go a long way to helping not just Flint but Michigan's other destitute cities and school districts.

3. The federal government must then be placed in charge.

The state government cannot be trusted to get this right. So, instead of declaring a federal disaster zone, President Obama must declare the same version of martial law that Governor Snyder declared over the cities of Flint and Detroit. He must step in and appoint a federal emergency manager in the state capitol to direct the resources of both the state and federal government in saving Flint.

This means immediately sending in FEMA in full force. It means sending in the CDC to determine the true extent of not just the lead poisoning in the water, but also the latest outbreak that has been discovered in Flint -- a tenfold increase in the number of Flint people who've contracted Legionnaires Disease. There have now been 87 cases since the switch to the Flint River water, and ten people have died. The local hospital has also noted sharp increases in a half-dozen other toxins found in people's bodies.

We need the CDC. The EPA must take over the testing of the water, and the Army Corps of Engineers must be sent in to begin replacing the underground pipes. Like the levees in New Orleans, this will be a massive undertaking. If it is turned over to for-profit businesses, it will take a decade and cost billions. This needs to happen right now and Obama must be in charge.

4. Evacuate any and all Flint residents who want to leave now.

They've suffered long enough and, until the water is truly safe, no one should have to stay there who doesn't want to. The state and FEMA should move people into nearby white townships that are still hooked up to Lake Huron water.

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5. For those who choose to stay in Flint, FEMA must create a temporary water system in each home.

One idea that has been suggested is to deliver two 55-gallon drums to every home in Flint. Each day water trucks will arrive to fill them with fresh clean glacial water from Lake Huron. The drums will have taps attached to them. People can't be expected to carry jugs of water from buildings that are miles away.

In the end, we will need to create a new economy and bring new employment to this town that created the middle class, that elected the first black mayor, and that believed in and created the American Dream. They deserved more than to be poisoned by their own Governor -- a Governor who thought that, because the people in the town were politically weak, he could get away with this unnoticed and without a fight. He figured wrong.

A crime against humanity has been committed against the people of Flint, making them refugees in their own homes. Tell me honestly: if you were living in Flint right now, and you learned that your children had been drinking lead-filled water for two years, and then you discovered that the Governor knew this and the state lied about it -- tell me, just how fast would your head be spinning? With your children now poisoned, and with the poisoning continuing... is the word "nonviolence" dominating your thoughts right now? Are you absolutely, stunningly amazed how peaceful the people in Flint have remained? Are you curious how much longer that can last? I hope it does.

If you want to help Flint, sign the petition, demand that the federal government take action, and then get involved yourself, wherever you live, so that this doesn't happen to you -- and so that the people we elect know they can no longer break the law as they rule by fiat or indifference. We deserve much better than this.
President Obama took a lot of heat recently for criticizing college leftists who are offended by dissenting opinions. But he's absolutely right: Productive discourse is dying, trampled over by closed minds who value comfortable opinion-holding over uncomfortable soul-searching. As dialogue lies flailing and gasping, outrage culture's pulse is stronger than ever. We see the degraded consequence everywhere.

We see it in Donald Trump's xenophobia. We see it in the smug rise of a regressive, illiberal "liberalism" on college campuses that interprets (and misinterprets) the other side's words in the most negative possible light--even trifling dissent is labeled a product of white male privilege or (when the opponent is neither white nor male) simple ignorance. We see it in any online comments section--cesspools of racism, sexism, xenophobia, naked hatred. At its most extreme, we see it in tribalistic mass murderers, from Dylann Storm Roof to the San Bernardino shooters.

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Hatred is everywhere; empathy and its cousin, civility, are nowhere. For in this culture of reflexive outrage, empathy is weakness. Listening? Surrender. When discourse is a competition instead of a dialectic, there are winners and losers; and one wins by persuading the other side (or at least scoring more re-tweets), even though we learn most from engaging our opponents. Outrage culture turns productive discourse into dumb competition.

Listening is hard, and sitting still can be taxing, especially when someone is being belittling, condescending, or immature. But outrage culture is so much pricier. By naming all disagreement problematic--"ignorant" (to the close-minded leftist), "naive" (to the close-minded right-winger)--it trashes thoughtful deliberation, which happens to be the very fuel our democratic machinery needs to run. Since no one's mind is malleable, nothing changes. Gridlock clogs the drains. Democracy halts.

Worse, outrage culture tempts us to cram a political opponent, always a complex human, into a simple box: Sexist, racist, xenophobe, bigot. The Right lobs different labels--communist, naive kid, bleeding heart--but the underlying psychology is identical: An anti-democratic stigmatization of the Other, which facilitates productive discourse's fall. Many people with valuable insights refrain from contentious discussions since they're afraid of being called names. I see this dynamic every day here at Harvard Law School (where, unfortunately, an intolerant Left commits most of the name-calling).

I suspect that social media--with its capacity to collate like-minded people into echo chambers promoting brevity at the expense of nuance, likes and re-tweets at the expense of knowledge--is helping outrage culture proliferate. Just ask President Obama. He's had to tolerate the anti-democratic ethos of knee-jerk outrage more than anyone else--and he happens to be the first president whose term fell entirely within the era of the social media echo chamber.

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Maybe that's why the President has spoken out so strongly against the illiberal liberalism strangling college campuses lately. Maybe it's why, in his final State of the Union address, he denounced a politics where the rhetoric of offense and tribalism trumps that of reason and common purpose. In addition to condemning outrage culture during his State of the Union speech, he exemplified its opposite by playing to our hopes instead of our fears, by daring us to exhibit the same audacity that allowed us to reach the moon and to recover from the Civil War. The same audacity that enabled him to open-mindedly befriend conservatives as an aspiring Harvard lawyer, with and without the approval of liberal friends.

Did Obama betray college liberals when he condemned their bizarre characterization of free speech, humanity's most hard-won political liberty (just ask my Lebanese parents), as regressive? No. He simply understands that to grow, personally and collectively, we must give and take. We must, from time to time, shut up and listen. Too many college liberals have forgotten how to listen, even though they constantly demand that others listen to them.

Obama knows that it's easy to hold opinions, especially when they mirror your inclinations. It's harder to think, with no aim--not self-justification, not self-righteous anger, not the will to power--aside from truth. And yet, as so often, the harder path is more fruitful than the easy one.

So take it from the President: America is best when it's "[b]ig-hearted. Undaunted by challenge. Optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." As years of congressional gridlock show, democracy excels only when citizens--from Congress on down--are willing to listen and to assert, to give and to take. Democracy doesn't work absent hard discussion--uncomfortable dialogue that, though anything but a "safe space," makes us a more cohesive (and thus safer) society in the long-run.

Whether you're a proud lefty like me or a right-winger, stop fearing disagreement. We're in this boat together--and unless we start plugging up this rig's leaks soon, we'll all go down together. Perhaps, as we drown, some partisan buffoons will come gasping and screaming to the surface. "X person is a Y!" they'll exclaim, to replies of "you're so ignorant!"

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WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 11: Rosario Reyes (L), 36, and her son Victor Reyes, 7, chant 'Si se puede!' during a prayer for justice vigil and rally in front of the Supreme Court December 11, 2015 in Washington, DC. Organized by The Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) and CASA, about 40 people gathered to pray for the Supreme Court justices after they agreed to hear a case regarding President Barack Obama's executive order to expand Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and implement Deferred Action for Parental Accountability. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

With the 2016 election season upon us, the Latino vote is again grabbing national headlines. At 55 million strong and growing, Latinos make an impact on ballot boxes in red states, blue states, and battleground states. Will 2016 be a year that proves demography is destiny or will Latinos continue to punch below their weight at the ballot box?

This November, there will be 27 million Latinos eligible to vote, up from 23 million in 2012 when they accounted for a record-high 10% of the electorate. But in 2012 more than half of all eligible voters, 12.1 million in all, stayed away from the voting booth. A recent study from Pew Research Center indicates that the growing numbers of Latinos have not succeeded in forcing action on policies like immigration reform and deportations.

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Republican candidates tend to ignore or actively incite fear of the growing Latino community. But Democrats also do a poor job of turning out Latinos in high numbers and, when in office, are unable to deliver on priority issues for the Latino community. Low voter turnout is a symptom of civic disengagement by Latinos in American society. To unlock Latino civic potential beyond 2016, the title of a report by the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society program, we must consider the broader context of civic engagement and create institutionalized long-view strategies to integrate Latinos so that they are fairly represented in American society. Four promising practices emerged from the report.

The first step is to focus on immigrant integration and naturalization. English language acquisition must become a national imperative. Nearly all Latinos (95%) say it is important to speak English, yet according to the Migration Policy Institute there is an acute shortage of teachers and classrooms. A campaign to learn English led by the private, public, and nonprofit sectors will serve us well as a nation.

Naturalization should be a goal of our immigration system, including the creation of a U.S. Department of Citizenship Services. An estimated three million Latinos are eligible to naturalize and data shows that once a person becomes a citizen they engage more by voting, volunteering, and advocating for their communities and families.

The second and third steps are to increase civic education and leadership development opportunities. Every month, 80,000 U.S. born Latinos turn 18. By bringing civic education to the classroom and providing opportunities for leadership development, the pipeline will be fortified for years to come. We must inculcate civic habits and convey civic knowledge at an early age so young people become active, knowledgeable, and engaged voting adults. Leadership incubators like Teach for America and the Peace Corps must reach out to young Latinos. Leadership and civic training matters. Just look at how powerful youth-led movements such as the DREAMer's can be.

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The fourth step is voter engagement. Latinos cannot only hear from their elected officials once every four years. Nor should Latinos be thought of as a single-issue voting bloc motivated solely by immigration. Latinos, like all Americans, care deeply about jobs, wages, healthcare, quality education, the environment, and national security. In 2012, Kantar Media CMAG analyzed political ad spending and found that Spanish language television got a meager 4.57 percent of all dollars spent. Only sustained engagement by politicians, in both languages and across a variety of platforms including social media and mobile, will yield results. Candidates and parties who successfully engage this community will be able to build a powerful voting coalition.
After a single University of Southern California student complained about optional questions about their sexual history that were asked as part of a required, online Title IX training video, administrators apologized and took them down, per the Washington Post.

"It was just full of super personal questions," Jacob Ellenhorn told Campus Reform, a watchdog that covers higher education.

I've spent the last two years investigating sexual assault policy at USC. While both the student complaints and USC's response, to fold like a tent instead of continuing to gather necessary input, are sadly typical, they continue to raise questions about just how far our campus has to go.

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The questions, part of the "standardized module being used by hundreds of colleges and universities across the country," according to a USC statement, asked students how many sexual encounters and partners they had in the past three months, if they had used contraception, and if they had been drinking or using drugs. And according to experts, by excluding those questions, USC might now be missing some necessary information.

"As a researcher that information is very interesting, as it would enable analysis of how patterns of sexual behavior relate to risk of assault or perpetration," said Professor Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who coauthored the book "Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality."

However, Armstrong acknowledged that removing the questions might be related to student-administration relations, saying, "I can see why students might want them removed, particularly if the level of trust with administration is not high."

But according to Campus Clarity, the company that administers the survey, the responses are anonymously recorded, and totally optional (a no-comment option is clearly visible next to each question), which paints a rather perplexing picture. Moreover, USC's statement only referred to "these questions," but declined to specify exactly which questions it was removing. Why did USC both apologize for, and then remove questions for which "no comment" was an optional response?

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The student quoted in the original Campus Reform piece that ostensibly led to the question takedown shed more light on the motive near the end of the same article when he criticized not just the questions, but the (accurate and necessary) implications behind them.

"It kept on saying that drunk people cannot give consent," he complained. "In one scenario both the man and the woman were drunk but the video still blames the male for the assault. I found that a little confusing."

When the Washington Post asked Campus Clarity to comment, they had this to say:

"And it is disturbing that someone could draw this conclusion from the course," the organization said, adding: "The reason the man is to blame is because he rapes her while she is unconscious. It does not matter that he has also been drinking. As mentioned in the course, 'being drunk doesn't release anyone from legal or student conduct responsibility.' "

Let's be clear. The point of the training course is for students to be educated on exactly what consent is: a conscious, affirmative, clear, and freely given decision by each individual to engage in mutually agreed upon sexual activity without coercion. The fact that some students think it is legal in California, or anywhere else, for that matter, to have sex with someone who is unconscious (which is what the video actually portrayed), is deeply disturbing, and demonstrates the need for the course in the first place.

While anyone has the right to criticize and speak freely about their experiences, the particular notion that a man is free of blame when both he and a woman are intoxicated perpetuates a dangerously retrograde view of consent. But USC implicitly affirmed that notion, by treating it as part of a legitimate complaint and apologizing instead of correcting the misconception, and that's even more troubling.

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There is no indication from Campus Reform, USC, or otherwise that anyone else complained about the "super personal" questions. Nonetheless, the response to the 'watchdog' article was to scrap a vital data-gathering component of a mandatory sexual assault training course used by hundreds of schools around the country.

Finally, place "super personal" questions about sexual history, which are by definition the exact opposite of 'personal' since they're anonymous and optional, on the spectrum of the uncomfortable campus environment debate that has pervaded higher education news for much of the last year. Compared to Jewish students as Missouri who found swastikas made in human feces in a bathroom, or African American students who found cotton balls in their cultural center, do anonymous and optional questions really have a place at the table?
The Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986 not only shocked millions watching it on TV, it threw America's ambitions for space into upheaval.

The Reagan administration had had every reason to want to make space travel "ordinary." They wanted to privatize it, transferring space adventures from NASA control rooms to corporate boardrooms. The decision to include Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher as one of the space shuttle's crew was intended to prove that a space traveler could be an "ordinary person."

The Challenger disaster threatened all of that. Space travel was not so "ordinary" after all. That night, however, in one of his most famous speeches, Reagan argued that, in America, even great disasters can be "ordinary." Saying that he laid the rhetorical groundwork for promoting the idea that outer space should be commercial space.

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In a 1983 essay, George Keyworth, Reagan's science advisor, expressed the ideal, if not the reality, of the Reagan administration's use of space. "How can the United States fashion a space program that addresses today's national aspirations and needs?" he asked. He provided his own answer:

Like an evolving company, the US space program has options for both horizontal and vertical expansion. . . I would characterize the evolution of commercial launch services as a kind of vertical expansion. Conversely, horizontal expansion would require revolutionary new ventures in space exploration. These would be the kind of initiatives that open new frontiers, develop new technologies, or recapture the sense of national unity that Apollo did.

But in order for space to become an economic frontier, it had to undergo a certain familiarization. A vision of a vast and dangerous frontier had to be reimagined so that investors would be willing to take financial risks. NASA's so-called Teacher in Space Program was in keeping with this revision. Drawing on an age-old American means of domesticating the frontier, it put a New England woman, Christa McAuliffe, on the space shuttle Challenger. Space travel, as the publicity around her flight claimed, was now safe.

The Challenger explosion clearly posed a serious challenge to the Reagan Plan. The shuttle's visible and tragic demise would quash the hopes of those in the Reagan administration who sought a much more privatized space program, and NASA would take years to recover (if it ever did). But, the ideology -- of economic expansion, technological revolution, venture and growth -- survived, and eventually thrived thanks to Reagan's audacious speech the very night of the disaster.

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Even as it eulogized the seven victims of the Challenger explosion, the address functioned as a vigorous apologia for the American-style publicity that was behind NASA's 1960s adventures.

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.

In this way, Reagan framed the shocking and manifest character of the Challenger disaster as a normal product of political freedom. Publicized disasters, Reagan argued, have a direct ideological function -- that is, through their visibility we are reminded of "the way freedom is." Thus, Reagan went on to insist that the space shuttle program would continue.

We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and journeys continue.

From an argument for the importance of visibility, he moved seamlessly to promise economic progress in space exploration, complete with private citizens.

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Reagan did not save NASA in the wake of the Challenger disaster. Far from it, he made the case for accepting the intrusion of high-risk venture capital into the upper atmosphere and beyond. Today, while NASA tries to convince Congress to keep on funding its Mars ambitions, Elon Musk's company, Space X, has become the emblem of the future of space. And Musk has competition from other space entrepreneurs: Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, owns Blue Origin, a spaceflight company, and Richard Branson has big ambitions for Virgin Galactic to take paying passengers into space "with a goal of democratizing access to space." Branson claims to be back on track to become the first commercial space service despite a devastating set back in 2014 which killed one of the two test pilots on board.

In these and other adventures lie proof that Reagan's hopes for the commercialization of space travel survive, now a full 30 years after the Challenger disaster.
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a news conference after a stop at the United Steelworkers Local 310L union hall, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

For a long time, as he campaigned for president, a wide spectrum of establishment media insisted that Bernie Sanders couldn't win. Now they're sounding the alarm that he might.

And, just in case you haven't gotten the media message yet -- Sanders is "angry," kind of like Donald Trump.

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Elite media often blur distinctions between right-wing populism and progressive populism -- as though there's not all that much difference between appealing to xenophobia and racism on the one hand and appealing for social justice and humanistic solidarity on the other.

Many journalists can't resist lumping Trump and Sanders together as rabble-rousing outliers. But in the real world, the differences are vast.

Donald Trump is to Bernie Sanders as Archie Bunker is to Jon Stewart.

Among regular New York Times columnists, aversion to Bernie Sanders has become more pronounced in recent days at both ends of the newspaper's ideological spectrum, such as it is. Republican Party aficionado David Brooks (whose idea of a good political time is Marco Rubio) has been freaking out in print, most recently with a Tuesday column headlined "Stay Sane America, Please!"

Brooks warned that his current nightmare for the nation is in triplicate -- President Trump, President Cruz or President Sanders. For Brooks, all three contenders appear to be about equally awful; Trump is "one of the most loathed men in American public life," while "America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are."

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That "political center" of power sustains huge income inequality, perpetual war, scant action on climate change and reflexive support for the latest unhinged escalation of the nuclear arms race. In other words, what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot realism."

Meanwhile, liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman (whose idea of a good political time is Hillary Clinton) keeps propounding a stand-on-head formula for social change -- a kind of trickle-down theory of political power, in which "happy dreams" must yield to "hard thinking," a euphemism for crackpot realism.

An excellent rejoinder has come from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. "Krugman doesn't get it," Reich wrote. "I've been in and around Washington for almost fifty years, including a stint in the cabinet, and I've learned that real change happens only when a substantial share of the American public is mobilized, organized, energized, and determined to make it happen."

And Reich added: "Political 'pragmatism' may require accepting 'half loaves' -- but the full loaf has to be large and bold enough in the first place to make the half loaf meaningful. That's why the movement must aim high -- toward a single-payer universal health, free public higher education, and busting up the biggest banks, for example."

But for mainline media, exploring such substance is low priority, much lower than facile labeling and horseracing... and riffing on how Bernie Sanders sounds "angry."

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On "Morning Edition," this week began with NPR political reporter Mara Liasson telling listeners that "Bernie Sanders' angry tirades against Wall Street have found a receptive audience." (Meanwhile, without anger or tirades, "Hillary Clinton often talks about the fears and insecurities of ordinary voters.")

The momentum of the Sanders campaign will soon provoke a lot more corporate media attacks along the lines of a Chicago Tribune editorial that appeared in print on Monday. The newspaper editorialized that nomination of Trump, Cruz or Sanders "could be politically disastrous," and it declared: "Wise heads in both parties are verging on panic."

Such panic has just begun, among party elites and media elites. Eager to undermine Sanders, the Tribune editorial warned that as a "self-declared democratic socialist," Sanders "brandishes a label that, a Gallup poll found, would automatically make him unacceptable to nearly half the public."

A strong critique of such commentaries has come from the media watch group FAIR, where Jim Naureckas pointed out that "voters would not be asked to vote for 'a socialist' -- they'd be asked to vote for Bernie Sanders. And while pollsters don't include Sanders in general election matchups as often as they do Hillary Clinton, they have asked how the Vermont senator would do against various Republicans -- and he generally does pretty well. In particular, against the candidate the Tribune says is 'best positioned' to 'capture the broad, sensible center' -- Jeb Bush -- Sanders leads in polls by an average of 3.0 percentage points, based on polling analysis by the website Real Clear Politics."

In mass media, the conventional sensibilities of pundits like Brooks and Krugman, reporters like Liasson, and outlets like the Chicago Tribune routinely get the first and last words. Here, the last ones are from Naureckas:

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I am fed up with Christian in organized form that do not stand up for vulnerable brothers ans sisters. Since I live in Sweden I will start to address the Swedish Church and other Swedish Christians in organized form who are not fighting for the survival of Christians in the Middle East:

Join the fight or stop calling yourselves Christians! Jesus would be furious with you. His followers are being persecuted, kidnapped and killed. The few that remain in areas controlled by Islamists are living as slaves. What are you doing about this? He is equally disappointed in you for not standing up for other vulnerable and targeted people, such as the Yazidis.

Lars Adaktusson has initiated a resolution in one of the world's major political arenas, the European Parliament. He wants the persecution to be recognized for what it is: genocide. We, at A Demand For Action, sat on the edge of our seats in front of our computer screens during the debate in the Parliament on the evening of Wednesday January 20th. A discussion on the millions of non-Muslims, but also Muslim minorities continued existence in Syria and Iraq, was discussed. MP's gave their presentations.

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In the beginning, there was some tension between the speaker and one of the British politicians. The speaker thought the Brit was talking too fast, and the simultaneous interpreters therefore could not keep up. The Brit was furious over being interrupted, as he only had 90 seconds to discuss an ongoing genocide that he wants to help stop. And in that spirit, the discussion continued. Adaktusson opened with his powerful speech and it was hard to argue with him. At the same time, all of my social media chat rooms were driving me crazy. Friends and acquaintances from Syria, Iraq, Australia, Europe and the U.S. who were all discussing the debate as it was in progress. Will the EU recognize and take action to stop the genocide? Will anything substantial happen before the Assyrians/ Chaldeans/ Syriacs, Melkites, Armenians, other Christians and Yazidis, become only history in their native lands?

Many among the chat rooms wrote that their tears were falling while others cited country by country: Belgium, Portugal, the UK, Germany, Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Poland ... We could now hear them use words similar to "genocide" and then hear the interpreters say the same word in English.

"Now, for the first time since my sister was kidnapped and disappeared, and my brothers were killed, I can feel an ounce of joy. Maybe we now will get at least some kind of rectification. Thank the Swede Nuri, I beg you, thank him." These are the words I received via Facebook from a Yazidi. "God exists and he has not forgotten us. Thank the Swedes for their support, thank both the Christian Lars and the other, Bodil! The Swedes have good hearts and are good Christians," a Christian friend from Baghdad wrote.

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REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF REAL CLEAR DEFENSE

Last month, the Pentagon unceremoniously dropped the name "Air Sea Battle" from its bureaucratic lexicon. However, unofficially, the Air Sea Battle concept has for years enjoyed the same status as Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series as that which "must not be named."



The clear political reason for the Pentagon's bureaucratic dodge has to do with the very essence of AirSea Battle - the implied imperative to strike the mainland of China should the People's Liberation Army launch an attack on American forces or allies in Asia.

In fact, the negative response to Air Sea Battle from a strange bedfellows coalition of the American Left, e.g., Amitai Etzioni, and top military strategists like T.X. Hammes when the concept first surfaced in 2009 was nothing short of ballistic. As a result of that public flogging, the name Air Sea battle has now gone the way of all flesh.

The question of how Washington should counter-strike if Beijing strikes first nonetheless lives on. It is a question that may hit any new president smack upside the Situation Room. It is therefore a question that certainly must be asked during this 2016 campaign debate.

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This extended, and highly nuanced, excerpt from an interview I conducted for the Crouching Tiger book with Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace presciently captures the essence of Air Sea Battle in a Taiwan scenario:

"There is a clear risk that despite the presence of secure second strike capabilities on both sides, China and the United States could well find themselves in a serious military conflict in the years to come, and the risk of such a conflict arises because China has now steadily acquired the capabilities to prevent the United States from coming to the assistance of its friends in Asia if Chinese political objectives demand such a campaign.

So, for example, if China faces the prospect of a Taiwan that appears to be going independent, China will do its best to suppress Taiwanese military capabilities in order to prevent such a outcome from happening while it simultaneously works to limit the United States from being able to come to Taiwan's defense. And the Chinese tools that will be used in that scenario will be everything from its land-based ballistic missiles targeting American carriers and its land-based ballistic missiles targeting American forward bases to its conventional military instruments to attack U.S. power projection forces that would be moving to Taiwan's aid.

What is the United States to do in such circumstances? It has one of three choices.

One is it can decide that the business of attempting to protect Taiwan has simply become too dangerous operationally and so it changes its political objectives. That is, its cedes Taiwan to China.

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The second thing it could do would be to simply aim to defeat Chinese war fighting capabilities though local battles that do not attempt to reach and touch the Chinese homeland.

And the third thing it can do is to conclude that it would be impossible to defend Taiwan purely through defensive actions alone; and therefore, there has to be some measure of offensive conventional operations that target the Chinese homeland.

There is every likelihood that the United States will not do the first. That is, it will not cede Taiwan to China for political reasons.

There is every likelihood that the United States will conclude that it cannot do the second. That is, it cannot protect Taiwan adequately through purely defensive means and therefore it is compelled to go to Option Three, which is to protect Taiwan and all its other Asian allies by including in its strategic mix at least some conventional attacks on the Chinese homeland. Now, this is the essence of air sea battle.

Air sea battle essentially is attempting to protect American freedom of action in Pacific Asia by holding at risk key Chinese capabilities that happen to be located on the Chinese mainland. By attacking these capabilities only in the war, it essentially creates a freedom for the United States to be able to move its war fighting capabilities closer to the Chinese coast which is where all America's allies happen to be located.

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This, in turn, raises the question of whether even conventional attacks on the Chinese coast do not open the door to potential Chinese nuclear retaliation.

Now how China actually responds in such a situation is really impossible to predict with any confidence today. Much will depend on the political circumstances surrounding the conflict. Much will depend on the stakes as Chinese leaders see those stakes. And much will depend on the extent on the damage or the devastation caused by American attacks on the Chinese homeland.

It is possible that some of these attacks will be relatively discreet. They will be relatively focused, and aimed at paralyzing Chinese response capabilities rather than exacting an extremely high human toll. And if that is the case, if we are lucky, China may choose not to respond through any sort of nuclear instruments.

On the other hand, China could do just the opposite and at least threaten the use of nuclear weapons if not actually use them. And then the question becomes if China reaches that point, is American deterrence, the fact that both sides have secure second strike capabilities, is that adequate enough?

And honestly, no one can tell you whether those capabilities would be adequate or not because, deterrence is in many ways a mystical product. We don't know what contributes to it.

We just hope that anyone threatening to use nuclear weapons would be cautioned by the fact that the use of nuclear weapons invites comparable retaliation and that puts both sides in a very untenable position before long."

It should be clear from these observations of Ashley Tellis why we must hear from frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on this issue - and all of the other candidates nipping at their heels.

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Opinion / Columnist

The trouble with being neophyte Guru is that people do not take them seriously even when they have said something sensible because of the yawning chasm between what they say and what they do. Our MDC MP for Bulawayo South, Eddie Cross, is one such greenhorn philosopher who words and actions are poles apart!"If you are in government or business, then you need to maintain a sense of proportion  what is important? What is really urgent, so urgent that it has to be dealt with NOW!" advised MP Cross in his latest article."It is so easy to be diverted by things that are not really in any sense important or deal breaking. However sometimes things creep up on us which turn out to be anything but trivial and which have the potential to change a whole lot of things and which, if not attended to will cause damage."Has it ever occurred to MP Cross that implementing the democratic reforms agreed in the GPA during the GNU were both important and urgent, "so urgent that it (implementing the reforms) has (had) to be dealt with NOW (immediately)"? Then why the dickens did MDC fail to implement the reforms? We would not be in this mess with Mugabe and Zanu PF back in power and ruining all our lives!Yes sometimes things do "creep up on us which turn out to be anything but trivial" but that would be a feeble excuse for MDC's failure to implement any reforms because:- SADC and many others reminded MDC leaders, including (no doubt) MP Cross himself, throughout the GNU to implement the reforms but MDC paid no heed.- MDC had five years to implement the reforms but failed to get even one reform implemented. Not one! With so time in the hands to carry out this important and urgent task, which they had initially said they would do in a year and half, it is nonsense to talk of time creeping up on them.Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, MP Cross and many of his follow MDC leaders continue to treat their failure to implement the reforms during the GNU as if it is a trivial matter. If the reforms were implemented then Zimbabweans would have had their freedoms and basic human rights including the right to free, fair and credible elections denied to them for all these years finally restored.Mugabe and Zanu PF would NOT have blatantly rigged the election and being unelectable, because of their track record of corruption, incompetence and murderous oppression, Zanu PF would not have won free and fair elections. In short Mugabe and Zanu PF would not be in power ruining the economic and destroying all our lives and dreams.Implementing the GPA reforms is the single most important and urgent issue of our time because with no reform there is no hope of this nation hoping free, fair and credible elections  the pre-requisite for breaking the no-regime-change mantra Mugabe imposed on the nation and replacing it with a good and democratic regime. Only a good and democratic regime will have the vision and political will to implement the tough economic reforms required for economic recovery.By failing to get even one reform implemented MP Cross and his fellow MDC leaders have proven beyond doubt that they are breathtakingly incompetent and corrupt. These are very serious charges so serious that in healthy and functioning democratic nations any leader found to be incompetent and/or would apologize and resign for good from ever holding public office.MP Eddie Cross, Morgan Tsvangirai and the rest of the MDC leader have never apologized and have been doing their best to ingratiate themselves to the people so they are elected back into parliament, other than the few like MP Cross most MDC leaders lost the parliamentary or senatorial seats in the rigged July 2013 elections. If we aspire for a healthy and functioning democratic Zimbabwe then we must make sure MDC leaders who betrayed the nation during the GNU ride into the sunset of their public life! Never ever to return!
The holiday decorations had barely been returned to the attic when 2016 already saw its first high-profile cyber attack. Time Warner Cable said on Jan. 6 that up to 320,000 customers may have had their email passwords stolen. The information likely was gathered through malware downloaded during phishing attacks or indirectly through attacks against other companies that store TWC subscriber information, the company said.

Here we go again. The world is coming off another banner year for hackers. Notable attacks in 2015 included the U.S. Office of Personnel Management server breach that compromised sensitive personal information of about 21.5 million people; the theft of information from tens of millions of Anthem Inc. customers (considered among the largest data breaches in corporate history); the stealing of personal data including Social Security numbers and completed tax returns of 330,000 people from the IRS; and the infamous Ashley Madison hacking that provided grist for the tabloids and late-night TV comedians for weeks.

Everyone still cringes over 2014's big attacks: The theft of data including names, mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses from more than 70 million Target shoppers and the credit card information of 40 million shoppers. Home Depot's admission that 56 million accounts had been put at risk after hackers infiltrated the retailer's systems. J.P. Morgan, Staples, Healthcare.gov, Neiman Marcus... the list of victims goes on and on.

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The Worst May Be Yet To Come

Cyber attacks are nothing new. In fact, the first Internet breach occurred before there was even an Internet - the 1988 Morris worm that traveled across ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet, and infected more than 6,000 university, research center and military computers.

But the incidents have increased in recent years as people hand over more and more personal information to retailers, financial services companies, healthcare providers and other businesses and government agencies via the Internet and hackers find new ways to exploit security holes.

And the worst may be yet to come. While more high-profile attacks like the ones that attracted headlines in recent years are a virtual certainty in 2016, the biggest Internet security threat this year could be something else: A rise in identity theft and account takeovers.

It's a cause-and-effect of the massive breaches of the last few years. In 2016, cybercriminals increasingly will put all that sensitive data to nefarious use.

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The Dark Web

Hackers often sell stolen customer data on the black market. According to the security news site Krebs on Security, 1 to 3 million of the credits cards stolen from Target were resold on the black market, generating an estimated $53.7 million for the hackers.

A wealth of stolen data - credit card numbers, passwords, you name it -- lives on the so-called Dark Web, the seamy underbelly of the Internet where websites are publicly visible but the IP addresses of the servers that run them are undetectable, making them invisible to search engines and the authorities. This is often where the bad guys sell and re-sell hacked information.

We're also certain to see an increase in phishing attacks this year. Unlike hacking, phishing tries to trick people into clicking on links or downloading files in emails that seem legitimate but are actually gateways to malware - such as computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.

The main reason phishing persists is simple: People continue to fall for the scams. "If you're not sure what it is, don't click on it" is a bit of common sense that still eludes surprising numbers of Internet users.

To be fair, though, phishers are becoming more sophisticated. The supposed Nigerian prince who wants to give you $50 million is being replaced by emails that can look a lot like the genuine article, say from your bank. Cybercriminals are figuring out new ways to get their e-mails past the spam detection systems in many common email programs.

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The Bot Threat

Yet another threat comes from bots, the pieces of software that run automated tasks over the Internet. Bots, much like the microorganisms all around us in the physical world, come in good and bad forms. Google, for example, uses bots to crawl and catalog the web and deliver accurate search engine results. But hackers also use bots to carry out a variety of attacks, unauthorized data gathering, spam and click fraud. Bots (good and bad) account for 60 percent of Internet traffic; humans just 40.

In 2016, bad bots will become better at disguising themselves to blend in with legitimate network traffic and fool IT administrators responsible for keeping them out.

While hackers can use bots for nefarious purposes such as lifting your credit card number from online store or turning your laptop into a spam-spewing zombie, businesses are exposed too.

Take the retail industry, for example. An entire underground industry has grown around the use of automated bots dedicated to scraping as much pricing and other data from online retailers' websites to share with competitors.

While the government is trying to step in and put controls on bots -- such as legislation proposed by Sen. Charles Schuler (D-NY) to crack down on bots in the online concert ticket market -- it lack the teeth to make a meaningful impact.

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There are several reasons why. The nature of the bot industry makes identifying and prosecuting those who launch bots difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Bots can originate from almost any location in the world and they usually come from well-known hosting providers and networks that organizations trust. Even when a bot originator is identified, it's often tracked to an international location where US laws provide little or no recourse. On top of all that, most bot technologies are not even considered criminal.

The bad bot threat landscape will continue to grow in 2016 for a simple reason --bots are an effective means to an end for Internet evil-doers.

Be Concerned

If the Internet security landscape in 2016 sounds scary, it ought to. For too long, even the largest companies haven't done enough to close security holes. And they're still playing catch-up.

Businesses have no choice but to make online security their absolute No. 1 priority this year or risk losing the customers they've worked so hard to gain.

There once was a time when hacking was largely about mischief: "Let's see if I can take this site down!" Now, the bad guys have become more organized and sophisticated and they're after one thing - money.

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This week marks the anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Obama seven years ago this Friday. The law finally gave women the ability to challenge unequal pay whenever they discover it is occurring -- or had occurred.

It was a privilege to work to make this law a reality alongside effective, results-oriented leaders like Senator Barbara Mikulski and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The Act was an important step forward in expanding a woman's ability to take action when discrimination takes place. But much work remains to be done to eliminate the gender wage gap in our country.

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It's a national disgrace that in the year 2016, someone can work full time in America and not make enough to support herself or her family.

Today, women in Maryland still earn on the average only 85.4 percent of every dollar a man earns -- and the gap is wider for African American and Hispanic women. Working mothers provide the principal paycheck in over 40 percent of households nationwide and the economic security of over 300,000 households in Maryland depend on a woman head of household.

For women and families, equal pay isn't just about fairness. It can mean the difference between being able to put food on the table, pay for childcare, or save for retirement. Yet Congressional efforts to strengthen the laws against wage discrimination through passage of bills like the Paycheck Fairness Act have been blocked by Republicans.

Steps like raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would help all minimum wage workers make ends meet and disproportionately assist women, who make up 63% of this group. We should all be able to agree that it's a national disgrace that in the year 2016, someone can work full time in America and not make enough to support herself or her family.

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As the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, I have made sure that the budgets I bring to the House floor include equal pay for equal work, an increased minimum wage, and expanded paid sick, family, and maternity leave. And I have been proud to lead the fight against the Ryan-Republican budget agendas that undermine economic progress for women, gut investments in education, and slash the safety net for families with potentially devastating consequences.

The time is long overdue that we eliminate all gender discrimination in America. As we're pushing for equal pay, we must also seek to finally pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
The 25th Boeing 787 airplane purchased by Qatar Airways is shown Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2015, during a delivery ceremony in Everett, Wash. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Earlier this month, at a press conference in Los Angeles, the CEO of Qatar Airways, His Excellency Mr. Akbar Al Baker, once again said he and his airline were being "bullied" by U.S. airlines, notably American and Delta. The notion that he and his lavishly subsidized, state-owned carrier from one of the richest countries on earth could be bullied is silly; worse, misusing the term "bully" trivializes a serious issue for children and adolescents worldwide. As someone who 1) understands the airline business and 2) got beat up fairly often as a kid, he's not being bullied.

Reducing the rhetoric from nasty and hyperbolic to calm and factual, the issue is quite clear. U.S. airlines and seven unions, backed by scores of U.S. Senators and members of Congress, asked the Obama administration last year to consult with the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to address the massive subsidies provided to their state-owned airlines. For a year now, the U.S. carriers have proven that the massive government subsidies have enabled the Gulf carriers to expand rapidly in the U.S., Europe, and across the globe.

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A painstaking global investigation revealed the $42 billion in cash and unfair benefits the three Gulf carriers have received over the last decade from their government sponsors. An investigation of this magnitude was the only way to unearth the truth because the three Gulf airlines do not publish financial statements that meet Western standards for transparency and completeness. The wheelbarrows of cash violate the "Open Skies" aviation agreements that the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar signed with the U.S., pacts that prohibit subsidies and mandate a level competitive playing field. This unfair competition has damaged U.S. airlines (and their European partners) and threatened good-paying U.S. jobs.

Some airline observers believe that Mr. Al Baker lashes out precisely because he's not credible. Three examples: first, at the Paris Air Show last June, he announced that Qatar Airways earned a profit of $103 million in its previous financial year. Just a soundbite, no details. Revenues? Total expenses? Return on equity? Mr. Al Baker didn't offer those salient details.

Second, in response to the proof that Qatar Airways had received subsidies and other unfair benefits totaling more than $17 billion since 2004 (about 40% of the total for the three Gulf airlines), he has repeatedly denied the state support without offering a shred of independently-verifiable financial data. "Trust me" seems to be his modus operandi. If he's got contrary evidence, why not produce it?

Third, he has repeatedly tried to convince the marketplace and the media that his employees are treated fairly. However, the UN's International Labor Office and others have shown clear patterns of abuse and inequity in a workforce comprised of 90 percent migrants, mostly from poor countries. At Qatar Airways, a flight attendant can be fired for positioning her hat incorrectly, or applying too much hair gel. More broadly, the Gulf carriers' labor strategy is suspiciously simple: hire lots of people (mostly attractive young women) from poor countries, give them a short, fixed-term contract, treat them badly, dismiss them easily (sometimes without a ticket home), and repeat. To Mr. Al Baker and his counterparts at Emirates and Etihad, the supply of job candidates is virtually unlimited. Now that looks more like bullying, and on a global scale.

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Not only does Mr. Al Baker lack credibility, but his behavior is threatening and abrasive. Three more examples. First, on a 2015 trip to the Netherlands, he said that European companies would win Qatari state contracts only if their governments allowed Qatar Airways to expand. To their credit, the Dutch authorities promptly said "no thanks" to further Qatar growth at Amsterdam, one of the first times a nation has stood up to Mr. Al Baker. At a time when all three Gulf mega-carriers are attempting to convince us that they are not instruments of the state, Mr. Al Baker's quid-pro-quo threat clearly suggested otherwise.

Second, his criticism of U.S. and European airlines is extreme and mean-spirited. At a recent Los Angeles press conference, he mocked Delta, noting that his airline doesn't "fly old, crap, second-hand airplanes." And this from a 2012 speech on the eve of new service from Montreal: "My crew, my cabin crew, is a maximum of 35 years old. Not 65 years old, you are used to in [sic] flying American carriers."

Third, his continuing personal attacks on Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson are totally unwarranted. Among other nastiness, Mr. Al Baker said: "He's just a bully. And he's a liar . . . He has no dignity, he has no ethics."
There is deep concern about Middle Eastern immigration these days. Like so many Americans, comedian Bill Maher opposes letting Syrian refugees into the West because this time their values are so different; they don't understand Western values and cannot assimilate. This cohort is totally unique, unlike past generations of newcomers, and cannot accommodate our way of life.

So let's expose the dirty secret of immigration: it's a difficult process, filled with messy stories, and lots of crime. For all groups, throughout our history; none have ever adjusted well. And Americans have always reacted against them. In those regards, the current wave of immigrants is no different than those of the past.

Let's look at Jews, often cited as the model group. They have incredibly high mobility rates, a love for education, little inclination for alcohol. All true, but only part of the story.

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In 1908, Theodore Bingham, police commissioner of New York, authored an article in the September issue of the North American Review. This distinguished figure, an expert on urban crime, announced that fully 50% of the criminals in that great city were Jews, a fearsome crime wave. He wrote that, "It is not astonishing that... perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider that ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor, is conducive to crime....Among the most expert of all the street thieves are Hebrew boys under sixteen who are brought up to lives of crime...."

While there was an abundance of bigotry here, there were also nuggets of truth. Jews were impoverished, living in despicable conditions, laboring at slave wages in vicious jobs. Many, particularly younger ones, turned to crime as a way out.

This was not the only obstacle Jews faced in being accepted as Americans. They were widely perceived as a foreign group, with values alien to our country. A stateless people, Jews could never understand or participate in loyalty to a nation with its own firm and rich traditions.

Italian immigrants were even worse. They prayed to a foreign ruler in Rome, knew nothing about democracy. Coming from backwards rural regions, they had no experience with modern urban, industrial values and would have difficulty assimilating, if that was even possible.

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They were also prone to violence; many accounts describe "the way of the stiletto", the knife every Italian was supposed to carry and use to redress any slight (just for the record, my wife is descended from Neapolitans and she has cut herself in the kitchen a few times with a paring knife). Similar to the message Donald Trump sent this year about Mexican-Americans, Bingham declared of Italians, "while the great bulk of these people are among our best citizens, there are fastened upon them a riff-raff of desperate scoundrels, ex-convicts and jailbirds...such as has never before afflicted a civilized country in time of peace."

In the past, Americans took these beliefs--that the foreigners back then were a dangerous element--even more seriously than they do today. If you think there's animosity towards today's ethnics, in earlier years they didn't just tweet, they lynched them. In 1891 in a New Jersey mill town, when the leading company hired fourteen Russian Jews 500 residents rampaged through the Jewish section, forcing most of them to leave the area for good. That same year, in New Orleans the Superintendent of Police was murdered in a way that pointed to the local Sicilian population. Instead of calming rising hysteria, the mayor issued a public statement, "We must teach these people a lesson that they will not forget for all time." When a jury refused to convict, a mob hung eleven Italians in that city.

And that's just a start of the list of unassimilable immigrants from that generation. Poles were again rural and ignorant, and hence a threat to twentieth-century ways. They could never understand how to be Americans, to swear allegiance to a country as they had no experience ever doing so: Poland had disappeared as a nation-state in 1793, and was not resurrected till after the First World War.

Fears of immigrant terrorism existed back then too. In 1886 in Chicago, at a rally for the eight-hour day, someone threw a bomb into the ranks of police. The explosion and subsequent gunfire by officers into the protestors' ranks left seven police officers dead and four civilians. Although the identity of the assassin has never been fully determined, newspapers and the public widely trumpeted that it was the act of immigrant anarchists, probably German-Americans.

Long before Americans believed migrants should be kept out because modern social media corrupts them, Commissioner Bingham warned how, "There is always the possibility of some crack-brained fanatic being inflamed by the anarchist who only talks to a desperate deed," and then cited his example of a typical dangerous manipulator, "like that of Silverstein in Union Square...."

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Americans knew this, and reacted accordingly, based on the very real evidence before them, just like today. They believed these groups could never be part of the American tapestry. In 1928 the author of an article in Current History, a highbrow periodical, emphasized that, "the Catholic Church is opposed to the principles of democracy."
Within the therapy community there is a general belief that counselors and psychotherapists are gender neutral and that they do not impose their personal beliefs about gender roles onto their clients. In my experience, this belief is incorrect. Many of my clients tell me stories of how their previous therapists encouraged them to comply with gender roles and stereotypes that limited their voice and power. And last month I met with a psychotherapist whose unconscious and covert sexism biased her understanding of me and the advice she gave.

I went to see the psychotherapist because I wanted help with how to facilitate a new normal in my marriage. I chose her because she said on her website that she had a background in women's studies, did couples and family therapy, and understood that clients live in social contexts that impact the choices they make. I thought that these ingredients would help her understand the subtle power issues I was trying to navigate. Power issues that involve examining the deeper issue of what it means to be female in a world where men's voices and men's needs still dominate.

Over the last four months I have experienced what it really feels like to be entirely cared-for by my husband. During our thirty-plus year marriage I have had to ask, and sometimes badger him to listen to what I need. But then last September when I suddenly became seriously ill, my relationship with my husband changed. He now listens more closely to what I need and sometimes he just knows without me having to ask. It is an amazing feeling to feel understood without having to explain myself. Admittedly at first all this attention felt uncomfortable. But as I got used to it I realized that this is the normal I have been yearning for with my husband for a long time and I do not want to lose it. Why shouldn't I be effortlessly understood? Why shouldn't what I need be naturally present in my marriage, just like my husband's needs have been present from when we got married?

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When I shared this experience with my therapist I could see from the look on her face that she was struggling to understand where I was coming from. Her body language communicated that she was uncomfortable with my desire to stop being my family's main caregiver, even though my children are adults. And when we discussed my desire for my career goals to now take precedence over my husband's, she started arguing with me.

When I said to her that I no longer want to be the main caregiver in my family, she asked me if I was thinking of leaving my family. And when I told her that I want my work and career goals to take precedence in my marriage, she asked me if my husband was retiring. She went on to ask what my husband's career goals were, suggesting that if I put myself ahead of him I would be jeopardizing this career. I felt as if I was back twenty-three years ago when my husband and I left New Zealand so that he could study for his doctorate in America. Not a single person at that time asked me what my plans were or what I was hoping to get out of our move. Everyone expected me to be the dutiful, supportive wife and again, that is how this therapist saw me.

I was shocked by her lack of understanding of the subtle nuances of male dominance that force wives into doing more of the accommodating. I could not understand why in her mind, she thought that asking for a more shared caregiving in my family I would end up being alone. And why after thirty years of fitting my work around my family and my husband's work, I did not have the right to claim my time and my turn. Her reaction made me feel angry that this trusted professional was trying to guilt-trip me into ignoring what I need. I wondered how another female client, who feels less entitled to her needs and voice than I do, might feel? Chances are she will walk away from therapy feeling guilty and ashamed for wanting more.

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I agree with Carmen Knudson-Martin, who comments in her article "Why power matters: Creating a foundation of mutual support in couple relationships", Family Process, Vol. 52, No1, (2013), that therapists are not gender neutral and that successful couples therapy must include an understanding of the socio-cultural context couples live in, and the subtle power hierarchy within their relationship. I would go further and suggest that all therapy must include an understanding of the client's family system and the gender roles and expectations that have been passed down from generation to generation.
Unless you've been living under a rock, by now you've heard about Liberty University President, Jerry Falwell, Jr., son of the late Moral Majority founder, making anti-Muslim remarks and gesturing to the handgun he was carrying during a chapel speech to Liberty University Students. Referring to the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, Falwell Jr. said that if those who'd been attacked "had what I have got in my back pocket right now...we could end those Muslims before they walked in..." He added his personal confusion that President Barack Obama's answer to repeated incidences of mass gun-violence was to appeal for stricter gun control laws, then let students know they could take free "concealed carry" classes offered by the university. Several days later, Falwell Jr. authorized concealed weapons in dorms at Liberty University.

Predictably and rightfully, Falwell's remarks and actions were condemned by progressive Christian leaders like Shane Claiborne and Brian McLaren, and also by more conservative voices like the students at Wheaton University. Even a Liberty University student found Falwell Jr's remarks appalling, and she certainly wasn't alone. I was contacted by a number of friends and colleagues at Liberty University who expressed their embarrassment. Here's a clip from one message I received:

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"Will you please write something about how the there are countless faculty and students who are thoroughly embarrassed by Jerry Jr.? People like me who, if I posted something on Facebook, might reap serious consequences. That asshole doesn't speak for LU, just himself."

I've always said there are some good folks at Liberty.

But just when I thought the dust had settled, Falwell Jr. asked Donald Trump to speak at Liberty University on Martin Luther King Day 2016. And in one final, and somehow, still shocking blow, Falwell Jr. endorsed Trump for President.

How does one make sense of all this?

When I was a kid, my brothers and I had an Atari-2600. I still have the original one, as a matter of fact, complete with the "Why would you put this on a children's toy?" metal knobs on top that could poke out an eye. One of my favorite games was called "Keystone Kapers." In it, Officer Keystone Kelly, a police officer in a blue uniform, chases Harry Hooligan, a criminal in a vintage prisoner outfit, around a four-story department store where Hooligan is on the loose, no doubt after a recent prison-break where he was rightfully doing time for crimes he'd actually committed. It was all very simple and straightforward, really. And not at all like real life.

Video games aren't like that anymore. In everything from the legendarily controversial Grand Theft Auto to more recent games like Watch Dogs, the player is left to dictate what kind of actions his or her character will take, presumably because players have so much more command over the character. They're not just relegated to running the four levels of the Keystone Department Store in control of a law enforcement agent. They command ambiguous characters with motives as yet to-be-determined in a game of life that isn't otherwise particularly directive. There are consequences to the actions players take, sure, but they can still drive around a city, talk to people, enlist their support, have sex with them, run them over, beat them up, rob them, or do pretty much anything else they want (or not). Each player has to determine what code of ethics they'll follow, what kind of person they'll be. It, on the other hand, is far more like real life than we'd perhaps care to admit.

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Films have undergone a similar evolution. A few years before he ever became a darker and more brutal James Bond, Daniel Craig starred in a brilliant film entitled, The Layer Cake. Like today's video games, crime is depicted in a more realistic way, at least conceptually.

As the film makes clear, gone are the days of cops vs. robbers, heroes vs. villains, good guys vs. bad guys. It shows the difficult to swallow reality that criminals are sometimes very likable, otherwise upstanding people whose ethics (and their commitment to them) often puts the rest of us to shame, law-breaking perhaps being the major exception. The film also points to the notion that what constitutes "illegal" is ever-shifting, as the increasing number of states legalizing marijuana seems to equally point out. Drug dealers once viewed as social pariahs can now legally sell their goods in states like Colorado. And as the families of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and the 13 African-American women sexually assaulted by rapist and former police officer Daniel Holtzclaw know, what constitutes a "good guy" is heavily determined by your vantage point.

Let me bring this home.

You can't call some people once and for all "good" and others "bad." Or, well, you can, but that doesn't make it so, and it doesn't make you exempt from the other category. Falwell Jr. just doesn't seem to get this, or to see the utter inconsistency in his positions. When he condemns all Muslims for the violent acts of a few, then turns around to spit in the face of a martyred avatar for peace and reconciliation on the holiday that bears his namesake and lend his public support to an ignorant, small, and divisive pseudo-celebrity in his bid to be the leader of the free world, he helps us remember something crucial. Left to our own devices, we are all "bad guys," each prone to avarice and violence, clamoring for power and selling our souls to vilify those we believe threaten our interests and double-mortgaging them to support whomever we believe will protect them.

St. Paul seemed to get this in his letter to the Romans, when he invoked the wisdom of King Solomon: "There is none righteous, not even one." Pronouncing yourself and your tribe "good" and others "bad" isn't a virtue, and certainly not a Christian one. Christ "did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage," and in fact, repeatedly refused to defend himself when he was wrongfully accused of crimes that eventually lead to his crucifixion.

In short, there are no "good guys." And you'd think this would go without saying, but Donald Trump definitely isn't one. Ironically, the more you claim yourself or someone else to be a "good guy," the less likely it is to be true, and the easier that claim is to unmask for what it is - just another half-baked layer to the bizarre cake you're making.
A woman walks past a group of construction workers gathered on the street during their lunch break Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010, in New York. Although these men did not harass any of the passersby, a New York City Council committee heard testimony Thursday from women who said men regularly follow them, yell at them and make them feel unsafe and uncomfortable. The man whose arm is raised in the background had just finished holding onto a beam. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)

On the night of January 22, 29-year old Janese Talton-Jackson was shot to death on a sidewalk by a man who was angry that she'd refused to give him her phone number. Her story is sadly reminiscent of Mary Spears', who was killed in similar circumstances in 2014. Every few months stories like these make it into the news cycle, even though related harassment and assaults are happening every day in the US and elsewhere. When stories do surface, people express surprise, sadness and outrage, all of which seem to dissipate in a heartbeat. If there is more prolonged criticism, it often falls along racist, ethnic, nationalist, classist lines, despite the far greater prevalence of attacks on women by men in their own peer groups.

Consider the recent assaults of women in several German cities on New Year's Eve. Those events didn't mark Day One of gender-based violence Germany. While the media and public were rightfully appalled by the mass nature of the assaults, "Arab-looking" men have no monopoly on street harassment, rape, gang-rape, sexual harassment and violence. One in three German women experience violence, primarily at the hands of their male German counterparts. Sixty-eight percent of German women report being groped on public streets, and 80% regularly alter their commutes to avoid harassment. During the countries' annual Oktoberfest celebration, an average of 10 rapes are reported each year, but the estimated number of unreported rapes is 200. German law still require a victim to prove that they physically resisted rape. German media did not respond in outrage over the fact that migrant women face similar levels of abuse as German women do in refugee camps and as they make their way to new countries. According to Amnesty International, migrant women consistently report that "in almost all of the countries they passed through they experienced physical abuse and financial exploitation, being groped or pressured to have sex by smugglers, security staff or other refugees." There's such a serious ugliness to the media outrage.

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These numbers are mirrored in the US, where 71% of women report being followed and 57% of women report verbal harassment. In Talton-Jackson's case, she and her assailant were strangers. However, he had previously harassed another woman so persistently (once breaking into her bedroom to harangue her) that, feeling unsafe, she'd moved from the state she lived in. According to a national Stop Street Harassment survey, forty-one percent of American women have experienced physically aggressive street interactions, including touching, flashing, and being forced to do something sexual against their wills. Seventy-two percent of women have changed their commutes to avoid feeling unsafe. Do people really want to think they do it because they want a change of scenery or are engaged in a spy fantasy?

Through it all, girls are taught through silence not to say anything about their growing consciousness of double standards regarding physical integrity and freedom and young boys are wrapped in ignorance (including boys of color, who are also subject to high levels of harassment). Women are told to "ignore" harassment, or to "stay inside," learn to "take a compliment," "fight back," or "focus on more important issues." Anything but societal introspection about what goes into making a culture in which women encounter these levels of hostility to our full engagement, in the world. As full human beings and adults with rights.

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I'm really hard pressed to understand what is trivial about the fact that girls and women, because we are girls and women, face the everyday possibility that we might be verbally and physically attacked, mutilated, terrorized or killed for not consenting on the spot to what some random man wants. Or what is trivial about coming to terms with the idea that -- at home or in public -- our physical integrity and consent to the use of our own bodies are not socially, politically, communally respected rights. If you are a transwoman (perceived socially as having chosen to walk away from the privilege of being male) or a woman of color, physical safety is doubly, triply compromised.

Even though there are many good examples of why we shouldn't, women can and do say no, sometimes successfully and in ways that are empowering. When we do, people applaud us, cheer us on, make videos that go viral. But, every single time we do so at great risk.

Women. Don't. Have. The. Right. To. Say. No.

How many women have to die because they try to before this is taken seriously as a matter of public health and women's rights? "Just tell him to you aren't interested?" is a sorry and entitled display of a profound lack of caring about what happens to the person you are talking to.

I'm saddened by Janese Talton-Jackson's brutal killing. But I am enraged that attacks like this happen all the time and we continue to ignore the connective tissue and ask women to take a back seat to more pressing issues. Women are dying because of it, three a day at the hands of men they know. Last month, a man, angry that a woman had rebuffed him earlier in the night, knocked down the front door of her apartment and, when he found she wasn't home, grabbed her three month old puppy and threw it out of a third floor window. Last week, a man was sentenced to two years in jail for attacking his spouse with a hammer. Another was arrested for attacking his girlfriend as she tried to attempt leaving him. And yet a third was arrested after killing his wife for wanting divorce. This week, police in Florida are trying to locate a man who has been serially harassing women real estate agents while they work. Every day, thousands of women are terrorized by stalkers, only to be told that police can't help them till a crime has actually been committed.

Talton-Jackson was shot by a stranger, but in some countries, the most violent attacks against girls and women who reject men involve acid throwing. Here, its more likely, in the range of horror, to be setting a woman on fire, as happened in Pomona, California on Christmas Day. That might sound like an outlier, until you begin to look and see similar cases in Maryland, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon. We measure what we care about and we don't keep systematized track of male-perpetrated, gender-biased cases like these and Talton-Jackson's.

The largely tolerated right and ability of strangers to harass women in public coexists with the largely tolerated right and ability of acquaintances to harass women in private. A newly released study, for example, found that sixty percent of women in Silicon Valley report workplace sexual harassment. Can't a girl take a compliment? Play with the big boys? One in three women said that they feel afraid for their personal safety because of work-related circumstances. Men might not mean to provoke fear in their clumsy and exploitative attempts to have sex with someone who is not interested, but they do it anyway because what they do doesn't happen in a social vacuum.

Which is all to say that it's no surprise that the physical reality of harassment and violence has a thriving corollary online. The 2014 nonconsensual sharing of stolen intimate photos of more than a hundred women celebrities was a high profile example of something that happens regularly. Danielle Citron explores these issues in her book, Hate Crimes In Cyberspace, where she cites a study of 1,606 revenge porn cases that revealed 90% of those whose photos were shared were women, targeted by men they knew. A 2012 National Network to End Domestic Violence survey of US domestic violence programs reported that 89% of victims experience intimidation and threats by abusers via technology, including through cell phones, texts, and email.

If these events had happened in, say, India, chances are you would have heard about it. If these, and countless others cases that don't get compiled in a sensible way, were happening in another country, our media would be all over how incredibly abusive, patriarchal, misogynistic that country's culture is. Instead, we get, from our highest rated news media outlet, "Men are going to be that way. What can you do?" Strong, move, America.

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The male sexual entitlement that fuels so much of this gender-based violence is so wrapped up in how we teach boys to be men that it's hard to know where to start. Once in a while an illuminating video, utilizing a gender reversal, makes the rounds and captures people's attention. But, while videos depicting gender reversals are good catalysts for discussion and awareness, they are superficial at best and create a false equivalence. There is no gender equivalence because there is no systemic power inversion that would support it. Sexual entitlement doesn't exist in isolation, but thrives alongside political, economic and social male domination. Girls are socialized to please other people because just the act of women saying "no" is fundamentally, politically and socially, disruptive. Combined with racial and class dimensions, even more so. By far the easiest way to make sure women aren't comfortable saying "no' or expecting to be paid attention to when they do is to regulate women with gender and race-based violence or the threat of it and socialize them to limit themselves.

As is always the case, clearly not all men are to blame, but, as we keep asking, how are we supposed to tell? What are we supposed to say every day? It's so tiresome. But, not as tiresome as the response that men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes. Yes, men too, are subject to violence and its threat -- but almost entirely at the hands of other men. Additionally, men are no longer more likely. The Department of Justice's most recent crime report shows that between 2004 and 2013 the rate of violent crimes against men and women reached equal levels of prevalence, crimes against men flat-lining, but against women increasing.
BIRMINGHAM, AL - JANUARY 18: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at Boutwell Auditorium, January 18, 2016 in Birmingham, Alabama. Sanders spoke to a capacity crowd of around 5,000 supporters. (Photo by Hal Yeager/Getty Images)

I happened to catch the tail end of the CNN Iowa Democratic town hall event last night. And to my surprise, I found myself agreeing with a couple of the pundits afterward. They were talking about Bernie Sanders. I thought Van Jones made a good point by saying that when Bernie Sanders talks about "socialism" he needs to shut up about fucking Denmark already. He actually didn't use those words. But the next time an American voter asks Bernie Sanders what he means by "socialism," this is what I would whisper in his ear...

Look, Bernie, to most Americans, myself included, Scandinavia is just one big snowdrift where they wear wooden shoes. What? Oh, Holland? That's right. Legal prostitution. Semi-legal? Europe? Never mind. See, this is what I'm trying to tell you. Americans don't give a fuck about Scandinavia. Despite the fact that they kick our ass in every quality of life survey and ski naked. I've seen the pictures. Although, that could have been Aspen. Anyway...

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This is what you gotta say: Social Security, Worker's Compensation, Unemployment Insurance. Born under FDR as a result of the Great Depression and largely responsible for the fact that we didn't see people standing in bread lines after the bankers crashed the world economy. Socialist. Booya!

The GI Bill, which gave our veterans a place to start after they came home from World War II. Socialist! That's what I'm talking about!

The Interstate Highway System under Eisenhower. So companies could move their goods more easily and quickly across the country. Socialist! Come on dude, you gotta Elizabeth Warren this mo' fo'.

The space program, also under Eisenhower. Then the race to the moon under Kennedy. Handed private industry so many technological innovations. Socialist? Hell, we out-communisted the Communists!

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The Pentagon, beloved by Republicans (except Rand Paul) and whose budget is never really cut, the question only ever is the speed at which it will increase. That's 573 billion dollars worth of socialism! That's right, I hyperlinked that: just to show I'm not making this shit up.

The Internet, for fuck's sake! Sorry, did I spit in your ear? I'm getting excited. That digital equivalent of the Interstate Highway System that put Mom and Pop adult bookstores out of business -- developed at the Pentagon and public universities. Socialist!

The library -- where that Ted Cruz-endorsing idiot Glenn Beck claims he got so smart and was available to him because it was "free." That makes him a library card-carrying socialist

You do a good job hammering the big banks. But you have to remind the people that in addition to the bailouts, banks are chartered by the government to hand out money. Government IOUs. That's what money is. In addition, their deposits are insured by the government up to 250K. These are, by definition, socialist enterprises that want to act like they could survive in a free market. They're like the kid who has to keep moving back into his parents' place, because he can't make it out in the world selling pot. History proves over and over again that financial institutions can't really thrive outside the government nest. Which by my reckoning makes that Master of the Universe, Jamie Dimon, a stone cold pussy.

And what about all of those industries that socialize the costs and privatize the profits? For instance...

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The nuclear industry would not exist without billions of dollars of taxpayer provided loan guarantees. How is that not socialist? And don't even get me started on the subsidies we are still giving the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry?! That's right. 34 billion dollars for the poor bastards!

Big Pharma: So many of the big drug breakthroughs are developed at the National Institute of Health and public universities. Socialist! OK, maybe not the dick pills, but most of the other stuff.

You also have to stop people from thinking you are demonizing entrepreneurship. The other pundit, Michael Smerconish, said something like that. Entrepreneurship: that's a sacred American idea. That's why all of that stuff you're saying about education is great, but you need to emphasize that it's about leveling the playing field to create more entrepreneurs. Use Donald Trump, that classic "born on third base and thought he hit a triple" guy, whose humble beginnings included his father giving him a million dollars. That's a million dollar head start when so many young people today are starting out tens of thousands of dollars in the hole.

(No need to tell Smerconish that the free market is a fiction and always has been. It would be like telling him there's no Santa Claus. Capitalists are very sensitive about that. Shhh...)

These are just a few of the things that are all a part of a hallowed tradition most of us take for granted.

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Our proud tradition of American "keep your dirty government hands off of my Medicare" socialism.
I am currently in Marrakesh, Morocco for the Marrakesh Declaration and Call to Action, a three-day gathering of prominent Sunni and Shia scholars from around the world who have come together in order to affirm the rights of minorities within Muslim-majority contexts and mobilize action to protect them.

Drawing from historic Islamic sources, particularly the Charter of Medina, a contract established by the Prophet (peace be upon him) with the Jewish community in Medina ensuring freedom of religion and vows of protection, the summit will issue a declaration at its conclusion. In workshop sessions, participants are developing the substance of this declaration and plans for its implementation. Clergy of other faiths and interfaith activists are attending as observers, supporters, and contributors to the discussion.

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The gathering has been in the works for four years, led by the prominent Mauritanian Sunni scholar Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah under the auspices of his Forum for Muslims Promoting Peace. The Moroccan king is a co-sponsor and host.

Sheikh bin Bayyah developed the framework for the summit and its declaration. His efforts came in response to the rise of extremist groups in the Muslim world that target minority groups (among others) with violence, rape and sexual enslavement, forced conversion, and destruction of holy sites. These "uneducated" and "arrogant fools," as Sheikh bin Bayyah described them on the first day of the meeting, distort Islam, and so these prominent ulema (Islamic scholars) have an important role to play in discrediting extremists' arguments and advancing protection of minorities and their cultural and religious traditions as an essential Islamic duty.

There is no doubt that the current moment is one of exceptional crisis for the world generally, and for the Muslim world in particular. But this moment of crisis is also one of opportunity, creating motivation as never before for those involved in peace-building in the Muslim world to come together across sectarian, ethnic, and national lines; to affirm, renew, and strengthen positive teachings and relationships within the tradition, address historical points of disagreement that have divided the greater Muslim community; and to draw from the many Islamic sources available to transform the underlying drivers of violent extremism in the Muslim world and beyond.

There have been many attempts to organize the greater ummah, or world community of Muslims, to find points of consensus amongst the religion's diverse followers in order to advance peace and reduce sectarianism. For example, the Amman Message, drafted in 2004 and signed by hundreds of Muslim leaders, called for tolerance and unity within the Ummah. The 2010 Mardin Conference convened over a dozen Sunni scholars to methodically denounce and invalidate a fatwa that is often cited by militant jihadists.

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Gatherings and statements such as these have been and continue to be significant markers in considering Islam in the current global context. However, these platforms and declarations have sometimes been criticized for failing to organize and mobilize action yielding tangible impact in transforming the underlying drivers of violent extremism.
I just returned from this year's annual gathering of the World Economic Forum at Davos, where leaders from around the world gathered to discuss the implications of a new industrial revolution. This fourth industrial revolution (after the revolutions brought about by steam power, electricity and electronics) is using digital technology to revolutionize almost every part of our life at an unprecedented pace, from self-driving cars to AI-enabled assistants.

One of the biggest implications, outlined in The Industry Gender Gap report, is just how harmful this revolution may be to the progress of women because they are underrepresented in tech. As market forces transform industries to favor technological skills, women only hold 26 percent of all tech jobs. Worse yet, they only stand to gain one new STEM job for every 20 that are lost in other disrupted industries. For men, that ratio is a much more favorable one to four.

As the report makes clear, "If current industry gender gap trends persist and labour market transformation towards new and emerging roles in computer, technology and engineering-related fields continues to outpace the rate at which women are currently entering those types of jobs, women are at risk of losing out on tomorrow's best job opportunities."

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I found the conversations at Davos and the findings of the report very troubling, but also familiar. Last October, I traveled to the Grace Hopper Celebration in Women in Computing Conference to deliver a similar message: not only do women risk missing out on tomorrow's next great job opportunities, they also risk a more worrying decline in societal influence. As tech remakes the world, women will miss the chance to affect the massive economic and social changes this fourth industrial revolution will bring.

There are many things we must do to tackle this issue, most notably improving the work-life balance which the report correctly cites as a leading barrier to attracting and retaining women in the tech industry. Below, you can find the text of my Grace Hopper where I talk about this impending problem, as well as the steps we can take to ensure women take their rightful place in shaping the future.

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What follows is adapted from the keynote remarks for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing by the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Good morning Grace Hopper! It is an absolute honor for me to be here with all of you... so many interesting and brilliant women computer scientists! For all the women who feel alone in their field, this convention is a lifeline--a place where you can feel supported, be inspired, be yourself and come together as computer scientists. That's true for me too.

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It's so great to see so many of you here in the audience.. including the 1,000 Googlers and YouTubers who are here today. Thanks you all of you for coming!

So let me start with a story from my own life...

A few years ago my daughter who was ten told me she hated computers.

I don't think you thought I'd start out my speech that way this morning.

When she told me this, I was in shock. She had been coming to Google since she was a baby. She knew that both of her parents worked in technology. She knew that I cared about women working in technology. Suddenly this issue that I cared about so deeply about at work, hit me at home.

What happened in my house might sound familiar to all of you. We had one computer at home, and my son loved it. He loved it so much that he didn't let my daughter get near it. In her words: "he had conquered it," so she had to find something else to do.

She also added that it was "super lame" to like computers, and she had much better things to do in her busy life.

Today, that same pattern is playing out with girls throughout America. Girls are being left out of the conversation when it comes to technology. They're led to think tech is insular and antisocial. And they're never given a chance to correct those perceptions.

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This pattern might start in our homes, but it has serious implications for our economy and for women at large.

By 2020, jobs in computer science are expected to grow nearly two times faster than the national average, totaling nearly 5 million jobs.

And those are just the jobs that Pew Research Department considers tech jobs. But of course, tech touches many more jobs than the ones just listed as tech, and as a result has much more influence.

For instance, every car produced today has more computing power than the Apollo 11 rocket that put a person on the moon. IBM's Watson is diagnosing cancer more accurately than oncologists. And farmers are using satellites and weather predictions to increase harvests.

Technology is revolutionizing almost every part of our life at an unprecedented pace. Yet today, women hold only 26 percent of all tech jobs.

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If women don't participate in tech, they are losing the chance to influence the largest economic and social change of this century.

The fact that women represent such a small portion of the tech workforce shouldn't just be a wake up call, it should be a Sputnik moment.

It threatens our country's continued economic prominence and risks our future competitiveness. And it should awaken all of us to act.

So where do we start?

There's been a serious debate about the shortage of women in tech. Is this a pipeline issue? Or is it a retention issue?

In my opinion, it is both.

Let's start with the pipeline. Right now women earn over half of all bachelor's degrees in America but fewer than 20% of computer science degrees.

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And this problem, unfortunately, is not getting better, it's getting worse.

Female representation in tech actually used to be higher in the mid-'80s. Other fields like Biology and Chemistry have since improved; while computer science has decreased. The decline is now unique to computer science.

Two years ago, I was in the audience here at Grace Hopper, when, Maria Klawe was here on stage. For those of you who don't know, Maria is the President of Harvey Mudd College, where she helped lead a successful effort to encourage more women to major in computer science. Maria has dedicated herself to getting women excited about tech; and she is getting results. When she spoke, she spelled out the three reasons girls don't go into technology.

And these are in her words:

One, they think it's boring.

Two, they think they won't be any good at it.

And three, they wouldn't want to be seen dead with the people who major in computer science.

I double checked with my daughter, and, unfortunately, for her, these mis-perceptions were true.

But all of us here in the room know that none of this is actually true. But perceptions drive reality. So let's look at what is driving these mis-perceptions and how we can fix them.

First, computer science is boring.

Ok, obviously that's not true. But how would anyone know for sure unless they tried it? The problem is unless you're the person sitting in front of the computer, building your own program, it can look, from the outside, incredibly boring.

We need more girls to have the opportunity to actually show them what computer science is.. they need to see for themselves that computer science can be creative and inspiring.

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The second perception, the perception that girls wouldn't be good at computer science... that just makes me mad.

Of course they would be good at it.

Some of the greatest programmers of all time have been women! Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer; Ida Rhodes who designed the first computers to run the Census and Social Security;

Margaret Hamilton who wrote the software that put Apollo 11 on the moon; and Joan Clark who, along with other women, broke the Nazi Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

And let's not forget Anita Borg and Grace Hopper.

And there are many great women in industry today and at Google and YouTube who are working on big parts of our systems. There are too many of them to call out by name, but I bet many of them are here in the audience.

But given the number of men in the field vs the number of women, and given that most women haven't even tried computer science, I can see how women can internalize these misperceptions.

So, let me tell you a little secret I learned along the way from being at the top of one of the largest tech organizations...

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Men have no special skills that enable them to run technology companies.

There are just way more of them, and they're more aggressive about getting to the next level.

Now, the gender disparity in computer science is not going to change on its own. Every single time I go to the computer camps in Silicon Valley to pick up my kids, I see the 7 years olds, the 10 year olds the 12 year olds, and I see the same thing as I see in my office. Unless we make a change, the future of tech will look just like it looks today.

So the only way we're going to fix these perceptions is by giving everyone a chance to learn computer science.

I would start with making computer science available to all students in the United States with the ultimate goal of making it mandatory.

I recognize that many schools around the country are strapped for resources and they're budget constrained. I'm not saying this is easy, but on the other hand, the world is changing and our educational system needs to prepare students for the 21st century.

Today, approximately ten percent of schools nationwide offer Computer Science classes, while often the other sciences like biology, chemistry and physics are required courses.

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Unless we make CS a priority, we risk making gender, class and racial disparities worse as jobs and opportunities flow to those who have a computer science background. As a nation, we also risk our future competitiveness.

There are other forward-looking countries that have already adopted these standards. Last year, England became the first country in the European Union to mandate computer science classes. Italy will soon implement something similar. And Israel and South Korea have some of the most rigorous computer science curriculums.

In the US, we're also starting to see momentum. Cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco are making progress but we still have a long way to go.

The best thing about raising a generation where all students understand computer science is that it will have a significant impact on women and minorities that are otherwise underrepresented in tech.

And now for that last misperception... I'd never be caught dead taking a class with a computer geek.

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First, we need more of these girls to come Grace Hopper to see the extraordinary women we have here in computer science.

Usually for these kinds of misperceptions, we blame the media for reinforcing stereotypes...

People love to blame the media for our stereotypes.

Humm.. there is a problem with this in my case... I cannot blame the media... I run one of the largest media platforms in the world. We have over 1 billion people coming to it every month!

So I started looking to see what could YouTube do to change the perceptions.

Well, the first thing we can do is help people understand that there is a problem.

So I'm proud to announce that we're working with Oscar winning-producer Lesley Chilcott, who produced "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman." Lesley created a new documentary about the role girls can play in technology and the importance of getting them involved.

Lesley's new film is called "Code Girl," and not only is she in the audience with us today but she's brought an exclusive teaser for the film that I'd like to share with all of you right now.

Let's roll the clip.

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I'm proud to announce that together with Google's Made w/Code team, we're going to host "Code Girl" for free on YouTube for five days before it hits the theaters. I want to thank Lesley for the tremendous passion she's brought to the project to help raise awareness of this important issue.

But our support doesn't end there.

Over the next year, you'll hear about how YouTube is working to bring more women behind and in front of the camera, and how we will be encouraging content that shows women in technology in a positive light.

But even if we do change perceptions and strengthen the pipeline of female candidates in tech, we have to be honest that there are many cultural problems that are pushing women out.

For tech companies like Google, this is a huge loss of talent in a field where we constantly have shortages. Today, women working in STEM fields are 45 percent more likely to leave the industry than their male peers.

There a few issues behind this. One of them is a culture that praises people for working all night and embracing long hours.

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It can get particularly extreme, especially at start-ups. Putting in those long hours shows your seriousness, your commitment, your potential as a 10Xer. There are all-night code jams and coders drinking Soylent so they don't have to get up to eat. And the mini-fridges are stocked with Red Bull for when you need some extra energy. It creates a culture that intimidates people who want to have a normal life and punishes those who have important commitments at home, male or female.

I could never participate in this kind of tech culture since I had my first baby soon after joining Google. Throughout my career, I've made it a point to try to be home every night for dinner with my family.

At first this wasn't really a choice. My kids were in daycare. And do you know what happens if you're late for day care pickup? You're charged a dollar a minute! And that's not the worst part... The worst part is your kids are really mad at you that they were the last ones to be picked up.

But that constraint enabled me develop a work style that focused on efficiency, productivity and prioritization during office hours.

There are times in your career where long hours are appropriate and necessary. There are emergencies when you need to come in on weekends and evenings. But it is not a sustainable long-term solution.

A recent study in the Harvard Business Review, found that employees who took regular breaks saw a 30 percent higher level of focus compared with those who didn't. And employees who felt encouraged by their bosses to take breaks reported a nearly 100 percent higher loyalty to their employer!

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So here's my advice to all of you: focus on working smart. Work hard, do a great job. But then.....go home.

Being in it for the long term, and not burning out is more important than a short and fiery stint in technology. And tech companies, if you want to attract and retain the best talent, you need to help employees find a balance.

The other way we can make our industry a far more inviting place for women is to advocate for paid family leave.

I have been lucky in my life. I was Google's first employee to go on maternity leave and last year I became the only person to take five maternity leaves at Google. Each of those leaves enriched my career and more importantly, enriched my life. They left me with the peace of mind, knowing that I could return after spending the time I truly wanted and needed at home with my new baby.

Interestingly, I also found that each break gave me a chance to reflect on my career. During my second maternity leave, I decided to make a change and work in advertising, where I then spent the next 12 years of my career.

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It may sound counterintuitive, but the research--and Google's own experience--shows a generous paid maternity leave actually increases retention.

When women are given a short leave, or they're pressured to be on call, some decide it's just not worth it to return. That's why, when Google increased its paid maternity leave policy from 12-to-18 weeks, we saw the rate at which new mothers quit fall by 50 percent.

I've been inspired to see other companies like Netflix and Microsoft offer more generous paid family leave in recent months. Sadly, the United States is the only nation in the world besides Papua New Guinea not to offer paid maternity leave. Today, 88 percent of American women do not get any paid family leave. It creates an awful situation where a quarter of all women in the U.S. return to work just ten days of giving birth.

If tech companies want to boost their retention, they need to offer generous paid leave. And by raising awareness about the benefits of paid family leave, they can hopefully inspire the nation to do the same.

If you work for a company and you feel you can not work a balanced day, and the maternity leave is bad or non existent, then I recommend you start looking around and try to find a company that will support you.

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And by the way... we're hiring!

But as we work to reform the culture, I would advise all of you to become an advocate for yourself and not feel guilty about it.

Let me give you an example:

A few years ago, there was an important invitation-only conference that convened all of the top leaders in my industry. I worked with these people. They were people I had relationships with, strong partnerships with, and somehow my invite never came.

I could have just let it go. But I didn't. I wanted to go this event since it was important for my job. I reached out; other people reached out on my behalf. I asked and I asked... but the invite didn't come.

Some people seemed annoyed that I kept asking about this. Honestly, it was kind of embarrassing to tell people that I hadn't been invited. At one point I began to think that maybe I didn't even belong at this event in the first place.

But then when I had almost given up hope, I found someone who had the right influence. And when I told him, he supported me and made it happen.

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Within a day of telling him, like magic, the invite came. And when I got there, it was obvious-- I had a rightful place there.

After going through this experience, I realized that we've all gone through something similar. It may be a meeting, an event, a class, an offsite where you would like to attend but you weren't invited.

There are many ways people can deter you from going.

So my advice is for you to keep asking. Look out for yourself, advocate for yourself. And don't feel guilty about it.

I also realized something else important during this experience...

Someone in the organization who had more power and influence than I did, reached out on my behalf and made it happen.

It crystallized for me how people get that next job, how they get that promotion, how they get that invite. Power and influence is passed down from those who have it.

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So, if you see a company with poor diversity numbers, look to its leader.

So, just to get back to my daughter now.

I'm happy to report that she now likes computers. After my wake-up call at home, I enrolled her at a local computer camp. She came home complaining that her class was all boys--and that no one there was like her. She hated computers even more than she did at first!

But I didn't give up then either!

I switched her to an all-girls coding camp, and soon, she started to see the light. Soon afterwards she sketched out a drawing of a computer watch, complete with phone, video and her friends contact info, just the way she wanted. And this, by the way, was before Samsung and Apple had released their watches.

I could see that she was starting to see that technology was a tool to build out her ideas, and make the world better for her. By supporting and encouraging my daughter, I was able to turn her around. But she is just one girl.

So, I'd like to ask all of you to support and encourage each other. And reach out to the next generation of girls in your life who think tech is inaccessible, or uncreative, or hard, or boring --and show them just how wrong that stereotype actually is. No matter where we are in our lives we can make a difference.

If you are a student in college, you influence high school students or other students at your school. If you just started working you can help those in school get their first job. If you are a manager, you can identify talented women in your organizations and help them get to the next level.

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And if all of us do that together, we'll make progress in changing these perceptions and overcoming these statistics.

So we have to strengthen the pipeline of girls entering CS by reforming our educational standards for the 21st century. We have to improve the work culture in our industry to make it friendlier to women.

And above all, we have to make it our personal responsibility to show the next generation of girls and the current generation of women that they belong in computer science and with it they can change the world.
Opinion / Columnist

"The origins of the Australian Aborigines has never been a mystery to Africans."As far as Africans are concerned, the Australian Aborigines, Trobian Islanders and Melasesians are all part of the protohistoric African Diaspora. However, what we have is not a mere migration of people to Australia but a wide 'Black belt' that circled the tropical, subtropical and temperate zones even before the 'evolution' of African migrants to Europe and Asia and the gradual change due to climatic adaptation into Caucasiod and Mongolod (sic) 'races'.The Black belt included an area around the globe as far north as Siberia and as far south as Australian and New Zealand. The entire area was peopled by the protohistoric Negroid racial type, which is what most Africans see Aboriginals and other Blacks in Asia and the Pacific as. Why, because there are tribes in Africa who have features identical to the Australian Aborigines, the Trobian Islanders and the Melanesians. Also, there are cultural traits found in Africa that are also found in Australia and Melanesia, India and other places.For example, the boomerang was a common weapon for hunting small game in Africa about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago [a fact that may mean Australian Aborigines and Native Africans interacted].Cave paintings in the Sahara which was wet during that time show hunters with boomerangs as well as bows and arrows. Do the Australian Aborigines use the bow and arrow. If no, then they may have left Africa before its invention.Another cultural trait is skin scarification. This is common in Africa as well as Melanesia and perhaps Australian as well. [Definitely in Australia].The language spoken by Australian Aborigines have characteristics in the suffix and prefix forms that are identical to African languages [all 200 Australian Aboriginal languages??] particularly the Mende language family, which was once widespread throughout the Sahara and was spread to India by Blacks who migrated to India in protohistoric times.The Aborigines are related to a number of ethnic groups in Africa. Among them are the Tibbou, who have characteristics identical to Aborigines, others are the Nagas, who are spread from West Africa to Sudan to South Arabia all the way east to Indo China. The Nagas are Blacks of the Negro type.The point that the Aborigines currently were a part of a much larger and wider group of people spread around the world and are the same as African Negro types is important. It clearly shows that although Aboriginals migrated to Australia about 100,000 years ago were among the very first groups of people to migrate out of the African continent. (See The Black Untouchables of India by V.T.Rajsher, Runoko Rashidi www.saxakali.com and Y.N.Kly, Clarity Press, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)However, they also migrated to Europe, the Americas, East Asia and other places during the same period. According to many scientists and anthropologists who have done work on this issue, they were along with other Blacks the first people on this planet and were to be found on every continent. In fact Blacks were also in the Americas as early as 75,000BC according to C.S.Gladwin (The Gladwin Thesis, McGraw Hill Books,1947)The very first Blacks who went to Europe, went there about the same time Aborigines migrated to Asia, Europe and Australia. These Blacks are called 'Grimaldi Negroids'. They were homosapians similar to modern humans and they were basically hunters, however their social organization and culture was quite advanced.Now, over the many years, the Australian Aborigines were called 'Archaic White', however from the African perspective, it was the Blacks who moved into Europe and Asia who gradually adapted to the temperature and differentiated to suit the climate. Thus, Whites should be called 'archaic black' rather than saying Aborigines are 'archaic white' unless they mean that the present day 'white' population of Europe once looked like the Black Aborigines...that is a common belief already.The Blacks from whom the Australian Aborigines most likely came from still live in Africa and the migration of the cousins of the Aborigines did not stop about 60,000 years ago, nor did they migrate only to India, SE Asia and Australia in protohistoric times. There is evidence that a group of Black African people called the 'Anu' who lived in northern Africa / Egypt and followed the Bear cult (bout 5000BC and back to protohistoric times, see the book, African Presence in Early Asia, by Ivan Van Sertima, Transaction Publications, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA) they made a series of migrations to Asia. That is documented in ancient Egyptian texts. They were related to Aboriginals and were of a 'Negro' type in color, features and origins. Many went to northern Asia and China, others went to Japan.Well, there are people called 'Ainu' in Japan, who seem to have affinities close to Australian Aborigines and Africans and Melanesians. Anu is also a common African name and both the prefix and suffix. Today many are mixed, but a strong 'Negroid' racial characteristics can still be seen, although there is also a strong Mongoloid set of features as well. They have been said to have 'Caucasian' blood, however some experts believe they are among these Blacks who once lived throughout Eastern Asia, and who later mixed with the Mongoloid to create the Polynesians, some Philipinos and other groups in Asia today. (See the text. Susu Economics The History of Pan-African Trade, Commerce, Money and Wealth, ISB# 1-58721-454-7, 1st Books Library, 2511 West Third Street, Suite 1, Bloomington, Indiana 47404 www1stbooks.com email: 1stbooks@1stbooks.com).As for the black people of Melanesia, such as the Fijians, New Caledonians and others, they also began settling Asia and the Pacific in protohistoric times back to about 100,000 years ago, most lived in China, SE Asia and the landmass before the Mongoloids began expanding southwards and pushing the Blacks out of Asia. Yet, according to some Fijians (the President of the Fijian community in Los Angeles (California), some of their people were still migrating from Africa about 2000 years before Christ, Whilie Ben Tangghamma, the former Foreign Minister of Papua New Guinea pointed in the book, The Black Untouchables of India, that all the Blacks of Asia have African roots and connections going back to protohistoric times about 100,ooo years ago.See the Dalit website at www.dalitstan.org Apart from the Blacks who settled in Asia and Australia from prehistoric Africa, there are a number of tribes and nations right here in the U.S. and the Americans such as the Washitaw Nation, the Afro-Darienite, the Choco Region Blacks of Columbia, the Garifuna who are of pre-columbian and prehistoric origins. The Washitaw Nation built the first empire in the Southern U.S. and the Mississippi Valley and once owned the entire Louisiana Purchase Territories, which were annexed. Recently in 1991, the U.S. returned about 70,000 square acres after the Washitaw won in a court battle. The Washitaw Nations was a great civilization of Pyramid and Mound builders who had a maritime civilization and trade with Africa before Columbus.By: KUFAKUNESU MAWIRA, mawirak1979@yahoo.comHWANGE: 0772 322 580
Xinran Yuan, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.



Xinran Yuan is a visual artist in New York City. She has exhibited internationally in the U.S., Iceland, China, and Switzerland. Xinran has shot documentaries in Iceland, was an artist resident at Banff Research in Culture in partnership with Liverpool Biennial, and has recently been selected for a year-long residency at the Center for Book Arts, New York. She currently manages projects for the internationally-renowned artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

For the past six years, Xinran's art has focused on the ocean. Having spent a significant part of her childhood on coastal construction sites in China, where her father designed and engineered commercial ports, she developed a deep fascination with the changing coastline. In 2012, she took on a residency in a former herring town in Northern Iceland, where she worked closely with the fishing community and documented their practices today and memories of the bygone herring era.



Xinran Yuan, Seeing Landing, installation view, 2014, 2-channel video projection, muslin screening, two cedar benches. Courtesy of the artist



Xinran's approach to environmental issues ultimately returns to the issue of seeing, or according to her, "our (in)ability to see", as she proposes through an artist's lens a series of questions from "what does herring look like when it's in the ocean?" to "how do we visualize the vast network that surrounds us - ecological, environmental, sociological, and geopolitical?" Xinran's artworks span across sculpture, drawing, poetry, and video. In the stunning videos of hers, black whales jump out of the gray water, aged seamen sit in a communal hot tub reminiscing a sea from the past, bubbling like a boiling pot full of silver herring. Viewers are invited to hear the whispers and cries of the ocean along with tales told by people whose identities and livelihood depend on it.

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My favorite piece by Xinran is ladder, et, an installation in which she assembled materials through a system of poetic gestures, such as untreated pine connected by handcrafted Japanese joinery yet provisionally propped up by a slender plaster pole over text silkscreened on the floor. As I crouched to read the text "[r]emember the exhilarating feeling of achievement when we climb up a ladder?" which is a quote from Yoko Ono, I thought about the issues of mentorship in the arts, a field often perceived as opaque, alternative, perhaps elitist, and all the symbolic ladders that young artists have to climb to inhale the air of achievement. So I decided to ask her how she launched her career in visual arts, and tell us about the people and experiences instrumental to her growth.

Xinran Yuan, Ladder, et, detail, 2011, pine, plaster, silkscreened text. Courtesy of the artist



Xinran formulated the following seven pieces of advice for young and aspiring artists in college:

1. Choose the right program for yourself.

Art schools offer focused trainings that benefit those who desire to spend concentrated time developing their professional tools at school. For others, the different schools of thoughts present at a liberal arts environment is crucial for forming their artistic language. Research universities often have big art departments that combine art and design. Some schools are technique-oriented, whereas others are more conceptual. My own undergraduate experience at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) at Harvard University exposed me to the most current contemporary art theory and practice across disciplines through small group settings and mentorship from faculty who are active and accomplished in their own practice. Each year, up to ten visiting faculty - practicing artists and filmmakers - are invited to teach and lecture; brought along with them are new inquiries and perspectives that truly make the Department special. I remember visiting the Swedish artist Sophie Tottie's year-long studio on Linden Street, and while surrounded by her work in progress, experiencing an immense feeling of admiration and longing.

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2. Be active gaining mentorship and apprenticeship opportunities.

While formal mentorship demands a lot of time and commitment from the mentor, most artists enjoy sharing their process and practice with an observant audience. For example, I gained my woodworking skills from a two-year "apprenticeship" that I "set up" with Walter Stanul: by all the time hanging out at the woodshop that he manages at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. An accomplished guitar maker and musician, Walter taught me to understand wood with a most sensitive approach, noticing the different colors, weight, density, cellular patterns, and most importantly, sound. My "apprenticeship" with him was instrumental in shaping my aesthetics and sensibility in installations, where I often incorporate hand-planed and joined wood of different species.

3. See more. See more with your own eyes.

Visit museums on a regular basis, and when with the artworks, let go of the wall text and art history textbooks. Oftentimes when an artwork is presented to the public, it has already been labeled with what is perceived as the "correct" meaning or interpretation. For art students, it is much more important to articulate exactly what is in front of you and why it is interesting/uninteresting to you, than to be able to name and label things in art historically correct terms. Ultimately, these international conversations one has with the artworks can generate fruitful examination and understanding of one's own practice.

4. Gain an open perspective of art and life.

When I taught advanced studio courses, I often introduced my students first to Allan Kaprow's The Education of the Un-Artist from his Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Because I believe that a successful undergraduate education in visual art is one that prepares students to first be responsible participants in the world - in life - and then be responsible participants in the art world. A moment of special significance in my own art education was when I performed the Fluxus piece "Newspaper Music" with Alison Knowles during her residency at the Radcliffe Institute. Reflecting on the Fluxus ideology of going out of art and into life has liberated my own practice in many ways. After all, both making art and making life are lifelong pursuits.

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5. Keep an open attitude by trying different roles in the art world.

Organize a talk, curate a show, write a review, visit an art fair, guide a museum tour: these are all experiences that are inseparable from being a contemporary artist. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing harmful about working as a gallery intern for a summer as long as one can figure out the finance creatively. Schools tend to steer students away from all conversations about the commercial aspects of art, but very soon many graduates find themselves in New York juggling several jobs and not knowing how to begin selling their work. I would encourage college students to acquaint themselves with different roles in the art world, be it commercial or non-profit, auction houses or artist-run spaces. It will also help expand your notions of a career in art.

6. Engage with all kinds of techniques and technology.

Fine artists are often material and process-oriented (myself included). Yet looking around I can't help but be amazed by the visualization tools 3D animators are using to create forms and experiences. Right now I am incorporating in my practice the most ancient bookbinding and letterpress techniques while thinking a lot about virtual reality. I love the fact that we are at an era where all tools and techniques are widely available, and I do think the art world and the world at large would benefit from artists utilizing new technologies in their creative processes.

7. Find your community and be supported.

Know that a career of a professional artist is hard, and that there is no standard path or curve, and certainly no prediction when your career will "bloom." And this is not the only reason why artists should identify or establish communities that receive, support, and sustain their work. Throughout history, artists have formed collaboratives and collectives to support each other's practice and together gain better visibility. Contemporary practices, such as social practice, have opened possibilities for artists to closely engage with communities outside the art world and its audience. More and more artists are also collaborating with scientists and fields experts in their research. As competitive and ego-driven the art world may appear to be, the most sustainable careers are built through exchange.
Make more ambitious demands. Push secondary schools to infuse problem solving in pursuit of the common good into our daily classrooms, not merely into after school activities. It's possible. I have teacher colleagues, this year, who have taken extra-curriculars and pushed them down into the school day, allowing for more in-depth reflection, learning and relationships. The Spanish club's annual trip abroad is now embedded in a class that is studying foreign aid, partnering with an international NGO, and wrestling with whether literacy initiatives are an effective way for the global north to support development in the south. Another teacher has taken the work of a service club and imbedded it in a class that is actively organizing blood drives and working with a camp for kids with cancer. An English teacher is cultivating youth radio journalists, reporting on topics like climate change and education funding. And our Health teacher leads a film class in which students to turn the cameras on important public health concerns in our community: teen pregnancy, addiction, depression. Difficult and sometimes taboo subjects are now opportunities for self-reflection and for connecting with often marginalized people in our community.

If schools are intentional about this stuff, citizenship and service can be integral aspects of the daily curriculum, providing relevance and meaningful context for learning academic skills. It is important that higher ed assert the value of this kind of teaching.
This year, like 2015, promises to be yet another busy year in Africa's electoral democracy stakes. More than a third of the continent's 54 countries will conduct polls.

All elections are important, but in some countries they carry particular weight. Key ones coming up are:

Senatorial, state and federal constituency elections in Nigeria. In Africa's most populous nation elections can serve as a yardstick for advancing electoral democracy. This year's elections are expected to lead to further governance reforms. They follow last year's presidential poll which ushered in a new government.

Burkina Faso also experienced fundamental change in 2015 with the departure of President Blaise Compaore. The change must be consolidated with electoral participation of citizens and normalisation of politics in soon-to-be-held municipal elections.

Elections in the Central African Republic will be closely watched. They present an opportunity for stabilising a country that has experienced conflict.

Zambia's situation is unique. Its recent elections led to a change of government through the ballot -- a rare phenomenon in African politics. Presidential and general elections are due in August.

Uganda's presidential poll will undoubtedly test President Yoweri Museveni's entrenchment of power. Uganda will face the challenge of adhering to international and African Union election standards by ensuring level playing fields for all candidates.

The DRC presidential election set for November will also be scrutinised because of previous violence and the country's propensity for instability.

Ghana's general elections in November might provide lessons on how to trust in the power of the ballot and run elections peacefully. But its leadership faces severe constraints given that the economy is in the doldrums. It has had to turn to the IMF for assistance.

South Africa will arguably hold its most important municipal elections since 1994. To be held between May and August, the elections will test the popularity of the governing African National Congress. Signs are its support is falling in some municipalities.

Elections in the coming year will be held as economic growth shows signs of slowing in Africa. Tougher economic times might heighten electoral stakes.

The good and the bad of 2015

In 2015 almost 20 African countries held municipal, regional, general, presidential elections and by-elections. Two referenda were also held in Rwanda and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville).

Rwanda's citizens apparently voted overwhelmingly in favour of extending President Paul Kagame's term of office, possibly until 2034. The referendum ostensibly suggests that the incumbent respects the popular will by subjecting the term limit to the vote.

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The Republic of Congo's President Dennis Sassou Nguesso also called a referendum to amend the presidential term and age limits, a move rejected by opposition parties. He thus joined African leaders who devise innovative means to cling to power while opposing the provisions of the African Charter on democracy, elections and governance.

But how significant are elections in Africa?

Regular changes of government through free, fair and democratic elections that reflect the wishes of the majority of voters are critical for democratisation.

The 2015 polls could tempt us to perceive elections as a reliable measure of democratisation. But 2015 presented mixed opportunities and drawbacks for democratisation. A major drawback is that some leaders clung to power and elections simply became rubber stamping exercises for the incumbents. This happened in the DRC, Rwanda, Congo (Brazzavile) and Gabon.

Elections are an essential component of democratisation, but other more important measures include:

narrowing the rich-poor gap,

improving living standards and promoting active citizenship,

freedom of expression and media,

respect for human rights and rule of law, and

accountable public representatives.

Isolated successes were registered in last year's elections. Some countries for once conducted polls acceptable to local opposition parties, civil society and domestic and international observers. Fewer incidents of violence were seen. Tanzania was a particular case in point.

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But, nothing spectacular emerged from Africa's 2015 elections. Some polls actually perpetuated the usual stereotype of violent elections that threaten peace, stability and democratisation.

They also presented doubts about some incumbents' legitimacy to rule.

Unfulfilled expectations

There were high expectations about the impending polls early in 2015.

First, they were expected to continue the 1990s trend of further democratisation but with the hope that they would comply with international and African Union standards. Such elections must have integrity, be free, fair and reflect the wishes of the electorate.

Zambia's presidential elections early in 2015 following the death of President Michael Sata provided some interesting lessons. The opposition claim that the election results did not reflect the will of the people.

The process therefore remains incomplete. Zambians will hold presidential elections followed by parliamentary and local government polls in August.

Second, Africa's 2015 elections were expected to consolidate democracy at least in countries that now hold regular polls.

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And thirdly, the 2015 elections were also expected to help produce leaders with greater legitimacy and accountability.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Ethiopia, Burundi and the DRC produced results where the pendulum swung towards questionable and mediocre ends contrary to election best practices. Thus, this expectation remains unfulfilled.

Ethiopia's election results suggested a landslide victory for its governing party despite opposition allegations of irregularities. Such scenarios usually create legitimacy crises and may undermine government's accountability.

For Burundi, the current turmoil is traceable to its questionable elections after ignoring advice that they be postponed to allow for a more conducive atmosphere. The subsequent polls were boycotted by the opposition. They were also shunned by African and international observers.

Third term machinations

Admittedly, citizens have a right to propose constitutional amendments to allow leaders to govern for as long as electorates want. But the tendency by some leaders to extend terms by manipulating national constitutions weakens democratisation and constitutionalism.

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President Pierre Nkurunziza's amendment of Burundi's constitution and his decision to run for a disputed third term is a case in point.

The era of military coups, dictatorship and authoritarianism might be declining. But leaders who resort to manipulating electoral and constitutional mechanisms and intimidating citizens to prolong their stay in power pose new challenges.

Research suggests that Africa's elections are struggling to enhance its democratic trajectory. Examining the 2015 elections in Lesotho, Burundi, Ethiopia, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, Sudan, Togo, Benin, Comoros and Egypt hardly inspires confidence. This does not augur well for Africa's 2016 polls, nor future elections.

Kealeboga J Maphunye, Wiphold-Brigalia Bam Chair in Electoral Democracy in Africa, University of South Africa
Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, listens to a question from the crowd at a campaign event at Bridge View Center Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in Ottumwa, Iowa. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Norway has been without an American ambassador for more than 850 days. It is time for Ted Cruz and his fellow Senate Republicans to allow crucial nominations to pass.

More than two years have passed since the American ambassador to Norway, Barry White, completed his tour and left the country. An uncontroversial candidate stands ready to assume the post, but Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has blocked the nomination.

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As a Norwegian, a friend of United States, and a former employee of the American Embassy in Oslo, I am deeply concerned about the situation. Norwegians expect more from our most important ally, and we are right to do so.

The Tsunis Fiasco

In September 2013, President Obama nominated the Greek-American businessman George Tsunis to succeed Barry White as ambassador to Norway. In a notorious hearing before in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tsunis showed a shocking lack of knowledge about my country.

In fact, he managed to offend one of the two parties in the government coalition, refer to the country as a republic run by a president (it's a constitutional monarchy where the king is the Head of State, and the government is run by a Prime Minister), and acknowledged that he had never even visited Norway.

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Watch the embarassing hearing again (YouTube)

Sam Heins, an uncontroversial candidate

Tsunis withdrew his name from consideration, and in his place, President Obama nominated an accomplished and uncontroversial candidate in the Minnesotan Sam Heins. The two former ambassadors, Ben Whitney (R) and Barry White (D) both support his nomination. Not surprisingly, the Midwestern attorney skated through his committee hearing last summer. Nothing has happened since.

Procedural tricks in the Senate

In an attempt to speed up nomination processes, the then-Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in 2013 invoked "The Nuclear Option", thereby eliminating the Filibuster Rule for certain appointments. Republicans have responded by slowing down nominations by using procedural tricks.

Placing a "hold" on nominees is one tactic that has been employed by several senators, including Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL). These holds have all been unrelated to the actual nominees or countries in question.

Cotton quickly came to his senses. Rubio seems to still oppose the appointment of a new ambassador to Mexico, America's third-largest trading partner. Cruz however, has taken it one step further and placed a blanket hold on all politically appointed ambassadorial nominations (non-career Foreign Service nominees) to protest the P5+1 Iran nuclear deal. He remains steadfast in his opposition.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) have ways to get around the gridlock, by scheduling a floor vote, but he has not chosen to do so yet.

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Mitch McConnell has the power to get ambassadors approved, but won't use it. Photo: FlickrCC, Gary Skidmore

The Senate has actually approved some career-appointees recently, but no political appointees. Around one-third of U.S. ambassadors serving abroad fall into this latter category. While one could debate the value of appointing Foreign Service professionals instead of campaign donors, people in the host country rarely make a distinction -- a political appointee is still viewed the same as any other U.S. ambassador. Norway has welcomed political appointees for the last forty years, without any noticeable effects on the bilateral relationship.



Does it matter?

The American Embassy in Oslo is staffed by very capable diplomats and very experienced local employees. However, no matter how you spin it, there is no equivalent representative to the president's appointed delegate to a country. Other diplomats simply cannot make up for the prestige that comes with having an ambassador present.

An absence like this is a bigger deal in countries where hierarchy and formal communication means more than in Norway, but former and current U.S. officials whom I have spoken with are concerned that Norwegians may soon view the prolonged lack of an ambassador as a direct affront to my country. And, let's be honest, why shouldn't they?

Not having an ambassador present also means that the embassy's efforts to promote cultural, educational and commercial ties are likely to slow. The ambassador often plays a symbolic role by attending several hundred public and non-public events every year. Often, the ambassador takes a personal interest in this work, and therefore drives such efforts forward. As such, the absence hurts U.S. trade relations and educational exchange, to name a few.

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The former ambassador to Norway, Barry White (second from the right), at one of the many he events he hosted to promote educational opportunities in the U.S. Photo: Courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in Oslo

The Senate gridlock calls unwanted attention to the conflict between the congressional majority and President Obama, well beyond America's shores. For many Norwegians it seems downright odd that the world's foremost superpower cannot manage the simple task of deploying an ambassador to a close friend and ally like Norway.



U.S. National Security Interest

Former Vice President Walter Mondale recently wrote in the New York Times that it is in America's national security interest to fill such positions as the ambassadorship in Norway, and that especially "[i]n a time of dangerous international crises, we need to work with friends and allies, using all the tools of diplomacy."

While some may scoff at the thought of Norway as a "crucial ally" of the U.S., they would be wise to recall that my country recently played a big part in the transportation of 60 tons of raw uranium to Iran, a central aspect of the aforementioned nuclear deal. Two years ago, Norway had a similarily significant role in removing chemical weapons from Syria.

For over a decade, my country was a loyal contributor to ISAF, the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan. Moreover, while other countries have reduced its original order of the new F-35 fighter jets, Norway has instead reiterated its commitment. Finally, my country is an active and constructive member of NATO, which by the way, is led by Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian Prime Minister.

In other words, Norway has actively sought to support U.S. Foreign Policy goals in recent years, and has historically been a close and loyal ally. In today's turbulent international climate, America needs friends like Norway. I hope Senator Cruz and his Republican colleagues soon realize that, and stop holding our ambassador hostage.
Sharks are circling in the Atlantic ocean, and we're not referring to the majestic wildlife found there.

International oil supermajors Exxon, Shell and Chevron have all submitted public comments urging the government to open up as much of the U.S. coastline to oil exploration as possible, in particular the Atlantic offshore area stretching from Virginia to Georgia.

What's at Stake

In the next month or two, the Obama administration will be accepting public comments on a proposed five-year leasing program that may allow offshore oil drilling in the Arctic, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Opening up new areas to risky oil extraction has prompted a wave of activism from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to more than 100 coastal communities in the Southeast, but giant oil companies are using every ounce of their political clout to make sure they continue to have easy access to resources owned by the American people.

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In public comments submitted last year regarding the draft five year program, Exxon, Shell and Chevron all called for opening up the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to leasing and attacked even the minor protections that the plan included. Exxon lamented that the program authorized oil and gas leasing in "only" eight of the 26 offshore planning areas and warned that any further restrictions would have "deleterious consequences" for the domestic economy.

All of the oil companies criticized a planned buffer zone that prohibits oil drilling within 50 miles of the shore -- a protection that would likely cut profit margins for the drillers as they are forced to explore in deeper water. They also requested that the lease sale (currently planned for 2021) be moved up.

Beneath the Surface

Like an iceberg mostly submerged beneath the surface, these public comments are only the visible markers of a campaign that has been waged behind closed doors for several years now. An expose by the Center for Public Integrity found that oil industry trade groups led by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) successfully enlisted governors of the Atlantic states to lobby the Obama administration to open up the Atlantic OCS to drilling. The American Petroleum Institute (API) has also been central in developing oil industry talking points on the Atlantic and lobbying Congress.

These comments do not necessarily mean that these companies will end up bidding on Atlantic leases or ultimately drilling for oil. Conversely, companies who did not comment (such as BP) may later decide to pursue the Atlantic. The companies will likely wait to see the data on oil and gas deposits collected by seismic testing, which is planned to take place later this year, before making any decisions.

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But such public comments do indicate that Exxon and friends are keeping tabs on the Atlantic and are closely following the details of the lease process. Oil companies are constantly depleting their proven reserves. But in order to keep their financial backers happy, they must constantly be searching for new places to drill -- a strategy that is flatly inconsistent with a healthy and stable climate.

What's Next
Reversing climate change and addressing income inequality are the twin challenges of our time. Solving them both means a safer, more stable future for generations to come.

If we don't stop and reverse climate change, our environment and our economy could collapse. If we don't address the growing gap between rich and poor, our political structures and our economy will continue to fray, robbing us of both the funds and the political will to address climate change.

These challenges are irreversibly linked -- and we can't solve one without solving them both.

That's why progressives, labor leaders and everyone who cares about addressing these twin threats should oppose the California Public Utility Commission's recent proposed decision to require poor utility customers to subsidize richer customers and the new Wall-Street funded quasi-utilities serving these wealthy customers.

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The California Public Utilities Commission's decision is on a technical issue called Net Energy Metering: the system that provides subsidies for the installation of residential solar systems by forcing utilities to buy surplus energy generated on rooftops at an artificially high price. For a long time it made sense to provide these very generous subsidies -- we all benefit from a robust solar industry. Some of us closest to the economics of solar thought it made more sense to subsidize larger solar installations, which are up to three times more cost-effective than residential solar systems. But broad adoption of solar and renewable power is a goal we must all support.

But what is happening now is that Wall Street has figured out how to game the system. And what usually happens when Wall Street financiers and speculators get involved is happening now in solar -- the rich are being subsidized by the poor.

Net Energy Metering allows wealthier solar customers to sell the power they produce back to power providers at retail rates. Solar customers might think they are "off the grid," but their lights still go on at night or when the sun isn't shining because they are using the electric grid as a giant free battery.

But they don't pay for it, others do. And "others" are renters and homeowners without the funds to install solar.

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Solar customers are by every measure wealthier and whiter than traditional power customers. That's because it's expensive to install rooftop solar (between $12,000 and $40,000, even with the generous tax credits), and because you generally have to own your home in order to install the panels. What's more, the panels are typically leased to the homeowner by a company like SolarCity. Those companies then bundle the leases and sell them to investors (sound familiar?), and it is not the customer but the investors who receive both the tax credit and the benefit of the Net Energy Metering subsidy associated with the panel.

Traditional power customers also include CARE customers -- low-income families who earn less than 200 percent of the poverty level -- who are particularly impacted by this decision. There are nearly 1.5 million CARE families across California, taking home an average of $40,180 a year -- and they receive a 30-35 percent discount on their electric and natural gas bills. By comparison, there are only 200,000 solar customers, and they earn more than double that amount -- about $92,210 each year.

The CPUC's proposed ruling would force CARE customers to pick up the tab for the high cost of Net Metering, eating into the discount those families need. That would very plainly divert money intended for low-income customers to Wall Street and wealthier Californians. That's not right, and the proposed decision has been roundly criticized by ratepayer advocates and others across the state.

California is moving towards a green energy future, and that's a positive thing. But we need to be cognizant of how we get there. Forcing low-income people to subsidize Wall Street will only exacerbate the growing income inequality that is gnawing at our communities.
By Mia Adorante for W Magazine.

Man Out

Banish the chiseled cheekbones. You'll be striving for teenage-like rosy-not-rudy cheeks long before it's time to break out the rose--because contouring is so out.

You're going to let your hair blow free!



Giambattista Valli Spring 2016

The Spring 2016 runways showed nary a straight head of hair, as stylists and designers favored letting models' natural wave fly freely.

...Or You Might Just Shave It Off.



Isabel Marant Spring 2016

After you get over the initial shock, you will not believe the freedom you'll feel from shedding all that unnecessary weight. Just try to avoid Marine Corps recruiting offices. And maybe wear more dresses. And some lipstick.

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Ditto for the Nail Art



courtesy of Deborah Lippmann

Hey, Monet manicurists? Let's stick to just one solid shade this season. Hint: Nude is having a moment, say our friends at Tenoverten nail salon. So is Crimson. Something for everybody.

Your Cleanser Will Require a Removal Cloth



courtesy of Erborian

Direct from Korea, an unctuously rich cleansing balm with the consistency of Crisco will land on your sink (hence, the required washcloth). Once you feel how soft your skin feels afterwards, you'll start looking forward to the ritual.



courtesy of SK-II

The Emperor's New Skin Care Step Japanese brand SK-II introduced us to the essence, but it's the new post-cleansing must-have. It may feel like water, but its magical powers prepare skin to accept that moisturizer more optimally.



Read more: 15 Ways You Can Rock Bangs

Patch Work



courtesy of LaRoche-Posay

By the end of this year, you might have control over the amount of sun exposure you're getting--or, at least you'll be made aware. L'Oreal-owned skin and suncare brand LaRoche-Posay is hoping to launch a patch that lets you know how much sun exposure you're getting, along with times when your skin is most vulnerable. It's like having your needling grandmother with you at all times!

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You'll Consider Giving Your Grays a Smoky Eye



courtesy of Style Edit

As the root concealer explosion continues, the notion of aiming spray-paint looking cans or eye shadow brushes on your grays will become completely natural.

Red My Lips



Courtesy of Celine

When the best makeup artists in the biz (think: Pat McGrath, Aaron De Mey, Diane Kendal) all send a red lip down the runway, you'd be smart to make the statement too. Just think of it as the perfect supplement to joining the 'Just Not Sorry' campaign.

Freckles Welcome



courtesy of Nars

What will come of implementing the ever-growing slew of skincare innovations into your routine? All the more reason to show your hard work off with a #humblebrag, especially if you're #blessed with freckles.



courtesy of La Prairie

Color, Better In an age where you can have everything, now, makeup that's just that won't cut it. You'll reach for the color from skincare brands like La Prairie, Omorvicza, Eve Lom, Algenist, and Perricone M.D. Not to worry, though, your favorite makeup brands are catching on, too.

Goop Goes Rogue



courtesy of Milk Makeup

What do Juice Beauty, Milk Makeup, and Glossier all have in common? They were created by women who took the path less traveled before landing in beauty. Our thoughts? Where have they been?!

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One Thousand Points



courtesy of EndyMed

You will rely on a combination of radiofrequency and a handpiece containing micro-needles to vanquish your deep wrinkles, acne scars and stretch marks. Could cellulite removal be far off?

And speaking of needles...



courtesy of Priv

You will stick your arm out to relieve what ails you. The beauty home delivery app Priv has added Nutridrip to its offerings. A registered nurse will come to you and administer a drip whatever ails you, be it the flu, a hangover or just plain old lethargy.
The Heritage Foundation has asserted that Americans deserve an "honest debate" about the costs of national security. I couldn't agree more.

In a piece that ran earlier this week in the National Interest, Heritage analyst Justin T. Johnson puts forward what in his view are "5 Bad Arguments For Cutting U.S. Defense Spending." But Johnson deploys some bad arguments of his own. I will focus on five of them.

America's Ability to Defend Itself and Its Interests Is "Marginal"

It's hard to believe that any serious assessment of U.S. military power could come to the conclusion that the United States' ability to protect itself and its interests is "marginal." Yet that is exactly what Mr. Johnson does.

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The United States has the best-trained, best-equipped military in the world. The problem is that many of the most urgent threats we face are not amenable to military solutions. We need a better strategy, not a larger, more expensive military.

It is important to note that in those areas where military force is being used, the costs are a relatively small part of the Pentagon's $600 billion-plus budget.

For example, expenditures on Operation Inherent Resolve - the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria -- are slated to be less than $6 billion this year, or one percent of the Pentagon's total resources. The budget for the war in Afghanistan comes in at $42 billion, well under 10% of the Pentagon's total resources. Pentagon officials will no doubt point out that these conflicts generate indirect costs, but they have never documented those costs in any meaningful way. Either the wars against ISIS and in Afghanistan are costing more than the Pentagon is acknowledging, or -- far more likely -- the Department of Defense spends the vast bulk of its budget on items unrelated to current wars. So the next time you hear that we need to boost the Pentagon budget to fight ISIS, hang on to your wallet.



In the mean time, there are large swaths of the Pentagon budget that are useless in addressing current threats. This is certainly true of the dangerous, costly plan to spend $1 trillion modernizing and sustaining the nuclear triad over the next three decades. And an August 2015 analysis by the National Security Network demonstrates that the F-35 -- the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon -- is an under-performing, overpriced aircraft that is ill suited to the wide variety of missions it is being asked to perform.

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Part of any new strategy must involve recognizing the limits of military power, and the need to invest in civilian activities like diplomacy and economic assistance that can help prevent conflicts from occurring in the first place. The United States may be able to do a better job of defending its people and its interests, but it needs the right mix of tools to do the job.

It Doesn't Matter How Much the U.S. Spends on Its Military Compared to Other Countries



Johnson dismisses the fact that the United States spends more on its military than the next seven nations combined as mere "click bait" that has no place in a serious argument about how much to spend on defense. On one level Johnson has it right -- defense spending should be tied to an assessment of defense needs, not a particular number. But spending levels do put important questions on the table. If the U.S. spends so much relative to the rest of the world, are our allies paying their fare share for dealing with emerging security challenges? Are the relatively large sums being spent by the United States being spent efficiently and effectively? Is it really possible to spend this much money and have capabilities that are merely marginal, as Mr. Johnson asserts?

We Have Our Smallest Army Since 1940



Bean counting about how U.S. forces are smaller now than they were in completely different eras that posed completely different challenges is misleading and irrelevant. Today's Army is far better trained and equipped than it was in 1940. And it is more than adequate in size and capability to deal with the most likely challenges on the horizon. Unless Mr. Johnson is suggesting that we build our defense strategy around fighting a large-scale ground war in Europe or fighting two Iraq-style wars with no allies, there is no need for a larger Army.

Pentagon Spending Is Not a Significant Contributor to the National Debt



Johnson implies that Pentagon spending plays no significant role in running up the national debt. But a program that accounts for more than half of all discretionary spending cannot be overlooked in crafting a responsible package of revenues and expenditures that promotes economic growth and increases the strength and resilience of the American economy, which is the ultimate foundation of U.S. security. There are tens of billions of dollars of wasteful and misguided expenditures within the Pentagon budget that could be put to better use, either in reducing the deficit or investing in critical domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and environmental protection. The Pentagon - which is the only federal agency that can't pass an audit - should not be given a free ride when it comes to setting budget priorities.

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The Increases in Pentagon Spending Since 9/11 Have Been Insufficient



In 2011, the United States had the highest level of military spending since World War II - higher than during the Korean or Vietnam Wars, and higher than during the Cold War nuclear buildup. Those numbers have come down since then, driven by a combination of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. But Congress and the president have raised the budget caps twice, and the Pentagon has used the war budget, which is not subject to caps, to pay for all manner of projects that have nothing to do with current conflicts. The budget signed by the president in December provided $607 billion in Pentagon spending, and billions more for work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That's more than the U.S. spent on defense at the height of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, when it faced a superpower adversary, the Soviet Union.
By Rara Williams, WiSci STEAM Camp participant

I was recently part of the ANNpower Global Delegation to the 2015 Trust Women Conference in London, a conference dedicated to "putting the rule of law behind women's rights" with a focus on modern day slavery and human trafficking. I met global thought leaders, from Tunisia to India to Switzerland. The conference offered a chance to interact with leaders of multinational corporations, governments, and NGOs. Discussions occurred both on and off the stage, and potentially impacted the lives of thousands of people.

The importance of exposing youth like me to these kinds of events is not to be taken lightly or overlooked. The opportunity to be at such an event is an investment. As Redeat Gebeyehu, a fellow WiSci camper and a WiSci Youth Ambassador at the recent UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris, has written, "Investing in youth is investing in our future." Not only is the youth perspective important, the world needs youth to be present at events like Trust Women because such experiences can accelerate our understanding and knowledge. We do not yet have strong formal commitments to governments or corporations, and thus we are free to soak up information and learn as much as we can on an independent basis.

The conference was held immediately following the terrorist attacks in Kano, Beirut, and Paris and there was great focus on the role of women in countering violent extremism. There was a panel devoted to discussing women under extremist rule, from ISIS to Boko Haram. We learned how ISIS recruits girls and women, beyond the push factors associated with Western estrangement, the pull factors of purpose and meaning for disaffected youth living in the West. To quote from the panel, "if we don't give them a reason for life, ISIS will give them a reason for death."

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In London, I had the opportunity to speak with Fiona Mahvinga, a co-founder of the Camfed (Campaign for Female Education) Network. Camfed is a pan-African network of educated women that is helping to empower the next generation of African female leaders. More than 190,000 girls have been supported through Camfed. Combined with the force of the African Leadership Academy, as well as other leadership programs throughout the continent, there is most certainly a tide of strong African leadership that continues to grow stronger. This up and coming generation of African leadership represents how "Africa for the Africans" can now truly be realized.

It is important to recognize who is making the decisions for whom. Those seeking to combat issues such as modern day slavery and gender-based violence are often coming from a place of privilege, which can translate to distancing from the realities of these issues. At Trust Women, human trafficking was not discussed from such usual distances. We heard directly from survivors, from Ghana to Japan to the United States. When we learned about the Yazidi genocide, we learned about it from a Yazidi man who came to the conference seeking funds and partners for an organization he runs supporting Yazidis. Gratefully, he was successful in both efforts. When we talked about disaffected youth in the West joining ISIS, the discussion was led by a mother who had lost her son to ISIS. She has since formed a network of other mothers who have lost their children to ISIS. Thus, Trust Women offered firsthand accounts of the topics we discussed, and provided an incredible first-hand look at what is being done to confront these pressing issues of our time.
By Julie Nimoy

Innovation develops from having inspiration, overcoming challenges, and nurturing ingenuity. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE exemplifies innovation. It's a $10 million competition challenging teams from around the world to make the Star Trek medical tricorder a reality, bringing healthcare to the palm of your hand. As the daughter of Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed Star Trek's Mr. Spock, I am intimately familiar with the show's enduring ability to inspire.

The tricorder was a mobile device carried by the crew of the Starship Enterprise and used to collect biomedical information. Notably, the device effectively diagnosed the vital signs of all beings--not just humans. The tricorder's ability to read those life signs, as well as Mr. Spock's frequent encouragement to both friend and foe to "live long and prosper," can be viewed as fictional engagements with the idea that illness does not discriminate and all beings have a right to lead healthy lives. The concept of the universality of well-being and the drive to make it a reality are the inspiration for the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE. They are also a major motivation for my film, COPD: Highly Illogical--A Special Tribute to Leonard Nimoy.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, literally takes a person's breath away. It makes the simple act of breathing, which most people take for granted, difficult and painful. It's estimated that COPD affects close to 30 million Americans. Sadly, over a third of these people suffer the symptoms of the disease without ever being diagnosed. This, as Spock would say, is "highly illogical," since early detection and treatment can reduce suffering and save lives. Thus, a user-friendly, mobile device that could diagnose individuals in the absence of a physician would be a great benefit for people with COPD.

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Julie Nimoy and her father, Leonard Nimoy.

My father died from COPD in 2015. He had been diagnosed with the disease in 2013, but an unselfish concern for the lives of others wouldn't allow him to convalesce. He set out to use the influence of his personality to educate the public about the silent killer that is COPD. He passed on before he got to see his goal realized, but that does not mean it will not be realized. I have taken up his resolve to help people learn about COPD and deal with it logically.

I am excited to announce that my husband, David Knight, and I have begun a 30-day crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise the funds necessary to complete production of COPD: Highly Illogical. We have gotten together some great rewards and have some never before seen footage of my father. Please join us in fulfilling Leonard Nimoy final wish to prevent the loss of millions of lives.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org; follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+; and get our newsletter to stay informed.
Opinion / Columnist

There has been much hype on the issue of housing land, land barons, illegal settlers and demolitions for quite a long time, but solutions to this problem seem to eluding council officials.Previously, the media has been awash with disgraceful articles stating different dimensions on the issue of housing land. Some sections of the media reported that desperate land seekers were now erecting structures on land reserved for burial sites at Granville Cemetery, popularly known as Kumbudzi whilst others were unlawfully erecting structures on wet lands. Council of Harare should take responsibility and address the anomaly that it does have to reach this sad point.Land barons have mushroomed under the noises of council duping home seekers of their hard earned funds by allocating them on illegal land. The case in point is the Arlington Estate saga. It is actually surprising how officials who approved such illegal land to home seekers and now pointing fingers absolving themselves of all blame. It is heartening to note that government has instituted an inquiry in the activities of such officials most of whom were given brides no doubt.Home seekers have now lost confidence in the whole process as at the end of the day they lose their home and monies whilst the land barons are left scotch free. On the other hand people seeking housing stands should ensure that they go through all necessary paper work that should be done before building structures on allocated land. When demolitions are underway, it may seem as if the Government is being unjust, but alas, the law should take its course. The unlawful settlers at Arlington estate were last year advised to pull down their structures on their own in order to save tiles, window and door frames. However, some complied while others refused the councils' order which then led to the invitation of bulldozers to demolish their homes.Opposition MDC led by Welshman Ncube has been criticizing MDC-T councillors and Government alleging that the demolitions were forced displacement. Opposition parties should stop the blame game and start working. Most councillors in Harare belong to the opposition, MDC-T party. These councillors have a pivotal role to play in organizing land in the city. For instance, Harare municipality should have identified long back that people erecting their structures at Arlington estate were settling unlawfully. Councillors should not sleep on duty, instead they should move around and assess the real situation on the ground and take measures before it's too late.On the other hand, MDC-T councillors could have been connived with MDC-T hoodlums in demolishing the structures. How could the city fathers leave people constructing structures on illegal land? In other words, the Mayor, Bernard Manyenyeni and his councillors had an agenda of tarnishing ZANU-PF led Government. Surely, Council officials should be visible on the ground.Had it not been that President Mugabe noticed and expressed displeasure over the illegal structures on an opening section of Joshua Nkomo Road, the illegal settlers could have continued mushrooming on that area.Pleasing to note is that Government, which has the people at heart, is offering the displaced families legal stands in Stoneridge.The Housing sector should try to offer available stands to home seekers so as to lessen the issue of illegal settlements. Housing is an important component of investment. And in many countries housing makes up the largest component of wealth. Therefore, issuing of housing stands to people is part of development. Availing housing stands to home seekers is also one of the objectives of the economic blue print, Zim-Asset.Conclusively, land at Arlington estate is supposed to be reserved for the expansion of the Harare International Airport. Period.
True to hopes, 2015 was a landmark year for global development. Two decades of talks yielded an ambitious, universal agreement to fight climate change and the UN General Assembly defined the next 15 years of development targets with the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs) and agreed to a framework for financing them. However, as with any year, 2015 brought in unexpected crises: millions of Syrian refugees, an earthquake in Nepal, and violent extremism around the world in Kenya, Mali, France, Iraq, Lebanon, and many other countries.

What is 2016 going to bring? Predictions are a tricky business, but we think these are going to be defining themes for the coming year in global development:

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Blended finance will become the de facto way to finance development priorities.

The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in effect, but there's currently a 2.6 trillion funding gap for the SDGs per year - roughly equivalent to the GDP of Brazil. Traditional development aid cannot fill this void alone; more private sector involvement is critical to the success of the SDGs. However, investments in emerging markets are lagging and major funds have lost between 12 and 30 percent of their value in the past five years. Moreover, for the first time in nearly three decades, investors have pulled more money out of emerging markets than they have put in.

Is this a death knell for the development goals? Not at all. We predict increased investment in blended finance, a new way to use public funds to entice private capital towards investments that have financial, social, and environmental gains. The recent launch of the Convergence platform at Davos is a good first step. We also believe that there will be a growth in financing from developing countries themselves: think tax revenues, private domestic savings, pension funds, private equity markets, and remittances. Combined these can surpass current aid flows.

The implication? The public sector needs to design structures and initiatives that incentivize the private sector to collaborate with them - they will not be able to achieve the ambitious SDGs alone.



The race for a new UN Secretary General (SG) will result in a clarified mandate for the United Nations.

The UN had a few successes in 2015 (read: SDGs and climate agreement) but it has fallen far short in maintaining peace and security - it was hampered in its ability to broker solutions in Syria and Yemen and in protecting human rights in Daesh territory.

The UN has a watershed moment in 2016 when a new SG will be sworn in. She (most of the leading current contenders are women) will have the gargantuan task of making the UN relevant again. She will have to articulate a vision to make the large bureaucratic organization nimble enough to respond to a new form of conflict and humanitarian crisis that is quick to flare and driven by non-state actors. As is, the institution is at risk of being relegated to a 70-year experiment no longer fit for its purpose.



The implication? The UN needs to follow through on its promise to ensure a robust election process where candidates are forced to articulate, debate and defend their vision for a UN that is fit for today's purpose.



El Nino will show that all the investments we have made in building resilience are not enough.

El Nino has already hit and will compound the effects of climate change in 2016. This is the planet's first real test since passing the COP21 agreement in December 2015.

There have been a number of resilience initiatives over the past five years - like Rockefeller's 100 Resilient Cities and the World Bank's Small Island States Resilience Initiative. We predict that El Nino will test these investments - and sadly they will come up short. 2016 will see increased weather pressure on coastal cities, more natural disasters and a higher frequency of extended droughts or flooding on agricultural plains - all of which will have significant knock-on effects.

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To mitigate this, we need to double down on resilience investments and data is key. Crowd-sourced maps, advanced weather radars, and real-time monitoring during crises will need to become ubiquitous to keep people safe. Financial innovation through weather-indexed insurance for crops will be an important component.



The implication? Development finance institutions need to re-prioritize resilience programs and investments as a critical part of their portfolio in order to avoid significant human casualties in 2016.

Syrian refugees will come to be viewed as an opportunity for European growth.

Europe is aging - 27 of the 30 countries with the largest population over 65 are in Europe. Countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary have seen their populations shrink by 5 to 15% since 1990. Maintaining economic prosperity with a shrinking working-age population is a major challenge.

We predict that as Syrian refugees become more integrated, they will be recognized as the sustainable solution to ensuring economic prosperity in Europe. Is this overly optimistic? Perhaps. There is a rise of right wing politics driven in part by this crisis, and attitudes towards immigrants are firmly negative.

But there are two things that give us hope. First, Europe has overblown fears of immigration before (e.g., the immigration of Poles, Turks, Romanians) which have subsided with time. Second, this group of refugees from Syria is disproportionately well educated, which will help - over 40% have a secondary school education or higher. Research shows that these refugees are likely not only have a positive fiscal impact, but are also likely to create jobs by starting their own businesses.

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Ideally, we should prevent a refugee flow by tackling the root cause of the problem in the country of origin. But in the interim, we should also focus on integrating the refugees that are already here. This will require reducing processing times; providing job support; and dispelling rumors and misinformation about refugees' impact on society.



The implication? National governments need to avoid the reaction to "contain" refugees - and implement long-term policies positioning refugees as the solution to Europe's unsustainable economy.



Democracy will be redefined in sub-Saharan Africa.

Over the past twenty years, democracy on the African continent has become more widespread. However, its fundamentals still have tenuous roots in many countries.

A movement, endorsed by the AU and African Development Bank, supports a more centralized and integrated form of governance known as the democratic development state. Championed by Ethiopia and Rwanda, this model seeks to cultivate a robust free market and pair it with strong and centralized political institutions in a common effort to eradicate poverty. The major shift with this model is a move away from relying on external actors (i.e., NGOs) to achieve growth.

Our prediction is that this model will become a more popular transitional form of democracy. This doesn't mean that all countries will follow suit. There are counter examples, such as Kenya, which is undergoing a devolution process. However, we think this model will gain favor as governments see how it balances growth with inclusiveness. There is a key danger here though: critics rightly point out that this model can lead to abrogation of civil liberties (as is alleged in Ethiopia and Rwanda). This cannot continue to be the norm if indeed this model is going to flourish.

The implication? If this model does become dominant, donors will need to fundamentally rethink the ways in which they engage with governments because their presence may no longer be welcome.
It is time for me to make a confession to the people of my hometown in Lakewood, Ohio. In the summer of 2014, I brought illegal contraband into the confines of the city. Like a bootlegger during prohibition, I drove into the little suburb of Cleveland during the cover of night with my booty hidden in tow. No, it wasn't 10 cases of the finest hooch this side of the Appalachia; it was a 50-pound pit bull named Calliope.

I wasn't always a criminal. Mom and dad raised me with the same values as any good Midwestern parent does. This ranged from the stay-out-of-jail basics, to finding things to do that weren't in front of the television, to being open and accepting of all walks of life. The latter wasn't difficult. Despite its tiny 6.69 square mileage, Lakewood packs a big city's amount ethnicities, culture, and lifestyles. Growing up there exposed me to all of them. Nobody paid any mind if you were a homosexual, a "grip the gun and flag" conservative, a "let's stay PC, bro" liberal, a political refugee, a Muslim, an immigrant, a Jehovah's Witness, a junky, or a jock. I grew up with all of them and we all cried the same tears at the end of each Browns game.

However, in 2008, the openness of the city I had grown accustomed to had changed. Piggybacking off of Ohio's dangerous and vicious dog ordinance, which deemed that all pit bulls were vicious from birth, Lakewood passed a ban on these types of dogs altogether. Even though Ohio has since removed specific breeds from the ordinance and now just focuses on each individual dog's behavior, Lakewood's ban is still holding strong. After the ban was put in place, people could no longer adopt dogs that were deemed to be pits. Lakewood's council members claimed this was an attempt to make the city safer, when in reality it prevented good dogs from being able to find homes, forced respectable citizens to move, and created criminals out of ordinary people by forcing them to keep their family pet under the city's radar.

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I didn't agree with the legislation but I also didn't dwell on it. I was finishing up college and planning a move to California after graduating. Dogs and the consequences of breed specific legislation were not on my mind. A couple of years later, I settled in San Francisco, met a pretty lady named Malli and moved in with her.

After several years in SF, Malli and I decided to move to New York City and were in the planning stages for the move. A dog simply wasn't something we were in the market for with a 3000-mile move across the country on the horizon. However, my coworker who fosters rescue dogs brought a brown and white mixed-breed pup named Calliope into the office to say hello. As I walked in, she was obediently lying on the ground basking in all of the attention of the girls in the office as they surrounded her saying "you're so cute!" in various forms of baby talk. Something happened when I stood there admiring her docile demeanor as she coolly looked up at me with her heart-shaped nose and doey brown eyes.

"Okay...okay" I thought to myself, "from this point forward, I will never allow any harm to come to this creature."

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After Malli and I signed the papers making us Calliope's legal guardians, I had unknowingly joined a coveted group of dog owners. I was now a pit bull person. It was at that point I had learned pit bulls aren't actually a breed; it is simply an umbrella term of many different breeds that fit within certain characteristics. Being a rescue dog, we didn't know what exactly she was, but I knew that her large, dimpled smile, short fur, and big, blocky head, would be associated with pit bulls. I was perfectly comfortable with that.

Similar to purchasing a car then noticing the same model every time one passes, I began to take note of all the pitties I walked by. I found myself reading about the controversy and misconceptions about these dogs. I learned that 1000 - 3000 pit bulls are put down every day, and that breed specific legislation not only prevents families from adopting these animals in need, it also instills the mindset that these animals are inherently aggressive. This leads to a reluctance to adopt, thus adding to the death count.

I also read about the stories of devotion these dogs have to their people and their patient demeanor with children. I saw these characteristics in Calliope as she instantly latched onto Malli and I and greeted children in the park with licks to their faces. I soon felt connected with the proud owners who are trying to end the discrimination that their furry companions constantly face.

Pit bulls were just another type of pooch before I adopted Calliope. Shortly after, I was a few paw prints away from protesting whichever team would sign Michael Vick.

Since Calliope would be categorized as an "aggressive breed", most airlines make it difficult to fly with her. So, my new family and I decided to drive across the country making a pit stop (pun so very intended) in my old stomping grounds of Lakewood.

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As the entire country rolled by during the drive, our girl sat gracefully in the back seat as the only world she even knew fell further away.

The night we entered unfriendly territory, we all were weary-eyed and antsy from being in the car since Des Moines. We passed the Rocky River corp limit on 90-E and hit Lakewood's perimeter at roughly 10 pm on May 24th, 2014. Calliope stood up and licked her chops with excitement when we slowed down getting off the freeway since she learned that the slowing of the car meant that she could soon stretch her legs. I didn't have the heart to break it to her that she was now illegal contraband and could be taken away by the faceless brutes of animal control.

To avoid drawing attention, I drove inconspicuously to a safe house where we could keep her - my parents' place.

With respect to keeping this a full confession, I should admit that I had plenty of co-conspirators after we arrived. On top of my aforementioned parents, there was my niece, Madison (feel free to let me know if I should provide contact information for her arrest). Our trip to Ohio coincided with her fourth birthday party and she was excited to celebrate it with her new "puppy cousin."

As soon as Madison and Calliope met, they were like two pups in a playpen. Calliope greeted her with some doggy kisses to her face while Madison giggled. The two youngsters were inseparable thereafter. This made it easy for Malli and I to leave Calliope in Ohio while we went to New York to lock down an apartment. We decided to leave Calliope with my niece at my sister's house so the new BFFs could spend some more quality time together while we got our lives situated out east. We planned to come back a month later pick her up.

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Yes, residents of Lakewood, you read that correctly. My vicious K-9, that only attacks by exuberantly licking faces and blowing farts powerful enough to clear a room, crashed your peaceful little suburb for an entire month. During this time, Calliope was running around with her big pittie smile on her face while on playdates with the neighbors' dogs and spent her naps cuddling with a toddler, all of whom were operating outside of the confines of the law. She was taken for walks by the houses that rest the melting pot of families, the schools that educate through diversity, and among the local government that seemingly embraces all walks of life - while hypocritically not accepting hers.


Smoking warning written in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian - photo used with permission of Michal Huniewicz.

Last year, on June 23, the President of the Bosnian Serb Republic Milorad Dodik stated that the Bosnian language does not exist. He claimed that only the Bosniak, Croat, and Serbian languages exist. In response, Bosniak parents moved their children from school into temporary classes to learn Bosnian instead of Bosniak.

All of these actions add further confusion to the language politics in the former Yugoslavia, where there are now at least five different names for what had earlier simply been called Serbo-Croatian. These names are: Bosniak, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Ultimately, does it make sense to call these 'languages' by different names?

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I argue that it does not make sense to call them different names since it defies common sense. If you ask most speakers of these 'languages' to communicate with one another, they will do so without a problem. According to Slavic linguist Bernhard Groschel, there are fewer differences between these dialects than between certain varieties of American English. Nevertheless, ethnic nationalists in the region maintain that since these dialects have partially different vocabularies and someone in one region (e.g. Western Croatia) would have difficulty communicating with someone in another region (e.g. Eastern Serbia), the dialects are, in fact, different languages.

In this situation, ethnic nationalists have been manipulating minor differences to dismiss overwhelming similarities among the dialects. Ultimately, few would say that since the British use the words crisps and pants to describe what Americans call chips and underwear, they are different languages. It would be equally strange to say that if someone from Louisiana and someone from Scotland could not communicate easily, then this is conclusive proof that American and British are separate languages. Granted, mutual intelligibility is not the only criteria for determining what a language is. Yet, given so many similarities between these modes of speech, it seems absurd to argue that Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, are different languages because of slight differences in vocabulary and accent.

Furthermore, many argue that, since Croatian and Bosnian are written in only the Latin script and, Serbian is only written in Cyrillic, they are different languages. This is a misconception. While Serbians write in Cyrillic, they equally (if not more frequently) use the Latin script. The Cyrillic alphabet is used in official documents in Serbia, but text used elsewhere in Serbia (e.g. shop signs, magazines) regularly appears in either script. However, even if all Serbs stopped using the Latin script and only used Cyrillic, it still would not make sense to call Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian different languages on this account. Imagine that a group of British classics students wrote letters to each other in English, but wrote out those messages using the Greek alphabet. These students have not suddenly created a new language by writing their letters using a different script. Although the English words now have a different graphical representation, the language still follows English grammar, uses English vocabulary, and, thus, remains English.

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Nevertheless, setting all these points aside, it could be argued that the citizens of Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, simply want to form their own national standards and call their 'languages' whatever they want to in forming their identities as independent countries. If these countries have chosen to unconventionally establish new languages, why should anyone interfere?

In the end, language diffusion of Serbo-Croatian has led to or could lead to several harmful effects. First, previous language politics has led to poor use of public funds. In Croatia, ethnic Serbs demanded that street signs be written in Cyrillic even though they can read the versions written in the Latin script. In the Sandzak region in Serbia, a whole new set of textbooks for students have been "translated" from Serbian to Bosnian. Finally, printed documents in Bosnia are regularly rendered into three versions, even when the Bosnian and Croatian versions of the texts are indistinguishable (see photo above). Although I respect all ethnic minorities, in the current bleak financial situation in the Balkans, it seems downright irresponsible to use money on such pointless nationalistic games. Instead, it would be much more worthwhile to use this time and money to support underfunded mental institutions, improve the lives of Roma, or assist the refugees currently in the region.

Second, there could also be negative future effects of such language policies. If the Serbo-Croatian dialects did became four separate languages that lacked mutual intelligibility, the lack of a common language would, as Chang Hoon Oh et al. show, discourage trade between the ex-Yugoslav republics. Moreover, given the current rate of language extinction, it is not difficult to imagine a future where globalization pressures even threaten the existence of these weakened mini-South slavic languages.

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It would be logical to prevent such harm by creating a regional commission for Serbo-Croatian in some neutral location like Sarajevo. The commission would maintain some standardization in the language while letting each dialect have some freedom. Moreover, while Serbo-Croatian is a useful name for the language since, as Dalibor Brozovic points out, it denotes the geographical location of the speakers as being between Serbia and Croatia, the commission might decide that another name is more acceptable to all parties.

As change is unlikely to come from the governments in ex-Yugoslavia, I urge speakers of the language to create a unified Serbo-Croatian standard through individual actions. For instance, people in Serbia and Montenegro could try writing in exclusively the Latin script while people in Croatia and Bosnia could spend the four hours it would likely take them to master the Cyrillic alphabet. Moreover, people in Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia could start regularly using typically Croatian words like: sveuciliste, vlak and Nizozemska. Similarly, people in Croatia could, instead of the former words, start using: univerzitet, voz, and Holandija. Although this vocabulary mixing would initially sound foolish, these words could, with time, become synonyms in Serbo-Croatian rather than arguments for separate languages.
Hindustan Times via Getty Images NEW DELHI, INDIA - JANUARY 25: Congress Senior leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kapil Sibal, Mallikarjun Kharge and Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki after meeting with President Pranab Mukherjee talking with media person over Union Cabinet's decision to impose President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh, at President House, on January 25, 2016 in New Delhi, India. The Centre's recommendation came after a meeting on Sunday chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sources say the government told the President that the situation in the state has 'severely deteriorated'. The Congress has accused the BJP of trying to destabilize every state where it is not in power. (Photo by Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

NEW DELHI -- The Supreme Court has given the Narendra Modi government two days to respond to the Congress Party's petition challenging the imposition of President's Rule in the state of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Supreme Court today asked Governor J.P. Rajkhowa to submit the report in which he recommended President's Rule, citing "constitutional breakdown." Rajkhowa's counsel asked that the report not be shared with the Congress Party.

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Following a recommendation by the Union Cabinet, last week, President Pranab Mukherjee signed the order to impose central rule in the northeastern state on Tuesday.

Likening the political turmoil in Andhra Pradesh to an emergency, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has said that an Arunachal Pradesh Legislative Assembly session has not be held for the past six months, and Speaker Nabam Rebia had sealed its premises.

Describing the move as the "murder of democracy," the Congress Party has questioned why the Modi government rammed through President's Rule, even before the Supreme Court heard a petition challenging the Centre's decision.

In the Supreme Court hearing today, the Congress Party was represented by a battery of prominent lawyers including Fali Nariman, Rajeev Dhawan, and Kapil Sibal.

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The Congress Party has also questioned whether it was appropriate for the Centre to act on the Rajkhowa's recommendation, especially since the constitutional validity of the Governor's own actions had been challenged in the Supreme Court by Rebia.

On Dec. 9, Rajkhowa ordered that the Winter Session be moved forward to Dec. 16 from its scheduled date of January 14 at the behest of dissidents in the Congress Party, and he also sought Rebia's removal as the Assembly Speaker.

The Congress Party has accused of Rajkhowa of doing BJP's bidding in Arunachal Pradesh, and trying to destabilise the sensitive border state.

On Dec. 16, lawmakers from the Congress Party and the BJP met at a community centre to impeach Rebia, and the next day, they gathered at a hotel to pass a "no confidence" motion against Chief Minister Nabam Tuki (now former), whom they accused of corruption and mismanagement. The rebels chose Congress Party's Kalikho Pul to succeed Tuki.

Anticipating trouble, Rebia had ordered the local administration to seal the Assembly premises, but lawmakers were granted permission by Rajkhowa to meet at a makeshift venue.

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Both sessions were dismissed as illegal and unconstitutional" by Rebia and Tuki.

The 60 seat House is made up of 42 Congress Party lawmakers, 11 from the BJP, 5 from the People's Party of Arunachal (PPA) and two Independents. The rebel lawmakers included 21 Congress Party MLAs, 11 BJP lawmakers, and two Independents.

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NEW DELHI-- A US-made helium-filled balloon that was shot down by a Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft over Rajasthan had possibly come from Pakistan and could have been an attempt to gauge India's response time, top government sources said today.

According to reports, India has decided to take up the issue with Pakistan. The Defence Ministry has now written to the Ministry of External Affairs informing it about the incident.

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The shiny 3 metres in diametre balloon, with "Happy Birthday" written on it, was flying at a height of about 25,000 feet in Jaisalmer district.

Taking no chances amid a high security alert around the country on Republic Day, the Sukhoi fired as many as 97 rounds from its 30mm GSh-301 auto-cannon at the balloon to ensure it was destroyed in the air.

"Our radars picked up a shiny flying object entering our air space. A fighter jet was quickly scrambled which intercepted it and shot it down," Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said without elaborating, on the sidelines of an event here when asked about yesterday's incident.

In a warning to Pakistan, Parrikar also said, "Pakistan needs to be told to avoid such incidents in future. It seems they were testing our response."

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Pakistan to be told to avoid such incidents in future. It seems Pakistan was testing our response: Defence Minister  ANI (@ANI_news) January 27, 2016

The Indian Air Force said in a statement, "Due to heightened security alert, the balloon was shot down as it would have been carrying unknown payload. However, on analysis of the debris it was established that there was no dangerous payload."

Meanwhile, government sources said that balloon, made by an American company, was flying at an altitude higher than that of an helicopter (18,000 feet) and hence leaving nothing to chance, it was shot down.

The wind speed was also high and the threat level was high.

"Investigation is on but it could have been an attempt to check our response time," they said, adding that IAF followed the protocol by scrambling the jet and shooting the object down.

"Imagine, if it was not just a commercial balloon," the sources said, adding that 97 rounds were spent as the fighter plane sprayed bullets as per Standard Operating Procedure.

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As per the Aircraft Act 1934, "aircraft" means any machine which can derive support in the atmosphere from reactions of the air, (other than reactions of the air against the Earth's surface) and includes balloons, whether fixed or free, airships, kites, gliders and flying machines.

The balloon was manufactured by Illinois based firm CTI Industries.

All airbases usually maintain an ORP (operational readiness platform) round-the-clock. This includes two to three fighters being kept combat-ready in blast pens adjoining the runway at an airbase for immediate take-off whenever an alarm is sounded.

"The pilots, by rotation, are kept on duty for the ORP. They just have to zip-up their G-suits and run to the fighters with their helmets. It is supposed to take just three-four minutes from the time the hooter goes off to the actual taxing out of the fighters. The pilots are given their instructions once they are airborne," said an officer.

Meanwhile, another balloon caused a security scare in the country this afternoon.

On Wednesday, a balloon was spotted near Delhis Indira Gandhi Airport. The balloon was then seen moving towards Aya Nagar Air Force Station. Gurgaon Police said that the balloon was red and white in colour and about 1 metre in diameter.

However, Delhi Police later confirmed that the balloon had been launched by the Meteorological Department and there was no need for panic.

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@ndtv the so called suspicious baloon is of the Met Department. All safe. Pl do not panic.  Delhi Police (@DelhiPolice) January 27, 2016

(With inputs from PTI)

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Bob Riha Jr via Getty Images Low-angle view of Indian Yoga guru Bikram Choudhury as he instructs his yoga class in heated room, Beverly Hills, California, February 2, 2000. (Photo by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)

In what comes as a significant blow to his career, Bikram yoga founder Bikram Choudhury has been ordered by a Los Angeles County jury to pay over $6.5 million to his ex-attorney in punitive damages for harassment.

Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, who was employed by Choudhury as his general counsel in 2011, sued the 69-year-old yoga instructor alleging that she suffered gender discrimination, wrongful termination and sexual harassment, according to a Los Angeles Times report.

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The decision was taken a day after Choudhury was ordered to pay Jafa-Bodden approximately $1 million as compensatory damages. On 26 January, the jury found Choudhury guilty of acting with malice, oppression and fraud, allowing Jafa-Bodden to proceed with punitive damages immediately.

Jafa-Bodden alleged that she was fired in 2013 for investigating the claims of Choudhury raping a yoga student.

Choudhurys attorneys, however, claimed that Jafa-Bodden was let go because of she did not have a license to practice in the United State. However, Jafa-Bodden countered the claim by saying the yoga guru had persuaded her to leave India in 2011 to work for him in America.

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During the court proceedings, Choudhury claimed that he did not have any knowledge of his net worth, and had not been making any money from the yoga business for several years. He did acknowledge the fact that he owned a fleet of 40 luxury cars, but claimed that he had transferred the ownership of the cars to the state of California to start a Bikram auto engineering school for children. His statement allegedly left the jury smirking.

His statements were overridden when one of Jafa-Boddens lawyers displayed photographs of Choudhurys Beverly Hills Mansion, and a pair of white Ferraris he had brought for his children.

Choudhury, who left the courtroom without commenting, has in the past been sued by six other women for sexual misconduct. On being questioned about these incidents during the recent trial, Choudhury denied he had sexually assaulted any woman.

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BENGALURU-- In much embarrassment to the Congress government in Karnataka, a minister has admitted that he was involved in the transfer of a senior woman police official for putting his call on hold on her mobile phone.

A video footage, that has gone viral, shows Labour Minister P T Parameshwar Naik taking responsibility for the shunting out of Deputy Superintendent of Police of Kudligi sub-division in Ballari district Anupama Shenai.

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Watch the video here:

Video | Karnataka labour minister admits he was reponsible for transfer of deputy SP Anupama https://t.co/eBLj5VaF2l  Times of India (@timesofindia) January 27, 2016

In the video, Naik tells his party workers, "If they don't answer the phone call of the minister in charge, why should we keep them?"

Naik is the district minister in charge in the Hadagali Assembly constituency.

The minister has added more embarrassment as it comes only a few days after he rejected any role in the transfer as "far from the truth."

The minister had then claimed that the officer has been transferred for administrative reasons.

"You are important for me, not officers, I have never played politics on officials. For 42 seconds, DySP spoke to me, it is 42 seconds, not minutes," Naik is seen telling a group of party workers in the video.

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"When I called her again, she did not receive, so I have got her transferred, this is true. Why do we want officials who don't take district minister's phone?" he said.

Shenai had reportedly received a call from a number which said the minister would speak to her.

At the same time, she also received a call from the Superintendent of Police, Ballari and she allegedly put the minister's call on hold and spoke to the SP.

Angered by this, Naik reportedly took her to task and also complained to her higher-ups.

Meanwhile, Home Minister and State Congress Chief G Parameshwara has said that the DySP has not been transferred.

"I want to clarify to you she has not been transferred, she has been sent on OOD (On Official Duty) by concerned head of the department, we also won't know about it. It happens naturally in administrative and official setup," he said.

The minister drew flak from BJP, with its state unit President Prahlad Joshi, alleging that the morale of the state police had considerably gone down due to the action of politicians like Naik.

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(With inputs from PTI)

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How many countries does India share its land borders with? What is our national sport? Which is India's national bird? These basic general knowledge questions about India sound easy, right?

Folks from a YouTube channel -- Social Clowns -- went around Mumbai asking locals some 'basic GK questions' about their country on Republic Day. They started out confident in the hope that everyone would probably know the answers to these. But their confidence turned to skepticism and eventually to despair when youngsters struggled to answer them.

People messed up the Hindi term for Republic Day, and one man on being asked who the President of India was, said, 'that fellow', while several others generously handed the title to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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Bonus tip: If you don't know which Republic Day it is, just say you're from Kashmir. This woman just did.

Well, she also thought she was India's National Bird.

Brush up your GK, folks!

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In a fresh twist to the Rohith Vemula case that has divided political opinion on the discrimination faced by Dalit students in India, Manikumar Vemula, the father of the PhD scholar who hanged himself at the Hyderabad Central University campus, claimed that his son was murdered. At a press conference on Tuesday, Manikumar alleged that that his son Rohith's death was homicide and demanded that the government conduct a judicial inquiry to find out the truth.

He also claimed that the suicide note was not written by Rohith, according to the Times of India.

With questions being raised on Rohith's caste, Manikumar, who hailed from Gurajala in Guntur district, said his son was "not a Scheduled Caste person".

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(A member of the National Students Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of India's main opposition Congress party, shouts slogans as he got entangled in police barricade during a protest against the death of Rohith Vemula in New Delhi, India, Friday, Jan. 22, 2016. AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

"We hail from the Vaddera community of backward classes," TOI quoted him as saying.

As protests continued, the Indian Express reported that the university is allegedly considering replacing interim Vice-Chancellor, Prof Vipin Srivastava, with the next senior-most faculty member. Srivastava was given the charge of the institution after VC Aappa Rao went on leave amid escalation of protests last week.

Meanwhile, as many as 60 protesters who were demanding the resignation of HRD Minister Smriti Irani and Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya over the suicides of Vemula and the three medical students in Tamil Nadu, were detained in Chennai, reported NDTV.

Rohith Vemula suicide case: Students' protest outside University of Hyderabad. pic.twitter.com/jieXZuiIH4  ANI (@ANI_news) January 27, 2016

50 people detained from a students' protest against Rohith Vemula case & the suicide matter in Villupuram (TN)  ANI (@ANI_news) January 27, 2016

The SC and ST Teachers Forum of the HCU have said they would go on a hunger strike demanding the resignation of the Vice Chancellor and the interim head over the issue.

(Members of the National Students Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of India's main opposition Congress party, shout slogans during a protest against the death of Rohith Vemula in New Delhi, India, Friday, Jan. 22, 2016. AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

"The SC/ST Teachers Forum will go on a hunger strike demanding the resignation of VC P Appa Rao and incumbent VC Prof Vipin Srivastava in order to resume academic and administrative activities," the Forum said in a notice to the HCU Registrar.

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Several members of the Forum have given up their administrative responsibilities in solidarity with the agitating students. NDTV reported that a joint committee of student protesters plans to mark Vemula's birthday on January 30 with a Chalo Delhi protest.

Rohith Vemula suicide case: Students' protest outside University of Hyderabad. pic.twitter.com/DxlLZ9bojv  ANI (@ANI_news) January 27, 2016

Six of the seven students of HCU, on hunger strike to protest the suicide of Vemula, have been shifted to a health centre even as the agitators today took out a march to the residence of the interim head of the institution.

The students, who had given a nationwide university strike call, marched to the residence of the Srivastava and then went outside the campus and burnt the effigy of the Vice-chancellor, whose ouster they have been seeking.

"Six (students) were shifted (to the health centre) yesterday", Ravindra Kumar, chief medical officer said. One student is continuing with the hunger strike, which resumed three days back after the first batch of his colleagues who went on fast were moved to the health centre.

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But selection of Srivastava as interim head of the institution was stiffly objected to by the students and SC/ST staff forums alleging he headed the Executive Council sub-committee whose decisions were "responsible for the death of Rohith" and was one of the accused in the death of another dalit student in 2008.

Srivastava had yesterday made a fresh appeal to students to help restore normalcy on the campus. Rohith was found hanging in a hostel room on the HCU campus on January 17, sparking strong reactions on the campus and across the country. Rohith and four other students, all from the dalit community, were suspended last year by the varsity for allegedly attacking an ABVP leader.

The suspension of the four students were revoked last week after the issue snowballed into a major political row with the agitation drawing support from parties other than the BJP.

Rohith Vemula suicide case: Congress' Hanumantha Rao takes up vow of silence as a protest at University of Hyderabad pic.twitter.com/ctH1J804HV  ANI (@ANI_news) January 27, 2016

"The University reiterates its appeal to the students and requests the parents and public to bear with us while we make earnest efforts to restore the normalcy at the earliest," the interim V-C said. Srivastava said he and the HCU fraternity deeply condole the "tragic and untimely" death of Vemula.

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(With inputs from PTI)

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STOCKHOLM, SwedenLELO has recently been paying attention to men with the introduction of its prostate massagers and the Pino love ring, but now the manufacturer has stepped it up a notch with the debut of the TUX, described as a luxurious concept in male intimate apparel inspired by the classic tuxedo.

LELO said the new item is based on a Scottish tradition or adorning the penis.

Why should the Scots have all the fun? said Steve Thomson, chief marketing officer at LELO, We wanted to bring this concept to a global audience, while updating it with a stylish and modern twist. It was actually much more complicated than it sounds, from selecting the materials to finalizing the cut, and TUX went through multiple design iterations before the finished product. In 2016, it really is incredible the concept of male intimate apparel has not been explored further.

Tailoring garments for the penis is not a new phenomenon, but nothing as luxurious as TUX exists on the market. One variation commonly known as the Willy Warmer is still widely- sold in Scotland and the UK, while being relatively unknown elsewhere. Its origins date as far back as the 12th century, where shepherds would wear a knitted cover to protect their personal assets in freezing temperatures, with historical records showing use across mainland Europe and the fjords of Norway and Sweden.

Sex and relationship expert Tristan Taormino is hopeful TUX will instigate some playful fun in the bedroom this Valentines Day.

There is all this emphasis on women dressing up in lingerie, sexy undies, or role-play costumes to entice their partners or revive a spark, but I say it's equally important for men! she said. Women love to be seduced by their partners. Knowing that a man has made extra effort to dress for sex is a real turn-on.

TUX retails for $29.95 and is a slip-on one-piece, accessorized with a smart black bowtie and red rose. Presented as one-size-fits-most, with a stretchy cord that slips comfortably around the male undercarriage, it arrives in a luxurious gift box with instructions for wear included.

Valentines Day can become a routine within a routine for many, and at LELO with both our awarding winning pleasure objects and now TUX, we stand for adding a burst of excitement, Thomson said. We believe our customers will embrace TUX as a way of keeping fantasy, exploration and humor central to their relationships.

View a short video about TUX here.

Retailers interested in stocking LELO products should contact [email protected]

For more, visit LELO.com/TUX.
American International Groups actions this week to pare down without resorting to a breakup appear to have fallen on deaf ears among several industry observers.The insurance carrier announced Tuesday that it would sell off its broker-dealer network, partially spin off its mortgage-insurance business, significantly cut costs and return at least $25 billion to shareholders over the next two years. AIG CEO Peter Hancock emphasized the selling of 19.9% of United Guaranty in an IPO  the first step to a complete sale  and the sale of AIG Advisor Group to Lightyear Capital and PSP Investments. The company also committed to cutting expenses by $1.6 billion over the next two year.AIGs new businesses are now expected to produce return on equity better than 10% by 2017.However, anything less than the three-way breakup proposed by activist investor Carl Icahn is unlikely to please most shareholders, said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Josh Stirling.The company is showing incremental urgency and is clearly listening to its shareholders, but its efforts appear to stop short of being radical or transformational, Stirling wrote in a note to clients. Sadly, this was not the big bang from management we suspect most shareholders were hoping for.Stirling added that a more radical breakup is needed both to tame its underwriting and expense problems and to get out from under the thumb of federal regulations applying to SIFI-designated companies, otherwise known as too big to fail companies.Reuters Breakingviews columnist Antony Currie was also unimpressed, stating that the companys latest moves will only take the mega-insurer toward mediocrity.Hancocks plan is to elevate return on equity next year to a subpar 9%, he wrote.  MetLife is expected to do slightly better, according to Thomson Reuters data, when it reports last years profit later this week. Prudential is on track for 14.4%, just ahead of what Travelers achieved.All told, this restricting story probably has further to go.Hancock dismissed these criticisms in a conference call Tuesday, however  in particular those related to a SIFI designation, which he called a complete red herring.The creation of more nimble, standalone business units that can grow within AIG or be spun out or sold allows us to do what is in our shareholders best interests, he said.At least some financial analysts backed Hancock. In a Tuesday note to clients, Citi analyst Todd Bault called the plan as aggressive as possible, short of full breakup, and praised AIGs future proposals as a way to measure management success.
by Richard BrownShareholders in beleaguered American International Group Inc. are to enjoy a $25 billion bonanza over the next two years thanks to asset sales partly spurred by criticism from outspoken activist Carl Icahn.AIG CEO Peter Hancock told an analyst and investor conference yesterday (26 Jan.) he plans to divest company assets, such as almost 20 percent of $3.5 billion mortgage insurer United Guaranty Corp prior to a total sale of the unit.Hancock also unveiled a new, modular structure to the business, designed to create flexibility to sell or float additional holdings if they underperform or draw attractive bids. The core operating portfolio will have nine modules and account for about $56 billion in equity. They include U.S. commercial coverage, European commercial, U.S. retirement and the Japan division.Profits from operating units and tax benefits will yield up to $10 billion of the total divestiture, while proceeds from the sell-offs will add as much as $7 billion more. AIG said that reinsurance deals, could add an extra $4 billion or more and cutting debt would provide even more cash.Hancocks shareholder schmooze follows a total of about $12 billion in 2015, which included buybacks and dividends.David Havens, analyst at Imperial Capital, was reported by Bloomberg as calling the $25 billion capital return eye-catching to say the least. They are navigating a middle ground that preserves most of AIG as it is now, but offers the flexibility to spin off or sell units in the future.AIG is also curbing its hedge fund bets to free up more cash to return to shareholders. The insurer generated an annualized yield from hedge funds of just 2.36 percent in the first nine months of last year from a total allocation of $11 billion. AIGs overall investment portfolio is valued at more than $340 billion.Last October, Icahn began pressuring Hancock to split AIG into three separate companies in a bid to shrink and prevent it being categorised a systemically important financial institution, which can lead to tighter capital rules from the Federal Reserve.AIG founder Maurice Hank Greenberg commented Hancock was right to resist Icahns breakup demands, but had yet to prove that hes the right person to lead AIG.JPMorgan Chase & Co. is to make a $995 million settlement to New York-based Ambac Financial Group Inc. over claims the latter was duped into insuring mortgage bonds backed by dodgy loans.The deal could unleash much larger settlements between the bank and institutional investors triggered by the 2008-9 global financial crisis. An Ambac unit was the worlds second-biggest bond insurer in 2008 when cascading defaults on mortgages overwhelmed it with claims.Terms of the agreement include Ambac ceasing objections to a $4.5 billion pact over suspect home loans between JPMorgan and other investors including BlackRock Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co.Ambac said Tuesday in a statement that the bank will pay $995 million to end two lawsuits the New York-based insurer filed in New York state court in 2011 and 2012 over the quality of loans underlying mortgage bonds sold by Bear Stearns & Co. JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns in 2008.JPMorgan said the move ends Ambacs attempts to recover past and future payments of principal and interest on about $3.3 billion of 11 mortgage- backed security trusts sponsored by EMC Mortgage LLC, a unit of Bear Stearns.Ambac still has lawsuits pending against Bank of America Corp. over losses almost triple the size of the JPMorgan ones.Bill Thygeson has joined Everest Insurance as Chief Administration Officer, reporting directly to Jonathan Zaffino, President. Thygeson will focus on technology and its impact on business processes for underwriting and claims in addition to other administrative functions.Thygeson brings over 20 years U.S. and international experience in business development, operating management, strategic planning, and transformational leadership to the role.Most recently, he served as Chief Operating Officer for Hamilton Insurance, where he oversaw the implementation of its U.S. insurance platform. Prior to Hamilton, he spent a decade working for AIG in similar functions.Regulators in Japan and the US have approved Sumitomo Life Insurance Co.s takeover of Bellevue, Washington-based Symetra Financial Corp. The acquisition is set to complete on Feb. 1 when each Symetra common share will be convertible into $32.00 cash, as a term of the deal.Symetra provides employee benefits, annuities and life insurance through a national network of benefit consultants, financial institutions and independent agents and advisors. Sumitomo Life is a leading life insurer in Japan with multi-channel, multi-product life insurance businesses. It holds $229 billion in assets, approximately 6.8 million customers and 42,000 employees.Newly-acquired Chubb has posted Q4 and full year results - including legacy ACEs numbers - showing income of $780 million and $3.2 billion respectively. Full-year per share operating income dipped to $9.76 versus $9.79 in 2014, while return on equity stood at 11.1% and 11.5% for the periods under consideration.The figures from the worlds largest publically-traded property and casualty insurer reveal global P&C net written premiums down two percent for the quarter, but up 1.2 percent for the year. Net investment income generated $2.2 billion for the year, down 2.6% with full-year operating cash flow of $3.9 billion.ACEs $29.5 billion takeover of Warren, New Jersey-headquartered Chubb completed earlier this month.
New Zealand Team Preview T20 World Cup 2022: 'Nice Guys' New Zealand May Once Again Surprise With Final Finish

'India Doesn't Take a Single Penny From Asian Cricket Council': Former Opener Claims Pakistan Will Definitely Take Part in ODI WC

India to Tour Bangladesh For 2 Tests And 3 ODIs in December 2022

'Bumrah's Absence is a Big Loss For India But Facing Shami And Bhuvneshwar Will be a Challenge For Pakistan'
DeLorean Cars To Begin New Production

Trending News: You'll Soon Be Able To Buy A Brand New DeLorean

Why Is This Important?

Because admit it, you still want one?

Long Story Short

Texas-based DeLorean Motors recently announced that they'll begin producing brand new DeLorean DMC-12s. They currently have parts for about 300 new cars, which will cost about $100,000.

Long Story

For being kind of a business failure, the DeLorean DCM-12 holds a prominent spot as a piece of car iconography. Sadly, getting your hands on one is nearly impossible. Not many were made and even fewer survive, so your chances of even owning one to have it refurbished are slim. But for Back to the Future fans with deep pockets, there's light at the end of the tunnel: A Texas company says they'll soon begin production on brand new DeLoreans.

Its fantastic, Stephen Wynne, CEO of DeLorean Motors in Humble, TX told Eyewitness News 3. Its a game-changer for us. Weve been wanting this to happen.

DeLorean Motors is currently the place for current or aspiring DMC-12 owners. The company came to Texas in 1987, and has ever since been home to what's left of the original DeLorean parts and materials inventory. While most of the company's work has been in using replacement parts to refurbish original DeLoreans (which retail for $45k-$55k), the new replicas will be the first DeLoreans produced in over 30 years, and the first ever built on U.S. soil. The new production comes, in part, thanks to a low-volume manufacturing bill approved by the U.S. government.

Right now, DeLorean Motors believes they have enough parts to build about 300 new cars at a rate of one per month, eventually ramping up to one per week. The first cars will roll of the line early next year, and will retail for $100k. Part of the sticker price is likely due to DeLoreans being a luxury item, but it's also a supply issue. If demand is high enough, you have to figure that DeLorean Motors (or other OEMs) would start to produce the necessary parts from scratch.

Given the success Lyft had with using DeLoreans on Back to the Future day last year, I'd say the demand is there.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Are DeLoreans practical as daily-driving cars?

Disrupt Your Feed

I know what I'd do with my Powerball winnings if I had any.

Drop This Fact

Only about 9,000 DeLorean DMC-12s were ever produced.
There are over 95,000 small to medium enterprises in the country, with each and every one having the potential to grow and compete on a global scale. With a wide assortment of online tools now within reach, there is no better time to be an SME than today, said Reynaldo Huergas, President of IPC (IP Converge Data Services, Inc.), a local cloud services and data center pioneer.

According to data from the research agency We Are Social, the Philippines harbors an Internet penetration of 44 percent. For businesses, this translates to the opportunity to engage almost half the total population via the Internet, and ultimately, cultivate huge potential for growth.

Customers are largely mobile, with about 32 million active mobile Internet users in the Philippines. This makes going digital and embracing the consumerization of IT, now more critical than ever. Enterprises need to be easily reached by their customers via various channels such as social media, email and mobile. People want information in real time and if they cant get it from you, theyll get it from your competitors. Business is lost, said Huergas.

Huergas said that 2016 is also the time to tap big data and analytics. Big data analytics can give valuable insights about your customers and target market. In essence, it uses statistics to understand customer behavior which allows for more effective campaigns and product or service developments that help achieve optimum results.

Going digital also requires businesses and their employees to be mobile. They must be able to work remotely, from wherever they are to ensure that operations go on no matter what. For instance, businesses can maximize Google Apps for Work to help them communicate (via Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, etc.), store (via Drive), and collaborate (via Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.) with one another. Additionally, there are cloud-based products like Salesforce.com CRM that help businesses in customer relationship management that will allow them to achieve and maintain leadership and profitability.

Moreover, the World Wide Web has long opened the channels to access international markets. With social media and a myriad of available digital tools, local enterprises can overcome geographical boundaries and access new markets, particularly overseas, Huergas added.

There is definitely room for growth in e-commerce in the Philippines and the current data may well be the signal for enterprises to go digital this 2016. This is what our Enterprise Sachet model addresses we afford our entrepreneurs with the same capabilities as larger organizations through IT tools available at affordable, pay-as-you-use packages, said Huergas.

According to Huergas, enterprises can sign up and pay for IPCs cloud-based softwares online through major credit cards (MasterCard, Visa, AMEX), over-the-counter cash payments via Dragonpay or popular online payment provider Paypal through the cloud.com.ph portal.

This is the time to adopt a digital frame of mind. From acquiring business leads to managing our own organizations, online tools have a significant role to play, Huergas concluded.

Back to top
Imperial Valley News Center

NSC Spokesperson Ned Price on the Publication of New Regulatory Changes for Cuba Sanctions

Washington, DC - Since President Obama's historic December 2014 announcement that the United States would re-establish diplomatic relations and begin a process of normalizing relations with Cuba, we have taken important steps to promote engagement between U.S. and Cuban citizens by facilitating greater travel and commerce. By expanding people-to-people ties, business opportunities, and greater access to information, we are promoting the transformation of our relationship in ways that advance U.S. interests and improve the lives of the Cuban people.

The President has repeatedly underscored that our Cuba policy has changed, and supports increasing connections between the people of the United States and Cuba. The Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, in coordination with the Department of State, previously issued amended regulations to support the President's policy of empowering the Cuban people and creating conditions for more economic opportunities between Cubans and Americans. Today, these agencies have announced additional regulatory changes to build on that progress. These changes will remove financing restrictions for most types of authorized exports, amend regulations to increase support for the Cuban people and facilitate authorized exports, and further facilitate authorized travel. Just as the United States is doing its part to remove impediments that have been holding Cubans back, we urge the Cuban government to make it easier for its citizens to start businesses, engage in trade, and access information online.

Engagement and purposeful steps like those announced today will continue to empower the Cuban people and advance our enduring objectives of supporting human rights, improving the lives of the Cuban people, and promoting closer ties between our peoples.
Imperial County Jail inmate Jocelyn Sandoval found unresponsive in her cell

El Centro, California - Saturday an Imperial County Jail inmate identified as 21 year old Jocelyn Sandoval was found unresponsive in her cell by Sheriffs Office staff. She was located at about 3:00 a.m. during a routine inspection of the module in which she was housed.

Immediate medical attention was provided by Jail staff and the victim was transported to El Centro Regional Medical Center. Jocelyn Sandoval was subsequently airlifted to the Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Desert where she was pronounced deceased in the late evening hours. Sheriffs Office Investigators responded to the scene and an investigation was initiated. The preliminary investigation has revealed injuries which are indicative of suicide. The cause and manner of death is pending an investigation by the Riverside Coroners Office.
Up to five rural GPs along the West Coast alone could end up standing as candidates in the forthcoming General Election, IMT has established.

This comes after Dr Michael Harty of Kilmihil in Co Clare was officially announced as an independent candidate for the county at a public meeting in Corofin on January 18, and as a second GP was expected to be officially announced as a candidate for Mayo at a meeting in Mulranny, Co Mayo last Tuesday (January 26).

Dr Jerry Cowley, the Chairman of the Rural Island and Dispensing Doctors group, confirmed to Irish Medical Times on Monday his plans to declare this week. Speaking to this newspaper ahead of his announcement, Dr Cowley, who is a part of the No Doctor, No Village campaign, said: Theres a number of GPs thinking about it at the moment. Maybe two or three more, we dont know yet.

Its a big step to take and people are reluctant to move away from the security of their practices, but its just that the GPs are being driven to do something or else to go down fighting, for the sake of their patients.

Dr Cowley said the campaign wanted to put the patient centre stage and to rebalance the general practice budget so that its not only 2.5 per cent [of the health budget] but a hell of a lot more than that.

The patient is the most important person in this equation, but the patient is the one that is forgotten now and is being bussed off to an ambulance doctor, to acute hospital EDs all over the country, Dr Cowley commented.

There were many illnesses, he said, citing pneumonia in older people and sprains, which could be treated in good time by GPs if they were properly resourced and had the tools, equipment and personnel to look after people at home or in community hospitals, which would ease ED crowding.

Tuesdays meeting was to be chaired by Dr Liam Glynn, who successfully sued for the reinstatement of his Rural Practice Allowance (RPA), and attended by Dr Harty, and GPs from Mayo and the surrounding areas, plus members of the public.

It was arranged to highlight the challenges being faced by the only functional part of the Irish health service, not just in rural areas, but all over Ireland, with rural practice obliterated overnight following the removal of the distance coding and changes to the award criteria for RPA, the former TD added.

Government proposals for changing RPA are in the blue yonder down the line and subject to negotiations and to all sorts of conditions and clauses, Dr Cowley cautioned his colleagues. Once bitten, twice shy.

lloyd.mudiwa@imt.ie
The ICGP has issued a call for its Quality in Practice (QiP) Awards 2016, which recognise improvements or innovations by individuals in a general practice setting in Ireland of a clinical or practice management nature. These are the 12th annual ICGP QiP Awards.

The College has set a deadline for the receipt of entries, which will only be accepted via email, of March 23 at 5pm. Awards will be presented to the top three entries at the ICGP AGM on Saturday May 7.

The ICGP stated that all general practice, including non-clinical, staff were eligible to enter the competition.

Entries will be judged according to their impact on general practice care in the Irish setting. In this regard, special emphasis will be given to: originality, simplicity of design, ease of implementation and continued use, ease of application to other general practices, benefits derived, and evidence of impact.

The winner of the 11th ICGP QiP Awards was Practice Nurse Sheila McKeown, Wheaton Hall Medical Practice, Drogheda, for her Bitter Sweet: Impaired Glucose Regulation an Early Diagnostic Tool for Diabetes.

Runners-up were Dr Joe Moran, Fermoy-Rathcormac Medical Practice for his campaign Vaccination Uptake in Pregnancy: An Evaluation of the Introduction of a Patient Information Package in General Practice; and another Practice Nurse Toni Finnegan, The Keogh Practice, Waterford, who innovated a Practice Protocol for Denosumab 60mg Administration in a Large Urban Practice.

Medisec, the IMOs medical indemnity insurance company for GPs, is once again sponsoring the Awards.

For more information about the awards, please email janet.stafford@icgp.ie.

lloyd.mudiwa@imt.ie
Prof the Lord Ara Darzi, an Alumnus of RCSI, has recently been admitted to the United Kingdoms (UKs) Order of Merit for outstanding contribution to medicine and global health, as part of the Queens New Years Honours 2016.

The Order of Merit is considered the United Kingdoms highest honour, as recipients are selected directly by the head of state, Queen Elizabeth II.

Lord Darzi graduated from the RCSI in 1984. In 2013, he received an Honorary Doctorate of RCSI, which was bestowed on him at the School of Medicine conferring ceremony.

He holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College, London and is an Honorary Consultant Surgeon at the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and the Royal Marsden NHS Trust Hospitals. In October 2010 Lord Darzi was appointed as Director for the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College.

He was knighted for his services to Medicine and Surgery in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth II. Lord Darzi was introduced to the UKs House of Lords in 2007 as Prof the Lord Darzi of Denham and appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health. He relinquished this role in July 2009. Under appointment (July 2009-March 2013) as UKs Global Ambassador for Health and Life Sciences, Lord Darzi took an active international role in outlining and shaping healthcare policy.

Lord Darzi was appointed as a member of Her Majestys Most Honourable Privy Council in June 2009 and was also elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013.

gary.culliton@imt.ie
IFS Officer Shares Rare Photo of Endangered Turtle Species, Says 'Less Than 150 Left on Earth'
Oregon Militia Standoff: Ammon Bundy, Others Arrested

Trending News: Oregon Standoff Turns Bloody

Why Is This Important?

Because the situation in Oregon is still potentially very dangerous.

Long Story Short

Police have confirmed that they have arrested the leader of an armed Oregon militia which is occupying a wildlife refuge in a shootout that claimed one life.

Long Story

The FBI has announced the arrest of Ammon Bundy, the leader of the Oregon militia which is protesting in support of two ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven Hammond, who were jailed for around four years for setting fire to federal land.

The campaign began peacefully on social media and with marches, but things have deteriorated since and become much more volatile.

Since January 2nd, armed militiamen have been present in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and have been making demands for areas of federal land to be handed over to local control. They posted a video on Facebook asking patriots from across the U.S. to join them with their guns.

Officers arrested Bundy and his brother Ryan Bundy, plus associates Bryan Cavalier, Shawna Cox and Ryan Payne after stopping them on a highway in rural Oregon.

They were reportedly on their way to a community meeting in John Day where Bundy was due to give a speech.

BREAKING: Booking photos of Ammon Bundy, 7 others after arrest near Burns. https://t.co/AcqRyP4pd5 #KOIN6News pic.twitter.com/un82wepf95  Brent Weisberg (@BrentKOIN) January 27, 2016



It is believed that one person died in the standoff and he has been named by his daughter as Robert LaVoy Finicum, who was a spokesman for the militia. Police are yet to confirm this identification. Two others, Joseph OShaughnessy and Peter Santilli, were arrested in a separate police operation in Burns, Oregon.

The Guardian also reports that former marine Jon Ritzheimer, another leader, turned himself in to police in Peoria, Arizona late on Tuesday night.

Despite the loss of their leader, it is being reported that members of the group are still occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the FBI is trying to ensure the situation is resolved as peacefully as possible.

The FBI is especially mindful of the Waco siege in 1993 when a religious group called Branch Davidians resisted the FBI for 51 days before the standoff came to a bloody end with 76 fatalities, and will be looking to avoid a repeat of that tragedy.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Can the Oregon militia standoff be resolved without further loss of life?

Disrupt Your Feed: The police should have stormed to building as soon as it was occupied.

Drop This Fact: Ammon Bundy is the son of Cliven Bundy, a vocal cattle rancher who opposes federal government control of land, whose armed stand-off in 2014 over cattle grazing rights made him famous.
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Late last year, Ai Weiwei caused quite a stir by accusing David Cameron of putting human rights aside when he welcomed the Chiese President.

Even earlier in 2015, Weiweis use of Lego for politically poignant work led the toy company to stop sending him bulk numbers of bricks. Hundreds of supporters rallied against Lego, the company eventually allowing their toy to be used for political statements.

The Chinese artist/activist has now closed his latest exhibition in Denmark to protest the countrys new law allowing authorities to take valuable items from refugees seeking asylum.

Ai Weiwei has decided to close his exhibition Ruptures at Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen, Denmark, stated his Instagram account. This decision follows the Danish parliaments approval of the law proposal that allows seizing valuables and delaying family reunions for asylum seekers.

Ai Weiwei has decided to close his exhibition Ruptures at Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen, Denmark. This decision follows the Danish parliaments approval of the law proposal that allows seizing valuables and delaying family reunions for asylum seekers. Jens Faurschou backs the artists decision and regrets that the Danish parliament choses to be in the forefront of symbolic and inhuman politics of todays biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe and the Middle East, instead of being in the forefront of a respectful European solution to solve the acute humanitarian crisis. A photo posted by Ai Weiwei (@aiww) on Jan 27, 2016 at 1:47am PST

Jens Faurschou backs the artists decision and regrets that the Danish parliament chooses to be in the forefront of symbolic and inhuman politics of todays biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe and the Middle East, instead of being in the forefront of a respectful European solution to solve the acute humanitarian crisis.

It was recently announced that the Danish parliament had approved the controversial law that would allow authorities to seize refugees cash and valuables.

We are talking about a real exodus, Martin Henriksen, immigration spokesman for the populist DPP said. We need tighter immigration rules.

The country received over 21,000 asylum applications last year, one of the highest rates per capita in the Europe.
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Ellen Page has argued that gay actors should be able to play roles of any sexuality.

The Oscar nominee came out in February 2014 and is regularly asked if she fears pigeonholing after signing up for lots of gay parts. Her response? Hollywood still has that double standard.

Zachary Quinto is out and he stars in one of the biggest blockbuster franchises [Star Trek], she told Elle magazine. I have four projects coming up - all gay roles. People ask if Im concerned about getting pigeonholed. No one asks: Ellen, youve done seven straight roles in a row, shouldnt you shake it up and do something queer?

The 28-year-old, best known for Juno, continued: Theres still that double standard. I look at all the things Ive done in movies: Ive drugged a guy, tortured someone, become a roller-derby star overnight. But now Im gay, I cant play a straight person?

Ellen Page in quotes Show all 6 1 /6 Ellen Page in quotes Ellen Page in quotes As a girl, you're supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean, who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin? GETTY IMAGES Ellen Page in quotes I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools, supporters for that GETTY IMAGES Ellen Page in quotes I'm actually just playing honest, whole young women GETTY IMAGES Ellen Page in quotes I don't want to become unhealthily attached to what I do. I'm grateful for what I do, but I also want to be able to be OK when I'm not doing it GETTY IMAGES Ellen Page in quotes I don't want to become unhealthily attached to what I do. I'm grateful for what I do, but I also want to be able to be OK when I'm not doing it GETTY IMAGES Ellen Page in quotes When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be GETTY IMAGES

Page was, in part, motivated to go public with her sexuality after battling to bring gay rights drama Freeheld to cinemas for six years.

The film is released in the UK on 19 February and stars Julianne Moore as a terminally ill detective struggling to pass her pension rights onto her female domestic partner.

Page still finds her mind blown by how closely her personal journey mirrored the development of Freeheld. It felt wildly inappropriate to be playing this character as a closeted person, she said. Coming out was a long process, though.

Recommended Read more Ian McKellen asks why no gay man has ever won Best Actor at the Oscars

Pages comments on Hollywoods attitudes to gay people echo those made by Ian McKellen recently. The legendary actor weighed into the diversity debate and claimed that homophobia is as much of a problem as racism.

No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar, he said. I wonder if that is prejudice or chance. My speech has been in two jackets, Im proud to be the first openly gay man to win the Oscar. Ive had to put it back in my pocket twice.

Read the full interview with Page in Elles March issue, out on Thursday
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There's an art to film taglines: while many play it straight, using the opportunity to bolster the serious nature of a film, others use the phrase - usually a pun - to provide a knowing wink to the audience.

Unsurprisingly, there are those that fail spectacularly - step forward, London Has Fallen.

In an attempt to emulate some good old-fashioned British humour, the groan-inducing tagline on the sequel's US poster reads: "Prepare for bloody hell."

The film is a sequel to 2013 action thriller Olympus Has Fallen which follows Gerard Butler's disgraced Secret Service agent Mike Banning who must rescue the President (Aaron Eckhart) after a terrorist assault on the White House.

London Has Fallen sees Banning, now a lead agent, embroiled in an assassination attempt on multiple world leaders all assembled in Great Britain's capital for the Prime Minister's funeral.

Butler and Eckhart both return alongside Olympus co-stars Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett and Melissa Leo. British actress Charlotte Riley (Peaky Blinders) has joined the cast as a British MI6 agent.

Last year, the film came under heavy criticism when the trailer - depicting destroyed London landmarks - was released ahead of the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 terror attacks.

London Has Fallen is released on 4 March.
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Kazakhstan showrunners are preparing to launch a Game of Thrones-style TV series to tell the countrys story in the face of mockery from Hollywood.

The ten-part epic will follow the dramatic events that led to the birth of the first Kazakh khanate over 500 years ago, after the Mongolian-ruled Golden Horde empire collapsed.

Expect raging warriors, brutal battles and love stories from Kazakh Khanate, which centres on rebellious leaders Kerey and Zhanibek who formed the state after breaking away from a kingdom ruled by the Uzbeks.

Director Rustem Abdrashev is determined to prove to Hollywood that Kazakhstan is about much more than mockery movie Borat.

The history of my country and the history of my people and how it was born isnt simply important but also topical, he said. For the next generation, this will be a good example for imitation and for awareness.

Kazakhstani audiences will likely enjoy the series after the 550th anniversary of the khanate was celebrated across the country last year.

National pride is running particularly high after Russian president Vladimir offended Kazakhs by dismissing their past and claiming that Kazakhstan had no history.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled since independence in 1991, responded by designing festivities to showcase Kazakhstans long history and is credit in the Kazakh Khanate trailer as an ideological inspiration.

It spurred us on, said Arsenov of the incident, dismissing some critics doubts about the shows historical accuracy.

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History is extremely complicated and subjective but aside from history, were making movies and this should be an artistic production, he said. The priority isnt to distort history but to tell an interesting story.

Following the TV series, Kazakh Khanate will be released as a film in a range of languages including English to try and counter unfavourable Western representations of Kazakhstan.
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The best hiking boots will take you a long way. Hiking, walking, rambling, trekking  whatever you call it  is brilliant for both your physical and mental health.

Its great cardio, builds muscle and burns a ton of calories, as well as helping to ease stress and anxiety. Combine those exercise endorphins with the exhilaration of the outdoors and some beautiful scenery (and possibly a cosy country pub), and youll feel the emotional benefits.

Whether youre going for a gentle countryside stroll or scrambling up mountains, the right hiking gear is essential  and a good pair of boots should be at the top of your list. Some hikers prefer the lighter, lower cut of a walking shoe, but for the best support, protection and durability you cant beat a classic boot.

The decision to opt for leather or fabric boots is largely down to personal preference. Fabric boots often have the upper hand as they tend to be lighter, breathable, cheaper and the more ethical choice (although its worth noting that fabric boots arent always vegan boots).

Yet gone are the days when leather meant heavy, clunky boots that took an age to break in, as there are now some excellent leather hiking boots that are low-maintenance and surprisingly lightweight.

Read more:

How we tested

Each of these boots has covered many miles on our feet as we stomped our way along trails, up mountains, through peaty bogs and across muddy fields. We judged the boots on how comfortable they were (as much on mile 25 as on mile five), how long they took to break in, and the level of support, as well as technical features such as waterproofing, traction, cushioning, weight and breathability.

The best womens hiking boots for 2022 are:

Best overall  Scarpa rush TRK GTX: 185, Scarpa.co.uk

 Scarpa rush TRK GTX: 185, Scarpa.co.uk Best vegan boot  Lowa innox pro GTX mid WS: 175, Lowa.co.uk

 Lowa innox pro GTX mid WS: 175, Lowa.co.uk Best for travelling  Salomon outpulse mid gore-tex: 155, Salomon.com

 Salomon outpulse mid gore-tex: 155, Salomon.com Best for versatility  Adidas terrex AX4 gore-tex hiking shoes: 140, Adidas.co.uk

 Adidas terrex AX4 gore-tex hiking shoes: 140, Adidas.co.uk Best all-season boot  Arc'teryx acrux TR GTX: 220, Arcteryx.com

 Arc'teryx acrux TR GTX: 220, Arcteryx.com Best for rocky terrain  Inov-8 roclite G345 GTX: 155, Inov-8.com

 Inov-8 roclite G345 GTX: 155, Inov-8.com Best cushioning  Hoka anacapa mid gore-tex: 159.99, Ellis-brigham.com

 Hoka anacapa mid gore-tex: 159.99, Ellis-brigham.com Best comfort  Merrell bravada mid waterproof boot: 39.99, Sportsshoes.com

 Merrell bravada mid waterproof boot: 39.99, Sportsshoes.com Best classic style  Danner mountain light cascade clovis: 420, Danner.com

 Danner mountain light cascade clovis: 420, Danner.com Best beginners boot  Berghaus explorer trek gore-tex: 150, Berghaus.com

 Berghaus explorer trek gore-tex: 150, Berghaus.com Best leather boot  Altberg malham walking boot: 214.99, Altberg.co.uk

 Altberg malham walking boot: 214.99, Altberg.co.uk Best for light hikes  Ecco exohike w: 119, Ecco.com

 Ecco exohike w: 119, Ecco.com Best lightweight boot  Columbia peakfreak X2 mid outdry boot: 115, Columbiasportswear.co.uk

 Columbia peakfreak X2 mid outdry boot: 115, Columbiasportswear.co.uk Best for city to trail  The North Face vectiv exploris futurelight boots: 93, Thenorthface.co.uk

Scarpa rush TRK GTX Best: Overall Rating: 10/10 Weight: Approx 465g per boot If youre looking for an all-rounder boot that will carry you from season to season in the UK and further afield, the Scarpa rush TRK GTX should be on your radar. Its pretty hard to fault. The ankle is wrapped in Scarpas padded autofit collar so the entire foot is supported and protected, making this boot a good option if youre carrying a pack or tackling rocky terrain. The rush TRK GTX is also surprisingly lightweight given how sturdy it feels, and is both breathable and flexible while also being an incredibly tough boot. Weve taken ours on several long day hikes, including steep climbs and splashing through streams (the GORE-TEX lining means the boot is completely waterproof), and it has been able to tackle all the terrains weve thrown at it. Buy now 185 Scarpa.co.uk {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Lowa innox pro GTX mid WS Best: Vegan boot Rating: 8/10 Weight: approx 370g per boot These Lowa mid boots have become our go-to for everything from dog walking and day hikes to overnight camping trips. Theyre light and comfortable, and theres little to no breaking in period  you can take these boots straight out of the box onto the trail. We were particularly impressed by the fact that these boots are 100 per cent vegan, which can be pretty tough to find in hiking boots, as even if not made from leather, boots often contain animal-derived components. The upper is fully synthetic, which makes it both lightweight and breathable, and the boot is GORE-TEX lined so you dont need to worry about soggy feet. Buy now 175 Lowa.co.uk {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Salomon outpulse mid gore-tex Best: For travelling Rating: 9/10 Weight: Approx 328g per boot Salomon is always a reliable choice when it comes to hiking boots and this year weve been particularly impressed with this sturdy mid-cut outpulse boot. Its incredibly lightweight yet retains many of the features that wed want to tackle more challenging terrain. This makes it an excellent choice for travel as it will add only minimal weight to your suitcase or backpack and yet can handle almost anything you throw at it on your adventures, from sandy trails to rocky scrambles. For more technical trails or harsh elements you may want to opt for Salomons popular crosshike, but the outpulse hits a sweet spot between walking shoe and hiking boot. Your foot feels better protected and supported than it would in a walking shoe, but the outpulse is still agile and flexible with almost trainer-like comfort. Buy now 155 Salomon.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Adidas terrex AX4 gore-tex hiking shoes Best: For versatility Rating: 9/10 Weight: Approx 400g per boot Weve worn our Terrex AX4 hiking shoes pretty much everywhere and they havent let us down yet. Although there is zero wearing-in period and trainer-like comfort from toe to ankle, these boots feel sturdier than other training shoe/hiking boot hybrids and provide superior ankle support. The GORE-TEX membrane provides complete waterproofing, while also letting feet breathe too. Dewy fields, heavy rainfall, muddy puddles and ankle-deep creeks  we took these shoes through the lot and our feet stayed warm and dry. Throw in the Continental compound rubber outsole that offers impressive traction on all terrains, and youll find that these boots are perfect for all-weather hiking. Buy now 140 Adidas.co.uk {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Arc'teryx acrux TR GTX Best: All-season boot Rating: 8/10 Weight: Approx 470g per boot Its not the lightest boot weve tried, but given the level of support and technical features it boasts, we were impressed at how little the Arcteryx acrux TR GTX weighs. This is thanks to the micro-plated technology of the SuperFabric upper that is superlight and flexible yet incredibly durable. These boots are suitable for technical trails and we found they could handle pretty much anything we threw at them, including icy ascents and even snowy mountain terrain. The lug pattern combined with Arcteryxs Vibram megagrip outsole means that theyre incredibly grippy with impressive traction, and the GORE-TEX insert keeps feet dry while also allowing them to breathe in the warmer weather. Buy now 220 Arcteryx.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Inov-8 roclite G345 GTX Best: For rocky terrain Rating: 10/10 Weight: approx 345g per boot If youre going to be scrambling up mountains, youd be hard pressed to find a better boot than the roclite G345 GTX. It features Inov8s world-first graphene-grip (graphene is the strongest material on the planet) and 6mm lugs for unparalleled grip on all terrains. We really noticed just how superior the grip is on slippery climbs and rocky descents, and with GORE-TEX waterproofing the boots kept our feet completely dry in all conditions, including rain, mud, slush and even snow. We were also impressed by the comfort of the Roclite G345 GTX. Its incredibly light and the midsole is well-cushioned, making it a great choice for fast hiking, as well as more gentle countryside rambles. This is a brilliant boot with some impressive technology at a really reasonable price. Buy now 155 Inov-8.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Hoka anacapa mid gore-tex Best: Cushioning Rating: 8/10 Weight: Approx 384g per boot When it comes to cushioning, its not surprising Hokas boots are a cut above the rest. The brand is known for the supremely cushioned soles on its running shoes that help prevent injury and soften impact, and the brand has applied this technology to its hiking boots. The Anacapa boot is not quite as striking as the Hoka TenNine Hike GORE-TEX with its oversized sole, so it will likely appeal to a wider range of hikers, yet it still felt incredibly springy and has the sense of propelling you forward. Thanks to a Vibram megagrip sole with 5mm lugs, this boot is grippy even on very slippery surfaces and we found it allowed us to keep up a fast hiking pace along very muddy tracks and wet trails. Buy now 159.99 Ellis-brigham.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Merrell bravada mid waterproof boot Best: Comfort Rating: 8/10 Weight: Approx 342g per boot Merrells bravada boot is honestly one of the most comfortable weve ever tried thanks to its snug, trainer-like fit, support around the ankle, and air cushion technology in the heel. With 5mm lugs and Merrells quantum grip rubber outsole, the bravada will also take care of you over uneven or rocky terrain. Its 100 per cent vegan and incredibly lightweight at roughly 342g per boot, yet is durable enough to tackle more challenging trails. The clever M select dry barrier membrane keeps water out and kept our feet dry on wet winter hikes, but it also lets moisture escape so our feet didnt get sweaty when stomping along the trails in the warm early spring weather. For the price, you wont get a better boot. Buy now 39.99 Sportsshoes.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Danner mountain light cascade clovis Best: Classic style Rating: 6/10 Weight: Approx 650g per boot Danners Mountain Light boots have the feel of an old-school style hiking boot, but thats the charm of them. Sure, theyre heavy, but theyre also beautifully made in a classic style with full-grain leather and high quality stitching. Theyre a very sturdy boot, but the payoff here is that they did take a little wearing in (we wouldnt want to do a long hike in these straight out the box) and theyre not as flexible as other leather options. After several short walks and one long hike theyve started to mould to the shape of our feet and we only expect this to get better mile after mile. Theyre an investment, but these Danner boots will likely last you forever. Buy now 420 Danner.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Berghaus explorer trek gore-tex Best: Beginners boot Rating: 7/10 Weight: Approx 540g per boot Berghaus has created a simple, sturdy and reliable boot in the explorer trek. Its a little heavier than some of the other entry level boots on our list, but it also feels a little sturdier and the ankle is well supported. Thanks to the GORE-TEX lining, the boots are completely waterproof and our feet stayed dry even when sloshing through creeks and plodding through thick mud. As always, the grip of the Berghaus opti-stud sole didnt let us down even on slippery descents and the OrthoLite hike footbeds kept our feet comfortable as we racked up the miles. The lightweight suede construction also means theres nothing to break in here  youll be ready to hit the trails as soon as you put the explorer treks on your feet. Buy now 150 Berghaus.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Altberg malham walking boot Best: Leather boot Rating: 8/10 Weight: Approx 672g per boot Its one of the heavier boots on our list (although still light for a leather boot), but we were impressed by the durability and versatility of this classic-style Malham boot from Altberg. After many miles of hiking on wet and boggy terrain and several small mountain ascents, these boots showed little wear and moulded perfectly to our feet for a snug yet supportive fit. The full-grain leather is soft and supple so these boots were comfortable enough to take straight out onto the trail  although wed recommend doing a few shorter walks in these before embarking on a full day hike to avoid blisters or rubbing. Buy now 214.99 Altberg.co.uk {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Ecco exohike w Best: For light hikes Rating: 6/10 Weight: Approx 531g per boot We wouldnt usually recommend hiking with a boot thats not fully waterproof (the Ecco exohike W is just water-repellent), but this pair has a lot going for it. Its rare to find a leather boot thats this comfortable right out the box and is still comfortable after the first ten miles. Theres none of the pinching, rubbing and chafing youd expect from a fresh pair of leather boots. Its a snug and supportive fit and features Eccos phorene midsole that is designed to rebound energy to create a cushioned and almost bouncy feel when hiking. We also love the style of this boot and wear it out and about in the city just as often as on the trails. Its not a boot that youll want to take on serious treks, but for light hikes, walks in the countryside and strolling around town the Ecco exohike W is a top choice. Buy now 119 Ecco.com {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

Columbia peakfreak X2 mid outdry boot Best: Lightweight boot Rating: 6/10 Weight: Approx 318g per boot This is a great little hiking boot for the price. It doesnt have many of the features that more technical boots boast, but for day hikes and simple trails its the perfect entry-level shoe. The boots are nicely cushioned, flexible, and held up well in rainy or muddy conditions. Theyre fully waterproof and the omni-grip rubber soles are grippy on slippery paths and trails, as well as rocky or gravelly surfaces. Its worth noting that we found that these boots could rub slightly at the top of the ankle when tied too tightly or improperly, so wed recommend paying attention to your lacing and, as always, investing in a good pair of hiking socks. Buy now 115 Columbiasportswear.co.uk {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}

The North Face vectiv exploris futurelight boots Best: For city to trail Rating: 8/10 Weight: Approx 357g per boot The sneaker-style hiking boot is really having a moment right now and the vectiv exploris futurelight ecompasses this beautifully. It feels like a trainer/hiking boot hybrid with the comfort of the former and the technical features of the latter. The vectiv technology combines a 3D plate with a rocker midsole for forward propulsion, which feels a little strange at first with each step almost taking on a rolling motion, but helps power you along the trail. The futurelight membrane is waterproof yet breathable, and North Faces grippy and high-traction SurfaceCTRL outsole along with protective toe cap make the boot suitable for rocky lowland trails and slippery or muddy terrain. Buy now 93 Thenorthface.co.uk {{#hasItems}} Price comparison {{#items}} {{ merchant }} {{ price }} Buy now {{/items}}
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Google Glass appears to be getting scrubbed from the internet, as the search giant removes its social media accounts.

The company has been largely quiet about Google Glass in recent months. And it has now started removing any trace that the spectacle-mounted computer ever existed.

The Glass-owned Twitter, Instagram and Google+ accounts have all been removed. Google+ was the only site that did so with any recognition that it was disappearing, with a final commemorative message.

Hi Explorers, weve had a blast hanging out with you on G+ throughout the Explorer Program, the official account wrote. From now on, if you have any questions about your Glass, you can get in touch with us here, the account continued, providing a link to Googles support page for Glass.

The support page offers tips on common issues with Google Glass, such as how to pair it. It also gives a phone number for people to call, which appears to still be in operation.

Google launched Glass in 2013. Its reception was chilly from the off, with many complaining that it looked bad and made it too easy to record people without their consent or knowledge.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

It has since discontinued the consumer version of Glass. Instead, it has looked to launch the glasses as a product for the workplace  focusing on selling them to people such as surgeons, as a specialist tool.
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The Government is licensing the sale of invasive surveillance equipment from the UK to repressive and dangerous states, The Independent can reveal.

New records show that the UK is sending equipment to countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tools can be used to intercept private phone messages and hack into devices  and appear to be being used in countries that the UK has condemned for human rights abuses.

Because of newly-implemented regulations, 2015 is the first year that surveillance technologies were included in the Governments list of export licenses. As such, the new releases  found by charity Privacy International and seen by The Independent  are the first time that the huge amount of surveillance technologies that are sent from the UK around the world have been revealed.

Recommended Read more Cameron refuses to launch inquiry into arms sales to Saudi Arabia

The legal framework for use of such equipment is still unclear and untested in the UK, and is still being debated by parliament as part of the Investigatory Powers Bill. But those same technologies are being sold to countries "some of which lack basic rule of law", according to charity Privacy International.

The documents show that the UK has given export licenses to sell intrusion software, which allows its users to look in on electronic devices and control them, to countries around the world.

That intrusion software has been sold from the UK into countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, according to the documents.

Licenses have also been granted to sell IMSI catchers, which can be used to find mobile phones and intercept messages and calls that are sent through them. The Government has granted licenses worth millions of pounds to sell those tools to countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Licenses have also been granted for IP monitoring systems, which can be used to allow authorities and regimes to run nationwide monitoring and surveillance programs on a countries entire internet.

All of the equipment being sold falls into the category of arms and controlled goods that can only be exported out of the country with the approval of the UK Government. Data on what is being licensed for export is collected by the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and published online.

The revelation comes as David Cameron has refused to launch an inquiry into British arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The arms exports to the country are "carefully controlled", Mr Cameron claimed at Prime Minister's Questions.

Campaigners have called on authorities to be more stringent in the tests that are applied when granting the licenses.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

To its credit, the British system is one of the more transparent in the EU, and the government has already taken some steps to better regulate the trade, said Edin Omanovic, a research officer at Privacy International. Put simply however, similar to UK policy on arms exports, whats needed is that human rights considerations take precedence over financial incentives and security relationships.

British authorities arguments around surveillance techniques often contrast UK usage with that in foreign, authoritarian regimes. But the new releases show that many of those same tools are being sold into those same countries.

 Cameron on arms trading with Saudi Arabia.mp4

These categories of surveillance technology cover some of the most advanced and intrusive systems on the market, said Mr Omanovic. These would allow some of the most authoritarian countries in the world to carry out mass, suspicion-less surveillance and gain unlimited access to anyones private communications and devices.

Such surveillance technology can be used to clamp down on dissent through the monitoring of activists, journalists and opposition groups, as well as allow agencies to identify and target individuals and carry out serious human rights abuses, including arbitrary killings and torture.
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Drinking coffee regularly does not cause the heart to beat more, a new study has found.

The findings go against previous studies which suggested that drinking coffee raises the heart rate, and have prompted the research team to call for clinical recommendations against caffeine to be reconsidered.

Past research has indicated that premature atrial contractions (PACs) in the top chambers of the organ and excessive premature ventricular contractions (PVC) at the bottom are linked to a number of different forms of heart disease, and can be caused by caffeine consumption.

Current guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association recommend that caffeine, alcohol and nicotine use should be stopped entirely to prevent heart problems worsening.

However, the team at the University California, San Francisco, have cited previous evidence which showed that caffeinated product including coffee, chocolate and tea could in fact have cardiovascular benefits.

To conduct the study published in the Journal of the American Heart, scientists analysed 1,388 randomly selected participants from the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Cardiovascular Health Study database of nearly 6,000 patients. Those with persistent extra heartbeats were excluded.

How often they ate was taken into account, as well as their coffee, tea, and chocolate intake. Participants also underwent a 24-hour ECG test.

Food trends in 2016 Show all 11 1 /11 Food trends in 2016 Food trends in 2016 Celeriac root We had a kale obsession in 2015, but 2016s vegetable sine qua non is predicted to be the knobbly celeriac root. Celeriac milk (Tom Hunt at Poco in Bristol serves it with winter mussels and wild water celery), celeriac cooked in Galician beef fat (from Adam Rawson of Pachamama, hot new chef in the capital) and salt-baked celeriac (to be found in Matthew and Iain Penningtons kitchens at The Ethicurean in the West Country) are just a few examples. Getty Images Food trends in 2016 Middle Eastern food The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook (24.95, Phaidon) by grand-dame Salma Hage, author of the bestseller The Lebanese Kitchen (whose halva is pictured here), is out in April  Liz & Max Haarala Hamilton Food trends in 2016 Non-alcoholic cocktails Grain Store mixologist Tony Conigliaro has created Roman Redhead, a riot of red grape juice, beetroot, pale ale and verjus, and Rose Iced Tea (black tea, rose petals, anise essence, pictured here) Food trends in 2016 Gin The discerning will be slurping Hepple gin  from chef Valentine Warner and cocktail guru Nick Strangeway  which is punctuated with bog-myrtle nuances Food trends in 2016 Argyll and Bute Restaurant followers are getting in a froth about Pam Brunton in Scotland, who opened the Inver restaurant in Argyll and Bute to acclaim last year Food trends in 2016 Andy Olivers Som Saa One of the most eagerly awaited restaurants of 2016 will be the permanent incarnation of Andy Olivers remarkable pop-up Som Saa opening very soon in east London. Oliver, who worked at Thai god David Thompsons Nahm in Bangkok, raised a whopping 700,000 through crowdfunding, and is renowned for his piquant Thai flavours and obsessive attention to detail, including in his home ferments and DIY coconut cream  Adam Weatherley Food trends in 2016 Venison Another ruminant in vogue is venison, with Sainsburys doubling its line for 2016. It provides a protein-packed punch, with B vitamins and iron, and its low in fat. Its entry into the mainstream is in part thanks to the Scottish restaurant Mac and Wild, just opened in London, whose Celtic head chef Andy Waugh (who also runs the Wild Game Co) has been touting it as street food for years (his venison burger pictured here) Food trends in 2016 Goat From Brett Grahams The Ledbury to Angela Hartnetts kitchens at Lime Wood Hotel in the New Forest, Cabrito is the go-to goat supplier among the chef cognoscenti (roasted loin of kid pictured here)  but this year, domestic cooks can get in on the action, as Sushila Moles and James Whetlor of Cabrito offer their meat through Ocado Mike Lusmore / mikelusmore.com Food trends in 2016 Coffee Coffee sage George Crawford is launching the much-anticipated Cupsmith with his partner, Emma. Crawford believes that 2016 is the year purist coffee will finally meet the masses; Cupsmiths mission will be to make craft coffee as popular as craft beer on the high street. The company roasts Arabica beans in small batches, improving its quality  but sells it online, at cupsmith.com, in an approachable way: expect cheerful packaging and names such as Afternoon Reviver Coffee (designed for drinking with milk  no matter how uncouth, most of us want milk) and Glorious Espresso Julia Conway Food trends in 2016 120-day-old steak Hanging meat for extremely long lengths of time has become an art. In Cumbria, Lake Road Kitchens James Cross is plating up 120-day-old steak (pictured here). The beef is from influential ager Dan Austin of Lake District Farmers, who is currently investigating the individual bacterial cultures that go into this maturing process Food trends in 2016 Lotus root Diners can expect root-to-stem dining - cue the full lotus deployed by the Michelin-starred Indian Benares in its kamal kakdi aur paneer korma Getty Images

Of the total volunteers, 80 per cent consumed more than one product containing caffeine on a daily basis.

Researchers found that they did not any more extra heart beats per hour, even after consuming coffee, tea and chocolate.

Senior author Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, a UCSF Health cardiologist and director of clinical research in the UCSF Division of Cardiology, said: "Clinical recommendations advising against the regular consumption of caffeinated products to prevent disturbances of the hearts cardiac rhythm should be reconsidered, as we may unnecessarily be discouraging consumption of items like chocolate, coffee and tea that might actually have cardiovascular benefits."

Further research is now needed to understand whether consuming excessive amounts of caffeine affect heartbeats, the team said.
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An NHS mental health hospital failed to act after two patients died by hanging within weeks of each other while being treated on wards that had been repeatedly judged unsafe.

In a damning report, the Care Quality Commission said that North Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust had failed to respond to warnings issued over five years about ligature points on its acute wards, despite repeated assurances that it was acting on the concerns.

The CQCs inspectors gave the trust its worst possible rating for safety and revealed that when they visited the hospital inspection staff found a patient unconscious following an attempt to strangle themselves with a ligature.

The inspectors added that the incident was in spite of serious concerns identified to the trust by the Care Quality Commission as part of our on-going regulatory inspections.

The previous two deaths had taken place three months before the inspectors visited.

Overall, the inspectors found that 25 incidents relating to the use of a ligature attached to a fixed object had occurred over nine months in the Essex trusts acute psychiatric wards.

And Paul Lelliott, the deputy chief inspector of hospitals, said that serious concerns about the safety of patients had been raised long before then.

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The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has more than 100 officials investigating the cause of the mystery illness, and has warned citizens against smoking e-cigarette products until more is known, particularly if modified or bought off the street Getty Health news in pictures Baldness cure looks to be a step closer Researchers in the US claim to have overcome one of the major hurdles to cultivating human follicles from stem cells. The new system allows cells to grow in a structured tuft and emerge from the skin Sanford Burnham Preybs Health news in pictures Two hours a week spent in nature can improve health A study in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that a dose of nature of just two hours a week is associated with better health and psychological wellbeing Shutterstock Health news in pictures Air pollution linked to fertility issues in women Exposure to air from traffic-clogged streets could leave women with fewer years to have children, a study has found. 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The average 10 year old consumes the equivalent to 13 sugar cubes a day, 8 more than is recommended PA Health news in pictures Child health experts advise switching off screens an hour before bed While there is not enough evidence of harm to recommend UK-wide limits on screen use, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health have advised that children should avoid screens for an hour before bed time to avoid disrupting their sleep Getty Health news in pictures Daily aspirin is unnecessary for older people in good health, study finds A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that many elderly people are taking daily aspirin to little or no avail Getty Health news in pictures Vaping could lead to cancer, US study finds A study by the University of Minnesota's Masonic Cancer Centre has found that the carcinogenic chemicals formaldehyde, acrolein, and methylglyoxal are present in the saliva of E-cigarette users Reuters Health news in pictures More children are obese and diabetic There has been a 41% increase in children with type 2 diabetes since 2014, the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit has found. 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Just Giving Health news in pictures Government to review thousands of harmful vaginal mesh implants The Government has pledged to review tens of thousands of cases where women have been given harmful vaginal mesh implants. Getty Health news in pictures Jeremy Hunt announces 'zero suicides ambition' for the NHS The NHS will be asked to go further to prevent the deaths of patients in its care as part of a zero suicide ambition being launched today Getty Health news in pictures Human trials start with cancer treatment that primes immune system to kill off tumours Human trials have begun with a new cancer therapy that can prime the immune system to eradicate tumours. The treatment, that works similarly to a vaccine, is a combination of two existing drugs, of which tiny amounts are injected into the solid bulk of a tumour. 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Rex Health news in pictures Potential key to halting breast cancer's spread discovered by scientists Most breast cancer patients do not die from their initial tumour, but from secondary malignant growths (metastases), where cancer cells are able to enter the blood and survive to invade new sites. Asparagine, a molecule named after asparagus where it was first identified in high quantities, has now been shown to be an essential ingredient for tumour cells to gain these migratory properties. Getty Health news in pictures NHS nursing vacancies at record high with more than 34,000 roles advertised A record number of nursing and midwifery positions are currently being advertised by the NHS, with more than 34,000 positions currently vacant, according to the latest data. Demand for nurses was 19 per cent higher between July and September 2017 than the same period two years ago. 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Getty Health news in pictures Over 75,000 sign petition calling for Richard Branson's Virgin Care to hand settlement money back to NHS Mr Bransons company sued the NHS last year after it lost out on an 82m contract to provide childrens health services across Surrey, citing concerns over serious flaws in the way the contract was awarded PA Health news in pictures More than 700 fewer nurses training in England in first year after NHS bursary scrapped The numbers of people accepted to study nursing in England fell 3 per cent in 2017, while the numbers accepted in Wales and Scotland, where the bursaries were kept, increased 8.4 per cent and 8 per cent respectively Getty Health news in pictures Landmark study links Tory austerity to 120,000 deaths The paper found that there were 45,000 more deaths in the first four years of Tory-led efficiencies than would have been expected if funding had stayed at pre-election levels. 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The class is therefore predominantly aimed at parents but you actually do not have to have children to take part Getty Health news in pictures 'Fundamental right to health' to be axed after Brexit, lawyers warn Tobacco and alcohol companies could win more easily in court cases such as the recent battle over plain cigarette packaging if the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is abandoned, a barrister and public health professor have said Getty Health news in pictures 'Thousands dying' due to fear over non-existent statin side-effects A major new study into the side effects of the cholesterol-lowering medicine suggests common symptoms such as muscle pain and weakness are not caused by the drugs themselves Getty Health news in pictures Babies born to fathers aged under 25 have higher risk of autism New research has found that babies born to fathers under the age of 25 or over 51 are at higher risk of developing autism and other social disorders. 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Over the past five years, CQC inspectors, along with Mental Health Act reviewers, have inspected the trust several times. Each time we have identified problems that the trust needed to address each time the trust had given assurances and then has not done so.

Melanie Leahy, whose 20-year-old son, Matthew, was found hanged in 2012, told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the CQCs report was too long in coming.

Ive been pushing since 2012 for an official acknowledgement that safety standards at the trust are inadequate.

She said she wrote to the CQC last summer to complain about the trusts failure to remove a ligature point in the acute wards. If this issue had been addressed after my sons death in 2012 I believe the two other men might not have died, she said.

The report coincides with the release of NHS figures this week showing the number of deaths annually among mental health patients in England has risen 21 per cent over the last three years from 1,412 to 1,713. Norman Lamb, the former mental health minister, said the statistics bore comparison with the Mid Staffordshire scandal in which patients died as a result of poor care.

Significant numbers of unexpected deaths at the Mid Staffs NHS trust caused an outcry and these figures should cause the same because they show a dramatic increase in the number of people losing their lives, Mr Lamb said. NHS England and the Government should set up an investigation into the causes.

The CQC report said the Essex trust had identified the need to make changes to wards to remove fixtures and fittings that might put patients at risk but had not yet undertaken the work. Ligature-free doors had not been installed or even commissioned despite these having been agreed some time ago. Senior managers and directors could not explain why the trust had not addressed the problems, the report said.

The trusts chief executive, Andrew Geldard, said the trust had already begun a programme of improvements costing more than 1m.
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Experts fear the Zika virus, which has been linked to brain damage in unborn babies, may be transmitted through sex.

Zika is known to be spread by mosquitos bites and has spread rapidly through Brazil and other South American countries since late 2015.

While it manifests itself as a relatively harmless fever in most patients, it has also been linked to a spike in microcephaly  a condition causing babies to appear to have shrunken heads.

Health officials across the world have warned pregnant women in affected South American countries to take precaution to protect themselves from mosquito bites, with some advising women to put off becoming pregnant.

However, two cases of the virus in medical literature suggest that Zika may also be spread through during sex, prompting experts to call for further investigation into the possibility.

The only known cases of the virus being detected in a mans semen involved a 44-year-old Tahitian man who contracted Zika during a drink to French Polynesia in 2013, The New York Times reported.

While his blood was clear, French investigators found traces of the virus in his semen and his urine.

The second case was that of Dr Brain D Foy, an expert in insect-borne diseases at Colorado State University, who unwittingly developed the virus after he travelled to Senegal to collect mosquitos for a study. Both he and his colleague who accompanied him fell ill with a fever when he returned to the US.

Days later, Dr Foys wife, a nurse, displayed similar symptoms including headache pains, a rash, and bloodshot eyes.

However, what had infected the three was unclear after the blood samples tested for malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever returned negative.

On the suggestion of another scientist, Dr Foy had the blood samples re-tested and found that he and his colleague, as well as his wife who had remained in the US, had been infected by Zika.

Dr Foy relayed his experience of the virus in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Research into Zika is further complicated by the fact that it does not infect common lab animals such as rats and mice, meaning controversial trials on monkeys may need to be used to investigate the condition.

Dr. William Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical School told The New York Times that while two suspected cases do not warrant a health warning from public health officials, he said: it certainly should be studied.

Battling the zika virus - in pictures Show all 19 1 /19 Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures A worker of the Salvadorean Ministry of Health fumigates a house in Soyapango, 6 kilometers from San Salvador, El Salvador. Salvadorean authorities have began a three days campaign of fumigation to reduce the presence of the mosquito that transmit the Zika virus. EPA/Oscar Rivera Battling the zika virus - in pictures A Health Ministry employee fumigates a home against the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the spread of the Zika virus in Soyapango, six km east of San Salvador. Health authorities have issued a national alert against the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, because of the link between the Zika virus and microcephaly and Guillain-BarrE Syndrome in foetuses. AFP PHOTO/Marvin RECINOSMarvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A pediatric infectologist examines a two-months-old baby, who has microcephaly, on 26 January 2016 in Recife, Brazil. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A woman walks through the fumes as Health Ministry employee fumigate against the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the spread of the Zika virus in Soyapango. Marvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A health ministry employee sprays to eliminate breeding sites of the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, which transmits diseases such as the dengue, chicunguna and Zica viruses, in a Tegucigalpa cemetery on January 21, 2016. The medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) recommended that women in the country avoid getting pregnant for the time being due to the presence of the Zika virus. If a pregnant woman is infected by the virus, the baby could be born with microcephaly. AFP PHOTO/Orlando SIERRA Battling the zika virus - in pictures A man walks away from his home with his son as health workers fumigates the Altos del Cerro neighbourhood as part of preventive measures against the Zika virus and other mosquito-borne diseases in Soyapango, El Salvador REUTERS/Jose Cabezas Battling the zika virus - in pictures A three-months-old, who has microcephaly, in Recife, Brazil. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A pregnant woman waits to be attended at the Maternal and Children's Hospital in Tegucigalpa. The medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) recommended that women in the country avoid getting pregnant for the time being due to the presence of the Zika virus. If a pregnant woman is infected by the virus, the baby could be born with microcephaly. ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures Army soldiers apply insect repellent as they prepare for a clean up operation against the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is a vector for transmitting the Zika virus in Sao Paulo, Brazil. AP Photo/Andre Penner Battling the zika virus - in pictures Workers disinfect the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro to fight the spread of the Zika virus Battling the zika virus - in pictures Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, measures the head of a 2-month-old baby with microcephaly in Recife Battling the zika virus - in pictures Mother Mylene Helena Ferreira cares for her son David Henrique Ferreira, 5 months, who has microcephaly, on January 25, 2016 in Recife, Brazil. In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures U.S. women who are pregnant from traveling to many South American countries Battling the zika virus - in pictures In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, examines a two-month-old baby with microcephaly on January 27, 2016 in Recife, Brazil Battling the zika virus - in pictures Washington Post Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures

However, the World Health Organisation has sought to quell fears and said that

Zika has been isolated in human semen, and one case of possible person-to-person sexual transmission has been described" but added: "more evidence is needed to confirm whether sexual contact is a means of Zika transmission.

The role of Aedes mosquitoes in transmitting Zika is documented and well understood, while evidence about other transmission routes is limited, it said.

Health officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also said the two apparent instances are a theoretical risk and there is insufficient evidence to issue a warning about any concern that the virus may be spread through sex.

Dr Marcio Nehab, a paediatrician and infectious disease specialist at the Fiocruz research institute in Rio de Janeiro said that researchers should focus their efforts on mosquitoes.

"We still need a lot of study to conclude that sexual transmission can happen because little is known about the Zika virus.

"At the moment, we have to care more about the known vector, which is the mosquito, as the virus transmission route, he said according to MailOnline.
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Tesco deliberately and repeatedly withheld money owed to suppliers to boost its sales performance artificially, in a serious breach of supermarket regulations, the sectors watchdog has found.

The Groceries Code Adjudicator also said that the supermarket would encourage suppliers to give it extra cash in return for more control over where products appeared on shelves or to avoid losing out to rivals. In the weeks leading up to Tescos results presentations to the City and investors, buyers were also encouraged to push suppliers even harder to accept payment delays in order to flatter the sales figures, according to the findings.

The matter of misreporting to the stock market is now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Christine Tacon, the head of the GCA, demanded that Tesco improve relations with suppliers, stop taking money from them without permission and speed up correction of the many errors that would occur on its payment systems. She also said that all finance and buying teams must be trained in the findings of the investigation.

Her report came as the Tesco chief executive, Dave Lewis, issued another public apology to suppliers about the issues raised and insisted that new safeguards were in place to avoid future problems.

However, the report was also the trigger for lawyers for a group of investors to write to the company. It was the first step towards a lawsuit for lost earnings as a result of the share price crash when it was revealed that profits had been inflated.

The 60-page document is the first significant report into Tescos internal workings since it admitted that it had overstated profits under the leadership of its former chief executive, Phil Clarke. It paints a picture of a culture where staff were encouraged to boost margins at any cost and ignore pleas for payment. In one case Ms Tacon found that Tesco had withheld a multimillion-pound payment to one supplier for more than two years. Several suppliers also made payments of 1m to Tesco, regardless of whether more of their products had been sold.

Ms Tacon said: A Tesco list of methods for meeting the half-year target included not paying back money owed. The evidence I received revealed a number of examples of Tesco deliberately deferring payment of money in order to maintain its margin at key financial reporting periods.

I find that Tesco knowingly delayed paying money to suppliers in order to improve its own financial position.

She added: In particular, requests for payments to meet margin targets appeared to be more prevalent at the end of trading periods. Some suppliers reported that what set Tesco apart from other retailers was the pressure it put on suppliers at the end of a financial quarter, half-year or full year.

It is very clear that delay in payments was a widespread issue that affected a broad range of Tesco suppliers on a significant scale.

Ms Tacon also pointed to the reluctance of some Tesco buyers to proactively engage in the resolution of payment disputes. There were times when Tesco did not appear to even attempt to resolve supplier concerns before unilaterally deducting money from suppliers.

In some cases, suppliers in dispute were forced to call Tescos service centre in Hindustan, even though staff there were not authorised to make payments. She added: The most shocking thing I found was how widespread it was. Every supplier I spoke to had evidence of delays in payment.

Bosses were in breach of the groceries code on payment delays, but not on charging suppliers directly for prominent positioning on shelves, she said.

However, the adjudicator did find examples of indirect charging, with suppliers paying hundreds of thousands of pounds to become part of the supermarkets range review, or category captaincy, which allowed them to be the dominant product in a category. Tesco claimed these policies had since been eradicated, and Ms Tacon said she would look more closely at the wording of the code to see whether it needed changing in light of the indirect links between suppliers making payments and getting prominent shelf positions or the ear of buyers.

The report led to the third-party litigation finance group Bentham Europe, which represents between 50 and 100 institutional investors in Tesco, revealing that it had appointed the law firm Stewarts Law to write to the supermarket to start formal legal action.

Sean Upson, the Stewarts Law partner in charge of the Tesco claim, said: There is mounting public evidence that Tescos management were aware that the financial statements were untrue or misleading, and claims against Tesco have a solid basis.

Experts said the amount owed could run into hundreds of millions of pounds. Last year, Tesco settled a case in the US with investors for $12m(8m).

David Scott of Scott & Scott, the law firm representing Tesco Shareholder Claims Ltd, which is filing a separate suit, said it would wait for the SFO report before pressing ahead with its claim.

Mr Lewis said no money has been set aside by Tesco to cover any legal costs. He has since introduced simpler contracts with suppliers and accepted the report in full, saying the worst of Tescos excesses were now a thing of the past.
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Faith schools have been accused of adopting an approach bordering on religious racism by turning away pupils simply on the grounds of their religion.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain told a conference it would be intolerable if schools were to close the door to pupils because of their race - yet it was permitted to segregate them on religious grounds.

Dr Romain, chairman of Accord - the group which campaigns for equal access to faith schools - said it meant you had Hindus over here, Muslims there and Catholics over there. It is almost religious racism, he added.

He was speaking at a conference organised by Westminster Education Forum as a group of 15 organisations - including teachers unions, Hindus , Muslims, Christians, Lib Dems and Greens,- wrote an open letter to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan urging her to retain the 50 per cent limit on the religious selection of pupils attending free schools.

In an interview with The Independent, Nick Timothy, chief executive of the New Schools Network - the charity which supports free schools, urged Ms Morgan to scrap it to bring a boycott of the free school programme by the Catholic Church to an end.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain (Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

The 15-strong group argue, instead, that the cap should be extended to all state schools - to avoid the spectacle of pupils being turned away on grounds of faith.

Abolishing the cap would be an astonishingly regressive proposal and pander to those who wish to isolate pupils of their faith from wider society, the letter adds.

It also ignores the reality that faith-based free schools have managed successfully with it and have found they have been able to both maintain their identity and be open to children from other backgrounds.

Dr Romain told the conference that faith schools admissions criteria which judged a child on whether their parents attended services, sang in a choir or did flower arranging was edging selection towards parents who have the time or nous to go in for such leisure time activities.

It tends to reflect a certain income or educational level in those parents and puts them in a certain socio-economic background, he added.

Figures showed that schools with no religious character admitted five per cent more pupils on free school meals - whilst Church of England Schools admitted 14.5 per cent fewer, Roman Catholics 27.6 per cent fewer, Muslims 27.8 per cent fewer and Jewish schools 63.4 per cent fewer.

Church and faith schools do have powers to accept/turn away children on religious grounds that would be illegal in any other state-funded body - hospitals, swimming pools, you name it, unthinkable, he added. The only reason it happens is because of an exemption clause in the Equalities Act ... although these discriminations may be legal, are they moral?

Paul Barber, director of the Catholic Education Service, said: "None of our schools have any admissions criteria relating to flower arranging or choirs or anything like that.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA UK news in pictures 7 September 2022 Police officers stand guard after Animal Rebellion activists threw paint on the walls and road outside the Houses of Parliament in protest, in London, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 6 September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2022 Visitors at the PoliNations garden in Victoria Square, Birmingham, which is made up of five 40ft high tree installations and over 6,000 plants. The PoliNations programme aims to explore how migration and cross-pollination have shaped the UKs gardens and culture PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2022 Undergraduates at the University of St Andrews take part in the traditional Pier Walk along the harbour walls of St Andrews before the start of the new academic year PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2022 The Massed Pipes and Drums parade during the Braemar Highland Gathering at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2022 Number 12 Company Irish Guards at Wellington Barracks, central London, before commencing their first Guard Mount at Buckingham Palace PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2022 A salmon leaps up the weir at Hexham in Northumberland, despite the drought warnings and low water levels, the River Tyne is still flowing well allowing the salmon and sea trout to head up river to spawn. 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He added that Catholic schools had a greater proportion of pupils from ethnic minority groups - 32.2 per cent compared with 30.4 per cent nationally. Significantly more pupils in our schools live in the most deprived areas, he added.

In his interview with the Independent, Mr Timothy argued that the 50 per cent of pupils from the same faith as the school was deterring good providers from entering the system.

However, the Department for Education argued its free school policy helps to tackle segregation and ensures that young people will experience the diversity or religious beliefs that make up modern Britain.
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Graham Linehan has underlined exactly why David Cameron's decision to dismiss Calais refugees as a bunch of migrants is so controversial by sharing the picture that sums up the reality of their plight.

The Father Ted writer posted the image of toddler Aylan Kurdis body washed up on the shore of a Turkish beach after Mr Cameron sparked uproar with his comment during Prime Minister's Questions.

The harrowing image of Aylan's lifeless body moved hundreds of thousands to back the Refugees Welcome campaign and urge the Governments to accept a quota of the most vulnerable.

Mr Cameron has referred to refugees living in dire conditions in Calais in this manner as he criticised Jeremy Corbyn, who met women with emaciated children and criticism of torture during his visit to the notorius Calais Jungle and Grande-Synthe camps last week.

Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.

The idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable, he said. Look at their record over the last week. They met with the unions and gave them flying pickets. They met with the Argentinians, they gave them the Falkland Islands. They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers.

Mr Cameron's disgraceful and inflammatory comment left some backbenchers aghast and the backlash continues to grow online, with over 7,000 tweets about his remark being posted in less than hour.
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An American academic who has spent nine years studying and teaching in the UK is believed to be in a deportation centre, despite claiming a knock on his door by police was the first he knew of any problem.

The Shakespeare specialist Paul Hamilton was arrested at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon on 17 January and is thought to have been held in the Morton Hall Immigration Removal Centre near Lincoln.

After being taken into custody, Dr Hamilton says he saw documents showing that the decision to remove him was taken on 9 December last year, but he had not been told.

Since his plight was written about by his friend and colleague Timo Uotinen, a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, 100 academics have signalled their support for Dr Hamilton. The US citizens friends say he has spent nine years in the UK, setting up conferences, giving lectures and contributing easily over $150,000 [104,500] to the economy with tuition fees.

They say that after being awarded his PhD by Birmingham Universitys Shakespeare Institute in July, he based his appeal to stay on the human rights argument that he had built up a valuable network of professional contacts while in Britain.

But, it was claimed, he was arrested because the authorities feared he would try to go on the run to evade removal from the UK.

Speaking to the politics.co.uk website from the detention centre, Dr Hamilton said: Everyone in the process knew this was wrong. My thesis was on the bookshelf when they arrested me.

The idea is that Im not trustable, that Im going to go into hiding and become a car washer in Cardiff. Im going to ruin my entire career rather than depart for the United States and continue with the application Im preparing for academic grants.

Its really disturbing. I can only conclude the Home Office wants international students to be intimidated, to be bullied from applying for leave to remain.

He added: The predominant feeling is degradation. At 11:30pm, when youre in bed, theres a peep hole in the door. An officer opens it, peers in and shines a light on you.

Your liberty is gone, your property is gone, your privacy is gone and youre subject to these daily humiliations.

In supporting his friend, Mr Uotinen wrote: He paid 650 for his application as well as buying in July 2015 an open-date return ticket [worth $1,200] in case of the denial of his application. He is being treated like a criminal for making a legitimate and costly application.

He added that at the time of his arrest Dr Hamilton was preparing an application to funding bodies for a cultural history project.

Dr Hamilton is continuing to write his application after having to petition [those detaining him] for pen and paper, [but] he is still unable access any of his research.

With 2016 being the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares death, these alarming actions perpetrated by UK immigration officials against a Shakespeare scholar starts this year of celebration in a deeply unsettling way.

The Home Office is yet to comment.
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An American Shakespeare scholar who was arrested without warning after applying to remain in the UK has been released from an immigration detention centre after his case caused outrage across the academic world.

Dr Paul Hamilton, 42, said he was hugely relieved to be freed from Morton Hall Immigration Removal Centre after 10 days in custody, but immediately condemned the Home Office as completely brazen, cynical and unapologetic.

As reported in The Independent, Dr Hamilton said that the first he knew about the refusal of his application to remain in the UK was when there was a knock on his door and he was arrested at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The US citizen said he was arrested on the grounds that he might abscond to evade deportation  despite having already spent $1,200 (842) of his own money on an open-date plane ticket to be used if his application failed.

Dr Hamilton added that he was hardly likely to go undercover as a car washer in Cardiff when his whole reason for wanting to stay had been to press ahead with his academic career, having spent eight-and-a-half years in the UK researching, organising conferences and making contacts.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA UK news in pictures 7 September 2022 Police officers stand guard after Animal Rebellion activists threw paint on the walls and road outside the Houses of Parliament in protest, in London, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 6 September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2022 Visitors at the PoliNations garden in Victoria Square, Birmingham, which is made up of five 40ft high tree installations and over 6,000 plants. The PoliNations programme aims to explore how migration and cross-pollination have shaped the UKs gardens and culture PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2022 Undergraduates at the University of St Andrews take part in the traditional Pier Walk along the harbour walls of St Andrews before the start of the new academic year PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2022 The Massed Pipes and Drums parade during the Braemar Highland Gathering at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2022 Number 12 Company Irish Guards at Wellington Barracks, central London, before commencing their first Guard Mount at Buckingham Palace PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2022 A salmon leaps up the weir at Hexham in Northumberland, despite the drought warnings and low water levels, the River Tyne is still flowing well allowing the salmon and sea trout to head up river to spawn. Every year tens of thousands of salmon make the once-in-a-lifetime journey along the Tyne to spawn, having been out a sea PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2022 Flowers are placed at the gates outside Kensington Palace, London, the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, on the 25th anniversary of her death PA

Dr Hamilton believes the only reason he was released was because of a growing outcry in the press. As more than 150 academics  many in the UK, but some as far afield as Hong Kong and Brazil  condemned Dr Hamiltons treatment, the Home Office finally issued a statement on the case on Wednesday afternoon, at about the same time he was released.

It said: The Immigration Act 2014 clearly states that a person who does not have leave to remain in the UK is liable for removal. Enforcement action may be taken to remove these individuals.

The Home Office also issued guidance that although a person must be notified of their liability to be removed from the UK, this can be on the same date as an enforcement visit.

Making no mention of the fact that Dr Hamilton bought his return plane ticket months ago, the guidance added: We encourage people with no right to be in the UK to return voluntarily. Mr Hamilton is now following this course of action.

Recommended Read more American Shakespeare expert arrested pending deportation from UK

As he was being driven home after his release, Dr Hamilton said the Home Office statement was unbelievable. He added: That they are completely brazen, unapologetic and cynical in their response is newly shocking to me.

The academic claimed the Home Office wanted to bully people... its like speaking to a bulldozer coming at you. There is no sense of proportion; of reasonable use of power.

But the former teacher said it had been his dream to study Shakespeare in the UK and he still loved England.

Its just a tiny fragment of the bureaucracy that is intransigent. Even the people processing me told me they felt terrible about it. One police officer said: I dont want to [do this]. This is unjust.

Dr Hamilton will now fly to the US on 1 February. He said that because of his detention he had missed the deadline for applying for a research grant that would have allowed him to work with a leading UK Shakespeare scholar.
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A south London high street was closed by police as five men collapsed in the street after taking dodgy drugs.

Officers were called to Kingston town centre on Wednesday afternoon following reports of the men slumped on ground and fitting.

The men, believed to be in their mid to late 30s, are said to have taken the same batch of drugs and suffered a reaction.

Kingston Police - who originally reported that four men had been taken ill - tweeted no other members of the public were believed in be involved or were at risk.

A Met spolesman initially told the London Evening Standard the men had "shared some sort of drug and the drug has obviously been bad or dodgy".

They were treated at the scene and four were later referred to hospital in West London.

One witness, David Stewart, told The Standard: "There was a huge police and ambulance presence.

"I saw one of the guys be loaded into an ambulance. He looked sedated and the ambulance stayed with him for about 25 minutes, and then shot off to hospital at high speed."

A police spokesman later told the Independent: "Police in Kingston were called to Adams Walk, Eden Street at 14:52hrs on Wednesday, 27 January following concerns of the welfare of five men.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA UK news in pictures 7 September 2022 Police officers stand guard after Animal Rebellion activists threw paint on the walls and road outside the Houses of Parliament in protest, in London, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 6 September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2022 Visitors at the PoliNations garden in Victoria Square, Birmingham, which is made up of five 40ft high tree installations and over 6,000 plants. The PoliNations programme aims to explore how migration and cross-pollination have shaped the UKs gardens and culture PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2022 Undergraduates at the University of St Andrews take part in the traditional Pier Walk along the harbour walls of St Andrews before the start of the new academic year PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2022 The Massed Pipes and Drums parade during the Braemar Highland Gathering at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2022 Number 12 Company Irish Guards at Wellington Barracks, central London, before commencing their first Guard Mount at Buckingham Palace PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2022 A salmon leaps up the weir at Hexham in Northumberland, despite the drought warnings and low water levels, the River Tyne is still flowing well allowing the salmon and sea trout to head up river to spawn. Every year tens of thousands of salmon make the once-in-a-lifetime journey along the Tyne to spawn, having been out a sea PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2022 Flowers are placed at the gates outside Kensington Palace, London, the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, on the 25th anniversary of her death PA UK news in pictures 30 August 2022 Edinburghs waste workers clearing mountains of rubbish at Forrest Road as they return to work following their 11 days of industrial action PA UK news in pictures 29 August 2022 Competitors take part in the World Gravy Wrestling Championships at the Rose 'N' Bowl, in Rossendale, Lancashire PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2022 People from the Emancipated Run Crew who are running the carnival parade all in green to remember the 72 people that died in the Grenfell fire during the Family Day at the Notting Hill Carnival in London, which returned to the streets for the first time on two years, after it was thwarted by the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 27 August 2022 Competitors in the bog section during Rude Health Bog Triathlon at Llanwrtyd Wells, in Wales PA UK news in pictures 26 August 2022 Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson meets patient Rita Thomson after she had a complete hip replacement during a visit to South West London Orthopaedic Centre Getty UK news in pictures 25 August 2022 Finney Harrod receiving his GCSE results at Norwich School, in Norwich, Norfolk PA

"Officers and London Ambulance Service attended. Four of the five men required treatment and were taken to west London hospitals for assessment.

"One line of enquiry is that the men may have taken drugs and suffered a reaction.

"The investigation is ongoing".
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A pressure group has claimed leaving the European Union could reduce net migration to the UK by 100,000 a year.

Migration Watch UK claimed its research gave a realistic forecast of post-Brexit immigration but pro-EU campaigners slammed the report as a disingenuous take on fudged facts.

Its analysis estimated that expected changes including tighter restrictions on people coming to the UK for work could see net migration from the bloc - the difference between the numbers of people arriving and leaving - fall from its current level of 180,000 a year to around 65,000.

Lord Green of Deddington, the chairman of Migration Watch UK, said alternative immigration regimes should be examined.

Lord Kinnock asked the Government to provide 'all factual evidence' that shows benefits encourage EU migrants to come to the UK (PA)

Under the current arrangements all the signs are that EU migration to Britain will continue at a substantial rate for the foreseeable future; indeed, immigrants tend to generate further migration as their friends and relatives join them in their new countries, he added.

Work permits for EU citizens would substantially reduce net migration and its resultant pressure on our population and public services.

His groups report suggested the key change if Britain votes to leave the union should be the introduction of permits which would only allow in EU workers in higher-skilled occupations, in a similar scheme to that currently governing arrivals from outside Europe.

The 16-page paper said that on average, only around 20 per cent of EU migrants who came to Britain between 2004 and 2014 were doing higher skilled work.

Claiming the argument that a Brexit would not affect migration relied on remaining in the European Economic Area (EEA), Migration Watch UK argued the country could exit both unions in favour of a new settlement.

The report was criticised by pro-EU campaigners (AFP/Getty Images)

The authors concluded that there would be no need for restrictions on EU students or tourists, and that self-sufficient migrants would also be free to live in Britain.

European family members would also be allowed to join British citizens in the UK, as would relatives of skilled EU workers.

Migration Watch UK admitted that its prediction of future EU net migration of 65,000 should not be taken as a precise estimate but was intended to illustrate the scale of the potential reduction under the policy outlined.

The Government's record on immigration has come under intense scrutiny in the run-up to next years referendum on the UKs membership of the EU, with overall net migration reaching a record annual level of 336,000 in the latest statistics.

Lord Rose, chairman of stay campaigners Britain Stronger in Europe, previously said immigration isn't going to go away if the country leaves.

 Lord Rose warning over Brexit

James McGrory, a spokesperson for the group, dismissed Migration Watch UKs latest report as a disingenuousexample of the Leave campaigns fudging the facts because they know they're losing the argument.

"Freedom of movement isn't on the ballot paper - and neither Leave campaign even proposes ending it, he added.

"Right now, Britain has the best of both worlds. We have an opt-out from the passport-free Schengen area, while still enjoying full access to the single market.

"The Leave campaigns haven't produced a shred of evidence to show how they could guarantee a deal that is at least as good if we left"

Migration Watch UK said its report does not advocate exiting from or remaining in the EU, but the group has become associated with an anti-immigration stance because of its numerous negative reports with headlines including Immigration is driving Londoners out of their capital and Immigrants have cost the tax payer over 140 billion since 1995.

University College London researchers whose statistics were previously used to argue that immigrants cost Britain 3,000 a year each criticised Migration Watch UKs sloppy or simply wrong conclusions based on serious misinterpretation of the original research.

10 things immigration has done for Britain Show all 10 1 /10 10 things immigration has done for Britain 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Mini The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marks and Spencer Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Thunderbirds And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television. Rex Features 10 things immigration has done for Britain The House of Windsor Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldnt stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain I Vow To Thee My Country Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached. Creative Commons 10 things immigration has done for Britain Curry and Cobra Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named Hindoostanee Coffee House. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Sun Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marxism OK, Karl Marxs philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The NHS They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for. Getty Images

Danny Shaw, the BBCs home affairs correspondent, was among those poking holes in its latest report today.

No-one knows for sure what impact a British exit from the EU would have on immigration, he pointed out.

But say, as Migration Watch advocates, that it did herald controls on the flow of low-skilled EU migrant labour, would that really work in reducing net migration?

Wouldn't there be an influx of migrants from the EU before the restrictions came into force?

Wouldn't businesses that currently rely on labourers, chambermaids and supermarket shelf-stackers from Europe demand that they be allowed to recruit them from elsewhere?

And wouldn't the EU introduce work permits for British workers, thereby reducing emigration from the UK?

Additional reporting by PA
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Muslim communities are unlike others in Britain and will not integrate in the same way, according to the former head of the equalities watchdog.

Trevor Phillips, who was the chairman of the Equality and Human rights Commission between 2003 and 2012, told the Policy Exchange think tank it was disrespectful to suppose that Muslim communities would change, reported The Times.

Mr Phillips said: Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect.

Recommended Read more Cameron calls on Muslim women to learn English to fight radicalisation

He went on to claim that we should accept that Muslims see the world differently from the rest of us.

Mr Phillips said part of the integration process was for the rest of us to grasp that people arent going to change their views simply because we are constantly telling them that basically they should be like us.

His claims come just a few days after David Cameron announced people who do not pass an English test cannot stay in Britain, in a bid to close the cultural gap and bring those on the fringes of society into the mainstream.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA UK news in pictures 7 September 2022 Police officers stand guard after Animal Rebellion activists threw paint on the walls and road outside the Houses of Parliament in protest, in London, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 6 September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2022 Visitors at the PoliNations garden in Victoria Square, Birmingham, which is made up of five 40ft high tree installations and over 6,000 plants. The PoliNations programme aims to explore how migration and cross-pollination have shaped the UKs gardens and culture PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2022 Undergraduates at the University of St Andrews take part in the traditional Pier Walk along the harbour walls of St Andrews before the start of the new academic year PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2022 The Massed Pipes and Drums parade during the Braemar Highland Gathering at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2022 Number 12 Company Irish Guards at Wellington Barracks, central London, before commencing their first Guard Mount at Buckingham Palace PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2022 A salmon leaps up the weir at Hexham in Northumberland, despite the drought warnings and low water levels, the River Tyne is still flowing well allowing the salmon and sea trout to head up river to spawn. Every year tens of thousands of salmon make the once-in-a-lifetime journey along the Tyne to spawn, having been out a sea PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2022 Flowers are placed at the gates outside Kensington Palace, London, the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, on the 25th anniversary of her death PA

The Prime Minster linked a failure to integrate into British society to an increased risk of terrorism.

Muslims make up five per cent of the UKs population, with around 2.7 million currently living in Britain.

The Muslim Council of Britain said asking Muslims to change assumes that Muslims are not equal, and not civilised enough to be part and parcel of British society, which they most certainly are.

Fiyaz Mughal, head of the Tell Mama charity, which campaigns against Muslim hate crimes, said Mr Phillips' claims assume Muslims have views that are inherently different to other communities.

Mr Mugal added: There are Muslims fully integrated into our society that have a world view that is no different to others and the only difference is that they pray five times a day.

Mr Phillips has previously caused outrage after he defended the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, by saying people should be able to offend each other.

He also branded multiculturalism as a failure, and said a black candidate cannot rise to the top in British politics because of institutional racism.
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The Governments so-called Bedroom Tax policy has been declared discriminatory and unlawful by the Court of Appeal.

Judges made the decision following a legal challenge against the Government by a domestic violence victim and the family of a disabled teenager.

The charge, which takes the form of a reduction in housing support for people with more than a certain number of bedrooms, was introduced in April 2013 to encourage people to move out of homes they are "under occupying".

It has since been criticised for causing poverty, disproportionally affecting the disabled, and hitting people who have nowhere suitable to move to.

The Department for Work and Pensions said it would appeal the decision in the Supreme Court  the UKs highest and final appellate court.

One of the two successful appeals was brought by a woman identified as A who had been a victim of domestic violence. Her home has been specially adapted to include a panic room.

 David Cameron defends bedroom tax despite court ruling it unlawful

Her lawyers claimed the policy discriminated against her because she would have to leave a room that had been adapted for her safety. Wheelchair users and disabled people have made similar claims.

The second successful appeal was brought by Paul and Susan Rutherford on behalf of their severely disabled grandson Warren.

Warren suffers from a rare genetic disorder and requires 24 hour care because he cannot walk, talk or feed himself.

The couple was hit by the bedroom tax because they have a room that is used for overnight carers and storing specialist medical equipment.

The court found the policys impact on disabled children was contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Both appears were being considered by the Court of Appeal because they had been rejected by the High Court.

In pictures: Bedroom tax protests Show all 5 1 /5 In pictures: Bedroom tax protests In pictures: Bedroom tax protests pg-26-bedroom-tax-pa.jpg PA In pictures: Bedroom tax protests bedroom2.jpg In pictures: Bedroom tax protests bedroom3.jpg In pictures: Bedroom tax protests bedroom4.jpg In pictures: Bedroom tax protests bedroom1.jpg

Beth Grossman, head of policy at disability charity Scope, said the policy was inappropriate for people with disabilities and causing hardship for them.

For the vast majority of disabled people these are not spare bedrooms, these are essential rooms," she said.

Many people need a room for specialist equipment, or so that their disabled child can sleep separately from their siblings, or with a carer.

Weve spoken to disabled people who arent able to share a specially adapted bed with their partner, and have to sleep in a separate room. Theyre being forced to move, or find the extra cash they dont have to pay their rent.

Life costs more if you are disabled. Scope research shows disabled people pay more for all kinds of everyday things  on average a premium of 550 per month. We should be looking at ways to bring costs down rather than ramping them up.

Owen Smith MP, Labours Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said the party had long argued against the cruel policy.

This victory in the Court of Appeal is a massive blow to the Tories Bedroom Tax. It provides a glimmer of hope for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been hit by this cruel policy, he said.

Labour has long argued that the Bedroom Tax is deeply unfair and discriminatory, which is why we have campaigned so hard against it. Surely the time has now come for the Tories to discover a conscience, listen to the courts as well as the public, and scrap the hated Bedroom Tax.

A DWP spokesman said the people found to have been discriminated against were in receipt of discretionary housing payment  payment provided by councils to cancel out the effects of the bedroom tax.

We are pleased that the court found  once again  that we have complied with the Public Sector Equality Duty, the spokesperson said in a statement.

We fundamentally disagree with the courts ruling on the ECHR, which directly contradicts the High Court. We have already been granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

We know there will be people who need extra support. That is why we are giving local authorities over 870m in extra funding over the next five years to help ensure people in difficult situations like these dont lose out.
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David Cameron has refused to launch an inquiry into British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, saying arms exports are "carefully controlled".

A UN panel investigating the Saudi-led coalition's bombing campaign in Yemen uncovered "widespread and systematic" attacks on civilian targets in violation with international humanitarian law.

Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for the Prime Minister to launch an inquiry into arms exports to Saudi Arabia in light of the report's conclusions, and to suspend arms sales until the review had concluded.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

Mr Corbyn said: "The report has documented that coalition forces have conducted air strikes targeting civilians and civilian objects in violation of international humanitarian law - including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees, civilian residential areas, medical facilities, schools and mosques.

"These are very disturbing reports. In the light of this, will the Prime Minister agree to launch immediately an inquiry and a full review into the arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia, and suspend those arms sales until that review has been concluded?"

Mr Cameron replied: "As the Right Honourable gentleman knows, we have the strictest rules for arms exports [of] almost any country anywhere in the world.

"And let me remind him we are not a member of the Saudi-led coalition, we are not directly involved in the Saudi-led coalition's operations. British personnel are not involved in carrying out strikes.

Promising to look into the report, he added: "But our arms exports are carefully controlled and we are backing the legitimate government of the Yemen, not least because terrorist attacks planned in the Yemen would have a direct affect on people in our country.

"I refuse to run a foreign policy by press release, which is what he wants, I want a foreign policy which is in the interests of the British people."

British arms companies took advantage of Saudi Arabia's military campaign in Yemen by increasing arms sales to the country's autocratic government by over a hundred times.

Commenting on the UN report, Amnesty International UKs Head of Policy and Government Affairs Allan Hogarth said: Weve been calling for an independent international inquiry to investigate alleged violations by all parties to the conflict in Yemen, and the UN panel will certainly add weight to that call.

As a major supplier of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, the UK government ought now to do what it should have done months ago - suspend export licences for all further UK arms bound for Saudi Arabia that could be used in Yemen.

We also want to the see the UK government supporting these mounting calls for an independent inquiry into the bloody conflict in Yemen. Thousands of civilians have already died and its been utterly dismaying to see Downing Street brushing aside extremely serious concerns about the reckless conduct of Saudi Arabia in this devastating conflict.

During PMQs, Mr Cameron also sparked outrage by referring to the Calais refugees as "a bunch of migrants".
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David Cameron has been accused of deliberately using inflammatory language against refugees to distract attention from the Google tax row.

The Prime Minister has attracted widespread condemnation for referring to people living in refugee in camps in Calais as a bunch of migrants

But rather than being a gaffe, the Mr Camerons dismissive remark appeared to be part of a reply scripted in advance to deflect attention away from issues that the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn used to attack the government during Prime Ministers Questions.

Conservative election campaign manager Lynton Crosby is a known advocate of such a dead cat strategy - the idea of throwing a dead cat on the table to distract people from a topic you wish they would stop discussing.

Alex Salmond, the SNP spokesman open foreign affairs, suggested that the remark was a calculated attempt to change subject.

He said: A lot of people, including myself, have got a bit of a theory that Cameron does this when hes trying to deflect attention from other things, because he was in trouble on the Google tax deal today. So all of a sudden he comes out with this phrase.

 David Cameron refers to Calais as 'bunch of migrants'

Now most stuff at Prime Ministers Questions is rehearsed, so my charge against David Cameron is not just hes describing people in pretty disgusting terms, but hes doing it deliberately.

Under attack over the governments record, Mr Cameron turned on Mr Corbyn and the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Look at their record over the last week, he told MPs. They met the unions and they gave them flying pickets. They met the Argentinians; they gave them the Falkland Islands. They met a bunch of migrants in Calais; they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working taxpayers.

Alex Salmond, right, believes the Prime Minister was trying to deflect attention away from the Government's dealings with Google (Getty) (Getty Images)

His words provoked an instant reaction, with some MPs shouting bunch of migrants? in apparent shock.

After the exchange, the Labour MP Yvette Cooper protested to the Speaker, John Bercow, about the Prime Ministers choice of words. She called for Mr Cameron to withdraw that language and use much more statesmanlike language about the need to build a cross-party consensus on such a complex and sensitive issue.

The Prime Ministers comments were also condemned by groups working with refugees. Lisa Doyle, head of advocacy for the Refugee Council, said: When we are facing the greatest refugee crisis of our time, it is disappointing the Prime Minister is using flippant remarks to score political points.

We have all seen the pictures of the desperate conditions people are living in across Europe, including just miles from the UKs border. The Prime Minister should be showing political leadership and work with other European countries to ensure that people can live in safety and dignity.

Former shadow cabinet minister Chuka Umunna described the remark as shameful and inflammatory and unbecoming of his office.

But the Business Minister Anna Soubry said she did not believe that the Prime Minister had planned to use the word bunch.

She told the BBC Radio 4s World at One programme: What everybody forgets is that in the heat of things one says things that you might say in a conversation, by way of example, but you wouldnt necessarily say when it was analysed and picked apart. Mr Corbyn visited migrant camps in Calais and Dunkirk at the weekend and called for the UK to be a bit more human about allowing them into the country  though he stressed that he was not saying that all 9,000 people in French camps should be admitted.
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David Cameron has defended the so-called bedroom tax despite the Court of Appeal ruling the controversial policy unlawful and discriminatory.

The Prime Minister said he would look at the courts judgement carefully but claimed the charge, which mainly hits disabled people living in social housing, was fair.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn asked Mr Cameron at Prime Ministers Questions whether he would finally abandon the cruel policy in light of the ruling.

But Mr Cameron defended the principle of the under-occupancy penalty and said scrapping it would be too expensive.

We always look very carefully at the judgements on these occasions  but of course, our fundamental position is that its unfair to subsidise spare rooms in the social sector if you dont subsidise them in the private sector where people are paying their housing benefit, he said.

That is a basic issue of fairness. Isnt it interesting that the first pledge he makes is something which could cost as much as 2.5 billion in the next parliament? Who is going to pay for that?

Judges ruled the policy unlawful following a legal challenge against the Government by a domestic violence victim and the family of a disabled teenager.

What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? Show all 8 1 /8 What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? Welfare payments will be slashed One of the most controversial parts of the Conservative manifesto was to cut benefits for the working age poor by 12 bn over the next three years. But during the campaign they only said where 2 bn of these savings would come from. That leaves 10 bn still to find. Some experts think the only way they can close that gap is by means testing child benefit  with millions of families losing out Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be tax cuts for those in work and those who die The Tories will increase the threshold at which the 40p rate of tax becomes payable to 50,000 by 2020. They havent said so but it is also likely that at some point in the next five years they will abolish that 45p rate of tax altogether for the highest earners. They also want to increase the effective inheritance tax threshold for married couples and civil partners to 1m Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be an in/out EU referendum in 2017 The next two years are going to be dominated by the prospect of a referendum on Britains membership of the EU. First off David Cameron has the daunting task of negotiating a deal with other EU leaders an acceptable deal that he can sell to his party so he can go into the referendum campaigning for a yes vote. This may be unachievable and it is possible that the Tories may end up arguing to leave. Opinion polls show Britain is divided on EU membership, one poll this year showed 51% said they would opt to leave compared to 49% who would vote to stay in Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be more privatisation of the NHS Having won the election the Tories now have a mandate to go further and faster reforming the NHS. In order to make cost savings there is likely to be greater private involvement in running services, while some smaller hospitals may lose services they currently provide like A&E and maternity units Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be many more free schools  and traditional state schools will become a thing of the past The Tories plans to create 500 new free schools and make 3,000 state schools become academies. They will also carry on reforming the Department of Education and remove more powers from local authorities over how schools are run Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? On shore wind farms will be a thing of the past and fracking will be the future Government spending on renewable energy is under real threat now the Lib Dems are no longer in power with the Tories. Subsidies are likely to be slashed for off-shore wind farm and other green energy supplies. Meanwhile there will be generous tax break for fracking as ministers try and incentivise the industry to drill for onshore oil and gas Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There maybe more free childcare  but not necessarily In the campaign the Tories pledged to double the amount of free early education for three- and four-year-olds from 15 hours a week to 30. The extra hours would only be offered to working families where parents are employed for at least eight hours a week. However they have not said where the money will come from to fund the pledge Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? Workers' rights could be reduced The Tories want to slash business regulation, merge regulator and cut costs. The Lib Dems stopped them from reducing the employment rights of workers in power  but these are now under threat Getty

The charge, which takes the form of a reduction in housing support for people with more than a certain number of bedrooms, was introduced in April 2013 to encourage people to move out of homes they are "under occupying".

It has since been criticised for causing poverty, disproportionally affecting the disabled, and hitting people who have nowhere suitable to move to.

The Department for Work and Pensions said it would appeal the decision in the Supreme Court  the UKs highest and final appellate court.

A DWP spokesman said the people found to have been discriminated against were in receipt of discretionary housing payment  payment provided by councils to cancel out the effects of the bedroom tax.

We are pleased that the court found  once again  that we have complied with the Public Sector Equality Duty, the spokesperson said in a statement.

We fundamentally disagree with the courts ruling on the ECHR, which directly contradicts the High Court. We have already been granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

We know there will be people who need extra support. That is why we are giving local authorities over 870m in extra funding over the next five years to help ensure people in difficult situations like these dont lose out.
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David Cameron has been urged to immediately suspend all arms sales to Saudi Arabia amid growing fears that British-made weapons may have been used to bomb hospitals, schools, markets and other civilian targets in Yemen.

A United Nations report said the Saudi-led bombing campaing in Yemen had involved widespread and systematic targeting of civilians in violation of international humanitarian law.

Britain is a leading arms supplier to the Saudi regime and has military personnel working with the Saudi forces on the ground, although the Government insists its officials only work in a liaison role and do not assist in the selection of targets.

Recommended Read more UK selling invasive spying equipment to Saudi Arabia and others

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn have written to the Prime Minister demanding to know whether UK personnel on the ground have seen evidence of strikes that could have breached international humanitarian law.

But Middle East minister Tobias Ellwood told MPs on the International Development Committee that it would be naive to think the UK could not sell weapons to its Saudi allies.

Appearing before the International Development Committee, Mr Ellwood referred to widespread reports of attacks on civilian targets as details that should be scrutinised.

Middle East minister Tobias Ellwood (AFP/Getty Images) (Getty)

We dont just accidentally sell these things on Ebay, he added. Every single arms sale across the world is scrutinisedevery nut and bolt is scrutinised and comes across my desk.

The 51-page UN report by Yemen experts, which was sent to the Security Council last week, documents 119 sorties by the Saudi-led coalition relating to violations of international humanitarian law.

The report states: The panel documented that the coalition had conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international humanitarian law, including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities; schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses; and other essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sanaa, the port in Hudaydah and domestic transit routes.

People bury the body of a judge who was killed along with his family by a Saudi-led airstrike, on Tuesday (AP)

In their letter, Mr Corbyn and Mr Benn call for a review of arms export licences to Saudi Arabia. International law experts have warned the Government could be in breach of national, EU and international law banning the supply of weapons when there is a risk they may be used to violate humanitarian law.

Challenged by Mr Corbyn in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister said he would look at the new UN report, but insisted the UK had the strictest rules for arms exports of almost any country anywhere in the world.

 Cameron on arms trading with Saudi Arabia.mp4

An influential joint committee of MPs is set to investigate claims that British-made weapons may have been used for strikes against civilian targets. The Committee on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), made up of members of the Foreign Affairs, International Development, Defence and Business select committees, has not sat so far this Parliament, but will be re-established.

Recommended Read more Cameron refuses to launch inquiry into arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Crispin Blunt, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Stephen Twigg, chair of the International Development committee, have both indicated that they want the CAEC to investigate whether UK arms have been used for military strikes against civilians, and also to scrutinise the role of UK personnel working in Saudi command and control centres orchestrating airstrikes.

On Wednesday the International Development Committee heard evidence from UNICEF, Oxfam, Save the Children and SaferWorld, that the UKs role as an arms exporter to Saudi Arabia risked undermining humanitarian work in Yemen, to which the Department of International Development (DFID) has committed 85m.

Josephine Hutton, Oxfams regional programme manager for Middle East said that arms exports to those perpetuating the conflict should be stopped.
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David Camerons comments dismissing refugees in Calais as a bunch of migrants have been condemned as vile and hypocritical coming on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Prime Minister had paid tribute to the millions of Jews and other targeted groups killed by the Nazi regime minutes before making his controversial aside while attacking Labour.

Yvette Cooper, the former shadow Foreign Secretary, later raised a point of order to call on Mr Cameron to withdraw his comment.

 David Cameron refers to Calais as 'bunch of migrants'

In the light and spirit (of Holocaust Memorial Day) doesnt the Speaker think it was inappropriate for the Prime Minister to use language referring to the refugee crisis in Europe to talk about a bunch of migrants? she asked.

Ms Cooper requested that the House of Commons demand the comments be withdrawn but the Speaker, John Bercow, declined and said it was up to Mr Cameron to comment if he chose to.

On Twitter, shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham said the moment showed the Conservative leaders mask slipping.

He just dismissed desperate people fleeing conflict as a bunch of migrants - on Holocaust Memorial Day, he added.

Scores of critics were noting the timing of the comment, which sparked a storm of criticism as people highlighted the persecution faced by many of the refugees fleeing to Europe.

Here are some of the responses on Twitter:

Families with emaciated children and torture victims were among the refugees met by Jeremy Corbyn at squalid camps in Calais and Dunkirk earlier this week.

Responding to a question on corporate tax from the Labour leader during Prime Ministers Questions, Mr Cameron called his stance laughable.

Look at the record over the last week, they met with the unions and gave them flying pickets, he said.

"They met with the Argentinians and they gave them the Falkland Islands.

Inside the camps in Calais Show all 20 1 /20 Inside the camps in Calais Inside the camps in Calais A Kurdish child and her father get out of their tent in the makeshift migrant camp in Grande-Synthe near Dunkerque Inside the camps in Calais Kurdish migrants works around the tents of the makeshift migrant camp in Grande-Synthe near Dunkerque Inside the camps in Calais Volunteers from Holland set up a bridge of fortune over the mud using pallets of the makeshift migrant camp in Grande-Synthe near Dunkerque Inside the camps in Calais Refugees walk among tents in a makeshift camp as containers (rear) are put into place to house several hundred migrants living in what is known as the "Jungle", a squalid sprawling camp in Calais Inside the camps in Calais A makeshift camp is seen in front of containers (rear) put into place to house several hundred migrants living in what is known as the "Jungle", a squalid sprawling camp in Calais Inside the camps in Calais Inside the camps in Calais Inside the camps in Calais Inside the camps in Calais Inside the camps in Calais Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais The camp near Calais harbour where refugees from the Middle East and central Asia congregate to attempt the crossing from France to the UK Justin Sutcliffe Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais Most of the temporary residents in this camp are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria or the Kurdish administered regions Justin Sutcliffe Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais Camp residents cook and share food at their site just outside Calais Justin Sutcliffe Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais A group walk through the camp near Calais Justin Sutcliffe Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais Most of the temporary residents in this camp are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria or the Kurdish administered regions Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais A 16 year old immigrant from Eritrea tries to brace himself against the rain and cold by sheltering under the road bridge Justin Sutcliffe Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais Rubbish strewn on the ground near one of the campsites Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais A man stands among the tents at the campsite just outside Calais, France Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais A camp near Calais harbour where migrants from the East africa congregate to attempt the crossing from France to the UK. Most of the temporary residents in this camp are from Eritrea. Inside the camps in Calais Asylum seekers in Calais Graffiti depicting the dangerous journey trying to smuggle onto a lorry to the UK

They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais they said they could all come to Britain.

"The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working tax-payers."

He later claimed that no country in Europe has been more generous than Britain in funding refugee camps in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

The Government has previously been criticised for agreeing to take only Syrian refugees from camps in Turkey and the Middle East, rather than from migration hotspots across Europe that are the subject of EU resettlement schemes.
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Just six per cent of the public think the Governments disability benefit reforms will make Britain a better place for disabled people, a new poll suggests.

Survey conducted by pollsters Populus for the charity Mencap found that just 6 per cent of people think provisions included the Welfare Reform and Work Bill will improve disabled peoples lives.

Conversely, as many as 71 per cent of people believe the welfare change will make Britain a worse place to have a disability  with 47 per cent, nearly half, thinking it will make life much worse.

The findings come ahead of a key vote in the House of Lords on changes to Employment Support Allowance, one of the main disability and sickness benefits.

The latest round of cuts will see many disabled people lose 30 a week from the 102.15 work related activity group payment as new claimants are brought in at a lower rate.

Previous surveys of people in the current group affected have found that over half per believe they would struggle to stay healthy if hit by the cut.

Around a third people getting help from the ESA WRAG also believe they would be unable to heat their homes or eat.

A coalition of disability charities has previously warned that the reductions will make it more difficult for people with disabilities to move into jobs  a state goal of the Government.

Peers are debating the cuts on the same day the Court of Appeal ruled that the Governments so-called bedroom tax  which mainly affects disabled people  is unlawful and discriminatory against the disabled.

Ministers have said they will appeal the ruling at the UK Supreme Court.

Jan Tregelles, chief executive of Mencap, said disabled people were being hit by repeated rounds of cuts by the Government.

What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? Show all 8 1 /8 What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? Welfare payments will be slashed One of the most controversial parts of the Conservative manifesto was to cut benefits for the working age poor by 12 bn over the next three years. But during the campaign they only said where 2 bn of these savings would come from. That leaves 10 bn still to find. Some experts think the only way they can close that gap is by means testing child benefit  with millions of families losing out Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be tax cuts for those in work and those who die The Tories will increase the threshold at which the 40p rate of tax becomes payable to 50,000 by 2020. They havent said so but it is also likely that at some point in the next five years they will abolish that 45p rate of tax altogether for the highest earners. They also want to increase the effective inheritance tax threshold for married couples and civil partners to 1m Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be an in/out EU referendum in 2017 The next two years are going to be dominated by the prospect of a referendum on Britains membership of the EU. First off David Cameron has the daunting task of negotiating a deal with other EU leaders an acceptable deal that he can sell to his party so he can go into the referendum campaigning for a yes vote. This may be unachievable and it is possible that the Tories may end up arguing to leave. Opinion polls show Britain is divided on EU membership, one poll this year showed 51% said they would opt to leave compared to 49% who would vote to stay in Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be more privatisation of the NHS Having won the election the Tories now have a mandate to go further and faster reforming the NHS. In order to make cost savings there is likely to be greater private involvement in running services, while some smaller hospitals may lose services they currently provide like A&E and maternity units Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There will be many more free schools  and traditional state schools will become a thing of the past The Tories plans to create 500 new free schools and make 3,000 state schools become academies. They will also carry on reforming the Department of Education and remove more powers from local authorities over how schools are run Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? On shore wind farms will be a thing of the past and fracking will be the future Government spending on renewable energy is under real threat now the Lib Dems are no longer in power with the Tories. Subsidies are likely to be slashed for off-shore wind farm and other green energy supplies. Meanwhile there will be generous tax break for fracking as ministers try and incentivise the industry to drill for onshore oil and gas Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? There maybe more free childcare  but not necessarily In the campaign the Tories pledged to double the amount of free early education for three- and four-year-olds from 15 hours a week to 30. The extra hours would only be offered to working families where parents are employed for at least eight hours a week. However they have not said where the money will come from to fund the pledge Getty What does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain? Workers' rights could be reduced The Tories want to slash business regulation, merge regulator and cut costs. The Lib Dems stopped them from reducing the employment rights of workers in power  but these are now under threat Getty

Disabled people were hit by 18bn of benefit cuts in the last parliament. Despite this the Government are again targeting them with this cut to ESA WRAG. So far the Government have offered no substantial impact assessment for a cut which 7 in 10 disabled people say will cause their health to suffer, she said.

Disabled people have been hit hard by previous rounds of cuts and the cut to ESA will make it worse  especially when combined with social care cuts. The public now clearly share these concerns, with a third saying the Government are not at all aware how these cuts will affect disabled peoples lives.

With the public joining disabled people, opposition around this cut cannot be ignored. We ask Peers ahead of the vote to listen to disabled people and the wider publics deep unease with the cut to a key disability benefit.

The government should instead focus on the many barriers that have led to just 6% of people with a learning disability being in paid work. Cutting ESA WRAG will not improve this figure.

The Government says disabled people will benefit from the social security changes and receive more support to get into work.

At the Conservative party conference in October Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith urged disabled people to work their way out of poverty, saying they should not be "sustained on government handouts".

A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions previously said of the cuts: The fact is that currently someone placed in the Work-Related Activity Group would receive more money every week than a person on Jobseekers Allowance, but get nothing like the help to find suitable employment," a spokesperson said.

Our reforms will provide up to 100m per year to give people in this group the practical support they need to move closer to the labour market and when they are ready, back into work.
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A London council could become one of the first in England to announce its support for Britain leaving the European Union.

Ukip councillors have put forward a motion calling on the London Borough of Havering to declare an anti-EU position ahead of next year's referendum.

Due to the negative impact that EU directives such as the agency working time directive and EU procurement rules have on the ability and cost of Havering Council to fulfil its obligations, this council agrees that Britain would be better off outside the European Union, the statement said.

It was due to be considered on Wednesday evening, just days after an opposing motion was passed backing the union in Leicester.

The city council, which is all Labour bar one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat, supported a statement saying it is in the best interests of residents, business and the whole city of Leicester for the UK to remain a member of the European Union.

Councillor Lawrence Webb, who leads Haverings Ukip group and stood as the partys London mayoral candidate in 2012, was confident his motion would have similar success.

He said that although his party has only eight out of 53 council members, a broad coalition of Eurosceptics exists across the local Conservatives and residents groups.

The motion is about bringing the issue to peoples attention, Mr Webb told the Independent.

Theres all this talk but I dont think people are being given the full information.

He cited the EUs Landfill Directive, which has caused councils to incur large fines for missing targets, among the decisions made in Brussels and rubber-stamped in Westminster that he believes are negatively affecting local authorities.

An amendment by Haverings Independent Residents Group had been filed broadly in support of the Ukip motion ahead of the meeting, adding a call to restore the sovereignty of Parliament and strengthen our borders and protect the NHS.

Ukip gaffes and controversies Show all 18 1 /18 Ukip gaffes and controversies Ukip gaffes and controversies European elections poster Party's latest EU election posters branded 'racist' and compared to BNP campaigns Rex Ukip gaffes and controversies Farage 'car-crash' interview Ukip spin doctor forced to intervene as Farage falters in disastrous radio interview Ukip gaffes and controversies Neil Hamilton Picture Exclusive: The year is 1998. The venue is a Springbok Club meeting. The flag is a symbol for white supremacists in South Africa. And the speaker is Ukips deputy chairman, Neil Hamilton Ukip gaffes and controversies Kerry Smith Kerry Smith resigned as would-be MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock after it emerged he had mocked gay party members as disgusting poofters, joked about shooting people from Chigwell in a peasant hunt and referred to someone with a Chinese name as a Chinky bird PA Ukip gaffes and controversies Natasha Bolter Former Ukip member Natasha Bolter was suspected of not having the teaching qualifications she professed to, only days after it was revealed that claims of her having attended Oxford University were also false PA Ukip gaffes and controversies Ukip Calypso song Mike Reid released a single in praise of UKIP trying to control the UK's borders, only to withdraw the single after being accused of racism for singing in a Jamaican accent Ukip gaffes and controversies Janice Atkinson Janice Atkinson, Ukip's South East chair, pictured by protesters while campaigning in Ashford, Kent with local party chair Norman Taylor Facebook/Maria Pizzey Ukip gaffes and controversies Ukip cancels Freephone Ukip cancels Freephone number after protesters repeatedly called to push up costs Getty Images Ukip gaffes and controversies Farage 'car-crash' interview Mr Farage appeared to be caught out on a number of issues, from Romanian neighbours to people speaking foreign languages on the train Ukip gaffes and controversies Ukip employs illegal immigrants Ukip criticised after European election candidate found employing illegal immigrants AP Ukip gaffes and controversies Magnus Nielsen Ukip candidate: 'Take away the right to vote to improve election turnout' Getty Images Ukip gaffes and controversies Poster model A British builder portrayed in a Ukip poster accusing EU workers of taking UK jobs turns out to be an Irish actor - aka a migrant worker Ukip gaffes and controversies 'Arrest protesters' Ukip called for police to arrest protesters who call us fascists ahead of showdown with anti-fascist groups in Brighton Ukip gaffes and controversies London Live make-up Ukip's Nigel Farage reportedly refused to go on London Live 'without professional make up-artist' Reuters Ukip gaffes and controversies Andre Lampitt Ukip forced to suspend the "poster boy" of its European election broadcast, after it was revealed he had posted a series of vile racist comments on Twitter Ukip gaffes and controversies Expenses Nigel Farage says he is taking taking legal advice over outrageous allegations that he is responsible for more than 50,000 of missing EU funding that was paid directly into his personal bank account Ukip gaffes and controversies Have I Got News For You Nigel Farage appears in Have I Got News For You, spends the entire episode being ridiculed over expenses and party 'fruitcakes' BBC Ukip gaffes and controversies Anti-gay comments Local branch chairman for Ukip defends a party's councillor candidate Douglas Denny who called gay people abnormal and said he wished they stop trying to ram it down my throat, all while discussing whether the word sodomite should be used

But opposition was already coming from the larger, and completely separate, East Havering Residents Group, which submitted its own amendment urging the council to take no position ahead of next years in-out referendum.

As representatives of the whole borough, this Council notes that it is for individuals to decide for themselves, rather than as a Council, as to whether or not Britain would be better off outside the European Union, it said.

Mr Webb dismissed it as an amendment to stifle debate and said other councillors were supporting the formation of a campaign group pushing for an out vote in Havering.

But the criticism was echoed by Labour London Assembly candidate Ivana Bartoletti, who told the Telegraph: Although the UK's place in Europe touches all our lives, I'd encourage Havering Council to focus its mind on Havering's own crises.

The Outer London borough, which borders Essex, has previously seen British National Party councillors elected and has no representation from Labour, the Liberal Democrats or Greens.

Nigel Farages party has made gains in recent local and general elections, with Romfords Conservative and Eurosceptic MP, Andrew Rosindell, seeing his margin slip in the last general election as a Ukip candidate won almost a quarter of the vote.
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The public might never be told about Google-style sweetheart tax deals which HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) reaches with internet giants such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it has emerged as fury grows over the secrecy surrounding the tax affairs of multinational companies.

Both HMRC and George Osborne have come under fire over the agreement allowing Google to pay 130m to cover a decade of back taxes, which critics claim is an effective tax rate of just 3 per cent.

The deal, which was hailed by the Chancellor as a major success, is paving the way for similar arrangements with other multinational companies which have previously paid minimal amounts of UK tax despite having substantial British operations.

Potential HMRC targets include Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon and Microsoft. But details of deals with such companies are not likely to be made public because of the confidentiality surrounding tax matters, Whitehall sources have confirmed.

Googles agreement with HMRC was only divulged at its own request and the furore over the deal is likely to deter other companies from following suit. A survey found that the vast majority of people support the establishment of a public register showing whether the worlds largest people support the establishment of a public register showing whether the worlds largest firms pay UK taxes. But the move is being ruled out by the Government on the grounds that it would be hugely complex and would breach the principle of tax confidentiality.

The shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, has launched a petition urging the Government to come clean on the details of the deal with Google, whose executives have regularly met ministers. He said that it was important for public trust that HMRC is fair and transparent in its dealings with such companies.

The tax burden: Who has paid what? Facebook: paid 4,327 in tax in 2014, after a 28.5m loss in 2014, caused by paying out 35m in a share bonus scheme paid to 362 British staff. Apple: paid 11.8m in tax in 2014 and channels sales through Ireland, although the company denies this is done to lessen its tax burden. The tech giant also reached a deal with Italian tax authorities to pay 318m in back taxes dating from 2008-13. Amazon: paid 11.9m in tax in 2014 and previously channelled sales via Luxembourg. In its last financial year the company booked more than 5.3bn of British online sales via its Luxembourg operation. Amazon.co.uk, a British subsidiary, posted a modest profit of 34m. LinkedIn: the British wing of the professional networking website, which employs 200 people in the UK, paid 532,000 in tax for 2014 and the majority of its UK sales were booked in the groups Irish subsidiary. Starbucks: paid 8.1m in tax in 2015. Also paid 20m to HMRC between 2012 and 2014 following a public outcry, when it emerged that the company had paid just 8.6m in UK corporation tax over 14 years previously.

Mr McDonnell told The Independent: Taxpayers will be appalled at more potential sweetheart deals. MPs were claiming in the Commons that it looks like George Osborne is giving mates rates to big business, and this wont stop these allegations.

The TUCs general secretary, Frances OGrady, said: It is essential that companies are held to account for their tax practices.

David Cameron looks certain to be challenged in the Commons today over the Google deal after senior Conservatives and charities joined the condemnation of the arrangement.

David Davis, the former minister, said tax deals with tech giants should not be agreed as though the other guys were carrying a shotgun. He said: We need to say: If you earn income in the UK, you pay income in the UK. Its true for you and me so why is it not true for a corporation?

Apple has also faced questions over the amount of its UK tax payments (AP)

The problem is with successive British governments and with HMRC. If you have a tax regime which allows people to minimise their taxes then thats what they will do.

He added that the law should be changed so that confidentiality over tax did not apply to publicly quoted companies.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said people wanted clarity on where their profits are being made and an agreement on how much they should be paying.

Lord Crickhowell, a former Tory cabinet minister, said small businesses regarded action to force international companies to pay more tax to be inadequate and called for a really determined effort by the Government to sort out an unacceptable situation.

Jim Harra, HMRCs business tax director general, insisted Google had agreed to pay all the money due. He said: We only accept the full amount of tax, interest and penalties that is due, otherwise if we cant reach an agreement on that amount we will go to tribunal. We certainly dont apply any rate of tax other than the statutory rate that Parliament has published.

Toby Quantrill, Christian Aids principal adviser on economic justice, said: The UK and other governments should not make such tax deals with multinationals, unless they are prepared publicly to reveal their working: precisely how did they calculate what the company should pay?

The BMG Research poll for the London Evening Standard found that 84.5 per cent of people wanted the Chancellor to set up a register showing whether multinationals operating in the UK were paying taxes in this country.

Downing Street sought to calm suggestions of a rift with the Treasury over the Google deal. A spokesman for No 10 insisted: The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are of the same mind on this.
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David Cameron has faced an immediate backlash after he dismissively described refugees fleeing war in squalid camps in Calais as "a bunch of migrants".

Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron ranked Jeremy Corbyn's visit to refugee camps in northern France with political issues such as the Falklands and the unions.

Mr Corbyn met women with emaciated children and victims of torture when he went to Calais and the less well-known but "far worse" camp of Grande-Synth near Dunkirk.

On Wednesday lunchtime, the Prime Minister responded to questions from Mr Corybn on the tax deal signed with Google this week and whether or not more could have been taken by HMRC.

He said: "The idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable.

"Look at the record over the last week, they met with the unions and gave them flying pickets.

"They met with the Argentinians and they gave them the Falkland Islands.

"They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais they said they could all come to Britain.

"The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hard-working tax-payers."

Some backbench MPs shouted back "bunch of migrants?!" in apparent shock.

Yvette Cooper, Labour's former shadow Home Secretary, said she has raised a point of order calling for him to withdraw the "divisive, not statesmanlike" comment.

Andy Burnham, the current shadow Home Secretary, said: "Once again, Cameron's mask slips. He just dismissed desperate people fleeing conflict as a "bunch of migrants" - on Holocaust Memorial Day."

David Cameron's biggest controversies Show all 8 1 /8 David Cameron's biggest controversies David Cameron's biggest controversies Pig-gate A book released by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft alleged that an MP and Oxford contemporary of David Cameron had allegedly seen a photograph of Mr Cameron performing a sex act on a pig while at university. Downing Street did not comment on the allegations and the peer said they could have been a case of mistaken identity David Hartley/REX Shutterstock David Cameron's biggest controversies Swarm of migrants In July 2015 David Cameron referred to refugees coming into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa as a swarm. He was criticised for using the language, which critics said was dehumanising Getty David Cameron's biggest controversies Child tax credits In April 2015 David Cameron was asked whether hed cut child tax credits. No, I dont want to do that, he said, saying that he rejected reports that he would. Shortly after the election the Government unveiled cuts to child tax credits EPA David Cameron's biggest controversies Cycling to work As leader of the opposition David Cameron was regularly photographed cycling to work. In early 2006 he was photographed cycling but with a driver in a car carrying his belongings. It was suggested at the time the cycling was just for show and that having two vehicles on the road instead of one was wasteful Rex David Cameron's biggest controversies Andy Coulson David Cameron employed former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as government communications director from 2010. After stepping down from the post due to coverage of the phone hacking affairs, Mr Coulson was later found guilty of conspiracy to intercept voicemails. He served a short prison sentence AFP David Cameron's biggest controversies His personal windmill Early in his leadership of the Conservative David Cameron made an effort to change the partys image by making eco-friendly gesures. As one of these gestures, the future PM put a wind turbine on his house. However, the turbine later had to be removed after neighbours condemned it as an eyesore and the councils planning committee said it had been put in the wrong place Getty David Cameron's biggest controversies Funeral selfie David Cameron was pictured posing for a selfie with Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Barack Obama at Nelson Mandelas funeral. Some in the press criticised the prime minister for showing in an inappropriately low level of respect for the gravity of the occasion AFP/Getty Images David Cameron's biggest controversies Eating a hotdog with a knife and fork The Prime Minister was pictured eating a hotdog with a knife and fork in the run up to the 2015 general election. He was accused of being posh. I had a very privileged upbringing... I've never tried to hide that, he said Reuters

The Government is currently considering proposals for Britain to take a few thousand additional unaccompanied refugee children, above and beyond the 20,000 the UK will take over this Parliament.

But the comments were particularly charged on Wednesday given the background of Holocaust Memorial Day, with the Second World War seen by many as the last time Europe faced a refugee crisis on this scale.

Later on in the Prime Minister's Questions session, Mr Cameron was pressed on the issue of Saudi Arabia's apparently indiscriminate air strikes in Yemen, in a conflict which is creating new refugees every day to fuel the crisis.

Mr Corbyn urged the Prime Minister to launch an inquiry into British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, citing a "very disturbing" new UN report into international law breaches in Yemen.

Mr Cameron insisted that "we have the strictest rules for arms exports [of] almost any country anywhere in the world".

"And let me remind him we are not a member of the Saudi-led coalition, we are not directly involved in the Saudi-led coalition's operations. British personnel are not involved in carrying out strikes," he says.
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Here are the latest updates:

David Cameron has been grilled in the Commons with the 'Google' tax, 'Bedroom' tax, the war in Yemen and migrants at the forefront of the debate.

Again taking a question from the public - this time Geoff - Jeremy Corbyn pinned the Prime Minister down over a tax deal which saw Google pay 130m to the treasury - a tiny portion of their profits over the past decade. 'Geoff' asked Mr Cameron if there was any way he could pay the same rate of tax (3 per cent) as the tech giant.

George Osborne has previously described the 130m deal as a "major success" in his drive to get internet giants to pay more tax - but shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has told The Independent it shows the Tories are "giving 'mates' rates' to big business".

Meanwhile, this morning a landmark Court of Appeal ruling found that the Tory bedroom tax was "unlawful" and "discriminatory" in two cases.

And a damning report from Transparency International into global corruption has described the Government as "extraordinarily inept" over its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
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Stuart Monk is pugnacious, perma-tanned and, above all, plain-speaking. It would be hard to make 175m in the North-east of England without at least two of these qualities.

Whether he had four years or merely a week to come up with an answer as to why his company appears to have been housing asylum-seekers in homes specifically marked with red doors is a question well come on to later, but in the meantime, this was that answer:

We were not aware of any reported incident regarding giving rise to any issues regarding a red door. There hasnt been a reported incident regarding a red door issue.

So thats that then. Mr Monk has done nothing wrong. Since it was revealed in The Times last week that asylum-seekers in a deprived part of Middlesbrough claimed their homes were easily identifiable because the doors were red and, as such, targeted for abuse, Mr Monks company, Jomast, has been repainting them all. But not because it has done anything wrong.

Recommended Read more Red doors of asylum seeker housing in Middlesbrough repainted

The press have gone out and knocked on a lot of doors to try and create a story, he said. Some people dont even want their doors repainted.

Alongside Mr Monk was John Whitwam, head of immigration and borders at the Home Offices favourite one-stop cock-up shop, G4S. Until recently, the Home Office was known as the graveyard of politics. If Theresa Mays record-breaking survival there can be assigned to anything, its the fact that everything remotely unpleasant, like running prisons, deporting illegal immigrants, housing asylum-seekers and dressing the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been outsourced to one particularly loathsome company, who can be relied on to take the fall for everything.

Mr Whitwam said there was no red door policy, even if emails from the companys social cohesion manager sent in 2012 asked them to look into it. It had received no complaints, not even since last year, when Ofcom made it change its asylum-seeker complaint line from a premium rate number to freephone.

The Home Affairs Committee were sceptical that no one had ever complained about the red doors, given the number of people happy to do so to The Times. But Mr Monk was having none of it. We provide the best standard of asylum accommodation in the country. We have a track record thats second to none, he said.

Victoria Atkins MP asked if he might be able to provide a log of the complaints he had received. He almost laughed. Oh, he said, as if the task were impossible. Therell be an enormous amount of complaints.

Second to none then, Mr Monk. Well done.
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David Cameron has been attacked on all sides after he dismissed refugees in Calais as a bunch of migrants, with Labour and the Lib Dems in particular quick to seize on the comment.

The use of the phrase in Prime Ministers Questions has been deemed all the more insensitive as it came on Holocaust Memorial Day, as Europe remembers another time when millions were forced to flee persecution and war.

But what was perhaps most telling about the Prime Ministers poor choice of words was the reaction from his own MPs in the Commons, who generally cheer his every word.

In what appears to be something of a pre-prepared jibe, Mr Cameron denounced Jeremy Corbyn and shadow Chancellor John McDonnell by saying the idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable.

He said the pair met with the unions and gave them flying pickets and met with the Argentinians and gave them the Falklands Islands, each time receiving a laugh and a cheers from the benches behind him.

When the Prime Minister then finished the trio of apparent criticisms by saying they met with a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could all come to Britain, he was met with stony silence.

As he moves swiftly on, the Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn can be seen mouthing the phrase repeatedly in disbelief, while other MPs can be heard repeating bunch of migrants in shock.

Mr Camerons own spokesman has tried to deflect attention from the wording he used, insisting that the public would be more concerned about Labours immigration policy.

Asked if the phrase bunch of migrants should be seen as pejorative, the spokesman avoided the question, saying the Prime Minister thinks that the key thing here is to get the policies right.

Seeming to confirm the view among his own Conservatives that Mr Cameron had misspoken, business minister Anna Soubry told the BBCs World At One programme she was sure the Prime Minister meant to say something else.

She said she wouldnt necessarily have used the phrase herself, saying: I will not criticise the PM on this one because I know that when you're standing at the despatch box ... and you have all the noise and the row around you it is very easy to use a word which on reflection may not be the best way.

I am sure he meant to say a group, but we all use slang.

David Cameron's biggest controversies Show all 8 1 /8 David Cameron's biggest controversies David Cameron's biggest controversies Pig-gate A book released by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft alleged that an MP and Oxford contemporary of David Cameron had allegedly seen a photograph of Mr Cameron performing a sex act on a pig while at university. Downing Street did not comment on the allegations and the peer said they could have been a case of mistaken identity David Hartley/REX Shutterstock David Cameron's biggest controversies Swarm of migrants In July 2015 David Cameron referred to refugees coming into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa as a swarm. He was criticised for using the language, which critics said was dehumanising Getty David Cameron's biggest controversies Child tax credits In April 2015 David Cameron was asked whether hed cut child tax credits. No, I dont want to do that, he said, saying that he rejected reports that he would. Shortly after the election the Government unveiled cuts to child tax credits EPA David Cameron's biggest controversies Cycling to work As leader of the opposition David Cameron was regularly photographed cycling to work. In early 2006 he was photographed cycling but with a driver in a car carrying his belongings. It was suggested at the time the cycling was just for show and that having two vehicles on the road instead of one was wasteful Rex David Cameron's biggest controversies Andy Coulson David Cameron employed former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as government communications director from 2010. After stepping down from the post due to coverage of the phone hacking affairs, Mr Coulson was later found guilty of conspiracy to intercept voicemails. He served a short prison sentence AFP David Cameron's biggest controversies His personal windmill Early in his leadership of the Conservative David Cameron made an effort to change the partys image by making eco-friendly gesures. As one of these gestures, the future PM put a wind turbine on his house. However, the turbine later had to be removed after neighbours condemned it as an eyesore and the councils planning committee said it had been put in the wrong place Getty David Cameron's biggest controversies Funeral selfie David Cameron was pictured posing for a selfie with Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Barack Obama at Nelson Mandelas funeral. Some in the press criticised the prime minister for showing in an inappropriately low level of respect for the gravity of the occasion AFP/Getty Images David Cameron's biggest controversies Eating a hotdog with a knife and fork The Prime Minister was pictured eating a hotdog with a knife and fork in the run up to the 2015 general election. He was accused of being posh. I had a very privileged upbringing... I've never tried to hide that, he said Reuters

Ms Soubry said she would be amazed if that part of Mr Camerons answer had been a scripted line, however.

Away from the political reactions, the Refugee Council said it was disappointing to hear the Prime Minister use such language and called on him to show leadership in the desperate situation.

Lisa Doyle, the Refugee Council's head of advocacy said: When we are facing the greatest refugee crisis of our time, it is disappointing the Prime Minister is using flippant remarks to score political points.

We have all seen the pictures of the desperate conditions people are living in across Europe, including just miles from the UK's border. The Prime Minister should be showing political leadership and work with other European countries to ensure that people can live in safety and dignity.


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A Swiss nun who was abducted in 2012 has appeared in a hostage video released by al-Qaeda after she was kidnapped again by Islamists.

Beatrice Stockly was captured by armed jihadists, who climbed the walls of her home in Timbuktu, Mali, earlier this month.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) released a video of Ms Stockly dressed in a hijab, in front of an al-Qaeda banner.

She explains the conditions which would see her released, which include the freeing of Islamist extremist Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, who is in custody at the International Criminal Court.

They also call for the release of AQIM members who are imprisoned by the Malian government.

In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Show all 20 1 /20 In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack People run to flee from the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali. The company that runs the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali's capital says assailants have taken hostages in a brazen assault involving grenades AP In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Security force personnel escort people fleeing from the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Malian troops take position near the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Security personnel, right, attend close to the scene of an attack on a hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Malian troops take position outside the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Malian security forces evacuate two women from an area surrounding the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Security forces drive an armored vehicle near the Radisson hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Security forces, center left, escorts a man, center right, from the Radisson Blu hotel entrance area were gunmen attacked in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Onlookers gather near the Radisson Blu hotel after gunmen stormed the building in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Malian security forces take position near the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Malian troops take position outside the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako In pictures: Mali Radisson hotel attack Malian troops take position outside the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako

In the video, an English-speaking militant says the nun was abducted for teaching Christianity.

He says: "We, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Sahara region, declare our responsibility for the kidnapping of this Christianising kaffir Beatrice Stockly, who by her work, drove out many from the fold of Islam by seducing them with crumbs of this worldly life."

Speaking after Ms Stockly was abducted from her home on 8 January, Bilal Mahamane Traore, a town councillor in Timbuktu, said: "People were sleeping but neighbours heard the noise - the woman screamed a lot.

"Not a single neighbour, though, called security forces."

Ms Stockly was first kidnapped in April 2012, but returned to missionary work after being released two weeks later.

She remained in Timbuktu when the town fell to extremists linked to al-Qaeda and was abducted and passed to the militant group Ansar Dine.

She was freed by helicopter 10 days later in a pre-arranged hand over between Burkina Faso and the rebels.

At the time, she was accused of proselytising for Christianity and warned she would be executed if she returned to Timbuktu.
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The rare white giraffe discovered in Tanzania could become a target for poachers, a researcher has warned.

The giraffe, named Omo, resides at Tarangire National Park and has a condition called leucism, which means her skin cells are incapable of making pigment.

Images of Omo have been posted widely on social media since she was spotted on 19 January.

Derek Lee, founder of the Wild Nature Institute and a researcher at the park, hoped the 15-month-olds popularity would raise global awareness for the problems facing giraffes".

In a statement given to The Independent, Mr Lee said he feared Omo could be threatened by poachers in Tarangires rampant meat hunting market.

It is illegal to kill giraffes in Tanzania because they are the national animal. But illegal market hunting for meat is well-known to be rampant around Tarangire.

Unfortunately all giraffes, not just white ones like Omo, are threatened by bushmeat poaching, as well as habitat loss," he said.

Giraffes have declined drastically all across Africa... The situation is so dire, that in Africa today there are currently four elephants for every one giraffe, so they are a threatened species.

However, Mr Lee said the fact that Omo lived in national park meant she had the highest chance of survival thanks to anti-poaching efforts in the area.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Show all 26 1 /26 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Wildlife Photographer of the Year A polar bear's struggle - Highly Commended Justins whole body pained as he watched this starving polar bear at an abandoned hunter's camp, in the Canadian Arctic, slowly heave itself up to standing. With little, and thinning, ice to move around on, the bear is unable to search for food. Justin Hofman / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Curious Encounter - Shortlisted Cristobal Serrano, Spain. Any close encounter with an animal in the vast wilderness of Antarctica happens by chance, so Cristobal was thrilled by this spontaneous meeting with a crabeater seal off of Cuverville Island, Antarctic Peninsula. These curious creatures are protected and, with few predators, thrive. Cristobal Serrano / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Bond of brothers - Winner David Lloyd, New Zealand / UK. These two adult males, probably brothers, greeted and rubbed faces for 30 seconds before settling down. Most people never have the opportunity to witness such animal sentience, and David was honoured to have experienced and captured such a moment.The picture was taken in Ndutu, Serengeti, Tanzania. David Lloyd / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Fox meets fox - Highly Commended Matthew Maran, UK. Matthew has been photographing foxes close to his home in north London for over a year and ever since spotting this street art had dreamt of capturing this image. After countless hours and many failed attempts his persistence paid off. Matthew Maran / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Three Kings - Highly Commended Wim Van Den Heever, South Africa. Wim came across these king penguins on a beach in the Falkland Islands just as the sun was rising. They were caught up in a fascinating mating behaviour the two males were constantly moving around the female using their flippers to fend the other off. Wim Van Den Heever / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year One toy, three dogs - Highly Commended Bence Mate, Hungary. While adult African wild dogs are merciless killers, their pups are extremely cute and play all day long. Bence photographed these brothers in Mkuze, South Africa they all wanted to play with the leg of an impala and were trying to drag it in three different directions! Bence Mate / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Clam Close-up - Shortlisted David Barrio, Spain. This macro-shot of an iridescent clam was taken in the Southern Red Sea, Marsa Alam, Egypt. These clams spend their lives embedded amongst stony corals, where they nest and grow. It took David some time to approach the clam, fearing it would sense his movements and snap shut! David Barrio / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year The Orphaned Beaver - Shortlisted Suzi Eszterhas, United States. A one-month-old orphaned North American beaver kit is held by a caretaker at the Sarvey Wildlife Care Center in Arlington, Washington. Luckily it was paired with a female beaver who took on the role of mother and they were later released into the wild. Suzi Eszterhas / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Ice and Water - Shortlisted Audun Lie Dahl, Norway. The Brasvellbreen glacier moves southwards from one of the ice caps covering the Svalbard Archipelago, Norway. Where it meets the sea, the glacier wall is so high that only the waterfalls are visible, so Audun used a drone to capture this unique perspective Audun Lie Dahl / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Teenager - Shortlisted Franco Banfi, Switzerland. Franco was free diving off Dominica in the Caribbean Sea when he witnessed this young male sperm whale trying to copulate with a female. Unfortunately for him her calf was always in the way and the frisky male had to continually chase off the troublesome calf. Franco Banfi / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Resting Mountain Gorilla - Shortlisted David Lloyd. The baby gorilla clung to its mother whilst keeping a curious eye on David. He had been trekking in South Bwindi, Uganda, whenhe came across the whole family. Following them, they then stopped in a small clearing to relax and groom each other. David Lloyd / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Painted Waterfall - Shorltisted Eduardo Blanco Mendizabal, Spain. When the sun beams through a hole in the rock at the foot of the La Foradada waterfall, Catalonia, Spain, it creates a beautiful pool of light. The rays appear to paint the spray of the waterfall and create a truly magical picture. Eduardo Blanco Mendizabal / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year The Extraction - Shortlisted Konstantin Shatenev, Russia. Every winter, hundreds of Steller's sea eagles migrate from Russia, to the relatively ice-free northeastern coast of Hokkaido, Japan. They hunt for fish among the ices floes and also scavenge, following the fishing boats to feed on any discards. Konstantin took his image from a boat as the eagles retrieved a dead fish thrown onto the ice. Konstantin Shatenev / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Shy - Shortlisted Pedro Carrillo, Spain. The mesmerizing pattern of a beaded sand anemone beautifully frames a juvenile Clarkii clownfish in Lembehstrait, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Known as a 'nursery' anemone, it is often a temporary home for young clownfish until they find a more suitable host anemone for adulthood. Pedro Carrillo / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Red, Silver and Black - Shortlisted TinMan Lee, USA. Tin was fortunate enough to be told about a fox den in Washington State, North America, which was home to a family of red, black and silver foxes. After days of waiting for good weather he was finally rewarded with this touching moment. Tin Man Lee / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Isolated - Shortlisted Anna Henly, UK. Snapped from a helicopter, this isolated tree stands in a cultivated field on the edge of a tropical forest on Kauai, Hawaii. The manmade straight lines of the ploughed furrows are interrupted beautifully by natures more unruly wild pattern of tree branches. Anna Henly / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Sound Asleep - Shortlisted Tony Wu, USA. This adult humpback whale balanced in mid-water, headon and sound asleep was photographed in Vavau, Kingdom of Tonga. The faint stream of bubbles, visible at the top, is coming from the whales two blowholes and was, in this instance, indicative of an extremely relaxed state. Tony Wu / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year All That Remains - Shortlisted Phil Jones, UK. A male orca had beached itself about a week before Phils visit to Sea Lion Island, Falkland Islands. Despite its huge size the shifting sands had almost covered the whole carcass and scavengers, such as this striated caracara, had started to move in. Phil Jones / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Ambush - Shortlisted Federico Veronesi, Kenya. On a hot morning at the Chitake Springs, in Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe, Federico watched as an old lioness descended from the top of the riverbank. Shed been lying in wait to ambush any passing animals visiting a nearby waterhole further along the riverbed. Federico Veronesi / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Gliding - Shortlisted Christian Vizl, Mexico. With conditions of perfect visibility and beautiful sunlight, Christian took this portrait of a nurse shark gliding through the ocean off the coast of Bimini in the Bahamas. Typically these sharks are found near sandy bottoms where they rest, so its rare to see them swimming. Christian Vizl / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Otherworldly - Shortlisted A school of Munk's devil ray were feeding on plankton at night off the coast of Isla Espiritu Santo in Baja California, Mexico. Franco used the underwater lights from his boat and a long exposure to create this otherworldly image. Franco Banfi / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year The Bats Wake - Shortlisted Antonio Leiva Sanchez, Spain. After several months of field research into a little colony of greater mouse-eared bats in Sucs, Lleida, Spain, Antonio managed to capture this bat mid-flight. He used a technique of high speed photography with flashes combined with continuous light to create the wake. Antonio Leiva Sanchez / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Under the Snow - Shortlisted Audren Morel, France. Unafraid of the snowy blizzard, this squirrel came to visit Audren as he was taking photographs of birds in the small Jura village of Les Fourgs, France. Impressed by the squirrels endurance, he made it the subject of the shoot. Audren Morel / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Unique Bill - Shortlisted Rob Blanken, The Netherlands. The pied avocet has a unique and delicate bill, which it sweeps like a scythe, as it sifts for food in shallow brackish water. This stunning portrait was taken from a hide in the northern province of Friesland in The Netherlands. Rob Blanken / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Family Portrait - Shortlisted Connor Stefanison, Canada. A great grey owl and her chicks sit in their nest in the broken top of a Douglas fir tree in Kamloops, Canada. They looked towards Connor only twice as he watched them during the nesting season from a tree hide 50 feet (15 metres) up. Connor Stefanison / Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year A dog jumps to catch a disc during a dog frisbee competition in Poznan via REUTERS

Omo was first spotted in 2015, but researchers at the institute, based in Tanzania, were excited at the second sighting earlier this month.

In a blog post they wrote: We are thrilled that she is still alive and well.

Speaking of Omo's condition, Mr Lee said she was "only the second record of a white giraffe in Tarangire over the past 20 years... among more than 3,000 giraffe in the area". He added that the institute took photos during their giraffe studies to spot patterns to identify individuals.
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The rebel leader known as Juan Pablo carries with him a new telescopic assault rifle and a heavy heart.

As a commander of the 36th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), one of the most active units in a half-century of bloodshed, the paunch-bellied warrior has spent 25 years plotting ambushes and assembling land mines but has never been to the cinema, driven a car or eaten in a restaurant.

Now peace appears within reach as a self-imposed deadline of 23 March for an agreement between the guerrillas and the government approaches. So, for the first time Juan Pablo, 41, is thinking about a future outside this jungle hideout. His dream: to return to the poor village he left as a teenager and run for mayor. But transition to civilian life will come without his girlfriend and comrade-in-arms who was killed six months ago in an army raid, underscoring the toll still being exacted by Latin Americas last major guerrilla conflict even as it winds down.

This war is going to end without victors but lots of suffering on both sides, said Juan Pablo, the son of a street vendor. Its false to say we arrived defeated to the negotiating table. They dealt us some heavy blows, of course, but 51 years of war against an enemy backed by the most powerful army in the world [the US army] has not made us cower.

That mixture of pride and trepidation about the future is common among Farcs roughly 7,000 fighters, many of whom, like Juan Pablo, come from poor rural beginnings and struggle to imagine life outside the highly regimented ranks of the guerrillas.

Decades of fighting between guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the armed forces has, according to government figures, left a toll of more than 220,000 dead, some 40,000 missing and more than five million driven from their homes.

 Bomb death apology from FARC

But after President Juan Manuel Santos travelled to Cuba in September and shook the hand of Farcs top commander, both sides feel confident enough to predict a final deal. On Monday, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution to establish a political mission to monitor and verify a future ceasefire, after the government and Farc made a joint request to the UN that such a body be set-up.

The resolution approved by the 15-member council said the UN would establish a political mission for 12 months to monitor and verify the definitive bilateral ceasefire and cessation of hostilities, and the laying down of arms.

If peace deal arrives, this generation of Farc guerrillas would be the first to fight for their ideals at the ballot box.

During a recent visit to a Farc camp in Antioquia state, the day starts at around 4.30am The jungle comes to life to the sound of metal pots clanging as breakfast is prepared. Farc insisted that the location of the camp, said to be home to 22 rank-and-file fighters, four commanders and two dogs, not be revealed to protect the lives of its fighters.

Graffiti in Bogota reflects the desire for peace in Colombia (Getty Images)

Thanks to a unilateral Farc ceasefire, it has been months since gunshots rang out in this remote corner of the Andes. Still, the rebels show no sign of letting down their guard.

They sleep with their weapons, restrict all conversation at night and use assumed names. Once-a-day radio contact with other units happens via code, and lengthier missives are saved to thumb drives and transported through a network of human couriers.

Their wariness highlights one of the thorniest issues that negotiators must still work out: how and under whose auspices Farc will demobilise, when experience has taught the rebels that politics can be just as perilous as war.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. 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A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. 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The guerrillas recall too well how during 1980s peace talks that ultimately failed, Farc established a party known as the Patriotic Union as its political arm.

In just a few years, more than 3,000 leftist activists, rebel sympathisers and two presidential candidates were gunned down by paramilitaries. It became a cautionary tale in a country plagued by political violence.

We learnt a lot from that experience, but who says the only way to practise politics is in Congress? said Leonidas, another commander. One thing is clear: in this new phase Farc is not going to demobilise, we are going to mobilise [politically].

 Colombians take to the streets for peace

The rebels tried to downplay Farcs deep involvement in drugs  a lucrative trade that could prove a powerful economic incentive to remain armed. Families living in the remote valleys that the 36th Front lords over acknowledge paying a war tax to protect their coca plantings, but the rebels say they will help develop alternative crops if an accord is reached.

Even as the camp maintains a wartime footing, the guerrillas have begun holding twice-a-day peace assemblies. On a recent day the first one, before breakfast, was led by Yira Castro, a commander. Under the shade of a tree, she read from a 63-page sub-accord that was recently signed during peace talks in Havana.

Yira Castro, a commander of the 36th Front (AP)

Listening attentively was Juliana. Like many others, her path to Farc was born as much from personal tragedy as political ideology. At age 16, after she says she was raped by her stepfather, she fled her impoverished home.

Juliana said that if she hadnt taken up arms she would have liked to have studied computers. But now she hopes to serve Farc even during peacetime: I want to prepare myself to get involved in politics and continue my association with the organisation.

Talk came to an abrupt halt as an unfamiliar aircraft flew overhead a second time, setting nerves on edge. Politics is a lot tougher than war, another commander, Anibal, observed from his hammock.

You pay for a mistake on the battlefield with your life, he said, swinging back and forth, but an error in the field of politics brings down an entire organisation.

AP
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The lengthy stand-off between armed anti-government activists and the authorities in rural Oregon has finally descended into violence, with one protester shot dead, several others arrested, and the remote federal buildings where they staged their occupation surrounded by the FBI.

Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum, 55, who regularly acted as a spokesman for the militant group, was killed on Tuesday afternoon after he and five other occupiers were pulled over by the FBI and Oregon state police on a highway some 50 miles north of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, which the protesters have occupied since early January.

Ammon Bundy is the leader of the group who occupied the ranch earlier in January (Reuters)

The group were driving to a community meeting in the town of John Day when their vehicles were flagged down at around 4.30pm. It is thought Mr Finicum and another occupier, 40-year-old Ryan Bundy, refused to surrender. Mr Finicum was shot and killed, while Mr Bundy suffered a minor gunshot wound to his arm. He and the four other surviving activists were arrested.

At a press conference, the FBI declined to offer further details of the incident or to identify the dead man, but Mr Finicums family confirmed he was the one killed during the confrontation. My dad was such a good, good man, through and through, 26-year-old Arianna Finicum Brown, one of his 11 children, told The Oregonian. He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.

Mr Finicums cowboy hat and ear-warmers had become a familiar sight at the occupation. He was one of several US ranchers who had refused to pay fees to graze his cattle on federal land, along with Cliven Bundy, Ryans father, whose own stand-off with authorities in Nevada in 2014 became a right-wing cause celebre. The Bundy Ranch paid tribute to Mr Finicum on its Facebook page, saying: America was fired upon by our government and one of libertys finest patriots is fallen.

Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum was killed in the incident (MSNBC)

The five arrested occupiers, including Ryan Bundy and his brother Ammon, 40, the groups de facto leader, were charged with conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats. Harney County Sheriff David Ward said police could have waited a lot longer to confront the group, but that the occupation has been tearing our community apart.

Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Show all 5 1 /5 Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Protesters hold signs during a rally against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Ammon Bundy and his armed followers, while at the Federal Building in Eugene AP Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge With the armed takeover of the national wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon in its third week, Bundy and his armed group are still trying to muster up broad community support, so far without much luck AP Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Protesters rally against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Ammon Bundy and his armed followers, while at the Federal Building in Eugene AP Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge John Perry holds a poster during a rally against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Ammon Bundy and his armed followers AP Protest against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Renee Irvin holds a sign during a rally against the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge AP

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, began their occupation of the Malheur refuge headquarters on 2 January, after two local ranchers were ordered to return to prison to complete their terms for arson. Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven, 46, were convicted of setting fires that spread onto federal land in 2001 and 2006.

Around 15 men and women seized the unmanned federal buildings, making vague demands, including the release of the Hammonds, and the return of the federally managed refuge lands to local landowners. They carried firearms openly, and called on fellow patriots to join their protest. Speaking to reporters early on in the occupation, Mr Finicum said: There are things more important than your life, and freedom is one of them... Im prepared to defend freedom.

During the occupation, the protesters had moved back and forth between the refuge and the nearby town of Burns unhindered by the authorities, who seemed keen to avoid a violent confrontation. On Tuesday, however, two more of the protesters were arrested in Burns, while Jon Ritzheimer, another prominent occupier, turned himself into police in Arizona. The seven protesters arrested in Oregon were expected to appear in court in Portland on Wednesday, while Mr Ritzheimer will be extradited from Arizona to face the same conspiracy charge.

Up to a dozen militiamen were thought still to be at the refuge, after voting amongst themselves to continue the occupation. The FBI and Oregon state police said that they had initiated a containment of the refuge headquarters, establishing checkpoints on the road that leads to the occupied buildings. FBI Agent Greg Bretzing told reporters that the law enforcement response to the occupation had been deliberate and measured, adding: It is the actions and choices of the armed occupiers of the refuge that have lead us to where we are today.
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Donald Trump has said he will be backing out of the last Republican debate before the Iowa caucuses.

The decision was announced on Tuesday evening by Mr Trumps campaign manager - just 48 hours before the Fox News debate.

Mr Trumps campaign released a statement saying: Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country, Mr Trump knows when to walk away. Fox News think they can toy with him, but Mr Trump doesnt play games.

The statement says Mr Trump will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors.

The announcement followed a press conference in which Mr Trump dismissed Fox News' debate moderator, Megyn Kelly, as a "lightweight", third-rate reporter and claimed she had been toying with him.

On Tuesday nights airing of Ms Kellys Fox News show, The Kelly File, the host said the debate would go on with or without Mr Trump.

A Fox News spokesperson said Mr Trump was still welcome to participate in the debate but would not be allowed to dictate the moderators or the questions.

So, who is the woman Donald Trump is running scared of?

 Megyn Kelly v Donald Trump

Megyn Kelly

A journalist and political commentator, Ms Kelly has received criticism from Mr Trump since moderating the first GOP debate in August, when she quizzed him about past comments he made about women.

The host of The Kelly File, currently the second most-watched programme in all of the USs cable news, made headlines and received praise for her tough questioning.

Youve called women you dont like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals, Ms Kelly told the Republican frontrunner.

She also queried Mr Trumps party affiliation, asking: When did you actually become a Republican?

In an interview with CNN after the debate, Mr Trump criticised Ms Kellys approach, saying she had had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever while questioning him.

Mr Trump has since repeatedly criticised Ms Kelly and the jibes have intensified in the run-up to Thursdays debate.

Fox News has even accused Mr Trumps team of threatening her.

On Saturday, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski reportedly said Ms Kelly had a "rough couple of days after that last debate" and he "would hate to have her go through that again."

Fox News said in a statement: It should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing  Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage.

"Capitulating to politicians ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one levelled by Trumps campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly."

Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Show all 14 1 /14 Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Isis: "Some of the candidates, they went in and didnt know the air conditioner didnt work and sweated like dogs, and they didnt know the room was too big because they didnt have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?" Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On immigration: "I will build a great wall  and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me and Ill build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Free Trade: "Free trade is terrible. Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people." PAUL J. RICHARDS | AFP | Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Mexicans: "When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists." Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On China: "I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them?... I love China. The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On work: "If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable." AP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On success: "What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate." Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On life: "Everything in life is luck." AFP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On ambition: "You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On his opponents: "Bush is totally in favour of Common Core. I don't see how he can possibly get the nomination. He's weak on immigration. He's in favour of Common Core. How the hell can you vote for this guy? You just can't do it." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Obamacare: "You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high. It's virtually useless. And remember the $5 billion web site?... I have so many web sites, I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a web site. It costs me $3." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Barack Obama: "Obama is going to be out playing golf. He might be on one of my courses. I would invite him. I have the best courses in the world. I have one right next to the White House." PA Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On himself: "Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On America: "The American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." GETTY

Mr Trump has previously said he would not participate in the event because of Fox's insistence on including Ms Kelly.

"Megyn Kelly shouldn't be in the debate," Mr Trump said at a press conference before a campaign event in Iowa. "I'm not a fan of Megyn Kelly. I think she's a third-rate reporter. I think she is frankly not good at what she does. And I think they could do a lot better than Megyn Kelly".

Fox News Chairman, Roger Ailes, defended Ms Kelly telling The Washington Post: Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her. She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night."

Additional reporting by Press Association
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On Monday, the Iowa caucuses will kick off the 2016 US Presidential election race.

After months of speculation, debate, and poll-watching, we will discover whether Donald Trump really has as much support as surveys suggest, and whether Bernie Sanders can actually challenge Hillary Clinton as the Democrats' candidate.

Once again, the people of Iowa - along with those in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada - will wield the considerable power they have to shape the contest to become the leader of arguably the world's most powerful country.

Over the next month these four states, and only these four states, will choose between each partys candidates, while everyone else in the country can only watch.

A poor showing in these early votes by flailing candidates, such as Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina, may force them to drop out.

Together these four states make up just 1-in-25 Americans, giving a tiny fraction of the country's population the power to eliminate certain candidates and build momentum behind others.

Hilary Clinton was beaten into third place in Iowa in 2008.

To become the nominee, would-be presidents need win delegates in contests across each US state.

While these first four states dont in themselves offer many delegates, the candidate who does best in them is likely to fare well when many more states vote on Super Tuesday, on March 1.

Between a fifth and a quarter of delegates will be decided on Super Tuesday.

That makes the first four states critical. But who are the 1-in-25 Americans who live there?

They come from four states that have been carefully selected, as this map shows.

This map reflects the ancestry of the largest group of people in each US county. The data comes from the 2000 US Census, as equivalent details were not collected in the 2010 Census.

German ancestry, represented by the light blue tiles, dominates the Mid-West and Americans of Mexican ancestry are in light pink along the southern border.

The Deep South is split between African-Americans in purple and whites who identify as 'American' in yellow, while Irish and Italian communities are coloured in shades of blue in the North East.

The four early voting states are circled.

Each state has been selected so they will collectively represent these different groups.

Iowa

Iowa is a prototypical state of German ancestry in the Mid-West, the region which stretches from the Dakotas in the west to Ohio in the east.

Around 90-95 per cent of the state is white, with one-in-three of them descending from Germans. US counties with predominantly German ancestry are coloured light blue in the map above.

Bernie Sanders' campaign hinges on next week's Iowa caucus. (Getty)

While Iowa looks small on the map, it is actually slightly bigger than England in geographical size, but has 1/20th of the population.

That makes it about average for the US in both size and population.

Sometimes described as Americas Heartland, it is at the centre of the Corn Belt.

While no longer as rural or agricultural as it long was, Iowa is still a major producer of Americas eggs, soybeans, hogs - and corn.

It is a critical swing state in presidential elections. While it only has six electoral votes in November (out of 538), they could prove pivotal in a close race this year.

Mitt Romney campainging in Iowa's cornfields in 2008.

Barack Obama won the state convincingly in 2008 and 2012, after George Bush and Al Gore won it by less than one per cent in 2004 and 2000 respectively.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz currently lead the Republican polls there, while establishment favourite Marco Rubio is aiming for third.

Hillary Clintons candidacy stumbled in 2008 when she could only manage third place there. This time she must beat Bernie Sanders to end his campaign quickly.

Polls suggest the race between them is too close to call.

But US polls are even less reliable than those in the UK have shown themselves to be. US pollsters only ask a few hundred voters in each survey, which means their results have a large margin of error.

New Hampshire

After Iowa votes next Monday, the race will move to New Hampshire, which votes for both parties the following Tuesday, 9 February.

Ms Clinton resuscitated her campaign here in 2008 after losing Iowa. If she also wins Iowa, Hillary Clinton could end Mr Sanders campaign by winning here.

New Hampshire has traditionally been a contest where establishment candidates do well.

John Kerry in the forests of New Hampshire in 2004.

Mitt Romney and John McCain recovered from losing Iowa by winning here in 2012 and 2008, and John Kerry become the Democratic frontrunner in 2004 after winning here.

But Mr Trump has shocked commentators by polling very well in the state this year.

A more moderate candidate, like Mr Rubio, Chris Christie, or former Ohio Governor John Kasich, might beat him if there were not so many moderate candidates splitting the vote.

If you add up support for those three, Mr Bush and Ms Fiorina, the moderate vote exceeds 40 per cent, but no one moderate candidate seems likely to win more than 15 per cent.

One of the smallest states in the US but one of the richest, New Hampshire is a prototypical state of the North-East.

But unlike other affluent north-eastern states, New Hampshire is, like Iowa, one of the most equal in the US.

The people of New Hampshire, like man across the region, are mainly descended from French and English colonialists, as well as Irish and Italian settlers.

Former Ohio Governor John Kasich is polling second in New Hampshire.

As in Iowa, the state is 90-95 per cent white and considered an American heartland; one of its towns inspired Thornton Wilders Our Town (1938), a classic depiction of small-town America.

It is also a swing state with a very similar voting history to Iowa. It has even fewer electoral votes (four) but they could also prove crucial in November.

Unlike Iowa, it is mountainous to the north and full of forests. Its extensive quarries led to its nickname, 'The Granite State'.

South Carolina

After New Hampshire, the Republican race will move south, skipping the nations capital and major cities and crossing the Mason-Dixon line into the Deep South.

South Carolina is the most southern state of the first four. Its Republican primary is on February 20.

Jeb Bush was recently endorsed by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. (Getty)

Like the rest of the region, it is divided between whites who culturally identify as American - rather than of European descent - and African-Americans.

In June, a white racist killed nine black people in an attack on a church in the states capital, Charleston, which led to the Confederate flag being taken down from the State Capitol building.

It is the most populous and the poorest state of the four, in what is country's poorest region.

Recommended Read more Trump heckles protester wearing a turban

A quarter of voters are black and overwhelmingly vote Democrat, but South Carolina has nevertheless voted Republican in every presidential election since 1976.

Mr Cruz has been gaining in the polls here, but Mr Trump leads and would be favourite to win if has already triumphed in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mr Sanders trails Ms Clinton by a wide margin here, but the Democrats will first fly west before South Carolina votes on February 27.

NEVADA

Nevada is the final early-voting state.

Democrats will cast their ballots here on the day of the South Carolina Republican primary on February 20, while Republicans will do so three days later.

Nevada is the representative of the American West.

After South Carolina, the Republicans will fly over Middle America  Missouri, Kansas, Colorado  and land in Nevada, home of Las Vegas and neighbour of California.

Marco Rubio performing in the recent GOP debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Getty)

Known by many names but perhaps best-known as the Desert State, two million of its 2.9 million people live in its southern tip. Most of the state is semi-arid.

Once dependent on silver mining and still a major gold producer, its Vegas-based economy and lax laws on sin means it is now home to 190,000 hotel rooms.

Nevadas population has increased 18-fold since 1950 and it is one of six US states with a sizeable Hispanic population; Latinos make up one-in-five of the vote here.

Four of the other states with big Hispanic populations share a border with Mexico. The sixth is Florida. Americans of Mexican ancestry are marked by pink squares in the map below.

Nevada is also another of the small swing states, like Iowa and New Hampshire. Paying great attention to these states suits both parties ahead of the election in November.

Its large Hispanic population  and sizable black and Asian communities  make it the state most representative of America among the first four.

A total of 40 per cent of Nevada voters, and 30 per cent of the US electorate, is non-white.

There have been few polls in Nevada - and the race here is likely to be shaped by results in the first three states.

'Super Tuesday'

The days after the final contests in Nevada - for the Republicans - and South Carolina - for the Democrats - could be the most pivotal in the entire race.

On Tuesday March 1, exactly one month after Iowa begins the voting, more than a dozen states will vote in both the Republican and Democratic races.

The Democratic primary could be over by then if Ms Clinton is undefeated and more than a quarter of delegates will be up for grabs on the Republican side.

If Mr Trump has faired as well in the early states as polls currently suggest, he could be on his way to the nomination.
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President Barack Obama has called for the rapid development of tests, vaccines and treatments to fight the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects.

American health officials are stepping up efforts to study the virus. Mr Obama emphasised the need to accelerate research efforts.

Recommended Read more Why the US is so vulnerable to the spread of the Zika virus

The President said that researchers should make available better diagnostic tests to develop vaccines and therapeutics, and to ensure that all Americans have information about the Zika virus and steps they can take to better protect themselves from infection.

A link is suspected between the virus and brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil. There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, a close cousin of dengue and chikungunya, which causes mild fever and rash. An estimated 80 per cent of people infected have no symptoms, making it difficult for pregnant women to know whether they have been infected.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

On Monday, the World Health Organisation predicted the virus would spread to all countries across the Americas except for Canada and Chile. There are no global estimates for how many people in the world have been infected by the Zika virus, a WHO spokesman, Christian Lindmeier, said this week. He added that because Zika has such mild symptoms, the virus has not really been on the radar.

On Wednesday, the National Health Institute in Portugal said that five people in the country have tested positive for mild cases of Zika virus after recent trips to Brazil. These people have not been admitted to hospital and do not require further medical attention as these are mild cases, a spokesman for the institute said.

In Denmark, the Aarhus University Hospital said a Danish tourist has been infected by the virus after visiting southern and central America.

Health experts say such cases are to be expected in Europe, given the scale of the outbreak in South America and the frequency of international travel.

Reuters
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A 17-year-old girl from Denmark could be fined because she used pepper spray to defend herself against a man who allegedly attacked her.

The girl said that the man, who spoke English, forced her to the ground and tried to remove her trousers on a street in the centre of Sonderborg on the night of 20 January, according to police.

She then managed to spray the alleged attacker before he ran off.

But the 17-year-old, who reported the attack the following day, could now be handed a fine because carrying pepper spray is illegal in Denmark under the countrys arms law.

Police spokesperson Helle Lundberg said the incident was being investigated as a case of attempted rape and that the police were still trying to locate the alleged attacker.

According to Danish law, it is illegal to be in possession of pepper spray, she told The Independent, adding that it fell under the same category as being in possession of knives and firearms.

Ms Lundberg said she did not know yet if the fine would be imposed, adding that only a court could decide to drop it if it deemed the girl had acted in self-defence.

The fine could be anywhere between one and 5,000 Danish krones, she said.
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President Francois Hollande lost far more than his Justice Minister after her resignation. He lost a living icon of the French left and crippled his already tenuous hopes of a second term in the Elysee Palace.

Christiane Taubira  the only senior black politician in France, a lyrical defender of left-wing values and a perennial target for right-wingers and racists  resigned in protest against Mr Hollandes plans to amend the constitution after the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November.

Ms Taubira, like many on the left, objects to Mr Hollandes proposal to strip French citizenship from convicted terrorists who are dual nationals. The former Justice Minister, who has a near-religious reverence for the ideals of the French Republic, regards the proposal as a gimmick inspired by the far right that tramples on the principle that all French citizens are equal.

On Wednesday morning, she said: Sometimes resisting means staying on; sometimes resisting means leaving.

President Hollande insists that the change  part of a wider constitutional reform to strengthen anti-terror powers  sends a signal that France is determined to root out home-grown extremists. Critics suggest that his real motive is to disarm his right-wing opposition, rather than radical Islam.

After a series of failed attempts to reach a compromise, Mr Hollande and Ms Taubira decided last weekend that she could no longer remain in her post. The constitutional changes, which will also extend emergency powers against terrorism, go before a parliamentary committee for the first time on Thursday.

In a statement, Ms Taubira said she had chosen to be faithful to myself, my commitments and my battles. The terrorist peril that threatens us is real but we know how to fight it. We need hand them no victories  no military ones, no diplomatic ones and no symbolic ones.

Christiane Taubira with President Hollande in 2014 (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

The proposed stripping of French citizenship from convicted terrorists who have a second nationality may seem a rather abstract and obscure cause for a political crisis, but both sides argue that important principles are involved.

Mr Hollande  who once dismissed the idea  says it sends a signal that French nationality implies acceptance of core democratic values. Ms Taubira and other critics say that creating different categories of Frenchness is un-Republican and will increase, rather than reduce, the alienation of young French Muslims.

Ms Taubira is much loved on the left and much hated on the hard and racist right. She rose from extreme poverty in her native French Guiana to become a successful academic and then a politician.

As Justice Minister in the past four years, she has faced repeated, and mostly unjustified, allegations by right-wing politicians that she is soft on crime. And, as the main sponsor of a gay marriage law in 2013, she faced a barrage of racist attacks.

The headline of Wednesday's Le Monde reads 'Taubira slams the door' (AFP) (AFP/Getty Images)

One right-wing magazine pictured her as a monkey on its front page. And when she visited Angers in central France in November 2013, the children of anti-gay protesters brandished bananas for the monkey.

Such attacks increased her popularity on the left, but her public opposition to the plan to strip dual-nationality terrorists of their French passports became an embarrassment for Mr Hollande. In a radio interview last month, she said the government was going to have to abandon the plan as unconstitutional.

Her departure strips the reformist government of Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister, of its last senior figure from the traditional left. She was immediately replaced by Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a relatively untried Breton Socialist and Valls loyalist.

That may be good news for Mr Valls, but it leaves Mr Hollande more than ever divorced from the grassroots of his own Socialist party and from the wider  and harder  left that he will need to seek re-election next year. He is already being urged to submit to a primary of the left rather than run again as a sitting President. His popularity, which rocketed after the jihadist attacks in November, has collapsed again in recent days.

Ms Taubiras use of the word resist in her tweet suggests she will now join the ranks of left-wingers who have been frustrated by Mr Hollandes failure to cut unemployment and angered by the market-opening and tax-cutting reforms of the Hollande-Valls administration.

While Taubira was there, many people of the left could still believe this was their government, one dissident Socialist MP said. Now she is gone, they see no one that they can believe in.

Reactions from other French politicians were predictably polarised. The former Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti saluted Ms Taubiras immense talent. The Green politician and former Housing Minister Cecile Duflot praised her courage. However, the deputy leader of the far-right Front National, Florian Phillipot, said: The resignation of Taubira: Finally! Really good news for France.
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Carnival is a centuries-old tradition, reads the first line of a leaflet printed by the organisers of this years Cologne and Bonn carnivals. The leaflet, which provides cultural information along with rules on urinating in public and what sexual consent means is printed in a number of languages including English, French, Arabic and Farsi.

The information for refugees leaflet is intended to welcome people to join in with the celebrations, but it is explicit about sexual consent following the mass sex attacks in Cologne on New Years Eve.

Carnival is a centuries old tradition. People wear fancy dress costumes, celebrate, sing and dance together, it reads, explaining the size of the parades that will be expected on the cities streets next week.

In the Rhineland region, everyone can join in during carnival, but we must treat each other with respect and observe the law, it states.

Butzen means kissing somebody on the cheek, one of our carnival customs. Sexual overtures are strictly prohibited. Women and men must always consent to the butzen. No means no!

Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Show all 13 1 /13 Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Women protest against sexism outside Cologne Cathedral on 5 January after the assaults Oliver Berg/EPA Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Women protest against sexism in Cologne following the rash of sex attacks on New Year's Eve Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police initially failed to mention the assaults in report the following morning EPA Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police officers patrol in front of the main station of Cologne, Germany AP Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks German far-right supporters demonstrate at Cologne`s train station (Reuters) Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement Pegida in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016. Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police used pepper spray to control supporters of Pegida, Hogesa (Hooligans against Salafists) and other right-wing populist groups as they protested against the New Year's Eve sex attacks on 9 January, 2016 in Cologne, Germany Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police use a water cannon during a protest march by supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement Pegida in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016 Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police use pepper spray against supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement Pegida, in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016. Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Artist Mira Moire protests naked in Cologne against the mass sex attacks on New Year's Eve AP Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks A demonstrator holds a sign in German that reads 'No violence against women' during a demonstration in the wake of the sexual assaults on New Year's Eve, outside the cathedeal in Cologne, Germany, 09 January 2016. EPA Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Counter demonstrators hold up a sign reading "Against sexism, against racism" as they protest against a demonstration of the islamophobic movement PEGIDA at the train station in Cologne, Germany, on January 9, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Demonstration by a womens group on Saturday (AP) AP

A total of 497 people have filed reports of sexual assault following the attacks, while a police report said up to 1,000 drunken men, mainly of Arab or North African origin were responsible for robbing and attacking women on the night.

While the Cologne festival committee, the umbrella organisation for all carnival events in Cologne, has issued a leaflet explaining what the carnival is and how to join in, officials in Bonn have added to the information with the multi-lingual leaflet.

It also states that urinating in public is strictly prohibited, and addresses the consumption of alcohol as a widely accepted part of the festivities.

Many Muslims do not drink alcohol and there is a section on the leaflet informing refugees that while many Cologne locals drink beer or other alcoholic beverages during Carnival, it is of course not compulsory. You can have fun, sing and dance just as easily without alcohol.
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Denmarks plan to seize asylum seekers valuables and cash has provoked international outrage - but there is one key part to the law that may have a far bigger impact on refugees.

Plans to search new arrivals and take anything worth more than 10,000 kroner (1,000) to cover their housing and food costs is just one of a raft of new measures approved by the Danish parliament on Tuesday.

Critics likened the practice to the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, but some human rights groups were more concerned by changes to family reunification laws.

Critics say Denmark has tried to portray itself as a destination few refugees would want to go to (Getty Images)

The waiting period before refugees can apply for their spouses and children to join them has been raised from one year to three, potentially stranding vulnerable people in conflict zones or elsewhere on the migration route through Europe, activists said.

The Danish government itself acknowledged that the change may be incompatible with Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which protects the right to a family life, but argued that family members only have limited links to the country.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said family unity is a fundamental and important human right ensured by a number of regional and international laws ratified by Denmark.

Video: Denmark launches anti-migrant ad campaign

In its report on the legislation, it said the proposals were evidently aimed at conveying a message to make it less attractive to seek asylum in Denmark, and is a deeply concerning response to humanitarian needs.

It should be a priority to ensure that Syrians can join family members who are residing in European States, as a legal entry channel, the UNHCR report said.

This would also contribute to reducing the number of persons now having no other options for reaching safety but to embark on dangerous boat or risky overland journeys.

Family reunion laws allow the children, partners and spouses of those given protection to legally join them in Europe, with permission to stay for the same period.

Many of the men who have reached Italy and Greece this year have risked the treacherous smuggling routes and sea journeys alone while their families remain in Syria and other warzones, planning to gain family reunion permits so they can join them safely.

But Denmarks delay could force dependent wives and children to resort to smugglers instead, risking abuse, exploitation and drowning on overcrowded boats.

The UNHCR also said that family separations can have devastating consequences on the well-being of both adults and children, as well as damaging the integration process.

Amnesty International accused Denmark of forcing families to make an "impossible choice" between taking children and loved ones on potentially deadly journeys or leaving them behind in "the horrors of war".

To prolong the suffering of vulnerable people who have been ripped apart from their families by conflict or persecution is plain wrong, John Dalhuisen, the groups Europe and Central Asia Director said.

The mean-spirited vote in Danish Parliament seeks not only to pilfer the possessions refugees cling to, but also to needlessly lengthen their separation from their loved ones.

Andreas Kamm, from the Danish Refugee Council, said family reunification delays were very worrying and very inhumane, leaving vulnerable groups in conflict zones.

Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.

Jonas Christoffersen, the director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, accused Denmark of violating international law.

He told Al Jazeera: The right of refugees to be reunited with their family is protected by numerous international conventions ratified by Denmark.

We believe the government is overstepping international law by implementing this bill.

Denmarks new laws have also shortened residence permits from five years to two and restricted the conditions for obtaining the permanent right to stay.

Officials have been authorised to additionally consider integration potential in resettlement cases and increase administrative fees.

Denmark had already tightened its immigration laws last year, when it received 21,300 asylum applications, by reducing benefits for asylum seekers and stepping up efforts to deport those whose applications are rejected.
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The French government has been thrown into disarray by the resignation of its justice minister ahead of a debate over controversial laws to strip citizenship from convicted terrorists.

The constitutional reforms in the wake of the Paris attacks are popular among conservatives in France, but have proved increasingly divisive for its ruling socialist party.

Christiane Taubira, one of very few black women at the top of French politics and a devoted left-winger, has expressed reservations about the new law.

On Wednesday morning, she tweeted somewhat cryptically: Sometimes to resist is to remain, sometimes to resist is to leave.

President Francois Hollande announced her resignation shortly afterwards, just moments before the French parliament was due to take up the issue of the citizenship bill.

He said Ms Taubira would be replaced with immediate effect by Jean-Jacques Urvoas, widely regarded as more supportive of Mr Hollande and the centre-leaning Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Born in French Guiana on 2 February 1952, Ms Taubira was best known for championing legislation in parliament to legalise same-sex weddings in France.

Praise for her role in driving that change, she was nonetheless accused even by her own party of advocating too soft a touch on law and order  an issue which came to the fore in the wake of the shootings on 13 November which killed 130 people.

France faces new presidential and legislative elections next year, and French media had been talking up the possibility of a cabinet reshuffle before Ms Taubiras apparent protest.
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Russia has accused Germany of attempting to cover up the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl in Berlin.

On 11 January, the Russian-speaking girl disappeared in Marzahn-Hellersdorf and then reappeared the following day.

Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: It is clear that the girl certainly did not voluntarily disappear for 30 hours.

I hope that these migration problems do not lead to an attempt to cover up the reality for some domestic politically-correct reason, he said, according to Radio Free Europe.

In claims made by Russian television station Channel One, the girl was raped by a group of asylum seekers after being abducted on her way to school.

However, police in Germany said the girl was not abducted or raped, in a press release published earlier this month. Police are reportedly investigating two men for child abuse, according to the BBC.

The incident gained widespread attention after the Channel One report was shared on social media.

It has contributed to the growing backlash against migrants in Germany, sparking demonstrations involving around 700 people outside German Chancellor Angela Merkels office on Saturday.

It comes after more than 500 complaints were made by women who claimed they were assaulted by men on New Year s Eve in Cologne. It has since emerged that the perpetrators were from a migrant background . Failures on behalf of the police to call in reinforcements to deal with the situation have been blamed.

During the press conference, Mr Lavrov called on German authorities to deal with the allegation made by the young girl by saying he hoped the problems [were] not swept under the carpet.

I hope that therell be no repeat cases like [this].
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More than half of all migrants to Europe are motivated by economic reasons and are not fleeing war or persecution, the vice-president of the European Commission has said.

Dutch politician Frans Timmermans said the majority of migrants to Europe are from North African countries such as Morocco or Tunisia, where there is no conflict.

More than half of the people now coming to Europe come from countries where you can assume they have no reason whatsoever to ask for refugee status... more than half, 60 per cent, he told Dutch broadcaster NOS.

The refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 70 1 /70 The refugee crisis - in pictures The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Syrian refugee holding a baby in a lifetube swims towards the shore after their dinghy deflated some 100m away before reaching the Greek island of Lesbos The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A refugee raises a child into the air as Syrian and Afghan refugees are seen on and around a dinghy that deflated some 100m away before reaching the Greek island of Lesbos The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Syrian and Afghan refugees fall into the sea after their dinghy deflated some 100m away before reaching the Greek island of Lesbos The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A refugee cries as he holds a child on the Serbian side of the border with Hungary in Asotthalom Reuters The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees stand in front of a barrier at the border with Hungary near the village of Horgos, Serbia Reuters The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A refugee from Syria prays after arriving on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos aboard an inflatable dinghy across the Aegean Sea from from Turkey. Greece sent troops and police reinforcements to Lesbos after renewed clashes between police and migrants, the public broadcaster said, while Syrian refugees on the island were targeted with Molotov cocktail attacks The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Police try to stop refugees going under a fence to board a train at a station near Gevgelija, Macedonia. Several thousand refugees in Macedonia boarded trains to travel north after spending a night in a provisional camp. Macedonia has organised trains twice a day to the north border where they cross into Serbia to make their way to Hungary The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees push each other as they try to board a bus following their arrival onboard the Eleftherios Venizelos passenger ship at the port of Piraeus, near Athens, Greece The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees are welcomed by locals after their arrival at the main railway station in Frankfurt, Germany. Over 1,000 more refugees arrived in Germany to cheers and "welcome" signs, but calls grew for a European solution to its worst refugee crisis since World War II The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A young Syrian boy arrives on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing in a dinghy with other refugees from Turkey AP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees walk on the railway tracks between Bicske and Szar, some 40 kms west of Budapest, trying to reach Germany EPA The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Hungarian policemen stand by the family of refugees as they wanted to run away at the railway station in the town of Bicske, Hungary The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A family is arrested by local police after their local train coming from Budapest and heading to the Austrian border has been stopped in Bicske, west of the Hungarian capital The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A man is arrested by local police after his local train coming from Budapest and heading to the Austrian border has been stopped in Bicske, west of the Hungarian capital The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict More than 2,500 refugees have died trying to reach Europe this year and the struggle continues as they travel through the continent Getty Images The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees protest in front of a train at Bicske railway station. Hundreds of people, were stranded on a train in Hungary for a second, demanding passage to Germany in a standoff with riot police The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Syrian refugees arrive on the shores of Lesvos island Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Syrian refugees on the Greek Macedonian border Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees storm into a train at the Keleti train station as Hungarian police withdrew from the gates after two days of blocking their entry The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees storm into a train at the Keleti train station in Budapest The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees cross the border between the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, near the town of Gevgelija, Macedonia. The Gevgelija-Presevo journey is just a part of the journey that the refugees, the vast majority of them from Syria, are forced to make along the so-called Balkan corridor, which takes them from Turkey, across Greece, Macedonia and Serbia to Hungary, the gateway to the European Union, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A refugee helps up an exhausted fellow refugee as they cross the border between Macedonia and Greece, near the town of Gevgelija, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict People breaking through a police cordon and crossing the border between Macedonia and Greece, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees pass the border between Macedonia and Greece, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Macedonian policeman carries a child across the border between Macedonia and Greece, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Syrians sleep on railroad tracks waiting to be processed across the Macedonian border in Idomeni, Greece, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Czech police officer marks a refugee with a number after more than than 200 refugees were detained, mostly from Syria, on trains from Hungary and Austria at the railway station in Breclav, Czech Republic, September 2015 AP Photo, CTK/Igor Zehl The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A baby is lifted on to the Norwegian vessel Siem Pilot during a search-and-rescue mission off the Libyan coast, September 2015 AP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Budapest's main international railway station ordered an evacuation as hundreds of people tried to board trains to Austria and Germany, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict People wave their train tickets and lift up children outside the main Eastern Railway station in Budapest, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict People protest at the Eastern (Keleti) railway station of Budapest, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugee children sleep in the surrounding green area of the Keleti railway station in Budapest, September 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Syrians cross under a fence into Hungary at the border with Serbia, near Roszke, August 2015 Reuters The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees who have just crossed the border from Serbia into Hungary walk along a railway track that joins the two countries, August 2015 Getty Images The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Police arrest refugees at Cobham Services on the M25 in Surrey, August 2015 Twitter: @bigwheeluk The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Men hold a boy as they are stuck between Macedonian riot police officers and fellow refugees during a clash near the border train station of Idomeni, August 2015 AFP/Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Syrian father holds his children close as his arrives on the Greek Island of Kos, August 2015 Eyevine The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A tourist offers water to Iranian refugees as they arrive by paddling an engineless dinghy from the Turkish coast (seen in the background) at a beach on the Greek island of Kos, August 2015 Reuters The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Syrian holds his 30-day-old baby on an overcrowded train as they travel through Macedonia. Tens of thousands of refugees, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, use the Balkans route to get into the European Union, passing from Greece to Macedonia and Serbia and then to western Europe, August 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A man rests on a platform at the train station in Gevgelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, August 2015 Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees react after boarding the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) ship MV Phoenix some 20 miles (32 kilometres) off the coast of Libya. Some 118 refugees were rescued from a rubber dinghy off Libya. The Phoenix, manned by personnel from international non-governmental organisations Medecins san Frontiere (MSF) and MOAS, is the first privately funded vessel to operate in the Mediterranean, August 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Authorities are being overwhelmed as they try to fight off hundreds of refugees, prompting France to beef up its police presence, July 2015 AFP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict People escape from the French Police as they try to catch a train to reach England, July 2015 EPA The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A man jumps over a fence as he attempts to access the Channel Tunnel, in Calais, northern France, July 2015 PA/Thibault Camus The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Two men cling to the roof of a freight truck as it leaves the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone, July 2015 Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A man climbs a security fence of a Eurotunnel terminal in Coquelles near Calais, July 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Men help a man squeeze through a gap in a fence near the Eurotunnel terminal in Coquelles in Calais, July 2015 Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Desperate for entry to the EU, the group of people risked being washed away by the sea at Ventimiglia rocks, June 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Stranded refugees spend night on rocks - they were supplied with emergency blankets after a cold night next to the sea, June 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees climb in the back of a lorry on the A16 highway leading to the Eurotunnel in Calais, June 2015 Getty Images The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A police officer sprays tear gas to men trying to access the Channel Tunnel on the A16 highway in Calais, northern France, June 2015 PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Men jump out of a lorry after being discovered by French gendarmerie officers, June 2015 AP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A man sits under the trailer of a lorry, June 2015 AP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Belgian navy sailor passes life vests to refugees sitting in a rubber boat as they approach the Belgian Navy Vessel Godetia, June 2015 AP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict People on the Belgian Navy vessel Godetia after they were saved during a search and rescue mission in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast, June 2015 AP The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Iraqis wait as they are detained by Hungarian police after crossing the Hungarian-Serbian border illegally near the village of Asotthalom, Hungary, June 2015 Reuters The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Syrian refugees walking on train tracks through Macedonia on the Western Balkans migration route, after entering Europe through Greece, June 2015 Reuters The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A group of people huddle together during an operation to remove them from the Italian-French border in the Italian city of Ventimiglia. Italy and France engaged in a war of words as a standoff over hundreds of Africans offered a graphic illustration of Europe's migration crisis. Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano described images of refugees perched on rocks at the border town of Ventimiglia after being refused entry to France as a "punch in the face for Europe", June 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A man is carried by Italian police in Ventimiglia, Italy. Police reportedly removed refugees from under a railway bridge, June 2015 EPA The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict People queue after disembarking from the Royal Navy ship HMS 'Bulwark' upon their arrival in the port of Catania on the coast of Sicily, June 2015 GIOVANNI ISOLINO/AFP/Getty Images The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A Syrian child holds a drawing as he waits to disembark from Belgian Navy vessel Godetia at the Augusta port, Italy. Around 250 refugees from Syria arrived at the Sicilian harbour from a Damascus refugee camp, June 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A dinghy overcrowded with Afghan refugees arrived on a beach on the Greek island of Kos, May 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict An Afghan child is helped off a rib on the Greek island of Kos, May 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict An Afghan girl holds the hand of a woman as they arrive on a beach on the Greek island of Kos, after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece, May 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Refugees crossed part of the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece, May 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Afghan refugees arrive on a beach of Kos, May 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Rescuers help children to disembark in the Sicilian harbor of Pozzallo, Italy in April 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict A boat transporting refugees arrives in the port of Messina after a rescue operation at sea, April 2015 Getty The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Armed Forces of Malta personnel in protective clothing carry the body of a dead man off Italian coastguard ship Bruno Gregoretti as surviving refugees watch in Senglea, in Valletta's Grand Harbour, April 2015 The refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees fleeing conflict Rescued people talk to a member of the Malta Order after a fishing boat carrying refugees capsized off the Libyan coast, is brought ashore along with 23 others retreived by the Italian Coast Guard vessel Bruno Gregoretti at Boiler Wharf, Senglea in Malta, April 2015

His said his statement came after viewing new figures from EU border agency Frontex which have not yet been officially published.

Mr Timmermans also said that to ensure the support for genuine asylum seekers and refugees was available, economic migrants should be returned as quickly as possible, according to DutchNews.nl.

If the economic migrants were sent back, Mr Timmermans said, it would make a big difference to the care given to refugees fleeing conflict in countries such as Iraq and Syria.

Despite his remarks, Mr Timmermans maintained that for Europe to close its borders would be extremely risky and that there was no proof it would help ease the refugee crisis.

The statement comes at a time of changing attitudes to refugees in Europe. Denmark's parliament recently passed a controversial bill allowing refugees to the country to be stripped of their valuables worth over 10,000 Kroner (1,000) to pay for the costs of supporting them.

There is also growing uncertainty for the EU more generally, as a number of states have introduced temporary border controls to help control the flow of people into the continent.

However, there has recently been a push by member states for border controls to be extended to two years.
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Prime Minister David Cameron has branded Nigeria and Afghanistan "the two corrupt countries in the world" in a rare off-guard moment caught on camera.

His comments come as the UK prepapres to host to a major corruption conference in London on Friday.

But strictly speaking, Mr Cameron is only half right. Although Afghanistan comes third from bottom on Transparency International corruption index, Nigeria came in at 136th out of 168 countries.

Somalia and North Korea were named the most corrupt countries in the world for 2015, where open conflict or poverty have been exploited for manipulative officials personal gain. But even the cleanest countries are not corruption free, the research shows.

Northern Europe has scored well on the Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 with Denmark, Finland and Sweden topping the list for the cleanest countries in the world.

But despite their rankings, clean countries dealings overseas can leave a mark on their reputation, according to the report.

The index references the issues facing Sweden, where the Swedish-Finnish firm, which is 37 per cent owned by the Swedish state, is facing allegations that it paid millions of dollars in bribes in connection with its business in Uzbekistan. Banking has also remained an issue in Western Europe, with Deutsche Bank paying the largest Libor fine since the investigations began  a record $2.5bn  for its part in manipulating the Libor benchmark, while in Finland the former head of Helsinki polices anti-drug squad has been charged with running his own drug cartel.

While a handful of countries in Europe and Central Asia have improved, the general picture across this vast region is one of stagnation, said Anne Koch, Director for Europe and Central Asia.

Also very worrying is the marked deterioration in countries like Hungary, FYR of Macedonia, Spain and Turkey where were seeing corruption grow, while civil society space and democracy shrink. Corruption wont be tackled until laws and regulations are put into action and civil society and the media are genuinely free.

For the lowest scorers on the index such as Afghanistan, the scandals have been linked to conflict and seriously undermine efforts to sustain peace the report states. Last year the countrys ministry of defence reportedly paid an excess of $200m to fuel contractors as part of a kickback scheme using money destined for reconstruction, resulting in a number of senior ministry officials being fired.

The Americas have shown an improvement in the fight against corruption however, where there has been mass mobilisation of citizens in the wake of the Petrobras and La Linea scandals, leading to an improvement of scores in the region.

Its no surprise that Brazil  which faced its largest ever corruption scandal around Petrobras  is this years biggest index decliner in the Americas, yet there and elsewhere we saw corruption investigations against people who looked untouchable only 12 months ago, said Alejandro Salas, regional director for the Americas.

The challenge now is to tackle the underlying causes. The citizens who took to the streets demanded an end to corruption for good  only serious institutional reform will make that happen.
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Cases of the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus have been reported in Germany following confirmation a Danish tourist has also tested positive for the illness.

Authorities said on Wednesday the patient in Denmark is not the first Zika case in Europe, with confirmed cases in both Germany and Britain, according to Romit Jan from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm.

According to n-tv, multiple German travel returnees have been diagnosed with the virus, however the World Health Organisation says there have been two German cases of the virus in tourists returning to the country in December.

A WHO statement released on 21 January says: Between 4 and 12 January 2016, the National IHR Focal Point for Germany notified PAHO/WHO of two cases of ZIKA virus infection in German nationals who had returned from Haiti to Germany in late December."

WHO says samples from both patients were collected and sent for laboratory testing at the national reference centre for tropical diseases in Germany.

Battling the zika virus - in pictures Show all 19 1 /19 Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures A worker of the Salvadorean Ministry of Health fumigates a house in Soyapango, 6 kilometers from San Salvador, El Salvador. Salvadorean authorities have began a three days campaign of fumigation to reduce the presence of the mosquito that transmit the Zika virus. EPA/Oscar Rivera Battling the zika virus - in pictures A Health Ministry employee fumigates a home against the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the spread of the Zika virus in Soyapango, six km east of San Salvador. Health authorities have issued a national alert against the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, because of the link between the Zika virus and microcephaly and Guillain-BarrE Syndrome in foetuses. AFP PHOTO/Marvin RECINOSMarvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A pediatric infectologist examines a two-months-old baby, who has microcephaly, on 26 January 2016 in Recife, Brazil. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A woman walks through the fumes as Health Ministry employee fumigate against the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the spread of the Zika virus in Soyapango. Marvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A health ministry employee sprays to eliminate breeding sites of the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, which transmits diseases such as the dengue, chicunguna and Zica viruses, in a Tegucigalpa cemetery on January 21, 2016. The medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) recommended that women in the country avoid getting pregnant for the time being due to the presence of the Zika virus. If a pregnant woman is infected by the virus, the baby could be born with microcephaly. AFP PHOTO/Orlando SIERRA Battling the zika virus - in pictures A man walks away from his home with his son as health workers fumigates the Altos del Cerro neighbourhood as part of preventive measures against the Zika virus and other mosquito-borne diseases in Soyapango, El Salvador REUTERS/Jose Cabezas Battling the zika virus - in pictures A three-months-old, who has microcephaly, in Recife, Brazil. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A pregnant woman waits to be attended at the Maternal and Children's Hospital in Tegucigalpa. The medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) recommended that women in the country avoid getting pregnant for the time being due to the presence of the Zika virus. If a pregnant woman is infected by the virus, the baby could be born with microcephaly. ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures Army soldiers apply insect repellent as they prepare for a clean up operation against the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is a vector for transmitting the Zika virus in Sao Paulo, Brazil. AP Photo/Andre Penner Battling the zika virus - in pictures Workers disinfect the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro to fight the spread of the Zika virus Battling the zika virus - in pictures Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, measures the head of a 2-month-old baby with microcephaly in Recife Battling the zika virus - in pictures Mother Mylene Helena Ferreira cares for her son David Henrique Ferreira, 5 months, who has microcephaly, on January 25, 2016 in Recife, Brazil. In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures U.S. women who are pregnant from traveling to many South American countries Battling the zika virus - in pictures In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, examines a two-month-old baby with microcephaly on January 27, 2016 in Recife, Brazil Battling the zika virus - in pictures Washington Post Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures

While one of the cases was confirmed by both RT-PCR and serology, the other was confirmed only by serology.

Anhus University Hospital in Denmark said a patient was discovered to have the virus on Tuesday after running a fever, a headache and muscle aches.

The hospital did not release any further detail about the patient said there is little risk of it spreading in Denmark because the mosquito-carrying virus isnt found in the country.

Public Health England confirmed on Monday "a total of 6 cases have been diagnosed in UK travellers" returning from Colombia, Suriname and Guyana.

They said "a small number of cases have occurred through sexual transmission or by transmission from mother to foetus via the placenta" - the virus does not spread directly from person to person.

A Zika virus case was also confirmed in Sweden last summer, said Sara Rorbecker of the Swedish Public Health Agency.

She said the patient contracted the virus while traveling, adding there was nothing dramatic about the case.

Zika virus is not a notifiable disease in the European Union, meaning EU countries are not required to report cases to the ECDC. Therefore, there is wide variation on reporting by member states.

Officials warned on Monday only Canada and Chile would escape the spread of the virus as it extends its spread across the Americas, where thousands of people have been affected by the illness that poses a particular threat to pregnant women.

While Zika itself is not particularly dangerous to most people, there is growing evidence of a link between the virus in pregnant women and birth defects in their children.

There is no known antidote to the virus.
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A Danish national has tested positive for the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus after travelling to South and Central America, where thousands of people have been affected by the illness that poses a particular threat to pregnant women.

In a statement, the Aarhus University Hospital said the patient ran a fever, had a headache and muscle aches and was discovered as having the virus on Tuesday.

There hospital released no further details about the patient but it says that there is little risk of it spreading in Denmark because the mosquito carrying the virus isn't found in the country.

Danish broadcaster DR quoted Professor Lars Ostergaard from the university hospital as saying the case involved a young man. Professor Ostergaard said the patient was allowed to go home after doctors made sure that he was feeling well.

Officials warned on Monday that only Canada and Chile would escape the spread of the virus as it extends its spread across the Americas.

While Zika itself is not particularly dangerous to most people, there is growing evidence of a link between the virus in pregnant women and birth defects in their children.

Specifically, Brazil has experienced a massive growth in cases of microcephaly  a congenital disorder which sees the brain of the developing foetus failing to grow normally  at the same time as the spread of Zika.

Battling the zika virus - in pictures Show all 19 1 /19 Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures A worker of the Salvadorean Ministry of Health fumigates a house in Soyapango, 6 kilometers from San Salvador, El Salvador. Salvadorean authorities have began a three days campaign of fumigation to reduce the presence of the mosquito that transmit the Zika virus. EPA/Oscar Rivera Battling the zika virus - in pictures A Health Ministry employee fumigates a home against the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the spread of the Zika virus in Soyapango, six km east of San Salvador. Health authorities have issued a national alert against the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, because of the link between the Zika virus and microcephaly and Guillain-BarrE Syndrome in foetuses. AFP PHOTO/Marvin RECINOSMarvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A pediatric infectologist examines a two-months-old baby, who has microcephaly, on 26 January 2016 in Recife, Brazil. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A woman walks through the fumes as Health Ministry employee fumigate against the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the spread of the Zika virus in Soyapango. Marvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A health ministry employee sprays to eliminate breeding sites of the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, which transmits diseases such as the dengue, chicunguna and Zica viruses, in a Tegucigalpa cemetery on January 21, 2016. The medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) recommended that women in the country avoid getting pregnant for the time being due to the presence of the Zika virus. If a pregnant woman is infected by the virus, the baby could be born with microcephaly. AFP PHOTO/Orlando SIERRA Battling the zika virus - in pictures A man walks away from his home with his son as health workers fumigates the Altos del Cerro neighbourhood as part of preventive measures against the Zika virus and other mosquito-borne diseases in Soyapango, El Salvador REUTERS/Jose Cabezas Battling the zika virus - in pictures A three-months-old, who has microcephaly, in Recife, Brazil. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures A pregnant woman waits to be attended at the Maternal and Children's Hospital in Tegucigalpa. The medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) recommended that women in the country avoid getting pregnant for the time being due to the presence of the Zika virus. If a pregnant woman is infected by the virus, the baby could be born with microcephaly. ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures Army soldiers apply insect repellent as they prepare for a clean up operation against the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is a vector for transmitting the Zika virus in Sao Paulo, Brazil. AP Photo/Andre Penner Battling the zika virus - in pictures Workers disinfect the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro to fight the spread of the Zika virus Battling the zika virus - in pictures Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, measures the head of a 2-month-old baby with microcephaly in Recife Battling the zika virus - in pictures Mother Mylene Helena Ferreira cares for her son David Henrique Ferreira, 5 months, who has microcephaly, on January 25, 2016 in Recife, Brazil. In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures U.S. women who are pregnant from traveling to many South American countries Battling the zika virus - in pictures In the last four months, authorities have recorded close to 4,000 cases in Brazil in which the mosquito-borne Zika virus may have led to microcephaly in infants. Getty Images Battling the zika virus - in pictures Dr. Vanessa Van Der Linden, the neuro-pediatrician who first recognized the microcephaly crisis in Brazil, examines a two-month-old baby with microcephaly on January 27, 2016 in Recife, Brazil Battling the zika virus - in pictures Washington Post Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures Battling the zika virus - in pictures

Normally the country reports about 200 microcephaly births a year, but since last October, Brazil has seen nearly 4,000 reported cases of newborns with microcephaly. In the poorer region of Pernambuco in the country's north-east, between 1 and 2 per cent of newborns now have microcephaly.

At the weekend, Public Health England confirmed that three cases of Zika virus had been found in the UK, in travellers returning from Colombia, Suriname and Guyana.

Though the virus does not spread directly from person to person, Public Health England said "a small number of cases have occurred through sexual transmission or by transmission from mother to foetus via the placenta".

Countries in the affected region are warning women to postpone pregnancy if possible until more is known about the outbreak, while El Salvador is telling women to put off getting pregnant until 2018. Expectant mothers are also being told to stay away from this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

There is no known antidote to the virus.
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The Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann pleaded for his life in a letter to the Israeli President two days before his execution, newly released documents show. He wrote that he had been forced to serve as an instrument of more powerful leaders whom, he said, bore the real responsibility for the Holocaust.

The handwritten letter in German to President Yitshak Ben-Zvi, dated 29 May 1962, was released to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 55th anniversary of the trial in Jerusalem.

Eichmann oversaw the concentration of millions of Eastern European Jews into ghettoes and their transport together with that of Jews from other parts of Europe to the death camps. Yet, in his letter, as in his trial, he insisted he bore no responsibility. I detest as the greatest of crimes the horrors which were perpetrated against the Jews and think it right that the initiators... will stand trial, he wrote.

Notwithstanding, there is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders. I was not a responsible leader and as such do not feel myself guilty, he added. Eichmann had been abducted by Israeli intelligence agents from Argentina in 1960, where he was living as a fugitive under an alias.

In his letter asking for clemency, among a number of other original documents released from the trial, Eichmann maintained that he was not of high enough rank to be considered a persecutor in the pursuit of Jews and that it was wrong to view him as the driving, zealous force in this respect. Had he been so, he argued, he would have been promoted and received other awards.

 PM meets Holocaust survivors

He even claimed that he had put in for a transfer from his job after he witnessed the horror being perpetrated.

It is also incorrect that I was never influenced by human emotions. Specifically under the impression of the unspeakable horrors that I witnessed, I immediately requested a transfer to a different post, he wrote. Eichmann added that he should be given credit for revealing of my own will during the police investigation horrors which had been until then unknown in order to help establish the indisputable truth.

Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Show all 29 1 /29 Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Auschwitz death camp survivor Zofia Wareluk, 70, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Wareluk was born in Auschwitz two weeks before the camp was liberated. Her mother was sent to Auschwitz when she was four months pregnant. As the liberation of Auschwitz approaches its 70th anniversary this month, Reuters photographers took portraits of now elderly survivors. About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp which has became a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two, which ravaged Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet Red Army troops on January 27, 1945 and about 200,000 camp inmates survived. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Auschwitz death camp survivor Barbara Doniecka, 80, who was registered with camp number 86341, poses for a photo in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Doniecka was 12-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising when she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother. As the liberation of Auschwitz approaches its 70th anniversary this month, Reuters photographers took portraits of now elderly survivors. About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp which has became a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two, which ravaged Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet Red Army troops on January 27, 1945 and about 200,000 camp inmates survived REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Doniecka holds up wartime photo of herself. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Auschwitz death camp survivor Imre Varsanyi, 86, holds up a photo of fellow survivors during World War Two, as he poses for a portrait in Budapest January 12, 2015. Varsanyi was 14-years-old when he and his family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was the only member of his family to survive. After the war Varsanyi did not talk about Auschwitz for 60 years because he felt ashamed of having survived. As the liberation of Auschwitz approaches its 70th anniversary this month, Reuters photographers took portraits of now elderly survivors. About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp which has became a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two, which ravaged Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet Red Army troops on January 27, 1945 and about 200,000 camp inmates survived. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Auschwitz death camp survivor Jerzy Ulatowski, 83, who was registered with camp number 192823, poses for a photo in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Ulatowski was taken by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau when he was 13-years-old. In January 1945 he managed to escape with his family, as there was a lack of power in the barbed wire surrounding the camp. As the liberation of Auschwitz approaches its 70th anniversary this month, Reuters photographers took portraits of now elderly survivors. About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp which has became a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two, which ravaged Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet Red Army troops on January 27, 1945 and about 200,000 camp inmates survived. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Auschwitz death camp survivor Erzsebet Brodt, 89, poses for a portrait in Budapest January 12, 2015. Brodt was 17-years-old when she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau along with her family. Remembering the journey to the camp she said that those who were "sick or about to give birth were forced out and put into one wagon. When the wagon was opened in Auschwitz we saw that everyone was dead inside." As the liberation of Auschwitz approaches its 70th anniversary this month, Reuters photographers took portraits of now elderly survivors. About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp which has became a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two, which ravaged Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet Red Army troops on January 27, 1945 and about 200,000 camp inmates survived. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Brodt holds a picture of her family, who were killed in the concentration camp during World War Two. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Jacek Nadolny, 77, who was registered with camp number 192685, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 7, 2015. Nadolny was seven during the Warsaw Uprising, when he was sent with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau by train. In January 1945 the family was moved to a labour camp in Berlin. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Nadolny holds up a wartime photo of his family. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Laszlo Bernath, 87, poses for a portrait in Budapest January 12, 2015. Bernath credits his father being a practical man with his survival of Auschwitz. He was 15 when they were taken but his father told him to lie about his age so that they would not be separated. Even whilst in the camp, Bernath had no idea about the gas chambers. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Bernath holds up a picture of his family, who were all killed in the concentration camp during World War Two. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Janina Reklajtis, 80, who was registered with camp number 83043, holds a photo of herself taken during the war as she poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 7, 2015. Reklajtis was 12-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising when she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were sent to a labour camp in Berlin in January 1945 and were kept there until they were liberated. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Danuta Bogdaniuk-Bogucka (maiden name Kaminska), 80, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 5, 2015. Bogdaniuk-Bogucka was 10-years-old when she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp with her mother. Bogdaniuk-Bogucka was part of Josef Mengele's experiments when she was in Auschwitz. After the war she met her mother again and they discovered they had both been at Ravensbruck camp at the same time, but they had not realised this. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Maria Stroinska, 82, gestures as she poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Stroinska was 12-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising when she and her sister were sent from their house to a camp in Pruszkow before she was moved alone by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Stroinska holds a family photo taken before the war. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Janos Forgacs, 87, holds a document as he poses for a portrait in Budapest January 12, 2015. Forgacs recalls that he was in a group transported to a camp in a cattle wagon, with the windows sealed with barbed wire. An military officer told them to hand over their belongings, telling them they would not need them anymore. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Bogdan Bartnikowski, 82, who was registered with camp number 192731, poses for a portrait in Warsaw December 18, 2014. Bartnikowski was 12-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising, when he and his mother were sent to Auschwitz Birkenau camp. They were moved between camps several times. After the war Bartnikowski worked as a pilot and then became a journalist and writer. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Bartnikowski holds a family photograph. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Henryk Duszyk, 80, who was registered with camp number 192692, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Duszyk was 10-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising in August, 1944. He was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his father, brother and stepmother. The family were separated and Duszyk only saw his father once more before he was killed at the camp. Duszyk, his brother and stepmother were kept at Auschwitz-Birkenau until the camp was liberated. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Halina Brzozowska, 82, who was registered with camp number 86356, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Brzozowska was 12-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising when her family were sent to a camp in Pruszkow, she and her 6-year-old sister were then moved by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Brzozowska said that it was hard to say what had happened to them, that they were taken from their homes, family and lost their childhood. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Brzozowska holds a picture of herself which was taken during the war. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Lajos Erdelyi, 87, holds a drawing made by a campmate as he poses for a portrait in Budapest on January 13, 2015. Erdelyi was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 and was later moved to another camp. When he was freed he weighed under 30kg, but tried to walk home. He collapsed, and was taken to a hospital by a farmer. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Stefan Sot, 83, who was registered with camp number 192705, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 5, 2015. Sot was 13-years-old during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, when he was sent from his home to a camp in Pruszkow prior to being sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. He was later moved to a labour sub-camp, where he worked in a kitchen for S.S. officers. After the war he worked as a typesetter at a printing house. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Sot holds a picture of himself taken during the war. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Elzbieta Sobczynska (maiden name Gremblicka), 80, who was registered with camp number 85536, gestures as she poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 7, 2015. During the Warsaw Uprising, when Sobczynska was 10-years-old, she was sent with her mother and brother from their home to a camp in Pruszkow and then moved by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There they were separated into blocks for woman, girls and boys. Sobczynska said that she was robbed of her childhood, and lost the chance to experience a different kind of life. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Sobczynska holds her father's watch, which was kept by her brother while they were in the camp. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Eva Fahidi, 90, holds a picture of her family, who were all killed in the concentration camp during World War Two, as she poses for a portrait in Budapest January 12, 2015. Fahidi was 18 in 1944 when she and her family were moved from Debrecen to Auschwitz-Birkenau. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Jadwiga Bogucka (maiden name Regulska), 89, who was registered with camp number 86356, poses for a portrait in Warsaw January 12, 2015. During the Warsaw Uprising in August, 1944, when Bogucka was 19, she and her mother were sent from their house to a camp in Pruszkow and then moved on August 12, 1944 by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Beautiful portraits of survival show Auschwitz prisoners 70 years later Auschwitz survivors, 70 years on Bogucka holds a picture of herself from 1944. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Eichmanns five siblings, Emil Eichmann, Irmgard Molnar, Otto Eichmann, Frederick Eichmann and Robert Eichmann also penned an appeal to President Ben-Zvi. Being acquainted with our brothers nature, his education and the position of our family, we can say with conviction that the impulses of our brother do not conflict with the ethical principles of social order, they wrote. It is only out of an obligation to his oath as an officer that he felt obliged to follow the rule and regulations set out by the countrys leadership at the time, that forced him into a situation that was impossible to face.

Recommended Read more Pressure grows on Germany to open its files on Eichmann

Israels President, Reuven Rivlin, presented the batch of documents during an event at his official residence that was attended by Holocaust survivors and people who played a role in the Eichmann case. Not a moment of kindness was given to those who suffered Eichmanns evil, Mr Rivlin said in a statement. Eichmanns application for amnesty revealed here today proves that Eichmann and his family recognised that in the state of Israel, a murderer such as Eichmann would be convicted and that justice would be done.

Eichmann was hanged on 31 May 1962 and then cremated. He remains the only person judicially executed by the Jewish state.
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Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General has been accused of encouraging terror by Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking at the UN Security Council, Mr Ban said it was human nature for oppressed peoples to react to occupation, adding that a recent wave of attacks was driven by a "profound sense of alienation and despair" among some Palestinians.

Recommended Read more Israel plans to expel families of Palestinian assailants to Gaza Strip

"Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process," he said. "As oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism."

Since October, more than 155 Palestinians and 28 Israelis have died in violence and Mr Ban also criticised the recent stabbings of Israelis by Palestinians.

Israels commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state was cast into doubt by its settlement building programme, said Mr Ban.

But Mr Netanyahu called the Palestinians murderers who do not want to build a state.

They want to destroy a state and they say it out loud," he said in a statement. "They do not murder for peace and they do not murder for human rights.

He added that the comments of the UN Secretary General encourage terror. There is no justification for terror."
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Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, is a greater threat to Europe and the US in the long term than Isis, according to a new report by the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute.

The report's key findings state: "Jabhat al-Nusra poses one of the most significant long-term threats of any Salafi-jihadi group."

"Its defeat and destruction must be one of the highest priorities of any strategy to defend the United States and Europe from al-Qaeda attacks."

The report argues Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra attacks could threaten the global economy and provoke "Western societies to impose severe controls on... freedoms and civil liberties".

Fighters loyal to Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies smash a statue of the late Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, father of current President Bashar al-Assad, in the Syrian city of Idlib (AFP/Getty)

Fred Kagan, one of the authors of the report says Jabhat al-Nusra has made a tactical decision not to attack the West for the time being.

"While Isis is flashier... both represent an existential threat, both wish to attack the homeland, both seek the mobilisation of Muslim communities against the West," he said.

He added: "Al-Nusra is quietly intertwining itself with the Syrian population and Syrian opposition... They are waiting in the wings to pick up the mantle of global jihad once Isis falls."

The report describes how Jabhat al-Nusra has established an extensive network of partnerships with local opposition affiliates which have become fiercely loyal to the organisation.

Jabhat al-Nusra militia group emerged during the early days of the Syrian civil war in 2011, with the aim of establishing an Islamic State in the region.

It recently seized two of Syria's most prominent activists in a raid on their opposition radio station.
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A government minister has urged Saudi Arabia to do a better job of trumpeting its human rights successes during an official visit to the country, less than a month after it carried out the mass execution of 47 people.

Tobias Ellwood, the Foreign Office minister for the Middle East, made the comments on Monday as he and other British delegates addressed Saudi Arabias National Society for Human Rights in the capital Riyadh, The Independent understands.

Leading human rights organisations described Mr Ellwoods remarks as astonishing, pointing out that Saudi Arabia was currently presiding over a surge in executions and engaging in a brutal military campaign in Yemen that may be breaking international laws.

Recommended Read more Cameron urged to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia over Yemen fears

During the visit, which was not publicised by the Foreign Office, Mr Ellwood was told that Saudi Arabia had introduced a series of reforms, such as allowing women to vote in municipal elections.

In response, he told his hosts that they needed to improve the way they promoted their human rights successes, according to people present at the meeting.

Accounts of the meeting that appeared in three Saudi media outlets claimed that Mr Ellwood went even further, saying that people in Britain were unaware of the notable progress made on human rights by the Saudi regime.

Tobias Ellwood The Foreign Offices current Minister for the Middle East has a suitably international background. Born in New York, the 49-year-old dual British-American national was educated in Bonn and Vienna while his parents were working for the UN. A qualified pilot, Mr Ellwood also spent five years in the Army with the Royal Green Jackets. He left as a Captain but is still a reservist. He was first elected MP for Bournemouth East in 2005. Last year he told Ipsa, the House of Commons expenses watchdog, that a 10 per cent pay rise for MPs was well overdue.

An article in the daily newspaper Al Watan read: Tobias Ellwood revealed the ignorance of the British to the notable progress in Saudi Arabia in the field of human rights, confirming throughout the visit of a British FCO delegation... that he had expressed his opinion regarding the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia before the British Parliament, and that the notable progress in this area has been obscured.

However, a Foreign Office spokesman strongly denied that Mr Ellwood had used those words. We do not recognise these remarks, he said. Mr Ellwood raised our human rights concerns in all of his meetings in Riyadh... The Government will continue to raise our concerns in public and private.

The minister was very clear that despite some recent incremental progress  such as Decembers municipal elections... in which women were allowed to stand and vote in  further progress still needed to be made. A press release issued by the National Society for Human Rights said Mr Ellwood had been joined at the private meeting by Simon Collis, the British Ambassador, who stressed the importance of creating partnerships between human rights organisations in the two countries.

 Cameron on arms trading with Saudi Arabia.mp4

The chairman of the society, Dr Mofleh bin Rabiean Qahtani, told Mr Ellwood he was concerned that some high profile individual cases were being exploited, generalised and circulated in order to discredit Saudi Arabias reputation, the press release said.

Recent cases which have drawn international condemnation include that of Raif Badawi, the liberal writer sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for promoting free speech, and Ali al-Nimr, who was sentenced to death at the age of 17 for taking part in a pro-democracy protest.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

Mr Nimrs uncle, the Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, was among 47 people killed by Saudi Arabia earlier this month as part of the countrys biggest mass execution for more than 30 years. It has since emerged that two of those killed were minors at the time they were arrested.

Recommended Read more Son of Sheikh Nimr calls on Cameron to intervene and save his cousin

Human rights groups have criticised Mr Ellwoods comments. As Tobias Ellwood must surely realise, theres one very easy way for Saudi Arabia to gain a better human rights reputation  and thats by genuinely reversing the ongoing crackdown, said Amnesty International UKs head of policy and government affairs Allan Hogarth.

Saudi Arabia needs to release prisoners of conscience... to end rampant executions... and to ensure that the rights of women and repressed groups are properly respected.

Maya Foa, of the human rights organisation Reprieve, added: These comments are astonishing. The Saudi authorities have a bad reputation on human rights because of their appalling human rights record  not because of bad PR.

Mr Ellwood told MPs earlier this month that Saudi Arabia was making small progress on human rights, but added that the Government still had serious concerns.
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A Turkish ultra-nationalist who allegedly killed a Russian pilot is being hunted by the Kremlins forces in Syria.

Alparslan Celik  who claimed to have attacked the pilots of an Su-24 fighter shot down by Turkey in November  was reportedly being targeted in the province of Latakia after a string of gains by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

With the aid of Russian air power and local militias, the Syrian military has captured a series of rebel-held towns in the province, which shares a border with Turkey.

The major push comes ahead of talks to end the Syrian conflict due to begin in Geneva on Friday and has triggered growing concern in Turkey at the plight of ethnic Turkmens, whose brigades are suffering heavy losses.

Russian media said that Mr Celik, a Turkish citizen who has been fighting alongside Turkmen rebels, was likely to be hiding in the town of Rabia, which fell from opposition hands at the weekend.

Though he originally claimed to have killed both pilots of the Russian jet, it later emerged that one survived and was rescued.

He subsequently said that Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Peshkov deserved to die, prompting the Russian foreign ministry to demand his arrest. Mr Celik then taunted Moscow with a jibe that he had yet to be killed by the dust and smoke from your bombs. However, in a statement published by the Turkish newspaper Vatan, he conceded that rebels were struggling to contend with air strikes that have been pounding the region.

Syrian government forces in Rabia on Wednesday (Reuters)

Russia and Turkey have supported opposing sides in the Syria conflict since its outset in 2011, but the downing of a Russian plane by the Turkish air force sent relations plummeting to a new low.

Tensions have been aggravated by Turkeys growing alarm at Russian-backed gains by Syrian government forces in Syria, which threaten opposition supply lines and could force Turkey to share more of its border with President Assad. The area is populated by several groups including Turkmen, an ethnic minority whose members speak Turkish and whose rebel brigades have received support from Ankara. Their cause has been taken up by Turkish nationalists such as Mr Celik.

 Russian jet downed

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erodgan, has repeatedly warned the Kremlin against targeting our Turkmen brothers in the region. Their plight was on the agenda for Wednesday's national security meeting. Turkish media has warned that the Turkmen community is facing ethnic cleansing of villages in Latakia in an effort to turn the area into an Assad stronghold. Dr Kerem Kinik of the Turkish Red Crescent told The Independent that the situation in the province was very fragile as heavy Russian air strikes and fierce fighting continued. The rebels were losing territory, he said.

He and other local sources said the majority of civilians had fled Turkmen villages in the region known as Bayirbucak, but that 5,000 to 6,000 Turkmen civilians were living in difficult conditions in camps near the Syrian border.

The stand-off between Russia and Turkey has complicated the already messy efforts to hold peace talks to end the Syrian conflict, which will soon enter its sixth year.

It remained unclear whether the main Western-backed opposition delegation would even turn up for the start of the United Nations negotiations. The group says it will not talk with the Assad government while rebel-held areas are being bombed and besieged.

As night fell the group said that it was seeking urgent clarification from the UN over its demands.

Mr Rocket Launcher: An explosive name

A Turkish man called Rocket Launcher has described the challenges of his unusual name. The businessman is called Roket Atar, which means rocket thrower or rocket launcher. Mr Atar, 45, whose company makes baby products, said his father chose the name after it was suggested by a friend during military service.

Many people call me and want to find out whether my name is real, he told the Anadolu news agency. His only negative experience came after 9/11 when he applied for a German visa. Fearing his name was a coded message, a special team vetted him. They were relieved to learn it was his real name, but still refused him a visa.

Laura Pitel
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A tourist has been escorted from a plane by security officials after allegedly opening an emergency exit door just for fun, seconds after landing.

The Jet Airways passenger purportedly explained his glib reasoning to the plane's cabin crew and was later taken to a local police station by security forces.

The man, identified as a German tourist by local media, had just landed after a two-and-a-half hour flight from Abu Dhabi to Mumbai on Sunday when the reckless urge is said to have come over him.

He was reportedly banned from boarding a connecting Jet Airways flight from Mumbais Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport to Delhi, according to local news site Mid-Day.

No damage to the Boeing 737-800 or harm to any of the other passengers on board is believed to have occurred during the incident.

The plane is understood to have been parked when the door was opened. It remains unclear which of the plane's emergency exits was involved.

A Jet Airways spokesperson said: On January 24, 2016, a guest, who travelled from Abu Dhabi to Mumbai by Jet Airways flight 9W 585, opened the emergency exit after the aircraft had parked at the bay at the Mumbai airport. The matter was reported to the security agencies.

Jet Airways did not give any further information about the passengers identity or say whether the cabin crew had disarmed the planes doors when the incident took place.

According to Mid-Day, a further passenger was arrested on another Jet Airways flight on the same day for smoking in the toilet of a plane travelling from Mumbai to Singapore.

An airline official reportedly said a man "started smoking near the lavatory and was noticed by his co-passengers, who informed the crew members, who then asked him to put out the cigarette immediately.
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I blame Jeremy Corbyn. He has made class war fashionable again, and in his own backyard the revolutionary forces are gathering. The barricades are manned, and the first shots are being fired across the class divide. Eat the Rich! Or at least stop them turning on our lumiere show This is a story of such trivial importance, but yet it says something about Britain in the early 21st century.

Acland Burghley is a comprehensive school in the Tufnell Park area of north London (the heart of Mr Corbyns constituency) and, as part a programme of events to celebrate its 50th anniversary, it has organised a light show that will illuminate the schools brutalist facade.

So far, so parochial. The headmaster of Acland Burghley, casting around for a celebrity to open the display, alighted (so to speak) on the actor Damian Lewis, who lives in the area. The star of Homeland was happy to do his bit for the community and agreed to flick the switch. But this is where the story takes a disquieting turn.

Some former pupils of the school took exception to Lewis, because he was educated at Eton. They say it is wholly inappropriate for a man educated at an establishment that represents the reproduction of privilege and inequality in the UK should be given a lead role at such a demotic urban comprehensive.

And so, in the way of the modern world, they launched an online petition and a hashtag (#realburghley) to gather support, demanding that Lewis should be barred from the event. They have urged that the school keep it real, and should ask one of its former students  such as the pop star Ms Dynamite, or her brother, the rapper Akala  to perform the ceremonial duties.

The headmaster, Nicholas John, was commendably unbowed in the face of a nascent digital protest  to which the disinterested and the politically motivated have attached themselves. Damian Lewis very kindly agreed to open the light show, said Mr John, to give up an evening of his time. The school he went to is of no consequence.

That assertion, of course, is not quite true. The school Damian Lewis went to is of considerable consequence. I have encountered quite a few Old Etonians in the course of my career, and whatever scholastic advantages Eton offers, it cauterises its pupils with a confidence that gives them a distinct advantage over those of us who are closer to Acland Burghley on the educational spectrum.

That, however, is not the point. On the narrow question of whether Lewis is well cast for this job, Mr John is right: the actors background is of no significance. But we live in a trigger-happy world as far as connecting outrage is concerned. And, with a few clicks and keyboard strokes, a fully fledged protest is off and running.

The rise of Mr Corbyn, and the rhetoric he has inspired, has quite correctly put the serious and growing inequalities in British society high on the political agenda. There are so many reasons to feel angry, and social mobility is indeed one of them.

A recent study revealed that a young person from a middle-class background is 20 times more likely to get a professional job than a contemporary from a working-class background.

Thats worth manning the barricades for, rather than the nonsensical posturing over an actors bona fides to switch on a light show.
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I wrote on Sunday about the Conservative leadership election, and said that I didn't see how George Osborne was going to stop Boris Johnson.

Naturally, the state of the competition between the two is more complicated. One piece of information for which I didn't have space is the betting market for the next Conservative leader. This morning, it gave Osborne a 31 per cent chance, with Johnson on 22 per cent. That seems to mark Johnson's chances down heavily, although it is interesting that there has been a two-point swing in his favour since Saturday. But it also suggests a 47 per cent chance that David Cameron's successor will be Someone Else.

Maybe that is right, because despite the fake certainty of my headline a lot could happen between now and the leadership election, which may not be for three and a half years yet. But I still cannot see who would make it to the final two apart from Osborne and Johnson. It is not as if Tory MPs are likely to put someone they don't really want on the ballot paper to "widen the debate". The other names that attracted more than 2 per cent support from party members in the Conservative Home poll in November were Sajid Javid (17%), Theresa May (16%), Liam Fox (12%) and Michael Gove (8%), and I don't think it's any of them. Fox and Gove weren't even offered as possibles in the YouGov poll of party members in October.

So let me add some more weights to the scales of an Osborne-Johnson contest. The economy could be a problem for the Chancellor. If growth stutters, he will get the blame while Johnson floats free. It may be that the subtext of the Cameron-Osborne theme of economic security and national security is partly aimed at Boris. People want a prime minister who makes them feel safe, as an astute Labour MP said to me.

Then there is the effect on the Tories of the state of the Labour Party, currently not presenting a formidable threat at the 2020 election. That could work both ways. In Osborne's favour, party members won't feel that they have to choose the candidate with proven broad appeal to Labour voters. On the other hand, if Johnson is seen as the riskier candidate, Labour's abdication means that Tories may feel they can take a risk.

Overall, I think Johnson has a better chance than the bookies give him.

 Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times yesterday disagreed with "a commentator who has seen political sensations flicker brightly and fizzle out" (I think he was calling me old) who asserted recently that UKIP is finished. His is an outstanding column, making the point that Labour has moved away from the working class:

New Labour was always misread as a middle-class takeover of a working-class movement. It was something close to the opposite. By hardening its line on crime and defence, by cloaking it unsqueamishly in the British flag, by taking school standards and welfare abuse seriously, Tony Blair returned a party captured by the whims of the Brahmin left to actual working people. ...

Ukip has a future as long as Labour is run by people who embrace everything about the working classes apart from what they say, do and think.

 And finally, thanks to Nick Harvey for this:

Son: Where do you find giant snails?

Me: Hang on. [Googles.] Originally from Kenya, the Achatina Fulica now...

Son [sadly]: Giants' fingers.
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In September 1980, the MV Derbyshire, a bulk carrier with 42 crew members, two wives and 157,000 tonnes of iron ore on board, disappeared without trace in a typhoon in the South China Seas. It was the biggest British registered merchant ship ever to have been lost at sea. Unable to find it, the wreck commission reached a convenient conclusion that the Derbyshire had been overwhelmed by the forces of nature.

The bereaved families campaigned for a formal investigation based on evidence to get to the truth about what really happened, by the Independent Reviewer of Counter Terrorism Legislation, but the Government refused. Worse still, suggestions were made that negligence by the crew was responsible for the wreck.

It took the bereaved families 20 years to discover the truth that flaws in the design of the carrier were responsible. Paul Lambert of the Derbyshire Families Association has described the families quest for truth as like being outside a glass bubble, seeing the official response to the disaster going on inside and knowing that response was getting it wrong; and then trying to tell them they were getting it wrong but being ignored because the families were not privileged to be inside the dome.

As the Hillsborough inquests enter their final weeks, the story of that tragedy has uncanny parallels with that of the Derbyshire. Once again it took two decades of dignified, indomitable campaigning by the families to discover what really happened; two decades of campaigning against official indifference and smears against the victims.

So many families bereaved in other public disasters still remain excluded from official processes, with the truth about what happened to their loved ones still concealed from them. The Hillsborough Panel report revealed how and why bereaved families feel so alienated from official processes for responding to public disasters. After that report, its clear how the experience of bereaved families can illuminate what happened in a disaster and reveal flaws in the official response.

Yet the progress made finally by the Hillsborough families might so easily never have happened. When, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, the call was again made to release all the documents, the consensus within Westminster and Whitehall was that all the documents that could possibly be released should be. Not all the documents, just those that could be. Data protection legislation meant that the crucial 1 per cent of documents the families most wanted to see might not have been released.

Its not that the consensus within Westminster and Whitehall wasn't sympathetic to the families. It was, but it was felt that nothing would bring closure for them and so their desire for the truth should not be allowed to compromise other public policy objectives.

The Hillsborough Panel was devised as a way around all the institutional and legal obstacles in Whitehall that were blocking the way to the truth. My Private Members Bill, which receives its second reading in the Lords on Friday, is based on the experience of that Panel and is designed to try to provide better support for families bereaved in public disasters.

The Bill is founded on the principle that the state serves the people, not the other way round. It sets out not to replace the existing system of responding to public disasters, such as inquests and public inquiries  they will clearly have a continuing role to play to ensure any overarching public interest is protected  but rather to augment it to protect better the interests of the bereaved.

It will set up a government-funded but independent Public Advocate (modelled institutionally on the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation) to act for bereaved families, if they request it, and support them through official processes. It will also give the advocate the power to set up a review panel along the lines of the Hillsborough Panel to secure transparency. To ensure the government of the day will not be able to ignore the Advocates work, there would be an annual report issued to Parliament.

Westminster and Whitehall have too often forgotten that their primary duty is not to serve some abstract conception of state interest but the needs of those most in need. In the case of public disasters such as Hillsborough that means the interests of the bereaved should be given greater priority. That is what the Public Advocate Bill is intended to achieve.

Lord Michael Wills is a Labour Peer and former Justice Minister
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I was 10 years old when my whole life changed. I was living with my grandparents and the Nazis forced all of us into the odz Ghetto. My grandfather died of starvation soon after  he was very religious and refused to eat the non-Kosher food. My grandmother and I were alone. I no longer went to school, I worked in a factory. My childhood was over.

Two years after we arrived in the Ghetto, there was a round-up and I was put on a lorry to be deported. Looking around, I saw that I was surrounded by children, elderly and disabled people and I knew that I had to get off the lorry. By some miracle, the guards in the yard werent looking and I managed to jump off.

I stayed working in the Ghettos metal factory until one day we were all put on cattle trucks and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I cant explain the sights, smells and sounds of that place. To this day, I will never understand how the commandants could do such horrible things and go home and have dinner with their families in the evening. From Auschwitz-Birkenau I was sent to Stutthof concentration camp, and then a forced march to Neustadt in Germany. I was liberated by British troops and immediately my friends and I set about looking for food after so many years of hunger.

I left school at the age of 10, but now at the age of 86 I go into schools with the Holocaust Educational Trust to teach young people. I tell my story, the story of a Holocaust survivor, up and down the country. I am so impressed by the way these young people listen intently, and ask so many questions. They are interested, they want to know more. There is a lot of bad press about young people now, but I have spent the last 25 years speaking to children, and I think we need to hear more about their potential.

One thing that these students often ask is whether I hate the Germans. I am always confused by this question. How could I hate someone for something their grandparent or great-grandparent did? But I think the young people I speak to leave my talk understanding something even bigger  I dont hate anyone. And they take this message home with them. I get letters every week from students who have gone away and learned more after my talk, or from young people who have spoken to their parents differently because hearing me speak about growing up alone made them realise how precious their lives were.

At the age of 10, my life was taken from me. My father had run away in 1939 to escape the Nazis, I never learnt what happened to him. My grandfather died of starvation. My grandmother died in Theresienstadt concentration camp the day it was liberated. From the day we entered the ghetto she never knew one single day as a free woman.

But despite all of this, by some miracle I survived. I came to the UK in 1947 and was reunited with my mother, who had spent the war here. Soon after, I was reunited with a group of other child survivors I knew from the camps  we call ourselves the Boys to this day. And they are like my family. And I had my own family  a beautiful wife, two children, 6 grandchildren and even a great grandchild. Hitler didnt win. But if I spend the rest of my life hating, I wont win either. I survived, and I will keep telling my story as long as I can, to make sure that young people always know what happened to us. We must never give up, and we must never stop teaching young people about the dangers of hatred.

Zigi Shipper speak in schools through the Holocaust Educational Trusts Outreach Programme. To find out more, visit www.het.org.uk
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Even if your assessment of Corbyns Labour Party is accurate (Dont shoot me if I say Corbyns Labour really isnt working, Letter from the Editor, 23 January) have you considered one possible reason for this state of affairs?

There are many factors, but the refusal of the Blairite grandees and lesser disciples to accept the legitimacy of Corbyns leadership, their vicious and unremitting attacks on him and his policies, has fuelled the constant media denigration.

Like countless others during the Blair regime I bit my tongue and campaigned for Labour, not lauding Blair, but not publicly cursing him. If the current malcontents are truly desirous of a Labour success in elections at all levels, they would renounce personal venom and refrain from flooding the news media with anti-Corbyn rhetoric.

Or perhaps as Mr Tony has stated, they also would prefer to see a Cameron government rather than one under Corbyn.

It has to be the easiest of tasks for our gallant scribes to see their names in print at the head of a column dismissive of Corbyn.

Eddie Dougall

Walsham le Willows, Suffolk

I admit I am an optimist and probably an idealist, but Jeremy Corbyn is the only high-profile politician who offers me a glimpse of something I like the look of.

I want a politician who has steadfast principles, rather than pop-up populist policies. I want someone who says This is who I am, not I will be whoever you want me to be. In Tony Benns political dichotomy, I want a signpost, not a weathercock.

Jeremy Corbyn is offering a seismic shift from Oxbridge PPE work experience to leadership guided by ethics, empathy and understanding. It will take time to build a new political consciousness. This campaign has only just begun. The cake is still in the mixing bowl and you are trying to test it with a knife to see if it is baked yet.

Gordon Watt

Reading

Jeremy Corbyn is the embodiment of the little boy in The Emperors New Clothes: about Trident, bombing Syria, and the rest, he is pointing out that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes. That is why other politicos and the media hate him so much; because they have bought into the con, praising the Emperors wonderful garments, for many years.

That is why many of us love him, and look forward to voting for him in 2020.

Labour MPs should get over themselves and pull behind him. When they keep pointing out the subtle beauty of the fabric, they just continue to make fools of themselves. Its not quite too late for them to be forgiven their past mistakes.

Henrietta Cubitt

Cambridge

Im sure Amol Rajans comments are all true. However, lets face it, Labour has almost no chance of winning the next election regardless of who is the leader. As long as we have our current undemocratic electoral system we will have a Conservative government until the brainwashed electorate gets thoroughly sick of it. Given the continual drip-feed of anti-Labour comments by the Tory press, Im surprised Labour gets the votes it does!

Jeremy Corbyn seems to be a decent and honourable man, at least by the standards of Westminster, and if he manages to move the middle ground leftwards, back towards the centre, then he will get my vote and I hope the vote of most decent people.

Peter Johnson

Eaton Socon, Cambridgeshire

Do Labours new membership and the parliamentary party really agree, as Amol Rajan asserts, that Tories are scum?

And if so, are Conservatives scum because they want to get people off benefits and into work, cut the deficit, reduce strikes, help businesses to create more jobs, let taxpayers keep more of their own money, bomb Isis, reduce low-skilled immigration, encourage home ownership, turn failing schools into academies, slash red tape, or increase competition and consumer choice?

I cant find anything scummy in any of this.

Keith Gilmour

Glasgow

Hunts apology for death of baby

It is only right that Jeremy Hunt should apologise for his mistakes in causing the appalling death of William Mead (Family of dead baby let down by NHS in worst possible way, says Hunt, 27 January).

He is responsible for setting up and encouraging all the inadequacies now existing in our NHS: the shortage of doctors and nurses; the host of various and expensive agency nurses and locum doctors who only have very short-term interest in the patients in their care; the secondary and impersonal NHS 111 system with untrained operatives; the management of the permanent lack of beds which is a needless and time-consuming exercise; the lack of one-doctor-one-patient relationships which causes so many serious medical mistakes; an increasingly overburdened A&E, partly due to a larger population and more senior citizens.

All of these are under-funded.

When did Jeremy Hunt have a seven-year specific training for his job, and when did he last have 12-hour shifts with the need to be ready to make life-and-death decisions every minute of his working day?

John Curtis

Fareham, Hampshire

Donald Trump, racism and incest

As an American living in the UK, I can surely share Matthew Normans concern over the increasingly viable Presidential campaign of the vile Donald J Trump (27 January). However, Mr Normans decision to challenge Trumps execrable racism and just a bit further on to make a retrograde slur about supposed incestuous leanings of people living in Appalachia was both in very poor taste and hypocritical.

Dr Martha Vail

Edinburgh

As usual, Matthew Norman is spot on politically when he says of Donald Trumps tergiversations: The one thing no one seeks from a messiah is consistency.

In so doing Matthew Norman demonstrates that there is still hope for Jeremy Corbyns new-look Labour Party cum Peoples Protest Party.

Paul Wilder

London SE11

Justin Moyers The kids are far right (19 January) nicely described the exercise in self delusion of the Donald Trump-supporting USA Freedom Kids, exemplified in their call for freedom and liberty everywhere.

Is that the same sense of freedom and liberty which Trump was invoking when he said that he would strongly consider shutting down mosques in the US? As Saba Ahmed, the founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition, pointed out when bravely appearing on Fox News, freedom of religion is an American constitutional right.

Jeremy Redman

London SE6

Benefit sanctions under the carpet

On Monday night a vote in the House of Lords requiring Iain Duncan Smith to report annually on the health and wellbeing of children was lost, 110 for and 184 against. It was lost because Labour peers abstained while Conservatives voted against. Five bishops supported the amendment moved by the crossbenchers Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher.

Among the policies that damage health the most are the benefit sanctions. They were invented by New Labour, the screws were turned by the Coalition and they are now mercilessly imposed in increasing numbers by the present government.

As a result, the Fawcett Society has reported, particular groups of women (including single mothers, women facing sexual and domestic violence, and women who have difficulties with English) are exceptionally vulnerable to sanctions through no fault of their own. This is affecting womens safety, their mental and physical health, and the health and wellbeing of their children.

The benefit sanction is a slow release punishment that goes on inflicting pain long after the treatment is over. Council tax and rent arrears cannot be paid while a one-month or three-month sanction has stopped income. Debts pile up, their enforcement continues during the sanction; they have to be paid when the sanction ends out of low pay or diminishing benefit incomes.

The devastating impact on the health and wellbeing of men, women and children when debts are enforced by powerful government departments against the low, or non-existent, incomes of vulnerable and powerless households has been brushed under the noble carpets of Government and Labour peers.

The Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

London N17

Good news of Pacific rowers

In view of Henry Worsleys unhappy demise (Explorers fundraising page collects 200,000, 27 January) it was with some relief that I greeted those women in a pink rowing boat who did make the last 30 miles.

Godfrey H Holmes

Withernsea, East Riding of Yorkshire
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Muslims this morning woke to the news that Trevor Phillips, the ex-chairman of the Equality and Human rights Commision, thinks Muslim communities are unlike others in Britain, and will not integrate in the same way.

Replace the word Muslim with Black, Christian or Jewish and you can see the problem, cant you?

Unfortunately, Phillips remarks have not been the only case of institutional Islamophobia to hit the headlines this week. I have been silently gnashing my teeth having read the Governments disappointing proposal to deport those on spousal visas  if they fail to learn English  within two and a half years. Blimey.

Depressingly, hot on the heels of this Governments announcement is a recent You Gov poll which says 77% of people of British people support deporting migrants on spousal visas  thereby agreeing with our Prime Minister.

I suspect if David Cameron had it his way, Id have been deported already. As a little girl, I lived on top of my Dads flock wallpapered Indian restaurant. I smelt of curry. Permanently. I arrived at infant school with no English, even though I was born at St Georges Hospital in Tooting, London. Mrs Matthews  the black teacher whom I had high hopes of (how wrong I was)  mercilessly and in her own self-loathing way, would mock me for not knowing words such as radiator (my family had gas fires). The white kids laughed at me. The whole class ganged up one day to beat me up. Such was their hatred of my skin colour, poor English and shyness.

My English took years to develop. I even recently contacted a sympathetic teacher to share my shock at how the stupid, feckless Yasmin  as a more frustrated member of staff called me  was now somehow being given free rein to write for the Independent. He wrote back saying: I found your email really uplifting and at the risk of sounding patronising I am really proud of you.In 2016, that email may not get sent to future kids like me. No wonder we're upset.

The You Gov poll serves to remind us of the latent racism and xenophobia extant in the UK and born out of discontent at the success of a diverse and multi-racial society. To isolate Muslims is wrong, while Camerons linking of speaking English and stemming radicalisation is bizarre. They are unrelated. Integration is key but to believe it is achieved simply via language classes is misleading and hurtful.

If you genuinely want to help Muslim women, Mr Cameron, use the mosque infrastructures which we repeatedly state can be a brilliant means to access and provide empowering experiences. Engage the Imams and community leaders. We women want to banish the idea that mosques and Islamic centres belong to, and are controlled, solely by men.

Muslims communities  both David Cameron and Trevor Phillips need to accept  are not the problem here. Lack of funding in local services integration and education strategy is. Not to mention the well the shocking funding cuts made to womens rights groups and domestic violence charities in the past half-decade.

Cameron and his Cabinet should sit down and talk directly to Muslim men and women, as well as all the support services that already exist to support them. All that we are seeing so far from the likes of Cameron and Philips is the fuelling of xenophobia and hatred. Not what the UK or Muslims need right now.
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The first step towards Europe ending its policy of open internal borders has been taken. On Tuesday, EU interior ministers requested that the European Commission  the blocs executive arm  draw up plans that would allow member states to reintroduce checks and barriers, and so refuse any number of the migrants and asylum seekers pleading for entry. It is early days yet but preparing for the worst will smooth the passage to it.

With Austria joining Germany, Sweden, Norway, France and Denmark in bringing in border controls last week, the die appears cast. Germany is now mulling over whether to suspend Schengen for two years, which would set the tone for the entire EU. As one unnamed official put it: It is hard to see borders being removed [when that period elapses].

What we are seeing here is in part a result of the decision to end the Dublin agreement, which nominally forced asylum-seekers to make their claim in the country in which they first set foot.

That cancellation upped the burden on northern EU member states, in so far as under it they will have to deal with more asylum claims. So now the European Commission is also pressing ahead with plans to seal off Greeces border with Macedonia (the only one through which refugees can reach Europe), if not expel Greece from the Schengen zone altogether.

The idea that Greece has failed to uphold its side of the bargain, in terms of controlling its borders, ignores the reality on the ground. Unless the country deployed its navy to block off boats, and so leave their passengers to drown, it had no option but to host the thousands who have been seeking to enter. Northern European states want, in essence, to turn Greece into a giant internment camp for refugees. The buck will thus be passed to a country whose inability to deal with migrants so far has led most other EU member states to deem it unsafe to return asylum-seekers there. This has the makings of a practical disaster, let alone a moral one.
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Britains policy towards Saudi Arabia is a disgrace. It makes a mockery of our claims to have an ethical approach to bilateral relations with other countries, and it betrays a lickspittle way of dealing with autocratic regimes, which should be a source of embarrassment to people of any political persuasion.

In the latest episode of this cringe-making story, which we report exclusively today, Tobias Ellwood, the Foreign Office minister who a few weeks ago expressed the UKs disappointment at the Saudis mass head-chopping of opponents, has now urged Saudi Arabia to do a better job of trumpeting its human rights successes. The progress to which he refers includes the right of women to vote in municipal elections and stand as candidates, and the permission granted for women to sit on the  powerless  Shura Council.

Mr Ellwood approaches his hosts as one would a dangerous maniac with a gun who must be flattered and cunningly cajoled into dropping his weapon and surrendering. But while the Saudi regime is indeed increasingly dangerous, rather than disarming it we continue plying it with arms as fast as we can.

Nor are these arms merely sitting in some stockpile against the evil day when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his Isis forces come roaring over the border towards Mecca. They are being actively used in one of the ugliest of the many wars currently disfiguring our planet. This is the war that is raging in Yemen, where the Saudis head a coalition which has reduced that beautiful country  once upon a time known as Arabia Felix, Happy Arabia  to desolation and despair.

It is a war in which Britain is deeply complicit, as a result of which we are able to say nothing critical about it. Instead, we heap patronising and undeserved praise on this brutal regime for its progress.

Everyone knows why Britain is so cosy with the Saudis: we buy their oil and sell them our arms. Added to that, since the ill-fated Arab Spring  however repellent their regime may be  they are the devil we know. It is better to have them in charge of Islams holiest shrines, whatever architectural and archaeological vandalism they may wreak in the process, than letting Mecca and Medina slip into even more fanatical hands. If we have learnt anything from the misbegotten wars of the past 13 years, that is a lesson worth remembering.

But that is not the same as giving the Saudis a free pass, which is clearly Mr Ellwoods and the Foreign Offices settled intention.

Saudi Arabia is the most explosive element in the increasingly ferocious sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Islam, in which Yemen is just one bloody theatre. With the return of Shia Iran to the international community, that war risks becoming far more vicious, and the willingness of the Saudis to use violent jihadis as their proxy shock troops is likely to become unrestrained. The execution of Irans Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on 2 January was a provocative statement of intent.

The Saudis do not deserve our patronising pat on the head. Instead we should be holding this wretched regime  however important its continued existence  to account, denouncing its profligate use of capital and corporal punishment, freezing arms sales at least until it halts the destruction of Yemen, demanding the release of the blogger Raif Badawi and his lawyer. These would be the actions of a responsible friend of the country  not the obsequious kowtowing which has become our accustomed posture.
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There has been some disgraceful treatment of refugees across Europe in recent days. The Danish parliament has passed a law forcing refugees to surrender their valuables on arrival. Asylum-seekers in Cardiff have been required to wear coloured wristbands to receive food. Our own Government is still considering whether to take in 3,000 unaccompanied children who have fled the Middle Easts war zones. Quite a way to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Great currents of fear about refugees are swirling around the Continent. Some of this anxiety relates to culture, some to crime, some to terrorism, but much is economic in nature. And there are many economic myths around asylum-seekers.

First, the numbers. One prevalent idea is that Europe is bearing the brunt of the human fallout from the conflicts of the Middle East. There has certainly been a pronounced pick-up in asylum applications in the European Union: 995,000 in 2015 alone, double the previous year. Yet that still needs to be put in a global perspective. Of the 14 million cross-border refugees worldwide just one million are in Europe. There are two million Syrian refugees in Turkey alone. Jordan is also home to two million displaced people, equivalent to around a third of the native population.

Another perception is that refugees are all indigents who cant work or contribute economically. But the experience of Nordic countries in recent decades suggests the labour market participation rates of refugees show the greatest increase over time of all migrant groups. While on arrival only around 15 per cent of refugees in Sweden worked that ratio ultimately rose to more than 60 per cent.

Its worth remembering that skills flee along with people. In Germany a fifth of Syrian refugees in 2013-14 had been through higher education, roughly the same ratio as native Germans. This may be because often only wealthier and more educated individuals can afford the passage to Europe. Another fear centres around how European countries with already painfully high jobless rates, such as Spain and Greece, can possibly cope if there is a new influx into the labour market. Yet most asylum-seekers have tended to choose to claim asylum in countries with high employment rates such as Germany and Sweden.

What about the impact of refugees on the economy and public finances? The International Monetary Fund recently estimated that there will actually be a modest short-term GDP boost due to the higher government spending on feeding and sheltering refugees. The IMF also suggests refugees can, in the longer term, help alleviate Europes demographic crisis, helping relieve the pressure on national pension systems. Many fear that a flow of refugees will have a negative impact on natives living standards. But evidence from Turkey suggests its sizeable influx of Syrian refugees into the informal local labour market has actually boosted the average wages of native workers in the formal economy.

In the end, the case for generosity to refugees should be based on humanitarian, rather than economic, arguments and there is a danger of over-claiming over the material benefits from an open door policy. There is a short-term boost to Europes GDP under the IMFs latest forecasts, but GDP per capita is still seen as falling slightly. And much of long-term fiscal impact will depend on the extent of refugees participation in the labour market and the skills mix of refugees. Yet it is still useful to dowse the economic alarmism. The facts also suggest some sensible policy avenues for politicians. The net impact on the public finances of higher refugee flows could be offset by allowing asylum-seekers to work while awaiting their claims to be processed. The UK has considerably more onerous restrictions in this regard than Germany and Sweden.

Finally, we should recognise that refugees are not simply economic statistics, but people with talents and ambitions. A 17-year-old Hungarian called George Soros fled to England in 1947. He earned a crust as a waiter, a house painter and, bizarrely, a handbag salesman in Wales. The billionaire investor and philanthropist for liberal causes recalls, with gratitude, that he was able to dream about making his fortune in Britain while still a displaced person. Similarly, Michael Marks arrived in Leeds as a child from Belarus to escape anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1880s. He founded a penny bazaar in the city which eventually became Marks & Spencer. His business empire was significant even before Marks was finally naturalised as a British subject in 1897.

If were going to think about the economics of refugees, lets remember that there will be more like Soros and Marks among the wretched masses fleeing war and repression and seeking asylum in Europe today.
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The case for Britain to remain in the European Union rests on three pillars: prosperity, security and the possible break-up of the UK if we quit. Those arguments are just as strong, if not stronger, than they were a year or two ago. But the campaign to keep Britain in the EU isnt going well. Earlier this week, Stuart Rose, chairman of the Stronger In campaign, struggled to get the name of his own organisation straight.

Stronger In hasnt fared too well in the battle of the statistics, either. Iain Begg, a pro-European economics professor at the London School of Economics, dismissed one of its central claims  that membership benefits the average UK family to the tune of 3,000 a year  as spuriously precise.

Meanwhile, the endless torrent of migrants entering Europe from the Middle East and further afield is playing into the Leave campaigns hands. Eurosceptics have successfully managed to muddle the refugee crisis, which is having little impact on Britain, with free movement of people within the EU  which concerns completely different groups of people such as Poles and Italians. The Remain campaign has struggled to come up with any issue that resonates nearly as strongly.

The latest poll of polls has Remain on 51 per cent to Leaves 49 per cent, according to What Britain Thinks. But things may be worse for the Remain campaign than those figures suggest, because the same bias in last years general election polls  in which Labour-leaning youths were over-represented  could be repeating itself. Young people are generally pro-EU but dont tend to vote as much as older people.

The Remain campaign needs to get its messages across more effectively. The economy should be a strong suit. Even if it is hard to put a precise figure on what the EUs membership is worth, quitting would be bad for jobs and pay. After all, we do nearly half our trade with the EU and, under all credible scenarios, this would be impaired by leaving. What is more, Leave campaigners struggle to say what out would look like. Theres a schism between free-marketeer and protectionist eurosceptics. Given the growing populist mood around the world, there is a risk, after a Brexit, that the nationalist little Englanders would gain the upper hand.

In the past, eurosceptics were enamoured of copying Norway or Switzerland, which have varying degrees of access to the EUs single market without being members of the club. But the flaws in these models  still having to pay money into the EU budget, follow a lot of its rules and yet not hold any vote on what those rules are  have become increasingly apparent.

Norman Lamont tried another model earlier this week: Canada, which is close to clinching a free-trade deal with the EU. The former Tory chancellor, who was playing Britain in a war game on what would happen if we quit the EU organised by the Open Europe think-tank, argued that we should get a trading arrangement like Canadas, souped up to give our largest industry, financial services, access to the EUs single market. The people playing the other EU nations would have nothing of it. In fact, they took relish plotting how they might attract slices of the City of Londons lucrative business to their own financial capitals.

All of this doesnt just mean a Brexit would be a leap in the dark; it suggests that the divorce could be acrimonious. At a time when the global economy is being buffeted, heaping on risk doesnt look smart. As Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, argued yesterday, Britains large current account deficit also makes it vulnerable if nervous global investors lose confidence.

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The economy isnt the Remain campaigns only strong suit. Another is that exiting could lead to the break-up of the UK. Tony Blair yesterday argued plausibly that, if Britain votes to quit the EU, the Scots will vote to leave Britain. But perhaps the most powerful card for the Remain campaign is foreign and security policy. Isis is creating havoc in the Middle East and Russia is flexing its muscles, while the United States no longer wishes to be the worlds policeman.

This is a bad time to lose influence in foreign policy. If we went solo, we would have no vote in the councils of Europe. We would find it harder to co-operate on fighting jihadi terrorism. We already benefit from the European arrest warrant and access to the Schengen Information System which, among other things, carries data on 2,000 suspected EU citizens who have gone to the Middle East to join the jihad.

The EU is now strengthening its counter-terrorism policies by measures such as interconnecting DNA databases, keeping track of passengers air travel and swapping information on terrorist financing.

Although the EU might let us tag along, we would have precious little say over what policy to pursue. We would also have less influence with the US, for whom we would become less relevant. Our special relationship would become less special.

Meanwhile, our leaving could have far-reaching implications for the rest of the EU. An EU that unravelled in the wake of Britains departure  as Marine Le Pen, the leader of Frances National Front, hopes  would be even less able to help stabilise its neighbourhood. That would be bad for our security. On the other hand, if the EU formed a tighter bloc in response to our exit, that would marginalise us. It would be a sad end to hundreds of years of wars and diplomacy aimed at stopping the creation of a superstate on our doorstep.

The Remain campaign hasnt yet made much of these security arguments. But we are still in the phoney war. If Mr Cameron can secure a deal to refashion Britains EU membership at next months summit, he is expected to throw himself into the campaign with zeal. The Prime Minister is also likely to argue strongly the foreign policy case for membership. Lets hope that he will prove a more effective spokesman than Lord Rose.

Hugo Dixon is chairman of InFacts, a journalistic enterprise making the fact-based case for Britain to stay in the EU
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Its less a case of dressing up, than a dressing down. Kate Chisholm, a headteacher in Darlington, has warned the parents of her pupils that theyd better get dressed in the morning before they bring their kids to school. If were to raise standards its not too much to ask parents to have a wash and get dressed, she said.

What is so wrong with wearing pyjamas in public? Weve been doing this sort of thing in Liverpool for years and nobody bats an eye lid, instead we fly our cheque flannel flag high.

PJs are worn out to the supermarket, the high street, appointments and all other casual day time social engagements. It is a tradition I try to hold down in south east London by not changing into normal clothes until five oclock on a Saturday. I hastily pull on smart work clothes in the ungodly darkness of weekday mornings, so at the weekend I take full, unadulterated enjoyment in my lounge wear.

Im yet to have a tete-a-tete with the head master about her take on the issue, but what I think she is getting at, is that by rocking up to assemblies in brushed cotton co-ords, parents are sending signals to their children that it is acceptable to appear stretched for time and/or lazy in the public sphere and that this is fundamentally a bad thing.

Whilst she has not actively singled out mothers, the parents who have come out against the schools letter have so far been women; so Im also taking this as a statement about lazy and/or busy mums.

A look to the tabloid fetish of snapping female celebrities doing errands in slacks is testimony to societies obsession with monitoring women who appear in public with the audacity to be unkempt.

Ladies in pyjamas rebel against these social standards. In Liverpool, these women are the feminist superheroes who, by day, walk around the city centre in their jarmies with curlers in their hair and at night reveal their glamzilla alter egos.

They unashamedly show the world the full spectrum of female gender identities - absolutely not arsed, all the way to manicured perfection. They refused to be bound by any social norms and what better message to send the next generation? To use the words of widely celebrated feminist priestess on high, Beyonce, those Darlington mothers quite literally Woke up like this.

This is a class, as well as a gender issue. Students are not banned from wearing their pyjamas to university lectures; Vogue was not torn down for running nightwear as a trend last season; and Rhianna wearing her silkies was celebrated in the press.

This denouncement of mums in pyjamas buys into the narrative of the lazy working class woman and the need for those categorised within these confines to strive toward respectability. To wear lounger wear in public is a middle finger to social standards imposed upon working class women by those more educated, such as, well, school head teachers.

Finally, if we are talking about higher standards for children, surely it is better that these mothers are making sure that their kids are arriving to school on time and showing an active interest in their education by attending PTA meetings and assemblies. These mothers should be applauded for putting their kids education before their own appearance.

So mothers of Darlington join with your slumber clad Scouse sisters in rallying against classist female beauty norms and teaching your children that they can excel wearing whatever they want to wear.
Chairman Ciaran Lynch at the publication of the Oireachtas banking inquiry report

Europe's banking chiefs blocked Ireland from saving as much as 9.1 billion euro on crippling bank debts, the banking inquiry has revealed.

The marathon investigation found the Central Bank and Financial Regulator gave the country's six main banks a clean bill of health when they were guaranteed in September 2008 - a move which ultimately cost citizens about 30 billion euro.

But the hardline stance of finance chiefs in Frankfurt made for some of the most damning findings.

The Oireachtas banking inquiry found the European Central Bank put the Fianna Fail-led coalition under undue pressure to accept tens of billions in bailout loans, but it also blocked burden sharing among international money lenders.

The inquiry repeated evidence that Jean Claude Trichet, the ECB chief in March 2011, told Finance Minister Michael Noonan that a "bomb would go off in Dublin" if senior bondholders - the first in line to have loans repaid - did not get their investments back.were burned.

It revealed advice from the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) that 9.1 billion euro might have been saved if the top lenders were forced to take a share of the losses.

During hearings former International Monetary Fund chief Ajai Chopra put the figure at about eight billion euro while Fianna Fail's Michael McGrath said the savings in reality could have been about 3.7 billion euro.

It was the second time the ECB warned Ireland not to pass banks' losses on to their paymasters, t he inquiry found, with a November 2010 letter from Mr Trichet carrying a threat to switch off billions in emergency cash which was keeping the Irish banks alive.

The inquiry said it was an "explicit threat" and that the ECB interventions were "critical".

"These were all actions for which the Irish people ultimately paid and are still paying a heavy price," the parliamentary inquiry found.

The committee accused the ECB of undermining its work by refusing to allow Mr Trichet to give evidence in Leinster House and it said there is a serious democratic deficit when it comes to the bank's accountability.

After 18 months of work and 413 hours of hearings, the cross-party report found:

:: A culture of excessive executive pay and bonuses for bankers.

:: No one single event or decision led to banking collapse - it was the cumulation of events and decisions over a number of years.

:: Property or land valuations were not routinely carried out as the boom heightened, even for some large developments, and desktop and drive-by valuations were used without agents seeing inside the home.

There was a lmost universal acceptance until 2008 that the property bubble would end with a "soft landing", which the inquiry called a "fatally-flawed" theory that was never substantially tested or challenged by government, the Central Bank or the Department of Finance.

The inquiry said the infamous September 2008 "n ight of the guarantee" was a "myth".

The idea to protect the six main banks in a 440 billion euro blanket security was tabled as early as January that year, the inquiry found, and ultimately the "decision -makers" on the night based their plan on inaccurate information about the health of the banks.

The lack of an i ndependent, in-depth, deep-dive investigation into the state of the banks before that night was also criticised.

The committee published its report after Sinn Fein's Pearse Doherty and Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins refused to give their support to the findings and recommendations.

Mr Doherty said: " While the banking report touches upon of the relationship between bankers, developers and politicians, what it fails to do is examine those relationships. This is another fundamental failure of the report."

Mr Higgins said banks had undue influence over government and while he praised the public hearings he said the inquiry ultimately failed to get to "the root cause and source of the infection".

Chairman Ciaran Lynch defended the 6.5 million euro inquiry, which never had the power to blame individuals.

"The report was never from the outset about finding a specific smoking gun," he said.

Mr Lynch rejected the idea that Ireland was bounced into a bailout, insisting that it had been inevitable, and also said a myth of t he bank guarantee night had been debunked.

"There is no certain formula to avoid another crisis but constant vigilance and early preventative action is critical," he said.

Among the r ecommendations are for a new commercial property price register and for consumer champions to review how a perceived lack of competition in banking impacts customers.

The inquiry reserved some of its harshest criticism for the watchdogs of the time.

It said the Financial Regulator, headed then by Patrick Neary, had sufficient powers to crack down on the banking sector by imposing conditions or revoking licences or by suspending business or imposing fines for exceeding lending limits.

It said both the Central Bank and the regulator could have ordered banks to keep more cash to cover potential losses in the event of a crash.

The inquiry revealed that the Central Bank and the regulator knew in 2003 that Irish banks were relying too much on loans for property.

"Neither intervened decisively at the time or in the years prior to the crisis," the report said.

The inquiry criticised light touch regulation, it called for bankers to be constantly retrained and for their contracts to include clawback clauses if they miss medium term performance targets.

It found the crisis in the banks was directly caused by decisions of their boards, managers and advisers to pursue risky business practices and that they moved far away from p rudent lending on property.

In response the Central Bank said it has seen fundam ental institutional reform since the crash, including assertive risk-based approach to oversight, a credible threat of enforcement and restricting mortgage lending.
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By the end of this century many of the worlds islands and coast lines will have changed or disappeared altogether, placing the lives of millions of people at risk.



These are people that live and depend on the ocean for their livelihood. Whilst changes in sea level have occurred over the long geological history of the planet, recent global observations indicate that rising sea-levels will dramatically transform many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Arctic Communities, Island Nations and Coastal States.

One of our missions is to bring together countries, scientists, policy-makers, the civil society, the media and other stakeholders to share know-how; provide a platform for public-private partnerships and mainstream sea-level rise adaptation within country-level institutions.
Ireland is home to one of the biggest populations of equines in Europe, with some 180,000 horses and ponies registered between the sport horse and thoroughbred sectors.

Due to these high numbers, it is not surprising that equine vets are constantly in high demand across the country for both routine and emergency procedures.

Injuries, ailments and sickness in horses comes part and parcel with horse ownership, but advances in equine veterinary medicine and the growing number of excellent veterinary surgeons in Ireland mean that if your horse is injured or ill, you can rely on your vet's expert care.

The majority of Ireland's equine veterinary surgeons today have graduated through UCD in Dublin.

The university offers the only degree course in veterinary medicine in Ireland and the on-site hospital has been integral to the success of the veterinary medicine programme for many years and its worldwide accreditation.

Since moving to its state-of-the-art facilities in 2002, the hospital has offered unrivalled services to owners of equines suffering from a wide range of ailments, from lameness to colic, trauma and orthopaedic injuries.

It is estimated that approximately 6,000 small and large animals are treated each year, with a further 12,000 diagnostic laboratory samples processed by the large team of senior and specialized veterinary academic staff.

Of that number, some 1,400 horses are treated by the members of the equine team with approximately 650 horses being treated in the equine surgery discipline. This is open 24-hours a day for emergencies.

Through its varied services, the hospital also allows students to complete their clinical training using some of the more advanced techniques and equipment in the country. While students are involved with all of the cases, this is always under the direct supervision of the veterinary specialists.

As Professor of Veterinary Surgery, originally from the Netherlands, Pieter Brama has seen the team of specialists at the equine clinic evolving it into one of the finest veterinary hospitals in Europe.

"We have some of the best Irish equine specialists here in their field - from medicine to diagnostic imaging," he said.

These include equine surgery specialists John Mark O'Leary and Clodagh Kearney and specialists Vivienne Duggan and Lisa Katz in equine medicine, supported by specialists in anaesthesia, diagnostic imaging, clinical pathology and many other specialities.

Prior to coming to Ireland Professor Brama had a long history with sport horses, knowledge which he has since used to develop the treatments available to the growing sport horse sector here.

He has a particular interest in cartilage repair and joint disease in horses and was the first to develop a surgical treatment for thrombosis of the aorta, a rare but debilitating disease.

"For a long time people presumed it is only the most exclusive thoroughbreds being treated here, but nowadays more and more people are aware that any horse, show jumpers, trotters, ponies and pleasure horses of all shapes and sizes are welcome to benefit from either routine or highly sophisticated treatments offered at the clinic."

While clients are charged for medications and procedures, the hospital does not exist as a merely "for profit" business. Professor Brama believes that the teaching hospital environment means that all patients receive a high standard of care. "As we are trying to teach our students best practice - we always strive to be thorough in our diagnostic investigations. As the veterinary specialists are also in the business of teaching final year students, a lot of time can be devoted to discussing cases, and investigating the best possible treatment options.

"Therefore the time and attention that the specialists will spend on each case is not necessarily reflected in the bills the owners receive."

Additionally, having staff members so actively involved in research means that there is always a drive to bring the most current and up to date treatments to our clients.

Profits

Any profits made by the hospital are used to continually develop the facilities and expertise. The hospital boasts a full range of state of the art facilities and equipment and is particularly proud to have the first dedicated veterinary CT scanner in Ireland for horses.

While some treatments for horses are admittedly expensive, the hospital also understands that most owners do not have limitless funds, and the clinicians are always happy to work with the client and the referring vet to come up with the best treatment option to suit both the horse's needs and the client's budget.

"We are sometimes the end of the road for owners who have tried other treatments using their own vets. We also find we are getting quite a number of horses presenting with colic each year.

"Fortunately we are well-equipped here and have a team in place if and when we need to do surgery.

"The perception is that the success rates for those needing surgery is always poor but with current facilities and specialists on call 24/7 this is no longer the case for many cases."

The hospital also caters for horses with fractures, also often presumed to have a very poor prognosis, but again the highly skilled staff and capability of the CT scanner to provide 3D reconstructure of the fracture before going into surgery optimises the repair.

Followed by its Anderson sling recovery system after surgery, horses with serious fractures can safely recover from general anaesthesia. Horses awaken suspended in a sling in a standing position so that they do not have to struggle to rise to their feet, thus avoiding further injury.

"We are also continuously expanding our services and we are delighted to now offer an ambulatory dentistry service through our ambulatory equine vet Aoife Quigley.

"We have invested heavily in skills in this area and also equipment over the last year or so because we felt that was an area that did not get a lot of veterinary attention in Ireland.

"Additionally with the reinforcement of the surgical team with John Mark O'Leary who has obtained significant training in dentistry under Professor Paddy Dixon in the UK we have the most extensive denstistry service available for horses on the Island, computed tomography, sinoscopy, and extractions are common procedures in our hospital," said Pieter Brama.
Agri-contractors appear determined to hold their prices at 2015 levels even though plummeting oil prices in recent months have knocked one third off fuel bills.

The fall in tractor diesel prices to 50c/l has wiped 25/ha off fuel bills on cereal crops, according to Teagasc.

In heavy soils far from the yard, the fuel savings are almost double this level, said mechanisation specialist, Dermot Forristal.

"The average cereal farmer will use about 85 litres of diesel per hectare, but that excludes road-work," said Mr Forristal.

Despite the savings, contractors are adamant that they should not drop their prices.

"Rates aren't going to go down, because they never went up," said Farm Contractors of Ireland general secretary, Peter Farrelly.

"Every second operator I talk to is fed up, and plenty have gone to the wall over the last number of years because they were losing money."

He added that large dairy farmers were a particular problem for contractors looking to get paid at the moment.

"The drystock men and the 50-60 cow dairy farmer are all paying their bills, but the bigger lads are under pressure," he said.

When diesel was costing 77c/l, contractors estimate that it was costing them 38/ac in diesel to keep a silage outfit with four trailers moving.

The subsequent 30pc drop in diesel prices would translate into a 13/ac saving.

While the Professional Agricultural Contractors (PAC) association admitted that some farmers would be able to negotiate a lower rate, it maintained most rates would stay the same.

"Those that put up their prices without any break-out of the fuel charges when diesel was expensive may well have leeway to drop their prices now," said PAC director, Tom Murphy.

"But not every contractor increased their rates, and others simply added a separate fuel surcharge when prices were high to help the farmer see where the increase in costs was.

Option

"The other option for farmers is to supply the contractor with diesel out of the yard. The contractor arrives with a full tank of diesel, and leaves with a full tank, but anything used in between is supplied by the farmer."

Mr Murphy claimed that the contracting business in Ireland was not sustainable, and that proof of this was the absence of successors following their fathers into the business.

"Contractors haven't been charging economic rates for years. Instead, they've been cross-subsidising their business with farming or off-farm work in construction.

"There's also a problem with unprofessional contractors not being fully insured for the work that they are carrying out, or paying the correct PRSI," he said.

Instead, PAC want to introduce more fixed price contracts, where farmers and contractors agree to a fixed price arrangement for up to two years for a pre-determined range of jobs.

"This is one of the ways we've been exploring with Teagasc to make contractors more professional and sustainable.

"Fixed price deals would give contractors the security to invest in kit, and variable fuel prices could be covered by an agreed fuel surcharge that would reflect the changing cost," he said.
A farm body has criticised the rollout of Government funds to people and businesses impacted by flooding as "slow progress".

ICMSA president John Comer said the sense of urgency to rollout the funding to cleanup the damage seemed to have eased as the floodwaters dropped.

"It might be understandable that as the floods recede that the urgency around this issues recedes as well, but that would be very unfortunate and compound the misery of the farmers and ordinary householders who have been so badlly hit by the recent floods," said Mr Comer.

He urged the Environment Minister Alan Kelly and Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney to ensure monies are delivered speedily.

It comes as figures showed 265 applications to the fodder replacement scheme were received by Friday morning, with more expected to be processed by the deadline.

In addition to the fodder scheme, a hardship scheme is also being operated for farmers badly impacted by flooding.

"Farmers have seen damage to yards, buildings, milking and storage facilities and we are calling on the Agriculture Minister to amend the TAMS farm grants scheme to include grant-aid for the provision of flood defences on vulnerable farms," Mr Comer urged.

It is estimated the overall costs of the floods could reach as high as 100m.

The European Commission has pointed out that dredging is not banned under EU law.

Mr Kelly has said works will get underway to tackle flooding but they will likely have to relocate some people from where they currently live due to the likelihood of future flooding.

Mr Comer said measures were needed to project farms.

"Farmers are in a particularly vulnerable position in that they can't "up sticks" and carry on their livelihoods in another location," he said.
Farmers have parted with around 8pc of the 10 million Glanbia plc spin-out shares valued at over 170m since the certificates were sent out.

The move by the dairy co-op members to retain the shares follows a similar path taken by members of the Kerry Co-op.

It is understood that the figures from trading appear to indicate that around 8pc of the shares have changed hands since the spin-out late last year.

Ian Hunter, equity analyst with Investec, said they had expected most farmers to hold onto the shares rather than sell out.

He said some farmers facing pressures in the current environment with difficulties with low milk price or those looking to invest in their business might have moved to realise the value of the stocks.

"The share price peaked around mid-July and in mid-October there was a bit of a rally but it has now drifted back again," he said.

Mr Hunter said the business was under volume and pricing pressures on the international markets.

Liam Igoe, an analyst from Goodbody Stockbrokers, said they had expected the majority of farmers would hold on to the shares as per the experience in other spin-outs. The share spin-out to over 15,500 farmers was valued at 170m based on a March share price of 17.03 at the vote in May.
Concerns are being raised over the economic viability of rented land, with prices as high as 550/ac being paid for potato crops and 300/ac on grass for expanding dairy farms.

Auctioneers are reporting a distinct growth in the longer term leasing market with farmers willing to pay higher prices to secure five-year leases.

However, Teagasc advisor Ivan Whitten urged farmers to carefully weigh up the costs of land rental against increased volatility in world markets.

"Farmers - whether in milk, beef, dairy or tillage - are paying too high prices for land rental with the volatility there is in the commodities market," said Mr Whitten.

"The land rent that farmers need to be paying going forward needs to be paid on the productive capability of the field and their actual growing costs or production costs."

The expansion in the dairy industry post quota, along with more farmers competing for land for the young farmers scheme and the tax incentives for longer leases are just some of the factors behind the demand.

"Farmers are out competing against each other and driving up the price of land," said Mr Whitten.

He urged those entering into five-year or longer leases to ensure they have review clauses built in.

"If they are tied in it will be the same as the rental market in Dublin. The land lease market is very similar to the property bubbles in the Celtic Tiger years in my opinion," he said.

In the south east, Wexford auctioneer David Quinn has reported prices between 185 and 260 for grassland, with dairy farmers paying higher prices for land near their milking platform, both with and without entitlements. "There will be less land this coming year as more people are opting for the five-year leases," said Mr Quinn.

Long-term leases

In Kilkenny, Castlecomer auctioneer Joseph Coogan reported a parcel of ground made 220/ac on a five-year lease in a letting auction. "This marks a 44/ac increase on the price paid for the same land last year on a one-year arrangement," Mr Coogan said.

"I have seen up to 300/ac paid for adjacent ground for milking. A lot of new land coming on the market is only available for five-year lease."

Average prices in the Kilkenny and Laois area are between 220 and 280/ac.

Stephen Barry of Raymond Potterton, which handles lettings from Meath to Cavan, says new tillage ground is making an extra 10pc on last year, with 450 to 550/ac for a five-year lease on "spud ground".

"Grass is making between 165 and 240 while regular tillage land is making around 210/ac," he said. "There is a strong demand for new ground, especially from potato and grain farmers."

In Cork, Blarney auctioneer Dan Fleming recently let a 110ac tillage farm for 250/ac. He reported a distinct shortage of tillage land on the letting market, with prices of 250-300/ac for longer leases.

Roscommon's John Earley said flooding has delayed the letting season, with prices expected to hold at around 150/ac to 200/ac.

Teagasc figures indicate that it takes 666l of milk at 30c/l, 50kg of beef at 4/kg, 1,333kg of wheat at 150/t or 1,666kg of potatoes at 120/t to cover rent at 200/ac.

Mr Whitten said farmers must question if the field would produce an "additional 15pc in output to compensate the farmer for a predicted 10pc drop in the price of commodities in 2016."

Current grain market pressures indicated prices would fall 5 to 10/t next year. He added that with green wheat at 140/t, it would take a 4t crop to break even.

"Someone is not going to get paid or the farmer is prepared to work for nothing. It is putting families under serious pressure financially and their health as well."
The brother of former Taoiseach Brian Cowen has said the Banking Inquiry report makes no mention of an alleged economic treason in a clear swipe at former Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore.

Laois/Offaly TD Barry Cowen also hit out at Taoiseach Enda Kenny, saying his previous claim that the inquiry would uncover the truth behind an act of collusion between Anglo bankers and Fianna Fail has not materialised.

Speaking following the publication of the report, Mr Cowen said the inquiry was set up by the Government in the aim that it would damage Fianna Fail.

He also made reference to a previous allegation made in the Dail by former Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore that his brother, ex-Taoiseach Brian Cowen, was potentially guilty of economic treason.

I havent read it in detail, but Im lead to believe, there is no mention of an axis of collusion as was alleged by the Taoiseach. There is no mention of any member of the previous government committing a treasonous act in their governance of the country, Mr Cowen told independent.ie.

No mention of the fact there were files shred in the Taoiseach office as Kenny alleged.

"Rather than that, there was confirmation contained in the conclusion of the inquiry that the government was led to believe by the central bank and regulator that Irish banks were solvent.

"That doesnt suit the mantra we have heard over the past five years. The Irish public have copped onto that, the Irish public are telling us that and the Irish public will pass their judgement on that type of politics.
The Central Bank's chief economist has urged voters and political parties to be cautious and prudent given the extent of the risks facing the economy.

As parties prepare for the General Election, both chief economist Gabriel Fagan and newly installed governor Philip Lane called on the next government to do more to slash debt and deficit levels.

Despite the global markets turmoil and concern of a slowdown in China, the bank gave an upbeat assessment of the economy overall, saying the pick-up in spending and continuing strength of employment growth confirms that a "convincing" recovery is well established.

The bank's latest quarterly bulletin said the performance of the economy reflects a recovery which is broad based and has increasingly come to be driven by a significant rebound in domestic demand.

Growth last year as measured by GDP was estimated at 6.6pc, and is forecast to ease to 4.8pc this year and 4.4pc in 2017, it said.

But Mr Fagan said that despite the strong numbers, there are significant risks, from both the high, although declining, levels of both public and private debt, and the threat posed to the global economy.

He repeatedly urged prudence, and said his call wasn't confined to politicians.

"It's a message not just to parties; it's a message to the country as a whole, to the voters and to society as whole," he said.

"We've done a lot of progress; tremendous achievements have been made on the fiscal side. But be careful, there are risks out there, there are vulnerabilities there, so be cautious and be prudent. That's essentially our message."

Mr Fagan said if there is scope, more should be done to slash both the debt and deficit to build up "as many buffers as can be built up".

"If it is at all possible, given the risks that the economy faces, to go for a more ambitious, a faster pace of deficit reduction, which would imply a faster pace of debt reduction," he said.

"Serious consideration should be given to using that [fiscal] space, given the vulnerabilities that the economy faces."

It was a view echoed by Governor Lane later at the Oireachtas Finance Committee, when he said the next government needs to focus on reducing debt levels.

"You're about to go to election mode, but I would hope that the next government takes seriously that you have to reconcile not just genuine public spending needs, but also the importance of getting back to a safe level of public debt. No easy task," he said.

Oil extended its slide below $30 a barrel yesterday and Chinese stocks took another plunge amid concern about the country's slowing economy and confusion over China's central bank's foreign exchange policy.

Luca Onorante, the Central Bank's acting head of monetary policy, said there is considerable uncertainty facing the global economy.

"There is uncertainty from the financial side, there is uncertainty about the numbers, there is uncertainty about what the connections are between a change in monetary policy in the United States and to what extend it may affect other emerging market economies, especially those that have a high level of debt in dollars," he said.

"This is a global phenomena, but the numbers as we have shown them today are subject to a clear downward risk."

The bank's latest quarterly bulletin, despite the risks posed, sates that Ireland is going through a period of "exceptional" growth. The bank said outside factors have also contributed to the strong recovery, including lower energy prices.

"Growth has also benefited from a more benign policy environment, reflected in both the easing of the pace of fiscal consolidation and continued favourable financial conditions, while additional support has been provided by the ongoing improvement in household and firm balance sheets and continued favourable financial conditions in Ireland's main export markets."

Rising employment has helped stimulate a strong pick-up in consumer spending, which last year grew at its fastest rate since 2007.

The bulletin said domestic demand is expected to be the main driver of growth over the coming period, with a robust outlook for both consumption and investment spending.
Minister for jobs, Richard Bruton, has dismissed talk of tax inversions with US companies after democratic presidential candidate, Hilary Clinton, labelled Johnson Controls' move for Irish firm Tyco as 'outrageous'.

Speaking on RTE's Morning Ireland, the minister said that the tax inversion that Ms Clinton was referring to is not a feature of the Irish tax system by of the US'.

"I think the first thing to say is that this is not a feature of the Irish tax code, it has absolutely got to do with the US tax code. We are not interested in winning such inversions. We're not interested in them at all, the in fact cost us money.

"We are interested in companies that invest in substance and Tyco for example has 700 people employed in Cork. Foreign companies over the last four years created 30,00 additional jobs."

It was announced this week that Johnson Controls, a US maker of car batteries, has agreed to acquire Ireland-based Tyco in a deal worth $16.5bn.

The move received widespread criticism in the US with Hilary Clinton saying that she had a plan that she would immediately put in place, if elected, to stop tax inversions.

"I have a detailed and targeted plan to immediately put a stop to inversions and invest in the US, block deals like Johnson Controls and Tyco, and place an 'exit tax' on corporations that leave the country to lower their tax bill," she said.

When asked whether or not he was concerned that comments such as Ms Clinton's would damage Ireland's reputation the minister said:

"No I think we will continue to win. IDA had the best year ever last year and this has been a feature of the landscape its not just in Ireland. As you know there have been inversions in other European countries and they are a problem with the US tax code.

"I'm not going to tell US politicians how to resolve their issues but they come from the way US tax worldwide income, which is different from other countries," the minister said.
The parliamentary inquiry into the controversial sale of Namas northern loan portfolio is to publish an interim report in the coming weeks.

The report by Stormonts committee on finance and personnel is expected to be issued before the Northern Assembly is dissolved for elections, most likely in March.

An inquiry by the committee into the 1.6bn deal has been ongoing since July following allegations of political kickbacks.

Officials said the committee had agreed to prepare a progress report on its inquiry to date before the mandate of the current assembly runs out.

The inquiry has heard explosive allegations that five individuals, including former First Minister Peter Robinson, were due to share a Stg7.5m (9.9m) payment linked to the deal.

All five have denied the allegations.

Other parallel investigations are being conducted by the UKs National Crime Agency (NCA) and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Stormont committee is due to meet with the NCA prior to the publication of its report.

A spokeswoman said it would be seeking to minimise the risk of its work inadvertently prejudicing the ongoing criminal investigation.

The report will set out the progress of the review to the end of the mandate, and outline the oral and written evidence given to the committee, the factual information that the committee has learnt and indications of any further evidence that remains to be taken, the spokeswoman said.

The Stormont probe was launched following claims in the Dail by Independent TD Mick Wallace that over Stg7m in an Isle of Man bank account was destined for a Northern politician or party.

Mr Robinson subsequently denied he or anyone linked to him was intended to be the recipient of the cash.

The committee has heard evidence from Mr Robinson, the Norths Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, prominent businessmen Gareth Graham and Paddy Kearney, political blogger Jamie Bryson and representatives of the Law Society of Northern Ireland.

Its inquiry is likely to continue after the assembly elections.

The probe has been looking into matters related to the purchase of the loan book by US vulture fund Cerberus in April 2014.

In the fallout from Mr Wallaces allegations, it emerged another potential bidder, Pimco, left the fray after a former Nama advisor, northern businessman Frank Cushnahan, sought a success fee of Stg5m (6.6m) in connection with the deal.

Mr Cushnahan has denied any wrongdoing.

US law firm Brown Rudnick and Belfast solicitors Tughans had also been due to receive similar success fees had Pimco succeeded.

After Pimco withdrew, Cerberus emerged as the winning bidder, with Tughans also involved in helping it secure the deal.

But the sale became mired in controversy following revelations Stg7.5m paid to Tughans was diverted to an Isle of Man account by its then managing partner Ian Coulter.

Mr Coulter departed the firm and the cash was returned.

Cerberus denied making any improper payment in connection with the deal.

Mr Coulter also denied any wrongdoing and said the money was transferred for complex, commercially and legally sensitive reasons which would be explained to the appropriate authorities.

Political blogger Jamie Bryson testified at the inquiry that he had received information that five people were to be the beneficiaries of the cash.

He named them as Mr Robinson, Mr Cushnahan, Mr Coulter, developer Andrew Creighton and accountant David Watters.

All five have rejected his testimony.

Mr Creighton said he did not claim, nor expect, to receive any payment in relation to Project Eagle, while Mr Watters described the "unsupported testimony" as "completely false".
Sharon Donnery has been named as the new Deputy Governor at the Central Bank.

Ms Donnery, currently the director of Credit Institutions, will be one of two deputy governors at the regulator alongside Cyril Roux.

She will be the first female deputy governor in the Banks history, and will take up her new post at the beginning of March.

She replaces Stefan Gerlach who left in December.

Ms Donnery will be responsible for central banking functions, including economics, financial operations and resolution and corporate affairs.

Governor Philip Lane said Ms Donnerys breadth of experience at the Bank in regulation and central banking, combined with her European experience, will serve her well as Deputy Governor

Ms Donnery joined the Central Bank in 1996 and had been director of credit institutions since March 2014.

She is the Bank's alternate member of the Supervisory Board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and also is the Chair of the ECB SSM High Level Group on Non-performing Loans (NPLs). From February 2013 to August 2014, she held the statutory position of Registrar of Credit Unions. She has held a range of senior positions at the Central Bank including Head of Consumer Information and Head of Consumer Protection.

Ms Donnery holds a BA in Economics and Politics and an MA in Economics from University College Dublin.
Global customer credit agency Equifax will create 100 jobs with the opening of its new offices in Dublin.

Equifax said its IT talent centre on Sir John Rogerson's Quay will develop new solutions for its business around the world.

Recruitment for the "highly skilled research and development" roles is already under way. Equifax said the opening of the new facility comes as a result of "support from the Department of Jobs through IDA Ireland".

The Dublin centre will be headed up by Paul O'Dwyer. "We have made a big bet on Dublin as we recognise the technology talent pool is strong and the market can support Equifax's increasing demand for bold, innovative thinking," he said.

Mr O'Dwyer said the company is seeking applicants who are "interested in working with a globally recognised leader in consumer, commercial and workforce information solution."

Jobs Minister Richard Bruton said: "Business services is a key sector which we have targeted as part of our Action Plan for Jobs, and we have put in place actions specifically aimed at attracting research and development activity to Ireland.

"[The] announcement that Equifax, a world-leading company in its specific area, is establishing a research and development centre in Dublin is very welcome news as part of this plan. I wish Paul and his team every success with this great project."

IDA chief executive Martin Shanahan also hailed the announcement, saying that the new centre will play a key role in developing new IT solutions for its global operations.

"Equifax's decision to establish its R&D activity in Ireland is a great endorsement of the country's well-educated and technologically savvy workforce," he said.

Founded in 1889, Equifax gathers and maintains information on over 600 million consumers worldwide.

The company, whose CEO is Richard Smith, has its global headquarters in Atlanta.

The company has been in Ireland since October 1994, when it opened its Wexford operation. That facility is now based in a purpose-built centre at Wexford Business and Technology Park.

The operation in Wexford employs 90 people.

In 2002, Equifax transferred a large section of its UK operations to Wexford including database management and consumer activities connected to its credit information services.
The Central Bank has no power to compel banks to end the two-tier market on mortgage variable rates, its newly installed Governor Professor Philip Lane has admitted.

Prof Lane also told TDs and Senators that interfering in the contracts between a lender and borrower was not in the bank's power.

At the Oireachtas Finance Committee yesterday, Fianna Fail's finance spokesman Michael McGrath said many of the reductions in rates that have been announced over the past year are restricted to new customers.

Prof Lane said he understood that it appeared unfair.

But he added: "Banks have to be run on a commercial basis. We can discuss the issue about delivering competition in the banks, and we can discuss whether the existing high rates are likely to persist, but the Bank cannot interfere with the contracts between the lender and the borrower."

He said the Central Bank will look at ensuring the process for switching a mortgage to another lender is easier.

"But the issue of insisting that a bank treats new customers and existing customers the same way, that's not really within our power," he added.

Despite the huge difference in costs between here and the eurozone average, the Central Bank said last week that variable rates were down marginally in November.

Six main domestic lenders were twice dragged in before Finance Minister Michael Noonan last year in a bid to persuade them to cut their high variable rates. AIB and its EBS subsidiary responded with cuts.

Mr McGrath said more needs to be done by the Central Bank as the banks' rates are "unjustifiable".

"I think it is fundamentally unfair that the rate reductions are not being extended to the existing customer base across the banking system. You are a new governor and I hope that this is an issue that you will tackle," he said.

Figures from the Central Bank released last week showed first time buyers here are paying 2,000 more a year for their mortgages than the equivalent in the rest of the Eurozone.

That is because the average variable mortgage rate is almost 2pc higher here than the average in the euro currency area. New home buyers are being charged an average borrowing rate of 3.96pc.

The equivalent euro rate is nearly half this, at 2.05pc.

Prof Lane also said the Central Bank has done all it can in relation to mortgage arrears, adding that the number of legal proceedings against mortgage holders have been increasing.

"I think a lot of it is coming to a conclusion. The way the legal system works, there is still going to be some years in this, but I believe the supervisory teams that we have are engaging with the banks, making sure that they are in fact achieving sustainable solutions."

And he added: "From the point of view of the Central Bank, I think what has happened through these strategies is as much as a central bank can do."

On the mortgage deposit rules, he said the issue around rents will factor into the review of the rules due to be published in November.

And he said prices will fall meaning the "bidding war on houses will be less intense".

"So people will be able to buy houses at a lower price than if credit were unregulated," he said.

Meanwhile, the Government has said it will increase social housing output to 17,000 units this year - up from the 13,000 units it provided in 2015, as part of its five-year programme to solve the housing crisis.

In a Social Housing Output report, the Department of the Environment said public housing is now being built at a quicker rate than in the private sector, with 420 staff recruited by local authorities to deliver more social housing units.

The 17,000 units in 2016 will be made up of a mixture of construction, the refurbishment of previously unfit local authority dwellings, from leasing buildings for rental to council tenants and private rental properties, with rental-assistance paid directly to landlords.
Mark Carney has been hinting he'd like to remain in the top job at the Bank of England.

In testimony to politicians in London yesterday, Carney, below, said it's a "tremendous honour" to have his current job and there is a "lot more to be done" at the central bank.

It's yet another signal from the Canadian that he could seek to stay for the full eight-year term permitted by UK legislation, instead of the five years he indicated when he was appointed.

Carney was named to the role in late 2012 by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

He succeeded Mervyn King at the London-based institution in July 2013, meaning he reached the half-way point of the five years he said he will serve at the end of 2015.

The mystery surrounding his future has echoes of the build-up to his appointment, when he denied he had any interest in the BOE job and ruled out the possibility he would move from the Bank of Canada, where he was governor.

For now, he has a much bigger question to grapple with - whether and when to increase benchmark borrowing costs from 0.5pc.

Coveney plays his cards close

Annual general meetings can be difficult affairs. Depending on how a company is doing, it can either be an all-day epic with rows every few minutes and angry shareholders demanding the chief executive's head on a platter (think bank AGMs in recent years), or a leisurely affair with all resolutions passed easily and everyone happy.

Greencore's meeting has gone from one to the other in recent years. Back in 2011, after a failed merger with Northern Foods, the share price was stuck below 1 and investors lined up to lambast CEO Patrick Coveney. Yesterday's meeting was a much more sedate affair.

It was long, but with shareholders basically pleased with a company share price that has trebled in the last four years. Every resolution was carried with at least 98pc support.

That's the kind of Saddam Hussein-esque approval rating that his brother, Agriculture minister Simon Coveney, can only dream of.

And if Patrick has any insights into when his brother is going to face his own "shareholders", the electorate, he was keeping it to himself.

"No," he laughingly replied when asked if he knew when the General Election date will be.

Green shoots, and scores

Property firm Green REIT has persuaded financial powerhouse Fidelity International to take 26,500 sq ft at its Georges Quay House property in Dublin 2.

Fidelity is moving into the area as Twitter moves on - for bigger premises elsewhere. The Punt isn't sure what the shift from techies to moneybags says about the hipness or otherwise of the neighbourhood. Perhaps nothing. Strictly speaking, Fidelity is initially moving into space vacated by Royal Bank of Canada.

It won't expand into the separate 41,000 sq ft at same property being vacated by Twitter and US firm Invesco until later in the year.

Green's asset management director, Ronan Webster, commented; "We are delighted to secure Fidelity International as tenants in Georges Quay. With the letting to Fidelity International and the retention of Royal Bank of Canada within the Georges Quay estate, we continue to keep occupancy at 100pc in one of Dublin's finest office locations."

Both leases are for 49 per sq ft. JLL were agents on the deal.
David Cameron has said he is "genuinely angry" about Google's tax treatment - but insisted his Government is making up for lax rules under Labour.

The Prime Minister said he "disputed" claims that a 130 million back-tax settlement by the internet giant meant it was paying a rate of just 3%.

He said those upset about the firm's tax should blame Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who allowed it to pay "zero percent".

The comments, in angry clashes with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions, came with ministers under fresh pressure to justify the deal struck by HM Revenue & Customs.

Italy is said to be about to seal an agreement which will see Google pay a higher proportion of its profits, while Mr Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and other senior figures are under close scrutiny over their links to the internet giant.

French MEP Eva Joly, vice chairwoman of the Special European Parliamentary Committee on Tax Rulings, said it wanted Mr Osborne to answer questions about the "very bad deal".

"This bad deal is very bad news for everybody because it shows that the UK prepares itself to become a kind of a tax haven to attract the multinationals," she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

In the Commons, Mr Corbyn asked the premier whether it was correct that Google's settlement meant it had an effective 3% tax rate.

Mr Cameron replied: "We're talking about tax that should have been collected under a Labour government, raised by a Conservative government.

"I do dispute the figures that he gives. It's quite right this is done independently by HMRC, but I'm absolutely clear that no government has done more than this one to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. No government and certainly not the last Labour government."

Mr Corbyn, who pointed out that the inquiries into Google had started under Labour, said ordinary taxpayers would be angry that such firms were getting special treatment.

But Mr Cameron said the new Diverted Profit Tax would mean companies would "pay more tax in future".

He said the coalition had raised 100 billion extra from business in the last parliament by closing loopholes.

Mr Cameron insisted he was "genuinely angry" about the situation with Google, which he said had been allowed to pay "zero percent" under Labour.

"Maybe he should start by calling Tony Blair - you can get him at JP Morgan. Call Gordon Brown - apparently you can get him at a Californian bond dealer called Pimco. Call Alistair Darling - I think he is at Morgan Stanley, but it is hard to keep up," he told MPs.

"Those are the people to blame for Google not paying their taxes."
China is doing just fine and whats happening in the global economy is not a repeat of 2008, the President of Morgan Stanley told a conference in Dublin.

Chinas highly volatile shares ended lower again today, after plunging on Tuesday, taking losses so far this year to about 22pc or 12 trillion yuan.

The new year has seen a number of weak economic indicators from the worlds second biggest economy, including data today showing profits at Chinese industrial firms fell 4.7pc in December from year earlier, the seventh straight monthly decline.

But at the European Financial Forum in Dublin this morning, Irishman Colm Kelleher was upbeat on China.

Chinas like marmite, you either like it or you dont. We are of the view that China is just fine. 6.9pc growth is OK, we believe those numbers broadly, Mr Kelleher said.

Theres no new news here.

The newly installed President of the US investment banking giant claimed the markets were undergoing a correction, and he dismissed suggestions from the likes of George Soros that the world faced a repeat of 2008.

This is not 2008. There is no systemic risk, theres no smoking gun, he added.

It was a view shared by the Irish ambassador to China, Paul Kavanagh, who decried the constantly negative headlines on China and highlighted the opportunities for Ireland.

Speaking from the floor of the conference room in Dublin Castle, Mr Kavanagh complained of the lack of balance in the coverage of the sprawling Asian economy.

A lot of people are reading these headlines and can become discouraged whereas in fact a rebalancing Chinese economy and a burgeoning middle class will continue to need all of the things that Ireland does best, Mr Kavanagh said.

Food, top quality education, a platform for investment in the only English language country in the Eurozone. Ireland is a perfect market for China and they will continue to need, want and be able to pay for everything that Ireland does best. I would encourage people in Ireland who are reading these headlines not to be blown aside by the ambient constantly negative headlines. Keep your eye on the ball and see the opportunities that are there for Ireland in particular.

Mr Kelleher, who was this month announced as President of the US investment banking giant, said Ireland had been far sighted and brave in its attitude towards bondholders in 2011. He said you have to follow the rules of capital markets.

Ireland did the right thing. Some other countries didnt. Ireland is now one of the richest issuing countries in the west, Mr Kelleher said.

His comments came in the wake of a report from the EUs Court of Auditors, which stated that the European Central Banks refusal to let Ireland burn senior bondholders was not explained to authorities in Brussels.

It also said it was not required to explain the advice it was given.
The character known as the 'Galway Player' has posted an open letter to the website that named Irish people the ugliest "in the world".

BeautifulPeople.com today released a survey which claims that Irish men are the 'ugliest in the world', and an Irish man who made his name picking up women is not happy about it.

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Writing on Facebook, the 'Galway Player' wrote that he is regretfully "withdrawing from your website", a decision "based entirely on the results of your recent survey".

He claims the finding is a "gross injustice", naming a number of attractive Irish people who have made careers in acting and music.

"The Emerald Isle is the birthplace of Colin Farrell, Tommy Bowe, Stuart Townsend, Michael Fassbender, Rob Kearney, Johnathan Rhys Meyers, Danny O Donoghue and myself to name but a few".

"Any nation that boasts such quality of men folk is entitled to doubt the validity of your findings".

Attempting to figure out where it went wrong for Irish men, he blames "climatic conditions" which make it hard for Irish men to become bronzed gods.

"A good tan can make a person look more attractive, hence living on a Island that sees more rain than your site sees airbrushed profile pictures, has us at a massive disadvantage".

"What we lack through in genetic and time spend manscaping we absolutely make up for in other critical departments".

He questioned the validity of the survey, asking if the "higher than average proportion of ginger people" in the country has "adversely affected our rankings".

Resigned, he adds that Irish men will "just have to make do with being highly regarded worldwide for our charm, wit, personality, warmth and generosity".

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"As the old Irish saying goes..If youre lucky enough to be Irish, youre lucky enough".

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Fewer than one in 10 single Irish males who applied to put their profiles on elitist site Beautifulpeople.com last year were accepted.

The LA-based site, which has a worldwide membership of more than five million, makes no apology for only accepting the globe's best-looking singles.

Further analysis of the Irish statistics on beautifulpeople.com revealed that applicants from Dublin, both male and female, had the highest acceptance rates on the site, while romance-hunters from Limerick were most likely to be rejected.
The BBC has been accused of acting as a cheerleader for suicide after announcing that it is to air scenes showing a British businessman taking his own life at a Swiss suicide clinic.

The corporation said yesterday that it will screen a 90-minute documentary following the declining health of Simon Binner, a Cambridge graduate who suffered from motor neurone disease, and his eventual decision to kill himself, on October 19 last year.

Mr Binner, who was diagnosed with the degenerative disease in January 2015, made headlines after he announced on LinkedIn that he planned to end his life at the Eternal Spirit clinic, in Basel.

A preview version of the deeply moving BBC documentary, which will air on February 10, shows the 57-year-old lying on a bed in the Swiss clinic, before opening a valve that allows a powerful sedative to enter his veins. While the moment of dying is not shown, there is a fleeting glimpse of Mr Binners dead body, as his friends and family sit weeping. The camera then cuts to the lid of his coffin being screwed down.

The corporation says that the film, which reveals that Mr Binner had at one stage tried to hang himself, is a sensitive observational documentary following one familys experience of assisted death.

But opponents of assisted dying said the broadcaster was acting as a cheerleader for suicide. Alistair Thompson, a spokesman for Care Not Killing, said: We are deeply disturbed by this. This has the capacity to encourage others to take their own lives.

The film is not the first time the BBC has shown assisted suicide. In 2011, the corporation aired a documentary, presented by Terry Pratchett, the late author, that showed another British motor neurone disease sufferer dying at Dignitas, the famous Swiss clinic.

The forthcoming film examines both sides of the assisted dying debate, with Mr Binners wife, Debbie, telling the camera at one stage that she does not believe that her husband is doing the right thing in seeking to end his life - although she later changes her mind.

The company director, from Purley, Surrey, initially aimed to kill himself on November 2, his 58th birthday, but brought his trip to Switzerland forward after his condition worsened.

In the moments before his death, Mr Binney, who had lost the power of speech, plays his wife a recording of a voice actor reading a message, speaking of his love for her.

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Historical fiction: Perdita Weeks as Vanessa and Sarah Greene as May in RTE's 'Rebellion'

Managing Director of RTE Glen Killane is unconcerned by drama Rebellion's drop in ratings.

The drama's viewing figures have slumped in recent weeks. The fourth episode pulled in 487,000 viewers - down 159,200 from the second episode which reached the highest viewership at 646,800.

But Killane insists the drama is a triumph, describing it as a brave attempt.

"It was an attempt by RTE to get back into that space of period drama which we haven't done since Strumpet City (in 1980) so it was a big step for us. Is it going to please everyone? No, of course not but it's achieved what we wanted."

"I am not concerned by the figures. It is performing well with a 30pc share. It is a hugely ambitious project for us, and one which we have put a lot into it.

"You will always be on shaky grounds when discussing The Rising. I think it is a brave attempt. I would love to see a follow up in the decade of commemoration.... in the next 24-36 months."

Killane was speaking at the launch of the new Boston College/ Centenary Ireland 1916 online exhibition in the national library.

The online resource sheds light on previously unseen archival imagery and footage and reveals "the hidden stories of 1916."

Special topics include the women of 1916, audio and video footage from the time, specially commissioned documentaries about key individuals and detailed historical analysis.

RTE and Century Ireland hope to recreate the palpable sense of confusion and trauma that engulfed Dublin by live tweeting the events of 1916 in real time.
Island Ferries intends to cease winter sailings from Ros a Mhil to Inis Mor from January 31, following a dispute over the collection of an 80 cent passenger charge.

The largest of the Aran Islands could be left without a ferry from as early as next week after the operator said it would press ahead with plans to end the service.

Island Ferries intends to cease winter sailings from Ros a Mhil to Inis Mor from January 31, following a dispute over the collection of an 80 cent passenger charge.

Minister of State Joe McHugh has insisted he will take all necessary measures to ensure that islanders are not left without a service.

Galway county councillors urged the minister to put in place a Public Service Obligation (PSO) contract for the island. The ferry to Inis Mor is the only service to the Aran Islands not operating under the security of a State subsidy.

Cathy Ni Ghoill, of Comharchumann Forbartha Arann, said islanders were back at square one.

She said: This will leave the island totally stranded from the end of the week.

The flights in the winter run three times a day but they often only take seven or eight people because of weight restrictions.

And even at that, not everyone can afford to take the plane on a daily basis.

A spokesperson for the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht said: Minister of State McHugh has already indicated to representatives of the Aran community that whatever measures are necessary will be taken to ensure that they are not left without a ferry service after January 31, 2016.
Valuable antique books which went missing during the restoration of Carton House were identified due to the distinctive Fitzgerald family crest printed on their spines, a trial has heard.

Andrew Shannon (51) has gone on trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court accused of unlawfully possessing 67 of the books after they were allegedly found during a search of his home.

The books, including a 1660 edition of the King James Bible of which only six exist, went missing after they were put in storage during the restoration of the Kildare country house.

Mr Shannon of Willans Way, Ongar, Dublin pleaded not guilty to possession of the books at his home while knowing or being reckless as to whether they were stolen on March 3, 2007.

Counsel for the DPP, Monika Leech BL told a jury today that it was not the States case that Mr Shannon stole the books himself but that he had them in his possession. She said the books were found when gardai searched Mr Shannons home in March 2007.

Conor Mallaghan gave evidence that he has worked at Carton House since 1994 overseeing its restoration after his fathers company bought the estate in 1977. He said that before restoration work began, he put all items in the house, including the library books, into storage. He said he photographed each book before storing it.

The books remained in boxes until 2006 when the process of restoring them to the library began. Mr Mallaghan said it was then he noticed the missing books and went to the gardai.

He agreed with counsel that in 2007 he went to the garda station with his father to identify several books which had been found.

Mr Mallaghan was shown three of the antique books in court including a large edition of the King James Bible. He told counsel he identified them by the Fitzgerald family crest which was on their spine and inside the cover.

Mr Mallaghan explained that the crest featured a monkey which according to legend saved one of the Fitzgeralds after waking him up in a burning building.

Mr Mallaghan said some of the books dated from the middle of the 17th century and beyond. He told counsel that his family had never sold or lent out any of the 67 books nor had they given anyone permission to remove them from the house aside from the storage company.

The trial continues before Judge Petria McDonnell.
A GUNMAN fired five shots at a man standing at a busy roundabout outside a shopping centre in Tallaght, an inquest heard.

Karl Wynne (45) of Russell Avenue, Tallaght, Dublin 24 died on July 19 2013, two months after he was shot.

He sustained gunshot wounds to the head, neck and abdomen after he was shot by a pillion passenger on a motorbike. The gunman dismounted the motorbike and stood over the man lying on the footpath to fire two more shots from a semi-automatic pistol, Dublin Coroners Court heard.

Mr Wynne, a father of one, had left his partner Lorraine Lynch and their son to meet someone on May 30 2013. Ms Lynch, who broke down in tears as she entered the witness box, said he talked on the phone with someone she felt he knew before leaving the house.

It was a male voice. He (Karl) was trying to buy cocaine. It was a civilised call, as if he knew him (the caller) well, she said. I told him I didnt want him to go out. He said he wouldnt be long, she said.

Gardai had previously called to the house to talk to her partner about a threat made against him, Ms Lynch said.

The guards had been around but he ran out the back of the house, Ms Lynch said.

Witness James Reid saw the shooting in his rear view mirror as he passed St Dominic's Shopping Centre in Tallaght.

I saw a black motorbike with two men. The driver was crouched down and didnt move. The second guy had his arm out, pointed at a man standing on the footpath. I heard two shots, he said.

The motorbike sped off in the direction of the Tallaght by-pass so fast that the passenger was almost thrown from the bike as it passed over a speed bump, Mr Reid said. He walked over to the man lying on the path.

I looked down and saw it was Karl Wynne. He was lying on his back with his two arms up and his palms were facing the sky, Mr Reid said.

Ballistics specialist Det Garda Seamus ODonnell found five shots had been discharged from a semi-automatic pistol. Neither the weapon nor the motorbike have been recovered, Det Insp John Walsh told the court. Some 100 statements were taken by Gardai and a file was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions but no charges were brought due to insufficient evidence. The file remains open, Det Insp Walsh said.

Mr Wynne was admitted to Tallaght Hospital at 10.04pm. He spent fifty days in the intensive care unit before he passed away on July 19 2013. He remained seriously ill but was responsive and could speak to his partner.

He could say my name. He knew who I was. He would ask the nurse to call me, Ms Lynch said.

Expand Close Gardai at the scene of the fatal shooting of Karl Wynne at St Dominic's road in Tallaght. Pic:Mark Condren / Facebook

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Whatsapp Gardai at the scene of the fatal shooting of Karl Wynne at St Dominic's road in Tallaght. Pic:Mark Condren

The deceaseds brother Kevin Wynne left the hospital hours before he died.

There was no one there when he died, I got the call about an hour after, he said.

The cause of death was bronchial pneumonia due to gunshot wounds to the head and neck with gunshot wounds to the abdomen as a contributory factor.

The jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing by persons unknown.
The Irish chip design company Movidius has signed a "substantial" sales deal with Google that will allow the software giant to develop new devices using chips made by the Dublin-based firm.

The deal is the first in an expected series of announcements to be made by Movidius with big international technology companies as it seeks to establish a global position at the top of the internet of things' manufacturing pile.

The tie-up between the two companies will let Google build as-yet unnamed products that can handle large amounts of computer processing by themselves without having to beam the raw data back to servers or data centres for interpretation.

"Think of a security camera," Sean Mitchell, co-founder and chief operating officer of Movidius, told Independent.ie.

"Using our chip, it can understand what it's seeing or hearing without being told by a more powerful machine in a data centre. In this way it can act with more autonomy and in a more unsupervised way."

One advantage to this, says Mitchell, is that devices have to transfer far less data because they're capable of making decisions on-site. "It might be one hundredth of the data you would need today when a terminal is dumbly taking in raw data," he said.

It also means that some devices won't need an internet connection to intelligently assess a situation, widening the range of products and environments they can be used in.

"What Google has been able to achieve with neural networks is providing us with the building blocks for machine intelligence, laying the groundwork for the next decade of how technology will enhance the way people interact with the world," said Blaise Agera y Arcas, head of Google's machine intelligence group in Seattle. "By working with Movidius, we're able to expand this technology beyond the data center and out into the real world, giving people the benefits of machine intelligence on their personal devices."

Current system can't do this because the amount of processing power required to intelligently process information such as high resolution video content is beyond the capacity existing, small embeddable chips.

Last year, Google said that it would use Movidius's technology as part of its own 3D-mapping platform. The move means that Movidius chips could form part of a much wider adoption among phone and mobile device makers.

Movidius's current line of Irish-designed chips has also attracted the interest of other top-end tech companies that want to position themselves in the internet of things' sector.

"We talked last year about customer announcements in 2016," said Mitchell. "This is the first one and there's more to come soon. It's a substantial deal for us in revenue terms."

Last year, Movidius announced one of Europe's biggest tech funding rounds, with 38m in cash from investors that included Summit Bridge Capital, the China-Ireland Growth Technology Fund co-managed by Atlantic Bridge Capital and WestSummit Capital, ARCH Venture Partners and DFJ Esprit. The new investment round brought its funding haul to over 83m.

The company was founded in 2006 by David Moloney and Sean Mitchell.

Its main activity is making chips that drive software and hardware product innovation in visual sensing for emerging applications such as virtual reality headsets, drones, home automation, robots, medical devices and wearables. Its most recent chip can process six high definition cameras at once, handling 600 megapixels per second.
A JUDGE has refused to jail a thief who demanded a prison sentence for snatching 500 from a supermarket till.

David Cummins (27) told Judge Anthony Halpin he wanted a term of imprisonment for the theft, but the judge would not agree and instead suspended it.

Cummins was already serving a sentence for another crime when his case was heard at Dublin District Court.

Judge Halpin gave him another six months for the supermarket theft but suspended it for 18 months, meaning it will be activated if he re-offends on release.

Cummins, of Oak Green, Royal Oak, Santry, pleaded guilty to stealing 500 from the till at Lidl, Butterly Business Park, Kilmore Road, last November 28.

The court heard he was held by two male customers until the gardai arrived and arrested him.

Convictions

He had 110 prior convictions and was already serving a three-month sentence.

"He would prefer if there wasn't a suspended element," Cummins' solicitor told the judge.

Judge Halpin said he believed the accused had had a "rush of blood to the head" and that sentencing was the exclusive role of the judge, not the defendant.

"Does he want to swap places?" he asked.

Cummins initially refused to sign his bond but agreed when the case was called again.
A Pakistani man has pleaded guilty to killing a man he suspected of having an affair with his wife.

Shahzad Hussain (35), with a last address at Woodland Avenue, Mosney, Co Meath, was previously jailed for life for murdering his wife's cousin and his own distant relative Muhammad Arif (32).

He was also sentenced to seven years for seriously injuring his wife Rashida Bibi Haider (44) and two years for assaulting her on January 6, 2011 at Mr Arifs apartment in Fitzwilliam Court, Dyer Street, Drogheda, Co Louth. He had denied the charges.

However, in July 2014 the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed his murder conviction and ordered a retrial after a three-judge court found that there was a very real risk of injustice in the manner in which the central question of provocation was explained to the jury by the trial judge.

Today Mr Shane Costelloe SC, prosecuting, told the Central Criminal Court that in circumstances where the court of appeal had directed a retrial, he had been instructed by the DPP that Hussain could be arraigned on count one.

Hussain then pleaded not guilty to the murder but guilty to the manslaughter of Mr Arif.

Prosecution counsel told the court that this plea "meets the case in the circumstances."

The court previously heard evidence that all three, who were originally from Pakistan, had lived together in Fitzwilliam Court.

However, difficulties arose in the arranged marriage of Ms Haider and the accused after he began to suspect that she was having an affairwith her cousin. Both husband and wife moved out separately in December 2010.

Defence counsel, Mr Dominic McGinn SC, told Ms Justice Margaret Heneghan that "there was a lot of evidence to go through" and she remanded Mr Hussain in custody until April 4 for sentencing.

The court heard Hussain was currently serving a sentence on the other two counts on the indictment "as those were not overturned by the court of appeal."

Mr McGinn told Ms Justice Heneghan that his client has been in custody for the last five years during which he has been in four different prisons. He asked for a governor report from each of those.
A man who facilitated the importation of ten million cigarettes from the Netherlands by supplying the necessary documentation to get the containers into the country has been sentenced to three years.

Graham Costigan (42) of Santry Court, Santry Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to evasion of excise duty and attempted evasion of excise duty on cigarettes on September 16, 2013. The potential loss to the exchequer was more than 4 million.

Detective Garda Paul Kane said that Costigan was not the principal target of the operation. He said six men including Costigan and the driver of a lorry were arrested but Costigan was the only one who was charged.

He told Garrett McCormack BL, prosecuting, that the container transporting the cigarettes was stopped on the M1 in Dublin.

Three men who were shadowing the lorry in a Toyota Landcruiser were arrested but refused to co-operate with gardai during questioning.

A fourth man who was seen paying the purported duty on the container on CCTV and who used his company as a cloak to facilitate the scheme, was also never charged.

Costigan made immediate admissions when arrested. He said he had been supplied with a laptop and his role was to e-mail a number of documents, including packing lists, to facilitate the transport of the cigarettes from Singapore to the Netherlands and ultimately into Ireland.

Det Gda Kane said Costigan was familiar with the procedure for clearing goods from a previous job and knew what was needed to bring the containers into this country.

He agreed with Michael Bowman SC, defending, that Costigan had never been on the garda radar and was not the principal target of the garda operation. He has no previous convictions.

Mr Bowman said his client acknowledged that he got involved in a business transaction he was suspicious of and that he strongly suspected, because of the other men involved, that cigarettes would be in the container.

He was left isolated and immediately identifiable, counsel said He was completely disposable and once he was arrested, the people who used and exploited his vulnerability, assumed he would know better than to name names.

Judge Melanie Greally said Costigan had been specifically chosen for his ability to create the appropriate digital footprint but acknowledged that he had co-operated with the garda investigation and saved the State considerable difficulty.

She said the scale of the attempted evasion could not be overlooked considering that it is a crime which is particularly difficult to detect due to the volume of cargo coming through the ports.

Judge Greally noted Costigan's previous good character and good employment history but said he had got involved with his eyes open and for monetary gain.

She also acknowledged that the evidence proved that Costigan was neither the instigator nor the primary beneficiary of the crime.

Judge Greally said the public interest requires that a custodial sentence be imposed before she sentenced Costigan to three years in prison with the final 18 months suspended on strict conditions.

Det Gda Kane said the documentation with the container indicated that it contained posts and fencing.

Following the seizure of the cigarettes a number of business premises were searched and laptops, mobile phones and tablets were seized. Evidence gathered from the analysis of this equipment led to Costigan's arrest.

Det Gda Kane said Costigan made a number of admissions in garda interviews after various documents were put to him.

He said Costigan was co-operative with the gardai and confirmed that there were people higher up in the operation than him.

Det Gda Kane confirmed that Costigan had bought a furniture company in 2011 but it later failed. He accepted that Costigan was in fear of the others involved and that was reasonable considering who they were.

He further accepted that Costigan had no control over the amount of cigarettes shipped in and the State was never at a loss of excise and duty because the haul had been seized by gardai.

Det Gda Kane told Judge Greally that it was his understanding, although it was never confirmed, that Costigan was to get a sum of cash for his role.

Mr Bowman handed in a number of testimonials into court on behalf of Costigan. He said his client was deeply ashamed of his actions and lost his most recent job due to the publicity surrounding the case.
The wife of slain Irishman Jason Corbett is to be summoned before a US court to explain what she has done with some of his belongings.

The move comes after a court in North Carolina issued a temporary restraining order, blocking murder accused Molly Martens (32) from taking any more items from the home that the couple shared together. She has also been banned from selling any of Mr Corbetts personal belongings.

The order was granted after the executor of Mr Corbetts estate, his brother-in-law David Lynch, received information that belongings were removed from the property last Thursday.

A court hearing on the issue was scheduled for today, but has been put back until next week.

It is the latest development in the bitter row which has raged between Mr Corbetts family and Ms Martens over property and custody issues since his death last August.

Ms Martens and her father, former FBI agent Thomas Martens (65), have both been charged with murdering the Limerick man at his home in the town of Wallburg.

Under North Carolina law, Ms Martens will lose any rights to her husbands belongings if she is deemed to be a slayer.

According to court documents, the alleged removal of his belongings violated an earlier consent order issued in September.

That order directed Ms Martens not to remove any tangible personal property owned by her husband from the house.

Children

As well as issuing a restraining order, the Davidson County Superior Court also ordered that Ms Martens appear before it to be examined on the issue.

Ms Martens has previously lost a bid to adopt her husbands two children, who were born to his late first wife Mags.

They are now living with Mr Lynch and his wife Tracey in Ireland.
A mother who sued two doctors after a swab was left inside her during the delivery of her baby has been awarded 117,000 by the High Court.

Sarah Daly (38), a marketing manager from Rathfarnham in Dublin, had sued her consultant, Valerie Donnelly, and another consultant, Charles Julian Dockeray, who managed the delivery and was standing in for Ms Donnelly on April 22, 2013, at Mount Carmel Hospital in Dublin.

Mr Justice Kevin Cross said what ought to have been a very joyous occasion for Ms Daly had become something that she will live with for the rest of her life.

He said Ms Daly was entitled to be compensated for the wrongful insertion of the swab and the fact that it was not diagnosed despite her complaints for a considerable time.

She was also entitled to compensation because no internal examination took place and she was discharged from hospital after the swab had been removed without any antibiotic and she developed a significant infection.

Ms Daly was admitted to Mount Carmel on April 22, 2013 and her baby was safely delivered.

Three days later, she was in extreme pain and distress and was taken back to the hospital by her husband but no internal examination was carried out, the judge said.

On April 28, in an internal examination, the swab which was "offensive and malodorous" and the "size of a plum" was removed.

Awarding her 117,000, the judge said the swab ought not to have been left inside Ms Daly and should have been detected sooner.
A YOUNG woman has denied hitting another in the face with a glass in an alleged nightclub assault.

Amy Sutton (25) is alleged to have struck the woman in a confrontation in the toilets at Copper Face Jacks, leaving her scarred.

The case against her was adjourned after Dublin District Court heard that some of the CCTV footage taken on the night had not been disclosed by the prosecution.

Ms Sutton, from Tobernea Terrace, Blackrock, is pleading not guilty to assault causing harm to Sinead Pope.

Ms Pope told the court she was in the toilets in the club on Harcourt Street in the early hours of November 30, 2014.

As she walked out, she felt someone push her from behind in the doorway.

I turned around and asked the girl to have patience and to stop pushing me, she said.

It was then that she got quite aggressive and started shouting at me and cursing at me, and then the glass hit my face.

She said the woman had been pushing at her with a glass in her hand, which was raised towards her face.

There was a large cut to her nose and she was left with a scar there and another under her left eye.

She ran back into the toilets and the woman left, she said.

I was in a panic, I just saw blood streaming down my face in the mirror, she said.

She tried to focus her vision, which was blurred as she wore contact lenses and the drink had got into her eyes.

She described the woman as being smaller than her, with fair hair, wearing a black crop top, black jeans and black boots.

Staff took her around the club to see if she could see her alleged assailant, but she could not.

Ms Pope said there were a lot of people in the club and she could not see the woman on the CCTV either.

Staff then went to find the woman and asked Ms Pope to identify her.

When I saw her, I was 100pc certain it was her, she said.

Defence barrister Brian Storan said Ms Sutton would say she recalled trying to get out of the bathroom on the night when somebody was standing there, asking her to properly say excuse me.

A staff member said in evidence that when he spoke to Ms Sutton she was not wearing shoes and became extremely aggressive.

He asked her to put her shoes on. I was told to f*** off, and who the f*** was I, he said.

Footage

He said the woman had pink high heels. In CCTV footage a woman the club employee referred to was wearing a white top.

However, the employee then told the judge he had viewed a separate piece of footage that was not before the court.

A state solicitor said this was the first time she had heard

of the other piece of footage, and asked Judge Bryan Smyth to adjourn the case to establish whether it was still available.

Mr Storan asked the judge to dismiss the case, saying the description of the alleged assailant and the woman on the CCTV footage did not match.

The judge refused to dismiss the case and granted the adjournment.

The case will continue on a later date.
Mr Lowry made 31 bank accounts available to the tribunal over nine years which involved a huge amount of work

Former Communications Minister Michael Lowry is challenging a decision by the Moriarty Tribunal to only award him one-third of his legal costs during the inquiry's 14-year tenure.

He claims he was treated unfairly and was discriminated against compared to the other subject of the tribunal, the late former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, who was awarded 100pc of his costs.

The Independent Tipperary North TD says his overall bill will run into millions of euro because he had to engage with the tribunal on an almost continuous basis over its 14 years.

The claims came on the opening of Mr Lowry's High Court judicial review application over the October 2013 decision of the tribunal to only award him one-third of his legal costs after it found he failed to fully co-operate with it.

The tribunal is opposing the action.

Niamh Hyland SC, for Mr Lowry, said Mr Lowry and Mr Haughey were the two subjects of the terms of the reference of the tribunal which was set up in 1997 to investigate whether payments were made to the two men while in public office and in circumstances which gave rise to inferences the payments were in connection with office.

In its findings, the tribunal held that in the course of his office, Mr Lowry conferred benefit on businessman Denis O'Brien who had made or facilitated payments to the then communications minister (Lowry) but there was no finding Mr O'Brien had benefited from those payments. Mr Lowry rejects those findings, counsel said.

In "stark contrast" to what happened with Mr Lowry, the tribunal found that between 1979 and 1996, Mr Haughey obtained benefit of 11m which in 1998 was 171 times his salary, counsel said.

No criminal charges arose out of this as the tribunal findings have no legal effect and were described by one Supreme Court judge as "sterile" legal findings.

Ms Hyland argued the tribunal's awarding of only one-third of Mr Lowry's costs was disproportionate particularly having regard to the level of co-operation he provided to it.

For example, Mr Lowry made 31 bank accounts available to the tribunal over nine years which involved a huge amount of work.

Mr Lowry had not brought any legal challenge to the tribunal until this case unlike others, including Mr Haughey and Mr O'Brien, who had brought such challenges. This was in circumstances where 70pc of the tribunal was devoted to the awarding of the country's first mobile phone licence to ESAT, Mr O'Brien's company.

There was inequality by the tribunal in that it failed to apply its own legal principles in making the costs order, counsel said. The tribunal said Mr Lowry failed to identify one bank account in the Isle of Man and had furnished falsified documents. This was denied by Ms Hyland.

The case continues.
A WOMAN who says she fled her native Nigeria after her family threatened to kill her over being involved in lesbian activity has failed in a legal challenge to being refused refugee status here.

The woman, aged in her thirties, alleges she is bisexual, was introduced to same-sex relationships while a teenager in Nigeria, and continued to have same sex relationships along with heterosexual relationships.

She claimed, after her sister discovered her with a girl in August 2011, her family, who are Christian, threw her out and threatened to kill her. She she fled to Lagos to another sister who told her to leave after being told by their parents what she had done, she says.

She claimed she then met a man, referred to as T, who let her live with him for a time. She claimed she later she had a relationship wth a girl whose Muslim father threatened to have her stoned after he found out about them.

As a result of these events, she claimed T arranged for her to travel to Ireland in 2011. She claimed she met another man, H, on arrival here and lived with him until she told him in July 2012 she was bisexual. She also claimed H was the father of her son, who was born here.

She sought refugee status on grounds including an alleged well-founded fear of persecution in view of laws in Nigeria which fail to afford ppropriate protections to persons in the LGBT community.

A Bill prohibiting same-sex marriage, and providing for 14 years jail for those who marry a person of the same sex, was approved by the Nigerian Senate last year, the court heard.

She appealed to the High Court against a 2012 decision of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal upholding the refusal of her application for refugee status on grounds including that several of her claims were not credible.

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Robert Eagar said the tribunal had reasonably found several of the woman's claims lacked credibility.

The finding by the tribunal the woman had not said why T took her in and there was no clear evidence why he would do so was reasonable, the judge said.

It was also reasonable for the tribunal to find the woman's account she remained in T's yard for two days despite being threatened she would be stoned to death by T's landlord, the Muslim father of the girl she allegedly had a relationship with, did not "add up".

The tribunal also reasonably that the woman's claim that, within hours of arriving in Dublin, she met "another perfect stranger", a man, who had agreed to let her stay with him and later became pregnant by him "beggared belief", he said.
A YOUNG man has been sent for trial charged with dangerous driving causing the death of a toddler in the Phoenix Park.

Ciaran Lane (24) had a book of evidence served on him at Dublin District Court today.

Judge Anthony Halpin sent him forward for trial to Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

Mr Lane, a father-of-one of Ashington Avenue, Cabra, is charged with dangerous driving causing the death of Vanessa Siatka (1).

The offence is alleged to have happened at Ratra Triangle in the Phoenix Park on April 6 last.

He is also charged with two counts of dangerous driving - at the Maple Centre car park, Cabra and at Ashington Avenue.

He is further charged with driving under the influence of an intoxicant and without insurance at Ratra Triangle on the same date.

The court heard the book of evidence was ready and it was served on the defendant.

Judge Halpin gave Mr Lane the formal notice that he must provide within 14 days to the prosecution details of any alibi he intends to rely on.

The judge then sent him for trial to the current sittings of the circuit court. He remanded him on bail under existing conditions.

No plea has yet been entered by the defendant.

All the charges against him are under the Road Traffic Act.

Venessa Siatka was a month short of her second birthday when she was allegedly hit by a car in the Phoenix Park near the Ashtown Gate.
Richard Blackburn who was found guilty of sexual offences at Letterkenny Circuit court. (North West Newspix)

A youth club worker at an evangelical church who indecently assaulted a teenage girl every day has been jailed for two years.

Richard Blackburn (57), a landrover mechanic from Carnone, Raphoe, Co Donegal, pleaded guilty to three specimen charges relating to a series of sexual assaults on the girl between 2000 and 2002.

Most of the attacks took place in the back of a converted Mercedes van which he used to take children to and from a youth club run in Raphoe by the Congregational Church.

The victim, Rachel McAuley, now 29, wrote to the court from abroad where she now lives to waive her right to anonymity so her attacker could be named.

In her powerful victim impact statement, read to the court by investigating officer Det Sgt Ciaran Brolly, she told how she was now afraid to return home to Ireland for fear of meeting Blackburn.

Her life, she said, had been destroyed and simple things for most people like going to the shop were now nerve-wrecking experiences.

It is like my teenage years didnt exist at all, said the victim.

What happened to me was life-altering, dark and very scary. Richard Blackburn was a trusted family friend. My mother was a bridesmaid at his wedding.

He knew me from birth and therefore he knew my age. I was abused daily. For years he convinced me it was all my fault but I now know it wasn't my fault.

When I go home to Ireland I am afraid to meet him in the street. I wanted to spend time there when my granny was unwell and she died recently. I didnt get to spend that special time with her.

Ms McAuley, now a school teacher, said she doesnt sleep at night and constantly feels nervous.

She plucked up the courage to report Blackburn at a UK police station in 2010 and travelled to Ballybofey six months later to give gardai an extensive statement about the attacks.

DS Brolly told the court that Blackburn used his adapted van to ferry children to and from a youth club set up in church hall.

But when he was alone with Rachel he would sexually assault her.

Rachel, he said, had a strict religious upbringing. Blackburn had known her from birth, was a friend and parishioner along with her parents and her grandmother.

Most of the incidents happened when Blackburn was leaving Rachel home to her grannys house in Convoy

One one occasion he had taken her to Kilkenny on a trip, stopped at the isolated Barnesmore Gap outside Ballybofey on the way home and sexually assaulted her.

Whilst the assault took place, a passing patrol car stopped to check on the vehicle.

Blackburn had jumped back into the front of the van and told gardai he had stopped to rest.

Gardai didnt see Rachel in the sofa-bed in the back because the windows were obscured by curtains.

Rachel told gardai that Blackburn had said to her after the incident: That was close.

Judge John OHagan said Blackburn had breached the trust of an impressionable young girl in her formative years.

The age difference of 28 years was absolutely mind-boggling.

Blackburn, said the judge, had put his victim through an absolutely traumatic experience which had left deep scars on her life.

He sentenced Blackburn to three two-year prison sentences to run concurrently, with the last year suspended.

He also placed the mechanic on the sex offenders register for 10 years.
A doctor found guilty of 28 counts of poor professional performance and six counts of professional misconduct has hit back at claims he mistook an ankle for an elbow.

Dr Omar Hassan Khalafalla Mohamed (30) claims the Medical Council Fitness-to-Practice inquiry which found against him last night after hearing eleven days of evidence was organised to discredit him, following his attempt to expose colleagues working under falsified documents.

The bizarre claim was made during an interview with RTEs Liveline, where Mr Hassan denied all allegations made against him during the Medical Council hearting.

Asked about alleged instance in which he mistook an X-ray image of an ankle for that of an elbow, the 30-year repeatedly said he could not recall every making such a mistake.

Instead he said that the claim he had related back to a training session where there had been a lot of confusion.

I mentioned to the committee that that instance was simply not true, he said.

It was a teaching meeting where we were discussing up to 15 patients and x-rays, so there was a lot of x-rays around and misunderstandings will occur.

But there were no patients there and a teaching environment is a chance for people to make mistakes and learn more.

Asked by host Joe Duffy on whether he did confuse an ankle for an elbow, Mr Hassan said he remembered the instance but that he had been speaking about a different patient.

[He] mentioned one patient with an x-ray and I was speaking about another I can not recall the full details because it was years ago.

I dont really recall the incident clearly, he repeated.

Pushed on the issue by Joe, Mr Hassan continued to insist he could not recall, saying: I dont recall that particular training session. We are in training sessions all the time.

Asked about the audible gasp mentioned during the hearing when he is said to have made the mistake, the 30-year-old said that there were many reasons why such a noise would be made during a training session.

Dr Hassan, who attended the inquiry yesterday via telephone, was asked by host Joe want he thought of the Medical Councils verdict against him.

Reluctant to answer, he replied that he had not heard or could recall the president of the committee mentioning the word guilty.

[The committee] were detailing some allegations and whether the probability of these events took place.

Insisting he was very unhappy with how he had been portrayed as sloppy and unqualified by those giving evidence against him, Mr Hassan said exams dont lie and went into a detailed account of his educational background.

One of the allegations was that my English wasnt good enough but I did a national English exam and I sat and passed the exam set by the Medical Council.

Saying that most only score 50pc on the test, Mr Hassan claimed he passed it with flying colours.

He went on to say that he came from family of doctors, and that his brother and father had both worked in Ireland before returning to their native Sudan.

My father worked here as a surgeon in the late 1970s, and became a fellow of the [Royal] College of Surgeons in the UK afterwards.

He became the National Director of Surgery in Sudan after returning home.

Mr Hassan, whose medical registration has been suspended, said he did not know what his next step would be but said that he would always be a doctor regardless of what sanctions the Medical Council decides to take against him.
Numerous agencies that deal with domestic violence and sexual abuse victims are calling on members of all parties to make the issues a priority for the next government.

Labour Senator Mairia Cahill led representatives of Womens Aid, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and One In Four to brief members of the Dail and Seanad at a cross-party event.

The experts on both sexual abuse and domestic violence are the people who have suffered from it, but the experts in being able to comprehensively deal with the issue are the agencies who are on the coalface dealing with the issues day in, day out, she said.

Meanwhile, Ellen OMalley-Dunlop welcomed the recent publication of the Governments national strategy on domestic violence. But she warned that Ireland had a long way to go towards addressing the issue.

In 2014, we accompanied 221 victims of rape and sexual assault. In 2015, we accompanied 303. Thats an increase of nearly 47pc. That is quite shocking, she said.

Ms OMalley-Dunlop added that she hoped to see the restoration of funding for rape crisis centres and other organisations, saying that the services are nearly at breaking point because of cuts implemented during the recession.

Margaret Martin of Womens Aid said domestic violence was an issue thats always seen as important, but not urgent.

It is urgent if its your children, if its your daughter. If it is somebody you care about and you love, you need them to be protected, she told Independent.ie.

Ms Martin also highlighted the plight of domestic violence victims who flee their homes and are caught up in the ongoing housing crisis.

We know women who are sleeping in their cars, who are sleeping on the floors of their friends houses, in spare rooms, she said. That is no way for anybody to live.
A SPLIT is emerging between senior Fine Gael ministers as to whether Michael Lowry should form part of the next government.

Pressure is being heaped on Taoiseach Enda Kenny to rule out Mr Lowry as a potential coalition partner after Tanaiste Joan Burton finally moved to cut the Tipperary TD loose.

For two days, Ms Burton declined to address the question of whether Ms Lowry would be an acceptable coalition partner.

However, a spokesman last night said: The Tanaiste does not believe it appropriate that the individual in question would form part of a future government.

She has made very clear her concerns about the type of secretive deals with Independents that were a hallmark of Fianna Fail governments.

Last night, Mr Kennys spokesman said the Government was not contemplating engaging with any independents, but he did not rule out the prospect of post-election talks with Mr Lowry.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar heaped pressure on the Fine Gael leader to cut Mr Lowry loose, saying the ex-Communications Minister has an issue with the law.

This morning, Jobs Minister Richard Bruton refused to completely rule out a coalition which included Mr Lowry.

We are not going to be looking for any support. The electorate will make the decision about who is elected. We do not intend to rely on the support of Michael Lowry. We intend to win this election.

When asked on RTEs Morning Ireland could he rule out seeking Mr Lowrys support after the election, Mr Bruton said the Tipperary TD was expelled from Fine Gael after the Moriarty Tribunal report.

That is as categorical as we can be, but the Taoiseach isnt starting to go through every conceivable candidate talking about candidates who might be or not be people who would support a government.

He said independent TDs with shopping lists would undermine the stability of the approach Fine Gael were adopting.

We will not be relying on Michael Lowry at the end of this and nor will we be relying on other such candidates, Mr Bruton said.

Mr Lowry fuelled the debate yesterday by taking to his local radio station, Tipp FM, to attack Environment Minister Alan Kelly for jumping on the bandwagon.

He was responding to comments Mr Kelly made in which he categorically ruled out Labour working with his constituency rival.

Mr Lowry said the minister is suffering from a bit of delusion and his statement smacks of his customary arrogance.

The Environment Minister then hit back saying that Mr Lowry hasnt done any work with him in the constituency in the past five years, so it will continue that way.
Gardai who have sealed off an area of Ashgrove estate in Tallaght. Picture: Mark Condren

Gardai who have sealed off an area of Ashgrove estate in Tallaght. Picture: Mark Condren

Gardai who have sealed off an area of Ashgrove estate in Tallaght. Picture: Mark Condren

Gardai who have sealed off an area of Ashgrove estate in Tallaght. Picture: Mark Condren

Gardai who have sealed off an area of Ashgrove estate in Tallaght

Gardai are investigating a serious sexual assault in south Dublin during which a 14-year-old girl was violently attacked.

The vulnerable young victim, who has been described as having a learning disability, was set upon in the Ashgrove estate in Springfield, Tallaght, shortly after 4pm on Monday.

Expand Close Gardai who have sealed off an area of Ashgrove estate in Tallaght. Picture: Mark Condren / Facebook

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Specialist officers from the Child Protection Unit based in Tallaght garda station were last night interviewing the traumatised victim.

Sources have said that investigating detectives are following a definite line of inquiry and described the incident as a random attack.

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"Officers will work tirelessly to track down the perpetrator of this particularly heinous crime.

"It was an extremely serious sexual assault on a vulnerable victim and investigators are following a definitive line of inquiry in the case," the source said.

"It was a random attack. The victim is very shaken, to say the least, and local specialist officers are conducting interviews with the victim and residents in the area."

Local gardai will also liaise with officers from the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigation Unit, based in Harcourt Square, which provides advice, guidance and assistance to gardai investigating crimes of a sexual nature.

The teenage victim was taken to the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit in the Rotunda Hospital following the horrifying ordeal, where she was treated for her injuries.

The scene of the alleged attack, adjacent to St Mark's GAA Club was preserved by gardai throughout Monday and yesterday as detectives carried out searches of the area.

Local Fianna Fail councillor Charlie O'Connor, who is a former resident of the Ashgrove estate, described how locals were "absolutely appalled" by the incident and appealed for anyone with information to contact gardai.

Heinous

"It is an extremely shocking thing to happen. I'd like to extend my sympathies to the victim and her family during this traumatic time," Mr O'Connor said.

He added: "I used to live in the estate, and from talking to locals I can say that the people are absolutely appalled by what has happened.

"I would like to ask anyone with any information to get in touch with Tallaght garda station. They have a dedicated team who will be working non-stop to solve this awful crime."
Kenneth OBrien was shot in the head by his killer

Gardai are trying to trace the gun used to murder Kenneth O'Brien after he clashed with thugs from an organised crime gang in west Dublin.

A post mortem examination by Deputy State Pathologist Michael Curtis disclosed yesterday that Mr O'Brien had been shot in the head and his body was then dismembered.

DNA analysis of the remains also confirmed that the murder victim was Mr O'Brien.

The examination was carried out at Naas General Hospital on the body parts, including the head, which had been recovered from bags found in the Grand Canal at Sallins, Co Kildare, on Sunday and Monday.

The body parts were handed over to Dr Curtis after forensic tests were carried out on the bags on Monday night.

Checks for fingerprints and other clues to the identity of the killers are also being carried out on a motor, which, gardai believe, is a component part of the tool used to dismember the body.

It was discovered in a bag found at the weekend in the Royal Canal, near Carton House, in Maynooth.

Searches were extended by gardai yesterday from where the two finds were made near the canal bridge in Sallins back into Osberstown as officers combed through fields and checked outhouses and disused sheds on land adjoining the water.

Gardai have not yet established a firm motive for the gruesome murder.

But they think it is likely that Mr O'Brien (33), a father-of-one, became involved with a crime gang, through an intermediary, when he returned from Australia last month.

It is understood that Mr O'Brien had built up substantial savings while working in Australia. Gardai are looking at the possibility that he may have been approached to invest some of his money in a financial deal involving the criminals.

Officers said it was possible that he might not have known the full background to the deal and then sought the return of the money, resulting in a row.

Gardai believe Mr O'Brien met his killer by arrangement after he left his home at Lealand Road in Clondalkin at 7am last Friday week, January 15.

He had told his partner the previous night that he intended to travel down the country for work. Gardai have yet to establish whether he was collected as he left his estate or used public transport.

Supt Gerry Wall last night renewed an appeal to anyone, who might have seen Mr O'Brien since the early hours of Friday week, to contact them at Leixlip station, 01 6667800.
A doctor was last night found guilty of poor professional performance and professional misconduct on multiple counts at a disciplinary inquiry.

Dr Omar Hassan Khalafalla Mohamed - who was not present in person for the decision at the Medical Council's headquarters in Dublin - faced a number of allegations relating to time he spent working at the Midlands Regional Hospital Portlaoise, Mayo General Hospital and University Hospital Galway.

The 30-year-old, who took part in proceedings via telephone, was found guilty of 28 counts of poor professional performance and six counts of professional misconduct.

Dr Hassan, whose medical registration has already been suspended, denied the allegations.

Sanctions against him will be determined at a later date.

During the inquiry, a number of former colleagues expressed grave concerns regarding Dr Hassan's clinical abilities.

Two of his former colleagues at Galway were so concerned that they checked the Irish medical register to see whether he was actually a registered doctor.

A senior colleague at Galway told the inquiry that Dr Hassan's level of competence was so low that "someone off the street" would do a better job than he did.

The inquiry also heard of a number of incidents that took place while Dr Hassan, who is originally from Sudan, was working as a senior house officer at the three hospitals.

Consultant Odhran Murray, who worked with Dr Hassan in Galway, told of one occasion where Dr Hassan mistook an X-ray of an ankle for an image of an elbow.

"There was an audible gasp in the room," said Mr Murray, who added that he would expect a medical student, let alone a senior house officer such as Dr Hassan, to know the difference.
Even a health-conscious days eating can still leave a person taking in nearly three times the recommended daily sugar limit.

Food companies will be told today to cut the amount of hidden 'added sugars' in popular products by 10pc in the next four years.

And they must reduce levels of saturated fat by 5pc by 2020 to help tackle rates of obesity.

The targets are expected to be set by Health Minister Leo Varadkar at the launch of a major report by the Food and Drinks Industry Ireland into progress on how food products are being reformulated to make them healthier.

The report is expected to say that salt levels have been cut in some products by between 8pc and 45pc.

Saturated fat has come down by 5pc to 23pc in some foods.

However, progress has been slower in reducing added sugars, with falls of between 1pc and 14pc noted.

The Irish Independent revealed recently how even a health-conscious day's eating can still leave a person taking in nearly three times the recommended daily sugar limit.

The food industry report will also point to progress that the industry has made in reducing calories in food.

But the Department of Health wants it to speed up the rate at which this is being achieved.

The idea behind reformulation is to reduce the content of sugar, salt and fat in products over time, so that customers will not notice the difference.

The food companies are to be asked to set clear timelines for reductions early this year.

The Dutch EU presidency is making reformulation of food products the focus of a high-level conference next month.

Food companies have argued that salt and sugar are vital food preservatives.

Foods regarded as healthier may be concealing high levels of salt. A breakfast of coffee, orange juice, a standard bowl of cornflakes and two slices of toast with butter and marmite contains half the daily allowance of salt.

Food companies are also being urged to improve labelling to make it easier for people to make healthier choices.
Beaumont Hospital, which has been hard hit by overcrowding in its emergency department, has seen the number of permanent nursing vacancies almost double in the past three months. Stock image

A Dublin hospital struggling with overcrowding has 235 staff positions to fill - up almost 65pc on the figure of 142 from three months ago.

Beaumont Hospital currently has vacancies for 116 nurses, 20 doctors and 16 consultants as well as another 32 clinical staff, 26 administrators, 12 support staff and 10 others.

Worryingly for its ability to cope in the face of the national trolley crisis, the number of permanent nursing vacancies at Beaumont has almost doubled in since October when there were 62 nursing posts unfilled. This is despite intensive efforts to recruit more nurses both at home and from abroad.

The hospital has recruited 30 nursing students, reducing the present nursing shortage to 86; however, these students are not classified as permanent nurses until they have graduated.

The hospital usually has around 3,500 staff. With 235 posts unfilled, this means it is running an overall vacancy rate of almost 7pc.

Lorraine Monaghan, of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), told the Irish Independent that the "severe shortage" in nurses was down to a very high attrition rate at the hospital.

She said that while hospital management has been actively recruiting staff - a high number of nurses have been leaving the hospital for a number of different reasons including their working conditions.

"There's been a high number of nursing staff who have left Beaumont - so recruitment and retention is a problem.

"Obviously there are major issues when staffing levels are so low, because patient care is compromised and staff are faced with intolerable workloads - and there's an impact on their own health, so there's an impact for staff as well.

"Staff feel obliged to work additional shifts to help out their colleagues and it's unsafe - they're working extra shifts that's putting them under extreme pressure," she added.

Other areas short-staffed in Beaumont include clinical staff, who have seen an increase of six vacancies up to a total of 32, and support staff, which doubled from 12 vacancies last October to its current level of 24.

The INMO has said a lot of work needs to encourage emigrant nurses to return home.

"These nurses left the country to get jobs and superior working conditions," said Ms Monaghan. "They're desperately needed in this country and you can see that in the likes of Beaumont they are recruiting but are struggling to get nurses to fill the positions and are struggling to retain staff."

In a response to a question, posed by Councillor Denise Mitchell to Dublin City Council, the hospital said it "the always has a high turnover of posts and, as such, is particularly challenged at present in relation to nursing vacancies".

It continued: "Strenuous efforts have been made to recruit nursing staff both at home and abroad and it is anticipated that the situation will improve in quarter two of 2016."
Health Minister Leo Varadkar has warned that it will be another two weeks before levels of flu peak as the trolley crisis continues.

St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin, which was the worst hit hospital in the country for overcrowding yesterday, said "every available bed space" had to be brought into service as more than 50 patients endured lengthy waits on trolleys in its emergency department.

A hospital spokesman said it had also cancelled all non- urgent procedures for the next 24 hours due to the surge in patients.

Nationally the numbers on trolleys breached the 500 mark again yesterday morning.

Mr Varadkar, who yesterday briefed the Cabinet on the ongoing trolley crisis, said it would be another two weeks before the levels of flu circulating peak.

The flu was now a major driver behind emergency department congestion with the numbers of patients presenting for treatment up 10pc, he added.

The Cabinet was told that at-risk groups are being urged to get the flu vaccine.

Other measures, including using private hospitals to cater for patients on public waiting lists, offering more staff overtime and an increase in community intervention teams, are also being used to help alleviate the crisis.

Meanwhile, Junior Health Minister Kathleen Lynch announced that the 90 nursing homes across the country would benefit from badly needed upgrades or replacement under a 385m capital plan between now and 2021.

The improvements have been called for by Hiqa inspectors who have pointed to structural risks and out-dated living conditions in the old-style homes.

An extra 215 places will also be provided in north Dublin, Drogheda, Co Louth, and Ballyshannon, Co Donegal.

The original deadline set by Hiqa was July of last year but the funding was not available.

However, Tadhg Daly of Nursing Homes Ireland, which represents private homes, warned the current level of funding under the Fair Deal scheme needed to be improved.

"It is imperative the incoming government addresses the very serious issue and delivers a funding model that supports the majority providers of nursing home care - private and voluntary nursing homes."

Meanwhile, the new national maternity strategy to be launched today will see more emphasis on midwifery care options for low-risk pregnancies.
Manish Patel holds a picture of his eldest brother Bipin, a victim of the 1985 Air India Disaster after he attended a service at the memorial in Ahakista on Sheeps Head penninsula, West Cork, Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the disaster

The only person ever to be convicted in relation to the 1985 Air India explosion off the Cork coast has been released from prison.

Inderjit Singh Reyat was today freed from a Canadian jail after serving two decades behind bars.

In one of the deadliest airline attacks in history, Air India Flight 182 blew up off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 passengers and crew, including 82 children.

All but a handful of those on board the flight, en route from Canada to Bombay, were of Indian origin with Canadian citizenship.

The search operation was spearheaded by the Irish naval vessel LE Aisling.

Its commander Captain Jim Robinson later recalled wreckage was strewn around a five mile area - with his ship surrounded by dead bodies in the water.

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An hour after the Cork bombing, an explosion at Tokyos Narita Airport killed two baggage handlers, when a device meant for another Air India flight blew up prematurely.

A spokesman for the Canadian Parole Board confirmed Reyats statutory release after serving two-thirds of a nine-year sentence.

The attack took place during an Indian crackdown on Sikhs fighting for an independent homeland.

Those who planned it were allegedly seeking revenge for the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Indian troops.

Reyat, a Sikh immigrant to Canada, must abide by several conditions set by the parole board, including having no contact with victims families or alleged former co-conspirators, and must desist from all political activities.

He must also obtain counselling to address violent tendencies, a lack of empathy, and cognitive distortions.

If at any time, his parole officer feels theres a risk to the community he can return Reyat to prison, a spokesman added.
A motorist was stabbed after he tried to stop a gang of youths from throwing rocks at his car.

The man, who is in his 30s, was set upon by up to half a dozen teens when he approached a group who pelted his car with stones as he was driving down Corbally Road in Limerick.

During the confrontation, which happened shortly after 9:20 pm last Saturday, the man was stabbed in the back, possibly while he was walking away.

Following the attack, the youths fled the scene and the man managed to get into his vehicle and alert Gardai.

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Gardai said they are treating the incident as a case of serious assault and are appealing for witness to come forward.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Mayorstone station on 061-456980 or the the Garda Confidential Hotline on 1800-666111.
Gardai are investigating the armed theft of just under 190,000 from a cash-in-transit van in west Dublin.

The incident happened in the car park of Blanchardstown Shopping Centre at 12.40pm on Sunday.

Two men approached staff working for the G4S security company who had collected the money from an ATM at the shopping centre.

The raiders threatened the employees and demanded that the cash box be handed over.

One of the suspects was armed with a handgun and both men wore balaclavas and blue boiler suits.

Robberies

After getting the huge cash haul, the men fled the scene on foot via the shopping centres multi-storey car park.

Their movements after leaving the car park are not known.

No arrests have been made in the case which is being

investigated by gardai at Blanchardstown.

There has been a decrease in cash-in-transit robberies nationwide in recent years.

The last major heist occurred last month and also involved the G4S security company.

On that occasion, criminals used a fake cash-in-transit van to make off with more than 60,000 from a Dublin

cash-and-carry before they crashed the vehicle and set it on fire.

The two criminals duped staff by pretending to be employees of the G4S security company. The incident happened at around 2.30pm on Monday, December 7, at the Merrywell Business Park in the Ballymount Industrial Estate.

Just days earlier in an unconnected crime, gangsters were involved in a Tiger Kidnapping in which 225,000 was stolen which led to a security alert at Dublin Airport.

It then emerged that the gang lost out on a potential stg10m haul which had been due to be collected by the cash-in-transit employee from a London flight after the mobsters fled with the far lesser cash sum.

A mother and daughter were held hostage in a van after a gang of three entered their home in Artane, north Dublin.

Extreme

The father, a cash-in-transit worker with GSLS, was forced to deliver the huge cash haul to the gang at a business park in Dublin Airport.

He was in extreme fear for the well-being of his partner and her daughter at the time, having been given a phone which contained photos them being held at gunpoint.

However, he eventually

managed to notify a member of staff at the airport after discretely handing over a note revealing the terrifying predicament.

Security workers subsequently notified gardai.

The prime suspect behind the heist is a career criminal who specialises in tiger kidnappings and has been linked to at least 12 similar crimes.

The Dubliner previously travelled to Eastern Europe to be trained in surveillance techniques and firearms by ex-special forces soldiers there.
An Irish musician who was in the same bar where Alexander Litvinenko was given a fatal dose of poisoning by polonium in November 2006 has revealed that he's lucky to be alive.

Derek Conlon got radiation poisoning after drinking from the same teacup as the murdered former KGB man.

Piano player Mr Conlon was playing piano in the London bar an hour after the former Russian agent Litvinenko was slipped the dose of polonium in November 2006.

Speaking on The Ryan Tubridy Show this morning, Mr Conlon, who is originally from Glasnevin, revealed how he was completely contaminated by the incident.

Litvinenko was there an hour before I started playing that particular evening. Nobody suspected anything until a day or two later when they sealed the bar off. I arrived there to go to work and was told I couldnt get in until the following week. When a week had passed, I heard on the news that there was testing going on for polonium.

A form of nuclear material only found at Russian nuclear facilities, polonium is fatal when administered in small quantities. However, Mr Conlon was originally told he wasnt at risk as it wasnt airborne or couldnt pass through paper.

Apparently the dishwasher was broken and I drank from the same cup as Litvinenko. It had spread over the whole bar and the whole place was contaminated.

The entire bar was contaminated. It had to be gutted and restructured. Even my microphone was covered in polonium. It was everywhere. It was a reckless act. These guys took so many lives in danger. It is insane what they did.

On his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Russian president Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination. Last week an inquiry said that Russian President Vladimir Putin probably approved poisoning of the former KGB agent.

Mr Conlon said he only became aware of the seriousness of the incident when he arrived for work a couple of days later and saw that the entire bar had been shut down.

Although Mr Conlon said he hasnt yet developed any symptoms, he still undergoes check-ups every six months.

It has really increased my chances of catching certain cancers. What happens with polonium is that it does a lot of damage when it originally attacks your body and then it leaves. But over the space of years  depending on the dosage  you can see the initial damage. So now I am tested over six month periods.

If you catch a cold or a spot turns up somewhere on your body, you are very cautious about it. You can become paranoid about it. Hopefully nothing will come of it.

Although he said he often thinks about the incident, Mr Conlon considers himself lucky to be alive.

Now I try and live life in the fast and I appreciate things more. I try and live for the moment and not worry about the small stuff.
FINE Gael TD Alan Shatter has criticised ministers who complain in public in a thinly veiled swipe at his party colleague and Health Minister Leo Varadkar.

Mr Shatter pointed to several shortcomings in the countrys health service and said it was a disappointment that Fine Gael had failed to deliver on reforms.

Addressing the Fine Gael parliamentary party, Mr Shatter said the Fine Gael must do much more to put an end to the completely unacceptable conditions in the Accident and Emergency Departments.

During a lengthy but calm contribution, Mr Shatter said that Mr Varadkars predecessor James Reilly had arm-wrestled with Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin in private unlike what we have see more recently.

Meanwhile, there were tense senses after Tipperary TD Noel Coonan launched a stinging attack on Environment Minister Alan Kelly, his Tipperary colleague.

Mr Coonan, seen as battling for the last seat in the newly-merged five-seat Tipperary constituency, said the Environment Minister was not a colleague.

He added that he believes Mr Kelly's "ego is set to burst".

TDs and Senators present at Fine Gaels weekly parliamentary party meeting said Deputy Coonan also voiced his dissatisfaction at Ministers from his own party.

He complained that they had not mentioned his name in public discussions about the prospects of taking coalition support from Tipperary Independent TD, Michael Lowry.

At the meeting, Taoiseach Enda Kenny thanked a number of party individuals, including staff, colleagues and the chairpersons of committees.

The move is a clear indication that Mr Kenny intends to dissolve the Dail next week - paving the way for the General Election.
A SCHOOL caretaker has been accused of stealing fruit from lunches for disadvantaged pupils that had been delivered as part of a healthy eating scheme.

Thomas Byrne (55) is alleged to have taken bags of apples, oranges and bananas that were to have been given to children in a north Dublin primary school.

Mr Byrne, of Howth Road, Raheny is pleading not guilty to eight counts of theft at Scoil Fhursa, Cromcastle Green, Kilmore.

The thefts - of 12 bags of apples, 14 bags of oranges and five bags of bananas worth a total of 67.25 - are alleged to have happened on dates between February 24 and March 5, 2014.

Judge Ann Ryan adjourned the case for continued hearing on a later date at Dublin District Court.

School Principal Martin Stynes told the court the school was in a disadvantaged area and one initiative undertaken to allay this was the healthy eating scheme.

The initiative involved Dublin City Council, suppliers Glanmore Food and the Department of Health.

The food included individual, named packages of food and loose bags of fruit and milk. The Department of Health's element of the scheme encouraged children to sample pieces of cucumber, carrot or grapes to help develop their palates.

Free pencils, rulers or toys were given with this.

The caretaker was responsible for the distribution of the loose fruit after it was delivered.

The school began to notice irregularities in the supply of the DCC food, Mr Stynes continued.

He did not think much about that but it was highly unusual that there would be any fluctuation in the supply from the health board scheme because we were really careful about the cost of it.

When this was reported as well he made observations.

He said he asked school secretary Catherine Fowler to keep a record every morning, and asked Glanmore to be certain about what was provided in case any of the food went astray.

Mr Stynes said he asked the school board of management for advice. Mr Byrne was placed on administrative leave and Mr Stynes was told to carry out an internal investigation.

The board decided to dismiss the accused and the gardai were contacted.

In cross-examination by Kevin Fields BL, for the defence, Mr Stynes said CCTV recorded the deliveries at 4.45am and the motion-activated system shut down until Mr Byrnes arrival at 7.30.

He accepted other people had access to the schools alarm code - the secretary and senior teachers as well as the caretaker for neighbouring Scoil Ide.

He said leftover food would be thrown out if it was going off and kept for later if not. There was no policy or practice of people taking food themselves, he said.

Its a disadvantaged area, the food is supplied for the children. Somebody is paying for it, whether it is the Department of Health or the Department of Social Protection or Dublin City Council," Mr Stynes said.

We cant have an acceptance of it being OK or standard practice for people to eat the food that has been delivered for the children, or taking it home.

When I asked the caretaker over the years why the teachers were asking why do we have no bananas today, or not enough oranges, I was told: some days we get more, some days we get less, you cant depend on the deliveries Mr Stynes told Mr Fields.

Given that this person was trusted in his area of work I took this person at his word, he added.

The delivery man from Glenmore told the court everything was counted and if there was undelivered fruit it would be in the van. He said he did not leave dockets.

Evidence for the defence has not yet been heard in the case.
A commuter struggles with an umbrella in the wind. Photo: Kyran OBrien

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

Commuters struggling in the wind and rain in Clontarf earlier this morning

2.23pm today, the moment the sea at Malahide estuary started to swallow parked cars. Photo: Paul Larkin

Cars destroyed in Toft car park in the flooding in Salthill as storm Jonas hits the West coast. Photo: Andrew Downes

Cars destroyed in Toft car park in the flooding in Salthill as storm Jonas hits the West coast. Photo: Andrew Downes

Toft car park in in Salthill as Storm Jonas hits the West coast. Photo: Andrew Downes

The 4x4 from which a farmer was rescued in the River Roe at Dungiven, Co Derry. Photo: Margaret McLoughlin.

Close to 1200 homes are without power this morning after storm-force winds swept across much of the country in the wake of Storm Jonas.

High tides, heavy rain and 120km/h gales combined to cause chaos in communities as the remnants of the blizzard which left 35 dead in the USA hit Ireland.

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Worst hit is the small town of Patrickwells in Limerick, where 313 homes lost their power shortly after 5:30 am.

Among the others towns and villages with downed power cables include Kilrush (103), Drumquin (101), Birdhill (99), Kyletaun (71), and Ashbourne (163) in Meath.

Met Eireann has issued three status yellow weather alerts for today but despite the strong winds and heavy rainfall, calmer weather is due to set in as the stormy conditions clear later this morning.

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There will be sunny spells and scattered showers as the blustery weather moves north-easterly, Met Eireann said

A wind warning is in effect for Dublin, Wexford, Wicklow, Galway, Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Waterford.

The forecaster is reporting an average speed of between 50 to 65 km/h, with gusts reaching upwards of 90 km/h, and said that coastal areas could experience even more powerful gales.



A second yellow flood warning for Wexford, Galway, Clare, Cork, Kerry and Waterford is due to expire shortly after 9 am.



A combination of strong winds, high tides and heavy rain has increased the risk of flooding along coastal areas.

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In Galway traffic is moving slow heading towards Claregalway, while near Cork it is busy on approaching the Dunkettle Interchange on the N8 Dublin Rd and on the N40 South Ring.

Gardai are asking motorists to avoid the Carraroe/ Ballintogher Road in Sligo due to flooding. Also affected is the Enniscrone/ Easky Road near Leaffony.

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The Enniscrone/ Tullylin Road has been closed at Lacknaslevia.

Meanwhile the M1 Belfast/ Dublin Rd has reopened southbound.

AA Roadwatch has asked motorists to take extra care, saying that the majority of roads are very wet this morning and that and caution is advised.



Irish Rail has resumed services between Newry and Dundalk following an earlier closure.

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On Tuesday a farmer near Dungiven, County Derry, had to be rescued when his 4x4 vehicle was swept almost a kilometre along a river before being jammed against a tree.



It took a rescue team and seven fire crews to bring him to safety.

In the UK, meanwhile, the remnants of the storm that caused severe snow storms to the US is bringing heavy rain and gales to large swaths of the country.

Severe weather warning are in places across Wales, Scotland and parts of the UK as communities hit the flooding after Christmas are warned to expect further deluge.
Galway residents had their cars destroyed after flood waters submerged vehicles in Toft Park car park in Salthill.

Aisling Daly (32) woke to find her car destroyed and water coming into her ground floor Brinkwater House apartment.

"The water just came in the door so there wasn't any damage (to the apartment) but my car is written off. I can't even get near it to see the damage because the water is too deep. It's not worth even messing with my policy. The water was up too high, I'll just have to write it off," she said.

Ms Daly questioned why residents were not warned to avoid the car park due to flooding concerns.

"Everyone knows not to park there when the warnings are put out, but there was no warning this time," she added.

A spokesperson for Galway City Council said there were permanent signs in place at the car park warning of possible flooding. He said the flooding was worsened by a significant amount of seaweed in waves crashing over the top of the promenade due to high winds. This clogged up drains and stopped the water from receding.

The car park will remain closed for the rest of the week as specialist crews remove the seaweed.

Local businessman Kevin Kearney, who runs the Lighthouse giftshop attached to the Galway Atlantaquaria, was unable to open yesterday after the entrance and car park were left completely under water.

"Thankfully the water didn't get inside but it was right up to the front door. We're closed for the day and we'll have a big clean-up to do on the car park. It's completely covered in seaweed," he added

Local Labour councillor Niall McNeilis is now seeking a text alert system for residents and a temporary lighting sign to warn of high tides.
Surgeons are today battling to save the arm of a young woman savaged by her partner's dog at her home.

Paola Sahovic was at home in Mitchelstown, Cork, with the Staffordshire Bull Terrier when neighbours reportedly heard screaming at around 9.15am on Monday.

Rushing to the house just doors away on Upper Cork Street, gardai found the 22-year-old being mauled by the animal in the back yard and were forced to draw their batons.

Witnesses say it took five officers to free the victim from the jaws of the dog - which has since been put down - before she was rushed to Cork University Hospital for emergency surgery.

It is believed that surgeons were able to save one of the woman's arms, and are currently working to prevent the second from being amputated due to serious injuries.

Ms Sahovic, a dog lover who described the animal as her "best friend" on Instagram, is thought to have moved from Croatia to Ireland to be with her boyfriend at Christmas.

She was reunited with the black and white cross-breed owned by her partner - who has been living and working in north Cork since the summer - after it arrived in the country only last Friday.

Sometimes used as guard dogs, Staffordshire Bull Terriers are one of 11 restricted breeds in Ireland, meaning they have to be kept on a short lead and muzzled in public.

But the 1998 regulations legislate for the control of the dog only in public places, and not in private homes.

Cork County Council veterinary officer Edmund O'Sullivan last night warned: "You cannot relax in the presence of all dogs, but in the case of restricted breeds, it's more important to be so careful."
The chiselled good looks of Irish-born celebrities such as Michael Fassbender, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy are the exception to the rule, according to an international dating site that has again ranked men from Ireland the ugliest in the world.

Fewer than one in 10 single Irish males who applied to put their profiles on elitist site beautifulpeople.com last year were accepted.

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But there's better news for Irish women, who have scored their best ever rating after being voted the ninth best-looking nationality out of 21.

Hottest

Analysis of last year's statistics found that Sweden is judged to be home to the planet's best-looking men, while Norway has the bragging rights to the world's hottest babes.

The LA-based site, which has a worldwide membership of more than five million, makes no apology for only accepting the globe's best-looking singles.

There is some small consolation for Irish men, who get to share last place in the handsome table with the UK and Poland.

Greg Hodge, who runs the site, said he believes Irish men could fare better if they made more effort with their profile pictures before applying.

"A topless selfie shot in a seedy room or an image of them at the pub, pint in hand, does not go down well with women. Men are not just selling themselves, they are selling a lifestyle," he said.

"A polished image showing an interesting lifestyle would greatly improve their acceptance rates."

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Further analysis of the Irish statistics on beautifulpeople.com revealed that applicants from Dublin, both male and female, had the highest acceptance rates on the site, while romance-hunters from Limerick were most likely to be rejected.
Ever gritted your teeth while paying through the nose for a train fare?

A man tried to find out whether it is really cheaper to fly on a budget airline than take a train.

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Jordon Cox was shocked when his train to Essex from Sheffield cost 50, so he flew home instead.

The MoneySavingExpert.com blogger said: "I always go the extra mile to save money, but last week I went the extra 1,017 miles and saved 7.72 by getting back to Essex from Sheffield via Berlin  I even had enough Euros spare for a currywurst sausage by the Brandenburg Gate Wunderbar !"

Although it was worse for the environment, it was cheaper to travel over a thousand more miles to get home from Sheffield to Essex.

The blogger was giving a talk on couponing, and realised he wouldn't exactly save much money when the cheapest single train fare was 47.

I'm about to do one of the CRAZIEST things I have ever done to save money!It may not look like it... But there is more to this story! Blog AND Video coming this week!  Posted by Jordon Cox on Tuesday, January 19, 2016

He said: "It turned out that flying out from East Midlands Airport to Berlin, spending seven hours exploring the city and then flying to Stansted and getting the bus home was cheaper than a single train journey in England."

Mr. Cox also found he could buy a return train ticket to Berlin city centre, enjoy a free tour of a government building and lunch while he was out there and still save money.

This isn't just true for one journey - the blogger was shocked to find other journeys showed similar savings.

Other train savings

London to Bristol  Ryanair flights via Dublin: 14. South West train: 41.

London to Manchester  Ryanair flights via Milan: 33. Virgin train: 101.

Bristol to Newcastle  Ryanair flights via Dublin: 14. Cross Country train: 74.

What he would have spent by going by rail

47 for train from Sheffield to Shenfield

2.99 for ham and cheddar toastie for lunch

1.80 bus fare from Sheffield to Hutton

TOTAL - 51.79

What he actually spent

4 train from Sheffield to Derby

4.20 for bus from Derby to East Midlands Airport

11.83 Ryanair flight to Berlin

5 Berlin return train from airport to city centre

1.50 Currywurst for lunch

9.54 Ryanair flight to London Stansted

8 bus home to Hutton from Stansted airport

TOTAL - 44.07

Rail fares in the UK have only been getting more expensive - rising at three times the rate of salaries.

Long-suffering commuters from January 2 face the latest annual price hike for their tickets, as campaigners said services were so poor in parts of the country that passengers would be amazed rises would be allowed.

The latest annual rise means fares have risen at three time the rate of wagepay packets since David Cameron was elected Prime Minister in 2010, according to an analysis by Labour.

Tickets this year rise by an average of 1.1 per cent in England, Wales and Scotland, affecting 1.7 billion rail journeys made in the UK each year.

Anthony Smith, chief executive of the independent watchdog Transport Focus, said: "In some parts of the country, given rail performance has been so dire, passengers will be amazed there are any fare rises at all."

He added: "Passengers are paying their part in the railways  rail revenue is heading towards 9 billion a year. The rail industry must now keep its side of the promise: deliver on the basics."

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
After her fiance called off their wedding, Katy Colins left her job, sold her house and bought a one-way ticket for a worldwide adventure.

It's anyone's worst nightmare - being jilted by your fiance weeks before the big day.

This was the unfortunate case for 30-year-old public relations officer Katy Colins in 2012. She and her fiance had spent months and 20,000 planning their wedding, their families and friends had already confirmed their attendance, but after returning from a work trip to Uganda, her college sweetheart and beloved partner of more than eight years, the legal worker Thom Soutter (30) dropped a bomb.

He confessed that he had been having an affair, and he wanted to call off their engagement, a month before they were meant to be exchanging vows.

Devastated by the news, the heartbroken Katy was inspired to quit her PR job at Manchester Airport, sell her car and her half of the home they shared, and buy a one-way ticket around the world in search of adventure.

While on her travels, she posted regular updates on social media and on her blog, called Not Wed Or Dead, to keep her loved ones updated on her journey from jilted bride to fun-loving globe-trotter.

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The blog attracted a substantial following as Katy visited 30 countries before the age of 30, working her way through destinations as far afield as India, Nepal, Dubai, Argentina and Brazil.

Nicknamed 'the Backpacking Bridget Jones', she has said that many readers wrote to her to thank her for being so brave.

"I received messages from other newly single men and women who said they read my blog as an inspiration, that just because you've been dumped it doesn't mean you have to listen to bad power ballads and devour ice-cream.

You can use this as a catalyst for something much bigger and better.

The success of the blog led to a three-book deal with Carina, an imprint of the publisher Harper Collins. Loosely based on her own experiences, the first instalment in the The Lonely Hearts Travel Club series chronicles her time in Thailand, and was published last week.

Colins revealed in an interview that the date she found out shed secured the book deal would have been her third wedding anniversary with Thom, offering a moving reminder of how dramatically her life has changed in such a short time.

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It is poignant to think how far Id come through hard work, being brave and wanting to live the biggest life I could.

From Formby in the northwest of England, Katy now lives in a small fishing town in France, where she teaches English. She admitted that when she first told her family she was selling off her house and car to set off on a solo journey across the globe, they thought she was a little mad, but that it just felt right.

Katys philosophy is that every cloud has a silver lining and that things happen for a reason. She has said that despite feeling initially lost and disillusioned in the aftermath of the split, she has a lot to thank her nearly-husband for.

She described the moment as having turned out to be the wake-up call she needed, and gave her a second chance to find herself.

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I had a good job, a lovely house and lived a comfortable lifestyle but it lacked adventure. That is something I hoped travelling half-way around the world on my own would give me, and luckily it paid off, she has said.

She has since had a wealth of fabulous experiences abroad that she couldnt have otherwise enjoyed, from climbing a volcano in Chile to skydiving in France.

Spurred on by the release of Katys book, her former fiance hit back at her claims in an interview with The Sun, saying that the couple actually split three months, not one, before their wedding.

Offering his side of the story, he says that after his engagement to Katy, the wedding took over everything and that he felt she loved the wedding more than me.

It has emerged that Thom is now engaged again, to another woman, Alyson Mobey (29), whom he met while working abroad after his split from Katy.

He said that although he wishes Katy well with her writing career, he wasnt pleased with her decision to reveal the details of their relationship in a book, and believes it may contain more fiction than fact.

I dont want to be portrayed as this horrendous person, he told The Sun.

Thom also claimed that she slept with a mutual friend after they split up (the relevance of which is not entirely clear), but Katy remains unfazed.

As she writes on her blog, Staying put, living the same day over and over again and never venturing out of your comfort zone is easily done.

But who wants to live a life of 'what ifs'?
The EU's Court of Auditors has come out very strongly against the EU Commission's handling of Ireland's bailout, particularly the way the EU Commission backed - without reservation - the ECB's insistence that Ireland pay all the senior bondholders of the banks.

It also, rightly, concludes that the great Irish economic crash was predictable and preventable and yet the EU Commission - rammed to the rafters as it is with well-paid experts and economists - didn't see the crisis coming.

The report states the obvious, yet the obvious should be stated again: the bailouts and all the other emergency measures taken were the consequence and not the cause of the crisis.

Had there been proper regulation, proper oversight and proper controls of the banks, the crisis wouldn't have happened in the first place - and obviously there would not have been any bailouts.

Clearly one set of problems stemmed directly from the pathetic policy in place since the introduction of the euro. In fact, the currency is the culprit in this sorry saga. The euro was sold to the people of Ireland and Europe as being essential for economic stability. In reality, the euro has presaged a period of profound economic and financial instability in Europe where booms have been followed by busts; countries have gone bankrupt; and "temporary" capital has flowed unchecked into the nooks and crannies of the eurozone, only to disappear in a heartbeat, leaving company coffers and treasuries empty. Maybe for the EU institutions the most worrisome aspect of the euro's short history is that its deficiencies have driven a deep wedge between the countries of the north and the south, and between the debtors and the creditors.

The result is mass disillusionment with the EU project and the emergence of nationalist politicians from Poland to Spain, Greece and France pushing for much less Europe rather than much more Europe.

The Court of Auditors report identifies (correctly) that the root of the problem was not the frantic period between 2008 and 2010; rather, the root lies in the previous five years of bad policy when all these imbalances were allowed to build.

This credible narrative echoes the great English economist and thinker John Stewart Mill, who observed that "the crisis itself doesn't destroy wealth, it merely evidences how much wealth has already been destroyed by incautious decisions taken in the so-called boom".

The Court of Auditors is highly critical of the ECB and the pressure it put on the Irish government to pay the bondholders. The ECB's argument - which never stood up - that "a bomb would go off in Dublin" if the bondholders were held accountable to the iron law of capitalism was an entirely bogus argument. It reveals a profound misunderstanding of capitalism, which is quite worrying.

This column argued all during this time that if banks make silly and greedy mistakes, then they should pay for them. Such is the iron law of capitalism. When you make bad investments, you lose. If someone else subsidises losses indefinitely and gives the bill for banks' bad investments to people who had nothing to do with those investments, then you are destroying the basic fabric of commerce.

In Ireland, there is sometimes a mistaken notion that arguing for "burning the bondholders" is in some way a leftwing or socialist article of faith, but it is actually the opposite: it is a free-market cornerstone! Without the risk of bankruptcy, you can't have capitalism. That's the rule.

The financial markets understood this rule all along which is why the bondholders of the Irish banks were, in truth, shocked to see even a portion of their money going back to them, let alone all of it.

The government's line in 2010 was that if we didn't pay the bondholders, the country would lose credibility. But what actually happened is this country lost credibility because we did pay the bondholders and not because we didn't!

In fairness, at the time, many of us citizens thought the State was being craven in the face of the EU but it is now clear that Trichet's ECB was prepared to let the Irish banks go to the wall, prompting a new bank run in 2010. This is like a hostage situation. The ECB was saying to the Irish government: you managed in September 2008 to prevent a bank run with the guarantee (which should always have been temporary and conditional) but now we are going to threaten you with another bank run - because we are still funding your banks and you must pay all the bondholders and add the cost to the national debt of the country.

So the implicit threat was: "We will close the banks, cause a bank run and you will be left to pick up the pieces politically, socially and economically."

This, it is now clear, was also the backdrop to the present Government's first few months in office.

This is where the Court of Auditors report gets very interesting, because it is pointing the finger at the EU Commission - the civil service of the EU - for going with the bullyboy tactics of the ECB. The ECB was overstepping its mandate in terms of driving the austerity agenda and threatening a country through the convalescent banking system. So it wasn't so much that a bomb "would go off" in Dublin but that a bomb would be set off in Dublin and the bomber would be the governor of the ECB.

As the EU institutions begin to worry about the long-term impact of the crisis on the overall project, each agency is involved in a battle for self-preservation. This is the opening salvo of an internal battle deep within the EU where, as always, the institutions seek to preserve their own prestige and power, while the citizens are left to pick up the tab.
Welcome to the KTIC Agriculture Information blog!!! Check back here for the latest in ag news and information, from local events to international happenings and government reports that affect your operation. Please email with suggestions! -Chad Moyer, Farm Director, KTIC Radio
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Ian O'Doherty Opinion For once, the UN is right  were standing on the edge of a deadly nuclear precipice

For those of us of a certain age, the last few months have felt as if we have somehow time-warped back to the 1980s. Stranger Things, which is set in that decade, has been the biggest show on TV. Kate Bush  thanks, incidentally, to Stranger Things  is now regularly played on the radio and she has reached number one in 2022 with the re-release of her 1985 hit, Running Up That Hill.
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John Downing Opinion Last time the Tories diced with economic disaster it took them another 18 years to win an election

I was listening to the young woman from the Daily Mail trying to recruit a gang of reporters to club together and hire an aeroplane to fly back to Brussels. She got an enthusiastic response from another British colleague who was celebrated for lavishly spending his employers funds.
RTE's Kathryn Thomas is living the life of domestic bliss with restaurateur boyfriend Padraig McLoughlin.

But the star (37) revealed that one issue has sparked major disharmony between her and her restaurateur other-half - the sticky issue of calories on the menu.

"Myself and Padraig have disagreements all the time on calories, and it's the bane of my life," she told the Herald.

Scaring

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The super-fit Operation Transformation presenter said that while she's a huge advocate of listing calorie counts on Irish menus, he's not a fan.

"While I'm for it, I'm not about scaring the s**t out of people," she said. "I go out to dinner and I know that, because I'm quite good during the week, I will have a starter, main course, dessert and a bottle of wine.

"I know that's a large calorie count, so I won't have a big lunch or I'll go for a run beforehand - or get up and walk the dog the next day.

"It's not about terrifying people, but knowing what to put into your body. No one's telling you not to have a nice night out - it's about making informed choices."

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She said that it all boils down to education and making the right choices for your lifestyle.

"When you see the calories on menus, there's no running away from it and no avoiding it," she continued. "There is a very real obesity crisis in this country and it can seem like a nanny state, but my biggest worry here is that our children are going to die before their parents. Something needs to be done urgently.

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Joy

"My friends say it takes the entire joy out of the meal, but my take on it is if you know you've worked hard beforehand and know that you're not going to have a big lunch beforehand, then why not?"

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Currently in the middle of filming the current Operation Transformation, she said the reaction has been "just phenomenal".

"We got our highest rating last week, there's a huge growth in numbers and it's been trending, but there's been a lot of ups and downs as well," she continued.

"The mood was quite low this week and we really needed to rally around the team leaders."
Critics have told film fans not to panic over the new Dad's Army remake, giving it warm reviews.

Stars of the big screen adaptation of the classic BBC sitcom were out in Leicester Square for the world premiere a nd the newspapers make happy reading for the actors and fans alike, describing it as "fun" and "nostalgic".

Grant Rollings, for the Sun, said the film was "a thoroughly spirited remake of a classic British comedy show".

"So what if many of the jokes are older than the cast's combined age? They're the best ones. And they're delivered by great actors," he added.

The Daily Mail's Brian Viner awarded three stars, saying: "Don't panic, it's actually rather good fun."

He said: "Oliver Parker's film, while never reaching anything like the heights of the original BBC series at its glorious best, has the same sort of gentle charm and a few bursts of inspired physical comedy."

Nigel Farndale, writing for the Daily Telegraph, singled out Toby Jones, as Captain Mainwaring, and Sir Michael Gambon, as Private Godfrey, for particular praise.

But he said: "On the subject of women in the film generally, it is mildly irksome that the film-makers felt they had to PC up their story to include a 'Mum's Army' sub-plot."

He added the depiction of the Women's Auxiliary Army as in their 50s and 60s might "enrage" hardcore fans but "everyone else may be too busy laughing to care".

Giving the film a five star rating, Sean O'Grady, in the Independent, called it "as tasty and nostalgic as a slice of that upside-down cake that Godfrey's sister Dolly used to bake".

He added: "This celebration of Dad's Army surpasses the original. Like facing up to the Nazi menace, it took courage for me to say that, such is my reverence for the original."

But the Daily Mirror's David Edwards gave the remake a heavy shelling.

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He said: "Who do they think they are kidding? This all-out assault on Britain's comedy crown jewels contains all the humour of a V2 rocket attack.

"With moments of humour strictly rationed and inspiration rarer than a pair of wartime nylons, it's time for all involved in this career-killing catastrophe to panic."

The film remake of the Second World War-set sitcom, which ran from 1968-77, sees Catherine Zeta-Jones play journalist Rose Winters, whose arrival in Walmington-on-Sea to report on Captain Mainwaring's (Jones) Home Guard sets pulses racing and proves a distraction while the group tries to smoke out a German spy in their midst.

The pair are backed by an all-star British cast which also includes Bill Nighy as Sergeant Wilson, Bill Paterson as Frazer, Daniel Mays as Walker and Blake Harrison as Private Pike.

The film is out in UK cinemas on February 5.
The countdown to one of the most important events in Ireland's fashion calendar is on, as the finalists for the Irish Fashion Innovation Awards (IFIAs) are announced.

Often referred to as the Irish Fashion Oscars, the IFIAs celebrates up-and-coming designers from all over Ireland.

They've shortlisted Ireland's best design talents in five exciting categories including: Millinery Designer of the Year, Jewellery Designer of the Year, Accessory Designer of the Year, Student Designer of the Year as well as the hugely coveted title of Fashion Designer of the Year.

One of the lucky category winners will also receive the overall Innovation Award and four up-and-coming designers will also showcase their collections in the Ones to Watch category.

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Caroline Mitchell, Mona Swims' Caroline Mitchell and Hannah Mullan and Grainne Finn of the brand Tissue - the popular brand that uses traditional fabrics such as pure lambswool, silk and Donegal tweed by Molloy & Sons - have all been nominated for Designer of the Year, along with Irish rising star Giovanna Borza.

Half-Italian fashion designer Borza, whose work has been given the seal of approval by Made in Chelsea's Millie Mackintosh and model Madeline Mulqueen, recently said that social media plays a big factor in raising her profile as the fashion landscape changes.

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Special guests, Mariad Whisker and Heidi Higgins, will lead the event which takes place on Thursday March 10 at the Radisson Blu Hotel & Spa, Galway.

Renowned as one of the industry leaders, Mariad started her own label in 1984 and following a move to Los Angeles in the mid-90s, she continued to produce collections for prestigious stores in the United States and Europe before returning to Dublin to set up her own studio in 2001.

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A finalist at the Irish Fashion Innovation Awards in 2011 and 2012, Heidi Higgins now returns to present pieces from her chic and contemporary label that she established in 2009.

The Irish Fashion Innovation Awards is the only event of its kind in Ireland and each year recognises the wealth of innovative and creative designers we possess, from students emerging in to the industry to established designers making waves on the fashion scene internationally," said Patricia McCrossan founder of the awards.

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"We wish all of the finalists the very best of luck and welcome the fashion-loving community of Ireland to come along and support the finalists, while enjoying an amazing night of fashion and style at the same time."

Be part of what promises to be the highlight of the year for the Irish fashion industry with tickets just 35 each (reserved seating just 45).

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Fashion Designer of the Year

Giovanna Borza

Caroline Mitchell

Mona Swims: Carla Johnson

Tissue: Hannah Mullan (Derry) & Grainne Finn (Dublin)

Millinery Designer of the Year

Elaine Keogh

Davina Lynch

Caithriona King

Emily Jean OByrne

Andrea Tighe

Jewellery Designer of the Year

Vivienne Martin

Vivienne Walsh

KiKiNa (Ciarna Pham)

Natasha Heaslip

Emma Bourke

Accessory Designer of the Year

Sara ONeill- KDK (Keira & Dairine Kennedy)

Kinsale Leather

Dee Mangan- Hazel Greene

Ones to Watch

Etain Grant

Kyree Forrest

Fintan Mulholland

Ruth Duignan

Special Guests

Heidi Higgins

Mariad Whisker

Student Designer of the Year Colleges

Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD)

Galway Technical Institute (GTI)

National College of Art & Design (NCAD)

University of Ulster

Griffith College

St Angelas Sligo
Brazil's health minister said the country would mobilise 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects - but he also said the war was already being lost.

Marcelo Castro said nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations. Details of the deployment were still being worked out.

Castro also said the government would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

But the minister also said the country was failing to adequately tackle the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

"The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito," the ministers said as a crisis group on Zika met in the capital, Brazilia.

A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighbouring nations. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year caused little alarm, as the virus's symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didn't become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.

One of them, the US territory of Puerto Rico, reported 18 confirmed cases of Zika yesterday, though none involve pregnant women.

Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis passes.

Repellent has disappeared from many Brazilian pharmacies and prices for the product have tripled in recent weeks since the government announced a suspected link between Zika and microcephaly

Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in all of 2014.
Ammon Bundy (R) meets with Harney County Sheriff David Ward along a road south of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon in this January 7, 2016 file photo. Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed occupation at a wildlife refuge in Oregon and several of his companions were arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday, CNN reported

Ammon Bundy arrives to address the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon in this January 5, 2016 file photo. Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed occupation at a wildlife refuge in Oregon and several of his companions were arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday, CNN reported

The leaders of an armed group that has occupied a national wildlife refuge for the past three weeks have been arrested by the FBI and police in a traffic stop that sparked gunfire - and one death - along a highway through Oregon's frozen high country.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting in John Day, a town in Grant County town about 70 miles north of Burns, to address residents to discuss their views on government management of public lands.

The Oregonian newspaper said several hundred people gathered at the John Day Senior Centre and were told the "guest speakers" would not be appearing.

The FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made eight arrests: Bundy, 40; his brother Ryan, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32, during a traffic stop on US Highway 395.

Expand Close Ammon Bundy (R) meets with Harney County Sheriff David Ward along a road south of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon in this January 7, 2016 file photo. Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed occupation at a wildlife refuge in Oregon and several of his companions were arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday, CNN reported / Facebook

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Whatsapp Ammon Bundy (R) meets with Harney County Sheriff David Ward along a road south of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon in this January 7, 2016 file photo. Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed occupation at a wildlife refuge in Oregon and several of his companions were arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday, CNN reported

Authorities said two others - Joseph O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50 - were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

Police said troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting, though neither agency released details about what started it. One of those arrested, described only as a man, had non-life-threatening wounds and was treated in hospital, the agencies said.

Another man "who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest" was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information about the death until he was identified by the medical examiner.

Bundy's group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

Officers converged on the refuge after the arrests. It was unclear how many people, if any, remained in the buildings.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously took a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody stand-offs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathise with his criticism of federal management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover, fearing violence could erupt.

Ammon Bundy had recently begun travelling into Grant County to try to drum up more sympathy for his cause.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon senator Jeff Merkley said.

"The leaders of this group are now in custody and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender so this community can begin to heal the deep wounds that this illegal activity has created over the last month."

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 stand-off with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Deschutes County Major Incident Team and the Harney County District Attorney's Office.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous national land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two ranchers convicted of starting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The US government controls about half of all land in the West.
President Barack Obama has said that American politics has become "meaner" and that the rhetoric of Republican candidates such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has become "unrecognisable" to him.

Mr Obama has so far sought to remain aloof from the contest to succeed him but broke his silence in an interview in which he attacked the idea, espoused by Donald Trump, of banning Muslims from the United States.

He told 'Politico' magazine: "You think about it - when I ran (in 2008) against John McCain, he and I had real differences, sharp differences, but John McCain didn't deny climate science. John McCain didn't call for banning Muslims from the United States.

"The Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognisable."

Mr Obama added: "John McCain was a conservative but he was well within the mainstream of not just the Republican Party but within our political dialogue."

David Axelrod, Mr Obama's former senior strategist, writing in the 'New York Times', said: "Who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr Trump? His bombast allows no room for nuance or complexity."

Robert Gates, the former US Secretary of Defence, also criticised the level of debate among Republican presidential candidates.

He said: "I think middle-school kids would be embarrassed by the level of dialogue going on in the national campaign.

"These guys are making these broad pronouncements, it's clear they don't know what they're talking about.

"The worrying thing is they actually believe what they are saying - and if that is the case, we really are in trouble."

Also yesterday, Hillary Clinton attempted to fend off an insurgent left-wing challenge from Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, even while admitting that her favourite American president was a Republican.

She told a televised town hall meeting that Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who led the United States during the civil war and issued the proclamation freeing American slaves, was her chosen role model, overlooking her husband Bill's presidency.

Mrs Clinton said: "Sorry, President Obama, sorry, Bill - it's Abraham Lincoln.

"What could be more overwhelming than trying to win a civil war but he also kept his eye on the future and kept summoning up the better angels of our nature?"

Mrs Clinton was much less generous about present-day Republicans and issued a blistering moral condemnation of Mr Trump's call for a ban on Muslims entering the US when a Muslim woman wearing Islamic head-covering asked for an assurance that America was the best place to raise her three children.

"It's not only shameful and contrary to our values to say that people of a certain religion should never come to our country, it also dangerous," she said, without naming Mr Trump.

"We cannot tolerate this. We need a coalition that includes Muslim nations to defeat Isil and it's pretty hard to figure out how you're going to make a coalition with the very nations you need if you spend your time insulting their religion."

Several questioners told Mrs Clinton that they were leaning towards voting for Mr Sanders in next Monday's Iowa caucus, the first electoral test of the US primary season - with one even telling her that she was perceived as "dishonest".

Amid mounting evidence from the polls that she is losing support to Mr Sanders, Mrs Clinton - her party's putative frontrunner - told the audience in Des Moines, Iowa, that she was most qualified of the three Democratic candidates, who also include Martin O'Malley, a former Maryland governor, to become the next president.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
A police spokesman said: 'The schools were evacuated as a precaution while the incidents were looked into'. (stock photo)

A Putin-sympathising Twitter group that says it supports the regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad has claimed responsibility for international "mayhem" as thousands of pupils were evacuated from 14 British and six French schools yesterday following bomb scares.

The group, which uses an email address with a Russian ".ru" domain name and calls itself "Evacuators 2K16", has now been removed from the social network, after inviting students to get in touch if they want to "get out of school".

Bomb threats were made to six schools in England's West Midlands, four in London and four in Cornwall this morning.

Students in Paris were also affected, where six schools were evacuated. All the scares were believed to be hoax calls.

A Twitter account claimed responsibility for the calls. The alert comes only a week after four schools in the West Midlands sent pupils home following similar hoax calls.

The account claiming responsibility, which used the handle @Ev4cuati0nSquad, also claimed to be able to "divert the police away from a crime you're going to commit".

The profile picture showed Russian president Vladimir Putin and one tweet read: "We support the regime of Bashar al-Assad." But it stated its location as "Everywhere" and described itself as "6 individuals based internationally".

West Midlands Police said calls were made "in quick succession" at about 9am to four schools in Sandwell, one in Dudley and one in south Birmingham.

In London, four hoax calls were made to schools claiming "a suspicious device" had been left in their premises.

Ricards Lodge School was also evacuated as a precaution.

A police spokesman said: "The schools were evacuated as a precaution while the incidents were looked into.

"Searches of the premises have been completed and all the incidents have been stood down.

"The incidents are being treated as malicious communications."
Dedicated to (1) protecting the Charles River in Cambridge/Boston, MA, USA.(2) standing up to destructive governments.(3) protecting the Charles River White Geese & other wildlife. See: http://www.friendsofthewhitegeese.org. Viewed in 121 plus countries. Email: boblat@yahoo.com. Friend the Charles River White Geese on Facebook. 2005-22, Friends of the White Geese, a MA non-profit.
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is withdrawing his works from two museums in Denmark to protest against a new law that allows Danish authorities to seize valuables from migrants.

Ai announced on social media that he no longer wanted to have his works on display at the Aros museum in Aarhus and the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen.

Curator Jennie Haagemann said Ai called the owner of the Faurschou Foundation to inform him of his decision.

Aros museum officials said they did not know anything beyond what Ai had posted on Twitter and Instagram.

Museum director Erlend Hoeyersten said he has "great respect" for Ai's criticism of Danish immigration policies, "but I also find it unreasonable that an entire people is punished for the government's policies".
Serial killer Levi Bellfield has admitted abducting, raping and killing schoolgirl Milly Dowler for the first time, police said.

Bellfield, who was given a whole-life prison sentence in June 2011 for the brutal slaughter of the 13-year-old, made the admission during an investigation into whether he had an accomplice, Surrey Police said today.

The force also revealed it had arrested a man in his 40s on Wednesday before releasing him without charge over the allegation, after finding there was no evidence to support it.

In a statement issued through solicitors, Milly's family said: "The Dowler family has been made aware of the recent arrest.

"They have been aware for some consideration time that a new police investigation was taking place into the circumstances of the abduction and murder of Milly.

"The effect of this information has been devastating for a family which has already had to endure so much.

"We must stress how important it is that, notwithstanding this development, the Dowler family should be afforded privacy and space to go about their lives, and we are grateful for the consideration of the public and media in that regard."

Milly was snatched from the street while on her way from school to her home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002. Bellfield was found guilty of abducting and killing 13-year-old Milly following a trial at the Old Bailey.

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In February 2012 he lost a bid to challenge his conviction at the Court of Appeal in London.

A police spokesman said today: "During this investigation police have also spoken to Levi Bellfield and he has admitted his responsibility for the abduction, rape and murder of Milly Dowler.

"Despite his conviction, this is the first time Bellfield has made such admissions to police.

Bellfield was already in jail for the murders of Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, when he went on trial accused of killing Milly.

In 2008, he had been given a whole life term for murdering Ms McDonnell, 19, in 2003, and murdering Ms Delagrange, 22, and attempting to murder Ms Sheedy, 18, in 2004.

Milly's body was found in a wood in Yateley Heath, Hampshire - 25 miles from Walton-on-Thames. Experts could not say how she died.

Bellfield, who now calls himself Yusuf Rahim, lived 50 yards from where Milly vanished but did not become a suspect until he was arrested by police in London for the other crimes in 2004.

The Surrey Police spokesman added that the man arrested today was held "in relation to allegations of rape and assisting an offender".

He added: "The arrest was made following new information regarding an accomplice being involved with Levi Bellfield (who now calls himself Yusuf Rahim) in the abduction and rape, but not murder of Milly Dowler.

"Police have thoroughly investigated this claim and as the final part of their inquiries made the arrest today. The man arrested has subsequently been released with no further action as no evidence has been found to support the allegations."

The judge at his trial described Bellfield as a "cruel and pitiless killer".

After he had been convicted of Milly's murder Bellfield yawned as he was led from court.

When he refused to return to the Old Bailey for sentencing the next day, Mr Justice Wilkie said Bellfield had ''not had the courage'' to come to court.

Bellfield subjected Milly's family to the "appalling anguish" of many months of not knowing what had become of her, the judge had said.

He added: "But most cruel of all, in an attempt to divert responsibility from himself, he instructed his lawyers in this trial to expose to the world her most private, adolescent thoughts, secrets and worries, and sought to hint that she was a dark, unhappy and troubled person."
The Danish parliament has voted in favour of controversial plans to confiscate asylum seekers' personal possessions in order to pay for their upkeep.

The Danish authorities say the policy would treat migrants and refugees in the same way as the country's unemployed, who must sell assets above a certain value before they can receive benefits. But the proposals have drawn widespread condemnation from human rights groups, while some Danish critics have likened it to the confiscation of valuables from Jews during World War Two.

Danish MPs had been expected to vote in favour of the plans, which would also delay refugees' family reunions.

Integration Minister Inger Stoejberg has insisted that none of the items taken from refugees would be of sentimental value.

But Amnesty Denmark said the law reflected how the government's main priority was to deter asylum seekers from coming to the country in the first place.

"Our concern is that the new rule would seek to prevent the reunion of refugee families for up to three years," Claus Juul, senior legal adviser at Amnesty Denmark said.

"The real objective of this law is stop Denmark from appearing as an attractive country to asylum seekers.

"It is meant to make refugees go to other countries instead, because the message it sends is that if you really want to come to Denmark then you will have to wait up to three years before you can see your family.

"The proposal to make asylum seekers give up their valuables has backfired for the government, because the general public found that it was reminiscent of Nazi Germany - and that this provision really just serves to amplify the message: 'You do not want to seek asylum in Denmark'."

The law would apply to cash or assets of up to 10,000 kroner (1,500).

"The tone in the public debate about refugees and immigrants has undoubtedly become tougher," Kashif Ahmad, the leader of Denmark's National Party said.

Denmark received 20,000 migrants and refugees last year, while Germany received 1.1 million and Sweden 163,000.

Polling suggests up to 70pc of the Danish public see the number of migrants entering the country as its most pressing issue.

"I wouldn't say that I have become racist or anything," Poul Madsen, a taxi driver, said before the bill was debated.

"But I may be more aware of the fact that this has some downsides and may be a potential problem for our society and our economy."

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Many migrants are trying to make their way to Europe

Isil jihadists are exploiting the migrant crisis to smuggle terrorists into Europe with fake passports they can then use to travel to the UK, British intelligence officials fear.

Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Isil) is increasingly exploiting the huge migrant flows to slip jihadist cells through undetected to launch attacks in the UK and elsewhere.

They are mainly travelling on fake Syrian or Iraqi passports which are now so sophisticated it is almost impossible to distinguish between genuine refugees and terror suspects.

The concerns will increase pressure on European leaders to get a grip on the migrant crisis that is engulfing the EU.

It is feared sleeper cells are being established in the UK and across Europe having been sent back by their Isil commanders fully trained and with attack orders.

The strategy is being run out of Isils Syrian stronghold in Raqqa where would-be recruits are briefed and handed new identities.

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It also means suspects who were under watch by the intelligence agencies suddenly vanish.

It came as one of the EUs most senior officials disclosed that six in 10 migrants arriving in Europe are economic migrants with no right to asylum.

Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission, said that the majority of those coming to the EU are not fleeing war or persecution and that they should be deported.

Its about 60 per cent of all asylum seekers, he said, citing internal figures held by Frontex, the EU border agency. These are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status.

The disclosure that terrorists are exploiting the refugee crisis to gain access to the UK will intensify pressure on the Government ahead of the European Union referendum, which Downing Street is now looking to hold on June 23.

Eurosceptics have warned that the only way of ensuring that terrorists are not able to travel to the UK would be by withdrawing from the EU and imposing much stricter border regulations.

Robert Fico, the Slovakian prime minister, on Tuesday declared the EU is committing a ritual suicide by letting so many migrants in to the continent.

Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary and a noted eurosceptic, said that immigration is "effectively uncontrolled" in the EU and has become an issue of "profound public concern".

There has been growing concern that the refugee crisis would provide opportunities for fanatics to slip in under the radar since the Paris attacks in November.

At least two of the terrorists who killed 130 people in the marauding gun and suicide bomb attack had entered Europe on fake Syrian passports.

It was also feared the ringleader, Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, one of Europes most wanted terrorists, was able to return from Syria hiding among the thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Greece.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
A migrant girl tries to warm herself as she disembarks a boat on the Greek island of Lesbos. Photo: AP

Poland has vowed to veto any plan by the European Union that would oblige member states to accept set numbers of migrants, the nation's interior minister said yesterday.

Last year, Poland and other countries in the region opposed a plan to redistribute over 120,000 migrants from Africa and the Middle East among the EU members. Warsaw agreed to accept no more than 7,000 asylum-seekers, but not economic migrants, by the end of 2017.

Mariusz Blaszczak said that Poland would veto any new relocation plan that would impose a quota of migrants to be accepted, saying such a plan would encourage more arrivals.

Poland says that the migrants should be helped outside Europe, at refugee camps close to their home countries.

Some 53pc of Poles are against accepting any migrants, while 41pc are for offering them temporary shelter only, according to a poll released yesterday by the CBOS survey centre.

Only 4pc of respondents said Poland should allow migrants to settle permanently. The poll conducted earlier this month on 1,063 adults has margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Mr Blaszczak also said that Poland would "most probably" introduce temporary border controls in July when it will host a Nato summit and world youth's meeting with Pope Francis.

Speaking in Prague yesterday, the Czech and Slovak prime ministers called on the EU to be ready with alternative plans to reinforce its borders.

Czech prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka has called a meeting of the Visegrad group of central European countries for February 15, three days before an EU summit that will tackle the migration crisis.

The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have together taken a tough stance on migration and been at odds with western EU neighbours in dealing with an influx of migrants that topped one million last year.

The 28-nation EU on Monday inched closer to accepting that its Schengen zone of passport-free travel may be suspended if it cannot curb the number of asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East and Africa.

More than 40,000 people have arrived in EU-member Greece by sea from Turkey in 2016 despite a deal with Ankara two months ago to hold back an exodus of Syrian refugees. Mr Sobotka said it was even a question whether Greece had "given up" on its duties.

"Greece has not been able to provide (border) protection," he said in a televised news conference with Slovak counterpart Robert Fico in Bratislava.

"We have to put pressure on Turkey to fulfil its agreements with the EU. We have to insist that Greece, as far as it is in Schengen, meets its requirements."

Mr Sobotka and Mr Fico said it was time to start agreeing a back-up border control system to have ready in case migration could not be controlled in Turkey or Greece.

"There must be a back-up plan, regardless of whether Greece stays in Schengen. We must find an effective border protection," Fico said.

Most migrants head to richer EU countries such as Germany, so the number entering central European states has been low.

However, countries in the region have protested against an EU quota system intended to redistribute asylum seekers among member states. They have also stressed the need for stricter EU border protection and speeding up the creation of a joint border patrol. The EU is expected to agree details of the new guard only in June.

Yesterday the Turkish coastguard recovered the bodies of four migrants - three of them children - after a smuggler's boat sailing from Syria sank on the way to Greece, the state-run news agency said.

The bodies were found near the tiny Greek island of Farmakonissi, near the Turkish resort of Didim, according to the Anadolu agency.

The coastguard is searching the Aegean Sea for more possible victims.

Officials say 57 migrants have died in Turkish waters so far this year while attempting to reach the Greek islands.

More than 700 people have died or gone missing in the Aegean Sea since the start of 2015.
Brazil is one of the countries in South America where the Zika virus has taken hold

A Danish tourist has been infected by the Zika virus after visiting southern and central America, Danish hospital officials said.

The man in his mid-twenties suffered fever, headaches and muscle pain and was tested in the University Hospital in Denmark's second biggest city Aarhus on Tuesday, Professor Lars Ostergaard said.

The doctor said he saw no risk of the disease spreading further in Denmark. "His condition is good, he is recovering and he will be released from the hospital soon," Ostergaard told Reuters.

The mosquito-borne virus has been linked to brain damage in thousands of babies in Brazil. There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, a close cousin of dengue and chikungunya, which causes mild fever and rash.

An estimated 80 percent of people infected have no symptoms, making it difficult for pregnant women to know whether they have been infected.

Three Britons who travelled to South America have also been infected, health officials said last week.

Health experts say such cases are to be expected in Europe, given the scale of the outbreak in South America and the frequency of international travel.

But Zika is not expected to pose a threat in colder countries since they are not warm enough for the virus-carrying Aedes mosquito to breed.
Iran has arrested more than 100 Christians in the last week, amid a growing crackdown by the Islamic Republic. Photo: AP

Dozens of people who were arrested in Iran for crimes committed before they turned 18 remain at risk of the death penalty despite recent reforms, with many having already spent years on death row, according to a report by Amnesty International released yesterday.

The London-based group also found that Iran has executed at least 73 juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2015, including four last year.

Amnesty's 110-page report intensifies pressure on Iran at a time when Tehran is working to rebuild relations with the West following last year's landmark nuclear deal.

Iran is one of the world's largest users of the death penalty, ranking second behind China in 2014, according to the most recent figures from Amnesty.

Most executions overall in Iran are carried out for drug smuggling. The country straddles a major narcotics trafficking route linking opium-producing fields in Afghanistan to Europe.

Amnesty's researchers were able to identify the names and locations of 49 juvenile offenders who face the death penalty, though the group notes that actual numbers could be higher.

A 2014 UN report put the number of juvenile offenders at risk of execution at more than 160.

The majority of the 73 juvenile offenders Amnesty identified who were put to death over the past decade were convicted of murder. Others were executed for crimes including rape, drug-related crimes and national security offenses such as "enmity against God".

The group noted that reforms introduced in 2013 give judges more discretion to take into account juvenile offenders' mental maturity and potentially impose less harsh punishments, and that the Supreme Court has since said juvenile offenders facing execution could have their cases retried.

Additional reforms introduced last year require that cases involving juveniles must be heard in special juvenile courts.

Still, Amnesty says more must be done. "Despite some juvenile justice reforms, Iran continues to lag behind the rest of the world, maintaining laws that permit girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 to be sentenced to death," Amnesty said.

Iranian officials could not be reached for comment.

In late October, the United Nations' special investigator on the human rights situation in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, said executions in Iran had risen at an "exponential rate" since 2005 and could exceed 1,000 in 2015.

He said Iran put more people to death per capita than any other country, adding that the majority of executions did not conform to international laws banning the death penalty for juveniles and non-violent offenders.

The head of Iran's Human Rights Council, Mohammad Javad Larijani, subsequently dismissed the UN report as "a collection of baseless accusations".

Meanwhile the grandson of the founder of Iran's Islamic Republic has been barred from running for a top clerical body, his family said yesterday, as the country prepares for crucial elections next month.

The decision to bar Hassan Khomeini, who has close ties to reformists, likely serves as pushback against anyone proposing changes to Iran's clerical government after the nuclear deal with world powers negotiated by the administration of moderate President Hassan Rouhani.

Khomeini had planned to stand in the Assembly of Experts election, which will be held the same day as the Iran's parliamentary election in which moderates hope to make gains. The 86-member cleric body is elected by the public to eight-year terms.
Pope Francis meets President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in the Vatican. Photo: Andrew Medichini

Pope Francis met the Iranian president yesterday, joining in a cordial discussion which touched on the recent nuclear accord and Iran's role in the region.

President Hassan Rouhani met first with Francis privately for 40 minutes and later with other officials.

The Vatican in a statement said the conversation delved into the nuclear accord recently taking effect and "the important role that Iran was called to play" to combat terrorism along with other countries in the region.

Iran was also urged to help fight arms trafficking, the Vatican said.

The Vatican described the talks as "cordial" and said "common spiritual values were highlighted," as well as good Iranian-Vatican relations.

After the meeting, Iran's president asked Pope Francis to pray for him.

Rouhani's visit to the Holy See saw the first meeting between a pope and an Iranian president since 1999.

Before going to the Vatican, Rouhani told business leaders in Rome that "Iran is the safest and most stable country of the entire region."

Iran, which agreed to limit its nuclear activities in exchange for an end to economic sanctions, is eager to carve out a bigger role in mediating Middle East conflicts.

Rouhani's four-day visit to Italy and France is part of efforts to reach out to its old partners following the nuclear deal.

The trip was originally planned for November but postponed because of the attacks in Paris.

Pope Francis' papacy has emphasised mediation and conflict resolution, including his role in helping Cuba and the US to normalise relations.

The pontiff described the visit as "a real pleasure."

He gave the Iranian a medal depicting St. Martin helping a poor man, an act Francis called "a sign of unsolicited brotherhood".

Rouhani brought a gift of a handmade rug and told the pope it was made in the Iranian holy city of Qhom.

Italy also sees Iran as a potential peacemaker in Syria's civil war, as the Italian government fears the warfare will further destabilise Libya, just across the Mediterranean from southern Italy, fuel terrorism and jeopardise energy security.
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India's premium mass Hindi movie channel &pictures is all set to bring director- producer Michael Bays magnum opus Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on Friday, 28th January at 8 PM. The film also known as Transformers 2, a 2009 American science fiction action film is also produced by Steven Spielberg.The movie revolves around a young man named Sam who is caught in an age old war between two factions of alien robots, the Autobots and evil force- the Decepticons.The sequel continues when Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) leaves the Autobots for a normal life. Sam starts having strange visions of ancient symbols. The Decepticons need access to Sam's mind to see these symbols imprinted and hence he is being hunted by them under the orders of an ancient Decepticon named The Fallen. These symbols when interpreted and inserted in an alien machine which was hidden in Egypt will unleash supreme power.The Decepticons in their wicked scheme of things also target Sams parents and his girlfriend Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox). Will they be successful? Will Autobots be able to save the world yet again?Watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on Friday, 28th January at 8 PM only on &pictures
Indian equity markets end the day in Green Indian equity markets ended the day in green. The markets were in red for most of the day. They rose in the last one hour, to end the day in green. Nifty 50 ended the day, up by 51.70 points. S... October 20, 2022 | 3:41 pm

Dilip Buildcon bags LOA for project worth Rs723.45 crore Dilip Buildcon Limited informed that it has received the letter of acceptance (LOA) from the Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation (GMRC) Limited. The company has received the order for the... October 20, 2022 | 3:29 pm

CRISIL upgrades rating on JK Papers facilities worth Rs2,576.50 crore; stock soars ~3.5% CRISIL Ratings has upgraded the rating on JK Paper Limited's long-term bank facilities, non-convertible debentures, and fixed deposits to 'CRISIL AA/Stable' from 'CRISIL AA-/Stable.' ... October 20, 2022 | 3:13 pm

Ind Ra revises Manorama Industries' outlook to positive, affirms rating; Stock climbs 1% India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra) has revised Manorama Industries Limited's (MIL) Outlook to Positive from Stable while affirming its Long-Term Issuer Rating at IND BBB+. ... October 20, 2022 | 2:58 pm

Aster Hospital inaugurates 100-bed multi-specialty facility in Sharjah Aster Hospital, Aster DM Healthcare's hospital arm, has built a 100-bed multi-specialty hospital in Sharjah. His Highness Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi, Deputy Ruler of the Emirat... October 20, 2022 | 2:38 pm
The Board of Directors of Apollo Energy Company Ltd., an Apollo Hospitals Group Company, at a meeting held today, approved the divestment of 23.3% shareholding in Apollo Munich Health Insurance Company Ltd. (Apollo Munich) to its joint venture partner, Munich Re of Germany for Rs. 163.5 cr. The proposed transaction values Apollo Munich at Rs. 703 cr.Completion of the proposed transaction is subject to applicable regulatory approvals and execution of customary agreements, which is expected to be completed at the end of the first quarter of 2016. Post consummation of the transaction, Apollo Hospitals Groups shareholding in Apollo Munich shall stand reduced from 74.4% to 51.1%. Correspondingly, Munich Res shareholding in Apollo Munich shall move to 48.7% and 0.2% will be held by employees. Apollo Hospitals shall continue to hold its stake in Apollo Munich.Dr. Prathap C Reddy, Chairman, Apollo Munich Health Insurance Company Ltd. and Chairman, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd., welcomed the development and said, Insurance is a key element for making quality healthcare facilities accessible to the masses. The show of confidence from our JV partner will go a long way in helping the Group achieve its vision of Healthcare for all.Mrs. Shobana Kamineni, Whole Time Director, Apollo Munich Health Insurance Company Ltd. and Vice-Chairperson Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd., said We are delighted that Munich Re has decided to increase their shareholding in our insurance venture. The transaction highlights the strong position of Apollo Munich as one of Indias leading and most trusted standalone Health Insurance Company. It also demonstrates the commitment of both the partners to further expand the operations of Apollo Munich.The opportunity for Munich Re to increase its shareholdings was provided through the decision of the Indian Government in March 2015 to increase the foreign direct investment cap in the insurance sector from 26 % to 49 %.With the increase in shareholding, Munich Re strengthens its presence in India which is one of the key markets for the company.Doris Hopke, the member of the Munich Re Board of Management responsible for Munich Health, said: Indias population structure, increased life expectancy and positive economic development will usher in a steep rise in medium-term healthcare spending. Since its start in 2007, Apollo Munich Health Insurance has shown exceptional, often above-market growth rates. With the increased stakeholding, we are strengthening our position for sustainable and profitable growth in this region. Apollo Munich Health Insurance is committed to make quality healthcare easy and accessibleAxis Capital acted as the financial advisor to Apollo Hospitals group for the transaction.
Bharti Airtel, countrys largest telecom firm, will announce its financial results for the quarter ending December 2015 on January 28, 2016. Here are 7 things to look out for in Q3 FY16 results:According to IIFL estimates, the company is expected to report net revenue of Rs. 24,424 crore, a 5.1% growth on Y-o-Y basis. While, on Q-o-Q basis, the telecom firms net revenue growth is expected to grow at 2.4 % driven by seasonality tailwind in domestic business and Airtel Africa US$ growth.The companys net profit for Q3FY16 is likely be around Rs. 1133.5 crore, declining by 21.1 % on Y-o-Y basis and 25.6 % on Q-o-Q basis. The EBIDTA margin is expected to be at 34.3%.IIFL estimates 1.4% traffic growth though voice pricing would remain under pressure for India business.Gopal Vittal, CEO of Airtels India & South Asia unit, while announcing Q2 results had said, "Performance in Africa is showing slight revenue increase. We expect margins to remain in the 40% range going forward."IIFL estimates Africa margins to climb 20.8% while consolidated PAT would decline on sequential basis due to Rs. 660 crore one offs gain in Q2 mainly related to sale of tower assets in Africa.Airtel acquired Augere Wireless in Madhya Pradesh closing the deal in two parts. With the acquisition, Augere has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Airtel. The company, however, did not disclose the financial details of the deal. However, reports estimate the deal to be around Rs. 150 crore.On November 30, 2015, Bharti Airtel had announced a Rs. 60,000 crore investment towards its comprehensive network transformation program  Project Leap. Under its ambitious Project Leap, Airtel plans to add around 1,60,000 sites in the next three years, while it is currently working on installation of nearly 23,000 data sites.The top telco offered an automated talk time credit up to Rs. 30 for its prepaid customers affected by Chennai floods. Moreover, it offered a 10 minutes credit for Airtel to Airtel calling free of cost along with a free credit of 50MB data. However, due to incessant rains, the services of all the telecom operators were disrupted for almost a week and telcos said to have suffered considerable losses due to failure of services in flood-affected areas of Chennai.Given focus on accelerated roll outs of 3G/4G networks, India wireless margin is expected to remain flat despite a +1.5% Q-o-Q revenue tailwind.Bharti Airtel has been rolling out data benefits for mobile customers, ranging from Data Cashback, Family Data Share to other Smartphone Surprises to sustain the growing competition and pricing pressure, which is likely to impact Q3 numbers.
In an effort to lower the $250,000 bond for 20-year-old Lyndsey Cheyenne Brock, Attorney John Brooks said Tuesday that Ms. Brock did not assault a one-year-old, but tried to calm the child down during an alleged violent temper tantrum by the child.

Attorney Brooks sought to have Criminal Court Judge Tom Greenholtz lower the bond to $10,000. He did lower the bond, but not as much as the defense wanted.



Ms. Brock was arrested Jan. 11 on charges of aggravated child abuse after allegedly assaulting her husbands one-year-old to the point the child needed emergency care.

Ms. Brock and her husband, Robert Brock, were not married at the time of the incident, which took place at the husbands home in Soddy Daisy on Sept. 16, 2015.

According to County Investigator Mickey Rountree, approximately 10 to 20 minutes after Mr. Brock left for work on the morning of Sept. 16, Ms. Brock made a call to 911 regarding the injured state of the child.

On that day Investigator Rountree responded to Childrens Hospital, where the child had been transported by ambulance. He described to prosecutors that the child had multiple injuries to the face, a busted lip, ear swelling, and a bruised knuckle.

Medical personnel told Investigator Rountree the childs injuries were highly indicative of non-accidental trauma.

The attending Emergency Room doctor told the investigator the child also sustained a skull fracture in the back of his head and multiple bleeds on the brain. The doctor indicated the child experienced seizures caused by his injuries.

Attorney Brooks defended Ms. Brock by saying the injuries happened while she was caring for the child after her then-boyfriend left for work. He said Ms. Brock, who is not the childs biological mother, said the child had a temper tantrum and fell down on the floor repeatedly. She said she splashed water on him to get him to stop, but he kept throwing a tantrum. When the child stopped breathing, Ms. Brock said she called 911.

Investigator Rountree confirmed that Ms. Brock and the child were the only ones in and out of the house during the time of the incident. The investigator took an account from Ms. Brock on how the child sustained his injuries. He then brought the photos he took of the child in the hospital and the medical report to Dr. Annamaria Church, who specializes in child abuse victims at Children's Hospital.

Dr. Church maintained that the child did not inflict his injuries upon himself.

Interviews were conducted and investigators found the child had never been observed to have a tantrum on the level Ms. Brock described, it was stated.

During the three-month investigation, Ms. Brock indicated she and her boyfriend were looking to get married and have children of their own.

When Investigator Rountree took steps to arrest Ms. Brock in January, he found she had changed her address and last name on her drivers license.

According to Ms. Brocks father, who testified Tuesday, she had been in no trouble before this. The father said his daughter was very responsible. She was enrolled in Virginia Colleges pharmaceutical technical program at the time of the incident, and she was eligible to return.

However, Ms. Brocks family could not afford the $250,000 bond. But the $10,000 bond they could manage.

She has all her family here. Shes always been a good child, her father said.

By decreasing the bond to where the parents could pay it, prosecutors feared Ms. Brock would contemplate running between now and the time of her trial.

I dont think theres any chance that she wont be present in court, attorney Brooks said.

Ms. Brocks mother testified that two days after Ms. Brock went to the Silverdale Workhouse, five to six girls attacked her, leaving her with a black eye, bruises, and loose teeth. Ms. Brock called her mother and said she was frightened, and that she knew she could be in danger based on the nature of the charge against her.

Judge Greenholtz said aggravated child abuse was a class A felony with a minimum sentence of 15 years served at 100 percent.

Prosecutor Leslie Longshore said, I believe the evidence is strong that she injured this baby to where his life was in danger.

She said the $250,000 bond was necessary and appropriate.

Judge Greenholtz said the court found it extremely unlikely the one-year-old inflicted such severe injuries upon himself. The likeliness of Ms. Brocks conviction looked high, he said.

He lowered the bond to $99,000, with the condition that Ms. Brock would be on house arrest with a GPS to monitor her once the bond was paid.
Vietnam will effectively shelve the equivalent of 70 large coal power plants following an announcement from the Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung that the country would drop all further coal-fired power plant projects and move towards cleaner energy.This huge win follows tireless work from environmental advocates highlighting the health and environmental impacts of the countrys coal expansion plans, said Arif Fiyanto, Greenpeace Southeast Asia Coal Campaigner.This is one of the biggest victories for environmental and climate advocates in Vietnam, and a crucial step for Southeast Asia where development plans have tended to rely heavily on coal, said Arif. Vietnams decision is the Paris Agreement in action, and with a clear steer towards renewable energy it sets the benchmark for countries across the region to follow.Before the announcement, Vietnam had the biggest plans for coal-fired power plants in Southeast Asia with 44 gigawatts planned (the equivalent of 70 large coal plants) on top of 17 gigawatts under construction. Some of the planned coal projects will be converted to gas and measures will be made to create better investment conditions for wind and solar.Vietnam is playing its part in kicking our global addiction to coal. With Indian coal imports falling and China implementing a three-year ban on new coal mines, there is a definite sense that change is in the air in Asia, said Arif.Driven by concerns from people more aware than ever of the health and environmental impacts of fossil fuels, we are on the cusp of an energy revolution. But it needs to move faster and policy announcement such as this are just the first step.Greenpeace Southeast Asia last year worked with environmental groups, such as the Vietnam Sustainable Energy Alliance (VSEA), and researchers from Harvard University, to highlight the health impacts of the planned coal expansion. The groundbreaking study used modelling to show how existing coal plants in Vietnam cause an estimated 4,300 premature deaths every year, which would have risen to 25,000 premature deaths per year if the coal expansion plans were approved.
At 2:10 PM, the S&P BSE Sensex is trading at 24,516 up 29 points, while NSE Nifty is trading at 7,447 up 11 points.The BSE Mid-cap Index is trading up 0.48% at 10,265, whereas BSE Small-cap Index is trading up 0.48% at 10,755.All sectors are trading in green on BSE.Sun Pharma, NTPC, Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors, ICICI Bank, Lupin, Infosys and Axis Bank are among the gainers, whereas Coal India, ONGC, BHEL, Cipla and GAIL are losing sheen on BSE.Indian Rupee opened at 67.90/$,down 7 paise in early trade on Tuesday as against the previous close of 67.83/$. On the global front, US dollar continues to gain ground against currencies of commodity exporting economies. In this respect, Russian Ruble, South African Rand and Turkish Lira have weakened substantially during the past few trading sessions.The India VIX (Volatility) index is up 3.57% to 18.9175. Out of 1,787 stocks traded on the NSE, 518 declined and 955 advanced today.A total of 16 stocks registered a fresh 52-week high in trades today, while 20 stocks touched a new 52-week low on the NSE.Hinduja Foundaries jumped 2.3% to Rs.34.10 on BSE. Hinduja Foundries Ltd has informed BSE that the committee of Board of Directors at their meeting held on January 25, 2016 recommended to the Board of Directors to issue Global Depository Receipts (GDRs) to promoters, promoter group, group company(ies) and any other entity which is a subsidiary, associate of its parent, group companies or any other entity eligible to invest in GDR for an amount upto Rs. 400 crores. The Board of Directors at their meeting (which was held immediately on conclusion of the Finance Committee meeting) discussed deliberated and approved the issue of GDRs to promoters, promoter group company(ies) and any other entity which is a subsidiary, associate of its parent, group companies or any other entity eligible to invest in GDR for an amount up to Rs. 400 crores.Vardhman Textiles climbed 8.6% to Rs.778 on BSE. The company reported standalone net profit of Rs. 128.31 crore, registering growth of 80.85% yoy. he companys revenue stood at Rs.1,444.8 crore, witnessing decline of 1.54% yoy. Its core operating profit of Rs. 288.1 crore increased by 18.5% yoy.Swaraj Engines slipped 2.3% to Rs.870 on BSE. The company reported standalone net profit of Rs. 8.36 crore for the quarter ended December 31,2015, registering marginal growth of 0.96% yoy. The Companys standalone revenue stood at Rs. 105.59 crore, witnessing growth of 3.48% yoy.Sun Pharma and Lupin Ltd have received tentative approval for Lurasidone Hydrochloride by the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). The drug is used to treat certain mental disorders such asschizophrenia, depression associated with bipolar disorder.Indosolar slumped 5% to Rs.10.16 on BSE. The board of directors of Indosolar has informed the exchanges that banks, at their joint lenders meeting, have not considered the second restructuring proposal of the company as of now. The lenders are exploring the possibility of sale to an asset restructuring company and/or to invoke a change in management.Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company (SPARC), a research and development company owned by Dilip Shanghvi, has received a go-ahead from the Securities and Exchange Board of India's (Sebi) to raise up to Rs. 250 crore through a rights issue. The drug discovery firm had filed draft for the issue on September 18, 2015 seeking clearance from Sebi to raise funds through rights issue.Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd has informed BSE that a Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Corporation will be held on February 01, 2016, inter-alia, to consider declaration of Interim Dividend, if any for Financial Year 2015-16.Further in terms of Insider Trading Code of the Corporation, "Trading window" would remain closed from January 27, 2016, till 48 hours after communication of declaration of Interim Dividend to the Stock Exchanges.Ramco System jumped 2.7% to Rs.619.50 on BSE. The company has bagged order from AAI Worldwide Logistics.AAI Worldwide Logistics Inc, a leading logistics and freight-forwarding firm in the Philippines and its new Express Courier business unit Black Arrow Express, on Wednesday announced that it will implement Ramco Systems Logistics Software to streamline its domestic and international freight forwarding operations.LG Balakrishnan & Bros Ltd on Wednesday reported a 6.2% increase in standalone/standalone net profit at Rs. 15.4 crore for the third quarter that ended on December 31, 2015.The company had reported a net profit of Rs. 14.5 crore for the corresponding quarter last year, it said in a filing to the BSE.The company's total income has increased by 7.34% at Rs.283.4 crore for the quarter against Rs. 264 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous year. During the quarter under review, sales were at Rs.2.66 bn compared with Rs. 2.46 bn.
TeamLease Services Limited will open on Tuesday, February 2, 2016, a Public Offer of equity shares of Face Value of Rs. 10 each for cash at a price band from Rs. 785 to Rs. 850 (including share premium) per Equity Share comprising a fresh issue of up to Rs. 1,500 million (Fresh Issue) and an Offer For Sale of up to 275,977 Equity Shares by Gaja Capital India Fund-I (GCIF); up to 76,660 Equity Shares by Gaja Advisors Private Limited (GAPL); up to 1,180,569 Equity Shares by GPE (India) Ltd. (GIL); up to 1,533,206 Equity Shares by India Advantage Fund S3 I (IAF); and up to 153,321 Equity Shares by HR Offshoring Ventures Pte Ltd. (the Selling Shareholders) (the Offer For Sale and together with the Fresh Issue, the Offer).

The Offer comprises a Net Offer to the Public of such Equity Shares (the Net Offer) and a reservation of up to 10,000 Equity Shares for subscription by Eligible Employees (the Employee Reservation Portion). The Net Offer will constitute atleast 25% of the post-Offer paid-up Equity Share capital.

The Book Running Lead Managers (BRLMs) to the Offer are IDFC Securities Limited, Credit Suisse Securities (India) Private Limited and ICICI Securities Limited.

The Company and the Selling Shareholders may, in consultation with the BRLMs consider participation by Anchor Investors in accordance with the SEBI ICDR Regulations. The Anchor Investor Bid/ Offer Period will be one Working Day prior to the Bid/ Offer Opening Date - i.e., Monday, February 1, 2016. Bids can be made for a minimum of 15 Equity Shares and in multiples of 15 Equity Shares thereafter. The Bid/ Offer opens on Tuesday, February 2, 2016, and closes on Thursday, February 4, 2016.

The Equity Shares offered through the Offer are proposed to be listed on BSE Limited (BSE) and National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE).

The Offer has been graded by CRISIL Research and has been assigned a CRISIL IPO grade of '4/5' indicating that the fundamentals of the Offer are above average relative to other listed equity shares in India.

The Offer is being made through the Book Building Process, in compliance with Regulation 26(2) of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2009, as amended (SEBI ICDR Regulations), wherein at least 75% of the Net Offer shall be Allotted on a proportionate basis to Qualified Institutional Buyers (QIBs), provided that our Company and the Selling Shareholders may allocate up to 60% of the QIB Portion to Anchor Investors on a discretionary basis. 5% of the QIB Portion (excluding the Anchor Investor Portion) shall be available for allocation on a proportionate basis to Mutual Funds only, and the remainder of the QIB Portion (excluding the Anchor Investor Portion) shall be available for allocation on a proportionate basis to all QIB Bidders (other than Anchor Investors), including Mutual Funds, subject to valid Bids being received at or above the Offer Price. If at least 75% of the Net Offer cannot be Allotted to QIBs, then the entire application money shall be refunded forthwith.

Further, not more than 15% of the Net Offer shall be available for allocation on a proportionate basis to Non-Institutional Bidders and not more than 10% of the Net Offer shall be available for allocation to Retail Individual Bidders in accordance with the SEBI ICDR Regulations, subject to valid Bids being received at or above the Offer Price. All potential investors, other than Anchor Investors, shall participate in this Offer mandatorily through the Application Supported by Blocked Amount (ASBA) process providing details of their respective bank account which will be blocked by the Self Certified Syndicate Banks (SCSBs).
Twenty three years ago, Bagicha Singh left home and his crying mother to do something for his country. Following in Bhagat Singh's footsteps, Singh wanted to offer his sacrifices to bring good to his motherland. That's why the 81-year-old man has not stopped travelling; he has till now covered 5,80,000 kilometers on foot on a mission to rid India of its evils.

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This samaj sevak - a name he likes to be addressed with - wants to eradicate social ills that plague the society. Alcohol, drugs, tobacco and sex with sex workers are some of his main concerns that he thinks are killing the youth.

Singh hails from Panipat, and his journey began as early as 1993 when on February 22, he decided to begin his never-ending walk from Jammu to Kanyakumari. He gave up studies after passing out of Class XII and took upon himself the herculean task wherein he carries a 90 kg backpack and two Indian flags on 18 feet long poles.

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Singh has met many prominent personalities along the way, including politicians and celebrities.

While speaking to TOI, he even shared some interesting snippets:

"Throughout my journey, I have been meeting chief ministers, governors, police commissioners and film stars. They meet me, take a picture, and move on with their lives. I never asked anything for myself, but why don't they do something for the country? Why are our leaders going round the world begging companies to invest in India instead of addressing the issues here. The country here seems to be on a dangerous path while our politicians only care about their next foreign trip."

He further spoke about an interesting incident that happened with him:

"On my way from Tezpur to Guwahati in Assam, I had to cross a forest One has to carry dozens of bananas to cross the forest, as herds of elephants stop their human counterparts and dont let them go unless they are given their tax. I carried six kilo bananas, and indulged the elephants. Not far ahead on this journey, I was surrounded by a group of Naga tribesmen. They demanded that I hand over all my belongings. Thats when the elephants came to my rescue! The biggest one among them ran towards the group. The men panicked and fled. The elephant then picked up my bag with its trunk and the whole herd walked with me. Once we reached the road, I was given my bag and the herd walked back in."

Watch his story here:

He has finished 22 trips and is still going strong. We wish him godspeed and hope that he succeeds in his mission!
Official government and police social media pages are really getting their game on. The Mumbai Police, for example, really knows how to send their message across while being cool all along.

Take a look at this message for all the stoners in Mumbai -

If you roll, we will weed you out. #HoshMeinAao  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 27, 2016

It's mildly funny and puts the point across as well.

But this wasn't the first time the Mumbai police resorted to humour to get their points across to the public. We've had some gems from them in the past week.

Your creepy comments on her photo will get you a long date with us. #CyberSafetyWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 19, 2016

Don't let 140 characters write your destiny. Avoid cybercrime. #CyberSafetyWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 18, 2016

Dont let Facebook be the reason for you to hide your face. #CyberSafetyWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 20, 2016

Puns might be their forte right now, but we hope it'll get better with time.

Don't let 140 characters write your destiny. Avoid cybercrime. #CyberSafetyWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 18, 2016

Helmet or Hell-met. Choose Wisely #TrafficAwarenessWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 14, 2016

Then there are some heavy ones as well.

If you are driving like no one can stop you, your karma will #TrafficMantraIn140 @ta_tweety  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 20, 2016

If you do good, good follows. If you do bad, we follow. :) #CyberSafetyWeek  CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) January 24, 2016

Well played Mumbai police, well played.
After adopting two severely drought-hit villages Dhondalgaon and Gogalgaon in Vaijapur taluka of Aurangabad district the NAAM Foundation formed by actors Nana Patekar and Makarand Anaspure would be adopting two more villages Kutubkheda and Kaudar in Paithan taluka on Monday. The actors after extending monetary aid to the farm widows of Marathwada region decided to adopt drought-hit villages in the region for about a year with an aim to make them tanker-free and self-independent.

deccanchronicle

The NAAM Foundation, an NGO set up by actors Nana Patekar and Makrand Annaspure for the drought-hit farmers of state, has decided to give all kinds of help to affected farmers and the family of those farmers who had committed suicide due to their inability to repay loans.

Earlier, after adopting two villages in Vaijapur taluka in Aurangabad district the actors would be visiting two villages in Paithan Taluka on Monday. They will be making announcement about the works to be carried out in Kutubkheda and Kaudar villages in Paithan taluka, Aurangabad district tomorrow.

The NGO scrutinised around 100 villages and selected these two villages. The criteria for selection is that the villages should extend maximum peoples participation, should be free from alcohol addiction and firewood cutting. Meanwhile, the criteria are also based on the severity of water scarcity of the particular village.

With the foundation receiving monetary aid from all corners the duo during their visit to Aurangabad earlier had said that there is no dearth of money in our country it is the faith that we need to impose among donors and ensure that the aid is put to right use and reaches the needy.

cusswindia2013

With response increasing the duo has established five centres in the state to execute the mission meticulously. The centres have been set up in Matunga, Thane, Pune, Nagpur and Aurangabad. Representatives and coordinators have also been entrusted with their responsibility.

The basic objective of the NGO is to focus on generating employment, providing education to the children of farmers facing financial crisis, bringing growth in agriculture and tackling water problem for permanent.

The Foundation has decided to establish Krushi Seva Kendra with the help of agriculture experts, who will guide the farmers from Marathwada, Vidharbha and Khandesh regions about cultivation and farm activities.

He said for education of the children of farmers who had committed suicide, the Foundation would open a residency school with facilities of earn and learn.

In view of on-going dry spell and scarcity in the state which it has been experiencing since past four years, the Foundation has decided to plant one crore saplings across the state.
While India's nuclear arsenal is no secret, for the past few years the country's nuke weapons have been a notable absentee from the high profile Republic Day parade, where we showcased our military might.

AP

The story was no different of Tuesday, and it was the third successive year that this is happening.

In 2013, India had displayed the Inter Continental Ballistic Missile Agni-V during the Republic Day Parade. The chief guest at that time was Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck.

However, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came in as the chief guest in 2014, no ballistic missiles were displayed. India at that time was negotiating a civil nuclear deal with Japan, the only country to have suffered an atom bomb attack.

AP

The nuclear missiles were also missing during the Republic Day parade last year when US President Barack Obama was the chief guest. Asked why ballistic missiles are not being displayed, Maj Gen Rajesh Sahai, chief of staff Delhi area of Indian Army said deterrence is not about showcasing everything we have.

"Certain platforms are in open domain which are not showcased. There are some items which are not showcased every time," he had told reporters recently. However, he added that some items could come back next year as displays are done on a rotation basis.

AP

The Army, which has been talking about the 'Make in India' initiative, chose to display Russian T90 tanks instead of the indigenous Arjun tanks developed by the DRDO.

The Army displayed infantry combat vehicle BMP-II (Sarath), mobile autonomous launcher of the BrahMos missile system, Akash weapon system, Smerch launcher vehicles and integrated communication electronic warfare system.

RIA Novosti

The Navy displayed flight deck operations on the new aircraft carrier Vikrant, under construction at the Kochi Shipyard, and the indigenously constructed submarine 'Kalvari' by Mazagaon Dock, having 'Made in India' tag on them.

Among the fighters displayed by the IAF, there were five Anglo-French Jaguars.
Last week, Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan lashed out against promoters of defaulting companies who continued lavish lifestyles despite owing thousands of crores to banks.

"If you flaunt your birthday bashes even while owing the system a lot of money, it does seem to suggest to the public that you don't care. I think that is the wrong message to send. If you are in trouble, you should be cutting down your expenses," said Rajan.

forbes

It appeared to be a veiled, but accurate reference to Vijay Mallya, promoter of Kingfisher Airlines.

Mallya, despite losing many of his precious toys and properties, celebrated a Goa birthday bash that involved a performance from international star Enrique Iglesias - Kingfisher Airlines reportedly owes banks over Rs 7,500 crore. Turning 60 for Mallya meant fireworks and a palace decor theme that roped in an event management agency to entertain 500-600 guests.

A source told the Times of India: "The parties have around a few hundred people, perhaps 500-600 at a time. Many guests are put up in the villa itself, and others are hosted in the neighbouring Vivanta by Taj resort from where the guests walk in from the beach-side. Mallya is usually seen sitting with his foreign business investors from the liquor industry. His house is run like a hotel."

Mallya may have hidden 4,000 crore of bank loans in tax havens across the world.

According to First Post, 17 Indian banks are about to lose a battle to recover these crores plus interest overdue.

forbes

Speaking to NDTV, he had spoken what has been on everyone's mind: "The system has been geared to favouring those who have the ability to work the courts. The policy that you (large businessmen) follow is that during good times you take the upside but in bad times you go to banks and ask how much of a haircut are you going to take?"

In a 2,500-word letter to staff earlier this year, the governor had urged employees to go after the rich and powerful. "No one wants to go after the rich and well-connected wrongdoer, which means they get away with even more. If we are to have strong sustainable growth, this culture of impunity should stop. Importantly, this does not mean being against riches or business, as some would like to portray, but being against wrongdoing," said Rajan.
You will have to do better than hitting the delete button to get rid of porn. Delhi Police is out shopping for 'porn detection sticks'  USB devices with software that can bring back pornographic content from the dead.

Though cops say the devices will be used to "fight cybercrime", it's a safe guess they will help nail paedophiles, exes playing revenge porn, and sex criminals using photos and videos of their victims for blackmail.

Sources say the software can scan computers for porn images, videos and chats even if these have been deleted. It detects and analyses faces, flesh tones, shapes and curves but leaves no trace of use. This makes it immensely useful in a developing case requiring secrecy, for instance, a honeytrap probe.

Three months from now, Delhi Police will have a better handle on cybercrime. The department is all set to revamp its Cyber Cell by procuring state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure for investigating cases effectively. Sources tell that police will be equipped with gadgets and software that will bring them on par with their counterparts in the West.

TOI





From EnCase Forensic-computer forensics software of global reputeto forensic workstations, email examiners and digital intelligence servers, Delhi Police has its shopping list ready.

Officers said they feel helpless when faced with cases requiring high-level cyber investigations. From financial crime to terror, cases requiring computer expertise force them to rely on forensic labs or private investigators. Evidence in such cases needs to be retrieved immediately from emails, websites, chat rooms and databases and also traced on desktops, laptops as well as mobile phones for quick action.

Last month, Turkey-based hackers suspected to be working for the terror outfit Islamic State syphoned off Rs 6 crore in Indian currency by sending their own account numbers to a UK-based firm from the email ID of its Delhi-based contractor. Delhi Police found themselves in a fix during the investigation because they had to examine emails, email accounts, source and origin of transactions, etc.

The new technology is going to change that. "We are also procuring email examiners. They will not only recover deleted emails but also analyse them from the content of their header, subject, body, etc. They can scan through hundreds of email formats. Besides, cyber forensics will assist us in tracing the origin and destination of the mails," said an officer.

EnCase Forensic, officers said, is on top of their shopping list as it will not only allow them to swiftly capture data from a wide range of devices but also help them discover evidence by analysing the content. "It will also generate comprehensive reports of the findings and provide secure integrity of the evidence which courts will accept during trials," another officer said.

Hindustantimes

The Cyber Cell will be equipped with dedicated data acquisition and access devices, and be aided by CyberCheck Suite, another programme. These technologies will be installed or form part of 'forensics workstations' (portable and static) which are a part of the list as well. These advanced workstations are equipped with highspeed hard drives which help investigators store and analyse the data.

The Cyber Cell will also be equipped with digital intelligence servers, a top officer of Economic Offences Wing said, adding that it will help them connect all the systems of the cyber lab on to a single network and centralise the system for easy access.

firstpost

"It would support internet and email investigation for browser history analysis, web history & cache analysis, Kazaa toolkit, HTML carver, HTML page reconstruction, internet artefacts, instant messenger toolkits, etc. The technology will also allow for easy preparation of mirror images of the seized disks which will further aid the investigation," the officer said.

Sources said the department is in touch with a few global firms which specialise in manufacturing the required technology and the process is being given top priority. Delhi Police commissioner B S Bassi confirmed that the department is in the process of acquiring instruments for the cyber lab.

Of late, Delhi Police has been increasing its cyber capabilities. While it had set up a cyber training lab in 2014, the crime branch got its own cyber cell division to tackle the increasing cybercrime. Two other cyber divisions are already active in the special branch/cell and Economic Offences Wing. The training lab was set up at Police Training College, Jharoda Kalan to train officers to investigate cybercrime and specialize in fields like IP tracking, computer forensics and mobile phone security issues.
Amateurs looking to beef up end up exercising wrongly. Result: infertility due to varicose veins

Telegraph

Prolonged gymming, especially lifting weights using improper technique is resulting in most men landing up in the city's infertility clinics.

It often leads to an enlargement of varicoceles (enlargement of varicose veins in the spermatic cord), doctors say. In fact, infertility experts say that almost 20 per cent of male infertility cases that come to clinics in the city are due to this problem and have to undergo surgery. Most amateur gym buffs are paying a heavy price for exercising without supervision.

Dr S S Vasan, head and director, Andrology and Men's Health, Ankur Healthcare, told Bangalore Mirror: "With the city's youngsters increasingly turning fitness freaks, these problems have become increasingly common in the middle-aged group. Varicoceles are thought to raise the temperature of the testicles or cause blood to back up in the veins supplying the testicles. This usually results in impaired sperm."

If it is diagnosed as a cause of infertility in men, it is often corrected through a surgical procedure and is often carried out by a urologist. Dr Anand M, urologist with Manipal Hospital told BM, "It is a contributing factor towards infertility and is more common on the left side than the right side. There might not be immediate consequences but it could have adverse effects over a prolonged time. It is basically a network of tangled vessels in the scrotum and causes pain and shrinkage. It can be corrected through a simple laparoscopic procedure."

Doctors advise that people who hit the gym for the first time should do so with proper and guidance and with the help of an instructor. If they experience discomfort they should see a doctor immediately.

Dr T V Seshagiri, consultant urologist and andrologist, B G Global Hospital told BM, "The issue is debatable and has been a hot topic of discussion for quite some time now. Even though there are no concrete studies, a lot of clinical data has emerged in this regard. Excessive weight-lifting increases the intra-abdominal pressure thus resulting in this problem."

Most heading to gyms either don't hire an instructor or follow expert instructions; as a result, injuries are quite common. However, the sad part is that most of these injuries tend to be chronic. Speaking to BM, celebrity fitness trainer Shodan M Rai, who is also incidentally an international bodybuilder representing the country, said, "I can quote a number of such examples. Recently, one of my friends had a ligament tear as he exercised excessively. He had to travel all the way to Mumbai to get an operation caused by his amateur gymming. Generally, the trend that I have noticed is people trying to go overboard with exercises, either without adequate knowledge or without proper instruction. If they are supposed to do 10 sets of exercises, they tend to do much more which will definitely cause more harm than good. The injuries may not be seen overnight but it may turn out to be chronic and many of them realise it two or three years later."

Not customised'

Another famous fitness expert Sachin S said, "These days, we see many of them trying exercises using apps. However, what they fail to realise is that most of these apps are generic and not specific to an individual. My body is different from my brother's; so, if both of us follow the same app exercises, then, it definitely will not help. An instructor will definitely help people not to go wrong in the gym."

The Cause

Varicose veins occur when the tiny valves within the veins stop working efficiently. If the valves become inefficient, weak, or damaged, the blood can collect in the vein which causes it to become swollen or enlarged.

Key facts

* Varicose veins affect up to three in 10 adults

* Women tend to be more affected than men

* The veins themselves serve no purpose in the 'varicose' state

* Varicose veins get worse with time if not treated
Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center, a ministry of the Presbytery of East Tennessee, condemned the arrest of Mendon John Price on charges of aggressive panhandling and the Chattanooga Visitors Bureau's labeling of him as the number one enemy downtown.

The ministry issued a statement calling on the Visitors Bureau "to apologize and for all charges, fines and penalties to be dismissed against Price."

In addition, the Justice and Peace Center's building partner, Chattanooga Organized for Action, began an online fundraiser to help Price pay for legal fees and court costs as a result of the arrest. The fundraiser can be found at: https://www.generosity.com/community-fundraising/1-downtown-enemy-support-fund/x/4729764.

Price, who is restricted to a wheelchair due to the loss of one of his legs, was arrested on Thursday evening during a symphony performance at the Tivoli Theatre.

Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center Co-Director Beth Foster said the ministry "is planning further action to support Price and to raise awareness about the treatment of panhandlers and poor and homeless people in the tourist district."

Ms. Foster said Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center, which includes both followers of Jesus Christ and an interfaith community, "condemns the Chattanooga Visitors Bureaus criminalization of poverty and the labeling of our economically disadvantaged sisters and brothers as 'the enemy.' We condemn the oppressive mass incarceration and policing systems that enable the city to value a tourists dollar over the lives of its own citizens.

"We call out the lies of the powerful and question the legitimacy of the charge that Mendon John Price was 'aggressively panhandling.' We know Mr. Price, who we call John John. We know him as a gentle, respectful and kind person. We demand that the Chattanooga Visitors Bureau apologize for calling Mr. Price the 'number one enemy downtown.'

"In a city filled with the violence of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, in a city where children are hungry and elders are homeless, the Visitors Bureaus statement is deeply offensive on many levels, only one of which is signaling out a deeply loved member of our community  our differently-abled, wheel chair-bound brother, who has only one leg  as the enemy.

"We also call on the Chattanooga Police Department and the court system to dismiss any charges, as well as any fines and penalties, against Mr. Price. They are unfair and unfounded and using precious public resources that should be directed toward making our city a better place to live for all Chattanoogans."

The Rev. Brian Merritt, co-director of Mercy Junction who serves as a minister at Renaissance Presbyterian Church, where Mr. Price often attends, said he "points to Christs attempts to radically tear down the oppressive systems that keep some in power and others shackled to poverty.

"John was at church this Sunday, Rev. Merritt said. After the service he came up to me in his wheelchair and said, I liked what you said when you said, This is the day that the Lord has made. That is true. John can teach the powerful of this city a valuable lesson about gratitude. Maybe they will repent and strive to be a city that is grateful for all its citizens. Then it will be the day the Lord intended.
While Iranian President Hassan Rouhani almost cancelled his France trip after officials refuse to entertain Rouhani meeting President Francois Hollande after Iran demanded a wine-free meal with halal meat", Italy won't let sensibilities come in the way of business.

And big business it is - Italy and Iran will sign up to 17 billion euros of business deals during the two day visit of the Iranian delegation which began on Monday.

Italian opposition leaders and commentators said Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had gone too far to please Rouhani. Renzi came under fire after ancient nude statues in Rome's Capitoline museum were covered up to avoid any possible offence to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who is visiting the country.

"Respect for other cultures cannot and must not mean negating our own"

muftah.org

Politicians on the left and right said not only had Renzi made almost no reference to Iran's human rights record during a joint news conference, but had also "surrendered" Italy's cultural identity by hiding the nude statues of women. "Respect for other cultures cannot and must not mean negating our own," said Luca Squeri, a lawmaker in former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia party. "This isn't respect, it's cancelling out differences and it's a kind of surrender."

At Iran's request, Italy also kept wine off the menu at a ceremonial dinner on Monday evening. Northern League deputy Barbara Saltamartini said covering the statues with white panels was an "act of submission," while the party's leader Matteo Salvini wrote on his Facebook page that it was "crazy". Gianluca Peciola, of the Left, Ecology and Freedom party, called on Renzi to explain "a disgraceful decision which is a mortification of art and culture as universal values". The 41-year-old Renzi met with similar criticism last year when he covered up nude pictures in the renaissance town hall of Florence, the city where he used to be mayor, on the occasion of a visit by the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates.
Follow us on my father would have been very proud of me priyanka chopra on receiving padma shri award

New Delhi: Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra is on cloud nine these days and all thanks to her achievement on her professional front.

The diva recently won the People's Choice Award for Best Actress for Quantico. In fact, she became the first South-Asian actress to have won this award.

While Priyanka was still in the hangover of her international achievement, here comes another big news for her.

The Barfi' actress is conferred with Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour.

Priyanka Chopra is being awarded this honour for her critically acclaimed performances and contribution to the Indian cinema.

The actress just can't stop smiling over her achievement and feels very humbled about it.

Being awarded the Padma Shri from the Government of India is a great honour and I am humbled to receive it. I am the daughter of Indian Defence Services. the child of 2 army officers, which makes this so much more special to me. I know that this Award would have made my father very proud of me. My congratulations to the other awardees of this year. I am privileged to be a part of such an illustrious list of achievers, Priyanka told a leading daily.

The Mary Kom' actress went on to congratulate her fellow counterparts who have received the civilian honour. She stated, My congratulations to the other awardees of this year! I am privileged to be a part of such an illustrious list of achievers. To be a part of this century-old Indian Cinema, for more than a decade has been a fantastic journey. I have grown not only as an actor but also as an individual. I share this honour with all my co-stars, directors, technicians and everyone who has been part of this journey with me.

There is so much I have to be grateful for and I have strived to give back in any way that I can. I will continue my efforts to bring pride to my country wherever I am and in the best possible way, she further added.

Currently, Priyanka Chopra is in US shooting for the American series Quantico' in which she plays the role of an FBI agent named Alex Parrish.

Latest Bollywood News
Follow us on fed up of high prices in mumbai anil kapoor buys luxurious flat in dubai

Dubai: Actor Anil Kapoor can now proudly call a plush flat in Dubai his home as he booked a two-bedroom apartment in Ritz by Danube' housing project on Tuesday.

The Dil Dhadakne Do' actpr addressed a press conference in the populous city of the United Arab Emirates. It was at the media interaction that he said was his "Sindhi" wife Sunita Kapoor who froze the deal in Mumbai a fortnight ago.

"I am an actor and must admit that I do not have that nose to smell business, but my better half being Sindhi is apt at it" he said amid guffaws from those he was addressing.

Calling Dubai his "second home" which over the years had endeared itself to him and his family, he said the "deal appeared lucrative" as real estate was set to appreciate in value in the city owing to the World Expo-2020.

He said Danube Group chairman Rizwan Sajan informed them about Spanish technology being used in the project to optimise the use of space, which was another reason to go in for the buy.

Dressed in a black suit, Kapoor couldn't stop praising Rizwan and the Danube Group's initiative.

The actor later told IANS that property in Mumbai was "out of reach for even the richest" and that he and his wife had a harrowing time in finding an appropriate place for their actress daughter Sonam Kapoor.

"Either the place was not good or it was not affordable," he said, contrasting his experience in Mumbai with his Dubai buy which was "both within reach and good".

Sajan said 'Ritz by Danube' was a 300 million Dh project being planned in Al Furjan neighbourhood in Jebel Ali area that was in close proximity to Dubai south, the Dh 120 billion and 140-square km mixed use development, which will host the Al Maktoum International airport and the World Expo 2020.

With inputs from agencies

Latest Bollywood News
Follow us on aamir khan reacts to anupam kher getting padma bhushan award

New Delhi: Veteran actor Anupam Kher is on seventh heaven after he was conferred with Padma Bhushan Award which happens to be third highest civilian honour.

Anupam will be receiving the honour for his commendable contribution to Indian cinema as well as to the society.

Ever since his name was announced for the award, the veteran actor was poured in by congratulatory wishes from everyone.

However, there was this one person who was unexpectedly among the first one to react on Anupam Kher getting the honour.

We are talking about Aamir Khan and his reaction to Anupam Kher did stun everyone.

During a recent media event, when Aamir was aske about Anupam Kher conferred with Padma Bhushan Award, the PK' star stated, Warm congratulations to Anupam Kher on his Padma Bhushan.

It's been a while that Aamir had landed himself in a controversy over his remarks on intolerance in India. Veteran actor Anupam Kher was quite angry with Aamir over his remarks and also took a dig at him for this.

But with Aamir being happy enough with Anupam's achievement, it seems all is well between the two actors.

Recently, while talking about his intolerance remarks, the Dangal' actor clarified that he has no intentions to leave the country ever. He rather confessed that he often ends up feeling homesick when he is abroad.

Latest Bollywood News
Follow us on here s what mandan karimi said when compared with katrina kaif

New Delhi: Mandana Karimi, the Iranian-model-turned actor, is a household name now, thanks to her stint in reality show Bigg Boss 9. Though, the lady couldn't win the Salman Khan hosted show, but she is happy with the love and support she is getting from the viewers post her exit.

Apart from this, Mandana's recently released porn-com', Kya Kool Hai Hum 3, is also making her famous in the tinsel town. In such scenario, it was obvious to ask about her future endeavours in Bollywood.

In an interview, Mandana was asked if she wants to be next Katrina Kaif, as she is one of the few foreigners to have made it big in the industry. The lassy leg got miffed with the comparison and said she don't want to follow anyone.

I don't want to be the next anyone. I believe that everyone is different. Katrina is a massively successful person, and she has worked hard to reach this spot. I have faith and I believe I will be as successful as her and many others in the industry, Mandana told a leading daily.

Interestingly, at the Bigg Boss 9 finale Mandana Karimi shared the screen space with Katrina Kaif who was there to promote her upcoming movie Fitoor'.

We hope Mandana's latest remark goes well with Katrina.

Latest Bollywood News
Follow us on tusshar mandana s kyaa kool hain hum 3 banned in pakistan

New Delhi: Bollywood actor Tusshar Kapoor is making to the news for his recently released adult comedy Kya Kool Hain Hum 3'.

The actor is quite popular for his comic roles and is on the way to become the king of adult comedy now.

His recent release Kya Kool Hain Hum 3' is another gag bag of raunchy jokes.

But it seems that Tusshar's KKHH3 hasn't gone down well with the censor board of Pakistan as the movie has been banned there.

According to the media reports, the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC) and its provincial censor boards both decided after a meeting yesterday that the film was unsuitable for public exhibition.

CBFC chief Mobashir Hasan said the film was found to be an 'out and out obscene film' with vulgar dialogues and nudity. He also stated that the film couldn't be allowed for public viewing even with an adult rating as it was over the top vulgar.

"The film is full of nudity and has a lot of vulgar content in its dialogues. The board has officially disallowed the film from public viewing," he said.

Interestingly, some cinemas had started screening the film since Friday after its release. However, the general manager at a cinema said that just after two days they got orders from their distributor to suspend the screening of the film which has reportedly grossed about Rs130 million in India in its first two days of release.

"We have issued a showcause notice to the distributor and he faces a hefty fine for importing this film and selling it to some exhibitors without first going through proper channels," Hasan said.

Fakhre-Alam, chairperson of the Sindh Board of Film Certification (SBFC) said all the provincial censor boards, including Punjab and Sindh, found it unsuitable for public exhibition in cinemas.

'Kya Kool Hain Hum 3' starring Tusshar Kapoor and Aftab Shivdasani is a story of two boys, who end up joining the adult film industry, but have to pretend to be sober to win the heart of the girl's family. The movie is directed by Umesh Ghadge and was released on January 22.

Latest Bollywood News
Follow us on when sunny leone s denial made mr perfectionist aamir khan sad

New Delhi: Sunny Leone has been recently making to the headlines because of her recent interview to a leading news channel.

The actress faced sexist' questions about her past during the interview, however, Sunny put up with the entire episode strongly and confidently.

While several B-town celebs came in support of Sunny, Mr. Perfectionist recently confessed that he was quite hurt by Sunny's statement about him.

Reportedly, Sunny was questioned about working with Aamir to which the Jism 2' actress had said no'

Aamir Khan not just felt dejected with Sunny's response but also stated that he doesn't have any problem with her past and wouldn't mind working her.

I felt bad about how she was questioned during the interview. I even felt sad when she refused to work with me. But yes, if the script and the character suits, I have no problem in working with her. I have nothing to do with her past life, Aamir was reported saying while celebrating the 10th anniversary of his film Rang De Basanti.

I have nothing to do with her personal life. She is a woman and I respect her. I seriously would like to work with her. I hope that she would also like to work with me, he said.

The Dangal' actor earlier took to his twitter handle to voice his support for Leone. I think Sunny conducted herself with a lot of grace & dignity.I wish I could have said the same about the interviewer, he tweeted.

Sunny, I will b happy 2 wrk wid you. I have absolutely no problems with your past, as the interviewer puts it.Stay blessed.Love .a, added Aamir.

About the interview that has gone viral, Sunny said that she agreed for it anticipating that it would revolve around her upcoming movies and not her past career choices.

Currently Sunny Leone is busy promoting her forthcoming movie Mastizaade' also starring Tusshar Kapoor and Vir Das, which is slated to hit the screens on January 29.

Latest Bollywood News
Follow us on woody allen casts miley cyrus in upcoming amazon series

New York: Woody Allen has an unlikely new female star: Miley Cyrus.

Cyrus will star in Allen's not-yet-titled Amazon series, a spokeswoman for Cyrus confirmed. The head-spinning casting combines the 80-year-old filmmaker with the 23-year-old former Disney star.

Cyrus will star alongside Elaine May in the six half-hour episodes planned to run this year.

On Instagram, Cyrus posted a painting of Allen that she said had been beside her bed for years. Cyrus wrote that she was "looking into his eyes when I got the call to be a part of the cast."

Allen has previously voiced regrets about his first foray into streaming television. At the Cannes Film Festival in May he called it "a catastrophic mistake."

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Follow us on india may make fresh bid to tag maulana masood azhar a global terrorist

New Delhi: In the wake of Pathankot terror attack, India can make a fresh bid to tag Pakistan based Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar as a global terrorist.

According to reports, the Government of India is reconsidering reviving its 2009 request at the United Nations to designate Azhar's JeM as a terrorist organisation.

In 2009, India had impressed upon the UNSC to ban Azhar but China, at the behest of Pakistan, had blocked the UNSC sanctions against the JeM chief.

The then Government of India had also provided detailed information to China about Azhar's involvement in terror attacks and urged Beijing to support the move. China had, however, argued that it did not have the necessary information about Azhar's involvement in terrorism.

The latest move might come as a setback for China which had in 2009 blocked the efforts by United Nations on the matter keeping in mind the ties it shares with Pakistan.

At present, the Indian government believes that the current situation, where it has provided 'actionable evidences' to Pakistan against Azhar's hand in Pathankot attack and Islamabad's move to detaining some members of the outfit, will give China a tough time if it go against Pakistan's interests.

It should be noted that China had strongly condemned the attack on IAF base in Pathankot earlier this month and vowed to deal with Islamic extremists radicalised and trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The JeM, founded in 1999, has been labelled as a terrorist organisation in several countries including Canada, Australia, UAE, United Kingdom, United States and India. The JeM was also behind the Parliament and J&K Assembly attacks in 2001.

In June last year, at a meeting of the UN Sanctions Committee, India had sought action against Pakistan for release of militant Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi in the 26/11 trial in violation of a UN resolution but the Chinese representatives blocked the move on grounds that New Delhi did not provide sufficient information.

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U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander said Wednesday a broad, bipartisan energy bill being considered by the Senate would help fuel innovation in our free enterprise system to help lower energy costs and provide an abundance of clean, cheap, reliable energy.

The bill, the Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2016, includes several provisions supported by Senator Alexander and passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in July 2015, by a vote of 18 to 4. If signed into law, the legislation would be the first broad energy legislation in eight years.

I commend Chairman Murkowskis leadership in crafting this bipartisan energy bill that will help the United States maintain its brainpower advantage and create an abundance of clean, cheap, reliable energy to fuel innovation in our free enterprise system, Senator Alexander said. This bill reauthorizes energy programs in the America COMPETES Act and puts us on a path to double basic energy research. It also authorizes the Department of Energy to move forward with plans to build the worlds fastest supercomputers.

The bill includes provisions from two Alexander-sponsored bills  the Energy Title of America COMPETES Reauthorization Act and the ExaSCALE Computing Leadership Act. The legislation also includes language from the Vehicle Innovation Act, which Senator Alexander cosponsored.

Senator Alexander said language from the Energy Title of America COMPETES Reauthorization Act will help grow jobs and boost the Department of Energys ability to find new ways to make clean, cheap, reliable energy.

Its hard to think of an important technological advance since World War II that has not involved at least some government-sponsored research. Putting the U.S. on a path to double funding for basic energy research is one of the best ways to keep good-paying jobs from going overseas, Senator Alexander said.

The ExaSCALE Computing Leadership Act authorizes funding for public-private research partnerships between industry, universities and the Department of Energys national laboratories to research and design at least two different types of exascale supercomputers capable of a billion billion calculations per second, which is a thousand-fold increase over the supercomputers in use today. Senator Alexander called exascale supercomputing essential to U.S. national security, and competitiveness in science and technology, saying the new research effort would also help create high-wage jobs.

The bipartisan energy bill also reauthorizes the Vehicle Technologies Office at the Department of Energy, which supports the development of cutting-edge technologies in the American auto industry. Automotive innovation is important to Tennessees auto industry and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Such innovation helped create new jobs related to carbon fiber and composites manufacturing in Tennessee, said Senator Alexander.

The Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2016, which the Senate began debating today, includes the following provisions supported by Senator Alexander:

Energy Title of America COMPETES Reauthorization Act

Authorizes a 4 percent increase in funding each year for basic energy research and reauthorizes the Department of Energys Office of Science and ARPA-E, an agency that supports research in energy technology, for five years. The legislation would put the Department of Energy on a path toward doubling the roughly $5 billion it spends on basic energy research.

Eliminates six Department of Energy programs that were never fully implemented and reforms five other department programs.

Attracts and keeps the countrys most talented scientists in the lab through competitive grant programs.

ExaSCALE Computing Leadership Act of 2015

Authorizes funding for research partnerships between industry, universities and national laboratories to design at least two different types of exascale supercomputers capable of a billion billion calculations per second, which is a thousand-fold increase over the supercomputers in use today.

The Vehicle Innovation Act

Reauthorizes the Vehicle Technologies Office at the Department of Energy, which supports research and development to make vehicles more efficient.

The Utility Energy Service Contracts Improvement Act

Allows federal agencies to enter into long-term contracts with utilities to improve energy efficiency, which some day could include small modular reactors.

The Quadrennial Energy Review Act

Requires the president to conduct a review of domestic energy capabilities and needs and establish a government-wide federal energy policy plan to submit to Congress.

The Smart Manufacturing Leadership Act

Leverages existing Department of Energy programs and the smart manufacturing infrastructure at national laboratories, including high-performance computing, to assist small and medium manufacturers.
Follow us on indo pak foreign secretary meet likely in early february

New Delhi: Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan, who were scheduled to meet in Islamabad on January 15-16 to decide the timetable and modalities of the resumed peace dialogue but postponed it following Pathankot airbase attack, are likely to hold the meet in first week or in the second week of February.

According to a report by Economic Times, the officials from both the two sides have been in touch and trying to reschedule the meeting keeping in mind other preoccupations of both Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and his Pakistani counterpart Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry.

Two sides are toying with the dates of February 6-7 and February 7-8 to schedule the meeting. But a final decision is yet to be taken, the report adds.

Pakistan's English daily Dawn also quoted a senior official as saying that there was an understanding between the two sides for a meeting in February, but its dates had not been finalised.

The FS-level meeting will decide on the schedule of meetings under the Dialogue over the next six months prior to the SAARC Summit.

The two NSAs mandated to discuss terror are in regular touch with the other to discuss progress in Pathankot case.

India lost seven security personnel in the Pathankot strike and blamed the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) for it.

India put the ball squarely in Pakistan's court, linking the FS-level talks to Islamabad's "prompt and decisive" action in the Pathankot terror attack for which it has provided "actionable intelligence".

The process of resumption of talks was set in motion with an ice-breaking meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Paris climaxing with the former's surprise trip to Lahore

Pakistan and India had agreed last month to resume the bilateral dialogue after a hiatus of two years because of tensions along the Line of Control and Working Boundary.

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Follow us on jnu dalit scholar threatens suicide demands extension of research grant

New Delhi: Even as there is no end to the outrage triggered by the alleged suicide of a research scholar in Hyderabad University, a Dalit student of Jawaharlal Nehru University has threatened to commit suicide if his research grant is not extended next year.

Alleging that he has been "discriminated and harassed" by his department which is trying to "block his PhD", the Dalit researcher has demanded resumption of his fellowship in a week's time or he would commit suicide.

The PhD scholar, Madan Meher, has written to JNU vice chancellor alleging caste discrimination.

Citing an RTI reply, Meher claimed that no Dalit student had completed PhD from the centre since 2006.

JNU has reportedly called a meeting with students on February 8 to resolve the issue.

While H Sharma, the varsity's Controller of Examinations, said that the extension of his senior research fellowship was withheld as he had not been able to get clearance from the finance officer, outgoing Vice Chancellor S K Sopory said the matter will be resolved soon and asked the university's chief security officer to keep an eye on the student.

The researcher with International Organisation (ORG) division, CIPOD, had received an advance payment of Rs 66,000 for his field trip to Brussels, Belgium. "The student was supposed to return this advance amount to allow his fellowship to continue. But the money has not been returned. Also, the researcher deregistered himself as a JNU student between December 2013 and July 2015," Sharma said.

The Vice Chancellor, who demits office tomorrow said, the matter will be resolved at the earliest and till then the student is being counselled. The threat letter by the student comes at a time when there is widespread outrage over death of 26-year-old Vemula Rohit, a Dalit PhD scholar, who was found hanging in a hostel room in Hyderabad Central University on January 17.

The death of 26-year-old Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar, who was found hanging in a hostel room in Hyderabad Central University on January 17, has snowballed into a major controversy with fingers being pointed at varsity authorities for caste based discrimination.

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Follow us on shani shingnapur temple row all you need to know

Mumbai: On Tuesday, a group of 500 women from Bhumata Ranragini Brigade led by president Trupti Desai, set out in buses to defy five-century-old tradition that debars women from worshipping the stone idol of Lord Shani, on account of harmful vibrations believed to be emanating from the deity.

The agitating activists, on the other hand, want entry for women into the inner sanctum of the shrine, maintaining that women have a right to pray.

The unique open temple located at Maharashtra's Shingnapur village has no walls or roof. A self-emerged five-foot high black stone stands on a platform and is worshipped as Lord Shani.

The temple platform stands in the centre of the small village, also known as Sonai and attracts millions of tourists and devotees from across the country and abroad.

Shani Shingnapur is also globally renowned as the only village where the houses do not have doors and locks, and even a local branch of a nationalised bank does not have locks as there is no fear of thieves.

The temple trust however created a sort of history after it recently appointed a woman as the trust president.

This is the first time in the temple's over five centuries old history that this welcome development has taken place today. Another woman, Vaishali Lande, has also been appointed to the board of 11 trustees managing the temple, Prafull N. Surpuriya, a trustee, told IANS.

The activists, who tried to head to the popular temple defying prohibitory orders to worship the deity, were stopped by the police at Supa, about 70 km from the Shani temple, .They were detained for a few hours and released in the evening and sent back to Pune in busloads.

Following a half-hour stalemate in which the police refused to yield, the agitators led by Ms. Desai resorted to a sit-down strike, singing bhajans and kirtans, proclaiming their resolution to remain there until the police permitted them to pass.

Meanwhile, thousands of villagers from Shani Shingnapur, opposing the RBB's campaign, formed a counter-campaign pandal' announcing their intent to uphold the temple tradition.

The locals were joined by activists of right-wing groups represented by the women's wing of the ruling Shiv Sena and various other outfits belonging to the fringe-right, represented by the Sanatan Sanstha, the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS) and its women's wing Ranragini Shakha.

Earlier in the day, nearly 500 women and men left Pune in buses and cars to storm the temple if the police thwarted their plans to offer prayers to the deity at the sanctum, as Desai had said Monday.

Earlier, after the Pune District Collector denied permission for a helicopter flight, the RBB president jettisoned her plan of rappelling down to enter the inner sanctum.

Fearing damage to temple property, the district administration had banned any form of assembly.

As the showdown erupted, Maharashtra CM Deven-dra Fadnavis favoured a dialogue between temple authorities and activists to find a way out over the ban on entry of

Indian culture and Hindu religion gives women the right to pray. A change in yesterday's traditions is our culture. Discrimina-tion in praying is not in our culture. The temple authorities should resolve the issue through a dialogue, tweeted Mr Fadnavis, who also holds the home portfolio.

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Follow us on clean ganga talks on long term policy to be held

New Delhi: A number of Union Ministries tasked with various responsibilities under Clean Ganga mission will come together on Saturday to hold parleys with heads of villages along the river to craft a long-term policy to rid it of pollutants.

Union Ministers Uma Bharti (Water Resources), Smriti Irani (HRD), Nitin Gadkari (Transport and Shipping), Birender Singh (Rural Development), Mahesh Sharma (Tourism), Sarbananda Sonowal (Sports) and Shripad Naik (Ayush) are expected to address the day-long conference to be attended by nearly 2,500 people, including eminent policy-makers and NGOs.

Chief Ministers of Uttarakhand and Jharkhand will also take part in the consultations themed 'Swachh Ganga - Gramin Sahbhagita'.

"The consultation and sensitisation programme is a national dialogue on Ganga to facilitate interaction with various stakeholders and draw ideas that will give a better insight for framing a strategic long-term policy for restoration of the Ganges," Water Resources Ministry said in a statement.

During the meet, deliberations will take place on topics of medicinal plants and livelihood, treatment of rural solid waste and cleanliness in villages.

The Ministry will also screen a video of Namami Gange programme, while Ayurveda exponent Acharya Balkrishna will address the gathering on medicinal plants and livelihood in the upper ridges of Ganga.

The NMCG will also launch 'Ganga Vichar Manch', a portal created for initiating a dialogue between various stakeholders.

In addition to this, presentations will be made on different water management models including Ganga Gram, Unnat Bharat Synergy and Seechewal.

"The programme will also feature the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with governments of Jharkhand and Uttrakhand," the Ministry said.

When contacted, Secretary, Water Resources Ministry, Shashi Shekhar confirmed the participation of different ministries in the Mission, saying these were brought onboard nearly a month back.

"We are signing MoUs with other Ministries concerned. As part of the same, the HRD has been asked to figure out if an institution or varsity can be set up to offer courses on applied river sciences," Shekhar said.

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Follow us on active shooter reported at military hospital in san diego

Los Angeles: An active shooter was reportedly spotted at a Military hospital in San Diego today, according to a post on the medical centre's Facebook page.

"An active shooter has just been reported in building #26 at Naval Medical Centre San Diego. All occupants are advised to run, hide or fight," read the post.

Travis Easter, San Diego Police spokesman, reported a possibility of shooting in the premises of the medical centre.

A nearby Naval Base, advising people through an online post, said, "If in immediate danger, hide or seek shelter in secure space. Barricade the door and dial 911. Silence phones and other devices."

San Diego, located on the southernmost California coast, has a huge military infrastructure and is a major port for the US Navy.

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Follow us on dozens of juvenile offenders face death in iran amnesty

Dubai: Dozens of people who were arrested in Iran for crimes committed before they turned 18 remain at risk of the death penalty despite recent reforms, with many having already spent years on death row, according to a report by Amnesty International released on Tuesday.

The London-based group also found that Iran has executed at least 73 juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2015, including at least four last year.

Amnesty's 110-page report intensifies pressure on Iran at a time when Tehran is working to rebuild relations with the West following last year's landmark nuclear deal. The agreement came into force this month after Iran took steps to curb its nuclear program, leading to the lifting of crippling international sanctions.

On Monday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in Rome at the start of the first European trip by an Iranian president in almost two decades. The visit, which will also include stops at the Vatican and France, is expected to lead to a raft of business and trade deals.

Iran is one of the world's largest users of the death penalty, ranking second behind China in 2014, according to the most recent figures from Amnesty.

Most executions overall in Iran are carried out for drug smuggling. The country straddles a major narcotics trafficking route linking opium-producing fields in Afghanistan to Europe.

Amnesty's researchers were able to identify the names and locations of 49 juvenile offenders who face the death penalty, though the group notes that actual numbers could be higher.

A 2014 United Nations report put the number of juvenile offenders at risk of execution at more than 160.

The majority of the 73 juvenile offenders Amnesty identified who were put to death over the past decade were convicted of murder. Others were executed for crimes such as rape, drug-related crimes and national security offenses such as enmity against God".

The group noted that reforms introduced in 2013 give judges more discretion to take into account juvenile offenders' mental maturity and potentially impose less harsh punishments, and that the Supreme Court has since said juvenile offenders facing execution could have their cases retried.

Additional reforms introduced last year require that cases involving juveniles must be heard in special juvenile courts.

Still, Amnesty urged Iran to do more.

Despite some juvenile justice reforms, Iran continues to lag behind the rest of the world, maintaining laws that permit girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 to be sentenced to death, Amnesty said.

Iranian officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

In late October, the UN special investigator on the human rights situation in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, warned that executions in Iran have risen at an exponential rate since 2005 and could top 1,000 in 2015.

He said Iran puts more people to death per capita than any other country, adding that the majority of executions do not conform to international laws banning the death penalty for juveniles and non-violent offenders.

The head of Iran's Human Rights Council, Mohammad Javad Larijani, subsequently dismissed the UN report as a collection of baseless accusations".

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Follow us on bikram choudhury slapped with fine of 1 million in sexual abuse case

Washington: Prominent Indian-American Yoga guru Bikram Choudhury has been asked to pay USD 924,500 as compensatory damages to his former lawyer by a US court over allegations that he sexually harassed her and fired her for probing claims of abuse made by other women against him.

Attorney Minakshi Jafa-Bodden in her lawsuit claimed that she suffered gender discrimination, wrongful termination and sexual harassment while working for 69-year-old Choudhury, the founder of Bikram Yoga.

Los Angeles jury yesterday deliberated for about a day, before returning with a unanimous verdict in favour of Minakshi.

During testimony, Choudhury strongly denied allegations of sexual assault against him. Choudhury described accusations of mistreatment and abuse of employees as "lies" and "big lies."

"I don't do that," he testified. "I don't have to."

Choudhury said Minakshi was let go in 2013 because she did not have a license to practice law in the United States, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The jury found that Choudhury acted with malice, oppression and fraud - findings that allow Minakshi to seek punitive damages, the daily said.

Minakshi claimed that Choudhury persuaded her to leave her native India to work for him as his general counsel in 2011. During her employment, she alleged, Choudhury repeatedly sexually harassed her and subjected her to obscene comments.

The lawyer alleged that she was fired in 2013 after she attempted to investigate allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Choudhury, including allegations of rape by one of his female students.

Mark Quigley, who along with attorney Carla Minnard represented Minakshi, after the jury's decision said, "She faced retaliation and intimidation when she refused to stay silent about witnessing illegal behaviour."

"This verdict sends an important message, that speaking out when you see signs of sexual abuse is the right thing to do," Quigley said.

Choudhury's lawyer, Robert Tafoya, declined to comment after the verdict.

Minakshi's lawsuit is one of multiple cases of alleged sexual assault filed against Choudhury, who built a yoga empire in the US after moving to California in 1971.

Choudhury gained millions of followers through his style of Yoga, which consists of a series of 26 poses, done over 90 minutes in a room heated to 104 degrees.

Six other women in recent years have sued Choudhury, alleging that he sexually assaulted or harassed them.

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Follow us on isis may target europe again with mumbai style attacks report

London: The ISIS is planning 'Mumbai-style' attacks in Europe after the Paris massacre in November 2015, a report by the Europol police force has warned.



"The so-called Islamic State had developed a new combat style capability to carry out a campaign of large-scale terrorist attacks on a global stage - with a particular focus in Europe", Chief of the European Union (EU) police agency, Rob Wainwright told media.



He was unveiling the findings of a new Europol report on changes in how the terrorist group operates, coinciding with the launch of the agency's new counter-terrorism summit at The Hague on the Netherlands.



The unit will seek to improve information exchange and identify the links between terrorism and other areas of crime.



The Europol report said: "IS is preparing more terrorist attacks, including more 'Mumbai-style' attacks, to be executed in member states of the EU, and in France in particular".



"The attacks will be primarily directed at soft targets, because of the impact it generates. Both the November Paris attacks and the October 2015 bombing of a Russian airliner suggest a shift in IS strategy towards going global," it said.



ISIS had claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks on November 13 which killed 130 people.



According to the report, ISIS has training camps in the EU and the Balkans, as well as in Syria.



It, however, said there was no "concrete evidence" that terrorists were using the influx of refugees into Europe in order to sneak themselves in and carry out attacks though it warned refugees might be "vulnerable to radicalisation".



The new counter-terrorism centre's priority would be to improve information exchange between EU members and will also focus on links to other criminal sectors.



Europol has about 800 staff at its headquarters in The Hague. They work with law enforcement agencies in the 28 member states and in other non-EU partner nations to combat serious crime.

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Follow us on pakistan court denies access to voice samples of 26/11 suspects

Islamabad: A Pakistani court today dismissed a petition seeking voice samples of 26/11 mastermind Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects in the case, marking it as the latest in a series of reversals in Pakistan's apparent intent to bring the perpetrators of the ghastly attack to justice.

The prosecution had filed an application in the Islamabad High Court seeking voice samples of the suspects to compare it with the communication intercepted by Indian intelligence and then present it before the anti-terrorism court (ATC) as evidence against the seven suspects in the Mumbai attack case.

However, the petition was dismissed by the Islamabad High Court on Monday. In 2011 and 2015 as well, requests regarding obtaining voice samples of Lakhvi had been turned down by the trial court on grounds that no such law exists that allows obtaining of voice sample of an accused.

The prosecution's petition said the Indian intelligence agencies had intercepted communication between the suspects and the terrorists in connection with the Mumbai attack in 2008.

In the recorded intercepts, the suspects are heard instructing the terrorists.

The prosecution lawyers had argued that the samples were essential for concluding the investigation of this high profile case.

The trial court had also rejected another petition of the prosecution requesting the court to declare Ajmal Kasab and Faheem Ansari absconders in order to meet legal formalities.

The prosecution had told the court that unless it declared the two men absconders, the trial against them would remain inconclusive as both have been cited as accused in

the Mumbai attack case by Indian authorities and that they were also wanted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that was probing the 26/11 case.

During External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's visit here last month, Pakistan had assured India of steps being taken to expedite the early conclusion of the Mumbai attack trial, something that India has been pressing for long.

Pakistani authorities arrested seven Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) members involved in the planning of the attacks including the terrorist group's operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the mastermind of the Mumbai attack.

Six accusedAbdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum -- have been in Adiala Jail for more than six years in connection with planning and executing the Mumbai attack in November, 2008, that left 166 people killed.

Lakhvi, 56, secured bail in December, 2014, and was subsequently released from Adiala Jail on April 10, 2015, after the Lahore High Court set aside the government's order to detain him under a public security act.

A trial is underway against them at the ATC since 2009.

(With PTI inputs)

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Follow us on will not visit india until blockade is lifted nepal pm

Kathmandu: Raising a question-mark over his visit to India next month, Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli on Tuesday said it will not be appropriate for him to visit New Delhi as long as a blockade of the Nepal-India border continues.

A now more than five-month-old snti-Constitution protest by Madhesis in the southern Nepali Terai has led to a blockading of a major portion of the 1,868-m open border that the landlocked Himalayan nation has with its southern neighbour.

Most of the 41 transit and customs points along the southern portion of this open border have been besieged by the Madhesi protestors who are demanding, among others, a redrawing of the boundaries of the provinces in Nepal as proposed in the new Constitution -- promulgated on September 20 last year; and representation in Parliament on the basis of population.

Significantly, the Nepal Terai has almost 51 percent of the country's population and yet gets only one-third of seats in Parliament.

The Madhesis also seek proportional representation in government jobs and restoration of rights granted to them in the interim constitution of 2007 which the new charter has snatched away.

An India visit by Oli, the first foreign tour by him after assuming the office, is likely to take place in late February with preparations apace, according to reports in the Nepali media.

But the leftist premier, who has assumed an ultra-nationalist posture and shown unwillingness to meet the grievances of the Madhesi protestors, has often declared his resolve not to visit New Delhi till the agitation in the Terai was over.

In an interaction with senior editors at his residence here on Tuesday, Oli expressed the hope that the blockade at key Nepal-India entry points will be lifted within a couple of days.

He also reiterated that he will not visit India until the situation in the Nepali Terai normalises.

"I believe in friendship between friends, political honesty among friends and upon my confidence... I am hopeful that the embargo at border points will be lifted," Oli declared.

Nepal is falling severely short of fuel, essential supplies, medicines and other stuff due to the prolonged blockading of the border customs points by Madhesi protestors.

India has been urging Kathmandu to reach out to the discontented sections in the Nepal Terai as soon as possible.

Unnerved by the prolonged Madhesi agitation, the ruling major-Left coalition as also the main opposition Nepali Congress last week approved two amendments to the four-month-old Constitution partly meeting the demands of the agitating Madhesis.

Also last week, the government launched an ambitious NRs.5 billion Border Area Development Programme (BADP) in the south-eastern Nepali Mahottari district.

The five-year development programme shall initially target the development of proposed province number 2 -- the heartland of the ongoing Madhesi agitation -- and will seek to create physical and social infrastructures in the region that borders southern neighbour India.

The region chosen for the programme has villages and towns bordering India. It has been lagging behind in life expectancy, literacy and per capita income values as compared to other regions of the country.

Oli told the senior editors that his government had fulfilled demands of the agitating parties. "There is no question why the embargo will not be lifted," he said.

However, the Madhesi Morcha spearheading the agitation on Monday rejected the amendments to the statute and announced a fresh agitation programme besides calling for a broader alliance among all forces in the Terai-Madhes region.

The agitating four-party alliance, at a meeting here on Monday, resolved that the stir would continue until their demands were met by the ruling elite in Kathmandu.

The Madhesi Morcha later asserted that their struggle would continue till all their demands were met in a package. The meet also demanded the setting up of a high-level judicial panel to probe the numerous instances of killings by the state in the Terai.

In its fresh programme, the Morcha has announced candlelight vigil at district headquarters on Wednesday as a tribute to those killed during the protests; regional assemblies on Saturday to inform people about the latest political developments; and interactions with professionals, intellectuals, labourers and traders on Monday next about the Morcha's agenda.

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A "We Believe" campaign to help build a new Children's Hospital at the Erlanger campus on Third Street has already raised over $8 million, it was announced at a press conference Wednesday.

Tom Edd Wilson and Grady Williams, who are heading up the drive, said, "We are 34 percent of the way toward the $23.5 million goal."

The drive is being helped by honorary finance leaders Olan and Butch Mills, who have pledged $1 million. They were at the event.

Mr. Wilson said the hospital's Volunteer Auxiliary is also pledging $1 million.

Kevin Spiegel, Erlanger president and CEO, said 100 percent of the hospitals management and board are giving to the campaign, along with many Erlanger employees.

Erlanger is using bonds to finance the $35 million cost of the first phase of the project - a children's outpatient facility across from the Chattanooga Hamilton County Health Department. A parking lot is now at that site. It will serve 100,000 children per year. Work is set to start before the end of the year.



To be built nearby will be an inpatient facility and a women's unit.

There will be a bridge over Third Street connecting the new Children's Hospital to the adult campus.

Bruce Komiske, who earlier designed one of the large children's hospitals in the world in Chicago, called it "one of the most important projects this city is doing."

He said, "What is more important than taking care of our children?"

Mr. Komiske said the inpatient center will have several features meant to delight children, including an entryway with a train theme. He said it will include a locomotive engine from the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum that dates to 1891 - the year that railroad official Baron d'Erlanger put down money to help start the original Erlanger.



Mr. Spiegel said Children's already has "a world-class" staff of over 80 trained pediatric specialists. But he said they are working in a facility that is outmoded and 40 years old.

Kim White of the RiverCity Company said Third Street is part of "a major gateway to our city." She said other improvements will be coming in line with the new Children's Hospital.


Follow us on kejriwal s chronic cough delhi cm heads to bengaluru for naturopathy treatment

New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today left for Bengaluru to undergo a naturopathy treatment for his chronic cough problem.

Kejriwal will undergo treatment at Jindal Nature Care, where he had undergone treatment even in March last year for his high sugar level and chronic cough.

"Kejriwal left for Bengaluru at 11.30 am. He will be there for ten days and undergo naturopathy treatment," an official said.

Kejriwal was scheduled to leave for Bengaluru on December 22, but he postponed his visit to oversee the implementation of odd-even formula which came into force on 1 January.

The Aam Aadmi Party chief is also expected to address a rally in the city on January 31.
Follow us on mim polarising people on communal lines venkaiah on owaisi

Hyderabad: Union minister Venkaiah Naidu today accused Asaduddin Owaisi of indulging into communal politics by appealing citizens to vote for MIM in forthcoming civic polls if they don't want ban on consumption of beef like in other states.

"(Generally) what anybody (political leaders) say in elections? If we come to power, we will get piped water, roads (for people)...The party (MIM) is saying new things. Vote for us if you want beef. Beef for you (people) and development for us," Naidu said addressing a campaign meeting at Saidabad here in support of the BJP-TDP combine for the February 2 Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections.

The senior BJP leader said he had no objection about people's culinary preferences.

"I don't to get into what to be eaten. Except humans (flesh), everybody has the right to eat anything. Let them eat, no objection. But, the point is...they are trying to divide people on religion basis," he said.

Naidu said the MIM (All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen) led by Owaisi should explain why the Old City area of Hyderabad remained backward.

Pointing out that MIM is not in the fray from Saidabad ward, he alleged the party had a tacit understanding with others.

"MIM is the major enemy to the development of Hyderabad," he said.

Referring to some parties wooing Seemandhra natives who are called "settlers", Naidu said all those living in Hyderabad have equal rights.

Addressing a public meeting here yesterday, Owaisi had said that a ban on consumption and sale of beef may be imposed in the city if MIM was not voted to power in the polls.

"I am not trying to scare you. But, the fact is if we don't come to power, there may be a scope for ban on beef (in Hyderabad) on pretext of faith," he had said.

Owaisi also said that such a ban will hit the poor and also beef traders hard as it happened in Maharashtra.
Follow us on pm modi cracks whip demands action against erring officials

New Delhi: Taking strong exception at the number of complaints and grievances from people related to the customs and excise sector , Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked for strict action against the concerned officials.

Modi, who chaired his ninth interaction through PRAGATI - Pro-Active Governance And Timely Implementation - urged all secretaries whose departments have extensive public dealing, to set up a system for top-level monitoring of grievances immediately.

Later in the day, Modi held a meeting of his council of ministers to review progress on schemes related to some ministries and laid thrust on faster delivery of government initiatives.

According to the sources, the meeting reviewed schemes and government initiatives related to ministries such as agriculture, chemical and fertilizer and water resources.

Such meetings were likely to be held every month, added the sources.

The meeting with to review implementation of schemes came a day after the government completed 20 months in office. The coming year was crucial for the government as it will be completing half of its term.

The opposition has accused the government of being high on promises and low on delivery.

It has also slammed the government over rise in prices of some food items such as pulses.

BJP leaders have dismissed the allegations of the opposition and said that the slew of initiatives government were already showing impact and will show greater results in the coming days.

In his interaction through PRAGATI, Modi reviewed the progress of vital infrastructure projects in road, railway, coal, power and renewable energy sectors spread over several states including Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan.

An official release concerning the PRAGATI said that among the projects reviewed were the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Jal Marg Vikas Project from Allahabad to Haldia.

Modi also reviewed the progress of the Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY).

He reviewed implementation of the National Old Age Pension Scheme and emphasized the need to ensure that beneficiaries receive the payment on time.

(IANS)
Follow us on solar scam kerala cm oommen chandy refuses to undergo lie detector test

New Delhi: Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy has refused to undergo a polygraph test while deposing for nearly 14 hours before a judicial commission in connection with solar scam.

During the deposition, Chandy told the judicial commission probing the scam that there was no need for him to undergo polygraph test as he has done 'nothing wrong'.

"What is the need for that? (lie detector test). I have not done anything wrong. None has doubts that I have done anything wrong," he said.

The Chief Minister was asked to undergo a polygraph test by one by the lawyer of Biju Radhakrishnan, the main accused in the case.

He told the commission that the charges against him and his office were 'politically motivated'. This is the first time a Chief Minister in Kerala is appearing before a judicial commission.

The commission was on its final stage of evidence taking on the scam that broke out in 2013 and caused a huge embarrassment to the Congress-led UDF government.

The Kochi-based commission held the sitting at government guest house here to enable Chandy depose as per his earlier request. Rejecting charges that he and his office had helped Team Solar Company that committed the fraud, Chandy had said that after the scam broke out, the government had taken steps to bring the 'fraudsters' -- Biju Radhakrishnan and Saritha S Nair -- before law.

The CM had said that his government had ensured punishment to the fraudsters who were committing the crime since 2005 and that the conviction and sentence of the accused clearly showed his government's commitment towards the scam, he added.

Chandy had also hit out at the opposition, saying they had so far not brought before the commission a single shred of proof to support their charges that he and his office had helped the Team Solar Company.

Opposition CPI(M)-led LDF had launched a massive stir demanding Chandy's resignation as the scam took a political turn after it emerged that two members of the CM's staff -- Tenny Joppen and Jikkumon -- had alleged links with Saritha.

Government had appointed retired High Court judge Sivarajan as one-man commission on October 23, 2013, to probe the scam.

The scam pertains to cheating several persons of worth crores of rupees by Saritha and Radhakrishnan by offering solar panel solutions. The duo allegedly canvassed business by using high-level names, including that of Chandy.

While Saritha was granted bail after being behind bars for about nine months, Radhakrishnan is still in jail in connection with the murder of his wife.
With all the hype about the Ukraine problem, why isn't anybody asking why the United States is so involved? Throw away the crap about how it's a bright, ...

1 day ago
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The Pan-Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, on Tuesday, rose from its monthly meeting with knocks for the 2016 budget proposal presented to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari, saying the budget is marred by excessive borrowing.

The group, which met at the residence of its national leader, Chief Reuben Fasoranti, in Akure, Ondo State capital, also picked holes with some of the policies introduced by the Federal Government in its attempt to revive the economy.

Reading the communique of the group after the meeting, the publicity secretary, Yinka Odumakin, stated that Afenifere noted the collapse in virtually all the sectors of the economy, adding that the decisions and recommendations of the 2014 national conference remained the only panacea for the nations woes.

The Afenifere spokesman further observed that all the measures employed by the Federal Government to solve the nations problem by diversifying the economy would not yield positive results without first embarking on the complete restructuring of the country.

All these measures, to us, showed that the Federal Government wants to run away from ways of solving the problems, which is to diversify the economy. Diversifying the economy is not possible without restructuring the country and we are saying and insisting on that, to get out of this economy crisis.

We have noticed the increase in kerosene price, which can only increase the hardship of poor people of Nigeria. We noticed the imposition of N50 stamp duty on every bank deposit, which we considered an anomaly. A Central Bank should be encouraging bank culture in the country, but it is now trying to discourage banking culture, because many people will not want to take their money to bank again.

Having gone through the whole budget as presented, we have seen many headies in it which suggest that either we are not aware of the situation or as a country, we are doing more of what brought us to where we are. There are scandalous expenditure in the budget which cannot be justified, he said.

The group advised the Federal Government to revisit the recommendations of the 2014 national conference, saying this would take the country out of the present economic quagmire it has found itself.

The Federal Government should immediately consider the restructuring of this country along the recommendation of 2014 national conference.

The last government organised the conference and said they are going to implement the report, since government is a continuum, the present government should immediately implement it, so that we can create the new corridor of prosperity that will take Nigeria out of the current crisis we are facing, the group noted.

Still addressing the 2016 budget, the group said we were embarrassed and scandalised by the processes that characterised the presentation of 2016 budget, which is unprecedented in the history of our country. That a budget will be presented, declared missing without knowing how another one resurface is worrisome.

If there were mistakes in the ealier budget presented, government should have come out clean and said sorry, we make mistakes and we want to correct the errors. We asked the Federal Government that this should not happen again in our country, it is embarrassing and scandalous.

Afenifere, however, threw its weight behind the anti-corruption crusade of President Buhari, but said the crusade should be holistic and not sectionalised.

It also congratulated the new Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Ogunwusi and commended him over his steps to foster unity among Yoruba rulers, while members commiserated with the people of Ibadan on the passing of the Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Samuel Odulana.
The controversial governorship election held on 21 November 2015 in Kogi state has attracted a lot of criticisms in recent times. Its initial outcome confounded even the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Going forward, the circumstance surrounding the emergence of Yahaya Bello as Governor has continued to be a hot topic for lawyers and political analysts alike. In lieu of this, INFORMATION NIGERIA brings you 3 times Kogi State made history with the governorship election

 The time the initial candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Mr. Abubakar Audu died during the collation of election result by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INECs, leading to the election declared inconclusive.

 The time APC picked Bello as replacement for its late candidate, Mr. Audu. This decision made Bello the first governorship candidate to contest election without campaigning.

 The time Yahaya Bello, the fourth democratically elected governor of the state was sworn in without a deputy, making it the first time in Nigerias political history that an elected governor would be inaugurated without a deputy.

It would interest you to know that Yahaya Bello is only 40year-old!!!
The Yoruba ethnic group is one of the largest African ethnic groups south of the Sahara Desert. The Yoruba ethnic group dominates the western part of Nigeria. They speak a language of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. The Yoruba people have a very rich culture no doubt. In lieu of this, INFORMATION NIGERIA has put together 6 very interesting facts to know about them

 The term Yoruba (or Yariba) did not come into use until the nineteenth century, and was originally confined to subjects of the Oyo Empire. The word Yoruba was first recorded in reference to the Oyo Empire in a treatise written by the 16th-century Songhai scholar Ahmed Baba.

 According to the CIA World Factbook report of 2013, the Yoruba constitute over 40 million people in total; the majority of this population is from Nigeria and make up 21% of its population.

 The Yoruba are among the most urbanized people in Africa because centuries before the arrival of the British colonial administration, most Yoruba already lived in well structured urban centers organized around powerful city-states (Ilu) centered around the residence of the Oba.

 The Yoruba are a very expressive people who celebrate major events with colorful festivals and celebration. From Wedding ceremonies (Igbeyawo), Naming ceremonies (Isomoloruko), Funerals (Isinku), to Housewarming (Isile), the rich, pomp and ceremonial nature of their culture is undeniable.

 Yoruba drums typically belong to four major families. The Dundun/Gangan family (the most common) imitate the sound of Yoruba speech, the Sakara family are typically played in a ceremonial role in royal settings, weddings and Oriki (praise singing). The Gbedu family (literally, large drum) is used by secret fraternities such as the Ogboni and royal courts and the Ogido is a cousin of the Gbedu.

 The Yoruba have legendary types of clothes from processed cotton by traditional weavers. The most basic being the Aso-Oke, which is a hand loomed cloth of different patterns and colors sewn into various styles.

Rich culture right???
The Nigerian Senate has threatened to sanction any Senator who received financial inducement from government agencies during the budget defence.

Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, said this at the upper House of the National Assembly in Abuja at the end of the 2016 Budget debate, as the Senate passed the budget through its second reading.

 let me categorically make it clear as we have said and all agreed, there is no room for money for budgeting in the process. Any allegation of such will be thoroughly investigated by Ethic Committee and such allegations where proven will be met with severe sanctions.

We will ensure that where it involves an agency of government, we will play our own role, we will report it to the executive and ensure that they take appropriate action in this area. We must ensure that the integrity of this institution will continue to be sustained and not tarnished by anyone, Saraki remarked.

He asked the Committees on Budget and Appropriation to reflect the concerns which lawmakers raised during the budget debate, as the committees worked on the budget.

He told the lawmakers at the upper House that they would be under heavy scrutiny in order to bring forth a budget that the Senate would be proud of.

Distinguished colleague, Mr. President has played his own role, it is now the time for us to play our own role. Sub-Committee on Appropriation, I hope we will all take note of all the observations that have been made and highlighted.

Key areas, for the Committee, particularly, the Committee on Finance and Petroleum, is the estimate. Very key that we get this right because if we dont get this right, there is a likelihood of we archiving what will not work. So, I like these committees to particularly be very ready to critically scrutinize this revenue estimate that we can all put our name too and ensure that every item and every objective it has been designed to achieve have been fully captured.

On our parts, we will ensure that starting from tomorrow, the sub-committee will start to meet with MDGs and start to present defence on the budget. The submission of the reports that we need for those two weeks from February 12 to February 18, we will want those reports to be before the Appropriation Committee.

Distinguished colleagues, as we scrutinize the other budget from different ministries, as part of also leading by example, also the budget on our side, first time we have made commitment about it to be open about it and to know what of going to the Senate, to the management and to the different parts on the National Assembly, it is important also that we can see there will be much over sight functions for this budget to be effective. So, when we are doing the National Assembly budget, we must take this into note that we must empower our Committees to be able to do proper oversight and also it is clear that our own laws that exist now also need review in order to be in line with the new direction of prudence and efficiency. Again, that is going to be mean a lots of work to our committees. So, our committee on Services should address this issue in the budget.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday in Eldoret, Kenya, said the global community must act with more determination and vigour against radicalisation and extremist ideologies, which promote terrorism.

Speaking at a memorial service in honour of Kenyan soldiers killed by Al-Shabaab militants in Somalia recently, Buhari said peace-loving nations of the world must now come together and deal with the threat posed to global security by terrorism with greater zeal and cohesion.

The presidents remarks were contained in a statement issued by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina.

Terrorists should not have a place in our communities, villages, towns, cities and countries. We must all rise against the culture of intolerance, hatred and extremist ideologies, which drive terrorism.

We must also act with more firmness against radicalization and all those who promote values and principles that threaten our unity and cohesion as a people.

Nigeria is willing to work with Kenya, other African countries and the global community at large with a view to defeating these undesirable elements.

We must take the battle to the terrorists whoever they are and wherever they are. This requires commitment, sacrifice, resources, collaboration and above all a realization that no country is immune to the scourge, as terrorists do not respect national boundaries, race, colour, religion or creed, President Buhari was quoted as saying.

He also applauded the bravery of Nigerian and Kenyan soldiers, and others around the world who have remained faithful and committed to the cause of ensuring a secure and peaceful world in spite of daunting challenges.

President Buhari paid special tribute to the Kenyan soldiers who lost their lives in the terrorist attack on their base in Somalia.

I wish to use this occasion to pay tribute to all the fallen heroes of the El Adde attack and pray for the repose of their souls.
Seven officers including a Brigadier General, two Colonels and four Lieutenant Colonels yesterday appeared before the Court Martial Board of the Nigerian Army in Lagos.

The army officers that appeared at the court martial are  Gen. J.O. Komolafe, Colonels I.B. Maina and I.A. Aboi, Lieutenant Colonels N.N. Orok, C.A. Magaji, A.O. Agwu and O.O. Obolo.

The aforementioned officers were among the initial 22 whose trial commenced in 2014 at the 9th Brigade, for alleged desertion and cowardice in the fight against Boko Haram sect.

They are also being tried for alleged negligence and complicity in the invasion of the 21 Artillery Brigade, Bama, by Boko Haram insurgents on September 2, 2014.

Also standing trial before the Court Martial is a soldier, whose identity could not be ascertained.

The trial of the officers, which started last year and away from the prying eyes of the press, has witnessed series of postponement, which was blamed on transfers and promotions of members of the Army Board.

It was reliably gathered that of the 22 officers who appeared before the Army Court Martial Board, the cases involving 14 of them had been decided.

The 14 officers, whose cases have been disposed of include Colonels A. Laguda, V. Ebhaleme, V.O. Ita, I.M Kabir, M.H. Abubakar, A. A. Egbejule, A.J.S. Gulani, A.M. Adetuyi; Major M.M Idris; Captains M. Adamu, O. A. Adenaike, M. Gidado, M.M. Clark and S. Raymond as well as a Second Lieutenant, S.O. Olowa.

Confirming the development, the spokesman for the 81 Division in Lagos, Col. Kingsley Samuel said: The court martial resumed sitting on Monday, January 25, to continue hearing cases of seven officers and a soldier.

This is against erroneous news reports that 19 officers of the Nigerian Army are facing trial at the court martial.

The case was part-heard and now the court martial board has continued to hear the case. This is not a fresh court martial but a continuation of the former one.
After months of silence, British developer Bill Davies has come forward with a new plan for Chicago's Old Main Post Office  rental units. The behemoth Art Deco building has been the focus of numerous plans, partnerships and potential sales since it was purchased by Davies in 2009 for $24 million. However, this week, a new plan for 1,500 apartments and a new tower addition have emerged for the Chicago landmark. According to Ellen Phillips, managing broker of Loop Apartments, Davies' International Property Developers North America Inc. is currently looking to gauge interest in the plan for new apartments at the site. If there is enough demand and interest in the proposal, Davies could start building rental units in the old post office building as early as this coming March. IPDNA is also seeking large-scale retail anchors for the major redevelopment, simply titled Olde Chicago Post Office. One suggestion would be a retailer like IKEA, which the post office building could certainly accommodate.

The post office's redevelopment will be built in phases, with the first phase expected to be completed by the end of this year. IPDNA has teamed up with Chicago's Joe Antunovich of Antunovich Associates to lead design duties for the new plan. The majority of the new rental units that would be built for the post office will be quite small compared to the average apartment in Chicago. The new proposal calls for a mix of studios that start at just 280-square-feet to 350-square-foot one bedrooms, and 600-square-foot two bedrooms. Rent prices are expected to fetch in the ballpark of $4 per square foot, according to Phillips. This would translate to roughly $1,100 per month for a micro-studio unit.

Like previous proposals, this plan is not set in stone. According to Phillips, the team is still doing some behind the scenes exploration and number crunching to determine if the apartment proposal is one that will actually move forward. It's certainly a far cry from the radical $3.5 billion "urban mecca" that Davies had proposed for the post office back in 2011, but also much more lucid and one that may be more likely to attract the interest of investors.



Developer to Part Ways with Old Post Office, Puts It Up For Sale [Curbed Chicago]

There's Been Yet Another Setback for the Old Main Post Office [Curbed Chicago]

Developer Planning $3.5-Billion "Urban Mecca" at Post Office [Curbed Chicago]
Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose has tasked the Federal Government on doing more than just talking about whether or not the Halliburton and Siemens corruption scandals will be reopened.

Speaking through his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, the governor said: As it still appears, the statement made by the Federal Government on the Halliburton and Siemens corruption scandals may not be more than another decoy to shift the attention of Nigerians from the selective nature of President Buharis fight against corruption.

Like I have maintained, I do not buy into the EFCC story of Jafaru Isas refund of N100 million because it raises more questions than answers and I am also seeing this talks by the Federal Government about reopening of the Halliburton and Siemens scams as an aftermath of the failure of the Jafaru Isas stunt to achieve the desired result.

This is because unlike the arms deal that the EFCC is investigating, the Halliburton and Siemens scams have been investigated both in Nigeria and in the other countries. None of the top Nigerian culprits implicated in the $1.5 billion bribery scandal had been questioned and put on trial in Nigeria while others from other countries were already serving various jail terms.

Therefore, reopening the Halliburton and Siemens scams should be immediate and total. It should not be another decoy to deceive Nigerians by giving the impression that the anti-corruption war is not targeted at those opposed to President Buhari in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and his own party, the APC.

Also, the president should go a step further by directing the EFCC to investigate the many petitions written against those who financed his election and other chieftains of the APC, including Ministers serving in the government presently.

Until those alleged to be involved in the Halliburton and Siemens scams and those who financed the Presidents election with public funds are charged to court, Nigerians will be right in believing that the fight against corruption is only an instrument of settling political scores, Fayose said.
The Federal Government says it would soon embark on the recovery of additional $750 million said to be part of the billions stolen by former Head of State Late Gen. Sanni Abacha. The FG also said that about 6.9 million said to have been misappropriated by a former governor of Delta State, James Ibori would be recovered as well.

The Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami disclosed this during an interactive session with the House of Representatives Committee on Justice in Abuja.

In respect of of the recovery of looted assets, the ministry will engage in an agree waive policy of using Mutual Legal Assistance Agreements or other bilateral and multilateral instruments to seek cooperation with other jurisdictions to ensure the repatriation of illicitly- acquired assets in foreign jurisdictions.

The collaboration will equally involve the engagement of foreign-based Counsel to attend to matters on behalf of the Federal Government. Low- hanging fruits being targeted in this initiative include $750 million Abaca loot as well as the sum of GBP 6.9 million of the Ibori loot.

On the long run, the ministry will be in a position to coordinate the recovery of billions of Dollars in foreign jurisdictions, based on current estimations, Malami said.

Speaking further, he noted that The anti-corruption campaign will involve the deployment of resources by the ministry to assess and prosecute the requisite cases in collaboration with the anti-corruption agencies, pursuit to the overriding powers of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice in Sections 150 and 174 of the 1999 Constitution as amended.
A former Inspector General of Police, Chief Sunday Adewusi, is dead. He died on Tuesday around 8.30 p.m. at the National Hospital, Abuja.

He was aged 79.

Adewusi, the Asiwaju of Ogbomoso, was Nigerias Inspector General of Police between 1981 and 1983.

Confirming his death, a former governor of Oyo State, Chief Adebayo Alao-Akala, described the late Adewusi as a gallant officer, who served Nigeria with commitment and dedication.

The Asiwaju of Ogbmosho, Chief Sunday Adewusi, is a father who, in no small way, contributed to my success in life.

He is a rare officer and boss who served Nigerian police force gallantly. His contribution to the image of police is still a reference point up till today. He will be sorely missed by the police, Ogbomosoland, Oyo State and Nigeria in general, he said.
The Israeli government says it plans to restart its law of return programme in Ethiopia. Under the Aliyah rule, anyone who can prove their Jewish identity can move to Israel. Israel stopped the programme for Ethiopians in 2013, saying there was no one left who met the criteria  a move that split up thousands of families.

For example, the family of Werkenshe Akalu, an Ethiopian Jew, left for Israel in 2013 but she was unable to follow. I feel lonely here because all my family are in Israel, Akalu told Al Jazeera. Feleke Gobas parents and grandparents were allowed to settle in Israel in 2003. He said he does not know why his application was not accepted. His mother passed away in Israel and he was unable to afford to travel and see her before she died.

Now I hope I can go to Israel before my father dies, even just for one day, said Goba. However, in light of the governments recent change of heart, critics say Israel arbitrarily makes changes to increase the Jewish population, and treats Ethiopian Jews as second-class citizens. Last year, Ethiopian Jews clashed with police in Tel Aviv during protests against institutionalised racism.

In Hebrew, Aliyah means the journey to Israel. The Jewish Agency, which helps to organise the immigration of Jews to Israel, denies accusations that the government applies the law of return arbitrarily. Ethiopian immigration to Israel is the only example of a Western democracy investing money to bring people from Africa to serve as full-fledged citizens of that country, and not for other purposes, Avi Mayer, Jewish Agency spokesman, told Al Jazeera.
The member representing Irepodun/Ekiti/Isin/Oke-Ero federal constituency of Kwara State in the House of Representatives, Princess Funke Adedoyin, has labeled the Jebba-Mokwa road a national disaster.

The lawmaker said the road was in need of urgent reconstruction.

Speaking in Ilorin, Kwara State capital on Wednesday when she led a delegation of the House of Reps Committee on the Army, of which she is Deputy Chairman, on a courtesy call on the Kwara State Governor, Abdulfatah Ahmed, at the Government House, Ms. Adedoyin noted that the deplorable state of the road had caused loss of lives and properties as it is a major link road between the Northern and Southern parts of the country.

She promised to liaise with the House of Reps Committee on Works on how to ensure that the road receives urgent Federal Government attention to halt carnage on it.

The lawmaker also commended the state government for what she called the excellent relationship between it and the Army and other security forces.

Adedoyin said the 22 Armoured Brigade Cantonment at Sobi in Ilorin occupies a strategic position in its operations, which covers Kwara State and parts of the neighbouring state of Niger.

Responding, Governor Ahmed said he had made several presentations at the National Economic Council and other fora on the need for reconstruction of the Jebba-Mokwa Road.

Mr. Ahmed promised greater partnership with the Nigerian Army and other security agencies on security in the state.

He said the nation must tackle its security challenges in parts of the country.

The governor commended the members of the House of Representatives on the Army for their active disposition to the promotion of the welfare of the Nigerian Army.
Yahaya Bello was today sworn in as Governor of Kogi State despite controversies surrounding the governorship seat.

Bello was sworn in at exactly 12:02pm at the Confluence stadium, Lokoja by the Chief Judge of Kogi State, Justice Nasir Ajanah, with the administration of oath.

James Faleke who is regarded as his deputy was absent.

Faleke was the Deputy Governorship Candidate to Abubakar Audu at the November 21, 2015 Governorship election in Kogi State. He had earlier raised the alarm over attempts to announce his name as Deputy Governor during the swearing in ceremony of Yahaya Bello as Governor of Kogi State.

In a statement signed by the Director, Media and Publicity, Audu/Faleke Campaign Organisation, Honourable Duro Meseko on Wednesday, Faleke said the plan was hatched for Bello to escape the obvious lacuna of not running the Supplementary election with a Deputy, which is unconstitutional.

I want to bring to the attention of Nigerians, plans to call me out to take oath of allegiance as Deputy Governor to Yahaya Bello today in Lokoja since it is the Deputy that takes oath first.

The script is to announce my name for oath taking at least three times after which they would declare that the Deputy Governor-elect has absconded, but would be sworn in at a later date. They would now go ahead to swear in Bello as the Governor.

Let me make it very clear to the good people of Kogi State and Nigerians in general that I am not the Deputy to Yahaya Bello and will therefore, not be present today (Wednesday) at his inauguration.

I had made my position abundantly clear to my party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that I will not serve as Deputy to Bello, neither would I participate in the December 5, 2015 Supplementary election.

A strongly worded letter was written to the leadership of APC and INEC to back up my position. It is therefore the height of political mischief for anyone to attempt to call my name for oath taking at an inauguration ceremony they know I would not be present, Faleke said.

Bello makes history as
The Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, yesterday, pleaded with the Federal Government to release 23 members of the group in detention even as it raised alarm over the antics of its erstwhile leader, Ralph Uwazuruike to take over its headquarters.

The group alleged that Uwazuruike, who it expelled from its fold, was planning to launch an attack to reclaim MASSOB headquarters in Okwe, Onu-Imo Local Government Area of Imo State, in a desperate bid to reassert himself as leader of the pro-Biafra group.

MASSOB warned that it will resist such attack as it appealed to security agencies to come to their aid given its peaceful stance on the agitation for Biafra.

Factional leader of MASSOB, Uchenna Madu, who made the plea on Tuesday while addressing journalists, warned that the group will not fold its arms and watch but rather stamp its foot on the ground to ensure that Uwazuruike and his cohorts do not occupy the pro-Biafra base.

Uwazuruike is under pressure because he never fought for the Igbo course. That is why we are appealing to security agencies to come to our aid as our demonstration for Biafra is peaceful. We will resist Uwazuruike fire-for-fire if security agencies fail to arrest him.

We will not fold our arms and watch him (Uwazuruike) take over our headquarters. He has mortgaged our future to politicians, the MASSOB leader alleged.

Madu also appealed to the Federal Government to release unconditionally, its 23 members that are currently languishing in prisons scattered all over the south-east geopolitical zone.
Punch

The National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, says there is a deliberate plot by some individuals to rub his name in the mud through fictitious reports in various blogs and the social media.

Vanguard

A Senior Special Assistant on Media Affairs to Edo State Governor, Mr. John Mayaki, has accused the state chapter of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, of plots to blackmail Governor Adams Oshiomhole in the build-up to the 2016 governorship election.

The Sun

Trial of the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party [PDP], Chief Olisa Metuh, continued yesterday with the Office of the National Security Adviser [ONSA] tendering documents relating to the payment of N400 million into the account of Destra Investment Limited, owned by Metuh.

Guardian

President Muhammadu Buhari will leave Abuja today on a three-day state visit to Kenya. The President will also head to Ethiopia at the conclusion of his visit to Kenya.

Daily Trust

The federal government will appoint a foreign lawyer in its effort to recover a total of N150 billion stashed abroad by late former Head of State, General Sani Abacha and former Delta state governor, James Ibori.

Leadership

The Nigerians in Diaspora Monitoring Group has accused those it described as sponsors of the Boko Haram insurgents as being behind the recent call for the probe of the Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai.

National Mirror

Mr. President received the US Secretary of Commerce Ms. Penny Pritzker at the State house today January 26th. Ms Pritzker said she was directed by President Obama to lead a 10-man American business men and women team to Nigeria to seek ways the two countries can partner.

Tribune
An anti-crime patrol team at Ikeja on January 18 caught a Nigerian soldier, Innocent Egbuna, and an unemployed 21-year-old man, Jide Ajayi allegedly having anal sex inside a jeep. They were subsequently arrested and charged to court. INFORMATION NIGERIA brings you step by step details of how it all happened and how the case is being treated

 Ajayi said the soldier accosted him and told him to have sex with him, promising to give substantial amount of money and that he will also take him to the club to have a nice time.

 Ajayi, an unemployed 21-year-old man agreed because he was frustrated and did not have money to fend for himself.

 The anti-crime patrol team caught them inside a parked Nissan Jeep with registration no. KSF 914 AC having anal sexual intercourse at Ajao Road, Ikeja.

 The two men were docked on a three-count charge bordering on conspiracy and act of gross indecency.

 The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the charge, a development that made their counsel urge the court to grant his clients bail in liberal terms.

 Chief Magistrate, Alexander Komolafe, in his ruling on the bail application, granted the two men bail in the sum of N100,000 each with two sureties each in like sum. March 7 was fixed for hearing.

We promise to bring you more details as the case progresses!!!
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act  George Orwell

Never has a nation been so ravaged by corruption. Nigerians suffer terrible maul from the deadly claws of the looters. The cruelty of man is much colder. Our people are suffocated and starved. The thieves only left the carcass in the treasury after their vicious hunting.

For years, fighting corruption is like beating a dead horse. Thanks to President Muhammadu Buhari who gave the war on corruption a beating heart. Now revenge is being served warm. Not minding weve lost everything to corruption, the sympathizers, friends, close allies, and extended families of corruption, believe Buharis approach in fighting corruption is totally insane. The times demand Buharis undemocratic surgical removal of corruption from our society.

The titillating revelations by the Jonathan National Security Adviser (NSA) Sambo Dasuki, have legally and morally hooked Mr. Jonathan to the holster of corruption. The memory of corruption from the Jonathan years conjures invocation of doom in our national psyche. With the United Arab Emirate (UAE) list of names of corrupt Nigerians that reads like alphabetical soup, the war on corruption builds to a dramatic climax. Indeed, the soporific effects of corruption on Nigerians has altered the very existence of majority of Nigerians. With an errant embrace, we become infected by corruption. With each new revelation, the past becomes the prologue.

The names from Dasukigate and the names on the UAE list are like corruption grenades ready to explode anytime. Once the Corruption Explosive Devise (CED) is detonated, we should expect collateral damages from the war on corruption. I have deliberately chosen the Big Four  the Big, Fat, Idiot Doyin Okupe, ex-danfo driver and star Ekitigate Ayodele Fayose, the ATM Sambo Dasuki, and toxic hypocrite Femi Fani-Kayode  out of the madding crowd of looters  because of their prominence and high visibility in the Jonathan administration and a PDP run state government.

A former South Korean President, Roh Moo-Hyn (2003-2008) committed suicide for allegations that his family accepted $6 million in bribes during his term. Though Mr. Roh never accepted wrongdoing, he left a suicide note for his family and the press which read: I am indebted to too many people Too many people have suffered because of me And I cannot imagine the suffering they will go through in the future. That was in South Korean. In comparison to President Rohs sense of remorse, most of the people accused of corruption in Nigeria are devils incarnate. No remorse. No shame. This is Nigeria!

In Nigeria, public officials accused of corruption hide in disputed details. With arrogance bluster spiced with a dubious game of figures and figments of imagination, they argued their innocence. They resort to familiar, tired template for defending their kleptomania: their political enemies are behind allegations that they have helped themselves to the public till. Youll never see these thieves use the opportunity of their enemies attacks to declare what they own or dont own and how and when they acquired their assets. Where clarity is desired they respond with evasion.

Lets meet the interpreters for corruption maladies. Pay attention to their tenuous defenses.

Im Doyin Okupe, the Big, Fat, Idiot. Im the erstwhile senior special assistant on public lies and propaganda to former President Goodluck Jonathan. Im a renowned salesman of delicacies of lies and poison. Half my brain is tied behind my back. My specialty is political propaganda, and lies. My stance is distortion. I once described Mr. Jonathan as the Mandela of Africa. In fact, I compared him to Jesus. During the Jonathan regime, I escaped arrest and prosecution for stealing N886 million (about $6 million) meant for road construction projects which never took place. The money was diverted for my personal use. I also served as the German Shepherd for Mr. Jonathan.

I was accused of receiving N18.2 billion Dasuki. I never got along with Colonel Dasuki retired. In fact, he twice told me to my face that he will get Alhaji Gulag and myself out of former President Jonathans administration. I had no knowledge of their bidding for contracts from the office of the National Security Adviser, I was not informed when they were awarded any contract neither was I in the know of what and when they were paid. I have not benefited financially from the proceeds of payment for the said contract neither can any money be traced to me, or any of my family members or associates.

Here comes the ex-danfo driver and star Ekitigate Ayodele Fayose the self appointed spokesman of PDP. Hi! My name is Ayodele Fayose the ex-danfo driver and star Ekitigate. The once disgraced and impeached governor of Ekiti State. I rigged myself back to governors house by means of Ekitigate election rigging plan conceived and birthed with the help and approval of President Jonathan. The Ekitigate video is available on YouTube and other social media outlets. The EFCC once indicted me for stealing N416 million public fund belonging to Ekiti State. I also converted N1.4 billion meant for poultry projects for 16 local government areas of the state. No poultry was built in the four designated centers in the state. Im responsible for the deaths of Tunde Omojola, who vied for the Ifaki Ward II council membership, Dr. Ayo Daramola, nine students of the College of Education, Ikere-Ekiti, Aseweje, Ben Ogundana, Dapo Osunniyi, Kamoru Folorunsho, Ojo Sunday, and several others. President Jonathan gave me the protective cover against all criminal prosecutions in all the cases.

Im not among those lily livered Nigerians that will deny their assets anywhere. They are in the federal government and they should have access to all information both in Nigeria and abroad. I therefore challenge them to check books on owners of all properties in Dubai. If they trace any house to me in Dubai, the federal government should make public all details including pictures, location, and title documents. The government should also confiscate such property and I am ready to waive my immunity to be prosecuted. No amount of their falsehood and propaganda can silence me the $2.1 billion arms deal is a scam because all that they are just doing is brandish figures to deceive Nigerians and demonized the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and those opposed to his dictatorship in the All Progressive Congress (APC). Till today, the amount they have charged people for stealing is not up to N10 billion and $2.1 billion they claimed was stolen is about N600 billion.

Hellooo! My name is Colonel Sambo Dasuki (rtd) Jonathans National Security Adviser (NSA). You all know me by now. Ill not bore you with a long winded introduction. Im the ATM for the Jonathan reelection campaign. The $2.1 billion earmarked for my office to fight Boko Haram terrorists were shared among several PDP big wigs to ensure the March 28 presidential election was successfully rigged in favor of Jonathan. I challenge the federal government for disobeying court order. The government has no moral and legal rights now to prosecute me having been in contempt of three high courts that admitted me on bail but which were not obeyed. I rest my case.

How are you all doing? Im Femi Fani-Kayode, the toxic hypocrite, the famous son of the notorious Fani Power. Im known for my Satanic Verses on issues. I also deal in oversize evangelical claptrap with stubborn myths to confuse the uninformed and gullible Nigerians. Ive never been an impressive moral personality. Im known for my cantankerous marginal ability. Im a political hermaphrodite. I never missed any opportunity to show case the plague-spots in my character. My personal and public life reveals much. This is false that I received N1.7 billion from the office of the former NSA, Colonel Sambo Dasuki. I have never received one kobo from President Jonathans government. I have never been in receipt of any public funds and neither was I the beneficiary of any payments in cash, transfer, cheque or otherwise from any government official during the tenure of President Jonathan. On behalf of my co-looters, I declare all accusations as persecution, selective, one-sided, unfair, biased, prejudiced, and a personal vendetta against our great leader Mr. Jonathan and our great party PDP. Were not guilty!

It is only in Nigeria that youll see politicians and public officials with all brazenness construct a wall of resistance, defense, and intimidation to justify public looting of the treasury. The phony invention and reinvention of lies of these interpreters of corruption maladies have become a nauseating comedy.

Rather than admit guilt, they resort to bland pontification. They recoil into a shell of infantile infatuation and with willful imaginary concoct lies. Its not surprising therefore that their defenses read like praise worship of a known armed robber at his funeral eulogy. The Buhari corruption war is the most overexposed in the history of corruption of our nation. The nightmares from the corruption frontline portend hard times ahead for the thieves. They are reeling in panic and their hearts are jumping out of their chest.

We got them  real good!

[email protected]
Ex City Official Found Guilty In Red Light Camera Bribery Scheme

By Kate Shepherd in News on Jan 26, 2016 10:30PM

A former City Hall employee was found guilty on 20 counts of fraud, extortion, bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery and filing false tax returns by a federal jury Tuesday.

John Bills, former Chicago Department of Transportation assistant commissioner, was on trial for taking $2 million in bribes and gifts from red light camera vendor Redflex Traffic Systems in exchange for contracts with the city, according to the Sun-Times.

The jury took about five hours to reach a verdict, according to the Tribune.

His defense attorney, Nishay Sanan, had argued that the bribes from Redflex actually went to "lobbyists with ties to Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley, who then funneled the cash 'upstairs,'" the Sun-Times says.

Sanan says Bills isn't giving up his fight after the guilty verdict.

"John is going to continue to fight for his innocence," he said outside the courtroom, according to the Tribune. "The fight is not over. The people who are guilty of this know who they are, (but) we don't expect them to come forward."

The lead prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon told reporters that justice has been served.

"I do believe that public corruption is a disease, it is a cancer, it is insidious," Fardon said.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall has set a sentencing hearing for May 5.
Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State on Tuesday advised his Ekiti State counterpart, Ayodele Fayose, to accept the reality that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is dead as a party.

Aregbesola said while he is not making overtures to Fayose to dump the PDP for All Progressives Congress, APC, he would only advise him to join hands with a political party that will give hope to the people of Nigeria.

He also charged the Ekiti State governor to direct his energy towards bringing human and physical development to western region and Nigeria as a whole.

The Osun governor stated this when Gov. Fayose paid him a courtesy visit at the Government House, Osogbo.

Earlier, during the course of their discussion, Governor Fayose said that he was in Osun not for any political reason or to defect to the APC, but for his belief in the Yoruba race and her development and unity.

Aregbesola described the visit of his Ekiti State counterpart as demonstration of maturity, saying it takes a very matured human being to know that at the end of every public office, he will be left with humanity.

He said, Osoko has said that he is not going to leave his party, but the reality today is that PDP has served its term in Nigeria. When a horse is dead, it is either you abandon it or you bury it.

I want my good friend and brother to know that PDP has exhausted its stay in Nigeria, it can no longer be revived, let us look at a political party that will give hope to our people. Opposition must be for a purpose, I stand by you on the unity of Yoruba land and that our leaders not put down in the country.

The war is over, we are in a season of mobilising our people to agriculture and produce such that we will economically have the strength to give leadership to the Nation and Africa. Our energy must be directed at bringing human and physical development, we have enough in this region to give leadership, Aregbesola stressed.

The Osun governor assured Mr. Fayose that he will stand by him in his effort to galvanise the people of South-west for accelerated development.

Aregbesola, who lamented the present economic situation of the country, noted that there is an invasion on the economy of Nigeria to the extent that the country is losing 75 per cent of her income due to oil glut.

The country is facing a very serious crises with the rate at which the crude oil price is falling. There is an invasion on the economy to the level that we are losing 75 percent of our income which is not good.

At this point, wise people must have an alternative to oil which part of it is your visit. We must use our culture and affinity to form a bond that can make our people live a normal life, it is a duty that we owe our people, States and Nigeria as a whole, Governor Aregbesola said.
Pope Francis met with the Iranian president Tuesday, joining in a cordial discussion which touched on the recent nuclear accord and Irans role in the region. President Hassan Rouhani met first with Francis, privately for 40 minutes, and later with other officials. The Vatican in a statement said the conversation delved into the nuclear accord recently taking effect and the important role that Iran was called to play to combat terrorism along with other countries in the region.

Iran was also urged to help fight arms trafficking, the Vatican said. The Vatican described the talks as cordial and said common spiritual values were highlighted, as well as good Iranian-Vatican relations. After the meeting, Irans president asked Pope Francis to pray for him. The Vatican meeting was a key part of an Iranian effort to take a more prominent place on the world stage after a nuclear deal with Western powers.

Rouhanis visit to the Holy See saw the first meeting between a pope and an Iranian president since 1999. Iran, which agreed to limit its nuclear activities in exchange for an end to economic sanctions, is eager to carve out a bigger role in mediating Middle East conflicts. Francis papacy has emphasized mediation and conflict resolution, including his role in helping Cuba and the United States to normalize their relations after.

The Iranian leader is on a four-day European swing to boost Irans image abroad as well as to rehabilitate economic ties with a continent that had been a big trade partner before sanctions. I ask you to pray for me, Rouhani told Francis after their 40-minute meeting. He called the visit by the leader of a Muslim country to the head of the Roman Catholic church a real pleasure.

AP.
Nigerias stolen funds are not only found in Europe but all over the world. This was according to the Head of the EU Delegation to Nigeria, Mr Michel Arrion, who spoke at a press briefing on Wednesday in Abuja.

Nigerias stolen funds are not only in Europe; they are everywhere. So we are happy to see that President Muhammadu Buhari went to UAE to discuss the repatriation of stolen wealth, Arrion said.

We welcome any form of cooperation in the judicial, the police cooperation that Nigeria wants to have with EU member-states, he said.

The EU envoy while noting that all countries are fighting corruption said that what may be different is the level of commitment. However, he remarked that the level of corruption in the country had impacted negatively on the economy and infrastructure.

He also cautioned against executive interference with the judiciary in the fight against corruption. There have been cases of abandoned corruption trials in the past, so there is nothing wrong with the executive making statement on expeditious trial of corruption cases. But prosecution must be within the ambit of the Rule of Law, he said.

He said the EU is supporting Nigerias fight against corruption through a range of programmes aimed at strengthening the anti-corruption agencies and the criminal justice system.

Arrion explained that the EU is supporting the fight against corruption in Nigeria through a 35 million Euros project being implemented nationwide by the UN Office on Drug and Crime. He said the EU support to the Justice Sector Reform in Nigeria with the UNODC is currently being implemented in six focal states.
The Governor of Cross River State, Senator Ben Ayade, has justified his seeming closeness to President Muhammadu Buhari despite belonging to different political parties.

With the political dust yet to settle over the 2015 general elections that saw the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, lose power at the center to the All Progressives Congress, APC, coupled with the mass defections that have hit the former ruling party, any romance with the Presidency especially by a Governor of the opposition party is immediately assumed as a plan to join the train of change and there lies the irony for Governor Ayade.

Either by an act of commission or omission, the Cross River governor is today considered as one of the few among the PDP governors who enjoys a cordial working relationship with President Buhari.

Furthermore, the frequency of his visit to Aso Rock Presidential Villa to meet Buhari is doing little to douse the fears in some quarters that the real motive may still be under wraps.

Unperturbed by the speculations that trail his closeness to the Presidency, Ayade said while remained a loyal member of the PDP, he would not allow politics hinder his quest to deliver good governance to people of Cross River.

Speaking with newsmen recently at the Margaret Ekpo International Airport Calabar, Governor Ayade said: We did not seek office for the mere sake of politics; politics is for service to your people, it is not politics for the sake of politics, and so for me, I am focused on ensuring that I work with President Buhari for the good of my people in Cross River State.

He also disclosed that his relationship with Buhari is based on the presidents character, person and integrity.

According to him, these qualities have tremendously endeared him to believing that if I share my feelings with him, he wont look at me as a southern governor or PDP governor and he has shown that in all ways.

The governor added that in his bid to construct a new economy for Cross River through the signature projects, there was need for a good relationship with President Buhari at all stages.

He (Buhari) did not seek election to be APC president; he sought to be the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and that is who he is and what he has continued to exhibit, the governor pointed out.
HRW Soft on UN, Doesn't Cover Dec 17 Rapes Report, Who Watches the Watchers?

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, January 27 -- Today Human Rights Watch released its 2016 report with much fanfare, purporting to cover full-year 2015. But for example on the issue of UN Peacekeepers involved in sexual abuse, HRW's January 26 report says the UN's panel was due to release its report on December 17.



The December report, which HRW did not cover, slams two UN officials who already left as well as UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous. See Jan 26 coverage here. At the UN, Ladsous on camera linked the rapes to R&R, video here -- something HRW never said anything at all about.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is mentioned seven times in HRW's 659 page 2016 report, mostly praising him for canned statements issued during a trip to Central Asia. F or example:



"During a June visit to Tashkent, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Uzbek government.. . During his June visit to Turkmenistan, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered a forceful speech " -- really?



This is typical of HRW: it wants to show its access to the UN and so goes soft on any criticism of it. When HRW comes to the UN, they often go behind closed doors with those who do not question them, to whom they dole out their own canned quotes and embargoed statements and reports. As set forth below, HRW refuses to even disclose what issues it raises to Ban Ki-moon. Who watches the Watchers?



B ack on March 5, 2013, t en days after Haiti cholera claims were deemed not receivable by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Human Rights Watch boss Ken Roth met with Ban.

One might think HRW would issue some summary or read-out, at least of the issues it raised to Ban. But one would be wrong.

Immediately after the scheduled meeting, Inner City Press wrote to Roth, his press office and UN lobbyist asking to be informed of the topics

raised to Ban Ki-moon at the meeting listed from 4:40 pm to 5:15 pm, including but not limited to:

did HRW/Roth raise the issue of Ban's dismissal of claims the UN brought cholera to Haiti?

did HRW/Roth raise any needed safeguards for the UN's use of drones?

did HRW/Roth raise the issue of Ban Ki-moon praising post-war steps taken by Sri Lanka?

did HRW/Roth raise the UN's Human Rights Due Diligence Policy including how it relates to Mali and/or the 126 FARDC rapes at Minova in the DRC?

Awaiting your response, on deadline.

The last question, on the Democratic Republic of Congo, is meant to assess whether Roth and his HRW only raise the issue of the M23 rebels, or for example the 126 rapes committed by the Congolese army which is supported by the UN, which now seeks to use drones.



On Sri Lanka, Ban Ki-moon as exclusively exposed by Inner City Press on February 22 accepted a whitewash report from Japan and others, then praised it in Geneva on March 1. Did Roth use his Ban face time to raise the issue? Many would like to know.



But there has been no response from HRW. The seemingly automated Twitter feed of Ken Roth has been churning out messages unrelated to the meeting or UN, one an hour, on Pakistan and Azerbaijan and urging the EU to press Burma / Myanmar.

But what did HRW press Ban about? What about Pressing HRW to disclose at least this? Previously in May 2011, its UN lobbyist Philippe Bolopion replied to Inner City Press' request for a read-out of Roth's meeting with Ban Ki-moon thusly:



Date: May 28, 2011 at 10:04 AM

From: Philippe Bolopion [at] hrw.org

To: Matthew Russell Lee [at] InnerCityPress.com

Cc: Ken Roth [at] hrw.org

Subject: Re: Press request for read-out of Ken Roth's meeting with Ban Ki-moon, incl re Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Sudan / Haroun, or explanation

Hi Matthew: To preserve our ability to have frank discussions with UN officials and advance our advocacy goals, we don't typically communicate on the content of discussions we have with them.

Very best

Philippe Bolopion, UN Director

Human Rights Watch

And now? Is this acceptable? Watch this site.

Footnote: Perhaps just as HRW tells its big donors what it is raising, it tells some journalists (its UN lobbyist used to be a UN correspondent). But the UN Correspondents Association, increasingly known as the UN's Censorship Alliance, chose on the day Ban's Haiti cholera dismissal was announced at the UN noon briefing to demand the first question -- only to ask about an unrelated letter it had sent to the UN Department of Public Information about the floor plan of the renovated Security Council. This is an issue on which UNCA fell asleep in 2012 as it sought to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN.
HRW Soft on UN, Doesn't Cover Dec 17 Rapes Report, Who Watches the Watchers?

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, January 27 -- Today Human Rights Watch released its 2016 report with much fanfare, purporting to cover full-year 2015. But for example on the issue of UN Peacekeepers involved in sexual abuse, HRW's January 26 report says the UN's panel was due to release its report on December 17.



The December report, which HRW did not cover, slams two UN officials who already left as well as UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous. See Jan 26 coverage here. At the UN, Ladsous on camera linked the rapes to R&R, video here -- something HRW never said anything at all about.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is mentioned seven times in HRW's 659 page 2016 report, mostly praising him for canned statements issued during a trip to Central Asia. F or example:



"During a June visit to Tashkent, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Uzbek government.. . During his June visit to Turkmenistan, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered a forceful speech " -- really?



This is typical of HRW: it wants to show its access to the UN and so goes soft on any criticism of it. When HRW comes to the UN, they often go behind closed doors with those who do not question them, to whom they dole out their own canned quotes and embargoed statements and reports. As set forth below, HRW refuses to even disclose what issues it raises to Ban Ki-moon.



Who watches the Watchers?



B ack on March 5, 2013, t en days after Haiti cholera claims were deemed not receivable by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Human Rights Watch boss Ken Roth met with Ban.

One might think HRW would issue some summary or read-out, at least of the issues it raised to Ban. But one would be wrong.

Immediately after the scheduled meeting, Inner City Press wrote to Roth, his press office and UN lobbyist asking to be informed of the topics

raised to Ban Ki-moon at the meeting listed from 4:40 pm to 5:15 pm, including but not limited to:

did HRW/Roth raise the issue of Ban's dismissal of claims the UN brought cholera to Haiti?

did HRW/Roth raise any needed safeguards for the UN's use of drones?

did HRW/Roth raise the issue of Ban Ki-moon praising post-war steps taken by Sri Lanka?

did HRW/Roth raise the UN's Human Rights Due Diligence Policy including how it relates to Mali and/or the 126 FARDC rapes at Minova in the DRC?

Awaiting your response, on deadline.

The last question, on the Democratic Republic of Congo, is meant to assess whether Roth and his HRW only raise the issue of the M23 rebels, or for example the 126 rapes committed by the Congolese army which is supported by the UN, which now seeks to use drones.



On Sri Lanka, Ban Ki-moon as exclusively exposed by Inner City Press on February 22 accepted a whitewash report from Japan and others, then praised it in Geneva on March 1. Did Roth use his Ban face time to raise the issue? Many would like to know.



But there has been no response from HRW. The seemingly automated Twitter feed of Ken Roth has been churning out messages unrelated to the meeting or UN, one an hour, on Pakistan and Azerbaijan and urging the EU to press Burma / Myanmar.

But what did HRW press Ban about? What about Pressing HRW to disclose at least this? Previously in May 2011, its UN lobbyist Philippe Bolopion replied to Inner City Press' request for a read-out of Roth's meeting with Ban Ki-moon thusly:



Date: May 28, 2011 at 10:04 AM

From: Philippe Bolopion [at] hrw.org

To: Matthew Russell Lee [at] InnerCityPress.com

Cc: Ken Roth [at] hrw.org

Subject: Re: Press request for read-out of Ken Roth's meeting with Ban Ki-moon, incl re Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Sudan / Haroun, or explanation

Hi Matthew: To preserve our ability to have frank discussions with UN officials and advance our advocacy goals, we don't typically communicate on the content of discussions we have with them.

Very best

Philippe Bolopion, UN Director

Human Rights Watch

And now? Is this acceptable? Watch this site.

Footnote: Perhaps just as HRW tells its big donors what it is raising, it tells some journalists (its UN lobbyist used to be a UN correspondent). But the UN Correspondents Association, increasingly known as the UN's Censorship Alliance, chose on the day Ban's Haiti cholera dismissal was announced at the UN noon briefing to demand the first question -- only to ask about an unrelated letter it had sent to the UN Department of Public Information about the floor plan of the renovated Security Council. This is an issue on which UNCA fell asleep in 2012 as it sought to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN.
NETFLIX vs DISNEY: Who's Winning the Streaming War? Wavetraders - 24 minutes ago Both NETFLIX and NETFLIX vs DISNEY are in a bearish trend, that can slow down in the next few months, moving up into a corrective rally.

German leader warns against 'worldwide renaissance' for coal AP - 1 hour ago BERLIN (AP)  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Thursday that mustn't lead to a worldwide renaissance for coal  comments that come as Germany itself brings coal-fired power plants back online... $SPX : 3,695.16 (-0.67%) $DOWI : 30,423.81 (-0.33%) $IUXX : 11,103.38 (-0.40%)
Dumplings And Filipino Cuisine Unite At Top Chef Alum's Latest Pop-Up

By Kristine Sherred in Food on Jan 27, 2016 3:16PM



One of nine dumpling offerings at Maddy's BAGO: The Philippines 2.0 pop-up dinner on Jan. 31 - ukoy, a shrimp and sweet potato fritter served with a vinegar dipping sauce. (Photo: Caitlin Preminger for Filipino Kitchen)

Since opening and shortly thereafter closing her Filipino-focused Lincoln Square restaurant Laughing Bird in 2014, Top Chef alum Chrissy Camba has stayed true to her promise of pop-upsmostly in dough form and rarely focused on her native cuisine. That's about to change, with a new pop-up coming on Jan. 31.

Named after her late bunny friend, Maddys Dumpling House hosted a number of dinners in 2015, including a few at Ampersand, the kitchen and dining space adjoined to Kinmont. Sarahlynn Pablo of Filipino Kitchen featured Cambas Christmas pop-up there last year, which initiated a relationship that led Camba to cook at both the October and December Kultura Festivals.

On Sunday, January 31, Camba realigns with her heritage alongside Filipino Kitchen for BAGO - The Philippines 2.0 (bago means new in Tagalog) inside the private event space above Salero. Camba invited Filipino Kitchen to be her guest chef for this aptly themed evening - Im pretty sure I squealed! exclaimed Pablo - featuring a starter course of nine dumplings for each guest, plus a family-style entree course with three offerings and dessert.

From a pocketed version of chicken adobo (the national dish of the Philippines) to an empanada stuffed with crispy pork and dinuguan (a blend of pig meat, offal and blood spiked with chilis and vinegar endearingly deemed chocolate stew), the dumplings lean toward Filipino comfort food, albeit all wrapped up in single bites. The casings, however, touch other regions. Moms Spaghetti, traditionally an imperialized mash-up of banana ketchup, spaghetti noodles, cheddar cheese, and hot dog (yes, hot dog!), gets a facelift with short rib and a Shanghai-style casing.

Camba returned from her most recent trip to the Philippines with an invigorated perspective on the cuisine and a desire to revitalize the lesser-known dishes. I ate things with which I was familiar and some that I hadnt ever heard, she says. The latter intrigued me.

For the family-style entree round, Camba and co-chef Adam Wendt of Bangers & Lace whip up more Filipino classics: the stir-fried egg noodle dish pancit basil patong with vegetables, shrimp, beef and pork; the breakfast-anytime staple of longanisa, a sweet, garlic-studded sausage, with garlic rice and a fried egg; and bringhe, a sort-of paella with coconut milk, chicken, chorizo, and vegetables (and usually raisins). Salads come as sides, including a salmon kinilaw (ceviche) and pinakbet, here a mixture of salted pork, eggplant, okra and chiles.



Bringhe, a Pampanga regional dish akin to the Spanish paella, combines coconut milk, malagkit (sticky rice) and patis (fish sauce) cooked in a pan lined with banana leaves. (Photo: Caitlin Preminger for Filipino Kitchen)

To build the menu, Pablo hauled her vast Filipino cookbook collection to Cambas, including a new pastry book that inspired the ice cream sandwich guests will surely relish for dessert.

While I was in the Philippines, I grew fond of having ice cream sandwiches for a mid-afternoon snack, explains Pablo. We listened for the bread peddler in the morning, signaling his presence to the neighborhood with a bike horn. In the afternoon, I headed to a sari-sari [bodega] and picked out ice cream. I always looked through [each flavor] - jackfruit, mango, chocolate - but I always got ube, Moms favorite.

Ube, or purple yam, might seem an odd flavor of ice cream; it is also mixed with queso. Camba will have warm homemade pan de sal ready for equally homemade ube and queso ice cream to sandwich between the buns.

Chefs create dishes based on memories and experiences, Camba contends. Filipino food will always be in my heart. Its just a matter of how it projects itself into what Im making, straightforward or subtle.

Will this pop-up echo Cambas next brick-and-mortar venture? Despite a year lapse since her last Filipino-centric menu, Camba says it could become more of a focal point in a future restaurant.

Space is limited. Tickets and the full menu for the $55 BYO dinner are available here.
Last year, we ran a sad story about LaGuardia Community College in New York City celebrating a $2 million gift from Goldman Sachs. The gift was the largest ever for a school that mainly enrolls lower income kids of color, and what was so pathetic was that it would nearly double LaGuardias endowment.

Meanwhile, nearly every week, Inside Philanthropy reports on yet another eight- or nine-figure gift to elite universities that are already rolling in dough.

Now comes new data for 2015 that showed that higher ed giving hit a record level, with $40.3 billion raised, and that the inequities in such contributions are just as bad as you think. The annual survey by the Council for Aid to Education found that the top 20 fundraising schoolswhich make up less than 1 percent of the nations collegesraised 28.7 percent of all gifts last year.

Many of the schools bringing in the biggest bucks already have some of the largest endowments in the nation, including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Columbia.

This shower of wealth to the Haves in higher ed comes amid an ongoing divestment in state universities and community colleges. A report last year found that these public schools have yet to recover from major spending cuts made after the 2008 financial crisis, cuts that hiked tuition for struggling students and threaten to put college out of reach for more students.

Like many of the trends fueling inequality, a self-fulfilling dynamic is at work in higher ed funding. Plenty of grads from elite universities become economic winners and have spare cash to give back to their alma maters. Few grads from places like LaGuardia will ever be in such a position.

Philanthropy has long drawn fire for the way that it is used by the wealthy to boost institutions to which they have a personal connectionwith taxpayers helping foot the bill. But that longstanding critique has lately gained more steam amid growing anxiety about inequality and a tighter fiscal climate. Its hard to watch the wealthy boost certain private institutions upward while so many public institutions are struggling. As a practical matter, also, that $40 billion given to top schools last year will cost the U.S. Treasury a lot of money at a time when Congress has been paring back Pell Grants, citing budget deficits.

All that said, higher ed giving by the rich is not quite as disturbing as it looks. For one thing, the latest data shows that public universities were among the top beneficiaries of private giving last year, as in years past. Six of the top 20 fundraising institutions in 2015 were public universitiesincluding four University of California schools, which lately need all the help they can get.

We write often about big gifts to public universities, and not just the well-known ones like UC Berkeley. Private donors have boosted such schools all over the country, a trend which reflects the ever larger and more diverse ranks of the far upper class. While its true that a stunning percentage of billionaires have graduated from Ivy League schools, the great wealth boom of the past few decades has made many grads of state schools insanely wealthy, too. And more of these folks are now giving back.

In fact, thanks to surging giving by public university graduates in the past decade or two, some of these schools have huge endowments. The University of Texas system has the largest endowment in the U.S., after Harvard. The University of Michigan is No. 8 on the list, while the UC system is No. 14. Ohio State University has a bigger endowment than Brown, while the University of Minnesota has a larger stash than NYU. Thanks in part to private money, some of Americas public universities rank among the very best in the world. And, as weve reported, one reason that some major donors have stepped forward in recent years to help public universities is because theyve wanted things to stay that wayand counteract cuts to these schools.

I know: This is not such a pretty picturephilanthropy propping up public institutions that shouldnt be faltering to begin withbut it is at odds with the prevalent image of higher ed donors feathering the nests of their own class.

Another reason to think happier thoughts about all the money flowing to top universities is to look at what much of this money is actually for. Some of the biggest gifts, as we report often, are for medical and scientific research with the potential to benefit all of us. John Paulsons controversial $400 million gift to Harvard, for example, was to bolster engineering and applied sciences (SEAS) at the school. We werent among those piling on in criticizing that giftwhich actually seemed pretty cool to us. As a Harvard press release said at the time:

Through research and teaching, SEAS faculty and students address some of the greatest challenges facing society. SEAS laboratories have achieved remarkable discoveries, including recent breakthroughs such as an organ-on-a-chip platform that can be used for drug testing, a swarm of self-organizing robots, novel nanotechnology devices that are changing optical electronics, an implantable cancer vaccine, new knowledge about the links between atmospheric chemistry and climate change, and a robot that can assemble itself from a flat sheet.

If you know anything about medical and scientific research in the U.S., you know that much of it is conducted at top universities. When government agencies give money to these schools for such research, we cheer. We should also cheer when people like John Paulson provide such support, even as we recognize the problem with private individuals driving research priorities as government research is money is cut.

Among the schools receiving the most private support last year was the University of California-San Francisco. It came in at No. 4, with just over $600 million in gifts. What was all that money for? Well, the biggest gift, for $100 million by Chuck Feeney, was for a new Global Brain Health Institute initiative that will train 600 global leaders over 15 years in the U.S., Ireland and across the world... to carry out dementia research, deliver health care, and change policies and practices in their regions.

That sounds like money well spent to us. Another big gift last year to UCSF was for HIV research. Over recent years, the school has pulled in a whole bunch of big private gifts for scientific and medical research.

Look, theres no shortage of major gifts to elite schools that fit into the stereotype of the wealthy looking out for their own institutions in narrow ways. We could name a few big ones from 2015. But so often, the eight- and nine-figure gifts actually fund important work. Here again, in other words, is yet another example of how Big Philanthropy is a pretty complex phenomenon.
Xiao Gang just cant win. Just days into the new year, Xiao, chair of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, had to explain to senior leaders in Beijing why the CSRCs so-called circuit breaker mechanism had worsened the sell-off of Chinese stocks that began last summer.

Mr. Xiao has an unenviable job  when people make money, they would not thank him, but when they lose money, he becomes a scapegoat, says Hong Hao, managing director of research at Hong Kongbased brokerage BOCOM International Securities. If someone else were in his position, could he or she do a better job?

The CSRC adopted the circuit breaker in a bid to steady the market, but on January 4  the first trading session of 2016 and the first day the mechanism came into effect  the benchmark Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index fell by 7 percent, the maximum allowed, and trading was halted early. After a brief respite, selling pressure triggered the circuit breaker again three days later, forcing the market to shut after just 29 minutes of trading. That evening CSRC officials pulled the plug on the mechanism.

The design of the circuit breaker generated the magnet effect that made prices gravitate toward breakers and accelerated the sell-offs, says BOCOMs Hao. But they corrected the mistake by suspending it quickly. It is a good outcome of a bad situation.

The market continued to drift lower, though. As of January 22, the Shanghai Composite had fallen 17.6 percent year-to-date and sat 43 percent below its 2015 peak last June.

Rumors persist that Xiao, 58, has turned in his letter of resignation to the top brass several times, only to be rebuffed. On January 8 the website of respected financial magazine Caijing reported that his resignation would be approved over the weekend, but more than two weeks later hes still on the job.

Xiao, who took charge of the CSRC in 2013 after spending much of his career as a bureaucrat with Chinas central bank, has taken steps to deepen the countrys capital markets, including allowing short-selling and margin trading. These measures, all adapted from the West, have had mixed results.

The world should cut China some slack, argues Kenneth Courtis, former vice chair of Goldman Sachs Asia. China has come a very long way in a very short time, probably faster than for what the regulators are prepared, says Courtis, who now serves as chair of Starfort Investment Holdings, a Cayman Islandsregistered firm with offices in London, New York and Tokyo. What that really means is that China has not yet developed the sometimes more sophisticated means of intervention that we see employed on occasion in more mature markets.

Li Jiange, a former secretary to ex-premier Zhu Rongji, who oversaw the launch of the nations stock markets in the early 1990s, is less charitable. Chinas entire financial system lacks people who have adequate experience, especially experience in crisis management, Li, now a professor at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Renmin University of China, griped in a recent speech.

Xiao spent more than 20 years rising through the ranks at the Peoples Bank of China, becoming a deputy governor, before being named chair of Bank of China in 2003. He was appointed to head up the CSRC in 2013, but reports say his real ambition was to become governor of the central bank.

The official has said he only studied economics, at the Hunan College of Finance and Economics, because he didnt have the grades to get into a Chinese literature program at a prestigious university. I didnt study economics voluntarily, Xiao told Hong Kongs Phoenix Satellite Television Holdings. I didnt even know what finance was.

Some would ask whether he does today. Xiao, or whoever succeeds him, will have to be a quick study. Investors are counting on it.

Follow Allen Cheng on Twitter at @acheng87.
Young, bold and media-savvy are not adjectives usually attached to the Saudi Arabian monarchy. But desperate times and a new king have produced just such a figure in Prince Mohammed bin-Salman.

The 30-year-old royal jumped onto global investors radar earlier this month, when he hinted at plans to privatize gargantuan state monopoly Saudi Arabian Oil Co. in an interview with the Economist. But hes been busy with much more than that since his father, Salman, ascended to the throne in January 2015. Son of Salmans third, and reportedly favorite, wife, young Mohammed was quickly elevated to the position of deputy crown prince, second in line to succeed his 80-year-old dad, with a broad mandate to modernize the kingdoms bureaucratic and paternalistic economy. He also took over as Defense minister, just in time to head a Saudi-led coalition of Sunni Muslim states against Shiite rebels in neighboring Yemen.

A year on, Saudi watchers discern an emerging bin-Salman doctrine for the worlds beleaguered top oil exporter: a more transparent and unfettered economy at home to back a more muscular policy abroad. He wants to shake up the Saudi economy for sure, says Sebastien Henin, who controls $85 million as head of asset management at Abu Dhabi, UAEbased investment bank The National Investor. He is involved in everything.

While his multitudinous half brothers and cousins gravitated toward degrees from the University of Oxford or Georgetown University, bin-Salman stayed home and studied law at King Saud University. That gave him a chance to network with reform-minded top technocrats like Saudi Aramco chair Khalid al-Falih. Aramco management would like to be free of royal influence, and Falih is very close to the young prince, says Jean-Francois Seznec, a Middle East scholar at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a branch of Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

The prince has also tapped Mohamed al-Mady, former CEO of petrochemical power Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC), to lead defense procurement and root out corruption there, Seznec says. The budget that bin-Salman unveiled in December slashes subsidies for fuel, electricity and water, pushing Saudi industry to stand on its own feet.

His dynamic vision has won plaudits in high places. President Barack Obama called him extremely knowledgeable, very smart, wise beyond his years after the prince stood in for Salman at a Camp David regional summit last spring. The conflict in Yemen that he oversees, with U.S. logistical assistance, gets less glowing reviews. The United Nations tallied 5,300 civilian casualties in the first nine months of fighting, amid reports that the Saudi air force was dropping cluster bombs in urban areas.

In a leaked memo late last year, the German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst fretted, The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy thanks to bin-Salmans influence. (Januarys mass execution of 47 accused terrorists, including a ranking Shiite cleric, is attributed to his cousin, crown prince and Interior minister Muhammad bin-Nayef.)

Bin-Salman will pick his biggest domestic fight if he pursues plans to sell off part of Aramco, where he already leads the supreme council, rough equivalent to an audit committee. Saudi Arabia doesnt need privatization cash yet: Its $650 billion in reserves can last five more years of current oil prices, TNIs Henin estimates. The princes real goal is for outside investors to push financial governance on the monopoly, Seznec says. That would dry up a honeypot that informally distributes $10 billion to $15 billion a year to thousands of far-flung royal relations, he reckons.

For what its worth, Seznec predicts, bin-Salman can count on support from the Saudi population, 70 percent of whom are younger than him: He is responsible for representing the younger Saudis who resent the old folks and the old ways. How far that gets him remains to be seen.

Get more on emerging markets.
Australia and the United States will work closer together in a bid to combat cybercrime, it has been announced by the Prime Minister.Malcolm Turnbull announced the partnership last week as the countries will look to work together to curb online crime.In a statement, the Government announced a series of measures the partnership will bring including an annual Australia-US Cyber Security Dialogue which will engage senior representatives from both countries business, academic and government sectors to discuss common cyber threats, promote cyber security innovation and shape new business opportunities.The partnership will also look to promote peacetime norms for cyber space, which will lead to practical confidence building measures that help to reduce the incidence of malicious cyber activity and the risk of conflict.The deal will bring law enforcement efforts between the two nations closer together as both will be able to use experts in the field.To meet the growing threat of cybercrime, we will also enhance cybercrime cooperation between our nations, including through increased exchanges between respective law enforcement and cybercrime experts and more collaboration on cybercrime investigations, the Government statement continued.It is not just Australia and America that will benefit from the partnership as the Government said the ramifications of the deal will be felt throughout the region.Finally, we agreed to enhance the coordination of our cyber capacity building efforts in the Indo-Pacific, to help our partners in this region increase their cyber security and their capacity to combat cybercrime.
After more than three days with life at a virtual standstill in the nations capital and elsewhere up and down the East Coast, the cities hit hard by a massive snowstorm were getting closer to their normal routines.

In the Washington area, the Metro subway system was closer to fully operational Tuesday, although several suburban stations remained closed and trains were running less often. Schools in the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and Maryland were still closed, and federal offices were closed for another day, but city government employees were back at work.

New York City recovered more quickly, with subway and bus service fully operational Monday, although commuter trains were limited. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio credited better communication and other lessons learned after fiascoes during the 2010 Snowmageddon storm. But New York usually gets much more snow than Washington and budgets accordingly, spending three times as much per lane-mile for snow removal.

In Baltimore, which got more than 2 feet of snow, plenty of people were still freeing their cars, and many side streets remained unplowed.

Im expected to be at work but I dont have the best car for snow, said Tameka Smith, who was doing her best to shovel out her maroon sedan. I dont know what Im going to do. Its ridiculous to expect people to get to their offices today.

In downtown Washington, conditions on Tuesday morning had improved significantly from 24 hours earlier, but the city was still moving at half-speed, thanks largely to the federal government closure. Car traffic from northern Virginia was light, and Virginias commuter rail service was still closed.

Metros red line, which brings commuters in from Maryland, was standing-room-only as usual as trains rumbled through the Metro Center station downtown at 9 a.m.

There was a lot of snow. I was expecting worse, said Michael Pollock, a 29-year-old law student commuting from northwest Washington to Judiciary Square. The snow removal exceeded his expectations; still, he was relieved many workers stayed home.

It would be a lot messier if the federal government was not shut down. The Metro would have been bad. It was pretty crowded as it is.

The citys tourist attractions were also slowly getting up and running, with some Smithsonian museums welcoming visitors again Tuesday. Many National Park Service attractions remained closed.

Joann Dombrowski of Baltimore said her sons car is stuck on a road still full of snow, and his boss threatened to fire him if he didnt show up.

Nobodys come up to plow. Its just ridiculous. People have to do something, people have to get to work, she said.

With the District likely to blow through most if not all of its $6.2 million snow-removal budget, Mayor Muriel Bowser has already requested federal disaster assistance. Baltimore, too, was likely to spend more than it planned.

When you have a storm of historic proportions, the budget will be historic as well, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

Residents in southern New Jersey were still cleaning up the mess from flooding, and officials there warned that repairing the damage and beach erosion could be expensive.

Associated Press writers Jessica Gresko in Washington, Jonathan Lemire in New York and Juliet Linderman in Baltimore contributed to this report.

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Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics New York Washington Virginia
Efforts by Iran to start exporting oil to Europe are being held up as foreign tanker owners are still struggling to secure insurance for cargoes, leading shipping players said on Tuesday.

A nuclear deal between world powers and Iran earlier this month led to the removal of curbs on Tehrans banking, insurance and shipping sectors.

Since then, Iran has ordered a 500,000 barrel per day (bpd) increase in oil output, of which 200,000 bpd will go to Europe.

But many foreign firms remain wary of violating other sanctions that were imposed by the United States and have not been lifted. Measures still in place from Washington prohibit most business between U.S. persons, U.S. companies and Iran as well as no dollar trades.

Paddy Rogers, chief executive with tanker operator Euronav, said his company had been approached to carry Iranian oil to Europe.

We have had inquiries. It is interesting that the first inquiries to move Iranian oil came from Europe not from China, Rogers told a Capital Link web conference.

Third-party liability insurance and pollution cover for vessels is provided by P&I clubs  marine insurers owned by shipping clients and reinsured internationally.

Rodgers said the umbrella International Group of P&I clubs were still unable to confirm payments under reinsurance contracts.

It has not been cleared yet. So, nobody can load at the moment it seems to me  unless somebody has some alternative method of insurance, he said.

I think this is going to come on. But it will take time and it wont be very straightforward.

Greeces biggest oil refiner Hellenic Petroleum agreed on Friday to buy crude oil from state-owned National Iranian Oil Company, becoming the first European refiner to restart trade relations with Tehran.

Irans oil exports have fallen to just over 1 million bpd, from a peak of more than 3 million bpd in 2011  before the imposition of tougher sanctions.

Oil held by Iran on its domestic tankers in floating storage is estimated by shipping sources to be at least 40 million barrels as the country struggles to offload supplies because of a global glut.

Robert Hvide Macleod, chief executive with tanker group Frontline Ltd, said he expected additional Iranian exports of at least 500,000 bpd this year.

They will do what they can what they can to get the European market back and there will be demand for international tonnage to handle this volume, he said.

Macleod said the insurance and payment system was still not there yet, but added that it will get in place in the short-term.

Nikolas Tsakos, president and chief executive of another leading tanker player Tsakos Energy Navigation Ltd., said competition between Iran and arch rival Saudi Arabia was expected to heat up, further boosting vessel demand.

They are going to compete and are going to try to out produce each other, Tsakos told the call. That, of course will add supply in the market.

(Reporting by Jonathan Saul, editing by David Evans)

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Topics USA Europe Energy Oil Gas
RSA, announced that Derek Walsh, group general counsel, company secretary and global broker relationship director, has decided to leave RSA at the end of February after five and half years.

In response to Walshs departure, RSA said that Jon Hancock will be responsible for RSAs relationship with key global insurance brokers in addition to his current role as managing director commercial (a position he has held since July 2011), Hancock has worked with RSA for over 25 years in a variety of roles in both commercial and personal lines across underwriting, claims, sales and leadership positions, in the UK, Asia and the Middle East.

In addition, Charlotte Heisshas been appointed chief legal officer and company secretary. She will join the group executive team and report to chief executive, Stephen Hester.

She is currently the head of group legal at RSA, leading a team of lawyers in RSAs head office and across its emerging markets businesses. She joined RSA as legal counsel in 2010 from Linklaters LLP and was promoted to head of group legal in 2011.

Group chief risk officer, William McDonnell, will assume responsibility for the compliance function.

Stephen Hester, group chief executive said:

Derek has helped steer RSA through challenging times and has been a terrific adviser to the board and the company during the last five and a half years. We are grateful to him for his support and service. He will be missed and we wish him every success in the future.

Martin Scicluna, RSA chairman commented:

On behalf of the board I would like to thank Derek for his contribution and guidance since 2010. He has provided wise counsel to me and my colleagues on the board and he leaves with our strong appreciation and gratitude.

Heiss appointment is subject to regulatory approval.

Source: RSA

Related:

RSA Appoints Stewart as Chief Risk Officer for UK and Western Europe

Topics Agencies
Global Insurance Accelerator (GIA), a Des Moines, Iowa-based global business accelerator focused on developing and growing innovative insurance-centric startups, has announced its 2016 portfolio.

With a global pool of twice as many applicants compared to the previous year, the five standout teams selected to participate in the mentor-driven program represent the automotive, property and health insurance segments. The sophomore class includes:

Smart Drivinc (St. Louis, Missouri): Distracted driving and crash prevention app disables drivers cell phones while driving.

Fluttrbox (Montreal, Canada): On-demand aerial imaging and mapping application that provides detailed property assessments via aerial drone images.

WeSavvy (Dublin, Ireland): Health insurance app that rewards customers with cash off their insurance premium based on physical activity.

Telematic (Madison, Wisconsin): Connected car app that offers auto insurance companies the ability to price insurance by monitoring driving and mobile usage.

Serious Social Media (Orange, California): Automated social media marketing software for insurance agents.

Hailing from the United States, Canada and Ireland, the startups will move to Des Moines for the 100-day program that kicks off on Feb. 9, 2016.

The accelerator offers each team $40,000 of seed capital, office space, one-on-one mentorship, business development training and access to the GIAs extensive and diverse network of insurance executives and carriers, investors and industry leaders. In exchange, the GIA receives a six percent equity stake in each company.

Investors backing the GIA (all returning from 2015) include the following insurance carriers: American Equity Investment Life, Delta Dental of Iowa, Farmers Mutual Hail, Farm Bureau Financial Services, Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance, IMT Insurance Company and Principal Financial Group.

The accelerators mentors are industry leaders and executives who have a deep understanding of the industry and come from insurance carriers and brokerages including all seven GIA investors, AIG, Nationwide, EMC, Transamerica, Merchants Bonding and more.

The program runs until May 19, but culminates in April with the annual Global Insurance Symposium, where each team will pitch its innovative insurance solution to more than 350 prominent industry executives from around the world.

Created by the Greater Des Moines Partnership in 2014, the GIA is the first U.S.-based insurance accelerator that helps grow insurance startups. The GIAs inaugural 2015 class consisted of six portfolio companies from all over the world.

Accelerator alum ClinicNote, creators of a tool that eases the note-taking and reporting process for speech-language pathologists, announced the closing of a seed round in late 2015.

Source: GIA

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Topics InsurTech Iowa
Risk Point LLC, a nationwide dealer open lot program for independent agents, has expanded its offerings to include physical damage and garage package coverage for franchise RV dealers.

The Vehicle Inventory Program (VIP) provides dealer open lot physical damage insurance for dealership owned vehicles. This includes new and used inventory, demonstrators, shop rentals, furnished autos, vehicles held for consignment, and hired vehicles.

Available for dealers nationwide, the turnkey VIP program provides optional aggregate weather deductibles at competitive rates. Claims are managed by Applied Claims Group, LLCs whose claims professionals are located in our Dallas office. Coverage is written on a non-admitted basis.

The Risk Point Garage Program is tailored to meet the insurance coverage needs of franchise RV, dealers. Coverage is written on an admitted basis and includes property; garage liability coverages, including products and completed operations and transactional errors and omissions; garage keepers; employee dishonesty, depositors forgery, and other forms of crime, and an umbrella policy.

The VIP program and the Garage Package are underwritten with insurers that are rated A- or better by A.M. Best & Company.

The program is available to retail insurance agents and brokers.
Rauner Says Illinois Should Be More Competitive In State Of The State Address

By aaroncynic in News on Jan 27, 2016 10:21PM

Hundreds of demonstrators pack the Capitol rotunda ahead of Governor Bruce Rauner's 2016 state of the state speech. Photo by Aaron Cynic/Chicagoist

Gov. Bruce Rauner delivered his second State of the State address Wednesday in Springfield as Illinois nears entering its eight months without a budget. In a 30 minute speech teeming with dropped gs, Rauner took aim at unions and state Democrats who have fought his Turnaround agenda, saying that Illinois needed to be focused on being competitive with other states.

All I'm askin for is a return to balance in this state'cause right now, we don't have competitive balance and jobs are leavin, Rauner said in his well practiced folksy way of speaking to the public. Instead of letting Indiana and Texas take our workers, lets go compete and take their jobs!

Rauner and state Democratic legislators have butted heads frequently since he took office last year, and the state has been without a budget for months. Before he moves forward on a budget, he demands lawmakers prioritize his pro-business Turnaround agenda, which would drastically weaken the states labor movement. To see more people employed at high pay, we need to stop crushing employers, said Rauner, hammering home his love for big business. To create good jobs, we need more job creators.

State democrats have said that Rauners proposals have little to do with the actual budget, and have harshly criticized the governor for the impasse, which has forced many social service agencies and other entities that depend on state money to make drastic cuts. Last week, the same day the Governors office its hire of a chief of staff for Diana Rauner at $100,000 a year, Lutheran Social Services announced it would have to eliminate 750 jobs and cut services provided to nearly 5,000 people. Democrats have insisted that Rauner is to blame for the cuts, while the governor has insisted its their own fault for not passing his agenda.

During his speech however, the governor made an attempt to show hes making an effort to work with Democratic lawmakers, citing his willingness to move forward with a plan to help alleviate the states pension crisis. As a first step toward bipartisan compromise, President Cullerton and I have agreed to support his pension proposal that will save $1 billion/year from four of the state pension plans, said Rauner. As part of ten long-term goals he introduced, Rauner also said he would work closely with Cullerton to increase state support for education.

Despite this, he had strong words for AFSCME, the largest union which represents state workers. Unfortunately, the compensation demands being made by AFSCME leaders are out-of-touch with reality, said Rauner, who later accused state workers of manipulating overtime policies.

Closing his speech out, Rauner said that to achieve compromise, we must cast partisanship and ideology aside. Our job in this Capitol is to improve the lives of all the people of Illinois, through more economic opportunity, better educational opportunity, and more value for their hard-earned tax dollars, said Rauner.

The governors critics however, found his words empty, and called him out for spending more time outlying an agenda they say will be harmful, rather than addressing the immediate concern of the budget impasse. Speaking on behalf of the Responsible Budget Coalition, which packed the rotunda with people prior to Rauners speech, Dan Lesser, Director of Economic Justice for the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, said:

The Governor treated the enactment of a fully funded budget that invests in families and communities as an afterthought, failing to mention the issue until the final two minutes of his speech. This is despite hundreds of families chanting outside the chamber doors, calling for the enactment of a responsible budget immediately.

Emily Miller, director of policy and advocacy at Voices for Illinois Children, said the agenda Rauner outlined in his speech could have long term negative consequences if the state cant keep funding for social services in tact. Unfortunately, long-term structural reforms will not have the desired positive impact if we continue to disinvest in the families and communities and destroy the state-funded structures that provide public services due to the lack of a fully funded state budget, Miller said in a press release.
A business group said on Monday it is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal of a lower-court ruling tossing out its challenge of part of Seattles law to increase the minimum wage.

The International Franchise Association, which brought its lawsuit against the city in June 2014, says the law favors independent businesses because it requires franchises like McDonalds and Burger King to phase in the new $15 minimum wage more quickly.

Our appeal has never sought to prevent the City of Seattles wage law from going into effect, association President Robert Cresanti said in a statement.

Our appeal to the Supreme Court will be focused solely on the discriminatory treatment of franchisees under Seattles wage law and the motivation to discriminate against interstate commerce, he said.

The associations lawsuit challenges the laws treatment of franchises as subsidiaries of parent companies, rather than completely separate businesses.

Representatives for the city could not be immediately reached for comment. Commenting on the lawsuit last year, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, a Democrat who championed the wage hike, said: Rather than investing in lawyers to prevent workers from earning higher wages, it is time for these large businesses to begin investing in a higher minimum wage for their employees.

A federal judge last March denied the groups lawsuit, saying it failed to back up its discrimination claims. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in September.

The law, which took effect on April 1 last year, requires businesses in Seattle with more than 500 employees nationwide to raise their minimum wage to $15 by 2018. Smaller companies have until 2021.

Seattle is among a number of large U.S. cities to pass laws raising the minimum wage above $10 an hour. The franchise associations lawsuit could have an impact in cities like Chicago and San Francisco.

The association said it expected the Supreme Court to say in the spring whether it would take the case.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Topics USA
The families of 10 sailors aboard a cargo ship that sank in a hurricane last year have settled claims with the vessels owner.

The Florida Times-Union reports that each of the families will receive $500,000 each in the settlement with Tote Maritime Puerto Rico.

The 790-foot freighter El Faro sank after losing engine power and getting caught in a hurricane while sailing from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Thirty-three mariners were aboard, and some of their families have filed lawsuits against Tote claiming negligence.

Legal documents say the settlements cover pre-death pain and suffering and economic losses from the deaths.

Among the parties to settle is the family of the ships captain, Michael Davidson.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Claims Trucking
The U.S. crop insurance market has been abandoned by some of its largest companies as lower agricultural prices crimp revenue, and uncertainty about federal aid clouds the businesss future.

Cargill Inc., the largest privately held company in the U.S., last month reached a deal to sell a crop insurer. Wells Fargo & Co., the largest bank by market value, also announced a retreat, as did seed provider Monsanto Co. and tractor maker Deere & Co.

It isnt easy money, said Mike Foley, chief executive officer of the North America commercial division for Zurich Insurance Group AG, which agreed in December to pay as much as $1.05 billion for Wells Fargos Rural Community Insurance Services, one of the largest U.S. crop insurers. It may not be something you want to do if it isnt part of your core business.

The industry had an underwriting loss of $1.3 billion in 2012 and gains of just $657 million in 2013, the most recent years for which figures are available, according to a study from the Congressional Research Service in August. That compares with annual profit of more than $1 billion in the five years through 2011.

Volatile crop prices, pressure on government subsidies and the potential for extreme weather tied to climate change have added risk for insurers, said Keith Coble, an agricultural economist at Mississippi State University. Bumper harvests have sent corn, the biggest U.S. crop, to less than half its 2012 peak, ratcheting down the premiums farmers pay to insure against loss. Other crops have also seen steep price declines.

Lean Times

Its just not as lucrative a business as it used to be, Coble said. Companies dont want to bother with it in the lean times if its not part of their core business.

Cargills departure from crop insurance will help the company concentrate on its main businesses like grain shipping and trading, spokesman Mark Klein said in an e-mail. Wells Fargo, the biggest U.S. agricultural lender, said that getting out of crop coverage helps the insurance operation focus on its role as a middleman between banking clients and underwriters. Cargill had been in the insurance business since 2007, and Monsanto added crop coverage with the 2013 purchase of Climate Corp. RCIS was part of Norwest Corp. before that banks 1998 merger with Wells Fargo.

The sales arent a sign of long-term industry turmoil because food demand will inevitably rise, and Wells Fargo didnt have to settle for a fire-sale price, according to Coble. But the divestitures may show that crop insurance, like agriculture itself, is best left to the specialists, he said.

When results slump, you see ownership revert to people with the patience and ability to see things through, the professor said.

ACE, Aspen

The biggest players in the industry in recent years have been Wells Fargos RCIS and Evan Greenbergs ACE Ltd., which took the Chubb name this month after buying its long-time rival and becoming the worlds largest publicly traded property/casualty insurer. Other companies that have been expanding in the crop market count insurance as their primary business  even if they dont all enjoy the decades-long relationships that companies like Deere have with farmers.

AmTrust Financial Services Inc. agreed last year to add the Monsanto unit. Bermuda-based Aspen Insurance Holdings Ltd. announced a deal Jan. 20 to buy AgriLogic Insurance Services. Silveus Insurance Group, which has an agricultural focus, completed the purchase of the Cargill unit this month. Farmers Mutual Hail Insurance Co. of Iowa added the unit from Deere, which said in late 2014 that it was exiting after eight years in crop coverage.

Crop insurance protects farmers against weather-related setbacks or lower-than-expected revenue. Policies bought from private insurers have become the main form of federal farm aid, as traditional government crop supports have been replaced by subsidies that cover 62 percent of premium costs on average. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also covers operations expenses for companies that serve farmers.

The cost can be steep. Annual federal spending reached a record $14.1 billion after a drought in the U.S. Corn Belt in 2012 fueled losses. President Barack Obama and House Speaker Paul Ryan both have proposed limiting the risk for taxpayers. And Congress last year approved a $3 billion cut to the federal program, which was subsequently reversed after outrage from rural lawmakers.

Still, I dont think companies can be comfortable that the kind of support theyve received will remain the same, said Craig Cox, a senior vice president based in Ames, Iowa, for Environmental Working Group, which seeks to cut crop-insurance subsidies.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Carriers USA Agribusiness
Diamond Risk Insurance LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Baptist Health, has been approved as a captive insurer by the Arkansas Insurance Department.

Arkansas Insurance Commissioner Allen Kerr said Baptist Health is the first entity in Arkansas to create its own captive insurance company.

Diamond Risk Insurance LLC will transact business under the Arkansas Insurance Code regulating captive insurance companies.

It will be regulated by the Arkansas Insurance Department, unlike companies that choose to be regulated by the federal Department of Labor by offering coverage to employees under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, the department said.

Source: Arkansas Insurance Department

Topics Carriers Arkansas
A man who played a dancing hamster in car commercials and was a backup dancer for Madonna, has pleaded no contest to single counts of insurance fraud and making a false statement.

The Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office says 29-year-old Leroy Barnes was immediately sentenced Friday to 90 days of electronic monitoring, 400 hours of community service and ordered to pay more than $24,000 in restitution.

Barnes is best known for playing one of the hip-hop hamsters in the popular Kia car commercials.

Hes also been a backup dancer for Madonna, Kelly Rowland and Chris Brown

The California Department of Insurance says Barnes reported he wasnt working when he received disability benefits between September 2010 and September 2011.

Authorities say he was actually working for Kia then.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics California Fraud
A decision from the California Department of Insurance has workers compensation carrier Applied Underwriters and one of its companies on the defensive, and now a class action suit has been filed seeking to recover premiums paid by insureds to one of its large programs.

The decision handed down by California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones last week found that the workers comp carriers EquityComp program and an accompanying reinsurance participation agreement constitute a collateral agreement under California code, and that Applieds failure to apply with the Workers Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau for approval of the agreement violates that code.

California Insurance Co. is named in the decision. CIC is a licensed property/casualty insurance carrier domiciled in California and is wholly-owned by North American Casualty Co., which is in turn wholly-owned by Applied Underwriters. Applied Underwriters is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.

Attorneys for Applied Underwriters provided a statement regarding the decision on Wednesday that disagrees with the commissioners decision that the participation agreement constitutes a collateral agreement, and that the carrier will seek the balance of the insurance premiums for the workers comp policies that are now due.

We are exploring our options, but in the interim we will reach out to the California Department of Insurance to discuss how to file the Reinsurance Participation Agreement for their review and approval, the statement reads.

According to the statement, Applied Underwriters will now seek the remainder of unpaid premiums owed on the workers comp policies, which comes to $232,022.46. The company also said it reserves the right to challenge the commissioners decision.

With what he considers a victory from the commissioner in hand, an attorney for the insured said on Tuesday he has filed a federal class action lawsuit in the Eastern District of California against Applied Underwriters and its affiliate entities.

At the end of the day the question is: what are they going to return to the employer and what does the employer owe to the California Insurance Co., said Craig E. Farmer, of Farmer, Smith & Lane, LLP. The firm represents the insured, Shasta Linen Co.

Farmer noted that Jones opinion is that that process used by EquityComp is unlawful. To me what that means is that these people engaged in an unfair business practices and that has to be stopped, he said.

Farmers law firm late Tuesday issued a press release announcing the class action lawsuit, which in part states:

The complaint alleges on behalf of Shasta Linen Company and all those similarly situated that these defendants engaged in fraud and unfair, deceptive, and unlawful business practices in violation of Californias unfair competition law, Business & Professions Code section 17200, et seq.

The suit seeks damages, including punitive damages, as well as restitution and disgorgement of all monetary sums collected by the defendants pursuant to this illegal scheme.

It was not immediately clear how many companies are part of the EquityComp program, but Applied Underwriters said it has significant writings under the program throughout the country.

The statement from Applied Underwriters also addressed the class action suit.

Not only is the case without merit, we doubt Shasta Linen is the appropriate lead plaintiff, and also doubt that a majority of our clients who are enjoying the benefits of our EquityComp product will join and risk losing the benefit of their EquityComp participation, or end up owing more money under the guaranteed cost workers compensation policies similar to Shasta Linens current situation, the statement reads.

Shasta Linen is a privately-held, family-owned California corporation in the linen rental business that employs roughly 63 full-time workers. Shasta Linens customers include restaurants, hotels, surgery centers and doctors offices.

Shasta Linens attorneys contend that CIC violated the insurance code and that the reinsurance participation agreement entered into constitutes a collateral agreement under the California Code of Regulations, which require such agreements to be first filed with the insurance commissioner.

They also argued workers comp policy does not specify the basis and rates upon which the final premium was to be determined and paid.

The attorneys asked the commissioner to bar CIC from enforcing the terms of EquityComp and the reinsurance agreement, including the mandatory arbitration provisions, and that the commissioner order CIC to return all money contributed to Shasta Linens cell account  except for those used to settle workers comp claims  as well as all fees collected and disbursed to Applied Underwriters and Applied Underwriters Captive Risk Assurance Co.

CIC in its arguments before the commissioner asserted that Jones lacks jurisdiction over Shasta Linens appeal, and that the reinsurance agreement is not a collateral agreement because it does not change the cost of insurance under the policy, nor does it impact insurance rates, and it doesnt modify the terms of the policy issued to Shasta Linen.

The Applied Underwriters statement from Wednesday noted that the companys EquityComp product has provided clients with flexible risk retention options for more than 15 years, and that it has significant writings through EquityComp throughout the United States.

Without exposing the client to excessive amounts of risk, EquityComp allows businesses to participate in a long term risk sharing arrangement across multiple years and including multiple states, the statement reads. For businesses that run good operations and work to control the occurrence and cost of workers compensation claims, EquityComp is an excellent choice. Customer satisfaction in EquityComp is reflected by the continued growth in the product in last the last decade and a year-over-year renewal retention rate approaching 90 percent.

The dispute dates back to Aug. 29, 2014, when Shasta Linen filed an appeal with the CDI Administrative Hearing Bureau in response to CIC decision rejecting Shasta Linens complaint and request for action.

On Sept. 5, 2014, the matter was assigned to Administrative Law Judge Kristin L. Rosi, who at one point during a series of hearings ordered CIC to turn over certain information, such as copies of CICs annual statements, the total number of EquityComp participants, a list of complaints filed regarding the program and an EquityComp loss ratio sensitivity analysis for 2013 and 2014.

Rosi also ordered copies of Shasta Linens corporate tax returns, the total amounts paid in workers comp premium and losses for policy years 2013 and 2014, and the most recent experience rating modification.

Sacramento Valley Insurance Services served as Shasta Linens insurance broker and secured the companys workers comp insurance through a guaranteed-cost policy. From 2002 through 2008, Shasta Linens experience modification ranged from 66 percent to 80 percent, demonstrating that Shasta Linen had a more favorable loss experience than other businesses in their industry, Jones decision states.

Executives for the agency could not be immediately located to comment for this story.

When Shasta Linen anticipated an increase in its experience modification factor in 2009 due to several earlier claims, the broker presented the EquityComp program as an alternative to the traditional guaranteed-cost policy along with quotes from other insurers offering guaranteed-cost policies.

A quote from Zenith Insurance Co. was returned with an annual premium of $446,541, and Insurance Company of the West quoted an annual premium of $301,091, according to the decision, which states that the broker placed EquityComp on the line below ICW, and attached a program proposal and rate quote from Applied Underwriters EquityComp program.

The EquityComp rate quote indicated a minimum single-year premium of $107,541 and a maximum premium of $322,623, the decision states. The broker did not present Shasta Linen with a copy of the Reinsurance Participation Agreement nor had the broker read the RPA at the time he presented the program.

Shasta Linen agreed to enroll in the three-year EquityComp program after reviewing the premium and claim amount tables in Applied Underwriters marketing materials, according to the decision.

In the final month of the three-year program, December 2012, Shasta Linen received a monthly bill for $77,593.66, the decision states. By that time, Shasta Linen had already paid $934,466.60 in EquityComp costs over the three years and its captive cell help roughly $200,000, according to the decision.

One month after the program ended and the worker s comp policy expired, Shasta Linen received a bill for an additional $166,619.75. According to the decision, Shasta Linen has not paid the additional money owed because it argues that such payments exceed the guaranteed-cost policys quoted amount, they were not fully explained and are inconsistent with the guaranteed-cost policy, the decision states.

The decision states that CIC continues to compound interest on the unpaid charges each month.

Topics Lawsuits California Agencies Workers' Compensation Underwriting Reinsurance
Join ITR and TMF Groups tax experts at 2pm CET (1pm GMT) on November 15 as they discuss how finance leaders are increasingly faced with doing more with less, and how CFOs should adapt.
Some Jerk Stole $70,000-Worth Of Wisconsin Cheese Off A Trailer

By Rachel Cromidas in News on Jan 27, 2016 9:43PM



A selection of great American artisan cheese. Photo by Erika Kubick

Wisconsin police are on high alert after someone stole $70,000 worth of cheese from a 54-foot long trailer last Friday. Police in Germantown, Wisconsin are searching for the robbers.

Police recovered a semi-tractor used to cart off the trailer full of cheese, and the trailer, empty of its delicious golden cargo, Friday morning. The trailer was taken from D&G Transportation, at N118W18574 Bunsen Drive, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Punsters at Jezebel are hoping some gouda citizens will help ricotta the criminals and solve the queso, and we admire their optimism. They also have some suggestions for what the cheese bandits can do with their haul, from swimming in a pool of it like Scrooge McDuck to carving some ambitious cheese art. But, being as we are a bit closer to the Wisconsin border than them, and more learned in the ancient traditions of Wisconsin cheese, we know exactly what these Monterey jackers plan to do: live out their days gorging on fried cheese curds.
E arrivata lufficialita, dopo una giornata di voci rincorrenti: per il triennio 2018-2021 sara lemittente Sky a godere dei diritti televisivi per trasmettere, in esclusiva assoluta, le partite non solo delle prossime edizioni dellEuropa League ma anche quelle della massima competizione continentale, la Champions. Un pacchetto da favola per il quale la tv satellitare di Rupert Murdoch avrebbe messo sul piatto unofferta giudicata piu congrua di quella presentata dalla concorrente Mediaset. A dare lannuncio dellaffare concluso e stata la stessa Sky che, in un comunicato, ha spiegato che il nuovo format sviluppato dalla UEFA ci consentira di portare ai nostri abbonati un prodotto rivoluzionario per il calcio europeo in Italia. Per la prima volta la UEFA Champions League e la UEFA Europa League saranno insieme in unesclusiva offerta integrata, che permettera agli appassionati di seguire fino a 7 squadre italiane, mai cosi tante prima dora, impegnate nelle sfide con i migliori club europei.

Sky: Rafforzata leadership

Anche il livello tecnico dellofferta sara altissimo ed e ancora lemittente a rivelare i dettagli: Continueremo a fare innovazione, trasmettendo le partite piu importanti anche in 4K HDR. Questofferta senza precedenti rafforza la posizione di Sky come leader della programmazione sportiva in Italia ed e anche un altro passo importante di sostegno al calcio italiano. Insomma, per i prossimi tre anni, sara unegemonia totale quella della satellitare sul calcio europeo, avendo mantenuto il pacchetto Europa League (gia sua esclusiva) e affiancandola a quello ancor piu appetibile della Champions League ad appannaggio Mediaset dal 2015 al 2018.

Sfida Serie A

Ora la sfida fra i due colossi delle trasmissioni sportive si spostera sui diritti televisivi della prossima Serie A, per la quale si e ancora in attesa di un nuovo bando che, come annunciato dal commissario della Lega, Carlo Tavecchio, avra le stesse caratteristiche del precedente, andato pero a vuoto: solo una delle offerte presentate per i cinque pacchetti, infatti, superava la soglia minima richiesta dalla base dasta. Niente di fatto, quindi, anche in virtu della stessa Mediaset che, in sostanza, ha disertato il bando (giudicato inaccettabile) non presentando alcuna offerta. La battaglia, anche in questo caso, sara sulle esclusive: del resto, dopo essersi vista scivolare via una componente importante come la Champions, sulla Serie A Mediaset dara sicuramente battaglia.
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When Barack Obama took Presidential office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) continued its credit crisis slump and fell to 7,949.09, the lowest inaugural performance (as measured by percentage drop) for the Dow since its creation in 1896. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq took similar hits on inauguration day, dropping 5.3% and 5.8%, respectively. Fourth-quarter earnings reports were on track to drop more than 20% compared to the same quarter the previous year.

Bank stocks had been hit prior to Obama taking office, and the selling continued the day he was sworn in, with the banking sector in general declining by 30%. Bank of America Corporation (BAC) dropped 29%, and Citigroup Inc. (C) sank 20%.

While the economic backslide may have seemed to indicate that the American public was less than confident in their newly elected president, the dip was, instead, widely credited to a continued lack of confidence in the failing economy left behind by the previous administration. The market found a bottom in March 2009 and entered one of the longest bull markets in history.

Obama was inaugurated for the second time on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013; since it was a Sunday, the market was closed. It was also closed on Monday, Jan 21, for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. However, on Tuesday, Jan. 22, the DJIA opened at 13,649.70 and rose 0.46% by the end of the session. If correlation always meant causation, traders might conclude that market participants were more confident in Obama the second time around.

A Presidential Comparison

Investors should be very careful about drawing conclusions from the market's performance on Election or Inauguration Day because there isn't enough data. For example, the maximum number of inauguration days for any president is two (with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt), which is too small for statistical analysis. Each inauguration is also accompanied by unique economic circumstances that make drawing conclusions even more difficult. It seems more likely that incoming presidents deserve neither credit nor blame for what happens the day they are sworn in.

While President Obama's first inauguration was a bad day for the market, the first year of a presidential administration or even the first term might be a better measuring stick for economic performance. From that perspective, President Donald Trump's first year was the market's best since President Jimmy Carter's, while President Clinton's first term experienced the best DJIA performance.

In the case of President George W. Bush, the stock market was down over 8% his first year in office and lost 3.7% by the end of his first term. However, the dotcom bust that helped inflict that damage had little to do with the president's economic agenda. What can be said for sure is that the historic lows during George W. Bush's administration and the shaky beginnings of Obama's first few months in office were correlated with widespread economic crises and an economy in flux.

Despite its inauspicious economic beginnings, the Obama administration was correlated with an impressive upswing in the stock market. By the end of Obama's second term on Jan. 20, 2017, the DJIA had more than recovered from its January 2009 low point.
Production of semiconductors is an exceedingly competitive business, with top players in the industry dictating much of technological progress for the world at large. A few companies own their foundries and brand chips with their own company namethink Intel (INTC)while others custom-build chips for their clients. This group includes one of the largest and most successful companies you've probably never even heard ofTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM). Keep reading to find out more about this company and how it makes a profit.

Key Takeaways Taiwan Semiconductor is one of Taiwan's biggest companies and one of the world's largest semiconductor companies.

Semiconductor companies design and manufacture microchips that are used in communication devices, radios, televisions, medical equipment, as well as video games.

Taiwan Semiconductor makes its money by selling chips to clients all over the world.

Apple accounts for about one-fifth of TSMC's annual revenue and North America is TSMC's largest market.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing: A Brief Overview

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is one of Taiwan's largest companies and among the world's leading semiconductor companies. Founded in 1987, the company is headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, with shares trading on both the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). As of the company's 2021 annual report, it had earned $477 billion in revenue and employed more than 65,000 people.

If you're interested in investing in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, shares trade on both the Taiwan Stock Exchange and in U.S. dollars on the NYSE.

But what does a semiconductor company like TSMC do? The semiconductor industry plays a very important role in the production of electronic devices. Companies in this field research, design, and manufacture microchips that are used in communication devices, radios, televisions, medical equipment, as well as video games. So that tablet you play your games on and the phone you use to text contain technology that produced by semiconductor companies like TSMC.

According to the company's website, TSMC produces more than 12,300 products for 535 clients worldwide. In fact, the company produces chips for some of the largest names in the world. Among many others, the company designs and manufactures chips for Apple (AAPL), for whom TSMC is the only company to make A-series chips. According to Appleinsider, Apple is TSMCs largest client, generating revenue that is estimated to earn more than $17 billion by the end of 2022, an increase of more than 23% over 2021. Other top TSMC semiconductor clients include Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, OmniVision Technology, Qualcomm, and Renesas Electronics.

In Your Ear and Elsewhere

Apple is just one of the hundreds of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing customers, which can be divided into three classesintegrated device manufacturers, systems companies, and fabless companies. That last one refers to firms that design and sell chips, but farm out the business of actually making the things to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing itself.

Even some giants of semiconductor production, such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), have switched from the so-called pure play model to farming out the production of chips to companies like TSMC. As a pure-play foundry, it never actually uses its own brand name on its products. Thats much to the delight of its customers, Apple, and the 534 others.

Taiwan Semiconductor sells chips to clients all over the developed world. Geopolitics does make an appearance in the companys breakdown of its revenue by region. The companys biggest market, by far, is in North America, which brings in more than 65% of the company's revenue.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing officially lists its country of headquarters as the Republic of Chinaa seemingly trivial distinction, yet one sure to anger forces in what the company refers to as Mainland China, where Taiwan is officially considered nothing more than a rogue province to one day be readmitted whether by agreement or force. As a practical matter for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing investors, the distinction means that company revenue originating in China refers to both the free and communist varieties.

Smaller Is Bigger, Up to a Point

The industry standard is 28-nanometer system-on-chip production, in terms of volumeand dollar volumeof chips sold. Along with its derivatives, 28-nanometer makes up nearly 11% of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing revenue. The firms 28-nanometer processes are used in ultra-low-power applications, which include central processing units, graphic processors, smart phones, tablets, automotive, and consumer electronics.

The imagination of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturings customers, and to a lesser extent, the laws of physics, is the only limit. As astonishing as 28-nanometer process technology might soundmore than 35,000 gates across your thumbnailits rapidly supplanted by ever-smaller nodes. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing has to not merely compete, but lead the charge as technology advances, to survive.

TSMC is the archetype of a company that exploits Moores Law. This is the observation that transistors halve in size or more accurately, double in performance per area every two years. If were nearing the theoretical limits of Moores Law, no one bothered to tell Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The company has everything from 90nm tech to developing 5nm tech. The company hopes to have 3nm fabs ready at the end of 2022, possibly spending a reported $7 billion on the technology.

The Bottom Line

Few industries are more capital-intensive than chip manufacturing. Even with the prohibitive outlays required in getting a fabrication plant up and running, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing still manages to enjoy high-profit margins.
A charitable private foundation set up by a family can provide welcome benefits to both the charities it supports and the family members who direct the foundations activities. However, private family foundations are subject to complex tax regulations, which, if violated, can result in steep penalties and even revocation of the foundations tax-exempt status.

If you are interested in forming a family foundation or are already part of one, it is good to be aware of these Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules. Below are the basics about family foundations along with some practices that may incur problems with the IRS.

Key Takeaways Establishing a family foundation can be a great way to increase your philanthropy and reduce your taxes.

Family foundations, however, can be abused for the purpose of sheltering taxes and so are highly scrutinized by the IRS.

Understanding the rules and potential red flags for running a family foundation can reduce your chances of an audit and keep your charitable giving above board.

How Does a Private Family Foundation Work?

The most common form of a private family foundation is a nonprofit organization (NPO) that is tax exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). The foundation can be established by an individual, a family, or a private business to support one or more charitable activities.

The foundation is funded by its creator(s), who receive tax deductions for their contributions. These funds form the foundations endowment, which is invested in ways that will generate income to finance the foundations charities into the future. The foundation must annually distribute at least 5% of its assets toward its charitable endeavor. A foundation generally distributes funds as grants to individuals or other charities, while a public charity funds specific charitable endeavors directly.

5% The percentage of its assets that a private foundation must pay out annually to further its charitable goals

Benefits of Family Foundations

The benefits of family foundations are greater than those of simple charitable cash gifts. Here are half a dozen of them.

Because family members retain control of the foundation, there is sustained continuity of charitable giving. The foundation can receive tax-deductible contributions from third parties that can fund the program beyond the familys own contributions. Managing the foundation can unite family members while instilling in them a spirit of community service. Having a family member act as administrator keeps management responsibilities within the family and administrative costs low. The foundation creates a visible and lasting public legacy for the family. Establishing a family foundation is less expensive and requires a smaller endowment than many people would think.

Potential Stumbling Blocks

One of the greatest difficulties in managing a family foundation might be trying to unravel the complicated rules that the IRS sets for them. These rules are meant to avert potential conflicts of interest that could arise when family members work together closely to manage their foundations assets.

Not being aware of the rules could get you into deep trouble with the IRS, which has an entire section on its website devoted to private foundations. If you are interested in establishing a private family foundation, its also important to seek professional guidancefor example, from a tax lawyer who specializes in foundations.

Family Foundation IRS Rules

The list below is not exhaustive but includes some of the more common sticking points of section 501(c)(3) with regard to family foundations. View these topics as red flags if youre involved in a foundation or thinking about creating one.

Understand the terms "self-dealing" and "disqualified persons"

Central to all of the regulations below is a concept that prohibits self-dealing between a foundation and its disqualified persons. Here is what you need to know about these terms: Although self-dealing can take many forms, it basically refers to an individual who benefits from a transaction. And although the IRSs definition of a disqualified person is in itself complicated, it generally means anyone who is a substantial contributor to the foundation; the foundations managers, officers, and family members; and any affiliated corporations and their family members.

Hiring family members/disqualified persons: A family foundation is permitted to employ family members and other disqualified persons. However, their roles must be deemed as reasonable and necessary to the foundations purpose.

A family foundation is permitted to employ family members and other disqualified persons. However, their roles must be deemed as reasonable and necessary to the foundations purpose. Offering compensation: Pay for disqualified persons should be in line with comparable data for similar positions. If the IRS believes that youre paying a disqualified person more than the going rate for a job, then that person would be penalized 25% of the excess monetary benefit they received.

Pay for disqualified persons should be in line with comparable data for similar positions. If the IRS believes that youre paying a disqualified person more than the going rate for a job, then that person would be penalized 25% of the excess monetary benefit they received. Selling or leasing: The IRS does not permit sales or leases between foundations and their disqualified persons. For example, if a family member were to sell the foundation a piece of office equipment that is worth $10,000 but receives only $1,000 for it, then the IRS still would consider it an act of self-dealing. The same would apply if a disqualified person were to rent the foundation a car for only $100 per month when the actual price for renting the same car is $1,000 per month.

The IRS does not permit sales or leases between foundations and their disqualified persons. For example, if a family member were to sell the foundation a piece of office equipment that is worth $10,000 but receives only $1,000 for it, then the IRS still would consider it an act of self-dealing. The same would apply if a disqualified person were to rent the foundation a car for only $100 per month when the actual price for renting the same car is $1,000 per month. Granting loans: Extending loans or credit either way between the foundation and a disqualified person is considered an act of self-dealing by the IRS, even if the loan or credit agreement is fully secured and made via fair-market terms.

Extending loans or credit either way between the foundation and a disqualified person is considered an act of self-dealing by the IRS, even if the loan or credit agreement is fully secured and made via fair-market terms. Providing facilities, goods, and services: The IRS does not allow these kinds of transactions between a foundation and its disqualified persons in exchange for pay. However, if these transactions are freely given, then they are allowed, as long as the disqualified person does not benefit.

The IRS does not allow these kinds of transactions between a foundation and its disqualified persons in exchange for pay. However, if these transactions are freely given, then they are allowed, as long as the disqualified person does not benefit. Traveling: Bringing disqualified persons on a trip for foundation business and having the foundation pay for their travel costs is generally an act of self-dealing. However, this doesnt include providing reasonable and necessary lodging and meals to a foundation manager.

The Bottom Line

A family foundation can be an excellent way to achieve long-term charitable objectives while enjoying the zeal of giving and creating a lasting legacy for your family. However, if not done correctly, a family foundation can be an all-consuming, frustrating, and costly enterprise. Perhaps it would be helpful to remember that once you have donated to a family foundation, its no longer your moneythere are new rules of the game.



What Is a Private Family Foundation? A private family foundation is a charitable organization set up and controlled by a family to promote specific philanthropic causes. It is funded by an endowment, which is invested to generate operating funds, and it usually has nonprofit status under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

How Does a Private Foundation Distribute Funds? A private foundation gives grants of money to individuals or organizations that pursue its philanthropic goals. This differs from a public charity, which directly funds its charitable pursuits.

Can a Private Family Foundation Employ Family Members? Yes. However, their compensation must not be excessive, meaning that it must be in line with what others are being paid in similar positions, and the jobs must be necessary and reasonable to the foundations purpose.
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Local officials in Beijing vowed to further renovate and protect the city's cultural heritage, in particular the narrow streets or alleys known as hutong, in the downtown area.

Beijing's hutong [File photo]

In the old districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng, which cover 62 square kilometers, some people will be asked to move from one-story hutong houses to avoid further damage to ancient architecture, said Huang Yan, director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning.

Hutong are commonly found in the cities of North China, but they are at risk. Beijing is currently believed to have fewer than 1,000 hutong, most of which are located near the Forbidden City. Only 60 years ago, the number was 3,250.

Huang said the two districts represent the core area of Beijing, and measures will be imposed to safeguard the historic treasure.

"Dongcheng and Xicheng are where the offices of the country's top leadership are located. Meanwhile, there are plenty of world heritage sites such as the Forbidden City. The importance of protecting all that is self-evident," she said.

"On average more than 100,000 people visit the Forbidden City during the National Day holidays. The visits put pressure on the protection of cultural relics," Huang said, adding that hutong should be renovated and protected from human damage.

Beijing's legislators have scrutinized the enforcement of the regulation on cultural heritage protection, Du Deyin, chairman of the Beijing People's Congress Standing Committee, said in his annual report on Monday.

"The Congress focused on the implementation of protection plans and how the management of cultural heritages worked," Du told deputies.

Wang Shaofeng, head of the Xicheng district government, said the area has 182 cultural relics, many of which were built as far back as the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

Hutong are key for local authorities to safeguard, Wang said.

The densely populated district of Xicheng has 1.28 million residents in its 57 square kilometers of land. "The most efficient way is to decrease the local population to reduce the possibility of causing harm to the heritage," Wang said.

"Each community has been required to report the status of its cultural heritage, especially hutong, and any actions to damage the heritage will be punished," Wang said.
Press Note

IPU missions to push for progress on MPs human rights cases

Geneva, 27 January 2016

Colombian Senator Ivan Cepeda Castro is among the MPs whose situation is giving cause for concern. IPU

The Inter-Parliamentary Unions (IPU) Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians will carry out several human rights missions in the coming months to push for progress on cases involving the abuses of the human rights of MPs.

In a range of decisions adopted by the IPU Committee during a three-day meeting on cases concerning a group of 40 MPs, priority has been given to missions to Cambodia, the Maldives and Venezuela.

A mission to Cambodia in mid-February will investigate an increasing number of cases, including last years attacks on MPs Kong Sophea and Nhay Chamreoun and the legality of new action taken against opposition leader, Sam Rainsy.

In the Maldives, the Committee will examine what the authorities are doing to follow up on allegations concerning threats and attacks against MPs and to better understand developments in the case concerning the murder of an MP, Afrasheem Ali in 2012.

A mission to Venezuela will investigate a case where three MPs have been prevented from taking their parliamentary seat, as well as other long-standing cases.

The IPU Committee will also continue to engage the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on IPU cases in the region. It also reiterated its commitment to carry out missions to Belarus, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and Lebanon.

The Committee has urged authorities in the DR Congo to allow former MP Pierre Jacques Chalupa to travel abroad to receive proper medical care and to release Diomi Ndongala. The former MP was sentenced in 2014 for sexual offences in a case marred by irregularities. A possible IPU mission to Kinshasa would include a prison visit to also ascertain Ndongolas state of health.

The IPU Committee, which is currently investigating cases concerning more than 270 MPs globally, also adopted decisions on cases from Colombia, Niger, Palestine, Rwanda and Turkey.

The Committee has called for legal reforms and urgent action to address concerns over freedom of expression and association related to anti-terrorist laws in a case of nine Turkish MPs prosecuted for destabilizing or overthrowing the constitutional order. With one of the MPs, Engin Alan, having been cleared and given compensation, the Committee trusted that justice would be rendered promptly and fairly in the remaining cases.

In Colombia, there was concern that the political career of Ivan Cepeda Castro - one of five MPs who had received death threats - might come to an end due to disciplinary proceedings which the Committee sincerely hoped would be dropped.

The Committee also expressed concern about the parliamentary procedure followed to allow for the arrest of two MPs in Niger. It was disturbed by the circumstances under which former Speaker of Parliament and current presidential candidate Amadou Hama was arrested and detained upon returning to the country from self-imposed exile. The Committee called on the Niger authorities to ensure full respect for due process in his case and decided to send an observer to attend his trial.

There were concerns over the arrest and detention of Palestinian MPs and the lack of progress in shedding light on the case of Rwandan MP Leonard Hitimana, who disappeared 13 years ago and is feared dead. The Committee asked for specific information on what action has been taken to shed light on this case.

During a three-day meeting in Geneva, the Committee elected a new President, Bangladeshi MP Fazle Karim Chowdhury, and a Vice-President, Margret Kiener-Nellen of Switzerland.

A unique mechanism in the world, the IPU Committee works to address alleged violations of parliamentarians human rights and to seek redress. Cases range from harassment and unlawful exclusion from office, to imprisonment, torture and murder.

About IPU The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) is the global organization of national parliaments. It works to safeguard peace and drives positive democratic change through political dialogue and concrete action.
Shanghai needs to improve information security in an increasingly digitized world by establishing a comprehensive online identification recognition and protection system, a lawmaker said yesterday during the annual session of the Shanghai People's Congress.

"It will be much safer and convenient," said Hu Chuanping, chief of the Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, which is responsible for online security.

Transacting business online, Hu said, is increasingly risky "so it is necessary and urgent to set up an e-ID system."

The proposed system, which is much more stringent than the current name registration requirement on some websites, is being examined by experts, Hu said, adding that the technology necessary to make the system possible is in place.

Vice Mayor Zhou Bo, who was present yesterday to hear SPC deputies' proposals, said Shanghai is in need of better information security management to facilitate the city's plan to develop various "Internet Plus" industries. "The 'Internet Plus' strategy, or the combination of Internet with some traditional industries like manufacturing, finance, commerce or tourism, is key to the city's growth in the next five years," Zhou said.

"We have to pave the way or finish the 'online infrastructure construction' like the establishment of a secure online environment to support such a strategy."

According to official data, telecommunications fraud has been on the rise in recent years, increasing by around 40 percent annually.
Social media giant Facebook have announced the construction of a data center in Clonee, Co. Meath, that will create 2,000 temporary construction jobs for Ireland.

The $220 million (200 million) data center is also expected to create 150 long-term positions for the Irish job pool once the center is in operation.

The is Facebooks sixth data center worldwide and the companys second in Europe, after Lulea in Sweden. The Irish site will be modeled after this first European center.

The 31,000 sq.m facility was initially granted planning permission by Meath County Council in July 2015 but appeals made by local residents to An Bord Pleanala (Irelands planning board) meant the site was only officially granted permission last October a final decision made by Facebook earlier this week.

Read more: The Irish town that was deemed too offensive for Facebook.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement via his own Facebook page stating that the company were happy to continue their relationship with Ireland and further their investment in Europe. Dublin has played host to Facebooks international headquarter since 2009.

Were glad to be investing in Ireland, to become a part of the Clonee community, and to continue building the massive infrastructure that connects our global community, Zuckerberg said in his post.

I'm proud to share that Facebook's sixth data center is now under construction in Clonee, Ireland. This will be our... Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on De Domhnaigh, 24 Eanair 2016

He also said that the center would be one of the most advanced and energy efficient data centers in the world, taking advantage of Irelands wind energy to run 100 per cent on renewable energy.

The company aims to power 50 percent of their worldwide infrastructure with renewable energy by the end of 2018.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, data centers are currently one of the largest and fastest growing consumers of electricity in the United States. In 2013, they consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, equal to that consumed by 34 large coal-fired power plants.

Clonee will be packed full of cutting-edge technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world, said Tom Furlong, Facebooks VP for site operations.

All the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.

Due to its proximity to the Irish Sea, the cooling process used at the center will need a special filter system to extract salt from the air.

"One interesting engineering detail is that were cooling the facility with outdoor air, but because this is near the Irish Sea well be using an indirect air cooling process to filter the salt from the air," said Zuckerberg.

Following his post, some questioned why the data center could not be built in the US.

Zuckerberg stressed that while they already have four data centers in the US, it is important to establish new centers across the globe closer to the people Facebook are serving.

Internet services connect at the speed of light. That is very fast, but if you live all the way around the world, it might mean introducing 0.1s or 0.2s of lag for every connection made, he wrote.

Since using our services often takes tens or hundreds of requests, putting data centers around the world adds up to a meaningfully better experience over time.

The Irish center will handle data from more than a billion people who use the site globally.

The construction work on the greenfield site is set to commence by the end of this year and is scheduled to be completed by 2018 at the latest.

Read more: The most annoying things Irish people do on Facebook.
Guinness is attempting to become more popular in Indonesia, where alcohol is mostly frowned up by the predominantly Muslim population.

The company has developed non alcoholic Guinness in a bid to win over those who shun alcoholic beverages. Indonesias population is 249 million making it a huge Asian market.

The new non-alcoholic beer is called Guinness Zero and is said to be selling very well. There are no plans, however, to sell it anywhere else.

Read more: Top ten facts about Guinness

The Guinness move comes after after the Indonesian government banned the sale of beer in convenience stores from April 2015 and other small stores. Guinness will continue to sell its regular brew in large supermarkets and restaurants, and advertise the Guinness label in mini markets.

According to Graeme Harlow, managing director of Diageo, Guinness Zero  marketed with the tagline bold taste, zero alcohol  is also aimed at customers of the regular Guinness beer. For example, men looking for a masculine drink while avoiding alcohol in a society where drinking is often taboo, Harlow added.

Guinness Zero ABV was launched in September. Guinness is planning a new facility to produce the drink locally, according to the Financial Times.

Do you think non-alcoholic Guinness would make it in America and Ireland? Let us know in our comment section below.

Read more: This Guinness Ice Cream Float is out of this world (RECIPE)
The crisis in Catholicism apparently has one source: women. According to Cardinal Raymond Burke, since the 1960s women have feminized the church and discouraged manly men from participating in clerical life.

Burke, 66, the firebrand conservative who was recently demoted by Pope Francis to the ceremonial post as patron of the Order of Malta, pointed to the introduction of altar girls as an example.

Serving mass is a manly job argues the Irish American Cardinal, and so the participation of women and girls in the daily life of the church has had a chilling effect that has led to a drop in morale and priestly vocations.

"Young boys don't want to do things with girls. It's just natural," Burke, a Wisconsin native with Tipperary roots, told a group called The New Emangelization (a conservative organization that exists to put the man back in evangelization).

"It requires a certain manly discipline to serve as an altar boy in service at the side of priest, and most priests have their first deep experiences of the liturgy as altar boys.

"If we are not training young men as altar boys, giving them an experience of serving God in the liturgy, we should not be surprised that vocations have fallen dramatically," he said.

So its not the international abuse crisis that has most led men to reconsider joining the church, its girl cooties. And feminism, of course.

The radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized, said the Cardinal, a member of one of the oldest and most enduring mens groups on earth.

Apart from the priest, the sanctuary has become full of women. The activities in the parish and even the liturgy have been influenced by women and have become so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved."

Not only do boys not want to share altar time with the girls, they resent how much better girls do their jobs apparently.

"The girls were also very good at altar service. So many boys drifted away over time. I want to emphasize that the practice of having exclusively boys as altar servers has nothing to do with inequality of women in the Church."

There you go again girls, breaking into places where you dont belong and doing a better job at it. Have you no shame?

Actually, what you ladies did wasnt just invasive it was terrible, as Burke underlines.

There was a period of time when men who were 'feminized' and confused about their own sexual identity had entered the priesthood; sadly some of these disordered men sexually abused minors; a terrible tragedy for which the Church mourns."

There you have it, it was the feminists with their feminizing that was the real engine of the molestation crisis. Im sure that youre reading this and having an Aha! moment. Who could disagree?

Burke, it should be emphasized, is not calling for complementary roles to be performed by both sexes in the life of the church, comporting to their sex. Hes simply calling for a removal of all female influence, because it leads men astray and tarnishes or ruins things.

No wonder Pope Francis thought hed be better off sent to pasture rather than pastoring.
Irelands recent cold winters are nothing compared to the ninth century snowfall which sparked a famine

As Francis Ludlow, leading historical climatologist at Yale University, explained in a documentary for Irish state television RTE, a waist deep snowfall in 822 sparked starvation across the land. The documentary, presented by Cork native John Creedon, told how Ireland experienced extreme winters as far back as the 800s. Ludlow presented his findings based on the medieval history manuscript, the Annals of Ulster written from the early 400s to 1504.

As he told the Irish Examiner at the time, It recorded weather extremes. In the year 818, it says sneachta mor, a great snow.

In translation, it reads that in 818 there was abnormal ice and much snow. It described how the River Boyne was frozen and lakes were frozen and you could walk across them on foot.

It is identifying for us a major cold spell in the winter of 818.

The prolonged cold spell had a devastating effect on the Irish population.

By 825, we have the text reporting conditions of widespread famine and scarcity and various diseases affecting, it says, particularly the old and the young.

This is effectively the outcome of the hardship of the previous years. These people would have been much more exposed to the severe weather and they let you know in no uncertain terms.

They often describe not just the cattle dying but wild birds and wild deer. Most of their stored grain would have gone towards sowing the next years crop.

If they were forced to eat very much of that in the first year, then they were faced with having less grain to sow for the next year. It can often just delay the inevitable and delay the onset of scarcity.

Ludlow also explained how the weather extremes would have had a very different effect in the 820s compared with the 21st century.

Presenter Creedon said: Our weather has always been changeable. Its funny. We have a wet summer and we think of spoiled holidays but in the 800s if they had a wet summer, they would have famine and starvation the following year. We take the weather for granted.

Gerard Fleming, a meteorologist with RTE, explained in the documentary how Ireland would be as cold as Siberia without the Gulf Stream which comes across from Florida.

He said: Were pretty far north, 52, 53, 54 degrees north, and weve no right to get the temperatures we get at that latitude, except for the fact that we have this big warm ocean to the west and south of us.

With the Gulf Stream in particular the water temperatures around us are the key to our temperature and our rainfall. If you look at a place like Irkutsk in Siberia which is just about the same latitude as Dublin, they would be getting down to minus 30 to minus 35 degrees Celsius in the middle of winter.

* Originally published in 2014.
EasyJet says fewer people are flying after the terror attacks in Paris and the suspected bombing of a Russian airliner in Eygpt.

Both Paris and Sharm el Sheikh have been important destinations for the airline, but it will not now fly to Sharm until the end of May at the earliest. It said both events had dented its revenues at the end of 2015.
The banking inquiry's final report will be published later - with criticism for the European Central Bank for saddling the Irish people with huge levels of debt on two occasions.

The financial regulator will also come under criticism for not using the powers available to keep a check on our banks.

It has taken years of setting it up, thousands of hours of work and hearings, a reduced report and extended deadlines but the final report of the banking inquiry will be published this afternoon.

The report will say that while the IMF supported the burning of bondholders and the Attorney General had even examined doing so, the ECB blocked the move saying there would be no bailout in November 2010, and that the ECB stopped it again in March 2011 after the new Government examined the option.

The report will find that the ECB position inappropriately placed significant levels of banking debt on the Irish people.

Also mentioned will be the financial regulator which the inquiry has said had sufficient powers but did not use them in an intrusive enough manner.

On the infamous bank guarantee the report will find the Central Bank had measures in place for banks to open without it and that there was inadequate information available to decision makers on the night.

Before the report is published one member of the inquiry - Joe Higgins - who has not signed off on the report, will hold a press conference to present his own conclusions
Gardai investigating the murder of Kenneth O'Brien are renewing their appeal for witnesses.

It is after DNA analysis last night confirmed that body parts found in the canal at Sallins in Co Kildare belonged to the 33-year-old Dubliner.

Gardai are appealing to anyone who may have seen anything suspicious along the Grand Canal in the area to contact them.

The latest find follows the initial discovery, over a week ago, of Mr O'Brien's partial remains in the canal at Ardclough.

Gardai are continuing to search for the scene of the 33-year-old's murder.

They are urging the owners of premises in Kildare and Dublin to check if equipment or rooms have been disturbed.
The HSE has fined the countrys acute hospitals over 3.7m for breaching waiting list targets for the last five months of 2015.

University Hospital Galway was hit with the largest fine by the HSE.
Pregnant women - or those planning to become pregnant - are being asked to take extra precautions and consider avoiding any travel to countries affected by the Zika virus.

The disease has been linked to a birth defect affecting babies brain development.

Meanwhile a case of Zika been confirmed in Denmark in a patient who had recently travelled to South America.

Relatively little is known about the Zika virus, as it was fairly rare until 2013.

This outbreak has spread to more than 20 countries in South and Central America, after first emerging in Brazil where it is been linked to an increase in incidence of a birth defect.

Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity College in Dublin, Luke O'Neill said: This is transmitted by mosquitos and it is pretty benign actually, you get a bit of a flu, you are laid up for maybe a week and so on.

But the trouble is if it infects women there is evidence that it causes a deformation, and the babies are born with smaller heads.

There's no vaccine or treatment and Zika's symptoms are generally mild, with four out of five people unaware that they have caught it.

Here, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Health Protection Surveillance Centre have issued guidance to Irish people travelling abroad.

Professor O'Neill says pregnant women or those planning a pregnancy should consider postponing any trips to affected areas: The advice is and the advice in America is dont travel to South America at the moment if pregnant.

Meanwhile a Danish man who tested positive for Zika after a trip to Mexico and Brazil is expected to recover, and doctors there say there is no risk of the disease spreading.
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Premier Li Keqiang held a symposium to solicit opinions on the draft of the annual government work report and the countrys 13th Five-Year Plan.

Premier Li Keqiang held a symposium to solicit opinions on the draft of the annual government work report and the countrys 13th Five-Year Plan.

Participants included leaders of non-Communist political parties, officials of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and prominent figures without party affiliation.

Wan Exiang, leader of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang made proposals on the promotion of law-based governance and using hi-tech to modernize agriculture.

Leaders of other non-Communist parties made suggestions on people-oriented urbanization, reform of the medical system, international cooperation in production capacity and innovation, and the utilization of urban underground space, among others.

Wang Qinmin, chair of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, said more importance should be attached to the non-public sector and effective private investment.

Chen Zhangliang, a representative for those without party affiliation, talked about mass entrepreneurship, innovation and social services.

Li said their input would be treated seriously.
A huge number of high level executives from across the aviation complex were in Dublin to network, do business and debate the fortunes of the enormous industry in which they operate.

This is a useful opportunity to assess whether or not Ireland is doing enough to retain and further grow its reputation as a base for such a sophisticated part of the global finance sector.

A few eye-watering numbers are indicative of the size of this prize;

(1) in 2015 over $120bn of new commercial aircraft were delivered worldwide;

(2) leasing accounts for about 45% of all aircraft being delivered to airlines;

(3) 50% of the global lessor set are based in Ireland, and;

(4) it is projected that over $120bn of aircraft will be supplied by manufacturers in each of the next ten years, creating a large market in which lessors can grow and expand.

The leasing companies are in a constant state of dynamic development.

Each of them operates a fleet which is regularly moving between airline customers.

All have large order books with manufacturers that ensure further growth and expansion.

An intense period of corporate activity has ensued over the last five years, including mergers, acquisitions and IPOs with a lot more planned for 2016 and beyond.

Amid this hyper-finance activity Ireland has played a cool but powerful hand in forging a key role in supporting and growing the air finance market.

Continuous efforts are underway to broaden out the sophisticated network of bilateral tax and ownership treaties that offer unparalleled assurance for aircraft owners that their assets can be accessed in the event of a customer crisis.

Ireland has emerged from the global push against tax havens as a location where legitimate low-tax strategies are validated.

One of these is Aercap. Its fleet is no less than 1,300 aircraft and another 460 are on order.

Its asset base is valued at $43bn.

After transferring a large amount of the fleet it acquired when buying US based ILFC in 2014 it moved the administration of those planes to Dublin.

As importantly it is now moving its leadership team to a brand new landmark office in Dublin city.

Another global air finance leader  GECAS  has also recently migrated a key element of its management to Dublin and Shannon.

Yet another interesting entity in this context is Avolon.

It was recently acquired by the Chinese conglomerate Bohai.

Avolons CEO is spending time in Hong Kong as part of that transaction but he and Bohai have affirmed Ireland as the headquarters for its aircraft leasing unit.

This, too, is an indicator that despite various changes in ownership, and lobbies by other jurisdictions to attract the leasing industry, Ireland maintains a strong and vibrant role in the business.

Other major lessors that have expressed an interest in tapping public equity markets for finance are reported to include CIT (which has important assets in Ireland) and ACG.

Both of these are profitable components of larger financial services companies and both could create value for their owners by being separately listed. However, any IPO will have to navigate the choppy waters that financial markets, including aviation, have entered.

Given its global exposure and the newsflow since year-end it is no surprise that the aircraft leasing sector is being challenged for 2016.

The share prices of the four listed lessors in New York have suffered heavily since January 1.

This reflects investor worries about the exposure of lessors to weakening economies and currencies in the developing world.

It is also reflective of concerns that funding costs for aircraft lessors will tighten.

This year will pose a challenge to the leasing sector which prides itself on an ability to ride out economic and aviation cycles while providing consistent positive returns for investors.

Ireland, as a stable and tax efficient base populated with senior air finance professionals, will play an important role in that debate as the year unfolds.

Joe Gill is director of Corporate broking with Goodbody Stockbrokers. His views are personal.
John McDonnell, Labours finance spokesperson, wrote to George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, asking if he personally signed off on the tax settlement as a row over the deal intensified.

McDonnell said questions remain unanswered over Google parent Alphabets agreement to pay 130m (171.9 m) in tax, an amount Labour called derisory.

His letter, sent yesterday, also asked if any members of Osbornes private office met with Google or UK tax authorities before the arrangement was made public last week.

This deal with Google raises a number of important issues about the tax treatment of large companies in the UK, McDonnell said in the letter, which he chose to make public.

When times are tough it is more important than ever that everyone pays  and is seen to pay  their fair share.

Osbornes financial secretary David Gauke defended the governments position in an unscheduled parliamentary debate on Monday and denied the UK is giving Google and other multinationals special treatment.

The debate, which was called by Labour, failed to answer lawmakers doubts over the deal, McDonnell said.

Further questions were yesterday prompted by reports in the Times of London that France is seeking a much larger tax payment from Google.

The report claimed that French officials have aggressively pursued the company for more than 500m.

Camerons office rejected suggestions the settlement was too small. Spokesman Christian Cubitt told reporters the prime minister and the chancellor were of the same mind on this.

The tax agency is satisfied, he said.

The settlement they have got in this particular case is an acceptable one in light of their litigation and settlement strategy.

The agreement also drew criticism from within Osbornes Conservative Party.

London mayor Boris Johnson said it was absurd to attack Google over the settlement because you might as well blame a shark for eating seals.

Johnson instead criticised the government for not extracting enough money, saying, in an article for The Telegraph on Monday, that the fault in the whole affair lies with our national arrangements  our own system for not getting a fair whack from the tech giants.

Bloomberg with additional reporting by Irish Examiner staff
In what must have been a painstaking process, the boys and their teacher from the Cork city school released a stop frame video entitled Lego 1916 The Movie on YouTube yesterday - and we must say its a fantastic effort!

The sets the students put together are excellent and they even voice the video themselves.
French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll said the government would also provide an additional 500m in cash advances, Reuters reports.

Livestock farmers have been blocking roads in several parts of Brittany, in north-western France, with trailers, tractors and piles of mud for over a week in protest against low prices.
Jobs Minister Richard Bruton and Health Minister Leo Varadkar, who announced the new national hub at Government Buildings in Dublin yesterday, described it as a win-win for business and the health service.

Director of the Demonstrator Health Innovation Hub at UCC, Dr Colman Casey, said he was delighted the Government had decided to scale the project up to national level.

Direct financial support is being provided by Enterprise Ireland and in-kind support is being provided by the Health Service Executive with staff seconded from the health authority.

A consortium led by UCC and which included Cork Institute of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, and the National University of Ireland Galway, was appointed to the hub following a competitive process.

Dr Casey, who is administrative director for research and industrial liaison at UCCs College of Medicine and Health, said a new director would be appointed to guide the hub over the next five years.

The microbiologist said his day job meant that he came across a lot of people involved in research in small companies.

We acted at the integrating point between the company and the healthcare system, a role that allowed us to gain access to very good test beds, he said.

Dr Casey said being linked to the new clinical research network meant work could be completed very efficiently.

Companies that the hub helped to sell their technology abroad include Lincor Solutions in Cork, which tested bedside screens in the new respiratory ward at Cork University Hospital.

Helix Health, based in Dublin, developed an electronic prescribing system with two GPs and seven pharmacies in Blackpool, Cork.
According to Supt Con Cadogan, who is in charge of policing the Gurranabraher Garda District, which includes a large part of the northside of the city as well as Blarney and Ballincollig, gardai carried out test purchases at 13 off-licences between last June and December and found that six of them readily sold alcohol to an underage person.

The minors were accompanied by a plainclothes detective on the operation and the breaches of the law were described by the senior garda as quite frightening.

He said a number of prosecutions were pending as a result of the garda investigation. Chief superintendents Gerard Dillane (Cork North Garda Division) and Tom Hayes (West Cork Garda Division) said it seemed that off-licences in the city were more likely to sell to minors than their counterparts in the county.

Chief Supt Dillane told a meeting of the Cork county joint policing committee in County Hall that test purchases in rural areas did not show nearly as many breaches. He said it was probably down to local off-licence owners personally knowing those who were coming into them, their families, and their ages.

Joint policing committee member Labour councillor Cathal Rasmussen asked the gardai, in future, to provide the forum with statistics for the amount of alcohol they had confiscated from minors, saying that underage drinking is a huge problem in his town of Cobh.

Chief Supt Hayes said he would compile the figures.

Fianna Fail councillor Daithi O Donnabhain said there was a similar with underage drinking problem in Ballincollig and apart from the antisocial aspect the tidy towns group were blue in the face from having to constantly remove large amounts of cans and broken beer bottles from the regional park.

Fine Gael TD David Stanton said he hoped the Government would be able to set minimum pricing on alcohol which would make it more difficult for minors to purchase drink.

Independent councillor Tim Collins drew the wrath of joint policing committee colleagues when he suggested drink-driving laws were too stringent. He said he knew a town in North Cork where there were once 32 pubs but were now six.

While he said he would not condone people driving with excessive amounts of alcohol, he knew of people who could drive quite sensibly with two or three pints and never had an accident.

Theres no need for gardai to raid pubs in my area as you wont catch anyone in them, he said.

Fine Gael TD Jerry Buttimer attacked his comments and Fine Gael councillor Kevin Murphy joined in, telling Mr Collins: There might be people who can drive with that many pints, but lets be quite clear about it, its illegal.

Chief Supt Dillane said the number of people detained for suspected drink driving in the Cork, Kerry, and Limerick areas was up 2% on last year and the most common offenders were in their 40s and 50s. The majority were men.
The Cork Education and Training Board (CETB) announced its intention yesterday to apply for patronage of the new eight-classroom primary school which has been earmarked by the Department of Education for Ballincollig, and which is due to open in 2017.

Efforts are under way to secure a site for temporary accommodation as well as a site for the permanent school building.

Cork ETBs announcement comes a week after Gaelscoileanna Teo, the national organisation which supports the development of Irish-medium schools, and which is already supporting an application by An Foras Patrunachta  Irelands largest patron of Irish-medium schools  held an information meeting in the town about their bid to have the new school designated as an Irish-medium multidenominational school.

Ballincollig has a recently built 600-pupil gaelscoil and a second level gaelcholaiste which is an Irish-language unit within the towns 1,500-pupil Cholaiste Choilm secondary school.

CETB is the patron of the second level schools. However, the gaelscoil and the two second-level schools are struggling to provide places for the sheer numbers of pupils applying for places.

CETB said yesterday that following the departments announcement that it intends to provide a new primary level school in the town, it hopes to establish it as a non-denominational community national school to meet the demands of the towns growing population and the over-subscription to the existing schools.

CETB is also co-patron with the Diocese of Cork and Ross in Ballincollig Community School, of Community National Schools in Carrigtwohill and Mallow, and of 25 post-primary and colleges across the county.

CETB chief executive, Ted Owens, said they will engage over the coming months in a public information campaign in Ballincollig to outline its patronage plans.

The proposed CETB patronage benefits to Ballincolligs community would include a proven track record for the provision of state-funded effective, accountable and high-quality education which it already provides in several schools across Cork, he said.

We feel sure the communities of Ballincollig and its hinterland will recognise and appreciate our considerable experience in education, particularly since the Cork Board has been one of the first ETBs outside of Dublin to introduce the community national school model, with Scoil Aonghusa in Mallow opening in 2014, and Scoil Chliodhna, Carrigtwohill, which opened in 2015.

The CorkETB is responsible for 25 post-primary schools and colleges, the Cork ETB School of Music, Music Generation Cork City, the Cork Training Centre in Bishopstown, and three of the largest PLC colleges in the country  Cork College of Commerce, St Johns Central College, and Colaiste Stiofain Naofa.

The board is also responsible for youth services, including Youthreach, projects for disadvantaged youth, young peoples facilities and services funds, and grants for youth initiatives.
Governor Philip Lane also agreed to consider a special credit system for homebuyers which would take into account their track record in paying rent when applying for a mortgage.

Mr Lanes comments came as the Central Bank signalled the economy will weather the turmoil rocking international stock markets and continue to post very strong growth over the next two years.

But appearing at the Oireachtas Finance Committee, Mr Lane was quizzed about fanciful promises being put out at election time, given the likelihood of an international recession. Is it not a dangerous game to be playing? asked People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd-Barrett.

The governor acknowledged there were emerging risks about economies in Brazil and China, and said the banks role was to protect the financial system if bad events happen. He added: Equally in terms of governments and manifestos, I think its a good question to ask, what if youre wrong? If it turns out the world goes back into recession, which is not the main forecast, you cant rule it out, what are your strategies then? I agree, excessive forecasts on the best guesses is incomplete, you need to have a risk plan as well.

Mr Lane also agreed to a request by Fianna Fails Michael McGrath to review later this year how homebuyers mortgage applications are assessed, based on their track record paying rent.

Meanwhile, the Central Bank has signalled that the Irish economy will avoid global market storms and instead experience continued growth.

Ahead of the start of the election campaign, the forecasts will be closely watched by politicians as they suggest that a new Government can expect the exceptional flow of tax revenues to continue.

In its most positive outlook since the country exited the international bailout at the end of 2013, the Central Bank projects the economy will grow 4.8% and 4.4% in 2016 and 2017, respectively.

It said that the outlook was benevolent despite investors fears about the effects a slowdown of the Chinese economy could have across the world.

The favourable winds driving the Irish economy including the weakened euro boosting exports, low oil prices, and the increase in jobs and household spending are set to prevail for some time, the bank said.

It forecasts pay increases will average 2.5% this year and in 2017, helping to boost consumer spending across the economy.

News: 2

Business: 17
Some 13m has been set aside to deliver 65 social homes on a publicly-owned landbank in Cork City which has lain vacant since 2007.

The city council said it will advertise its Part 8 plans for the controversial Deanrock site in Togher next month, with construction due to begin in October.

The site, cleared in 2007 following the demolition of eyesore flats, has been the subject of controversy since 2011.

Efforts to sell it on the open market collapsed three times amid controversy over the tender process, and subsequent proposals to develop a supermarket on a portion of the site.

Against the backdrop of a threat of legal action from a developer, which could have seen the city facing damages of up to 15m, the site was withdrawn from the open market. But the new social housing plan emerged at Mondays council meeting.

Local councillor Fergal Dennehy (FF) welcomed news that councillors would have now a say in the development of the site. He said he was particularly pleased that talks are ongoing about the provision of a community facility on the site.

This is a welcome development compared to where we were two years ago, he said. But the devil is in the detail. If we can deliver something positive, something we can sell to the local community, I think it will benefit everyone.

The Deanrock site is one of several social housing schemes earmarked for six city council-owned landbanks which have the potential to deliver up to 350 units, councillors were told.

Building work on up to 150 units  including the 65 on the Deanrock site  could be underway by the end of the year. In a report presented at Mondays council meeting, officials said six significant sites in council ownership are suitable for social housing. The council said it also plans to advertise a Part 8 planning process next month for the development of 40 social housing units on Gerald Griffin St, with construction earmarked to start in September.

An approved housing body is expected to be involved in the delivery of a further 39 units on a site on Thomas Davis St, with work due to start in November.

Plans to develop 125 units on Boherboy Rd and units on Nashs Boreen are being considered for delivery using a social housing public-private partnership.

Yesterdays funding announcement will also see 4.7m being earmarked for the delivery of 26 units in Passage West, 6.5m for 28 units in the Castletreasure area of Douglas, and a further 7.3m for dozens more units in Ballincollig.

Fine Gael TDs Jerry Buttimer and Michael Creed said the new funding will help address the chronic housing shortage.

New housing units are needed in Cork, with the large demand for homes, and its great to see that the councils are now progressing plans to build these new homes, Mr Buttimer said.

But opposition politicians said the housing projects, while welcome, were a drop in the ocean, with the housing waiting list in Cork City alone standing at over 6,000 eligible applicants.
The minister, Dara Murphy, said he would stress to Anthony Gardner, Americas highest-ranking diplomat in the EU, the need for the principles of fair trade and commerce to be upheld, as the US department of transportation (DoT) continues assessing an application from Norwegian Air International (NAI), a subsidiary of low-cost giant Norwegian, for a foreign-carrier permit.

NAI says despite an unprecedented two-year delay assessing its application, it is still committed to launching its Cork-to-Boston service in May, and a Cork-to-New York service next year.
An increasing number of Chinese are opting for spending Spring Festival overseas, according to a report by Mafengwo, a major tourist information-sharing website, released on Tuesday.

Tourism destinations around the globe are expected to see nearly 40 percent more Chinese tourists during the Spring Festival holiday that begins on Feb 7, possibly the highest number on record, despite the holiday traditionally being a season for family reunions.

"It's a new fashion to spend Spring Festival abroad traveling instead of gathering with families and relatives,' said Ma Yutao, head of Mafengwo's data center.

"Packages for independent tourists in Asian destinations witnessed a 600 percent increase this year, with Thailand, Japan and South Korea especially popular with Chinese travelers."

A report by Mafengwo shows that nine of the 10 most popular overseas destinations are in Asia, including Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

According to Mafengwo, many choose to go abroad during the Festival as they find the seven-day vacation too precious, while loosened visa requirements for Chinese, more convenient flight connections and preferential policies to ease overseas travel also facilitate the increase.

"Countries like Singapore, Thailand, Japan and Vietnam have a simplified visa application process for Chinese, which will encourage more trips abroad," Ma said.

Chinese outbound tourists also saw an increase in spending, with online booking per capita for overseas independent trips up 30 percent to 6,800 yuan this year, Mafengwo said,

Figures from the China National Tourism Administration reveal that Chinese tourists paid more than 120 million visits overseas in 2015, with 5.18 million of those paid to foreign countries and regions during Spring Festival. That's an increase of 10 percent year-on-year.

"People used to care about the price more, but now they focus more on the quality of the trips," Ma said.
However, it did not receive detailed explanations from the ECB about why those who had invested in Anglo Irish Bank should be repaid by the Irish taxpayer, rather than losing their money as is the usual procedure.

The information is part of the European Court of Auditors report into how the commission managed its role in the austerity programme. It says co-operation between the troika members  the commission, ECB, and IMF  was informal only.

For example, the ECB provided advice but this did not mean it provided the commission and IMF with the details, including its thinking on burden-sharing by senior debt holders in the restructuring of Irish banks.

The auditors noted that since Ireland was dependent on the ECB providing financing of close to 100% of the countrys GDP, it was essential that the ECB did not withdraw it. As a result, the other troika partners accepted no burden-sharing by senior debt holders, the report notes. It adds says the IMF, evaluating the programme when it was finished, suggested there were alternatives but they were not pursued.

Responding to the report, the commission said because the ECB is independent, it could not demand information on its decision on burden-sharing, and accepted the decision since continued ECB financing was essential for Ireland.

Developments since then have justified the choice not to bail in senior bondholders. Irish debt is clearly sustainable, credit default swap spreads are down to the levels of France, Belgium, and Slovakia, Irelands credit rating was upgraded, and Irish banks repaid most of the ECB funding, it said.

The decision also needed to be considered in light of the government giving a blanket guarantee for all bank deposits. The benefits also had to be weighed against the costs in terms of the spillovers to other banks and the litigation risks.

The report is broadly in line with what the Oireachtas banking inquiry was told last year by the commissions economic and financial affairs director general, Marco Buti, that the ECB was forceful on the bondholder issue, that Ireland and the eurozone was in a life-threatening situation, and anything else would have been too risky.

The ECB made this decision for a second time in March 2011 on foot of a government request, strongly supported by the central bank governors of Spain, Italy, France, and Cyprus, which all feared Irelands effect on the euro.

The then secretary general of the Department of Finance, Kevin Cardiff, told the banking inquiry that one of Germanys two ECB governing council members, Axel Weber, issued a statement that same March day favouring the burning of bondholders but was not at the board meeting.

Mr Cardiff, who is now a member of the European Court of Auditors, played no role in the drawing up of the report because of his previous role in the department.

Editorial: 12
The European Court of Auditors also reveals the Troika did not demand the Government privatise any of the States assets, but that this was proposed by the Government at a later stage.

The report found the commission was unprepared for the magnitude of the crisis and as a result its management, especially of the initial stages, was weak. It advised the commission it must improve its procedures to deal with any crisis.

The court said in March 2008 the commission reported no problems with the Irish budget but nine months later the situation changed.

The building and private lending booms in Ireland and the other countries were not spotted by the commission until after they had happened. However, the commission, commenting on the report, said it had warned Ireland and Spain to run a budget surplus and none of the domestic and international institutions or the private sector anticipated the severity of the Irish downturn in 2008. It had warned about overheating housing prices in 2005.

The report said there were differences between the memorandum of understanding signed by the Troika and the Irish authorities, and what had, in fact, been agreed by the European Council, representing the member states.

In Ireland, although the council decisions mentioned no specific conditions with regard to banking surveillance and sales of state assets and privatisation, these conditions appeared in the memorandum of understanding, the report said.

The commission, in its response agreed that privatisation was not part of the council decision and that the programme never included formal conditions to sell state-owned assets.

Over the course of the programme the authorities agreed to identify a number of assets that could be privatised.

In addition they agreed that, in case the Irish authorities decided to privatise, half of the proceeds would be used for growth-enhancing measures. During the course of the programme no privatisation proceeds were accrued,it said.

Frequent changes to some of the programme conditions made it much harder to track a countrys performance. In Irelands case some reforms were gradually diluted as they were replaced by less demanding ones or completely disappeared before they were fully completed.

A failure to comply with conditions was rarely reported, and for Ireland it was confusing with different terms used from largely met, broadly met and partially met without any explanation.

The commission said a programme-monitoring table detailing how Ireland was complying with the various requirements had been attached to the memo and updated.
She recently agreed to spend 4m on the system, which means gardai, customs officials, and other law-enforcement agencies will get alerts in real time after they are put into the system by agencies in the other 27 member states.

Britain, which like Ireland is not yet part of the Schengen border-free area, has been part of the complex internet system for some time.

The country has been limited to receiving alerts only on law enforcement such as stolen cars, fake passports, and missing persons.

However, Ms Fitzgerald said she hoped Ireland would be in a position to receive live alerts, such as those on terrorists, adding that security is now a very important part of the migration issue.

The European Commission has also proposed a border and coast guard for the Schengen countries that would be able to take over the external borders of the Schengen area if the national services of that country were not in a position to control it. However, Ireland would not take part in this proposal.

Ireland will continue to operate the travel-free area with Britain, said Ms Fitzgerald, adding that her department is in discussion on the large number of Pakistani and Bangladeshi men primarily coming from Britain when their visas have expired.

Everyone is entitled to an assessment but that is a concern, said Ms Fitzgerald.

While Ireland is not part of Schengen, the country benefits from it in several ways, including economically.

Therefore, it has a deep interest in maintaining the area and this means dealing better with both the migration and terrorism threats.

Ms Fitzgerald recently visited 170 Syrians who arrived from a UN camp in Lebanon last year.

The first family of 10 arrived last week under the EUs scheme to relieve the pressures from Greece and Italy. Ms Fitzgerald said integration is important.

She said there was a lot of help offered by Irish people and, earlier this month, she met representatives of the Christian and Muslim religions with offers to help people integrate.

She said family reunification is difficult because of the security issue.

However, she said gardai are helping with vetting on the ground before families are being taken to Ireland.

Ms Fitzgerald was attending an informal two-day meeting of justice ministers in Amsterdam where the threat to the continuation of the Schengen area was foremost on the agenda.
The strategy, being developed jointly by the tourism industry and the city and county councils, aims in particular to target increases in visitor numbers from Britain, France, Germany, and North America and, if successful, will create an additional 9,000 full-time and seasonal jobs in the trade. Tourism currently supports around 39,000 jobs in the region.

Details of the plan, Growing Tourism in Cork: A Collective Strategy  were announced at Cork Airport by the Cork Tourism Strategy Taskforce.

The five-year plan aims to increase annual visitor (domestic and international) numbers to the region from 2,275,000 to 2.8m, which would bring in an annual income of around 865m.

The taskforce is comprised of the chiefs executive of both local authorities, together with representatives from Failte Ireland, Tourism Ireland, and a number of local tourism businesses.

Taskforce chairman, Ger OMahoney, said the strategy was developed following extensive research and several rounds of stakeholder engagement to help develop a compelling, authentic tourism proposition for city and county.

He said Cork is the only county in Ireland which benefited from Wild Atlantic Way and Ancient East status and it was the organisations aim to capatilise on this.

The strategy will be delivered through Visit Cork, a new leisure tourism organisation.

Cork currently accounts for 17.5% of all overseas visitors who come to Ireland, and is second only to Dublin in terms of tourist bed nights, said Mr OMahoney.

The visitor research tells us that there are further opportunities for Cork to grow its tourist potential by providing clarity and an awareness of what Cork is and what it has to offer.

City council chief executive Ann Doherty said brand ambassadors would be created and it was hoped to develop unified travel ticketing like Leap or Oyster travel cards and similar models for entry into visitor centres.

Her counterpart in the county, Tim Lucey, said the regions food, scenery and maritime pursuits would be heavily focused on as part of a marketing campaign.

Mr Lucey said if a company came to Cork which would generate 214m annually for the local economy there would be a huge fanfare on its arrival.

Failte Irelands Fiona Buckley said the government has earmarked more than 100m for spending on tourism capital projects over the next six years and Cork is well-placed to benefit from this.

She said work was already going on to market the region with tour operators and at trade fairs.

Mr OMahoney said a key objective of the strategy was to grow Corks visitor numbers by 21.3%. Currently the region gets 825,000 Irish-based visitors and 1.45m foreign visitors.

Im delighted to say that from the outset, this process has had significant public and private sector buy-in and there has been huge support for, and engagement in, the process by a range of stakeholders across the city and county, said Mr OMahoney.
The 71-year-old man, who can not be named for legal reasons, was convicted by a Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury of indecently assaulting his three sons at locations in the city  mainly in the family home  on dates between 1974 and 1986.

The children ranged in ages between six and 15 during the period of abuse.

Judge Catherine Murphy said the offences were particularly heinous having been perpetrated over a protracted period by a father against three innocent and vulnerable sons.

She said the three men did not wish the court to refer to any details in their victim impact statements but said she wished to make it clear that each had suffered profoundly as a result of the offences.

Judge Murphy added that each of the three men had courageously given clear, cogent, and convincing evidence.

She noted the accused man had shown neither regret nor remorse.

She also took into account factors such as the relationship of the man to his victims and the childrens ages at the time of the offences.

The judge imposed sentences totalling six years which she backdated to reflect time in custody.

Detective Garda Shay Woods told Garnet Orange, prosecuting, that the abuse of each of the children started when they went to their fathers bedroom looking for money for treats.

He began by opening the childrens clothes and masturbating the boys.

The abuse progressed over time but ended when the childrens mother made a decision to move the family away.

The accused man has a number of previous convictions but none for sexual offences.

Victim impact statements made by the three complainants were handed into court.

Michael Bowman, defending, said his client had lived a transient lifestyle since his relationship with his wife collapsed.

He said there were no outstanding matters in relation to any other members of the family and he had not come to any further attention in relation to offences of this kind.

Mr Bowman said the accused man was in advanced years and, although he had no particular health issues, serving a sentence would be difficult at his age.
JUST 73 seconds into take off, Space Shuttle Challengers pilot Mike Smith uttered the words, Uh Oh. He was never heard from again.

On January 28, 1986, 30 years ago this month the NASA space shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after take-off. All seven of Challengers crew died, with the tragedy having a major impact in America and throughout the world. Upwards of 17% of the American public watched the launch because of one significant crew member, Christa McAuliffe. McAuliffe was to be the first teacher in space.

Sharon Christa McAuliffe was one of 11,000 applicants competing to be part of the Teacher in Space Program . The idea was to send an ordinary person into space at a time when budgeting for the shuttle programme was being scrutinised by Washington. It was also a opportunity for NASA to show the world the reliability of spaceflight. With this in mind, Christa McAuliffe eagerly posted her application form. McAuliffe had long had an interest in spaceflight and keenly remembered the excitement of the first moonlanding in 1969.

On her application form she wrote, I watched the Space Age being born and would like to participate.

She was selected in the summer of 1984 for the mission two years later and her role on the shuttle was to give lessons to students from space. McAuliffe had an engaging personality which captured the imagination of the American public. The Teacher in Space tag gained NASA much media attention in advance of the launch and so the public relations fall out was even greater than it would have been when the mission crashed into the Atlantic ocean.

On the morning of the launch, family and friends of the flight crew gathered at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida for Challengers 11:38 am launch. Ice covered the launch pad and icicles could be seen hanging from the Launch Tower. Administrative hold-ups and bad weather had already delayed the launch with countdown originally planned for January 22 before it was pushed back . Eventually NASA committed to the 28th of the month.

In little over a minute, television viewers saw a mood of excitement give way to horror as Challenger broke into pieces a little over a minute into take off. As debris fell towards earth the NASA flight controller was heard saying,  Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously at a major malfunction.

President Ronald Reagan later that evening gave an address from the oval office saying weve never lost an astronaut in flight, weve never had a tragedy like this. He ended his address stating Nothing ends here: our hopes and our journey continue. President Reagan then launched the biggest naval rescue in American history.

The Rogers Commission of Enquiry found a technical fault within a seal (the 0-ring) as the main cause of the accident. The commission also blamed NASAs structure as a contributing cause. This was thanks to the diligence of the commissions Richard Feynman who unearthed significant dirt on NASA. Feynman was threatened with his findings being left out of the concluding report. Feynman, who despised corruption, insisted on their conclusion.

Another hero to emerge was an aerospace engineer named Roger Boisjoly, a man who had repeatedly warned NASA to cancel the launch. Boisjoly had major reservations about the 0-rings capacity to operate effectively in cold weather. He was dismissed by his manager, who snorted: When do you want us to launch- next April? Months prior to the launch Boisjoly had sent several memos stating that unless the problem with the 0-ring was addressed, we could be looking at a catastrophe of the highest order with loss of human life. Boisjolys concerns were also dismissed by his co-workers.

Later Boisjoly was later given an award by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his bravery.He continued on to have a successful career in forensic engineering and corporate ethics and died four years ago.

After the Challenger disaster shuttle flights were suspended for three years;. Another tragedy befell US space exploration in 2003 when Space Shuttle Colombia disintegrated on re-entry into the earths atmosphere; all seven crew members died. Every January NASA pauses to remember those who died in the cause of space exploration. A monument to the crew of the ill-fated Challenger crew can be seen at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC.
The film's giant ape was no doubt based and inspired by the hairy half-hominid bigfoot, who was said to inhabit the forests of the Pacific north-west.

Believers claim that bigfoot's ancestors crossed from Asia to north America, when the continents were joined at the shoulder near what is now the Bering Strait.

Alas, there is no such thing as bigfoot. No data other than material thats clearly been fabricated have ever been presented declared Washington State zoologist John Crane.

But in 1935, while King Kong was terrifying audiences worldwide, anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald found some fossilised bones and teeth in a traditional Chinese medicine shop. They belonged to an ape-like creature but the enormous molars were not those of any known primate.

He named their owner Gigantopithecus, from the Greek gigas, a giant, and pithekos, an ape. King Kong, apparently, was not an entirely fictional character; he had actually existed.

Since Koenigswalds day, more teeth and bones have come to light in south-east Asia, where they are ground to powder and sold by traditional healers.

Research has confirmed that Gigantopithecus was indeed a member of the great ape family, the one to which we ourselves belong.

There were at least three species, some of whose members were 3m tall and weighed more than a quarter of a tonne. Their arms could span almost 4m. Though not nearly as big as the one seen climbing the Empire State building to rescue the heroine in the greatest horror film of all time, the great ape must have been an impressive sight.

Whether he moved on all fours, or was bipedal, isnt known but walking upright, its been suggested, may have placed excessive stress on knees and ankles.

Despite his fearsome appearance, Gigantopithecus was probably as docile a creature as his surviving relatives, the gorilla and orang-utan, are today. The teeth and jaws are those of a plant eater.

However, why did the big ape become extinct when those other large Asian herbivores, the rhinos and elephants, survived? Primates have huge brains; surely the great ape had the ingenuity to save himself? The question has intrigued scientists.

Now, Herve Bocherens and colleagues at the University of Tubingen think they have the answer. In an article in Live Science, they claim that Gigantopithecus perished when the climate changed 100,000 years ago. He had become too big for his boots.

Isotopes of carbon are formed when cosmic rays bombard the upper atmosphere. During photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Grasses take in more of the carbon-13 isotope than do the leaves of trees.

This isotope doesnt decay with time. The amounts of it present in their tooth enamel, compared to the ubiquitous carbon-12, indicate that the ancient apes were forest dwellers eating leaves rather than grasses.

Nor did they survive on bamboo as giant pandas do today. The isotope ratios found in the teeth of other animals of their time, show that the habitat back then had both forests and open grasslands.

When the climate became cooler and dryer, the forests shrank. The apes, it seems, failed to make the transition from leaf to grass feeding. They had over-stretched themselves; there was insufficient foot to sustain them.

Like those of the giant Irish deer the mastodons and mammoths, which would go to the wall thousands of years later, the lifestyle of the huge primates was no longer viable. They had fallen victim to their grandiose tendencies.

Orang-utans, distant relatives of the giant apes, faced a similar challenge. They too were restricted to a single habitat type but managed to survive adverse climate changes because they had slower metabolism and lower food demands.
In 1930s Germany, Nazi Party leaders understood the power of mass communication to disseminate hatred and anti-Semitism. Propaganda, Hitler wrote, is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.

In their rise to power, the Nazis deployed sophisticated modern communications technologies, including radio and film, to win the battle of ideas  and thus to shape public opinion and behaviour  among a well-educated population in a fledgling democracy.

The Nazis are gone but propaganda lives on, and its potential is deadlier than ever. As we commemorate the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau today, extremist groups around the globe wield new technologies to incite hatred and perpetrate new mass killings and genocides.

Thats why Unesco has decided to base this years International Day of Commemoration on the theme From Words to Genocide: Anti-Semitic Propaganda and the Holocaust.

There are things we might wish to forget, and there are things we must never forget #HolocaustMemorialDay pic.twitter.com/9kKy87MJ5A  Colm O'Gorman  (@Colmogorman) January 24, 2016

Unesco and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum are joining forces to present, at Unesco headquarters, the exhibit State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.

During the early 1930s, a period of severe economic distress, many Germans were willing to overlook the Nazis anti-Semitism, because they were attracted to other aspects of the partys message.

The Nazis knew this: In the run-up to the 1932 election, the party relied on the emerging field of public opinion research to probe the needs, hopes, and fears of blue- and white-collar workers, the middle class, women, farmers, and youth.

Accordingly, Nazi propagandists toned down anti-Semitic rhetoric and presented the party as the only political force capable of creating jobs and putting food on German tables. Likewise, they won over newly enfranchised women voters by portraying themselves as the defender of traditional German womanhood and the family.

Hitlers extreme nationalism resonated with many audiences, including young people who wanted to restore Germanys lost territories and military might. Rabid anti-Semitism remained at the centre of the Nazi worldview.

As soon as the party came to power, in 1933, it began to implement anti-Jewish policies. The Nazis eliminated alternative sources of information, burning books and arresting journalists as they prepared to advance their goal of establishing a united Aryan Europe.

Especially sobering to reflect how poorly Ireland responded to #refugees at the time #HolocaustMemorialDay pic.twitter.com/TswiPddcNA  Colm O'Gorman  (@Colmogorman) January 24, 2016

In todays interconnected world, individuals and non-state groups motivated by extremist ideologies can use the power of new technologies to shape attitudes and beliefs, and incite violence on a global scale.

Since 2014, IS has disseminated more than 700 propaganda videos, tailored to various audiences, in all major languages, to maximize the reach and impact of its message.

Nearly 50,000 Twitter accounts are propagating these vehicles of hatred, seeking to exploit ignorance, intolerance, and divisions within societies. Young people are being targeted for recruitment. Within the territories it controls, IS persecutes and kills individuals on religious and cultural grounds, with a recent report by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum concluding that the group has committed acts of genocide against the Yazidi minority population under its control.

Another worrisome trend is the increasingly sophisticated use of hate speech directed against minorities and migrants. Violent, exclusionary, and discriminatory rhetoric has returned to Europe  the land of the Holocaust. Extreme nationalists exploit the current refugee crisis, in a context of fear and deadly terrorist attacks, to gain large numbers of supporters.

State of Deception shows us how propaganda can have deadly consequences. The Holocaust began with words, not mass killings. We must remember how the poison of anti-Semitism and racism, projected through mass media and entire political, cultural, and educational systems, led a continent into violence and genocide.

Today, against the new propaganda of hatred, our challenge is to harness the power of new communication technologies to empower pluralism and human dignity for all, to combat anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

This new war for hearts and minds can be won only if we update and upgrade the tools of education, culture, science, and communication. Unesco was created 70 years ago for this purpose, and it leads a global programme for Holocaust education and genocide prevention, working with governments and teachers to instill this history in classrooms.

Bombs and bullets alone cannot defeat political poison. We must also win the battle of ideas. Schools, museums, and the media must help young people develop critical thinking skills.

Intellectuals, artists, and public figures must highlight the danger of indifference toward groups espousing intolerance and exclusion. Political leaders should encourage social integration and mutual understanding. This is how we can pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust  not only to lament the dead, but also to empower the living.
Marcelo Castro said nearly 220,000 members of Brazils armed forces will go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts, according to Rio de Janeiros O Globo newspaper.

It also quoted Mr Castro as saying the government would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

And all major Brazilian dailies quoted Mr Castro as saying the country is badly losing the battle against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever.

The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito, he reportedly said as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.

Worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond.

Repellent has disappeared from many Brazilian pharmacies and prices for the product have tripled or even quadrupled where it is still available in recent weeks since the government announced a suspected link between Zika virus and microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.

Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in 2014.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks over fears about microcephaly.

Both Brazils Zika outbreak and the spike in microcephaly have been concentrated in the poorer north east of the country, though the prosperous south east, where Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are located, is the second hardest-hit region.

Officials in Rio also ramped up their fight against the Aedes aegypti, dispatching a team of fumigators to the Sambadrome, where the citys Carnival parades will take place next month.

Governor Luiz Fernando Pezao was to be on hand for a ceremonial handover of around 30 vehicles to help poor Rio suburbs fight the spread of the mosquito.

Officials have also pledged to redouble mosquito eradication efforts during the Olympics in Rio which are being held in August.
Working as a cancer treatment professional and living with the disease himself, Xu Kecheng, chairman of the Fuda Cancer Hospital, has dealt with the most diverse illnesses ever seen in the world, bringing life and hope to countless desperate families.

Xu Kecheng is awarded by Publicity Department on May 27, 2014.[Photo/Yangcheng Evening News]

Strong and healthy, Xu barely looks like a cancer patient who has undergone five major surgeries. He often jokes about himself being a 10-year-old, implying his rebirth from liver cancer in 2006.

In his personal computer, the 76-year old veteran surgeon kept many photos featuring the development of the Fuda Cancer Hospital, a private cancer treatment center he founded from scratch which has helped over 7,000 patients from over 70 countries and regions.

His personal connection with cancer started in the 1970s when his mother died of the disease only 3 months after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seeing her passing away with great pain, he determined to wage a "war" against the disease.

In 1998, Chen Minzhang, then the Minister of Health and Xu's old friend, suggested that he found a specialized hospital in southern China, and later wrote an inscription for it. However, Chen did not witness its founding as pancreatic cancer took his life not long afterward.

Grieved and distressed from the loss of both his mother and friend, the then 61-year-old gastroenterology specialist founded the Fuda Cancer Hospital with only 20 beds, and has gradually built it into a full-fledged group with 3 branches.

"We have different technology in tackling with the problem," said Xu who helped the hospital find a niche by introducing new systemic therapy combining Cryosurgical Ablation (CSA), Cancer Microvessel Intervention (CMI), and Combined Immunotherapy for Cancer (CIC), or the 3C treatment model which proved a big success for intractable diseases.

The modern Bethune

In March 2006, Sin Chew Daily, the largest Chinese newspaper in Malaysia, reported the story of a 19-year-old girl with a massive tumor on her face. Upon reading the news, Xu immediately traveled there and checked the girl's condition despite his painful hepatectomy procedure which occurred only 2 months before.

He and his team used microvessel intervention therapy five times, and operated cryosurgery on the girl who finally "unmasked" the massive tumor after 4 months of treatment.

News of the successful surgery travelled far thanks to extensive media coverage and Fuda gradually become a beacon of hope for desperate cancer patients worldwide.

In 2008, a sufferer of pancreatic cancer from Denmark, diagnosed with only several months of life, witnessed a drastic decline in cancerous tissues.

In 2010, an Indonesian health minister had his terminal cancer under control and returned to his work post.

In 2011, a Syrian judge had his vicious 20-kilogram tumor removed from his abdomen, which shocked the Arab world.

Foreign patients in Fuda account for almost 70% of the overall total. Xu was awarded the Norman Bethune Medal in 2012 and recognized as a "model of the times" by the Publicity Department of the CPC.

Helping the poor

Only 15 days after his own hepatectomy, Xu, despite great pain, insisted on joining a group consultation of a girl surnamed Jiang who had grown a volleyball-sized tumor that covered her right eye.

In order to find a cure for her illness, Jiang's family even sold their ancestral home. But when they arrived at Fuda, the clinic physician found that they only brought 1,000 yuan. Xu asked the physician to hospitalize the patient, saying, "don't ask them how much money they brought but ask yourself if you can cure the disease."

Xu and his team removed Jiang's massive tumor which weighed 1.5 kilograms without affecting her eyes.

After the 12-year-old girl left the hospital, Xu remained concerned about her education. Having only slightly recovered from his own surgery, the old man took an 8-hour ride to visit Jiang in her hometown, bringing a computer and learning software to her school.

"Whenever he sees poor families during his ward rounds, President Xu can't help but give away some money from his pocket," said a staff member of the hospital. "Once, he gave a patient everything that was in his pocket. It was 5,000 yuan."

Over the years, the hospital has helped over 400 poor patients, reduced or exempted medical charges of over 6 million yuan, and donated 16 million yuan in public welfare.

During the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, the hospital dispatched a team to help with medical relief. It was the only privately sponsored team in Guangdong Province, and donated nearly all the financial resources of the hospital.

Inspired by his good faith, many of Xu's patients choose to study medicine or nursing and even become lifetime volunteers of the hospital after full recovery.

Bribery-free hospital

At Fuda Cancer Hospital, everyone knows the three bottom lines that prohibit all the staff from receiving any illegal payments, kickbacks and other bribes. Xu has stuck to these principles ever since the opening of the hospital and did not offer a green light for bad behavior even to its co-founders.

"Integrity and honesty are essential for private medical services," said Xu Kecheng. "Binding medical treatment with the doctor's own financial interest is nothing less than self-destruction."

Instead, Xu increased the doctors' income and allowances, and explained that "gaining higher pay through better services can eradicate the root causes of gray income."

For countless cancer patients, Xu is regarded as a super-hero bringing life and hope to the desperate. He considers himself as one of them, also struggling against the disease and trying to make every single day count.

After every major surgery, he never waits until he is fully recovered to return to his post. "Since I'm still alive after all this suffering, I try to live my life to the fullest," said Xu.

He pointed out that cancer is a kind of systemic body disorder associated with "diehard" cancerous cells, but with the 3C treatment model, 70% of middle and terminal stage cancer patients can embrace a longer life or even recover from the deadly disease.
The measures, which also include extending family reunification among refugees from one year to three years, are the latest sign that the Nordic welcome for refugees is waning as large numbers flee war in Africa and Middle East for a better life in Europe.

The jewellery bill is the latest attempt by Denmarks minority centre-right government to curb immigration to a country that took in a record 20,000 refugees last year.

Under the bill, refugees could keep possessions amounting to 10,000 Danish crowns (1,350), raised from 3,000 crowns after criticism from human rights organisations.

Valuables of special emotional value such as wedding rings will be exempt.

Most (refugees) have lost everything and yet this legislation appears to say that the few fortunate enough to have survived the trip to Denmark with their few remaining possessions havent lost enough, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said.

The Liberals Party government has just 34 out of 179 seats in parliament and depends on support of right-leaning parties, including the anti-immigration Danish Peoples Party (DF), to pass laws.

During a three-and-a-half hour debate, dissenting voices from small left-wing parties were heard including from Red Green Alliance.

But the bill passed with an overwhelming majority, backed by the main centre-left opposition party Social Democrats, highlighting a shift to the right in Denmarks political landscape thanks to DFs popularity and rising concern over refugee numbers.

Denmark is not the only Nordic country trying to shut its doors to migrants.

Sweden, which took in over 160,000 refugees last year, the most per capita in Europe, has introduced checks on its border to Denmark.

Norway, meanwhile, has been trying to send back refugees who crossed over from Russia.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday that Moscow would not take them back.

Denmark is also not alone in targeting migrants valuables. Switzerland has started taking valuables from asylum seekers over 1,000 Swiss francs (900), the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg valuables above 350, while other southern states have been reported to do the same.
Many of them have spent years on death row, according to Amnesty International.

The London-based group says Iran executed 73 juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2015, including four last year.

Amnestys 110-page report intensifies pressure at a time when Tehran is rebuilding relations with the West, following last years landmark nuclear deal.

The agreement came into force this month, after Iran curbed its nuclear programme.

Crippling international sanctions were lifted, as a result.

On Monday, Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, arrived in Rome at the start of the first European trip by an Iranian president in two decades.

The visit, which will also include stops at the Vatican and France, is expected to lead to a raft of business and trade deals.

Iran is one of the worlds largest users of the death penalty, ranking second behind China in 2014, according to the most recent figures from Amnesty.

Most executions in Iran are for drug smuggling.

The country straddles a major narcotics trafficking route that links opium-producing fields in Afghanistan to Europe.

Amnestys researchers identified the names and locations of 49 juvenile offenders who face the death penalty, though the group notes that actual numbers could be higher.

A 2014 UN report put the number of juvenile offenders at risk of execution at 160.

The majority of the 73 juvenile offenders put to death over the past decade were convicted of murder.

Others were executed for crimes including rape, drugs, and national security offences, such as enmity against God.

The group noted that reforms introduced in 2013 give judges more discretion to take into account juvenile offenders mental maturity and to potentially impose less harsh punishments, and that the Supreme Court has since said juvenile offenders facing execution could have their cases retried.

Additional reforms, introduced last year, require that cases involving juveniles must be heard in special juvenile courts.

Still, Amnesty says more must be done.

Despite some juvenile justice reforms, Iran continues to lag behind the rest of the world, maintaining laws that permit girls as young as nine, and boys as young as 15, to be sentenced to death, Amnesty said.
The actress, most famous for her role in Twilight, was speaking at the Sundance Film Festival, where she was promoting her new movie Certain Women.

Asked for her thoughts on roles for women in the film industry, she told Variety: If youre bored or you feel like theres a lack of something in front of you Instead of sitting around and complaining about that, do something.

Go write something, go do something.

And thats easy for me to say, like  fuck, it is hard to get movies made, its a huge luxury, its like, who gets to just make movies?

But that subject is just like so prevalently everywhere right now, and its boring.

Guys make more money because their movies make more money, she said.

Lets start making more movies. It makes sense.

Variety originally implied that her comments referred to the lack of racial diversity in the film industry rather than gender inequality.

The magazine was forced to issue a correction and an apology after posting the video with a misleading headline, indicating that she found the Oscars diversity controversy boring.

A longer version put her remarks into context, including the interviewers question.

On the question of whether the film industry had made progress on gender equality, Stewart argued that its expanding quickly, on so many levels  despite a historically narrow view.

Stewart has often spoken out about her views on Hollywood and its treatment of women.

During an interview in 2015 with Harpers Bazaar, she called the industry disgustingly sexist.

Its crazy. Its so offensive, its crazy, she said.

In a 2014 interview with The Daily Beast, Stewart said it was a really ridiculous thing to say youre not a feminist.

Last year Stewart said that she would be kind of fascinated by a future reboot of Twilight.

The actress made her name playing Bella Swann in the original 2008 Twilight movie and reprised the role in four sequels released every year until 2012.
Najib was buffeted last year by allegations of graft and mismanagement at the debt-laden state fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), and by a revelation that $681m was deposited into his personal bank account.

But the attorney-general, Mohamed Apandi Ali, said the transfer was a gift from Saudi Arabias royal family, and that no further action needed to be taken.

Opposition party leaders denounced the finding, saying the appointment of the attorney-general by the prime minister, in the midst of the crisis, suggested a conflict of interest.

But analysts said it was a victory for Najib that would allow him to focus on winning the next election, in 2018.

The AGs statement, today, pretty much allows the government to move on ... As far as things are legally concerned, the prime minister is in the clear, said Ibrahim Suffian, director of independent opinion polling firm, Merdeka CentrE.

Apandi told a news conference no criminal offence had been committed by Najib in relation to three investigations submitted by Malaysias anti-graft agency.

I am satisfied with the findings that the funds were not a form of graft or bribery, he said.

There was no reason given as to why the donation was made to PM Najib. That is between him and the Saudi family, he said.

The involvement of the Saudi royal family is an unexpected twist in the saga over the funds transfer and the troubles of 1MDB, whose advisory board Najib chairs.

Najib denied any wrongdoing and said he did not take money for personal gain. His office declined to comment on the attorney-generals findings.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) had earlier said only that the funds were a political donation from an unidentified, Middle Eastern benefactor.

Apandi said $620m was returned to the donor in August 2013, five months after the transfer, because it had not been utilised.

He did not clarify what happened to the remaining $61m, nor why it had taken so long for news of the return of the funds to be released.

Najib, the son of a former prime minister, enjoys the backing of most of the powerful division chiefs in the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) party.

Even his fiercest internal critics, such as influential former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, accept that he cannot be unseated.

Najib now needs to put aside the scandal and build support ahead of the 2018 election, after scraping to a narrow victory in the last polls.
Asia Kerry Presses China on North Korea, South China Sea

The US Secretary of State called Wednesday for China to do more to rein in North Koreas nuclear activities and decrease tensions over the South China Sea.

BEIJING  US Secretary of State John Kerry called Wednesday for China to do more to rein in North Koreas nuclear activities and decrease tensions over disputed parts of the South China Sea.

Wrapping up an eight-day, around-the-world diplomatic mission in Beijing, Kerry hailed US-China cooperation on several issues, including the Iran nuclear deal and climate change, but said consensus on North Korea and the South China Sea remained a work in progress.

Clearly we have several important issues that we need to find the way forward on, Kerry told reporters as he began his meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Kerry called North Korea a major challenge to global security and noted US concerns and activities in the South China Sea.

We have proven when our two countries find common ground and work together, we can make things happen, he said. And it is my hope that today will be constructive and we will find a way forward.

In his opening remarks, Wang mentioned both issues briefly and said he was eager to hear what Kerry had to say. But he offered no hint as to whether China would respond to the entreaties beyond saying he hoped the two nations would be able to deepen our understanding and mutual trust to deepen our strategic cooperation.

The US badly wants China to take a firmer stance in urging North Korea to end its nuclear testing. China is North Koreas main link to the outside world, and American officials say Beijing isnt doing enough to persuade North Korea to stop the tests and return to disarmament talks.

The so-called six-party talks between North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan have been stalled since they were last held in December 2008. Pyongyang has since conducted three nuclear tests, including the latest on Jan. 6, sparking worries the country has made progress in its bomb program.

Kerry, who after meeting with Wang was set to see State Councilor Yang Jiechi and hoped to meet later with President Xi Jinping, also called on China to halt land reclamation and construction in disputed areas of the South China Sea, which have alarmed its smaller neighbors.

Kerry arrived in China from stops in Laos and Cambodia, where he called on the two members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to present a united front in dealing with increasing Chinese assertiveness over the South China Sea claims. His visits to Vientiane and Phnom Penh come ahead of a summit with the leaders of all 10 ASEAN nations that President Barack Obama will host next month in California.

China, which claims sovereignty of much of the territory in the South China Sea, rejects claims from countries like the Philippines and Vietnam and has bristled at US warnings that its activities threaten the freedom of navigation in some of the worlds busiest commercial shipping lanes. Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei also have overlapping claims in the strategically vital sea, through which around $5 trillion in world trade passes each year.

The US says it takes no position on the claims but says developments in the South China Sea are a national security interest. It has urged that the disputes be settled peacefully and that a binding code of conduct be established for the area.

Tensions have been especially high since Beijing transformed seven disputed reefs into islands, where it is now constructing runways and facilities that rival claimants say can be used militarily. China has said it built the islands primarily to foster safe civilian sea travel and fishing.

In response, the US sent a guided-missile destroyer close to one of the Chinese-built islands, called Subi Reef, in October in a challenge to Beijings territorial claims, sparking warnings from China. US officials vowed to continue maneuvers to protect freedom of navigation and overflight.

Recent developments, including Chinas movement of an oil rig into a zone disputed with Vietnam and warnings against Philippines overflight of what it claims to be its territory, have raised those levels of concern. China dismisses the warnings as unwarranted, but has harshly criticized a US-Philippines defense pact that allows American forces, warships and planes to be based temporarily in local military camps.

China says that will escalate tensions and undermine peace and stability in the region, echoing language the United States uses to criticize Chinas actions.
Asia Vietnam Party Retains Key Policymakers, Cabinet Posts Not Guaranteed

Vietnams Communist Party reelected to its central committee key policymakers and incumbent ministers on Tuesday, signaling wholesale changes may not ensue.

HANOI  Vietnams Communist Party re-elected to its central committee key policymakers and ministers of the current government on Tuesday, signaling wholesale changes may not ensue after Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dungs political exit.

The party congress vote also saw re-election to the committee of several politicians considered by experts as allies of Dung, maintaining the possibility of roles in running a fast-growing country that has committed to major trade pacts and economic reforms.

Their inclusion in the new 200-member central committee is no guarantee of cabinet posts, however, which would be decided later this year. Ministers have traditionally come from within the central committee and politburo.

Congress allowed Dung to decline his nomination to the committee on Monday, ending speculation of him contesting a party leadership that has only one candidate, incumbent Nguyen Phu Trong.

Dung was popular among businessmen and known for his decisive approach and his departure has raised questions about reform momentum.

Analysts say Dungs ambition may have been his undoing and his omission from the politburos nominations for four key leadership posts reflected concern among the partys old guard about his growing influence.

His opponents, say experts, accuse his administration of graft and mismanaging state-run firms, including a massive debt default by shipbuilder Vinashin in 2010.

The economy is now in better shape and grew 6.7 percent in 2015, the fastest in five years, with record figures for foreign investment inflows and mergers and acquisitions.

Sixteen of the 28 incumbent ministers, including Dung, were not re-elected, and all but one were over 60, the standard retirement age. Dungs son, Nguyen Thanh Nghi, 39, retained his committee seat, moving from an alternate to a full member.

Others re-elected were Finance Minister Dinh Tien Dung, Transport Minister Dinh La Thang and deputy prime ministers Vu Duc Dam and Pham Binh Minh, who is also foreign minister.

Also included was Nguyen Van Binh, the governor of a central bank praised for restructuring of a banking sector that was until recently engulfed by non-performing loans.

Trinh Nguyen, senior economist at investment bank Natixis, said there was still uncertainty about the economy, even though Trong looked set to remain party boss.

The air over the succession is tense and it is over whether the country will have the leadership required to help the economy reach escape velocity to avoid the middle-income trap, she said in a research note.
Burma 10 Student Activists Face New Charge, a Year After Protest

Rangoon police open a case against students under the controversial Peaceful Assembly Law for organizing education reform demonstrations more than a year ago.

RANGOON  Police in Rangoons Thanlyin Township have opened a case against several students under Burmas controversial protest Law for organizing demonstrations against the countrys National Education Law more than a year ago.

Po Po, one of the student activists, told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that she received a letter from police alleging that she, Min Thway Thit, Ye Min Oo, Tin Tin Khine and six others had staged a protest without permission on Aug. 28, 2014, at Rangoon Eastern University.

The letter said the 10 student activists were being charged accordingly under Article 18 of the Peaceful Assembly Law, which requires anyone wishing to hold a public protest to acquire permission from local authorities prior to the event.

The police summoned us to the Thanlyin Central Police Station for questioning by Jan. 29, Po Po said.

In addition to Article 18, Po Po was charged under articles 143, 145, 147 and 505(b) of Burmas Penal Code by a Kamayut Township court last year for participating in a protest against the excessive use of police force to disperse students during a separate demonstration.

A brutal crackdown by baton-wielding police on peaceful student protesters at an education reform rally in Letpadan, Pegu Division, on March 10 led to the arrest of more than 100 demonstrators.

Fifty-three students and their supporters have since been detained in Pegu Divisions Thayarwaddy Prison awaiting trial, while more than a dozen others have been released on bail.
Burma Burma Still the Third-Most Malnourished Country in Southeast Asia

Despite a rice surplus, malnutrition is high and there are many food insecure areas in the country, says the head of WFP, the UNs food agency.

RANGOON  The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Myanmar is facing a funding shortfall of $51 million to meet all the needs until the end of 2016. The organization, which has a 250-strong staff in the country, says it provided food and cash assistance to 1.2 million people in 2015. This includes emergency food assistance to half a million victims of disasters and conflict.

Myanmar Now chief correspondent Thin Lei Win spoke to Dom Scalpelli, WFP country director in Myanmar, about what the shortfall means, why Myanmar is still food insecure, and what eradicating hunger and malnutrition would mean to the country.

How concerned are you about the funding shortfall? Or is this part of a long-standing problem?

The funding shortfalls are a common part of our business, unfortunately. Its like running a fire department without having the money for the trucks or the petrol in the trucks. Imagine, each time theres a fire, you need to quickly run around the city and ask for money.

This is a bit like what happens when a flood happens in Myanmar or conflicts displaced people in Shan State. If its a new emergency we typically have to run after new money. Its a constant challenge but thats the way the system is at the moment.

What would the shortfall mean in terms of humanitarian assistance?

We have enough food for the internally displaced people (IDP) to support them fully until April. (After that) we start to run into some problems. Were continuously in discussion with traditional and newly emerged donors, so were very hopeful that new contributions would materialize before April.

When there is a funding shortfall, we have to prioritize life-saving activities. This means nutritional support to malnourished babies and children under 5 years old, and pregnant and nursing mothers, assistance to the internally displaced people, especially those that are confined to camps in Kachin, Rakhine and Shan states, and the floods- and landslides-affected people.

Things like the daily school meals programmenutritious snacks to about 230,000 children in primary and pre-schools in very food insecure areasto encourage parents to keep sending their children to school have to be put as a second priority. Same for other development programmes like rehabilitating community infrastructure like dams, fish ponds, roads and bridges, although it helps to prevent or mitigate future shocks and builds resilience.

Myanmar is a food surplus country, and yet a lot of communities, especially in ethnic areas, are food insecure, leading to malnourished people and children. Why is that?

Every country in the world, to some degree or another, has malnourished individuals. Theres a huge issue of education. Even when people have access to food, they wont necessarily always be consuming it the right way. They might not even consume it, they might sell it and eat cheaper foods.

Its true that Myanmar is a rice surplus country and rice is often equated with food. But rice is not in and of itself nutritious in the way it is eaten here. Not many people eat brown rice. It has to be as white as white, and that means all the nourishment is gone.

Also, when youre talking about a place like Chin State, just to get from one town to another could be three hours in a good vehicle. The food may be available but its expensive. We saw this in the floods when a bag of rice costs $100 when it normally should have been $30, which was already quite high. So access is another issue.

Food insecurity is common among disadvantaged populations, like the landless, smallholders and minority ethnic groups, due to limited or inequitable access to land and resources, poor agriculture conditions and low resilience. Most farmers only have access to very small areas of land. This limits their ability to cultivate sufficient amount of staple food or vegetables for their household needs during the whole year. Agriculture conditions are not optimal. In the dry zone, soils are sandy and rainfalls are low. In mountainous areas, arable land is limited and cultivating cycles too short to allow the soil to regenerate.

In ethnic areas, the issues related to access to land and livelihood sources are more important due to movement restrictions and/or insecurity.

What are some of the most food-insecure places in Myanmar and why?

Essentially, border areas and the central dry zone are the most food insecure areas in Myanmar. In Chin, its caused by remoteness and isolation, and lack of job opportunities and arable land. In Rakhine its movement restriction and lack of access to job opportunities and land, for all communities in Rakhine. For the central dry zone, its poor soil and agriculture techniques.

How bad is malnutrition in Myanmar?

Myanmar is still the third-most malnourished country in Southeast Asia after Timor-Leste and Cambodia. Theres no reason for it. Its a country thats rich in resources. Its just access to these resources, education and behavioral issues, and sometimes cultural practices that need to change to promote better nutrition.

The worst malnutrition in Myanmar is in the border with Bangladesh in the northern part of Rakhine State. The average stunting rate for under-5 children in Myanmar is about 34 percent, meaning one in every three children under five years is too short for his age. On the border with Bangladesh that is over 50 percent. [Editors note: Northern Rakhine States Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships are home to the roughly 1 million-strong stateless Rohingya Muslim minority.]

There were many short people in Japan after the [second world war] but now if you go to Tokyo there are lots of tall people. It really only takes a generation to break this cycle. Its doable. Nutrition is not just about food. Its about health and sanitation. In South Asia for example, bad sanitation ultimately leads to bad nutrition. Things like encouraging exclusive breastfeeding in the first 1,000 days of a childs life accompanied by nutritious food after 6 months may not be encouraged everywhere according to various cultures.

Malnutrition can have permanent impacts too, right?

Yes. If a malnourished girlsomeone in a food-insecure area here in Myanmartypically gives birth at too early an age, chances are the child will be malnourished with some sort of deficiency, physical or mental.

If the baby doesnt have enough nutrition for the first 1,000 days then the brain will not develop properly. Think about multiplying that across the whole population. There are studies in countries where the economic loss can be, on average, 11 percent of the GDP just because its babies are malnourished. That cycle can be broken. If, while shes pregnant, she starts to consume adequate, nutritious food and good, clean water etc, and continues to breastfeed exclusively after birth and gives nutritious food afterwards, the child can grow up healthily especially up to the age of two.

But it doesnt stop there. The child has to go to school so they understand the importance of nutrition. And the longer a girl stays in school the more likely shell give birth at a later age, meaning healthier babies, and the more likely shell space her babies.

What can be done to address the problem? What should the new government do?

Weve just started with the government of Myanmar and a few other organizations to produce fortified foods. We want to try and put [that] on to the market and for us to be able to purchase it for our nutrition programmes. I understand Myanmar is the largest per capita rice consumer in the world, with more than 200 kilograms per person per year. If people are consuming that much of a certain food and its fortified, that would go a long way to helping [malnutrition] even though its not the perfect solution.

In areas where fortified rice might not reach for now, we have to make sure the populations have access to nutritious food and theres diversification in agriculture and access to markets. For a country like Myanmar to address this is to make it a priority. You need champions at different levels of society whether politicians, educators, celebrities and sportspeople. Myanmar doesnt produce qualified nutritionists yet. The willpower and the commitment is important.

Myanmar government launched the Zero Hunger Challenge in late 2014. Its a first step. Its a global initiative and theres a draft action plan on nutrition and food security, with clear responsibilities so that by 2025 there wont be any stunted children in Myanmar.

This article first appeared on Myanmar Now.
Burma High-Level Officials Ignoring Rangoon Building Regulations: YCDC Member

The body responsible for regulating construction in Rangoon is toothless to intervene when disputes concern powerful officials, according to a board member.

RANGOON  The municipal body responsible for regulating the construction of high-rise buildings in Burmas business hub is toothless to intervene when disputes are connected to powerful officials, according to a board member.

Khin Hlaing, one of nine members of the Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC), said despite regulations stating that prior permission must be obtained before new structures are built within 33 townships overseen by the committee, some ministries have overlooked the stipulations.

We have found that some buildings constructed on lands owned by some ministries have no YCDC permission. The authorities [connected to] those ministries really need to seek permission, he said during a press conference last week.

Until 2010 under the previous military regime, YCDC was directly managed by the Rangoon mayor. But when the new administration under President Thein Sein assumed power, the municipal body was placed under the Rangoon Division government.

Khin Hlaing said some ministry officials were of the apparent opinion that they need not seek permission from an inferior local body.

The committee member said most of the buildings constructed on lands in Rangoon owned by the military, the port authority, the ministry of health and others departments had failed to seek prior permission from the YCDC.

Even the police department didnt seek permission. They only did so upon the completion of the buildings they managed in Pabedan, Latha and Kyauktada townships, he explained, adding that for high-rise buildings, the regional government gives approvals based on comments from the YCDC.

We have regulations to restrict building heights. Despite our restrictions and objections, there were times we had to nod [approval] when the divisional government gave the green light for high-rises to go ahead. We could do nothing, he said.

Khin Hlaings comments came after an NLD lawmaker submitted an urgent proposal in Parliaments Lower House earlier this month requesting that all high-rise constructions in Rangoon be halted. The proposal resulted in the suspensions of a high-rise in the Rangoon General Hospital compound that was operating without YCDC permission and another 12.5 story construction on University Avenue.

Since 2011, Burmas commercial capital has seen a plethora of high-rise projects initiated across the city in the name of modern development. Many projects, planned or in progress, have attracted criticism from urban planners and architects who contend they would impact the citys already heaving traffic and detract from historic surrounding colonial heritage, among other concerns.

Last year, the government finally canceled a controversial high-rise project near the Shwedagon pagoda after mounting local criticism.

Khin Hlaing admitted that even some YCDC employees had failed to follow the bodys rules and regulations regarding construction in the city.

Given the regional governments interventions on building permissions, some officials here make the most of it for their interests too, he said.

Hla Su Myat, a member of the Myanmar Architects Council and a technical consultant for YCDCs Committee for Quality Control of High Rise Buildings, agreed with Khin Hlaings assessment.

Even in the YCDC, we dont know what department is building what, she said.

Whether its U Thein Sein or Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, anyone who wants to build something has to follow the YCDC regulations. Anyone who fails to do so is violating the law.

The architect suggested that the incoming government should review all ongoing and proposed high-rise projects.

If we cant control them the traffic and building density problems will surely deteriorate. We would all suffer, she said.
Burma Letpadaung Farmers Crop Compensation Demands Denied

Chinese firm Wanbaos Burma subsidiary tells locals in the Letpadaung mine area that it doesnt plan to further compensate them for crops forgone last year.

RANGOON  The Chinese firm Wanbaos Burma subsidiary has reportedly told locals in the Letpadaung mine area that it has no plan to compensate them further, after hundreds of would-be farmers sought payment for crops forgone last year due to the project.

On Tuesday, responsible officials from Wanbao and Sagaing Divisions security and border affairs minister, Col. Kyaw Thant Naing, told the locals that compensation would not be provided in lieu of the money that a 2015 harvest might have yielded, according to Mar Mar Cho, a resident of Tonywa village.

The controversial copper mine is a joint-venture between Myanmar Wanbao Mining Copper Limited and the Burma Army-owned Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd. (UMEHL).

Affected farmers, many of whom have not accepted compensation for their confiscated lands, were given recompense for their crops ranging from between 200,000 kyats (US$154) and 400,000 kyats per acre in December 2014, after Wanbao had fenced off their lands.

Since December of last year, locals have similarly been demanding a years compensation for crops for 2015, as well as jobs. They are seeking payment for the crops that they would otherwise have grown on their land if it had not been confiscated and fenced off.

Around 300 locals met the responsible person of Wanbao and the security and border affairs minister. They said they would not pay compensation because there was no crop grown on the farmlands, Mar Mar Cho told The Irrawaddy.

How can we grow crops while they have forcibly fenced off our farmlands since last year? Since the last rainy season, we asked them to let us grow on our lands. But we could not as they did not allow it, she added. Now, we are arguing with them as they say they will not pay compensation because we did not grow crops.

Asked by The Irrawaddy whether the company planned to offer compensation, Dong Yunfei, a manager of Myanmar Wanbao Mining Copper Limited in Rangoon, told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday that it would depend on the decision of the Burmese government.

We have no plan to give compensation for this. It is the responsibility of the government to handle this. I think the government has not made a decision yet. Only after the government has made a decision, well act on it, Dong Yunfei told The Irrawaddy.

The Letpadaung copper mine is being implemented on more than 7,000 acres of land, and the former owners of two-thirds of seized farmlands in the area have refused to take compensation for the acreage confiscated.

Locals from 10 villages within the copper mine area have been demanding compensation for forgone crops since last December and 65 of them, including Mar Mar Cho, have been charged with Article 18 of Burmas Peaceful Assembly Law.

Long-standing local opposition to the project prompted Wanbao to rejigger its arrangement with the government in 2013, in an attempt to assuage the concerns of affected populations. Under revised terms, the company agreed to pay 51 percent of profits to the Burmese government, and contribute $2 million annually toward programs aimed at addressing environmental concerns posed by the project, as well as 2 percent of net profits toward corporate social responsibility initiatives benefitting affected communities.

Those moves have not been enough to quell lingering resentment, however, a fact tragically highlighted by the death of Khin Win, a woman in her 50s who was killed in December 2014 when police opened fire on farmers who were protesting efforts by Wanbao to fence in their farmland as part of the project.
The city of Beijing will cut the level of PM2.5 in the air by 5 percent this year, and will allocate more funds for projects to reduce emissions, an environmental official said.

To achieve the goal, the capital will inject 16.5 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) into projects to reduce air pollution in 2016, up from 5.9 billion yuan in 2015, said Yu Jianhua, chief engineer of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.

The money will subsidize projects including cutting coal consumption in rural areas, phasing out old vehicles with high emissions and shutting down 300 polluting companies, he said during a news conference at a session of the Beijing's People's Congress on Tuesday.

The average concentration of PM2.5 - particles smaller than 2.5 microns that can damage the lungs - reached 80.6 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing last year, according to the bureau.

The State Council set targets in 2013 for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to improve air quality, saying the capital will cut the average PM2.5 reading to 60 micrograms per cubic meter by 2017.

Annual coal consumption in the capital has been cut from 23 million metric tons in 2012 to 12 million in 2015, which will be further lowered to 10 million by 2017, the bureau said. By then it should account for less than 10 percent of the energy consumption mix.

The capital's cluster of neighboring cities, which are frequently hit by severe smog, have also strengthened their funding of pollution control efforts, especially in reducing coal consumption.

Provinces like Hebei, Henan and Shandong plan to direct more funding to upgrade facilities and technologies, and shut down outdated companies.

Henan province will allocate 1 billion yuan to improve technology in large power plants so they will discharge almost zero pollutants in 2016, said Governor Xie Fuzhan.

Henan failed to reach national air quality standards on half of the days in 2015, and Zhengzhou, its capital, was listed in the top 10 cities with poor air quality in December.

Hebei, the province with the heaviest smog, has faced more financial pressure in lowering coal consumption to 40 million tons by 2017, which would require about 266 billion yuan, said Yin Guangping, deputy head of the provincial environmental protection bureau.

Of that, 63.6 billion yuan will come from the provincial government, which would add huge pressure to the province, he said.
Burma New Vice Chairs Appointed in KIO Reshuffle

The Kachin Independence Organization has reshuffled its senior ranks, with two leading figures in the groups armed wing promoted to senior political posts.

RANGOON  The Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) has reshuffled its senior ranks, with two leading figures in the groups armed wing promoted to senior posts in the political unit.

During a five-day conference in Laiza, Kachin State, which began on Jan. 21, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA)s chief-of-staff Gen Gam Shawng and deputy chief-of-staff Gen Gun Maw were appointed as joint deputy chairs of the KIO.

Lt-Gen NBan La had served in the position. According to San Awng of the Kachin Peace Creation Group, he will now serve as deputy chair of the Kachin Independence Council (KIC), another political arm of the ethnic armed group.

Brig-Gen Hkawn Lum and Brig-Gen Awng Seng La will share the post of deputy chief-of-staff of the KIA, while Gen. Gam Shawng will continue to act as KIA chief-of-staff concurrent with his new position, according to San Awng.

Zawng Hra remains chairman of the KIO.

San Awng said the current reshuffle was the most significant since 2001 and was based on the new political realities in the country, with the National League for Democracy set to form government.

Gen NBan La will be the second key player in the KIO working in the political section. Then Gen Gum Maw will work as a policy maker, he said, adding that the latter official would be able to continue to focus on the peace process.

According to San Awng, Zawng Hra is aging and attends few meetings of the armed group but still makes important decisions.

The KIO has also reportedly formed a committee charged with soliciting advice from the Kachin community on building peace with the incoming government.

The KIA commands between 7,000 to 10,000 troops, according to the Myanmar Peace Monitor, and is one of several ethnic armed groups that did not sign the so-called nationwide ceasefire agreement in mid-October.

The group has been locked in intermittent fighting with the Burma Army since a 17-year ceasefire broke down in June 2011.
Burma Parliament Mulls Proposed Military Ministerial Expansion

Outgoing President Thein Sein proposes bringing immigration under the military-controlled Home Affairs Ministry, an eleventh-hour attempt to extend the reach of the armed forces.

Burmas outgoing President Thein Sein on Tuesday proposed bringing immigration under the authority of the military-controlled Home Affairs Ministry, in an eleventh-hour attempt to extend the reach of the armed forces before transferring power to the newly elected opposition party.

The Union Parliament will discuss the proposal on Wednesday, but is unlikely to decide on the measure before the assembly concludes on Jan. 29, lawmakers said. A new legislature led by Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy (NLD) party will convene on Feb. 1.

The proposal by Thein Sein, himself a former general, was viewed as an attempt to expand the militarys power before the political handover. The countrys armed forces currently control three key ministries: Defense, Border Affairs and Home Affairs.

Thein Seins proposal recommended dissolving the Ministry of Immigration and Population to reduce costs and streamline security and naturalization processes, a lawmaker told The Irrawaddy.

Immigration and border security have become hotly contested issues in recent years, as Burma has grappled with citizenship claims by Rohingya Muslims viewed as immigrants from Bangladesh.

Most members of the stateless minority say they have lived in Burma for generations, though they have been stripped of documentation, ostracized by their neighbors and subjected to discrimination.

Ye Tun, an ethnic Shan lawmaker of the Shan Nationalities Development Party (SNLD), said the assembly is prepared to hear the bill committees report on the proposal but that it is too soon to rush into it.

Suu Kyi has promised a lean and efficient government that would reassess the roles of Burmas 36 ministries, vowing to eliminate redundancies and reduce unnecessary spending.
Burma Shan Advisor Ponders Burmas Top-Down System After Swiss Exposure Trip

Khuensai Jaiyen, an advisor to the Restoration Council of Shan State, discusses his recent trip to Switzerland to study democratic practices and federalism.

Burmas transition is an example of top-down reform and differs from Switzerlands bottom-up federalism, said a senior member of a Shan delegation that recently returned from an exposure trip to Switzerland.

Khuensai Jaiyen, a long-time advisor to the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), the political wing of the Shan State Army-South (SSA-S), told The Irrawaddy that he and his fellows were invited to study democratic systems and federalism in Switzerland by the countrys Foreign Ministry. The visit lasted from January 16-25 and was arranged by the Swiss Embassy in Rangoon.

Their democratic system is not controlled by the top [central government]; it is a bottom-up system. They have a power sharing system among three main governing bodies. Individuals have authority, said Jaiyen of Switzerlands system of autonomous cantons and communes. The Swiss constitution grants a central authority but also protects the right to self-government on local issues.

What is happening in our country is a top-down system, he said of Burma. Financial institutions are controlled by the top. The public is not allowed to participate [in politics].

Jaiyen also found it noteworthy that the Swiss government holds referendums before spending funds from the national budget and then adheres to decisions made by the people.

Asked about the general perception of Burmas reforms in Switzerland, Jaiyen said that the Swiss representatives they met tended to stay neutral on the topic of Burmese politics, and encouraged the Shan delegation to engage in strategies that they deem effective for their situation.

They didnt comment on whether they are good or bad, he said of the reforms. But they offered for us to come and see their practices and apply them if [we think] they would work in Burma.

In December of last year, a delegation from the Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic Karen political and armed group, also went to Switzerland to study federalist systems and practices. Switzerland plans to invite ethnic Kachin and Burma Army representatives to the country in the future, according to Jaiyen.

The RCSS delegation included its chairman, Lt. Gen. Yawd Serk, who also leads the SSA-S, an armed group with an estimated 7,000 troops throughout Shan State. In October of last year, the RCSS/SSA-S became one of eight ethnic armed groups to sign a so-called nationwide ceasefire agreement with Burmas government.

Jaiyen is also the director of the Pyidaungsu Institute, which monitors and advocates within the peace process in Burma. He is a veteran journalist and the founder of a Shan media outlet, the Shan Herald Agency for News.
Burma Thousands Homeless After Demolition in Rangoon

Police and plain-clothed individuals destroy more than 500 houses near an industrial zone in Rangoons Mingaladon Township on Tuesday.

Around 1,500 police and plain-clothed individuals demolished more than 500 households in Kon Ta La Paung village in Rangoons Pyinmabin Industrial Zone on Tuesday morning, alleging that the inhabitants were squatters.

The demolition left more than 2,000 people in Mingaladon Township homeless, local residents told The Irrawaddy.

Uniformed police and people wearing blue hard hatswho appeared to be civiliansdestroyed houses, fences and farms with sticks, swords and bulldozers, while some residents reportedly dismantled their own homes to salvage materials.

The ownership of the land was not immediately clear, but local residents say they have been living there for at least 15 years. According to a Wednesday article in the Myanmar Times, Myanmar Economic Holdings Company Ltd. claims to have a long-term lease on the area.

President U Thein Sein has said that those who have lived in a place for more than five years are not squatters, said Aye Shwe, who spoke to The Irrawaddy after her house was demolished in the raid. But now our houses are destroyed.

Police whose motto is may I help you are also the people who destroyed our homes, she added.

Locals told The Irrawaddy that on Jan. 25 they met with members of the military, representatives from Myanmar Economic Holdings Company Ltd. and the townships general administration department.

According to those who attended the meeting, Rangoon Division Chief Minister Myint Swe instructed police to remove Kon Ta La Paungs houses if the residents failed to move that day.

Weve been living here since some 30 years ago when the land was still full of bushes, said Aung Ko Oo whose house was also demolished. Weve submitted a petition to the ministries, but despite a reply that they have received the petition, they have done nothing.

The Mingaladon Township General Administration Department issued a notice dated Jan. 17, asking those living there to leave along with their belongings. The notice did not specify a deadline for moving, but stated that squats will continue to be removed even under the next government, which is set to take office in early April.

On January 24, around 200 shelters met the same fate in wards 61, 73, 74 and 75 of Rangoons Dagon Seikkan Township, leaving hundreds of people homeless.

Meanwhile, the Kyauktan Township General Administration Department has issued a similar notice to that in Mingaladon, asking that squats be abandoned in several wards and on the construction site of the Japan-backed Thilawa Special Economic Zone.

Translation by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma UEC Chairman, Suu Kyi Discuss Electoral Bodys Work

Burmas outgoing Union Election Commission chair discussed some of the bodys shortcomings in a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi in Naypyidaw on Tuesday.

RANGOON  Burmas outgoing Union Election Commission (UEC) chair discussed some of the bodys shortcomings over the past five years in a meeting with National League for Democracy (NLD) chairwoman Aung San Suu Kyi in Naypyidaw on Tuesday.

The hour-long meeting, which took place at the UECs headquarters in Naypyidaw, was also attended by other electoral officials and NLD central committee members.

We were weak in giving voter education at ward and village level though we did well at township level, UEC chairman Tin Aye said during the dialogue, according to a press release issued by the commission.

He said sub-commissions had also faced various difficulties, including securing office space, and had to seek help from government ministries.

Tin Aye also relayed some of the tasks of the commission going forward.

The voter lists which are saved on the main server need to be updated each six months, the chairman said, adding that he would offer suggestions for the amendment of election laws and by-laws for the new parliament.

UEC director Thein Oo, who attended Mondays meetingthe first confab between Suu Kyi and Tin Aye since the November general electionsaid the NLD leader thanked the commission for facilitating a peaceful vote.

Prior to the poll, many questioned whether the UEC, under the stewardship of Tin Aye, a former general and Union Solidarity and Development Party lawmaker, would be an impartial arbiter.

However, the poll was largely seen as credible, despite shortcomings including voter list errors and a lack of access to polling stations in military cantonments, among others.
[gallery type="slideshow" ids="105358,105359,105360,105361,105362,105363,105364,105365,105366,105367,105368,105369,105371,105372"] KA THIT KHONE VILLAGE, Pegu Division  Once a thriving farming village, Ka Thit Khone today barely resembles its former selfnearly all the agricultural lands that once surrounded its 300 households have disappeared, victim to unrelenting erosion caused by a nearby river. Situated on the banks of the Sittaung River, the village in Pegu Division has come to know land erosion as an unwelcome annual visitor. Since the rainy season last year, four nearby villages have been reclaimed by the river. The erosion is so severe that recently about two-thirds of Ka Thit Khone residents decided to leave the village out of fear that their homes would be the next casualties. Authorities have temporarily relocated nearly 200 displaced households to the middle of a field not far away from the river. When The Irrawaddy visited the area last week, the villagers were stranded in rickety makeshift huts, complaining that the land on which they are now staying is unfit for farming. We are not asking for compensation from the government. But we want safety. Take us away from the river to someplace where we could make a proper living, one villager said.
[By Zhai Haijun/China.org.cn]

A new pattern and trend have appeared in the continuous evolvement of Sino-U.S. ties in recent years.

The new pattern refers to the phenomenon that tensions escalate between the two countries immediately after they have engaged in dialogue, while the new trend refers to the fact that Sino-U.S. relations are mired in a slump.

Dr. David M. Lampton, director of SAIS-China and China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, believes relations are reaching a "tipping point," because "some critical underlying supports for predominantly positive U.S.-China ties" are eroding, and more and more people on both sides, especially the elites, regard the other country as the main challenger or an obstacle to the advancement of their own country.

Dr. Lampton's view is now being shared by an increasing number of scholars. However, they should also understand that the two countries are seeking more opportunities for cooperation on the crucial climate issue, bilateral investment agreement negotiations, negotiations on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, maintaining the security of maritime shipping lane, fighting corruption and responding to cross-border endemic diseases.

Despite mounting friction, China and the U.S. will not start a war against each other, because the cost is too high given their mutual independence, and they can always find other means to safeguard their own interests.

With rising interest in the current international order, China will not seek to challenge it. China is not seeking to make the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank, which it took the lead to establish last year, different from other international financial agencies; certainly, it has no intention to replace the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. The AIIB is intended to supplement the current international financial order, not become a replacement.

The deeper China merges into the current international order, the more common interests it shares with the U.S. in safeguarding that particular order.

Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.
Major: Communication

Hometown: Brazil, IN

Student Media Involvement: Syc Creations

Favorite Food: Burgers with everything but mustard

Fun Fact: He really loves superhero movies, and wants to make his own someday
5 Ways to Patch the IT/Marketing Disconnect (and Thrive)

Earlier this month, I wrote about pop-up retail storestemporary brick-and-mortar extensions of online retail sitesand about my recent conversation with Melissa Gonzalez, founder and CEO of Lionesque Group, a pop-up retail consulting firm in New York. The portion of the conversation I covered in that post left me with an appreciation for the worthwhile nature of these pop-ups, but I wanted to look deeper into the value that Lionesque Group adds to the equation.

To that end, I opened this portion of the conversation by noting that according to a Forbes article from about a year ago, the average pop-up that Gonzalezs company works with sees a 35 percent increase in sales from doors open, to six months after doors close. I asked Gonzalez if thats the span of time thats typically used to calculate ROI in the pop-up retail world. She said it depends on the brand:

I always tell our clients, its not about the sales they make while the doors are openif you limit it to that, youre kind of selling yourself short. For new and emerging brands, every dollar counts, so the time theyre open in the pop-up means everything to them. But you always need to approach a pop-up by considering more than just what youre selling when the doors are openits also what youre doing to create brand awareness, to learn about your customers and product fit, and how youre using that to fine-tune the next couple of quarters so you can continue to improve your ROI, with both marketing and merchandising strategies.

I asked Gonzalez whether theres a benefit that can be identified and measured after the next couple of quarters are over. She said there is, and she gave an example to illustrate her point:

We have a pop-up client right now, Nora Gardner. Some of its tangible, some of its intangible; some of its qualitative, and some of its quantitativeit depends on what you do with it.

So with Nora Gardner, we did a pop-up with her in December 2013 as a collective, and shell even say it wasnt the most successful pop-up for her. Part of it was because she was in a collective, and part of it was because she wasnt targeting the right customerthat pop-up, while the doors were open, was not profitable for her. But she learned a tonshe learned that her target customer wasnt the person she thought it was. It wasnt the girl right out of collegeit was an older woman, 35-plus, more established in her career, who knew herself better.

Her marketing and merchandising strategy all changed because of that first pop-up, and she fine-tuned it for the next nine months. In September 2014, she opened a one-month pop-up, and she broke even in the first week. Shes been seeing growth ever since, and continues to come back to use this strategy, and shes now considering a long-term lease. So her ROI was like a year, but it was hugely impactful for her whole business, because she was able to sit and listen and learn from the people who were coming into the space, so she could re-strategize her business.

As for the biggest mistakes pop-up retailers tend to make, Gonzalez said cutting corners in the wrong places is all too common:

They jump on a location because its free, not because its the right fit. Theres opportunity cost in everything, and its all about location. You need to be in the right space with a pop-up, even more so than with a long-term lease. Dont go for the cheapest spaceyou have to go for the right space. Ive seen that mistake made plenty of times, because youre fighting an uphill battle on foot traffic by not being in front of the right customer.

I also see people skimping in the wrong areas when it comes to budget. So maybe they do invest in the right space, but then they dont spend the right amount for the right store staff. Thats huge, because your store staff become an extension of your brand. Customers walk into a pop-up store with a different mindset than walking into a regular store. Theyre going in there to be surprised and delighted, and to have an experience and to discover something new. Part of that discovery is the experience they have with the in-store staff. So not adequately investing in quality people, and not spending the time to really train them to understand the value of your brand, and whats interesting about each product, really can hurt the customer.

Finally, I asked Gonzalez if she could have one do-over as founder and CEO of Lionesque Group, what it would be. She said she should have heeded her own advice sooner:

I think everythings a learning experience, but a trap that happens in the beginning is you say yes to everything. I think in the beginning it was very distracting to me as a CEO, because we were so eager to take on projects, I didnt take time to think all the factors through. Everybody needs a brand filter, and homing in on our brand filterwhat is our value proposition, and who is our target customerI tell my clients to do that all the time, and I took a long time to do that for myself. Were getting there, but I wish we could have done that sooner.

If youd like to take an even deeper dive into all of this, you might want to check out Gonzalezs book on the subject: The Pop Up Paradigm: How Brands Build Human Connections in a Digital Age.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.
The Five Dos and Donts of Virtualization

Its hard to believe that a company that has sold its product to virtually every enterprise on the planet would run afoul of the investor class, but as VMware seems to be proving this month, market share alone does not guarantee continued support.

The news has not been good for VMware since last fall when EMC announced it would sell itself to Dell. With EMC owning the majority stake in VMware, this left the virtualization company in a state of limbo as top executives tried to figure out what to do with it. At one point VMware was to be folded into Dell as part of EMC to face an uncertain future. This plan was quickly shelved in favor of a tracking stock that would allow the company to retain a certain amount of autonomy. But then concern started to mount that a planned joint venture with EMC called Virtustream would saddle VMware with high costs and little profitability, so that was quickly scrapped.

And now, VMware holders are starting to get restless again as the stock continues to slide despite positive third quarter results. Revenues were up a solid 10 percent to $1.87 billion, and would have been even higher if not for the strong dollar. Even licensed revenue climbed 11 percent to $825 million in an era in which enterprises of all sizes are said to be turning away from traditional software spends in favor of more flexible service-based contracts. But the long-term outlook was less than analysts were hoping for, so the stock remains under pressure as the experts crunch the numbers.

On top of that, VMware is undergoing a management shake-up and is planning to lay off about 800 workers, roughly 5 percent of its workforce, in a bid to shave about $850 million from its payroll. To some, this is a move to make the merger with Dell a little more palatable for VMware holders, while others see it as a normal restructuring as the company seeks to shore up its competitive position for the massive shift to cloud computing that will unfold in the latter half of the decade.

But the bigger problem for VMware could be the merger itself. According to John Shinal of USA Today, with EMC having lost about a third of its value since the merger was announced and now trading at below the cash offer of $24.05 per share, many analysts are starting to wonder if the deal makes sense at all.

And that is hurting VMware particularly badly, with the tracking stock falling from $9.10 last fall to near zero today. These kinds of omens are already putting jitters into other major mergers, such as Symantecs sale of the Veritas storage business to The Carlyle Group. While there are key differences between the two deals, they both rely on the same debt markets that are already skittish over the recent rout on Wall Street and exchanges across the globe.

For VMwares part, the company is taking a proactive approach to the changes affecting the data center, and in particular to the container technologies that are vying with the virtual machine for control of abstract data infrastructure. In a lengthy interview with eWeeks Chris Preimesberger, CIO Bask Iyer says virtual platforms like vSphere and NSX are still the best way to organize and manage software-defined environments regardless of whether they remain in the data center or extend onto the cloud. This need for end-to-end management and visibility will become increasingly crucial, he says, as infrastructure becomes more software-defined and the need to push security, governance and other functions moves up the stack onto the virtual and application layers.

At the moment, there is no indication from anyone at Dell, EMC or VMware that the merger will not go forward from here. That could change, however, if VMware investors decide theyve had enough.

But as the old saying goes, someones loss is somebody elses gain. If VMware does prove to be the linchpin for the hybrid cloud, then todays unease could be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Arthur Cole writes about infrastructure for IT Business Edge. Cole has been covering the high-tech media and computing industries for more than 20 years, having served as editor of TV Technology, Video Technology News, Internet News and Multimedia Weekly. His contributions have appeared in Communications Today and Enterprise Networking Planet and as web content for numerous high-tech clients like TwinStrata and Carpathia. Follow Art on Twitter @acole602.
2016 Software Trends: The Evolution of Enterprise Software

In terms of major innovations that will transform enterprise IT in the months and years ahead, nothing is quite as profound as the recent advances in memory. First with the rise of Flash and DDR4 and now the arrival of non-volatile memory technologies such as 3D XPoint from Intel and Micron Technology, applications will soon run multiple orders of magnitude faster than they do today on traditional magnetic storage systems.

To provide a framework that will make it simpler for IT organizations to tap into those advances, Plexistor today unveiled a layer of software-defined memory, dubbed Plexistor Solution, which company CEO Sharon Azulai says eliminates the need for IT organizations to provision dedicated infrastructure resources to specific classes of applications. Instead, the IT organization defines the level of performance required by the application workload, which Plexistor Solution then configures the available IT infrastructure resources to provide.

In addition to making it simpler to manage the underlying IT environment, Azulai says the same IT infrastructure can now be used to support both advanced in-memory applications and existing legacy applications that were originally designed to access magnetic storage.

The result, says Azulai, is that IT organizations no longer have to waste valuable time fine-tuning IT environments to optimize application performance.

IT organizations of all sizes are clearly trying to create more elastic IT environments that can scale resources on demand. Driving that shift is demand from the business for more responsiveness in terms of overall IT agility. While advances in memory technologies represent a major advance in application performance, IT still needs a way to manage those resources with enough automation to keep up with the speed at which those applications will soon run.
 Flash

Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang will offer a 144-hour visa-free entry for international transit passengers from Jan. 30, in renewed efforts to boost business and tourism.

The new policy, unveiled Tuesday, covers travelers from 51 countries and regions, including the United States, Russia, Britain, Australia, France and Japan, the Ministry of Public Security announced on Tuesday.

They can enjoy a 144-hour stay in the Yangtze River Delta upon entry via Shanghai's air, sea and railway ports, Jiangsu Province's Nanjing Lukou International Airport and Zhejiang Province's Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, providing they have third country visas and tickets to leave for a third country or region within 144 hours.

Shanghai, Zhejiang's capital Hangzhou and Jiangsu's capital Nanjing have allowed 72-hour visa-free entry for international transit passengers since 2013.

Under the previous policy, transit passengers could only enter through the airports of the three cities and were not allowed to travel to areas outside of the city.

Apart from doubling the time of their transit stay, the new policy also allows international passengers to travel to all three provincial areas in the Yangtze River Delta, an economic powerhouse in China.

The move signals intensified efforts to increase international tourism and commercial and trade cooperation as well as the flow of talent, the ministry said in a statement.
 Flash

The United States on Tuesday announced new amendments to its sanctions on Cuba, easing restrictions on export financing and facilitating authorized travel.

The amendments, which will take effect on Wednesday, "will remove existing restrictions on payment and financing terms for authorized exports and reexports to Cuba of items other than agricultural items or commodities," the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments said in a statement.

The amendments, which came about six months after Washington and Havana resumed diplomatic ties, will further facilitate travel to Cuba for authorized purposes by allowing blocked space, code-sharing, and leasing arrangements with Cuban airlines, it said.

The changes will also authorize additional transactions related to professional meetings, disaster preparedness and response projects, and information and informational materials.

The amendments "send a clear message to the world: the United States is committed to empowering and enabling economic advancements for the Cuban people," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said.

"We have been working to enable the free flow of information between Cubans and Americans and will continue to take the steps necessary to help the Cuban people achieve the political and economic freedom that they deserve," Lew added.

The United States and Cuba resumed diplomatic relations in July 2015, ending more than five decades of enmity. U.S. President Barack Obama called the move "a historic step in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people."

In mid-September 2015, the U.S. announced amendments to sanctions on Cuba, easing travel and business restrictions on the island country.
According to an article by Refinery29 posted on Sunday, Apple has spoken about their protection of their customers privacy before, but only recently has it been proven through documents that the company really does practice what it preaches.

Last Saturday, The Daily Dot said that apart from supporting its customers' right to encrypted communications, it also stands up to the government even for the meth dealers' iPhones. All the information came from a court transcript from a hearing in Brooklyn in October of last year, where the judge asked the company to expound on why they ignored search warrants from the U.S. prosecutors to unlock the phone of Jun Feng. Alongside six others, Feng pled guilty in attempting to distribute methamphetamines. Feng's iPhone 5S was configured to erase all of its data if someone fails to enter the correct passcode after 10 times in a row of trying.

Apple's lawyers wrote in their file of response that the government's request is impossible to perform, and that in most cases, may it be today or in the future, the request order is burdensome. Even their latest operating systems are designed to be impassable by the company itself.

In the past, Apple has already been bombarded with requests for iPhone unlock since 2008. But, the protection of their supporters' privacy is their main concern. The comoany's lawyer Marc Zwillinger said at the hearing that they are aware that customer data is under siege from a variety of different directions and they have prioritized the importance of the security of their customer data.

"A hypothetical consumer could think if Apple is not in the business of accessing my data and if Apple has built a system to prevent itself from accessing my data, why is it continuing to comply with orders that don't have a clear lawful basis in doing so?" Zwillinger added.
Iran is set to talk with Airbus, the leading aircraft manufacturer, to give life to Iran's economy once again.

The country plans to purchase of more than 100 Airbus planes to modernize it's current air fleet. The number of potential planes listed rose from 114 with Airbus to 127. The number may keep on rising depending on the current negotiations being cemented.

After the country's sanctions have been lifted, Iran has been aggressively pursuing goals to modernize its state.

Transport Minister Abbas Akhoundi has indicated that they have been in talks for 10 months and that the country is in need of 400 long-range and mid-range planes, as well as 100 short-range planes. Once the deal is successful in its implementation with Airbus, it is expected that the first set of new jetliners will reach iran by March of this year.

Airbus has already confirmed that it's ready to negotiate terms with Iran's national carrier, Iran Air. The aircrafts subjected to the deal are dozens of new commercial aircraft. Stefan Schaffrath, Airbus spokesperson has announced that the company is ready to engage in commercial negotiations with the Middle Eastern country.

The type of planes that are being listed range from the 100-seater turboprops to the 555-seater twin deck Airbus A380 jumbo jet. The finality of the deal will be signed by President Hassan Rouhani in Paris, France, this week on January 27.

Airbus said that they are ready to proceed once compliance with international laws are set, reports indicated.

Airbus, however, is not the only company Iran might be conducting negotiations with. Iran has shown interest in Mitsubishi's MRJ and Canada's Bombardier CSeries and other aircraft companies. With Iran's expanded, and continuously expanding, shopping list for more than 160 European planes, the country hopes to revitalize its economy soon especially since the sanctions have been lifted.
 Flash

Ukraine officially declared a flu epidemic in the country on Tuesday as the outbreak of the deadly virus has claimed the lives of 83 people.

"Ukraine is now experiencing a flu epidemic," Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili told reporters, noting that the epidemic threshold was surpassed in 18 out of the country's 24 regions.

Kvitashvili said that between early October 2015 and the end of January this year, more than 2.6 million cases of flu have been reported across Ukraine, about 6 percent of the country's population.

Later in the day, Kiev city authorities said that a total of 19 people were killed by influenza in the Ukrainian capital since the start of the cold season and that 12 of them died over the past week.

Earlier, the Health Ministry said that the vast majority of the reported influenza cases in the country were caused by the H1N1 strain, the so-called swine flu.

To prevent the spread of the flu, most schools and kindergartens have been closed across the East European country since Jan. 16 and people were asked to wear protective masks in public places.

On the eve of the winter season, only 120,000 people in Ukraine were given a flu shot, data showed.

A major outbreak of the H1N1 virus sparked a global pandemic alert issued by the World Health Organization in June 2009. The strain, which has been lethal mainly to those with complicating circumstances, is now considered a seasonal flu.
Currently, 33% of Americans are not prepared for their own retirement. If Obama's proposal for a retirement savings program is enacted then 30 million Americans can have access to a retirement account.

President Barack Obama is busy making his lists as he prepares to pitch more new proposals to maximize access to retirement savings accounts. He also plans to revisit previous proposals when the budget will be issued next month.

According to the Federal Reserve report, one in three Americans are not prepared for retirement and that means not having any savings accumulated over the years or even a pension fund to tap for their later years.

In a statement released by the White House, President Obama's plan to expand the retirement savings program will enable over 30 million Americans to gain access to retirement accounts.

The plan requires employers to enroll employees to an Individual Retirement Account. As an incentive, employers who do this would get a tax credit of $3,000. This proposal was part of last year's budget but Congress did not approve of it.

Thomas Perez, United States Labor Secretary, aims to make this plan easy for for employers to engage themselves in this initiative of offering retirement plans to workers. The tax credit will be a means to lower their administrative expenses, especially for small employers. Perez explains:

We are willing to take steps to make it easier and cheaper for employers to offer a path to dignified retirement. They should be willing to do the right thing and set up more plans so their workers can save.

The White House is pressing Congress to pass the legislation. In the meantime, only a few states have approved a state-run retirement plan especially for private sector employees.

Obama has been working tediously to make saving for retirement easier for many workers.

Below is an clip from USA Today that reports on Obama's proposal for retirement plan changes.
Plugged In Thomas Content offers insight on changes in the world of energy, climate change and efforts to build a greener economy. SHARE

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A coalition of coal-mining and coal-reliant states including Wisconsin filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday to block President Barack Obama's landmark climate change regulation from taking effect.

The coalition sought an emergency stay from the nation's highest court, just days after a federal appeals court in Washington declined to do the same thing.

The rule, known as the Clean Power Plan, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by shifting to less power generation from coal-fired power plants.

In a petition to Chief Justice John Roberts, Wisconsin and dozens of states led by West Virginia called the EPA rule a federal power grab that oversteps the authority of the agency.

The petition terms the rule "a blatant act of commandeering that leaves the states no choice but to alter their laws and programs governing electricity generation and delivery to accord with federal policy.

"If this Court does not enter a stay, the Plan will continue to unlawfully impose massive and irreparable harms upon the sovereign States, as well as irreversible changes in the energy markets," the petition said.

Supporters of the rule  the centerpiece of the carbon reduction commitments President Obama made as world leaders reached a global climate change accord last month  say the planet faces irreparable harm from failing to act to address carbon emissions.

Last week, Wisconsin utilities argued that even as it fights the plan Wisconsin should consider taking steps to comply with the rule.

Some outside experts have termed the petition a long shot, but opponents of the rule are hoping that a Supreme Court that's backed EPA in the past on climate change regulations may take a fresh look.
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Aspirus and WPS Health Solutions are partnering to start a new health insurance company that will sell health plans in 16 counties in north-central Wisconsin.

The partnership is an example of health systems' entering the insurance business.

"It's something we are seeing around the country," said attorney Fred Geilfuss, a partner with Foley & Lardner who specializes in health care issues.

Another example is Froedtert Health's buying a 50% interest in Network Health from Ministry Health Care, part of Ascension Health, in 2014.

Owning a stake in an insurance company would enable health systems to share in the potential savings if they can provide quality care at a lower cost.

The new insurance company also could help Aspirus compete with health plans, such as Security Health owned by Marshfield Clinic, tied to competing health systems' networks.

Aspirus, based in Wausau, employs more than 7,000 people and operates four hospitals in Wisconsin and four in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as well as 50 clinics. Aspirus reported net income of $109 million on revenue of $926.1 million for its fiscal year ended June 30.

At the same time, WPS Health Insurance and Arise Health Plan, divisions of WPS Health Solutions in Madison, must compete with health insurers owned by health systems as well as large national companies such as UnitedHealthcare and Anthem.

Pending approval from the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance, the new company  Aspirus Arise Health Plan of Wisconsin  will sell health insurance for individuals, small employers and large employers next year.

Aspirus and WPS have committed to investing more than $20 million over the next several years in the new insurance company.

Arise Health Plan will not sell health insurance in the 16 counties in which Aspirus Arise will sell health insurance.

Health plans sold by Arise cover about 15,000 people in those counties and a total of 30,000 people in Wisconsin.

Health plans sold by WPS Health Insurance will continue to be sold in the markets where they currently are available.

The partnership will enable WPS and Aspirus to work together to find ways to improve quality and control costs. Ellen Foley, a senior vice president with WPS, said the company could reach similar agreements with other health systems.

"They are willing to try things," Geilfuss said of WPS.
Que El-Amin, co-founder of Young Enterprising Society LLC, gives feedback to Ayanna Newsom and Davionne Herring (right) during an entrepreneurship workshop at Northwest Opportunities Vocational Academy. Credit: Rick Wood

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When Que and Khalif El-Amin ask students in their entrepreneurship workshops to list role models, two groups are noticeably absent: business and technology professionals and males.

The El-Amin brothers are aiming to change that.

In December, they launched WERCBench JV, a program aimed at introducing inner-city high school students to new role models, along with technologies and tools for building a business. The first of what they say will be at least 14 workshops at Milwaukee high schools was held at the Northwest Opportunities Vocational Academy.

"The only way to help the city of Milwaukee in terms of the African-American unemployment problems is to start our own businesses," said Que El-Amin, co-founder of Young Enterprising Society LLC. "It's been ingrained into us, so we want other people to have the opportunity and the knowledge that it is possible."

Young Enterprising Society, which runs STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) workshops, plants apple orchards in the city and organizes events and social media campaigns, partnered with Mid-West Energy Research Consortium to run WERCBench JV. The partnership received $90,000 of funding from the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority.

Top teams from the WERCBench JV workshops will be invited to a 14-week summer camp where they will learn how to refine their business plans, acquire customers and do computer coding, Que El-Amin said. The goal is for each team to walk out the door with stock in the company it started.

Role models who participated in the NOVA high school workshop included Sieria Payne, owner of independent living provider Building New Pathways; Jonathan Cousin, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee mechanical engineering major; and Hank McGowan, owner of Osha's Market on Milwaukee's northwest side.

And of course, the El-Amin brothers.

Que El-Amin, 31, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an art degree and received a master's degree in geography from Chicago State University. Khalif El-Amin, 29, has a sociology degree from the UW-Stevens Point.

The El-Amins say they were fortunate enough to have in their lives their father  Saleem El-Amin, president and chief executive officer of The New Horizon Center Inc., a social services provider. But they said many of the students point to their own mothers and grandmothers or celebrities like Oprah Winfrey or LeBron James as role models.

"Our largest youth population in Milwaukee is in these neighborhoods," said Greg Meier, managing director of WERCBench Labs, a start-up training program. "We need to get these young people on this technology innovation path, which is the path in our times to build wealth and the community."

At the NOVA workshop, students came up with business ideas and learned about turning them into companies. Students and teachers at the school were impressed with how engaging the mentors were and pleased that WERCBench JV was able to help the teams build business plans, said Scott Campbell, principal of TransCenter for Youth charter school.

"They're definitely well-connected, and they have a great group of professionals working with them," Campbell said.

The students will continue working on their ideas, and the two top teams from each high school will be invited to the summer camp, Que El-Amin said.

"You'd be astonished by the vast number of things they think of," he added.
When Epic Systems employees reach the 10-year anniversary of their employment, clay tiles with their hand prints are created and displayed. This wall includes the hand print of founder and CEO Judy Faulkner. Credit: Mark Hoffman

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More than a dozen years ago, George Halvorson, the chief executive of Kaiser Permanente, pressed Judy Faulkner on her "number"  the sum that would entice her to either sell Epic Systems Corp. or take the company public.

Epic was a finalist for a huge contract with the private health system, a contract big enough to turn the Madison-area software maker into a major player in the fast-growing industry of electronic health records.

"We're from the Bay Area. Technology companies build themselves up and then go public and then go 'poof.' Right?" Andrew Wiesenthal, who was Kaiser Permanente's lead physician for the project, recalled years later. "That's everybody's get-rich strategy.

"She did not blink," Wiesenthal said. "She said, 'There is no number. We are not going to have an IPO.'"

It was one of the early signs that money is not what drives Faulkner, Epic's founder and chief executive.

Another came last May when Faulkner  now a multibillionaire  pledged to give 99% of her family's wealth to a nonprofit foundation.

She made her plans public in a letter to the Giving Pledge, an initiative led by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett that encourages the world's richest people to commit to giving more than half of their wealth to charitable causes.

Faulkner's foundation, funded with her Epic shares, will give money to health care, education, especially for those who have the least opportunities, and "if possible, help create a more peaceful world," Faulkner wrote.

Forbes has estimated Faulkner's wealth at $2.6 billion. Based on the stock market value of Epic's top competitors and estimates of the company's profit margins, more than $4 billion is closer to a reasonable estimate.

Faulkner and her family control about 43% of Epic, a company with more than $1.8 billion in annual revenue and 9,500 employees. In all, about 75% of the company is owned by about 200 employees and their families. All other employees are eligible for stock appreciation rights.

The only outside stockholders are the initial investors and their families, a few people who bought stock from those investors and some outside directors given stock in 1990s.

Faulkner declined a request to talk about her pledge. But in her letter, she said she never had any personal desire to live lavishly. She is among the billionaires who are indifferent to the lifestyle that great wealth can buy. There is no apartment in New York or Paris. There is no ranch in Aspen. There are no private or even corporate jets.

She drives a 5-year old Audi wagon and has had two cars in the past 15 years. And she and her husband, Gordon, a pediatrician, have lived in the same house in a Madison subdivision for almost three decades.

Faulkner avoids publicity and began granting occasional interviews only when Epic became too big to escape attention. She asks that her picture not be taken because she likes to be able to go out without being noticed.

Faulkner grew up in New Jersey and earned an undergraduate degree in math at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. In the 1960s, she came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school in computer science  and now is one of the best examples of the economic benefits of a state's having a respected university.

"I took a class in computers and medicine, and one of my professors asked me to work with them," she said in an email. "That got me started working with health care."

After graduate school, while working for UW Hospital and Clinics, she was asked to create a database to collect and track patient information. Other physicians began asking her to customize the database for their specialties. They eventually encouraged her to start a company.

Having no idea how to start a company, she was told to get permission from UW, get a good lawyer and get a good accountant.

In 1979, Faulkner and about a dozen other people, most of them co-workers, founded Human Services Computer Inc. to sell and customize a database management system for various tasks in health care. Most kept their day jobs and pitched in after hours; technically, the company started with the equivalent of 11/2 employees.

"I was the CEO and I was half-time (although I worked a lot more than that)," Faulkner said, "and I had a morning assistant and an afternoon assistant."

The initial investors put up $70,000 and included her parents, who invested despite Faulkner's efforts to dissuade them. The investment, she acknowledged, worked out.

For more than a decade, the company was a successful but small software shop. By 1990, it had sales of $1.7 million and 29 employees.

Company folklore has it that in the early days, workers would go home and return the next day only to find Faulkner still at her computer, according to Sean Bina, an Epic vice president.

With the power of computers improving at a stunning rate, the company sensed an opportunity. Around 1992, the renamed company introduced EpicCare, its first electronic medical record. Epic focused on large physician practices, and sales began to take off, reaching $18 million in 1995.

In the late 1990s, Epic turned its attention to hospitals, a market dominated by much larger companies. Sales soon exploded, jumping to $162 million in 2003.

That same year, Epic stunned the industry by winning the contract with Kaiser Permanente.

Along the way, Faulkner learned what she needed to know about running a fast-growing company. She took her own path, though, vowing that it will never go public, in part because she has never wanted to be beholden to Wall Street.

The company is known for hiring academic superstars almost exclusively, people who majored in math, physics, computer science, engineering and philosophy. Applicants take intelligence and personality tests as well as tests for specific jobs, such as programming. The typical Epic employee is exceedingly bright, accomplished and disciplined.

The company is not for everyone. Voluntary turnover is about 10% a year. And the company has a reputation for being a demanding employer. Bina contends that the hours that Epic employees work are overstated, estimating that the typical Epic employee works about 45 hours a week, though he acknowledges some work much more.

The atmosphere is neither uptight nor laid back. Much is made of Epic's somewhat zany campus, with each cluster of buildings having a theme, such as New York, a jungle or a farm, and its tree house. But you also get the sense that this is a company that has to work at being zany.

For one expansion, the architect suggested putting motion detectors in the offices to turn off the lights when empty. Faulkner told him that it would never work, because the lights would constantly go off when programmers were motionlessly staring at their computers thinking about a problem. The architect later acknowledged that she was right.

The goal is for each employee to have his or her own office, because Faulkner says that is how she likes to work.

Faulkner's priorities and values also are manifested in other ways. Epic supports local businesses, from buying local produce for its three cafeterias to local bookstores, whenever possible. Its campus doesn't have a fitness center or day care center partly so that it doesn't take business away from other businesses. The company is the state's largest generator of solar power. It also owns six wind turbines off campus.

And after Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state's largest business lobby, ran a large advertising campaign to support a candidate for the state Supreme Court, Epic announced that it would no longer do business with companies that belonged to the group.

Epic instead has focused on building its system for electronic health records, steadily adding features and improving existing ones.

"Epic is a software factory," she said.

People say Faulkner, who describes programming as "a mix of language, math and art," remains a software developer at heart. And at 72, she has no plans to retire or even slow down.

Wealth was a byproduct, and maybe an unexpected one. Now, she has taken steps to ensure it will be put to good use for decades to come.

In her letter to the Giving Pledge, she wrote:

"Many years ago I asked my young children what two things they needed from their parents. They said 'food and money.' I told them 'roots and wings.' My goal in pledging 99% of my assets to philanthropy is to help others with roots  food, warmth, shelter, health care, education  so they too can have wings."
Johnson Controls chairman and chief executive officer Alex Molinaroli is seen in 2014 at company headquarters in Glendale. Credit: Mike De Sisti

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Alex Molinaroli will hand over the reins of Johnson Controls Inc. to Tyco International's top executive 18 months after the big merger of the two companies is completed this fall.

That means Molinaroli, whose brief tenure as CEO of the state's largest company has included wheeling and dealing as well as two personal scandals, will likely be in for a big payday and poised to leave on top.

In the weeks leading up to the merger, both Johnson Controls and Tyco International moved to put some troubling matters behind them, with Tyco reaching a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service over back taxes and Johnson Controls saying a law firm found no wrongdoing by Molinaroli in his involvement with convicted Ponzi schemer Joseph Zada.

Molinaroli, who until last fall bankrolled the legal defense for Zada and let him live rent-free in a suburban Detroit mansion, has maintained that foibles in his personal life haven't carried over to his professional role running a $37 billion enterprise.

Jeff Joerres, lead outside director of Johnson Controls, said in a statement that the Johnson Controls board of directors "took this matter extremely seriously, and using an independent counsel from a top law firm, conducted a review of the circumstances.

"In exercising its business judgment, the Board considered that the association was personal in nature, did not involve misuse of corporate assets or a violation of company policies, and did not appear to involve a violation of law," he said.

In announcing a merger with Tyco, Johnson Controls said it would see $150 million in tax savings after it reorganizes under Tyco's Irish-based parent company, to be renamed Johnson Controls plc. The company will have its operating headquarters in Milwaukee.

The company also announced a gradual exit path for Molinaroli over the next three years. Plans call for Molinaroli to be chairman and chief executive for 18 months and then executive chairman for another year. Succeeding him will be George Oliver, current chairman of Tyco, at which point Molinaroli would leave the company.

Company spokesman Fraser Engerman said Molinaroli and Joerres wouldn't be available for interviews, but Molinaroli told The Wall Street Journal "the time is right" for his planned exit.

Oliver has been running Tyco from its operating headquarters in Princeton, N.J., but he will be moving to Milwaukee and will be based here, Engerman said.

Molinaroli was promoted to the top job at Johnson Controls in the summer of 2013 and quickly started to transform the company by selling off pieces, including the automotive interiors and electronics businesses as well as a global workplace facilities management business now owned by CBRE.

The goal: to move rapidly to remove an investor perception that Johnson Controls was mired in low returns as a slow-growth auto parts supplier.

But while making a flurry of buy-and-sell decisions involving his company, decisions in Molinaroli's personal life caused concern for Johnson Controls, first with disclosures of an extramarital affair with a corporate consultant and then the involvement in the Ponzi scheme.

In late 2014, the board announced it had investigated the affair and found that Molinaroli had violated the company's ethics policy by failing to disclose the affair promptly. It reduced his pay package by $1 million, but his total compensation that year topped $19 million.

Then came 2015, when Molinaroli's name surfaced in federal court proceedings involving Zada, who was sentenced Friday to 17.5 years in prison for running a massive Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of at least $37 million.

Molinaroli clearly has the support of the board of directors, Joerres said, noting that he was listed as chairman, CEO and a candidate for re-election to the board for Wednesday's shareholders meeting.

For his work reshaping Johnson Controls into a multi-industrial company, Molinaroli received a 12.5% raise in his base salary last year, and received total compensation of $21.74 million. His salary for the current fiscal year hasn't been disclosed, Engerman said.

It's unclear how much Molinaroli stands to make as a result of the merger. Companies typically announce "golden parachute" compensation details for corporate executives prior to the shareholder meetings at which they will be asked to vote to ratify the deal.

Engerman said that shareholder vote is tentatively scheduled for this summer.

But through stock awards, option awards and his company retirement package, Molinaroli is already in for a big payday when he retires. He owns $28.7 million in stock at current prices and is eligible to see vested options and stock awards worth nearly $60 million when he retires.

Tyco, which was based in Bermuda when it was led by Dennis Kozlowski before his conviction for defrauding Tyco of more than $100 million, has been based in Ireland since 2014. In recent years it has gone through a variety of transformations to divvy up pieces of a once sprawling conglomerate.

Cary Spivak of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report
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Wellbe Inc., which makes web-based software to help patients participate in their health care, has raised $1.3 million of debt funding from 20 investors, according to a filing with federal securities regulators.

The Madison company closed on a $2.4 million round of equity funding from 26 investors earlier this month, another filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows.

Wellbe was founded in 2007 by James Dias, who was previously vice president of marketing and sales at Sonic Foundry Inc. The company sells a cloud-based "Patient Guidance System" that helps patients follow their doctors' orders by providing them with "smart checklists."
Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at a freedom rally at the Milwaukee Auditorium on Jan. 27, 1964. Credit: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel files

SHARE Members of the Milwaukee chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality lower a banner protesting Mayor Henry Maier as he stepped to the podium to welcome Martin Luther King Jr. at a rally at the Milwaukee Auditorium on Jan. 27, 1964. Milwaukee Sentinel photo Members of the Milwaukee chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality stood and turned their backs to the stage as Mayor Henry Maier welcomed Martin Luther King Jr. at the rally at the Milwaukee Auditorium on Jan. 27, 1964. According to the Journal, Maier did not acknowledge the protest. Milwaukee Journal photo Martin Luther King Jr. (center) is greeted by well-wishers at the Milwaukee Auditorium on Jan. 27, 1964. Among them (top center), is longtime Milwaukee public relations executive Ben Barkin. Milwaukee Sentinel photo

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Martin Luther King Jr. drew more than 6,300 people, bomb threats, at least one protest and some studies in contrast to the Milwaukee Auditorium when he spoke there on Jan. 27, 1964.

In his 48-minute speech, King stressed the importance of passing civil rights legislation quickly.

"It may be true that you cannot legislate morality," he told the crowd, according to a report in the Jan. 28, 1964, Milwaukee Sentinel, "but behavior can be regulated.

"Law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.

"Law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me."

King's words capped a nearly three-hour freedom rally at the venue, now the Milwaukee Theatre, with the civil rights leader not taking to the podium until nearly 10 p.m. Preceding him were, among others, Rabbi Dudley Weinberg, president of the Wisconsin Council of Rabbis; Ald. Vel Phillips; and Mayor Henry Maier, who issued an official welcome to King from the city.

Maier's remarks were met by a protest by about 20 members of the Milwaukee chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, who stood up and turned their backs to the stage while draping a banner over the railing that read, "Our mayor can't be a roadblock of civil rights."

In its story on the speech, also published Jan. 28, 1964, The Milwaukee Journal reported that an aide to King had asked CORE to cancel its protest of Maier, out of concern that it would be construed as a comment on King or the group that organized the event. But the group declined, saying Maier, who the group felt was putting the brakes on ending segregation in Milwaukee, shouldn't have been on the program in the first place.

The CORE protest didn't appear to detract from King's speech, in which he called on Milwaukeeans to fight against two prevailing myths, according to the Sentinel: that civil rights legislation wasn't important, and that time would resolve segregation's ills.

"Progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability," King said. "We must help time and we must realize that the time is always right to do right."

King  who nine months later would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his quest for equality through nonviolence  told the mostly African-American audience that they could not "like" those who oppressed them, but they could "love" them.

"You love every man because God loves him," King said, according to the Journal. "You rise to the level of loving the man while hating the evil deed he does. This is the kind of love that can guide us through this difficult period of transition."

The Journal estimated that the rally raised more than $7,000 for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which King was president.

The Sentinel reported that the standing-room-only crowd  with more people turned away  was greeted in the evening's 8-degree temperatures by "hawkers of Socialist Workers Party newspapers and Muslim newspapers (who) stood side by side with persons handing out right-wing handbills."

Police Inspector Raymond Dahl told both newspapers that the police had been fielding crank calls and bomb threats "all day." The Journal reported that the "first report of a bomb at the Auditorium came to The Milwaukee Journal switchboard before noon, and the last during the rally itself." Dahl told the Journal that the police had searched the Auditorium before the rally "and found it safe."

ABOUT THIS FEATURE

The Journal Sentinel's photo archives are testament to the idea that the past is never even past. If you dig deeply enough, you can find images from Milwaukee and Wisconsin's recent history that echo today.

Each Wednesday, Our Back Pages will dip into those archives, sharing photos and stories from the past that connect, reflect and sometimes contradict the Milwaukee we know today  or at least give us something to smile about.

Special thanks and kudos go to senior multimedia designer Bill Schulz for finding many of the gems in the Journal Sentinel photo archives.
MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver on Tuesday addresses members of the Assemblys urban education task force at MacDowell Montessori School. Driver and others spoke about the importance of early childhood education. Credit: Rick Wood

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Testifying before the Legislature's Task Force on Urban Education on Tuesday, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Darienne Driver stressed the importance of early childhood education, calling it crucial for children's academic development, job prospects and outcomes in life.

And Driver called on lawmakers to increase funding that would allow MPS to expand the 3-year-old kindergarten program it bolstered two years ago to give students a head start on that path.

"Children who have high-quality preschool experiences are more likely to do better in school and find better jobs. And they are less likely to commit crimes," Driver told lawmakers during a public hearing at MacDowell Montessori School on Milwaukee's near-northwest side.

Investing in high-quality early childhood programs, she said, "yields substantial savings in education, child welfare and corrections."

Driver was the first among several speakers to testify Tuesday before the committee launched by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) last year to address the challenges and concerns of urban school districts around the state. In addition to early childhood education, the committee has been exploring a host of issues: teacher recruitment and retention, truancy, academic performance, graduation rates and access to technology.

At MacDowell, the committee also heard from several MPS partners active in its early childhood programs, including Danae Davis of Milwaukee Succeeds, Tim Coughlin of United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County and Gabriel McGaughey of Children's Hospital of Wisconsin.

Before the hearing, lawmakers toured two schools Driver called "shining stars" of the MPS system: MacDowell and Rogers Street Academy on the city's south side. The Rogers Street tour included a look at a new center for science, technology, engineering and math at its adjacent Boys & Girls Club funded in part with a $100,000 gift from Rockwell Automation.

"It was wonderful," said committee Chairman Jessie Rodriguez (R-Franklin), who called it an example of the kind of collaboration with businesses that can "really impact the outcome of students and the climate of schools."

Rodriguez, who worked as a school choice advocate before her election, said she was interested in hearing not just about Milwaukee's challenges, but also its successful programs that could be replicated elsewhere.

Among the programs Driver cited was the 3-year-old kindergarten that has been in the district since 1969 but was expanded significantly two years ago. It now has a waiting list of 1,000 students, she said.

The program, she said, is only partially funded. State funding at even half of the full-time equivalent rate per student, she said, would help serve another 1,800 students.

Full funding for MPS' 4-year-old kindergarten program  now funded at 60%  would allow it to lower class sizes, improve teacher training and development, and provide more classroom resources, she said.

"We recognize that Milwaukee is one of the poorest cities in the country and we need help," Driver said.

"We know, long term, if we're going to have an impact in our city, we're going to need more resources to ... fully fund these programs."

Davis, of the nonprofit Milwaukee Succeeds, also touted a new reading program aimed at boosting skills in kindergarten through second grade.

The tutor-intensive program is now in eight schools, she said, five of them in MPS. There are plans to expand it to 50 schools in the coming years.

"We believe this is a statewide model that can be implemented elsewhere," she said.

Davis said Milwaukee Succeeds is also working with deans of education at area colleges to better prepare teachers to work in an urban setting.
Milwaukee Public Works Department crews on Wednesday repair a break in the city-owned section of a lead service lateral between the water main and a private property boundary in the 2100 block of S. 14th St. City officials have canceled all routine water main replacement projects for 2016 in older residential neighborhoods where lead laterals connect municipal mains to homes. Only emergency repairs will be done in those neighborhoods. Credit: Angela Peterson

By of the

The City of Milwaukee and 70,000 residential property owners are facing total costs of $511 million or more to remove all lead pipes delivering drinking water to those homes, and eliminate the risk of contaminating tap water with the toxic metal.

In the interim, the Milwaukee Water Works has canceled 5 miles of water main replacement projects scheduled this year in older residential neighborhoods where lead pipes connect municipal mains to around 500 homes.

The projects are "on pause," Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said, while public works and health officials plan how they will work with property owners to remove the lead service laterals throughout the city.

Make no mistake, Barrett said, Milwaukee treats Lake Michigan water to control corrosion of lead pipes and prevent contamination of drinking water. Tests of tap water required by federal drinking water regulations confirm city water is safe to drink, records show.

The lack of corrosion control is at the root of the lead poisoning crisis that is gripping Flint, Mich. When the city switched to the Flint River for its water supply in late 2014 as a cost-cutting measure, the river water was not treated to control corrosion of toxic lead from laterals.

The Milwaukee Water Works decision on main construction was made out of concern that the brief disconnection required in main replacement work temporarily would boost lead contamination in drinking water of those 500 homes, according to public works officials.

But that number represents only the tip of a much larger problem: the 70,000 lead laterals serving city residences built before 1951.

Simply proceeding with main replacements in neighborhoods with lead laterals would ignore evidence of the contamination caused by cutting the lead pipe during main replacement, city Health Commissioner Bevan Baker said.

That disturbance "has been found to contaminate drinking water and present a public health risk especially to vulnerable populations such as young children, pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers," Baker said in letters to state officials.

Water Works Superintendent Carrie Lewis said 2016 main replacement projects were canceled in the pre-1951 neighborhoods after reviewing results of water tests done last year at homes where mains were replaced and then reconnected to the lead laterals.

Only 62 residences served by lead laterals were affected by 15 miles' worth of main replacement projects last year in several neighborhoods. Those families were advised to flush water pipes in the homes after work was done, Lewis said.

In each of six residences where tap water was tested, contamination increased after lead laterals were reattached to mains, Lewis said. Highest levels of lead were found the day after construction was completed.

Disconnecting and reconnecting the laterals when mains are replaced appears to break off enough lead particles to contaminate drinking water flowing into a residence, Lewis said.

Unsafe levels of lead were not found four weeks later when the tap water was retested, according to Water Works test results.

Replacing all of the city's lead laterals over time to prevent water contamination during main replacement would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with the city and property owners splitting the expense. The city owns the lateral from the water main to the property line; the property owner is responsible for the section between the property line and the residence.

Here are the estimates: The city share would be $266 million based on estimate of $3,800 each; property owners would face a total tab of $245 million to $490 million due to varying lengths of privately owned sections and costs between $3,500 and $7,000 each; the total price would be $511 million to $756 million.

"This is a statewide problem," Barrett said. "And we believe we've brought this problem to the state's attention."

Baker in his letters asks state officials to create a partnership with municipalities "to remedy this situation on behalf of all citizens in Wisconsin."

A survey done by the Milwaukee Water Works found that lead laterals remain in place in communities throughout the state. Racine officials said there were 10,437 lead pipes there, while West Allis reported 8,133. Manitowoc counted 6,579. Kenosha counted 7,326, while Green Bay estimated 1,900 and Shorewood responded that 95% of its 3,500 laterals were lead pipes.

Only in Madison is the number close to zero.

Since 2001, the Madison water utility has worked with property owners to replace 8,000 lead laterals. The utility offers an incentive  a rebate of up to $1,000  for a property owner to replace the lead lateral between the residence and property line.

Milwaukee has more of the lead laterals than most older, eastern cities from Boston to Racine because those communities stopped using lead pipes for laterals a few decades before Milwaukee, Public Works Commissioner Ghassan Korban said.

A survey by the Milwaukee Legislative Reference Bureau of nine other eastern cities, not including New York City, confirmed Milwaukee has more than the others. Philadelphia counted 60,000, Boston reported 40,000, Cleveland counted 45,000 and Dayton, Ohio, reported 35,000. The others had 20,000 or fewer lead laterals.

Lewis is a member of a National Drinking Water Advisory Council established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The council last month recommended revisions to federal regulations governing lead in tap water, including "the removal of all lead service lines."

The council acknowledged the work "will require significant resources and time." No nationwide cost estimates are available.

While Cudahy, Whitefish Bay and other communities in southeastern Wisconsin have swapped out publicly owned sections of lead laterals with copper when mains are replaced, Milwaukee has not done that routinely.

Replacing just the municipal section does not eliminate the lead problem, according to Lewis.

Since 1996, Milwaukee Water Works has treated Lake Michigan water with a phosphorus compound to control corrosion of lead pipes and prevent contamination of drinking water with the toxic metal.

It cost the city $393,000 in 2015 to add ortho-phosphoric acid during lake water treatment at the Linnwood and Howard Ave. plants. The chemical is added continuously to drinking water so that it coats the inside of lead laterals and even old fixtures in homes, according to Lewis.

Water testing required under federal regulations shows that lead levels in tap water steadily declined since 1997. The Water Works has been in compliance with the federal regulation, known as the lead and copper rule, since 1999.

To be in compliance, at least 90% of tap water samples must contain less than 15 micrograms of lead per liter of water, the equivalent of 15 parts per billion.

In 1999, 90% of tap water samples tested here were below 12 parts per billion of lead. That 90% mark has fluctuated between 4.6 ppb and 9.5 ppb in testing done from 2001 through 2014.

Exposure to lead in drinking water can cause a wide variety of health problems, from stomach distress and increased blood pressure to brain damage, according to federal health and environmental officials.

Children 6 and younger are most susceptible to the toxic metal. Lead can cause lower IQ and behavioral problems in young children.
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Pension system is just fine

Contrary to what Dennis Gasper claimed in a recent opinion piece, there was never a "spectacle of a bankrupt state pension system" in Wisconsin ("Don't bail out Teamsters," Crossroads, Jan. 24).

The true object of Act 10 was to retaliate against public sector unions that did not support Gov. Scott Walker's election and give Walker a platform for a future presidential election bid. Act 10 made public service workers pay a portion of their pension and health premiums that were previously paid by school districts, cities, villages, counties or the state. If there was any other legitimate reason, why exempt the police unions, who happened to supported Walker, from Act 10?

The Wisconsin Retirement System is a meticulously well-managed pension fund that uses claw backs of monthly benefits when times are bad and increased contributions when needed to keep the fund actuarially sound over the long haul. You will not find too many if any pension funds with those provisions built in.

For Walker, Republicans or Gasper to suggest the WRS was headed toward bankruptcy is just another non-truth. Gasper should get on the WRS website, do research and think for himself.

Wayne Meyer

Oak Creek



Wrong to single out workers

I would like to respond to Dennis Gasper's letter regarding bailing out the Teamsters ("Don't bail out Teamsters," Crossroads, Jan. 24).

First, they are asking for help in preventing drastic cuts to their pensions of up to 70% without first looking into other ways to save their pension fund. Second, they are taxpayers, and have seen their money used to fund things they didn't have a say in or agree with. Third, we are talking about veterans, seniors and disabled workers who earned their pensions, and no law that was passed without debate or public input should take their rights away.

It is wrong to single out certain union members and make them responsible for a pension fund the government was supposed to be monitoring.

R. Kraker

West Bend



Employees and religion

Some of the Muslim employees at Ariens Co. and their "spokesmen" at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) insist that Ariens (and presumably all employers) make allowances for the employees to practice their religion at work ("Somalis caught in different conflict," Jan. 24).

They cite United States law and the generally tolerant and charitable traditions in America toward freedom of religion.

How would they respond if the employers said that they would agree to treat their Muslim employees no different than any Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist employee would be treated by an employer in Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad, Islam's holiest city and the spiritual heart of Islam?

Bruce Becker

Wauwatosa



Paid leave hurts employees

"Paid family and medical leave benefits everyone," according to Zohreh Emami's op-ed (Opinions, Jan. 25).

I beg to differ. When employees get paid for not working, other employees, without any financial benefit, have to take up the slack and increase their workload to cover for the absentee employee. Businesses have to increase the price of their products or services to pay for the expense of the nonproductive employee on paid leave.

So employees have to work more for less and customers have to pay more for goods and services. That's a great socialist idea in a capitalist society. It only works until the money runs out and everyone's out of a job.

Russ Biernat

Milwaukee
State Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley (left), Circuit Court Judge Joe Donald (center) and Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg are facing off in the Feb. 16 state Supreme Court primary. The three appeared Wednesday at a forum in Milwaukee.The top two vote-getters in the primary will advance to the April 5 general election. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

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Two judges trying to unseat a freshly appointed member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court warned Wednesday that partisan politics are destroying the integrity of the court, while the incumbent stuck to her script about applying the law as the Legislature intended.

The three candidates appeared together for the first time at a lunchtime forum hosted by the Milwaukee Bar Association.

A primary on Feb. 16 will decide who among incumbent Rebecca Bradley, JoAnne Kloppenburg and Joseph Donald will make it to the general election April 5. All seek a 10-year term to replace Justice N. Patrick Crooks, who died in September.

Each made opening statements before taking questions from audience members, mostly lawyers and judges, submitted to the moderator.

Kloppenburg, who lost a very close challenge of Justice David Prosser in 2011, is now presiding on the District 4 Court of Appeals in Madison, having been elected without opposition to an open seat in 2012. She spent the first 23 years of her legal career as an assistant attorney general.

Kloppenburg said the breadth and length of experience makes her best to do "justice without fear or favor" and "stand up to special interests."

Donald was appointed a Milwaukee County circuit judge by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1996 and has been re-elected without opposition ever since. He helped develop the county's drug court and served as its first judge, and currently hears homicide and sexual assault cases.

He said the election is important to restore integrity at the high court and that without a new independent, "we're stuck with an ideologue on the court for the next 30 years," referring to Bradley.

Bradley was appointed to the Supreme Court in October to replace Crooks after he died in his chambers in September. It was her third judicial appointment by Gov. Scott Walker in three years, including to the Court of Appeals in May and to the circuit court in November 2012. A former litigator with a large law firm, she has been a darling of conservatives and enjoyed support from the Republican party.

She said she welcomes support from anyone who offers it, and pledged to run "a positive and nonpartisan" campaign.

Kloppenburg said she would accept campaign funds from any groups except political parties. Donald joked no political action committees have offered him any money, proving he's the true independent candidate. He got more laughs when he noted the seating arrangement, "I have one candidate on my right," referring to Bradley, "and one on my left," Kloppenburg.

Bradley defended the demeanor of the current court, saying that in her short experience all the justices have been collegial and professional, characteristics Bradley said she has displayed in her varied legal practice.

Donald, the first in his family to attend college, said he has had to overcome racial, economic and cultural differences during his career. He said that skill set would help him restore more civility to the often-fractious court.

"We need to convince the people it's their court, not Governor Walker's court, not the Republican Party's court, not the Club for Growth's court," Donald said.

So far, the candidates' campaigns report raising between $200,000 and $300,000 by the end of 2015, with Kloppenburg leading at $278,447, Donald at $250,657 and Bradley at $229,870.
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Madison Several Wisconsin district attorneys are seeking to involve private attorneys in their difficult attempt to reach the U.S. Supreme Court with the litigation over a closed investigation into Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and conservative groups.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and two other Democratic DAs, Ismael Ozanne of Dane County and Larry Nelson of Iowa County, filed a motion with the state Supreme Court seeking permission to share sealed documents with their outside counsels.

The appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to hinge on whether Justices Michael Gableman and David Prosser should have ruled on the investigation because their campaigns benefited from heavy spending by groups that were caught up in the probe.

The three private attorneys work for the firm Reed Smith LLP, which handled another major case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. That case also dealt with the question of whether state supreme court justices could sit on cases involving major political benefactors.

The Reed Smith attorneys, Brian Sutherland of San Francisco, Kasey Curtis of Los Angeles and Patrick Yingling of Pittsburg, are representing the prosecutors for free. The state ethics law prohibits elected officials such as district attorneys from receiving gifts, but they may in certain cases be able to accept legal services if they are acting in their official capacity.

Chisholm did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Government Accountability Board, which enforces the ethics law, had no immediate comment.

The move follows a recent action by the Wisconsin Supreme Court declining to reconsider an earlier ruling ending the investigation.

Special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, who hoped to see the nation's high court take the case, had made that request for reconsideration earlier this year. The state Supreme Court rejected that and clarified that going forward only district attorneys also involved in the so called John Doe probe could work on the case.

The latest request seeks permission for Sutherland, Curtis, Yingling and an assistant to review sealed documents for the purposes of making the appeal.
Doing Nothing class at Lawrence University garners national attention

The Doing Nothing course meets for one hour every week and is taught by a new professor each week. Students are graded either pass or fail and can't have their phones during the class.
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By Amy Maguire | (The Conversation) |  

Israel is preparing to make its largest land seizure in the West Bank since August 2014. Israeli settlers are already farming the 154 hectares in the Jordan Valley, displacing Palestinian communities.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on Israel to change its settlement policies. Settlements are illegal on occupied territory. They undermine the widely acknowledged right of Palestine to statehood. Yet Israel violates international law with near impunity.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the perennial dilemma of the modern international legal system. In 1947, the new UN resolved a Plan of Partition to create an Arab state and a Jewish state on Palestinian territory. The Jewish state  Israel  was declared in 1948. Palestine, though, remains a nascent state.

The Israeli government publicly states its commitment to a two-state solution. Yet many of its ministers oppose the proposal and the peace process itself.

Academic and author Padraig OMalley recently reported that the Israeli Defence Force is increasingly becoming a religious army. Its ideological makeup may very soon make it incapable of enforcing the evacuation of 100,000 Israeli settlers required to leave the West Bank to enable a two-state solution.

The Israeli wall and Palestinians rights

Israels construction of a wall in the West Bank symbolises its posture towards international law. Construction began in 2002 and is around 80% complete. The wall extends more than 700km in length, including at least 70km of concrete slabs.

Israel calls the wall a separation barrier. In 2002, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon claimed the wall was necessary to protect citizens from Palestinian suicide bombers. Some commentators credit the wall as highly successful in achieving this. Others question whether reductions in terrorist attacks can be attributed to the wall. Some refer to it as an apartheid wall.

The wall does not follow the Green Line considered essential for preserving territory to create a viable Palestinian state. 85% of the wall runs inside occupied Palestinian territory on the West Bank. Some Palestinian towns are almost entirely encircled by it.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israels construction of the wall violated a number of international legal principles. These included:

the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination;

the individual human rights of Palestinian people, which Israel  as occupying power  is obliged to protect;

the prohibition on transferring settlers onto occupied territory to change its demographics; and

the annexation of territory by force.

In 2014, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine reported that:

Palestinian farmers are often prevented from accessing their land;

around 36,000 Palestinians will be isolated between the Green Line and the wall when it is complete. These residents will require permits to remain in their homes;

access to the proposed Palestinian capital of East Jerusalem is heavily restricted; and

limits to border crossings keep people from accessing essential services.

Earlier this month, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Makarim Wibisono, resigned, citing Israels denying him access to Palestine. He said:
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By Emily Schwartz Greco | (Otherwords.org) |  

Donald Trumps first presidential campaign ad pledged to take their oil. Thats what President (gasp) Trump would do after having quickly cut the head off the Islamic State, says the deep-voiced narrator.

Along with political decapitation, there are many disturbing things in the Republican front-runners commercials besides these three words. But stop and ponder the questions they raise.

First, the U.S. government lacks state-owned oil companies, the requisite drilling equipment, and a fleet of tankers. How would Trump take their oil?

Hed get around this inconvenience wrought by Americas capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with a ring of U.S. troops.

You ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? Trump crowed in Iowa in November. Theyll rebuild that sucker, brand new  itll be beautiful.

(Exxon and its competitors arent great companies. Theyre destroying the planet and are dangerous for investors. But lets stick with those three words.)

Second, much of the territory the Islamic State controls today lies in oil-poor Syria. If a businessman-turned-president is going to deal with all the hassles that making our nations fifth-largest corporation an official agent of foreign policy would entail, why operate there?

Further, Syria faces a crisis so severe that babies are starving and the locals are eating cats and dogs to stay alive. Taking their oil would sow more instability and create more refugees. Doesnt Trump see how bad snatching oil from the Islamic States survivors right after it falls would look?

Whether its out of humanitarian concern or propelled by the optics, shouldnt the immediate post-ISIS U.S. mobilization focus on delivering aid and relief rather than further impoverishing the carpet-bombed populace?

Furthermore, the diplomatic conflict now brewing between Iran and Saudi Arabia may spiral into a regional war. Shouldnt the Pentagon get out of the way instead of forming a ring around invasive oil rigs?

Finally, Uncle Sam cant take oil that doesnt lie below federal land without stealing it. How would swiping a commodity that belongs to other people foster stability in the Middle East and dial back the threat of radical Islamic extremism, three other words Trump likes to chant?

Hes also repeatedly criticized the U.S. government for not taking Iraqs oil during Washingtons occupation, which began 13 years ago amid related oily delusions.

The bulk of the funds for Iraqs reconstruction will come from Iraqis, notably including their oil revenue, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrongly predicted in October 2003.

Ultimately, Washington squandered $60 billion on Iraqs botched reconstruction. The U.S. government left the country in shambles, vulnerable to the Islamic States operatives, and ready to forge military ties with Iran.

Trumps call for easy fixes and letting post-conflict oil pay the bills coincides with our countrys latest Middle Eastern milestone. The Gulf War officially began with the bombing of Baghdad on January 17, 1991. Happy 25th anniversary, everybody!

While shorter and cheaper than the second Iraq War, that misadventure set the stage for the failures that followed. It dragged on in other ways through years of harsh economic sanctions and intermittent bombing.

The conflict inflicted immeasurable misery upon the Iraqi people with relatively little inconvenience on our part. Since it ended, however, cancers and other chronic diseases have sickened and even killed some 200,000 Gulf War veterans.

Isnt it time to stop pretending that Americans can quickly fix the Middle Easts problems and deluding ourselves about how the profits from taking their oil will pay the tab for our military intervention?

It sure would be nice if the GOP presidential debate moderators were to ask The Donald some of these questions.

Columnist Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org.



Related video added by Juan Cole:

Ruptly TV: USA: Bomb the oil, take the oil  Trump outlines plan to tackle IS
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By Nidhal Guessoum | (Project Syndicate) |  

SHARJAH  The Muslim worlds past contributions to science and education were extraordinary. The Islamic golden age  during which scholarship and learning flourished across the Muslim world  lasted many centuries, and included the establishment of the worlds first universities. Today, however, Muslim-majority countries lag well behind the rest of the world in terms of education and research. This must change if the region is to provide modern jobs and better lives to its booming population and keep up with global development.

As it stands, only one university from the Muslim world  Turkeys Middle East Technical University  makes the top 100 in an international ranking, and only a dozen or so can be found in the top 400 in various other lists. While there are no international standardized tests in science and math at the university level, fourth-, eighth-, and tenth-grade students in the Muslim world test below the global average in these subjects, according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Program for International Student Assessment. And the gap with students elsewhere is widening.

Support Project Syndicates mission Project Syndicate needs your help to provide readers everywhere equal access to the ideas and debates shaping their lives. Learn more

Moreover, research output  as measured by publications and citations in international journals, as well as patents  is disproportionately low relative to population and financial capabilities. Muslim countries spend, on average, only about 0.5% of their GDP on research and development, compared to the global average of 1.78% of GDP and the OECD average of above 2%. The number of people working in science fields in the Muslim world is also well below the global average.

Eighteen months ago, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan task force of international experts  convened by the Muslim World Science Initiative and the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology, and coordinated by me  set out to explore the sorry state of science in the Muslim world and determine how universities could help to improve the situation. A better understanding of the various issues and possible remedies could enable science to flourish again in the Muslim world, with far-reaching benefits for its economies and societies.

Our review of the state of science at universities in the Muslim world took into account not just budgets and research, but also issues like the status of women in science studies and careers. Moreover, we conducted a thorough review  the first of its kind  of how science is taught at universities in the Muslim world, including pedagogical methods, textbooks, language of instruction, censorship of controversial topics (such as the theory of evolution), and the role of religion in science classes.

In a just-released report, the task force concludes that, though the overall state of science in the Muslim world remains poor, much can be done to improve it effectively and efficiently. The task force offers specific recommendations for academic institutions, national policymaking bodies, and other stakeholders, such as science academies, industry associations, and civil-society organizations.

For academic institutions, one major goal should be to build students capacity for creative thinking and critical inquiry. To this end, the task force recommends broadening the education of science-focused students to include humanities, social sciences, languages, and communication. At the same time, it calls for the adoption of internationally tried and true teaching methods, particularly inquiry-based and active-learning approaches. Of course, such a shift would require professors to receive training in these methods.

Professors should also be encouraged to dedicate themselves to writing textbooks and conducting science outreach, not just publishing more papers. This recommendation may be surprising, given the Muslim worlds low research productivity. But the reality is that such efforts will produce more real-world benefits than a single-minded focus on publication, which can inadvertently encourage plagiarism and junk science.

The task force has recommended that national policymaking bodies grant universities more space to innovate (especially in curricula) and evolve (in research programs and collaborations), each in its own way, according to its strengths and weaknesses. And it has called on all institutions to embrace meritocracy and shun gimmicks likes paying for collaborations to boost publications. A quick rankings boost is never worth the risk of reputational damage in the longer term.

These steps require a bottom-up program of change. That is why the task force has now put out an open call for universities across the Muslim world to join a voluntary Network of Excellence of Universities for Science (NEXUS). Overseen by the task force, this self-selected peer group  comprising university administrators and faculty who recognize that change must start from within  will implement the steps that the task force has devised.

The hope is that once the first group of universities efforts begin to bear fruit, more institutions will join. The resulting momentum will create pressure for ministries, regulators, and other policymaking bodies  which may be the most resistant to change  to take complementary steps.

Universities are hubs of research, critical thinking, and lively debate, where the next generation is not only exposed to established facts and theories, but also learns to dissect ideas, pinpoint flaws, and help enrich and expand our knowledge base. At a time when the Muslim world is facing unprecedented challenges, the importance of creating a healthy academic environment cannot be overstated.

Nidhal Guessoum is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Via Project Syndicate



Related video added by Juan Cole:

Aljazeera English: Science in a Golden Age  Chemistry: The Search for the Philosophers Stone
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke out this week in an address to the UN Security Council against Israels policy of stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank (allotted to Palestinians in the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan that Israelis celebrate so fiercely), and of building ever more squatter homes in occupied Palestine. Ban went on to say that it is natural for Palestinians to resist this assault on their basic human rights. That is, Ban described the Palestinians as wronged and as rational actors:

Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process. Some have taken me to task for pointing out this indisputable truth. Yet, as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism. So-called facts on the ground in the occupied West Bank are steadily chipping away the viability of a Palestinian state and the ability of Palestinian people to live in dignity.

Ban is right. Civil resistance to foreign military occupation is not viewed as illegal in international law.

Killing random civilians, on the other hand, is always condemnable.

The reaction of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was swift and vicious. He accused Sec.-Gen. Ban of incitement and of supporting terrorism:

The secretary generals remarks provide a tailwind for terror. There is no justification for terror. Those Palestinians who murder do not want to build a state, they want to destroy a state, and they say this openly.

Netanyahus racism toward the Palestinians requires that their violence either be without a motive, springing from an internal character flaw, or that it be driven only by hatred of Jews (the Likudniks typically nazify the Palestinians, as though Jews were the aggrieved party here).

In reality, of course, Palestinians have been remarkably patient given what the Zionists (Jewish nationalists) did to them. In the 1930s, Palestine had a vast Palestinian majority and was scheduled to be an independent state by British officials by the late 1940s, just as Mandate Syria under the French and Mandate Iraq under the British became independent countries.

Instead, in 1947-48 Jews let into Palestine by British colonial authorities over the objection of native Palestinians took up arms and ethnically cleansed 720,000 of the 1.2 million Palestinians from their homes. The Zionists, now become Israelis, stole the houses and farms of the people they had deliberately driven out, leaving much of that people homeless and scattered in refugee camps (many Palestinian families driven from what is now Israel to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon or Jordan still live in those refugee camps). Jews, including Israelis, have received massive reparations from Germany for the harm that country did to them. Palestinians not only received not a dime from the Israelis who stole their nationhood, but they continue to be robbed of further property and dignity every day.

Worse of all, most Palestinians were left without citizenship in a state. They are the largest group of stateless people in the world. In Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burgers phrase, citizenship is the right to have rights. Palestinians have no such right. They are without basic human rights, at the mercy of the Israeli jackboot.

Yet most Palestinians have not reacted with violence to this horrible injustice with which they continue to live.

That some do is not, as Ban said, at all surprising.

So when the Zionists were living under British rule in Mandate Palestine, they were unhappy with British policy. Large numbers of them joined terrorist groups. They blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing innocent civilians and British officers along with their intended target, British intelligence officers.

Netanyahu actually openly commemorated this act of terrorism. Netanyahu daily incites militant Israeli squatters on Palestinian land to commit violence against Palestinians, including home invasions.

This is not to mention the state terror Netanyahu imposes on the people of the Gaza Strip, whom he has attempted to keep on the edge of survival, and whom he intensively bombed in summer of 2014, killing hundreds of innocent civilians with a reckless disregard for non-combatant life.

So Netanyahu, one of the great inciters of terrorism in the contemporary world, doesnt have the standing to criticize Ban Ki-moon.

But Ban didnt even say what Netanyahu accused him of (no surprise since Netanyahu is one of the worlds most practiced liars). Here is what Ban actually said in condemnation of violence:

 Sadly, 2016 has begun much like 2015 ended  with unacceptable levels of violence and a polarized public discourse across the spectrum in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. Stabbings, vehicle attacks, and shootings by Palestinians targeting Israeli civilians  all of which I condemn  and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, have continued to claim lives. But security measures alone will not stop the violence. They cannot address the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians  especially young people. The full force of the law must be brought to bear on all those committing crimes  with a system of justice applied equally for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

So Ban condemned Palestinian attacks on Israelis but this is incitement? Surely what Netanyahu is complaining about is that Ban was even-handed, considering the Israeli actions that drives such conflict, and demanding that Israeli terrorist who burn Palestinian children to death also be punished.

Ban was not speaking in generalities. He was addressing specific Israeli actions and policies:

 Progress towards peace requires a freeze of Israels settlement enterprise. Continued settlement activities are an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community. They rightly raise fundamental questions about Israels commitment to a two-state solution. I am deeply troubled by reports today that the Israeli Government has approved plans for over 150 new homes in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. This is combined with its announcement last week declaring 370 acres in the West Bank, south of Jericho, as so-called state land. These provocative acts are bound to increase the growth of settler populations, further heighten tensions and undermine any prospects for a political road ahead. I urge the Israeli Government not to use a recent decision by the Israeli High Court affirming a large tract of land south of Bethlehem as state land to advance settlement activities. The demolitions of Palestinian homes in Area C of the occupied West Bank continue. So do the decades-long difficulties of Palestinians to obtain building permits. The Bedouin community, in particular, is paying a heavy price. I reiterate the UNs call for an immediate end to Israeli plans to forcibly transfer Bedouin communities currently living within the occupied Palestinian territory in the Jerusalem area.

Most of these actions of Netanyahu are war crimes. He is the inciter to terrorism. Big time.

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VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Jan. 27, 2016) -

Highlights:

First gold poured on January 26, 2016

Designed hourly throughput rates and mill grind attained in both SAG and Ball Mills

Ramp-up to commercial production remains on track for Q2 2016

Asanko Gold Inc. ("Asanko" or the "Company") (TSX:AKG)(NYSE MKT:AKG) announces first gold production of approximately 400 ounces from Phase 1 of the Asanko Gold Mine ("AGM" or the "Project") in Ghana. This follows the successful commencement of operations of the entire processing facility one month ahead of schedule. The latest videos and photographs are available at http://www.asanko.com/projects/photo-gallery.

Commenting on this historic milestone, Peter Breese, President and CEO, said: "I am proud to announce that the Asanko Gold Mine is officially the newest producing gold mine in Ghana, with Phase 1 successfully built within our capital budget and commissioned one month ahead of schedule.

"As we embark on a new chapter for Asanko, I'd like to thank the Government and our stakeholders in Ghana for all their assistance in facilitating our transition from explorer to producer. In addition I would like to commend my team, our EPCM contractor DRA Global and all the thousands of construction and service sub-contractors for delivering a well-executed project over the past 18 months.

"As we complete commissioning and ramp up to steady-state production rates, I am pleased to note the early gains that we have already achieved with respect to throughput rates and mill grind, which have exceeded our expectations. We remain confident of declaring commercial production during Q2 2016."

Commissioning and Ramp-Up

Commissioning of the processing facility is progressing well and is approximately one month ahead of the original schedule. The crusher was handed over from the EPCM contractor to Asanko in mid-December and was commissioned during the last half of the month. Ore was stockpiled ahead of the milling operations and introduced into the SAG and Ball mills during the last week in December.

Commissioning of the mills was initially conducted on marginal grade ore until the mills achieved the designed hourly throughput rates and grind. The mills have had several days of continuous operations with daily milling rates matching or exceeding designed throughputs of 8,300 tonnes per day. In addition both mills have also attained grinds that are in line with the plant design parameters.

The operations were fed low grade ores until the density built up in the fully erected and commissioned CIL circuit. Once this was achieved, cyanide was introduced into the CIL and gravity gold circuits and the entire operation from milling to the CIL circuit is now being run at planned feed grades. Gold inventory in the CIL circuit will continue to build up to steady-state levels over the next month, after which time full gold production rates are expected to be reached. Commercial production is expected in Q2 2016.

Mining

The development of the Nkran pit continues to advance well with full drill and blast operations continuing at long-term steady state levels. To date, over 22 million tonnes of material has been removed from the pit and various ore benches have been exposed. There are now enough working faces available in the pit to facilitate mining of the requisite quantities of ore at planned grades to feed the mill at designed throughput rates.

Grade control drilling is proceeding according to plan with the next six months of planned ore having been drilled and modelled into the medium term mine plan. The grade control based mine plan for 2016 is expected to be in-line with the Definitive Project Plan, which was published in November 2014.

Cash Position

The Company has a strong balance sheet with US$116 million cash on hand, as at December 31, 2015.

About Asanko Gold Inc.

Asanko's vision is to become a mid-tier gold mining company that maximizes value for all its stakeholders. The Company's flagship project is the multi-million ounce Asanko Gold Mine located in Ghana, West Africa. The mine is being developed in phases. Phase 1 has been commissioned, with first gold produced in early Q1 2016. Ramp-up to steady state production of 190,000 ounces per annum is expected in Q2 2016.

Asanko is managed by highly skilled and successful technical, operational and financial professionals. The Company is strongly committed to the highest standards for environmental management, social responsibility, and health and safety for its employees and neighbouring communities.

Forward-Looking and other Cautionary Information

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address estimated resource quantities, grades and contained metals, possible future mining, exploration and development activities, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes the forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements should not be in any way construed as guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices for metals, the conclusions of detailed feasibility and technical analyses, the timely renewal of key permits, lower than expected grades and quantities of resources, mining rates and recovery rates and the lack of availability of necessary capital, which may not be available to the Company on terms acceptable to it or at all. The Company is subject to the specific risks inherent in the mining business as well as general economic and business conditions. For more information on the Company, Investors should review the Company's annual Form 20-F filing with the United States Securities Commission and its home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com.

Neither Toronto Stock Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
VANCOUVER, Jan. 27, 2016 /CNW/ - Bear Creek Mining Corporation (TSX Venture: BCM) ("Bear Creek" or the "Company") is pleased to provide shareholders with an update on its activities regarding the Santa Ana and Corani projects in Peru, and an outlook for 2016.

"2015 was a productive year for Bear Creek, with the completion of the Corani Optimized Final Feasibility Study* and the submission of our initial statement of claim (the "Memorial") in respect of the Santa Ana project arbitration," states Andrew Swarthout, President and CEO. "Corani is one of the largest undeveloped silver projects in the world, and coupled with our Santa Ana deposit, forms the basis of Bear Creek's future growth profile. We recognize that during this sustained downturn in mining markets and metal prices our treasury is a key asset and a factor that separates us from many other exploration and development companies. Our goal for 2016 is simple; to continue to meaningfully move the Corani project forward and work to unlock the value at Santa Ana while operating in as cost-effective a manner as possible so that our treasury continues to buffer us from the worst of the mining downturn. Ultimately, our aim is to weather this mining market slump and emerge from it in a 'front-row' position, able to accelerate quickly and decisively when the markets improve."

Santa Ana

The Santa Ana arbitration, being heard at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ("ICSID"), is proceeding on schedule. Bear Creek's Memorial was filed on May 29, 2015, which was followed by the Government of Peru's Counter-Memorial filing on October 6, 2015. Bear Creek submitted its reply to Peru's Counter-Memorial in early January, 2016. Peru's rejoinder to this filing is due to be submitted to ICSID in mid-April and a final submission from Bear Creek will be filed in late May, 2016. ICSID is posting these written submissions on their website, generally within several weeks of their filing, at https://icsid.worldbank.org/apps/ICSIDWEB/cases/Pages/casedetail.aspx?CaseNo=ARB/14/21&tab=DOC. In-person hearings before the arbitration tribunal are scheduled to occur at ICSID headquarters from September 8 to 16, 2016, after which the tribunal will commence its deliberations. An award on Bear Creek's case is anticipated within the second half of 2017, though there is no prescribed deadline for the tribunal's ruling. Bear Creek and its legal counsel remain very confident in the merits of its claim that the Santa Ana project was expropriated without compensation in June 2011 through the Government of Peru's issuance of Supreme Decree 032, which nullified the Company's rights to advance the Santa Ana project.

Corani

After completing the Corani Optimized Final Feasibility Study last year, Bear Creek undertook an exploratory investigation of possible Corani project-financing scenarios. Feedback from a range of potential participants, including lenders, off-take partners, development banks, equity markets, and streaming partners, aligned closely with the Company's internal conclusions; Corani, as one of the largest, and longest-life-span, undeveloped silver deposits in the world, is a financeable and buildable operation but will require significant upfront capital access and improved metal and share prices to justify a development decision. Therefore, our plans for Corani during the coming months are to continue to de-risk the project by acquiring key permits in preparation for an application for the Construction Permit that is ultimately required to commence development, while maintaining the excellent community relationships we have worked hard to foster. The Company's goal is to ensure the necessary components are in place to make sound and nimble decisions for Corani when the opportunity arises. To this end, in late 2015 Bear Creek submitted modifications (based on the Corani Optimized Final Feasibility Study) to its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment ("ESIA") originally approved in September 2013. In mid-January Bear Creek received approval of the modified ESIA from the Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines; a key milestone for the Corani project and an important component of the eventual Construction Permit.

Exploration Projects

Bear Creek has 3 prospective exploration properties in Peru under joint venture; the Sumi and La Yegua copper-gold projects and the Maria Jose gold-silver project. While we continue to maintain an ownership interest in these projects, they are currently being advanced at virtually no cost to the Company.

Cost-Cutting

Bear Creek's strategy for the coming months will continue to comprise both offensive and defensive elements. We will continue the Santa Ana arbitration process so that its value to shareholders can be unlocked. We will continue to meet our Corani social and environmental obligations and maintain our cooperative and respectful community partnerships while we work to secure the additional permits required for its eventual development. Our focus on longevity will be amplified in the coming months however, in order to preserve our treasury as long as possible without reversing our forward momentum. General and administrative expenses are being lowered as much as possible, staffing levels are being reduced to core functions only, and the Company is preparing to replace a significant percentage of the cash component of director and management compensation with non-cash alternatives.

*see Bear Creek news releases dated June 2, 2015 and July 20, 2015, available on its website (www.bearcreekmining.com) for details of the 2015 Corani Optimized Final Feasibility Study.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Andrew Swarthout

President and CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") Disclosure

All of Bear Creek's exploration programs and pertinent disclosure of a technical or scientific nature are prepared by or prepared under the direct supervision of Andrew Swarthout, P.Geo., President and CEO, a Qualified Person ("QP") as defined in NI 43-101.

The 2015 Corani Optimized Final Feasibility Study Technical Report, filed on July 20, 2015, was prepared by a team of independent engineering consultants as described in the Company's news release of June 2, 2015.

Caution Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This information and these statements, referred to herein as "forward-looking statements" are made as of the date of this news release or as of the effective date of information described in this news release, as applicable. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect current estimates, predictions, expectations or beliefs regarding future events. Any statements that relate to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements made herein and in the documents referred to herein, are based on the Company's or its consultants' beliefs at the time the statements were made, as well as various assumptions made by and information currently available to them. Although management considers these assumptions to be reasonable based on information available to it, they may prove to be incorrect.

By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved or that assumptions do not reflect future experience. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important factors could cause the actual outcomes to differ materially from the beliefs, plans, objectives, expectations, anticipations, estimates, assumptions and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements. These risk factors may be generally stated as the risk that the assumptions and estimates used to make such forward-looking statements do not occur and the additional risks described in the Company's Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2013, annual financial statements and management's discussion and analysis for the year ended December 31, 2014 and in the feasibility study entitled "Optimized and Final Feasibility Study, Corani Project, Puno, Peru, Form 43-101F1 Technical Report" filed on July 20, 2015. When relying on our forward-looking statements, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by the Company or on behalf of the Company, except as required by law.

SOURCE Bear Creek Mining Corporation
Yildiz Holding is restructuring its confectionery and biscuit businesses, uniting the likes of United Biscuits, Ulker and Godiva under a single umbrella subsidiary. The Turkish conglomerate has some ambitious growth targets for the new unit. Katy Askew takes a look at whether it can deliver.

Yildiz Holding has merged its global confectionery and biscuits businesses into a single operating unit, called Pladis. The move creates a new global giant with annual revenue of US$5.2bn and 26,000 employees worldwide. It brings together the blockbuster regional brands of Ulker, United Biscuits and Godiva as well as a number of smaller businesses.

Pladis, which started trading last week, operates across various geographies with a focus on the northern hemisphere. In order to maintain the culture of the companies and brands that fall under Pladis, Yildiz will adopt a regional management approach. The company will be divided into three regions: Turkey, Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia; Japan and Korea; and Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Yildiz Holding chairman Murat Ulker said becoming a global company provided agility and flexibility and a unity of purpose. The company, the third-largest global snack maker, has previously indicated it intends to overtake Kellogg and become the worlds second-largest snack group after Mondelez International.

Under the new structure, Yildiz said it wants to grow 2018 EBITDA by 17% and achieve a 26% acceleration in EBITDA margin. It is a significant growth target that will require action on both the top and bottom lines.

In many respects, the reorganisation of operations reflects the historical evolution of the confectionery-to-biscuits maker and its rapid expansion via a series of M&A moves. From its majority stake in Ulker, which has a free-float of 43.02% on the Istanbul stock exchange, Yildiz has built up its portfolio through an active acquisition strategy, such as the 2007 purchase of premium chocolate brand Godiva.

The firms rapid growth led to a complex corporate structure in the biscuit and snack business. The first steps towards simplification were taken at Ulker between 2008 and 2011 when the group embarked on a massive restructuring drive. The company sold off non-core food operations and consolidated its food businesses from four sales companies and four production companies. The merger of the production and sales functions simplified channel distribution. The company also embarked on a process of SKU optimisation, cutting the number of products from 502 in 2010 to 330 SKUs in 2014.

This streamlined base was once again expanded via M&A when Yildiz took control of UK-based biscuit maker United Biscuits in 2014. Michael Weiss, partner at AT Kearney in Turkey, says the formation of a single operating platform was a very logical next step after the United Biscuits acquisition.

In a strategy with echoes of Ulkers prior simplification drive, Weiss suggests if the restructuring is well executed there are many margin benefits to be had. There are opportunities within that to simplify the business through EBITDA synergies, purchasing opportunities and the like These are international brands that are in good shape but synergies are easier as an umbrella, to take a more orchestrated approach.

Synergy opportunities lie in joint cocoa, palm oil and packaging material procurement, with lower costs driven by increased scale. In integrating the businesses, the group also plans to leverage cross production at United Biscuits 16 facilities and Ulkers eight production sites, Ulker management revealed at a recent investor event. Lower costs will be supported by lower logistics, sales and distribution costs, the Ulker executives predicted.

Savings are also expected to come through the integration of sales and distribution networks. Benefits will be found in the combination of the two supply chain networks particularly in sourcing and distribution, given Ulkers vertically integrated supply chain, Ulker explained.

Greater integration will enable the group to capitalise on each companys brands and route-to-market expertise across complementary geographies in order to boost sales, Ulker suggested.

Weiss believes that the top line advantages are the main motivation for the reorganisation and suggests that the umbrella corporation will prove more effective than the sum of its parts. I see a very significant cross-selling opportunity. There are fantastic opportunities to have a customised approach in go-to-market strategies and play the portfolio. Top line synergies are the first priority and bottom line synergies are not to dominate. The umbrella brand will make market communication easier. Individual brands will not need to compete for shelf [space] because you can act as one group.

By cross-selling its brands, the combined business can also utilise its extensive geographical footprint in both developed and emerging markets.

Ulker is Turkeys largest producer of confections, biscuits and crackers with a stable of well-known and trusted brands. It has a 45% market share in the biscuit category, a 46% share of the chocolate sector and a third of the cakes market. The group is also expanding in high-growth economies in the Middle East and north Africa, with businesses in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Egypt.

Godiva offers a gateway to the premium sector, an area Ulker has increasingly been targeting in order to improve its product mix. Since its acquisition by Yildiz and Ulker, the brand has built on its base in the developed markets of North America and Europe, expanding into China, South Korea, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Godiva plans to open 50 new stores a year, it was revealed at the end of last year, with a focus on growth markets in the Far East.

For its part, United Biscuits is the UKs largest biscuit maker with a presence in continental Europe and highly recognised brands including Jacobs and McVities. The company has been ramping up sales in emerging markets and recently forecast a 50% rise in exports from the UK by 2020. The integration of its business within Pladis looks set to accelerate this growth.

However, for all the regional strength of its brands, unlike global confectionery leader Mondelez, Pladis finds itself lacking powerbrands that can be leveraged internationally in the way Oreo, Ritz or Cadbury have been. This is likely to be a limiting factor to any cross-selling opportunities and the groups ability to ramp up sales by moving existing brands into new markets.

As Euromonitor analyst Jack Skelly notes: I dont think the Yildizs portfolio complements itself that well. I cant imagine, for example, Godiva working in conjunction with McVities. This is something Mondelez has been really successful at but thats because its portfolio works well together  it has a wide range of biscuit and mass-appeal chocolate brands such as Dairy Milk.

For Mintel analyst Jody Monotto, of equal importance is the revenue and earnings stability that combining United Biscuits brings to the enlarged portfolio. The deal provides Ulker with access to relatively stable markets, strong brands and a wide network of production facilities. The stability is particularly important given the volatility they face in the Middle Eastern and African markets they are expanding into, she suggests.

UB has a solid revenue and production base in the UK and Europe, which will provide stability as the newly expanded Ulker biscuits business expands into the Middle East, Africa and Russia, which remain volatile. UB also provide Ulker with the number two position in the European biscuit market, a significant achievement given their goal of becoming a global leader in the category.

As Yildiz works to grow its Pladis snacks business, the group is therefore ultimately likely to look to further M&A in addition to the organic expansion of its existing brands. AT Kearneys Weiss expects the group will strike a balance between organic and inorganic growth, with augmenting Pladiss production footprint likely to be high up the M&A agenda.

Meanwhile, Minotto believes further acquisitions will be used to grow in new markets. Ulker have also stated their plans to enter the Latin American and Russian markets Ulker have also indicated they are planning further acquisitions and these are likely to be focused on delivering them an advantage in these two important biscuit markets, she predicts.
When the Canadian National Railway Intermodal Rail Terminal opened four years ago on West River Street in Chippewa Falls, it provided the Chippewa Valley with a gateway to the world.

The terminal provides many regional businesses and farmers with access to international markets for the first time. Suddenly, they had direct access to container shipments from all across the country and a faster way to ship their product to burgeoning markets, such as those along the Pacific Rim.

Located on 8.5 acres at Canadian Nationals Chippewa Falls Yard, the terminal features 2,500 feet of intermodal loading and unloading track, a certified scale and a grain transfer facility. It employs four people and operates seven days a week, carrying an estimated 5,000 tons a year.

Since Canadian National acquired Wisconsin Central Ltd. in 2001, it has reportedly invested more than $500 million in rail infrastructure improvements in Wisconsin, with at least $10 million to $15 million dedicated to the Chippewa terminal alone.

With our commitment to innovation and supply-chain collaboration, our goal is to help our customers compete more effectively in their end markets, be they in North America or around the world, said Jean-Jacques Ruest, CN executive vice president and chief marketing officer at the time of the terminals grand opening in February 2012.

The Chippewa Falls terminal established the first intermodal facility for CN between Chicago and Winnipeg, Manitoba. From Winnipeg, a train rolls on toward Price Rupert, British Columbia, where the containers are loaded onto ships, with various Asian markets as their destination.

Creating options

Before this terminal was built, River Country Co-op of Chippewa Falls trucked its grains only to markets within 150 miles. Now the co-ops soybeans, soybean meal, distillers grain and corn cross several time zones to reach buyers thousands of miles away.

We started using the terminal in 2013, which allowed us to ship our grains by container for the first time, says Bruce Mlsna, CEO of River Country Co-op. Now our products are shipped across the Pacific Ocean to Asia.

Containers arrive at the terminal carrying tons of shipments for customers such as Menards and Federal Express every week. These same containers then leave the terminal filled with, among other things, grains from farmers across the Chippewa Valley.

This new facility has been better for our customers, since theyre getting better prices with their products going overseas now, Mlsna said. We ship 3,000, 29-ton containers a year. Thats about 50 containers a week.

In the two years since we started using the intermodal facility, we have shipped two million bushels of corn. The rail terminal has helped us ship our grain to several ports and given us more opportunity.

All this increased activity at River Country Co-op is providing a boost to the area economy as well. River Country has increased its payroll by $200,000 to $300,000 since the intermodal terminal opened.

With property already adjacent to the new terminal, the co-op built its own rail facility, so now it can move its containers more easily, directly onto the rail property, without having to cross highways.

Cooperative venture

The economic benefit to having an intermodal rail terminal in Chippewa County was recognized long ago by such people as Charlie Walker, president/CEO of the Chippewa County Economic Development Corp.

Intermodal requires cooperation and dependence with ocean carriers, terminals, railroads, and local businesses. For the past several years, CCEDC has been promoting rail development in Chippewa County as an economically competitive, efficient and sustainable way to move goods in and out of the region.

Intermodal facilities bring together two or more modes  often rail and truck carriers. So promoting the establishment of one in Chippewa Falls only made sense.

Currently, much of the investment in new or improved rail intermodal facilities is taking place in the Midwest in places like Chippewa County, near the interstate highway system but away from the congestion of major metropolitan areas where land rates are lower.

This facility is near two major retail distribution centers: Menards and Walmart. It provides shippers a speed advantage by offering single-line service, and leverages the geographic advantages of Prince Rupert and Vancouver, Canada. So the CN Intermodal Facility not only serves local markets but it is also strategically located to reach a substantial portion of the U.S. population that is within a one-day drive.

In addition, the CCEDC has been working with CNs Supply Chain Logistics Group in identifying regional companies that can benefit from the railroads Matchback program. This CN program works with the steamship lines to facilitate loading of containers and returning them back to the port of origin filled with Wisconsin agriculture products.

Canadian access key

Menards spokesman Jeff Abbott agrees with Walker that having access to the seaport of Prince Rupert is a plus.

It provides the shortest and most economical route between North America and China and neighboring countries, he said. Shipping through Canada avoids the congested West Coast shipping ports in California, plus labor strikes at the California ports that have disrupted freight services in the past.

Walker said the demand Menards creates for in-bound rail shipments was key to helping the CCEDC and others convince Canadian National to invest millions into a new terminal. During a meeting Walkers group had to demonstrate the volume was here to make it work.

Menards is this regions primary importer, he said. They were trucking in tons of raw materials a day from other rail facilities hundreds of miles away.

Abbott also attributes the success of the campaign to build this terminal to other government entities.

The Chippewa Falls container base was the combined effort of the Canadian National Railroad and Menards, but it could not have happened without the support of Gov. Scott Walker, the Department of Commerce and the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation for their role in securing the land use and necessary permits, he said.

Menards knew it would be receiving hundreds of overseas containers filled with merchandise at this base, he said, and that meant opportunity for the Chippewa Valley.

Area farmers and loggers are filling the resulting empty containers with exported grains, hardwoods and more to be sent back to the base for overseas shipping, Abbott said. Hundreds of area farmers and loggers no longer need to send containers to the Twin Cities or Chicago, resulting in reduced shipping costs and thus increasing their bottom line.

Distance to market

One of those farms is Custer Farms, located in Chippewa Falls on the site of the familys original dairy farm, which was started by Ken Custers father in 1943. Today Ken, Darryl and Douglas Custer  father and sons, respectively  own and operate Custer Farms and two subsidiaries: Chippewa Valley Grain Transport, celebrating its 25th year of operation; and Wheaton Grain.

Along with grain from their own crops, the Custers ship grains collected from farmers from a wide radius around the Chippewa Valley and as far north as Bayfield. As with River Country Co-op, they started using the new intermodal terminal in 2013. Custer Farms trucks containers filled with primarily distillers grain and soybeans to the terminal.

Before this intermodal facility was built here, we did not ship anything by container, says Ken Custer. Its all about distance to market, and now we are able to capitalize on that.

Darryl Custer estimates Wheaton Grain ships 1,500 containers a year. Their shipments have grown steadily since shifting their emphasis to container shipping by rail. As the value of the U.S. dollar significantly effects the volume they sell overseas, future growth is difficult to predict. However, their current pace of growth is impressive with more than 250 containers going out in December.

Our soybeans and distillers grains are in much greater demand now that we have access to the Asian markets, Darryl says. The value of soybeans has increased about 10 to 15 cents a bushel since the facility was built.

In just four years, the new intermodal terminal has positioned the Chippewa Valley as a capable exporter to international markets.

This rail facility is bringing export dollars to the Chippewa Valley that didnt exist before, Ken Custer said. It has undeniably expanded market opportunities for soybeans  the demand is huge now. And we know we will be exporting other crops as well in the near future. This project also brought other money to region by facilitating road improvement to accommodate increased traffic. As a whole, it has brought tremendous value here.

Abbott says the intermodal facility has proven to be a success story of great proportions. The Chippewa Falls container base has become the gateway for exporting Wisconsin agricultural products worldwide, he said, and a great economic engine for the entire area.
People havent stepped onto a platform from a passenger train in Eau Claire for 52 years.

The Chicago and North Westerns "400" used to stop in Eau Claire while whisking passengers to various stops from Chicago to the Twin Cities. Famed for covering "400 miles in 400 minutes," it ended service in 1963. When Amtrak took over the private railroads in 1971, its route from Chicago to Minneapolis-St. Paul bypassed Eau Claire.

But a number of people are working to bring passenger rail service back to the region, and with it, a new economic engine for the Chippewa Valley.

The West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition formed in 1999 with two legends from the area's business community among its founding members. Bill Leinenkugel and Owen Ayres were among the people who saw how reinstating passenger rail could advance economic development.

Today's coalition members are hoping developments in the ensuing years will reinvigorate demand. These developments include a generation that may be ending America's love affair with the car, increasing traffic patterns to and from the Cities, and technology that is much more integral to our lives.

This service could be a benefit for RCU and other businesses in the area by enhancing the vitality of Eau Claire and increasing the talent pool for employers here, says Jan Johnson, a member of the coalitions newly formed Passenger Rail Organizing Council and executive vice president of organizational agility at RCU. Some talent is not always available locally and more millennials are attracted to raising families in a smaller city, but want easy access to a big city and its events, such as sporting events and concerts.

And millennials, more than previous generations, are expressing a desire to steer clear of the steering wheel. David Simpson is director of government affairs and strategic initiatives for Iowa Pacific Holdings, which manages several commuter rail routes throughout the country. Simpson also chairs the National Academy of Sciences committee on passenger rail.

The trends are clear, Simpson said. Young professionals are not wanting to drive as much. Thats reflected in data indicating car ownership among millennials is down and that they prefer living in urban versus suburban areas.

This preference by young professionals to eschew suburbia and car travel once they settle down is driving the need for passenger rail in some cities. Were seeing downtowns across the country come back that we never thought would, says Simpson, citing Oklahoma City as an example. "The millennials want to live downtown near the arts centers, restaurants and other event centers. The Chamber of Commerce there told us that they have to have passenger rail to Tulsa or the city will lose its young professionals to other areas such as Denver or Salt Lake City.

The flurry of recent development in downtown Eau Claire, which includes new housing options, could be another reason why passenger rail would be a good fit. Look at the revitalization of Eau Claire, especially with the Confluence Project nearing its funding goal, Johnson said. It's one thing to want to become a destination market, but a downtown has to be easily accessible.

Just as trains tend to run both ways, so do the potential benefits for our region of attracting millennials with passenger rail service. Many of them who live in the Twin Cities now drudge through rush-hour traffic, taking up to one hour to go one-way to work. If passenger rail to our region were available, more metro millennials may consider job opportunities here.

Conversely our region can avoid brain drain by retaining university graduates who would prefer to stay in a smaller community, if they have fast, easy access to a large metro area where they can take in a concert, shopping trip or other amenities without having to worry about potential travel headaches.

Unlike driving by car, you don't have to worry about the weather, rush hour, accidents or other unexpected delays keeping you from arriving on time, Johnson said.

Todays professionals know the value of time, said Nick Amundsen, who joins Johnson as a member of the rail coalitions Organizing Council. He is director of research at JAMF Software.

"We have a Twin Cities office and spend on average $105 for every trip an employee makes going there for meetings, which is often, he said. Millennials want to work differently. Theyd rather work on a train on the way to a meeting than drive. For our company, passenger rail would enable more productivity and savings.

Its not just millennials who are trending away from traditional auto travel, says Scott Rogers, chair of the West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition. "Were seeing interest on both ends of the age spectrum: millennials and aging boomers, he said. As boomers retire, they want to travel, but fewer want to drive.

One of the coalitions more recent achievements is convincing the Departments of Transportation from Minnesota and Wisconsin to include the Eau Claire-Menomonie-Hudson corridor in long-term passenger rail plans. Helping them was data from MnDOT indicating more than 100,000 vehicles cross the St. Croix River at Hudson every day, a significant number of them carrying passengers to and from the St. Croix and Chippewa valleys.

MnDOTs plan estimates train service could attract 1,000 to 1,400 riders a day  thats 5 percent of the travel market, and could cover our daily operating cost, Rogers said. If that plan is implemented, it would have four round-trips a day, seven days a week. Tickets might be in the $25-$40 range. With trains traveling at 80 miles per hour, people departing Eau Claire would arrive in downtown St. Paul in one hour and 15 minutes.

The effort to reinstate passenger rail service to the Twin Cities is helped by the fact Union Pacific already has a route in place for freight. Rogers said the tracks are in good condition, although improvements are needed to make track speeds faster for passenger service and add trains. Union Pacific has a history of balancing its freight service with passenger rail service in other parts of the country, such as Illinois and California.

Of the two states, Minnesota has a more specific, concrete vision for future passenger rail with routes planned to Duluth, Rochester and Eau Claire. Wisconsin is concentrating more on improving existing routes between Milwaukee and Chicago, but its longer-range plan includes adding service from Chicago to the Twin Cities, and Eau Claire is in the loop.

Momentum is growing for passenger service for two reasons, Rogers said. One, passenger rail development across the country is accelerating in recent years: More places have it, more people are using it. The Midwest has one of the highest patronized routes: Chicago to Milwaukee has seven trains a day. Also, theres new ideas for how to make it happen, namely public-private partnerships.

One of the first directives of the Organizing Council, which formed last summer, is to explore feasibility from financing to track readiness to public support. The council hopes to determine how much capital it will take to improve tracks and acquire and operate the trains. Were watching whats working around the country, Rogers said. And several new passenger lines are using public-private partnerships successfully.

Unlike relying on Amtrak to provide the service, many of these partnerships involve a private operator, such as Iowa Pacific Holdings, which maintains a fleet of passenger cars and locomotives for use on commuter and state-supported intercity rail lines. Examples of emerging public-private partnerships are All Aboard Florida, the Hoosier State Train and the Texas Central Railway.

This is a more saleable way to seek public support, Rogers said. "I think it is politically possible, because we're changing the conversation. Before, you went to the state, asked for a train and hoped you got it. With a private partner, we would not be totally reliant on government support.

Simpson agrees that non-Amtrak operators can offer advantages. "Amtrak, as a national operator, has limited resources and perspective that can be devoted to a single corridor such as the Twin Cities to Eau Claire. A customized, locally based approach can develop the rail market by developing unique services and tapping into the specific attractions and demographics of the region."

As IPHs business model is centered on destination travel markets, such as Polar Express Holiday trains and dinner trains, Simpson encourages passenger rail in our region to do the same initially. Start by introducing the concept with runs to major events, so people who may not be the typical rail commuter get a chance to experience it," he said.

Managing expectations is also important, Simpson said, since opposition to passenger rail often holds it to a much higher standard than other forms of publicly funded mass transit in America: the highway and airport systems.

People often mistakenly think theyre paying for our highways at the pump with the gas tax, when in reality that only covers 40 to 50 percent of highway funding, Simpson said. Millions more come out of the federal budget every year for highways and runways, and no one bats an eye. But propose passenger rail, and the discussion turns to how will it pay for itself.

Demand can also exceed expectations, as was the case with the Downeaster. Developed to attract Bostonians to Portland, Maine, as a travel market in the early 2000s, people were skeptical of its potential at the onset, Simpson said. It now runs five trains a day, both ways.

A recent study found this increase is driven by people not wanting to drive into Boston versus the other way around, Simpson said. If the driving experience is miserable enough, as it is in Boston, Simpson says that people will want to leave the driving to someone else.

Many services will be available to elevate the ridership experience, Amundsen said of the proposed line, such as food, beverages, wireless, and passengers will enjoy roomy seats and accommodations to conduct business meetings.

In addition to expanding the labor pool, encouraging our graduates to live here  even if they work in the Twin Cities metro area  and helping to increase Eau Claires visibility as a destination by providing easy access to it, Amundsen says passenger rail will provide other economic benefits. We'll need depots along the route, he says. This development generated significant economic impact in other communities.

For example Normal, Ill., on the Chicago-St. Louis corridor, utilized a combination of federal funding, local taxes and tax-increment financing to build a transportation center that generated $220 million in economic development.

Also, all the major cities along this proposed route  Eau Claire, Menomonie and Hudson  are all access points for University of Wisconsin campuses. Having access to affordable, reliable rail service may convince more potential students from the Twin Cities to attend these schools.

Johnson is hopeful more members of the local business community will lend their expertise to the West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition. We truly are in the early stages of studying the feasibility options, she said. We are not asking businesses to commit financially at this point, but to simply be a part of helping decide the best course of action regarding passenger rail for the community.
The skills gap is still the states number one economic development concern, according to the secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.

Mark Hogan was the guest speaker for the Dunn County Economic Development Corporations annual meeting, held last Wednesday at UW-Stouts Memorial Student Center.

The fact of the matter is, there are not enough well-trained people to take the jobs that we have in the state of Wisconsin, Hogan said. If you look on our Workforce Development website, we have over 73,000 jobs listed by employers in the state ... about 11,000 of those in the manufacturing sector.

Hogan noted that its the single biggest challenge that he and his economic development cohorts in neighboring states face.

Its not about the jobs ... we have the jobs, he said. Its that we dont have the people to fill those jobs. [Its] making sure that the kids who come to school here, stay here ... and that those that go away want to come back and work in the state.

One of the solutions thats gaining traction, Hogan said, is the bipartisan Wisconsin Fast Forward program. Created in 2013, Fast Forward provides grants and other incentives to support employer-led worker training.

As of the beginning of the year, economic development and jobs tax credits were consolidated into a business development tax credit and funded at $17 million for 2016.

Other ways to create more jobs will also result from the Community Development Investment Grant Program which provides financial incentives for shovel-ready projects with an emphasis on downtown efforts. So far, there has been $5.5 million awarded for 22 different projects, among them $500,000 for the 10,000 square foot Menomonie Farmers Market Plaza, currently under construction on the east side of Wilson Park.

Hogan pointed out that the program leverages a commitment on the part of its partners: Theres an average of $15 in either public or private community monies to every dollar of state money that goes in there. When you look at it, our $5.5 million helped create over $80 million in economic activity in the state.

Into the future

Hogan acknowledged that the WEDC encountered and addressed its share of issues  and scandals  when it was created to replace for the old Department of Commerce four years ago.

There have been significant improvements that weve made over the last four-plus years, but as with any organization, there are growing pains, he said, noting that last year, the WEDC board retained the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness to do an do in-depth analysis of the operations and provide strategies for improvement. The result was a comprehensive report that provided seven fundamental recommendations  ones that the WEDC intends to fully embrace in its goal to achieve organizational excellence through continuous process improvement.

We want to be transparent, Hogan said. We use the taxpayers money. It is incumbent upon us to make sure that we earn our credibility with you as taxpayers and also as our business partners each and every day.
This harrowing documentary follows one Guatemalan woman during her three-year battle to hold her sister's killer accountable. She encounters many obstacles: a police record that is missing, a judge who is accused of killing his own wife, and witnesses who are too afraid to testify. In the end, Rebeca emerges as a leader in her community with a message for others: justice is possible.
Chippewa County would trade 150 acres from the Chippewa County Forest for 180 acres owned by an Eleva family trust under a proposal before the countys Land Conservation and Forest Management Committee.

The meeting will be at 5 p.m. Thursday in room 302 of the courthouse at 711 N. Bridge St., Chippewa Falls.

The countys land is in the town of Birch Creek. The Christenson Family Trusts land is in the town of Sampson.

The Herald first reported on the proposed swap on June 29. Leland Christenson of Eleva said he wants to build a large dam on property he bought in 2008 to create a large lake where terminally or gravely ill children can catch fish.

The Christensons desire to acquire the county forest parcels to allow them to remove one of the dams on their property and replace the second dam on their property, with a new, safer, engineered, low-hazard dam that will allow them to restore the property, the family trust said in a filing with the committee.

In June, the committee told County Administrator Frank Pascarella to work out details of a swap with Christenson.

The countys 150 acres were appraised at $285,000 as of Nov. 7, 2015 by Jon E. Gargulak. The Christenson Family Trusts 180 acres were appraised at $337,500 by Lee A. Steigerwaldt as of Jan. 8.

Ownership of county forest land cannot be transferred to private parties unless said land is withdrawn from the states County Forest Program, said the resolution before the committee.

The Chippewa County Board would have to approve the resolution with a two-thirds vote, and the swap would also be needed to be approved by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Members of the Land Conservation and Forest Management Committee include Supervisors Michael Goettl, Glen Sikorski, Bill Stimeling, Lee McIlquham, Mike Leisz. Carl Cronquest serves as a citizen representative on the committee.
"Spirits' Homecoming," a film directed by Cho Jung Lae, is currently touring U.S. campuses. The 2015 film focuses on the controversial topic of the 200,000 Korean women forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War II. They were euphemistically known as comfort women.

Director Cho Jung Lae was inspired to make his film after he saw a painting by one of the comfort women survivors. It showed her memory of soldiers taking young sex slaves to a burning pit. He could not erase the image from his mind.

It was not an easy film for Cho to make as the subject was very controversial and he was an indie filmmaker with few options for financial backing.

In an interview with The New York Times in March 2015, he spoke about the opposition he faced while trying to raise money for his film.

"They asked me why I wanted to throw salt on an old wound," said Cho. "They see the subject of comfort women as a history of shame."

Since Cho knew he could not get commercial funding, he crowdsourced the film and about 70,000 people contributed. A few of the actors worked without pay.

Cho's film focuses on the fictional story of two young girls who were forced to become comfort women during the war. But the story is based on his interviews with surviving comfort women.

The film took Cho more than a decade to make. While he was filming it, Japan filed a lawsuit against the film, claiming there was no evidence that Japanese soldiers took Korean women by force. Despite the difficulties, the film was finally released in 2015. Cho wanted to release it to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II.

The subject still remains controversial and continues to factor in the relationship between Japan and Korea. Only 46 of the 200,000 women are alive today. It is possible that the release of the film early in 2015 played a part in Japan finally offering an official apology for the wartime actions later that year. In December 2015 South Korea officially accepted Japan's apology. Japan offered to contribute around $8 million to a victim's fund for former comfort women but did not accept any legal responsibility. Part of the deal was that this ended any discussions about past actions. According to a recent article in the English news outlet The Guardian, some of the surviving comfort women said that the apology was not enough.

The film will be shown at the University of Connecticut, Brown University and Northern Virginia Community College.
GRAND ISLAND -- After 30 years in the Hall Countys Sheriffs Department, Capt. Todd Bahensky is hanging up his badge.

Tuesday morning, the Hall County board unanimously appointed Bahensky as Hall County corrections director, a job he has been filling as interim director since September.

Im very pleased that it finally got to this point and that I was able to be appointed by a 7-0 vote, Bahensky said. Its been a long process, a long road  I understand the process, it had to take place.

The county board fired former Hall County Corrections Director Fred Ruiz and Assistant Director Jimmy Vann in August after longtime corrections Sgt. Debb Rea retired and brought forth concerns about jail management. The county board hired Omaha attorney Pam Bourne to conduct a jail investigation, the results of which led to the immediate firings of the jails administrative team.

The county then hired former Richardson County Sheriff Randy Houser as interim director, but he resigned after a week on the job.

Hall County Sheriff Jerry Watson then offered to give Bahensky six months leave from his role as patrol captain so the county would have a solid leader for the jail and the county could test Bahenskys skill in the corrections position.

Bahensky said that time gave him great insight into how the jail is run on a day-to-day basis, the jails budget and working with the corrections officers union, which has a labor contract up for renewal in 2016.

Bahensky, who grew up in St. Paul and earned a bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, started his career with Hall County in 1984 as a corrections officer when the jail was under the oversight of the Hall County sheriff. He was later promoted to deputy, then to sergeant and finally to his role as captain.

He said during interviews last week that returning to a corrections position has long been in the back of his mind and he had great interest in taking on the top leadership position for an organization, particularly after earning his masters degree in management with an emphasis in leadership.

Bahensky said he plans to use his 30 years of law enforcement experience and his leadership knowledge to work with jail supervisors and officers to get on the same page and work as a team. He said there are unresolved issues and divides that developed over the past few years that need to be addressed.

Im in a better position to address some of those things now going forward, knowing that Im going to be there and its not going to be somebody else down the road, Bahensky said.

There are so many things as interim I have hesitated to do because I cant leave major changes in the organization to somebody else, he said. I can move forward and push those things a little bit more, as well as make some decisions that need to be made that Ive had to hold back on.

Chief among those delayed decisions is naming an assistant director. Bahensky said he will encourage internal candidates, as well as open the search to external candidates to see whats out there.

Im extremely impressed with the talent that I have at my disposal there, he said of the current jail staff. I have what is necessary (in the staff), the knowledge and the skills, to run that facility the way it needs to be run, just need to get people focused a little bit more.

Bahensky said he views the jails personnel issues as something that will require ongoing work.

They are not insurmountable  but I will have to put a lot of effort into them and Ill have to get the right people around me to help me fix those problems, he said.

Bahensky said he feels that tension that existed between the former jail administration and local law enforcement has already eased since he took over five months ago.

Ive noticed just simply by doing nothing more than being there, it has changed, he said. I am going to reach out and continue that because there are things we can talk about  we all have the same issue, to keep the community safe.

Grand Island Police Chief Steve Lamken, Sheriff Watson and Chris Kolb, the captain of the Troop C headquarters of the Nebraska State Patrol in Grand Island, had all written letters of support for Bahensky.

He said he will also continue regular talks with state officials regarding Hall Countys contract with the Nebraska Department of Corrections to house state inmates at the Hall County Jail. On Tuesday, 87 state inmates were part of the jails total inmate population of 222.

That relationship is a good one and beneficial to both of us, Bahensky said.

He also will continue the close working relationship with the Nebraska Crime Commission and regional representative Chris Harrifeld, who was the other finalist for the Hall County corrections director job. Harrifeld inspects county jails for compliance with Nebraska Jail Standards and had recently certified the Hall County Jail as being in compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

As for turning over his deputys badge, Bahensky said that will be a bit difficult.

Ive worked with a lot of great people over there and thats going to be tough, but theyve been supportive of me through this and I think going forward its the right move for me and  the right move for everybody, he said.

Watson said he was willing to support Bahensky because hes a good listener, a good leader and had been pursuing other leadership opportunities, so the sheriff knew it was just a matter of time before Bahensky moved on to another role.

The loss to the Sheriffs Department is a great loss, Watson said. But its a gain to the law enforcement community as a whole and to the community as a whole to have Todd where hes at.

The appointment came rather quickly and almost unexpectedly on the county board agenda Tuesday. The board heard Bahenskys regular directors report, then recessed to a 15-minute closed door meeting to discuss the background checks of the corrections director finalists.

The boards next item of business after the closed session was to discuss and set the correction directors salary and then to discuss and hire a new corrections director.

Instead, when the board came out of closed session, Supervisor Gary Quandt made a motion to appoint Bahensky at the interim directors salary of $106,724. The board voted 7-0 without any discussion or comments about Bahensky.

Following the vote, the board made no comments to Bahensky, but later took a break during which individual board members shook hands with Bahensky and congratulated him on the appointment.

Supervisor Steve Schuppan congratulated him while saying he hadnt meant to be a hard ass by making Bahensky go through the five-month selection process.

For the record

In other action Tuesday, the county board:

 Approved an interlocal agreement with Wood River, Cairo, Alda and Doniphan to re-establish the county building inspector. Vote was 6-0 as Supervisor Jane Richardson left the meeting early.

 Set a 10:30 a.m. Feb. 23 public hearing for the possible elimination of the township form of government.

 Met in closed session with Hall County Attorney Jack Zitterkopf and Hall County Public Works Director Casey Sherlock regarding real estate.

 Approved the use of county roads for the April 9 Eagle Spirit duathlon hosted by the Grand Island YMCA that starts and ends at Eagle Scout Lake and includes Highway 281, Chapman Road, Sky Park Road and Airport Road. Public Works Director Casey Sherlock said Airport Road was recently designated as a truck route, but the race is scheduled for a Saturday morning, so truck traffic is expected to be less than on a weekday.

 Renewed five-year conditional use permits for a Mid-Nebraska Disposal yard waste site at 13th St. between 60th and 70th roads and for a Pappas Telecasting telecommunications tower at 12100 W. Rainforth Road in Wood River.

 Accepted a $94,900 bid from Mid-Plains Construction to flatten floors and do sewer work at the courthouse annex. The lone bid exceeds the $50,000 budget line item, so the bid was referred to the Facilities Committee for study and review.

 Opened bids for 2016 loaders from Murphy Tractor, NMC Caterpillar and Road Builders. The budget is $350,000 and bids were referred to the Public Works committee.

 Approved committee assignments for 2016.

 Recommended Grand Island/Hall County Emergency Management Director Jon Rosenlund and Adams County Emergency Management Director Chip Volcek to the Nebraska Regional Interoperability Network board of directors.
GRAND ISLAND  An accordion inside a box turned out to be the suspicious package that resulted in the evacuation of approximately 900 students and staff members from Walnut Middle School Wednesday afternoon.

Capt. Robert Falldorf of the Grand Island Police Department said a staff member spotted the box in the band room, but could not recall seeing it there before. Falldorf said the staff member did not think the box looked like it held any kind of band instrument.

He said the Grand Island Public Schools safety officer was contacted, with that person agreeing that Walnut Middle School should be evacuated as a precaution. Falldorf said all students and staff walked to Grand Island Senior High, which is just a few blocks north of Walnut.

Falldorf said the call to the Grand Island Police Department came in at about 1:50 p.m. He said the Nebraska State Patrol was then contacted, with the Grand Island Fire Department also responding to the scene.

Falldorf said the State Patrol brought a canine unit, although he did not know whether the dog was used to help determine that the package was harmless. He said the State Patrol bomb unit determined that they could open the latches on the box, which is when the accordion was discovered inside.

Falldorf said he believed the incident was handled properly, with school staff responding appropriately when seeing a package of undetermined origin and whose contents are completely unknown.

Falldorf said that he is sure that school officials will review the incident as a matter of routine to make sure all the right protocols were followed.

Law enforcement and the fire department blocked all entrances and exits to Walnut Middle School because they did not want any parents mistakenly trying to get to the school to pick up their children, Falldorf said. Parents of Walnut students were informed that they were to pick up their children from Grand Island Senior High.

Jack Sheard, GIPS communications coordinator, said Walnut parents were allowed to pick up their children as though Wednesday was an early out day. Students had to sign out to show school officials that they were either riding home with a parent, walking home or riding the bus.

Falldorf said that GIPS middle schools dismiss earlier than Grand Island Senior High, which he thought would minimize any traffic congestion at the high school.

Sheard said that all Walnut after-school events for Wednesday were canceled. Students will return to Walnut on Thursday as part of their regular schedule.
Our representatives in Congress have ignored problems with the U.S. Postal Service since 2008. Now the unprecedented fiscal pressures placed on USPS are trickling down to constituents as late deliveries and service interruptions disrupt everyday life, especially in rural America.

Unlike any other agency of government, Congress has required USPS since 2008 to prefund its employees medical care 75 years into the future. Imagine being forced to do the same in your family. Setting aside money for expenses so far distant would force a host of budget cuts: No cable TV, Internet or college, and only the bare minimum on groceries and other necessities.

No family would ever want to live like that, but USPS must set aside $5 billion annually to satisfy its prefunding obligations. The result has placed USPS between a rock and a hard spot. Its leadership has been cornered into making desperate and disastrous decisions that have harmed service and compromised USPSs survival.

These facts were echoed on Jan. 21 during a U.S. Senate hearing that unfolded under the title, Laying Out the Reality of the Postal Service.

Sen. Carl Johnson, R-Wis., chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, arranged the hearing. A number of high-ranking postal officials commended their organization for its aggressive cost-cutting decisions, but the two people outside government who spoke said the cuts are a detriment to USPS, and theyre sapping local and national economies.

The two witnesses were a representative of the American Forest and Paper Association, who said Americans jobs depend on USPS, and a newspaper publisher, who said lives in rural American revolve around mail service.

In small-town America, we need it for medicines, to apply for jobs, to vote and to receive the newspaper, Chip Hutcheson of Princeton, Ky., told the committee. Speaking as president of the National Newspaper Association, he added that 92 percent of the NNAs 2,300 member newspapers have had recent trouble with postal issues. As more sorting centers are closed or consolidated, the flow of mail slows down.

Additional consolidations would save USPS $27 billion over five years, but the cuts risk postal efficiency and would be unnecessary if Congress would heed constituents whose lives revolve around the post office. USPS is charged with serving every house in the nation. Isnt it time for Congress to ease the financial pressure and lift the prefunding mandate before USPS is damaged further? Three hundred twenty million Americans are watching.
A health worker stands in the Sambadrome as he sprays insecticide to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. Inspectors begin to spray insecticide around Sambadrome, the outdoor grounds where thousands of dancers and musicians will parade during the city's Feb. 5-10 Carnival celebrations. Brazil's health minister says the country will mobilize some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus linked to birth defects. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Rancher Cliven Bundy stands along the road near his ranch after speaking with media Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, in Bunkerville, Nev. Cliven Bundy and his wife Carol Bundy was returning from a trip to visit the family of LaVoy Finicum, a 55-year-old rancher from Cain Beds, Ariz., who died Tuesday after law enforcement officers initiated a traffic stop near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It's unclear what happened in the moments before his death. (AP Photo/John Locher)
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Welcome to "What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You." I have always had a passion for history, and Church History (or, as it is better termed "The History of the Church") and in this blog I hope to bring up interesting--and frequently deliberately overlooked--facets of the history of the Catholic Church. I will probably also dip into the history of other Christian Churches from time to time and even that of non-Christian religions, but I do hope to keep my focus on the History of the Catholic Church. I am particularly anxious to show that the Catholic faith--which while doctrine tells us "comes from the Apostles" (and presumably to them from Jesus) is in fact, like all historical institutions, an evolutionary phenomenon. There is a huge difference between Tradition and traditions,. What many "Traditionalists" are caught up with today is not Tradition at all but various minor customs of human origin and little or no theological significance. As a Catholic myself, I am anxious to separate the wheat of the Gospel from the chaff of religiosity.



I am a life-long Catholic and a professional historian (M.A., Ph.D) who also has a Master's in Theology. My grade school (Sisters of Mercy), high-school (Society of Jesus), and undergrad university (Society of Jesus) education is all in official Catholic, Kennedy Directory listed, educational Institutions as is the Grad School where I earned my Theology Degree. My History Degrees, Master's and Doctorate, are from a private East Coast University (where Jews teach Christianity to atheists) that ranks in the top one-hundred American Colleges and Universities lists. I chose a secular campus for my history work precisely so that I could not be accused of having done an "in-house" educational program. As it worked out I had one Catholic professor for one course and that course was "The History of Islam." I currenlty teach on a graduate faculty and specialize in medieval spirituality (of which I am not only a professor but a practioner) and in History of the American Church. I have also been invited around the English Speaking World to give classes and workshops--England, Ireland, Australia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, and Texas (among other places). I have spoken at conferences in Rome, Sao Paulo, Nantes, Krakow and other non-Anglophone locations in Europe and the Americas. I have done lecture tours on a prominent cruise line commeting on European History and the various ports of call--a great job if you can get it. In other words, I am not an amateur at this.



I am thoroughly committed to the program of the SecondVatican Council as it was promulgated in 1965 (as contrasted with how it has been reinterpreted, in some cases almost out of existence) by both self-appointed and divinely anointed authorities over the last thirty-some years. As I get older I realize that the Council is an opportunity for us Catholics to embrace the Gospel as the guiding light of our lives and is too

great an opportunity to be bypassed by those who are anxious to see a revival of the juridicism, triumphalism, and clericalism decried by Bishop Emil de Smedt in the opening session of the Council. There are those "fleshpots of Egypt Catholics" who want to retreat to the slavery of pre-conciliar American Catholicism," but as for me, I still believe that John XXIII (and Pius XII before him and Paul VI after him) saw a promised land of a mature and evangelical Catholicism so needed in the 21st century and I for one embrace the future, not the past.



By the way, historians are those who e mbrace the future and realized that the past is there to guide us toward it. Those who embrace the past and seek to restore it are antiquarians. Christians know that we stand facing the future for that is from where the Kingdom of God calls us. Those who prefer restoring the past have not yet heard that call. Or, as one spiritual director once told me: "If God had wanted you to live in the 13th century (or the 18th, or the first half of the twenti eth) he would have put you there. He put you in the present facing the future.
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Thomas Hobbes described life as pitifully nasty, brutish, and short. Thanks to the free market and the state, life is no longer a Hobbesian nightmare. But death has become nasty, brutish, and long.

Surgeon and writer, Atul Gawande, explores the medicalization of ageing and death in Being Mortal. Gawande points to a glaring deficiency in medical education. Taught to save lives and fight death, doctors dont bow out gracefully and say enough is enough. Were not taught about dying. Were taught about not dying.

In our lexicon, life is a constant war against the Grim Reaper. We say inactivity kills, screening saves lives, an intervention reduces mortality by 5 percent  an arithmetic impossibility as mortality for our species, barring select prophets, remains 100 percent. Words have precise meanings. Words also hide precise desires. Its not that we cant distinguish between a murderer and colorectal cancer; but by giving cancer moral agency  we wage war on cancer we imply that death is an anomaly that must be fought.

And we fight. We fight death in the hospices. We fight death in the hospitals. In many parts of the world, more people die in hospitals than in their homes. Some die, attached to a noradrenaline infusion, in the CT scan  the last pit stop of hope between the intensive care unit (ICU) and the morgue.

It would be easy to blame doctors, their incentives, and egotism and offer fixes  such as fee for value, alignment of incentives, value to stakeholders, and other management speak. But Gawande doesnt take the easy path, instead exploring death compassionately.

Gawande contrasts two cultures: the traditional east and the modern west. His grandfather, Sitaram Gawande, in a village in India lived fruitfully and died gracefully. He lived with extended family who supported him but didnt dictate how he should live. Sitaram checked the farmland every night on horseback even at an age when, according to Gawande, he might have been in a nursing home in the United States.

I saw self-sufficiency in my grandfather as well. His family fretted about high blood pressure and his smoking. He would indulge them and then ignore them. He enjoyed their company but remained sovereign in his (bad) choices. I admired his chutzpah.

Modernisms paradox is that strange calculus between independence and dependence. Individualism has oddly increased dependence. Dependence, that is, with the medical profession. But doctors did not cross this line willfully, even though many crossed happily. They were invited to fill a space that was occupied traditionally by religion, family, and community.

For while the rise of the nuclear family has made many people more independent, it has also left them more lonely and insecure as well  and left many people feeling guilty for ignoring their parents too. The guilt swells when a frail parent is in hospital. Physicians are caught between older patients and their children. For some relatives, medical intervention shows that they truly care, the more aggressively they push for treatment, the more evidence that they care. For the doctor, intervention is the path of least resistance.

Zero paternalism hasnt helped. The doctor no longer knows best, although other cultures are different in this. My grandfather in India fractured his femur after a stroke. My relatives paid for his care as there is no Medicare in India. The CT scan showed a large brain infarct. Fixing his femur was deemed pointless as meaningful recovery from the stroke was unlikely. After a couple of days of unconsciousness in the ICU, his physician asked my relatives to take him home saying, emphatically, that he needed his family and not an operation.

The physician was paternalistic. He didnt dwell on what the family might have wanted. The family accepted his judgment. They had no choice. This would be unthinkable in the U.S. But my grandfather died in his home surrounded by his children and grandchildren, not in a CT scan. Paternalism sent him home.

Paternalism is a good thing to shun, and patient empowerment is a good thing to encourage. But even good things have side effects, and one side effect here is that physicians would rather intervene than risk being accused of undertreatment or paternalism.

Culture explains a lot. Indians are fatalistic. The British used to be stoic. Americans are optimistic. India taught me reality. The NHS taught me limitations. But it was the U.S. that showed me medicines possibilities. Reality  limitations  possibilities. This is fodder for cognitive dissonance. The can do spirit of Americans, that admirable and infectious optimism and hope, means they throw the kitchen sink to extend life. Hope drives medical care: It is a state of mind and cant be switched off by pressing a button.

Gawande doesnt patronize the reader with sound bites and solutions. Being Mortal is his best writing, by far. His treatment of death is transcendental and tirelessly reflective. His treatment of deaths prequel, the nursing home, is searing. He indicts politely, but indict he does.

The nursing home is a mirror for health cares warts: regulations that ground innovation, concerns about safety that defy common sense, and  most depressingly  an unwillingness to individualize. Nursing homes have become mirthless, soulless places where the elderly are literally dumped.

Standardization may or may not be good for health care, but standardized care for older people in nursing homes is bland. It doesnt have to be this way. Gawande describes how a maverick physician transformed the mood in a nursing home by bringing in birds and animals. Nuance, not six sigma, ails the human spirit in its twilight.

Physicians can make aging and dying less medical. Doctors are known to die differently, tending to use less medical care. Whats good for the gander is not good for the goose. Why dont doctors prescribe thrift to others?

But doctors, alone, cant beat culture. Modern society obsesses about not dying. Recently, an eminent physician, Ezekiel Emanuel, in an essay wrote that he wouldnt seek medical care after 75. It was deeply personal writing that somehow offended readers, including physicians. Some interpreted from his writing that an unproductive life is a life not worth saving.

This paranoia over nullifying the sanctity of an unproductive life reaches even the courts, as in the famous case of Terri Schiavo, who was eternally fed in a persistent vegetative state for years despite her husbands objections. Even President Bush thought it important for her to be fed.

Where demagogues rush, doctors fear to tread. Deaths demagogues are bipartisan. Some warn that people are dying because of toxins. Others caution that in socialized health care there will be death panels  mythical committees that deny life-saving treatments to save costs. But costs arent trivial. Nearly a third of health care spending happens in the last six months of patients lives  costs that may break apart U.S. health care.

Dying is a vexing problem for the medical profession. The can do blends with the wont give up, which is difficult to give up. As long as we give health an infinite value we will demonize death. In the age of plenty, it is not easy to lighten up about life. But to live a little, we must risk dying a little. If we die to live, we will live solely to not die. Which would be an overmedicalized life, and a dull one.

Saurabh Jha is a radiologist and can be reached on Twitter @RogueRad. This article originally appeared in BMJ Blogs.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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This past summer an article in USA Today talked about Regina Hollidays efforts to make the medical record more easily and promptly available to patients, so it becomes as a tool patients use as they engage in co-managing their own care. Her cause is just, and her story is compelling, so I was dismayed at the pushback saying: Not so fast. There are lots of errors and ambiguities in the record, so it is in everyones best interest to make the record hard for patients to obtain.

What a concept.

The commonest examples listed by opponents of patient access to patient information reflected a combination of poor communication with patients and concern about the extra work that transparency might require for institutions and clinicians. For example:

 the majority of patients dont understand differential or provisional diagnoses and want those removed, because they say they are an error. The majority of patients dont understand trade versus generic drug names, and want those removed because they are an error. The majority of patients dont understand autopopulation of fields (when you click normal) and say the doctor didnt ask me those things, and want them removed because they are an error; the majority of patients dont understand spontaneous abortion, and definitely want that removed it, because they never had an abortion; the majority of patients dont want dependence on anything included in their records, and want it removed because its an error  they are very unhappy with all the errors in their medical record. And then, there are the legitimate errors due to poor documentation on admission, hospitalists who see the patient once and dont review the record adequately, and nursing staff who just want to get their charting done and go home.

Wow! Everyone who works with medical records knows that the record is full of both errors and ambiguity. The question is what to do about it. There are two general categories of response.

1. Make it hard for the person with the most to gain or lose (that would be the patient) to see the record, because that reduces the awareness of the problem and the pressure to fix it.

2. Make it easy for the person with the most to gain or lose (that would be the patient) to see the record, because that increases awareness of the problem and creates both incentive and opportunity to fix it.

I understand the implications of cumbersome, user-hostile, and error prone documentation. Like all clinicians, I get 100+ page documents after my patients 5-day stay in the tertiary care center, where key data is intermixed in (obscured by) a flood of trivia, and which no one has gone through or vetted. Like all clinicians, I have to deal with the letter from the orthopedist about my patients which incorrectly states she is HIV positive.

I spend all day with patients, trying to help them understand their health (or illness) and use the health care system. I am painfully and exhaustingly aware of how complex medicine is, and how imperfect our information and documentation systems are. I just dont think that hiding the flaws from the patient makes any sense.

Look at it this way. What if my bank said they didnt want to give me an itemized statement of my transactions, explaining that it includes technical financial terms, is hard to understand, and is likely to have errors? They dont want me to be confused, upset, or angry, so if I submit a written request and pay a reasonable copying charge, they will send me my balance and a summary limited to total deposits, withdrawals and interest within 30 days? Id lose confidence in my bank and find another. And I would tell all my friends to do business elsewhere.

When an institutions or a clinician tells a patient that the record cannot be made promptly available because it is too ambiguous, has errors, and might be upsetting, that is a terrible and frightening message. It undermines trust. A reasonable patient will ask, if I cant trust the institution to share with me in real time an accurate accounting of what they do and why, is there any reason I should trust them to put me to sleep, cut me open, and take out parts? Or irradiate me? Or infuse toxic chemicals?

If I were a malpractice attorney, I think I would want a drawer full of letters from hospitals explaining that they are not making the record transparent to the patient because of ambiguity and errors. I can hear it now: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The hospital has admitted in writing that their documentation is ambiguous and often incorrect. Why should we believe their claim that the information in the record supports their statements that  ?

The excuse we need to make it hard to access the record because it is poor quality just doesnt work for me. The reverse is true. We need to make it easy for the patient to access the record so we can do a better job of making it accurate and usable. The best way to make the record accurate and understandable is to make the default be that the patient knows what is going into the record when it is going into the record and while it is being used, not days, weeks, or months later when it has been retroactively revised or redacted in the interest of the institution or clinician.

We should all document care with the assumption that we are recording what we are thinking, and why we are doing what we are doing, with the information we have at hand. That is, we are telling the truth. This way, we and the patient are on the same page, both literally and figuratively. If the record accurately reflects what we are doing and the information we are using, even though it may at times be confusing, ambiguous or contain errors, we have nothing to hide.

Yes, it may require more time and effort on the part of the clinician and the system. So be it. Inconvenience for the clinician, the institution, or the clinical and support staff, pales beside the imperative of putting the best interest of the patient as the first priority that trumps all others.

Peter Elias is a family physician who blogs at his self-titled site, PeterEliasMD. This article originally appeared in the Health Care Blog.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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1 week ago
(Kitco News) - A slew of recent trade data points to surge of gold demand in China, according to some market analysts.

Citing trade figures from the Hong Kong government, analysts at Commerzbank said that 129.3 tonnes of gold was imported to the mainland last month, an increase of 81% compared to December 2014, the highest increase since October 2013.

In another recent report, Simona Gambarini, commodity economist at Capital Economics, noted that China imported more than 180 tonnes via Switzerland, an increase of 86%.

Gambarini added that total gold imports into China increased by 12% last year, compared to 2014.

December saw Switzerland export more gold to both China and Hong Kong than at any time in at least two years, said the analysts from Commerzbank. Chinas high gold demand is also reflected in data from the Shanghai Gold Exchange; nearly 2,600 tons of gold were withdrawn there last year, which is even more than in the record year of 2013.

The analysts note that because of the Chinese New Year -- which will be celebrated Feb. 8 this year -- gold demand in December has been historically strong; however, there is also another factor that is helping to boost imports this year, economic and currency concerns.

It appears consumers in China are beginning to get a little concerned with the falling yuan and looking for alternative stores of value..., said Alex Thorndike, senior precious metals dealer at MKS (Switzerland) SA.

Gambarini said that Capital Economics remains optimistic on Chinese gold demand for 2016, calling for a rise of 5%.

We expect demand from emerging markets to remain strong in 2016, helping to underpin our positive view on prices, she said.

However, analysts at Natixis note that global prices might have to decline further if the current trend is going to continue.

Whereas Western investors typically seek a safe-haven refuge in gold, Chinese gold investors tend to have a more opportunistic outlook and enter the market when sharp movements in the price of gold occur, the analysts said in a report Wednesday.

Analysts have noted that global uncertainty, led by slower economic conditions in China, is helping to boost gold prices. Wednesday, Comex February gold prices last traded at $1,117.50 an ounce, relatively flat on the day.

By Neils Christensen of Kitco News; nchristensen@kitco.com

Follow Neils Christensen @neils_C
On Newsstands Now: Here's Everything You'll Find in CityBeat's Latest Issue

From a Bigfoot hunt to delightfully spooky ghost stories from one of Cincinnati's watering holes, here are the stories you'll find in CityBeat's latest print edition.

By CityBeat Staff Oct 19, 2022

For many of us, Bigfoot is a legend present only on an episode of Ancient Aliens, or perhaps only among the towering, mysterious pines of the Pacific Northwest. However, for CityBeat's latest issue, we went on a hunt for Bigfoot in a place where the massive furball had allegedly been spotted before  Ohio's Pleasant Hill Lake Park...
(Kitco News) - Researchers from three universities are re-opening the manipulation debate with their study, which suggests gold and silver prices are more likely to be meddled with on options expiry dates.

The research paper released last Sunday on the Social Science Research Network, suggests manipulation in the gold and silver markets, with the authors hedging that its findings are not conclusive.

Do these findings clearly support the notion of price suppression? No. They are at best suggestive, said authors, Jonathan Battena of Monash University in Australia; Brian Lucey of Trinity College in Dublin, and Maurice Peat of the University of Sydney Business School.

The study highlights contract expiration dates as a likely time for price manipulators to step in. The researchers said they noticed large spikes in returns around the last three days of each month, which is typically when futures and options contracts expire.

Gold Day of Month Absolute Returns

This spike in large returns is suggestive of the existence of contract roll over manipulations of the type that have been observed for other assets, they explained.

Looking at the largest 1% of returns, there is evidence of a concentration of large returns on contract expiration dates, which is suggestive of manipulation on derivative expiry dates, they added.

Tuesday was the last day February 2016 gold and silver options could be traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The researchers looked at five-minute intervals from Thomson Reuters Tick History (TRTH) database from January 1, 2010 to April 30, 2015. TRTH provides time-stamped global tick data on more than 45 million over-the-counter and exchange-traded instruments worldwide. The study looked at two series  one for gold and one for silver -- containing 383,640 observations sampled at five-minute intervals, they said.

Silver Day of Month Absolute Returns

In order to look for hints of price manipulation, the researchers focused their attention on anomalies or negative runs in the data collected. In other words, they looked for times where abnormal downward price pressure occurred in gold and silver prices.

According to the research, the data showed that the proportion of negative runs in the abnormal cluster was greater than the proportion of negative runs in the control cluster. However, even if the data suggests price suppression is occurring, the researchers said it is not enough to be conclusive.

What constitutes market manipulation is not in fact well understood. What we know from instances where market regulators launch legal action (such as the LIBOR scandal) is that manipulation can and does take place. However, given that we only observe those instances that are prosecuted by regulators we do not know the true extent of market manipulation and all of the mechanisms that could be used to manipulate market prices, they said.

In 2014, well-known researcher and New York University professor, Rosa Abrantes-Metz released research suggesting collusive behavior in the London gold and silver fixes over the past decade. Metz was previously responsible for bringing the Libor Scandal to light in 2008.

In an email response to Kitco News, she declined to comment on this particular study, noting that she cannot comment on anyones work in metals due to ongoing investigations.

By Sarah Benali of Kitco News; sbenali@kitco.com

Follow me on Twitter@SdBenali
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By Chris Henry

CENTRAL KITSAP  Central Kitsap School District is ready to cut its losses in its nearly five-year dispute with the Department of Education.

The school board Wednesday is expected to approve an agreement stating the district will drop its suit against the DOE over federal heavy impact aid denied to the district from 2011 through 2014 in consideration of $14 million in aid payable by Feb. 19.

Heavy impact aid supplements funding for districts like Central Kitsap that contain large tracts of nontaxable military or tribal land.

The $14 million was pledged by Congress to Central Kitsap schools in a recent education bill, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind. It's half the amount CK officials calculate would have been received had the DOE not disputed the district's eligibility for funding. But district attorneys say pursuing the remaining funds through an appeal (now in the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) would likely be a losing battle and not cost effective, according to Superintendent David McVicker.

The district since 2011 has spent just shy of $300,000 in legal costs related to the lost heavy impact aid.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a co-sponsor of the bill, fought to get the $14 million for the CK district. The source is impact aid that was in federal coffers but not allocated. U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor, and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., made earlier efforts at legislation that would have helped the district.

"We are so fortunate to have had the support of Sen. Murray, Rep. Kilmer and Sen. Cantwell," McVicker said. "They're tracking and working this and have just done a stellar job."

Central Kitsap will use the $14 million to complete capital projects pledged to the community when voters approved a capital levy in 2011. That was before the district learned it wouldn't get the heavy impact aid needed to help pay for all projects.

Construction of John D. "Bud" Hawk Elementary at Jackson Park is complete and a major renovation of Silverdale Elementary is underway. Construction of a new transportation, maintenance and central kitchen facility can now move forward, said Doug Newell, executive director of business and operations.

The district's legal agreement with the DOE has both parties agreeing that the district was correct in using the state's formula for calculating the state's average property tax rate to show eligibility for federal funds. That's an about-face for the DOE, which was essentially forced into the provision for CK in the bill.

The average tax rate is used to calculate certain types of education funding, including heavy impact aid. To qualify for heavy impact aid, a district's property tax rate must be higher than 95 percent of the state's average, showing that local taxpayers shoulder a heavier tax burden because of federal and tribal properties.

The bill says the district may use the state's "alternative methodology," the formula it has been using all along, to qualify for heavy impact aid in the future. That's a benefit to the district, McVicker said.

And there's another benefit to the DOE's reversal on the question of eligibility. Future legislation on education funding programs might require the district to have previously qualified for heavy impact aid. Now, given the agreement with DOE and provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act, the district can correctly say what it's been arguing all along: it was eligible for the funds for 2011 through 2014.

"The end is in sight," McVicker said of the tortuous legal fight. "I've moved from cautiously optimistic to looking forward to the end."

The district, according to the agreement, won't close the books on this case unless the money's in hand by the Feb. 19 deadline, however.
Stuff reports:

A South Island farm owned by Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias has breached regional council rules by allowing cattle in a lake.

Holidaymaker Allan Brown photographed cows drinking in Lake Taylor, about 50 kilometres northwest of Hawarden, last week. He has since lodged a complaint with Environment Canterbury (ECan).

His picture, which has been widely shared online, showed the animals were on Lakes Station land. Elias and her businessman husband, Hugh Fletcher, are the majority owners of the 5000-hectare high country farm.

Fletcher told RNZ he let the cows into the lake on hot days, but their access was not continuous.

ECan consents and compliance manager Marty Mortiaux said the cattle were not allowed to be in the lake.

Its breaking our regional rules, there is a . . . resource consent to carry out the activity, but in this case there is no consent, so they are breaching the rules, he told RNZ.

We have an officer thats investigating. There may well be an explanation that is satisfactory for them being in there and that will determine what sort of enforcement action we look at.

Mortiaux said there were several penalties that could be imposed, including an abatement notice, an instant $750 fine and, in the worst case, prosecution.
The Herald reports:

Two senior Labour MPs have broken ranks with the party line and declared their support for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), amid rumours that at least one, Phil Goff, could cross the floor of Parliament to vote with National if Labour opposes enabling legislation. The issue was hotly debated at the Labour caucus retreat in Wairarapa this week. Labour has joined the campaign to oppose the deal as the focus turns to the signing in Auckland next week. Mr Goff, a former leader and former Trade Minister and now an Auckland mayoral candidate, and David Shearer, also a former Labour leader, last night told theHerald they both still supported the TPP. Mr Goff said the deal should be signed. Former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark also backed the TPP among 12 countries and it was begun under her leadership. Mr Goff was Trade Minister.

Helen Clark in fact said not being part of TPP was unthinkable. Yet that is now Andrew Littles position it seems.

Labour has decided to oppose the TPP on the grounds that it undermines New Zealands sovereignty. Mr Goff did not blatantly criticise Labours position. But he effectively dismissed that view and the suggestion that Labour would not be able to prevent foreign investors buying New Zealand residential property. Every time you sign any international agreement you give away a degree of your sovereignty. He cited the China free trade deal negotiated when he was Trade Minister. We gave up the sovereign right to impose tariffs against China when we signed up to the China free trade agreement. But it came with quid pro quos. China gave up its right to impose huge tariffs on us. Thats what an international agreement is; its an agreement to follow a particular course of action and a limitation on your ability to take action against the other country. You have the ultimate right of sovereignty that you can back out of an agreement  with all the cost that that incurs.

Thank you Phil Goff for that rational analysis. Indeed every international agreement limits sovereignty  we have agreed not to torture people, we have agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions etc etc. The sovereignty argument is an intellectually weak and desperate diversion, that Little is deploying because there is so little to attack on the substance of TPP. Basically almost all the bad stuff that got scaremongered against wasnt in the final version.

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By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Even prison didn't deter the criminal plotting of two men accused of extorting money from banks by holding bankers' families hostage, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

Brian Witham, 45, of Waterville, Maine, and Michael Benanti, 43, of Lake Harmony, Pa., face a 15-count indictment in U.S. District Court in Knoxville in three kidnapping and extortion plots last year  one in Knoxville, one in Oak Ridge and one in Elizabethton, Tenn.

Witham was arraigned Tuesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Clifford Shirley. Benanti is to be arraigned Friday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lewen said at Tuesday's hearing the pair are career criminals too dangerous to go free pending a March 29 trial. Both were serving hefty federal prison terms for robberies when they found themselves housed at a facility in Lewisburg, Pa., Lewen said.

Together, prosecutors said, the pair plotted an escape bid thwarted by authorities and were transferred to a Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., to complete their sentences.

Benanti was freed first in 2008 and launched Prisoners Assistant, which he billed as a financial concierge service for inmates. Witham later joined him in the endeavor. Lewen alleged the service was a sham.

"A federal search warrant was executed at this business, which was in the basement of Benanti's home, and in a closet in Benanti's office, FBI agents recovered a bag containing tools and equipment used to perpetuate the types of crimes alleged in this (extortion) indictment, including rubber masks depicting human faces, temporary tattoos, wigs, and clothing bearing "FBI" and "NYPD" insignia  and I can assert neither of these defendants have ever been employed by any law enforcement agency," Lewen said.

He alleged the pair twice led authorities on high-speed chases  once in September on Interstate 40 in North Carolina in which they escaped and again in November on Interstate 26, when they were arrested on charges of possessing stolen vehicles. By then, Lewen was already in the process of securing an indictment in the East Tennessee extortion plots.

"Regarding that incident on I-26, and this demonstrates the danger both these defendants pose to the public, both of these defendants were on their way to South Carolina as part of their plan to target and terrorize additional bank executives and their families," Lewen said. "In fact, Benanti, as he was being arrested, had surveillance tools and was attempting to conceal a piece of paper containing the names, addresses and other details for several bank employees."

The two are accused of holding bankers' loved ones hostage to extort money from three banks  the Y-12 Federal Credit Union in Oak Ridge in April, a SmartBank branch in West Knoxville in July and Northeast Community Credit Union in Elizabethton in October.

Witham ultimately agreed Tuesday he could not win a bid to go free pending trial and waived his right to a hearing.
Four correctional officers and one inmate have been indicted on charges of mistreating inmates in the Morgan County Jail. Those indicted are Correction Officer Denny Hughett, inmate Samuel Jennings, Correction Officer Joe D. Shoffner Jr., Correction Officer Garren Austin Luke Cooper, and Correction Officer Michael Alan Lloyd. (TENNESSEE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION)

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By Mamie Kuykendall of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Four correctional officers and an inmate have been indicted on charges of mistreating Morgan County Jail inmates in 2015, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

The five were charged in two separate cases, both investigated at the request of 9th District Attorney General Russell Johnson, according to the TBI.

The indictments were returned Monday by a Morgan County grand jury.

The first case was opened after an inmate's family accused officers of assaulting the inmate on Nov. 21 in front of more officers who allegedly did not intervene, according to the TBI.

Officer Denny Hughett, 31, of Wartburg, was charged with two counts of official misconduct and one count of coercion of a witness. Inmate Samuel Jennings, 39, was charged with aggravated assault, according to the TBI.

Hughett was booked on a $3,000 bond Tuesday at the Roane County Jail. Jennings, who is being held on unrelated charges in the Sequatchie County Jail, was notified Wednesday of the indictment.

The second case allegedly occurred Dec. 12. TBI agents concluded that three correction officers assaulted an inmate while attempting to restrain him in an improper manner, according to the TBI.

The grand jury charged Joe D. Shoffner Jr., 43, of Wartburg, with one count of official misconduct and one count of assault, according to the TBI.

Officers Garren Austin Luke Cooper, 20, and Michael Alan Lloyd, 22, both of Wartburg, were each charged with one count of assault, according to the TBI.

The correctional turned themselves in Tuesday at the Roane County Jail. Each was booked and released on bond, according to Roane County officials.

More details as they develop online and in Thursday's News Sentinel.
Gary Christian and Hugh Newsom, fathers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, await a death penalty appeal hearing Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, for Lemaricus Davidson before the Tennessee Supreme Court. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

SHARE Deana Christian, mother of Channon Christian, enters the courtroom Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, for a death penalty appeal hearing for Lemaricus Davidson, convicted of killing her daughter and Christopher Newsom. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL STAFF) Lemaricus Davidson

By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

KNOXVILLE  Tennessee Supreme Court justices could use the case of the ringleader of a January 2007 torture slaying to craft new law.

The justices heard arguments Wednesday in the appeal of Lemaricus Davidson, who was sentenced to die for his role in the January 2007 carjacking, kidnapping, beating, rape and slayings of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23.

It is an appeal guaranteed by law in all capital murder cases.

Although the justices will weigh many issues surrounding Davidson's case, the justices in oral arguments today in Knoxville made clear they are interested in using a search warrant foul-up to explore the possibility of crafting what is known as a "good faith exception."

Federal courts long have used such an exception to essentially forgive honest mistakes, such as clerical errors, by police that lead to flawed legal documents, such as search warrants. Typically, if a search warrant is deemed legally flawed, whatever evidence is discovered as a result of that search is tossed out. If, however, a court determines the police were acting in good faith  officers didn't lie, for instance  when obtaining and executing the warrant, the evidence can be saved.

Tennessee courts have repeatedly declined to adopt a good-faith exception. In 2011, the state Legislature created one. That law would not apply in Davidson's case, though, and the state's high court has not yet been asked to rule on whether that 2011 law is itself constitutionally valid.

Justice Jeffrey Bivins said during arguments in Davidson's appeal the high court already has one case ripe for consideration of the creation through actual case law of a good faith exception, and Davidson's case could provide fodder in that as well.

"This court has the authority to adopt that, and we want to know if we should adopt that," Bivins told attorney David Eldridge, who represents Davidson.

The state Court of Criminal Appeals already has held that because police already had amassed evidence against Davidson as a suspect and had discovered Newsom's body and Christian's missing vehicle near Davidson's house, authorities inevitably would have found Christian's body through legal means. It's known as the doctrine of inevitable discovery and, in Davidson's case, saved the day for prosecutors.

The warrant mix-up occurred because lead investigator Todd Childress chose the wrong size paper to fax a copy of the document and supporting affidavit to a Knox County General Sessions Court judge for approval. The signature line wound up cut off from the document, and Childress inadvertently signed the document in the wrong place.

The mistake was discovered within minutes of the initial entry into Davidson's home, by then left vacant, but an officer found Christian's body before commanders ordered the raiding team to back out. A second search warrant  with the proper signature line and signature  was then obtained.

Christian and Newsom were carjacked and kidnapped outside the Washington Ridge Apartments and taken to Davidson's house, where both were beaten and raped. Newsom was taken from the house to nearby railroad tracks, where he was shot execution-style and his body set on fire. Christian was held captive for several more hours and repeatedly raped. She was stuffed alive inside the trash can and left to die.

More details as they develop online and in Thursday's News Sentinel.
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By News Sentinel Staff

LENOIR CITY  State authorities are investigating after Loudon County Sheriff's Office detectives shot and killed a man Wednesday afternoon, officials said.

The shooting was reported about 3:30 p.m. at a Lenoir City home at 265 Grandview Drive. The detectives were attempting to serve the man with a warrant on a statutory rape charge when the man brandished a gun and investigators fired their weapons, said Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Susan Niland.

The detectives were not injured, and the man was taken to the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, where he died, Niland said. The TBI did not identify the man, saying next of kin hadn't been notified.

Loudon County Sheriff Tim Guider also didn't identify the man, who he said is about 40.

TBI agents are investigating at the request of the 9th Judicial District attorney general's office, the sheriff said. TBI officials expect the investigation to continue into the night.

More details as they develop online and in Thursday's News Sentinel.
By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

The ringleader of a January 2007 torture-slaying will try Wednesday to convince the state's highest court a flawed search warrant should rate him a new trial.

The Tennessee Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Knoxville in an appeal of Lemaricus Davidson's conviction and death sentence in the carjacking, kidnapping, rape and slayings of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23.

The appeal  granted as a matter of legal right in capital murder cases  will cover a plethora of topics, from the constitutionality of the death penalty to the victims' families' wearing of buttons bearing the couple's photo.

But of all the issues facing the high court, one is particularly thorny for the state  the validity of the search warrant for Davidson's Chipman Street house that led to the discovery of Christian's body.

The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals already deemed the warrant flawed, thanks to a wrong paper size which led to a missing signature line which then led a Knoxville Police Department investigator to sign his name where it did not belong. It was in executing that search warrant that Christian's body was found stuffed inside a trash can.

Under the law, if the search warrant is flawed, whatever is discovered as a result of it cannot be used at trial. There are exceptions, though, and the midlevel appellate court cited one in its March 2015 opinion upholding both the guilty verdicts and death sentence in Davidson's case.

The Court of Criminal Appeals held that because police already had amassed evidence against Davidson as a suspect and had discovered Newsom's body and Christian's missing vehicle near his house, authorities inevitably would have found her body through legal means. It's known as the doctrine of inevitable discovery and, in Davidson's case, saved the day for prosecutors.

Davidson's attorney, David Eldridge, will be asking the high court to take another look at the issue in today's arguments.

The warrant snafu occurred because lead investigator Todd Childress chose the wrong size paper to fax a copy of the document and supporting affidavit to a Knox County General Sessions Court judge for approval. The signature line wound up cut off from the document, and Childress inadvertently signed the document in the wrong place.

The mistake was discovered within minutes of the initial entry into Davidson's home, by then left vacant, but an officer found Christian's body before commanders ordered the raiding team to back out. A second search warrant  with the proper signature line and signature  was then obtained.

Christian and Newsom were carjacked and kidnapped outside the Washington Ridge Apartments and taken to Davidson's house, where both were beaten and raped. Newsom was taken from the house to nearby railroad tracks, where he was shot execution-style and his body set on fire. Christian was held captive for several more hours and repeatedly raped. She was stuffed alive inside the trash can and left to die.
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By Richard Locker

NASHVILLE  A report released Wednesday by the Tennessee Comptroller's Office concludes that while the state has reduced the percentage of freshmen on its public college campuses needing remedial help for what they should have learned earlier, large numbers of high school graduates still arrive inadequately prepared for college work.

Public colleges and universities in Tennessee primarily use ACT scores to assess students' academic readiness for post-high-school secondary education. Based on an analysis of available scores, the Comptroller's Office of Research and Education Accountability concluded that in 2014, 75 percent of the state's community college freshmen, 48 percent of freshmen at the six Tennessee Board of Regents universities and 28 percent of freshmen at the three University of Tennessee campuses did not meet their schools' criteria for college readiness in math, reading and/or writing.

UT Knoxville had the lowest percentage of freshmen  18 percent  not meeting college-readiness guidelines, and Tennessee State University had the highest at 82 percent.

Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville had the lowest percentage of freshmen (65 percent) not meeting readiness guidelines among the state's 13 community colleges, and Southwest Tennessee in Memphis had the highest percentage at 90 percent, according to the report.

The study analyzed college readiness of Tennessee students and the efforts underway to reduce the need for and improve the effectiveness of remediation on the state's public higher education campuses. Remediation is designed to address students' weak skills in math and reading and/or writing so they are more academically successful in credit-bearing entry-level college courses.

Remediation may be specific coursework to address weaknesses or supplemental assistance tied to a college-level course. Board of Regents community colleges require additional noncredit coursework for students assessed as underprepared. Since 2010, Tennessee public universities cannot offer remediation courses but may include learning support as part of college-level courses.

The report says Tennessee has several initiatives underway in K-12 schools focused on reducing the need for remediation by addressing students' academic weaknesses earlier. And programs are underway on college campuses to improve the effectiveness of learning support.

The report says the state has shown progress in reducing the percentage of college freshmen assigned to remediation. In 2014, 68 percent of Tennessee community college freshmen were assigned to remediation courses, a decline from 77 percent in 2011. Thirty-three percent of TBR university freshmen in 2014 were assigned to entry-level college courses that included some form of learning support, a decline from 43 percent in 2011.

The full report is online at http://www.comptroller.tn.gov/OREA/.
SHARE Christi Branscom

By Megan Boehnke of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Knoxville issued 23 percent more building permits in 2015 over the previous year, totalling $360 million in construction projects, city officials announced Tuesday.

That investment is at an eight-year high for the city, and up $105 million over last year's construction projects. The uptick has been mostly driven by large-scale commercial projects like the East Tennessee Children's Hospital addition and multi-family residential complexes like The Standard on Cumberland Avenue and Marble Alley downtown, said Christi Branscom, deputy to Mayor Madeline Rogero and the city's chief operating officer.

"I think it's a positive indicator that we're reviewing more projects through plans review process, doing more inspections and issuing more building permits," Branscom said.

"When we're doing that, it's a pretty good indicator that we have more going on than what we've had going on. That's the case anywhere."

The developments include big commercial ventures and smaller projects, mostly concentrating downtown and continuing outward along the city's major corridors, said Peter Ahrens, director of building inspections for the city.

"You've seen smaller projects even in the downtown area, with the new restaurants coming into the (former) JC Penny building, and the investment in the Old City on West Jackson and even on Central there," Ahrens said.

Ahrens said his staff has remained busy grappling with the influx of new permits and inspections.

"For instance, Greg Taylor is our electrical inspector and his role is to do the (electrical) plans review, but it's not uncommon for him to have to go and supplement the field inspectors," Ahrens said. "We're seeing an increase in activity and we're trying to stay flexible."

Ahrens said his staff has also seen an increase in pre-submittal conferences, where they meet with developers before they begin planned projects.

That, he said, leads him to believe the boom in permits will continue.

Branscom agreed.

"We still are reviewing lots of projects, so for the near term, what I see is that it's going to continue," she said. "We know of several (projects) being reviewed that will be visible before long."
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By Kristi L. Nelson of the Knoxville News Sentinel

More than 30 advocacy groups have signed a letter to the Tennessee General Assembly, urging lawmakers to end a controversial law that allows pregnant women who use narcotics to be jailed.

The Jan. 26 letter says the law has "a harmful impact on women and families in Tennessee" and asks that it be "allowed to sunset with no extensions, expansions or replacements."

PDF: Full letter and list of signees

Passed in 2014, the law lets a woman be jailed if she gives birth to a baby harmed by the use of narcotics during pregnancy.

The letter, however, said the law  SB1629/HB1660  "has been used to punish women who have used narcotic drugs and given birth to healthy babies, as well as women who have used no drugs at all.  Women are told they can avoid jail time if they complete a treatment program, but in actuality they are being forced into the criminal justice system because they either cannot afford paying out of pocket for medication-assisted treatment or they are turned away from treatment programs because there are not enough facilities available. Further, the law discourages women from seeking prenatal care and other critical health services out of fear of being arrested" and disproportionate affects low-income and minority women.

The advocacy groups are asking that the money used to prosecute these women instead be used to "expand access to evidence-based treatment programs," which currently are few and typically have long waiting lists.

The law arose in response to Tennessee's rate of neonatal abstinence syndrome, or babies born dependent on drugs, which increased tenfold between 2000-2010 and is higher in East Tennessee than in anywhere else in the state.
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency wildlife officers successfully removed a plastic bucket that was stuck around a deer's neck in the Choto area of Knox County. (TENNESSEE WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY)

SHARE A bear that wandered into the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport was immobilized by Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency agents and returned to the Cherokee National Forest. (TENNESSEE WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY)

By News Sentinel Staff

KNOXVILLE  A white-tailed deer with an unwanted fashion accessory got some much-needed help Wednesday morning from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

In December, wildlife officers started receiving reports of a doe in the Choto area of Knox County with a large, plastic bucket stuck around its neck. After several unsuccessful attempts to immobilize the deer, officers Wednesday were able to tranquilize the deer and remove the bucket, which appeared to be a type of chicken feeder with the base removed.

Agency officials say the mishap likely occurred as the deer attempted to get at the feed inside the bucket. Because the handle was wrapped around the deer's head, it took several officers to remove the bucket. After being administering a tranquilizer reversal agent, the deer returned to the woods, sans bucket and unharmed.

Black bears are finding themselves in odd predicaments, too. The TWRA says a combination of lack of hard mast this fall and mild temperatures most of this winter have caused some bears to leave their winter dens and search for food.

On Tuesday morning, TWRA officers received a call about a 150-pound bear on the Eastman Chemical Company property in Kingsport that was lying under a railcar. Officials with the chemical company assisted by shutting down the railroad so wildlife officers could safely drug the bear using an air rifle and a jab stick.

Once immobilized, the bear was given an ear tag and released in the Cherokee National Forest near Erwin, Tenn.
SHARE Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown

By Richard Locker

NASHVILLE  The state Senate unanimously approved a bill Wednesday that sets out how legislators confirm or reject the governor's appointees to the Tennessee Supreme Court and other appeals courts.

The state House will likely follow suit Thursday and send it to Gov. Bill Haslam to sign into law.

The issue was the subject of a dispute between the House and Senate since last year. The bill is needed to implement provisions of the amendment to the Tennessee Constitution ratified by voters in 2014 that altered how Tennessee selects judges on the state Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals and the Court of Criminal Appeals  a total of 29 judges in all.

The 2014 amendment removed election of appellate judges from the constitution and replaced it with a system of appointment by the governor and confirmation by the Legislature within 60 days of the appointment or from the start of an annual legislative session if the appointment occurs when the General Assembly is not in session.

House and Senate leaders were unable to agree until last week on the confirmation process  specifically on what happens if one chamber approves an appointee but the other doesn't.

The compromise approved 33-0 by the Senate on Wednesday says confirmation will occur by default if only one house rejects the appointee  but if one house rejects by at least two-thirds of its members, the nominee is rejected, even if the other house votes unanimously to confirm.

The compromise was drafted last week by a House-Senate conference committee, after days of discussion and after the work of a separate conference committee last year was rejected by the Senate at the end of last year's session.

"We ended up with a solution that was maybe not anybody's first choice, but it ultimately was a very good discussion and it got a 10-0 conference committee report," Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, Senate sponsor of the bill, told his colleagues.

When the governor appoints an appellate court judge to fill a vacancy occurring after an eight-year term has begun, the public gets to weigh in with a retention vote at the next statewide August election in even-numbered years. When the governor's appointment is for a full eight-year term  when, for example, a judge is not seeking a new term  the public doesn't get a direct vote until eight years later when the appointee is up for a new full term.

The bill also creates a new Trial Court Vacancy Commission to screen applications to fill vacancies in trial court judgeships across the state and send three nominees to the governor, who could appoint one or ask for a new slate of three nominees. The panel will be composed of five members appointed by the House speaker, five appointed by the Senate speaker and a chairman appointed jointly by the two speakers.
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When Zaevion Dobson died in Lonsdale while shielding two fellow high school students from gunfire last month, the nation mourned his passing and praised his selflessness.

Zaevion's heroism is inspiring. This evening an extraordinary gathering of Knoxvillians determined to reduce inner-city violence will be held at Fulton High School.

Two panels of people on the front lines of the struggle against gangs, guns, drugs and poverty will discuss and answer questions about what is being done in the city's neighborhoods  and how anyone can help.

We encourage our readers to watch the forum, which will be live-streamed 7-8 p.m. at www.knoxnews.com and broadcast commercial-free on WATE-TV, Channel 6; WVLT, Channel 8; and WBIR-TV, Channel 10. After watching, resolve to be part of the solution.

Much of the discussion will focus on gangs. The victim of misidentification, Zaevion, 15, died in one of a string of gang-related shootings that also left a young black man dead and his mother wounded.

The community must band together to stop such bloody and senseless outbursts. Giving young inner-city boys and girls alternatives to gang life and providing opportunities for a brighter future are needed.

The reasons young people join gangs is well documented, with numerous studies showing how interlocking forces entrap inner-city youth.

Typically, gang members come from broken homes and lack male role models, and often they have grown up amid family violence and substance abuse. Prior delinquency, aggression, drug use and a need for excitement can be red flags.

Families do not exist in isolation, however. People who join gangs seek acceptance and replacements for absent fathers. They live in neighborhoods that are disorganized socially and destabilized by the easy availability of guns and drugs. They fail to obtain an education, the time-honored ticket to success, because of low aspirations and expectations, plus a history of academic failure. In a nutshell, gangs grow out of a grinding poverty that spawns hopelessness and violence.

Police must remain vigilant in protecting the public against gang violence, but addressing the problem only through law enforcement is not enough. To keep kids out of gangs, the community as a whole  individuals, businesses, churches, governments and nonprofits  also must pitch in to strengthen families, improve urban schools, rebuild crumbling neighborhoods and provide economic opportunities for inner-city youth.

Fortunately, Knoxville does not have to reinvent the wheel. Churches, nonprofit organizations and local government agencies have proven programs in place. They just need more help  from financing, to volunteers, to facilities.

Representatives of several groups  100 Black Men of Knoxville, the Boys and Girls Clubs, Project GRAD, Emerald Youth Foundation, Save Our Sons and the Knox County Public Defender's Office, to name a few  will participate in tonight's forum. We urge people to watch and find ways they can help these organizations save lives.
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For over 30 years, our country has focused on raising academic achievement in our low-income neighborhoods. Yet not a single city or school district can claim success in significantly closing the learning gap. Not one. The human suffering that entails is staggering. The financial consequences can be enormous.

In Knox County, per pupil spending in our lowest-performing schools is about 50 percent higher than the average school. Nevertheless, all of our inner-city schools have proficiency levels below 50 percent in reading and math and some are well below. Just as important, most of these schools have less than 5 percent of students who achieve at levels that would predict readiness for post-secondary education necessary for 21st-century careers.

How can we justify charting a course for these students and families that does not deviate from the past 30 years? It is time to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of our best and brightest educators to tackle this opportunity. In every industry, Americans have proven time and again that innovation can bring transformative change  quickly. Teachers and administrators cannot be blamed for these results, which primarily stem from significant societal changes over time. I believe, however, that with some space, latitude and resources they can solve the problem.

School vouchers can pave the way for this type of transformation for children who are left behind. In Tennessee, we have waited too long. The arguments to protect the established way of doing business cannot be justified any longer. Sure, there is a short-term financial cost to invest in a voucher program. However, the creative, inspiring, cost-effective ideas that will arise from educators who dream to offer another option, another way, compel us to move forward. Our "return on investment" will be measured in the triumph of the human spirit and financial prosperity that will be opened to millions of impoverished Americans.

Doug Harris, chairman, Knox County Board of Education
By Park Jin-hai



POSCO, the nation's top steelmaker, will participate in a high-tech steel mill project in Iran, exporting technology and buying a stake in the recently reopened market.



The company will sign a preliminary agreement with Iranian steelmaker PKP in March to export its technology and buy an eight percent stake in a $1.6 billion steel mill project in the Middle Eastern country, according to the trade ministry, Wednesday.



The integrated steel mill to be established in Iran's Chabahar free economic zone will produce 1.6 million tons of steel each year, using POSCO's next generation eco-friendly iron extraction FINEX technology and CEM technology that enables mass production of highly valuable hot-rolled products.



The FINEX technology that POSCO succeeded in applying to mass production in 2007 can cut emissions of pollutants and reduce production costs by 15 percent.



The construction of the steel mill is slated to begin in March next year, with an aim to starting production in 2018.



In September, POSCO signed a memorandum of understanding with PKP to build the steel mill with POSCO technologies. It also plans to build a cold rolled steel mill with an annual capacity of 600,000 tons in 2019.



"Iran has some 10 steel makers, but the country has only an annual steel production of 15 million tons, suffering supply shortages," said an official of the trade ministry. "With the new steel mill, POSCO is successfully gaining a strong foothold in the country."



It is POSCO's second such deal with a foreign country. In 2013, the steelmaker signed an MOU with China's Chongqing Iron & Steel to export the FINEX iron-making technology, which received final approval from the Chinese government in May last year.




South Korea's central bank chief called for a careful watch for changes in the Chinese economy Wednesday, noting the ongoing troubles in the local economy may have been partly caused by a slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.



"Considering its impact on the global economy, we cannot but be sensitive to changes in the Chinese economy," Bank of Korea (BOK) Gov. Lee Ju-yeol said in a monthly meeting with economists.



The top central banker noted should there be a new global recession, it will have been caused by slowing growth in China.



Lee said the difficulties his country currently faces may have also been caused by uncertainties concerning the future of the Chinese economy.



"The economy is continuing to show signs of instability with the global financial market showing great fluctuations at the beginning of the year, while in the local market, stock prices plunged and the won-dollar exchange rate continued to drop," the BOK chief said.



"The reason may have been the result of many elements, such as the possibility of oil prices continuing to fall and uncertainty over the direction of U.S. monetary policy, working together, but the instability in the Chinese economy may have also been a reason," he added.



Since the beginning of the year, foreign investors have remained net sellers of South Korean shares, continuing their record selling streak for 37 consecutive sessions as of Tuesday.



The local currency also continues to remain weak against the U.S. dollar, once dipping to the lowest level since July 29, 2010.



"We are always carefully watching the Chinese economy but believe we must more closely analyze any changes in the Chinese economy and begin taking necessary measures," Lee said.



On Tuesday, the central bank reported South Korea's economic growth dipped to a three-year low of 2.6 percent in 2015, hurt by slumping exports and sluggish domestic consumption. (Yonhap)




By Choi Kyong-ae



The National Tax Service (NTS) said Wednesday that it has started an intensive investigation targeting 30 individual and corporate offshore tax evaders.



The probe comes as part of its extended efforts to bring the underground economy into the open, an official said.



"We will step up our efforts this year to crack down on any attempts to evade taxes on overseas income and assets they hide in tax havens," Han Sung-hee, assistant commissioner for investigations at the NTS, said in a press briefing in Sejong.



As an increasing number of countries exchange financial information on possible tax evaders, those who have not reported their overseas income or assets here will be allowed to voluntarily pay the taxes to the tax agency by the end of March, Han said.



Some officials working for the country's top 30 conglomerates are reportedly expected to be investigated for alleged tax evasion; but the NTS didn't give the names of the conglomerates.



"There will be a full-scale tax probe into those conglomerates and their owner families suspected of evading taxes on their overseas income and assets," he said.



The NTS said it will trace all of their financial transactions, restore databases likely erased by the conglomerates and exchange financial information on possible tax evaders with other countries. From next year, exchanges with 53 countries including the U.K., Germany and Cayman Islands will be possible.



If they voluntarily pay the taxes, they will be exempt from additional taxes and penalties and their tax-evasion charges will be treated leniently, according to the NTS.



However, if the NTS finds any intentional attempts by individuals and businesses to avoid paying taxes, they will be forced to pay the taxes and face criminal charges, it said.



The voluntary reporting system was introduced in October last year to help boost tax revenue. It will be available for six months through the end of March this year.



The NTS collected 1.286 trillion won ($1.1 billion) last year from tax evaders, sharply up from 825.8 billion won in 2012.



The tax agency achieved 197.3 trillion won, or 95.8 percent, of its tax revenue plan for 2015 in November. It has set a tax revenue plan of 213 trillion for this year.




By Yoon Ja-young

Korail CEO Choi Yeon-hye

KTX is facing consumer backlash for scrapping its discount programs. Complaints are mounting that the train fare is more expensive than a plane ticket, but the high-speed rail service is in a dilemma as it needs to make up for the losses from unprofitable train lines.

At Air Busan's website, Wednesday, some flights from Seoul's Gimpo Airport to Busan's Gimhae Airport were offered for a 10 percent discount. When adding 4,000 won airport fees and 1,100 won fuel surcharge to the 53,100 won cost, a flight from Seoul to Busan was 58,200 won. The fare drops further when tickets are bought in advance. Another special offer from Air Busan sells tickets from Seoul to Busan at only 35,100 won for a flight scheduled on Feb. 9.

In both cases, flights are cheaper than the 59,800 won KTX fare for the Seoul-Busan trip.

While low-cost carriers (LCCs) are cutting prices through diverse promotional events, KTX has been scrapping its discount programs one by one.

Previously, it offered a 7 percent discount for weekday train tickets. Seats facing backwards on the train or seats right in front of the doors were also discounted 5 percent, before being scrapped last year.

The KTX Family Seats, which are grouped in four with a table in the middle, were previously subject to a 37 percent discount, but the discount rate was lowered to 15 percent.

"When I go with my family to visit my parents in Busan during Lunar New Year or Chuseok, the total KTX fare nears 500,000 won. It really is burdensome," said Park Seung, a native of Busan working in Seoul.

A spokesperson for Korail, which operates KTX and other rail services, said though some discount programs have been scrapped, it also adopted new ones.

"If you purchase a ticket in advance, you can get up to 30 percent discount," he said. "Just like airline tickets which get cheaper when bought earlier, we introduced new discount program."

Consumers, however, complain that discounted tickets are limited and hard to get.

Regarding the scrapping of discount programs on reverse-direction seats, the spokesperson said, "We thought travelers might feel inconvenient in the reverse-direction seats, but now it doesn't seem so. Traveling in reverse direction has become common."

Korail also argued that it has to make up for the losses in non-KTX services.

"KTX is the only train service where we make a profit. Except for the high-speed lines, there is a deficit in most of the train lines that operate Mugunghwa and Saemaeul trains."

However, as these non-high-speed train lines are useful means of transportation for the working class or those in remote rural areas, Korail can't scrap its service or raise fares.

Though KTX is scrapping discount programs, its users are continuously increasing. Around 170,000 people use KTX a day on average, which compares with 70,000 in 2004.

Consumers seem to find KTX more convenient than flights. Though a flight takes around one hour less than KTX from Seoul to Busan, the total time isn't as short, as the airports are located in the suburbs of both cities while KTX stations are in the city centers.

KTX shoulders 62.4 percent of transportation between Seoul and Busan. After its 2004 opening, the stake of cars in transportation for the Seoul-Busan route dropped from 39.9 percent to 20.1 percent, and that of airlines went from 8.7 percent to 2.9 percent.
The Seoul metropolitan government will push to expand exchanges with the Iranian capital of Tehran, with the recent lifting of international sanctions on the Middle East country.



Seoul city's plan is in line with the Iranian government's move to improve relations with South Korea by expanding exchanges and cooperation between the two countries.



Although details of their exchange programs have not been made, Seoul city officials said the two cities will work out plans soon to increase their friendly and cooperative ties.



For example, an advisor to the mayor of Teheran recently visited Seoul City Hall and discussed intensifying cooperative relations between the capitals.



A city official said Wednesday that mayoral advisor Mohammad Khodadadi visited Seoul City Hall and extended an invitation for Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon to participate in the Asia Mayors Forum (AMF) to be held later this year.



Mayor Park was invited to the AMP meeting last year, but could not attend due to his busy schedule.



For the forthcoming meeting this year, the city will dispatch a delegation in Teheran, even though Mayor Park will not be able to attend for inevitable reasons, said an official from the Seoul mayor's office.



The two cities had maintained good relations in the 1960s and 1970s. Two separate avenues were named after Seoul and Teheran in each other's capital in 1977 in a sign of mutual friendship.



"Teheran-ro" was named in a business district in southern Seoul.



After years of lull in their relations, the two cities began to restore friendly, cooperative ties from 2014 when signs of easing sanctions on the Middle East country emerged.



In April 2014, a senior transportation-related official from Teheran visited Seoul to sound out the possibility of increasing exchanges between the two cities at various levels.



A city official said the Seoul metropolitan administration will seek ways to make inroads into other cities in the Middle East on the basis of its close relationship with the Iranian capital.



Seoul city has sisterhood relationships with 23 cities around the globe. It also has "friendly relationships" with 28 other cities in the world.



Teheran has a population of 8.2 million in an area of 1,274 square kilometers, a size 2.1 times larger than Seoul.



Teheran officials have special interests in Seoul's mass transportation system as the Iranian capital suffers from severe air contamination from vehicle exhaust fumes and industrial environmental pollution. (Yonhap)




President Park Geun-hye / Yonhap



Korean President Park Geun-hye is reviewing a plan to visit Iran, considered a promising market in the wake of the end of Western sanctions, Yonhap reports.

"The President is considering a visit to Iran and we will soon disclose the dates when they are confirmed," said presidential spokesman Jeong Yeon-guk on Wednesday.

If Park does go, she will be the first South Korean President to make a state visit to Iran. Possible dates are in April or May, various reports said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has visited the country while Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is on a four-day European tour.
By Kang Seung-woo



President Park Geun-hye is considering undertaking a visit to Iran in a few months to revitalize bilateral economic relations, Cheong Wa Dae said Wednesday, following the lifting of international sanctions on the Middle Eastern nation on Jan. 16.



"President Park's visit to Iran is under consideration," presidential spokesman Jung Youn-kuk told reporters, without elaborating on when she will leave.



However, some sources said her Iran visit may occur in April or May.



"We have sought a state visit to Iran since last year and we will discuss a detailed schedule," said a Cheong Wa Dae official.



Last June, Cho Tae-yong, then the first vice foreign minister, flew to Iran, and in November Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se also visited  the first such visit in 14 years for the nation's top diplomat  to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.



"With Iran facing international sanctions, Korean companies still remained there unlike those of other nations, so Korea has presented a good image to the country," the official added.



The possibility of Park's visit comes while Asian countries are scrambling to seek closer ties with Iran as it emerges as a land of opportunity.



Iran holds the world's fourth-largest oil reserves and the second-largest natural gas reserves.



Last week, Rouhani held a summit with his visiting Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping  the first international leader to visit the country after the trade restrictions were lifted on Jan. 16  during which they reached 17 agreements for cooperation in areas including energy, trade and industry.



Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also plans to travel to Iran during the first half of the year after Rouhani invited him last year in hopes of boosting cooperation with Japan in various sectors, such as transportation and the environment.



Korea's exports to Iran reached $4.14 billion in 2014, up 8.3 percent year-on-year. Seoul's share in Iran's imports, however, fell 0.5 percentage point over the cited period to 7.9 percent, according to the state-run Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency.



The government also plans to take advantage of Park's possible visit as leverage in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue.



North Korea and Iran have maintained close relations, especially when it comes to their cooperation in the development of nuclear materials for warheads.



Also on Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs held a task force meeting seeking ways to boost exchanges between Korea and Iran.



Representatives from relevant ministries, including the Ministry of Strategy and Finance and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, participated in the closed-doors discussion  the second of its kind following a meeting in December.




The head of the main opposition party quit his post on Wednesday and handed over the top job to a key architect behind President Park Geun-hye's campaign pledge of economic democracy.



"I am sorry for causing concerns and disappointment to the people," Moon Jae-in said in a party meeting.



Moon's party has suffered a factional feud for months following the party's crushing defeat in the parliamentary by-elections last April.



Moon had failed to work out differences with Ahn Cheol-soo, a former co-chairman of the Minjoo Party's predecessor, over how to reform their party, resulting in Ahn's departure.



Moon has since changed the name of the party to the Minjoo Party in an apparent move to improve its image before the April 13 poll.



Moon said last week that he will resign from his post as soon as the new party leadership is settled.



"I will do his best for the victory of the parliamentary elections," Moon said, though he stepped down from the party's top job.



The party is being led by Kim Chong-in, who crafted Park's "economic democracy" pledge.



Kim joined the opposition party earlier this month as the party's chief campaign manager for the parliamentary elections. (Yonhap)




By Lee Kyung-min



The Ministry of Environment has filed a complaint against the local unit of Volkswagen over the rigging of emission tests for some of its models.



It said Wednesday that it filed a complaint with the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office against Audi Volkswagen Korea Executive Director Johannes Thammer and Terence Bryce Johnsson, the group's head of overseas sales with Audi.



This is in addition to the complaint filed last week against the local unit of Audi Volkswagen Korea and Thammer over the company's failure to provide a proper recall plan to the ministry.



The ministry's move follows legal consultation with the Korean Government Legal Service (KGLS) that concluded that the automaker violated two clauses of the Clean Air Conservation Act regarding permitted emissions and vehicle authorization. Violators of each clause are subject to up to seven years in jail or up to a 100 million won fine.



KGLS said the cars' emissions were far over permitted levels, saying it would be subject to criminal liability using software installed in the engine control computer to cheat on tests for nitrogen oxide emissions.



It also said the company did not get vehicle authorization because the ministry revoked this in November last year after the emission scandal emerged.



"KGLS said that according to Supreme Court precedents, the government's administrative measure is effective retroactively, and therefore the vehicles produced earlier were sold in violation of the law," a ministry official said.



However, the ministry said it would not file a civil suit seeking damage against the carmaker for discharging excessive levels of hazardous gases, thereby polluting the air, after KGLS advised that maintaining clean air falls under the responsibility of the government, not automakers.



Earlier last year, the ministry ordered the carmaker to recall about 125,000 vehicles and fined it 14.1 billion won ($11.6 million).



But the company failed to provide required information about the recall, such as how to fix the software. The ministry also asked for measures to reduce emissions and maintain fuel efficiency after removing the emissions-cheating software, which the company also failed to carry out.



Meanwhile, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport said it plans to conduct fuel efficiency test on the bTiguan, Beetle, CC, and Passat in relation to the emissions cheating scandal.



Earlier, the California Air Resources Board also disapproved of the company's recall plan for the U.S. market, citing insufficient information on fuel efficiency, emissions and safety.



Complaints are spiking here as Volkswagen has not provided any compensation measures for Korean consumers; while it offered around US $1,000 worth of vouchers and other benefits to those in the U.S. and Canada.




Rep. Kim Moo-sung



By Kim Hyo-jin



A feud between ruling Saenuri Party Chairman Rep. Kim Moo-sung and followers of President Park Geun-hye is resurfacing after Kim openly criticized the nation's head of state, Tuesday, over the current deadlock in the National Assembly.



While speaking at a forum hosted by the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Kim said a "person in power" exerted influence on fellow lawmakers to pass a revision bill in 2012 to toughen requirements for parliamentary votes on contentious bills. Kim did not mention Park's name, but he was apparently referring to Park, who played a leading role in the passage as the leader of the ruling party at the time.



"I can't help but explain how the law on parliamentary votes was revised in 2012," Kim said. "Many ruling party lawmakers opposed the revision bill first, but changed their stance after a person in power expressed support for the bill."



Eventually, the bill was passed with the support of 127 lawmakers out of 192 on May 2, 2012. Kim was one of 48 lawmakers who voted against the bill.



The Saenuri Party is currently pushing to revise the law again and ease requirements for parliamentary votes because it believes that the 2012 revision was the root cause of the current impasse over labor and economic bills.



Legislative gridlocks have often hit the current 20th Assembly when parties failed to agree on the content of bills. The law made it impossible to hold a parliamentary vote on contentious bills unless 60 percent of assembly members agree.



Saenuri Party lawmakers loyal to the President hit back at Kim.



"Kim got it all wrong," said Yoon Sang-hyun, a noted pro-Park figure who served as a special political adviser to the President. "If lawmakers' stance changed along with Park's intention as he argued, why didn't I vote for the bill?"



Presidential spokesman Jung Youn-kuk refused to comment on Kim's remarks, saying "We've got nothing to say about it."



There has been a simmering conflict between Kim and Park while Kim tried to overhaul candidate nomination procedures for the general election slated for April 13.



While loyalists to the President have demanded "strategic nominations" as a move to prevent pro-Park candidates from being excluded, Kim has been pushing for a "bottom-up" selection process based on public opinion. Kim also vowed to root out various malpractices by powerful politicians, including influencing the process of selecting candidates, deepening discord with Park and her loyalists.



"I proposed a bottom-up selection process to stop lawmakers from following what is politically advantageous to them, while seeking the powerful figure's favor during the candidate nomination process," Kim said.
By Kim Hyo-jin



Independent lawmaker Park Joo-sun joined the envisioned People's Party led by Rep. Ahn Cheol-soo, Wednesday, giving momentum for Ahn's camp in preparation for the general election slated for April 13.



Park agreed to drop his plan to launch his party and instead help Ahn to launch a new opposition party scheduled to happen in early February.



"We agreed to join forces in order to win over the ruling Saenuri Party and judge the Park Geun-hye administration in the 2016 general election, and further change the government in the 2017 presidential election," Park said during a joint press conference with Ahn.



The move came two days after independent lawmaker Chun Jung-bae joined forces with Ahn. Their integration heralded that Park, who earlier promised an alliance with Chun, will follow suit.



Park, a three-term lawmaker who quit the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) last year, has pushed for launching a new opposition party based on the support of voters in the Jeolla Provinces, the traditional home turf of the opposition.



The prosecutor-turned-politician served as a presidential secretary for legal matters under the previous Kim Dae-jung government. He was a close confidant of Kim's, who once cited Park as a "figure who will write history with me."



Park was elected twice as an independent candidate in the Jeolla region with strong support there. He has strongly criticized MPK lawmakers loyal to late President Roh Moo-hyun exerting power in the party and claimed the party needed the centrist reform.




By Chung Ah-young



Incheon International Airport has been under criticism for its loose security with the recent illegal entry into the country of two Chinese travelers.



Experts pointed the finger at the lack of security specialists and lax management which are supposed to prevent suspicious travelers from entry.



According to the Incheon International Airport Corp. (IIAC), Wednesday, 490 out of 1,091 security staffers, or 45 percent of the total, have been working at the airport for less than two years as of August 2015. Also, the turnover rate stood at 20 percent.



Although the airport supervises security operations, it outsources guard services to three subcontractors.



Experts said that most of the subcontracted security firms are selected through bidding so that they offer low costs by reducing the number of personnel they will put on the job.



Most of the security guards who have worked at the airport for 10 years receive around 2 million won a month. Due to such poor working conditions, they tend to quit frequently or lack a sense of duty.



When the Chinese travelers broke out of the airport illegally, only one security guard was on duty because it was not during regular operation hours, when two guards are supposed to be on duty.



"The failure of the system is attributed to lax rules and procedures of the guard operations," said Lee Ho-il, a professor at Jungwon University.



"The lack of responsibility is the biggest concern as well because the airport transfers its duties to outsourced firms. The airport should have monitored their training and operational rules more closely," he said.



On Jan. 21, the two Chinese travelers slipped through security after sneaking into security inspection points which were closed. They were caught Monday in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province.



The couple flew from Narita to Incheon around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 21 and were supposed to board a flight to Beijing at 8:20 p.m. the next day.



They passed through the immigration counter and security checkpoints with ease. They even removed the latch of the gate that was shut and locked near the immigration counter.



The Korea Immigration Service, though, did not find out about their illegal entry until Korean Air informed it that the couple did not board their flight to China the next day.



After receiving the notice, the immigration office requested the airport to check surveillance cameras so they could trace the couple down on Jan. 22.

Prosecutors requested an arrest warrant for the two, Wednesday, on charges of violating the Immigration Control Law.



The immigration office said that they entered the country to get jobs through brokers.



The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the airport corporation vowed to strengthen security, announcing plans to tighten controls at security checkpoints by installing high-tech security equipment such as infrared ray scanners.




Gray Eagle combat drone



By Jun Ji-hye

The United States Forces Korea (USFK) will deploy U.S. Army Gray Eagle combat drones in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula, officials said Wednesday.

"In wartime, the USFK 2nd Infantry Division will operate the Gray Eagle," an official at the ROK-U.S. Combined Division told reporters on condition of anonymity.

The move is part of countermeasures against North Korea's latest nuclear test conducted on Jan. 6.

The USFK is operating two types of reconnaissance drone here, the Raven at the battalion level and the Shadow at the brigade level. Combat drones are not currently deployed.

The Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is capable of high-definition surveillance. It can carry four Hellfire air-to-ground anti-armor missiles, allowing it to hit key facilities in North Korea.

"It would take about a day for Gray Eagles to arrive on the peninsula from the U.S. mainland, if transported by a C-17 transport plane," another military official noted.

Measuring eight meters in length with a 17 meter wingspan, the MQ-1C Gray Eagle has an endurance of up to 25 hours, an operating altitude of up to 25,000 feet and payload capacity of over 1,000 pounds, according to manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI).

The combat drone was used in exercises in August 2015 at Gunsan Air Base in North Jeolla Province.

At the time, the Gray Eagle UAS streamed video and metadata via a line-of-sight data link directly to a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter from extended distances. The Apache subsequently was able to re-transmit the imagery to a One System Remote Video Terminal (OSRVT), allowing ground forces to view the video, according to GA-ASI.

Then, field commanders were able to receive both live Gray Eagle streaming video and the re-transmitted video sent by the Apache. Once the Gray Eagle was airborne, U.S. ground forces passed contact reports and target coordinates to operators in the aircraft's One System Ground Control Station (OSGCS). The operators were then able to direct the Gray Eagle's sensors to positively identify and track targets, GA-ASI added.

Following the exercise, some observers raised the possibility that the USFK was planning to deploy the Gray Eagle permanently on the peninsula.

A USFK official refused to elaborate on details, only saying "We don't comment on the USFK's operational capabilities."

In the wake of the North's fourth nuclear test, Seoul and Washington have continued to discuss the additional dispatch of U.S. strategic assets, according to Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. flew a B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber over South Korea in a show of force aimed at deterring the repressive state from further military provocations.

Observers say the next move from the U.S. forces would be to send the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, F-22 Raptor stealth fighters or B-2 stealth bombers.



Follow Jun Ji-hye on Twitter @TheKopJihye
By Choi Sung-jin

About 25,000 North Korean children are malnourished because of a long drought last year and require immediate treatment, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said.

The agency made the announcement Tuesday while noting that the North's grain production fell 20 percent from 2014, according to The Guardian.

"The effects of drought will continue through this year," UNICEF was quoted as saying. "The rationing of grain has sharply dropped, affecting the health and nourishment of women and children."

Timothy Shafter, UNICEF's representative in North Korea, said: "The severe drought of 2015 has reduced both grain production and the supply of safe and clean water to children."

Of the total 15.5 million British pounds (27 billion won) needed for the support of North Koreans, the agency has received only 38 percent, Shafter said, adding that every time Pyongyang conducts a nuclear test, aid from the international community dries up.
By Kim Se-jeong



Koo Bon-chang, an activist who runs a website tracking Korean men who fathered babies with Filipina women out of wedlock is facing a defamation charge.



One of the fathers whose face was disclosed on the website has filed a complaint with the prosecution here for defamation and infringement of privacy, according to Koo.



"The man texted me on Jan. 22 through Kakao, saying he was at the prosecutor's office with his lawyer to file the charge," Koo said. Neither the plaintiff nor his lawyer were available for comment.



On the website, Koo has posted photos, names, addresses and ages of 40 fathers which the Filipina women provided. Thirty-two children, also known as Kopinos, found their fathers among the 40.



Posting another person's photo on the Internet without consent infringes on privacy and defames the person, according to the Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection Act.



Violators are subject to up to a 5 million won fine or two years in prison. If the information is proven to be false, the fine is increased to 10 million won and the prison term, five years.



Concerns over possible infringement of privacy for the men have been raised since the website's opening, but this is the first legal action taken against Koo.



He said the suit will not make him stop doing what he is doing. "If I lose the case  whether it's civil or criminal  I will have to pay a fines or compensation and be done with it, and I'll do it. But no matter what happens, I will keep the website up and running," he wrote on his personal blog.



Some lawyers say he violated the law but the punishment will probably not be serious.



"Although he disclosed the men's faces, it is clear that he did it to help the Kopinos find their fathers, not to defame the men," said Kim Ji-mi from Lawyers for a Democratic Society.



The law states that if the defamation was committed in pursuit of the public interest it is not subject to punishment.



"This is the grounds upon which he can avoid punishment," Kim said.



There are an estimated 30,000 Kopinos but no official statistics are available. Most of the men were students or vacationers when they stayed in the Philippines. The children are raised in a poor environment, not fed well or medically treated when they become sick.



An NGO Koo established, "We Love Kopino," is running the website to help the Filipina mothers find the men so they can begin the legal battle for childcare.



In June 2014, the Seoul Family Court ordered the father of a Kopino child to provide 300,000 won per month in childcare, the first case involving a Kopino.



When a father contacts the NGO, it links him with the mother. The group removes the photo only when the mother consents. The group also sells cosmetic products to raise funds to cover the cost of taking care of the children.




President Park Geun-hye is considering visiting Iran, an official said Wednesday, as Iran has emerged as a land of opportunity following the lifting of international sanctions.



Presidential spokesman Jeong Yeon-guk made the comments to reporters, without elaborating on the time frame for the possible visit.



Park, if the trip is made, would be the first South Korean president ever to visit Tehran.

South Korea is seeking to tap into business opportunities in Iran as the United Nations have lifted most economic sanctions against Iran in a follow-up to a nuclear deal reached with the U.S. and five world powers.



Iran boasts the world's fourth-largest known crude oil deposits and ranks No. 1 in terms of natural gas reserves.



South Korea's exports to Iran reached US$4.14 billion in 2014, up 8.3 percent on-year. South Korea's share in Iran's imports, however, fell 0.5 percentage point over the cited period to 7.9 percent, according to data compiled by the state-run Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency. (Yonhap)




A senior U.S. diplomat arrived in Seoul on Wednesday to coordinate the allies' response to North Korea's nuclear test.



Ambassador Thomas Shannon, counselor of the State Department and nominee for under secretary of state for political affairs, flew in from Tokyo for a two-day stay, during which he plans to meet with Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam.



Through his visit, Seoul and Washington plan to strengthen their coordination on responding to North Korea's fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6. In the meetings, the two sides will also discuss a wide range of other issues, such as cooperation on the regional and global stage, both governments said.



In a meeting with reporters in Tokyo, Shannon said he would seek China's cooperation in drawing a strong U.N. sanctions resolution to punish the North for its nuclear test, according to media reports.



China, one of five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, has shown a lukewarm attitude toward imposing tough sanctions on Pyongyang out of concerns for its own security interests.



Shannon said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is currently in Beijing to deliver Washington's firm stance on the issue.



Washington and Seoul have been pushing for "strong and comprehensive" sanctions that will force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons for good.



Shannon also commented on last month's landmark agreement between Seoul and Tokyo to resolve the issue of Korean women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II.



The deal was not only in the interests of the two countries but also of the U.S., in all areas, including foreign affairs, security and the economy, he said.



The U.S. has urged South Korea and Japan to overcome their disputes over history and improve ties, seeking to strengthen trilateral cooperation in the face of a rising China. (Yonhap)




The statue of a girl, a symbol of Korean sex slavery victims during World War II, stands in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Wednesday. / Yonhap



By Yi Whan-woo

A month has passed since the governments of South Korea and Japan reached an agreement to resolve the decades-old issue of "comfort women," but they are still finding it difficult to implement the deal.

One of the conflicting issues is whether or not to relocate the comfort woman statue, better known as the "girl statue' here, which is situated across the street from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

Japan insists that Korea remove the statue from the site to move the agreement forward, but most Koreans and victims of Tokyo's wartime sexual enslavement say that should never happen.

Japan claims such removal is a pre-condition for Tokyo to implement the "final and irrevocable" agreement, under which Japan promised to finance 1 billion yen ($84.4 million) to set up a foundation aimed at helping the surviving victims.

But Korea maintains the view that the government cannot meddle in the issues involving the statute, citing it was set up by civilians in December 2011.

A group of Japanese, including officials and lawmakers, have cited Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, who promised that the government will consult with related parties to settle conflicts about the statue "in a relevant manner" during the historic deal reached between foreign ministers of the two nations.

On Tuesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said his government has not yet fixed a schedule to make the 1-billion yen compensation, hinting Korea should fulfill Tokyo's demand about the statue first.

He repeatedly has told the Japanese media that the statute is believed to be removed "in a timely manner."

According to Japanese wire service Jiji Press, Monday, the lawmakers of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party have filed a motion petitioning the Korean government to tear down the statue at the earliest date possible.

Some 64.1 percent of 1,000 Japanese adults responded in a survey jointly carried out by Sankei Shimbun and Fuji News Network from Jan. 23 to 24, that Japan should offer 1 billion won to Korea only after the statue has been removed.

Only 24.1 percent responded that compensation should be made unconditionally.

When asked whether Japan will still offer 1 billion yen in compensation even if the statue is not removed, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, "There's a trust relationship between me and President Park Geun-hye."

"It's important for both of us to trust each and carry out our respective promises," Abe said in a joint interview conducted and published by Nihon Keizai Shimbun and Financial Times on Jan. 17.

Under such circumstances, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Cho June-hyuck said "We'll not deal with claims made by the Japanese case-by-case."

"We remain consistent about what was agreed to in December," he said during the ministry's regular media briefing, Tuesday. "In addition, it should be noted that the statue was voluntarily set up on a civic level."

Cho's comment was seen as a move seen as to placate the public that has been upset about the December deal.

The former Korean sex slaves and civic activists have protested that the government did not take their opinions into account before reaching the agreement in December.

They also argued that it was reckless for Yun to mention the statue in a government-to-government agreement.

Koreans accounted for a majority of an estimated number of 200,000 comfort women, a euphemistic term for those who were coerced into sexual servitude at front-line brothels operated by the Japanese Army.

There are 46 survivors in Korea. They're age averages over 89.
Ewha Womans University's campus was originally located in Jeong-dong, central Seoul, in the 1910s.

/ Courtesy of Ewha Womans University



By Chung Hyun-chae



Established in 1886 as Korea's first educational institution for women, Ewha Womans University grew through the turbulent history of modern Korea.



Ewha, one of the world's largest women's universities, started as a small class called Ewha Hakdang created by Mary F. Scranton, an American Methodist missionary, starting with only one Korean female student.



"Back then, it was very rare for Korean people to send their daughters to school for education, which means Ewha Hakdang was founded to serve the solid purpose of providing educational opportunities for women," said Ham Dong-ju, director of Ewha Archives.



Ewha launched its college courses in 1910 to nurture female professionals beyond offering basic education.



The school moved its campus from Jeong-dong, central Seoul, to its current location in Sinchon, western Seoul, in 1935.



"Since then, Ewha has become what it looks like today," Ham said.





Overcoming crisis



Ewha suffered under the 1910-45 Japanese occupation. But it made desperate efforts to protect academic freedom despite Japanese control of every sector of society, including education. This was made possible thanks to the university's American missionary founder.



"In January 1945, the school lost its name and the curriculum was slimmed down to a one-year course," Ham said.



Despite all difficulties, Ewha prepared for the restoration of its status as a university prior to the nation's liberation and independence from Japan.



Ewha received accreditation in 1946 right after liberation. It opened a hospital near Dongdaemun in central Seoul in 1945 to train medical students.



"Ever since the name Ewha Hakdang was bestowed by King Gojong in 1887, Ewha has been a pioneer of higher education. Its achievements have been based on a strong belief in the power of truth and knowledge, as well as the challenging spirit," said Chang Myong-sue, chair of the university's Board of Trustees.



Ewha has many firsts in its history. It became the first Korean women's university to open a department of law in 1950 and a college of law in 1996. The university also established the world's first engineering college for women in 1996.



Ewha underwent financial difficulties in the early 1940s under Japanese rule as well as in the late 1960s. But it managed to muddle through with generous financial support from its alumni and other benefactors at home and abroad.



According to Ham, Chu Tae-kyoung donated her entire fortune of 100,000 won in 1943  worth 10 billion won today  to the university when it experienced a severe financial pinch.



Helen Kim, who served as Ewha's seventh president from 1939 to 1961, went to the U.S. to stage a fundraising campaign for the school in the 1960s.



Her commitment resulted in the establishment of the International Foundation for Ewha Womans University in 1970.



Since then, the foundation, whose board of directors is comprised of 35 Americans and Ewha alumni living in the U.S., has made multiple financial contributions to the university.





21st century values



"I still remember that Helen Kim advocated equal education for women and men. Ewha has played a leading role in educating women," Ham said. "Now we need to stand up for new values in the 21st century. Ewha will continue to provide better education for women to improve their competitiveness and realize their potential."






U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon received an honorary doctorate from Ewha Womans University on its campus in Seoul, May 20. Ban was lauded for promoting women's rights and fighting violence against women under the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals project.

Michael Gilligan, president of the Henry Luce Foundation, visited Ewha on June 30 to attend the Ewha-Luce International Seminar: Expanding Horizons, a newly launched program with the support of the foundation.

Cherie Blair, chancellor of the Asian University for Women, had a roundtable discussion on women's education at Ewha's campus, Sept. 2.

French President Francois Hollande visited Ewha, Nov. 4, during his first state visit to Korea since taking office in 2012.

U.S. Ambassador to Korea Mark Lippert was invited to a town hall meeting on campus attended by about 200 Ewha students, Nov. 10. This event was held as part of Ewha's Scranton College global lecture series which was launched in 2007.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a French-Mauritian writer and professor who was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, participated as a key speaker at the 15th Kim Okgill Memorial Lecture on campus, Nov. 25.

Lastly, Helmut Schwarz, president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, gave a lecture at the Humboldt Colloquium held on campus, Nov. 27.

/ Courtesy of Ewha Womans University
North Korea's dual pursuit of nuclear weapons development and economic growth may have a short-term impact on boosting its moribund economy, but the policy could be a stumbling block for sustainable growth, experts here said.



North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been pursuing his signature policy of nuclear and economic development in tandem, commonly known as the "byeongjin" policy.



Seoul and Washington have warned that the North's dual-track policy is a dead end.

The North's leader did not make any reference to North Korea's nuclear weapons program in his New Year message, spawning speculation that he might offer a conciliatory gesture to China ahead of the North's key party congress in May.



But North Korea's nuclear test on Jan. 6, the fourth in a decade, has proven that the North has no intention of ditching its dual-track policy.



Analysts said that the North's byeongjin policy may have a short-term effect on boosting its economy, but it will likely hamper economic growth over the long haul as growing military tension will scare off investors.



"If North Korea sticks to the dual-track policy, it will hurt the North's external relations and lead foreign investors to shun the North due to high military tension," said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University.

Since the North's leader took office in late 2011, North Korea's economy has posted marginal growth.



North Korea's economy is estimated to have grown 1 percent in 2014, slightly slowing from a 1.1 percent on-year gain the previous year, according to South Korea's central bank. It posted economic growth for the fourth straight year in 2014 after contracting in 2009 and 2010.



The North has operated a state-controlled rationing system for a long time. But marketplaces have gradually increased since the mid-1990s as North Koreans had to find sources of survival following a severe famine and economic hardship, widely known as the "Arduous March."



In an annual audit session last year, South Korea's spy agency told lawmakers that around 380 markets exist across the North that help instill market capitalism in ordinary North Koreans. The growth of marketplaces has expanded noticeably over the last 10 years, experts said.



"North Korea has transferred considerable parts of its munitions productions to manufacturing of goods for daily lives, which might help prop up its economy in recent years," said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher at the Sejong Institute.



Pyongyang has designated several special economic zones mainly in areas bordering China in a bid to attract foreign investment. But its ambitious development plans have faced serious setbacks as foreign investment remains lackluster due to the North's ceaseless provocations.



"North Korea's pursuit of the byeongjin policy only will deepen its international isolation," said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

Cheong said that China's case of seeking reform and openness can be a lesson for North Korea, adding that the North should return to the international community by abandoning its nuclear weapons program.



Lee Jong-seok, a senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute, said that the two Koreas and other five regional powers should create a six-way security network to better deal with regional security in Northeast Asia. (Yonhap)




South Korea voiced deep regret Wednesday that North Korea rebuked President Park Geun-hye for stressing the need to hand down stronger sanctions over the North's nuke test in her recent national address.



North Korea's main newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, said Tuesday that the South Korean leader delivered a national speech to avert a political crisis, calling her a devil of this era indulged in a dictatorship.



On Jan. 13, Park vowed to make all diplomatic efforts to ensure that the U.N. Security Council adopts a resolution that slaps the most powerful sanctions on North Korea over its fourth nuclear test early this month.



The Unification Ministry urged North Korea to stop insulting Park, expressing strong disappointment over the North's unfounded criticism.



"The international community has condemned North Korea for conducting its nuclear test (despite repeated warnings)," Jeong Joon-hee, a ministry spokesman, told a regular press briefing. "We voice deep regret that North Korea has made unfounded criticism against President Park."



Jeong, meanwhile, said North Korea is presumed to be blamed for a recent influx of malicious code which was aimed at breaching Samsung Group's corporate messenger system.



"The North is projected to have been behind it, but the government is still seeking verification," he added. "How to respond will be decided later."



Earlier this week, malicious code was distributed online in connection with Samsung's messenger system. Samsung claimed that no hacking attempts have been detected so far. (Yonhap)




Customers of Volkswagen vehicles in South Korea plan to file a class-action lawsuit against the German carmaker in the United States for deceiving them on emissions results of cars with 3-liter diesel engines, their legal representative said Tuesday.



This is in addition to the ongoing class-action suit filed by customers of the carmaker's 2-liter diesel models whose emissions results were proved to be faked by using the so-called defeat device.



"As (Volkswagen) admitted to its wrongdoing related to the 3-liter diesel engines in the U.S., we plan to gather victims here and file a lawsuit with a court there first," said Ha Jong-sun, a lawyer of local law firm Barun.



The lawyer said that there are more than a few Volkswagen customers making inquiries about a possible legal action in relation to the damage they claim to have suffered due to manipulated emissions results.



The lawsuit is likely to be filed in the middle of February in the U.S. A similar suit will be sought in South Korea later, he added.



Vehicles newly found in the U.S. to have faked emissions through the engine electronic control unit are the A6, A7, A8, Q5 and Q7 that were produced from 2009-2016, along with the Porsche Cayenne and the Volkswagen Touareg.



Some market estimates put the number of the cars of the same models sold in South Korea at 50,000-100,000.



Last week, the environment ministry here asked the prosecution to investigate the head of the local unit of Volkswagen for failing to provide sufficient data related to its recall plan for around 125,000 emissions-faked vehicles.



In November, the ministry ordered Volkswagen to recall the vehicles whose emissions were found to be manipulated through the defeat device. The carmaker was also asked to provide data related to how it would maintain fuel efficiency even after removing the device.



Customer complaints are growing in South Korea as Volkswagen has not provided any compensation measures for its customers in the wake of the emissions-cheating scandal as opposed to its offering of around US$1,000 worth of vouchers and other benefits to those in the U.S. and Canada. (Yonhap)




Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn on Tuesday vowed to take stern measures against a walkout by a major labor organization.



The warning comes as the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), one of the country's two umbrella labor groups, was to go on an indefinite walkout in protest of the government's adoption of contentious labor guidelines.



"The KCTU's general strike is a clear illicit strike that goes against a difficult economic situation both home and abroad, crisis such as North Korea's nuclear test, and the hopes of young job seekers," Hwang said during a Cabinet meeting.



Last week, the Ministry of Labor and Employment announced that it will ease restrictions for employers to fire "noticeably" underperforming workers and allow companies to change employment rules more easily, as part of its reform drive.



The KCTU, which has more than half a million workers as its members, argues that the government's labor reform would end up making it easy for companies to fire workers, eventually worsening overall working conditions.



Hwang also said that the Ministry of Justice will bring criminal charges against those who stage illicit protests across the country. (Yonhap)




By Michael Bergmann

"It will be the end of Korea as a member of the international community if it breaks its promise."

I was thunderstruck when I read this warning attached to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's "heart-felt" apology to the last surviving Korean victims of the government-organized sexual enslavement before and during World War II published in the Dec. 31 edition of the Korea Times.

The "promise" that "Korea" should not dare to break allegedly means to once and for all silence the issue and to remove the monuments reminding the world of the undeniable historical truth. Having dishonored the victims as common prostitutes so far, Abe now wants to be respected for his generosity to utter the truth, unheard and never to be heard again, that it was indeed Imperial Japan's government that masterminded and systematically organized the sexual exploitation of women in occupied countries. Abe leaves no doubt that the only purpose of his "heart-felt" apology is not to be bothered any further by Korean victims on the international stage and to make sure it would not cost Japan more than the petty amount of $8 million.

As if not to be suspected of any shred of decency and conscience, Japan's political leader could not prevent the amazing coincidence that his wife visited Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine on the very day while Korea's government, for whatever reason, was signing this deal. (The shrine honors Japan's war dead including 1,068 war criminals, 14 of whom are considered Class A.)

There are only two ways to interpret her move, as China's official news agency Xinhua in this case correctly distinguished, as either a "misguided, heartless gesture" or a "flagrant display of hypocrisy and contempt."












By John J. Metzler



NEW YORK  Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates slammed both the Obama Administration and the Presidential primary candidates calling for long-term realism in America's fight against the Islamic State terrorism. "I think that the president has all along underestimated ISIS, has underestimated the degree of fear that they have been able to provoke among a lot of Americans," Gates stated.



Speaking at a forum at New York's prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary Gates also derided presidential hopefuls' tough talk on terrorism stressing, "these men and women are making these broad pronouncements. It's clear they don't know what they're talking about."



He opined, "So I think at the same time the Administration has underestimated the impact of ISIS and what it's going to take to deal with ISIS, on the other side of the fence, you're getting these simplistic and, frankly, ridiculous formulas on how they're going to take care of the problem."



Secretary Gates stressed, "a problem like ISIS and the extremism associated with ISIS is complex, it's going to be hard, and it's going to take a lot of time, and it's going to take some sacrifice. And there are no easy solutions, and there certainly are no quick solutions."



Tom Brokaw, veteran NBC reporter served as moderator setting the stage: "upheaval in the Middle East, jihadism, and dealing with a war that's a clash of cultures as much as it is a clash of nation-states," confronts the U.S. domestically and internationally.



Robert Gates who served as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush and Barack Obama offered a sobering and stoic overview of key issues facing the USA globally.



Regarding Russia's role in supporting the Assad regime in Syria while also attacking terrorists, the Secretary stated, that as he and former Secretary of State Condi Rice wrote,"diplomacy is determined by the facts on the ground, not vice versa. And the Russians are helping the Syrian government change the facts on the ground But the point is that I think, his (Putin's) collaboration with the Iranians, and with the Syrian regime is working pretty well for him right now in terms of diplomacy."



He cautioned however, "But long term, I think he has made a mistake, in the respect that most of the Russian Muslims are Sunni and most of the Muslims in the world are Sunni. And he's aligned with a minority element of the Islamic world. So that may come back to bite him."



Viewing the wider ISIS threat beyond the U.S., Secretary Gates asserted, "the Russians and the Chinese are both worried about ISIL and about Islamic terrorismI do think that Putin would like to see ISIL controlled and contained and destroyed. I think they do see ISIL as a danger to them."



Considering China, Robert Gates told the audience, "I don't believe that China has any intention of engaging in a global arms race with the United States. I do believe that they intend to establish regional dominance and believe that that is, that comports with their history and their role in the world." He added ominously, "On the military side, by 2020 the Chinese will have about 350 surface warships and submarines. And the United States will have about 70 in that region."



The U.S. Navy's steep decline is part and parcel of the Obama Administration's massive military budget cuts which since 2011 alone have slashed $485 billion from defense spending.



An exchange on North Korea's leadership brought a degree of levity if not gallows humor, "we're now in our third generation of Kims, and with each successive generation we've been swimming in a shallower and shallower part of the gene pool. My worry about Kim Jong-un is not only that he's dangerous, but that he's stupid." Regarding Beijing's influence over the Pyongyang regime, Secretary Gates added that "China has influence in North Korea, but it doesn't have control." He views North Korea's nuclear proliferation as "a very dangerous situation."



Interestingly, Secretary Gates shed light on an overlooked option for the USA in the war of ideas. During the Cold War, "You had Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty So you had this Wurlitzer of strategic communications that was a big part, I think, of success in the Cold War. That's all been basically dismantled."



Given the current global chaos, we should heed Secretary Gates sober assessment while realizing that we must settle in for a long term and focused response.





John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China"




Odds are that if you're reading this, you're not attending the 46th World Economic Forum that runs through Saturday in Davos, Switzerland. You're not a banker or tycoon, celebrity or statesman, economist or development official or otherwise among 2,500 of the world's economic elite.



Every year they show up in the chic ski resort town, challenging the Zurich air traffic control system with their private jets, to listen to earnest speeches during the day and network late into the night. If the world's economic leaders were ever going to do something significant about the problems affecting the world's poor and middle class, Davos might be where it started.



Two years ago, for example, the Davos elite were warned  in a study they commissioned  that the widening rich-poor income disparity presented a global threat second only to climate change. Did they go home and advocate for spending more on education and training? Did they advocate for tax reform and higher minimum wages? A few did. Others, not so much.



What happens in the Alps stays in the Alps.



Every year, right before the Davos conference, Oxfam, the U.K.-based anti-poverty organization, releases a new study of power and privilege. Five years ago, Oxfam reported that the world's 388 richest people owned as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population.



In 2014, that number was down to 85 rich families. This year it's 62.



"The growing disparity between those with and without privilege and power is being fueled by tax havens, loopholes, and subsidies  things that working families don't have access to," Oxfam reported.



Such "complex financial schemes are driving incomes down for working families and sticking them with the bill for the infrastructure upgrades, national security and social services we all benefit from," the report says. "While worker productivity is higher than ever, their wages do not reflect it."



Meanwhile, back in Davos, participants were hoping to rub shoulders with likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Bono. A few were signing up for the "Refugee Simulation Experience," where for an hour they'll get to see what it's like to live like a displaced person, albeit displaced to the basement of a Hilton hotel.



The big worries in Davos this year are the cratering Chinese economy, the refugee crisis as it affects the European economy and the global commodities glut. Income inequality will be worsened by all of these factors and more, but inequality, per se, is not a major agenda item.



Besides, what happens in Davos has little impact on political systems already captured by moneyed interests  that is, by the wealthy who want to protect their bottom lines ahead of everything else. When people come home from the World Economic Forum advocating for a living wage, for affordable health care, environmental justice and a fair tax burden, then Davos will be more than a feel-good playground for plutocrats.



This editorial appeared on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was istributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.




By Kate Lim

The Korean art community took part in the development of contemporary art as a latecomer. Just as modern Korean economic development is regarded as "compressed," the evolving course of contemporary Korean art has been different from that of Western art. It occurred within a short frame of time and simultaneously, it was with the imperative to interact with the West that Korean art has been challenged to formulate its own creative language. In comparison, Western art progressed over a much longer span of time, without the need to interact with "the East." Thus, the Western artistic precedents are not really applicable to Korean art although Korean artists have been much influenced by the Western art practice. No direct relationship between the two exists.

It seems to me that it is more appropriate to compare the development path of Korean art with that of other latecomer countries that have faced similar needs for compression and interaction with "the West." Russian Constructivism, though it emerged much earlier than Korea's earnest participation in contemporary art, has circumstantial resemblances to Korean art at a particular phase, offering us an enticing vantage point from which we can make a comparative understanding of the art of Korea and Russia.

Russian Constructivism started as Russian artists' creative response to the social call for a new state-building initiated by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russian artists were inspired and encouraged by Lenin's dictum: "Those who have the best technology, organization, discipline and the best machines emerge on topIt is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed." The organic identification between art-making and revolutionary vision was transferred into a new synthesis of art and technology. The famous constructivist Vladimir Tatlin was supposed to make a model of the "Monument to the Third International" in 1920 using wood. The tower was meant to consist of three great rooms of glass, erected with a complicated system of vertical pillars and spirals. The forms of the rooms were all to be different, harmonically corresponding to each other and revolving at different speeds. The fascinating aspect of the tower was how the different moving speeds of the rooms symbolized components of the revolutionary social system. Although the project was never realized, one can vividly imagine that Tatlin was envisaging a tower constructed from an intense concentration of technology and new industrial materials that would construct a new artistic language. His counter-relief, another Constructivism-orientated example on a much smaller scale, is an exquisite building using a variety of materials such as iron, aluminum, zinc, wire and fastening components. Through this artistic construction, the entirety of the work liberates the constraints of materials, subtly playing out the tension, harmony and interaction with all parts involved.

This emergence of Constructivism was a great leap from the preceding state of the Russian art scene that was a continuation of the late 19th century. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the Russian art community had been passionately engaged with the artistic judgement of Western art and its applicability to Russian art. While artists were experimenting with various re-organization of Western styles, Russian critics and intellectuals admired, heavily criticized and rigorously analyzed Western art styles one after the other: Symbolism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism. At the same time, serious discussions on "the national" or "the Russian"took place, comparing their works directly with the Western art and simultaneously trying to define Russia's cultural identity in the context of their dialogue with the West. In the wake of all such animated and experimental practices and discourse, the Russian artists encountered a critical juncture in their history. With the Revolution and the social milieu of new optimism, their artistic confidence grew substantially and they embarked on a new artistic configuration, immersed in an unexpected constructive drive in spite of the scarcity of materials at the time. The echoes of Russian Constructivism elevated the sense of Russian-ness that is was charged with artistic experiments, and became a common ground for all artists across the national border.

The emergence of Dansaekhwa in the mid-1970s bore some resemblance to that of Russian Constructivism. Between the late-1950s and the 1960s, Korean artists were engaged with various new artistic explorations in a constant dialogue with Western art. The late-1960s, in particular, saw the explosion of experimental art in the Korean art scene, acting as a catalyst for debate on the potential of conceptual art. The piecemeal economic improvement was creating a situation where even the devastating memory of the Korean War was being relegated to the faint past. In the early 1970s, the debate on Korean-ness similarly broke up within the Korean art community. It was trying to move beyond the mere technical implementation of foreign artistic style to the making of an authentic artistic formulation. This artistic desire that was being coupled with a sense of artistic confidence was generating a lot of positive energy among the artists of 1970s' Korea.

With all of this happening, a group of artists were unexpectedly driven to look for a formulation of a new artistic language by liberally focusing on the potential of the medium. Thus, the Dansaekhwa artists arrived at a surprising artistic re-configuration of the medium by intensely involving themselves with the material with their hands and body. Just like the Constructivists, they emphasized the artistic faktura (Russian for facture).They poured their artistic exertion drawing repeatedly on wet paint, creating different kinds of surfaces of the canvas with wet hanji, pushing the paint through the fissure of the canvas, and so on for the "construction" of new imagery. It was an artistic break-through achieved by the evolving course of conversations with Western art in search for a "creative and experimental" focus on Korean-ness. Now,Dansaekhwa art is gaining a belated respect and acknowledgement in the global art world. Although the specific contents of the historic juncture encountered by Dansaekhwa artists and Russian Constructivists were different, the relatively similar genesis of their art should be what we must pay attention to in their position in global art.





Kate Lim is director of Art Platform Asia, an independent curator and art writer.
Security concerns at Incheon International Airport have surfaced after two Chinese transfer passengers managed to break through an immigration checkpoint and flee the nation's main airport on Jan. 21 without any security intervention. The pair easily made their way to Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, but were eventually apprehended four days later. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport should take this breach as an opportunity to examine security operations at the airport.



Some experts say that the incident was a result of the airport's negligence on updating security systems while focusing too much on quality of service. It is well known that Incheon has topped previous service assessment surveys. From 2005 through 2014, the airport was ranked first on the Global Airport Service Quality list.



But it seems that its security systems fall way short of international standards. In particular, it seems that the airport security staffers lack professionalism and a sense of duty. The airport said that one security guard standing nearby did not notice the Chinese pair going through an unlocked automatic glass door at a security checkpoint.



Lax morale among staff is becoming more prevalent at the airport, which is causing deterioration in the airport's overall services. The security breach, which was undetected for 24 hours, came only weeks after Korea's flagship airport came under fire for a luggage delay that occurred over the New Year holiday. A prolonged leadership vacuum at Incheon International Airport Corporation (IIAC) is only worsening the airport's problems. The first priority for its next leader, who should be an expert in the airport business, must be to better train and discipline its staff.



The airport also needs to tighten security to prevent terrorists from entering Korea. Amid heightened alert against terror attacks, airports in major destination in the U.S. and Europe have been investing heavily on beefing up security. Incheon should be doing the same. Highly-trained terrorists can surely take advantage of such security holes if a pair of regular Chinese travelers seeking work here were able to break in and roam around for days without getting caught. It is time for the Korean authorities to craft security measures that can respond to terrorist activities. The latest reports from the National Assembly show that Korea is no longer safe from terrorists. Foreigners who have ties to the Islamic State (IS) were denied entry into Korea last year after they were found to have been in possession of bomb-making material.




Lee Jun-seok



By Kang Seung-woo

Lee Jun-seok, a 30-year-old political rookie of the ruling Saenuri Party, will face off with political bigwig Rep. Ahn Cheol-soo in his Seoul district during the April 13 general election.

The Harvard graduate launched his bid to participate in the ruling Saenuri Party's internal race to become its candidate for the Nowon C district in Seoul, where he will vie with Rep. Ahn, a presidential hopeful, should he survive the primary election.

Lee burst onto the political scene in late 2011 after Park, then a presidential candidate, scouted him as the head of her subcommittee for online communications. At that time, Lee was running an Internet-based education firm.

Lee was known to have initially turned down the offer to join the council of the Grand National Party, the predecessor of the Saenuri Party, but accepted after Park called him in person.

After the general and presidential elections in 2012, Lee mostly stayed away from politics, aside from TV appearances as a political commentator, but speculation was rife that he would run in this year's election.

The Seoul native is regarded as a progressive member of the conservative governing faction, often criticizing the government and even the President.

In addition, his youth plays an important role in boosting the image of the ruling party among those in their 20s and 30s, a group where the ruling party has struggled to win support, according to political analysts. In addition, his public reputation built by his TV appearance, is another strong point.

Amid a ceaseless political standoff and public distrust, Lee said when he announced his candidacy that he hopes the election "will clear the ground for the generational shift" to regain public confidence.

He also said that age does not matter in politics, citing former President Kim Young-sam, who became the youngest lawmaker in Korea at 26.

However, some politicians are casting a critical eye on him.

"For the past four years, what did Lee do to qualify for the public office other than appearing on TV programs?" said an official of the ruling party. "There are politicians who have focused on their election districts during the same period. It is not an ideal way for a political rookie to prepare to run for the general election."

In addition, he has fallen behind his potential rival Ahn in approval.

According to a public poll by the Hankook Ilbo, the sister paper of The Korea Times, Lee was trailing Ahn by 15.8 percent in a two-way race as of Jan. 4, but the gap was reduced to 7.7 percent in a three-way race that included Roh Hoe-chan of the minor opposition Justice Party, a former lawmaker in the district.
By Yoon Sung-won



LG CNS said Wednesday it has launched its ODPia open big data sharing platform.



Based on the service, the system integration affiliate of LG Group pledged to boost its presence in the sector both at home and abroad, covering diverse industries including commerce, finance and healthcare.



"We plan to ultimately build up ODPia as a data analytics platform by collecting data from diverse sources such as shopping, financial technology and healthcare," LG CNS's big data business development senior leader Lee Jin-hyeong said in a statement.



LG CNS has pushed for the big data business as one of its new growth engines alongside cloud computing, energy management, smart green systems, smart transportation and the Internet of Things.



In 2011, it organized a department dedicated to this sector for the first time in Korea's system integration industry.



By 2012, the company had launched more than 10 big data-related services including the nation's first integrated big data system, the Smart Big Data Platform (SBP), and its analysis platform SBP Appliance.



In particular, LG CNS has targeted global big data markets by releasing its Smart Social Media Analysis platform in China in June 2013.



ODPia is an open platform where users can easily search analyze and share big data.



The platform service provides real-time analysis of data cited on social media to monitor a company's public awareness and customers' lifestyle trends. It processes and provides data from public agencies and links them for cross analysis.



Users can also share, sell and buy big data-related applications and services on the platform and communicate with each other through analysis galleries and community bulletin boards, the company said.




A highly regarded legendary K-pop idol will be celebrating the lunar new year on Chinese TV next month.

Kangta (Ahn Chil Hyun), a member of the '90s K-pop boy band H.O.T, will be appearing on the most-watched Chinese entertainment show next month, reports The Korea Times.

Kangta will be singing a duet with Lynn Hung on the 2016 CCTV New Year's Gala (Chunwan), which is set to air on February 7.

Kangta has been resurging in popularity amid news of his upcoming album release and concert appearances with fellow H.O.T member Moon Hee Joon.

On Jan. 16, Kangta revealed in an interview that he is working on a new album that will not only mark the 20th anniversary of his debut as part of H.O.T back in 1996, but also feature collaborations with older and younger idols.

Kangta's new album is highly anticipated since he has not released any new music since his last Korean studio album Eternity, which dropped in 2008.

There have also been reports coming out that Kangta and the rest of H.O.T will be reuniting for their 20th debut anniversary.

At the very least, Kangta and Moon Hee Joon will be reuniting, their first time to do so since the group disbanded in 2001. Moon Hee Joon will be staging a series of concerts in Seoul and Kangta is set to join him on stage.

---

Mickey is a writer and digital content creator based in Manila. He is a co-founder of ZAVI App. He has also been bitten by the K-Pop fashion bug - follow him on Instagram @mickjami.
There are more than 35 million dedicated fans of Korean pop culture, according to a report from the Korea Foundation.

The Korea Foundation's global hallyu (Korean wave) data from 2015 revealed that there are an estimated 35.59 million fans of Korean culture around the world, a 63% increase from 2014's estimated 21.82 million fans. The Korea Foundation expressed that the jump is largely in part due to the rise in accessibility of rising genres of Korean pop culture, including Korean hip-hop and Korean web dramas.

The Korea Foundation based its results on the growth in international fan clubs and events overseas.

The report determined that there were 1,493 international hallyu fan clubs in 86 countries, 21% up from 2014's 1,229.

Last year saw major growth in Korean hip-hop and web dramas, with Korean rap artists holding concerts overseas and Korean web dramas becoming available on numerous international streaming sites. The musical genre and shorter drama episodes reportedly attracted many fans who had previously not been involved as fans of K-pop, Korean dramas, or other aspects of Hallyu.

Last year for the first time ever, a Korean hip-hop agency surpassed top K-pop agencies in local sales.

The Korea Foundation's findings were based on a series of polls that were promulgated through the world with the help of the Korean Foreign Ministry and Korean diplomatic missions and embassies overseas.

The largest number of K-pop fans live in Asia and Oceania, followed by the Americas, then Europe. Africa and the Middle East have the least reported fans.

Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, was a term coined in 1999 by China's Beijing Youth Daily meant to describe the growing popularity of South Korean pop culture content, such as music, dramas, and films. South Korea's government has funded numerous hallyu entities to promote Korean culture, food, traditional arts, etc. overseas.

The Korea Foundation is government-affiliated, and closely linked with the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since being founded in 1991, the goal of the Korean Foundation has been promoting Korean culture throughout the globe and building goodwill between Korea and the international community.

---
A little history... I taught math for five years in North Carolina, until I switched roles and became an instructional facilitator for two middle schools. It changed my life and opened so many doors for me. I have taught high school math and became a Standards Facilitator in Bahrain for the past year. While here I met the man of my dreams and am moving back to the states-a little further north-Maine. While there I hope to continue to encourage young people with their math skills while being an amazing wife to John and mom, to our fur babies.

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The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary

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Longtime Democratic campaign strategist and environmentalist Mitchell Schwartz told the LA Times on Tuesday that he will run next year against Mayor Eric Garcetti. Schwartz has worked behind the scenes on campaigns for Antonio Villaraigosa, Barbara Boxer, Al Gore and Bill Clinton, and in 2008 ran the California campaign for Barack Obama. Schwartz was a spokesman at the State Department under President Bill Clinton, and is currently on the board of the LA League of Conservation Voters, where he used to be president.

And if you vote in Los Angeles elections, you have almost certainly never heard of him.

So why run for mayor, without any known political base of his own, against a Democrat whose fans see him as a future star of Schwartz's own party? Schwartz, 55 and a neighbor of the Garcettis in Windsor Square, talked to the LAT's Peter Jamison:

Obviously, Im a little bit of an underdog, Schwartz said. But Im determined to do this. And once Im in it, I want to win...

Schwartz said he has been exploring a mayoral run and holding meetings with potential supporters since the fall. He said he decided to enter the race out of concern that the city is not dealing effectively with surging homelessness, rising crime, decaying infrastructure and patterns of real estate development that Schwartz characterized as out of control. This is not about Eric Garcetti. I know Eric and I like Eric. Hes a nice guy, Schwartz said. But the quality-of-life issues that are facing this city are all trending badly. Schwartz said he was encouraged by people both inside and outside City Hall who told him that the city was not adequately delivering basic public services. Garcetti placed promises to improve those services at the center of his 2013 campaign.



OK, so Schwartz is not the leading edge of a revolt bubbling up from the neighborhoods in a city where almost no one votes. He is a member of Temple Israel and on the committee for the Future of Cities: Leading in LA group that convened last year, so he's got connections. But for now, that's about it. It's way premature to take Schwartz seriously as a challenger to an incumbent mayor, but Jamison suggests that just by running he could "prove an unwelcome distraction for Garcetti" and complicate any ambitions the mayor may have to use reelection to propel him into a 2018 race for governor.

Schwartz may well build a currently non-existent political movement over the next year, and after he does, the media should start to cover him. Until then, well, longtime Democratic strategist Darry Sragow says in the Times story: "Going into this, youd have to say that this is the longest of long shots. And its been my experience that most long shots remain long shots. Yup.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District on Tuesday sued Southern California Gas over the three-month old natural gas leak in Aliso Canyon, saying the utility was negligent in the design and operation of the leaking gas well. The lawsuit will attempt to ding SoCal Gas for each day of the leak, up to $250,000 in civil penalties per day. The utility is drilling a relief well and is now within 200 feet of the leaking well, but says that even the most optimistic view has the methane gas continuing to escape into the atmosphere well into February. Porter Ranch residents, businesses and the city have so far sued over the disruption, health threats and loss of business blamed on the leak. Gov.. Jerry Brown has declared the calamity a disaster area. Now the AQMD comes in from the air pollution side. The amount of methane to escape so far is considered a major contributor of greenhouse gases.

From the LA Times coverage:

According to the lawsuit, the air quality agency has received more than 2,000 odor complaints from those living and working near the Aliso Canyon facility.

The lawsuit comes days after the agency approved a comprehensive abatement order that requires the gas company to permanently shut down the damaged well, establish a leak detection system and conduct an independent health study.



From the Daily News coverage:
PRESS RELEASE

Italy, Iran Open New Phase in Bilateral Relations

Jan. 26, 2016 (EIRNS)Iranian President Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi presided over the signing of 13 memoranda for EU17 billion of contracts in steel, infrastructure projects, energy, and shipyards, yesterday in Rome. The Danieli group alone signed contracts for EU5.7 billion, three in the steel sector and one in the mining sector.

At the press conference with Renzi, Rouhani said that he had chosen Italy as first leg of his first visit to Europe after the lifting of sanctions, because "Italy has a particular importance. We have a good history of collaboration with you, and the Iranians know Italy and your work, they trust the Italians." Relations with Italy go beyond bilateral significance and can contribute to security and stability in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and North Africa regions, he said, according to IRNA.

Iran can be the hub of security, energy, human resources and development, and geopolitical importance, Rouhani said. Were it not for Irans pioneer role in the fight against terrorism in the region, the world would have been witnessing more difficult conditions for the people of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, he stressed.

"The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action can be an example to be followed for the settlement of regional issues," Rouhani said.

Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni referred to the pioneering role of Italian industrialist and political leader Enrico Mattei in the relationships with Iran. It was Iran in 1957 to sign the first oil deal of a producing country with a company not belonging to the "seven sisters" oil cartel, namely with Matteis ENI. Mattei launched the competitive formula 25/75, whereby Iran would get 75% and ENI 25% of profits, against the 50/50 formula imposed by the Anglo-Dutch-French cartel.

Matteis dream "has become reality," Gentiloni said. A reality made up of "close political dialogue" and economic collaboration. Gentiloni quoted Mattei: "When we started our activities in Iran, we were dreamers."

At the Italy-Iran Business Forum, Rouhani said that, similarly to the nuclear deal, "we must start a win-win collaboration in the economy; in the current regional condition, Iran is the most secure and stable country in the entire region."

Also, Iran is the most tolerant in religious matters, he said. The Quran teaches that "the church, the synagogue and the mosque [should stay] one beside the other" or better, "we must first preserve the church, then the synagogue, then the mosque."

Rouhani was accompanied by a delegation of 6 ministers and 120 businessmen. At the Forum, there was a closed-door session in which businessmen of both sides discussed, face-to-face, opportunities in four strategic sectors: industry, infrastructure, oil/gas, and food.

Before sanctions, bilateral trade between Italy and Iran stood at EU7 billion. Now it has dropped to EU1.5 billion, said the head of Italian business association Confindustria, Giorgio Squinzi; we must go back to the past levels and beyond. On February 8-10, a mission with 130 Italian businessmen, led by the ministers for infrastructure and agriculture, will be in Tehran.

Today, Rouhani met the Pope. The 40-minute discussion centered on the Middle East. Rouani gave the Pope a hand-made carpet from Qom and a volume of miniatures; the Pope gave him an icon of St. Martin and (the bad news), his encyclical Laudato Si. The good news: since there is no edition in Farsi, he had to give him a copy in English and one in Arabic.
PRESS RELEASE

Helga Zepp-LaRouche Speaks at National Press Club

Jan. 26, 2016 (EIRNS)EIRs Forum today at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., featuring founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, an internationally recognized expert on the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and the New Silk Road and Thomas Wysmuller, former NASA meteorologist and member of "The Right Climate Stuff," drew a quality audience, despite 36 inches of snow, which has prompted Congress to call off its scheduled session for the entire week, and chaos closed area schools, governments and other enterprises through today.

The attendees included a prominent rocket scientist from the JFK era, a Democratic Party pre-candidate for Congress from the area, Russian press, international trade layers, embassy representation, and local supporters.

The entire EIR Forum is available in video on www.larouchepac.com

Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave the following remarks to the EIR Forum at the National Press Club today. She was preceded by Thomas Wysmuller, a meteorologist and former Apollo-era NASA employee and active in "The Right Climate Stuff group, composed of mainly retired NASA scientists, astronauts, engineers, and administrators who are exploring the real science of climate change, sorting out the fact vs fiction and focussing on available hard, validated data. EIR's Michael Billington was the forum's moderator.

Wysmuller opened the Forum with 12 powerful graphics handed out to all attendees, allowing them to follow, graphic by graphic, his exposure of claims that the COP21 proposals could reduce CO 2 ; graphs exposing that the 7,500-Year Spike in Post-Glacial Sea Level Rise leveled off in the last 8,000 years, and much morean open-and-shut case. Wysmullers presentation had a powerful effect on the audience.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (transcript) gave a 50-minute tour dhorizon of the strategic situation: the threat of nuclear war, pointing out that today there was no "code of behavior," as there was between Kennedy and Khrushchov in the 1960s; the imminent financial collapse which former BIS Chair William White pointed to at Davos; the plan for global bail-in, which cant work, and the refugee crisis that is tearing Europe apart. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche said that if even German Finance Minister Schauble can say the Mideast needs a Marshall Plan, this shows the world can change, and emphasizes the importance of the work of the international LaRouche movement behind the potential of the Chinese Land-Bridge solution.
Apple on Tuesday announced its best quarterly results, with a record profit of $18.4 billion on record sales of $75.9 billion, fueled by record sales of 74.8 million iPhones. CEO Tim Cook declared the numbers for the quarter ended Dec. 26 our strongest financial results ever and incredible.

So of course Apple shares have opened trading Wednesday with a loss of more than 4.5% (as of this writing). Investment pundits have begun talking about whether the world has passed peak Apple, as though anyone and everyone who could conceivably want an iPhone already has one.

What are we supposed to think about this?

Were seeing extreme conditions unlike anything weve experienced before just about everywhere we look.  Apple CEO Tim Cook

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The simplest explanation for the stock sell-off is that the stock market exists to discount the future, and Apples future  its near future, to be sure  doesnt look quite as glittery as its recent past.

For Apple, the iPhone is the ballgame, accounting for nearly two-thirds of revenue in recent quarters. But iPhone sales are expected to plummet in the current quarter: The company projection of a revenue decline to $50 billion-$53 billion implies iPhone sales falling to as few as 50 million. That would represent a fall-off of 16% from the same quarter last year and of one-third from the past quarter, when iPhone sales advanced from a year earlier by less than 1%.

In his earnings conference call with investment analysts, Cook mentioned numerous headwinds facing the company. These include economic doldrums around the globe: Major markets, including Brazil, Russia, Japan, Canada, Southeast Asia, Australia, Turkey and the eurozone, have been impacted by slowing economic growth, falling commodity prices and weakening currencies, he said. Were seeing extreme conditions unlike anything weve experienced before just about everywhere we look.

Then theres the weakening of foreign currencies, especially the euro. Because two-thirds of Apples sales happen overseas, that has a big impact. Currency adjustments alone sliced nearly $5 billion off Apples quarterly revenue, reducing its gain over the year-ago period from the 8% that would have been recorded had currencies remained stable, to a mere 2%.

Its worth noting that despite Apples ruling position among consumer electronics makers and its status as one of the worlds most profitable companies, Wall Street hasnt been entirely in love with the stock. As of this moment, Apple trades at a price-earnings multiple of about 10 based on trailing 12-month earnings, compared with the multiple of 21 for the Standard & Poors 500.

The P/E of Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, is 30; for Facebook its 97; and for the chronically profit-challenged Amazon its 852. That may not seem fair to Apple, but life and the stock market arent about being fair. To pump up the price, Apple has resorted to that old standby of companies running out of ideas: the stock buyback. Apple repurchased $6.9 billion of its shares in the last quarter, on top of a record $14 billion in the previous quarter.

Still, doubts about Apples stock are driven today not by the most recent earnings, but about what the future holds. One could hear in almost every line of the earnings presentation by Cook and CFO Luca Maestri an effort to shift investors perceptions of the company from a maker of hardware to a purveyor of services.

Their argument is that, regardless of what happens to unit sales of iPhones, the installed base of 1 billion phones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and Apple TV units is a platform to sell billions of dollars in apps, movies, music, cloud storage and other intangible stuff to customers. From this standpoint, past sales are the gift that keeps on giving. The vast majority of the services we provide to our customers, Maestri said, are tied to our installed base of devices, rather than to current quarter sales.

Services in the Apple ecosystem, including the App Store, Apple Music and iTunes, showed revenue growth of 15% over the year-ago quarter, the executives said. But sales still came to a meager $5.5 billion, less than 20% of total revenue.

Apples real problem may be that its stock price is tied to expectations about its hardware. The company is locked, like a hamster on a wheel, into the need to drive consumer excitement about upgrades and new products in an endless loop. The counterweight is that with revenue and profits as large and sales as robust as theyve been in the past, even big numbers look incremental.

Cook ran into this buzz saw himself during Wednesdays call, when he observed that selling 74.8 million iPhones in three months translated into over 34,000 iPhones an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 13 straight weeks. That just got people thinking about how hard it is to keep selling that many phones day after day into the limitless future.

At this moment, Apple is caught in a lull between product cycles. Its last iPhone, introduced in September, was a minor upgrade to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, introduced a year earlier. The Apple Watch, which went on sale early last year, doesnt seem to have taken the consumer world by storm; the company still doesnt break out its sales figures, which makes it seem that there may be nothing to crow about.

The Apple TV box competes with several entries in the streaming-video space, including Googles Chromecast and Rokus lineup, without offering much thats unique. The mysterious Apple Car effort has stalled, with the departure of a key executive and a hiring freeze, according to reports in the Apple news universe.

As a result, Apple investment fans are left thirsting for the next big thing. Their hopes and fears are wrapped up in the iPhone 7, presumably to be unveiled in September. The speculation machine about the new device already is revving up, so you can imagine what it will look like as the release date approaches.

How good will the iPhone 7 have to be to get investors, not just consumers, excited? Its hard to say, given the mediocre performance of Apple shares  over the past year of sterling financial performance, the company has lost nearly 28% from its peak above $131 in May.

As a manufacturing and consumer goods company, Apple may be just too big and successful. Its investors not only are asking, Whats next? With a yawn, theyre asking, What have you done for me lately?

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see our Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed suit against the operators of DeVry University on Wednesday, alleging that the for-profit education group misled students about their job prospects and potential earnings after graduation.

The suit focuses on two claims DeVry made in advertisements on television, radio and social media: that 90% of graduates seeking employment got jobs in their fields within six months and that students incomes a year after graduation were 15% higher than the average of all other college graduates.

The FTC complaint, filed in federal court in Southern California, alleges those claims are false and unsubstantiated.

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This is the latest action against for-profit colleges, which are facing increasing scrutiny from state and federal regulators amid evidence of aggressive recruiting, high costs and poor student performance.

In the Devry case, the government said DeVry counted students who were working the same jobs before enrolling toward the 90% success rate. In other cases, the complaint alleges DeVry stretched the definition of graduates employed in their field.

For example, a business administration graduate was considered employed in the field by working as a server at the Cheesecake Factory. Graduates of the technical management program were also counted as employed, though they were working as unpaid volunteers at a medical center, according to the suit.

The suit also questioned the methodology of DeVrys claims about students earning 15% more than other average college graduates, saying the schools own internal data showed graduates did not earn significantly more.

We want people to be making informed choices based on accurate information, said Christina Tusan, a staff attorney in the FTCs Los Angeles office. Thats our concern in these types of cases.

DeVry, which is based outside Chicago and operates more than a dozen campuses across California, said the FTCs complaint is without a valid legal basis. In a statement, the company said the lawsuits relies on anecdotal examples that exaggerate the allegations but do not prove them.

The company said it measures employment and earnings of graduates on a sound, rational and transparent basis, and has published these results in a consistent manner over the years.

There is no national standard for measuring employment statistics, DeVry said.

The U.S. Department of Education also announced it would require DeVry to stop certain advertisements about job prospects for students and to hire an auditor to examine any future claims.

The FTC suit seeks an injunction and monetary compensation for past and current DeVry students.

Twitter: @c_kirkham

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Struggling drug developer MannKind Corp., the maker of an inhalable insulin treatment thats so far posted disappointing sales, might be looking for a buyer.

News that MannKind is working with investment bankers on strategic options  including a possible sale  was reported Tuesday by Reuters, citing unnamed sources.

I cant comment on anything like that, said Matt Pfeffer, MannKinds chief executive and chief financial officer. The attorneys are quite emphatic about it.

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The company recently lost the backing of French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, which had agreed to market and distribute MannKinds only product, inhalable insulin Afrezza. MannKind is a drug developer with no sales or distribution operations.

Founded by billionaire Alfred Mann, the Valencia company had bet big on Afrezza, which took more than a decade and nearly $2 billion to develop. Analysts once thought it could be a blockbuster drug that would generate billions in annual sales, but Afrezza failed to gain traction after hitting the market last February. Sanofi and MannKind sold just $5.5 million of the drug through September.

On top of weak sales and the loss of Sanofi as a partner, MannKind has had other troubles. The companys chief executive resigned in November, leaving Mann, 90, to step in temporarily.

A replacement had to back out because of a contract dispute with a previous employer. Now, the company is being led by Pfeffer, the companys longtime finance chief.

Pfeffer has acknowledged that MannKind has enough cash to make it only into the second half of this year.

MannKind shares jumped 22% to close at 92 cents Tuesday, though much of the days gain came before Reuters published its report.

Shares traded for more than $10 immediately following Afrezzas FDA approval in 2014, but theyve lost more than 90% of their value since then. Theyve traded for less than $1 since Sanofi scrapped its deal with MannKind.

If the company is for sale, that would be an apparent reversal. The day MannKind announced Sanofi was pulling out, Pfeffer said the company would carry on.

I speak today with resolve to say that this is not the end of the line for Afrezza or for MannKind by any means, he said on a Jan. 5 conference call.

In an interview with The Times this week, Pfeffer said MannKind is looking for new sales and distribution partners, rethinking the marketing strategy for Afrezza, working to get the drug approved for sale in markets outside of the United States, continuing to develop other inhalable drugs and licensing its technology to other drug developers.

He gave no indication that the company was for sale.

Keith Markey, an analyst at Griffin Securities who owns MannKind stock, said he doesnt believe MannKind is looking for a buyer.

It was only two weeks ago that Matt Pfeffer laid out the companys strategy. I cant imagine theyd suddenly change their direction, he said.

Lloyd Greif, chief executive of downtown L.A. investment bank Greif & Co., said all the activity that Pfeffer mentioned suggests the company is scrambling to stay afloat  and that it is likely considering any option, including a sale, that would stave off bankruptcy.

It conveys a sense of urgency. No question the companys back is up against the wall and theyre going to look at any and all reasonable options, Greif said.

Ahmed Enany, chief executive of trade group Southern California Biomedical Council, said any company in MannKinds situation would consider a transaction. He also noted that choosing its finance chief to lead the company made sense.

Putting him at the helm might help the company explore options, including a sale, Enany said.

Although Afrezza has been a flop so far, MannKind has other assets that could be attractive to a buyer. The companys inhalable drug technology, Technosphere, could be used to develop inhalable versions of other drugs.

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Pfeffer said MannKind is developing an inhalable epinephrine  the drug used to treat anaphylaxis, a potentially deadly allergic reaction  as well as an inhalable version of a drug used to treat nausea in chemotherapy patients. Last week, the company agreed to license Technosphere to a Seattle company that plans to use it with other drugs.

A buyer would have to take on the companys more than $194 million in outstanding debt. And it would have to spend much more to develop more inhalable drugs, get them approved by the FDA and get them to market  a process that could take years if it happens at all.

The question mark revolves around the technology. Is it commercially viable? Greif said. Any buyer coming into this situation is going to have to make a huge investment to bring this product to market. Theres lots of heavy lifting left before you can declare success here.

james.koren@latimes.com

Twitter: @jrkoren

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The highly anticipated new production of Harold Pinters The Room by The Wooster Group has run into difficulties after the licensing company for the play said that critics may not review the show when it has its world premiere in Los Angeles next month.

In addition, future performances of The Room in New York and Paris appear to be in jeopardy after The Wooster Group failed to obtain the necessary permission from Samuel French, the licensing company.

The Room is still scheduled to be performed at REDCAT in downtown L.A. from Feb. 4 to 14. The production is staged by The Wooster Groups longtime director Elizabeth LeCompte, and features such company acting stalwarts as Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos.

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The Wooster Group held advance preview performances of its new production of The Room late last year in New York ahead of the L.A. world premiere.

Officials at REDCAT said in a release this week that Samuel French instructed the New York-based Wooster Group that all promotion and reviews of the production would be forbidden.

The Wooster Group subsequently appealed this decision, and Samuel French later lifted the restriction on promoting the production, but told the theater company that the blackout on reviews will remain in place.

The release quoted an email from Samuel Frenchs licensing manager David Kimple: We are elated and honored to have your company investing in a show like this but, unfortunately, outside circumstances require us to maintain this restriction.

Kimple didnt immediately respond to requests for comment.

A London representative for the Pinter estate said via email that The Wooster Groups application came to Samuel French after the theater company had already announced its production plans.

The fact is that it was very late in the day last year when we heard they were planning to present the play in Los Angeles and unfortunately, the rights were not available when they applied for them, said Judy Daish, the representative for the writers estate.

We proceeded with allowing the production with limitations out of courtesy to them.

Both The Wooster Group and REDCAT disputed her assertion about the timing of the application.

They said that The Wooster Group first applied and received approval for the license for the New York run in July 2014, when it was applying for funding.

The Wooster Group then contacted Kimple at Samuel French to request a license for the L.A. extension on Oct. 16, 2015 -- prior to the Oct. 28, 2015 start of performances in New York.

They said The Wooster Group followed up by email on Dec. 9 because it hadnt received a licensing agreement yet, and were told on Dec. 20 that final confirmation would be received soon.

Earlier this month, Samuel French informed the Wooster Group of its decision regarding reviews and promotional material.

In August last year, REDCAT announced its fall 2015 lineup, which included a mention of The Room for early 2016 in the announcement.

Speaking by phone from New York, LeCompte said that I dont think this is good for theater. Theater is always an event... when you stop people from doing it, it might put the playwright up in literature, but it doesnt help theater.

She added that as a director, she is totally loyal to the writing of the play. I dont cut it up, or re-do it. I dont change the words.

The Wooster Group is world-renowned for its experimental productions that put an avant-garde, sometimes multimedia spin on classic dramas. In the past, it has staged plays by Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Eugene ONeill and Tennessee Williams.

The company has presented a number of its productions at REDCAT over the years, including Hamlet, Vieux Carre" and Early Shaker Spirituals.

Blackouts of critic reviews are highly unusual in the theater world. Personally, its very perplexing, said Mark Murphy, executive director of REDCAT, in an interview.

It seems to me that even if a critic doesnt like it and writes a review that isnt positive, that seems like a very small matter compared to the press about this precedent-setting move that might be generated.

He said REDCAT had already invited some members of the press to The Room but has alerted them to the restrictions.

LeCompte said The Wooster Group was in discussions to present The Room at the Festival dAutomne, the annual arts festival held in Paris. She said no dates for the official New York premiere had been set.

The Room was Pinters first play and was produced in 1957.

The British writer, who died in 2008, was a Nobel laureate and is widely considered one of the most important dramatists of the 20th century. His plays, including Betrayal, The Homecoming and The Birthday Party are revived regularly in productions around the world.

Twitter: @DavidNgLAT
New evidence suggests its easier to build the worlds tallest skyscraper than to create an original American musical.

Empire: The Musical has just opened at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. Inspired by the story of the Empire State Building, authors Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull began writing the book, music and lyrics in 1999. By comparison, the Empire State Building itself  all 102 stories of it  was finished after just a year and 45 days, in 1931, in the midst of the Depression.

Of course, the skyscraper was financed from the get-go by industrialists; the musical had to find backers, as well as the director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge (nominated for a Tony Award in 2010 for her revival of Ragtime). Up on its feet at last at La Mirada, the world premiere of Empire is billed as the pre-Broadway engagement. But how sturdy is this structure, really? (Warning: Architectural analogies will be used heavily in this review, as they are in the musical.)

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In this Empire, the foundation is wobbly. The framework teeters until intermission, then collapses to rubble in Act 2.

The Empire State Building is a triumph of Art Deco architecture and a metaphor for the ambition and grit of the American spirit. The workers who built it, immigrants as well as Native American Mohawk skywalkers, exemplify the dream of diverse cultures unified by a bold common dream  or as one of Sherman and Hulls lyrics puts it, succinctly if unappetizingly, a melting pot of can-do.

This lavish production summons up the patriotism and pluck of a long-gone America. Its video projections, by Brad Peterson and scenic designer David Gallo, breathtakingly evoke Lewis Wickes Hines black-and-white photographs of the Empire State construction site. And they move, sweeping the audience into 3-D tours of 1930s New York City and sending us high up into the vertiginous structure. The actors interact playfully with the images, bending to lower digital beams into place or, down at street level, disappearing through a projected revolving door.

The show reaches its pinnacle late in the first act with the number Lunchtime, in which the laborers show off their acrobatic skills on the girders to impress female passersby. The set and projections work together like clockwork; Dodges choreography is at its playful and muscular best; Leon Wiebers period costumes add individuality and color to the ensemble; the songs cheeky energy is irresistible.

But people dont buy tickets to watch a building get built, even if its tall. Sherman and Hull may have found a promising backdrop for an American musical, but theyre still searching for the story to set against it and the characters to embody its themes.

Two historical figures, the industrialists/politicians John J. Raskob (Tony Sheldon) and Al Smith (Michael McCormick), depicted as jocular buffoons, are joined onstage by fictional musical-theater tropes. Theres Al Smiths bombshell of an assistant, the tough-talking can-do gal Frankie Peterson (Stephanie Gibson), who holds an undefined but critical position in the construction of the new skyscraper, then known as the Al Smith Building. For some reason shes annoyed when a handsome young architect, Michael Shaw (Kevin Earley), is hired to design it. Hes a dreamer  his architectural philosophy can be summarized as going up  whereas shes a pragmatist with a gift for greasing wheels. Their spiky rapport is such a tried-and-true form of foreplay that they dont even bother to display the slightest mutual attraction before abruptly launching into a love duet. (Its called Falling Into My Heart, and because it follows the fatal fall of a construction worker from a high floor, its imagery seems in poor taste.)

A few members of the crew are also given story lines: Ethan ODowd (Caleb Shaw), an appealing Irishman whose wife, Emily (Katharine McDonough), fears for his safety at work; Bucky Brandt (Tommy Bracco), who yearns to walk on the high beams with the Mohawk; and a mysterious person who answers to the name Bill Johnson. These three command the wrecking ball of plot twists that ultimately vaporizes the ambitious edifice of Empire.

A Playbill article from 2008 about an earlier iteration of Empire, said to be eyeing a Broadway run even then, lists the characters: Michael, a starry-eyed young architect  Hilda, a driven journalist who believes in the good of the people  Gladys, the fast-talking, dont-mess-with-me contractor who teaches both Hilda and Michael about trade-offs  and Sam, the dedicated laborer with a secret, which, once revealed, will change everyone.

Most of those people didnt make it into this draft, but swapping them out hasnt resolved the problems. The story of the Empire State Building may not lend itself to the kind of musical Empire wants to be, in which scrappy dreamers overcome the odds to build an American icon. The skyscraper was the baby of fat cats with the means to truck in tons of steel and marble while much of the country stood in bread lines  and the money to influence politicians, silence protesters and buy off grieving widows.

The Empire State Building had its naysayers, but it reached the sky anyway. Empire: The Musical could very well do the same. The show abounds in theatrical imagination, ingenuity and passion. It just needs a plot that can bear the weight.

Empire: The Musical, La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 14. $20-$70. (562) 944-9801 or www.lamiradatheatre.com. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.
Before Janet McTeer began performances as the coldly calculating Marquise de Merteuil in the current London revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, she received a brief word of advice from Albert Nobbs costar Glenn Close, who played the marquise in the 1988 movie version, Dangerous Liaisons.

Bizarrely, she was in town during rehearsals. We had a giggle about how weird it was, McTeer recalled in a recent phone interview from London.

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Glenn is a friend. But like any good actress, she gave me room to explore the character. The only thing she said was, Shes a survivor.

McTeer is starring with Dominic West in the new Donmar Warehouse production, directed by Josie Rourke, which will be shown in cinemas around the world starting Thursday. For West, who plays the Vicomte de Valmont, the timing of the production came down to the wire with the shooting of his Showtime drama series, The Affair.

Speaking separately after a recent matinee performance, West said he had finished shooting the second season of The Affair in late October and was back in London for rehearsals in early November.

I didnt have enough preparation as Id like, he said. Especially learning the lines. Its not ideal with a part this big. And its so language-based.... It means I wasnt really ready on press night. But I am now and have been for a few weeks.

Playing 18th century French aristocrats who engage in games of sexual one-upmanship, the two actors dont spare words when describing the depravity of their characters.

Hes unquestionably cruel and unconscionably so, West said. And he loves that. Hes deliberately cruel and enjoys the sexual charge of cruelty.

At one point, Valmont deflowers a young woman at the request of the marquise to ruin an arranged marriage. Or, as West puts it: He effectively rapes a 15-year-old girl. Thats a difficult one to pull off and still have sympathy for him. One of the advantages of this production is that its directed by a woman. I think that would have been different to do with a male director.

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McTeer delivers one of the plays most famous lines, explaining why cruelty, as opposed to betrayal, is her favorite word: I always think that has a nobler ring to it.

If you judge a person by their actions, yes, shes cruel, said the two-time Oscar-nominated actress (Albert Nobbs, Tumbleweeds). I think shes a damaged person.

Liaisons, written by Christopher Hampton from the epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, was first performed 30 years ago in a Royal Shakespeare Company production starring Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan.

McTeer saw that production and said the death of Rickman this month was particularly painful.

Ive known Alan for a long time, she said. He was always incredibly funny and delightful, and a great person of the theater and a great supporter of young people in particular.... It was completely bizarre doing this play after he died. There were a few difficult shows, let me tell you.

West never met Rickman, but he said that day was very poignant. You feel an affinity for those who have done it before you.

The actor added that the 1988 movie, in which Close starred with John Malkovich, had made a big impression on him and that he avoided watching it in preparing for the new revival. Every inflection of Malkovich, I remember, he said.

West described the escalating series of sexual dares between the marquise and Valmont, who are former lovers, as being male in nature: Its competitive. Theyre going out into the world, [having sex], coming back and talking about it. Its quite masculine. Whenever I brought this up in rehearsals, the women in the room would roll their eyes.

But their sexual games soon turn into a war of the sexes with deadly consequences.

I really approached it by asking, Why do people do what they do? McTeer said. These two people start out having great fun and end up destroying each other. You dont kill the main person in your life for fun. You do it because the fun turned into something terrible. She destroys him in the end because she wont let him destroy her.

She added: I think for want of a better phrase, both are sex addicts who cant get to intimacy.

For the actors, playing such nasty decadence can be exhilarating.

Whats great about the first half of the play is youre enjoying yourself, McTeer said.

By the time you get to the end of the play, youre in a whole world of savagery. The fun is being able to do both things with the same actor. [Dominic] is a gentleman. Consequently, you can trust him. In the scenes that are very physical, you feel you can just go for it.

david.ng@latimes.com
In 2005, Conor Oberst asked Jenny Lewis if she might be interested in making a solo album for his fledgling record label, Team Love.

Her reaction wasnt quite what the Bright Eyes frontman was expecting.

I was like, Are you crazy? I cant make a record on my own! recalled Lewis, then known as the singer in the Los Angeles indie-rock group Rilo Kiley. My identity was wrapped up in my band. I never envisioned myself as a solo artist.

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Yet a solo artist is just what Lewis became with the rootsy Rabbit Fur Coat, which came out in January 2006 and -- with closely observed tunes about love, religion and her complicated childhood -- opened a new chapter for one of pop musics smartest, funniest songwriters.

Since then, Lewis (who began her show-business career as a child actor in 1980s movies like Troop Beverly Hills) has released a string of acclaimed albums, including 2014s The Voyager. Shes also recorded with Elvis Costello and Brandon Flowers and toured as a member of the Postal Service.

Now shes celebrating the 10th anniversary of Rabbit Fur Coat with a brief tour on which shes playing the album in its entirety with help from M. Ward and the Watson Twins, who appeared on the original album.

I spoke with Lewis this week before the tour launches Thursday with a three-night stand at Immanuel Presbyterian Church on Wilshire Boulevard. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Lots of bands hit the road these days to perform old records. Do you go in for that retrospective vibe?

I dont tend to look back in my life, which is probably why Ive found myself in some pretty weird situations. But I think touring with the Postal Service a couple of years ago changed my perspective on that; it showed me how important it is to reflect, to kind of assess the songs from your life.

What did you find when you assessed the songs from Rabbit Fur Coat?

Theyre strangely relevant now. And that doesnt always happen. There are some Rilo Kiley songs that Ive tried to put in my more recent touring sets, and they just dont feel like me anymore. But with these songs, theyre like predictors of the future; theyre little psychic bursts. When Im writing songs, sometimes I dont understand what Im writing about, and it kind of takes me a decade to figure it out.

Part of what distinguished The Voyager was its clear-eyed quality. The debut feels different.

It feels wordier. I think I was in a place where I was listening to so many of Conors songs, and I was so entrenched in his world that I didnt really edit a lot of the lyrics. Ive become a more thorough editor of my own words. But back then I had no expectations, and these were just songs that I wrote in my bedroom. I kind of barfed out the lyrics and committed them to tape.

Its more innocent.

Theres something really pure about it. No one was watching me; no one knew about it. No one was even really calling me a songwriter at that point. I was in a band, and although I was writing those songs -- by myself and with Blake [Sennett, of Rilo Kiley] -- its just different when youre creating in a vacuum. And then people start talking about your music, and you start, unfortunately, taking that in when youre writing. You cant help it.

What do you remember about the shows you played at the time?

It was the first time for everything. It was the first time I ever stood on a stage without Blake. It was the first time I was collaborating with women. It was the first time I took on all these things that in the past I had shared with my band: merch and videos and pictures and all of this stuff. I was becoming this fully formed artist, and I didnt even know it.

You went on working with women in your live bands. Was it important to you to continue that?

Oh, absolutely. Its just a different dynamic when women are playing together in a room. The moment I started singing with the twins, I knew it was meant to be. It really reminded me of when I started singing as a child with my mother and my sister in the San Fernando Valley. Thats when I discovered music. And working with women has led to some of the most satisfying moments of my musical life. Some of the most difficult, too, because my relationship with my mother is a difficult one. But its almost karmic that I reach out to women in my work.

The arrangements on Rabbit Fur Coat are pretty sparse compared with the last couple of Rilo Kiley albums.

That was definitely a choice I made. If you think about it, in Rilo Kiley I was the lyricist -- and a songwriter, with Blake. But the lyrics were mine. Blakes role was producer, and his job was to fill out the instrumentation and arrange the songs. So theres a lot of that there. But when you take all of that away, its just the songs. With Rabbit Fur Coat, I wanted to strip it back to the bare essentials, so you could really hear the stories.

One of the songs on the album that attracted the most attention was a rendition of Handle With Care by the Traveling Wilburys, which you did with vocals from Oberst, M. Ward and Ben Gibbard. People thought it was kind of a wacky choice.

I know, and its so funny, because I chose it because of the lyric. I mean, straight up, it couldnt have been more perfect for the story of my life. Sent to meetings, hypnotized / Overexposed, commercialized? Thats like my whole childhood. So it was truly just a stoner idea: I love this song. George Harrison is my favorite Beatle. Im gonna ask my friends to sing the parts.

Since then youve become known as a great classic-rock appreciator with very warm things to say about bands such as Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. Was Glenn Freys death a shock, especially coming right after David Bowie died?

Glenn Frey is my David Bowie. And I love David Bowie. We shared the same birthday, so Ive been thinking about him since I was 4 years old. But for the way I grew up, in the Valley with my mothers record collection -- the Eagles songs, I know them all by heart. And that music has informed my music throughout the years. I was pretty devastated.

Among hip young musicians, the Eagles havent quite been reappraised in recent years the way Fleetwood Mac has. Are the Eagles big in your circle?

I dont know if my friends would admit that they love the Eagles. But they do. Did the Eagles become less cool after The Big Lebowski? Was that the moment?

I think it was a moment.

I wonder if that reflects how the Coen brothers feel, or just how they imagined the Dude felt. I wonder if the Coen brothers actually like the Eagles? I bet they do.

One last thing. I read that you popped out to play a song with Jimmy Buffett during his show in Brooklyn on New Years Eve. That blew my mind a little bit.

Well, Im writing -- this is the first time Im saying this out loud -- Im writing some songs for a Margaritaville musical with Jimmy, whos a friend of mine. I cant really say too much about it, but I can tell you because he announced it onstage at Barclays Center that night after Huey Lewis played. It was one of the most surreal nights of my life.

You know, the question of whether youre related to Huey Lewis never entered my mind until right now.

I met him in the hallway and made a joke. I was like, Dad, is that you?

Twitter: @mikaelwood

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What will Californias coast look like five, 20, and 50 years from now, and who will decide?

A few developers? A handful of lobbyists? Rock stars and moguls? Environmentalists? The governor?

Will the boogie boarders, birders, snorkelers, sailors, surfers, old guys with metal detectors, Christians who sing around fire pits, Muslim families who picnic, joggers, abalone divers, sun worshippers and sand castle builders have a say?

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We are now in Week 2 of the great California Coastal Commission Coup, in which a flotilla of commissioners is angling to throw Executive Director Charles Lester overboard without a public explanation as to why.

Rather than go quietly, Lester has requested a hearing, and the showdown is scheduled for Feb. 10.

Defenders of the imperiled coast are rallying to defend Lester, while Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislative leaders  who share the appointment of commissioners  have been silent as sea slugs.

Here are my questions: What exactly has Lesters record been, and why are Browns appointees out to get him?

Fifty environmental and social justice groups say that Lesters five-year record of interpreting and enforcing the Coastal Act is a good one. That coalition made its feelings known Tuesday in a sharply worded letter delivered to commission Chairman Steve Kinsey and state leaders.

We are deeply concerned over the unjustified and misguided attempt currently under way to oust Dr. Lester, said the letter from representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Heal the Bay and dozens of other groups.

The letter listed a number of accomplishments under Lesters reign and offered a different version of reality than I got last week from a commissioner who spoke to me anonymously.

The commissioner denied allegations that a pro-development faction wants to shove Lester out of the way and open the coast to more construction, saying the real reason is a growing sense that there are management issues.

Such as?

Per the commissioner: Slow response to commission requests, lack of leadership, lack of vision, lack of diversity in hiring and lack of transparency.

While were on the subject of lack of, how about the lack of specificity in those claims, many of which critics dismiss as hogwash?

To look at just one, diversity, an agency report notes that about 30% of the Coastal Commissions staffers self-identify as minorities. Not perfect, but not bad.

Theres lots of evidence, on the other hand, that pro-development forces are getting bolder about throwing their weight around.

I noted several cases in my Sunday column in which commissioners have challenged or dismissed staff recommendations against projects that would diminish the publics access to or enjoyment of the coast.

The agencys database indicates that since Lester took his job in 2011, he and his staffs expert opinion to deny coastal projects has often been pummeled by commissioners.

The trend is troubling. In 2006 alone commissioners denied 26 projects, whereas in the last four years commissioners denied a total of 24 projects.

Lesters admirers dont characterize the cerebral wonk as perfect. Some wish he had more political skill.

But an annual report Lester released Tuesday shows significant progress in his five-year strategic plan.

The gang of 50 enviro groups letter also blows away any suggestion that Lesters been sitting on a beach sunning himself.

Among the accomplishments it cites:

New penalties for those who illegally deny beach access.

A massive blueprint for helping local communities plan for sea-level rise.

The updating of local coastal plans up and down the state.

Reduced process times for permits and appeals.

Creation of a database so the public can get information on projects in the works.

Treating beach access for low-income and minority residents as a civil rights issue.

Weve made tremendous progress under Dr. Lester, said lawyer Robert Garcia of the City Project, which has fought for beach access in Malibu and other areas where private property owners have used guards, bogus signs and parking restrictions to keep citizens off public beaches. The beach belongs to everybody. Not just the rich and famous and the mainstream enviros.

Beach access is just one example of whats at stake here.

The Coastal Commission is in the business of deciding on proposals for residential properties, hotels, energy production facilities and other coastal projects that together are worth billions of dollars. And yet theres not a lot of transparency built into the process.

If you want to build a hotel, for example, you hire a lobbyist who in some cases is very chummy with coastal commissioners. But those lobbyists arent even classified as lobbyists.

Theyre agents under the law, and dont have to report how much theyre being paid. Those same lobbyist/agents are known to ante up at fundraisers for commissioners who run for local office in their communities.

Serving as a commissioner, then, means you can belly up to whats been described as a fundraising chuck wagon.

There are rules in place to prevent conflicts of interest when it comes to coastal commission business, but the potential for abuse is one more reason to be wary of any attempt by any commissioners to take greater control of the agency from staff.

What you want to make sure of is that the agency is not captured, or produces analysis that is slanted in one way or another. The only slant should be whats in the Coastal Act, said Susan Jordan of the California Coastal Protection Network.

Jordan, involved in coastal protection for 20 years, said she advocates for her position just as lobbyists advocate for theirs.

What the agency needs, and has in Lester, is someone who plays it straight, she said. Ive watched, and I do believe he does an honorable and admirable job.

She wonders, as do I, if Brown  who recently took bows in Europe for his environmental leadership  is even paying attention.

Hard to say.

I asked to talk to Brown again Tuesday, and I got the same brushoff his staff gave me last week.

Is it me, or are his once-charming quirks becoming more irksome?

Brown is the one who signed coastal protection into law in 1976, and yet his appointees are the ones said to be leading the charge against Lester.

Itd be nice to know if hes behind the ouster, or at least what he thinks about it.

All thats at stake is the future of the worlds greatest 1,100 miles of coastline.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATstevelopez

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Los Angeles County prosecutors are attempting to remove Carson Mayor Albert Robles from serving as a director on a regional water board, claiming in a lawsuit that holding both offices at the same time is a conflict of interest and violates California law.

It is the latest legal issue to confront Robles, recently part of a failed high-profile bid to land an NFL stadium in Carson. He is facing a separate inquiry from county prosecutors into his city of residence, which followed a Los Angeles Times report that raised questions about whether Robles lives in Carson or in the Adams-Normandie neighborhood of Los Angeles; Robles says his legal residence is in Carson.

The lawsuit filed this week did not address the residency issue. In the suit, filed Monday and served to Robles on Tuesday, prosecutors asserted that one person cannot be mayor or a city councilman in Carson and be on the board of the Water Replenishment District of Southern California. The district is responsible for replenishing groundwater in basins that supply water to the residents of Carson and nearly 4 million other people in southern L.A. County.

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The positions  are incompatible, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marian Thompson wrote in court papers. The water district and the city have overlapping territory, duties and responsibilities, and a clash of duties is likely to arise in the exercise of both offices simultaneously.

Lawyers for the California attorney generals office said there is good reason for a court to decide whether Robles two elected jobs are legally incompatible, they wrote in an opinion requested by county prosecutors.

For instance, say the water district wanted to raise the tax on pumping groundwater. What would the elected official do? Sue in court to keep water bills low for Carson residents? Or back the water districts effort to fund replenishment of the groundwater basins?

There also could be a conflict in the Carson City Councils oversight of water and land use that could threaten the supply or quality of the groundwater. Would the official back a lawsuit against Carson to keep toxins away from groundwater? Or would he back the citys interest in fostering economic activity?

These are examples of conflicting duties and loyalties that could arise, state lawyers wrote.

The attorney generals office cited a section of the state government code that says public officials shall not simultaneously hold two public offices that are incompatible.

In a telephone interview, Robles disagreed with the countys and states arguments, saying, There is no law that prevents me from holding both offices.

If the Legislature has a problem with it, then they should pass a law tomorrow that says you cannot hold both offices, said Robles, who has been on the water district board since 1992 and was first elected to the Carson City Council in 2013. He was selected by his colleagues to fill the mayors seat on the council shortly after it became vacant in 2015.

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Robles said there is no conflict in being both Carson mayor and on the water district board. For example, he said, Carson has no contracts with the water district, the city does not buy water from the district and the city has no groundwater rights to the districts basins. Robles said two private water companies receive water from the district and sell it to Carson residents.

State lawyers acknowledge that the water district does not sell water to Carson residents, does not directly set water rates, and has no rights to extract groundwater from district basins. But they said there are many other conflicting duties and loyalties that could arise. They include the Carson City Councils power to deny the water district permission to build projects in Carson, or the water districts ability to sell water directly to Carson and its residents if it so desired.

Robles said the district attorneys office is targeting him because he is Latino.

Another Water Replenishment District board member also has a second elected job. Sergio Calderon has been on the water district board since 2006, representing a district that includes Maywood. In November, Calderon was elected back to the Maywood City Council, a job he quit in 2009 after county prosecutors raised questions about him holding both offices.

The district attorneys office is reviewing Calderons holding of both elected jobs, a spokeswoman said Wednesday. Calderon did not respond to a request for comment.

Robles is also facing an inquiry from the California Fair Political Practices Commission, which enforces state ethics laws.

He came under scrutiny for failing to submit state-required disclosure statements for his political campaign finances and personal economic interests for both his elected jobs.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County district attorney spokeswoman Jane Robison said Tuesday that the question of Robles residency remains under review.

In a Times report in September, Robles asserted that he lives in his parents home in Carson, but said he spends most of his free waking hours with his wife and two children at their Adams-Normandie apartment in Los Angeles.

The Times reported that several current or former residents of the Adams-Normandie neighborhood said Robles has been a fixture there for many years.

Robles said he has lived in his parents small Carson home since moving back here from the Bay Area in 2003. At that time, Robles said, he and his wife decided to live separately, even though they were in a loving marriage that later produced two children.

If Robles lives in Los Angeles, he would be ineligible to serve as Carsons mayor or sit on the board of the Water Replenishment District. He earned more than $100,000 in total compensation from the two posts in 2013.

Times staff writers Paul Pringle and Nathan Fenno contributed to this report.

ron.lin@latimes.com

Twitter: @ronlin

ruben.vives@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATVives

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Im Davan Maharaj, editor of the Los Angeles Times. Here are some story lines I dont want you to miss today.

TOP STORIES

Trump vs. Fox News

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The presumptive front-runner for the GOP takes on the standard bearer for conservatism, Fox News, by bowing out of Thursday nights debate. Trump, a big TV draw with his outspoken rhetoric, blamed it on anchor Megyn Kelly. I think shes a third-rate reporter, said Trump. There go the ratings.

Oregon Standoff Turns Violent

One militant was killed and another wounded as federal authorities moved in to arrest the armed protesters who took over the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2. Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy are among the eight individuals currently in custody, facing felony charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers. Isnt this a wonderful country we live in? said Cliven Bundy, Ammons father upon hearing the news.

Get a Horse

For years, transportation agencies across Southern California have tried to woo drivers out of their cars and into buses and trains. But their efforts  costing up to $9 billion in Los Angeles County alone  seem to be failing. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority lost 56 million riders between 2013 and 2015, and in Orange County, the numbers are worse: Bus ridership has dropped 30% over seven years. Is this how transportation money should be spent?

Who is Michelle King?

Since being named superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Michelle King has said little about what she hopes to achieve. Her record as an educator and administrator offers a few clues, but as one source says, Its hard to tell whos the real Michelle because she is always so dutiful to her bosses.

Downward Dog

Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga, has been ordered to pay $6.4 million in punitive damages to a former employee, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, who claimed that the instructor sexually harassed her while she worked for him. The suit is one of several being leveled at Choudhury, who built an empire with millions of followers attracted to his brand of yoga practiced in a room heated to 104 degrees.

Jail Break Fall Out

The search continues for the three inmates who escaped from Central Mens Jail in Santa Ana, and the Sheriffs Department is facing heavy criticism for its management of the facility. Why did 16 hours lapse between bed checks? Why were the men kept in dormitory-style housing rather than individual cells? Is this how a maximum-security jail should be run?

Castles Made of Sand

The ingredients are simple: high waves, high tides and El Nino rains. The results are catastrophic. After weeks of wet weather and pounding surf, a cliff south of San Francisco has begun to crumble, leaving a number of ocean-view apartment buildings teetering on the edge of the Pacific. Their owners have begun making plans to demolish them.

Oscar and the PC Police

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is being wrongfully targeted by the PC police, argues member William Goldstein. The problem with #OscarsSoWhite  and the solution  is not with its members but with the studios and independent producers making the movies. Caving in to recent demands risks devaluing the Oscar as a benchmark of excellence for moviemakers.

CALIFORNIA

-- Run, Hide or Fight were the words out of San Diego, prompting a search for an active shooter at a Navy hospital. None was found.

-- Two BASE jumpers leapt off the iconic Bixby Bridge in Big Sur and were presumably drowned in the high surf off the beach below.

-- Who will decide the fate of the California coast? Steve Lopez looks ahead to the Feb. 10 showdown of the Coastal Commission.

-- 25 and younger: the demographic focus on the current count of Los Angeles Countys homeless.

NATION-WORLD

-- Do Democrats want the revolution that Bernie Sanders pledges or the continuity that Hillary Clinton promises? Iowa will offer a clue.

-- After landing the endorsement of pastor Jerry Falwell Jr., Donald Trump is looking more and more like a  politician.

-- Winter in Mumbai means elaborate weddings along the boulevard that overlooks the Arabian Sea.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

-- J.T. Leroy never existed, but that hasnt kept indie film director Jeff Feuerzeig from making a documentary about his life.

-- Nate Parkers The Birth of a Nation  the story of the Nat Turner slave rebellion  is taking Sundance by storm.

-- John Ridley, acclaimed creator of ABCs American Crime, talks about the shows controversial second season.

BUSINESS

-- Apples latest earnings report confirms the tech giant is slowing down.

-- Uber begins a pilot program to monitor its drivers driving habits.

SPORTS

-- Bill Plaschke: Clippers must send a clear message and severely punish Blake Griffin for his punch.

-- The odd couple: The Dodgers new manager Dave Roberts takes to the road with mercurial outfielder, Yasiel Puig.

WHAT OUR EDITORS ARE READING

-- Concepcion Picciotto maintained a peace vigil outside the White House for more than three decades. She dedicated her life to stop the world from being destroyed. (Washington Post)

-- Journalist Asieh Amini fights to end stoning and juvenile execution in Iran. (The New Yorker)

-- Nearly 300,000 civilian drones have been registered in U.S. (The Guardian)

ONLY IN L.A.

With his paunchy stomach, stooped-over physique and baby-face stare, Joaquin Guzman  a.k.a. El Chapo  may not qualify as a supermodel. But when Rolling Stone photographed the notorious Mexican drug lord wearing an electric blue paisley shirt, its Los Angeles-based wholesaler  Barabas  saw a sudden spike in demand. Narcoterrorista wannabes? Its not that I approve what he does, said one purchaser of the shirt. Hes so popular, and I want to have that shirt, thats all. I love the design, the color.

Please send comments and ideas to Davan Maharaj.
At the announcement that Michelle King had been promoted from deputy superintendent to the top leadership position at the huge and troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the small throng gathered at district headquarters rose to its feet in applause.

The ovation was a Survivor"-like salute to a member of the tribe. Here was someone who had navigated a high-stakes, politically treacherous enterprise in which, this year alone, 60,000 employees will spend more than $7 billion in taxpayer-supplied money to give 650,000 students a better chance at succeeding in life.

This very district, after all, had educated King since kindergarten. It provided her first job, as a teachers aide, while she was still at Palisades High School. And for almost 30 years it has provided her livelihood.

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Applause, however, doesnt necessarily mean shes the best person for the job.

If theres not much recent public evidence by which to evaluate Kings suitability for one of the most important positions in education, its because 10 years ago the district swallowed King into the upper reaches of its labyrinthine bureaucracy.

In a home movie of her life, that would be the point at which we switch from vibrant color into grainy black and white.

It is hard to tell whos the real Michelle because she is always so dutiful to her bosses, said one source who requested anonymity. I cant remember a time when she said: This is what I think. It was always the party line.

Kings earlier career provides some insight.

Take, for example, another show of support that came in 2002, when King walked into her first faculty meeting after being promoted from vice principal to principal at Hamilton High in Los Angeles Palms neighborhood.

The entire faculty burst into a standing ovation, says retired teacher Shelley Rose. Ive never seen it before or since.

Hamilton, it seems, had been tearing itself apart. The district had set up two magnet schools on the home campus as part of a strategy to lure back white students who had fled public schools. Some staff complained that the combined campus favored the wealthier, whiter magnets.

The staff already had confidence in King. As an assistant principal, she had bridged all of the factions, says Merle Price, a former deputy superintendent.

As principal, she reassured the magnets that they could remain independent, while also addressing grievances from the neighborhood school, Price says.

 Newly appointed L.A. Unified Supt. Michelle King stops by Century Park Elementary School during a two-day tour of the schools she attended as a child.

She also began to even out class sizes, so that the magnets no longer had far fewer students.

Michelle united the faculty, boosted morale, and righted the ship almost immediately, says Barry Smolin, an English teacher. A lot of it had to do with her calm demeanor, her willingness to hear all sides of an issue and make informed decisions based on sometimes conflicting perspectives  and her genuine concern for students and teachers.

One way she showed that concern, former colleagues say, was by letting teachers with nonconformist styles do things their way  an approach that has been notoriously foreign to some administrators.

English teacher Dan Victor, now retired, remembers telling King that a schoolwide assembly shed called conflicted with his plan to prepare students for an Advanced Placement test the next day.

Why dont you do what you think is best, she said.

He kept his students in class.

At least by some important measures her approach worked.

In each of the three years before King became principal, Hamiltons test scores had fallen short of the states target for how much the school was supposed to improve.

After she took charge, the scores surged well past these annual goals.

She didnt solve all of Hamiltons problems, though.

The home school continued to perform below the state average and a large divide remained between the higher scores of whites and more prosperous students and those of low-income blacks and Latinos.

That achievement gap remains one of the most significant challenges in the district she now runs.

::

In thinking of the forces that shaped her, King recalls the riots of 1992 when, as a young teacher, she stood in her hillside home in South Los Angeles largely African American, largely upscale View Park neighborhood, watching large swaths of Los Angeles burn.

Her father had become a lawyer while she was still a child. Her mother worked for the county. Together they provided their daughter with a sheltered life.

It was assumed and expected you would go to college, King says. My father looked at my report cards. We were taught to respect our teachers and that we would get good grades.

She attended L.A. Unified schools, including Palisades High, where she was a top student and a cheerleader and one of the few blacks at a school whose student body was mainly wealthy and white.

After attending UCLA, her first teaching assignment was in the San Fernando Valley, a world apart from the worst poverty of the L.A. basin.

King was not oblivious to social ills, but her understanding deepened, she said, as she watched the video of police officers beating Rodney King, followed by the trial that acquitted them.

The community rage that followed made an impression, firing up a long-standing instinct to help foundering students push ahead.

In high school shed become a student aide because she liked helping students who were struggling. She also tutored at UCLA.

Later, she moved through teaching jobs at Porter Junior High and Wright Middle School while shepherding her own three daughters through school.

Sometimes that meant making choices. The first time King was offered the principals job at Hamilton she turned it down. Her marriage by then was in trouble, and, even after the divorce, King was determined not to miss back-to-school nights or lose the familys tradition of long Sunday dinners, at which the girls could talk out the issues of their lives, she says.

When one of her daughters wanted to attend a girls school, King enrolled her in the private Archer School in Brentwood.

King says that watching how the all-girl school empowered her daughter made her believe in the value of single-gender schools  an option she has said she wants to expand in L.A. Unified.

Beyond that, King hasnt detailed specific new initiatives shell suggest for the district, nor has the school board articulated how it plans to measure her success.

In recent years, success has meant remaining in the background and carrying out orders.

Michelle never really had a chance or opportunity to stand out or share her thoughts, says longtime PTA leader Scott Folsom. She is always quiet in meetings. I have never heard her disagree with or question the company line.

King acknowledges this trait.

Ive always followed the direction of my superintendent, she says. I might not agree with him, but ultimately Im a soldier and its their ship. Its their vision and Im going to follow it.

And, she says, shes learned from each superintendent shes served.

As Supt. Ramon C. Cortines chief of staff, and later as chief deputy superintendent, she learned to communicate and communicate and overly communicate, particularly with the Board of Education.

As head of operations for Supt. John Deasy, who replaced Cortines, and then was replaced by him after resigning under pressure in October 2014, King learned from his unrelenting focus on youth and poverty, she says.

King also cites two readings that have influenced her approach to management.

The first befits a former science teacher: Turning Research Into Results by Richard Edward Clark and Fred Estes.

I believe you gather data before you strike out, King says.

The other is Leadership from the Middle: A System Strategy by Michael Fullan.

Even now that shes at the top, being in the middle is where she seems most comfortable.

Those who know her best describe a regular-gal charm, a margarita buddy who got visibly embarrassed at the raunchier parts of the Spike Lee-produced movie The Best Man, a person who likes to bowl and is pretty good at it.

Colleagues say shes easy to be with, a team player.

King says her devotion to collaboration was instilled early, as a new UCLA graduate in an intern program that shoved an unproven teacher in front of a room of seventh-graders ready to test her.

That trial by fire seared something into her mind. If her colleagues hadnt rallied to support her, she could have failed, King says. It taught her that educators need to rely on each other.

She wants to apply that same lesson to a fractured school system with a team that now includes parents and district critics. That, she says, is why the board hired her.

They have charged me with bringing the district together, she said.

howard.blume@latimes.com

Twitter: @howardblume

Times staff writers Zahira Torres and Sonali Kohli contributed to this report.

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The walk began shortly after 9 p.m. at the busy Starbucks in East Los Angeles.

Omar Romero, 32, and his 18-year-old brother, Benjamin, crossed 3rd Street and walked the length of a Pomona Freeway onramp peering into the night for any signs of homeless camps.

By the light of passing cars below, Benjamin spotted a disheveled comforter on the embankment. The brothers crept cautiously closer. There was nothing but the blanket.

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It looks like its been there for a while, Omar concluded. They didnt count it.

For the brothers, who live nearby in City Terrace, a three-hour trek to count the homeless was an act of compassion and duty.

 Counting the homeless in East Los Angeles on Tuesday night.

I just thought it was something beneficial, to be able to provide them with the services they need, Omar said.

He was drawn to the 2016 homeless census by a blast email to his work. Hes an eligibility specialist for the L.A. County Department of Social Services.

He recruited his younger brother, a student at East Los Angeles College, to join him.

The brothers were among 41 volunteers who showed up at the Centro Maravilla Service Center on Tuesday night.

It was one of about 150 locations from which thousands of volunteers would fan out over three days and nights to document the presence, or absence, of homeless people in almost all of the countys 1,887 census tracts.

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The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority conducts the count to focus its efforts and to satisfy a requirement to receive federal homelessness funds.

The three-night count got started in the San Gabriel Valley and the Eastside on Tuesday. It was scheduled to continue Wednesday in the San Fernando Valley, West Los Angeles and South Bay and will conclude Thursday in the Antelope Valley and central and South L.A.

In a brief training session, LAHSA organizers covered the basics of how to recognize homelessness  appearance, behavior and condition, and emphasized one goal above all others: accuracy.

Its OK if you dont find anyone, said organizer Jonathan Hans. Its as important to know where they arent as where they are.

Volunteers were instructed to mark their observations on tally sheets. There was one section for individuals, another for families and a third for vehicles, shelters and camps.

If they clearly saw a single person in a tent, they should count one individual, Hans said. Otherwise they should record one tent. If they saw a row of makeshift shelters of cardboard or tarps, they should try to identify individual bedding and mark each one as a shelter.

A ground rule was that the volunteers would observe, not engage, with two exceptions: They were given cards listing service resources to hand to anyone obviously needing help, and they were to report any unattended children to 911.

County employees made up a large portion of the volunteers, several from social services agencies and others working for county Supervisor Hilda Solis.

Six young women participated as an assignment for their classes in urban environmental policy at Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

The turnout in unincorporated East Los Angeles was disappointing, since more than 100 people signed up to help count but only 41 showed up. Instead of one or two tracts to survey, each team of volunteers would have at least three.

The added burden didnt seem to matter. The teams began drifting back to the center by 10 p.m.

Each returning team reviewed its findings with staff from LAHSA, who sometimes tweaked their counts to maintain consistency.

One thing the volunteers all had learned was that counting homeless people is a task fraught with uncertainty.

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Aabha Sachar, one of the Occidental students, explained that at one spot they had seen several old cars with blacked-out windows.

In the end I decided not to count them, she said.

As predicted, some came back with empty tally sheets. Alan Bergman, a retiree from Echo Park, wasnt disappointed.

Its reassuring to see that there are neighborhoods that are not affected, he said.

Bergman said he signed up for all three nights of the count out of a sense of purpose.

Every time I see homeless people I say someone should do something, he said. This is an opportunity to do something.

Just after midnight, the Romero brothers returned, the last team to come in from the field.

In their first tract they found only people living in vehicles. Every one required a deliberation: the black Blazer in a vacant lot with the stroller on top and household goods inside counted; the three cars in the dark lot at the end of a cul-de-sac didnt.

They just look like abandoned cars, Omar Romero was saying when a man talking on a cellphone stepped out from between them and watched the brothers walk away.

Was he homeless? Romero thought not.

He looked well dressed, he said.

Three of the Occidental students lingered in the center almost to the end. They had made friends with Anthony Chan, a gregarious business administration student at University of the West in Rosemead.

They had come by Uber. Chan was driving his new friends back to campus.

Twitter: @LATdoug

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A longtime Democratic operative who played important roles in the first Obama presidential campaign and the Clinton White House said Tuesday that he plans to run against Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2017.

Mitchell Schwartz, 55, said he plans to take out papers for his campaign in the coming weeks. A political strategist who directed Barack Obamas 2008 campaign in California and served as communications director for the State Department under President Clinton, Schwartz would be the first challenger with a significant political resume to enter the 2017 mayoral race.

Obviously, Im a little bit of an underdog, Schwartz said. But Im determined to do this. And once Im in it, I want to win.

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Reached at his home in L.A.s Windsor Square neighborhood, Schwartz said he has been exploring a mayoral run and holding meetings with potential supporters since the fall. He said he decided to enter the race out of concern that the city is not dealing effectively with surging homelessness, rising crime, decaying infrastructure and patterns of real estate development that Schwartz characterized as out of control.

This is not about Eric Garcetti. I know Eric and I like Eric. Hes a nice guy, Schwartz said. But the quality-of-life issues that are facing this city are all trending badly.

Schwartz said he was encouraged by people both inside and outside City Hall who told him that the city was not adequately delivering basic public services. Garcetti placed promises to improve those services at the center of his 2013 campaign.

At the time of the last official count, homelessness had risen 12% since 2013, the year Garcetti took office. Last month the Los Angeles Police Department announced that violent crime had risen 20% in 2015.

Garcetti campaign manager Bill Carrick declined to comment.

Despite his political pedigree, Schwartz could struggle to mount a serious challenge to Garcetti, who will enjoy the advantages of incumbency. As of June, the mayor had already raised more than $2.2 million toward his reelection effort. Three other candidates who have entered the race, all political unknowns, have not yet reported raising any money.

Garcetti can point to achievements, including L.A.s $15 minimum-wage ordinance, expanded earthquake-safety regulations for apartment buildings and the acceleration of local and federal plans to redevelop portions of the long-neglected Los Angeles River.

Going into this, youd have to say that this is the longest of long shots, said veteran Democratic strategist Darry Sragow, noting Schwartzs fundraising disadvantage and the absence of any serious scandals marring Garcettis first term. And its been my experience that most long shots remain long shots.

A Schwartz candidacy could nevertheless prove an unwelcome distraction for Garcetti, forcing him to rebut criticisms from a media-savvy and politically connected opponent.

A contested city election could also hinder the mayor from turning his attention to the 2018 gubernatorial race, for which he is widely viewed as a potential contender alongside Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Schwartzs professed concerns about unfettered development could dovetail with a 2016 ballot initiative proposal that would limit the citys current pace of growth by restricting large real-estate projects. Garcetti has said he hopes to head off the measure before it reaches the ballot. Schwartz said he has not yet taken a position on the proposed initiative.

Development is out of control and is ruining big parts of our city, Schwartz said. The development is pushing people out  middle-class people just cant live here.

In 2009, Schwartz was involved in the unsuccessful campaign for L.A.s Measure B, a ballot initiative that would have expanded the development of solar-energy panels in the city. Measure B was also backed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents most employees at the citys Department of Water and Power.

Schwartz said he has not had specific discussions about a mayoral run with the union, which spent millions to defeat Garcetti in 2013. Union officials could not be reached for comment.

Schwartz said he has had discussions with other labor leaders but declined to say which ones.

I talked to some of the labor folks, but its a little too early to say who will support me, he said, adding that he sees broad public support rather than the backing of monied interests as key to success. I want to get the support of the people.

Twitter: @petejamison

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Bac Duong, one of three Orange County jail prisoners who escaped last week, was ordered deported 16 years ago but continued to live in the country, federal officials said.

Duong entered the United States from Vietnam legally in 1991, but in 1998 he was ordered deported by an immigration judge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement. The agency would not reveal the reason for his deportation.

Despite the order, Duong remained in the United States. In 2003 with his appeals exhausted he was taken into custody by ICE, officials said. Because people awaiting deportation cannot be held for more than six months, officials said, he was freed in 2004 and for the next decade reported regularly to ICE officials.

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He could not be returned to his home country in part because of a 2008 pact under which Vietnam agreed to provide documents to repatriate its citizens who had entered the U.S. after 1995 -- four years too late for Duong.

When Duong was arrested by the Orange County sheriff in 2014, ICE filed a detainer order for him.

With the prisoners at large since Friday, the jail has come under intense scrutiny for several policies that some believe may have made their escape easier.

Court documents made public Tuesday offered the most detailed description of the escape scheme yet, suggesting that more than 17 hours may have elapsed before evidence of the jailbreak was discovered.

Jail staff first realized that something was wrong around 8 p.m. Friday during a nightly count of prisoners that came up three short, according to the arrest warrants filed late Monday. The warrants make no mention of a jailhouse brawl that sheriffs officials have said delayed completion of the evening bed check until about 9 p.m.

After identifying the missing men as Duong, Jonathan Tieu and Hossein Nayeri, deputies checked the mens schedules to make sure they hadnt been in court that day or been left behind in a visitor area. They also checked to see whether the prisoners were in classes offered at the jail.

With no leads, deputies performed a second head count, confirming what many of them probably were dreading  the three men werent merely missing, they might have escaped.

At 8:45 p.m., deputies launched a physical search of the entire facility. Seven inmates claimed they saw Tieu, Duong and Nayeri during the jails 5 a.m. head count but did not see them the rest of the day.

As teams swept every cell, bunk bed and dorm, other deputies scoured the buildings roof and plumbing tunnels, where they found makeshift ropes, cut-apart gates and sawed-open vents. Slowly, investigators were able to trace the trios path from Module F, the fourth-floor dormitory where they were housed, to a rope of knotted bedsheets they used to descend from the roof.

Sheriffs Department officials have said the escape probably began with the prisoners cutting through a metal screen in their fourth-floor cell. That gave them access to a plumbing tunnel that deputies discovered quickly leads to a ventilation shaft, according to the warrant.

A deputy searching the plumbing tunnel reported that the shafts security bars had been cut away. About two feet below the shafts entrance was a white bedsheet tied into a sling, with another sheet tied to more security bars, according to the affidavit.

This was used as a way for the inmates to pull themselves up into the vent, one deputy wrote.

Once inside the shaft, the escapees had to remove multiple ventilation louvers, or shutters, before they reached a trap door leading to the outer edge of the roof, according to the reports. That area is outside a security gate that keeps prisoners in a recreation area.

Hallock said the fact that inmates typically use the roof for recreation purposes is one of many design flaws of the nearly 50-year-old jail.

The reports in the warrants say the escapees sawed through some of the security bars but make no mention of any tools they may have used or from where they may have gotten them.

Once atop the jail, the prisoners cut barbed wire from the rooftops edge and used the bed heets to rappel to the ground, deputies wrote.

About 10:30 p.m., investigators found two pairs of jail-issued sandals and a paper bag containing more rope that the trio presumably left on the roof before making their way to freedom.

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The founder of a prominent chain of Los Angeles charter schools said Wednesday he is considering running for mayor in 2017, the second person in as many days to muse aloud about challenging incumbent Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Steve Barr, who established the successful Green Dot Charter Schools group and has been a high-profile player in the battle to overhaul the L.A. school system, said his exploration of a potential run was driven by frustration over what he described as Garcettis hands-off approach to public education.

Although the mayor in L.A. has no formal control over the school district, Barr said Garcetti had abdicated any meaningful involvement in the school system  in contrast to Garcettis predecessor, former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who placed education reform at the core of his agenda.

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Barr said he believes Garcetti is avoiding education issues out of fear of alienating the powerful interest groups involved in the schools debate.

When people move to a new neighborhood, their first question is not, Whats the water system like? or Are there enough press conferences about climate change this week? Its, What are the schools like? Barr said. It seems Ive talked to at least a half-dozen people who will tell you he wont get involved because its too controversial.

Barr, 56, of Silver Lake, said he is meeting with potential supporters and donors but has not decided whether to run. He said he wants to enter the race but will only do so if he can see a path to building a campaign with adequate political and financial backing. He said he expects to make his decision by the beginning of April.

Villaraigosas foray into public education saw mixed results. His effort to assert mayoral control of the school district, emulating the systems in cities such as New York and Chicago, was defeated in court.

However, he succeeded in establishing direct control over a group of district schools and was an advocate of charter-school expansion. The prolonged fight earned Villaraigosa the enmity of the local and state teachers unions, the latter a major donor to political campaigns.

Garcetti, by contrast, has not been vocal in the intensifying battle over charter-school expansion or other education issues.

At Green Dot, Barr led a successful effort to take control of Locke High School, near Watts. It was the first time that operation of an L.A. Unified school was handed over to a charter organization. Barrs group was distinguished by its acceptance of unionized teachers; most charters are non-union.

Barr, whose campaign flirtation was first reported by LA Weekly, made his statements about a potential run a day after former Obama and Clinton campaign operative Mitchell Schwartz said he plans to file papers to challenge Garcetti in 2017.

Schwartz, who directed the 2008 Obama primary- and general-election campaigns in California, said he is running out of frustration at city officials inattentiveness to quality-of-life issues such as rising homelessness and crime.

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Latino organizers sensed an opportunity when they heard Donald Trump was bringing his presidential campaign to Marshalltown, a small farm city that is home to an increasing number of Latino immigrants and their children.

So they organized protests at the high school gymnasium where Trump spoke Tuesday, with about 50 young Latinos marching silently outside as a smattering of Trump supporters hurled insults and laughed at them.

But the protest was only the beginning. Down the street, advocates held a drive to register voters and educate immigrants on the complexities of next weeks Iowa caucuses, the kickoff for the presidential nominating process.

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We want to turn his negativity into a positive for our community, said Joe Enriquez Henry, whose group, the League of United Latin American Citizens, helped organize the event.

In Iowa, where voters have been exposed to the presidential campaign at a level of intensity that most Americans wont experience until fall, Latinos have already begun to counterpunch Trump, prompted by his calls for a massive border wall to keep out immigrants whom he has described as rapists, drug dealers and carriers of infectious disease.

Advocacy groups have launched unprecedented voter registration efforts aimed at the states small but rapidly growing Latino population. The nonprofit Henry works for earmarked $300,000 for outreach in Iowa shortly after Trump got into the race, and the groups field workers have led Spanish-language caucus training sessions for voters in most of the 11 counties where Latinos constitute more than 10% of the vote.

Democratic and Republican campaigns have also been wooing Latinos angered by Trumps rhetoric. When Jeb Bushs Latino outreach workers field questions about Trump, they often tell voters that caucusing for Bush is the best bet to combat the real estate mogul.

Whether a similar movement takes shape across the country remains to be seen, but many Latino leaders are hoping Trump could be the catalyst to push their growing but chronically underperforming electorate to the polls. There is talk of a Trump effect rivaling Proposition 187, the anti-illegal-immigration measure that jolted California Latinos to action 20 years ago and is credited with helping create the states current Latino power structure.

My gut is that itll be substantial, Democratic consultant Bill Carrick said of Latino turnout in November. They have been activated.

The energy was palpable in Marshalltown on Tuesday, where Trump appeared alongside controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has put in place strict policies in his county in Arizona aimed at identifying immigrants in the country illegally.

In addition to the protest outside, other Latinos entered the gymnasium to disrupt Trump with shouts of: Latinos united will never be divided! Trump, who garnered headlines at the event for announcing that he would not appear in Thursdays Republican debate because of disagreements with host Fox News, smiled as the protesters were ushered out, telling one of them, Enjoy yourself, darling.

Although its unfortunate that its taken Trump to do this, its getting the community engaged, said Maria Alcivar, 27, one of the protesters ejected from the rally.

Alcivar, a graduate student at Iowa State University in Ames, says she feels a sense of responsibility to stand up to Trump and his supporters.

Its an attack to my community and directly to me, she said. Hes allowing people to feel comfortable to cross a dangerous line.

Alcivar plans to vote for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders when she attends her first caucus on Monday. But she says she knows Latinos who have registered to take part in Republican caucuses just so they can vote for candidates other than Trump.

Even though Latinos in Iowa are organizing like never before, there are hurdles to widespread participation by their community in the caucuses and the November election.

For years, the Latino vote has been regarded as sleeping giant on the verge of waking, even as turnout rates continue to lag behind whites and blacks. Thats in part because they are concentrated largely in such noncompetitive states as California and Texas. Eligible Latinos are also on average much younger than other demographic groups, and young people tend to vote at lower rates.

There is also a level of mistrust among some Latinos about the political process after President Obama boosted deportations and failed to deliver immigration reform after winning large numbers of Latino votes in 2008 and 2012.

Veronica Guevara, 24, fought hard for Obama in the 2012 election, telling anybody who would listen about his pledge to push through legislation to create a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. Four years later, she feels disillusioned.

While Guevara plans to caucus for Bernie Sanders on Monday, she hasnt been campaigning for him.

Its a disservice to try to guide people any certain way because they might end up disappointed, said Guevara, who works at a nonprofit in Des Moines. She has had trouble persuading her father, an employee at the meatpacking plant that has drawn many Latino immigrants to Marshalltown in recent years, to vote at all this time around.

Whats the point? hes asked her.

Latino Republicans face a different battle  and one that could have long-term consequences for their party.

Juan Rodriguez, 43, a prominent Colombian immigrant in Des Moines who owns a restaurant, an insurance agency and a Spanish-language radio station, said he decided to support Bush in part because Bush has stood up to Trump. Rodriguez also likes that Bush speaks Spanish, is married to a Latina and called Rodriguez personally to win his endorsement.

Rodriguez has been working hard to persuade fellow Latino business owners to caucus for Bush. A few have agreed. But others, like his brother, say they arent willing to consider Republican candidates because of Trump.

Why should we vote for Republicans? Theyre going to deport everybody, his brother, a barbershop owner whose clientele is largely in the U.S. illegally, told him recently. Theyre going to deport my customers.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Hoy: Lea esta historia en espanol

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The Supreme Court is being asked to make a quick decision on another of President Obamas far-reaching regulations and to put on hold climate-change rules that would force a 32% cutback in carbon emissions by 2030.

Lawyers for West Virginia, Texas and 24 other mostly Republican states filed an emergency appeal Tuesday night with Chief Justice John G. Roberts that calls Obamas plan an unprecedented power grab by the Environmental Protection Agency that seeks to reorder the nations energy grid.

In particular, they say the Clean Power Plan rule, adopted last year, would force many states to shut down older coal-burning power plants and switch to wind and solar power.

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The West Virginia-Texas state coalition urged Roberts and the high court to issue an order that puts the Obama initiative on hold for several years while its legality is fought out in the lower courts. They insist the 1970s Clean Air Act did not authorize a broad regulatory attack on climate change.

How the high court responds to the emergency request could prove crucial to both sides. If the justices agree with the state challengers, it would halt EPAs enforcement of its most significant climate change initiative until after Obama leaves office.

However, if the justices turn down the request, it will clear the way for EPA to require all the states to submit plans by September on how they will sharply reduce their carbon pollution.

It is only the latest Obama administration rule to reach the high court. Last week, the justices agreed to rule later this year on Obamas immigration order that would offer relief to more than 4 million people who are living in the country illegally. In that case, Obamas lawyers are asking the justices to lift a judges ruling that blocked his plan from taking effect.

By contrast, on climate change, judges who are weighing the legal challenge to the EPA regulation have refused to block it from taking effect.

Challenges to federal regulations are usually brought before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Its judges have scheduled arguments for June in the case, but they issued a brief order Friday saying they would not prevent EPA from going forward with its enforcement.

That prompted the 26-state coalition to seek help from the chief justice, who oversees emergency appeals from the D.C. court.

Last week, the Natural Resources Defense Council called it a huge win for clean air and climate change when the D.C. court refused to block Obamas plan.

David Doniger, director of climate and clean air program, said the West Virginia and Texas lawyers have trotted out the same arguments that failed to persuade the D.C. circuit panel. We are hopeful this will be quickly denied.

Vickie Patton, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the D.C. circuit had agreed to decide the case on an expedited basis. Unfortunately, there is a pattern here of excessive, reckless litigation, including an early attack on the proposed regulations that was thrown out.

But the new 63-page appeal includes an argument likely to get the attention of the courts five more conservative justices. In June, they joined in a 5-4 ruling that ruled the EPA had wrongly imposed a rule forcing reductions in mercury and other hazardous pollutants without first weighing the $9.6 billion cost of compliance.

But shortly afterward, EPA boasted on its official blog that the courts decision was effectively a nullity because power plants had already been forced to comply, said the West Virginia and Texas lawyers. They said the high courts decision came too late to be effective. So this time, the justices should block the new rule from being enforced while the legal fight proceeds, they argued.

Late Wednesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several dozen utilities filed separate appeals with the chief justice urging him to block the EPA plan.

Meanwhile, state lawyers for California, Illinois, New York, Maryland and Connecticut and a dozen other mostly Democratic-led states joined in support of the EPA rule.

The chief justice asked for a response by Feb. 4 from Obamas lawyers, and then he will likely refer the matter to the full court. There is no deadline for the court to act, but the justices usually act within a few weeks on a request for an emergency order.

On Twitter: @DavidGSavage
Where some activists at an occupied federal wildlife refuge preached rowdyism and brimstone, Robert LaVoy Finicum was wistful, almost sad.

Bedecked in his trademark earmuffs and cowboy hat, the Arizona rancher would wonder aloud with a shake of his head why reporters couldnt simply see the rightness of his position: that the federal government was illegally possessing land it had no right to take.

He insisted he and the other occupiers were helping the people of Harney County, Ore. He often carried a handgun at his side and sometimes set up watch with a long gun across his lap.

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He maintained a blog  One Cowboys stand for Freedom  in which he posted videos of himself denouncing the federal government and demanding that federal land be turned over to local authorities and private ranchers. He also wrote a novel, a post-apocalyptic Western thriller called Only By Blood and Suffering.

Finicum, 55, was killed Tuesday night by an Oregon State Police trooper during an altercation between authorities and some who had occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. About 20 occupiers have squatted for more than three weeks while they protested the incarceration of a father-and-son pair of ranchers and demanded federal agencies leave the land to local authorities and landowners.

The circumstances of the altercation have not yet been released, but FBI Special Agent in Charge Greg Bretzing said at a news conference on Wednesday that police were attempting to take Finicum into custody.

Let me be clear: It is fully and unequivocally the behavior and the choices made by the armed occupiers that have led us to where we are today, Bretzing said. And, as the FBI and our partners have demonstrated, actions are not without consequences.

Finicums son, Robert C. Finicum of Provo, Utah, declined to comment when contacted on Wednesday. Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, one of Finicums 11 children, told the Oregonian on Tuesday, My dad was such a good, good man, through and through. He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.

On Wednesday evening, about two dozen people held a brief vigil for Finicum in tiny downtown Burns, a town near the refuge, walking several blocks along Broadway while holding candles. Tony Atencio, 32, carried a sign with a photograph of Finicum above the words "#All Lives Matter.

This man stood up to fight for all Americans, not just Harney County, Atencio said. He is the spokesman for what America should be.

Atencio said that he was not one of the occupiers but that he supported them, once by delivering donated pizza to the refuge.

During the occupation, Ammon Bundy, putative leader of the activists, often was gruff and dismissive when talking to the media or public. Jon Ritzheimer, a Phoenix-area anti-Muslim activist who, like Bundy, was arrested Tuesday, would stay silent for long stretches before exploding in anger. But Finicum kept his cool.

Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum keeps watch Jan. 5 during the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. (Rick Bowmer / Associated Press)

I can point to the page, here, Finicum told the Los Angeles Times during the second week of the occupation, holding aloft a pocket Constitution. I can tell you where to look if you want to see why were here.

You say were breaking things up. [But] were keeping something together here.

Though he was soft-spoken, Finicum was as hard-line as his comrades in arms.

In his writings and in videos posted to his blog, Finicum feared that the federal government was preparing to take away his guns, and highlighted President Obamas National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order, which allows the U.S. government to to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, which Finicum read as permission to seize his assets.

One night during the standoff, Finicum decided to make a stand by sitting down. After hearing a rumor that there was a warrant for his arrest, Finicum declared himself willing to be arrested and took up a position at the mouth of the camps entrance, sitting on the ground and under a tarp, as if were a blanket.

There he stayed for a good part of the night, with his tarp and his pocket copy of the Constitution. It was almost certainly a publicity move, one that earned him the moniker Tarp Man on Twitter.

Finicum often served as a spokesman for the group, reading statements into cameras and then chatting with reporters when the cameras were off. He told reporters that the occupiers were going through federal files looking for proof of federal malfeasance.

One day with reporters watching, he scaled a ladder to the top of a telephone pole to remove a camera lens. He later held it up for reporters, saying it had been placed by the FBI to monitor the occupiers.

Finicum was, for most of his life, a rancher who paid his grazing fees to the federal government. He declared bankruptcy in 2002 with his wife, Dorthea, on a New Mexico business called Southwest Horse and Trails.

Nine years later, in 2011, Finicum had relocated to Arizona and obtained loans from the Farm Services Agency from both Arizona and Utah  his ranch near Colorado City, Ariz., is near the Utah border in a heavily Mormon part of the state. He put up as collateral all of his crops, equipment and inventory.

 Robert LaVoy Finicum died during a clash between law enforcement and his group during a traffic stop. Finicum told the Associated Press in early January that the occupation of a wildlife refuge was intended to be peaceful. He also said, indicati

Finicum said that his outlook began to change regarding his own grazing fees and the vast swaths of land owned by the federal government when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy refused to pay $1 million in fees and faced off with federal agents who had rounded up cattle he let graze on federal land.

The Bundys claimed that federal land was essentially theft by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., from the citizens of the West. They were determined to undo the federal possession of land that had once been purchased by the United States.

The Bundys also subscribe to the belief espoused by a faction of Mormons that the United States is a Christian nation gifted to the people of the West by a Christian god. The federal governments possession of the land, they say, flies in the face of the will of their god.

Shown the possibilities of avoiding paying grazing fees and an ostensible constitutional grounding that meshed with his religious values, Finicum proceeded with the zeal of a convert. He recorded a series of videos he posted to his own blog. The recurring theme: the overreach of government and how it infringed on individual freedom.

Hello everyone, this is LaVoy Finicum, he began his last video, posted Dec. 17. To the degree that us individuals are dependent on any government  for our food, our water, our shelter, to that degree, were not free.

Finicum advised viewers to prepare for a year without food  a suggestion popular among doomsday preppers, those who believe the biblically foretold end times are coming, and the righteous must be prepared to survive for a time without help.

Pointing to his supplies, including 300 pounds of wheat for $70 and 100 pounds of rolled oats for $45, he smiled.

Theres not a lot of variety, youre going to get tired of it, he said. But it keeps body and soul together.

Finicum joined Cliven Bundy at the Nevada ranch for the 2014 standoff, and he was one of the earliest to join Clivens sons Ammon and Ryan in Burns, Ore., in December, when they began the first protests in support of Dwight and Steven Hammond, the ranchers sent to prison in early January.

When a group of about 15 men broke off from a protest in support of the Hammonds to occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2, Finicum wasnt far behind.

Finicum indeed told reporters he would die before he went to prison, but like most other activists, said he wasnt seeking a violent end to the occupation.

According to Talking Points Memo, his novel, Only by Blood and Suffering, uses the boogeymen of the conservative movement  the U.S. government, China and terrorists  as foils to the main characters. In 241 pages, Finicums characters endure series of calamities and try to reach a family members ranch as they escape San Diego.

Hamstrung by the governments ban on guns and his own lack of preparation, one character chastises himself for not stocking up on food before the crisis began  a theme Finicum would repeat in his videos.

A twinge of guilt pulled at me. What would dad think with me showing up at the ranch with so little food? one character thinks to himself. How many times had he told us kids to lay up stores and supplies?

Times staff writer William Yardley in Burns, Ore. contributed to this report.

Twitter: @nigelduara

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The leader of the armed occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge urged his colleagues-in-arms to stand down Wednesday, as a small band of holdouts vowing to fight fell under increasing pressure to surrender to the cordon of law enforcement now surrounding the sprawling facility.

By late Wednesday, it appeared that several of the protesters still inside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were heeding the request, as three more people were arrested and several others were allowed to leave freely, according to the FBI and other sources.

The FBI, which began setting up checkpoints around the refuge early Wednesday, said a total of eight people had left through the checkpoints, including the three who were arrested.

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One of those detained, Duane Leo Ehmer, 45, of Irrigon, Ore., had become a symbol of the occupation. He made a custom of going on morning patrols carrying an American flag while riding his horse, Hellboy.

Another, Jason Patrick, 43, of Bonaire, Ga., had become an unofficial leader of the remaining group after the arrest of much of the occupations top leadership in a traffic stop a day earlier.

Officials identified the third person arrested Wednesday as Dylan Wade Anderson, 34, of Provo, Utah.

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Each chose to turn himself in to agents at a checkpoint outside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the FBI said in a statement Wednesday night.

All three face the same charge faced by the eight taken into custody Tuesday: a federal felony count of conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

The FBI and our partners continue to work around the clock to empty the refuge of the armed occupiers in the safest way possible, the agency said.

Earlier in the day, at least some at the refuge were still expressing defiance.

There are no laws in this United States now! This is a free-for-all Armageddon! a heavyset man holding a rifle yelled into a camera transmitting from the refuge. He urged others to join those at the protest site, adding that if they stop you from getting here, kill them!

But that was before leader Ammon Bundy, arrested with other protesters Tuesday in a law enforcement operation that killed one of their comrades, called for those remaining in the high-desert refuge to go home and hug your families.

Bundy and several codefendants appeared in U.S. District Court in Portland on Wednesday afternoon and were ordered held without bond.

Right now, Im asking the federal government to allow the people at the refuge to go home without being prosecuted, Bundy said in a written statement read after the hearing by his attorney, Mike Arnold. To those remaining at the refuge, I love you. Let us take this fight from here. Please stand down. Please stand down. Go home and hug your families. This fight is ours for now -- in the courts.

Authorities were offering free passage to most who left peacefully, and there were signs Wednesday evening that FBI agents were in communication with those inside the refuge before the departures.

Were just camped here by the fire, one of the occupiers, David Fry of Ohio, said in a brief telephone interview.

Im waiting on the FBI calling, he said.

A live stream feed Fry was running from the refuge through most of the day Wednesday showed a group with apparently mixed feelings. Some holdouts seemed ready to leave, while others were counting their weapons and ammunition.

Sgt. Tom Hutchison stands in front of an Oregon State Police roadblock on U.S. 395 between John Day and Burns. (Dave Killen / Associated Press)

I want to go to my wife, a man could be heard saying Wednesday afternoon, complaining that his credit card was maxed out and he was driving a rental car. Sorry, guys.

No hard feelings, another man responded.

At one point, the live stream caught what sounded like the cocking of a gun, and at least six occupiers could be seen passing through the cameras field of vision and discussing their available weapons and ammunition.

You got enough rounds for the 12-gauge?

Weve got, what, two SKS [rifles]?

Hey, Sean! I think these fit your gun  they wont fit the AR [rifle].

Anybody got a .45 pistol?

 Robert LaVoy Finicum died during a clash between law enforcement and his group during a traffic stop. Finicum told the Associated Press in early January that the occupation of a wildlife refuge was intended to be peaceful. He also said, indicati

But by Wednesday night, the stream included an image of a campfire burning in darkness, with a few voices talking of topics ranging from their personal finances to marijuana, relationships and the stars above.

Oh, another great night, a woman said. Theres the Milky Way.

Bundy and four other protesters were arrested Tuesday after a traffic stop on a highway north of Burns, a rural town in eastern Oregon. One, Robert LaVoy Finicum, an Arizona rancher who had insisted this week he would die before returning the refuge to federal control, was shot and killed during the confrontation.

Elsewhere, two other protesters and a right-wing Internet show host were also taken into custody.

At a news conference Wednesday, federal officials provided no details about the incident. Gregory T. Bretzing, special agent in charge of Portlands FBI division, called the law enforcement operations a very deliberate and measured response.

A pair of unverified videos from a man and a woman who said they were traveling with the protesters when they were arrested said that Finicum was shot after he sped away from officers during the traffic stop.

Even as many weary residents in Burns expressed hope that the arrests would speed the end of the standoff, it was also clear that neither they nor law enforcement had wanted it to end violently.

This has been tearing our community apart, Harney County Sheriff David Ward said of the armed protest during a news conference in Burns, where he urged everybody in this illegal occupation to move on.

There doesnt have to be bloodshed in our community, Ward said. We have issues with the way things are going in our government; we have a responsibility as citizens to act on those in an appropriate manner. We dont arm up and rebel.... This cant happen anymore. This cant happen in America.

Ammon Bundy, 40, and his brother, Ryan, who was also among those arrested Tuesday, are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who led an armed standoff of his own against the federal Bureau of Land Management in 2014 in a dispute over $1 million in unpaid grazing fees.

The younger Bundys are among those leading the small group that took over the Oregon refuge on Jan. 2, saying they were protesting federal land management policies in general but also the prison sentences of two local ranchers who set fires that spread to federal land.

The BLM became a target of their anger in Oregon, according to an FBI affidavit unsealed as part of the criminal charges.

One local BLM employee said Jon Ritzheimer, an anti-Muslim activist involved in the occupation, and another man accosted her in a grocery store for wearing a BLM shirt.

When she turned around, the second individual shouted, Youre BLM, youre BLM, at her, FBI Agent Katherine Armstrong wrote in the affidavit.

That person further stated to [the BLM employee] that they know what car she drives and would follow her home. He also stated he was going to burn [her] house down.

Activists began targeting her, the employee said. A vehicle matching one she saw Ritzheimer and the other man driving began to appear parked in front of her home and in front of her workplace, she said.

A week later, a white truck with a Confederate flag sticker in the rear window tailgated her and flashed its lights, the affidavit says.

After Tuesdays arrests, law enforcement agents moved swiftly to surround the refuge. On Wednesday morning, they blocked roads outside while protesters still inside could be seen operating heavy machinery.

A group in contact with the occupiers, calling itself the Pacific Patriots Network, urged supporters to stand by as it urged peace and gathered more information about what was happening. Cooler heads must prevail, the group said in a statement.

The Tuesday arrests came as the Bundys and others were traveling to a community meeting north of Burns.

Gunfire broke out when the FBI and Oregon State Police intercepted the group on a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 395 about halfway between the refuge and the town of John Day.

Law enforcement agencies put a lot of work into doing the best tactical plan they could to take these guys down peacefully, Ward said.

Details of what happened on the highway were scant. Officials would only say that shots were fired.

Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., was shot in the arm, and the 55-year-old Finicum was killed, his daughter and Nevada state Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said.

The void of official information about the incident has been filled by unverified videos circulating widely on social media among occupation supporters.

A man named Mark McConnell, who is identified as Ammon Bundys security guard, posted a video on Facebook early Wednesday in which he said that he was driving one of the groups vehicles and that Finicum had been driving the other.

McConnell said that after officials detained him and the other passengers in his vehicle, including Ammon Bundy, Finicum sped away with Ryan Bundy, Shawna Cox, 59, and an 18-year-old girl riding with him.

LaVoy is very passionate about this ... about what were doing here.  But he took off, said McConnell, who said he was released after two hours of interrogation. He said he was not among the original occupiers.

Dont put speculation, dont put nonsense out there, McConnell said, scolding Facebook commenters who were not at the scene. Get to business, we have work to do here, all right. Lets not let LaVoys death be in vain.

There doesnt have to be bloodshed in our community. ... This cant happen anymore. This cant happen in America.  David Ward, Harney County sheriff

A second witness unverified account gave a more dramatic  and more controversial  version of events, which has yet to be either substantiated or contradicted by law enforcement.

A young woman who identified herself as Victoria Sharp gave an audio interview in which she said she was in Finicums vehicle at the time of the encounter with police.

The Kansas City Star reported that the woman had recently visited the refuge as a member of a Kansas-based singing troupe. The Bundy Ranch Facebook page, operated by Cliven Bundy, prominently posted the interview on the top of its page.

In it, the woman said that officers who had attempted to stop their vehicle fired a single shot at passenger Ryan Payne when he stuck his head out the window. After Payne climbed out, she said, Finicum sped away and soon hit a snowbank.

He got out of the car, and he had his hands in the air.  Hes like, Just shoot me, then!  They did, she said. They shot him dead. [He was] just walking, with his hands in the air, and they shot him.

She recalled asking aloud, Is he dead? Is he dead? Agents continued to fire, she said, as she and two others still in the vehicle cowered. We were praying, like, so hard, she said.

No one even touched their gun, no one pulled their gun out  We showed no aggression at all, she said.

Are the two video accounts authentic? Maureen Peltier, who spent a week and a half at the camp and who stayed in contact with the occupiers and their supporters, said she didnt personally know either Sharp or McConnell, though she said McConnell was relatively well known by other camp supporters.

Everybody has turned their phones off or is just not answering them, Peltier said. Theres a lot of people down there I dont know where they are and if they are OK.

From the live stream Wednesday night--before the FBI announced the departures from the refuge--all appeared quiet. You know what, I think Im just going to cut off the live stream, Fry said at one point. I think like half the people are just wanting to see us die anyways.

The stream stopped a moment later. But soon, Fry was streaming again.

Yardley reported from Burns and Pearce reported from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Nigel Duara in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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One person died and eight others were taken into custody Tuesday when authorities confronted an armed protest group responsible for a nearly monthlong occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon, officials said.

Killed in the confrontation was Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum, who had acted as a spokesman for the group of self-styled defenders of the Constitution, according to Nevada state Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, who spoke with the wife of Ammon Bundy, the son of a renegade Nevada rancher and a leader of the group.

Bundy was among five people initially taken into custody, including his brother, Ryan, who was shot in the arm during the incident, Fiore said.

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Finicums daughter, Arianna Finicum Brown, confirmed her fathers death to the Oregonian newspaper. He would never, ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom, and he knew the risks involved, said Brown, who was one of 11 children.

1 / 4 A television truck and a reporter in a car sit along Highway 78 near Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon on Jan. 27. (Rob Kerr / AFP/Getty Images) 2 / 4 Ammon Bundy, leader of a group of armed anti-government protesters, arrives to speak to the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., on Monday. (Rob Kerr / AFP/Getty Images) 3 / 4 Ryan Bundy talks on the phone at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. on Sunday. Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, is one of the people occupying the refuge. (Rebecca Boone / Associated Press) 4 / 4 Federal buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Protesters are occupying the refuge in Oregon to object to a prison sentence for local ranchers. (Rebecca Boone / Associated Press)

Fiores account of how the arrests occurred could not be confirmed with authorities, nor was it clear whether any protesters remained at the refuge.

In a statement on the arrests, authorities said that shots were fired during the incident on U.S. 395. The injured person, whom Fiore identified as Ryan Bundy, was treated and released, the statement said.

The highway confrontation began at 4:25 p.m. when authorities from the FBI and Oregon State Police began a law enforcement action to take into custody those associated with the armed occupation of the refuge, officials said in a statement.

Authorities did not give details on the killing of the suspect, who they said was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest.

Police said they made a separate arrest of another man, Joseph OShaughnessy of Cottonwood, Ariz., who was taken into custody in the town of Burns, near the occupied wildlife refuge.

About two hours after the initial confrontation, authorities also arrested Internet radio host Pete Santilli, a supporter of the occupation who has documented the case on his program and via live stream since it began.

An eighth suspect, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32, was arrested in Peoria, Ariz., about 8:30 p.m. on a federal charge related to the occupation, the FBI said.

Ritzheimer, an antigovernment activist who has organized armed anti-Muslim rallies in Phoenix, turned himself to the Peoria Police Department and was taken into custody without incident, officials said.

All of those taken into custody, including Santilli and Ritzheimer, face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede federal officers through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said he congratulated law enforcement officials for ending the illegal activity at the refuge.

I am pleased that the FBI listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists, he said in a statement.

The leaders of this group are now in custody, and I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender so this community can begin to heal, he said.

Leaders of the group have been largely holed up at the refuge outside Burns since Jan. 2, protesting the federal sentencing of two local ranchers and the governments administration of public lands.

They had been expected to appear at a community meeting Tuesday night in the city of John Day, but never arrived.

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In addition to Ammon Bundy, 40, a resident of Emmett, Idaho, those arrested included his brother, Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev.; Brian Cavalier, 44, also of Bunkerville; Shawna Cox, 59, Kanab, Utah; and Ryan Waylen Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont.

Isnt this a wonderful country we live in? Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, father of Ammon and Ryan, said sarcastically when the Los Angeles Times informed him about the arrests and the death.

We believe that those federal people shouldnt even be there in that state, and be in that county and have anything to do with this issue. ... I have some sons and other people there trying to protect our rights and liberties and freedoms, and now weve got one killed, and all I can say is, hes sacrificed for a good purpose, Bundy said.

Ammon Bundy and a group of about 15 others took over the wildlife refuge after a march in support of Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond, a father and son who had been sentenced to prison for setting fires on federal land.

The Hammonds said they were not asking for such support, and the occupation quickly took on much of the rhetoric of the Sagebrush Rebellion of another era.

The activists condemned the federal governments management of public lands in the West, and invoked a constitutional provision that they believe provides that the federal government is not entitled to own land.

This is the way all wars have happened: The land and the resources get so controlled by one entity and not available to the people that the people get frustrated and then they end up retaliating, Ammon Bundy said earlier this month. So this is a peaceful effort to make sure that that doesnt happen.

Finicum, 55, who came from his ranch in Cane Beds, Ariz., to join the occupation, gave reporters tours of the refuge early on in the protest.

This contest is just beginning. But we will not stop, we will not back down. We will not be deterred, Finicum told reporters on Jan. 18, in a statement posted on YouTube.

Wearing a cowboy hat, flannel shirt and denim jacket, Finicum stood in front of an American flag.

Make it known clearly, he said. These buildings are very symbolic. Theyre a bunch of rock buildings, 35 miles away from nowhere. But theyre symbolic. Were holding this. Its been the federal governments fortress, their castle. And were holding it.

We shall not give it up to them ever. It returns to Harney County when it goes back.

Times staff writer Nigel Duara in Phoenix and Steve Padilla and Alan Zarembo in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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For weeks, law enforcement had kept their distance from the isolated wildlife refuge. They wanted to avoid a massacre out in Oregons high desert.

Since Jan. 2, Ammon Bundy and several other armed activists had chosen the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as the site of a daring protest that riveted and infuriated many Americans.

The men, who gave news conferences in their cowboy hats, opposed the governments prosecution of two local ranchers  as well as federal administration of the Wests vast public wildlands. The local sheriff, fearing violence, pleaded for the men to leave.

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They called his bluff and refused, and on Tuesday afternoon, the government finally played its hand.

At least one occupier was killed and eight others were in custody on federal charges Tuesday night after law enforcement struck in a flurry of surprise arrests that caught protesters who had temporarily left the occupied refuge, apparently to attend a community meeting.

Gunshots broke out when the FBI and the Oregon State Police apparently intercepted Bundy and several of his supporters on a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 395.

The protesters had been en route to a meeting with hundreds of Oregon residents, many of them supporters of the occupation, about 100 miles north of the refuge in the town of John Day. They never made it.

Details of what happened during the showdown were scant. Officials would only say that shots were fired.

Ammons brother, Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., was shot in the arm, and Robert LaVoy Finicum, a 55-year-old Arizona rancher who had acted as a spokesman for the group, was killed in the highway confrontation, according to Nevada state Assemblywoman Michele Fiore.

Ammon Bundy, 40, who has acted as a leader of the occupation, told his wife in a phone call that the group had been cooperative when law enforcement agents confronted them, according to Fiore, a Bundy family supporter who spoke with Bundys wife on Tuesday.

Ammon Bundy, a leader of the refuge occupation, was among those arrested Tuesday. His brother, Ryan, was wounded before being taken into custody. (Rick Bowmer / Associated Press)

Its very unfortunate. The only saving grace is theres six witnesses to it, Fiore said in an interview.

My perspective is our government has acted lawless and we have got to stop it, she said.

Ryan Bundy was treated for non-life-threatening injuries and released into FBI custody.

It was not clear Tuesday night whether other protesters remained at the wildlife refuge.

The Bundy brothers are the sons of Cliven Bundy, a southern Nevada rancher who was at the center of a tense armed standoff of his own with federal Bureau of Land Management officials in 2014.

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When federal officials seized some of the familys cattle over an estimated $1million in unpaid grazing fees, a ragtag band of armed militiamen rode to his defense at his ranch about 90 miles outside Las Vegas.

The BLM backed down and released the cattle.

Isnt this a wonderful country we live in? the elder Bundy said sarcastically Tuesday night when The Times informed him about the arrests and the death.

We believe that those federal people shouldnt even be there in that state, and be in that county and have anything to do with this issue. ... I have some sons and other people there trying to protect our rights and liberties and freedoms, and now weve got one killed, and all I can say is, hes sacrificed for a good purpose, he said.

A sign outside a home in Burns, Ore., near Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, addresses protest leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy earlier this month. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

In addition to the Bundy brothers, those arrested on the highway included Brian Cavalier, 44, also of Bunkerville; Shawna Cox, 59, Kanab, Utah; and Ryan Waylen Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont.

Within two hours, officials had also arrested Peter Santilli, 50, of Cincinnati and Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, of Cottonwood, Ariz. Another occupier, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32, turned himself in to police in Peoria, Ariz., without incident, officials said.

All face a federal felony charge of a conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.

The group of about 15 men and women took over the wildlife refuge Jan. 2 after a march in support of Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond, a father and son who had been sentenced to prison for setting fires on federal land.

The protesters have issued a muddled set of demands for ending the occupation. They demanded freedom for the imprisoned Hammonds and asked that federal land be returned from the U.S. government to local landowners, the county and the town of Burns, near the refuge.

They made it clear they were willing to resort to violence if the federal government moved against them, but also said they did not want such a confrontation.

Firearms were a constant presence at the wildlife refuge. Men walked around casually with assault rifles slung over their shoulders or with handguns holstered on their hips.

One day a reporter saw a man dressed in military clothing with a patch that read MILITIA, cleaning a Russian rifle.

When asked on Jan. 15 about all the weaponry, Ammon Bundy replied, Thats ridiculous that you would connect walking around with arms to violence. Thats what keeps it peaceful.

Through it all, the protesters won support from around the country, and also among some local residents. But they also angered many. Around Burns, signs popped up declaring: Bundy militia go home and No Bundy caliphate.

The occupiers repeatedly said they were protesting on behalf of their fellow citizens.

Were trying to accomplish the task of restoring rights to the people who have lost them or surrendered them, Ryan Bundy said earlier this month.

We dont want it to end with violence. Were not looking for bloodshed, he said in an interview with The Times.

But around Burns, frustrated community members wondered when the occupation might end.

We can enforce the Constitution in Harney County, and thats what we intend to do, Ammon Bundy told reporters one day. We have a lot of plans.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

Twitter: @mattdpearce

Times staff writers Nigel Duara in Phoenix and Steve Padilla in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>

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When presidential candidates turn to data crunchers at Rocket Fuel in Silicon Valley for help finding voters who want tougher immigration enforcement, the firm comes up with a surprisingly specific answer: Chevy truck drivers who like Starbucks.

The data modeling from Rocket Fuel shows that this group leans against a path to citizenship for workers in the U.S. illegally. And these particular voters have become surprisingly easy  some argue creepily so  for campaigns to find and approach. So have consumers of frozen vegetables, who are more likely to oppose abortion. As have people curious about diabetes, a group that tends to settle on a candidate early in the race.

Knowing the nuances of each voter beyond whether they lean right or left makes every difference, said JC Medici, the firms national director of politics and advocacy. We can identify what people are persuadable.

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But as presidential campaigns push into a new frontier of voter targeting, scouring social media accounts, online browsing habits and retail purchasing records of millions of Americans, they have brought a privacy imposition unprecedented in politics. By some estimates, political candidates are collecting more personal information on Americans than even the most aggressive retailers. Questions are emerging about how much risk the new order of digital campaigning is creating for unwitting voters as the vast troves of data accumulated by political operations becomes increasingly attractive to hackers.

The security breach last month at the major voter database controlled by the Democratic National Committee, and another days later involving a large political data firm, have raised concerns about the fitness of candidates to safely manage their data. At the same time, the methods used by independent data brokers that acquire and disseminate private details for political campaigns and scores of other clients are at the center of a years-long regulatory battle, with the Federal Trade Commission warning Congress that consumers need more protections.

Yet the push for more accountability and transparency rules on the accumulation of private data is faltering in Congress, where lawmakers are reluctant to rein in the industry that they increasingly rely on to win elections.

This is the Wild West, said Tim Sparapani, a data privacy consultant and former director of public policy for Facebook. There is nothing that is off-limits to political data mining. The fleeting, impulsive nature of campaigns, he said, means they often have far less stringent security procedures than retailers and social media firms, which themselves often fail to adequately protect sensitive information.

The mining of such data for politics is not a new phenomenon. Presidential candidates began pioneering the approach more than a decade ago, and it was a key part of Barack Obamas winning strategy in 2008 and 2012. But technological advancements, plunging storage costs and a proliferation of data firms have substantially increased the ability of campaigns to inhale troves of strikingly personal information about voters, spit it into algorithms, and use the results to narrowly customize messaging and outreach to each individual household.

There is a tremendous amount of data out there and the question is what types of controls are in place and how secure is it, said Craig Spiezle, executive director of the nonprofit Online Trust Alliance. The groups recent audit of campaign websites for privacy, security and consumer protection gave three-quarters of the candidates failing grades.

The campaigns and the data companies are cagey about what particular personal voter details they are trafficking in.

One firm, Aristotle, boasts how it helped a senior senator win reelection in 2014 using over 500 demographic and consumer points, which created a unique voter profile of each constituent. Company officials declined an interview request.

When investigators in Congress and the FTC looked into the universe of what data brokers make available to their clients  be they political, corporate or nonprofit  some of the findings were unsettling. One company was selling lists of rape victims; another was offering up the home addresses of police officers.

The data companies are required by law to keep the names of individuals separate from the pile of data accumulated about them. Instead, each voter is assigned an online identification number, and when a campaign wants to target a particular group  say, drivers of hybrid vehicles or gun owners  the computers coordinate a robocall, or a volunteers canvassing list, or a digital advertisement with relevant accounts.

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Since campaigns are ultimately in the business of finding particular people and getting them to show up to vote, some scholars are dubious their digital targeting efforts offer the same level of anonymity as those of corporations.

A retailer doesnt care what person is behind a particular online profile, just that they are buying new sneakers, said Ira Rubinstein, a research fellow at New York University School of Law who specializes in data privacy. This is about targeting very specific people to go out and vote.

------------

For the record

7:44 a.m.: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of New York University research fellow Ira Rubinstein as Rubenstein.

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An exhaustive paper Rubinstein recently published on voter privacy found that political dossiers may be the largest unregulated assemblage of personal data in contemporary American life.

Basic privacy guidelines that apply to other industries dont appear to apply to candidates. Some do not even have clear privacy policies posted on their websites, which would be grounds for a private business to have their site shut down under both federal and California law, according to the Online Trust Alliance.

Rules that require companies to notify their customers if there has been a data breach also do not necessarily apply to campaigns, Rubinstein said.

Its an unregulated entity whose only goal is to elect a candidate over a short term, then it goes away, he said. They are not circumstances in which security is made a priority.

Campaign digital strategists take umbrage. They say their operations are constantly withstanding the attacks of hackers, and that candidates are in no position to be cavalier with all the sensitive information on their servers, as voters would punish them for it.

Yet it is also unclear whether many voters are aware how much could be on those servers. Among the regulations the Federal Trade Commission is urging Congress to implement is one that would allow consumers to find out what information the data brokers are selling to their many clients, political campaigns among them. Consumers could more easily adjust which data are being sold or could opt out of the monitoring altogether.

The problem with the data broker industry is consumers have no idea this is going on, said FTC commissioner Julie Brill. They are creating hundreds of millions of profiles of American consumers.  Some of this information can impact consumers in a negative way.

Back at Rocket Fuel, which specializes in placing potential voters into hundreds of different audiences, each targeted for a package of digital advertisements specifically catered to their interests, there are warnings that more regulation could have its own unintended consequences.

Wed no longer be able to put the right message in front of the right people, Medici said. If what we are putting in front of voters is relevant to them and of interest, it is a natural part of the process.

Twitter: @evanhalper

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In the final days before Iowans begin the presidential nominating process, Donald Trump, whose candidacy has both perplexed and enlivened various factions of the Republican Party, is focused on shoring up the support of the states evangelical voters who could propel him to victory and bolster his momentum in the upcoming primaries.

Trump announced Tuesday the endorsement of Jerry Falwell Jr., an influential evangelical leader and president of Liberty University, who called the billionaire businessman a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.

The endorsement from Falwell comes a week after former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tossed her support behind the billionaires candidacy. Palin has a strong following of evangelical and tea party supporters.

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Each of those endorsements arrives as Trump seeks to slow the surge of his top rival in Iowa, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has strong support from evangelicals.

Its all calculated and really shows how he can morph himself so that hes appealing, Steffen Schmidt, a professor of political science at Iowa State University, said of Trumps support from Falwell and Palin. He does what he needs to. ... Hes not a tried and true politician, but ... in many ways, he has become a politician. Has Trump ever talked about evangelicals in his career? I would say not so much.

Indeed, over the weekend Trump attended church in Iowa and last week he spoke at the invocation at Falwells Liberty University.

National polls show Trump is succeeding in winning over evangelicals -- who are also influential in South Carolina, another state with an early vote. An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released Tuesday showed Trump with 37% support from white evangelicals nationwide, while Cruz had 20%, a 9% drop since last week.

Still, a mix of state and national polls reveals the race for evangelical support appears to be a toss-up.

A Quinnipiac University poll of likely Iowa GOP caucusgoers released Tuesday showed Cruz leading Trump among evangelicals, 39% to 27%.

I am a Christian. Im a good Christian. And the evangelicals have figured it out, Trump said at a news conference in Marshalltown, a small farming community in central Iowa where he held a rally Tuesday.

Jon Espenscheid, a 50-year-old evangelical Christian, attended the rally. He he said his support for Trump doesnt have to do with his religion.

Hes an outsider, Espenscheid said. He wont have to answer to anybody.

On Tuesday, Trump went on the attack against Bob Vander Plaats, a powerful Iowa evangelical leader who endorsed Cruz. Vander Plaats is head of the faith-based group the Family Leader and a staunch opponent of abortion, and his endorsement was courted heavily by both Cruz and Trump.

Why doesnt phony Vander Plaats tell his followers all the times he asked for him and his family to stay at my hotels, Trump tweeted.

Cruz in recent weeks has battled Trump over the senators presidential eligiblity (Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban father) and his positions on immigration. The Texan has sought to cast Trump as a faux conservative whose Christian beliefs should be questioned.

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A super PAC supporting Cruz released a television ad on Monday in Iowa castigating Trump for his past views on abortion, which cites a 1999 interview in which Trump notes hes pro-choice in every respect.

If Donald wins Iowa, he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire, if he went on to win New Hampshire as well, there is a very good chance he could be unstoppable and be our nominee, Cruz warned pastors at a private meeting in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, earlier in the week.

Katie Packer, a Republican strategist who is unaligned in the 2016 presidential race but whose super PAC operates a website questioning Trump on various issues, said the businessmans endorsements are an effort to validate his support among evangelicals.

But his record -- on issues like abortion -- is not steadfast, Packer said. Hes wavered a lot.

Times staff writer Kate Linthicum in Marshalltown contributed to this report.

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You know that hollow feeling brought on by, say, the death of a favorite celebrity? As the tributes stack up on social media, you can only stare at the screen in disbelief.

That is how I felt on Jan. 15, the day MGM Resorts International announced the end of Las Vegas. By which I mean the end of free parking at the Bellagio, Mirage, Mandalay Bay, Aria, MGM Grand, Luxor, Excalibur, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Delano and Vdara resorts. Thats more than half the Strip, if youre counting. Parking fees will set you back up to $10 per night, with valet service costing even more.

Im like one of those Medicare-loving, anti-government protestors, yelling, Get your corporate casino hands off my free Strip parking!

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Paying to park may be nothing to New Yorkers or Angelenos, but in Las Vegas, its sacrilege. MGMs chief operating officer acknowledged as much in the companys news release, calling the move a significant departure from a long-established paradigm.

Jay Sarno, who created Caesars Palace and Circus Circus, knew the value of setting the tone at the entrance. According to his biography Grandissimo: The First Emperor of Las Vegas, the majestic driveway at Caesars Palace was built to transport the guest out of time, out of space, away from his workaday life and into a fantasy world  with gratification only a throw of the dice or the flash of a smile away.

People, that is the magic of getting parking right. Parking isnt just car storage. Its a symbol. Free valet in particular makes Joe Gambler feel like a high roller, like Lady Luck is on his arm as he breezes into the air-conditioned lobby. That Cinderella experience  call it hope  is what Vegas offers the world. Mix in a few free cocktails, and youve got the formula that turned a dusty desert outpost into a global destination.

The change hurts Californians far more than tourists arriving by plane; 94% of Southern Californians drive here. Well, gas is cheap.

But even if you rich Angelenos dont mind getting ripped off, Las Vegas locals are outraged on your behalf. The End of Days is upon us! proclaimed Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Steve Sebelius, in the first of many primal cries in print. A reader survey in the same paper garnered more than 10,000 votes, with 73% responding No free parking!? Never going there again. Theres a petition, a Facebook group calling for a boycott and angry memes. In a nod to burning draft cards, local gamblers are cutting up their MGM loyalty cards and posting pictures of the shards on social media.

Meanwhile, Im like one of those Medicare-loving, antigovernment protesters, yelling, Get your corporate casino hands off my free Strip parking! But this is no time for dignity.

Historically, only one property on the Strip has ever imposed a similar fee-on-arrival at a casino. Circus Circus, when it opened in 1968, charged $2 admission (about $14 in todays money) to cover the free circus acts. Tourists paid. Locals protested. And the fee disappeared after a few months.

Memes are great, but I fear Vegas residents, being only 2 million strong, lack boycott-level numbers. If the 41 million-plus annual tourists dont join the revolt, its only a matter of time before we have to pay to park everywhere, even off the Strip.

MGMs official rationale is the cost of building a $54-million, 3,000-space parking structure, plus $36 million to upgrade existing parking. But parking fees are just part and parcel of the very un-Vegas trend of nickel-and-diming guests: tighter slots, lower payouts, fewer comped rooms, mandatory $25-a-day resort fees, etc.

In truth, all these are a matter of packaged versus a la carte costs. Weve always paid to be at casinos. But the seduction of Las Vegas is the feeling that youre getting something for nothing, even while youre losing at the blackjack table. Why call attention to a cost that brings no joy? At least an overpriced mojito gives you a buzz.

The Las Vegas Strip is a uniquely American landmark, an amalgamation of public square and private space, famous around the world for projecting bounty to all comers. MGM has for decades benefited from being part of that, but now it has violated the public trust. It might propose strip-mining the Grand Canyon next.

If profits dont bend to the greater good, Las Vegas risks becoming a failed state. Like Atlantic City.

C. Moon Reed is a writer in Las Vegas.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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Frustrated with the pace of toxic cleanup efforts surrounding a shuttered battery recycling plant in Vernon, state and local politicians are pressing for swifter action from the Brown administration.

This has gone on too long, Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis said Tuesday during a news conference at the Capitol; she pledged to go after Exide Technologies, which operated the plant for decades.

The states Department of Toxic Substances Control is overseeing the cleanup of lead-contaminated soil, but incoming Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) said the department has not done a good job and promised hed push officials to act more urgently.

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Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Echo Park) said all legislators should be disheartened by the slow progress in cleaning up affected neighborhoods where most residents are Latino and low-income -- particularly as efforts to address the natural gas leak near the wealthier community of Porter Ranch have mobilized relatively quickly.

We dont want to send the wrong message. That if you live ... in Porter Ranch that youre more important than the folks that live in East ... or Southeast Los Angeles, Gomez said.

Solis said shed like to see more state money put toward cleanup, but did not specify how much at the news conference.

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A poster at the news conference laid out a $70-million proposal for next years budget that would be used to assess the contamination and clean up the most affected homes.

But, Solis said, that figure was meant to begin the discussion. She emphasized that Exide must be held accountable for the costs of the pollution.

California has received around $9 million from Exide for residential cleanup. Last year, the state also dedicated about $7 million to test and clean up homes, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to spend $2 million to accelerate those efforts.

The closure of the Exide facility was the focus of an informational hearing at the Capitol on Tuesday, where Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) pressed for $70 million in state funding for the cleanup.

It feels like the state is just throwing pennies at brown people to keep us quiet, said Garcia, who called for declaration of a state of emergency.

Solis also chimed in with a call for $70 million at the afternoon hearing.

Administration officials sought to assuage concerns that they were not working with enough urgency.

I can assure you the governor has us all commited to working on the site, said Matt Rodriquez, the states secretary for environmental protection. Its a priority for us. Its a priority for me.

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In a sign that the treatment of depression is shifting to the mainstream of American medical care, a federal panel has recommended that general physicians screen all adults for depression and treat those affected by the mood disorder with antidepressant medication, refer them to psychotherapy or do both.

For the first time, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force also advised that physicians assess all pregnant and postpartum women for signs of depression, as well as elderly adults.

The task force, which assesses the harms and benefits of screening programs and makes recommendations accordingly, said that screening pregnant and postpartum women for depression would have a moderate net benefit.

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At the same time, the panel acknowledged that, given the small risk that treatment with antidepressants could harm a developing fetus, pregnant women with depression should be offered a range of treatment options, including cognitive behavioral therapy, which has been found effective in relieving depressive symptoms.

The new recommendations, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., ensure that virtually all adults consulting with a physician will at some point be asked a battery of questions aimed at discerning the signs of depression. Among those are prolonged sadness or irritability, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, disturbances of sleep or appetite, and loss of energy and interest in activities once a source of enjoyment.

The federal panels advisory issued Tuesday departs from an earlier slate of recommendations on depression screening by urging that physicians look for signs of depression, at least periodically, in all of their adult patients.

The last time the task force took up the subject in 2009, it recommended physicians screen adults for depression when staff-assisted depression care supports are in place. Physicians without staff to make referrals or to counsel patients on how to seek further treatment were left to decide for themselves whether they should screen their patients for depression.

Now, the panel said, such support is ... much more widely available and accepted as part of mental health care. Physicians who provide general care for adults should have systems ... in place to ensure proper diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care for depression, the task force added.

What this recommendation is saying is that, as a country, we dont have an excuse for failing to diagnose and treat depression, said UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Nelson Freimer, director of a university-wide initiative that aims to improve depression care and uncover the biological bases for the disorder.

This is one of the nations leading killers and causes of disability, and it has enormous effects throughout our society. Its just too important to be optional, Freimer said.

He added that the task forces recommendation that pregnant and postpartum women be screened underscores the powerful impact that a mothers depression has not only on her own well-being but on that of her child.

If Im depressed right after giving birth and have a newborn depending on me, it has an enormous effect, said Freimer. Its important we dont miss any cases.

In the United States, as many as 1 in 5 women who give birth each year is thought to have postpartum depression symptoms.

In 2009-12, the most recent period for which statistics are available, 7.6% of Americans over the age of 12 were thought to suffer from moderate to severe depression. A recent study estimated the yearly economic burden of the disease--in lost wages, cost of treatment and suicide-related costs--to be $210.5 billion in the United States.

As more seek care for depression, those numbers will probably increase. Experts say that depression, which is more common in women and among low-income Americans, remains significantly underdiagnosed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only about about a third of those experiencing severe depressive symptoms have had contact with a mental health professional in the previous year.

Increasingly, physicians in family medicine and general care are the first to suspect depression in their patients. Those doctors growing role in prescribing antidepressant medication has driven the growth of those drugs, which, despite doubts about their effectiveness, are the third most commonly prescribed class of medication in the United States.

In 2010, more than 253.6 million prescriptions were filled for antidepressants, according to a report by IMS Health.

Roughly half of patients who seek treatment for depression, however, do not report their symptoms having resolved completely, said Freimer.

Over the next 10 to 15 years, UCLAs Depression Grand Challenge is expected to screen all patients cared for by the universitys healthcare system--more than a million patients. Under the initiative, the university expects to enroll 100,000 participants into research studies that will explore the genetic and neural bases of the disease and seek better ways to match depression sufferers to treatments that are effective.

An editorial on the task forces recommendations, also published in JAMA, said that although progress in recognizing and treating depression has been substantial, there is still much work to be done.

Dr. Michael E. Thase, professor of psychiatry at University of Pennsylvanias Perelman School of Medicine, wrote that physicians treating depressed patients will have to be prepared to follow up to determine whether the treatment is working, and change course if it is not. In time, he expressed hope that better methods to match patients with specific forms of treatment"--one of the aims of the UCLA initiative--will be found.

Follow me on Twitter @LATMelissaHealy and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi appeared to reach an impasse Wednesday over the severity of prospective sanctions for North Korea, three weeks after the isolated country conducted its fourth nuclear bomb test.

Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday night after two days in Laos and Cambodia, and met with Wang for more than four hours Wednesday morning. North Korea topped the agenda, he told reporters at a news conference afterward.

At the conference, Kerry and Wang painted a positive picture of U.S.-China relations in broad strokes, discussing cooperation on a range of issues including the Iranian nuclear deal, wildlife trafficking and combating the Ebola virus.

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Yet their failure to bridge a deep divide on North Koreas nuclear program and Beijings territorial ambitions in the South China Sea illustrated the fragility of the regions security environment.

On Jan. 6, North Korea announced that it successfully conducted its first underground test of a hydrogen bomb; experts said that a nuclear bomb clearly detonated but raised doubts about Pyongyangs claim of owning a significantly more powerful thermonuclear weapon.

Beijing has provided an economic lifeline to North Korea for decades and fears that unrest in the country could destabilize Chinas northeastern provinces.

North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat to the world, Kerry told reporters. He proposed negotiating a U.N Security Council resolution to tighten sanctions on North Korea, dealing a potential blow to China-North Korea trade in industries including aviation, shipping, and the exchange of resources such as fuel and coal.

The U.S. will do what is necessary to protect the people of our country and our friends and allies in the world, he said. All nations, particularly those who seek a global leadership role or have a global leadership role, share a fundamental responsibility to meet this challenge with a united front.

Although Wang agreed that the U.N. Security Council must pass a new resolution in response to the nuclear test, he balked at the prospect of tightening sanctions. Sanctions are not an end of themselves, he said. We must point out that the new resolution should not provoke new tension in the situation, much less destabilize the Korean peninsula.

Experts said that China likely does not see much upside in adopting the U.S. proposed framework for dealing with Pyongyang.

On the nuclear side, Ive never had any doubt that the Chinese want to end this program but they dont see a strategy in the international community to achieve that goal, said Bonnie Glaser, a senior advisor for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A lot of people think China is the missing link and if only it would get on board with sanctions that North Korea could be compelled to give up its nuclear weapons. The Chinese just dont look at it like that.

They play out in their minds, what are the consequences if they really agree to very tough sanctions  if they cut off oil deliveries to North Korea? she added. So that creates instability in North Korea most likely, then China ends up with a crisis on its border that potentially brings U.S. troops closer to China, and you end up with a worse situation than when you started.

On Wednesday morning, Chinas New China News Agency accused Washington of uncompromising hostility toward North Korea, flaring up the countrys sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship.

Kerry also reached loggerheads with Wang regarding Chinas maritime ambitions, which have riled the countrys neighbors and threatened the regions U.S.-led security order.

China claims virtually all of the South China Sea, a potentially oil and gas-rich area of the western Pacific Ocean dotted with remote islands and reefs. Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also claim parts of the sea as their own.

China has stepped up its claims in recent years with a series of heavyweight projects, including building artificial islands on a shoal also claimed by the Philippines. In October, the U.S. sent a warship within 12 nautical miles of these islands, drawing harsh rebukes from Beijing.

NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>

The South China Sea islands were historically Chinas territory, and China has a right to protect its maritime sovereign and legal rights and interests, Wang said at Wednesdays news conference. He denied accusations that China has militarized its artificial islands, adding that Beijing has built some necessary facilities for self-defense.

Southeast Asian countries are indeed divided over how to handle the issue, and the lack of consensus has allowed China to advance its projects with limited opposition.

Kerry said he also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and that they had a constructive discussion.

Before his meetings in China, Kerry visited Laos, a landlocked, deeply impoverished country of 7 million people between Thailand and Vietnam, and Cambodia, which enjoys close economic ties with China and tends to side with Beijing on issues of maritime rights.

Although the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, a 10-member regional bloc, could band together to counter Chinas territorial claims, internal divisions have stymied attempts at collective action. In 2012, Cambodia blocked mentions of the disputes at a summit in Phnom Penh, leading the association to fail to issue a joint communique.

ASEAN leaders will attend a summit hosted by President Obama in California in February. Laos is the associations chair.

During his visit to Laos, Kerry  only the second U.S. secretary of State to visit the country since 1955  promised to boost U.S.-funded programs to ameliorate malnutrition and remove unexploded ordnance left from the Vietnam war. China, meanwhile, has promised the country major investments in infrastructure, including a high-speed rail line.

Chinas state media have responded to U.S. pressure on the South China Sea issue with significantly less restraint than the countrys foreign minister.

Washingtons strategy has fed the strategic distrust between China and the US, and prompted smaller countries in the region to vacillate between the two powers and try to benefit from their contest, said a Tuesday commentary in the state-owned, notoriously bombastic Global Times newspaper.

Many of them are manipulated by Washington behind the scenes as a proxy to counter China. Washington instigates some smaller nations to challenge China in the South China Sea, one of Chinas core interests, and sugarcoats itself as a defender of justice.

Times staff writer Julie Makinen contributed to this report.

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When the Italian government attempted to introduce same-sex unions in 2007, local documentary maker Gustav Hofer was on hand to film the political effort behind the bill as it stuttered and died in the face of stiff Catholic opposition.

Now, nine years later, as the Italian Senate prepares to debate a new bill on Thursday, he is not holding his breath.

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FOR THE RECORD:

Same-sex unions: In the Jan. 27 Section A, an article about same-sex unions in Italy said a Family Day rally was planned for Sunday. It is planned for Saturday.

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Years of pressure by bishops on Italian politicians to oppose same-sex marriage, or even civil unions, has meant Italy is the last country in Western Europe without some form of legislation on the books. That is a blow to people such as Hofer, a 39-year-old gay man who has been waiting years for the chance to tie the knot with his partner.

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Keeping gay unions illegal in Italy has a symbolic value for the church  its the Vaticans last stronghold, he said.

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But the close-knit relationship between the Vatican and Parliament unraveled somewhat in 2013 with the election of Pope Francis, who has shown disdain for the Italian churchs habit of influencing Italian politics and warned bishops in a speech in Florence in November not to be obsessed by power.

Francis has a critical opinion of the old guard in the Italian church who were close to governments, said Iacopo Scaramuzzi, a Vatican expert with the Italian news service ASKA.

Francis has even halted the tradition of Italian government ministers coming out to meet the pope at the Rome airport whenever he flies in or out of Italy, said Scaramuzzi.

Meanwhile, young, reform-minded Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made civil union legislation a centerpiece of his legislative program, spurred in part by pressure from the European Court of Human Rights.

Judging by Italys uneasy relationship with Catholic tenets today, it would appear the country is ready to turn its back on the concept that marriage must be between a man and a woman. Church attendance is down, fewer Italians are getting married and the countrys traditional large families are a thing of the past.

But same-sex unions require a law change and many Italian lawmakers continue to pay lip service to the Vatican, as former Prime Minister Romano Prodi discovered when his 2007 civil unions bill sank, thanks to Catholic opposition within his short-lived center-left coalition.

Church leaders, including then-Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, openly backed a massive Family Day rally in Rome in 2007 in defense of the heterosexual family.

Prodi was replaced by Silvio Berlusconi, who critics believe shared the Vaticans views on a range of issues to keep bishops from questioning his womanizing.

Last year, under Francis, church officials noticeably stayed away from a Family Day rally and hard-line Catholic politicians became less vocal, suggesting Renzi might have a clear run at passing same-sex union legislation.

Still, as the date to debate the latest bill neared, the church stirred. Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the head of the Italian bishops conference, said this month that this years Family Day rally was absolutely necessary. The rally is planned for Saturday.

Italians may show ambivalence toward same-sex unions, but bishops and Catholic politicians have been buoyed by polls showing that only 15% support adoptions by gay and lesbian parents.

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Although adoption of children by two same-sex partners is not foreseen in the bill, critics have targeted a so-called stepchild clause that allows a gay or lesbian partner to adopt the biological child of his or her partner.

The clause, they argue, will encourage homosexual men to have a child using a surrogate mother, then have the child adopted by their partner.

Surrogacy is illegal in Italy, so Italians seek surrogate mothers abroad.

Angelino Alfano, Italys interior minister, this month called for surrogate parents to be treated like sex offenders and sent to jail. In an interview with Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops conference, he called surrogacy the most vile, illegal trade that man has invented.

Alfanos hostility to surrogacy and gay adoption reflects the difficulties Renzi will have pushing the civil union bill through the Senate.

Beatrice Lorenzin, Renzis health minister, has also opposed stepchild adoption.

As a tense vote nears, Scaramuzzi said he believed Francis was unhappy about Bagnasco dabbling in politics by giving open backing to the Family Day rally on Saturday.

After Bagnasco spoke out, an audience he was due to have with Francis was canceled, which is very unusual  and I believe it is because Francis didnt like Bagnascos statement, he said.

Hofer, for one, remains skeptical, pointing out that the pope made a timely, headline-grabbing speech Friday in which he reasserted his belief that marriage was between a man and a woman. There can be no confusion between the family desired by God and any other type of union, the pontiff said.

The fact he spoke out now shows the mask is off and Francis is no different to Pope Benedict, he said. Francis has turned out to be a delusion for gay Catholics.

Kington is a special correspondent.

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The prospect of Iranian crude oil returning to global markets that are already oversupplied has piled additional pressure on prices that recently fell below $30 a barrel.

The International Energy Agency, a leading industry watchdog, is forecasting that supply could exceed demand by 1.5 million barrels per day in the first half of the year.

Unless something changes, the oil market could drown in oversupply, it warned in a recent report.

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Adding to the glut would not seem to be in the interests of a country that is counting on oil profits to help revive an economy crippled by Western sanctions. But Iranian officials say they are less worried about low prices than about reclaiming the market share lost to Saudi Arabia, Russia and other big oil producers.

Iranian crude exports stand at about 1.1 million barrels per day, about half their pre-sanctions level. With the lifting of restrictions aimed at curbing Irans nuclear activities on Jan. 16, the government is vowing to increase output by 500,000 barrels a day within weeks and to add another 500,000 barrels before the year is out.

Its our right to return to the level of production we historically had, Irans oil minister, Bijan Zangeneh, told reporters in November.

But can the country ramp up production that quickly? Many experts are skeptical.

The U.S. governments Energy Information Administration is forecasting that Iran will add about 300,000 additional barrels of crude in 2016 and another 500,000 more in 2017.

Some analysts ascribe Irans more ambitious targets to political posturing. The country is trying to reassert authority in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries after losing ground to its chief regional rival, Saudi Arabia. The government also needs to reassure its population that the highly anticipated economic dividends of a landmark nuclear deal are on the way.

No one doubts the potential in Iran. Once the second-largest producer in OPEC, the Islamic Republic sits atop the worlds second largest gas reserves and the fourth-biggest petroleum reserves.

Iran was producing an average of 3.7 million barrels of crude a day in 2011, before the start of U.S. and European Union sanctions that limited the countrys ability to export oil and prevented it from importing the latest Western technology and equipment.

Although industry analysts believe it should be possible to bring back some of that production relatively quickly, more investment will be needed to achieve the kind of levels promised by the government, they say.

Were talking about opening oil fields, freshening up infrastructure, putting new capacity in place, new technology in fields, said Julius Walker, a senior energy consultant for JBC Energy, a Vienna-based research firm. All of this is a question of time and not something that can happen in the very short term.

Irans Oil Ministry has said it hopes to attract $100 billion in foreign investment to modernize the energy sector. That could prove challenging, according to some analysts.

Do people have confidence to put their money to work in Iran? There isnt much of a favorable record so far for foreign investors, said Sadad Ibrahim al-Husseini, a former executive with Saudi Arabias state oil company Aramco. What Ive heard from oil people in general is that the terms [Iran is offering] are not sufficiently attractive.

Iranian analysts dispute that. Reza Zandi, an energy columnist for a reformist Iranian newspaper, said the enthusiasm among investors is evident from the list of visitors received at the Oil Ministry, including high-level delegations from Britain, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Russia and China. Even before the nuclear deal was signed in July, non-American oil majors like Anglo-Dutch Shell and Italys ENI were courting Iranian partners.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been using a trip to Europe this week to try to woo back old customers and drum up new business. A number of deals have been inked in recent days, including with Greeces biggest oil refiner, Hellenic Petroleum, the Italian oil-field services company Saipem SpA and Italian energy group Ansaldo Energia.

But Iran faces competition from Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq, which have poured oil into Europe, as well as Asia, where Tehran is hoping to sell additional barrels to customers it was able to retain despite the sanctions.

The key to understanding whether or not Iran will be able to market a lot of this crude is to what extent they are going to be willing to discount their crude very aggressively in order to be able to undercut other producers, Walker said.

Saeed Laylaz, a pro-government economist in Iran, said the countrys production costs are low, about $7 per barrel for crude. So even if the price falls to $15 per barrel, Iran can afford to export it, he said.

There are also other inducements that Tehran could offer, including deferred payments or investments in the foreign refineries that will use its crude.

But many foreign oil and services companies are holding back until some of the ambiguity about doing business with Iran is resolved.

Although the United States has lifted the sanctions it imposed on the Islamic Republics nuclear program, companies are wary of running afoul of other restrictions that remain in effect. There is also concern that some sanctions could snap back if Iran doesnt fulfill its commitments under last years deal, or if a Republican president moves into the White House.

With prices so low, there is no reason to rush in. Last week, the price for a barrel of crude plunged below $27 for the first time in 12 years. It was trading at just over $32 Wednesday.

To be very blunt, it would have been a lot easier to invite investors if there was a big shortfall of supply in the market, if oil prices were pushing $100-plus dollars, and oil companies were anxious to get their hands on reserves, but this is not the case, al-Husseini said. Its probably the worst time possible for Iran to be trying to invite investors.

Staff writer Alexandra Zavis reported from Los Angeles and special correspondent Ramin Mostaghim from Tehran.

For more international news, follow @alexzavis on Twitter

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Colombia drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's famous pink mansion has been demolished. Workers report that while digging through the rubble of the late drug baron's Florida home, they have chanced upon a safe. Its contents might contain a boatload of wealth.

BBC reports that the new owners of Escobar's Florida mansion believe that the famed drug lord might have hidden treasures within the mansion's vicinity.

The Colombian drug lord was gunned down by police. During the height of his career, he supplied 80 percent of smuggled cocaine into the United States, earning him the reputation of "The King of Cocaine." His drug dealings have made him the richest criminal to date, even more so than Mexico's Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

The Colombian drug lord accumulated so much wealth during his lifetime that he hid his money all across Colombia and even outside the country. Miami became a key point for drugs coming in from South America by boat. During his death in 1993, many viewed Escobar as a Robin Hood. 25,000 people, mostly the poor that he aided during his lifetime, attended his funeral.

Christian de Berdouare and his wife, Jennifer Valoppi, said that a worker found the white metal safe hidden in one of the walls of the mansion. For now, the couple disclosed that Escobar's safe is being kept in a "safe place." The couple have not opened the safe as of this time.

The couple have called the find "a Holy Grail." During his lifetime, Escobar was vastly wealthy, having a net worth of $30 billion.The safe, which was reported to weigh 600 kg., could very well hide just a fraction of Escobar's secret stash, ranging from gold bars to precious jewels.

When the home was purchased, the couple said that they were not aware of the home's history. The mansion was seized by the US government in 1987. The mansion was later destroyed in a fire, and the couple purchased the four-bedroom mansion in 2014. The new owners of the mansion also own a restaurant and are planning on building a new house on the property.

Workers disclosed that they have found another safe on the property before, but it mysteriously disappeared soon after.

Time reports that the couple plan to open the safe at an "undisclosed time." While Escobar owned the property in Miami, the drug baron never actually lived there, although he did pay numerous visits to the home during his stay in Miami.

 2015 Latin One. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Mexican lawmakers have opened the first batch of debates about legalizing marijuana amid President Enrique Pena Nieto's opposition on the matter and the public's support for medical cannabis.

In the past, Pena Nieto has publicly expressed his opposition on making the cultivation and use of marijuana legal in Mexico.

Despite this, he remained open to public opinion, and even launched a series of debate to hear out opinions from every side of the matter.

In a report from AFP posted in Tico Times, Interior Minister Miguel angel Osorio Chong spoke at the beginning of the forum launched on Tuesday.

"This is an issue that has directly or indirectly affected the lives of millions of Mexicans. Such a delicate issue cannot be left to improvisation," he said at the beginning of the forum held in Cancun City.

Those who are in favor of legalizing recreational use of medical marijuana argued that decriminalizing it would remove drug cartels' major source of income and would in turn reduce violence in the country.

However, Pena Nieto rejected this kind of reasoning. However, he agreed to have a debate to discuss the pros and cons of marijuana legalization, which will most likely tackle the medical benefits of the plant than its use for recreational purposes.

According to TeleSUR, the first of these debates tackled social issues that involved addiction to the substance as well as potential danger to public safety. The remaining four covered matters related to personal consumption.

The outlet further noted that marijuana decriminalization debates were sparked by a ruling from Mexico's Supreme Court, stating that recreational use of the substance is "a constitutional right."

TelSUR reported about this controversial ruling dated November 2015, which was comprised a 4 to 1 vote from justices in a case presented by an advocacy group.

Despite this, Supreme Court Justice Arturo Zaldivar clarified that the ruling does not "in any way provide authorization of business activities, supplying or any other provision that refers to the sale and/or distribution" of the plant.

In the Supreme Court justice's opinion, limiting adults' recreational use of marijuana is unconstitutional, as it violates the rights of the individual.

Currently, commercialization and production of cannabis in Mexico is unlawful and is thereby punishable by law.

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Uber remains in a legal limbo in Costa Rica as the Central American country has yet to accept the ride-hailing service since it entered the country last year.

Contrary to common notion, the country was not very happy when the company revealed its plans on opening a new support services center for the Latin American region and would provide about 300 bilingual Costa Ricans a decent job, a report from Tico Times stated.

"Any activity connected to the operation of Uber, even if it is technically legal, will be exhaustively investigated to make sure that it does not support the operation of a business that is illegal in the eyes of the country's current laws," says a statement from the Public Works and Transport Ministry released on Tuesday.

Uber has also received no patronage from Costa Rica President Luis Guillermo Solis Rivera, who has been a long-time strong supporter of foreign investors. He warned the company of a more vigilant Transit Police on the lookout for vehicles linked to the mobile ride-hailing service.

Apparently, the Central American country has not shown any love for the taxi-hailing service because it has been considered notorious for side-stepping licensing, which resulted in unrest and several lawsuits against the company.

"As a business, Uber is a wildly successful company that seems to have not limits in relation to its commercial ambitions; however, its freewheeling plans for expansion have resulted in a number of private lawsuits, protests, licensing issues, as well as allegations of sabotage and interfering with press freedom," the Costa Rica Star News explained in a report back in February.

Citing La Republica Spanish-language writer Johnny Castro, the state news agency also explained how Uber is facing with strong opposition considering the more legal as well as informal "porteadores" it will be competing against.

In fact, many of these competitors took the law into their own hands, showcased in harassment incidents involving cab drivers who attacked an Uber driver in August, as reported by Reuters.

Despite this, Uber remains positive that the Central American country will welcome their business with open arms.

"What better place than Costa Rica to establish our first Center for Excellence in Latin America. We're very excited to be here and launch operations in this city that has a tradition of receiving innovative companies," Umberto Pacheco, Uber Costa Rica's General Manager, said in a statement.

 2015 Latin One. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Depite there being a ban on long-term detention, many detention centers all around the United States are still reportedly detaining Central American women, as well as minors, for extended periods of time. Many of these Central American immigrants were reported to have crossed the U.S. border illegally.

According to a report with Washington Times, many advocacy groups have questioned the legality of detention centers because they violate the dignity of human rights. Many of these detainees, particularly the women, complained that they had experienced some form of abuse during their stay in the detention center.

The report said that many of the female detainees were subjected to a lot of "humiliating" strip searches, in which they were forced to "stand and walk barefoot" on unclean floors. Many of these illegal immigrants said that the experience was "deplorable."

Advocates of immigration raised their complaints that the Obama administration is not doing enough to make sure that the rights of these detainees were being protected. Think Progress reports that one detention center in particular did not provide any special provisions for those who were on their period during the strip search. Even detainees who suffered sexual assault and trauma in the past were still subject to strip searches.

Minors who have crossed the border illegally are also being held in the detention centers for extended periods of time. Many of these people are unaccompanied minors, coming from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. These children have their own stories to tell of making a perilous journey in order to escape poverty and the rampant gang violence, particularly in El Salvador.

Fox News Latino reports that 10,500 of these unaccompanied minors crossed the Southern U.S. border in October to November last year. Out of these numbers, 68,500 were arrested at the U.S. border.

Manoj Govindiah, an attorney who works for RAICES, which advocates the rights of refugees and immigrants everywhere said that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) have the power to release the detainees at any given time, but have not done so.

Many of the mothers being held at the detention centers demand justice and action from the Obama administration, saying that being held in the detention centers is very much like jail, with mothers having a hard time explaining to their children why they are in the detention center.

"We are humans and we have the right to be happy and safe," said Dominga, one of the detainees being held at the detention center.

 2015 Latin One. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A new fast-food joint has started operations in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The restaurant's opening is particularly note-worthy, since it is believed to be the only Ecuadorian diner to exclusively serve kosher food.

Israeli restaurateur Ofir Belaishe had been serving homemade shawarma to his kashrut-observant Jewish friends in Guayquil since 2012. He said he decided to open Kosher Pita Grill to provide a convenient place for the local Jews to eat. Approximately 30 Jewish families living in the area will benefit from Belaishe's Middle Eastern entrees, per Times of Israel.

According to Kosher Certification, kosher food is a strict set of edible items devout Jews are allowed to eat. The laws of Kashrus, which roughly translates to "pure" in English, is an all-encompassing religious directive that guides the Jewish citizenry on what to and what not to consume.

The only kinds of meat devout Jews are only allowed to eat are cattle, cows, bulls, sheep, goats, lambs and any other animal that chews cud and walks on cloven hooves. Animals that meet only one of those criteria are forbidden.

Poultry animals permitted by the Kashrus are chicken, goose, turkey and duck. Devout Jews can devour eggs so long as they do not contain blood and come from the aforementioned kosher birds. The same law applies to milk. Only milk from kosher animals can be drunk and it must not contain non-kosher additives.

With regards to fruits and vegetables, everything that grows on trees and in the soil is considered kosher, unless it has been infested with insects. Fruits from trees that are not older than three years old should not be eaten. All marine life that has fins and scales can be eaten, but not those that have shell skins like lobsters and shrimp.

Wine drinking is generally prohibited, since wine was often used to appease pagan gods in the ancient times. However, kosher regulations have become relatively lenient over time, but are still stringent for most Jews.

My Jewish Learning reported that devout Jews can only drink wine if it has passed all the necessary kosher requirements. Only wines from grapes that have been harvested, pressed, fermented, clarified and bottled by Shabbat-observant Jews are deemed as kosher.

The demanding nature of the kosher lifestyle truly puts even the most religious of Jews to the test, but it's also one that truly fulfills those who astutely conform to it.

As for the newly-opened kosher restaurant in Guayaquil, some of its patrons said Kosher Pita Grill also welcomes non-Jewish customers.

"The restaurant is not intended for Jews only," Shahar Matza clarified. "Some people get here thinking it's one more ordinary fast-food house."

 2015 Latin One. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The US government has recently announced that some aspects of the Cuba embargo are easing, but will not be lifted completely.

The measures, which will affect travel, trade, and finance, will take effect on Wednesday, as noted by a joint statement from the US Departments of Treasury and Commerce.

According to the Havana Times, the Obama administration noted that the "restrictions on payment terms and financing of authorized exports and re-exports to Cuba of goods will be lifted, as well as on agricultural goods or commodities." Until the embargo was lifted, The New York Times noted that for American products to get into Cuba, they must be paid for in advance, and then routed through another country, making the process tiring and burdensome.

Other things like textbooks, construction machinery and sanitation equipment will be approved by the American government on a case by case basis.

Still, among all the businesses that are now accessible, the fact that television shows and movies can now film in Cuba makes one of the biggest impacts, as it can opens the doors to many opportunities, not only for Hollywood scenery, but for locals who can get jobs in production as well. Reuters noted that Conan O'Brien and Showtime series "House of Lies" has already started to film, having shot scenes and segments in Havana recently.

CNN Politics said that this easing is the result of the high-level talks between the two countries that started about a year ago. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said that the new measures "send a clear message to the world: the United States is committed to empowering and enabling economic advancements for the Cuban people."

The head of the anti-embargo US group said that while the initial exceptions to the embargo were criticized, new regulations were more sensitive to the intricacies of Cuba's economy.

However, the US is still waiting for Cuba to reciprocate the easing of trade and business to the other country. Via ABC News, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said "Just as the United States is doing its part to remove impediments that have been holding Cubans back, we urge the Cuban government to make it easier for its citizens to start businesses, engage in trade, and access information online."

To cement ties, The New York Times noted that President Obama is pushing to ensure that US-Cuban relations normalize before he leaves office. Among his intentions is to travel to Cuba before ending his term, a move that many reckon will "highlight progress" between the two countries.

 2015 Latin One. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The proposal for an emergency OPEC meeting has finally been approved by Ecuador, as confirmed by Oil Minister Carlos Pareja. He told Reuters, "We want a new meeting to see if we can make a decision together, but it has to be a decision made by all of us."

Ecuador President Rafael Correa has already admitted to being tired of dealing with the OPEC issues. He told VOA News that his government is "tired" of pushing the organziation to decrease output. He said, "With a small cut in production, the price could rise a lot. Why don't they do it? I'm tired of insisting."

Senior OPEC and Russian oil industry officials stepped up to try fixing what is said to be among the worst supply in decades, and Saudi Arabia has signaled to allow the market to balance.

Meanwhile, the rest of the OPEC countries are still clashing over the emergency meeting, with Iran claiming that the time is not yet right for such interventions.

Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, who made the call for the emergency meeting, was sympathetic to the qualms of Nigeria and other such OPEC members who are struggling with the oil prices.

Kachikwu stated that in its current state, the oil industry still produces about one-third of the world's oil, and still needs to do something more proactive.

Iran's reason for disallowing the emergency meeting is the fact that the organization currently has little intention in making drastic changes, making the impact of the meeting more negative. The country's oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said, "There should be an intention to make a firm decision in such a meeting; otherwise, the meeting will have negative impacts on world oil markets. The important thing is that there must be an intention for change, but we have not yet received such a signal."

Leadership Nigeria noted that oil prices have fallen lately due to over supply. Iraq's oil ministry, for instance, reached an all-time high in December, when the fields in central and southern regions produced over 4.13 million barrels a day, and the oversupply has wiped out most of the gains made. Brent Crude said that oil is down 83 cents, and closing in at $31.35. This means that the oil has been losing 2.5 percent from its last closing price.

OPEC Secretary-general Abdullah al-Badri said in a London conference, "It is vital the market addresses the issue of the stock overhang. As you can see from previous cycles, once this overhang starts falling, then prices start to rise."

 2015 Latin One. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Norovirus Definition, Signs & Treatment: Bellevue Maggiano Closed by Health Officials due to Possible Outbreak

media@latinoshealth.com By Staff Reporter Jan 27, 2016 05:30 AM EST

Norovirus continues to make headlines, as another case broke out in Bellevue, Washington, The Seattle Times reports. A Maggianos Little Italy restaurant in Bellevue has been closed by health authorities after a suspected outbreak of norovirus food poisoning occurred, victimizing 50 people at a private event held on Jan. 18.

According to health officials, several workers were already showing symptoms of norovirus, however, test results have not yet confirmed this.

Norovirus is a contagious virus which can be picked up from an infected person, contaminated food or water, or contact with contaminated surfaces, CDC reports. The virus then causes inflammation of the stomach or intestines, or both, often called acute gastroenteritis. Symptoms include stomach pains, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. Every year, about 19 to 21 million illnesses and about 56,000 to 71,000 hospitalizations are linked to norovirus, which is also known as stomach flu or winter vomiting disease.

According to The Compton Herald, there is also an increase in norovirus cases in California. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) confirmed 32 cases in the state since Oct. 1, 2015, most likely leading to numerous reported illnesses across California.

"One of the most important things you can do to avoid norovirus and other illnesses this winter season is to wash your hands frequently with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds," CDPH Health Director and State Public Health Officer Dr. Karen Smith recommended. "This is especially important after using the bathroom, changing diapers, and before preparing or eating food. Hand sanitizers are not effective against norovirus."

Aside from frequent hand washing, safe food handling practices are also highly recommended. Health authorities encourage thorough washing of fruits and vegetables, and cleaning and disinfecting food preparation tools and equipment, kitchen surfaces, and cooking all meats, fish, and poultry well.

According to WebMD, norovirus does not respond to antibiotics that kill bacteria, and there is no antiviral drug that can currently treat noroviruses. Instead, those who contract the virus are encouraged to consume a lot of liquids to prevent dehydration. Children are recommended to be given oral rehydration solution to replace lost fluids and electrolytes, and to avoid sugary drinks, which worsens diarrhea, and caffeinated drinks, which contributes to dehydration.

Last December, a new strain of norovirus hit Minnesota, and the Minnesota Department of Health warned against this new strain called GII.17 Kawasaki, which first broke out early 2015.

"Every few years, a new strain of norovirus emerges and causes many illnesses. We dont know yet if this new strain will lead to an increase in the number of outbreaks reported, but it could. If were meticulous about washing our hands and handling food properly, we may be able to limit the impact," foodborne disease epidemiologist at MDH Amy Saupe explained. "Norovirus tends to hit especially hard during the winter season, so now is a good time to get in the handwashing and norovirus prevention habit."

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Alzheimer's Disease Possibly Transmittable: Study

media@latinoshealth.com By Staff Writer Jan 27, 2016 05:30 AM EST

A new research provides evidence that Alzheimer's could possibly be a transmittable disease.

Researchers from the University of Zurich and Medical University Vienna found that patients who have received brain grafts of dura mater from donor cadavers died later from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Dura mater is a membrane that envelops the brain and spinal cord and it is a mandatory procedure given to patients to let their brains repair after undergoing surgery.

CJD is a degenerative brain condition that progresses to dementia and then death. According to Mayo Clinic, the disease resembles other brain disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease, but CJD is more progressive.

Researchers defined Alzheimer's disease as "progressive dementia" with "brain plaques consisting of the A protein." While it was widely known that it is not a transmissible disease, they found that they found more plaques in mice when they injected them with plaques taken from brains of Alzheimer's patients.

The autopsies were detailed in the Swiss Medical Weekly.In their autopsies, lead researcher Karl Frontzek and colleagues found A plaques in 5 of 7 brains in younger patients who received dura mater grafts who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The plaques were found to be higher in brains who received the graft than those who did not undergo the procedure, according to the researchers via EurekAlert.

"Further studies will be needed to elucidate whether such pathology resulted from the seeding of A aggregates from the grafts to host tissues," the researchers said, as noted by Daily Mail.

"Whilst the iatrogenic transmission of aggregated A is one of several possible explanations for the findings reported here, the growing circumstantial evidence for such transmission should prompt a critical re-evaluation of the decontamination procedures for surgical instruments and drugs of biological origin, with the goal to ensure the complete absence of potentially transmissible contaminants."

This is the second case which provides evidence that Alzheimer's may be transmissible. In the article published in the journal Nature, a September study by University College London scientists found that in the autopsies eight young patients who died of CJD after receiving grafts have amyloid plaques in their brains and blood vessels.

The article notes that the studies did not imply that Alzheimer's can be passed on through normal human physical contact. However, if the theory of amyloid seeding being transmissible was true then surgical instruments used in the brain might become infected as standard sterilization cannot remove the stick amyloid- proteins.

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Gun Violence a Mental Illness? Experts Say 'Not Necessarily'

media@latinoshealth.com By Staff Writer Jan 27, 2016 05:30 AM EST

In trying to determine the connection between gun violence and mental illness, health experts say that the two are not necessarily linked.

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama presented new actions with regards to reducing gun violence in the country. According to the White House press release, more than 100,000 Americans have been fatally wounded by gun violence, while many more have been exposed to other gun crimes including robberies and assault.

In order to reduce gun violence, the President and Vice President are proposing to improve the guns laws through enhancing background checks, increasing mental health treatment, and improving gun safety mechanisms.

There is a certain way with how gun violence is presented by the media. According to CNN, the media spins mass shootings and gun-related tragedies as done by individuals with severe mental illness.

However, the outlet cites a research from last year about the assumption the mental illness causes gun violence, only a small portion of mentally ill people are three times more likely to be violent on themselves and others. Specifically, those with schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder only commit about 4 percent of firearm homicides in the country.

The research which was posted on National Institutes of Health cites three more assumptions about gun violence and mental health illness. It includes the assumption that a psychiatric diagnosis can predict the tendency of gun violence among individuals, mentally ill loners are to be feared as they may cause mass shootings and gun control cannot prevent mass shooters due to their psychiatric histories.

However, when it comes to suicides, CNN reports that it accounts 61% of firearm fatalities in the US in 2014 as recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Professor Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina told International Business Times that the new rules contain "mixed messages."

Swanson told the outlet that the rule may fail to protect people at risk for suicide as it is too "broad and narrow."

"Lots of people with depression, mood disorders with a high risk of suicide don't get involuntarily committed. They're not prohibited persons," he said. "Lots of people who are at risk aren't even going to be susceptible to this policy."

Yahoo reports that the new gun control rules could mean better mental health progress and easier access to it. However, it would also perpetuate the perception that mental illness causes mass murders and violence.

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Zika Virus Update: Costa Rica Confirms First Case in the Country; Rio Olympics Affected?

media@latinoshealth.com By Staff Writer Jan 27, 2016 05:30 AM EST

Costa Rica health officials confirmed that there is a first known case of the Zika virus in the country.

According to the country's health ministry, a 25-year-old man was diagnosed with the virus as he contracted it while on a trip in Colombia. Tico Times reports that the patient exhibited the known symptoms of the virus on Jan. 22 before returning to the country on Jan. 23.

He showed signs of muscle and joint pain, headaches, malaise, skin rashes, fever and conjunctivitis. The man then brought himself to a Costa Rican hospital on Jan. 24. The health officials had the man's bedroom fumigated and assessed neighbors that may have had contact and exhibiting the same symptoms as precaution.

According to the World Health Organization, the Zika virus is spread by the same mosquito that carries dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. There is currently no treatment and vaccine against the virus as most cases are mild and require no treatment. Furthermore, it cannot be spread from human to human. The best prevention is to protect oneself from mosquito bites.

The virus is linked to a wave of birth defects in Brazil. Babies whose mothers may have been infected by the virus have unusually small heads according to their research, according to US & World Report News.

Due to the outbreak of Zika, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published a travel advisory on pregnant women postponing their travel plans to mostly Latin American countries affected by the virus. This includes countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay, Panama, Haiti, Guyanam, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

With Rio de Janeiro, Brazil hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics in August, the country is saddled with safe-proofing the country from the Zika as they welcome their hundreds of thousands of visitors.

"We are losing the battle in a big way," Brazil's health minister Marcelo Castro told Reuters.

Next month, the country will be celebrating the highly awaited Brazilian Carnival. To prepare, Castro plans to send more than 200,000 troops to help spread awareness about the virus and more than 3,000 health workers have been dispatched across Rio to determine mosquito hot spots so they can eliminate it.

Parade grounds were also sprayed with insecticide especially in places where people will gather for the festivities. They will be keeping a very close eye on the Carnival and Olympic venues during the major events.

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Lower Asthma Risk From Prenatal Vitamin D Unconfirmed But Supplement Isn't a Bad Idea: Experts

media@latinoshealth.com By Staff Reporter Jan 27, 2016 06:29 AM EST

Recent studies have linked vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy to increase cases of asthma in young children. However, two clinical studies published in the January 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reveal that there's no evidence to prove that vitamin D can reduce the risk for asthma in young children.

WebMD reports details on the two studies conducted to establish a link in vitamin D deficiency and an increase in asthma cases among children. A team led by Dr. Hans Bisgaard of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark tracked outcomes of more than 600 pregnancies. Their children were monitored until they were three years old.

Medical Express reports that persistent wheezing was diagnosed during the first three years of life in 47 children in the vitamin D3 group (mothers were given higher levels of vitamin D3 during pregnancy). Meanwhile, the 57 children in the control group developed persistent wheezing despite getting Vitamin D supplement as required during pregnancy.

It was found that taking vitamin D supplements during pregnancy did not decrease the incidence of children developing asthma, chronic wheezing, upper and lower respiratory tract infections or autoimmune skin disorder, according to Bisgaard and his team.

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to increasing rates of childhood asthma in Western nations. There have been speculations that Vitamin D deficiency may affect immune system development of the fetus, increasing the risk for asthma during childhood.

There were also suggestions that a low umbilical cord level of vitamin D during birth is associated with childhood asthma.

The second study included almost 900 pregnant women whose children were considered to have a high risk of developing asthma. Two groups were formed: one taking vitamin D and their prenatal vitamin which also contains vitamin D and the other taking placebo and their prenatal vitamin. The women started taking the vitamins beginning week 10 to week 18 of their pregnancy.

It was found that 24 percent of the children whose mother took higher levels of vitamin D developed asthma or chronic wheezing. Meanwhile, 30 percent developed asthma or chronic wheezing in the other group. According to the researchers, the 6 percent difference is not considered significant.

Dr. Augusto Litonjua of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, lead author of the study, said that further study is needed to fully establish the link between Vitamin D and the risk for asthma during childhood.

However, there is no harm in taking vitamin D during pregnancy. Vitamin D is essential in the development of bones during pregnancy. It also helps the immune system and wound healing.

Know more about vitamin D during pregnancy in the video below:

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College Students are Distracted: Spending a Fifth of Class Time on Devices: Study

media@latinoshealth.com By Ivan Menchavez Jan 27, 2016 06:00 AM EST

Tags digital, devices, Smartphones, Students, distraction

It appears that college students are busier on their digital devices than their actual studies. A new research, published in the Journal of Media Education, revealed that college students are distracted and spending a fifth of class time on gadgets.

Although it is not surprising to know that students nowadays can be seen on their digital devices during break times, the amount of time they spent on these products as suggested by the study is rather shocking.

Students tend to check their smartphones more than 11 times during regular classes. There are about 12 percent of the students, who do email messaging, texting and other nonclassroom activities 30 times a day. Parents must be so concerned how these new technologies, which do not have anything to do with their school work, were able to get much attention from their kids.

Study author Barney McCoy said that technology definitely helps a lot in society.

"Most of us love technology," said McCoy, who is also an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. "And we want it to benefit us. But technology also affords a view that can be distracting."

"So the question now is, how do we balance this out?" the associate professor stated in a report relayed by U.S. News. "How can we take in all the constructive dynamic benefits that this technology enables us to have, and then also be disciplined enough to recognize that there is a time and place to put it aside, and pay attention and stay focused?"

McCoy, who also teaches multimedia and new courses at the University, conducted the study to raise awareness in the abuse of modern technology. He said that the distraction has risen to another level, which gives parents and teachers so much to worry about.

In 2013, 30 percent of the students admitted that they used gadgets 10 times or more during class hours. In 2015, the numbers increase to 34 percent.

What is more concerning is, the total number of students that self-reported to have not used these digital devices for distraction in the past have dropped from eight percent to three percent in the span of two years.

The study stated that texting is the most common form of distraction followed by email messaging, which is at 76 percent. Social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are also common distraction as reported by 70 percent of the respondents.

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GradNation, a campaign aimed at raising the nation's high school graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020, released a data brief highlighting trends among low-income, disabled and minority students.

Graduation rates reached a record-high 82.3 percent in 2014, up nearly one percent from the 2012-13 school year and 10 percentage points from the start of the millennium. Iowa led the way with a 90.5 percent graduation rate, and 28 other states followed by equaling or exceeding the national average.

While researchers found that half of states are on pace to reach GradNation's goal, the rate at which their goal is met slowed to the point that it needs to increase annually by 1.3 percent.

"High school graduation rates continue to climb thanks to the work of millions of students and adults, but low graduation rates for large groups of students still plague all regions of the nation," Robert Balfanz, study co-author and director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said in a statement. "Our goal is a 90 percent graduation rate for all groups of students."

Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, and they have continually exceeded the national rate of improvement since 2011, yet they are not on track to reach 90 percent in four years. In fact, 11 states graduated less than 70 percent of Latinos; the gap between Latino and White students stands at 10.9 percent, down slightly from 11.4 percent in 2013. African-Americans and Caucasians have a bigger gap to bridge with a difference of 15.9 percentage points.

"These numbers tell a cautionary story of tremendous progress and sobering challenge," added John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises, also a co-author. "Yes, we are making national progress, but too many students are being left behind in today's economy. Without a high school diploma, they won't have a chance at the American dream."

Whereas growing up in low-income neighborhoods used to deter Latinos from graduating, the number of students dropping out from low-performing schools has declined.

Nationwide, there are about 1,000 "dropout factories," or schools where the 12th grade enrollment rate is 60 percent less than the enrollment rate of when the students were freshmen. Just one year ago there were 1,200 "dropout factories" affecting over a million students; in 2002, more than 2,500 schools saw 2.5 million drop out.

GradNation's most recent study found that number to fall below one million for the first time, though it disproportionately includes Latinos and African-Americans.

"Of the roughly 924,000 students in low-graduation-rate high schools, 65 percent were low-income and 63 percent African-American or Hispanic/Latino," researchers wrote. "It is clear these schools and students need greater support to improve and become places where graduation is the norm."
The rumor mill is running at full steam. The Mobile World Congress 2016 is just weeks away now, and Samsung is expected to kick the proceedings off in Barcelona, Spain by unveiling the company's flagship smartphone for this year. Here's the roundup of what Samsung watchers are expecting in the new Samsung Galaxy S7.

Name, Unveil Date & Release Date

First of all, the basics: All signs point to Samsung sticking with convention and naming its 2016 flagship smartphone the Galaxy S7. It's also more than likely that the company will launch an "edge" variant of the Galaxy S7, along with the "plus" size variants.

The unveiling is also likely to follow a predictable pattern. Last year Samsung showed off the Galaxy S6 at Mobile World Congress 2015, and this year's trade show is heavily rumored to provide a similar stage for the company's follow-up.

Release dates are a little trickier, but according to SamMobile, the most likely scenario, considering Mobile World Congress 2016 will take place a few weeks earlier than last year, in mid-February, is that Samsung will move up the Galaxy S7's release date in the U.S. and other launch markets accordingly.

So instead of a March unveiling and April release date, we'll probably see the Samsung Galaxy S7 unveiled in February and released in March.

Display, Specs & Features

The rumors get a lot more speculative when it comes to the specific details of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7, though not due to a lack of ostensible information leaked online.

Leaks of supposed factory images, spec sheets, listings, and benchmarks have been flooding the Internet in recent weeks, providing a plethora of often contradicting details on the 2016 flagship. Part of this may be explained by Samsung's prototyping process, which this year reportedly covers a lot wider and more varied set of possible hardware specifications.

Perhaps the most likely hardware rumor has the Korean smartphone giant re-introducing the microSD card slot, whose removal from the Galaxy S6 caused uproar among diehard fans.

However, the Galaxy S7's design will still be closer to the premium-built Galaxy S6 than any prior Samsung handset, though water and dust resistance looks like it's making a comeback this year, harkening back to the Samsung Galaxy S5.

Meanwhile, many other specs for the Galaxy S7 are up in the air. There's evidence for a Samsung Galaxy S7 sporting a 5.1-inch display, but also evidence that the Galaxy S7 Edge will be at 5.5-inches.

Could Samsung have two different display sizes for the flagship and edge variant? Sure, but it's also very possible one (or both) of those leaks is wrong.

For the camera, an iteration of Samsung's 16-megapixel shooter from the Galaxy S6 is rumored, but so is a 12-megapixel rear camera with a larger sensor size and f/1.7 aperture for better low-light photography.

There's one piece of Galaxy S7 hardware that doesn't need leaks or rumors, due to the nature of Samsung's chip production business and recent manufacturing partnership with Qualcomm.

The Galaxy S7 will definitely sport Samsung's latest Exynos 8 system on a chip (SoC) for the Korean market and elsewhere, while the U.S. variant of the Galaxy S7 will almost certainly be powered by the (now) Samsung-manufactured Qualcomm Snapdragon 820.
The threat of Republican front-runner Donald Trump becoming president has motivated Latin American immigrants nationwide to pursue full citizenship.

The Guardian reports this "naturalization blitz" will involve a campaign to help assist Latino Americans who are legal permanent American residents to upgrade their immigration status. This will allow them to register to vote, and help ensure Trump never reaches the White House.

The movement was sparked in retaliation to the presidential candidate's harsh rhetoric concerning undocumented immigrants, and Latinos in general. Throughout his campaign, the businessman has referred to Mexican Americans as rapists and criminals, and has proposed building a wall along the border of the U.S. and Mexico.

"Our messaging will be very sharply tied to the political moment, urging immigrants and Latinos to respond to hate with political action and power," said Maria Ponce, member of the immigration rights organization iAmerica Action.

The campaign will kickoff in California, Nevada, Colorado and Texas, where citizenship clinics will host workshops for legal permanent residents. Attendees will be provided with the necessary paperwork, legal consultation and, in some circumstances, financial aid to cover the $680 application fee.

Over 300 legal residents plan to attend one of the upcoming workshops in Las Vegas this weekend. With Nevada being one of the first early voting states to boast a large Latino population, organizers and advocacy groups hope to make a large impact on the election there.

"This is a big deal," said Jocelyn Sida of partner group Mi Familia Vota. "We as Latinos are always being told that we're taking jobs or we're anchor babies, and all these things are very hurtful. It's getting to the point where folks are frustrated with that type of rhetoric. They realize the only way they can stop this is by getting involved civically."

Among the 8.8 million legal permanent residents in the U.S., nearly 90,000 live in Nevada. Many have neglected to pursue citizenship, but Trump's ignorant comments and political agenda have spurred people to action.

"It's not just the Donald Trump situation," Sida added. "Mostly, it's just not wanting to be suppressed anymore. They want to elect people who are going to propose a good pathway to citizenship, a good pathway for education and healthcare, a good pathway for a better life here in America. They want to have that voice."

Must Read: Engaging, Amplifying Latino Voices for Iowa Caucus 2016
Voters in the crucial early primary state of New Hampshire list immigration as one of their top concerns, and Republican presidential hopefuls have been busy addressing the issue at campaign rallies across the Granite State.

Given that New Hampshire is far removed from the porous U.S.-Mexico border and home to only about 10,000 of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, the focus on the problem may be surprising, The Associated Press noted. But Bob Belanger, a voter who recently challenged Marco Rubio on the subject, told the newswire that the issue has an effect on citizens all across the nation.

'We Are All Immigrants, for Crying out Loud'

Belanger's top concerns had to do with the threat of terrorism and the effect undocumented immigrant workers might have on driving down wages and benefits, he explained.

"We just want to know who's coming in the front door of our country; that's all," Belanger noted. "Whether it's roofers or whether it's welders, it affects me even when they are in Texas or California; we are in a global economy."

But Belanger insisted that his views and those of other GOP supporters in New Hampshire, whose Hispanic population is only about 3.3 percent, should not be misinterpreted.

"People tend to think that we are anti-immigrant, but we're not," he insisted. "We are all immigrants, for crying out loud."

Ted Cruz Hammers Donald Trump on Immigration

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz, on Jan. 25, again spoke on the issue at a New Hampshire rally, according to Fox News. The Texas senator used the opportunity to attack his main rival, GOP front-runner Donald Trump, who kicked off his campaign with controversial comments on immigration.

"If you didn't stand up and fight amnesty, when the stakes were live or die, do we lose this permanently or do we win, I would suggest as voters you have reasons to doubt the credibility of the promises of a political candidate who discovers the issue after he announces for president," Cruz noted in remarks directed at the real estate tycoon turned White House hopeful.
Controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Arpaio & Trump's Support

In a statement from the Trump campaign, Arpaio is recognized as an individual with a hardline stance on immigration, and he traveled to Marshalltown, Iowa, for a rally on Tuesday to show support less than one week before the Iowa caucus.

"Donald Trump is a leader," said Arpaio in a statement. "He produces results and is ready to get tough in order to protect American jobs and families. I have fought on the front lines to prevent illegal immigration. I know Donald Trump will stand with me and countless Americans to secure our border. I am proud to support him as the best candidate for President of the United States of America."

Trump welcomed the Arizona sheriff's endorsement, stating he has great respect for Arpaio.

"We must restore law and order on the border and respect the men and women of our police forces," said Trump. "I thank him for his support of my policies and candidacy for President."

Condemnation in Iowa & Beyond

The police chief of Marshalltown, however, was not pleased with Arpaio's trip and endorsement for Trump.

"Marshalltown has been enriched by the arrival and contributions of immigrants to the community," said police chief Mike Tupper, in a statement via the National Immigration Forum Action Fund. "As a law enforcement agent, the mission of community policing becomes more difficult when immigrant communities feel threatened and victimized. Harmful rhetoric from candidates jeopardizes the relationship that we in law enforcement have worked so hard to develop and maintain. Hyperbole and exaggeration don't advance the conversation. Instead it sets us all back."

The endorsement also brought the attention from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Pablo Manriquez, Hispanic Media Director for the DNC, said the endorsement is another acceptance of dividing Americans, especially in a town such as Marshalltown.

"Today Donald Trump continued his efforts to divide Americans on his way to the GOP nomination by accepting the endorsement of infamous anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Marshalltown, a city with one of the largest Latino populations in Iowa," said Manriquez. "Donald Trump claimed he's a uniter who will bring the country together, but demonizing immigrants and campaigning with divisive figures like Sherriff Joe Arpaio show he's anything but."

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For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Politics Editor Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.
Attorneys representing victims of the Flint water fiasco in a class action lawsuit served Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) with subpoenas on Monday.

The subpoenas call for the release of emails, text messages and other documents sent or received by the Republican governor, his office and emergency managers relating to the Flint River as a water source, reports MLive. The subpoenas seek records dating back to January 2011.

The subpoenas were served as part of civil action over alleged personal injury and physical damages suffered by residents affected by the city's lead-contaminated water supply. They were issued nearly a week after Snyder released almost 300 Flint-related emails and other related correspondence regarding the man-made water crisis. However, critics said the release may have been incomplete.

The governor is also under fire over the way he has been handling the crisis in Flint, a municipality that is predominantly African-American and one of the poorest cities in the nation. As a result, the contents of communications by Snyder and his administration have become a focal point, as critics questioned just how much and for how long he knew about the city's polluted water supply.

The drinking water first became contaminated with lead after one of Snyder's appointees decided to start using the Flint River as a water supply in April 2014 to save money, reported The New York Times. That's when residents raised alarms about their faucet water, which looked like urine and caused skin rashes. However, their cries went ignored for months, and officials told them the water was safe to use for bathing and cooking.

Snyder didn't take action until an independent research study conducted in 2015 found elevated levels of toxic lead in the blood of children in the area. He then decided to switch the water supply from the Flint River back to Lake Huron last October.

Earlier this month, state and local officials announced the deaths of nine people in the Flint area from Legionnaires' disease, which could be another result of the water crisis.

Critics also pointed out that, even though Flint residents were told not to drink the contaminated water starting in October, they are still required to pay for the water. Meanwhile, the city has been sending shutoff notices to those who failed to pay their water bills.
When tax season comes around, the scammers also arrive in full force.

Recently, the Federal Trade Commission received thousands of reports regarding IRS imposters exploiting the phones, as per AJC.com.

Typically, these swindlers allegedly claim they are IRS officials and tell you that you still have taxes that you need to settle. They would also give threats should you not comply with their requests for payment. Some of these threats involve deportation, arrest, business shut down, or license cancellation.

What makes some of these scammers quite convincing is the fact that they know your social security number or, at least, part of it. Also, they can tweak things so that their caller ID makes it appear they really are calling from Washington, D.C. In fact, about 5,000 have fallen victim to this modus since October 2013, according to The Detroit News. The total involved reached $26.5 million, with immigrants and senior citizens pegged as the preferred targets as they are said to be easily intimidated.

"This scam has proven to be the largest of its kind that we have ever seen," revealed Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration J. Russell George. "It is critical that all taxpayers continue to be wary of unsolicited telephone calls and e-mails from individuals claiming to be IRS and Treasury employees."

"If someone unexpectedly calls claiming to be from the IRS and uses threatening language if you do not pay immediately, that is a sign that it is not the IRS calling, and your cue to hang up," he advised.

Meanwhile, Better Business Bureau's Manager of Communications Dottie Callina said that the IRS does not actually call taxpayers, much less threaten them.

If you do receive such a call, the Treasury Department recommended filling out an "IRS impersonation scam" form that can be secured from www.treasurytigta.gov. One can also call officials at (800) 366-4484.

If you suspect you do owe taxes, call the IRS instead at 800-829-1040 or check out its official website. While staff may answer questions regarding your taxes, they do not ask for credit card numbers over the telephone.

Generally, the IRS contacts taxpayers by mail about due taxes, not by phone, text, email, or even social media.

In October last year, the IRS issued an advisory against scammers in the wake of reported incidences of bogus calls about tax debts. However, despite these warnings, "people still readily give out personal data and fall into the traps of these scammers," according to CNBC's Jim Pavia.

WATCH:
Researchers have suspected that the Zika virus could be transmitted via sexual intercourse after they found traces of it in semen samples from a patient.

"It is mainly transmitted through [the] mosquitoes. The Zika virus can also be sexually transmitted, but that's not what usually happens," Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit explained, as per Latin Times. "One issue, however, is that the majority of those infected will never get ill and don't know they're carrying the virus. That makes the sexual transmission a little more likely."

However, he also explained that Zika cannot be acquired in the same way as HIV or Ebola, which was spread via touching or kissing an infected individual as the latter could be transmitted through the air.

"We shouldn't compare Zika with HIV or Ebola, so people don't get the wrong idea and spread hysteria by saying Zika is the new HIV," he continued. "Zika is clearly a mosquito virus. It has adapted to mosquitoes and is usually not in contact with humans in its natural environment, the jungle."

"Unlike HIV, it hasn't adapted to humans and to being transmitted from one person to another," he added.

While the evidence showing the possibility of sexual transmission is slim and rather theoretical -- only one patient has been found having an active Zika virus in his semen -- some experts thought this risk was worrying enough to require information dissemination, according to The New York Times.

Dr. Marcio Nehab, a Rio de Janeiro-based infectious disease specialist, said that more research is required to fully establish the theory. He also emphasized that the mosquito itself is a bigger concern right now.

The case that brought the sexual transmission possibility to the spotlight was that of a 44-year-old Tahitian man who caught the virus in 2013, during an outbreak in French Polynesia. French scientists had found high levels of the virus in his semen even after the virus was no longer detected in his blood.

However, an earlier case, as far back as 2008, had also hinted at the possibility that the virus can indeed be acquired via sexual intercourse. It involved a Colorado State University biologist who returned to the U.S. from Senegal unknowingly infected with Zika.

A week after Dr. Brian D. Foy returned, he showed symptoms of the illness. His wife, who had never left the U.S., followed suit a couple of days afterwards. However, their children did not get infected. They were able to recover from the condition successfully.

Fortunately, Dr. Foy had frozen his blood samples, which were infected with the Zika virus. Later, when another scientist suggested testing for the virus, after getting negative results for dengue, malaria, and yellow fever, the results came back positive.

After evaluating various factors, including the fact that the infected couple did have sex after Dr. Foy came back, it appeared that the sexual contact influenced the transmission of the virus to his spouse.

Dr. Foy is said to be attempting to get funding to enable him to research this phenomenon.

"If I was a man and I got Zika symptoms, I'd wait a couple of months before having unprotected sex," recommended Institute for Human Infections and Immunity's Scott Weaver, who is also an expert on the Zika virus. "If my wife was of childbearing age, I'd want to use protection, certainly for a few weeks."

WATCH:
The U.S. government has started the research to find a vaccine for the Zika virus that is spreading like wildfire in Latin America. The said virus has already reached the Northern Hemisphere. President Barack Obama called a meeting on Tuesday with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) at The White House, per the Associated Press.

Obama wants to speed their research in order to prevent an even bigger epidemic as well as the proper way to diagnose and treat the mosquito-borne disease. The meeting also tackled the effects of the Zika virus in the U.S. economy and development.

"Zika has been a relatively inconsequential virus as far as we were concerned in the United States or even globally. However, we have been working for some time, intensively and quite successfully, on viruses that are very similar," Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH told TIME.

"Things like this tend not to go away. Cases may go up and down, but it's not just going to go away, so you need to start working on a vaccine now. It may be important in a year from now or six months from now, we don't know," he added.

The Zika virus has been linked with microcephaly, a rare birth defect in newborn babies where the brain fails to properly develop resulting to a small, deformed head. According to FOX News, Brazil has the most number of cases of microcephaly with over 3,500 since the outbreak in October 2015. The Brazilian government has already started research on a possible vaccine and has continued to find ways to decrease the population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

The New York Times also noted that the Zika virus may also be linked to an increasing number of cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome in Brazil and El Salvador. Guillain-Barre is a rare condition, where the immune system attacks the nervous system leaving the victim paralyzed and eventually leading to death in some cases.

The CDC has already issued a travel warning for pregnant women that are planning or scheduled to travel to 25 countries and territories in the Americas, Caribbean Islands, Pacific Islands and Africa confirmed with Zika virus cases. The list of areas includes Barbados, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Saint Martin, Samoa, Suriname, U.S. Virgin Islands and Venezuela.

The virus originated from the Zika Forest in Uganda, Africa where a monkey was diagnosed with yellow fever in 1947. Since its discovery, confirmed cases were rare until 2007 when an outbreak hit many islands in the Pacific including the Cook Islands, Easter Island, Micronesia, New Caledonia, Polynesia and Yap Island, per ZikaVirus.net.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned people about the impending disaster when they unveiled that "Doomsday Clock" on Tuesday. The clock counts down to the worldwide catastrophe that will happen in the future due to various reasons like tensions between nations, nuclear testing and climate change, per the Associated Press.

The "Doomsday Clock" is three minutes close to midnight where midnight marks the start of the apocalypse. The last time the minutes were three minutes before midnight was back in 1984 during the Cold War while it reached two-minutes-to-midnight in 1953 when the United States and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs.

"Unless we change the way we think, humanity remains in serious danger," Lawrence Krauss, Chairman of the Board of Sponsors said.

Krauss added that the newly implemented nuclear agreement with Iran and the Paris climate change treaty are a good start, but there are several factors that are still capable of overpowering these measures. He listed the ongoing tension between India and Pakistan, North Korea's nuclear testing and the lack of concrete actions to lessen the amount of emitted greenhouse gasses.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry noted that the threat of a nuclear war is far serious at the present day while former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz suggested the need for the U.S. to take on Russia and China.

However, Skeptic Magazine's Michael Shermer has described the "Doomsday Clock" as cynical and just a public relations move since it started. Shermer is not the only skeptic of the metaphorical clock as former TIME writer Michael D. Lemonick also is not a fan.

"Whenever Doomsday Clock time rolls around, I roll my eyes, because the Clock doesn't actually gauge anything measurable. The various threats the Clock concerns itself with nuclear war and climate change are the biggies have completely different timescales. It's more truthiness than truth," Lemonick wrote in the Scientific American.

"The Doomsday Clock is anything more than an excuse for concerned scientists to remind us about the dangerous technology we've created. Let us not pretend, however, that these threats can actually be measured in any meaningful way," he added.

According to the official website of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the "Doomsday Clock" is designed to show how close the human race is in destroying the world by the things he created. It recognizes nuclear weapons, climate change, biotechnology and emerging technologies as the trigger that will start the downfall of civilization. The clock was created in 1947 by scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project.
A tongue-in-cheek statement issued by Fox News Tuesday afternoon had a cascading effect on the network's upcoming Republican presidential debate, first by causing Party front-runner Donald Trump to bow out and then by preparing a second statement condemning his rhetoric.

Earlier in the day, Trump threatened to skip Thursday's debate -- scheduled less than a week before Iowa caucuses - citing Fox News anchors "biased" line of questioning during a presidential primary in August. Trump asserted that the network's ratings would tank without his participation before issuing a statement saying he "doesn't play games" and won't be toyed with, specifically singling out Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes.

A network spokesman issued the first statement soon after, wryly setting up a scenario where Trump was conducing Twitter polls in the Oval Office.

"We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president - a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings," the statement read.

The long-simmering feud between the real estate mogul and the right-leaning cable giant reached its climax. Trump official announced his decision to skip the debate, instead courting other networks for an alternative televised Iowa event; one where he will raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project.



In speaking with CNN, Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski quipped that "Fox will go from probably having 24 million viewers to about two million."

Late Tuesday night, Fox News offered a second, stern rebuttal.

"Donald Trump is refusing to debate seven of his fellow presidential candidates on stage (Thursday) night, which is near unprecedented," the statement said. "We're not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing - Megyn Kelly."

It went on to say that giving into Trump's ultimatums would violate all journalistic standards, as do threats levied by his campaign manager.

"We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees," the statement continued. "Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly...but he can't dictate the moderators or their questions."

Trump, who initially mused an independent run, continues to put a distance between himself and establishment Republicans.

Last weekend, he called conservative publication the National Review a "dead magazine" after some of the Party's most prominent voices wrote scathing editorials about his campaign; Trump said the 22 essayists are "mostly losers."

More than 40 percent of Republican voters nationwide still back Trump, according to a recent CNN/ORC Poll taken between Jan 21-24. Whether his attack on Fox News has an impact remains to be seen.
Autopsy reports have indicated that Jessica Lewis Colker, the 39-year-old American tourist who was killed in the Caribbean island of Grenada last Sunday, died due to extensive skull fracture and asphyxia, according to Now Grenada, a local publication.

Initial reports of the fatal incident involved a man allegedly brandishing a cutlass, or in some reports, a machete, attacking the couple as they were taking a leisurely stroll in a deserted part of La Sagesse Beach, which is located in the town of St. David.

As of writing, however, AJC News stated that Grenada authorities are still quite tight-lipped about the specifics of the tragic incident. However, a police spokeswoman did assure the media that the woman did not die after being attacked by a bladed weapon.

"No, no there was no machete involved," the police spokeswoman said, referring to the recently-conducted autopsy.

Her husband, 62-year-old Brian Melito, escaped the fatal attack. By the time he came back with help, however, his wife had already been murdered and her killer had already left the scene.

Police have stated that they are not considering Melito as a suspect in the case.

A man claiming to be the one behind the fatal attack turned himself into the police on Monday morning, however. Identified as ex-convict David Martin Benjamin, he had previously received a 7-year prison sentence due to charges of rape and carnal knowledge, reported FOX News.

He never finished his prison sentence, however, as he was set free for good behavior and after actively participating in a prison program that was aimed at the reformation of incarcerated men.

Prior to his conviction, he also served prison time for robbery, grievous harm, as well as other offenses.

Despite his admittance to the crime, however, Benjamin is yet to be charged with Colker's murder.

Colker had worked as a physician's assistant who worked with anesthesiologists at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Her husband also works as a physician.

Sarah Greene, and neighbor and friend of the victim, stated that both Colker and her husband were avid travelers. After meeting in Costa Rica, they were married in 2014. Prior to the fatal trip, Greene stated that she and her husband were planning a Valentine's Day benefit to help refugees entering the country.

"She was beautiful, alive and vibrant, and she really loved to dance That was her passion. That was how we met several years ago, before she moved here, next door," she said.

The United States Embassy in Barbados has stated that a full-scale investigation has been initiated, and that the embassy is working closely with authorities to solve the crime.
Almost two years after a controversial bid by the country's politicians to auction off part of the Amazon Rainforest to Chinese oil drilling companies, the it seems like the deal is finally about to get finalized, according to The Business Insider.

If the deal does go through, China would be free to exploit about 3 million of the country's 8.1 million hectares of pure, untouched Amazonian rainforest. The region has remained pristine despite the advent of industrialization, until now.

Areas of the Amazon are widely believed to carry vast deposits of oil, one of the global market's primary commodities. With China growing at an unprecedented pace, its acquisition of the Amazonian rainforest would, of course, enable the Asian giant to access more resources.

Of course, such a move carries undeniable consequences, most of all being the obvious negative effects on the Amazon's ecosystem. Ecuador, most especially the millions of hectares of pure rainforest, is extremely biodiverse and is widely thought to hold species of animals that are probably yet to be discovered.

However, such biodiversity is also extremely delicate; thus, the oil exploration activities of China might very well compromise its balance.

Axis of Logic stated that the sale of parts of the Amazon was met with much criticism, especially from the indigenous groups who consider the land their home. A previous court ruling has also granted them the right to veto any projects that might involve the environment.

In a nutshell, the court ruling stated that their consent is needed before the rainforest could be touched.

Narcisa Mashienta, one of the leaders of Ecuador's Shuar people, has stated that her people, as well as the other indigenous groups residing in the area, are sternly refusing the intended exploitation of the forest.

"They have not consulted us, and we're here to tell the big investors that they don't have our permission to exploit our land," she said.

With Ecuador's current financial troubles, however, groups such as the Shuar people might not have a choice. Avid environmentalist and human rights and campaigner Adam Zuckerman of the California-based NGO Amazon Watch, believes that China might have left Ecuador with no choice, reported The People's Voice.

"My understanding is that this is more of a debt issue. It's because the Ecuadoreans are so dependent on the Chinese to finance their development that they're willing to compromise in other areas such as social and environmental regulations," he said.

China has been loaning Ecuador billions of dollars since 2009 in exchange for oil shipments. The Asian superpower has also helped the country fund its most ambitious hydroelectric infrastructure projects. As of last summer, Ecuador owned China $7 billion, which is more than a tenth of the country's GDP.
The long-standing rift between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) might eventually see its end after the two sides requested an intervention from the UN Security Council. According to the Telegraph, the "political mission" that they wanted to establish had been greatly supported by the UN and has immediately ordered UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to make the preparations.

The secretary-general will be responsible in submitting all the important details of the peace talk including its scope, mandate and overall operational aspect. The peace talk between the FARC and the Colombian government will be assisted by the UN through "unarmed international observers."

The mandate is said to be valid for 12 months wherein observation as well as the supervision of ceasefire and cease on hostilities will be carefully monitored. Colombian President Juan Manuel said "The Security Council's decision means we are no longer going alone, but hand in hand with the UN, the entire world, towards the end of this war.

According to BBC, the peace agreement is expected to be signed by March 23, but it was as early as September last year when Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC Chief Timoleon Jimenez expressed their desire to settle the agreement in six months.

The Colombia-FARC conflict is also known to be one of the longest armed conflict. Since November 2012, negotiators between the Colombian government and the FARC reached several agreements including the rebels' right to participate on political issues, transitional justice, drug trafficking and land rights.

Out of the six agreements, the issue of disarmament remains unresolved citing the time when it will also take effect once agreed.

British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said, "It isn't common for a country to refer itself to the council, but it's exactly the kind of role the United Nations should be playing. I hope today will mark the start of the final stage of peace talks."

US Ambassador Amanda Power, on the other hand, believes that the integration of settled issues such as the land mine removal and the presence of guerrillas in the town should also be mandated.

On her official Twitter account, Power expressed her support to the Colombian government saying, "UNSC just passed res for UN observers to support Colombia's peace efforts, standing w/Colombians on path to peace after >50yrs of conflict."
It's impossible to imagine the famed Niagara Falls as anything less than spectacular, but the waterfalls will soon be "turned off" to begin the replacement of the bridges connecting the U.S. mainland to the Goat Island.

According to a report from CNN, a report from the New York State's park and transportation agencies included a proposal to build new bridges in the place of the two existing 115-year-old ones. In order to make the operations safe and effective, the American Falls would need to be "dewatered" by redirecting the entire Niagara River flow to Horseshoe Falls, which is on the Canadian side of the border.

"Dewatering is necessary for two reasons," the report explained. "The existing 115-year old bridges need to be demolished. The river channel must be dewatered in order to demolish and remove the bridges. [And] the piers and abutments for the replacement bridges must be constructed 'in the dry,' to allow for safe construction procedures and to ensure that the new foundations are firmly anchored to bedrock."

One industry that is expected to take a hit in the upcoming project is tourism, as the Niagara Falls welcomes over 20 million tourists every year. However, while it might be disappointing to see the hotspot all dried up, officials are confident the unique sight is a novelty and will attract a good chunk of visitors who want to take a glimpse of the bare rock formations underneath the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls.

John Percy, CEO of the Niagara Tourism & Convention Corporation, called the event "an exciting -- even an enormous -- marketing opportunity for us."

The state report said, "Dewatering is expected initially be a tourism draw (a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the falls and river channel without water), but after some period of time could negatively impact park attendance, particularly during the summer tourist season."

According to a report from National Post, the project is still in the proposal stage and a few years away. Different suggestions were included in the report including one that requires five months of dewatering the waterfalls (August to December) and another that would leave it dry for nine months (April to December).

The replacement of the bridges had been in discussion for over a decade after the extent of its deterioration was discovered. Currently, there are temporary bridges constructed for pedestrians and bicycles, but the original structures are still in decline.

The entire project will cost around $24 million. A public hearing is set on Jan. 27, Wednesday, at the Niagara Falls Convention Center, the publication reports.
The San Antonio campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) was recently approved to provide GED exams. UNAM became the first Mexican university and only non-US institution allowed to offer such exams after it obtained certification in December 2015.

Fox News Latino revealed that Oscar Bocanegra, coordinator of General Educational Development (GED) certification at UNAM San Antonio, shared the news of the universitys approval. The full accreditation was given by the Commission on English Language Accreditation (CEA).

As a result, the US Department of Education will recognize UNAM as an institution of higher learning. Bocanegra added that the new achievement will make students feel more comfortable inside the university since they can take both the course and GED exam in the same location. Students no longer have to travel long distances or deal with unknown persons.

The UNAM website stated that their mission is to support the success of Mexicans in the US by developing linguistic and cultural competencies. SA Current wrote that UNAM offers both English and Spanish classes, courses and workshops covering various topics regarding US and Mexico. There are also courses for teenagers available in the summer.

In the US, the great majority of school districts offer certification, normally in English and Spanish, but we are the first Spanish-language institution that not only gives classes but also gives examinations totally in Spanish, Bocanegra said.

The course is offered in Spanish and covers 132 classroom hours and is made up of four academic subjects, namely reading, social sciences, natural sciences and math. Some of the students looking to take and pass the GED tests were actually able to complete their high school education in their countries of origin.

Based on the same Fox News Latino report, Verna Pena Vera, 40, came from Coahuila, Mexico, and has a masters degree in bilingual education. She has been teaching for almost two decades before transferring to the United States late in 2015. She said that she had to leave Mexico due to the violence and hope to begin working again as a teacher in any educational center.

Maria de Jesus Roiz Esparza, 64, plans to improve her educational background by acquiring a high school equivalency certificate at UNAM. She is among the hundreds of students who started the GED course provided by UNAM in Spanish. Unlike Vera, she was not able to finish high school. Esparza can also take the exam required by the US Department of Education for the GED.

More updates and details on UNAM are expected soon.
After heading the longest-running act of peaceful protest demonstrated in the U.S. history for decades, Concepcion Picciotto died at a housing facility operated by N Street Village in Washington at the age of 80.

Since 1981, Picciotto has started doing her vigil as she took a stand against the U.S.'s willingness to approve the use of nuclear weapons and support other nations with the same outlook. Her vigil was set up in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House with only a barrage of different protest posters, signs and tent. Two of her signage are those that read, "Live by the bomb die by the bomb" and "Ban all nuclear weapons or have a nice doomsday."

When Jonathan Karl, a correspondent of ABC News, asked Picciotto why she keeps on doing this vigil and constantly stands for what she believes in, she answered, "Because nobody will do it. Nobody will stand up."

In 2005, Picciotto told DCist that what inspired her to protest were the government's "corruption" and her desire to rail against nuclear weapons.

"Corruption. I used to live in New York, and something happened to me that opened my eyes to the reality of what this nation is doing, the government. And that is why I am here," Concepcion Picciotto said.

During her peaceful vigils, Picciotto would often spend her days inside a tent wearing a helmet, headscarf and wig to keep her head away from the effects of radio waves.

Before she was hit by a car in 2012, Picciotto used to give all of her time protesting and would only take a break to bath or to use the bathroom. But after the incident, her body grew weaker that she started to rely heavily on the younger members of the group.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Delegate to the U.S. Congress representing the District of Columbia, described Picciotto as "the living symbol for staying with a principled cause, such as nuclear non-proliferation and peace, until it is achieved, even when others grow tired."

Norton also shared in a statement last Tuesday how she was inspired by the extraordinary life of Picciotto. "At a time when people ask me whether I think we will ever achieve statehood, I think of extraordinary activists like Picciotto, who recognized that there is no progress without activism."

Meanwhile N Street Village is still yet to respond with the request for an interview. Picciotto's cause of death is still unknown.
"Millionaire rides" have been a very big issue in Bogota, the capital of Colombia. No wonder why hailing a taxi from the streets can be very difficult and even be risky.

But a new innovation of technology has entered the market creating a huge change in the Colombian history. With just a matter of clicks using a smartphone, the Tappsi App will now let its users experience a hassle-free ride without the risk of getting robbed or even lose his life.

"Usually you have to hail off the street or wait on the phone with an operator to get a taxi. With our free app, GPS tells the nearest taxi driver exactly where you are and there are other features that make it safer for both driver and passenger," said Juan Salcedo, the the co-CEO of Tappsi Company.

Founded by Salcedo and his co-CEO Andres Gutierrez, the Tappsi Company was built not just to provide service but also to deliver safety. It uses its own protocol and security filters to screen the credibility and trustworthiness of every driver. The app also features a secure chat function where passengers and drivers can converse without the need to talk privately. That way, friends and families will never have to worry because of how easy they can track their love one's taxi.

The Tappsi Company has garnered the trust of its users since it was launched in 2012. The app has even expanded to other Latin markets like that of Ecuador and Peru. It has also been featured as the 6th World's Top Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Latin America listed by the Fast Company. Recently, Tappsi app has now more than one million users.

In 2013, the issue about the "millionaire rides" has gained an international spotlight when a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agent was killed after a Bogota gang was unable to get anything from him. The gang confessed that aside from killing Terry Watson on Jun. 20 in Bogota, they have also robbed at least 50 victims under the influence of drugs.

According to Colombia Reports, "millionaire rides" are a form robbery "where victims hail a cab off the street only to find instead of going to their destination, the cab picks up more passengers wielding guns, tasers or knives." Then the victims will be taken to the nearest ATM to withdraw money from their account using their debit and credit cards.
A nearly month-long standoff came to a deadly end late Tuesday when Oregon state and federal officials confronted several memberss of an armed anti-government group that had taken over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in protest, killing at least one man.

According to Oregon Live, the dead man has been identified as 55-year-old Robert Lavoy Finicum of Arizona. He often served as the face of the three week occupation and was considered the spokesperson for group leader Ammon Bundy.

Bundy was among several protesters taken into custody as part of an "enforcement action" as they drove from the Harney County Building to a nearby meeting. He now faces charges of conspiracy to impede or injure an officer through the use of force, intimidation or threats. The charge is a felony and carries a maximum sentence of six-years behind bars and fines.

In all, as many as seven people have now been arrested. One of the other men arrested, Bundy's 43-year-old brother, Ryan, of Bunkerville, Nevada, suffered a minor gunshot wound during a highway stop coordinated by FBI and Oregon State Police.

Ammon Bundy and his followers took over the building on Jan. 2 in protest after two local ranchers were sent to federal prison on arson charges. The group had vowed not to leave until they were released.

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, a longtime loyal supporter of the Bundy family, later claimed Ammon Bundy told his wife that Finicum had been cooperating with law enforcement when he had his hands up yet was shot three times.

Several other sources are already disputing those allegations, insisting that Finicium and Ryan Bundy both disobeyed direct orders and were resisting arrest when gunfire erupted.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is now pleading for calm from everyone.

"The situation in Harney County continues to be the subject of a federal investigation that is in progress," she said. "My highest priority is the safety of all Oregonians and their communities."

FBI officials said that they plan to hold a news conference on Wednesday in nearby Burns.

In the hours following the confrontation, protester Jon Ritzheimer, 32, took to Facebook to post a video saying goodbye to his two daughters and seeking financial assistance with legal fees.

"I came home to visit my family," he posted. "The Feds know I am here and are asking me to turn myself in. I need an attorney so I can get back to my girls. Please help my family ... with legal fees. Thank you all in advance."

Reports are Ritzheimer later surrendered to police in his home state of Arizona. He is perhaps best known for leading anti-Islam protests last year in Phoenix and selling anti-Islam T-shirts through an apparel company he owns.

In the midst of the confrontation, the Oregon Department of Transportation closed 56 miles of U.S. 395 between Burns and John Day. The roadway closures extended from Milepost 12, south of Canyon City, to Milepost 68, just outside of Burns.

Thus far, Haney County officials have not indicated where those arrested are being held or when they might be transported to a more permanent jail facility.
Argentina is facing a locust plague the likes of which it is hasn't seen in decades, country officials said Monday.

Argentina's agricultural inspection agency, Senasa, has strengthened efforts to eradicate the insect swarms, but to little avail, The New York Times reports. Within a few days, the locusts may take flight in a massive horde that threatens to destroy the country's crop fields and grasslands.

"It's the worst explosion in the last 60 years," said Senasa's chief of vegetative protection Diego Quiroga to the Times. "It's impossible to eradicate; the plague has already established itself. We're just acting to make sure it's the smallest it can be and does the least damage possible."

Since June of 2015, locust swarms have spread over a region roughly the size of Delaware. Last fall, farmers reported seeing insect clouds four miles long and two miles high, according to a representative from the Rural Confederations of Argentina.

The plague can be blamed on the planet's altering climate. Warmer and wetter seasons in Argentina have resulted in ideal breeding conditions for the insects.

It only takes ten days for a larvae to mature and take flight, and fumigators are finding it impossible to contain the ever-growing plague.

Climate change has increased the threat of locust plagues worldwide. The Food and Agriculture Organization issued a warning in November that rain conditions could generate destructive swarms in northwest Africa and Yemen.

"There is clearly an impact in our country, too. We are definitely being affected," said Quiroga to the Times.

According to National Geographic, locusts are similar to grasshoppers but exhibit unique behavior. When plant life is abundant, the insects enter a behavioral phase which causes them to congregate into large swarms and devour fields.

Enormous swarms can contain between 40 to 80 million locusts in less than half a square mile, and can stretch up to 460 square miles. Each individual locust can eat its own body weight in food in a day, meaning a swarm may consume 423 million pounds of vegetation daily.

Farmers who encounter swarms have been encouraged to call a hotline for help.
The Zika outbreak continues to cause concern around the globe, as an expert decried the lack of information on the virus available in Venezuela. Meanwhile, a Danish hospital confirmed that a tourist had been infected with the disease after visiting South and Central America.

Former Venezuelan Health Minister Jose Felix Oletta told The Associated Press that Zika now constitutes a "public menace." He was concerned that the government of President Nicolas Maduro was not adequately informing citizens about the virus linked to a wave of birth defects.

Felix Oletta urged Maduro to start a national prevention campaign. But the South American country's Ministry of Health this month has even failed to publish the official report on endemic and epidemic diseases, which typically comes out once a week, The AP noted.

Little Risk in Danish Case

In Europe, meanwhile, Danish hospital officials said the case of a patient diagnosed with Zika was not the first time the virus had been detected in the continent, the Danish broadcasting service DR reported. Lars stergaard, a professor of infectious medicine at Aarhus University Hospital, told the channel that the latest occurrence affected a Danish national who had traveled to the Americas.

The unidentified patient, who was diagnosed with the virus on Jan. 27, was running a fever and had a headache and muscle aches, The Associated Press detailed. The hospital sought to reassure the public by saying that there was little risk of Zika spreading in Denmark because Aedes aegypti, the mosquito carrying the virus, is not found in the northern European country.

South American Countries Take Action, U.S. Discourages Travel

Nations across Central and South America, meanwhile, have taken dramatic steps to rein in the outbreak. The government of El Salvador, for example, this week asked its citizens to avoid pregnancies for the next two years because "these mosquitoes exist (in the country) and transmit this disease."

U.S. health officials, for their part, have issued a wide-ranging travel alert for pregnant women, advising them to avoid trips to almost 30 destinations, including Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname and Venezuela; a number of Caribbean islands; as well as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Immigrant rights advocates have called out the Obama administrations inconsistencies towards Central American immigrants fleeing the region.

Rights Violations

In response to the Obama administration's, specifically the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), raids on undocumented immigrants, numerous calls have been made to immediately cease future removals. During a press call on Wednesday morning, Esther Lopez, member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International, spoke about the inadequate human and labor conditions in Honduras and how it's a root cause to the migration crisis.

Lopez said she has met with the Department of Labor in Honduras, who openly reported that 60 percent of Honduran employers violate minimum wage laws -- which is less than $1. She has spoken to union members who have faced death threats and youths who have been deported by the U.S. Lopez disclosed she met with a plane of deportees arriving from the U.S., including 13 to 15 years old, arriving with only the clothing on their back, struggling to wear shoes since officials removed their laces.

"They barely survived the journey north in hopes of protection, only to be sent back to the very dangers they ran from," said Lopez.

"We strongly believe that the inertia of our government to address some of these route causes such as the egregious human and labor violations going on in Honduras today have contributed to the crisis that is going on today," Lopez added. "If our government does not play a constructive role to reinstate rule of law and eliminate rampant human and labor rights protections in Honduras, we are going to continue to have this debate year after year."

Temporary Protection

Oscar Chacon, executive director of Alianza Americas, a Latino immigrant-led organization promoting inclusive and sustainable policies for migrant communities, said the situation in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is a humanitarian crisis, and it's an issue the U.S. has not appropriately responded. Chacon said the deportation raids amount to the contribution of sending people back to their deaths.

"There's no question about the fact that a lot of the people who have come from Central American countries in the last several years have tried to secure legal representation ... to be able to make their cases before immigration judges and frankly in light of the very difficult challenge of ensuring adequate legal representation to everybody, there has also been an increasing call on the Obama administration to consider granting much more class-wide protection in the form of temporary protective status (TPS) or other forms of administrative relief that would not require legal representation on an individual basis," Chacon said.

More than 270 organizations, advocates and politicians have raised the calls for TPS. As Latin Post reported, 275 organizations, varying from civil rights, faith-based, labor rights, humanitarian and legal-based groups, called on DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson to give Guatemalan, Honduran and Salvadorian immigrants, currently in the U.S., with TPS as a result of the growing violence in their native countries.

Homeland Security's Defense on Raids

Johnson, however, defended the deportation campaign, which he confirmed occurred shortly after New Years Day. The DHS secretary said additional raids may occur under his discretion based on existing laws. Johnson disclosed 121 individuals were taken into custody and were in the process to be deported.

Johnson said the raids focused on families or individuals apprehended for illegally crossing the southern U.S. border after May, 1, 2014, were issued final orders of removal by an immigration court, exhausted appropriate legal remedies and have no outstanding appeal or claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief under current U.S. laws.

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For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Politics Editor Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.
Just days before Iowa voters kick off the first-in-the-nation presidential contest, evangelical leaders published an open letter urging 2016 hopefuls to approach the issue of immigration from a stance of compassion and love based on Biblical teachings.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump has made anti-immigrant rhetoric a focal point in his campaign, while Republican candidates like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have taken a hardline stance on immigration reform.

In response, five national evangelical leaders and 32 Iowa signatories sent a message to all the candidates on Wednesday encouraging them to be compassionate towards immigrants and refugees, as guided by Scripture.

"Scripture teaches us that every human being is made in God's image and is endowed with inherent dignity and potential to flourish. All people, including immigrants, deserve respect," reads the letter, which was published on the Des Moines Register's Caucuses page.

"Jesus demonstrated high regard for foreigners in his teaching and actions, and identified himself with the stranger in Matthew 25. We recognize that immigrants can be agents of blessings to their receiving communities as well," it states.

The Christian leaders also say another reason immigrants should be welcomed and treated humanely is because of their contributions to the local economy within the early-voting state.

"In Iowa alone, Asian- and Latino-owned businesses employ thousands and contribute more than $1 billion annually to the economy. Immigrants are also key to the agricultural sector, which makes up more than 25 percent of Iowa's economy," reads the letter.

It goes on to say to describe immigrants as "vital members" of the community.

"Immigrants are not just our co-workers but also our neighbors, friends and members of our church family," the letter reads. "When our immigrant neighbors are attacked with harsh rhetoric, we feel their pain."

In addition, some of the signatories voiced their support for the letter in a statement sent to Latin Post.

Rev. Dr. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said, "Demagoguery or constructive conversations; that is the choice for today's presidential contenders. As it pertains to immigration, Americans will no longer tolerate sound bites. Now is the time for a solution that will protect our borders and values. Now is the time for a Christian conservative prescription; one that stops illegal immigration while integrating those currently here in a manner that reflects the hopes of Ronald Reagan and the conviction of Jack Kemp. Now is the time!"

"The impact of our broken immigration system is something that is near to all of our hearts, as the people directly affected are our neighbors, classmates, students and fellow church members," wrote Shirley Hoogstra, the President of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. "Therefore, we must ensure our leaders understand that as Christians, we are called to both love the stranger and to uphold the law, and so we must work together to find solutions that meet both of these goals."
Mexico's highest court legalized same-sex marriage on Jan. 26 in Jalisco state, which is home to more than 7 million inhabitants and contains the country's second-largest city, Guadalajara.

The Supreme Court ruled the western Mexican state was not permitted to define marriage as the union between one man and one woman, as it had attempted to do through state law, The Associated Press reported. Such a provision would be in violation of the national constitution, the tribunal noted.

Jalisco thus becomes the third state where gay couples will be legally equal to their heterosexual counterparts. Coahuila, in northern Mexico, and Quintana Roo, home to the popular vacation spot Cancun, already allow same-sex marriage, as does the Distrito Federal that surrounds Mexico City.

State Law 'Violated Right to Self-determination'

The court struck down Article 260 of Jalisco's Civil Code, which stated, "To enter into matrimony, the man and the woman need to be at least 16 years of age," underlining that such language was unconstitutional.

"[The article] violated people's [right to] self-determination and every individual's right to the free development of one's personality, in a manner that implicitly created a violation of the principle of equality," the court said in a statement, "because it ordered a different treatment for homosexual couples than for heterosexual couples by preventing couples of the same sex from marrying."

LGBT Advocates Celebrate Decision

Gay rights activists in Guadalajara cheered the ruling, which had been expected after the Supreme Court had already affirmed last year that local laws banning same-sex marriage were, in principle, unconstitutional, though it still needs to hear individual cases on a state-by-state basis.

But the LGBT organization Colectivo Union Diversa decried that it took a court decision to pave the way for equal rights in Jalisco, El Informador noted.

"The question now is when the Jalisco state legislature will finally accede to this decision (and) modify the civil code," the group said. "We regret that it took a Supreme Court decision to defend human rights. ... The Supreme Court corrected our public servants and did their job for them."
A New York City cab driver was arrested Tuesday morning, after he allegedly stole his friend's $50,000 winning lottery ticket and tried to cash the earnings for himself.

Police said Rubelin Segura of the Bronx stole a Powerball ticket worth $50,000 in the record breaking $1.5 billion drawing earlier this month. The ticket belonged to Segura's friend and colleague Victor Castillo, 66, reports NBC New York.

Castillo said Segura got hold of his ticket when they were out at a diner with fellow cab drivers to check the winning numbers on Jan. 14, one day after the Powerball drawing. That's when Segura grabbed the ticket from his hand and took it to check the numbers at a local bodega where Castillo had purchased it.

Once Segura found out how much it was worth, he allegedly tried to switch the ticket and give Castilla one that was worth only $4. However, Castillo realized that Segura had not returned his ticket.

"He snatched it from my hand and ran to the bodega," Castillo said about his winning ticket, reports The New York Daily News. "He came back and threw me a ticket that only won $4. I knew the numbers I played. I knew I won."

Workers at the La Fuerza bodega in the Bronx also told The Daily News that they have surveillance video of Castillo purchasing the $50,000 ticket.

"We saw everything on the videotape," said manager Wagner Cruceta. "Victor bought the ticket. The other guy came to check it but left. It was not nice."

Castillo eventually filed a police report accusing his friend of stealing his Powerball ticket.

"He never came home," recalled Castillo, who said he had a receipt to prove he was the owner of the ticket. "Then I called the cops."

Police then found the stolen ticket in the suspect's possession and arrested him Tuesday morning. Later that night, the 44-year-old accused thief was charged with larceny and forgery at an arraignment.

Despite his earnings, Castillo said he was remorseful over the fact that he had lost a friend over his lucky win.

"He was my friend, but he is no longer. We were like brothers. He betrayed me. I'm still in shock," he said.

But Segura, who was released on his own recognizance late Tuesday -- defended his actions.

"It was both our ticket," he said. "I only went to the store to check the numbers. I was going to split it 50-50 with him."
The US Supreme Court rejects an appeal from North Dakota's bid to save strict abortion law. The toughest legislation in the country, which is the Fetal Heartbeat Law has been blocked permanently after the US Supreme Court trashed to review a lower court's ruling that overturned the legislation.

In 2013, the Fetal Heartbeat Law was passed. It intends to make abortions illegal after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is about six weeks into the pregnancy. The US Supreme Court refused to review the law and found the restriction unconstitutional, as reported by the NPR. The Fetal Heartbeat Law never took effect, and pro-abortion said it was the toughest law against abortion in the country.

The US Supreme Court junked an appeal from state officials in Arkansas who wanted to restore a similar Fetal Heartbeat Law. Earlier this month, NBC News reported that the lower courts also blocked banning abortions after about 12 weeks of pregnancy. Three panels of judges, which was appointed by President George W. Bush, unanimously voted against the law.

Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem knew it was unlikely and the refusal to review the proposal came as no surprise. ABC News reported that the US Supreme Court gets about 7,500 requests but only take less than 100 cases each year. Stenehjem added that it was a longshot, and it is the end of their litigation on the issue of abortion. Even the people who are pro-life or individuals who are against abortion agree that there isn't much more they can do at this point.

The US Court of Appeals said that good reasons exist for the US Supreme Court to review cases like abortion. The Eight Circuit said that the continued application of the Supreme Court's viability standard discounts the legislative branch's recognized interest in protecting unborn children.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court will also decide if they will block or allow another abortion law during this current court term. The Texas law is one of the legislation which the Court is now reviewing. The Texas law requires abortion facilities to comport to the same establishment standard as surgical centers. The state also requires physicians performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The justices will review this law by March and a decision is expected by late April.
The United Nations Security Council has agreed on building an unarmed mission in Columbia in support of its building peace deal. This aims is to monitor any bilateral ceasefire between the Columbian government and Feurzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC.

The said mission will run through for 12 months to oversee any improvements and ceasefire deals with the government and the FARC. United Nations has supported this peace talks and was expressed its approval in last week's settlement in Cuba.

According to BBC, parties involved have agreed to have March 23 as a deadline for the signing of peace accord. The 12-month political mission will be manned by unarmed observers from Latin America and Caribbean nations.

Colombian President Manuel Santos expressed his delight with the decision taken by the Security Council, saying Columbia is not alone in this situation with the support of the United Nations, Channels TV shared. The said 12-month mission can be also, and not limited to any extension if and when there is a need to do so.

Moving on, the UN resolution have asked Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, for his detailed recommendations regarding the said mission and its particulars such as its operations and definite size. The mentioned recommendations are set to be approved by the Security Council after 30 days of ceasefire.

This mission is said to end the longest war in Latin America that has started in 1964. The war has reportedly killed 220,000 people and displaced a million more since the year it commenced, Reuters cited. In accordance, all parties involved have showcased their willingness to participate in the said mission.

If successful, the mission will not only end the half-century war but would also specifically settle key issues such as the political participation of the rebels, land rights, drug trafficking and transitional justice for good.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review and go over the lower court rulings to North Dakota in accordance of banning abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. The justices was noted to have turned away the state's appeal of decisions, striking down the 2013 fetal heartbeat law as unconstitutional.

According to Yahoo! News, Arkansas had initially presented their own version of fetal heartbeat law last week but was later on rejected. The said law is set to ban abortion at 12 weeks.

North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem expressed that it was no surprise that the court had refused to review the said filing. The proposal had been disagreed by a unanimous decision from three (3) panel of judges, originally appointed by George W. Bush in the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland had declared North Dakota's proposal unconstitutional and went off to its total shutting in April 2014. The said filing was also challenged by New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights and Bismac attorney Thomas Dickson in affiliation with the state's abortion provider, Red River Women's Clinic, The Bismarck Tribune shared.

There has been several federal appeals regarding the law and a petition was also moved to Supreme Court's end in November for its further review. The appeals panel of judges has decided to reject it for the law was inconsistent with the Supreme Court standard, even with the presence of North Dakota's request for re-evaluation. The said law was approved by North Dakota in 2013 but promptly put on hold by the higher court because of the aforementioned inconsistencies, ABC News cited.

In this regard, no new abortion law and rulings have been pushed through for the past year. It is said that lawmakers need to know the citizens are also alert and concerned about all issues especially if it is about abortion and pregnancy-related matters.
Mohamed Nasheed was the first ever democratically elected president of the Maldives and in his recent press conference last Monday, he warned that his country is already reverting to dictatorship.

Nasheed was recently freed for medical treatment to be held in London. He held a press conference while he was in London and announced that he has not yet decided whether to return to serve the remaining time of his 13-year prison sentence, according to The Guardian. The 48-year-old former president was granted one month by the government of President Yameen Abdul Gayoom to seek treatment for his back. He has assured that he will definitely be coming back to Maldives but there is not yet any certainty as to how and when he will go back.

When he was asked as to why he is still unsure of when he is coming back, he says there are still more things to take into consideration. The Hindu reported how Nasheed says he needed to meet with people first, consult with lawyers and doctors. When asked about the new government of Yameen now, he made a very specific reference to the close economic ties established by his regime with China. However, he exclaims how India is the principal trading partner with Maldives and that despite the debts of Maldives now currently exposed to China, the Indian government is working hard to see that their situation is normalised.

According to Government News, during the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting last November, they all agreed how Nasheed's release was a positive step and it was important for the Maldivian government to maintain momentum. The upcoming visit of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group next month could send a strong message on their government's need to engage in open political dialogue.

Nasheed could not help but emphasize the situation that Maldives is now currently facing. The new regime could eventually lead to dictatorship to his opinion as well.
A New York executive caught fleeing to South America was arrested after he tried to purchase a sailboat to escape to South America, according to the prosecutors. Sean Ludwick, a New York real estate executive is ordered held without bail in the Central Islip, Long Island court hearing on Tuesday.

An FBI agent covering as a sailing instructor immediately suspected that Ludwick is hiding something when he tried to swiftly close a deal to buy a sailboat for $400,000. Ludwick, 43, a managing partner and founder of Manhattan-based Blackhouse Development was captured last week when he tried to avoid the prosecution. The NY executive caught fleeing to South America is charged with vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving after a deadly car collision in Southampton in August, according to Fox News.

"This man was absolutely going to flee," Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota said. "The searches clearly show that he wanted to know what country or countries were free of extradition to the United States. He was focusing clearly on Venezuela."

Earlier this month, the NY executive pleaded not guilty in the case filed against him. He was freed on a bail of $1 million, ABC News reports. Prosecutors said that aside from inquiring about buying a 50-foot sailboat, the NY executive was tracked doing searches on countries that don't have extradition treaties with the United States. Ludwick was also researching on how to be an effective liar, trials in absentia, and percentage of bail jumpers who are actually caught. He is said to be eyeing to be in Venezuela.

The Eagle adds that the NY executive caught fleeing to South America made searches on the possibility of purchasing a vessel that could take him to South America while he was in Puerto Rico. Prosecutors also believe that Ludwick tried to run away after learning that he could be imprisoned for up to 32 years if he is proven guilty for vehicular manslaughter.

During the car crash, 53-year-old Paul Hansen, a real estate broker from Sag Harbor was killed. It was reported that the NY executive tried to flee from the scene.
I have a whole series of opportunities for chamber-member engagement to share with you today. Bottom line: Nobody should go hungry on Thursday!

First on Thursday morning, the Industrial Leaders Breakfast gives local manufacturing leaders a chance to talk with each other and share challenges and opportunities. This time well be hearing from the leadership at Superior Industries, one of our newer corporate citizens. Please RSVP to the chamber for the 7 a.m. breakfast at Wunderlichs.

As soon as our members are done at that breakfast, they can join us at the chamber office for another breakfast! The Micro Business Development Program of Centro Hispano is holding a networking breakfast with the Columbus Latino Business Networking Group Thursday at 8:30 a.m. at the chamber office. They are inviting all chamber members to come network with other Columbus businesses.

The chambers Engaging Immigrants Strategic Priority, led by Nebraska Public Power District CEO Pat Pope, is a partner in the MBDP series. This has been a highly successful program, providing training to new Columbus businesses and at the same time building bridges that make this one community  which makes all of us more successful.

If members are still hungry (either for food or for information), next up Thursday is a very timely topic. The next Lunch n Learn hosted by the Leadership Columbus Alumni Association is The Pulse of City Government-City Sales Tax. While the event was scheduled many months ago, it happens to fall as the Columbus City Council is debating what will be presented to voters this spring in terms of a sales tax ballot issue.

City Administrator Joe Mangiamelli will speak and the group will engage in a discussion about the options in front of city leaders and voters.

The Lunch n Learn will be at the chamber office. Lunch will be served at 11:45 a.m. and the discussion will follow. There will be a $7 fee for lunch, and an RSVP is appreciated to Amy Blaser at 402-562-3371 or aeblaser@columbushosp.org. All employees of a chamber member are invited.

Finally today, I have one last chance to remind members about your opportunity to engage on the issues in Lincoln. The Legislative Committee of the chamber is co-sponsoring the ninth annual Northeast Nebraska Day at the Capitol on Monday.

Prior to an evening reception at the Nebraska Club, educational sessions begin at 2 p.m. in the State Capitol. We will also visit all 49 Senators offices with our legislative priorities. An evening reception with senators and other leaders will follow at 5:30 p.m.

This event is available to a limited number of people, so be sure to reserve your spot today. RSVP to the chamber office at 564-2769 or chamber@megavision.com. Thanks to the local sponsorship of First National Bank and Loup Public Power District, there is no cost for Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce members to attend.

Northeast Nebraska Day is organized by chambers of commerce in Columbus, Wayne, West Point, Norfolk, Blair, South Sioux City and Fremont.
A Minnesota man linked to a pair of area vehicle thefts faces a handful of charges after his arrest over the weekend in Kansas.

Anthony Vannett of Minneapolis is accused of stealing a car from the Caseys General Store parking lot in Schuyler before driving the vehicle to a rural Kansas community where he abandoned the sedan and fled on foot, prompting law enforcement to initiate a manhunt.

According to an affidavit supporting Vannetts arrest, the 30-year-old Minnesota man swiped a 2001 Ford Taurus from the Schuyler convenience store around 7:20 p.m. Friday after the owner left the vehicle running and unlocked while he was inside the business.

The car was reportedly involved in a hit-and-run accident later that night on Interstate 80 in Lincoln after the westbound Taurus rear-ended another vehicle while traveling more than 90 mph.

A resident in Tipton, a town of about 200 people in north-central Kansas, called the Mitchell County Sheriffs Office after a suspicious vehicle was parked in front of her house and the driver said he ran out of gas, the affidavit states. The car matched the description and license plate number of the Taurus stolen from Schuyler.

Sheriffs deputies initiated a search for the suspect, who was arrested around 5:30 p.m. Saturday after asking area farmers for a place to stay. The farmers, who were aware of the manhunt, called the sheriffs office, which reported that Vannett was near hypothermia after spending several hours on the run and hiding in a machine shed.

Vannett admitted he stole the Taurus, according to the affidavit, and items recovered from the vehicle also tied him to the theft of a GMC Envoy in Columbus on the same day.

The stolen SUV was located on Saturday just outside Schuyler and footprints from the scene led to a rural house where several other vehicles were broken into, the Colfax County arrest document says.

Vannett, who is being held in the Mitchell County jail, was charged with felony theft and two counts of interference with law enforcement in Kansas. He faces charges of theft by unlawful taking, a Class IV felony, and unauthorized use of a propelled vehicle, a Class III misdemeanor, in Colfax County.

The Platte County incident remains under investigation.
NARFE meeting set Thursday

COLUMBUS -- The Platte Valley Chapter of the NARFE will meet at 11:30 a.m. Thursday at the Columbus Family Resource Center.

Social time will be followed by lunch at the center. The speaker will be Ron Moore of Gering, president of Nebraska Federation of NARFE. Installation of officers will be held.

All members are encouraged to attend. Those planning to attend are asked to call Bob Voboril at 402-564-3344.

Book sale slated for city library

COLUMBUS -- The Friends of Columbus Public Library will hold a book sale Super Bowl weekend, Feb. 4-7, in the library.

Hours are 6-9 p.m. Feb. 4 (no preview fee), 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Feb. 5, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Feb. 6, and 1:30-5 p.m. Feb. 7. All remaining items will be sold for a buck a bag.

Those attending can bring their own bag. Most hard-backed books will be $1, with paperbacks and childrens books sold for 25 cents.

There will also be some CDs, record albums, DVDs and VHS tapes available.

Antique appraisals planned Feb. 20

COLUMBUS -- Nebraska native Tom Bennett will be conducting free antique appraisals beginning at 2 p.m. Feb. 20 at Columbus Public Library in the auditorium.

Those who have antiques is too large to bring to the library can bring bring pictures. Cookies and coffee will be provided.

Environment presentation set

COLUMBUS -- New Century Environmental will give a presentation on crane migration at 2 p.m. March 5 at Columbus Public Library.

This is an opportunity for the public to come and learn more about our native environment and ask questions.

The presentation will cover fish, wetlands, birds, climate change, and threatened and endangered species. Refreshments will be provided.

Rotary award nominees sought

COLUMBUS -- Columbus Morning Rotary is seeking individuals from the Columbus area who exemplify the spirit of community service.

Nominations are being received from the community for the clubs 18th annual Service Above Self award. This individual cannot be a Rotarian.

Anyone can nominate an individual by contacting Tonya Wemhoff at StaffCo Employment Service, 2336 23rd St. by calling 402-562-7823 or emailing tonyaw@staffco.net. The deadline for nominations is March 9, and the award will be presented March 17.

Legion fish fries to begin Feb. 5

COLUMBUS -- American Legion Hartman Post 84 will hold its annual fish fries from 5:30-8 p.m. beginning Feb. 5 and continuing every Friday night through March 25.

This is an all-you-can-eat buffet that is open to the public.
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Geneva LIVE: 2017 Porsche 718 Boxster, 718 Boxster S

Mar 1, 2016, 10:30am ET

The flat-four-powered Boxster S reaches 60 mph from a stop in four seconds flat.

The Porsche Boxster has been renamed 718 Boxster as part of a mid-cycle update. It also gets a minor facelift, and it receives Porsche's first flat-four engine in decades.

The base 718 swaps the Boxster's naturally-aspirated 2.7-liter flat-six for a turbocharged 2.0-liter flat-four that makes 300 horsepower and 280 lb-ft. of torque. Moving up, the 718 Boxster S uses a 2.5-liter turbo four rated at 350 ponies and 309 lb-ft. of twist. Both engines offer 35 more horses than the six they replace.

A six-speed manual transmission comes standard, and a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic controlled by shift paddles is available as an option. The extra power allows the base Boxster to reach 60 mph from a stop in 4.5 seconds when it's equipped with the optional Sport Chrono package and the aforementioned dual-clutch gearbox. The similarly-equipped Boxster S performs the same task in four seconds flat, half a second faster than the outgoing model. Porsche has completely redesigned the suspension and the brakes.

Visually, the 718 nameplate is accompanied by sharper headlights, larger front air dams, bigger air inlets behind the doors, and thinner LED tail lamps that emphasize the roadster's width. 19-inch alloy wheels come standard, and 20-inch units are available at an extra cost.

The cabin is fitted with the latest generation of Porsche's touch screen-based infotainment system and a three-spoke steering wheel whose design is loosely inspired by the one found in the sold-out 918 Spyder. Navigation is available at an extra cost. The cloth soft top carries over from the Boxster to the 718 with no major modifications.

The 2017 Porsche 718 Boxster will go on sale in June with a base price of $56,000, excluding a mandatory $1,050 destination charge. To put that figure into perspective, the 2015 Boxster starts at $52,100.

The Cayman will become the 718 Cayman, and it will receive the same mechanical and visual updates as the Boxster. Porsche admits the two cars will share more visual similarities than ever before. In short, the Stuttgart-based car maker is combining its two smallest models into a single model line offered as a coupe and as a convertible. The Porsche 718 Cayman will likely make its official debut in April at the New York show, and both models will go on sale in time for the 2017 model year. Interestingly, Porsche has confirmed the coupe will cost less than the convertible.

What's in a name? The heritage-laced 718 nameplate was first applied to a successful race car that Porsche introduced in 1957. Powered by a flat-four engine, the original 718 took first place twice in the Targa Florio that was held in Sicily, and it won first in its class during the 1958 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Live photos by Ronan Glon.
LINCOLN  An attempt to send a controversial gun bill back to the drawing board failed Tuesday in the Legislature.

The measure sponsored by state Sen. Laura Ebke of Crete would eliminate Nebraska cities' ability to regulate firearms beyond what is included under state law. An initial vote on the bill is expected Wednesday morning.

Opponents including Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, along with others concerned about the bill's broad reach, had moved to have it returned to a legislative committee instead  with some calling for a rewrite before the bill could again be debated by the full Legislature.

But Tuesday, their colleagues widely rejected that approach, voting 31-10 against recommitting the measure to the Judiciary Committee.

The question is now whether lawmakers can reach a compromise to protect city ordinances seen as critical to combating gun violence while preserving the essence of Ebke's bill.

Omaha Sen. Heath Mello and Lincoln Sen. Adam Morfeld are working with Ebke on amendments they hope will address issues raised by leaders in the state's two largest cities.

Those senators and Sen. David Schnoor of Scribner, who prioritized the bill, planned to meet Wednesday morning in Speaker Galen Hadley's office. The results of that meeting could determine the measure's chance of passing.

"The original bill does not have enough votes to break the filibuster," Morfeld said.

Those who oppose the bill as-is come armed with a pair of letters from the Omaha police union that says the bill would give gang members a "free pass." Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler and four Omaha City Council members voiced concerns this week as well.

"Frankly, the proposed changes arguably come across not so much as pro-gun, but pro-gang," John Wells, president of the Omaha police union, wrote to lawmakers Tuesday.

Ebke says local gun ordinances encroach on Nebraskans' constitutional right to bear arms and threaten responsible gun owners who might unknowingly break the law while traveling throughout the state.

"Obviously we want to protect the transportation issue," Ebke said Tuesday afternoon. "We want to minimize the infringement on the liberties of people to possess firearms.

"There's the ideal and there's the reality, and so we've got to try and figure out what the balance is."
An Allentown man accused of fatally abusing his 2-month-old daughter two years ago is now facing possible trial in the case.

An Allentown man is accused of killing his baby daughter in 2013. (AP file photo)

Matthew Wolfe, 31, of the 1900 block of West Columbia Street, waived his preliminary hearing Wednesday on charges of third-degree murder and child endangerment.

The charges were sent to Lehigh County Court, where Wolfe now faces trial.

He remains in county jail without bail, but defense attorney Scott Wilhelm said he plans to file a motion in county court requesting bail in the case.

The child's mother, who is not facing charges in connection with the death, was in the courtroom with a crowd of family members. They declined to comment after the hearing.

Wilhelm said the charges and arrest were a surprise to his client, and that Wolfe is innocent.

The couple were living together at the time the baby girl died, but separated soon after and did not have contact since then, Wilhelm said.

The baby died in 2013, but Wolfe was arrested last month in the case. At a news conference, Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin said his office used the county grand jury to obtain certain documents for the case.

Prosecutors said the baby girl was brought to St. Luke's University Hospital in Fountain Hill on Nov. 12, 2013, with multiple traumatic injuries to her body including brain hemorrhages, multiple rib fractures and leg fractures.

The baby was near death, and immediately taken to St. Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia. She was pronounced dead on Nov. 18, 2013.

An investigation found the baby was in Wolfe's care for most of the day at the family's home in the 1200 block of Forrest Road in Whitehall Township, and that she would have shown symptoms immediately from the abusive head trauma, Martin previously said. Doctors now prefer the term abusive head trauma instead of the term shaken baby syndrome.

Prosecutors provided Wolfe's attorney with a bevy of reports Wednesday related to the case. Chief of Prosecutors Matt Falk declined to provide details about the reports, citing the ongoing case.

The baby was seen by a pediatrician the day before and had no signs of injuries, prosecutors said, and the child's mother had fed her in the early morning the day she was injured and noticed no problems.

The baby's mother worked at St. Luke's Hospital, which is why Wolfe took the baby there, prosecutors said.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Bethlehem Area School District Superintendent Joseph Roy is explaining his decision to close schools a third straight day after the record-breaking storm in a letter to residents.

The Easton Area and Allentown school districts, both of which also remained shut Wednesday, are having many of the same struggles as Bethlehem, officials from each said Wednesday.

"Despite tireless snow removal efforts by the BASD Snow Crew and local contractors, I have concluded that in a number of areas, conditions continue to be unsafe or impassable for buses and hazardous for student walkers," Roy wrote in the letter posted on the district's website and linked by Roy in a Twitter update.

Snow Update with background on schools closure: https://t.co/mBBQGDoufP  Joseph Roy (@BASDSUPT) January 26, 2016

The district has several schools in "tight locations" in the city, making snow removal more difficult, he said. And students heading to suburban schools can't get to bus stops "compromised due to snow piles."

The communities the Bethlehem district serves "continue their work in cleaning up" after the historic 31.9-inch weekend snowfall, he wrote.

"Each municipality is working closely with us to overcome the obstacles that remain," Roy wrote. "Municipal efforts include removing snow on key streets near schools and reducing snow piles at some of our larger bus stops across the district."

Bethlehem Mayor Bob Donchez on Tuesday said the city had made "tremendous progress" in cleaning up after the storm.

The decision whether to open schools Thursday will be made Wednesday afternoon, Roy wrote. He was "confident" that students would be back in class after three days off.

"I understand the inconvenience and frustration that school closings cause, however, after weighing all of the difficult conditions we face across our large district, I concluded closing was in the best interest of our students safety," Roy wrote.

Easton Area waits for urban areas to be cleared

Easton Area Superintendent John Reinhart said the city rather than the suburbs is the bigger challenge this time in his district.

"The issues are similar because we both have urban areas within our districts," Reinhart said by email, comparing his district with Bethlehem. "Lower Mount Bethel Township as well as the townships of Palmer and Forks managed to clean up rather quickly.

"The cities of Easton and Bethlehem had greater challenges in snow removal for obvious reasons. They have done the best that they could do given the amount of snow, the availability of the machinery needed to remove the snow and the fact that on most streets they had to haul snow away."

The decision to close school isn't done in a vacuum, Reinhart said.

"Superintendents consult with many individuals regarding the conditions for transporting students in their districts following a storm," Reinhart said. "There are numerous variables impacting on these decisions that are not under our control. We consult with people who have knowledge and experience in the business of the transportation of students."

Each district is different, so while some can open others remained closed, Reinhart said.

"Every set of circumstances surrounding a storm is as unique as the square mileage, topography, elevation, population clusters and human resources contained within a district," Reinhart said. "As we all know, the circumstances surrounding weather events are unpredictable."

It still can be a lonely call, and one that members of the community often question, he said.

"While some people may seem bewildered at the decisions that superintendents make regarding snow days, superintendents are equally bewildered that there are parents and others in the community who suggest that we ignore the advice given to us by those in business of transportation and direct buses on streets that have been deemed hazardous," he said.

"I have always followed the advice given to me by those who are consulted regarding the transportation of our students in weather emergencies."

All about safety for Allentown district

Roads and sidewalks in Allentown are just not yet ready for students, school district spokeswoman Kimberly Golden-Benner said Wednesday morning.

The district is working with the city, and although the district doesn't bus that many students, it has to be deemed safe before transportation resumes, she said.

"Although the Allentown School District's Maintenance Team has spent the past few days clearing the areas around our schools, the city of Allentown is still working diligently to remove the mounds of snow clogging our city's streets," the district said in a prepared statement. "When the district makes the decision to delay or close school it is based on ensuring the safety and welfare of our students. At this time, a number of streets and sidewalks in the city remain impassable for buses and unsafe for walkers."

When will school resume in Allentown?

"The district will continually assess the snow removal status and will make a decision each day on when it is safe for students to return to school," the statement said.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Neighbors Wednesday morning along Spruce Street in Wilson Borough were shocked to learn 68-year-old Marie Patterson died after her clothes caught fire while she was cooking just a few days before.

The Wilson Borough fire chief said the victim, who lived in the 1500 block of Spruce Street (door at left), got help after a neighbor heard her hollering Saturday outside her home. (Pamela Sroka-Holzmann | For lehighvalleylive.com)

"I just can't believe it," said Jackie Griesmeyer, who lives a few homes down from Patterson's 1510 Spruce St. home. "I'm shocked."

Fire officials and neighbors say Patterson was cooking about 5 p.m. Saturday on a gas stove when the sleeve of her top ignited. Patterson managed to jump into her snow-covered backyard.

One of her neighbors heard Patterson yelling and found her face-down in a snowbank, fire Chief Michael Collins said. The neighbor called 911, Collins said, and Patterson was taken by ambulance to Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township.

She died at 6:04 p.m. Tuesday from her injuries, Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grim said. He ruled the death an accident.

Griesmeyer saw the ambulance having trouble navigating the snow-covered road during the storm to get to Paterson. Another neighbor said a firetruck became stuck in the snow as it was leaving.

A handful of neighbors grabbed shovels to clear a path for emergency crews.

"I saw the firetruck, but never questioned it," Griesmeyer said while shaking her head in disbelief. "I thought they were just checking on a gas leak or something. I never asked."

Griesmeyer said she just saw Patterson digging out during the storm, adding she smiled and gave her a wave. Patterson usually kept to herself, but sometimes would fill in Griesmeyer on borough happenings, she said.

She added that Patterson recently was taking care of her sister, now living in a nursing facility.

Taylor Shaffer, who also lives near Patterson's home, said he knew Patterson for the entire 28 years or so he's lived in the neighborhood. He heard about the incident after Patterson left in the ambulance.

"She was always friendly," he said.

Others took to the Wilson Borough and Surrounding Community's Facebook page to express sadness.

"So sorry to hear about this," Terry Reichard Gulick posted.

"Prayers for her family," Peggy Oliver posted.

"God bless this woman and her family," Angi Sos posted.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Wilson fire where woman burned cooking during snowstorm

The Wilson Borough fire chief said the victim, who lived in the 1500 block of Spruce Street (door at left), got help after a neighbor heard her hollering outside the home Saturday. (Pam Sroka-Holzmann | For lehighvalleylive.com)

UPDATE: Neighbors cleared snow for emergency crews in fatal fire

A 68-year-old Wilson Borough woman died Tuesday from injuries received when her clothing caught fire Saturday evening while she was cooking dinner, Lehigh County coroner Scott Grim reports.

Marie Patterson, of 1510 Spruce St., was burned about 5 p.m. at home and was taken for treatment to Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Grim said.

She died at 6:04 p.m. Tuesday in the hospital, Grim said. Her death was ruled an accident, Grim said.

Although Patterson was hurt during Saturday's snowstorm, her death was not storm-related, Grim said. She was using her stove when she was fatally injured, Grim said.

A neighbor heard Patterson yelling and found her face-down in a snowbank outside her home, fire Chief Michael Collins said. The neighbor called 911, Collins said.

The borough fire department got the call at 5:03 p.m. Saturday, Collins said, and had a truck near the scene within seven minutes.

There wasn't a fire in the home, Collins said. "There was nothing for the guys to extinguish," he said.

A carpet was charred, but there was little other evidence of the accident, he said.

He confirmed Patterson was burned using a gas stove.

The storm wasn't a factor in the response because Patterson was already injured when authorities were notified, he said. The firetruck did get stuck in the snow as it was leaving, he said.

The EMS crew used a stretcher to get the victim through the snow to the ambulance, he said.

"It's just a sad thing that happened to the lady," Collins said. "She was just trying to make something to eat. It's not supposed to happen that way."

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Lehigh Valley region's blood supply critical after snow

Blood donations are held in a refrigerator in June 2014 at the Miller-Keystone Blood Center in Hanover Township, Northampton County. Miller-Keystone needs more than 450 donors a day to adequately supply its hospitals, according to spokesman Sean Tinney. (Lehighvalleylive.com file photo)

The exclusive blood supplier to 26 hospitals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey issued an urgent call Tuesday for donations of all blood types and platelets.

Last weekend's record snowfall in the Lehigh Valley critically impacted the region's blood supply, said Deb Otto, director of donor resources for the nonprofit Miller-Keystone Blood Center.

"Between Saturday and Tuesday, we have incurred 15 storm-related blood drive losses, totaling approximately 350 lifesaving blood donations, as well as the loss of additional units due to the closure of our fixed sites on Saturday," Otto said in a news release.

The ideal blood inventory on our shelves should be a three-day supply, or approximately 1,500 units," she continued. "At this time, we are only at about 800 units, which is only half of our desired inventory level."

Based in Hanover Township, Northampton County, Miller-Keystone needs more than 450 donors a day to adequately supply its hospitals, spokesman Sean Tinney said.

"While we've had a decrease in the number of people donating, the demand at our hospitals remains steady," he said in the release. "We would just like to remind people that blood cannot be manufactured, it can only come from the kind generosity of volunteer blood donors.

"If there was ever a time to donate, now is that time."

It can take up to 50 units of blood to help someone in a car crash, and up to eight units to help someone with internal bleeding, according to Miller-Keystone. It can also take up to eight units a week to help someone battling leukemia.

Blood donors must be at least 17 years old, weigh 110 pounds or more and be feeling healthy. Their last blood donation needs to have been at least eight weeks prior. Donors must provide valid identification.

To schedule a donation, call 800-B-A-DONOR (800-223-6667) or visit GIVEaPINT.org.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Sen. Ben Sasse is headed to Iowa to essentially make a case against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in advance of Monday's Iowa caucuses.

Most polls show Trump on the verge of winning the first-in-the-nation GOP presidential showdown, although polling is not always a reliable indicator of which voters will show up at party caucuses.

Sasse announced Tuesday he will appear with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas at separate campaign events and may appear with other "constitutional candidates."

"I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances," Sasse said. "I'm pro-Constitution and if that makes me anti-Trump, that's Mr. Trump's problem."

"Although Sasse has not endorsed any candidate, he has strongly questioned GOP front-runner Donald Trump," the Sasse news release stated.

In recent days, Nebraska's freshman Republican senator has taken after Trump on Twitter in a series of messages.

Sasse questioned Trump about whether he still favors a single-payer health care insurance plan, still "hate(s) the concept of guns," and still favors a $6 trillion tax hike. He also questioned Trump's "affairs with married women" in a tweet.

"You're very talented and on a huge roll," Sasse tweeted. "If I were betting -- you're likely next POTUS. Congrats. But...."

In Tuesday's statement, Sasse said: "America already has one post-constitutional party; we don't need another."

"We have a president who does not believe in executive restraint," he said. "We do not need another."

"I am not endorsing any candidate," Sasse said. "I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances."

Sasse's trip to Iowa follows a journey last week to New Hampshire, site of the first Republican presidential primary election on Feb. 9.

In Nashua, Sasse substituted for former Vice President Dick Cheney as keynote speaker at a Republican town hall.

"We need to be able to explain to people what we're for," he said, according to a story in the New Hampshire Union Leader in Manchester.

"It's not enough to just be against the establishment. I am, but we need to be for America."

Sasse did not mention Trump by name in Nashua.
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Two teenage business students from Leitrim have been honoured at the Youth Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2015, organised and run by Foroige, for their udder-ly genius cow-manure briquette business.

Two teenage business students from Leitrim have been honoured at the Youth Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2015, organised and run by Foroige, for their udder-ly genius cow-manure briquette business.

The two were amongst the 1,000 participants who set up 600 businesses as part of this years Foroige Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) programme, generating a collective turnover of 250,000.

The Transition Year Students from St Clares Comprehensive School in Manorhamilton, cousins Linda Dolan (16) and Clare Dolan (16) were honoured at a ceremony this week in the Mansion House, Dublin, for their business MURE which offers fire logs made out of cow manure.

MUREs aim is to reduce global warming as our product is renewable and made out of a completely natural resource  cow manure, explains Linda. Your Effluence is our Affluence is our business motto, she added.

Explaining where they came up with their innovative idea, Clare said: We were on our family farm when we were discussing the amount of cow manure that is being wasted and not being used for anything.

We were trying to think of ways to turn this vast amount of cow manure into euros when we came up with the idea to dry it out and burn it.

A year-long scientific study carried out by the girls in conjunction with their school and Sligo Institute of Technology on their product found it to be more efficient than its peat counterparts.

We compared the calorific values of our MURE briquettes to peat briquettes and it showed that ours has a higher calorific value and has a longer burning time, continued Linda.

However, it hasnt all been a walk in the park for the duo. One of our biggest challenges was that our customers were worried about an odour from cow manure briquettes, she explained.

A MURE fire log costs 4 and fire bag, which consists of their briquettes, kindlers and a fire lighter, costs 5. Since MURE was established last October, the business has generated an income of 1,154.

The girls are hoping to take their product nationwide. We are in consultation with McPartland Fuels, Corrib Oil and also several Apple Green stores asking them to stock our products, said Linda.

The girls are not merely milking their success. MURE donates 10% of its profits to the Irish Cancer Society and Mental Health Ireland.

Commenting on their experience, Clare said: After taking part in the Foroige NFTE programme, we are both interested in studying business in the future. Weve learned so many things from setting up our own business  though the biggest lesson is you get what you put in. Its been a fantastic experience!

CEO of Foroige, Sean Campbell, paid tribute to all the participants in this years programme, but stressed that more support is needed to sustain the level of participation in the programme in the future.
We are, on account of abiding by certain inadequacies of the global community, fighting an ill-defined war, at home and abroad, which is tearing nation-states apart and dividing our own communities in abhorrent ways, and which without further strategic solutions beyond conflict, we will continue to fight perpetually and fail miserably. No, not the War on Terror, but a similar conflict against a poorly defined enemy: the War on Drugs.

British involvement with the conflict abroad has always been subtle and at points, secretive. The Foreign Office has often refused to comment on Britains involvement, and in that vacuum a great number of allegations have arisen. A Guardian investigation in 2003 suggests that in Colombia, the SAS trained anti-narcotics police and provided aid, equipment and advice for military units in the drug fields. There are numerous accounts of atrocities on all sides of the Colombian conflict, including by government sponsored paramilitaries. Worse still is the situation in Mexico, where the cartel versus government conflict claimed 6,000 lives last year, and in 2012 it was 18,000. With a cumulative death toll since 2006 of at least 60,000, the Mexican Drug War is the 8th largest conflict by death toll in the world, and the largest not associated with the War on Terror.

Whilst the government seeks to pass the regressive Psychoactive Substances Bill, we are about to debate considering a new legal framework for the regulation of marijuana at conference. Im of the opinion that this is a welcome step forward for debate in the UK about reforming archaic drug laws. We are Liberals, we know why strategic legalisation, community strengthening, mental health reform and focusing on prevention is the only way we will ever come close to finding a sustainable solution for drug issues in the UK. The burden it places on our finances to sentence 42,000 people per year for possession is perhaps equalled only by the burden placed on our community services by an approach which ultimately fails to prevent abuse. But as I have outlined above, we should also remember the global aspect of this.

We are a country that despite a shifting world order, still has influence, and it is our responsibility not to use that influence to support a dogmatic and bloody status quo that has absolutely failed to halt the drug trade or deal with abuse. We could, alongside like-minded nations (notably Trudeaus Canada), implement a global reform package through a robust legal framework which puts the cartels and drug lords out of business, makes a redundancy of vast swathes of the black market and reduces crime rates everywhere.

The greatest obstacle to this isnt logistics, or a lack of capacity for reform, but the dangerous impact on our morale of the rising tide of regressive Conservative attitudes everywhere. It is easy for all of us to look to the attitude of our own government, and of the likes of Donald Trump and various new forces of the radical right across Europe, and despair helplessly at their stirring and manipulation of deeply anti-progressive sentiment in the electorate. But that is why both a British and global #fightback is needed, to square up these attitudes and win the argument as we know we can, because only then can we build the consensus for Liberal reforms that, with issues like drugs, we so desperately need.

* Guy Russo was the Parliamentary Candidate in Enfield North at the General Election and is an Ex-President of the Queen Mary University of London Liberal Democrats.
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Finally, someone is actually planning on using the new tax-varying powers given to Scotland. Willie Rennie has made a big announcement on education this morning. He intends cleaning up the mess the SNP have made in education with 4 radical measures, paid for by a modest rise in income tax which will not affect anyone who earns 19,000 a year or less.

That 475 million investment will include the Lib Dem Pupil Premium, already successful in England and, thanks to Kirsty Williams, in Wales. Thats all about giving extra money to disadvantaged kids in school. Then theres investment in nurseries and colleges, as well as a reversal of the SNPs education cuts.

Speaking at an Edinburgh nursery this morning, Willie said:

Liberal Democrats have an ambitious plan to get Scotland back on track by making the biggest investment in education since devolution with just one penny on income tax.

A Scottish education was once the envy of the world. It has fallen hard and fast. But we have the plan that will put it right back up there.

To get fit for the future our economy and our children need the best education. If we fail to act, a generation of children will miss out on the quality education they deserve. Every day counts. Kids cannot get their time at school back once it is gone.

Liberal Democrats are not prepared to stand by while the SNP inflict even more devastating damage to our once-proud education system.

We have four immediate and urgent proposals for Scotlands education system.

A pupil premium for children who need extra help at school, which Scottish Liberal Democrat MSPs in Holyrood will lead a debate on this afternoon.

An expansion of the nursery education programme.

Repairing the disproportionate cuts to colleges.

And stopping the SNPs damaging cuts to schools.

Our costed and progressive package of measures will ensure that Scotland races back up the international education standings to our world-beating best.

We are protecting people on low and middle incomes thanks to the Liberal Democrats in government who raised tax thresholds to take thousands of people out of tax and cut it for thousands more.

One penny is a small price for a big boost to get the country fit for the future.

Our ambitious plan will enable every child in Scotland to make the best of themselves and get on in life. Progressives will support it, conservatives will oppose it. The question is where the Nationalists will stand. On investing in a first class future for our children, is Nicola Sturgeon progressive or conservative?
THE boss of Northern Trust in Limerick hopes the financial firm can outstrip its plans to hire 1,000 people by 2017.

Based at the Plassey National Technology Park and in the Ballysimon Road, Northern Trust has been steadily growing its headcount to become one of the largest employers in the city.

Weve announced 1,000 jobs by the end of 2017, and we are well on track for that, said Catherine Duffy, who is also the president of the Limerick Chamber.

Asked if this figure could be surpassed, she added: Hopefully, hopefully. Thats all I can say, if things go well.

Last March, the firm announced it would create 300 new IDA-backed jobs, with Taoiseach Enda Kenny attending a special event to mark the expansion.

These roles will be filled using a new office development at the Ballysimon Road. Ms Duffy said this building will be fully operational by the end of the year.

The last [announcement] we made was last March. We are busy, we are keeping our head down, it is a very busy regulatory quarter for us, so everyone is head down, working hard at the moment, she added.

This week, Wychwood Properties announced its intention to apply for planning permission to build further office space at City East retail park, part of which is used by Northern Trust.

The plan will see an extension of almost two acres to office complexes being built in the area just off the Ballysimon Road.

Ms Duffy declined to comment on the planning permission, stating this is a matter for the owner of the land.

Northern Trust rents this site.

Operating in Ireland since 1989, Northern Trust provides asset and fund administration services to businesses and individuals.

It employs more than 500 people at a separate operation in Dublin, which was set up in the year 2000.

In 2012, Northern Trust announced plans to employ 400 people in Limerick by 2017, at the time one of the biggest announcements for the city in years.
AFTER nearly $10m was knocked off its price-tag, a mansion in the Bahamas once belonging to the legendary Limerick actor Richard Harris is still on the market.

The oceanfront estate on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, described as being home to lavish parties, outrageous guests, and secrets and scandals, was named Kilkee House by Harris, in a nod to his many summers spent in the Clare resort.

It was previously listed for sale in 2013 for $19.9m, and after failed to reach the new asking price of $10m at auction recently.

The seven-bedroom, 11,000 sq ft home went up for auction on January 14, but a spokesperson for Concierge Auctions, which is handling the sale, told the Limerick Leader that while they had a number of registered bidders, the highest bid did not meet the reserve,

The agents for some of the most exclusive real estate in the US said that it remains available for offers.

The property was built more than 70 years ago by Huntington Hartford II, who dreamed of transforming it into a hideaway for the wealthy. Harris bought it in 1971, and his ashes were also scattered on the island. Although he owned real estate throughout the world during his life, he sold every other property and kept his Paradise Island home until his passing.

Continuing the tradition of his predecessor, entertaining was serious business with Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, the Beatles, Peter OToole and Pierce Brosnan among the visitors.

The actor Rupert Everett also includes Kilkee House in his juicy Hollywood memoir. The property includes a stone bridge over a winding rock grotto pool, 60m of waterfront on the harbour, a private dock to take in mega-yachts, a dining room that seats 18, a guesthouse, waterfall and gym.

Harriss children and, later, grandchildren enjoyed the property,but sold it in 2005 to real estate developer David Kosoy.
LIMERICK is to get a new central library, funding for which has been confirmed this Wednesday lunchtime.

Some 2m has been made available by Environment Minister Alan Kelly for the project, which will see the ageing library at the Granary in Michael Street replaced.

Mayor Liam Galvin has welcomed the funding boost, which has been made under the Capital Funding Programme for local libraries.

"This proposed new library will act as a powerful cultural and social inclusion agent, playing a pivotal role in strengthening community identity and promoting civic participation," he said.

"It will support the Local Authoritys economic agenda through business and job skills support. It also will combat educational disadvantage through the promotion of literacy and community lifelong learning."

Council boss Conn Murray said the new library will be of 21st century design and "will address what good digital spaces should look like and what kind of new learning spaces are needed.

"The library, which will eventually replace the existing facility at the Granary, will be Limericks open and inclusive venue, nurturing the development of critical thinking and an informed citizenry.

Central to the library plan is an emphasis on innovation, education and new ways of learning achieved through collaboration between key education stakeholders in the City and County," added Mr Murray.

The library remain one of the most popular and best-used cultural services provided by Limerick City and County Council. In 2015, Limerick City and County Libraries issued over 750,000 books to 31,500 readers.

Limerick Library Services also recorded over 700,000 visitors who availed a wide range of services, including access to Information Technology, study facilities and cultural events.




1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
May 1, 2021, 5 PM

The 1948 Portuguese Guinea souvenir sheet of 13 Local Scenes stamps and two labels (Scott 270a) is in demand in mint never-hinged condition and is selling for $100 to $125.

By Henry Gitner and Rick Miller

When collectors of classic stamps think of beautiful colonial issues, British and French colonies often come first to mind. But Portugal possessed an empire that was older, as widespread and almost as vast as the British and French imperial powers. Many Portuguese colonial issues are just as attractive as their French and British contemporaries.

Portuguese explorers arrived on the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1400s. They came looking for gold, but stayed to exploit the slave trade. By 1446, they established the colony of Portuguese Guinea with its capital at Bissau.

Following the outlawing of slavery and suppression of the slave trade, Portuguese Guinea became a center of peanut cultivation, with most of the crop being exported to Portugal in the form of cooking oil. On Sept. 10, 1974, the former colony became the Republic of Guinea-Bissau.

In April 1948, a set of 13 stamps depicting local fauna, people and scenes was issued (Scott 258-270). A souvenir sheet of 13 with two labels (Scott 270a) also was produced and sold for 40 escudos. The 2016 Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue values the souvenir sheet at $67.50 in unused hinged condition.

The souvenir sheet is a good buy in unused hinged condition at $50 to $60. However, it is in demand and commands a large premium in mint never-hinged condition, selling for $100 to $125.

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DO YOU have a Boulevard Aristide-Briand near you? Or do you send your child to school in a Jules-Ferry or a lycee Emile Combes? If so, you are already familiar with key names in the construction of the French Republic.

Between them, these three politicians were responsible for free state schooling, obligatory education for girls and the rock of state neutrality towards religion on which la Republique is built: the principle of laicite.

The term is very much in the news, with a new laicite charter being introduced into schools this autumn alongside classes in morale laique. Presenting the charter, Minister for Education Vincent Peillon explained: Everyone is free to have his own opinions but no one has the right to contest teaching content or miss a class in the name of religious precepts.

Public debate over the Muslim community in France pops up in the news regularly and is nearly always related in one way or another to perceived challenges to this element of the Constitution. Peillons remarks refer also to repeated evangelist pressure to alter class content, in particular regarding the theory of evolution. A recent example was the proposal to swap two Christian holidays with Jewish and Muslim ones: confusing whether France was secular or multi-religious.

Left and Right politicians often unite to initiate laws to protect laicite. Once the source of conflict with the Catholic Right over private education funding, the principle, an important element in the integration process, regularly generates ill feeling these days among extremist sectors of the Muslim community. That is why, a century after the original 1905 law, several new laws have been passed to protect it.

First, a few explanations. Laicite does not translate well. Secularity is close but confusing. Laicite is not easy to define either. It has evolved over two centuries and is evolving still. The concept was born of the Revolution, which guaranteed freedom of conscience to all and first separated State and Church.

Napoleon backtracked, signing a concordat with the Vatican in 1801 that was to poison Church-State relations during the 19th century and put laicite on the back burner for much of it. (For historical reasons, this concordat still applies in Alsace and Moselle.)

Having been suppressed by the Vichy regime (along with liberte, egalite, fraternite  without which laicite could not function), the principle was cast in the constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946  the State is indivisible, laic, democratic and social  and remains firmly in that of todays Fifth.

To understand the concept is to go a long way towards understanding the French. Maybe it could be defined as their permanent search for a delicate balance between sharing what they all hold in common, the Republic, and catering for diversity.

It is the principle that protects both personal and collective liberty and, as such, is the responsibility of both State and citizen. The indivisibility of the State is the States refusal to recognise any religious or ethnic community. France is one. There are two major dates in the history of laicite: 1881 and 1905. In 1881-82, Minister of Education Jules Ferry decreed school to be publique, gratuite et laique  state-run, free and non-clerical.

Teaching in French to a national programme provided children, whatever their linguistic background or beliefs, with the theoretical possibility of equal opportunity.

It created a framework in which adults could bring no pressure to bear on pupils to adhere to any philosophy, religion or political idea. That remains the basis of the French educational system today.

The 1905 law, engineered by Emile Combes and Aristide Briand, enforced the neutrality of the State and State institutions through the separation of the Churches and the State. Since that date, the State recognises no religion and therefore cannot directly fund any either.

If the same law grants the individual total liberty and privacy regarding beliefs, there is one condition: they must not disturb public order.

Given the repeated trauma that religion has caused in Frances recent history  from the Wars of Religion to the expulsion of the Huguenots and the Dreyfus affair  this means no proselytising and nothing that could be remotely interpreted as such.

It also explains why, in France, religious belief is far more than a private matter. Things spiritual belong to the realm of intimacy. It is extremely unusual to see anyone wearing any conspicuous religious symbol in public. To do so is perceived as a deliberate act, a message to others.

It is unthinkable to ask someone what their religion is and most people will be frankly embarrassed by anyone saying what theirs is. When Nicolas Sarkozy publicly announced he had appointed Frances first Muslim prefect, he sent shockwaves throughout the land.

Knowing this helps in understanding intense French reaction to young girls wearing veils. It is seen not only as an unacceptable way of bringing religion into the public sphere, but also a form of peer pressure on other girls to do the same. Which takes us back to Jules Ferry and neutrality in the classroom.

This insistence on the privacy of beliefs was of course also reinforced after World War II by the fate of Frances Jews under the Vichy regime, and the obligation to publicly show their religion by wearing the yellow star. As a result of the trauma of State responsibility in their deportation and extermination, no statistics may be made regarding peoples religious beliefs, ethnic origin or colour.

All citizens are not only equal, but remain neutral in the eyes of the State.

The mosque debate

The 1905 law was finally well accepted by both Catholic and Protestant churches in France, who benefited financially when the State handed existing buildings and their costly maintenance over to local authorities. But the State cannot fund new religious buildings.

Hence the mosque-building debate and recent legislation allowing local authorities to contribute. For with generous donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim foundations abroad pouring in, the inherent risk of encouraging fundamentalist movements to develop in France is obvious.

Under the Nicolas Sarkozy government, the training of imams in France to Republican principles was considered.

But the State cannot finance religious education either. The impasse has been paradoxically circumvented by the Catholic University offering courses, and Algerian imams due to work in France being trained in French and laicite at the government-funded Institut Francais in Algiers.

Conspicuous symbols and full-face veils

After a number of potentially inflammatory cases in which some schools were confronted with Muslim girls wearing Islamic headscarves, legislation was passed in 2004 banning the wearing of any conspicuous religious symbol or sign in state schools. Never specifically aimed at the Muslim community (kippas, large crosses and Sikh turbans fall under the same category), the new law, despite fears it would be perceived as discriminatory and arouse further reaction, had the almost immediate effect of calming the situation, though some veiled Muslim girls and turbaned Sikhs found their way to private schools.

But this legislated solely for public schools, not privately run establishments. In March of this year, Fatima Afif, an employee dismissed in 2008 from the privately run Baby Loup creche in the Yvelines for refusing to remove her headscarf, won on appeal for wrongful dismissal on the grounds of religious discrimination.

New legislation is now under consideration to cover pre-school structures and religious symbols in the workplace, none of which are currently covered by law.

When, in late July, a police officer in the town of Trappes stopped a fully veiled young women for an ID check in the middle of Ramadan, he did not know he was unleashing days of rioting. But Cassandra, 22, was not infringing any law on laicite. This time it was the one against dissimulating the face in the public sphere, put into effect by the Sarkozy government in 2011.

Introduced ostensibly as anti-terrorism legislation, many felt its real purpose was more anti-veil. In fact, the number of women in France wearing the niqab is extremely small, and the number of women fined likewise.

Laicite with an adjective

The latest solution of Frances politicians to calm the debate has been to add adjectives. Sarkozy invented laicite positive, in which the government took into account the existence of religious groups in France.

He created a representative Muslim council, through which to address the Muslim community in France. Representative of only a portion of Frances Muslims, many of whom are non-practising, it has created more problems than it has solved.

The Hollande government has coined laicite apaisee, a low-profile approach in which negotiation would replace legislation as the best way of winning over those who regard the principle with suspicion.

True laicistes believe the principle cannot survive any moderating tags. It must exist alone.

Universities oppose campus headscarf ban proposal

In early August, Le Monde published a report signed by members of the Haut Comite de lIntegration (HCI), a body no longer briefed to deal with laicite since the creation of a separate mission last April. It called for a Muslim headscarf ban in universities.

Government replies were swift but hardly in unison. Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls stated evasively that the subject needed to be considered, while Genevieve Fioraso, Minister for Higher Education, warned that we should avoid problems where there are none.

For Gerard Blanchard, president of La Rochelle University, and vice-president of the national CPU, Conference des Presidents dUniversite, laicite is not an issue on his campus or anywhere in France. We have 14% foreign students in La Rochelle, mostly from South East Asia, and we only ask women students to take off their veils in science laboratories, for safety reasons. That has never posed a problem.

The University Presidents Conference has issued a public statement against any specific university ban. For Blanchard, the over-mediatised debate that burst upon us mid-summer is without foundation. He is adamant that he has never had a complaint from a teacher. An environmentalist, he is far more concerned by pressure that could be brought on teachers to introduce non-scientific versions of the origins of the universe into the syllabus. No university teacher should ever have to submit to any pressure on the content of his teaching.

Jean-Loup Salzmann, president of the CPU, and president of Paris XIII, in the heart of Seine- Saint-Denis, one of the most multi-cultural universities in France, firmly believes in laicite, but sees no need for new laws on the campus. His main concern is elsewhere. He is angered by the incongruity of the State promoting laicite on the one hand, while financing the Catholic universities on the other.

Expressing a personal opinion, he said: The main issue for these young Muslim women, who have enough problems coping with family pressure, is to achieve independence and emancipation through their studies, whether they wear a veil or not. An anti-veil law would achieve the opposite of what we want. Many of these women would then not have access to university at all.

How the principle of laicite is applied today

NICOLAS Cadene, chairman of the Observatoire de la Laicite, a watchdog committee created last April by President Francois Hollande to report on how the principle of laicite is applied in France today, spoke to Connexion.

Can you define this difficult concept for our readers?

Laicite is a principle which allows us all to live together. It is not a ban on religion or religious practices. On the contrary, it guarantees believers and non-believers alike the freedom to express themselves, to practise or not to practise a religion as they choose, on condition that public order is not disturbed. The State adopts an attitude of total impartiality towards citizens, who are all equal in the eyes of the State.

Do the current religious bank holidays not favour one religious group?

Christian festivals have, for the majority, become traditional holidays with little religious significance. Still, the State does not want to be seen as favouring one religion over another. In 1905, there was no Muslim population. But I dont think this poses a real problem. Employees can use their RTT (recuperation of unpaid overtime in the form of days off) as they wish. The Stasi Commission (set up by President Jacques Chirac in 2003) went a long way towards identifying issues in the workplace. We shall build on that.

The conspicuous religious symbols ban was seen as directed only at women. Is that not a form of discrimination?

If people set out to present themselves in a way which is obviously a proselytising or a provocative attitude, that is not acceptable. It is not so much what people wear or their physical appearance, as the reason behind the choice. This is one of the subjects we shall be working on.

Islam has no clerical hierarchy. Isnt the laicite legislation trying to apply to individuals a law aimed at an institution? Doesnt the 1905 law need to be adapted?

Not at all. The principle enables us all to live together. But, of course, we must avoid situations in which one group feels stigmatised by the law. That is one of our major subjects of reflexion. But there is no question of adapting the principle to new circumstances. It is one of bringing people to understand that laicite is not a ban on religious practice but a system of personal freedom and helping them to adapt to the principle.

There has been talk in the press over banning the Islamic headscarf at university. [The full-face veil is already banned anywhere in public].

The State has a duty to protect minors from any form of ideological persuasion, hence the headscarf ban in schools. University is a world of adults. But the Republic has a duty to protect its citizens against the dangers of extremism. Some people attribute to laicite powers it simply does not have. There is an urgent need for strong political action, at state and local level, in order to resolve the many problems the threat of extremism has brought to certain sectors of society.

The Observatoire has published its first report, a history and background to the concept. What else has it achieved?

We helped draw up two important documents: the laicite charter and the syllabus for non-religious morality for schools. Both take effect this year. In addition, our report has pinpointed situations needing close attention in public administrations and local authorities (non-Metropolitan France included), as well as in the private sector.

How do you see your work developing?

We need a better definition of laicite that reiterates the States position of neutrality and is more clearly understood by all, in France and at an international level. We are drawing up guidelines for the application of laicite and religious practice in the workplace, and in the wake of the Baby Loup issue [see main article], for pre-school structures. We must show people how to react to situations. Overreaction is one of the major problems we face, when so much could be achieved by negotiation and taking things calmly.
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TRAFFIC remains disrupted in parts of Paris today as taxi drivers continue their protest - while some roads in Brittany and Normandy are blocked in a separate protest by farmers.

The Paris prefecture de police is advising drivers to avoid the Porte Maillot, a major interchange to the west of the capital, which was gridlocked by taxis overnight, and to allow plenty of time to reach Charles de Gaulle or Orly airport if you have a flight to catch.

The access road from the A1 motorway to Charles de Gaulle airport was blocked on Wednesday morning. Roadblocks have reportedly also been put up around Toulouse and Marseille airports and the taxi demonstrations continue in Lille and Bordeaux as well.

It is reported that some drivers from the regional protests have headed to the capital today, including about 100 Nicois taxis.

Meanwhile, in Brittany, farmers are threatening to block major roads in a protest about falling prices and worsening living conditions.

The first blockade was on the RN12, and others are planned on the main Routes Nationales in the region, as well as the A84 from Rennes to Caen. The protest has also spread to parts of Normandy and the Pays de la Loire.
Young women who use tanning beds or booths have up to a sixfold increase in their likelihood of developing melanoma, a new study found.

The study also suggests that indoor tanning has likely played a role in the rise in melanoma rates among young U.S. women in recent years.

The findings indicate that the "melanoma epidemic  seems likely to continue unabated, especially among young women, unless exposure to indoor tanning is further restricted and reduced," the researchers, from the University of Minnesota, wrote in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal JAMA Dermatology.

Although some states have implemented bans on indoor tanning for people under age 18, these efforts "need to be accelerated and expanded," the researchers said. [5 Things You Must Know About Skin Cancer]

In the new study, the researchers analyzed information from 681 people ages 25 to 49 who were diagnosed with melanoma in Minnesota between 2004 and 2007. The scientists compared this group with 654 healthy people, who did not have melanoma but who were around the same age and also lived in Minnesota.

The researchers found that women who had ever gone indoor tanning were 2.3 times more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma in their 40s, and six times more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma in their 20s, compared with the women in these same age groups who had never gone indoor tanning.

Of the 63 women who were diagnosed with melanoma before the age of 30, only two said they had never gone indoor tanning.

On average, the women who were diagnosed with melanoma in their 20s started using indoor tanning at age 16 and had 110 tanning sessions in their lifetimes. In contrast, women diagnosed with melanoma in their 40s reported starting indoor tanning at age 24 and had gone about 50 times in their lifetimes.

"Women in their 20s seemed to be at highest risk of developing melanoma from indoor tanning," because they started indoor tanning at the youngest age and reported a high number of lifetime tanning sessions relative to their ages, the researchers said.

"Given the substantial proportion of young women today who began indoor tanning as adolescents, this result is particularly concerning, because their risk of developing melanoma in the future may be very high," the scientists said.

The researchers did not find a similar link between indoor tanning and increased risk of melanoma among young men but noted that this may have been because there were too few men in this age group to show an association. Men are generally much less likely to go tanning than are women, the researchers said.

The new findings may also partly explain the recent rise in melanoma among young women, which has increased more rapidly than melanoma in men, the researchers said. Rates of this cancer among U.S. women under age 50 increased from 8.3 cases per 100,000 women in 1995 to 11 cases per 100,000 women in 2006, according to the National Cancer Institute. During that same time period, melanoma rates among men nudged only slightly upward, from 7.6 cases per 100,000 men to 8.0 cases per 100,000 men.

"Indoor tanning is a likely factor for the steeper increase in melanoma rates in the United States among younger women compared with men," the researchers said.

The new study "demonstrates the importance of public health efforts in reducing indoor tanning," Gery Guy Jr., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote with several co-authors in an editorial accompanying the study. "While all exposure to UV radiation can increase the risk of melanoma, exposure to artificial UV radiation from indoor tanning is a completely avoidable risk factor."

Although age restrictions for indoor tanning may be effective at reducing use among minors, "these policies leave many gaps unaddressed," the editorial authors said. For example, a recent study found that nearly half of the top 125 U.S. colleges had indoor tanning facilities available on campus or in off-campus housing, which may encourage young people to use them, the editorial said.

To address the increasing rates of melanoma among young women, colleges could adopt campus policies to discourage indoor tanning, the editorial authors said.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
This image of the Zika virus was taken using a transmission electron microscope. The virus particles are 40 nanometers in diameter, with an outer envelope, and an inner dense core.

With fears of Zika virus reaching new heights  women in some countries, for example, are being advised not to get pregnant for years  all eyes are turning toward prevention.

And experts say that developing a vaccine will be one of the best ways to fight this virus.

"If a vaccine is feasible, it would be one of the best ways to combat [Zika virus]," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and a senior associate at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Health Security. [7 Devastating Infectious Diseases]

Zika causes an infection that is usually mild, but officials are concerned that infections in pregnant women may lead to microcephaly in their children, a condition that affects the brain and severely affects a child's cognitive development. The virus was originally seen in Africa and Asia, but has spread in the last decade to Central and South America, and some Caribbean and Pacific islands. In recent weeks, health officials in El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia and Jamaica have suggested to women that they avoid getting pregnant until more is known about the risk of microcephaly.

Because Zika virus hadn't previously been considered a public health threat, there hasn't been much research done on the virus, Adalja told Live Science.

However, that doesn't mean that a vaccine is unattainable.

Although Zika virus is relatively new to the Americas, it's part of a family of viruses called flaviviruses, which includes more well-known viruses such as dengue, yellow fever and the West Nile virus.

And there's a lot of existing research on other flaviviruses, Adalja said. For example, scientists have found ways to replicate human infections with these other flaviviruses in animal models, so that researchers can study how the infection progresses and test out possible drugs, he said.

Not only that, but scientists have a track record of success in making vaccines for such flaviviruses, which indicates that this family of viruses isn't completely impervious to vaccination, he said. There are currently vaccines against the flaviviruses that cause yellow fever and Japanese encephalitis, and these have paved the way for future vaccines against other flaviviruses, he said.

Still, as with any new vaccine, the first step for researchers is to devise a vaccine that triggers a response from the human immune system that can protect people from future infections, Adalja said. Then developers can move on to questions of side effects, cost and how long immunity lasts, he said.

And although the mutations that can occur in viruses over time can pose a problem, the goal of vaccine developers is to try and target a part of the virus that tends to not change, he said.

"All viruses mutate  so it's not a question of whether it mutates" but how stable Zika virus is in Brazil, for example, Adalja said. In other words, does it look like the virus is mutating quickly? Some clues to this might be found by sequencing the genetic material of a virus strain in Central America, and comparing it to the sequences of strains in other outbreaks in Asia and Africa, he said.

Adalja said that, for the time being, research on a vaccine would likely take priority over looking for drugs that can treat people infected with the virus.

Once a woman is infected with Zika virus, and the virus is in the blood, it can cross the placenta and affect the fetus, he said. It would be very hard to make an antiviral drug that could be administered fast enough to prevent the virus's effects, he said.

Follow Sara G. Miller on Twitter @SaraGMiller. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.
The real-life stories of UFOs would be enough for the fictional "X-Files" FBI agents Mulder and Scully to spend a lifetime investigating.

With a nod to the new "X-Files" reboot (which airs on Fox on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET), the Central Intelligence Agency has released a trove of once classified documents on several real-life unidentified flying objects.

Not surprisingly, many of these UFO sightings emerged in the early 1950s. The space race was on, the Cold War fears had reached a fever pitch, and science-fiction movies like "The Flying Saucer" (1950) catapulted schlocky depictions of aliens and their flying machines into the popular consciousness. In fact, by 1953, UFO mania had reached such heights that the CIA marshaled a team of scientific consultants to investigate all of the reports and review the "Unidentified Flying Object Problem," according to a 1953 memorandum by the agency.

While most of these encounters were likely weird cloud formations, lightning or even missile tests rather than little green men, they still inspire countless conspiracy theories. From the flying frying pan of West Germany to the mysterious craft hovering over uranium mines in Africa, here are some of the CIA's most mysterious X-files. [7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs]

The flying pan of West Germany

In 1952, Oscar Linke, the 48-year-old former mayor of Gleimershausen, Germany, and his 11-year-old daughter Gabriella were traveling home, when his tire blew out near the town of Hasselbach. His daughter noticed something in the distance, which he initially thought was a deer.

When Linke got closer, however, he saw two men peering at what looked like a massive frying pan, between 42 and 49 feet (13 to 15 meters) in diameter, he reported. Around the rim were two rows of holes, each about 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter, and a large, conical tower, about 10 feet (3 m) high, loomed at the top of the object.

When his daughter called back to him, she startled the two men, who immediately jumped inside the mysterious frying pan, according to the CIA report.

One of the men, according to Linke, had a round protrusion on his chest that glowed green and then red. While he was watching, the conical structure fell down to the ground, the saucer began rising in the air and its rim was encircled with flames from below. Then, it turned horizontally and took off above the trees, disappearing into the distance.

"I would have thought that both my daughter and I were dreaming if it were not for the following element involved: When the object had disappeared, I went to the place where it had been. I found a circular opening in the ground, and it was quite evident that it was freshly dug. It was exactly the same shape as the conical tower," Linke testified to a West German judge at the time.

Linke, who had recently escaped from East Germany, claimed he had never heard of flying saucers when in the Soviet Zone. He was convinced that the flying machine was a Soviet military apparatus. Other people in the area reported seeing what looked like a comet at the time. [Flying Saucers to Mind Control: 7 Declassified Military & CIA Secrets]

Uranium mine surveys?

That same year, in what was then the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), two fiery discs were spotted hovering over the uranium mines in the Elisabethville district, according to a news report from the local newspaper Die Presse.

"The disks glided in elegant curves and changed their positions many times, so that from below, they sometimes appeared as plates, ovals and simply lines," the article said.

According to the article, Cmdr. Pierre, who worked at the Elisabethville airfield, pursued the two flying discs in a fighter plane, but gave up after 15 minutes. He said he estimated the discs were flying at 932 mph (1,500 km/h). The saucer zoomed off, disappearing over Lake Tanganyika. [Supersonic! The 10 Fastest Military Planes]

According to Pierre, the discs were aluminum-colored metal, between 39 and 49 feet (12 to 15 m) in diameter, and had a central knob that seemed to stay absolutely still as the outer disc rotated at tremendous speeds. The outer circumference was "veiled in fire," according to the report. Like the one in the previous report, this saucer seemed capable of flying both vertically and horizontally, and often "shot down" to within a few hundred feet of the treetops. The pilot thought it was unlikely that the mysterious machine was manned, as the disc's erratic motion and high heat would not allow someone to stay inside. (The dubious aerodynamics of such an object were not mentioned.)

Though Pierre is noted as a reliable officer, no one else confirmed his sighting. Based on his report, however, the CIA produced a sketch of the purported saucer's dimensions and potential operating principles.

Smoke trail over Barcelona

It turned out that 1952 was a hot year for unidentified-object sightings.

Several people reported seeing lightning-fast objects streaking through the sky over North Africa and Spain. For instance, newspaper reporter Valentin Garcia noticed a smoke trail coming from a strange, rocketlike object flying near Barcelona. After he reported on the object, his office was flooded with calls about the enigmatic object, and one of his friends even captured a photo of the smoke trail, Garcia reported.

That same year, people in Sousse, Tunisia, reported seeing "a flying object traveling at dizzying speed from west to east emitting a pale green light."

And in Morocco, witnesses reported a flying saucer shooting silently through the sky. In comparison, the flights of nearby T-33 fighter planes seemed slow. The object traced a parabola in the sky, paused, and then streaked off toward a town in the south.

The CIA did not release documents to show exactly how all of those investigations were resolved, but other documents suggest that most seem to be hoaxes or misidentified objects.

In a 1953 report by a scientific advisory panel to investigate UFOs, agency officials noted that "the Panel members were impressed by the lack of sound data in the great majority of case histories."

For most of the cases, expert investigators uncovered reasonable explanations for the sightings, and for others, a process of induction suggested similar reports could be dismissed as well, the panel found.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
This Greek inscription was uncovered at Zippori, which was once the Jewish capital of Galilee in northern Israel.

Archaeologists surveying an ancient cemetery in Israel say they have discovered 1,700-year-old inscriptions in stone that may mark the burial place of elite rabbis.

The inscriptions were uncovered at Zippori, also known as Sepphoris, which was once the Jewish capital of Galilee in northern Israel. For the past three years, archaeologist Motti Aviam, of the Kinneret Institute for Galilean Archaeology, and his colleagues have documented several hundred ancient tombs of Zippori.

The burial grounds were used between the 2nd and late 4th centuries A.D., Aviam said. Sarcophagi, ossuaries and other burial chambers have been found inside the boundaries of a national park (which also contains ancient streets, mosaic floors and a Roman-style theater) as well as inside the modern moshav, or village. Some tombs have even been found in residents' backyards, the archaeologists said. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

By hiking the area and looking into holes and under bushes, Aviam and his team have mostly been marking tombs that can been seen on the surface. (Actual excavations are rarer, as the digging up of ancient cemeteries in Israel is sometimes controversial, prompting protests from religious groups who want the tombs left undisturbed.)

A few weeks ago, locals told the archaeologists about a place on the edge of the modern moshav where they remembered seeing a few stones with inscriptions. The researchers investigated, and indeed, they discovered three inscriptions  one written in Greek and the other two in Aramaic  on stone lintels that would have rested above the entrance to the graves.

Archaeologists clean off one of the Aramaic inscriptions discovered in an ancient cemetery in Israel. (Image credit: Miki Peleg, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority)

"Everyone who stood in front of the tombs would have been able to read it," Aviam told Live Science. He said the finding was surprising, because inscriptions are not common archaeological discoveries in Israel.

"Most of the inscriptions are on mosaic floors of synagogues and churches," Aviam said. "Finding these three inscriptions together in one day is a great contribution to our historical knowledge."

The Greek inscription mentions the name "Jose," according to an announcement from the Israel Antiquities Authority. The two Aramaic inscriptions each claim to mark the burial place of a "rabbi." Aviam said it is not clear if the title "Rabbi" had the same meaning 1,700 years ago as it did today, though important rabbis were undoubtedly social and religious leaders  as was the case with the 2nd century A.D. Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi, a famous resident of Zippori, who compiled the Mishnah, the written version of oral Jewish law.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has taken the stone artifacts into storage, and specialists in Aramaic and Greek will take a closer look at the inscriptions to decipher words that are not clear, such as the names of the rabbis. The researchers plan to publish their findings in an academic journal.

For now, they can tell that one of the lintels has the phrase "from Tiberias," perhaps indicating the person buried there came from Tiberias, another city in Galilee that eventually eclipsed Zippori in terms of political importance.

The other tomb marker bears the Aramaic epitaph "le-olam," which means "forever." Aviam said this word had special significance in the ancient world. "In the ancient periods, some people sometimes took over old tombs," he said. "So what he means is, 'Don't interrupt my resting place I want to be here forever.'"

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
To the editor:

I have been thinking about Manuel Blancos Jan. 16 letter; consequently, I cant decide who his real target is.

Is he attacking Republicans for not being subscribers of Roman Catholic social doctrine?

Is he equating Protestantism with Republican Party policy? Does he disagree with Martin Luther?

If he wants to understand what Luther had to say, I direct him to What Luther Says published by Concordia Publishing House.

This book addresses in encyclopedia format Luthers writing on a multitude of topics.

By the way, one ought to use the entire verse (Romans 1:17) not just the last portion.

God is righteous, and we are sinners and we apprehend Gods righteousness via faith.

If he is attacking Republicans for not supporting Roman Catholic social doctrine, I ask him to consider the level of servitude, a modern benefits recipient gets.

Recent studies show that to move from welfare to working is likely to cost many beneficiaries money.

Most benefits are means tested with sharp earning boundaries: a person earning a dollar or so more per hour could lose more dollars in benefits than they would gain in increased wages.

This means that the person under consideration is employed by the government to do nothing.

There can be no more demeaning a situation  an able bodied individual down on their luck trapped in government assistance.

If we desire true equality, it seems to me we need more people working and fewer people on social support.

The Republican Party generally supports the dignity of work and not servitude to government.

The last topic to address is the assertion that Republican candidates are not true Christians if they do not support Roman Catholic social doctrine.

Social doctrine is adiaphora, that is social teachings are not dogmatic or creedal.

Adiaphoron is a Greek concept of Stoic philosophy that indicates things outside of moral law actions that morality neither mandates nor forbids.

We can believe in the sufficiency of Jesus atoning death without subscribing to a particular solution to human problems.

What the Protestant Reformation did was to reintroduce scripture as the source of Church teaching.

There are no economic formulae in scripture.

Jesus condemned wealthy people not for having money, but for relying on their wealth not His grace.

Sincerely,

Joseph Pelto
The website of Dr Jim Swire and Lockerbie researcher Peter Biddulph, in the case of Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi, convicted in 2000 for the Lockerbie bombing
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By Long Island News & PR Published: January 27 2016

The Fair Media Councils Folio Awards, slated for April 22, 2016 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Crest Hollow Country Club, honors the best in news. Reserve now to be among the 600 business ...

Woodbury, NY - January 26, 2016 - The Fair Media Councils Folio Awards, slated for April 22, 2016 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Crest Hollow Country Club, honors the best in news. Reserve now to be among the 600 business leaders and media from major news outlets throughout the New York metro area. Its a star-studded event with a purpose: To improve the quality of local news, so everyone wins.

Long Islanders need to know whats going on, whether its in their backyards, in Albany or in Washington, D.C., said Fair Media Council CEO Jaci Clement. Quality news is vital to ensuring Long Island prospers. News identifies the problems so leaders can get to work to solve them. We also need news to celebrate our successes, so we maintain a strong community, and a strong identity.

What makes FMC Folio Awards such an important program is the fact that the public judges the news. About 40 community leaders adjudicate the awards process. The winning stories have a common thread: The news tapped the pulse of the public.

The Fair Media Council is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that advocates for quality local news and works to create a media savvy society. More information about FMC and its work, as well as details about the Folio Awards and how to purchase tickets, sponorships and ads are all available at www.fairmediacouncil.org or by calling 516-224-1860, ext. 1.
Lawrence, NY - January 26, 2016 - To help save lives and combat the Heroin epidemic, Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano and County Legislator Howard J. Kopel will host a free Overdose Prevention Seminar on Thursday, February 4, 2016 at 7 p.m. at the Five Towns Community Center, located at 270 Lawrence Avenue in Lawrence. Residents will learn how to administer Narcan - the lifesaving antidote that can reverse the fatal effects of an Opiate overdose - and learn the warning signs of drug addiction, treatment options, personal stories of recovery, and more.

Through education, awareness enforcement and treatment, my administration and the Heroin Prevention Task Force are diligently combatting heroin and opioid abuse throughout Nassau, said County Executive Mangano. These free Overdose Prevention Seminars continue to help save lives and keep families whole.

At least 190 Nassau residents died from Heroin and prescription painkillers in 2014 (final statistics for 2015 is not yet available). Narcan has been used by paramedics and emergency room doctors for decades, to save lives. Yet a 2006 State law allows citizens to administer Narcan in an attempt to save a life, without fear of liability. Nassau County has already provided Narcan training for nearly 6,000 people since 2012. At least two dozen trainees have used that knowledge - and the Narcan kit they were given - to revive someone overdosing on Heroin or painkillers, and save their lives. Narcan is administered through a nasal spray, and is provided at no charge to trainees over the age of 18.

Legislator Howard J. Kopel stated, I urge any person who suspects that a loved one may have a drug problem to attend this meeting. It could help you save a life!

Social Worker and Certified Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor attendees will be eligible to receive free Continuing Education Units (CEU) for the two hour workshop  which is provided by the Nassau County Department of Human Services.

Anyone can attend, but seating is limited. Residents MUST pre-register either by email or by calling (516) 571-6105. For dates and locations of other Overdose Prevention Seminars, visit online.
Looking to stay up to date about all of the news stories and local headlines that are important to Long Islanders? We've rounded up the top coverage for all of the important topics from multiple sources around Long Island, so you can be sure you've got the most recent update on the top stories for Long Island. Have an idea for a news story? Email us at news@longisland.com

Columnists Press Releases
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 27, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Young adults who spend too much time on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may pay the price in poor sleep, new research suggests.

"This is one of the first pieces of evidence that social media use really can impact your sleep," lead author Jessica Levenson, a postdoctoral researcher in psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said in a university news release.

Her team tracked the social media use and sleep troubles of nearly 1,800 Americans aged 19 to 32.

On average, participants said they spent 61 minutes a day on social media and visited social media sites 30 times a week. Nearly 30 percent of the participants also said they suffered sleep disturbances.

While the study couldn't prove cause-and-effect, Levenson's team found that people who spent the most time on social media each day were twice as likely to have sleep problems as those who spent less time on social media.

People who checked social media most often during the week were also three times more likely to have sleep problems than those who checked the least often, the study found.

The findings, released online in advance of publication in the April print issue of the journal Preventive Medicine, suggest that doctors may need to ask about social media when assessing sleep problems in young adults, the researchers said.

The young adults questioned in the study are "arguably, the first generation to grow up with social media," Levenson pointed out.

Study senior author Dr. Brian Primack said there are a number of ways that too much surfing on social media might get in the way of a good night's sleep.

For example: it could replace sleep, such as when someone stays up late using social media; it could cause emotional, mental or physical arousal, such as when involved in contentious discussions; or the bright light emitted by devices might disrupt the body's circadian rhythms.

Some young adults may also use social media to pass the time when they can't fall asleep or get back to sleep, said Primack, who directs the university's Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health.

"Difficulty sleeping may lead to increased use of social media, which may in turn lead to more problems sleeping," he said. "This cycle may be particularly problematic with social media because many forms involve interactive screen time that is stimulating and rewarding and, therefore, potentially detrimental to sleep."

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on sleep.
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Luton is a large town, borough and unitary authority area of Bedfordshire. Luton and its near neighbours, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, form the Luton/Dunstable Urban Area with a population of about 258,000. Luton is home to Championship team Luton Town Football Club, London Luton Airport and The University of Bedfordshire. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. For all the latest news from Luton sign up to our newsletter here.
Range Rover Offers The Most Luxurious Road Trip On Earth

The itinerary, developed as a joint venture between the two brands, offers customers 21 days of unparalleled luxury combined with the greatest driving routes the world has to offer, both on-road and off-road.The trip takes in five continents, eight countries and nine of the world's best hotels. The locations have been handpicked to not only offer the very highest levels of luxury, but to provide guests with truly off-the-beaten-track experiences at locations only accessible thanks to the peerless capability of the Range Rover.The one-of-a-kind Abercrombie & Kent itinerary has been developed to mark the launch of the Range Rover SVAutobiography - the ultimate variant of the British manufacturer's luxury model line. Featuring unique exterior design enhancements, an exquisitely detailed interior and the most powerful engine ever offered in a Range Rover, the SVAutobiography is exclusively crafted at Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations in the UK.Mark Cameron, Land Rover Experiential Marketing Director, at Jaguar Land Rover said: "We set out to design a trip worthy of the ultimate luxury SUV and thanks to our partners at Abercrombie & Kent we have achieved just that. From Europe to Australia, this trip is all about the epitome of luxury but done so in a Land Rover way - the unexpected, the off-the-beaten-track and the once-in-a-lifetime experiences. This itinerary represents the definitive drive adventure, achieved in the definitive vehicle."Simon Lynch, Director of Business Development, Abercrombie & Kent, adds: "A&K are delighted to be partnering with Land Rover on offering this, the most ultimate of driving journeys. Our love of adventure, combined with exploration and luxury for over 50 years, gave us the inspiration for this expedition, which is packed full of unforgettable experiences. Our pioneering customers will explore landscapes, see wildlife and meet communities well and truly off the beaten track."Starting at 100,000 per person based on two travellers, this matchless road trip is fully customisable according to guests' preferences and is being offered through Abercrombie & Kent's bespoke boutiques located in Harrods London; City of London; Abu Dhabi and Monaco, as well as via online enquiries.The A&K SVAutobiography road trip itineraryStarting in Europe, guests take in the twisting mountain roads of Monaco, the coastal highway to Portofino and the breathtaking vistas of the Italian lakes, all from the leather-lined luxury of their personal SVAutobiography.Accommodation for the first leg includes Four Seasons Cap Ferrat, the Villa D'Este overlooking Lake Como and the San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge in the stunningly beautiful and remote Dolomites region of the Alps. Lunch is taken at world-renowned eateries including Joel Robuchon at the Metropole and unique, bespoke activities include a personalised fragrance making class in the lavender scented hills of Provence and a glacier picnic - by chartered helicopter - in the peaks of the Alps.The second leg of the trip sees guests fly to Marrakech for a three-night stay at the unsurpassed Royal Mansour. Drives in the region take in the arid desert around Ouarzazate, the perfect territory for guests to develop their off road skills in the SVAutobiography, and a route up into the Atlas Mountains ending with a lunch at Richard Branson's exquisite hotel, Kasbah Tamadot.The unique climate of the Arizona desert is the destination for the third part of the trip, as guests fly in to experience the one-of-a-kind Amangiri resort in Utah. Amangiri - meaning peaceful mountain - is located across 600 acres, tucked into a protected valley with sweeping views towards the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument. The resort is built around a central swimming pool and blends the dramatic surrounds with deep canyons and towering plateaus to create a raw and captivating landscape. Activities for this leg include a hiking and scrambling excursion into Antelope Canyon, a private dinner under the stars at a local Sandstone Butte and breakfast in Zion National Park.The fourth leg sees guests take an overnight flight to Chile to experience the Atacama Desert - the driest non-polar desert in the world. Staying at Awasi - one of the most luxurious and remote lodges in South America - guests are assigned a personal concierge who designs a wholly bespoke experience customised to their interests. The driving excursions in the area are some of the most epic on earth and include a day drive to the Alamo Observatory, a 1bn telescope that can see the 'beginning of time.'An overnight flight to Sydney marks the final part of the trip. A night's stay at the Park Hyatt gives guests the opportunity to relax after they have experienced both a VIP bridge climb and behind-the-scenes access to the landmark Opera House. A short hop to Tasmania the following day provides the opportunity for a stunning drive through the vast, rugged wilderness, taking in coastal heathland and forest, giving drivers the chance to put the SVAutobiography through its paces. Guests stay at Saffire Freycinet, where they experience a breakfast like no other - standing knee deep in an estuary enjoying fresh oysters and local sparkling wine.Full itinerary:Day 1 - Nice to MonacoLunch at Joel Robuchon at the Metropole, MonacoOvernight at Four Seasons Cap FerratDay 2 - Hills of ProvencePersonalised fragrance making classLunch at Chateau St MartinOvernight at Four Seasons Cap FerratDay 3 - Coastal drive to Portofino3 hour drive to Portofino along the coastal highwayOvernight at Hotel Splendido, PortofinoDay 4 - Cinque TerreDrive along the coast to the Cinque TerreLunch on the Italian RivieraOvernight at Hotel Splendido, PortofinoDay 5 - Lake Comocruise3 hour drive to Lake ComoTake a private sunset cruise over the lake to BellagioOvernight at Villa D'EsteDay 6 - Dolomite Mountains5 hour drive through the Italian lakes into the Dolomite mountainsOvernight at San Lorenzo Mountain LodgeDay 7 - Helicopter picnicFly up by Helicopter for a discreet picnic on a glacierSnow shoeing and crevasse rappellingOvernight at San Lorenzo Mountain LodgeDay 8 - Fly toMarrakechTransfer to VeniceFlight to MarrakechOvernight at Royal MansourDay 9 - Ouarzazate Desert driveDay drive into the arid desert around OuarzazateLunch in a private desert campOvernight at Royal MansourDay 10 - Atlas MountainsDay drive into the Atlas Mountains through Berber villagesLunch at Richard Branson's hotel Kasbah Tamadot.Overnight at Royal MansourDay 11 - Transfer to USFlight to Las VegasHelicopter to Amangiri - Range Rover on standby for drive to hotelOvernight at AmangiriDay 12 - Monument Valley driveDrive 2.5 hours to Monument ValleyAntelope Canyon - Hiking and Scrambling excursionOvernight at AmangiriDay 13 - Grand Canyon by helicopterHelicopter to North rim of the Grand CanyonPrivate dinner under the stars at a local Sandstone ButteOvernight at AmangiriDay 14 - Utah desert driveDrive 4.5 hours though the Arizona/Utah desertBreakfast in Zion National ParkOvernight Flight from Las VegasDay 15 - Atacama, ChileArrival day in the Atacama DesertOvernight atAwasiDay 16 - Alamo ObservatoryDay drive to the Alamo ObservatoryPrivate LunchOvernight at AwasiDay 17 - Atacama desert driveDay Drive into the Atacama Desert.Overnight at AwasiDay 18 - Transfer to AustraliaOvernight flight to SydneyDay 19 - Sydney Bridge climbVIP Sydney Bridge climb experience and behind the scenes at Sydney Opera HouseOvernight at Park Hyatt SydneyDay 20 - Transfer to TasmaniaFly to TasmaniaDrive 2 and a half hours through Tasmania on stunning roadsOvernight at SaffireDay 21 - Boart trip to Wineglass BayQuad bike through the coastal heathland and forestBoat trip to Wineglass BayOvernight at SaffireDay 22 - Return to LondonLand Rover Adventure Travel by Abercrombie & Kent offers a variety of incredible driving excursions throughout the year. For more information on further trips please see
The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa Offers the Ultimate Presidential Experience for Presidents Day 2016

From an ultimate Live Like a President' all-inclusive overnight package, to special self-guided property tours, to a curated menu of cocktails inspired by famed U.S. Presidents, guests and locals alike can walk in the footsteps of some of the nation's most notable presidents at The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa this Presidents Day weekend.To capture the spirit and history of the Presidents Day holiday, The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa will offer a luxurious U.S. Presidents-inspired package  aptly named Live Like a President'  which includes luxurious overnight accommodations in the Alhambra Presidential Suite  where Ronald and Nancy Reagan spent their honeymoon; VIP docent-led tour of the hotel highlighting its rich, presidential history with intriguing stories and unique facts; dinner at Duane's Prime Steaks & Seafood; spa treatment at Conde Nast Traveler award-winning Kelly's Spa; and complimentary valet parking.Additional Presidents Day-inspired specialties include a curated menu of presidential cocktails at The Inn's signature Presidential Lounge  formerly a suite reserved for presidential visits, and the room where Pat and Richard Nixon said their wedding vows in 1940. The cocktail menu is inspired by the favorite beverages of the famous U.S. Presidents who have stayed at The Inn. Sample cocktails include a Hoover Dry Martini; Kennedy Daiquiri; Roosevelt Mint Julep; Reagan Orange Blossom Special; and a Taft Champagne Cocktail.To cap off the presidential experience, The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa will be offering special self-guided tours of the property, which will showcase the various places and memories surrounding presidential visits to the hotel. Tour highlights include a custom-crafted chair for former President William Howard Taft to accommodate his large stature, as well as one of Riverside's two parent navel orange trees, now found in the Spanish Patio of the Mission Inn Restaurant, which was replanted by Theodore Roosevelt.For more information, please visit http://www.missioninn.com/
Tuesday was an Apple quarterly financial report day like none other. Not only did the company set records for revenue, profit, and iPhone salesits $18.4 billion profit is one of the most profitable quarters for any company everbut it got hammered by stock analysts who fear that the iPhones rocket ride of rapid growth has come to an end.

Still, some of the most interesting news of the day comes out of the hourlong conference call that Apple executives, namely CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri, have with financial analysts about a half an hour after the results are released. Heres a look at the most interesting things they said (or didnt say) in that call.

iPhone deflection

Whatever you do, Basil Fawlty warned his employees, dont mention the war. The equivalent on Tuesday was the iPhones lack of sales growthiPhone revenue grew less than 1 percent when compared to the same quarter a year ago. Wall Street really likes growth, and this isnt that.

Cook tried to downplay the lack of growth and, even more damning, Apples admission that iPhone sales will decline year-over-year in the forthcoming quarter. While saying that Apple wont project iPhone sales in subsequent quarters, Cook said that the second fiscal quarter of 2015 would be the most difficult to beat this year, because of sales that came from pent-up demand that Apple wasnt able to fulfill in the first fiscal quarter of 2015.

Have we reached peak iPhone? Probably not. Apples explanation for next quarters expected slip is that the pent-up demand carried over from holiday 2014 into the March quarter of 2015 will be tough for this years March quarter to beat.

Fair enough, except that if that number was lowerif Apple had managed to make as many iPhones for the 2014 holiday season as there was demandthat wouldve set the bar higher for the first quarter, which means iPhone sales growth would have looked worse Tuesday but better in three months. The larger point still stands: iPhone sales seem to have plateaued. Nobodys saying theyre going to dropthe smartphone is basically one of the most popular product categories in existencebut if youre focused purely on growth, this category may no longer be as exciting as it once was.

Economic headwinds

Echoing a buzzword from last quarters conference call, Cook cited the economic headwinds Apple faces, both in the softness of the Chinese economy and difficulty in foreign-exchange conversations. Apple went to the trouble of releasing an appendix to its financial statements ( PDF) that showed its numbers in a more favorable light if currency rates were constant, rather than fluctuating as they have done. The state of currency conversions has definitely taken a toll on Apples numbers, hiding some progress.

Moreover, in markets where the local currency is losing out to a stronger U.S. dollar, Apple is forced to choose between two difficult options: raise prices (and presumably depress sales) in order to maintain profit margins, or hold prices steady and watch profit margins dwindle.

Apple Apple makes two-thirds of its money outside the United States, so soft currencies around the world hit the company in a big way this past year. (Click the graph to enlarge it.)

Were in an environment now that is dramatically different from a macroeconomic point of view, Cook said. From a currency point of view, from the level at which weve had to adjust pricing in several of these markets, and sort of the overall malaise in virtually every country in the world.

The difficulty of the world economy and of playing in many different international markets is definitely a big story when it comes to understanding Apples business, and its becoming a major theme when the company discusses some of its biggest challenges. Or as BuzzFeeds Tom Gara wrote on Twitter, Apple lost more revenue to foreign exchange fluctuations in last quarter than all of Facebooks quarterly revenue.

Still bullish on China

Difficulties in the Chinese economy havent soured Cook and Apple on China, however. We remain very bullish on China, and dont subscribe to the doom and gloom kind of predictions, Cook said Tuesday. Apple revenue grew 14 percent year-over-year in China, to an all-time record $18.4 billion. Mac sales were up 27 percent year-over-year in mainland China.

And then theres the continued potential of the iPhone in China. Almost half of the iPhones that we sold in China last quarter were to people who were buying their first iPhone, Cook said, adding that he expects a huge wave of future buyers who will upgrade their existing 3G smartphones to ones that connect to faster LTE networks.

India Press Information Bureau Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi speaks with Apple CEO Tim Cook in San Jose, CA, on Sept. 26, 2015.

Apple is also interested in India, despite not doing nearly as well there as in China, and the country got a lot of talk from Cook on Tuesday. India is also incredibly exciting, Cook said. Its the third-largest smartphone market in the world behind China and the United States. The population of India is incredibly young, the median age there is 27. And so I see the demographics there also being incredibly great for a consumer brand, and for people that really want the best products. And as you know, weve been putting increasingly more energy in India. India revenue for us in Q1 was up 38 percent. We also had currency issues in India, as everybody else did. Constant currency growth was 48 percent, and so its a very rapidly expanding country and I think the government there is very interested in economic reforms and so forth that I think all speak to a really good business environment for the future.

Given Apples small presence in India and low penetration of LTE networks in that country, Cook thinks there are a tremendous number of people there (and elsewhere in the world) that will give Apple opportunities to keep growing the iPhone user base.

Pump up the Services

Apple also spent more time talking up its Services financial line, which covers the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Pay, and more. A page in Apples appendix PDF was devoted to showing growth in this area, especially in categories that come from Apples installed base of customers. In fiscal 2015 Apple generated $16.8 billion in installed base related revenue, meaning money from existing Apple customers.

I do think that the assets that we have in this area are huge, Cook said. And I do think its probably something that the investment community would want to and should focus more on. In other words, Apple is sending a message to investors: dont sell our services business short.

Square Services like the App Store and Apple Pay are making the company money, but growing slightly more slowly than the overall install bases growth.

However, analyst Toni Sacconaghi was appropriately skeptical of some of the numbers. Sacconaghi pointed out that while Apples installed base grew more than 25 percent, services grew 24 percent during the same period. It almost implies your penetration of your install base in terms of your ability to sell services is going down, Sacconaghi said. Apple CFO Luca Maestri didnt really have an answer for that one, but its a good question. Is Apples services revenue growing at a slower rate than its user base, and if so, why? And what does that mean for future growth?

Given Apples commitment to discussing services, I suspect well be hearing a lot more about all of this in the quarterly results conversations to come.

A nod toward the future?

Then there was that weird moment where analyst Gene Munsterwho famously beat the drum on an Apple-made television set for yearsasked Cook if he had any high-level thoughts on the virtual reality theme? Do you think this is more of a geeky niche, Munster asked, or something that could go mainstream?

You might have expected Cook to brush off Munster with one of his trademark we dont comment on future products one-liners. But instead, Cook actually responded.

In terms of virtual reality, uh, no, I dont think its a niche, he said. I think it can beits really cool, and has some interesting applications.

Could it be shades of when Cook said the wrist is interesting a long while before the Apple Watch was announced? Or is he just trolling Gene Munster? Either way, the world is more fun when the CEO of Apple plays coy about future product directions, and launches thousands of pages of fevered speculation.
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U.S. Marines and Sailors with the Combined Arms Company concluded the initial iteration of the units three planned rotations at Novo Selo Training Area, Bulgaria, Jan. 22, 2016.

The mechanized unit, supplemental to the Black Sea Rotational Force, arrived in Eastern Europe in August 2015 to provide reassurance to partner-nations by demonstrating the value of the U.S. commitment to security in the region.

Accompanied by roughly 160 U.S. Marines, the CAC is composed of M1A1 Abrams Tanks, M777 Howitzer artillery cannons, and light-armored vehicles. There is no other unit in the Marines Corps like the Combined Arms Company, said Lt. Col. Kemper Jones, commanding officer of BSRF. The unit was conceived in North Carolina, the equipment was brought overseas to Germany and transported Bulgaria, ready to meet strategic objectives and support partner-nations, Jones said.

The heavy equipment, not only a token of commitment, builds upon collective capabilities and enhances major exercises. The most recent exercise in which the CAC participated was Platinum Lion 16-2, which concluded Jan. 15, 2016.

During Platinum Lion, we really hit the mark on what the CAC is out here to do, which is to show our NATO Allies the capabilities we can bring to the table with armor and artillery, said Capt Dan Whitt, commander of Combined Arms Company. We proved that we can fight effectively side-by-side with integrated combined arms.

The CAC incorporated its assets into three multinational live-fire exercises during the six-month deployment and engaged with more than five different nations. These exercises, Whitt said, are a unique opportunity to exchange tank employment techniques, mechanized infantry tactics, and indirect fire procedures.

The development and employment of the CAC proves the Marine Corps can build composite units quickly and effectively to meet the demand signal, Jones said.

The oncoming Combined Arms Company, commanded by Capt. Kirk Steinhorst, is sourced from 1st Battalion, 10th Marines; 2nd Tank Battalion; and other augments from II Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The unit is scheduled to participate in cold weather training with partners in Latvia during the months of February and March.
Via the Yale School of Public Health: Haitis Cholera Epidemic Could Have Been Prevented With Low-cost Approaches, Study Finds. Excerpt:

Cholera remains a critical risk for U.N. peacekeeping operations, years after Nepalese troops inadvertently brought the disease to Haiti in fall of 2010 and triggered one of the worst epidemics in recent years.

New research by scientists at Yale School of Public Health, in partnership with colleagues at the Yale Law School, has found that simple and inexpensive interventionswhich the United Nations has yet to implementwould be effective in preventing future outbreaks of the bacterial infection.

Researchers developed a mathematical model for the arrival of peacekeepers carrying cholera and the early spread of the disease in Haiti. The model estimated the probability of an epidemic occurring under current U.N. protocols, and compared this against the probability of an epidemic if peacekeepers had been given antibiotics for cholera, screened or vaccinated.

A team of independent scientific and medical experts had previously recommended that the United Nations consider these interventions to limit peacekeepers risk for spreading cholera. However, their implementation by the UN has been complicated by a lack of evidence to support decision-making.

The Yale team found that all three strategies could significantly reduce risk for cholera epidemics such as occurred in Haiti following a massive earthquake that devastated parts of the Caribbean nation. Antibiotic prophylaxis beginning one week before peacekeepers depart their home countries was the most promising strategy, reducing the probability of an epidemic by over 90 percent, at a cost well below $1 per peacekeeper. Screening for cholera infection was found to reduce the probability of an epidemic by over 80 percent at around $2.50 per peacekeeper.

The findings are published today (January 26) in the journal PLOS Medicine.

More needs to be done by the United Nations to protect both peacekeeping personnel and the populations that they serve from cholera, said senior author Virginia Pitzer, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the School of Public Health. This study provides quantitative support to show that effective strategies are available.

Vaccination, meanwhile, was estimated to reduce the probability of an outbreak by around 60 percent at best. While cholera vaccines prevent severe symptoms when people are exposed to the pathogen, they do not necessarily prevent people from becoming infected and unknowingly transmitting to others. Given the limited supply of cholera vaccines, the researchers argue that vaccination might be better used in response to emergencies.

One of the goals of modeling is to get a sense of the potential large-scale outcomes of different policies, said Joseph Lewnard, the studys lead author and a Ph.D. student at the School of Public Health. Evidence that the available interventions are effective substantively changes the conversation about preventing cholera introduction during deployments.
The Miami-based cruise operator Norwegian Cruise Line has announced its ground-breaking summer 2017 deployment for Europe with for the first time in company history five ships sailing in European waters as well as regular cruises out of Hamburg, with embarkation also available in Southampton and Amsterdam.

Announcing the news at a press conference in London, Harry Sommer, EVP International Business Development, said: "Part of this is a response to market demand, part of this is the growth in the company."

Norwegian has launched three huge ships in the past three years  the aforementioned Getaway, sister Breakaway and last year, Norwegian Escape. The company has long promised a return to the U.K.  which it left in 2008  once it had more ships.

Norwegian said one of its newest ships, the 3,969-passenger Norwegian Getaway, would reposition to the Baltic for the summer from its current home in Miami, operating eight- and nine-night voyages out of Copenhagen.

Marking the first time that Norwegian will homeport a ship in Hamburg, Germany, Norwegian Jade -- one of the companys four Jewel-Class vessels -- will offer new cruises from Hamburg in 2017.

Three other ships will sail European waters in 2017, including the recently refurbished Norwegian Epic on its seven-night Western Mediterranean itinerary, where guests can choose to depart from Barcelona, Civitavecchia (Rome) or Marseille; Norwegian Spirit sailing alternating 10- and 11-night Grand Mediterranean cruises between Barcelona and Venice; and Norwegian Star, which after its return from Australia, will spend the summer cruising from Venice to the Greek Isles as well as the Adriatic, Greece & Turkey.

The Getaway's new itineraries will feature calls in Tallinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland; Stockholm, Sweden; and St. Petersburg, Russia.

Andy Stuart, president and chief operating officer of Norwegian Cruise Line said: With these exciting new summer European itineraries, we are offering our guests a wider variety of adventurous itineraries that span the continent, while also bringing one of our newest and most innovative ships to Europe

In addition to the European sailings, Norwegian announced details on Norwegian Escapes 2017 summer cruises to the Caribbean from Miami. The ship will spend summer 2017 sailing alternating seven-night Eastern and Western Caribbean cruises year-round from Miami, starting on May 6, 2017.
The American Maritime Partnership (AMP), the voice of the domestic maritime industry, today released a statement in response to the sheer number of factual errors in the recent report published by the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructures (Aii)  Jones Act: Protectionism v. Global Trade.



The publication is littered with fabrications intended to mislead policymakers and we demand a retraction of the report," said Tom Allegretti, Chairman of AMP. It is shocking that a nonprofit organization led by former senior members of the U.S. military would produce such a factually inaccurate report and take such a myopic view of an important national security issue. They have failed to even acknowledge the fact that the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant, multiple 4-star generals leading USTRANSCOM, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Transportation, national security experts in the Congress, and many others have all stressed how critical the Jones Act is to national security.



The AMP Chairman also suggested that the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure should do a better job of checking basic facts before issuing its publications. AMP seeks to set the record straight by correcting more than a dozen factual errors presented in the Aii report:



CLAIM: There are about six dozen Jones Act-qualified vessels in operation. (page 2 of report)



FACT: There are approximately 40,000 vessels in the Jones Act fleet.



CLAIM: According to the report, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has estimated that the Jones Act costs the nation $656 million annually. (page 4)



FACT: In truth, the ITC has completely backed away from that estimate (made in 2002) and now says it cannot calculate the cost of the Jones Act, if any. The ITC changed its position after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed the ITCs findings and called them uncertain, undeterminable, incomplete, and unverifiable.



CLAIM: The report asserts the GAO has found that the price per gallon of gasoline [in Puerto Rico] is 15 cents per gallon higher  than it would be in the absence of Jones Act requirements. (page 6)



FACT: Actually, the GAO found there was no way to estimate a cost of the Jones Act, if any, because it was impossible to know which American domestic commerce laws would be applied to foreign shipping companies if the Jones Act were repealed. The 15 cent figure cited by Aii exists nowhere in the GAO report.



CLAIM: Aii says foreign ships must avoid [non-contiguous states and territories] if the continental U.S. is their ultimate destination. (page 3)



FACT: This claim is flatly wrong. The Jones Act only pertains to the movement of domestic cargo between domestic ports. A foreign ship coming from a foreign port may drop off foreign origin cargo at non-contiguous states and territories even if the continental United States is the ultimate destination.



CLAIM: Aii reports it costs many more times to crew an American ship than a foreign ship. (page 1)



FACT: This argument is deceptive, comparing apples to oranges. Foreign ships are not required to meet U.S. wage standards and can pay their crews third world wages and benefits (and frequently do). (A recent New York Times story described waiters on a foreign cruise vessel as paid $50 a month plus tips and no benefits.) Of course, American shipping companies pay more for their American crews just as any American domestic industry pays higher labor costs than their competitors in third world industries.



CLAIM: The report says the Jones Act requires foreign shippers to bring their goods to the mainland U.S. where products are then offloaded and reloaded onto expensive vessels to be transported to [places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico] at substantially higher cost to consumers. (page 1)



FACT: This claim is completely wrong. There is no requirement under the Jones Act, or anywhere else, that foreign shippers bypass the islands and reload their cargo on mainland vessels. Foreign shipping companies can deliver foreign origin cargo directly to Hawaii and Puerto Rico and they do regularly. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the vessels calling on Puerto Rico are foreign.



CLAIM: Aii asserts imported oil must be carried on a U.S. flag ship if it makes more than one stop along the U.S. coast. Consequently, it becomes cheaper to export and more expensive to import (page 3)



FACT: Wrong again. A foreign tanker can make as many stops in the United States to deliver foreign cargo as it desires.



CLAIM: The report states it is not uncommon for foreign vessels to travel between Alaska and California, making a quick stop in British Columbia This allows a vessel that does not meet Jones Act standards to avoid a waiver and still transport goods between U.S. ports. (page 5)



FACT: Incorrect. Such a movement would be illegal. It is false that it commonly occurs or that the Jones Act (or any other law) encourages such a move.



CLAIM: Aii describes the Jones Act shipping industry as unchallenged by competition with no incentive to innovate. (page 7)



FACT: The domestic maritime industry faces intense competition among itself, foreign shipping companies, railroads, pipelines, trucks, and airlines. The result is a highly innovative fleet that, with 40,000 vessels and an estimated 500,000 related jobs, is the envy of the world. The domestic fleet is a world leader in innovation, from the invention of the shipping containercalled the invention that made the boom in global trade possibleto the recent construction of the worlds first LNG-powered containerships.



CLAIM: The report quotes a Patrick Holland for the facts that Virgin Islands was exempted from the Jones Act in 1992 and predictably the costs of shipping goods to the Virgin Islands from the mainland is now nearly half that of shipping to Puerto Rico. (page 6)



FACT: The report does not provide any basis for these statements, and there does not appear to be any study or information of any kind backing up the data. (The report does not even explain who Patrick Holland is.) The statement that the Virgin Islands shipping costs is half as much is simply not true. Also, the Virgin Islands were exempted in 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, not 1992.



CLAIM: Aii claims that as result of the Jones Act and the lack of competition, the [U.S.] cargo fleet has slowly deteriorated. (page 1)



FACT: The American domestic fleet is 40,000 vessels strong and is the envy of the world. Over the last several years, the fleet has enjoyed a shipbuilding renaissancethe most significant in a generation. It is also highly innovative, e.g., creating the first self-unloading bulk carriers and the first LNG-powered containerships. This error probably represents confusion by the report writers with the U.S. flag international fleet, which has decreased over the years for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with the Jones Act.



CLAIM: The reports mistaken premise is that the Jones Act is a hindrance to global free trade.



FACT: What the report appears to miss is that the Jones Act does not involve global trade. By definition, the Jones Act is limited to 100% U.S. domestic commercetransportation between two points in the United States. The report recommends allowing foreign crews to engage in 100% domestic commerce outside of American laws, which is not allowed in any U.S. industry; there is no reason it should be allowed in shipping. It would certainly save costs to allow foreign shipping crews to operate in U.S. domestic commerce at third world wagesas it would in refining or any other U.S. industrybut no Congress is likely to allow that any time soon.



CLAIM: The report cites as fact a 2010 University of Puerto Rico study which concluded that the island economy loses approximately $537 million annually as a result of the Jones Act. (page 6)



FACT: The report did not mention that a 2013 GAO studyby all accounts the most detailed study of the Jones Act ever conducted in Puerto Rico or anywhere elsedirectly contradicted this by saying such an estimate was not possible.



CLAIM: Aii takes the novel position that the complexity of the issue alone should encourage revision [of the Jones Act]. (page 6)



FACT: The Jones Act is not complex. Life without the Jones Act would be far more complex, as the Lexington Institutes Dr. Daniel Goure noted, saying [w]ere the Jones Act not in existence, DHS would be confronted with the difficult and very costly task of monitoring, regulating, and overseeing all foreign-controlled, foreign-crewed vessels in internal U.S. waters. That would undoubtedly be complex.








The U.S. Senate on Wednesday began debate on the country's first major energy bill in over eight years, featuring measures aimed at protecting the electric power grid against cyber attacks and speeding the export of liquefied natural gas.



Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican chair of the Senate energy committee and Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, its ranking Democrat, urged lawmakers not to thwart passage of the bipartisan bill, which cleared their panel in an 18-4 vote.



A handful of senators were preparing to file amendments to the bill later on Wednesday, to address more contentious energy issues. These were expected to include a measure to repeal a moratorium on coal development on federal land introduced this month by the Interior Department.



"Let's show the Senate can work. Let's not go crazy with a bunch of ancillary things," Cantwell said on the Senate floor.



Murkowski said the bill is the result of more than a year of working with committee members to find common ground on a handful of key priorities.



"We found common ground in many areas, more, perhaps, than any of us expected," Murkowski said. The bill focuses on energy efficiency, infrastructure, supply, accountability, and conservation.



Measures include expediting the permitting of LNG projects, natural gas pipeline permits, boosting hydropower production and improving defenses against cyber attacks on the electric grid.



Murkowski and Cantwell tried to craft a bill that could pass with bipartisan support in an election year.



In December, Congress voted to repeal a 40-year-old ban on exporting crude oil, a Republican policy priority. The deal also included the Democratic goal of extending tax breaks to boost renewable energy for five years.



"Not only will this bipartisan legislation help bring our energy policies in line with the demands of today, it will also help position us to benefit from the opportunities of tomorrow," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.



The Obama administration said in a statement that it "supports some provisions of the legislation" but has concerns with a few elements of the bill.

Reporting by Valerie Volcovici
First delivery of LNG bunker expected to commence in 2017



Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd (Keppel O&M), through its wholly-owned subsidiary KS Investments Pte Ltd (KSI), and BG Group plc (BG Group) have been selected to supply Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) bunker to vessels in the Port of Singapore. The joint bid submitted by Keppel O&M and BG Group for the LNG bunker supplier licence is one of the two top bids selected by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA). The awarding of the licence is in line with the Port of Singapore's plans to launch the LNG Bunkering Pilot Programme in 2017.

Keppel O&M and BG Group will work on forming a 50/50 joint venture to deliver an end-to-end bunkering solution using LNG sourced from BG Group's diversified LNG portfolio and leveraging Keppel O&M's expertise in LNG vessel servicing.

"Singapore is one of the world's most important strategic ports and we are excited about the prospect of supplying LNG as a fuel for ships in this key market, with first delivery expected in 2017," said Steve Hill, EVP, Global Energy Marketing and Shipping, BG Group.

The new venture builds on BG Group's existing role as the exclusive aggregator for Singapore's first 3 million tonnes per annum of LNG demand. Following the start of commercial operations at Singapore LNG Corporation's LNG terminal in May 2013, BG Group has to date delivered 72 cargoes into Singapore from its global LNG portfolio, helping the country to safely diversify its energy sources and increase security of supply.

"The move into LNG bunkering is in line with Keppel's strategy to provide solutions for the global LNG market, and we are happy to partner BG Group in this exciting new venture," said Chow Yew Yuen, CEO, Keppel O&M. "As the exclusive gas aggregator for Singapore, BG Group has the experience of importing LNG into Singapore where they already have a ready supply on Jurong Island."

Keppel O&M's experience in providing LNG solutions encompasses not only repair services for gas carriers, but also complex offshore conversions. Keppel O&M successfully completed the world's first Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) in 2008, which was followed by two more similar units, and was the first shipyard to undertake the conversion of a Floating Liquefaction Facility in 2014.

To focus further efforts on solutions for the LNG market, Keppel O&M set up a new design and technology arm, Gas Technology Development (GTD) in 2015. Through its other design and technology arm, Marine Technology Development, Keppel O&M has also developed a range of designs for LNG vessels including barges, carriers, and dual-fuel tugs that can run on diesel and LNG.
Finnish industrial engine maker Wartsila reported higher quarterly earnings on Wednesday and forecast improved margins this year, hoping growth in services would offset sluggish demand for ship technology.



The company said it expected 2016 sales to be at worst unchanged to five percent higher and that adjusted operating margins would be in the range of 12.5-13.0 percent, up from a margin of 12.2 percent in 2015.



Chief Executive Jaakko Eskola said while low crude prices continued to curb demand for new offshore drilling vessels the outlook was brighter for the company's services and power plant businesses.



"On the power plant side, we are seeing good activity in the United States, Mexico and Africa," Eskola, who became CEO in November, told Reuters.



On the marine side, he said demand from cruise ships and ferries looked positive amid a recovery in Europe and increased interest for cruises in Asia.



"Offshore is totally down. Containers were okay last year but this year they will be more challenging. In some segments, like bulk carriers, nothing is happening, the oversupply is huge," he said.



Eskola also said the company was on the look out for acquisitions.



Wartsila's fourth-quarter adjusted operating profit rose 10 percent from a year ago to 215 million euros ($233 million), below the average analyst forecast of 225 million euros in a Reuters poll.



The company proposed a dividend of 1.20 euros per share for 2015, up from 1.15 euros a year earlier.



Shares in the company rose 1.4 percent by 1111 GMT.



Last year, 43 percent of Wartsila's sales came from services, 34 percent was generated by its marine division and about 24 percent came from its energy business.





Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl and Tuomas Forsell
A Marine Corps recruiter was awarded the Purple Heart medal during a ceremony in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jan. 26, 2016.



Sergeant DeMonte R. Cheeley was presented the medal by Brig. Gen. Terry V. Williams, the Commanding General of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., and Eastern Recruiting Region, for injuries he sustained during a July 16, 2015 attack in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Armed Forces Career Center where he works.



I cant take anything away from the five brave men who paid the ultimate sacrifice, I will wear this in honor of those men and every recipient before me, said Cheeley. I can only move forward from here and continue to recruit the future of the Marine Corps.



Cheeley was injured in his leg when a shooter opened fire on the building and the recruiters working there. The shooter went on to attack a local Navy Reserve Center where he fatally wounded four Marines and one sailor. The shooter was later killed by Chattanooga police responding to the attack. Cheeley was hospitalized and later recovered from the injury.



An investigation conducted by the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service determined the attack had been inspired by a foreign terrorist group making Cheeley eligible for the Purple Heart medal.



The five service members killed in the attacks, Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan, Staff Sgt. David Wyatt, Sgt. Carson A. Holmquist, Lance Cpl. Squire D. Skip Wells, and Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Smith, will be posthumously awarded the Purple Heart medal during separate ceremonies requested by their families.



Words cant explain the feelings and impact that tragic day had on the Recruiting office, and Reserve Station, Staff Sgt. Robert Driver, the staff non-commissioned officer in charge of the Marine recruiting office where Cheeley was shot. I am proud to see the Marines receive what they rightfully deserve. We are continuing with recruiting efforts, never forgetting the five service men who paid the ultimate sacrifice here on our home front.





More Media
Marines with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 365 took to the sky to assist the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Special Operations Command with parachute operations at Marine Corps Air Station New River, Jan. 21.



The squadron supported Marine Raiders by conducting high altitude jumps, which are jumps at a height of around 13,000 feet, as well as static line jumps, at a height of around 4,000 feet, to allow Marine Raiders to train for future operations.



Parachute operations are basically getting Marines to land in their drop zones undetected, said Lance Cpl. Harrison Haymaker, a crew chief with VMM-365. If the landing zone is too dangerous for the Osprey to land, we still have the ability to accomplish the mission by allowing Marines to parachute in.



This training provides operational reach and tactical flexibility to the deployed forces and gives them the ability to overcome obstacles that would otherwise hinder the mission. If the operational area is unreachable to ground forces, VMM-365s ability to insert Marines into difficult areas is a valuable option.



The squadron conducts parachute operations weekly for different units to ensure they are ready to deploy at a moments notice.



Flights like this give us the extra practice to be able to conduct the procedures of parachute operations smoothly, said Capt. Brett Statema, a VMM-365 pilot. This also enhances our overall unit readiness to operate while on deployment.



No matter how many times VMM-365 conducts these operations theres always room for improvement.



Practice makes perfect, the more the Marine Aircraft Wing and the squadron conduct these kinds of operations the better we will be when the time comes for us to drop Marines in, Haymaker added.



More Media
Another U.S. Constitutional Convention: An Idea Whose Time Has Not Come

In the midst of the seemingly indeterminable presidential electoral campaign, some of the candidates have been asked about the possibility of convening a constitutional convention in the hope of addressing the nations most pressing issues, most ominously the gargantuan federal deficit now in excess of $18 trillion.

Governor John Kasich supports such a notion with the explicit purpose of passing a balanced budget amendment.

Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self Governance, a leading group pushing the idea, believes that If it starts to become a serious presidential issue, we could get it done in 2016.*

Not all presidential contenders are on board with the idea. Senator Marco Rubio has expressed trepidation over the possibility of a convention for amending the current document fearful that it would lead to a total rewrite:

Just make sure that we know how it is going to turn out

because if you open up the Constitution, you are also

opening it up to people that want to re-examine the First

Amendment, people that want to re-examine the Second

Amendment, people that want to re-examine some other

fundamental protect[ions] that are built into the Constitution.**

Unlike most issues on which he pontificates, Senator Rubio is this time right in his analysis, but most likely for the wrong reasons.

The original Constitutional convention was called to revise the supposedly defective Articles of Confederation, but by the time the deliberations (more like arm twisting, threats, and bribes) were over, the Articles had been replaced by a brand spanking new document. The Constitution granted the central government far more power than it had before while the individual states had, in effect, lost their cherished sovereignty and had become mere appendages within the new federal union.

Under the current ideological climate, the convocation of another constitutional convention would not return the nation to its halcyon days as a confederation of independent states, but would more than likely increase the central governments power at the expense of what is left of state and individual rights. The idea of amending the current document is naive at best, but more importantly a gigantic waste of time.

Groups like Citizens for Self Government do not grasp the essential problem of American political, social and economic life. It is the Constitution itself that is the cause of the myriad of problems which besiege the land. The adoption of the Constitution despite what its sycophantic champions of today and yesteryear have erroneously argued, created a highly centralized national state which is virtually limitless in its power.

The Articles of Confederation, on the other hand, were just that  a system where the national government was dependent for its existence on the individual states benevolence. American constitutional history can be seen as the systematic destruction of state, regional, local and, eventually, individual sovereignty from the aggrandizement of federal power, all achieved under Constitutional rule.

The Constitution negates one of the great safeguards of individual liberty  voting with ones feet. Under a confederation of states, tyranny can be avoided, to an extent, by simply relocating to another political jurisdiction. If a state becomes too confiscatory in its taxing policies, its subjects can move to a less tax burdensome district. Thus, the more political jurisdictions there are the better.

Under the Constitution, there is no escape from its dictates unless one expatriates. The ability of populations to move and the greater number of political units provides a far superior check on tyranny than the supposed checks and balances and separation of powers so celebrated in American federalism.

Amendments, conventions, strict interpretation of the Constitution, and all other reforms of the federal system will do nothing to limit or eventually slay the American Leviathan. Decentralization is the key which means secession and a dismantling of the Union.

Secession should not be limited to the Union, but allow for the breakup of the existing states along political, economic and cultural lines. States as geographically, culturally, and economically diverse as California should be broken down into numerous smaller entities. The overriding principle in regard to liberty and prosperity is the greater number of political configurations the better.

Until the Constitution is seen for what it truly is, the rapacious federal state will continue to gorge itself on the ever dwindling productive efforts of its citizenry. Once this is recognized and efforts are taken to disembowel the beast, will the lives, liberties, and property of Americans and a great many around the globe be secured.

*David Sherfinski, GOP Hopefuls Support Boosts Constitutional Convention Idea. The Washington Times. 24 December 2015.

**Ibid.

By Antonius Aquinas

http://antoniusaquinas.com

 2016 Copyright Antonius Aquinas - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




A Dangerous Moment for Social Security

By Justin Spittler

Social Security funds are drying upwill there be any money left when you retire?

Social Security is Americas largest federal program. In 2015, it paid out $870 billion to more than 59 million Americans.

Most Americans see Social Security as a retirement savings program. During your working life, you pay 6.2% of every paycheck to Social Security. In return, the government sends you a check every month after you retire.

However, unlike a retirement plan like a 401(k), the money you pay into Social Security doesnt land in your own personal account. Instead, it goes into one big pot called the Social Security Trust Fund.

The Social Security program pays retirees from this pot. As long as enough money flows into the pot, the program works, and retired people get the payments they expect.

 Last year, the Social Security Trust Fund lost money

On Wednesday, Investors Business Daily reported (emphasis ours):

The Social Security Trust Fund just suffered its first annual decline since Congress shored up the retirement program in 1983.

The unexpected $3 billion decline is an indication of the precarious state of Social Security's finances . Since 2010, the program has been paying out more in benefits than it gets in tax revenue .

In 1955, there were 8.6 workers paying into Social Security for every one person receiving Social Security. Today, due to Americas aging population, there are just 2.8 workers for every recipient. And that number will decline as the baby boomer generation continues to retire.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects Social Security to go broke within 13 years, according to Investors Business Daily.

Social Security's cash shortfall is expected to rapidly escalate from $74 billion a year to $361 billion in 2025 alone, the Congressional Budget Office projects. Under current policies, the CBO says the trust fund will be gone by 2029.

 To fix Social Security, the government would need to cut benefits by 29%...

According to Investors Business Daily, this would bring the programs costs in line with how much money it takes in.

The average retiree receives $1,355 each month from Social Security. A 29% cut would reduce that to $962 per month.

Thats not going to happen. Because senior citizens are a huge voting bloc, most politicians consider Social Security benefits to be untouchable.

 The U.S. government will continue to make promises it cant keep

To keep the scheme going, Washington will run bigger deficits. It will go deeper into debt.

Longtime readers know the U.S. government is drowning in debt. The federal government already owes more than $18 trillion. Thats 129% more than it owed a decade ago.

The federal debt is now bigger than the yearly output of the entire U.S. economy. The current debt-to-GDP ratio is 101%, the highest since World War II.

Programs like Social Security helped cause this financial wreck. Today, $0.72 of every dollar the government spends goes to entitlement programs like Social Security. In 1970, only $0.28 of every dollar went to entitlement programs.

 Casey Research founder Doug Casey says Social Security is a gigantic Ponzi scheme.

He says its nothing but a vague promise backed by nothing but an impossibly debt-ridden government with financial problems that are about to get much worse.

Heres Doug.

By taking almost 15% of a person's wages right off the top, Social Security makes it much harder for a poor person to save money. Worse yet, it makes people think they don't need to save for themselves; it gives them a false sense of security. Even worse is that the money never really belongs to the presumed recipient; it's simply another unsecured obligation of a bankrupt government.

Doug says millions of Americans who expect Social Security income wont get it. He believes the Social Security program should be eradicated.

 We dont expect the government to fix Social Security...

If youre under the age of 50, youll probably never get a dime in Social Security payments.

However, we doubt Social Security will go away quietly. The government will likely try to fix it the only way it knows how: by printing and borrowing money.

As we mentioned earlier, the U.S. government is already drowning in debt. Printing and borrowing billions more to fix Social Security could wreck the economy. Or worse, it could destroy the U.S. dollar.

If you keep a significant portion of your money in assets tied to the U.S. dollar, we recommend watching this free video. It contains all of Casey Researchs best advice on how to protect your money from a U.S. dollar collapse. Click here to watch.

Chart of the Day

The Social Security Trust Fund lost money last year

Todays chart shows the Social Security Trust Funds annual cash flows. As you can see, the fund took in more money than it paid out every year from 19842014.

However, in 2015, the fund handed out $3 billion more than it received. It was the funds first deficit since 1983.

Unless the government reforms Social Security, the Congressional Budget Office says the fund will run out of money by 2029.

Casey Research Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Via The Bubble, an English-language periodical in Argentina: The Zika Virus May Have Just Made It To Argentina. Excerpt:

Way back when (in December), we wrote about Zika virus cases in Brazil and said there was probably no reason to panic. Plot twist! The first Zika case may have just been detected in Argentina.

A man in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, began showing signs of the virus and, after testing negative for chikungunya and dengue fever (recently declared an epidemic), he currently awaits test results to see if he does, in fact, have Zika. The unidentified man commented that he recently traveled to Brazil, where there have been over 1 million recorded Zika virus cases in the past several months.

I'll an eye on this unsurprising but unwelcome development.

Update: Via El Ciudadano in Rosario, I find a January 14 report (in Spanish) of a Zika case in the city of Funes, imported from Paraguay along with several dengue cases in Rosario. But the vector control officer said then that neither Zika nor dengue was circulating in the province.
This report was originally sent to us on January 14th as the movement of the trainee teachers in Morocco was beginning. Since then, the struggle of trainee teachers against the decrees has continued. In response to the intransigence of the government, the National Coordination of Trainee Teachers called for a national march in Rabat on Sunday, January 24th.

Immediately after the call for the protest was published, the government threatened that it would not allow them to organise and that it "will take all necessary measures to prevent it", that is, they threatened repression. Rather than leading the teachers to back down from their decision, it increased public sympathy for them. The march became advertised and other groups joined it. It was a great success, with more than 100,000 teachers and sympathizers demonstrating.

On Thursday, January 7th, trainee teachers in Morocco came out simultaneously in regional protest marches. They were implementing a decision of the National Coordination of Trainee Teachers in Morocco, demanding an end to the following decrees: Decree 2/15/588, which separates training from recruitment [ie. students are not guaranteed jobs], and decree 2/15/589, which reduces the basic salary of trainee teachers in the central areas from 2450 to 1200 dirhams.

The Crime

The marches were peaceful and the teachers unarmed, except for their vocal chords and their determination. They exercised, with the utmost discipline, their right to express their legitimate demands. But the dictatorial regime had a different opinion. It launched the forces of repression with clear orders to come down on the teachers brutally and without discrimination. Their orders were to target the head and face - the face in particular - terrorising and torturing the protesters to the utmost.

Dozens were left wounded following the brutal attack, some with serious injuries for which they are still undergoing treatment. According to a report published by the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, the outcome was as follows:

1. Inezgane: the repression in front of the Centre of Education has led to about one hundred injured, fifty cases have been transferred to the hospital.

Ms. Lamia: a fracture in shoulder, a fracture of rib cage, fracture in face - requires a cosmetic procedure.

Mr. Alkhumar: fracture of the spine requiring surgery, partial loss of sight.

A pregnant teacher: suffered haemorrhage.

Many Injuries to the head area (between seven and ten stitches)

Many Injuries to the legs and shoulders.

Several cases of loss of consciousness.

2. Marrakech: twenty cases.

One case of hemiplegia (intensive care)

Fracture of leg.

Several cases of loss of consciousness.

3. Tangier: eight serious cases

Female teacher: twisting of foot and Pulmonary edema.

Male teacher: fracture of leg.

Female teacher: fracture in the arm

Many Injuries close to the spine

Several cases of loss of consciousness.

4. Casablanca: forty cases

Fracture in the arm area

Fracture of the leg area

These assaults on the teachers by the police were, according to human rights associations, in addition to insults, verbal abuse and degrading treatment.

Reaction

What happened on Thursday was a crime by any standard. But it did not stop there, rather the response of the government poured further salt on the wounds. The statements of the officials following the massacre were filled with utmost of insolence and provocation. Prime Minister Benkirane expressed his solidarity with the police forces "who lead the mission" and called on the youth of his party, not to show solidarity with the abusive teachers.

As for the Interior Ministry, it has denied the existence of any repression and the existence of any injuries among the teachers. It said that the videos were fabricated, and on the contrary, the teachers who were pretending to faint and those sustaining "minor injuries" were due to a stampede.

That is indeed the logic of the dictatorial Moroccan regime. The regime does not care about the sanctity of the bodies of its citizens, nor for their rights or dignity. It is the logic of tyranny, despotism and barbarism. They shed the blood of the defenceless in the streets for no other reason than that they were demonstrating peacefully. Then they contemptuously, cynically and arrogantly proceed to ridicule their suffering and wounds.

The popular response was a wave of indignation against police brutality. Broad solidarity was expressed by layers such as teachers, workers, students, street vendors, activists, trade unionists, radical intellectual democrats, among others.

The aim behind the manner and force of this brutal repression is to invoke fear in the hearts of the trainee teachers. They are determined to shatter their morale and pressure them to stop the struggle. In addition, it is a bloody message directed at all other layers of the Moroccan people - workers, students, and others - that if they dare demand their rights, or stand up to the policies of austerity waged by the ruling class and its state, that they will suffer a similar fate.

However, the repression had the exact opposite result to that intended. In spite of their severity, they did not hurt the morale or the militancy of the student teachers, but only produced a wider popular support for them, fostering a spirit of defiance.

Horror moves to the other camp

The regime is now in major a dilemma. If repression does not produce the desired result - the terrorisation of the masses - then the fear and horror will change camp and haunt the opposite side: the side of the ruling class and its state.

Indeed, immediately after the crackdown, the call was made to organize a protest rally in front of parliament on Sunday, January 10th. It denounced the repression and demanded a response to the teachers call to repeal the decrees. The rally of the teachers was a resounding success. The state was unable to react.

That same dictatorial regime which broke the bones of the teachers on January 7th, shedding their blood in the streets, is the same one which, on January 10th was retreating before the eyes of the angry crowd in front of parliament. This is not because it suddenly swallowed a dose of democracy, but only because it was terrified that any provocation against the protesters would have dire consequences for the regime.

Continuing the solidarity with the teachers and popular anger against the dictatorship, Monday, January 11th witnessed protest rallies in the city of Beni Mellal. The rally, which turned into a mass march, is unlike anything the city has seen since the February 20th movement in 2011. The powerful slogans which were raised not only condemned the treatment of the teachers and demanded the repeals of the decrees, but moved on to emphasise the rights of the people to good, free education, alongside other economic and political demands.

Once again, the forces of repression were mere bystanders. They tried not to do anything to provoke the people. They know very well that, given the combustible situation of accumulating unemployment, poverty and oppression, any provocation could lead to an angry explosion.

Who has won and lost at this point? The answer to this question is very clear. Fear has moved to the other camp. Despite all what has been achieved so far, the worst days of the ruling class are yet to come.

Slogans to continue the fight

Benkirane explained recently, that he would not back down on the decrees, even if this led to the overthrow of his government. We are also not ready to give up our right to employment, and the rights of all those toilers who sympathized with us, who stood by us in our time of need and expressed their love and solidarity with us, as well as their anger against what we are exposed to. Down with the government! Let our motto be down with the government and dissolve the parliament, which produced this government!

Moreover, the crime of attacking the protesters must not go unpunished. The blood which was shed must not be without a price. All the perpetrators of the serious injuries which threatened the physical and psychological well-being of the teacher trainees, must be held accountable. It is necessary to put on trial all those who gave the orders, and those who carried them out.

Who is the real enemy?

It is clear that the Islamist government has completely lost its popular appeal. Benkirane was dancing four years ago because of the electoral landslide against his opponents. Now he has reached rock bottom. That was clearly evident in slogans during the rallies, in debates on social networking, and in the discussions in popular Cafes, students seminars, and other places.

For decades, the Islamists have managed to win the sympathy of broad layers of the masses. They played the cunning role of "radical opposition", and hypocritically condemned the apparent social injustice and corruption of the ruling class.

Then it was difficult to expose them. That is because the conflict against them often took the form of mere intellectual struggle. But the masses do not learn from books, intellectual debates or through theoretical discussions and seminars. They learn through concrete reality.

As Marx explained, for any given phenomenon to pass away, it must first be fully realised. Indeed, in order to to overcome the period of confidence in these political currents (at least some of them) it was necessary to test their ideas in the real world. A few years of experience was enough to expose them in the eyes of the popular masses, not only in Morocco, but also in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.

They have demonstrated their reactionary nature. They are nothing more than another version of the parties of the ruling capitalist class. They apply the same policies, practice the same methods and serve the same interests: the interests of big capital.

A few years of experience of Islamism in power was not a heavy price to pay for the masses to reach this historical conclusion. That is what the broad layers of the masses have reached now. They understand that they are their enemies.

But this conclusion is merely one side of the coin. The other side is to know which class is benefiting from the policies that the Islamists, the "secularists", and all other official parties are applying. Let us be objective, Benkirane, his party and government, are nothing but instruments in the hands of a particular social class, serving its interests and defending a specific social system.

It is not Benkirane as a person nor his government and his ministers alone who benefit from applying the two decrees. Separating training from employment, the reduction of grants, and other austerity measures implemented by the current government, are measures in the service of the capitalist class and the capitalist system.

Benkirane and his government are not ruling Greece or Spain, Tunisia or Egypt. Nevertheless, all these governments, in their different shapes and forms, "left-wing" and right-wing, apply the same policy: the policy of austerity, cuts, privatization and attacks against the social gains of the workers. They are all defending the same interests: the interests of the bankers and major domestic and international companies.

The capitalist class and its system are the real enemies. That is what we must understand, and explain to anyone who wants to understand. We must uproot them if we want to struggle effectively against the origins of the horrors and injustices that we, the workers, poor peasants and industrious youth, live with.

Of course it is necessary to struggle against all forms of exploitation, and all forms of attacks, whether they be large or small, no matter how partial and limited. But at the same time we must have a general perspective and scientific understanding of the nature of the enemy, as well as a programme which responds to both the immediate needs, as well as the ultimate goal.

Deep-rooted problems require radical solutions. If we want an alternative to the policy applied by the current government, and all other capitalist governments, we must struggle for the overthrow of the capitalist class itself. We have to fight for the confiscation of the keys of the economy and power, by the working class, to build socialism.

Original: Morocco: Crime and Punishment - repression of the march of the trainee teachers

The comrades of the IMT in Morocco are participating in this movement. We ask all our readers and supporters to express their solidarity against the repression of student teachers. You can do this by making photos with posters of students, teachers, trade unionist showing their solidarity and by publishing them on social media.

Please send messages and pictures to:

contact@marxy.com and editor@marxist.com

Please also publish your images on the Facebook page of Marxy.com: https://www.facebook.com/marxycom
After increasing outrage around statements made by billionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump, many on the left, academics, and sections of the capitalist media have begun to raise the question, Is Trump a fascist?

There is a consistent pattern in this reportage. First, attention is drawn to the superficial similarities between Trump and European fascists of the last century: The rise of a sense of jingoistic victimhood; the gravity of populist strongmen; a special identity where even the lowest of a group is part of something special; and of course, the vilification of outsiders.

For Hitler, the blame for the woes suffered by Germany and the Aryan race could be attributed to the Jews, Marxists, the Roma, homosexuals, the labor movement as a whole, and on and on. For Trump, the offenders range from Mexicans to Black Lives Matter protesters to Muslims. Trumps comments about Muslims provoked particular indignation; he has called for measures ranging from a national registry of Muslims in the US to a blanket ban on their entry into the country.

The serious bourgeois press, with the aid of bourgeois academics, is almost uniformly concluding that Trump is something like a proto-fascist. But this analysis has two serious shortcomings.

The first is a philosophical one, an inaccurate representation of the process of change. The idea that fascism originates in some sort of proto-fascist broththat brews until it is fully cookedis linear and mechanical. Fascism does not come off an assembly line in boxes marked crypto-fascism, proto-fascism, neo-fascism, or post-fascism, until we live in a George Orwell novel, but emerges as a qualitative break to meet the concrete needs of capitalist reaction. For Marxists, the word is not merely an epithet to insult those one disagrees with, or even those who are criminally dangerous for society, but describes a definite social phenomenon that can be scientifically analyzed and is rooted in an objective material basis.

Which leads to the second problem with the Trump-as-fascist analysis: where has this new fascist movement come from? For many demoralized elements on the left, the apparent threat of Trumps fascism has appeared as a ready-made vessel for their pessimism and lack of faith in the working class. In actuality, the class balance of forces today is strongly to the advantage of the working class.

What is the real political situation?

As the International Marxist Tendency explained in our 2010 World Perspectives:

Only after a failed revolutionary movement, and when the bourgeoisie felt threatened did they revert to fascism, whose role was to completely atomize the working class. Nowhere today in Europe is the bourgeoisie threatened with losing power. Today, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie leans on the leaders of the labor movement. That will change once the trade unions will be forced into opposition. The perspective ahead of us today is one of increased class struggle. Revolutionary developments are ahead of us, not behind us. That means that the ruling class everywhere is preparing for such developments. In the US, the ultraright has been stirred up with the so-called tea parties in preparation for the battles of the future . . . Naturally, these reactionary parties are demagogically using anti-immigrant propaganda to get an echo from the most backward layers of society. To some extent this suits the purposes of the ruling class, which is always interested in dividing the workers on national lines. But the bourgeoisie cannot do without the immigrants, who provide them with a cheap source of labor, and they cannot allow the right-wing gangs to go too far for fear of provoking a serious mass movement. While we must take note of these phenomena, and intervene in the fight against fascism and racism with correct transitional demands that link these questions to the class issues and the fight for socialism, we must maintain a sense of proportion . . . It is true that the ruling class is making preparations for the future, when the normal mechanisms of parliamentary democracy will no longer be able to control the movement of the masses. Everywhere we see a tendency to restrict and curtail the democratic freedoms that were conquered by the working class in the past. Using 9/11 as an excuse, the Bush administration rushed through anti-democratic legislation camouflaged as anti-terror laws. This has been imitated by all other capitalist governments. These laws will be used in the future against the labor movement . . . However, at this stage the bourgeoisie prefers to rule through the medium of formal parliamentary democracy, which is more economical and less risky than unstable dictatorships. They can lean on the trade union and Social Democratic leaders, who, at this stage, are their most reliable support. At this point in time they need the mass reformist organizations. In fact, they could not last long if these props were withdrawn. The ruling class therefore does not need to destroy the workers organizations, even if they were able to do so. However, that can change. As the crisis deepens, pressure on the reformist leaders will increase to break with the bourgeoisie. Trotsky pointed out that there is an organic tendency of the tops of the unions to fuse with the bourgeois state, and we see this tendency manifested repeatedly. But in order to maintain their alliance with the union leaders, the bourgeois must give them some concessions to offer to the workers. This is now virtually impossible. At a certain stage the union leaders will be compelled to go over, first to semi-opposition, and then to open opposition. They will be forced to put themselves at the head of the workers in struggle, or else lose their positions and be replaced by others. When the ruling class sees that it can no longer use the unions as guard dogs, they will turn against the unions and their leaders. Under conditions of crisis the bourgeois will eventually draw the conclusion: there is too much disorder, too much chaos, too many strikes and demonstrations. They will attempt to move in the direction of reaction. But that is not an immediate perspective. There is no question of fascist or Bonapartist reaction in any advanced capitalist country at this stage. But in the long run, if the workers do not take power, the situation can change . . . Thus, insofar as they exist, the fascists are small organizations, in the main. They can be particularly vicious, violent and engage in provocations, but there is no question of them taking power. Bourgeois democracy is a very fragile plant that can grow only on the fertile soil of economic prosperity. The deepening of the crisis will inevitably lead to a sharp polarization between the classes that cannot be contained within the normal channels of democracy. However, the ruling class would only resort to open reaction after the working class has suffered a series of very heavy defeats. Long before the question of fascist or Bonapartist reaction is posed, the workers would have tried time and time again to take power. And there will be many opportunities to build a strong Marxist tendency on the basis of events.

The trajectory of Trumps presidential run confirms this perspective. When Trump announced his campaign with his characteristic fear-mongering and bravado, he was practically sanctioned by his business partners, losing a small fortune. The ruling class was irritated; here they are, trying to put on a human face for the public, and here is this wayward scion of Fred Trump, a caricature from reality television, insulting all sorts of target demographics and threatening the already thinning seams of a dependable Bush-Clinton sequel production.

However, they were forced to lean on him sooner than they could have imagined. The contralateral insurgency of the Sanders campaign had tapped into a motherlode of forgotten voters, the disaffected, the alienated, those sick of the status quo and looking for change that will be the real deal. As it became increasingly clear that a mere blackout of media coverage would not be able to postpone the arrival of this layer onto the political scene, the establishment looked around for a representative more likely to defend their business interests, one who wouldnt call himself a socialist or encourage the already alarming shift to the left by ordinary Americans. They needed a loyal opposition, and for all of his bluster and belligerence, his ego and his abuse, Trump could be trusted to divert some of this pressure into relatively safer channels than Sanders. This in large part explains the outstanding imbalance of media coverage in relation to these two upstart candidates. It also served the general purpose of demoralizing the working class and infecting those eager to fight back with pessimism.

The reactionary role of Islamophobia

At the same time, the interplay between Trump and his media coverage revealed the role of the capitalist media to shape the public perception of eventsincluding events that occur beyond the dictate of the capitalist class. This pessimistic idea, promoted by some on the left, that the media has a monolithic, automatic, almost supernatural control over events, information, and ideas is erroneous for two reasons: 1) it presents a static view of society without acknowledging the basic class contradiction between labor and capital upon which capitalist society is based; and 2) it ignores the critical possibility of splits in the ruling class, a classic symptom of capitalist crisis and a harbinger of social revolution. Furthermore, the media is not a conscious, unified, conspiratorial political actor, but a sprawling mass of large corporations and their appendages in fierce competition for ad revenue, working in the chaotic, unplanned process of commodity production.

Islamophobiaa form of racism against Muslimshas been cynically used by the capitalist class to keep workers divided. As such, it is an alien class idea which does not arise organically among workers whobecause of the social basis of production under capitalisminstinctively strive for solidarity in their struggle against their common exploiters. It is the product of a well-organized, well-funded, and lucrative propaganda campaign by a network of millionaires and paid demagogues. Despite this effort, Islamophobic sentiment waned after an initial peak following 9/11. In recent months, however, it has been revived and intensified.

By its nature, change is a dialectical and contradictory process. The forces for revolution and counterrevolution rise concomitantly. While the situation in the United States cannot be described as revolutionary, or even pre-revolutionary, it is to be expected that a certain, backwards, section of the working class will embrace reactionary ideas when subjected to concerted propaganda from the most reactionary sections of the ruling class particularly in the midst of a systemic crisis when no clear working class political alternative is offered.

The rise in Islamophobia since 2010 does not have an automatic, direct relationship with actual events of terrorism, the recent example of a mass shooting in California notwithstanding. It can be best explained as a tool consciously activated by the ruling class to disorient workers in the midst of a sharpening of the crisis of capital.

Trumps political genesis

Donald Trumps own political genesis can be neatly mapped along with this right-populist demagoguery. Trump initially supported the presidency of Barack Obama, in the hopes that he would resolve the crisis of capitalism for his class. But the crisis cannot be solved on a capitalist basis and when it became clearer to even Trumps unsophisticated mind that the crisis was not going away, he jumped the Democratic Party ship and threw his lot in with the nativist, Islamophobic current around the Tea Party.

As Socialist Appeal explained at the time of the rise of the Tea Party, this was an entirely artificial phenomenon. In like manner, the interest in Trumps campaign cannot be accurately described as a fascist movement. An accurate and balanced political analysis of the concrete situation is of paramount importance for revolutionaries. To imply that the large crowds at Trump rallies constitute the embryo of fascism is to misunderstand the social basis of fascist reaction, overestimate the strength of reaction, and underestimate the objective strength of workers. Trotsky once explained: Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois. That said, to mistake the particle for the real thing blurs the lines of scientific demarcation and can lead to a variant of the boy who cried wolf syndrome. The susceptibility of the petty bourgeois to demagogy and reactionary confusion is always present under capitalism, but becomes increasingly apparent in times of crisis and economic pressure on the little guy.

If the working class fails to win political and economic power in the coming historical period, we cannot theoretically rule out the possibility of an openly reactionary regime coming to power in the United States. However, there will be many opportunities for the workers to change their destinies and end capitalism before such a turn comes to pass. Reaction is one thing. But fascist reaction is another altogether. Fascism, as we have explained, is a mass phenomenon based on the ruined and enraged petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the most backward layers of the workers. Its historic role has been to break the impasse in the class struggle, to rule by the sword, and thereby to perform the sisyphean task of temporarily holding back the rolling boulder of the crisis of capital. Its aim was to turn the clock back to some fictitious, pristine past, when capitalism supposedly worked.

Fascism has historically served as a means to an end for the capitalists, as a last resort to hold back the clear and present danger of the workers capturing power. However, the social basis for fascism has been squeezed out by the unprecedented concentration of capital in the postwar period. More than that, given the role of the workers leaders, the workers are not on the cusp of expropriating the ruling class, despite their enormous social weight. Far from being gleeful, the serious capitalist strategists are aghast. The Tea Party moment had outlived its usefulness. Society has actually moved to the left. According to recent polls, nearly as many millennials have a positive view of socialism as capitalism. After decades of socialism is dead and buried propaganda, this is a watershed moment. However, because of the lack of a real working class alternative, a mass party of labor, much of this rising support for socialism is being channeled safelyfor nowinto the capitalists Democratic Party machine.

The Republican Party has not been immune to this shift to the left, even within the narrow confines of the US political system. Support for right-wing populism has lost ground within the Republican Party. As of October 2015, only 17% of the population view the Tea Party favorably. While decline is not a linear process, and there will be sharp zigzags in consciousness, workers will eventually draw conclusions about the very narrow scope of the solutions such politics offer. The Republican establishment realizes that right-wing populism has lost much of its usefulness and now seeks to put forward a more palatable face.

It is in this context that Trump has deviated from the script that the more serious sections of the ruling class hoped to write for him. He has served a certain function in that he has prevented more discontent with the status quo from being channeled into the Sanders campaign. But he is causing deep embarrassment for the Republican Party as well.

As Trump sensed weakness, and enjoyed, as only he can, the privilege of calling major presidential candidates losers, he began to move beyond the limited parameters set out for him: that of another Michele Bachmanntype court jester. Not only was his support base among angry, fed-up malcontents far deeper than they had calculated, he risked sparking a mass reaction by millions of Americans scandalized by this demagogue crassly attacking their way of life, or that of their coworkers and neighbors. Instead of serving as a safety valve to let off steam, Trump was destabilizing and discrediting the whole political process. This explains the extremely hypocritical display of recent weeks, where those responsible for imperialist attacks on the so-called Muslim world, deportations of immigrant workers, legal and economic attacks on the rights of women, and so on, have all lined up to excommunicate Trump as an un-American bigot and Hitlerite interloper. Such sanctimonious condemnations from the status quohurled at a hypocrite posing as an alternative to the status quocan only lend credence to the charade, in a symbiotic relation akin to that of a dead body and its resident maggots.

The more responsible representatives of the ruling class do not want to see this because it does not serve their current needs. While the needs of the ruling class may change in the future, as of this moment such attacks are viewed as repugnant by a majorityabove all because they may well unleash hard-to-contain forces. The genie, however, is already out of the bottle. While the ruling class does not have absolute control over the agency of journalists, it does have tremendousand in the final analysis decisivecontrol over the parameters within which political discourse is conducted. This explains the extremely hypocritical display of recent weeks.

Yet, as Trump has been quick to point out, he is only following precedent in American history. From the benevolent peanut farmer Jimmy Carters ban on Iranian immigration, to FDRs mass deportations of Mexican immigrants and internment of Japanese, Italian, and German Americans, including US citizens, even the superheroes of Democratic Party lore are no less guilty than Trump of fascism. For Marxists, this is no contradiction.

Trump, far from representing fascism in the scientific sense of the word, represents the current default setting of capitalism. To ensure we maintain a sense of proportion, we must look to the rest of the world and to history. The social stability and high standards of living in the advanced capitalist countries during the post-WWII economic boom were not natural to capitalism but a historical aberration. The new normality is in reality merely a return to the old normality.

Of course, the abrupt return of American capitalism to this basic setting of instability and antagonism is not a simple flick of a switch. As Trotsky explained, a continuation is not a repetition but a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Capitalism may be returning to its rude roots, but it does not do so with a gradual trickling out of bygone times, but the sudden punctuation of an economic crisis that is upending all spheres of life. Chaos in the market must be expressed in the congresses and parliaments of the bourgeois world. There are many parallels to Trump around the world, such as the Greek Golden Dawn, the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain, Wild Rose in Alberta, Marine Le Pen in France, and others. A polarization in society, not just to the left but also the right, is an inevitable part of the dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution that stems from capitalist crisis.

We must not be demoralized by such polarization, but understand its place in a process that generally trends toward rising class consciousness and mobilization of the working masses in revolutionary struggle. In Greece, the ruling class has been challenged with the explicit threat of social revolution. SYRIZA, representing a mass movement and relatively far left, was voted into power in early 2015. In the past, the bourgeoisie would have turned to a military coup as a reflex, or used fascist thugs to terrorize the movement before it could break into parliament. This time they were forced to wait things out and trust in the reformism of the SYRIZA leadershipwhich finally betrayed the masses in Juneas the working class was too strong to smash in direct confrontation.

The story of Golden Dawn, the Nazi organization in one of the countries where capitalism has been threatened most, is worth studying. While originally closely nurtured by sections of the ruling class, these virulent Greek nationalists and xenophobes, contrary to their paramilitary ambitions, were to remain an auxiliary force of the capitalist class, never allowed a leading role in counterrevolution for fear of provoking a revolutionary reaction by masses. In fact, after the murder of the leftist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, the Greek ruling class moved to marginalize their goons, purging individuals from top ranks of the military and the state associated with Golden Dawn, arresting leading Golden Dawn members, and denouncing their creation with the same hypocrisy and moral effluvia we now see from the US establishment against Trump. This is in sharp contrast to the past, when Golden Dawn may have been called upon to do the purging, and not be purged themselves.

In Britain and Alberta, momentous events have shaken society which can only be described as political earthquakes: the seismic victory of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party leadership elections and the electoral victory of the New Democratic Party in Alberta, the Texas of Canada. Prior to the rise of Corbyn and the Alberta NDP, UKIP and Wild Rose, respectively, were making gains, partially thanks to splits in the ruling class, but also by preying on disaffected voters who were turning their back on the traditional parties. The mass movement around Corbyn and the shocking victory of the NDP revealed how flimsy these shifts to the right were, and how they only expressed the weakening and division of the capitalist class and the urgency for an alternative to politics-as-usual for all classes involved.

In a capitalist crisis, the working class needs a party and leadership that can point the way forward out of the dead end of capitalist economic and political crisis. Until a mass working class political alternative becomes a reality, alternatives like Trump, who delight in transgressions of bourgeois political decorum, but ultimately only serve to maintain the domination of the capitalist ruling class, will be able to continue in their demogogy without exposure. The only answer to phenomena like Trump is to tap into the enormous potential of our times to build a decisive challenge in the form of a mass party of labor armed with socialist policies.

A sense of proportion

As Marxists we must have a sense of proportion about events, and this includes not screaming fascist! at every utterance by right-wing demagogues. The question of how to fight Trump must therefore begin with taking stock of the danger he actually does represent.

What Trump represents is repugnant and reactionary. While we must not overestimate the support behind him we must acknowledge the alarming rise in violence against Muslims in the US. Mosques are regularly being attacked, often with worshipers in them. Muslim transport workers face increasing attacks, and many have been physically assaulted in particular Muslim women. Even without an organic mass social base, he is clearly dangerous and seeks to divide and rule. He is the mortal enemy of the working class and would not be averse to mobilizing his supporters to serve as a battering ram against the leftif the left actually constituted a potent social force, that is.

Panicking will solve nothing. Only mass forces can take on and decisively defeat Trump and his ilk. The only fitting response to his calls for working class disunity is concerted working class unity in struggle against our common oppressors. Marxists stand for unity across religious and national divides. We stand against attacks on Muslims and immigrants and for unity of our class around the world.

There are no shortcuts in this battle. As a form of racism, Marxists must explain to workers that Islamophobia only serves the capitalist class. Despite calling some of them morons, in the final analysis, even Trump displays unity with his own class. While he fans the fire of bigotry at home he is happy to do business with Muslim capitalists across the world. While a few of his wealthy associates in the Middle East have pledged to drop their association with him, his lucrative connection to capitalists in the Middle East continues. This is the same reactionary, decrepit class that supports reactionary forces like ISIS for their own cynical calculations. Marxists must highlight the reality of this class unity among capitalists who seek to divide class unity among workers.

At the same time, we must explain that the solution to fighting Trump does not lie in supporting Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The Democrats are the smiling face of capital. They make polite noises about not discriminating against Muslims, Latinos and black people while relying on drone attacks, deportations, extrajudicial killings by police, and continued mass incarceration to maintain their rule.

The substance of the ruling parties policies is the same. Obama has deported more Latinos than Bush. Due to mass surveillance policies by both Bush and Obama, a national directory of Muslims already exists. Immigration from Muslim countries has already been severely curtailed by both parties. Bush, Trump, Hillary, and Sanders all promote various flavors of imperialist adventure overseas. Neither party is able earnestly address the Syrian refugee crisis. Both capitalist parties stand to benefit from rhetoric that shifts blame for the crisis away from the capitalists.

Cause for optimism

Marxists have good cause for optimism. The ruling class is in a deepening political crisis. The molecular process of revolution, the sharpening rift between left and right, the natal kicks of revolution and counterrevolution, all point towards an inevitable revolutionary situation in the future. Scientists cannot precisely predict when an avalanche will erupt, or when tectonic movements in faults will cause an earthquake, but they can confidently say where it is that one will inevitably happen.

Trump is such an irreverent representative of his class that his peers originally wished to censor him. But his brashness makes him no less a representation of capitalism. In fact, in his rudeness and backwardness he foreshadows the only kind of future his system can offer. Again, what Trump represents is repugnant and reactionary. This is a fact already bored into the heads of great numbers of Americans. That many workers call Trump a fascisteven if it is inaccurate and pessimisticultimately springs from a desire for a better society. Our job is to explain that he is only a harbinger of the capitalist future, and to connect the widespread indignation at his beliefs and character to the long-term struggle against capitalism, for which we have all the reason to be optimistic.

As Marxists, we patiently explain the need for a mass organization that could catalyze these initial impressions and take them to their revolutionary conclusion. And who will build that organization except those already reaching these conclusions? We must connect the perspective of socialist revolution and workers unity with the struggle against racism and Islamophobia, explaining that bigotry and nationalism are incompatible with the interests of workers from all races, creeds, and backgrounds. We must consistently explain the need to break with both the Democrats and Republicans, the left and right boots of capitalism, and above all, the need to end the whole wretched system that spawns such miserable creatures as Donald Trump and his cohort on the Republican debate stage, not to mention their counterparts in the Democratic Party, such as the Clintons, who could be found socializing with other members of high society at Trumps most recent wedding.

To the grief and disease of capitalism we counterpose the vista of world socialism. While the process will not be automatic, if we are armed with a long view of events and an appreciation for the strength and potential of the working class, we can be confident in our future. To fight Trump, fight capitalism! Join the International Marxist Tendency!

Source: What Trump Is and How to Fight Him
Via Daily Trust: Lassa fever: Lagos confirms death of second person.

The Lagos State Government has confirmed the death of another person as result of the Lassa fever. The state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris told newsmen that a 27 year old lady whose name he did not disclose died on Tuesday at Ijede Hospital in Ikorodu Local Government Area, few hours after she was admitted at the hospital.

Last week the state government had announced the first person to die of the virus in Lagos in the latest outbreak who reportedly travelled from Edo state, one of the states where the disease had been confirmed earlier.

The latest person to die in Lagos of the disease was said to have travelled to Edo state on December 24, 2015 and returned on January 2, 2016. She took ill in January 11, 2016.

According to the Commissioner, the lady was taken to one private hospital and three churches before she was later brought to Ijede Hospital by her relatives.

Her remains had been kept in the morgue, she would be buried after due consultation with her family, he said.
Maura Healey

Maura Healey

( File)

Gilead Sciences Inc. has reached out to meet with Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey after she called the company out for charging $1,000 per pill in the U.S. as part of a Hepatitis C drug treatment.

At a Wednesday morning breakfast with biotechnology officials, Healey said that Hepatitis C virus (HCV) rates are rising in Massachusetts as medication like Sovaldi, the drug treatment from Gilead, sits on pharmacy shelves as people can't afford it.

In a letter to the California-based company sent last week, Healey said her office is weighing whether Gilead's pricing may fall under unfair trade practices, a violation of state law.

"Because Gilead's drugs offer a cure for a serious and life-threatening infectious disease, pricing the treatment in a manner that effectively allows [Hepatitis C] to continue spreading through vulnerable populations, as opposed to eradicating the disease altogether, results in massive public harm," she wrote. "My civil enforcement attorneys will continue to examine this potential claim for unfair commercial conduct."

"We agree with the Attorney General about the importance of helping all HCV patients - and that the advent of safe, effective regimens means we can now consider the possibility of eradicating the disease," Amy Flood, Gilead vice president of public affairs said in an email sent to MassLive.com.

"We look forward to working with the Attorney General's office to address questions and concerns and ensure a mutual understanding of the work we are doing to deliver a cure for HCV to as many patients as possible in Massachusetts and around the world," she added.

Healey noted that the drug, while priced at $1,000 per pill in the U.S., costs just $10 in Egypt and $4 in India.
WHO has published Human infection with avian influenza A(H5N6) virus  China. Excerpt and then a comment:

On 18 January 2016, the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) of China notified WHO of 1 additional laboratory-confirmed case of human infection with avian influenza A(H5N6) virus.

Details of the case

The case is a 31-year-old female from Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province who developed symptoms on 8 January. The patient was admitted to a local hospital and is now in critical condition.

Public health response

The Chinese Government has taken the following surveillance and control measures:

 making every effort to treat the patient; collecting and testing the specimens of the patient, carrying out viral isolation, gene sequencing and alignment;

 conducting epidemiological investigation; tracing, managing and observing close contacts of the patient;

 strengthening surveillance of pneumonia of unknown causes and routine sentinel surveillance of influenza; strengthening the etiological surveillance of influenza/avian influenza virus;

 strengthening measures to control the source of infection.

WHO risk assessment

WHO continues to closely monitor the influenza A(H5N6) situation and conduct risk assessments. So far, the overall risk associated with avian influenza A(H5N6) viruses has not changed.

I remember Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1983 when it was just a handful of highrises wrapped in bamboo scaffolding on a broad plain that had once been rice paddies and villages. It became a metaphor for three decades of explosive Chinese growth, the core of the vast industrial sprawl between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Millions of Chinese and foreigners swarmed into Shenzhen, rather as draftees like me had swarmed into Fort Ord, California, twenty years earlier. I met a lot of interesting guys there, we exchanged life stories and germs, and a lot of us got sick.

Meningitis was our scare word, especially after a major outbreak in the basic-training barracks a few months later. I went through basic when you had to be unresponsive to get permission to go on sick call; now you were on sick call no more than the sniffles. Recruits' mattresses hung out the barracks window to air while the recruits themselves went through a gentler form of basic than I'd known. Eventually, basic training was shut down temporarily and new recruits were sent to Fort Polk, Louisianawhere, the army grapevine informed us, meningitis raged on, but with less publicity.

With so many people from so many places crowded into such a small area, Shenzhen is a great cauldron for rare new viruses, and not the only one. I wish this unknown 31-year-old woman, born just a year or so after I last saw Shenzhen, all the luck in the world.
gus morales

Gus Morales.

(Republican file photo)

HOLYOKE -- Gus Morales, the former head of the Holyoke teacher's union and English teacher, has left the district.

At the end of the 2015 school year, Morales was one of 78 teachers asked not to return to Holyoke Public Schools for the fall semester. He -- like 54 other non-renewed teachers -- did not have professional status, meaning he did not consecutively hold position for more than three years.

Morales began working as an English teacher at Maurice A. Donahue School four years ago. Within his first two years of employment, he began criticized educational reforms in the district, from data walls to the level of testing in the classroom.

In the spring of 2014, he was named president-elect of the teacher's union after campaigning against such district policies. A month later, his contract with the district was non-renewed.

Districts are not required by law to give teachers a reason for non-renewal when he or she lacks professional status. Morales claimed it was retaliation for his organizing efforts.

Holyoke Teachers Association filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations on his behalf.

In a preliminary finding released several months later, the Department of Labor Relations said there was probable cause in the complaint.

"Based on the evidence presented during this investigation, I have found probable cause to believe that a violation occurred," Brian K. Harrington, of the Department of Labor Relations, wrote in 2014. "Therefore, this Complaint of Prohibited Practice shall issue, and the parties will be given the opportunity to be heard for the purpose of determining the following allegations."

Morales was invited to return to the district midway through the school year, in exchange for withdrawing all pending grievances and claims.

His contract was again non-renewed seven months later. The union filed another complaint on Morales' behalf claiming he was improperly let go.

"I guess they want round two," Morales told MassLive in 2015. "The district has decided in all its infinite wisdom that it's better to fight me than to work with me."

Half a year after the second lawsuit was filed, it has been withdrawn.

"The matter with Mr. Morales has been resolved," Holyoke Receiver Stephen K. Zrike said, adding Morales is no longer employed by the district. He is no longer the president of the Holyoke teacher's union.

MassLive has filed a records request with the district to obtain the settlement agreement between Morales and Holyoke Public Schools.

The former Holyoke teacher did not return repeated requests for comment from MassLive.

In a public statement to members of the Holyoke Teacher's Association, Morales said it was an honor to serve as president and that he's proud of his record representing the union.

Related: Former Holyoke teacher Gus Morales on retaliation complaint: 'Put me back in the classroom, avoid the messiness of a full-scale hearing'


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Spiros Hatiras, member of the Holyoke Soldiers' Home board of trustees, top right corner, speaks during the board's meeting Tuesday at the 110 Cherry St. facility.

(MIKE PLAISANCE / THE REPUBLICAN)

HOLYOKE -- Paul Barabani's last day as superintendent of the Holyoke Soldiers' Home will be Friday.

Cheryl Lussier Poppe, superintendent of the Chelsea Soldiers' Home, will become interim director Monday.

A search for a permanent chief proceeds.

Those were among factual steps that emerged from a board of trustees meeting Tuesday dominated by heated exchanges.

Board member Spiros Hatiras said the board needed clarity from Barabani about his departure date.

"We need to know," Hatiras said in the meeting held at the 110 Cherry St. facility.

"In my belief, my decision to retire is my decision," said Barabani, who said he has yet to submit a formal retirement letter.

Board Chairman Steven E. Como said Barabani was "very clear" in an email in December he would leave once a yearly federal evaluation of the facility is done this month.

"Friday is your last day," Como said.

"You requested something in writing. I don't know if I ever responded to that request," said Barabani, who has been superintendent since February 2011.

"It was very clear in the email you sent to staff," Como said. "I am absolutely holding you" to that.

Poppe attended the meeting but declined to comment later.

Barabani said he could choose not to retire and Como said he could do so but his tenure as superintendent still would end Friday.

The Holyoke Soldiers' Home is a state-funded health care facility for veterans established in 1952. It employs more than 300 people, has 265 long-term care beds and 30 private rooms for veterans and serves 2,200 veterans a year with its in- and out-patient facilities. It has a yearly budget of $23.1 million.

Board member Daniel J. Smith made one of numerous references that occurred in the meeting to a Dec. 21 letter from Gov. Charlie Baker to the trustees about the Holyoke Soldiers' Home leadership transition.

Baker said in the letter that he acknowledged Barabani's "written notice of retirement" that will take place "no later than Jan. 31, 2016."

Finding a new superintendent will mirror the process that resulted in Barabani being appointed by former Gov. Deval L. Patrick in February 2011, Baker said. That involves forming a search committee that will recommend candidates from whom the governor will choose a new superintendent, Baker's letter said.

"This process reflects standard practice for boards operating under the supervision of the executive department, and I look forward to receiving the board's final recommendation," Baker said.

But Smith is among officials, including board lawyer Donald R. Andrejczyk and Barabani, who said that state law gives authority to appoint a superintendent, and even an interim leader like Poppe, only to the board of trustees and not the governor.

The uncertainty means it was unclear when Barabani was leaving and what role Poppe would play, Smith said.

"This is one of the reasons why I disagree with the letter," Smith said.

Hatiras said he was convinced by Barabani's comments at the Dec. 15 board meeting that Barabani was retiring as superintendent by late January. Uncertainty about the leadership isn't an option, Hatiras said.

"That's not going to happen," said Hatiras, who suggested he otherwise would "move to terminate."

"Are you telling me I'm terminated as of the 31st?" Barabani said.

"I think at some point in time we have to get past the drama of what's going on here," Como said.

The priority should be caring for the facility's veterans, he said.

Barabani said his intention wasn't to hang around until July but at least to be available to help Poppe with a transition.

"We know from (Baker's letter) that there has been a date set," Como said.

"There hasn't been a date set," Barabani said.

Hatiras said board members have received conflicting intentions from Barabani. He said he was leaving, he might change his mind and he wants to help with a transition, he said.

"So what is it? I just need to know as a trustee," Hatiras said.

Barabani said he would like another week before his departure.

At that point, defenses of Barabani, who retired in 2002 as a colonel after 32 years in the Army National Guard, began to be voiced.

Some colorful support for Barabani came from Alan Keeler. A former U.S. Marine, Keeler lives at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home and is vice chairman of the veterans advocacy council. But he said he attended the meeting to defend Barabani, whom he referred to as "the colonel," and wasn't representing the council.

Como initially prohibited Keeler from addressing the board. Keeler proceeded to make comments anyway as discussion proceeded. The board eventually voted to let him speak.

"The governor has fallen prey to someone's deceitfulness" regarding how Barabani was being treated, Keeler said. "It's absolutely abominable."

The situation has deteriorated into a "real 'Magilla Gorilla'" of a problem, he said.

"I say stick with the colonel," Keeler said, because otherwise, "It's a colossal mistake. It's almost like a premature ejaculation from Boston."

He concluded by comparing the trustees to the "Keystone Cops."

"Put that in your pipe and smoke it," Keeler said.

Hatiras thanked Keeler for his comments.

"No, you're not thanking me for my comments," Keeler said. "You're vilifying me."

Hatiras said that that was untrue and that he genuinely appreciated Keeler's comments.

Trustee Brian Q. Corridan said he didn't like how Barabani was being treated.

"He's dedicated himself for five years to turning around this facility," Corridan said.

Hatiras said the board should go into executive session for discussion of such sensitive topics.

Como said executive session was prohibited under the Open Meeting Law in this case because such an item wasn't on the meeting's posted agenda.

Andrejczyk cautioned the board to avoid discussing "termination" of an employee in a public meeting.

"I see no reason to even raise the term 'termination,'" Andrejczyk said.

"I just see no reason for this man to leave under this kind of atmosphere," Corridan said.

Como and Hatiras repeated that they were left with the understanding Barabani was leaving as of the end of January.

"So that's it, then," Barabani said. "You're throwing me out."

Andrejczyk asked to speak. Como initially refused but relented.

"I think everybody wants to do the right thing here ... but you've got to follow the law. You can't go by a letter," said Andrejczyk, again referring to Baker's letter.

The point, he said, is the law authorizes the board of trustees to appoint the superintendent. And the board hasn't voted whether to make Poppe interim leader, he said.

"We need to sit back and look at the requirements and do the right thing," Andrejczyk said.

"I fully understand it," Como said.

"I hope so," Andrejczyk said.

A story with additional details about the Holyoke Soldiers' Home board of trustees meeting will be published later in the week as reporting continues.
The United Nations called upon the world Wednesday to commemorate the 11 million lives taken by German Nazis during World War II.

The UN designated the date International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi deaths camps.

On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. About 1.1 million prisoners were killed in Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were Jewish, historical records show.

Six million Jews, two million Gypsies, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people and 9,000 gay men were killed by the Nazis.

President Obama is expected to attend an event Wednesday at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where two Americans and two Polish people will be honored for their work trying to save persecuted Jews, according to USA Today.

Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 40,000 labor and death camps and other incarceration sites between 1933 and 1945, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Birkenau camp had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to killing center, as many as 6,000 Jews were murdered there every day. In forced-labor camps, thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, diseases, shooting executions and medical experiments.
ISO New England.jpg

System operators in the ISO New England control room keep a careful watch on the use and flow of electricity in New England in this photo taken in 2006.

(Michael S. Gordon / The Republican File)

The New England power system continues to be in a "precarious position" during extended periods of extreme cold, said Gordon van Welie, president and CEO of ISO New England, the independent operator of the six-state high-voltage grid.

Van Welie, in delivering the organization's State of the Grid 2016 presentation on Tuesday, said New England needs additional natural gas pipeline capacity to serve its power generation needs, and also requires high-voltage transmission lines to carry Canadian hydro and wind power from northern regions to more southern population centers.

The update from ISO New England comes as Massachusetts grapples with two controversial natural gas pipeline proposals, a stance by the state's Attorney General that the pipelines aren't needed to ensure grid reliability, and a push by Governor Charlie Baker to import large amounts of Canadian hydro into the Bay State. Major transmission line proposals include the New England Clean Power Link and Northern Pass.

Van Welie said that under normal conditions, wholesale electricity prices in New England are competitive with other parts of the country. But when natural gas pipelines are constrained during very cold weather, dirtier oil and coal plants are fired up, resulting in higher emissions and higher prices.

"In winter, the pipelines serving New England are operating at full capacity just to meet heating demand," said van Welie. "When that happens, we've experienced challenges to power system reliability as well as extreme price spikes."

Van Welie spoke of a major shift in the region's energy mix, largely due to booming production of natural gas from Marcellus shale:

"The shift to natural-gas-fired generation has been underway for the last two decades. New England's competitive wholesale electricity markets have attracted significant investment in new power plants."

Natural gas now accounts for 49 percent of the region's power generation, a dramatic jump since the year 2000, when the figure stood at 15 percent, according to the ISO's numbers. Meanwhile, the combined use of oil and coal fell from 40 to only six percent. Hydro and other renewables have climbed from 13 to 15 percent.

New England will have lost more than 4,200 megawatts of generation capacity by 2019, including coal, oil, and nuclear plants, said van Welie, adding that most of the lost capacity will be replaced by efficient natural gas power plants and large-scale wind.

Van Welie noted that while the ISO can't "see" distributed resources such as residential solar, they are already having an impact. He said in the near future, a "hybrid grid" will be the norm, with grid-connected distributed resources and a continued shift toward natural gas and large-scale renewables.

In good news, he said, New England has invested in cleaner technologies ahead of the rest of the country, and has seen regional air emissions decline significantly over the past decade.

ISO New England is the Independent System Operator in charge of the six-state power system. The non-profit operates the high-voltage grid, administers wholesale electricity markets, and conducts power system planning.

ISO New England as a matter of policy does not take a position on any specific proposal for natural gas pipelines or transmission lines. Its employees are banned from having any financial interest in the wholesale energy markets.

Mary Serreze can be reached at mserreze@gmail.com
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Paul Barabani, superintendent of the Holyoke Soldiers' Home.

(PHOTO BY MARY SERREZE)

HOLYOKE -- The Veterans of Foreign Wars Hampden District 7 has asked Gov. Charlie Baker to do a "personal inquiry" into leadership and veterans' care issues at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home.

"The Veterans of Foreign Wars Hampden (County) District 7 is having serious concerns regarding the recent resignations and retirement of the highly respected and highly effective management team at the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke," said the Jan. 24 letter to Baker signed by District Commander Brian Willette.

"In light of these serious concerns, the nearly 1,100 members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hampden District 7 respectfully request that you conduct a personal inquiry into these issues. We also request that you address the findings and possible remedies needed with the appropriate agencies, as well as the Massachusetts Legislature," Willette said.

Among the concerns is the loss of Superintendent Paul Barabani and John Paradis, who was deputy superintendent until Jan. 1, Willette said.

After Barabani announced his plan to retire Dec. 15, Paradis said he would resign because he didn't want to work with a superintendent other than Barabani.

District 7 represents 11 Veterans of Foreign War (VFW) posts in Hampden and Hampshire counties. Post members voted "overwhelmingly" to send the letter to Baker, Willette said in an email.

Barabani, who was appointed superintendent in February 2011, said he was leaving largely based on the state's failure to provide strong funding and staffing support for the Holyoke Soldiers' Home. Barabani retired in 2002 as a colonel after 32 years in the Army National Guard.

The Soldiers' Home's divided board of trustees Tuesday battled and supported Barabani in a meeting held at the 110 Cherry St. facility.

The result of the meeting was establishment of Barabani's departure date, which will be Friday, confirmation that Cheryl Lussier Poppe, superintendent of the Chelsea Soldiers' Home, will become interim director of the Holyoke Soldiers' Home Monday and plans to continue with a search for a permanent superintendent.

The state has posted notice that the job is available at a yearly salary of $57,285 to $151,560.

The application deadline is Feb. 12.

Overlooking Interstate 91, the Holyoke Soldiers' Home is a state-funded health care facility for veterans established in 1952. It employs more than 300 people, has 265 long-term care beds and 30 private rooms for veterans and serves 2,200 veterans a year with its in- and out-patient facilities. It has a yearly budget of $23.1 million.

The Chelsea Soldiers' Home budget is nearly $28 million.

State officials have said the Chelsea facility was larger and had different needs than the Holyoke Soldiers' Home, including more and older buildings that needed funding for maintenance.

But Barabani said the issue boils down to providing care to the veterans who most need it and that means those confined to beds or who require daily help with washing and other needs, Barabani said.

The Holyoke Soldiers' Home has on average a 264-bed occupancy of veterans with such thorough and intensive staff needs while the Chelsea Soldiers' Home has such an occupancy of 162 beds. But the Holyoke facility's budget is nearly 22 percent less than Chelsea's, he said.

At a Dec. 23 meeting at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home that drew facility residents, their families, veterans and officials, staff like Quality Manager Pamela Camerlin said veterans would continue receiving attention and care despite the leadership changes.

"We are still here to take care of you," Camerlin said.

In a visit to the region Dec. 20, after the exits of Barabani and Paradis had been announced, Baker said the Holyoke Soldiers' Home has his attention.

"This has the attention of everybody in our administration ... Holyoke Soldiers' Home is an important institution, not just in Western Mass but in Massachusetts period," Baker said then.

Secretary Francisco A. Urena of the state Department of Veterans Services is among officials who have disputed Barabani's contention that state support of the Holyoke Soldiers' Home has been inadequate.

The facility's budget increased 7.5 percent this year compared to last year, it was spared spending cuts sustained by other state agencies and programs and 99 percent of the positions vacated when staff took early retirement offers were filled, Urena has said.

Barabani has said the increased funding failed to recoup previous budget cuts and staffing remains unaddressed.
BURNS - Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed and other leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation were arrested Tuesday after the FBI and state police stopped vehicles about 20 miles north of Burns.

Authorities did not release the name of the person who died at the highway stop, but Finicum's daughter confirmed it was Finicum, 55, of Cane Beds, Arizona, one of the cowboy-hat wearing faces of the takeover.

"My dad was such a good good man, through and through," said Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, one of Finicum's 11 children. "He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound in the confrontation about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395. He was treated and released from a local hospital and was in FBI custody, authorities said.

Also arrested during the stop were his brother, Ammon Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho, Ryan W. Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont., Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada, and Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah. They were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony.

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said that Ammon Bundy called his wife, Lisa Bundy, from the back of a police car on Tuesday night.

Gov. Kate Brown called for calm late Tuesday night.



"The situation in Harney County continues to be the subject of a federal investigation that is in progress," she said in a statement. "My highest priority is the safety of all Oregonians and their communities. I ask for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."

Little detail was available about the dramatic finish to the free-roaming ways of the militant leaders. State police said troopers were involved in the shooting and that one person died, another suffered non-life-threatening injuries and no police were hurt.

The militants seized the wildlife refuge on Jan. 2, insisting they wouldn't leave until their demands were met, including the freeing of two Harney County ranchers jailed on federal arson charges.

One militant on Tuesday afternoon posted a video of Ammon Bundy talking earlier in the day with an FBI negotiator identified only as "Chris." The two have been negotiating since last week, with Bundy dictating the circumstances under which he would talk and what the group wanted.

The leaders were on the highway bound for John Day, where they were scheduled to participate in an evening community meeting set up by local residents. A crowd of several hundred had gathered at the John Day Senior Center and were subsequently told the the "guest speakers" would not be appearing.

The highway was blocked for a 40-mile stretch between Burns and John Day. Police were stationed near Seneca, a small city of 200 south of John Day, with long guns. They said they didn't know how long the roadblock would be place. Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer was there.

Palmer two weeks ago had met with Payne and Ritzheimer. He later publicly declared that Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, should be freed from federal prison to help end the standoff. Palmer also has recommended that the FBI leave the Harney County scene and turn the matter to local police.

The armed militants took over the vacant headquarters compound at the refuge. They have been using refuge buildings for meetings and lodging, posting armed security guards.

The occupiers have been moving without police interference between the refuge and Burns, even attending a county-sponsored community meeting at the Burns High School a week ago. Police estimated at least 50 militants scattered through the crowd of about 400 people.

The dramatic event came days after local and state officials had publicly complained about the apparent inaction by federal law enforcement. The governor had complained directly to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey as well as the White House. On Monday, Harney County Judge Steve Grasty, who chairs the county commission, also publicly urged police to resolve the occupation.

Payne and Bundy have been in and out of Harney County since November, aroused by the sentencing of the Hammonds. In October, they were ordered back to federal prison to finish five-year terms for deliberating starting fires that burned federal land in 2001 and 2006. Bundy and his followers had demanded that Harney County Sheriff David Ward protect the ranchers from having to surrender, a demand Ward rejected.

Payne and other militia met local residents in an informal meeting on New Year's Day in Burns, vowing they had peaceful intentions. The next day, about 300 people - a mix of militia and local residents - paraded in protest through downtown Burns, stopping at the sheriff's office and then stopping at the home of Dwight Hammond and his wife Susan.

That afternoon, a splinter group of militants drove out to the refuge, left vacant after federal authorities warned employees to stay away over safety concerns. Later, Payne confirmed in interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive that the group had long planned to seize the refuge.

Besides demanding freedom for the Hammonds, the Bundy group wanted the refuge turned over to prior private owners and to the county. They insist that the federal government has no constitutional authority to control land in Harney County, a county that measures 10,000 square miles. The federal government controls 76 percent. The Bundy group also has encouraged ranchers to renounced their federal grazing permits, showcasing a New Mexico rancher Saturday at the refuge who did just that.

-- Laura Gunderson, Carli Brosseau, Denis Theriault, Luke Hammill, Elliot Njus, Anna Marum, and Ian Kullgren of The Oregonian contributed to this post.

-- Les Zaitz
Brianna Cuoco

Brianna Cuoco, of Chicopee.

HOLYOKE -- State and local officials are searching the Connecticut River in Holyoke Wednesday as part of a search for a Chicopee teenager who went missing earlier this month.

Holyoke Fire Department Capt. Anthony Cerruti said the department was asked to assist Massachusetts State Police Wednesday in their search. The search began at 10 a.m. and, as of 2:30 p.m., officers and firefighters were still searching the river near the Holyoke dam.

No one has been found yet, Cerruti said.

Brianna Cuoco, 18, has been missing since the early hours of Monday, Jan. 18. The Chicopee Comprehensive High School student was reportedly last seen around Bridge Street in South Hadley.

State police searched the Connecticut River in South Hadley last weekend.
SPRINGFIELD - A judge has dismissed a drug distribution charge against a Springfield woman arrested with her boyfriend and his parents when police seized more than 1,500 packets of heroin during a raid last summer.

At a prosecutor's request, one count of possession of heroin with intent to distribute was dropped against Princeza Aponte, 24, on Jan. 11 in Springfield District Court.

Aponte, her boyfriend, James Galanis, 23; his father, Peter Galanis, 59, and mother, Susan Galanis, 53, were arrested in June after city narcotics detectives raided the family's home on Los Angeles Street and a second residence on Kenwood Park.

Investigators seized 1,584 packets of heroin, seven firearms and $12,816 in cash during the raid, according to court documents.

All four defendants pleaded innocent during their arraignment in Springfield District Court on June 17. In late August, the charges against James Galanis, his father and mother were transferred to Hampden Superior Court after the trio was indicted by a grand jury.

Aponte's case remained in District Court and was scheduled for a jury trial on Dec. 10.

No explanation for dismissing the case was provided in court records, but defense lawyer Dennis J. Powers said his client played no role in the drug sales allegedly conducted by her boyfriend.

"The prosecutors did the right thing," the lawyer said, adding that his client had barely begun dating James Galanis before they were arrested.

A spokesperson for Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni agreed.

"During the course of the investigation, it became apparent that Ms. Aponte was not involved in her boyfriend's alleged illicit activity," James Leydon said.



In September, Judge Bethzaida Sanabria-Vega rejected a defense motion to dismiss the charge.

The judge wrote that Aponte was sitting in a parked vehicle, with 51 packets of heroin in plain view, when she and James Galanis were arrested on June 16.

While James Galanis was the target of the investigation, the presence of Aponte in his vehicle along with the visibility of 51 packets of heroin met the legal standard for charging her with possession of heroin with intent to distribute, the judge wrote.
We're still waiting for a Ministry of Health update on microcephaly cases across Brazil, but in the meantime here's a January 26 report from Folha de Pernambuco, at the centre of the hot zone: Boletim: 1.373 casos de microcefalia foram notificados em Pernambuco.[Bulletin: 1,373 cases of microcephaly reported in Pernambuco] Edited excerpt from the Google translation:

From August 1, 2015 until January 23, 2016, 1,373 microcephaly cases were reported in Pernambuco. Of this total, 530 (38.6%) met the parameters of the World Health Organization (WHO) for microcephaly, which identifies the malformation in babies with head circumference equal to or less than 32 centimeters. In all, 138 cases were confirmed as microcephaly and 110 were rejected - taking into account the outcome of babies' imaging.

Also recorded were eight cases of stillbirths and four babies that died soon after birth. None of the cases had microcephaly as the underlying cause of death. The deaths were in the cities of Recife (03) Ipojuca (03), St. Lawrence (01), Bodoco (01) Bom Jardim (1), Sao Caetano (1), Ipubi (1) and Petrolina (1) .

Since the notification of cases of pregnant women with rashes was made compulsory in the period from December 2, 2015 to January 23, 2016, 84 municipalities in the state reported 792 cases of pregnant women with this clinical picture. Of this total, nine pregnant women have confirmation of intrauterine microcephaly.

It is worth noting that the notification of women with rash does not necessarily mean that they are suspected cases of dengue, chikungunya or Zika, since other factors may have caused the red spots (rubella, poisoning, allergies or some other virus). The rash is not indicative that the woman will have a child with microcephaly.
Glo European Windows has won the USGBC Sustainability Merit Award for Products and Processes. The USGBC Montana Chapter created the Montana Sustainability Awards to acknowledge and celebrate the best building, site development and product/processes in sustainable design and construction across the state.

The intent of the Montana Sustainability Awards program is to encourage excellence in sustainability and to provide an avenue through which practitioners may gain recognition by their peers and the public.

The USGBC Montana Sustainability Awards is awarded annually with the ultimate goal of raising the standards of sustainability in the state of Montana.

Recently the USGBC Montana hosted its Annual Summit at the Big Sky Resort. Attendees were given the opportunity to learn about the latest in the green building industry, case studies and more.

"The USGBC Montana promotes environmental stewardship and green building practices" said Mark Wells, vice president of Sales and Marketing for Glo European Windows. "It is a great honor to receive this award and this recognition from the USGBC".

About Glo European Windows

Founded in Missoula, MT, Glo windows currently delivers custom made windows and doors throughout the United States and has active projects in Missouri, Montana, Iowa, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Glo European Windows is based in Missoula, MT. For more information about Glo windows please visit the website at http://www.glowindows.com or call 406-721-2741

About USGBC

The United States Green Building Council is made up of tens of thousands of member organizations, chapters and student and community volunteers that are moving the building industry forward in a way that has never been seen before. USGBC is diverse group of builders and environmentalists, corporations and nonprofits, teachers and students, lawmakers and citizens that share the same vision of a sustainable built environment for all within the next generation. For more information visit http://www.usgbc.org.
The impact this change will have on entrepreneurs, the lifeblood of the U.S. economy, is significant. This new code will enable a companys founders and employees holding stock, including that obtained upon exercise of options, to save up to millions of dollars in taxes upon a company achieving a successful liquidation event.

Risk-taking entrepreneurs and investors who create jobs through building businesses will be rewarded for their efforts with lessened tax burdens. In this case, the disruptive innovation is a line of tax code rather than software code.

by Alan Patricof (@alanjpatricof)

Full Story: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/25/early-stage-investing-for-entrepreneurs-and-individual-investors-just-got-a-whole-lot-more-attractive/
President Obamas latest budget proposals will include provisions that could make it easier to save for retirement by tackling one of the largest obstacles workers face: access to retirement plans.

The presidents proposals https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/26/fact-sheet-building-21st-century-retirement-system , which will be included in his 2017 budget plan, would make savings account plans more available to workers by lowering the costs for small businesses. It also introduces more options for people who dont currently have a plan through their employer.

By Jonnelle Marte

Full Story:
"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."

Oswaldo Jose Paya Sardinas (2002)
A new survey shows one in five Americans have decided to put off any debt payment planning.

PennyWise Podcast host Teri Barr is talking with Melissa Lambarena, a credit card expert with NerdWallet, to learn why so many people are deciding not to deal with their debt right now.

Melissa tells us more about the survey, than walks us through the simple but solid steps to start tackling your debt.

More from Melissa on NerdWallet:

Support the show: https://omny.fm/shows/pennywise

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chicken will be the best-positioned protein due to its low price position in times of pressure on consumer spending power but rises in production costs and the long-term impact of COVID-19 threaten to disrupt the sector, according to Rabobank.
CHAMBERSBURG  Chambersburg Borough Council is painting a rosier picture of the storm cleanup than many communities throughout the Midstate.

In fact, they say theyre not worrying about the cost.

The roads are (for the most part) plowed, the sidewalks are getting better, and now borough leaders are looking toward the weekend.

There isnt much snow left in the towns square; the timing is just right.

People get a little stir crazy at the end of January, and thats without nearly three feet of snow, said Penny Shaul, one of the chairs for IceFest.

The borough is following her lead in gearing up for the winter celebration.

Theyve been doing a great job getting everything as clear as possible for IceFest, Shaul said.

Street parking is clear downtown, and by Tuesday afternoon, 34 tons of ice and the sculptors who work it arrived in the square. The festival will go on as planned this weekend.

The borough says all streets have been plowed at least once.

And theyre going back for second passes, council president Allen Coffman said. Theyre going to continue to work on this until we get the snow moved away and hauled out of here.

Thats still a big task. The borough hired private hauling companies to take it all away. The council doesnt know what the final cost will be.

That number has not been talked about, Coffman said. Nobodys questioned it. Were just going ahead with it and well deal with it when the numbers come in.

They hope to be included in a disaster area to get either state or federal reimbursement.

With major roads clear and downtown getting back to business, the borough appears ready for the largest-ever IceFest  with the right winter touches.

We would like a little less atmosphere, Shaul laughed.

IceFest starts on Thursday and runs through Sunday.
On a recent media tour of innovative Dutch medical facilities we were privileged to visit XILLOC, a company based in Geleen, a city in the south of the country, just outside of Maastricht. Its a small firm that focuses on patient-specific 3D-printed titanium implants, but also does related work for the auto, aerospace, and other industries that have unusual manufacturing requirements. It was founded in 2011 within the Maastricht University Medical Centre by Maikel Beerens as a spinoff of Maastricht Instruments B.V., a company that develops new medical technologies in the pre-approval stage.

Maikel has been running the firm ever since, building a product portfolio, expanding the available materials used during printing, and offering customers (surgeons and others) the opportunity to take advantage of XILLOCs expertise. Nevertheless, work in the other industries is meant to support expansion of the firms efforts at making 3D printing more widely used for medical applications.

XILLOC has been doing a lot of work in cranial reconstructions and within the face, replacing critical bones with custom manufactured implants made of titanium, PEEK (polyether ether ketone), ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). Since each material has its own benefits and drawbacks, the surgeon can decide which to go with depending on the specific needs of each case.

The manufacturing process involves performing a CT scan on the patient, which is uploaded to XILLOCs computer for a review. The company sends back a a quotation based on the case, and once approved the surgeon works with the implant designers on the important little details. After validation, the 3D file is sent to the printer.

Maikel showed us one of the printers, but also the more impressive next generation machines which were still sitting within wooden shipping boxes. Theyll now be using the additive manufacturing machines, including EOS M 400 for metal and EOS P 396 for printing using polymers.

But to show us the clinical impact of 3D printing in clinical practice, Maikel gave us an example of a patient, Marc, whose life was saved because of a titanium implant. Marc was involved in a biking accident and suffered a serious concussion. His brain swelled to such a degree that an entire section of the cranium was removed to relieve the intracranial pressure. In the meantime the sections of bone that were removed were preserved inside an incision in Marcs belly and are then months later, in a series of surgeries, re-implanted back where they came from. One of those surgeries failed, with serious issues that followed, and he was advised to receive a patient specific implant based on a CT scan of his head.

The part was designed, printed, and implanted into Marcs head, and since its titanium it doesnt get infected, has just the right shape, osseointegrates with nearby tissue, and is way stronger than the original! Considering the high failure rate of re-implanted bone, the 3D printed implants have a lot going for them. Currently theyre expensive and new, and it will take time for adoption to progress. But certainly 3D printing of implants is one of the huge new medical technology industries thats still in an infant stage.

Wed like to thank Maikel for an enlightening lecture and tour XILLOCs research and development facilities. Seeing how specific patient implants were being designed, we could not show you more photos of the facility. Rest assured theres a small group of dedicated folks that may not be inside a hospital, but are improving and saving lives of real patients.

Link: XILLOC Patient Specific Implants info page
by Felicia Greiff , January 27, 2016

Portland, Ore.-based software company Cedexis recently raised $22 million in Series B funding, bringing the total outside investment the company has received to $33 million. Portland, Ore.-based software company Cedexis recently raised $22 million in Series B funding, bringing the total outside investment the company has received to

In addition, the seven-year-old Cedexis received a $770K business development loan from bpifrance. The company will use the money to increase investments and hiring in engineering, marketing and sales, as well as to drive the company's global growth, broaden solutions for accelerating over-the-top (OTT) video, software as a service (SaaS) and Web app delivery, the company said in a release.

The funding round was led by Ginko Ventures with participation from Foxconn, Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), Citrix Systems Ventures, as well as previous investors Advanced Technology Ventures and Madrona Ventures.

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One of Cedexis' products, Radar, demonstrates how cloud and network performance impacts the experience of Web and mobile application users by measuring hundreds of cloud service providers, content delivery networks and private platforms, from more than 50,000 networks around the world, according to Cedexis. Then, that information can be used to route traffic to achieve the best performance, availability or cost, or any mix of those three factors.

Companies that use Cedexis' Web performance monitoring software include Accor Hotels, Airbus, Cartier, Comcast, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Nissan and Shutterstock. It has offices in Portland, San Francisco and Brooklyn, as well as London and Paris.
Globe and Mail, Wednesday, January 27, 2016 10 AM

Ipsos Reid is out with its Most Influential Brands in Canada roster. The research has found that the most influential brands also tend to outperform on the stock market. In other words, tech brands dominate: Amazon, Samsung and Netflix have all moved up significantly since Ipsos first conducted the study in 2011. Ipsos chief operating officer Steve Levy said these represent brands that people interact with most often, as presence in peoples day-to-day lives, more than advertising, correlates with influence. You could refer to it as earned media, he said.

Read the whole story at Globe and Mail 
by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, January 27, 2016

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) conducted a study on how registered voters interact with information about the 2016 presidential race. Their findings further endow digital media with concrete evidence that it is rivaling TV and quickly gaining in overall reach.

Most notably, digital media has reached parity with TV as a primary information source about presidential candidates, and barely loses out to TV as a source for general political issues.

Ad budgets look to mirror this reality in digital and mobile advertising, with increasing focus on developing engaging creative and drilling into granular audience targeting.

Especially among Political Influentials, digital media is a tremendously important medium. Seventy-eight percent of them are particularly dependent on digital media for information about politics.

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Indeed, heavy use of digital skews younger, with 35% of younger voters saying digital is their primary source of candidate information this cycle, compared to 23% of the total sample.

Primary users of online digital media are also more likely to take action after being served a political advertisement, with 71% of this group planning to be politically active, compared to 53% of the total sample.

Hispanic and African-American voters in particular are much more likely to interact with political information through mobile.

Sixty-seven percent of Hispanic and 60% of African-American voters explore political sites on mobile, compared to 49% of the total sample. Hispanic voters also respond better to mobile or digital advertisements, with 87% saying they have taken action after seeing an ad.

What is striking here is the direct positive correlation between an increase in the use of digital and being politically active.

Social media also plays a big role: 31% of registered voters interact with political articles and links shared by friends on social media, 25% have seen a candidate ad and 24% have defriended or unfollowed someone due to the persons political posts.

The IAB study dove deeper into the intricacies of digital engagement this cycle. Candidates who want to reach minorities will have to shift more of their ad budget over to digital, and specifically mobile. The engagement is better and targeting abilities are increasingly robust.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who does well among progressives, but fails to dent Hillary Clintons lead when it comes to minority voters, will surely have his team look at opportunities to improve his campaigns mobile presence.

Republican candidates looking to engage a younger demographic and minority groups hope they have harnessed the digital opportunity as the primary season hits its first test in Iowa next week.
by Sara Guaglione , January 27, 2016

National Geographic Partners announced today the appointment of George W. Stone as National Geographic Travel magazines new editor-in-chief. He will be the brands third editor-in-chief in 15 months. National Geographic Partners announced today the appointment of George W. Stone as National Geographic Travel magazines new editor-in-chief. He will be the brands third editor-in-chief in 15 months.

Stone replaces Maggie Zackowitz, who was appointed in April 2015 to fill in for Keith Bellows, who stepped down in October 2014. Zackowitz reportedly retired in December, but a spokesperson told Skift that Zackowitz, who had been at the magazine since 1984, had taken advantage of a buyout offer.

As editor-in-chief, Stone will oversee all of the travel content. In addition to editing the print magazine, he will spearhead National Geographic's digital and social media travel strategy, including the brands annual photo contest and blogging network.

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National Geographic has nearly 14 million followers across all social media platforms.

"My goal is to empower our audiences to embrace travel as a tool for exploration, cultural engagement, creative expression and personal growth, Stone stated.

Stone has worked as a writer and editor for National Geographic Travel for 18 years, most recently as an editor at large based in Singapore. National Geographic stated that Stone has led several initiatives prior to this promotion, including Travel magazine's "Travelers of the Year list and its annual Traveler 50 project, which looks at the future of travel and urban design.

He will report to Susan Goldberg, editorial director of National Geographic Partners and editor-in-chief of National Geographic magazine.

"George has a knack for creating print and digital features that resonate with new audiences  and reflect his spirit of adventure and fun, Goldberg stated.

Stone told Travel Weekly that he will relocate to Washington in a few days. His main goal as editor-in-chief will be to bridge the gap between the print and digital strategies, which have operated relatively separately in the past.

Stone also told Skift his priority will be to establish a unified content experience across platforms.

As Publishers Daily previously reported, 21st Century Fox and National Geographic Society closed a deal to form National Geographic Partners last November, after Fox paid $725 million in cash and equity in September to take control of The National Geographic Societys media assets.

Just last week, National Geographic Partners announced other new hires. The company named Claudia Malley Chief Marketing and Brand Officer and John Campbell SVP, global media.
by Brian Donahue , Op-Ed Contributor, January 27, 2016

If prostitution is the Worlds Oldest Profession, lobbying must be a close second. Over the years, companies have perfected ways to use money to peddle influence among federal, state and local politics.

However, the truth is, lobbying is dying a slow, painful death.

The capricious political environment weve witnessed over the past decade has ushered in new generations of political leaders  and lobbyists have not developed long-term relationships with them.

Federal reforms, evaporating earmarks and junkets that run afoul of the law are also helping this form of persuasion wither away.

In our complex political environment, companies cant rely on their government relations team to protect their interests; they need to activate their consumer audience.

Consumers are constituents who dont need political contribution requirements or a meeting with their representatives in Washington to air their feelings on an issue. They can take to their mobile phones, Facebook feed or email to unleash their grievances or rally others to a cause.

The way people interact with media and politics has forced massive change upon the legislative and regulatory process. According to a Pew Research study, Facebook is the second-biggest political news source for Americans with Internet access. (It trails only local TV.)

Todays digital democracy is turning consumers into activists. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, United Healthcare and People Magazine have shown that if customers are loyal to a brand or product, they also tend to be loyal to their politics.

For example, Uber leveraged its consumer base through emails calling upon riders to contact legislators in New York. Uber also deployed a call-to-action within its app targeting New Yorks mayor. In November, Airbnb won a public advocacy campaign against the city of San Francisco.

Many businesses are slower to adopt this strategy because their agencies are using old-school tactics to fight new-school battles. Agencies that adopt the concept of digital democracy will lead in the years to come.

According to Roll Call, the rise in use of social networks, improved digital advertising and better use of audience data, have created a potent force for gaining the attention of policymakers. They communicate to them directly, raise noise and attention by crowdsourcing grassroots energy, and influence both media coverage and public opinion.

Armed with this advocate army, brands and agencies can target ads to Capitol Hill, state capitals, governors mansions and local municipal offices within a one-mile radius. They can leverage contextual, behavioral and geo-targeted data for video pre-roll, social, search, mobile and display ads.

They can also direct consumer audiences to advocacy advertising landing pages where they can learn more about issues and take action against elected officials.

Agencies can utilize email, mobile apps and other platforms to enlist action. A recent campaign to protect Washington, D.C.s food trucks used the tactics above to advocate for the rights of food trucks to sell to customers.

Some might argue that engaging in this new advocacy doesnt sell soap; however, if done correctly, encouraging digital democracy does improve brand recognition.

It creates more opportunities for meaningful content distribution, brings greater exposure to social or consumer issues and increases user engagement, builds more loyal customers and stakeholders  which in turn, sells soap.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, January 27, 2016

Nielsen announced Tuesday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Annual Leadership Meeting that Digital Ad Ratings are now available in DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

After successfully completing its beta run in Google DoubleClick, Digital Ad Ratings have now become available in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Australia and Brazil, and DoubleClick for Publishers in the U.S.

Nielsen says the release represents a milestone because its platform becomes the first independent campaign audience measurement solution available in select DoubleClick markets internationally.

Marketers using the programmatic platform can measure digital media with metrics comparable to television. Tagging campaigns in DoubleClick allows clients to optimize creative pieces in real-time. It aims to improve efficiency and manage guaranteed buys with increased visibility into performance, specifically for brands looking to run TV and video ad campaigns, or those working with cross-media campaigns such as search or social.

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Jason Miller, director of product management for Brand Measurement Solutions at Google, believes that creating a seamless audience measurement process through Nielsen's Digital Ad Ratings within DoubleClick is very important for brand advertisers looking to run TV and video ad campaigns.

Nielsen says that in the U.S., U.K., Italy, and France it has integrated Digital Ad Ratings data with television ratings to provide enhanced reach measurement with Total Ad Ratings. Last year, the company expanded into 17 markets representing about 85% of the digital advertising spend globally to build momentum.
by Erik Sass @eriksass1, January 27, 2016

Apple is preparing to bring content from subscription publications to its News app, allowing subscribers to access paid content directly through the news service. That means they won't have to visit the publishers app or Web site, according to Reuters.

The app will enable publishers to maintain paywalls, while taking advantage of the higher profile and increased reach offered by Apple News.

Previously, Apple had been helping publishers recruit new subscribers by sharing certain content or excerpts of content for free, with an invitation to visit the Web site or app to become a subscriber. It will continue to offer these services.

Now, by allowing existing subscribers to log in and consume content on the platform itself, Apple News will be able to gather additional usage data which publishers can use to target advertising and their own marketing efforts.

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The new service appears to be intended to give Apple News a competitive advantage over rivals like Facebook Instant Articles as they woo publishers, which stand to benefit from access to the tech platforms huge potential audiences. But publishers are also leery of giving away too much control over their own relationships with consumers.

It remains unclear whether Apple will enable subscription sales through Apple News, and if so, whether it will demand a revenue split from those sales.

The move comes amid a reshuffling of Apples mobile businesses, including moves to hand publishers more control over their ad operations.

Last week, the tech giant announced will shutter its iAd App Network at the end of June no longer accept new apps into the network. Advertising campaigns may continue to run and publishers can earn advertising revenue through June 30.

Apple is shuttering its iAd sales and creation operations, but will continue to offer the iAd service to publishers through an automated platform.
Since lasers were first produced in the early 1960s, researchers have worked to apply laser technology from welding metal to surgeries, with laser technology advancing quickly through the last 50 years.

Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy all play important roles in cancer treatment, and sometimes the best successes come from combining all three approaches.

Doctors usually do the most common form of radiation therapy with x-rays, which can penetrate tissue, killing the cancerous cells in deep-seated tumors. Unfortunately, these same x-rays can also damage healthy tissue surrounding the tumor.

Share on Pinterest Proton density after laser impact on a spherical solid density target: irradiated by an ultra-short, high intensity laser (not in picture) the intense electro-magnetic field rips electrons apart from their ions and creates a plasma. By varying the target geometry and laser properties, scientists could find optimal regimes to accelerate high quality, directed ion beams that are currently studied in accompanying experiments.

Image Credit: Axel Huebl, HZDR, David Pugmire, ORNL.

Thus, in recent years, the use of beams of heavy particles, such as protons or ions, has come into focus. These beams can deposit most of their energy inside the tumor, while at the same time leaving the healthy tissue unharmed. Unfortunately, these beams come from bulky particle accelerators, which make the treatment cost prohibitive for many patients.

At the German research laboratory Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), researchers are looking into replacing particle accelerators with high-powered lasers. The electromagnetic fields of the laser can accelerate ions in a very short time, thus effectively reducing the distance needed to accelerate the ions to therapeutic energies from several meters to a few micrometers.

As a scientist experienced in accelerator research and laser physics, HZDR researcher Michael Bussmann aims for understanding and controlling this new method of particle acceleration to make it available for patient treatment. "I'm coming from accelerator research and laser physics, and what my team and I have been looking at is how we make best use of the high-power lasers so they can replace accelerators for applications like treating cancerous tumors," Bussmann said.

"This is fundamental physics on the one hand, as the laser pulse rips apart all the matter found in a target, usually a very thin metal foil or a tiny sphere, separating the building blocks of atoms--negatively charged electrons and positively charged atomic nuclei, ions--from each other. This state of matter is called a plasma," Bussmann explained. "On the other hand, it has real applications as well. Simulations play a role that is unique, as experiments are still not very reproducible and we can't really diagnose what's happening in a few femtoseconds."

To observe these atomic-scale interactions happening many times per second, Bussmann's team is using the Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Bussmann explained that without access to leadership-class supercomputing resources, his team would not be able to run such complex simulations efficiently. "I need to simulate a huge volume of atoms over a very long time scale," Bussmann said. "The only way to do this comes through supercomputing, because the large volume needs a lot of memory, and the long time scales mean I need a lot of computational power, and that is where the GPUs come into play."

Titan uses traditional CPUs along with high-speed GPUs, or graphics processing units, to accelerate simulations. Bussmann's team does all of its calculations on Titan's GPUs at a rate 10-100 times faster than what is possible on CPU-only machines. "We no longer think of simulations in terms of CPU hours but rather frames per second," Bussmann said, describing the effect this speed-up has had on the team's research.

Particles to laser pulses

When using lasers to treat tumors, researchers must work within extremely small parameters. Typically, a team must aim a laser pulse at a target about the same size as the laser's focus -- no more than several micrometers long. Researchers then suspend a thin foil material; next, they use the laser to excite electrons connected to its atoms and drive the electrons away from the atoms. In the end, the strong separation of negatively charged electrons and now positively charged atoms, or ions, creates the forces that accelerate an ion beam toward the tumor.

Until recently, lasers that provided pulses with enough power to reach high ion energies were large and costly. Now, new technologies such as energy efficient laser diodes--which help increase the laser power -- have made these systems much more compact. Moreover, as more of the electrical energy used to operate these lasers can be converted into laser light power, researchers can now take several hundred laser shots per minute. This is a huge gain compared with several shots per day that were possible with the first laser systems.

With this gain, researchers can produce laser-accelerated ion beams at the rate needed for treating patients, reducing the potential treatment time to several minutes, thus saving costs and making the procedure easier for patients to endure. Still, researchers must perform extensive research not only to increase the energy of the ions to reach even deep seated tumors but also to really control the beam well enough to be used routinely in a medical treatment. Due to power demands, this technology is still in its infancy, and may require several years before it can be used in clinical applications.

Ions are ideal to target the cancerous tissue precisely. Unlike x-rays, ions do not release a lot of their energy into the tissue before coming to their final stop inside the tumor. There, they release a sudden burst of remaining energy, depositing the lethal dose of radiation directly into the tumor. Using ion beams allows medical professionals to calculate exactly where ions need to stop; with precise aiming, they can kill only the tumor cells and spare the vast majority of nearby healthy cells.

Successful student simulations

In August 2008, the team got an unlikely boost in its computational capabilities in the form of 17 year old high school student Heiko Burau. He won a German "Jugend forscht," or youth research award, allowing him to work with experts at a prestigious German research institution. This award allowed Burau to work with Bussmann's group, and the results were immediately noticeable-- within 6 weeks, the student GPU programmer had created the team's first GPU accelerated two-dimensional simulation. Burau is now starting his diploma thesis -- still as part of the HZDR team.

Burau's initial work has been picked up by an ever-growing team of young researchers. Axel Huebl, who joined the team a year after Burau, has pushed the code to make optimal use of all of Titan's GPUs, winning him time on Titan through DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program for his PhD research on laser-driven radiation therapy of cancer. The team has been developing its code, PIConGPU (particle in cell on graphics processing units) for 8 years, with undergraduate students doing much of the development work. Although some might see this as a sign of inexperience, Bussmann loves his team's youthful approach to problem solving.

"Our group is full of youth; otherwise we couldn't have done this research," Bussmann said. "One of the main reasons is because we weren't afraid of doing it. If you're sure things are going to get rocky down the road, maybe an older group wouldn't go there, but we said, 'let's just give it a try,' and it worked out."

For its work on PIConGPU, the Bussmann team was named a finalist for the 2013 Gordon Bell Prize -- one of the most prestigious honors in supercomputing.

In addition to student developers, OLCF veterans have also helped optimize PIConGPU for Titan. ORNL's Scientific Data Group, led by Scott Klasky, has helped the team drastically improve its ability to write out petabytes of data from the simulation and move it between Titan and other ORNL computing resources. To address I/O concerns, the team has been using the Adaptable I/O System, or ADIOS, developed by the Scientific Data Group. ADIOS has enabled a tenfold improvement for the team's I/O capabilities.

ORNL visualization expert David Pugmire is also collaborating with the team to develop a full-scale visualization of its data, which is a huge help. "We've done this kind of visualization on other projects, but that in itself is a huge effort. That's an area where we get help from Oak Ridge quite a lot, and we're impressed by how far this help goes," Bussmann said.

Because of its various collaborations and diligent work on Titan, the team was able to create some of the most realistic three-dimensional simulations of high power laser interactions with targets that are on the scale of the laser focus. With the calculation power available, the team could use targets at densities close to what is used in experiments.

Moreover, the team can include effects that happen on much longer time scales than the interaction of the laser pulse itself and that strongly influence the outcome of experiments. One of the main advances dealt with the creation of plasma caused by laser energy deposited into the target well before the main part of the laser pulse hits the target. This so-called preplasma can be much larger than the initial target, meaning the team has to simulate a much larger volume. These effects are present in experiments as well as in large-scale simulations, so the team is able to offer a much more detailed comparison between simulation and experiment.

Though the team has made major advances using Titan, there is plenty of room for improvement. Bussmann noted that further improving the atomic-level physics in his team's simulations would help improve accuracy. Ideally, the team could use a database to describe every atom with each atom's respective electronic configurations.

Describing billions of atomic level interactions in such small time scales, while also needing to reference the atomic database, is currently too computationally expensive. Summit, the OLCF's next-generation supercomputer, set to be delivered in 2018, will address some of these issues. "Summit would be an almost ideal system for this task," Bussmann said. "We could leverage the power of the CPU to go through the database quickly and bring the information we need to the GPUs using the very fast interconnects. Right now, we're basically relying on GPUs, but heterogeneous computing makes sense -- to let each part of the system do that part it's best at and let them work things out together."

IMAGE CAPTION: Proton density after laser impact on a spherical solid density target: irradiated by an ultra-short, high intensity laser (not in picture) the intense electro-magnetic field rips electrons apart from their ions and creates a plasma. By varying the target geometry and laser properties, scientists could find optimal regimes to accelerate high quality, directed ion beams that are currently studied in accompanying experiments. Image Credits: Axel Huebl, HZDR, David Pugmire, ORNL).
Up to now Alzheimer's disease has not been recognised as transmissible. Now researchers at the University of Zurich and the Medical University Vienna demonstrated Alzheimer-type pathology in brains of recipients of dura mater grafts who died later from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by progressive dementia and brain plaques consisting of the A protein. Conventional wisdom has it that AD is not a transmissible disease. However, plaques recovered from brains of AD patients were repeatedly found to induce further plaques when injected into the brains of laboratory mice, suggesting that transmission may actually occur.

Share on Pinterest Brown colored A plaques in the cerebral cortex in Alzheimer's disease

Image: University Hospital Zurich

Reporting in Swiss Medical Weekly, Karl Frontzek and colleagues (University of Zurich and Vienna Medical University) have investigated individuals who received brain grafts of dura mater during neurosurgery. The dura mater ("tough mother") is the leathery membrane covering the brain and spinal cord. Such grafts were necessary to allow the brain to heal after surgery. Tragically, some of the dura mater donors were infected with prions (the agents causing the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), and the grafting procedure transmitted the disease to the recipients.

Frontzek and colleagues now report the presence of A plaques in 5 of 7 brains of relatively young recipients of dura mater grafts who succumbed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. A plaques were detected much more frequently than in brains of people who did not receive any dura mater grafts. A plaques are highly unusual in young individuals and may have been caused by the dural grafts. This study adds to the evidence that the hallmarks of AD may indeed be transmissible under certain circumstances, and calls for heightened attention to an unexpected, potentially very serious problem of transplantation medicine.
Pharmacists who screened at-risk patients for chronic kidney disease (CKD) found previously unrecognized disease in 1 of every 6.4 patients tested, according to a study to be published in the January/February 2016 issue of the Canadian Pharmacists Journal.

"It was actually surprising for us," says the study's primary author, Dr. Yazid Al Hamarneh, a pharmacist and the scientific officer for Consultation and Research Services in Alberta's SPOR (Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research) SUPPORT Unit. "We knew that we would find unrecognized cases, but not that many."

The study is one of the first to provide concrete evidence of the benefits of allowing community pharmacists to order laboratory tests and see patients' test results.

CKD is a serious illness defined as reduced kidney function or signs of kidney damage lasting more than three months. It affects an estimated 1 in 10 Canadian adults, according to a 2013 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. But it is often missed because patients in the early stages may have no symptoms. Undiagnosed CKD can lead to life-threatening long-term effects, mainly cardiovascular disease -- heart disease and stroke. Without changes in lifestyle or medication, as required, patients may eventually develop kidney failure and need dialysis or a kidney transplant.

The study tested a new online decision-making tool, called the "CKD Pathway1", to help primary care providers decide which patients to test, identify cases, and give affected patients appropriate lifestyle advice, medication, or a referral to a nephrologist (kidney specialist).

"We worked closely with our end-users -- primary care physicians, pharmacists and nurses. It took about a year to develop the pathway and was launched one year ago," explains Dr. Brenda Hemmelgarn, a nephrologist involved in the pathway, who is also a co-author of the study.

In the study, pharmacists at 55 community pharmacies across Alberta identified patients at risk of CKD based on recent prescriptions and lab test results. Those who had risk factors outlined in the pathway were sent for blood and urine tests for kidney function, unless they had recent test results (in the previous 12 months) on file. The pharmacists used the online CKD pathway to analyze test results and determine whether patients had CKD.

Of 720 at-risk patients screened during the study, 39% had CKD. Of those with CKD, 60% had already received a diagnosis, but 40% (16% of the total screened) had no record or knowledge of a previous CKD diagnosis ("unrecognized" CKD).

The pharmacists' role in screening those at risk of CKD was possible only because pharmacists in Alberta have been able to order, interpret and view lab tests since 2012. (See Background: How are pharmacists' practices changing?)

Dr. Hemmelgarn comments, "Pharmacists as front-line care providers are in a unique position to identify high-risk patients for CKD, do targeted screening through blood and urine tests, and identify the presence of CKD. They have a unique position in Alberta to participate in care of patients with chronic disease at the community level." Kidney disease is usually managed in primary care, with nephrologists like Dr. Hemmelgarn seeing only the most severe cases, amounting to about 5% of CKD patients.

Dr. Al Hamarneh points out that, in Alberta, patients with certain chronic conditions can meet with their pharmacist to put together a comprehensive annual care plan, or receive a standard medication management assessment. (See Background: How are pharmacists' practices changing?) These occasions give pharmacists a chance to screen patients for CKD as well as other diseases and conditions.

Knowing a patient's CKD status is important for pharmacists, as certain medications are contraindicated for patients with kidney problems, Dr. Al Hamarneh says. Pharmacists may need to review or adjust medication for affected patients.

"When it comes to pharmacists providing such clinical services, it's not taking patients away from family physicians," emphasizes Dr. Al Hamarneh. "Pharmacists see patients with chronic diseases frequently. If the pharmacists are providing those clinical services, they can bring those patients back to their physicians." In the case of CKD, pharmacists can encourage patients with CKD to visit their family physician, or to get a physician if they don't have one. "It's working collaboratively to get the best results for the patient."

What is CKD?

Kidney disease is defined as reduced kidney function, measured by the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), which can be determined by a blood test. An alternative measure is a marker of kidney damage called albumin-to-creatinine ratio (ACR), which is determined by a urine test.

Kidney disease is considered chronic (CKD) if it lasts for 3 months or more. In this study, eGFR and ACR tests were taken 3 months apart to determine whether the eGFR and ACR levels had improved.

There are many causes of CKD, but the two most common are diabetes and high blood pressure. Inherited conditions can cause CKD, as can acute infections and other urinary tract problems that develop. A recent study estimates that 1 in 10 adult Canadians has CKD.

The most common outcomes of CKD are cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) as well as severe kidney failure.

In this study, patients were included if they had:

diabetes,

established vascular disease,

a high risk score for cardiovascular disease, or

a history of CKD,

plus at least one risk factor:

high blood pressure,

high LDL cholesterol,

high glycated hemoglobin (a sign of diabetes), or

current smoking.

What is the CKD Pathway?

The impetus for the CKD Pathway was new international clinical practice guidelines for CKD management released in 2012. The pathway was developed by a group called the Interdisciplinary Chronic Disease Collaboration in Alberta, inspired by the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which develops clinical pathways that health care professionals can use to make decisions about patient care. The pathway incorporates other Canadian and international guidelines as well, to create a harmonized approach that can be used across Canada. It is supported and endorsed by Alberta Health Services, the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta.

The online tool, available at ckdpathway.ca, is designed for use by primary care physicians, pharmacists and nurses. Step-by-step decision guides help these primary care providers to diagnose CKD from test results, manage the condition through lifestyle changes and, if needed, prescribe medication, as well as refer the patient to a kidney specialist (nephrologist) if there are warning signs of serious disease.

The pathway is now in use in Alberta, where primary care providers have been encouraged to use it through a widespread dissemination strategy involving faxed messages, social media, conference presentations, brochures, and the web site.

How are pharmacists' practices changing?

In recent years, provincial and territorial laws and regulations that set out what pharmacists are permitted to do have been updated. As a result, pharmacists in many provinces and territories can perform some services that were previously restricted to physicians and, in some cases, nurses.

In this study, pharmacists ordered laboratory (blood and urine) tests for patients. They also checked past and current test results to find signs of CKD or risk factors for the disease. Pharmacists currently have these capabilities in Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec and Nova Scotia. As well, they will soon be able to order tests in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Pharmacists have added many other services to their repertoire:

Renewing or extending prescriptions (all provinces plus Northwest Territories)

Changing drug dosages or formulations (all provinces)

Making therapeutic substitutions (all provinces except Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec)

Prescribing for minor ailments (all provinces except British Columbia and Ontario)

Initiating prescription drug therapy, either independently (pharmacists in Alberta with additional prescribing authorization) or in a collaborative practice setting (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia)

Administering drugs or vaccines by injection (all provinces except Quebec. Limitations do apply and may differ between jurisdictions)

In Alberta, where this study was conducted, pharmacists have had a widely expanded scope of practice since 2007. For patients with multiple chronic conditions such as diabetes or asthma, or one chronic condition and at least one risk factor such as smoking, obesity or addiction, pharmacists can conduct comprehensive annual care plans that include an assessment, medication history, resolution of drug-related problems and a follow-up and monitoring plan. For patients with one chronic condition who take at least four medications, a standard medication management assessment can be conducted.

With additional authorization obtained through the Alberta College of Pharmacists, a pharmacist in Alberta can assess patients and initiate needed prescription drug therapy for any disease or condition, not solely minor ailments as in some other provinces.

For more information about pharmacists' scope of practice across Canada, see http://www.pharmacists.ca/index.cfm/pharmacy-in-canada/scope-of-practice-canada/


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Men with a high DNA fragmentation index (DFI) also have more chromosomal breaks, which is linked to lower fertility. The couples who participated in the study underwent assisted reproduction, either through the standard method in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or the more advanced - ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection).In standard IVF the harvested egg is mixed with a large number of sperms in a test tube. The goal is that the fertilisation will succeed without further measures or assistance. ICSI involves selecting a single viable sperm cell that is then injected into the egg through a needle."In couples where the man had many chromosomal breaks, their best chance of becoming pregnant was to use ICSI rather than IVF. The DFI analysis thereby makes it possible to personalise treatment and increase the chances of having children", says Krzysztof Oleszczuk, PhD student at Lund University and senior consultant at Skane University Hospital."We hope that these results will mean that involuntarily childless couples are offered the most effective treatment right away. Undergoing unsuccessful assisted reproduction can be very stressful - both physically and mentally - especially if done repeatedly", explains Aleksander Giwercman, professor at Lund University and consultant at Skane University Hospital.To confirm these results, a follow-up multicentre study is currently underway, in which three hospitals in the greater Copenhagen area will participate within the scope of the EU funded research collaboration in the Oresund region on fertility - ReproUnion. However, Aleksander Giwercman is looking forward to immediately transferring this new knowledge into practice at the Reproductive Medicine Centre at Skane University Hospital.For a long time, the clinic has emphasised the importance of conducting a thorough analysis, both in terms of research and treatment, of women and men in couples that are involuntarily childless:"Traditionally the main focus has been on the woman in cases where couples have difficulties to conceive. But our research and experience show that it is important to thoroughly study both partners", says Aleksander Giwercman. The study is published in the medical journalSource: Eurekalert
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(1) to assess the accuracy of TB tests in diagnosing a highly contagious and world-wide public health scourge in patients who are doubly at risk and(2) to find a method to identify which women carrying latent TB infection are most likely to develop active TB. In latent TB the individual is infected but does not show any symptoms.Some individuals with latent TB go on to develop active TB --the form of the disease that causes symptoms in the carrier and transmission to others. While a healthy, functioning immune system can keep the infection in check, pregnancy and HIV infection, which compromise the immune system, increase the chances of developing active TB. Therefore, there is a critical need to improve diagnosis."The World Health Organization and many governments endorse the TST because it is a cheap and ubiquitous test," said lead study author Jyoti Mathad, MD, MSc, Instructor of Medicine in the Center for Global Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. "However, our over-reliance on this single test means that we are failing to detect and treat a potentially life-threatening infection in tens of millions of high-risk women. We found that QGIT positivity was almost three times higher than the more widely used TST at every time point tested," noted the authors.Dr. Mathad and her colleagues enrolled 252 women who were in their second or third trimester and receiving care at a public teaching hospital in India. The women received TB testing at enrollment during pregnancy or at delivery. An additional 39 women participated in a longitudinal study to assess how the TB tests were affected by changes in different stages of pregnancy. They were tested at delivery and three months postpartum. The researchers also collected blood samples to assess for levels of infection-fighting proteins."Our blood data suggests that pregnant women produce lower levels of the immune chemicals that many TB diagnostics look for. This finding has implications beyond diagnostics," said Dr. Mathad. "For example, not all pregnant women lose immune control of TB infection. But, currently we have no way of predicting which women are most likely to get sick from the disease. Our findings about these immune chemicals provide a starting point for developing a test that will tell us who in this already high-risk population is at greatest risk of disease and death and is in most need of treatment." She added that this insight about indicators of risk would also benefit other high-risk groups such as the elderly, young children and all people who are HIV positive.In terms of the broader significance of their findings, the researchers would welcome a greater effort to include pregnant women in future medical studies. "Pregnant women have been excluded from all 40 trials of new TB drugs that are ongoing today," said Dr. Mathad. "Some of the caution is justified, but, oftentimes, it is simply the path of least resistance. This habit - and habit is all that it is in many cases- exacts a toll on women worldwide. Pregnant women often get stuck taking longer regimens of outdated drugs due to a lack of research."Source: Eurekalert
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Two people returning from Haiti and Colombia to Switzerland were also diagnosed with the virus, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health said. Neither was pregnant and neither required hospital care, the statement said.A woman in the Swedish capital Stockholm was diagnosed with the virus in July 2015, the Swedish Public Health Agency confirmed Wednesday 27 January 2016."The symptoms were treated and the woman recovered," said Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of microbiology at the health agency.There is no vaccine or specific treatment for Zika, a flu-like disease with a rash that goes unnoticed in 70 to 80 percent of cases. Most patients treat the symptoms simply with painkillers and other medication.Britain has reported five cases in travelers returning from South America since last year while the Netherlands has confirmed 10 cases, also in people returning from the region.The virus was first reported in Africa, Asia and the Pacific before leaping to the Americas, where it has been linked to a jump in the number of babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, particularly in Brazil.The number of cases of the deformity in Brazil surged from 163 per year on average to 3,893 after the Zika outbreak began last year. Forty-nine of the babies have died.Some 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries have been swept up in the outbreak which has extended as far north as Mexico.Travelers have also brought it back to the US states of Florida, Hawaii and New York.The virus is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also carries dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.So far there has been no known cases of local transmission in the US or Europe.Source: AFP
Companies in the Russian defense industry are beginning 2016 with optimism: The contracts in their portfolio exceed $50 billion, and the military campaign in Syria has been excellent advertising for Russian armaments.

In an article published last week in Kommersant-Dengi magazine, writer Ivan Safronov analyzed the internal (economic) and external factors which will impact armament exports in the new year. He also predicted which countries will buy arms from Russia in 2016, and in which quantities.

Following are excerpts from Safronov's article:[1]



S-500 missile (Source: Indiandefense.com); Sukhoi SU-27SKM (Source: Airliners.net)

Adopting To The New Economic And Political Realities

"...According to the Federal Authority on Military Technical Cooperation (MTC),[2] the export of Russian weapons has increased dramatically during the last 11 years, from $5 billion to $11.3 billion. However, even though Russia has arms contracts with some 60 countries, most of the revenue comes from five or six major players. Although the sales figures for 2015 has not been officially announced, we know that as of December 1, $11.6 billion worth of military equipment was exported. Existing contracts for future military sales total $57 billion.

"According to Kommersant-Dengi's source in the MTC, Russian defense enterprises in 2015 had to cope with grossly unfair competitive practices from the U.S. and NATO, as well as with 'politically motivated sanctions.' Simultaneously, it was the first time Russia had had to deal with a dramatically deteriorating economic reality. MTC's contact also notes that Moscow had previously been able to provide significant loans to its customers. For example, in 2005-2007, Venezuela was given a $2 billion loan to help pay for $4 billion in contracts. Currently, it has become extremely difficult to get state or bank loans for potential customers. On the other hand, the devaluation of the ruble against the U.S. dollar and the euro was beneficial for exporters, and this led to an increase in total revenue.... Russia is now going to compete in certain markets by providing additional services (like post-sale warranties) as well as offering weapon systems which are customized for the specific needs of the client.

"The Russian Push Into Saudi Arabia

"Cooperation in the field of military technology has existed for many years. The cooperation between Russia and India is on a special level since two-thirds of all Russian arms contracts every year are with the Indian military... Negotiations with India on a wide spectrum of new contracts will be continuing this year. In particular, there are a number of significant deals on the table, including five divisions of the newest C-400 surface-to-air missile system, two diesel-electric submarines... and 48 military transport helicopters. There are also several more major projects being discussed. These include India's lease of its second nuclear submarine in the Akula ('Shark') class (Project 971), and purchase of the SU-30MKI multi-functional fighter aircraft. Both sides are also discussing the joint development of the fifth generation FGFA aircraft.

"Military cooperation with Algeria will also doubtlessly continue. This began in 2000, when then-president 'Abd Al-'Aziz Bouteflika actively sought out Russian arms and signed contracts worth not less than $6 billion... According to the Russian Ministry of Defense officer, the performance of the SU-34 fighter aircraft, demonstrated during the Syria campaign, had a significant impact on the Algerian decision to continue military cooperation with Russia. 'Interest in Russia's military production is growing in geometrically,' says Vladimir Kozhin, advisor to President Vladimir Putin on MTC matters. He added that even countries which have not cooperated with Russia for decades are now interested in Russian arms.

"Regarding cooperation with Iran, there are hopeful expectations. The disagreement surrounding the contract to deliver five S-300PMU-1 surface-to-air missile systems has been resolved... In general, according to the Kommersant source in the Ministry of Defense, the potential for arm sales to Iran is quite high. After the lifting of the sanctions on Iran, the sale of arms is expected to increase dramatically. Combat aircraft, air defense systems, and naval systems are currently in high demand, as Iran takes steps to secure its borders.

"According to the top managers of Russian military industries, the current conflicts in the Middle East will cause a dramatic increase in demand for Russian products. Saudi Arabia has always based its military cooperation on the U.S. and NATO. However, recently the Saudis have shown interest in Russian missile boats, coast guard ships, and mid-distance amphibious landing craft... According to Kommersant-Dengi sources, Russia is going to present a $10 billion proposal to Saudi King Salman on his forthcoming visit to Moscow. The draft contract will include aviation equipment, several types of the air defense systems, and other military hardware.

"In 2016, the delivery of components for the Antey-2500[3] system to Egypt (a $3.5 billion contract) will be completed, and a new $2 billion contract for 46 MIG-46 fighter aircraft will be signed. In 2014, China was the first country to acquire four divisions of the C-400 surface-to-air missile system (worth $1.9 billion), and in 2015 another contract was signed for the supply of 24 fighter aircraft, worth $2 billion. (OC)

"According to a Kommersant-Dengi source close to the Rosoboronexport,[4] new Russian MTC initiatives will be focused mostly on the Asia Pacific region (Indonesia and Malaysia), as well as on solvent African countries (Angola and Uganda). According to another magazine's high-ranking government source, the volume of military exports in 2016 will not be less than $14-15 billion, even if some negotiations fail and in spite of external and internal negative factors."
Indirect talks between the Syrian regime and Syrian opposition are scheduled to commence in Geneva on January 29, 2016. Ahead of these talks, the recently established High Negotiations Committee (HNC),[1] which is charged with nominating the opposition's delegation to the talks and steering the talks on behalf of the opposition, has been heavily pressured to drop its preconditions for beginning the talks, such as ceasing the bombardment of civilians and lifting the siege from areas in Syria. The HNC is also under pressure to comply with Russian demands to change the makeup of the opposition delegation and allow the participation of oppositionists who are close to Russia and lenient in their positions vis-a-vis the Syrian regime, such as Qadri Jamil and Haytham Manna'.

Most of the pressure on the HNC actually came from the U.S. - which had been expected to support the Syrian opposition and to counterbalance Russia's relentless backing of the Syrian regime. In January 23, 2016, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met in Riyadh with representatives of the HNC and of the opposition delegation. According to HNC members and according to many reports in the Arab media, at the meeting Kerry strongly pressured on the opposition to accept Russian dictates. HNC members said that Kerry, expressing "a scary retreat in the U.S. position," had threatened that if they did not comply with Russian dictates they would lose the support of their allies; he also clarified that their preconditions for the talks - such as sending in humanitarian aid and lifting the siege from Syrian cities - would be discussed in the talks themselves. According to HNC members, Kerry told them that Assad had the right to run in the future Syrian elections, that UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura was entitled to intervene in the makeup of the opposition delegation, and that the talks would lead to the establishing of a national unity government. This contravenes the 2012 Geneva I Communique[2] and effectively means leaving the Syrian regime in power.

Recent statements by HNC members, who spoke of a "positive atmosphere," indicate that, in spite of the HNC's sharp criticism of the retreat in the U.S. position, it will likely be compelled to accept the American dictates and allow the participation of additional opposition elements in the talks. Attending the talks will mean accepting the suggested agenda and dropping the precondition of stopping the bombardment of the civilian population and dispatching humanitarian aid.

This document reviews reports on pressures exerted by Kerry on the Syrian opposition and on the opposition's responses to this.



U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with High Negotiations Committee head Riad Hijab (image: Zamanalwsl.net, January 26, 2016)

HNC Spokesman: A 'Scary Retreat' In U.S. Position Has Brought It Closer Than Ever To Russia's, Iran's Positions

The spokesman of the HNC, Monzer Makhous, said after the January 23 meeting with Kerry that "there has been a scary retreat in the American position," and added: "Kerry told us today: You must go to Geneva on the terms that have been presented to you, otherwise you will lose the support of your friends and allies." According to Makhous, Kerry and Staffan de Mistura had said even earlier that they supported forming a national unity government, and had instructed the HNC not to speak of Assad's removal or establishing a transitional governing body with full powers. The meaning of this, said Makhous, is that they support Iran's plan and have completely renounced the Geneva I Communique.[3] He added: "The American perception has grown closer to the Iranian-Syrian-Russian position that speaks of forming a national unity government."[4] He noted, however, that the "European friends" took a completely different stance and had had emphasized that "Kerry's statements hold only for the U.S."[5]

Another HNC spokesman, Riyadh Na'san Agha, said in a similar vein: "Kerry told us that Assad was entitled to participate in the elections, and that if we could, we would stop him from winning... Kerry's statements are illogical..." Agha described the American role as "destructive."

An unnamed official in the Syrian opposition told the London-based daily Al-'Arabi Al-Jadid that Kerry's meeting with the HNC representatives was "tragic and very bad," and added: "Kerry relayed clear messages that [originate with the] Russians and Iranians, and threatened that the opposition must obey them... He said that Geneva III would be [a round of] talks, rather than negotiations, and that they would lead to the establishment of a national unity government rather than a transitional governing body... Kerry told the HNC delegation that UN envoy de Mistura was entitled to intervene in the makeup of the opposition delegation and to appoint advisors [to the delegation], and that the confidence-building steps that the opposition was demanding ahead of the Geneva convention, such as releasing prisoners, lifting the siege from Syrian cities, ceasing the bombardment of civilians, and dispatching humanitarian aid, etc., would be part of the Geneva talks [themselves]... Kerry stressed in the meeting that Bashar Al-Assad had a right to run in the future presidential elections... [He] asked the HNC to go to Geneva, otherwise it would lose its allies, and [only] it would be responsible for this... Kerry added that his country would only intervene in Syria to fight terrorism, not for any other purpose."[6]

Haytham Al-Maleh, chair of the legal committee of the Syrian National Coalition, which is represented in the HNC, described Kerry as "a distorted copy of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov."[7]

Muhammad 'Aloush: American Pressure Will Meet With A Firm Response

HNC officials clarified that they rejected the U.S. dictates. Chief opposition negotiator Muahmmad 'Aloush said that Kerry had come to pressure the HNC to give up its humanitarian preconditions and agree to negotiate about them instead, and warned that "the American pressure will meet with a firm response."[8]

HNC spokesman Riyadh Na'san clarified: "The opposition has made numerous and painful concessions. We began with a slogan [calling for] Assad's ouster, and [now] we have reached the point of [agreeing to] let him remain in power for a limited period in order to lay the ground for a political resolution... The Riyadh delegation will not agree to the presence of another [opposition] delegation at the talks, because it is difficult to form a body with two heads... Our purpose in going to Geneva is not to enter into a broad government with the Assad regime but [to launch a phase of] political transition."[9]

Columnist On Opposition Website: Going To Geneva On Kerry's Terms Is Suicide

In response to Kerry's reported statements at the meeting with the opposition representatives, Ghassan Yasin, a columnist on the opposition website Orient News, wrote that going to Geneva on the terms dictated by Kerry would be suicide for the opposition. He said: "Kerry wants the delegation to go to Geneva when not a single one of the confidence-building steps has been implemented and without any guarantees. Worse, he wants them to go there in order to form a government together with Assad's regime [that used] chemical [weapons] and then hold presidential elections in which Assad will run! The Secretary of State did not forget to threaten the opposition that, if it decides to boycott the Geneva talks, [the Americans] will stop supporting it.

"Agreeing to go to Geneva on Kerry's terms is suicide. The opposition cannot go [there] in the present circumstances and in compliance with the American and Russian wishes. True, the opposition's options are limited and its room for maneuvering is narrow, but it can nevertheless leverage the disagreements between the Americans and the Europeans, and especially the French, who do not accept the American proposal... That is the only way to pressure the Americans to stop their dictates."

Yasin added: "Russia is 'negotiating' by means of force on the battlefield, and the opposition cannot make achievements at the negotiation table without defeating the Russians [on the ground], even if only on some fronts. Force can only be answered with force."[10]

Endnotes:
Now you don't have to travel to have a holiday romance. Dating apps have made it super easy to meet foreigners passing through the city. And once the expat's gone back, he becomes an ex.

After uninstalling and then reinstalling the dating/hookup/weird-relationship-limbo app Tinder, a friend we'll call P found herself desultorily swiping through its offerings one weekday evening. She 'matched' with a Colaba banker who opened with a (not good) knock-knock joke, and then a Mexican guy, pictured lying around on a beach next to a black Lab. The Cancun resident was almost painfully good-looking and just the right amount of 'artsy'. She began talking.

 Thinkstock/Getty Images

He had arrived in Mumbai for a three-month-long backpacking trip across the country. The conversation moved rapidly from Tinder to Whatsapp, and the duo kept in touch through the entire duration of his travels. Indo-Mexican stereotypes were discussed, recommendations sent ('Dharamsala's way overrated, man. Stay in McLeod.' 'The only way to have tequila is without the stupid salt, like Mexicans do, okay?') and previous travel diaries shared. With the backpacking trip done, Manuel returned to base camp for a few days and the two met for drinks, dinners, and very many auto-rickshaw kisses. A teary but final airport goodbye followed.

Barely a week after he got to sunny Cancun, however, the Mexican got back in touch. For the past two months, my friend and he have been writing letters  yes, actual letters-  to each other. They discuss their lives, their pets and her upcoming trip to Mexico later this year. "It might or probably might not work out but we thought, hey, let's give it a shot. How often does this happen?" she said.

The transcontinental snail-mailing aside, fairly often. Since dating apps became popular in India, it's become extremely easy to date expats living or travelling here, for women at least. There's Daniel from Boston, eight kilometres away, grinning from a ski-slope; Ohio resident Andy, at five kilometres away, who's straddling a coconut tree for some reason, and Davide from Siena  virtually my neighbour at two kilometers  who, for once, is not the ugliest chap in the group photo he has posted.

 Thinkstock/Getty Images

"The thing with firangs is that they're more likely to initiate conversation and because they're only in town for a few days, agree to meet right off the bat," says K, who's gone out with a Spaniard from Madrid and a British expat living in Hong Kong. "With the English guy, for instance, we started chatting at night, and the next night we had met for a drink. They don't waste time chatting for ages like Indian guys do."

Another plus for K is the fact that there's always more than enough to talk about. "You ask a ton of questions about each other's countries. That's always a great conversation starter," she says. "No awkward silences."

I decide to give it a shot, picking Davide to practise my rusty Italian on. Though slightly mystified, he very nicely agrees. Before I can start picturing my future Tuscan villa however, the conversation devolves. "Do Indian girls get drunk."

"Um, yes."

"On alcohol?"

"Yes."

"You want to do weed?"

"Not really, no."

"I have some, want to see a pic on Whatsapp?"

I move on to Matthieu, who is not a troglodyte, has been in India for a friend's wedding, and flies out in a couple of days. Sigh.

He's had a pretty productive trip though. A girl he matched with on Tinder accompanied him to the Elephanta Caves. The adrenaline rush from the thieving monkeys here must have clearly been potent because they hooked up the same night. I tell him I'm 'doing research' for a piece and he's tickled. "You should explain why you guys can't kiss on the street but it's fine to do it in a taxi!" His Indian date's sudden ardour in the cab ride home was mildly panic-inducing. "I didn't know what was allowed. I thought the driver would throw me out in the middle of the road!"

It had started out as a hook-up for S too, when she swiped right on the documentary filmmaker from Canada. "I was on this rebound thing and he was pretty cute," she says. The added incentive was that she wouldn't have to run into him accidentally after the fling had ended. "He'd be far, far away soon." Over ten days, the duo wandered around old Bombay neighbourhoods, tucked into keema pao at Irani joints and marvelled at the gorgeous blue Knesset Eliyahoo synagogue. Though they keep in touch through the occasional Facebook message, S definitely isn't planning any future trips to Canada. Unlike my optimistic Mexico-bound friend, she says it just isn't realistic. "Yeah, we had the most perfect ten days together when he was in India. But they were only perfect because we both knew that was it!"
A US court has asked popular Indian-American yoga guru Bikram Choudhury to pay $9,24,500 as compensatory damages to his former lawyer Minakshi Jafa-Bodden in the ongoing sexual harassment case against him.

Jafa-Modden had earlier accused Choudhury, who is famous for founding Bikram Yoga, of firing her after she began probing claims from other women who claimed they had been abused by Choudhury. She had also claimed that Choudhury had persuaded her to leave India and come work for him in 2011.

During testimony, Choudhury called the allegations against him as lies and said that Jafa- Modden was asked to leave as she did not have a valid license to practice law. However, the jury unanimously agreed that Choudhury acted out of malice and asked him to pay close to a million dollars.

Jafa Moddens lawsuit is one of at least six other cases against Choudhury alleging sexual assault or harassment. Choudhury moved to California in 1971 and found fame and success with Bikram Yoga that consists of practicing yoga moves in a heated room.
Danish Parliament, Folketing, on 26 January 2016 voted on a proposal to confiscate asylum seekers' personal possessions in order to pay their upkeep.

The minority Liberal Party government's bill was adopted by 81 votes to 27, with the support of the opposition Social Democrats and the anti-immigration Danish People's Party (DPP). One politician abstained and 70 others were absent.

The policy says that the police will be able to seize valuables worth more than 1340 euros (10000 kroner or 1000 Pound) from refugees to cover housing and food costs. MPs also approved plans to delay family reunions for asylum seekers.





The government said that the policy brings refugees in line with unemployed Danes, who also face having to sell assets above a certain level to claim benefits. Denmark received more than 21 thousands asylum seekers in 2015.

Reactions on the decision

 A spokesman for UN chief Ban Ki-moon criticised the decision, saying refugees deserved compassion.

 The bill has been widely criticised by human rights groups.

 The proposed policy was condemned by liberal and left-wing EU parliamentarians by saying that the policy aims at delaying the family reunification of the migrants for up to three year.

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The winters this time are biting cold, arent they? Well, lets put things into perspective here. 30 kilometres northwest of Tomtor on the Kolyma Highway in Russia along the Indigirka River, lies a small village called Oymyakon  the coldest village on earth. It has the lowest recorded temperature ofr any habitable place on earth. Okay, lets just say, as you read this comfortably tucked inside your blanket, still shivering in a mere 10 degree Celsius temperature, Oymyakon is at  50. Yes, you heard that right. Thats 60 degrees colder. And thats not even the coldest. Oymyakon once recorded a brain freezing temperature of -72 degree Celsius!

Photographer Amos Chapple visited the place and brought back these spectacular photographs that will make you shudder! Heres what a general store looks like in Oymyakon  in the middle of nowhere!

 Amos Chapple

Amos Chapple recalled how his thumb almost froze while taking this photograph at dusk.

 Amos Chapple

The cars have to be kept running all day so they dont get frozen!

 Amos Chapple

Heres what a petrol station looks like.

 Amos Chapple

A toilet on the way from Oymyakon to Yakutsk.

 Amos Chapple

Can you imagine walking over this frozen bridge?

 Amos Chapple

Theres no vegetation there. So, the only things shops sell is reindeer and horse meat! Clearly not a place for vegetarians.

 Amos Chapple

No wonder the dog looks angry.

 Amos Chapple

The warmer air from inside the house escapes out and freezes in the form of puffs.

 Amos Chapple

Dont freak out. Theyre not whitewalkers, just statues.

 Amos Chapple

A local makes her way into the Preobrazhensky Cathedral. Alive.

 Amos Chapple

And you thought your feet were cold?

 Amos Chapple

About 500 people live here.

 Amos Chapple

Cows walk over a patch of thermal water in the freezing temperatures.

 Amos Chapple

Amos Chapple revealed how he had to hold his breath while taking a shot, for it would freeze and swirl around like cigar smoke.

 Amos Chapple

Thank God for this thermal water spring  the only thing thats not frozen here.

 Amos Chapple

This road is called The Road Of Bones and we really dont wanna know why.

 Amos Chapple

Heres another picture from the road to hell.

 Amos Chapple

The ground cant be dug easily here. It has to be thawed using hot coals and digging a grave could take up to three days!

 Amos Chapple

A young woman poses for a photograph at bus station in Yakutsk.

 Amos Chapple

This just changed the whole meaning of the word cold.
For more than 15 years, the narrow alleys of the Kasturba Nagar slum in Nagpur were ruled by a local thug named Akku Yadav. He was a man from the higher caste, who looted, killed and raped people in this Dalit-dominated slum region. Barging into homes, demanding money, shouting threats and abuse and assaulting women on daily basis was the order of the day. They reported these incidents but only to get laughed at and abused by the hands of the police.

Residents claimed that he had killed at least (or probably more than) three neighbors and dumped their bodies on the nearest railway tracks. They also claimed that there was at least one rape victim in every other house in the slum, girls as young as 12 were reportedly dragged outside and gang-raped by his henchmen. Like any other thug who thinks he has the world under his control, Akku Yadav, too, used to ascertain his dominance and control the male members of the family by assaulting their women.

 telegraph

Rape even today is a huge taboo in India but several of Akku Yadavs victims reported the crime to the police dozens of time, each time he was arrested and granted bail. Police were also in cahoots with the criminal. They used to tell the women to drop the complaint because he would eventually come after them. In fact, according to the people there, one woman went to the police station to report that she had been gang-raped by Yadav and his men, and the police raped her too. Akku used to bribe police and feed their mouths, and they, in turn, used to protect them. All of this was a big, vicious circle.

 mnsfoundation

All of this changed when Usha Narayne, now 35, a hotel management graduate stood up and reported the incident when Akku and his gang of goons attacked her next-door neighbor. She came from a Dalit family too, but all her siblings and her parents were educated. In a neighborhood that was plagued by illiteracy, this was a phenomenal achievementone of the reasons why these goons never tormented her family.

The neighbors had got their leader. Seeing someone standing up for themselves against these criminals gave them courage. Soon a mob gathered and burned down Akku Yadavs househe became so scared, he turned himself to the police for protection. His bail hearing was set two weeks after on the day of August 13, 2004 but soon the word got out that he would be eventually free. 200 determined women, armed with kitchen knives and chilli powder, gathered and marched from the slum to the courthouse. Exactly at 3pm, after spotting Akku Yadav being accosted by a constable, these women lynched him to death. Chilli powder was thrown in his face and stones were hurled. The constable, seeing the mob of scorned and incensed victims, fled in fear. As Akku fought for his life, one of the women hacked off his penis with the kitchen knife. 70 stab wounds were found on his body, the body that was found lying on the clear white marble flooring of the Nagpur district courtthe place where justice is supposed to be delivered!

 Jagaran

The police arrested a handful of women, including Usha, for the murder. But Usha could prove that she was not in the courtroom that day. And then every woman living in the slum claimed responsibility for the murder. They said to the police that no one person can take the blame; they told them if they want to make any arrests, they would have to arrest us all.

As of today, all the accused women had been let off, including Usha, who has unintentionally become the face of Akku Yadavs lynching. She has begun her new life as a social activist and is helping the slum dwellers of Nagpur make food and clothing that they can sell together to feed their stomach.

I dont condone vigilante justice. Taking law into your own hands can never be the answer, but sometimes it is the only solution!

H/t The Guardian
RBI governor Raghuram Rajan is known for calling a spade a spade. This time he has lashed out at the stakeholders and promoters of defaulting companies who splurge away in their personal lives despite owing crores to banks.

 Reuters

"If you flaunt your birthday bashes even while owing the system a lot of money, it does seem to suggest to the public that you don't care. I think that is the wrong message to send [] If you are in trouble, you should be cutting down your expenses, he said.

Considering that Mr. Vijay Mallya had thrown an extravagant bash in Goa for his 60th birthday recently, there was no doubt who the remark was directed at. He currently owes around Rs 7,500 crore to banks.

 thetimes (dot) co (dot) uk

It is no secret that the Kingfisher tycoon is considered as the Richard Branson of India. Mallyas lavish lifestyle has been well in the news. Fond of throwing opulent parties, Mr Mallya had invited pop sensation Enrique Iglesias for his birthday bash in December 2015. A decade ago, it was Lionel Richie.

Well, he must have gotten away with his ways so far, but when you owe crores to banks and you have Raghuram Rajan as the governor, theres no getting away easily.

H/t  Business Insider
        : BJP     - TRS         
With the greatest respect, the Greek state today honors, as it does every year, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the memory of the millions of innocent victims of the Nazi Holocaust.



We feel particular abhorrence at the memory of the mass extermination of the Jewish population by the Hitler regime, which dealt an extremely painful blow to the community of Greek Jews.



The Greek state is making every effort to keep the memory of these events alive and pass them on to younger generations. At the same time, it is taking initiatives to redress historical injustices perpetrated against the Greek Jewish community and to institutionally establish respect for the memory of the Holocaust.



Greece supports and participates actively in all of the international initiatives for respect of Holocaust remembrance and to fight anti-Semitism and every other form of intolerance, so that humankind may NEVER AGAIN experience such atrocities.
The Foreign Ministrys Secretary General for International Economic Relations, Giorgos Tsipras, visited Tirana on 26 January 2016, for bilateral meetings with the Albanian Minister of Energy and Industry, Damjan Gjiknuri, and the Minister of Economic Development, Tourism, Trade and Entrepreneurship, Arben Ahmetaj.



With the Energy and Industry Minister he discussed the prospects for broader energy cooperation on a regional level, with special reference to progress in the construction of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). At the meeting with the Economic Development Minister, there was affirmation of the will of the Albanian authorities to assist towards improving of the climate for Greek enterprises and resolving their problems, while mention was made of the positive prospects opening up for the Greek economy, which is expected to return to positive growth rates following seven years of crisis, bolstering the restoration of the trust of the international investment community.



Mr. G. Tsipras was also a keynote speaker at a Greek Embassy event for the presentation of the Greek-Albanian e-Business Guide for 2015-2016, which was edited by the Embassys Economic and Commercial Affairs office. The event was attended by a large number of representatives of the local Greek business community and was addressed by Albanian Deputy Prime Minister Niko Peleshi, who stressed the importance of Greek investments for the Albanian economy.
A jury in South Carolina found Dennis Paulsen guilty Monday in one of the largest fraudulent disability compensation claims for a single person in the history of the Department of Veterans Affairs, U.S. Attorney Bill Nettles said. An attorney for Paulsen did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Paulsen, 45, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and discharged from the Navy in the early 1990s, according to the federal government. Unsatisfied with his monthly benefit from the VA, prosecutors said Paulsen began claiming more severe disabilities, telling government officials that he couldn't use his hands or feet. He said he couldn't leave his home, required daily medical care and had to use a wheelchair.

Simultaneously, according to the government, Paulsen convinced officials at the Social Security Administration that he was entitled to disability benefits from that agency.

But Paulsen continued to lead an active lifestyle, playing sports, riding a jet ski and motorcycle and working out at a gym, the government said. When he moved from Virginia to Blythewood, South Carolina, Paulsen bought a home that was not wheelchair-accessible and even stopped going to specialists for his multiple sclerosis.

In 2014, a "concerned citizen" called the Veterans Administration, reporting that Paulsen wasn't as impaired as he appeared, the U.S. attorney said in a news release.

Using a combination of surveillance video, undercover agents and family photographs provided by Paulsen's now-ex-wife, the government built a case against him, noting that he even participated in a Marine Mud Run, a strenuous, obstacle-laden foot race. At his seven-day trial, several doctors testified on behalf of Paulsen, who testified in a wheelchair.

Paulsen faces up to 20 years in prison and half a million dollars in fines when he's sentenced later, along with forfeiture of the more than $1.5 million he received.
The Holland Sentinel reports that the staff at Huisman Family Dentistry in Ottawa County's Holland Township plans to ask patients if they would like to submit a cheek swab to register as a potential bone marrow donor in the national registry.

Patient care coordinator Linda Cooper, who lost a young child to leukemia 21 years ago, started the effort. She tells the newspaper that other workers in the dentist's office also have relatives who have been affected by cancer.

Huisman Family Dentistry is working with the organization Delete Blood Cancer DKMS to offer the registration to patients and the community.
The Goose Creek Fire Department was called to the 6400 block of Lakeview Dr. for a house fire reported at Tuesday at 9:13 a.m.

Goose Creek Fire Chief Bob Reeves said said the residents were home at the time and were able to get out of the house.

The neighbor ran over to my house since I live next door and called 911 while he was running over, said Reeves. I wasnt there, but my wife came over to try and get a hose out to do something with it, but the hose was froze because it is winter time.

Reeves said he was there before his guys with a tanker, but didnt have the gear to go inside.

There was smoke coming from the (air conditioning) side of the house and when we opened up the door, the smoke was all the way down to the ground and it was from the fireplace," he said. "Its a wood-burning fireplace that they use to heat the place.

Reeves then called for more manpower and they made a second attack on it. He said they were able to save most of the building.

The most important thing is that he had a small attached business and we saved that completely, said Reeves. There wasnt any damage in there at all, but his house is pretty well shot. Im thinking it is going to be totaled, but Im not an insurance man.

He added they had to tear down the smokestack because it was still hot.

It appeared to start in the flue itself, said Reeves. That is the second chimney fire we have had out here this year. People have got to learn to clean their flues. He told me he had his cleaned in November, but it can happen sometimes.

Fire departments to assist the Goose Creek Fire Department were Big River, Wolf Creek, Kinsey, Lake Timberline, De Soto Rural Fire Departments. They called Farmington when they struck a second alarm, but didnt end up using them.

Reeves said they had close to 30 firefighters at the scene and were there for two hours. There were no injuries.
Two former senior executives with the Veterans Affairs Department who were demoted after allegedly abusing their positions to get plum job assignments have appealed the decision -- again.

Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves were senior executives and regional directors with the VA accused of using their titles to force subordinates out of jobs they wanted for themselves, according to a department's inspector general report from September.

The VA tried to demote the women in October, but the case was dismissed in December on account of a technicality after the department didn't provide them with all the necessary information in the allotted period. The VA earlier this month again tried to discipline the women. And again, they appealed the move to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which will determine whether the demotions stand.

"We'll see," VA secretary Bob McDonald said in a recent interview with Military.com. "Both ladies have appealed and we'll see if our calibration of punishment sticks."

The secretary acknowledged that it may not -- a move that would further infuriate Republican lawmakers who have criticized him for not firing the employees.

The board "could very well overturn even the demotions," McDonald said.

Such a scenario is sure to inflame an already contentious relationship between Congress and the VA over how the department has responded to incidents of alleged corruption.

Rep. Jeff Miller, a Republican from Florida and chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, has said he'd like to see Rubens and Graves fired, if not prosecuted. He said the VA's decision to demote rather than dismiss the women showed it's not "committed to real accountability for corrupt employees."

The VA's inspector general forwarded its report to the U.S. Attorney's Office for possible criminal charges, but the office in December declined to prosecute.

McDonald defended his decision during the recent interview.

Regardless of what congressmen say or demand or even what his own department's investigators report, McDonald said he won't fire agency employees unless he believes the case against them is solid and the dismissal will stick.

"If you're a member of Congress, you can accuse people of anything. You have no evidentiary standard," he said. "If you're an IG [inspector general], the same thing. You can write up a report with all kinds of innuendo and not have to substantiate it."

According to the IG, Rubens got herself into the job of director of the VA's Philadelphia Region and Graves as director of the St. Paul, Minnesota, region by forcing the previous directors to take other jobs.

In both cases the women were assuming jobs with less responsibility but were retaining their higher, senior executive service-level salaries. Between the two they also picked up more than $400,000 from the department through a relocation assistance program for senior executives.

When brought before Congress under subpoena to testify about the IG claims both Graves and Rubens declined to do so, citing their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

In demoting the two, the VA cut their salaries $50,000 by stripping them of their senior executive status -- though each will still earn more than $120,000 a year -- and also transferred them to other regions as assist ant directors.

McDonald said he knows the decisions are unpopular with Congress, but stands by the call made by Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson, who he has known since they were cadets at West Point more than 40 years ago.

The secretary said Gibson previously served as chief executive officer of AmSouth Bancorporation, one of the largest banks in the South, and later successfully headed the USO, where he more than doubled contributions to the organization.

"I have immense confidence, trust and even love for him," McDonald said. "When he tells me he's gone through the evidence and the evidence does not support firing but supports demotion, I believe him."

-- Bryant Jordan can be reached at bryant.jordan@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bryantjordan.
Demand for the new tabs had indeed led to small shortages, but the problem was suddenly blown up into something much larger...
Theres something about a man in uniform that makes seven the most levelheaded of us fall hard. But, there are so many reports of romance scams that you really have to take a second, or third look at these potential relationships.

A military man I've been in a relationship with online says he needs me to send him money so he can come home from his deployment. He is a sergeant deployed to Syria, and he says he can't come to visit me without paying to come home. His Army base is in Detroit. I already sent him money so that we could continue to talk since military men aren't allowed to be in touch with home without paying for it. Why does the military make him pay to come home?

It sounds like you've fallen victim to a classic scam artist -- men who prey on gullible women who are hoping for love. These scammers say they are in the military and deployed, and maybe they even show you a picture of someone in uniform.

But that picture is probably stolen from a real service member. And unless your guy is in the National Guard or Reserves, there is no Army post in Detroit.

But your benefits question was "why does the military make him pay to come home?" The answer is: It doesn't.

The U.S. military does not require service members to pay their own way to or from a deployment. And while they may need to buy a calling card or pay for an internet connection, and may have to wait in line to use a phone, they do not have to pay for the privilege of calling home. Both of those claims are classic scam artist moves.

Unfortunately, you've been taken for a ride by a scam artist. And there have been many others like you, too. Next time, follow the scam-protection rule of thumb that's as old as the internet: Never, ever send money to an online love interest.

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If you're going through a voluntary military separation, the government will typically pay for one final military move up to six months after your final out date. But depending on where you are headed, you could be forced to pay some of that cost out of your own pocket.

What will the military pay for on your final PCS after voluntary separation? We talked with Defense Department military PCS experts to get all the details.

But first, a word of caution: While these are general rules for the DoD, each military service has its own rules and regulations and could change what they offer their troops at any time. Always check with your local transportation office for the latest on what is available to you.

Basic facts: Will the military pay for a final PCS move?

In most circumstances, the military will pay for you to make one last move -- but it will likely foot the bill only for you to move to your home of record or your place of entry. That means if you are stationed in San Diego, California, for example, and your home of record or place of entry is Los Angeles, California, what the military will pay for your move probably isn't very much.

So what do you do if you want to move somewhere other than your home of record or place of entry? Will you have to pay for the majority of your move yourself?

Not necessarily, Defense Department officials say. How much the DoD will pay for your move is based on a formula that combines the amount of weight you are permitted to move based on your rank, and the distance your goods are authorized to travel. If the weight you are moving is extremely low, for example, the DoD could still cover your whole shipment even if you are planning to go farther than your home of record or place of entry.

On the other hand, if your weight is very high and you are going beyond your allowed distance, you could be paying quite a bit on your own.

Paying out of pocket for a final military provided move

If you decide to let the military hire packers and movers for your final PCS, local transportation office officials will help you calculate how much extra your move may cost you out of pocket, officials said. You'll also likely be asked to sign a document saying that you were counseled about the potential extra costs.

After your goods are weighed and transported, the government will issue a DoD form DD-1131 cash collection voucher showing how much you owe. Depending on where you are living and your branch of service, you may need to go to your nearest installation to pay the bill or you may be able to pay by mail.

Officials said your household goods will be delivered regardless of whether you pay the overages bill. But be warned -- the money will likely be recouped by the DoD eventually, possibly through your tax return, officials said.

Doing your final move yourself

If you decide to make your final military move a "personally procured move" (PPM), formerly known as a "DITY" move, the process does not differ much from that used by service members staying in the service.

The primary difference, officials said, is how much the military will reimburse you after your move. The reimbursement rate will be based on the allowed-weight to allowed-distance formula. The government will pay you 95% of the amount it would've paid a contractor -- just like in any PPM move -- for the actual weight you area moving.

Which type of final PCS move will cost less out of pocket?

DoD officials said which move ends up costing a service member less out of pocket on his or her final PCS is based on a lot of factors, including where they are moving and how many pounds of belongings they are planning to take with them. The best thing for service members to do, officials said, is to meet with the local transportation office, learn their options and shop around.

Service members may be surprised, however, by which option ends up being cheaper. For example, if a service member is moving much farther than his home record, but has a much lower weight than his allowance, letting the DoD orchestrate the move could be cheaper, since what they will pay a contractor is based on the total amount allowed, not the actual weight moved.

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The Sentries - Fenelon High School Right After a Bomb Alert, January 26, 2016- Les sentinelles : le lycee Fenelon juste apres une alerte a la bombe le 26 janvier 2016 - 48/130  2016 CHANT WAGNER

130 Street Photographies after the Paris Attacks - 130 photographies de rue, apres les attentats de Paris - In Memoriam

Yesterday, six high schools in Paris amongst the most historic - and also best academically in France - were the scenes of simultaneous bomb alerts. After several phone calls alerted authorities, the students were evacuated either in the courtyards or on the streets and a bomb squad was sent to Henri IV where a suspicious package had been located...

The phone calls turned out to be pranks, which is technically correct a term, yet admittedly mild a word for finding funny this kind of plaisanterie in a time when a state of emergency exists. On the other hand, one cannot exclude the possibility that they could be rehearsals or Cry-Wolf or strategic diversion tactics since similar simultaneous bomb alerts took place the same day in schools in Great Britain.

I had the time to swing by and see what was going on near the school I went to, Fenelon. What I noticed were some faces looking pensive bordering on aghast, just like right after November 13. A group of students was dwindling away. Some parents had visibly come to evaluate the situation. The guardian of the building was on the doorstep of the high school. There was still some tension in the air.

This is due not least to the fact that there is a Jewish foyer on the same street which is protected by the military almost all the time, although I once went by recently there and there was no one, which allowed me to take a closer shot of the place.

This photo is part of a series capturing the atmosphere of Paris after 11/13 in 130 pictures, one each day for each of the 130 Paris Attack victims.

Previously:

Letting the Light In - Laisser la lumiere entrer - 47/130

The Lights Are On Again - La lumiere revient - 46/130

First Signs of a Reawakening - Les premiers signes d'un renouveau - 45/130

French-American Friendship - L'amitie franco-americaine - 44/130

The Young Patriot - Le jeune patriote - 43/130

The Republic Stands United in Front of the Screens - La Republique est debout, unie devant les ecrans - 42/130

Reading, Protecting the Plaque - Lire, Proteger la Plaque - 41/130



Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. - Plein les yeux et le coeur - 40/130

Place de la Republique January 9, 2016 - Place de la Republique le 9 janvier 2016 - 39/130





Prepping the Tree of Remembrance - Preparatifs autour de l'Arbre du Souvenir - 38/130





A Parisian Elf's Reaction - La reaction d'un lutin parisien - 37/130

Rue Alibert (e) (Liberte) - 36/130

Breaking Down - Un trop plein de souffrance - 35/130





Flowers, Sawdust, Blood - Des fleurs, de la sciure et du sang - 34/130

Have Heart - Courage - 33/130

A New Pilgrimage Map is Born - Une nouvelle carte de pelerinage est nee - 32/130

Fire with Humor - Combattre le feu par l'humour - 31/130





Looking Back Towards the Future of the Past - Regarder vers le futur du passe - 30/130

Fluctuat Nec Mergitur Is Still Around - Fluctuat Nec Mergitur perdure - 29/130

Bleu, Blanc, Rouge at Polly Maggoo's - Du bleu, du blanc et du rouge au balcon du Polly Maggoo - 28/130

Shining the Light on November 13 - Projeter la lumiere sur le 13 novembre - 27/130

Strange Goings Around a Carousel - Etrange manege le soir du reveillon de Noel - 26/130





The New In Colors - Le tricolore revient en vogue - 25/130





Drawing Resilience with Tealights - Dessiner la resilience avec des bougies - 24/130





Fascination - 23/130

Everything Happened, Nothing Happened - Tout est arrive, rien n'est arrive - 22/130



Patriotic Street Art - Un art des rues patriotique - 21/130

Keeping Emergency Services in a Central Paris Hospital - Maintien des urgences a l'Hotel-Dieu - 20/130

Semiotics of Insult - La semiotique de l'insulte - 19/130

Hacking It - Le systeme D - 18/130

Habit Rouge Impression - Une Impression d'Habit Rouge - 17/130

Recueillement - Meditation - 16/130

Saving Memorial Art from the Rain - Sauver un art de la memoire de la pluie - 15/130

A Month Later - Un mois plus tard - 14/130

December 13, 2015 - Le 13 decembre 2015 - 13/130

Quentin Mourier, 29 ans - Quentin Mourier - 29 years old - 12/130

I Love You - M - Je t'aime, M - 11/130

Game Over: Culture Shock - Fin de partie : le choc culturel - 10/130



The Blood of the Republic was Shed - Le sang de la Republique a ete verse - 9/130

Under Shock - Sous Le Choc - 8/130

Bullet Holes at the Laundromat - Impacts de balles au Lavratonic - 7/130

A La Bonne Biere Reopens: Shades of Emotions - Une Palette d'Emotions - 6/130

Peaceful Day at Republique - Jour Paisible a Republique - 5/130

Eagles of Death Metal - Still up on the Marquee II - Les Eagles of Death Metal sont toujours la-haut sur la marquise II - 4/130

Eagles of Death Metal - Still up on the Marquee - Les Eagles of Death Metal sont toujours la-haut sur la marquise - 3/130

Woman with a Tricolor Turban - La femme au turban tricolore - 2/130

Down Rue de Charonne - En bas de la rue de Charonne - 1/130
DEAR HARRIETTE: I am getting my breast implants removed for health reasons. I fell on the stairs, and an implant ruptured and spread silicone in parts of my chest. I know I must get my implants removed because the silicone could make me sick. What bothers me the most about this whole procedure is how my husband is acting. He is pretending to mourn the loss of my breasts. Although he claims he is joking, I know he is serious underneath it all. I have had these implants for the entirety of our time together, but this is my health we're talking about. I have told him my breast size does not make me any less of a woman. I am frustrated with him and want to concisely and honestly convey my feelings. Every time I try to think of something, it feels as though I would end up yelling at him. What can I say to start this conversation? He needs to get over the implants; there is more to me. -- No More Fake, San Jose, California

DEAR NO MORE FAKE: To be fair, if your husband has only known your breasts one way, it is understandable that he would "mourn" the upcoming change. You set the bar by getting the implants. So give him time to adjust to the new reality. You may want to point out to him that it could be much worse. Many women literally lose their breasts due to breast cancer. Hopefully, you will not have to face that -- or any other life-threatening illness. Ask him to support you during this scary part of your journey.

DEAR HARRIETTE: I am going through a less-than-amicable divorce from my wife. Our children are young (4 and 6 years old). When I FaceTime with them, sometimes the kids will ask me if I want to "talk to mommy." I've been lying and saying I spoke to her earlier on the phone, which seems to make my kids happy. I've been feeling conflicted about lying to my children like this, but they really do not understand what is going on between their mother and me. Is it wrong to lie to a young child like this? I cannot imagine any conversation between my soon-to-be ex and me going smoothly right now. -- Avoiding FaceTime Confrontation, Detroit

DEAR AVOIDING FACETIME CONFRONTATION: You and your wife actually do need to figure out how to communicate with each other in a respectful way -- for the children. You will never be completely separated from each other, because you have children together. Reach out to her and ask to have a conversation about the children. Do your best to talk with each other about the welfare of the children and how you can work together to care for them. This may be difficult at first, but it is essential for their mental well-being.

You can even talk about how to talk to your children about the separation. Though they are young, they are very sensitive. Agree together on your strategy and then implement it. No matter how hard it is to work together, do it.

DEAR HARRIETTE: I am the first of my longtime friends to be a mother, and I am having difficulty making new friends who understand motherhood while keeping up with the old ones. I've kept the same friends for over a decade, and we've always reminisced on college (or even high school) together; we love partying and being silly. In the past few years, I really feel as though I've grown up. My professional life has gotten to where I want it to be, I got married and I gave birth just a few months ago. Some of my friends are engaged, but for the most part, they claim they are enjoying their youth. I realize that my friends have no idea what I am going through, working and being a first-time parent AND making sure my husband and I carve out some time for ourselves. I am trying to make some new friends who are mothers, but I feel like I'm betraying my old friends. I still want to see my old friends and have a good time, but I am torn because I have no way to talk about my life with people who understand. What should I do? -- Stuck in the Middle, Seattle

DEAR STUCK IN THE MIDDLE: Transitioning into this new station in life is naturally challenging. And you are doing the right thing by looking to connect with young married mothers who will have some sense of your daily life. This is important for your well-being. What's also wise is for you to understand who to talk to about what. Your friends from high school and college are not yet capable of talking to you about motherhood. Don't try to force that conversation with them, but you don't have to dump them, either. You will likely spend less time with them as you nurture your family. Do yourself a favor and stop feeling guilty. Do what you must to thrive, which includes expanding your friend pool.

DEAR HARRIETTE: I don't trust my daughter's ex-husband with my grandchildren. She has more parental rights than he does, but I find myself so nervous whenever my grandbabies spend the weekend with him. He has a history of substance abuse, but my daughter claims she knows her children are safe. Harriette, I've tried prying, but my daughter seems so certain and tells me to stop trying to make her nervous. He is supposedly sober and has been for months, but I just don't like them spending time with him unsupervised. Do you think I can invite myself over to his house and see how he's treating my grandchildren? I would never forgive myself if something happened to them under his watch. -- He's Not a Good Father, Memphis, Tennessee

DEAR HE'S NOT A GOOD FATHER: Trust your instincts. If you want to stop by unannounced on one of his weekends, go for it. You should bring food for everyone or a game everyone can play -- something that shows your support. Even as you are suspicious, it is best to be supportive of him because he is their father. As long as he has the chance of interacting with them, you want him to welcome you into his life so that you can watch out for them. If you see evidence of abuse when you visit, be sure to tell your daughter and the police.

DEAR HARRIETTE: My uncle, who always used to be the life of the party and a fairly slim man, has turned into a total recluse and supposedly ballooned in weight after my aunt filed for divorce. I wouldn't know what he looks like because he doesn't want relatives coming over and seeing him. I miss him and worry this weight gain will have more damaging effects than he anticipated, like on his health and self-esteem. I thought about sending him a care package and a card so that he will still know we are thinking about him. My mother told me that sending a package is cold when we can just drive over and see him. I don't want to start a family feud, but I want to make sure my uncle is OK without overstepping his boundaries. Should I go behind my mother's back and send her brother a card? -- Missing Uncle, Roxbury, Mississippi

DEAR MISSING UNCLE: You should follow your heart. If you would like to send your uncle a card saying that you are thinking about him, go for it. Invite him to go out with you. Ask if he needs anything. As far as your mother is concerned, if she wants to go visit him, she can try that. If enough people reach out to your uncle during this stressful period, hopefully somebody will get through.

DEAR HARRIETTE: My sisters and I have been thinking of going into business together. We have always talked about how fun it would be to have a family business, and now all of us have reached times in our lives where we are able to make this happen. I hate to be the secret Debbie Downer in all of this excitement, but I am not sure if this business venture will work out. The financial risk isn't horrible, and I don't want to be the only one out of four sisters to bow out of this family business. Also, if it turned out to be a success, I would never hear the end of it! I haven't shared my feelings with my family yet, but I have a 70 percent feeling that this venture isn't going to work. Should I just give some money to maintain family unity? I don't want to ostracize myself from my sisters. -- Sister Biz, Cincinnati

DEAR SISTER BIZ: Think of yourself as being practical. Rather than presenting as Debbie Downer, ask your sisters to have a meeting to discuss the business idea. During this meeting, express your doubts about the viability of the business. Be sure that you have more than your gut instinct to point to your concerns. Do your research so that you can present your concerns as objectively as possible. Ultimately, if your sisters decide to go ahead with the business, you will have to decide what you will do. If you are willing to lose a small amount of money as you show your support, contribute. If you are completely against the whole idea, don't.

Lifestylist and author Harriette Cole is president and creative director of Harriette Cole Media. You can send questions to askharriette@harriettecole.com or c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.
The Orioles were a third team in on outfielder Yoenis Cespedes late last week, joining the Nationals and Mets, Jon Heyman reports on Twitter. Baltimore had a five-year offer on the table, says Heyman, but it was obviously turned down.

It appears, then, that Cespedes rejected two separate five-year concepts to go back to the Mets for three years and $75, with an opt-out after the first season. But it hasnt been reported what kind of guarantee and payout structure was involved in the Os offer. And its important to bear in mind that recent reporting suggests the Nationals five-year deal had extensive deferrals that put a huge dent in its real value.

Aside from the historical interest, this news is chiefly relevant because of what it says about the Orioles willingness and capacity to keep spending. Expectations were that the club would not be involved on Cespedes  at least, not to that level  after promising $161MM (with major deferrals) to slugger Chris Davis. In all likelihood, the Cuban star would have followed Davis in topping the teams prior record for largest guarantee.

Looking ahead, Baltimore still has good reason to pursue another outfielder and at least one additional starter. It seems that the club will have at least the possibility of deploying some rather significant resources to fill those needs. There are options on hand, of course, and it could be that Cespedes was a somewhat unique target. But the news suggests that the Os have the means to participate in the markets for top remaining players such as Dexter Fowler, Austin Jackson, and Yovani Gallardo.

There are also some trade possibilities that could be opened up by the presence of salary space. Hypothetical trade targets like Carlos Gonzalez, Andre Ethier, Jay Bruce, or even Ryan Braun could, in theory, be made to fit from a payroll perspective. Likewise, pricier arms  say, Tyson Ross or C.J. Wilson  could be considered under various scenarios. (The point here is not to say any of these particular players are being or should be pursued, but rather to provide examples of the range of conceivable options.)

Longer-term payroll developments are an interesting element of the story, too. Baltimore not only added Davis, but also took on a significant obligations this winter to backstop Matt Wieters (via the qualifying offer) and reliever Darren ODay. The clubs estimated Opening Day spending already tops last years ~$118MM mark, and thats before accounting for the still-undetermined salaries of Zach Britton and Brian Matusz, which figures to cost another $10MM and change. Needless to say, whatever the offer, adding Cespedes would have pushed the payroll well outside the teams prior spending bounds.

As noted, its entirely unclear whether Baltimore will pursue other ways of re-deploying the funds that might have gone to Cespedes. Indeed, its not impossible to think that adding him might have required the team to shed some other salary. Regardless, the possibility of significant additional payroll space is intriguing to consider moving forward.
DETROIT, MI - We could be saying arrivederci to the Chrysler 200 and Dodge Dart.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is adjusting a five-year business plan, put in place in 2014, in light of abrupt changes in market conditions.

"We've seen a significant shift in the product mix of cars being sold in the U.S.," company CEO Sergio Marchionne said on a conference call Wednesday.

One such major change is U.S. consumers' appetite for trucks and SUVs amid low fuel prices, and as such, FCA will be shifting its production focus in the North America.

Chrysler Group LLC will debut a sportier Dodge Dart at the 2013 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. (courtesy image)

Marchionne said that over the next 18 months, FCA will withdraw the smaller Chrysler 200 and Dodge Dart cars from the marketplace, but it will however look for partners for the vehicles' architecture. The company will instead focus North American production on its Jeep and Ram brands.

The FCA chief said the company hopes to do so without increasing production capacity, He noted that more space is expected to come on line in Toledo for a new Wrangler model in 2017.

Marchionne also said the company is currently searching for a production home for its forthcoming Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer full-size SUVs.

The realignment comes as the company reports its 2015 full-year financial results.

The 2015 Chrysler 200. (Courtesy image/FCA)

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' full-year, net profit for 2015 fell to 377 million euros (about $411 million) in 2015, compared to net income of EU632 million (about $689 million) in 2014.

However, the company said in reporting its financial results Wednesday that its adjusted net profit was up 91 percent to EU2.0 billion.

Its bottom line was hit by Q3 charges related to recalls and costs in Q4 related to the restructuring in the North America.

The Jeep brand, always expected to be strong, has done even better than expected, shipping 1.3 million units in 2015 for an annual rise of 21 percent. The company now aims to sell more than 2 million units globally by 2018.

At the same time, the company's margins in the NAFTA region are already at 2018 plan levels, and the Europe, Middle East and Africa region is profitable one year ahead of the plan.

These positive developments have been partially offset by a Brazilian market that has been far worse than expected, and slower-than-expected growth in luxury-focused China, which has adversely affected FCA's plans for its Maserati and Alfa Romeo brands there.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles unveiled the Alfa Romeo Giulia in Milan, Italy on June 24, 2015. (Courtesy image/FCA)

For Maserati, a short-term initiative will be the launch of a crossover vehicle in the second quarter of this year. The Alfa Romeo brand's focus will be shifted away from China and more toward the NAFTA and EMEA regions.

The Alfa Romeo Giulia sedan is launching in the U.S. this year, and the company is planning a mid-size SUV for the marque as well.

Financially, FCA has revised its revenue projections for 2018 upward to EU136 billion from EU129 billion, and edged up its adjusted net profit expectations to EU4.7-5.5 billion from its previous goal of EU4.5-5.3 billion.

Much of it will be driven by Jeep.

"Clearly Jeep is the bedrock of this plan," company CFO Richard Palmer said.

David Muller is the automotive and business reporter for MLive Media Group in Detroit. Email him at dmuller@mlive.com, follow him on Twitter or find him on Facebook.
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Small businesses in West Michigan can apply for funding to help them hire Western Michigan University student interns in the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines. In this Feb. 13, 2014 file photo, accounting student Vince Behnke makes some notes after talking to recruiters during WMU's Career Fair 2014 at the Bernhard Center.

(Junfu Han | MLive File)

KALAMAZOO, MI --Small businesses who want to hire scientifically or technically savvy interns this summer have Western Michigan University as a resource.

WMU is promoting the Small Company Internship Award Program, which is set to provide up to $3,500 per student in matching funds to help companies hire interns during the summer of 2016.

"The Small Company Internship Award Program provides matching funds to help businesses with 500 or fewer employees hire WMU students to work on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) or STEM-related projects that are both beneficial to the company and academically relevant to students," Lisa Garcia, director of WMU's Business Connection, said in a press release.

Garcia said the matching money is being provided through the Michigan Corporate Relations Network.

"WMU and five other Michigan schools are members of the network, which connects industry to critical university talent in ways that will help the state's economy grow and prosper," she said in the release.

Western Michigan University has $35,000 to disperse this year, Garcia said. That is expected to be enough to support 12 to 14 internships at a recommended rate of at least $12 per hour.

According to the university, the program is targeted towards companies in Allegan, Berrien, Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Kalamazoo, St. Joseph and Van Buren counties that would like to hire a WMU intern. Preference is to be given to small companies that focus on innovative work in the STEM fields, provide an internship where STEM skills are employed and have yet to receive an award through the program.

Companies may apply for funding for up to two interns from either one or two schools in the Michigan Corporate Relations Network, according to WMU. The maximum award for a company is $3,500 from each school that provides an intern. Funding applications for this summer are due by March 11.

The six public universities that make up the network are; Michigan State University; Michigan Technological University; Wayne State University;

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; University of Michigan-Dearborn; and WMU.

Those interested may download a 2016 application at wmich.edu/businessconnection/hire and email the completed form by March 11 to Lisa Garcia at lisa.garcia@wmich.edu.

More information about the Small Company Internship Award Program is available from Garcia at her email address or via 269-387-6004.
The city of Ann Arbor is facing another lawsuit over its decision to hire sharpshooters to kill up to 100 deer in city parks.

Ann Arbor resident Sally Daniels, who lives off Packard Street in the 3rd Ward, filed a lawsuit against the city on Monday.

"I'm very concerned," Daniels said of the deer cull when reached by phone, referring questions to her attorney, Aaron Matthews.

Matthews couldn't be reached for comment.

The new lawsuit -- the second against the city over the deer cull -- was filed in Washtenaw County Circuit Court and is before Judge Timothy Connors.

Connors this week denied Daniels' initial request for a temporary restraining order seeking to halt the cull, which started earlier this month.

A hearing is now set for Thursday morning on Daniels' motion seeking preliminary injunction to stop the cull.

The new lawsuit, which challenges the validity of the cull permit issued to the city by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, is separate from another lawsuit filed in federal court earlier this month, though it's similar in nature.

The seven-page complaint notes that, under Michigan law, all animals in the state are legally considered the property of the people of Michigan.

"The city's deer cull is impairing and destroying the natural resources of this state and will continue to do so unless enjoined by this court," the complaint alleges.

The lawsuit includes a recitation of state rules for hunting deer, including dates of the open firearm season and established hunting hours, noting the deer cull activities in Ann Arbor fall outside of those times and dates.

The lawsuit further cites the requirements under state law for issuance of damage and nuisance animal control permits, which is the type of permit the city received from the DNR in late December for the deer cull.

The lawsuit specifically cites the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act, which is codified under Michigan law, as well as the DNR-issued Wildlife Conservation Order, claiming the deer cull violates both.

"Except during an open season for deer, deer may be taken under this subdivision if the department determines that deer have caused damage to emerging, standing or harvested crops or to feed properly stored in accordance with normal agricultural practices," reads an NREPA regulation cited in the complaint.

The lawsuit also cites this deer damage permit requirement: "Deer damage shooting permits may be issued statewide to owners of specific lands with significant agricultural or horticultural crop damage documented by the department."

The lawsuit states the city's application for a cull permit did not even allege that any deer have caused such crop damage.

The city's stated goal is to decrease the deer population to reduce deer-human negative interactions and support biological diversity in natural areas.

The DNR-issued permit for the Ann Arbor deer cull indicates the type and extent of damage or safety issue to be "damage to horticulture, biological diversity in natural areas, resident concerns about deer/vehicle collisions."

The lawsuit claims the DNR did not and cannot determine that deer being killed in Ann Arbor have caused damage to "emerging, standing or harvested crops" or to "feed properly stored in accordance with normal agricultural practices," nor did the DNR document "significant agricultural or horticultural crop damage."

"The permit is therefore invalid and void," the lawsuit alleges, urging the judge to grant an opinion in agreement.

The lawsuit also challenges the use of silencers, baiting deer this time of year, and shooting from vehicles.

City officials have argued "silencers" is not the correct term for the type of sound-suppression equipment sharpshooters are using.

City Attorney Stephen Postema said the city is preparing responses to both complaints now pending against the city.

The city continues to stand by its decision to move forward with a cull and believes it is being done legally.

Kristen Bissell, a DNR wildlife biologist, wrote a letter to the city on Dec. 21, relaying the DNR's support for killing up to 100 deer in various Ann Arbor parks and nature areas in wards 1 and 2, for the stated purpose of reducing human-deer conflicts and negative impacts of deer activity on biological diversity in natural areas.

"Based on information provided by the city of Ann Arbor, the DNR Wildlife Division and Law Enforcement Division have concluded that a permit for an out-of-season, mid-winter cull for white-tailed deer is justified," Bissell wrote.

DNR regulations specifically for damage and nuisance animal control permits, which is what the city received, indicate such permits can be issued to allow shooting "at a time or in a manner not otherwise permitted by law or order."

That requires a DNR officer or wildlife biologist to make an investigation into a complaint that deer are causing damage.

"At the time of such investigation, the complainant shall furnish the department investigator with a written statement, on forms provided for this purpose by the department, indicating the location, extent, kind and approximate value of the property allegedly damaged, destroyed or in danger of being damaged or destroyed, the kind and number of animals believed to be doing the damage, and such other information as may be required," the regulations state.

"If, after investigation, it appears the circumstances warrant control of the animals involved, the investigator will, except for horticultural or agricultural damage caused by deer or requests to use restricted pesticides, issue a permit authorizing their control by shooting, trapping, or otherwise."

Separate from the new lawsuit, a group called Ann Arbor Residents for Public Safety is suing the city in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

The group, represented by attorney Barry Powers, was unsuccessful earlier this month in trying to convince Judge Arthur Tarnow to at least temporarily halt the deer cull. So, the cull has proceeded while that lawsuit plays out.

Tarnow wasn't convinced Ann Arbor residents face any imminent danger from shooting in the parks, as the federal lawsuit claims. He also wasn't convinced it's a matter for the federal court to decide, so he gave the plaintiffs seven days to amend their complaint and articulate the basis for federal jurisdiction.

Ann Arbor Residents for Public Safety ended up filing a 107-page amended complaint on Jan. 20, reasserting their case.

Daniels, though she is not a plaintiff in the federal case, was in Detroit for the hearing earlier this month.

"This decision upsets me greatly," she was quoted saying in the Detroit Free Press after the hearing, lamenting the killing of deer in Ann Arbor. "I hope in the next three years, we can save their lives."

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.
As it currently stands, state and local officials are responsible for notifying citizens when lead leaches into their water supply.

Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow

Congressman Dan Kildee (D) Flint Township

Citing the failure of state officials that led to Flint's water crisis, some of Michigan's U.S. lawmakers are introducing a bill that would give the Environmental Protection Agency more leeway in such situations.

U. S. Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow and Congressman Dan Kildee, all Democrats, announced in a press release Wednesday they will introduce legislation to clarify the EPA's authority to notify the public if there is a danger from lead in their water system.

"The bill would direct the EPA to notify residents and health departments if the amount of lead found in a public water system requires action in the absence of notification by the state," the press release said. "The legislation also allows the EPA to release results of any lead monitoring conducted by public water systems. Currently, the responsibility for notification lies at the local and state level."

Peters said the bill is necessary due to the state's failures in Flint.

"It is clear the State of Michigan did not fulfill their responsibility to prevent lead from leaching into Flint's drinking water system or to make the public aware of the danger in their drinking water," Peters said in the release.

The legislation would make it clear just what the EPA could do if "a state is dragging their feet and endangering the health of its residents," Peters said.

"When the people of Flint raised concerns about the safety of their water, the EPA tested that water and found that it was dangerous to drink," Stabenow said in the release. "The State of Michigan chose to criticize and ignore those findings, which has caused irreversible harm to potentially a generation of children."

Kildee said the bill would ensure something like Flint's crisis would never happen again.

"The state has a moral responsibility to act, and it must do more to help make sure that Flint families and children get the immediate and-long term resources they need to help cope with this terrible crisis," he said.

Flint went off Detroit water and started drawing and treating water from the Flint River in 2014. Residents immediately complained about the water's smell and hardness, though it wasn't until later that the water was determined to be corrosive and leaching lead off the pipes. The testing that ultimately resulted in the issue being exposed was conducted by Marc Edwards, a professor at Virginia Tech. Then Hurley Medical Center Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha tested children in the area and determined that they had higher levels of lead in their blood, too. Flint has since been declared to be in a state of emergency by state and federal authorities.

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder's spokesman Dave Murray said the situation in Flint is not just the fault of officials at the state level.

"The crisis in Flint was the result of missteps of all levels of government -- local, state and federal," Murray said in an email. "We are focused on helping city residents, getting them water, filters and supplies they need to have access to safe, clean water."

John Counts is a reporter on MLive.com's statewide Impact team. Send tips to johncounts@mlive.com or you can follow him on Twitter.
The former Ford and Visteon plant in the city of Ypsilanti, which is now owned by Angstrom and partially leased for use as a storage facility, is on the city's dangerous building list.

Beth Ernat, Ypsilanti's economic development director, stressed Angstrom is working to address issues, but there's a long list of serious fire code violations and some other relatively minor building problems that are of concern to inspectors.

"The fire department has created a punch list of items that needs to be addressed immediately, and the owners have been cooperative and working with the city to make the needed fixes. However, some of those aren't quick fixes," Ernat said.

Among the most serious concerns is a sprinkler system that's inadequate for the amount of material - mostly trailer hitches - stored in the building, Ernat said.

The 715,000-square-foot building, located at 128 Spring St., sat vacant from the time Angstrom purchased it for $2 million in December 2009 until it leased 15,000 square feet of of the factory to Howard Ternes Packaging Company in 2014.

Ernat said officials discovered the issues during a routine building inspection and she didn't suspect the company, a tier one automotive parts supplier, of intentionally neglecting the property.

She added that Angstrom officials are investing what's likely seven figures to improve the building. The company still intends to use the property for manufacturing once there's enough demand, and the improvements would have been required as part of that process, Ernat said.

Angstrom originally announced plans to use the building as a production facility that would create tubing for automotive manufacturers, but that hasn't come to fruition.

According to the Ternes website, the company was formed in 1948 and specializes in packaging, warehousing and distribution. It has 300 full-time employees and has facilities in Michigan, Indiana and Tennessee.

Calls to Angstrom seeking comment were not returned.

Tom Perkins is a freelance reporter for The Ann Arbor News.
Iorio's Gelato founders Mary and Nick Lemmer were driving from Ann Arbor to their East Lansing store earlier this month, when they saw cars on the highway that had signs calling for the impeachment of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder over the Flint water crisis.

"We understood why people were angry, but we said to each other, why doesn't someone actually do something," said Mary Lemmer. "People are getting sick. This is a big deal, and it seems like the people are getting lost in all of this."

That was before the Flint crisis became the cause celebre for celebrities like Madonna, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Aretha Franklin and The Insane Clown Posse, explained Lemmer.

"We thought about what we could do to help," said Lemmer. "We make gelato, and gelato always lifts people's spirits and puts a smile on their faces. We started getting excited about doing something to bring the community together."

The brother and sister team decided to put together a fundraising campaign to raise money for fresh, potable water for Flint residents. By donating through this campaign, Lemmer said, contributors can be guaranteed that every penny goes toward buying water for the people of Flint. And every contributor to the campaign will be invited to a community ice cream party in Flint in the spring.

"We're going to be handing out ice cream to everyone in the Flint community," said Lemmer. "We'll have live music, we will be providing food from Zingerman's and other local vendors. We're thinking about bringing in a bounce house and doing face painting, and make it a mini festival."

Donations can be made on the Iorio's Gelato Project Acqua fundraising page, which launched on Monday. As of Wednesday afternoon, $760 of the project's $10,000 goal had been raised.

Nick and Mary Lemmer opened their first gelato shop in Ann Arbor in 2011. Mary explained that they chose gelato, a creamy Italian variety of ice cream, as a nod to the siblings' Italian heritage. A second cafe and gelateria opened in East Lansing in 2015.

Jessica Webster covers food and dining for MLive and The Ann Arbor News. Reach her at JessicaWebster@mlive.com. You also can follow her on Twitter and on Google+.
BAY CITY, MI -- A Bay City contractor owes a four-figure restitution sum for scamming a client more than a decade after his license expired.

Bay County Circuit Judge Joseph K. Sheeran Monday, Jan. 25, ordered Matthew J. Cnudde to pay $2,610 in restitution to a specific victim. The amount of restitution he owes an insurance company is to be determined.

Sheeran also sentenced Cnudde to three years probation, during which he is to participate substance abuse counseling and submit to random alcohol and drug tests. Sheeran gave him credit for 46 days served in jail and deferred an additional 45 days, meaning he'll have to serve them only if he violates his probation.

Cnudde, 45, in December pleaded guilty to one count of larceny by conversion. In exchange, the prosecution dismissed a second count of the same charge and single counts of fraudulent use of a building contract fund and being an unlicensed residential builder.

Police in early 2015 were contacted by a man who said he hired Cnudde in November 2014 to help him complete work on a roof at a home in the 500 block of Catherine Street, court records show. He said he paid Cnudde $2,000 in cash and $2,000 via check for the service, court records show.

The man told police he had roofing shingles delivered from Home Depot to his home on Dec. 11. On Dec. 30, the man was contacted by Cnudde, claiming it looked like the house had been burglarized and the shingles stolen, he told police. The man made an insurance claim and bought new shingles.

While at Home Depot, he asked staff if anyone had recently returned shingles. He was informed several bundles of shingles matching the ones he had previously purchased had been returned, court records show.

The man confronted Cnudde, who said he had returned six bundles because he ran out of money, court records show. Home Depot staff subsequently provided investigators with surveillance camera footage of Cnudde returning the six bundles on Dec. 24, court records show.

On Feb. 4, police contacted the Michigan Builder's Licensing Bureau and determined Cnudde's license expired in 2004, court records show.

Before police arrested Cnudde, they allege he committed another crime. On Thursday, April 9, police responded to a home in the 1400 block of Ninth Street, where a couple was fixing up the house and had hired Cnudde, whom they found on Craigslist, to help, according to court records. In January, they bought leveling jacks from Menards to fix the house's floor, they said.

The day they called police, the couple noticed eight of the jacks were missing, they said. They texted Cnudde, who said he took them to help fix his sister's house and would return them by 9 p.m., court records state.

When Cnudde didn't return the jacks by 9 p.m., the couple called police.

On Monday, April 13, the female homeowner called police to say she had phoned Menards and staff there told her Cnudde had returned the jacks, according to court records. The couple called Cnudde, who confessed to returning the jacks, saying he was in a tight spot and desperate for money, court records show. He added that he had every intention of rebuying the jacks, and on Friday, April 10, he brought them back to the couple, they told police.
KAWKAWLIN TOWNSHIP, MI -- A one-vehicle crash took out a utility pole in rural Bay County.

About 6:40 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 27, a 16-year-old was driving a white 1994 Buick southbound on Seven Mile Road in Kawkawlin Township when he approached a school bus with its stop lights activated near Wetters Road, according to Michigan State Police at the scene. The teen was traveling too fast for the icy road conditions, police said, attempted to brake, and wound up in a ditch on the west side of the road.

The teen's Buick struck a wooden utility pole, severely fracturing it.

The teen was uninjured, police said. The collision with the pole did not cause area residents to lose power, police said.

As of 9:21 a.m., troopers and Charter Communications personnel were still at the scene and the Buick remained in the ditch.

As of 9:56 a.m., the road is open to traffic.
FLINT, MI - Water activists say they plan to deliver petitions with nearly 20,000 signatures to Flint's newly elected mayor calling for the city to stop issuing water bills in light of the city's water crisis.

Food & Water Watch and Water You Fighting For say they will deliver the petitions Thursday, Jan. 28, calling for the moratorium. Copies of the petitions are also being delivered to Gov. Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette.

"The people of Flint have been subjected to toxic drinking water for over a year, and yet they are expected to pay for the toxic water flowing from their faucets," the groups said in a press release. "To add insult to injury, residents are paying some of the highest combined water and sewage bills in the county. No one should have to pay for water that is poisoned."

The petitions include signatures from Flint residents, as well as people from across Michigan and the country.

The groups delivered more than 26,000 signatures in August 2015 to former Mayor Dayne Walling asking the city to end its use of the Flint River as the city's drinking water source.

City Administrator Natasha Henderson told the city council earlier this week that the city's water fund would likely be out of money by the end of the year due to an increasing amount of people not paying their bill.

The Synder administration requested a supplemental appropriation for the current fiscal year that would use $22 million in state money plus some federal money to direct $28 million to address immediate in Flint. It allocates state funding to six department and would enable the state to increase National Guard efforts, increase nurses in schools and replace fixtures in some public places.

More than $17 million of the funding would go to provide emergency bottled water, filters, blood testing and other services.

The bill also includes $5 million to aid the city in the loss of revenue from unpaid water bills and new water system infrastructure.
The Park Hills City Council met for a work session on Tuesday night and discussed a variety of issues, including numerous possible changes to existing city ordinances.

Prior to tackling their formal agenda, council members heard from Brad Dush, a representative from the Park Hills-Leadington Chamber of Commerce.

Dush spoke to the council about the chambers tentative plans to acquire a building in which various city functions could occur. He said that the chamber wishes to form a partnership with the city to use the building for meetings, events and possibly to use for business start-up space to help new businesses with office space and/or other functions.

Toward this end, the chamber has formed a building committee to explore the idea and pursue a means for funding such a project. He emphasized that the project is in its infancy at this point.

On behalf of the Downtown Park Hills Association, Mayor David Easter expressed support for the project and offered Dush and the chamber board of directors any assistance the association might be able to provide.

Economic Developer Norm Lucas spoke next and reported that the city received only two proposals for the hotel development study. A tentative plan to build a hotel in TIF District 2, located just north of the Hefner Furniture and Appliance store on the west side of U.S. 67, was announced during a previous council meeting.

Lucas reported that the two bids were much higher than he had anticipated in the budget for the project, but that a third agency had contacted him and stated that due to the seven-week time line for the study, the agency had decided not to submit a bid. The representative from the agency, however, said that if the tim frame could be extended to a 10-week window to perform the study, the agency would like to submit a bid.

Lucas recommended to council members, therefore, that the timeframe be extended to 10 weeks and that a request for proposals be put out one more time. The council agreed to Lucas recommendation.

Next, Park Hills Fire Chief Jackie Wagganer addressed the council regarding the departments proposal for the decal designs and their placement on the new pumper truck. After a brief exchange of ideas among council members, the decals for the new truck were agreed upon.

Wagganer also asked the council to consider changes to the city ordinances that relate to the fire department. First, he asked that the ordinance governing residential requirements be changed to allow residents outside the city limits to serve on the Park Hills department.

Secondly, he requested a change regarding the number of captains that the ordinance allows. He requested permission to add a fourth captain if the number of firefighters serving the department increases.

Thirdly, he requested a decrease of pay for department-related secretarial duties. Wagganer reported that he has been performing such duties and that the time commitment is less than he had expected.

Later in the meeting, Wagganer asked whether a council member would like to accompany him to Appleton, Wisconsin the week of Feb. 22 to a pre-building meeting for the new fire truck.

Ward 3 Councilman Tom Reed said he would like to go if his schedule will allow. Council members voted to approve Reeds participation, contingent on his schedule.

Also during the meeting, Community Development Director Josh Hankins gave a report on the planned installation of two monuments for welcoming visitors into the City of Park Hills. Designs for the monuments were shared and discussed in addition to whether the monuments will be constructed of stone or another material.

City officials plan to place one of the monuments north of Parkway Drive and the second one south of Fairgrounds Drive. It was agreed that solar lighting would be used to light the monuments.

As previously requested by council members, City Administrator Matt Whitwell initiated a discussion about the number of unlicensed vehicles parked on the property of vehicle repair businesses in the city.

Whitwell reported that the issue is not unique to Park Hills and that compared to other municipalities, the citys code is very similar.

Whitwell also reported that citations have been issued when such businesses are in violation of city ordinances but that due to the current language of the city code, there are not many options available to reduce the number of unlicensed and/or derelict vehicles on these properties.

City Attorney Ed Pultz explained the legal options available to council members.

Youve got a couple of options, he said. One option is just to live with it. The second option would be, at least to the extent theyre violating the city ordinances, would be to continue to write tickets.

And the third option is the city could bring an action for what is called a public nuisance. Im not necessarily recommending that  but its something else we could look at if the council is wanting to do so.

Whitwell then stated that council members may also want to consider amending the current ordinance to place a time limit on how long a vehicle may be kept on the properties.

He informed council members that the current zoning code requires a minimum of four vehicles spaces on a lot per work bay be present on properties that operate as vehicle repair businesses, which obviously accounts for the relatively large numbers of disabled vehicles that currently occupy such businesses.

Whitwell asked council members to consider what they would like to see happen regarding this issue.

Hankins then gave a report on the citys current noise ordinance in relation to past complaints by citizens about being bothered by excessive noise from vehicles mufflers and/or loud stereo systems.

Hankins reported that he had been researching the issue and had spoken with officials from various other cities about how noise complaints are being handled.

He emphasized that such ordinances are difficult to enforce for a variety of reasons. Depending on the language of the code, it often boils down to whether a citizen is willing to file a formal complaint.

Without a driven complaint, he said, its really hard to determine at what point, at what level and who is disturbed.

He suggested a number of possible solutions, but again emphasized that there must be a formal complaint in order for a law to be enforced.

There again, he said, there has to be a complainant. It really isnt enforceable until someone puts it on paper.

The distinction between peace disturbance and public nuisance complaints was discussed and debated by council members as well as the establishment of objective standards by which to enforce the code and the many variables that exist when it comes to noise and perception of sound.

Hankins ended the discussion by reporting he will continue to research the issue and try to come up with a satisfactory resolution for establishing a clear and enforceable law.

Whitwell and Hankins then asked for input from council members regarding commercial outside sales. The issue was initiated by a citizen who had recently complained about a business that had been displaying merchandise outside of the establishment and whether the placement of the merchandise was in violation of the city code.

Three sections of the city code relate to the issue with specific language relating to placement of merchandise on city sidewalks: Section 210.130, which prohibits merchants from allowing merchandise to obstruct sidewalks; Section 210.090, which mandates that businesses keep sidewalks clean; and Section 620.060, which prohibits merchants from displaying items on sidewalks.

Hankins suggested a simple solution may be to define public versus private property.

Ward 4 Councilman Larry Kelly expressed a strong position on the matter and said I dont want to do anything that restricts any of our merchants from having stuff on their property, emphasizing that it is of utmost importance to him to allow local merchants to conduct their business unhindered as long as they are not in violation of any city ordinance.

Ward 4 Councilman Charles Politte interjected by saying that he believed the issue initiated by the complaining citizen was about appearance and aesthetics.

Do you want your city to look this way or do you want it to look another way? he said.

Whitwell stated that a new proposed set of ordinances regarding this issue was being developed and would be presented to the council at a future date.

Whitwell ended the session with a report on the citys various departments. Among other statements, he reported that the city had received positive feedback from the community regarding snow removal during the recent snow storm.
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[January 26, 2016] Technavio Releases New Report on Location-Enabled Platform Market in SEA

Technavio's latest machine to machine (m2m) and connected devices industry report covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global location-enabled platform market in SEA (Southeast Asia) 2016-2020. In this report, Technavio's ICT industry research experts announce their key market highlights for the location-enabled platform market in Southeast Asia. Their findings include: Location-based advertising, location-based search and navigation, and location-based games are driving the demand of location-enabled platforms in the SEA region The Southeast Asian region is an emerging market for location-based services and platforms. Location-enabled platforms such as location-based search (LBS) services are finding increased market penetration due to GPS-enabled devices. The growing popularity of LBS, especially among government organizations, enterprises, and consumers, coupled with deployment of high-speed broadband networks in the Southeast Asia region, presents favorable market conditions for platform providers to venture. LBS value-chain providers require location-enabled platforms (consists of hardware and software components) to provide various LBS applications such as location-based advertising, gaming, and search and navigation. The increased adoption of location-based advertising (LBA), location-based gaming, and location-based navigation and search by enterprises and individual consumers is expected to drive the market growth until 2020. LBS value-chain providers funded by venture capitalists predicted to invest heavily in R&D to develop innovative products and platforms Investments in location-enabled platforms has changed the marketing investment strategy of enterprises from traditional marketing to individual user-based target marketing. These developments are backed by innovative location-enabled platforms. The growth rate as well as revenue generated by these platforms is expected to be high during the 2015-2020 period because of increased investment by large vendors and VC funding for small LBS platform providers. Innovative LBS platforms are augmenting the profitability of many existing as well as upcoming players. Many small LBS platform providers have flourished with the development of innovative LBS platforms. For instance, Foursquare (News - Alert), that started as a LBS platform for searching food joints in the US, has almost 55 million users, and has been browsed approimately 7 billion times.



In a strategic move for market expansion, some innovative LBS platforms have also been acquired by big enterprises. For instance, Green Dot acquired Loopt (News - Alert), an LBS-based marketing platform. SK Planet acquired Shopkick, and Facebook acquired Gowalla in a bid to expand their market share. Innovation of new LBS platforms have paved the way for many more strategic M&A of small LBS platform providers in the market. Over the next four years, the market is predicted to attract many large content or service providers to Southeast Asia, resulting in a significant increase in VC funding for local LBS platform providers.

Retail, healthcare, aviation, and tourism are major sectors that employ location-enabled platforms LBS applications are used by enterprises across Southeast Asia in various sectors such as retail, energy, production, aviation, healthcare, hospitality, sports, and IT to increase employee productivity and workforce management. Consumers in Southeast Asia use LBS applications for vehicular and pedestrian navigation, obtaining traffic information, mobile payment, mobile coupons, social networking, family locator, check-ins, indoor routing, mobile yellow pages, shopping guides, product tracking, car-parking guidance, weather information, and information on transportation services. Government organizations in this region use LBS for public safety and emergency applications in situations such as theft, fire, accidents, flood, and drought. In Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore, LBA is commonly used among retailers and malls to drive store sales. For instance, 313 Somerset, a mall in Singapore uses a beacon-based mobile advertising technique. A consumer using the Tring313 app gets a notification about ongoing sales and discount coupons when at a distance of 50 to 500 meters of distance from the mall. In Philippines, Stores Specialists, a franchiser of lifestyle brands, with the help of Sprooki, a mobile marketing services firm, started a SSI Life app for shoppers. It acts as a location-aware app for luxury brand shoppers. SSI Life app offers limited and time-based promotions to consumers as and when they approach the store. Airports in Singapore have also started using beacon technology to deliver up-to-date and relevant information on passengers' smartphones. Customers receive notifications through the beacon supporting application that helps them navigate the airport better as relevant information such as distance to gates, boarding times, and the closest security check lines is provided. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia have a strong youth population. LBS apps such as friend finder, location-based games, and taxi finder are very popular among the masses in these countries. Vendors in these countries are partnering with each other to increase adoption level of LBS. For instance, Morpho, an identity and security solution provider, partnered with W-Locate, an LBS provider, to implant geo-location technology in its SIM cards. With the growing popularity of LBS, the market will witness many new product launches and collaborations until 2020, and it will provide significant traction to the overall in Southeast Asia. Browse related reports: Global LBS Market 2015-2019

LBS Market in China 2015-2019

Indoor LBS Market in Western Europe 2015-2019

Mobile LBS Market in Southeast Asia 2015-2019 Purchase three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact [email protected] with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform. About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies. Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users. If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at [email protected]. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160126005064/en/

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[January 27, 2016] VoiceBox CEO Mike Kennewick To Address How Entrepreneurs Can Help Shape The Next Generation Of The Internet At National University Of Singapore

BELLEVUE, Wash. and SINGAPORE, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As the keynote speaker of the National University of Singapore's Scale Up Singapore event this February 1, 2016, serial entrepreneur Mike Kennewick will discuss how to leverage opportunities created by the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). His talk, Opportunity Knocks: From IoT to Talking Things draws from his 30-year career in technology, using VoiceBox - and its increasing Asian presence - as a case study. VoiceBox, a respected voice technology pioneer, is the leader in natural language technology in the automotive market and ships on cars and mobile devices globally, including Asia. With offices in Tokyo and Tai Pei the Company is in the process of establishing a presence in Singapore and Beijing. "In addition to commercial relationships, we will be investing in technological Centers of Excellence as part of our aggressive Research and Development intiatives," said Kennewick, "and our recent experiences in the World Class markets of Singapore have been particularly fruitful."



VoiceBox, whose intellectual property was ranked by IEEE as among the most impactful in the world, is focusing its attention increasingly on technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The Company recently assembled a Scientific Advisory Board, which includes some of the world's most respected research scientists. The National University of Singapore (NUS) is consistently ranked as one of the world's top universities and generally considered Asia's premier educational institution. The University actively promotes innovation and entrepreneurship.

About VoiceBox Technologies Corporation

VoiceBox provides one-stop-shopping for companies looking to voice-enable products and solutions; offering enhanced Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), NLU, Text To Speech (TTS) technologies together with a full range of development, testing and data services. The Company shares several CES Best in Show honors with its partners. VoiceBox ships with Toyota, Fiat, Dodge, Chrysler, Maserati, Renault, Mazda, Subaru and Tom-Tom in 23 languages across 3 continents. All are powered by VoiceBox's award-winning voice technology, protected by over thirty patents. Headquartered in Bellevue, WA, the Company has offices in Los Angeles, Munich, the Netherlands and Tokyo. For more information, visit VoiceBox. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/voicebox-ceo-mike-kennewick-to-address-how-entrepreneurs-can-help-shape-the-next-generation-of-the-internet-at-national-university-of-singapore-300210323.html SOURCE VoiceBox Technologies Corporation

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While acceptance of mobile and other new forms of payments is expected to double in the next two yearsa recent study from Amdocs says this is in part because consumers are looking for cheaper options for transferring moneythere are still hindrances that can stifle mobile payments growth. Indeed, a new global study conducted by Ponemon on behalf of Gemalto shows theres a critical need for organizations to improve their payment security practices before the market can truly mature.

The data for this study comes from a survey of more than 3,700 IT security practitioners from more than a dozen major industry sectors. According to the payment data security study, 54 percent of those surveyed said their company had a security or data breach involving payment data four times in the past two years on average.

This may have to do with the fact that 55 percent of respondents said they dont even know where all of their payment data is stored or located. In addition, the survey reveals that ownership of payment data security isnt centralized, with 28 percent of respondents saying security lies with the CIO, 26 percent saying its the business units responsibility, 19 percent pointing to the compliance department, 15 percent looking to the CISO, and 14 percent saying other departments are responsible for data security.

These independent research findings should be a wakeup call for business leaders, said Jean-Francois Schreiber, senior vice president for Identity, Data and Software Services at Gemalto. Given what was found with traditional payment methods and data security, companies involved with payment data must realize compliance is not enough and fully rethink their security practices, especially since a full one-third of those surveyed said compliance with PCI DSS is not sufficient for ensuring the security and integrity of payment data.

Despite recognizing insufficient security at their organizations, 54 percent of respondents said payment data security is not a top five security priority for their company. Only 31 percent said they feel their company allocates enough resources to protecting payment data. With mobile payments predicted to grow in the coming years, these problems are likely to be exacerbated as companies face further difficulty securing new payment methods.

The financial fallouts from data breaches, and the damages to corporate reputation and customer relationships will carry even greater potential risk as newer payment methods gain adoption, added Schreiber.

Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Fast-rising Ghanaian dancehall and reggae artiste, Ras Kuuku and JKL4real will release a hotly anticipated single exclusively for their fans this week.

Its still a big deal even if youre not a particularly big fan of JKL4real or Ras Kuuku.

Ras Kuukus hit single, titled NUFF GYALS, will stream on Y FM Online Radio and will be released exclusively on 107.9 Yfm with Trigmatic on the Mid-Morning Show.

NUFF GYALS is a masterful move by 4Real Records that might make a lot of people consider switching to listening to songs of Artist under 4real Records.

This single is going to be an absolute monster since Ras Kuuku is no stranger to sudden releases. His last surprise broke over 25 thousand streams in 3 days, beating his own record set in 2006.

4Real Records has managed to surprise fans with a long-rumored single between two of popular and most sparingly hot artists.

Theyve released a single thats a surprise and hotly anticipated at the same time. Thats marketing savvy that should have the people of Africa scratching their chins.

Nobody knows for sure the size or terms of Ras Kuukuss deal with 4Real Records, it could be zero or it could be $10 million, but this single release is a guaranteed hit.

Complain all you want about exclusivity in music, but 4real Records has managed to spin a first single release in 2016, into something a bit bigger and shared. As a fan of music, its thrilling.

Click the link below to listen:
Cape Town (AFP) - Kagiso Rabada took three wickets in two overs as South Africa sent Sri Lanka crashing to a 282-run defeat on the fourth day of the second Test at Newlands on Thursday.

Fast bowler Rabada finished with six for 55 as Sri Lanka crumbled to 224 all out, giving South Africa a winning 2-0 lead in the three-match series. It took South Africa less than two hours to claim the remaining six wickets after the tourists resumed on 130 for four.

Overnight batsmen Angelo Mathews and Dinesh Chandimal played out the first five overs of the day without undue alarm before Rabada struck with the first ball of the sixth over when Chandimal (30) flicked him straight to Stephen Cook at square leg, the only fielder in a largely unmanned area of the field.

New batsman Upul Tharanga showed aggressive intent and hit Rabada for three fours, one off an edge, before flashing at a wide delivery from the first ball of the fast bowler?s next over to be caught behind by Quinton de Kock.

Sri Lankan captain Mathews fell to the last ball of the over, edging a lifting delivery to De Kock after making top score of 49 off 82 balls.

Rabada struck once more when he had Suranga Lakmal caught behind. It was the fifth time in his 13-Test career that he had taken five or more wickets in an innings. He had match figures of 10 for 92, his second ten-wicket haul.

There was a flurry of strokes from Rangana Herath and Lahiru Kumara, who put on 33 for the ninth wicket before Keshav Maharaj and Vernon Philander wrapped up South Africa's win.
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South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar (C) greets people as he arrives to hold a press conference in Kampala, Uganda on January 26, 2016. By Isaac Kasamani (AFP)

27.01.2016 LISTEN

United Nations (United States) (AFP) - A UN panel of experts has recommended imposing sanctions on South Sudan's president, rebel leader and two other top officials for their role in the country's brutal war, diplomats said Tuesday.

A list of four names was submitted to the UN Security Council in a confidential annex to a report by the panel, which also calls for an arms embargo on South Sudan.

President Salva Kiir, rebel chief Riek Machar, army chief of staff Paul Malong and internal security chief Akol Koor were listed for a series of serious rights abuses, according to diplomats familiar with the document.

It is now up to the UN sanctions committee to decide whether to follow the panel's recommendation and slap a global travel ban and assets freeze on the four men.

Imposing sanctions on the leaders would be the strongest step yet taken by the 15-member council, which has been largely powerless to stop the fighting in South Sudan, one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

The council in July imposed sanctions on six commanders -- three from each side -- but the punitive measures appeared to have little impact on the ground.

The panel of experts said Kiir and Machar were responsible for most of the violence committed during the war, now in its third year.

"There is clear and convincing evidence that most of the acts of violence committed during the war, including the targeting of civilians and violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals at the highest levels of government and within the opposition," said the report obtained by AFP.

Kiir and Machar "maintain command responsibility for their respective forces" and both sides have "consistently engaged in actions and policies" that are "grounds for the imposition of targeted sanctions," said the report.

The world's youngest nation, South Sudan has been torn by fighting between forces loyal to Kiir and rebels allied with Machar since December 2013 and the violence has exploded along ethnic lines.

After much international pressure and threats of sanctions, the leaders signed a peace deal in August, but the report confirmed that the agreement had "failed to result in a meaningful reduction of violence."

- Weapons buildup -

The panel said both sides were actively seeking to buy arms and military equipment, even after the signing of the peace agreement.

Last month, Kiir's forces were awaiting delivery of the fourth Mi-24 attack helicopter from a private Ukrainian company, Motor Sich, as part of a $43-million deal, said the report.

It was also seeking to buy four more attack helicopters from a Uganda-based company for $35.7 million.

Rebel forces have received ammunition, some arms and other items such as uniforms from Sudan, it added.

The panel recommended that the council "impose an embargo on the supply, sale or transfer to South Sudan" of arms, weapons, ammunition, military vehicles and spare parts to prevent a worsening of the violence.

The proposal is bound to stir controversy. Angola, China and Russia have resisted calls to slap an arms embargo on South Sudan.

The report confirmed that children were being recruited as soldiers, and that rape was used as a tactic of war by both sides, with girls often abducted to become sex slaves.

"Almost every attack on a village, whether perpetrated by the SPLA, the SPLM/A in opposition or an allied militia, is accompanied by the rape and abduction of women and girls," the report said.

Thousands have died in the war, more than 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes and 3.9 million South Sudanese face severe food shortages, an increase of 80 percent over the past year.

More than 200,000 civilians are sheltering in UN peacekeeping bases.
Cairo (AFP) - Egyptian youth leader Amr Ali whose now banned April 6 movement spearheaded the 2011 revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak is to stand trial Wednesday for incitement, a judicial official said.

The public prosecutor decided on Tuesday to refer Ali, the general coordinator of the movement who was arrested last September, to a criminal court, the judicial official said.

He is accused of inciting a general strike and possessing leaflets, the official added.

Ali is in custody, and three other defendants, currently free on bail, will be tried alongside him.

Ali's lawyer, Anas Sayyed, confirmed that the trial will proceed on Wednesday, and told AFP that the maximum penalty he faces is three years in jail.

In April 2014, an Egyptian court banned the April 6 youth movement, based on a complaint that accused it of defaming the country and colluding with foreign parties.

Its leader Ahmed Maher was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2013 for violating a law banning all but police-sanctioned protests.

And last December, authorities arrested four other April 6 movement leaders.

Sherif Arubi, Mohamed Nabil, Ayman Abdel Megid and Mahmud Hesham were arrested at their homes on December 28, less than a month before the fifth anniversary of the revolution.

April 6 led the January 25, 2011 uprising that ended the autocratic rule of president Mubarak.

It also opposed his successor, Islamist president Mohamed Morsi who was toppled by then army chief and now President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The group then turned on the military-installed regime when authorities cracked down on dissidents.

Since the army toppled Morsi in July 2013, the authorities have cracked down on all opposition.

They adopted a new law in November 2013 outlawing demonstrations that have not been given advance authorisation by the police.

Hundreds of Islamist protesters -- as well as dozens of secular and leftwing demonstrators -- have been jailed under the legislation.

On Monday, Egyptians marked the fifth anniversary of the revolution amid tight security and a warning from the regime that demonstrations will not be tolerated.

Critics have accused Sisi of restoring Mubarak's autocratic rule and betraying the hopes of those who took part in the uprising.
Accra, Jan. 26, GNA - The Coalition of Muslim Organisations in Ghana (COMOG), has called on government to appoint a technical committee that is national in character, to collate all suggestions, views, and contributions on the acceptance of the two ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The collation of such views from civil societies, corporate bodies, religious entities and public, the group believe would allow the current varied discussions to die a natural death.

A statement signed by Haj Abdel Manan Abdel Rahman, General Secretary of the COMOG and copied to the Ghana News Agency said the 'committee must be composed of neutral, credible and non-partisan eminent personalities with security, legal, diplomatic and international relations backgrounds'.

The statement added that the committee should carry out its deliberations in camera within a specified period, and should be provided with all available information on the issue, including details of the deal, and the accurate personal profiles of the two detainees.

"The committee must submit report with specific recommendations that would satisfy all interest groups and individual aspirations, guided and driven by national interest considerations, which override all partisan, religious and parochial interests."

COMOG also urged all and sundry, especially media practitioners, to help end the media war and direct all correspondence, comments, suggestions and recommendations to the proposed Technical Committee if and when constituted.

'We, the Coalition of Muslim Organisations, Ghana are not oblivious of nations devastated by wars and conflicts, fuelled by religious intolerance and sectarian dogmatism.

"We, therefore, wish to assure all doubting Thomases, that we are conscious of our collective and individual responsibilities to save our religion and country from any extremist influences and tendencies, and would jealously guard the harmony and peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Christians, as well as peace and security the nation is currently enjoying."

GNA
Ho, Jan. 26, GNA - VOICE-Ghana, a disability interest think-tank based in Ho, has hinted that it would make disability issues an important topic to be discusses in the 2016 elections.

Mr Francis Asong, Director of Voice-Ghana said the body wants to end the wishy-washy attitude of political parties to concerns of People with Disabilities (PWDs), during campaigns and governance.

He was speaking at a meeting in Ho to evaluate an Inclusive Governance Project for Persons with Disabilities.

Open Society Initiative for West Africa, an American NGO, funded the two-year project, which was implemented by VOICE-Ghana, in 10 districts in the Volta Region.

Mr Asong said the projected Disability Manifesto, akin to the Women's Manifesto, should commit political parties to the statute-backed world trend of mainstreaming issues of disabilities into governance at all levels.

The project on the theme: 'Inclusive Governance for All,' sought to 'increase the voice of the marginalised and socially excluded people with disabilities.'

Beneficiary districts were Akatsi-South, Akatsi-North, Ketu-North, Ketu-South, Nkwanta-North, Nkwanta-South, Krachi-East, North-Dayi, Ho-West and Central-Tongu.

Implementation was done mainly through 20 Self-Help Disability Groups as front-liners, working with District Assembly core staff.

Besides energising PWD's towards a rights-based approach to governance issues, the project raised capacities of local governance staff, along the lines of policy conception, formulation and implementation.

The evaluation meeting covered the project's key results, discussed impact on beneficiaries, collated lessons learnt, evaluated the good practices and heard feedback from beneficiaries on how to scale up project objectives in other districts and regions.

Mr Asong said landmarks of the implementation process included the establishment of memorandum of understanding with the assemblies to commit them to project goals and involvement of PWDs in Public Hearing Sessions and Town Hall meetings.

He said the project mid-year review wanted possible future projects to raise capacities and participation of PWDs in development planning processes, create forums for discussion of development issues and raise awareness of local development stakeholders about disability issues.

Consensus at the evaluation meeting was that the project had moved the districts many steps forward in the involvement of PWDs in local governance.

Angelica Wemegah, Public Relations Officer for an amalgam group of PWDs in the Ketu-South District with a membership of 752 told the GNA that getting a hearing from the assembly authorities was difficult in the beginning but things changed for the better after persistent overtures of project managers.

Philip Zidah said PWD participation and input into the Akatsi-North Districts affairs had resulted in the re-birth of a defunct vocational school at Ave-Afiadenyigba.

Charles Valentine Nyante, Programme Coordinator, VOICE-Ghana said the project was necessitated by a disturbing scenario of PWDs 'largely excluded from development processes and therefore had limited opportunities to engage in public consultations and decision making'.

He said 'anecdotal evidence has shown that people with disabilities generally lacked access to information about their rights and thus lack of knowledge about how to challenge their situation and often suffer discrimination in all aspects of their daily lives'.

An unintended result of the project was the push it gave to PWDs to participate in the recent local government elections.

GNA
Accra, Jan 26, GNA - Mr John Abdulai Jinapor, the Deputy Minister of Power, has urged the public to conserve energy in their usage of power as there is an astronomical increase in power consumption by customers.

'I urge customers to try and conserve energy as we also do our best to work around the clock and solve the challenges posed by our energy system,' Mr Jinapor stated on Tuesday, when he paid an unannounced working visit to some industries in Accra.

The visit, which formed part of the Ministry and its constituted task force comprising Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Volta River Authority and Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo), saw the electricity meters of Latex Foam head office, Dannex and Fan milk Ghana Limited being audited to ensure there were no illegal connections and debts.

The Deputy Minister observed that the visit, which would be a yearlong visit to hotels, ministries, night clubs, departments and agencies, would not only be held in Accra but across the regions.

'We have contacted our district managers to follow suit in their various regions as well as districts,' he said.

Mr Jinapor cautioned customers who were involved in illegal connections to stop, saying 'If you are doing illegal connections we are cautioning you to stop as it breaks the law and if found guilty, the law will deal with you,' he said.

He, however, noted that the major problem of the ECG was money and advised customers to pay their bills on time.

Mr Jinapor indicated that so far, three million Ghana cedis, has been refunded to more than 333,902 consumers who were over billed by the ECG.

He assured customers of better services especially when ECG was overhauling its system.

GNA
26.01.2016 LISTEN

Obuasi, Jan. 26 - GNA - The Progressive Peoples Party parliamentary candidate eyeing the Obuasi East constituency seat, Mr Frank Aboagye Danyansah has expressed an ambition to build a gold refinery in Obuasi to curb joblessness among the youth.

Many of the youth in the gold mining town has been thrown out of jobs following the relocation of AngloGold Ashanti from its concession leading to series of youth protests to demand compensation and re-engagement in the new site.

Mr Danyansah told the Ghana News Agency that the gold processing plant would be capable of creating thousands of jobs in the area, reduce crime and improve living conditions.

'The gold refinery will see to the processing of raw gold ore into finished product and be used for jewellery in the constituency and solve the unemployment problem in Obuasi, because 1000s of jobs will be created,' he said.

'I will also lobby to convert the already existing timber market into an ultra-modern wood village.'

Mr Danyansah, who is an award winning Chief Executive Officer of Danywise Estate and Construction said his vision was motivated by his entrepreneurial expertise and the desire to lead the people with a development focus agenda to slash poverty in the area.

'The Obuasi people deserve better living conditions and ought to be empowered to control their destiny and resources, he said.

'I plan to build an MP's office for the first time in the constituency to get closer to the constituents.

'I will meet every community twice in the term of four years to get first-hand knowledge of their problems and to help, since every community has a unique problem that will be solved,' he said.

The MP aspirant also mulled to build a modern market, ease human and vehicular traffic as weaved into the party's vision of expanding infrastructure and markets to make traders, hawkers and drivers engage in vibrant business activities.

GNA
Accra, Jan 26, GNA - Government has directed the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to rectify all anomalies that had plunged the energy sector into confusion since the implementation of new tariffs on the electricity.

"Government has directed the ECG to solve the problems that have emanated from the implementation of the new tariffs within 14 days."

Mr Haruna Iddrisu, Minister of Employment and Labour Relations who announced this during a meeting between the government negotiating team and Organised Labour at the Flagstaff House, Kanda on Tuesday said the directive is to restore the confidence of consumers in the utility company.

The meeting that was supposed to be concluded on Tuesday was however pushed to Wednesday to enable the stakeholders to fine-tune their positions for amicable agreement.

The Employment Minister said government had agreed to cushion the industrial sector with some reliefs, but the announcement and implementation of the package would hinge on how soon the Association of Ghana Industries would present their proposals.

On the lifeline consumers of electricity, Mr Iddrisu said government had agreed to cushion them but have not yet come out with the modalities of how it would be implemented.

He gave the assurance that everything concerning their agreements would be spelt out by the close of January 27.

Mr Robert Dwamena, Acting Managing Director of the ECG explained that his outfit had so far paid back in excess of GHa 3 million to consumers whose credits are mistakenly deducted in respect of the credit they buy.

He gave the assurance that steps would be taken to rectify the problems to put an end the furore that had been generated by consumers since the implementation of the tariffs.

GNA
Guinness Ghana Breweries Limited (GGBL) has appointed Francis Agbonlahor as the new Managing Director, taking over from Peter Ndegwa who is now the Managing Director for Guinness Nigeria PLC.

Francis Agbonlahor has an exceptional business performance track record spanning over 25 years in the highly competitive, culturally diverse Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FCMG) industry.

He has extensive executive and board level experience; managing demanding and diverse stakeholders and priorities, step changing organizational performance, brand building/performance, developing and growing people, effectively leading strategy to action and effectively connecting with customers and consumers to deliver enduring business goals.

Prior to his new role as Managing Director of GGBL, Mr. Agbonlahor was General Manager of Meta Abo Brewery, Diageos business in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for four years, where he successfully transformed a previously government owned company into a high performing, privatized, global business in Ethiopia. He also served for four years as Supply Chain Director and Board Member of Guinness Nigeria PLC until December 2011 and before that he held various senior roles within Diageo, majority of these in Nigeria. He joined Guinness Nigeria in 1990 as a Graduate Management Trainee fresh from the University.

Speaking on his appointment to Ghana, Simon Harvey  Managing Director of the African Regional Market said, Francis joins the Guinness Ghana with a wealth of experience from other countries. I am confident that leading the executive management team, he will spearhead our ambition of becoming the best performing, most trusted and respected consumer Products Company in Ghana.

Mr. Agbonlahor holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Benin, Nigeria and is a qualified Master Brewer from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling (IBD), United Kingdom. He will also be a member of the GGBL Board.
27.01.2016 LISTEN

THE WAY FORWARD

We have the eerie feeling that the ruling party may have engaged the services of Anas, to come up with a scandal that will be so serious in its implications for national security and scathing in its indictment of judicial corruption, as to bury the public din resulting from the seeming rifeness of political corruption associated with the ruling party. This is just a convenient hypothesis, by the way. However, we draw on Amidus public claims that Anas may have handed over his corpus of investigative work on parliamentary corruption to the Mahama Administration, to cover the latters back, that is the spate of corruption allegations rocking the country. If this is true, then, we want to imply some degree of clandestine collusion between the sitting government and Anas, an unhealthy arrangement that may, in the long run, be counterproductive to reforms in the legislature.

Unfortunately Amidu did not provide verifiable collaborative evidence for his wide-ranging assertions and pontifications. He claimed to have done this to protect the privileged provenances or sources of his wide-ranging moralistic assertions and public pontifications. So we are still waiting. Notwithstanding our reservations with regard to the methodological contestations between Amidu and Anas, it still does not take anything away from what should be done to deal with some of the issues we have raised thus far, as implied in the public tensions between the two activists.

Electoral reforms are high on our laundry list. The Electoral Commission (EC) and state institutions, through the power of constitutional oversight impose and then enforce such hypothetical instruments dealing with statutory caps placed on political parties and their monetization of electioneering campaigns and other electoral activities on the national landscape. This is important as there is also a tendency for foreign governments and corporations to exert undue influence on Ghanaian politics and politicians by offering financial support to political parties.

Financializing politics this way does not augur well for Ghanas budding democracy and national security. Bribery and money laundering from illicit drug activities and other corrupt practices which are the hallmarks of Ghanas partisan duopoly and, if we may add, the blatant use of state properties particularly by incumbency, are now part of the normative landscape of Ghanaian politics. The latter, however, grossly disadvantages small political parties and the main Opposition. Let us be clear: We are not saying political parties do not have the necessary internal oversight structures in place to deal with these questions. What we are saying, rather, is that we want to see certain internal operations of political parties brought under a limited oversight of the EC.

We may even have wished, for instance, if the EC could monitor and regulate intraparty monetization of election procedures and practices, since so much corruption goes on in electing persons to national executive committees, fielding parliamentary candidates and presidential candidates and so on, corrupt practices that eventually go on to reflect badly on the character of national politics in matters of general elections and electioneering campaigns. This may, nevertheless, appear to be asking too much of the organizational constitution of the EC and, possibly, of encouraging or promoting unlawful contravention of the wide range of freedoms, including questions of internal organizational autonomy, which the national Constitution grants political parties and their teeming supporters.

We make the foregoing assertion on the basis of a laymans understanding of Article 55, Clause 5 of the 1992 national Constitution, as well as on Article 55, Clause 14. It is quite possible to deal with some of these problems if the electorate will learn to address its franchise to competence voting, rather than to heaven-like electioneering promises based exclusively on a model of political communication which is, in turn, skewed more toward a rhetoric of political ethnocentrism, ethno-regionalism, economic apocalypse, and regularized instances of panacean psychologizing about the end of economic apocalypse.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It is crucial that the electorate make competence voting part of their voting psychology, in addition to prospective voting and retrospective voting, and not rely on irrelevant valuation indices such as candidate image and other nonverbal variables of presidential hopefuls as some are wont to do.

Competence voting is based on a suit of issues that directly affects citizens and their security, future, economic and biological survival, and health; national development; strong national currency and functional institutions; environmental cleanliness and ecological balance; national pride; improved standard of living and quality of life; their countrys progressive national projection in global affairs; etc., and which of their leaders, in that connection, can actually deliver on these issues. But their leaders are epitomai of corruption and of everything that is apparently wrong with the political psychology of modern state management. For the most part, the masses themselves are not exempt from this general negative characterization as the entrenched corruptibility of politicians somehow reflects the moral depravity of social psychology in the Ghanaian context.

What sort of a country is Ghana where the President and literally hundreds of public office holders are exempted from paying tax, yet millions of the countrys poor citizens are expected to do otherwise? Here is a country whose non-patriotic leaders habitually pay lip service to public sentiment on the need to make open to the public ready access to asset and liability declarations on the part of parliamentarians and other public office holders prior to and at the end of their terms of office, an easy task for the Auditor-General to handle, only for these public officials to amass wealth during and after their terms of office? Parliamentary standing committees are just as useless. We are also not too sure if the constitution of the Council of State is inclusive enough of ideological and partisan diversity. What do our parliamentarians got to say the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) versus the Ghana Hybrid System (GHS)?

What is the leadership of the judiciary saying about the high level of corruption among its ranks, and whether it is just enough not to prosecute those criminal jurists caught in Anas expose by simply dismissing them, and sending them to prison when found guilty? What about the failure to pass the Freedom of Information Bill (FOIB)? What are we also doing to bring in an independent prosecutor to replace the Attorney-General who also doubles as a Minister of Justice? Have we given serious thought to how the role of the Attorney-General in matters of prosecutorial adjudications may itself be undermining judicatorial fairness as well as the political and moral crusade being waged against public corruption, given that the Attorney-General has now and then capitalized on prosecutorial discretion as a tactical avenue of escape for political criminals?

How do we expect to achieve appreciable levels of regional development when the Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) are the drooling dogs of the executive presidency, yes-men whose rise to privileged positions in the hierarchy of the party organization of incumbency is largely beholden to the political patronage of the executive presidency and to an expressly loose political expenditure of executive fiats. The appropriate authorities should look into the mouth-watering freebies given to parliamentarians and other public office holders whether they are deserving of them. The idea of MMDCEs going to school while in office is troubling indeed. One wonders if this does not undermine their productivity and add to bureaucratic inefficiency.

Why these are so is not too difficult to fathom. Plus, we have already said elsewhere that it is in the collaborative efforts between the executive presidency and the legislature under the guise of constitutionality in the execution of the national interest, where the latter institution constitutes a numerical majority from the party of the executive presidency, that the constitutive powers of executive exceptionalism and the political muscularity of executive dominance are most felt. In other words where the executive presidencys gridlock of decisional authority is derived from a quorum based on its partys numerical majority in parliament, we clearly see a constitutive imposition of executive dominance on the body politic, a practice that may not, in and of itself, be a bad thing.

It is only bad when it succeeds in subverting the national interest and handing it over to the political vampires of corporate statism and duopolistic dictatorship. Corporate statists and duopolistic dictators come in various shades and characters as those whose Orwellian khakistocratic brothers and sisters set up the Azu Crabber Commission of Enquiry (1967), which came up with the grandiose canard that Kwame Nkrumah stole millions and hid them in foreign banks, a shameful canard which has not stood the test of time.

Questions? Where is judicial patriotism? Executive patriotism? Parliamentary patriotism?

BOB MARLEY, POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS, & POLITICAL WICKEDNESS

Bob Marley may have had these corporate statists and duopolistic autocrats in mind when he included the following memorable line, They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality, in the iconoclastic track Burnin And Lootin. Then in the revolutionary track Ambush In The Night, Bob sings:

See them fighting for power... But they know not the hour So they bribing with their guns, spare-parts and money, trying to belittle our integrity now They say what we know is just what they teach us; And we're so ignorant'Cause every time they can reach us Through political strategy... They keep us hungry And when you gonna get some food Your brother got to be your enemy Well, what we knowIs not what they tell usWe're not ignorantI mean itAnd they just cannot touch us

While Marley says politicians capitalize on their subjects ignorance to abuse them and cheat them out of the national pie, that is, what is rightfully theirs, he also implies this abuse can only go so far. He says also that there is a tipping point where the same ignorant subjects will rethink their plight and in that connection rise against their wicked political overlords. Thus, the ignorance of the masses is not a permanent birthmark. Change and time probably are. The gathering momentum of critical mass for positive change in social, political and economic dynamics is just a matter of time. The masses are not ignorant and foolish as politicians think their long-suffering and largely de-conscientized subjects are!

Please go and listen to the rest of Bob for the full storyAnd then Sarkodies Dumsor, Wanlov the Kubolors FOKN Country (Fucking Country), Fela Kutis Coffin for Head of StateFelas particular song speaks to the strategic uselessness of African leadership in terms of the question of policy mis-prioritization concerns and of the creeping part political theology plays in undermining clear, focused, and strategic thinking on the part of African leadership. The focus is on Nigeria, but the songs rich lyrical content offers an empirical case study on the crushing failure of African leadership. Listening to this radical political song, however, we get an implied fair sense of what Fela expected of African leadership in terms of the delivery of quality leadership!

We shall return
Health officials in the Volta Region have confirmed a first case of cerebrospinal meningitis, a disease common in the three regions of the north.

The Regional Directorate of the Ghana Health services has been deploying disease control officers to the Krachie West district where the case was recorded.

Disease surveillance is also being stepped up around the region, officials say.

Earlier reports from the region had suggested an outbreak of 7 new cases of pneumococcal meningitis which has so far claimed 33 lives in three regions  Brong Ahafo, Northern and Ashanti regions.

However, Regional Director of Ghana Health Services, Joseph Teye-Nuertey, told Joy News Kwabena Owusu-Ampratwum the reports were not accurate.

 The conditions in Krachie are just like in the north [of the country]. So if in the north you normally have such cases around this time of the year, then it is not out of place to have a case like this in Krachie West, he said.

He said the Ghana Health Service in the region has been on high alert since the outbreak of pneumococcal meningitis in the Northern Region.

We just called back all the disease control officers in the district to move to this community where the case is suspected to have come from and then try to screen people for observation, Dr Teye-Nuertey told Joy News.
TAKE ME BACK TO BRITAIN TO FACE TRIAL  FUGITIVE

The British national, who allegedly murdered his girlfriend and his two sons, has voluntarily subjected himself to repatriation to the United Kingdom (UK) to face the law.

GOVERNMENT DIRECTS ECG TO REFUND EXCESS CHARGES IN 14 DAYS

The government has given the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) 14 days to refund all excess charges to its customers.

CPC SHUTS DOWN TWO PLANTS DUE TO OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES

The Cocoa Processing Company (CPC) Limited has temporarily shut down its two cocoa processing plants because of what it describes as operational challenges.

I WANT TO GO HOME  UK WIFE KILLER GIVES UP

An Accra High Court on Tuesday ordered the extradition to London of Arthur Simpson Kent, the 48-year-old British/Ghanaian accused of allegedly murdering his actress girlfriend and their two children.

BURKINA TERRORIST GRABBED

One of the suspected terrorists who recently took neighbouring Burkina Faso by storm leaving in his wake 30 dead bodies and several others seriously injured has been arrested in Ghana.

BAWUMIA STORMS COCOA FARMS

Vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Mahamudu Bawumia, has decried the continuous decline in the countrys coca industry.

RIP OFF IN GNAT: a200,000 EXIT PACKAGE FOR GENERAL SECRETARY

While the ordinary teacher might just be fortunate to receive a small radio set and a diary at the end the year for his/her contribution as a member of the Ghana National Association of Teachers, top officials of the Association are feeding fat and comfortably remunerating themselves with the millions of cedis poor teachers contribute to the Association.

SEND ME TO UK  MURDER SUSPECT TELLS COURT

The boyfriend of ex-East Enders actress Sian Blake, Arthur Simpson Kent who has been accused of murdering the actress and their two sons, has waived his extradition process before a High Court on Tuesday.

BUSY LAUNCHES 4G DATA SERVICE

Ghanas leading internet service provider, Busy, formerly known as Busy Internet, has taken another major leap with the introduction of a cutting edge 4G data service.

FPSO ATTA MILLS SETS SAIL FOR GHANA

The FPSO Atta John Evans Atta Mills, which will produce and store oil from Ghanas Twenboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN) offshore oil fields, began its voyage to Ghana on January 23, 2016.

COCOA PROCESSING COMPANY SENDS 60 WORKERS HOME

Over 60 workers of Cocoa Processing Company in Tema in the Greater Accra Region have been laid off by the company.

OIL IMPORT BILL GOES DOWN $1.5B

Ghanas spending on oil imports declined by more than #1.54 billion in 2015, mainly on account of crude oil price collapsing on the world market.

SADAS DREAM WONT BE SCUTTLED  CEO

Chief executive Officer of the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority, Charles Abugre is confident the broad consultation proceeding the adoption of a Master plan of the SADA area will make the plan impossible to abandon irrespective of any regime change.

POWER MINISTRY TO UNDERTAKE TRANSMISSION LINES AUDIT

The Power Ministry says it has given the Energy Commission a two-week ultimatum to undertake a nationwide audit of the countrys power transmission network following a fault in one of the transmission lines that led to massive blackouts in a greater part of the country.
Accra, 26th January, 2016- Instinct Wave, organisers of the Ghana Telecom Awards, Ghana Construction Awards, Ghana CFO Awards and 3rd West African Telecom Summit & Expo open nominations for 2016 Ghana Public Sector Awards.

A statement issued in Accra by Deborah Arthur, Project Manager of the 2016 Ghana Public Sector Conference and Awards, said the award recipients would be honoured at a premium networking dinner scheduled on the 23rd of April 2016 at the Movenpick Ambassador Hotel in Accra. The event will bring together the best innovative and efficient performers from Ghanas public sector.

The deadline for the entries to be nominated for the 2016 Ghana Public Sector Awards is on the 29th of February 2016, the theme for the GPSA2016 awards is: Rewarding & Promoting Excellence in The Public Sector.

The awards will recognize excellence in the delivery of public services to Ghanaians by the public sector organizations and the stake holder businesses supporting national growth.

The key objective of the awards is to reward the creative achievements and contributions of public service institutions that lead to a more robust and encompassing administration in Ghana. It also seeks to reinstate public opinion on delivery of public services and complements the change currently going on in Ghanas democracy.

The Private sector has witnessed different kinds of awards and recognitions over the years. It may be interesting, to note that, the Public sector has however been underrated and discredited with failure and negativity. In the real sense of it, public sector has not been well represented, and thus has been under celebrated. The statement said.

The judging criteria would include an assessment on outstanding achievements and efforts among public sector institutions, growth, vision and innovation, personal integrity and commitment, strategic marketing and corporate social responsibility involvement in Ghanas economic growth. Also assessing will be commitment and dedication to departmental goals and priorities, demonstrated professionalism, intelligent risk taking and strong ethics in their day-to-day work while adhering to sound human and financial resources management practices.

A panel of judges will be invited to review the nominations and decide winners in the various categories.

Below is a List of 2016 Ghana Public Sector Awards Categories;

Driving Efficiency through technology Adoption

Excellence in Business Transformation

Excellence in Public Private Partnership

Excellence in Public Public Partnership

Excellence in Community Engagement

Excellence in promoting & Supporting Education

Excellence in Promoting Pension

Excellence in Employment and Training for young people

Excellence in Governance & scrutiny

Best public sector website

Excellence in promoting Financial Literacy

Excellence in Trading standard

Excellence in Sport Development

Excellence in Promoting Green Environment

Excellence in Health & Safety

Excellence in Youth Development

Excellence in promotion Art, Culture & Lifestyle

Excellence in promoting Foreign Investment

Public Sector Agency of the Year

Excellence in Delivering Customer Services

Excellence in Waste Management & Recycling service

Excellence in Transport & Fleet service

Most Sustainable Public Sector Project

Most Innovative Public Sector Agency

Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility

Excellence in Energy Management

Most improve Government Agency of the Year

INDIVIDUAL / SPECIAL RECOGNITION CATEGORIES
The Ambassador of Indonesia, H.E. Mr. Sunu M. Soemarno has today bid farewell to President James Michel in a meeting held at State House, following his three and half-year tenure in office.

President James Michel commended Ambassador Soemarno for his efforts in enhancing cooperation between Seychelles and Indonesia and wished him all the best in his new posting. It was noted that the two countries need to work together in order to achieve more progress at bilateral level. During the meeting, the President and Ambassador Soemarno discussed various issues of mutual interest such as combating transnational crime in the Indian Ocean. They also discussed the facilitation and increase of trade and investment opportunities in both countries.

Speaking to the local press after the meeting, Ambassador Soemarno said that bilateral relations between Seychelles and Indonesia have developed at various levels and that there were still opportunities for a stronger partnership. Officials of both countries have had the chance to strengthen the diplomatic contact with each other and we hope that this will be enhanced in the future... As Indonesia holds the Chairmanship of the Indian Ocean Rim Association and Seychelles occupies the Chairmanship of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia , I am sure we can assist each other in those roles... I am sure that my successor will speed up the works undertaken to facilitate air and maritime transport between the two states of the Indian Ocean, concluded the outgoing Indonesian Ambassador.

The farewell call was attended by the Diplomatic Adviser in the Office of the President Ambassador Callixte d'Offay, and the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Indonesia based in Seychelles, Mr. Harry Tirant. Ambassador Soemarno was based in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Peace and Security Council of the African Union (AU), at its 568thmeeting held on 18 January 2016, received a briefing by the Panel of the Wise on its activities relating to conflict prevention in Africa.

Council took note of the presentation made by a member of the Panel of the Wise, former Vice President of the Republic of Uganda, Dr. Speciosa Wandira-Kezibwe.

Council commended the important contribution that the Panel of the Wise plays, which contributes to the effectiveness of the PSC in discharging its mandate of promoting peace, security and stability in Africa, within the overall context of the African Peace and Security Architecture.

Council stressed the need for regular interactions between the Council and the Panel of the Wise, as well as for the Panel of the Wise to regularly submit its reports and conclusions of its retreats to the Council.

Council also stressed the need for the Panel of the Wise to keep the Council informed, including through horizon scanning, as part of early warning, with regard to peace and security situations on the continent, in order to enable the Council to take appropriate and timely decisions.

Council underscored the urgent need for enhancing the capacity of the Secretariat that supports the Panel of the Wise, including through the mobilization of additional human, material and financial resources with a view to ensuring that the Panel discharge its mandate more effectively.

Council looked forward to regular interactions with the Panel of the Wise.
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Really desire to wrestle power from the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) come election 2016?

From empirical observations, I am a bit doubtful about the readiness and sincerity of the other opposition parties, excluding New Patriotic Party (NPP) of course, to wrestling power from NDC to save Ghana from the diabolical economic hardships and country mismanagement visited upon Ghana by President Mahama and his bunch of clueless cum incompetent Government Ministers, party gurus and cronies.

Either the leaders of the various opposition parties are as clueless about the strategies of winning elections as NDC is clueless about managing the economy, or they simply cannot be bothered about rescuing Ghanaians from the satanic grips of President Mahama, the so-called youth born after Gold Coast gaining her political independence in 1956, hence a full-blooded Ghanaian.

Why am I raving and ranting, the reading public may wish to know? Why should I not rave and rant when with all the economic rot, blatant daylight plundering of the coffers of the nation by President Mahama and his government, open nauseating institutional tribalism and corruption seeping through the very fabric of Ghana politics, the opposition parties keep RAMIFYING instead of UNITING? Does this very attitude by the opposition parties show any seriousness on their part as parties or leaderships desirous of liberating Ghana and Ghanaians from the shackles of Black on Black slavery that President Mahama and NDC have bonded about 99% of Ghanaians?

What is ramifying by the way? Ramify is to divide or spread out into branches or branchlike parts; extend into subdivisions.

Are parties like PPP, PNC, CPP and the newly-formed APC (All Peoples Congress) by Mohammed Hassan Ayariga alias Ayaricough, be able to win general elections on their own to form a government to rule Ghana even for half a day? I am afraid not!

If such parties never stand one in chance in a million times to win elections on their own limping legs to rule Ghana, why should they not all merge with say, NPP, to chase the UNPRECEDENTEDLY CORRUPT NDC government out of power to bring smiles back on the faces of the currently suffering Ghanaians?

If the opposition parties are serious and do really care about the concerns of Ghanaians, and without wanting to prove themselves jokers and empty barrels making most noise, they SHOULD begin consultations to merge with NPP now!

There should not be the question of ideological blocks or reasons to hamper any desire of theirs to unite to chase out the NDC devils who are wickedly flaying Ghana alive. It is a time and season to unite as one viable opposition party resolutely determined to salvage Ghana from total economic annihilation under the hands of President Mahama and his NDC government.

Do any of the independent Presidential candidates honestly hope to win elections in Ghana to ascend to the nations presidency? Instead of joining forces together to get rid of President Mahama, my younger brother Dr Abu Sakkara is going independent. Even in the CPP, he could not make any meaning advances or headway onto the presidency ladder, how can he do so as an independent candidate if he is not only tickling himself and laughing?

This reminds of the Akan adage which translates as, When the rain was pouring heavily, your bucket could not be fully filled, now that it is only drizzling, how will the bucket be full?

Unless people want their CVs to look good with a reference of having once contested for the presidency of Ghana, or formed a political party, I see their moves as a mere joke.

Let us see all the serious and meaningful opposition political parties and their leaders unite under the umbrella of the Great Elephant (NPP) to kick President Mahama and NDC out of power come election 2016.

I want to see action but not mere talk. You keep complaining about Ghana sinking under the weight of the disastrous official corruption masterminded and spearheaded by President Mahama and his government, yet you are doing nothing positive to indicate that you are ready to save the nation from total collapse.

Is having fragmented opposition parties going to the polls on 7th December 2016 your best solution of booting the ruling party out of power to save Ghana from her economic precipice or abyss? If that is your plan, then please, please, please, give me a break. Dont be jokers!!!!!

Rockson Adofo
27.01.2016 LISTEN

We all vote based on different kinds of reasons and for diverse leadership qualities. Whatever rationale one has, our democracy grants one the right to vote and to use that right however one wants. However, the secrecy of the ballot entails we can never tell how well people use that right.

Hence, it is important to have more civic education and a good constitution to strengthen people's effective participation into the democratic process, not by merely voting but by voting based on credible information. Lets have a look at what kind of voters we may be and the associated biases we can avoid.

The Self-Benefit Voter:

These make up a candidates support base as they simply cannot bend. They are usually the party leaders,relatives, friends and sponsors who expect a direct benefit from the candidates victory. The quality of this support base can have a positive influence on the other types of voters. This voters reasons are compromised and engaging them in a debate is mostly useless as they are biased and not open to criticism. Lesson: We cant change their minds, the only thing we can do is observe their conduct as this can reflect their true intention for the country.

The sympathy Voter:

For instance, these voters will vote for President John Mahama because of late Professor Atta Mills presidency was inadvertent cut short. These voters will vote for President John Mahama because the Late President Atta Mills trusted him with power. These voters will vote for President John Mahama because he didn't finish his term. These voters will vote for Nana Akuffo Addo because he has lost several times. The sympathy voter, is an emotional voter who will relate to the circumstances of the candidate and not the qualities. Emotional voting should be avoided by all means period. Lesson: These voters need to learn that the interest of the nation are more important than the compensation to a candidate in whatever circumstances.

The Wind Voter:

Are you a voter who goes with the wind, you follow the crowd, use the buzz words and spend more time chanting party slogans than debating issues? You may want to fit in with peers and are too lazy to make independent decisions. You need to know that it is not about the name of the candidate but their message and track record. The ruling party and the strongest opposition usually captures these voters and the supporters may switch allegiance between the two. These voters need to look beyond the noise and watch the conduct of party officials not their words. Lesson: These voters need to learn the elections are not just for the moment but that their decision will shape them next four years.

The Undecided Voter:

This voter make his or her decision in the last few days. They spend most of their time listening or criticising all the candidates. They are pessimists and require more explanations from candidates and not rhetoric. They usually have nothing in common with the candidates or party and may feel there are segregated from the political process. The undecided may have been disappointed by their preferred candidates past performance and have lost hope in them. These may also include minorities, certain religious groupings or races. Lesson: Politicians are not perfect but there is always a lesser evil, your vote may be amongst the best ones.

The Common Interest Voter:

This voter engages in the politics and spends time listening to candidates and fellow electorates. They are receptive to all candidates and prefer one who meets their most valued interest. They are usually the first timers or young voters who want tertiary education, the women who want empowerment, the nurses who want better working conditions or young entrepreneurs who want contracts. These voters will make good decision depending on how much information is made available to them. Due to their numbers they form a very good swing vote. Lesson: Dont concentrate on one common interest with the candidate but look at the whole picture or the context in which your interests will be met.

The disaffected Voter:

These voters are highly discontented towards authority. They feel the whole system is a failure and a candidate or party with a poor track record does not stand a chance. They are the employees or traders who cant get a loan, the graduate who cant find a job, the unpaid retirees, the nurses who got fired, the working class family that is financially stressed and the disgruntled unions, civil society or NGOs. This voter group distrusts politicians but lookout for better alternatives.

These voters have experience with election candidates and will improve their choice with every election that comes. Lesson: Dont make the mistake of giving up on voting, you are probably the most important group due to you large numbers and good judgement

The Sophiscated Voter:

This voter is educated, has a good job, may be highly engaged in politics, or is a political analyst or pundit and is well informed. This voter knows what he wants and asks the how questions. He is not influenced by populism or the wind of change but makes independent decisions.

He has preference to an equally educated candidate and well explained manifestos. He is sensitive to questionable characters and seeks improvement in the style of politics. This voter knows there is no best candidate but can objectively chose a better candidate. Lesson: Most of these voters need to engage more in debates with everyone not just amongst themselves, because they can add value to the process.

Politics as a game of numbers, a politician cannot ignore one voter group for the other. Each group has some influence over the other and each group can be the difference between victory or loss. They say your vote counts but your good vote matters more. Identify which group you belong to, look out for the biases and choose wisely. Ibrahim Hardi,contact 0208235615,Email [email protected]
The Minister will be focusing on peace, security and prosperity during his meetings at the AU Summit.

Mr Duddridge said:

We have seen Africa rocked by conflict and terrorism for too long. Peace and security will be at the top of my agenda in all the meetings I have this week. This is an area where I hope the UK can make a real difference, from practical support to the countries currently battling Boko Haram to active peacekeeping with British forces deploying as UN troops to Somalia and South Sudan this year. Without security it is difficult for people and nations to thrive.

An Africa that is peaceful and thriving is in all our interests. Economic development that brings prosperity is a subject that is close to my heart and one that I am keen to promote at every opportunity. It will soon be the case that there is more Foreign Direct Investment flowing into Africa from the UK than development assistance. That can only be a good thing. Ensuring business and the private sector can flourish, creating jobs and generating taxes, will benefit us all.

In Africa today I see a continent of hope and opportunity, of creativity and drive. Together we are all working towards a common goal of a peaceful, prosperous and integrated Africa. The 26th AU Summit gives us the chance to bring that a step closer.

Prior to his arrival to the summit, the Minister is visiting South Sudan to encourage progress in implementing the peace agreement. The UK has worked closely with regional bodies to help secure the current peace deal.

Ahead of arriving in South Sudan Mr Duddridge said: There are a few places that better demonstrate the need for proactive and united regional, African Union and international, engagement more than Africa's youngest country. More is now needed, especially from South Sudan's leaders, to ensure the deal sticks and to begin to piece together a country that has been broken by conflict.
Seychelles resident Ambassador in Beijing, Ms. Vivianne Fock Tave, has presented her Letters of Credence to H.E President Park Geun-hye in a ceremony held in Seoul on 15th January 2016.

During the audience with the South Korean President, Ambassador Fock Tave conveyed the warm wishes of President James Michel and the People of Seychelles and expressed their appreciation for the valuable assistance provided by South Korea over the years, including assistance in the fight against piracy in the Western Indian Ocean. The Seychelles Ambassador also reassured President Park Geun-hye of Seychelles support to the Republic of Korea on matters of global importance, in particular on issues which are affecting her country. As we approach the 40th Anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between our two countries, it is the hope of the Government and the People of Seychelles that we shall continue to share the warm ties of friendship that exist between us, remarked Ambassador Fock Tave.

In her address, President Park Geun-hye pointed out that Seychelles was blessed with an abundance of marine resources. In this regards, she congratulated President Michel for promoting the Blue Economy concept on the international arena and for adopting the policy in the sustainable development of the Seychelles vulnerable and fragile economy. She also shared the sentiments of the Seychelles Ambassador for a continuation of excellent relations between the two countries.
The new Ambassador of of Finland to Seychelles, H.E. Ms. Tarja Fernandez, presented her credentials to President James Michel at State House today.

President Michel and Ambassador Fernandez spoke about creating new partnerships in renewable energy, as well as other bilateral projects concerning sustainable development, environment and energy.

They also spoke about the need to maintain peace and security in the Indian Ocean, and use the existing anti-piracy structures to fight against transnational crime, particularly drugs, which would ensure stability in the region.

Ambassador Fernandez told the national media that she intends to further the cooperation between the two countries particularly in the energy sector.

" There are quite a few areas where we have common interests...We have been supporting some of the sustainable energy/solar power projects here in the past and some of them are still ongoing.The area of security is an area we have been cooperating and we will continue...Finland is part of the training crew that is training the East Africa Standby Force and they have organised courses in the region. Seychelles has been very active in this framework. We are looking forward to organising a course this year as well," said Ambassador Fernandez.

Ambassador Tarja Fernandez is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Also present during the meeting were the Principal Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Maurice Loustau-Lalanne, the President's Diplomatic Adviser, Ambassador Callixte D'Offay, and the Honorary Consul of Finland based in Seychelles, Ms. Marja Karjalainen.
The government has given the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) 14 days to refund all excess charges to its customers.

Already, the ECG says it has refunded over GH3 million resulting from the billing defect but the government wants the process to be expedited in order to restore sanity in the system.

At a meeting at the Flagstaff House yesterday to address the concerns of labour unions over recent adjustments in utility tariffs and petroleum prices, the Minister of

Employment and Labour Relations, Mr Haruna Idrissu, noted with concern that some of the charges that astronomically shot up electricity bills were not attributable to the adjustments announced by the Public Utilities and Regulatory Commission (PURC).

'The ECG is, accordingly, directed to take steps to end, within 14 days, the refund process,' he said.

The Chief Executive of the ECG, Mr Robert Dwamena, who was at the meeting, said everything was being done to make full refunds.

He said any refund made was verifiable and so customers should have nothing to fear.

PURC's earlier directive

Last Monday, the PURC gave the ECG and the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) up to February 5 to refund excess bills to customers and threatened to impose sanctions on the two utility providers if they failed to heed to the directive.

In a statement, the commission warned that failure by the utility providers to comply with the order by February 5 would result in a surcharge of five per cent of the excess amount overbilled to every affected customer, in addition to the refund.

Far-reaching decisions

Although yesterday's meeting could not arrive at a final resolution on the workers' demands, the parties, nevertheless, took what the minister described as far-reaching decisions.

For instance, the Employment Minister said, the committee accepted the government's principle to cushion industry following the adjustments.

Consequently, the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) was asked to submit a comprehensive proposal to the President and the Minister of Finance detailing the prioritisation of key areas for immediate support.

Besides, he said, organised labour tabled some adjustments to its previous positions, which was indicative of the spirit behind the negotiations.

He gave an assurance that the decision reached to cushion lifeline consumers and the vulnerable over utility tariff adjustments would be communicated to the public.

The committee would continue its meeting today in a bid to bring a final resolution to the discussions.
Koforidua, Jan. 26, GNA - Mr Antwi Boasiako Sekyere, the outgoing Eastern Regional Minister, has said the land for the construction of a public university in the region is ready for construction works to begin shortly.

The proposed university for environment and sustainable development in the Eastern Region is in fulfillment of a promise made by President John Dramani Mahama to provide the region with a public university to enable the increasing population to access higher education.

Mr Antwi-Boasiako Sekyere made the remarks at the 58th Anniversary and Speech and Prize-Giving day of Pope John Senior High School and Minor Seminary, at Koforidua.

Mr Sekyere said Parliament had already passed the law for the establishment of the university and a committee set up to develop its curriculum had completed their work.

Mr Sekyere said other interventions in the region such as the construction of 123 Senior High Schools( SHS) out of the 200 promised by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in its manifesto were in progress.

He said classroom blocks and dormitories had been provided for selected SHSs and JHSs in the region, all in efforts to create access to education at all levels.

Mr Sekyere said the Pope John SHS and Minor Seminary has benefitted from the construction of a 2000-capacity assembly hall and two blocks of four unit teachers bungalow, metal bunker beds, mattresses and dual desks.

The guest speaker of the function, Professor Kojo Ofori of the University of Ghana, called for cooperation among stakeholders to plan for children's education and their future.

He advised teachers and parents to be role models for their children and also tasked students to take their studies serious to ensure their bright future.

The headmistress of the school, Mrs Benedicta Foli, said Pope John was established in 1958 as a private school with 45 students under the name, St John's Seminary and College.

It was later renamed Pope John Secondary School and Minor Seminary when it was absolved into the public educational system in 1968.

She said the school had won several awards in both academic and extra-curricular activities including sports.

Mrs Foli said at the 2015 West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), the school scored 100 percent with 92.8 percent of the 639 students presented passing in eight subjects, while Master Isaac Nkansah Osafo, who had eight 'As' earned a scholarship to study at a university in Germany.

She, particularly, urged the media to be circumspect in their reportage about the school, as unconfirmed publication about the school created unnecessary panic among parents.

Mrs Foli called for support for the completion of the school's dining hall, provision of teacher's bungalows and the resolution of the drainage problem between the school and its neighbours.

As part of the celebration, the 1992 year group presented a 4.8 KW electricity solar system to the school for use at the classroom block and the dining hall to reduce their energy bill.

Deserving students and long serving staff of the school were presented with prizes.

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

It started in 2008 with huge bill boards, Chinese designed posters and a promise of Better Ghana. In the run-up to 2008 the NDC set out in a wicked agenda to besmear the NPP with dirt. A day never passed without one accusation or the other corruption charges heaped on the NPP. They said the NPP leadership was living luxurious lifestyles and that the leadership of the party did not have the welfare of Ghanaians at heart. Electricity and water tariffs, they said were unbearable and the Kufour administration was out there to kill Ghanaians. In fact, they made the NPP looked like the devil incarnate and they were always on the neck of the sitting president, Mr. Agyekum Kufour. According to these nation wreckers, Kufour did nothing to warrant his party coming to power again.

They closed their eyes to all the social intervention programmes introduced by the Kufour administration to assuage the suffering of the poor in society and bastardized everything that the man did for the good of the nation. Even when Kufour introduced the Peoples' Assembly for Ghanaians to have the opportunity to ask him whatever questions were baffling their minds, the NDC formed a group to travel to wherever the Peoples' Assembly were held in every region to ask embarrassing questions and sometimes insult the president. At Sunyani, a herbalist and an NDC supporter called Dr Asemfoforo literally poked his finger into the eye of the president and took him to the cleaners, but Kufour appealed to angry supporters of the NPP to spare him because that was some of the prices we had to pay in order to nurture democracy in the country.

At Accra where one of the Peoples' Assembly was organized, Okudjeto Ablakwa who used to roam the streets of Accra without a job insulted the president but all what Kufour did was to advise the young man to learn how to address the elderly because one day he will also grow. In fact Kufour made sure he organized the Peoples' Assembly in all the ten regions of Ghana. When the NDC realized that Ghanaians admired the whole project, they promised Ghanaians that when they hold the rein of power they will rather organize Town Hall meetings in all the districts so that people will have the opportunity to question their respective MMDCEs. It has been seven years since that promise was made but that dream has been thrown into the Pacific Ocean where whales have swallowed it.

The late Professor Mills accused then President Kufour of criss-crossing the country with unacceptable long convoy and travelling outside the country 'by heart'. Even when the price of crude oil at the world market hit $147.00 per barrel, an unprecedented and colossal hike which was never seen before in the history of petroleum prices and the Kufour administration decided to increase the prices of petroleum products, hell broke loose. Led by Kwasi Pratt, a chameleon of a politician, the Committee for Joint Action took to the streets in all the regional capitals of Ghana to demonstrate against the government. Even when the situation at Tamale was very volatile due to the death of the Ya Naa and the police refused to give them permit to demonstrate there, they took the law into their own hands and demonstrated.

Madam Ama Benyiwa Doe, are you there? It was this loud  mouth politician who told Ghanaians that the NDC had made some calculations and have realized that taxes on petroleum products were too much and that when the NDC came to power they will remove the taxes to make the prices of petroleum products very cheap. Then running mate, Mr. John Dramani Mahama went to Techiman in the Brong Ahafo Region to campaign in the run-up to the 2012 general election and speaking at ASTA FM, a local radio station, he told the listening public that the NHIS which was introduced by the Kufour administration was not the best because the poor man could not afford to pay a yearly premium to join the scheme.

He said, as written in the manifesto of the NDC, when the party held the reins of power they would introduce a one-term premium so that every Tom, Dick and Harry would be brought on board. He said since the rich buy milk, beer and other luxurious items and pay VAT on them, the amount received from VAT alone could make the one-term premium payment possible. On that same radio station on that same day, Mr. Mahama told the listeners that the NPP government has destroyed agriculture and that when the NDC came to power the party will introduce Mechanized Farming and make agriculture attractive to the teeming youth who troop to the big towns for non-existing jobs. The man knew greater number of the people in the Brong Ahafo Region were farmers and so when he wooed them along that line he would get votes and true to that, the people of Brong Ahafo voted for the NDC in 2012. Today agriculture is virtually dead in the Brong Ahafo Region and the fertilizer subsidy which was introduced by the Kufour administration has been thrown to the dogs.

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When the Volta River virtually dried up and the Akosombo Dam faced some serious challenges, the NDC seized the opportunity to castigate the Kufour administration as being insensitive to the plight of businessmen and women whose businesses were collapsing as a result of power outages. Kofi Adda, the then Minister of Energy was always at the receiving end as the NDC goons and hounds descended on him, accusing him of being incompetent. The man treated their accusation with contempt and worked around the clock to make sure the situation was normal. Today I hear the generators Mr. Adda imported to solve the problem have been sold by the NDC regime while dumsor continues unabated. Meanwhile the Volta River is overflowing its banks but the Akosombo Dam is operating at half capacity.

Ex-president Kufour went on an official visit to India and seized the opportunity to beg the Indian government to build a befitting Presidential Palace for Ghana because the Castle, which was then the Presidential Palace used to be a slave dungeon. The Indian government willingly offered to grant Ghana money to build the Flagstaff House which was renamed Jubilee House. Asiedu Nketia and Ama Benyiwa Doe, are you people there? Asiedu Nketia told Ghanaians when the Jubilee House was built that when the NDC came to power, they will use the place as hospital because Korle-Bu could not serve the many patients who patronize the facility while Ama Benyiwa Doe said the place would be turned into a poultry farm. Today a certain cockerel called John Mahama and his fellow chickens are brooding in the Flagstaff House. You see how God works? And yet Mahama is telling Ghanaians that we are all forgetful and shortsighted!!!

I am recounting all these promises made by the NDC for the sake of the eighteen-year old boy or girl who will be voting this year because as at the time these promises were made, he or she was barely ten years old. These group of persons need to know all these failed promises so that they can sieve the wheat from the chaff when the electioneering campaign is in full gear. They were able to hoodwink some Ghanaians with such juicy promises and we should not allow them to hoodwink these younger generation.

After failing to deliver these promises and more, all what the NDC are saying now are;  We have built schools, we have built roads, we have built CHIPP Compounds, we have built clinics etc, as if from the days of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah no government had ever built such facilities. The NDC took seven years to destroy the foundation laid down by Kufour and surely they cannot take the eleven months remaining to fix it. They have only one trump card left in their pile of cards: plan to steal the election. And that too is very dangerous because once bitten, twice shy. If they try anything funny and the country plunges into chaos, they will be the losers because they have stolen monies, built luxurious mansions and acquired several landed properties. If there is any anarchy, their properties will be targeted.

And if they fear that when they lose the election an NPP government or any other incoming government will probe them, they should forget it. Because any government that will come after the NDC leaves office will have no time to lose. The mess they have caused is so enormous that any president who will take over from INCOMPETENT Mahama will have to work around the clock to fix the mess and there will not be any time for witch hunting. We will pray for them to live long in this country to see how an economy is managed. Change is coming Indeed!!!

Eric Bawah


27.01.2016 LISTEN

Dr Bawumia in Torompan  Amenfi West

Vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has decried the continuous decline in the country's cocoa industry.

Addressing cocoa farmers at Berekum in the Amenfi West constituency of the Brong-Ahafo Region, the celebrated economist and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) said, The cocoa industry itself in Ghana is collapsing. If you look at the cocoa sector in the Ivory Coast and you look at Ghana, there is a clear difference in how the sector is going. Pointing at a farm close by, he observed: If you look at this farm behind us, most of the cocoa trees in it are dying.

He blamed the situation on President Mahama and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration, which he (Bawumia) has often labelled as incompetent.

Concern

That, he said, was because the NDC introduced politics into the Mass Spraying policy for example; they forgot that cocoa farms are like a network and so if one farm gets damaged, it will spread to other farms and so it is not smart to discriminate like the NDC has done because it is farmers who create wealth for this country and so by helping farmers, you are helping Ghana.

For him, any government that therefore does politicisation with a sensitive issue like cocoa is only damaging Ghana. The economy of Ghana is going down at the same time cocoa is going down.

Dr Bawumia recalled how under the erstwhile Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government cocoa production was raised from 341,000 tonnes to about 700,000 tonnes between 2001 and 2008.

Thanks to the good work of the NPP, cocoa production hit the historic one million mark in 2010/2011. This was due to policies like the Mass Spraying and Fertilizer Subsidy Programmes as well as other policiesbecause under the NPP, our view was that for Ghana to do well, cocoa must do well. It is because of this we introduced the Mass Spraying Programme and Fertilizer Subsidy Programme.

Now, the NPP vice presidential candidate said, these have collapsed.

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Dr Bawumia with Cocoa farmer Sabi Tetteh in Brekum -Amenfi West

Dr Bawumia with Cocoa farmer Sabi Tetteh in Brekum -Amenfi West

Assurance

But when elected into government, Dr Bawumia indicated, the NPP would aggressively pursue policies that would ensure that 500,000 metric tonnes are added to the current output in 10 years and that the achievement of this vision would be hinged on supporting the hardworking cocoa farmers to produce more and cultivate more trees.

Our policy is to immediately restore the Mass Cocoa Spraying and Fertilizer Subsidy Programmes as well as a policy to supply and bring new seedlings into cultivation because without this, the Ivory Coast will leave us behind and we will soon fall below 500,000 metric tonnes; but our vision is to introduce policies that will see the addition of 500,000 metric tonnes to the output now, he promised the farmers.

That, according to Dr Bawumia, is going to be an intensive exercise and we will support our cocoa farmers greatly to achieve this because when cocoa does well, Ghana does well but the NDC has failed to realise this.

He therefore urged cocoa farmers and all involved in the cocoa sector to support Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP because it is the party that has demonstrated the capacity to grow the cocoa sector with well thought-out policies.

Dr Bawumia took the opportunity to visit various cocoa farms in Berekum and other communities in the Amenfi West Constituency to see for himself the extent of decline in the sector.

He was accompanied on the tour by the parliamentary candidate for the area, Paul Dekyi.

By Charles Takyi-Boadu


The market section of the land

27.01.2016 LISTEN



Hundreds of homes and livelihoods in the Ashanti Regional capital of Kumasi are set to be destroyed in another demolition exercise.

The Lands Commission seeks to recover a state land that has been sold to the presidential candidate of the United Progressive Party (UPP), Akwasi Addai Odike.

The land, about six acres and located around the Santasi roundabout, is housing small and medium size businesses, shops, a mini market and is also serving as a place of abode for some northern settlers and a terminal for tipper truck drivers.

Occupiers, numbering about 2,000, have been given notice to immediately vacate the site ahead of an application to redevelop the area.

The private developer, Akwasi Addai, who claims to be the leaseholder of the site, is on the neck of the Lands Commission to execute a court order to get rid of the occupants who were served notice last Thursday.

He told DAILY GUIDE in an interview that he needed the land to begin his Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) testing project which has been scheduled to commence in December this year.

The UPP leader said he had secured building permit and other necessary documentations for the commencement of the project under a public-private partnership agreement.

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It is not only the DVLA testing project that will be sited on the land, but also an office accommodation for the Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC), Odike revealed.

However, occupants of the land are worried about the sudden attempt to eject them from the public property, asserting that the Lands Commission had not given them ample time to vacate the place, saying the move would affect their livelihoods and economic opportunities.

Mr Owusu Kwarteng, spokesman for the squatters, said inasmuch as they acknowledge they have no title to the land, government ought to carry out the exercise with a human face.

We need ample time to quit the site. Some of us have been here for the past 25 years and built our livelihoods on this land. Relocation cannot be done overnight. That is why we are appealing for some time to get prepared, he explained.

Last year, a Kumasi high court presided over by Justice Paul Richardson granted an order for removal of trespassers from all state lands in the regional capital in an ex-parte motion.

The squatters told DAILY GUIDE they were not made aware of the order of the court until last Thursday when the Commission served them with the eviction notice.

Officers of the Lands Commission were tight-lipped on the issue when DAILY GUIDE visited their offices on Monday, insisting that the right person to speak to the matter, the Regional Director, was out of town.

From Ernest Kofi Adu, Kumasi


27.01.2016 LISTEN

As part of effort to support the deprived and less privileged in rural communities, BY Foundation has introduce a project dubbed one Ghana cedi campaign to solicit for funds to support deprived persons in the society.

The project seeks to raise funds to support all the humanity projects of the Foundation. The modus Operandi of the project is; to appeal to individuals, famous people in the society and stars to donate just one Ghana cedi note to support this noble course. The project will be carried out throughout the country to appeal to the conscience of wealthy men in the society to support humanity.

BY foundation will post pictures and video of individuals and organizations, including government departments who will donate to the course.

The CEO of BY Foundation, Yaw Barwuah said he believes this campaign will go a long way to help put smiles on the faces of rural communities.

The rationale behind the project is not just the name but the impact. You can donate more than one Ghana cedi but the signature is one cedis. This little donation will help the Foundation support poor people, especially children and women.

The foundation is non-governmental organization (NGO), non-profit making established in the year 2011 and finally registered and incorporated in 2014 with the Registrar Generals Department. The foundation had since been engaged in projects and activities like the environmental issues, gender and development, climate change etc.

B.Y. Foundation is a humanitarian organization whose aim is to improve the well- being of people affected by poverty in our society; we have been fighting global poverty and defending the dignity of people around the world since inception. B.Y. Foundation currently works in poor and developing countries, helping millions of the worlds poorest people find routes out of poverty. We are there to provide life-saving assistance when disaster strikes, and to help people rebuild their lives afterwards. And we are there to work alongside poor people and communities on long-term programmes to deliver lasting change. Our programmes and our policy work tackle the underlying causes of poverty so that people can become self-sufficient.
Francis Agbonlahor

27.01.2016 LISTEN



Guinness Ghana Breweries Limited (GGBL), the country's leading beverage business, has appointed Francis Agbonlahor as the new Managing Director.

He takes over from Peter Ndegwa, who is now the Managing Director for Guinness Nigeria PLC.

Francis Agbonlahor has an exceptional business performance track-record spanning over 25 years in the highly competitive, culturally diverse Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FCMG) industry.

He has extensive executive and board level experience, managing demanding and diverse stakeholders and priorities, step-changing organizational performance and brand building and performance, among others.

Prior to his new role as Managing Director of GGBL, Mr. Agbonlahor was General Manager of Meta Abo Brewery, Diageo's business in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for four years, where he successfully transformed a previously government owned company into a high performing, privatized, global business.

He also served for four years as Supply Chain Director and Board Member of Guinness Nigeria PLC until December 2011.

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Before that he held various senior roles within Diageo, majority of these were in Nigeria.

Mr. Agbonlahor joined Guinness Nigeria in 1990 as a Graduate Management Trainee fresh from the University.

Speaking on his new appointment, Simon Harvey, Managing Director of the African Regional Market said, Francis joins the Guinness Ghana with a wealth of experience from other countries. I am confident that leading the executive management team, he will spearhead our ambition of becoming the best performing, most trusted and respected consumer products company in Ghana.

Mr. Agbonlahor holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Benin, Nigeria and is a qualified Master Brewer from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling (IBD), United Kingdom.

He will also be a member of the GGBL Board.

A Business Desk report


Prof. Kwame Boasiako Omane-Antwi

27.01.2016 LISTEN



Professor Kwame Boasiako Omane-Antwi, Dean of Pentecost University Graduate School (PUCGS), says it will be difficult, if not possible, for government to achieve the 2016 Budget deficit target of 5.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

According to him, achieving the 5.3 percent target in an election year is very tricky.

Can we resist election year expenditure deficit? It is a herculean task?

Prof. Omane-Antwi, who made this known at a seminar on the review of the 2016 National Budget statement at the PUCGS in Accra, noted that already the three main causes of the countrys expenditure overruns- labour demands, subsidies on utilities and a fall in commodity prices have resurfaced, with labour already agitating for an increase in salaries as a result of the increases in utility tariffs and the introduction of the energy levy.

For me it is high time we refocused on agriculture as the support base for youth employment and halt rural-urban migration. We must refocus by enhancing the agricultural projects listed in the budget to ensure sustained growth in agriculture, he said.

Prof. Omane-Antwi said though government seems to be implementing several programmes to secure the right medium-term economy, many businesses have struggled to maintain profitability, unemployment remains high and government has had to adjust to slow revenue growth.

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Budget Constrained

We must intensify our efforts to address economic constraints, improve our growth performance, create work opportunities and broaden economic participation, Prof. Omane-Antwi said.

He stressed the need to re-strategize by identifying priorities for growth and development, resolving the energy challenges, developing an industrial policy action plan, unlocking the potential of small and medium scale enterprises, among others.

We need to work hard and more transparently to achieve the set goals if our dream of consolidating progress towards a brighter medium-term can be realized.

[email protected]

By Cephas Larbi


27.01.2016 LISTEN

An unemployed man and self-styled visa contractor has fallen foul of the law after he allegedly defrauded two persons to the tune of GH11,400 under the pretext of securing them Ghanaian passports together with Turkish visa.

Ernest Agyemang, the accused, was put in an Accra circuit court presided over by Afia Agbaney Kudamor and charged with defrauding by false pretences, but he pleaded not guilty to the offence.

He has been granted bail in the sum of GH12,000 with one surety; and asked to make a security deposit of GH3,000 with the court registry as the case has been adjourned to February 10, 2016.

The facts of the case as presented by Chief Inspector Georgina Agbodoka are that the complainants in this case are Anthony Afriyie and Collins Yeboah while the accused person is unemployed and resident of Mataheko, a suburb of Accra.

According to her, in April 2014, a man by name Alhassan who is now domiciled in Turkey, contacted Afriyie, gave him an invitation to travel to Turkey and asked him (Afriyie) to contact Ernest Agyemang to assist him to acquire a visa.

She said the said Alhassan gave the contact number of the accused to his friend (Afriyie) and Ernest Agyemang was then contacted and he in turn asked Afriyie to meet him at the passport office near the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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In addition, Chief Inspector Agbodoka said Afriyie then informed the second complainant, Yeboah, who expressed interest in the deal and consequently followed him to meet Agyemang.

Furthermore, the police officer stated that the accused met the complainants and collected GH5,500 and GH5,900 from them and promised to get them Ghanaian passports, Turkish visa and plane tickets for Turkey.

The prosecutor averred that Agyemang promised to call them after the whole processes were over but he never did so and all efforts to get in touch with him failed so a report was made to the police.

The prosecutor said that Agyemang was arrested and in his caution statement admitted the offence and pleaded for some time to refund the moneys and again went into hiding.

She said he was re-arrested on December 9, 2015 at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle and arraigned.

BY Fidelia Achama


27.01.2016 LISTEN

The Mayor of Kumasi, Kojo Bonsu appeared before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday and told the committee that he has to sometimes use stick to beat traders at the Kejetia Market before they will conform to orders because they are stubborn or recalcitrant, as he put it.

He was at the public hearing together with the Deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Emmanuel Agyekum to answer queries on frequent fire outbreaks in public markets and the Kumasi Mayor was asked why Kumasi has been recording frequent fire outbreaks in the markets and whether the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly has been carrying out preventive fire outbreak education in the markets within its jurisdiction.

In his answer, he said, Kumasi traders are very recalcitrant and will not accede to simple directives so sometimes he had to use sticks on them to force them to comply.

According to him, Kumasi is so traditional that anytime, somebody wrongs another, the person will invoke a dreadful deity to exact punishment on the purported offender and that at the Kejetia Market cursing (duabo) is very common amongst the traders.

He told the committee that the Assembly has constantly been undertaking education on fire prevention in the markets but the women in the markets continue to cook all the time in the markets.

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When you tell the women not to impede access to the market by occupying the lanes, they will even pay the watchmen to put their wares in the lanes and on the access routes to the market where firemen can have access to the market, he said.

He said there is even a siren in the markets to notify the market women on fire prevention but they will still do all sorts of things that result in fire outbreaks that is why he sometimes had to use sticks on them.

He intimated that the new Kejetia Market being built will be the solution to the frequent fire outbreaks in the markets in the Kumasi metropolis.

The chairman of the committee, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu told the mayor that the committee had been petitioned by some individuals concerning some financial impropriety on his part as the Metropolitan Chief Executive but that is beyond the remit of the committee because it is only mandated to look into issues brought up in the Auditor-Generals report.

He therefore advised the petitioners to rather petition the speaker of parliament who will in turn refer the matter to the appropriate committee to look into the matter.

I want to put it on record that we have the petition against Hon Kojo Bonsu but we can do little about it since it is not part of the Auditor-Generals report, he stated.

By Thomas Fosu Jnr
Ankobeahene Asiedu Daaduam presenting the items to the Gyaasehene,Nana Osim Kwatia

27.01.2016 LISTEN

Palmer Green International Group of Companies, a construction and installation company based in Accra has presented a cheque of GH100, 000 and cartoons of assorted drinks to the Okuapeman Funeral Planning Committee.

The items which are valued at GH10, 000 were presented together with the cheque to the Gyaasehene of Akuapem Traditional Area, Nana Osim Kwatia who is also a member of the committee at the inner court of the Okuapeman Traditional Council at Akropong early this week.

The Executive Director for Palmer Green International Group of Companies, Nana Appiah Anti said the items were his company's contribution towards the performance of the final funeral rites of the late Okuapehene Oseadeeyo Addo Dankwa III.

The late Okuapehene, Oseadeeyo Addo Dankwa III passed away a couple of months ago and his final funeral rites will be held from 1-8th February 2016 at Akropong- Akuapem in the Eastern Region.

The Gyaasehene who is also the Amanorkromhene expressed appreciation to the management of the company for the gesture.

Nana Osim Kwatia urged other corporate bodies and individuals to follow in with similar presentations.

In a related development, the Benkumhene of Suhum who is also the Akuapem Adantamuhene (Special Envoy), Nana Opeabere Awuah Asiedu I has presented a cheque of GH5000 and a number of alcoholic beverages to the Okuapeman Funeral Planning Committee.

Presenting the items valued at GH10, 250 and made up of cartoons of beer, schnapps and mineral water, Ankobeahene Asiedu Daaduam who made the donation on behalf of the Special Envoy said they were his personal support for the upcoming funeral of the late Okuapehene Oseadeeyo Addo Dankwa III.

By Solomon Ofori


27.01.2016 LISTEN

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Tema East Constituency, Daniel Nii Kwarrtei Titus-Glover has assured his constituents that he will convincingly defeat Robert Kempes Ofosuware, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary candidate in this year's general elections.

According to him, Mr Ofosuware, who has been re-elected to represent the NDC at Tema East in the November 7 elections, would not be a match for him.

I used about 45 days to campaign before the 2012 contest and I managed to beat Kempes who used not less than four years to campaign including using his office as Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE) for Tema. This shows clearly that the people of Tema East were not pleased with his administration.

Can you imagine the disgrace I will give him in November 7 elections because I have done a lot of visible work for my constituency and my people can attest to the fact that I'm a hardworking MP and not a joker and I will retire Kempis in this year's election, he boldly stated.

They met at Manhean, a suburb of Tema Newtown where the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) inaugurated Unit and Council Committees of the Tema East sub-metro District.

According to him, Kempes is a joke. He says those things to make himself happy. I'm coming like a sub-marine and I want to assure my brother Kempes that I will beat him and retire him in this year's election.

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I will bring him onboard after giving him a resounding beating to assist me build the constituency,

But in a quick rebuttal, Mr. Ofosuware added that the MP should start preparing his handing over notes to him after the November 7 elections.

He expressed excitement about meeting his political opponent at the function, adding that he was working hard to win the Tema East Parliametary seat for the NDC for the first time.

According to him, he would give Titus-Glover and the NPP a fierce contest after learning from his mistakes.

It would be recalled that in 2012, the NPP in the Tema East Constituency voted Mr. Titus-Glover as their parliamentary candidate after their earlier candidate, Kofi Brako moved to contest for the same position unopposed at Tema Central after the Electoral Commission (EC) created new constituencies in the country.

From Vincent Kubi, Manhean


Matteo Renzi

27.01.2016 LISTEN



Parliament re-opened yesterday for the last session of the Sixth Parliament with the announcement that the Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, will pay a visit to the House next week and address the House.

The is the second time a high profile international personality would be addressing Ghanas Parliament since the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government took over power in 2008. The first person was President Barack Obama of the United States of America.

The speaker, Edward Doe Adjaho, who made the announcement, did not tell what the address would focus on but said Parliament would be ready to receive the 41-year-old Italian Prime Minister, who is the youngest Premier in the EU after winning power in February, 2014.

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Kwadaso, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, told DAILY GUIDE that the Italian Prime Ministers visit to Parliament is refreshing news but indicated that unfortunately his visit to Ghana cannot help salvage the sinking economy of the country.

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The Italian Prime Minister is a very young leader and his visit will serve as an inspiration to up-and-coming young politicians in the country and also help deepen the relationship between Ghana and Italy but can never save this government from losing the general elections, he said.

Welcoming MPs back to Parliament for the first meeting of the last session of the Sixth Parliament, the speaker asked the MPs to be more proactive and take the business of the House more seriously because there are a lot of outstanding businesses to be cleared, in addition to a packed business for that meeting.

He noted that he was aware that MPs would be fully occupied because of the general elections in November and pleaded with them as well as ministers of state to respect the time-table for that meeting.

He also said Parliament would be looking forward to the new bill that would change the election date from December 7 to November 7 this year.

He also indicated that he would officially announce the new ministerial appointments as presented by the President last week to enable the Appointments Committee of Parliament consider the new appointments in good time.

By Thomas Fosu Jnr


27.01.2016 LISTEN

Landowners at La East Dadekotopon near the Trade Fair Centre in Accra have accused the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) of constantly vandalising their properties, despite the Attorney General's (AG) directive that the military stay off those lands.

The complainants claim they are the rightful owners of the land they acquired from the La East Dadekotopon Development Trust, but the military have continuously pulled down their structures on grounds that the place is a security zone.

One of the developers, Kwame Akorsah, Director of BRAGHA Construction Company Limited, told DAILY GUIDE that on December 12, 2015 the military, after several confrontations with his workers, pulled down the fence wall around his land in a mid-night operation.

He said his company acquired 30.150 hectares of land from the Trust, got a valid land title in 2008 and sold other portions of the land to other real estate developers and prospective buyers.

We also decided to wall the land so that we can start development. Some time ago we received reports that the Army was harassing our workers and I met one Lt. Colonel P.K. Apenkwa who admitted that they came to stop the workers because they wanted to create a buffer zone so they won't allow us to work. On December 12, they came back and I told them that we still won't stop and at dawn the following day, the military came back and pulled down my wall with impunity, Mr Akorsah said.

When DAILY GUIDE visited the site, portions of a fence wall constructed by BRAGHA Construction had been pulled down.

The military had earlier indicated its intention to create what it called a 'security buffer zone' and that it required an area of 2,456.55 acres or 994.15 hectares of land around Burma Camp but they were met with fierce resistance from the landowners, led by the East Dadekotopon Development Trust, who had gone ahead to sell the lands to private developers with land titles.

Deputy Attorney General Dr Dominic Ayine, who took part in the initial negotiation process, warned the military to stay away from the land, stressing that it was unacceptable and nothing short of lawlessness.

The deputy AG, acting on behalf of his boss, Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, came to the conclusion that if Ghana Armed Forces intended to proceed with the creation of a security buffer zone it must commence the formal process, through the Ministry of Defence, to start the compulsory acquisition of the 994.15 hectares of land and pay promptly the compensation due the current owners of the land.

Dr Ayine also stated categorically that until the negotiation and acquisition processes were completed, the GAF should not trespass or use force to prevent the current landowners from developing their lands.

However, residents, tenants and landowners in the area disclosed that the military had not heeded the A-G's directive but had resorted to using force to terrorise them with the intention of getting them off the site.

Some of us are ready to sit with the military and talk. Once they agree to pay us compensation, we would gladly give them the land but using force is not appropriate, a landowner told DAILY GUIDE.

High Court Decision

When the Trust sued the government through the A-G over the land, the court was very categorical that it was the duty of the state to go ahead and acquire the said land under the State Lands Act as provided by law and pay due compensation to the owners; and until that was done, the military had no business to act in a manner inconsistent with the plaintiff's ownership of the land.

Dr Ayine said the A-G takes the view that the East Dadekotopon Development Trust has a constitutionally protected right to compensation for the proposed taking of its land for the security buffer zone, adding, even without a High Court decision, the Ghana Armed Forces could not proceed to use the land without following due process of law and paying compensation.

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He also said that the High Court decision had not been overturned on appeal by the defendant, saying, until that is done, it is binding on the government and for that matter the military and must of necessity be respected.

Any attempt to enforce the creation of a security buffer zone outside of the framework of law is unconstitutional, he added.

Armed Forces' Response

Meanwhile a military source told DAILY GUIDE that their action was aimed at ensuring the security of civilians and the country as a whole.

He said due to some security installations around Burma Camp and La East Dadekotopon, they urged residents and landowners who were within a 400-meter radius around the camp not to develop anything on the land.

The people who acquired the land close to our security installations are exposing themselves and other civilians to security threats and that is what we are trying to avoid. We have also started a compulsory acquisition process to legally get lands that fall within the 400-meter radius; then government would pay compensation to all those affected, he said.

[email protected]

By Nii Ogbamey Tetteh


Queen Mother of Bechem, Nana Adwoapo Dwamena Serwaa II welcoming Nana Akufo-Addo to the funeral grounds with a hug

27.01.2016 LISTEN

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's huge popularity in Kumasi was once again showcased on Saturday.

The NPP guru was accorded a rousing welcome when he stormed the Heroes Park to mourn with the Apagya family following the death of three outstanding members.

The loud shouts of joy that greeted Nana Akufo-Addo and his entourage including his wife Rebecca nearly turned the venue upside down.

Interestingly, those who were vociferous in welcoming Nana Akufo-Addo to the funeral venue were women, who have voting rights.

They started with shouts of the NPP leader's name immediately Nana Akufo-Addo's delegation arrived.

The excited women, who were speaking Twi, then changed their chorus into 'Nana Wo Krom', to wit Nana is in town.

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Nana Akufo-Addo, from the look on his face, seemed to be enjoying the massive support the crowd offered him.

The security personnel of the NPP leader did a yeoman's job clearing the way for Nana Akufo-Addo to move.

This did not deter the women from continuing to show their strong support for the NPP presidential candidate.

These women were later seen using their mobile phones to snap pictures of Nana Akufo-Addo after he took his seat at the funeral grounds.

FROM I.F. Joe Awuah Jnr., Kumasi




Nana Akufo-Addo

27.01.2016 LISTEN



There has never been a time in our recent history as nation that Ghanaians from diverse ethnic, religious, class, political, and ideological persuasions clearly articulated their displeasure against an act by a government that has direct consequence for human and national security until President John Dramani Mahama violated Ghana's Anti Terrorist Act and by implication the Presidential Oath by bringing in the ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees.

What the president calls an act of humanitarianism and questioning the compassion of some religious leaders who had criticized his decision is a clear indication of the lack of diplomatic tact on the part of the president in a globalizing world. Why should President Mahama put the lives of 26 million Ghanaians in danger by accepting to settle the two ex-Gitmo detainees in Ghana?

In our view, the president's decision is a true sign of failure of exercising leadership on foreign policy matters as the number one diplomat of the state. It is certainly not in the national interest of Ghana for the President to take a decision that has created so much controversy.

We join Ghanaians in venting our anger against the reckless decision of the John Mahama government. The President's defense that the Gitmo-two are not terrorists defies reality especially when the two men will be under the surveillance of national security while they remain in Ghana for the next two years.

Why are their liberties being curtailed if indeed they do not pose any threat to Ghana's national and human security fourteen years after being in captivity? The humanitarian justification by President Mahama of the presence of the ex-detainees in Ghana in no way can diminish the real threat they or their terrorist-cronies may pose to the current and future security of Ghana.

To be sure, international politics has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is therefore incumbent on political leaders, especially, those from developing countries to learn the art of statecraft and marry it with diplomatic tactfulness as they pursue their national interest. The lack of appreciation of this fact of international life by the John Mahama administration accounts for the current tension that is brewing in our beloved Ghana since the arrival of the ex-Gitmo detainees.

Prudent leadership in the international arena is about making foreign policy decisions to satisfy the national interest, including the rights of citizens to live in freedom from fear. Indeed, this cardinal principle underpins the policy of the Barack Obama administration regarding the transfer of the Guantanamo detainees to Ghana.

President Obama acted to protect the national interest of the United States! Yet, the John Mahama administration ignored all the potential threats, fear, and panic that the acceptance of the detainees could bring to the nation and the people by sacrificing the national interest on the altar of humanitarianism to please the United States.

By his action, President John Mahama did not protect the sovereignty and national security interest of Ghana. He has literally made Ghana the 51st state of the United States as our foreign policy decisions appear to be made in Washington instead of Accra. Ghanaians are therefore right to express their fear of a possible terrorist attack in the country and convey their anger to the government in the strongest possible terms.

We want to remind Ghanaians that this is not the first time that the United States has made a request to Ghana on an issue that borders on national and human security. Indeed, in 2007 the John Agyekum Kufour's government rejected the United State's request to establish its Africa Command military base in Ghana.

President Kufour's skilful and bold rejection of the United States' request is what leadership in the international arena is aboutstanding up to protect the national interest and the security of your citizens. It requires skillful diplomacy and tact to dealing with major powers such as the United States. In spite of Kufour's decline to the United States' request, Ghana still had good relations with the United States.

The Kufour administration found in Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo the qualities of an astute lawyer and a diplomat to push Ghana's national interest on the international agenda. Not surprisingly, Ghana and President Kufour was invited to exclusive summits of major economic powers such as the G8 and G20.

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Africa's rising star, Ghana, played an actively role in the establishment of key international institutions at the turn of the twenty first century, including the International Criminal Court. At the continental level, not only did president Kufuor serve as the AU Chairman but as well Ghana played a leading role to promote continental programmes such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

Moreover, Ghana's election to the UN Security Council and Nana Akufo-Addo's chairing of Security Council Meetings as president is another powerful testimony of how Ghana was held in high esteem by the international community.

Nana Addo's outstanding performance as Foreign Minister and one time president of the Security Council partly explains why he has been a toast of world leaders and international institutions. Nana Addo was appointed as the chair of the Commonwealth Observer Mission for the South African national and provincial elections in May 2014. Moreover, Nana Addo has on several occasions received European Union delegations and paid official visits to world leader such as the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel.

All these have taken place while he is the leader of the opposition party, NPP. Readers should note carefully that these international assignments and diplomatic courtesies that are extended to Nana Addo are rare in a competitive international scene where sitting presidents even struggle to have audience with the movers and shakers of world politics.

It is therefore not surprising that the Africa Courier International Magazine in its October/November issue in 2014 named Nana Addo among the Fifty (50) Best Africans who are the key drivers of the rising continent of Africa. This list includes former UN Secretary- General, Kofi Annan, and President Kufuor. At home, we want to refresh the memory of readers that Nana Addo was named the most influential politician in the e-TV-Ghana's annual Ghana Most Influential Awards in May 2015.

These recognitions bear further testimony to the exceptional leadership qualities of Nana Addo. Thus, in Nana Addo, Ghana will have a president of high international repute assisted by a world respected economist and a brilliant young man, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, whose every prediction about the Ghanaian economy under John Dramani Mahama has come to pass.

This unique combination of domestic political experience, international reputation, and intellectual prowess is the kind of leadership Ghana needs to thrive in a competitive global political economy.

We the members of NPP Canada are of the candid opinion that every generation of political leaders have geniuses among them and that in Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo and Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Ghanaians would have what it truly means to be a transformative leader.

These great men have the international and domestic clout not only to save the ailing Ghanaian economy and address deep rooted corruption in government, but as well, they have what it takes to make prudent foreign policy decisions that will safeguard Ghana's national interest.

Ghana cannot afford another four years of corruption in high places of government, poor management of the economy that has brought untold hardship on the already poor Ghanaians, and reckless foreign policy decisions of the John Mahama administration.

NPP Canada Communications Team

[email protected]

www.nppcanada.org

Tel: 587-708-9915 / 647-800-3585


27.01.2016 LISTEN

Internet service provider, BusyInternet, now 'Busy'  has launched a cutting edge 4G data service aimed at providing high quality internet service to businesses and customers.

With the launch of the 4G service, said Praveen Sadalage, the Managing Director of Busy, customers and businesses would enjoy an innovative and flexible range of 4G data packages, plus MiFi and wireless routers designed to suit every need, delivered with high quality and personal customer service.

He said: We have made sure that our innovative 4G service is fast, affordable, reliable and flexible; because that is what consumers told us was most important to them. According to him, the Busy brand's aim was to enrich lives through connectivity and that our launch of 4G services that are accessible to the mass market is a major first step towards us achieving this.

Sadalage, therefore, urged companies, institutions, entrepreneurs and the public to join the excitement and explore Busy's state of the art services, saying Let's Get Busy. He was speaking at the ceremony to officially announce the launch of the 4G service and also unveil Busy's new brand name  Busy and Logo.

The new look was designed to symbolize the brand's dynamism, youthfulness and positivity, which was aimed at moving the brand forward into what he described as this exciting new era whilst also being true to the brand's proud heritage. Dr. Edward Omane Boamah -Minister of Communications congratulated Busy for playing a pioneering role in the evolution of internet services in the country.

He said: For over a decade, Busy symbolized the provision of internet service in Ghana and I am particularly encouraged that you have taken your service to the next level to meet increasing demands of your wide range of clients. Continuing, he stated that the increasing number within the 4G landscape was a clear attestation that the economy is business friendly and that investors are trooping in to invest in the country.

He advised the management of Busy to stick to its license conditions to ensure the provision of enviable quality service to the people. The National Communication Authority's (NCA) Director of Regulatory Administration, Paul Kofi Datsa also admonished Busy to, in its quest, serve the public always, adhere to the NCA's regulations.

Mrs. Linda Narh, head of Marketing at Busy, on her part observed that there had never been a better time to upgrade to 4G, with MiFi priced from as low as GH 99.00  declaring that 4G is more affordable than ever. Busy 4G data bundles; she said ranges from 100MB for casual users to 50GB commercial users with the ability to rollover unused data from one bundle to the next.

Also, Mrs. Narh added Busy would offer a choice of unlimited freebies to any customer who purchase more than 5GB of data each month and that customers can choose between unlimited and free usage of facebook, whatsApp, youtube, ghanaweb and myjoyonline.

By Mohammed Awal ([email protected])
27.01.2016 LISTEN

The decision by Presidential Chief-of-Staff Julius Debrah to cause the retrieval of the GHC 1.9 million contractual profit-margin excess paid by the Government to the Smartty Management Company, in connection with the rebranding of some 116 state-owned and operated intra-city buses, will not amount to the proverbial hill of beans.

To be certain, it reeks of the patently silly and may well have been initiated as a facile method of scoring cheap electioneering points in the lead-up to Election 2016.

Trust me, Ghanaians are not that naive and stupid, Mr. Debrah (See AG not likely to Retrieve GHC 1.9 M  MP MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/25/15). If he were the least bit imbued with the sort of wisdom that Alhaji Asoma Banda has virulently accused the three-time Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) of sorely lacking, President John Dramani Mahama and his right-hand man would rather focus their attention and energies on retrieving the whopping GHC 52 million creamed off our national treasury by Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the notorious major underwriter of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The comfort of power and influence may have caused him to so soon forget this, but most Ghanaians still vividly remember that one of the first promises that Mr. Mahama made, shortly after succeeding to the Presidency, in the wake of the July 24, 2012 passing of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, was to ensure that every pesewa illegally taken from the people of Ghana was returned to exactly where it was taken from. Some three-and-half years later, the President has yet to make good on this promise.

Indeed, what the former Rawlings Communications Minister has done is to actually plunge the country into more fiscal scam-artistry. As Ms. Adwoa Osei-Asare, the New Patriotic Partys Member of Parliament for Atiwa-East Constituency, in my neck of the country, had occasion to aptly point out, Attorney-General Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong may be the countrys least efficient holder of her cardinal cabinet portfolio.

To-date, the Attorney-General has yet to collect a pesewa from Mr. Woyome. And this comes in the wake of the unanimous Supreme Court decision to the damnable effect that, indeed, Mr. Woyome scammed the state out of money he absolutely had no right, whatsoever, to or was entitled to, despite the fact of him having apparently been able to convince an evidently cognitively crocked and pathologically corrupt former Attorney-General Betty Mould-Iddrisu and her equally harebrained and incurably corrupt deputy, Mr. Ebo Barton-Odro.

Then we also have the epic scandals of RLG (the Agambilla Group) and Zoomlion, the apparently more theoretical than practical sanitation company under President Mahamas pet GYEEDA project. That the tribalistic and ethnically chauvinist GYEEDA scam makes the President at least as morally corrupt as the operatives of the firms he has decided to go after cannot be gainsaid.

If the country were blessed with a Parliament worthy of its nominal designation, Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho, Majority Leader Alban Bagbin and Minority Leader Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu would have since long launched a probe into the evidently shady dealings of the Chief Occupant of the Flagstaff House.

Well, even as Ms. Osei-Asare, the Atiwa-East MP, rightly points out, the order by Mr. Debrah, the Presidential Chief-of-Staff, for Attorney-General Appiah-Oppong to retrieve the ill-gotten money from the proprietor of Smartty Management Company may itself be illegal, as it lacks any legal or judicial backing. Besides, like the odious judgment-debt scandals, this brazen attempt at strong-arming Smartty Management Company could well end up costing the Government and the Ghanaian taxpayer far more than we bargained for.

Like it or not, Smartty Management  I nearly wrote Smarty Pants  entered into a legally binding contractual compact with the government whose flagrant abrogation would not be that simple. Yes, procurement guidelines laid down by Parliament may have been violated by the Flagstaff House, but this is primarily because, as we also learn, the owner-proprietor of Smartty Management is a National Democratic Congress stalwart. Which further inextricably incriminates the Presidency vis-a-vis the conduct of the entire affair.

The Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party may have slogged through 2015 convulsively wracked by factional strife; now it is the turn of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress to prove that it can be trusted to wisely and efficiently manage the peoples money.

This, I confidently predict, is bound to be the NDC agenda in the lead-up to Election 2016. And Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia had better learn fast how to perennially put the Mahama Posse on the defensive or kiss their third shot at the presidency goodbye.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
Ghana has been ranked the 7th African country with high level of corruption in the latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by an anti-corruption body, Transparency International.

According to a statement from the local chapter of (TI), Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), The CPI 2015 scored Ghana 47 out of clean score of 100 and ranked the country 56 out of 168 countries.

Thus, Ghana slid back by one percentage point from the 48 points scored in 2014 but better than its performance in 2012 when it scored 45 and 2013 when it scored 46 points, the statement said.

Ghana scored below six African countries - Botswana - 63, Cape Verde - 55, Seychelles - 55, Rwanda  54, Mauritius and Namibia which scored 53.

The CPI 2015 made use of eight data sources out of the 12 data sources to compute the index for Ghana.

The statement says that the sources that have assessed Ghana with regards to corruption, are the World Bank (CPIA)  47, the African Development Bank (55), the Bertelsmith Foundation (45), the World Economic Forum (33), the World Justice Project (37), the Economic intelligence Unit (54), the PRS International Country Risk Guide (50) and the HIS Global Insight (52).

The score made by Ghana, is said to be an average of the scores from the data sources of the institutions listed above.

It, however, stated that Ghanas score and ranking show that the country has performed much better than several other African countries, including South Africa, Senegal and Tunisia.

The BBC Africa tweeted that Ghana and Senegal had been identified as improving in their fight against corruption.

Below is a full statement from the Local Chapter of Transparency International about CPI 2015.

GHANA INTEGRITY INITIATIVE (GII)

Local Chapter of Transparency International

PRESS STATEMENT ON THE RELEASE OF THE CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX (CPI) 2015

Transparency International, the leading civil society organization fighting corruption worldwide, released its 21st Annual Corruption Perceptions Index this morning Wednesday, 27 January 2016 globally. This years index ranks 168 countries/territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. The index draws on 12 surveys covering expert assessments and views of business people. Ghanas assessment was based on eight assessments  the World Bank, World Economic Forum, Bertelsmann Foundation, ADB, World Justice Project, PRS International Country Risk Guide, the Economist Intelligence Unit and IHS Global Insight. The Corruption Perceptions Index is the leading global indicator of public sector corruption, offering a yearly snapshot of the relative degree of corruption by ranking countries from all over the globe.

The CPI 2015 showed that when people work together, they can succeed in the battle against corruption. According to the report released this morning, corruption is still rife globally but more countries have improved their scores than declined. However, overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries on the 2015 index scored below 50, on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived to be very clean). The good news is that, in countries like Guatemala, Sri Lanka and our own country  Ghana - citizen activists in groups and on their own worked hard to drive out the corrupt, sending a strong message that should encourage others to take decisive action in 2016. Investigative journalists, like Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Manasseh Awuni have also exposed corruption and other crimes and human rights abuses in Ghana.

These sentiments were expressed by Jose Ugaz, Chair of Transparency International, when he stated that Corruption can be beaten if we work together. To stamp out the abuse of power, bribery and shed light on secret deals, citizens must together tell their governments they have had enough. He added that The 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index clearly shows that corruption remains blight around the world. But 2015 was also a year when people again took to the streets to protest corruption. People across the globe sent a strong signal to those in power: it is time to tackle grand corruption. .

Ghanas Performance

The CPI 2015 made use of eight data sources out of the 12 data sources to compute the index for Ghana. These sources that have assessed Ghana with regards to corruption, are the World Bank (CPIA)  47, the African Development Bank (55), the Bertelsmith Foundation (45), the World Economic Forum (33), the World Justice Project (37), the Economic intelligence Unit (54), the PRS International Country Risk Guide (50) and the HIS Global Insight (52). The Ghana score is, therefore, an average of the scores from these data sources. The institutions are independent institutions with a high level of credibility and their assessments are considered credible.

The CPI 2015 scored Ghana 47 out of clean score of 100 and ranked the country 56 out of 168 countries. Thus, Ghana slided back by one percentage point from the 48 points scored in 2014 but better than its performance in 2012 when it scored 45 and 2013 when it scored 46 points. Ghana performed below six African countries (Botswana - 63, Cape Verde - 55, Seychelles - 55, Rwanda  54, Mauritius and Namibia 53). However, as in previous years, Ghanas score and ranking show that the country has performed much better than several other African countries, including South Africa, Senegal and Tunisia. Thus, although scoring lower than six African countries, Ghana has scored higher than all the rest of the African countries included in the CPI 2015.

This does not mean that corruption is not a serious problem in Ghana because, like two-thirds of the rest of the 168 countries/territories ranked by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, Ghana scored below the 50 pass mark. Although the government of Ghana has also started pursuing the corrupt in the country, this still remains selective and needs to be improved. The pursuance of the officials of the National Service Secretariat, the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Smartys and the GYEEDA needs to be commended but there is a lot more to be done. The AMERI case needs to be investigated. The African Automobile cars are left to rot at the Institute of Local Government Studies even after the Judgment Debt Commission has concluded its work. Some of the people indicted by the Commissions report are still holding public positions. Public officers who won their parliamentary primaries are still holding onto their public positions. This shows that we have still not put in enough effort and commitment in tackling corruption.

The African Picture

In Africa, Botswana came up first with a score of 63, ranking 28 globally, followed by Cape Verde and Seychelles scored 55 and ranked 40 while Rwanda scored 54 and ranked 44 globally. Both Namibia and Mauritius scored 53 and ranked 45. Clearly, all the six countries that performed better than Ghana passed the 50% pass mark. Although always the best performer in Africa although Botswana seems to be sliding backwards as in 2014, the country scored 63 as against 64 and 65 in 2013 and 2012, respectively.

However, many African countries still remain at the bottom of the CPI 2015. Somalia (8) remained at the very bottom with North Korea. Sudan (12), South Sudan (15), Angola (15) and Libya (16) performed slightly better, beating only Afghanistan (11) outside the continent. Other African countries, such as Guinea-Bissau (17), Eritrea (18), Zimbabwe (21) and Burundi (21) are also at the bottom although slightly better.

Global Performance

Globally, Denmark has continued its lead in the CPI 2015, scoring 91, having scored 92 both in 2014 and 2013 and 90 in 2012 but ranking first in all these years. Denmark was followed by Finland with a score of 90 and ranking 2, Sweden and New Zealand followed with scores of 89 (3) and 88 (4), respectively. The Netherlands and Norway both scored 87, ranking 5 with Switzerland following with a score of 86 and ranking 7. Finland has urged up a bit to a score of 90 from its score of 89 both in 2014 and 2013. New Zealand has slided backwards in the CPI 2015 from its impressive scores of 91 in both 2014 and 2013. Singapore dropped out of the best seven, scoring 85 out of 100 and ranking 8.

From other previous years, it is clear that the top performers have remained almost the same over the years and are largely clean of corruption, near perfect but short of a clean score of 100. These countries are characterized by a high level of transparency and accountability, which are essential to help curb corruption. These countries are helped by strong access to information systems and rules governing the behaviour of those in public positions and they should be good examples to Ghana. However, the fact remains that no country has scored 100 or even 95 for a very long time, an indication that corruption is a global canker and that no country is free from it. This calls for a global approach to the fight against corruption and a call for support to the less performing countries by the leading countries.

The fight against corruption requires all hands on deck and that is why Transparency Internationals chair, Jose Ugaz, has emphasized the importance of the various roles that civil society organisations can play in exposing, detecting and sanctioning corrupt behaviours.

What Needs to be Done

Governments need to ensure real and systemic reform  starting with freeing judiciaries from political influence and creating better regional cooperation between law enforcement to stop the corrupt hiding in different jurisdictions. Citizens, meanwhile, should continue their calls for change. In 2015 we saw ever more people connect the poor services they receive with the illicit enrichment of a few corrupt individuals. These people need to keep up their pressure on leaders, and demand the accountable, well-functioning institutions they deserve.

Ghana Integrity Initiative wishes to call on all Ghanaians, no matter their partisan affiliation to RESIST, CONDEMN AND REPORT all forms of CORRUPTION and abuse of power in our society! But GII calls on government to promptly investigate any credible allegations of corruption it receives. The reports of Commissions of Enquiry must also be implemented.

For the full ranking and regional tables, go to: www.transparency.org/cpi
water

27.01.2016 LISTEN

The National Association of Sachet and Packaging Water Producers (NASAPAWAP) has announced an increment in the price of sachet water from GHP20 to GHP30 pesewas beginning from February 1, 2016.

Also, the price for a bag of sachet water, which is currently being sold for GH3.00 would be adjusted upwards to GH5.00 The price hike, according to the NASAPAWAP, was as a result of recent increment in utility tariffs by the government.

The association, however, could not state the prices for bottled water, though it was also affected by recent increments.

The National President of the Association, Magnus Nunoo, addressing a press conference in Accra yesterday urged bottled water companies to exercise similar circumspection in adjusting their prices to bring uniformity in the system.

Mr. Nunoo said the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) discriminated against the Association as it failed to invite the members to the negotiation table to dialogue over the new increments, even to the extent that it went ahead to re-categorize consumers.

He said the new categorization has caused commercial rate to move from GH3.8 to GH8.36 representing 120% and industrial rate from GH3.8 to GH10.07 representing 165%.

Sachet water, now in a new category, has moved from GH3.8 to GH11.21 representing 195% while special commercial (bottle water) moved from GH10.07 to GH50.76 representing 400% plus, he explained.

It baffles our mind why the PURC will show such bias in fixing rates for industrial or commercial consumers. Apart from government institutions, there are basically two main consumers of water namely; domestic consumers and commercial or industrial consumers.

In the past, the progressive tariff system automatically takes care of high consumers of public utilities. If the progressive system is still in place then why such bias which tends to favour companies that produce alcoholic beverages and soft drinks with health risks on the citizenry, he stressed.

He, however, questioned the PURC whether the commercial, industrial and bottled are not all business entities that are considered on the same corporate tax rate. Mr. Nunoo called on the PURC to prescribe a standard rate for all industrial users be it sachet water, bottled water, soft drink producers etc.

The NASAPAWAP President also blamed the increase in sachet water prices on high cost of import and depreciation of the Ghana Cedi against other trading currencies, like the US dollars.

By Bernice Bessey
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Some Christians refuse to become involved in elections for so-called religious reasons and even tag their peers involve in politics as second to the Devil. They justify their attitude towards politics by quoting from John 18:36, My kingdom is not of this world. And Philippians 3:20, For our citizenship is in Heaven. They believe that political activity is not compatible with our spiritual calling or Christian life.

Now I agree that believers who enter into the political arena are bond to face some strange temptations. In spite of this, however, I believe that Christians can enter politics and remain true to the Lord. After all, the scriptures tell us that God Himself ordained human government for the benefit of mankind.

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. for there is no power but God; the powers that be are ordained of God(Romans 13:1). Government must therefore be viewed as a blessing from God. The Old Testament tells us that two of the godliest men in history filled high offices in pagan governments: Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon.

And in the first century after Christ, even though believers couldnt vote or run for office because of the political situation of their day, they were not forbidden to serve as magistrates,. The very fact that God has established structured civil authority for the welfare of the human race gives us good reason to conclude that Christians may be involved in politics when given the opportunity.

In this article I will discuss six important issues about which believers should have definite convictions, and which should be taken into account as WE CONSIDER THE CANDIDATES and also encourage believers to go out and vote. I pray the Lord will use this lesson to help us fulfil our responsibility to both salt and light in the decaying and in sin-darkened society.

The six important issues or reasons why Christians must be encourage to participate in politics are; Morality of leaders, Protection from tyranny, Human rights, Criminal justice, The work ethic, Economic justice. Will on this chapter only discuss Morality of leaders then follow with others in my subsequent release.

MORALITY OF LEADERS

The first most important issues to weigh as we choose our governmental leaders is their personal moral integrity. I realize that in pluralistic society we dont always have the opportunity to vote for those who love the Lord. Then too, on some occasions it would be better to select competent non-believers instead of an incompetent believer. However, we have a right to insist upon certain ideals. We cannot approve of any candidate who scoffs at biblical standards or morality, or who gives evidence of dishonesty or deceitfulness.

A person who has low standards of sexual morality, uses profane and foul language, or takes an atheistic view of life may have no principles at all when he reaches office. He would not be a suitable president, minister or a Member of Parliament. Yes, Christians should oppose the election of flagrantly immoral or openly godless candidates. The moral integrity of those in public offices is important.

It is my prayer we as Christians rise up to the task and help our people chose the rightful leaders to man our beloved country Ghana rather than discouraging others who do. Stay tuned for the rest 

Acheampong Annor K Ernest(Ing.)

Osonoba-Achy
The Kumasi Diocese of the Methodist Church Ghana has inducted the Very Reverend Stephen Kwaku Owusu as its new Synod Secretary.

The Right Reverend Christopher Nyarko Andam, Methodist Bishop of Kumasi used the occasion to admonished leaders to strive to be selfless and always seek the welfare of the masses.

Leadership is a call to duty and those who find themselves in such positions should always be committed to the cause of humanity, he said. He said every leader is endowed with his or her own potential and ought to be used to transform the lives of the people to achieve social prosperity.

Touching on the proliferation of self-styled prophets, the Methodist Bishop expressed worry at how some of their prophecies are twisted for selfish gains. Prophecies of today have all been centred on the acquisition of visas and other trivial issues. They do not demonstrate God's own true vision for the people, and I think it is about time that the people are told the truth, he said.

Rt Rev Nyarko Andam, preaching on the theme You are Mine, I Have Ordained You, entreated the new Synod Secretary to liaise with the laity and stakeholders to step up the church's outreach programmes.

He asked him to strengthen evangelism at all levels to salvage the society from evil.Very Rev Owusu thanked the church for the confidence reposed in him, and promised to work in humility, and also abide by the church's principles for growth.

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

It's an age-old debate: Are beards clean or a magnet for germs and bacteria? Last year, we were told that men's beards could be dirtier than a toilet because they collect bacteria. Some beards contain more poo than a toilet, declared one headline.

But before you reach for the razor to shave off your hipster beard, let's take a closer look at the evidence. Where did the story about beards being as dirty as toilets come from?

Rather than a peer-reviewed study in a scientific or medical journal, the research involved a TV news crew swabbing a handful of beards in Albuquerque, NM. The samples were then tested by John Golobic, a microbiologist from Quest Diagnostics, who declared on KOAT-TV, I'm usually not surprised, and I was surprised by this.

Disturbing



The station reported several of the beards they tested contained a lot of normal bacteria, but some were comparable to toilets. Golobic concluded: There would be a degree of uncleanliness that would be somewhat disturbing. After the story went viral, some commentators pointed out that although there was no reason to doubt what Golobic found, the approach to the study fell far short of the best science.

For instance, there was no mention of swabbing clean-shaven men. Since bacteria gets on to all sorts of surfaces, including skin, this might have told us what we really need to know: Do beards harbor more bacteria than a clean-shaven face? The debate about hygiene and beards sprouted again last week. The BBC and The Sydney Morning Herald quoted a recent study debunking the idea that beards are dirty.

The research was published in 2014 in the Journal of Hospital Infection and supports the view that growing a beard is no health hazard. Researchers compared bacterial colonization on the faces of 408 male health care workers with and without facial hair. The teams found little difference between the two, but the results did show that some species of bacteria were more likely to be found in those without beards.

The researchers say there were a few limitations to their study, including not being able to assess whether the density of men's beards could affect bacterial colonization.

Hygiene Last year, Alun Withey, an academic historian of medicine and the body from the University of Exeter in the U.K., began a 3-year project to chart the health and hygiene history of facial hair between 1700 and 1918.

During this time, beards fell in and out of fashion. Between 1700 and 1830, the fashion was mainly for the clean-shaven look. Then the Victorian era ushered in the beard movement in which huge patriarchal beards  think Darwin and Dickens  dominated from around 1850 to the end of the 19th century.

Hippie beards were all the rage in the 1960s, culminating in one of the most famous sproutings of facial hair in recent times: the bearded model in Alex Comfort's 1972 gourmet guide to lovemaking, The Joy of Sex. The book sold millions of copies, but by the time it was updated and republished in 2002, the bearded model had been replaced with a clean-shaven man.

Withey charts the current hipster beard fashion as dating from 2013. His research is still in its infancy, but a speech he gave on the subject for the Wellcome Trust last October was sold out.

He sees no end to the current trend for beards and believes the current arguments over hygiene just reflect this popularity. In a blog last May, when the TV news report comparing bacteria in beards to toilets was being picked up by news media around the world, he wrote: In the 1660s the English churchman and historian Thomas Fuller was referring in print to the beard as 'that ornamental excrement under the chin.' Sound familiar?
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Wa, Jan. 27, GNA - The Upper West Region is grappling with a poor nutrition situation, statistics from the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS) has indicated.

About 22 per cent of children in the region are stunted, 14 per cent underweight, five per cent wasting and a whopping 74 per cent have anaemia.

Thirty-six per cent of women in their reproductive age are reportedly anaemic.

Mr. Chrissantus Danaah Dari, the Upper West Regional Nutrition Officer for the Ghana Health Service (GHS), gave the statistics during a multi-sectoral Regional Nutrition Coordination Body meeting, in Wa.

He attributed the situation to high infections, poor maternal and child care and inadequate food intake or consumption of food with poor nutritional value.

Mr Dari said the overall goal of the coordination body meeting was for them to pool resources to be able to overcome the nutritional challenge.

He said promoting good nutrition through multi-sectoral collaboration was the way to go since the challenge was bigger for the GHS alone.

The meeting also sensitised stakeholders on nutrition and development to enable them to understand and play their roles very effectively to help arrest the situation.

He commended the World Food Programme (WFP), United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Renewed Effort Against Child Hunger (UN REACH) for the support so far and appealed to all concerned about the situation to also support

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

The Obuasi Municipal office of the National Commission for Civil Education (NCCE) on Tuesday, 26th January 2016 organized a Focus Group Discussions on Local Government for stakeholders in Obuasi.

The commission which was established by Act 452 of the Parliament of Ghana in 1993 is among other things mandated to educate the general public on their civic rights and responsibilities.

The focus group for the discussion included chiefs, the clergy, men and women groups, youth groups, Assembly Members and Unit Committee Members in the Municipality.

A Government appointee to the Obuasi Assembly and the chairperson for the programme, Mrs. Christiana Kagya revealed that the local government/ decentralization concept in Ghana though has been practiced for a long time, it is still yet to find its feet. She continued that such programmes by NCCE will give opportunity for people to really understand the whole decentralization system.

In a speech read on his behalf, the Municipal Chief Executive for Obuasi, Hon. Richard Ofori Agyemang Boadi highlighted extensively on the relevance of the Local Government/ Decentralization system. He said, the decentralization system is intended to take the workload off the central government and to ensure the development of the local level.

He tasked discussants to use the opportunity to explore the strength, weakness and find out the progress of the local government system. Hon. Ofori Agyemang further charged Assembly Members to intensify communication between them and their electorates on every Assembly meeting.

Mr. Alhassan Yakubu, theAshanti Regional Director of the National Commission for Civic Education praised participants for coming out in their numbers to support this worthy cause. He, again, tasked them to fully participate in the discussion since their contributions will go a long way to deepen and consolidate the Local Government/ Decentralization concept in the Municipality.

The Municipal Director of NCCE, Mr. Emmanuel Duah Attobrah who thanked the European Union (E.U) for their unflinching support to the success of the programme also singled out the Obuasi Municipal Assembly for praise for its continuous support to the Department.

GROUP DISCUSSION

Participants were divided into four (4) groups to discuss the following subjects;

Challenges confronting District Assembly Members in the performance of their duties. The challenges to the work of the Unit Committee Members Strategies to strengthen and ensures community participation/support for the work of the Unit Committee and Assembly Members. Factors that account for low voter turnout at the District Level Elections.

The group discussions were immediately followed by a presentation by the four groups

Mr. Anthony Bucknor, the Deputy Coordinating Director of Obuasi Municipal Assembly represented the MCE for Obuasi, the Regional Director, NCCE-Ashanti, Chiefs, Assembly Members, Youth Groups, NGOs and the Media were present.
27.01.2016 LISTEN

The International Criminal Court (ICC) must ensure that justice is done for all victims of crimes under international law committed in Cote dIvoire, Amnesty International said today as the trial against former President Laurent Gbagbo and his youth minister Charles Ble Goude kicks off in The Hague.

Following the countrys 2010-2011 post-election crisis during which more than 1,000 people were killed the two are being tried by the ICC on four charges of crimes against humanity including murder and rape, other inhumane acts, and persecution.

This trial marks a milestone in the search for justice for the victims of crimes committed during the post-election crisis. It is the first time a former head of state has been put on trial at the ICC, which sends a strong message that no-one is above the law, said Gaetan Mootoo, Amnesty International West Africa Researcher.

All those suspected of criminal responsibility for these horrific crimes, including current President Alassane Ouattaras supporters, must be brought to account through fair trials, either in country or by the ICC. This is the only way to ensure justice for the hundreds of victims.

Background

Laurent Gbagbo, former President of Cote d'Ivoire, was surrendered to the ICC on 30 November 2011 and he first appeared before the pre-trial chamber on 5 December 2011.

The Ivorian authorities surrendered Charles Ble Goude to the ICC on 22 March 2014 following an arrest warrant issued on 21 December 2011.

The ICC has also issued an arrest warrant against Simone Gbagbo, the former First Lady, but Cote dIvoire refuses to surrender her to the Court.

Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the Ivorian authorities and the ICC Prosecutor to investigate all crimes under international law committed by all parties during Cote dIvoires post-election crisis. In a hugely worrying step, ICC investigations into alleged crimes committed by those loyal to President Ouattarra have been delayed due to resource constraints placed on the Office of the Prosecutor by states party to the Court.

Until now, the prosecutions have been largely focused on those who had supported former President Gbagbo.
27.01.2016 LISTEN

1 How Dictatorship has wreaked havoc, poverty and deprivation for the people of Equatorial Guinea

Throughout my 25 years in and out of Africa, working in international development, democratization, economic, social and political development, I have come across, time and time again, the deplorable results of bad governance, inexistent rule of law and rampant corruption across the continent. Yet, the case of Equatorial Guinea is particularly acute.

Since it only gained political independence from Spain in 1968, it is a relatively young nation, yet in its short history the country has been riddled by brutal dictatorship and extreme deprivation and poverty. After declaring freedom and independence on October 12, 1968, the political leadership at the time chose Francisco Nguema as President, who subsequently declared himself President for Life in 1972. During this time period, the subsistent agricultural rural economy generated income through exports of cocoa, coffee and timber.

Nguema was betrayed by his nephew, a low ranking military official, a man who graduated last in his class at the military academy in Zaragoza, Spain, prior to his return to what was then known as Spanish Guinea. On August 3, 1979 there was a coup detat after an intense struggle for power, in which this nephew, Lieutenant Colonel Teodoro Obiang became the ruler in 1979, making him now the longest dictator serving in Africa over 37 years of tyrannical rule.

After the discovery and extraction of oil in 1995 by a small Texas oil company called Walter International, which would be later be acquired by ExxonMobil, the dictatorship became even more entrenched in its brutal rule, despotic governance and reckless ruthlessness, as greed has lead the Obiang regime to use new found oil wealth to enrich the inner circle and leave the people in dire poverty. The legacy of both the uncle Nguema and the nephew Obiang has taken African kleptocracy to its greatest lows.

There is no transparency in this government, nor any accountability as to how the profits in oil revenues are being used and distributed. In point of fact, President Obiang has declared that the petro revenues are a state secret, thereby precluding the public from knowing the exact amounts filling dictatorial coffers. Meanwhile, the people of Equatorial Guinea live in extreme poverty, with no electricity, no running water and inadequate nutrition is a country that in 2013 had one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa.

These conditions are clear examples of gross negligence, specifically when dealing with misappropriation of the peoples money, particularly in a country which makes an estimated $3.3 billion dollars a month from oil revenues. With a small population of just over 700,000 and a size equivalent to the state of Maryland in the USA, it is discouraging and disheartening to see how this dictatorship has used these funds to enrich itself and squander the wealth on its own vices and whims. According to Transparency International, the country is ranked as number 172 out 183 countries in terms of being one of the most corrupt in the world.

The French Government in cooperation with the USA in 2012 seized over $4.9 million dollars of luxury goods from the son of the Dictator, Teodorin, which is only a small fraction of the close to $4 billion under his suspected control, all of which is believed to be clandestinely stashed and was secretly stolen to be placed in banks all over the world by the Obiang family and regime.

The abuses of the dictatorship have been well documented through Human Rights Watch during Equatorial Guineas false and rigged elections. Amnesty International has documented extrajudicial killings, torture and clandestine operations to quash the opposition. While, Freedom House has ranked the Equatorial Guinea government as one of the least open and transparent in its annual global review. Also Obiang is a constant ranking on Parade Magazines Worst of the Worst list. Even the US government has voiced its opposition to the Obiang regimes human rights abuses, killings of opposition leaders and unlawful detentions of nationals and foreign nationals.

So, at this point, one might be asking, what is the international community doing to aid a population in such dire straits, yet, there seems to be little to nothing that has been done for over 37 years against this regime. An estimated 15 percent of USA oil imports originates fromAfrica; after Nigeria and Angola, the third most important country is Equatorial Guinea. Now that globalization has pushed the oil market to a level of importance for countries like China and India, there is little political pressure from the international community to end this dictatorship and put an end to this reign of terror.

I can imagine that it is taxing on the USA, after so many challenges across the Middle East and Central Asia, to then turn to Africa and take on the dictatorships that rape, pillage and pawn their countries for fodder, but something must be done, in order to usher change on the African Continent. Equatorial Guinea is a perfect place to start, with a manageable geography, coupled with its strategic location in the Gulf of Guinea, it is a prominent trading zone in Central West Africa.

When I first began my career working in Africa, I served briefly for an advisory firm that represented the interest of dictators in Gabon, Cameroon and Nigeria, and after a short stint of pure frustration about how global politics really works, I vowed that the future of Africa was not in dictatorship. I proclaimed that I would no longer serve the interests of despots, while the people of Africa were suffering.

Well that was 22 years ago when I left that firm and unfortunately not much has changed when it comes to the crisis of democracy in Central and West Africa, but there can be a beacon of light in the small central west African nation of Equatorial Guinea. There is an opposition movement swelling across the world of citizens of Equatorial Guinea that long for true freedom, independence and democracy in their country.

They are organizing across the globe to raise a united flag for democratization and a clarion call to put an end to this dictatorship. It is my hope that they can spread the call for true democracy and pressure the international community to call for the ouster of the Obiang Regime. It is time for a new Equatorial Guinea. It is time for a new democracy in Africa.

Since 1991, there is a champion for human rights, democracy and dignity for the people of Equatorial Guinea and that is my fiance, Gustavo Envela Jr. who has been fighting tirelessly, since we graduated from Stanford University together in 1990, to usher in regime change in his country, to advocate for democracy in Equatorial Guinea and to call on the USA and the global community to end the rampant rage and unaccountable scourge of dictatorship in his country and bring an end to those responsible for the dictatorial pandemic across the continent of Africa, which has infected the continent since colonialism.

We are now jointly appealing, both here in the North America as well as in Europe and Africa, to the entire opposition landscape across the world to join forces and resources in creating an environment in which democratic space will be achieved where the tenant of good governance, rule of law, respect for human rights and human dignity and mandating that free, fair, open and transparent elections be mandated as the standard for the will of the people to be expressed in Equatorial Guinea and throughout the African continent.

It is our mission to put out a clarion call to all opposition leaders and organizations globally in an effort to collaborate and cooperate to cause a ripple of pressure on the Obiang dictatorship to finally relinquish power and allow free, open, transparent and fair elections in the country, after five decades of one party, one family Nguema rule.

The future of Africa is in our hands because once one dictatorship falls the rest will follow, like despotic dominoes, so we hope to initiate an African Renaissance. The future of Equatorial Guinea will be determined by the actions or inactions that we take this year to organize the opposition movement in a massive coalition to push for elections and finally transition this ruthless, vindictive and corrupt dictatorship out of power. The will of the people must triumph. The will of all the souls that have died for true freedom and democracy in Equatorial Guinea must not be denied their victory and with the acknowledgement that they have not died in vein.

On January 26, 2016, Gustavo Envela Jr. celebrates his 48th year on earth, born in Bata-RioMuni, Equatorial Guinea, he dreams of a rebirth for himself and the country simultaneously. We feel together that there must be a new beginning for the country of Equatorial Guinea and are united in our conviction that Equatorial Guinea and the African Continent must elect more competent leadership in which the percipient focus shall be promoting, preserving, protecting the health, education and socio-economic welfare of each of its respective citizenries. This mandate is best expressed in the touching words written by Alice Walker in her poem titled, To Change The World Enough.

To Change The World Enough

To change the world enough

you must cease to be afraid

of the poor.

We experience your fear as the least pardonable of

humiliations; in the past

it has sent us scurrying off

daunted and ashamed

into the shadows.

Now,

the world ending

the only one all of us have known

we seek the same

fresh light

you do:

the same high place

and ample table.

The poor always believe

there is room enough

for all of us;

the very rich never seem to have heard

of this.

In us there is wisdom of how to share

loaves and fishes

however few;

we do this everyday.

Learn from us,

we ask you.

We enter now

the dreaded location

of Earth's reckoning;

no longer far

off

or hidden in books

that claim to disclose

revelations;

it is here.

We must walk together without fear.

There is no path without us

Alice Walker

If you believe in this cause and want to join in this movement then contact us at the Voice of Democracy for Equatorial Guinea on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at @GlobalCitizenAJ and join the movement for freedom and democracy in Equatorial Guinea or contact us directly on email at [email protected] or [email protected]
A forty-seven-year-old businessman and popular serial caller on radio, Ali Yussif Adamu has been charged with fraud by the police at a Kumasi Circuit Court.

He has been accused of defrauding one Kwaku Asante, also a businessman based at Ayigya in Kumasi to the tune of GHC33, 600 under the pretext of helping him to secure an auctioned Mercedes Benz tipper truck and a saloon car.

Adamu, who is based in Accra and also known as Ali Phobia, allegedly collected the money from the victim somewhere in 2014 and has since gone into hiding until his arrest in October last year.

He pleaded not guilty to one count of defrauding by false pretence and the court presided over by Mr John Ekow Mensah, admitted him to a bail of GHC35, 000 with two sureties.

He is to reappear on January 29, 2016.

According to Chief Inspector Felix Akowuah, the complainant is a business man based at Ayigya in Kumasi while the accused person is a resident in Accra and a known serial caller.

He said somewhere last year, the accused person approached the complainant that he could assist him to procure a Mercedes Benz Tipper truck and one Toyota Corolla saloon car at a total cost of GHC33, 600.00.

He said Adamu gave the complainant an account at Stanbic bank into which payment should be made.

Mr Akowuah said Asante dully transferred the money into the said account which was later withdrawn by the accused.

According to him, after withdrawing the money, the accused started giving one excuse after the other and all attempts to retrieve the money proved futile.

Consequently, he said Asante lodged a complaint with the police leading to the arrest of the accused person.
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Ho, Jan. 27, GNA - MTN, the leading telecommunications service provider in Ghana, has received an international award for outstanding people management- the Africa Best Employer Brand Award 2015.

The Company received the award at the recent Employer Branding Awards ceremony held in Mauritius and hosted by Employer Branding Institute.

The award recognizes top organizations across Africa for excellence in building strong employer brands and are 'employers of choice', a release copied to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) said.

This year's event, the second edition of the awards, attracted over 200 global leaders.

Commenting on the award, Mrs. Amma Benneh-Amponsah, MTN Ghana Human Resource (HR) Executive, said, 'MTN thrives on its core values, cultural operating system and HR practices that provide opportunities for employees to freely share ideas, collaborate to get tasks done and ensure accountability.

'These values have contributed immensely to making MTN an employer of choice and a place for effective career growth and development,' she stated.

Mr Ebenezer Asante, CEO, MTN Ghana, was quoted as saying, 'I am excited to receive an award that is a celebration of the best talent in human resources development. This demonstrates the importance MTN attaches to the development of its employees,' and dedicated the award to staff of MTN Ghana.

MTN Ghana was recently awarded the Investors in People Gold accreditation, joining the top three per cent of accredited organizations, which believe in realizing the potential of their people.

It was also adjudged the Overall Best Organization in Human Resource (HR) Practice, for the second time in a row at the HR Focus Awards, 2015.

Other awards won at the same event include: Best Organization in Recruitment and Selection and Best Practice in HR Information Systems in Ghana.

GNA
Accra, Jan. 27, GNA - A total of 300 Ghanaian troops serving with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) have been honoured with medals in recognition of their service to UN peacekeeping.

A statement by the UN Information Centre, in Accra, on Tuesday, said Mr Eugene Owusu, a Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator, who presided over the medal parade, held at Bentiu, South Sudan, encouraged the peacekeepers to continue to bring hope to the people of South Sudan and to continue to work with the communities to alleviate their suffering.

'The situation in South Sudan is difficult at the moment,' he said. 'The world's youngest country has encountered many challenges since the optimism and hope that first came with independence. It is encouraging that the big guns are silent, and that the peace process is broadly holding.'

'We cherish and that a Transitional on National Unity will be formed soon to give the long suffering people of South Sudan the opportunity to rebuild their lives and for many South Sudanese the opportunity to live the life of dignity,' Mr Owusu said.

He also advised the peacekeepers to respect the policy on sexual exploitation and abuse, saying that the peacekeepers were there in South Sudan to protect the population.

'The Secretary-General, and the United Nations, has a zero-tolerance policy towards sexual exploitation and abuse, and I would like to remind you of the importance of the exemplary behavior,' he said.

'As the peacekeepers, we must never forget that we are here to protect and support the people of South Sudan. We are here to support peace and help the South Sudan people to live in dignity'.

Mr Owusu said: 'It is our individual and collective duty to safeguard the dignity of the people that we are here to support and protect. Everyone, from the senior mission leadership, commanding officers, to young soldiers, or staff members, must comply with the policy on sexual exploitation and abuse.'

UNMISS, which was established in 2011, with the mandate of the protection of civilians; monitoring and investigation of human rights; creation of the conditions for delivery of humanitarian assistance; and offering support for the Implementation of the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement.

Ghana is currently the eight largest contributor of military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping with 3,198 currently deployed worldwide.

GNA
Assin-Odumasi (C/R), Jan. 27, GNA - The head teacher of the Assin-Odumasi R/C basic school in the Assin-Central District, Mr. Anthony Addae, has appealed for its inclusion in the feeding programme.

This, he said, was the way forward to entice more children not to only enroll but to be retained in the school.

Making the appeal through the Ghana News Agency (GNA), he stated that the high level of poverty in the area was forcing many kids out of the classroom.

Some of them often come to school on empty stomach and this combined with the long distances, they have to travel on foot daily, had become a disincentive and affecting the development of education.

Mr. Addae said providing the kids with at least one hot meal a day could bring immense relief to the pupils.

He also complained about inadequate classrooms and the lack of teaching and learning materials including chalk and textbooks.

The school, which is up to basic six, has only four classrooms and said this was creating discomfort for the teachers and pupils.

Mr Addae therefore called on the assembly to find the resources to complete a three-unit block of classrooms it started for it in year 2008 but had since been left abandoned.

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Accra, Jan 27, GNA - BusyInternet, a major internet service provider, has launched a cutting edge 4G data service in Accra and Tema, along with its new brand name 'Busy', and a fresh colour brand identity.

'We have made sure that our innovative 4G service is fast, affordable, reliable and flexible, because that is what customers told us was most important,' Mr Praveen Sadalage , the Chief Executive Officer of Busy,' said at the media launch, in Accra.

Busy now offers consumers and businesses an innovative and flexible range of 4G data packages, in addition to MiFi and Wireless Routers designed to suit every need, all delivered with its customary high quality and personal customer service.

Mr Sadalage, who was addressing journalists on of the Company's new product and brand name, said the rebranding was the result of the successful transitioning of the company's operations from an Internet Service Provider to a Mobile Data Operator after a network upgrade from WiMax to 4G LTE, which would enable the provision of enhanced services to customers and the public.

According to him, the facility offered numerous opportunities to Ghanaians when they upgrade to 4G, saying, the Busy brand purpose was to enrich lives through connectivity and accessibility to the mass market.

'There has never been a better time to upgrade to 4G, with MiFi priced from as low as GHC 99.00; Busy's data bundles ranges from just 100 Megabites (MB) for casual users to 50 Gigabites (GB) for 4G lovers, with the ability to rollover data from one bundle to the next,' he said.

The Company, he said, also offered a choice of Unlimited Freebies to customers who would purchase more than 5GB of data each month, while customers could choose between unlimited and free usage of Facebook, WhatsApps, You Tube, Ghanaweb or Myjoyonline; or unlimited and free usage either at Night-Time or at the Weekend.

'We now invite companies, institutions, entrepreneurs and the public to join the excitement and explore Busy's state of the art services,' he said.

Dr Edward Omane Boamah, the Minister of Communications, congratulated the Company for playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Internet services in the country.

'For over a decade, Busy symbolised the provision of Internet services in Ghana and I am particularly encouraged that you have taken your service to the next level to meet the increasing demands of your wide range of clients,' he said.

Mrs Linda Narh, Head of Marketing at Busy, urged customers wishing to try or purchase the Busy 4G to visit the Busy Experience Centre on the Ring Road Central, Accra Mall, West Hills Mall, or visit their websites at www.busy.com.gh for more details on the various outlets in Accra and Tema.

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Tema, Jan 27, GNA - The Right Reverend Thomas Forson, Methodist Bishop of Tema, has called on parents to train their children to fear and honour God since that was the greatest legacy they could bequeath to them.

According to him, the solution to the worries and battles of life could only be found in the word of God and 'our association with him.'

Rt. Rev. Forson, who was delivering a sermon during the induction of connexional officers of the Methodist Guild at the Saint Paul's Methodist Cathedral in Tema, said children who honoured God grow to appreciate the fact that loving and honoring God was service and compassion to humanity.

According to him, such people develop the right character, which was needed to steer the affairs of the family, society and nation in which they lived.

He said since leadership determines the rise or fall of every society, it was crucial that people given the power to lead have attributes needed to guide and encourage followers or citizens.

'You may be charismatic but without character, your leadership will be meaningless. You must have the will to focus on the needs of others before you consider yours. In fact, you must be the servant leader that Jesus taught his disciples.'

According to him, 'Christian leaders are taught by Jesus to be humble, selfless, see responsibility as service and not power, be creative, forgiving and loving.'

Mr Jonathan Bassaw, Connexional President of the Guild, was inducted with fourteen other officers to steer the affairs of the group for three years.

The Methodist Guild was introduced in Gold Coast as Ghana was then called in 1899 to mobilize Methodist youths and adults for Church activities, train them for leadership and make them effective witnesses in the Church and country to the Gospel of Christ.

GNA
Accra, Jan. 27, GNA - Ghana's leading producer of bottled natural mineral water, Voltic (GH) Limited (Voltic), has inaugurated a kitchen space, a reading area and an office for the Meyah Preparatory School at a cost of GHa45,000.00.

Located at Medie in the Ga West Municipality of the Greater Accra Region, the school for several years has been a beneficiary of various corporate social investment initiatives of Voltic.

In 2012, Voltic constructed a mechanized borehole with a storage tank for the school.

This current initiative is aimed at improving the teaching and learning facilities at the school for which the community will also benefit.

The project, which commenced in December 2015, is in fulfillment of the company's aim to support the provision of social amenities within areas where it operates.

The Meyah Preparatory School was established in 2004 after the Principal, Moses Emerson, retired from the military in 2000 and relocated to Medie.

He identified the need to establish a school to provide quality educational support to a growing number of children of settler famers.

The school has a population of over 200 from crAche through to Junior High School form one.

Mr Phil Redman, Voltic's General Manager, speaking at the handing over ceremony, said a conducive environment replete with adequate amenities is pivotal in the delivery of quality basic education.

He said the company's decision to support the school was based on needs assessment carried out by the company so that the required assistance could be provided.

"Voltic is passionate about supporting basic education and promoting good health. Supporting the Meyah Preparatory School with a kitchen space, reading area and an office, demonstrates our passion for quality education in a healthy environment,' he said.

Mr Moses Agbodra, the Proprietor of the school, commended Voltic (GH) for their immense support, adding that, the amenities provided would go a long way to improve upon the quality of basic education delivery in the community.

'We will put the facilities to good use and ensure proper maintenance,' he promised.

He also used the occasion to request for more support for the school and called on other organisations to emulate the kind gesture demonstrated by Voltic (GH) Limited.

Voltic (GH) Limited has been operating at Medie since 1995 when the company was established. Over the years the company has executed a number of corporate social investment activities in the community.

The most recent being the construction of a culvert with a bridge in July 2015 at a cost of GHa40,000.00.

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Wenchi, (B/A), Jan. 27, GNA - Ideal Finance, a non-banking financial institution, has earmarked on a GHa 50,000000.00 credit facility to support the operations of Rural and Community Banks (RCBs) in the country this year.

Dr Nii Kotei Dzani, Chief Executive Officer, said the facility is to support the training and capacity building of staff, and advised interested RCBs to access the facility.

He disclosed this to the Ghana News Agency at the climax of the 5th edition of Rural Banking Week celebration of the Association of Rural Banks.

It was on the theme: '40 years of rural banking in Ghana: achievements, challenges and prospects.'

Dr Dzani emphasised that well-trained and skillful employees in the RCBs services are needed to make the sector attractive to win the confidence of local and foreign investors.

He observed that because some RCBs employ professionally low-calibre of staff they find it difficult to go into market research and product development to meet their prospects.

He expressed concern about the general financial and banking illiteracy rate among Ghanaians and the behaviour of some politicians and political parties who mount unnecessary pressures to access credit facility from community and rural banks for their electioneering campaigns.

'Personally I have experience this before and the sad aspect of it is that many of these political parties fail to pay back the facility', he added.

Osagyefo (Professor) Anye Amoapong Tabrako II, Paramount Chief of Wenchi suggested that the ordinary share capital base of RCBs ought to be strengthened by raising their capital base to an appreciable level.

He entreated the association to endeavour to mobilise resources for the training of staff in practical learning and skills development in areas like marketing, selling and good customer care services.

Osagyefo Tabrako II observed that if staff of the RCBs are abreast of banking ethics it would help to elevate them to a higher pedestal and make them as competitive as commercial banking staff.

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Accra, Jan 27, GNA - Mrs Theresa Forkuo, mother of a 13 year-boy with Cerebral Palsy has urged the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection to work towards the provision of social services to help develop the talents of children with the condition.

She said there was the need to have well-structured and efficient institutions that were friendly and suitable for children with Cerebral Palsy to stimulate their proper development in an environment the children would feel comfortable.

Mrs Forkuo also called for the establishment of a fund and some support from the government for parents who would like to send their CP children abroad by facilitating visa collection.

She made the call when a group of women with children who have the condition met to discuss their welfare issues and advocacy for CP issues in Ghana.

The women met as part of the Special Mothers project, a project that seeks to create awareness about Cerebral Palsy while encouraging and motivating mothers not to give up on their children.

Medical experts explain Cerebral Palsy as a neurological disorder usually resulting from brain injury. Cerebral Palsy affects the movement and muscle coordination. It contributes to a large percentage of all childhood disabilities.

The condition happens during pregnancy or shortly after birth, Cerebral Palsy can also result from non treatment of neo-natal jaundice. No two children with Cerebral palsy look the same but most of the children experience spasm (stiffness of joints and muscles) and delayed speech.

Mrs Forkuo said: As a country, we are very silent on Cerebral Palsy and families are suffering. However, early intervention programmes can help children with CP. The CP children come up so well when we start intervention early, my son can draw very well and I wish we had well established schools with the supportive environment to develop that talent.'

'Such social services are given to parents in developed countries and even some developing countries, so why can't it happen in Ghana?' she asked.

Mrs Forkuo said policy makers had to create an environment that encouraged efficient social support and services the children.

'Many parents are lamenting in their homes, we need help, every disability is a disability,' she stated.

Mrs Esi Anim, mother of a six-year old girl with Cerebral Palsy supported the idea of well established institutions and social structures, and also expressed concerns about the lack of specialists' services in Ghana to attend to these children.

She said: 'It is very frustrating trying to access the services of physiotherapists, psychologists, speech therapists, and neurologists in Ghana and even more frustrating if one is living outside Accra.'

Mrs Faustina Asiedu Larbi, another mother with a three-year old CP girl, said many mothers were left with no choice but to abandon their CP children because there was no social support service in Ghana.

'Most of these children are even left home without any hope of getting educated because while some schools reject them, others charge extra for admitting them.'

Ms Malwine Amoako, mother of a three-year old CP boy, called for extension of specialist services into rural Ghana, saying, even some major cities do not have such services in their hospitals so mothers have to travel long distances to access them.

Mrs Joyce Adubofuor Atta, mother of an eight-year old girl with CP, who expressed helplessness about her child's situation, said she hoped that policy makers would pay attention to children and families affected by the condition.

'Children with Cerebral Palsy are very intelligent and can contribute to our economic and social development as a country, if given the needed push,' she added

GNA
27.01.2016 LISTEN

Berekum - Koraso (B/A), Jan. 27, GNA - Mr Kwaku Agyenim Boateng, the Member of Parliament for Berekum West Constituency, has commended the Yesu Ka Woho Fun Club for helping to put up a police post in the area.

The MP observed that it was unusual that fun club members would construct a police posts, saying, 'This is usually team the effort of the government and the citizenry'.

Mr Agyenim Boateng said this at a fund raising ceremony held by the Yesu Ka Woho Fun Club at Berekum Koraso, which realised GHa5, 000.00.

The fundraising was in aid of the completion of the on-going police post, which has reached the lintel stage, and is expected to be completed in June this year.

He appealed to other fun clubs in Berekum to emulate the goodwill of the Yesu Ka Woho Fun Club to develop their communities.

Mr Agyenim Boateng also presented 10 packets of roofing sheets as his contribution to the project

The District Police Commander, thanked the club members for their efforts towards enhancing security in the area, and gave the assurance that the police personnel would be posted to the community to help in maintaining law and order.

Mr Edmund Asante, the President of the Fun Club, noted that peace and security played an essential role in the development of every society hence their contribution.

He urged individuals, philanthropists, organisation and the government to support them either in cash or kind for early completion of the project.

GNA
According to the Jordanian government, the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, who masterminded the Sbarro massacre in 2001, cannot be extradited to the...
IVA Struggling with debt? Compare your debt options and write off up to 80% of your unsecured debts  from 80 per month Get Started for free

What is an IVA? With an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) you can make affordable monthly payments towards a percentage of your debt for 5 years. At the end of the 5 year plan, your remaining debt will be completely written off.

Benefits of an IVA

Here is a list of the cost common advantages of an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA):



 Affordability  You will only be asked to pay back what you can afford, with allowances taken into account for food, bills, entertainment, travel, childcare and others. You may be sacrificing certain essential costs at the moment. With an IVA they are budgeted for so they will no longer be neglected

 No upfront costs  When you set up an IVA, there are no upfront costs whatsoever. This means that you can put a debt solution in place today without spending a penny

 You have a finishing line  Do you feel like there will be no end to your debt problems? With high interest costs and charges, the balances of your credit accounts may not reduce as you need them to. With an IVA you will become totally debt free at the completion of the IVA (usually 5 years). You can use this as an opportunity to change your financial life, for good

 Confidential  Your IVA is not advertised in the London Gazette or local newspaper. It is your decision whether you would like to disclose it to other people or not

 No more contact from creditors  When you are in an IVA, your creditors will no longer have the right to contact you or refer the debt on to debt collectors/bailiffs. This is a great benefit for most people as it will take away the stress caused by constant calls/texts/emails and home visits

 Stay in your house  Unlike some debt solutions, an IVA will allow you to stay in your current home. This is even the case if the property has a mortgage or is owned outright

 Your pension  An IVA does not have an impact on your pension. You will not have to surrender your pension or withdraw money from it to pay into your IVA

Risks of an IVA

Here is a list of the cost common disadvantages of an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA):

Equity Release  If you own your property and it has value, you may be asked to release the equity in the property

Credit Rating  If you have a perfect credit rating, this will be damaged and you will not be allowed to take out more debt whilst in an arrangement

You must keep up with repayments  If you do not keep up with your monthly repayments, there is a risk you will be made bankrupt

Who qualifies for an IVA?

There is no office guidelines to who qualifies for an IVA. It is a legally binding, Government legislation designed to help all people. Generally speaking, insolvency practitioners (IP) will look at your situation if they think the IVA proposal they submit is beneficial to both yourself (the debtor) and your creditors. This often restricts people to a certain criteria which you will have to meet:

Over 5000 worth of unsecured debt You must have 2 or more creditors of 2 or more lines of credit Must live in England, Wales or Northern Ireland Must be insolvent Must be willing to pay at least 70 per month into their IVA Must have some type or types of regular income

What debts can I include in an IVA?

You can include a wide range of unsecured debts within your IVA. These include:

Credit card debt/credit cards

Loans/loan debt

Payday loans

Council tax arrears

HMRC debt

Overpaid benefits

Catalogues

Gas and electricity arrears

Overdrafts/overdraft debt

Water arrears

Income tax arrears

Debts to friends and family

Other unsecured debts

Note: If you are a resident of Scotland, you will need to apply for a Scottish Trust Deed (legally binding). Speak to our advisors for Scottish Debt Advice.

What debts cant be included in an IVA?

Secured loans

Your mortgage (if you still live in the house)

Car finance (if you still have the car)

Rent arrears for your current property

Court fines/Police fines

Hire purchase arrears (if you still have the product)

Log book loans (if you still have the vehicle that the debts are secured on)

Student loans

Other secured debts

What does I.V.A stand for?

IVA stands for Individual Voluntary Arrangement. It is a formal way to consolidate your debts into one affordable monthly repayment, resulting in the debtor becoming debt free at the end of their payments.

Can I apply for an IVA online?

Use the IVA Calculator to check your eligibility Prepare your IVA proposal and apply for your IVA. When your IVA is accepted, your creditors can no longer contact you. Pay 60 low monthly payments. After 5 years, you are out of your IVA and completely debt free.

Will an IVA affect my employment?

In most occupations, your credit rating or credit scoring is not a factor and it may never have been checked in the past, it may also be likely that it is not checked in the future either.

There is no law to tell you that you must advise your employer that you have entered an IVA or that you owe money. They will not be notified by your insolvency practitioner. If you wanted to keep it a private matter, in most cases this would be absolutely fine. With some roles such as financial advisors, solicitors or bank workers it may make up part of your contract to advise them of changes like this. In these situations we would advise to inform your employers of your intentions before you enter into any arrangements. This way there will be no nasty surprises for you later down the line. More often than not, we find that your employer would not be concerned by your IVA and that it would not affect your employment status. An IVA is a formal solution and could affect some employments, such as if you were a solicitor or accountant for example. We would always recommend that you receive approval from your employers that your job isnt affected before you sign up for anything.

Will an IVA impact my partner?

There are certain situations where you may not want to involve your partner at all in your IVA proposal due to personal reasons. Insolvency Practitioners are very aware of these circumstances and can operate solely via telephone and email and at your convenience, so rest assured that your matters can be kept completely private.

If the debts which you are looking to place into your IVA are in joint names, then this would be different. Your IP would look to place all of your debts into an IVA, including joint debts therefore you would have to inform your partner of your plans.

If your debts are solely yours, then there would be no negative impact on your partner, their credit score would remain unaffected and they would not be entered onto any registers or be tainted in any way.

Will an IVA affect my credit score/credit file?

Whilst you are in your arrangement, you will not be able to get any credit. An IVA will stay on your credit file for 6 years, so 12 months after a typical IVA. When this time has passed and your monthly payments have ended, you will be able to rebuild your credit rating.

What proof will I need to apply for an IVA?

Proof of ID  Passport/driving license/birth certificate/utility bills/national insurance identification/credit agreement Bank statements  3 months bank statements with all transactions displayed Proof of income  3 months payslips/P60/proof of benefits

How long does it take to set up an IVA?

Your initial call will only last around 5-10 minutes. The IVA process will be explained to you and you will be told what further information you will need to provide to proceed with your IVA proposal. Once you have returned the required information, an IVA will usually take between 7-14 days to get into place. You will be protected from creditors within this time, your advisor will provide you with documentation via email.

How long does an IVA last?

Most IVAs will last for a length of five years. The i v a will remain on your credit file for a period of six years and is placed on the Insolvency Register for that period. You can work out what date it will be removed from your credit file, it will be six years from the start date of the IVA term. So if the IVA started on 1 January 2000, it should be removed from your credit file six years from that date, which would be 1 January 2006. When you apply for an individual voluntary arrangement your Insolvency Practitioner (IP) will tell you if you qualify for an IVA, how long it lasts, how much it costs and provide you with any other debt advice which you may need.

How much will debt advice cost for an Individual Voluntary Arrangement?

The advice cost for individual voluntary arrangements is free of charge. Your I.V.A company will tell you if you qualify for an IVA. They will talk to you about your different debts, provide you with free debt advice and check if your creditors are likely to approve your proposal for your IVA for debt.

How does an IVA affect your life?

By taking out an IVA you may affect your overall financial position. You will not be allowed to take out credit for 6 years. You will struggle to get a mortgage or remortgage your existing property. It also may affect any future increase in earnings or windfalls you may receive, as these will need to be paid to your insolvency practitioner. Your insolvency practitioner will take control of your debts for this period, they will deal with all of your creditors and this is legally binding. That means you will not be allowed to take out any more debts whilst in the IVA.

Once the plan is completed, any debts which you accrue will be managed by yourself. Your ability to take out further debts in the future will not be impacted once the IVA has completed.

What is the IVA protocol?

The I.V.A protocol is a voluntary set of guidelines which your Insolvency Practitioner (IP) can sign up for which improves the efficiency of Individual Voluntary Arrangements. When you apply for debt advice, it is important that you understand the steps of the debt solution, so you can decide whether or not the solution is the best one for your circumstances.

How do I know if creditors will accept my IVA?

Generally speaking, most creditors will approve voluntary arrangements for unsecured debt. But some debts can not be included within one formal debt solution. Your Insolvency Practitioner will tell you how likely it is that your creditors will be willing to accept your proposal, based on the voting creditors.

Can I pay in one lump sum?

There are occasions when you may be eligible for a debt solution which is payable in a one off lump sum as a final settlement to your creditors. This is usually when the money is being gifted from some one else, or you have received inheritance or a windfall for example. With a one-off lump sum payment, the advice is usually the same as when you normally apply for an IVA. You wouldnt have to make regular payments into the solution, your IP can provide you with more advice on one off lump sum solutions for your debts. Your IP will provide you with more advice on the debt IVA and explain what is IVA to you.

Who regulates the debt industry?

At present the debt industry is not regulated. Some Insolvency Practitioners offices choose to sign up to the Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA) or register with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). You can contact the IPA using the contact details or email address on their website. Your creditors do not regulate the debt industry and your creditors will not be able to impact any decisions which the IPA or FCA make. In our experience, the regulators will take assertive action on any advisers or businesses which do not comply with their strict codes of practice. To check if a person is regulated by the FCA, enter their name into the search box in the FCA website.

Should I use a debt charity?

There are thousands of companies which provide debt help in the UK. You may be looking for an alternative to a private company. You should know that charities usually pass their fee charging products to sister companies which charge fees and disbursements, just like private companies. So what you initially thought was a good option, on further analysis could be different to what you originally thought. Charities do have their part to play though. They can help you if you have a problem with your bank accounts, maintenance arrears, living costs, credit reference agencies, child support arrears, bankruptcy, assets, accountancy issues, mortgages, creditor issues, insurance providers, mobiles, your bank account, rates arrears, PAYE contributions or if you want to work out your expenditure. They can make sure that you speak to an adviser or supervisor and look at proposals to offer your lender. A petition has started with the possibility of a debate in parliament about how charities represent themselves and their services.

Which charities help with debt?

You can contact Money Advice Service, National Debtline, Step Change, Shelter or a combination of the three. Charities are particular useful for a low debt level under 1,000. If the debt is high (such as a debt value of 10,000 or more) you would usually seek an assessment from a professional adviser. If you do decide to use a charity to guide you, make sure you check their charity number and the registration number on their website to make sure you are content that their team can answer your questions in the right ways. A lot of clients of charities have a minimum debt level which does not meet the basis for an IVA, so you could always chat to a charity that is happy to act on your behalf for low debt levels.

Although an I.V.A could be the answer to your debt problem, its important to understand the monthly payment so call us on our free phone number. Anyone customers can receive expert feedback on their rights from debt charities, if they cant help they will usually point you in the director of firms which help with IVAs.

We are homeowners, will lenders see my proposal differently?

In some cases yes. In the majority of cases, if you are a homeowner you will not need to remortgage or take out any additional finances that will effect your property. You will need to sign a additional restrictions which remove your ability to take out additional credit tied to your property, which is something that is restricted once you are in an i.v.a. There are exceptions to this, such as when you have a lot of equity in your property/properties. If you own half of a property and another party owns the other half, only your equity will be affected.

If you are landlord and you are in a position of equity, your IP may review your trading position or business to make sure the figures in question are in order. This is usually the case if you have two or more properties, as sometimes the equity can be used to form a repayment to your creditors. But this usually depends on the amount of value built up in your properties.

Banks and building societies will not change the terms of your mortgage as long as a contribution is still being made for the duration of your arrangement. Your mortgage payments will be added to your expenses and accounted for within your budget, as long as you can provide evidence that you can afford to continue to make payments into your mortgage for duration of the plan.

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business Apollo Hospitals rises; to sell 23% stake in Apollo Munich Apollo Energy Company, an Apollo Hospitals Group Company, has approved the divestment of 23.3 percent stake in Apollo Munich Health Insurance Company to its joint venture partner, Munich Re of Germany for Rs 163.5 crore.
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Chinas own Shanghai Composite (SHA:000001) performed terribly on the first day of trading for 2016. It dropped 6.9% on the first day of trading.

Chinas own Shanghai Composite [SHA:000001] performed terribly on the first day of trading for 2016. It dropped 6.9% on the first day of trading. And it has substantially dropped twice more since then. 7% on 6 January and yesterday it dropped a further 6.4%. The most recent drop has helped the composite reach 13 month lows. And it could be the Chinese governments fault.

Source: Bloomberg

Pumping money just compounded the problem

Mid last year, the Shanghai Composite was in melt down mode. The index has lost 43% of its value and was unravelling fast. The government had to do something quick before their stock market completely kicked the bucket.

The solution was simple. Banks would lend billions to big Chinese brokerage firms so they could buy more stocks. The goal was to buy enough shares to stop the stock market from crashing further. This injection of capital was the largest since 2013.

But the problem wasnt fixed. The composite continued to drop. Zheshang Securities analyst, Zhang Yanbing said even though the central bank injected funds, this money wont necessarily go into the stock market. Other analysts agreed, believing the injected fund were to replace capital out flows.

It was estimated that Chinas capital outflow reached $1 trillion last year. And in response the government has limited capital leaving the country. We are now refusing all foreign currency transfers where the documents are not fully completepreviously the requirements were not so strict, said a banking executive in Shanghai.

Capital outflow jumped in December last year. The cause could be the immediate trigger for a pickup in capital outflows towards the end of the year was the Peoples Bank of Chinas poor communication over its shift in currency policy, said Mark Williams, chef Asia economist. And he might well be right.

Up until this time, China used to peg their exchange rate against the US. And usually China tries to keep the yuan low to keep their exports competitive. But recently China has changed the way they set the exchange rate. China has stated that the previous days trading of the yuan would be taken into account. This means the market now greatly affects the yuan instead of staying pegged.

The decision triggered the biggest devaluation of the yuan in 20 years. Some believe the foreign exchange reserve could tumble as much as $300 billion this year. Slow economic growth and an unexpected devaluation have left policy makers fighting to reduce the yuans volatility.

The Chinese state media has even tried to discourage billionaire George Soros, betting on the yuan to fall. It seems like a ridiculous statement, telling traders how to trade. But Soros has been dubbed as the man who broke the Bank of England. Soros made US$1 billion by shorting sterling in 1992, so maybe Chinas pleas could be justified.

Its an issue about confidence and theres no confidence in the market now, said fund manager, Wu Kan. And hes completely right. Right now, negative news is being compounded by millions of investors. Analysts are adding to the fears by aggressively advising investors to sell. Managing director of Chart Partners, Thomas Schroeder says the benchmark will drop to 2,400.

Yet its still uncertain whether the Shanghai Composite will drop a further 14.57%. But what is more certain is the growing pessimism in our own market.

What does Chinas situation mean for Australian shares?

For the first time in a little over two weeks it looked like the ASX 200 was going to rally out of its slump. On Monday the market traded up 2% to a high of 5006.6 points. But of course pessimism has kicked in and our market has dropped again below the 5000 mark.

Source: Yahoo finance

China is our biggest trading partner. We depend upon them to buy mass quantities of our minerals, finished goods and agricultural products. Thus, slowing growth or subpar economic indicators out of China really hurt Aussie companies. Adding to the problem is a downwards trending Shanghai composite. When Chinese investors arent confident, it encourages Australian investors to follow suit.

When will it be over? Everyone is guessing at the moment. But a declining stock market isnt all too bad. When stock prices are declining it make them cheaper to buy. Sure, not all cheap stocks are worth buying but if its a really great company, then why not buy? Investors are all spooked by whats happening in the global market. Selling out of their holdings or short selling shares because they are scared to buy into anything. But we must remember that emotions should never be a factor when deciding what to invest in.

There is a famous story of Warren Buffett giving back investor their money because he couldnt invest in a bull market. He told investors in a note that investing in a bull market was unfamiliar to him. He believed his investment options were limited and his methods were ineffective.

So if we were to take a leaf out of Buffetts book, a declining market would be music to savvy investors ears. There are plenty of opportunities to make money. You just need to keep your emotion out of your portfolio.

Harje Ronngard,

Junior Analyst, Money Morning

PS: The market has beaten down many blue chip companies this year. Yet there are only a select few which are worth buying. According to Money Mornings Publisher Kris Sayce, there are 5 Blue Chips out there that are a must buy.

Kris has close to 20 years experience in analysing stocks. His experience ranges from brokerage houses to leading wealth management firm. But Kris has found his home at Port Philip Publishing. Kris understands that investing your money isnt easy, especially in a declining market.

In Kriss report he will tell how you how moving capital into beaten down blue chip stocks is a good idea. There is one common denominator that makes these 5 blue chips a buy. And Kris will show you how to identify it for future investments. To get your free copy today, click here.
The Western Piedmont Foundation will host the Tesla Quartet, resident quartet with the Western Piedmont Symphony, for a free performance open to the public on Tuesday, Feb. 2 at 7 p.m. in Leviton Auditorium located in Moore Hall on the campus of Western Piedmont Community College. This event is free and open to the public.

Winner of the Gold Medal at the 2012 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Prizewinner in the 2012 London International String Quartet Competition and 2013 Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, the Tesla Quartet was formed at The Juilliard School in 2008 and quickly established itself as one of the most promising young ensembles in New York, winning second prize at the J.C. Arriaga Chamber Music Competition only a few months after its inception.

The quartet has enjoyed a busy performing schedule, both in the United States and abroad, with appearances in Austria, England and France. Community involvement and outreach are integral parts of the Tesla Quartets mission, and the group has brought inspiring music to childrens hospitals, soup kitchens, libraries, retirement communities, and schools.

This concert is made possible by the support of generous donors to the WPF and is the result of a partnership between the WPF and the Western Piedmont Symphony.

Visit www.wpcc.edu/foudation to give to or learn more about the Western Piedmont Foundation. Visit www.wpsymphony.org to learn more about the Western Piedmont Symphony.
Raeford, N.C.  At the request of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and the Hoke County Sheriffs Office, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) is assisting with the seizure and care of nearly 600 animals from The Haven, a 122-acre unlicensed, self-described animal rescue in Raeford, N.C. The owners of the facility were arrested on charges of animal cruelty after a search warrant was served Wednesday morning. The Department of Agriculture and Hoke County Sheriffs Office began investigating The Haven after receiving numerous complaints of sick animals adopted from the facility. The ASPCA is assisting with evidence collection, animal removal, transport, sheltering and medical care.

More than 300 dogs, 250 cats and 40 horses were discovered, along with numerous farm animals. The animals were kept in filthy kennels, cages, outdoor pens and paddocks, many without protection from the elements. Many animals are suffering from untreated medical issues including open wounds, severe upper respiratory disease and emaciation.

What we found today at this facilityself-described as North Carolinas most successful no-kill shelter--is unacceptable, said Tim Rickey, senior vice president of ASPCA Field Investigations and Response. This is one of the largest animal seizures the ASPCA has ever conducted in our 150 years as an organization. We have a team of nearly 140 responders on the ground to remove and care for these hundreds of neglected animals who have clearly not been receiving adequate care. Our goal is to help them become healthy and ultimately find them homes.

The ASPCA Field Investigations and Response team is currently providing medical attention to animals in critical condition on the property and the ASPCAs Forensic Sciences team is collecting evidence to support the criminal case. They will remove the animals and transport them to a temporary shelter in an undisclosed location over the next few days, where the animals will receive medical exams and behavioral assessments. The ASPCA will continue to care for the animals at the temporary shelter until custody is determined by the court and will provide ongoing legal support until resolution of the criminal case.

The condition of these animals is pressing and required immediate attention, stated Hoke County Sheriff Hubert Peterkin. In addition to protecting Hoke County citizens, law enforcement has an obligation to ensure the safety and well being of Hoke County animals at all times. We cannot and will not allow this type of mistreatment to continue any longer. All persons involved will be held accountable.

The Haven has been operating without a license and in violation of many requirements in the North Carolina Animal Welfare Act for at least ten years. The population of animals at the facility has fluctuated over the years, previously reaching more than 1,000 animals. Past inspections by the Department of Agriculture deemed the facility inadequate, citing the large number of animals as well as sick and injured animals without access to water.

Agencies assisting the ASPCA with the removal, transport and sheltering operation include: Asheville Humane Society (Asheville, N.C.); Charleston Animal Society (North Charleston, S.C.); Cumberland County Animal Services (Fayetteville, N.C.); Humane Society of Greater Savannah (Savannah, Ga.); Loving Friends Transport (Clear Water, Fla.); North Carolina Specialized Mobile Animal Rescue Team (Spring Lake, N.C.); Wake County Animal Center- (Raleigh, N.C.); St. Huberts Animal Welfare Center (Madison, N.J.); Wayside Waifs (Kansas City, Mo.); and 808 Equine Rescue (Ewa Beach, Hawaii).
Peter Whittle, an antiques dealer, says he is looking to invest for the longer term. As I run my own businesses, my income can fluctuate, and I dont have a pension to fall back on, so I try to ensure I lock some money away each month for the future.

At the moment these savings are being invested into the property market. However, as he is in his late 20s, Whittle says he does not have the capital, nor the inclination, to take out a second mortgage on a buy-to-let property.

Instead, hes chosen to invest smaller sums through a number of crowdfunding sites, where they are invested directly into bricks and mortar.

He explains: I have invested in a couple of projects through The House Crowd. The minimum investment is 1,000. The money raised is used to buy, improve, then rent a property - of which you then own a share.

You have to lock your money away for a minimum of three of five years - depending on the project. The shareholders then vote on whether to sell the asset or to continue renting it.

Near Double Digit Returns

Whittle says he first invested a couple of years ago - and to date hes made between 8 and 9% on these investments. Many of these projects are regenerating properties in deprived areas to ensure they are fit to rent. I think this is a good use of my surplus savings, and hopefully it will also make a decent return for me.

He adds that investing in separate projects allows him to diversify. I dont have all my money tied up in one property. I also get some exposure to rising house prices without the direct hassle of being a landlord. For example, Im not going to get calls at 2am because the boiler has broken down.

He says he remains confident that property is a good long term investment - despite recent Government moves to dampen investors enthusiasm for buy-to-let. Stamp duty will be soon increased on second home purchases, and landlords will only be able to claim basic-rate tax relief against mortgage interest.

We just have to see what effect these changes will have on the property market, he said.

Investing in Start-up Businesses

As well as investing in property through this and other crowdfunding sites, he has also invested with Funding Circle, which raises money from many smaller investors to invest in start-up businesses.

He says: I run my own antiques business Whittle & Ward so I know it can be difficult getting a venture off the ground. Hopefully the money Ive invested will help other businesses to grow, which will benefit everyone.

He says there may be more risk in these crowdfunding sites, his money for example is not protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, but he is hopeful there will be decent rewards too, particularly if he diversifies his holdings.

Shares Passed Down the Generations

Whittle also holds a small share portfolio, most of which he inherited from his mother. He says these holdings are primarily in large blue-chips.

He has shareholdings in Scottish & Southern (SSE), Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY), BT (BT.A) and Tesco (TSCO).

Scottish & Southern, one of the big five energy companies in the UK, has a four-star rating from Morningstar. This means it has currently considered undervalued by Morningstar equity analysts. It is also a steady dividend payer.

BT has been another solid performer in recent years. The share price is up 24% over the last five years. It has two stars from Morningstar equity analysts, meaning that it is currently trading at more than its fair value.

Supermarket and Banking Stocks that Disappointed

Whittle has had more of a more bumpy ride with both Tesco and Lloyds.

Tesco, like other large supermarkets, has seen profits fall, thanks in part to discount retailers Lidl and Aldi. As a result its share price has fallen by 33% in the last year, and it has seen an 11% decline over the last five years.

The picture is more mixed at Lloyds. Share prices at all the major banks plummeted in the wake of the financial crisis. Since then it has been a slow and at times painful recovery for the financial sector. Over the last three years the value of these shareholdings have risen by 6%, but over the past year they have slipped by 14%, and the share price of one of the UKs flagship banks is still 8% down on where it was a decade ago.
Morningstar's "Perspectives" series features investment insights from third-party contributors. Here, George Luckraft, Manager, AXA Framlington Monthly Income Fund, examines the outlook for smaller companies.

It may only be January, but clouds have already been gathering for UK equity investors in 2016. China is undoubtedly one of the dominant factors, with domestic efforts to devalue their currency driving deflationary forces that are being felt globally. From a UK perspective, EU referendum uncertainty is likely to weigh on sterling given the potential trading impact of a Brexit. Whats more, continued weakness in mining markets including oil and gas, are also causing concern and many companies related to these industries are likely to slash dividends.

Maximise these opportunities by keeping selections varied

However, I believe that there are opportunities for investors to capitalise on some of the compelling growth stories which we are equally likely to see in 2016  it is simply a question of knowing where to look. The all share UK equity benchmarks tend to be concentrated in a small number of very large stocks, whereas smaller companies can offer a rich stream of opportunities.

In 2015, a number of smaller companies did especially well in a wide range of sectors, especially UK consumer goods, that we believe could hold positive prospects for 2016, such as Pendragon and Topps Tiles.

Alumasc, a construction company, is just such an example of an equity which performed well last year, and in my view, shows scope to continue this year. The company is supplying the UK and overseas construction market backed by strong order books, yet it is trading at a modest price compared to value.

Sigma Capital is another potential smaller company to watch in 2016. They are currently undertaking a build-out in the private rented sector, an area we believe is primed for growth; the share price nearly doubled last year. Another smaller company in the property arena with a good yield is Regional REITS, which only recently came to the market. The stock offers a prospective premium income in comparison to that of the broad market.

Beyond the smaller companies, there are medium sized companies which may also offer opportunities in property with a twist on exposure to the sector. New River Retail, for example, runs a property portfolio for retailers, and offers a current yield of around 5.5%. The stock is trading on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), but will be moving to the main market, the FTSE, in mid-2016, which could generate some buying in the stock that could potentially squeeze the price higher in my view.

The key to maximising these opportunities is to keep selections varied to preserve capital. In my management of the AXA Framlington Monthly Income Fund, in which I also invest my own money, I work hard to maintain a diversified portfolio to address the heavy weighting in a small number of large companies, which is a common problem amongst all-share benchmarks. The small and medium sized company strata of the market have less analytical coverage, so there is huge potential for investors willing to get to know the individual stocks and identify where opportunities lie.

Disclaimer

The views contained herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of Morningstar. If you are interested in Morningstar featuring your content on our website, please email submissions to UKEditorial@morningstar.com
Interest rates have been at a record low for seven years, yet there is little sign of the tide turning. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney recently confirmed there was no need for interest rates to rise; meaning income seekers will have to continue to look for alternatives to cash.

Artemis Income and Schroder UK Alpha Income and the passive fund, iShares FTSE 100 ETF have half of their top holdings in common

Dividend paying stocks are one attractive option. According to the latest UK Dividend Monitor from Capital Asset Services, UK top 100 companies pay-outs rose 5.5% to 74 billion in 2015. In total, dividends paid by UK companies reached 88 billion in 2015. Predictions suggest UK equities will yield 4% on average in 2016, with the prospective 12 month yield on the large-cap index standing at 4%, and 2.9% for mid-caps.

Despite the volatility in the global equity market, Justin Cooper, chief executive of Shareholder solutions, part of Capita Asset Services, said investors could still gain profits, We still expect strong dividend growth to come through from companies better insulated from these negative global trends, with mid-caps likely once again to outperform the top 100.

Picking a Truly Active UK Equity Income Fund

If you do not want to hand-pick stocks for your income portfolio, UK equity income funds are a good option. Since Bank Rate was dropped to 0.5% in March 2009, these funds have remained popular, and according to Morningstar Direct, UK equity income funds saw 305 million inflows in 2015.

But in a crowded sector, which UK equity income fund offers you the most diverse portfolio? We examined the top 10 UK equity income funds as rated by Morningstar analysts, and compared them to a passive fund that tracks FTSE 100 to illustrate their similarities and differences in asset holdings.

The funds we looked at were a Gold rated fund, Artemis Income , three Silver Rated funds; Threadneedle UK Equity Income, Royal London UK Equity Income, and JOHCM UK Equity Income, and five Bronze Rated funds, Woodford Equity Income, Fidelity MoneyBuilder Dividend, Liontrust Macro Equity Income, Schroder UK Alpha Income, Aviva Investors UK Equity Income and Franklin UK Equity Income. The passive fund for comparison is one that tracks the UK blue-chip index the iShares FTSE 100 ETF.

Pharmas Prove Popular

Among the top 10 rated UK equity income funds, apart from the Aviva UK Equity Income fund, all 10 funds hold AstraZeneca (AZN), making up an average of 5% of each funds portfolio. iShares FTSE 100 ETF, the passive fund, also holds the stock, making up 4% in its portfolio. The stock has lost 4% year to date.

Likewise, all but one fund invest in GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)  making up an average of 5% of each funds portfolio. iShares FTSE 100 ETFs also holds the stock, composing 4% in its portfolio. GlaxoSmithKline gains 2% year to date.

Seven out of 10 of the funds invest in Imperial Tobacco Group (IMT), making up an average of 5% of each funds portfolio. The stock makes up 8% of CF Woodford Equity Income Fund, and 7% of Threadneedle Investment Funds. iShares FTSE 100 ETF also holds 2% of the stock in its portfolio.

Seven out of 10 of the funds invest in BT Group (BT.A), six out of 10 of the funds invest in British American Tobacco (BATS), Royal Dutch Shell (RDSB), and HSBC Holdings (HSBA). iShare FTSE 100 ETF also holds these four stocks, which invests 7% in HSBC Holdings, and 5% in British American Tobacco.

Large Cap Value Biased Companies

Out of the 10 portfolios, more than half of the underlying holdings are large value stocks.

The Gold rated fund, Artemis Income and Schroder UK Alpha Income and the passive fund, iShares FTSE 100 ETF have half of their top holdings in common.

JOHCM UK Equity Income Fund, the Silver rated fund, holds 7% of HSBC Holdings, as many as the passive fund iShares holds. JOHCMs top 20 stocks holdings are 40% similar to iShares.

Who is the Most Different to the Tracker?

Stock holdings of Threadneedle Income and two Bronze Rated funds, Woodford Equity Income and Liontrust Macro Equity Income, are the least similar to iShares.

Most of these actively management funds have at least 25% of their holdings similar to the passive fund, the iShare FTSE 100 ETF, which have the symptom of running like a closet tracker.

Any Closet Trackers?

A closet tracker is a supposed active fund that runs little different from a passive fund. In order to limit the risk of underperformance, some fund managers choose to track a benchmark and do little active management within the fund. Therefore investors are paying high fees for an active fund that barely varies from a passive fund. Investors might need to be cautious of paying too much for a closet tracker fund.

Active Funds vs Passive Funds

Active funds are run by an individual who chooses and monitors a portfolio of assets for a pool of investors. The fund manager researches the markets and the economy alongside company fundamentals in order to make the decisions about whether to buy and sell assets. Actively managed funds can bear a higher risk as its performance relies on fund managers understanding of the market, but when right they can also significantly outperform a particular market or indices. Investors need to pay higher fees to actively manged fund, which is expected to outperform an index or a market.

Active share is the proportion of stock holdings that varies from an underlying comparative index or market in an active funds portfolio.

Passive funds track an index or market rather than trying to beat it. So the performance of a passive fund follows the move of a benchmark. If the benchmark performs badly at the moment, the fund will also plunge. A passive fund comes with a lower cost, as fund manager most of the time follows whatever is offering in the index or market.
TANNER

Sometimes we all hear jokes about a person being "special" or "rides the short bus" or " isn't all there". Well, that kind of describes my Tanner although he is a real person. My Tanner is sweet, affectionate and forgiving. Many times I am unkind to him because he is so messy, so difficult and so time consuming. But before I know it, he is right by my side giving me a hug or gently touching my face. He looks into my eyes with a sincerity unmatched by anyone I have ever known. It is at these moments that I feel such an intense love for this boy. I just poke him in the tummy and he laughs heartily, forgetting that I was ever mad at him in the first place. So, through all the tough spots and sacrifices we make as a family, Tanner adds a unique element to our lives....he makes us admirable.


The man who allegedly made off with $3 million as a result of a mortgage scam has been sentenced to six years in prison.



Randy Poulson was accused to soliciting dubious investments and hoodwinking property owners into handing over their homes. Investigators allege the scheme made him over $3 million.

He was able to swindle his victims under the guise of presenting himself as a real estate guru, according to the FBI.



Poulson gave three weekend-long seminars, numerous speeches at monthly dinners and various, private tutorial sessions purporting to teach real estate investing tips to individuals who paid fees to attend, the FBI said in a release following his original arrest. Poulson was the former president of the South Jersey Real Estate Investment Club.



Poulson was originally arrested in May, 2014.



Poulson engaged in a two-pronged scheme. First, he promised to pay the mortgages of distressed homeowners facing foreclosure if they sold their homes to himfor no other compensation. Using this method, Poulson obtained the deeds to more than 25 distressed homeowners residences, causing them to vacate the homes so renters could move in, the FBI said. Poulson then stopped making the monthly mortgage payments, causing those mortgages to go into foreclosure without the distressed homeowners knowledge.



The second part of the scheme involved soliciting investors, according to the FBI.



Poulson explained to the investors that their money would be used to acquire and rehabilitate properties, which Poulson claimed he would rent out and then sell for a 10 to 20 percent return on the investment, the FBI said.
Overseeing the nations second largest state, one with the worlds seventh largest economy, is challenging.

Every part of your life, every day, the Texas Legislature has some impact, said Tom Craddick, the longest-serving member of the Texas House in state history.

After addressing the Petroleum Accountants Society of the Permian Basin, the Midland Republican was honored for his service in the state Legislature, which began with his election in 1968.

Since taking office, he has seen the states growth soar, challenging its $200 billion budget. We have an influx of new residents coming from all over the country, he told his audience.

That fiscal challenge is intensifying as oil prices have plummeted to 14-year lows, ending a boom that not only poured billions into the state treasury but attracted tens of thousands of new residents.

Craddick said forecasts are that because of low oil and gas prices, legislators will have between $2 billion and $2.5 billion less to spend when they meet next year to craft the FY 2018-2019 budget.

Oil and gas will be huge in the next session, he said.

Declining oil and gas prices, and the resulting decline in tax revenues from oil and gas production, will challenge the states rainy day fund, formally known as the Economic Stabilization Fund. Voters had just agreed to start tapping the $11 billion fund -- fed primarily from severance taxes paid by the oil and gas industry -- for transportation needs.

Falling oil prices and revenues will not only affect the rainy day fund, but funding for the Railroad Commission, for school districts, which base their ad valorem taxes on the price of oil, Craddick said.

The $11 billion in the rainy day fund has declined in recent months, and the Railroad Commission is seeing its budget impacted by a decline in fees charged for permits, because the agency is issuing far fewer drilling permits.

Amid declining revenues, Craddick said hes asked why the Legislature cant make budget cuts across the board. He pointed out that the Legislature has very little say over much of the $200 billion budget; much of those funds are federal dollars that are already allocated.

Asked what he sees as the top challenges facing the Texas Legislature when it convenes next January, Craddick listed education and transportation.

Were getting 80,000 new students a year. Last session we allocated $1.5 billion just to fund school growth, he said. How do we pay for those additional dollars?

He said that a number of school districts are again suing the state, citing inadequate funding. He pointed out that school districts that spend more per student dont necessarily have higher test scores.

Transportation will be a challenge, in part because its a battle between urban areas and rural areas for funds. Craddick said one interchange in Dallas or Houston could be built for what could be spent in Midland-Odessa. He stressed rural areas are getting their share of funding but needs are statewide.

We cant build roads fast enough, he said.
Support groups this week

-- The Knot Adoption Support Group, 11:30 a.m. today, First Presbyterian Church; Kathy Hagler, Kathy@WTIE.net

-- Caregiver support, noon today, HospiceMidland 911 W. Texas Ave., 682-2855.

 Midland Parkinson Support Group, 6:30 p.m. Monday, HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital, 699-6640.

 for miscarriage grief recovery, call 570-5935.

 for post-abortion healing, call 570-5935.

-- The Helping Hand Metastatic Cancer Support Group, noon Tuesday, Texas Tech Physicians of the Permian Basin Clinic, Room 210B. Lunch will be served. To RSVP , call Amber Chavez at 620-1023.

-- Parent Quest, for parents of special needs children 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, First Christian Church. For more information, contact Malissa Roach, SHARE program coordinator, at 349-1069.

 Midland Chapter of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), 7 p.m. Tuesdays, First Presbyterian Church (Koinonoa Room); Judith Craig, 683-3648.

 A confidential peer-to-peer support gathering for combat veterans, Tuesday, Midland College Cogdell Center, 201 Florida Ave.; Steve Cree, 770-7469.

-- Coffee Break for Men, 9 a.m. Feb. 3, HospiceMidland 911 W. Texas Ave., 682-2855.

MMH classes, events

-- Birthplace Tour, 5-6 p.m., Monday, MMH. For more information, contact Casey Weems at 221-3283 or email childbirtheducation@midland-memorial.com

Multimodal Pain Management for Acute Pain, 5:30-7:30 p.m., Feb. 3, MMH. Contact Rebecca Pontaski at 221-1625 or email rebecca.pontaski@midland-memorial.com

Weigh to Success Support Group Meeting, 4-5 p.m., Feb. 4. Contact Sundae Adkins at 638-8081 or email sundae.adkins@midland-memorial.com

****

Weekly Meetings

Alcoholics Anonymous  hotline 580-7868.

Narcotics Anonymous  hotline 582-2926.

 Survivors of sexual abuse; interactive Bible study to help deal with the consequences of sexual abuse meets Tuesdays. Child care available; House of Hope, 570-5935.

-- Overeaters Anonymous; 7-8 p.m. Tuesdays and 3-4 p.m. Sundays; B&J Plaza, 206 N. Midkiff Road, Suite 1-D; 553-1031.

-- Peer to Peer support group for veterans, active duty, guard, reserves and their families, 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Permian Basin Community Center, 401 E. Illinois Ave., Suite 403; Wil Hoggard, 213-5342, william.hoggard@wtcmhmr.org.

How sick are you?

Midland Memorial Hospital is offering a nurse triage program 68-NURSE.

The program is designed to help people determine whether or not their health situation warrants a trip to the emergency room. Midland residents can call the line by dialing 686-8773.

The program is free and available 24 hours a day-365 days a year. Local nurses are available to help you determine the best place to receive care for your situation. 68-NURSE can help you save time and money by directing you to the most appropriate healthcare option, whether its a neighborhood clinic, urgent care center, emergency room  or just staying home.

* * *

Contact your Hospital District representative

MIDLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

400 Rosalind Redfern Grover Parkway, Midland, Texas, 79701

Phone: 221-1111

Website: www.midland-memorial.com

President Russell Meyers 221-1584

Directors -- District 1: vacant, District 2: Dorothea Logan, District 3: Tommy Lent, District 4: Cressinda Hyatt, District 5: Alison King, District 6: Joe Kiowski, District 7: Jeffrey Beard
BURNS, Ore. (AP)  Federal and state officials were restricting access to the Oregon refuge being occupied by an armed group after one of the occupiers was killed during a traffic stop and eight more, including the groups leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested.

The group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2. They want federal lands turned over to local authorities.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge.

Details of the fatal encounter were sparse. It happened as Bundy and his followers were heading to a community late Tuesday afternoon in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed that her father, Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum, was the man killed, the Oregonian reported. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Brown told the paper, he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.

The FBI and Oregon State Police would only say the man killed in the police shooting was wanted by federal authorities, and said no more information would be released pending identification by the medical examiner.

Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the occupation, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that five or six group members remain inside the refuge.

The FBI and Oregon State Police said they were setting up checkpoints in the refuge Wednesday. According to the statement, only ranchers who own property in specific areas will be allowed to pass.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundys supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasnt sure what those remaining would do.

The entire leadership is gone, he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. I wouldnt blame any of them for leaving.

Thornton called the arrests a dirty trick by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32 - apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

Law enforcement previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies but opposed the refuge takeover.

I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The group, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.
Research Software Firm Nebu Names New MD

In The Netherlands, research software firm Nebu has appointed Otto van Linden as Managing Director, responsible for the day-to-day running of the company. In this role, he will free up CEO Eric van Velzen to focus on the market, customers and promoting Nebu.



Founded in the Netherlands in 1992 by van Velzen and Fred Broers, Nebu is now a global company with offices in the UK, USA, Hungary, Sweden and Germany. New MD van Linden (pictured) has been with the company since last October, serving as interim Business Development Manager. Prior to this, he was General Manager of software firm NICE Systems, which acquired his former employer CyberTech International, where he was MD. Earlier, he was Marketing and Sales Manager at TetraNed, and Project Manager at Koning & Hartman.



van Velzen comments: 'Otto brings experience in building businesses and delivering results, and has been a major contributor to the growth and success of an internationally oriented technology-company, like Nebu. He has demonstrated great ability in leading organizations, including product, sales and services teams, and introducing new technologies and innovation to the market'.



Web site: www.nebu.com .





All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.
Three Michigan Universities Receive Pacesetters Awards to Attract More Women to Computer Science

High school girls discover the excitement of computer science during Michigan Tech's summer program, Women in Computing Sciences.

Michigan Technological University, Michigan State University and the University of Michigan have been selected for the National Center of Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Pacesetters program sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Google and Qualcomm. Pacesetters is a 2-year program under which participating institutions develop aggressive and measurable goals for increasing the number of women in the US computing and technology workforce.

Michigan has more than 16,000 job openings in computing right now, according to code.org, a nonprofit founded to improve access to computer science for women and underrepresented minorities.

With three universities chosen and a community college partnership, Michigan is one of the three best-represented states in Pacesetters.

Women in Computing

This is the second Pacesetters grant that Michigan Tech has received. We had been selected for the 2013 cohort, and the decision to apply again was a simple one, says Linda Ott, a professor of computer science and associate dean of special initiatives in the College of Sciences and Arts. Although weve made progress, we still have a long way to go. Ott, former chair of computer science, has been the driving force in getting Michigan Tech Pacesetters grants from the NCWIT.

We had percentages of female students in the single digits for decades, says Ott referring to the number of female computer science majors. We set a goal to double it, and we hit that goal this fall.

NCWIT introduced a new two-track program this year to distinguish organizations new to the program from those that have participated before.

This years grants went to 42 organizations nationwide, including Michigan Tech, the University of Michigan and Michigan State. Tech is the only one from Michigan that has participated before, although Michigan State and UM have been active in NCWITs Academic Alliance and Extension Services for Undergraduate Programs.

Michigan Tech

Michigan Tech will expand on the successful outreach programs that were developed during the initial Pacesetters project. Tech also plans to encourage alumnae across Michigan to support local outreach programs in an effort to broaden the impact statewide.

A big advantage of being a part of this program is the opportunity to work with others, sharing ideas and support, says Ott. With a larger infrastructure, we can make an impact. To recruit more women to computing science, we need to work on a global level. So many girls are not exposed to computer science, programming and that type of problem solving in high school, and they dont realize they might like it.

Michigan Tech has been working to improve that pre-college experience. The Universitys Summer Youth Programs offers a week-long Women in Computer Science (WICS) session that introduces pre-college women to the computing sciences. During the school year, Tech hosts outreach programs in the local schools, such as Women in Computing Day.

Attending WICS made me think more about computer science as a degree, and it made me sure that that was what I wanted to do, says Emily Morningstar, who attended WICS in 2014 and is now a first-year student in computer science at Michigan Tech. My advice for pre-college women interested in computer science is that you can do programming. Some people might tell you that you cant or that its not something girls can do, but if its what you want to do, you should do it.

Along with the support from NCWIT, the effort to attract more women to computer science has been possible with the support of many different departments on campus, including Career Services, Admissions, Summer Youth Programs and Enrollment, Marketing, and Communications. It has taken a broad base of support to be successful, says Ott. It means people are realizing the importance of this.

Michigan State University

NCWIT has also supported broad-based programs to improve recruitment and retention of female engineering students at Michigan State University in multiple grants over the last seven years and through the Extension Services for Undergraduate Programs. Female majors in computer science at MSU have steadily increased from 7 percent in 2008 to the current 13 percent. On the strength of these programs, MSU was awarded a 2015 NCWIT Extension Services Transformation Award.

In its Pacesetters program, Michigan State is partnering with Lansing Community College to increase recruitment and retention of women, first-generation students and students of color in computer science, said Laura Dillon, professor of computer science and engineering at MSU. The partnership will use courses at the community college to provide affordable introductory programming experiences for at-risk students enrolled at Michigan State. Pacesetters will also reach out to K-12 guidance counselors to help broaden the diversity of the computing workforce, Dillon said.

To be competitive in tomorrows economy, Michigan needs the talents and contributions of a more diverse workforce skilled in how to createnot just usetechnology, Dillon explained. This MSU-LCC Pacesetter partnership is a great opportunity to better support and prepare diverse students, many of whom lack opportunity in K-12, for the rigors of the computer science major at MSU. And getting the message about computing to K-12 administrators and guidance counselors is critical to solving the pipeline problem.

University of Michigan

There is a high level of enthusiasm at the University of Michigan for the Pacesetters program. In my view, Pacesetters is a great way for academic institutions to collaborate and arrive at an aggressive plan to accomplish a 50/50 (female/male) representation in computer science within four years, says Mary Lou Dorf, a lecturer in computer science at UM. Female computer science majors at UM have increased from 12 to 18 percent in the last five years, even as the overall number of CS majors has more than doubled to over 1,000. I believe that with a continued focus on this issue, we can achieve 50/50 representation.

In addition to building a K-12 pipeline, higher education institutions must make the structural changes necessary to transform CS programs into more welcoming environments, Dorf says. At UM, events have been designed to showcase the potential for impact in CS, and courses have been redesigned with an across-the-board focus on inclusiveness and teamwork. Student groups exist for both undergraduate and graduate women, and the department sponsors participation in conferences and associations dedicated to equity in computing.

Our goal is to embody a spirit of inclusiveness that will attract a broad and growing array of students into computer science, while at the same time providing support for women and other underrepresented groups in order to help them access these programs, Dorf says.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigans flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.
The 27th annual GLAAD Media Awards, celebrating the representation and portrayals of LGBT characters in TV and movies, is finally coming to TV in 2016. Airing on the Logo network in a one-hour special premiering in April, this important ceremony is finally getting the recognition it deserves. This week, GLAAD announced this year's nominees. You can check them out below!

You can check out more buzzing news coverage from Music Times right here!

Check out a special video clip from last year's ceremony:



"For nearly three decades, the GLAAD Media Awards have propelled inclusion in media and driven LGBT acceptance forward," GLAAD CEO and President Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "This year's nominees have raised the bar for creating thoughtful and diverse LGBT images and storylines, deepening audiences' understanding of LGBT people and accelerating acceptance across the world."

There are actually two ceremonies this year; one for April in LA and another for May in NYC.

You can check out the full list of nominees right here, but check out a selection of the GLAAD nominations right here:

Outstanding Film (Wide release)

Carol (The Weinstein Company)

The Danish Girl (Focus Features)

Dope (Open Road Films)

Freeheld (Lionsgate)

Grandma (Sony Pictures Classics)

Outstanding Film (Limited release)

52 Tuesdays (Kino Lorber)

Appropriate Behavior (Gravitas Ventures)

Boy Meets Girl (Wolfe Video)

Drunktown's Finest (Nehst Studios)

Tangerine (Magnolia Pictures)

Outstanding Drama Series

Arrow (The CW)

Black Sails (Starz)

Empire (FOX)

The Fosters (ABC Family)

Grey's Anatomy (ABC)

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC)

Nashville (ABC)

Orphan Black (BBC America)

Sense8 (Netflix)

Shameless (Showtime)

Outstanding Comedy Series

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (FOX)

Faking It (MTV)

Grace and Frankie (Netflix)

Looking (HBO)

Master of None (Netflix)

Modern Family (ABC)

Orange Is the New Black (Netflix)

Please Like Me (Pivot)

Transparent (Amazon Instant Video)

Vicious (PBS)

Outstanding Individual Episode (in a series without a regular LGBT character)

"Gender" The Carmichael Show (NBC)

"Please Don't Ask, Please Don't Tell" Black-ish (ABC)

"The Prince of Nucleotides" Royal Pains (USA Network)

"Rock-a-Bye-Baby" NCIS New Orleans (CBS)

"We Build, We Fight" NCIS (CBS)

Outstanding TV Movie or Limited Series

Banana (Logo)

Bessie (HBO)

Cucumber (Logo)

Outstanding Documentary

Kumu Hina (PBS)

Limited Partnership (PBS)

Mala Mala (Strand Releasing)

Tab Hunter Confidential (The Film Collaborative)

Tig (Netflix)

Outstanding Reality Program

I Am Cait (E!)

I Am Jazz (TLC)

New Girls on the Block (Discovery Life)

The Prancing Elites Project (Oxygen)

Transcendent (Fuse)

 2015 MusicTimes.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
For more comfortable regularity, choseAfter 35, your system naturally slows down, Dr.suggests a daily laxative which stimulates both the mind and the intestines to aid easy '' without strain or griping.- use daily!Also featuringNow comes inThe Dr.blamedfor not reminding him to check out the latest posts fromHe thought he would teach her a painful lesson with a hot pot of coffee, later that dayNo Mr. Stone, don't do it, you can just read the blog's handy archived postings.
Something pretty scary is happening in the music world, and we're not talking about Kanye West's Twitter rant. Philadelphia City Councilman Mark Squilla has this week proposed a bill that would require local and touring bands, rappers, DJs, et. performing in the city to submit their personal information to a registry for use in Police work. If you are a musician, whether you're from the City of Brotherly Love (like me!) or not, this is a huge threat to the music scene that is incredibly vibrant and exciting. While most don't think this will become a law, you should still make sure to save the Philly music scene by reading more below.

You can check out more buzzing news coverage from Music Times right here!

Billy Penn broke this story, with plenty of information about the bill, which is entitled the "Special Assembly Code." You can check out the actual bill right here.

"Giving performers' information to police when requested enables them to review past performances to see if there were any public safety issues during their events," the Councilman explained in an email to the publication. The Philadelphia Police Department did not respond to any questions about the bill.

On a personal note - my social media feeds are blowing up with this news, linking information on how to contact Squilla, a petition webpage and just venting on how this is threatening the music scene. It's scary, but the odds are in our favors, you guys!

Famed Philadelphian, Sean Agnew, founder of R5 Productions, was informed about the bill by Billy Penn, and had a great response.

"This is news to me. I'm not sure what the reasoning or theory is. As someone who books 600+ shows a year, I have never once received an artist's home address or phone number. It's all through booking agents, managers, publicists," he said. "There is a firewall in place with the artists. I can't imagine a band's representatives wanting to give their clients information over to the police without a really good reason."

This reasoning has us believing that this bill will die.

Make sure to sign that petition above!

Who does this bill help? C'mon, Philly. https://t.co/8Xjvs9rCpM  Restorations (@Restorations) January 27, 2016

 2015 MusicTimes.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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Sarkodie should have been bigger than ...
If you're looking for a job that's literally out of this world, now is the time to see if you have the right stuff.

Starting Dec. 14 and running through mid-February, NASA is accepting applications for a new class of astronauts to prepare the U.S. for the upcoming Orion missions.

Being born and raised here in Central Florida, and having a dad working in the defense industry, gave me great access to launches from the Space Coast. That love for the sky and space helped guide my career to where it is today, in meteorology.

There are a few basic requirements that must be met to even be considered for the program:

Education: You must have at least a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science or mathematics.

You must have at least a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science or mathematics. Vision: Your eyes must be correctable to 20/20.

Your eyes must be correctable to 20/20. Blood Pressure: Your blood pressure must not exceed 140/90 in a seated position.

Your blood pressure must not exceed 140/90 in a seated position. Height: You must be between 62 and 75 inches standing, or 5 2 to 6 3.

You must be between 62 and 75 inches standing, or 5 2 to 6 3. Age: There is no age limit, but most of the candidates are between 26 and 46 years old.

So, if you are feeling adventurous, get more information at nasa.gov. Have your resume ready and head to usajobs.gov to apply this December. I hope to see you in Houston!
A new school uniform policy for Volusia County was changed Tuesday night after a contentious school board meeting, delaying a vote.



The school board was expected to vote in DeLand on the new policy Tuesday, but instead the policy was amended to include jeans in the new dress code.

Since the policy was amended, more time is required to approve the measure.

It's an unpopular policy with parents in Volusia County, with more than a dozen parents speaking against the policy on Tuesday night. School board members also had mixed opinions.



"There are board members who would really like to have the uniform policy," said board member Linda Cuthbert. "I think it would not be a good idea for our district at this time. Too many parents are against it."



Several speakers, though, brought up the bigger picture, asking the board why they were focusing on this debate when so many other pressing issues. Those issues included low teacher morale and too much testing.



"While most teachers in our district do support uniforms, they're also saying this is not the priority right now," said Andrew Spar, president of Volusia County's school board. "This is not what we need to be focusing on attention on. This is a diversion."



"I just don't think they understand the magnitude of what they're trying to take on and how that's going to suck energy out of our entire district," said parent Kim Short.



It could now be weeks before the amended dress code goes up for a vote again.


A former Marion County deputy was indicted Tuesday on charges of using excessive force during an arrest.

A federal grand jury in the Middle District of Florida returned the indictment against Jesse Alan Terrell, 33, on charges that he violated the civil rights of Derrick Price last summer during a drug-related arrest.





The indictment alleges that on Aug. 7, 2014, Terrell, while working as a deputy sheriff with the Marion County Sheriffs Office, repeatedly struck, kneed and kicked Price, seen here on the left, in the head, neck and shoulder area.



The Sheriff's Office said a video recording of the incident was discovered by MCSO supervisors that depicts abusive actions by the employees toward Price.

After seeing the video, Marion County Sheriff Chris Blair on Aug, 11, 2014, suspended Terrell and four other employees  James Amidei, Trevor Fitzgerald, Adam Crawford, and Cody Hoppel  without pay after a routine internal use-of-force review. Blair then requested the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigate the incident and the suspension of the five employees.



"The actions of these five individuals shown on the video which we discovered violated the oath of office they took to serve and protect our citizens and have compromised the integrity of the badge," Blair said. "The abusive and unprofessional actions they displayed shocked me to my core and there was absolutely no hesitation for me to immediately inform the Florida Department of Law Enforcement of their actions, to immediately suspend those former deputies without pay and, ultimately, to request their resignation and/or termination. I ask our community now to not let the actions of the few define the actions of all. We have 700+ employees who have dedicated themselves to our community and they will remain steadfast in their mission to serve

Marion County citizens with honor and protect them with pride."

Amidei, Fitzgerald, Crawford, and Hoppel resigned from the agency, and Terrell was terminated.



If convicted, Terrell faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.



Marion County Sheriff Chris Blair addresses the media Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016, regarding video of his deputies beating a suspect. (Tony Rojek, Staff)
WASHINGTON  Agriculture Deputy Secretary Krysta Harden has announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will begin offering farm ownership microloans, creating a new financing avenue for farmers to buy and improve property. These microloans will be especially helpful to beginning or underserved farmers, U.S. veterans looking for a career in farming, and those who have small and mid-sized farming operations.

Many producers, especially new and underserved farmers, tell us that access to land is one of the biggest challenges they face in establishing and growing their own farming operation, said Harden. USDA is making it easier for new farmers to hit the ground running and get access to the land that they need to establish their farms or improve their property.
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Fifty years ago the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan came to life in Plainview when a group of church women cared for an Ohio family that had been touched by tragedy as they traveled through the area.

We worked up a schedule and made sure someone was there around the clock, remembers Darlene Teel, a member of Northwest Church of Christ.

Just like we do now for one of our own, we all took our turns sitting up at the hospital, recalls another member, Margaret Helen Hayes.

The differences between today and that incident in 1961 were that it involved strangers passing through the area, and the mission of mercy lasted for months . . . and months.

It all began about 10:45 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 11, 1961, at Plainviews south Y. At that time, U.S. 87 followed Columbia Street through Plainview, and the south Y, which was just outside the city limits, was where South Broadway and Columbia split  just east of the Ollie Liner Center and Hale County Sheriffs Office.

According to the Herald, Mrs. T.J. Collins of Franklin, Ohio, was taking her two children, Patricia, 7, and Eddie Ray, 18 months, to Lubbock to reunite with her husband. He had moved to Lubbock a week earlier to begin a new job.

Accompanying Mrs. Collins on her long-distance trip were her brother, Newman Oskar Collins, 20, and his wife, Lavon, 18, of Ypsilanti, Mich. That couple had left their 6-month-old son, Dennis Ray, with relatives in Ypsilanti before departing early Friday for the long trip to Texas.

Driving straight through to Texas, the Collins families had gone about 1,350 miles and were just 45 miles shy of their destination when disaster stuck.

Highway Patrolman (and later DPS sergeant) Thurman Keffer, who investigated the wreck, explained that the Collins auto was traveling southwest through a curve at the south Y when it collided with a truck-tractor and semi-trailer headed the other way on the two-lane road. That truck was driven by George Walls, 53, of Plainview, an employee of Plainview Floral, Inc.

Walls was not seriously injured and released from Plainview Hospital and Clinic after a couple of days of treatment.

His trailer, Keffer said, was carrying a partial load of floral plants. As a result of the crash, the tractor disconnected from the tractor and traveled 85 feet before coming to a stop. Neither vehicle overturned, although Lavon Collins was thrown from their automobile.

Keffer said the collision occurred partially in the west or southbound lane.

Dead at the scene were Newman and Lavon Collins along with their young niece, Patricia.

Critically injured were Patricias mother and young brother. Eddie Ray suffered a fractured skull and their mother, Mrs. T.J. Collins (her first name wasnt listed in news accounts and neither Teel nor Hayes were able to recall it), had multiple fractures in both legs as well as head injures.

They were taken by Henderson Brothers Ambulance to Medical Center Hospital, just a few blocks away.

It would be late that evening before authorities could locate T.J. Collins in Lubbock and let him know that tragedy had decimated his family. According to Keffer, the delay was due to confusion as to just where in Texas he was located.

Investigators found a postcard that Newman and Lavon Collins had addressed to relatives in Ypsilanti. It read: Hope our baby is fine: Tell him hi and give him a big kiss for both of us.

Not long after physicians at Medical Center Hospital began their valiant efforts to save the lives of Mrs. T.J. Collins and her son did members of what was then 11th and Amarillo Street Church of Christ begin their around-the-clock vigil.

Dr. (Eugene) McCarthy was probably the one behind it, recalled Teel, referring to one of the principle physicians at the hospital.

Among his patients were numerous church members, and he had delivered children for several church families.

And once they were made aware of the need, church members quickly responded by sitting up with and caring for the injured around the clock.

Mrs. Collins had to have several surgeries to repair her injuries, explained Teel. And as a result, she developed a serious staph infection. We all had to wear face masks when we were in her room, and its the only time I remember that we ever had to dip our feet in a disinfectant bath.

I didnt like wearing that mask at all, Hayes added, because it reminded her of when she worked in a tuberculosis ward years earlier.

According to the Herald, Mrs. Collins was hospitalized for three months and then continued her lengthy recuperation in the home of Robert and Gertrude Hayes, two other church members. The injured womans husband also stayed there.

Im sure the reason she stayed there was because Dr. McCarthy knew that she would get the best of care, Teel recalled. Gertrude was so kind-hearted and such a caring person. Their home would have been a perfect environment for someone who had been through such an ordeal.

That lodging arrangement continued for several more months before Mrs. Collins could resume normal activities.

In the ensuing years, the Hayes and the Collins families continued their friendship and remained in contact until Gertrude Hayes died in 2000. Gertrudes husband, Robert, died in 1964.

To comment:

dmcdonough@hearstnp.com

806.296.1350
BERLIN  Rustic barns and sloping hills are just a few of the assets on the Chamberlain Highway that one Berlin resident hopes to incorporate into a local winery. Bradford Kelley spoke at a recent Planning and Zoning Commission meeting, adding to the discussion of amending winery regulations in town.



Kelley is envisioning a winery on a 24-acre farm just off Southington Road. He painted a mental picture of stretches of grape vines with a sunny patio situated at the top of the hill. The old barn on the land would be restored, and hayrides would be an option for autumn days.



The town is in the process of looking into winery operations in surrounding towns, according to Development Services Director Hellyn Riggins. She noted that she was going off state regulations to create a first draft. The public hearing on proposed regulations this week received plenty of opinions from residents, many concerned about the area farms.



This is proposed, nothing is set in stone, said Planning and Zoning Commission Chairman Bruce Moore.



These regulations are not site specific, we are not just having a discussion on the approval of one spot, Riggins clarified.



With the amendment, wineries would be allowed in several spots around town not just within Kelleys proposal. The public hearing will continue at the next meeting. There will also be a meeting in March concerning agricultural regulations.



However, any type of winery will not be sprouting up anytime soon. Kelley told the board that it takes five years for grapes to mature and be used for quality wine. In that time frame, it would take at least two to three years to form an operational wine business. He gave the commission a taste of the process and described how roughly three pounds of grapes were crushed for one bottle. The actual fermentation process, he stated, took 18 months.



We need to study the issue carefully and make sure everything is in the proper zones, said Riggins.



With the land contracted, the regulations would have to be established before Kelley could begin work on a winery.



We have to start somewhere, Moore said.



Throughout the hearing, other residents added to the discussion. Many voiced their fears that agricultural regulations were not being considered. One man was concerned about how limited the drafted winery regulations appeared, while another resident told the commission that a winery would bring more people to town which she believed Berlin needed.



The public hearing will be continued to the next Planning and Zoning meeting. There will also be a meeting in March related to agricultural regulations.






Enacted in 2005, the National Do Not Call Registry has protected consumers from unwanted calls. The rules are pretty simple and they're designed so people can have dinner or watch television without being deluged by a steady stream of telemarketers seeking to sell them something. Its entire purpose and operation is described in a paragraph on its homepage:

The National Do Not Call Registry gives you a choice about whether to receive telemarketing calls at home. Most telemarketers should not call your number once it has been on the registry for 31 days. If they do, you can file a complaint at this Website. You can register your home or mobile phone for free.

It's hard for rules to be more clear than that and most companies have complied with the rules as set by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. But there have been frequent violations and now DISH Network stands accused by four states and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of massive violations of the rules. If the accusations prove true, the company could be liable for fines that exceed its market cap even though past precedent suggests that's not what should happen.

Source: YCharts.com

What is DISH accused of?

The DOJ, Ohio, Illinois, California, and North Carolina are seeking $900 million in civil penalties, and $23.5 billion in fines, according to the Denver Post. They seek the money because a judge ruled that DISH and contractors working on its behalf made more than 55 million illegal telemarketing calls using recorded messages and phoning people on do-not-call lists.

A trial to determine whether DISH actually knew it was breaking the law is currently under way.

The satellite television company has already settled with the 46 other states regarding the telemarketing calls paying just under $6 million all together for violating the do-not-call registry, ARS Technica reported.

DISH fires back

DISH does not exactly deny the claims. Instead, the company noted in an email to ARS that "most of the Dish calls complained about took place almost ten years ago and DISH has continued to improve its already compliant procedures." In addition, the email pointed out that in 2008 the company hired Possible Now, a company that specializes in marketing and regulatory compliance.

The satellite television company also has taken issue with the severity of the fines sought by the DOJ and the four states. In a motion filed in U.S. District Court the company called the proposed penalty "a shocking amount far in excess of any penalties that the federal government has sought or obtained from any other entityfor telemarketing violations, and for which the United States provides no factual support."

To support its case, DISH cited a number of similar situations where much lower fines were levied for comparable violations. Specifically it noted cases involving Comcast and DirecTV (which is now owned by AT&T).

In a case against Comcast for 900,000 telemarketing call violations, the court entered a stipulated judgment for $900,000, or $1 per call. In a case against DirecTV as a repeat offender for violation of a telemarketing consent order that DirecTV entered into with the government, the court entered a stipulated judgment for $2,310,000, or just over $2 per call.

Basically, DISH is saying that maybe we did it, but it was a long time ago, we've taken significant steps to improve, and we're probably willing to pay a token fine in line with what Comcast and DirecTV paid.

DISH has a really good point

The numbers being thrown around here seem silly if not downright embarrassing for the DOJ and the four states involved. Perhaps the settlements reached with the other 46 states were too low, but it seems clear that nothing has been done by DISH to warrant fines that are massively higher than the ones set by previous precedents.

It's hard to see why this case is moving forward with numbers this big associated with it. Had DISH not shown remorse or changed the offending behavior, it might make sense to go after the company, but that is clearly not the case.

The satellite company may have committed a huge Do Not Call violation in the past, but its future should not be in the balance due to that transgression. The point of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the Do Not Call registry is to stop the American public from receiving unwanted calls.

If DISH has stopped breaking the rules -- which certainly appears to be the case -- and has been compliant for 10 years, then this issue should be settled, a fine paid, a wrist slapped, and a warning for the future given. It's hard to imagine that won't happen and that rationality won't prevail, making this a lot of unneeded bluster by the DOJ and the states threatening these seemingly unwarranted fines.

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The article Here's Why DISH is Facing $23 Billion In Fines (More Than Its Market Cap) originally appeared on Fool.com.

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Healthy Start, a program of the Metropolitan Health District, will hold a community baby shower to help pregnant women in San Antonio connect with community resources and obtain early prenatal care.

The event will run from noon to 2 p.m. Friday at the Frank Garrett Community Center, 1226 NW 18th St. Pregnant women can meet with representatives from WIC, health insurers, the Baby Cafe and other resources. The event will include lunch, games and door prizes.
SAN ANTONIO  Fire department crews are working to bring a large fire under control at an automotive shop on the Northeast Side.

Firefighters were called to the blaze around 1:45 p.m. after receiving reports of a fire at an auto shop on 9700 block of Perrin-Beitel Road.
Fox Mulder and Dana Scully returned at just the right time, because weve had another UFO sighting here in San Antonio.

For those who believe the truth is out there, the sighting allegedly occurred Saturday, when the viewer saw a white object moving through the sky.
SAN ANTONIO  Testimony continues this morning in the murder trial of Christian Bautista, charged in the brutal stabbing death of a runner on New Year's Eve in 2013.

Prosecutors are laying out their case.
January 21, 2016: ISIS militants in the Libyan town of Sirte have executed at least three men and whipped another for drinking alcohol, according to a 'photo report', published by the terror group.





Published on an anonymous content sharing website, it shows the deaths of three men and the whipping of four others.





In one photo a man in a grey t-shirt, his face blurred, is led to his death - the caption says he was executed for the sin of 'banditry'.





According to the 'report', the other men were executed for converting from Islam, for cursing god and for belonging to a militia loyal to Khalifa Haftar, the UN-backed government general deeply hostile to Islamist forces - both the self-appointed government in Tripoli and ISIS.





The post is entitled 'Implementing punishment in the city of Sirte' and links to ISIS-related hashtags in Arabic.





In the seven photos that follow, each is captioned with the sin the men are accused of committing and their punishment.





A crowd of masked men stand to watch as the punishments are carried out - a mixture of executions and whipping.





One photo shows a group of four of the accused on their knees in front of a crowd of masked men, as their 'sentence' is read out - the caption declares flogging is the punishment for drinking wine.





ISIS reportedly has 3,000 fighters in Sirte and has imposed the strict rules familiar with residents in their defacto capital in Raqqa, Syria.





Beheadings and crucifixions plague the town, which has been deserted by citizens by the thousands.





Source: Mailonline, January 21, 2016




The Meizu M2 is an affordable smartphone offering decent specs and targeted at young, entry-level users. It sports an HD display while also offering powerful cameras, decent memory and a quad-core processor.

Where to Buy Meizu Phones Jumia.com.ngfrom 39,500.00 Buy Now

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Design and Display

Featuring a unibody design, the Meizu M2 is attractive for a phone at this price point, even though the body is made of polycarbonate. It is built for comfortable one-handed use with its polished R-angle curves. The device is designed to be smooth to touch and the weight is respectable at 131 grams.

It features a 5-inch fully-laminated display with an HD resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels for a decent pixel density of 296 ppi. The screen, which is based on IPS technology, is covered by AGC Dragontrail protective glass.

Camera

The Meizu M2, like most phones from its Chinese manufacturer, delivers impressive value in the camera department as well. It features a robust 13-megapixel primary camera with f/2.2 aperture, 5-element lens, single flash and Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

Turn the phone around and you are presented with a 5-megapixel snapper featuring 4-element lens, an f/2.0 aperture size and a Face AE face light boost for superior selfies. You will be able to enhance selfie quality further with a FotoNation 2.0 feature.

Hardware and Software

Under the hood, the Meizu M2 packs a quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor with Cortex-A53 cores and a Mali T720 GPU. Its manufacturer says the CorePilot feature in the SoC ensures both the CPU and GPU work in synergy for seamless multitasking. The CPU moves along at speeds of up to 1.3 GHz and is supported by 2 GB of RAM.

The M2 features advanced 16GB eMMC 5.0 storage from Samsung said to perform beyond anything that can be expected in its price range. It boots Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system.

Other Features

The Meizu M2 has a microSD card slot for extending the decent internal storage capacity by another 128 GB. Power is provided to the device by a 2500mAh battery. The phone supports lightning-fast 4G LTE connectivity.

It has dual SIM slots, both of which are LTE-enabled. Bluetooth 4.0 with BLE support and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n are also available for wireless connectivity.

Pricing and Availability

Meizu M2 is not yet available in Nigeria. When available, you can buy it at leading online stores in the country. Meizu M2 Price in Nigeria is expected to range from N39,000 to N50,000 depending on your location in Nigeria.
By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

Russias Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held a meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, last Wednesday, January 20, with US Secretary of State, John Kerry. The meeting-room and press opportunity were set up by State Department officials. One of the Kerry delegation was Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian affairs. She is one of several Washington officials directing the war against Russia on the Ukraine front. In her arsenal, Nulands mouth has been used to attack European governments reluctant to join her war, as her Fuck the EU remark to US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, revealed at the start of 2014, before President Victor Yanukovich was ousted in Kiev.

The sequence of stills showing Lavrov greeting the US delegation for the press, ahead of the Zurich talks, has been extracted from a videotape recorded by a Russian press camera crew. Lavrovs hand shakes every US official introduced by Kerry (1), except for Nuland. Her hand was extended (2), then slipped, or slapped past, as Lavrov turned to his left to greet each of the junior US officials lining the wall. As he did so, Lavrov presented Nuland with his right shoulder. Nulands mouth fell open (3); the microphones recorded that nothing came out.



On January 15, five days earlier, Nuland had met Kremlin advisor, Vyacheslav Surkov. According to the US Government organ, Radio Free Europe, and the Russian state news service, the meeting had taken place at a Russian state residence at Pionersky, near Kaliningrad city, behind closed doors. Tass reported their talks lasted for more than four hours. No photographs have been released.

The State Department announced later in the day: The talks were constructive and designed to support the ongoing work of the Normandy countries and the Trilateral Contact Group. Surkov told the Russian media: We had rather substantial, constructive and helpful discussions. It was, so to speak, brainstorming on ways to find compromises in the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

Surkovs (below, left) meeting was endorsed by Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov (right), on January 19. He told Tass that Surkov had reported on Nuland to President Vladimir Putin. Peskov also claimed: Regarding these talks, in this case we are talking about dialogue at the expert level between Moscow and Washington. As you know, the United States is not party to the Normandy process, at the same time, of course everyone is interested in the United States having the opportunity to receive first hand information, [despite] not being a member of the Normandy process.

One day later, at the Zurich meeting, note the Russian flag behind Kerry (4). Minutes before the meeting commenced, the State Department organizer recorded this response to a Russian cameramans warning that the Russian standard was flying on its flag-pole upside down. This has been an important signal since the time of sailing ships. According to the US Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Sect 176 (a), the display of the flag upside down is a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.

These images have been interpreted in the international media as indicators of Russian, also American animus towards each other, as the war to topple the Russian government enters its third year. This interpretation is mistaken. The images are signals intelligence (sigint), but they arent encrypted or coded. Nulands moves revealed her belief that she can conduct warfare without risk to herself. Her gape registered shock that she is a target.

Lavrovs moves werent a display of personal pique. They communicated the conclusion of the General Staff, the intelligence services, and the Foreign Ministry that there is no point in talking to US officials like Nuland. That is because there has been nothing they have said, or signed their names to over the past two years, which can be believed. If Nuland conducts this war, Lavrov was signalling, the outcome will be decided by arms, at the front.

This was not the Nuland signal Surkov and Peskov have sent.

NOTE: an alert reader who has studied the Zurich meeting record points out that for less than a second, between 0.19 and 0.20 of the running tape, Lavrovs hand and Nulands appear to touch. Comparing Lavrovs grip and hand-shake with every other American in the room, the Nuland move is more a slip or a slide; its not the shake Nulands hand was extended for and anticipating. Watch again.
Taking a step back, it is important to understand what could be behind the sudden change in market sentiment. Borrowing a literary expression, this is to some extent the chronicle of a death foretold. Italian banks have been very resilient to the first wave of financial crisis in 2008, due to the low exposure of Italian banks to US products and to the fact that there was no housing bubble that burst (contrary to what happened e.g. in Spain). But when the financial crisis turned into a euro sovereign banking crisis, things started to deteriorate for Italian banks, and they have really never improved much since then.

Figure 1

Source: own calculations based on data from Bank of Italy

As the economic situation worsened, bad loans accumulated on banks balance sheet, making it increasingly difficult for them to lend to the private sector and support the economic recovery. Bad loans have been growing constantly ever since 2008, and reached 200bn euro in September 2015. This is roughly equivalent to 9% of total loans, a level that was unseen since the late Nineties. About 71% of the total bad debts is made of loans to non-financial corporations, whereas 27% is constituted by loans to households, and the ratios are higher in the Southern and Islands regions  where the economic situation is worse  than in the North (see Table 1). At the bank level, the situation is mixed (Table 2). Non-performing Loans ratios range from about 14% for Unicredit to as much as 39.9% for Monte dei Paschi and coverage ratios also vary considerably across the individual institutions.

Table 1  Bad debt by geographical area



Source: own calculations based on data from Bank of Italy

The existence of sizable and increasing bad loans in the Italian banking sector has been known for quite a long time (see e.g. here and here). What acted on market sentiment is probably a worry about how this could play out in the future, given that the new regime for bank recovery and resolution (the BRRD) has now entered into force.

The recent episodes of creative resolutions of four Italian banks have in fact highlighted a potentially very serious problem, i.e. that over the past years some Italian banks had been placing their subordinated debt with retail customers who were unaware of the true risk associated with these products.

Figure 2 shows that as of September 2015, Italian households were holding about 30% of the total bonds issued by Italian banks, slightly less than the 35% that was held by other Italian banks. The households share of total bank bonds used to be much higher (around 60%) until the mid-2000s. It declined to about 45% between 2005 and 2007, mostly substituted by increased foreign holdings, and it started to to decrease again in 2011, substituted this time by increased holdings of other Italian banks.

Figure 2  holdings of Italian banks bonds, by sector (% total)

Source: own calculations based on data from Bank of Italy

The entry into force of the BRRD makes this a thorn in the side of the Italian government. BRRD aims at reducing the cost of bank rescues for taxpayers, which would be especially problematic for states  like Italy  that have high public debt. But in order to do so, BRRD requires sizable bail-in of bondholders, which in the case of Italy can likely retail holders with limited awareness of the risk. The potential for political backlash is obviously large, and creative solutions like those implemented this fall to protect senior bondholders will hardly be possible under BRRD. Even if they were possible, it would be very difficult to engineer them, because of their cost. The operation that was carried out to resolve four banks in November without haircutting senior bondholders required the three biggest Italian banks to advance the money that were not in the resolution fund. And these were only 4 very tiny banks, making up for around 1% of Italian deposits in total.

These worries, and the resulting market stress, speeded up the talks between the Italian government and the European Commission about the creation of a bad bank. This could be a potentially important step to finally clean the Italian banks balance sheet, but it is probably not going to be miraculous and it is certainly not going to be as easy as it would have been in the past. According to Reuters, the plan that is being discussed aims at reducing the balance sheet impact of the necessary writedown by having the bad loans sold to special vehicles, which would issue bonds to fund the purchase. To make the bonds appealing and cheaper to issue, Italy would offer a state guarantee on them, with the underlying idea that the easier it is for the SPV to finance the purchase and the better the terms on which it can buy the loans from the banks, thus limiting the balance sheet impact.

But the implementation of this public-private scheme could be much more difficult today under the new regulatory framework than it was at the time when Spain and Ireland cleaned up their banking sectors. The point of contention is the the price at which the banks will be able to offload their bad loans to the vehicle. If this price is too low, than the writedown could have a sizable impact on banks balance sheet and it would not reassure the markets. Reuters reports that the selling price of the bad loans to the SPV could be between 20 and 30 percent. If we pick the average (25 percent), a very simple back of the envelope calculation suggest the existence of additional provision needs for the sector (see table 2). On the other hand, if the government guarantee were such that the selling price resulted too high compared to the market value of the loans, then the operation would be considered state aid.

Table 2  selected indicators at individual bank level

Sources: banks reports

Last year, just after the release of the ECB stress test results, I wrote about some long-term structural issues  such as the low profitability of the Italian sector compared to e.g. the Spanish one, or the complex and opaque governance system. While having been know for a long time, these problem were at that time lying quietly below the surface waiting for their moment of recognition.

The final wake up call might have finally come on the 1st January 2016, when the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) officially entered into force. Based on the management of recent resolution episodes, investors have probably realised that the Italian government will have troubles managing a change that could have potentially relevant social consequences of which the country had little awareness until a couple of months ago. Facing the long-lived issues in the Italian banking sector is now urgent, but Italy might have waited too long for it not to be painful.
Julie Glenn Columnist SHARE Prince Robert of Luxembourg, right, owner of Chateau Haut Brion, was presented with an incredibly rare 1926 vintage of his estate's wine at a Naples Winter Wine Festival dinner in 2010. It's a wine he said they didn't even have in the vineyard's extensive winery since few of the older vintages survived World War II. Photo by Julie Glenn Prince Robert of Luxembourg, right, owner of Chateau Haut Brion, was presented with an incredibly rare 1926 vintage of his estate's wine at a Naples Winter Wine Festival dinner in 2010. It's a wine he said they didn't even have in the vineyard's extensive winery since few of the older vintages survived World War II. Photo by Julie Glenn An incredibly rare 1926 vintage of Chateau Haut Brion presented to Prince Robert of Luxembourg at a Naples Winter Wine Festival dinner in 2010. Photo by Julie Glenn Tasting lineup for Stag's Leap wines. Photo by Julie Glenn

The first time I covered the Naples Winter Wine Festival in 2010, it felt like I had "arrived" as a freelance wine writer. I mean, this is a big deal. The biggest deal.

Everyone who's anyone in the wine world goes to this event, wines from the most famous estates are on the auction block, and millions of dollars are raised every year. And there I was in a penthouse condo on a Friday night, inhaling the aromas of a dinner prepared by a world-class chef flown in for the occasion.

I took pictures of the Chateau Haut Brion Bordeaux as it sat in stunning crystal decanters, preparing to be poured for people who'd paid thousands to be part of the most exclusive weekend-long wine event in the country, if not the world. Earlier that night, I'd met Prince Robert of Luxembourg, whose family has owned Chateau Haut Brion since 1935.

His Royal Highness was presented with an exceedingly rare 1926 vintage of his ch teau's wine by a local wine collector. I have never been so grateful to be a peripheral observer than that night; seeing a bottle that old being passed from one pair of hands to another nearly sent me into panic attacks that someone might drop it. The bottle handled the transition just fine, but I was still having palpitations as I photographed it; fearful the flash on my camera might harm this precious bit of history.

I somehow summoned all the sang-froid I could muster and managed to sound reasonably intelligent while interviewing royalty. Y'know, no big whoop. Then, the next day at the auction I was wandering around the grounds outside the tent looking for photos to take and who walks right over, arms extended for an acquaintance hug saying, "Well, hello Julie! So good to see you again ...?" Yeah, the Prince of Luxembourg himself. It was like William Shatner greeting a Trekkie or Taylor Swift remembering the name of a tween fan.

The following year I was slightly less nervous but equally star-struck when I was able to interview Christian Moueix, the owner of Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux and Dominus in Napa. His merlot, which sells for a few thousand dollars a bottle, was probably the only merlot not damaged by the movie "Sideways," which firmly placed pinot noir at the top of varietal popularity charts. It was a lowbrow concern, but I wondered what he thought of the unseating of merlot as Americans' go-to grape. So sheepishly, I asked.

Moueix told me the makers of that movie had sent him an early script asking him to allow Chateau Petrus to be the iconic wine coveted by the film's lead character. He refused because, he said, "I thought the movie was stupid and I didn't want to be a part of it." Here I was, giggling with the owner of one of the world's greatest wineries, agreeing that I didn't much care for the movie either. I've still never tried his wine, but I still have his business card in case I'm ever in Bordeaux and want to stop by.

If a map existed of wine featuring the United States, our little town of Naples would probably have a larger point on it thanks to the Naples Winter Wine Festival. A growing number of California winemakers are making a second home here, and at least two of this year's auction participants have roots in the area.

Jeff Gargiulo, one of the founders of the festival, was originally from Naples where his family had success in the produce business. He continues to work in produce in the San Francisco Bay area but spends the bulk of his time following his other two passions, winemaking and music, with soul-filling success.

His namesake wines have achieved "cult" status, meaning they are very difficult to find and fetch several hundred dollars a bottle. Standing on the open-air stage he built into the back of his Napa Valley property, Gargioulo surveys his vines with a not-too-distant view of his neighbors' vineyards which round out the top tier of California "cult" cabernet sauvignon. More than a vineyard viewing platform, the stage hosts his band the Silverado Pickups, which is comprised of seven wine industry friends who share a love for music.

Legendary harvest parties happen here every autumn, but late January is reserved for Naples where Gargiulo and his wife Valerie Boyd host vintner dinners for the wine festival.

A valley away another Naples to California connection is found in the Hamel family that launched Hamel Family Wines in 2010 along the Sonoma Highway. The cellars were dug into the mountain the winery nestles into, and all of the earth removed for the winding tunnels was used to create the modern yet warm tasting room and facilities. Brothers John and George are winemaker and managing director respectively with their mother and father offering support and guidance. This will be Hamel Family Wine's first year of participation in the vintner dinner part of the festival as a winery. The Hamels will co-host a dinner Friday with Ann Welsh McNulty, featuring their own wines alongside the wines or Staglin Family Vineyard.

I welcome comments and questions at juliewriteswine@gmail.com. You can see more of my writing at julieglenn.com, and can connect with me on Facebook and on Twitter @juliewriteswine.
<p>In July 2007, Krispy Kreme doughnuts were available adjacent to Subway on the corner of Davis and Collier boulevards in East Naples. Daily News file</p>

What about Baskin-Robbins and Long John Silver's?

Q: Is there a Krispy Kreme in Naples or Bonita Springs? You referred to Krispy Kreme in todays paper.

 Bruni Collins, Bonita Springs

A: Krispy Kreme recently was mentioned in a National Coffee Day feature, but the company does not have a doughnut store in Southwest Florida.

Known for its melt-in-your mouth glazed doughnuts and its Hot Now lights when a new batch is ready, the nearest Krispy Kreme store is more than 90 miles across Florida in Tamarac, near Fort Lauderdale. The company, headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., since 1937, has more than 880 shops in more than 20 countries.

Naples has had only satellite locations for Krispy Kreme, meaning the doughnuts are baked elsewhere and shipped here.

Ron Klein of Naples became an instant fan of Krispy Kreme doughnuts years ago when he sampled them during a drive through South Carolina.

I said, These are great. Why dont we have them in Naples? Klein said.

So, Klein made it happen in 2000. He called Krispy Kreme and had doughnuts shipped early every day from the national chains Tampa bakery to The Bagel Place, a deli-bakery he formerly owned in the corner of Park Shore Plaza.

They were delivered every morning fresh, he said. We sold them. We did well with them. People would come in and buy a half dozen or a dozen. They were good doughnuts, they were.

Klein said the agreement with Krispy Kreme was that he had to buy at least 60 dozen doughnuts a day from the wholesaler, feature them in their own display case and he could not sell day-old doughnuts.

Whatever I had left over I could not sell. I could not sell next-day doughnuts, he said. I ate a lot of doughnuts.

Although the local shop featured a few Krispy Kreme varieties, the original glazed sold like hotcakes and usually were gone before noon. The shop was initially successful as the exclusive local purveyor of Krispy Kreme baked goods, but the market soon became fragmented, Klein said.

Then, they started to put them in Sams or Costco and selling them in gas stations. That really just killed my market to a degree, he said. I said, you know what, forget it. I just got out of it.

Until a few years ago, Krispy Kreme doughnuts were co-branded locally with Subways nontraditional stores beginning in 2007, and could be purchased at locations such as the gas station stores on the corner of Davis and Collier Boulevards in East Naples, said Joe Candito of Subway Southwest Regional Development Inc. Candito said the doughnuts arrived from Tampa about 5 a.m. daily.

To my knowledge, there was never any freestanding Krispy Kreme stores or inline stores in this area, he said.

Krispy Kreme doughnuts also were available locally in ExxonMobils On the Run convenience stores until they were converted to 7-Eleven stores a few years ago.

I dont think anybody has them anymore in town, Klein said. I dont know why theres not a Krispy Kreme in Naples again. If I was younger I might do it, but not anymore.

Baskin-Robbins

Q: Is there a Baskin-Robbins in Naples?

 Sydney, Naples

A: Until a few years ago, Baskin-Robbins had three locations sharing space with Dunkin Donuts stores in North Naples. The ice cream chains store in Lehigh Acres is the only one still operating in Collier or Lee counties.

Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin Donuts, both owned by Massachusetts-based Dunkin Brands, once shared retail space in Uptown Center on Immokalee Road, across from Gulf Coast High School off Immokalee Road, and in Mission Square off Pine Ridge Road. But instead of operating two different concepts at one location, Gulf Coast Donuts decided to just try to focus really hard on one of them, said Keith Roman, the local franchisees district manager.

Operationally, they didnt perform well, Roman said. And, operationally, it was too hard to manage the concept in one location.

Baskin-Robbins, once known for its 31 flavors slogan and its free samples on tiny pink spoons, remains the worlds largest chain of ice cream specialty shops. A local store could eventually open independently, but probably not again as part of Dunkin Donuts.

As far as us doing it, I dont see it ever happening, Roman said.

Long John Silvers

Q: Is there still a Long John Silvers in the area?

 Bob B., East Naples

A: The nearest location for Long John Silvers shares a building with Taco Bell near the corner of Colonial Boulevard and Six Mile Cypress Parkway in Fort Myers.

The last Collier County location for the Kentucky-based seafood restaurant chain closed in 2011 after operating for more than 30 years on U.S. 41 East in East Naples. Long John Silvers also had a North Naples location from about 1984 to 1994 where Loving Hut vegan restaurant is today on Pine Ridge Road near its intersection with U.S. 41 North.

The aforementioned Fort Myers location is the only one left in Lee County.

The company doesnt have plans to reopen locations in this area, according to corporate spokeswoman Charissa Acree.

Right now, there is no franchise news we can share for the Naples market. Ill be sure to keep you updated if that ever changes in the future, Acree said.

Have a local question? Email it with your name and city of residence to intheknow@naplesnews.com. In the Know is published every Monday and Wednesday.
Bonita Springs National Art Festival returns to Riverside Park from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 30-31. Patrice Shields/Special to The Banner

SHARE Artist Christine Reichow talks with as festival goer during the Bonita Springs National Art Festival. The festival returns to Riverside Park from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 30-31. Patrice Shields/Special to The Banner : Artist John Cheer at the36th Bonita Springs National Art Festival January 30-31, 10am-5pm, Riverside Park, Old 41, Bonita Springs

By Patrice Shields

Some art collectors travel the globe searching for artwork to enhance their collections.

This weekend art lovers can stay right here in Bonita Springs because 200 of the finest artists from across the globe will have their fine art paintings, glass, jewelry, clay works, photography, sculpture and more on display to view and purchase at The Bonita Springs National Art Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, and Sunday, Jan. 31, at Riverside Park on Old 41 Road in Bonita Springs. This fine are and craft festival is one of the nation's most highly rated and the top ranked show in Bonita Spring/Naples Metropolis by The Harris List and ranked 11th nationally by Sunshine Artist Magazine.

"Hundreds of thousands of people have attended our festivals in Bonita Springs. They come back each year because they know the art is great and there is something for everyone. It is like a walking tour of high quality art galleries, but this one is set up outside in sunny Florida. Riverside Park is a beautiful location with old Florida charm, a perfect backdrop for our spectacular Festivals. Gorgeous sculptures, paintings, glass, photography, and clay accompanied by great music and refreshments in this fantastic setting," said Susan Bridges.

While on your walk through Riverside Park this weekend, you will want to stop to see Vermont native Edward Loedding's stunning floral images that combines both painting and photography. Loedding calls his technique Visual Choreography because it is many steps brought together to create a dance for the eyes.

"The white flowers are the lyrics; the rhythm and movement is the music. I use digital tools to create my work. It begins with photography, then proceeds to photo montage, taking sections from dozens of different photos to create a graceful composition," said Loedding. "Next is digital painting to simplify, modify color, light and shadow, and to turn lines and shapes into dance movements. No filters are used; only brushes."

Stroll past Riverside Park's fountain and you will find the stunning sterling silver jewelry pieces of metalsmith Kimberley Coy.

"My metal pieces begin as raw materials, typically sheet & wire," Coy said. "Those materials are molded using traditional metalsmith tools including mandrels, hand-files, flame and grit papers as well as contemporary metalsmith tools including a flex shaft, rolling mill, texturing hammers and flame enhanced through a torch system."

The results are both stunning and unique.

Your walk through Riverside Park this weekend offers a sampling of 200 new award winning artists including Jeannie Maddox and her larger than life, photo realistic oil paintings, Brian Becher's stunning glass vessels, beaded treasures by Barbara Ellis and the intriguing porcelain and glass work of John Cheer.

Soak up some sun at a table in the food court by the bandshell or walk the shady path along the Imperial River. Wherever you go in the park this weekend you are certain to find art that will inspire and perhaps even become part of your own collection.

The Bonita Springs National Art Festivals are an integral part of the Centers for the Arts Bonita Springs and their programming. As part of their mission of "Arts for All," the Centers for the Arts provide programming to over 12,000 at-risk youth annually. Last year they awarded over $100,000 in scholarships.

The Riverside Park location offer ample free parking on site with wine, beer, food and beverages available for purchase and live music to enjoy while you view and purchase fine art.

While there is no admission fee for this event, the Centers for the Arts of Bonita Springs volunteers will be asking for an optional $5 donation, directly supporting the Centers for the Arts programming.

IF YOU GO

36th Bonita Springs National Art Festival

When: 10 a.m.- 5p.m. Jan. 30 and Jan. 31

Where: Riverside Park, 10451 Old 41 Road, Bonita Springs

Cost: Free ($5 optional donation for admission to support the Center for the Arts Bonita Springs)

Information: 239-495-8989 or visit artcenterbonita.org/artfest
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By Joe Landon

Every so often we learn about something that just blows our minds. Such is the case with me and the problem of grandparent alienation. The how and why and scope of it just baffles me. I've written about it before but there still seems to be a lack of awareness. Lots of grandparents, estranged from their grandkids, are apparently in desperate need of help.

There's a group known as Alienated Grandparents Anonymous (AGA), founded here in Naples in 2011, standing by to provide information and support to grandparents who are suffering. And that's not too strong a word.

Family therapist Carol Golly explains that "alienated grandparents are suffering and experiencing profound emotional and physical health problems in grieving the loss of contact with grandchildren. It can be intense chronic grief leading to lowered life satisfaction, numbness, shock and denial and post-traumatic stress disorder."

Not surprising since a recent study told us that 72 percent of grandparents report that being a grandparent is the single most important and satisfying thing in their lives. Golly shares that sadly there have been eight suicides of alienated grandparents known to AGA since 2011.

So why does this alienation happen in the first place? Nationally known psychologist Joshua Coleman explains that "it's almost always a result of the parents alienating themselves from their own parents. There's a strong sense in our culture today that if a relationship doesn't make you feel good, then completely ending it is a reasonable decision. Unfortunately, many parents fail to consider the loss they create in both their child and the grandparent." Both become victims.

One grandparent calls her estrangement "a living bereavement." Another relates that "each day that passes without my grandchildren, a part of me dies."

When asked for the best advice he can give to a grandparent trying to cope, Coleman replied "support, support, support. Find people you can talk to. Social isolation is the worst part of any form of estrangement or alienation." Golly urges anyone in this predicament to "reach out to others who understand."

This is where AGA enters the picture with monthly support group meetings which they believe can bring attendees some peace. The next one will be held at 5 p.m. on Feb. 23 at the library on Central Avenue in Naples. Information from experts and the sharing of heartfelt stories and coping skills is the focus of these sessions. Grandparents remain anonymous and free to openly discuss their plight.

With its reach now spreading to all 50 states and 13 countries, AGA continues to work with thousands who are still in pain. But they have been able to help as many as 94 families reconcile their differences since 2011.

A grandparent we spoke with who reunited with her grandchildren after five years called AGA a lifesaver: "The strategies we learned from AGA made the difference."

Now there's good news on a couple of fronts. A relatively new grandparents rights bill in Florida allows grandparents to sue for visitation if the parents of their grandchild are deceased, missing or in a persistent vegetative state. While the bill applies to only a small percentage of cases, it's viewed as a step in the right direction.

And the David Lawrence Center (DLC) has joined forces with AGA to provide mental health services to those dealing with alienation. A TeleHealth program makes the support of specially trained therapists available through web-based, face-to-face video counseling sessions. To learn more about the services go to DLCTeleHealth.org.

If you are an alienated grandparent, or know someone who is, please reach out to AGA. You are welcome to attend the Feb. 23 meeting or visit aga-fl.org online.

- - -

Joe Landon is a communications consultant having retired as executive director of communications for the Collier County School District. Please send suggestions for future columns to JoeLandon@Outlook.com.
SHARE Madison Szittai, 16, with her "I Lava You" creation. Thousands walked Fifth Ave. South on a windy Saturday to view artwork created directly on the street in Chalk Art 2016, presented by the Pelican Bay Rotary Club. Lance Shearer/Citizen Correspondent Selina Wagner's artwork won the $1,500 first prize. Thousands walked Fifth Ave. South on a windy Saturday to view artwork created directly on the street in Chalk Art 2016, presented by the Pelican Bay Rotary Club. Lance Shearer/Citizen Correspondent Twins Kristina and Amanda Cortada went with an India theme. Thousands walked Fifth Ave. South on a windy Saturday to view artwork created directly on the street in Chalk Art 2016, presented by the Pelican Bay Rotary Club. Lance Shearer/Citizen Correspondent Chelon Benetoa-Perez imagined a golden retriever licking an ice cream cone. Thousands walked Fifth Ave. South on a windy Saturday to view artwork created directly on the street in Chalk Art 2016, presented by the Pelican Bay Rotary Club. Lance Shearer/Citizen Correspondent

By Lance Shearer

If people said they got blown away while viewing the street paintings on Fifth Avenue South in Naples during Chalk Art 2016, it didn't necessarily mean they were art lovers  although there was a lot of creativity on display. With winds as high as 30 mph throughout the day, and stronger gusts, the day was memorable for the weather as well as the artwork.

But strong breezes didn't keep the artists or the public away, as thousands walked up and down the street, blocked off from vehicular traffic for the day, to view dozens of individual panels, vote for their favorites, greet their friends and enjoy Fifth Avenue as a pedestrian mall. While the wind blew, luckily the rain which threatened held off, or the artwork might have been reduced to a host of colorful smears.

Artists, many of them students, showed up early in the morning to work on their "canvases," actually squares marked off on the pavement where ordinarily cars would be whizzing  well, creeping  by. The squares were purchased by local businesses, and while some of the resulting artwork featured the sponsors' names, others were simply abstract flights of fancy, tropical scenes or portraits.

The artists were competing for some serious change, with the top prize given by the judges carrying a $1,500 cash award, $1,000 for second, and even fifth place finishing in the money with a $200 prize. The event is a fundraiser for the Pelican Bay Rotary Club which puts it on each year, and in addition to the judges' selections, popular vote or people's choice awards were given out, with spectators invited to purchase ballots.

Downtown Naples was a busy place Saturday, with another event, the Empty Bowls fundraiser held by the Harry Chapin Food Bank, bringing its own crowd to Cambier Park. Many soup sippers made their way to Fifth Avenue after that event, providing a nucleus for crowds that basically thronged the street all day. It could be hard to find a place to walk, even without cars to contend with, when one had to be careful not to walk across some artist's canvas.

Ansley Grigsby, 18, a Barron Collier High School student, collaborated with eight of her friends to do their entry, which included a stylized owl.

"We all came up with this together," she said. "We're all seniors, so we won't have many more chances to do something together like this." T

heir artwork, sponsored by Mike Horn Family Insurance, took a second place prize in the popular vote. First place in the 12 x 12 popular vote category  there were three sizes of canvas  went to Jess Telmanik for her Sunshine Kids Foundation piece, which positively radiated sunshine, and said it was "dedicated to children with cancer."

The official judges awarded first place to Selina Wagner for her piece, sponsored by the law office of Sam Saad III and Paradise Coast Title. Second place went to Darin Sellers, sponsored by Wind in the Willows, with what appeared to be an illustration straight out of the book.

Twin sisters Kristina and Amanda Cortada worked on an Indian-themed piece, and Seth Miller honored the Grateful Dead with his artwork, although wearing a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.

Chalk art wasn't the only art form exhibited during the show. While all vehicles had been removed along the street, car dealers who acted as sponsors displayed their wares up and down Fifth Avenue, including an eye-catching trio of red, white and blue Corvettes. And along with food trucks and violinist Emilia Lipinska playing Boccherini, Miracles in Action, which sells native beadwork made by Mayan villagers in Guatemala, did a brisk business at their booth, selling $6,600 and making future connections with retail outlets.

When the chalk dust settled, Chalk Art 2016 raised approximately $45,000 to fund the charitable work of the Naples-Pelican Bay Rotary Club, said the club's public relations director Pete Rossi. In addition to providing college scholarships to local high school students, the club gives to Kids-Against-Hunger, St. Matthew's House, the Boy Scouts and the Immokalee Friendship House, among other organizations.
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By Sebastian Gonzalez

Belgian Yummies

Belgian Yummies, the former Jack and Rita's Ice Cream shop, has a new owner who came directly from Belgium and offers Belgian ice cream as well as Belgian waffle desserts. The shop, still displaying its previous name, is at 2378 Immokalee Road, North Naples. 239-260-1407.

Consumers' Choice Awards

The fresh fish experts at Bonefish Grill received the top honors for food quality in the 2016 Consumers' Choice Awards announced by Technomic. The awards are based on consumer surveys that rate more than 120 U.S. restaurant chains on more than 60 attributes as part of an ongoing study recording almost 100,000 consumer visits annually. Bonefish Grill was designated a food quality "Pillar of Excellence" as the winner in the full-service restaurant category. Bonefish Grill restaurant has a location in Naples as well as one in Bonita Springs.

De-stress and renew

The Escalante Hotel will begin a series of "lunch and learn" sessions focused on health and wellness. Each session will feature an expert speaker in a related field and include a three-course meal by Naples chef Bryan Sutton. The first session will take place 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday at the Escalante Hotel, 290 Fifth Ave. S., Naples. Speaker Lenka Spiska, LMT, medical intuiologist, shows how to manage the vicious cycle of stress to renew life without damaging side effects. $45. Reservations required. 239.659.3466. hotelescalante.com. lenkaspiska.com

The Cider Press Cafe

The Cider Press Cafe will celebrate its second anniversary on Friday, from 6-9 p.m. by featuring an installation of Florida artist Margaret Juul's Organic Coastal Waterscape Series. ciderpresscafe.com; margaretjuul.com

Dock anniversary

The Dock at Crayton Cove will celebrate its 40th anniversary next month. The open-air restaurant is known for its waterfront dining, seafood and laid-back atmosphere. Operating since 1976, The Dock has become a part of Naples' history. The Dock at Crayton Cove, located at 845 12th Ave. S., has sponsored and hosted many of Naples' events such as the annual Dickens Fest, the annual Naples St. Patrick's Day Parade and the Great Dock Canoe Race. For more information about the history, new menu items and specials at The Dock at Crayton Cove visit dockcraytoncove.com.

End of January sale

Naples Food Tours is offering $20 off each tour ticket for some remaining tours of the month. Tour dates include Wednesday, Jan. 27  Uptown Culinary Tour; Thursday, Jan. 28  Downtown Culinary Tour; Friday, Jan. 29  Small Bites and Chocolate School. Make your reservation online using the promo code "FoodiesSWFL." naplesfoodtours.com

Fifth Friday on First

Fifth Friday on First features River District restaurant food samples for purchase in $5 increments at 6-9 p.m. Friday in the historic River District, Fort Myers. Also included are several stages along First Street with Blues Music.

Food sample tickets are available at participating downtown retail shops. Fifth Friday on First patrons will vote for their favorite downtown restaurant, which will be determined by the most food tickets sold for the night. The winning restaurant will receive a Fifth Friday on First trophy. 239-945-0405. riverdistrictevents@gmail.com. fortmyersriverdistrictalliance.com

Staglin wine dinner

The Catch of the Pelican restaurant at Naples Grande is hosting a wine dinner with the Staglin family on Jan. 28.

Enjoy this special five-course dinner paired with Staglin Family Wines.

The Staglin donate their proceeds to mental health research. Naples Grande is located at 475 Seagate Drive, Naples.

For reservations: 866-991-4661 or naplesgrande.com

Wine dinner

Chef Vincenzo Betulia of Osteria Tulia is partnering with Chef Alessandro Taras and Antonio Argiolas to host an exclusive wine dinner at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4, at Bar Tulia, 462 Fifth Ave. S., Naples.

Vincenzo and Alessandro will be preparing a multicourse meal, while Argiolas will describe the wine paired with each meal in detail.

The Argiolas estate is widely known for its crisp and refreshing white wines and complex and precocious reds.

The Argiolas family has insisted on utilizing the indigenous white varietals Nuragus and Vermentino and the red varietals Cannonau, Monica, Carignano and Bovale SardoIn.

The last eight vintages, their top wine, Turriga, has won Italy's most prestigious wine award from Gambero Rosso Editore, "Tre Bicchieri Award."

Space is limited. $100. 239-228-7606

Wine Fest tribute

La Bazenne, the French restaurant on Fifth, will host a tribute to the Naples Winter Wine Festival on Jan. 29 through Jan. 31, offering their exclusive reserve wines with dinner at 10 percent discount for Social Club members. 474 Fifth Ave. S., Naples. 239-682-8623

Worden Farm

"Outstanding in the Field" is coming to Worden Farm on Sunday, Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. Experience an unforgettable evening seated at the long community table, in the midst of vibrant organic vegetables.

The meal will feature Worden Farm vegetables and products from other local food purveyors, brought together with the culinary talents of Chef Jeff Mitchell and his team from The Local restaurant of Naples.

A portion of the proceeds will benefit the nonprofit Florida Organic Growers and Consumers Inc.

Worden farm, 34900 Bermont Road, Punta Gorda

Yes, they are open

Grouper and Chips, one of the most traditional restaurants in Naples, will now open its doors on Sundays from 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

This lunch and dinning opportunity will be available until April. 338 U.S. 41 N., Naples. 239-643-4577

Compiled by Sebastian Gonzalez, Sebastian.Gonzalez@Naplesnews.com, 239-435-3432
SHARE Daniel Espinosa Daniel Espinosa Stephanie Marie Morales

By Daily News Staff

A Miami man wanted on felony warrants in two other counties was arrested by Collier County Sheriff's deputies Tuesday after his friend was seen stealing expensive wine and champagne from Publix.

Daniel Espinosa, 21, faces charges of fraud and driving with a suspended license. He also faces a slew of charges out of Osceloa County for grand theft and battery and St. Lucie County for seven theft-related charges including felony retail theft in concert with others.

Stephanie Marie Morales, 21, of Davenport faces charges of retail theft for taking wine and champagne. Morales told deputies she was out on bond for stealing liquor in Orlando and had previously been arrested in Miami for a similar crime.

Deputies stopped Espinosa while he was driving along Interstate 75 Tuesday with illegally tinted windows.

Inside the vehicle, deputies found 12 bottles of champagne and wine in plain view and 30 more in the trunk. One of two other occupants Morales, was identified as the woman seen taking alcohol from the supermarket.
The statement said that Mohammed bin Awadh bin Ahmed Al-Zahrani - a Saudi national - had stabbed by a knife Ryadh bin Saeed bin Taher Al-Zahrani - a Saudi citizen - several times to death.

Security authorities managed to arrest the above mentioned murderer who pleaded guilty; the General Court convicted him of his crime and the sentence was endorsed by the concerned authorities.

The murderer was executed in Jeddah governorate of Makkah region today after the sentence was endorsed by the Appeal and Supreme Courts and sealed by a royal order.

The execution of Al-Zahrani brought the total number of executions in Saudi Arabia this month to 53, AFP reported.

Sources: SPA, Agence France-Presse, Hands Off Cain, January 25, 2016

Married gay couples arrested in Saudi raid

Manama: Saudi security authorities have arrested four gay men in the capital Riyadh after they raided the flat where they were living as married couples.Acting on tips about the men living together after they held wedding parties attended by other homosexuals, members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the religious police, headed to the flat in Al Quds neighbourhood, Saudi news site Sabq reported on Tuesday, citing sources close to the Commission.As the religious police members arrived at the flat, they were spotted by two of the gays who tried to get rid of the fake breasts they were wearing, the sources said. The Commission members arrested and then detained the other two gays inside the flat. The four admitted they were living as married couples. The first couple said that they got married two days earlier at a recreational facility south of Riyadh and that they were still on their honeymoon. The second couple said they celebrated their marriage last week. The four said they used the flat as their residence.According to the report, three of the detainees were unmarried and one, 28, was married.The sources added that the Commission found on the mobiles of the detainees several pictures and clips of the wedding parties and of the guests wearing womens clothes and make-up.Homosexuality and cross-dressing are socially taboo and legal offences in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Reactions from social media users to the raids mostly touched on the need to mete out tough punishment to those found to be involved so that it would act as a strong deterrent. Some users even suggested that those who took part in the party be secluded for five years in remote areas.In June, authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested several people in Jeddah following raids on two parties in which most participants were homosexuals.The raids were conducted simultaneously at dawn in the Harzat area, known for its recreational facilities.Security staff and members of the Commission noted down the numbers on the licence plates of the cars parked near the party venues before they raided the premises. The vehicle details were recorded in order to ensure that those who managed to escape the raid would be tracked down and arrested.The raids led to the arrest of several people, mainly gays, and netted locally produced alcoholic drinks and hashish, sources said. Those who were arrested were referred to a police station while those who fled the premises will be summoned since they were all identified.In November 2014, a court in the port city of Dammam in Saudi Arabias Eastern Province sentenced a homosexual man to three years in jail for engaging in immoral acts. The man, in his 30s, was also ordered by the court to pay a 100,000 Saudi riyal fine.The man was apprehended by the Commission after he posted pictures of himself naked on social media and offered to have sex with other men. Offensive pictures and chats with other people were found on his confiscated mobile phone.In October 2014, police in Kuwait arrested 23 cross-dressers and homosexuals after they busted a wild party held at a chalet in the south of the country.Lawmakers have been pushing for a crackdown on homosexuality, including the adoption of tougher immigration measures against expatriate homosexuals, including their prompt deportation.In 2013, a suggestion by a health official to bar homosexual and transgender foreigners from working in the GCC raised a storm that eventually cooled off after officials clarified that the proposal was the personal view of the official and did not reflect the government policy.Source: Gulf News , January 28, 2016
<p>Audience prepares to get seated before the Bonita Springs Zoning Board meeting on Oct. 20, 2015. The board unanimously voted to deny a requestion that would have allowed the excavation of a 1,268-acre lime rock mine in East Bonita. Photo by Patrick Riley/Staff.</p>

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By Patrick Riley of the Naples Daily News

A Bonita Springs companys plan to continue mining a large East Bonita property for another decade failed to gain the support of the city zoning board.

Heeding recommendations from a number of concerned residents during public comment, the board unanimously voted to deny a request that would have allowed Bonita Grande Properties, L.P., to excavate the 1,268-acre lime rock mine for 10 more years, from May 27, 2020 to May 27, 2030. Board member James Wurster was absent and did not vote.

Permission to mine the land off Bonita Grande Drive was set to expire in 2018. The state Legislature extended those rights through 2020 after Gov. Rick Scott declared state of emergencies ahead of Hurricane Isaac and Tropical Storm Debby in 2012, said Russell Schropp, an attorney representing Bonita Grande Properties.

DOCUMENT: Supporting documents from the zoning board meeting.

Roger Brunswick, chairman of the seven-member board, said he heard enough from the citizens, who have been waiting for the agreement to expire.

Theyve been promised this for many, many years and it just seems like the right thing to do, Brunswick said. There is a better use for the land.

The request still goes before city council, which will have final say on the matter. The issue will likely be brought before council for a first reading without public comment Nov. 4 and a second reading with vote Nov. 16, said City Attorney Audrey Vance.

Part of the property sits on protected land known as the Density Reduction Groundwater Resource (DRGR) area. The 90,000-acre region was created to limit development and preserve water resources in Lee Countys rural eastern areas. The mine predates that concept and has been operating under various owners since the 1980s.

In 2003, Bonita Springs annexed the mining property. The sites former owners entered into an agreement with the city that allowed them to continue to mine, Schropp said.

When the recession hit during the late 2000s, Schropp said, the property was transferred from Bonita Grande Aggregates LLC to Bonita Grande Properties under dire economic conditions.

Bonita Grande Aggregates financial difficulties caused a timing setback that prompted Bonita Grande Properties to ask for the mining extension, Schropp said.

At Tuesdays meeting, a number of residents spoke before the board to object to the companys request. They complained the city did not give them enough time to review hundreds of pages related to the application. The city posted the information packet online Thursday night.

I do not believe continued mining is the best use of this land, said Tori Polonitza, a former member of the citys water strategy task force and a 20-year resident. This property has come up for discussion as a residential property in the past and that land use fits this location far better.

Many others voiced environmental concerns.

How much more do we have to see before we learn the lesson that we must protect our water now? said resident Donna Stone, referring to cases of groundwater contamination and water shortages across the country. The DRGR mine area and the land between Terry Street, Bonita Grande and Bonita Beach Road is our only source of water for the entire city.

Pending a decision from city council and even beyond the future of the longtime mining land is uncertain.

We have been pursuing a plan amendment that would allow for ultimate conversion or transition from mining to some alternate use, said David Depew, a planning consultant representing Bonita Grande Properties. So a lot will depend on what the city will do with its comprehensive planning efforts in this area.
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By Arek Sarkissian of the Naples Daily News

Florida Legislature

TALLAHASSEE  A Florida Senate committee Tuesday approved a bill that would weaken public records law by stripping out a guarantee that people could recover legal fees if they won court fights to obtain records.

Some government agencies in Florida deny the public access to public records, requiring them to obtain a court order before the information is released.

Florida law now allows people to sue agencies for records and guarantees payment of legal fees if a lawsuit is successful.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah, drew criticism.

"No attorney is going to take the case if they aren't sure they're going to get paid," said Florida First Amendment Foundation President Barbara Petersen.

"We know there are some bad actors who are taking advantage of this, but there are better ways to address the issue," Petersen said.

Garcia said his bill would trust a judge to determine whether a public records lawsuit was filed in bad faith.

"I'll be more than happy to work out the issues of this bill and come to a happy medium so we can have a policy in place that works and protects the public," Garcia said. "I believe in this and I feel like people should have access to public records law."

St. Petersburg bankruptcy attorney Matthew Weidner, who sued Gov. Rick Scott last year for public documents about Florida Department of Law Enforcement Chief Gerald Bailey's ouster in January 2015, said the bill would end lawsuits seeking public records.

For his suit, eventually backed by a coalition of new agencies, he was faced by a dozen state-paid attorneys that charge $400 an hour.

"Just imagine your everyday person walking into a room and seeing 12 high-price attorneys staring back at them," Weidner said.

Garcia's bill passed the Senate Committee on Governmental Oversight and Accountability on Tuesday with a unanimous vote from a three-member panel.

The bill would require an agency to acknowledge a request within five days of receiving it. That change would prevent lawyers from filing a lawsuit the same day as the request.

Garcia said he filed the bill after hearing from several cities that were flooded with lawsuits. The issue surfaced in 2014 when news sites such as the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting wrote about a law firm owned by South Palm Beach millionaire Martin O'Boyle, which made hundreds of public records requests to local government agencies across the state. An employee hired by O'Boyle accused him of filing the requests so that he could file claims for legal fees.

Gulf Stream received 2,500 public records requests in two years from law firms. Gulf Stream Vice Mayor Robert Ganger brought up during the Tuesday committee meeting a case where a law firm requested all pictures of bicycles. The city replied to the request that it had no such pictures, and then it faced a lawsuit when one was found on its official website.

"The court today has no discretion and because we technically didn't comply, they awarded legal fees," Ganger said. "It's killing us."

Garcia's bill is paired with HB 1021, by state Rep. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, who said the bill should not prevent citizens from waging public records fights in court, Steube said.

"I'm not saying you can't file a public records lawsuit and I'm not saying you can't get attorney's fees," Steube said. "I'm simply saying it's up to the discretion of the court just like it says in statute in civil actions in Florida."

Contact Daily News reporter arek.sarkissian@naplesnews.com or 850-559-7620
FILE - Collier County Clerk of Courts Dwight Brock stands by while debating with Georgia Hiller during a Collier County Commission meeting on Tuesday, September 9, 2014. (Scott McIntyre/Staff)

By Greg Stanley of the Naples Daily News

A state judge said Tuesday he needs time to consider arguments that he should settle before trial a dispute between county officials over how vendors are paid.

County Clerk Dwight Brock sued county officials over their purchasing policy, saying state law doesn't allow commissioners to hand over spending authority to their county manager and purchasing director for items under $50,000. The commission has allowed the practice for more than 20 years, saying it's necessary to keep the government operating, and a majority of Florida counties have similar policies in place.

Brock and county commissioners opposing him asked Circuit Court Judge James Shenko to issue a summary judgment to settle the matter.

Shenko, who said he'll need time to rule, can either throw out Brock's suit, side with the clerk or allow the matter continue toward a February trial date.

Brock had argued against the county policy for years, but went along with it until last spring. In June, county vendors, many of them small and local businesses, stopped getting paid after the clerk refused to cover some of the county's bills.

Over the course of a month, Brock blocked payment of a total of $5.6 million to hundreds of companies and employees until he and commissioners agreed to a deal that allows vendors to be paid while the matter is in court.

Commissioner Georgia Hiller said she is hopeful the judge's ruling, when it comes, will end the dispute.

"What we're doing is absolutely legal," Hiller said. "I sincerely hope the judge sees that as a matter of law and this ruling leaves no question that this practice is absolutely legal."

The practice allows county staff members to make purchases under $50,000 with little scrutiny from commissioners or the public, said attorney David Ackerman, who represents Brock.

"None of it is in the sunshine," Ackerman said. "The way the threshold is being applied lets staff members spend more than $50,000. You see them sign three-year contracts that cost $24,000 a year. It's a myth that this is kept to $50,000."

Ackerman said state law makes it clear that commissioners must approve each expenditure of public money before the money is spent.

But that reasoning is "ludicrous," said attorney Jamie Cole, who represents County Manager Leo Ochs.

The law clearly allows commissioners to delegate ministerial duties, he said. Expecting commissioners to approve each expense before it's made would be like asking commissioners to personally handle all of their other statutory duties, requiring the five of them to enforce their liquor laws or mow the grass in public parks.

"The board can delegate this," Cole said. "They can't give a manager the power to go buy whatever he wants. It has to be limited." And the county's spending policies are limited, he said.

Staff can only spend money that's budgeted and within the $50,000 threshold. To buy anything that costs more than $3,000, employees need to be have three quotes and find the best price. And, in the end, every expense is cataloged and has to be brought before commissioners, who vote on whether it served a valid public purpose, Cole said.

"This power is very limited," he said. "It's clearly ministerial. Commissioners do exactly what the clerk wants them to do, because every expense goes before them and they get to approve it or not."

But the board only approves the expenses after the fact, when the county is already obligated to pay, Ackerman said.

"This blanket approval doesn't give sufficient information about each expenditure," he said. "Neither the county manager nor the purchasing director can document the purpose of each purchase. It's not too much to ask to say they should be responsible for knowing why they're buying it."

If the case is allowed to continue it is scheduled to start trial February 24.
SHARE Bernabela Gonzalez prays in her Immokalee home while waiting for her children to be returned to her on Monday, Jan 25, 2016. Gonzalez had her 10-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter taken from her by the children's father in 2014 while she was fighting for custody. After some complications due to Gonzalez being undocumented, her children were released to her from the Department of Children and Families early Tuesday morning. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Bernabela Gonzalez and her two children Eddie, 10, and Ashley Roblero, 4, arrive at their Immokalee home after Gonzalez picked up her children from Miami on Tuesday, Jan 26, 2016. Gonzalez had her 10-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter taken from her by the children's father in 2014 while she was fighting for custody. After some complications due to Gonzalez being undocumented, her children were released to her from the Department of Children and Families early Tuesday morning. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Bernabela Gonzalez, left, is held by friend Flor Perdomo during a prayer in her Immokalee home while waiting for her children to be returned to her on Monday, Jan 25, 2016. Gonzalez had her 10-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter taken from her by the children's father in 2014 while she was fighting for custody. After some complications due to Gonzalez being undocumented, her children were released to her from the Department of Children and Families early Tuesday morning. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Related Photos Photos: Immokalee woman reunited with her children

By Maria Perez of the Naples Daily News

A long two-year separation from her children ended Tuesday for Bernabela Gonzalez as 4-year-old Ashley and 10-year-old Eddie arrived, sleepy and silent, at the family's home in Immokalee.

Gonzalez kept the children close by as they greeted family and friends eager to see them again. She carried Ashley over her hip as they stood outside the mobile home where the family lives. They said their hellos, gave hugs and the children inspected their new home. It was an emotional morning for Gonzalez, who at times was crying, but this time joyful tears.

Her reunion with her children is the latest development in a two-year-long custody fight that escalated after their father took them to Mexico without Gonzalez knowing. Tuesday morning's arrival in Immokalee ended a five-day journey home that started in the state of Chiapas, Mexico on Friday. Those days brought waves of hope and fear, with the most difficult moments coming late Monday when authorities in Miami told Gonzalez they could not release her children to her because she is in the country illegally.

"I thought they had taken them away from me," she said.

The father, Angel Luis Roblero, had taken the U.S.-born children back to his native Mexico while Gonzalez was fighting for custody in 2014. The father violated an Alabama judge's custody order when he took the children to Mexico, triggering an international effort to bring them back to Immokalee.

With the help of the U.S. Department of State's Office of Children's Issues and her relatives in Mexico, Gonzalez took the legal battle to her Mexican hometown of Motozintla. A judge there ordered the father to deliver the children to Gonzalez's relatives. When relatives went to pick them up in November, the father and children were gone, Gonzalez said.

Last week, Mexican authorities located the children and handed them over to Gonzalez's relatives, who quickly sent the boy and girl on their way back to their mother.

Immokalee pastor Karl Glander, service director of Immokalee Amigos Center, traveled to Mexico to pick up the children, and was allowed to board a flight back to the U.S. with them Monday.

Glander believed he had all the paperwork he needed: the order from a Mexican court to release the children to Gonzalez; an Alabama judge's order awarding custody to Gonzalez; the children's passports; and two notarized statements from Gonzalez allowing him to pick up the children in Mexico and bring them to her in Immokalee.

At her home in Immokalee on Monday, Gonzalez waited nervously for Glander to return with the children. Wearing a green dress and white sandals, Gonzalez was surrounded by friends in the kitchen waiting to welcome her children. They were expected to arrive between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.

"I haven't seen my children for two years. I don't know how to receive them," she said as the tears began to flow. "I don't know what to do. I feel joyful."

But then a phone call came.

Authorities at the Miami International Airport said they couldn't release the children to her because she is in the country illegally. They were placing them in the state's custody.

Gonzalez stayed up after the conversation was over, next to the table, crying. A friend tried to console her.

Elva Santos, who had helped her find assistance to keep fighting for custody, said she didn't understand. All the people involved, including U.S. Department of State employees, knew Gonzalez had crossed illegally into the U.S. in 2004.

"They knew this from the beginning," she said.

Gonzalez told State Department employees who were helping her find her children months ago that Glander would pick them up. But when he arrived with the children in Miami at about 6:45 p.m. Monday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers held them. An officer said the notarized statements weren't good enough to travel with the children because they can be falsified.

The officers gave the children to the Florida Department of Children and Families at about 10:30 p.m., Glander said.

Gonzalez was first told she would have to pick up her children at U.S. Customs at the Miami airport, and bring documents that showed she was the mother. But in a later phone call, she was advised they wouldn't release the children to her.

After receiving a call at about 1:45 a.m. Tuesday, Gonzalez was told to travel to Opa-locka with the custody order from the Alabama judge and other paperwork. The children would remain with DCF until things could be clarified and if she arrived late, the children would be taken to court.

She wasn't sure where she was going or what would happen when she got there.

"I thought it could be the immigration authorities, that they could deport me," she said.

An acquaintance took her to the Opa-locka address, a DCF building. When she arrived, she said the building was closed, but someone who didn't speak Spanish opened the door. She translated through a friend over the phone. The man led her to a room with a small table where, she said, her children were lying awake over a bedspread on the floor.

Her son, Eddie, saw her first. "Look, it's mom," he said. His sister stood up fast, not recognizing Gonzalez at first.

The man, she said, told her to sign some papers and take the children home.

"I was crying," she said. "I couldn't believe it."

DCF spokeswoman Jessica Sims said in an statement that the agency followed state law, working to safely reunite the children with their mother as soon as possible.

U.S. Customs spokesman Keith Smith said in a statement that the agency is prohibited from discussing specific cases or personally identifiable information regarding the arrival or departure of international travelers.

"U.S. Customs and Border Protection strives to treat all travelers with respect and in a professional manner, while ensuring the security of our nation's borders," the statement said. "Travelers may be referred for further inspection for a variety of reasons to include identity verification, intent of travel, and confirmation of admissibility."

While driving to Immokalee in the car, Gonzalez said, her children were talking and playing at first, looking at her phone, going through old photos. Then they fell slept.

"Yesterday I felt everything was lost, and that what I hoped for, wouldn't be fulfilled" Gonzalez said standing in her mobile home with her children. "Now all that is over."
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Collier County commissioners took a commendable step Tuesday by offering a settlement to the North Collier fire district in a dispute that could have adversely affected emergency care as of midnight Friday.

Commissioners, voting on a settlement proposal formulated by Commissioner Tom Henning, showed good faith by agreeing to maintain the status quo for a month to see if a deal can be reached.

As it stood at the conclusion of a joint meeting Monday between commissioners and fire board members, about 100 paramedics in northern Collier would have stopped using their advanced life-saving skills as of midnight Friday. The equipment on which they rely would have been removed from fire district vehicles.

The conflict erupted in September when commissioners surprisingly denied the North Naples fire district a certificate of public convenience and necessity (COPCN) to have its own medical director and make decisions about the level of emergency medical service firefighters provide. Commissioners had awarded the COPCN for five consecutive years; county staff and an advisory board recommended renewal.

Based on that September vote, the COPCN was to expire Dec. 31. Late last year, the deadline was extended until Friday after North Collier fire board members sued over the COPCN denial. The settlement offer made Tuesday is related to that lawsuit.

Commissioners voted 4-0, with Commissioner Georgia Hiller absent, to extend the COPCN until Feb. 25 while this latest settlement offer is considered.

This provides a month for North Collier fire board members to weigh the proposal, accept it or return a counteroffer to commissioners. We would urge fire board members not to wait until their next scheduled meeting Feb. 11 to respond, but to instead convene quickly to respond to county commissioners.

County commissioners have two meetings scheduled before the new Feb. 25 COPCN deadline, so there is time for the elected boards to work together in good faith.

The offer

There will be elements of the offer framed by Henning that we don't expect fire board members to like, and others we believe they will.

A notable negative is the district would come under the county's medical director. District staff has stated in the past they never again would work under Dr. Robert Tober, who in 2009 accused North Naples firefighters of cheating on paramedic exams, an accusation the state deemed too unfounded to even investigate. The settlement offer opens the door to the fire district working with a subordinate to Tober.

A notable positive is that paramedics working for North Collier fire could begin using their equipment and skills in the Big Corkscrew Island area that became part of the North Collier district with North Naples through a merger vote in November 2014. That also could benefit Immokalee and Ave Maria because it could station more paramedics closer to that area for dire emergencies; Immokalee fire officials cited that benefit when urging renewal of the COPCN.

Acceptable?

There are other aspects of Henning's proposal related to credentialing, staffing ambulances during patient transport and information tracking.

Based on a 5-3 vote by the fire board Monday during the joint meeting, we believe there will be an appetite to consider what Henning framed. The 5-3 vote would have created an agreement between the sides to allow the paramedics to continue providing that higher level of care.

Notably in any settlement, neither side gets all it wants. If North Collier fire commissioners agree, they get the COPCN for another year. Some may oppose it.

Monday, both sides suggested a separate lawsuit might be needed to get a judge to decide the broader question of whether a COPCN is needed to have such an agreement between the agencies for emergency response.

Nothing advanced by county commissioners Tuesday would preclude the fire board from seeking that legal determination in the future. In the meantime, the issue is resolved until after the fall elections when the composition of the fire board and County Commission may change. We see that, too, as a benefit.
Larson on Wallace incident: 'It is what it is'

Kyle Larson responds to his wreck with Bubba Wallace and Wallace's retaliation at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Beatrice Stockly, who was previously abducted by Islamists in northern Mali in 2012, was taken for the second time on January 7 (Photo: YouTube)

Nouakchott: Al-Qaeda's north Africa affiliate has claimed the kidnapping of a Swiss woman in Mali's Timbuktu in a video, as Switzerland demanded her unconditional release.

Beatrice Stockly, who was previously abducted by Islamists in northern Mali in 2012, was taken for the second time on January 7 by armed men who stormed her home in the country's fabled city.

The eight-minute video includes triumphant montages of jihadists brandishing weapons and a masked English-speaker who claims responsibility for the abduction on behalf of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

"Beatrice Stockly is a Swiss nun who declared war against Islam in her attempt to Christianise Muslims," the speaker said.

Stockly has previously been identified as a missionary and social worker in her 40s who had lived in Timbuktu for years.

With at least three other fighters dimly lit in the background, the speaker said AQIM carried out the abduction and listed conditions for Stockly's release.

They include the release of a number of AQIM fighters jailed in Mali and one of their leaders, Abu Tourab, detained at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Abu Ahmad Tourab is the nom de guerre of Ahmad al-Faki al-Mahdi, who is accused of ordering the destruction of historical monuments in Timbuktu in 2012.

Tourab, who was a leader of the Al-Qaeda-linked Malian group Ansar Dine, is the first jihadist to appear before the war crimes court.

Stockly appears at the end of the video dressed in a black hijab. She identifies herself and the date as Tuesday, January 19, 2016.

A Swiss foreign ministry spokesman told AFP that Bern was "aware of the video in question," and called for the hostage's unconditional release.

The foreign ministry has previously said that it discouraged Stockly from further travel to Timbuktu following her first kidnapping.

The security situation in northern Mali has not stabilised since a loose coalition of Islamists and Tuareg rebels overran the region in 2012.

Jihadist fighters were largely chased from the area in 2013 by a French-led military intervention, but entire swathes of the area remain beyond the reach of both the Malian army and foreign troops.

The speaker in the video said AQIM had developed an expertise in dealing with Western hostages and was prepared to be "patient" while waiting for its demands to be met.
Eamonn Lacey

Eamonn Lacey

A letter sent by the HSE to silence a senior consultant who advocated for mental health services has caused outrage in South Tipperary.

The letter, sent to Dr. Alan Moore, a consultant psychiatrist who has spearheaded a campaign to save St Michaels psychiatric unit in Clonmel which the HSE announced on Tuesday of last week would now close at the end of March 2012, has shocked medical colleagues and has been condemned as bully boy HSE tactics by the Save Our Hospital campaign group.

Dr. Moore was threatened with disciplinary action if he spoke out about management of the HSE again on July 21. Details of the letter were revealed at a special meeting of the Save Our Hospital Group last Thursday night which was held to discuss the HSE announcement two days earlier of the closure of the unit.

A leading consultant at South Tipperary General Hospital, Dr.P aud ORegan has condemned the letter and called for it to be withdrawn and an apology to be issued to Dr. Moore immediately.

The silencing controversy will be an issue to be raised this Thursday when South Tipperary elected representatives meet Junior Health Minister Kathleen Lynch.

The letter was sent to Dr. Moore on July 21 by Mr Frank Kelly, Clinical Director of Mental Health Services in Carlow, Kilkenny and South Tipperary, following comments made in the media by Dr. Moore who has advocated for the retention of a 20/25 bed acute in Clonmel since it was threatened with closure.

It is quite extraordinary for a medical colleague to effectively silence a fellow doctor. Its very damaging for the doctor, the patients and the services he was trying to represent and it sets an extremely dangerous precedent as to how the rest of us who are attempting to advocate on behalf of patients and services may be handled, he said.

Dr. ORegan said he was outraged by the threatening tone of the letter sent to Dr Moore and said such anti democratic action was a sign that the political system needed to take on in a serious way the monster of the HSE which they created

Dr ORegan said he and all the consultants who were aware of the contents of the letter were shocked by the executive and the way they went about preventing a very respected doctor from advocating for his patients and the services which he feels should be provided for them.

He was very disappointed that while Health Minister James Reilly had declared a moratorium on closures, the HSE were busy preparing the ground for the closure of St. Michaels and an important element of that for them was silencing the most vocal and public of their critics.

Dr. ORegan said it was very worrying that the only people to be involved in the consultative process were those who only agreed with the HSE policy.

The Chairman of the Save Our Hospital group Deputy Seamus Healy said there was widespread anger, shock and indeed disbelief at the recent bullying and silencing by the Health Service Executive of Dr Moore.

The letter was condemned at a Save Our Hospital Committee meeting and all present supported Dr Moore and renewed its determination to ensure the continued provision of acute in-patient psychiatric services at St. Michaels Unit at South Tipperary General Hospital.

Deputy Healy said Dr Moore had the support of all stake holders in the Mental Health Services in the county. He was an able and experienced professional, widely respected in the consultant psychiatric community and in the community generally.

This action by the Health Service Executive is bullying of the worst kind and will not be accepted. The way to stop bullying is to stand up to bullies and that is what we intend doing. Dr Moore has been doing no more that expressing the unanimous views of his South Tipperary Consultant colleagues and the views of all but one of his Kilkenny colleagues, he said.

Deputy Healy said the Health Service Executive were silencing Dr Moore, an experienced and well-respected consultant, while at the same time accepting advice from an individual who claims to represent local service users even though he is neither elected nor appointed and is not from the county nor does he reside in the county.

Mayor of Clonmel Darren Ryan said he could not understand why the HSE announced closure of St. Michaels before elected representatives had attended the scheduled meeting with Minister Lynch this Thursday.

What the HSE presented in their media briefing last week was nothing short of hypocrisy, there is absolutely no basis or evidence shown as to why St. Michaels Unit should be closed, they have been quoting the Departments document Vision for Change and that they are basing their decision on this report, Vision for Change actually states and recommends that there be two Acute units in the region, one in Kilkenny and one in South Tipperary, so I am at a loss on this he said.

I am extremely disappointed with this decision and indeed with Minister Lynch for allowing such an announcement take place when she had agreed to meet with us, it really is an insult to local democracy, said the mayor.

MEP Phil Prendergast said there was an arguable case for retaining a smaller unit at St Michaels which she planned to make to Minister Lynch

I remain to be convinced there is enough acute bed capacity overall in the system because the recession has led to a severe deterioration in the countrys mental health and existing acute facilities are under constant pressure.

Deputy Mattie McGrath has condemned their actions and the Government Ministers for their continual refusals to meet with South Tipperary Oireachtas Members.

We the Oireachtas Members for South Tipperary have been completely ignored by the HSE and the Minister for Health. Our requests to meet with Minister Reilly have been ignored and Junior Minister Kathleen Lynch TD paid a flying visit to St. Michaels without informing the Oireachtas Members said Mr McGrath

The HSE attempted to close St. Michaels last year, however following action from the Oireachtas members, Minister Moloney put it on hold and appointed Professor Hillery to investigate the matter.

Dr. Hillerys recommendations have been ignored and the HSE are continuing with their bully-boy tactics. It is absolutely outrageous that the HSE and the Department of Health will not consult with the South Tipperary Oireachtas members and all other stakeholders.

It is also outrageous that South Tipperary Oireachtas Members are the last to hear the plans as we were not invited to the Press conference last week oncludedMr McGrath

Deputy Tom Hayes said he was extremely disappointed to hear of the planned closure of St. Michaels.

I was even more disappointed with the lack of consultation between the HSE and the public representatives of South Tipperary, having failed to notify a single Oireachtas member of their decision despite countless efforts on our part to secure the future of this unit.

However, its now time to focus on what lies ahead. My immediate priority is to eliminate the uncertainties that now exist following this announcement, and to identify the community based services that will begin in May of next year. This weeks deputation to Minister Kathleen Lynch is both timely and important, and will allow us the opportunity to discuss these topics, he said.

The HSE said it had engaged in a comprehensive consultation and engagement process, as regards the next phase implementation of a Vision for Change in Carlow, Kilkenny and South Tipperary Mental Health Services.

The HSE signed up to and delivers on its commitments under the Consultants Contract 2008. Under Section 16 of 2008 Contract which state a consultant may advocate on behalf of patients/service users or persons awaiting access to service.

In the first instance such advocacy should take place within the employment context through the relevant Clinical Director or other line manager. Information given to the public should be expressed in clear and factual terms. It must never cause unnecessary public concern or personal distress nor should it raise unrealistic expectations.

The HSE South said it was very cognisant of this matter in relation to statements being issued in relation to mental health services and encourages all those involved in public statements to be clear and factual.
Stewart Information Services in Houston plans to eliminate its dual classes of common stock.

The title insurance underwriter will direct the holders of its Class B common stock to exchange about 1.1 million shares for an equal amount of the other class of common stock plus $12 million of cash in the aggregate. After the transition, all holders of common stock will be entitled to one vote per share.

The elimination of the dual classes of stock will "help to strengthen Stewart's corporate governance, aligning voting rights with the economic interests of our stockholders," Chairman Thomas Apel said in a news release.

Holders of Class B common stock have approved the plan and the other group of shareholders must also approve the restructuring. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter.

In October, Stewart reorganized its businesses under the Stewart Title brand for its core title business lines, and all other businesses under the Stewart brand, including Stewart Lender Services and Stewart Insurance and Risk Management.

Goldman Sachs is financial adviser to Stewart on the reclassification. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom is legal counsel.
Freddie Mac has priced a $757 million offering of structured pass-through certificates under its "K Certificates" program that securitizes recently originated multifamily mortgage loans.

According to a Freddie Mac release, the certificates are unrated and were priced at par with a one-month coupon of Libor plus 70 basis points, yielding 1.0021%. The certificates are expected to settle on or around Feb. 4, according to Freddie.

The certificates are backing 27 properties owned by Canadian alternative asset management firm Brookfield Asset Management Inc.

Wells Fargo is the sole lead manager and arranger, with Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Samuel A. Ramirez & Co. as co-managers.

The Brookfield K Certificates (or K-BAM certificates) will include one senior principal and interest class and one interest only class.

As per the structure of Freddie's K-Deals, the certificates will be guaranteed by Freddie and backed by corresponding classes in the FREMF 2016-KBAM Mortgage Trust. The trust will issue certificates of Class B and Class R certificates that will not be guaranteed by Freddie.

Freddie's K certificates program issues deals in multifamily securities that are intended to offload taxpayer risk through the government-sponsored enterprise entity on to private investors who purchase the nonguaranteed bonds. Freddie purchases multifamily mortgages secured by apartment buildings of five or more units, freeing up the pipeline of multifamily mortgage originations that ensure a greater supply of affordable rental housing.

In the first nine months of 2015 (using the latest available quarterly figures), Freddie Mac reported that it offloaded $21.9 billion of $34.1 billion of new business volume into so-called K-Deals. The entire volume of multifamily loans backed by Freddie in 2014 was $28 billion.

As of Sept. 30, 2015, according to a Freddie Mac investor presentation, Freddie had a multifamily loan portfolio of $54.2 billion and a multifamily investment portfolio of $20 billion.
JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay almost $1 billion to resolve claims by Ambac Financial that it was duped into insuring mortgage bonds backed by shoddy loans, clearing the way for approval of a larger settlement over similar allegations.

Ambac said Tuesday in a statement that the bank will pay $995 million to end two lawsuits the New York-based insurer filed in New York state court in 2011 and 2012 over the quality of loans underlying mortgage bonds sold by Bear Stearns, which was bought by JPMorgan in 2008.

As part of the deal, Ambac agreed to drop its objections to a $4.5 billion settlement between JPMorgan and institutional investors including BlackRock and Pacific Investment Management over claims of faulty home loans, leaving only one objector to the pact. Ambac's settlement clears the way for a judge to approve the larger deal, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Elliott Stein said.

The settlement with JPMorgan was a "bit of a surprise" as many investors had been focused on whether Ambac would be able to resolve similar claims against Bank of America, Mark Palmer, an analyst with BTIG in LLC in New York, said in a note to investors.

The question now is whether the balance of power has shifted in Ambac's talks with Bank of America and whether the JPMorgan settlement will lead to a resolution of that case, Palmer said.

The company's Ambac Assurance unit was the second-largest bond insurer before the 2008 financial crisis, when mounting defaults on mortgages swamped the company with claims.

The cases are Ambac Assurance v. EMC Mortgage, 651013/2012 and 650421/2011, New York State Supreme Court, New York County (Manhattan).
US authorities sacked six police officers who unloaded 137 bullets into a car with unarmed African Americans. (Photo: AP)

Chicago: US authorities sacked six police officers on Tuesday who unloaded 137 bullets into a car carrying two unarmed African Americans, killing the pair in a hail of gunfire in Cleveland, Ohio.

City officials, who have faced criticism for failing to take action sooner after the 2012 shooting, said they hoped the sackings would bring "closure" to a city struggling to rebuild trust following a series of high-profile police killings, including that of a black boy.

Cleveland pledged to overhaul its police force and aspire to "bias-free" law enforcement under an agreement reached with the US Justice Department in May.

The "consent decree" was announced two days after protesters filled Cleveland's streets following the acquittal of a white police officer charged in the November 2012 incident that left Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams dead after a car chase.

Patrolman Michael Brelo, 31, was one of 13 officers involved in the 22-mile (35 kilometer) high-speed chase.

The car of Russell and Williams had backfired as it drove past Cleveland police headquarters, and police thought the sound was a gunshot.

A total of 137 rounds were fired at their car, including 49 by Brelo. He shot the final 15 from the hood of Russell's Chevrolet Malibu.

Six officers, including Brelo, were fired and six will be disciplined. One has retired.

City officials said the officers crossed the line and endangered their fellow officers when they unleashed the barrage of bullets in just 20 seconds.

Cleveland police also faced severe criticism after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy carrying a toy gun, was fatally shot by a white officer at a playground in 2014. A grand jury declined last month to issue charges in that case.

Mayor Frank Jackson defended the amount of time it took to discipline the officers.

"What we've talked about from the beginning is conducting a process that has due process at its core and is fair," he told reporters.

But police union president Steve Loomis said he expected the six sacked officers to get their jobs back.

"The politics in this city is absolutely appalling," he told reporters.

"It's tragic that it went down this way, but at the end of the day, two people high on crack cocaine, high on marijuana, one of them intoxicated, made the decisions that they made and we responded."
United Airlines says customers booked to fly to areas affected by the virus can reschedule or get refunds. American Airlines says it will give refunds to pregnant women who were planning to travel to parts of Central America. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Two major US airlines are offering refunds to passengers worried about the Zika virus outbreak in many tropical countries.

United Airlines says customers booked to fly to areas affected by the virus can reschedule or get refunds. American Airlines says it will give refunds to pregnant women who were planning to travel to parts of Central America.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned pregnant women to take precautions against mosquito bites when traveling to areas in Latin America and the Caribbean where there have been Zika outbreaks. The CDC says the mosquito-borne illness could be linked to a birth defect of the brain.

The United Airlines offer began Tuesday and includes any country covered by a CDC travel notice, an airline spokesman said. American Airlines began refunds on Monday for pregnant passengers holding tickets to El Salvador, Honduras, Panama or Guatemala, according to a spokesman.

A spokesman for Delta Air Lines said the carrier was monitoring the situation but not yet offering waivers. JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines were not immediately able to say whether they were offering refunds.

Southwest Airlines said it was sticking to its normal policy, which lets customers who cancel ahead of time reuse the value of their tickets. All of those airlines fly to at least some affected locations.

On Tuesday, the CDC expanded its travel alert for pregnant women to add the US Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic to the list of areas with Zika outbreaks. The CDC has already recommended that pregnant women consider postponing trips to 22 other destinations.

In Central and South America: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname and Venezuela.

In the Caribbean: Barbados, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, St. Martin and Puerto Rico and Cape Verde, off the coast of western Africa, and Samoa in the South Pacific.
Jillian B Lafave, 25, was allegedly involved in sexting the 16-year-old differently-abled victim. She had exchanged about 13,000 text messages with the boy, most of which had a sexual nature.

Las Vegas: In a gruesome act, a married secondary school teacher was reportedly arrested on the charges on sexually abusing a minor as reported in the mirror.co.uk.

Jillian B Lafave, 25, was allegedly involved in sexting the 16-year-old differently-abled victim. She had exchanged about 13,000 text messages with the boy, most of which were in a sexual context.

Jillian B Lafave, 25, was allegedly involved in sexting the 16-year-old differently-abled victim.Lafave, a teacher at Valley High School in Las Vegas, was arrested by police on the suspicion of indulging in a sexual act with the minor. She was caught having sex with the minor by a hall monitor, says KSNV.

The minor boy, being differently-abled, lacked any understanding of sex, say reports. Police believe that the pair had been engaging in sex almost everyday, following which Lafave was arrested.

She was later released on bail and was sent on administrative leave by the school. Lafave is due to appear before the court in March.
Japan's Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko attend a wreath laying ceremony at the monument to Philippine national hero Jose Rizal in Manila. (Photo: AFP)

Manila: Japanese Emperor Akihito bowed his head in sorrow during a sombre ceremony at the Philippines' biggest war cemetery on Wednesday, but also enjoyed banter about cars, fashion and food on the first full day of a historic visit.

Akihito, 82, and his wife, Empress Michiko, are in the Philippines to celebrate 60 years of diplomatic ties, while also honouring those who died during Japan's brutal occupation of the Philippines.

Akihito's visit is the first by a Japanese emperor to the Philippines and comes as the two countries fortify economic and defence ties, partly to counter China's increasingly assertive actions in disputed regional waters.

The official events of his five-day trip began on Wednesday morning with a red-carpet welcome ceremony at the presidential palace hosted by President Benigno Aquino.

In the afternoon, he visited the sprawling Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes' Cemetery) in Manila, which was built in 1947 to honour Filipino soldiers who died during World War II.

The Philippines endured brutal Japanese occupation during the war, which saw tens of thousands of soldiers die marching to Japanese concentration camps.

An estimated 100,000 people also died during the month-long campaign to liberate Manila in 1945, which saw aerial bombings and gunfire flatten the city.

Promoting Peace

Akihito has made honouring Japanese and non-Japanese who died in World War II a touchstone of his near three-decade reign -- known as Heisei, or "achieving peace" -- and now in its twilight.

Akihito has also previously journeyed to other Pacific battle sites where Japanese troops and civilians made desperate last stands in the name of his father, Hirohito.

The other key symbolic event on Akihito's agenda in the Philippines will be a visit on Friday to a shrine for Japanese casualties of the war in Caliraya, a lake resort village about three hours' drive south of Manila.

Before leaving Tokyo on Tuesday, Akihito said a main focus of his trip was to honour the war dead.

"In the Philippines, many lives of Filipinos, Americans and Japanese were lost during the war," Akihito said.

He specifically referred to the Manila independence battle in his remarks.

"We'd like to conduct our visit by always keeping this in mind," said Akihito.

Akihito's remorse over the war helps to improve Japan's international image, counter-balancing his government's more nationalist bent, according to Manila-based political analyst Richard Javad Heydarian.

"The emperor will serve as the apologetic, sincere face of Japan... it will balance out his government's controversial, pugnacious and seemingly revisionist statements," he said.

Conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe angered China and South Korea when he marked the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender last year by saying that future generations should not apologise for the war.

Trusted Friends

But the Philippines now views Japan, its biggest source of development aid and foreign investment, as a trusted ally.

Highlighting the warmth of the relationship, Akihito and Aquino enjoyed a wide-ranging, 20-minute chat inside the presidential palace after the welcoming ceremony on Wednesday.

The conversation jumped from Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo that is popular in the Philippines to Akihito's previous visit as a prince in 1962 when he went to a fog-shrouded volcano close to Manila, according to their aides.

They also discussed hot sales of Japanese cars in the Philippines, and the rice industries that are so important to both nations.

Outside the palace, though, about 200 people rallied to demand justice for women who were forced into sexual slavery by occupying Japanese soldiers in World War II.

"To the emperor of Japan, talk to your leader about Filipina grandmothers who are fighting for their rights," one of seven former sex slaves at the protest, Narcisa Claveria, 85, said over a megaphone.

Known as "comfort women", they have long demanded a formal apology from Tokyo, compensation and inclusion of the atrocities in Japanese history books.
Exposing who finances anti-marijuana movements

(NaturalNews) The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is constantly finding ways to bypass state laws that sanction medical marijuana and harass providers who are operating under those state laws. They are overt and obvious with their application of federal laws.The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which operates under the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, a rating that classifies it medicinally useless, dangerous, and addictive. Strangely, the pharmaceutical drugs that are the most dangerous and addictive are Big Pharma's expensive and toxic opiate based pain killers.Big Pharma produced opiates have official medical merit as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved pain killers. Most of them are Schedule II and III on the DEA list. But, if doctor prescribed, they're okay. Fake prescriptions or multiple prescriptions are methods of choice used by addicts to obtain oxycodone pain killers such as OxyContin.One such addict was former Rhode Island Representative Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Ted Kennedy. His career ending episode in 2006 of crashing into a Capitol Hill barricade while under the influence of OxyContin led to discovering his history of prescription drug abuse.After rehab he became an anti-marijuana crusader, even though his problem centered on addiction to pharmaceutical drugs. A key speaker at an early 2014 Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA) rally, he urged the 2,000 people present to spread the word of marijuana's evils."Let me tell you, there is nothing more inconsistent with trying to improve mental health and reduce substance-abuse disorders in this country than to legalize a third drug ," bellowed Kennedy. Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, was a major sponsor for this CADCA event.Big Pharma's actions have not been as obvious as the DEA's. Groups that are against loosening cannabis restrictions, media articles warning of marijuana's dangers, and anti-marijuana legalization politicians are benefiting from Big Pharma's financial support.Another public relations strategy mega-corporations use to gain public trust and political clout is through front groups. These are organized to appear as grass roots organizations with a specific cause. Whether they are contrived or spontaneous, corporations help fund them to do their bidding on the front lines.Besides CADCA, another group that benefits financially from Big Pharma is Partnership for Drug-Free Kids.magazine obtained a confidential financial disclosure from the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids showing that the group's largest donors include Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, and Abbott Laboratories, maker of the opioid Vicodin.CADCA also counts Purdue Pharma as a major donor as well as Alkermes, the maker of Zohydrol, a highly controversial pain killer considered 10 times stronger than Oxycontin. Janssen Pharmaceutical, maker of the painkiller Nucynta, and Pfizer, which manufactures several opioid products, are also CADCA sponsors.The motivating force for funding CADCA, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and other grass root groups appears to be financially motivated rather than altruistic. Big Pharma's fear of losing a large percentage of their $11 billion annual opioid sales as more states legalize or decriminalize marijuana for medical and/or recreational use seems to be all the reason they need.
If argon isn't hazardous, why is it being banned?

EPA failed to evaluate 299 other "inert" ingredients still in use by chemical industry

(NaturalNews) The scientific community is in an uproar after it was learned that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is planning to ban an inert gas, one that occurs naturally in the air we breathe, from being used in pesticide formulas.According to the agency, the natural element argon is considered a "hazardous" substance and should no longer be on the approved list of inert ingredients. Since it isn't used anymore anyway, claims the EPA, argon is best removed until it can be proven safe through an official review application."Once an inert ingredient is removed from the list, any proposed future use of the inert ingredient would need to be supported by data provided to and reviewed by the EPA as part of a new inert ingredient submission request," stated the agency in its proposal.According to reports, the EPA issued the proposal after California Attorney General (AG) Kamala Harris and representatives from two environmental groups petitioned for 371 inert pesticide ingredients to be removed. Citing alleged hazards, the petition, which was filed in 2006, called for the ingredients to be declared "hazardous."In response, EPA Assistant Administrator James Jones wrote a letter back on May 22 indicating that his agency would investigate the claims and make an assessment. After scrubbing nearly 300 of the inert ingredients from the list, the EPA whittled it's list down to 72 inert ingredients, including argon, none of which are currently in use.When news of the EPA's proposed action went viral, scientists, academics, doctors and others began to rail the agency for even suggesting that argon be banned. A professor of chemistry from the University of Nebraska, for instance, posted a comment on the EPA's website urging the agency to take a closer look at the issue."Removal of argon , the quintessential common inert gas, from the approved inert ingredients list, is likely to result in ridicule for the EPA," he wrote. "Government science agencies have a poor enough reputation already. Please don't make it worse!"Others are questioning the scientific approach used by the EPA to conclude that argon is hazardous. One commenter emphasized that argon is "totally inert," and that no compounds created with it can even survive at room temperature."I think someone at the EPA must have previously consumed too much of some banned substance -- as this makes absolutely no sense!" he added.You can view the EPA proposal and leave your own comments by visitingAs concerning as it is that the EPA would suggest that the third most abundant gas in the atmosphere be "banned," the real question is why didn't the EPA evaluate the other 299 "inert" ingredients proposed by California's AG? The answer is that all of these ingredients are currently in use by pesticide companies.You see, the only thing that the EPA did was "ban" the 72 ingredients that nobody is using, while leaving all the others alone. The agency didn't actually do any investigating into which chemicals are harmful and which are safe. This is why argon was put on the chopping block even though it isn't actually dangerous -- banning it doesn't threaten the chemical industry's bottom line."The truth is: Most 'inerts' are not inert," explains the group Project Censored, highlighting this point. "They are biologically, chemically, and toxicologically active. Many inerts are in fact more toxic than the active ingredients."
Horseshoe crab and bird populations sacrificed for vaccine tests

Bacteria ecosystems being destroyed in the guts of vaccine recipients

(NaturalNews) As pharmaceutical "science" advances, it leaves a trail of carnage in its wake. Did you know that vaccine manufacturers are immune from all liability? The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVIC) was created by the US Congress in 1986 to circumvent the judicial process, to exempt vaccine manufacturers from being sued for damaging people's lives . The government vaccine court  has paid out over $3 billion to vaccine damaged families, while dismissing thousands of other cases of vaccine damage.Not only do vaccine manufacturers get away with damaging people's lives with this imperfect science, but they also have unlimited authority to destroy the ecosystem by snatching up half a million horseshoe crabs each year, and using them for vaccine tests. Each year, it is estimated that over 500,000 horseshoe crabs are sacrificed to prepare vaccines for sale. Apparently vaccine manufacturers are also immune from prosecution for endangering an entire species of ocean life.In North and Central America, horseshoe crab populations are threatened, in decline, and vulnerable to over-fishing. Now we know why. Pharmaceutical companies stealthily snatch up half a million of these beautiful sea creatures each year, just as the crabs are preparing to mate. After the crabs are kidnapped, they are hooked up to machines, as their magnificent blue blood is forcibly drained with a crude siphon during a 2472 hour process.A staggering 1030 percent of the crabs die during this cruel operation. According to estimates, over 150,000 crabs are ritualistically bled and killed each year, just to test bacteria levels in the vaccines . The remaining crabs that survive are returned to the wild, but have a difficult time reproducing from there on out. Because of this, scientists have also recognized a decline in the bird populations that feast on these eggs.Did you know that a single female horseshoe crab can lay 90,000 eggs when she is healthy? Countless species of shorebirds depend on this fresh supply of eggs. About 10 of the eggs laid by each crab survive  if the crab isn't snatched up by pharmaceutical companies first. Not only are pharmaceutical companies taking out the crabs, but they are also decimating bird populations on the shoreline, altering entire oceanic ecosystems.This cruel disregard for animal populations and ecosystems is a reflection of the same cruel disregard for the commensal bacteria ecosystem living in the human gut. A vaccine recipient retrains their entire immune system when they submit to an injection. The vaccine virus and other chemicals are injected and therefore bypass the body's normal filters  skin, membranes and immune system first lines of defense. The adjuvant in the vaccine (typically a brain damaging, inflammatory aluminum compound ), forces the immune system to respond to the virus or bacteria in the vaccine. This forced intervention teaches the immune response to learn a new way to protect against an individual virus or bacteria strain. In this retraining process, the entire immune system is suppressed, and becomes more susceptible to other pathogens. The antibiotics that are typically present in vaccines are capable of wiping out the diversity of the human microbiome, weakening the body's protective force of good bacteria.Just as cruel vaccine tests destroy entire crab and bird populations, the ingredients in vaccines destroy the ecosystem of the human microbiome. As animal populations dwindle, and as humans suffer with weakening immune systems and brain damage, the pharmaceutical companies go on with no liability and no consequences.
Welcome to the Dust Bowl mentality ...

An 'economic dead end' for farmers, thanks to chemicals, bad farming practices

Attempts to fix the problem exist, but will people listen?

(NaturalNews) The effects of the Western World's less-than-ideal way of farming, coupled with its need for greed, are being felt in countries across the globe  and that's definitely not a good thing. In particular, cacao farmers are left scratching their heads, frantically searching for a way to meet a surge in chocolate demand, all the while lacking the resources to make it possible.Yaa Amekudzi, who runs Mondelez's cocoa sustainability operations in Ghana, says that, "They need to change the way they farm." If Mondelez isn't familiar to you, perhaps Oreo cookies and Cadbury Dairy Milk bars are; Mondelez is the maker of those popular food items. Amekudzi is concerned, saying that, "We don't have the forest cover we had, we don't have the rain our grandfathers had, and the soil isn't as fertile." She explains that young people don't have it in them to carry on the traditions of other generations, often leaving "... to seek a better life in the city."So becomes the story of what happens when Western values seep into other cultures and environments: Those areas start to experience many of the same issues that are unfolding in the U.S. In other words, destructive habits and a collective disregard for preserving the natural goodness of the earth ensues.Is a Dust Bowl  much like the Great Depression when the lands of the Great Plains fell victim to man's make-room-for-me-and-my-greedy-needs attitude  spreading globally?Of course it is.It's been happening, and it continues to happen at breakneck speeds. Just as environmental problems happened as a result of the Dust Bowl, when millions of acres of land were destroyed in the name of over-plowing, over-planting and over-grazing  ultimately leading to massive dust swirls that drifted over the barren lands  similar problems appear to be looming in other parts of the world. After all, the changes that Amekudzi speaks of have Dust Bowl-esque issues written all over them: the depletion of lands, bad soil, diminished crop production and people fleeing in hopes of a better life elsewhere.Another case in point: It's explained that Ghana's cacao farming practices leave much to be desired. According to the Ghana Permaculture Institute, cacao is a tremendous industry. However, along with a big industry comes big ideas, many of which are destructive. The site outlines this situation as follows:The problem then spirals out of control: along with all the chemicals and fungicides, soil becomes depleted of nutrients; its fertility is compromised; and the entire system in which root systems and fungal networks should harmonize is instead disrupted  all from harmful methods to keep big production, and big money, flowing in. But the thing is, it eventually catches up with you, as farmers are beginning to realize, as they stare at dying crops and dwindling financials.To address the struggles with cacao production in Ghana, Amekudzi says she tries to provide farmers with more effective farming solutions. She often gives advice about how to use fertilizer, prune trees and space seedlings better.As for the Ghana Permaculture Institute, they too suggest a better way of doing things. They advise permaculture , not the ineffective monoculture that currently exists. To this end, this means avoiding chemicals and fixing broken farming practices, which in turn leads to better care of trees, plants and soil  and hopefully, improved cacao crop yields.But will Amekudzi's advice and the suggestions for permaculture be enough to bring about the changes that are so desperately needed in the area?One can only hope, because a new way of doing things must be put in place. The Western corporation mentality  on many levels, not just cocoa farming  must change, for the health of the planet and its inhabitants.(1) MarketWatch.com (2) PermacultureGhana.Wordpress.com
The link between ecosystem destruction and diseases like Zika

(NaturalNews) Call it Mother Nature's revenge ...The spread of a once-rare disease that causes birth defects  and which may also be linked to cases of another paralyzing disease  is almost certainly related to mankind's destruction of ecosystems The disease  Zika virus  is spreading rapidly throughout the world, with more than a dozen cases having now been reported in the United States. The mosquito-borne Zika virus has been linked to a rise in cases of microcephaly, a horrific birth defect that causes babies to be born with unusually small heads and brain damage.Scientists are also investigating a possible link between the virus and the contraction of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease that can cause paralysis and long-term nerve damage.From"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reported this week that a dozen cases of Zika virus have been confirmed in the United States, is expanding its advisory that pregnant women should avoid travel to countries currently seeing high rates of infection."The agency's initial list contained 14 countries, but the CDC on Friday added eight more -- in South America, the Caribbean and Polynesia -- as places where the reach of the virus is growing."Zika virus has infected more than one million people in Brazil, and is expected to spread throughout the Americas, even though the disease was virtually unheard of in the Western Hemisphere until recently. In fact, although the virus was discovered in animals well over half a century ago, no human cases were reported before 2007.Until May of 2015, the only reported cases of the disease in this hemisphere were found in Easter Island. Since then, the virus has appeared in countries throughout South America and the Caribbean:"The virus was discovered in 1947 in a feverish rhesus monkey living in the Zika Forest of Uganda, but until 2007 scientists knew of only 14 human cases of the disease . That year it arrived on the travel-brochure-perfect Yap Island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Within a few months, nearly three-quarters of the island's 11,000 or so residents older than 3 had been infected. ..."In 2013 Zika popped up again, this time in Tahiti and other parts of French Polynesia. An estimated 28,000 people (about 11 percent of the population of those islands) felt sick enough with the virus to seek medical care. By 2014 it was showing up in several other South Pacific spots: New Caledonia, east of Australia; the Cook Islands; and, early this year, Easter Island, which marked the official arrival of the disease in the Americas, since that remote island is part of Chile."Zika showed up in Brazil in May."The symptoms of the disease itself are relatively mild (fever, rashes and muscle pain for a few days, and with no symptoms in 80 percent of those who contract it). However, the link between Zika and microcephaly  and possibly Guillain-Barre syndrome  make it extremely dangerous.If it spreads in the United States, as it is expected to do, the Gulf Coast regions may be particularly susceptible because of the warm tropical-like conditions there.Zika is primarily spread by mosquitoes, but now it is suspected that the disease may also be transmitted through sexual contact.A clear link has been established between the destruction of tropical ecosystems  such as the deforestation of the Brazilian rain forest  and the spread on once-rare diseases such as the Zika virus From"Forest clearance alters ecosystem dynamics and leads to new breeding habitats for disease vectors, such as mosquitoes, fleas and ticks, by reshaping existing ecosystem boundaries. Such boundaries are often sites of contact between humans and forest pathogens. There is a well-documented, positive association between the increased deforestation of an area and the emergence of zoonotic, vector-borne diseases."Other human factors, such as the increase in air travel and the effects of overcrowding in cities, also are contributing to the rapid and far-reaching spread of tropical diseases As we continue to destroy our natural environment, we can expect to see more of these types of epidemics. Some might say we deserve what we are experiencing now. As the saying goes, "You reap what you sow."
It seems like a no-brainer: Animals with bigger brains, relative to their body size, are better problem solvers. That's the consensus from University of Wyoming researchers who recently devised a test of problem-solving skills for carnivorous animals that involved freeing food from inside a metal box.

For their study, researchers from the University of Wyoming and colleagues presented their novel puzzle boxes to 140 carnivores from 39 species in North American zoos. The animals  ranging from polar bears to arctic foxes, tigers and river otters, among others  were given 30 minutes to extract the food, according to a news release. To open the box and access the food, animals had to figure out how to slide a bolt latch. Each box was baited with a favorite food. For instance, red pandas received bamboo, while snow leopards got steak.

On the whole, animals with larger brains relative to body mass were better at opening the boxes and retrieving the food than those with relatively smaller brains. Larger animals were less successful than smaller-bodied individuals.

Interestingly enough, manual dexterity did not seem to correlate with problem-solving success.

"Overall, 35 percent of animals (49 individuals from 23 species) were successful in solving the problem," Ben Dantzer, study co-author from the University of Michigan, explained in the release. "The bears were the most successful, solving the problem almost 70 percent of the time. Meerkats and mongooses were the least successful, with no individuals from their species solving the problem."

"This study offers a rare look at problem solving in carnivores, and the results provide important support for the claim that brain size reflects an animal's problem-solving abilities  and enhance our understanding of why larger brains evolved in some species," Sarah Benson-Amram, lead author and an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming, added in the university's release.

Researchers also examined whether or not living in large groups factored into problem solving  what is known as the social brain hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence evolved to enable animals to anticipate, respond to and even manipulate the actions of others in social groups, researchers say.

"If the social brain hypothesis is correct, then we would expect that species that live in larger social groups would be more intelligent. However, we did not find any support for the social brain hypothesis in this study," Kay Holekamp, co-author and professor from Michigan State University, said. "There was no indication that social group size influenced problem-solving abilities."

The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.





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Rhino poaching in South Africa has decreased for the first time since 2007, experts say. Compared to the 1,215 rhinos illegally killed in 2014, only 1,175 rhinos were lost in 2015. This slight improvement, however, was greatly offset by alarming poaching rates recorded in neighboring countries.

"For Africa as a whole, this is the worst year in decades for rhino poaching," Tom Milliken, a rhino expert from the wildlife-trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, based out of Cambridge, U.K., said in a statement. "The poaching epicenter has spread to neighboring Namibia and Zimbabwe, but is nowhere near being extinguished in South Africa: Despite some commendable efforts being made, we're still a very long way from seeing the light at the end of this very dark tunnel." (Scroll to read more...)

At least 1,312 rhinoceros were illegally killed in Africa in 2015 - overall a record high for the continent. This means that 137 rhinos were poached in Namibia and Zimbabwe alone, indicating a 200 percent increase from 2014.

While poachers generally target rhinos in South Africa, these reports suggest hunters are expanding their range and targeting rhinos in previously secure areas.

In Namibia, for instance, 80 rhinos were lost to poachers in 2015 - up from 25 in 2014 and just four in 2013. And In Zimbabwe, 50 animals were killed, which is more than double the previous year's total.

These new reports are particularly alarming because these three countries are home to roughly 95 percent of all remaining African rhinos.

"The slight decrease in rhinos poached is somewhat of a relief compared to recent years when we've seen nothing but increases, however, no poaching is acceptable," Heather Sohl, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) - U.K.'s Chief Advisor on Species, added in a news release. "In the 17 years preceding the sudden escalation in 2008 fewer than 36 rhinos used to be killed by poachers in South Africa each year, so it's still totally absurd that today there is this high level of poaching. Wildlife crime is a serious crime and needs to be treated as such. WWF will continue to work with partners across the globe to reduce the poaching, the trafficking and the demand for illegal wildlife products like rhino horn."

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A new bundle of joy just arrived at the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, in Indiana, and it's a girl! While the endangered African penguin, Echo, was born a few weeks ago at the zoo, her gender was revealed just days ago.

That's because it was a mystery. Male and female penguins look identical, so the little black-and-white one's gender was discovered by a blood test and announced on Jan. 20, Penguin Awareness Day.

The 8-week-old penguin is the offspring of two other Fort Wayne Children's Zoo penguins, Flash and Chunk--both of whom were also born and raised at the zoo.

According to an official release, Flash and Chunk have a strong bond and exclusively raised Echo for the first several weeks of her life by feeding her regurgitated fish. After that, the zookeepers began hand-feeding Echo so that she would learn to accept fish from handlers in the future.

Echo is the first African penguin born at the zoo since 2012. Also, because the African penguin, or Spheniscus demersus, has been listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as endangered since 2010, Echo will serve as an ambassador to bring awareness to the species.

The African penguin is the only breeding penguin on the continent, residing primarily in southern Africa. Their population has been in a swift decline over the past six years as a result of commercial fisheries leading to depleted fish stocks, oil spills, and changes in prey populations, according to the IUCN. And the species has declined over 60 percent in the past 30 years. There is no sign that this trend will reverse, so conservation action is urgent.

Luckily, African penguins are known to return to the same breeding grounds every year and all breeding areas in South Africa are protected within a national park or nature reserve, according to ARKive.org.

The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo participates in the Penguin Species Survival Plan, a cooperative breeding program conducted by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums working to manage the populations of these endangered species within zoos.

"The zoo supports conservation of wild penguin populations as well," Dr. Joe Smith, director of animal programs at the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, said in an official statement. "We financially support [the South-African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds], an organization in South Africa that conserves coastal birds in their native habitat."

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The discovery of an ancient rabbit ancestor, Amphilagus tomidai, is helping to reveal an important biogeographic link between Asia and Europe during the Miocene. Researchers say this species, which lived in present-day Siberia during the Miocene period, belonged to a genus that thought to exist only in Europe. This suggests the two continents were once connected.

The Miocene began 23 million years ago and ended 5.3 million years ago during which time there was a barrier-free connection between Europe and Asia. The Paratethys Sea  which spanned from the northern Alps to the Aral Sea in western Asia  had disappeared and there were no high mountains to isolate the rabbits that radiated across open landscapes, aided by a cool, dry climate.

"The discovery of this mammal on the continent of Asia indicates that there were some paleogeographic and environmental conditions that favored the expansion of this species towards the east," Chiara Angelone, co-author and researcher at the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology Miquel Crusafont, explained in a news release.

"These ancient animals help us to better understand the climatic and paleogeographic conditions of that period in time. Some discoveries add new insight into what we already know. Others, such as this one, uncover remarkable stories," Angelone added.

The tudy also revealed that Amphilagus tomidai sported several primitive features. For instance, its teeth do not grow continuously as those of modern hares and rabbits grow, and these teeth also had solid roots.

Researchers say this data may justify a a re-evaluation of the Amphilagus genus.

The study was recently published in the journal Historical Biology.

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A bizarre fish that appears to have two legs recently washed up on a beach at the Bay of Islands in New Zealand.

The curious creature - believed to be a Frogfish - sports all-black, spiny skin and two fins on either side of its body. However, rather than being close to the abdomen, the fins are turned down and stretched out, resembling feet - which researchers say likely help propel the fish along the sea floor.

After being fished out of the water, the creature was sent to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, to be examined by experts, including Collection Manager of Fishes, Andrew Stewart.

"This weird creature is likely to be a species of Frogfish, but we won't know until we have a chance to examine it closely," said the museum in a statement.

However, it would make sense if the unusual animal was in fact a Frogfish, as the species is known for their leg-like fins, which they use to crawl rather than swim. (Scroll to read more...)





There are approximately 48 different species of Frogfish that can be found throughout the world's tropical and subtropical oceans. Generally speaking, these creatures are covered in tiny spines to help camouflage themselves. They also have a remarkably powerful bite.

"Frogfishes have the fastest bite of any vertebrate. Their mouths expand at the speed approaching a .22 rifle bullet - and that's in a medium 800 times denser than air," the museum added.

The fish are also known to be cannibals and regularly eat shellfish, other ocean dwellers and even each other.

Although the newly found Frogfish died after it was taken out of the water, the museum hopes it will make for a good exhibit in years to come.

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Bajaj Auto on Wednesday said that it will unveil a new motorcycle brand V, which contains metal from Indias first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant on February 1.

New Delhi: Bajaj Auto on Wednesday said that it will unveil a new motorcycle brand V, which contains metal from Indias first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant on February 1.

The companys highly anticipated new motorcycle brand named V contains metal of the Indias first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant, Bajaj Auto Ltd said in a statement.

For decades, the INS Vikrant has been celebrated as the pride of our country and is synonymous with Indian military capabilities and power projection. We are proud that Bajaj Auto is playing a role in keeping the legacy of Indias first aircraft carrier alive, Bajaj Auto president (motorcycle business) Eric Vas said.

For the warship, the name Vikrant was taken from the Sanskrit word Vikranta meaning stepping beyond, these qualities also form the essence of the companys new brand, he added.

We are confident that the bike will carry the spirit and legacy of INS Vikrant forward and become one of the most path-breaking motorcyles, that customers will witness this year, he said.

INS Vikrant was commissioned as the first aircraft carrier of Indian Navy in 1961. After years of distinguished service, it was decommissioned in January 1997 and served as a museum till 2012.

In November 2014, the aircraft carrier was dismantled and sold as scrap metal. Bajaj purchased the Vikrant metal and processed it to be a part of its new brand.
Terrorism and how best to contain the challenge was the central theme of French President Francois Hollandes three-day visit to India as chief guest for the Republic Day parade. Prior to what is often billed as the worlds most spectacular and colorful parade, there was considerable anxiety among intelligence professionals about a possible terror attack in Delhi given that the French President is a high visibility target. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had threatened to avenge the death of its cadres who carried out the November 13 Paris attack and were neutralised by French security forces.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi revealed that soon after the Paris attack he had decided to invite Mr Hollande to the Republic Day parade as a mark of solidarity apropos the terror menace. Predictably, the joint statement issued by India and France on counter-terrorism is explicit and names the various groups that have a South Asia-Pakistan connection. The relevant section notes: Stressing that terrorism cannot be justified under any circumstance, regardless of its motivation, wherever and by whomsoever it is committed, both leaders asked for decisive actions to be taken against Lashkar-e-Tayabba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. Condemning the recent terror attacks in Pathankot and Gurdaspur in India, the two countries reiterated their call for Pakistan to bring to justice their perpetrators and the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which also caused the demise of two French citizens, and to ensure that such attacks do not recur in the future. Mr Hollande commended India for its stabilising role in South Asia, particularly in Afghanistan, and its recent initiative to launch a comprehensive dialogue with Pakistan.

But will this attempt to resume dialogue with Pakistan yield any positive outcome when it comes to terrorism? This question acquires greater relevance against the backdrop of the terror attack on the Bacha Khan University in Chardassa (January 20) and the killing of innocent students, recalling the horror that was unleashed on an Army school in Peshawar in December 2014. That the Pakistani deep state supports certain terror groups as part of its strategic depth policy is well documented. Its origin goes back to the early 1980s when the image of a mujahideen holding the Quran in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other became the visual symbol of resistance against the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. Over the years, General Zia-ul-Haq honed the policy of Islamisation of Pakistan  both state and society  with active Saudi support. The inflexible Wahhabi-Salafi strand of Sunni Islam became the dominant theological denomination and the Punjabi ethnicity enabled to become the ruling dispensation in the post 1971 truncated Pakistan.

Creating and nurturing terror groups against India (LeT and JeM among others) and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan was part of this security policy that Rawalpindi, the general headquarters of the Pakistan Army, alone controlled  much to the chagrin of the civilian leadership in Islamabad  and this arrangement was subtly endorsed by Pakistans principal benefactors. The United States, China and Saudi Arabia were more than aware of this Rawalpindi support-to-terror policy and accepted it as part of a complex quid pro quo to advance their own interests. The global discourse about jihad-driven terrorism which had reared its bloody head in the mid 1990s was shaped in such a manner that Pakistans dubious role was excluded though the mainstream Western media and intelligence agencies were more than aware of this policy.

Consequently, a meta-narrative was created about Pakistan being in the forefront of the US-led global war against terror and this charade was maintained till the fiasco of Osama bin Laden being in Abbottabad and the perfidy of the Rawalpindi GHQ was revealed in May 2011. But even the enormity of this disclosure was glossed over by the US and its allies, and the image of Pakistan as a victim of terror was kept alive. The Faustian bargain that Pakistan had entered became evident when the same terror groups turned against the Pakistan state and military and targeted General Pervez Musharraf. His attempt at trying to clear the Lal Masjid in Islamabad of the jihad supporting right-wing in 2007 marked the end of his tenure and over the next few years the terror groups became even more audacious  Mumbai 2008 is illustrative of this.

The terror footprint within Pakistan has no doubt grown, as Peshawar and Chardassa have demonstrated. But the selective policy approach of Rawalpindi cannot be ignored. This is what compelled then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton to observe that Pakistan was keeping snakes in the backyard and expecting them to only bite the neighbours. What is instructive is that notwithstanding the tragedy of Peshawar and the responsibility claimed by the local Taliban, the spin doctors in Pakistan were again seeking to pin the blame on India. The hope that Peshawar was the turning point in Pakistans internal battle against terror was belied and Chardassa happened. Students who did not want to, had been converted into martyrs.

The make-believe continues and the Economist noted of the two attacks: With more imagination than evidence, Pakistani conspiracy theorists saw India behind both acts of violence on their soil, and sagely counseled that Pakistan must bring its Frankensteins to heel. This is a prescription that even US President Barack Obama reiterated. While describing the Pathankot attack as another example of the inexcusable terrorism that India has endured for too long, he noted that Pakistan can and must take more effective action against terrorist groups operating in its territory by de-legitimising, disrupting and dismantling such networks. But will it do so? On current evidence, this appears unlikely for the deep state in Pakistan remains tenaciously committed to its own charade that the selective approach to terror is ostensibly in their national interest. For national read Rawalpindi GHQ!

The writer is director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi
Federal, state and local leaders in Pacifica on Wednesday addressed the coastal citys crumbling cliffs and yellow-tagged structures weakened during this months El Nino-fueled storms.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco, San Mateo counties), representatives from State Senator Jerry Hill and Assemblyman Kevin Mullins offices, San Mateo County Supervisor Don Horsley and Pacifica city council members and staff organized a news conference to update the public on the damage in the city, and whats being done about it.

Speier also toured the waterfront areas with Mike McHenry, one of nearly 40 people being forced to move out of his Esplanade Avenue apartment building because it is dangling off the cliff's edge.

"We need help now," Speier stressed. "We've got to get a serious fix."

Stressing that the Pacifica Pier and Highway 1 are particularly vulnerable locations, Speier is calling for federal dollars to be spent on protecting land in the oceans path.

"An El Nino is just like a Superstorm Sandy, expect it happens over a great portion of time," she said.

For his part, McHenry said he is grateful that the city plans to offer financial housing assistance to help those who have been displaced find new homes.

"Hopefully, I'll sleep on couches," he said. "If not, I'm not going to allow myself to sleep in the street."

On Monday night, the city council approved a state of emergency declaration, which frees up federal and state funds to help repair the damage left behind: A sinkhole, damaged sea wall and several homes deemed uninhabitable to live in.

Eroding cliffs along Esplanade Avenue have already led the city to declare three apartment buildings on the 300 block unsafe to life in, though some residents are digging in their heels and staying anyway.

"This is my home," Michelle Mackay said on Tuesday. "A lot of us don't have a place to go anyways. The rents are too high. We are living paycheck to paycheck. What are we going to do?"



Mackay also questioned whether her apartment building is truly in danger of toppling off the cliff.

The Pacifica Pier has sustained storm damage and is partially closed. Beach Boulevard remains closed near Santa Maria Avenue because of the failure of the seawall there, too.

A dramatic drone video taken by Duncan Sinfield and posted to YouTube shows bluffs falling into the ocean below.

T.J. Tullo lives across the street from the affected buildings and has watched his neighbors pack up and move out over the past few days.

"You always think, its not going to happen to me but its happening to plenty of people right here," he said. "It's a nice area and I hope they do everything to protect it."
A South Bay woman faces a murder charge after confessing that she drowned her adopted son in a bathtub in their house, police said.

Tara McNeill Palajac allegedly killed the 12-year-old boy on Jan. 8 in a Conner Place residence. The 51-year-old Santa Clara woman, who has not yet entered a plea, initially reported that the child's death was an accident, authorities said.

Santa Clara firefighters and police officers responded to Palajacs house, near Forest Avenue and Winchester Boulevard, after the woman reported finding her child unconscious earlier in the month.

Although he was rushed to an area hospital, the boy was pronounced dead roughly two hours after the incident, police said.

Palajac first claimed that she and the boy were at home when she discovered him floating in the bathtub water. However, she reneged on her story while being interrogated by detectives, according to the Santa Clara Police Department, which has forwarded the case to the District Attorneys office.

"It's heart wrenching," neighbor Adriane Alston said. "We're a big city but small community feel so it's really tragic when someone that miserable and that bad off will do something like that to a child."

Police say the boy's death was not announced to the public because of the sensitive nature of the crime and the fact that the victim was a juvenile.

An investigation is ongoing and Palajac, who was charged with murder on Jan. 14, is slated to appear in court Feb. 1.

NBC Bay Area's Robert Handa contributed to this report.
Practicing is always harder than preaching.

Even those who preach for a living, like Father Brendan McGuire of San Jose's Holy Spirit Catholic Church, will tell you that.

It is why, then, he is so proud of what his congregation is doing these days, or, more accurately, nights.

After the last sermon of the day is done, Father Brendan's parishioners walk his talk right through the front doors of the church, carrying fifteen cots and placing them among the pews.

The cots are for the fifteen homeless women who, for this month at least, are calling this house of worship, their home.

"When you see that person not as a stranger but as a brother and sister," Father Brendan said, "somebody who could be your brother or sister, then somehow it doesn't seem that far a stretch to open your house. Because if your brother or sister were in trouble, you'd open your house."

Father Brendan says the motivation to do more for the homeless of his community actually came after a chance meeting with a young, homeless man in Portland, Oregon.

Getty Images

He says they talked for forty minutes. The young man told Father Brendan he was nineteen-years-old and had been on the streets for four or five years. "I was, at the same time, shocked, saddened and deeply moved by the experience."

He returned to Holy Spirit and suggested they take make space in the church available for homeless people to sleep at night. His parishioners ran with the idea. More than 500 of them volunteered to help with the shelter.

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"At least for a moment we are going to try and make your life a lot better than it has been," said Mike Ferrero, a Holy Spirit parishioner. "That's our gift."

"I am so grateful and I am blessed," said Bri, one of the fifteen homeless women being allowed to spend nights in the church. Just twenty-two-years-old, Bri said she had been staying, most recently in an abandoned building in downtown San Jose.

There is however a legal limit of thirty days the church can provide temporary shelter to people, so Holy Spirit has formed a coalition with three other South Bay churches to take turns sheltering the women this winter.

Father Brendan would love to see even more come on board.

"It would change us, it would change the Valley. Silicon Valley wouldn't be the same if every house of worship chose to help."

Until then, he said, his church will continue to do what it can, giving a lucky few the chance to sleep under the stars, watched over by angels.
The wife of disgraced Fox Lake Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz, who authorities say took his own life in a carefully staged suicide following years of criminal acts, has been indicted by a grand jury.

Melodie Gliniewicz was indicted Wednesday on multiple counts of disbursing charitable funds without authority and for personal benefit and money laundering.

Investigators said they found inconsistencies in financial documents surrounding the Fox Lake Police Explorer Post managed by Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, where it appeared non-business-related monies were withdrawn and money laundering took place.

According to authorities, Gliniewiczs widow, Melodie Gliniewicz, was found to hold a fiduciary role as an adult advisor with the Fox Lake Police Explorer Post.

The wife of disgraced Fox Lake Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz, who authorities say took his own life in a carefully staged suicide following years of criminal acts, has been indicted by a grand jury. NBC 5s Natalie Martinez reports.

The investigation revealed money was withdrawn from the police explorer account over the course of several years, Undersheriff Ray Rose said in a statement. Detectives determined this money was used to finance a number of personal expenses and personal finances.

Those personal expenses included a trip to Hawaii, payments to businesses such as Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Fox Lake Theatre, and over 400 restaurant charges, officials said.

Following the indictment, a Lake County judge issued an arrest warrant for Melodie Gliniewicz, setting bond at $50,000. Authorities said Wednesday afternoon she was in the custody of the Lake County Sheriff's office.

The wife of disgraced Fox Lake Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz, who authorities say took his own life in a carefully staged suicide following years of criminal acts, has been indicted by a grand jury. NBC 5s Natalie Martinez reports.

Fox Lake, all of Lake County, and quite frankly the entire country have been through a mix of emotions throughout the Gliniewicz investigations, Sheriff Mark Curran said in a statement. It is my hope the community can continue healing and rebuilding.

Melodie Gliniewicz's attorney said she has "suffered greatly over the past few months."

"Considering Melodies cooperation with law enforcement, she is devastated by the decision to bring charges against her," a statement from Kelleher & Buckley, LLC read. "Melodie is a victim of her husbands secret actions and looks forward to her day in Court to show the world her innocence."

Last year, authorities froze several of the Gliniewicz family's bank accounts as investigators worked to untangle the scandal that led Gliniewicz to take his own life in September.

In an affidavit seeking the freeze on the familys accounts, prosecutors accused Joseph Gliniewicz of looting an Explorer Scout account of thousands of dollars, to pay for, among other things, a trip to Hawaii, hormone supplements, and fees on adult websites. And their motion carried strong suggestions, that Gliniewiczs wife was a party to the malfeasance.
A proposal to increase the reward for information in the search for three "very dangerous" inmates who escaped from an Orange County jail by $150,000 was approved Tuesday by county supervisors.

Todd Spitzer of the Orange County Board of Supervisors requested the board increase the reward by $150,000, bringing the total to $200,000. The motion passed unanimously at Tuesday's meeting.

"Money talks and the stakes couldn't be higher," Spitzer said. "Apparenlty, the $50,000 cumulatively is not getting the job done."

Jonathan Tieu, 20, Bac Duong, 43, and Hossein Nayeri, 37, were awaiting trials for unrelated violent crimes when they vanished from a dormitory they shared with about 65 other men at the Orange County Men's Central Jail.

"They could be very desperate," said Orange County Sheriff's Lt. Jeff Hallock. "We don't have any information to indicate that they are together. But time would tell you they get to a point where they become desperate, whether they need money or somebody to help facilitate their well-being on a day-to-day basis. But obviously the concern is that they are desperate.



"They are facing some very serious charges. That's why we're pleading for the public's help because we know somebody out there knows something."

The men had a nearly 16-hour head-start before authorities realized they were missing Friday. Authorities said they believe Tieu and Duong may still be in the region due to their ties to local Vietnamese-American gangs.

"We think that there's obviously ties, based on the fact that one of the individuals is a documented Vietnamese gang member," Hallock said. "We think it's a strong possibility that he may have connected with those fellow gang members in the Vietnamese community."

Around 30 warrants had been served since the escape was discovered. Those warrants were served and homes and used to search electronic devices, such as computers and phones.

The men are believed to have escaped Friday shortly after a 5 a.m. physical body count, one of two that take place each day at the jail. The disappearance wasn't discovered until about 9 p.m. Friday, during the second daily headcount, which was to have started at 8 p.m. but was delayed by an altercation possibly staged to help delay discovery of the escape, Hallock said.

Authorities were continuing to investigate whether other inmates had a hand in the escape, notably through the altercation that delayed the 8 p.m. body count.

The men cut through a steel grate, half-inch steel bars and plumbing tunnels early Friday before making their way to an unsecured part of the jail's roof and using makeshift ropes to rappel several floors to the ground.

Nayeri, of Newport Beach, was in custody on kidnapping and torture charges for the abduction of a marijuana clinic owner who Nayeri allegedly drove to the desert and burned with a blowtorch. The victim, his attackers thought he had stashed money in the desert, was also sexually mutilated, prosecutors said.

Nayeri fled the United States to Iran. Authorities do not have extradition agreements with Iran, where Nayeri has family, so investigators used a ruse to get him to the Czech Republic, which is more cooperative with the U.S. for extraditing fugitives, according to Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy. Nayeri was arrested in Prague while changing flights from Iran to Spain to visit family, Murphy said.

Tieu, of Fountain Valley, faces murder and attempted murder charges in connection with a gang hit, prosecutors said, and Bac Duong, of Santa Ana, faces an attempted murder charge and was being held without bail on an immigration hold pending a possible federal deportation hearing.
This is the first edition of the Ward Rooms Campaign Round-Up, a weekly posting dedicated to keeping voters informed about the state and countys upcoming 2016 elections. Check the Ward Room blog for continued coverage every Tuesday.



Illinois Senate Race



Republican Sen. Mark Kirk faces an uphill battle in his quest for re-election. Over the past year, he has faced a handful of scandals, from being caught calling Sen. Lindsey Graham a "bro with no ho" to attacking the Chicago Tribune for a story that was not yet published.



Kirk recently became the first Republican senator to co-sponsor the Equality Act. The act builds on past civil rights legislation, banning discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.



Discrimination on the basis of being gay is against the law in Illinois and should be against the law nationwide, the Republican senator said in a statement.



James Marter, Kirks opponent in the Republican primary, was recently endorsed by Congressman Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona. Franks is the Chairman of the House Sub-Committee on Constitution and Civil Justice.



Incumbent Mark Kirk repeatedly disregards the Constitution, Franks said.



Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth is considered the frontrunner in the Democratic primary race.



Last week Duckworth attended a rally in Rockford that attracted over 100 supporters. At the rally, Duckworth discussed her plan to help middle class and poor families.



When people say that poor people are poor because theyre lazy, theyre wrong, said Duckworth.



Duckworth also discussed fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid and the lack of cost-of-living increases within the Social Security system.



Duckworth will face former Urban League President and CEO Andrea Zopp and State Senator Napoleon Harris in the Democratic primary.



The Reverend Jesse Jackson endorsed Zopp on Sunday.



I support her unequivocally, said Jackson. She is a woman of personal integrity and impeccable credentials.



Jackson also called for additional public debates leading up to the democratic primary in March.



Electing a U.S. Senator should not be a closed-door process, said Jackson. It should be open to the voters.



State Senator Napoleon Harris recently opposed the Republican plan for the state of Illinois to take control of Chicago Public Schools.



Harris lauded Senate President John Cullertons Monday speech at the City Club of Chicago that focused on education funding reform.



Affording children a quality education has been one of my priorities since becoming a state senator, said Harris in a statement on his website.



Veterans Party candidate Chris Aguayo will participate in the South Lakeview Neighborhood Candidate Forum at the Athenaeum Theater on Feb. 9.



Primary elections for the race will be held March 15 with a general election being held Nov. 8.



Cook County States Attorney Race



Anita Alvarez, who was first elected to the seat of Cook County State's Attorney in 2008, is running for re-election amid countless calls for her resignation in the wake of the Laquan McDonald dashcam video release. This year's election will be Alvarez's first contested run in the Democratic primary in eight years.



Alvarez faces protege and former Assistant State's Attorney Kim Foxx as well as former federal and state prosecutor Donna More in the March 15 election.



Foxx secured another high-profile endorsement after courting the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Council 31. AFSCME Council 31 is the largest county employee, representing roughly 21,000 workers.



Foxx has already racked up some impressive endorsements including Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, SEIU Local 73 and a handful of aldermen.



More recently spent over $50,000 on campaign ads. More has donated over $250,000 to her own campaign.



Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court



Clerk Dorothy Brown, who has served as county clerk for 15 years, lost the endorsement of the Cook County Democratic Party amid reports of a federal investigation.



Brown will host a Super Bowl party at the Millionaires Club on Feb. 7.



The incumbent Brown faces opposition from Ald. Michelle Harris and attorney Jacob Meister in the March 15 election.



Michelle Harris received the endorsement of the Cook County Democratic Party. She is scheduled for Beat meetings at the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy headquarters on Jan. 26-28. She is also scheduled to meet with constituents on Feb. 1.



Jacob Meister was endorsed by New Trier democrats Sunday.



Meister spoke at the 47th Ward forum Monday about social justice and transparency in the Court Clerks office.



Meister will attend the Judges & Lawyers for Jacob Meister fundraiser on Feb. 8. The event will take place at Chicago law firm Flamm, Teibloom & Stanko, Ltd. Tickets for the event are available for $100.



8th Congressional District



In a contentious race for Rep. Duckworth's soon-to-be-vacated seat in the northwest and west suburbs, former Deputy State Treasurer Raja Krishnamoorthi has emerged as the Democratic frontrunner.



Krishnamoorthi was endorsed by the states largest public interest group, Citizen Action/Illinois, Monday.



The former Deputy State Treasurer has also recently received endorsements from Senator Dick Durbin, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicaid.



Krishnamoorthi will face off against State Senator Michael Noland and Villa Park Mayor Deb Bullwinkel in the Democratic primary.



Michael Noland received an endorsement from former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn last week. Noland has also received endorsements from AFSCME Council 31 and the Associated Fire Fighters of Illinois.



The Republican ticket boasts DuPage County Commissioner and former mayor of Elmhurst Pete DiCianni.



As an independent in Illinois, high school teacher Bill Fraser will appear on the general ballot in November.



Primary elections for the race will be held March 15 with a general election being held Nov. 8.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has named a group of medical and field experts to a committee that will determine long-term solutions to fix Flint's water system and help residents who have been exposed to lead.

Speaking at a news conference Wednesday, the governor says the 17-member committee will make recommendations regarding the health of people exposed to lead, study Flint's water infrastructure and determine potential upgrades, and establish ways to improve communication between local and state government.

"This is the start of a longer process," Synder said.

The committee includes Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, who has extensively studied the issue in Flint and elsewhere, and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is credited with bringing the problem to the public's attention after state agencies initially dismissed her concerns.

Members will serve three-year terms expiring Dec. 31, 2018.

Weaver said at the news conference Wednesday she has hired the Virginia Tech professor whose extensive testing helped bring the city's lead-tainted water problems to light.

Marc Edwards will oversee all water testing done by the state and federal governments. She added he will be "fully independent," report to her and get paid through private donations.

Weaver has requested that $3 million of the budget approved by the state House last week goes to help residents pay their bills.

Some people have been paying their bills, and we thank them for that because we need the money, Weaver said. "But residents should not have to pay for water that they can't and haven't used."

Snyder also said he has asked the federal government to expand medicaid to anyone under the age of 21.

Meanwhile, environmental and civil rights groups are asking a federal judge to order the prompt replacement of all lead pipes in Flint's water system to ensure residents of the city have a safe drinking supply.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday morning seeks an order forcing city and state officials to remedy alleged violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, including a failure to properly treat the water for corrosion, test it for lead, notify residents of results and accurately report if the correct sample sites are being selected.

Flint residents are currently unable to drink unfiltered tap water due to the contamination, and tests have shown high lead levels in some children's blood. Snyder said Wednesday that he could not give a date for when the city's residents would be able to cease their dependence on bottled water.

"The only way to permanently and completely fix the problem of lead in drinking water is to conduct the full replacement of the lead-containing pipes and solder in a water system," said Sarah Tallman, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council.

The group filed the complaint on behalf of citizens along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Concerned Pastors for Social Action and Melissa Mays, a Flint resident.

Gov. Snyder's administration has estimated it could cost up to $55 million to repair what officials have estimated are 15,000 damaged lead service lines leading from water mains to homes and other buildings. The complaint says the pipes should be replaced at no cost to customers.

The suit names as defendants the city of Flint, state Treasurer Nick Khouri  who continues to have budget powers as the city transitions away from state management  state-appointed officials on the Flint's Receivership Transition Advisory Board and city administrator Natasha Henderson, who was hired by one of Flint's former emergency managers. They could not immediately be reached for comment.
A narrow country road outside Jerusalem has turned into a new battleground between Israel and the European Union, deepening a dispute between the allies over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.

The EU is financing the paving of the dirt road by Palestinians as part of a broader effort to help them develop the local economy on the way to eventual independence. Israel, however, says the roadwork is illegal because it was done without Israeli permits and has ordered it to stop.

The dispute goes far beyond the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) road, which Palestinians say is to help farmers in the area reach their land. At issue is the future of portions of the West Bank known as "Area C," the 60 percent of the territory that remained under full Israeli control as part of interim peace accords two decades ago. Its ultimate fate has been a major contention point in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as the heartland of a future independent state.

Israel seeks to keep large chunks of the area, which is home to 300,000 of the West Bank's 2.4 million Palestinians as well as the 370,000 Israeli settlers in the territory. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the hard-line "Jewish Home" party, has even said the area should be annexed.

According to interim peace accords, any construction in Area C needs permission from Israel. Israel rarely grants approval for Palestinian building.

The international community has urged Israel to freeze settlement activity and lift restrictions on Palestinian development in Area C. The Palestinians, backed by organizations like the World Bank and the EU, say they cannot establish a viable state without developing this land.

In the maze of lines created by the Oslo accords in the West Bank, Area C divides up the territory under Palestinian control into isolated enclaves, making expansion of Palestinian communities difficult. Under the accords, that division was supposed to be temporary, with much of Area C to be transferred to Palestinian control, but with the breakdown of the peace process that never happened.

Last week, the EU Foreign Affairs Council said a change of policy by Israel in Palestinian areas, and particularly Area C, "will significantly increase economic opportunities, empower Palestinian institutions and enhance stability and security for both Israelis and Palestinians."

The EU runs dozens of projects in Area C. The Israeli government views these efforts with great suspicion and often demolishes projects it says are illegal.

Between January and May 2015, for instance, 41 EU-funded structures that cost some 236,000 euros ($255,000) to build were torn down by Israel, the EU's commissioner for aid and crisis manager, Christos Stylianides, recently told the European Parliament.

Those are the most recent figures available from the EU. But the dispute seems to be worsening. In a meeting with foreign journalists earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the EU-funded structures "illegal."

"They're building without authorization against the accepted rules and there's a clear attempt to create political realities there," Netanyahu said.

The spat comes against the backdrop of a larger dispute over Israeli settlement construction.

The Palestinians say Israel is expanding settlements in order to create its own political reality  entrenching its control over the West Bank. The international community considers the settlements illegal or illegitimate, saying they undermine the goal of establishing a Palestinian state.

Last year, the EU passed a bill requiring Israeli settlement products to have special labels if they are sold in Europe. Earlier this month, it said all agreements with Israel must "unequivocally and explicitly" show that they cannot apply to occupied territories, further underscoring its opposition to the settlements.

The new EU-funded road is meant to help Palestinian farmers gain better access to their land, Palestinians say. The road runs near the Palestinian town of Tukou, about 8 miles southeast of Jerusalem.

The Palestinians say that since the road already existed, the project is not considered new construction and there was no need to ask Israel for a building permit, said an official from the Union of Agricultural Works Committee, the Palestinian nonprofit that has been carrying out the work. He spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the issue with the media.

After work began last summer, Regavim, an Israeli advocacy group with ties to the Jewish settler movement, filed a challenge to the Supreme Court and Cogat, the Israeli military body responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Ari Briggs, a Regavim official, said his group objects to the construction on security grounds and fears that the Palestinians will expand their presence into settler areas. He accused the EU of "defying" Israeli law and establishing facts on the ground. "This is something that's illegal," he said.

In December, Cogat ordered construction to stop.

The Palestinian union official said 90 percent of the road was completed before the work was halted. He said the union is complying with the order, but is planning a legal challenge.

Ralph Tarraf, the EU representative to the Palestinian territories, said the 28-country bloc will carry on its mission in Area C.

"The EU provides humanitarian assistance to communities in need in Area C in accordance with the humanitarian imperative. And second, the EU also works with the Palestinian Authority to develop Area C and support the Palestinian presence there," he said last week at a ceremony in the in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Tarraf declined an interview request.

With the battle showing no signs of abating, Netanyahu suggested that Israel and the EU "reset" their relationship on the issue.

He told reporters that he recently met with the EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, in Paris, and told her the sides need to get past their differences.

"I hope we can do this on better terms," he said he told her. "We have to figure out a way to resolve this and set things on the right course."
Waterbury Police have obtained an arrest warrant for a suspect in a fatal shooting on Willow Street on Sarurday night.

Danny Gonzalez, 40, of Waterbury, was found dead in a vehicle. He had been shot several times in the head.

Waterbury Police have obtained an arrest warrant charging Luis Colon Ortega, 24, with murder and conspiracy at murder for the shooting.

Police said it appeared that Ortega was in the back seat and shot Gonzalez, who was driving north on Willow Street at the time. After the shooting, Gonzalez 's car hit two parked cars and the shooter fled, police said.

Ortega and Gonzalez knew one another and the shooting stemmed from a dispute earlier in the night between them, police said.

Police said it appears that Ortega fled the state and possibly headed to Puerto Rico. Ortega had served in prison in Puerto Rico for weapons charges and was released in November 2011.He had recently moved to Connecticut from Puerto Rico.

Police are working with the U.S. Marshals to track Ortega.

Police also expect to file charges against another man believed to be an accomplice.

Anyone with information about the murder or Ortegas whereabouts is asked to call Crimestoppers at 203-755-1234.

The shooting happened near a Catholic church and the road was blocked off on Sunday morning and parishioners had to walk around the shooting scene.
A 23-year-old teacher in Hartford is on paid leave since September after facing charges out of state for being arrested in Cape Cod.

Travis Marks was arrested by the Barnstable, Massachusetts Police Department on Sept. 6, 2015. The Hartford Public School District placed him on paid administrative leave from his teach position at Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School on Sept. 14, 2015.

According to a criminal complaint from Barnstable's District Court, obtained by the Troubleshooters, marks is now charged with assault and battery, strangulation or suffocation and indecent assault.

"If you have those charges, you're an angry person and you shouldn't work with kids," Adrian Caban, a father of five in the district, said.

Another parent of the district, Tania Barton, also said: "You're joking? A teacher? Yeah, that's not good, not good at all. I hope he's not at work still, he was fired, right?"

Marks is still earning his $48,000 salary while his case goes through the court system.

Over the phone, Marks told NBC Connecticut that he had no comment. A district spokesperson said they don't comment on personnel matters.

"I think everyone should've been notified," Caban said. "Given a heads up."

The Troubleshooters reached out to Mark's attorney today but have not heard back.

Marks is slated for a pre-trial hearing in Barnstable district court for Feb. 1.
Where you're going on Metro-North trains you don't need roads, but you also won't need hoverboards now that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has banned the newly popular devices that bear the same name as the hovering skateboards in the iconic "Back to the Future" trilogy.

MTA announced Wednesday it is now prohibiting travelers on Metro-North Railroad, New York City Subway, New York City Buses, Long Island Rail Road, Staten Island Railway or Access-A-Ride from bringing hoverboards on trains or buses or to the stations.

The transportation authority is promoting the hoverboard ban in the "Hoverboards Not Allowed" advertising campaign featuring "bubble people."

The safety of our customers and employees is always our top concern, MTA Chief Safety Officer David Mayer said in a written statement. For obvious reasons, it is not safe to use hoverboards, skateboards or other personal wheeled vehicles on station platforms. Were equally concerned about the safety risk of bringing devices that pose fire hazards into the confined spaces inside trains and buses.

The MTA's safety rules already prohibit using personal wheeled vehicles like skateboards, skates or scooters in train stations and bringing hazardous or flammable material into its public transportation network, according to a press release from the transit authority, which notes the lithium-ion batteries that power hoverboards "pose the risk of fire."

The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration regulates hoverboards and recently issued an alert that under certain conditions, lithium batteries can pose a heat, fire, and explosion risk," according to the MTA. The authority discovered that 80 percent of hoverboards in a study didn't have "proper certification of battery testing."

MTA police will enforce the hoverboard ban on Metro-North, as well as the LIRR and Staten Island Railway. New York City police will also be enforcing the hoverboard prohibition on New York City's subways and buses.

Amtrak, American regional railroads, including Chicago's Metra and Los Angeles' Metrolink and most airlines in the United States have also banned hoverboards, according to the MTA.




Delta Airlines has joined two other major U.S. airlines in offering refunds to passengers worried about the Zika virus outbreak in many tropical countries.

Customers with current reservations through Delta, who are concerned about traveling to destinations reported by the CDC to be affected by the Zika virus, "may qualify for a change to alternate destinations, travel dates or a refund."

The Atlanta-based airline said travelers can make fee-waived changes to future reservations. The deadline to make any changes or cancellations is Feb. 29.

United Airlines announced earlier this week that customers booked to fly to areas affected by the virus will be allowed to reschedule or get refunds. American Airlines said it will give refunds to pregnant women who were planning to travel to parts of Central America if they can provide a doctor's note.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned pregnant women to take precautions against mosquito bites when traveling to areas in Latin America and the Caribbean where there have been Zika outbreaks. The CDC said the mosquito-borne illness could be linked to a birth defect of the brain.

The United Airlines offer began Tuesday and includes any country covered by a CDC travel notice, an airline spokesman said. American Airlines began refunds Monday for pregnant passengers holding tickets to El Salvador, Honduras, Panama or Guatemala, according to a spokesman.

A spokesman for Delta Air Lines said the carrier was monitoring the situation but not yet offering waivers. JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines were not immediately able to say whether they were offering refunds. Southwest Airlines said it was sticking to its normal policy, which lets customers who cancel ahead of time reuse the value of their tickets. All of those airlines fly to at least some affected locations.

On Tuesday, the CDC expanded its travel alert for pregnant women to add the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic to the list of areas with Zika outbreaks. The CDC has already recommended that pregnant women consider postponing trips to 22 other destinations.
Esmerelda Mendez was grieving after her sister, who suffered from chronic pain, bought unlicensed pharmaceutical medication as an affordable alternative and died within hours of taking the drugs.

The story was familiar to LA County Health professionals who were warning the public Tuesday that the cheap alternative of buying illegal prescription medicine was a dangerous gamble.

"You've heard of road paint? There's also rat poison in this too," Jim Pietsch of the LA Regional CrimeStoppers said as he discussed the counterfeit medication  medication available with no oversight, or anyone looking into the ingredients.

According to CrimeStoppers, the medication is often purchased online with a prescription.

Public service announcements have been going out on TV and social media, warning that "counterfeit pharmaceutical medication kills" and the "fake drugs are often made with toxic chemicals and are stored in filthy conditions."

Health officials behind the announcements hope to stop others from enduring what Mendez has with the death of her sister.

Mendez said her 40-year-old sister didn't have insurance when she started to have a pain in her leg three years ago. She said a man her sister thought was a licensed professional injected her with two medications.

She was dead within hours, and Mendez said there was nothing anyone could do for her.

Now LA County Sheriff's Deputies are saying the trend of counterfeit pharmaceuticals is growing in Los Angeles County.

Nonprofit Partnership for Safe Medicines said the counterfeit pills look like their real counterparts in packaging and appearance, but are still not safe.

The problem is too often it's the cheaper alternative but LA County Health professionals said that's not entirely true, and they offer assistance to anyone who reaches out to a county public health office.

"Money is driving this whole thing," LA County Sheriff Lim McDonnell said. "If somebody is looking for a product and someone else can imitate what they're doing, they're going to try to do it."

The counterfeit pill business is a billion dollar industry, with many fake medications coming from China, Canada and South America, according to nonprofit Partnership for Safe Medicines.

"The purity and potency of these drugs vary and often are not what is represented on the labels. They are smuggled into our country and are not certified by the FDA. The buyers never truly know what they are paying for," Sgt. Steve Opferman said in a statement after $3 million worth of confiscated pharmaceuticals were destroyed in 2015 raids.

For more information, call CrimeStoppers at 1(800) 222-8477 or visit Pharmaceutical Security Institute's website.
More than 60 people packed a courtroom Wednesday for a hearing that will determine whether there is enough evidence to order a former Los Angeles police officer to stand trial for the shooting death of a man after a fistfight in a Pomona bar last year.

Henry Solis, 28, is accused of fleeing to Mexico after the March 13 killing of Salome Rodriguez Jr., 23.

"It's important for us to be here so that they know he has family," Lidia Rodriguez, mother of the victim, said. "He has a mom and a dad to be at his side even if he is not here."

Police said Solis and Rodriguez got into a fight in a bar, and the confrontation spilled into the street, ending in gunfire. Solis is charged with one count each of murder and assault with a firearm, along with an allegation that he personally discharged a handgun.

The courtroom was filled to capacity at Wednesday's hearing and included the victim's parents. Witnesses included a nightclub worker who was a friend of Rodriguez.

The medical examiner, Ogbonna Chinwah, who performed the autopsy on Rodriguez testified Wednesday.

When asked by the defense if Rodriguez's body showed evidence that he had been in a fist fight, he said no.

Two women, who were to remain unidentified per court request, testified that they had been with Rodriguez the night he was killed.

They recalled watching him leave the nightclub with a friend, and did not know until several hours later that he had died.

Rodriguez's parents, who called their son "Junior," said it was an incredibly hard day in court.

"I don't know why but I don't hate this man if he killed Junior," Lidia, the victim's mother, said through tears. "That's why I ask Junior and God: 'Could I forgive this person in time?'"

Solis was off-duty and a probationary officer in the LAPD's Devonshire Division in the San Fernando Valley at the time of the crime. He was fired by the department soon after becoming the subject of an extensive manhunt.

His father, Victor, drove Solis out of state and later told federal authorities that he had simply dropped his son off at a Texas bus stop. The pair, however, were caught on surveillance video walking across the Mexico border.

Solis was arrested May 26 by Mexican authorities in the border city of Juarez and deported to the United States. He had been staying with relatives in the Juarez area before his arrest, FBI officials said. Special Agent Scott Garriola said Solis was "moved from one house to another" to help him avoid capture.

Victor Solis, 53, was convicted by a federal jury in El Paso of lying to the FBI about helping his son escape. He was sentenced to three years probation and a $1,000 fine.

The trial was set to continue Thursday, and as many as 15 witnesses were expected to be called.

Lolita Lopez contributed to this article.
County health officials Tuesday urged travelers to Latin America, the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, especially pregnant women, to take precautions to protect themselves from contracting a mosquito-borne virus that can cause birth defects.

The Zika virus outbreak is ongoing in 21 countries, including Mexico and Puerto Rico. No transmission of the disease has been reported in the United States. However, there has been one confirmed case of the virus in Los Angeles County -- in an adolescent girl who traveled to El Salvador in late November.

Health officials said she has recovered. The species of mosquito that can transmit Zika is present in the San Gabriel Valley and the eastern part of the county.

"At this time, local transmission is unlikely," according to a Los Angeles County Department of Public Health statement. "It would require an Aedes mosquito biting a Zika infected person and then biting others."

Local health officials said they are continuing "surveillance to identify any potentially infected travelers returning to the county."

The county's top health official advised travelers to use bug spray approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants or clothing specially treated to avoid mosquito bites.

"Pregnant women should avoid travel to the areas where the outbreak is ongoing, if possible," said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, the county's interim health officer.

The disease has been linked to miscarriages and microcephaly -- which can cause serious developmental delays and babies born with abnormally small heads -- though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website notes that additional studies of such reports, initially out of Brazil, are needed. As of Jan. 22, Zika-affected countries included Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Saint Martin, Suriname, Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

"Because the Aedes species mosquitoes that spread Zika virus are found throughout the world, including the U.S., it is anticipated that outbreaks will spread to new countries," the DPH statement says.

For those who are not pregnant, about one in five will get sick, according to the CDC. Symptoms, including fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis, typically begin two to seven days after being bitten. Some people experience no symptoms. People can reduce the spread of the Aedes mosquito -- and the risk of other mosquito-borne diseases such as chikungunya and dengue -- by eliminating standing water around their homes where mosquitos may breed.

Updates of affected countries and traveler health notices are posted on the CDC website.
A Connecticut man was charged with a $7,700 bill for the weeks he spent in a rehabilitation center unknowingly under observation, a patient status that is not covered by Medicare.



Well Im glad Im still around, said the victim, Angelo Verdini, a North Haven resident who will turn 90 in March.



After several appeals, he says he fears he will have to fight Medicare until his death.

The trouble is I wasnt aware that Medicare was not going to be paying for my stay at the rehab which was going to be a little more than a $400 fee per day, said Verdini.



At the end of his stay, he was stuck with a $7,700 bill for the weeks he spent in a rehabilitation center, after a car accident left him with a neck fracture.



After the accident, Angelo was rushed to an emergency room that was part of St. Raphaels Hospital in New Haven, where he was subjected to a slew of tests. He spent five days in the hospital room where he felt like an admitted patient.



I couldnt tell the difference and I dont know if anyone else who has experienced it could tell the difference, said Verdini.



But there was a huge difference. He later discovered that he was under observation and not admitted. As a result, Medicare did not cover post hospital care.



Hospitals are under a great deal of pressure to consider patients on observation status, said Judith Stein, executive director for the Center for Medicare Advocacy, who has been helping Angelo with his appeals.



For the patient, the most problematic is if he needed to go to a skilled nursing facility [nursing homes] Medicare wont pay unless the patient received three-day inpatient hospital care, said Stein.

LISTEN: Pei-Sze Cheng on WNYC: How Your Patient Status Could Affect Your Hospital Bill



Observation stays do not count towards that three-day minimum. It is a costly distinction and observation stays are on the rise.



According to the most recent healthcare spending data, the number of Medicare outpatient observation visits increased approximately 96 percent since 2006. At the same time, other data shows that while outpatient services steadily increased, inpatient services were on a steady decline for the same period.



It is an incredible burden on us to make sure we get the patient status correctly, said Dr. Ohm Deshpande the Director of Care Management at Yale New Haven hospital.



Yale New Haven hospital now owns St. Raphaels. They cant talk about Angelos case specifically, but they say they are just following the strict guidelines set by Medicare.



It really has to do with what Medicare will pay for after the care, said Deshpande. I think that the quality of care is exactly the same. We are providing whatever the patient needs medically.



The Center for Medicare Advocacy is suing the federal government to give Medicare patients the right to appeal their decisions; something Angelo believes could have helped him tremendously. Instead, he must pay for his hefty medical bills on his own with his fixed income.



Well Im disenchanted with Medicare and the medical people and Im going to stay as long as I can to pursue it, said Verdini. But I dont know what else to do now except some help that you people might help other people to be aware of.



Something else that could help patients is the Notice Act, which takes effect this August, 2016. The act requires hospitals to tell patients in writing when they are under observation. Until then, patients must make sure to check their own status while in the hospital.


As comedian Bill Cosby prepares to fight criminal sex assault charges made by a former Temple University employee in court next week, Cosby's lawyers went to federal court to try to keep Andrea Constand's decade-old case file out of the hands of other Cosby accusers.

NBC10 Investigators Harry Hairston spoke with Judge Anita B. Brody in her chambers just prior to Tuesdays status hearing. Brody declined NBC10s request to sit in on the hearing held in her chambers but did supply a recording of the proceedings.

The fight is over Constand's legal files that could contain interviews with other women who accused Cosby of sexual assault. Currently Cosby only faces criminal charges based on Constands allegations in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania that stem from a 2004 incident.

NBC Owned Television Stations generally do not identify victims of alleged sexual assaults unless they agree to have their names published, as Constand has done.

Washington, D.C.-based attorney Joe Cammarata, who represents seven Cosby accusers in the Massachusetts defamation case, subpoenaed Constand's attorney Delores Troiani for the file in December.

"What we are after is the documents that were gathered by Ms. Troiani's discovery," said Cammarata.

Cosby's attorney filed a motion earlier this month to quash the subpoena.

In court Tuesday, Brody questioned the relevance between Constand's sexual assault case file to the defamation civil law suit.

"Mr. Cammarata what do you expect to find in the Troiani case file?"

"I expect to find highly relevant information about Mr. Cosby and his dealings with several of the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts litigation," said Cammarata.

Cammarata says he believes the case files have information involving at least four of Cosby's accusers.

Cosby's legal team argues Constand's case file is not relevant to the defamation claims and suggest Cammarata depose the other accusers for their testimony.

Troiani told Hairston Wednesday she does not object to the subpoena and will do whatever the court orders. Judge Brody could make her ruling late next month after hearing more arguments by both sides.
Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ruffled feathers when defending his return to the campaign trail Monday amid flooding on the Jersey Shore, saying, "You want me to go down there with a mop?"

The governor made the comment during a campaign event in New Hampshire. Now, a GoFundMe campaign has been launched to send Christie an abundance of mops.

A page, entitled "Mops for Christie," has raised $255 toward its goal of $1,000. Created by Kiyle Osgood, the purpose of the fundraiser is to "join together by raising funds to Mop up the mess we have in Trenton. Funds will be used to send as many mops as possible to the Governer (sic) of New Jersey."

Christie left New Hampshire on Friday and returned to the Garden State as a massive blizzard dumped heavy snow on the East Coast, causing flooding along the shoreline that some said rivaled Superstorm Sandy. The blizzard flooded streets and homes in several southern Jersey Shore communities and left thousands without power.

The governor was back on the campaign trail by Monday, though he did return Tuesday to call for the state to take over administration of financially beleaguered Atlantic City.

During a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Monday, Christie took a question from a woman in the audience.

"Why are you here in New Hampshire campaigning instead of there, helping to survey the damages done by the coastal flooding from the storm?" she asked.

"Because its already done," Christie replied. "Its already done. Tell me why you think it isnt."

The woman told Christie her friends and family had sent her videos and pictures of flooding "all over the state."

"All over the state?" Christie replied. "Really? Theres been one county thats flooded in the state. That was Cape May County. So I dont know where from all over the state, since we have 21 counties, where thats happened. Second, I dont know what you expect me to do. You want me to go down there with a mop?"

The comment generated backlash and received criticism from North Wildwood Mayor Patrick Rosenello, who said his town had been inundated.

During the same town hall meeting, Christie referred to Rosenello as "crazy mayor." The governor later apologized, saying he got carried away. Rosenello accepted the apology.

During a news conference in Trenton, New Jersey on Tuesday, Christie clarified his comments during the town hall meeting.

But what I was objecting to both on Sunday and Monday and I object to today is any, any type of characterization of what happened in Jonas here to be anywhere near what happened in Sandy. I mean its not even close. Its not even in the same ballpark  you know what Ive said to the folks down there all along is we did our jobs and were going to continue to do our jobs.


Police have made a second arrest in the shooting and killing of a man in Philadelphia back on Thanksgiving.

Keanan Glenn, 21, is charged with murder, robbery and other related offenses in connection to the shooting death of 21-year-old Ryan Kelly.

The first suspect in Kelly's death, 18-year-old David Ramos, Jr., was arrested back on January 16 on the 4900 block of Frankford Avenue. On January 17, police obtained an arrest warrant for Glenn. Glenn was then arrested on January 22 in New Castle, Delaware. On Tuesday he was transported to Philadelphia from the Howard Young Correctional Facility in Wilmington.

On Nov. 26 shortly after 5 a.m. police responded to a radio call reporting a person with a gun on the 3500 block of Almond Street in Philadelphia. When they arrived they found Kelly on the ground suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest. He was taken to Temple University Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 5:31 a.m.

Family Photo

"We don't know if this was an attempted robbery or not," said Philadelphia Police lieutenant John Stanford. "But at this point it seems that he was approached and shot by these males."

Kelly lived with his parents a block away from where he was found dead.

"I was in shock," said Austin Fleury, Kelly's friend and neighbor. "I really was. Especially him you know?"

Police later released surveillance photos of the men they believed were responsible for Kellys death as well as several other gunpoint robberies. The photos show the men, later identified by police as Ramos, Jr. and Glenn, using a stolen debit card inside a TD Bank Thanksgiving morning, according to investigators.
A 5-year-old girl was killed Monday after she was hit by a car while sledding, Maryland authorities said.

The girl had been sledding down a driveway in Sykesville Sunday morning when her sled went onto Heritage Lane, where she was hit by a Kia Sorento driven by a 49-year-old woman Sunday, the Carroll County Sheriff's Office said.

The child was rushed to Carroll Hospital Center, but she died of her injuries.

No charges have been filed against the driver at this time, authorities said. Neither speed nor alcohol appear to have been factors in the accident, they said.

Once the investigation is complete, the case will be presented to the Carroll County State's Attorney's Office for final determination.

The sheriff's office is not releasing further details, including the identities of the child or driver.
Delaware State Police say a former lawmaker has died after a crash near Bridgeville.

Police announced in a news release that 84-year-old Ben Ewing was in the westbound lane of Federalsburg Road on Tuesday evening when he was hit by a Mazda CX5. Police say Ewing, a former state representative and state police deputy superintendent, was thrown onto the shoulder of the road and the Mazda stopped nearby.

Police say Ewing died at the scene. The driver of the Mazda was not injured.

Police are investigating, but say alcohol and speed did not contribute to the crash.

Ewing retired in 2008 after serving 21 years in the House. Stepson Matthew Esham tells The News Journal that Ewing was hit while checking his mailbox, which had been hit by snowplows.

Gov. Jack Markell commented on Ewing's passing:

"Its hard to think about Bridgeville without thinking about the impact Ben Ewing had on that community for decades...Ben and his family will be in my thoughts and prayers tonight and in the tough days to come."

Delaware State Police encouraged anyone with information related to the incident to call Master Corporal K. Argo at 302-703-3264, Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-TIP-3333 or www.delaware.crimestoppersweb.com, or text an anonymous tip to 274637 (CRIMES) using the keyword "DSP."
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors backed efforts to work with schools and the hotel industry to report human trafficking across the region.

During their Tuesday meeting, the supervisors discussed three new initiatives to fight the illicit industry, which is San Diegos second largest underground economy after drug trafficking. A recent study by the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University showed human trafficking rakes in an estimated $810 million a year.

The proposed initiatives include educating motel and hotel staff on sex trafficking and working with school employees and students on what signs to look for in identifying the crime. The District Attorneys office is also helping to launch a new public awareness campaign called "The Ugly Truth."

Who can become a victim? Really anybody, and sadly San Diego is on the top 13 cities for child prostitution, said San Diego Chief Deputy District Attorney Summer Stephan, who is leading the local human trafficking task force.

Stephan visited Hoover High School Tuesday to discuss the problem in an interview that will broadcast to the entire student body Wednesday.

Authorities say an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 sex trafficking victims live in the San Diego region, and most of them are young girls around 13 years old. Recruitment is happening at almost every school in the county, so the task force wants to make educating students and teachers a top priority.

Initially it's offered as a boyfriend or some glamor operation, a movie, or becoming a model, but then what it turns into is a lifetime of sexual exploitation, said Stephan.

At the state level, California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) announced human trafficking reforms that would essentially treat the buying and selling of sex separately. That means there would be harsher punishment for those buying it and no punishment for trafficked victims who are minors.

It's long-term, said Supervisor Dianne Jacob. It's not an easy issue to talk about; it's not an easy issue to tackle but we must.


Community groups in San Diego County are investigating possible connections with a Louisiana man now in custody on allegations of child molestation made decades ago.

U.S. Marshals arrested Frank Selas, 76, Monday at his home on Casa Verde Court in Bonita. Selas was a fugitive, officials said, wanted in connection with accusations made in Louisiana three decades ago.

The former PTA president and Cub Scout leader is contesting he is the man wanted in Louisiana on a decades-outstanding warrant for sexually abusing children during a free camping retreat. Selas pleaded not guilty to a fugitive charge Wednesday in court and a judge set bail at $10 million.

"This is a shock to everybody, that these allegations have even been made," said Selas' defense attorney Marc Carlos. "It's from 1979, some 35 years ago, so its a shock to them."

At the identity hearing, officials will take Selas' fingerprints to determine whether he is the same man named in the warrant.

"The investigation of child abuse was a lot different in 1979 than it is now," said Marc Carlos, Selas' defense attorney. "There's a lot more suggestibility in children's interviews. Police departments and investigating agencies have changed the way they deal with sex cases and children since 1979."

He will appear next in court on Feb. 11.

Investigators say Selas spent the last three decades on the run, living in San Diego and volunteering with community organizations including the Cub Scouts and the American Red Cross.

The leader of Pack 8-88 in Bonita told NBC 7 he was very surprised by what he saw on the news. Selas had helped set up the chapter in 2013 and then retired right after, the leader said.

The Boys Scouts of America sent an email to NBC 7 stating that Selas had been removed from the scouting program for non-compliance with our youth protection policies and procedures. The BSA also said the recent allegations appear to be unrelated to scouting.

According to an online blog, Selas was involved in parent teacher groups in the Bonita area, he was a swim and CPR instructor for the American Red Cross and also organized camp style programs for children.

Selas is a former member of the Bonita Optimist Club, according to president Tim Jeffries.

He hasnt been very active in the club for perhaps a decade and is now no longer involved with the club, Jeffries said.

Even so, members are upset about the allegations.

"I was certainly shocked, Jeffries said. Especially since serving the youth community is our primary mission. It's really disturbing."

The Chula Vista Elementary School District informed NBC 7 that there does not appear to be a direct connection between their schools and Selas.

The individual's access to area youth raises a number of 'red flags.' It is very much a concern to us," according to the districts statement.

In the late 1970s, Selas hosted the "Mr. Wonder" show on KNOE-TV in north Louisiana. In 1979, the sheriff's office received complaints from parents who accused Selas of abusing their children during a camping trip near Valentine Lake at Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana.

The three-day retreat was promoted by Selas through Ouachita Parish, associated with his TV personality. He promoted the trips for children ages 5-11, according to a flier provided by the sheriff's office.

Louisiana law enforcement officials obtained a warrant for Selas' arrest in relation to two counts of obscene behavior with a juvenile. When officials went to his home, his wife told them her husband had fled in the family car. In the coming days, officials would find Selas' car in Dallas. Selas, then 39, allegedly fled the country and flew from Dallas to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before investigators could arrest him.

When Salas returned to the U.S., investigators say he changed his last name and Social Security number.

NBC 7 Investigates is looking into connections between Selas and community groups in our region. If you have information, please contact our hotline at (619) 578-0393 or email NBC7Investigates@nbcuni.com.
A former Louisiana television personality known as "Mr. Wonder" was arrested in San Diego County on charges he sexually abused young children during a free camping trip nearly four decades ago.

Frank John Selas III, known by his television name "Mr. Wonder," is accused of criminal sexual conduct with juveniles, said Sheriff William Earl Hilton of Rapides Parish, Louisiana. For the last 30 years, he has been living in the San Diego area under another last name, officials revealed Tuesday.

In a statement, the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana said 76-year-old Selas remained a fugitive for 37 years before his arrest Monday at his home in Bonita, California, on two counts of obscene behavior with a juvenile.

As I have stated many times before, there are cases you never forget, some that always are in the back of your mind that you hope one day to solve. And today, this person has been brought to justice, said Sheriff Hilton in a statement.

It was not immediately clear if Selas had an attorney.

In the late 1970s, Selas hosted the "Mr. Wonder" show on KNOE-TV in north Louisiana. In 1979, the sheriff's office received complaints from parents who accused Selas of abusing their children during a camping trip near Valentine Lake at Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. The three-day retreat was promoted by Selas through Ouachita Parish, associated with his TV personality. He promoted the trips for children ages 5-11, according to a flier provided by the sheriff's office.

Louisiana Sheriff's officials obtained a warrant for Selas' arrest in relation to two counts of obscene behavior with a juvenile. When officials went to his home, his wife told them her husband had fled in the family car. In the coming days, officials would find Selas' car in Dallas. Selas, then 39, allegedly fled the country and flew from Dallas to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before investigators could arrest him.

Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office

During the investigation, detectives learned Selas was accused of prior offenses when he worked as a teacher at a school in Tokyo, Japan.

Investigators believe he returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s and lived with his wife under assumed names in several different cities and towns across the country, including San Diego; Chicago; Darien, Connecticut; South Royalton, Vermont; and Sheffield, Massachusetts.

The sheriff's office said investigators learned about two weeks ago that Selas was living in San Diego County, California, where he had legally changed his last name to Szeles in the early 1990s.

Selas has lived in San Diego since 1985 and during that time, he was the PTA President of Ella B. Allen School at 4300 Allen School Road in Bonita and Valley Vista Elementary at 3724 Valley Vista Way. He was a PE teacher, soccer coach and a member of the Southern California Mormon Church and Bonita Optimist Group. He was an American Red Cross swim instructor and Cub Scout Troop Leader of Troop 888 in Bonita. As they arrested him, they found a Cub Scout uniform in his home.

"It's quite alarming, the access to children he had," said Steve Jurman, supervising deputy with the U.S. Marshals Service. "At this time, we don't know of any victims here in San Diego."

A Boy Scouts source told NBC 7 San Diego Selas worked with the Boy Scouts until 2012, when he was removed.

The Boy Scouts of America sent NBC 7 this statement regarding Selas:

"This individual was removed from Scouting several years ago and precluded from any further participation in our program. The safety of our youth members is of paramount importance to the BSA and we seek to prevent child abuse through a comprehensive program of education on the subject, the chartered organization leader selection process, criminal background and other checks, policies and procedures to serve as barriers to abuse and the prompt mandatory reporting of any allegation or suspicion of abuse."

When asked why he was removed, the spokeswoman said in an email, "This individual was removed from the Scouting program for non-compliance with our youth protection policies and procedures."

Agents from a U.S. Marshals Service task force arrested him without incident.

Hilton, the Louisiana sheriff, was one of the detectives assigned to the case in 1979.

If there was a definition of a sexual predator, this is one, and I am so proud of the work of our investigators along with the assistance of Ouachita Parish Sheriffs Office and our local members of the U.S. Marshals Western District-Louisiana, Violent Offenders Task Force, in locating this suspect after all these years. We never forget our victims, Hilton said.

Selas is being held at San Diego County Detention Center on the two initial counts of obscene behavior with a juvenile and may be charges with additional crimes as detectives continue their investigation.

At a press conference Tuesday, Louisiana officials said they believed there may be additional victims spread throughout several Louisiana jurisdictions, across the nation and possibly internationally. At the time, Selas is said to have traveled to several countries, including Japan, Central and South America.

A neighbor, who did not wish to be identified, told NBC 7 she had a jarring experience with Selas years ago.

"The gentleman, when my children were little about 20 years ago, would come to the bus stop with a puppy," she said. When she asked Selas if he had children, he said no.

She called police and they told Selas to leave. However, now the neighbor wishes she had pushed harder.

"I saw fliers for camps he was offering that I knew weren't right, and when we called police, they said there was nothing they could do," said the woman.

Anyone with information is encouraged to call the RPSO Criminal Investigations Division at (318) 473-6727 or (318) 473-6700.
San Diego Unified School District trustees voted to build an apartment complex on the site of a charter school despite objections from parents and residents in Scripps Ranch.

Scripps Ranch residents say they worry about the impact high density housing will have on the area schools.

The proposed development is at the corner of Spring Canyon Road and Scripps Poway Parkway, where the Innovations Academy Charter School now operates. Approximately 365 students attend the school now, only 75 of whom could attend neighborhood schools if the charter school has to relocate.

At Tuesday night's meeting, trustees approved a 66-year lease with Monarch Development, out of Laguna Niguel, to build a four-story, 264 unit apartment complex on the property.

Residents say they need more schools in the area to accommodate the growing population, and building a high density apartment complex will only add to the congestion in the budding area.

Board members estimate the project will bring about $500,000 in revenue and savings to their annual budget.

If you look at the big picture, this benefits the entire city providing more housing stock, more affordable housing stock, but it also provides needed revenue for the school district to help educate its students throughout the city," said Lee Dulgeroff, SDUSD Chief of Facilities Planning.

The plan's opponents say they will take their fight to the San Diego City Council and California Board of Education. If necessary, they say they will sue the district to stop the proposal from moving forward.


Sick of snow? Spring is coming... eventually. And the Cherry Blossom Festival is ready.

Shortly before the blizzard slammed D.C., festival planners announced the dates for the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which will run between Sunday, March 20 and Sunday, April 17 this year.

Even 104 years after receiving the first gift of cherry trees from Japan, the trees and festival activities attract 1.5 million visitors every year, according to the festival website.

The best activity of the festival? Up-close and personal views of the blossoms surrounding D.C.s Tidal Basin, of course. But the National Cherry Blossom Festival also features four packed weeks and three weekends of events you can enjoy when you're not gazing dreamily at the blossoms.

We have a quick guide to some of the best below. Mark your calendars!

Saturday, March 26: The official opening ceremony features performances at the Warner Theatre (513 13th St. NW). Tickets are free but are required to attend; see the festival website.

Saturday, April 2: Oh, go fly a kite! The Blossom Kite Festival, a family-favorite tradition, has competitions and demonstrations. You can bring your own kite, or kids can make their own!

Saturday, April 9: The Southwest Waterfront Fireworks Festival will blast off above the water after a full day of enjoying food vendors, an artists' marketplace and more.

Saturday, April 16: The National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade boasts a 10-block-long lineup of balloons, bands and all things pink. Grandstand tickets are on sale now for $20, but standing room along the route is free.

Saturday, April 16: After the parade, six blocks near Capitol Hill turn into a celebration of Japanese culture with food, performances and more during the Sakura Matsuri Festival. Tickets are $10 and free for children under 12.

Keep checking NBCWashington.com for insider guides, insights and photos from the festival from now until March.
Chennai/Hyderabad: More than 50 students were detained in Chennai after the Joint Action Committee of Social Justice in Hyderabad called for a countrywide bandh over the suicide of dalit scholar Rohith Vemula. The students also carried out protests over the suicide of three Villupuram medical students.

Rohith Vemula was found hanging in a hostel room at the Hyderabad Central University 10 days ago. In a separate incident, 3 medical student allegedly committed suicide by jumping into a well, blaming their college for charging them 'exorbitant' fees.

Read: 3 medical students commit suicide in Tamil Nadu, blame college

Students have alleged that pressure from Union Ministers Bandaru Dattatreya, and Smriti Irani resulted in Vemula's suspension which eventually was the cause of suicide.

Read: Police books Bandaru Dattatreya for Hyderabad scholar Rohiths suicide

Earlier on Tuesday, as many as 60 activists protesting at the Ambedkar statue near Telugu Talli flyover were arrested by police. Activists from AISF, AIYF, NSIW and DHPS staged a protest in front of the statue, demanding immediate removal of Union ministers Bandaru Dattatreya and Smriti Irani from the cabinet and action against UoH VC Appa Rao Podile.

Read: University of Hyderabad: Caution the buzz word

They held the Union government responsible for the discrimination against students from weaker section in educational institutions. Since, Rohith' suicide, student unions have been staging protests at Dattatreya's residence and other places. More than 100 students of Osmania University were also detained by police on Tuesday after they started a rally from People's Plaza at Necklace Road to the BR Ambedkar statue.

Read: University of Hyderabad: Caution the buzz word

In Hyderabad the Students Union of English and Foreign Languages University urged students to observe bandh. The UoH JAC also formed an All India JAC in collaboration with JACs elsewhere in the country like the JNU, New Delhi, TISS, Mumbai and Wardha University, Maharashtra which have also decided to observe a bandh on Wednesday.

The Gender Studies faculty of department of Ambedkar University, New Delhi decided not to conduct classes on Wednesday. The Pondi-cherry University Teachers Association said that it condemns the high-handedness of UoH administration.
Two DC Public Schools administrators were shot Monday night in a car in the Barry Farm neighborhood of Southeast D.C., police and school officials said.

The man and woman were shot about 7:20 p.m. Monday on the 1500 block of Eaton Road SE, D.C. police said. Both victims, whom police did not identify, were conscious and breathing.

The victims work at Roosevelt STAY High School in Northwest D.C. and Ballou STAY High School in Southeast D.C., school district spokeswoman Michelle Lerner said. The alternative schools teach non-traditional students seeking GEDs.

"The DC Public Schools community is shocked and saddened by the violence against our administrators and are hoping for a swift recovery of our colleagues," Lerner said in a statement. "We continue to work with MPD in the ongoing investigation."

Police are searching for Justin Headspeth, 23, who is charged in a warrant with assault with intent to kill.

Headspeth was described by police only as a black man who stands about 5-foot-6 and weighs about 160 pounds.

No information was immediately available on what preceded the shooting or whether the victims may have been targeted in connection to their jobs.

Anyone with information for police is asked to call 202-727-9099. Information can be sent by text message to 50411. A reward of as much as $10,000 is offered.

Stay with News4 for more details on this developing story.
Piled-up snow is leading to major delays around the D.C. area as thousands of people hit the roads for the first time since a historic storm dumped 2 to 3 feet of snow on the region.

Drivers have reported notably longer commutes as they travel on roads with reduced numbers of lanes.

"Going on one hour trying to get from Rockville to Fairfax and still stuck in MD. It's not rush hour. It's noon," tweeted driver Joshua DeLung.

During Wednesday morning's commute, delays were reported around the region.

Massachusetts Avenue was jammed near Westbard Avenue, where traffic was getting through on just one lane because of the snow. In Northern Virginia, 236 East at Braddock Road had two right lanes still covered with snow.

Buses were experiencing up to 45-minute delays system-wide Wednesday morning, and snow cleanup efforts led to the closing of Rock Creek Parkway on Wednesday through 3 p.m.

Authorities are also warning drivers to beware of pedestrians.

"Most sidewalks are covered in snow. Drivers, look out for pedestrians near bus stops," Fairfax County Police posted on Twitter.

As if all that's not enough, potholes are starting to become a big problem again this season, as the region gets into a freeze/thaw cycle. On Williamsburg Boulevard in north Arlington, a portion of the road is actually coming apart.

"Yeah, that caught me off guard," one driver said. "That's never fun. But I guess there's going to be a lot of that."

Four accidents involving tractor trailers also snarled traffic during Wednesday morning's commute.

A collision involving three tractor trailers shut down the Outer Loop of the Capital Beltway early Wednesday morning. The accident happened near Braddock Road in Virginia. While melting snow has left many area roads slick, police have not said what caused the crash. The lanes reopened just after 6:30 a.m.

A tractor trailer crash also tied up traffic on the Outer Loop after the Dulles Toll Road. At 7 a.m., only one lane of traffic was getting by.

In Maryland, a jackknifed tractor trailer closed the local lanes of I-270 southbound at Montrose Road. A 2-mile backup is being reported in the main lanes. HOV restrictions have been lifted since the local lanes are closed.

A second jackknifed tractor trailer caused a 7-mile backup in the southbound lanes of I-270 at Old Hundred Road.

The delays came as thousands of people return to work and school in Washington, D.C. Wednesday.

Federal offices reopened on a three-hour delay, after offices opened late Friday and were closed Monday and Tuesday.

D.C. public school students headed back to class Wednesday, but most other schools across the region remained closed Wednesday.

Metrorail service has been fully restored -- even on the Silver Line. Trains running every 8 minutes starting at 5 a.m. Wednesday. Metro said extensive snow and ice removal over the previous 48 hours allowed them to open the final five stations on the Silver Line.

But some residents still can't leave their neighborhoods because snow plows have yet to reach them.

"[S]till no plow and now icy! Ridiculous. S 23rd & S Garfield Sts in Arlington," @KTMaloneDC tweeted Wednesday morning, sharing a photo of a snow-covered street.

"#SnowStuck Germantown Md. Residents have had no relief on Waterford Hills boulevard," @BpsDai tweeted.

On social media, Prince George's County shared an online snow removal request form, and Montgomery County said its crews are plowing and hauling snow "24/7, working hard to get to you as fast as they can." However, officials have asked residents to be patient.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Tuesday crews have "gotten down to asphalt on all major arteries" and were continuing to plow District neighborhoods nonstop.

"Although there are still some areas we're working really hard on, we have also started to tackle the hardest-to-reach streets," she said.

Bowser urged residents to shovel their sidewalks if they haven't already. She also reminded business owners that they're required by law to remove snow from their sidewalks, and they are beyond the deadline to do so.

"We will begin to enforce the commercial sidewalk snow-clearing provisions of the law, so you must get out and remove snow from your sidewalks immediately," she told business owners.

D.C.'s snow emergency will remain in effect though Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. Vehicles parked or abandoned on any snow emergency route, or considered to be road hazards, are being towed at the owner's expense. Cars parked in a traffic lane on any road, and are deemed a hazard or a barrier to snow removal, may also be towed.

Violators face a $250 ticket, a $100 tow and a $25-per-day fee until they pick up their vehicles.

"Don't park your car illegally, and that includes parking it kind of in the middle of the street next to the snow bank," Bowser said Tuesday. Cars should be parked no more than 12 inches from a curb, not a snow bank, or drivers risk a ticket.

Garbage pickup in D.C. is suspended through Wednesday, Bowser said.

"We hope to resume regular trash pickup on Thursday," she said.

This storm will easily rank among the region's five worst, and the cleanup will likely to take days, Storm Team4 said. Temperatures across the area plummeted overnight, creating icy conditions on many of the region's roads Monday.

Updates on Travel by Train, Bus and Taxi

MARC trains are running Wednesday on a limited schedule, officials said Tuesday evening. The Penn Line that runs between D.C. and Baltimore will operate on an "S" weekday schedule. See the Maryland Transit Administration's website.

VRE resumed normal service Wednesday, officials said Tuesday evening. See VRE's website.

Amtrak restored regular service Wednesday between D.C. and New York, officials announced Tuesday afternoon. Click here for the latest Amtrak information.

D.C. taxicabs are still charing a $15 snow emergency surcharge. The fee will expire Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., officials said.

Historic Amounts of Snowfall

In Frederick County, Maryland, some places saw an astonishing 38 inches of snow, the National Weather Service reported. Jones Springs, West Virginia, had 39 inches.

But places closer to the metro area saw feet of snow as well: More than 36 inches of snow fell in north Potomac, Maryland. More than 29 inches fell in Centreville, Virginia.

And more than 22 inches of snow fell at the National Zoo in Northwest D.C.

For reference, the December 2009 and February 2010 snowstorms, popularly called "Snowpocalypse" and "Snowmageddon," clocked in at 16.4 inches and 17.8 inches, respectively.

Help for Those Needing Shelter

Be on the lookout for homeless people, who could get hypothermia during this cold spell. If you see someone in the D.C. area who needs shelter or warmer clothing, call the following numbers:

The District: 202-399-7093 or 311 if calling within the city

Arlington County: 703-228-1010 (24 hours)

Fairfax County: 703-691-2131 (police non-emergency line)

Montgomery County: 311 if calling within the county

Prince George's County: 888-731-0999

[NATL] Blizzard Pushes Snow, Wind Through East Coast
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, people are looking back at that fateful day that claimed the life of Concord, New Hampshire, high school teacher Christa McAuliffe and six other crew members.

The Challenger broke apart on live television 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986, becoming a generational touchstone.

Inside the Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord, there's a headstone with a bright red apple on top honoring the woman who was supposed to be the first teacher in space. A number of members of the class of '86 in Concord have gone on to become teachers and guidance counselors themselves in the 30 years since.

The city has been low-key on marking Challenger anniversaries as McAuliffe's family stayed in Concord and her young children, Scott and Caroline, grew up. Today, both are educators with children of their own. Caroline declined to be interviewed, and Scott did not respond to an email.

McAuliffe, 37, was interviewed by retired necn reporter Greg Wayland in 1986 just before the Jan. 28 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

"You don't look frightened at all," Wayland said.

"Oh no, I am really looking forward to it," McAuliffe replied with a smile.

Also in Cape Canaveral that day was former Associated Press reporter David Tirrell-Wysocki, now the executive director at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Concord.

In his office Wednesday, Tirrell-Wysocki played the audio he captured from the bleachers during the launch. He was one of the only reporters in the VIP section with McAuliffe's parents and her son's third grade class. He narrated the scene from the launch.

"You can hear the roar of the shuttle," He spoke into his microphone. "Ed and Grace Corrigan from Framingham, Massachusetts, standing in the bleachers with their arms around each other."

Just over a minute later, you hear the spectators cheer, thinking the explosion was a planned occurrence.

Shortly after, you can hear a young voice ask, "Where is it?"

About minute after that, the audio is almost silent, until Tirrell-Wysocki speaks.

"A hush has fallen over the bleachers; they say there's been a major malfunction," he said. "Everyone in the stands are holding their faces and crying, some of the parents are hugging their kids."

When official word makes it to the bleachers, the sounds are chilling.

"Oh God, no," a woman screams.

Tirrell-Wysocki has not done a television interview in more than two decades, and he didn't do one Wednesday. He said the story isn't about him  it's about the people who were around him that day.

The man who brought the apple to McAuliffe's headstone Wednesday was New Hampshire Rep. Mel Myler. He said he worked with McAuliffe and was at the launch with his 10-year-old son back in 1986. He's been bringing an apple to her gravesite every year for the last three decades.
A day after construction-related speed restrictions snarled subways up and down the MBTA's Red Line, the system's busiest line -- with over 200,000 daily riders -- reported fewer problems Tuesday after the T partially lifted the maximum speed over the Longfellow Bridge.

By Tuesday's afternoon and evening rush hour, the T reported only "minor southbound delays" to southbound Ashmont and Braintree trains.

The problem is the ongoing reconstruction of the 1,700-foot-long Longfellow Bridge and installation of temporary replacement rails for Red Line subways between the Charles and Kendall stations. Out of safety concerns, engineers early Monday cut the subway speed limit on the bridge from 25 to 10 miles an hour while the new rails settle. But that created a bottleneck rippling up and down to Cambridge, Dorchester, and Quincy.

Clifton Fitzgerald of Arlington, speaking Tuesday afternoon outside the Harvard Square station, described "constantly stopping" during his ride on the Red Line into Boston. "Every stop, we had to wait. It took me from here to Park Street about 40 minutes" for a ride that usually takes 10 to 12.

Mike Lopez of Chelsea agreed: "That's the problem, morning time, trying to get to work: The Longfellow Bridge. It's a hangup."

Mary Anne Wolf of Cambridge called the construction delays just the latest example of how the Red Line "is a hot mess. It's deteriorating, it's getting worse ... and in terms of relying on it, everyone I know has to tell their job that they can't have a meeting at 9 o'clock because they don't know if they're going to get to work on time." Wolf said she'd recently passed on a job that would have meant a $10,000 pay raise because she didn't want to have to ride on the Red Line daily.

Tuesday morning, the T raised the speed limit to 20 on half the bridge -- from the Kendall side to the peak of the bridge over the middle of the and Arthur MacEwan of Cambridge said he saw an immediate improvement.

"The train was much slower on Monday," MacEwan said. "But I just want to say, I've been riding that train for 40 years, and I think it's pretty decent. I know the problems with the Red Line are obvious, but given the money it gets -- it doesn't get enough money -- so they're going to have breakdowns like this."
Employee bank records are among the sensitive details that companies are failing to protect adequately through encryption, a recent study has uncovered.

While enterprises now take customer data protection seriously, in many cases they're ignoring their workers' needs for security, according to encryption product vendor Sophos.

Not always doing it

Sophos says that it found almost half (47%) of the companies it surveyed had owned-up to not always encrypting employee healthcare information when it stored that data.

And close to that number (43%) failed to always encrypt workers' Human Resources employee files.

Many (31%) came clean on not always encrypting bank details, the security vendor said in a press release about its report.

Sophos polled 1,700 "IT decision-makers" in multiple countries and sectors about their encryption habits.

Records getting stolen is a significant problem, Sophos thinks.

In 2014, 700 million records were compromised, according to Verizon's 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report. Sophos quotes Verizon's statistic in its blog.

Out of sight, out of mind

Sophos thinks that one of the main problems is that the customer data breaches have been getting more publicity than employee data hacks.

"While customer data breaches are the ones that get the biggest headlines, companies have an obligation, and may be legally required, to protect sensitive employee data," the security company says.

"This is an area of data security that is far too often overlooked," it adds.

Governments not encrypting

Notably, data in the famous hack of the Office of Personnel Management that leaked 4 million federal employee records in 2015 was not encrypted, according to multiple reports. Encryption had reportedly been recommended after an earlier attack, but it was never put into place.

"You failed. You failed utterly and totally," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told the managers at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Comprehension

An issue Sophos raises (unrelated to the aforementioned federal hacks) is that organizations don't understand the different kinds of encryption, Sophos says. They get it wrong.

"Full-disk and file encryption are not and should not be mutually exclusive," the vendor says.

Full-disk encrypts devices and drives, but "doesn't protect the data once it leaves the device," Sophos explains. You need to use file-level encryption for that.

That kind of scrambling protects the data always, even when it's being moved around.

"Only 36% of companies said they use both full-disk and file encryption," Sophos says it found in its study.

Cloud

As one might expect, cloud-security awareness is "one area driving increased adoption of encryption," the vendor says.

"While 80% are using the cloud for storage, only 39% encrypt all files stored in the cloud," Sophos says. Why? Reliance on the cloud vendor for security, maybe?

I wrote about a report suggesting cloud documents were wide open to theft earlier this week. That report found enterprise cloud documents via Google searches. It was one example of the lax security practices it found.

And if you think that these companies might be picking on the employees with this apparent lack of sensitive document handling?

Not so. The Sophos report found that 41% of companies "inconsistently" encrypted their own intellectual property, too.
I'm dyslexic, and when I was young I had problems learning how to read. The conventional, phonetic-based approach didn't work for me and I fell behind. I was teased relentlessly, but despite my classmates' taunting, I knew I wasn't stupid. If anything, it made me extremely determined to learn how to read.

While my teachers' methods didn't work for me, they did offer a reference point for my own efforts. Dyslexic people process visual information differently than most people, so instead of starting with letters or sounds, I looked at sentences or even paragraphs as a whole, and then broke them down into parts. That process  starting with the big picture and breaking things down  worked much better than the "normal" word-by-word, letter-by-letter approach taught in school. Essentially, I learned how to read by reverse-engineering my first-grade teacher's reading comprehension methods.

That was my introduction to hacking, and I've been at it ever since.

By the time I entered the Israeli army, not only had I become a prolific reader, I had learned to enjoy problem solving. The military is all about conforming to the chain of command and following orders, but there are plenty of areas within it where independent, out-of-the-box thinking is highly valued. I landed in one of them  the Israeli Defense Forces' cybersecurity intelligence group, Unit 8200. I became commander of a team that specialized in reverse-engineering intricate hacking operations.

Our job was to hack hackers. It sounded great to me since it was an undertaking that was heavy on problems and light on instructions. In a way, I was right back in grade school, but instead of looking at words, I was looking at seriously complex hacking operations, dismantling them piece-by-piece. And the stakes were high; we may not have been fighting a physical war, but we were engaged in conflict with real adversaries who were just as talented as we were. It was an incredible education.

Applying this approach to enterprise cybersecurity

Unsurprisingly, when I left the army, I was eager to put my unique experiences to use, but I was no longer surrounded by elite soldiers who shared my worldview and perspective on cyber defense. The mindset in the private sector was focused on compliance, expediting and prioritizing alerts, and trying to keep up as their networks grew. Organized criminal attacks may have been on the radar, but for most part, they were still on the periphery.

Now breaches are commonplace, but our approach to dealing with them has not changed. Security teams are still singularly focused on piecemeal tasks. When it comes to attacks, the conventional practice when malware is found is to remove it immediately. It's a knee-jerk reaction that's deeply ingrained into the culture. This myopic view of cyber defense leaves organizations extremely vulnerable to today's cybercriminals.

The advanced persistent attacks my team dealt with in the IDF were viewed as aggressive acts of war. Whether perpetrated by nation-states or organized crime, these kinds of attacks are now commonplace in the private sector. Enterprises are foolish if they don't start defending themselves as if hostile forces were aggressively attacking them, because they are.

It explains why so many people from Unit 8200 have started cybersecurity companies  including my co-founders and myself  are doing so well. But as amazing as our products may be, they are just one piece of the equation.

And that's why I am so excited about this blog.

Security myopia is deeply embedded in the culture of cybersecurity teams. Moving past it requires swimming against a very strong current. In my view, it requires organizations to change their fundamental mindset about cyber defense. That's a tall order  it includes re-evaluating what technology they use as well as why and how they use it.

Reaching this goal becomes a lot more achievable if we evolve our approach to the problem, even if it departs from the status quo. If a company is breached, it doesn't have to mean the defenders have lost and the adversaries have won. Rather, it becomes the starting point for the organization to turn a perceived failure into a major advantage. For example, rather than wipe malware the moment it's found, why not let it run and see how it operates? It might lead you to other code hiding out on the network that you had no idea was there.

Today's cyber-defense landscape is one in which businesses can and should be hacking the hackers. My experience has taught me that any adversary can be beaten at their own game.

In future posts, I'll be discussing the tradecraft of hacking hackers as it relates to security operations, but wanted to kick off this blog with a post about how the most powerful resource we have at our disposal is our minds. Corporate security teams need to transition out of security myopia. Once we get around the limitations of our own thinking, hacking the hackers is a lot easier than we would think.
Around two dozen U.S. government departments and federal agencies are being questioned by the U.S. Congress on whether they were using backdoored Juniper network security appliances.

In December, Juniper Networks announced that it had discovered unauthorized code added to ScreenOS, the operating system that runs on its NetScreen network firewalls. The rogue code, which remained undetected for 2 years or more, could have allowed remote attackers to gain administrative access to the vulnerable devices or to decrypt VPN connections.

The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wants to determine the impact that this issue had on government organizations and how the affected organizations responded to the incident.

The Committee sent letters on Jan. 21 to the Department of Defense, the Health Department, the State Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NASA, the Social Security Administration, USAID and many other government agencies.

The letters ask the recipients to identify whether they used devices running the affected ScreenOS versions, to explain how they learned about the issues and whether they took any corrective actions before Juniper released patches and to specify when they applied the company's patches.

The questioned organizations have only two weeks, until Feb. 4, to respond and deliver the appropriate documents, a very tight time frame giving that "the time period covered by this request is from January 1, 2009 to the present."

Determining whether any division of a government department or agency used a vulnerable Juniper appliance for any period of time might prove difficult, especially if accurate inventories haven't been kept. For example, last year, due to inaccurate inventory records, the Internal Revenue Service did not know whether 1,300 of its computers had been upgraded away from Windows XP, which was retired by Microsoft in April 2014.

Security researchers estimate that the VPN backdoor was introduced into ScreenOS in August 2012 and the administrative access one in late 2013. Juniper has yet to reveal who and how added the unauthorized code to ScreenOS and the incident is reportedly being investigated by the FBI.

It will also be interesting to see if the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is only interested in this particular case, or will make similar inquiries going forward. After all, intentional or unintentional backdoor-like vulnerabilities -- such as hidden administrative accounts with hard-coded, static passwords -- are frequently found in networking products from a variety of vendors, and some of them are likely used by government agencies.
Hyderabad: Incharge Vice-Chancellor of Hyderabad Central University (HCU) Vipin Srivastava faced the ire of agitating students on Wednesday when he reached their protest site to initiate a dialogue with them to break the impasse over Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula's suicide.

Srivastava stood at the protest site for a few minutes even as the students raised slogans against him, asking him 'to go back'.

Read: Rohith suicide: SC, ST teachers to go on hunger strike from tomorrow in HCU

He left after a few minutes. Some one banged on his car when it was about to move.

"We have been criticised constantly that no one is making an effort. The truth of the matter is that the police have been stopping me. It is stopping us, Prof Appa Rao Podile (the VC who has gone on leave) as well as me. Because they felt that it may result in a law and order situation," Srivastava said.

Read: Only partial suspension on Rohith, 3 others imposed, HCU tells High Court

Noting that a large number of students, agitating over the suicide of Rohith, gheraoed his residence in the staff quarters this morning when he was busy in a meeting with non-teaching staff, he said he prevailed upon the police today to let him go and interact with the protesting students.

"I told the police once again that, look, this is what is happening and they are not unruly. I would like to go and talk to them then they gave me the clearance and I went along with my colleague... both of us went there. I think you were there, you saw what happened," Srivastava said.

Read: University of Hyderabad: Caution the buzz word

He said he could have stayed at the protest site for a longer duration but felt that there was no purpose.

"I could stay have stayed for longer. But then, I did not see any purpose because they were not willing to speak. I thought they wanted some body to come and talk to them. So I went, there was no possibility," the incharge VC said.

Read: Rohith Vemula suicide: Protests in Delhi, 100 students detained

Dickens, a representative of protesting students, said they hold Srivastava "equally culpable" in the alleged wrong affairs in the university and that they are demanding that he should step down from the post of VC.

"We will not actually have any dialogue with any committee formed under the order of the Vice Chancellor. We see him (Srivastava) equally culpable on the wrongs that have been done as the chairperson of executive council. We want him to step down first that is why we also went to his house," he said.
Chennai: The Madras High Court on Wednesday allowed a fresh postmortem of one the three college girls who allegedly committed suicide last week at Villupuram following a request by her father.

Justice R Subbiah, while allowing the postmortem to be performed again, also granted the request of Monisha's father for the presence of doctors of his choice during the exercise.

Read: Chennai: 50 detained for protesting over suicide of 3 medical students

Tamilarasan had moved a petition on January 25 in the High Court seeking a CB-CID inquiry and a fresh postmortem in a state-run hospital in Chennai. He had also requested that a doctor of his choice be allowed to be present during autopsy.

On January 23, three girl students of SVS Medical College of Yoga and Naturopathy at Villupuram had committed suicide by jumping into a farm well over alleged harassment by the management demanding 'exorbitant' fees.

Read: 3 medical students commit suicide in Tamil Nadu, blame college

The college head Vasuki Subramaniam surrendered in a court in Chennai on Jan 25 and was remanded in judicial custody, while two others, including its principal, were arrested in connection with the case.

The suicides came following recent protests by students alleging collection of exorbitant fees by the college and lack of amenities.

The deceased girls -- V Priyanka, T Monisha and E Saranya -- were second year students.

Read: TN: College head surrenders in girls' suicide issue

Tamilarasan had expressed serious doubts over the suicide claim and alleged his daughter was murdered as she and other girls had complained to district authorities about collection of exorbitant fees.

The girls' parents had also filed complaints claiming their daughters were murdered.

Read: Chennai: Suicide note says college fleeced money from students

The triple-suicide has snowballed into a major issue with political parties demanding tough action. The college was sealed on January 24.
Hyderabad: Tension prevailed at the University of Hyderabad on Wednesday as students protestors held a roadblock on the Old Mumbai highway demanding suspension of the Vice Chancellor and the interim VC over suicide of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula.

26-year-old Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula who hanged himself in Hyderabad Central University campus, was suspended from his hostel by the HCU administration in August last year for allegedly attacking an ABVP leader.

Read: Only partial suspension on Rohith, 3 others imposed, HCU tells High Court

The protests resulted in traffic snarls along stretches from Kondapur village to Serilingampally until it was cleared by the police.

After the police intervention, the students took the protests inside the campus, where they marched to the residence of the interim VC, and burnt effigies of VC professor Appa Rao and Union Minister Smrithi Irani.

Read: Police books Bandaru Dattatreya for Hyderabad scholar Rohiths suicide

The Joint Action Committee (JAC) for Social Justice, that has been steering the protests, also held a massive rally inside the campus with slogans VC down down Step down the VC, and We want Justice.

Meanwhile, six of the seven students on hunger strike have been shifted to a health centre.

The students, who had given a nationwide university strike call, marched to the residence of the interim head of the institution and then went outside the campus and burnt the effigy of the Vice-chancellor, whose ouster they have been seeking.

"Six (students) were shifted (to the health centre) yesterday", Ravindra Kumar, chief medical officer said. One student is continuing with the hunger strike, which resumed three days back after the first batch of his colleagues who went on fast were moved to the health centre.

Read: University of Hyderabad: Caution the buzz word

Speaking at gathering at shopping complex, HCU faculty members, professors and teachers from SC, ST teachers forum, contract employees and non-teaching staff promised students for their support until they obtain justice.

The SC, ST teachers forum announced that they would take part in the hunger strike from Thursday demanding the resignation of Vice Chancellor Prof. Appa Rao.

Forum leaders Professors V Krishna, K Laxminarayana, Sripathi Ramudu and

others told media that they have given a notice in this regard to the registrar of the university.

They demanded that interim VC Vipin Srivatsava also be removed. He was faced allegations during the death of a dalith student Senthil Kumar in 2008 and he was one of the members in the committee which recommended the suspension of five students including Rohit Vemula. Now, a judicial enquiry will be taken up and the VC or interim VC are the authorities from the UoH who have to give explanation. We strongly say that if the persons who are facing allegation will not give a justification to our struggle during judicial enquiry, they said.

Sripathi Ramudu told Deccan Chronicle that they would decide whether go for relay hunger strike or indefinite hunger strike by Thursday morning. We demand the resignation of VC and incumbent VC in order to resume academic and administration activities, he said.

The JAC for Social Justice, an umbrella of student groups, have also called a 'all universities bandh' to demand the arrest of central ministers Smriti Irani, Bandaru Dattatreya, Vice Chancellor Appa Rao and others, blaming them for the "institutional murder" of Vemula.

The JAC has also condemned the appointment of Vipin Srivastava as the interim vice chancellor as he headed a sub-committee of the executive council, which suspended Vemula and four other students.
Hyderabad: SC and ST teachers forum of University of Hyderabad on Wednesday announced that the forum would go on hunger strike from Thursday demanding the resignation of vice-chancellor Prof. Appa Rao.

Forum leaders professors V. Krishna, K. Laxminarayana, Sripathi Ramudu and others told the media that they have given a notice in this regard to the registrar of the university.

They demanded that the interim V-C Vipin Srivatsava would also be removed. He faced allegations during the death of a Dalit student Senthil Kumar in 2008 and he was one of the members in the committee which recommended the suspension of five students including Rohith Vemula.

Now, a judicial inquiry will be taken up and the V-C or interim V-C are the authorities from the UoH who have to give an explanation, they said. Sripathi Ramudu told DC that they would decide whether to go on relay hunger strike or indefinite hunger strike by Thursday morning.

We demand the resignation of V-C and interim V-C in order to resume academic and administration activities, he said.
Hyderabad: In a twist in the ongoing protest, prominent writers started sitting on hunger strike in UoH along with students. As six students were shifted to a health centre, famous author Meena Kandaswami sat on hunger strike on Wednesday. Talking to DC she said that more civil rights activists and writers should come forward for hunger strike.

The Modi government has not taken the students protest against caste discrimination seriously. This issue is not just the matter of campuses, but of the outside world as well. Caste is the extreme form of discrimination. So the writers should come forward, like they did in the intolerance debate, to join the students, she said.

The civil society of the country also should come forward to address this caste issue, she added. She said that the secular community in the country is reluctant to address the caste issues in the country.

I came here to support the students and to participate in Chalo HCU on Monday, so I also felt like joining the students on hunger strike, she added.

Another writer Goku Shyamala also sat for the hunger strike for a day. The students were earlier forcibly shifted to the health centre as their health turned unstable.

Earlier, speaking at a gathering at the shopping complex, HCU faculty members, professors and teachers from SC, ST teachers forum, contract employees and non-teaching staff promised students of their support till they get the much needed justice.
Hyderabad/Vizag/Kakinada/Tirupati/New Delhi: Students from several universities across the country including Andhra Pradesh and Telangana responded overwhelmingly to the bandh call by the Joint Action Committee on Wednesday.

Protests were reported in Osmania University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNTU, Kakatiya University, Warangal, Calicut University Kerala, Mahatma Gandhi University, Nalgonda and Telangana University, Nizamabad.

Protests were also held in various universities across India. Protesting inaction of the state in the Rohit Vemula suicide, the bandh was also total in AP. AU students boycotted classes, took out a rally with black flags and later held protests on the varsity campus. The students said that they are going to launch a relay hunger strike.

Bandh was successful: JAC members

The students who observed the bandh in Acharya Nagarjuna University on Wednesday locked the main gates. ANU officials cancelled all examinations which were scheduled on Wednesday.

JNTU Kakinada postponed engineering examinations due to the strike. Students of TTD run Oriental College boycotted classes. JAC members said that the bandh was successful.

The teaching and non-teaching staff members of the ANU in Guntur tried to attend duties but agitating students did not allow them.

They raised slogans demanding dismissal of UoH V-C, Prof. P. Appa Rao and resignations of Union ministers Ms Smriti Irani and Mr Bandaru Dattatreya holding them responsible for the death of Rohith. NDSF ANU president, P. Gopalakrishna objected to the non-responsive behaviour of CMs of AP and TS.

He objected to BJPs politicising of Rohiths caste issue and asked the union government to dismiss the VC and sack the union minsters.

The JNTUK Registrar G.V.R. Prasada Raju said that the date of the days examinations would be announced later.

The students of Adikavi Nannayya University at Rajanagaram also observed the bandh. Student organisations staged rasta roko near APSP junction at Kakinada.

Prof. Sharon Raju, a faculty of Andhra University, said that they would intensify their stir until justice is provided to the family of Rohith.

We are going to launch a relay hunger strike from Thursday. The government should immediately sack the UoH V-C Prof. Appa Rao as well as Union ministers Mr Dattatreya and Ms Irani, he added.

SFI leader Priyanka described Rohiths suicide as a political conspiracy and murder.

The saffron brigade is waging a war against the minorities and Dalits in the country. What is the need for a Union Minister to write six letters for rustication of a student? she asked.
Policemen investigate after an unidentified balloon-shaped object picked up by the Indian Air Forces radar was intercepted and shot down over Barmer. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi/Visakhapatham/Hyderabad: Five foreign nationals with Iranian passports, suspected to be terrorists on the prowl who gave the slip to Bhubaneswar police on Monday were caught at Nakkapalli in Vishakapatnam of Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday night.

Out of the five, two are aged around 50 years. The group had a man and woman and three youths aged around 23 years. They initially told the police they are all of the same family, but the passports of Iran found with them showed that they are not.

Terror suspects sneak into Vizag from Odisha

Andhra Pradesh additional director general of police Law and Order R.P. Thakur said, Based on inputs from Odisha police we caught them at Nakkapalli gate and shifted them to Vishakapatnam. We are verifying the terror links if any. We havent found any explosives with them so far.

They also told cops that they were coming from Hyderabad but it was found that they were coming from Bhubaneswar.

Police verified the car number and it was found to be a car rented from a travel agency in Delhi. They told the travel agent they were using it for local touring but they drove to Bhubaneswar.

A senior police official said, All of them arrived at Delhi from other countries on different dates. Some of them have come from Bangladesh. We are now talking to Iran Embassy to verify the passports authenticity.

Odisha police alerted AP police that suspected anti-national elements have passed the Palasa gate in Andhra Pradesh at 4 pm on Wednesday.

Odisha Inspector General (Crime Branch) Arun Bothra said, Concrete inputs have been obtained about the entry of four terrorists who came to book two rooms in a hotel near Master Canteen Square on Monday evening and fled the place when the hotel authorities and a sub-inspector present at the reception suspected their movement. The Ford Icon car in which they had come has been located in Visakhapatnam.

At around 9 pm on Wednesday, four persons who introduced themselves as citizens of Iraq came in a Ford Icon car bearing a Delhi registration number  DL4C 9645 and wanted to check into Hotel Arya Mahal.

The rent for two rooms was finalised at Rs 5,000. When the hotel authorities asked for their identity cards, they could not produce any and said they had their passports in the vehicle. They went to their car parked at a distance and sped away.

Suspecting their activities, the hotel authorities immediately informed the police which swung into action. A plain-clothes police sub-inspector, who arrived at the hotel reception for checking the guest list, suspected the activities of them and asked for their passports. They left the hotel reception to get the passports from the vehicle.

However, instead of returning to the reception with the passports they sped away. On another front, the helium-filled balloon that was shot down by an IAF Sukhoi-30 MKI fighter over Rajasthans Jaisalmer district on Tuesday had flown in from Pakistan and was apparently an advertising balloon with no payload, though it may have been a ploy to test Indias operational preparedness, top government sources said Wednesday.

In other terror related incidents across the country, a big balloon hovering over the IGI airport, New Delhi, four bomb threat calls to the officials had the police and the armed forces on their toes on Wednesday.

The bomb threat calls received in quick succession at Delhi and Bengaluru airports forced aviation authorities to ground three flights, including two international ones, creating panic among fliers.

The police said the call centre of Delhi International Airport Ltd. got a call that a big balloon had been spotted, after which the airport was put on alert. The police, however, said later that no such object was spotted by the authorities.

The Delhi police DCP in-charge of IGI Airport, D.K. Gupta, said all the security agencies were informed, though the police had not spotted the object.

Following the bomb hoax calls, while Air India and Jet Airways flights to Kathmandu were grounded at Indira Gandhi International Airport, no-frills airline AirAsias Goa flight from Bengaluru also failed to take off as scheduled.

The Kathmandu-bound flights of Air India and Jet Airways, which were scheduled to take off at 1.15 pm and 1.25 pm, were halted and sent to the isolation bay just before they were readying for departure after the airport police received a bomb threat call. At the same time, budget carrier AirAsia Indias flight to Goa from Bengaluru, which was to fly 141 passengers and four infants, was also delayed following a similar bomb scare on its flight from Jaipur.
This is not the first time Katju has attempted to disappear from social media. Back in 2013, the retired judge has vanished for weeks shortly after some weird requests asking for Urdu shairi started appearing under journalists profiles from Katju's twitter account.

Hyderabad: On Tuesday night, retired Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju wrote out what he said would be his last Facebook post.

The judge, 70, has been quite prolific on social media  constantly posting thoughts on everything from women in Delhi (whom he once called vishkanyas (poison women) to his open disapproval of gay marriage and the need for the election of beautiful women as politicians.

Yes, Katju has been, radical and Tuesdays post was not short on drama.

I am a man of 70 and have very few years more to live. I tried to pass on all my knowledge I acquired in my life to you, so that you may benefit. This knowledge I acquired from my gurus, before whom I stood with folded hands for decades before they gave me that knowledge. But what did I get in return? I got mostly abuses from most of you, because most of you are stupid and arrogant, and have no desire to learn. I am sorry I even tried to teach you. So, goodbye, he wrote, addressing over three lakh followers on Facebook.

The responses were in their hundreds. Some were relieved while others begged him to continue posting. Katju then took a screenshot of his Facebook post and tweeted it, with a single word, Goodbye.

But on Wednesday, the post was missing from Facebook. Only Twitter still had the write-up which claimed he was giving up on his guidance. In the meantime, as an explanation, Katju attached another Facebook post saying he was getting tired of writing these posts. He concluded his post saying, I intend to write fewer posts and only when they are required by the changing circumstances.

This is not the first time Katju has attempted to disappear from social media. Back in 2013, the retired judge has vanished for weeks shortly after some weird requests asking for Urdu shairi started appearing under journalists profiles from Katju's twitter account.

Many claimed Katjus account was hacked but there hasnt been a satisfying, formal explanation.
New Delhi: Saying its too serious a matter, a five-judge Supreme Court bench Wednesday sought the report of Arunachal Pradesh governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa recommending Central rule in the state, and listed the matter for Monday. The Congress, which had challenged the imposition of Presidents Rule in the state, has said the party has an open mind on reaching out to the rebels, but reiterated that it still has a majority in the Assembly.

The five-judge bench headed by Justice J.S. Khehar also brushed aside the objection by attorney-general Mukul Rohatgi, who had raised a preliminary contention saying the notification on promulgation of Pres-idents Rule has not been challenged in the fresh plea. The bench asked the attorney-general not to raise technical objections when he persisted with his plea arguing that the rules are rules and they applied equally to all.

Centre told to file reply by Friday

The Supreme Court bench posted the matter for February 1, and asked the governor and the Union home ministry to file responses by Friday on the petitions filed by Congress leaders, including one by Rajesh Tacho, chief whip of the Congress Legislature Party in the state Assembly, which is now under suspended animation. The bench allowed the petitioners to amend their plea by Friday.

When additional solicitor-general Satpal Jain, appearing for the governor, sought to maintain the secrecy of the report and recommendation for Presidents Rule, the bench said: He will only mention the date of report recommending Presidents Rule to opposite parties during the course of the day. However, the bench sought in a sealed cover the report and recommendation on the imposition of Presidents Rule for its own perusal.

Unless we get the grounds for recommending Presidents Rule, we cannot proceed. If the grounds are not the same in the proclamation, then it is a totally different ballgame, the bench, which also comprised Justices Dipak Misra, M.B. Lokur, P.C. Ghose and N.V. Ramana, said during the hearing.
Though the government has launched Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) last year with the Centre and state sharing the expenditure in the ratio of 75:25, the situation continues to be grim. (Representational image)

Hyderabad: The Telangana State government has a dismal record of providing toilets to all households. The latest survey by the rural development department revealed that out of 45 lakh families in rural areas, there are no toilets for 30.34 lakh. Of them, 29.29 lakh are BPL families.

This survey is no different from the TS Household Survey done in August 2014. Though the government has launched Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) last year with the Centre and state sharing the expenditure in the ratio of 75:25, the situation continues to be grim. A financial assistance of Rs 12,000 is given to build a toilet. However, few are coming forward to utilise this opportunity as there has been a long delay in clearing bills. The other reason is they are incurring Rs 18,000 as expenditure and the poor are not in a position to bear an additional Rs 6,000.

With this, the beneficiaries are stopping works midway resulting in incomplete toilets that are forcing people to go for open defecation again. The TS survey revealed that out of 1.01 crore households, 42.10 lakh had no toilets. Even in GHMC, out of a total of 19.43 lakh households, 2.75 lakh had no toilet.

It's very difficult to construct a toilet with government aid. The money is given in three instalments. We have to submit photos at each stage to claim the bill. We are forced to run around for months. So the poor dont come forward. Even if some start the works by taking loans, they stop midway. There is no guarantee that we will get the full amount. Besides there is corruption at village level as sarpanches and others demand bribes to clear bills, said C. Nagender, a beneficiary in RR district.

The government is aiming to make TS open defecation free by 2019 by constructing 30 lakh toilets at a cost of `3,660 crore.

As of now, we have achieved 100 per cent toilet coverage in Siddipet, Siricilla and Vemulawada Assembly constituencies. This could be done due to the participation of local peoples representatives, officials and beneficiaries. All have to work with the same spirit, if we have to meet targets, said a rural development official.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 64F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds. Low 41F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
New Delhi: Pakistani businessmen travelling to India for the first tme who can bring in business of at least Rs 1 crore can now be eligible for the Saarc India Business Card.

The card allows all Saarc business travellers multiple entry into India for three years.

The government has fixed the criteria for Pakistanis to avail of the business traveller card based on the value of business they can bring into India.

Those Pakistani businessmen who have already travelled on a business visa to India have got some relaxation; the total value of their business should exceed Rs 50 lakh in the preceding financial year to make them eligible to hold the card.

After various security concerns were flagged by Intelligence agencies on extending relaxed entry facilities to Pakistanis, New Delhi set conditions for eligibility and decided to issue the business cards to Pakistanis only along with the visa. This facility will only be given to those Pakistani nationals whose annual income is not less than Pakistani rupees 10,00,000.

Union home minister Rajnath Singh has given approval and the cards will come into force soon. It will enable hassle-free entry for all Saarc business travellers.

While the initial proposal, after it was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to Nepal, was to ensure that smart cards suffice at immigration points, the cards will be in addition to visas for those travelling from Saarc countries.
Columnist

Tom Kacich is a columnist and the author of Tom's Mailbag at The News-Gazette. His column appears Sundays. His email is tkacich@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@tkacich).
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NOTICE: This Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) is intended for persons living in Australia.

nizatidine Consumer Medicine Information

What is in this leaflet This leaflet answers some common questions about TACIDINE. It does not contain all the available information. It does not take the place of talking to your doctor or pharmacist. All medicines have risks and benefits. Your doctor has weighed the risks of you taking TACIDINE against the benefits they expect it will have for you. If you have any concerns about taking this medicine, ask your doctor or pharmacist. Keep this leaflet with the medicine. You may need to read it again.

What TACIDINE is used for TACIDINE contains the active ingredient nizatidine. Nizatidine belongs to a group of medicines called histamine (H2) antagonist or histamine (H2) blockers. These medicines work by reducing the amount of stomach acid produced which in turn reduces the pain and allows the ulcers and/or reflux disease to heal in most people. Ulcers TACIDINE is used to treat both gastric ulcers and duodenal ulcers. A gastric ulcer occurs in the stomach. A duodenal ulcer occurs in the duodenum (which is part of your small intestine). The ulcers can be caused in part by too much acid being made in the stomach. TACIDINE is also used to help stop duodenal ulcers from coming back. Reflux Disease TACIDINE is also used to treat reflux oesophagitis or reflux disease. This is caused by "washing back" (reflux) of food and acid from the stomach into the food pipe (also known as the oesophagus). Reflux causes burning sensation in the chest rising up to the throat (heartburn) and most often occurs after eating or at night. Ask your doctor if you have any questions about why this medicine has been prescribed for you. Your doctor may have prescribed it for another reason. TACIDINE is not recommended for use in children, as the safety and effectiveness have not been established. This medicine is not addictive. This medicine is available only with a doctor's prescription.

Before you take TACIDINE

When you must not take it Do not take TACIDINE if you have an allergy to: any medicine containing nizatidine any other histamine (H2) blocking medicine (e.g. cimetidine, ranitidine, famotidine) any of the ingredients listed at the end of this leaflet Some of the symptoms of an allergic reaction may include: shortness of breath wheezing or difficulty breathing swelling of the face, lips, tongue or other parts of the body rash, itching or hives on the skin Do not take this medicine after the expiry date printed on the pack or if the packaging is torn or shows signs of tampering. If you take this medicine after the expiry date has passed, it may not work as well. If it has expired or is damaged, return it to your pharmacist for disposal. If you are not sure whether you should start taking this medicine, talk to your doctor.

Before you start to take it Tell your doctor if you have allergies to any other medicines, foods, preservatives or dyes. Tell your doctor if you have or have had any of the following medical conditions: kidney disease liver disease chronic lung disease diabetes a weakened immune system or lowered resistance to infection, sometimes caused by certain diseases or treatments Tell your doctor if you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant or are breastfeeding or plan to breast feed. Your doctor can discuss with you the risks and benefits involved. The active ingredient in TACIDINE passes into breast milk and there is a possibility that your baby may be affected. Tell your doctor if you plan to have surgery. If you have not told your doctor about any of the above, tell them before you start taking TACIDINE.

Taking other medicines Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are taking any other medicines, including any that you get without a prescription from your pharmacy, supermarket or health food shop. Some medicines and TACIDINE may interfere with each other. These include: aspirin certain antacids used to treat heartburn and indigestion such as Mylanta and Gelusil These medicines may be affected by TACIDINE or may affect how well it works. You may need different amounts of your medicines, or you may need to take different medicines. Your doctor and pharmacist have more information on medicines to be careful with or avoid while taking this medicine.

How to take TACIDINE Follow all directions given to you by your doctor or pharmacist carefully. They may differ from the information contained in this leaflet. If you do not understand the instructions on the pack, ask your doctor or pharmacist for help.

How much to take The dose varies from person to person: duodenal and stomach ulcers - the recommended dosage is 150 mg twice a day or 300 mg once in the evening to stop duodenal ulcers from coming back - the usual dosage is 150 mg once daily reflux disease - the recommended dosage is 150 mg twice daily Elderly people and those who have kidney problems may need to take a lower dose.

How to take it Swallow the capsules whole with a full glass of water.

When to take it Take your medicine at about the same time each day. Taking it at the same time each day will have the best effect. It will also help you remember when to take it. TACIDINE can be taken with or without food. The 150 mg capsule is usually taken twice a day - one capsule in the morning and one capsule in the evening before you go to bed. The 300 mg capsule is usually taken once a day at bedtime.

How long to take it Continue taking your medicine for as long as your doctor tells you. This medicine helps to control your condition but does not cure it. It is important to keep taking your medicine even if you feel well.

If you forget to take it If it is almost time for your next dose, skip the dose you missed and take your next dose when you are meant to. Otherwise, take it as soon as you remember, and then go back to taking your medicine as you would normally. Do not take a double dose to make up for the dose you missed. This may increase the chance of you getting an unwanted side effect. If you are not sure what to do, ask your doctor or pharmacist. If you have trouble remembering to take your medicine, ask your pharmacist for some hints.

If you take too much (overdose) Immediately telephone your doctor or the Poisons Information Centre (telephone 13 11 26) for advice, or go to Accident and Emergency at the nearest hospital, if you think that you or anyone else may have taken too much TACIDINE. Do this even if there are no signs of discomfort or poisoning. You may need urgent medical attention.

While you are taking TACIDINE

Things you must do If you are about to be started on any new medicine, remind your doctor and pharmacist that you are taking TACIDINE. Tell any other doctors, dentists and pharmacists who treat you that you are taking this medicine. If you are going to have surgery, including dental surgery, tell the surgeon, anaesthetist or dentist that you are taking this medicine. It may affect other medicines used during surgery. If you are taking it for an ulcer, you should go to your doctor regularly for checkups to make sure that TACIDINE has healed your ulcer. If you become pregnant while taking this medicine, tell your doctor immediately. Keep all of your doctor's appointments so that your progress can be checked.

Things you must not do Do not take TACIDINE to treat any other complaints unless your doctor tells you to. Do not give your medicine to anyone else, even if they have the same condition as you. Do not stop taking your medicine or lower the dosage without checking with your doctor. If you stop taking your medicine too soon then your condition may not have been properly treated.

Things to be careful of Be careful driving or operating machinery until you know how TACIDINE affects you. This medicine may cause dizziness or light-headedness in some people. If you have any of these symptoms, do not drive, operate machinery or do anything else that could be dangerous.

Things that would be helpful for your condition Some self-help measures suggested below may help your condition. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist about these measures and for more information. alcohol - your doctor may advise you to limit your alcohol intake aspirin and other medicines used to treat arthritis/period pain/headaches - these medicines may irritate the stomach and may make your condition worse. Your doctor or pharmacist may suggest other medicines you can take caffeine - your doctor may advise you to limit the number of drinks which contain caffeine, such as coffee, tea, cocoa and cola drinks, as the caffeine may irritate your stomach eating habits - eat smaller, more frequent meals. Eat slowly and chew your food carefully. Try not to rush at meal times smoking - your doctor may advise you to stop smoking or at least cut down

Side effects Tell your doctor or pharmacist as soon as possible if you do not feel well while you are taking TACIDINE. This medicine helps most people with ulcers or reflux disease, but it may have unwanted side effects in a few people. All medicines can have side effects. Sometimes they are serious, most of the time they are not. You may need medical attention if you get some of the side effects. Do not be alarmed by the following list of side effects. You may not experience any of them. Ask your doctor or pharmacist to answer any questions you may have. Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you notice any of the following and they worry you: sweating itchy skin rash or hives headaches, being short of breath when exercising, flatulence, vomiting, diarrhoea, constipation impotence The above list includes the more common side effects of your medicine. They are usually mild and short-lived. Incidences of abnormal liver function, accompanied by jaundice (yellow skin) have been rarely reported by patients taking this medicine. This side effect has been reversed when TACIDINE is stopped. Prolonged use of TACIDINE may impair the absorption of Vitamin B12. Tell your doctor immediately if you notice any of the following: yellowing of the whites of the eyes or skin, also called jaundice dark urine symptoms of anaemia, which may include tiredness, dizziness and looking pale confusion The above list includes serious side effects that may require medical attention. If any of the following happen, tell your doctor immediately or go to Accident and Emergency at the nearest hospital: vomiting blood or food passing black (blood-stained) bowel motions symptoms of a severe allergic reaction which may include skin rash, itching or hives; swelling of the face, lips or tongue which may cause difficulty in swallowing or breathing; wheezing or shortness of breath The above list includes very serious side effects. You may need urgent medical attention or hospitalisation. Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you notice anything that is making you feel unwell. Other side effects not listed above may also occur in some people.

After taking TACIDINE

Storage Keep your capsules in the pack until it is time to take them. If you take the capsules out of the pack they may not keep well. Keep your capsules in a cool dry place where the temperature stays below 25C. Do not store TACIDINE or any other medicine in the bathroom or near a sink. Do not leave it on a window sill or in the car. Heat and dampness can destroy some medicines. Keep it where children cannot reach it. A locked cupboard at least one-and-a-half metres above the ground is a good place to store medicines.

Disposal If your doctor tells you to stop taking this medicine, or the expiry date has passed, ask your pharmacist what to do with any medicine that is left over.

Product description

What it looks like TACIDINE capsules are available in 2 strengths: TACIDINE 150 mg strength - hard gelatin capsule where one half of the capsule is pale yellow and has "NZ 150" printed in black. The other half of the capsule is dark yellow and has "G" printed in black TACIDINE 300 mg strength - hard, light brown, gelatin capsule with "NZ 300" printed in black on one half of the capsule and "G" printed in black on the other half

Ingredients TACIDINE contains either 150 mg or 300 mg of nizatidine as the active ingredient. The capsule also contains: colloidal anhydrous silica croscarmellose sodium pregelatinised maize starch purified talc sodium lauryl sufate magnesium stearate quinoline yellow CI47005 [E104] (150 mg only) allura red AC CI16035 [E129] (150 mg only) iron oxide red CI77491[E172] (300 mg only) iron oxide yellow CI77492 [E172] titanium dioxide [E171] gelatin black ink SW-9008 black ink SW-9009
Panasonics new MDF-U5412H -40C freezer provides a reliable freezing environment for Fresh Frozen Plasma and blood related products with outstanding stability and uniformity as well as superior efficiency through the use of hydrocarbon (HC) refrigerants. The natural refrigerants used in the Panasonic range of Biomedical Eco Series freezers minimize energy consumption, reduce environmental impact and save on running costs. A comprehensive alarm system and Class IIa Medical Device Certification ensure this freezer provides unsurpassed reliability and sample security.

The Natural Choice

The Eco Series from Panasonic utilize the next generation of refrigerants  naturally occurring hydrocarbons. These organic compounds boast a number of benefits when compared with traditional refrigerants. Not only do they have no effect on o-zone depletion, they also have short atmospheric lifetimes and exceptionally low global warming potentials (GWP). With an increasing global focus on environmental impact and reducing carbon footprints, the new MDF-U5412H provides an ideal solution for all laboratories looking for reliable, efficient and environmentally friendly equipment.

Enhanced Efficiency

Not only do HC refrigerants dramatically reduce environmental impact, but they are also more efficient than traditional HFC refrigerants. The high latent heat of evaporation of hydrocarbons means that each refrigeration cycle will remove more heat from the freezer, making the cooling extremely effective and reducing the energy required to reach the desired temperature.

Reduced Running Costs

The highly efficient hydrocarbon refrigerants used in the Panasonic Eco Series result in reduced energy consumption and therefore lower running costs. With crucial equipment operating continuously, laboratories can consume a lot of power and freezers can contribute significantly to this expensive energy consumption. Power consumption and electrical running costs are reduced by up to 28% in the new MDF-U5412H when compared with an equivalent HFC model.

Performance Through Design

The Panasonic MDF-U5412H provides an optimum cold storage environment for the preservation of important samples. A direct cooling system with cooling tubes under every shelf ensures the most uniform temperatures while the double door design reduces the effect of ambient temperatures during sample placement and retrieval. Defrosting of the unit is done manually, preventing any large temperature peaks that could affect the integrity of stored samples.

Sample Security

An intuitive microprocessor control with an easy-to-read digital display delivers comprehensive set point, alarm, monitoring and diagnostic functions to track system conditions and alert users in the unlikely event of an abnormality so they can take appropriate actions. An access port allows external temperature monitoring with the use of a probe, or an optional temperature chart recorder can be added.

Hydrocarbon refrigerants, innovative technology and Class IIa Medical Device certification make the new Panasonic MDF-U5412H -40C freezer the perfect storage environment for the preservation of blood plasma, vaccines, test samples and other biological specimens.

Panasonic are committed to contributing towards progress in life science while helping to build a greener future.

By implementing hydrocarbon refrigerants, the Eco Series minimize energy consumption and reduce environmental impact while also saving money on running costs.

For more information, please visit: http://www.biomedical.panasonic.eu/MDF-U5412H
Health pioneers BetterYou have welcomed the views of Nutritionist Marilyn Glenville, that oil based supplements can help you get your recommended dose of vitamin D.

A recent article in The Sun stated that 10million of us lack vitamin D, which is known to lower blood pressure and the risk of heart disease and kidney disease.

BetterYou who are at the forefront of research into vitamin D levels and whose range of popular oil based vitamin D oral spray are recommended by the NHS, are keen to educate about the importance of maintaining your vitamin D levels. They aim to inform how much of this vital vitamin you should be taking, as dosage levels are still poorly understood.

BetterYou recommends 1000IU (International Units) of vitamin D is supplemented per 25kg of body weight. An adult living in the Northern Hemisphere requires between 2000-3000IU daily to maintain a healthy optimum level.

There are a number of diseases related to Vitamin D deficiency, including Multiple Sclerosis, Type 2 Diabetes, bone diseases such as osteoporosis and over 17 internal cancers are believed to cost the UK taxpayer 29 billion annually  more than a quarter of the NHS budget.

A recent study published by the BMJ Open Gastroenterology discovered a significant association between a patients vitamin D levels and the severity of their Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms.

Research, led by Dr Bernard Corfe, from the University of Sheffield's Molecular Gastroenterology Research Group, featured IBS patients taking a high dose (3000 IU daily) vitamin D oral spray versus a placebo. Overall, supplementation significantly improved participants vitamin D levels and importantly the trial found that the negative impact on quality of life maybe reduced through vitamin D supplementation.

BetterYou has joined forces with Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust to provide a simple, affordable and accurate home testing kit for everyone to take control of their own vitamin D requirements. Testing is carried out by City Assays, who use liquid chromatography mass spectrometry to measure the Vitamin D in the blood. A clear interpretation of the vitamin D level is then sent to the customer.

Customers are offered supplementation advice, along with a complimentary DLux daily vitamin D oral spray to help raise levels to adequate amounts.

By taking just one spray a day of one of our DLux oral sprays, vitamin D levels can be effectively managed and many health conditions and diseases associated with deficiency could be avoided. Andrew Thomas, founder and managing director at BetterYou.

Multiple clinical trials have found that oral vitamin sprays elevate serum vitamin D levels on average 50% faster than traditional tablets and capsules.

Researchers at Cardiff University, when testing BetterYous DLux vitamin D oral sprays, found that absorption within the mouth was far superior to the more traditional digestive route of tablets and capsules.

In addition, trials by both the National Technical University of Athens and the Swiss Research Centre Pharmabase found that vitamin D absorption via an oral spray was at least 50% faster and more effective than traditional tablets and capsules.

Dr Charles Heard, who lead the Cardiff University absorption trial, explains: The ultra-fast uptake is due to the very absorbent tissue within the mouth and the close proximity of a rich vein network. In some cases it is close to that of IV or intramuscular injections.

Source: Better You
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System report data suggesting that e-cigarettes are toxic to human airway cells, suppress immune defenses and alter inflammation, while at the same time boosting bacterial virulence. The mouse study is published January 25 by the Journal of Molecular Medicine.

"This study shows that e-cigarette vapor is not benign -- at high doses it can directly kill lung cells, which is frightening," said senior author Laura E. Crotty Alexander, MD, staff physician at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System and assistant clinical professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "We already knew that inhaling heated chemicals, including the e-liquid ingredients nicotine and propylene glycol, couldn't possibly be good for you. This work confirms that inhalation of e-cigarette vapor daily leads to changes in the inflammatory milieu inside the airways."

Crotty Alexander reported the preliminary results of this work at the American Thoracic Society annual meetings in 2014 and 2015. But now her team has also seen their findings hold up in mice. Inflammatory markers -- signs of full-body inflammation -- in the airways and blood of mice that inhaled e-cigarette vapors for one hour a day, five days a week, for four weeks were elevated by 10 percent compared to unexposed mice.

"We don't know specifically which lung and systemic diseases will be caused by the inflammatory changes induced by e-cigarette vapor inhalation, but based on clinical reports of acute toxicities and what we have found in the lab, we believe that they will cause disease in the end," Crotty Alexander said. "Some of the changes we have found in mice are also found in the airways and blood of conventional cigarette smokers, while others are found in humans with cancer or inflammatory lung diseases."

Conversely, bacterial pathogens exposed to e-cigarette vapor benefited. Specifically, Staphylococcus aureus bacteria were better able to form biofilms, adhere to and invade airway cells and resist human antimicrobial peptides after exposure to e-cigarette vapor.

E-cigarette vapor extract-exposed bacteria were also more virulent in a mouse model of pneumonia. All mice infected with normal methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant "superbug," survived. Meanwhile, 25 percent of mice infected with MRSA pre-exposed to e-cigarette vapor died.

The results were consistent with e-liquids from seven different manufacturers, demonstrating that the findings are not limited to one formula or brand.

Crotty Alexander and team also recently reported that MRSA bacteria exposed to conventional cigarette smoke are more resistant to killing by the immune system than unexposed bacteria.
Pune: The womens outfit spearheading the campaign against a centuries-old ban on female devotees entering the sacred platform at Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra on Wednesday brought their fight to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for lifting of the restrictions.

A day after police foiled the attempt by 400 women activists to barge into the famous temple in Ahmednagar district as part of their high-voltage stir, Bhoomata Brigade leader Trupti Desai met Fadnavis here and presented a memorandum of demands seeking his support to end gender bias and unrestricted entry to women at the temple and all other sacred places in the state.

The meeting with Fadnavis took place on the sidelines of a function here even as the Gram Sabha at the village where the shrine is located passed a resolution condemning Desai and her volunteers for attempts to storm the Chauthara (sacred platform). The plan was foiled when police stopped the marchers at Supa village, 70 km away from the shrine. The activists were released after being detained for a few hours.

At a meeting of the Gram Sabha of Shingnapur village, a resolution condemning Desai and her brigade was passed. Mr Fadnavis, who on Tuesday favoured a dialogue on the issue in the wake of a tense showdown, did not make any comment on the set of demands before leaving the venue. Ms Desai, however, told reporters that Mr Fadnavis favourably responded to the demand as he accepted the memorandum with a positive assurance. She also suggested he visit the temple along with his wife to

strengthen the womens cause. Over 400 women, mainly hailing from Pune, led by Ms Desai had launched a protest against the tradition of not allowing women at the inner platform (chauthara) of the temple where only men are permitted to make offerings to the deity (Shani).

Mr Fadnavis favoured a dialogue between temple authorities and activists to find a way out over the ban on entry of women into the inner sanctum of the shrine.
A recent study showed that medical provider training, new clinic policies and efforts to "taper" opioid use for pain treatment could significantly reduce the level of opioid medication that patients used -- a limited but positive step for a nation enmeshed in opioid use, abuse and overdose deaths.

The findings were made by researchers from the Oregon Health & Science University and Oregon State University, and published in the journal Substance Abuse. They offer some of the first evidence to show that systematic efforts actually do help constrain opioid prescriptions, while raising both doctor and patient awareness of the dangers involved.

Such help, experts say, is desperately needed, given that prescriptions of opioid medications in the U.S. have risen about 600 percent in the past two decades, and the number of people dying from either prescription or illegal drug overdoses now exceeds those killed in motor vehicle accidents. In Washington state, deaths from opioid-related overdose increased by 17 times from 1995 to 2008.

This research was done with 514 patients who had been prescribed long-term, chronic opioid therapy. In one group of patients prescribed high-dose opioids, it showed that proactive steps and opioid dosing policies helped 37 percent of the patients to taper their doses to what's considered a safer level, 120 milligrams per day of "morphine equivalent." In many cases dosages were reduced by almost half -- but the research also found that women had less success with the tapering approach.

"The approach used in this study showed progress, but not enough," said Dr. Melissa Weimer, an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. "We'd rather have a higher success rate. But in some cases we're dealing with a generation of patients who have been prescribed high-dose opioids for many years."

The problems, researchers said, began in the 1980s and 90s as one part of an effort to better manage pain, especially for chronic, non-cancer pain, from such health issues as neuropathy or lower back problems. At the time, some experts even advised that opioid medications were neither harmful nor addictive.

"This is now known to be an extremely serious problem," Weimer said. "We have a prescription opioid abuse epidemic in the U.S."

A primary goal of this research, which was some of the first of its type, was to find out if an aggressive program to educate doctors, patients, and promote safe tapering of opioid doses would work. The study was supported by the Society of General Internal Medicine.

The researchers found that tapering, backed by health system policies and educational programs, not only could reduce dosages, but that patients who took substantially lower doses did not report any higher levels of pain as a result. But the issue is not simple, the scientists said.

"Part of the problem with these issues is that the concern is not just opioids," said Daniel Hartung, an associate professor in the Oregon State University/ Oregon Health & Science University College of Pharmacy, and co-author on this study.

"Many of the patients who are taking long-term medications for pain management often have other issues as well, such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder or substance abuse," Hartung said. "They may be taking medications for those conditions, and sometimes these combinations can be dangerous."

A close collaboration and continued monitoring between doctors, pharmacists and patients would help to better address these concerns, Hartung said. Pharmacists who are often on the front line of patient drug use and management may need to play a stronger educational role and also be heavily involved in this issue, he said.

Among the other findings or observations made in the study:

Chronic non-cancer pain affects 20-50 percent of patients in primary care, and has been increasingly treated with opioid therapy despite little evidence to support its safety or efficacy.

Risk of opioid overdose and death increases when patients use more than 100 milligrams of morphine equivalents per day.

In this limited sample size, clinical outcomes of subjective pain and quality of life scores did not appear to be affected by the opioid dose limitation policy.

Female sex was the only significant predictor of less success with opioid tapering.

Patients with substance abuse disorders succeeded in tapering their opioid doses as well as other patients.

The length of time providers had been in practice was linked with greater prescribing of high-dose opioids.

While recognizing that the program helped, the researchers also noted that a year after policy adoption, only a minority of patients had successfully tapered their dosages below the policy threshold.

"Educational efforts and opioid dose-limitation policies may not be sufficient to decrease opioid misuse, addiction, or opioid-related mortality," the researchers wrote in their conclusion, "but they appear to be one step in the right direction."
Naturally occurring clay from British Columbia, Canada -- long used by the region's Heiltsuk First Nation for its healing potential -- exhibits potent antibacterial activity against multidrug-resistant pathogens, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.

The researchers recommend the rare mineral clay be studied as a clinical treatment for serious infections caused by ESKAPE strains of bacteria.

The so-called ESKAPE pathogens -- Enterococcus faecium, , Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species -- cause the majority of U.S. hospital infections and effectively 'escape' the effects of antibacterial drugs.

"Infections caused by ESKAPE bacteria are essentially untreatable and contribute to increasing mortality in hospitals," says UBC microbiologist Julian Davies, co-author of the paper published today in the American Society for Microbiology's mBio journal.

"After 50 years of over-using and misusing antibiotics, ancient medicinals and other natural mineral-based agents may provide new weapons in the battle against multidrug-resistant pathogens."

The clay deposit is situated on Heiltsuk First Nation's traditional territory, 400 kilometres (250 miles) north of Vancouver, Canada, in a shallow five-acre granite basin. The 400-million kilogram (400,000 tonne) deposit was formed near the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 10,000 years ago.

Local First Nations people have used the clay for centuries for its therapeutic properties -- anecdotal reports cite its effectiveness for ulcerative colitis, duodenal ulcer, arthritis, neuritis, phlebitis, skin irritation, and burns.

"We're fortunate to be able to partner with UBC on this significant research program" says Lawrence Lund, president of Kisameet Glacial Clay, a business formed to market cosmetic and medicinal products derived from the clay. "We hope it will lead to the development of a novel and safe antimicrobial that can be added to the diminished arsenal for the fight against the ESKAPE pathogens and other infection-related health issues plaguing the planet."

In the in vitro testing conducted by Davies and UBC researcher Shekooh Behroozian, clay suspended in water killed 16 strains of ESKAPE bacteria samples from sources including Vancouver General Hospital, St. Paul's Hospital, and the University of British Columbia's wastewater treatment pilot plant.

No toxic side effects have been reported in the human use of the clay, and the next stage in clinical evaluation would involve detailed clinical studies and toxicity testing. Loretta Li, with UBC's Department of Civil Engineering, is conducting mineralogical and chemical analyses of the clay as well. MITACS, Kisameet Glacial Clay Inc. and the Tally Fund supported the work.
Thailand today confirmed Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS CoV) disease in a traveler, the second such case in the country in the last seven months, as WHO cautioned other member states in its South-East Asia Region against the continuing risks and the need to remain vigilant.

The new case of MERS CoV is a reminder of the continued risk of importation of the disease from countries where it still persists. All countries need to further enhance surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections, focus on early diagnosis, and step up infection prevention and control procedures in health-care facilities to rapidly detect any case of importation and effectively prevent its spread, Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region, said.

A 71-year -old national from Oman, who arrived in Bangkok, Thailand for treatment on 22 January, and was admitted to a private hospital, tested positive for MERS CoV. He has since been transferred to the Bamrasnaradura Infectious Disease Institute. Measures are being taken to trace all those who could have been in his contact during his journey to Thailand, and within Bangkok.

This is the second MERS CoV case in Thailand and in the WHO South-East Asia Region. Earlier, on 18 June 2015 another Omani national who arrived in Bangkok for treatment, was tested positive for MERS CoV.

In the recent past, countries in the WHO South-East Asia Region have been reviewing and strengthening preparedness to respond to MERS CoV.

WHO has been strongly advocating for strengthening health systems and ensuring strict infection control measures are in place in countries to respond to infectious diseases such as MERS CoV.

In the Region, WHO is supporting Ministries of Health to build capacities and strengthen preparedness as required under the International Health Regulations (2005) to effectively detect and respond to outbreaks and other hazards.

MERS CoV is caused by a virus. Typical symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath. Pneumonia is common, but not always present. Gastrointestinal symptoms, including diarrhea, have also been reported.
Teens' experiences with violence -- either through fear of violence, observing violent events, or being victims of violence themselves -- are associated with how likely they are to have sex and use condoms, new research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests.

The findings of the Baltimore-based study could eventually lead to new ways to improve sexual health among this population. They will be presented at the International Conference on Family Planning in Nusa Dua, Indonesia.

Violence is a common experience among youth living across the United States, particularly in poor, urban communities. While a growing body of research links violence to poor sexual and reproductive health outcomes, these studies have primarily focused on violence within relationships, such as intimate partner violence or gender-based violence. Less is known about how violence at the community level might affect teens' sexual choices and, consequently, their sexual health, says Hannah Lantos, PhD, a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health and a research scientist at Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center.

"We need to help young people understand what's happening to them in terms of violent experiences in order to help them feel empowered to make healthy choices about sex, sexual partners and condom use," says Lantos, who will present the findings from her study. "A first priority in these neighborhoods is to reduce the high levels of violence that adolescents fear and experience. However, if we cannot put a stop to violence in these neighborhoods, helping young people process these experiences and learn coping skills may have a broader impact on their behavior."

Lantos gathered data from the Well-Being of Adolescents in Vulnerable Environments (WAVE) study, a project run jointly by Hopkins' Center for Adolescent Health, its Urban Health Institute and the drug maker Astrazeneca. Started in 2011, WAVE collected information from young people in five study sites (Baltimore; Johannesburg, South Africa; Shanghai, China; Delhi, India; and Ibadan, Nigeria) to further the health of teens in low-income communities around the world.

Lantos used data from 426 participants between the ages of 15 and 19 (245 male and 181 female), who took a 30-minute computer survey at Johns Hopkins. These participants, all from East Baltimore neighborhoods, answered a series of questions asking about their experience with violence in their communities. These questions focused on the participants' fear of violence, observations of violence or whether they'd been victims of violence themselves. In addition, the teens also answered questions about whether they'd had sex in the past year and whether they'd used a condom the last time they'd had sex.

Results showed that the teens' experience with violence and sex differed between males and females. While 71 percent of the female participants reported fear of violence, only 41 percent of the male participants did. Females were also about 7 percentage points more likely to report observing violence, though males and females were equally likely to have been victims of violence.

Males were about 10 percentage points more likely to report having sexual intercourse in the past year, and condom use was about the same between the two genders. For the female participants, all three experiences of violence increased the odds of having sex in the past year. Fear increased the likelihood that females engaged in sex by 40 percent, females who observed violence were 3.5 times as likely to engage in sexual activity, and being a victim of violence more than tripled it.

For the male participants, victimization wasn't associated with sexual activity, but fear cut the odds of engaging in sex by more than 50 percent. Observation of violence more than doubled the likelihood of sexual activity for males.

Condom use also differed by gender. For females, experiencing fear was associated with a 70 percent reduction in condom use the last time they engaged in sexual activity, while for males observing violence cut the likelihood that they used a condom the last time they engaged in sexual activity by half.

Though the study was unable to ascertain why violence was linked with sexual behavior or why it might differ by gender, Lantos suggests that showing that this link exists could eventually help researchers develop interventions that could help protect teens against the negative effects of violence while also assisting them in making decisions to improve their sexual health.

Lantos will present "Experiences of Community Level Violence and Sexual Risk Behaviors in Baltimore" at 4:20 p.m. local time on Tuesday, Jan. 26 in Legian 5 at the Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center.
In the Pacific Islands, many children dont have enough safe water to drink and their education has been interrupted as result of the severe, ongoing El Nino. Meanwhile, children in DPR Korea are struggling to recover from drought, and children in Myanmar are trapped in ongoing internal conflicts. These are just some of the children in the region caught in a series of conflicts and natural disasters, who need urgent help to survive.

UNICEF is today launching a US $2.8 billion appeal to reach 43 million children in humanitarian emergencies worldwide. For the first time ever, the largest portion of the appeal  25 per cent  is going towards educating children in emergencies. This year UNICEF plans to dramatically increase the number of children in crises who are given access to education  from 4.9 million at the beginning of 2015 to 8.2 million in 2016. More than half - 5 million  will be Syrian children inside the country or in neighbouring countries.

In East Asia and the Pacific, UNICEF is appealing for US $62 million to meet the needs of children in crisis.

Climate change, deforestation and the worsening El Nino weather system are pointing to more frequent and intense disasters in 2016, impacting a larger number of children in East Asia and the Pacific, UNICEF Regional Emergency Advisor Carmen van Heese said. UNICEF remains vigilant to respond to disasters, while also investing in preparedness to avoid unnecessary suffering and keep up with the increasing risks for children in one of the most hazard-prone regions of the world.

Impact of El Nino in the Pacific Islands

Across the region, El Nino has been causing more intense droughts, typhoons and floods, with Pacific islands taking the brunt. Drought warnings or alerts are in force for Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, Vanuatu and Palau. Children and families are struggling to cope with one of the worst El Nino cycles ever recorded, with more frequent and intense cyclones expected in 2016.

Children in Pacific Island countries face a high risk of malnutrition due to drought, crop failure, water shortages and poor sanitation. Some schools are experiencing low attendance rates due to water shortages. Children are hungry and dehydrated.

UNICEF is calling for $5 million to provide nutrition, health, water and sanitation, education and child protection services in Pacific Island countries. This will help prevent and treat malnutrition, prevent disease outbreaks, and keep children in school.

Over 2.3 million people, including 1.4 million children, are at risk from water shortages, food insecurity and disease due to El Nino and extreme weather events, UNICEF Pacific Deputy Representative Isabelle Austin said. We need to ensure that children can access safe, clean drinking water, and that schools are able to stay open without interruptions to childrens education.

Children affected by drought in DPR Korea

In DPR Korea, severe drought conditions in four agricultural provinces in 2015 affected overall food production, leading to reduced access to clean water and a reduction in crop production compared with 2014. The impact of this will continue into 2016. Cereal rations were reduced, impacting the nutritional and health status of women and children.

In drought-affected provinces, there has been a 72 per cent increase in diarrhoea among children under 5 years, a leading cause of malnutrition and death. There are currently 25,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition who require immediate treatment.

UNICEF is calling for $18 million to meet the needs of children in DPR Korea, including $8.5 million for nutrition, $5 million for water and sanitation, and $4.5 million for health. This includes funds for life-saving medication, immunization, prevention and treatment of diarrhoea and pneumonia, therapeutic food, and access to safe drinking water.

Conflict in Myanmar and the Philippines

In Myanmar, UNICEF is appealing for $25 million to respond to ongoing and unresolved conflicts in Kachin and northern Shan and inter-communal violence in Rakhine. Thousands of new displacements and limited access are impacting the humanitarian response. More than 240,000 people remain displaced in Rakhine, Kachin and northern Shan, and a further 308,000 lack access to essential services.

In the Philippines, UNICEF is appealing for $10 million to respond to conflict in the southern province of Mindanao, which remains unstable with more than 360,000 people displaced in 2015. Around 55 per cent of displaced people are children. In addition to conflict and insecurity, the Philippines is prone to natural hazards, including typhoons, earthquake and volcanoes, with typhoons expended to worsen in 2016 due to El Nino.
Suriya 42 To Be Shot In Chennai, Puducherry From Oct 26; All You Need To Know
Brussels, Belgium: An appeals court in Belgium's northern port city of Antwerp upheld Wednesday a 12-year jail term and fine of 30,000 euros ($33,000) for the leader of an Islamist group that sent jihadists to Syria.



Fouad Belkacem, 33, the chief of the Sharia4Belgium group who is serving his sentence in Belgium, was convicted in Antwerp in February last year of radicalising, recruiting and dispatching young men to wage holy war.



The appeals court in Antwerp also upheld jail terms of 12 years and fines of 30,000 euros for two other Sharia4Belgium leaders, Said M'nari and Houssein Elouassaki, the Belga news agency reported.

The court also confirmed a jail term of four years and a fine of 15,000 euros for Mohamed El Youssoufi, a member of the group.



It was not immediately clear if the three others were among the 37 who were tried in their absence.



Sharia4Belgium rose to prominence in 2010 after a protest against a proposed ban on wearing the full-face Islamic burqa in public.



It found fertile ground for recruitment in Antwerp, Belgium's second biggest city, which has a large Muslim community, mainly from Turkey and Morocco, as well as one of Europe's biggest Jewish Orthodox communities.



Belkacem, a hardline ideologue known for his virulent street sermons and online videos, was the leading figure in persuading young Belgians to fight holy war in Syria.



He had already been convicted in 2012 for incitement of hate against non-Muslims, and was portrayed by the others on trial as the spiritual leader of the group.



The main members of the Sharia4Belgium group were arrested during a police dragnet in April 2013.



Forty-six members of the group originally faced charges of belonging to a terrorist organisation, but only eight were actually present during the five-month trial that ended February 11, with one deemed medically unfit to stand trial.



The rest were believed to be either still in Syria, or dead.



The 37 were sentenced in their absence to between five years and 15 years in jail.



Belgium is the European country that has produced the most jihadist fighters relative to its population size, with some 500 believed to have gone to fight in the Middle East.
Serena Williams waves to the crowd after losing her quarter-final match 6-3, 5-7, 4-6 against Sloane Stephens of the United States of America. (Getty Images)
The Head Teacher of Skerne Park Academy, Darlington, Durham, made the appeal after she noticed more and more adults wearing pyjamas at the school gates as well as at meetings and assemblies. She said her aim was to help set a good example for pupils. (Photo: AP, Representational Image)

London: In an unusual appeal, a primary school in the UK has asked parents to wash in the morning and stop dropping their children off in their pyjamas.

Kate Chisholm, the Head Teacher of Skerne Park Academy, Darlington, Durham, made the appeal after she noticed more and more adults wearing pyjamas at the school gates as well as at meetings and assemblies. She said her aim was to help set a good example for pupils.

Chisholm said the final straw came when parents wore pyjamas to the Christmas show and to recent parents' evenings. "It just got to the point when I thought 'enough's enough'," she was quoted as saying by BBC.

"I'm not trying to tell people what to do with their lives, but I just think having a really good role model first thing in the morning, getting yourself up, getting yourself dressed, ready for business, out to school is a really good example to set," she said.

"I'm afraid wearing pyjamas, going to school, maybe doesn't reinforce that somehow," she added.

In her letter, Chisholm wrote: "If we're to raise standards it's not too much to ask parents to have a wash and get dressed. I have had loads of support from the community and people saying it's about time something was done. I have had far more positive responses than negative."

Parent Phil Naylor said wearing nightwear to school was "disgraceful".

Naylor said Chisholm had his support, "It's disgraceful, we should be guiding our children not giving them bad habits." Skerne Park Academy is not the first school to have problems with dishevelled parents. In 2011, 11 schools across Middlesbrough wrote to parents, asking them to dress appropriately for the school run.
Forbes India has come up with its list of top 100 celebrities in India. Shah Rukh Khan has topped the list with an earning of Rs 202.80 crore between September 2011 and October 2012.
Before you plant an apple tree, you need to know what you will do with the apples. Do you want them for snacks, pies or cider? What kinds suit your palate?

These are the first questions to consider when thinking about planting an orchard, large or small, according to Tom Burford, who has designed orchards all over the country and occasionally overseas.

Burford, known as Professor Apple, spoke about designing an orchard last week at a free workshop offered by the Lynchburg Tree Stewards.

At 80, Burford still is gallivanting around the world in search of new varieties and techniques for creating the perfect apple or orchard.

Apples are not native to the U.S. but early settlers planted apple seeds that produced a different tree from each seed. Apples have to be grafted to produce consistent fruit.

The world now boasts 16,000 varieties of apples. They got their start in Kazakhstan, where the fruit ranges from the size or your little fingernail to a softball and some giant trees are 300 years old. Alas, acid rain from the Danube Valley is destroying these ancient orchards, and the race is on to preserve them.

To start an orchard, Burford advises planting a handful of trees to prepare for a lifetime learning experience. For perfect fruit, you have to spray, but imperfect apples can make great cider.

Burford is helping revitalize the cider industry. From 2013 to 2014, the Virginia apple industry grew by 300 percent, resulting in $1.4 million in tax revenue. Its a good time to think about planting apples.

To decide what to grow, you should not only taste a lot of apples, you should consider a varietys disease resistance.

Finding the right spot to plant is important. Trees that get morning sun on a slope are less likely to develop fungus in our humid climate. Trees should be planted in a hole half-filled with compost with the proper pH, about 6.5. Trees must be fenced to keep out deer and other varmints.

Learning to prune apples correctly is critical to having a healthy tree. To learn more about pruning and grafting, check for upcoming workshops at albemarleciderworks.com.

Honeybees are crucial for fruit production so you have to be sure not to spray trees in bloom.

People want blemish-free fruit for the wrong reason, Burford said. The right reason is that unblemished apples store longer. Apples should be kept at 35 degrees in the main part of the refrigerator in a plastic bag with holes. In the crisper, apple off-gassing will change the taste of surrounding produce.

Of course, you may want other fruits, berries and nuts in your orchard. While peaches and apricots are difficult to grow in the mid-Atlantic, Burford said pawpaws are all the rage. If you want to plant nut trees, they need lots of space. Mulberry trees and elderberry bushes also are great, but often overlooked, fruit producers.

Whether you plant a pecan or an apple tree, you are making a tasty investment for future generations.
Hot-button political issues provided fertile territory for moral dilemmas as students from Randolph, Lynchburg and Sweet Briar colleges discussed doing the right thing during an ethics bowl held before an audience at Lynchburg College on Tuesday night.

The Lynchburg, Sweet Briar, and Randolph Ethics Bowl teams are preparing for the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges Ethics Bowl contest Jan. 31 and Feb. 1. The theme Ethics and Civic Responsibility also served as the theme of the exhibition debate Tuesday night.

In one of the scenarios presented, Inez, a fictional clerk at a low-cost womens health clinic in Houston, is torn apart when she realizes that a familiar patient, Blanca, has presented a fake identification card. Representatives from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently came to the clinic and asked them to report anyone they believe does not have a legal right to be in the United States and keep them until ICE can detain them.

Members of Lynchburg Colleges Team A and Randolph Colleges sole team faced off on that scenario.

Team members had just a handful of minutes to confer before presenting what they felt Inez should do, based upon ethical principles and terms.

Both teams said Inez should not report Blanca, arguing other ethical considerations trumped following government orders in this situation.

Members of the Lynchburg College team argued two points. Most importantly, they said, reporting Blanca would make other women afraid to use the clinic as word of her detainment spread, preventing them from getting needed health services. They also pointed out Blanca has her two children with her in the waiting room.

Randolphs team argued Inez should not report Blanca based on respecting her rights as an individual.

There are other avenues for ICE to pursue.  All people deserve a right to healthcare. That should be the norm, Randolph College student Tahan Menon said.

Sweet Briar coach and philosophy professor Heidi Samuelson said she is new to the school this year, but was happy to help the Sweet Briar students revive their ethics bowl team this year.

She said she loves talking about ethics with students.

Thats why I teach philosophy, Samuelson said. Its because it can apply to real-life situations and thats something that gets lost sometimes I think.
The fake passports are now so sophisticated that it is almost impossible to distinguish between genuine refugees and terror suspects (Photo: AP)

London: The dreaded Islamic State terror group is exploiting the refugee crisis to smuggle its members into Europe to create sleeper cells, British intelligence agencies have warned.

The suspected terrorists are mainly travelling on fake Syrian or Iraqi passports which are now so sophisticated that it is almost impossible to distinguish between genuine refugees and terror suspects, the Telegraph reported.

Citing security officials, the paper said it also means suspects who were under watch by the intelligence agencies suddenly vanish.

"Islamic State is skilfully exploiting the migrant crisis to smuggle terror cells from Syria into major European countries such as the UK," a top intelligence official said.

"Jihadists travel to Raqqa (Syria) to meet up with ISIL commanders, where they receive training and new passports. They then make their way back to Europe posing as migrants with new identities, making it virtually impossible for security officials to detect potential terrorists among those fleeing persecution," the British official said.

The House of Commons home affairs select committee (HASC) is examining the issue of fake passports being used by suspected terrorists to gain entry into the UK.

"It is deeply concerning that the migration crisis may be being used as cover for terrorists seeking to commit violent acts in Europe," Indian-origin MP and chair of the committee Keith Vaz said.

"The HASC has heard evidence from the Greek ambassador, who made it clear that Greece does not have the required technology to identify fake Syrian passports.

"It is vital for our national security that the UK, and EU as a whole, provides resources to secure the external border to prevent future atrocities like the attacks in Paris last year, and ensure international databases are up to date.

"The external border of the UK is now the front line in the fight against terrorism," Vaz added.

The European Union police agency Europol had earlier warned that ISIS is plotting "Mumbai-style" terrorist attacks directed at soft targets such as public places in Europe.

The Europol warning came as the ISIS released a strongly defiant new beheading video, showing the nine 'Paris attackers' and threatening an attack on the UK.

The latest disclosures will intensify pressure on the UK government ahead of the EU referendum, expected later this year to decide whether Britain should withdraw from the EU.

Eurosceptics are of the view that the only way of ensuring that terrorists are not able to travel to the UK would be by withdrawing from the EU and imposing much stricter border regulations.

At least two of the terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris last November had entered Europe on fake Syrian passports. It was also feared their ringleader, Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was able to return from Syria hiding among the thousands of refugees.
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NOT MY BOYS

Rita Garcia, mother of accused Keida Garcia and Jamile WASA Garcia, was the sole witness for the defence. She was called as a witness by her son Keida, but denied doing so with a bias to save her boys, insisting instead, she came to, speak the truth. On trial are Shervon Buffy Peters; the Garcia brothers, Marlon Mad Man Marlon Trimmingham; Earl Bobo Trimmingham; Ronald 22 Armstrong; Antonio Hedges Charles; Lyndon Iron James; Devon Blackboy Peters and Anthony Dwayne Gloster, also called Anthony Peters. Garcia said she recalled the morning of a police search. She said a number of police officers were at the back of her house. She said four male officers went straight to Keidas room while a female officer stayed with her and said they needed her present during the search. The cupboards of her sons room were searched and a mattress on the bunk bed in the room was removed during the search. Both Keida and Antonio Charles  another accused in the case  were in the room at the time of the search, she testified. According to evidence presented earlier in the trial, both Keida Garcia and Charles, who was found at the house during the raid, were arrested and charged for having an illegal gun, which was eventually linked to spent shells found at the scene of Naipaul-Coolmans kidnapping In continuing her evidence, Garcia said after Keidas room and others in the house were searched, all that was found was a Marvin  in reference to a Marvin Gaye knitted skull cap. She said there were two police officers  Hunte and Penny  outside the house. The officers were not part of the search, she said.

Hunte later informed her that the search was over and she could go ahead. She enquired about Antonio and Keida and was told by Hunte the officers were just taking them to a van to be questioned.

Garcia said they walked down the steps approaching the front gate.

Keida and Antonio were in front; she was behind them and Hunte was behind her. It was at this point, Garcia testified, that she realised officer Penny was not with them and then heard him call out to Hunte, who told him to, put it back where you got it. It puzzle me a bit, she admitted.

Garcia insisted at no point that morning was she taken back to Keidas room and only saw a gun when it was produced as an exhibit at the magistrates court. Defence attorneys at the trial have maintained the gun was planted by police as part of a conspiracy to frame their clients. During cross-examination by co-lead counsel for the prosecution, Israel Khan SC, Garcia was asked by Khan to deny that Lyndon Iron James  one of the men on trial  shot Naipaul-Coolman on a pool table in the black album in the presence of the other accused men.

Khan: You cannot deny Iron shot Vindra Naipaul-Coolman on a pool table in the black album in the presence of these other men.

Garcia: I could deny it because my house is a track away. I would have heard a gunshot and if they shoot a woman in there they needed to pick up everybody (in the community) because obviously we would have known.

Khan: You cant deny that a power saw was used to cut up Naipaul- Coolmans body.

Garcia: I could deny that...that house have no electricity.

She also said she heard the sound of a power saw before and, it makes noise. Garcia also said she could deny that Marlon Trimmingham had a part to play in chopping up Naipaul-Coolman since he was hardly around and was mostly out hunting. She also said she could deny Raphael Williams  another who was charged but died in prison  cut off Naipaul-Coolmans head and gutted her.

Garcia: I could deny that. You ever saw Raphael? She insisted she would have personally known if any of those acts took place at the red brick house. Garcia testified that brothers Shervon Peters, Devon Peters and Dwayne Gloster didnt live at the red brick house and while her sons would go there they did not frequent it. She did not see them at that house between December 19 and 28, 2006, when it was alleged Naipaul-Coolman was abducted and killed. With no other witnesses to be called for the defence, the next step in the trial will be for attorneys representing the accused to address the jury, if they so chose, after which the prosecution will follow. Before that step is to take place, presiding judge, Justice Malcolm Holdip informed jurors there were legal issues to be settled and asked that they return to court on February 1.
Canadian Govt to invest $M

This initiative was aimed to strengthen the statistical system of the Caribbean in order to improve socio- economic measure and support evidence- based policy making. On the first day of a three-day regional seminar on the Fundamental Role of Administrative Data in Official Statistics, hosted by the CSO at Hilton Trinidad, yesterday, it was revealed that the project would be conducted over seven years, from April 2015 to March 2022.

Through PRASC, Statistics Canada worked with National Statistical Offices (NSOs) of the 14 participating countries to develop methods and approaches that could eventually be used by the statistical system of all Caribbean countries.

CSO director Sean OBrien said they had been mandated to make the transformation to ensure that National Statistical Offices (NSOs) had a high measure of independence.

He said the NSI would be removed from Central Government which would make it more autonomous.

He said the United Nations fundamental principles with official statistics advocated that the NSO should be the supervisor of the National Statistical System (NSS).

Independence must not just be present, but it must be seen to be present. Many persons outside the area of statistics would not really understand the difference between the NSO and the NSS, but NSO can produce official statistics as they need to without the help of the rest of the NSS.

We cannot produce health statistics outside the Health Ministry.

We cannot produce education statistics without the cooperation of the Education Ministry. The fact of the matter is, many of the Satellite Statistical Agencies outside of the NSO need some sort of statistical mentoring, OBrien said. He said statistical capacity building did not happen by happenstance, and there was no serendipity in statistical capacity building.

Someone has to be there to maintain the standard to ensure compliance for a national statistical standard, he said. OBrien said at present the CSO in TT was not in an ideal position so as to fulfill the role of the supervisor of the NSS, thereby the new NSI in TT would be empowered to go into the national ministries and ensure compliance with the UN Fundamental principles with official statistics. He said this would ensure compliance with international practices and compliance with good statistical practice.

I do not know if you all believe in divine intervention, but PRASC is here at a time when we need them the most.

We need statistical capacity building at this point in our history more than we ever did before because in the context of TT, we do not want the change from the CSO to the NSI to be cosmetic.

We do not want it to be merely a change in name, we want it to move from an organisation at one level to one at a much higher level. To enable this we need statistical capacity building-- enter PRASC, OBrien said.
Turkey had been Russia's number one foreign tourism destination for years but this came to an abrupt end following the shooting down of a Russian military plane by Turkish jets (Photo: Instagram/turkey_home)

Moscow: Russia's federal tourism agency on Wednesday issued a warning that Islamic State jihadists were planning to abduct Russian citizens in Turkey.

"According to the competent agencies, leaders of the IS terrorist group plan to take hostages from among Russian citizens in Turkey," it said in a statement.

"Hostages can be transferred on to territories controlled by militants to hold public executions and to be used as human shields in combat with Syrian government and coalition forces," it added.

Therefore we draw the attention of all independent tourists departing for Turkey to the necessity of taking all possible measures to ensure personal security."

Turkey had been Russia's number one foreign tourism destination for years but this came to an abrupt end following the shooting down of a Russian military plane by Turkish jets on the Syria-Turkey border in November.

The warning essentially targets all remaining Russian tourists in Turkey, as organised tours by travel agencies were banned by Moscow as part of a raft of retaliatory measures in the wake of the jet downing.

The incident sparked a crisis in relations between Moscow and Ankara, with the Kremlin accusing the Turkish leadership of essentially funding Islamic State jihadists.

Russia reintroduced entry visas for Turks and slapped sanctions on several Turkish products.

Russia has been conducting air strikes in Syria, its ally in the region since Soviet times, since September. Turkey meanwhile is part of a parallel US-led coalition targeting IS in the country.

The two countries have lately also clashed over the guest list for Syria peace talks set for later this week, with Moscow saying they would be pointless without Syrian Kurdish group the Democratic Union Party, which Ankara considers is linked to Kurdish rebels inside Turkey.

Turkish authorities have blamed IS for a suicide bombing in the heart of Istanbul's tourist district earlier this month that killed 10 Germans, one of a string of deadly attacks said to be the work of the jihadist group.
TT needs public dialogue

Long said there needs to be discussion on how the country trains; what is our insurance policy as a country and pension reform. He said the TTEITI is planning to include the countrys mining sector in its 2014 and 2015 report, which will be compiled into one report. He said the TTEITI had already hosted several capacity building workshops with the local mining sector on sustainable mining practices, rehabilitation and corporate governance as well as international auditing standards.

However, he said there were some challenges involved in including the sector, but the TTEITI is aware of some of the issues which include a royalty payment shortfall; a need for sustainable mining practices; policy and the sectors regulation framework needs to be revised. He said that only in June last year there were changes to the Minerals Sector Regulation. He said the TTEITI could learn from the experience of other countries such as Mongolia, Liberia, Nigeria and Peru which report extensively on their mining sectors as well as Norway; Liberia and Tanzania which codify their EITI in laws. Long said a draft EITI Bill, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, is being studied by the Minister of Energy and Energy Resources and the Permanent Secretary in the ministry. He said it has already passed through the vetting process by the ministrys legal team. He said among the next steps for the TTEITI is to develop the countrys first Beneficial Ownership Register which would identify the person who ultimately owns, or controls a business or the person on whose behalf a transaction is being conducted. He said this should be published very shortly
The Hit That Killed Mobster

Was Ordered by His Own Son
The study is published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Cape Town: Growing up with lots of siblings has its downsides as a recent study suggests that having lots of brothers and sisters means that you are at greater risk of behavioral problems and falling behind at school.

According the University of Houston study, families face a substantial quantity-quality trade-off: increases in family size decrease parental investment, decrease childhood performance on cognitive tests and measures of social behaviour, You magazine reported.

The research further claims that these negative effects are not merely temporary disruptions following a birth but in fact persist throughout childhood.

Co-author Dr Chinhui Juhn said that a lot of what happens in early childhood has lasting impacts and in many respects, this matters more than a lot of things that happen later in (a child's) life.

In conclusion, it seemed that children from large families with financial difficulties suffered the most.

The study is published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
(Newser)  A concerned neighbor may have saved the life of a woman suffering from hypothermia and living in her car during last weekend's massive snow storm in Maryland, the AP reports. According to WJLA, the woman was trapped inside her car when it was buried by snow Friday, and she wasn't freed until Monday. The area had received about 20 inches of snow in that time, Fox 5 reports. Neighbor Stephen Mackey tells the AP the unnamed woman bought a house on the block but was living in her car because the house was condemned. She refused help prior to the storm and decided to "ride out the weekend blizzard" inside her vehicle. "My wife and I had some major concerns about her well-being," Mackey says.

By Monday, Mackey was concerned enough to call the authorities, the AP reports. Soldiers from the Maryland National Guard used a Humvee to get emergency responders to the woman. According to WJLA, the car was located on a side street that hadn't been plowed yet. The woman had run out of gas sometime during the weekend, leaving her with only blankets to keep warm, Fox reports. According to the AP, the woman initially resisted rescue. She was conscious and uninjured when eventually transported to the hospital, WJLA reports. According to the AP, she received treatment for hypothermia at the hospital. (Read more uplifting news stories.)
(Newser)  Donald Trump on Tuesday bowed out of the final Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses, saying Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly is "a lightweight." With 48 hours to go before the faceoff, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski confirmed Trump's decision Tuesday evening after a press conference in which Trump lashed out at Kelly and said she'd been "toying" with him. "He will not be participating in the Fox News debate Thursday," Lewandowski said after the press conference. Earlier, Trump tweeted that Fox News would sooner dump Kelly than slog through a Trump-less debate, but the network quickly rejected that idea.

"Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her," the Washington Post quotes Fox News CEO Roger Ailes as saying. "She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night." Trump has been upset with Kelly ever since the first Fox debate when she asked him about remarks he's made about women. "Megyn Kelly's really biased against me," Trump said in an Instagram video. "She knows that, I know that, everybody knows that. Do you really think she can be fair at a debate?" Kelly has declined to engage with Trump publicly since the debate. (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
(Newser)  Authorities say an Indianapolis elementary school principal was killed and two of her students were seriously injured when a bus suddenly lurched forward and struck them in front of the school on Tuesday, the AP reports. Indianapolis Fire Department Capt. Rita Reith says buses were lined up outside the school when the accident happened. She says the bus went over a curb and struck the principal and two 10-year-old children. The children were hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries, according to Reith.

The victim was identified as Susan Jordan, principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School. Lawrence Township Schools superintendent Shawn Smith says the district "lost a great educator." Reith says the bus driver and 25 students on the bus weren't injured. She said the driver was being interviewed. (Read more Indiana stories.)
(Newser)  Concepcion Picciotto's fellow activists hope that after 35 years protesting outside the White House, she has finally found peace. Picciotto began her anti-nuclear-proliferation vigil on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1981, and it's believed to be the longest-running protest in American history, reports NPR. All these years, Picciotto has either staffed the 24-hour vigil herself or made sure others did in her place. Picciotto, who moved to the US from Spain in 1960, died on Monday at a facility for homeless women within walking distance of her protest site. Recently, she'd been too frail to attend for more than a few hours a day, the Washington Post reports. She was around 80 years old.

Picciotto, who displayed hand-lettered signs with messages like "Live by the bomb, die by the bomb," protested alongside two fellow activists in the Proposition One group for many years. Protester Ellen Thomas tells the Post that while there were concerns about Picciotto's mental healthshe believed she was the target of government conspiraciesher dedication to the cause was never in doubt. In 2013, when ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked her why she had kept up the vigil for so many years, she said, "Because nobody will do it. Nobody will stand up." (That same year, Picciotto's vigil was dismantled by US Park Police, but quickly put back by protesters.)
(Newser)  Occupation over? Eight people were arrested after an anti-government protester was shot dead Tuesday evening, and it's no longer clear whoif anybodyis now leading the occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge. The man killed after FBI and state police stopped vehicles on Highway 395 has been identified as Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, 55, a spokesman for the occupation and one of its most visible members, the Oregonian reports. "He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved," one of the Arizona rancher's 11 children tells the paper. In other developments:



The FBI and Oregon State Police say group leader Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan were among five people arrested after the highway incident, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. Two men were arrested in the nearby town of Burns, and another suspect was arrested in Arizona.

Authorities say Ryan Bundy, 43, suffered a gunshot wound during the incident and was treated in a hospital before being released to FBI custody.

It isn't clear how many people remain at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which the protesters seized in early January. Bundy supporter Brand Thornton says he left on Monday. "The entire leadership is gone," he tells the AP. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

There are conflicting accounts of the highway shooting. Nevada lawmaker Michele Fiore says Ammon Bundy called his wife and told her that Finicum was cooperating with authorities when he was shot, but sources tell the Oregonian that he resisted arrest and ignored an order to surrender.

Raw Story reports that one of the two men arrested in Arizona is Jon Ritzheimer, another high-profile occupier. In a Facebook post, he says he came home to see his daughters before turning himself in, and he asks for donations to help with legal fees.

The FBI says all eight people arrested will face a federal felony charge of "conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threat," per the AP.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement. "I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender."

One occupier still at the refuge tells the New York Times that the plan now is to wait for sunlight "and see what's up." Jason Patrick says the mood is "prepared but calm," but he believes the FBI is "hellbent on war." "They said 'peaceful resolution,' but now there is a dead cowboy," he says.

(Read more Ammon Bundy stories.)
(Newser)  After Donald Trump announced his intention to skip Thursday's GOP debate, a gleeful Ted Cruz offered to debate him somewhere where Fox host Megyn Kelly wouldn't frighten him. "We'll do 90 minutes, Lincoln-Douglas, mano a mano, Donald and me," Cruz told a Tuesday night rally in Iowa, per NBC News, calling Trump a "fragile soul." Cruz later told radio host Mark Levin that he would like Trump to "explain to the American people and to the people of Iowa how he is prepared to be commander in chief if he's terrified by a television host," warning that Vladimir Putin is a lot scarier than Kelly. The Hill reports that on his website, Cruz has started a petition asking "Ducking Donald" to debate him.

On Kelly's show Tuesday night, Michael Moore decided to talk about Trump instead of his new movie Where to Invade Next, Mediaite reports. He praised Kelly for causing a "crisis upstairs" and told her: "You have done something that Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rubio, Cruz, none of them have been able to do, which is to essentially frighten him, make him run, shut him down." Fox, meanwhile, issued a statement saying Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had threatened Kelly by telling a Fox exec that she was in for a "rough couple of days" if she moderated the debate, Politico reports. The network said it won't cave in to "terrorizations"but Trump "is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly." (Kelly says Trump once tried to "woo" her.)
(Newser)  From President Obama to Justice Obama? It could happen. Hillary Clinton says she would consider appointing Obama to the Supreme Court should she take his place in the Oval Office. Clinton looked pleased and a little surprised when a man at a campaign event in Deocorah, Iowa, asked her about the possibility on Tuesday. "Wow, what a great idea. No one has ever suggested that to me, I love that, wow," Clinton told a crowd of 450, noting the next president could appoint up to three justices, per ABC News. "I would certainly take that under advisement."

"I mean he's brilliant, and he can set forth an argument, and he was a law professor, so he's got all the credentials, but we would have to get a Democratic Senate to get him confirmed," Clinton added, per the Washington Post. Whether Obama himself is interested is another story. "I think being a justice is a little bit too monastic for me," he said in a 2014 interview with the New Yorker. "Particularly after having spent six years and what will be eight years in this bubble, I think I need to get outside a little bit more." He added, "I love teaching. I miss the classroom and engaging with students." (Read more Hillary Clinton stories.)
(Newser)  In all of Israeli history, only one man has been sentenced to death by a civilian court and then executed: Adolf Eichmann. On Wednesday, the country released the Nazi's handwritten plea for clemency, penned two days before he was hanged. The AFP reports the release coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and quotes, along with the BBC and Ynetnews, from the May 29, 1962, letter, in which Eichmann tries to make the case that he was merely following orders when he implemented the "Final Solution":

"[The judges] made a fundamental mistake in that they are not able to empathize with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years.

There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.

Had I been, as the judges assume, the fanatical driving force in the persecution of the Jews, this should have been reflected in a promotion and other rewards, but I was never granted any benefit.

I am not able to recognize the courts ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honor Mr. President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out."

The Times of Israel reports that Eichmannwho fled a POW camp after the war, made his way to Argentina, and was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence agents in 1960was cremated hours after his May 31 hanging; his ashes were spread in the Mediterranean Sea. Wednesday's release includes related documents, including President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi's rejection of the request; the letter Eichmanns wife, Vera, wrote to Ben-Zvi; and chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner's moving handwritten opening statement that referenced the "six million accusers" with him who "are now only ashes." (The dark details of France's WWII Vichy regime were exposed last month.)
(Newser)  Austrian authorities are investigating the death of an American woman found Tuesday in her apartment in Vienna. The 25-year-old from Colorado, whose name has not been released, was working as a nanny while studying in the country, reports NBC News. The Local adds she had been there for about three years.

The AP reports she was found half-naked on a mattress in the bedroom next to a "considerable amount of blood" after she failed to show up for a meeting with her employer on Monday. "We are still awaiting the final autopsy report, but are presently treating this as a homicide case," says police rep Thomas Keiblinger. The Local cites detectives as saying no external injuries were noted; Keiblinger adds the blood could signal an internal injury. (Read more Austria stories.)
(Newser)  "Affluenza" teen Ethan Couch has dropped an appeal against deportation and will return to Texas to face charges in the coming days, said his Mexican lawyer Tuesday. "I gave him several options, but he decided to go to Texas to face whatever charges he faces," said attorney Fernando Benitez, adding that Couch formally ratified his decision to drop the appeal on Monday. The appeal had led to a court injunction against Mexico's original decision to deport Couch, reports the AP. Since then, he has been held at an immigration detention center on the outskirts of Mexico City. Benitez expected a judge to close the case Tuesday, noting that would clear the way for Couch to return to Texas.

"Once the injunction is removed, they will deport Ethan in 24 or 48 hours," said Benitez, who put it succinctly in an email to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "Should be sent back ASAP." He said Couch had decided not to continue with the constitutional appeal after "he reviewed the basis of the appeal in Mexico," and because "it was in his interest" to do so. Upon his return to Texas, Couch will be held in a juvenile detention center. A juvenile judge will hold a hearing to decide whether to continue to hold him there, book him into an adult jail, or let him go, said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson. A separate hearing is scheduled for Feb. 19 to determine whether Couch's case will be transferred to the adult system. (Read more affluenza stories.)
(Newser)  A car that's been stuck in the past can now go forward into the future, thanks to a government initiative that's allowing new models to be made for the first time in 35 years, KPRC reports. DeLoreansthe vehicle made famous in the Back to the Future movie franchiseare heading back into production in Humble, Texas, and it will be the first time the iconic car will be manufactured on American soil. "It's fantastic. It is a game-changer for us," DeLorean CEO Stephen Wynne tells KPRC. Wynne notes that he's got enough parts to put together about 300 cars, and although he anticipates initial output to be just one car a month, he's hoping to jack that to one a week. The first car is slated to be finished by early 2017. The anticipated price for one of these future throwbacks: $45,000 to $55,000 for a refurb, a vague "less than $100,000" for a new model.

The original Back to the Future gave the DMC-12the only model DeLorean ever made, per the Daily Dota high profile, but the company went down the tubes in part thanks to founder John DeLorean's drug and money problems, notes NBC Washington. Wynne came along in the mid-'80s, scooped up what was left of the company, rebranded it as the DeLorean Motor Company, and moved operations to the Houston area, but he was limited to refurbishing existing DeLoreans: A government rule made it illegal for low-volume production of cars that didn't meet current safety standards. But a recent federal highway bill now allows for a company to build up to 325 such replicas a year under certain conditions, and the DeLorean qualifies. "It's huge for us. It means we're back as a car company," Wynne tells KPRC. (Website commenters once helped find a DeLorean.)
(Newser)  Donated to the Wounded Warrior Project? You might've helped fund lavish parties for employees rather than veterans in need. A two-part CBS News investigation, based on interviews with more than 40 former employees, finds millions in Wounded Warrior donations have been wasted. "Their mission is to honor and empower wounded warriors, but what the public doesn't see is how they spend their money," says Erick Millette, a former employee who suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq. He accuses the organization of "using our injuries, our darkest days, our hardships, to make money," which is then spent on catered employee parties, fancy restaurants, and so-called team-building retreats at beachside hotels, where bar tabs can reach $2,500. The cost of the charity's four-day annual meeting at a five-star Colorado hotel in 2014: $3 million.

Employees describe CEO Steven Nardizzi arriving to events on a horse or Segway. One time, they say, he rappelled down the side of a building. A former staffer believes the charity wants "to show warriors a good time," but there's no follow up, per CBS. "It just makes me sick," adds Millette. He says Wounded Warriors waits for veterans to call, rather than reaching out to them, though the charity denies that claim. A rep also describes the spending as "the best use of donor dollars to ensure we are providing programs and services to our warriors and families at the highest quality." Tax forms note spending on conferences and meetings spiked from $1.7 million in 2010 to $26 million in 2014, the same amount spent on combat stress recovery that year. Public records also show the charity spends 60% of its budget on vets, compared to up to 96% for other veterans' charities. (Read more Wounded Warriors stories.)
(Newser)  Scandinavian countries apparently know how to steer clear of corruption. Anti-corruption body Transparency International is out with its annual list of the least corrupt countries in the world, based on expert opinions, and Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all find a spot in the top 10. Denmark tops the list with a score of 91 out of 100, where 100 means a squeaky-clean reputation, per CNBC. The US improved its score slightly to 76 to sit at 16th, reports the Week, while Brazil saw the biggest decline, falling seven spots to 76th with a score of 38. The top 10 look pretty good in comparison.

Denmark: 91 Finland: 90 Sweden: 89 New Zealand: 88 Netherlands: 87 Norway: 87 Switzerland: 86 Singapore: 85 Canada: 83 Germany: 81

Click for the full list . (Read more corruption stories.)
(Newser)  A 17-year-old girl who was attacked in Denmark may end up facing punishment herself. The teen says a man pushed her to the ground and started trying to undress her on Wednesday night in central Snderborg when she used pepper spray on him and got away, the Local reports, citing Danish media. "It is illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely be charged for that," a local police spokesperson tells a TV station. The attacker escaped and has yet to be found, RT reports.

There's been an outcry, and locals are pointing out that Denmark is seeing an uptick in sexual harassment cases while local police are "stretched too thin" to keep things under control. As the Copenhagen Post reported earlier this month, women have been complaining that male refugees and asylum-seekers have been harassing or even groping them at nightclubs in Snderborg, though in this case, it's not clear if the man was a refugee. Many commenters on the local TV station's article about the incident have offered to pay the girl's fine, which will probably be around $73. (Pepper spray abruptly ended a squabble between moviegoers.)
(Newser)  "I don't know what you expect me to do," Chris Christie joked when dinged on the campaign trail for skipping off to New Hampshire to campaign as New Jersey reeled in the aftermath of last week's mega-blizzard. "Do you want me to go down there with a mop?" The answer, apparently, is yes, and a New Jersey college grad has started a crowdfunding account to raise money to get Christie some mops, Politico reports. "Instead of staying in the state and being a leader during a record breaking Blizzard, our [governor] has abandoned us for his presidential campaign," Kiyle Osgood writes on his GoFundMe page.

He continues: "For his own personal gain, he abandoned the people that he promised to govern and lead. This is unacceptable of a leader and an embarrassment to the people of New Jersey." Osgood wants to buy the cleaning supplies so Christie can "mop up the mess we have in Trenton." He's currently raised $290 of the $1,000 he's requesting. (Maybe next someone will send Christie frozen school lunches.)
(Newser)  One of the militia members occupying an Oregon wildlife refuge told MSNBC on Jan. 5 that he'd be willing to die rather than go to jail. He was killed by authorities during a traffic stop exactly three weeks later, the Washington Post reports. "I have been raised in the country all my life," Robert "LaVoy" Finicum told MSNBC. "I love dearly to feel the wind on my face, to see the sun rise, to see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box." Finicum was shot and killed Tuesday as authorities arrested five other militia members on their way to a meeting, the Post reports. He was a 54-year-old rancher from Arizona who had been serving as the occupiers' spokesperson since they took over a building in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2.

The Oregonian reports it's still unclear exactly what happened during the confrontation with police Tuesday evening. Sources say Finicum was refusing to follow orders from state troopers when he was shot. But supporter and Nevada politician Michele Fiore says Finicum was not resisting arrest. "He was just murdered with his hands up," she tweeted. "He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved," one of Finicum's 11 children tells the Oregonian. During his regular radio broadcast Monday, Finicum ominously announced that "the federal government is beating the war drums," according to the Post. He's now being treated as a martyr. There are things more important than your lifeand freedom is one of them, he told MSNBC on Jan. 5. Im prepared to defend freedom." (Read more Ammon Bundy stories.)
(Newser)  Anjali Ramkissoon, the Florida doctor suspended after video of her assaulting an Uber driver went viral, is very sorry. "I was extremely stressed out that day," she tells Good Morning America. "It was probably one of the worst days of my life and I was caught at my lowest moment." Her father had just been admitted to the hospital, and mere moments before the Uber incident, she and her boyfriend of two years had broken up, Ramkissoon says. She adds that she had driven to the area where she was filmed, but then got drunk and didn't want to drive back; she apparently thought the Uber driver in question was the one she had called (he wasn't). She's grateful the driver allowed her to settle with him and pay the damages rather than pressing charges against her.

She adds that not only has her career been impacted (an investigation will determine whether she's terminated completely from her position as a fourth-year neurology resident at Jackson Health System), but she and her family have been receiving hateful messages. "There is absolutely no excuse for my actions. I am ashamed. I am so sorry," she says. "I made a huge mistake, the biggest mistake of my life, and that person is not me. ... Im here to own up to what I did. Im taking responsibility for it and Im asking for forgiveness." She notes that others can take a lesson from her: Watch your actions in public, because someone might be recording you. (Click to watch the video.)
(Newser)  We would have been concerned about birds' well-documented taste for worms, but to each their own. A traveler arriving from Cuba was caught trying to smuggle nine live birdsthree of them in the "groin area" of his pantsJan. 9 at Miami International Airport, according to US Customs and Border Protection. When the man arrived in Miami, he was "selected  for further examination." "Its unclear if officials were tipped off by any tweeting, warbling, or other melodious bird noises," Consumerist notes. According to US Customs, officers found three birds in the man's pants and another six crammed into small plastic tubes inside a fanny pack. The man was arrested, and his birds were seized by the US Department of Agriculture for quarantine. (Read more weird crimes stories.)
(Newser)  One of NBC's most popular television series of the '70s and early '80s is leaving the Midwest and heading for Hollywood. Paramount Pictures will be adapting Little House on the Prairie, which ran on TV from 1974 to 1983, for the big screen, per the Hollywood Reporter. The original series, which starred Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert, was based on books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who based the tales on her late-1800s childhood in remote locations such as Walnut Grove, Minn., and De Smet, SD, the Los Angeles Times notes.

The movie will be directed by Sean Durkin, who won a 2011 Sundance directing award for his film Martha Marcy May Marlene. The Little House cast has not yet been announced. (Meanwhile, Melissa Gilbert has been in the news recently for breast implants, tax woes, and a run for Congress.)
(Newser)  A man accused of killing a tourist from Georgia in a machete attack on an isolated beach in Grenada made his first appearance Wednesday before a judge on the Caribbean island to face a charge of capital murder. Dave Martin Benjamin did not enter a plea and was not given an opportunity to speak in the brief hearing. The 27-year-old could get the death penalty if convicted. Benjamin surrendered to authorities Monday, a day after the body of Jessica Colker, a 39-year-old physician's assistant from Atlanta, was found in a wooded area near an isolated beach where she had been walking with her husband. Benjamin became the chief suspect because people had seen him begging on the beach before the incident.

Police say Benjamin waylaid Colker and Brian Melito around noon on Sunday as they walked along the shore, the AP reports. The husband fled to get help and his wife was missing when he returned. Her body was found later that day in a wooded area. An autopsy found that she died from extensive skull fracture and asphyxia. Acting Police Commissioner Winston James said there were signs of sexual assault. Police said earlier that Benjamin was convicted of robbery and burglary in 2009 and of a rape in 2013. He was released early from prison in November because of good behavior. (Read more Grenada stories.)
Peshawar: Pakistani security forces on Wednesday claimed to have thwarted an imminent terror attack in Peshawar by seizing a huge cache of weapons and ammunition, including over 1,000 assault rifles, during raids in the city.

The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said that militants wanted to carry out a major terrorist attack in Peshawar, capital of the volatile Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which has been frequently targeted by the Pakistani Taliban.

At least 1,000 rifles, some of them foreign-made, were recovered during the raids at the warehouses in the city.

The raids were carried out after receiving information about presence of modern weapons in the area, ISPR said.

The weapons seized included automatic M4 rifles, M6 rifles, telescopes and a huge quantity of bullets.

Security in Peshawar and adjoining areas has been tightened since the attack on Bacha Khan University (BKU) near here on January 20, when Taliban militants breached the varsity complex and shot dead 21 people, including students.

The BKU attack was the second major attack by Pakistani Taliban on a school in the country, the first being the brutal massacre of 150 people, most of the children, at an army-run school in Peshawar in December 2014.

On Monday, the BKU was reopened briefly but then closed indefinitely to give students more time to recover from the tragedy.

Yesterday, authorities closed all the schools in Punjab province, following an alert over possible militant attacks.
(Newser)  If you didn't already love George Clooney, you might after hearing this story: The actor recently adopted a "dog no one wanted" from an Ohio animal rescue, Fox 8 Cleveland reports. As the LuvFurMutts rescue explains on Facebook, Nate the terrier was rescued out of a 22-dog hoarding situation, and he was skinny with a barrel chest and a birth defect"a leg that swayed" and caused him to walk "like a hyena." People stared and pointed at adoption events, but after nine months, he had yet to find a home. Clooney had been following the dog's story online, though, and he shared it with his mother, who "fell in love," the rescue says. Clooney's parents had recently lost their terrier, and the actor's dad wasn't bothered by Nate's funny walk.

Clooney's personal assistant arranged for the adoption, and for Nate to be delivered to Nick and Nina Clooney on Christmas Eve. "Nina cried a little when she opened the door and Nate was put into her arms," the rescue says. "They could have any dog in the world but they chose to adopt a dog who was crippled and could have been with LuvFurMutts for life." George and Amal Clooney also made a donation to the rescue that covered the cost of Nate's prior medical care and more. (Read more uplifting news stories.)
The Kremlin is challenging the US Treasury Department to produce evidence that would effectively nail President Vladimir Putin down after a US official accused the Russian supremo of corruption in an investigative documentary by BBC Panorama.

Following Russia's seemingly unlawful annexation of Crimea and its continuing destabilizing role in eastern Ukraine, Washington decided to apply tough economic sanctions on Putin's inner circle without directly implicating the president for any alleged corruption in his official capacity as a leader.

But as Russia's relationship with the West continues to deteriorate, with both sides drifting farther away on key global issues, words are beginning to grow sour.

"We've seen him enriching his friends, his close allies, and marginalizing those who he doesn't view as friends using state assets. Whether that's Russia's energy wealth, whether it's other state contracts, he directs those to whom he believes will serve him and excludes those who don't. To me, that is a picture of corruption," remarked Adam Szubin, who supervises the US Treasury sanctions, as quoted saying by The National Post.

The first-ever direct accusation leveled by a US official against the incumbent Russian leader was never taken lightly by the Kremlin.

"[It looked like] another classic case of irresponsible journalism, if not for an official comment from a representative of the US finance ministry," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said adding that such heavy accusation rightfully demands an equal weight of proof as mentioned in a report by BBC.

Despite being loathed by Western leaders for leading a resurgent Post-Soviet Russia, Putin also has his own share of admirers in the world for his astute skill in using limited military force alongside diplomacy in achieving Russian foreign policy interests.

For example, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump appeared to be quite fond of Putin who was so generous with words when he described the Russian president as "a man highly respected within his own country and beyond" as observed in article published in the The Guardian.
Abe Vigoda, an actor who made great success in the sitcom Barney Miller as detective, Philip Fish finally was laid down to rest on Tuesday this week as what his daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs said. He died in Fuch's home at Woodland Park, New Jersey.

As mentioned in ABC News, Fuchs declared the reason for his father's death as a result of old age.

"This man was never sick," she told the media.

Vigoda's death ended up speculations and inquiries via Google about his whereabouts and whether is still alive or not.

Mostly working as a theater actor in New York, Vigoda had his first big career break in his role as Sal Tessio in the award-winning 1972 movie, The Godfather. In the movie, Tessio holds a close friendship with Vito Corleone's (Marlon Brando). However, after Vito's death, he treacherously killed the latter's son, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) so that he can take over the family's wealth and influence.

He also appeared in the sequel The Godfather II.

In a 2009 interview, Vanity Fair asked the actor whether he has Mafia-like spirit in accordance to his epic role in The Godfather, Star Pulse recalled.

However, he said that time: "I'm really not a Mafia person. I'm an actor who spent his life in the theater. But Francis said, 'I want to look at the Mafia not as thugs and gangsters but like royalty in Rome.' And he saw something in me that fit Tessio as one would look at the classics in Rome."

The late actor was also remembered for his frequent guesting at The Late Night Show With Conan O'Brien from 1993-2009, The Wallstreet Journal reported.

In an episode, O'Brien remembered the 'hilarious' moments with the late actor with his sidekick Andy Richter.

"Abe was a huge part of our show in New York. I couldn't believe how many times Abe would come on the show and do hilarious things for us," the TV host said.

Abe Vigoda had two marriages in his life and had only one daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs.
The United States and China have met to discuss how they should handle North Korea after the country carried out an unsanctioned nuclear test on Jan. 6. After five hours behind closed doors, little progress was made.

The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed at least that something should be done. Both sides stated that there is a need to create a new United Nations Security resolution that will target North Korea. However, nothing concrete was decided upon.

"Kim Jong Un's actions are reckless, and they are dangerous," Kerry said firmly. "Whether or not he achieved the explosion of a hydrogen weapon is not what makes the difference. It's that he is trying. North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat, to the world, and it has stated its intention to develop a thermonuclear weapon."

Kerry added, "The U.S. will do what is necessary to protect the people of our country and our friends and allies in the world. All nations, particularly those who seek a global leadership role or have a global leadership role, share a fundamental responsibility to meet this challenge with a united front."

Although Wang stated that China is also committed to ending nuclear tests in the Korean peninsula, he added that peace and stability are vital as well.

"The commitment to uphold peace and stability. The commitment to resolve the issue through dialogue and consultation," Wang said. "China will act in a responsible manner. In the meantime, we must point out the new resolution should not provoke new tension in the situation, still less destabilize the Korean Peninsula."

Despite agreeing that measures need to be taken, Beijing, who is an ally to North Korea, continues to appear to be reluctant on agreeing to increase sanctions on North Korea.

"Sanctions are not an end of themselves," Wang said.

China's news agency, Xinhua, reported via Reuters that it was "unrealistic to rely merely on China to press the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] to abandon its nuclear program, as long as the U.S. continues an antagonistic approach wrought from a Cold War mentality. ...Bear in mind that China-DPRK ties should not be understood as a top-down relationship where the latter follows every bit of advice offered by the former."

Bonnie Glaser, who is a senior advisor for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained why agreeing to tougher sanctions might not work out in China's favor.

Glaser said, reported by the Los Angeles Times, ""hey play out in their minds, what are the consequences if they really agree to very tough sanctions - if they cut off oil deliveries to North Korea?" she added. "So that creates instability in North Korea most likely, then China ends up with a crisis on its border that potentially brings U.S. troops closer to China, and you end up with a worse situation than when you started."

China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, can vote to block any measures targeting North Korea.

Since the nuclear test, the U.S. and several other countries have condemned North Korea for continuing to carry out these tests. Beijing also expressed anger over the most recent test but did not appear to put extra pressures onto North Korea to end these tests.

Kerry and Wang noted that the details would be further discussed at the U.N. Security Council.
The FBI has arrested a man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who was reportedly plotting a mass shooting at a Masonic temple. The officials stated that Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 23, had plans to carry out the attack with the intention of becoming a world wide known Islamic extremist.

"I am telling you, if this hit is executed, it will be known all over the world," Hamzeh had reportedly said to two confidential sources identified as CS-1 and CS-2 in Arabic according to the agency's news release. "All over the world, all the mujahedeen will be talking and they will be proud of us ... We are marching at the front of the war."

He had continued, "Thirty is excellent. If I got out, after killing 30 people, I will be happy 100 percent ... 100 percent happy, because these 30 will terrify the world."

The department stated that Hamzeh was arrested on Tuesday. Hamzeh has been charged with possessing machine guns and a silencer.

Hamzeh has been under FBI surveillance since October 2015. At that time, he had several conservations with CS-1 and CS-2 about purchasing weapons. The conversations between the sources and Hamzeh were all monitored and recorded.

On Jan. 19, 2016, Hamzeh reportedly gave CS-1 and CS-2 a tour of his target, the Masonic temple in Milwaukee. He also told them about his plans, which were extremely detailed. Hamzeh had descriptions for where he and his attackers would stand and how they would escape.

On Jan. 25, 2016, Hamzeh brought CS-1 and CS-2 with him to buy guns from two undercover FBI agents.

The release detailed the exchange:

"The undercover agents displayed the weapons and a silencer to Hamzeh, told him that the weapons were capable of automatic fire, and explained to him the functioning of the selector switch that allowed the weapons to fire automatically. Hamzeh agreed to a price and paid it to the undercover agents, who then handed Hamzeh a bag containing two automatic weapons and a silencer. Hamzeh carried the bag to the vehicle in which he had traveled to the meeting, and he placed the bag in the trunk of the vehicle. He then was arrested."

"Samy Mohamed Hamzeh devised a detailed plan to commit a mass shooting intended to kill dozens of people," acting U.S. attorney Gregory J. Haanstad said in a statement. "He also said that he wanted this mass shooting to be 'known the world over' and to 'ignite' broader clashes. It is difficult to calculate the injury and loss of life that was prevented by concerned citizens coming forward and by the tireless efforts of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force."

Assistant United States Attorney Paul L. Kanter will be the prosecutor in the case.
Russia has continued to claim that a 13-year-old Russian-speaking girl was kidnapped and raped in Berlin and the foreign minister is now accusing Germany of covering it all up.

"I hope these issues do not get swept under the rug, repeating the situation when a Russian girl's disappearance in Germany was hushed up for a long time for some reason," the minister, Sergey Lavrov said during a news conference in Moscow, reported by CNN. "It is clear that [she] did not exactly decide voluntarily to disappear for 30 hours. Truth and justice must prevail here."

The highly popular Russian station Channel One reported on the alleged rape. The story was also being circulated online repeatedly via social media, which sparked anger.

German officials have repeatedly stated that there is no evidence that a rape ever occurred. According to a spokesman with the German prosecutor's office, a girl was reported missing on Jan. 11. When the girl returned 30 hours later, she said that she was kidnapped and raped by a group of asylum seekers.

The girl underwent a medical exam that showed no evidence that a rape or sexual intercourse had occurred. The girl subsequently changed her story. The office added that it does not know what the girl was doing during her disappearance.

The officials suggested that the girl might have had sexual intercourse prior to the day of her disappearance. Since the age of consent is 14 in Germany, officials will be investigating two men for child abuse.

Despite the German reports, Russia has maintained its stance. Lavrov stated that Russian officials will be working with the girl's attorneys as well as the Russian Embassy in Germany to get to the bottom of the case.

"I truly hope that these migration problems will not lead to attempts to 'gloss over' reality for political motives -- that would be just wrong," Lavrov said about Germany. "Problems need to be laid out honestly and admitted to the voters, open and clear solutions need to be proposed."

Over the weekend, thousands of people protested in Germany, carrying signs that read, "Our children are in danger" and "Hands of my child."

The spokesman for the German foreign ministry accused Lavrov of trying to politicize the case.
Mumbai:

On the occasion of 67th Republic Day today, Bollywood stars including Amitabh Bachchan, Lata Mangeshkar, Priyanka Chopra, Alia Bhatt, Akshay Kumar among other expressed their affection and patriotism for the country.

The stars took to Twitter to wish their fans on the occasion. Bachchan tweeted, Happy Republic Day.. 2016 !! January 26.

Namaskar. Wish you all a very Happy Republic Day, wrote melody queen Mangeshkar along with the link of Vande Mataram sung by her.

Actress Priyanka Chopra, who is one of the Padma Shri honourees expressed her gratitude towards the country and wished women police force on the occasion.

Proud to be Indian & so thankful for everything this wonderful nation has given me!Happy Republic Day, she wrote.

The 33-year-old will be seen playing a woman cop in her upcoming film Jai Gangaajal.

Padma Bhushan winner of 2016, Kher tweeted, On this auspicious occasion of Republic Day I wish all the Indians. Jai Hind.

Actor Akshay Kumar, whose Republic Day release, Airlift is garnering great reviews wrote, Just holding this flag swells up ur chest in pride. She did what no other country did for its people #HappyRepublicDay.

Actress Juhi Chawla urged her fans to be a good citizen of the country.

Its important to do well .. But its more important to do good !! Be a great and good citizen of this country .. Happy Republic day ..!!

A very happy Republic Day to all, tweeted NH10 star Anushka Sharma. Arjun Rampal, who is currently busy shooting for Rock On 2 pledged to make India the best.

Happy Republic day everyone. Lets work to make INDIA the greatest. Do your best. Jai Hind.

Happy Republic day, Jai Hind. Vande Mataram, wrote filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar.

Riteish Deshmukh tweeted, Wish you all a very Happy Republic Day. 26/01/2016.

Young stars Alia and Varun also wished their fans on the occasion.

Happy Republic Day!! they tweeted.

ABCD 2 actress Shraddha Kapoor wrote, Happy Republic Day.

Sonam Kapoor, who will next be seen playing Ashok Chakra awardee Neerja Bhanot in the biopic, remembered the unsung heroes.

While we look up to salute the Indian flag, heres to remembering our unsung heroes! #RepublicDay #Neerja, she wrote.

Happy Republic Day, tweeted Abhishek.

Wazir actor Farhan Akhtar wrote, Happy Republic Day.

Filmmakers Karan Johar and Meghna Gulzar also wished their fans on the micro-blogging site.

Happy republic day India !!!, actor Arjun Kapoor tweeted.

Recalling his childhood, actor Boman Irani tweeted about the days when he used to march as a sea cadet.

Brings back memories. Had marched for this magnificent parade as a 14 year old as a Sea Cadet. Happy Republic day! #JaiHind.

Filmmaker Nikkhil Advani said he is proud to be an Indian.

#HappyRepublicDay to everyone. #ProudToBeIndian.

Happy RepublicDay everyone. Jai Hind!, wrote Madhuri Dixit-Nene.

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New Delhi:

India is not only home to one of the largest smartphone userbase, but also the second most affected in terms of Android malware with close to one million devices being infected in 2015, a report by Cheetah Mobile Security today said.



India trails only China, which had 1.5 million infected devices last year. Other countries with high infection rates included Indonesia (8,00,327 devices), Russia (4,63,385), Malaysia, Mexico, the US (3,22,833), Vietnam, the Philippines and Iran.



In 2015, China, India and Indonesia were the three-most severely-afflicted countries. Apart from large Android user bases, another reason of these countries becoming the worst-hit ones is that third-party app markets are prevailing in these areas, many of which have been contaminated by malwares due to weak monitoring, the company said.



Also, with increasing use of mobile payment methods globally, online criminals would probably conduct more attacks towards peoples mobile payments systems, it added.



The report is cumulative data based on 567 million global monthly active users and an overall install base of almost two billion users using Cheetah Mobiles applications on their devices.



Also, the number of Android viruses rose sharply, exceeding 9.5 million. This is larger than twice the total number in the past three years, the report said, adding that compared with 2014 (2.8 million), the year-on-year growth is over 22 per cent.



In 2015, Cheetah Mobile detected over 13,00,000 malicious websites. The number of malicious sites increased month on month, reaching its peak in December.



As last months of the year are the festival and shopping season, people are willing to spend money, which online fraudsters seized as a chance to commit cyber crime, it said.



About the year ahead, the report said Google Plays (Googles app store) availability in China market and Chinese app markets are expected to become more standardised and secure.



Google Play has a much more secure ecosystem with its strict monitoring system. It is set to enter the Chinese market and will bring a more transparent, standardised and healthy application distribution channel to help create a healthy environment for the Chinese Android ecosystem, the report said.



Also, more effective steps will be taken by Google to enhance Android security in 2016, the report added.
New Delhi:

Bhawna Arora, girl who had smeared ink on Chief Minister Kejriwal, will be holding a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday. She is likely to exhume CNG scam which she mentioned while getting detained at Chhatrasal stadium after ink attack.



The incident had kicked off a political storm with several leaders claiming it to be Aam Aadmi Partys old formula; while AAP had alleged BJPs conspiracy in this.



The Court, on the other hand, came up with straight verdict of security lapse.



Throwing of ink on Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was a "clear-cut case of security lapse" and Delhi Police did not behave responsibly in protecting him, a city court said.



Noting that Kejriwal was "fortunate enough that liquid contained in the bottle was simply ink", Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) Sanjay Kumar Aggarwal said "one may imagine what would have been the situation in case, god forbid, the bottle could have contained some corrosive substance like acid etc, mixed with ink."



"If Chief Minister of Delhi is not safe, one may wonder as to what will be the fate of ordinary prudent citizens of Delhi," he wondered.



"I fail to understand as to how a bottle containing ink could not be detected during frisking. This is a clear-cut case of security lapses on part of police, especially in the circumstances when the public gathering was addressed in a walled stadium and not in an unfenced ground," the judge said.



26-year-old Bhawna Arora has been granted bail on furnishing a personal bond of Rs 10,000 with one surety of the like amount, saying "no useful purpose shall be served by keeping the applicant behind bars".

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After her first Kannada film Sangama alongside Golden Star Ganesh, she went under the radar for a while. Now, the gorgeous hudigi Vedhika is back in Sandalwood after a gap of six years with one of the most-awaited releases of 2016, Shivalinga opposite Century Star Shivarajkumar, directed by popular director P Vasu. Vedhika, is, quite evidently, in the best phase of her filmi career post Paradesi in Tamil. The actress then went on to work under two national award-winning directors and returned to her mother tongue with Shivalinga. The Mumbai-bred girl also has three more films in Malayalam including James and Alice, and two more in Tamil in the pipeline and she speaks exclusively to Bengaluru Chronicle about her return to Kannada films, and much more.

After Sangama, I was working on projects in other languages but I did not want to take on anything new as I was waiting for the right script to come along, though I did get quite a few offers in between Sangama and Shivalinga in Kannada. I think this project will be my most memorable, as it has the best script I have come across. It was wonderful working with P Vasu Sir, as it is well-known that he creates very powerful characters for the lead roles. It is also a commercial and entertaining film  a perfect combination, says Vedhika.

After her acting debut in Madrasi followed by Munni, the beautiful actress took a break to complete her studies in London. With a Masters degree, a M.Sc in marketing from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, she flew back to her first love  acting. I feel it was pre-destined for me. I have always been inclined towards acting and dancing. I was around four or five years old when I would pose in front of the mirror. Since then, I have always wanted to be an actor. Fortunately, I was lucky to have the right opportunities, she adds.

On her co-star Shivarajkumar, Vedhika says; He is one of the finest actors in Indian cinema, and an extremely humble and simple person. I never could believe that he comes from such a prestigious family, and is still so humble and down-to-earth, which is very rare. I got to learn a lot from him as a human being as he is so calm and patient. For her role, Vedhika explains that such a character has never been portrayed on the Indian screen or across the world. The credit also goes to producer Suresh, for making the film more grand.

Brought up in Mumbai, she has a special connection with Karnataka. I was brought up in Mumbai, but my grandparents hail from the border areas of Karnataka, and hence my mother tongue is Kannada. I speak the North Kannada dialect. I am very happy to be back in Kannada films. Lately, Kannada movies are doing so well and most of them are being remade in other languages. The industry has a bundle of talented script writers and technicians, she feels, adding about her role in Shivalinga, It was very challenging but director P Vasu Sir made it easy. Without him, I could not have pulled off such an amazing character. He is very clever and clear about the characters. He created a special playground, and all I had to do was play in it.

The actress who loves to workout, stresses on staying fit and always finds a good book relaxing. Apart from travelling, Vedhika, who has more than 5.3 million followers on Facebook, revels in interacting with her fans. With three more Malayalam films and two more in Tamil, including James and Alice (which marks the debut of cinematographer of Drishyam fame Sujith Vasudevan) she stars with Prithviraj Sukumaran. For now though, her aim is to get into practicing Yoga and keep at it.
New Delhi :

After Ebola and Swine Flu, the new outbreak of Zika Virus is scaring the world, so much so that India also fears a pandemic. The virus which is relatively born from mosquito is prompting worldwide concern because of an alarming connection to a neurological birth disorder.

It is transmitted by the aggressive Aedes aegypti mosquito and creates a small-head condition in children.

The virus has now spread to at least 25 countries with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning pregnant women against travelling to the alert areas. Experts believe it's only a matter of time before India becomes its next target The Zika virus.

In fact several health officials have also warned women of not getting pregnant for at least 2 years. They say that it is a pandemic in progress.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health says, "It isn't as if it's turning around and dying out, it's getting worse and worse as the days go by."

It has now been found in 19 people in Puerto Rico and has been linked to a surge in births of babies with abnormally small heads.

Officials have advised pregnant women of not travelling to Latin American and Caribbean countries because of the virus.

According to Puerto Ricos Health Secretary Ana Rius, 18 new cases of the Zika virus have been detected in the US possession, raising the total to 19 since the Caribbean islands first case was confirmed last month. So far the virus has not been detected in the continental United States.

But it is spreading!

In Arkansas, a resident also contracted a mild case of Zika while abroad. Florida, Hawaii and New York have also reported cases in recent weeks of residents who contracted Zika after they traveled to areas impacted by the virus.

The figures have gone up in Brazil where Zika virus infections in pregnant women have been linked to 3,893 births of babies with abnormally small heads.

This condition is known as microcephaly.

The World Health Organisation has warned that the virus could spread rapidly throughout the western hemisphere, except in Chile and Canada, which have no Aedes aegypti mosquitos.

Notably, a similar situation arose in Brazil in 1950s but a massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti, however, the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations.

What is Zika?

The virus is a flavivirus, part of the same family as yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and dengue. However, it is incurable as there is no vaccine to prevent Zika or medicine to treat the infection.

The problem worsened since November when Brazil saw nearly 4,000 cases of microcephaly in babies born to women who were infected with Zika during their pregnancies.

In 2014, only 146 cases were reported and so far, 46 babies have died.

Symptoms

About 1 in 5 people infected with Zika virus become ill (i.e., develop Zika).

The most common symptoms of Zika are fever, rash, joint pain, or conjunctivitis (red eyes). Other common symptoms include muscle pain and headache. The incubation period (the time from exposure to symptoms) for Zika virus disease is not known, but is likely to be a few days to a week.

The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting for several days to a week.

Zika virus usually remains in the blood of an infected person for a few days but it can be found longer in some people.

Severe disease requiring hospitalization is uncommon.

Deaths are rare.

Diagnosis

The symptoms of Zika are similar to those of dengue and chikungunya, diseases spread through the same mosquitoes that transmit Zika.

See your healthcare provider if you develop the symptoms described above and have visited an area where Zika is found.

If you have recently traveled, tell your healthcare provider when and where you traveled.

Your healthcare provider may order blood tests to look for Zika or other similar viruses like dengue or chikungunya.

Treatment
Washington:

Prominent Indian-American Yoga guru Bikram Choudhury has been asked to pay USD 924,500 as compensatory damages to his former lawyer by a US court over allegations that he sexually harassed her and fired her for probing claims of abuse made by other women against him.

Attorney Minakshi Jafa-Bodden in her lawsuit claimed that she suffered gender discrimination, wrongful termination and sexual harassment while working for 69-year-old Choudhury, the founder of Bikram Yoga.

Los Angeles jury yesterday deliberated for about a day, before returning with a unanimous verdict in favour of Minakshi.

During testimony, Choudhury strongly denied allegations of sexual assault against him.

Choudhury described accusations of mistreatment and abuse of employees as lies and big lies.

I dont do that, he testified. I dont have to.

Choudhury said Minakshi was let go in 2013 because she did not have a license to practice law in the United States, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The jury found that Choudhury acted with malice, oppression and fraud findings that allow Minakshi to seek punitive damages, the daily said.

Minakshi claimed that Choudhury persuaded her to leave her native India to work for him as his general counsel in 2011.

During her employment, she alleged, Choudhury repeatedly sexually harassed her and subjected her to obscene comments.

The lawyer alleged that she was fired in 2013 after she attempted to investigate allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Choudhury, including allegations of rape by one of his female students.

Mark Quigley, who along with attorney Carla Minnard represented Minakshi, after the jurys decision said, She faced retaliation and intimidation when she refused to stay silent about witnessing illegal behaviour.

This verdict sends an important message, that speaking out when you see signs of sexual abuse is the right thing to do, Quigley said.

Choudhurys lawyer, Robert Tafoya, declined to comment after the verdict.

Minakshis lawsuit is one of multiple cases of alleged sexual assault filed against Choudhury, who built a yoga empire in the US after moving to California in 1971.

Choudhury gained millions of followers through his style of Yoga, which consists of a series of 26 poses, done over 90 minutes in a room heated to 104 degrees.

Six other women in recent years have sued Choudhury, alleging that he sexually assaulted or harassed them.
New Delhi :

Sanitation workers of the citys civic bodies demanding payment of their salaries and arrears staged a demonstration at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwals residence on the first day of their proposed strike starting today.

A massive demonstration was staged at CM Kejriwals residence in which a memorandum of our demands including regular salary, payment of arrears, regularisation of contract based employees, cashless health cards among others will be presented to him, said Sanjay Gehlot, president of Swatantra Mazdoor Vikas Sanyukt Morcha leading sanitation workers.

The sanitation workers and other employees of the three municipal corporationNDMC, SDMC and EDMCwill also go on strike from January 27, he said.

The issues of salary and arrear payment have affected all the employees of the municipal corporations, including the doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, sanitation workers and other class III and IV staff, who have not been paid salaries for upto 3 months, Gehlot said.

He also claimed that not only sanitation workers but other employees of municipal corporations will join the strike.

The sanitation workers of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) had gone on a strike in October last leading to unhygienic conditions in that area due to huge amount of undisposed filth in the streets.

The strike was ended after the Delhi High Court intervened and directed the municipal corporation authorities to ensure disposal of garbage.

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New Delhi:

Can you imagine boys were not interested in Sunny Leone during her young days; blame it on her geek look that kept boys away from her.



I was a very academic student in college, but until college, I was an average student. But I knew business and I was fond of marketing, and all kind of geeky stuff. I was a nerd in my teenage years and didnt have a lot of friends."



I also knew how to edit videos, do photoshop and lot of other things that a lot of 18- or 19-year olds dont do... No boy was interested in me until I was 18, Sunny said in a statement.



The actress is busy in promotions of her upcoming movie Mastizaade and for the same reason she was sitting for an interview at a TV channel.



Sunny was recently in news for an interview that majorly focused on her past life rather than her growing stardom in Bollywood industry.



Mastizaade is all set to hit theatres on Friday.

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Chennai:

Veteran actor Kamal Haasan celebrated Republic Day in a unique way by joining micro-blogging site Twitter.



The 61-year-old actors first tweet was a video of the rendition of the National Anthem in his voice.



Indias freedom struggle remains unique even today. Respecting it is the only way to keep it and set new world standards, he tweeted.



His handle iKamalhaasan is a verified one and has so far got 35.3 K followers. His elder daughter actress Shruti Haasan welcomed him.



One of the happiest moments ever on Twitter! Welcome my most favourite person @ikamalhaasan to twitter!!! Love you appa, she wrote.



The Padma Shri awardee is currently busy with the post-production of his controversial spy thriller Vishwaroopam II.

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New Delhi :

The Islamic State cadres are hiring and this time their target is India. They are now luring Indian hackers to track into government websites and steal sensitive data.

According to reports, hefty amount in dollars will be paid to hackers who are also being asked to identify and create a database of potential recruits from Twitter and Facebook.

Experts believe that is by far the most lucrative job to the hacking community in India.

The new plan of stealing government data is part of ISIS intelligence gathering exercise and helps in formulating their India strategy.

The brainwash programme is already underway with ISIS supporters using Facebook and Twitter to propagate its radical ideology among the youth.

Reportedly 30,000 hackers were contacted and many hackers have already picked up the offer.

ISIS is also recruiting through internet-based services like Skype, Silent Circle, Telegram, and WhatsApp with their Syrian handlers.

Indian handlers who are spread in Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal and other states are now creating local content to spread their propaganda in Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu and other vernacular languages on cyberspace.

The techies recruited by ISIS are carefully planning to promote jihadi content on social media.

To tackle the situation, now Indian government is also planning to create a 24/7 war room to monitor social media.

In 2015 while certain websites were banned for hate-mongering, the government is also trying to ensure that hate content in any form is removed from platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

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New Delhi:

Arunachal Pradesh is going through a major political unrest prompting centre to impose Presidents rule in the state. However, Congress is accusing BJP of misusing Governors office to rein-in power unconstitutionally democracy in Arunachal Pradesh. Here is 10 point guide to what led to this political crisis.

What lead to crisis?

1) On 9th December, 2015, a group of rebel Congress MLAs approrched Governor JP Rajkhowa to impeach Assembly speaker Nabam Rebia. Rebia is the

2) Nabam Rebia is the cousin of Chief Minister Nabam Tuki, the MLAs accused Rebia of being partisan on Tukis side. They accused that Tuki is trying to get all the MLA disqualified from the Assembly.

3) The Governor considered the issue as urgent and called for a special assembly session on December 16, 2015, to take up the impeachment motion.

4) Congress termed this special assembly session as misuse of Governors office by BJP ruled centre. The congress moved to High Court regarding the cancellation of speakers impeachment.

5) Following the Governors order the session was convened. However, it was boycotted by the Speaker Rebia, Chief Minister Tuki and the other lawmakers of his comp.

6) During the session, a high level political drama was witnessed. The 20 rebel congress MLAs, along with 11 of BJP and two Independents passed the impeachment motion and moved a no-confidence motion against CM Tuki.

7) As per the Assembly, Tuki was defeated in a floor test and the House elected Kalikho Pul as the new Leader of the House.

Disqualification of MLAs



8) The same day, the Speaker Rebia issued an order disqualifying 14 rebel Congress MLAs.

9) On January 5, 2015, Justice B K Sarma of the Gauhati High Court stayed the disqualification of the 14 Congress MLAs.

10) The Speaker has filed a plea in the Supreme Court in the case and currently a Constitution Bench is examining the scope of the discretionary powers of the Governor. Thats when the Centre moved to impose Article 356.

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Hyderabad:

The police today arrested 10 Osmania University students as they were protesting against the death of Dalit Student Rohith Vemula.

The Hyderabad police, on Tuesday, foiled attempts to take out a peace rally towards Tank Bund and took 54 protesting students in preventive custody. They were later let off.

The students, under the banner of Osmania University JAC and University of Hyderabad JAC, assembled near the Peoples Plaza as per their plan to take out a peace rally towards Ambedkar statue at Tank Bund.

In the appeal put up on the varsity website, Srivastava said the University activities have come to a standstill due to continued blockade of academic and administrative facilities because of the agitation.

This will lead to a delay in the completion of courses affecting the employment and higher education prospects of the students, he said.

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New Delhi :

The procurement of 200 high-horse power electric locomotives for Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC) is stuck at the negotiation stage as the railways has differed with a Japanese consortium on the pricing front.

The railways is contemplating procuring 200 electric locomotives of 9000 horse power (HP) capacity each for WDFC and as per the loan condition, these have to be bought from Japan.

We are in negotiation with the Japanese consortium for for the procurement of 200 electric locomotives. The prices quoted by the Japanese companies are on higher side which we are not agreeing to, said a senior Railway Ministry official.

The loco contract is estimated to be about Rs 4500 crore and the first batch of locomotives is expcted to arrive after two years of the awarding of the contract.

While WDFC is being entirely funded by JICA loan, Eastern DFC is part-funded by the World Bank.

The railways was supposed to award the contracts for loco procurement by December end, last year but the pricing issue has delayed it further.

We are hopeful that the issue will be resolved shortly and the contracts will be awarded accordingly, he said.

The Japanese consortium comprising five companies including Kawasaki, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsubishi Corporate had submitted their bids in October last year for procurement of the 9000 HP locomotives for WDFC.

The sophisticated locomotives with IGBT technology are being procured with Japanese assistance.

While 40 will be imported from Japan as per the arrangement, 60 will be assembled at the railways Dankuni facility and the rest 100 will be manufactured at Dankuni.

The high-power locomotives will be used to haul double-stack containers on WDFC.

WDFC will cover around 1,534 kms from Dadri to Mumbai, passing through Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra.

The Eastern corridor will have a length of 1,839 kms, connecting Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni in West Bengal, while passing through Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

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Melbourne:

Three Indian-origin persons have been awarded Australias highest civilian honour for their contribution in the fields of physics, engineering and medicine.

Chennupati Jagadish, an eminent professor at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Jay Chandra, an eye doctor in New South Wales, and Sajeev Koshy, a dentist in Melbourne, received Order of Australia medal for the year 2016 announced on the Australia Day.

Jagadish was conferred with the award for his eminent service to physics and engineering, particularly in the field of nanotechnology, to education as a leading academic, researcher, author and mentor, and through executive roles with national and international scientific advisory institutions.

Jagadish was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to physics and engineering, particularly in the field of nanotechnology, to education as a leading academic, researcher, author and mentor, and through executive roles with national and international scientific advisory institutions.

This is a wonderful recognition for 25 plus years of work with my research group at the ANU, Jagadish, who works on semiconductor optoelectronics and nanotechnology.

Chandra, an eye doctor who has been the head of vitreoretinal surgery at Westmead Hospital since the unit opened in 1985, also received the award for his significant service to medicine in the field of ophthalmology as a clinician, and to the international community through eye care programs.

Im not a showy person but I was glad to be recognised, he was quoted as saying in a report

The field I specialise in is one of the most difficult in eye surgery. God has given me these skills and a good life in Australia, he said.

Koshy, who lives in Melbourne, was awarded the medal for his service to dentistry in the state.

This years Australia Day honours list included over 600 people whose remarkable achievements range from high-profile humanitarian missions to humble work at the grassroots level of societys most needy.

They are a source of courage, support and inspiration, and we are a stronger, safer and more caring nation because of them, Governor-General Peter Cosgrove said in announcing the awards.

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When Americans have more faith in the military than the political class, democracy is in trouble.



According to a recent Associated Press poll, the public lacks confidence in government. And by lacks confidence, I mean really lacks confidence. Specifically, More than 6 in 10 respondents expressed only slight confidence  or none at all  that the federal government can make progress on the problems facing the nation in 2016.



And this isnt just Republicans in a sour mood after seven years of Obama. As the AP noted, Perhaps most vexing for the dozen or so candidates vying to succeed President Barack Obama, the poll indicates widespread skepticism about the government's ability to solve problems, with no significant difference in the outlook between Republicans and Democrats.



Well, thats not just vexing for presidential candidates. Its a bad sign for the country. But if Americans lack confidence in the federal government, who can blame them?



Despite all the talk about smart power, the United States position in the world is in decline. The Middle East is on fire; Putin is running rampant in eastern Europe and Syria; Saudi Arabia is probably looking to get an atomic bomb to balance the one that Iran is expected to get in spite of (because of?) the recent U.S./Iran nuclear deal; and Europe is flooded with migrants who dont look likely to integrate well. The latter is of course a result of the Middle East problems and of the overthrow of Libyas dictator, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, in a war-of-choice launched without congressional approval at the behest of Hillary Clinton, then-United Nations ambassador Susan Rice and then-National Security Council senior aide Samantha Power.



Meanwhile, at home, the economy limps along despite seven years of recovery and record deficits. Among the Democratic political candidates, only Bernie Sanders seems to make a big deal of real unemployment (including underemployment and people who have given up looking for jobs) being much higher than the rosy official unemployment numbers. The New York Times, meanwhile, asks if Americas best days are behind it.



Then theres the official lawlessness. The IRS, hiding from investigations that it targeted Tea Party groups, keeps "accidentally" destroying hard drives. Hillarys emails also keep mysteriously disappearing, and now the State Department has used the blizzard as an excuse for not producing court-ordered emails, though its known about the order for months. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former attorney general Michael Mukasey says that Hillary should face criminal charges, but who really expects that? Shes politically untouchable, which says bad things about the rule of law.



All of this comes against a background of debacles like the botched ObamaCare rollout, the mistranslated reset button with Russia, a Secret Service that cant seem to hang on to its guns, to keep its agents sober or to keep intruders out of the White House, an EPA that didnt report the water problems in Flint, Mich., and a seemingly endless array of similar screwups. When theyre not crooks, our leaders all too often seem to be incompetents.



If this were just one-sided anger at the Obama Administration, then it would be troubling, but not dangerous. But if, as seems plausible, a majority of Americans dont think a Republican administration would represent a substantial improvement, then weve got a bigger problem. If voters think that they cant vote their way out of a problem, then they may look to other solutions.



A much-hyped YouGov poll from last fall found that 29% of Americans could imagine supporting a military coup. That poll probably overstated popular support  it didnt ask if people favored a coup right now, just whether they could imagine supporting one, including in the instance of the government violating the Constitution  but there was also this, as Newser reported: Some 71% said military officers put the interests of the country ahead of their own interests, while just 12% thought the same about members of Congress. 



A democracy that gives rise to those sorts of sentiments is a democracy thats in trouble. And Americas political class, which is used to operating in a world where theres lots of room to get things wrong, needs to up its game before things get worse.
New Delhi :

Two flights, one each of Air India and Jet Airways, were grounded today just before their departure for Kathamandu from here following a bomb scare.



Airport sources said that the two flights were halted after the Jet Airways security office at Indira Gandhi International Airport here received an anonymous call saying there was a bomb threat to Air India flight AI-215 and Jet Airways flight 9W 260.



The two flights were scheduled to take off for the Nepalese capital at 0115 hour and 0130 hours, respectively.



This is the second such incident of grounding of an aircraft due to a bomb scare as on Saturday the same flight of Jet Airways was delayed by six hours due to the grounding of the plane after a bomb threat call, which turned out to be a hoax.



While 121 passengers were booked on the Air India flight, Jet Airways said it had 122 passengers and seven crew on board its flight 9W 260.



The two aircraft have been taken to the isolation bay, where security personnel from Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS) are carrying out an extensive search of the baggage and check-in luggage of the passengers, the sources said.



Jet Airways flight 9W 260, scheduled to depart from Delhi for Kathmandu at 1325 hrs, has been delayed due to a security alert. All 122 guests and 7 crew have been taken to the departures waiting area at the airport, Jet Airways said in a statement.



National carrier Air India also said that the flight has been delayed due the same reason.

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Barmer:

A mysterious balloon-shaped object was today shot down by a Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft in Rajasthans Barmer district, bordering Pakistan, after the IAF radar detected it on a day the country was celebrating the Republic Day.

IAF officials said the object was flying in from the western sector (implying Pakistani side) and was shot down this morning. They even informed that it was of a private balloon used by some private company.

Between 1030 and 1100 hours today, an unidentified balloon shaped object was picked up by IAF radar. An IAF fighter was launched which intercepted the object and brought it down. Further investigation is underway, an IAF spokesperson said.

No one was hurt nor was any damage caused to the property in the area, IAF spokesman said in Jaipur.

The incident happened in Barmer, nearly 500 km from Rajasthan capital Jaipur, where some villagers have reported an incident of certain metal pieces falling down from the sky.

Police said a team led by Additional SP Jassaram Bose found about five pieces of a triangle kind of metallic objects but it was not an explosive material.

These pieces were handed over to IAF, police said.

It said people of Gugardi and Panavara villages under Pachpadra Thana area heard the defeaning sound blasts in about five km radius.

Quoting Manoj Singh, an eyewitness, police said the blast sound was heard five times and something fell down after an aircraft flew by.

Similar blast sounds were heard last year in January month at Sinleejageer village, and IAF was probing that incident too, the police said.

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Beijing:

Nuclear-armed North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat to the world, US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Beijing today following Pyongyangs fourth nuclear test earlier this month.

Washington is pushing for a strong United Nations response to the Norths latest atomic blastwhich Pyongyang said was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, a claim largely dismissed by expertswith enhanced sanctions.

But China, North Koreas chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor, is reluctant, despite the pairs ties becoming strained in recent years as Beijings patience wears thin with its neighbours ambitions for nuclear weapons.

The two powersboth permanent members of the UN Security Councilhad agreed to mount an accelerated effort to try to resolve their differences on a new resolution, Kerry told a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.

But he acknowledged that they had not agreed on the parameters of exactly what it would do or say.

The United States will do what is necessary to protect the people of our country and our friends and allies in the world, Kerry added.

Wang said that China also backed a new Security Council motion, but added that it should not provoke new tension in the situation.

Beijings ties with Pyongyang were forged in the blood of the Korean War and analysts say its leverage is mitigated by its overriding fear of a North Korean collapse and the prospect of a reunified, US-allied Korea directly on its border.

China has a particular ability... to be able to help us significantly to resolve this threat, Kerry said, noting that as the Norths main provider of trade and aid it could apply pressure through movements of ships and various resource exchanges.

Wang said he rejected all groundless speculation or distortion of Chinas position, re-iterating that Beijing was committed to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

China regularly calls for calm in the region, and for the resumption of the long-stalled six-party talks, which bring together the two Koreas, China, the US, Russia and Japan.

The goal is to take the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula back to the right track of negotiation, Wang said.

Sanctions are not an end in themselves.

As Kerry arrived in Beijing yesterday, the state-run China Daily ran an article headlined: Experts have low hopes for Kerrys China trip.

Before todays meeting, the official news agency Xinhua issued a commentary blaming the USs uncompromising hostility and Cold War mentality for the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Washingtons actions, such as flying a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber close to the inter-Korean boder, were heightening the Norths sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship, it added.

Wang and Kerrys discussionswhich lasted for nearly five hoursalso addressed the strategically vital South China Sea, where Beijing has built up artificial islands capable of hosting military facilities in disputed waters.

China asserts ownership over virtually the entire area, putting it at odds with regional neighbours the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

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Mumbai:

Maintaining its bullish trend, gold prices shot up to a three-month high at the domestic bullion market here due to heavy demand from stockists as well as good seasonal buying support.



Silver also surged to close above the key Rs 35,000 mark on the back of heavy industrial demand.



Depreciating rupee value and anticipation of robust demand ahead of the upcoming wedding season aided the sentiment.



Standard gold (99.5 purity) jumped by Rs 285 to finish at Rs 26,730 per 10 grams from Mondays closing level of Rs 26,445.



Pure gold (99.9 purity) also surged by a similar margin to end at Rs 26,880 per 10 grams as against Rs 26,595 earlier.



Silver (.999 fineness) climbed by a hefty Rs 620 per kg to conclude at Rs 35,385 from Rs 34,765 previously.



Since the beginning of the year, gold has been witnessing a massive surge owing to solid investment demand against the backdrop of a bearish trend in equities as well as speculative offtake driven by positive overseas sentiments, a bullion trader commented.



The consistent upmove in prices has instilled some confidence among local buyers who have started accumulating in small quantities and also restocking by jewellery stockists and traders ahead of the wedding season, largely supporting the case for further upmoves, he added.



The yellow-metal has gained over 7 per cent since the beginning of the year.



Meanwhile, the shiny metal moved down modestly in overseas trade after hitting a two-month high in early trade amid caution ahead of the Federal Reserves policy meet outcome later in the day.



In the meantime, benchmark crude had stabilised above the USD 31 per barrel after Iraqs oil minister said that Saudi Arabia and Russia were showing greater flexibility over production, lifting hopes of an output cut in the market.



Spot gold was substantially lower at USD 1,116.80 an ounce in early European trade, while silver quoted weak at USD 14.37 an ounce.
Hyderabad/New Delhi:

Fresh protests by students broke out today in Hyderabad, Delhi and Chennai over the alleged delay in justice to the Hyderabad university dalit scholar who committed suicide, as they remained unrelenting in the demand for resignations of Union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya.



Lending further support to the stir over Rohith Vemulas suicide, SC and ST teachers of the Hyderabad Central University(HCU) announced a hunger strike from tomorrow seeking resignation of Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao, who has gone on leave, and interim VC Vipin Srivastava for resumption of academic and administrative work. Several members of the Forum have already given up their administrative responsibilities.



Stepping up their campaign, the university students in Hyderabad held a demonstration outside the residence of Srivastava when he was in a meeting with non-teaching staff.



They then marched outside the campus and burnt effigy of the Vice-Chancellor whose ouster they have sought.



Srivastava later visited the protest site to initiate a dialogue but faced the ire of the students who raised slogans against him, asking him to go back.



Students in most universities in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana boycotted classes in solidarity with agitators seeking justice for Rohith who was found hanging in a hostel room on January 17. The HCU students had given a nationwide university strike call today in support for their stir.



Six of the seven students of the HCU on hunger strike protesting the suicide of Rohith, meanwhile, have been shifted to the health centre.



In Delhi, scores of students from varsities across the capital once again marched to the Human Resources Development Ministry where 60 of them were detained by Delhi police.



According to police, due to security concerns, around 60 students were detained from outside Shastri Bhawan and taken to Parliament Street police station.



Every time we try to go to the Ministry and raise our demands with HRD Minister Smriti Irani, we are held back and detained by police. Protesting is a basic right. We cant be denied that at a time when the government is trying to cover up institutional murder, JNU Students Union vice president Shehla Rashid Shora said.



Members of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) and Left-backed All India Students Association (AISA) were also part of the protesters, who demanded the removal of Irani and Dattatreya.



We are protesting against the delay in justice to the student who had to end his life due to the harassment by the institution. Who will be held accountable for similar such suicides in varsities across country which go unreported? Sucheta De from AISA, asked.



In Chennai, about 40 activists of the Revolutionary Students and Youth Front were detained for trying to picket the Raj Bhavan over the suicide of Rohith besides three students of a private college in Villupuram last week.



The protesting members were detained at Saidapet before they could proceed to the Raj Bhavan, police said.

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New Delhi:

Alleging delay in justice to Hyderabad University research scholar, 150 protesting students from varsities across Delhi who were detained earlier today decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike at Parliament Street police station here.



According to police, due to security concerns, around 150 students were detained from outside Shastri Bhawan and taken to Parliament Street police station.



Every time we try to go to the Ministry and raise our demands with HRD Minister Smriti Irani, we are held back and detained by police. Protesting is a basic right. We cant be denied that at a time when the government is trying to cover up an institutional murder, JNU Students Union vice president Shehla Rashid Shora said.



Members of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) and Left-backed All India Students Association (AISA) were among the protesters.



Sucheta De, national president, AISA said, We will not budge from the premises of the Parliament Street police station now and sit on an indefinite hunger strike here till our demands are met.



We are protesting the delay in justice to the student who had to end his life due to the harassment by the institution, she said and asked who will be held accountable for similar such suicides in varsities across country which go unreported?



The protests over the issue have been rocking the national capital since last week with three JNU students sitting on an indefinite hunger strike since Sunday.

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London:

Activist and lawyer Henri Tiphagne has been named the winner of the eighth Human Rights Award by Amnesty International Germany for tirelessly and bravely standing up for human rights in India.

Tiphagne, the Peoples Watch founder who campaigns against discrimination and the use of torture, will be presented the award on April 25 at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin.

Henri Tiphagne and his organisation Peoples Watch, while fighting to ensure the rights of others, are themselves being harassed and hampered in their work by the authorities. And there are other civil society organisations in India that are in a similar position, said Selmin aliskan, director of Amnesty International Germany.

The award is therefore meant to send a strong signal of support to the whole of the Indian human rights movement, aliskan said.

Tiphagne has been named for the award for tirelessly and bravely standing up for human rights, the rights group said.

Peoples Watch has been researching and documenting human rights violations, as well as providing legal representation to those affected for over 20 years, the group said. The organisation also actively supports human rights education.

In 1997, Tiphagne founded an institute offering training for teachers as well as mentoring around school human rights education programmes. So far, they have managed to reach out to around 500,000 children in 18 Indian states.

Through the award, Amnesty aims to honour and support the awardees exceptional human rights commitment and raise awareness of their work amongst the German public.

The award comes with 10,000 Euros (USD 10,876) provided by Amnesty Germanys foundation Stiftung Menschenrechte, Frderstiftung Amnesty.

Former award recipients include: Monira Rahman from Bangladesh (2006), Women of Zimbabwe Arise from Zimbabwe (2008), Abel Barrera from Mexico (2011) and Alice Nkom from Cameroon (2014).

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Cairo:

At least four military personnel, including a colonel, were killed and 12 others injured today when a roadside bomb hit their armoured vehicle in Egypts restive North Sinai.

The four men were killed in the blast south of Al-Arish city, security and health officials said. The 12 injured, some of whom were in critical condition, were transferred to hospital for treatment. Security forces have cordoned the area and were searching for attackers, officials said.

Egypts North Sinai has witnessed many violent attacks by militants since the January 2011 revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

The attacks targeting police and military increased after the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by military following massive protests against his rule. More than 700 security personnel have been killed since then.

The military has launched security campaigns in the area, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.

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New Delhi:

The DCW has issued another notice to Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi over not filing a charge sheet in connection with the rape of a four-year-old girl, an FIR regarding which was registered last year.



The Delhi Commission for Women had on January 11 issued a notice to Bassi, seeking to know why no charge sheet was filed by police in connection with the case despite the passage of 90 days since the registration of the FIR.



A notice was sent to you on January 11. However, the Comm ssion takes strong note of the fact that despite the passage of over 16 days, no reply in this regard has been received from you.



You are hereby directed to submit the information sought within 72 hours of receipt of this letter failing which appropriate action under law will be initiated by the Commission, the notice issued by DCW chairperson Swati Maliwal said.



The FIR in the rape case was lodged at Keshav Puram police station on October 9 last year.



In her earlier notice, Maliwal said, This is a serious issue as the accused has an absolute right to bail if the charge sheet is not filed within the prescribed period of 90 days in view of proviso (a) to Section 167(2) of CrPC.



It should be noted that until proper and timely charge sheets are filed in rape cases, justice to victims will be denied.



The Commission had also issued a notice to the Deputy Commissioner of Police concerned to ascertain the cause behind the delay in the submission of the charge sheet.

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Geneva:

Only Syrians have been invited to peace talks in Geneva, the UN said today, in an apparent contradiction to Turkeys suggestion that it would be included.

Yesterday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara would boycott the talks set to open on Friday if the Syrian Kurdish group Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Ankara believes is linked to militants fighting inside Turkey, was at the negotiating table.

But Khawla Mattar, a spokeswoman for the UNs Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said there was no plan to invite non-Syrians when asked about the possible inclusion of observer delegations from Turkey, Russia, the United States or France.

She declined to comment on which parties had been given invitations, which were issued by de Mistura yesterday.

Moscow has said the PYDs inclusion was key to the talks success.

Turkeys objection threatens to be a major blow to the negotiations, which have already been delayed by a stalemate over the make-up of the opposition delegation.

Members of the Syrian oppositions so-called High Negotiations Committee (HNC) were meeting in Riyadh today to decide whether to attend the UN-brokered talks. The HNC has asked de Mistura to send the full list of proposed participants before making its decision.

Asked whether the UN envoy had complied, Mattar said there were no pre-conditions attached to joining the talks, suggesting the HNC would not be able to view the guest list before deciding whether to come to Geneva.

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. . .



hen there was his failure to achieve health care reform (and I know how poorly organized they were, with Hillary supposedly at the helm, for that one from the inside. For I was what was known as a "Designated Speaker for the Clinton Health Plan.") I can tell you that although I did go out to community meetings, I also came home from the first "organizational meeting" that I attended at the White House and told my wife at the time, "If this is how they are going to go about it, they are never going to get anything passed." Not only did they not, but that failure led to the Gingrich so-called "landslide" (in which GOP House candidates got 18 percent of the total House vote nationally while Democratic candidates actually got 17 percent).



Briefly, we can mention, among other things: there was no fight-back on Whitewater, "travelgate," etc., even though there was, as my college classmate and first Clinton White House Counsel, Bernard Nussbaum said, no "there" there or anywhere, from the beginning; the bombing of Serbia without UN sanction that set a precedent taken full advantage of by George W. Bush who, unfortunately, did not take advantage of a major Clinton success, the intelligence and "black ops" that were behind the thwarting of both the 1998 "bombing 25 airliners over the Atlantic" plot and the "Millennium Bomb Plot" aimed at Los Angeles International Airport, either of which would have resulted in far more casualties than 9/11; and the repeal of "welfare as we know it," the end of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program.



Finally, but again also just briefly here, we must mention what were likely the two most important actions/disasters of the Clinton administration in the economic realm, each of which has played a direct role in the continuation and indeed strengthening of Reaganomics and the increasing stranglehold that the GOP/Tea Party has over fiscal policy. First was the Repeal of the Depression era Glass-Steagall Act that had separated commercial and investment banking. That repeal of course led directly to the crash of 2008 from which millions of people on this country have never recovered and likely never will.



Then there were NAFTA and the World Trade Organization initiatives, which led to the massive export of US capital to countries with (much) cheaper labor and that "massive whooshing sound" of job outflow that Ross Perot referred to in the 1992 Presidential Election Campaign. One could write a whole column about those two, of course. Let me just say briefly here that they have led invariably to the decline of US manufacturing, the parallel decline of US trade unionism, the creation of the permanent army of the unemployed, the ever-widening gap between the poor and everyone else, the increasingly creative use of the tax code to support the use of overseas so-called "tax shelters" that enable the avoidance of the payment of billions of dollars in taxes, and so on and so forth.



. . .
Ottawa:

Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only person ever to be convicted in the 1985 Air India bombings, was on Wednesday released from a Canadian prison. He served two decades in prison.

The statutory release of Reyat was confirmed by a spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada. Reyat served two-thirds of a nine-year sentence for his involvement in the attack.

A Sikh immigrant to Canada, Reyat was previously in jail for more than 15 years for making the bombs that were kept in two suitcases and planted on planes leaving Vancouver.

While one bomb blast took place in the Air India Flight 182 and killed 329 people aboard near the coast or Ireland, the second one exploded at Japan's Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers.

One bomb tore apart Air India Flight 182 as it neared the coast or Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard. The second exploded at Japan's Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers as they transferred cargo.



"If at any time, his parole officer feels there's a risk to the community he can return Mr. Reyat to prison," parole board spokesman Patrick Storey told AFP.

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There is a video out there of a crazy black guy who is butt naked running on the highway and jumping on the hood and the roof of a car who was taking video. If you are the driver, what can you do legally? Speed up and hit your brakes to throw him off your car (and kill him) or call 911 and hope help comes before PCP dude robs and rapes you.



I have been hit by a car and it is a unique, once in a lifetime experience. I was about 11-12 years old and I and my friend rode our bikes to the shopping mall alongside a busy street (Shelby Drive in Memphis, going to Southbrook Mall) when I darted across the road, and was hit, ironically by a black guy, in a ****** Ford Pinto, wearing a busboy outfit to go to work. Hits this white boy in front of God and everyone.



Black Dude: "Are you Ok? Are you OK?"



Me: In pain and dizzy "Im OK, is your car Ok?"



Black Dude "I dont care about the car, I care about you!"



I let it go and kept it a secret from my parents and told them it was a bike accident, but I fessed up to the truth about a year later. Poor bastard, wasnt his fault, poor me, that I was hit by the poorest guy on the road that instant.
The full contingent of the sky is falling brigade seems to have missed a real danger. Ebola was going to kill half a million in two months, the Mexican hoards are going to rape and kill all in their paths, Mulsim refugees will destroy civilization as we know it, but an endemic virus which causes a mild flu-like illness but also causes serious birth defects just doesn't have sufficient fear-factor I guess. Or once the babies are actually born, who cares?Thankfully President Obama is being proactive in this situation.
The remaining armed militants at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge vow that they will continue to fight until the end. The FBI asked the media to leave the area at approximately 7:45 AM PT. The militants have been running a live stream video from the refuge off and on overnight and into the morning after news of the arrest of Ammon Bundy and crew reached them. They have repeatedly made definitive statements that they are prepared to die at the refuge.
Textron Systems announced today the first export sale of its SCTV (Survivable Combat Tactical Vehicle) to the Ukraine. In 2015 the US Government has agreed to deliver Ukraine 200 HMMWVs from US military surplus; Some of these vehicles will be converted by Ukroboronprom into SCTV, using Textron delivered kits. Serial production of the vehicles will be done in Ukraine and Ukroboronprom will be able to export SCTV vehicles in the future, to other countries, pending a US permission. Ukraine officials foresee a viable market for such vehicles, particularly in the Middle East where they already sold locally made vehicles.

Textron has already delivered few converted HMMWVs to Colombia, which has evaluated three partly converted SCTVs, but has yet to decide on the scale and terms of the acquisition of more vehicles.

The SCTV is using an extended HMMWV chassis, new diesel motor, brakes and heavy duty suspension to carry the added weight. It is fitted with a new steel armored monocoque capsule, offering improved ballistic and blast protection, using V-shaped hull, and oblique side armor adding to the vehicles ballistic and roadside IED protection. Blast protected seats are also used to keep occupants protected in case of mine or IED blast under the vehicle. Removing the fuel tank and battery compartment from the crew capsule also improves survivability.

Ukrainian state-run defense company Ukroboronprom will convert the vehicles under a joint venture with the US Textron Systems. The vehicles will be delivered to the Ukrainian Army and could also be offered for export.

Textron System announced today at the International Armored Vehicles convention in London. Textron Systems is a subsidiary of Textron Inc. (NYSE: TXT)
Long before she became the future queen, the Duchess of Cambridge was just a regular girl growing up in England.

Take a look through the gallery above for a look into her life before she became the Duchess of Cambridge.
Contributed Photo

Witness Bahrain, the award-winning documentary that gives viewers a gripping and probing look into Bahrain two years after the Arab Spring, will be presented at the Ridgefield Playhouse on Saturday, Feb. 6. The 7:30 p.m. screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jen Marlowe, a New York and Seattle-based human rights activist and author.

Bahrain is a small archipelago of 33 islands off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf. When Marlowe was there, she uncovered stories of doctors who were arrested and tortured for treating wounded protestors, and of nurses who were caring for injured youths at underground clinics.
Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media  main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.




The Junior Players of Santiam Christian School have caught the acting bug thanks to the senior students showing them the ropes at the Majestic Theatre.

Now, the seventh, eighth and ninth graders have the chance to shine with three performances of "Get Smart." The spy comedy, adapted from the 1960s TV spy spoof co-created by Mel Brooks, opens tonight.

Students in the Junior Players program get to perform one play a year, and the senior directors, Leahgrace Connor and Seth Peterson, had several scripts to choose from. "Get Smart" proved too funny to pass up and both directors thought it would make for a fun learning experience.

"We looked for a really fun play the kids would enjoy, where we could teach them new techniques for acting through being a secret agent, and all the different versatile roles," Connor said.

"It had been ten-plus years since our school had done it, and we wanted to let another generation see it," Peterson said.

"Get Smart" was a TV sitcom during the late 1960s and adapted for the big screen in 2008. The directors say their play pulls together a couple of classic episodes from the original series.

"A professor has just invented the 'Enthermo', a device that can incinerate steel. This is the target of KAOS to steal, and Agent 86 has to protect it," Peterson said.

Agent 86, aka Maxwell Smart, played by Sean Madsen, must also rescue a diplomat's daughter, Princess Ingrid (Abby Riedlinger) and save the world from KAOS and the evil Mr. Big (Ian Wang).

"We've got your favorite bumbling Agent 86 and his wacky way of doing things," Peterson said. This includes Smart using the iconic spy gadget, his shoe phone.

When it appears Smart is playing right into the enemy's hands, he always ends up saving the day, especially with a little help from Agent 99 (Samantha Braukman) and Chief (Scott Larsen), Peterson said.

"Honestly, seeing the kids re-enact it is what makes it so funny," Connor said.

Students with smaller roles in "Get Smart" had the opportunity to work as tech and crew members as well.

This is the first time the Majestic Theatre is producing a Santiam Christian School play and has made all of its resources and staff available to help the cast and directors.

Peterson said the experience has provided great mentoring for everyone. Assistance from theater manager Jimbo Ivy has also allowed Connor and Peterson to take on more responsibility than they would have in the past, without as much stress.

"They're also very good at reminding us what we need to get done when, that way we're not so overwhelmed during play week," Connor said.

Peterson said his favorite part of the production has been inspiring the younger students to become actors and continue to grow.

"These kids have worked really hard to start perfecting their acting skills, and I think they deserve a lot of credit," Connor said.
Former Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on Political Matters, Alhaji Ahmed Gulak, on Wednesday pronounced himself the subs...

Gulak made the pronouncement inside the National Working Committee Hall at the partys national secretariat in Abuja.He spoke in company with his loyalists, which included former Special Assistant to ex-president, Goodluck Jonathan on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe and a former Commissioner in Bayelsa State, Chief Ayakeme Whisky.Gulak said he decided to take over the leadership of the party following the court order of December 16, 2015, which asked the party to name someone from the North-East to replace the former chairman of the party, Alhaji Adamu Muazu.Gulak told the cheering crowd, which included workers at the secretariat, that the NWC must work with him in order to move the party forward.But in a swift reaction, the PDP NWC described the action as shocking, a taboo that was unacceptable and described Gulak as a fifth columnist working for the All Progressives Congress, APC, to cause confusion in the party.It wondered that Gulak could come through the back door to become the national chairman of the party, asking him to go to his zone, consult, lobby for his name to be submitted from the North East zone.PDP National Legal Adviser, Mr Victor Kwon, dismissed Gulaks claims but urged him to go and lobby if he wanted to be chairman.He cannot proclaim himself national chairman and court did not tell the party to name him national chairman, he said.Flanked by the Deputy National Publicity Secretary, Abdullahi Jalo, Kwon who noted that the court ruling cited by Gulak, yesterday, was not mentioned at all, said the party did not receive any hearing notice that the application came up today.He also said PDP had filed an appeal on December 16 and an application for injunction, pending the appeal, which were served on Gulak.The National Legal Adviser admitted that the High Court judgement that favored Gulak called for the party to appoint a person from North East within 14 days, adding that the decision did not mandate PDP to appoint Gulak as chairman.He said: PDP is law-abiding and respect orders of the party and respect the right of North-East to complete their term.Kwon noted that consultations were ongoing to arrive at a person that would be agreeable to persons from the North-East.According to him, intervening events have made it difficult for the party to get a new chairman from the zone since last year.Nobody is making a gain for the elongation, he added.Kwon further declared that the party had yet to receive any hearing notice that the application came up today.So, if the application wasnt heard today, it goes to show that the stay of execution hasnt been struck out.Even the judgment asking Secondus to vacate his seat didnt say the party should appoint Gulak as chairman, he said.He further revealed that a meeting of the PDP NEC would soon be convened to produce a substantive chairman from the North-East ahead of the national convention slated for March.Meanwhile, 24 ex-officio members of PDP National Executive Committee, NEC, yesterday, distanced themselves from a ploy by Gulak to take over the chairmanship of the party.Reacting to the inclusion of the chairman of the committee of the ex-officios, Udo Ekpenyong, on the list of an 11-member committee set up by Gulak after he proclaimed himself national chairman of the party, they said they could not be party to any attempt to cause crisis in the party.Ekpenyong, who coincidentally flew into Abuja barely two hours after Gulak mentioned his name as member of the committee, lampooned him for attempting to divide the party, adding: I saw a statement by the former political adviser to the president, Mr Gulak, publishing names which he claimed he has inaugurated 11-man committee to look into the affairs of the party.I am just seeing this for the first time. Please, I am not a party to this statement. I have never been a party to anything having to do with impunity and against the law.I have been in politics for almost 18 years now and I helped to build PDP and I cannot destroy it now.There are constitutional ways of doing things. This press release shows personal interests. I am not involved in any way as chairman of the Ex-officios. I cannot be a party to this, I cannot destroy the house that the good people of this country collectively built.
The Supreme Court has affirmed the election of Nyesom Wike as governor of Rivers State. The court will give reasons for its decision of ...

The Supreme Court has affirmed the election of Nyesom Wike as governor of Rivers State. The court will give reasons for its decision of February 12.The Court of Appeal had on December 16 affirmed the judgment of the Rivers Governorship Election Tribunal.The appeal court had ruled that Mr. Wike was not validly elected.The Rivers Tribunal had earlier on October 24 nullified Mr. Wikes election.The tribunal, which delivered its ruling in Abuja, also ordered that a fresh governorship election be conducted in the state.After the tribunals ruling, the governor headed to the Court of Appeal, saying the judgment was untenable.The petition challenging the election of Mr. Wike as Rivers State Governor was filed by Dakuku Peterside, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the election.The Rivers governorship election, which was criticised by local and international observers, witnessed the largest amount of violence both in its build-up and after the election.
While Linn Countys unemployment rate continued to decrease in December, Benton Countys rate increased slightly  though it still was tied for the lowest unemployment level in the state.

Linn County

Linn Countys rate dropped from 6.9 percent in November to 6.4 percent in December, according to figures from the Oregon Employment Department.

This was a month where Linn County typically loses 80 jobs, and it was up 150. There was more hiring than typical, said Patrick OConnor, a regional economist with the Oregon Employment Department.

The Albany Lowes store, with 125 new workers, was reflected in December figures, as retail was up about 140 jobs.

Over 2015, Linn Countys employment grew by 920 jobs, a 2.2 percent increase.

Compared to the years of the recession, thats real strong growth for Linn County. Lets hope that continues, OConnor said.

Still, employment was still down more than 1,500 jobs, or roughly 3.5 percent, from Linn Countys pre-recession employment peak in February 2008.

Linn County isnt alone in that. Only 10 of Oregons 36 counties are back above their pre-recession employment levels, OConnor said.

Benton County

In Benton County, unemployment increased to 4.4 percent in December, up from 4.3 percent in November. During the past year, Benton County lost 270 jobs for a decrease of less than 1 percent.

OConnor wasnt too worried, however, by the fairly flat trend, as Benton County was tied with Wheeler County for the lowest unemployment rate in the state.

And Benton Countys economy is healthier than before the recession. Thanks to growth at Oregon State University and other factors, there were 1,220 more jobs than the areas pre-recession peak in November 2007, an increase of roughly 3.1 percent.

Growth at OSU masks the losses that happened in other sectors, OConnor said.

Oregons statewide unemployment dropped from 5.7 percent in November to 5.4 percent in December. During 2015, Oregon had job growth of 3.0 percent, compared to 1.9 percent throughout the United States.
President Muhammadu Buhari is billed to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016, the Head of the EU ...

President Muhammadu Buhari is billed to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016, the Head of the EU Delegation to Nigeria, Mr Michel Arrion, has said.Arrion, who disclosed this in Abuja on Wednesday at a news conference, said the Presidents visit to the Parliament was at the invitation of the EU. He explained that Buhari would deliver his speech to the over 750-member parliament from the 28 EU member countries. According to him, Buhari will afterwards, have personal sessions with the President of the European Commission.He said the visit would centre on the Presidents agenda of security, anti-corruption and economy development, among others. On security, he said the EU commended Buharis visit to Nigerias neighbours on regional collaboration against Boko Haram insurgency. He said the meeting would also discuss how the EU could cooperate with Nigeria to fight corruption and return stolen funds to Nigeria.Arrion said the Common Agenda on Migration and Mobility signed between Nigeria and the EU on March 12, 2015, would be fine-tuned during Buharis visit. He said the EU would further put the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), with Nigeria on the front burner during Buharis visit. The EU envoy declared that the signing of EPA would not be an invasion of the European products into the Nigerian markets. He said EU had signed the EPA agreement with ECOWAS while most African countries had ratified it but wondered why Nigeria had not.
Sales of the 2016 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations UTME, forms close on Friday, the Authority of the Joint Admissions and Mat...

Sales of the 2016 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations UTME, forms close on Friday, the Authority of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said, just as it also approved more computer-based test CBT, examination centres across the country.Head of Media and Information, JAMB, Dr Fabian Benjamin who spoke with Vanguard on phone Wednesday, disclosed that the examination body will conduct the 2016 UTME between February and March.He said: JAMB has approved more centres to give Nigerians the best computer-based test. He explained that the CBT examination would hold in over 400 centres within and outside Nigeria.Benjamin who vowed that JAMB will ensure that every CBT centre meets best global requirements, said, this year, there are innovations to ensure candidates write under the conditions.According to him, Some of the requirements given to the operators of the centres; are steady power supply, 200 computers, including Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS), accessible road, security and a waiting room.
Nigeria Muslim women yesterday expressed concerns over the alleged stigmatisation and harassment of women in hijab, the womens veil, ac...

Nigeria Muslim women yesterday expressed concerns over the alleged stigmatisation and harassment of women in hijab, the womens veil, across the country.The National Amirah of Al-Muminaat Organisation, Hajia Nimatullah Abdullateef, who addressed reporters in Lagos ahead of the World Hijab Day, noted that Muslim women were worried by the way the Army harassed their colleagues within and outside conflict zones because they wore hijab.She said hijab is a symbol of the Muslim womans faith and adherence to Allahs injunction.According to her, Muslim women remember the harassment, persecution, emotional and psychological anguish women in hijab suffered recently in Nigeria, especially after President Muhammadu Buharis statement that the nation might consider a ban on the Islamic dress code, if terrorists continued to use it as a cover to bomb innocent people.Hajia Abdullateef decried the attempt by authorities of the Nigeria Identity Management Commission (NIMC) in its Ibadan, Oyo State office, to legislate and limit the hijab standards in Nigeria.The amirah (womens leader) said the soldiers attitude remained a festering sore in our heart, while we note with suppressed anguish the harassment of Muslim women in hijab by officers and men of the Nigerian Army within and without military installations in different cities all over Nigeria.She added: Other government agencies are trying to rob the Muslim of the hijab as her right to freedom of religious expression, by demanding that she expose her ears during image capturing. These are: the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) and the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC). We call on the leadership of these agencies to call their men to order.We wish to remind the Nigerian security institutions that Boko Haram is the enemy and not Muslim hijabis (women in hijab). Indeed, Boko Haram has used several ingenious garbs and artefacts to camouflage its members and carry out its dastardly and evil attacks, including fruits, vegetables, motor vehicles and even fake army and police uniforms
Nigerians are reacting to the decision of the Supreme Court, which on Wednesday, which affirmed the election of Governor Nyesom Wike as t...

Justice Kekere-Ekun who delivered the lead verdict, held that three separate appeals that were filed by Wike, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and INEC, were meritorious, thereby setting aside concurrent judgments of both the Rivers State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal and that of the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal.The apex court panel headed by the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Mohammed however reserved their reasons for the judgement till February 12.Wike had beat his major challenger, Dakuku Peterside of the All Progressives Congress (APC), during the governorship election that held on April 11, 2015.
The National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, says there is a deliberate plot by some individuals to rub hi...

He said the smear campaign was tagged, Destroy the reputation of Tinubu and his relationship with Buhari.Tinubu said this in a statement by his media aide, Mr. Sunday Dare, on Tuesday.He said most of those behind the act were aggrieved members of the Peoples Democratic Party that had failed to recover from the defeat in the 2015 election.Tinubu alleged that some of them were being probed for corruption and had decided to push him into the controversy to whip up public sympathy.He said, The individuals behind the plot are mostly scared PDP elements made frightened by the Buhari anti-corruption campaign. They direct this falsehood at Tinubu in the futile mission of trying to drive a wedge between the President and Tinubu to disrupt the progress being made against corruption and to destabilise the APC.But their PDP is already something by-gone, buried under the mass of its corruption and wrongdoing. They fight for a cause that has no cause. They are mercenaries of all the ills and defects that the people want excised from our body politic. Thus, we must do the people a public service.The former governor of Lagos State said he never granted any interview regarding President Muhammadu Buharis plan to run for re-election in 2019.He also denied reports that he partook in the $2.1bn arms scam.Tinubu said he had a list of the blogs that were carrying the false news and would soon expose their sponsors.He said, In the last six weeks, the Tinubu Media Office has monitored the stream of false, distorted media accounts written against Bola Ahmed Tinubu. We have learned that there is a concerted, wilful campaign tagged, Destroy the reputation of Tinubu and his relationship with Buhari.As part of this ugly plot to cultivate the worst of lies against the national leader of the APC, several blogs and online sites recruited to launch this smear campaign have manufactured stories to advance this sinister plan to taint the public mind with gross lies disguised as news reports and interviews.Fallacious headlines such as Reasons why I collected N9m-Tinubu and I will not return N9m-Tinubu. I am afraid PDP will stop Buhari in 2019  Tinubu, are being paraded. Try as hard as they can the creators of these false tales and misleading headlines will fail miserably.Their stories cannot stand up to the slightest scrutiny. They are patently false and we condemn in the strongest terms those involved in this anti-Tinubu racket.Tinubu said such a smear campaign was nothing but libel and would not be taken likely.The APC leader said some of them had even gone as far as cloning the letter head of his media office, warning that those behind the campaign would soon be brought to justice.He added, While these fellows may think themselves cunning, they might have outwitted their very selves. In writing these stories, they have committed clear libel. In abusing the media office letterhead and name, their misrepresentations amount to forgery.They laugh now but walk on thin ice. Soon, that ice will break and they shall have nothing but the weight of their wrongdoing to blame for their predicament that will soon come.After identifying the bloggers and paid hatchet writers perpetrating these wrongs, the Tinubu Media Office is taking the step to alert the public to beware and be weary of hatchet writers, false prophets and paid bloggers. The Tinubu Media Office has the names and online sites recruited for this campaign and will not hesitate to make them know if they do not desist from their negative mission.
The Federal Government has said that no amount of blackmail will make it to surrender the ongoing war against corruption. This is even ...

The Federal Government has said that no amount of blackmail will make it to surrender the ongoing war against corruption.This is even as it said that Nigeria poverty rate has increased by the same proportion with annual budget since 1999 because the appropriated funds have mostly ended up in the pockets of few looters.The Minister of Information and Culture, Alh. Lai Mohammed stated this on Tuesday during his meeting with Abuja Bureau Chiefs in Abuja.He said that no amount of attacks will deter the administration from prosecuting the war against corruption in its efforts to save the country from collapse, insisting that the Federal Government will not be cowed or distracted on the ongoing fight against corruption. The pseudo-analysts and hack writers will labour in vain in their quest to stop the train of this anti-corruption fight, the Minister said.When I met with the News and Political Editors in Lagos on Sunday, I said, among other things, that the government is aware that in fighting corruption, corruption will also fight back. I also said that those who stole us dry are powerful. They have newspapers, radio and television stations as well as online platforms, and an army of supporters to continuously deride the governments war against corruption.Well, I can tell you today that corruption is already fighting back, and it is fighting hard and dirty. Sponsored articles have started appearing in the newspapers and in the Social Media, while Talking Heads have started making the rounds in the electronic media, all deriding the fight against corruption as well as this Administration.Not stopping there, they have been creating distractions by sponsoring articles in both local and international media to deride the administrations policies generally, tag the President a budding dictator and even write off his 2016 budget. We know that the sole purpose of these attacks is to distract attention from the war on corruption, he said.The cost of corruption is evidenced in the rate poverty in the country. Whereas Nigerias national budget has increased from just over 900 billion Naira in 1999 to over 6 trillion Naira in 2016, poverty has also increased almost by the same proportion. The reason is not far fetched: Appropriated funds have mostly ended up in the pockets of a few looters.When the money meant to construct roads are looted, the end result is that the roads are not built and the people suffer and even die in avoidable road accidents. When the money meant to provide electricity is looted, we all are perpetually sentenced to darkness. When the money meant for healthcare is pocketed by a few, we are unable to reduce maternal and infant mortality.These are the costs of corruption. Let us not just talk about corruption in the abstract, let us be counting its cost to our lives, in order to drive home the point that corruption must be tackled decisively for Nigerians to feel the impact of governance.The Minister said it was saddening that some otherwise credible voices have unwittingly allowed themselves to be railroaded into the bandwagon of pro-corruption orchestra, while some hack writers are struggling to whittle down the impact of the anti-corruption campaign.He sensed that though sponsored attacks may not stop, and that they will become more intense and more coordinated in the days ahead, he expressed optimism that the good news is that we are winning the war. Nigerians are now talking more about corruption. Nigerians are now counting the cost of corruption to their lives.Even one of those who benefitted from the Dasukigate had the temerity to deride the anti-corruption war as selective, when in saner climes, he should have been so ashamed of himself that he would have apologized to the nation and hunkered down for good.Mohammed charged Nigerians not to be swayed by the antics of the sponsored denunciation of the anti-graft war, warning that the treasury looters, who have so much resources in their kitty, and their cohorts will throw everything but the kitchen sink at this Administration. But we have no doubt that Nigerians are discerning enough to know the truth which, in the words of President Muhammadu Buhari, is that unless Nigeria kills corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria.Recall that in the so-called Dasukigate, 2.1 billion dollars meant for the fight against Boko Haram was diverted to other uses, including over 4 billion Naira for spiritual purposes, 13 billion Naira for Maritime University land, 2.1 billion Naira for publicity and hundreds of millions of Naira for political patronage.That explains why we lost many soldiers to the fight against Boko Haram, which in turn created many widows and orphans, in addition to pushing millions of Nigerians from their communities into IDP camps. This explains why the war dragged on for years until President Buhari assumed office and, within just seven months, strengthened the capacity of the military to decimate Boko Haram, he added.
Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State has said that he visited Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State, on Tuesday, as part of his effor...

Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State has said that he visited Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State, on Tuesday, as part of his efforts to foster unity among Yoruba leaders.The governor, who said that he was not in Osun for any political reason, pointed out that he was not ready to abandon the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the All Progressives Congress (APC).Governor Fayose stated that against all speculations from some quarters that he was coming to Osogbo to ask Aregbesola help him beg President Muhammadu Buhari, he was in Osun for the unity of Yoruba race.He said that the Yoruba race was greater than any political office hence his belief in the development of the race.The governor averred that the visit of the Ooni of Ife to the 45th coronation of the Alaafin of Oyo was instructive, hence the need for every Yoruba sons and daughters to see to the unity and progress of the race.He said, This is my first official visit to any APC state in Nigeria. I am not in Osogbo to ask Aregbesola to help me beg as being speculated in some quarters. We are all Yoruba, politics is like water, it can flow anywhere.I was moved by the historic visit of the Ooni of Ife to the Alaafin of Oyo and I am of the opinion that the Yoruba leaders must unite.The Yoruba nation must not be rubbished. Our leaders must not be rubbished irrespective of the political they belong to.I believe in the Yoruba race, the race comes first before the office of the governor. The race is eternal while that of governor ismomentary. We must watch today to be guided by tomorrow. I am here for the unity of Yoruba as it affect the Oodua, the progenitor Fayoseemphasised.While reiterating his ressolve to remain in the PDP, the governor said, I remain in PDP to play the opposition role.In all of this, there must be fairness. There must be equity and the rule of law must be followed. We should remember that power as it wastransient for the PDP, it can also be transient for the party in power now.For me, I dont want to contest which party is dead now or which one is alive. Whether or not PDP is dead, time will tell.Opposition is the major ingredient of democracy and without opposition in a democracy, there will be dictatorship. Those promoting dictatorship in a democracy will end up in the stomach of the dictator.Responding, Governor Aregbesola described the visit of Governor Fayose to Osun as demonstration of maturity, saying it takes a very matured human being to know that at the end of every public office, he will be left with humanity.He said, Osoko has said that he is not going to leave his party, but I want my good friend and brother to know that PDP has exhausted its stay in Nigeria, it can no longer be revived, let us look at a political party that will give hope to our people. Opposition must be for a purpose, I stand by you on the unity of Yoruba land and that our leaders not put down in the country.He assured Fayose that he will stand by him in his effort to galvanise the people of South-west for accelerated development.The Governor who lamented the present economic situation of the country noted that there was an invasion on the economy of Nigeria to the extent that the country is loosing 75 percent of its income due to oil glut.The country is facing a very serious crises with the rate at which the crude oil price is falling. There is an invasion on the economy to the level that we are loosing 75 percent of our income which is not good.At this point, wise people must have an alternative to oil which part of it is your visit. We must use our culture and affinity to form a bond that can make our people live a normal life, it is a duty that we owe our people, States and Nigeria as a whole.
The Federal Government yesterday said that it would soon embark on the recovery of additional $750 million said to be Abacha loot yet ...

The Federal Government yesterday said that it would soon embark on the recovery of additional $750 million said to be Abacha loot yet pending.The Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami disclosed this during an interactive session with the House of Representatives Committee on Justice in Abuja.The Minister further stated that his ministry was aiming at recovering on behalf of the Federal Government 6.9 million said to have been misappropriated by a former governor of Delta State, James Ibori.He said: In respect of of the recovery of looted assets, the ministry will engage in an agree waive policy of using Mutual Legal Assistance Agreements or other bilateral and multilateral instruments to seek cooperation with other jurisdictions to ensure the repatriation of illicitly- acquired assets in foreign jurisdictions.The collaboration will equally involve the engagement of foreign- based Counsel to attend to matters on behalf of the Federal Government. Low- hanging fruits being targeted in this initiative include $750 million Abaca loot as well as the sum of GBP 6.9 million of the Ibori loot.On the long run, the ministry will be in a position to coordinate the recovery of billions of Dollars in foreign jurisdictions, based on current estimations.On the issue of terrorism, the AGF said, My ministry is currently processing approximately 800 terrorism cases for prosecution . The resources required for the successful prosecution of these cases as well as the general coordination of the Criminal Justice Sector as envisaged under the ACIA, were fully captured in the original proposal made by the ministry to the Ministry of Finance.The successful prosecution of the above priorities will require the necessary balance of personnel capacity including staff training, travels and tours, resource capacity in terms of adequate budgetary allocations and legislative support by the National Assembly through the passage of all requisite Bills, as may be presented by the executive arm.The anti-corruption campaign will involve the deployment of resources by the ministry to assess and prosecute the requisite cases in collaboration with the anti-corruption agencies, pursuit to the overriding powers of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice in Sections 150 and 174 of the 1999 Constitution as amended.In respect of measures to ensure the expeditious prosecution of terrorism, the ministrys efforts will be anchored on the successful implementation of the administration of criminal justice Act 2015, ACJA, and the Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Act 2013.
SWEET HOME  Sweet Home has rallied around two local families whose husbands and fathers were critically injured in a Jan. 21 accident east of town.

Neil Nightingale, 39, and Robert Mayfield, 54, remain hospitalized with life-threatening injuries at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis and the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland, respectively.

All Star Pizza at 1203 Long Street in Sweet Home will donate 100 percent of its proceeds from all Thursday sales to the families. The shop is open from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.

On Saturday evening, a spaghetti feed will be held at Little Promises Pre-School, 28028 Pleasant Valley Road. Spaghetti, salad and bread will be served from 4 to 7 p.m. for $5 a plate. Other donations are welcome. There also will be a silent auction from 3 to 6:30 p.m.

GoFundMe accounts have been established for both families as well.

The goal for Nightingales Medical Expenses is $35,000 and as of Tuesday morning, more than $32,000 had been pledged.

According to information posted on its page, Nightingale has undergone several operations and remains unconscious and on a ventilator. He and his wife, Tami, have a young son, Ryder.

The post also noted, We continue to pray that God will give us a miracle of a complete recovery. We know it will be a long road but with a million miles under his belt (trucking) we know Neil is up for it! Tami and Ryder have loved all of the support and the love for Neil.

Gene Mayfield is the husband of Julie Mayfield, administrator for the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District. Mayfields page, Gene Mayfield Recovery Fund, has a $10,000 goal. As of Tuesday morning, more than $8,500 had been pledged.

The page's latest update noted, Gene is still in stable condition in trauma ICU at OHSU. It also noted that Mayfield has undergone shoulder surgery and is awaiting facial surgery. He will also need surgeries on one of his legs and one of his hands."

The men were injured the morning of January 21 near the entrance to Bauman Mill between Sweet Home and Lebanon on Highway 20.

According to the Oregon State Police report, Mayfield was driving a 1998 International utility truck owned by Pape' Machinery and was westbound when the vehicle left its lane of travel and crossed the center turn lane. It collided head-on with a 2011 Kenworth log truck driven by Nightingale. The truck is owned by Timberline Logging of Sweet Home.

The log truck was empty.

A third vehicle, a 2003 Subaru Legacy driven by David Briggs, 59, of Lebanon, was eastbound and struck Nightingales truck after the initial crash occurred.

Mayfield and Nightingale were taken to area hospitals in air helicopters. Briggs was not injured.
PARAMUS -- Susan Pendergraph, kennel manager at the Animal Protection Society of Caswell County, North Carolina, remembers what it was like before Bonnie Dickinson came calling.

"Before she came into our lives, every litter of puppies that came in, we had to choose half of them and put the other half down," she said. "It was a horrible ordeal."

About eight years ago, Dickinson, a Paramus resident, called the society out of the blue. She was from up north, she said, and she could help adopt out their puppies.

Dickinson, who runs a nonprofit rescue group--Bonnie's Animal Rescue Kingdom--found Caswell County on the dogsindanger.com website, which lists dogs close to being euthanized. She traveled to North Carolina in a friend's van and brought home 11 puppies and a good impression of the shelter's cleanliness and loyalty to animals.

But the Caswell County shelter has little room. Its kennel has 18 runs, which fit three to five dogs each. And because North Carolina is more lax about animal population control, those slots fill quickly.

"Nobody ties their dogs up," Dickinson said. "There's no licensing. Everything runs loose. They're just starting to do spay and neuter."

So Dickinson continued her trips to North Carolina. She's brought back as many as 42 puppies as once. Since making the North Carolina connection, the euthanasia rate at the Animal Protection Society of Caswell County has dropped from 90 percent to 28 percent, Dickinson said.

She's also formed bonds with the community. Dickinson used to rent a hotel when she went south. Now she has friends with whom she can stay.

While North Carolina has the supply, New Jersey has the demand. Spay and neuter is cheap and commonplace, so puppies can be difficult to adopt.

As a result, many rescue organizations make connections with southern shelters. But few have forged such close ties with a single shelter or the surrounding community.

Caswell County has a population of about 23,000, smaller than some Bergen County towns, and more than 21 percent live below the poverty line.

This winter she brought 12 bags of coats on a trip to Caswell, surplus from a drive at her church, the Second Reformed Church of Hackensack. On the past few trips she's taken dog houses, built by a Bergen County girl scout troop.

Dickinson is trying to promote spay and neuter in the Caswell community. She helped organize a free lasagna dinner in November for anyone who could produce a spay and neuter certificate.

"This has gone beyond just rescuing dogs and puppies," she said. "It's helping Caswell County as well."

The board members were apprehensive about Dickinson at first, Pendergraph said.

"I actually had to give them a list of where everyone got adopted to and where they went," Dickinson said.

Now she has her own key.

"We're doing amazing things with the help of Bonnie," Pendergraph said.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
EVESHAM TOWNSHIP -- Police are asking for the public's help in shedding light on a possible luring attempt in the township.

Police are looking for the driver of this black sedan as part of an investigation into an attempted child luring. (Photo provided)

According to police, two juvenile males were playing on Peter Hurd Way near their home in a housing development when a black sedan pulled up to them.

Inside were an older white male with gray hair and a teenage girl with long blond hair who asked the boys if they wanted some candy.

The pair drove away after one of the boys pretended to call the police on his cellphone.

A surveillance camera nearby captured an image of the vehicle as it was driving. The incident occurred close to the township's border with Waterford and Berlin townships in Camden County.

Police are urging anyone who might have information on this incident to contact them at 856-983-1116, call their confidential tipline at 856-983-4699, email them at Facebook@Eveshampd.org or send an anonymous tip by texting ETPDTIP to 847411.

Michelle Caffrey may be reached at mcaffrey@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ShellyCaffrey. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
VINELAND -- An employee at Atlantic Coast Freezers was arrested Monday for bringing a handgun to work, according to city police.

Ricardo A. Ferrera Jr., 22, of South West Avenue, was charged with unlawful possession of a handgun, possession of a handgun and obstruction.

Vineland police were called to Atlantic Coast Freezers on North West Boulevard at 10:17 a.m. Monday to investigate whether an employee possessed a firearm at work.

Police found Ferrera at the facility with a .32 caliber revolver in his pocket.

Ferrera was held in the Cumberland County Jail in lieu of $100,000.

In addition to the weapons charges, Ferrera was also charged with obstruction for not following a police officer's orders when he was first approached, police said.

Don E. Woods may be reached at dwoods@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @donewoods1. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
From classic musicals like "A Chorus Line," to new, hip shows like "Rock of Ages," South Jersey theaters are gearing up for the winter season with some must-see productions.

Off Broad Street Players of The Levoy Theatre in Millville are bringing "Rock of Ages" to South Jersey for the first time ever.

A "jukebox musical," the show features rock hits from 1980s bands such as Journey, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, and Poison.

OBSP veteran Robert "P.J." Muniz plays Drew Boley, an aspiring rock star who is working as a busboy in a Hollywood bar while awaiting his big break.

"Being a rock star is literally a dream come true," Muniz said. "I've always wanted to get signed to a record label and be a musician, so being able to rock out for the run of the show is such an amazing feeling."

Muniz said the hard work of the rest of the "Rock of Ages" cast fuels him to portray the rocker better and better each time he takes the stage.

"This cast is so close, and I am so humbled and grateful for sharing this dream with them," Muniz said.

And while he loves playing a rockstar, the character's slight personality shifts and adjusting his voice to those, are Muniz's biggest challenge with the part.

"For me, there are three different characters I have to play -- Drew who is a sweetheart, boy-next-door type; Wolfgang Von Colt who is Drew's alter rock ego; and then, towards the end of the show, I blend the two together to create the ultimate Drew for Sherrie."

He said each of these "characters" have a slightly different sound and persona.

But his favorite song to perform is "High Enough" -- a duet with Jill Bradshaw who plays Sherrie Christian, a hopeful actress who is working as a waitress.

"She is super talented and so supportive," Muniz said of Bradshaw. "This number is full of emotion for both of us and we really get to sing our hearts out."

Director Philip Hopf said he is "incredibly honored to be directing the South Jersey premier of "Rock of Ages."

"It's not your typical night at the theatre and that's what is great about the piece," he said.

However, Hopf said he took the same approach with this show as he would directing any show. "You lead with the characters and move out from there," he said. "Drew and Sherrie are like 99 percent of us. They have a dream and the show really goes about showing us that life doesn't always go the way you plan. In the end, you find out that the dream itself wasn't the important part, but the journey you took is."

As his OBSP directorial debut, Hopf said the biggest challenge in bringing "Rock of Ages" to life was the size of the production.

"It's huge," he said. "My background in directing has always been in smaller cast shows and even smaller theatre spaces. Working with a cast this size and knowing that my work is being put on this enormous stage is very nerve-wracking."

But his cast and crew made his task much easier.

"The group of people that we have brought together are truly incredible," Hopf said. "It has been very easy to get the work done because they are so open to trying things and they are all so dedicated to making sure that this show is truly amazing."

And even though the show focuses on 1980s rock and the lifestyle that surrounded that genre, Muniz said the show's message is all about dreams.

"The message is that sometimes the dreams you set out to achieve change and you discover new dreams that are just as good as the old ones if not better," he said. "If the message doesn't get you in a seat, the cast should."

Hopf said "Rock of Ages" has something for everyone.

"You have the music that everyone knows and loves," he said. "You have fantastic story with characters that you can root for, and characters you can dislike. I think that when the curtain goes down each night, the audience is going to be dancing and humming in the aisles.

Hopf said the show has heart.

"We are all so close and have worked so hard to make this production the best it can be," Muniz said about the cast. "The energy is through the roof and who doesn't love to rock out to some 80s classics?"

Off Broad Street Players present "Rock of Ages" at The Levoy Theatre, 126 North High Street in Millville, from Feb. 12 to 21.

For tickets, call 856-327-6400 or visit www.obsp.org or www.levoy.net.

Check out these other shows hitting the stage this winter.

Broadway Theatre of Pitman

43 South Broadway in Pitman

From now through Feb. 7, Broadway Theatre of Pitman presents "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" -- a fantastic musical adventure about a car that flies, sails, and takes eccentric inventor Caractacus Potts and his children on an exciting journey.

The show includes songs such as "Toot Sweets," "Teamwork," and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

For tickets, call 856-384-8381 or visit thebroadwaytheatre.org.

Cumberland Players

66 East Sherman Avenue in Vineland

The Cumberland Players are presenting "12 Angry Men" on Feb. 26, 27, and 28, and March 4 and 5.

In this classic drama, a dissenting juror in a murder trial slowly manages to convince the other jurors that the case is not as obviously clear as it seemed in court.

For tickets, call 856-692-5626 or visit www.cumberlandplayers.com.

Eagle Theatre

208 Vine Street in Hammonton

Eagle Theatre presents "Assassins" on select dates from Jan. 22 to Feb. 21.

Centered around nine people who have each attempted to assassinate a president of the United States, "Assassins," is a chilling comedy musical with a darkly poignant twist.

For tickets, call 609-704-5012 or visit theeagletheatre.com.

Grand Theatre: Home of the Road Company

405 South Main Street in Williamstown

From Jan. 21 to Feb. 6, the Road Company will present Rodgers and Hammerstein's "In the Heights" -- the story of New York's vibrant Washington Heights community which is on the brink of change, and full of hopes, dreams and pressures.

In 2008, "In the Heights" won Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations.

For tickets, call 856-728-2120 or visit www.roadcompany.com.

Haddonfield Plays and Players

957 East Atlantic Avenue in Haddonfield

Haddonfield Plays and Players will bring the legendary music of "Smokey Joe's Cafe" to life from Jan. 14 to 30.

With classic tunes like "Hound Dog," "Love Potion #9," and "Stand By Me," this show is the longest-running revue in Broadway history.

For tickets, call 856-429-8139 or visit www.haddonfieldplayers.com

The Ritz Theatre Company

915 White Horse Pike in Haddon Township

With music and lyrics by Dolly Parton herself, the Ritz Theatre Company brings "9 to 5 The Musical" to the stage from now to Feb. 7.

Based on the 1980 movie, "9 to 5 The Musical" follows three unlikely friends who take control of their office and learn that there is nothing they can't do, even in a man's world.

For tickets, call 856-858-5230 or visit www.ritztheatreco.org.

South Camden Theatre Company

400 Jasper Street in Camden

From now through Jan. 31, the South Camden Theatre Company presents "House of Blue Leaves" -- a story that takes place in 1965 in Sunnyside, Queens.

Set on the day Pope Paul VI visited New York City, the show features nuns, a political bombing, a GI headed for Vietnam, a zookeeper who dreams of making it big in Hollywood as a songwriter, and his wife Bananas -- a schizophrenic destined for an institution call the "House of Blue Leaves."

For tickets, call 856-409-0365 or visit www.southcamdentheatre.org.

Woodbury Sketch Club Players

433 Glover Street in Woodbury

The Sketch Club Players bring the classic musical, "A Chorus Line" to the stage from now through Jan. 30.

With iconic songs such as "Nothing," "Music and the Mirror," and "One," this story of 17 dancers competing for the few open spots in the chorus of a Broadway musical takes the audience through the audition process straight to the grand finale.

"A Chorus Line" will be presented at The Fine Arts Center at Rowan at Gloucester County College thanks to the Gloucester County Cultural and Heritage Commission.

The center is located at 1400 Tanyard Road in Sewell.

For tickets, call 856-848-8089 or visit www.sketchclubplayers.org.

Philadelphia

Walnut Street Theatre

825 Walnut Street in Philadelphia

Walnut Street Theatre presents the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy "Harvey" from now through March 6.

This story follows Elwood P. Dowd, a charming and kind man with one character flaw -- an unwavering friendship with a six-foot-tall, invisible white rabbit named Harvey.

The New York Post said "Harvey" is a "show for the entire family," and "by the end, you too may want to see that rabbit."

From Feb. 4 to 13, Walnut Street Theatre for Kids brings the love back from the dead with "Zombie in Love," based on the popular book series by Kelly DiPucchio.

Mortimer, a zombie, wants to find a date to Cupid's Ball, finds it difficult since his rotting body grosses out all the girls. But he learns there's someone for everyone in this sidesplitting yet touching musical.

For tickets, call 215-574-3550 or 800-982-2787, or visit www.walnutstreettheatre.org.

The Academy of Music at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

300 South Broad Street in Philadelphia

Broadway Philadelphia presents "Pippin" from Feb. 23 to 28 at the Academy of Music.

This Tony Award-winning musical tells the story of a young prince who is on a death-defying journey in search of his life's meaning.

For tickets, call 215-893-1999 or visit www.kimmelcenter.org.

Kelly Roncace may be reached at kroncace@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @kellyroncace. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
NEWARK -- Mayor Ras Baraka is defending key staff members some critics are claiming contributed to a lackluster response to this weekend's record-setting snowstorm.

While the mayor has taken the brunt of widespread complaints about the slow pace of plowing and snow removal in the city, many residents have taken to social media and other forums to place blame at the feet of officials they say are in place due to personal and political connections rather than professional qualifications.

"This administration has a history of hiring their friends, people who they like," said Veronica Branch, a city resident and former School Advisory Board candidate.

"Not necessarily somebody who would be qualified to get the job done."

Much of the invective has been directed at Director of Neighborhood and Recreational Services Patrick Council, who is charged with developing and executing the city's snow removal plan.

On Wednesday morning, East Ward Councilman Augusto Amador initially refused to vote for a resolution presented by Council's department to establish a fee schedule for non-residents to use certain city facilities until Council could share details on his response to the storm.

"In view of what has happened in the last weekend, he needs to appear before us and give us some explanations to a lot of questions that I, for one, have," he said.

"We were in a reactive mode, not in a proactive mode. Someone has to be accountable for some of the mistakes that were made."

A prominent pastor and current head of the South Ward Democratic Committee, Council was named acting director in August 2014 -- one of two unsuccessful City Council candidates backed by Baraka to get city jobs following his inauguration.

Prior to accepting the $136,599 job, Council served as recreation director for Newark Public Schools -- experience Baraka has cited as key to his appointment. In an interview Tuesday, the mayor said he had also proven more than capable of overseeing snow removal.

"It's a plan that's been in place before we got here. Maybe some minute changes here and there...Most of it is about management," he said. "Patrick Council is highly qualified."

Patrick Council

Attempts to reach Council directly Tuesday were not successful, but Baraka attributed any calls for his removal to motives that had more to do with last year's campaign than the safety of residents.

"Many people are taking advantage of this situation. They didn't say all of this last year when we had snowstorms," he said. "To make a judgment about them because we're having a bad snowstorm now, it's politically motivated. Ultimately there are going to be a few people who use this as an opportunity to campaign."

Baraka also defended Juba Dowdell, an admitted longtime friend who was named the city's deputy emergency management coordinator in January 2015. The city's Department of Emergency Management took over storm operations once a state of emergency was declared on Saturday.

A fellow poet who has performed at local tributes to Baraka's famed father, Amiri Baraka, Dowdell served six months in federal prison in 1994 for a small role in a tax fraud scheme while attending Hampton University in Virginia. He later returned to Newark to complete college and began teaching at Central High School, where Baraka also taught before becoming principal in 2007.

In an application obtained by NJ Advance Media through an open records request, Dowdell lists no previous public safety or emergency management experience, disclosing only his time as a teacher. Newark school personnel records indicate he left the teaching position to take a leave of absence before accepting his current $89,932 position.

City officials said he went through six months of training with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other state and local entities before fully taking the reins.

On Tuesday, Baraka said Dowdell's role is focused on helping to apply for grants and reimbursements for overtime and other expenses incurred during local emergencies, and he played no direct role in coordinating the city's storm response.

"It's strictly administrative," he said. "He is in no way strategizing any public safety response."

Since taking office, Baraka has hired a number of political allies from the South Ward and beyond, as well as family members, though the moves drew little to no public criticism at the time.

Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose, who oversees the city's police, fire and emergency management operations, called Council a "highly competent executive" and said Dowdell, while not directly involved with snow removal, was "one of the most valuable and hardest working people (in OEM)."

"I wish I had 10 Juba Dowdells," he said. "Snow removal is a team effort, and Pat and Juba are valuable members of the team."

Dan Ivers may be reached at divers@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanIversNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Tyrique Spruell

NEWARK -- Superior Court Judge Verna Leath said Jamil Bader Jr.'s family was operating a grocery store in Newark to provide a valuable service to neighboring residents.



But then Tyrique Spruell and Eugene Walker allegedly conspired to rob the business on Sept. 13, 2012. When the 18-year-old Bader tried to stop the robbery, he was shot and killed.



While charges are pending against Walker for allegedly pulling the trigger, Leath sentenced Spruell on Tuesday to seven years in state prison for acting as the getaway driver.



In handing down the sentence, Leath said the incident represented "a senseless crime directed at an innocent target by a young man who clearly has no concern for the value of this community," according to an audio recording of the hearing.



Spruell, 24, of Newark, had pleaded guilty on Nov. 9 to conspiracy to commit robbery at Jamil & Sons Family Grocery on Clinton Avenue, which was owned by Bader's family.



In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors recommended the seven-year prison sentence for Spruell. Spruell must serve nearly six years before becoming eligible for parole, and he will receive credit for almost three years of time served.



Spruell was sentenced on July 9 to five years in state prison on aggravated assault and theft charges in an unrelated case. On Tuesday, Leath noted how Spruell has been arrested seven times and this case represents his third conviction on an indictable offense.





Authorities have said Spruell was the getaway driver, and he never got out of the vehicle during the robbery, when Walker allegedly shot Bader. During Tuesday's hearing, Spruell's attorney, Sterling Kinsale, said his client had "nothing to do with" the homicide, according to the recording.



Spruell declined to make a statement during the hearing.



Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Adam Wells, who handled the case, said during the hearing that the Bader family continues to be distraught over the "senseless loss" of Jamil Bader Jr., according to the recording.



Wells added that the family is eager to see Walker's case proceed, and they are satisfied with the resolution of Spruell's case.



Walker, now 20, of Newark, was 16 years old at the time of the incident, and he was later waived up to adult court.



Walker also was charged with robbing a bodega on Aug. 14, 2012, authorities said. He was scheduled to go on trial in that case when he pleaded guilty on March 4, 2014 to robbery and related offenses.



Walker was then sentenced on May 8, 2014 to a 16-year prison term. He must serve nearly 14 years before becoming eligible for parole.

Bill Wichert may be reached at bwichert@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillWichertNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEWARK -- Rush hour was a nightmare for drivers passing through the downtown area Tuesday night.

Motorists and media accounts described traffic at a standstill heading towards the city's main crossroads, Broad and Market streets, as of about 5:30 p.m. Delays along McCarter Highway were as long as an hour or more, News 12 New Jersey reported.

NJ Transit buses were averaging about 45-minute delays throughout rush hour and beyond, with delays persisting as of about 8 p.m., a Transit spokeswoman, Nancy Snyder, said.

Jay Dow, a journalist, posted video from the vehicle he was traveling in along Broad Street around 7 p.m. Dow saw people leaving buses stopped in traffic and walking, and interviewed others at bus stops who said they had been waiting for at least an hour.

Traffic in Newark is a mess right now. pic.twitter.com/8OgZyzSjHd  Jeremy Settle (@JeremySettle) January 26, 2016

Newark has been grappling with the aftereffects of Saturday's blizzard, which dumped a record amount of snow on the city. A number of side streets remained clogged with snow 48 hours after Saturday's storm, prompting the city to ask for the state Department of Transportation to help with removal and street cleaning.

Even with the state assist, however, a number of side streets Tuesday afternoon were still clotted with snow and ice while major roadways, like McCarter, were narrowed by towering piles of plowed snow.

Paul Milo may be reached at pmilo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@PaulMilo2. FindNJ.com on Facebook
WASHINGTON TWP. --The Washington Township Board of Education voted Tuesday to approve its long-awaited plan for redistricting its schools.

The plan, presented during a communite-wide meeting last week, was a nearly five-year endeavor that began in 2011 with an 87-member task force to evaluate the need for redistricting for the township. With initial reasons being a decline in enrollment in 2013 of approximately 2,000 students, motives for redistricting have since touched on funding, equal use of facilities and equity amongst students, as well as adjusting for an implementation of full-day kindergarten.

Superintendent Joseph Bollendorf explained to an auditorium of parents at Washington Township High School Thursday night, that the goal for the board and the district was to establish six contiguous neighborhoods, in which the aim would be for students to go to the first closest school, to their neighborhood.

"Right now, we have students being bussed 45 minutes to school, and that's not right," Bollendorf said.

Bollendorf explained that the last redistricting plan for the township was created in 1997, in which developments were 80 percent full, with new construction scheduled to take place over the ensuing years. It was decided then, that both Whitman and Bells elementary schools would be used as overflow schools. In 2004, a small amount of redistricting occurred, moving kids who lived in Washington Way and Nob Hill from Wedgwood to Hurffville schools.

"We have nine developments that go to schools that are not the first or second closest schools," Bollendorf said.

Current district placement has students going from Sawyers Creek and Millstream Apartments, to Whitman; students going from Nob Hill to Hurffville; students from Sheffield Gate, County House Village, Arden Poste, Henly, Croften Run, Wrenfield and Whispering Oaks attending Bells. The new plan realigns the developments with schools that are considered the first or second closest schools. Bollendorf said that because of the patchwork situation, Whitman and Bells are filled to capacity.

"In the fourth grade, the average class size in one school is 27, while in another school the class size is 19," Bollendorf said.

The new plan would send students from Sawyers Creek and Millstream to Wedgwood; students from Nob Hill to Wedgwood; students from Sheffield Gate, County House Village and Henly to Hurffville; students from Croften Run to Whitman; students from Wrenfield to Whitman.

In total, 11 developments would be moved from one school to another, impacting 669 students, equal to 15 percent of the elementary and middle school population.

Bollendorf said that redistricting would allow the district's facilities to have excess classroom space that can be utilized at most schools. If enrollment continued its current rate, an extra two teachers, costing $160,000 would be needed.

"You trust me to be fiscally responsible to deliver a great product," Bollendorf said, "but be fiscally sound." Bollendorf said that he could not achieve that goal without redistricting or delivering full-day kindergarten.

Director of Elementary Education Gretchen Gerber on Thursday outlined a strategy for full-day kindergarten to go along with the redistricting map. Gerber said that children from Hurffville, Wedgwood and Birches would attend kindergarten at Grenloch Terrace Early Education Center, along with ESL students and students with disabilities.

Students from Bells and Thomas Jefferson schools will attend Kindergarten at Thomas Jefferson, while Whitman will house its own kindergarten.

Gerber said that the current half-day model, though excellent for the students, is "rushed." A full-day kindergarten model would allow for extended instruction, as well as increased playtime for children.

Gerber also said that registration for kindergarteners would begin in March of this year, with an end date undecided.

"We want there to be an end date so that we can evaluate the needs of the schools," Gerber said, though enrollment would still be accepted beyond the date.

Due to a lack of facilities at GTECC, hot and cold lunches would be transported to the school for students. Gerber also mentioned that a concrete schedule of a typical kindergarten day has not been solidified, as the board must still vote on the matter.

Bollendorf said that a total of 18 teachers would need to be hired for kindergarten, and specials would be facilitated by teachers, but only for kindergarten levels. The district will already be challenged to stay beneath the two percent cap increase on taxes, with state aid unknown until February.

Public responses to the proposed plans were of confusion and disagreement with the redistricting model and the implementation of full-day kindergarten. Parents were concerned with the need for a full-day kindergarten, and if there is any data to support its efficacy, now. Others felt that the board sprung the information on redistricting very suddenly without public input.

All documents pertaining to enrollment, redistricting and full-day kindergarten are available on the district homepage.
If you pay any attention at all to the Oregon Legislature, youre going to hear plenty of complaining over the next month or so from Republicans about how the Democratic majority is abusing the original intent of the short five-week legislative sessions that convene in even-numbered years.

During a session preview on Tuesday in Salem sponsored by The Associated Press, Republican legislative leaders argued, again and again, that the shorter sessions never were intended for the sort of complicated (and controversial) policy measures that will dominate this years session, which begins on Monday.

In fact, some Republican leaders argued, using the shorter sessions to advance proposals on items such as an increase in the state minimum wage and a controversial proposal to wean Oregon away from coal amounts to abuse of power.

Well, of course, some partisan politics is involved in that argument. And lets face facts: If Republicans enjoyed the kind of legislative majorities that Democrats currently do, no one doubts that Republicans would use their edge to push their priorities.

But even keeping that in mind, though, the Republicans have a point  and it was hammered home again and again, sometimes unintentionally  during Tuesdays preview session.

When Oregon voters approved the proposal for annual sessions, the idea behind it was that state government had become too large and complex an operation to guide with a Legislature that met every other year. But the idea was that these 35-day sessions would be focused on smaller items: As Gov. Kate Brown put it on Tuesday, the shorter sessions would be an opportunity to make budgetary adjustments and also to tie up any loose ends or unexpected developments resulting from the Legislatures work in its 160-day sessions held in odd-numbered years. That was the case voters approved.

In her comments on Tuesday, though, Brown added a third goal for the shorter session, and this one struck us as new  although, to be fair, our memories might be faulty: Legislators in the shorter sessions, she argued, also can work to come up with alternatives or compromises that could pre-empt voter initiatives that might make it to the election ballot.

In other words, the shorter legislative sessions might be necessary to help protect voters from themselves. No wonder that argument didnt get a lot of play in the campaign for annual sessions.

But the fact is that the shorter sessions are not the proper venue for complex policy bills, and heres the primary reason why: The pace of the session is such that it forecloses any real opportunity for public input. As legislators noted, its a bit of misnomer to call them five-week sessions: Since bills need to pass both houses of the Legislature, that means each body often has two weeks or less to pass a measure. Hearings on bills can be announced with 24 hours notice, and sometimes less than that.

The shorter sessions are not the place for complicated new policy initiatives  and the more legislators use them in that way, the more theyll find that theyre eroding a measure of trust with the public. (mm)
LINN COUNTY SHERIFF

Stolen vehicle recovered  Monday, Jan. 26, 6:36 p.m., 31900 block of Seven Mile Lane. A family vacationing in Mexico returned to find their 2003 Honda Civic had been stolen. After calling the Linn County Sheriff's Office, they learned deputies had found the car abandoned at the intersection of Gilkey Bridge and Goar Road. Deputies had tagged it for removal the night before, but had not yet had it towed, because they could not get in touch with its owners. Upon reuniting with their car, the callers started it up and drove it away.

ALBANY POLICE

Stolen Vehicle  Monday, Jan. 25, 1:28 p.m., 900 block of Washington Street. A woman who had taken a bus to Portland two weeks ago to visit her husband in the hospital came back to discover her 1995 Nissan Sahara pickup had been stolen.

Stolen vehicle  Tuesday, Jan. 26, 8;41 p.m., 100 block of Jefferson Street. A caller at the Jefferson Loft apartments says he woke up to find his truck missing, and that he last saw it at 5 p.m. the night before. He said it was locked, that he had paid off the loan, and that nobody else has permission to drive it.
A crime scene photograph taken by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation shows bullet holes in the windshield of the Chevrolet Malibu during the trial of Cleveland police officer, Michael Brelo, April 7, 2015, in Cleveland. The city of Cleveland on Tuesday is expected to announce what discipline Brelo and 12 other officers involved in the chase could face.
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You may now vote for the crook; it's legal again in Louisiana
Police inspect a car in the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie where a wounded toddler was taken. (Photo by Ben Myers, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
WASHINGTON (AP)  The House Jan. 6 committee plans to unveil "surprising" details at its next public hearing about the 2021 attack at the U.S. Capitol. The session Thursday afternoon is likely to be the last public hearing before midterm elections next month. The panel is expected to include new evidence from the U.S. Secret Service about its actions with Donald Trump that day. Ahead of a report later this year, the panel is summing up its findings. The committee says Trump, after he lost the 2020 presidential election, launched an unprecedented attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory. They say the result was the deadly mob siege of the Capitol.
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You would be hard pressed to find a concert featuring a more diverse selection of music than Friday's Concert for Hope, being held to raise money for a local group sponsoring two Syrian refugee families.

You would be hard pressed to find a concert featuring a more diverse selection of music than Friday's Concert for Hope, being held to raise money for a local group sponsoring two Syrian refugee families.Friday's show, being held at Glad Tidings Tabernacle, boasts a mix of classical, jazz, blues, country and rock music from some of Sudbury's most talented and well-known performers.It features a classical opera performance by Irmgard Hechler and Darquise Poulin, plus local Hugh Jazz, The Welcome Matt and The Bluez Brotherz.Concert For Hope features an outstanding lineup of local talent who have come together with one common goal: supporting Sudbury Project Hope and its effort to relocate and support two refugee families, said Jeffrey Burton, event organizer, in a news release. Concert for Hope promises something for every musical taste from classical to jazz, blues and rock.On the bill are the Bluez Brotherz Showband and Revue, a frequent performer for good causes, including Blues for Food, which helps the city's hungry and homeless.Vic Theriault said the 10-piece ban got involved thanks to a friendship between Burton and Rod Bazinet, the other Bluez Brother."He asked us to play," Theriault said. "We believe in helping the cause of new immigrants coming to Canada, fleeing war zones. We're in full support of it."The full 10-piece band will be performing, which includes a four-piece horn section."The Syrians that are being sponsored are going to be there, he said. So it's a welcome for them. It's not only a fundraiser, but it's a meet-and-greet welcome, sort of. A welcome to Canada, and welcome to Sudbury. And we'll show them a divergent style of music."On the classical bill, soprano Irmgard Hechler and vocalist Darquise Poulin will be accompanied by pianist Marie Ng-Au.Hechler performed with the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra for the first time in 2002. That same year, she received strong reviews for her concert performances with the Brandenburg Concert Orchestra in Berlin, as well as her concert at the St. Nickolaus Cathedral for their 500th anniversary in Gundelsheim, Germany. She and Poulin will perform duets as well as solos.Hugh Jazz will bring some live, gypsy jazz to the stage, to transport you to the romantic period of the early 20th century, is how the group was described before its appearance at the Jazz Sudbury Festival last year.Hugh Jazz performs live gypsy jazz in the 'le jazz hot' style of Paris, with jazz standards made famous by artists such as Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. Relive the golden period of jazz through the post-prohibition era deftly executed by Jean-Paul Gignac, fiddle; Eric Plangger, guitar; Christopher Dardick, drums; and Will Himsl, vocals."Rounding out the show will be a performance by the aptly named group, The Welcome Matt, featuring the husband and wife duo of Sarah (former Craig) and Jim Matt.Their sound combines Sarah's jazz background and Jim's country sounds, creating a set described as Cajun bluegrass with a touch of blues."Jim Gordon, on of the founds of Sudbury Project Hope, said he was blown away by the generosity of the performers in support of the cause."They're doing it for nothing, if you can believe that," Gordon said. "And Glad Tidings isn't charging us."It's a wonderful lineup. The artists here in Sudbury have really stepped up. These groups are known throughout the province for their professionalism ... This show is going to rock."Who: Performances by Irmgard Hechler and Darquise Poulin, plus local Hugh Jazz, The Welcome Matt and The Bluez Brotherz.What: Fundraiser for groups sponsoring refugee families from Syria.When: Friday, doors open at 7 p.m., show begins at 8 p.m.Where: Glad Tidings Church, 1101 Regent St.Tickets: Are $25 each, and can be purchased at these Greater Sudbury Library locations: Main, South, New Sudbury and Copper Cliff, or go to www.sudburyprojecthope.com to buy online.
Second-year Cambrian College powerline technician student Paul Gauthier said he couldn't help being excited when he recently got back from his co-op placement, and checked out the powerline equipment acquired by the college.

Second-year Cambrian College powerline technician student Paul Gauthier said he couldn't help being excited when he recently got back from his co-op placement, and checked out the powerline equipment acquired by the college.Greater Sudbury Utilities recently donated two older vehicles to the program: a bucket truck  the kind you see hydro workers using while doing line work  as well as a pickup truck used to transport equipment.Thanks to the donation, students now have two bucket trucks, and twice the opportunity to practice their skills, working on the mock electrical field set up on the college's property.It's really nice to have a second bucket truck, Gauthier said. It gets a lot more of the guys up in the air. We have to share the time in the air. Having another gives us twice the experience, essentially.If the college were to purchase the equipment new, it would have cost several hundred thousand dollars.Greater Sudbury Utilities has partnered with Cambrian's powerline technician program throughout its 10-year history, not only providing equipment, but also giving input on what students should be studying.The college was the first in the province to offer the program, and utilities now require line worker applicants to have completed the diploma.About 40 students graduate from Cambrian's program each year.This donation allows the college to get the vehicles they need for their program, but in turn, when students come out, there's an opportunity for employment with GSU, said GSU board chair and Ward 1 Coun. Mark Signoretti.It goes hand in hand. It works very well for both parties. You're contributing to their success, and us, for our future success.Bruce Cowtan, program co-ordinator of Cambrian's powerline technician program, said he can't say enough about the utility's contributions.I always talk about Sudbury Hydro not being a partnership, it's more of a brotherhood, Cowtan said.I pick up the phone, they answer. If I need help with something, they send somebody over. If we need something, they send it over. It's pretty awesome.Cambrian College president Bill Best also offered his thanks to Greater Sudbury Utilities.It's a recipe for success when you have a partner like Greater Sudbury Hydro involved, he said.Ten years ago they helped design the program. They stayed in touch with our program advisory committee every year. They give us donations. They give us co-ops. They hire our students.Like every great partnership, it's a mutually beneficial relationship, and we're just seeing the fruits of that effort here today.
Exorbitant hydro rates, a myopic First Nations consultation process and an onerous environmental review system  a familiar trio of regulatory barriers  are hampering the development of new mines in northwestern Ontario, a new report says.

Exorbitant hydro rates, a myopic First Nations consultation process and an onerous environmental review system  a familiar trio of regulatory barriers  are hampering the development of new mines in northwestern Ontario, a new report says.Regulatory barriers have halted the development of nine mines in northwestern Ontario since 2010, say the authors of a new report from the Northern Policy Institute.Those nine proposed mining projects, which include Noront Resources' Eagle's Nest and Black Thor projects in the Ring of Fire, and Treasury Metals' Goliath Gold project, had the potential to create 23,000 jobs and generate an estimated $135.4 billion in wealth, says the mining industry report As of today, none of them have started production, said Karl Skogstad, an economics professor at Lakehead University, and one of the report's authors.Rubicon Minerals Corporation's Phoenix Gold project made the list of nine mining projects, and while it was completed, turned out to be disastrous for the company.In 2013, Rubicon estimated the deposit contained around 3.3 million ounces of gold, but it turned out to be closer to 413,000 ounces in more recent estimates.The company suspended underground work on the project in November 2015.Construction has started on two other projects in the list  Goldcorp's Cochenour/Bruce Channel Mine and New Gold's Rainy River Gold Project  but both have not yet started production.Skogstad acknowledged a slump in commodity prices has impacted the current economic viability of many of the projects, but added other factors prevented their development when mineral prices were higher.What stopped them from developing when times were good? he asked.The answer, according to his report, is that high costs  especially for hydro and infrastructure  an onerous environmental review process, and a lack of clarity around Aboriginal consultations have all made it difficult for mines in Ontario to reach production.Skogstad commended the provincial government's commitment to invest $1 billion to build infrastructure that would connect the remote Ring of Fire mineral deposits to the rest of the province, but said the province has lagged in other areas.Hydro rates, in particular, are higher in Ontario than in the neighboring province of Manitoba and Quebec.Mining is a very energy intensive industry, Skogstad said. And without competitive hydro rates, it is difficult for Ontario operations to compete with their neighbours to the east and west of the provincial border.Skogstad said Ontario environmental review process has not only slowed some mines from going into production, but made them unviable. When mines in Ontario compete with mines around the world, there is a big advantage to being the first to market, said Skogstad.When a mine starts producing before a competitor, he said, it can often sale its minerals at a higher price, before the market is flooded and prices go down.The fact we have high environmental standards, I think is limiting the number of mines constructed in the region, he said. What do we value more, the construction of mines or protection of the environment?As for Aboriginal consultations, Skogstad said many First Nations lack the expertise and experience to properly negotiate with mining companies. The province could supply funds, he said, to help them hire consultants and make the process easier.A landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2014 has also made the consultation process more complicated, Skogstad said.In a unanimous decision, the court said Indegenous Canadians own their ancestral lands, unless that ownership was signed away in treaties with the government.Skogstad said the government needs to provide more clarity as to what those rights entail.If all levels of government make efforts to remove the barriers outlined in his report, Skogstad said Ontario's mining companies could be more well prepared to go into production when commodity prices innevitably bounce back.
On this day in 1998, 23-year-old Laurentian University student Renee Sweeney was stabbed to death while working at Adults Only Video in Sudbury. Her murder remains unsolved. Det. Sgt.

On this day in 1998, 23-year-old Laurentian University student Renee Sweeney was stabbed to death while working at Adults Only Video in Sudbury.Her murder remains unsolved.Det. Sgt. Robert Weston of the Greater Sudbury Police has been assigned the case for the past three years.We're still receiving tips on a weekly basis, he said. Every tip is actively followed up as far as we can.At the time, police said the suspect was a white man in his early 20s to early 30s, and released a composite sketch. But that suspect would be 18 years older now, and could have changed substantially in appearance.Weston said the best chance to catch the killer at this point is through DNA matching. The suspect's DNA was left on Sweeney's body, as well as on a jacket he discarded after the murder.The DNA has been uploaded into the national DNA databank, he said.It's also been tested throughout several states in the USA. It's checked every so often by the Centre for Forensic Sciences. We're just waiting for that hit to come back.Although it's been 18 years since Sweeney's murder  she'd be 41 years old today  Weston remains hopeful the case will be solved.I know that this will be solved, he said. It's just a matter of when.Anyone with information is asked to contact Greater Sudbury Police at 705-675-9171 or Crime Stoppers at 705-222-TIPS, online at www.sudburycrimestoppers.com or by texting TIPSUD and the information to CRIMES (274637).
WASHINGTON --- Adults who received assistance from the federal food stamp program as children were healthier and less likely to use safety net programs than those who didn't, according to a leading Northwestern University economist who will present her findings during a White House panel on child hunger in America.

Northwesterns Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach will discuss the findings and policy implications of a policy brief she co-authored, The Safety Net as Investment, during the White House event, to be held from 1:00 to 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 27.

The White House meeting also will feature Thomas Vilsack, U.S. Secretary, Department of Agriculture, and Cecilia Munoz, assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council. Families, religious leaders and federal, state and local officials, advocates and others also have been invited to speak.

Participants will address the impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other nutrition programs aimed at reducing childhood hunger and poverty, as well as improving longer-term health, education and economic outcomes, according to the White House.

Schanzenbach, a faculty fellow at Northwesterns Institute for Policy Research and an associate professor in the School of Education of Social Policy, is one of the nations leading experts on the economics of food assistance programs. She has extensively studied the later-life economic and health outcomes of children born to mothers receiving food stamps.

Her research suggests that SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, has a large impact on children and benefits carry over into adulthood, especially when implemented during key developmental periods.

Policy highlights of the paper include:

 Not only does SNAP improve food security in the short run, it also helps prevent negative, long-term and lasting effects of deprivation during childhood.

 Long-term improvement in health due to the program implies a decrease in future taxpayer costs for health care. Additionally, by increasing self-sufficiency, SNAP today can reduce the future costs of the safety net down the line and also increase tax revenues, according to the brief.

 Findings suggest that the SNAP benefits that go to children are better thought of as an investment rather than a charity.

The Safety Net as Investment was coauthored with Hilary Hoynes, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Schanzenbach also is director of The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow in Brookings Economic Studies program. She studies issues related to child poverty, including education policy, child health, and food consumption. Much of her research on poverty, achievement in schools and hunger investigates the longer-run impacts of early life experiences.
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The Chief of Police for the North Platte Police Department in 1916 was Chief Hank L. Baker.

On Nov. 1, 1916, Chief Baker received a telegram from authorities in Sterling, Colorado, to be on the lookout for a prisoner who had broken out of jail. Chief Baker went to the railroad yards here to search east bound trains for the wanted man. Chief Baker stepped from the path of an approaching locomotive directly into the path of a second engine. The locomotive knocked him to the ground and the wheels passed over his left leg. He was rushed to the Hospital in North Platte, but died six hours later. He was 54 years old and left behind his wife and two children.

In 2009, the Nebraska Law Enforcement Memorial was dedicated on the grounds at Fonner Park in Grand Island with 137 names of fallen officers who paid the ultimate sacrifice to honor them. In May of this year, Chief Bakers name will be included on the wall.

There is very little information on Chief Bakers family, and the North Platte Police Department is asking for the publics help in locating someone related to Chief Baker so they can let them know about the ceremony in Grand Island. NPPD knows he was born in 1862, and had two children, a son, Willis Baker and a daughter, Eva Baker. They lived in North Platte for many years. Chief Baker was also very involved with the Odd Fellows in North Platte.

If anyone has information that might help locate any of Chief Bakers relations, please contact Chief Mike Swain at 535-8413.
BEIRUT (AP)  Multiple bombings struck a government-run checkpoint in the central Syrian city of Homs on Tuesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding over a hundred amid intense political jockeying ahead of U.N.-backed peace talks scheduled to begin in Geneva on Friday.

The office of the U.N. envoy for Syria said it sent out invitations for the talks, but with just three days to go, the opposition is still undecided about whether it will attend. One opposition official suggested the Saudi-backed opposition delegation may boycott the talks.

Khawla Mattar, a spokeswoman for Staffan de Mistura, told The Associated Press in Geneva that the envoy would not make public the numbers and identities of the invitees until his office gets feedback from the invited parties  a sign of the delicacy of his task.

The talks are meant to start a political process to end the conflict that began in 2011 as a largely peaceful uprising against Assads rule but escalated into an all-out war after a harsh state crackdown. The plan calls for cease-fires in parallel to the talks, a new constitution and elections in a year and a half.

The attack in Homs, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, came as government forces retook a southern town from opposition fighters and other militants.

Homs Governor Talal Barazi told the SANA news agency that the checkpoint was hit first by a car bomb, which was then followed by a suicide bombing.

Syrian state television broadcast footage of the aftermath of the attack, showing cars ablaze and extensive damage to shops and apartments around the site of the explosion in the Zahra neighborhood, which is inhabited mostly by members of President Bashar Assads Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The district has been a frequent target of bombings in recent months.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group which relies on a network of informants across Syria, quoted witnesses at the scene as saying the first bomber attracted a crowd of security agents by shouting curses about the Homs governor, then blew up his vehicle.

Meanwhile, in southern Syria, government forces seized the town of Sheikh Maskin, culminating an offensive that began in late December to retake the town after seizing the nearby Brigade 82 military base.

Sheikh Maskin lies near the highway connecting Damascus and the Jordanian border, and connects the Syrian capital to Daraa, a border town held by opposition fighters. Its fall is the latest in a string of battlefield successes for Assads military that have bolstered his hand ahead of the planned peace talks.

The Saudi-backed opposition was meeting Tuesday in Riyadh to make a final decision about whether to attend the talks. The opposition has accused Russia, a key backer of the Syrian government, of trying to dictate who from the opposition would participate.

Tensions over who would be invited to the talks, the cause of earlier delays, continued Tuesday.
Each year, Jan. 22 marks the anniversary of the Supreme Courts 1973 decision in the case of Roe v. Wade. Over four decades later, thousands of Americans gather annually in Washington, D.C., to join the March for Life. This peaceful rally in our nations capital draws attention to pro-life, pro-women policies. It also reinforces the fact that all life, at every stage, is sacred.

Many Nebraskans traveled over 1,000 miles to Washington in the face of a historic blizzard to attend the March for Life. They took a strong stand for what they believe in. In fact, several buses of Nebraskans were stranded for days last week as they returned home, and I was relieved to see them arrive safely in Nebraska. These young men and women are powerful witnesses to the country on the importance of this issue. But bringing attention to the March for Life does not end in Washington. There are also ways to rally for life here at home. On Saturday, Jan. 30, I will join our citizens for the annual Nebraska Walk for Life in Lincoln. If you are in town, I hope you will consider joining us at the Capitol.

Throughout my time in public service, I have been committed to supporting common-sense, pro-life measures that offer compassion for women and unborn children. Too many women experience despair, pain, and judgment from others during an unplanned pregnancy. We should offer assistance for these expectant mothers, and they need to know that we will continue to support them in the challenging years ahead.

Over time, views on this divisive issue have evolved toward the side of pro-life policies. A recent Marist poll found that the majority of Americans support restrictions on abortions.

In the U.S. Senate, I am a cosponsor of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. This bill prohibits abortions after 20 weeks, which is the point at which science tells us unborn children are capable of feeling pain. I supported this reasonable policy when it passed by a vote of 44 to 5 in the Nebraska Unicameral. It should now be adopted at the federal level.

Just last year, Americans were shocked and deeply disturbed by the horrible revelations about Planned Parenthood. This organizations callous role in the harvesting of baby body parts was alarming and potentially illegal. Planned Parenthood receives over half a billion dollars in federal funding each year, and it is abhorrent to think your tax dollars are being used in such a way.

In response to these revelations, I joined Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa and several of our colleagues to introduce a bill that would completely defund this scandal-plagued organization. Our legislation would redirect taxpayer dollars to state and local health departments, community health centers, and hospitals that provide comprehensive womens health-care services. These services include, but are not limited to: Diagnostic laboratory and radiology services, well-child care, prenatal and postnatal care, immunizations and cervical and breast cancer screenings.

Here in Nebraska, there are six federally-qualified health centers and 36 clinic sites that serve over 64,000 people. From Omaha to the panhandle, these centers provide the care women and men need. Ultimately, our legislation would provide federal funding for these programs that support womens health.

Several committees in the House of Representatives are taking action. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee and the Finance Committee have launched their own investigations into Planned Parenthood.

All life is precious. Nebraskans who take part in pro-life events this year to raise awareness for this issue should be commended.

Thank you for participating in the democratic process. I look forward to visiting with you again next week.
CHICAGO  United Steelworkers union members rallied outside ArcelorMittal North America headquarters to send a message they want a fair contract.

They got that message across better than they could have hoped, not just from a megaphone on the sidewalk in the bitter cold, but upstairs in an executive office.

ArcelorMittal Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lakshmi Mittal, strolled across the plaza of One North Dearborn while USW members were marching and chanting demands for a new contract.

Mittal, who lives in London and was once ranked by Forbes Magazine as the sixth wealthiest person in the world, spoke briefly with union members, asking them why they were rallying. They told their CEO they wanted a new contract for 13,000 unionized steelworkers after the current one expired in September.

Mittal invited the union leaders on hand into the glass skyscraper for a meeting. Mittal and ArcelorMittal Americas CEO Lou Schorsch, who's leaving the company, had a brief discussion with a delegation of union members over coffee.

USW members told the executives the union won't agree to relinquish hard-earned benefits, or to triple the amount retirees contribute to health insurance premiums.

"The company's demands would immediately lower the standards of living for members and retirees," said USW District 1 Director David McCall, who chairs the union's negotiations with ArcelorMittal. "Further, these proposals are clearly designed to undermine our ability to defend our benefits in future negotiations."

ArcelorMittal is looking to cut expenses after losing $711 million in the third quarter. The entire industry is struggling. ATI, U.S. Steel and Steel Dynamics all reported losses.

Spokeswoman Mary Beth Holdford said no discussion took place of contract proposals or details of the ongoing negotiations. She said they discussed a need to be more cost-competitive, the impact of imports, a need for more worker productivity, and how each ArcelorMittal business unit around the world must be self-sustaining.

"Contract negotiations with the United Steelworkers serve an opportunity to align our cost structure with the current realities facing our industry and create a more sustainable business, not just for our company but also for our employees," Holdford said. "Mr. Mittal also stressed that the USW is and will continue to be a valued partner moving forward. The meeting was cordial, respectful and, frankly, Mr. Mittal's willingness to approach the demonstrators and invite them in for coffee serves as an example of the transparent and honest dialogue the company is trying to have around the issues impacting our business and industry."

Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal recently dropped a demand steelworkers start paying monthly premiums. It is still asking for concessions steelworkers reject, including on co-pays.

The two sides are however not close to a new deal, said Don Seifert, training coordinator for USW Local 1010 out of Hammond.

"The message is they need to get off their duffs and offer a fair contract," Seifert said. "We're not asking for the world. We'll accept anything that's fair."

Negotiations have been going on since June.

All of the USW locals at local ArcelorMittal mills were represented at the rally. The union is committing to bargaining in good faith, and just wants a fair and equitable contract that preserves existing benefits, said USW member Sarah Smith, who's a CAT coordinator with USW 6787 out of Burns Harbor.

"We want them to see that every ArcelorMittal plant across the country is unified," Smith said. "Health care is extremely important to active members and retirees. Our retirees are on fixed incomes. They have absolutely no way of generating more income to pay for these health care costs."

Health care remains the foremost issue in bargaining, but there are other concerns, such as the company wanting to deny the union access to records that would be used in safety training and limit when workers can take vacation to planned outages, Smith said.

Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees executive board member Scott Marshall said the company is demanding too much of retirees.

"They want to take away our benefits, they want to take away our pensions," Marshall said. "They got all kinds of cuts coming down, especially for retirees. Things get more expensive when you get older, not less expensive. But the union is fighting every step of the way."

USW Local 9777 Financial Secretary Jeff Tuinstra said the fight was bigger than just a three-year contract. Any reduction in pay or benefits would have a ripple effect.

"It trickles down," he said. "It affects youth and seniors and everybody working. If one big company like this starts taking, taking, taking, your company will take from you."
Theater fans who reserve a seat for the humorous interactive show "We Gotta Bingo" are also in for a tasty dining experience. Guests watching the 90-minute production are served an Italian dinner starring lasagna from the kitchens of North Shore Catering and Events.

"We Gotta Bingo" is in an open-ended run at Chicago Theater Works in Chicago. FYI: Call (312) 391-0404 or visit wegottabingo.com.

Lisa Frey, owner of North Shore Catering and Events, said she's been creating the food for the comedic production for the last few months. When the show opened, the menu was handled by another caterer.

Frey said lasagna is a great meal to feature for a show such as "We Gotta Bingo," which features characters with Italian and Irish heritage in a Catholic parish setting. Show attendees also get a chance to play bingo during the production.

About the lasagna featured during the theatrical event, Frey said, "There are so many different versions of lasagna. But I wanted to do a traditional type of lasagna and yet make it a little different."

Frey adds a bit of red pepper flakes, a mix of Italian sausage and ground sirloin and a bit of red wine in addition to other ingredients to her recipe. There's also a vegetarian dinner option at the show as well. Guests are encouraged to ask about the meatless choice in advance. A gluten-free dinner option also is available.

The caterer said she's been in the food catering business her "entire life" and is enjoying her stint working for the theatrical production in this capacity.

Here's her recipe:

Lisa Frey's Lasagna

Yields 3 sheet pans 24 cuts per pan

Ricotta Cheese Mixture:

10 pounds whipped ricotta cheese

10 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

2 tablespoons dry basil

1 1/2 tablespoons red pepper flakes

2 teaspoons salt

This mixture accommodates the 3 sheet pans

Meat sauce:

4 pounds ground sirloin

4 pounds Italian Sausage

13 cups marinara sauce

2 yellow onions

1 1/2 cups Red wine

1 tablespoon red pepper flakes

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon pepper

DIRECTIONS: Saute ground sirloin with1 onion. Saute Italian sausage with 1 onion. Combine all ingredients and simmer for several hours.

Marinara Sauce:

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 onion chopped

6 garlic cloves

2 (28-ounce) cans crushed tomatoes

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons fresh chopped basil

DIRECTIONS: Heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and cook until golden brown. Add tomatoes and salt. Bring to oil, stir often. Cook over low heat for 30 minutes. Turn off heat and add basil.

Layering:

On bottom of pan, layer marinara sauce, 1 1/2 cups. Layer cooked or No bake lasagna noodles-horizontally. Then layer 2 1/2 cups ricotta mixture, 1/4 cup Parmesan, sprinkled. Then layer 1 cup mozzarella-provolone shredded cheese and 1 1/2 cups marinara sauce.

Repeat with noodles going the opposite direction. Then layer 2 cups sauce; 2 1/2 cups mozzarella and provolone. Wrap with foil. Bake in 425-degree oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Note: Make sure all corners are sauced or they will burn. Top with meat sauce, Parmesan cheese, grated, and fresh parsley.
After five years of being in danger of state intervention, West Side Leadership Academy has climbed to a C from an F for the 2014-15 school year.

The Indiana State Board of Education met Tuesday morning and unanimously approved school grades. Schools had known their grades since November, but grades are not deemed official until the state BOE formally approves them.

Educators across the state were pleased last week when Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation that would hold schools harmless for their A-F accountability grade for the 2014-15 school year, as Indiana schools transitioned to more rigorous college- and career-ready standards and a more rigorous ISTEP-Plus assessment.

School grades are based largely on the state-mandated ISTEP-Plus test, which also is used in part to evaluate teachers. The test was aligned last year with new Indiana State Academic Standards. Teachers complained they had little time to adjust curriculum to the new standards before the test was administered last spring.

Area superintendents also said there were problems with the technology and length of the test. Formatting was changed due to technology-enhanced items, creating glitches, and the test, initially 12 hours long, was reduced only at the last minute after complaints from educators statewide.

While West Side is no longer in danger of state intervention, two local schools are among six that received an F for five consecutive years. A public hearing, as required by state law, will be held in the community to determine the future direction of those schools.

The two schools are Joseph Block Middle School in the School City of East Chicago and Beveridge Elementary School in the Gary Community School Corp.

State intervention can range from the mildest form, which calls for the school to revise its improvement plan, to the most severe, which calls for the state taking over the school and assigning a company to manage it.

Five years ago, the state took over Gary Roosevelt, appointing Tennessee-based EdisonLearning as the operator, and that arrangement continues.

East Chicago's Block middle has faced a number of challenges, said Dr. Youssef Dr. Joe Yomtoob, who became superintendent of the School City of East Chicago 18 months ago. However, he said, the climate at the school has changed dramatically since Dee-Etta Wright became principal.

With a new leader in place in that building, the changes in the last five months have been like day and night, Yomtoob said. The kids are well-behaved. They are actively involved in their lessons. Tardies and suspensions have gone down.

Yomtoob praised Wright and Assistant Principal Elsie Quiroga for their policy of walking the halls on a regular basis, and teachers for dedicating themselves to curriculum and school improvement.

Block currently has between 300 and 320 students in seventh and eighth grades, he said.

We put the sixth grades back at their elementary schools. Students who were in fifth grade last year now continue at the elementary schools, Yomtoob said. That may have had a positive impact.

The superintendent said the changes will take time to be reflected in the states A-F system of grading.

Im very, very proud of Block, Yomtoob said. Im very optimistic that we can change that F to an A.

West Side gains

Cheryl Pruitt, superintendent of the Gary Community School Corp., said West Side Leadership Academy had gains because it took a holistic approach with students.

Mr. Terrance Little (West Sides principal) who leads the new awesome administrative team, launched a program called SILS (Student Information Logging System). The purpose is to gather and submit real-time information about each student," she said.

"Everything from social and/or emotional challenges to academic data is documented. Based on a students unique needs, theyre assigned to appropriate support staff as needed."

Pruitt said West Side staff are listening to students and parents, who are on board as school partners. Pruitt said there is a better relationship among officers, students and the community. Last year, West Side had a significant decrease in student altercations and suspensions, and that's the expectation this year, she said.

Pruitt said West Side is using the restorative justice method, where administrators, school resource officers and school safety officers use proactive strategies with students.

There was a 40 percent increase in the number of ninth- and 10th-grade students passing mathematics on the End-of-Course Assessment," she said. "Theyve earned a B in the category of College and Career Readiness and their graduation rate is 86.6 percent. The state average is 82.8 percent.

Data-driven professional development for the instructors ensures that rigor, relevance and relationship are implemented. They teach math in math classes and apply math in science courses and teach literacy across all content areas. Courses are integrated so students can see the relationship and the relevance, she said.

Pruitt said West Side students can also take Advanced Placement and Dual Credit courses. She said eligible college-bound seniors also can graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree if they stay on track with the Early College program at Ivy Tech Community College. They also take courses at DeVry and Calumet College, and the courses are offered free to students.

Grade changes elsewhere

While educators were worried about the ISTEP-Plus scores and school grades they were based on, some schools improved while others remained the same or dropped.

Of the 19 schools in the School City of Hammond where students in grades three through eight took the ISTEP-Plus exam, four schools earned an A, two schools earned a B, eight earned a C and five earned a D.

In the School City of Hobart, every school earned an A except Hobart Middle School, which earned a C. River Forest Middle School earned an A while the high school scored a D. All five schools in the School Town of Munster earned an A.

Almost every school in Porter County earned an A or a B except for Boone Grove Elementary in the Porter Township School Corp., which earned a C. All three schools in Hebron earned a B.

Discovery Charter School in Porter earned an A. Thea Bowman Leadership Academy in Gary, Gary Lighthouse Charter, 21st Century Charter School in Gary, Aspire Charter Academy in Gary and East Chicago Lighthouse Charter all earned a D.

East Chicago Urban Enterprise School earned an A, and Hammond Academy of Science and Technology earned a B.

Charter School of the Dunes earned an F. That charter school is authorized by Calumet College of St. Joseph after it lost its charter though the Office of Charter Schools at Ball State University.
INDIANAPOLIS  A House committee is expected to approve legislation Thursday to enable alcohol sales at the Indiana Dunes State Park pavilion, regardless of consent by local authorities.

House Bill 1247 was amended by the Public Policy Committee on Wednesday to allow the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to obtain a new "state park" alcohol permit, without having to follow most of the procedures typically required to get state permission to sell beer, wine or liquor  including local review.

"I view these permits that we're talking about for the state parks as an economic development tool for the state, and a chance for us to leverage the assets that we have in our state parks," said state Rep. Sean Eberhart, R-Shelbyville, sponsor of the measure.

While the proposal eases the process to sell alcohol in every state park, nearly all the committee testimony during the three-hour hearing focused on the Dunes Pavilion controversy.

Last March, Pavilion Partners, LLC inked a $5 million public-private partnership with the DNR to renovate the historic lakefront pavilion and add a banquet center on an existing cement pad adjacent to the building.

After local residents furiously protested the possibility of drinking in the park, the Porter County Alcoholic Beverage Commission twice denied Pavilion Partners the alcohol sales permit they said is needed to run a successful operation.

That decision was affirmed in October by the Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission. An appeal before an ATC administrative law judge tentatively is scheduled for April.

The appeal may not be needed, however, if the proposed state park alcohol measure becomes law.

Norman Hellmers, of Valparaiso, speaking on behalf of Dunes Action, a group opposed to alcohol in the park, said it is unconscionable that state lawmakers would do an end-run around a decision that's already been settled locally.

"When you want to add an amendment that says they can just automatically get a permit for each of the state parks without any local input whatsoever, well that's simply not the democratic way to do things," Hellmers said.

Region representatives of the Sierra Club and Isaac Walton League environmental organizations similarly condemned the proposal.

The measure was supported by members of local building trades unions, Region tourism organizations, the state's commerce agency, Northwest Indiana Forum and the DNR.

"This is not a permit that's going to turn our parks into one giant saloon," DNR Director Cam Clark said. "We have structures that people want to hold events in all throughout our system. ...This gives us control to offer that service."

State Rep. Tim Wesco, R-Osceola, appeared unconvinced. He said the committee should respect the opinion of the local community in the Dunes controversy and not change the rules while an appeal is pending.

But state Rep. Terri Austin, D-Anderson, replied state parks are state property, and state lawmakers are the proper decision-makers concerning whether alcohol should be allowed in park buildings.

The committee is set to vote at 7:30 a.m. Region time on whether to advance the legislation to the full House.

If the proposal wins House approval, it still must pass the Senate and be signed by Gov. Mike Pence to become law.
INDIANAPOLIS  Bang-bang debates at the Statehouse featuring lawmakers shooting their mouths off soon could involve real guns.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 36-13 Tuesday for Senate Bill 259, which authorizes state senators, representatives and legislative branch employees to carry guns in the Statehouse.

State Sen. Jim Tomes, R-Wadesville, sponsor of the measure, said it is more about protecting General Assembly staffers when they leave the building than when they are inside, since everyone knows downtown Indianapolis is infested by street gangs.

"Some of these good people have to walk maybe two or three blocks to a parking garage to get to their automobiles," Tomes said. "A lot can happen. We're in a violent world."

Under the plan, Statehouse visitors and executive branch employees, who park in the same lots, still would be prohibited from bringing weapons into the building.

State Sen. Jim Arnold, D-LaPorte, was among 10 Democrats and three Republicans to vote against the measure, which now advances to the Republican-controlled House.

The former county sheriff said he can't support putting more guns in the hands of individuals without requiring any significant training in how to use them.

Tomes said mandating additional training would diminish Indiana's "shall-issue" policy for state gun permits.

State Sen. Frank Mrvan, D-Hammond, shook his head at the entire debate. Mrvan said he wonders what the world will think of Indiana when people find out its lawmakers feel the need to be armed in their Statehouse.
INDIANAPOLIS  A small Region campaign to improve civility in government and prevent bullying in schools got some big recognition Tuesday at the Indiana Statehouse.

The 50 Hoosier senators unanimously approved Senate Resolution 6, praising the efforts of Community Civility Counts to foster meaningful public dialogue that acknowledges every point of view.

State Sen. Lonnie Randolph, D-East Chicago, sponsor of the measure, said the Civility Counts commitments adopted by the governing bodies of Gary, Hammond, Valparaiso and Lake County should be a model for communities across the state, as well as in the Statehouse.

"The word 'civility,' that's a simple and easy word, but it's a very powerful word," Randolph said. "I would ask that we as a Senate get on board."

Lawmakers lauded Chuck Hughes, executive director of the Gary Chamber of Commerce, and Bob Heisse, executive editor at The Times Media Co., and their associates, for cooperating to make Community Civility Counts a meaningful and impactful institution.

Hughes said civility is needed now more than ever in households, workplaces, schools and basically everywhere people gather.

He said it's easy to be civil; all it takes is being mindful of what you say, what you do and how you act toward your family, friends, neighbors and strangers.

"It costs nothing, you don't have to join anything, there's no initiation, there's no fee," Hughes said. "It's simply what is expected of us."

That civility message appears to be resonating throughout the Statehouse during the 2016 legislative session.

House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, and House Democratic Leader Scott Pelath, D-Michigan City, both pledged earlier this month that debate over controversial issues will not devolve into name-calling or personal attacks.

In addition, the Association of Retired Members of the Indiana General Assembly this year established a Civility in Government Award to honor current lawmakers who show respect for the institution, their fellow members and help shape debate in a calm and constructive manner.

Among the first honorees were state Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, and state Sen. Earline Rogers, D-Gary, two veteran lawmakers well-versed in working across party lines on education, health care and other major issues.

"To have been given this award by such an esteemed group of legislators is a great honor," Rogers said. "Working alongside many of these friends and colleagues has been a great privilege, so to receive their nod of approval is incredibly humbling."
INDIANAPOLIS  A Senate committee declined Wednesday to take another bite of the "religious freedom" apple that last year poisoned Indiana's economy and reputation around the world.

Senate Bill 66, sponsored by state Sen. Mike Young, R-Indianapolis, was discarded without a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee and now cannot advance to the full Senate for a decision on whether to send it to the House.

The legislation  popularly known as "Super RFRA"  would have repealed the minimal anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Hoosiers enacted last year as part of the "fix" to the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which also would have been repealed.

In their place, the measure would have had state law declare that protections for freedom of religion, speech, assembly and the right to bear arms, as provided by the Indiana Constitution, are fundamental rights and only can be infringed by the state through the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest.

"Each of these rights are important and they should be protected at the highest standard that we have available to us under the law," Young said.

Young insisted his intent only was to ensure that courts apply strict scrutiny when considering whether state laws infringe on constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Anyone claiming otherwise is "sorely mistaken," he said.

At the same time, Indiana religious groups and business owners who disagree with the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide have sought to use "religious freedom" protections to justify the denial of services to LGBT individuals.

The committee chairman, state Sen. Brent Steele, R-Bedford, said the potential for another RFRA firestorm, which made Indiana appear to license LGBT discrimination and prompted boycotts of state businesses, made it impossible to fairly consider Young's proposal.

"Due to the fact that is has been mischaracterized by some in this room, and outside this room, and will be demagogued  the timing is incorrect," Steele said. "Probably next year will be a good chance to have a legal discussion about protecting our constitutional rights.
CROWN POINT  A 19-year-old woman who admitted to telling her boyfriend she wanted her mother dead and then watched as she was killed, told the court Tuesday that her mother didn't deserve it.

"She was an outstanding mother," Alyssa Barrett said in a soft voice.

Barrett pleaded guilty to a charge of murder for her role in the stabbing death of her mother, DeCarol Deloney-Cain, 54, of Crown Point.

Lake County Criminal Judge Salvador Vasquez sentenced Barrett to 50 years in prison, which is the agreed term the state and defense reached during negotiations. She will have to serve 75 percent of the sentence.

"It's a long time for reflection," Vasquez said. "And for the act of killing one's own mother, it's appropriately so."

Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Michelle Jatkiewicz said the plea agreement was fair because Barrett didn't have any adult criminal history. Still, she was in a position of trust, because no parent expects to be killed by their child.

"The state impresses that you simply don't kill your momma," Jatkiewicz said. "The defendant is going to have to live with that."

Deloney-Cain's body was found July 7, 2014, in the trunk of her abandoned car near 21st Avenue and Mississippi Street in Gary. Barrett admitted she told her boyfriend, Damarius McGriggs, that she wanted her mother dead.

On July 3, 2014, Barrett and her boyfriend lured Deloney-Cain into the basement of her home in the 9400 block of Roosevelt Street in Crown Point by turning off the electricity.

Barrett watched as McGriggs hit, stabbed and placed a pillow over her mother, according to the plea agreement.

McGriggs has pleaded not guilty to murder charges he faces in the homicide.

Deloney-Cain's body was wrapped in black plastic bags, bound with tape by her hands and feet and placed in the trunk of her car. Barrett, who was 17 years old at the time, put her mother's suitcase in the car to make it appear as though she had left for a work trip. Deloney-Cain was a United Airlines flight attendant.

With the assistance of two others, the couple left the vehicle in Gary. The group drove to ATMs to withdraw money from Deloney-Cain's account, and the couple purchased an engagement ring, according to court records.

Defense attorneys Sonya Scott-Dix and Derla Gross described working on the case as difficult with it taking an emotional toll on them. Scott-Dix became emotional as she thought of her own mother.

Scott-Dix and Gross said their client has matured and reached a state of remorse they believe is sincere.

Wearing a green Lake County Jail uniform, Barrett apologized to her family and told them it hurt her every day thinking about what happened.

"I really never understood the consequences that could happen in a blink of an eye," Barrett said.

According to the plea agreement, Barrett had been arguing with her mother days before the homicide about her pregnancy. Deloney-Cain wanted Barrett to get an abortion, but Barrett and McGriggs wanted to keep the child.

Barrett was pregnant when she was arrested, and her daughter is now in foster care.

Her father, Wayne Barrett, said Barrett lived in several foster homes starting when she was about 13, because an allegation arose that Barrett had been molested. Wayne Barrett and DeCarol Deloney-Cain had been divorced for years by then.

Jatkiewicz said the molestation allegation was later unsubstantiated by the Indiana Department of Child Services. Barrett lived with her father before returning to live with Deloney-Cain.

Barrett was also at some point diagnosed with having mental health problems, though court-appointed doctors determined she was competent to stand trial.

Deloney-Cain's husband, Jerome Cain, said Deloney-Cain cried and prayed for Barrett to return home during the years she was in foster care. A little more than a year after Barrett returned home, Deloney-Cain was killed.

Cain urged Barrett to come forward with information about who stole a safe from their home that contained a firearm. He said he was worried someone would get hurt.

"You have enough blood on your hands," Cain said.

Todd Deloney, who is the brother of DeCarol Deloney-Cain, told Barrett the family respected her for pleading guilty, which spared them from having the case go to trial.

"We forgive you, baby," Deloney said. "Look at me, we forgive you."

Barrett nodded while she was seated next to her defense attorneys.

Rogina Smith, a cousin and friend of DeCarol Deloney-Cain, said everyone has been hurting since the homicide. Speaking directly to Barrett, Smith said the family wanted her to get help.

"We are just here because your mother in spirit has been telling us to be here," she said. "We know that your mother still loves you."
MUNSTER  A resident was in serious condition Tuesday in the intensive care unit at Community Hospital in Munster after a Sunday night fire at his home, officials said.

Munster Fire Chief Dave Pelc said crews were called at 11:23 p.m. to the home in the 8000 block of Frederick Avenue for a fire alarm indicating smoke in a hallway. An ambulance was first to arrive and the crew saw heavy black smoke coming from the home.

"We knew no one was standing outside but there was a vehicle in the driveway which gave us more concern that someone was inside," Pelc said.

Crews entered the home and found the 41-year-old man in the basement of the home. Pelc said the man had no pulse when first responders removed him from the home.

Emergency crews began CPR at the scene and the man had a pulse by the time the ambulance arrived at Community Hospital, Pelc said.

The fire was extinguished within 10 to 15 minutes of firefighters arriving, the chief said.

A preliminary investigation showed cigarette smoking likely was to blame for the blaze, which began in a basement couch, Pelc said.

The victim was not burned in the fire and appeared to have been overcome by smoke.

"It looked as if he was trying to get out," Pelc said.

The amount of damage to the home has yet to be determined, but Pelc believes at least half of the lower level was damaged in addition to smoke and water damage in other areas.
VALPARAISO | Entering his fourth and final term as mayor, Jon Costas said he feels a deep sense of gratitude to the citizens of Valparaiso and a boundless sense of optimism for the city's future.

Costas on Wednesday delivered his State of the City address during the annual meeting of the Valpo Chamber of Commerce at Valparaiso University's Harre Union.

Costas said 2015 was a year to remember for the city, highlighting the expansion of downtown's Central Park Plaza, being a finalist in America's Best Communities contest sponsored by Frontier Communications that could net the city $3 million, and receiving national recognition when it was awarded the Google e-city distinction for the state of Indiana.

"Our local entrepreneurs and business sector are tech savvy and it shows nationally," he said.

Costas said while all cities struggle to find money to maintain their aging infrastructure, Valparaiso made good headway in 2015 by adding new sidewalks in the Memorial Elementary School neighborhood and more than 3,500 feet of pathway along Evans Avenue connecting citizens in Pine Creek to the city's pathway system. The historic brick block of Napoleon Avenue was restored to its original beauty and the city's main street, Lincolnway, got a face-lift, Costas said.

Costas also touted the ramping up of a $20 million U.S. 30 beautification project.

"No longer will we look just like every other community when you pass us on Route 30," he said.

Transportation has become a key theme for Northwest Indiana's future, Costas said, noting that the city's development of the Region's first transit-orientated development near downtown will help expand Valparaiso's transportation efforts in the future and provide unique housing options for commuters.

Costas also reflected on the loss in 2015 of Fire Chief David Nondorf, who died of cancer.

"He was the consummate fire chief and led the department to countless improvements and service expansions," Costas said. "He left behind a fire department that is certainly regarded as one of the finest in the state."

Costas said community policing was a high priority of his when elected in 2003 and overall crime was down another 12 percent in 2015. Costas said Police Chief Mike Brickner reports that since his team took office in 2004, major crimes have decreased 54 percent despite a growing population and tight safety budgets.

Costas said he's fired up about the future of the city.

"If Valparaiso were a Fortune 500 company, that's where I would invest my 401K funds," he said. "All signs point to success. We are a vibrant, welcoming city that is known far and wide for its commitment to unity, its spirit of optimism and its passion for progress. That's Valparaiso."
CHESTERTON  Police here are looking for alleged shoplifters who apparently had severe cases of heartburn.

Police were called to CVS, 505 East County Road 1100 North just before 6 p.m. Jan. 22 on the report that three women had stolen 25 boxes of the heartburn medications Nexium and Prilosec from store shelves, left the store and got into a red, four-door Hyundai with Illinois license plates and driven by a fourth suspect. The car fled eastbound on County Road 1100 North.

The medications were valued at $684.

A store employee described the three suspects who had been in the store as being female, black, in their late teens or early 20s, of medium build, between 5-foot 6-inches and 5-foot 10-inches tall.

A witness told police she saw the suspects grab the medications from the shelves and shove them into gift bags that had come from the card section of the store.
Porter County Career and Technical Education offers free dual college credits, skills that lead to high-paying jobs and hands-on classes that stress the latest technical skills through half-day programs.

Many future construction workers, nurses, EMTs, and teachers get a start on their professions in these elective classes.

Most programs offered through PCCTE will welcome potential students on Dec. 4. Parents also are welcome. Some schools will send students on field trips or allow them an excused absence.

The 30-plus programs also will welcome visitors on Jan. 20 and Feb. 2, including evening open houses on Feb. 2.

Almost 1,100 juniors and seniors from 10 area high schools annually take half-day programs ranging from Health Science Education to Industrial Mechanics to Early Childhood Education. Many programs offer dual college credits, and there is no cost connected with most of these credits. The programs help students get started on their careers and help them attain an Academic Honors Diploma or Technical Honors Diploma in Indiana.

High schools served are Boone Grove, Chesterton, Hebron, Hobart, Kouts, Morgan Township, Portage, Valparaiso, Washington Township and Wheeler.

For more information, check out the PCCTE website at www.pccte.org or call (219) 531-3170.
SHIP volunteers had the opportunity to assist 166 individuals during the open enrollment period that wrapped up Dec. 7.

The three volunteer counselors logged more than 140 hours during the seven-week period.

Although the open enrollment period has ended, SHIP counselors are available all year to help with any Medicare issue or question at the Porter County Aging and Community Services offices, 1005 Campbell St.

The State Health Insurance Assistance Program is a free and unbiased counseling program provided by the Indiana Department of Insurance for Medicare beneficiaries in Indiana.

Throughout the year, SHIP counselors assist those new to Medicare as well as those who've been on it for years.

Assistance includes providing answers to common questions about Medicare, including: coverage, enrollment, eligibility and claims; explaining Medicare Supplemental (Medigap) policies and which companies sell them in Indiana; providing information on Medicare Advantage health plans and what plans are available where individuals live; and offering information about the Medicare prescription drug plans offered in Indiana and how to select the best one for individual needs.

SHIP counselors also help Medicare beneficiaries with determining eligibility for any of the financial assistance programs that are available to help with Medicare costs, including prescription drug plan premiums and drug co-pays, Medicare Part B premium, Medicare Part A & B deductibles and co-payments for doctor and hospital services.

Both SHIP counselors and PCACS staff can help with completing and submitting the applications to the appropriate agencies.

There is also Hoosier Rx, a state program which helps pay the monthly Part D premium for those with yearly income of $17,475 or less (individuals) or $23,505 (couples).

For more information on any of these programs, call the SHIP office at (219) 464-1028. Also contact www.portercountyacs.org.
BURNS, Ore.  Father-and-son ranchers convicted of setting fire to federal grazing land were expected to report to prison as the armed anti-government activists who have taken up their cause maintained the occupation of a remote Oregon wildlife preserve.

Federal authorities made no immediate attempt to retake the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the remote high desert of eastern Oregon, which the activists seized last weekend as part of a decades-long fight over public lands in the West.

There appeared to be no urgent reason for federal officials to move in. No one has been hurt. No one is being held hostage. And because the refuge is a bleak and forbidding stretch of wilderness about 300 miles from Portland, in the middle of winter, the standoff is causing few if any disruptions.

Meanwhile, the armed group said it wants an inquiry into whether the government is forcing ranchers off their land after the father and son were ordered back to prison for arson on federal grazing lands.

The group of about two dozen members calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom demanded a government response within five days related to the ranchers' extended sentences.

Ammon Bundy  one of the sons of rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a 2014 Nevada standoff with the government over grazing rights  told reporters that Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven Hammond, were treated unfairly.

The Hammonds were convicted of arson three years ago for fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006, one of which was set to cover up deer poaching, according to prosecutors. The men served their original sentences three months for Dwight and one year for Steven. But an appeals court judge ruled the terms fell short of minimum sentences that require them to serve about four more years.

Their sentences have been a rallying cry for the group, whose mostly male members said they want federal lands turned over to local authorities so people can use them free of U.S. oversight.

An attorney for the Hammonds said they were to turn themselves in Monday in Los Angeles. They are seeking presidential pardons.

The Hammonds have distanced themselves from the protest group and many locals, including people who want to see federal lands made more accessible, don't want the activists here, fearing they may bring trouble.

Schools in the small town of Burns, about 30 miles from the refuge, were closed for the week out of concern for student safety.

For the moment, the federal government was doing nothing to remove them, but the FBI said it was monitoring the situation. The White House said President Obama was aware of the situation and hopes it can be resolved peacefully.

The refuge was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect bird populations that had been decimated by plume hunters selling feathers for the hat industry.

It sits in a wide snow-covered valley rimmed by distant mountains and contains lakes and marshland. The preserve has grown over the years to about 300 square miles and surrounds the ranch Dwight Hammond bought with his father in 1964. Dwight Hammond said his family has resisted pressure to sell the ranch as the federal government chipped away at his grazing allotments and increased fees on other lands.

The refuge contains about 10 small buildings, some of which had been entered by the occupying group. Other members of the group blocked the entrance to the headquarters.

The takeover prompted an outcry far beyond Oregon from both those who want to see federal lands opened to more ranching and logging and others who were astounded that private citizens with guns could seize government property without any intervention by law enforcement.

The tactics of the group were condemned by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat who is familiar with the Bundys from their standoff in his state, said the group could not continue breaking the law, but that everyone should remain patient.

"These people say we want to return (the land) to the people," Reid said. "The people have it right now."

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said he hoped the group would "stand down peaceably" with no violent confrontation "sooner rather than later."

Ammon Bundy said his group had sent a demand for "redress for grievances" to local, state and federal officials. The group, which included a couple of women and some boys and girls Monday, did not release a copy of its demands. Bundy would not say what the group would do if it got no response.

"We have exhausted all prudent measures and have been ignored," he said.

The dispute harkens back to a long-running struggle over public lands between some Westerners and the federal government, which owns nearly half the land in the West.

In the 1970s, during the "Sagebrush Rebellion," Nevada and other states pushed for local control over federal land. Supporters of that idea want to more land available for cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting.

Opponents say the federal government should administer lands for the widest possible uses, including environmental and recreational.

Bundy said the group plans to stay at the refuge as long as it takes.

Keith Landon, a longtime resident of Burns who works at the Reid Country Store, said he sympathizes with the Bundys' frustrations. Landon was a logger until the federal government declared the spotted owl a protected species in the 1980s  a decision that hurt the local logging industry.

"It's hard to discredit what they're trying to do out there," he said. "But I don't want anybody hurt."
BURNS, Ore.  The Oregon nature preserve being occupied by an armed anti-government group was surrounded by law-enforcement agents Wednesday, a day after one of the occupiers was killed by officers during a traffic stop and eight others, including group leader Ammon Bundy, were arrested.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for authorities to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which was seized by the group on Jan. 2 in a bid to force the government to turn federal lands over to local officials.

The traffic stop was supposed to bring a peaceful resolution to the situation but ended badly, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said, expressing disappointment.

"Multiple law enforcement agencies put a lot of work putting together the best tactical plan they could to take these guys down peacefully," Ward said at a news conference Wednesday.

The death didn't have to happen, he said.

Details of the fatal encounter were sparse. It occurred as Bundy and his followers were heading to a community meeting late Tuesday afternoon in the town of John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed that her father, Arizona rancher Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, was the man killed, the Oregonian reported. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

It was unclear what led to the shooting, or if Finicum or any of the other ranchers exchanged gunfire with officers. Authorities would not say how many shots were fired.

"This is where I'm going to breathe my last breath, whether I'm 90, 95 or 55," Finicum told The Associated Press on Jan. 5. " ... I'm going to not spend my days in a cell."

The FBI and Oregon State Police would say only that the dead man was wanted by federal authorities. They said no more specifics would be released pending formal identification by the medical examiner.

Greg Bretzing, special agent in charge for the FBI in Oregon, said authorities took a deliberate and measured response to the occupiers and tried to conduct the traffic stop safely and away from local residents.

The armed activists were given ample opportunity to leave the refuge peacefully and have their grievances heard through legal means, he said.

"They chose, instead, to threaten the very America they profess to love, with violence, intimidation and criminal acts," Bretzing said.

He and the sheriff urged the remaining group members to leave.

"This has been tearing our community apart. It's time for everybody in this illegal occupation to move on," Ward said. "There doesn't have to be bloodshed in our community."

Jason Patrick, one of the leaders of the occupation, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that five or six group members remained inside the refuge.

For weeks, law-enforcement vehicles have been noticeably absent from the roads around the refuge. On Wednesday, however, marked law-enforcement cars were parked throughout the region. The FBI and state police said they were setting up checkpoints and only allowing ranchers who own property in specific areas to pass.

"If the people on the refuge want to leave, they are free to do so through the checkpoints, where they will be identified," Bretzing said.

About 13 miles from the refuge headquarters, a sign warned drivers to turn around because a roadblock is ahead. Reporters and others who approached the vehicles blocking the road were met by FBI agents wearing camouflage body armor and helmets and carrying assault rifles. A spike strip, designed to puncture tires, was laid across the pavement just beyond the roadblock.

Police and news media have converged on the nearby town of Burns, where most hotels are booked to capacity.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundy's supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and was not sure what those remaining would do.

"The entire leadership is gone," he told the AP in a telephone interview. "I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving."

Thornton called the arrests "a dirty trick" by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32 - apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

Law enforcement previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies but opposed the refuge takeover.

"I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists," Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The group, which has included people from as far away as Michigan, calls itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. It came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

___

Associated Press writers Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, Gene Johnson and Lisa Baumann in Seattle and Terrence Petty and Kristena Hansen in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.
For years, Valparaiso has been investing in the city's quality of life. A new analysis by Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research confirms the city is moving in the right direction.

Indiana's employers are choosing communities that have invested in quality of life amenities, the study said.

It's a simple philosophy. Employers want to move to where the supply of talent is, and cities that are nicer places to live are going to attract the people that attract the jobs.

That's a big change from the idea that people should move to where the jobs are.

It also means a big shift is needed in the economic development mindset.

"Despite repeated support for the finding that 'jobs follow people' among published research studies, local economic development policy is predicated on the idea that it is largely driven by the movement of people to jobs, rather than jobs to people. This manifests itself in local economic development policies and both public and private spending at the county and municipal level," said the study, written by CBER director Michael Hicks and research director Dagney Faulk.

In Valparaiso, policies aimed at improving the quality of life include building the new downtown park, which has proved so popular that it has been expanded, with the new ice rink opening this winter  not just a flooded parking lot at a neighborhood park, but a covered pavilion that allows skaters to use the facility even when it's raining or snowing heavily.

Mayor Jon Costas, who is giving his State of the City address today, said Friday the numbers at the ice rink have exceeded expectations tenfold.

The tipping point for Valparaiso's downtown, when it really began to be lively in the evenings, came when the city persuaded the Indiana General Assembly to create 10 new liquor licenses so the downtown could become a fine dining mecca.

Creating two bus lines  the Chicago Dash to take residents back and forth between Valparaiso and Chicago, and the V-Line for intracity routes  has been a big success, too.

The V-Line, Costas said, was the best thing the city has done for low-income residents.

Attracting jobs, including those generated by the expansion of Pratt Industries' cardboard plant in Valparaiso, hasn't hurt, either. The combination of a top-tier school system and quality-of-life investments is a good strategy for the city, just as the CBER study said.

So what's next for Valparaiso? And by that, I don't mean this year, but into the future, after Costas is gone. He has said this will be his last term, and unlike many politicians, he seems serious about that promise.

Valparaiso doesn't have an heir apparent, and Costas isn't anointing anyone yet to be his successor.

"If I mention a name, it might discourage someone who might be better," Costas said.

But don't worry about the future. "This is a city with a deep bench of leaders," he said.
I am dismayed by the eagerness of many correspondents to buy into the negative portrayal of the current state of the union presented by the Republican candidates and the right wing media.

Contrary to the rant from the right, the military is strong, the economy is improving and the health care situation has improved dramatically for many Americans.

While the situation could have been better if not for the consistent resistance of the Tea Party faction to anything Obama has proposed, the improvement in the state of the country is probably greater for this president than for any Republican president since Teddy Roosevelt.

The right seems ready to coalesce behind candidates whose only ideas are how to continue the protection of the moneyed class. I can only hope that enough of the country sees through their lies and exaggerations.

Brady Williams, Valparaiso
INDIANAPOLIS  State Board of Education member Eddie Melton said he wants to see the Indiana Department of Education step into the Gary Roosevelt issue and permanently solve the heating problems.

Melton, who is also manager of Governmental and Community Relations at Northern Indiana Public Service Co., said he has had an opportunity to visit schools throughout the Region, including the Roosevelt College and Career Academy.

Melton asked the Indiana Department of Education to use the $3 million put in the budget enabling IDOE to assist turnaround schools. Melton wants to know why the department isn't using that money to put in a new boiler at Roosevelt.

Another SBOE member, Gordon Hendry, echoed Melton's concerns about Roosevelt. "We need to treat this with the urgency it deserves. We are failing those students (at Roosevelt)," he said.

Melton asked Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz to create a resolution for the next SBOE meeting scheduled for Feb. 3 to address the issue rather than continuing to talk about it. However, Ritz said they will continue to look at the problem, but a solution may not be ready quite that fast.

This is also the final year of the contract between the state and EdisonLearning, the Tennessee-based private management company appointed by the state five years ago to intervene due to poor academic performance under the Gary Community School Corp.

Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, who toured Roosevelt on Tuesday with students and other residents, said it's her understanding the two sides are working on a plan that will return Roosevelt back to the school corporation.

"When you look at this contract, the billing issues and the repair issues, it all goes back to the contract the state of Indiana signed when they made that rash decision to bring in an outside firm (EdisonLearning). None of it was spelled out in the agreement the state drafted," she said.

Roosevelt senior Cary Martin, one of the students who protested the lack of heat and conditions inside the building last week, said Tuesday his No. 1 priority remains the band room.

School leaders said the band room is not in use because it contains mold from previous flooding. The band students practice in a classroom.

Roosevelt senior Antonio Carter said he moved to the area from Hazel Crest, Illinois, and enrolled at Roosevelt as a freshman.

"When it was cold in the building, it was bitter cold," he said. "I had the shakes. I couldn't write. Now, it's warm and it's good."

Students missed several days of school because the boiler was not working and the building was cold. It reopened Monday after repairs were made to the boiler. The Roosevelt College and Career Academy is operated by EdisonLearning.

It was appointed by the state when the Gary district experienced six consecutive years of academic failure at the high school. The school corporation still owns the building and EdisonLearning is considered a tenant.

The two sides have continually bumped heads over who was responsible for maintenance and repairs at the high school, initially built in 1929. The financially strapped Gary Community School Corp. has had to step in and make repairs to the boiler at Roosevelt despite experiencing similar problems at other schools.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill.  What central and southern Illinois legislators heard during Gov. Bruce Rauners State of the State address Wednesday depended on which side of the House chamber they were sitting on.

Rauners staff and Republican lawmakers billed the speech as an attempt to highlight areas of possible bipartisan compromise amid a monthslong deadlock with the Democrats who control the General Assembly. Democrats, however, largely heard more of the same from the first-term Republican, who has insisted on passing portions of his policy agenda before agreeing to raise taxes to balance the budget.

In the speech, Rauner pointed out areas where compromises have been reached, such as changes to unemployment insurance and law enforcement reforms, and areas where he believes further compromises can be reached, including a pension reform plan proposed by Democratic Senate President John Cullerton and changes to the states education funding structure.

But for Democratic Sen. Gary Forby of Benton, there was too much talk of changes to collective bargaining rights and other issues on which his party has made its opposition clear.

If youre going to be a governor, youve got to be able to work with people, Forby said after the speech. Its not, My way or the highway. 

Republican Sen. Jason Barickman of Bloomington thought Rauner did a good job of continuing to present his ideas for reform, including term limits and changes to the way legislative districts are drawn, while underlining the areas for compromise.

Barickman said it was telling that the governor singled out Cullerton as the person with whom he can compromise on issues such as pensions. If deals are reached, that could put pressure on Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan to reach agreements as well, he said.

If theres an agreement between the governor and President Cullerton on pension reform, then theres only one person whos going to stop that, and thats Speaker Madigan, if the Democrats allow it, Barickman said.

Despite his repetition of points of his turnaround agenda, some Democrats took it as a good sign that Rauner mentioned school funding reform in his speech, something Cullerton stressed earlier this week in his own speech at the City Club of Chicago.

Sen. Andy Manar of Bunker Hill has been leading the charge for the Senate Democrats on school funding reform. He introduced a bill last year that would send more money to districts with higher poverty rates and lower property values.

During the speech, we heard many of the things that weve heard from the governor now for 12 months, but I think one clear difference is that hes embracing the idea that, without a doubt, school funding in the state has to change, Manar said. I heard that in a very strong way from the governor today.

Democratic Rep. Sue Scherer of Decatur, a former teacher, also was pleased to hear Rauner talk about the issue.

Reading between the lines, I felt that there was support for Senate Bill 1, she said, referring to Manars bill.

However, Republicans werent reading the governors remarks the same way.

Sen. Dale Righter of Mattoon said he doesnt believe Rauner was endorsing Manars plan.

He was very specific that we needed to try to find a way to direct more funds into the lower-income, lower-property value areas without taking money from other areas, Righter said. The plans that have been put out by Sen. Manar, supported by the Senate president, did exactly that.

Righter said he believes Rauner was talking about new money for education, which the senator believes could come from cuts to Medicaid and other public assistance programs, where the spending has grown immensely over the last decade.

Now that Rauner has laid out his priorities, Republican Rep. Dan Brady of Bloomington said, its time for rank-and-file lawmakers to put forward legislation that presents options for moving forward with the budget and other issues.

Thats what its going to take to undo this logjam, he said.
A Brooklyn jury heard evidence today about whether it was proper for a city cop to patrol the Pink Houses in East New York with his gun drawn the night he shot an unarmed man in a dark stairwell. Officer Peter Liang claims the shooting of Akai Gurley was a horrible accident.

A video of Akai Gurley's bloody clothes was shown to jurors in the trial of Officer Peter Liang.

Shortly after Liang shot and killed Gurley, The NYPD's crime scene unit videotaped the unlit stairwell where the shooting occurred.

Gurley's aunt says it was difficult to watch.

"It was just hurting to see my nephew's blood on clothing, on the floor," said Hertencia Petersen. "A precious life was stolen."

A crime scene detective testified that the bullet ricocheted off the cinderblock wall of the 7th floor stairwell.

Officer Liang says he was entering the 8th floor landing with a flashlight in one hand and gun in the other when his weapon fired, hitting Gurley on the stairs a floor below.

Two cops who responded to the shooting also testified for the prosecution.

Liang's defense lawyers got them to say they've pulled their guns when going to roof tops, which is where Liang was headed that night. One cop said they receive informal training to do just that.

But asked if he had his gun drawn in responding to the call about shots fired that night, Officer Salvatore Tramatana said, no.

"Sometimes you don't know when to pull it out," said Tramanata. "Running into the lobby I wouldn't pull it out."

One of the cops also said he had a hard time opening the door to the dark staircase and had to bang it open with his shoulder.

The prosecution contends Liang's actions that night were reckless, leading to Gurleys death.

Gurley's aunt says she wants officer Liang sent to prison and she's monitoring the trial closely.

"It can go anyway, but I have hope and confidence in the DA from what I am seeing in the district attorney side from what I am seeing so far I'm confident," said Petersen.

This case will resume on Thursday. The judge has told jurors they can expect to start deliberating the fate of Officer Liang on February 8 or 9.
With the Iowa caucuses coming up on Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio is headed to the Midwest this weekend to stump for Hillary Clinton.

The mayor announced his support for the former Secretary of State and former New York Senator last fall after initially withholding an endorsement.

De Blasio ran Clinton's successful Senate bid in 2000.

Recent polls in Iowa show Clinton locked in a tight race with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

The mayor had planned to hold a presidential forum in Iowa, but cancelled it after candidates did not commit to attending.

Meanwhile, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump says he will not take part in Thursday's GOP debate on Fox News.

Trump accused Fox network leaders of "toying" with him.

He also ripped the network for including Megyn Kelly as a moderator, calling her a "third-rate reporter."

Trump has been critical of Fox in the past.

He came under fire for controversial comments about Kelly after a debate in August.

Trump says he will hold his own event in Iowa during the debate to raise money for wounded veterans.
Today the United Nations remembers one of the darkest periods in history. It's the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the keynote speaker at the U.N. ceremony in Paris is a New Yorker who survived the holocaust. NY1's Michael Herzenberg has the story.

Seventy-one years ago today, the allies liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

The U.N. says remembrance of the Holocaust is critical to prevent further acts of genocide.

The Nazi's murdered one-third of the world's Jews.

"One second in Auschwitz was like a month, a day was like a year," said Roman Kent, President of the Auschwitz International Committee, who survived the concentration camp. "A month was like an eternity. How many eternities can you have in a lifetime? I don't know this."

Kent doesn't remember exactly how much time he spent Auschwitz with his younger brother.

"I think one of the reason what help us to survive was that we were together," he said. "We risked our life to be together but it helped us to survive."

His family did not make it through the holocaust intact. His father died in the Lodz Ghetto  one of the slums where the Nazis forced Polish Jews to live after Invading the country in 1939.

"I don't think you can imagine how it was like," Kent said. "It was starvation during the winter you could find frozen people on the streets and in their homes"

Kent's family was herded with other Jews onto cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz where his mother was killed. His two sisters survived, but one died shortly after liberation from illness she contracted in the camp.

Kent and his brother also survived Auschwitz  and three other camps  eventually moving to New York. Kent married another survivor and raised a family on the East Side.

He became a successful textile importer  and devoted himself to tirelessly advocating for survivors.

"If I were to say to you that there's maybe one thing worse than Auschwitz itself and that would be if we to forget that a place like this ever existed," he said.

Kent's work in Holocaust education, through writing, speaking and making a documentary has brought him honors from Presidents and even the German Government.

At 90, he's not finished. On this day, he's speaking before world leaders in Paris marking the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis systematically killed as one million Jews.

He says we must remember the murder and hatred and teach children tolerance and love.

"I don't want our past to be mankind's future," Kent said.
The director of the Knoedler & Company gallery in Manhattan, which sold dozens of fakes as the work of modern masters, was not duplicitous, but duped by paintings so expertly forged that they also escaped detection by several prominent art experts, a lawyer for the director, Ann Freedman, told jurors in court on Tuesday.

Ms. Freedman and the gallery are being sued by Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who paid Knoedler $8.3 million in 2004 for a work said to be Rothkos Untitled, 1956, which was actually painted, like the rest of the fakes, by a single man in Queens.

The couple has accused the gallery and Ms. Freedman of racketeering and fraud, saying that they knew or should have known that the work was fake.

But in his opening statement to the jury on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Ms. Freedmans lawyer, Luke Nikas, said it was unfair to hold her accountable for believing in forgeries that numerous experts had also accepted over the years.
Whether that actually happened is disputed, but Sky Arts, the television channel its being produced for, called it a light hearted look at a reportedly true event.

The show will air some time this year, though an exact date hasnt been set.

Image The actor Joseph Fiennes will play Michael Jackson in a comedy for British television. Credit... Jim Ruymen/Reuters

It is part of a series of comedies about unlikely stories from arts and cultural history, Sky Arts said in a statement, adding that producers are given the creative freedom to cast roles as they wish.

Brian Cox and Stockard Channing are also cast in the half-hour show.

The casting decision follows backlash against the Academy Awards, which failed to nominate any minority actors this year.
In a market that has scared off potential initial public offerings of stock, one company whose purpose is to manage risk is taking steps toward a market debut.

Octo Telematics, an Italian company, makes technology for cars that allows insurance companies to monitor customers driving patterns and charge them according to their safety profiles. The company is preparing for an I.P.O. in the United States that it expects to generate $350 million in proceeds, according to people briefed on the planning discussions.

Octo is aiming for a valuation of at least $2 billion in the offering, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the government requires a quiet period leading up to the first day of trading. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Credit Suisse are advising and underwriting the offering, these people said.

The I.P.O. market has been rife with pain, as the broader gauges slumped this year and volatility spiked. Those conditions have made pricing an initial offering more difficult, as investors become much pickier and the risk that deals will flop becomes higher.
Newborns should be tested for infection with the Zika virus if their mothers have visited or lived in any country experiencing an outbreak and if the mothers own tests are positive or inconclusive, federal health officials said Tuesday.

The reason for testing these infants is that infection with the Zika virus could be linked to defects in vision and hearing, among other abnormalities, even if the child does not suffer brain damage and an unusually small head, called microcephaly, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The new guidance applies only to infants of mothers who reported symptoms of Zika virus infection  a rash, joint pain, red eyes or fever  while living abroad in an affected country or within two weeks of travel to such a destination.

Within a month of birth, infants with a possible congenital Zika virus infection should also receive an eye evaluation and special hearing tests, the officials said. An evaluation for neurological abnormalities should also be performed. At six months, a repeat hearing screen is advised, even if the first was normal.
That paragraph came out of the distance between what the N.S.A. was collecting in terms of metadata, basically the Snowden leak, a relatively paltry amount of data compared to the rather large amounts of data we are willingly giving up  or unwillingly giving up by clicking the I accept the terms box  to these very powerful corporations, he said in a phone interview. And my feeling is, you look around at who is powerful in the world now, and, yes the U.S. government still has drones and a nuclear arsenal  it has some might  but in terms of power over peoples daily lives, I think its shifted to the private sector.

Later, he added: I think its appropriate always to resist concentration of power in the hands of too few. There is bound to come a point where that becomes dangerous.

Googles power is predicated, of course, on the enormous volume of information at its disposal. Its competitors, as I noted in my profile, have accused the company of abusing its dominance in the search space to steer consumers to Google services over theirs, and the European Commission seems to agree.

But Mr. Page has also used his own power  through an unusual share structure, he and co-founder Sergey Brin control the company outright  to isolate himself from Wall Streets demands. In the 16 years Ive been covering business I have met countless C.E.O.s who describe their jobs in almost academic terms, using phrases like fiduciary duty to dodge questions about what kind of role their company has to society.

In public comments, Mr. Page goes out of his way to say the opposite, describing Google more in terms of a nonprofit than a gigantic corporation. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, he said he wished there were a vehicle for people to donate money to their company so that it could be used for projects that had some kind of social purpose.

These are some of the ideas I tried to get at in the article, but of course I would love to have included an interview with the man himself. There is a popular image of reporters as a pack of pushy cold callers who will stalk anyone to get their story, and while that is true at times, I can tell you from experience that it is really awkward and emasculating to try to interview someone who doesnt want to talk. You feel like a big dork.

In total, I have encountered Mr. Page three times for a total of five minutes or so. Once was at an off-the-record gathering where nothing interesting happened, and another was at a press event where he politely shook my hand before heading in another direction.
A Bronx mother whose conversation with a hospital worker led to the discovery of her 7-week-old sons body north of New York City last month has been indicted on charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, prosecutors said.

Danielle Whyte, 31, pleaded not guilty in State Supreme Court in the Bronx on Tuesday to charges of second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and concealment of a corpse. If convicted of the charges, she would face up to 15 years in prison.

In a separate proceeding on Tuesday, her sons father, Jose Feliciano, 51, pleaded not guilty to charges of murder in the second degree, manslaughter in the first degree and concealment of a corpse. If convicted, he faces 25 years to life in prison.

Both parents have been remanded to jail, prosecutors said.

Their son, Mason Tyler Feliciano, also known as Mason Tyler Whyte, was found in a wooded area in Dutchess County after Mr. Feliciano killed him, according to prosecutors. Neither parent sought help while the baby was still alive, prosecutors said. Instead, after he died on Dec. 10 in their home in the Morris Park section of the Bronx, they checked into an inn in Brewster and sometime that weekend drove to nearby Dover to dispose of his body, prosecutors said.
Updated 9:04 a.m.

Good morning on this brightening Wednesday.



As the weather becomes slightly more temperate, it is less essential to protect against the threat of falling snow.

But what about your feet? The slush is spreading. Icy moats surround the curb at nearly every crosswalk. And for even the longest-legged among us, some puddles are too wide to be jumped successfully.

Especially in a large pile of nasty snow-dirt, you wouldnt want to ruin your Sunday (or Wednesday) best.

But most snow boots, even attractive ones, dont exactly go with a power suit.

So we headed to Chelsea yesterday, where we discussed how to best adapt to the current conditions with some stylish New Yorkers.
The Brooklyn housing project where a police officer fatally shot an unarmed man, Akai Gurley, was notoriously dangerous, according to testimony drawn out on Tuesday by lawyers for the officer, Peter Liang.

Two police officers who patrolled housing projects and responded to a radio call of a shooting at the Louis H. Pink houses testified in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn about the dangers they perceived.

The officers, Salvatore Tramontana and Andrae Fernandez, who were partners at the time, were at the Cypress Hills housing projects when a call came over their radio: male shot, on the fifth floor of 2724 Linden Boulevard. The officers drove the two or three minutes to the Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood.

Asked by Robert E. Brown, Officer Liangs lawyer, if the Pink Houses were considered the citys most dangerous housing project, Officer Tramontana replied, One of them. Officer Tramontana said he was aware of another shooting that had occurred in a Pink Houses stairwell a week or two before.
Think of a person, Mr. Rice wrote, going through difficult times. Perhaps its a death in the family, addiction, they could have just been let go from their job, even an illness or physical injury. Each one of those people you are thinking of has the potential to be a future victim of this crime.

Ms. Delmaros case has been the subject of several articles in The New York Times, and is notable for the amount of money involved  Mr. Rice paid a total of $713,975 to her and another fortuneteller he had met before her  as well as the improbability of the psychics promises.

Mr. Rice, dissatisfied with visits to the first fortuneteller, who has not been identified or charged, visited Ms. Delmaros psychic shop in Times Square in 2013. He was upset that his feelings for a woman named Michelle, whom he had met in a drug-treatment center in Arizona, were unrequited. Ms. Delmaro promised to bring him and Michelle together  with the help of special crystals, a time machine and an 80-mile bridge made of gold.

Later, Mr. Rice discovered Michelle had died, but Ms. Delmaro assured him she could reincarnate the womans spirit into another body, going so far as to say a woman Mr. Rice was seeing in California was the new Michelle, Mr. Rice said in an interview last year.

Throughout the ruse, Ms. Delmaro told Mr. Rice her work was putting her in danger and wiping her out financially. In his statement to the court, he said he believed Ms. Delmaro had sacrificed her business, home, car, was in $100,000 of credit card debt and had been living in a church for the last six months, all to help me.
Rose, a white rat who escaped poison and roadside peril for a life in the theater, died in a fall at home on Monday night, just four days after she started acting in a Broadway hit.

She was apparently playing on some shelves when a metal door on one of the shelves came off its hinges and landed on her, said Roses owner and trainer, Lydia DesRoche.

It was just a horrible freak accident, Ms. DesRoche said on Tuesday. Rose was about 8 months old.

Rose was profiled in The New York Times last week as she prepared for her debut in the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Last summer, Rose was one of hundreds of albino rats dumped on a median along the West Side Highway near 57th Street. No one has figured out who dumped them or why; albino rats are often raised as pets, reptile food or lab subjects.
Out of the blue in the fall of 2010, a blogger asked Jane Mayer, a writer with The New Yorker, how she felt about the private investigator who was digging into her background. Ms. Mayer thought the idea was a joke, she said this week. At a Christmas party a few months later, she ran into a former reporter who had been asked about helping with an investigation into another reporter on behalf of two conservative billionaires.

The reporter had written a story they disliked, Ms. Mayer recounts in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, out this month from Doubleday. Her acquaintance told her, It occurred to me afterward that the reporter they wanted to investigate might be you.

As it happened, Ms. Mayer had published a major story in the magazine that August about the brothers David and Charles Koch, and their role in cultivating the power of the Tea Party movement in 2010. Using a network of nonprofits and other donors, they had provided essential financial support for the political voices that have held sway in Republican politics since 2011. Dark Money chronicles the vast sums of money from the Koch brothers and other wealthy conservatives that have helped shape public dialogue in opposition to Democratic positions on climate change, the Affordable Care Act and tax policy.

Ms. Mayer began to take the rumored investigation seriously when she heard from her New Yorker editor that she was going to be accused  falsely  of plagiarism, stealing the work of other writers. A dossier of her supposed plagiarism had been provided to reporters at The New York Post and The Daily Caller, but the smears collapsed when the writers who were the purported victims made statements saying that it was nonsense, and that there had been no plagiarism whatsoever. Indeed, as one noted, Ms. Mayer had plainly credited his writing  though this was not mentioned in the bill of particulars that was passed around.
Khaldiya why are you standing outside on your own? Im looking at the people coming and going. Arriving at the gate changed a lot of things in my life. It was the first time Id been in a crowded place like this. There were children screaming and crying. It was freezing cold. There was no sleep. There was no warmth. A lot of thoughts were going through my head. From that moment I just felt like a different person. I was able to overcome my shyness. Now I am another kind of girl. A courageous girl. A courageous girl. My siblings didnt use to play with their hands. They would only play if they got a good toy. In the camp their lives completely changed. They started playing with their hands and singing their beautiful childrens songs. This is my sister Shahib, a little lady. Shes always pedaling her feet as if she were riding a bicycle. The nice thing about here is that the kids are always active. My siblings never wanted to do anything at home. What changed their minds in the camp? Honestly, I dont know. I started to teach kids because I was deprived of education. And they shouldnt also be denied. Our kitchen never used to be dark. But in the camp, our kitchen is always dark in the evening. Theres no light at all except what comes in from outside of the kitchen... the light of the caravans. In Syria, I used to be afraid. I needed the lights on in the kitchen. Here I can visit Marah at night with just a small lantern. And I am not afraid. In Syria it was from school to home until 8th grade. When I stopped in 8th grade I just stayed at home. But here we go to the center and we learn photography. We are more open-minded about life. In Syria I didnt have a lot of friends except at school. We never hung out with people in the neighborhood. Here I have many, many friends. They learn from me, and I learn from them. My siblings, my mother, my father, and grandmother... My head has too much going on in it. Khaldiya, imagine yourself 20 years older. What do you think the older Khaldiya would ask the younger Khaldiya? Do you regret the things that youve done at this age? Do you regret what you did at 17? This is what I imagine even though its impossible... Marah and I are in something like college dorms, but not in the same room. We are studying on our own and were comfortable. We would have to be studying on our own, real far away from our parents. Then we could focus on our studying. When I am mad I automatically start filming and it doesnt matter how it comes out as long as I am filming. Especially when I take the shots from weird angles. When I film I feel at ease because I love filming. When I film I feel I am someone very important.
STOCKHOLM  Now in his last year in office, President Obama is in legacy mode. He has much to be proud of. But if he doesnt want his achievements muddied by foreign policy, hell spend his last year redoubling his efforts to contain the Middle East refugee crisis before it goes from a giant humanitarian problem to a giant geostrategic problem that shatters Americas most important ally: the European Union.

I know  putting European Union into the lead of a column published in America is like a Do Not Read sign. Maybe I should call it Trumps European Union. That would go viral. But for the two of you still reading, this is really important.

The meltdowns of Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, Mali, Chad and Yemen and our takedowns of Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan  without proper follow-up on our part, NATOs part or by local elites  has uncorked the worst refugee crisis since World War II. This tidal wave of migrants and refugees is a human tragedy, and their outflow from Syria and Libya in particular is destabilizing all the neighboring islands of decency: Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Kurdistan and Turkey. And now it is eating away at the fabric of the E.U. as well.

Why should Americans care? Because the E.U. is the United States of Europe  the worlds other great center of democracy and economic opportunity. It has its military shortcomings, but with its wealth and liberal values, the E.U. has become Americas primary partner in addressing climate change, managing Iran and Russia and containing disorder in the Middle East and Africa.
When asked why he sought to cross the Antarctic unassisted and unsupported  with no supply drops or help from dogs, sails or any other source  Henry Worsley would say it was to raise money to help wounded soldiers. It indeed was that, and his adventure raised more than 100,000 pounds (about $142,000) for that worthy cause. But like the great explorers Mr. Worsley so admired, the quest that took his life was far greater and far harder to define.

That was less of a problem for earlier explorers like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus, for whom there were always great treasures to discover or blank spots to fill on their maps. For the later adventurers there was always the challenge of the first  first to reach the earths poles, first to climb Mount Everest, first to walk on the moon. It may be more difficult now, when so much is known and when adventures have been relegated to reality shows, to identify a genuine quest, but the longing to test oneself against the extreme and the unknown seems as powerful as ever.

Why? Because its there, was the famous response the mountaineer George Mallory gave to a reporter from The New York Times when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. Felicity Aston, the British meteorologist who achieved many firsts for women, including a solo crossing of the Antarctic in January 2012 (with supply drops, in contrast to Mr. Worsley) offered this explanation: When I look at a map of the world, my eye tends to wander to the fringes  thats where I want to be.

Mr. Worsley, 55, would no doubt agree. A retired British Army officer and friend of Britains royal princes William and Harry, Mr. Worsley was passionately interested in the explorers of the heroic age of Arctic exploration a century ago  Sir Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Roald Amundsen. Mr. Worsley had already led expeditions following each of their celebrated Antarctic routes; his latest plan was to make the trek across Antarctica that Sir Ernest had failed to make in 1915 when his ship became stranded in ice  and to do so on his own, dragging a sled with all his supplies and equipment over 1,100 miles.
The sudden resignation of the federal pardon attorney, Deborah Leff, an Obama appointee, is the latest evidence that until the clemency process is pried from the grip of the Justice Department, it will remain broken.

The pardon attorneys office, which operates out of the Justice Department, is responsible for reviewing thousands of petitions for pardons and sentence commutations and for making recommendations for clemency to the president. The presidents power to grant mercy in these cases is nearly unlimited, but for most of his time in office, Mr. Obama, like his recent predecessors, has exercised this power only rarely.

Since 2014, Mr. Obama has focused more attention on this issue. To overhaul the notoriously backlogged pardon office, he announced new standards encouraging tens of thousands of federal prisoners to request reductions of their inordinately long drug sentences.

And he hired Ms. Leff to replace Ronald Rodgers, whose incompetent tenure included a finding by the Justice Departments inspector general that in 2008 he hid information from President George W. Bush in recommending the denial of a clemency petition.
Q. Seems like youre filling a need of providing homes for the less affluent in the city.

A. Well, I like to think so.

We have income requirements. We have credit requirements, previous landlord requirements and a stable job, and if those four criteria are not met then we need a guarantor.

Q. Why the focus on rentals instead of condominiums?

A. Well, because Im a long-term investor. I have developer friends who started around the same time as me, but they dont own the stuff that they bought back in 92 and I still do, so Ive seen the appreciation.

Q. Could you see the company expanding into bigger developments?

A. Well, actually  under the development rights that we have in Jersey City  for our first time were doing a joint venture with a very big name, national developer. In that place were going to build 25 to 30 stories, glass tower in Journal Square.

Q. Who is that developer?

A. I cant say right now. We havent inked the deal yet.

And on our own, we have another mixed-use project in Jersey City, which is going through the approval process. We expect to build about 200,000 square feet of residential, retail and parking.

Q. Your focus seems to be on Jersey City.

A. Its a great market for us  the Journal Square area. Its not nearly as evolved or as efficient, I should say, a market as New York, where youll have 10 nationally known brokers who know about a property. So the competition to buy is very substantial.

In Jersey City, you have mostly local brokers. People know us. We have a pretty big presence there, so brokers come to us first. We get a lot of off-market deals and were able to buy those kind of things for pretty good prices.
Inspired by Borges and Chandler, Jose Luis Pereira dedicated almost a decade to writing short stories, with works published in various literary anthologies  but like every writer, I wanted to have my own bookshop, too, he says. And not just a generic bookshop, but a place of wonders where I could offer fellow literature lovers much more than the usual best sellers. For four years, he did just this, running a small store specializing in short story collections and hosting occasional readings and workshops in the inner-city Malasana neighborhood of Madrid. Then the economic crisis began, he recalls.

Far from ruining Pereira, however, the downturn that hit Spain in 2008 brought with it both inspiration and opportunity. Still determined to hold onto his dreams of being an independent bookseller  yet realizing that cash-strapped Spaniards were more likely to get their literary fixes through the local library or e-books  Pereira turned to pop-up books, an art form that had captivated him since childhood. The result, Tres Rosas Amarillas (Three Yellow Roses, a nod to Chandler), is Spains only specialist pop-up book store, nestled amid a jumble of vintage clothing stores, hipster cupcake vendors and bars on Malasanas main drag, Calle del Espiritu Santo, and a short hop from the location of his original store.

Image Jose Luis Pereira, the proprietor of Tres Rosas Amarillas, poses with one of his offerings. Credit... Jake Threadgould

Pereiras hunch  that people may be reluctant to buy a new best seller, but would happily pay double or even triple the amount for a marvel of paper engineering  turned out to be a good one. Most people find us by chance, often tourists visiting Madrid for the weekend, he explains, stressing his preference for connecting with his customers in person rather than through social media or the shops largely neglected website. Often they will stay for 30 minutes, maybe more, doing a slow lap of the shop, just opening up the books in wonder. When people do buy, its rarely for themselves. Instead, most books are purchased as presents for partners, children or friends.
EXPLORING THE CULTURE OF PORTUGAL, PAST AND PRESENT



Portugals rich culture is the focus of a new private trip to the country from the travel company Made for Spain. Called Cultural Highlights of Portugal, the seven-night itinerary begins in Porto and ends in Evora, a Unesco-designated World Heritage site, with a stay in a 15th-century convent. Activities include a tasting of traditional Portuguese appetizers, called petiscos, and visits to small port producers in Porto; a walking tour of Guimaraes, the city known as the birthplace of the Portuguese nationality; a hike in Pedras Salgadas Park in northern Portugal; a boat trip in the Douro Valley; and a visit to an artisan tile workshop in Lisbon where travelers can decorate their own tiles. Prices from 9,000 euros (about $9,444) for two people inclusive of accommodations, breakfast, some meals, all activities, transfers and taxes.

ACTION! TOUR IN JORDAN HAS A FILM FOCUS

A new tour to Petra and Wadi Rum in Jordan from the travel company Petra from Israel is inspired by the Oscars. Two films nominated for the awards this year  The Martian starring Matt Damon and Theeb, a contender from Jordan in the Best Foreign Language Film category  were filmed in the country, and on the three-day trip, travelers can see where they were shot and also visit sites where other popular movies were filmed. In Petra, an archaeological site in the southwestern desert that moviegoers may recognize from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, guests take a guided tour of the areas where the movies were filmed. In Wadi Rum, the largest valley in Jordan, they stay at the same Bedouin camp Mr. Damon resided in during the filming of The Martian and take a tour of the surrounding desert where Theeb, The Martian and Lawrence of Arabia were filmed. Prices from $650 a person inclusive of accommodations, most meals, entrance fees to sites and tours.

CELEBRATING CUISINE (AND WINE) IN CARMEL

A long weekend of good eating and drinking is coming to Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., from Feb. 25 to 28 with the third annual Relais & Chateaux GourmetFest, an extravaganza of 18 events featuring cuisine by renowned chefs and wine from highly regarded winemakers. Four three-star Michelin chefs are headliners of the event: David Kinch of Manresa in Los Gatos, Calif.; Joshua Skenes of Saison in San Francisco; Michel Troisgros of La Maison Troisgros in Roanne, France; and Hiroshi Nakamichi of Restaurant Moliere in Sapporo, Japan. Highlights over the four days include a 10-course dinner prepared by Mr. Kinch, Mr. Skenes and Mr. Troisgros and paired with rare wines such as Chateau Latour; a tasting of wines from Domaine Leflaive, a well-known Grand Cru winery in Burgundy; and a hunt for wild mushrooms through the 20,000-acre Santa Lucia Preserve in Carmel Valley with a team of mycologists followed by a wild mushroom lunch. Prices from $125. Tickets may be purchased at gourmetfestcarmel.com.

PASSOVER IN JERUSALEM

The Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem is offering a Passover package ranging from four to 10 nights for travelers who will be in Israel for the holiday, celebrated this year from April 22 to 30. It includes a lavish buffet breakfast daily and all Shabbat meals; those who book before Feb. 10 will receive a 10 percent discount. Prices from $2,530 for four nights.
Even as many Republican voters flirt with outsider candidates, a large minority of Republicans still supports one of the mainstream, traditional conservatives: Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina.

These supporters are concentrated in Florida, the Northeast and across most of the West, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm. The establishment candidates are weakest in the South, where they sometimes do not combine for even 20 percent of the vote.

The Civis estimates are based on interviews with more than 11,000 Republican-leaning respondents between August and December. The large sample, combined with statistical techniques that partly pool data by state and congressional district, allows for a detailed examination of the geographic contours of the race. The data reflects the race as it was in late December.
HOUSTON  A deputy had been shot and killed at a suburban gas station here the night before in an unprovoked attack. The Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, stood that Saturday afternoon in August next to the sheriff, on the verge of tears.

In brief remarks to reporters gathered around her, Ms. Anderson embodied the anger and sadness of Houstons lawmen and women. But she also subtly veered into more political and controversial terrain, using a favorite phrase of Richard M. Nixon that has recently been picked up by Donald J. Trump to say it was time for the silent majority in this country to support law enforcement.

Ms. Anderson, the top prosecutor in the third most-populous county in America, has tried to walk a fine line as a no-nonsense, by-the-book lawyer and someone with a clear conservative political profile who has been an outspoken Republican in a city that has been run by Democrats for decades. But she has never found herself in a more charged blend of law and politics than she did this week when a county grand jury investigating wrongdoing against Planned Parenthood instead indicted two abortion opponents on Monday.

Texas Republican leaders issued defiant statements in response to the Houston indictment, vowing to continue the states investigation into the videos recorded in Houston in April at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast. But Ms. Anderson has a far tougher role to play. She took the case to the grand jurors, presented them with evidence from a monthslong investigation and appeared to have allowed them to come to their own conclusions, however politically unpalatable it may have turned out for conservatives. The grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing.
The founder of Bikram yoga has been ordered to pay nearly $6.5 million in a lawsuit that said he had sexually harassed and wrongfully fired an adviser. A Los Angeles jury awarded punitive damages against the founder, Bikram Choudhury, on Tuesday, one day after awarding $924,000 in separate damages for compensation. Mr. Choudhurys former legal adviser, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, said he inappropriately touched her and wrongfully fired her in 2013 after she began investigating sexual abuse claims from other women. Six other women also have sued Mr. Choudhury, saying he sexually assaulted them. His lawyers deny the accusations. Mr. Choudhury, 69, built a worldwide empire around Bikram yoga, which is performed in rooms that can reach more than 100 degrees. However, Mr. Choudhury contends he is nearly bankrupt.
A white police officer facing murder and other charges in the shooting death of an unarmed, naked black man quit his post with an Atlanta-area police agency on Tuesday, his lawyer said. The officer, Robert Olsen, worked for the DeKalb County Police Department for eight years. He was indicted last week by a grand jury in the death of Anthony Hill. Mr. Olsen, who is free on bond, shot Mr. Hill, a 27-year-old Air Force veteran who was acting erratically in the parking lot of an apartment complex near Atlanta. Mr. Hill had bipolar disorder and was having a manic episode, his family has said. Mr. Olsen has said Mr. Hill was coming at him in a hostile manner and disobeyed commands to stop, making him feel threatened.
A federal judge has dismissed an attempt to halt the removal of prominent Confederate monuments in New Orleans. Judge Carl Barbier of United States District Court ruled Tuesday against preservation groups and a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which sued in December seeking to stop the city from removing four monuments linked to Confederate history. The monuments include a towering marble column and bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, a landmark on the cityscape. Judge Barbier said he found no legal reason the city should not be allowed to take down the monuments. The plaintiffs have vowed to appeal and had asked the judge to allow the monuments to stand until all appeals are exhausted.
Together, these developments highlight the political problem that could be caused if we were to nominate someone like Ted Cruz at the top of the ticket, said Brian Walsh, a Republican consultant and former adviser to House and Senate leaders, who has not endorsed a presidential candidate.

In the last several elections, the Democratic playbook has been to discuss the war on women narrative against Republicans, Mr. Walsh said. If you have a much more polarizing ideologue like Ted Cruz at the top of the ticket, you would make it that much easier for Democrats to prosecute that argument.

Karl Rove, a Republican strategist and a former top adviser to President George W. Bush, has called proponents of shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood the suicide caucus; party leaders are well aware that Republican attacks on the organization back to the Clinton era have not ended well for Republicans. On Tuesday, the House Democrats campaign organization attacked Republicans in 18 House races, asking in news releases whether the candidates still supported the now indicted conspirators behind Planned Parenthood videos.

Nonpartisan opinion polls suggest Republicans are right to be concerned.

A majority of Americans continue to support Planned Parenthood and its federal payments, which reimburse nearly 700 affiliates for providing reproductive care, preventive health services and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases to low-income Medicaid recipients. Payments for abortions, which are performed by a little more than half of Planned Parenthood centers, are prohibited by federal law except in cases of rape, incest and a pregnancys threat to a womans life.

A survey for The New York Times and CBS News this month showed that nearly six in 10 Americans say Planned Parenthood should receive federal funds. That finding was statistically unchanged from a similar survey in September, even as conservatives at the local, state and federal levels stoked outrage about the videos from a group called the Center for Medical Progress, founded by a 27-year-old Californian, David R. Daleiden, one of those indicted Monday.
After John Jay Hooker Jr. learned he had metastatic melanoma in January 2015, he began the last crusade of his quixotic career. He persuaded a Tennessee legislator to introduce a bill granting what Mr. Hooker called the ultimate civil right by legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. Typically, he also sued the state.

Mr. Hookers effort to replicate Oregons Death With Dignity Act failed in the General Assembly, and his lawsuit was dismissed. On Sunday, he died in a Nashville hospice. The cancer killed him, his daughter Kendall Hooker said. He was 85.

Mr. Hookers personal right-to-die campaign capped a flamboyant career as a perennial litigant and political candidate who figured in the Supreme Courts pivotal one person one vote ruling and helped persuade H. Ross Perot to mount an independent run for president in 1992.

Although Mr. Hooker repeatedly lost his races for elective office, he managed to advance a progressive agenda, dominated by campaign finance reform, through his candidacies and as a plaintiff in the courts.
OTTUMWA, Iowa  On the campaign trail, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas assures Iowa Republicans that they can finally ignore the barrage of political attack ads on television.

The time for that nonsense has passed, he told voters on Monday, wrapping up a high-minded closing argument.

Yet a few hours earlier, the top super PAC supporting Mr. Cruz had begun running its first negative advertisements against Donald J. Trump, the presidential rival who has chased him down in the state and pulled ahead in the polls. And minutes after Mr. Cruzs speech, his campaign announced its second ad against Mr. Trump in three days, this one attacking his past support for abortion rights and a more recent suggestion that Iowa voters were stupid.

Mr. Cruz and his allies are desperately trying to damage Mr. Trump, hoping to halt his momentum before it is too late. But while Mr. Cruz has won praise for effectively positioning himself in a volatile race, his campaign is being tested as never before, and it is showing signs of strain.
BALTIMORE  None of those snowplows that Baltimore leaders keep talking about ever made it to the 1200 block of West 37th Street in Hampden, a middle-class rowhouse community northwest of downtown.

So dozens of residents, tired of being marooned by the record blizzard for yet another day, took to the streets with shovels in hand on Tuesday and did what the city had not.

By Tuesday afternoon, they had cleared about half the block of snow, part of the long slog back in parts of cities like Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia that has left many residents frustrated and angry.

Can we bill the city if they dont clear our street? asked Heather Arthur, a 26-year-old manager of a J. Crew clothing store in the Washington suburb of Bethesda who could not get to work Monday or Tuesday because she was snowed in. Are they going to pay us the $12 they give city workers to clean the streets, for doing their job for them?
Two people were fatally shot and three others wounded Tuesday night at an encampment for homeless people, the Seattle police said. The shooting took place near Airport Way South and South Atlantic Street south of downtown. The police said they were searching for at least one person involved in the shooting. Roads in the area are closed. At a news conference addressing homelessness Tuesday night, Mayor Ed Murray called the shooting an active crime scene and urged people to stay away from the area. No other details were immediately available.
Kenyan forces pulled out of two towns in southern Somalia on Tuesday, and Islamist extremists moved into one of them, residents said. The withdrawal came after an attack by Shabab militants who claimed to have killed scores of Kenyan peacekeepers recently, residents said Tuesday. Some residents of the town of El-Adde, where the Jan. 15 attack happened, started returning to their homes, but residents of Badhadhe, another town in the Lower Jubba region, said Shabab militants took over and started searching homes. Kenyan officials have not said how many troops were killed in the El-Adde attack, but the Shabab claimed to have killed about 100 Kenyan soldiers. Kenya first sent troops to Somalia in 2011 to prevent extremists from crossing the border and carrying out attacks that threatened Kenyas crucial tourism sector.
Canada discriminated against aboriginal children by underfunding welfare services on reserves, a human rights tribunal ruled Tuesday. The decision could affect the way the government funds education, health and housing for indigenous Canadians. The ruling of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal comes nearly nine years after aboriginal groups filed a complaint against the federal government over its funding formula for child welfare on reserves. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to repair relations with Canadas indigenous people, who make up 5 percent of the population.
The Commission has confirmed today the members of the Industry Advisory Group (IAG), linked to the EU Energy Platform.
A machete-wielding man attacked an American tourist couple as they walked along a remote beach on Grenada, killing the woman, the police said Tuesday. The woman, Jessica Lewis Colker, 39, of Atlanta, was found dead after her husband ran to get help after the attack, which occurred around noon Sunday, said Sylvan McIntyre, an assistant superintendent with the Royal Grenada Police Force. A suspect is in custody. The motive for the attack is unknown. Ms. Colkers husband, Brian Van Melito, told the police that he fought with the suspect, then managed to get away and call for help. The police and local residents found Ms. Colkers body later in the woods. An autopsy found that she died of an extensive skull fracture and asphyxia.
What a difference 10 days make.

Irans president is in Europe this week, shaking hands with leaders, inking billion-dollar business deals and making headlines that would have been hard to imagine just a few months ago.

Since international sanctions against Iran were lifted on Jan. 16, the country, which for years was considered a pariah and isolated because of its nuclear ambitions, has engaged in something of a charm offensive.

Here are a few of the ways a newly unfettered Iran has been getting back to business and engaging again with the world.

Italy

 President Hassan Rouhani met with Pope Francis on Tuesday, the first meeting between a pope and an Iranian head of state in 17 years. Mr. Rouhani also met with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and businesses leaders, signing more than a dozen deals during his visit to Italy.
TEHRAN  A grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has been barred from helping to choose the next one, according to a family members posts on Instagram.

The grandson, Hassan Khomeini, is a Shiite Muslim cleric of a lower rank than his famous grandfather and is associated with the reformist faction in Iran. He has apparently been disqualified from running for a seat in the Assembly of Experts, a clerical council that will be elected on Feb. 26. The assembly would choose the countrys next supreme leader if the current one, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 76, dies or steps down.

To run in any Iranian election, a candidate must first be approved by a 12-member committee called the Guardian Council. That council announced on Tuesday that it had vetted 801 would-be candidates for the Assembly of Experts and had approved 166 of them to run. It did not specify who had been disqualified from running for the 88-member panel.

No official figures were available for the councils decisions on candidates for the parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for the same day. But reformist leaders said last week that almost all of their candidates for Parliament had been disqualified.
CAIRO  After the security forces raided the home of Islam Khalil, a 26-year-old salesman, last summer, he seemed to vanish without a trace.

Mr. Khalil, who lives about 50 miles north of Cairo in El Santa, Egypt, had not been formally arrested, so his family could not determine where he was being held, or by whom. His relatives, who said he did not have access to a lawyer, worried that he was dead.

When Mr. Khalil finally emerged, four months later, at a police station in the port city of Alexandria, Egypt, he looked dirty and emaciated, according to his brother Nour, and reported that interrogators had suspended him from his arms and his legs, and administered electric shocks to his genitals.

He didnt look like the Islam I know, Nour Khalil recalled in a recent interview.

Mr. Khalil is one of hundreds of Egyptians who have recently been subjected to what human rights groups call enforced disappearance, a harsh tactic that has become increasingly prevalent in Egypt as the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi widens its crackdown on opponents, real or imagined.
Mrinalini Sarabhai, an Indian dancer and choreographer who brought ancient South Indian dance forms into the 20th century and infused her work with social commentary, died on Jan. 21 at her home in Ahmedabad, in western India. She was 97.

The cause was complications of a stomach infection, her son, Kartikeya, said.

Ms. Sarabhai was one of the first women to perform Kathakali, a classical dance form based on Hindu epics that was usually performed by all-male troupes in elaborate makeup and costumes. She was also among a group of contemporaries who introduced wider audiences to Bharatanatyam, a dance form that had traditionally been presented in temples by women who were promised to Hindu gods.

As a choreographer, Ms. Sarabhai often deviated from the typical subjects of classical dance to tackle injustice.

For example, Memory Is a Ragged Fragment of Eternity, a Bharatanatyam dance, depicts a young bride driven to suicide. Ms. Sarabhais inspiration came from reading newspaper reports of young women dying of burns and learning that these were often cases of dowry death: a phenomenon in which women were abused and sometimes killed or driven to suicide by their husbands for not providing enough dowry.
BEETHOVEN, HAGEN: 33+1

Ingrid Andsnes, piano

(Simax Classics)

On this impressive recording, Ms. Andsnes, the sister of the acclaimed pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, plays Beethovens Diabelli Variations, bringing clarity, rhythmic elan and a touch of quirky playfulness to this demanding, audacious yet often humorous work. At the end of the 32nd variation, a formidable fugue, in which Beethovens music builds to a dramatic climax and leads into a short, elusive cadenza, Ms. Andsnes instead plays a five-minute piece by the Norwegian composer Lars Petter Hagen: Diabelli Cadenza. Its written for piano and EBow, a hand-held resonator which prolongs sounds from the piano strings in softly eerie ways that suggest electronic music. From Mr. Hagens haunting cadenza, Ms. Andsnes segues into Beethovens final variation, a lilting, ingeniously ornate minuet, played beautifully. (Anthony Tommasini)

BRAHMS, BARTOK: Violin Concertos

Janine Jansen, violin; London Symphony Orchestra; Orchestra dellAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; Antonio Pappano, conductor

(Decca)

Janine Jansens customary fire comes through, clear and blazing, in this unusual pairing of violin concertos by Brahms and Bartok (the heartache-riddled No. 1. But, as is often the case with this fascinating violinist, she makes you wait for it. The Brahms, recorded live with the Orchestra dellAcademia Nazionale and Antonio Pappano, starts off solid, even square, with the solo violin exercising restraint. But by the time Brahms ratchets up the drama in the development section, Ms. Jansen and Mr. Pappano let loose all their charisma and sonic clout. After an Adagio colored by exquisite wind solos, the last movement erupts in a jubilant, rustic dance. In the Bartok, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, Ms. Jansen begins by patiently spinning a timid and tense solo line, which she fills out with emotion in tiny increments. In the mercurial second movement she eagerly responds to each mood swing in the music, turning in a standout performance of this masterful concerto. (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim)

REICH: Works for Pecussion

Third Coast Percussion

(Cedille)

By the time the members of this impressive percussion ensemble joined forces in 2005, the composer Steve Reich was already a grandfather figure in the American new-music scene. So as the percussionist Robert Dillon writes in the liner notes to this beguiling CD, his groups responsibility is not to document this repertoire  it no longer needs basic preservation  but rather, to put our own stamp on it. Its above all a sensual approach to tone color that comes through in Third Coasts take on classic works, whether its the relaxed warmth of the Mallet Quartet or the glistening brightness of Music for Pieces of Wood. Joined by the pianists David Friend and Oliver Hagen, the ensemble also finds full-blooded drama in the Sextet, which contains within its five movements a world of expressions from impish charm to almost oppressive darkness. (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim)
Most musicians perform live for the first time in front of a few close friends. Majid Jordans live debut came before a televised crowd of millions.

The Toronto house-R&B act was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, long before the release of its first album. It was 2013, and the duo  Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman  were backing Drake as he performed a ballad theyd written, Hold On, Were Going Home. The song would peak at No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart and introduce the Toronto rappers pure pop ambitions. His secret weapon was in plain sight, but would, for a while longer, remain an enigma.

Now its Majid Jordans turn up front  its self-titled album will be released Feb. 5 via Drakes label, OVO Sound, in partnership with Warner Bros.

Were ready to be open and go into the world, Mr. Al Maskati, 25, the groups vocalist, said in their first extended interview. People want to put a face to the music.
Mr. van Zwedens guest appearances with the Philharmonic have produced exciting concerts. Critics at The New York Times have praised his dynamic, all-out performance of Mahlers First Symphony (at his debut in 2012) and his visceral, bristling account of Shostakovichs Symphony No. 8. When he led the orchestra this fall in Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 23 and Beethovens Fifth Symphony, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The Times that conducting this imaginative and playing this varied dont appear at Geffen Hall every week.

While his vision for the Philharmonic is not yet clear, Mr. van Zweden is less associated with contemporary composers than Mr. Gilbert is, suggesting a possible shift of emphasis. Mr. Gilbert, who has led the orchestra since 2009, was praised for championing new pieces and making them central to his tenure, but drew criticism in some quarters for his work in Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms  the so-called standard repertory, of which Mr. van Zweden is known for delivering crackling performances.

But Mr. van Zweden said that he looked forward to playing more contemporary music at the Philharmonic, noting that in his days leading the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, he conducted world premieres every week or two. It was a fantastic time, to work with composers who are still alive, he said, adding that he enjoyed the ability to ask for their input on how pieces should be played. Its a luxury I think we should treasure as conductors, because, you know, you cannot go back to Mahler or to Beethoven or Mozart.

Last month he conducted the premiere of Magnus Lindbergs Second Violin Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and next season he will lead the New York Philharmonic in the New York premiere of a viola concerto by the young composer Julia Adolphe.

Mr. van Zweden will become the Philharmonics music director-designate in the 2017-18 season, and begin his five-year contract as music director in the 2018-19 season, which, if all goes according to plan, will be the Philharmonics last in Geffen Hall before construction begins. (Mr. van Zweden will be released a year early from his contract in Dallas, which was to have ended in 2019; his final season there will be 2017-18.)
Robert Tuggle, who as the longtime archivist of the Metropolitan Opera helped create a digital database that includes details from every performance since the Met opened with Gounods Faust on Oct. 22, 1883, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 83.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his partner, Paul Jeromack, said.

Mr. Tuggle was the operas director of archives for more than 34 years and the author of The Golden Age of Opera, published in 1983, with photographs by Herman Mishkin. At his death, he was working on a biography of Kirsten Flagstad, the Norwegian-born Wagnerian soprano.

Mr. Tuggle was named archivist in 1981 after being director of education for the Metropolitan Opera Guild, a membership organization that supports the Met.

Robert Aubrey Tuggle was born in Martinsville, Va., on April 17, 1932. His father, Howard Irvine Tuggle, was a Coca-Cola bottling company executive. His mother was the former Margaret Roper.
The New York Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that the Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden would be its next music director. Here are some key facts about him.

First things first Its pronounced Yahp van ZVAY-den.

Current jobs Music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where hes significantly lifted the level of playing since starting in 2008, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

When he starts In 2017  sort of. He will be music director designate for the 2017-18 season, then officially takes over in fall 2018. His contract lasts until 2023.

His specialties Hes known for intense performances of the standard repertory  classics like Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Shostakovich  more than contemporary music.
In conjunction with Japan Pacific Resource Network, we have established the Japan Multicultural Relief Fund to support the victims and survivors of this escalating tragedy. Our goal is to provide aid to those who can be neglected and underrepresented in receiving disaster aids from the Japanese government or mainstream NPOs.

Your charitable contribution is tax-deductible.
Nearly a decade ago, Frank P. Quattrone, the star investment banker who took Amazon and Cisco Systems public in the 1990s, returned to the deal scene with a boutique investment bank catering to Silicon Valley.

After re-emerging as a major force in the technology industry, Mr. Quattrone is now yielding day-to-day management to one of his top lieutenants.

His firm, the Qatalyst Group, announced on Wednesday that George Boutros would take over as chief executive, overseeing overall management.

The appointment is the first major leadership change at Qatalyst since Mr. Quattrone, 60, began the firm in March 2008, seven months after clearing his name in a bitter legal fight with the federal government.
Call it the Saudi calculus.

Oil prices were already plummeting 14 months ago when, at Saudi Arabias insistence, OPEC put the global petroleum industry on notice: The member countries would not try to prop up prices by cutting production.

We dont want to panic, Abdalla el-Badri, secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, told reporters at the groups November 2014 meeting in Vienna. We want to see how the market behaves.

Since then, the market has behaved in a way few could have predicted  including Saudi Arabia, the worlds biggest oil exporter. The price of oil has collapsed under the weight of a growing international glut, made worse by slower growth in the global economy.

And yet the Saudis keep pumping oil at virtually full capacity. And they have persuaded their Persian Gulf OPEC allies  Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar  to do the same, despite mounting pressure from other big OPEC members to curtail production.
LONDON  When it was announced last Friday, Googles agreement to pay 130 million pounds in back taxes was welcomed by the countrys chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, as a major success.

Less than a week later, few are saying that of the deal, which has put Prime Minister David Camerons government on the defensive.

Googles $185 million settlement, announced last week, covers a 10-year period beginning in 2005 and was the result of a six-year inquiry by the British tax authorities. The agreement has been questioned by both the opposition Labour Party and by Conservative politicians including Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and Steve Baker, a member of Parliament.

Mr. Baker said the tax accord, while lawful and involving a substantial sum, was still derisory and completely unacceptable to the public.
DUBLIN  The European Central Bank placed an inappropriate debt burden on Irish citizens in 2010 when it refused to force bond investors to share losses from troubled banks, a parliamentary committee report on the countrys banking collapse said on Wednesday.

The report supports the view, widely held in Ireland, that the E.C.B. dictated policy to the government in a way that punished taxpayers while sparing investors who owned bonds issued by Irish banks.

The central bank, which is based in Frankfurt, routinely denies that it meddles in politics or tells eurozone governments what to do. But the report is likely to bolster critics who say that, in its zeal to protect the banking system, the bank has strong-armed political leaders not only in Ireland but also in other countries hit by crisis, like Greece and Cyprus.

The E.C.B. said in a statement on Wednesday that it welcomed the report, which it said provided a valuable contribution to an understanding of the crisis. The central bank said it had been open about its role in Ireland but declined to comment in detail on the report.
LONDON  In one of the first energy mergers in the era of low oil prices, Royal Dutch Shell shareholders on Wednesday approved the acquisition of the BG Group, the Britain-based oil and gas producer, for about $50 billion.

Analysts had expected major oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil to take advantage of low prices to acquire rivals or smaller companies to strengthen their position, but there have been few big moves so far, perhaps because of the steepness of the drop in oil prices, which have fallen since the summer of 2014 to around $30 a barrel from more than $100 a barrel.

Shell said that about 83 percent of the shareholders, who met in The Hague, approved the deal.

I am delighted with the positive shareholder vote and the confidence that shareholders have shown in the strategic logic of the combination of Shell and BG, the Shell chief executive, Ben van Beurden, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Even before Shell and BG announced the deal in April, there had long been rumors of a combination of the two companies. BG is considered a prime target for Shell. Although it is a midsize oil company, BG is a leading player in liquefied natural gas, a fuel that is chilled to liquid form and transported on ships. The combined entity would be the world leader among listed companies in liquefied natural gas.
Nothing unnerves consumers more and drives them away from a restaurant, food or beverage faster than a flurry of headlines about people being sickened by dreaded bacteria like E. coli or listeria.

Just ask Chipotle Mexican Grill, which has been scrambling to recover from a multistate E. coli outbreak that drove the companys stock down more than 40 percent and has resulted in a class-action lawsuit. Or Blue Bell Creameries, which faced several recalls and factory shutdowns and now faces a Department of Justice investigation in connection with listeria contamination of its ice cream.

But often, troubles for one business can mean opportunities for others. And the competitive field of food testing is one. Companies big and small are looking for ways to make food testing faster, more accurate and less expensive. It requires sophisticated scientific and technological skills and is far from the easiest point of entry for a small start-up. But one Philadelphia biotech company led by a pair of entrepreneurs is hoping it has found a niche.

The company, Invisible Sentinel, has developed a patented technology called Veriflow that uses a hand-held device to detect the DNA of micro-organisms like E. coli, salmonella and listeria quickly and at a relatively affordable price. The technology has been approved by AOAC International, an association that sets standards for microbial food testing.
MADRID  The Spanish Supreme Court ordered Bankia on Wednesday to reimburse two small investors for misleading them during its 2011 initial public offering.

Under the ruling Bankia must pay one investor nearly 10,000 euros, or about $10,850, and the other nearly 21,000 euros, to cover their purchases of shares that eventually were nearly worthless.

The ruling could be a boon to thousands of other investors who are suing the bank, accusing it of failing to fully disclose the loan problems that nearly caused the banks collapse in 2012.

The bank said on Wednesday that it was aware of lawsuit claims totaling 819 million euros. Bankia said it had adequate provisions for legal liabilities, having set aside 1.84 billion.
Mr. Hemsworth joins a parade of Australian actors promoting travel to the country. That parade includes Hugh Jackman (ambassador for Qantas airlines) and Naomi Watts (who recently promoted the Australia route for British Airways). And many Americans may still recall the run of Paul Hogan, the star of Crocodile Dundee, as the face of Tourism Australia from 1984 to 1990, during which he popularized the slogan shrimp on the barbie.

But Mr. Hemsworths remarks suggested he had come to bury that campaign, not to praise it.

Asked by Mr. Stone what myth about Australia he would most like to correct (this is when he was sticking to scripted questions written for him by the events organizer), Mr. Hemsworth replied, I can remember first coming to L.A. and many people thinking that we honestly rode kangaroos across Sydney Harbor Bridge.

He added, The hangover from Crocodile Dundee is somewhat dated.

Australia Day is a midsummer holiday, so the tall piles of snow left behind by New Yorks weekend blizzard were a novelty for most of the guests. Its the first time I have experienced this kind of snowstorm, said Ms. Bishop, who is the deputy leader of the Liberal Party and often mentioned as a potential prime minister. It was thrilling and exhilarating.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled 20 all-white acting nominees this month, the furor was immediate. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, created last year, returned in force, and there was talk of an Oscar boycott. Then, last week, the academy declared that it was doubling its diversity push and ending guaranteed lifelong voting rights.

This time, it was academy members turn to react in disbelief and outrage.

The most common cri de coeur: The changes were ageist (a possibility) and insulting to blacks (if theres a black academy member out there who agrees, please do get in touch). Another: Im liberal, so I cant be racist, a tautological cry that largely misses the point. For what its worth, Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith did not utter the dreaded r-word when they announced they were not attending the awards; Ms. Smith wished the academy grace and love.

There is, among older academy members, genuine bewilderment in the wake of this tidal shift. Sidney Furie, an 82-year-old member, noted that it was his brethren who made Sidney Poitier the first black man to win best actor, in 1963, and named In the Heat of the Night (1967) best picture.

The very people who voted for those Oscars are now being accused of being the roadblocks to the diversity the academy now seems committed to, Mr. Furie wrote to the Bagger in an email. Valid, but part of the charge against the academy is how out of touch it is with contemporary black culture.
Harlems African roots are at last coming to light.

Kept apart in life, pushed aside after death, the black residents of Harlem in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s have seemingly emerged from an unlikely spot: beneath a bus depot near the Harlem River where a Negro burying ground was once maintained by the first church in the Dutch settlement of Nieuw Haarlem.

The discovery of 140 bones by archaeologists digging within the decommissioned depot was announced last week by Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker, and the Rev. Patricia A. Singletary, pastor of the Elmendorf Reformed Church on East 121st Street, the successor to the Harlem Reformed Dutch Church of 1660.

Most poignant was a skull found in a trench halfway between the large bus-wash stall and a vehicle inspection station, near the center of the 2.4-acre depot. On examination, Vincent H. Stefan of Lehman College, who specializes in human skeletal biology, concluded that it belonged to an adult woman who was likely of African descent. The pastor has called her Nana, out of respect.
By J.R. Wu

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou will fly to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba in the disputed South China Sea on Thursday, a visit that could upset other claimants to the contested waterway.

The one-day trip was announced by Ma's office and followed months of speculation he would travel to Itu Aba in the Spratly archipelago before he steps down in May.

Ma's office said the president wanted to offer Chinese New Year wishes to residents there, mainly coastguard personnel and environmental scholars.

Taiwan has just finished a $100 million port upgrade and a new lighthouse on Itu Aba, known as Taiping in Taiwan, which also has its own airstrip and fresh water.

The president's visit comes just after national elections in Taiwan that put in power the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its leader Tsai Ing-wen.

Ma's office said it had asked Tsai to send a representative, but the DPP said it had no plans to do so.

Taiwan claims most of the South China Sea based on maps from the late 1940s belonging to the ruling Nationalists, when they ruled all of China.

The Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated in a civil war with China's Communists. Both sides have been ruled separately since then, but Beijing deems Taiwan a wayward province to be retaken by force if necessary.

China's own claims in the South China Sea are based on Nationalist maps, but Taiwan has maintained it does not cooperate with Beijing in the South China Sea.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims in the strategically located waters.

Itu Aba was now the fourth largest island in the Spratlys after China's land reclamation work on Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef and Subi Reef, Taiwan's coastguard said in October.

The last Taiwan president to visit Itu Aba was the DPP's Chen Shui-bian.

(Editing by Dean Yates)
A worker was critically injured at a construction site in Manhattan on Wednesday after he lost his balance on a ladder and fell into an elevator shaft, plummeting four stories and landing on metal bars, the authorities said.

The worker, a 55-year-old man, was preparing to hang drywall on a ceiling at 34 West 17th Street when he fell, shortly after 8 a.m., the police said.

According to the police, the worker was impaled by three metal bars that protruded from the base of the shaft, piercing his torso, a leg and an arm. Cinder blocks also fell on him. The metal bars had to be cut so he could be taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he was listed in critical condition on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities said.

The New York City Buildings Department said on Wednesday that it had initiated an investigation. In a statement, the department said the man was not wearing safety equipment, such as a harness, at the time of the fall.
Mayor Bill de Blasio will fly to Iowa this weekend to campaign for Hillary Clinton, a fellow Democrat and his former boss, in the final days of her close race against Senator Bernie Sanders in the states presidential caucuses.

Mr. de Blasio is not widely known in Iowa, and his monthslong hesitation to endorse Mrs. Clinton last year caused consternation among her supporters.

But the left-leaning New York City mayor may now be a potent surrogate, bolstering Mrs. Clintons bona fides among liberals as she tries to head off Mr. Sanders, who represents Vermont and identifies himself as a Democratic socialist.

The Iowa trip, details of which were still being made final on Wednesday, comes after numerous talks between Mr. de Blasios advisers and members of Mrs. Clintons campaign staff. The message from Mr. de Blasio, according to several people who requested anonymity to describe private discussions, has been clear: How can I help?
ONCE again, Michael R. Bloomberg is eyeing a run for the White House. Once again, hes got the political world buzzing, the pundits pontificating. Once again, the country is waiting for him to decide yea or nay.

Why again? Well, why not? This is Mike Bloomberg we are talking about  a man who has wanted to be president since his college years, when he told friends at Johns Hopkins that he was interested in three jobs: secretary general of the United Nations, head of the World Bank and president of the United States. They never forgot, convinced he was dead serious.

The former mayor of New York, 74 next month, always wanted to be his own boss, never wanted to work for anyone else, and has said so outright, whenever his name was floated for a cabinet job or the equivalent. Even in his first job out of graduate school, at Salomon Brothers, he told his bosses he could do a better job of running their company than they could.

He did well at Salomon, but by the early 1970s he was impatient. The rare Wall Street trader who understood the nexus between investing and computer technology, Mr. Bloomberg preached change. He said that investors wanted data, news and analytics in real time, and pushed for smaller desktop computers to replace the companys monster mainframes, accessible only to underpaid researchers. History would prove him right, but his needling won him no friends and he was demoted to the information-technology department.
To the Editor:

Re Why I Always Wanted to Be a Secretary (Sunday Review, Jan. 17):

Bryn Greenwoods essay about how typing affected her career struck a strong response with me because, in the early 1950s, typing kept me out of a foxhole guarding the border with North Korea, which is where most of my fellow soldiers in the Armys infantry basic training wound up.

Because I could type, I was sent to clerical school and spent the last 18 months of my service at Camp Irwin, Calif., typing separation papers for those leaving the Army. In high school in Kansas I had dozed through or stared out the window during most classes, but I did pay attention in my typing class, an elective I chose because I figured the only thing I would have to memorize was the qwerty keyboard.

After the Army, I used the G.I. bill to attend college, where I majored in journalism (typing again!), and from there to a career at newspapers and other journalistic endeavors (typing again!). Like Ms. Greenwood, I never mastered 120 words a minute, but my peak of 65 proved sufficient to shape my adult life.

JOHN MORTON

Jessup, Md.
The suicide on Jan. 17 of Rohith Vemula, a Ph.D. student at Hyderabad University in India, has unleashed a storm of protest and created a political crisis for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the issue of caste prejudice. In a speech last Friday, Mr. Modi expressed his regret that a mother has lost a son. But with members of his government implicated in the circumstances that apparently led Mr. Vemula to take his life, the prime minister must do better than that.

Mr. Vemula was a Dalit  a member of Indias untouchable caste  and was also active in a student Dalit group on his campus. The university administration suspended Mr. Vemula and four other students, barring them from the meal and residence halls  allegedly under direct pressure from Mr. Modis cabinet.

According to press reports, a member of a student group affiliated with Mr. Modis Bharatiya Janata Party had complained that he had been assaulted by members of the Dalit group. Bandaru Dattatreya, a cabinet minister from the state where the university is located, reportedly took up the complaint and sent a letter to the human resource minister, Smriti Zubin Irani, depicting the campus as a den of casteist, extremist and anti-national politics  after which Ms. Iranis office allegedly demanded that the university punish the students.

Dalit students face pervasive discrimination from higher-caste fellow students, faculty members and administrators. In Mr. Vemulas case  if press reports are true  heavy hands at the highest reaches of Indias government helped push him over the edge of despair by foreclosing his chance at a better future. My birth is my fatal accident, Mr. Vemula wrote in his suicide letter.
Varanasi, India  I met Sandeep Pandey days after he was sacked from his position as a visiting professor at a prestigious technical institute at Banaras Hindu University. We sat in a dreary guesthouse on the university campus. Mr. Pandey had just finished a long train ride. With his wrinkled kurta pajama and rubber slippers, he was every bit the picture of an old-fashioned Indian leftist.

That was why hed been fired. Ideologically, I am at the opposite extreme to the people who are at present in power, he said. These people not only cannot tolerate any dissent; they dont even tolerate disagreement. They want everybody who disagrees with them out of this campus. Mr. Pandey was referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modis Bharatiya Janata Party and  more to the point  the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the B.J.P.s cultural fountainhead.

The R.S.S., a Hindu nationalist organization, was founded in 1925 as a muscular alternative to Mahatma Gandhis freedom movement. Its founder admired Adolf Hitler, and in 1948 the organization was blamed for indirectly inspiring Gandhis assassination. The B.J.P. has not always had an easy relationship with the R.S.S. With its fanciful ideas of Hindu purity and its sweeping range of prejudices, the organization is dangerously out of step with the realities of Indias political landscape. When the B.J.P. wants to win an election, it usually distances itself from the R.S.S.s cultural agenda.

Mr. Modis 2014 election had very little to do with the R.S.S. and everything to do with his personality and promises of development. But the R.S.S. doesnt see it that way. Like a fairy-tale dwarf, the group has sought to extract its due from the man it helped into power. As payment for the debt, the R.S.S. wants control of education. Specifically, it wants to install its men at the helm of universities where they will wreak vengeance on the traditionally left-wing intellectual establishment that has always held them in contempt.
WASHINGTON  An agreement between federal officials and leaders in Ferguson, Mo., released Wednesday seeks to overhaul the citys beleaguered justice system. It calls for ending unlawful arrests, ensuring that the courts are independent of prosecutors and preserving peoples right to film police officers.

The pact between the Department of Justice and the city still requires public scrutiny and approval from the City Council. But it came after months of negotiations stemming from the Justice Departments scathing critique of the citys police and courts in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer in 2014.

The agreement, known as a consent decree, would spare Ferguson a long and expensive court fight. It could also help change the image of the city, which came to symbolize controversial policing. For the Justice Department, where civil rights and policing have become dominant policy issues, the broad settlement offers a road map that it can show cities around the country, a sort of benchmark against which other police departments can measure themselves.

The consent decree demonstrates the citys commitment to refocusing police and municipal court practices on public safety, rather than revenue generation, Vanita Gupta, the departments top civil rights prosecutor, said in a letter to Ferguson.
MIAMI  Black drivers in Florida were stopped and given tickets for not wearing seatbelts nearly twice as often as whites who drove on the states roads in 2014, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union released Wednesday.

In some parts of Florida, the disparity was much greater. Sheriffs deputies in Palm Beach County and Orange County, home to Orlando, were about three times as likely in 2014 to issue tickets to black drivers for not strapping on seatbelts. And in 2011 in Escambia County, in Floridas panhandle, black drivers were four times as likely as whites to be stopped and cited for failure to wear a seatbelt.

Florida has long grappled with accusations of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies, and the A.C.L.U.s report is likely to raise new questions about police procedure and training regarding traffic violations. A number of police departments across the country have been accused of racial bias in carrying out traffic stops, a situation that drew national attention in Ferguson, Mo.

The overticketing of any community in ways that arent justified by regular police behavior raises red flags and can cause serious harms, said Nusrat Choudhury, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.s racial justice program and an author of the report. Communities feel stigmatized not because of what they have done but who they are. And it burdens people with fines that can be hard to pay.
A post on the Facebook page of the Bundy Ranch, which has been providing videos and a stream of updates throughout the nearly monthlong occupation, said: LaVoy has left us, but his sacrifice will never be far from the lips of those who love liberty. You cannot defeat us. Our blood is seed.

Mr. Finicum, with his hat and sunburned skin, was one of the most recognizable faces of the occupation. He gave interviews under a blue tarp, and appeared beside Ammon Bundy during the first news conferences in early January, when the group discussed why the unoccupied federal buildings had been seized. They voiced support for two local ranchers who had been sentenced to prison for burning federal lands, and spoke of their belief that such lands should be returned to local ranchers and local governments.

Mr. Finicum was friends with Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher and father of Ammon and Ryan, who drew national attention for leading a 2014 standoff with the federal government over illegal grazing on public lands. When the Bundy-led crew traveled to Oregon to protest the prison sentences for the two ranchers, Mr. Finicum was with them.
PRINCETON, Ore.  The armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, which flashed into violent confrontation with law enforcement on Tuesday when eight members of the group were arrested and one was killed, appeared to be unraveling on Wednesday night when the jailed leader of the siege advised his followers to go home.

Several hours later, the police announced that they had arrested three more protesters. Over two days, 11 members of the group that has occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have been arrested.

For weeks, the occupation barely felt like a siege at all: The antigovernment militants came and went as they pleased, driving down snow-packed highways to attend community meetings and even going out for dinner. With little sign that law enforcement was about to move beyond surveillance, the occupation of the refuge became more theater than threat.

That changed Tuesday night when the ringleaders, the Bundy brothers, Ammon and Ryan, were among eight arrested, and a leading protester, LaVoy Finicum, 54, was shot dead by the authorities during a traffic stop on a rural road.
By J.R. Wu

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou will fly to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba in the disputed South China Sea on Thursday, a visit that comes amid growing international concern over rising tensions in the contested waterway.

Ma's office said the president, who steps down in May, wanted to offer Chinese New Year wishes to residents on Itu Aba, mainly Taiwanese coastguard personnel and environmental scholars. Ma will spend a few hours on Itu Aba, known as Taiping in Taiwan, his office added.

Itu Aba lies in the Spratly archipelago, where China's rapid construction of seven man-made islands has drawn alarm across parts of Asia and been heavily criticised by Washington.

Taiwan has just finished a $100 million port upgrade and built a new lighthouse on Itu Aba, which has its own airstrip, a hospital and fresh water.

Ma's visit follows elections won by the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ma's office said it had asked DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen to send a representative, but the party said it had no plans to do so.

Both Taiwan and China claim most of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims.

Ian Storey, a South China Sea expert at Singapore's ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, said he expected the Philippines and Vietnam to lodge a strong protest, likely seeing the visit as a violation of their claimed sovereignty over Itu Aba.

"But I do think it is unlikely they would stage a similar visit involving a senior political figure going to one of their own occupied islands ... that would risk inflaming relations with China and neither want to go that far," Storey said.

Asked to comment on Ma's planned visit, the mainland's Taiwan Affairs Office reiterated that China and Taiwan had a common duty to protect Chinese sovereignty in the waterway, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year.

"Safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as safeguarding the overall interests of the Chinese nation is the common responsibility and obligation of compatriots across the straits," spokesman Ma Xiaoguang told reporters in Beijing.

CHINA UNFAZED

The claims of both China and Taiwan are based on maps from the late 1940s belonging to the Nationalists, when they ruled all of China. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated in a civil war with China's Communists.

Beijing deems Taiwan a wayward province to be retaken by force if necessary.

But it has appeared unfazed by Taiwan's upgrading work on Itu Aba. Military strategists say that is because Itu Aba could fall into China's hands should it ever take over Taiwan.

Taiwan for its part has tended not to take sides with China in the South China Sea, despite the historical connection, given the political mistrust between them and because of its need to maintain good ties with the United States.

Dustin Wang, a long-time Taiwanese scholar on the South China Sea and who has visited Itu Aba, said one of Ma's goals was to highlight the island's civilian uses.

"Ma will demonstrate that facilities on the island, like the hospital, provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief," he said.

Itu Aba was now the fourth largest island in the Spratlys after China's land reclamation work on Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef and Subi Reef, Taiwan's coastguard said in October.

The island supports around 180 people, about 150 of them coastguard personnel who have had oversight of the 46-hectare (114-acre) island since 2000.

The last Taiwan president to visit Itu Aba was the DPP's Chen Shui-bian in 2008.

(Additional reporting by Michael Martina in Beijing, Sui-Lee Wee in Singapore and Greg Torode in Hong Kong; Editing by Dean Yates)
But it is likely that Mrs. Clintons campaign, which is especially sensitive to criticism of her connections to Wall Street, will view the ad as negative.

The moment for Mr. Sanders is a significant one. If he was to prevail in Iowa and then go on to win in New Hampshire, where he is favored, he could generate momentum and financial support to present a serious challenge to Mrs. Clinton. A loss in Iowa, however, would probably diminish his standing, and his campaign could quickly lose steam.

In an exclusive interview on board his campaign plane on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders seemed to be wrestling out loud with the conflict between his desire to preserve his reputation for positive campaigning and his eagerness to defeat Mrs. Clinton. He rejected any suggestion that his candidacy was only symbolic.

We want to win, Mr. Sanders said. We think we have a good chance to win. We think Iowa has a historical role to play in making it clear that the American people want to move this country in a very different direction, away from establishment politics and establishment economics. And thats what we hope will happen.

In the interview on the plane, a leather-upholstered Gulfstream jet, during which he snacked on cheese wedges and kiwis, Mr. Sanders repeatedly described his campaign as positive. Nonetheless, he questioned Mrs. Clintons acceptance of more than $600,000 from Goldman Sachs for giving three speeches.

I am surprised that Hillary Clinton does not understand why so many people have strong concerns about her receiving many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars from Goldman Sachs and from many other financial interests, Mr. Sanders said. And I think people dont understand why she doesnt see the concerns that Americans have when you receive millions of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street, the most powerful entity in America. You know, people can draw their own conclusions, but that is just simply a fact.
Good morning from Iowa, where, five days from the caucuses, there are no politics-free zones, especially now that Donald J. Trumps decision to boycott Thursdays Fox News debate is sure to dominate conversations on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump held two rallies Tuesday night, and his rivals for the Republican nomination are already jumping on him for deciding to skip the debate, with Ted Cruz calling him a fragile soul. Mr. Trump will not be in Iowa on Wednesday, but nine other candidates will, including Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, who will visit Davenport. Mike Huckabee and Carly Fiorina will both appear at the Iowa Pork Congress forum in Des Moines.

Waitress Says Sanders Is Really for People

Before the latest stirring of the pot by Mr. Trump, I was grabbing a coffee at Smokey Row on Tuesday when I spotted a flier for a drop-by visit by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the emperors of Ben & Jerrys ice cream, who are hitting the trail for Bernie Sanders. When they arrived, Mr. Cohen held a twinkling handmade Sanders sign.

Suzette Senephansiri, who served me, said she planned to caucus for Mr. Sanders. Hillary, shes done it before, the politics and stuff, she said. She knows what shes doing, but I think Bernie is really for people.
Many Oklahomans have too much income to qualify for Medicaid under state rules, but not enough to qualify for subsidies to help them buy private insurance in the federal marketplace.

Many of the people we see are destitute, Ms. Carmichael said. But they fall into the gap, and there is little we can do to help them.

In Oklahoma, parents with dependent children generally cannot obtain Medicaid if their household income is more than about half of the poverty level  higher than $9,240 for a three-person family. Adults generally cannot get Medicaid at all if they do not have dependent children and they are not elderly, disabled or pregnant.

In states that have expanded eligibility under the health law, Medicaid is available to people with annual incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty level, up to $27,724 for a three-person family and $16,242 for an individual. And states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility have generally had much broader gains in insurance coverage.

Consumers come in, eager to see their coverage options, said Jesus Frias, an insurance counselor at Variety Care. We go through their case, we help them apply, and often we find that they are not eligible for Medicaid or subsidized coverage in the marketplace.

James E. Cooksey, 54, visited the Health Department here last week and left with nine prescriptions for drugs to treat very high blood pressure and diabetes. Mr. Cooksey said his minimal income came from work as a Salvation Army bell-ringer in the holiday season and from odd jobs like mowing lawns. But he does not qualify for Medicaid because he lives alone and has no dependent children.
This is a difficult conversation that we as a city have been engaged in, not just in recent months, but for decades, he said.

In the speech, the mayor defended some of the actions he had taken to tackle the growing problem, referring to criticism that his administration has forced people out of encampments. The Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness and other advocates urged Mr. Murray in a letter last month to stop the sweeps of such encampments without offering alternative shelter.

I do not believe it is humane to allow someone to camp on a freeway on-ramp where they easily could be struck and killed by a car, he said. Or above a freeway where some have fallen to their deaths. Or in encampments where some have been murdered or raped. Instead, we go in and we offer services to get them out.

Informed of the shootings by his staff after the speech, he went to the scene, where he called the shootings a tragedy, saying the Jungle has been unmanageable and out of control for almost two decades.

The mayor last fall declared a state of emergency after the King County medical examiners office reported that 66 homeless people had died through September, including 47 on Seattle streets. The state of emergency freed up $7 million in new, one-time funding for assistance programs.

Maybe I should have issued the state of emergency months earlier, the mayor told reporters after the shooting. Weve tried to do the best that we can given the circumstances we have, but obviously Im going to question, was I good enough at my own job. Its on me in the end.

When asked Wednesday about his emotional response, Mr. Murray said he probably expressed a little too much frustration with about how slow it has been moving on this issue.
HONG KONG  Ticket scalpers can be a headache in China, raising the prices of concerts, train trips and more. But no scalpers are more detested than those selling tickets for hospital visits. A video of a woman in Beijing denouncing the practice circulated widely this week, as many others shared their own experiences.

Most hospitals require patients to take tickets to determine the order in which they are seen for nonemergency treatment. Often the tickets are sold for a fee. The goal is to prevent disorder and cutting in line when many people are seeking medical care.

But the practice lends itself to abuses, particularly when scalpers buy tickets and sell them for much higher prices. The problems are made worse by the large numbers of people from outlying areas who seek treatment in major cities, either because their local hospitals lack services or they do not trust the quality of care.
BEIJING  Chinese officials are urging the government of Afghanistan to restart peace talks with the Taliban after the last round of discussions collapsed, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said.

The statement by China late Tuesday was a sign that its leaders were asserting their commitment to the nascent peace process despite problems after the major countries involved learned last year that a Taliban founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had been dead for two years. That caused a split in the Taliban ranks and raised questions among the participants in the talks.

China is a member of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group, which is promoting the peace process. That process is at such an early stage that the nations are still talking about mechanisms for holding more formal discussions that would, in theory, involve representatives of the Taliban. The group, which also includes Afghanistan, the United States and Pakistan, is expected to meet in February in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

The Afghan and United States governments are hoping that China will exert greater influence in the talks on Pakistan, which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s and is a Chinese ally.
After dinner on Wednesday, the couple strolled hand-in-hand through the neon-lit streets of eastern Changsha, not far from Mao Zedongs hometown. Mr. Sun, who works in Internet marketing, is the more outspoken of the two, though he has never had a reputation as a gay activist.

For eight months starting in October 2014, he ran a teahouse in southern Changsha where he gave weekly talks on sexuality and identity. I wanted to have a little home that was diverse and friendly, and gradually have a world that is diverse and friendly, he said. During the talks, people would sometimes reveal to others for the first time that they were gay.

Mr. Sun told his family he was gay at age 14, when he was asked by a relative at a dinner for his grandmothers 70th birthday whether he had a girlfriend. I like boys, Mr. Sun recalled saying. He said his father kicked him after they got home, and that he punched his father back.

There followed a cold war with his family for seven or eight years, Mr. Sun said. While living with his grandparents, he would bring dates home, and his grandparents would cook them dinner and avoid asking questions.

The thaw did not begin until 2014. That Mothers Day, Mr. Sun and his mother visited an island in Changsha with a famous statue of a young Mao. I explained to my mother that being gay is a basic human right, he said. Its internationally recognized. My mother accepted the fact that Im gay. Since then, my mother has stood by me on this matter.

The next month, Mr. Sun and Mr. Hu messaged in the chat group. They met in person that day and have not been apart since.

Mr. Hu said his mother now approved of his sexuality, and Mr. Sun plans to meet her for the first time over the Lunar New Year holiday next month. (Im nervous  I asked my boyfriend yesterday what gift I should get his mother, and he said, I dont know, either,  Mr. Sun said.)
KABUL, Afghanistan  The Taliban have sabotaged a major power line in the northern province of Baghlan, officials said on Wednesday, cutting a supply of electricity from Uzbekistan to Kabul, the Afghan capital, and exposing a vulnerability in the nations rickety infrastructure at a time when the insurgency has government forces thinly stretched.

Wahidullah Tawhidi, a spokesman for the national power company, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat, said insurgents destroyed one electricity transmission tower and damaged two others late Tuesday in the area of Dand-e-Shahabuddin, near the highway that links Baghlan and Kunduz Provinces. Utility workers reached the area not long afterward, he said, but could not begin repairs until Afghan security forces had dismantled mines left by the insurgents and secured the area. He predicted that service would be restored on Wednesday.

Afghanistan suffers from a chronic power shortage, with less than 40 percent of the population even connected to the grid, according to World Bank data. Three-quarters of the countrys electricity is imported from the neighboring countries of Uzbekistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The long transmission lines leave Kabul vulnerable to outages from sabotage. As a result, backup generators are de rigueur among those who can afford them.
The United States has been concerned for half a decade about when North Korea will succeed in the difficult task of mating a nuclear weapon to an accurate missile  and it has already taken the North more time than American intelligence agencies once estimated.

Almost exactly five years ago this month, Robert M. Gates, then the secretary of defense, on a similar trip to Beijing, warned his Chinese counterparts that he believed the North was within five years of reaching that milestone. To date they have not  it is unclear whether the North Koreans have designed a warhead small enough to fit atop the missile and able to withstand the stresses of atmospheric re-entry  and this week American officials would not say how far they believe the North is from that goal.

In interviews, American officials say Mr. Kerry made the case that the nuclear and missile threat was a direct threat to the U.S., a way of explaining to the Chinese why North Koreas fourth nuclear test cannot be shrugged off as merely symbolic.

Yet the Chinese have been resisting broad new sanctions against Pyongyang, just as they stripped such sanctions out of a United Nations resolution in 2013, after the Norths last nuclear test. Instead, the officials say, Beijing is pressing for targeted sanctions against individuals in the North Korean nuclear complex, which are unlikely to have serious repercussions.

Mr. Kerry adopted the tough tone after nearly five hours of talks with Mr. Wang that were dominated by North Korea and what the United States and China, a treaty ally of the North, should do in the aftermath of the latest nuclear test. Mr. Kerry was referring to the deployment of a missile defense system to South Korea that has been under discussion for some time but that the South, an American ally, has resisted because of Chinas opposition. The system is called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad; China views it as a threat to its own capabilities in the Pacific.
HANOI, Vietnam  The Communist Party of Vietnam has chosen the incumbent general secretary as the countrys top leader for a second five-year term, the official Vietnam News Agency reported Wednesday.

The reappointment of Nguyen Phu Trong, 71, could slow the pace of Vietnams shift to a more open, market-oriented economy, but it is unlikely to alter its strategic balance in relations with China and the United States, analysts said.

Mr. Trong is a leader of the partys old guard, which was trained in Soviet-style economics and has long seen neighboring China, Vietnams top trading partner, as a critical strategic and ideological ally. Notably, Mr. Trong appeared reluctant to criticize China when it deployed an oil rig in disputed waters in 2014.

But his visit to the White House last July underlined a growing view among party elites that developing better relations with the United States is in Vietnams national interest, and an essential counterweight to Chinas influence in the region. Mr. Trong steered Vietnam into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an American-led trade agreement among a dozen Pacific Rim nations that excludes China.
By Seyhmus Cakan

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Security forces killed 20 Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey while three Turkish soldiers died in a rebel attack, the military said on Wednesday, as authorities widened a curfew in the mainly Kurdish region's largest city, Diyarbakir.

Hundreds of locals, including children and the elderly, fled curfew-bound areas of Diyarbakir's Sur district as gunfire and blasts resounded and police helicopters flew overhead, a Reuters witness said. Some people cried as they carried away possessions.

Southeastern Turkey has endured its worst violence in two decades since a 2-1/2-year-old ceasefire between the state and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants collapsed in July, reviving a conflict that has killed 40,000 people since 1984.

The army said 11 PKK members died in the town of Cizre, near the Syrian border, and nine more in Sur on Tuesday, bringing the militant death toll in the two towns to some 600 since security operations began there last month.

It said three soldiers were killed in a militant attack in Sur, where security sources said militants opened fire with rifles and a rocket launcher.

The ancient Sur district, enclosed by Roman city walls, has suffered extensive damage in the fighting and much of it has been under a round-the-clock curfew since Dec. 2.

The district governor's office said the curfew was extended to five more districts so security forces could remove explosive devices and barricades and fill in ditches set up by militants.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union all classify the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The PKK says it is fighting for autonomy for Turkey's Kurdish minority.

"URGENT SITUATION"

Rights groups and locals have voiced growing concern about the civilian death toll in the security operations since last month. The pro-Kurdish HDP party puts the toll at nearly 120.

Rights groups and the HDP have highlighted the plight of some 28 people sheltering in a Cizre cellar, where four have died and three are in a critical condition, according to information obtained by Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch.

"Medical attention is not being provided to those in need. This is an urgent situation that the Turkish government needs to address imminently to prevent loss of life," she told a news conference in Istanbul.

Rights groups, and a doctors' association have called for ambulances to be allowed to rescue the wounded. The HDP said three of its parliamentarians had gone on hunger strike and were staging a sit-in at the offices of the Interior Ministry to force authorities to send ambulances.

The local governor's office said emergency services were unable to enter the area because of the PKK.

"Our ambulances have been sent to the closest (safe) location and have asked for all the wounded, if any, to be brought to this location. But despite all our efforts, our call has been ignored," the Sirnak province governor's office said.

(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley and Humeyra Pamuk in Istanbul and Gulsen Solaker in Ankara; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by David Dolan and Gareth Jones)
WHITTLESEY, England  No one knows why a catastrophic fire tore through the small settlement that rose by a river channel, incinerating the homes of several families and sending burning timbers crashing into the marsh below. It might have been an accident, an attack by enemies or even some sort of ritual.

Yet answers are emerging, piece by piece, some 3,000 years later.

The Must Farm archaeological site here in Cambridgeshire is considered so rich that it has been compared to Pompeii, the Roman town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

Must Farm does not look like a picturesque ruin, much less a farm. It occupies raw, muddy terrain with wind turbines and smokestacks towering in the distance. And the bright yellow vests worn by the people involved in the excavation make it look like a construction site.

But its treasures beckon. From the soggy earth, a charred wooden bowl and a ceramic vessel protruded last week, close to the backbone of a cow, presumably butchered for meat. A few feet away, the unmistakable shape of a human skull jutted from the murky sediment in which it had been encased since the Bronze Age.
LONDON  European governments have allowed widespread fears about migration and terrorism to erode their commitment to civil rights and liberal ideals, according to a new report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

Blatant Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees have become the currency of an increasingly assertive politics of intolerance, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in an essay in the groups annual World Report, the 26th it has published.

The report, released in Istanbul, praised Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for demonstrating remarkable leadership in the face of one of the largest refugee crises in history  the exodus of four million Syrians from a civil war that began in 2011  but it criticized European countries for erecting razor-wire fences, restricting movements across borders and trying to deflect the problem by pledging 3 billion euros, or about $3.25 billion, to Turkey to help stem the flow of refugees.

To a large extent, Europes preoccupation with the new refugees as a possible terrorist threat is a dangerous distraction from its own homegrown violent extremism, given that the Paris attackers were predominantly Belgian or French citizens, the report said, referring to the Nov. 13 assaults orchestrated by the Islamic State, which killed 130 people.
PARIS  The French justice minister, one of the most outspoken and progressive voices in the government, resigned on Wednesday after a clash over a proposal to strip the citizenship of French-born dual nationals convicted of terrorism.

President Francois Hollandes office said in a statement that he had accepted the resignation of the minister, Christiane Taubira, a native of French Guiana. She had held the position since Mr. Hollandes election in 2012 and had disagreed with his government on several issues.

The statement said that Mr. Hollande had expressed gratitude for Ms. Taubiras service and that she had reformed the justice system with conviction, determination and talent.

At a news conference at the Justice Ministry, she said, I am leaving the government over a major political disagreement.
PARIS  The French Culture Ministry ruled Wednesday that a new documentary film on Islamic radicals was unsuitable for minors, saying that it offered images of violence that were sometimes unbearable and interviews with members of Al Qaeda and other extremist figures that provided a platform for propaganda.

The documentary, Salafistes, will also be accompanied by a warning about its contents. It shows one leader of the Salafists, who practice a fundamentalist form of Islam, supporting the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and another leader justifying the amputation of hands as a punishment under Shariah, the legal code of Islam. They also speak freely about their opinions on the inferiority of women.

The decision to restrict a movie to those 18 and over is usually reserved for films with pornographic content or extremely violent scenes, and is very rare for documentaries in France, which has been grappling with how to balance freedom of speech and expression with national security after a series of deadly attacks last year. This month, the distributors of Made in France, a film about fictional homegrown jihadists, decided to cancel its release in theaters, citing security concerns.

The documentary starts with a tour of Timbuktu, Mali, under the occupation of jihadists in 2012 and ends with propaganda images of the Islamic State last year. The images inspired the movie Timbuktu, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
BERLIN  The German cabinet endorsed measures on Wednesday that would make it easier to deport many noncitizens convicted of crimes, responding to outrage over the sexual assault of hundreds of women by foreigners on New Years Eve and growing skepticism about the governments ability to accommodate more than one million asylum seekers.

The legislation would lower the bar for denying criminals the right to stay in Germany, allowing the authorities to require anyone to leave the country if convicted of homicide, bodily harm, sexual assault, violent theft or serial shoplifting, even if given only a suspended sentence.

The measures require approval in Parliament, but Chancellor Angela Merkels coalition holds a majority there and they are expected to pass easily.

Ms. Merkels refusal to limit the number of migrants entering the country has damaged her popularity and caused a rift in her governing coalition.
ROME  A decision to cover up nude statues from Roman antiquity during a visit by President Hassan Rouhani of Iran has drawn ridicule and scorn in Italy  much of it directed at the Italian government  and spurred a debate about the national identity.

The statues, in a corridor leading to a grand hall in Romes renowned Capitoline Museums, were encased in tall white boxes ahead of a news conference that Mr. Rouhani held on Monday with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy. One of the statues was the Capitoline Venus, a Roman copy of a legendary fourth century B.C. work by Praxiteles; some of the other sculptures were of ancient Greek and Roman gods, dressed minimally, if at all.

As Iran re-engages with the world after reaching an accord last summer to curb its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, the awkward episode seemed like a prime example of culture clash: an austere Islamic government that promotes chastity and piety meets a nominally Roman Catholic but largely secular culture that has a reputation for embracing lifes pleasures.

But it also left Italians asking a basic question: Who ordered the cover-up?

Some media reports suggested the Iranian delegation had asked Italian officials to hide the statues to avoid Mr. Rouhani any potential embarrassment. Other reports fingered nervous (and perhaps overzealous) Italian bureaucrats. One newspaper even reported that in the grand hall at the Capitoline where the two leaders spoke, the lectern was placed to the side  not the front  of an equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, apparently to avoid having images of the horses genitals appear in news photographs.
Handwritten in blue ink on lined paper, the 1962 letter from Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the lethal logistics of the Holocaust, to the president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, repeats part of Eichmanns defense from his four-month trial: He was a lower-level official following orders, and he should not be held accountable for the crimes of his superiors. The letter was written in German on the day that Eichmanns appeal was denied by Israels Supreme Court. Here is an English translation:

To Mister President!

I join the appeal of my defense lawyer and allow myself to point out the following:

The judges made a fundamental mistake in their judgment of me, because they are not able to empathize with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years. The mistake was caused by the fact that at the time of my trial, only individual documents were presented, which, without being seen in connection with the general documents of the orders, gave an incorrect picture.
JERUSALEM  After he was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for his role in the annihilation of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, Adolf Eichmann pleaded for his own life.

There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders, pleaded Eichmann  the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the lethal logistics of the Holocaust  in a letter dated May 29, 1962, the day that Israels Supreme Court rejected his appeal.

Eichmann asked the Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for a pardon, arguing, I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.
WASHINGTON  In a German prison camp 71 years ago, Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds stared down the barrel of his Nazi captors pistol and refused to say which of his fellow prisoners of war were Jewish.

We are all Jews here, said Sergeant Edmonds, the highest-ranking American noncommissioned officer at Ziegenhain stalag that day, instead ordering more than 1,000 of his fellow prisoners to stand together in front of their barracks. The Geneva Convention required prisoners to provide only their name, rank and serial number, not their religion, Sergeant Edmonds said, warning the German that if he shot them all, he would be tried for war crimes.

That act of defiance in January 1945 spared the lives of as many as 200 Jews, and, on Wednesday, President Obama echoed Sergeant Edmondss words of solidarity with the Jews as he recognized him posthumously as the first American service member to be named Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

The event was the first time a sitting American president has spoken at the Israeli Embassy, and it was all the more notable because it came only months after Mr. Obama clashed openly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over the Iran nuclear deal. On Wednesday, there was little sign of the rift.
By Gulsen Solaker and Ece Toksabay

ANKARA (Reuters) - A Turkish prosecutor is seeking life sentences without parole for two prominent journalists on charges of assisting terrorists, according to a court document seen by Reuters, after they published video footage purporting to show the state intelligence agency helping to send weapons to Syria.

Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of the secular Cumhuriyet newspaper, and senior editor Erdem Gul were arrested in November in a case that has drawn international condemnation and revived concern about press freedom under President Tayyip Erdogan.

The two are charged with intentionally aiding an armed terrorist organisation and the publication of material in violation of state security.

Cumhuriyet published photos, videos and a report in May which it said showed intelligence officials transporting arms to Syria in trucks - allegedly to opposition fighters - in 2014.

Turkey's involvement in Syria is particularly sensitive as the NATO member is under pressure to step up the fight against Islamic State militants.

Erdogan, who has cast the newspaper's coverage as part of an attempt to undermine Turkey's global standing, has said he would not forgive such reporting.

He has acknowledged that the trucks, which were stopped by gendarmerie and police officers en route to the Syrian border, belonged to the MIT intelligence agency and they were carrying aid to Turkmens in Syria. Turkmen fighters are battling both President Bashar al-Assad's forces and Islamic State.

However, Erdogan has said prosecutors had no authority to order the trucks be searched, and that they acted as part of a plot to discredit the government ? allegations that the prosecutors denied.

A prosecutor is seeking two life sentences plus 30 years for each man, according to the 473-page document submitted to an Istanbul court on Wednesday and seen by Reuters. The sentences include one of "aggravated" life, which means no chance of parole and solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. It also limits family visits.

The court has yet to decide whether to accept the indictment, according to lawyers familiar with the case. Erdogan and the state security agency are listed as the two plaintiffs in the indictment. The court declined to comment.

Government officials have said the case is matter purely for the judiciary, not a political issue.

Dundar and Gul say the case has no legal basis. They told Reuters in a faxed message from prison last week that their arrest was instead designed to send a warning to journalists.

The government denies there is a political agenda behind the investigation, saying there was an "open breach of law".

Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch expressed dismay, saying: "We are absolutely clear that Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, in publishing stories on the subject were doing their jobs as journalists and no more than that."

European Union Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said on Twitter he was "shocked by life sentences" demanded for Dundar and Gul and that Turkey, negotiating for EU membership, must respect freedom of expression.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on a visit to Istanbul last week that Turkey was setting a poor example for the region in intimidating media. He met Dundar's wife and son during his trip, according to Turkish media reports.

Following Biden's comments, Erdogan said terrorist propaganda was not freedom of expression.

(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul; Editing by David Dolan, Nick Tattersall and David Stamp)
In the second season of Transparent, a quick scene gave me one of the most ecstatic highs Ive had watching almost anything recently.

Transparent is Jill Soloways comedy on Amazon, which is loosely  and too narrowly  described as the awakening of Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a 70-year-old transgender woman in Los Angeles. And it spoils nothing to say that at the end of this eighth episode, Maura has guilted her two bisexual but radically different adult daughters, Sarah (Amy Landecker) and Ali (Gaby Hoffman), into bringing her along to a womens  excuse me, womyns  music festival.

Before you even see them in Sarahs speeding minivan, you can hear guitars strumming on the soundtrack. And if you recognize the song, you have to laugh at the sheer of-courseness of the choice: Closer to Fine, the Indigo Girls 1989 coffeehouse spiritual. Its so obvious in its earnestness, the musicians so perfect in their brand of feminist existentialism, that playing it is not just on the nose  its on the entire face. This is practically the womyns festival theme song.

Youre supposed to laugh, and I did. Ali and Sarah scream the lyrics  Theres more than one answer to these questions/Pointing me in a crooked line/And the less I seek my source for some definitive/Closer I am to fine  while Maura, from the back seat, clutches a bag of Popchips, her long body stretched so that her big, bare feet are riding shotgun, and tries to mumble along.
Somewhere in Woodhaven, Queens, there is a man with a wife named Zaida. Margie Schmidt of Schmidts Candy on Jamaica Avenue may not remember his name, but she knows what Zaida wants for Valentines Day. Butter crunch, graham, milk-chocolate-covered pretzels, pretzel nuggets, according to a list taped to a wall in the stores back room.

Ms. Schmidt always keeps customer notes, either on scrap paper or mentally. So when their husbands come in, she said, they know what to get them.

In mid-January, with a few candy canes and chocolate Christmas trees still lingering on the shelves, preparation was in full swing for Feb. 14, the next holiday on the sweets calendar that has kept Schmidts buzzing since 1925, when Frank Schmidt, Ms. Schmidts grandfather, opened the shop in the shadow of the elevated BMT line. Ms. Schmidt took over the business in 1986, when she was 27.

On a recent Saturday, Ms. Schmidt, now 56, dipped pillowy nubs of lemon-cream candy into warm milk chocolate while her friend and occasional helper, Susan Tirino, arranged assorted delights in heart-shaped boxes. Another package completed, Ms. Tirino, 52, wrapped it in red ribbon curled by the swift pass of a scissor blade. This is for the guys who just say, Give me that one, she said. They dont care whats in it.
The project had its origins in Barcelona in 2006, where Mr. Falls saw posters for the Spanish paperback featuring an image of pink crosses in the desert and the ominously mysterious title. (Its significance is never explained). A Spanish friend told him the story of Mr. Bolano, who was an obscure avant-garde poet before turning to fiction late in life and shooting to international stardom with The Savage Detectives and then near-sanctification with 2666, which he had rushed to finish before his death from liver failure in 2003, at 50.

When the English translation of 2666 came out in 2008, Mr. Falls devoured it and was soon carrying it everywhere, highlighting and crossing out pages, he recalled.

He did an informal reading of a partial script in 2009 with the cast of his production of King Lear, then at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He later brought on Mr. Bockley  a 34-year-old writer and director whose eclectic resume includes adaptations of two George Saunders short stories, the book for the musical February House, and spectacles for the Chicago site-specific company Redmoon.

Sharing directing duties was the big, unusual leap for me, Mr. Falls said. But I admired Seths work, and he was much more experienced with the use of narrative voices  much of 2666 is addressed directly to the audience  which is something Id never really done.

There was a staged reading at the Goodman in 2012. But the play still seemed potentially unproducible until lightning struck last year in the form of Roy Cockrum, a former actor and onetime Episcopal monk who started an arts foundation with part of his $153 million Powerball winnings, and chose 2666 as its first grant recipient.

Its like a Bolano story: an actor turned monk turned Powerball winner, Mr. Bockley said. (Another Cockrum-backed project, Charles Mees The Glory of the World, about the mystic Thomas Merton, is running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Feb. 6.)
I woke to the gentle prodding of a flight attendant asking me to raise my window shade for the landing in Windhoek. I complied, and was immediately assailed: a bolt of white fury forced my eyelids to contract in submission, never to open again. Or, at least, not until it was time to deplane.

A road trip across Namibia is an education in its own right, filled with trials, pop quizzes and even the occasional all-nighter spent stargazing. Thanks to my brief foray into sightlessness, my schooling had begun before I even touched down.

Lesson 1. The Namibian sun is every bit as potent as youve heard.

At midday, the formidable orb that lights the Namibian sky blazes so fiercely that the landscape resembles an overexposed photograph. Slipping on a pair of sunglasses has the effect of adding an Instagram filter, retouching the panorama with definition, warmth and saturation.

Namibia has been called the Land God Made in Anger  or, less poetically, the Gates of Hell  but I wonder if the Land God Forgot About might be more accurate. On a road trip through more than 1,500 miles of its stark terrain, it seemed as though Namibias blueprint had been carefully conceived but abandoned midthought: dried-out riverbeds left thirsting for water; rolling savannas devoid of vegetation; towering mounds of sandy dunes shifting aimlessly for millenniums, waiting to be sculpted into something permanent. And plenty of space, but few humans to fill it. Namibia is more than twice the size of Germany, but with just over two million people, its one of the least densely populated countries on the planet. Its austere, charred, forsaken  and that ferocious sun certainly doesnt help its case. God blessed Namibia with plenty of light, but didnt bother bestowing many places to find respite from it.
Ancestry and Long-Run Growth Reading Club: Putterman and Weil By: Bryan Caplan

Welcome to the first installment of the EconLog Reading Club on Ancestry and Long-Run Growth. This weeks paper: Putterman, Louis, and David Weil. 2010. Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long-Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality. Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(4): 1627-1682. The authors data is here.

Summary

Putterman and Weil start by noting that  at least by some measures  economic success is persistent over the centuries. Countries that were advanced in the distant past tend to be richer today. But should we think of countries as locations or peoples? Economists routinely do the former, but maybe they shouldnt.

[T]he further back into the past one looks, the more the economic history of a given place tends to diverge from the economic history of the people who currently live there. For example, the territory that is now the United States was inhabited in 1500 largely by hunting, fishing, and horticultural communities with pre-iron technology, organized into relatively small, pre-state political units. In contrast, a large fraction of the current U.S. population is descended from people who in 1500 lived in settled agricultural societies with advanced metallurgy, organized into large states. The example of the United States also makes it clear that, because of migration, the long-historical background of the people living in a given country can be quite heterogeneous.

To surmount this problem, P&W laboriously construct a country-by-country matrix of ancestry:

We construct a matrix detailing the year-1500 origins of the current population of almost every country in the world. In addition to the quantity and timing of migration, the matrix also reflects differential population growth rates among native and immigrant population groups. The matrix can be used as a tool to adjust historical data to reflect the status in the year 1500 of the ancestors of a countrys current population. That is, we can convert any measure applicable to countries into a measure applicable to the ancestors of the people who now live in each country.

How could one even begin to construct such a matrix? Whenever possible, P&W use actual genetic data, then supplements genetics with history. What does their matrix look like?

The matrix has 165 rows, each for a present-day country, and 172 columns (the same 165 countries plus seven other source countries with current populations of less than one half million). Its entries are the proportion of long-term residents ancestors estimated to have lived in each source country in 1500. Each row sums to one. To give an example, the row for Malaysia has five nonzero entries, corresponding to the five source countries for the current Malaysian population: Malaysia (0.60), China (0.26), India (0.075), Indonesia (0.04) and the Philippines (0.025).

The resulting matrix exposes two basic facts.

1. Long-distance migration is rare. Most modern countries are almost entirely populated by the descendants of earlier inhabitants of the region.

2. Long-distance migration is bimodal. When countries arent almost entirely populated by the descendants of earlier inhabitants of the region, those earlier inhabitants usually have almost no descendants left in the country.

Check out the Distribution of Countries by Proportion of Ancestors from Own or Immediate Neighboring Country:

Heres the Distribution of World Population by Proportion of Ancestors from Own or Immediate Neighboring Country:

places traits, they look at the long-run effect of tribes traits. They focus on two measures: state history and years of agriculture. State history measures how long a country had a supratribal government, the geographic scope of that government, and whether that government was indigenous or by an outside power. Following previous work, they massage this measure: The version used by us, as in Chanda and Putterman (2005, 2007), considers state history for the fifteen centuries to 1500, and discounts the past, reducing the weight on each half century before 1451-1500 by an additional 5%. Years of agriculture, in contrast, is not massaged. Its simply the the number of millennia since a country transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture. P&W now revisit earlier research on long-run growth, using their matrix to transform the key variables. Instead of looking at the long-run effects oftraits, they look at the long-run effect oftraits. They focus on two measures: state history and years of agriculture. State history measures how long a country had a supratribal government, the geographic scope of that government, and whether that government was indigenous or by an outside power. Following previous work, they massage this measure: The version used by us, as in Chanda and Putterman (2005, 2007), considers state history for the fifteen centuries to 1500, and discounts the past, reducing the weight on each half century before 1451-1500 by an additional 5%. Years of agriculture, in contrast, is not massaged. Its simply the the number of millennia since a country transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Since migration history is bimodal, adjusting these measures for migration has a bimodal effect. Most countries are near the 45-degree line, but a few radically diverge. Heres state history by location versus people: Heres agricultural history by location versus people:

much more predictive of modern GDP than raw measures. Not surprisingly, given previous work, the tests suggest significant predictive power for the unadjusted variables. However, for both measures of early development, adjusting for migration produces a very large increase in explanatory power. In the case of statehist, R2 goes from .06 to .22, whereas in the case of agyears it goes from .08 to .24. The coefficients on the measures of early development are also much larger using the adjusted than the unadjusted values. Regression tables: Now for the punchline: Migration-adjusted measures aremore predictive of modern GDP than raw measures. Not surprisingly, given previous work, the tests suggest significant predictive power for the unadjusted variables. However, for both measures of early development, adjusting for migration produces a very large increase in explanatory power. In the case of statehist, R2 goes from .06 to .22, whereas in the case of agyears it goes from .08 to .24. The coefficients on the measures of early development are also much larger using the adjusted than the unadjusted values. Regression tables:

P&W try an array of robustness tests. The most notable challenge they address, however, is What about geography? Earlier researchers have found strong effects of latitude and being landlocked. Correcting for these factors, the effects of migration-adjusted history crash, but remain absolutely large. After further checks, P&W switch gears to analyze how ancestry matters for current inequality. Punchline: [T]he heterogeneity of a countrys population in terms of the early development of its ancestors as of 1500 is strongly correlated with income inequality. We also show that heterogeneity with respect to country of ancestry or with respect to the ancestral language does a better job than does current linguistic or ethnic heterogeneity in predicting income inequalities today.
A Little Art Talk at Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University is held at noon on Wednesdays through March 9. This spring, presenters are artists from the 2016 Auburn University Department of Art and Art History Studio Faculty Exhibition, featuring professors and instructors from Auburns College of Liberal Arts. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, March 20.

On Wednesday, Jan. 27, Wendy DesChene will discuss her work in the exhibition, on view in the Bill L. Harbert Gallery and Gallery C of the museum. DesChene is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History working in installation, 2D, digital media and environmental practice. She received her master of fine arts from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her bachelor of fine arts from Concordia University in Montreal Quebec. Her recent exhibitions include the solo exhibition, Arrrt at Ritsukeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Japan and The Institutionalists at The Drawing Center in New York, New York.

A Little Art Talk attendees will receive a free coffee or tea when they dine in the Museum Cafe. The Museum Cafe is open for lunch Tuesday through Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free courtesy of JCSM Business Partners. To learn more about this program and other activities and exhibitions at the museum, visit the museums website, jcsm.auburn.edu, or call 334-844-1484.
The two district attorney candidates in Lee County's only contested Republican primary race answered community questions in a debate Tuesday night, hosted by the Lee County Republican Club little more than a month before Super Tuesday. Both candidates showcased years of experience and a heartfelt passion for being a prosecutor.

Incumbent District Attorney Robbie Treese was elected to the position in 2010 and has been with the DA's office 16 years. He estimates his office has tried "thousands and thousands and thousands" of cases in that time.

"My first job in Lee County was domestic violence coordinator for the Legal Services Division. I may be the only DA in the state to have come from such humble beginnings," Treese said. "I wanted to do the right thing for the right reasons. Not for the politics, not for the joy, not for the accolades."

Challenger Brandon Hughes worked for the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office from 2002 to 2006 before joining the Alabama District Attorneys Association to help prosecutors across the state. He has lived in Lee County since 2007.

"I was told a long time ago that your ideal job is where your passion and your talents intersect," Hughes said. "For me, that's a prosecutor."

Throughout the debate, Treese called himself and his team of prosecutors combat lawyers and touted his team as the best in the state.

"This is a job a lot of folks like to think they can do, but not many actually can," Treese said.

But Hughes criticized the pay scale of Treese's office, alleging his chief deputy makes $110,000. If elected, Hughes said, he would cut that salary by $50,000 to help bolster the office's funds.

"As far as Lee County is concerned, we have the top prosecutors in the state. I will pay them whatever I can pay them," Treese contended. "Every one of my folks that I recruited, trained, hired, they are worth every penny. I guarantee it."

Hughes argued the county should put more into programs such as a pre-trial diversion program in Montgomery County that he said saw a recidivism rate of 5 percent.

"It was about a yearlong program, and that's what we're bringing to Lee County," Hughes said, adding those in the program pay restitution and do community service. "The resources are there, there's no reason we can't be doing this stuff."

Hughes further alleged that though Treese told the crowd he engages in "courtroom combat," he has "been in a foxhole since he took over the DA's Office in 2011."

"Lee County needs a district attorney who is willing to work and serve its citizens."

Treese fired back all his experience as a prosecutor has been in Lee County.

"I don't claim any experience in Montgomery County," Treese said. "I don't want any experience in Montgomery County.

"To be accused of not trying cases, when I've tried more than anybody in this jurisdiction, is just hurtful," he continued. "We've had a great impact on the cases that we handle. I care about the victims mightily."

Hughes countered he valued both his experience as a Montgomery County prosecutor and as a Lee County resident.

"He's tried a lot of cases; I've tried a lot of cases. That doesn't make any of us special. That just makes us prosecutors," Hughes said.

"I take it very much as a point of pride. I've tried cases all over this state, and I think that's a big deal. So yeah, I take pride in my experience. I love Lee County. I chose to live here."

The Lee County District Attorney's race will be on the ballot in the March 1 primary election.
Gratitude: Food and mood combine like never before at this upscale version of Cafe Gratitude, a Los Angeles and Bay Area concept known for its vegan cuisine and soul-defining hospitality. Attitude is critical at this restaurant, where the menu is 100 percent plant based and organic. Each restaurant prides itself on providing diners a healthy dose of love by attaching an uplifting expression to every meal. For example, when you order the Awesome eggplant Parmesan panini, diners are encouraged to say: I am Awesome. Want the grilled polenta? Simply utter, I am Warm Hearted. It might sound hokey, but operators hope diners will leave their worries at the door. Whatever space you are in, the hope is you can check out for an hour, and be in a different space, Chris Bonbright, managing partner, told the Register last year. Gratitude is scheduled to open the week of Feb. 8 at 1617 Westcliff Drive, Newport Beach.
RIO DE JANEIRO  Brazils health minister says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects  but he also says the war is already being lost.

Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazils armed forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the countrys Carnival celebrations. Agency spokesman Nivaldo Coelho said Tuesday details of the deployment are still being worked out.

Castro also said the government would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

But the minister also said the country has failed in efforts against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations, public health experts have said. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as the virus symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didnt become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.

The World Health Organization repeated Tuesday that the link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.

But worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks. One of them, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, reported 18 new confirmed cases of Zika on Tuesday, though none involve pregnant women. One case had been reported earlier.

Health officials in Virginia and Arkansas have reported cases of Zika in their states. In both instances, the patient had recently traveled out of the country.
Federal and state law officers arrested the leaders of an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge, during a traffic stop along a highway in Oregons frozen high country that prompted gunfire and left one man dead.

Militant leader Ammon Bundy and his followers were reportedly heading to a community meeting at the senior center Tuesday in John Day, about 70 miles north of Burns, to address local residents to discuss their views on federal management of public lands.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said agents had made a total of eight arrests  including Ammon Bundy.

Oregon State Police confirmed that its troopers were involved in the traffic-stop shooting. One of those arrested, described only as a man, suffered non-life-threatening wounds, the agencies said. Another man who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest was killed, they said. The agencies said they would not release further information pending identification by the medical examiner.

The Oregonian reported ( http://bit.ly/1nOammV ) that Arizona rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum was the person killed, citing the mans daughter. The 55-year-old was a frequent and public presence at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, often speaking for the group at news conferences.

Arianna Finicum Brown confirmed her fathers death to the paper, saying he would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.

It was unclear how many people remained in the buildings at the refuge. Late Tuesday night there was no obvious police presence there and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution.

Early Wednesday, the FBI and Oregon State Police established a series of checkpoints along key routes into and out refuge. The agencies said in a statement that the containment was to better ensure the safety of community members. According to the statement, only Harney County ranchers who own property in specific areas will be required to show identification and be allowed to pass.

Brand Thornton, one of Bundys supporters, said he left the refuge Monday and wasnt sure what those remaining would do.

The entire leadership is gone, he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. I wouldnt blame any of them for leaving.

Thornton called the arrests a dirty trick by law enforcement.

In addition to Ammon Bundy, those arrested were: his brother Ryan Bundy, 43; Brian Cavalier, 44; Shawna Cox, 59; and Ryan Payne, 32  apprehended during the traffic stop on U.S. Highway 395 Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said two others  Joseph Donald OShaughnessy, 45, and Peter Santilli, 50  were arrested separately in Burns, while FBI agents in Arizona arrested another, Jon Eric Ritzheimer, 32.

Each will face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said. Authorities released few other details. A new conference with the FBI, local sheriff and other was scheduled for late Wednesday morning.

Ammon Bundys group, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the West.

The confrontation came amid increasing calls for law enforcement to take action against Bundy for the illegal occupation of the wildlife refuge. They previously had taken a hands-off approach, reflecting lessons learned during bloody standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during the 1990s.

Many residents of Harney County, where the refuge is located, have been among those demanding that Bundy leave. Many sympathize with his criticism of federal land management policies of public lands but opposed the refuge takeover. They feared violence could erupt.

I am pleased that the FBI has listened to the concerns of the local community and responded to the illegal activity occurring in Harney County by outside extremists, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.  I hope that the remaining individuals occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will peacefully surrender.

The Bundys are the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.

The state police said it would investigate the officer-involved shooting.

The militants, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, came to the frozen high desert of eastern Oregon to decry what it calls onerous federal land restrictions and to object to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.

Specifically, the group wanted federal lands turned over to local authorities. The U.S. government controls about half of all land in the West. Conflicts over Western land use stretch back decades.

In the 1970s, Nevada and other states pushed for local control in what was known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. Supporters wanted more land for cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting.
DES MOINES, Iowa  Republican leaders are growing alarmed by the ferocious ways the partys mainstream candidates for president are attacking one another, and they fear that time is running out for any of them to emerge as a credible alternative to Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Leaders of the Republican establishment, made up of elected officials, lobbyists and donors, are also sending a message to the mainstream candidates, such as former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, that they should withdraw from the race if they do not show strength soon.

The members of the party establishment are growing impatient as they watch Trump and Cruz dominate the field heading into the Iowa caucuses next Monday and the New Hampshire primary about a week later.

The party elders had hoped that one of their preferred candidates, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, would be rising above the others by now and becoming a contender to rally around.

Instead, they have a muddled field of battered mainstream candidates: Bush, Rubio, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

Theres a mounting sense of urgency among donors that the weak performers need to go ahead and get out, said Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC.

The establishment candidates and their allies have spent approximately $35 million attacking one another, and there is no sign that they plan to relent anytime soon. A super PAC supporting Bush is targeting Rubio on the air in Iowa and New Hampshire for reversing himself on an immigration overhaul. And late last week, the same group began broadcasting a commercial in New Hampshire assailing Kasich for expanding health care in Ohio under the Affordable Care Act.

A super PAC supporting Kasich quickly swiped back at Bush, mocking him for a campaign that sunk like a rock. At the same time, a super PAC backing Rubio continues to blast Christie, reminding Republicans of the scandal involving the governors aides over the shutdown of the George Washington Bridge, and of his embrace of President Barack Obama in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey.

That prompted Christie to lash out at Rubio on Sunday during a town-hall-style meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The governor ridiculed Rubio at length for his incomplete attendance record in the Senate and noted that some of the ads aired on Rubios behalf were funded by a group that did not have to disclose its donors.

The cumulative effect of all the ads, and corresponding attacks through harshly worded mailings, has been to stunt the growth of the so-called establishment candidates, keeping them clustered together in New Hampshire polls while Trump soars.

These guys are so busy fighting one another that theyre only continuing to facilitate the rise of Trump and Cruz, complained Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., a longtime Republican strategist.

After the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, and the New Hampshire primary eight days later, the pressure on those candidates who are lagging in the polls will intensify.

Whoever is not named Trump and not named Cruz that looks strong out of both Iowa and New Hampshire, we should consolidate around, said Henry Barbour, an influential Republican strategist based in Mississippi.

But it is not clear that the Iowa and New Hampshire results will come so neatly, or that the also-rans will be so willing to drop out after two states. Bush, in particular, still has the support of a well-funded super PAC. And even if he were to trail Rubio after the first contests, Bush might still fight on to South Carolina, where he recently won the support of Sen. Lindsey Graham and where he plans to deploy his older brother, former President George W. Bush.

Some in the party now concede that it might take until March or beyond for the Republican establishment to coalesce behind an alternative to the current front-runners. And that could be too late to catch either Trump or Cruz.

Many in the party say they believe the assault by Bush against Rubio has been particularly damaging.

Rubio has stepped up his complaints in recent days about the ads from Bush and his supporters. Rubio aides have been working aggressively behind the scenes to portray the attacks as strengthening Cruz and Trump, highlighting, for instance, an article in The Weekly Standard that argued that Bush would be to blame if Trump became the nominee.

But it is not just supporters of Rubio who are uneasy about the attacks against him by the super PAC backing Bush, Right to Rise, an assault which will have lasted two months by the New Hampshire primary.

Asked about the attacks, Cole, who has not endorsed a candidate, suggested Republicans would not tolerate them much longer if Bush did not show viability in Iowa and New Hampshire.

You need to be prepared to stop if the evidence is that its not working, Cole said, lamenting the amazing amount of resources wasted on one candidate.

The partys major contributors are starting to become increasingly vocal in their impatience.

The next couple of weeks are very important for Jeb, said William E. Oberndorf, who has given more than $1.5 million to Bushs campaign and the super PAC backing him.

Others in the partys donor class are so worried that they are already envisioning another path to their preferred nominee, months after the primary contests, at the Republican convention this summer.

Earle I. Mack, a real estate developer and former ambassador to Finland under George W. Bush, said the heavy bloodletting in the Republican race might prevent any candidate from clinching the nomination. In that case, he said, Republicans should turn to Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

In these horrible crossfires, with everybody shooting each other down, it would be good to nominate somebody uncontroversial, who could appeal to a broader electorate, Mack said.
RIO DE JANEIRO  New figures released Wednesday by Brazils Health Ministry as part of a probe into the Zika virus have found fewer confirmed cases of a rare brain defect than first feared.

So far, only 270 of 4,180 suspected cases have been confirmed as microcephaly, with the brain damage associated with the defect ruled out in 462 cases. Researchers are still studying 3,448 of the cases, which were recorded from Oct. 22.

Brazilian officials still say they believe theres a sharp increase in cases of microcephaly and strongly suspect the Zika virus, which appeared in the country last year, is to blame. The concern is strong enough that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned pregnant women to reconsider visits to areas where Zika is present.

The rare birth defect, which also can be caused by factors such as infections, malnutrition or drugs, means babies have unusually small heads, 12.6 inches or less in circumference, and it can cause lasting developmental problems.

The cases reported to the Health Ministry include delivered infants, stillborn and miscarried babies, and fetuses shown to have unusually small heads by ultrasound or other diagnostic tests, the ministry said. It then tests to see if neurological imaging shows the brain has been affected.

Officials said babies found to be microcephalic and their mothers are given additional tests to see if they had the Zika virus  often a difficult process. Six of the 270 confirmed microcephaly cases were found to have the virus. Two were stillborn and four were live births, three of whom later died, the ministry said.

Brazilian health officials estimate they had 150 cases of microcephaly in all of 2014.

The Health Ministry said Brazilian states were not required to report microcephaly cases before November. That could mean the 2014 list didnt fully account for all cases, though the ministry dismissed the idea there might have been a large number of unreported cases.

The U.S. CDC says about the rate of microcephaly in the U.S. is about 2 to 12 per 10,000 live births  a figure far higher than Brazils estimates for earlier years.

On Tuesday, Brazils health minister, Marcelo Castro, announced that 220,000 military personnel were being deployed to bolster efforts to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Castro said the government also would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm as the virus symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. Then late last year, Brazilian researchers reported they suspected Zika was linked to the dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly.

The World Health Organization has stressed that a link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.

The CDC is advising pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks. Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.
DANA POINT  A cliffside cable car designed in Switzerland is being tested this week at the north end of Strand beach and will be open to riders by Saturday, city officials say.

The new beige funicular  that can take eight riders at one time  replaces the green one installed in 2007 by Strand at Headlands developer Sanford Edward. For the past eight years, the free funicular has given the public an option other than the nearby staircase to get down to Strand beach.

Edward gave the funicular to the city in 2008. The $680,000 replacement project was approved by the City Council in October 2014 after officials noted the cable car was showing signs of wear in the corrosive marine environment.

The city used Inauen-Schatti AG  the same Swiss manufacturer Edward had commissioned for the first car  because the rails and other infrastructure were already in place, officials said.

We picked the equivalent of a Mercedes Benz, Edward said about his decision to use the company, which manufactures ski lifts and other cliff cable cars.

The replacement funicular was installed last month and got permits from state inspectors last week. The project was paid for by the citys Strands Community Facilities District.

People may see it operating this week for testing purposes to make sure all the programming and control equipment are working exactly to specification, then it will be reopening to the public on Saturday with its normal operating schedule, said Mike Rose, who oversees the cable car and its operation.

In winter time, the funicular operates on weekends and holidays from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. After Memorial Day it will run daily from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The funicular was a mitigation effort to allow construction of gates at Strand Vista Park above the multimillion dollar homes, Sanford said. Those gates have become a source of litigation between the city of Dana Point and the California Coastal Commission.

The commission in November demanded the gates be removed but has given the city an extension until the end of this month to file its response on why the gates have not come down.

City Attorney Patrick Munoz said the city is working with the Coastal Commission to resolve the matter, and is in active settlement discussions with them.

Munoz said the city is not operating the gates for the time being.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or Twitter@lagunaini
LAKE FOREST  After a few quiet years, Lake Forest is once again fighting to keep medical marijuana dispensaries out of town.

The city has filed a lawsuit in hopes of shutting down a dispensary thats operating despite a citywide ban.

The Green Room LLC has been distributing medical marijuana out of a small, nondescript suite in the Canada Business Center on Lambert Street, according to the lawsuit filed Jan. 15 in Orange County Superior Court.

Along with suing The Green Room, the citys lawsuit is also filed against the propertys landlords: PS Business Parks, a Glendale-based commercial real estate firm, and Acquiport Three Corp., a Delaware company that merged with PS Business Parks nearly a decade ago.

The goal is to get the marijuana dispensary completely locked down and have the property barred from being used as a dispensary for up to a year, said attorney Matthew Richardson, whos representing Lake Forest in the suit.

Robin Mather, who oversees Southern California operations for PS Business Parks, said she couldnt comment on the pending litigation.

A phone number for The Green Room thats listed with multiple dispensary directories is disconnected.

Theres no signage for Suite 109 at 22651 Lambert St. Open the door, however, and the smell is unmistakeable.

The walls are painted bright green inside the small waiting room, and cameras are fixed on the door. Theres a buzzer next to a frosted window. Press it and a smiling face appears, asking visitors if they have filled out patient paperwork.

Friday, a woman who identified herself as a volunteer said The Green Room had left two weeks earlier, with new management now in charge. She said the new collective doesnt have a name, preferring to stay low-key.

That makes sense given that Lake Forest banned all marijuana-related business  including dispensaries and deliveries  in 2013, after the Supreme Court ruled cities had the right to do so.

Just a few years before, the city was locked in a battle with dispensaries that had set up shop across Lake Forest.

The city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get rid of nearly 40 dispensaries, with the last one known at the time shuttered in November 2011 following multiple raids by law enforcement.

The Green Room is really the first store that has popped up since that time, said Hannah Shin-Heydorn, spokeswoman for the city.

City officials served notice to the location, the lawsuit states, letting dispensary owners know the business was illegal and demanding that they cease and desist. The claim alleges that The Green Room continued doing business anyway and threatened to keep doing so unless the city got a court order to stop it.

The city argues that the dispensary interferes with the comfortable use and enjoyment of property, which affects an entire community.

Directly next-door is EcoShield Pest Control. A worker there said the dispensary has been a decent neighbor and hasnt caused any problems for his business.

Lake Forest is asking the courts to issue an injunction to shut the business down and declare the site a public nuisance, claiming its injurious to health, indecent and offensive to the senses. That would give the city the power to keep the location closed for up to a year so another dispensary cant play a shell game and take The Green Rooms place, Richardson said.

The lawsuit is also asking for a civil penalty of up to $25,000 each charged to The Green Room, Acquiport Three Corp. and PS Business Parks.

The city takes seriously its prohibition of all marijuana activity and will aggressively pursue any violation of its local zoning laws, Mayor Andrew Hamilton said in an email. I love Lake Forest, and we will fight to keep the community safe and maintain our high quality of life.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7963 or bstaggs@ocregister.com
Americas obsession with Girl Scout cookies can best be summarized by an anti-solicitation sign hung outside a front door in Orange.

No Soliciting. We are too broke to buy anything. We know who we are voting for. We have found Jesus. Seriously, unless you are selling Thin Mints, please go away.

The message is clear. When it comes to peppermint-infused chocolate wafers, the doors are open for green-vested girls lugging a wagon full of cookies.

Its nostalgia. People buy the cookies not only because they love them, but they know they are supporting an iconic brand, said Nancy Nygren, Chief Executive of Girl Scouts of Orange County.

Cookie sales began Sunday  marking the 99th year for the key Girl Scout fundraiser. Last year, Girl Scouts of the USA sold 200 million boxes through online, door-to-door and booth sales. In Orange County, roughly 16,000 Girl Scouts sold 2.4 million cookies in 2015, down from 2.6 million the year before.

Did last years $1 price hike  the first in 10 years  impact sales?

Slightly, said Julie Weeks, a spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of Orange County.

Though boxes sold dropped last year, Weeks said the price increase (triggered, in part, by rising bakery fees) helped boost average troop income. Orange County troops earned $1,300 to help fund activities, up $100 from the year before.

Off to a good start

Early signs show troops are off to a good start.

Over the weekend, local troop leaders crammed nearly 1.6 million boxes of pre-ordered cookies into SUVs, trucks and mini-vans. That represents the amount of boxes troops anticipate selling in the first few weeks.

At $5 a box, thats roughly $8 million in sales. Extra orders are expected as sales pick up throughout the selling season, which runs through March 6.

People support us, through thick or thin, said longtime volunteer Marti ONeill, 69.

ONeills Cypress home is among a dozen distribution hubs, dubbed Volunteer Cookie Cupboards, in Orange County. Her two-car garage becomes a temporary warehouse for cookies  from Shortbreads to Lemonades to Caramel deLites.

ONeill is storing nearly 1,400 cases to support re-orders from roughly 850 Girl Scouts in her region. Shes been a cookie hub for 25 years.

On Monday, a day after cookie sales began, she said she was already getting requests for extra boxes.

I think the public is more than ready for Girl Scout Cookies, she said.

In the beginning

Devouring Girl Scout cookies one by one, crumbled over ice cream or paired with your favorite beverage (sometimes alcoholic) has become a tradition for generations of families for decades.

Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Law launched the first cookie program in 1917 as a way for troops to finance travel, camping and uniform supplies. In the beginning, troops baked sugar cookies and sold them door to door.

By 1936, the cookie program went national with commercially produced cookies. Today, the Girl Scout Cookie Program is the largest girl-led business in the world. Its credited for training young girls ladies on important real-world skills from bookkeeping to salesmanship.

In recent years, the program has evolved to increase sales and efficiencies.

In 2011, Orange County troops switched to a direct sales strategy, where troops pre-ordered their inventory. The move eliminated the torturous wait time between ordering your favorite cookies and getting them delivered.

Now, cookies are on the street from day one, Nygren said. It took a whole step out of the process.

Recognizing the importance of e-commerce, last year the organization debuted Digital Cookie, on online system for tracking sales and online orders. Similar to school fundraisers, troops are able to email an invitation to friends and family to buy cookies through a secure site.

It expands the knowledge girls gain every year  and broadens their entrepreneurial experience, ONeill said.

Tale of Two Bakers

Each year, questions inevitably arise over the different names tied to cookies throughout Southern California.

Why do Los Angeles residents get Samoas and Tagalongs, while Orange County gets Caramel deLites and Peanut Butter Patties?

Some regions also get different seasonal cookies. For example, Orange County is in its 10th year of selling Lemonades. But across the county line in Los Angeles, troops sell Savannah Smiles  a lemon cookie dusted with powdered sugar.

Whats behind the cookie lineup conundrum?

ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers are the only two factories in the country authorized as official Girl Scout cookie manufacturers.

Each holds trademarks to certain cookies. Both sell the top favorites, but some names are changed. and the recipes might also be tweaked. The only exception are the Thin Mints, the No. 1 seller across the nation.

Troops in the Greater Los Angeles area use Little Brownie, a Girl Scout cookie baker since 1974. The baker owns the trademark for Tagalongs, Do-si-dos, Samoas and Trefoils.

ABC Bakers, an official Girl Scout cookie baker since 1937, uses different names for the same cookies: Peanut Butter Patties, Peanut Butter Sandwich, Caramel deLites and Shortbread, respectively.

In 2008, Girl Scouts of Orange County switched from Little Brownie Bakers to ABC Bakers, which has been cranking out cookies and crackers for 100 years. After several blind taste tests, Orange County organizers felt that ABC provided a superior tasting cookie.

ONeill, a Girl Scout volunteer since her daughter joined in 1975, said shes tasted them all.

She said the key difference between the Samoas and and Caramel deLites is the type of chocolate. ABC Bakers uses milk chocolate; Little Brownie uses dark chocolate, she said.

Like many Girl Scout cookie fans, ONeill keeps a stash of her favorite cookies  Peanut Butter Patties and Lemonades  in her freezer for year-round consumption.

Over the years, shes come up with fun recipe applications.

For the Lemonades, she inserts a marshmallow between two wafers. After applying a little heat, its like eating a lemon meringue pie, she said of the smores-like creation.

With the Peanut Butter Patties, simple is best. She crumbles the chocolate coated vanilla cookies layered with peanut butter and sprinkles the bits over vanilla ice cream. Top with a little chocolate sauce. Yummy, she said.

Though her daughters days as a scout ended a long time ago, ONeill said she continues to volunteer each year.

It keeps me young, she said.

Contact the writer: nluna@ocregister.com
A former top California prison official said Orange Countys schedule for checking jail inmates was deficient, giving three recent escapees a 16-hour head start before they were discovered missing.

Dan Vasquez, former warden at San Quentin Prison and now a security expert, said Orange County should be doing more than two body counts every day  at 5 a.m. and at 8 p.m. In a body count, a deputy sees each inmate and compares the inmates picture with his face.

The day of the jailbreak, the last count didnt get done until 9 p.m. because of an inmate fight.

Two counts between 15 hours is not any good, from my experience, Vasquez said.

Orange County sheriffs Lt. Jeff Hallock said the Central Mens Jail conducts three more administrative checks throughout the day, at 11 a.m., 4 p.m. and midnight.

Those checks consist of comparing paperwork  such as for jobs and kitchen duties  with the sites where the inmates are housed.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation conducts four body counts every day  twice as many as in Orange County Central Mens Jail, said spokeswoman Terry Thornton.

In Los Angeles County, deputies conduct three inmate checks daily, but officials at the jail would not elaborate on the nature of the checks.

At a news conference, O.C. Sheriff Sandra Hutchens was said to be deeply troubled by the fugitives 16-hour head start.
Despite Bac Duongs several criminal convictions, federal authorities for more than 15 years have been unable to deport to Vietnam the inmate who escaped Friday from an Orange County jail.

Duong, 43, who along with Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu is the subject of an ongoing manhunt, has lived in the United States since 1991. During that time, he has been arrested on charges of burglary, domestic violence, attempted robbery and carjacking.

The year he arrived, Duong initially received a green card, making him a legal permanent resident of the United States.

In 1995, Duong was convicted of burglary in San Diego.

Three years later, a judge ordered that he be removed from the country and returned to Vietnam, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement released Tuesday. An appeals board upheld the ruling.

During that time frame, however, Vietnam routinely rejected requests to accept deportees, refusing to issue required travel documents.

Duong was once again placed in ICE custody in 2003, but was released the next year, according to the statement.

Immigration officials are not able to keep people locked up indefinitely, unless they pose a national security risk.

After his 2004 release, and for the next decade, Duong reported on schedule to immigration officials.

In 2008, Vietnam came to an agreement with the United States to issue travel documents for those being deported. The accord, however, pertained only to those who entered the United States after July 12, 1995.

In November, Duong was arrested after police allege he shot a 52-year-old man in the chest. He is also facing charges for allegedly stealing a motorcycle and resisting arrest.

After his latest arrest, ICE officers placed a detainer hold against Duong, asking the Sheriffs Department to notify them before he could be released. As a result, Duong was being held without bail at the time of his escape.

Contact the writer: semery@ocregister.com
WASHINGTON  The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee assailed Pentagon officials on Wednesday for relying on Russian rocket engines to launch American military satellites into space, arguing that the practice enriches friends of President Vladimir Putin and puts U.S. national security in jeopardy.

Today Russia holds many of our most precious national security satellites at risk before they ever get off the ground, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said at a hearing to examine military space launch capabilities.

Yet McCain said the Pentagon has actively sought to undermine the committees direction to limit that risk and end the use of the Russian RD-180 engines by the end of this decade. McCain also blamed the U.S. contractor that acquires the engines, United Launch Alliance, and two senators who support the company, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., for thwarting the committees instructions.

Air Force Secretary Deborah James told the committee the department is working to end the use of the Russian engines as soon as possible. She said disengaging from use of the Russian engines is far more complicated than it appears. She recommended a stockpile of 18 of the RD-180s until an American-made rocket can be tested and fielded.

McCain and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., are introducing legislation Thursday to repeal a provision in law that they say allows the unlimited acquisition and use of RD-180 engines, which are manufactured by NPO Energomash. The manufacturer is owned primarily by the Russian government and controlled by several of Putins confidants, according to the lawmakers.

United Launch Alliance is under contract with the Air Force to launch military and spy satellites. The purchases effectively reward Putins inner circle even as Washington continues to condemn Russias invasion of Ukraines Crimea region, its continued support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, and other hostile actions, the lawmakers said.

The benefits to Vladimir Putin, his network of corruption, and the Russian military industrial complex are well known, McCain said Wednesday. Yet despite the availability of alternatives, a select few still want to prolong our dependence on Russia while they target our satellites, occupy Crimea, destabilize Ukraine, bolster Assad in Syria, send weapons to Iran, and violate the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Yury Melnik, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said Russia considers congressional discussions about the RD-180 an internal U.S. matter and would not comment on specific remarks by different lawmakers.

Proponents of using the RD-180s to launch a range of national security satellites said the Russian engines fill a crucial gap while the U.S. develops and tests a domestically made rocket. Barring the purchase of the Russian engines could delay important missions during that transition period, they said, while also undercutting the competition among American companies essential to ensuring costs stay under control.

United Launch Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Rye said the company had no comment.

The debate over the Russian equipment also illustrates a longstanding tension between congressional committees that have similar yet distinct responsibilities. McCains panel is an authorization committee that writes defense policy and approves annual military spending levels. But the appropriations committees actually allot the money, and their actions can occasionally contradict what the authorizers decided.

During a December floor speech, McCain said Shelby and Durbin, both senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, reversed a restriction on buying the engines in what McCain called a triumph of pork-barrel parochialism. Their provision was added  in secret, with no debate, McCain said  to a $1.1 trillion government-wide spending bill passed by Congress late last year and signed into law by President Barack Obama.

United Launch Alliance, which uses the RD-180s on its Atlas V launch vehicle, has manufacturing facilities in Decatur, Alabama. Defense industry giants Boeing, based in Chicago, and Lockheed Martin formed United Launch Alliance as a joint venture. Shelby, who faces a GOP primary challenge, helped craft the spending bill but then ended up voting against it because the bill didnt tighten the vetting process for Syrian refugees seeking to enter the United States.

Over the past two years, McCain said, his committee supported measures also approved by Congress that prohibited the Russian engines but allowed a small number to be used during the transition period if the engines were fully paid for before Feb. 1, 2014  just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Durbin, also speaking on the Senate floor last month, said nothing was done in secret. He said Defense Department officials told him and other lawmakers that excluding the Russian engines so quickly could leave the Air Force short of all the rockets needed to launch satellites essential to national security. Durbin also said it prevents United Launch Alliance from bidding on military work, leaving the company SpaceX as the monopoly source for the engines.

SpaceX, a rocket and spacecraft builder, is based in Hawthorne, Calif., McCarthys home state.
SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS  Mike Sebbo steps back as his 14-year-old son squeezes the trigger on a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, sending a bullet hurtling at some 700 miles an hour.

Faster than the human eye can see, the bullet tears through a target some 20 yards away at Burro Canyon Shooting Park. Both father and son smile. Anthony, a ninth-grader, is on his way to becoming a sure shot.

Its Saturday, family day for a group of Orange County parents who occasionally come together to bond, share different guns and teach their children  as young as 7 years old  firearms safety as well as how to shoot a weapon.

In a time of mass shootings across America and the president of the United States pushing stricter gun laws, the scene may seem oppositional, even dangerous. But for hundreds of thousands of Americans, shooting guns isnt a whole lot different than, say, bowling.

Moreover, many people who own guns are just fine with Californias gun laws, among the strictest in the nation.

Safety procedures

Walking around Burro Canyon sounds like walking by a gunbattle. While there are lulls, shots ring out almost constantly. On Saturday, rangemasters reported 400 people firing shotguns, rifles and pistols.

The priority is safety. Incidents such as the one in Arizona in August 2014, in which a 9-year-old girl with an Uzi accidentally shot and killed an instructor, are unheard of. Not only are automatic weapons illegal in California, these Orange County parents know better than to hand over such powerful guns to small children.

The Orange County crew  nicknamed Cigars and Guns  sets up a series of foldout tables. Ammunition is carefully organized. Firearms are laid out on cloths. But before anyone is allowed to load a gun, the groups semi-official rangemaster addresses the gathering.

Wearing cargo pants tucked into combat boots and clutching a cigar, Sergey Molkov, a financial adviser from Laguna Niguel, warns that we must wear hearing protection, never walk around carrying a firearm, never step in front of the tables unless he announces a cease-fire.

Although most of the moms and dads know the speech by heart, they listen solemnly and ensure that their children pay strict attention. The day is meant to be fun. But it also is a day where respect for the power of weapons is reinforced. Then it is reinforced again.

At 16 years old, Boris Rabinovich already is a veteran of the outdoor range. Three years ago, he practiced with his father shooting an AR-15 rifle equipped with a high-powered scope. On this day, father and son focus on pistols and skeet shooting.

The son is very good at blasting orange clay pigeons. Dad is like a machine. Every disc disintegrates in the air.

A man is supposed to know how to do everything, Dmitriy Rabinovich says of his motivation for training his son in firearms. Parents are not forever. Someday he will be alone, and (if need be) he can protect himself and his family.

His words may sound post-apocalyptic. But they are more about family tradition. Rabinovich hopes to teach the same things his father taught him.

Like others I talked to at the range  as well as people I have talked to at indoor ranges  Rabinovich says he is fine with Californias gun magazine limits, waiting periods and background checks.

Still, Rabinovich says President Barack Obama must remain mindful of constitutional rights.

PROUD PARENTS

Nick Kirkland a massage therapist in Santa Ana, is far from the typical gun guy portrayed in typical media reports. Then again, so is the entire gathering. Perhaps that is why gun hobbyists are so frustrated.

They like their guns, but they see them as tools for sport. Not weapons of violence.

Kirkland has brought a World War II-era M-1 rifle, a cap-and-ball handgun and a Civil War-era rifle that requires pouring gunpowder down the barrel, tamping down a ball and inserting a cap in the firing mechanism.

With modern firearms, theres so much machismo, Kirkland says, thats why I like the old stuff. My reasons are recreational.

Kirkland points out that while firearms may seem out of place in a place like Orange County, in other parts of the country they are simply part of the culture, especially where hunting is popular.

If you know how to treat firearms safely, Kirkland says, you arent afraid of them.

As Sebbo and son hone their skills with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, Molkov worries about his 12-year-old daughter, Alina. She arrived feeling a bit sick after the winding drive. It is her first visit to the range, and the ring of gunfire doesnt help.

Eventually, Alina rises and starts her initiation with a .22-caliber handgun. Before the afternoon is over, she is eager to test herself with a shotgun. On the drive home, she tells her dad shes already excited about returning.

The next day, Molkov shares, Im a very proud father.

Contact the writer: dwhiting@ocregister.com
Seven Orange County residents were arrested Tuesday morning and face federal fraud charges in connection with a boiler-room mortgage loan scheme that required homeowners to pay thousands in upfront fees.

A federal grand jury in Connecticut returned an indictment on:

 Aria Maleki, 33, Santa Ana;

 Serj Geuttsoyan, aka Anthony Kirk, 33, Santa Ana;

 Mehdi Moarefian, aka Michael Miller, 36, Irvine;

 Daniel Shiau, aka Scott Decker, 30, Irvine;

 Kowit Yuktanon, aka Eric Cannon, 31, Huntington Beach;

 Michelle Lefaoseu, aka Michelle Bennett, 41, Huntington Beach; and

 Cuong Huy King, aka James Nolan and Jimmy, 32, Westminster.

Federal agents also seized $350,000 from bank accounts, $362,000 from a bitcoin account, a $100,000 cashiers check and a 2013 Ferrari 458 Italia.

They are all charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. In addition, all except Maleki are charged with one or more counts of mail fraud, and Moarefian, Yuktanon, King and Shiau are each charged with one of more counts of wire fraud.

Prosecutors believe Maleki was the leader of an operation that began around March 2009 in which homeowners across the country were cold-called and offered loan-modification services at favorable terms in exchange for upfront fees ranging from $2,500 to $4,300 that supposedly covered closing costs and other expenses, the indictment says.

The suspects used false names and falsely told potential clients their loans had already been negotiated with lenders and that they would receive help from government programs such as the Troubled Assets Relief Program and the Home Affordable Modification Program, according to the indictment.

If the loan modifications fell through, the homeowners were told they would be refunded the fees paid.

To further induce homeowners, they were shown fake and misleading documents printed with Government Loan Modification Application and Loan Modification-Home Saver Legal Program and told the paperwork would be sent to various government mortgage relief programs.

The group changed business names several times to avoid being detected and defied cease-and-desist orders, including one from the state of Connecticut Department of Banking in December 2013, prosecutors allege. All the businesses had California addresses.

The case is being prosecuted in U.S. District Court in Connecticut.

Each of the seven faces up to 20 years in federal prison on each count and an additional 10 years for participating in a crime that invoked telemarketing fraud and victimized 10 or more people over 55.

They are expected to be appear in court Feb. 17.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2478 or lcasiano@ocregister.com
One of the three fugitives from Orange County Central Mens Jail was a U.S. Marine with special operations training and a history of mental illness who once told his wife he was upset with the world.

People who know Hossein Nayeri said his life fell apart after a 2005 accident in which he drove drunk and rolled a car, an incident that killed his friend in a fiery crash after they had been partying at a casino in Madera County.

Some elements of Nayeris complex past contrast with the charges he now faces: the kidnap and torture of a Newport Beach marijuana dispensary owner who, in 2012, was burned, beaten, shocked with a stun gun, and left bleeding in the desert after his penis was severed. A prosecutor has described Nayeri as Hannibal Lecter.

Nayeri, Jonathan Tieu and Bac Duong were still on the run late Tuesday after escaping Friday. All three men had pleaded not guilty to crimes including murder, attempted murder and torture. More than 250 law enforcement officials from local, state and federal agencies are engaged in the search.

At least nine people once wrote letters of support to the judge after Nayeri pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter after the 2005 accident. They described a man whose life had become a contradiction.

On one hand, in 2006, while on parole, Nayeri warned young prisoners about drunken driving and volunteered to help victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.

But he also jumped bail that year, the first of at least three times Nayeri has evaded authorities  once fleeing to Iran and, on another occasion, leading police on a high-speed chase in Orange County before escaping into the night.

RAISED IN FRESNO

Nayeri was born in Iran but raised by siblings in Fresno, according to friends. He wrestled for the Clovis West High School varsity team in the 1996-97 school year.

He had friends in high school  including some who prosecutors say participated in the 2012 attack in the desert  but has said he suffered as well.

He told Irvine police in a 2011 report that hed been sexually assaulted as a child. He also told at least one friend that his father, a physician who lived in Iran, had been kidnapped and never came home.

In 1997, soon after graduating from high school, Nayeri enlisted in the U.S. Marines, completing basic training at Camp Pendleton. He also trained in special operations on Coronado, learning force reconnaissance work, in which operators serve independently behind enemy lines.

It is not clear if he was ever deployed abroad. Nayeri was discharged in 2002.

Soon after leaving the military he moved back to his hometown, Madera, about 25 miles northwest of Fresno, and took a job at a paint store.

He was a nice guy, always laughing, said Oscar Martinez, an auto mechanic in Madera who said he was friendly with Nayeri in the mid-2000s.

Martinez said Nayeri lent his 2004 Chevy Silverado truck to a friend, who crashed it and left it at the scene. Martinez repaired the truck for Nayeri.

In 2005, Martinez said Nayeris friend Ehsan Tousi was celebrating his engagement when Nayeri joined him for drinks at a casino the day after Christmas.

He told me they got drunk, and nobody wanted to drive, Martinez said. Nayeri offered to drive.

Ali Tousi, Ehsans brother, told a contradictory version of the story. He said his brother was not engaged, and that Nayeri was not his friend.

Nayeri lost control of the car, and it rolled off the road, pinning Tousi. Nayeri was airlifted to a hospital, and Tousi died at the scene.

Nayeri suffered a broken right leg and burns on his right side, and several of his toes were amputated, according to court documents. He was charged with vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated without gross negligence.

A LOYAL FRIEND

One high school friend who wrote a letter of support in the case described Nayeri as loyal, honest and considerate. She said she was impressed when Nayeri comforted her mother after her stepfather died.

But the accident, according to many of the letters, changed Nayeri in ways beyond the physical scarring.

He has not been the same joyful person since the night of the accident, the woman wrote.

Other friends and family said Nayeri had nightmares and flashbacks from the crash. One person wrote that he had become a shell of himself.

When he recovered, he fled the country, breaking his bail agreement and prompting a warrant for his capture and arrest. Nayeri later told Martinez that he went to Iran.

VISIT TO MOTHER

While in Iran, Nayeri stayed with his mother, who wanted him to agree to an arranged marriage. When Nayeri refused, his mother taunted him, calling him murderer, according to what he told Martinez.

Nayeri was recaptured in 2006 in Washington, D.C. He pleaded no contest to the vehicular manslaughter charge.

He was sentenced to 125 days in jail and four years probation.

In 2010, the last time Martinez saw him, Nayeri asked if the mechanic could dog-sit his pit bull, Tyler. Martinez hasnt seen Nayeri since. He still has the dog.

Martinez was shocked Tuesday to learn that Nayeri is a fugitive and of the recent charges against him.

He was totally different back then, Martinez said.

But court records indicate the changes might not be recent.

In 2011, Irvine police detailed an encounter with Nayeri in which he described himself as bipolar, suffering from post-traumatic stress and suicidal. But he also told police he is a gentle person.

Police did not think Nayeri was a danger to himself or others, so they called his psychiatrist and did not take him to jail.

In 2012, Nayeri led police on a high-speed chase. He crashed his car, but escaped.

Police found camera equipment in his car, but did not know whether it was linked to any crime. Later, prosecutors said the camera was used by Nayeri to track the Newport Beach man who was beaten and tortured, allegedly by Nayeri and his co-defendants.

While awaiting trial, Nayeri, Tieu and Duong were housed in Mod F of Orange County jail along with 65 other inmates, half of whom are considered violent.

Its unclear how the three men connected or how they planned their escape.

On Tuesday, a sheriffs spokesman said the men were housed appropriately, but an investigation into the escape is ongoing.

Nayeris trial had been scheduled for Feb. 23.

Staff writers Scott Schwebke and Ian Wheeler contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: ksharon@ocregister.com
VIENNA  France has asked the European Union to consider new sanctions against Iran over recent missile tests, in a request made shortly after the EU ended sanctions over Irans nuclear program, officials have told The Associated Press.

Two officials from European Union nations said the French proposal is under EU review but most other EU members view it as counterproductive to efforts to revive political and economic ties with Iran after the protracted chill over the nuclear dispute. The officials, who were briefed by people who attended the meeting, spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Disclosure that the French asked for such a review  even if it is ultimately unsuccessful  could complicate a visit by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who arrived in Paris from Rome on Wednesday to improve political and economic ties now that the sanctions have been removed.

A French diplomat who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the topic cited Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius as saying the EU is considering possible new sanctions on Iran. He declined to say which nation initiated the process.

The officials said the request came at a meeting of 28 EU foreign ministers shortly after the EU and the U.S. lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for U.N. certification that Iran had scaled back its nuclear programs. Iran said those programs were peaceful but critics feared it wanted to build nuclear weapons.

Another diplomat from an EU nation said hovever that the review was not discussed at the meeting. He declined to comment on whether France had requested a review about such sanctions elsewhere and demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the issue publicly.

The French government did not respond to AP requests for comment by late Wednesday. The European Union also did not address whether France had asked for a review.

The United States had imposed new sanctions over the firing of a medium-range Iranian ballistic missile shortly before the reported French request.
On the eve of National School Choice Week, now underway, neaToday, a news site operated by the National Education Association, published a snarky article claiming that school choice is merely a smokescreen.

What its really about, according to the article, is the transfer of public money to the private sector without accountability or transparency.

The school-choice movement is bankrolled by a faction of incredibly wealthy conservative donors and political groups, the article continued. That group includes the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

And the aim of that vast right-wing conspiracy, according to the NEA, is to dismantle public education throughout the fair land.

Well, thats just so much disinformation from the 3.2 million-member union, with which the 325,000-member California Teachers Association is affiliated.

Almost none of those taking part in the more than 1,500 events throughout the Golden State marking National School Choice Week have been bankrolled by either the brothers Koch or ALEC.

That includes the mayors of Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo, all of whom issued proclamations recognizing School Choice Week.

We dont think those mayors are out to dismantle public education. We think they simply recognize  as do most parents  that some schools are better than others.

Indeed, there is no greater gap between the regions affluent and less-advantaged families than quality of education.

Thats why there is much public support for school choice, according to a December 2015 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed favored charter schools, while a similar ratio would allow parents to select any public school in their district.

School vouchers  allowing parents to enroll their children in private schools at public expense  did not elicit the same level of support, roughly a third. But vouchers very well may have if they were limited to lower-income parents of children attending low-achieving public schools.

We think its absurd for the NEA to suggest that school choice is but a smokescreen intended to destroy public education. Its to bring this county closer to when the quality of education its public school children receive is not determined by their ZIP code.
When Karla Ramos recently got word that her son could transfer from his assigned school in Las Vegas to a school that she believed would work better for him, she felt all her anxieties disappear.

Thats because Ramos, like tens of thousands of parents, simply wants the power to choose what is best for her son, who, like too many other children in America, has been the victim of schoolhouse violence.

My son was punched in the face and bit on the ear, Ramos said. I dont feel like its right for me to send him to a school where he isnt safe.

Ramos relief came in the form of a new school-choice program in Nevada known as Education Savings Accounts.

The empowerment that Karla Ramos felt is being mirrored by families all across the United States, which now has millions of families choosing public and charter schools and almost 400,000 families using public funds to choose private schools.

Celebration of empowerment. This is the main message of National School Choice Week, which includes more than 16,000 events being held this week in all 50 states. The events celebrate the progress that parents and policymakers have made in creating more educational choice options for parents.

The good news is the educational freedom in America envisioned by Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman is growing by leaps and bounds. Already, millions of families choose their public school by moving to a new home, but they can afford it. What is really exciting, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, is that there are now 2.3 million students currently choosing a charter school. Moreover, when it comes to private school choice, options are growing at a record pace.

There are 59 educational choice programs on the books in 28 states and Washington, D.C., according to the recently released ABCs of School Choice, an annual publication by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Those programs include school vouchers, ESAs, tax-credit scholarships and individual tax credits and deductions.

In 2015, Nevada made national headlines when it adopted the most expansive school choice program in the nation with an ESA. Under the program, all 453,000 students who attend public schools for at least 100 days, plus children entering kindergarten, would qualify for an ESA. The state would deposit money into an account that a parent can spend on approved educational expenses ranging from tutoring to special education therapy to tuition at private schools. It is individualized learning at its best.

Unfortunately, there are opponents of educational empowerment who dont believe that parents like Ramos should be free to choose. Right now, a Nevada judge put a hold on the Nevada ESA program, frustrating the 4,000-plus parents like Ramos who desperately want more educational options. As a result, their childrens futures are in jeopardy.

Thankfully, opposition to school choice, while still present, is waning. Americans think that our current system is on the wrong track and believe that all parents should be empowered to choose. They care more about the quality of a school, not whether the school is public, private or charter.

Thats why National School Choice Week is so important. It is an annual celebration that reminds us that education and educational choice is essential to the future of our country, vital to the academic success of our children and critical for millions of parents like Karla Ramos who simply want the best for their children.

Robert Enlow is president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the legacy foundation of Nobel economist Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose.
IRVINE  The five animals adopted daily from the Irvine Animal Care Center, on average, are sent off to their new homes with fanfare.

The adoption is announced over the loudspeaker and J. Kevin Hertell, the centers new director, hops from his office to the hall ringing a bell in celebration before giving the exiting animal one last pat on the head.

Its my favorite part of the job, he said.

That happy scene is strikingly different from the picture painted a year ago by some volunteers, who said animals at the shelter that would have in the past been made adoptable were being euthanized.

Complaints about inhumane treatment and mismanagement at the Irvine Animal Care Center turned on its head the centers image as one of the countys most progressive shelters.

A contingent of volunteers went to City Hall in early 2015 to plead with the City Council to improve conditions. The resulting changes in leadership have led to a revitalization at the center.

Notifications of upcoming euthanizations are sent out to staff and volunteers to give them a chance to say goodbye. Volunteers who felt unwanted say employees now express thanks for their help. And programs like Third Chance for Pets, which takes in animals from overcrowded Southern California shelters, have the full support of shelter staff.

Irvine resident Tani Welsh has volunteered at the center for more than 10 years, helping with event planning and fundraising, as well as with the adoptable cats.

We went through some ugly times, she said. The city hired the wrong people to run that very special facility and that was the result.

Welsh said she and other volunteers took a step back when they felt they were no longer being treated with respect.

It really deteriorated in terms of relationships between the staff and volunteers and the care of the animals, she said.

Welsh resumed her previous schedule after hearing about major staffing changes.

I didnt ever really give up on the place, she said.

Hertell, executive director of the Second Chance Center for Animals in Flagstaff, Arizona, was hired in September to manage the Irvine facility for $105,040 a year.

He is in the 36th year of his career working with animals.

Ive worked for one city, two counties, three states and the federal government, he said.

He said the programs like Third Chance for Pets drew him to work there  even after hearing about the drama that roiled the shelter.

I didnt feel that the challenge was insurmountable, he said. I didnt feel it was anything atypical. There are always ebbs and flows with all animal rescue organizations.

Since he arrived, Hertell has instituted an open door policy and regular meetings of the centers directors and leadership team and a monthly all-staff meeting.

Its all about the animal, but its collective, its a team, he said. I value the team approach. Ive really seen a change since Ive started, with the volunteers too. Theyre just an extension of our family.

Since returning, Welsh said she has not heard any more talk of mistreatment. She said the volunteers are once again feeling valued.

Kevin set the tone, she said. He cares about the animals. He cares about the people who care about the animals.

She is among the shelters 200 active volunteers, who help in a variety of ways, from socializing adoptable animals to staffing the front office. Hertell said he expects the pool of active helpers to increase this year to about 300.

Hertell has put into place recommendations made by Dr. Jyothi Robertson, a consultant the city hired to review the centers practices after volunteers reported mismanagement.

Today, 48 hours before any animal at the center is euthanized, a message is sent out to staff and volunteers who have elected to be informed.

We dont want any surprises; theres nothing hidden, Hertell said. Theres no agendas other than doing whats best for the animal. Thats one point Im driving home. Its always about the animal.

A minimum of three people sign off on any euthanasia order, including Hertell, animal care supervisor Jim Warren and a veterinarian.

Shelter director Michelle Quigley resigned in January 2015 following public allegations by volunteers of inhumane practices at the facility; chief veterinarian Lawrence Kosmin was replaced by the city with another veterinarian, Bradley Brunskill, at the end of December 2014.

In January, the council temporarily halted all euthanasia, unless medically necessary, for 60 days.

Robertsons review of the centers practices, released in June, recommended the updated animal care practices, more stringent training protocols for staff and volunteers and to implement team decisions on all animal euthanasia.

Volunteer Laurel Arnold, who has given her time to the shelter for more than 30 years, mainly as a cat volunteer, said the complaints of inhumane treatment had lasting consequences.

It was devastating, because of it had always been a place we were so proud of, she said. Then to have rescues say they didnt want to send us animals because of the fear of euthanasiawere still fighting that.

Now that those changes have been made, I think it is very quickly getting back to where it was.

Contact the writer: sdecrescenzo@ocregister.com
Weekly Radio Ecoshock show - Description, production notes and extra info - for non-profit rebroadcasters (college & community stations, low power FM, repodcast services..) Sign up for podcast to receive 1 hour program weekly, set up for radio. Find instructions on timing for your Station ID, announcements etc for each show in this Blog.
A proposed regulation will be in front of the Orange County Sanitation District Wednesday night that would ban liquified animal remains from going down the drain.

If approved, the change could prompt an Orange company that does water animal cremations to haul the discharge elsewhere or shutter, even though those in the industry say the water is completely safe.

The districts staff, saying it doesnt have enough information on the process, is recommending that the board prohibit the liquefied remains from entering the sewer system.

Theres no data, said Jennifer Cabral, the districts spokeswoman. Theres no standards. We have nothing at all to show what the by-product is.

Cabral called it a possible public health concern.

But some in the industry say theres data available the agency could look at. Instead, the county agency is letting the ick factor come into play, they say.

Wednesday night, the first of two public hearings is scheduled. If approved, a ban would go into effect on July 1.

It is so stressful, said Deanna Kondrath, who with her husband, Brian, opened Paws and Claws in April in Orange that uses the process called aquamation. Theyve just completely doomed us.  We put all our money in it.

Paws and Claws averages eight water cremations a week of animals up to 400 pounds with its $80,000 unit, she said. Most are dogs and cats. The cost is $60 to $275, based on weight and type of service.

Dean Fisher pioneered the technology on humans at the Mayo Clinic and now runs the only approved human unit in California. He took issue with the proposed ban. The water is safe, he said, and tests would show that.

They havent done their homework, said Fisher, who now runs a water cremation unit at UCLAs Donated Body Program. I just dont get it. Most of these individuals are scientists; they have water backgrounds. They would just have to look at the test data from people running it.

The city of San Diego allows the process. Brian Taylor, an inspector for the city, has inspected a unit for the San Diego Zoo for roughly seven years.

The analysis weve done and studies (show) a lot of the waste water doesnt have anything in there that would be considered hazardous, Taylor said. Its nothing that would be considered a problem for a treatment plant.

Water cremation, called alkaline hydrolysis in scientific circles, became commonplace in the agricultural industry years ago. Veterinarians have used it for deceased animals and livestock, a way to eliminate disease versus releasing pathogens into the air with traditional cremation. Its touted as a green alternative. Farmers in the Midwest use the water byproduct as fertilizer.

Human water cremations can be conducted in 13 states. In California, water cremations are legal for animals and on human remains for certain medical purposes.

In Orange County, theres at least two businesses that have the water-cremation units, Paws and Claws and Only Cremations in Newport Beach. The units use water, heat and alkalinity to break down tissue, leaving bone.

I think it is kinda ridiculous if its just based on whether they think its gross or not, the process itself, said Jeff Katcherian, a vice president at Only Cremations, which plans to begin animal water cremations within a month. What I know for sure is there wont be disadvantages regarding the sewage. It is just an image thing.

Bio-Response Solutions, which makes water-cremation units, says the discharge is peptides, amino acids, sugars, nutrients and some soap. Sam Sieber, vice president of research, said she reached out to the district to provide data but an Orange County Sanitation District engineer told her the district wasnt interested.

Contact the writer: 714-704-3706 or jclay@ocregister.com
As of January 2016, the gas leak from an underground storage facility that has sickened some Los Angeles residents and sent thousands from their homes has been out of control for almost two months. Millions of pounds of methane are leaking into the atmosphere, and California officials say it's shaping up to be a major ecological disaster.

Thousands have been forced to evacuate the area, and several lawsuits have already been filed by people who claim they've been harmed by the leak. "I have felt the effects, as my husband has  the stomach, the vomiting, the headaches. But when my 17-month-old son has to be on a nebulizer and comes home with bloody noses, there's no excuse," resident Robin Shapiro said.

So far, efforts to contain the gas leak have been unsuccessful. State officials say it could take months before it's stopped. SoCalGas, which is owned by Sempra Energy, has spent some $50 million in its efforts to stop the leak and mitigate its effects, and Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency over its emissions.
Olson Engage has picked up US PR duties for Jim Beam Bourbon, after a competitive review.



Edelman previously handled the business.

Dan Cohen, PR director for the brand's owner, No. 3 global spirits company Beam Suntory, said his company liked Olson's track record of "bringing big creative ideas to life for great brands."



Japan's Suntory holdings bought Jim Beam for $18B in 2014.

Bryan Specht, president of Chicago-based OE, said the firm is "humbled" by the opportunity.
Up to 150 people in Mountmellicks Macra Hall in support of IFA candidate Henry Burns proved Laois has the energy for another presidential election campaign.

The event, organised by the Mountmellick IFA local branch and Macra na Feirme was designed to assess interest in his home town to get behind Burns, who will need a strong local team to mount a successful canvas in 26 counties.

Helen Dempsey, chairperson of Mountmellick Macra, said Mr Burns had been a dedicated member of both organisations since the early 1990s, when he was assigned to be the Macra clubs delegate at county IFA meetings.

She said it would be fitting if Mr Burns, who had fought tirelessly for the organisation he loves, could bring about real, tangible change.

Describing him as a capable leader with a strong work ethic, she said it was his commitment and down to earth attitude which makes him approachable to all.

IFA county chairman Pat Hennessy said the organisation is still reeling from recent unacceptable pay controversies, but added that people on the ground realise a strong organisation is needed to act on behalf of farmers nationally and Europe.

The IFA is the envy of international farming organisations and Burns is the man to pick the organisation up, he said.

The candidate's campaign manager Francie Gorman said the role of president isnt a training school and after the turmoil of the last three months, IFA needs a serious farmer in the role.

We need someone 365 days for four years if were to get back that respect. As a farmer, I want to see the best man for the job  Im selfish, he said. And Henry is head and shoulders above the others.

Mr Burns said hed been devastated and demoralised by those same controversies.

We were misled. We trusted and trust will have to be regained, he said, adding that the organisation is not at full strength now.

Were curtailed on the decisions we can take because of the state of the organisation, he said, adding that he wants to pull the members together.

He referred to Juan Greene who started the IFA in 1965 for no reward.

We have no say unless we stand together, said Mr Burns, adding that he was humbled by the support of the large audience from Portarlington, Clonaslee, Clonaghadoo and Mountmellick. I wont take it for granted.

Kieran McEvoy, Portarlington, said hed been immensely proud to see how Mr Burns chaired a meeting in Brussels and described him as a hard-working, honest, genuine person.

Paddy Delaney, Timahoe, said he had left IFA because of issues relating to malting barley contracts but is returning to support Burns. He hoped the Mountmellick man would make young farmers of a core part of his policies.
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On January 19, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Nisha Desai Biswal welcomed an Uzbek government delegation led by Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov to Washington for the sixth U.S.-Uzbekistan Annual Bilateral Consultations.

As part of the consultations, the delegation met with Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom and other senior U.S. officials to discuss political developments, regional stability and security, human rights and labor, education and cultural exchanges, and economic development and trade, and other issues of mutual interest.

The Annual Bilateral Consultations, which were established in 2009, are a structured policy dialogue designed to build mutual trust and advance our common agenda and opportunities for cooperation across the full range of bilateral and regional issues.

The United States looks forward to broadening and deepening its relationship with Uzbekistan on the basis of these candid and constructive conversations.
JPMorgan Chase will install new ATMs later this year that will allow customers to withdraw cash or initiate other transactions using their cellphone. The move will include new cash machines that dont require a card and upgrades to existing machines that will allow customers to withdraw more money and in different denominations, Chase spokesman Michael Fusco said. The withdrawal limit also will be substantially higher, up to $3,000.

Stocks drop doesnt hurt consumer confidence

A strong job market and low gasoline prices helped boost U.S. consumer confidence again this month. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 98.1 in January from 96.3 in December, the second consecutive monthly gain. The business research group said Americans were more confident about the future, though their assessment of current economic conditions was unchanged from December. Consumers shrugged off the sharp decline in the stock market and signs of weakness overseas.

Buick convertible to get a plug during Super Bowl

General Motors Buick brand will use its first Super Bowl ad to plug a sleek new convertible as it continues the fight against an image of cars that are custom-made for senior citizens. The 30-second spot will feature New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and actress-model Emily Ratajkowski from the thriller Gone Girl. The ad will promote Buicks new Cascada, the brands first convertible in a quarter-century, which is due in showrooms in a matter of weeks.

BNSF Railway to reduce capital spending

BNSF Railway Co., the railroad owned by Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway Inc., plans to reduce capital expenditures for the first time in six years as railroads seek to rein in costs amid a freight slump. The rail carrier said Tuesday that it will spend $4.3 billion, down 26 percent from a record $5.8 billion in 2015, on locomotives, railcars, track and maintenance. The railroad joins Union Pacific, CSX and Kansas City Southern in ratcheting down spending amid a drop in carloads, led down by coal.

Home prices rise faster than a year earlier

U.S. home prices increased at a faster clip in November, the gains fueled by solid hiring growth, historically low mortgage rates and a shortage of houses on the market. The Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index rose 5.8 percent from a year ago, up from a 5.5 percent pace in October, according to a Tuesday report. The number of available listings fell 3.8 percent from a year ago, causing tight inventories that raised prices.
It could be Friday before the last of the remains stored in a fire-ravaged funeral chapel at 78th Street and West Center Road are retrieved.

Heafey Hoffmann Dworak & Cutler officials said all nine bodies that were in the building were removed Tuesday. Cremains in the building likely will not be brought out until Friday, said Terry Kucera, one of the companys funeral directors. The Fire Department would not allow Heafey Hoffmann employees inside the building on Wednesday, he said.

Funeral home leaders said Wednesday that they have been in contact with all families who had loved ones bodies in the chapel

Co-owner Bill Cutler, who needed 15 stitches in his head after he was injured in Tuesday mornings fire, said the companys other chapels and leaders of area churches have kept matters moving forward.

Were proceeding, Cutler said. Its business as usual.

Many of the funeral homes records and paperwork were lost in the fire, Kucera said, which may have led to a few families not being contacted quickly.

Cremains in the building were not damaged, Kucera said, because they were behind steel doors and were situated in the west side of the building, which sustained the least damage.

The middle of the mortuary, he said, took the brunt of the fires wrath.

The bodies, either prepped for burial or awaiting burial, were removed Tuesday.

Some of the caskets sustained water damage, Kucera said, and the caskets have been replaced.

God watched out for us, Kucera said. All of them (the bodies) were untouched.

The cremains, which were in temporary urns, were marked with the persons name, the funeral homes name and an identification number.

In addition to Cutler, who was hit in the head by the roof when it collapsed, three firefighters were injured. Mike Terrell, an 18-year veteran, also was injured when the roof collapsed. He complained of pain in his lower back and head. Bradley Philippi, an eight-year veteran, was picking up a hose when his back went out on him. Bill Young, a seven-year veteran, was on the buildings roof when it bubbled up and came back down. He landed awkwardly on his left foot.

All were released from the hospital by Tuesday afternoon.

The building was valued at $1.55 million, and its contents were valued at more than $777,000.

Firefighters said the cause of the fire was under investigation, but neighbors reported hearing a loud explosion when the fire began.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1259, jay.withrow@owh.com
B'luru: Kormangala residents to hold protest against rising pollution & bad state of roads

Bengaluru

oi-Shalini

Bengaluru, Jan 27: After a successful "Save Whitefield" campaign, now Kormanagala residents of Bengaluru, are all set to hold a protest rally against the poor infrastructure of the locality and heavy traffic grievances.

The protest rally will be held on Sunday, January 31 on the pavement lining the Sony World Junction, from 5 pm to 6 pm and around 500 residents are expected to join hands together to hold a peaceful protest.

The infrastructure issues such as huge traffic jams, non-stop movement of the vehicles and increasing noise and air pollution inside the residential areas have left residents irritated. Residents have also complained that they approached the traffic police but their pleas fell on deaf ears.

"Traffic police are the ones who direct vehicles to go onto the interior lanes of Koramangala" one of the residents alleged. [Bengaluru: After 'Save Whitefield', now Sarjapura residents to march protest]

Nitin Sheshadri, another resident complained, "implementation of infrastructure projects will help to decongest traffic and the elevated road from Ejipura to Kendriya Sadan, a road from Ejipura to Agara Road and a flyover from Silk Board Junction to Forum Junction are among the stalled projects."

"The only agenda of traffic police is to let the traffic pass and they don't seem to care about the residents' welfare. The completion of infrastructure projects will not only help commuters but us (residents) too", he further said.

Dr Radhakrishna, member, Koramangala RWA said, "The civic projects of the locality is in an incomplete mode and we also want to raise voice against the terrible state of roads."

OneIndia News
Anupam Kher says his mother now 'healthy', will be quarantined at home

Anupam Khers Padma story negated the French lesson: The irony of this R-Day

Feature

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

The controversy over actor Anupam Kher's U-turn on Padma awards after his selection as a recipient of the Padma Bhushan this Republic Day is nothing new. In India, state awards today have become political rewards long back and whoever rules the day, abide by the same set of norms.

But what was ironical is that Kher's moment of shame came on a Republic Day when the president of France, a country which has historically been known for setting up high social ideals like Liberty, Equality & Fraternity'.

How Anupam Kher ruined his hard-earned name

Have we in India ever felt the urgency to abide by those ideals to set up a high standard in our social life? The way a respected veteran actor like Anupam Kher showed how we Indians easily ruin our hard-earned names just to remain in the good books of the rulers of the day, it proves fundamental human values so vigorously championed in the West have little appeal in these parts.

It is painful to see that the civil society in India is unable to rise above the influence of political partisanship and patronage and in the process, loses the moral ground to back individual rights and freedom.

When Kher's colleague Aamir Khan mentions about a statement made by his wife apprehending an intolerant atmosphere in the country, the former aligns himself with a majority sentiment to criticise the latter.

Do Indians care about liberty, equality & fraternity?

One feels disappointed to see that even the educated and sophisticated minds of this country disapprove of the ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood just to find it politically favourable.

The majoritarian voice gobbles up individuals' sense of responsibility to overshadow, sometimes even by questioning the external identity, those who feel it urgent to express their doubts.

This is how the rule of the majority functions, caring little about the noble motto that nations like France had preached centuries ago.

Hence, when we invite the French president and troops from his country to grace the occasion we choose to express our nationalistic pride, the self-defeating stand taken by people like Kher makes the picture look imperfect.

More than supporting France's military cause, we need to back its democratic ideals

If we are keen to support France's war on the Islamic State, we should be equally eager to match that country's commitment to democratic ideals. Else, things look hollow.

However, having spoken about Kher's U-turn that earned him brickbats in the public domain, let us also be clear about the fact that he is neither the first nor the last individual who is at the receiving end (both the award and the criticism).

As we said, the civil society in this country is a soft victim of political partisanship and we have seen time and again how that society gets split in displaying loyalty to diverse political camps, both for short-term and long-term gains.

Issues like "intolerance" just give an occasion to launch the mission in search of opportunism.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 12:27 [IST]
Feeling depressed or hopeless? Check with your brain, not heart

Feature

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Have you started feeling depressed or moody while in love, lacking focus or motivation to finish a task at work or finding yourself addicted to shopping or even gambling? Do not just blame sudden impulses or your stars - at the axis of such deviating behaviour are two key naturally occurring chemicals in your brain: dopamine and serotonin.

While dopamine helps keep our mood in a balanced level so that we avoid depression, serotonin is also a vital feel-good hormone - important for calmness and emotional well-being - and is responsible for enhancing confidence levels.

Any fluctuation in their levels can lead to myriad health problems - from depression and anxiety disorders to greater impulsivity and even hallucinations and suicidal thoughts.

"When these key neurotransmitters become volatile, there is rapid mood imbalance. It leads to a rise in depression and, over a period of time, can be clinically dangerous," Dr. Mohinish Bhatjiwale, director (neurosurgery) at Mumbai's Nanavati Super Specialty Hospital, told IANS.

According to Dr. Madhuri Behari, director (neurology) at Fortis Flt. Lt Rajan Dhall Hospital here, serotonin is the happy neuro-transmitter and when its levels go down, we feel low and depressed.

Dopamine receptor, on the other hand, is more complex and has two classes. When the levels of Class 1 (D1, D2 and D3) receptors go down, one experiences symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

"When levels of Class 2 receptors (D4 and D5 ) go high, one gets symptoms of psychosis where the person becomes agitated, cannot sleep, believes that people are up to harm his or her family, wife/husband is having extra-marital affair and hallucinations," Behari told IANS.

A study led by Robb Rutledge at University College London and published in the Journal of Neuroscience last year found that increasing dopamine levels in healthy adults led participants to choose more risky options in a gambling task.

The findings revealed that participants took more risks to try to get bigger rewards after receiving dopamine but not a placebo.

Dopamine is involved in reward learning and previous research has linked dopamine drugs with compulsive gambling problems in people with Parkinson's disease.

When it comes to serotonin that regulates mood, appetite, sleep and also impacts cognitive functions including memory and learning, increased levels can cause vasoconstriction (constriction of blood vessels which increases blood pressure) and contributes to migraine.

"Large amounts of serotonin are also secreted by carcinoid tumours, resulting in flushing (of the skin, usually of the head and the upper part of thorax)," said Dr. Keki Turel, consultant neurosurgeon and ex-head, department of neurosurgery, Bombay Hospital.

The healthy levels of both neuro-chemicals are affected by our changing lifestyles; so tweaking the way we live can help us get back our optimum levels.

"Exercise, especially ancient practices of pranayama and yoga, can go a long way in ensuring balanced levels of the two important neurotransmitters," Bhatjiwale advised.

When our thoughts are judgmental or critical, the brain chemicals affect our immune system in a negative way. And when our thoughts are loving, empowering and positive, the neurotransmitters enhance the immune system.

"Science is confirming that our negative thinking is killing us. Joy and sorrow are all creations of the mind. Peace is within you and what's strange is that it stays right where restlessness, anger and resentment reside! You can control your thoughts with mindful meditation and positive lifestyle," explained Dr. Rajiv Anand, director (neurology) at the BLK Super Specialty Hospital here.

At times, anti-depressants and other medication can affect healthy levels of both brain chemicals. "There are some people who are genetically predisposed to having high or low levels of these neurotransmitters, leading to Parkinsonism and schizophrenia," Behari noted.

According to her, such people can have certain food which are rich in these neurotransmitters - like complex carbohydrates, the B vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids.

Food such as whole-wheat bread, pasta, potatoes, cereal and brown rice are rich in tryptophan - an amino acid that converts to serotonin in the brain.

Other nutrient-rich carbohydrate choices include starchy root vegetables such as sweet potatoes and carrots, as also corn.

"Participate in activities that you like. 'Giving' is also known as 'Vitamin G' that if we provide to people in terms of means, support, education and spiritual support, we can remain happy 24/7," Behari said.

In a nutshell, enjoy life, eat and sleep well and give anxiety an early retirement to keep your mood and confidence levels up.


A 'Kapda Bank' to help the poorest of the poor

India

oi-Reetu

New Delhi, Jan 27: When we say bank, one can only think of money, but can you imagine a bank which provides clothes?

Yes, in Maharashtra, a 'Kapda Bank' was inaugurated which intends to provide clothes to the poorest of poor.

Few day back, a 'Roti Bank' was also launched by the Haron Mukati Islamic Centre. HMIC founder Yusuf Mukati said that while the 'roti bank' is flourishing with food donations, he had observed that many poor people who came to pick up their food packets barely had enough clothes.

"In fact, I saw many people, especially elders and children, shivering in the biting cold as they were wearing torn or insufficient clothes. This gave me an idea to do something about the problem," Mukati told IANS.

He passed the word around the communities to come forward and donate whatever extra clothes people could manage.

The response was most encouraging, he said.

"The only condition was that though the clothes may be used, they should not be torn or worn out, so we can directly donate them to the poor people. I was surprised when within two days, I got a 'deposit' of around 600 full sets of clothes and we could open the 'Kapda Bank' on the auspicious Republic Day," Mukati said.

All clothes are carefully examined for any wear/tears, missing buttons, hooks, loose stiching, segregated according to size and gender, then sent for dry-cleaning and ironing before they are given in transparent plastic bags to the beneficiaries.

The first day saw a large number of poor men, women and children, mostly slumdwellers, trooping down to collect the clothes.

Mukati's team of volunteers checked out their 'yellow ration cards' indicating they fall in the below poverty line (BPL) category and gave them one set of clothes each after noting down their names, addresses, etc.

"This is to ensure that people don't come repeatedly for more clothes and we can cast the net wide for beneficiaries. We want them to wear and use the clothes and not give them away or even sell them cheap. We want everbody to appear dignified with decent clothes," said Mukati.

Now, people are encouraged to donate their extra or unused shoes, slippers, sweaters, bedsheets, rugs, pillows, mattresses, etc, which can be given to the poor through the Kapda Bank.

This is the second major initiative by HMIC after launching the Roti Bank on December 5 last year, which has elicited response from social organizations and groups across India.

Advised and inspired by Mukati, the Badavara Bandhu Charitable Trust, Mysuru started a Roti Bank which was inaugurated on Tuesday by Rajmata Pramodadevi Wodeyar at Mahaveera Nagar in the erstwhile royal kingdom.

Mukati said that inspired by the HMIC initiative, around 250 organisations from all over India are in touch with him and want to launch similar roti banks in their areas.

Besides the Roti Bank and the Kapda Bank, the HMIC contributes to women's uplift with an academic centre for 2,000 girls in which they impart regular spiritual and vocational education in 15 different vocations, including yoga, fashion designing and computers.

OneIndia News

(With inputs from agencies)
Cabinet okays amendment to railway land policy, 300 cargo terminals to be developed in 5 years

Cabinet gives approval to Afghan parliament construction

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New Delhi, Jan 27: The union cabinet on Wednesday gave post facto approval for the construction of Afghanistan's parliament building in Kabul, built by India at a revised cost of Rs.969 crore.

The project was inaugurated and dedicated jointly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani on December 25, 2015.

The building will be handed over to the Afghan authorities by March 31, an official statement issued here said.

"It is part of India's efforts in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan. The project is a visible symbol of India's contribution to strengthening and rebuilding democracy in Afghanistan," it said.

The construction of the new parliament building was completed in December 2015 under the India-Afghanistan development cooperation whereas minor touch-up work, including part of sound system and furniture, are being undertaken, the statement said.

IANS
Gap between rich and poor has widened, needs to be bridged: Gadkari

First in Maha: Nagpur Central Jail inmates get SBI ATM cards

India

oi-PTI

Nagpur, Jan 27: Around 140 inmates of the Central Prison here were given State Bank of India (SBI) ATM cards on Wednesday, Jan 27 for use inside the premises, with plans to extend the service to all 800 prisoners of the facility.

The cards were given to select inmates by Maharashtra Additional Director General of Police (Prisons), Dr Bhushan Kumar Upadhyaya and the SBI Deputy General Manager, Nagpur Zone, B Shankar in the presence of Jail Superintendent Yogesh Desai and Assistant GM, SBI, Nagpur Zone, Rakesh Sinha.

Upadhyaya said over 10,000 inmates in nine Central prisons across Maharashtra will be extended the facility.

Nagpur has been chosen as a pilot project, he said. The inmates can swipe the cards in the canteen to purchase daily use items like soaps, hair oil, eatables etc against the payment they receive for doing works on the premises.

The inmates can also use the cards once they are released after serving their terms, Upadhyaya said adding it will inculcate a habit of savings among them.

Any prisoner can spend up to Rs 2,500 per month. Their relatives can also deposit in their respective saving bank accounts up to Rs 2,500 which is the monthly upper limit for inmates, he said.

Shankar said the SBI might tie up for similar smart card facility in other Central Prisons in the State. Upadhyaya also said prisoners practising Yoga are entitled for remission up to a maximum of three months.

"Since Yoga has been adopted by the United Nations and Yoga Day is celebrated on June 21, the facility is being extended to them," he added. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had visited the Central Prison here on June 21 last and practised Yoga with the inmates.

PTI
India sews up cyber security accords with 3 countries

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New Delhi, Jan 27: Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has signed agreement with its counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore and Japan, an official statement said here on Wednesday, Jan 27.

The agreements related to cyber security will promote closer cooperation for exchange of knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of security related incidents between India and the respective country, the cabinet statement said.

The CERT-In and its Malaysian counterpart signed an agreement on November 23, 2015, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Malaysia.

The agreement between CERT-In and Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team, Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, was signed on November 24, 2015.

The agreement between CERT-In and Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center was signed on December 7 through diplomatic exchange and exchange of the signed agreements between the two parties completed by December 22, 2015.

IANS
Interview: Suspected IS sympathiser Najmul Huda's family says he was sharing casual IS posts

India

oi-Shreyas

Mangaluru, Jan 27: The arrest of suspected IS sympathiser Najmul Huda from Permude village tucked in the corner of Mangaluru has dropped spotlight on educated Muslims falling prey to the web of global jihad.

Najmul Huda, a 26-year-old diploma holder in polymer technology and a chemical engineering dropout from a well-known R V Engineering college, was arrested for allegedly sympathising with the Islamic State and for carrying out suspected activities over the social media.

The NIA, in a country-wide anti-terror swooping, arrested Huda, and seized five mobile phones, laptop, CDs and DVDs from his place. He was arrested from his house at Permude of Dakshina Kannada in a pre-dawn raid.

Now the family of Huda is shocked over the unexpected development, while they still maintain that 'Najmul is a masoom baccha' (innocent child). The family of Huda had migrated to Mangaluru almost 26 years back from Bihar. His father Saiful Huda is a cleric at a local mosque, Usmaniya Mohammedi Masjid at Permude.

Saiful Huda and his family, after repeated requests, agreed to give a brief interview to OneIndia in which the family stood behind Huda and Islam claiming Najmul is innocent. His sister (did not wish to name) said he was in possession of casual videos of ISIS, which the whole world sees through the internet.

"You know what is happening to Islam at global level. I do not want to talk about that. We are deeply saddened by the arrest as we believe that he is innocent", his sister rued.

When questioned why he was in a bid to fly to abroad, particularity Dubai, she said the family persuaded him to move out of the country to find a job. He was jobless and was looking after a mobile shop owned by his elder friend who resides at Mumbai.

It has to be observed that sleuths seized keys of the shop when he was arrested and was taken for the interrogation. Saiful Huda, father of Najmul, admitted his son was sharing IS related posts on Facebook, but it was casual shares and nothing unusual as to brand Najmul a sympathiser of IS or terrorist.

However, Saiful vociferously said Islam is being isolated across the globe and those fighting for the rights are looked at as terrorists. When asked "does Quran support killings", he said "Islam is a religion of peace and it does not support killing of women and children."

Najmul's mother (did not wish to name), whose eyes were numb while conversing said "ye to masoom baccha hai" (he is innocent child). The RV college now says he was not attending classes since 2013, while news reports say he dropped out in 2014.

On the other hand, his mother questioned, "why the RV authorities failed to inform us about his attendance in 2013. Are they now lying?" She genuinely pointed that how parents could know about what son is doing many miles away.

Besides she maintained that 4 mobile phones those were captured by the NIA were basic sets and all were defunct. There was one smart phone which Najmul was using.

She also disclosed that he was sharing usual posts on Facebook and 'Jihad' related photos. Najmul's sister said, he had one video of PM Narendra Modi visiting the Google office. What offense is holding the video?, she asked. "He was not using Skype. He did not had dongle and how he can avail the Skype?"

Saiful Huda, hoping his son would be released soon, said, "the NIA and Delhi Police showed video contents to me in Mangaluru commissioner's office. Astonishingly, there was no single content of Narendra Modi except few IS related videos."

OneIndia News
Kolkata hit-and-run case: IAF for joint probe with police

India

oi-PTI

Kolkata, Jan 27: Seeking a speedy probe in the hit-and-run case of an airman, the air force has requested Kolkata Police for a joint investigation.

In a letter written to Police Commissioner Surajit Kar Purkayastha recently by Air Vice Marshal KPUK Nair, Air Officer Commanding of Advance Headquarters in Eastern Air Command, a formal request for a joint investigation was made so that the process of probe and trial could be expedited.

Kolkata hit-and-run case: Another man held in Delhi

A defence official said IAF is yet to receive a response from the police. "We have also requested the police for a list of witnesses and all other evidences collected by them to help complete our own Court of Inquiry. These witnesses will later be required to depose before the Court of Inquiry," the official said.

The air force was also conducting its own departmental investigation into the January 13 incident at Red Road when 21-year-old corporal Abhimanyu Gaud was killed by a speeding Audi car during the Republic Day rehearsal.

Since then the police have arrested Sambia Sohrab, the main accused and son of state Trinamool Congress member Mohammed Sohrab, his friends Sonu and Johnnie.

In the meantime, the father of the late airman called up Air Vice Marshal Nair on Tuesday and referred to the situation in the aftermath of the period of custody of the accused coming to end.

"He also expressed his desire to meet Nair in person as he was of the view that the case may get prolonged and there may not be an early end in sight. He was assured by the Air Officer Commanding of all possible support in ensuring speedy delivery of justice," the official added.

PTI
PC SUPPORT TECHNICIAN (END USER & DESKTOP) CRANEIT-297259-Z:

Bowhead is hiring a PC Support Technician (End User & Desktop) to provide support to the NMCI CTR through software/hardware upgrades and support for NMCI tickets. Support responsibilities include software installation; and configurations. This technician performs technical; operational; and training support to users of personal computers either by telephone; or on-site for PC desktop hardware and software packages.

Other job duties will include; but are not limited to; troubleshooting computer problems; performing hardware and software diagnostics; coordinating needed repairs; resolving computer system problems; including coordination between users and components of a local area network; and participation in the evaluation of system configuration and software.

 Bachelors Degree (preferred) and 2 years of relevant experience or an equivalent combination of education, experience and certifications.

 IAT Level II Certification

 Good understanding of PCs, networks and common applications

 Good Communication skills

DESIRED SKILLS: Prior experience supporting the Information Technology Services Division (Code 104) at NSWC Crane

SECURITY CLEARANCE: Must be able to obtain a Secret clearance and maintain access to government/military installations. US Citizenship is a requirement for access to this military installation

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

1. Use of hands and fingers simultaneously with repetition.

2. Ability to lift objects up to 35 lbs.

3. Climbing, stooping, bending, kneeling, crouching or crawling.

4. Pulling or pushing.

5. Ability to ID and distinguish colors.

6. Reach/relocate items above shoulders.

7. Ability to work in extreme heat, cold, and adverse weather conditions.

8. Ability to distinguish difference in noise levels and work in high noise areas.

9. Ability to sit for prolonged periods at work station.

Office Environment: The environmental conditions consist of computer stations and desks with adequate and adjustable lighting. Chairs are designed to fit the various individuals and the tasks being performed. Dual monitors are utilized when projects specify their necessity. Ergonomic evaluations are completed as needed, to provide up to date modifications to all work stations. All employees interact with co-workers on a regular basis. Additional external environmental hazards are identified below.

Applicants may be subject to a pre-employment drug & alcohol screening and/or random drug screen, and must follow UICs Non-DOT Drug & Alcohol Testing Program requirements. Applicants may be subject to a random drug screen, and must follow UICs Non-DOT Drug & Alcohol Testing Program.

Where driving may be required or where a rental car must be obtained for business travel purposes, applicants must have a valid driver license for this position and will be subject to verification. In addition, the applicant must pass an in-house, online, driving course to be authorized to drive for company purposes.

All candidates must apply online at www.uicalaska.com, and submit a completed application for all positions they wish to be considered. Once the employment application has been completed and submitted, any changes to the application after submission may not be reviewed. Please contact a UIC HR Recruiter if you have made a significant change to your application.

In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), persons unable to complete an online application should contact UIC Human Resources for assistance (http://www.uicalaska.com/contact-us/human-resources/).

UIC is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, age, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics EOE/AA/M/F/D/V. In furtherance, pursuant to The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 43 U.S.C. Sec. 1601 et seq., and federal contractual requirements, UIC and its subsidiaries may legally grant certain preference in employment opportunities to UIC Shareholders and their Descendants, based on the provisions contained within The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

If the position requires, an applicant must pass a pre-employment criminal background history check. All post-secondary education listed on the applicants resume/application may be subject to verification.

UIC Government Services (UICGS) and its Bowhead family of companies are an Alaska Native Corporation owned by Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation (UIC) of Barrow, Alaska. UICGS/Bowhead provides innovative business solutions in areas such as engineering, maintenance services, information technology, program support, logistics/base support, and procurement. Collectively, the fast-growing Bowhead Family of Companies offers a breadth of services which are performed with a focus on quality results. Headquartered in Alexandria, VA, we are a fast-growing, multi-million-dollar corporation recognized as one of the top 25 8(a) companies for government contracting.

^ LINK TO APPLY:

https://rn21.ultipro.com/UKP1001/jobboard/NewCandidateExt.aspx?__JobID=8436
Maharashtra: Congress backs women's agitation for lifing temple entry ban

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Jan 27: Congress on Wednesday backed the agitation by a woman's organisation in Maharashtra for lifting of the centuries-old ban on female devotees entering the sacred platform at Shani Shinganpur temple in Ahmednagar district.

"I commend the move of one of the women's organisations of Maharashtra asserting their right of worship at Shani Shingnapur.

"Women have got equal rights in the field of religion and philosophy in our country for centuries. Doors of knowledge and religion should be open to everyone without any discrimination", party General Secretary Janardan Dwivedi said.

He said that it is the "pious duty" of whole society to support such a move. "This is also the responsibility of the government so that reason prevails over those people who are creating hurdles and problems in this direction."

His statement came a day after around 400 women activists made an attempt to defy the ban on female devotees entering the sacred platform at Shani Shingnapur which was foiled by police as they were stopped at a village, 70 km from the shrine.

The activists, who tried to head to the popular temple defying prohibitory orders to worship the deity, were detained by police at Supa village for a few hours and released in the evening and sent back to Pune in buses.

PTI
Mamata miffed for not being invited to be part of Bangaldesh PM's India visit

'Another feather in cap': Mamata on WB's highest success rate in All India Trade Test

'Is this acceptable?' Mamata Banerjee on Hindu Mahasabha's depiction of Mahatma Gandhi as Asura

People should be grateful to police and not always criticise: Mamata Banerjee

India

oi-PTI

Kolkata, Jan 27: Stating that the police in West Bengal has done a commendable job in maintaining the security of the state, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today said people should be grateful rather than criticising them.

"We criticise them throughout the year.. But we do not see their efforts. They will continue to work when we will enjoy the festival seasons...

Give me one single incident that has happened in West Bengal and still you will say that there is misrule in the state," Banerjee said at the Investiture Ceremony of the Kolkata Police at the Red Road here today.

"We need to see whether action at an incident has been taken quickly or not. We have produced the chargesheet within 72 hours of a rape incident," Banerjee said without specifying the incident.

Describing Kolkata Police as one of the best, Banerjee said that police officers have been doing hard work for which they have received distinguished awards.

"You will not get such a good police system anywhere..In fact, Bengal Police also has improved a lot," Banerjee said, adding that in four year's time around 90 new police stations have been set up.

Banerjee today inaugurated four police stations run by women personnel at Watgaunge, Tollygunge, Amherst Street and Patuli.

She stated that recruitments for the Police, which was ceased for a long time during the Left Front government, was started by her government.

"Huge task has been done. Youths from Jangalmahal have been recruited in the force, for green police, civic police... Our administration has done a commendable job and the state have surged ahead because of their efforts," she said.

"But people who cannot see this are only one per cent... Let them do it...,"Banerjee said.

PTI
President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh: Who has upper hand in Supreme Court

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Jan 27: The arguments before the Supreme Court of India on the imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh will be interesting. The decision taken by the cabinet was consented by the President of India.

The Supreme Court would today hear a petition challenging the imposition of President's Rule filed by a Congress leader who has alleged that the decision was flawed.

There will be various points of law and judgments which will come into the picture when the Supreme Court hears the matter today. Has the union cabinet acted in accordance with the provisions of the Indian Constitution or not is what the Supreme Court will decide.

Article 356 or 174:

Those challenging the decision to impose President's Rule would tell the Supreme Court that the Union Cabinet has abused its powers under Article 356. President's rule" refers to the imposition of Article 356 of the Constitution of India on a State whose constitutional machinery has failed. In the event that a State government is not able to function as per the Constitution, the State comes under the direct control of the central government; in other words, it is "under President's rule".

However, this power had been misused in the past and the Supreme Court in the S R Bommai case had stated that that courts can question the reasons leading up to the imposition of President's Rule. The point was reiterated in yet another verdict of the Supreme Court which had held that the report of the Governor cannot be considered as the Gospel truth.

The Union Cabinet will, however, argue that there has been no misuse of Article 356. First and foremost the Governor of the state had recommended imposition of President's rule only after Chief Minister Nabam Tuki lost majority after 21 Congress MLAs revolted against him.

The Union Government will also rely on the violation to Article 174 which states that a constitutional machinery has failed as the state assembly has not met in 6 months.

OneIndia News
Prez rule in Arunachal Pradesh: SC notice to centre, matter adjounred to Friday

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Jan 27: The Supreme Court today issued notices to the Union Government on a petition challenging the imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh. The Supreme Court directed the central government to file its response by January 29th (Friday).

Arunachal crisis: Former CM Tuki confident of proving majority

A petition had been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the imposition of President's rule in Arunachal Pradesh. The decision was taken by the union cabinet based on the recommendations of the governor of the state and the same was confirmed by the president of India as well.

Earlier the Supreme Court had sought for a report of the Governor based on whose recommendation President's rule was imposed in the state. The petition challenging this decision accused the union government of violating the provisions of Article 356 of the Indian constitution by usurping the powers of the elected government.

The Supreme Court which heard the matter this morning agreed for an emergency hearing on the same. When the matter came up for hearing at 2 PM today, the court sought for the report of the Governor. When the union government counsel said that it would take time, the court said that it would grant 15 minutes to produce the report. The court also said that the governor's report could be sent via email and the same placed before the bench.

OneIndia News
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Rohith Vemula suicide: Hyderabad varsity readies for a major overhaul

India

oi-Vicky

Hyderabad, Jan 27: The Hyderabad Central University is expected to bring about a host of changes in the days to come to bring about normalcy. There have been protests and the university has been in the news following the suicide of PhD scholar Rohith Vemula.

As a first measure that interim Vice Chancellor is expected to be changed. Vipin Srivastava had taken over as interim VC after Prof Appa Rao Podile went on indefinite leave.

Students flock to Hyderabad varsity for protest

The students have expressed displeasure over Srivastava taking over as the interim VC as he was chairman of the controversial committee that recommended the suspension of five students including Rohith Vemula.

Major changes expected

In the days to come several changes in the administration are expected to be effected. As a first measure the university would look to replace the interim VC. Srivastava had appealed for calm and even assured the students the university had not lodged a complaint or approached a court against the students.

However the students are refusing to relent for now and this has led to the university suggesting a change of interim VC.

In addition to this there may be a proposal seeking the resignation of Prof Podile who is on indefinite leave. The students have demanded that he resign from his post with immediate effect.

Moreover the administration of the university has been blamed by the Union HRD ministry for mishandling the situation. These aspects are likely to increase the call for the resignation of Prof. Podile.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 8:48 [IST]
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Rohith Vemulas birthday: Students plan Chalo Delhi protest

India

oi-Oneindia

By Maitreyee Boruah

Bengaluru, Jan 27: Friends and well-wishers of Rohith Vemula are going to mark his 27th birthday in a special way on January 30 (Saturday).

26-year-old Dalit research scholar from Hyderabad, who committed suicide on January 17, would have turned 27.

Around 200 student associations from across the country have set up a national joint action committee. Students are planning to commemorate Rohith's birthday with a Chalo Delhi (Let's march to Delhi) protest.

The Hyderabad Central University is on a boil since Rohith's tragic and untimely death. Protest rallies have become a regular affair at the university campus.

Several of Rohith's friends are on hunger strike. Three students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi are also on an indefinite hunger strike in solidarity with Hyderabad university student protesters.

Everyday students from various parts of the country are holding protests demanding justice for Rohith. Rohith's death has become a rallying point for all those who have long been saying that there exists a systematic discrimination of Dalit students in the higher educational institutions.

The agitating students are demanding resignations of Union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya over the suicide. They also want vice chancellor Appa Rao Podile to be sacked.

Rohith was one of the five scholars who were expelled, after a scuffle broke out between Ambedkar Students' Association (ASA) (Rohith was a member of ASA) and Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in August last year.

Protesters allege that pressure from Dattatreya, labour minister and BJP lawmaker from Secunderabad, resulted in Irani's education ministry sending repeated reminders to the university, forcing it to punish the students.

Protest marches were witnessed in the capital city on January 27 (Wednesday). Protesting the alleged "delay in justice" to Hyderabad university research scholar, scores of students from varsities across Delhi today once again marched to the HRD Ministry where around 100 of them were detained by Delhi police.

Moreover, 20 teachers from Bahujan Teachers' Association hailing from Nellore and Prakasham districts of Andhra Pradesh will be on a hunger strike from January 28 (Thursday), until justice is delivered to Rohith.

Students of several universities across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are on strike demanding justice for Rohith.

On January 27 (Wednesday), students of HCU painted themselves with black colours as a part of their protest.

OneIndia News
Five policemen killed in Naxal attack at Jharkhand

India

oi-Vicky

Palamu, Jan 27: Five police personnel have been killed in a Naxal attack at Palamu in Jharkhand on Wednesday.

Six others have been injured.

The policemen were killed when the convoy in which they were going was hit by a landmine planted by the Naxals.

The injured police personnel have been shifted to hospital. Senior police officials in Jharkhand informed OneIndia that the convoy was targetted by a landmine which the Naxals had planted.

Palamu in Jharkhand is known for its Naxal menace.

There had been intelligence suggesting that the Naxals may stage an attack in the event of a major operation undertaken against them by the security forces.

OneIndia News
TMC doing vote bank politics over Rohith: Smriti Irani

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Durgapur (West Bengal), Jan 27: Union Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday accused the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal of indulging in a vote bank politics over the suicide of a Dalit scholar in Hyderabad.

"Trinamool leader Derek O'Brien had gone to Hyderabad to demand justice for the Dalit student. I want to ask him... in Nadia, a Trinamool leader had murdered three Dalits inside their home in May 2015... why didn't O'Brien visit their families?" Irani said.

"Because for him, vote bank 'tamasha' in Hyderabad is more important than securing justice in Nadia," she said at a public rally in Durgapur, around 165 km from Kolkata.

Widespread protests have rocked India following the death of Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide on January 17 after his suspension along with four other Dalit students from Hyderabad University over an alleged clash with a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

Last week a two-member Trinamool MP delegation, led by its leader in the Rajya Sabha Derek O'Brien, spent a long time at the Hyderabad University campus and addressed the students demanding justice for Vemula.

Irani also slammed the Mamata Banerjee-led government on recent incidences of violence in the state.

"In Malda, a police station was burnt. Police watched the tamasha and Mamata did not say a word. Nobody said anything when the constitutional laws were being torn apart," she said.

Irani also criticised the party on the sensational hit-and-run case in which an IAF corporal was mowed down in Kolkata. He was killed while supervising the Republic Day Parade rehearsals.

IANS
Mamata Banerjee to reshuffle West Bengal Cabinet today | All you need to know

TMC welcomes Nitish's decision to ditch BJP, says \"no political party in NDA is safe\"

A new Trinamool Congress in six months? What we know

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Trinamool indulging in vote bank politics over Rohith: Smriti Irani

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Durgapur (West Bengal), Jan 27: Union minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday accused West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress of indulging in vote bank politics over the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad and flayed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for remaining a "silent spectator" to atrocities on women.

"Trinamool leader Derek O'Brien had gone to Hyderabad to demand justice for the Dalit student. I want to ask him... in Nadia, a Trinamool leader had murdered three Dalits inside their home in May 2015... why didn't O'Brien visit their families?" said the minister for human resource development.

"Because for him, vote bank 'tamasha' in Hyderabad is more important than securing justice in Nadia," she said at a public rally organised by the BJP in Burdwan district's Durgapur, around 165 km from Kolkata.

Widespread protests have rocked India following the death of Vemula, who committed suicide on January 17 after his suspension along with four other Dalit students from Hyderabad University over an alleged clash with a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

Last week, a two-member Trinamool parliamentary delegation, led by its leader in the Rajya Sabha O'Brien, spent a long time at the university campus and addressed the students demanding justice for Vemula.

Irani also slammed the Mamata Banerjee government on recent incidents of violence in the state.

"In Malda, a police station was burnt. Police watched the tamasha and Mamata did not say a word. Nobody said anything when the constitutional laws were being torn apart," she said, and also mentioned the sensational hit-and-run case in which an Indian Air Force corporal was mowed down in Kolkata.

Launching a scathing attack on the state government, she raised the issue of crimes against women.

"This assembly poll is not just a political fight but a fight for every brother who has seen his sister being sacrificed in the face of Trinamool's bad conduct. This is a fight for every sister when her modesty was outraged, the Trinamool was silently watching the show," she said, referring to the killing of 16-year-old student Rajib Das in Bengal's Barasat while trying to protect his sister from getting molested by drunken goons four years ago.

Mocking Banerjee's pet slogan of 'Maa, Maati, Manush' (Mother, Land and People), Irani said: "Nor did it (Trinamool) respect Maa, nor did it make the 'maati' productive nor did it manage to save its people."

On the chief minister announcing compensation to victims of violence against women, Irani pulled up the Trinamool supremo for "watching in silence as women's modesty was outraged".

"When a sister is molested, Trinamool puts a price on her modesty... Rs.20,000 to Rs.30,000 ki baat karte hain."

"Ask a woman that if the Bengal government puts a price on you, then is it not your insult?"

Irani also questioned the Trinamool's promise of 'parivartan' (change in English).

"I want to ask how many daughters will the Trinamool government sacrifice and how much blood will it shed on the land (maati) on which it vowed to bring about a change.

She charged Trinamool with preventing an immersion in Bengal's Nadia district during the Durga puja for "appeasement", and exhorted her party workers in the district to "teach them a lesson".

Amid assertions that "Trinamool has no right to come to power again", Irani also dredged up the issue of illegal sand mining in Durgapur.

"If I ask anyone in Durgapur what is their biggest problem? They say illegal mining, mafia but the state government hasn't done anything. You are encouraging the mafia instead of stopping it," she alleged.

IANS
What mystery object did IAF fighter aircraft shoot down in Rajasthan?

India

oi-Vicky

Jaipur, Jan 27: A probe has been launched following an incident in which a Sukhoi 30 Fighter aircraft of the Indian Air Force shot down an unidentified object at Barmer district in Rajasthan.

Sources say that the probe is on to find out what exactly the object was, but it prima facie it appears to be a meteorological balloon.

What has been ascertained is that the object was not dangerous and contained no explosives. Even an official statement from the IAF confirmed that the object did not contain explosives. While it appears to be a meteorological balloon the investigators are checking exactly where it had come from.

On high alert

The IAF says that they could not take any chances. The object looked suspicious and hence had to be shot down. Moreover yesterday being Republic Day, the nation was on high alert.

Further there are enough and more intelligence bureau alerts that had been issued in the past couple of days warning of strikes on Republic Day.

IAF officials say that a detailed probe is on. In an official statement, the IAF had said that between 1030 and 1100 hours on Tuesday, an unidentified balloon shaped object was picked up by IAF radar. An IAF fighter was launched which intercepted the object and brought it down.

The incident took place in Barmer, nearly 500 km from Jaipur. There were loud sounds and the villagers had reported that metal pieces were falling from the sky. The IAF however clarified that it was just scrap from the spent shells that fell on some of the houses.

OneIndia News
PROJECT ANALYST (CRANE-15-0093-F):

Bowhead seeks a Project Analyst in support of GXMT. Tasking consists of, but is not limited to the following:

 Proofread briefs, presentations, reports, and written correspondence for proper grammar, spelling, and overall comprehensiveness

 Attend meetings, prepare minutes and track action items and send out weekly reminders

 Manage and maintain meeting schedules in Microsoft Outlook for the Division and Branch

 Scheduling meetings, reserving conference rooms

 Compile monthly metrics and post to SharePoint

 Assist in collection of data for miscellaneous data calls

 Use automated government financial systems to track, analyze and prepare financial and budget reports

 Create, update and track DD1149 Shipping Requests

 Prepare and track travel orders for employees in Defense Travel System (DTS)

 Check branch funding balances and update NWAs weekly using EDW and ERP report

 Research, record and analyze cost transactions to determine if appropriate levels of funds and type of funds exist

 Assist in creation of financial budget plans for the year and track/execute funding according to the plan

 Bachelors Degree and 3+ years of relevant experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

 Prior experience supporting NSWC Crane.

 Experience with SharePoint, Adobe Acrobat and various Microsoft Programs, such as Outlook, Word, Access, Excel, Project and PowerPoint

Physical Demands: Office Environment   The environmental conditions consist of computer stations and desks with adequate and adjustable lighting. Chairs are designed to fit the various individuals and the tasks being performed. Ergonomic evaluations are completed as needed, to provide up to date modifications to all work stations.

UIC is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, age, color, religion, sex, national

origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics EOE/AA/M/F/D/V. In furtherance, pursuant to The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 43 U.S.C. Sec. 1601 et seq., and federal contractual requirements, UIC and its subsidiaries may legally grant certain preference in employment opportunities to UIC Shareholders and their Descendants, based on the provisions contained within The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

If the position requires, an applicant must pass a pre-employment criminal background history check. All post-secondary education listed on the applicants resume/application may be subject to verification.

All candidates must apply online at www.uicalaska.com, and submit a completed application for all positions they wish to be considered. Once the employment application has been completed and submitted, any changes to the application after submission may not be reviewed. Please contact a UIC HR Recruiter if you have made a significant change to your application. In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), persons unable to complete an online application should contact UIC Human Resources for assistance (http://www.uicalaska.com/contact-us/human-resources/).

UIC Government Services (UICGS) and its Bowhead family of companies are an Alaska Native Corporation owned by Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation (UIC) of Barrow, Alaska. UICGS/Bowhead provides innovative business solutions in areas such as engineering, maintenance services, information technology, program support, logistics/base support, and procurement. Collectively, the fast-growing Bowhead Family of Companies offers a breadth of services which are performed with a focus on quality results. Headquartered in Alexandria, VA, we are a fast-growing, multi-million-dollar corporation recognized as one of the top 25 8(a) companies for government contracting.

^ Link to Apply: https://rn21.ultipro.com/UKP1001/jobboard/NewCandidateExt.aspx?__JobID=15510
This man plays saxophone to a herd of cows in Oregon field after learning from YouTube

1 dead as police arrest Oregon siege leader: FBI

International

oi-PTI

Los Angeles, Jan 27: One person died in an armed clash with police as they arrested the leaders of a group laying siege to an American wildlife refuge, the FBI said.

Ammon Bundy, who has led the revolt in rural Oregon, was one of seven people arrested after a stand-off pitting an anti-government militia against the US authorities.

Bundy has said protesters acted at the request of a rancher who wanted to graze his 600 cattle on federal property, but was prevented from doing so when the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) installed a fence last year.

Bundy, 40, was arrested along with six others who face "a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats," the FBI said.

"During (the) arrest, there were shots fired," the FBI statement said of an operation along a highway involving FBI agents and Oregon state police. Authorities did not immediately identify the person who was killed.

"One individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased," and another person was injured and receiving medical treatment, the FBI statement added.

The activist group which took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was protesting the jailing of two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were convicted of arson. They were calling for the government to turn over federal land in the area to the people.

Both ranchers distanced themselves from the movement and voluntarily began their scheduled prison sentences after the occupation began. Some neighbors and members of the local community, notably the Oregon Cattlemen's Association, rejected the takeover, even if they support the Hammonds' plight.

AFP
Don't drop off children in pyjamas: UK school tells parents

International

oi-PTI

London, Jan 27: In an unusual appeal, a primary school in the UK has asked parents to wash in the morning and stop dropping their children off in their pyjamas.

Kate Chisholm, the Head Teacher of Skerne Park Academy, Darlington, Durham, made the appeal after she noticed more and more adults wearing pyjamas at the school gates as well as at meetings and assemblies.

She said her aim was to help set a good example for pupils. Chisholm said the final straw came when parents wore pyjamas to the Christmas show and to recent parents' evenings.

"It just got to the point when I thought 'enough's enough'," she was quoted as saying by a media.

"I'm not trying to tell people what to do with their lives, but I just think having a really good role model first thing in the morning, getting yourself up, getting yourself dressed, ready for business, out to school is a really good example to set," she said.

"I'm afraid wearing pyjamas, going to school, maybe doesn't reinforce that somehow," she added.In her letter, Chisholm wrote: "If we're to raise standards it's not too much to ask parents to have a wash and get dressed.

I have had loads of support from the community and people saying it's about time something was done. I have had far more positive responses than negative.

" Parent Phil Naylor said wearing nightwear to school was "disgraceful".Naylor said Chisholm had his support, "It's disgraceful, we should be guiding our children not giving them bad habits."

Skerne Park Academy is not the first school to have problems with dishevelled parents. In 2011, 11 schools across Middlesbrough wrote to parents, asking them to dress appropriately for the school run.

PTI
India concerned over downtrend in Middle East peace process

International

oi-PTI

United Nations, Jan 27: India has expressed concern over the downward trend in the Middle east peace process including Yemen, Syria and has called for a resumption of a comprehensive peace process that brings a lasting solution to the Palestinian issue.

"We are concerned that since last attempts for serious direct talks broke in April 2014, there has been a downward trend in the peace process despite efforts for serious negotiations between the parties which remained inconclusive," India's new permanent representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin told the Security Council yesterday.

Instead there has been an unfortunate escalation in Gaza, Akbaruddin said while participating in an open debate on the situation in the Middle East. Unilateral actions by the parties unfortunately are moving them further apart, he said adding that India remains firmly convinced that dialogue remains the only viable option that can effectively address the issue.

"The imperative need is for restraint, to avoid provocation and unilateral actions and to return to the peace process. We remain hopeful and urge both sides to resume the peace process soon, for a comprehensive, just and lasting resolution of the Palestinian issue," Akbaruddin said.

Voicing concern over the political and security situation in Yemen, he asked all concerned parties there to amicably resolve their differences. "We hope that the UN-mediation efforts would assist the people of Yemen in finding a consensus-based solution," he said.

Akbaruddin also expressed concern with the activities of proscribed outfits, radicalised and extremist groups in the West Asia and Gulf region especially in northern parts of Iraq and Syria which are critically impacting on peace and stability in the region.

Saudi Arabia: The vital factor in the Middle East cauldron

"Efforts must be taken by all parties and stakeholders in the region to curb these dangerous trends. We believe the consolidation of political processes and solutions while building durable state institutions will be the effective way of addressing such extremism and radicalism in the region," he said.

He said New Delhi's position on the Middle East Peace Process has been consistent and clear. "India supports a negotiated solution resulting in a sovereign, independent, viable and united State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side at peace with Israel as endorsed in the Quartet Roadmap and relevant UNSC Resolutions," he said.

"India has always played a proactive role in garnering support for the Palestinian cause in multilateral fora. We supported the recent vote in the General Assembly on raising the flags of non-member observer states," Akbaruddin said.

PTI
Italy gets 'tied' up instead of ties with Iran, hides its nude sculptures

International

oi-Pallavi

Rome, Jan 27: Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi went a little too far for signing ties with Iran after he instructed to cover up the nude sculptures of Rome's Capitoline museum to avoid offending President Hassan Rouhani who is visiting the country.

It is said that Italy and Iran will be signing 17 billion Euros of business deals during the two days visit of the Iranian delegation that began on Monday. However, the opposition leaders are not happy and they accuse the PM of going overboard to please them.

They said that Renzi's act of hiding the nude sculptures in a way demeaned the culture of the country. Luca Squeri, a lawmaker in former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia party said,"Respect for other cultures cannot and must not mean negating our own."

She was not the only one to demand an explanation from the leader, but Northern League deputy Barbara Saltamartini and Gianluca Peciola, of the Left, Ecology and Freedom party also deemed this derogatory.

OneIndia News
N Korea a 'threat to the world': Kerry

International

oi-PTI

Beijing, Jan 27: Nuclear-armed North Korea poses an "overt threat, a declared threat to the world", US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Beijing today after talks with his Chinese counterpart following Pyongyang's fourth nuclear test earlier this month.

"The United States will do what is necessary to protect our country and our friends and allies in the world," Kerry added at a joint press conference with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.

A US official said earlier the issue would be at the top of Kerry's agenda in his talks with Wang, adding: "The Secretary has made no secret... of his conviction that there is much more that China can do by way of applying leverage (on Pyongyang)."

China is North Korea's chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor, but those ties have become strained in recent years as Beijing's patience wears thin with Pyongyang's unwillingness to rein in its nuclear weapons ambitions.

After the latest test on January 6 - which Pyongyang said was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, a claim largely dismissed by experts - China said it "firmly opposes" the North's actions and summoned its diplomats for "solemn representations".

Nevertheless, the Asian power has proven reluctant to follow Washington's lead on the issue and no substantive actions towards the North have been announced.

Kerry said the two powers - both of them permanent members of the UN Security Council - had agreed to mount an "accelerated effort" to reach agreement on a new United Nations resolution on the issue.

But Beijing's ties with Pyongyang were forged in the blood of the Korean War and analysts say its leverage is mitigated by its overriding fear of a North Korean collapse and the prospect of a reunified, US-allied Korea directly on its border.

Earlier, as the two diplomats met, Wang welcomed the fact that Kerry's trip had taken in a number of Asian countries, saying visiting them could help him understand the continent.

"It can help you listen to voices more objectively," he added. As Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, the state-run China Daily ran an article headlined: "Experts have low hopes for Kerry's China trip."

Before today's meeting, the official news agency Xinhua issued a commentary blaming the US's "uncompromising hostility" and "Cold War mentality" for the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Washington's actions, such as flying a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber close to the inter-Korean boder, were heightening the North's "sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship", it added.

PTI
US Secretary of State John Kerry presses China on North Korea, South China Sea

International

oi-PTI

Beijing, Jan 27: US Secretary of State John Kerry called on Wednesday for China to do more to rein in North Korea's nuclear activities and decrease tensions over disputed parts of the South China Sea.

Wrapping up an eight-day, around-the-world diplomatic mission in Beijing, Kerry hailed US-China cooperation on several issues, including the Iran nuclear deal and climate change, but said consensus on North Korea and the South China Sea remained a work in progress.

"Clearly we have several important issues that we need to find the way forward on," Kerry told reporters as he began his meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Kerry called North Korea "a major challenge to global security" and noted US "concerns and activities in the South China Sea."

"We have proven ... when our two countries find common ground and work together, we can make things happen," he said. "And it is my hope that today will be constructive and we will find a way forward."

In his opening remarks, Wang mentioned both issues briefly and said he was eager to hear what Kerry had to say. But he offered no hint as to whether China would respond to the entreaties beyond saying he hoped the two nations would be able "to deepen our understanding and mutual trust to deepen our strategic cooperation."

The US badly wants China to take a firmer stance in urging North Korea to end its nuclear testing. China is North Korea's main link to the outside world, and American officials say Beijing isn't doing enough to persuade North Korea to stop the tests and return to disarmament talks.

The so-called six-party talks between the North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan have been stalled since they were last held in December 2008.

Pyongyang has since conducted three nuclear tests, including the latest on January 6, sparking worries the country has made progress in its bomb program. Kerry, who after meeting with Wang was set to see State Councilor Yang Jiechi and hoped to meet later with President Xi Jinping, also called on China to halt land reclamation and construction in disputed areas of the South China Sea, which have alarmed its smaller neighbors.

Kerry arrived in China from stops in Laos and Cambodia, where he called on the two members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to present a united front in dealing with increasing Chinese assertiveness over the South China Sea claims.

AP
No need for massive new strikes on Ukraine: Vladimir Putin

'If NATO clashes with Russian army, it will lead to global catastrophe,' says Putin

Wedding on cards for Vladimir Putin?

International

oi-Jagriti

Moscow, Jan 27: Russian President Vladimir Putin may remarry soon as his ex-wife has reportedly remarried. However, the Kremlin remained tight lipped over the reported marriage of president's ex-wife.

Kremlin is the official residence of the President of the Russian.

According to a reports in Russia, former first lady Lyudmila has married to 37 year-old Arthur Ocheretny, who used to work at a company called Art Show Centre. The company organised parties for United Russia - Putin's political party - and energy giant Gazprom, reported the Daily Mail.

Lyudmila, a former airline stewardess, got married to Putin in 1983 and they have two daughters. The couple announced their divorce in July 2013.

President Putin is also rumoured to be a partner of gymnast Kabayeva, who is in her early 30s. Although both have angrily denied a relationship.

Vladimir Putin denies using his dog to scare Angela Merkel

After divorce, Putin had said that he will not remarry himself until Lyudmila is 'betrothed'.

If wedding reports of his ex-wife is true, it may pave the way for him to remarry.

OneIndia News
Terror in Islamabad: A top secret mission, all for the nation, all for the truth

Why did Pak army chief General Sharif decide not to overstay?

International

oi-Vicky

Islamabad, Jan 27: The decision by General Raheel Sharif (Pakistan army chief) not to overstay in office has made news. It may come as a surprise as to why an army chief's decision not to extend his tenure is making so much news. This is mainly because he becomes the first army chief in Pakistan since 1998 not to overstay in office.

Although his tenure ends in November 2016, he had made a surprise statement a day back in which he said, " I do not believe in extension and will retire on the due date.

Why is the general's decision surprising?

While he is the first army chief in Pakistan since 1998 not to extend his tenure, people also draw comparisons to his immediate predecessors, General Pervez Musharaff and General Ashfaq Kayani. Musharaff had not only overstayed, but even topped the civilian government. Kayani on the other hand took the extension of three years given to him.

General Sharif is considered to be a sensible army chief. With this unprecedented announcement made almost 10 months in advance, he has put to rest all speculations. There have been speculations in Pakistan whether he would continue in office after November 2016 also. Experts say that he has done his job and wants to ensure that there is a smooth transition.

In addition to this, General Sharif also wants to ensure that the job of picking his successor is done early so that the person in question is prepared.

Pakistan has been battling terrorists with the army taking the lead in the past couple of years. General Sharif wants to ensure that this exercise continues and no time is wasted in talking about his retirement plans.

A report in the Pakistan's Tribune states that the army chief's clear thinking' reflected in some of the crucial decisions he has made, such as launching a full-scale military offensive in North Waziristan Agency and supporting the democratic setup despite anti-government protests in August 2014.

When Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan and Pakistan Awami Tehreek chief Tahirul Qadri descended on Islamabad with tens of thousands of supporters to oust the premier, Gen Raheel assured the beleaguered premier that the army had no interest in removing him from power. "History shows that he lived up to his words. the Tribune also reported.

OneIndia News

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United States Postal ServiceExternal Publication for Job Posting 10001004

If this job requires qualification on an examination, the number of applicants who will be invited to take or retake the



examination may be limited.



Branch



Greater Indiana District



Job Posting Period



01/26/2016  01/31/2016



This job has an exam requirement. Currently, applicants for this posting who do not yet have an exam score are being



invited to take the exam. Examining will continue until capacity has been reached.



Job Title



PSE SALES & SVCS/DISTRIBUTION ASSOCIATE



Facility Location



HARMONY



1875 E US HIGHWAY 40



HARMONY, IN 47853-9998



CONTACT INFORMATION: Timothy.J.Williams@usps.gov



Position Information



Title: PSE SALES & SVCS/DISTRIBUTION ASSOCIATE



FLSA Designation: Non-Exempt



Occupation Code: 2395-0017



Non-Scheduled Days: Varies



Hours: Varies



Window training is required after hire, followed by an end-of-training test on which employee must qualify to remain



employed.



Postal Support Employees (PSE) hold temporary appointments for periods not-to-exceed 360 days. Subsequent



appointments after a 5 day break in service may be offered but are not guaranteed and should not be expected because the



use of PSEs is discretionary and subject to business needs.



PSEs can be scheduled any hours and the position is intended to be very flexible, including weekends and holidays as



needed. PSEs must be available to work when needed.



SALARY RANGE: $15.63 per hour paid bi-weekly



FINANCE NUMBER: 173641



BENEFIT INFORMATION: This is a non-career position, which may lead to a career position depending on organizational



needs. Limited benefits include paid time off at the rate of 1 hour for every 20 paid hours, and pay raises. After one year of



service, PSEs may be eligible for health insurance under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program with a Postal



Service premium contribution for APWU CDHP, dental and vision insurance through the Federal Employees Dental and



Vision Insurance Program, and long term care insurance through the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program.



Persons Eligible to Apply



All U.S. Citizens, permanent resident aliens, citizens of American Samoa or any other territory owing allegiance to the United



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Functional Purpose



Performs distribution and a variety of sales and customer support services for products. Maintains pleasant and effective



public relations with customers and others requiring a general familiarity with postal laws, regulations, and procedures



commonly used.



DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES



1. Performs any variety of sales and customer services at a retail window such as maintaining sufficient inventory of and



selling stamps, stamped paper, other retail products and services and may use a computerized system, accepting and



delivering packages and accountable mail; issuing and cashing foreign and domestic postal money orders; accepting and



responding to customer claims and inquiries, and providing information to the public regarding postal regulations.



2. Provides sales and customer service support by greeting customers and explaining store layout; determining special



interests and referring to sales and promotional programs; offers assistance in product selection; provides special assistance;



and answers customer inquiries when needed.



3. Provides product and service information to customers, including informing customers regarding special offers;



suggestive selling related merchandise; promoting products based on customer needs. Provides additional information



regarding product features and services.



4. Handles and processes customer purchases and returns relating to products and services and may use a point of sale



system. Assists customers with transactions.



5. Maintains appearance of store by setting up, arranging, and replenishing displays and merchandise racks; ensures



display and selling areas, work stations, and storage areas are presentable to customers.



6. Conducts product inventories by counting items on hand; attaches and removes security devices; accounts for items on



display; and verifies and records sales floor inventory and shrinkage. Brings inventory discrepancies and shrinkage reports to



the attention of the appropriate supervisory presence.



7. May verify presort and bulk mailings of all classifications computing and maintaining on a current basis mailers credit



balances.



8. Checks and sets post office stamp-vending machines and postage meters.



9. Rents post office boxes, receives rental payments, conducts reference checks, and completes related forms.



10. In addition, may assign and clear accountable items.



11. Distributes primary and one or more secondary schemes of incoming mail by delivery point based on a knowledge of the



distribution scheme established for the office, branch or station.



12. Distributes primary and one or more secondary schemes of outgoing mail for dispatch based on knowledge of current



distribution schemes.



13. Follows established safe work methods, procedures and safety precautions while performing all duties.



14. Performs other duties as assigned.



PSE SSDAs perform a variety of clerical duties in mail processing and retail/customer services to support day to day



operations.



Duties are physically demanding requiring moderate to heavy lifting, carrying, prolonged standing, walking and reaching.



PSEs may be required to handle heavy sacks of mail/parcels, sort & distribute incoming/outgoing mail, and work at a service



window selling postal products & services to customers. Applicants must be able to perform the duties of the position with or



without accommodation.



SUPERVISION



Supervisor of unit to which assigned.



The United States Postal Service has the following excellent and challenging employment opportunity for highly motivated



and innovative individuals. Successful candidates must demonstrate through a combination of education, training, and



experience the following requirements:

Requirements



1. Physical Requirements:

Applicants must be physically able to perform efficiently the duties of the position with or without reasonable accommodation.



Qualified applicants must successfully pass a pre-employment drug screening to meet the U.S. Postal Services requirement



to be drug free. Applicants must also be a U.S. citizen or have permanent resident alien status.



IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

Applications must be submitted by 11:59 p.m., Central Time, of the postings closing date. Applicants claiming veterans



preference must attach a copy of member copy 4 (only) of Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty (DD Form



214) or other proof of eligibility if claiming 10-point veterans preference. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is an



equal opportunity employer. The USPS provides reasonable accommodation for any part of the application, interview, and/or



selection process, please make your request to the examiner, selecting official or local manager of Human Resources. This



request can also be made by someone on your behalf. Explain the nature of your limitations and the accommodation



needed. The decision on granting reasonable accommodation will be on a case-by-case basis.



SPECIAL NOTE: Current career Postal Service employees are ineligible to apply to this posting.
One of PNGs Significant and Iconic Government Building was officially opened today in Port Moresby after being left rundown for a very long time.The Iconic Pineapple Building which was named Marea House was opened by the Prime Minister Peter ONeill today in front of all Cabinet Ministers, Governors and departmental heads at Waigani this afternoon.However, in opening the Building PM ONeill renamed it to SIR MANASUPE HOUSE in recognition of Chief Secretary Sir Manasupe Zurenous governments service, which he had served this country in the last 30 years."It is right that outstanding Papua New Guineans are given that recognition that they deserve in their dedication and work that they do in moving this country forward," said Mr O'Neill.The Sir Manasupe House was an Oil Search Funded project to have it refurbished and the key to the building was handed over the the PM by Oil Search Boss Gerea Aopi.The Building has 12 levels, 9 of which are office areas and an open car park area that can cater for more than 200 vehicles.The Dept of PM & NEC will be the first ones to move into the office.
Komfie Manalo, Opalesque Asia:

"The planned hedge fund parks in Shanghai, and also in Pudong and Hangzhou have received a warm welcome from both local and foreign investors," says Kenny Li, CEO of Sino-Foreign joint venture firm Quattro Quant, during the latest Opalesque China Roundtable. He adds that the original plan for a hedge fund park was for 10 offices in CITIC plaza, but the number of registrants climbed rapidly, beating even long-term projections.

According to Li, Hongkou, a district of Shanghai wanted to create a niche in the financial sector and launched the first ever development zone for hedge funds in China called Shanghai Hedge Fund Park. The local government originally hoped to register 70 firms in one zone, with a collective AUM of $1.54bn (RMB 10bn) within a year-and-a-half. But by May 2015, some 250 firms, managing a total AUM of $22.8bn (RMB 150bn) had asked to join.

Hedge fund parks also established in Pudong, Hangzhou

After helping to prove the concept for a financial center in Shanghai, Li acted as a consultant for the Hongkou government on the other parks. Li's firm, Quattro Quant aimed to become the local partner for new hedge funds to help them run their China business.

Dr. Martin Lockstrom QuantCore Capital Management added that there are also hedge fund parks planned in Pudong and Hangzh......................

To view our full article Click here
Komfie Manalo, Opalesque Asia:

A group of U.S. and London-based macro hedge funds made money when they correctly predicted that China would devalue the yuan between 20 and 50 percent, reported Free Malaysia Today.

Texas-based fund Corriente Partners, which earned hundreds of millions of dollars forecasting Europes debt crisis, has been increasing its "low delta" options since September of last year and benefitted from the 50% decline in the yuan.

Corriente believed that even with $3.3tln in foreign reserves, Chinese regulators would not be able to contain withdrawals from investors as well as local savers.

Corriente chief Mark Hart was quoted as saying on Real Vision TV, "China has an opportunity now to allow a very sharp devaluation. The wise move would be to do it quickly. If they wait to see if things change, they will be doing it increasingly from a position of weakness. Thats how you invite the speculators. Every month that they hemorrhage cash, people look at it and say, 'well now if they werent able to defend the currency last month, now theyre even weaker."

Since the start of 2014, London-based Omni Macro Fund has been shorting the Chinese yuan. Omni shares the view of several other hedge fund managers who believe that the further weakening of the yuan is becoming an accepted reality.

"Its a popular t......................

To view our full article Click here
Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York:

2015 was a rough year for a lot of hedge fund managers, but it was especially bad for Bill Ackman's Pershing Square. Ackman included in his most recent investor letter an apology to investors for the poor performance. "2015 is a year we will not forget," he wrote.

Ackman cited missed opportunities to sell out of some of his positions namely, Valeant which hit $200 over the summer. The uptick was modest from Pershing's entry at $196, but the price has subsequently fallen on controversies surrounding its business practices. Ackman called the miss a "very costly mistake" but not an unforced error, as Pershing was restricted from trading after it became aware of a transaction in Valeant's pipeline.

He also said the firm made a similar blunder by failing to trim its position in Canadian Pacific after another modest gain in price.

"Our most glaring, albeit small, unforced error was buying additional stock in Platform Specialty Products at $25 per share to assist the company in financing an acquisition," he wrote of another botched call. "We paid too much as we assumed the new transaction would create substantial value, and because we assigned too much platform value to the company."

Despite this list, Ackman stands by the concentration of his portfolio. He noted one factor that isn't necessarily economic in nature, but that appears to be impacting performance - as Pershing Square has developed a following amon......................

To view our full article Click here
Komfie Manalo, Opalesque Asia:

A federal court ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday to refund the now defunct hedge fund Level Global Investors $21.5m in settlement money arising from an insider trading probe in 2011, reported the New York Times.

The order of U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin came after the SEC said a day earlier that it would not object to the motion filed by Level Global. The motion sought to return the settlement money paid in 2013 after one of its founders, Anthony Chiasson, was involved in an insider trading scandal. Investors lost confidence in the firm as a result of the probe, leading to its closure.

The SEC told the court of its non-objection in response to a request by Level Global to vacate the 2013 settlement and asked the SEC to repay it, Reuters said.

Level Global asked for a refund after Chiasson won in federal appeals court in December 2014 reversing his conviction on insider trading charges resulting from trades of Dell Inc and Nvidia Corp. That court decision has made it harder for the SEC to try insider trading cases.

The report said the SEC will be paying the settlement money to former investors of Level Global. However, Gregory Morvillo, a lawyer ......................

To view our full article Click here
Opalesque Industry Update - Agecroft Partners announced that all profits from its new conference Gaining the Edge - 2016 Hedge Fund Marketing Leadership Summit taking place on April 28th at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City will be donated to non-profit charities that benefit children. Hedge Fund Cares and the World Pediatric Project will be the main beneficiaries. This reflects an ongoing commitment by Agecroft Partners, to help organizations that benefit children. "We are happy to support these wonderful charities both financially and to enhance their awareness throughout the hedge fund industry." stated Don Steinbrugge, Managing Partner of Agecroft Partners. The focus of the conference is "How to Enhance the Asset Raising Capability of Your Hedge Fund Organization" and will feature many of the world's most influential hedge fund marketing experts. Panelists will include most of the heads of capital introduction from the top prime brokerage firms such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi Global Markets, Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs, Jefferies & Company, Societe Generale and Wells Fargo Prime Services. Some of the key topics that will be covered include: What are the firms that raise significant assets doing differently? What factors do institutional investors use to evaluate hedge fund managers? How to create an effective marketing strategy. How to improve your marketing presentation to enhance investors' perception of your firm. What fund strategies are the most attractive to investors right now? What type of investors are allocating to hedge funds? Where is money being allocated outside the US and how do you raise assets outside the US? Gaining the Edge - 2016 Hedge Fund Marketing Leadership Summit is expected to sell out quickly, with over 600 registrants. Registration for hedge fund managers is free, although they are asked to make a voluntary donation. Sponsors for the event so far include: US Bancorp Fund Services, Kleinberg Kaplan, Baker Tilly, Imagineer Technology Group, CME Group and Anchin. Agecroft Partners is also the co-organizer of "Hedgeopolis New York" where the firm has donated all of its profits to non-profit organizations that benefit children. For more information about the upcoming conference, please visit the website www.apgainingtheedge.com . Hedge Fund Cares/Help for Children is an international charity, supported largely by the hedge fund industry, whose sole mission is preventing and treating child abuse. Each year, HFC gives grants to community based nonprofit organizations throughout the US, Canada, the Cayman Islands and the UK that address child abuse through education, support (for victims or at risk families), research, and training. Over 50,000 people are directly impacted by HFC's grants every year. World Pediatric Project provides critical-care health services to children in the Caribbean and Central America. The WPP helps children by sending surgical and diagnostic teams to partner countries to provide onsite treatment to children in need and to educate and train local nurses and doctors in order to create a sustainable, long-term healthcare solution. WPP's vision is to give every child, regardless of geography, access to quality, critical care in order to live a full and productive life. Agecroft Partners is a global third party marketing firm that has won 28 awards as the Hedge Fund third party marketing firm of the year. Agecroft strives to be a thought leader in the hedge fund industry and frequently writes white papers covering industry trends by leveraging the knowledge they gain through the thousands of investors with whom they are in contact on a regular basis. These investors include a global array of pension funds, endowment funds, foundations, insurance companies, private banks, fund of funds, family offices, investments consultants and sovereign funds. Additionally, Agecroft has emerged as one the most sought after firms by industry conferences and the media for the company's views on the hedge fund marketplace and institutional investors. Members of the Agecroft Partners team have spoken at over 100 alternative investment conferences, have appeared in hundreds of industry articles and are regular guests on business television.
Reprinted from Wallwritings

Jesus told his disciples they must learn to "discern the signs of the times" (Matthew 16:3).

In the Iowa caucuses, Monday, February 1, voters will offer their secular versions of political signs for the future when they select two potential presidential candidates.

Democrats will choose between an establishment leader who seeks to become the nation's first female president, and a declared Socialist Senator from Vermont, who could become the nation's first Jewish president.

Republicans have many choices for a future president, led by a raging bully named Trump, a "non-politician" who has so far outrun all the politicians lined up against him.

Which 2016 political signs are there for discernment? For voters concerned about guns, ISIS, God, wages, and health care, signs abound. But don't look for signs to discern the end of Israel's continued military control over the people of Palestine.

There are none. Unless, that is, the total absence of signs, is a sign in itself.

Don't look to the Iowa caucus results for any grasp of reality on the Palestine-Israel issue. Look instead, to corners of Israel's media. Begin with the editor-publisher of Jerusalem's major moderate Ha'aretz publication, Amos Schocken.

Schocken began an editorial in his own publication with these clear and cogent words:

"There are many differences between conditions in South Africa during the apartheid era and those current in the land from the Jordan River to the sea, especially in the territories that Israel controls beyond its internationally recognized borders. However, there is one important feature they share: two peoples living on one piece of land. "One people has all the rights and protections, while the other is deprived of numerous rights and lives under the former's control. Israel determines the fate and day-to-day life of millions of people who have no influence over its decisions. "The government of Israel is the party that will debate whether or not to accept the Israel Defense Forces' recommendation to ease policies toward the Palestinian Authority and its people. "In South Africa, there were similar discussions about easing apartheid for blacks. "Israel as an apartheid state is not a viable situation, not only because of the corruption of values but also because this predicament is liable to lead Israel, like South Africa in its time, to banishment from the family of nations."



(Image by Amazon) Details DMCA



This is from a highly respected Israeli publication. Remember how the American media and the Democratic party leaders denounced President Jimmy Carter for even his use of the term "apartheid" in the title of his 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid


Copyrighted Image? DMCA



The latest Oxfam report on poverty and inequality in our dysfunctional world makes a depressing read. It shows that the chasm between the richest 1% and the rest of humanity has considerably widened in the last few years. One statistic that is truly shocking is the number of people whose wealth is equal to that of the poorest half of the world's population (3.6 billion people); this number has gone down from 388 in 2010 to 62 in 2015.

These 62 people have a combined wealth of a staggering $1,760 billion, averaging $28.387 billion per individual. What is the point of owning so much wealth? If these individuals were to use 95% of their wealth to lift billions of people from grinding, oppressive poverty they would still be billionaires.

Their material life style need hardly change, but will be enhanced by having the inner contentment and happiness that comes from knowing that you have made such a positive difference to the lives of so many. I would like to think this is what I would do if I were in their position. But, wait; is there something in our psyche that makes us behave differently once we start accumulating wealth? Does our love of wealth dull our compassion and empathy with our fellow human beings? The answer to these questions is likely to be yes, and in that case do we need psychiatric help once we acquire such wealth?

These people have become members of the super-rich club, competing with one another on who has gone up and who has gone down in the table of the ultra-wealthy. This causes many of them anxiety and neuroses. This self-obsession renders them blind to the needs and suffering of fellow human beings in their own countries and beyond.

Imagine the contentment and happiness you feel when greeted by the smiles of adults and children as you visit places, knowing that your money has brought them such happiness and joy: children going to school instead of working to support a family simply to have enough to eat, health clinics to treat simple conditions to relieve pain and suffering, clean water to drink thus preventing disease and death that result from drinking contaminated water , shelter to protect families from heat, flooding and cold. The need is great, and the remedies are in our grasp if only the resources are made available.

Another issue highlighted by Oxfam is the use of tax havens. It states:

"As a priority, it[Oxfam] is calling for an end to the era of tax havens which has seen increasing use of offshore centres by rich individuals and companies to avoid paying their fair share to society. This has denied governments valuable resources needed to tackle poverty and inequality. It is three years since David Cameron told Davos that he would lead a global effort against aggressive [tax] avoidance in the UK and in poor countries, yet promised measures to increase transparency in British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands, have not yet been implemented."

I really find it difficult to understand how democratic governments can tolerate the existence of tax havens. They serve no purpose other than to help the powerful, be it individuals or corporations, to hide their wealth, thus avoiding making contributions to their societies whose resources they used to create their wealth. Tax havens also help assorted despots, royals and the corrupted elite in the developing world to hide the wealth they pillage from their own countries. Oxfam reports that: "30 percent of all African financial wealth is estimated to be held offshore, costing an estimated $14billion in lost tax revenues every year." Let us shut down these relics from a bygone age that steal wealth from the impoverished to the benefit of the already bloated few.

We are having a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union; here is a suggestion for another one: Should Britain continue to allow the existence of tax havens in its overseas territories and crown dependencies? Let the people decide.

What sort of system have we created that relentlessly siphons wealth from the poor to the richest 1%, and in the process deprives humanity of the resources that could bring happiness, contentment and joy to billions of people? When, oh when, will world leaders take concrete steps to remedy this injustice and unfairness?
This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Reprinted from Consortium News

There is a lot more than meets the eye in the newly revealed Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence briefing of Sept. 5, 2002, which showed there was a lack of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- just as President George W. Bush's administration was launching its sales job for the Iraq War.

The briefing report and its quick demise amount to an indictment not only of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld but also of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers, who is exposed once again as a Rumsfeld patsy who put politics ahead of his responsibility to American soldiers and to the nation as a whole.



In a Jan. 24 report at Politico entitled "What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn't Know About Iraq," journalist John Walcott presents a wealth of detail about the JCS intelligence report of Sept. 5, 2002, offering additional corroboration that the Bush administration lied to the American people about the evidence of WMD in Iraq.

The JCS briefing noted, for example: "Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely -- perhaps 90% -- on analysis of imprecise intelligence."

Small wonder that the briefing report was dead on arrival in Rumsfeld's in-box. After all, it proved that the intelligence evidence justifying war was, in Rumsfeldian terms, a "known unknown." When he received it on Sept. 5 or 6, the Defense Secretary deep-sixed it -- but not before sending it on Sept. 9 to Gen. Richard Myers (who he already knew had a copy) with a transparently disingenuous CYA note: "Please take a look at this material as to what we don't know about WMD. It is big. Thanks."

Absent was any notation such as "I guess we should tell the White House to call off its pro-war sales campaign based on Iraq possessing WMD since we don't got the goods." Without such a direct instruction, Rumsfeld could be sure that Gen. Myers would not take the matter further.

Myers had already proven his "company man" mettle by scotching a legal inquiry that he had just authorized to provide the armed forces with guidance on permitted interrogation techniques. All that it took to ensure a hasty Myers retreat was a verbal slap-down from Rumsfeld's general counsel, William James Haynes II, as soon as Haynes got wind of the inquiry in November 2002. (More on that below.)

The more interesting story, in my view, is not that Rumsfeld was corrupt (yawn, yawn), but that so was his patsy, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the country's top uniformed military officer at the time. Myers has sported a well-worn coat of blue Teflon up until now.

Even John Walcott, a member of the Knight-Ridder team that did the most responsible pre-Iraq-War reporting, lets the hapless Myers too easily off the hook in writing: "Myers, who knew as well as anyone the significance of the report, did not distribute it beyond his immediate military colleagues and civilian boss, which a former aide said was consistent with the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs."

Principal Military Adviser to the President

That "former aide" is dead wrong on the last point, and this is key. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs works directly for two bosses: the President of the United States, whom he serves as the principal military adviser, and the Secretary of Defense. The JCS Chairman has the statutory authority -- indeed, the duty -- to seek direct access to the President to advise him in such circumstances, bearing on war or peace.

Indeed, in his 2009 memoir, Eyes on the Horizon, Gen. Myers himself writes, "I was legally obligated to provide the President my best military advice -- not the best advice as approved by the Secretary of Defense."

But in reality, Myers wouldn't and he didn't. And that -- quite simply -- is why Rumsfeld picked him and others like him for leading supporting roles in the Pentagon. And so the Iraq War came -- and, with it, catastrophe for the Middle East (with related disorder now spreading into Europe).

Could Gen. Myers have headed off the war had he had the courage to assert his prerogative to go directly to President Bush and tell him the truth? Sad to say, with Bush onboard as an eager "war president" and with Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld intimidating the timid Secretary of State Colin Powell and with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet fully compliant, it is not likely that Myers could have put the brakes on the rush to invade Iraq simply by appealing to the President.

After all, the JCS briefing coincided with the start of the big sales pitch for the Iraq War based on alarming claims about Iraq possessing WMD and possibly developing a nuclear bomb. As White House chief of staff Andrew Card explained the September timing of the ad campaign, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

Just three days after the date of the JCS intelligence report depicting the shallowness of the intelligence on the issue of WMD in Iraq, the White House, with the help of The New York Times and other "mainstream media," launched a major propaganda offensive.
Reprinted from Robert Reich Blog

Not a day passes that I don't get a call from the media asking me to compare Bernie Sanders's and Hillary Clinton's tax plans, or bank plans, or health-care plans.



I don't mind. I've been teaching public policy for much of the last 35 years. I'm a policy wonk.



But detailed policy proposals are as relevant to the election of 2016 as is that gaseous planet beyond Pluto. They don't have a chance of making it, as things are now.



The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders's proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a "recipe for gridlock."

Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock.



This election is about changing the parameters of what's feasible and ending the chokehold of big money on our political system.



I've known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she's the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have.

But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he's leading a political movement for change.

The upcoming election isn't about detailed policy proposals. It's about power -- whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well.

A study published in the fall of 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin Page reveals the scale of the challenge.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens.



Their conclusion: "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy."



Instead, lawmakers respond to the moneyed interests -- those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

It's sobering that Gilens and Page's data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its "Citizens United" and "McCutcheon" decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and "dark money," and even the Wall Street bailout.

If average Americans had a "near-zero" impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero.


The 12 million Syrian refugees may differ regarding the reasons why they had to flee their homes and country in the last five years. Yet, they are united in their plight and in the collective trauma of the violent dislocation they have all experienced. Half of those refugees are estimated to be children, which complicates the psychological toll suffered by the Syrian people since their uprising-turned war took place.

According to a German study released in late 2015, half of the Syrian refugees who made it to Germany are suffering from trauma that has already produced psychological distress and mental illness.

The president of the Chamber of Psychotherapists, which carried out the research, said that more than 70 percent of the refugees had witnessed violence and more than 50 percent were themselves victims of violence. Nearly half of them have nightmares and flashbacks as if their terrible ordeals "were happening all over again."

These details indicate the short-term effects of such trauma; however, what would take years to verify is the long-term impact of such massive distress and the shattering of the sense of identity which once united the Syrian people.

Before the war, Syrians, despite their sectarian, religious or even political backgrounds, saw themselves as part of the same modern national identity. However, the war redefined that identity based on the whims of several actors -- the regional and international war parties -- and the rewriting of Syria's history by various powers that now share control of large swathes of that country. One of these powers is Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

Daesh has relentlessly worked to redefine the Syrian identity by using extreme interpretations of religious texts in its imposed school curricula. Others did the same, by resorting to other frames of reference which, either way, is breaking the sense of national identity of the Syrian people into provisional fragments. While many are focused on who controls what in terms of Syria's physical landscape, few seem to be taking the matter of the fragmentation of the national identity seriously.

Apart from these concerns, there is the issue of six million children, many of whom are being raised in other countries, and are learning alternative languages, cultures and other value-systems in order to survive. The impact of that alone shall prove consequential in how the Syrian people are redefined in the future.

Palestinian exile is particularly important for Syrians. Its trials and valuable lessons can shed light on the issue of collective identity for a nation that has subsisted for the most part in exile for nearly seven decades.

Ebrahim Mahmoud is a 77-year-old man who lives with his family, which includes 11 children, in the Baharka Refugee Camp in Iraq's northern Kurdish region.

During his lifetime, he became a refugee twice: Once, when he was nine years old living in Haifa, Palestine, and a second, more recent exile in Mosul, Iraq. Just weeks before Israel declared its independence in 1948, Ebrahim lost his homeland and fled Haifa, along with tens of thousands of Palestinian Muslims and Christians after Israeli militias conquered the city in a military operation they called Bi'ur Hametz, or "Passover Cleaning."

Throughout Palestine, over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled the horrors of the militia-instigated war. Those who are still alive, along with their descendants, number more than five million refugees. When Daesh militias swept into Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014, Ebrahim plotted his flight, along with his entire family. Between 1948 and 2014, life was anything but kind to them. At first, they sold falafel, and Ebrahim's children left school to join the workforce at a young age. They all had cards that identified them as "Palestinian refugees," and they have never known any other identity.

When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, they granted their soldiers and the Shiite-militias a free hand in that country. The once relatively thriving and peaceful Palestinian community of refugees in Iraq was shattered. Now, according to the United Nations Refugees Agency, no more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees are still living in Iraq, many of them in refugee camps.

Ebrahim has finally managed to escape Mosul and is living in a dirty and crowded refugee camp within Kurdish-controlled territories in the north. Considering his old age and faltering health, his story could possibly end there, but certainly not that of his children and grandchildren.

Ebrahim's tragedy is not unique within the overall Middle East refugee crisis. It is in fact being lived and experienced by millions of Syrians. Nonetheless, if seen within its painfully protracted historical context, Palestinian exile is almost unprecedented in its complexity and duration. Few other refugee populations have struggled with exile and were defined by it, one generation after the other, as Palestinians have.

When refugees were expelled from their land in 1947-48, exile then was first seen as a political crisis that could only be remedied with the return of refugees, as instructed in United Nations Resolution 194. When that possibility grew dim, other resolutions followed, all expressing the political contexts of each era: in 1950, 74, 82, 83, etc.

Regardless of the nature of the discussion pertaining to Palestinian refugees -- whether legal, political or moral -- the refugees themselves were rarely consulted, except as subjects of selective and sometimes dehumanising poll questions, drawing their conclusion from refugees selecting "Yes" or "No," or checking a box or two in a poll.
Angio Consult Establishes Catheter Laboratory in Mannheim

Your Experts in Healthcae Consulting

The laboratory for trainings and simulations of the company Angio Consult that opened in April 2015, is being more accepted and established by the minute.

Our customers can use an ultramodern and innovative hybrid-OR catheter laboratory and are able to organize a successful training with their product using the highly modern SIEMENS Artis Zeego, an interventional radiology system designed to optimize your workflow. On site, we are cooperating with the Medical Technology Cluster of the city of Mannheim, the project team for automation in medicine and biotechnology of the Fraunhofer cooperation and the University Medical Center Mannheim. This cooperation is an advantage, not only for the profiting customer, but also for the participating companies since they can discover new horizons of medical technology through this promising cooperation. The manager of the Medical Technology Cluster, Dr. Elmar Bourdon, is convinced: Cubex41 opens up new prospects of cooperation to our partners in industry, clinic and research. By merging the high interdisciplinarity and the diversity of the companies fields, previous borders of medical device development and administration can be moved forward.

Cubex 41 on the premises of the University Hospital Mannheim has proven to be the perfect location for every kind of training. Not only because of the perfectly equipped catheter laboratory with all facilities needed for a successful training day, but also because of its proximity to the airport Frankfurt am Main. This way, all customers coming from far away were able to get on a plane back home in the evening of the training day.

The customers were all very pleased and praised the large and modern hybrid-OR catheter laboratory, that fulfilled all their needs and also the fact that the entire day ran very smoothly.

The CEO of Angio Consult, Hanns-Joachim Rieck said: The happiness of our customers is our first priority. The opportunities of Cubex 41 and its location make it easy for us to fulfill it.

It is planned to extend the trainings at Cubex41 even further to make sure that the new year 2016 will be even more successful for our customers.

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Medical science is fast-paced and businesses are improving devices, drugs, and medical procedures continuously. Physicians are committed to driving excellence and innovation in their clinically oriented objectives to improve quality of life on a daily basis. We at Angio Consult GmbH are equally committed to empowering and equipping our partners with the necessary knowledge to understand, adapt, and apply product innovation as efficiently as possible.

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"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." ~~Thomas Jefferson

"Who will protect us from those who protect us?"

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. ~ Thomas Jefferson



"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." ~~Goethe
CARLIN  Carlin has a new addition to their established lineup of clubs this year.

A STEM Club is being created and managed by the math and science departments in which the focus and mission is to engage the 23 club members in STEM activities in order for them to become familiar with career opportunities after high school.

Ideally, when students are exposed and participate in real world applications of content being learned in class, their understanding and interests are tremendously enhanced.

In order to accomplish this, the members will have in person and virtual STEM guest speakers, hands-on projects with STEM field-specific mentors, field trips to local supporting businesses, as well as participating in regional/state science and math competitions.

Up to this point, the members of Carlins STEM Club have been enlightened about all the math it takes to be a mining engineer by Sarah Bull, a local practicing engineer.

They also took part in a virtual Webinar with guest speakers from the nations Department of Defense agency, DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) informing us of the many ways that science and math is used to deal with biological and chemical threats to our nation.

Most recently, the students took part in a tour with Lisa Becker to Newmont Mining Corps lab, a mine control room, and the welding shop to see applications of STEM being used so close to home. The students were able to discuss different ways that STEM is utilized in the mining industry with Boyd Burden, Derek Burwell, Kevin Dowdle, Larry Peterson, and Michael Tsigbey.

It was a very enlightening experience for the students, said Janie Kimble, STEM Club advisor.

Throughout the rest of the year, the club is planning on visiting Ormats Tuscarora Geothermal plant as well as participate in some math and science competitions at the Science Olympiad hosted by UNR in Reno.

We will have various field guest speakers in order to continue bringing viable, real world applications to the students in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
ELKO  Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said the country needs a president who has proven leadership skills and received applause for his stance on public lands Tuesday at the Northeastern Nevada Museum.

After the Elko Band of Indians music preceded Bushs arrival on stage, he began his speech talking about foreign policy and handling terrorism.

He said fellow candidates didnt take strong stances on how to handle terrorism issues such as Syria and ISIS, until our country was attacked. He singled out Donald Trump and said he is all over the map on how to handle terrorism.

I will be a commander in chief, not an agitator in chief, not a divider in chief, Bush said. It wont be about me. I will have the back of the military, and I will do it each and every day, because the first priority of a president of the United States is to keep us safe. Nothing else matters if we dont get that right.

Bush told the audience we need to change the culture in Washington.

The simple fact is, Washington is broken, he said. It doesnt work. What we need is a balanced budget amendment to make sure that government lives within our means again.

After applause from the crowd he continued.

What we need is the line item veto power, like I had as governor of the State of Florida. They called me Veto Corleone because I vetoed 2,500 separate line items in the budget, not to show I was the big dog.  I did it because I believe in my heart, if we allow government to grow faster than our ability to pay for it, the net result is it will overwhelm the next generation. Well have debt that will make it impossible for our children and grandchildren to pursue their dreams.

He told the crowd term limits work because it makes elected officials public servants rather than career politicians.

We need term limits, he said. Politicians should be serving. Theyre not the masters.

Bush said the government needs to do a better job of taking care of veterans. The crowd erupted in applause when he said he will fire people for incompetence. Bush said the waiting list for veterans was reduced but the veterans still didnt get care.

When Im president of the United States, heads will roll out of the Department of Veterans Affairs building, he said.

He said veterans should have choices to receive care in their own community at their private physicians to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and long term diseases.

The biggest applause of the day for Bush was when he told the Elko crowd the Department of the Interior needs to move to the West, so the bureaucrats actually understand what the challenges are in this area.

Here in Nevada you all suffer with a landlord called the Department of the Interior, Bush said. Im the only candidate who has laid out a Western lands policy that respects the aspirations of people who live out here.

Bush said the approach for using the land needs to be balanced. He said the focus should be on economic impacts as well as environmental.

There should be greater access for all sorts of purposes, hunting, fishing, mining, timber and it shouldnt take 10 years to get a permit to be able to create jobs in this part of the world, he said to applause. My proposal is a two-year limit for permits. Shifting the power away from Washington will allow us to grow our economy at a far faster rate.

Here in Nevada you all suffer with a landlord called the Department of the Interior.  Jeb Bush
Militant spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum is dead and the top leaders of the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were taken into custody after law enforcement officials stopped them Tuesday afternoon about 20 miles north of Burns.

Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound and was taken into custody in the stop about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395 conducted by the FBI and the Oregon State Police.

Bundy and four others were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony, at the traffic stops.

Three other people associated with the occupation were later arrested separately on the same conspiracy charge.

Here is the list of those arrested, beginning with those traveling with Finicum to a public meeting in John Day when their vehicles were stopped.

Ammon Bundy

Ammon Bundy

The main public face of the occupation is Ammon Bundy, the 40-year-old son of Cliven Bundy, whose 2014 standoff with federal officials in Nevada over $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and penalties made national news.

In 2014, Bundy blocked a truck trying to leave federal lands with his father's cattle, which rangers had seized because the family had not paid the grazing fees that other ranchers must pay.

A video of the encounter shows Ammon Bundy lunging at a federal ranger holding a police dog. The dog snapped at Bundy, who then kicked the dog twice, the video shows. Federal rangers used a stun gun to keep Ammon Bundy away. He was not arrested.

Jon Ritzheimer

Jon Ritzheimer

Ritzheimer, 32, surrendered to police Tuesday in Arizona, authorities said. He gained national fame for complaining in a video about the delivery of sex toys to the refuge in response to the occupiers' plea for supplies.

Until the occupation, Ritzheimer, was most widely known for the anti-Islam protests he organized in 2015 in Phoenix, drawing hundreds of people and garnering the attention of the FBI. He sells anti-Islam T-shirts through his apparel company, Rogue Infidel, and also advertises his services as a motorcycle mechanic.

Military records show Ritzheimer was in the Marine Corps Reserves from 2002 through 2014, serving two tours in Iraq as a motor transport driver. He lives in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria with his wife, Rachel, and two daughters.

Joseph O'Shaughnessy

Joe O'Shaughnessy

O'Shaughnessy, 43, was arrested by Oregon State Police in Burns. Known in militia circles as "Captain," O'Shaughnessy is from Cottonwood, Arizona, authorities said. Public records also show recent addresses around Phoenix and in a suburb of Chicago.

O'Shaughnessy appears in Facebook photos with the occupation's core planners in December. He is also pictured next to Cliven Bundy during the 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada. O'Shaughnessy has been active in militia groups along the U.S.-Mexico border, his social media accounts show.

Arizona court records show weapons misconduct charges in 2007 that were later dismissed. O'Shaughessy served 10 days in jail in 2009 after he failed to appear in court on traffic charges that included failure to display a foreign license plate, having no valid driver's license, no proof of insurance and no functioning brake lights, court records show.

Pete Santilli

Pete Santilli

Santilli, 50, an independent broadcaster known for his aggressive manner and support for the occupiers' cause, was also arrested in Burns, authorities said. He had been live-streaming reports about Ammon Bundy's arrest earlier in the day. He got his start as a self-described "shock jock" in 2014, when he showed up at the Bundy ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, during the 2014 standoff.

Police in Newtown, Ohio, stopped Santilli in December, saying he was seen driving 20 miles per hour in a 50-mile-per-hour zone and was believed to be texting, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. He was detained for 45 minutes because police were alerted that he was on a national watch list but was later cleared of suspicion of being on the list, the newspaper reported. Police found a loaded gun at the feet of Santilli's female passenger, the Enquirer reported.

Santilli was charged with illegally carrying a concealed weapon, the Enquirer reported. "Because of death threats I receive because of my views, I need to carry a gun," he told the newspaper.

He said at the time that he was on his way to Oregon. In videos since his arrival in Burns, Santilli said he was unarmed because his gun is still in police possession in Ohio.

Santilli had recently moved to Ohio from Southern California, where he had been licensed as a security guard since 2003.

-- The Oregonian

Photography by Thomas Boyd, Mark Graves, Beth Nakamura and The Associated Press.
Update: Search and rescue personnel joined the effort overnight overnight to locate a hiker lost near Larch Mountain. Searchers covered about 20 miles of trails and have not found the hiker, identified as Alexio Avila, 22.

Avila hiked to the top of Larch Mountain and was unable to find his way back down, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office said in a news release.

Multnomah County sheriff's deputies responded at about 5 p.m. Tuesday, according to the news release, and were joined by search and rescue personnel. The authorities haven't yet been able to find the lost hiker.

A full search and rescue team is joining the search efforts, deputies said. The hiker's cell phone battery was running low, according to the news release, and dispatchers told the hiker to stay put on a rocky road he found.

-- Jim Ryan

jryan@oregonian.com

503-221-8005

@Jimryan015
COA2014Judges_web-1.jpg

The 2014 Oregon Court of Appeals. Judges Timothy Sercombe, Erika Hadlock and Douglas Tookey ruled on the case of Sophia Downing.

(Oregon Judicial Department)

Sophia Downing

The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday threw out the manslaughter and assault convictions of a 29-year-old driver who had prescription drugs in her system when she swerved into three Salem high-school students, killing two of them and injuring the other.

Sophia Louise Downing -- who had unsuccessfully claimed she was unaware she wasn't supposed to drive while taking prescription Ativan -- was sentenced to more than 25 years for veering onto a sidewalk and through a crosswalk in the 2010 incident that left dead Francisco Cervantes, 16, and Brittany Green, 18. Prosecutors could appeal Wednesday's reversals to the Oregon Supreme Court, and if the reversals stand, Downing will get a new trial.

"I think she deserves a new trial," said Meredith Allen, a deputy public defender who represented Downing on appeal. Allen added that compared to most other manslaughter cases under similar circumstances, Downing's sentence is "incredibly harsh."

The appeals court reversed two convictions for first-degree manslaughter and one conviction for second-degree assault based on jury instructions read by Marion County Circuit Judge Dennis Graves during a 13 day trial in 2012. In order to find Downing guilty of all three of those counts, the jury had to find -- in part -- that Downing acted "under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life." The appeals court found that the judge didn't properly instruct jurors about the meaning of that phrase.

A school bus driver had said that on the afternoon of Sept. 23, 2010, she was carrying a load of kindergartners when Downing cut in front of the bus and onto a sidewalk, forcing the bus driver to slam on the brakes. The bus driver said she later saw Downing zoom past her at 40 mph, onto another sidewalk and into the crosswalk -- in the process striking Cervantes, Green and 18-year-old Jorge Echeverria, who suffered a traumatic head injury and torn aorta but survived.

The teens attended Winema High School, an alternative program on the Chemeketa Community College campus.

Witnesses said Downing got out of her 1994 Chevrolet Blazer, asked about the well-being of one of the victims then asked a high-school student rendering aid if Downing was free to leave. The high-school student said no, then Downing sat down on the curb and began smoking a cigarette, about a foot away from Green's head, which rest in a pool of blood. A witness testified that Downing had a "dreamy, not really all there" look on her face, and another witness heard Downing exclaim, "I'm going to jail for this."

Weeks after the crash, while Downing was in jail, she told a friend that she was "tripping" as she drove that day. In a different conversation, she told a friend over the phone that she felt like she was "being crucified" for taking her medications, according to the appeals court summary of the case.

Three days before the deadly crash, Downing has received a prescription for Ativan, known by the generic name lorazepam, to help with insomnia.

A pharmacist who spoke to Downing about her prescription didn't remember exactly what he told her about its effects, but the warning label says the drug may cause drowsiness and the label also instructs, "Use caution when operating a car or dangerous machinery," the appeals court summary states. A doctor testified that it's expected for emergency medical professionals to tell a patient not to drive at all after taking Ativan, the summary states.

Tests also showed that Downing had cyclobenzaprine, a muscle relaxer, in her urine but not in her blood.

Downing also was convicted of driving under the influence of intoxicants and recklessly endangering another person. The appeals court decided that those two convictions still stand.

Prosecutors -- or even defense attorneys, who didn't win on every contention before the Court of Appeals -- could ask the Oregon Supreme Court to review Downing's case.

But in the meantime, Downing will continue to be locked up. Now 34, she is serving her nearly 310-month prison sentence at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, with an expected release date in 2036.

Wednesday's ruling was made by a three-judge panel of the court: Timothy Sercombe, Erika Hadlock and Douglas Tookey.

Read the opinion here.

-- Aimee Green

503-294-5119
deer.jpg

Oregon State Police Fish and Wildlife troopers seized these four trophy buck skulls.

(Oregon State Police)

The Oregon State Police says a Harney County teenager has been criminally cited for possessing the skulls of trophy mule deer.

The agency said in a news release that 19-year-old Jaden Simpson faces four counts of illegally possessing game parts. The skulls were discovered after an OSP fish and wildlife trooper got an anonymous tip last week.

Simpson was cited for four counts of illegal possession of game parts, specifically mule deer skulls. Other wildlife charges will be forwarded to the Harney County District Attorney's Office for consideration.

-- The Associated Press
AURORA, Colo. -- An off-duty Jefferson County sheriff's deputy was critically injured in a shooting outside an apartment complex in Aurora.

The Aurora Sentinel reports the deputy, whose name has not been released, was one of two people injured near Rangeview High School on Tuesday evening. The other victim was treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries.

Investigators have not released any information about a possible suspect, and they have not said what led to the shooting.

The high school was placed on lockdown during a sporting event, and residents in the area were notified by phone of the police activity.

No other information has been released.

-- The Associated Press
Drone hobbyist Mark Cooper captured a bird's-eye-view of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last Saturday afternoon.

The video shows an overhead view of the buildings that armed militants have occupied since Jan. 2 at the refuge headquarters, about 30 miles outside of Burns.

Cooper said he was passing through Burns on a road trip to Idaho with his girlfriend and 9-year-old daughter.

They decided to stay the night in the tiny Harney County town because of snowy weather and ended up at the Silver Spur Hotel alongside media and militia members.

The next day, Cooper drove out to the refuge to take a look for himself.

When he first started flying his drone, he was questioned by one of the armed occupiers, he said. But Ammon Bundy, one of the occupation leaders, gave him permission to shoot the footage, he said.

Cooper said he isn't affiliated with the protest group.

--

Teresa Mahoney